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[Dec 29, 2018] Awan Plot Thickens As NY Democrat Yvette Clarke -Quietly- Wrote-Off $120,000 Of Missing Tech Equipment

Aug 21, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com

When we reported last week that Imran Awan and his wife had been indicted by a grand jury on 4 counts, including bank fraud and making false statements related to some home equity loans, we also noted that those charges could simply be placeholders for further developments yet to come. Now, according to a new report from the Daily Caller , the more interesting component of the FBI's investigation could be tied to precisely why New York Democrat Representative Yvette Clarke quietly agreed in early 2016 to simply write-off $120,000 in missing electronics tied to the Awans.

A chief of staff for Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke quietly agreed in early 2016 to sign away a $120,000 missing electronics problem on behalf of two former IT aides now suspected of stealing equipment from Congress, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned. Clarke's chief of staff at the time effectively dismissed the loss and prevented it from coming up in future audits by signing a form removing the missing equipment from a House-wide tracking system after one of the Awan brothers alerted the office the equipment was gone. The Pakistani-born brothers are now at the center of an FBI investigation over their IT work with dozens of Congressional offices.

The $120,000 figure amounts to about a tenth of the office's annual budget, or enough to hire four legislative assistants to handle the concerns of constituents in her New York district. Yet when one of the brothers alerted the office to the massive loss, the chief of staff signed a form that quietly reconciled the missing equipment in the office budget, the official told TheDCNF. Abid Awan remained employed by the office for months after the loss of the equipment was flagged.

If true, of course this new information would seem to support previously reported rumors that the Awans orchestrated a long-running fraud scheme in which their office would purchase equipment in a way that avoided tracking by central House-wide administrators and then sell that equipment for a personal gain while simultaneously defrauding taxpayers of $1,000's of dollars.

Meanwhile, according to the Daily Caller, CDW Government could have been in on the scheme.

They're suspected of working with an employee of CDW Government Inc. -- one of the Hill's largest technology providers -- to alter invoices in order to avoid tracking. The result would be that no one outside the office would notice if the equipment disappeared, and investigators think the goal of the scheme was to remove and sell the equipment outside of Congress.

CDW spokeswoman Kelly Caraher told TheDCNF the company is cooperating with investigators, and has assurance from prosecutors its employees are not targets of the investigation. "CDW and its employees have cooperated fully with investigators and will continue to do so," Caraher said. "The prosecutors directing this investigation have informed CDW and its coworkers that they are not subjects or targets of the investigation."

Not surprisingly, Clarke's office apparently felt no need whatsoever to report the $120,000 worth of missing IT equipment to the authorities... it's just taxpayer money afterall...

According to the official who talked to TheDCNF, Clarke's chief of staff did not alert authorities to the huge sum of missing money when it was brought to the attention of the office around February of 2016. A request to sign away that much lost equipment would have been "way outside any realm of normalcy," the official said, but the office did not bring it to the attention of authorities until months later when House administrators told the office they were reviewing finances connected to the Awans.

The administrators informed the office that September they were independently looking into discrepancies surrounding the Awans, including a review of finances connected to the brothers in all the congressional offices that employed them. The House administrators asked Clarke's then-chief of staff, Wendy Anderson, whether she had noticed any anomalies, and at that time she alerted them to the $120,000 write-off, the official told TheDCNF.

Of course, the missing $120,000 covers only Clarke's office. As we've noted before, Imran and his relatives worked for more than 40 current House members when they were banned from the House network in February, and have together worked for dozens more in past years so who know just how deep this particular rabbit hole goes.

Also makes you wonder what else Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and the Awans might be hiding. Certainly the decision by Wasserman-Shultz to keep Awan on her taxpayer funded payroll, right up until he was arrested by the FBI while trying to flee the country, is looking increasingly fishy with each passing day.


highwaytoserfdom , 1 year ago

Trivial write off http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/files/clubbingcomplaint.pdf

The 911 protection swamp is deep, and profiteers and drug, human traffic, NGO, Body part, war mongers runs deep.

Please stop calling it building 7 It was the Solomon building.. While you are at it look at the 1991 Solomon bond scandal which gave the Citi Clinton Mafia all power.... Oh yea Bush/Clinton cabal did get Saudis to buy Citi stocks and GE plastics. Swampy enough?

120k write off ! You are kidding me?

south40_dreams , 1 year ago

Blackmail was where the real money was at

pissantra , 1 year ago

The real problem here is being completely ignored -- and that is this: the Awan bros were likely spies (with Wasserman either forced to allow them to spy or the spymaster selling intel to Pakistan). This would mean that 21+ congress-critters have been completely compromised. THIS is important NOW, after Trumps Afghan speech -- if he plans to lean on Pakistan with an "either you stop helping the Taliban or we will destroy you (economically and/or physically) along with them...."--- these compromised congress-critters will defund Trumps war.

Freddie , 3 weeks ago

No. Pakistan is the smokescreen. Wasserscum, like Scott Israel, are dual shitizens. This is, as is Broward County, a MO$$$$ad op. Broward County for vote theft, fraud, attorney killings, false flags, etc. I would guess a lot more in Congress are owned.

Just watched Congress during Bibi and even ko$$her Porschenko addressing Congrez-zio. They jump up like circus trained animals to give standing ovations for every word.

Awans and Wasserscum will get passes. George Webb on youtube appears to be doing good work but it is probably another smoke screen because George has said he is a zioni$$t.

Ban KKiller , 1 year ago

Gee Michelle....you used the Pakistanis for your IT work? What, you like filthy muslims? Guess so.... When will you confess that you have NO IDEA where your confidential information is? Michelle Lynn Lujan Grisham is an American lawyer and politician who is the U.S. Representative for New Mexico's 1st congressional district, serving since 2013.

mtanimal , 1 year ago

I didn't know espionage and extortion were tax deductible. Who's her accountant?

Cardinal Fang , 1 year ago

I regret that we may never know the extent of the duplicity of our government with this ISI stooge.

pc_babe , 1 year ago

with Jeff Session at the helm, you can rest assured you never will

Loanman26 , 1 year ago

My spidy senses are flaring. It was the Russians who stole the equipment. It was comrade Sergei Awan

Blazing in BC , 1 year ago

To whoever is "in charge"....THE STENCH IS UNBEARABLE

runnymede , 1 year ago

Institutionalized unaccountability is what makes the systemic corruption function. As long as Wasserman's brother is in charge of D.C. prosecutions, nothing will happen. He is the gatekeeper, which is why DWS, the DNC and the Clinton Crime Machine have not only acted with impunity, but with extreme contempt. They know they are untouchable. Honest prosecution would expose D.C. itself as the professional criminal operation that it is, including most Repubs. There will never be allowed a real look into the rabbit hole, George Webb's outstanding efforts notwithstanding.

One of We , 1 year ago

President Not Hillary needs to lock some bitches up and expose the Clinton Crime Family Foundation. Definitely lowering the bar from my lofty hopes but I'd be happy with a partial roto rootering of the swamp if that's all he has to show for his term.

SRV , 1 year ago

The Awans were working for DWS and The Crook... this fruad is the tip of the iceberg...

How about doping Blackberry's for 80 House Dems to sync with servers around the Capital (remember DWS threatening the Capital Police Chief with "consequences" if he didn't give her back her laptop found in a Capitol Hill building. The Awans were selling the access to most of the secrets in congress since 2004... this was a spy ring (he has serious ties to Pakistani ISI).

JiminyCrickets , 1 year ago

As long as Debbie Wasserman Schultz's Brother Steven Wasserman is running the Seth Rich murder investigation this wont go any where.

gregga777 , 1 year ago

Unfortunately, the Anglo-Zionist FAKE NEWS Media won't cover this story, especially the links to Debbie Wasserman Schultz. It's anti-Semitic to discuss her criminality or to criticize her in any other way.

JiminyCrickets , 1 year ago

George Webb's detailed 300+ day investigation indicates the Awans were shipping stolen high end cars to foreign diplomats and depleted uranium weapons using DNC Diplomatic Containers.

https://www.youtube.com/user/georgwebb

hooligan2009 , 1 year ago

no surprise that demonRat politicians throughout all legislatures have been guilty of defrauding the tax payer for decades - in much the same way that demonRat politicians directly legislate for welfare benefits, free insurance and tax cuts for their family and friends - at the expense of tax payers - and who also extract tax payer funds via the gravy train of internships, federal grants etc for their family and friends.

this is how libtard demonRat politicians infect the swamp and then infest it with their filth and cronyism.

aided and abetted by the MSM.

if only iy was just the demonRats, there might be a chance - however, corrupt republicRats have been just as guilty.

one day, all this will be out in the open and perhaps demonRat and republicRat voters will see how they have been voting for corruption all these years.

are we there yet , 1 year ago

Because you are one of the little people.

NoPension , 1 year ago

We are below " little people". We are irrelevant. Just keep paying, slave. Someone correct me if I'm wrong..... This country was founded on the principle that the individual had sovereign rights, imbued from God...and was the vessel of ultimate power. Today...these illegally elected ( it's almost ALL proven a fraud) cocksuckers go in broke and come out the other end multimillionaires with legal immunity from anything, up to and including murder. It's high time to water the ******* tree.

[Dec 29, 2018] So Russian twits were a false flag operation

LinkedIn co-founder 'sorry' for funding fake Russian tweets for Democrats (RT video). Admiited producing 200 fake Russian twits.
Notable quotes:
"... Reid Hoffman is a Billionaire, who is a member of the Bilderburg Group, & is on the Council of Foreign Relations. Obviously 'above the law'. His sorry apology will be good enough. ..."
"... Oh he is only sorry after he got caught. ..."
Dec 29, 2018 | www.youtube.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54IcPmfqHlo

sneekie pete , 1 day ago

Imagine that ?...we knew... They owe Putin and the Russian people a apology....hmmm...would rather send all demoncrats to Putin for their punishments...

NowisEvollovetion , 1 day ago

Everything is FAKE about the democrats. They are as dishonest as the day is long.

Annie , 1 day ago

SCUMBAG!!! 🤮🤢😬🐷👿

TheKeithvidz , 1 day ago

Huh. Blame everyone but America's leaders for the country's sorry state.

Main Character , 1 day ago

Are you kidding me?! Man and here I was starting to think democrats weren't as bad. As an American I feel bad for how bad many of my countrymen have tried to make Russia look bad...

tyronebiggums3 , 1 day ago

Democrats = Pure Evil

James Bruno , 1 day ago

why doesn't anyone boycott CNN?

2MauiAngels , 1 day ago

Reid Hoffman is a Billionaire, who is a member of the Bilderburg Group, & is on the Council of Foreign Relations. Obviously 'above the law'. His sorry apology will be good enough.

Nothing will happen to him, & RT is probably the only media outlet that will even tell Americans about this. THX RT. How about reposting 'Who owns the Media in less than 30 seconds'?

Are you updating the info because Rupert Murdoch sold his media corps to Bob Iger?? THAT was your BEST video Ever!! PLEASE REPOST IT!!

Jim NORRIS , 1 day ago

Oh he is only sorry after he got caught.

Star Dust , 1 day ago

how can saying sorry undo all the damages they have done ?

Olive Locutions , 1 day ago (edited)

Oy vey! They know it's not Russian bots now. I hope we are able to deflect this one onto the goy!

Robbi rob , 1 day ago

Honestly, who even believes in democracy anymore? It's just bullshit, and pandering.

Susan Gamble , 1 day ago

Everyone involved need to go to jail!!!!

TectonicTsunami , 1 day ago

LinkedIn needs to be linked-OUT.

James Rockford , 1 day ago

Let me guess, not one single MSM outlet, will discuss this?

Brian , 1 day ago

Seditious Conspiracy is the charge!

Barbara King , 1 day ago

Cheating is the only way Democrats won this election! Results should be vacated. New Election!

Burt Reynolds Corpse , 1 day ago

Correction, a joo is pretending to be sorry, only because he was caught misleading the nation ..

Reji Bae , 1 day ago

You can't trust anything coming out of the mouth of US politicians or organizations. The biggest troublemakers on this planet. Bunch of psychopaths.

An American , 1 day ago

Treason has death for a consequence. Fu... your apology.

Леди Неизвестность , 1 day ago

They create fakes themselves, investigate them themselves, and after finding the sources themselves they apologize. And we are "guilty" of everything ... You look and wonder!

J. Baker , 1 day ago

What do you expect from Motherless son's Fooling good human beings Burn is hell Bastards

Radhika Technical , 1 day ago

Russia is great nation...

Simi822 , 1 day ago

if that is fluent Russian then I am fluent in Chinese...

Alvaro Dussan , 1 day ago

This is collusion between Democrats and social media

Joanne Mercader , 1 day ago

Brought to you by the Democratic Party founder of the KKK and slavery.

High Tech Hillbilly , 1 day ago

Real News ... Thank you RT

Diji D , 1 day ago

Hillary Clinton recently tweeted "Actions have consequences.." I am excited to see the consequences for this failure. i know, there wont be any.

Jack Booted Hug , 1 day ago

I haven't been getting my russian bot payments. ruble up pute

clash man , 1 day ago

Marxist playbook 101, exactly what the democrats have been using on the American people. Accuse those of the very thing that they themselves are guilty of!👍

Willy Wonka , 1 day ago (edited)

That (((commie))) should be incarcerated...and he keeps peoples resumes safe and secure...how is he not charged with fraud....? (((Untrustworthy)))

Jens Bröcher , 1 day ago

He has to go to jail!

pasta noodle , 1 day ago

will cnn, MSNBC, and the whole trump hating media apologize and admit the real Russian collusion was with the democrats

dev0n james , 1 day ago

democrats always lie and always double down. never let them gaslight you.

Pete fromtheIsland , 1 day ago

Didn't Putin do it? Oh no!

Albert Einstein , 1 day ago

Haha this is the old way to accuse Russia BRITISH STYLE PROPAGANDA!!!! LOL

I love The USA , 1 day ago

Another FAKE democommunist trying to get attention

b b , 1 day ago

TREASON hang them all

saul romero , 1 day ago

the irony, when democrats blame republicans for working with russia

RIP Arthur Morgan , 1 day ago

Does Russia welcome American immigrants? Asking for a friend

Divergent Evolution , 1 day ago

So by attacking other nations for interfering in other nations elections, the USA is promising to stop doing it themselves?

eagle-6 , 1 day ago

the fake media has no shame at all

Ed Robbins , 1 day ago

There's no low too low for the Democratic Socialist Extortion Party. P O S libtards.

Francois Egregyi , 1 day ago

More (((Demo-commie))) anti-Russian propaganda!

Michel de Nostredame , 1 day ago

Should arrest the CEO and send to Russia litigation...

Derek Hajos , 1 day ago

Many criminals are sorry AFTER they get exposed.

Chris Edward , 1 day ago

When will CNN and MSNBC apologize?

Silver4Life 1230 , 1 day ago

Demorats are garbage

SOPHIA FILMS , 1 day ago

Is he one of ((them))?

Clint Chapman , 1 day ago (edited)

This comes as no surprise of course. But, when you apologise for meddling/interfering in a state and or a federal election, this is all one has to do, to not be charged for a possible crime, just apologise? Oh, and be a Democrat of course. Im an American. But why has no other country came out and stated, that the US meddled in their elections? At least have come out in the last 3 years and stated that? Most know, every country spies on and meddles in one anothers elections. It's not ok but, we know and it happens.

Flyingcrocodile46 , 1 day ago

Make this news viral

starlord , 1 day ago

Where is Mueller?

Bertin Bahaya , 1 day ago

WOW ! The Demon-rats are simply genius ! And The Republicans are simply stupid. Reps keep being Rhinos for Dems !

AJ Khan , 1 day ago

Hahaha, "SORRY"........

John Grytbakk , 1 day ago

The "liberal" Left can do whatever they want. ....no worries. All others do not get away with anything. If ever there was a double standard, there you have it.

avenging angel , 1 day ago

Dirty Democrats hardcore leftist are to blame for the division in America

avenging angel , 1 day ago

I'm not surprised by this story Democrats are the founders of slavery KKK and we're also against civil rights in the sixties

beo wulf , 13 hours ago

TREASON/SEDITION, TRIAL, CONVICTION, THE DITCH, '.22CAL CURE' ... 'NEXT!'

Edin , 1 day ago

Murad Gazdiev speaks with such conviction every time lol...power

Gary Thompson , 1 day ago

Dems are a very sorry excuse for people. I believe they are so brain damaged and brainwashed, they will never recover.

Paul Rexs , 1 day ago

Will he be arrested for tampering with elections?

Roger Jennings , 1 day ago

"Fake Russian Tweets" is gonna be the name of my next band.

Sea Bass , 1 day ago

"Funding for tweets" Wow I didn't know it costs money to write something on Twitter

squidly1117 , 1 day ago

This is election fraud and the FEC needs to take action!

tracycolorado , 1 day ago

Only sorry that He got caught

paula conley , 1 day ago

You left out that New Knowledge gave a report product to the dem's senate committee to prove there was Russia interference during election.

Shane Brbich , 1 day ago

LinkedIn The hardest social media program to get out of

Darko Fius , 1 day ago

Linkedin is also biassed, there is no middle ground...one can establish highly sophisticated network linking each individual and finding the most influentials...data is worth billions upon billions...and people, mainly highly educated and skilled do have Linkedin account...so there is no "honest business", the co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, is among ones that are not "honest"...big money, bigger lies...once one tells a lie, he, or she is alway liar...

2532robh1 , 1 day ago

Another tech CEO A-hole.

Haasenpad , 18 hours ago

well Reid Hoffman is a BILDERBERGER!!!

Nancy G , 1 day ago

Dump Linkin !!! Never use it.

Dowlphwin , 1 day ago

Well, false flagging IS a specialty of the Clinton Intel Agency. (Among others, but lately it's a trend and people need to wake up to that.)

Chickennugget , 1 day ago

Wow haven't even heard this on our MSM

Daniel Bell , 1 day ago

Bet this won't be on CNN.

Just happened to walk by , 1 day ago

As usual, just another something -man/Klein/Smith affiliated to AIPAC.

Jeremy Chase , 1 day ago

Lots of complete morons in the comments who believe in the fake two party paradigm. Both parties believe you should suffer at the dictates of multinational corporations and the banking industry.

carl westernut , 1 day ago

Arrest and gulag the bastards

SIGNALacquired , 19 hours ago

False-flag attack

Wilcox Wilcox , 1 day ago

Omg.... He sold his soul to the devil.

Pat Hacker , 1 day ago

Are we supposed to believe that?

Peter Panino , 1 day ago

I am getting a lot of SPAM from somebody who disguises himself as "RUSSIAN BOT" including Cyrillic characters in the message and also in the metadata (!). Does anybody know who this could be?

eloundainfo , 1 day ago (edited)

What a disgrace, the left has totally lost the plot! A world leader (Putin) should receive a groveling apology!

S B , 1 day ago

Good job.

MrMnmn911 , 1 day ago

"Sorry"? That's it?? MUELLER MUST INVESTIGATE!

Infidel Atheist , 1 day ago

Give him the Ceausescu quick trial and fill him full of lead.

VERBODE KENNIS , 1 day ago

YEP.....DONT FORGET THE GOLDEN SHOWERS.........EH??

Jacob Diaz , 1 day ago

Lmaoo you idiots in the comments didnt even listen to the video.

EveryCrazyDay , 1 day ago

Defending Roy Moore....lol also anyone see a conflict of interest when the Russian government funds this news program. And basically is putting a story saying that Russian bots are fake and paid by dems.

TotoNut , 19 hours ago

Cyber security companies create fake news, can be trusted with making accusations against Russia, China? Lol.

1990cwa81625 , 1 day ago

Seriously considering shutting down my Linked In account.

Charles McCarron , 1 day ago (edited)

When are arrests going to me made? We ALL know that the DNC is a criminal organisation and that the USA is on borrowed time. The farce of American Democracy is getting more obvious by the day. There just aren't anywhere near enough people, among the overall pool of American voters, that even know how their government is theoretically supposed to work to have a functional self-governing nation state. Morons don't pick good government!

Millenial Sunshine , 1 day ago

Roy Moore should have won...they use the same tactics every time. Sex bots and Russian bots...

Jessica Lubien , 1 day ago

I would watch this if it wasn't for the coked up guy!!! PLEASE FIRE HIM!!

Floyd Zepplin , 1 day ago

Where is Mueller?

Roland James , 1 day ago

If you want to know what your enemies are like, just listen to what they are accusing you of.

Tron Carter , 20 hours ago

Jimmy Dore goes in depth on this very story. Well worth a look.

Juniper lane , 1 day ago

This is nothing new. Democrats are using Russian propaganda and Republicans like to use China propaganda. Both parties are rothschild puppets and love to use propaganda for political agendas.

MaryMag & Martha , 1 day ago

I can not remember the guy's name, but the guest that was speaking on the MSNBC panel at the 2:11 mark was pro -Trump earlier this year. I remember him saying that he was former Secret Service or something to that effect on Youtube. Now, we see him on a panel alledging Russian speculation moving it's way to the White House. I guess he couldn't become famous as pro-Trump, so he's went to the dark side

Conrad Angel , 1 day ago

...or sorry he got caught! Just saying!

Terry Bonnell , 1 day ago

Alexandra Orcasio Cortez 2020 this woman has a higher IQ than most of the Democratic Party's combined

Angry Shamrock , 1 day ago

They're not sorry. They will do it again.

Shawn Hennessey , 19 hours ago

sorry for creating false evidence in a federal investigation is a huge crime and makes him a conspirator in coup to the takedown of the presidency of the US.

Terrell Riley , 1 day ago

He isn't a Democrat. But I know that Americans were using fake bots before, during, and after 2016. All Dems aren't Dems. All GOP aren't GOP. There are a lot of coming out the closet for politicians going on in this day and age. Why now are we hearing this? 2020. You are not dealing with dummy's just deviants.

Donald Ganley , 19 hours ago (edited)

What Hoffman did is totally understandable. I myself frequently donate $100,000 amounts to causes about which I know nothing. Especially when I know that a minuscule amount like that won't really have any real impact on a Congressional election. Kidding aside, may we look forward to indictments of Hoffman, New Knowledge, Morgan, and Fox in this matter -- a case of real tampering and collusion? Glad I dumped Facebook AND LinkedIn on the same day last year.

Yellow Bhee , 1 day ago

Another American doing , full of amusement, Hollywood ! Not to worry they also robbing their owned citizens.

nucdn , 1 day ago

A new low for Demorats? No such thing Murad - they live in the low.

Antony bro , 1 day ago

Criminal America ... nothing but Scoundrels ...

Dimash_Lilliana Corredor , 1 hour ago

Thanks RT. We can count on you and trust your news! 👍👏❤

Scott Ewing , 1 day ago

Won't be able to look at linkedin in the same light again.

Yammel Heylel , 1 day ago

Like anyone really thought it was true, well actually as if anyone who doesn't get the bulk of their news from CNN, MSNBC, and the like, really thought it was true. Funny part is those idiots (CNN ect. veiwers) were screaming about how Russia was tearing apart American society, and as though out the history of mankind, you only have yourselves to blame.

Line upon Line Precept upon Precept , 1 day ago

"Sorry I got caught" hahaha. What a looser.

x13x Monkeys , 21 hours ago

This is not new- how many other projects like this are going on.

LJ B , 13 hours ago

Another day, another false flag in the USSA

kii Kale , 21 hours ago

The only truly verifiable fake news is from centrist. But I am not shedding tear for judge MooKKKre.

Andrew S , 7 hours ago (edited)

Our situation is TRULY DIRE... when it is indeed necessary to switch to RT for an honest appraisal of what is happening in American politics!

Barry Soetorro , 1 day ago

Dem should hand the office to the republicans

Asma , 1 day ago

😱😱😱and still they blame RUS for meddling the US elections

Cannibal Shark , 22 hours ago

Well one thing is for sure they know how to drag out a story, even the UK give up with the skripal crap after a year.

Douglas Baer , 1 day ago

Roy must sue the dem party.

Daniel Bonner , 1 day ago

Proof Russia is on the side of right 👊🏿👊🏿👊🏿

True Tech , 1 day ago

No Moore being within 1000 ft of people under the age of 18 years old.

Backpack PePelon , 23 hours ago

Their effort backfired in more the one way. Now real people took pride in becoming a russian bot aka supporting russian.

Sampson X , 10 hours ago

"By way of deception, thou shalt do war." - ZioCons

Brennen Nelson , 1 day ago

Time to boycott Linkdin.......

Herr Wahnsinn , 1 day ago

When the Van Allen radiation belt starts to end, let the current carry me

Jim C , 1 day ago

Nothing new here.

avenging angel , 1 day ago

Lockup CNN fake news

Stable Genius , 1 day ago

TRUMP was right....lol🤣

Caesar , 1 day ago

Good job on coming forward

Uber Steve , 1 day ago

Corruption- Q is coming for you

Jeffness Stuff , 1 day ago

Linkedin BAN

Daniel Bonner , 1 day ago

Can't be wrong and strong 🔥🔥🔥

John Hadleigh , 1 day ago

We all fail, that makes Us human.

Randy Hartono , 1 day ago

New Knowledge again???

Gina Kay , 1 day ago

Total vindication.

Bike Stream , 1 day ago

Bye LinkedIn!

Leonard Carr , 1 day ago

Linkedin ✡️🙀👍

7seven7 , 1 day ago

Dang it where's Bob Mueller? Wonder why the special council couldn't find this out.

Visteo Bman , 1 day ago

FAKE NEWS!!!

Daniel Paul , 1 day ago

This is fake news

Hendrik Van der Merwe , 9 hours ago

No surprise, this is how Liberals "roll"!

Los Time , 1 day ago

Good reporting.

Viator Nadeak , 1 day ago

Idiot idiot

Willemijn Heukels , 1 day ago

RT is funded by the Russian government btw so of course they're saying this I hope you all stop letting hate anger anger control your life when it should be dragging your nuts across broken glass only to fart in a walkie talkie to have a spiritual enlightenment experience and see all that is true thank you

Asaresa M , 1 day ago

This report is not the whole truth of what happened. You should look up the facts of this case before you get all partisan happy. Or you can just be a traitor and take Russia's (RT) word on election tampering.

Hiram Rosa Jr , 1 day ago

This comming from a russian news channel lololol

shinobi 30 , 1 day ago

Putin is a little midget pub not a bear,

Tutty Masala , 1 day ago

RT is a Russia state sponsored channel. This is pure propaganda.

Everett Mccurdy , 1 day ago

This is fake of course you fools!

Joe Black , 1 day ago

It's just like that Ukrainian journalist who faked his assassination so the world would blame Russia.

2wheelvloggers , 1 day ago

Americans are a sick bunch, so sad...

Jefe Hoptosh , 1 day ago

Even Gazdiev is fake. RT PLEASE STOP THE INFOTAINMENT. Gazdiev wants to be in theatre. Don't hold him back. Get a journalist who can deliver the news without all the fake pauses and arm waving.

Lee Haiko , 15 hours ago

Ok I would ask for a Muller investigation here, but it would be a waste of money, just like another investigation...

JJ Says , 1 day ago

He's sorry??? Sorry doesn't get it. He financed the ruin of a man's career! Fry him for election fraud, lying leftist POS.

EBobby Sing , 1 day ago

Even Mueller Probe is based on FAKE NEWS PROPAGANDA.

Four Toes , 1 day ago

Disgusting! I will never use LinkedIn

Mr Timmy , 1 day ago

If you want to destroy the worlds SuperPower and know you can't do it military, then infiltration into the minds of its people is a perfect way to destroy them when clearly America has a dumbed down population.

Dra O , 1 day ago (edited)

"I'm sorry I attempted to rig the US elections (but I sure wish hilary would've won!)." What an idiot, along with Suckerberg. Shameful.

gord oland , 1 day ago

Disgusting but no surprising.

dmob d , 10 hours ago

No one believes your BS RT not outside Rusky land anyway you are the typical example of propaganda news.

Frederick Rhodes , 1 day ago

Kushner is responsible for setting up fake proTrump republican twitter accounts to help Trump get elected. Why would democrats want to help Trump? That's another republican lie to fool the sheeple.

[Dec 29, 2018] Reporting on the Integrity Initiative is spotty yet but I did come across the link below of an article by Max Blumenthal

Dec 29, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

psychohistorian , Dec 26, 2018 9:32:36 PM | link

Reporting on the Integrity Initiative is spotty yet but I did come across the link below of an article by Max Blumenthal....and promises of more.

Inside the Temple of Covert Propaganda: The Integrity Initiative and the UK's Scandalous Information War

[Dec 28, 2018] Western propaganda turn: from sucking to alcoholic Yeltsin to the rabit hate of sober Putin in just 20 years

Looks like Western attempts to weaken Russia will never stop.
Dec 28, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

localsavage, 18 minutes ago

Notice that there is no time given. The story would then fall apart in minutes.

Pussy Biscuit , 20 minutes ago

This Russia **** is a never ending nightmare.

I remember when the libtards were constantly sucking Russia's **** in the early 1990s.

[Dec 27, 2018] Private Eye has reported that the #IntegrityInitiative anti-propoaganda unit is taking tips from the security masterminds who tried to sell the wisdom of going to war in Iraq!

Dec 27, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Blooming Barricade , Dec 26, 2018 12:18:48 PM | link

@2

My jaw dropped to the floor when I read that... the fact that they're reverting to the old name is the final step in the rehabilitation of the Iraq War criminals without liberals and pseudo left none of which would be possible

New podcast by Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton on Integrity Initiative https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=doip79-pYn0

And tying this together.....

Chris Williamson: Private Eye has reported that the #IntegrityInitiative anti-propoaganda unit is taking tips from the security masterminds who tried to sell the wisdom of going to war in Iraq!
And this outfit was set up by the Institute for Statecraft that's received £millions from HM Govt!!! https://mobile.twitter.com/DerbyChrisW/status/1076983080131416066

psychohistorian , Dec 26, 2018 9:32:36 PM | link

Reporting on the Integrity Initiative is spotty yet but I did come across the link below of an article by Max Blumenthal....and promises of more.

Inside the Temple of Covert Propaganda: The Integrity Initiative and the UK's Scandalous Information War

[Dec 22, 2018] Briefing note on the Integrity Initiative

Dec 22, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Sasha , Dec 22, 2018 10:38:52 AM | link

I do not know if this was included in "b"´s reports on Integrity Initiative, but worth the hour of reading ( without linking the hyeprlinks )

Briefing note on the Integrity Initiative

From what I have understood ( and as well you will, by extensive reading ) this, and other till now seeminlgy unknown initiatives, is the source

[Dec 22, 2018] It seems that the British government was prepared well in advance for the sudden attack on Skripal.

Notable quotes:
"... We can be actually confident not just that the journalists in the MSM are on the payroll but that the invoices and accounts for their bribes are carefully preserved. Murray's blog is almost always worth following, just as 'b's is. Yesterday more news about the Skripal case emerged: it seems that the British government was prepared well in advance for the sudden attack on Skripal. ..."
Dec 22, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

bevin , Dec 22, 2018 9:33:42 AM | link

The journalism scandals are just beginning.

Craig Murray today publishes accounts from the "Integrity Initiative" showing that journalists in Scotland are receiving retainers of 2500 a month Sterling, plus expenses and payment for actual articles published.

And if this is going on in Scotland we can be quite sure that it is actually happening in North America and Europe, generally, and, of course, in the less prosperous parts of the world where standards of integrity are just as low as they are hereabouts.

We can be actually confident not just that the journalists in the MSM are on the payroll but that the invoices and accounts for their bribes are carefully preserved. Murray's blog is almost always worth following, just as 'b's is. Yesterday more news about the Skripal case emerged: it seems that the British government was prepared well in advance for the sudden attack on Skripal.

What we are witnessing is the complete incompetence of those running the Empire. While malicious, indeed deadly, they simply cannot keep up with the critics of imperialism. Their power rests entirely on their ability to use force, both physical and financial. Their attempts to use social medias to their advantage are lame and ineffective. It seems clear to me that they will soon be reduced to using their power not just to hobble but to cripple critics- net neutrality is already finished.


BM , Dec 22, 2018 9:43:31 AM | link

it seems that the British government was prepared well in advance for the sudden attack on Skripal.
Posted by: bevin | Dec 22, 2018 9:33:42 AM | 12

That is a development. Can you give us a link, Bevin?

spudski , Dec 22, 2018 10:03:23 AM | link

BM, I think bevin was referring to the last two articles at https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/

Sasha , Dec 22, 2018 10:38:52 AM | link

I do not know if this was included in "b"´s reports on Integrity Initiative, but worth the hour of reading ( without linking the hyeprlinks )

Briefing note on the Integrity Initiative

From what I have understood ( and as well you will, by extensive reading ) this, and other till now seeminlgy unknown initiatives, is the source of the whole Russian meddling campaign, and Skripal and other "poisonings" issue, the rise of neonazis in Ukraine and the rest of Europe, the provocations in the Kerch Strait, various "colour revolutions" along European history, "independentist movements" and last wars in Europe and the Middle East, or money laundering schemes for unconfessable activities, with special chapter dedicated to the recruiting, conditioning and military trainning of Muslim youth from disadvantaged outcomes/neighborhoods to alleged "increase of opportunities", which has all the look of the formation of our well know "proxy" army to use in the Middle East and various "terrorist attacks" in European soil, where the perpetrators always resulted having a close relation, or were "well known" with the intelligence services.

[Dec 22, 2018] Craig Murray s latest provides convincing evidence that whatever happened to the Skripals in Salisbury was part of the Integrity Initiative s propaganda campaign against Russia.

Notable quotes:
"... The list is headed CND gen list 2. CND is Christopher Nigel Donnelly, Director of the Institute for Statecraft and the Integrity Initiative and a very senior career Military Intelligence Officer. ..."
"... Murder in Samarkand ..."
"... Now let us tie that in with the notorious name further down the list; Pablo Miller, the long-term MI6 handler of Sergei Skripal, who lived in Salisbury with Skripal. Miller is the man who was, within 24 hours of the Skripal attack, protected by a D(SMA) notice banning the media from mentioning him. Here Pablo Miller is actively involved, alongside serving FCO and MOD staff, in a government funded organisation whose avowed intention is to spread disinformation about Russia. The story that Miller is in an inactive retirement is immediately and spectacularly exploded. ..."
"... Now look at another name on this list. Howard Body. Assistant Head of Science Support at Porton Down chemical weapon research laboratory, just six miles away from Salisbury and the Skripal attack, a role he took up in December 2017. He combines this role with Assistant Head of Strategic Analysis at MOD London. "Science Support" at Porton Down is a euphemism for political direction to the scientists – Body has no scientific qualifications. ..."
"... Zachary Harkenrider is the Political Counsellor at the US Embassy in London. There are normally at least two Political Counsellors at an Embassy this size, one of whom will normally be the CIA Head of Station. I do not know if Harkenrider is CIA but it seems highly likely. ..."
"... So what do we have here? We have a programme, the Integrity Initiative, whose entire purpose is to pump out covert disinformation against Russia, through social media and news stories secretly paid for by the British government. And we have the Skripals' MI6 handler, the BBC, Porton Down, the FCO, the MOD and the US Embassy, working together in a group under the auspices of the Integrity Initiative. The Skripal Case happened to occur shortly after a massive increase in the Integrity Initiative's budget and activity, which itself was a small part of a British Government decision to ramp up a major information war against Russia. ..."
"... Working Group on Syria, Media, and the Propaganda ..."
Dec 22, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

lysias , Dec 21, 2018 1:58:07 PM | link

Craig Murray's latest provides convincing evidence that whatever happened to the Skripals in Salisbury was part of the Integrity Initiative's propaganda campaign against Russia.

British Government Covert Anti-Russian Propaganda and the Skripal Case - Craig Murray

It is worth starting by noting that a high percentage of the Integrity Initiative archive has been authenticated. The scheme has been admitted by the FCO and defended as legitimate government activity. Individual items like the minutes of the meeting with David Leask are authenticated. Not one of the documents has so far been disproven, or even denied.

Which tends to obscure some of the difficulties with the material. There is no metadata showing when each document was created, as opposed to when Anonymous made it into a PDF. Anonymous have released it in tranches and made plain there is more to come. The reason for this methodology is left obscure.

Most frustratingly, Anonymous' comments on the releases indicate that they have vital information which is not, so far, revealed. The most important document of all appears to be a simple contact list, of a particular group within the hundreds of contacts revealed in the papers overall. This is it in full:

Tantalisingly, Anonymous describe this as a list of people who attended a meeting with the White Helmets. But there is no evidence of that in the document itself, nor does any other document released so far refer to this meeting. There is very little in the documents released so far about the White Helmets at all. But there is a huge amount about the Skripal case. With the greatest of respect to Anonymous and pending any release of further evidence, I want you to consider whether this might be a document related to the Skripal incident.

The list is headed CND gen list 2. CND is Christopher Nigel Donnelly, Director of the Institute for Statecraft and the Integrity Initiative and a very senior career Military Intelligence Officer.

The first name on the list caught my eye. Duncan Allan was the young FCO Research Analyst who, as detailed in Murder in Samarkand, appears in my Ambassadorial office in Tashkent, telling me of the FCO staff who had been left in tears by the pressure put on them to sign up to Blair's dodgy dossier on Iraqi WMD. During the process of clearing the manuscript with the FCO, I was told (though not by him) that he denied having ever said it. It was one of a very few instances where I refused to make the changes requested to the text, because I had no doubt whatsoever of what had been said.

If Duncan did lie about having told me, it did his career no harm as he is now Deputy Head of FCO Research Analysts and, most importantly, the FCO's lead analyst on Russia and the Former Soviet Union.

Now let us tie that in with the notorious name further down the list; Pablo Miller, the long-term MI6 handler of Sergei Skripal, who lived in Salisbury with Skripal. Miller is the man who was, within 24 hours of the Skripal attack, protected by a D(SMA) notice banning the media from mentioning him. Here Pablo Miller is actively involved, alongside serving FCO and MOD staff, in a government funded organisation whose avowed intention is to spread disinformation about Russia. The story that Miller is in an inactive retirement is immediately and spectacularly exploded.

Now look at another name on this list. Howard Body. Assistant Head of Science Support at Porton Down chemical weapon research laboratory, just six miles away from Salisbury and the Skripal attack, a role he took up in December 2017. He combines this role with Assistant Head of Strategic Analysis at MOD London. "Science Support" at Porton Down is a euphemism for political direction to the scientists – Body has no scientific qualifications.

Another element brought into this group is the state broadcaster, through Helen Boaden, the former Head of BBC News and Current Affairs.

In all there are six serving MOD staff on the list, all either in Intelligence or in PR. Intriguingly one of them, Ian Cohen, has email addresses both at the MOD and at the notoriously corrupt HSBC bank. The other FCO name besides Duncan Allan, Adam Rutland, is also on the PR side.

Zachary Harkenrider is the Political Counsellor at the US Embassy in London. There are normally at least two Political Counsellors at an Embassy this size, one of whom will normally be the CIA Head of Station. I do not know if Harkenrider is CIA but it seems highly likely.

So what do we have here? We have a programme, the Integrity Initiative, whose entire purpose is to pump out covert disinformation against Russia, through social media and news stories secretly paid for by the British government. And we have the Skripals' MI6 handler, the BBC, Porton Down, the FCO, the MOD and the US Embassy, working together in a group under the auspices of the Integrity Initiative. The Skripal Case happened to occur shortly after a massive increase in the Integrity Initiative's budget and activity, which itself was a small part of a British Government decision to ramp up a major information war against Russia.

I find that very interesting indeed.

With a hat-tip to members of the Working Group on Syria, Media, and the Propaganda, who are preparing a major and important publication which is imminent. UPDATE Their extremely important briefing note on the Integrity Initiative is now online, prepared to the highest standards of academic discipline. I shall be drawing on and extrapolating from it further next week.

[Dec 22, 2018] British Security Service Infiltration, the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft by Craig Murray

Highly recommended!
Craig Murray is right that "As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier." Collapse of neoliberal ideology and rise of tentions in neoliberal sociarties resulted in unprecedented increase of covert and false flag operations by British intelligence services, especially against Russia, which had been chosen as a convenient scapegoat. With Steele dossier and Skripal affair as two most well known.
New Lady Macbeth (Theresa May) Russophobia is so extreme that her cabinet derailed the election of a Russian to head Interpol.
Looks like neoliberalism cannot be defeated by and faction of the existing elite. Only when shepp oil end mant people will have a chance. The US , GB and EU are part of the wider hegemonic neoliberal system. In fact rejection of neoliberal globalization probably will lead to "national neoliberals" regime which would be a flavor of neo-fascism, no more no less.
Notable quotes:
"... The British state can maintain its spies' cover stories for centuries. ..."
"... I learnt how highly improbable left wing firebrand Simon Bracey-Lane just happened to be on holiday in the United States with available cash to fund himself, when he stumbled into the Bernie Sanders campaign. ..."
"... It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, "Corbyn and Sanders supporting" Bracey-Lane is hosting a very right wing event, "Cold War Then and Now", for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely unbalanced panel of British military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia. ..."
"... the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in "clusters of influence" around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute's internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative's thus exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and others like Dan Kaszeta the US "novichok expert", have cheerfully admitted it. ..."
"... By sleuthing the company records of this "Scottish charity", and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement – it is the basement of the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building . It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London. ..."
"... Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence. ..."
"... I have a great deal more to tell you about Mr Edney and his organisation next week, and the extraordinary covert disinformation war the British government wages online, attacking British citizens using British taxpayers' money. Please note in the interim I am not even a smidgeon suicidal, and going to be very, very careful crossing the road and am not intending any walks in the hills. ..."
"... I am not alleging Mr Bracey-Lane is an intelligence service operative who previously infiltrated the Labour Party and the Sanders campaign. He may just be a young man of unusually heterodox and vacillating political opinions. He may be an undercover reporter for the Canary infiltrating the Institute for Statecraft. All these things are possible, and I have no firm information. ..."
"... one of the activities the Integrity Initiative sponsors happens to be the use of online trolls to ridicule the idea that the British security services ever carry out any kind of infiltration, false flag or agent provocateur operations, despite the fact that we even have repeated court judgements against undercover infiltration officers getting female activists pregnant. The Integrity Initiative offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media, it would be the biggest story of the day ..."
"... As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier. ..."
"... You can bank on continued ramping up of Russophobia to supply "the enemy". ..."
Dec 13, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

in Uncategorized by craig

The British state can maintain its spies' cover stories for centuries. Look up Eldred Pottinger, who for 180 years appears in scores of British history books – right up to and including William Dalrymple's Return of the King – as a British officer who chanced to be passing Herat on holiday when it came under siege from a partly Russian-officered Persian army, and helped to organise the defences. In researching Sikunder Burnes, I discovered and published from the British Library incontrovertible and detailed documentary evidence that Pottinger's entire journey was under the direct instructions of, and reporting to, British spymaster Alexander Burnes. The first historian to publish the untrue "holiday" cover story, Sir John Kaye, knew both Burnes and Pottinger and undoubtedly knew he was publishing lying propaganda. Every other British historian of the First Afghan War (except me and latterly Farrukh Husain) has just followed Kaye's official propaganda.

Some things don't change. I was irresistibly reminded of Eldred Pottinger just passing Herat on holiday, when I learnt how highly improbable left wing firebrand Simon Bracey-Lane just happened to be on holiday in the United States with available cash to fund himself, when he stumbled into the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Recent university graduate Simon Bracey-Lane took it even further. Originally from Wimbledon in London, he was inspired to rejoin the Labour party in September when Corbyn was elected leader. But by that point, he was already in the US on holiday. So he joined the Sanders campaign, and never left.
"I had two weeks left and some money left, so I thought, Fuck it, I'll make some calls for Bernie Sanders," he explains. "I just sort of knew Des Moines was the place, so I just turned up at their HQ, started making phone calls, and then became a fully fledged field organiser."

It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, "Corbyn and Sanders supporting" Bracey-Lane is hosting a very right wing event, "Cold War Then and Now", for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely unbalanced panel of British military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia.

Nor would it seem likely that Bracey-Lane would be involved with the Integrity Initiative. Even the mainstream media has been forced to give a few paragraphs to the outrageous Integrity Initiative, under which the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in "clusters of influence" around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute's internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative's thus exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and others like Dan Kaszeta the US "novichok expert", have cheerfully admitted it.

The mainstream media have tracked down the HQ of the "Institute for Statecraft" to a derelict mill near Auchtermuchty. It is owned by one of the company directors, Daniel Lafayeedney, formerly of D Squadron 23rd SAS Regiment and later of Military Intelligence (and incidentally born the rather more prosaic Daniel Edney).

By sleuthing the company records of this "Scottish charity", and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement – it is the basement of the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building. It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London.

Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence.

Having been told where the Institute for Statecraft skulk, I tipped off journalist Kit Klarenberg of Sputnik Radio to go and physically check it out. Kit did so and was aggressively ejected by that well-known Corbyn and Sanders supporter, Simon Bracey-Lane. It does seem somewhat strange that our left wing hero is deeply embedded in an organisation that launches troll attacks on Jeremy Corbyn.

I have a great deal more to tell you about Mr Edney and his organisation next week, and the extraordinary covert disinformation war the British government wages online, attacking British citizens using British taxpayers' money. Please note in the interim I am not even a smidgeon suicidal, and going to be very, very careful crossing the road and am not intending any walks in the hills.

I am not alleging Mr Bracey-Lane is an intelligence service operative who previously infiltrated the Labour Party and the Sanders campaign. He may just be a young man of unusually heterodox and vacillating political opinions. He may be an undercover reporter for the Canary infiltrating the Institute for Statecraft. All these things are possible, and I have no firm information.

But one of the activities the Integrity Initiative sponsors happens to be the use of online trolls to ridicule the idea that the British security services ever carry out any kind of infiltration, false flag or agent provocateur operations, despite the fact that we even have repeated court judgements against undercover infiltration officers getting female activists pregnant. The Integrity Initiative offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media, it would be the biggest story of the day.

As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier.

You can bank on continued ramping up of Russophobia to supply "the enemy".

As both Scottish Independence and Jeremy Corbyn are viewed as real threats by the British Establishment, you can anticipate every possible kind of dirty trick in the next couple of years, with increasing frequency and audacity

[Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... In his just published book, War With Russia? ..."
"... To paraphrase Putin: "You are making Russia a threat by declaring us to be one, by discarding facts and substituting orchestrated opinions that your propagandistic media establish as fact via endless repetition." ..."
"... Cohen is correct that during the Cold War every US president worked to defuse tensions, especially Republican ones. Since the Clinton regime every US president has worked to create tensions. What explains this dangerous change in approach? The end of the Cold War was disadvantageous to the military/security complex whose budget and power had waxed from decades of cold war. Suddenly the enemy that had bestowed such wealth and prestige on the military/security complex disappeared. ..."
"... The New Cold War is the result of the military/security complex's resurrection of the enemy. In a democracy with independent media and scholars, this would not have been possible. But the Clinton regime permitted in violation of anti-trust laws 90% of the US media to be concentrated in the hands of six mega-corporations, thus destroying an independence already undermined by the CIA's successful use of the CIA's media assets to control explanations. Many books have been written about the CIA's use of the media, including Udo Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalism," the English edition of which was quickly withdrawn and burned. ..."
www.theamericanconservative.com
Dec 22, 2018 |

Throughout the long Cold War Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University was a voice of reason. He refused to allow his patriotism to blind him to Washington's contribution to the conflict and to criticize only the Soviet contribution. Cohen's interest was not to blame the enemy but to work toward a mutual understanding that would remove the threat of nuclear war. Although a Democrat and left-leaning, Cohen would have been at home in the Reagan administration, as Reagan's first priority was to end the Cold War. I know this because I was part of the effort. Pat Buchanan will tell you the same thing.

In 1974 a notorious cold warrior, Albert Wohlstetter, absurdly accused the CIA of underestimating the Soviet threat. As the CIA had every incentive for reasons of budget and power to overestimate the Soviet threat, and today the "Russian threat," Wohlstetter's accusation made no sense on its face. However he succeeded in stirring up enough concern that CIA director George H.W. Bush, later Vice President and President, agreed to a Team B to investigate the CIA's assessment, headed by the Russiaphobic Harvard professor Richard Pipes. Team B concluded that the Soviets thought they could win a nuclear war and were building the forces with which to attack the US.

The report was mainly nonsense, and it must have have troubled Stephen Cohen to experience the setback to negotiations that Team B caused.

Today Cohen is stressed that it is the United States that thinks it can win a nuclear war. Washington speaks openly of using "low yield" nuclear weapons, and intentionally forecloses any peace negotiations with Russia with a propaganda campaign against Russia of demonization, vilification, and transparent lies, while installing missile bases on Russia's borders and while talking of incorporating former parts of Russia into NATO. In his just published book, War With Russia? , which I highly recommend, Cohen makes a convincing case that Washington is asking for war.

I agree with Cohen that if Russia is a threat it is only because the US is threatening Russia. The stupidity of the policy toward Russia is creating a Russian threat. Putin keeps emphasizing this. To paraphrase Putin: "You are making Russia a threat by declaring us to be one, by discarding facts and substituting orchestrated opinions that your propagandistic media establish as fact via endless repetition."

Cohen is correct that during the Cold War every US president worked to defuse tensions, especially Republican ones. Since the Clinton regime every US president has worked to create tensions. What explains this dangerous change in approach? The end of the Cold War was disadvantageous to the military/security complex whose budget and power had waxed from decades of cold war. Suddenly the enemy that had bestowed such wealth and prestige on the military/security complex disappeared.

The New Cold War is the result of the military/security complex's resurrection of the enemy. In a democracy with independent media and scholars, this would not have been possible. But the Clinton regime permitted in violation of anti-trust laws 90% of the US media to be concentrated in the hands of six mega-corporations, thus destroying an independence already undermined by the CIA's successful use of the CIA's media assets to control explanations. Many books have been written about the CIA's use of the media, including Udo Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalism," the English edition of which was quickly withdrawn and burned.

The demonization of Russia is also aided and abetted by the Democrats' hatred of Trump and anger from Hillary's loss of the presidential election to the "Trump deplorables." The Democrats purport to believe that Trump was installed by Putin's interference in the presidential election. This false belief is emotionally important to Democrats, and they can't let go of it.

Although Cohen as a professor at Princeton and NYU never lacked research opportunities, in the US Russian studies, strategic studies, and the like are funded by the military/security complex whose agenda Cohen's scholarship does not serve. At the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where I held an independently financed chair for a dozen years, most of my colleagues were dependent on grants from the military/security complex. At the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, where I was a Senior Fellow for three decades, the anti-Soviet stance of the Institution reflected the agenda of those who funded the institution.

I am not saying that my colleagues were whores on a payroll. I am saying that the people who got the appointments were people who were inclined to see the Soviet Union the way the military/security complex thought it should be seen.

As Stephen Cohen is aware, in the original Cold War there was some balance as all explanations were not controlled. There were independent scholars who could point out that the Soviets, decimated by World War 2, had an interest in peace, and that accommodation could be achieved, thus avoiding the possibility of nuclear war.

Stephen Cohen must have been in the younger ranks of those sensible people, as he and President Reagan's ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matloff, seem to be the remaining voices of expert reason on the American scene.

If you care to understand the dire threat under which you live, a threat that only a few people, such as Stephen Cohen, are trying to lift, read his book.

If you want to understand the dire threat that a bought-and-paid-for American media poses to your existence, read Cohen's accounts of their despicable lies. America has a media that is synonymous with lies.

If you want to understand how corrupt American universities are as organizations on the take for money, organizations to whom truth is inconsequential, read Cohen's book.

If you want to understand why you could be dead before Global Warming can get you, read Cohen's book.

Enough said.

[Dec 21, 2018] Virtually no one in neoliberal MSM is paying attention to the fact that a group of Pakistani muslims, working for a Jewish Congresswoman from Florida, had full computer access to a large number of Democrat Representatives. Most of the press is disinterested in pursuing this matter

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... What Are the Democrats Hiding?" http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2017/07/what-are-the-democrats-hiding-by-publius-tacitus.html "Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) demanded that Capitol Police Chief Matthew Verderosa return equipment belonging to her office that was seized as part of the investigation -- or face "consequences." ..."
"... "FBI agents seized smashed computer hard drives from the home of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's information technology (IT) administrator, according to two sources with knowledge of the investigation. Pakistani-born Imran Awan, long-time right-hand IT aide to the former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman, has since desperately tried to get the hard drives back." ..."
"... This is not your phony Russia-gate or McCain-commissioned funny dossier on Trump. This is the documented "serious, potentially illegal, violations of the House IT network," which is a case of a free access to classified information by a group of the proven blackmailers. Would this matter be treated with the same urgency of "patriotism" as the cases of Manning and Assange? ..."
Jul 25, 2017 | www.unz.com

annamaria , says: July 25, 2017 at 2:09 pm GMT

@zzzzzzz

" but the Deep State knows how to box"

Let's see: "What Are the Democrats Hiding?" http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2017/07/what-are-the-democrats-hiding-by-publius-tacitus.html "Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) demanded that Capitol Police Chief Matthew Verderosa return equipment belonging to her office that was seized as part of the investigation -- or face "consequences."

Virtually no one [from MSM] is paying attention to the fact that a group of Pakistani Muslims, working for a Jewish Congresswoman from Florida, had full computer access to a large number of Democrat Representatives. Most of the press is disinterested in pursuing this matter."

http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/23/exclusive-fbi-seized-smashed-hard-drives-from-wasserman-schultz-it-aides-home/

"FBI agents seized smashed computer hard drives from the home of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's information technology (IT) administrator, according to two sources with knowledge of the investigation. Pakistani-born Imran Awan, long-time right-hand IT aide to the former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman, has since desperately tried to get the hard drives back."

This is not your phony Russia-gate or McCain-commissioned funny dossier on Trump. This is the documented "serious, potentially illegal, violations of the House IT network," which is a case of a free access to classified information by a group of the proven blackmailers. Would this matter be treated with the same urgency of "patriotism" as the cases of Manning and Assange?

[Dec 21, 2018] Similarities between neo-McCarthyism and anti-Semitism

Dec 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Theo , Dec 20, 2018 11:16:04 AM | link

As I wrote a comment on the German magazine"Die Zeit"praising Trump's decision to retreat from Syria my comment was deleted.I denounced the European whining and letting do the Americans their dirty work.Now the Europeans show their true colors.In Germany's MSM it doesn't seem to be allowed to take Trump's side.By the way -it's very good and well researched article.Thank you.

bevin , Dec 20, 2018 11:16:15 AM | 22 ">link

". If you want to blame "the Jews" for all the problems in the world, just remember that your doing so in this language actually strengthens the position of the Zionists. And you may want to consider that at least *some* of these Jew-bashing critiques of Israel on sites like Unz and others are most certainly written by paid propagandists of the state of Israel." WJ@ 14

Absolutely right. The routine way in which, all over the internet, the tired and discredited themes of the anti-Semites and, their soul sisters, the anti-Communists infect every serious discussion or sensible discourse is maddening.

There is not the tiniest doubt who benefits from this idiocy and it isn't the people of Palestine or the working people.

[Dec 20, 2018] Forensicator Guccifer 2.0 Returns To The East Coast by Elizabeth Lea Vos

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. ~ Ian Fleming
Notable quotes:
"... We believe that in all three cases Guccifer 2 was unlikely to anticipate that this Eastern timezone setting could be derived from the metadata of the documents that he published. However, one vocal critic with significant media reach objected to our East Coast finding as it related to our analysis of the ngpvan .7z file. This critic concluded instead that Guccifer 2 deliberately planted that clue to implicate a DNC worker who would die under suspicious circumstances a few days later on July 10, 2016. ..."
"... Now, we have this additional East Coast indication, which appears just one day after the ngpvan.7z files were collected. This new East Coast indication is found in a completely different group of files that Guccifer 2 published on his blog site. Further, this East Coast finding has its own unique and equally unlikely method of derivation. ..."
"... If we apply our critic's logic, what do we now conclude? That Guccifer 2 also deliberately planted this new East Coast indication? To what end? We wonder: Will this new evidence compel our out-spoken critic to retract his unsubstantiated claims and accusations? ..."
Dec 20, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Elizabeth Lea Vos Tue, 12/18/2018 - 22:43 45 SHARES

Via Disobedient Media.

Editorial Note: The Forensicator recently published a report, titled " Guccifer 2 Returns To The East Coast ." Forensicator provided the following introduction to his latest findings, reproduced here with the permission of the author.

In this post, we announce a new finding that confirms our previous work and is the basis for an update that we recently made to Guccifer 2's Russian Breadcrumbs . In our original publication of that report, we posited that there were indications of a GMT+4 timezone offset (legacy Moscow DST) in a batch of files that Guccifer 2 posted on July 6, 2016. At the time, we viewed that as a "Russian breadcrumb" that Guccifer 2 intentionally planted.

Now, based on new information, we have revised that conclusion: The timezone offset was in fact GMT-4 (US Eastern DST) . Here, we will describe how we arrived at this new, surprising conclusion and relate it to our prior work.

A month/so after publication, Stephen McIntyre ( @ClimateAudit ) replicated our analysis. He ran a few experiments and found an error in our original conclusion.

We mistakenly interpreted the last modified time that LibreOffice wrote as "2015-08-25T23:07:00Z" as a GMT time value. Typically, the trailing "Z" means " Zulu Time ", but in this case, LibreOffice incorrectly added the "Z". McIntyre's tests confirm that LibreOffice records the "last modified" time as local time (not GMT). The following section describes the method that we used to determine the timezone offset in force when the document was saved.

LibreOffice Leaks the Time Zone Offset in Force when a Document was Last Written

Modern Microsoft Office documents are generally a collection of XML files and image files. This collection of files is packaged as a Zip file. LibreOffice can save documents in a Microsoft Office compatible format, but its file format differs in two important details: (1) the GMT time that the file was saved is recorded in the Zip file components that make up the final document and (2) the document internal last saved time is recorded as local time (unlike Microsoft Word, which records it as a GMT [UTC] value).

If we open up a document saved by Microsoft Office using the modern Office file format ( .docx or .xlsx ) as a Zip file, we see something like the following.

LibreOffice , as shown below, will record the GMT time that the document components were saved. This time will display as the same value independent of the time zone in force when the Zip file metadata is viewed.

For documents saved by LibreOffice we can compare the local "last saved" time recorded in the document's properties with the GMT time value recorded inside the document (when viewed as a Zip file). We demonstrate this derivation using the file named potus-briefing-05-18-16_as-edits.docx that Guccifer 2 changed using LibreOffice and then uploaded to his blog site on July 6, 2016 (along with several other files).

Above, we calculate a time zone offset of GMT-4 (EDT) was in force, by subtracting the last saved time expressed in GMT (2016-07-06 17:10:58) from the last saved time expressed as local time (2016-07-06 13:10:57).

We've Been Here Before

The Eastern timezone setting found in Guccifer 2's documents published on July 6, 2016 is significant, because as we showed in Guccifer 2.0 NGP/Van Metadata Analysis , Guccifer 2 was likely on the East Coast the previous day, when he collected the DNC-related files found in the ngpvan.7z Zip file. Also, recall that Guccifer 2 was likely on the East Coast a couple of months later on September 1, 2016 when he built the final ngpvan.7z file.

We believe that in all three cases Guccifer 2 was unlikely to anticipate that this Eastern timezone setting could be derived from the metadata of the documents that he published. However, one vocal critic with significant media reach objected to our East Coast finding as it related to our analysis of the ngpvan .7z file. This critic concluded instead that Guccifer 2 deliberately planted that clue to implicate a DNC worker who would die under suspicious circumstances a few days later on July 10, 2016.

Further, this critic accused the Forensicator (and Adam Carter ) of using this finding to amplify the impact of Forensicator's report in an effort to spread disinformation. He implied that Forensicator's report was supplied by Russian operatives via a so-called "tip-off file." The Forensicator addresses those baseless criticisms and accusations in The Campbell Conspiracy .

Now, we have this additional East Coast indication, which appears just one day after the ngpvan.7z files were collected. This new East Coast indication is found in a completely different group of files that Guccifer 2 published on his blog site. Further, this East Coast finding has its own unique and equally unlikely method of derivation.

If we apply our critic's logic, what do we now conclude? That Guccifer 2 also deliberately planted this new East Coast indication? To what end? We wonder: Will this new evidence compel our out-spoken critic to retract his unsubstantiated claims and accusations?

Closing Thought: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. ~ Ian Fleming


tion , 12 hours ago link

It is curious how those running vpn's often don't bother appropriately setting their device time zones.

Regarding the closing thought, that was my thinking regarding the Byzantine Vegetable 'ally' at /qr in a non-American time zone who repeatedly attacked me.

Perhaps I have shared some harsh words with you and William, but I do sincerely care for your well being and my appreciation for the work you both have done remains. The Optics have been understandably difficult to swallow for many, but I hope that in your own time, you both will be willing to take another look at Q.

Q is Stephen Miller, and Q+ is POTUS.

Best Wishes to you both.

Q's tion

Bastiat , 12 hours ago link

Interesting to see Fleming -- as time goes on, it is pretty clear that he was telling us a few things about how power really works--psychopathic oligarchs with private wetworkers. Of course now we have governments competing to hire the same mercenaries -- and the uniformed mercenaries working oligarchs with government complicity.

Etymology , 21 hours ago link

In short, not a Hack by "Ruski's" a leak by an insider due to the impossibility to data transfer rates.

When will we see a rational investigation and prosecution of these criminals?

boattrash , 13 hours ago link

" When will we see a rational investigation and prosecution of these criminals? "

40 years from now, when **** gets declassified, and the Globalists up in Yanktown have accomplished their mission of destruction.

[Dec 20, 2018] Canova Contests The Results Of Congressional Race Against Wasserman-Schultz, Calls For Revote – Disobedient Media

Notable quotes:
"... "Tim Canova, independent candidate in Florida's 23rd Congressional District, has filed a motion for a court to invalidate the results of the 2018 general election and declare that a "new election shall proceed with hand-marked paper ballots that are counted by hand in public and reported immediately and publicly at the local precinct level." ..."
"... "Unfortunately, this is only the most recent instance of what is now a pattern of misconduct by Snipes regarding paper ballots, as it follows barely a year after Snipes unlawfully destroyed hundreds of boxes of all paper ballots cast in Broward County in the 2016 Democratic primary for Florida's 23rd Congressional district between Canova and Schultz, in violation of state and federal law and while Canova's prior lawsuit to inspect those ballots was pending, as already determined on summary judgment by the Florida Circuit Court." ..."
"... "In addition to Snipes' failure to safeguard the integrity of the paper ballots in the 2018 general election for FL-23, the certification of the purported results is based on inadequate and incomplete information, and it is therefore an invalid certification of those results. More specifically, approximately 98,000 votes are reported by Snipes to have been cast for Schultz without any indication as to how and when those votes were cast. To date, Snipes still has not provided this information about the "98,000 votes from nowhere." These votes alone are enough to change the results of this election, or at the very least to place in doubt these results." ..."
"... "Florida Gov. Rick Scott suspended Broward County elections supervisor Brenda Snipes on Friday and installed a close ally to lead an office that could play a pivotal role in the next presidential election. Peter Antonacci, president and CEO of the state's business-recruitment agency Enterprise Florida, will serve for the remainder of Snipes' term until a replacement can be chosen by voters in November 2020, the governor's office announced." ..."
Dec 20, 2018 | disobedientmedia.com

Canova Contests The Results Of Congressional Race Against Wasserman-Schultz, Calls For Revote December 1, 2018 December 1, 2018 Elizabeth Vos Earlier today, former Congressional candidate Tim Canova announced that his legal team filed a complaint officially contesting the results of last month's congressional race, in which Canova faced off against former DNC Chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

The Canova campaign website announced the move:

"Tim Canova, independent candidate in Florida's 23rd Congressional District, has filed a motion for a court to invalidate the results of the 2018 general election and declare that a "new election shall proceed with hand-marked paper ballots that are counted by hand in public and reported immediately and publicly at the local precinct level."

" In the details of Canova's court filing, Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes [is alleged to have] "engaged in misconduct that was sufficient to change or place in doubt the results of the 2018 election." Canova cites Snipes, Dozel Spencer, the SOE Director of Voting Equipment, and other deputy supervisors "violated their oaths to faithfully perform their duties, engaged in repeated misconduct and violations of state and federal laws, including criminal statutes."

Highlights of the complaint , via the Canova Campaign website, include:

The complaint states in part :

"Unfortunately, this is only the most recent instance of what is now a pattern of misconduct by Snipes regarding paper ballots, as it follows barely a year after Snipes unlawfully destroyed hundreds of boxes of all paper ballots cast in Broward County in the 2016 Democratic primary for Florida's 23rd Congressional district between Canova and Schultz, in violation of state and federal law and while Canova's prior lawsuit to inspect those ballots was pending, as already determined on summary judgment by the Florida Circuit Court."

"In addition to Snipes' failure to safeguard the integrity of the paper ballots in the 2018 general election for FL-23, the certification of the purported results is based on inadequate and incomplete information, and it is therefore an invalid certification of those results. More specifically, approximately 98,000 votes are reported by Snipes to have been cast for Schultz without any indication as to how and when those votes were cast. To date, Snipes still has not provided this information about the "98,000 votes from nowhere." These votes alone are enough to change the results of this election, or at the very least to place in doubt these results."

This latest news comes under 24 hours after the Sun Sentinal reported that Florida's Governor Rick Scott had fired Brenda Snipes, effective immediately. The report states: "Florida Gov. Rick Scott suspended Broward County elections supervisor Brenda Snipes on Friday and installed a close ally to lead an office that could play a pivotal role in the next presidential election. Peter Antonacci, president and CEO of the state's business-recruitment agency Enterprise Florida, will serve for the remainder of Snipes' term until a replacement can be chosen by voters in November 2020, the governor's office announced."

Disobedient Media previously covered the disastrous aftermath of last month's midterm elections, specifically concerning the race between Canova and Wasserman-Schultz. On election night, the official vote count awarded a mere 5% of votes to Canova, despite a previous poll revealing the independent was tied with the former DNC Chairwoman.

This glaring discrepancy prompted vocal calls for the invalidation of the race. Given Snipes's history of illegal ballot destruction which benefitted Wasserman-Schultz's interest, as well as the fact that Snipes was photographed campaigning with Wasserman-Schultz days before voters went to the polls, it would be ludicrous if Canova and the public failed to question the validity of the results.

In a previous appraisal of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz's career, Disobedient Media noted her central role in seeing Bernie Sanders cheated out of the Democratic Party nomination in 2016, as well as her probable involvement in bizarre event surrounding the DNC Fraud lawsuit (voice-modulated phone calls including the phrase "okey-dokey" ), and the grossly underreported Awan scandal .

Disobedient Media additionally noted the furor that erupted after the publication of video evidence of a digital scanner voting machine sending results wirelessly. Some have also accused Snipes and her affiliates of falsifying ballots 'as needed,' dubbing the practice the 'Brenda Snipes Process,' which was allegedly used routinely in order to ensure a desired election outcome.

Independent journalist and progressive activist Niko House also set the internet on fire when he published a video of purported ballots being illegally and improperly transported. House discussed what he witnessed in Florida on election day with Lee Camp on RT's Redacted Tonight .

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Tim Canova has also called for the resignation of Snipes's Director, Dozel Spencer. As noted by this author and others, Brenda Snipes is merely the public face of a deeply corrupt political system, and without a massive overhaul, business will most likely continue as usual in Southern Florida – at the expense of its constituents.

Prosecution of those involved in documented, home-grown election interference is also essential moving forward. However, one should be under no illusion that such measures are likely in the near term without massive public pressure.

Regardless, the significance of Canova's two races against Wasserman-Schultz, as well as his campaign's quest for transparency, should not be forgotten. He is one of the very few progressive candidates who has opted to fight corruption head-on, from outside the DNC, rather than concede and meekly endorse the perpetrators of it from within the Democratic Party.

Unlike the faux " #Resistance " against fictional Russian-collusion or Russian-hacking, Canova is the singular example of real resistance against actual US election rigging in one of the most corrupt political fiefdoms in the country.

It is for all of these reasons, many believe, that the discrepancy between polling and election results was so extreme in Canova's latest race. It wasn't about "safely" beating Canova, it was about making an example of him to such an extent that no one else would follow in his footsteps. With all of this in mind, it is critical that the public support Tim Canova's efforts in contesting last month's election results. Donations can be made via the Canova campaign website .

Disobedient Media will continue to report on the corrupt dealings surrounding Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, as well as the efforts of Tim Canova and his campaign.

[Dec 20, 2018] Opinion The Guardian's Desperate Attempt To Connect Assange To Russiagate Backfires

Dec 20, 2018 | disobedientmedia.com

The Guardian's latest attack on Julian Assange was not only a fallacious smear, it represented a desperate attempt on behalf of the British intelligence community to conflate the pending US charges against the journalist with Russiagate. The Guardian's article seeks to deflect from the reality that the prosecution of Assange will focus on Chelsea Manning-Era releases and Vault 7, not the DNC or Podesta emails.

We assert this claim based on the timing of the publication, the Guardian's history of subservience to British intelligence agencies, animosity between The Guardian and WikiLeaks, and the longstanding personal feud between Guardian journalist Luke Harding and Assange. This conclusion is also supported by Harding's financial and career interest in propping up the Russiagate narrative

[Dec 20, 2018] The Guardian's Reputation In Tatters After Forger Revealed To Have Co-Authored Assange Smear

Notable quotes:
"... " The information in this post alone should make everyone question why in the world the Guardian would continue to use a source like Villavicencio who is obviously tied to the U.S. government, the CIA, individuals like Thor Halvorssen and Bill Browder, and opponents of both Julian Assange and former President Rafael Correa." ..."
"... 2014 Ecuador's Foreign Ministry accused the Guardian of publishing a story based on a document it says was fabricated by Fernando Villavicencio, pictured below with the authors of the fake Manafort-Assange 'secret meeting' story, Harding and Collyns." ..."
"... "There is also evidence that the author of this falsified document is Fernando Villavicencio, a convicted slanderer and opponent of Ecuador's current government. This can be seen from the file properties of the document that the Guardian had originally posted (but which it has since taken down and replaced with a version with this evidence removed)." ..."
"... " This video from the news wire Andes alleges that Villavicencio's name appeared in the metadata of the document originally uploaded alongside The Guardian's story." ..."
"... One of my greatest journalistic experiences was working for months on Assange's research with colleagues from the British newspaper the Guardian, Luke Harding, Dan Collins and the young journalist Cristina Solórzano from @ somos_lafuente " ..."
"... The tweet suggests, but does not specifically state, that Villavicencio worked with the disastrous duo on the Assange-Manafort piece. Given the history and associations of all involved, this statement alone should cause extreme skepticism in any unsubstantiated claims, or 'anonymously sourced' claims, the Guardian makes concerning Julian Assange and Ecuador. ..."
"... The two photographs of Villavicencio with Harding and Collyns as well as the evidence showing he co-authored the piece doesn't just capture a trio of terrible journalists, it documents the involvement of multiple actors associated with intelligence agencies and fabricated stories. ..."
"... Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win." ..."
"... That Harding and Collyns worked intensively with Villavicencio for "months" on the "Assange story," the fact that Villavicencio was initially listed as a co-author on the original version of the Guardian's article, and the recent denial by Fidel Narvaez , raises the likelihood that Harding and the Guardian were not simply the victims of bad sources who duped them, as claimed by some. ..."
Dec 20, 2018 | disobedientmedia.com

Regular followers of WikiLeaks-related news are at this point familiar with the multiple serious infractions of journalistic ethics by Luke Harding and the Guardian, especially (though not exclusively) when it comes to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. However, another individual at the heart of this matter is far less familiar to the public. That man is Fernando Villavicencio, a prominent Ecuadorian political activist and journalist, director of the USAID-funded NGO Fundamedios and editor of online publication FocusEcuador .

Most readers are also aware of the Guardian's recent publication of claims that Julian Assange met with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort on three occasions. This has now been definitively debunked by Fidel Narvaez, the former Consul at Ecuador's London embassy between 2010 and 2018, who says Paul Manafort has never visited the embassy during the time he was in charge there. But this was hardly the first time the outlet published a dishonest smear authored by Luke Harding against Assange. The paper is also no stranger to publishing stories based on fabricated documents.

In May, Disobedient Media reported on the Guardian's hatchet-job relating to 'Operation Hotel,' or rather, the normal security operations of the embassy under former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa. That hit-piece , co-authored by Harding and Dan Collyns, asserted among other things that (according to an anonymous source) Assange hacked the embassy's security system. The allegation was promptly refuted by Correa as "absurd" in an interview with The Intercept , and also by WikiLeaks as an "anonymous libel" with which the Guardian had "gone too far this time. We're suing."

A shared element of The Guardian's 'Operation Hotel' fabrications and the latest libel attempting to link Julian Assange to Paul Manafort is none other than Fernando Villavicencio of FocusEcuador. In 2014 Villavicencio was caught passing a forged document to the Guardian , which published it without verifying it. When the forgery was revealed, the Guardian hurriedly took the document down but then tried to cover up that it had been tampered with by Villavicencio when it re-posted it a few days later.

How is Villavicencio tied to The Guardian's latest smear of Assange? Intimately, it turns out.

Who is Fernando Villavicencio?

Earlier this year, an independent journalist writing under the pseudonym Jimmyslama penned a comprehensive report detailing Villavicencio's relationships with pro-US actors within Ecuador and the US. She sums up her findings, which are worth reading in full :

" The information in this post alone should make everyone question why in the world the Guardian would continue to use a source like Villavicencio who is obviously tied to the U.S. government, the CIA, individuals like Thor Halvorssen and Bill Browder, and opponents of both Julian Assange and former President Rafael Correa."

As most readers recall, it was Correa who granted Assange asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Villavicencio was so vehemently opposed to Rafael Correa's socialist government that during the failed 2010 coup against Correa he falsely accused the President of "crimes against humanity" by ordering police to fire on the crowds (it was actually Correa who was being shot at). Correa sued him for libel, and won, but pardoned Villavicencio for the damages awarded by the court.

Assange legal analyst Hanna Jonasson recently made the link between the Ecuadorian forger Villavicencio and Luke Harding's Guardian stories based on dubious documents explicit. She Tweeted : 2014 Ecuador's Foreign Ministry accused the Guardian of publishing a story based on a document it says was fabricated by Fernando Villavicencio, pictured below with the authors of the fake Manafort-Assange 'secret meeting' story, Harding and Collyns."

Jonasson included a link to a 2014 official Ecuadorian government statement which reads in part:

"There is also evidence that the author of this falsified document is Fernando Villavicencio, a convicted slanderer and opponent of Ecuador's current government. This can be seen from the file properties of the document that the Guardian had originally posted (but which it has since taken down and replaced with a version with this evidence removed)."

The statement also notes that Villavicencio had fled the country after his conviction for libeling Correa during the 2010 coup and was at that time living as a fugitive in the United States.

It is incredibly significant, as Jonasson argues, that the authors of the Guardian's latest libelous article were photographed with Villavicencio in Ecuador shortly before publication of the Guardian's claim that Assange had conducted meetings with Manafort.

Jonasson's Twitter thread also states: " This video from the news wire Andes alleges that Villavicencio's name appeared in the metadata of the document originally uploaded alongside The Guardian's story." The 2014 Guardian piece, which aimed a falsified shot at then-President Rafael Correa, would not be the last time Villavicencio's name would appear on a controversial Guardian story before being scrubbed from existence.

Just days after the backlash against the Guardian reached fever-pitch, Villavicencio had the gall to publish another image of himself with Harding and Collyns, gloating : "

One of my greatest journalistic experiences was working for months on Assange's research with colleagues from the British newspaper the Guardian, Luke Harding, Dan Collins and the young journalist Cristina Solórzano from @ somos_lafuente " [Translated from Spanish]

The tweet suggests, but does not specifically state, that Villavicencio worked with the disastrous duo on the Assange-Manafort piece. Given the history and associations of all involved, this statement alone should cause extreme skepticism in any unsubstantiated claims, or 'anonymously sourced' claims, the Guardian makes concerning Julian Assange and Ecuador.

Astoundingly, and counter to Villavicencio's uncharacteristic coyness, a recent video posted by WikiLeaks via Twitter does show that Villavicencio was originally listed as a co-author of the Guardian's Manafort-Assange allegations, before his name was edited out of the online article. The original version can be viewed, however, thanks to archive services.

The two photographs of Villavicencio with Harding and Collyns as well as the evidence showing he co-authored the piece doesn't just capture a trio of terrible journalists, it documents the involvement of multiple actors associated with intelligence agencies and fabricated stories.

All of this provoke the question: did Villavicencio provide more bogus documents to Harding and Collyns – Harding said he'd seen a document, though he didn't publish one (or even quote from it) so readers might judge its veracity for themselves – or perhaps these three invented the accusations out of whole-cloth?

Either way, to quote WikiLeaks, the Guardian has "gone too far this time" and its already-tattered reputation is in total shambles.

Successful Propaganda, Failed Journalism

Craig Murray calls Harding an " MI6 tool ", but to this writer, Harding seems worse than an MI6 stooge: He's a wannabe-spook, hanging from the coat-tails of anonymous intelligence officers and publishing their drivel as fact without so much as a skeptical blink. His lack of self-awareness and conflation of anecdote with evidence sets him apart as either one of the most blatant, fumbling propagandists of our era, or the most hapless hack journalist to stain the pages of printed news.

To provide important context on Harding's previous journalistic irresponsibility, we again recall that he co-authored the infamous book containing the encryption password of the entire Cablegate archive, leading to a leak of the unredacted State Department Cables across the internet. Although the guilty Guardian journalists tried to blame Assange for the debacle, it was they themselves who ended up on the receiving end of some well-deserved scorn.

In addition to continuing the Guardian's and Villavicencio's vendetta against Assange and WikiLeaks, it is clearly in Harding's financial interests to conflate the pending prosecution of Assange with Russiagate. As this writer previously noted , Harding penned a book on the subject, titled: " Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win." Tying Assange to Russiagate is good for business, as it stokes public interest in the self-evidently faulty narrative his book supports.

Even more concerning is the claim amongst publishing circles, fueled by recent events, that Harding may be writing another book on Assange, with publication presumably timed for his pending arrest and extradition and designed to cash in on the trial. If that is in fact the case, the specter arises that Harding is working to push for Assange's arrest, not just on behalf of US, UK or Ecuadorian intelligence interests, but also to increase his own book sales.

That Harding and Collyns worked intensively with Villavicencio for "months" on the "Assange story," the fact that Villavicencio was initially listed as a co-author on the original version of the Guardian's article, and the recent denial by Fidel Narvaez , raises the likelihood that Harding and the Guardian were not simply the victims of bad sources who duped them, as claimed by some.

It indicates that the fake story was constructed deliberately on behalf of the very same intelligence establishment that the Guardian is nowadays only too happy to take the knee for.

In summary, one of the most visible establishment media outlets published a fake story on its front page, in an attempt to manufacture a crucial cross-over between the pending prosecution of Assange and the Russiagate saga. This represents the latest example in an onslaught of fake news directed at Julian Assange and WikiLeaks ever since they published the largest CIA leak in history in the form of Vault 7, an onslaught which appears to be building in both intensity and absurdity as time goes on.

The Guardian has destroyed its reputation, and in the process, revealed the desperation of the establishment when it comes to Assange.

[Dec 18, 2018] Looks like AP joined Integrity Intiative

Dec 18, 2018 | news.yahoo.com

Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

Matt o'Brien and Barbara Ortutay, AP Technology Writers , Associated Press December 17, 2018

<img alt="Key takeaways from new reports on Russian disinformation" src="https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/9VGA29inJ83dPeqC.cvqTg--~A/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjtzbT0xO3c9ODAwO2lsPXBsYW5l/http://globalfinance.zenfs.com/images/US_AHTTP_AP_HEADLINES_BUSINESS/e66de17c8e1a4cecaf1da81f2bf87093_original.jpg" itemprop="url"/>
Some suspected Russian-backed fake social media accounts on Facebook.

Russians seeking to influence U.S. elections through social media had their eyes on Instagram and the black community.

These were among the findings in two reports released Monday by the Senate intelligence committee. Separate studies from University of Oxford researchers and the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge reveal insights into how Russian agents sought to influence Americans by saturating their favorite online services and apps with hidden propaganda.

Here are the highlights:

INSTAGRAM'S "MEME WARFARE"

Both reports show that misinformation on Facebook's Instagram may have had broader reach than the interference on Facebook itself.

The New Knowledge study says that since 2015, the Instagram posts generated 187 million engagements, such as comments or likes, compared with 77 million on Facebook.

And the barrage of image-centric Instagram "memes" has only grown since the 2016 election. Russian agents shifted their focus to Instagram after the public last year became aware of the widespread manipulation on Facebook and Twitter.

NOT JUST ADS

Revelations last year that Russian agents used rubles to pay for some of their propaganda ads drew attention to how gullible tech companies were in allowing their services to be manipulated.

But neither ads nor automated "bots" were as effective as unpaid posts hand-crafted by human agents pretending to be Americans. Such posts were more likely to be shared and commented on, and they rose in volume during key dates in U.S. politics such as during the presidential debates in 2016 or after the Obama administration's post-election announcement that it would investigate Russian hacking.

"These personalized messages exposed U.S. users to a wide range of disinformation and junk news linked to on external websites, including content designed to elicit outrage and cynicism," says the report by Oxford researchers, who worked with social media analysis firm Graphika.

DEMOGRAPHIC TARGETING

Both reports found that Russian agents tried to polarize Americans in part by targeting African-American communities extensively. They did so by campaigning for black voters to boycott elections or follow the wrong voting procedures in 2016, according to the Oxford report.

The New Knowledge report added that agents were "developing Black audiences and recruiting Black Americans as assets" beyond how they were targeting either left- or right-leaning voters.

The reports also support previous findings that the influence operations sought to polarize Americans by sowing political divisions on issues such as immigration and cultural and religious identities. The goal, according to the New Knowledge report, was to "create and reinforce tribalism within each targeted community."

Such efforts extended to Google-owned YouTube, despite Google's earlier assertion to Congress that Russian-made videos didn't target specific segments of the population.

PINTEREST TO POKEMON

The New Knowledge report says the Russian troll operation worked in many ways like a conventional corporate branding campaign, using a variety of different technology services to deliver the same messages to different groups of people.

Among the sites infiltrated with propaganda were popular image-heavy services like Pinterest and Tumblr, chatty forums like Reddit, and a wonky geopolitics blog promoted from Russian-run accounts on Facebook and YouTube.

Even the silly smartphone game "Pokemon Go" wasn't immune. A Tumblr post encouraged players to name their Pokemon character after a victim of police brutality.

WHAT NOW?

Both reports warn that some of these influence campaigns are ongoing.

The Oxford researchers note that 2016 and 2017 saw "significant efforts" to disrupt elections around the world not just by Russia, but by domestic political parties spreading disinformation.

They warn that online propaganda represents a threat to democracies and public life. They urge social media companies to share data with the public far more broadly than they have so far.

"Protecting our democracies now means setting the rules of fair play before voting day, not after," the Oxford report says.

[Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Sounds to me like that Integrity initiative dude needs to go on a 'de-radicalisation program !!! ..."
"... the powerbrokers have always been in London and now its hypercentralized endgame in Brussels. You can say that it is the US through and through, but ask yourself who has more to gain from US FP abroad: average Americans or the global elites? ..."
"... Those former-Eastern Bloc countries, i.e. Poland and Ukraine, do not count as power brokers. They have and will always be pawns in the game. So what if they still worship Icons of Americanism which is a remnant culture of their F*ed up narrative where they still believe they are fighting the commies. ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... From his curriculum vitae (pdf) we learn that Donnelly was a long time soldier in the British Army Intelligence Corps where he established and led the Soviet Studies Research Centre at RMA Sandhurst. He later was involved in creating the US Army's Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Ft. Leavenworth. ..."
"... He worked at the British Ministry of Defence and as an advisor to several Secretaries General of NATO. He is a director of the Statecraft Institute since 2010. Donnelly also advises the Foreign Minister of Lithuania. He is a "Security and Justice Senior Mentor" of the UK's Stabilisation Unit which is tasked with destabilizing various countries. He serves as a Honorary Colonel of the Specialist Group Military Intelligence (SGMI). ..."
"... This was an order from the core of the British thinking to Donnelly to get even deeper into the inner-British influence business. Hype Russia as a threat so more money can be taken from the 'vested interests' of the people and dumped into the military machine. ..."
"... That particular advise of General Barrons was accepted. In 2017 the Integrity Initiative bid for funding from the Ministry of Defence (pdf) for various projects to influence the public, the parliament and the government as well as foreign forces. The bid lists "performance indicators" that are supposed to measure the success of its activities. The top indicator for the Initiative's proposed work is a "Tougher stance in government policy towards Russia" ..."
"... In March 2014, shortly after Crimea split from the Ukraine, Donnelly suggested Military measures (pdf) to be taken by the Ukraine with regards to Crimea: ..."
"... Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of Sevastopol harbor, the frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in Crimea. Those "guestures" would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear power which were legally stationed in Crimea. And how was the west to immediately supply gas to Ukraine and Ukraine's pipeline network is designed to unidirectionally receive gas from Russia? ..."
"... Yes, Putin really believes his own propaganda ..."
"... Putin's paranoia is driving his foreign adventures ..."
"... Russian information warfare - airbrushing reality ..."
"... Distract, deceive, destroy: Putin at war in Syria ..."
"... Russian penetration in Germany ..."
"... Russian conspiracy theory and foreign policy ..."
"... Mapping Russia's whole influence machine ..."
"... Military Review ..."
"... BBC Newsnight ..."
"... The most recent release of Integrity Initiative documents includes lots of in-depth reports (pdf) about foreign media reactions to the Skripal affair. One wonders why the Initiative commissioned such research (pdf) and paid for it. ..."
"... Here is an interesting look at how little the Russia-linked entities spent on advertising on Google during the 2016 election: https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/12/google-russia-and-4700-in-advertising.html Slowly but surely, the Russian meddling narrative is falling apart. ..."
"... McCarthyesque smear campaigns to discredit opponents and squash dissent has become normal practice. Integrity Initiative tweets against Corbyn is a stark example, but there have been MANY other people and groups that have been tarred with claims of being sponsored/led/influenced by Russia, including Catalonian independence activists and Yellow vest protesters. ..."
"... Dear god, what has gotten into the minds of the military and political "elite" within the UK! Mining Sevastopol would have been an obvious act of war against Russia and Russia would have responded with force. ..."
"... It looks like one of the decision was to get closer to France (after getting very close friends in Homs and Aleppo?) See the list of people in the French II cluster dumped yesterday by Anonymous: half the names work at the fr Min of F Affairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancaster_House_Treaties and http://www.gmfus.org/publications/frances-defense-partnerships-and-dilemmas-brexit ..."
"... This group may have officially formed in 2015, but its work is no different from the British propaganda that swamped the MSM when MH17 was downed. Tied into the Steel dossier and Russian collusion in the US. This is the anglosphere or five eyes permanent state. ..."
"... it is apparent that this "Integrity Initiative" was engaged in to ensure that the regime was in the safe hands of the harpy. ..."
"... It is interesting that Trudeau, the Canadian figurehead, clothes his country's kidnapping of the Chinese business figure as "in defence of the rule of law." All in all, it is now apparent we would be far better off if the Kaiserreich, with all of its militaristic and bombastic flaws, had triumphed in the Great War. No Hitler, no Stalin, no five eyes fascism. ..."
"... Rules of the game are made up as the game is played to suit the players. There you have it real life imitates art. ..."
"... Better yet, can anyone name an NGO, any NGO ever, that's not closely if not directly linked to "a secret military intelligence operation." Anyone? Mueller? ..."
"... Thank you very much for this terrific analysis. Donnelly: "... it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. " Numerous American publications featured very similar language in the years ahead of 9/11, with "Islamic terrorist threat" substituted for the Russians. ..."
"... Vesti News has published an excellent documentary on how "clusters" work....not only to spread Russophobia...but also on continuous intends to overthrown Russian legitimate government... https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=E8-Stfrl5aM ..."
"... The last two periods of the US FP could be understood thusly: (1) Pre-Soviet collapse which was marked by a horrifically tragic and misplaced ideal of defending against communism (Good guys v. Bad Guys); and (2) Post-Soviet collapse which has been a period of coup d'etats where our hijacked military has been used for a Globalist Agenda for increasingly opaque (less defensible) reasons and missions. ..."
"... right after 2016 US elections there was a facade of split between military and intelligence differentiation. Seems that veil has been dispensed with ..."
"... Yeah, they hijacked a few other countries too, including Russia. Or if not hijacking, setting the mood right for some shenanigans in the near future... I think you're quite right about the cheif host of the globalist neolib parasite. Hijacked near fully. Being bled dry. That unaccounted for 21 Trillion at the pentagon is a bit of a giveaway. All under the guise of free markets and democracy. ..."
"... 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation Designed To Create A New Enemy ..."
Dec 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
uncle tungsten , Dec 15, 2018 6:28:07 PM | 41

Labour is not "silent". Apart from Thornberry's questioning already mentioned in another post here, the party's newspaper published a news about it:

Government admits that Institute of Statecraft was funded through CSSF , by Lamiat Sabin, 14th December 2018.

Mark2 , Dec 15, 2018 7:12:28 PM | link
Sounds to me like that Integrity initiative dude needs to go on a 'de-radicalisation program !!! How many billions is that guna save us all ! not to mention lives saved.
NemesisCalling , Dec 15, 2018 7:42:22 PM | link
@45 jr

Wrong JR. It seems quite the obvious that the big boy in the west, the US, would seem to be the one spearheading the whole globalist agenda.

But this is a retarded proposition.

The US is nothing more than a Golem. It has been reduced to somnambulism and hijacked, utilized for the ends of these Non-National elites. Sure, like many posters here, it feels good to blame the US for everything. But the powerbrokers have always been in London and now its hypercentralized endgame in Brussels. You can say that it is the US through and through, but ask yourself who has more to gain from US FP abroad: average Americans or the global elites?

Or are we just arguing semantics?

NemesisCalling , Dec 15, 2018 7:44:57 PM | link
Those former-Eastern Bloc countries, i.e. Poland and Ukraine, do not count as power brokers. They have and will always be pawns in the game. So what if they still worship Icons of Americanism which is a remnant culture of their F*ed up narrative where they still believe they are fighting the commies.
Uncle $cam , Dec 15, 2018 8:06:15 PM | link
Yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of the decider aka Bush Jr. having had a shoe thrown at him.

'For the sake of Iraq': Bush shoe-thrower running for parliament refuses to exploit 'hero image'

Muntadhar al-Zaidi was arrested and tortured for it...

"They broke my teeth, my nose, my leg, they electrocuted me, lashed me, they would beat me, they even broke a table or a chair over my back. I don't know, they had my eyes covered," al-Zaidi recalled. "This was one thing I never experienced before. Torture by the authorities, by the rule of law."

I wish it had been a hand grenade.

The British government financed Integrity Initiative is tasked with spreading anti-Russian propaganda and with influencing the public, military and governments of a number of countries. What follows is an incomplete analysis of the third batch of the Initiative's papers which was dumped yesterday.

Christopher Nigel Donnelly (CND) is the co-director of The Institute for Statecraft and founder of its offshoot Integrity Initiative . The Initiative claims to "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation".

The Integrity Initiative does this by planting disinformation about alleged Russian influence through journalists 'clusters' throughout Europe and the United States.

Both, the Institute as well as the Initiative, claim to be independent Non-Government Organizations. Both are financed by the British government, NATO and other state donors.

Among the documents lifted by some anonymous person from the servers of the Institute we find several papers about Donnelly as well as some memos written by him. They show a russophobe mind with a lack of realistic strategic thought.

There is also a file (pdf) with a copy of his passport:


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From his curriculum vitae (pdf) we learn that Donnelly was a long time soldier in the British Army Intelligence Corps where he established and led the Soviet Studies Research Centre at RMA Sandhurst. He later was involved in creating the US Army's Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Ft. Leavenworth.

He worked at the British Ministry of Defence and as an advisor to several Secretaries General of NATO. He is a director of the Statecraft Institute since 2010. Donnelly also advises the Foreign Minister of Lithuania. He is a "Security and Justice Senior Mentor" of the UK's Stabilisation Unit which is tasked with destabilizing various countries. He serves as a Honorary Colonel of the Specialist Group Military Intelligence (SGMI).

During his time as military intelligence analyst in the 1980s Donnelly wrote several books and papers about the Soviet Union and its military.

Donnelly seems to be obsessed with the 'Russian threat' and is determined to fight it by all means. His paranoia is obvious in a "private - confidential" report by the Statecraft Institute on The Challenge of Brexit to the UK: Case study – The Foreign and Commonwealth Offices (pdf):

Our problem is that, for the last 70 years or so, we in the UK and Europe have been living in a safe, secure rules-based system which has allowed us to enjoy a holiday from history.

... ... ...

Unfortunately, this state of affairs is now being challenged. A new paradigm of conflict is replacing the 19th & 20th Century paradigm.

... ... ...

In this new paradigm, the clear distinction which most people have been able to draw between war and peace, their expectation of stability and a degree of predictability in life, are being replaced by a volatile unpredictability, a permanent state of instability in which war and peace become ever more difficult to disentangle . The "classic" understanding of conflict being between two distinct players or groups of players is giving way to a world of Darwinian competition where all the players – nation states, sub-state actors, big corporations, ethnic or religious groups, and so on – are constantly striving with each other in a "war of all against all". The Western rules-based system, which most westerners take for granted and have come to believe is "normal", is under attack from countries and organisations which wish to replace our system with theirs. This is not a crisis which faces us; it is a strategic challenge, and from several directions simultaneously.

In reality the "Western rules-based system", fully implemented after the demise of the Soviet Union, is a concept under which 'the west' arbitrarily makes up rules and threatens to kill anyone who does not follow them. Witness the wars against Serbia, the war on Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the western led coup in Ukraine and the war by Jihadi proxies against the people of Syria and Iraq. None of these actions were legal under international law. Demanding a return to strict adherence to the rule of international law, as Russia, China and others now do, it is not an attempt to replace "our system with theirs". It is a return to the normal state of global diplomacy. It is certainly not a "Darwinian competition".

In October 2016 Donnelly had a Private Discussion with Gen Sir Richard Barrons (pdf), marked as personal and confidential. Barrons is a former commander of the British Joint Forces Command. The nonsensical top line is: "The UK defence model is failing. UK is at real risk."

Some interesting nuggets again reveal a paranoid mindset. The talk also includes some realistic truthiness about the British military posture Barrons and others created:

There has been a progressive, systemic demobilisation of NATO militarily capability and a run down of all its members' defences
...
We are seeing new / reinvented ways of warfare – hybrid , plus the reassertion of hard power in warfare
...
Aircraft Carriers can be useful for lots of things, but not for war v China or Russia, so we should equip them accordingly. ...
The West no longer has a military edge on Russia. ...
Our Nuclear programme drains resources from conventional forces and hollows them out. ...
The UK Brigade in Germany is no good as a deterrent against Russia. ...
Our battalion in Estonia are hostages, not a deterrent. ...

The general laments the lack of influence the military has on the British government and its people. He argues for more government financed think tank research that can be fed back into the government:

So, if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a response, then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and take it out of the political space. We will need to impose changes over the heads of vested interests. NB We did this in the 1930s

My conclusion is that it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. We must generate an independent debate outside government .

...

We need to ask when and how do we start to put all this right? Do we have the national capabilities / capacities to fix it? If so, how do we improve our harnessing of resources to do it? We need this debate NOW. There is not a moment to be lost.

This was an order from the core of the British thinking to Donnelly to get even deeper into the inner-British influence business. Hype Russia as a threat so more money can be taken from the 'vested interests' of the people and dumped into the military machine.

That particular advise of General Barrons was accepted. In 2017 the Integrity Initiative bid for funding from the Ministry of Defence (pdf) for various projects to influence the public, the parliament and the government as well as foreign forces. The bid lists "performance indicators" that are supposed to measure the success of its activities. The top indicator for the Initiative's proposed work is a "Tougher stance in government policy towards Russia" .


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Asking for government finance to influence the government to take a "tougher stand towards Russia" seems a bit circular. But this is consistent with the operation of other Anglo-American think tanks and policy initiatives in which one part of the government, usually the hawkish one, secretly uses NGO's and think-tanks to lobby other parts of the government to support their specific hobbyhorse and budget.

Here is how it is done. The 'experts' of the 'charity' Institute for Statecraft and Integrity Initiative testified in the British parliament. While they were effectively paid by the government they lobbied parliament under the cover of their NGO. This circularity also allows to use international intermediates. Members of the Spanish cluster (pdf) of the Initiative testified in the British Parliament about the Catalan referendum and related allegations against Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange. (It is likely that this testimony led to the change in the position of the Ecuadorian government towards Assange.)


Unfortunately, or luckily, such lobbying operations are mostly run by people who are incompetent in the specific field they are lobbying for. Chris Donnelly, despite a life long experience in military intelligence, has obviously zero competence as a military strategist or planner.

In March 2014, shortly after Crimea split from the Ukraine, Donnelly suggested Military measures (pdf) to be taken by the Ukraine with regards to Crimea:

If I were in charge I would get the following implemented asp
  1. Set up a cordon sanitaire across the Crimean Isthmus and on the coast N. of Crimea with troops and mines
  2. Mine Sevastopol harbour/bay. Can be done easily using a car ferry if they have no minelayers. Doesn't need a lot of mines to be effective. They could easily buy some mines.
  3. Get their air force into the air and activate all their air defences. If they can't fly the Migs on the airfield in Crimea those should be destroyed as a gesture that they are serious. Going "live" electronically will worry the Russians as the Ukrainians have the same electronic kit. If the Russians jam it they jam their own kit as well.
  4. Ukraine used to have some seriously important weapons, such as a big microwave anti-satellite weapon. If they still have this, they should use it.
  5. The government needs a Strategic communication campaign-so far everything is coming from Moscow. They need to articulate a long-term vision that will inspire the people, however hard that is to do. Without it, what have people to fight for?
  6. They should ask the west now to start supplying Oil and gas. There is plenty available due to the mild winter.

I am trying to get this message across

Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of Sevastopol harbor, the frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in Crimea. Those "guestures" would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear power which were legally stationed in Crimea. And how was the west to immediately supply gas to Ukraine and Ukraine's pipeline network is designed to unidirectionally receive gas from Russia?

Such half-assed thinking is typical for the Institute and its creation of propaganda. One of its employees/contractors is Hugh Benedict Nimmo who the Initiative paid to produce anti-Russian propaganda that was then disseminated through various western publications.

According to the (still very incomplete) Initiative files Ben Nimmo received a monthly consultancy fee of £2.500 between December 2015 and March 2016. In August 2016 he sent an invoice (pdf) of £5,000 for his "August work on Integrity Initiative". A Production Timetable (pdf) for March to June 2016 lists the following Nimmo outputs and activities:

One wonders how often Ben Nimmo double billed his various sponsors for these copy-paste fantasy pamphlets.

In late 2017 Ben Nimmo and Guardian 'journalist' Carole Cadwalladr disseminated allegations that Russia used Facebook ads to influence the Brexit decision. Cadwalladr even received a price for her work. Unfortunately the price was not revoked when Facebook revealed that "Russia linked" accounts had spend a total of 97 cents on Brexit ads. It is unexplained how that was enough to achieve their alleged aim.

Cadwalladr is listed as a speaker (pdf) at a "skill sharing" conference the Institute organized for November 1-2 under the headline: "Tackling Tools of Malign Influence - Supporting 21st Century Journalism".

This year Ben Nimmo became notorious for claiming that several real persons with individual opinions were "Russian trolls". As we noted :

Nimmo, and several other dimwits quoted in the piece, came to the conclusion that Ian56 is a Kremlin paid troll, not a real person. Next to Ian56 Nimmo 'identified' other 'Russian troll' accounts:

Ben Nimmo @benimmo - 10:50 UTC - 24 Mar 2018

One particularly influential retweeter (judging by the number of accounts which then retweeted it) was @ValLisitsa, which posts in English and Russian. Last year, this account joined the troll-factory #StopMorganLie campaign.

Had Nimmo, a former NATO spokesperson, had some decent education he would have know that @ValLisitsa, aka Valentina Lisitsa , is a famous American- Ukrainian pianist. Yes, she sometimes tweets in Russian language to her many fans in Russia and the Ukraine. Is that now a crime? The videos of her world wide performances on Youtube have more than 170 million views. It is absurd to claim that she is a 'Russian troll' and to insinuate that she is taking Kremlin money to push 'Russian troll' opinions.

The Institute for Statecraft Expert Team (pdf) list several people with military intelligence backgrounds as well as many 'journalists'. One of them is:

Mark Galeotti
Specialist in Russian strategic thinking; the application of Russian disinformation and hybrid warfare; the use of organised crime as a weapon of hybrid warfare. Educational and mentoring skills, including in a US and E European environment, and the corporate world.
Russian linguist

Galeotti is the infamous inventor of the 'Gerasimov doctrine' and of the propaganda about Russia's alleged 'hybrid' warfare. In February 2013 the Russian General Valery Gerasimov, then Russia's chief of the General Staff, published a paper that analysed the way the 'west' is waging a new type of war by mixing propaganda, proxy armies and military force into one unified operation.

Galeotti claimed that Gerasimov's analysis of 'western' operations was a new Russian doctrine of 'hybrid war'. He invented the term 'Gerasimov doctrine' which then took off in the propaganda realm. In February 2016 the U.S. Army Military Review published a longer analysis of Gerasimov's paper that debunked the nonsense (pdf). It concluded:

Gerasimov's article is not proposing a new Russian way of warfare or a hybrid war, as has been stated in the West.

But anti-Russian propagandist repeated Galeotti's nonsense over and over. Only in March 2018, five years after Galeotti invented the 'Germasimov doctrine' and two years after he was thoroughly debunked, he finally recanted :

Everywhere, you'll find scholars, pundits, and policymakers talking about the threat the "Gerasimov doctrine" -- named after Russia's chief of the general staff -- poses to the West. It's a new way of war, "an expanded theory of modern warfare," or even "a vision of total warfare."

There's one small problem. It doesn't exist. And the longer we pretend it does, the longer we misunderstand the -- real, but different -- challenge Russia poses.

I feel I can say that because, to my immense chagrin, I created this term, which has since acquired a destructive life of its own, lumbering clumsily into the world to spread fear and loathing in its wake.

The Institute for Statecraft's "Specialist in Russian strategic thinking", an expert of disinformation and hybrid warfare, created a non-existing Russian doctrine out of hot air and used it to press for anti-Russian measures. Like Ben Nimmo he is an aptly example of the quality of the Institute's experts and work.


One of the newly released documents headlined CND Gen list 2 (pdf) (CND= Chris Nigel Donnelly) includes the names and email addresses of a number of military, government and think tank people. The anonymous releaser of the documents claims that the list is "of employees who attended a closed-door meeting with the white helmets". (No document has been published yet that confirms this.) One name on the list is of special interest:


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Pablo Miller was the handler and friend of Sergej Skripal, the British double agent who was "novichoked" in Salisbury. When Miller's name was mentioned in the press the British government issued a D-Notice to suppress its further publishing,


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As we wrote in April:

Pablo Miller, a British MI6 agent, had recruited Sergej Skripal. The former MI6 agent in Moscow, Christopher Steele, was also involved in the case. Skripal was caught by the Russian security services and went to jail. Pablo Miller, the MI6 recruiter, was also the handler of Sergej Skripal after he was released by Russia in a spy swap. He reportedly also lives in Salisbury. Both Christopher Steele and Pablo Miller work for Orbis Business Intelligence which created the "Dirty Dossier" about Donald Trump.

In 1979, before becoming a spy, Pablo Miller served at the 4th Royal Tank Regiment . ( BBC Newsnight 'journalist' Mark Urban, who later published a book based on interviews with Skripal , served together with Miller in the same regiment.) The 4th regiment's motto was "Fear Naught". Pablo Miller's email address given in the Chris Donnelly list is [email protected].

At the very beginning of the Skripal affair, before there was any talk of 'Novichok', we asked if Skripal was involved in creating the now debunked "Dirty Dossier" and if that was a reason for certain British insiders to move him out of the way:

Here are some question: If there is a connection between the dossier and Skripal, which seems very likely to me, then there are a number of people and organizations with potential motives to kill him. Lots of shady folks and officials on both sides of the Atlantic were involved in creating and running the anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign. There are several investigations and some very dirty laundry might one day come to light. Removing Skripal while putting the blame on Russia looks like a convenient way to get rid of a potential witness.

The most recent release of Integrity Initiative documents includes lots of in-depth reports (pdf) about foreign media reactions to the Skripal affair. One wonders why the Initiative commissioned such research (pdf) and paid for it.

After two years the Muller investigation found zero evidence for the 'collusion' between Russia and the Trump campaign that the fake Steele dossier suggested. The whole collusion claim is a creation by 'former' British intelligence operatives who likely acted on request of U.S. intelligence leaders Clapper and Brennan. How deep was the Russia specialist Chris Donnelly and his Institute for Statecraft involved in this endeavor?


Checking through all the released Initiative papers and lists one gets the impression of a secret military intelligence operation, disguised as a public NGO. Financed by millions of government money the Institute for Statecraft and the Integrity Initiative work under a charity label to create and disseminate disinformation to the global public and back into the government and military itself.

The paranoia about Russia, which does way less harm than the 'western' "rules based system" constantly creates, is illogical and not based on factual analysis. It creates Russia as an "enemy" when it is none. It hypes a "threat" out of hot air. The only people who profit from this are the propagandists and the companies and people who back them.

The Initiatives motto "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation" is a truly Orwellian construct. By disseminating propaganda and using it to influence the public, parliament, the military and governments, the Institute actively undermines the democratic process that depends on the free availability of truthful information.

It should be shut down immediately.

---
Note: There have already been attempts to delete the released files from the Internet. A complete archive of all Integrity Initiative files published so far is here . Should the public links cease to work, you can contact the author of this blog for access to private backups.

flayer , Dec 15, 2018 11:49:39 AM | link

Aside from the fact that the government itself funds this organization, the creepiest thing about it is that the "non-governmental individuals" that help fund it are the same people that run the think tanks: a bunch of Rhodesians.

Russ , Dec 15, 2018 11:59:03 AM | link

"Such half-assed thinking...Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of Sevastopol harbor, the frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in Crimea. Those "gestures" would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear power which were legally stationed in Crimea."

It sure seems like this half-assed thinking isn't just the domain of a fringe element, but is increasingly mainstream among the elites. Doesn't bode well.

Roy G , Dec 15, 2018 12:10:11 PM | link
Thank you B. It is truly amazing to watch the UK elites unravel as they have become truly unhinged by their own connivances. It is a bad joke at the commoner's expense that they propagandize and demonize in the name of the 'Western rules based system' even as they are busy shooting themselves in both feet by committing Brexit. Although there are legitimate grievances with the EU, it is clear that Brexit is a Tory power play that is all politics and zero governance. Alas, Perfidious Albion has succumbed to Mad Cow disease.
Sally Snyder , Dec 15, 2018 12:10:23 PM | link
Here is an interesting look at how little the Russia-linked entities spent on advertising on Google during the 2016 election: https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/12/google-russia-and-4700-in-advertising.html Slowly but surely, the Russian meddling narrative is falling apart.
bjd , Dec 15, 2018 12:46:08 PM | link
Thanks, b.

What remains mysterious (not really) is why --if these initiatives are truly meant to save and strengthen democracy-- they aren't proudly proclaimed and advertised, in the open, transparent, for everyone one to see and judge, like an adult democracy that they claim to stand for might want to debate and form an opinion on.

The fact that it isn't, is testimony to the nefarious anti-democratic, authoritarian and totalitarian streak that runs in between every two lines that they put on paper.

Jackrabbit , Dec 15, 2018 12:58:35 PM | link
McCarthyesque smear campaigns to discredit opponents and squash dissent has become normal practice. Integrity Initiative tweets against Corbyn is a stark example, but there have been MANY other people and groups that have been tarred with claims of being sponsored/led/influenced by Russia, including Catalonian independence activists and Yellow vest protesters.

Every time one scratches the surface of such smears, it seems there is a connection to US/British MIC, Ukraine, or Israel - essentially, those who benefit (financially or otherwise) from greater tensions with Russia.

At what point does neocon doubling-down on failed foreign policy become more than just picking our pockets and warping our minds? At what point do they start killing our kids in another unnecessary war?

Clueless Joe , Dec 15, 2018 1:01:40 PM | link
Cold War has been over for nearly 30 years. It's time enough for Western countries to send into real retirement every single cold-warrior, their time is over, their mindset is quaint and useless, if not downright dangerous and counter-productive.
Mark2 , Dec 15, 2018 1:11:36 PM | link
Thank you 'b'
I'll just say -- - there is safety in numbers ! Already valuable information, important to the public good and democracy has been spread wide enough to be certain, this gene won't go back in the bottle ! D notice or no ! And by doing that, has made the fearless journalists and investigators lives all the safer ! Safety in numbers, spread this wide everyone?

Are these people above the law ? ...

psychohistorian , Dec 15, 2018 1:12:59 PM | link
Thanks for the continued exposition of this story b.....may it go viral

I want to comment on some of the wording you quote Donnelly as writing

" .....is giving way to a world of Darwinian competition where all the players – nation states, sub-state actors, big corporations, ethnic or religious groups, and so on – are constantly striving with each other in a "war of all against all". "

This is Donnelly's characterization of a world in which finance is a public utility instead of the private jackboot that it currently is. This is the delusion these people have been led to believe.

So instead of his "war of all against all" that some might call human cooperation on the basis of merit we have a mythical God of Mammon religion that continues to instantiate the private finance led world of the West with it parasitic elite and fawning acolytes.

Kadath , Dec 15, 2018 1:34:30 PM | link
Dear god, what has gotten into the minds of the military and political "elite" within the UK! Mining Sevastopol would have been an obvious act of war against Russia and Russia would have responded with force.

Thankfully it wasn't done but the fact this was even discussed by senior figures confirms that there was at least a sizable minority pushing for it. 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Western elite have truly abandoned all sense of reality and embraced a consequence free view of the use of force. After Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya they haven't learned a thing! I'm becoming more and more certain that a peaceful transition to the multipolar world is impossible and that it will only happen after the US or one of its' vassal states blunder into a proxy war and get utterly and comprehensively defeated, forcing a radical world realignment, but with nuts like John Bolton and the neocons in the Whitehouse it could easily lead to a nuclear war

Mina , Dec 15, 2018 1:45:39 PM | link
It looks like one of the decision was to get closer to France (after getting very close friends in Homs and Aleppo?) See the list of people in the French II cluster dumped yesterday by Anonymous: half the names work at the fr Min of F Affairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancaster_House_Treaties and http://www.gmfus.org/publications/frances-defense-partnerships-and-dilemmas-brexit

The grumpy general at Turcopolier has skept the II topic entirely.

TJ , Dec 15, 2018 1:53:44 PM | link
@13 psychohistorian

" we have a mythical God of Mammon religion" I hope you're not here in dear old Blighty, as you'll probably get arrested for antisemitism

Peter AU 1 , Dec 15, 2018 2:13:14 PM | link
This group may have officially formed in 2015, but its work is no different from the British propaganda that swamped the MSM when MH17 was downed. Tied into the Steel dossier and Russian collusion in the US. This is the anglosphere or five eyes permanent state.
exiled off mainstreet , Dec 15, 2018 2:22:39 PM | link
As an aside this happens to be "Bill of Rights Day", the anniversary of the passage of the Bill of Rights as amendments to the yankee constitution. This reveals again how far from the rule of law the yankee imperium, now the key element of the British Empire they supposedly seceded from, has strayed, since it is apparent that this "Integrity Initiative" was engaged in to ensure that the regime was in the safe hands of the harpy.

It has also ensured that the victorious candidate has been neutered and faithfully follows the world control line put forward by the five eyes spy-masters making up the empire in its present iteration. This also shows what a farce the regime, based on the rule of law, now presents.

It is interesting that Trudeau, the Canadian figurehead, clothes his country's kidnapping of the Chinese business figure as "in defence of the rule of law." All in all, it is now apparent we would be far better off if the Kaiserreich, with all of its militaristic and bombastic flaws, had triumphed in the Great War. No Hitler, no Stalin, no five eyes fascism.

GeorgeV , Dec 15, 2018 2:27:49 PM | link
The "Western-based rules system" described in this article reminds me of a game called "Calvin Ball" which appeared in the former comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes." In the strip Calvin a wildly imaginative adolescent boy who plays a free-form of football with his imaginary pet toy tiger (Hobbes). Rules of the game are made up as the game is played to suit the players. There you have it real life imitates art.
bjd , Dec 15, 2018 2:38:50 PM | link
b, I downloaded the zip file, and had also downloaded all the PDF's from pdf-archive yesterday. There are more files in the zip, but the following were on pdf-archive and are NOT in the zip:
sejomoje , Dec 15, 2018 3:06:48 PM | link
Better yet, can anyone name an NGO, any NGO ever, that's not closely if not directly linked to "a secret military intelligence operation." Anyone? Mueller?
jayc , Dec 15, 2018 4:05:08 PM | link
Thank you very much for this terrific analysis. Donnelly: "... it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. " Numerous American publications featured very similar language in the years ahead of 9/11, with "Islamic terrorist threat" substituted for the Russians.
Emmanuel Goldstein , Dec 15, 2018 4:21:51 PM | link
The transcript of his conversation with the general shows very starkly that we would last about two minutes in a nuclear exchange, but about half a day in a conventional one. No reserves, no equipment stockpiles, a navy consisting of two fat targets, neither of which has any aircraft and some destroyers which have propulsion problems, a smallish air force and very small numbers of troops. The tripwire force in Estonia is wholly sacrificial. In fact he lays bare the whole fallacy of biting the bear. With the armed forces in the state he describes, and with the recruitment and retention problems, wouldn't it be better, as one defense minister said, 'to go away and shut up'...
uncle tungsten , Dec 15, 2018 4:27:59 PM | link
Thanks b and especially the link to Valentina Lisitsa who I had tinkling in the background as I read your grand expose. These people are seditious morons, parasites infesting the state apparatus. Shut these fools down. Nice touch publishing the passport image. I can just imagine the frenzied aftermath of Kit's visit to the basement. Big thanks to anonymous and Craig Murray too. Their IT personel are probably visiting Devil's Island or Diego Garcia as we read.
Sasha , Dec 15, 2018 5:00:51 PM | link
Vesti News has published an excellent documentary on how "clusters" work....not only to spread Russophobia...but also on continuous intends to overthrown Russian legitimate government... https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=E8-Stfrl5aM

The British and US connections to loot and evade Russian riches and funds are exposed, as well as the origin of sanctions, supposed "alt-media" "truth-seakers" like Meduza...or supposed "pro-Russian" US intelligence operatives married to Russian women....

Sasha , Dec 15, 2018 5:32:32 PM | link
@Posted by: Mina | Dec 15, 2018 1:45:39 PM | 18

Amongst the many issues he usually passes over trying to make himself the fool, while at the same time trying to convince us of the oustanding intellectual capacities, honesty and classy stance of him and his "comittee"...

https://www.stalkerzone.org/an-american-military-attache-held-a-closed-meeting-with-uaf-commanders-in-mariupol/

For that travel, to end bluntly and in such public view siding with the nazis of the "Azov Regiment" and other criminals of war, there was no need of so many saddlebags, so as pretending that the people who supported Trump as if there was no tomorrow, were enlightened people who only wanted to rescue "America" for the "Americans", as if there would not be a sign of blatant exceptionalism in appropriating of the term "Americans" for themselves in such a huge continent....

NemesisCalling , Dec 15, 2018 5:44:31 PM | link
In my view, the USA's FP has been undermined by EURO elites which is forcing a game of chicken with Russia.

The FP pre-Soviet collapse consisted of one MO: GET THE COMMIES!

Since then, Neocons and Neolibs which are frontmen for this Non-National Globalized Elite, have hijacked our country's military and have steered it to a Global agenda where dominance in the ME means either superiority for these EURO elites or Vassal-hood.

The last two periods of the US FP could be understood thusly: (1) Pre-Soviet collapse which was marked by a horrifically tragic and misplaced ideal of defending against communism (Good guys v. Bad Guys); and (2) Post-Soviet collapse which has been a period of coup d'etats where our hijacked military has been used for a Globalist Agenda for increasingly opaque (less defensible) reasons and missions.

The average American could care less about the ME and the US would be 1000x better-off reverting to an isolationist stance.

But this will not happen so long as Nationalism in the US and UK is repeatedly put-down. It seems as though there is going to be another Brexit vote. Does anyone doubt that miraculously the people by then will have second-guessed their will to Brexit and so will vote against it given another crack at a vote?

Sickening.

slit , Dec 15, 2018 6:04:29 PM | link
"Unfortunately, or luckily, such lobbying operations are mostly run by people who are incompetent in the specific field they are lobbying for. "

Incompetence in general and IT and data analysis, physics 101, etc.:

Cry boo hoo hoo to wake up with indigenous capacity decades behind world players like Russia, China, India, etc who operate on fractional budgets...

But this drama also exposes ashura/emigods intra necine warfare: right after 2016 US elections there was a facade of split between military and intelligence differentiation. Seems that veil has been dispensed with , but it invites other questions, insofar as UK is Her Majesty's Service, so are we to read this with Prince Harry or Philip's culture, or a "consent by silence") in mind? Defending crown or EU "Saturnus Sattelitus"?

MadMax2 , Dec 15, 2018 6:28:58 PM | link
@Nemisis

Yeah, they hijacked a few other countries too, including Russia. Or if not hijacking, setting the mood right for some shenanigans in the near future... I think you're quite right about the cheif host of the globalist neolib parasite. Hijacked near fully. Being bled dry. That unaccounted for 21 Trillion at the pentagon is a bit of a giveaway. All under the guise of free markets and democracy.

Good to see Trump finally give it a face... 'you need freedom and security now pay up bitches'

Jackrabbit , Dec 15, 2018 6:38:00 PM | link
NemesisCalling | Dec 15, 2018 5:44:31 PM | 37
In my view, the USA's FP has been undermined by EURO elites which is forcing a game of chicken with Russia.... Globalist Agenda
I think the opposite is true.

The US-led Empire and their globalist sycophants seek to weaken Europe so that it can not act independently in its own best interests. They will do what ever they can to ensure that the vassals never join with Russia/China and the SCO.

Russian scare-mongering and immigration have been effective in furthering this agenda. Also note: what USA has termed "new Europe" - eastern European states like Poland and Ukraine - are solidly pro-American.

John2o2o , Dec 15, 2018 6:56:17 PM | link
'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation Designed To Create A New Enemy

Perfect description.

Why has this ageing nutjob been allowed to secretly dictate British foreign policy? He's clearly insane.

vk , Dec 15, 2018 6:58:49 PM | link
@

[Dec 16, 2018] Skripal father probably fully participated to the whole story. These kinds of narratives are useful to distract the masses from the complete impotency of their politicians.

Dec 16, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Mina , Dec 15, 2018 2:07:25 PM | link

Skripal father probably fully participated to the whole story. These kinds of narratives are useful to distract the masses from the complete impotency of their politicians.

He now enjoys a forced holiday in Brasil under a new name and a new face, and the same for his daughter, who had to share in this involuntarily .

[Dec 15, 2018] Newly Released Integrity Intitiative Papers Include Proposal For Large Disinformation Campaigns

Notable quotes:
"... It seemed to start with Bill Browder being kicked out of Russia. So I would assume that the main reason is that the west became aware that Russia was (had been) taking back control of their economy and resources and kicking out the western carpet-baggers. ..."
"... In June of 2016 a bill named Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 was introduced into the house by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger and Ted Lieu. H.R. 5181 sought a "whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions" to counter "foreign disinformation and manipulation," which they believe threaten the world's "security and stability." A similar bill was introduced in March in the Senate long before Russia gate. It was passed signed by Obama in December after the Russia Gate was played up following the election. ..."
"... Like I said US and UK are basically one entity on such matters. Soon after being passed we saw Prop or Not introduce its hit list of alt media sites. Sadly over the last 2 years alt media has been decimated. Engdahl seems to be the latest to fall, helped no doubt by Soros suit for 1 million against him for calling out his daughters NGO. Now he has fallen into line and backing Trump. Maybe next he will support the Climate Change meme. ..."
"... As I posted on an earlier thread, the demonization of Russia by Anglos began with the First Afghan War in the late 1830s and has continued at differing degrees of intensity ever since always due to geopolitics. ..."
"... The US State Department gives the title "public diplomacy" to its propaganda. ..."
"... Just ask John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who was sent to prison for telling the truth about US torture. ..."
"... Thanks, that looks great and should be reposted across alternative media- most of these groups use "anti-Russia" as a front to dismantle dissent and left-wing politics on behalf of the Multinationals and the Neoliberal Establishment- let's call it the "blob," and let's call that list Counter-Propornot. ..."
"... karlof1... my impression is the anti russian meme got real traction somewhere about 2014-2015 with the advent of Ukraine dynamics and Russia commitment to going into Syria.. around that time it all really picked up steam.. now you have think tanks and etc. etc. profiting from the sale of anti-russia spin.. there appears to be endless money available for this.. ..."
"... This is an incomplete narrative, think tanks are basically mercenaries who relieve the population from the need to think about the complicated matters, letting the folks to believe what is either true or should be believed to be true for the "common good". ..."
"... And indeed, Russian danger was identified ca. 2014 as the major worthy theme in the central parts of that nexus. So who are the paymasters? In part, "capitalists", wealthy individuals with means and motivation to set the course for the West and all forces of good. In part, intelligence agencies. Here Integrity Initiative seems an erratic creature: apparently, run by spooks on military and intelligence payroll, and yet also benefiting from a government grant that makes them a quango, "a semipublic administrative body outside the civil service but receiving financial support from the government, which makes senior appointments to it." In other words, they double dip. The total amount is relatively modest, so rather than getting fat on taxpayer money they merely double or triple they spare official salaries thus reaching "upper middle class" level. Therefore the morale in the outfit was mediocre and we can see one of the more amusing leaks of 2018. ..."
"... Note: Kissinger's WSJ Op-Ed was published on August 29, 2014. Within weeks of its publication, the Obama Administration was in full anti-Russia swing. Trump would enter the race for Republican nomination 9 1/2 months after Kissinger's Op-Ed (June 15, 2015). ..."
"... The hate campaign against Russia is just the old campaign, against any country resisting the Empire's hegemony, focused on the one power that had resisted since 1917 and was able to do so, returning to its old role of saying 'Niet' when all the rest of the world said either 'Aye Aye,Sir' "If you insist" or kept quiet and said nothing at all. ..."
"... One can't just edit a Wikipedia article, no matter how fact-based. It will almost immediately be retracted if it doesn't follow the 'official' narrative. If said person then tries to reestablish that content or tries to engage in a discussion with the admins, in many cases, they simply get banned then. ..."
"... Try this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlgGx9LM5cM It's about a former female STASI-employee turned fighter for freedom and democracy. Currently she is the head of the Antonio-Amadeo-Foundation dedicated, to put it bluntly, to doing the bidding for the usual suspects - and to add insult to injury taxpayer funded to a large part. ..."
"... Russia is the go to enemy when you need to bump up your purchasing of very expensive military equipment and to pour money into various security projects to achieve to goals (1 is to lock down infrastructure etc. but the other is to suppress the US citizens so a two-for). ..."
"... The long game plan, which continues unabated regardless of which party or who is in power, is American hegemony of the planet. When you consider the US has military bases in 155 countries (who essentially have become colonies) it seems like the goal is nearly completed unless you consider that major nuclear armed nations are resisting (Russia, China and maybe Pakistan and India as well). ..."
"... If you take a look at Russia during Yeltsin the US companies nearly bought everything in the country and the raping was in full vigor. Someone at DoS or the CIA very badly miscalculated letting Putin come into power. He was, after all, a minor minion and basically came out of no where. I am assuming they thought he would continue the raping and disarmament of all former Soviet weapons and Russian businesses. Sadly for them he turned out to be a patriot and actively resisted everything the US was trying to do to Russia. I believe the Yukos deal was the final straw which would have given nearly all Russian oil and gas to Exxon/Mobil. So, Putin has been battling the US successfully since and is very slowly eliminating all the oligarchs the US put into power and draining his swamp of Atlantacists and 5th column. ..."
"... i recall how quickly 'cambridge analytica' came and went, in spite of the strength of the data on them manipulating much... i imagine a similar story hee with 'integrity initiative'.. ..."
"... as for wikipedia - everyone knows it's a full on propaganda site masquerading as a neutral info site. ..."
"... the Chinese government currently has its hands around the financial windpipe of the man ultimately responsible for Ms. Meng's arrest ..."
"... "MAGA was as much a policy change as it was a campaign slogan....To prevail, Empire strategists recognized that USA needed to be able to call on regular troops and a deep sense of patriotism and righteousness that required re-developing nationalism. In short, 'MAGA'." ..."
"... Trump's invocation of MAGA on the campaign trail was presented in such a way as to seem to overwhelmingly favour a pullback from Imperialism in order to make things right at home. ..."
"... Trump engaged in a bare, pointed, often crass and bordering on contemptuous criticism of his predecessors' foreign policy. The irreverent tone was unprecedented in recent campaign history and was so plain and completely at odds with Hilary's stated positions that it essentially committed him (in my eyes anyway) to following through, or to make all efforts to follow through. If not, he would set one of the worst examples of a duplicitous politician, perhaps ever. The same applies to other bold campaign positions, such as the border wall, for example. ..."
"... Now Judge Emmet Sullivan wants expanded information, and wishes to see the actual notes (FD-302) that were mentioned by Flynn; and Judge Sullivan is directing the special counsel to provide all documents created by the FBI surrounding the Flynn interview: ..."
Dec 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

The person(s) who first published documents of the shady UK organization Integrity Initiative decided that the discussion is about the Initiative is not yet sufficient and published more documents.

The first dump on the Cyberguerilla site happened on November 5. We discussed it here . A smaller dump on November 29 revealed more about the UK government paid Integrity Initiatives influence work in Germany, Spain and Greece. A third dump followed today.

The leaker, who uses the widely abused Anonymous label, promises to publish more:

Well-coordinated efforts of the Anonymous from all over the world have forced the UK politicians to react to the unacceptable and in fact illegal activity of the British government that uses public money to carry out misinformation campaigns not only in the EU, US and Canada but in the UK as well, in particular campaigns against the Labour party.
The Integrity Initiative is now under first official investigation. We promise to give close scrutiny to the investigation that we believe should be conducted honestly, openly and absolutely transparently for the society, rather than become an internal and confidential case of the Foreign Office.

To show our expertise in the investigation as well as to warn the UK government that they must not even try to put it all down to the activity of some charity foundations and public organizations we reveal a part of documents unveiling the true face of The Institute for Statecraft and some information about its leadership.
...
As the scandal in the UK is gaining momentum, it is ever so striking that European leaders and official representatives remain so calm about the Integrity Initiative's activity in their countries. We remind you that covert clusters made up for political and financial manipulation and controlled by the UK secret services are carrying out London's secret missions and interfering in domestic affairs of sovereign states right in front of you.
...
This is another part of documents that we have on the Integrity Initiative. We do not change the goals of this operation. When we return with the next portion of revelations, names and facts depends on how seriously the UK and EU leaders take our intentions this time.

The dump includes invoices, internal analyses of international media responses to the Skripal affair, the Initiative's operations in Scotland, France and Italy, some strategy papers and various other stuff. There are some interesting bits about the cooperation of the Initiative with British Ministry of Defense. It will take me a while to read through all of it.

The most interesting paper I found so far is:

COMBATTING RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION
LAUNCHING AN ONLINE COMMUNICATIONS CAMPAIGN TO INFORM, DEBUNK, AND COMBAT STATE-SPONSORED PROPAGANDA
Comprehensive action proposal
(pdf)

A "strictly confidential" proposal by the French company Lexfo to spread the Integrity Initiative's state-sponsored propaganda through an offensive online influence campaigns for a monthly pay per language of €20-40.000. The proposal also includes an offer for "counter activism" through "negative PR, legal actions, ethical hack back, etc." for €50,000 per month.


bigger

The offer claims that the company can launch hundreds of "news" pieces per day on as many websites. It notably also offers to "edit" Wikipedia articles.

In short: This proposal describes large disinformation operations under the disguise of fighting alleged Russian disinformation.

It is at the core what the Integrity Initiative, which obviously requested the proposal, is about.

But as we saw in the information revealed yesterday there is more to it. The Initiative, which has lots of 'former' military and intelligence people among its staff, is targeting the political left in Britain as well as in other countries. It is there where it becomes a danger to the democratic societies of Europe.


Zanon , Dec 14, 2018 3:12:30 PM | link

Integrity Initiative: Spanish Cluster Misled UK Parliament Over Assange, Russia
https://sputniknews.com/world/201812141070699912-assange-integrity-institute-parliament/

What a bunch of mentalist type of people!

Mark2 , Dec 14, 2018 3:41:18 PM | link
I'd bet a weeks wages on it that this is where Craig Summers came from and what he was ! This blog is the antidote to the official spin! It was good to here from Craig Murray very thought provoking regards tactics.we all need our own method ! But not be gagged. I respect others ways we are on the same side .being united is the defence against devide and rule.

I wonder what the Tory's think of this scandal they must be angry at this attack on democracy, nah only joking! It'l be the dog that did'nt bark ! just like the media oh and the police ! One rule for them 'no rule' opression for us 99%

james , Dec 14, 2018 3:42:42 PM | link
thanks b.... aside from wondering if this is Russia accessing and sharing this, i think the sticking point is in this "Unintegrity initiative" going after the uk political left... that is where i think this is going to get traction as more folks are going to wake up if they see how deep and ugly this goes in targeting their own..

i could be wrong, but if this news catches on, or the uk MP women keeps hammering away on this, i think we will see some results..

i opened the pdf... here is a quick list of their objectives..

maybe the uk folks can tell us how this is going

ashley albanese , Dec 14, 2018 3:42:44 PM | link
In Australia the scale of tendentious anti-Chinese propaganda is absurd . Australia is flailing around trying to cope with changing circumstances . Already at a disadvantage in 'reading ' the world because of her geographical isolation the clear bias of information she now faces from the Anglo/ U S media and government systems puts her at a disadvantage in forming intelligent policies .
DontBelieveEitherPropaganda , Dec 14, 2018 4:38:49 PM | link
Can anyone make a zip with all dumps and files? For sharing and archiving this would be much easier.. As i believe it will not last long till the scribd uploads etc are DMCAed.. My LUKS+Veracrypt secured storage system would be a safe bet for archiving, so i would volunteer..
Much appreciated!
bjd , Dec 14, 2018 4:44:33 PM | link
Buyer beware!

Note that this document --and I've seen more-- presumes there is a large scale Russian disinformation campaign going on. Other documents presume Skripal was poisoned by Russia.

Once you run with these documents, beware that you are making those presumptions yours . That may be the objective here.

In short: all these documents need to be vetted.

Zanon , Dec 14, 2018 4:48:48 PM | link
DontBelieveEitherPropaganda

"Can anyone make "

No. Do it yourself.

No offense but in this age and on this blog, dont ask other people to do what you can do yourself. Make an effort and influence.

Jackrabbit , Dec 14, 2018 5:08:37 PM | link
Integrity Initiative got a lot of scrutiny because they used their Twitter account to attack Corbyn. In it's latest info dump, Anonymous describes additional UK political manipulation, writing that the Director of The Institute for Statecraft Christopher Donnelly:
... lobbied the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee for an inquiry into Russia's interference in the Catalan referendum. He invited members of the Integrity Initiative Spain cluster Francisco de Borja Lasheras and Mira Milosevich-Juaristi. At that moment they were receiving funds from the Foreign Office, i.e. the UK intelligence paid its own agents for fake proof of Russia's interference in the Catalan referendum and later told them to lie to the Parliament to convince it to take anti-Russian steps .
Kit Klarenberg , Dec 14, 2018 5:36:22 PM | link
This dump has plenty on our pal Simon.

His official profile is very telling indeed I think - https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/12/13/the-institute-for-statecraft-expert-team-v-3/the-institute-for-statecraft-expert-team-v-3.pdf:

"Simon Bracey-Lane: Currently runs the IfS "Integrity Initiative" network communications and network development process; deep experience in democratic election campaign processes in UK and especially in USA, viz: Regional Campaign Organiser: John Wisniewski for Governor of New Jersey, USA. January - May 2017; Statewide Campaign Organiser: Bernie Sanders for President 2016, USA. Sept 2015 – May 2016; special study of Russian interference in the US electoral process."

Whatever the truth of the matter, he can definitely multitask. Running the II network communications and development process (cultivating, recruiting, handling?) while also being a research fellow at the II's 'parent organization' Institute for Statecraft? I wonder how many hours he has left in a day to sleep!

Then again he seems to have form in this regard. 'Special study of Russian interference in the election process' simultaneously as being a key organizer in Sanders' campaign. Maybe he did his 'special study' in his free time?

karlof1 , Dec 14, 2018 5:42:04 PM | link
Pure brazen depravity. And how will the average UK citizen become informed of what seems treasonous activity? Seems venders with broadsheets in the style of yesteryear standing on street corners yelling EXTRA! need to return so the public can be informed of its government's activities--Social Media is not sufficient.

Bevin and other UK citizens: What do you call your Swamp?

jayc , Dec 14, 2018 5:46:12 PM | link
Any thoughts as to why exactly Russia became the chief demon? It seems the hysterical propaganda was focused exclusively on ISIS until Putin spoke at the UN announcing Russia's intervention in Syria. Then the propaganda shifted, first directed at Putin, then generally at Russia and Putin together. Is it anger over the prevention of imperialist design in the Middle East?
Koen , Dec 14, 2018 5:49:54 PM | link
Here's a list of about 60 organizations & projects devoted to spreading anti-Russia content in Western media. The Integrity Initiative is just the tip of the iceberg. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-wtpA2NomEj35bbVe1-iHX7rt4YzahPINm5w9A-SkcQ/edit?usp=drive_web&ouid=109242632477374337132

And here are 2 great books about the origins and nature of Russophobia

Lastly, I collect examples of anti-Russia content that I come across in the media at www.blameputin.com

ADKC , Dec 14, 2018 6:26:19 PM | link
jayc @15

It seemed to start with Bill Browder being kicked out of Russia. So I would assume that the main reason is that the west became aware that Russia was (had been) taking back control of their economy and resources and kicking out the western carpet-baggers. This belated realisation, that the prize that the west had gained and plundered in the '90s (from the collapse of the Soviet Union) had managed to wriggle free, seems to be something that the west can't accept.

Pft , Dec 14, 2018 6:54:10 PM | link
In June of 2016 a bill named Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 was introduced into the house by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger and Ted Lieu. H.R. 5181 sought a "whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions" to counter "foreign disinformation and manipulation," which they believe threaten the world's "security and stability." A similar bill was introduced in March in the Senate long before Russia gate. It was passed signed by Obama in December after the Russia Gate was played up following the election.

Like I said US and UK are basically one entity on such matters. Soon after being passed we saw Prop or Not introduce its hit list of alt media sites. Sadly over the last 2 years alt media has been decimated. Engdahl seems to be the latest to fall, helped no doubt by Soros suit for 1 million against him for calling out his daughters NGO. Now he has fallen into line and backing Trump. Maybe next he will support the Climate Change meme.

Oh well, looks like its almost over for Truth, although some truth probably gets allowed if enough of the lies are also presented. So my take is the anti Russia hysteria was just a clever way of getting support for a war on Truth (fake news).

Russia now has a similar initiative said to combat fakes news from US which will likely be used against Putin critics (US agents). The law allows them "to block online content, including social media websites, whose activities are deemed "undesirable" or "extremist." Maybe Putin is part of the Fake Wrestling game. Heel or Face, your choice.

I see the EU has set up a rapid alert system to help EU member states recognize disinformation campaigns, and increase the budget set aside for the detection of disinformation from . It will also press technology companies to play their part in cracking down on fake news. Major social media platforms have already signed up to a code of conduct. One minister said the EU would not stand for "an internet that is the wild west, where anything goes".

Macron introduced a bill recently seeking to get " judges and the media sector's regulator involved in the fight against fake news. A fact-checking state-run website would be created and social media would have to pitch in by warning users when a post is sponsored -- or when someone pays to give it better visibility in a feed."

I suppose the War on Truth has gone global. I wont bother to mention China as they are the role model the West follows.

karlof1 , Dec 14, 2018 7:36:27 PM | link
jayc @15--

As I posted on an earlier thread, the demonization of Russia by Anglos began with the First Afghan War in the late 1830s and has continued at differing degrees of intensity ever since always due to geopolitics.

bevin , Dec 14, 2018 8:08:33 PM | link
@14 What do you call your Swamp? "The Establishment", coined, I believe, by the historian AJP Taylor. The founder of modern journalism William Cobbett used to call it "The Thing"
Don Bacon , Dec 14, 2018 8:35:18 PM | link
The US State Department gives the title "public diplomacy" to its propaganda. Robert Parry wrote about it, and its contrast with truth, a couple years ago.
The idea of questioning the claims by the West's officialdom now brings calumny down upon the heads of those who dare do it. "Truth" is being redefined as whatever the U.S. government, NATO and other Western interests say is true. Disagreement with the West's "group thinks," no matter how fact-based the dissent is, becomes "fake news."

So, we have the case of Washington Post columnist David Ignatius having a starry-eyed interview with Richard Stengel, the State Department's Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, the principal arm of U.S. government propaganda.

Entitled "The truth is losing," the column laments that the official narratives as deigned by the State Department and The Washington Post are losing traction with Americans and the world's public.

Stengel, a former managing editor at Time magazine, seems to take aim at Russia's RT network's slogan, "question more," as some sinister message seeking to inject cynicism toward the West's official narratives.

"They're not trying to say that their version of events is the true one. They're saying: 'Everybody's lying! Nobody's telling you the truth!'," Stengel said. "They don't have a candidate, per se. But they want to undermine faith in democracy, faith in the West." . . here

Just ask John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who was sent to prison for telling the truth about US torture.
Blooming Barricade , Dec 14, 2018 8:47:12 PM | link
@15

Thanks, that looks great and should be reposted across alternative media- most of these groups use "anti-Russia" as a front to dismantle dissent and left-wing politics on behalf of the Multinationals and the Neoliberal Establishment- let's call it the "blob," and let's call that list Counter-Propornot.

james , Dec 14, 2018 9:19:09 PM | link
@ 15 jayc, @18 ADKC and @21 karlof1... my impression is the anti russian meme got real traction somewhere about 2014-2015 with the advent of Ukraine dynamics and Russia commitment to going into Syria.. around that time it all really picked up steam.. now you have think tanks and etc. etc. profiting from the sale of anti-russia spin.. there appears to be endless money available for this..
Piotr Berman , Dec 14, 2018 9:49:29 PM | link
... now you have think tanks and etc. etc. profiting from the sale of anti-russia spin.. there appears to be endless money available for this..

Posted by: james | Dec 14, 2018 9:19:09 PM | 26

This is an incomplete narrative, think tanks are basically mercenaries who relieve the population from the need to think about the complicated matters, letting the folks to believe what is either true or should be believed to be true for the "common good". And the "common good" is decided by paymasters. Somewhere in between are mass media populated by folks particularly averse to thinking -- again, they were selected by the employers not to think but to write and talk "correctly". But the press/TV lords will not chisel all details of what is true and important, and what is false, unimportant or both, so journalists can absorb it from think tanks and briefing from government informed sources. There are also astro-turfs and so on.

And indeed, Russian danger was identified ca. 2014 as the major worthy theme in the central parts of that nexus. So who are the paymasters? In part, "capitalists", wealthy individuals with means and motivation to set the course for the West and all forces of good. In part, intelligence agencies. Here Integrity Initiative seems an erratic creature: apparently, run by spooks on military and intelligence payroll, and yet also benefiting from a government grant that makes them a quango, "a semipublic administrative body outside the civil service but receiving financial support from the government, which makes senior appointments to it." In other words, they double dip. The total amount is relatively modest, so rather than getting fat on taxpayer money they merely double or triple they spare official salaries thus reaching "upper middle class" level. Therefore the morale in the outfit was mediocre and we can see one of the more amusing leaks of 2018.

Jackrabbit , Dec 14, 2018 10:41:58 PM | link
james @26:
... my impression is the anti russian meme got real traction somewhere about 2014-2015 with the advent of ukraine dynamics and russias commitment to going into syria..
I think we can surmise that the Russian objection to US bombing Syria in September 2013 was countered with a two-prong strategy:
> doubling down in Syria via ISIS;

> pushing hard for overthrow of Ukrainian government to: a) punish Russia, and b) keep Russia busy so that the Russians refrain from any further support for Syria

It was a superb and well-thought out strategy . . . that failed miserably. The coup in Ukraine succeeded and ISIS came within weeks of defeating Assad BUT Russia managed to secure the best parts of Ukraine -and- intervened in Syria anyway (along with Iran).

The failure to contain Russia was realised by Kissinger when he penned an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal that made a cryptic call for MAGA to counter the Russians/Chinese . After outlining the challenge to the World Order, Kissinger concludes:

Even as the lessons of challenging decades are examined, the affirmation of America's exceptional nature must be sustained. History offers no respite to countries that set aside their sense of identity in favor of a seemingly less arduous course . But nor does it assure success for the most elevated convictions in the absence of a comprehensive geopolitical strategy.
So the strategy changed once again. MAGA was as much a policy change as it was a campaign slogan. Obama's devious faux peacefulness that used covert action and proxy forces could not succeed against determined opposition from Russia/China. To prevail, Empire strategists recognized that USA needed to be able to call on regular troops and a deep sense of patriotism and righteousness that required re-developing nationalism. In short, "MAGA".

<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

This is what I wrote at nakedcapitalism.com shortly after Kissinger's Op-Ed was published in August 2014 :

My reading is that Kissinger is asserting that the US can and should do whatever it takes to keep the US preeminent – even if that means ignoring allies and/or the post-war international structure (UN, UNSC). That exceptional! message comes through loud and clear despite his 'triage' formalism. And it is a message that is comforting to the elite who read the WSJ (before a holiday weekend), though it should give Joe Sixpack nightmares if fully understood.

There is a lot more there which would take much longer to unpack. But I'll point to one more thing: Note how he forms an equivalence between all the troubles that the 'West' now face, and ignores US/Western actions that have contributed to these conflicts by conflating them. NC readers understand this via Merschemer's (in today's links) work on Ukraine and many links regarding ISIS (like this one).

This comforting message [from Kissinger] is needed because the Ukraine gambit has failed miserably – as many independent obeservers [sic] predicted– and a deeper conflict with Russia (possibly extending to others) is now in the cards. Like the true neocon that he is, Kissinger has doubled down on Nuland's obnoxious and misguided "f*ck the EU" with an exceptional! "f*ck the World".

God help us.

Jackrabbit , Dec 14, 2018 10:51:26 PM | link
Note: Kissinger's WSJ Op-Ed was published on August 29, 2014. Within weeks of its publication, the Obama Administration was in full anti-Russia swing. Trump would enter the race for Republican nomination 9 1/2 months after Kissinger's Op-Ed (June 15, 2015).

Trump was the ONLY populist, out of 19 contenders, in the Republican race. Hillary told Democratic-friendly media to focus on Trump and did things during the Presidential race that call into question her desire to actually win. Trump is a MUCH better choice for a MAGA nationalist than Hillary.

WJ , Dec 14, 2018 11:03:55 PM | link
@Jackrabbit 28,

You were right then, and you are right now. My one beef with your 2016 election analysis is that it seems to me you shortchange slightly the evidence of a real conflict and possibly fissure within the oligarchic elite, only certain segments of which seem convinced that now is the time for MAGA. Others among the actual power brokers would I think have preferred HRC and 4-8 more years of neoliberal internationalist interventionist grift a la Obama before having to finally turn to the MAGA nationalist strategy (which given the resource struggles that will emerge over the next decades was always inevitable once the Project for the New American (Israeli) Century collapsed, as it was bound to once Russia called its bluff in Syria.) But this is a minor point. What is much more important is that behind MAGA is an envisioned world war on the scale of WWI and WWII in which "The West" takes on China-Russia leading to the death of probably everybody.

bevin , Dec 14, 2018 11:33:45 PM | link
"..my impression is the anti russian meme got real traction somewhere about 2014-2015 with the advent of ukraine dynamics and russias commitment to going into syria..."

I think that the proper context begins with the failure of Medvedev's Russia to veto the UNSC motion establishing a No Fly zone over Libya. Inter alia this led to a real reverse for and an humiliation of China which had large financial investments as well as large numbers of personnel involved in Ghadaffi's imaginative schemes.

My guess, and it is not a particularly well informed one, is that after the Libyan disaster-the worst sort of imperialist over reach and brutality not only did China realise that Imperialism was reverting to its nightmarish type, but Russians leaders saw that a permanent alliance-until the defeat of the empire- was the only alternative that it and China had to 'hanging separately'. And that the same went for Iran and Syria-nobody could trust the west any longer and it would be foolish, and dangerous, to continue to do so.

The hate campaign against Russia is just the old campaign, against any country resisting the Empire's hegemony, focused on the one power that had resisted since 1917 and was able to do so, returning to its old role of saying 'Niet' when all the rest of the world said either 'Aye Aye,Sir' "If you insist" or kept quiet and said nothing at all.

Of course, 2011 was the last in a long series of increasingly stupid US aggressions, all of which Russia knew very well were aimed at it as much as the selected sacrificial victim. Those who say that Saddam was about oil could not be more wrong: he was a human sacrifice, slaughtered ritually on the corpses of a million of his fellows, to demonstrate that the USA can do what it chooses when it wishes. Karl Rove was wrong: not even Empires can create their own realities. The extravagant and bloody theatre of decades swaggering around the middle east finds the US not only poorer but weaker than it was in 1980.

V , Dec 14, 2018 11:37:12 PM | link
"It notably also offers to "edit" Wikipedia articles." b

Wikipedia stopped being a reliable source for accurate information a long time ago. Finding reliable alternatives is a bit more effort; but worth it for accurate information.

Piotr Berman , Dec 15, 2018 12:02:03 AM | link
Wikipedia stopped being a reliable source for accurate information a long time ago. Finding reliable alternatives is a bit more effort; but worth it for accurate information.

Posted by: V | Dec 14, 2018 11:37:12 PM | 32

It is more complicated. Wikipedia is sprawling and manipulations happen on entry basis, and it often leaves "controversies". I also discovered that it is worth to brush up on language skills, if there are any. For example, on recent events in Crimea there is an entry "Crimea Crisis" with Russian and Polish versions, and Polish "pro-Westerners" somehow left few traces of activity. I wonder how is it in German and French Wikipedias. In English, think tanks and deep states indeed lack sufficient counter-activity.

b , Dec 15, 2018 12:16:08 AM | link
@DontBelieveEitherPropaganda

Why didn't you make an archive yourself? Meanwhile the leakers account at Scribd has been slashed and all the files with it. Anyway - here is a Mediafire zip created yesterday of (allegedly) all files published so far. IntegrityInitiative.zip . Save it as long as it is available.

Augustin L , Dec 15, 2018 12:47:50 AM | link
@ jackrabbit, I've heard other observers make the link with Kissinger's op-ed, but your demonstration is very convincing. William Engdahl made the same call, Hillary's not a suitable player to pull off MAGA with masses of deplorables. Unfortunately for Anglo-American strategists, Trump with his linear cretinism lacks the necessary wherewithal to implement and execute a comprehensive geopolitical strategy. Kissinger comes from another era, and probably cannot grasp how far devolution has taken American elites in the cesspit of post modern hedonism.
Blooming Barricade , Dec 15, 2018 12:54:41 AM | link
@V

It's illuminating to see this NATO-backed operation looking at a PR firm to edit Wikipedia because this brings to mind the notorious "Philip Cross," which, for those not in the know, was uncovered by Craig Murray and others ( https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-cross-affair/) as having edited the pages of prominent left wing people and Labour Party people. In Germany, Left Party Bundestag member Diether Dehm has highlighted a similar figure in German language Wikipedia, "Feliks," targeting socialists in that country. The similarities of both to the proposals made by the PR firm above are eerie.

Hmpf , Dec 15, 2018 1:25:47 AM | link
@ Piotr Berman | Dec 15, 2018 12:02:03 AM | 33

Can't speak for the French version of Wikipedia but with the German edition it is as bad as anywhere else when it comes to social and political issues, particularly so if geopolitics (the West, ME, Russia ..) is concerned.

Two people, a biologist and a journalist, independently investigated networks on a senior editor and admin level active within WikipediaG. What they found is rather shocking. One can't just edit a Wikipedia article, no matter how fact-based. It will almost immediately be retracted if it doesn't follow the 'official' narrative. If said person then tries to reestablish that content or tries to engage in a discussion with the admins, in many cases, they simply get banned then.

These guys can also be found on Youtube: Gruppe42 (group42) Unfortunately their main documentaries are only available in German language but there's some other content 'Geschichten aus Wikihausen' - 'The Tales of Wikihausen' with English subtitles.

Try this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlgGx9LM5cM It's about a former female STASI-employee turned fighter for freedom and democracy. Currently she is the head of the Antonio-Amadeo-Foundation dedicated, to put it bluntly, to doing the bidding for the usual suspects - and to add insult to injury taxpayer funded to a large part.

Mina , Dec 15, 2018 4:16:39 AM | link
The BBC won't taalk about it but when it is in the House of Commons they have to Sole result of a search "Integrity Initiative" on the BBC news website
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bv9zxj (12/12 when then question was raised in the house of commons)
Zanon , Dec 15, 2018 4:43:24 AM | link
"Anonymous Hackers Expose UK Plans to Mine Sevastopol Days Before Crimea Vote" https://sptnkne.ws/kpWP
Russ , Dec 15, 2018 5:01:57 AM | link
Posted by: Soft Asylum | Dec 15, 2018 4:36:27 AM | 39

Such people might be some of the worst examples of humans, but that doesn't mean they're trolls. In fact, plucking some kind of motivations out of their psychopathic minds might be a good thing for the rest of us. If people such as them are posters here, this would allow an opportunity to study them.

You feel you lack opportunities to study them? Pick up a newspaper, or turn on the cable news.

TJ , Dec 15, 2018 5:03:04 AM | link
The thread over on Craig Murrays site- British Security Service Infiltration, the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft
William Bowles , Dec 15, 2018 6:01:23 AM | link
Integrity Initiative Part 3 https://williambowles.info/2018/12/15/integrity-initiative-part-3/

Combatting Russian Disinformation http://williambowlesnet.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/combatting-russian-disinformation.pdf

William Bowles , Dec 15, 2018 6:08:03 AM | link
B: this info is astounding! Or perhaps not? Maybe the fact that the spooks are notoriously inept is what's astounding? I mean you would think that what with all dweebs working for the state (eg GCHQ), they would be able to protect their own excreta? The earlier disinfo (it's a Russian plot etc) makes sense but it didn't work!
Old Microbiologist , Dec 15, 2018 7:09:31 AM | link
Jay @15
Sorry, I didn't read any of this until this morning. Russia is the go to enemy when you need to bump up your purchasing of very expensive military equipment and to pour money into various security projects to achieve to goals (1 is to lock down infrastructure etc. but the other is to suppress the US citizens so a two-for).

Asymmetrical wars against tiny nations without air support are hard to justify spending Trillions of dollars forever. That dog just won't hunt after 18 years of a no-win war in Afghanistan (or anywhere else). So, Russia and now just to make it even more critical, China are enemies that demand massive military buildups of equipment that won't ever actually (hopefully) be put to use. This is to fight a two theater war against two nuclear superpowers. Basically, it is insanity but it will make a few people very rich.

The long game plan, which continues unabated regardless of which party or who is in power, is American hegemony of the planet. When you consider the US has military bases in 155 countries (who essentially have become colonies) it seems like the goal is nearly completed unless you consider that major nuclear armed nations are resisting (Russia, China and maybe Pakistan and India as well).

If you take a look at Russia during Yeltsin the US companies nearly bought everything in the country and the raping was in full vigor. Someone at DoS or the CIA very badly miscalculated letting Putin come into power. He was, after all, a minor minion and basically came out of no where. I am assuming they thought he would continue the raping and disarmament of all former Soviet weapons and Russian businesses. Sadly for them he turned out to be a patriot and actively resisted everything the US was trying to do to Russia. I believe the Yukos deal was the final straw which would have given nearly all Russian oil and gas to Exxon/Mobil. So, Putin has been battling the US successfully since and is very slowly eliminating all the oligarchs the US put into power and draining his swamp of Atlantacists and 5th column.

That is the over simplified view but it sums it up enough to explain what we are seeing. It is as always all about money. So, Putin has resisted aggressively all US encroachments into the Russian sphere of influence. The sanctions actually help Russia. A devalued ruble is great for oil exports which are only 12% of Russia's GDP. More self sufficiency is also a huge benefit. A partnership with China ensures the US cannot ever achieve their goals of global domination. The US military has proven for the past 70+ years they are incapable of any meaningful fighting and that the military is woefully incompetent. The ABM test results even when cheating heavily are only roughly a 50% hit rate. That is against "normal" ballistic missiles. Russia's new systems already circumvent this system by mid-flight course corrections.

The biggest problem is the neocon elites really believe all their own propaganda. That is very scary.

William Bowles , Dec 15, 2018 7:54:52 AM | link
Posted by: jayc | Dec 14, 2018 5:46:12 PM | 15

Jayc: you ask why Russia and specifically Putin? Cast your mind back to 1991 and the fall of the USSR and Yeltsin's coup and the theft of billions of Russia's capital resources by Goldman Sachs et al. The Empire figured what was left of the former USSR was a pushover and its vast natural resources, highly educated population, ripe for plucking and along comes the Tatar Putin, a descendent of Genghis Khan! Whoops!

And only just in time. Then think about the invasion of Iraq in 1991 and later in 2003 and then Libya. The Russians stood by. But Syria was a step too far and too near!

Jayc, it's Western, racist hubris. The Russkies are just a bunch of jumped up peasants (Hitler made the same mistake), so when they asserted their right to resist, and it really started in 2015 with the Western financed 'revolution' against Assad, it came as a real shock to the system to see that Russia actually did have real guns that fired and real jets and satellites to watch it all. After all, it was those peasant Russians who went into space first (Duck agogo Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the genuine father of space exploration).

It must have rocked the bastards back on their heels. So they hate Putin! He restored Russia's faith in itself and that is simply not permissible! And do it with a military budget a small fraction of the Empire's and one that Putin CUT by 10% this year! Wakey-wakey!

Okay, this is a vastly simplified explanation and I'm not going to deal with the internal contradictions of Russia, that's for the Russians to do. But it seems that once more, the Russkies are saving our tired, sorry Western arses.

Bill

Emmanuel Goldstein , Dec 15, 2018 9:29:46 AM | link
William Bowles @ 57

I commented at the Saker at the time of the first Ukrainian war that it looks like Mother Russia is being set up to defeat fascism for the second time in 100 years. History may not exactly repeat itself but it does rhyme.

If I were the West I would tread very carefully, after the catastrophes of the 1990's the Russians are in no mood to roll over for anyone. The West was surprised at the weapons and operational arts displayed in Syria, and that was just the conventional stuff....

AnneR , Dec 15, 2018 9:30:57 AM | link
karlofi - Britain doesn't have swamps (environmental sort), but it does have lots of Bogs. And Bog is also another term for lavatory/toilet - so one might describe Westminster, the City of London and the rest of the bourgeois British world as one Big Bog (if only someone would flush it).
BM , Dec 15, 2018 10:18:31 AM | link
Well, I was excited about the supposed "lots on Skripal" and thought maybe there would be a smoking gun. Disappointed (mediafire zip linked by b)! All I opened was the files with the word skripal in the name - nothing but ultra-boring newspeak from what seem like spotty adolescents trying their best to feed their paymasters with the propaganda they want. The only one of any interest at all was the one reporting on skripal news coverage in Greece: the author was relatively normal, and coverage in Greece was pretty neutral and sceptical of the UK propaganda.

There were only 100 documents in the zip which was supposed to be everything released so far (i.e. all three dumps).

Is there any evidence to confirm that all three dumps were done by the same person/people? I can't help wondering whether the third dump might have been damage control from the Integrity Initiative themselves, to try to show that there is not much there.

As I said though, I didn't open anything except the files with skripal in the filename, so maybe there is something interesting somewhere else. It may be that by specifically looking for skripal I failed to find any files with policy or analysis. All the files I looked at seemed to be reports from the clusters in various countries (often addressed to Simon), or pure propaganda (spotty teenagers) with no analysis.

psychohistorian , Dec 15, 2018 10:32:15 AM | link
ZH has a posting up about the Integrity Initiative and gives MoA a hat tip for being early onto the issue. This should insure that it won't be buried but I suspect it is time for another big shiny thing to appear to distract the masses
William Bowles , Dec 15, 2018 10:52:51 AM | link
Okay! It is/was called Spybase, and created by Daniel Brandt. Foreign Affairs magazine badmouthed it here:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1989-03-01/spybase

And they misidentified it as well!

See also Namebase, the original collection of intelligence agents.

NameBase - Wikipedia
Founder Daniel Brandt began collecting clippings and citations pertaining to influential people and intelligence agents in the 1960s and especially in the 1970s after becoming a member of Students for a Democratic Society, an organization that opposed US foreign policy.
[Search domain en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spybase] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spybase

William Bowles , Dec 15, 2018 11:16:15 AM | link
Scary but worth a read: What are the Odds of a Shooting War Between NATO and Russia? "70% Chance of Combat" An Interview with George Szamuely https://www.globalresearch.ca/what-are-the-odds-of-a-shooting-war-between-nato-and-russia-70-chance-of-combat/5663011
Russ , Dec 15, 2018 11:44:03 AM | link
Posted by: William Bowles | Dec 15, 2018 11:16:15 AM | 67

That piece sums it up well, especially NATO's increasingly aggressive posture. And how self-righteously stupid the US is being. I think 70% might be optimistic. This situation is even more like 1914 than 1914 was, in that the reallywantingwar-to-bluster ratio looks even worse. Meanwhile Trump, with his self-indulgent saber-rattling, is like a twitter-empowered Kaiser. Imagine that back then.

Another commenter up above says this'll be Russia's second go-round with fascism. Yup, and they can send US/NATO where they sent Hitler, Napoleon, Charles XII.

William Bowles , Dec 15, 2018 12:15:58 PM | link
Posted by: Russ | Dec 15, 2018 11:44:03 AM | 69

Russ, I wish I could be that optimistic. Yes, madmen they may be but they're madmen with tactical nukes! And judging by another End of Days scenario, they actually seem to be contemplating their use, gambling that the Russians wont call their bluff! More like the Cuban Missile Crisis than Sarevevo. So which side will blink first?

See: Be Afraid Be Very Afraid! By John Rachel

https://williambowles.info/2018/11/23/be-afraid-be-very-afraid-by-john-rachel/

And then of course, we have Global Heating, which the Empire figures will 'take care' of that surplus to requirement population, whilst the 1% wait it out in their bunkers.


I'm glad I'm at the other end of my life, rather than the beginning.

" we have the certainty that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that none of its attributes can ever be lost, and therefore, also, that with the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation, the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again produce it". -- Frederick Engels, from the introduction to 'The Dialectics of Nature', 1883.
james , Dec 15, 2018 12:41:47 PM | link
thanks everyone for giving a response to either my comment, or @jayc's initial comment on what started this russiaphobia... i think many of the answers are relevant and there is no one answer...

i recall how quickly 'cambridge analytica' came and went, in spite of the strength of the data on them manipulating much... i imagine a similar story hee with 'integrity initiative'..

as for wikipedia - everyone knows it's a full on propaganda site masquerading as a neutral info site... the fact that it is mentioned in this integrity initiative data dump shows just how mainstream and 'go to' in the world of propaganda it is viewed by the intel services and anyone else trying to get in on some of the gov't money handouts for this type propaganda.. it would be very cool if the wikipedia site made a statement saying we no longer need donations, as the intel services of the west have been paying us to continue... at what point does wikipedia become an official and open arm of western propaganda?? why continue to try to hide this when it is so apparent??

Russ , Dec 15, 2018 12:47:43 PM | link
Posted by: james | Dec 15, 2018 12:41:47 PM | 71

"at what point does wikipedia become an official and open arm of western propaganda?? why continue to try to hide this when it is so apparent??"

That's one of neoliberalism's refinements over classical fascism: Just as they figured out you don't need to kill dissenters since no one listens to us anyway, so you also don't need formal Gleichshaltung under a de jure Geobbels ministry since the MSM will happily "coordinate" itself and really doesn't need to be told what to do. They already know since theirs is the same ideology.

Russ , Dec 15, 2018 12:51:58 PM | link
@ William Bowles 70

Well, I'm only optimistic about that last part if they really can keep it to just shooting and not let the missiles fly.

On the other hand I'm not at all optimistic about that. Though even then I suspect it'll hit the West worst, precisely because any such leveling is hardest on the most complex, most high maintenance, most just-in-time, least robust, least resilient, most top-heavy Tower of Babel. That would be the US, Europe, and their dependencies.

Noirette , Dec 15, 2018 12:52:52 PM | link
from the link in b's post: As we see it, the main weakness in the Russians' disinformation campaign is their embrace of a quantity - over quality and credibility - strategy as shown by their lack of credible spokespeople, their publication of a high volume of "easily" identifiable propaganda and "fake news", and their heavy reliance on a few biased partisan sites, dubious social media pages and uninspired trolls. Their stories are hard to believe,...

That sounds so much like a self-description of the US-UK MSM it is uncanny. (Bellingcat anyone? for ex.) Which, imho, shows a complete lack of creativity, suppleness, or even a low-level semi-efficient approach to the general problem of information / narrative control. Because that is what it is all about: much of the discourse around it is waffle, which masquerades as 'new' as it invokes 'new info' double-speak: social circuits, fake news, distribution, deep learning, connectivity, targetting, etc. (and other terms that are less readily comprehensible..)

William Bowles , Dec 15, 2018 1:30:28 PM | link

Posted by: Noirette | Dec 15, 2018 12:52:52 PM | 74

Hah! I think it was Goebbels who said that the biggest mistake a propagandist can make is to believe his own propaganda and I think your quote exemplifies it! But note it always has to contain an element of truth eg, 'as shown by their lack of credible spokespeople'. Yes, the Russians, just like the North Koreans ain't very good at spin and thank goodness. It was a lesson that Nixon never learned, the Emperor really is naked!

james , Dec 15, 2018 1:39:04 PM | link
@72 russ.. okay.. i get that... thanks!

on the newest thread bjd make what i thought was an exceptional comment, which is easy enough to gloss over, but i think worth repeating on this thread... here it is

"...why --if these initiatives are truly meant to save and strengthen democracy-- (aren't they) proudly proclaimed and advertised, in the open, transparent, for everyone one to see and judge, like an adult democracy that they claim to stand for..."
The fact that they aren't, is testimony to the nefarious anti-democratic, authoritarian and totalitarian streak that runs in between every two lines that they put on paper."

Posted by: bjd | Dec 15, 2018 12:46:08 PM | 8"

i modified bjds words in a minor way..

William Bowles , Dec 15, 2018 2:13:24 PM | link
I'm sure Bernard is going to ban me soon but before he does, you have to read this from Ron Unz on the Huawei debacle:
Although it is far from clear whether the very elderly [Sheldon] Adelson played any direct personal role in Ms. Meng's arrest, he surely must be viewed as the central figure in fostering the political climate that produced the current situation. Perhaps he should not be described as the ultimate puppet-master behind our current clash with China, but any such political puppet-masters who do exist are certainly operating at his immediate beck and call. In very literal terms, I suspect that if Adelson placed a single phone call to the White House, the Trump Administration would order Canada to release Ms. Meng that same day.

Adelson's fortune of $33 billion ranks him as the 15th wealthiest man in America, and the bulk of his fortune is based on his ownership of extremely lucrative gambling casinos in Macau, China. In effect, the Chinese government currently has its hands around the financial windpipe of the man ultimately responsible for Ms. Meng's arrest and whose pro-Israel minions largely control American foreign policy. I very much doubt that they are fully aware of this enormous, untapped source of political leverage.(my emph.

Averting World Conflict With China

The PRC Should Retaliate by Targeting Sheldon Adelson's Chinese Casinos

By Ron Unz

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50767.htm

Activist Potato , Dec 15, 2018 2:17:05 PM | link
"MAGA was as much a policy change as it was a campaign slogan....To prevail, Empire strategists recognized that USA needed to be able to call on regular troops and a deep sense of patriotism and righteousness that required re-developing nationalism. In short, 'MAGA'."
@28 Jackrabbit

I highlight these lines of your interesting post because, in the context of the Kissinger Op-Ed you refer to, they capture an angle I had not considered and have to a degree nudged my thinking off what had been a steady course of assumptions and beliefs relating to MAGA that go in the opposite direction from your hypothesis.

Trump's invocation of MAGA on the campaign trail was presented in such a way as to seem to overwhelmingly favour a pullback from Imperialism in order to make things right at home. It drew from, and fed on, the angst and diminishing prosperity of the segment of the population that had been hit hardest by Globalization of the economy, to which Imperial adventures can be, and after are, associated. The possibility that MAGA was, in fact, a sly misdirection to co-opt the fervour of re-ignited passions in a disenfranchised segment of the America people - to re-capture the kind of patriotic commitment and ardor that drove the war effort in two world wars - into a renewed Imperial adventure was obviated, in my view, by Trump's loud and overt criticism of past Imperial adventures such as the Iraq war and Obama's inaction regarding ISIS (the accusation that Obama "created" ISIS was a bombshell, in my opinion).

Trump engaged in a bare, pointed, often crass and bordering on contemptuous criticism of his predecessors' foreign policy. The irreverent tone was unprecedented in recent campaign history and was so plain and completely at odds with Hilary's stated positions that it essentially committed him (in my eyes anyway) to following through, or to make all efforts to follow through. If not, he would set one of the worst examples of a duplicitous politician, perhaps ever. The same applies to other bold campaign positions, such as the border wall, for example.

But when viewed in the context of a deep state "policy change," such a clear and utter denunciation and discrediting of the former policy would be necessary to shift the National mindset and would not necessarily preclude Trump from engaging in further Imperial adventures, as long as they were different from the discredited policy.

Doing it smarter and better than Obama did seems to the ticket to legitimacy for whatever Trump does in the foreign policy realm. Replacing ISIS with actual American troops (while protecting a core capacity to revive ISIS if needed) is an example of doing it differently from Obama, but the net result – with parts of Syria denied to the legitimate government – still supports stark Imperialist, interventionists goals in a different way. The Russians and Syrians have free reign to attack ISIS, but do not have the same liberty against American troops. The flip-side is that the American troops do not have the freedom of action of ISIS to attack Syria. This creates a static line that serves the purpose of a partitionist goal. (ISIS is being allowed to survive to enable an element of proxy action, for harassment purposes).

I find I can no longer dismiss Trump's appointments, in particular Pompeo and Bolton to key positions directing and shaping US foreign policy, as some kind of 5-D chess move. They are signs that he is either a hostage President, or he is in on the act. There is so much that remains unknown, but the clear outward indicators are that nothing really has changed when it comes to US foreign policy objectives, only the methods and approaches are different.

William Bowles , Dec 15, 2018 2:47:47 PM | link
@78

Remember Obama's 'Change' meme? We don't understand that behind all these guys, and they are mostly men, stands industry and its skills; advertising, marketing, statistics, psychology, pr, on and on it goes. And billions, billions, to spend! We are the amateurs! Remember Saatchi & Saatchi's campaign to have Thatcher elected?

Noirette , Dec 15, 2018 3:20:14 PM | link
A new extremely lucrative 'industry' has sprung up.

a) to exploit hugely massive data sets (Facebook's trove and money earner..) and influence ppl => attitudes, behavior, votes, etc. For ex. Cambridge Analytica. Much of this stuff is for now on the level of a scam. E.g. Trump was not elected due to any type of manipulation or meddling by anyone, excepting those who financed him (other story, hard bucks and bribes - not! internet detritus or subliminal messages) and imho the US MSM - TV specially - who care more about ratings and the money it brings than anything else.

These efforts have got a lot of press, imho it is all smoke. If anyone has a good ex. of success ? (The model is built on about 200 years of advertising lore.)

b) Further upstream is to control the information that goes out / the audiences who are allowed to see whatever info, react to it, communicate it - other. With the corollary of repressing dissident, unwelcome, contradictory, info, etc. Been going on since say the Upper Paleolithic.

Today, what has to be managed is the extreme free-flow (internet): the only way this can be done is:

- to limit the channel, block info or some proportion of it, make the channel too expensive / unusable / forbid, repress

- to limit or corral the users (via propaganda / coercion / permission / certification / numbers / privilege / cost, etc.)

- to triage the information, the 'news', the narratives, the opinions, the appeals, etc. which represents the ultimate control and is the choice made by the US-UK to mention only those.

Ex.

https://twitter.com/ERC_Research/status/999632938936479746

or totally 'bogus' 'science' like this:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146

William Bowles , Dec 15, 2018 3:34:42 PM | link
Posted by: Noirette | Dec 15, 2018 3:20:14 PM | 80

Noirette, yuo want proof? Check out 'Programming of the President' by Roland Perry, Aurum Books, 1984. It's About Richard Wirthlin and the Mormons. Can a computer be used to elect a president? Wel it elected Ronald Reagan. It's only a coupleof quid on Abe Books. Essential reading IMHOP.

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=22859608878&searchurl=tn%3DProgramming%2Bof%2Bthe%2BPresident%26sortby%3D17%26an%3DRoland%2BPerry&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-image1

pogohere , Dec 15, 2018 5:57:43 PM | link
jackrabbit @ 28

activist potato @ 78

Re: "The possibility that MAGA was, in fact, a sly misdirection to co-opt the fervour of re-ignited passions in a disenfranchised segment of the America people - to re-capture the kind of patriotic commitment and ardor that drove the war effort in two world wars - into a renewed Imperial adventure was obviated, in my view, by Trump's loud and overt criticism of past Imperial adventures such as the Iraq war and Obama's inaction regarding ISIS (the accusation that Obama "created" ISIS was a bombshell, in my opinion).

Trump engaged in a bare, pointed, often crass and bordering on contemptuous criticism of his predecessors' foreign policy. The irreverent tone was unprecedented in recent campaign history and was so plain and completely at odds with Hilary's stated positions that it essentially committed him (in my eyes anyway) to following through, or to make all efforts to follow through. If not, he would set one of the worst examples of a duplicitous politician, perhaps ever. The same applies to other bold campaign positions, such as the border wall, for example.

But when viewed in the context of a deep state "policy change," such a clear and utter denunciation and discrediting of the former policy would be necessary to shift the National mindset and would not necessarily preclude Trump from engaging in further Imperial adventures, as long as they were different from the discredited policy."

So which of Trump's nominees gets kneecapped first? Michael Flynn Former Military Chief: Iraq War Was A 'Failure' That Helped Create ISIS

12-19-16

Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency who came up through intelligence positions in Iraq and Afghanistan, says that the George W. Bush administration's Iraq war was a tremendous blunder that helped to create the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS.

"It was a huge error," Flynn said about the Iraq war in a detailed interview with German newspaper Der Spiegel published Sunday.

"As brutal as Saddam Hussein was, it was a mistake to just eliminate him," Flynn went on to say. "The same is true for Moammar Gadhafi and for Libya, which is now a failed state. The historic lesson is that it was a strategic failure to go into Iraq. History will not be and should not be kind with that decision."

When told by Der Spiegel reporters Matthias Gebauer and Holger Stark that the Islamic State would not "be where it is now without the fall of Baghdad," Flynn, without reservations, said: "Yes, absolutely."

Read the entire interview here: https://tinyurl.com/zmxd3uf

Flynn, who served in the U.S. Army for more than 30 years, also said that the American military response following 9/11 was not well thought-out at all and based on significant misunderstandings.


BTW:

Hold the Phone on Flynn Sentencing – Judge Emmet Sullivan Has Questions

12-12-18

Interesting, very interesting. As noted in the Flynn sentencing memo last night there were some curiously framed explanations of events surrounding his FBI inquisition.

Now Judge Emmet Sullivan wants expanded information, and wishes to see the actual notes (FD-302) that were mentioned by Flynn; and Judge Sullivan is directing the special counsel to provide all documents created by the FBI surrounding the Flynn interview:

from the comments:

Curt says:
December 12, 2018 at 9:56 pm
This could be big news! Judge Emmet Sullivan was the same judge that had prosecutors investigated for criminal actions they took in the Sen. Ted Stevens FALSE prosecution. Some on Mueller's team, including Weinstein, were held in contempt. One prosecutor committed suicide. Others threatened with disbarment and some were suspended. "A federal judge dismissed the ethics conviction of former Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska on Tuesday after taking the extraordinary step of naming a special prosecutor to investigate whether the government lawyers who ran the Stevens case (2008) should themselves be prosecuted for criminal wrongdoing.

Mueller was also involved in that horrible attempt by prosecutors to frame Sen. Ted Stevens. Judge Sullivan has absolutely no use for this group of prosecutors. He smells a rat here and is asking for all investigative materials, including 302s. This judge will not hesitate to take action against these crooked prosecutors if he finds evidence of ANY wrong doing.


See: Cautionary Tale: The Ted Stevens Prosecution

On April 7, 2009, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia unleashed his fury before a packed courtroom. For 14 minutes, he scolded. He chastised. He fumed. "In nearly 25 years on the bench," he said, "I've never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I've seen in this case.

. . .

For months Judge Sullivan had warned U.S. prosecutors about their repeated failure to turn over evidence. Then, after the jury convicted Stevens, the Justice Department discovered previously unrevealed evidence. Meanwhile, a prosecution witness and an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) came forward alleging prosecutorial misconduct. Finally, newly appointed U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he had had enough and recommended that the seven-count conviction against the former Alaska senator be dismissed.

On April 7, Judge Sullivan did just that. But he was far from done.

In an extraordinarily rare move, he ordered an inquiry into the prosecutors' handling of the case. Judge Sullivan insisted that the misconduct allegations were "too serious and too numerous" to be left to an internal Justice Department investigation. He appointed Washington lawyer Henry F. Schuelke III of Janis, Schuelke & Wechsler to investigate whether members of the trial team should be prosecuted for criminal contempt.

Judge sentencing . . . Michael Flynn orders special counsel to hand over all 302s"


12-13-18 Following the allegations, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan yesterday ordered that both the Mueller investigation and the Flynn team turn over all documents [the "302s"] relating to the fateful interview, including all contemporaneous notes, before 3pm Friday.

DiGenova slams Mueller's handling of Flynn FBI meeting

4:04

Rumor has it the next chapter of this story unfolds Monday, 17 Dec '18.

Jackrabbit , Dec 15, 2018 6:58:24 PM | link
Flynn was likely set-up and railroaded because he was a whistle-blower. I wrote about Flynn here.

In recent days we have discovered that Flynn was advised not to have counsel present during his FBI interview and that the FBI is withholding the actual interview notes. The same FBI cabal that has dogged Trump - but AFAIK, Trump has said nothing about the Flynn case.

Yet another reason to believe that Trump is not a "populist" savior but yet another agent of the establishment/Deep State.

Augustin L , Dec 15, 2018 7:48:43 PM | link
New Mueller memo smacks down Flynn's latest legal gambit: Nobody forced him to lie to the FBI. Dead in the water.
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/12/new-mueller-memo-smacks-flynns-latest-legal-gambit-nobody-forced-lie-fbi/

Michael Flynn's a well known islamophobe who'd gladly defend zionist interests to the last american soldier. He'd fit right in with Bolton on the NSC council. Flynn in his own words: "Islam is not a real religion, but a political ideology masked behind a religion," While campaigning for Trump in 2016: ''Islamism a vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people that has to be excised "

I wonder how he planned on excising the cancer ? Deploying more stormtroopers to the levant to fight Iran ?
As Trump assumed control of the executive in early 2017, it didn't take long for Flynn to push for direct military involvement in Yemen and confrontation with Iran: "Instead of being thankful to the United States for these agreements, Iran is now feeling emboldened... As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice."

Michael Flynn was also a fellow at the foundation for defence of democracies a well known den of zionists and universal fascists such as Michael Ledeen. In fact they both wrote a book together The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War against Radical Islam and Its Allies, where we find such nuggets as:

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Putin has declared the United States (and NATO generally) to be a national security threat to Russia, and "Death to America" is the official chant of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Both the Putinists and the radical Iranian Muslims agree on the identity of their main enemy. Hence, one part of the answer is surely that their alliance is simply the logical outgrowth of their hostility toward America.''

"The Russians and Iranians have more in common than a shared enemy. There is also a shared contempt for democracy and an agreement -- by all members of the enemy alliance -- that dictatorship is a superior way to run a country, an empire, or a caliphate."

Flynn's angle was to exploit any potential fissure to pry Russia away from Iran and China. Presumbably after having dealt with Iran and the middle Kingdom, the hegemon could then strike a final blow to defeat and contain an isolated Russia.
https://www.amazon.com/Field-Fight-Global-Against-Radical/dp/1250131626

Deplorables envisioning multi-dimensional chess moves, fancy Flynn as some sort of superpatriot but like most men surrounding Chump he's nothing but a grifter:
Lobbying for Turkey: https://theintercept.com/2016/11/17/turkish-client-paid-trump-adviser-michael-flynns-company-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars-for-lobbying/

[Dec 14, 2018] Hackers reveal British government s interference in Spanish politics by Alejandro López

Dec 06, 2018 | www.wsws.org

Documents leaked by internet hackers of Anonymous reveal how a supposedly independent think-tank based in the UK is a government funded and controlled operation of misinformation and fake news.

At the same time that the Western powers were accusing Russia of interference in democracy, the UK government and its intelligence services MI5 and MI6 were busily preventing the nomination of a Spanish official to Director of National Security, one of Spain's top advisory roles.

Details of the operation carried out by the Integrity Initiative (II), a project launched in 2015 by the Institute of Statecraft, have been published by the web site CyberGuerilla.org. It is a trove of documents allegedly hacked from II, showing carefully worked out campaigns, costs and internal guidelines, as well as names of individuals cooperating with the network.

Anonymous shows that the network:

1. Is mainly funded by the UK government through the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO).

2. Cost Ł1,961,000 ($2.5 million) this year.

3. Has received Ł168,000 in funding from HQ NATO Public Diplomacy and Ł250,000 from the US State Department.

4. Is controlled by figures in the UK who manipulate "clusters" of politicians, high-ranking military officials, academics and journalists.

5. Clusters are said to operate in Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Norway, Serbia, and Montenegro.

6. Its activities are carried under absolute secrecy via named intelligence services operatives in British embassies.

The Integrity Initiative poses as "Defending Democracy against Misinformation," but does exactly the opposite, spreading fake news against Russia in order to defend the national interests of the UK and its imperialist allies, influence Russian speakers in Europe and North America and "change attitudes in Russia itself".

An example of II's activities was the operation launched last June against the nomination of Army reserve colonel Pedro Bańos as Spain's Director of National Security. Attached to La Moncloa, the official residence and workplace of the prime minister of Spain, the director's role is to advise the PM on existing and potential threats to the country and possible responses.

II's operation started after it was warned that the new Socialist Party (PSOE) government under Pedro Sánchez, which had just been elected in parliament through a no confidence vote, was considering Bańos and was about to confirm his appointment on June 7, 2018.

Immediately, newspapers like El Mundo and El País published articles accusing Bańos of "sympathy for Russia." Proof of this for El País was his "regular presence" on Russia Today and Sputnik , media outlets funded by the Putin government. Further "evidence" was his tweet in response to a survey showing a domestic popularity rating of 74 percent for Russian President Vladimir Putin: "Wouldn't we love to have a political leader half as popular right here in the European Union!!!"

Bańos was also quoted as saying, "Which country has everything that we lack? Russia does. We will not gain anything by provoking Russia. So Russia wants to have its own sphere of influence? Of course it does, just like the United States or China do. It also wants to have its markets and like-minded countries nearby."

Numerous articles also put in doubt Bańos' sanity for his participation in the popular offbeat TV show Cuarto Milenio that often investigates topics such as conspiracy theories, ufology and parapsychology.

Bańos reflects a minority realpolitik opinion within the Spanish ruling class which opposes provocative military actions and sanctions against Russia. He sees the need to defend Spain's imperialist interests through a European army and closer relations with Russia -- positions also held by sections of the German and French ruling elite.

The UK-sponsored II, however, saw Bańos as a threat to British national interests and an obstacle to its anti-Russia campaign. According to the hacked documents, at midday on June 7, 2018, the Spanish Cluster, obviously through informants at the highest levels of the PSOE, "hear that a well-known pro-Kremlin voice, Pedro Bańos, is to be appointed at the weekend (09.06.2018) as the Director of the National Security Department (DSN), which works closely with the Spanish PM's office (La Moncloa) and is very influential in shaping policy."

An action plan is drawn up laying out how Institute of Statecraft Fellow and Spain Cluster leader Nicólas de Pedro will alert "the rest of the cluster members and prepare[s] a dossier to inform the main Spanish media. The cluster starts a Twitter campaign... trying to prevent an appointment."

Spanish Cluster members also include Borja Lasheras and Quique Badia-Masoni, writers and journalists well known for their hysterical anti-Russian positions. They are supported by II Team UK members Chris Hernon, Simon Bracey-Lane and Ben Robinson, and StopFake Spanish Desk members Alina Mosendz and Serbian Cluster member Jelena Milic.

At 15:45, "The head of the Spanish cluster urgently contacts the British cluster, which activates the II network in order to create international support for the Twitter campaign. The British Cluster creates a group in the WhatsApp messenger... to coordinate the reaction on Twitter, gets contacts on Twitter to spread concerns and encourage people to 'retweet' the material. He publishes material written by the head of the Spanish cluster Niko de Pedro on the Spanish version of the StopFake website, which is also 'retweeted' by key influential figures."

The Spanish cluster then sends material to El País and El Mundo to publish. On the same day, El País publishes, "Spanish PM taps Russia supporter for National Security Director."

The documents reveal that by 19:45, barely eight hours after the start of the operation, the "campaign [had] raised significant noise on Twitter Contacts in the Socialist Party confirmed that this information reached the Prime Minister. Some Spanish diplomats also expressed their concern. In the end, both the People's Party and the Civil Party (Ciudadanos) asked the Prime Minister to stop the appointment."

The following day, the government drops Bańos and nominates general Miguel Ángel Ballesteros instead.

The operation against Bańos is a graphic illustration of the inner workings of the intelligence services in collaboration with alleged "independent" journalists and academics. The same forces that accuse Russia of meddling in European nations' internal affairs are themselves meddling to stop elected governments from nominating officials when it conflicts with their interests. They use social media in the same way they accuse the Kremlin of using it.

By showing the real sources of information on which they rely, newspapers like El País or El Mundo are exposed as conduits of the intelligence services to support the suppression of maverick political viewpoints, in this case, Bańos' call for closer relations with Russia.

Last year, El País carried out a frenzied and paranoid campaign claiming that the Catalan crisis was not sparked by the Popular Party government's violent repression of the secessionists, but was the result of Moscow and its "fake news." It quoted experts and specialists working for Spanish think tanks like Instituto Elcano and Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB), and the European Council on Foreign Relations.

The leaked documents show that many members of these think tanks are members of the "Spanish Cluster" of the Integrity Initiative. The most notorious is Senior Analyst for Instituto Elcano, Mira Milosevich-Juaristi who testified last year in parliament to claim that Russia was promoting fake news.

The Bańos case is just one of the highlighted campaigns of Integrity Initiative, but according to Anonymous, similar operations have been carried out in numerous other EU states.

[Dec 14, 2018] New York Times fraudulent election plot dossier escalates anti-Russia hysteria

Notable quotes:
"... It acknowledges that "police never identified who had hung the banners," but nonetheless goes on to assert that: "The Kremlin, it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history." ..."
"... The authors, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, complain about a lack of "public comprehension" of the "Trump-Russia" story. Indeed, despite the two-year campaign of anti-Russian hysteria whipped up in Washington and among the affluent sections of the upper-middle class that constitute the target audience of the Times ..."
Sep 21, 2018 | www.wsws.org

The New York Times published a fraudulent and provocative "special report" Thursday titled "The plot to subvert an election."

Replete with sinister looking graphics portraying Russian President Vladimir Putin as a villainous cyberage cyclops, the report purports to untangle "the threads of the most effective foreign campaign in history to disrupt and influence an American election."

The report could serve as a textbook example of CIA-directed misinformation posing as "in-depth" journalism. There is no news, few substantiated facts and no significant analysis presented in the 10,000-word report, which sprawls over 11 ad-free pages of a separate section produced by the Times.

The article begins with an ominous-sounding recounting of two incidents in which banners were hung from bridges in New York City and Washington in October and November of 2016, one bearing the likeness of Putin over a Russian flag with the word "peacemaker," and the other that of Obama and the slogan "Goodbye Murderer."

It acknowledges that "police never identified who had hung the banners," but nonetheless goes on to assert that: "The Kremlin, it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history." The article begins with an ominous-sounding recounting of two incidents in which banners were hung from bridges in New York City and Washington in October and November of 2016, one bearing the likeness of Putin over a Russian flag with the word "peacemaker," and the other that of Obama and the slogan "Goodbye Murderer."

It acknowledges that "police never identified who had hung the banners," but nonetheless goes on to assert that: "The Kremlin, it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history."

Why does it "appear" to be the Kremlin? What is the evidence to support this claim? Among the 8.5 million inhabitants of New York City and another 700,000 in Washington, D.C., aren't there enough people who might despise Obama as much as, if not a good deal more than, Vladimir Putin?

This absurd passage with its "appeared" and "may well have" combined with the speculation about the Kremlin extending its evil grip onto "United States soil" sets the tone for the entire piece, which consists of the regurgitation of unsubstantiated allegations made by the US intelligence agencies, Democratic and Republican capitalist politicians and the Times itself.

The authors, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, complain about a lack of "public comprehension" of the "Trump-Russia" story. Indeed, despite the two-year campaign of anti-Russian hysteria whipped up in Washington and among the affluent sections of the upper-middle class that constitute the target audience of the Times , polls have indicated that the charges of Russian "meddling" in the 2016 presidential election have evoked little popular response among the

[Dec 09, 2018] CyberGuerrilla soApboX " Operation 'Integrity Initiative'. British informational war against all

Dec 09, 2018 | www.cyberguerrilla.org
Greetings. We are Anonymous.

We have obtained a large number of documents relating to the activities of the 'Integrity Initiative' project that was launched back in the fall of 2015 and funded by the British government. The declared goal of the project is to counteract Russian propaganda and the hybrid warfare of Moscow. Hiding behind benevolent intentions, Britain has in fact created a large-scale information secret service in Europe, the United States and Canada, which consists of representatives of political, military, academic and journalistic communities with the think tank in London at the head of it.

As part of the project Britain has time and again intervened into domestic affairs of independent European states. A most demonstrative example is operation 'Moncloa' in Spain. Britain set to prevent Pedro Baños from appointment to the post of Director of Spain's Department of Homeland Security. It took the Spanish cluster of the Integrity Initiative only a few hours to accomplish the task.

https://www.scribd.com/document/392195691/Moncloa-Campaign-6-AttTwitter-08-06-18

For now, Britain is capable of conducting such operations in the following states:

Spain https://www.scribd.com/document/392195775/Spain-Cluster

France https://www.scribd.com/document/392195457/France-Cluster

Germany https://www.scribd.com/document/392195486/Germany-Cluster

Italy https://www.scribd.com/document/392195660/Italy-Cluster

Greece https://www.scribd.com/document/392195527/Greece-Cluster

The Netherlands https://www.scribd.com/document/392195718/Netherlands-Cluster

Lithuania https://www.scribd.com/document/392195170/Baltics-Cluster

Norway https://www.scribd.com/document/392195748/Nordic-Clusters

Serbia and Montenegro https://www.scribd.com/document/392195208/Central-Eastern-Cluster

London's near-term plans to create similar clusters include Latvia, Estonia, Portugal, Sweden, Belgium, Canada, Armenia, Ukraine, Moldova, Malta, Czechia, countries of the Middle East and North Africa, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Hungary, Cyprus, Austria, Switzerland, Turkey, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, and the USA.

https://www.scribd.com/document/392195321/Cluster-Roundup-Jul18

All the work is done under absolute secrecy via concealed contacts in British embassies, which gives rise to more suspicion that Britain uses plausible excuse to create a global system of information influence and political interference into affairs of other countries.

Covert structures for political and financial manipulative activities under control of British secret services are created not only in the EU countries but also on other continents. In point of fact, quiet colonization of both former British neighbors in the EU and NATO allies is taking place.

The government of Great Britain has to come out of the dark and declare straight its intentions and unveil the results of the Integrity Initiative activities! Otherwise, we will do it!

Today, we make public a part of the documents we have available. In case London gives no response to our demands during the following week, we will reveal the rest of the documents that contain many more secrets of the United Kingdom.

Integrity Initiative Handbook. https://www.scribd.com/document/392195560/II-Handbook-v2

Integrity Initiative Guide to Countering Russian Disinformation May 2018. https://www.scribd.com/document/392195802/The-Integrity-Initiative-Guide-to-Countering-Russian-Disinformation-May-2018-v1

Austria Cluster. https://www.scribd.com/document/392194912/Austria-Cluster

Cluster leaders. https://www.scribd.com/document/392195250/Cluster-Leaders

Cluster participants. https://www.scribd.com/document/392195286/Cluster-Participants

UK Cluster. https://www.scribd.com/document/392195849/UK-Cluster

USA and Canada Cluster. https://www.scribd.com/document/392195882/USA-Canada-Cluster

xCountry. https://www.scribd.com/document/392195906/x-Country

xOutreach. https://www.scribd.com/document/392195933/x-Outreach

FCO application form 2017-18. https://www.scribd.com/document/392195350/FCO-Application-Form-2017-18

FCO application form 2018v2. https://www.scribd.com/document/392195390/FCO-Application-Form-2018-v2

FCO proposal Integrity budget 2017-18. https://www.scribd.com/document/392195430/FCO-Proposal-Integrity-Budget-2017-18

Integrity 2018 Activity Budget v3. https://www.scribd.com/document/392195593/Integrity-2018-Activity-Budget-v3

Top 3 deliverables (for FCO). https://www.scribd.com/document/392195825/Top-3-Deliverables-for-FCO

We are Anonymous.

We are Legion.

We do not forgive.

We do not forget.

Expect us.

Backup copies of the documents:

Moncloa campaign https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/moncloa-campaign-6-atttwitter080618/moncloa-campaign-6-atttwitter080618.pdf

Spain https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/spain-cluster/spain-cluster.pdf

France https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/france-cluster/france-cluster.pdf

Germany https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/germany-cluster/germany-cluster.pdf

Italy https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/italy-cluster/italy-cluster.pdf

Greece https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/greece-cluster/greece-cluster.pdf

The Netherlands https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/netherlands-cluster/netherlands-cluster.pdf

Lithuania https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/baltics-cluster/baltics-cluster.pdf

Norway https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/nordic-clusters/nordic-clusters.pdf

Serbia and Montenegro https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/central-eastern-cluster/central-eastern-cluster.pdf

Cluster roundup https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/clusterroundupjul18/clusterroundupjul18.pdf

Integrity Initiative Handbook. https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/iihandbookv2/iihandbookv2.pdf

Integrity Initiative Guide to Countering Russian Disinformation May 2018. https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/untitled-pdf-document-1/untitled-pdf-document.pdf

Austria Cluster. https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/austria-cluster/austria-cluster.pdf

Cluster leaders. https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/cluster-leaders/cluster-leaders.pdf

Cluster participants. https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/cluster-participants/cluster-participants.pdf

UK Cluster. https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/uk-cluster/uk-cluster.pdf

USA and Canada Cluster. https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/usacanada-cluster/usacanada-cluster.pdf

xCountry. https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/xcountry/xcountry.pdf

xOutreach. https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/xoutreach/xoutreach.pdf

FCO application form 2017-18. https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/fco-application-form-2017-18/fco-application-form-2017-18.pdf

FCO application form 2018v2. https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/fco-application-form-2018-v2/fco-application-form-2018-v2.pdf

FCO proposal Integrity budget 2017-18. https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/fco-proposal-integrity-budget-2017-18/fco-proposal-integrity-budget-2017-18.pdf

Integrity 2018 Activity Budget v3. https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/integrity2018activitybudgetv3/integrity2018activitybudgetv3.pdf

Top 3 deliverables (for FCO). https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/top-3-deliverables-for-fco/top-3-deliverables-for-fco.pdf


[Dec 09, 2018] Psyops oops UK-funded 'anti-Russian' programme outed in leak

Nov 28, 2018 | www.blogger.com
Isn't this interesting? A UK program to propagandize US and European audiences is set up to demonize Russia around the same time GCHQ and MI6 are busy spying on US presidential candidates and then ultimately doing their best to throw an election over here... while trying to frame Russia... for trying to throw an election over here. Cute right?

https://youtu.be/f0PY2M1r6Rc

Integrity Initiative , Russian hacking psyop

[Dec 09, 2018] 'Perpetual confrontation' MI6 chief lures young Brits into espionage with Russia-bashing

Dec 09, 2018 | eptoday.com

The head of MI6, the UK's intelligence service, hopes to recruit a new generation of tech-savvy spies, with a passionate speech urging graduates to protect the homeland against the arch nemesis who subverts the UK way of life.
"The era of the fourth industrial revolution calls for a fourth generation of espionage," Alex Younger will say at St. Andrews University on 3rd December.

To lure young Brits into the spy agency who otherwise might not have seen themselves in MI6, Younger paints an image of a clever arch nemesis –Russia– which can only be stopped with the help of brilliant young minds from all sorts of backgrounds, not just by the snobbish Oxbridge graduates typically associated with the service.

Fresh blood is needed to defend UK web domains against cyber-attacks, the spread of fake news and interference in domestic politics, Alex Younger will say, at the same time praising the old guard for "exposing" Russia in the highly-controversial Salisbury attack.

Russia, or any other UK adversary, better "not underestimate our determination and our capabilities, or those of our allies," Younger's speech warns.

Hardly historic friends and bitter Cold War rivals, the UK and Russia have seen their relations slip to new lows in March, following the poisoning of ex-Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. London immediately pinned the blame for the Salisbury incident directly on the Kremlin, and rejected any idea of an open joint investigation with Russia, insisting its own probe would suffice to make the case and then punishing Moscow with sanctions.

Moscow is also perpetually facing accusations of cyberwarfare against other states and attempts to undermine democracy and to influence the political process within those countries. And despite multiple reassurances that Moscow could not care less about the internal political struggles in foreign states, London and British mass media continue to vilify Russia with bizarre reports, like half of London's Russian community are spies for the Kremlin.

Claims of 'Russian meddling' look particularly hypocritical in the wake of a leak that exposed the Integrity Initiative – a group that claims to be fighting back against 'Russian misinformation' – being a clandestine network of influencers that manipulate European politics with the British government's backing.

The anti-Russia paranoia in the UK arguably reached its peak over the weekend, when military bases across the nation issued security alerts after a Russian TV crew was accused of spying outside the army's secret cyber warfare headquarters.

Credit : https://www.rt.com/uk/445410-mi6-spies-russia-confrontation/

[Dec 09, 2018] Hackers Leak More Details on UK's Info War in Europe

Dec 09, 2018 | sputniknews.com

International hacker group Anonymous went ahead with its efforts to counter what it calls Britain's interference with the domestic affairs of sovereign states. In a second dump of secret documents within two weeks, the hacktivists disclose more details on the ongoing UK-funded, anti-Russia information campaign spreading across Europe. The second batch of documents leaked by Anonymous unravels more information on the activities of the Integrity Initiative (II), a UK-based NGO ostensibly founded to counter disinformation and defend democratic processes from malign influence. According to the first documents leaked by the hacktivist organization last month, the project was in fact a "large-scale information secret service" sponsored and created by London to tackle 'Russian propaganda.'

However, the latest leak suggests that "the British government goes far beyond and exploits the Integrity Initiative to solve its domestic problems inside the United Kingdom by defaming the opposition."

Discrediting UK Opposition

Anonymous refers to a "scorching" article that surfaced in The Times on November 25 and was dedicated to Seumas Milne, director of strategy and communications under Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. The Times' official Twitter account promoted the piece three times within 24 hours on social media -- the only case for all of its articles, Anonymous says. The hacktivists add that the Integrity Initiative retweeted the "defamatory" article right after its publication (the post is now unavailable, but Anonymous provided a screengrab of the retweet).

Screenshot © Photo : Screenshot Screenshot

The group announced in November that the II constituted a network of clusters across Europe, which sought to tamper with domestic affairs of several European countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Norway, Serbia, Spain, and Montenegro.

Countering Russia on German Soil

Another part of the leak is an interim report on the establishment of a German cluster, which was purportedly written by Hannes Adomeit, a German political expert specialising in Russian foreign policy. According to the uncovered documents, the German cluster is coordinated by suspected MI6 agent Harold Elletson.

The report focuses mainly on research of Germans' attitudes toward Russia. Adomeit says that the so-called "Russian narrative" on the origins of the crisis in Moscow's relations with the West is "widely accepted by German public opinion." He adds that further research would be carried out to examine "the reasons for the great receptivity of the Russia narrative" in Germany.

READ MORE: Switzerland Follows Russophobic Narrative by Pressuring Diplomats -- Scholars

He also addresses the case of Andrei Kovalchuk, a Russian arrested in Germany on suspicion of smuggling cocaine to Moscow from Argentina. Kovalchuk was extradited to Russia in late July -- much to the dissatisfaction of Adomeit, who suggests that German prosecutors could have "made an effort" to question him and dig up some dirt on Russia.

Watching Russia's Reaction to Catalan Events

The activities of the Integrity Initiative's Spanish cluster were partly revealed by Anonymous in the first leak on the project. However, a newly unveiled document titled "Cluster Breakdown" identifies people associated with the Spanish chapter.

The list includes territorial minister Jose Ignacio Sanchez Amor, MEP Fernando Maura, head of Spain's peacekeeping mission in Central African Republic Dionisio Urteaga Todo, European Commission Speaker Dimitri Barua, State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Fernando Valenzuela Marzo, head of Spanish delegation to NATO PA Ricardo Blanco Torno, former defence minister Eduardo Serra Rexach. Other affiliates include foreign affairs reporters and pundits from Spanish think tanks: the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, the European Council on Foreign Relations, and the Elcano Royal Institute.

Screenshot © Photo : Screenshot Screenshot

The Spanish cluster was apparently closely watching Russia's reaction to the movement in support of Catalan independence in 2016. According to another leaked interim report , the project's members were disappointed with Russia's moderate position on the situation in Spain. However, they claimed, while Vladimir Putin insisted that the issue of Catalan sovereignty was Spain's internal affair, he was happy to watch Europe "take its own medicine" (a reference to the 2008 Kosovo declaration of independence).

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov © Sputnik / Vitaly Belousov UK Integrity Initiative Project Aims to Damage Russia's Public Image - Lavrov

This is why, they said, the Russian media took advantage of the 2016 developments in Catalonia to portray the European Union as "declining, undemocratic and troubled". They went on to link the media coverage of the Catalan events in Russia to Russia's alleged disinformation campaign against the West.

The authors contend that given that Catalonia has become part of Russia's "big narrative about the West," Russian meddling has also become part of the debates in Spain. "This represents a clear window of opportunity" for promoting anti-Russia sentiment, they conclude.

Skripal Case Coverage in Greece

The Integrity Initiative's Greek cluster was keeping a close eye on the media coverage of the Salisbury poisoning in local newspapers. They went to considerable lengths, studying 193 articles across six major media outlets. It seems, however, that the result of all the hard work was rather unsatisfactory: the authors confess that the majority of Greek newspapers adopted a neutral stance towards the Skripal case.

They claim that the Greek media were influenced into not taking sides and remaining unbiased. "The strong pro-Russian sentiment in the Greek public opinion seems to have influenced the Greek newspapers not to emphasize Russia's involvement."

The Integrity Initiative has yet to comment on this information dump. Anonymous claimed that it released the second batch of documents after the EU leaders and international organisations had ignored its first disclosure. The group accused the II and its sponsors of failing to "give assurances that the network of clusters will only be used to counter Russia's disinformation policy."

[Dec 09, 2018] Britain on the Leash with the United States but at Which End by James George Jatras

Oct 13, 2018 | off-guardian.org

The "special relationship" between the United States and the United Kingdom is often assumed to be one where the once-great, sophisticated Brits are subordinate to the upstart, uncouth Yanks.

Iconic of this assumption is the mocking of former prime minister Tony Blair as George W. Bush's "poodle" for his riding shotgun on the ill-advised American stagecoach blundering into Iraq in 2003. Blair was in good practice, having served as Bill Clinton's dogsbody in the no less criminal NATO aggression against Serbia over Kosovo in 1999.

On the surface, the UK may seem just one more vassal state on par with Germany, Japan, South Korea, and so many other useless so-called allies . We control their intelligence services, their military commands, their think tanks, and much of their media. We can sink their financial systems and economies at will. Emblematic is German Chancellor Angela Merkel's impotent ire at discovering the Obama administration had listened in on her cell phone, about which she – did precisely nothing. Global hegemony means never having to say you're sorry.

These countries know on which end of the leash they are: the one attached to the collar around their necks. The hand unmistakably is in Washington. These semi-sovereign countries answer to the US with the same servility as member states of the Warsaw Pact once heeded the USSR's Politburo. (Sometimes more. Communist Romania, though then a member of the Warsaw Pact refused to participate in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia or even allow Soviet or other Pact forces to cross its territory.

By contrast, during NATO's 1999 assault on Serbia, Bucharest allowed NATO military aircraft access to its airspace, even though not yet a member of that alliance and despite most Romanians' opposition to the campaign.)

But the widespread perception of Britain as just another satellite may be misleading.

To start with, there are some relationships where it seems the US is the vassal dancing to the tune of the foreign capital, not the other way around. Israel is the unchallenged champion in this weight class, with Saudi Arabia a runner up. The alliance between Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) – the ultimate Washington "power couple" – to get the Trump administration to destroy Iran for them has American politicos listening for instructions with all the rapt attention of the terrier Nipper on the RCA Victor logo . (Or did, until the recent disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Whether this portends a real shift in American attitudes toward Riyadh remains questionable . Saudi cash still speaks loudly and will continue to do so whether or not MbS stays in charge.)

Specifics of the peculiar US-UK relationship stem from the period of flux at the end of World War II. The United States emerged from the war in a commanding position economically and financially, eclipsing Britannia's declining empire that simply no longer had the resources to play the leading role. That didn't mean, however, that London trusted the Americans' ability to manage things without their astute guidance. As Tony Judt describes in Postwar , the British attitude of " superiority towards the country that had displaced them at the imperial apex " was "nicely captured" in a scribble during negotiations regarding the UK's postwar loan:

In Washington Lord Halifax
Once whispered to Lord Keynes:
"It's true they have the moneybags
But we have all the brains."

Even in its diminished condition London found it could punch well above its weight by exerting its influence on its stronger but (it was confident) dumber cousins across the Pond. It helped that as the Cold War unfolded following former Prime Minister Winston Churchill's 1946 Iron Curtain speech there were very close ties between sister agencies like MI6 (founded 1909) and the newer wartime OSS (1942), then the CIA (1947); likewise the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ, 1919) and the National Security Administration (NSA, 1952). Comparable sister agencies – perhaps more properly termed daughters of their UK mothers – were set up in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This became the so-called "Five Eyes" of the tight Anglosphere spook community, infamous for spying on each others' citizens to avoid pesky legal prohibitions on domestic surveillance .

Despite not having two farthings to rub together, impoverished Britain – where wartime rationing wasn't fully ended until 1954 – had a prime seat at the table fashioning the world's postwar financial structure. The 1944 Bretton Woods conference was largely an Anglo-American affair , of which the aforementioned Lord John Maynard Keynes was a prominent architect along with Harry Dexter White, Special Assistant to the US Secretary of the Treasury and Soviet agent.

American and British agendas also dovetailed in the Middle East. While the US didn't have much of a presence in the region before the 1945 meeting between US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Saudi King ibn Saud, founder of the third and current ( and hopefully last ) Saudi state – and didn't assume a dominant role until the humiliation inflicted on Britain, France, and Israel by President Dwight Eisenhower during the 1956 Suez Crisis – London has long considered much of the region within its sphere of influence. After World War I under the Sykes-Picot agreement with France , the UK had expanded her holdings on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, including taking a decisive role in consolidating Saudi Arabia under ibn Saud. While in the 1950s the US largely stepped into Britain's role managing the "East of Suez," the former suzerain was by no means dealt out. The UK was a founding member with the US of the now-defunct Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) in 1955.

CENTO – like NATO and their one-time eastern counterpart, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) – was designed as a counter to the USSR. But in the case of Britain, the history of hostility to Russia under tsar or commissar alike has much deeper and longer roots, going back at least to the Crimean War in the 1850s . The reasons for the longstanding British vendetta against Russia are not entirely clear and seem to have disparate roots: the desire to ensure that no one power is dominant on the European mainland (directed first against France, then Russia, then Germany, then the USSR and again Russia); maintaining supremacy on the seas by denying Russia warm-waters ports, above all the Dardanelles; and making sure territories of a dissolving Ottoman empire would be taken under the wing of London, not Saint Petersburg. As described by Andrew Lambert , professor of naval history at King's College London, the Crimean War still echoes today :

"In the 1840s, 1850s, Britain and America are not the chief rivals; it's Britain and Russia. Britain and Russia are rivals for world power, and Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, which is much larger than modern Turkey -- it includes modern Romania, Bulgaria, parts of Serbia, and also Egypt and Arabia -- is a declining empire. But it's the bulwark between Russia, which is advancing south and west, and Britain, which is advancing east and is looking to open its connections up through the Mediterranean into its empire in India and the Pacific. And it's really about who is running Turkey. Is it going to be a Russian satellite, a bit like the Eastern Bloc was in the Cold War, or is it going to be a British satellite, really run by British capital, a market for British goods? And the Crimean War is going to be the fulcrum for this cold war to actually go hot for a couple of years, and Sevastopol is going to be the fulcrum for that fighting."

Control of the Middle East – and opposing the Russians – became a British obsession, first to sustain the lifeline to India, the Jewel in the Crown of the empire, then for control of petroleum, the life's blood of modern economies. In the context of the 19th and early 20th century Great Game of empire, that was understandable. Much later, similar considerations might even support Jimmy Carter's taking up much the same position, declaring in 1980 that "outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." The USSR was then a superpower and we were dependent on energy from the Gulf region.

But what's our reason for maintaining that posture almost four decades later when the Soviet Union is gone and the US doesn't need Middle Eastern oil? There are no reasonable national interests, only corporate interests and those of the Arab monarchies we laughably claim as allies. Add to that the bureaucracies and habits of mind that link the US and UK establishments, including their intelligence and financial components.

In view of all the foregoing, what then would policymakers in the United Kingdom think about an aspirant to the American presidency who not only disparages the value of existing alliances – without which Britain is a bit player – but openly pledges to improve relations with Moscow ? To what lengths would they go to stop him?

Say 'hello' to Russiagate!

One can argue whether or not the phony claim of the Trump campaign's "collusion" with Moscow was hatched in London or whether the British just lent some " hands across the water " to an effort concocted by the Democratic National Committee, the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, the Clinton Foundation, and their collaborators at Fusion GPS and inside the Obama administration. Either way, it's clear that while evidence of Russian connection is nonexistent that of British agencies is unmistakable, as is the UK's hand in a sustained campaign of demonization and isolation to sink any possible rapprochement between the US and Russia .

As for Russiagate itself, just try to find anyone involved who's actually Russian. The only basis for the widespread assumption that any material in the Dirty Dossier that underlies the whole operation originated with Russia is the claim of Christopher Steele , the British "ex" spy who wrote it, evidently in collaboration with people at the US State Department and Fusion GPS. (The notion that Steele, who hadn't been in Russia for years, would have Kremlin personal contacts is absurd. How chummy are the heads of the American section of Chinese or Russian intelligence with White House staff?)

While there are no obvious Russians in Russiagate, there's no shortage of Brits. These include (details at the link) :

Andrew Wood , a former British ambassador to Russia Stefan Halper , a dual US-UK citizen. Ex-MI6 Director Richard Dearlove . Robert Hannigan , former director of GCHQ; there is reason to think surveillance of Trump was conducted by GCHQ as well as by US agencies under FISA warrants. Hannigan abruptly resigned from GCHQ soon after the British government denied the agency had engaged in such spying. Alexander Downer , Australian diplomat (well, not British but remember the Five Eyes!). Joseph Mifsud , Maltese academic and suspected British agent.

At present, the full role played by those listed above is not known. Release of unredacted FISA warrant requests by the Justice Department, which President Trump ordered weeks ago, would shed light on a number of details. Implementation of that order was derailed after a request by – no surprise – British Prime Minister Theresa May . Was she seeking to conceal Russian perfidy, or her own underlings'?

It would be bad enough if Russiagate were the sum of British meddling in American affairs with the aim of torpedoing relations with Moscow. (And to be fair, it wasn't just the UK and Australia. Also implicated are Estonia, Israel, and Ukraine .) But there is also reason to suspect the same motive in false accusations against Russia with respect to the supposed Novichok poisonings in England has a connection to Russiagate via a business associate of Steele's, one Pablo Miller , Sergei Skripal's MI6 recruiter . (So if it turns out there is any Russian connection to the dossier, it could be from Skripal or another dubious expat source, not from the Russian government.) Skripal and his daughter Yulia have disappeared in British custody. Moscow flatly accuses MI6 of poisoning them as a false flag to blame it on Russia.

A similar pattern can be seen with claims of chemical weapons use in Syria : "We have irrefutable evidence that the special services of a state which is in the forefront of the Russophobic campaign had a hand in the staging" of a faked chemical weapons attack in Douma in April 2018. Ambassador Aleksandr Yakovenko pointed to the so-called White Helmets, which is closely associated with al-Qaeda elements and considered by some their PR arm: "I am naming them because they have done things like this before. They are famous for staging attacks in Syria and they receive UK money." Moscow warned for weeks before the now-postponed Syrian government offensive in Idlib that the same ruse was being prepared again with direct British intelligence involvement, even having prepared in advance a video showing victims of an attack that had not yet occurred.

The campaign to demonize Russia shifted into high gear recently with the UK, together with the US and the Netherlands, accusing Russian military intelligence of a smorgasbord of cyberattacks against the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) and other sports organizations, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the Dutch investigation into the downing of MH-17 over Ukraine, and a Swiss lab involved with the Skripal case, plus assorted election interference. In case anyone didn't get the point, British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson declared : "This is not the actions of a great power. This is the actions of a pariah state, and we will continue working with allies to isolate them."

To the extent that the goal of Williamson and his ilk is to ensure isolation and further threats against Russia, it's been a smashing success. More sanctions are on the way . The UK is sending additional troops to the Arctic to counter Russian "aggression." The US threatens to use naval power to block Russian energy exports and to strike Russian weapons disputed under a treaty governing intermediate range nuclear forces. What could possibly go wrong?

In sum, we are seeing a massive, coordinated hybrid campaign of psy-ops and political warfare conducted not by Russia but against Russia, concocted by the UK and its Deep State collaborators in the United States. But it's not only aimed at Russia, it's an attack on the United States by the government of a foreign country that's supposed to be one of our closest allies, a country with which we share many venerable traditions of language, law, and culture.

But for far too long, largely for reasons of historical inertia and elite corruption, we've allowed that government to exercise undue influence on our global policies in a manner not conducive to our own national interests. Now that government, employing every foul deception that earned it the moniker Perfidious Albion , seeks to embroil us in a quarrel with the only country on the planet that can destroy us if things get out of control.

This must stop. A thorough reappraisal of our "special relationship" with the United Kingdom and exposure of its activities to the detriment of the US is imperative.

James George Jatras is an analyst, former U.S. diplomat and foreign policy adviser to the Senate GOP leadership.

[Dec 09, 2018] British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns

Dec 09, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns

In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia propaganda into the western media stream.

We have already seen many consequences of this and similar programs which are designed to smear anyone who does not follow the anti-Russian government lines. The 'Russian collusion' smear campaign against Donald Trump based on the Steele dossier was also a largely British operation but seems to be part of a different project.

The ' Integrity Initiative ' builds 'cluster' or contact groups of trusted journalists, military personal, academics and lobbyists within foreign countries. These people get alerts via social media to take action when the British center perceives a need.

On June 7 it took the the Spanish cluster only a few hours to derail the appointment of Perto Banos as the Director of the National Security Department in Spain. The cluster determined that he had a too positive view of Russia and launched a coordinated social media smear campaign (pdf) against him.


bigger

The Initiative and its operations were unveiled when someone liberated some of its documents, including its budget applications to the British Foreign Office, and posted them under the 'Anonymous' label at cyberguerrilla.org .
---
Update - The Integrity Initiative confirms the release of its documents. - End Update
---

The Initiative is nominally run under the (government financed) non-government-organisation The Institute For Statecraft . Its internal handbook (pdf) describes its purpose:

The Integrity Initiative was set up in autumn 2015 by The Institute for Statecraft in cooperation with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) to bring to the attention of politicians, policy-makers, opinion leaders and other interested parties the threat posed by Russia to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, across Europe and North America.

It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" and promises that:

Cont. reading: British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns

[Dec 09, 2018] Integrity Initiative: Country list of MI6 agents of influence according to the leak

Dec 09, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Zanon , Nov 24, 2018 2:12:45 PM | link

Country list of agents of influence according to the leak:

Germany

Harold Elletson ,Klaus NaumannWolf-Ruediger Bengs, Ex Amb Killian, Gebhardt v Moltke, Roland Freudenstein, Hubertus Hoffmann, Bertil Wenger, Beate Wedekind, Klaus Wittmann, Florian Schmidt, Norris v Schirach

Sweden, Norway, Finland

Martin Kragh , Jardar Ostbo, Chris Prebensen, Kate Hansen Bundt, Tor Bukkvoll, Henning-Andre Sogaard, Kristen Ven Bruusgard, Henrik O Breitenbauch, Niels Poulsen, Jeppe Plenge, Claus Mathiesen, Katri Pynnoniemi, Ian Robertson, Pauli Jarvenpaa, Andras Racz

Netherlands

Dr Sijbren de Jong, Ida Eklund-Lindwall, Yevhen Fedchenko, Rianne Siebenga, Jerry Sullivan, Hunter B Treseder, Chris Quick

Zanon , Nov 24, 2018 2:13:28 PM | link
Spain

Nico de Pedro, Ricardo Blanco Tarno, Eduardo Serra Rexach, Dionisio Urteaga Todo, Dimitri Barua, Fernando Valenzuela Marzo, Marta Garcia, Abraham Sanz, Fernando Maura, Jose Ignacio Sanchez Amor, Jesus Ramon-Laca Clausen, Frances Ghiles, Carmen Claudin, Nika Prislan, Luis Simon, Charles Powell, Mira Milosevich, Daniel Iriarte, Anna Bosch, Mira Milosevich-Juaristi, Tito, Frances Ghiles, Borja Lasheras, Jordi Bacaria, Alvaro Imbernon-Sainz, Nacho Samor

US, Canada

Mary Ellen Connell, Anders Aslund, Elizabeth Braw, Paul Goble, David Ziegler, Evelyn Farkas, Glen Howard, Stephen Blank, Ian Brzezinski, Thomas Mahnken, John Nevado, Robert Nurick, Jeff McCausland, Todd Leventhal

UK

Chris Donnelly, Amalyah Hart, William Browder, John Ardis, Roderick Collins, Patrick Mileham, Deborah Haynes, Dan Lafayeedney Chris Hernon, Mungo Melvin, Rob Dover Julian Moore, Agnes Josa, David Aaronovitch, Stephen Dalziel, Raheem Shapi, Ben Nimmo, Robert Hall Alexander Hoare Steve Jermy Dominic Kennedy
Victor Madeira Ed Lucas Dr David Ryall
Graham Geale Steve Tatham Natalie Nougayrede
Alan Riley [email protected] Anne Applebaum Neil Logan Brown James Wilson Primavera Quantrill
Bruce Jones David Clark Charles Dick
Ahmed Dassu Sir Adam Thompson Lorna Fitzsimons Neil Buckley Richard Titley Euan Grant
Alastair Aitken Yusuf Desai Bobo Lo Duncan Allen Chris Bell
Peter Mason John Lough Catherine Crozier
Robin Ashcroft Johanna Moehring Vadim Kleiner David Fields Alistair Wood Ben Robinson Drew Foxall Alex Finnen
Orsyia Lutsevych Charlie Hatton Vladimir Ashurkov
Giles Harris Ben Bradshaw
Chris Scheurweghs James Nixey
Charlie Hornick Baiba Braze J Lindley-French
Craig Oliphant Paul Kitching Nick Childs Celia Szusterman
James Sherr Alan Parfitt Alzbeta Chmelarova Keir Giles
Andy Pryce Zach Harkenrider
Kadri Liik Arron Rahaman David Nicholas Igor Sutyagin Rob Sandford Maya Parmar Andrew Wood Richard Slack Ellie Scarnell
Nick Smith Asta Skaigiryte Ian Bond Joanna Szostek Gintaras Stonys Nina Jancowicz
Nick Washer Ian Williams Joe Green Carl Miller Adrian Bradshaw
Clement Daudy Jeremy Blackham Gabriel Daudy Andrew Lucy Stafford Diane Allen Alexandros Papaioannou
Paddy Nicoll

Jen , Nov 24, 2018 2:25:43 PM | link
I see that the cluster of UK journalists to receive propaganda from the Integrity Initiative includes Guardian writer and former Le Monde chief editor (run out by her senior editors for her "Putinesque" leadership style) Natalie Nougayrede. As if The Guardian needs any more persuasion or encouragement to recede deeper into its labyrinthine network of rabbit-holes. Jonathan Freedland must be jumping up and down in an infantile tantrum that Nugget-head got such privileged access.
Zanon , Nov 24, 2018 2:30:45 PM | link
Agents of influence in Italy according to the leak:

Italy
Fabrizio Luciolli Vittorfranco Pisano Jason Wiseman Beppe Severigni Jacopo Iacoboni Alvise Armellini

erichwwk , Nov 24, 2018 2:32:15 PM | link
@ #2 pretzelattack Thanks for the Robert Mueller Guardian article link.

Am I the only one not to know that "As acting deputy attorney general, he [Robert Mueller] was in charge of the investigation and indictment of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the terrorist attack that brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland just before Christmas 1988.

Seems every new article I read on Robert Mueller, he was carrying out another CIA covert plan.


The Framing of al-Megrahi by Gareth Peirce London Review of Books 24 Sept 2019

Laguerre , Nov 24, 2018 2:32:37 PM | link
Britain has been a US dog for years, most overtly in Blair's time over Iraq and Afghanistan, but things haven't really changed. Britain's military has become more and more dependent on the US. There is no longer an independent nuclear deterrent - the weapons are rented from the US, and I'm certain that they couldn't be used without US approval (sure to be a backdoor somewhere in the electronics which would enable the US to turn them off, if the US disagreed). The F35s they've insisted on buying are probably in the same situation.

They're not slaves, or rather 'vassals' - the current word of sensitivity about the EU. More active collaborators, which implies initiatives also stemming from Britain.

One should also recall Britain's function as US agent in the European Union. They were opposed to many EU proposals, obviously to fit in with US desires. The most recent example is the Galileo GPS system - they were opposed to it for years, but as Ivan Rogers told us (former Brit ambassador to the EU), the opposition he was instructed to make failed.

It's all gone off a bit recently though. Trump is not interested in Britain in the way Obama was. Brexit is a nativist movement, not what America wants. If Brexit goes through finally, the interest of the US will be even less, as we can no longer intervene on the US's behalf in Europe.

Zanon , Nov 24, 2018 2:35:35 PM | link
French agents of inluence according to leak:
France
Francoise Thom Jusin Vaisse Thomas Bertin Caroline Gondaud Guillaume Schlumberger Raphael de Lagarde Roland Galharague
Martin Briens Jean-Christophe Noel Laurent Rucker Alexandre Escorcia Nikola Guljevatej David Behar Claire le Flecher Remy Bouallegue Paul Zajac Nicolas Roche Manuel Lafont Rapnouil Laurent Rucker Patrick Hardouin Etienne de Durand
Janaina Herrera
Bart Hansen , Nov 24, 2018 2:41:35 PM | link
I just knew if I scrolled down far enough the name Anne Applebaum would appear - Queen of the Dual-Loyalists; but Wm. Browder!?

From her Wikipedia page: "She is a visiting Professor of Practice at the London School of Economics, where she runs Arena, a project on propaganda and disinformation." I reckon she "Practices" at the Post.

steve , Nov 24, 2018 2:43:03 PM | link
Of course none of this will be reported in the "real" news outlets.
dh , Nov 24, 2018 2:43:03 PM | link
@7 "...things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of russia after the fall of the soviet union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit russia fully, as they'd intended..."

Crimea is the one that really hurts. NATO was all set to build a shiny new base.

james , Nov 24, 2018 2:50:46 PM | link
@18 russ... yes - that pretty well sums it up... as for putin falling into the neoliberal order - at this point it does look that way.. i am curious how russia could move forward at this moment in some alternative way? what would the alternative way look like?

@zanon... thanks, but the list given for usa/canada has only one person on it that appears to be a canuck - glen howard.. and unless it is a different glen howard, the guy is some curling wiz, but no mention of his anti-russian credentials... his e mail address is given as jamestown.org which is connected to the jamestown foundation.. turns out, he is not a canuck either - "Glen Howard President

Mr. Howard is fluent in Russian and proficient in Azerbaijani and Arabic, and is a regional expert on the Caucasus and Central Asia. He was formerly an Analyst at the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) Strategic Assessment Center. His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, and Jane's Defense Weekly. Mr. Howard has served as a consultant to private sector and governmental agencies, including the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Intelligence Council and major oil companies operating in Central Asia and the Middle East."


one of the people on the usa-can list - john nevado appears to be an equadorian...

bottom line - as a sensitive canuck, i think someone needs to change the list to say usa and remove canada, as no canucks are on the list from the small research i did...

that is the sad thing about canada - it gets lumped in with the usa for good and bad on a regular basis... maybe they could put crystia freelands name on this list... i think she would qualify as a rabid anti-russia canuck...

james , Nov 24, 2018 2:51:44 PM | link
@31 dh.. i think you are right about that.. annie applepants is still aching over that... her and crystia freeland..
frances , Nov 24, 2018 2:55:24 PM | link
reply to Plantman 13
re:
"Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow."
I don't think it was the Republican party that was the source of the deadlock.
I think it may have been Tillerson. He had close ties to Russia and in March 2018, he was forced out of State and Pompeo came in.
"President Donald Trump nominated Pompeo as Secretary of State in March 2018, with Pompeo succeeding Rex Tillerson after his dismissal."
jayc , Nov 24, 2018 3:00:23 PM | link
"The organisation is led by one Chris N. Donnelly who receives (pdf) £8,100 per month ..."

That's a decent salary. He probably can work from home too - like Bellingcat. A fake NGO operating with fake "integrity" to identify "fake news". Everything is rather upside-down these days. Good to have all those names attached. Where's C Summers on the list? - maybe he never realized till now the monthly salaries available.

Zanon , Nov 24, 2018 3:21:34 PM | link
Agents from:

Central Europe
Anne Bader Eduard Abrahayman Mitar Kuyundzic Plamen Pantev Solomon Passy Jaroslav Hajecek Jakub Janda Frantisek Vrabel Peter Kreko Jan Strzelecki Mario Nicolini
Austria
Harold Elletson Susan Stewart

Yul , Nov 24, 2018 3:23:47 PM | link
@ Zanon #28
All the French clique works for the government, especially Foreign affairs @ Quai d'Orsay.
Zanon , Nov 24, 2018 3:25:10 PM | link
Baltic section according to the leak:
Tomas Tauginas Asta Skaisgiryte Saulius Guzevicius Eitvydas BAJARŪNAS Renatas Norkus
Vytautas Bakas Laurynas Kasciunas Dr Povilas Malakauskas Ainis Razma Mantas Martisius Linas Kojala
Major Jane Witt Claire Lawrence James Rogers Andriy Tyushka Viktorija Urbonaviciute
frances , Nov 24, 2018 3:27:18 PM | link
reply to dh 31
"Crimea is the one that really hurts. NATO was all set to build a shiny new base."
True that!
I was blown away by their arrogance when I saw the US had bids out to remodel the existing Russian buildings in the Crimean port to for a school, housing.
It clearly never occurred to them that they could/would lose, nor did they even bother to think that Russia may keep an eye out for such mind blowing acts of stupidity such as these bids?
Jackrabbit , Nov 24, 2018 3:31:44 PM | link
Where's C Summers on the list?

There's only one "Craig" for all countries.

Perhaps Craig Oliphant is our resident troll? He was just talking trash about Russia on the Thanksgiving Open Thread .

ICRA Think tank bio


Craig Oliphant is Senior Advisor, Peaceful Change Initiative (PCI), based in London, and Senior Research Associate at the Foreign Policy Centre. Until the end of 2010, he worked in the diplomatic service and was Head of the Eastern Research Group in the Foreign Office, dealing with Russia and Eastern Europe.

In the first half of the 1990s, Craig held posts in Brussels at NATO as an advisor on Russia/Eastern Europe and was then at the OSCE in The Hague, as a regional advisor to the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities. Before that he was at the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD), as a senior lecturer at the Conflict Studies Research Centre at RMA Sandhurst; he also worked for several years in the 1980s at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich, Germany. Craig has published widely on Russia/FSU affairs. He is a member of IISS; RUSI; a Fellow of Royal Society of Arts; and is a Vice Chairman of the British Georgian Society.


Independent Conflict Research & Analysis (ICRA) was founded in May 2010 as a not-for-profit organisation providing objective conflict analysis and training. It is led by Christopher Langton OBE, who spent 32 years in the British Army. During this time he served in Northern Ireland, Russia, the South Caucasus where he was Deputy Chief of UNOMIG and held defence attaché appointments in Russia, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia. Subsequently he worked at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) for 9 years where he was the focus on Afghanistan. At IISS he held appointments as the Head of Defence Analysis, Editor of "The Military Balance" and Research Fellow for Russia before being appointed Senior Fellow for Conflict & Defence Diplomacy.

He has worked as an independent expert on the international investigation into the Russia-Georgia conflict of August 2008 and on the Kyrgyzstan Inquiry Commission investigating the violence that occurred in Southern Kyrgyzstan in 2010. Christopher was Advisor to the UK-China Conflict Prevention Working Group 2014-2015 under the aegis of Saferworld and supported by DFID.

He is also on the Board of a nonprofit that is active in Russia and other countries .
His photo is there.

Jackrabbit , Nov 24, 2018 3:33:25 PM | link
@craigsummers

Are you Craig Oliphant?

frances , Nov 24, 2018 3:36:33 PM | link
reply to:
This cureemt state of affairs cannot last longer. Right?
Posted by: PacoRepublicano | Nov 24, 2018 3:02:15 PM | 37
That may be why the globalists seem to be a bit off the rails.
I read in an article on the present French fuel tax protests/riots that a recent poll of world millennials found that 50 percent would go along with a change of govt, it was 75 percent in France. Concurrent with these riots the French govt is trying to bring back mandatory military service for those in the 3rd year of high school.
Indoctrination camps ala China is my guess.
craigsummers , Nov 24, 2018 4:01:51 PM | link
No Jackrabbit. That isn't me. I am far less important than you want to make me. Nor do I work for ORB International.
Bob , Nov 24, 2018 4:05:47 PM | link
Can we call 'Craig' Summers 'Anne' Summers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Summers

james , Nov 24, 2018 4:10:18 PM | link
i do think it is better to ignore the local shill... they say the same stupid shit on a regular basis.. out of the kindness of b, it is unlikely to stop... quoting jamestown.org is more of the same stupidity that i have come to expect from our resident shill..
Anta , Nov 24, 2018 4:27:51 PM | link
Craigsummers, | 36 |: "According to Bellingcat..."

Craig, you should see a neuropsychologists to check your sensory systems as well as basic cognitive abilities.

bevin , Nov 24, 2018 4:34:08 PM | link
Two more links
https://twitter.com/ShoebridgeC/status/1066080476404822017

https://www.cyberguerrilla.org/blog/operation-integrity-initiative-british-informational-war-against-all/
New I hope, from Murray's blog.
Note that Ben Bradshaw a Labour MP, famous forbeing the first MP who married a man, a fellow BBC reporter, and a Blairite is one of the scum on the UK list. So is 'Prof' Alan Riley, a lawyer with extensive interests in oil.
These people are constantly being wheeled out in the media as independent experts.
Talking of Murray's blog the latest piece laments the death of the Al Nusra spokesman who was killed yesterday, by fellow salafists, as a democrat, secular etc etc.

Jackrabbit , Nov 24, 2018 4:58:18 PM | link
Well Craig, the blatent disinfo that you write @36 is so godawful that I actually believe that you are nobody. Just another pathetic paid jerk-off.

But the embarrassment of Cold Warriors destroying democracy in order to save it is so consistent with your own goofball antics that I had to ask.

Zanon , Nov 24, 2018 4:59:26 PM | link
Check the propaganda organization's twitter account: https://twitter.com/initintegrity
They have been in a retweeting spam mode since they got exposed. Quite hilarious.
Entropy Wins , Nov 24, 2018 5:08:57 PM | link
"The Initiatives Guide to Countering Russian Information (pdf) is a rather funny read. It lists the downing of flight MH 17 by a Ukranian BUK missile, the fake chemical incident in Khan Sheikhoun and the Skripal Affair as examples for "Russian disinformation"."

This following document explicitly states that the Skripal incident is a Dirty Trick operation against Russia. It also mentions the use of aspects of Russian culture to be used as a weapon against it (eg the church)

https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/iihandbookv2/iihandbookv2.pdf

It lists tream members, funding for specificic tasks and this statement:

"Code of Conduct (Greg to commence with internet etiquette)
Anonymity of the team remains paramount. As our activity increases we will, no doubt, attract unwanted attention."

That directly contradicts the official UK government statement to the Russians that the Integrity Initiative is a public domain program.

spike , Nov 24, 2018 5:17:57 PM | link
the secret to all good propaganda: accuse the other side of doing what you're guilty of

so people believe that anonymous collective managed to gain access, via 'hacking'to the FCO computer system? really? seriously? you think that the second, or third most critical/secure UK govt. system can be either 'spearfished' or accessed by some other means?

have a word with yourself

uncle tungsten , Nov 24, 2018 5:29:17 PM | link
Feeding trolls is pointless they are forever ravenous. That is until the willow finds its mark.

Thank you b and zanon and sam @8. You make a magnificent day for our world.

Harry , Nov 24, 2018 5:35:36 PM | link
Do we know this is "genuine"?

I will say this. I had always assumed Ed Lucas was ex -UK intel. He worked at the Moscow embassy for the FCO and has stuck to the "save the baltics from the evil empire" line ever since. There is a surprisingly tight network of folk (Yes Ann Applebaum) who have been together hating the commies and now the non-commie Russians since the 90s. Some of them are very prominent now (Yes Chrystia) despite having backgrounds which might suggest an irrational agenda driven outlook (Nazis?). They meet up at conferences discussing the Soviet/Russian menace and never mention that on raw spend, Nato outspends their hated Russia by 10x or 20x.

Still, for some reason these people are considered angels of light and the rest of us need to follow their barely literate lead (actually Ed Lucas is very literate, as is Peter Pomerantsev). Anders Aslund a lot less so.

Ghost Ship , Nov 24, 2018 5:36:57 PM | link
>>>>: Forthestate | Nov 24, 2018 12:26:09 PM | 10
"A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants?

Luke "The Plagiarist" Harding and the other Guardian hacks must be really pissed off that they weren't considered to be worthy of even a sub-cluster.

Ghost Ship , Nov 24, 2018 5:41:16 PM | link
>>>>: Anya | Nov 24, 2018 11:57:00 AM | 4
For M16 to expose this level of stupidity is stunning.

No, not really. MI6 have demonstrated even greater levels of stupidity in the past. For example, supporting the salafist Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and then being surprised at the blowback that was the Manchester Arena suicide bombing by one of its followers

Zanon , Nov 24, 2018 6:23:51 PM | link
Ghost Ship

Now you are being too kind:
Manchester Arena suicide bomber rescued from Libya by Royal Navy
https://www.rt.com/uk/434701-manchester-bomber-royal-navy

-

Greek group according to leak: Despina afentouli ELIAMEP Thanos Dokos Ioannis Armakolas George Tzogopoulos Dimitris Xenakis Katerina Oikonomakou Ioannis Goranitis Tasos Telloglou Katerina Chryssanthopoulou Sissy Alonistiotou

uncle tungsten , Nov 24, 2018 6:30:36 PM | link
I would include Russia Insider on the list of fake news fronts that they support.
simjam , Nov 24, 2018 6:40:48 PM | link
This is the most explosive piece you have ever published. Another indication that the West is in a "panic" stage of its demise.
Willie Wobblestick , Nov 24, 2018 7:06:22 PM | link
Hastily Written Job Application

Dear Department of Integrity
I'd like to apply for a job.
I'm short of work at the moment
And could do with an extra few bob.

I don't have a problem lying
And am prepared to work scruple-free.
I will smear anyone you want
In return for an appropriate fee.

I've established a reputation
As a bit of an internet bard,
So talking some utter bollocks
Wouldn't be particularly hard.

I've studied your regular output
Viz the work of Bellingcat
And know I can do a lot better
Than that useless speccy twat.

Vladimir Putin eats babies
And Lavrov tortures rabbits.
Bashar Assad wears make-up
And Rouhani has disgusting habits

The above is a free sample
Of my slimy slanderous verse,
And as long as the money's right
I know I could a lot worse.

I'm not a very nice person
With terrible self-esteem,
So I'm sure I'll fit in swimmingly
With your personality-disordered team.

I know I'll just be perfect
So why not take the chance?
For a mere eight grand a month
I'll happily dance the Devil's dance.


wendy davis , Nov 24, 2018 7:06:24 PM | link
i remain agnostic for now on the authenticity of the 'integrity initiative, but is has a definite Gladio/NATO feel to it, so it's entirely plausible.

but as i was pasting together a new diary on the ever-increasing increased jeopardy to julian assange by way the Wikileaks account on twitter, they had these tweets up:


https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1066266619863855105

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1066357360153821189

but the breaking story, two days after this:

'Ecuador's president has signed a decree terminating the ambassador to the United Kingdom, Carlos Abad. All diplomats known to Assange have now been terminated to transferred away from the embassy.'

was this:

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1066370157826777091

psychohistorian , Nov 24, 2018 7:29:48 PM | link
@ Willie Wobblestick with the righteous poem....very nice, may it go viral with b's piece

@ wendy davis with the status of julian assange...thanks
I think these actions reek of desperation and lack of understanding of what exposure may ensue from julian going down in some way. Julian may be holding old news but I expect that there are depths of it that will be new to many.

The circus tent is starting to burn and the animals are freaking out, ready to stampede.

Can we evolve away from the private finance motivated world soon, please and thank you?

wendy davis , Nov 24, 2018 8:00:42 PM | link
@psychohistorian # 65

the first wikitweet was to the anon 'operation integrity initiative'; the second one says: "We have analyzed these documents and assess that a portion of them show hallmarks of being fabrications."

assange attorney hannah jonnason (@AssangeLegal) had been looking carefully at them, parsing them in belief, but finally had re-tweeted wikileaks take. the 'portion' as i took it by way of the subtweets was 'fabricated emails'. she's gret, plus brilliant, but on one thread i'd posted she'd called marcy wheeler 'fbi informant MW', lol.

karlof1 , Nov 24, 2018 8:17:14 PM | link
Golly gee-whiz! Why am I not surprised? Gotta have complementary sources of disinformation operating in tandem with BigLie Media! Indeed, the synchronicity of so much fairly well proves BigLie Media is part of this system. The Tower of Immorality being built primarily by the Outlaw US Empire and its UK sidekick is like a Ponzi Scheme in that for it not to fall it must have ever more lies continually added where eventually everything said by them will be 100% false.
psychohistorian , Nov 24, 2018 8:18:16 PM | link
It is getting tedious to have to type my personal information in every time I want to comment. B has written that he is working on issues but I may forgo the web site link if this continues....lazy as I am

@ wendy davis with the marcy wheeler as fbi informant claim....marcy seems well intentioned but seems to have some way weird bias blinders in her thinking. I have stopped following her because her signal to noise ratio got too bad. There are lots of folks like her I am sorry to write. Well intentioned but drinking some koolaid that has them mixed up in strategic ways.....almost like it was planned.....maybe more lists will come out now of other organizations that are paying folk to build and/or maintain certain narratives like GWOT, etc.


And yes, we can take the truth. It will set many free.

karlof1 , Nov 24, 2018 8:33:59 PM | link
To further my @67--

The chemical attack on Aleppo earlier today wasn't accompanied by immediate synchronized media and NATO political leader accusations against the terrorists like we've seen associated with the FFs. I've yet to see any, nor have any been reported on Twitter.

james , Nov 24, 2018 8:40:28 PM | link
@ 68 pscychohistorian.. ditto your comments on marcy wheeler... all the folks at emptywheel have gone off the rails, led by lead bozo - bmaz... i used to enjoy reading her, but the hate russia memo they all swallowed is tedious slogging and i am not up for it..
psychohistorian , Nov 24, 2018 8:56:04 PM | link
@ karlof1 with the reference to chemical attack on Aleppo today

I just posted a link from Xinhuanet on the thanksgiving open thread about it.

Roy G , Nov 24, 2018 9:11:53 PM | link
James @70 i'm right there with ya. Watching how the Russian Derangement Syndrome has afflicted otherwise sane and smart people has been disillusioning to say the least.
juliania , Nov 24, 2018 9:15:46 PM | link
Blessings, b and comment support on this - it takes me back to the days when Five Eyes was unravelling, and I can't but think that dastardly plot to surveil and snoop by means of developing technology was going to be a worldwide instrument of torture and oneupmanship that many thought would make that consortium top dog for all time.

So, they smashed the Guardian's computers, and they co-opted or blackmailed where they could, but the genie was out. And out for good. It would make a good spy novel if it weren't for the very real deaths and destruction that have happened in the wake of the revelations. And that will happen before this sorry historical episode is over. I simply believe, however, that thanks to nearly everyone contributing to this forum, such possibilities are diminishing. Thank you,b and everyone.

wendy davis , Nov 24, 2018 9:33:57 PM | link
@ psychohistorian #68

well, never mind.

Uncle $cam , Nov 24, 2018 9:35:33 PM | link

Wikileaks: "British Army creates a 1,500 strong team of Facebook psychological operations warriors...3 years ago."


on a different note... Hope -if he isn't dead,-Assange, makes it through the weekend...

Uncle $cam , Nov 24, 2018 9:41:12 PM | link
Wikileaks: "British Army creates a 1,500 strong team of Facebook psychological operations warriors...3 years ago." grrr. sorry...
V , Nov 24, 2018 10:42:02 PM | link
b's article is a sad, sad, commentary on today's reality.
But in fact, there is nothing shocking or even unexpected; just sad...
Geo , Nov 24, 2018 10:45:06 PM | link
Curious if and how this recent push against Zuckerberg by the UK government plays into this.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/24/mps-seize-cache-facebook-internal-papers?CMP=share_btn_tw

I'm not well versed enough myself but I am baffled by this whole mess. All sides of this are entities I don't trust at all: Intelligence agencies, Facebook, Trump and his crooked playmates... seems there are no sides to trust or root for in this whole game of espionage.

Jen , Nov 24, 2018 10:54:06 PM | link
Ghost Ship @ 58: There is a Guardian writer in that UK journalist sub-cluster list and that is Natalie Nougayrede. No surprise there ... over at Off-Guardian.org, commenters have their own unprintable names for her. And you thought the bar at Integrity Initiative wasn't low enough for Fraudian hacks.
SayLess , Nov 25, 2018 12:16:03 AM | link
It is important to note that Wikileaks questioned the authenticity of these documents. We should be cautious before drawing any conclusions and wait for more information.

"We have analyzed these documents and assess that a portion of them show hallmarks of being fabrications."

https://web.archive.org/web/20181125051405/https:/twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1066357360153821189

iv> Jelena Milić is actually doing very good job of making people sick of NATO and the UKUS governments. She's a laughing stock in Serbia. Idk why are they paying her in the first place. She could easily be Kremlin lobbyist the way how she's doing her job :) If they are all incapable like her I wouldn't be worried too much about this

Posted by: Б , Nov 25, 2018 12:41:26 AM | link

Jelena Milić is actually doing very good job of making people sick of NATO and the UKUS governments. She's a laughing stock in Serbia. Idk why are they paying her in the first place. She could easily be Kremlin lobbyist the way how she's doing her job :) If they are all incapable like her I wouldn't be worried too much about this

Posted by: Б | Nov 25, 2018 12:41:26 AM | link

Brian , Nov 25, 2018 1:06:56 AM | link
So Facebook is s co sponsor ? Social media not just about bringing people together but manipulator and subversion .
If they were targeting Jews this would be called antisemitism , as iybisvtheytecyargetumg russians ,
What role did they play In the novichok hoax ?
Brian , Nov 25, 2018 1:09:15 AM | link
'Making people see we arecinder attack by russia ' !
Could war paranoia . Do the British people want their funds to be used to manipulate them ?
Brian , Nov 25, 2018 1:26:23 AM | link
'Clusters established in each country' reads an awful lot like subversion and treachery
Should this be a matter for country police and national security ?
Quentin , Nov 25, 2018 1:54:01 AM | link
Brian @ 84

Right. Like sleeper cells ready at a moment's notice to spread terrifying disinformation and propaganda.

alain , Nov 25, 2018 2:06:13 AM | link
@Zanon 28
Même pour les Français, l'information est aujourd'hui en anglais... Ceci dit, l'hystérie et l'"activité" anti-russe n'est pas très effective en France... Trop d'Histoire et d'histoires partagées pour adhérer à cette soupe servie pour les peuples anglo-saxons... Mais enfin, pas besoin d'avoir lu Hegel pour comprendre que toute cette agitation-propagande sert in fine l'ennemi désigné, la Russie; et précipite encore un peu plus, si c'est possible, la fin de l'empire.
alain , Nov 25, 2018 2:10:11 AM | link
Oops... And by the way, thanks again b. for being :-)
b , Nov 25, 2018 2:25:31 AM | link
Hmmm -
WikiLeaks @wikileaks - 10:45am · 24 Nov 2018

Purported internal documents, from a UK government "counter-Russia" influence network targeting mostly Europe and US, appear on site often alleged to be used by Russian state hackers. cyberguerrilla.org/blog/operation

We have analyzed these documents and assess that a portion of them show hallmarks of being fabrications.

I have no idea what the Wikileaks folks mean. I did not notice any signs of fakery in the stash. There are some small but explainable inconsistencies (i.e. between budget plan and approved budget?) and the whole stash is likely bigger than the published one. But all the details I could check seem to fit.

b , Nov 25, 2018 3:17:29 AM | link
This seems to confirm that the papers are real:
Jakub Janda @_JakubJanda - 8:58pm · 23 Nov 2018

So the Russians hacked Institute for Statecraft (@InitIntegrity).

I am one of many people mentioned in here, as part of wide movement of folks trying to push hard aganist Kremlin influence operations.

It is a badge of honor to be among people who are together standing up!


Russ , Nov 25, 2018 3:37:33 AM | link
Posted by: b | Nov 25, 2018 2:25:31 AM | 88

"I have no idea what the Wikileaks folks mean. I did not notice any signs of fakery in the stash."

Who's running the show at Wikileaks by now? (I assume Assange can't do so from his hideout.) My memory's hazy, but I recall there being some kind of internal struggle there, and that a pro-Wall Street faction opposed the release of the Bank of America files and destroyed them.

Are they now trying to turn and appease their system enemies? Wouldn't be the first such sell-out. Maybe they're jealous of the prestige, lucre, and system respectability of the Snowden/Greenwald/Intercept industrial complex.

Emmanuel Goldstein , Nov 25, 2018 4:01:51 AM | link
This has everything...right down to FCO email addresses. For FCO read MI6. Either this is colossal disinfo from Anonymous or a significant operation is truly blown. To resort to something like this, on this scale, showa that they are worried about something. Perhaps RT is getting wore viewing and hits in the UK and Europe than their outlets are. Once the internet was invented this was bound to happen. In some societies this would be regarded as espionage and subversion and these shills would be rounded up for a little chat. Great journalism b, stay safe......at least we now know who the provocateurs for the next false flag are....
donkeytale , Nov 25, 2018 4:12:41 AM | link
Zero Hedge also striking similar skeptical notes. They retweet Assange from 2016 stating anonymous to be an FBI cutout organisation. These anti-Russian organisations are real and their aim is to fight Russian propaganda, they will say by publishing truth while Russia says with lies. Of course they are funded. So is Russian propaganda. What the Russians are doing is classic "Spy vs Spy" and Barflies of course lap up the kool-aid just as easily as every kool-aid drinker we deride. The constant state of confirmation bias and psychological projection on the internets isn't even newsworthy but it's interesting sociology. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Same as it ever was. Whatever gets us through the night. It's alright. But is Assange only speaking truth when he confirms our biases? I have more respect for him.


Thanks b for posting Wikileak's skeptical take even as you wish to believe otherwise. That's integrity. And to those who say Assange is only doing so to suck up belatedly to the US as a possible defense strategy I can only SMH. More projection. This is what you might do maybe if you were in his shoes.

Felipe , Nov 25, 2018 4:25:10 AM | link
This is so big of a news but the western media do not say a word about it!
This screams subversion, Gladio from the very top/deep state of western society.
Russ , Nov 25, 2018 4:30:24 AM | link
Posted by: donkeytale | Nov 25, 2018 4:12:41 AM | 92

"And to those who say Assange is only doing so to suck up belatedly to the US as a possible defense strategy I can only SMH. More projection. This is what you might do maybe if you were in his shoes."

Who said that, donkeydumbass? Learn to read. I asked if the post-Assange Wikileaks might be trying to do that. Of course I don't know what Assange himself might or might not do, any more than you do.

Peter AU 1 , Nov 25, 2018 4:32:15 AM | link
b 88

Perhaps a little bit of appeasement.. unless something changes, the brits will be sending Assange off to yankee land soon.

Horse's mouth , Nov 25, 2018 5:57:04 AM | link
https://apnews.com/fc570e4b400f4c7db3b0d739e9dc5d4d

The head of the French government's cyber security agency, which investigated leaks from President Emmanuel Macron's election campaign, says they found no trace of a notorious Russian hacking group behind the attack.

In an interview in his office Thursday with The Associated Press, Guillaume Poupard said the Macron campaign hack "was so generic and simple that it could have been practically anyone."

He said they found no trace that the Russian hacking group known as APT28, blamed for other attacks including on the U.S. presidential campaign, was responsible.

Poupard is director general of the government cyber-defense agency known in France by its acronym, ANSSI. Its experts were immediately dispatched when documents stolen from the Macron campaign leaked online on May 5 in the closing hours of the presidential race.

Poupard says the attack's simplicity "means that we can imagine that it was a person who did this alone. They could be in any country."

___

b , Nov 25, 2018 5:58:16 AM | link
@all

Some commentators claim that 'Anonymous' is an FBI operations and that lets them doubt this issue.

Actually 'Anonymous' has been used as a cover by various shady agencies and individuals. Everybody can publish whatever they want under the 'Anonymous' moniker. The moniker has no credibility or meaning.

As always one has to distinguish between the source of information and the actual content of the information.
Here the source is obviously shady. But the content, as far as I can tell, seems to be real.
---

Also - don't feed the house troll. Craigsummers is allowed to comment here solely for our amusement. There is no need to discuss whatever he posts.

john stack , Nov 25, 2018 6:12:18 AM | link
I cannot get into the list of agents. Who is listed for Ireland ?
blues , Nov 25, 2018 6:28:41 AM | link
My comments have been getting short of late.

It's crystal clear to me that the so-called "British" anti-Russia project is really sponsored by the CIA. Most everything is. I think. How else are they keep their VERY lucrative racket going?

BM , Nov 25, 2018 6:51:59 AM | link
In countries that may be hostile to this programme (Serbia, Spain, Italy for example), the exposed cluster members should be immediately arrested as foreign spies and tried for treason, and the exposed British Embassy contacts should be immediately expelled.
Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow.

Interesting isn't it, that from March 2018 the Trump Administration is no longer blocking this programme! When was Trump's first meeting with President Putin, wasn't that in March? Immediately afterwards of course he was lambasted. Was he turned at that point?

S , Nov 25, 2018 7:22:21 AM | link
@BM: The meeting was in summer. Early March was when the Skripal saga started.
William Bowles , Nov 25, 2018 7:57:23 AM | link
@15 Re Analytica:

It's owned by a US firm, or at least it was, until they wound it up.

Anya , Nov 25, 2018 8:48:43 AM | link
"Edward Snowden accused an Israeli cybersecurity firm of developing and selling surveillance software to Saudi Arabia, enabling the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=25&v=_LeOt4HCI-M

So humanitarian of Israeli!

Ghost Ship , Nov 25, 2018 8:52:17 AM | link
>>>> blues | Nov 25, 2018 6:28:41 AM | 98
It's crystal clear to me that the so-called "British" anti-Russia project is really sponsored by the CIA. Most everything is. I think. How else are they keep their VERY lucrative racket going?

Nah. like Skripal this is a home grown effort. After backing that loser Clinton with the Steele file, the British Conservative government which likes to have its head even further up Washington's arse than Tony Blair's is scared shitless that Trump will shit on them from a great height for backing his rival. I suspect he will wait for Brexit to go through and then take a dump on them when they turn up with their begging bowl in Washington looking for a "free trade deal". They're hoping that with these attacks on Russia they will ingratiate themselves with the Washington foreign policy establishment (Pat Lang's Borg) enough to reduce the incredible volumes of shit Trump would dump on them. It looks like it's working at the moment, but then Trump is known to be capricious so its anybody's guess what happens later. Bear in mind that if the Conservative government make enough mistakes, it's that socialist Corbyn who replaces it which is its Worst. Nightmare. Evah.

steve , Nov 25, 2018 9:01:14 AM | link
The bottom line as Al Gore said is there is no overriding authority. Sites like Above Top Secrect are obviously run by people who want things kept top secrect. Snopes revealed itself with its take on the White Helmets in Syria. Remember when the Greenpeace guy turned out to be a shill for Nuclear Energy.
alaff , Nov 25, 2018 9:08:00 AM | link
Thank you. Very good covering of the 'event', written in clear accessible language.
I am afraid that what was discovered is only a small part of the ocean of lies in which they are trying to force us to swim.
I am amazed how these people can sleep well. Rotten and lying through and through...

In fact, nothing "surprising" or "unbelievable" was found. Specialists, experts, as well as ordinary people, who have been interested in the topic, have long understood that it is about a targeted propaganda, which operates according to its laws. This propaganda calls truth a lie, and a lie truth, it calls white black and black it calls white. The work of this propaganda is also clearly visible, for example, when, on the eve of some important event, the "world community" suddenly (mean, "suddenly") finds out something "sensational", while MSM all start writing the same thing with a certain bias (often anti-Russian). The Russian Foreign Ministry has repeatedly pointed out the obvious coordination of the work of the Western media when it comes to 'anti-Russian news'. All these info are in briefings and statements of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which are publicly available on the Ministry's website.

Especially clearly a targeted coordinated work of propaganda was visible during the events in Syria, in particular, during the liberation of Aleppo. Remember all these "the last hospitals". Even high-ranking representatives of the UN, many of whom are essentially Western protégés, were also participating in this propaganda. For those who are interested in how this worked during the liberation of Aleppo, I recommend reading this in full. A lot of interesting details.

One thing is good - that such info become publicly known. Maybe more people will wake up and think about what is going on.

Ghost Ship , Nov 25, 2018 9:13:38 AM | link
We have analyzed these documents and assess that a portion of them show hallmarks of being fabrications.

This particular story might originate within MI6. If MI6 knew that the Russians had gathered compromising information on this operation, MI6 would put out a story favourable to them to capture the narrative before the Russians could. Like all black propaganda, they would have to include some of the real truth to make the fake "truth" appear reliable. It also allows the supposedly devious twats at MI6 to demonstrate their steadfastness in "fighting" the Russians.

BTW, it's entirely possible that the Skripal incident was by the Russians but only designed to incapacitate Skripal pere as a warning to him or MI6 to behave themselves and not do stupid things in future but the Conservative government rather stupidly decided to put out a bullshit narrative about what happened. Furthermore, don't forget that Churchill, the hero of the Conservative Party used chemical weapons against the Russians/Soviets. Most Brit's probably never knew or have forgotten but I doubt the Russians have or ever will.

donkeytale , Nov 25, 2018 9:14:41 AM | link
Here is the link to the Zero Hedge commentary , which was posted on Friday, including the Assange tweet from 2016.
WikiLeaks ‏ Verified account @wikileaks

Replying to @MashiRafael
"Anonymous" has been controlled by FBI agent "Sabu" and other agencies, including the CIA. Likely an attempt to manipulate.

6:28 PM - 24 Oct 2016

BM , Nov 25, 2018 9:32:22 AM | link
We have analyzed these documents and assess that a portion of them show hallmarks of being fabrications.

I have no idea what the Wikileaks folks mean. I did not notice any signs of fakery in the stash.
Posted by: b | Nov 25, 2018 2:25:31 AM | 87

The best way the elite can undermine wikileaks is to infiltrate it and undermine it from within, as they did to Amnesty International, and later Human Rights Watch, both of which are completely controlled by US and UK intelligence services. I think it is a given that they will have successfully infiltrated wikileaks - because I think it is impossible that wikileaks could have avoided it completely, but lets hope that wikileaks keep up sufficient defences to isolate the infiltration and limit its damage. With the current threats to Assange that will be a big challenge!

If, as I suspect, this claim that the documents were fake was being pushed by an infiltrator, then that infiltrator is raising flags to himself, so it is a high risk action and emphasises the desperation the elite are in, that they are willing to burn a key asset.

William Bowles , Nov 25, 2018 9:57:25 AM | link
The docs are fakes? I don't think so, there's just too much detail and the names it exposes, Aaronovich, Marcus (BBC), the financing. It's an awful lot of exposing in order to mislead us don't you think? And if it was, it was one, gigantic failure!

The best way is to see how the MSM deal with it, if at all, so today for example, there's been no mention on the BBC's RSS feed and there was none yesterday. I'd say that judging by the nature and structure of the 'Institute of Statecraft', it's straight out of Whitehall.

wendy davis , Nov 25, 2018 10:05:18 AM | link
@ psychohistorian #68

my apologies for my truncated response. what i'd meant to say is that we're talking past one another. my fault entirely, as i never should have brought wheeler into the discussion, and derailed my larger point. but i got in a hurry, and that was that.

but to those wondering why 'assange' would have noted that 'some portions have been fabricated', asange notably has been incommunicado for the past seven months, and any 'visitors' (really just his legal team) are forced to surrender all their communication device before entering the embassy. so who on the Wikileaks team had decided that is unknowable, of course. but on one of the subtweets where b had noted jakub janda's pride in being part of the organization (nice catch, by the way, b) one idiot linked to his home website noting that assange is a Mossad operative.

when i'd been contemplating writing some of up, i will say that my favorite part was the handbook, most especially this great psyop:

"What funding do they have/have access to/need? Caution! This is always a very sensitive issue. NB 1 If asked about money for funding activities of a cluster, always be firmly vague and helpfully uninformative and at all costs avoid making any funding commitments until we have discussed it! NB 2 When talking about the Institute, be sure you can explain clearly what we are and what we do. NB 3 if asked about our funding, be very clear: the Integrity Initiative is funded by the Institute for Statecraft. The IfS gets its funding from multiple sources to ensure its independence. These include: private individuals; charitable foundations; international organisations (EU, NATO); UK Govt (FCO, MOD"

one commenter on the cyber guerilla doc dump page had noted: 'Propagandist Stephen Dalziel is a given a regular platform by Monocle 24 in the UK and rebroadcast around the world. Dalziel shills for the fraud "Bellingcat".'


Anya , Nov 25, 2018 10:13:53 AM | link
And what is the difference between the MbS treatment of "unpleasant" Khashoggi and the US/UK treatment of "unpleasant" Assange?

The absolute majority of the "progressives" and "liberals" in both the US and the UK are sheepishly quiet when the most important journalist of our times, Julian Assange, has been smeared and his life endangered by the kangaroo courts of the western corrupt judiciary.

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/11/24/the-fate-of-julian-assange-chris-hedges-interviews-consortium-news-editor-in-chief-joe-lauria/

mike k: "The US Mafia Government kangaroo court gathers it's phony "legal" forces, salivating in anticipation of Assange as a choice morsel for it's evil appetite. Their "logic" goes like this, "if we say you are guilty, then you are guilty".

And where is the zionized MSM? -- With the kangaroo courts, of course, working in a accord with the mega war profiteers and other big-time criminals.

Noirette , Nov 25, 2018 10:27:10 AM | link
In France, last Pres. election, the favored candidate from the right (Républicains) was Alain Juppé. As the F establishment likes to mimic the US in all ways, they instored 'primaires' - primaries, to 'elect' 'the most popular candidate' from the two main parties. As the French don't glom the depth of corruption of the US system and how to do that, and just love - for all kinds of reasons - such gadgets, the vote at the Républicain table (even the name is a tribute) turned out surprise to be for Francois Fillon - who was (is) Catholic, pro-Russia, while your standard right-wing F-flavored stooge.

He was brought down speedily in a corruption scandal, for hiring his wife and children amongst others to do no work or symbolic stuff. One third of F Parliament members do this (off the cuff nos., but attested to ..), it is completely accepted. An allowed 'perk' - a way to spend the budgets > 'favored' 'loyal' ppl.

The effiency and speed of this attack surprised me. Fillon - no fool - 'withdrew' so to speak and made no waves beyond the acceptable i.e. stalwart opposition / defense at first, then went to work for a Financial Co. All the hype about suing the wife, about getting money back, whatever, died pronto.

I have no idea how this was organised. (The left was conveniently split.. between the entrenched "Socialists" and "Mélenchon," France Insoumise ) and so the end-run was between the vilified National Front (renamed now) Marine Le Pen, party which survives only as they play their puppet role to guarantee they collect low-class opposition to then always lose facing either the Socialists or the Républicains.

Piotr Berman , Nov 25, 2018 10:44:22 AM | link
NYT today:

Syria Urges U.N. to Condemn Rebels After Apparent Chemical Attack
Syria accused rebel forces of launching an attack in Aleppo that sent scores of choking victims to hospitals. Medical officials suspected chlorine had been used.

Characteristically, the attack is "apparent", but almost strangely, NYT reported Reuters news providing an inconvenient story rather fast.

lysias , Nov 25, 2018 10:44:25 AM | link
If some at least of the documents are fabrications, the plan of the Western intelligence agencies may be to expose some false details in the documents to discredit the whole story.
donkeytale , Nov 25, 2018 10:49:04 AM | link
So, what several posters here are now stating or at least implying is the @wikileaks account is basically the same as "Anonymous"? That is, it is merely a cover used by shadowy individuals and therefore no longer possesses any credibility unless it posts something with which we can all agree?

And the thoughts it expressed do not necessarily bear any relationship to Julian Assange?

Unless, of course, we agree with those thoughts?

Blooming Barricade , Nov 25, 2018 10:50:38 AM | link
The Integrity Initiative is now trying to smear and attack Seumas Milne, Jeremy Corbyn's communications director and a key voice on the anti-war, anti-capitalist left, tweeting a Times article that appears to have been contributed to by them. They also retweeted Michael Weiss on Milne, who they appear to want to remove from a future Corbyn government in the vein of that Spanish minister This should be a HUGE scandal given that this is funded by the UK government and thus the Tory administration and is thus GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA against the leader of the opposition, paid for by the taxpayer and in line with big business/military Euro-Atlanticist lobby. Thanks to the digital urban guerrilla site for exposing this assault on socialism and the public. https://twitter.com/InitIntegrity/status/1066691553350086656
AntiSpin , Nov 25, 2018 11:21:03 AM | link
Best MoA blockbuster yet!!! Somewhere down there Joseph Goebbels is gazing upward at all this exposed chicanery, eyes shining with delight, and also green with envy.
Ghost Ship , Nov 25, 2018 11:58:48 AM | link
>>>>: AntiSpin | Nov 25, 2018 11:21:03 AM | 117
down there Joseph Goebbels is gazing upward

Goebbels was a rank amateur and grossly overrated - he could do white propaganda when things were going well for the Nazis which wasn't difficult, otherwise he was useless. When things started to go bad for the Nazis, the British, particularly Sefton Delmer, started running rings around him. The Americans really never understood black propaganda but why should they, and the British are still trying to fight World War 11 with their black propaganda and are still losing.

Jackrabbit , Nov 25, 2018 12:20:47 PM | link
donkeytale

Donkeys don't read too good.

Reread b's comment @96.

And 'echo chamber' allegations are laughable coming from a Kool-Aid drinker/pusher.

Trailer Trash , Nov 25, 2018 12:49:07 PM | link
These kind of propaganda campaigns end up as own goals for the establishment. Peons and serfs don't need to know what is going on, but the Dear Leaders' functionaries do need accurate info in order to make correct decisions that further establishment goals. With all the smoke and chaos of conflicting stories, can bureaucrats keep their lies straight? I think not.

As I understand it, glowing but inaccurate fabricated reports submitted to the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) Dear Leaders left them unable to comprehend just how unhappy the GDR citizens actually were, so the collapse came as a surprise. [1] We can see this happening in Afghanistan today. The Pentagon insists they are "winning" while the Taliban-controlled territory continues to increase. When Uncle Sam is finally driven out, it will come as a complete surprise to the DC Dunces who believe their own phony reports.

[1] Fulbrook, Mary; Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR 1949-1989; Oxford University Books; 1995

Zanon , Nov 25, 2018 1:00:36 PM | link
Just imagine the response and publicity if this was a Russian government funded organization, having a network of agents of influence groups of people in western europe...
frances , Nov 25, 2018 2:25:27 PM | link
reply to Russ 89
"Who's running the show at Wikileaks by now?"

Good question. Do you recall when Assange's attorney was killed when pushed in front of a train at the time the Wikileaks founder Gavin Macfadyen died?

The staff roster at Wikileaks then went through an almost total turnover and there were reports that someone was escorted from the building with a bag over their head and there were reports that Assange's deadman switch was activated but stopped. All this occurred back in 2016.
The reason no one who knows Assange is being allowed physical contact may be because someone else is in his place.I have a sad feeling that he is in a Langley basement.

wendy davis , Nov 25, 2018 5:44:38 PM | link
on sept. 26, 2018 julian assange had named Kristinn Hrafnsson of iceland as the new editor-in-chief of wikileaks. at that time julian had been cut off from communicating for six months.

an hour ago wikileaks had tweeted:

@wikileaks: WikiLeaks Retweeted Integrity Initiative 'UK government backed anti-Russian influence network account for "Integrity Initiative" confirms release of documents.'

@InitIntegrity 'Here is our statement on the recent publication by Russian media of hacked Integrity Initiative documents.'

they offered some caveats, among them:

"We have not yet had the chance to analyse all of the documents, so cannot say with confidence whether they are all genuine or whether they include doctored or false material. Although it is clear that much of the material was indeed on the Integrity Initiative or Institute systems, much of it is dated and was never used. In particular, many of the names published were on an internal list of experts in this field who had been considered as potential invitees to future cooperation. In the event, many were never contacted by the Integrity Initiative and did not contribute to it. Nor were these documents therefore included in any funding proposals. Not only did these individuals have nothing to do with the programme – they may not even have heard of us. We are of course trying to contact all named individuals for whom we have contact details to ensure that they are aware of what has happened."

now my guess, fwiw, is that the WL knows chapter and verse how the CIA vault 7 revelations can be used to create false email addresses, etc., so perhaps they'd spotted some.

but assange's attorney jennifer robinson did get to see him on nov. 16.

https://on.msnbc.com/2zm3Eg8

wendy davis , Nov 25, 2018 5:47:36 PM | link
oh, fie; i'd forgotten the Tweet's url:

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1066804727973855233

arby , Nov 25, 2018 6:25:40 PM | link
Russia seizes Ukraine naval ships


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46338671

Mr Reynard , Nov 25, 2018 10:00:42 PM | link
British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns ??
Secret ??? Is that an OXYMORON ??
Col. B. Bunny , Nov 26, 2018 3:00:33 AM | link
Thus is an extraordinary article. It describes distilled hypocrisy on the part of the U.S. and U.K. who have conniptions over Russian "meddling," that has proved to be thin gruel indeed, but who organize a vast, expensive enterprise of their own to implement disinformation and smear campaigns to influence the internal affairs of other countries and friendly ones at that. Russia purchases a modest message on Twitter (?) and that is an attack on "our democracy."The attack on the now oddly-sequestered Skripals is an epic East Asian fire drill with Theresa May written all over it and it sure as hell has nothing "made in Moscow" about it.

Anne Appelebaum and the other "journalists" have some 'splainin' to do about what independent, unbiased journalists are doing as players in government propaganda organizations.

Brian , Nov 26, 2018 11:42:00 AM | link
Is the Sea of Azov incident a ploy to put off presidential elections in Ukraine ?
https://mobile.twitter.com/I_Katchanovski/status/1067050340623630337
Zanon , Nov 26, 2018 1:07:20 PM | link
'Anti-Russian psy-ops' program confirms UK govt funding, Anonymous denies leak
https://www.rt.com/news/444899-uk-psyop-leak-reaction/
kula , Nov 26, 2018 2:32:19 PM | link
Look y'all, @craigsummers is a paid troll. So all your responses are earning him or her income. Trolling is an art form. b, you could regularly remined new readers to ignore mwn.
Anton from Russia , Nov 27, 2018 5:14:22 AM | link
I am Russian, live in Russia.
This is the most interesting journalistic investigation I've read in the last six months.
Thanks.
Most of all I am surprised, the whole world is in economic crisis, people in developed countries are becoming poorer. Britain has an external debt of 7.5 trillion-314% of GDP. But all useless garbage the money is. And most importantly, Why?
We all (USA, Russia, Britain, EU) are just village losers who fight in a roadside ditch, proving that "I am good, they are bad".
And at this time past us at full speed is a huge Chinese train.
Anton from Russia , Nov 27, 2018 5:42:03 AM | link
And the destruction of the MH-17 Boeing by the Russians is also disinformation.
Do you know what the official version of the investigation is?
"Once upon a time. One air defense "Buk" secretly arrived from Russia, shot once, one rocket, in one civil plane, and left back to Russia" (facepalm). Seriously, I'm not kidding, this nonsense is the official version.
The involvement of several dozen Ukrainian air defense " Buk " located in the area of the disaster, not even considered.
No one knows what they were doing.
All photos of "wandering, mad Russian "Buk" were false.

But sanctions imposed by the EU after the disaster, no one is going to cancel. And to assume aloud "that" new authorities" of Ukraine at which hands on an elbow in blood " can be guilty of accident, it is impossible, taboo.

Emmanuel Goldstein , Nov 27, 2018 5:45:32 AM | link
Neatly observed Anton, neatly observed....;-)
Zanon , Nov 27, 2018 5:51:24 AM | link
Just been some days and this big news is already dead. Really scary how big of a impact the western MSM really have in silencing topics.
Russ , Nov 27, 2018 6:52:49 AM | link
@ 134

I bet if I surveyed my acquaintances (American middle class, NYT-reader types) few if any would even have heard of this potential Sarajevo flashpoint.

b , Dec 2, 2018 10:19:08 AM | link
Derelict Scottish mill is shadowy hub in UK's fight against Putin's propaganda machine

Gateside Mills in rural Fife is the official headquarters of the controversial Institute for Statecraft (IFS) – a "think tank" set up to combat Russian disinformation.

For the tiny number of people aware of its existence, Gateside Mills is a derelict building in rural Fife without any obvious signs of life.

Anyone curious enough to carry out further investigation might find a seemingly small Scottish charity is registered there.

But the Sunday Mail can reveal the crumbling Victorian mill is actually the official headquarters of the controversial Institute for Statecraft (IFS) – a shadowy "think tank" whose Integrity Initiative programme has been set up to combat Russian propaganda.

Leaked documents prove the organisation received hundreds of thousands of pounds of funding from the British Government via the Foreign Office.
...
The manager of the Integrity Initiative appears to be Christopher Donnelly.

A website biography states he is a graduate of Manchester University and reserve officer in the British Army Intelligence Corps who previously headed the British Army's Soviet Studies Research Centre at Sandhurst.

Between 1989 and 2003, he was a special adviser to Nato Secretaries General and was involved in dealing with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and reform of newly emerging democracies in Central and Eastern Europe.

He left NATO in 2003 to set up and run the UK Defence Academy's Advanced Research and Assessment Group. In 2010, he became a director of IFS.

[Dec 09, 2018] NATO's Clandestine Bureau UK 'Integrity Initiative' Spreading Anti-Russian Propaganda - 21st Century Wire

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John C Carleton 2 days ago ,

"UK 'Integrity "

Thanks!

Needed a good laugh!

Rollo10 3 days ago ,

Russia are the problem along with China, because they both oppose their NWO agenda! This agenda has been getting pushed from UK for decades now. It first started back in 1800's, but now is world wide. The Corporate & Bankers want complete control of all economies & jobs.
This way they control everything, where and who manufactures what and how much, all controlled by Corporations. Governments become non existent, as do the Electorate. This would have been obvious IF all TPP-TTIP-CETA Treaties had been signed. We'd have had one huge Single Market that excluded BRICS, who'd have been forced in by war!
To their end, 'deep state; then attacked Rouseff in Brazil, had her 'impeached' and placed their puppet Temer in charge, as an 'anchor' to BRICS, as well as creating problems in ME, where China's One Belt One Road [New Silk Road] crosses continents.
The more people become aware of their intentions, the harder it becomes for them to win, as they are now losing ground all round the world. The last two, Israel & UK are about to fall. Netinyahoo has been charged with Corruption and May in UK, is on the verge of being brought down, after being the first PM to be charged and found guilty of Contempt for Parliament! Next to fall, the corrupt EU.

verner 3 days ago ,

CIA they are everywhere!

Rollo10 verner 3 days ago ,

I think you'll find it's Secular Zionists!
https://www.ukcolumn.org/ar...

John2o2o2o Rollo10 3 days ago ,

No, no, no! CIA in the US, MI6 in the UK, Secular Zionists in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

imbroglio verner 2 days ago ,

Pro-Israel lobby Influence on US congress. --- http://www.informationclear...

[Dec 09, 2018] Showdown Moment -- British Enemy Apparatus Very Exposed, Very Ready for Termination LaRouchePAC

Notable quotes:
"... This is the context in which to see the blatant, dangerous gambits to wreck the Buenos Aires gathering of leaders, and any other such future opportunity, coming from the British Empire crowd, in the form of staged confrontations, lies and subversion. ..."
"... Look at recent destabilizing events: the Nov. 24 chemical weapons attack on Syrians in Aleppo; the stoking of suffering and strife at the Mexico-U.S. border; and on Nov. 25, Ukraine's naval provocation against Russia in the Black Sea. The British government asset, the "Integrity Initiative" is fully deployed to goad the U.S. and Western Europe to launch an offensive against Russia over the Ukraine incident, blaming Russia for "aggression" against Ukraine. The British imperialists are making a habit of exposing their own role in demanding world war! ..."
"... These provocations are not a sign of power, but of desperation, desperation to stop the spreading success of the New Paradigm of collaborative development expressed in the Belt and Road Initiative, and what lies ahead if the U.S. joins up. Schiller Institute Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche today emphasized that each time the British Imperialist apparatus steps forward in its own name to sabotage world peace, it works to the detriment of their dying system. The Empire is dangerous, but all the easier to crush. ..."
Nov 28, 2018 | larouchepac.com
We are in a showdown moment. At this week's Group of 20 Summit -- only three days away, in Buenos Aires, there is the potential for Great Power diplomacy in the direction of a New Paradigm of foreign relations, as an outcome of the sideline meetings of heads of state and government of the United States, China, Russia, India and others.

The growing momentum for New Paradigm economic development is seen in high-level events this month in six Western European nations: in Germany, the "Hamburg Summit: China Meets Europe" (Nov. 26-27); in France, the Lyon "Franco-Chinese Forum" (Nov. 26-28); in Spain, President Xi Jinping's state visit (Nov. 27-29); in Portugal, Xi's visit (Dec. 4-5); in Italy, a new Xinhua-associated Italian financial media service will be set up (Nov. 6 agreement); in Norway, the first Polar Route icebreaker delivery of Yamal LNG, for transshipment from the northern port of Honnigsvag.

This is the context in which to see the blatant, dangerous gambits to wreck the Buenos Aires gathering of leaders, and any other such future opportunity, coming from the British Empire crowd, in the form of staged confrontations, lies and subversion.

Look at recent destabilizing events: the Nov. 24 chemical weapons attack on Syrians in Aleppo; the stoking of suffering and strife at the Mexico-U.S. border; and on Nov. 25, Ukraine's naval provocation against Russia in the Black Sea. The British government asset, the "Integrity Initiative" is fully deployed to goad the U.S. and Western Europe to launch an offensive against Russia over the Ukraine incident, blaming Russia for "aggression" against Ukraine. The British imperialists are making a habit of exposing their own role in demanding world war!

These provocations are not a sign of power, but of desperation, desperation to stop the spreading success of the New Paradigm of collaborative development expressed in the Belt and Road Initiative, and what lies ahead if the U.S. joins up. Schiller Institute Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche today emphasized that each time the British Imperialist apparatus steps forward in its own name to sabotage world peace, it works to the detriment of their dying system. The Empire is dangerous, but all the easier to crush.

The Nov. 25 Ukrainian naval breach of Russian territorial waters was long pre-planned. As the Italian military journal Difesa Online wrote on Nov. 25, "it was evident to all those who follow local events that for some days already, the Poroshenko government in Ukraine was trying to provoke an armed confrontation with Moscow in the Crimean waters." Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, said the same yesterday, adding a warning. "We are talking about a pre-planned, deliberate, and now realized large-scale provocation.... I think everybody should be careful next time. I think there will be a next time, considering what is happening now."

President Donald Trump's first response to the Ukraine incident, Nov. 26, was to express concern, and hopes for settlement. "We do not like what's happening, either way; ... hopefully, it will get straightened out." President Vladimir Putin will issue his statement on this incident in a few days.

From London, however, comes a raving "script" of what Trump and the West must do against Russia. It is the featured item on the website of the Integrity Initiative, which is a British intelligence black war propaganda operation. Its funding is from the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Its Nov. 26 posting is titled, "West Is Once Again Failing Test Set by Russian Aggression," by Edward Lucas, formerly of The Economist , and a longtime Russia-hater, who wrote such books as Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West (2012) and The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West (2nd ed., 2014). Lucas calls for "kinetic, symbolic, and financial measures" against Russia. This is to include, the West sending military aid to Ukraine, running a NATO flotilla to the Ukrainian port of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, putting sanctions on Russian officials and businessmen present in the West, and cutting Russia off from Western finance. Lucas says that the West didn't act against Nazi Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland, but they must act now against Russia's aggression against Ukraine.

Lucas is part of the British "cluster" of Integrity Initiative's operatives, which also includes former British Ambassador to Russia Sir Andrew Wood of Orbis Business Intelligence, the firm of "former" MI6 agent Christopher Steele, who fabricated the infamous anti-Trump dossier. These figures are at the heart of the coup operations against Trump, and before that, the Obama Administration election subversion.

Zepp-LaRouche nailed the Integrity Initiative in a Sputnik interview published yesterday, now being run in media internationally. She said that the group's activity displays the " modus operandi of British intelligence operations, and it very well may turn out, that it is this network, which is deeply involved in 'Russiagate' and the entire coup against President Trump."

It is now urgent for all the documents bearing on these criminal, treasonous operations to be de-classified, and the full story revealed. Every hour counts.

[Dec 09, 2018] MI6's Spymaster Revealed How The UK Is Conducting Fourth Generation Espionage by Andrew Korybko

Recently MI6 were implicated in Steel report, Skripals poisonings, Browder machinations, and creation of the Integrity Initiative. Nice "non-interference" mode...
Notable quotes:
"... The UK's top spy spent some of his time blaming Russia for trying to, as he put it, "subvert the UK way of life" by supposedly poisoning the Skripals and through other mischievous but ultimately never verified actions, though moving beyond the infowar aspect of his speech and into its actual professional substance, he nevertheless touched on some interesting themes ..."
"... In other words, it's all about applying what he calls the "Fusion Doctrine" for building the right domestic and international teams across skillsets in order to best leverage new technologies for accomplishing his agency's eternal mission, which is "to understand the motivations, intentions and aspirations of people in other countries." ..."
"... "being able to take steps to change [targets'] behavior", this has actually been part and parcel of the intelligence profession since time immemorial, albeit nowadays facilitated by social media and other technological platforms that allow shadowy actors such as the UK's own "77th Brigade" to carry out psychological, influence, and informational operations. ..."
"... Considering Russia to be a country that "regards [itself] as being in a state of perpetual confrontation with [the West]", Younger believes that unacceptably high costs must be imposed upon it every time it's accused of some wrongdoing, forgetting that the exact same principle could more applicably be applied against the West by Russia for the same reasons. ..."
"... If read from a cynical standpoint by anyone who's aware of the true nature of contemporary geopolitics, Younger's speech is actually quite informative because it inadvertently reveals what the West itself is doing to Russia by means of projecting its own actions onto its opponent . ..."
"... That in and of itself is actually the very essence of Hybrid War , which is commonly understood to largely include blatantly deceptive techniques such as the one that the UK's top spy is unabashedly attempting to pull off. ..."
"... Accusing one's adversaries of the exact same thing that you yourself are doing is a classic method of deflecting attention from one's own actions by pretending that you're being victimized by the selfsame, which therefore "justifies" escalating tensions by portraying all hostile acts as "proactive defensive responses to aggression". ..."
"... Basically, the British spymaster just sloppily revealed his hand to Russia while attempting to implicate it for allegedly conducting "fourth generation espionage" against the UK. ..."
Dec 09, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,

The head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) Alex Younger briefed the public about the challenges of so-called " fourth generation espionage ".

The UK's top spy spent some of his time blaming Russia for trying to, as he put it, "subvert the UK way of life" by supposedly poisoning the Skripals and through other mischievous but ultimately never verified actions, though moving beyond the infowar aspect of his speech and into its actual professional substance, he nevertheless touched on some interesting themes.

According to him, "fourth generation espionage" involves "deepening our partnerships to counter hybrid threats, mastering covert action in the data age, attaching a cost to malign activity by adversaries and innovating to ensure that technology works to our advantage."

In other words, it's all about applying what he calls the "Fusion Doctrine" for building the right domestic and international teams across skillsets in order to best leverage new technologies for accomplishing his agency's eternal mission, which is "to understand the motivations, intentions and aspirations of people in other countries."

While he remarked that the so-called "hybrid threats" associated with "fourth generation espionage" necessitate "being able to take steps to change [targets'] behavior", this has actually been part and parcel of the intelligence profession since time immemorial, albeit nowadays facilitated by social media and other technological platforms that allow shadowy actors such as the UK's own "77th Brigade" to carry out psychological, influence, and informational operations.

Younger warned that "bulk data combined with modern analytics" could be "a serious challenge" if used against his country , obviously alluding to Cambridge Analytica's purported weaponization of these cutting-edge technological processes to supposedly "hack" elections, though neglecting to draw any attention to the fact that his intelligence agency and its allies could conceivably do the same in advance of their own interests, something that everyone who uses Western-based social media platforms is theoretically at risk of having happen to them.

What Younger is most concerned about, however, are what he describes as the "eroded boundaries" that characterize so-called "hybrid threats" lying between war and peace, which he fears could undermine NATO's Article 5 obligation for all of the military alliance's members to support one another during times of conflict. Considering Russia to be a country that "regards [itself] as being in a state of perpetual confrontation with [the West]", Younger believes that unacceptably high costs must be imposed upon it every time it's accused of some wrongdoing, forgetting that the exact same principle could more applicably be applied against the West by Russia for the same reasons.

He claims that it's the UK that will never respond in kind by destabilizing Russia like Moscow's accused of doing to the UK, but in reality, it's President Putin's so-called "judo moves" which prove that it's Russia who has mastered asymmetrical responses instead. If read from a cynical standpoint by anyone who's aware of the true nature of contemporary geopolitics, Younger's speech is actually quite informative because it inadvertently reveals what the West itself is doing to Russia by means of projecting its own actions onto its opponent .

That in and of itself is actually the very essence of Hybrid War , which is commonly understood to largely include blatantly deceptive techniques such as the one that the UK's top spy is unabashedly attempting to pull off.

Accusing one's adversaries of the exact same thing that you yourself are doing is a classic method of deflecting attention from one's own actions by pretending that you're being victimized by the selfsame, which therefore "justifies" escalating tensions by portraying all hostile acts as "proactive defensive responses to aggression".

Basically, the British spymaster just sloppily revealed his hand to Russia while attempting to implicate it for allegedly conducting "fourth generation espionage" against the UK.

[Dec 09, 2018] Wannabe Zionists (Bolton) has been trying hard to show his loyalty to the Jewish State

Notable quotes:
"... Trump won't fire his son-in-law, so if Jared doesn't have the decency to resign on his own, he may well be responsible for Trump's downfall in addition to his own. Trump's silly daughter, Ivanka, needs to go to. ..."
"... Time for Bolton to send for the clairvoyant Theresa May who has managed to accuse Russia, and Mr. Putin personally, in the Skripals' poisoning n the absence of any evidence ..."
Nov 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

annamaria, November 13, 2018 at 6:43 pm GMT

@Z-man The "wannabe Zionists (Bolton)" has been trying hard to show his loyalty to the Jewish State.

The latest tragicomic attempt by the mustached "person of easy morals": "John Bolton Says "No Evidence" Implicating Crown Prince On Khashoggi Kill Tape" https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-13/john-bolton-says-no-evidence-implicating-crown-prince-khashoggi-kill-tape

Comment section (David Wooten): "According to the crown prince himself, Trump's [Jewish] son-in-law gave him a secret list of his enemies -- the ones like Al Aweed who were tortured and shaken down for cash. Khashoggi might even have been on that list.

One or more of the tortured ones likely tipped off Erdogan, which is why Turkey only needed to enter the consulate, retrieve the recorded audio device they planted, and walk out with the evidence. Turkey also has evidence that puts MbS' personal doctor and other staff arriving in Turkey at convenient times to do the job -- and probably more. Khashoggi was anything but a nice person but Trump cannot say that or he'll likely be accused of involvement in his murder.

Dissociation is made far more difficult by the fact that Jared is a long time friend of Netanyahu who, like Jared, has befriended MbS .

Trump won't fire his son-in-law, so if Jared doesn't have the decency to resign on his own, he may well be responsible for Trump's downfall in addition to his own. Trump's silly daughter, Ivanka, needs to go to.

Were it not for the Khashoggi affair, fewer Republican seats would have been lost in the election."

-- Time for Bolton to send for the clairvoyant Theresa May who has managed to accuse Russia, and Mr. Putin personally, in the Skripals' poisoning n the absence of any evidence .

These people -- Bolton, May, Gavin Williamson and likes -- are a cross of the ever-eager whores and petty brainless thieves. To expose themselves as the willing participants in the ZUSA-conducted farce requires a complete lack of integrity.

Of course, there is no way to indict the journalist's murderers since the principal murderer is a personal friend of Netanyahu and Jared.

Jump, Justice, jump, as high as ordered by the "chosen."

By the way, why do we hear nothing about Seth Rich who was murdered in the most surveilled city of the US?

Z-man , says: November 13, 2018 at 7:21 pm GMT
@annamaria A 1st grader can see that MbS was behind the murder of Kashoggi.

Trump won't fire his son-in-law, so if Jared doesn't have the decency to resign on his own, he may well be responsible for Trump's downfall in addition to his own. Trump's silly daughter, Ivanka, needs to go to.

I've been hoping for this since they moved to Washington with 'big daddy'.

annamaria , says: November 14, 2018 at 12:49 pm GMT
@Anon " crappy bedtime reading the woolyheadedness "

Hey, Anon[436], is this how your parents have been treating you? My condolences.

If you feel that you succeeded with your "see, a squirrel" tactics of taking attention from the zionists' dirty and amoral attempts at coverup of the murder of the journalists Khashoggi, which was accomplished on the orders of the clown prince (the dear friend of Bibi & Jared), you are for a disappointment.

One more time for you, Anon[436]: the firm evidence of MbS involvement in the murder of Khashoggi contrasts with no evidence of the alleged poisoning of Skripals by Russian government.

The zionists have been showing an amazing tolerance towards the clown prince the murderer because zionists need the clown prince for the implementation of Oded Yinon Plan for Eretz Israel.

The stinky Skripals' affair involves harsh economic actions imposed on the RF in the absence of any evidence , as compared to no sanctions in response to the actual murder of Khashoggi, which involved MbS according to the available evidence . Thanks to the zionists friendship with the clown prince, the firm evidence of Khashoggi murder is of no importance. What else could be expected from the "most moral" Bibi & Kushner and the treasonous Bolton.

Z-man , says: November 14, 2018 at 1:58 pm GMT
@annamaria

The stinky Skripals' affair involves harsh economic actions imposed on the RF in the absence of any evidence, as compared to no sanctions in response to the actual murder of Khashoggi, which involved MbS according to the available evidence. Thanks to the zionists friendship with the clown prince, the firm evidence of Khashoggi murder is of no importance. What else could be expected from the "most moral" Bibi & Kushner and the treasonous Bolton.

Bears repeating.

[Dec 08, 2018] The zionized MIC and the "biased" truth about Russia's stance towards the West

Dec 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Anya , Dec 6, 2018 11:32:15 AM | link

The zionized MIC and the "biased" truth about Russia's stance towards the West:
http://thesaker.is/why-russia-wont-invade-the-ukraine-the-baltic-statelets-or-anybody-else/

"Today, just like in 1911, Russia needs internal and external peace more than anything else, and that is not what she would get if she got involved in some foreign military adventure! In fact, attacking an alliance which includes three nuclear power would be suicidal, and the Russians are anything but suicidal."

The zionized MIC has been prevailing because of money. The uncounted and unaccountable money: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50711.htm

The practice of DoD "violates Article I Section 9 of the US Constitution, which stipulates that, "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time." ... The status quo has been generating ever-higher DoD budgets for decades...

The losers in this situation are everyone else. The Pentagon's accounting fraud diverts many billions of dollars that could be devoted to other national needs: health care, education, job creation, climate action, infrastructure modernization, and more. Indeed, the Pentagon's accounting fraud amounts to theft on a grand scale -- theft not only from America's taxpayers, but also from the nation's well-being and its future."

[Dec 08, 2018] The British, most directly, and then the US Brennan-Hayden (ok, he is no longer operational) CIA-Deep State are launching myriad ops to wedge Trump in (Khashoggi, current CentCom terror ops in Syria, and Ukraine now).

Notable quotes:
"... The British, most directly, and then the US Brennan-Hayden (ok, he is no longer operational) CIA-Deep State are launching myriad ops to wedge Trump in (Khashoggi, current CentCom terror ops in Syria, and Ukraine now). ..."
"... Ukrainian and British officials all agreed that a safe and secure Ukraine is necessary for the safety and security of Europe. The time for talk from Ukraine's so-called allies is long over. It's time to act." -- The article is otherwise full of juicy nonsense: I highly recommend it. ..."
Dec 08, 2018 | thesaker.is

GeorgeG on November 28, 2018 , · at 11:27 am EST/EDT

Short overview as it looks from my current perch: Piggy Poro will go down in history , way down, that's for sure.

1. The British, most directly, and then the US Brennan-Hayden (ok, he is no longer operational) CIA-Deep State are launching myriad ops to wedge Trump in (Khashoggi, current CentCom terror ops in Syria, and Ukraine now). If the Trump-Putin meeting a G20 falls through, it would not necessarily be a definitive signal; if it does not fall through, that would be a definitive signal. Yes, MI-6 and the US cohorts are anxious about the "declassification" of FISA and other documents, both because of Russiagate as well as the definitive disenfranchisment it entails. That makes the timing of Piggy's Kerch fiasco important.

2. At the moment, the European or NATO response is not what the British or CIA expected or wanted.

a. Yesterday Ursula von der Leyen, German Defense Minster, spoke at a security conference covered by Sputnik (German): "Russia has Europe in check" was the headline, "check" as in chess, which in a chess game sometimes means not just a single check, but chasing the opponent with "checks" over the board until finally declaring "checkmate."

b. https://www.kyivpost.com/article/opinion/op-ed/jack-laurenson-in-this-dark-hour-where-are-ukraines-allies.html?cn-reloaded=1 In this dark hour, where are Ukraine's allies?, "The Kremlin wants to know how much it can get away with. If the response so far, in the last day or so, is a measure of that, then Moscow will likely feel emboldened to push even further. There is still time for NATO and the West to respond, but the question on everyone's lips is how and whether the political will and strength to do so exists." The end: "At Ukrainian Week in London this October, Ukrainian and British officials all agreed that a safe and secure Ukraine is necessary for the safety and security of Europe. The time for talk from Ukraine's so-called allies is long over. It's time to act." -- The article is otherwise full of juicy nonsense: I highly recommend it.

c. https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-russia-putin-is-in-control/ 'Putin is in control' Europe stands by as Russian president goes after Ukraine. "BERLIN -- Chalk another one up for Vlad." "To be perfectly honest, we don't have many options," a senior European official said. "We don't want to risk war, but Putin is already waging one. That makes us look weak." Given Europe's dearth of options, its leaders revert to hackneyed pronouncements about the importance of dialogue and, as German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas put it, "de-escalation on both sides."

d. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/27/ukraines-new-front-is-europes-big-challenge/ Ukraine's New Front Is Europe's Big Challenge -- There's plenty Europe should do to push back against Russia's latest attack on Ukraine.
There's plenty Europe should do to push back against Russia's latest attack on Ukraine. By Carl Bildt, Nicu Popescu. -- Juicy nonsense galore, a plea sent into the winds.

e. http://time.com/5463988/russia-ukraine-trump-putin-g20/?utm_source=RC+Defense+Morning+Recon&utm_campaign=1f01df16ac-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_11_27_07_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_694f73a8dc-1f01df16ac-85033789 President Trump Could Help Stop a War Between Russia and Ukraine -- But Only If He Will Stand Up to Putin -- Admiral Stavridis (Ret.) was the 16th Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and is an Operating Executive at The Carlyle Group. "

f. https://www.afpc.org/publications/articles/why-is-the-sea-of-azov-so-important -- Atlantidc Council -- Stephen Blank -- Why Is the Sea of Azov So Important? "Moreover, even a casual examination of Russian actions reveals the deep and continuing parallels with China's equally illegitimate actions in the South and East China Sea. In the Asian case, the United States has mounted and continues to stage numerous Freedom of Navigation Operations to demonstrate to China that it will uphold the time-honored principle of the freedom of the seas. This principle is no less at stake in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Ideally, NATO, at Kyiv's invitation, should send a fleet to Mariupol to shatter the pretense of Russian sovereignty and show Putin that the invasion of Ukraine has brought NATO into Ukraine. This is precisely the outcome Russia aimed to avert."

And that is what, at the moment, "NATO" of "the Europeans" apparently do not want. Send a fleet to Mariupol? -- Ask the Germans: they have a few speed boats that might not get stuck.

Poroshenko seems to be on the way to demonstrating that NATO is irrelevant.

[Dec 07, 2018] Theresa May's Husband's Capital Group Is Largest Shareholder in BAE

Dec 07, 2018 | www.unz.com

Anon [144] Disclaimer , says: December 7, 2018 at 3:23 am GMT

Theresa May's Husband's Capital Group Is Largest Shareholder in BAE

Philip May's Capital Group owned around 7.09% of Lockheed Martin

Theresa May's Husband's Investment Firm Made a "Financial Killing" from the Bombing of Syria

https://www.globalresearch.ca/disgusting-conflict-of-interest-theresa-mays-husbands-investment-firm-made-a-financial-killing-from-the-bombing-of-syria/5636632


The Brits recently landed in Mexico. Will they use the Mercosur-EU FTAS to secretly continue to hold the grip on Europe?
Will they install additional military bases in MAKEDONIA, ALBANIA, KOSOVA the heroin-smuggling human trafficking FAKE US state, BULGARIA, to finish the AMBO pipeline from IRAQ to GREECE?

City of London
Parasites' Paradise (Or the Best Criminal Sanctuary Money Can Buy)

From: Newsbud.com

"with multi-billion pound drug, arms, people smuggling and sex-slave cartels. The "Brits" specialize in laundering funds from the Mexican, Colombian, Peruvian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Nigerian narco-kings. Albanian white slavers have their 'private bankers' at prestigious City banks with a preference for graduates of the London School of Economics. Bi-lingual Greek kleptocrats, lifelong billion dollar tax evaders, fleeing from their pillaged homeland have their favorite real estate brokers, who never engage in any sort of naughty 'due diligence' which might uncover improper tax returns. The City Boys with verve and positive initiative, aided and abetted by the hyper-kinetic "Tony" Blair's open door policy to swindlers and saints of all colors and creeds, welcomed each and every Russian gangster-oligarch-democrat, especially those who paid cash for multi-pound 'Olde English' landmark estates'.

MONSTERS:

Miro23 , says: December 7, 2018 at 3:45 am GMT
@JLK naling of open frontiers and multiculturalism among the educated (indoctrinated).

For example, it's still completely unacceptable in middle class British society to support Nationalism (you're a Nazi) or Anglo racial identity (other races are welcome to their identities – but if you're and Anglo you're a racist).

It will eventually be resolved by the people who don't care (the working class), who will toss out their elite and their "educated" middle class collaborators – in fact it's already happening with Brexit – check out the Daily Mail comments section.

[Dec 06, 2018] Tom Kirkman

Notable quotes:
"... The psychological reason behind this trick has to do with "pattern recognition". Human beings – through evolution – have learned to identify a phenomenon as real and true because it repeats again and again and again ..."
"... The American knee-jerk reaction to the recent Kerch bridge incident is a case in point. Ignoring facts, people automatically placed Russian behavior in the "aggressive" category because they have been programed by constant repetition for many years to think this way. Not having been taught this trick of the mind even educated people buy into the narrative unaware that their schemata dictate that the belief must be reinforced. All experiences regarding Russia are simply put into one box labeled "aggressive behavior". ..."
"... Another psychological cause of why Americans buy into the "Russia is aggressive" narrative is due to "confirmation bias". For a variety of reasons many Americans demonize Russians. Part of this is due to the fact that people actually enjoy having a "bad guy" to hate. This is why outlaw cowboys and mafia gangsters are so popular in American culture. We love our "anti-heroes" as much if not more than our heroes. Putin, of course, is the prototypical "baddie". He's a real-life Boris from the Bullwinkle cartoon who satisfies our need to boo and hiss the proverbial bad guy. ..."
Dec 04, 2018 | community.oilprice.com

Tom Kirkman

Normally I don't quote entire articles, but this is a Panic Service Announcement (and a gentle ribbing).

My comment at the bottom, after the article.

The Psychological Origins of American Russophobia

The main reason so many Americans buy into the anti-Russian craze is not only due to what people are told by the government and media, but by how they think and process information. For if Americans were taught how to analyze and think properly they would not fall for the blatant propaganda.

For example, we are told that the Nazis discovered the secret of repetition as a means of programming people into believing something to be true, but we are not taught why this practice is so effective.

The psychological reason behind this trick has to do with "pattern recognition". Human beings – through evolution – have learned to identify a phenomenon as real and true because it repeats again and again and again. After a while, the mind interprets this consistent pattern as proof of truth value. In psychological terms, "schemata" are created by a layering of memories similar in nature over time so that all events associated with the phenomenon are perceived through a prism of previous repetitions. In other words, even if a certain type of behavior is different from the norm it will still be identified as belonging to the typical pattern regardless. It is literally a trick of the mind.

The American knee-jerk reaction to the recent Kerch bridge incident is a case in point. Ignoring facts, people automatically placed Russian behavior in the "aggressive" category because they have been programed by constant repetition for many years to think this way. Not having been taught this trick of the mind even educated people buy into the narrative unaware that their schemata dictate that the belief must be reinforced. All experiences regarding Russia are simply put into one box labeled "aggressive behavior".

Another psychological cause of why Americans buy into the "Russia is aggressive" narrative is due to "confirmation bias". For a variety of reasons many Americans demonize Russians. Part of this is due to the fact that people actually enjoy having a "bad guy" to hate. This is why outlaw cowboys and mafia gangsters are so popular in American culture. We love our "anti-heroes" as much if not more than our heroes. Putin, of course, is the prototypical "baddie". He's a real-life Boris from the Bullwinkle cartoon who satisfies our need to boo and hiss the proverbial bad guy.

To a certain extent, pattern recognition comes into play as well because in America TV shows and films over the past two decades evil Russian spies and mafia types have figured prominently. The repeating portrayals create schemata which then create stereotypes that frame how we think.

Russophobia, however, will not last forever because it is essentially based upon lies. Truth always wins out over time and fantasy gives way to reality. Despite the censorship on social media and the attempts to silence RT America the truth will eventually triumph.

For gagging the tongue of truth is always followed by a long-suppressed shout that echoes ever louder throughout the ages.

===============================

My comment:

The most basic form of mind control is repetition.
The most basic form of mind control is repetition.
The most basic form of mind control is repetition.
... ... ...
The most basic form of mind control is repetition.

Marina Schwarz
Well, Dr. Paul Whatshisname is obviously an agent of Putin. Did I even need to say this?

On a serious note, repetition works perhaps shockingly well. I was taught in my childhood that Germans are bad because Hitler and Russia was good because twice saviors. Simple and effective. However, with no social media at the time, critical thinking was also available so I could outgrow the propaganda.

A/Plague

... ... ...

Are you on a salary in "Russia Today" or a volunteer?

Tom Kirkman
On 12/5/2018 at 10:29 AM, A/Plague said: Are you on a salary in "Russia Today" or a volunteer?

I try to gently (and if possible, humorously) nudge people to question the "official narrative". CNN / WaPo is far worse propaganda than RT. RT is clearly biased, but they are open about their pro-Russia bias. CNN pretends to be objective "journalism".

And sometimes I feel like commenting in the same vein of this little guy, bouncing all over excitedly:

https://twitter.com/i/status/945219733464469504

Marina Schwarz
By the way, did you know RT was nominated for an Emmy this year? It actually has a few nominations. Shocking, right? I suspect a lot of the people who say "Ew, RT, propaganda," have never read anything from RT. I have. they regularly republish Reuters and the FT as well as major U.s. outlets. I don't know what to think about that, it's so confusing.
Tom Kirkman
16 hours ago, Marina Schwarz said: By the way, did you know RT was nominated for an Emmy this year? It actually has a few nominations. Shocking, right? I suspect a lot of the people who say "Ew, RT, propaganda," have never read anything from RT. I have. they regularly republish Reuters and the FT as well as major U.s. outlets. I don't know what to think about that, it's so confusing.

https://www.rt.com/about-us/

Dan Warnick
16 hours ago, Marina Schwarz said: By the way, did you know RT was nominated for an Emmy this year? It actually has a few nominations. Shocking, right? I suspect a lot of the people who say "Ew, RT, propaganda," have never read anything from RT. I have. they regularly republish Reuters and the FT as well as major U.s. outlets. I don't know what to think about that, it's so confusing.

When I read their articles I am mindful that they are Russian. Having said that, they seem to publish a lot of good content, and much of it is from Reuters and other (mostly) reputable sources. Editorials are free for anyone to research for themselves. Pretty much the same as other pubs.

Rodent
Laying conspiracy theories aside for one moment (and I do so love a good conspiracy theory), let's chat about this Russia panic.

I am not one to panic in general. Sure, I have a food, guns, and water stash in my basement. I'm generally well prepared. There are Russia-is-the-boogeyman theories, and then there are Russia-boogey-man-theories-are-silly theories. Of course they both can't be right.

But where do these theories come from?

I am sure I'm not going to do a very good job explaining my self in the rant that follows. But I'm going to give it a good college try.

I want to talk about the Russia Boogeyman theory. First, there's no way to explain this other than to divulge my age. So I'm just going to spit it out right here and get that out of the way. I'm 40. I've been 40 for approximately 5 years, stubbornly refusing to go further than that. There. I said it. Now that that's out of the way, it's important to note that children are sponges. As such, they are impressionable and in young childhood, traumatic events can have a profound and lasting effect, and even change how someone thinks.

When I was about 10ish, in about 1983, a movie came out. If you lived in America, and likely even if you didn't, and you're over the age of 40 (or if you've been 40 for a while), you've seen it. It's a movie called "The Day After". It was a huge production and it aired on television. The most watched TV movie ever. And ranked as one of the top 10 movies ever by several sources. You millennial whippersnappers will have no clue what I'm talking about. Read on anyway, if you'd like. I'm all inclusive.

The movie was about nuclear warfare, and most importantly, the aftermath. The setting was a small town in Kansas, I think. A small town that very closely resembled my home town, making it particularly impactful (I know that's not a word. Sue me.) to me at the time. In the movie, which although was a complete work of fiction was very realistic, Russia unleashed nuclear weapons. It was freaky. So eerily unsettling was it that I obsessed about it after I saw it. I thought about it every night. I remember being so afraid that in the event of a nuclear blast, I might be separated from my family. I remember pondering if I would rather be obliterated in the blast immediately, or whether I would prefer to be spared instant death only to survive without my family under horrid conditions. I also remember drills at school around that same time that were designed to get people prepared in the event of such a disaster. While it may have done so, it also solidified in my mind that there was a real possibility these events would unfold.

Nearly two years post-freaky-movie, Sting released it's "Russia" song, about Russians loving their children too. Although it was not talked about much at the time, since life proceeded as normal, in my mind I remember thinking that I didn't much care if the Russians loved their children, because they were looking to wipe us off the map. And I lived near the Soo Locks, and I distinctly remember knowing (but I don't have any idea where I came by this information) that the Locks would be a nuclear target in the event of a strike, since it is a main thoroughfare for ships.

You can't undo that kind of fear, no more than you can undo my fear of spiders. I know in my head that spiders, at least where I live, are not poisonous and they cannot harm me. I know it. But my head cannot eradicate the intense creepiness that even thinking about spiders conjures up. Likewise, no rational thought about Russia can completely undo a fear that was borne as a child.

There you have it. My Russia hysteria may be founded or unfounded--I know not. But I do not have the power within me to change this mindset.

Okay Russia-boogeyman-theories-are-silly promoters: fire away.

@Tom Kirkman @Marina Schwarz

Dan Warnick
Great description of what life was like back then, er, so I was told, by older people. Not those of us born in the 60's, er, I mean the 70's, er, the 80's. Yeah, that's it, the 80's!
Marina Schwarz
We had attack training at school in the 80s -- complete with gas masks and stuff -- on the other side of the Iron Curtain for when the imperialists invaded, what can I say. I was too distracted by everything to pay attention, though. @Rodent , your story tells me your propaganda was better than our propaganda, perish the thought. The Cold War was a blast, right?

P.S. Stephen King has done a really good overview of this stage in the U.S. entertainment industry, by the way. The stages of horror in movies. behind the curtain we only had heroic movies about the Second World War. I shall now hypothesize that the Soviet bloc lost the Cold War because its entertainment industry was absent. End of hypothesizing. Thank you for your attention.

Rodent
8 hours ago, Marina Schwarz said: We had attack training at school in the 80s -- complete with gas masks and stuff -- on the other side of the Iron Curtain for when the imperialists invaded, what can I say. I was too distracted by everything to pay attention, though. @Rodent , your story tells me your propaganda was better than our propaganda, perish the thought. The Cold War was a blast, right?

P.S. Stephen King has done a really good overview of this stage in the U.S. entertainment industry, by the way. The stages of horror in movies. behind the curtain we only had heroic movies about the Second World War. I shall now hypothesize that the Soviet bloc lost the Cold War because its entertainment industry was absent. End of hypothesizing. Thank you for your attention.

Makes sense. Not surprisingly the movie makers (supposedly) did not want to have Russia be the first striker in the movie, but they needed to borrow some footage from the DoD, and the govt. refused to play ball unless Russia struck first. The guy who made the movie, while he was making it, reportedly would go home at night literally sick to his stomach at the horrific nature of the movie. It went rounds and rounds with the censors who thought it might not be suitable for families.

Also interesting, speaking of Russia-led propaganda, and coming from someone who has dabbled a tiny bit in white-hatishness, if you google "The Day After Russia" as I did to inquire about the movie, there is actually a Russian movie titled "the day after" about zombies. Yup, let's just bury those search results! It's a conspiracy!!!

There is another interesting thread here about the different search results showing up for different people. What shows up when YOU google "The Day After"?

Rodent
You know, speaking of conspiracies, there is a fairly logical opinion that that movie was designed to scare the bajeezus out of people so they wouldn't vote for Reagan a second term.

[Dec 05, 2018] Integrity Initiative Organizing Neo-macarthyism and the new Cold War

Notable quotes:
"... 26 November 2018 ..."
Dec 03, 2018 | Defend Democracy Press
Greetings. We are Anonymous. We have obtained a large number of documents relating to the activities of the 'Integrity Initiative' project that was launched back in the fall of 2015 and funded by the British government.

The declared goal of the project is to counteract Russian propaganda and the hybrid warfare of Moscow. Hiding behind benevolent intentions, Britain has in fact created a large-scale information secret service in Europe, the United States and Canada, which consists of representatives of political, military, academic and journalistic communities with the think tank in London at the head of it.

Read more at https://www.cyberguerrilla.org/blog/operation-integrity-initiative-british-informational-war-against-all/

'UK Integrity Initiative is Meddling in The Affairs of Other Nations' 26.11.2018

A leaked hybrid warfare plan of the British government, known as the "Integrity Initiative," published by the hacker group Anonymous, has become a theme of discussion among scholars in Europe. Sputnik spoke to Professor David Miller of the University of Bristol on a plan allegedly adopted by London to counter "Russian propaganda." Sputnik: It [Integrity Initiative] states that its main aim is to counter Russian disinformation, however, what was happening with the Moncloa Campaign' in Spain suggests other motives does it not? Read more at https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201811261070148913-uk-integrity-russia-propaganda/

Statement on Russian media publication of hacked II documents 26 November 2018

"The Integrity Initiative is a partnership of several independent institutions led by The Institute for Statecraft. This international public programme was set up in 2015 to counter disinformation and other forms of malign influence being conducted by states and sub-state actors seeking to interfere in democratic processes and to undermine public confidence in national political institutions. You will find details on the website ( https://www.integrityinitiative.net/ ), and you can follow the programme on its Twitter account or on Facebook (both @InitIntegrity). Read more at https://www.integrityinitiative.net/articles/statement-russian-media-publication-hacked-ii-documents Read also: In Defence of Democratic Rights in Catalonia

EU-wide 'anti-Russian psy-ops' program confirms UK govt funding, Anonymous denies leak 26 Nov, 2018

A network exposed by leaked documents as a Europe-wide PR operation aimed at curbing "Russian propaganda" has confirmed receiving money from the British government, while Anonymous has denied on Twitter that it's behind the leak. The Integrity Initiative (II) is a network claiming to fight disinformation that threatens democracy. A trove of alleged II documents, which purports to show costs and internal guidelines as well as names of individuals cooperating with it, has been published by people claiming to be part of the Anonymous collective. A major Anonymous-linked Twitter account has denied it was linked to the leak. Read more at https://www.rt.com/news/444899-uk-psyop-leak-reaction/

Moncloa Campaign 6 AttTwitter Read more at https://www.scribd.com/document/392195691/Moncloa-Campaign-6-AttTwitter-08-06-18 Also read

A MUST SEE: Gladio or Undermining Democracy "to Fight the Soviets"
Dec 05, 2018 | www.defenddemocracy.press

[Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Rather, they seem to appear to reveal a plot by the British intelligence and security services working in collusion with then CIA Director John Brennan to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out? ..."
Dec 05, 2018 | www.unz.com
121 Comments Reply

And there are other friends in unlikely places. Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate. The real problem is that the documents apparently don't expose anything done by the Russians.

Rather, they seem to appear to reveal a plot by the British intelligence and security services working in collusion with then CIA Director John Brennan to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out?

So how about it? Teenagers who get in trouble often have to ditch their bad friends to turn their lives around. There is still a chance for the United States if we keep our distance from the bad friends we have been nurturing all around the world, friends who have been convincing us to make poor choices. Get rid of the ties the bind to the Saudis, Israelis, Ukrainians, Poles, and yes, even the British. Deal fairly with all nations and treat everyone the same, but bear in mind that there are only two relationships that really matter – Russia and China. Make a serious effort to avoid a war by learning how to get along with those two nations and America might actually survive to celebrate a tricentennial in 2076.

The Alarmist , says: December 4, 2018 at 10:39 am GMT
You don't say; British Collusion to influence the 2016 US Presidential elections. Why, if the beneficiary was anyone other than a Democrat, much less one named Clinton, someone might actually appoint a Special Counsel to look into it, not to mention the misdeeds of the various agencies and departments who aided and abetted it.
anon [178] Disclaimer , says: December 4, 2018 at 11:43 am GMT
"You don't say; British Collusion to influence the 2016 US Presidential elections."

MI6, along with elements of the CIA, was behind the Steele Dossier. Representatives of John Brennan met in London to discus before the go ahead was given. They later put Michael Steele onto the project; he was a guy with credible Russian contacts. Basically, the scam worked like this:

They funneled an MI6 intelligence file to Michael Steele (governments routinely keep such files on influential foreigners and what they are up to) so he could use his contacts to launder the information and make it appear that it came from sources within Russia; they then funneled the report back to elements of the FBI so they could use it to justify to the FISA court a spying campaign on Trump (the FBI illegally withheld the source of the document); they found nothing proving any Russian connection but they kept the spy program going; they tried justifying the spy program with a fake story involving a reliable asset that once passed information from Jimmy Carter's campaign to George H.W. Bush in an effort to help Reagan win the 1980 election; they later paid the asset nearly a quarter million dollars for his efforts using a fake "India-China" grant despite the grant running to 2018, the asset attempted to get a job in the Trump administration so he could act as a mole ; the Obama regime purposely mishandled information in regards to the spying program (ex: Michael Steele leaked his document to various news sources before the election and later lied to congress about it), ensuring it would leak to the press; the Obama regime illegally unmasked elements of Trump's personal contacts so they could clandestinely leak suggested targets off the record to the right people

They lost the election anyway, so they then planted dirt and negative press to make the document look legit – lies about Manafort meeting Assange (Guardian is funded by the British government to police the left), WaPo lies claiming a vast Russian conspiracy just as Trump came into office (it was an effort to delegitimize him and create calls for Hillary to take his place), leaking bank records, the special counsel .and leaking information on Trump policies to the media using a secret security clearance credentials program enacted by Obama. They also ran interference through CIA guys like Mark Warner in an effort to cover up the mole they planted; they falsely asserted this was a national security issue when the man's identity was well-known to the press and he was never an undercover spy like Jarret was, at least not in recent history.

To put this all into perspective, imagine the following scenario:

The government takes cctv footage of you at a grocery store; in the background there is an attractive woman. The woman then goes missing. The government illegally reads your emails and finds that you like sexual jokes. The government then interviews a friend of yours who claims that you once made a risque rape joke back in college. They also plant a mole in your workplace who befriends you and reports back all of your politically incorrect humor. Then the cops find the woman's body and the government claims that you killed her because you were in the area at the time and you make bad jokes, which has been confirmed by multiple credible people. You look guilty, don't you? The government 1) took information out of context 2) laundered circumstantial evidence through a credible witness when they originally obtained it elsewhere using nefarious sources. That's what they did to Trump, but much much much worse.

Johnny Walker Read , says: December 4, 2018 at 1:38 pm GMT
Like a friends divorce lawyer told him: You go to bed with a nasty bitch, you wake up with a nasty bitch.
Johnny Rottenborough , says: Website December 4, 2018 at 1:46 pm GMT
a plot by the British intelligence and security services to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out?

Deep State and Establishment stooge Donald Trump.

There is still a chance for the United States if we

declare independence from the Jewish Empire.

[Dec 05, 2018] Manufacturing Official Narrative by C.J. Hopkins

Guardian is just a propaganda outlet. That sad fact does not exclude the possibility of publishing really good articles, thouth. That still happens occasionally.
The fact that they follow MI6 and Foreign Office talking points in all foreign events coverage a is just a testament the GB is a "national security state". Nothing more, nothing less.
Notable quotes:
"... I'm not going to debunk the Guardian article here. It has been debunked by better debunkers than I (e.g., Jonathan Cook , Craig Murray , Glenn Greenwald , Moon of Alabama , and many others). ..."
"... The short version is, The Guardian 's Luke Harding, a shameless hack who will affix his name to any propaganda an intelligence agency feeds him, alleged that Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, secretly met with Julian Assange (and unnamed "Russians") on numerous occasions from 2013 to 2016, presumably to conspire to collude to brainwash Americans into not voting for Clinton. Harding's earth-shaking allegations, which The Guardian prominently featured and flogged, were based on well, absolutely nothing, except the usual anonymous "intelligence sources." After actual journalists pointed this out, The Guardian quietly revised the piece ( employing the subjunctive mood rather liberally ), buried it in the back pages of its website, and otherwise pretended like they had never published it. ..."
"... By that time, of course, its purpose had been served. The story had been picked up and disseminated by other "respectable," "authoritative" outlets, and it was making the rounds on social media. Nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution, in an attempt to counter the above-mentioned debunkers (and dispel the doubts of anyone else still capable of any kind of critical thinking), Politico posted this ass-covering piece speculating that, if it somehow turned out The Guardian 's story was just propaganda designed to tarnish Assange and Trump well, probably, it had been planted by the Russians to make Luke Harding look like a moron. This ass-covering piece of speculative fiction, which was written by a former CIA agent, was immediately disseminated by liberals and "leftists" who are eagerly looking forward to the arrest, rendition, and public crucifixion of Assange. ..."
"... And this is why The Guardian will not be punished for publishing a blatantly fabricated story. Nor will Luke Harding be penalized for writing it. Luke Harding will be rewarded for writing it, as he has been handsomely rewarded throughout his career for loyally serving the ruling classes. Greenwald, on the other hand, is on thin ice. It will be instructive to see how far he pushes his confrontation with The Guardian regarding this story. ..."
"... It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. ..."
"... Those who are conforming to [official truth] are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so. ..."
"... The powerless are either servants of power or they are heretics. There is no third alternative. ..."
"... It is important to realize that "the truth" is not going to "rouse the masses from their slumber" and inspire them to throw off their chains. People are not going to suddenly "wake up," "see the truth" and start "the revolution." ..."
"... The distinction is simple. We can't know the truth about distant and complex events like 9/11 or JFK unless we were directly involved, and those people are all dead. For big events we have to rely on, or ignore, the official accounts. ..."
"... Given all this, still, we can approach an approximation of truth that some can agree on. Here is where the trouble starts . ..."
Dec 03, 2018 | www.unz.com

...First, let's look at a concrete example of our system manufacturing official narrative (aka "official truth" or "truth" -- note quotes ). I'm going to use The Guardian 's most recent blatantly fabricated article (" Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy ") as an example, but I could just as well have chosen any of a host of other fabricated stories disseminated by "respectable" outlets over the course of the last two years. The " Russian Propaganda Peddlers " story. The " Russia Might Have Poisoned Hillary Clinton " story. The " Russians Hacked the Vermont Power Grid " story. The " Golden Showers Russian Pee-Tape " story. The " Novichok Assassins " story. The " Bana Alabed Speaks Out " story. The " Trump's Secret Russian Server " story. The " Labour Anti-Semitism Crisis " story. The " Russians Orchestrated Brexit " story. The " Russia is Going to Hack the Midterms " story. The " Twitter Bots " story. And the list goes on.

I'm not going to debunk the Guardian article here. It has been debunked by better debunkers than I (e.g., Jonathan Cook , Craig Murray , Glenn Greenwald , Moon of Alabama , and many others).

The short version is, The Guardian 's Luke Harding, a shameless hack who will affix his name to any propaganda an intelligence agency feeds him, alleged that Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, secretly met with Julian Assange (and unnamed "Russians") on numerous occasions from 2013 to 2016, presumably to conspire to collude to brainwash Americans into not voting for Clinton. Harding's earth-shaking allegations, which The Guardian prominently featured and flogged, were based on well, absolutely nothing, except the usual anonymous "intelligence sources." After actual journalists pointed this out, The Guardian quietly revised the piece ( employing the subjunctive mood rather liberally ), buried it in the back pages of its website, and otherwise pretended like they had never published it.

By that time, of course, its purpose had been served. The story had been picked up and disseminated by other "respectable," "authoritative" outlets, and it was making the rounds on social media. Nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution, in an attempt to counter the above-mentioned debunkers (and dispel the doubts of anyone else still capable of any kind of critical thinking), Politico posted this ass-covering piece speculating that, if it somehow turned out The Guardian 's story was just propaganda designed to tarnish Assange and Trump well, probably, it had been planted by the Russians to make Luke Harding look like a moron. This ass-covering piece of speculative fiction, which was written by a former CIA agent, was immediately disseminated by liberals and "leftists" who are eagerly looking forward to the arrest, rendition, and public crucifixion of Assange.

At this point, I imagine you're probably wondering what this has to do with manufacturing "truth." Because, clearly, this Guardian story was a lie a lie The Guardian got caught telling. I wish the "truth" thing was as simple as that (i.e., exposing and debunking the ruling classes' lies). Unfortunately, it isn't. Here is why.

Much as most people would like there to be one (and behave and speak as if there were one), there is no Transcendental Arbiter of Truth. The truth is what whoever has the power to say it is says it is. If we do not agree that that "truth" is the truth, there is no higher court to appeal to. We can argue until we are blue in the face. It will not make the slightest difference. No evidence we produce will make the slightest difference. The truth will remain whatever those with the power to say it is say it is.

Nor are there many "truths" (i.e., your truth and my truth). There is only one "truth" the "official truth". The "truth" according to those in power. This is the whole purpose of the concept of truth. It is the reason the concept of "truth" was invented (i.e., to render any other "truths" lies). It is how those in power control reality and impose their ideology on the masses (or their employees, or their students, or their children). Yes, I know, we very badly want there to be some "objective truth" (i.e., what actually happened, when whatever happened, JFK, 9-11, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Schrödinger's dead cat, the Big Bang, or whatever). There isn't. The truth is just a story a story that is never our story.

The "truth" is a story that power gets to tell, and that the powerless do not get to tell, unless they tell the story of those in power, which is always someone else's story. The powerless are either servants of power or they are heretics. There is no third alternative. They either parrot the "truth" of the ruling classes or they utter heresies of one type or another. Naturally, the powerless do not regard themselves as heretics. They do not regard their "truth" as heresy. They regard their "truth" as the truth, which is heresy. The truth of the powerless is always heresy.

For example, while it may be personally comforting for some of us to tell ourselves that we know the truth about certain subjects (e.g., Russiagate, 9-11, et cetera), and to share our knowledge with others who agree with us, and even to expose the lies of the corporate media on Twitter, Facebook, and our blogs, or in some leftist webzine (or "fearless adversarial" outlet bankrolled by a beneficent oligarch), the ruling classes do not give a shit, because ours is merely the raving of heretics, and does not warrant a serious response.

Or all right, they give a bit of a shit, enough to try to cover their asses when a journalist of the stature of Glenn Greenwald (who won a Pulitzer and is frequently on television) very carefully and very respectfully almost directly accuses them of lying. But they give enough of a shit to do this because Greenwald has the power to hurt them, not because of any regard for the truth. This is also why Greenwald has to be so careful and respectful when directly confronting The Guardian , or any other corporate media outlet, and state that their blatantly fabricated stories could, theoretically, turn out to be true. He can't afford to cross the line and end up getting branded a heretic and consigned to Outer Mainstream Darkness, like Robert Fisk, Sy Hersh, Jonathan Cook, John Pilger, Assange, and other such heretics.

Look, I'm not trying to argue that it isn't important to expose the fabrications of the corporate media and the ruling classes. It is terribly important. It is mostly what I do (albeit usually in a more satirical fashion). At the same time, it is important to realize that "the truth" is not going to "rouse the masses from their slumber" and inspire them to throw off their chains. People are not going to suddenly "wake up," "see the truth" and start "the revolution." People already know the truth the official truth, which is the only truth there is. Those who are conforming to it are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so.

And this is why The Guardian will not be punished for publishing a blatantly fabricated story. Nor will Luke Harding be penalized for writing it. Luke Harding will be rewarded for writing it, as he has been handsomely rewarded throughout his career for loyally serving the ruling classes. Greenwald, on the other hand, is on thin ice. It will be instructive to see how far he pushes his confrontation with The Guardian regarding this story.

As for Julian Assange, I'm afraid he is done for. The ruling classes really have no choice but to go ahead and do him at this point. He hasn't left them any other option. Much as they are loathe to create another martyr, they can't have heretics of Assange's notoriety running around punching holes in their "truth" and brazenly defying their authority. That kind of stuff unsettles the normals, and it sets a bad example for the rest of us heretics.

#

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .

Manufacturing Truth

James Forrestal , says: December 3, 2018 at 6:26 pm GMT

Good piece. I think there's another layer, though.

The truth or falsehood of individual facts about the physical world can often be determined with near-certainty. But when it comes to history, or "news" about current events/ politics, reality is much too complex to address directly. Too many individual facts to be comprehensible, let alone useful.

We must pick, choose, emphasize, or ignore particular elements, and arrange them into some kind of structure, in order to form a useful narrative. Or in the case of "news," the legacy media oligarchy largely performs this function for us -- we simply passively accept/ adopt their narrative. Or, in many cases, "choose" between the closely-related variants of that narrative offered by the "liberal" vs. "conservative" press.

This process of abstraction, simplification, and organization inevitably involves data loss. So no narrative is "true" in the same sense that individual facts about the real world are true. But some narratives incorporate large amounts of "facts" that are demonstrably false, and some are more useful/ descriptive/ predictive than others. No one engaged in this process is "objective." They -- or we -- are all in some way part of the story. It should be self-evident that some narratives are more useful to the perceived interests of owners of major media outlets than others, and that these will assume a much more prominent place in their coverage than ones that are deleterious to those interests.

Ideally, most people would take these factors into account when evaluating the "news," and maintain a much more skeptical attitude than they typically do. But there are several factors that prevent this.

One is simply time/ efficiency. These individual narratives, taken together, support -- and are supported by -- our overall worldview. There aren't enough hours in the day to be constantly skeptical about everything, especially since the major tools of distortion involved in constructing mainstream narratives tend to be selection bias/ memory-holing, with obvious lies about known facts (like the Guardian story referenced here) used only sparingly. It's simply not practical to to constantly consider potentially "better" narratives, and to reevaluate one's worldview based on these.

And which narrative we believe often has more to do with perceived social pressure/ social acceptability than with "truth." As you put it,

Those who are conforming to it are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so.

Mass media pushing a common narrative creates an artificial perception of social consensus. Creating, or even finding, alternative narratives means fighting the inertia of this perceived consensus, and potentially suffering social costs for believing in the "wrong" one. The social role of narratives is largely independent of their "truth" -- if what you're "supposed" to believe is highly implausible, that actually gives it higher value as a signal of loyalty to the establishment.

It's probably best to maintain a resolutely agnostic attitude toward most "news" items, unless one is particularly interested in that particular event. " Why are they pushing this particular story?" "Why now ?" and " What are they trying to accomplish here?" are often more useful questions than "Is it true?"

It's not a new issue -- only exacerbated by the advent of mass visual media:
"Propaganda" -- Edward Bernays (1928)
"The Free Press"– Hilaire Belloc (1918)

Kratoklastes , says: December 3, 2018 at 11:17 pm GMT
I get what Hopkins is trying to do here, but redefining terms (i.e., "truth") doesn't do what he thinks it does.

The truth is not ' what most people think '; it's not ' what we are told to believe '; it's not ' the official narrative '.

There is a useful cautionary tale embedded in Hopkins' piece, but he doesn't tease it out properly.

Take this excerpt:

The truth is what whoever has the power to say it is says it is. If we do not agree that that "truth" is the truth, there is no higher court to appeal to. We can argue until we are blue in the face. It will not make the slightest difference. No evidence we produce will make the slightest difference. The truth will remain whatever those with the power to say it is say it is.

With significant caveats, it is a reasonable description of the way the political world works: if the political class decides that its interests are best served by declaring that a specific narrative X is 'true', it will obtain immediate compliance from about half the livestock, and can then rely on force (peer pressure; subsidy or taxation; state coercion) to get an absolute majority of the herd to declare that they accept the 'truth' of X .

If X is objectively false, too bad.

Try to run a legal argument based on the objective falsity of a thing that the political class has deemed to be true: you'll be shit outta luck.

This is highly relevant where I am sitting: here are two examples – one really obvious, one a bit less so (but far more important because of its radical implications).

Obvious Example: Drug Dogs

Recent research has shown that drug sniffing dogs give false positive signals between 60% and 80% of the time – i.e., in terms of identifying people who are in actual physical possession of drugs at any point in time, drug sniffing dogs perform worse than a coin toss.

Note that this is before considering that the dog's handler is often pointing the dog at a target that the handler thinks is likely to be carrying drugs. (Although in reality, drug dogs are paraded around at concerts and in public spaces, sniffing every passer-by).

However there is an Act of Parliament (capitalise all the magic words) that asserts that a signal from a drug sniffing dog is sufficient to qualify as what Americans call "probable cause" – i.e., reasonable suspicion for a search.

Does anyone think that evidence should be admissible if it results from a search conducted based on 'probable cause' derived from a method that produces worse outcomes than tossing a coin?

Judges will tie themselves into absolute epistemological knots to get that evidence admitted – and they will refuse to permit defence Counsel from adducing evidence about drug dog inaccuracy because since the defendant actually did have drugs in their possession, the dog didn't signal falsely.

In other words, the judge conflates posterior probability with prior probability; the prior probability that the dog is correct, is 10%-40%; this should not suffice to generate probable cause (or 'reasonable suspicion).

More Interesting Example: 'Representative' Democracy

In general, Western governments assert that their legitimacy stems from two primary sources: some founding set of principles (usually a constitution – written or otherwise), and 'representativeness' (including ratification of the constitution by a representative mechanism, for those places with written foundational documents).

The Arrow Impossibility Theorem [1,2] and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [3,4], both show that there is no way of accurately determining group preferences using an ordinal voting mechanism.

What this boils down to, is that representativeness is a lie – and it's a lie before any consideration of voting outcomes ; it's a meta -problem (the problem that ordinal voting cannot do what it is claimed to do – viz ., accurately identify the 'will of the people'/'social preferences'/'what the people want').

Beyond the meta-problem, there is also the actual counting problem: no government has ever been elected having obtained the votes of an outright bare majority, i.e., 50%-plus-1 of the entire eligible franchise. (It's more like 25-35% for most parliamentary systems – for US presidential elections in the full-franchise period, the winner is voted for by 29% of the eligible population; you would be horrified to look at US Senate results).

So when the new unhappy lords (and their Little Eichmann bureaucrat enablers) promulgate laws based on assertions of legitimacy because of a constitutional Grundnorm and/or the representative nature of government both of those things are pretty obvious furphies; they are objectively not 'truth' and no amount of heel-clicking and wishing will make it so.

Which brings us to a key legal aphorism that has a jurisprudential history going back four centuries: Ratio legis est anima legis, et mutata legis ratione, mutatur ex lex – which dates from Milborn's case ( Coke 7a KB [1609]).

The reason for a law is the soul of the law, and if the reason for a law has changed, the law is changed .

What this means – explicitly – is that " no law can survive the [extinction of the] reasons on which it is founded ".

American courts re-expressed this as " cessante ratione legis, cessat ipsa lex " (the reason for a law having ceased, the law itself ceases) – e.g., in Funk v. United States , 290 US 371 (1933) in which Justice Sutherland opined –

This means that no law can survive the reasons on which it is founded. It needs no statute to change it; it abrogates itself . If the reasons on which a law rests are overborne by opposing reasons, which in the progress of society gain a controlling force, the old law, though still good as an abstract principle, and good in its application to some circumstances, must cease to apply as a controlling principle to the new circumstances.

(Emphasis mine)

Again: try running this argument in a court: " The asserted basis for all laws promulgated by the government, is provably false. Under a doctrine with a 4-century jurisprudential provenance, the law itself is void ."

See how far you get.

So Hopkins makes a good-but-obvious point – power does not respect either rights or truth; as such it does you no good whatsoever to have the actual truth on your side. He should have made the point better.

References (links are to PDFs of each paper)

[1] Arrow (1950). " A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare " Journal of Political Economy 58 (4): 328–346

[2] Geanakoplos, John (2005). " Three Brief Proofs of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem " Economic Theory 26 (1): 211–215

[3] Gibbard (1973). " Manipulation of voting schemes: a general result " Econometrica 41 (4): 587–601.

[4] Satterthwaite (April 1975). " Strategy-proofness and Arrow's Conditions: Existence and Correspondence Theorems for Voting Procedures and Social Welfare Functions " Journal of Economic Theory 10: 187–217.

Brabantian , says: December 3, 2018 at 11:18 pm GMT
C J Hopkins, despite some good quotes and insights above, regrettably falls into the trap of peddling Derrida-tier relativistic nonsense, playing a word game about 'truth', as if 'truth' was not real merely because most people have strong incentives to avoid being devoted to it

Where you stand depends upon where you sit, etc., Karl Marx's dictums about economic and power positions shaping consciousness, and of course the century-old classic:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

from Upton Sinclair (1878-1968). Hopkins more or less repeats Sinclair when he says

Those who are conforming to [official truth] are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so.

Despite selling-out truth to the relativism devil in some passages, Hopkins nevertheless creates some quotable, including the particularly insightful:

The powerless are either servants of power or they are heretics. There is no third alternative.

The following notion of Hopkins is seen now and then in the alt-sphere, but always bears repeating

It is important to realize that "the truth" is not going to "rouse the masses from their slumber" and inspire them to throw off their chains. People are not going to suddenly "wake up," "see the truth" and start "the revolution."

... ... ...

Kratoklastes , says: December 3, 2018 at 11:28 pm GMT
@Tulip

The coin of truth is iron and blood.

That's absolutely, 100% wrong.

Iron and blood are the tools used to force people to accept what isn't true. (Another way to tell: it was uttered by a fucking politician – a cunt who wanted to live in palaces paid for by the sweat of other people's brows).

Truth does not need violence to propagate itself: in a completely-peaceful system of free exchange, bad ideas (of which lies are a subset) will get driven out of the market place because they will fail to conform to ground truth.

Falsehood requires violence (arguably it is a form of violence: fraud is 'violent' because it causes its victims to misallocate their resources or to deform their preferences and expectations).

In a very real sense, truth does not need friends: all it requires is an absence of powerful enemies.

RobinG , says: December 4, 2018 at 12:21 am GMT
@James Forrestal

Occupation of the American Mind: Israel's Public Relations War in the United States

https://www.occupationmovie.org/

This film shows a great example of propaganda in action. Free to watch now and this link also includes a short version and a trailer.

Jett Rucker , says: Website December 4, 2018 at 3:04 am GMT
When I tell any Truth, it is not for the sake of Convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those who Do.

~ William Blake, 1810

polistra , says: December 4, 2018 at 7:33 am GMT
The distinction is simple. We can't know the truth about distant and complex events like 9/11 or JFK unless we were directly involved, and those people are all dead. For big events we have to rely on, or ignore, the official accounts.

But we CAN know the truth about our own situation, our own neighborhood, and our own families. The current riots in France are a concrete ASSERTION of local truth against the blatant and condescending official lies. The majority of France is getting poorer and suffering more from migrant crime. Macron insists that starvation is necessary to serve Gaia, and crime is necessary to serve Juncker. The people would prefer to have a leader that serves France.

The scalpel , says: Website December 4, 2018 at 1:07 pm GMT
@FB Scientific truth is limited by two factors – assumptions, and hidden variables. For example, we might drop a brick in a vacuum and believe that it falls at 9.8 m/s squared. Here, we make the assumption that the force of gravity is constant. And for most of history we were unaware of the hidden variable of relativity to the speed of light.

So, assuming (LOL) that we are able to eliminate all assumptions and account for all hidden variables, there is a scientific truth. That is ASSUMING we are not just a simulation in someone elses computer!

Given all this, still, we can approach an approximation of truth that some can agree on. Here is where the trouble starts .

DFH , says: December 4, 2018 at 4:05 pm GMT
What is truth? – John 18:38
FB , says: December 4, 2018 at 4:26 pm GMT
@The scalpel LOL and then there is the 'observer effect' also especially in good old quantum mechanics in the end scientific truth does boil down to what 'some can agree on'
Tulip , says: December 4, 2018 at 5:40 pm GMT
@Kratoklastes Strength is the production of force over distance. That is to say, force is a quantifiable, physical phenomenon that, deconstruct it as much as you want, will hit you like a tsunami whether you believe it or not.

Force only works because there is a real world that transcends philosophical bullshit and marketing.

The subjective piece is will: victory is attained when the enemies will to resist is crushed. Through the repeated use of physical force, eventually any enemy can be worn down and vanquished.

The world is finite, desire is infinite, and for every desire and appetite, there is a will. As multiple wills will that they attain their infinite desires in a finite world, there will always be a conflict of will, which will always ultimately be resolved by force. Which means ultimately, despite the rich imaginations and appetites of humans, and their related striving, physical force will ultimately rule the day, and conquer, condition, and constrain the mental life of mankind.

Of course, desire and appetite will not take no for an answer, and in their frustration, they will imagine, fantasize, and conceptualize rationales for why this is not so. This is the nature of our desires, and in good times of prosperity and peace, they may even bend our reason in the direction of these appetites and fantasies, until the instincts for self preservation and endurance rust, and are even forgotten. But like the moon revealed by a passing cloud, the perpetual war of human existence will inevitably reassert itself, and those that have prepared for the inevitable will vanquish those who were content to daydream when they should have been preparing.

TimothyPMadden , says: December 4, 2018 at 8:52 pm GMT
What is truth ?

Truth is a word .

After reading the article and the aggregate comments, I am strengthened in my belief that the physics analogy of Schrödinger's cat is among the most useful (and notwithstanding the otherwise valid criticism of it in the comments). In the same way that the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, does not purport to define a given word, per se , but rather gives a detailed description of how the word has in fact been used over the years and centuries.

I refer to my version of Schrödinger's cat as counter-sense words or oscillating-contradictions .

Oscillating contradictions and cogno-linguistic manipulation

The primary means by which corporate supremacy, for example, is achieved and maintained in practice is via the maintenance and use of a small arsenal of about two dozen critical counter-sense or yo-yo -like words/terms that are asserted or claimed to mean either "X" or "Minus-X" at the option of the decision-maker.

Among the most important and sui generis (in a class of its own) is the word person which is held to mean a living, breathing being of conscience (literally a being of equity) with the rights, powers and privileges of such being ("X"), or else it can mean a corporate entity which is a notional/inanimate item of property to be bought and sold and otherwise traded for profit in the stock and financial markets ("Minus-X").

By way of example/demonstration of the ongoing cognitive manipulation process, if someone had managed to hit the judges of the U.S. Supreme Court with a blast of truth-ray just before they announced their decision in Citizens United, here is what we may have got instead:

[MORE]

We here at the Supreme Court are part of what can be fairly and broadly referred to as an arm of the entrenched-money-power.

At certain times and under certain circumstances it is to our enormous advantage over you the masses that corporations be natural-persons-in-law with the rights, powers and privileges of a natural person or living being of conscience.

At other times and other circumstances it is to our enormous advantage over you the masses that corporations be items of property that can be actively bought and sold and traded for profit in the stock and financial markets.

Your laughable naiveté is manifest in your expectation that you are going to receive a definitive answer from this Court, or even that it is possible for us to give you one. Among the foundational purposes of this Court is to actively prevent that question from being answered definitively at all. The instant we give a definitive answer, the game is over.

Whatever answer we give you must perpetuate the systematized delusion that the same concept (corporate personhood) can mean either X (a living being of conscience), or minus-X (an item of property), depending on the ever-changing needs of the decider.

So our current answer is that a corporation is a natural-person-in-law with the rights, powers and privileges of a natural person, except when it isn't. We'll let you know next time whether that situation has changed in the meantime.

Essentially all counter-sense words/terms follow that same template .

Notwithstanding that the respective concepts are logically and objectively mutually exclusive , the judges of the Courts (and the broadly-defined financial-world/social-control-structure) maintain that it can be either or both , and we'll let you know if and when it becomes important.

So a corporate person has a right of free speech when giving money to influence political parties, but not to object to itself being sold as a piece of property in the stock and financial markets or when it is acquired in a merger or takeover financed by its own assets. If a corporation has the legal capacity and rights of a natural person, then how can it be owned as the legal property of another? The purpose of the Courts is to ensure that that question is never presented in that way.

After person , the remaining most significant counter-sense or yo-yo -like words are (surprise surprise) essentially all money-and-finance-based, and the most important among these is the word principal and its role in facilitating illegal front-loading or ex-temporal fraud (interest illegally and unlawfully compounded in advance).

Is the amount of principal the actual or net amount advanced by the creditor and received by the debtor for their own use and control?

Or is it the amount that the debtor agrees that they owe regardless of the amount received?

Is the amount of principal a question of fact ? Or of the agreement of parties ?

[Here is the premise / offer that is referenced immediately below:]

Lender (e.g., typical second-mortgage lender): "I will loan you $10,000 at 20% per annum provided that you sign and give to me a marketable security that claims or otherwise purports to evidence that I have loaned you $15,000 at 10% per annum, plus an undisclosed and unregistered side-agreement and cheque (check) back to me for a bonus or loan fee of $5,000 as a payment from the nominal proceeds."

In the process example used above, what is the principal amount of the loan? Is it $10,000 because that is the factual net amount invested by the creditor and received by the debtor for their own use? Or is it $15,000 because that is the amount that the debtor is required to falsely agree that they have received and owe as a condition of the loan? Or is it $20,000 because that is the total cash-equivalent/money assets ($15,000 mortgage + $5,000 cheque) that the debtor has to give to the creditor?

Is it a noun/fact ? Or is it an adjective/opinion merely pretending to be a noun? All debt and therefore money in the world today depends on the answer to that question that theoretically cannot exist.

Principal is a special type (and most significant form) of counter-sense word or oscillating contradiction where dictionaries normally only give one sense, while commercial practice defines the contrary. It would be very difficult to put the Whatever-the-debtor-agrees-that-they-owe sense into a dictionary, because the fraud against meaning (as well as the criminal law) is manifest in spelling it out, and ever more so in more specialized financial dictionaries.

So virtually every legal, financial, accounting, and ordinary English dictionary and/or regulation defines it to the effect "The actual amount invested, loaned or advanced to the debtor/borrower net of any interest, discount, premium or fees", while virtually every financial security in the real world at least implicitly incorporates the fraudulent alternative/contrary meaning.

This in turn allows the academic world to function on the rational/factual definition, while the markets maintain a wholly contradictory deemed or pretended reality, while both remain oblivious to the contradiction.

Thus principal means the nominal creditor's actual and net investment, unless it doesn't .

With this class of counter-sense word where there is a necessary and definitive answer, the real job of the judges of the Courts becomes to make certain that the question is never officially asked, and under no circumstances is it to be definitively answered.

With just one of these words you can theoretically steal the Earth . With a financial system that is relatively saturated with them, such becomes child's play . With these rules a group of competently-trained chimpanzees otherwise pulling levers at random could do as well as the so-called wizards of Wall Street .

And significantly, these oscillating contradictions enable the judges to be self-righteous in the extreme on behalf of the entrenched-money-power, while looting the little people of the product of their labour.

As in: You have received the principal amount ($10,000) and you are going to pay back the principal amount ($15,000) plus the ever-accumulating (and super-leveraged) interest upon it according to your contract, while the meaning of the word oscillates between fact and opinion – between a noun and an adjective – according to what the judge needs it to mean (or accommodate) at any given instant in time.

It seems impossibly obvious in this simple example, but with several of them orchestrated simultaneously or sequentially, anything can truly be made to mean anything .

A partial list of the most critical oscillating-contradicitions includes: loan, credit, discount, interest, rate-of-interest, agreement, contract, security, repay, restitution, etc., all of which mean either "X" or its conceptual opposite "Minus-X" at the option of the entrenched-money-power whose vast financial fortunes are founded on such cogno-linguistic arbitrage .

Here are what I believe to be four essential tools needed to triangulate reality via congo-linguistic parallax . The first two are mine, and the last two are from the American and English Courts, respectively.

1. Humans are highly cogno-linguistic . We perceive reality very largely as a function of the language that we use to describe it. Most everyone inherently believes and presumes that you have to be able to think something before you can say it. The greater reality is that, above a certain base level of perception and communication, you have to have the words and language by which to say something before you can think it .

2. The world is ever-increasingly controlled and administered by people who genuinely believe whatever is necessary for the answer they need. Administrative agents of the entrenched-money-power have solved the criminal-law enigma of mens rea or guilty mind by evolving or devolving (take your pick) into professional schizophrenics who genuinely believe whatever they need to believe for the answer they need, and who communicate among themselves subconsciously by how they name things. They suffer a cogno-linguistically-induced diminished capacity that renders them incapable of perceiving reality beyond labels .

3. Their core business model or modus operandi is the systematized delusion :

"A "systematized delusion" is one based on a false premise, pursued by a logical process of reasoning to an insane conclusion ; there being one central delusion, around which other aberrations of the mind converge." Taylor v. McClintock, 112 S.W. 405, 412, 87 Ark. 243. (West's Judicial Words and Phrases (1914)).

4.

One must not confuse the object of a conspiracy [to defraud] with the means by which it is intended to be carried out. Scott v. Metropolitan Police Commissioner [1974] 60 Cr. App. R. 124 H.L.

I have long since abandoned my search for truth, per se, since I came to realize that the best I can ever do is to constantly strive to move closer to it. With apologies to the physicists, Truth is the Limit of Infinite Good Faith .

The Scalpel , says: Website December 5, 2018 at 12:34 am GMT
@Tulip " which will always ultimately be resolved by force."

Right there is where you lost the plot. That statement is just your opinion and it cannot be proven true. The rest of your argument falls victim to this logical error.

" and those that have prepared for the inevitable will vanquish those who were content to daydream when they should have been preparing."

Also, just your opinion. For example, the "dreamer" might die still comforted by his/her dreams, while the "prepper" might waste his life witing for the "inevitable' that never arrives.

redmudhooch , says: December 5, 2018 at 2:15 am GMT
Truth shall set you free.

For the First Time Since 9/11, Federal Gov't Takes Steps to Prosecute the Use of Explosives to Destroy WTCs

https://thefreethoughtproject.com/911-lawyers-petition-grand-jury-explosives/

In what can be described as a monumental step forward in the relentless pursuit of 9/11 truth, a United States Attorney has agreed to comply with federal law requiring submission to a Special Grand Jury of evidence that explosives were used to bring down the World Trade Centers.

The Lawyers' Committee for 9/11 Inquiry successfully submitted a petition to the federal government demanding that the U.S. Attorney present to a Special Grand Jury extensive evidence of yet-to-be-prosecuted federal crimes relating to the destruction of three World Trade Center Towers on 9/11 (WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7).

After waiting months for the reply, the U.S. Attorney responded in a letter, noting that they will comply with the law.

Some good documentary films here to watch for free:

http://metanoia-films.org/psywar/

Heres a couple more. Occupation of the American Mind is very good. All of John Pilgers films are great.

James Forrestal , says: December 5, 2018 at 3:58 am GMT

@Wizard of Oz

My question/quibble relates to your objection to the use of sniffer dogs to establish probable cause for search because it is no better than a coin toss. That seems fallacious if, according to your figures, the dogs sniff 500 people and get excited by 10 of them of which 3 are correctly identified and 7 are false positives.

Yeah. The concepts of sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value might be very helpful in assessing this.

[Dec 02, 2018] CIA Officials Continue Efforts To Marginalize President Trump

Dec 02, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Caius Keys , 6 hours ago link

CIA Officials Continue Efforts To Marginalize President Trump Via Washington Post

There is a particular transparency of motive which becomes clear, and reconciles all inquiry, when an interested observer accepts a particular media framework:

Hadenough1000 , 4 hours ago link

Arab brennan

was arab Obamas weaponizing king

dumbocrats you put Arabs in total power??? 😳😳

After the rapist Clinton's Arabs burned 3000 Americans to death???

what possibly could go wrong😜😜

Caius Keys , 4 hours ago link

Bushes love SA long time https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/12/its-time-to-stop-holding-saudi-arabias-hand-gcc-summit-camp-david/

CatInTheHat , 6 hours ago link

"the rout of Sunni jihadists in Syria by the combined forces of the Syrian government, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, it's clear that Islamic terrorism is no longer a threat that stirs the paranoia necessary to feed big military and intelligence budgets . For all the money they've spent, intelligence has done a terrible job of either anticipating terrorist strikes or defeating them in counterinsurgency warfare"

Excuse me,but WTF??

It's the US,NATO, Israhell and Saudis that created ISIS, with the above mentioned spending BILLIONS to combat ISIS in Syria.

The war on terror is a hoax. The lame exploitation of Arabs and Islam to manufacture consent for war on Iraq, starting with Mossad planting of low yield thermal nuke weapons that brought the Towers down..Saudis were the patsies.

All of this with blessing of Zionists banksters and US Treasury& Fed Reserve.

[Dec 02, 2018] MSM are the biggest tool of passive compliance and propagandizing by a relatively docile population

Dec 02, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

PAX November 30, 2018 at 10:34 am

A timely article. Main Stream Media (MSM) are the biggest tool of passive compliance and propagandizing by a relatively docile population. I open the CNN URL and it is like reading the neocon version of 1960's Pravda. The Australian government should be doing more to get Julian Assange out of his current predicament. The 4th Estate is withering on the vine to comply with lobby dictates.The Founders had a reason to mention this entity in the Constitution.
Fran Macadam , says: November 30, 2018 at 10:37 am
Donald Trump used to love Julian Assange's WikiLeaks media outlet. Said so over a hundred times. Sad!
Sid Finster , says: November 30, 2018 at 11:10 am
To be fair to the MSM, they know that they are safe from persecution, as they never print a word that the establishment does not want to see published.
Fran Macadam , says: November 30, 2018 at 4:50 pm
Now here are some purveyors of Fake News, all evidence-free assertions proven totally false:

"But the evidence increasingly points to Assange having made himself a willing tool of Russian Intelligence. There's a huge difference between pursuing the public's right to know and and acting as the clandestine agent of an adversarial foreign power."

"He's a spy, a saboteur and a rapist. I'm all in for the free and adversarial press but when a reporter is an actual criminal, lock him up."

Fran Macadam , says: November 30, 2018 at 4:54 pm
"I don't think that it's the content of his email release that got Assange in hot water. It was his calculated timing of the release to cause the most harm to a candidate's run for President."

Right, journalists should always withhold true information about a politician and the political processes they engage in from the public, so that the voters will remain deceived. Well, I guess, the politicians YOU favor.

polistra , says: November 30, 2018 at 5:47 pm
The press does not have to be afraid. The press is Deepstate. The Department of "Justice" is Deepstate. They are the same machine, working in beautiful synchrony to obliterate civilization.
SteveK9 , says: December 1, 2018 at 9:03 am
Peter the 'press' is obviously not worried about losing their ability to inform the public of the truth, because they no longer view that as their function. They are tools of propaganda for the oligarchs that rule America. There are a few people like yourself, who want to inform the public, but you represent a (shrinking) minority.
Bill Lawrence , says: December 1, 2018 at 10:05 am
It's funny how Ds claim Assange helped seal Hillary's fate by releasing the emails without recognizing the reality that the emails needed to exist in order to be released.

Why would you vote for someone who admitted to doing the things described?

BTW, should "John Doe" the leaker of the Panama Papers be tracked down?

Chef , says: December 1, 2018 at 4:08 pm
This conundrum is partially the result of picking and choosing the enforcement of laws based on political affiliation or beliefs.
We are not a republic now.
The individual has been declared an enemy of GovCo, the EstGOP and the Democrat People's Parties.

[Dec 01, 2018] Assange Never Met Manafort by Craig Murray

Notable quotes:
"... I can also assure you that Luke Harding, the Guardian, Washington Post and New York Times have been publishing a stream of deliberate lies, in collusion with the security services. ..."
Nov 27, 2018 | www.unz.com

Luke Harding and the Guardian Publish Still More Blatant MI6 Lies

The right wing Ecuadorean government of President Moreno continues to churn out its production line of fake documents regarding Julian Assange, and channel them straight to MI6 mouthpiece Luke Harding of the Guardian.

Amazingly, more Ecuadorean Government documents have just been discovered for the Guardian, this time spy agency reports detailing visits of Paul Manafort and unspecified "Russians" to the Embassy. By a wonderful coincidence of timing, this is the day after Mueller announced that Manafort's plea deal was over.

The problem with this latest fabrication is that Moreno had already released the visitor logs to the Mueller inquiry. Neither Manafort nor these "Russians" are in the visitor logs.

This is impossible. The visitor logs were not kept by Wikileaks, but by the very strict Ecuadorean security. Nobody was ever admitted without being entered in the logs. The procedure was very thorough. To go in, you had to submit your passport (no other type of document was accepted). A copy of your passport was taken and the passport details entered into the log. Your passport, along with your mobile phone and any other electronic equipment, was retained until you left, along with your bag and coat. I feature in the logs every time I visited.

There were no exceptions. For an exception to be made for Manafort and the "Russians" would have had to be a decision of the Government of Ecuador, not of Wikileaks, and that would be so exceptional the reason for it would surely have been noted in the now leaked supposed Ecuadorean "intelligence report" of the visits. What possible motive would the Ecuadorean government have for facilitating secret unrecorded visits by Paul Manafort? Furthermore it is impossible that the intelligence agency – who were in charge of the security – would not know the identity of these alleged "Russians".

Previously Harding and the Guardian have published documents faked by the Moreno government regarding a diplomatic appointment to Russia for Assange of which he had no knowledge. Now they follow this up with more documents aimed to provide fictitious evidence to bolster Mueller's pathetically failed attempt to substantiate the story that Russia deprived Hillary of the Presidency.

My friend William Binney, probably the world's greatest expert on electronic surveillance, former Technical Director of the NSA, has stated that it is impossible the DNC servers were hacked, the technical evidence shows it was a download to a directly connected memory stick. I knew the US security services were conducting a fake investigation the moment it became clear that the FBI did not even themselves look at the DNC servers, instead accepting a report from the Clinton linked DNC "security consultants" Crowdstrike.

I would love to believe that the fact Julian has never met Manafort is bound to be established. But I fear that state control of propaganda may be such that this massive "Big Lie" will come to enter public consciousness in the same way as the non-existent Russian hack of the DNC servers.

Assange never met Manafort. The DNC emails were downloaded by an insider. Assange never even considered fleeing to Russia. Those are the facts, and I am in a position to give you a personal assurance of them.

I can also assure you that Luke Harding, the Guardian, Washington Post and New York Times have been publishing a stream of deliberate lies, in collusion with the security services.

I am not a fan of Donald Trump. But to see the partisans of the defeated candidate (and a particularly obnoxious defeated candidate) manipulate the security services and the media to create an entirely false public perception, in order to attempt to overturn the result of the US Presidential election, is the most astonishing thing I have witnessed in my lifetime.

Plainly the government of Ecuador is releasing lies about Assange to curry favour with the security establishment of the USA and UK, and to damage Assange's support prior to expelling him from the Embassy. He will then be extradited from London to the USA on charges of espionage.

Assange is not a whistleblower or a spy – he is the greatest publisher of his age, and has done more to bring the crimes of governments to light than the mainstream media will ever be motivated to achieve. That supposedly great newspaper titles like the Guardian, New York Times and Washington Post are involved in the spreading of lies to damage Assange, and are seeking his imprisonment for publishing state secrets, is clear evidence that the idea of the "liberal media" no longer exists in the new plutocratic age. The press are not on the side of the people, they are an instrument of elite control.

Assange Never Met Manafort

SporadicMyrmidon , says: December 1, 2018 at 7:47 am GMT

My opinions are conflicted, but I'd rather give Assange a Nobel Peace Prize than a criminal conviction. He definitely deserves a Nobel Prize more than Obama. I was in an eatery in Cambridge, MA, when I heard Obama's prize announced, and even there people where aghast and astounded.
jilles dykstra , says: December 1, 2018 at 10:25 am GMT
The Guardian was bought by Soros, a few years ago.
Washpost, NYT and CNN, Deep State mouthpieces.
That the USA, as long as Deep State has not been eradicated completely from USA society, will continue to try to get Assange, and of course also Snowdon, in it claws, is more than obvious.
So what are we talking about ?
Assange just uses the freedom of information act, or how the the USA euphemism for telling them nothing, is called.
How Assange survives, mentally and bodily, being locked up in a small room without a bathroom, for several years now, is beyond my comprehension.
But of course, for 'traitors' like him human rights do not exist.
Bill Jones , says: December 1, 2018 at 10:33 am GMT
I tried this in the Grauniad search box

Term: "Far Right" result: "About 1,400,000 results (0.23 seconds)"

Term : "Far Left" result: "About 7,310 results (0.22 seconds) "

Only Pol Pot is to the Left of that bird-cage liner.

anon [271] Disclaimer , says: December 1, 2018 at 10:38 am GMT
"I can also assure you that Luke Harding, the Guardian, Washington Post and New York Times have been publishing a stream of deliberate lies, in collusion with the security services."

These outfits are largely state-run at this point. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, a man with deep ties to the CIA through his Amazon company (which depends upon federal subsidies and has received security agency "support") and the Guardian is clandestinely funded through UK government purchases, among other things. MI6 has also effectively compromised the former integrity and objectivity of that outlet by threatening them with prosecutions for revealing MI6 spy practices. And the NYT has always been state-run. See their coverage of the Iraq War. The Israelis have bragged about having an asset at the Times. The American government has several.

Altai , says: December 1, 2018 at 11:38 am GMT
It's amazing to see the obvious progression of the lies as they take hold in an anti-Trump elite who seem completely impervious to understanding his victory over Clinton. All these people who claim to be so cosmopolitan and educated seem to think Assange or Manafort would have any interest in meeting each other. (Let alone in the company of unspecified 'Russians'.)

At first it was that Assange was wrong to publish the DNC leaks because it hurt Clinton and thus helped Trump.

Then it was that Assange was actively trying to help Trump.

Now it's that Assange is in collusion with Trump and the 'Russians'.

The same thing happened with the Trump-Russian nonsense which goes ever more absurd as time goes on. Slowly boiling the frog in the public's mind. The allegations are so nonsensical, yet there are plenty of educated, supposedly cosmopolitan people who don't understand the backgrounds or motives of their 'liberal' heroes in the NYT or Guardian who believe this on faith.

None of these people will ever question how if any of this is true how the security services of the West didn't know it and if they supposedly know it, how come they aren't acting like it's true. They are acting like they're attempting to smear politicians they don't like, however.

Che Guava , says: December 1, 2018 at 11:51 am GMT
Luke Harding is particularly despicable. He made his name as a journalist off privileged access to Wilkileaks docs, and has been persistently attacking Assange ever since the Swedish fan-girl farce.

Assange did make a mistake (of which I am sure he is all too aware now) in the choice to, rather than leave the info. open on-line, collaborate with the filthy Guardian, the sleazy NYT, and I forget dirty name of the third publication.

Big tactictal error.

Che Guava , says: December 1, 2018 at 12:05 pm GMT
@anon Since you are posting as Anon coward, I am not expecting a reply, but would be interested in (and would not doubt) state funding of the 'Guardian'?

As for the NYT, they are plainly in some sense state-funded, but the state in question is neither New York nor the U.S.A., but the state of Israel.

mike k , says: December 1, 2018 at 12:33 pm GMT
Only the thoroughly brainwashed can doubt the truths in this article. Unfortunately that includes a huge number of Americans.
Bill Jones , says: December 1, 2018 at 1:05 pm GMT
@Altai The one lesson that the left has learned is to double downin perpetuity.

Their invincible arragance is matched only by their stupidity.

Simon Tugmutton , says: December 1, 2018 at 1:23 pm GMT
@Che Guava Perhaps he is referring to the sheer volume of ads the British government places for public sector appointments. As for the paper edition, most of it seems to be bought by the BBC!

[Dec 01, 2018] The New York Times As Corrupt Judge And Jury

Notable quotes:
"... We've seen it before : a newspaper and individual reporters get a story horribly wrong but instead of correcting it they double down to protect their reputations and credibility - which is all journalists have to go on - and the public suffers. ..."
"... Sometimes this maneuver can contribute to a massive loss of life. The most egregious example was the reporting in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Like nearly all Establishment media, The New York Times got the story of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- the major casus belli for the invasion -- dead wrong. But the Times , like the others, continued publishing stories without challenging their sources in authority, mostly unnamed, who were pushing for war. ..."
"... The Times' unsteady conviction is summed up in this paragraph, which the paper itself then contradicts only a few paragraphs later: "What we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come. Acting on the personal animus of Mr. Putin, public and private instruments of Russian power moved with daring and skill to harness the currents of American politics. Well-connected Russians worked aggressively to recruit or influence people inside the Trump campaign." ..."
Sep 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

We've seen it before : a newspaper and individual reporters get a story horribly wrong but instead of correcting it they double down to protect their reputations and credibility - which is all journalists have to go on - and the public suffers.

Sometimes this maneuver can contribute to a massive loss of life. The most egregious example was the reporting in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Like nearly all Establishment media, The New York Times got the story of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- the major casus belli for the invasion -- dead wrong. But the Times , like the others, continued publishing stories without challenging their sources in authority, mostly unnamed, who were pushing for war.

The result was a disastrous intervention that led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and continued instability in Iraq, including the formation of the Islamic State.

In a massive Times ' article published on Thursday, entitled, "A Plot to Subvert an Election: Unravelling the Russia Story So Far," it seems that reporters Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti have succumbed to the same thinking that doubled down on Iraq.

They claim to have a "mountain of evidence" but what they offer would be invisible on the Great Plains.

With the mid-terms looming and Special Counsel Robert Mueller unable to so far come up with any proof of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign to steal the 2016 election -- the central Russia-gate charge -- the Times does it for him, regurgitating a Russia-gate Round-Up of every unsubstantiated allegation that has been made -- deceptively presented as though it's all been proven.

Mueller: No collusion so far.

This is a reaffirmation of the faith, a recitation of what the Russia-gate faithful want to believe is true. But mere repetition will not make it so.

The Times' unsteady conviction is summed up in this paragraph, which the paper itself then contradicts only a few paragraphs later: "What we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come. Acting on the personal animus of Mr. Putin, public and private instruments of Russian power moved with daring and skill to harness the currents of American politics. Well-connected Russians worked aggressively to recruit or influence people inside the Trump campaign."

But this schizoid approach leads to the admission that "no public evidence has emerged showing that [Trump's] campaign conspired with Russia."

The Times also adds: "There is a plausible case that Mr. Putin succeeded in delivering the presidency to his admirer, Mr. Trump, though it cannot be proved or disproved."

This is an extraordinary statement. If it cannot be "proved or disproved" what is the point of this entire exercise: of the Mueller probe, the House and Senate investigations and even of this very New York Times article?

Attempting to prove this constructed story without proof is the very point of this piece.

A Banner Day

The 10,000-word article opens with a story of a pro-Russian banner that was hung from the Manhattan Bridge on Putin's birthday, and an anti-Obama banner hung a month later from the Memorial Bridge in Washington just after the 2016 election.

On public property these are constitutionally-protected acts of free speech. But for the Times , "The Kremlin, it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history."

Kremlin: Guilty, says NYT. (Robert Parry, 2016)

Why? Because the Times tells us that the "earliest promoters" of images of the banners were from social media accounts linked to a St. Petersburg-based click-bait farm, a company called the Internet Research Agency. The company is not legally connected to the Kremlin and any political coordination is pure speculation. IRA has been explained convincingly as a commercial and not political operation. Its aim is get and sell "eyeballs."

For instance the company conducted pro and anti-Trump rallies and social media messages, as well as pro and anti-Clinton. But the Times , in classic omission mode, only reports on "the anti-Clinton, pro-Trump messages shared with millions of voters by Russia." Sharing with "millions" of people on social media does not mean that millions of people have actually seen those messages. And if they had there is little way to determine whether it affected how they voted, especially as the messages attacked and praised both candidates.

The Times reporters take much at face value, which they then themselves undermine. Most prominently, they willfully mistake an indictment for a conviction, as if they do not know the difference.

This is in the category of Journalism 101. An indictment need not include evidence and under U.S. law an indictment is not evidence. Juries are instructed that an indictment is merely an accusation. That the Times commits this cardinal sin of journalism to purposely confuse allegations with a conviction is not only inexcusable but strikes a fatal blow to the credibility of the entire article.

It actually reports that "Today there is no doubt who hacked the D.N.C. and the Clinton campaign. A detailed indictment of 12 officers of Russia's military intelligence agency, filed in July by Mr. Mueller, documents their every move, including their break-in techniques, their tricks to hide inside the Democrats' networks and even their Google searches."

Who needs courts when suspects can be tried and convicted in the press?

What the Times is not taking into account is that Mueller knows his indictment will never be tested in court because the GRU agents will never be arrested, there is no extradition treaty between the U.S. and Russia and even if it were miraculously to see the inside of a courtroom Mueller can invoke states secrets privilege to show the "evidence" to a judge with clearance in his chambers who can then emerge to pronounce "Guilty!" without a jury having seen that evidence.

This is what makes Mueller's indictment more a political than a legal document, giving him wide leeway to put whatever he wants into it. He knew it would never be tested and that once it was released, a supine press would do the rest to cement it in the public consciousness as a conviction, just as this Times piece tries to do.

Errors of Commission and Omission

There are a series of erroneous assertions and omissions in the Times piece, omitted because they would disturb the narrative:

Trump: Sarcastically calls on Russia to get Clinton emails.

Distorts Geo-Politics

The piece swallows whole the Establishment's geo-strategic Russia narrative, as all corporate media do. It buys without hesitation the story that the U.S. seeks to spread democracy around the world, and not pursue its economic and geo-strategic interests as do all imperial powers.

The Times reports that, "The United States had backed democratic, anti-Russian forces in the so-called color revolutions on Russia's borders, in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004." The Times has also spread the erroneous story of a democratic revolution in Ukraine in 2014, omitting crucial evidence of a U.S.-backed coup.

The Times disapprovingly dismisses Trump having said on the campaign trail that "Russia was not an existential threat, but a potential ally in beating back terrorist groups," when an objective view of the world would come to this very conclusion.

The story also shoves aside American voters' real concerns that led to Trump's election. For the Times, economic grievances and rejection of perpetual war played no role in the election of Trump. Instead it was Russian influence that led Americans to vote for him, an absurd proposition defied by a Gallup poll in July that showed Americans' greatest concerns being economic. Their concerns about Russia were statistically insignificant at less than one percent.

Ignoring Americans' real concerns exposes the class interests of Times staffers and editors who are evidently above Americans' economic and social suffering. The Times piece blames Russia for social "divisions" and undermining American democracy, classic projection onto Moscow away from the real culprits for these problems: bi-partisan American plutocrats. That also insults average Americans by suggesting they cannot think for themselves and pursue their own interests without Russia telling them what to do.

Establishment reporters insulate themselves from criticism by retreating into the exclusive Establishment club they think they inhabit. It is from there that they vicariously draw their strength from powerful people they cover, which they should instead be scrutinizing. Validated by being close to power, Establishment reporters don't take seriously anyone outside of the club, such as a website like Consortium News.

But on rare occasions they are forced to take note of what outsiders are saying. Because of the role The New York Timesplayed in the catastrophe of Iraq its editors took the highly unusual move of apologizing to its readers. Will we one day read a similar apology about the paper's coverage of Russia-gate? Tags Politics

[Nov 30, 2018] Mueller Takes Aim, But Is Trump in Trouble by By Aaron Maté

Witch hunt has its own dynamics and it is not necessary to get any facts to inflict great damage. Mueller, the key person in 8/11 investigation, is first and foremost a loyal neocon/neolib establishment stooge, not so much a lawyer. So the shadow of McCarthyism fall on the Washitnton, DC.
Felix Sater was FBI asset from the very beginning.
Which such Byzantium politics in Washington and intrigues between almost identical parties worth of Madrid court it is not accidental that FBI coves with upper hand in its struggle with Russian intelligence, Russians can't get such training in viciousness, double dealing and false flag operations anywhere.
Notable quotes:
"... Disappearing for the midterms , Russiagate has re-emerged front and center. This week's barrage of developments in the cases of indicted Trump campaign figures Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, and George Papadopoulos have renewed long-running declarations of a presidency in peril . ..."
"... They coincide with a fresh round of alarm over the fate of Mueller's investigation following Trump's ouster of attorney general Jeff Sessions and the installation of Matthew Whitaker in his place. ..."
"... Although Mueller's final report has yet to be released, the issue that sparked the FBI investigation he inherited has already been resolved. The FBI began eyeing potential Trump-Russia ties in July 2016 after getting a tip that unpaid campaign aide George Papadopoulos may have been informed that Russia was in possession of stolen Democratic Party emails well before WikiLeaks made them public. But that trail went cold. It turns out that a London-based professor, Joseph Mifsud, told Papadopoulos that the Russian government might possess thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails. ..."
"... The Russia probe's other instigating figure, Carter Page, was also a low-level, unpaid campaign official. The information that led to his investigation is even more suspect. ..."
"... But its a key source for that supposition turned out to be the Steele dossier -- the salacious, Democratic Party-funded opposition research compiled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. And while the FBI got Papadopoulos on lying to them, Page has not been accused of any crime... ..."
"... Just as the evidence used in Manafort's bank and tax fraud case underscored that he worked against Russian interests in Ukraine , Flynn's indictment turns up another inconvenient fact for the collusion hopeful: The foreign government that Flynn colluded with on Trump's behalf -- against the US government -- is not Russia, but Israel . ..."
"... Russians never signed on, and Cohen only grew increasingly frustrated with Sater's failure to live up to his lofty pledges. "You are putting my job in jeopardy and making me look incompetent," Cohen wrote Sater on December 31, 2015. "I gave you two months and the best you send me is some bullshit garbage invite by some no name clerk at a third-tier bank." ..."
"... It is also possible that Manafort's alleged lies have nothing to do with a Russia conspiracy; after all, his case, and that of his deputy Rick Gates, pertained not to Russia or the 2016 campaign, but instead to financial crimes during Manafort's lobbying stint in Ukraine. ..."
Nov 30, 2018 | www.thenation.com
Disappearing for the midterms , Russiagate has re-emerged front and center. This week's barrage of developments in the cases of indicted Trump campaign figures Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, and George Papadopoulos have renewed long-running declarations of a presidency in peril .

They coincide with a fresh round of alarm over the fate of Mueller's investigation following Trump's ouster of attorney general Jeff Sessions and the installation of Matthew Whitaker in his place. Leading Democrats now see the probe as so paramount that, despite having re-captured the House running on health-care issues, protecting the investigation has been deemed "our top priority" (Representative Jerry Nadler) and "at the top of the agenda," (Representative Adam Schiff).

There is nothing objectionable about wanting to safeguard the Mueller investigation, nor about concerns that Trump's appointment of an unqualified loyalist may jeopardize it. Mueller should complete his work, unimpeded. The question is one of priorities. After all, the fixation on Mueller has not just raised anticipation of Trump's indictment, or even impeachment -- it has also overshadowed many of the actual policies that those seeking his political demise oppose him for. At this highly charged moment, it seems prudent to re-consider whether the probe remains worthy of such attention and high hopes.

Although Mueller's final report has yet to be released, the issue that sparked the FBI investigation he inherited has already been resolved. The FBI began eyeing potential Trump-Russia ties in July 2016 after getting a tip that unpaid campaign aide George Papadopoulos may have been informed that Russia was in possession of stolen Democratic Party emails well before WikiLeaks made them public. But that trail went cold. It turns out that a London-based professor, Joseph Mifsud, told Papadopoulos that the Russian government might possess thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails.

The FBI interviewed Mifsud in Washington, DC, in February 2017, but Mueller has never alleged that Mifsud works with the Russian government. Papadopoulos was ultimately sentenced to just 14 days behind bars for lying to the FBI about the timing and nature of his contacts with Mifsud. He reported to a federal prison on Monday.

The Russia probe's other instigating figure, Carter Page, was also a low-level, unpaid campaign official. The information that led to his investigation is even more suspect. In its October 2016 application for a surveillance warrant on Page, the FBI claimed it "believes that [Russia's] efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with [the Trump campaign]." But its a key source for that supposition turned out to be the Steele dossier -- the salacious, Democratic Party-funded opposition research compiled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. And while the FBI got Papadopoulos on lying to them, Page has not been accused of any crime...

With the Russia investigation's catalysts coming up all but empty, there is little reason to expect that the remaining campaign members who face prison time will reverse that trend. Former national security adviser Michael Flynn awaits sentencing in the coming weeks on charges similar to Papadopoulos's. Just as the evidence used in Manafort's bank and tax fraud case underscored that he worked against Russian interests in Ukraine , Flynn's indictment turns up another inconvenient fact for the collusion hopeful: The foreign government that Flynn colluded with on Trump's behalf -- against the US government -- is not Russia, but Israel .

Despite much hoopla to the contrary, Muller's new indictment of former Trump fixer Michael Cohen contains more inconvenient facts. Cohen has pleaded guilty to a single count for lying to Congress about his role in a failed attempt to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. According to the plea document, Cohen gave Congress false written answers in order to "minimize links," between the Moscow project and Trump, and to "give the false impression" that it was abandoned earlier than it actually was. Cohen told the court that he made these statements to "be loyal" to Trump and to be consistent with his "political messaging."

As I noted in The Nation in October 2017 , the attempted real-estate venture in Russia "does raise a potential conflict of interest" for Trump, who "pursued a Moscow deal as he praised Putin on the campaign trail." But nothing in Cohen's indictment incriminates Trump. Much of what it details was previously known, and rather than revealing an illicit, transatlantic collusion scheme, it reads more like a slapstick mafia buddy comedy. As Buzzfeed News reported in May , Cohen communicated extensively with Trump organization colleague Felix Sater -- identified in the Cohen plea as "Individual 2″ -- who had promised to secure Russian financing for the proposed Moscow project. But the Russians never signed on, and Cohen only grew increasingly frustrated with Sater's failure to live up to his lofty pledges. "You are putting my job in jeopardy and making me look incompetent," Cohen wrote Sater on December 31, 2015. "I gave you two months and the best you send me is some bullshit garbage invite by some no name clerk at a third-tier bank."

Cohen then took matters into his own hands. As was previously known, he did not have an email address for a Russian contact, so he wrote to a generic email address at the office of Dmitri Peskov, the press secretary for Vladimir Putin ("Russian Official 1," in the indictment). We now learn from Cohen that he managed to reach Peskov's assistant, who asked him "detailed questions and took notes." But as The New York Times noted when the Trump Moscow story first emerged: "The project never got [Russian] government permits or financing, and died weeks later." Sater tried to save the project. He discussed arranging visits to Russia by both Cohen and Trump, but Cohen ultimately backed out after allegations of Russian email hacking surfaced in June 2016. According to Buzzfeed , Sater even proposed giving Putin a $50 million penthouse as an enticement, but "the plan never went anywhere because the tower deal ultimately fizzled, and it is not clear whether Trump knew of "Sater's idea."

Cohen now claims that he spoke to Trump about the project more than the three times that he informed Congress about. For their part, Trump's attorneys do not seem concerned, saying that his recently submitted answers to Mueller align with Cohen's account. That Cohen perjured himself to Congress raises problems for him, but it is hard to see how his lies about a project that failed and a proposed trip to Russia that never happened can hurt Trump. That could only change if, as part of his new cooperation deal with Mueller, Cohen has more to give.

As for Manafort, his case took a major turn when Mueller canceled their cooperation agreement and accused him of "crimes and lies." The crucial questions are what does Mueller allege he lied to him about and what evidence is there to substantiate that charge. Mueller is expected to provide details in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we can only speculate. The revelation that Manafort's lawyers shared information with Trump's attorneys even after the plea deal was struck in September has inevitably fueled speculation that Manafort is lying to benefit Trump, or even hide evidence of a Russia conspiracy. That is certainly possible. But theories that Manafort is then banking on a pardon from Trump do not square with the prevailing view that his agreement with Mueller -- which included admitting to crimes that could be re-charged in state court -- was " pardon proof ."

It is also possible that Manafort's alleged lies have nothing to do with a Russia conspiracy; after all, his case, and that of his deputy Rick Gates, pertained not to Russia or the 2016 campaign, but instead to financial crimes during Manafort's lobbying stint in Ukraine. The Wall Street Journal suggests that is the case, reporting that Manafort's alleged lies "don't appear to be central to the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election that Mr. Mueller is investigating." Earlier this month, ABC News claimed , citing "multiple sources," that Mueller's investigators are "not getting what they want" from Manafort's cooperation deal. When it comes to collusion, perhaps there is just nothing to get.

[Nov 28, 2018] Greenwald Goes Ballistic On Politico Theory Guardian's Assange-Manafort Story Was Planted By Russians

Nov 28, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Greenwald Goes Ballistic On Politico "Theory" Guardian's Assange-Manafort Story Was Planted By Russians

by Tyler Durden Wed, 11/28/2018 - 20:25 105 SHARES

After The Guardian attempted to shovel what appears to be a wholly fabricated story down our throats that Trump campaign manager met with Julian Assange at the London Embassy - Politico allowed an ex-CIA agent to use their platform to come up with a ham-handed cover story ever; Russia tricked The Guardian into publishing the Manafort-Assange propaganda.

To that end, The Intercept 's Glenn Greenwald (formerly of The Guardian ) ripped Politico an entirely new oriface in a six-part Twitter dress down.

Greenwald also penned a harsh rebuke to the Guardian 's "problematic" reporting in a Tuesday article titled: "It Is Possible Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange. If True, There Should Be Ample Video and Other Evidence Showing This."

In sum, the Guardian published a story today that it knew would explode into all sorts of viral benefits for the paper and its reporters even though there are gaping holes and highly sketchy aspects to the story.

It is certainly possible that Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and even Donald Trump himself "secretly" visited Julian Assange in the Embassy. It's possible that Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un joined them.

And if any of that happened, then there will be mountains of documentary proof in the form of videos, photographs, and other evidence proving it . Thus far, no such evidence has been published by the Guardian. Why would anyone choose to believe that this is true rather than doing what any rational person, by definition, would do: wait to see the dispositive evidence before forming a judgment?

The only reason to assume this is true without seeing such evidence is because enough people want it to be true. The Guardian knows this. They knew that publishing this story would cause partisan warriors to excitedly spread the story, and that cable news outlets would hyperventilate over it , and that they'd reap the rewards regardless of whether the story turned out to be true or false. It may be true. But only the evidence, which has yet to be seen, will demonstrate that one way or the other. - Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

In short, The Guardian tried to proffer a load of easily disprovable claims - which if not true, are pure propaganda. Once it began to blow up in their face, Politico let an ex-CIA operative try to save face by suggesting Russia did it . Insanity at its finest.


zerofucks , 20 minutes ago link

loving the lies being drug into the light

anyone who believes the MSM about anything is a fool

and i am shocked an ex-CIA guy was behind the fake news

CatInTheHat , 20 minutes ago link

GG neatly tied in the nefarious connection between the CIA and the media together

This CIA a criminal organization that has lied us into every single war. Yet the Resistance upholds the CIA as beyond reproach.

TODAY THEY LOOK AS FOOLS.

nidaar , 25 minutes ago link

They jumped the shark. This show has its days numbered.

Chuckster , 30 minutes ago link

We don't need the Russians re-chewing our cabbage. We have enough natural born idiots to screw the facts up.

Hippocleides , 34 minutes ago link

Someone ate my sandwich out of the work fridge, God damn Russians!

The Terrible Sweal , 38 minutes ago link

It looks like Greenwald is just about at the point of capitulation and accepting that the entire MSM is utterly fraudulent.

Alternative , 42 minutes ago link

Up next: Guardian journos suffer from Novichik poisoning but survive this lethal nerve gas.

Badsamm , 45 minutes ago link

That still doesn't clear the Guardian from lawsuits.

xrxs , 39 minutes ago link

Maybe discovery will reveal their 'sources.'

Jung , 46 minutes ago link

Ever since Alan Rusbridger. left the Guardian as Chief Editor and made room for Assange and Snowden etc., it seems that they have been infiltrated by the CIA and Luke H. gets attention for his stories and Russia-hatred. The ENglish have been conditioned to hate Russia and the Guardian will do anything to discredit Russia with whatever silly stories. Now they are begging for money to survive: well, NO, because you went along with fake news to get some money: corrupt, unlike Alan Rusbridger, Assange, Manning and Snowden.

Captain Nemo de Erehwon , 49 minutes ago link

Up next: The Russians put up the Guardian to launch a slimy and obviously stupid defence to discredit them.

Later: The Russians are making my hands move on the keys and making me type this nonsense.

BankSurfyMan , 48 minutes ago link

when you masturbate on the HEDGE...

5onIt , 50 minutes ago link

Doesnt matter, 1/2 of our population is convinced, that our governmemt would never do to the USA. what they do to other countries for the past 60 years.

BankSurfyMan , 50 minutes ago link

Assange took another dump today, he is full of **** just like the rest of us ??? Doom 2019! Your *** is on FIRE! neXT!

bluebird100 , 54 minutes ago link

Wow Glenn is discovering that the Fake News is real after all! He's such a hack

JimmyJones , 34 minutes ago link

Yep, the Russian Collusion / interference is so weak. Look at this story, it's breaking and will be huge. Epstine's dirty details released, Muller looks pretty bad.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/11/robert-muellers-fbi-gave-orgy-island-billionaire-epstein-light-sentence-today-details-were-released-on-his-widespread-child-sex-abuse/

[Nov 28, 2018] Funny stuff happens when a judge tells a plaintiff she has to pay $341,500 for the legal expenses of a lawsuit she lost. All of a sudden Stormy Daniels is saying her CPL, Michael Avenatti, was acting against her wishes

Nov 28, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

overmedicatedundersexed , 1 hour ago link

OT but we all need a laugh...stormy daniels..

Funny stuff happens when a judge tells a plaintiff she has to pay $341,500 for the legal expenses of a lawsuit she lost. All of a sudden Stormy Daniels is saying her CPL, Michael Avenatti, was acting against her wishes:

[Nov 27, 2018] EU-wide 'anti-Russian psy-ops' program confirms UK govt funding, Anonymous denies leak

Notable quotes:
"... "clear that much of the material was indeed on the Integrity Initiative or Institute systems." ..."
"... The organization expressed outrage over the publication of emails belonging to its alleged agents, and implied that the Russian intelligence community must have been behind the leak. ..."
"... The leaked documents, if confirmed genuine, expose the II as a semi-secretive operation to coordinate efforts by seemingly independent journalists, academics and experts involved in exposing and countering "Russian propaganda." The documents say the program cost £1,961,000 ($2.5 million) this year alone. ..."
Nov 26, 2018 | www.rt.com
A network exposed by leaked documents as a Europe-wide PR operation aimed at curbing "Russian propaganda" has confirmed receiving money from the British government, while Anonymous has denied on Twitter that it's behind the leak. The Integrity Initiative (II) is a network claiming to fight disinformation that threatens democracy. A trove of alleged II documents, which purports to show costs and internal guidelines as well as names of individuals cooperating with it, has been published by people claiming to be part of the Anonymous collective. A major Anonymous-linked Twitter account has denied it was linked to the leak.

Also on rt.com Anonymous blows lid off huge psyop in Europe and it's funded by UK & US

Responding to the leak on Monday, the organization said it did indeed receive funding from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) for the past two years, but insisted that private donors were its primary source of money.

The statement neither confirmed nor denied that the documents were genuine, saying that it didn't have time to validate them yet. But it said it was "clear that much of the material was indeed on the Integrity Initiative or Institute systems."

It claimed that many of the published documents were "dated and never used," and that many of the individuals listed as members of II "clusters of influencers" were never contacted by the program.

The documents not confirmed. However:
1. Their detail suggests they may be genuine
2. Nobody with knowledge has denied they're genuine
3. Some of those named have confirmed their association
4. Wkileaks hasn't evidenced its concerns
5. A history of some Wiki & Anonymous animosity

-- Charles Shoebridge (@ShoebridgeC) November 25, 2018

The organization expressed outrage over the publication of emails belonging to its alleged agents, and implied that the Russian intelligence community must have been behind the leak.

Russian news agency RIA Novosti contacted the FCO for comment about the disclosure, but its representative said that information about the II was "already in the public domain," and that the British diplomatic service was "happy for the project to receive greater exposure."

Interesting to watch Westerners picking up the Kremlin propaganda line that standing up to Putin's lying, thieving, murdering regime is 'anti Russian'. Putin and his enablers and appeasers are the true 'Russophobes'.

-- Integrity Initiative (@InitIntegrity) November 25, 2018

The leaked documents, if confirmed genuine, expose the II as a semi-secretive operation to coordinate efforts by seemingly independent journalists, academics and experts involved in exposing and countering "Russian propaganda." The documents say the program cost £1,961,000 ($2.5 million) this year alone.

RT, which reported on the leak last Friday, asked a number of alleged participants in the II program about their contribution. The majority of these have not yet replied, except for journalist Edward Lucas and Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council Stephen Blank.

It's been amusing to watch Putin sympathisers in the West who claim to be so adept at seeing through 'government lies' and 'MSM bias' uncritically swallow and regurgitate the version of events spread by Kremlin propaganda outlets that are known to relentlessly lie and distort.

-- Integrity Initiative (@InitIntegrity) November 25, 2018

If you like this story, share it with a friend!

[Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders

Highly recommended!
Skripal events probably helped to advance this line of investigation. So in a way UK intelligence services put their own stooge on the line of fire.
Notable quotes:
"... Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money laundering ..."
"... The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November 2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008 and September 2008, respectively. ..."
"... Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did. ..."
"... The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle taxpayers' money involving Russian officials. ..."
"... The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up. ..."
"... Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic competition. ..."
"... Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to US lawmakers and media outlets. ..."
"... If you like this story, share it with a friend! ..."
Nov 19, 2018 | www.rt.com
Kremlin critic Bill Browder may have given the order for his employee Sergei Magnitsky to be poisoned with a rare toxin in a Russian prison cell, along with other suspects in a tax-evasion probe against him, prosecutors have said. British financier Browder was once a well-connected investor in post-Soviet Russia, but he became a fugitive from the law in the country after being accused of financial crimes. In the West, however, he is best known as the employer of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian accountant who died in police custody while being investigated in connection to the Browder case. Magnitsky's death became an international scandal, with Browder accusing Russian officials of killing him.

Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money laundering.

The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November 2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008 and September 2008, respectively.

Korobeinikov died after falling off a high-rise building, while the others had health complications. The Russian prosecutors believe all four of them may have been killed with a rare water-soluble compound of aluminum. Each of the men showed symptoms consistent with being poisoned by the toxin prior to their deaths, while Korobeinikov had traces of it in his liver, according to a post mortem. An investigation into four possible murders has been opened.

Read more
UK 'fraudster' Browder briefly detained in Spain on Russian warrant, tweets from police car

Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did.

The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle taxpayers' money involving Russian officials.

The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up.

Last year, Browder was sentenced by a Russian court to nine years in prison for tax evasion. The trial was held in absentia and Moscow failed to have him extradited to serve the term. The prosecutors said that they will renew attempts to get custody of Browder as part of the new criminal case, using a UN convention on fighting transnational crime to have him arrested.

Browder is a US-born British financier, whose change of citizenship had the benefit of allowing him to avoid paying tax on foreign earnings. However, he claimed the switch was prompted by his family being persecuted in the US during the McCarthyism witch hunt, while the UK seemed like the land of law and order.

Read more

Magnitsky Act mastermind seeks to stop Cyprus from revealing his offshore assets to Russia

He made a fortune in Russia during the country's chaotic transition to a market economy, having invested before there was a stock exchange in Moscow. His Hermitage Capital Management fund was a leading foreign investment entity in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The transformation of his public image from a financial shark into a human rights crusader started when Browder himself entered the spotlight of Russian law enforcement. In 2007, the foundation he ran was targeted by a probe into possible large-scale embezzlement of Russian taxpayers' money. Magnitsky, who worked for Browder and had knowledge of his firms' finances, was arrested and held in pre-trial detention until his death in November 2009. The British businessman insisted that the entire case was fabricated and that Magnitsky had been assassinated for exposing a criminal scheme involving several Russian tax officials.

The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic competition.

Browder's new-found status as a rights advocate and self-proclaimed worst enemy of Putin helps him deflect Russia's attempts to prosecute him. On several occasions, Russia filed international arrest warrants against him with Interpol, which even led to his brief detention in Spain last May.

Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to US lawmakers and media outlets.

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[Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Trump's memo on the Saudis begins with the headline "The world is a very dangerous place!" Indeed, it is and behavior by the three occupants of the White House since 2000 is largely to blame. ..."
"... Indeed, a national security policy that sees competitors and adversaries as enemies in a military sense has made nuclear war, unthinkable since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, thinkable once again. ..."
"... George Washington's dictum in his Farewell Address , counseling his countrymen to "observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all." And Washington might have somehow foreseen the poisonous relationships with Israel and the Saudis when he warned that " a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification." ..."
"... Cautious optimism may be better than none, but futile nonetheless. Bullying, dispossession, slavery and genocide constitute the very bedrock, the essence and soul of the founding of our country. ..."
"... Truth be told we simply know of no other kinder, gentler alternatives to perpetual war and destruction as the cornerstone of our foreign policy. Normality? Not in my lifetime. ..."
"... Your CNI and 'If Americans Knew' informed me about Rand Paul's courageous move. I plan to call his office today to give him encouragement and call my Senators and Representative to urge them to support him (fat chance of that but I have to stick it in their face). ..."
"... America doesn't have a policy because America is no longer a real nation. It's an empire filled with diverse groups of peoples who all hate each other and want to use the power of the government for the benefit of their overseas co-ethnics. ..."
Nov 27, 2018 | www.unz.com

President Donald Trump's recent statement on the Jamal Khashoggi killing by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince might well be considered a metaphor for his foreign policy. Several commentators have suggested that the text appears to be something that Trump wrote himself without any adult supervision, similar to the poorly expressed random arguments presented in his tweeting only longer. That might be the case, but it would not be wise to dismiss the document as merely frivolous or misguided as it does in reality express the kind of thinking that has produced a foreign policy that seems to drift randomly to no real end, a kind of leaderless creative destruction of the United States as a world power.

Lord Palmerston, Prime Minister of Britain in the mid nineteenth century, famously said that "Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests."The United States currently has neither real friends nor any clearly defined interests. It is, however, infested with parasites that have convinced an at-drift America that their causes are identical to the interests of the United States. Leading the charge to reduce the U.S. to "bitch" status, as Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has artfully put it , are Israel and Saudi Arabia, but there are many other countries, alliances and advocacy groups that have learned how to subvert and direct the "leader of the free world."

Trump's memo on the Saudis begins with the headline "The world is a very dangerous place!" Indeed, it is and behavior by the three occupants of the White House since 2000 is largely to blame. It is difficult to find a part of the world where an actual American interest is being served by Washington's foreign and global security policies. Indeed, a national security policy that sees competitors and adversaries as enemies in a military sense has made nuclear war, unthinkable since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, thinkable once again. The fact that no one is the media or in political circles is even talking about that terrible danger suggests that war has again become mainstreamed, tacitly benefiting from bipartisan acceptance of it as a viable foreign policy tool by the media, in the U.S. Congress and also in the White House.

The part of the world where American meddling coupled with ignorance has produced the worst result is inevitably the Middle East...

... ... ...

All of the White House's actions have one thing in common and that is that they do not benefit Americans in any way unless one works for a weapons manufacturer, and that is not even taking into consideration the dead soldiers and civilians and the massive debt that has been incurred to intervene all over the world. One might also add that most of America's interventions are built on deliberate lies by the government and its associated media, intended to increase tension and create a casus belli where none exists.

So what is to be done as it often seems that the best thing Trump has going for him is that he is not Hillary Clinton? First of all, a comprehensive rethink of what the real interests of the United States are in the world arena is past due. America is less safe now than it was in 2001 as it continues to make enemies with its blundering everywhere it goes. There are now four times as many designated terrorists as there were in 2001, active in 70 countries. One would quite plausibly soon arrive at George Washington's dictum in his Farewell Address , counseling his countrymen to "observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all." And Washington might have somehow foreseen the poisonous relationships with Israel and the Saudis when he warned that " a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification."

George Washington or any of the other Founders would be appalled to see an America with 800 military bases overseas, allegedly for self-defense. The transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the military industrial complex and related entities like Wall Street has been catastrophic. The United States does not need to protect Israel and Saudi Arabia, two countries that are armed to the teeth and well able to defend themselves. Nor does it have to be in Syria and Afghanistan. And

If the United States were to withdraw its military from the Middle East and the rest of Asia tomorrow, it would be to nearly everyone's benefit. If the armed forces were to be subsequently reduced to a level sufficient to defend the United States it would put money back in the pockets of Americans and end the continuous fearmongering through surfacing of "threats" by career militarists justifying the bloated budgets.

... ... ...

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests [email protected] .


anon [355] Disclaimer , says: November 27, 2018 at 5:38 am GMT

US foreign policy is controlled by a few key ethnic groups and (to a lesser degree) the military-industrial complex.
Justsaying , says: November 27, 2018 at 6:04 am GMT

but even small steps in the right direction could initiate a gradual process of turning the United States into a more normal country in its relationships with the rest of the world rather than a universal predator and bully.

Cautious optimism may be better than none, but futile nonetheless. Bullying, dispossession, slavery and genocide constitute the very bedrock, the essence and soul of the founding of our country.

To expect mutations -- no matter how slow or fast in a trait that appears deeply embedded in our DNA is to be naive. Add to that the intractable stranglehold Zionists and organized world Jewry has on our nuts and decision making. A more congruent convergence of histories and DNAs would be hard to come by among other nations. Truth be told we simply know of no other kinder, gentler alternatives to perpetual war and destruction as the cornerstone of our foreign policy. Normality? Not in my lifetime.

Z-man , says: November 27, 2018 at 9:11 am GMT
Great article and I will spread it around.

Your CNI and 'If Americans Knew' informed me about Rand Paul's courageous move. I plan to call his office today to give him encouragement and call my Senators and Representative to urge them to support him (fat chance of that but I have to stick it in their face).

Hey, how about a Rand Paul-Tulsi Gabbard fusion ticket in 2024, not a bad idea, IMHO.

Going back to the Administration you can see the slimy Zionist hands of Steven Miller on all of those foreign policy statements. Trump is allowing this because he has to protect his flanks from Zionists, Christian or otherwise. He might be just giving Miller just enough rope to jettison him (wishful thinking on my part). Or he doesn't care or is unaware of the texts, a possibility.

anon [336] Disclaimer , says: November 27, 2018 at 9:26 am GMT
1. Because that defies human nature. See all of history if you disagree.

2. America doesn't have a policy because America is no longer a real nation. It's an empire filled with diverse groups of peoples who all hate each other and want to use the power of the government for the benefit of their overseas co-ethnics.

jilles dykstra , says: November 27, 2018 at 9:30 am GMT
The beginning of USA foreign policy for me is the 1820 or 1830 Monroe Declaration: south America is our backyard, keep out. Few people know that at the time European countries considered war on the USA because of this beginning of world domination. When I told this to a USA correspondent the reply was 'but this declaration still is taught here in glowing terms'.

What we saw then was the case until Obama, USA foreign policy was for internal political reasons. As Hollings stated in 2004 'Bush promising AIPAC the war on Iraq, that is politics'. No empire ever, as far as I know, ever was in the comfortable position to be able to let foreign policy to be decided (almost) completely by internal politics.

This changed during the Obama reign, the two war standard had to be lowered to one and a half. All of a sudden the USA had to develop a foreign policy, a policy that had to take into consideration the world outside the USA. Not the whole USA understands this, the die hards of Deep State in the lead.

What a half war accomplishes we see, my opinion, in Syria, a half war does not bring victory on an enemy who wages a whole war.
Assad is still there, Russia has airforce and naval bases in Syria.

Normally, as any history book explains, foreign policy of a country is decided on in secret by a few people. British preparations for both WWI and WWII included detailed technical talks with both the USA and France, not even all cabinet members knew about it. One of Trump's difficulties is that Deep State does not at all has the intention of letting the president decide on foreign policy, at the time of FDR he did what he liked, though, if one reads for example Baruch's memoirs, in close cooperation with the Deep State that then existed.

The question 'why do we not leave the rest of the world alone', hardly ever asked. The USA is nearly autarcic, foreign trade, from memory, some five percent of national income, a very luxurious position. But of course, leaving the rest of the world alone, huge internal consequences, as Hinckley explains with an example, politically impossible to stop the development of a bomber judged to be superfluous.

Barbara Hinckley Sheldon Goldman, American Politics and Government, Glenview Ill.,1990

Jim Christian , says: November 27, 2018 at 9:43 am GMT
Good luck. A fight over resources with the biggest consumer of resources, the People That Kill People and all their little buddies in the Alphabet Soup of Law Enforcement and Intelligence Depravity..

That could get a fella hurt. Ask Jack and Bob Kennedy.

Michael Kenny , says: November 27, 2018 at 10:10 am GMT
"The bilateral relationship between the U.S. and Russia is now worse than it was towards the end of the Cold War". Classic American cold warrior mentality. The present-day Russian Federation is assimilated to the former Soviet Union.
Johnny Rottenborough , says: Website November 27, 2018 at 11:31 am GMT
Tragically for America, and the West in general, President Trump is unrecognizable from candidate Trump :

'This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization that will determine whether or not we the people reclaim control over our government. The political establishment that is trying to stop us is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration and economic and foreign policies that have bled our country dry Their financial resources are virtually unlimited, their political resources are unlimited, their media resources are unmatched, and most importantly, the depths of their immorality is absolutely unlimited.'

[Nov 26, 2018] Russia to UK Prove Your Spies Did Not Poison Our Citizens or Face Consequences

Nov 26, 2018 | russia-insider.com

Russia to UK: Prove Your Spies Did Not Poison Our Citizens or Face Consequences What a great Russian response! Finally! RI Staff Thu, Mar 29, 2018 | 300 words 17,686 225 YOLO Lavrov What is good for the goose is good for the gander. At least Russia seems to think so. There may not be conclusive evidence Britain poisoned Sergei Skripal and his visiting daughter Yulia. But then neither is there evidence Moscow did it and that did not prevent London from demanding Russia proves its innocent (in 24 hours). Moreover the British are keeping Russians away from evidence, not the other way around.

So why wouldn't Russia now demand Britain instead proves its own innocence? Well, Lavrov's Ministry of External Affairs can't think of a reason why not.

It better be something good!

Russia as demanded that London provide proof that British spies did not carry out the poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that their analysis of the assassination attempt has them to believe in 'a possible involvement in it of the British intelligence services'.

The Ministry says that in the absence of proof of British innocence, Moscow will regard the incident as an attempt on the lives of Russian citizens on foreign soil.

'An analysis of all the circumstances ... leads us to think of the possible involvement in it (the poisoning) of the British intelligence services,' the foreign ministry said in a statement.

'If convincing evidence to the contrary is not presented to the Russian side we will consider that we are dealing with an attempt on the lives of our citizens as a result of a massive political provocation.'

Excellent! 'Do what you demand of us and prove your innocence to us, or we will regard it was a state-sponsored attempt at murder of our citizens.'

Lavrov has truly outdone himself here. And yet all he has done is responded in kind. So simple and yet so brilliant.

[Nov 25, 2018] A new type of US disclaimer: No Russian, living or dead, had anything to do with the posting of this comment

Notable quotes:
"... Disclaimer: No Russian, living or dead, had anything to do with the posting of this proudly home-grown comment ..."
Nov 25, 2018 | caucus99percent.com

What else is amazing about her emails @leveymg

is how no one really talked about their content, eh? We learned that she rigged the primary against Bernie and then everyone started talking about Russia ! Just as she and Podesta wanted.

#1
Amazing how elusive they are (scrubbed from the State Dept website) and how they have never been picked up on by most of the corporate media.

up 8 users have voted. --

Disclaimer: No Russian, living or dead, had anything to do with the posting of this proudly home-grown comment

[Nov 25, 2018] Doubling Down on Mueller by Kimberley A. Strassel

When McCarthyism ghost is out it is difficult to suppress it. The bottom feeder from Democratic Party have no other viable agenda that demonizing Russia and presenting it as the the root cause of 2016 fiasco, which actually are result of their neoliberal transformation under Bill Clinton. CIA democrats are now married to Russiagate.
Nov 25, 2018 | www.wsj.com

The Mueller probe has lost its political potency, as Democrats acknowledged on the midterm trail. They didn't win House seats by warning of Russian collusion. They didn't even talk about it. Most voters don't care, or don't care to hear about it. A CNN exit poll found 54% of respondents think the Russia probe is "politically motivated"; a 46% plurality disapprove of Mr. Mueller's handling of it.

That hasn't stopped Democrats from fixating on it since the election, in particular when President Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions and named Matthew Whitaker as a temporary replacement. The left now insists the appointment is unconstitutional or that because Mr. Whitaker once voiced skepticism on the Russia-collusion narrative, he is unfit to oversee the Mueller investigation and must recuse himself.

The joke here is that neither Mr. Whitaker nor anybody else is likely to exercise any authority over Mr. Mueller -- and more's the pity. The probe has meandered along for 18 months, notching records for leaks and derivative prosecutions, though all indications are it has accomplished little by way of its initial mandate.

As a practical matter, Mr. Mueller should have been brought to heel some time ago. As a political matter, that won't happen. The administration has always understood that such a move would provoke bipartisan political blowback, ignite a new "coverup" scandal, and maybe trigger impeachment. It's even more unlikely officials would risk those consequences now, as Mr. Mueller is said to be wrapping up.

Democrats know this, as does the grandstanding Sen. Jeff Flake. Yet they demand a Whitaker recusal and are again pushing legislation to "protect" the special counsel's probe. Senate Republicans rightly blocked that bill this week, partly on grounds that it is likely unconstitutional. They also made the obvious point that if Mr. Trump intended to fire Mr. Mueller, he'd have done so months ago and wouldn't need to ax Mr. Sessions to do it. And while the president tweets ceaseless criticism of the probe, he has never threatened to end it.

Democrats are nonetheless doubling down on the probe for political advantage. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared members of his caucus will demand that language making it more difficult to fire Mr. Mueller be included in a spending bill that needs to pass before the end of the current legislative session. Mr. Flake is offering an assist, saying that he will block any judicial nominees in committee until a Mueller protection bill gets a Senate floor vote. Over in the House, incoming Democratic committee chairmen, led by soon-to-be Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, are vowing an investigation blitz focused on collusion with Russia.

Mr. Schumer's last shutdown -- a year ago -- was a bust even though it was waged over the emotionally compelling issue of Dreamers, illegal aliens brought to the U.S. as children. He now proposes shutting down the government over a probe few people outside of Washington care about. Mitch McConnell should be so lucky.

Mr. Flake, should he run for president, will struggle to explain to conservative voters his obstruction of Trump judicial nominees, who'll be confirmed in 2019 anyway when the Republicans expand their Senate majority.

Democrats' other problem is that this strategy hinges in large degree on an expectation that Mr. Mueller ultimately finds something. There's no reason to believe he has turned up any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.

Sure, he's secured convictions against longtime Beltway bandits for long-ago lobbying. He's squeezed the ole standby lying-to-investigators plea out of a few targets. He's indicted a squad of Russian trolls, who will never be brought to trial and who even Mr. Mueller's office admits had nothing to do with the Trump team. And while it seems likely his report to the Justice Department will criticize Mr. Trump, it's improbable it will contain proof of collusion.

And then? The president will have a field day. He will claim vindication and mercilessly drive home that the investigation was a waste and a witch hunt. And he will have a point. Two years of Democratic hyperbole will be undercut by the special counsel they've held out as the ultimate sleuth. They'll have to decide whether to deride Mr. Mueller's findings as insufficient to justify continuing their own probes.

Maybe Mr. Mueller has something. We'll see. But if the reporting is correct that he's wound up high and dry, Democrats will end up there with him.

[Nov 24, 2018] MI6 Scrambling To Stop Trump From Releasing Classified Docs In Russia Probe

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Telegraph adds that the UK's dispute with the Trump administration is so politically sensitive that staff within the British Embassy in D.C. have been barred from discussing it with journalists. Theresa May has also "been kept at arms-length and is understood to have not raised the issue directly with the US president ." ..."
"... In September , we reported that the British government "expressed grave concerns" over the material in question after President Trump issued an order to the DOJ to release a wide swath of materials, "immediately" and "without redaction." ..."
"... Trump walked that order back days later after the UK begged him not to release them. ..."
"... MI6 agents have a reputation for writing fiction. Ian Fleming comes to mind. Its is interesting to reflect on the similarities of fiction and so called intelligence. ..."
"... Six U.S. agencies created a stealth task force, spearhead by CIA's Brennan, to run domestic surveillance on Trump associates and possibly Trump himself. ..."
"... To feign ignorance and to seemingly operate within U.S. laws, the agencies freelanced the wiretapping of Trump associates to the British spy agency GCHQ ..."
"... The decision to insert GCHQ as a back door to eavesdrop was sparked by the denial of two FISA Court warrant applications filed by the FBI to seek wiretaps of Trump associates. ..."
"... GCHQ did not work from London or the UK. In fact the spy agency worked from NSA's headquarters in Fort Meade, MD with direct NSA supervision and guidance to conduct sweeping surveillance on Trump associates. ..."
"... The illegal wiretaps were initiated months before the controversial Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. ..."
"... The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump's associates appear compromised. ..."
"... Following the Trump Tower sit down, GCHQ began digitally wiretapping Manafort, Trump Jr., and Kushner. ..."
"... After the concocted meeting by the Deep State, the British spy agency could officially justify wiretapping Trump associates as an intelligence front for NSA because the Russian lawyer at the meeting Natalia Veselnitskaya was considered an international security risk and prior to the June sit down was not even allowed entry into the United States or the UK, federal sources said. ..."
"... By using GCHQ, the NSA and its intelligence partners had carved out a loophole to wiretap Trump without a warrant. While it is illegal for U.S. agencies to monitor phones and emails of U.S. citizens inside the United States absent a warrant, it is not illegal for British intelligence to do so. Even if the GCHQ was tapping Trump on U.S. soil at Fort Meade. ..."
"... The wiretaps, secured through illicit scheming, have been used by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe of alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election, even though the evidence is considered "poisoned fruit. ..."
"... Add: GCHQ (UK NSA) was in agreement with HilBarry Inc to block the US 2016 election for U.K. candidate Hillary aka Clinton 'Rhodes scholar' Brit colonial agent. Study who 'Rhodes' was. CIA and MI6 are UK siblings. Note nickname for CIA is "Langley" = 'The English' in French L'Anglai. Trump Tower - Russkie atty Natalia met with Simpson GPS Fusion to debrief before & after meeting. Natalia was granted US entry by Mueller Spec Counsel teamster Preet Baharara (conflict in that Preet is compromised witness and also SC "investigator"). Russkie Ahkmedishin met with Obama WH in prep for meeting (see Jan 2016 WH log). The 'translator' at meeting was Obama WH translator. ..."
"... The evidence for false Trump Russkie bank connections is a phony server set up by CIA agent McMullen that robo scammed Russian Alfa Bank to robo talk to the phony server the CIA named with miss-spell Trump OrGAINization. See godaddy domain registration. Hillary slandered Trump with this scam on Twitter Oct 31, 2016 - her witchy day. ..."
"... Obama used the intelligence agencies to spy on all political opponents, not just the Trump campaign and eventually the administration. NSA databases were being queried by Democrat contractors with content feed to Obama's National Security staff where communications were "unmasked" by Rice and others. Rodgers shut down the scheme. So much Marxist criminality and fraud left unpunished. ..."
"... George Papadopoulos was not the reason the FBI opened their 2016 Counterintelligence Investigation into the Trump Campaign. John Brennan was the reason. ..."
"... Brennan was the man pushing the entire Russian Narrative that consumed Washington D.C. – and ultimately led to the Mueller Investigation. He did this based on little or no evidence. The Electronic Communication should prove interesting. John Brennan's Role in the FBI's Trump-Russia Investigation ..."
"... In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, head of Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) traveled to Washington D.C. to meet with then-CIA Head John Brennan regarding alleged communications between the Trump Campaign and Moscow. ..."
"... @Chupacabra-322 URL s/b " https://themarketswork.com/2018/04/09/john-brennans-role-in-the-fbis-trump-russia-investigation/ " ..."
"... The Trump Team was being surveiled the entire time by Breanan via the GCHQ. The CIA are Analysts. That's it. They had to involve the FBI to begin the Surveillance & Criminal Investigation into the Counter Intelligence Operation. Thus, Criminal at Large Breanan's trip up to Capital Hill to meet with Harry Reid to brief him on Steele. Brennan the "Puppet Master" has been quarter backing the entire Deep State Intelligence Psychological Operation & Parallel Construction Surveillance from the very start. ..."
"... They've been reverse engineering their lies ever since they lost the election to cover their tracks and use the excuse of "Plausible Deniability" as the Pure Evil War Criminal Treasonous Seditious Psychopaths at the CIA always claim. ..."
"... Why get a FISA warrant for Cater Paige after he left the Trump Team? Because folks, the FISA Warrant is RETROACTIVE. ..."
Nov 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation, according to The Telegraph , stating that any disclosure would "undermine intelligence gathering if he releases pages of an FBI application to wiretap one of his former campaign advisers."

Trump's allies, however, are fighting back - demanding transparency and suggesting that the UK wouldn't want the documents withheld unless it had something to hide.

The Telegraph has talked to more than a dozen UK and US officials, including in American intelligence, who have revealed details about the row.

British spy chiefs have "genuine concern" about sources being exposed if classified parts of the wiretap request were made public, according to figures familiar with discussions.

" It boils down to the exposure of people ", said one US intelligence official, adding: " We don't want to reveal sources and methods ." US intelligence shares the concerns of the UK.

Another said Britain feared setting a dangerous "precedent" which could make people less likely to share information, knowing that it could one day become public. - The Telegraph

The Telegraph adds that the UK's dispute with the Trump administration is so politically sensitive that staff within the British Embassy in D.C. have been barred from discussing it with journalists. Theresa May has also "been kept at arms-length and is understood to have not raised the issue directly with the US president ."

In September , we reported that the British government "expressed grave concerns" over the material in question after President Trump issued an order to the DOJ to release a wide swath of materials, "immediately" and "without redaction."

Trump walked that order back days later after the UK begged him not to release them.

Mr Trump wants to declassify 21 pages from one of the applications. He announced the move in September, then backtracked, then this month said he was "very seriously" considering it again. Both Britain and Australia are understood to be opposing the move.

Memos detailing alleged ties between Mr Trump and Russia compiled by Christopher Steele, a former MI6 officer , were cited in the application, which could explain some of the British concern. - The Telegraph

The New York Times reported at the time that the UK's concern was over material which " includes direct references to conversations between American law enforcement officials and Christopher Steele ," the former MI6 agent who compiled the infamous "Steele Dossier." The UK's objection, according to former US and British officials, was over revealing Steele's identity in an official document, "regardless of whether he had been named in press reports."

We noted in September, however, that Steele's name was contained within the Nunes Memo - the House Intelligence Committee's majority opinion in the Trump-Russia case.

Steele also had extensive contacts with DOJ official Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie , who - along with Steele - was paid by opposition research firm Fusion GPS in the anti-Trump campaign. Trump called for the declassification of FBI notes of interviews with Ohr, which would ostensibly reveal more about his relationship with Steele. Ohr was demoted twice within the Department of Justice for lying about his contacts with Fusion GPS.

Perhaps the Brits are also concerned since much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016 . Recall that Trump aid George Papadopoulos was lured to London in March, 2016, where Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud fed him the rumor that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was later at a London bar that Papadopoulos would drunkenly pass the rumor to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer (who Strzok flew to London to meet with).

Also recall that CIA/FBI "informant" (spy) Stefan Halper met with both Carter Page and Papadopoulos in London.

Halper, a veteran of four Republican administrations, reached out to Trump aide George Papadopoulos in September 2016 with an offer to fly to London to write an academic paper on energy exploration in the Mediterranean Sea.

Papadopoulos accepted a flight to London and a $3,000 honorarium. He claims that during a meeting in London, Halper asked him whether he knew anything about Russian hacking of Democrats' emails.

Papadopoulos had other contacts on British soil that he now believes were part of a government-sanctioned surveillance operation. - Daily Caller

In total, Halper received over $1 million from the Obama Pentagon for "research," over $400,000 of which was granted before and during the 2016 election season.

Papadopoulos, who was sentenced to 14 days in prison for lying about his conversations with a shadowy Maltese professor and self-professed member of the Clinton Foundation , has publicly claimed he was targeted by UK spies, and told The Telegraph that he demands transparency. Trump's allies in Washington, meanwhile, have suggested that the facts laid out before us mean that the ongoing Russia investigation was invalid from the start .

In short, it's understandable that the UK would prefer to hide their involvement in the "witch hunt" of Donald Trump since much of the counterintelligence investigation was conducted on UK soil. And if the Brits had knowledge of the operation, it will bolster claims that they meddled in the 2016 US election by assisting what appears to have been a set-up from the start .

Steele's ham-handed dossier is a mere embarrassment, as virtually none of the claims asserted by the former MI6 agent have been proven true.

Steele, a former MI6 agent, is the author of the infamous and unverified anti-Trump dossier. He worked as a confidential human source for the FBI for years before the relationship was severed just before the election because of Steele's unauthorized contacts with the press.

He shared results of his investigation into Trump's links to Russia with the FBI beginning in early July 2016.

The FBI relied heavily on the unverified Steele dossier to fill out applications for four FISA warrants against Page. Page has denied the dossier's claims, which include that he was the Trump campaign's back channel to the Kremlin. - Daily Caller

That said, Steele hasn't worked for the British government since 2009, so for their excuse focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK soil, is curious.


Anunnaki , 3 minutes ago link

Trump talks the talk but so far no walking of the walk. Not falling for it anymore, Tyler. No Swamp Draining from Pres. Cheeto anymore than we got Hope or Change from Superfly

Kefeer , 28 minutes ago link

When fraud is coming to light, the cockroaches scramble. The so-called intelligence agencies have run amuck for way too long and leave a trail of lies, murder and deception.

custard , 1 hour ago link

That is the reason Obama and Clinton went to New Zealand and Australia. They have access to the Five Eyes network in New Zealand and Australia without their requests being recorded whereas if they had asked in the US their requests and all documents given to them would have been recorded. . They are both traitors to not only the sitting President and the US people but also to the United States.

Synoia , 1 hour ago link

That said, Steele hasn't worked for the British government since 2009, so for their excuse focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK soil, is curious.

MI6 agents have a reputation for writing fiction. Ian Fleming comes to mind. Its is interesting to reflect on the similarities of fiction and so called intelligence.

STONEHILLADY , 1 hour ago link

I think we all know now that the UK not Russia was the dirtbags working for Obama/HRC to trap Trump. Release the declass Trump and let's start cleaning up the swamp. Let the SHTF those Brits have never been friends to freedom.

fleur de lis , 1 hour ago link

@European American,

If they released audio-video evidence of public officials indulging in cannibalistic pedophilia at their state desks, they would still get off the hook.

Their MSM fiends oops I meant friends would scramble to the rescue and create another AV to counter the actual one, and their idiot Democrat audiences would fall for it.

No matter what is exposed on 5 December the perps will get off the hook.

Chupacabra-322 , 2 hours ago link
StarGate , 1 hour ago link

Add: GCHQ (UK NSA) was in agreement with HilBarry Inc to block the US 2016 election for U.K. candidate Hillary aka Clinton 'Rhodes scholar' Brit colonial agent. Study who 'Rhodes' was. CIA and MI6 are UK siblings. Note nickname for CIA is "Langley" = 'The English' in French L'Anglai. Trump Tower - Russkie atty Natalia met with Simpson GPS Fusion to debrief before & after meeting. Natalia was granted US entry by Mueller Spec Counsel teamster Preet Baharara (conflict in that Preet is compromised witness and also SC "investigator"). Russkie Ahkmedishin met with Obama WH in prep for meeting (see Jan 2016 WH log). The 'translator' at meeting was Obama WH translator.

GPS Fusion wrote the Dossier with UK spy Steele and was paid by Hillary/DNC.

The evidence for false Trump Russkie bank connections is a phony server set up by CIA agent McMullen that robo scammed Russian Alfa Bank to robo talk to the phony server the CIA named with miss-spell Trump OrGAINization. See godaddy domain registration. Hillary slandered Trump with this scam on Twitter Oct 31, 2016 - her witchy day.

https://mobile.twitter.com/hillaryclinton/status/793234169576947712?lang=en

WorkingFool , 1 hour ago link

Obama used the intelligence agencies to spy on all political opponents, not just the Trump campaign and eventually the administration. NSA databases were being queried by Democrat contractors with content feed to Obama's National Security staff where communications were "unmasked" by Rice and others. Rodgers shut down the scheme. So much Marxist criminality and fraud left unpunished.

Chupacabra-322 , 2 hours ago link

George Papadopoulos was not the reason the FBI opened their 2016 Counterintelligence Investigation into the Trump Campaign. John Brennan was the reason.

Brennan was the man pushing the entire Russian Narrative that consumed Washington D.C. – and ultimately led to the Mueller Investigation. He did this based on little or no evidence. The Electronic Communication should prove interesting. John Brennan's Role in the FBI's Trump-Russia Investigation

April 9, 2018 by Jeff Carlson, CFA

In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, head of Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) traveled to Washington D.C. to meet with then-CIA Head John Brennan regarding alleged communications between the Trump Campaign and Moscow.

That summer, GCHQ's then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at "director level", face-to-face between the two agency chiefs. The meeting between Hannigan and Brennan appears somewhat unusual.

The US and the UK are two of the so-called Five Eyes -- along with Canada, Australia and New Zealand -- that share a broad range of intelligence through a formalized alliance.

The GCHQ is responsible for Britain's Signals Intelligence. The NSA is responsible for the United States' Signals Intelligence. Hannigan's U.S. counterpart was not CIA Director Brennan. Hannigan's U.S. counterpart was NSA Director Mike Rogers. Luke Harding of the Guardian originally reported the meeting in an April 13, 2017 article on Britain's spy agencies early role in the Trump-Russia investigation:

GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious "interactions" between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information

Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump's inner circle and Russians.

https://www.themarketswork.com/2018/04/09/john-brennans-role-in-the-fbi

StarGate , 1 hour ago link

See above about phony robot "suspicious communications" set up by CIA McMullen to smear Trump with Trump Tower falsely named server and data created in robo call response with Russian Alfa bank.

Russian "communications" was e-data of the Russkie Bank and the non-Trump server named "Trump OrGAINization". It was just two robo-computers pinging back and forth.

smacker , 1 hour ago link

@Chupacabra-322 URL s/b " https://themarketswork.com/2018/04/09/john-brennans-role-in-the-fbis-trump-russia-investigation/ "

Chupacabra-322 , 2 hours ago link

The Trump Team was being surveiled the entire time by Breanan via the GCHQ. The CIA are Analysts. That's it. They had to involve the FBI to begin the Surveillance & Criminal Investigation into the Counter Intelligence Operation. Thus, Criminal at Large Breanan's trip up to Capital Hill to meet with Harry Reid to brief him on Steele. Brennan the "Puppet Master" has been quarter backing the entire Deep State Intelligence Psychological Operation & Parallel Construction Surveillance from the very start.

They've been reverse engineering their lies ever since they lost the election to cover their tracks and use the excuse of "Plausible Deniability" as the Pure Evil War Criminal Treasonous Seditious Psychopaths at the CIA always claim.

Feb 13th, Don Bongino Podcast.

"I'll include an article from NPR. NPR, not a by any stretch a right Wing outlet. Ok? But it's actually a decent piece. Now, it describes the three hop rule. It's from 2013, but it describes it very shortly & ce scintillating in about 400 words. And it's done well so I'll include it in todays show notes.

Remember, It's now the "Two Hop Rule" but you just have to know what a "Hop" is to understand how dangerous this is.

Here's how they explain it.

It says, "testimony before Congress on Wednesday, remember this is written in 2013 Joe. Showed how easy it is for Americans, with no connection to Terrorism to unwittingly have their calling patterns analyzed by the Government." This is really wacko stuff. It hinges on what is known as a "Hop."

Or chain analysis. When the NSA identifies a suspect, it can look not just at his phone records Joe, but also the records of everyone he calls, everyone who calls those people and everyone who calls those people." Chain Migration.

You ain't kidding! Right!? Chain spying!

It goes on...though....this is good.

"If the average person Joe, called 40 unique people. "Three Hop Analysts" would allow the Government to mine the records....this is a staggering number...of 2.5 Million Americans when investigating one suspected terrorist."

"Holy Moly!" Holly Moly is right.

Why get a FISA warrant for Cater Paige after he left the Trump Team? Because folks, the FISA Warrant is RETROACTIVE.

All the the emails he sent in the past to Trump Team members, combine that with "Two Hops" you basically have everybody in the known universe that could of ever contacted the Trump Team.

Paige sends an email, whatever to Kushner. I don't know who he sends emails to. He probably didn't. But you get the point. Then you go to another "Hop." Kushner, who'd he send an email to? Now you got the while Trump Team.

That's the whole point. That's why I constantly say to you that they were trying to put a legal face on this thing after they realized the election was coming up and they could lose.

They were like. Man, we've been spying on these people the whole time. We already got most of their emails and their communications. How do we legally do it now?

Oh, we get a FISA Warrant, we use couple of "Hops" and we're Golden."

[Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Operating on a budget of Ł1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway, Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region ..."
"... The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government agencies." ..."
Nov 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

The hacking collective known as "Anonymous" published a trove of documents on November 5 which it claims exposes a UK-based psyop to create a " large-scale information secret service " in Europe in order to combat "Russian propaganda" - which has been blamed for everything from Brexit to US President Trump winning the 2016 US election.

The primary objective of the " Integrity Initiative " - established in 2015 by the Institute for Statecraft - is "to provide a coordinated Western response to Russian disinformation and other elements of hybrid warfare."

And while the notion of Russian disinformation has become the West's favorite new bogeyman to excuse things such as Hillary Clinton's historic loss to Donald Trump, we note that "Anonymous" was called out by WikiLeaks in October 2016 as an FBI cutout, while the report on the Integrity Initiative that Anonymous exposed comes from Russian state-owned network RT - so it's anyone's guess whose 400lb hackers are at work here.

Operating on a budget of Ł1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim.

The UK establishment appears to be conducting the very activities of which it and its allies have long-accused the Kremlin, with little or no corroborating evidence. The program also aims to "change attitudes in Russia itself" as well as influencing Russian speakers in the EU and North America, one of the leaked documents states. - RT

The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway, Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region .

The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government agencies."

The initiative has received Ł168,000 in funding from HQ NATO Public Diplomacy and Ł250,000 from the US State Department , the documents allege.

Some of its purported members include British MPs and high-profile " independent" journalists with a penchant for anti-Russian sentiment in their collective online oeuvre, as showcased by a brief glance at their Twitter feeds. - RT

Noted examples of "inedependent" anti-Russia journalists:

Spanish "Op"

In one example of the group's activities, a "Moncloa Campaign" was successfully conducted by the group's Spanish cluster to block the appointment of Colonel Pedro Banos as the director of Spain's Department of Homeland Security. It took just seven-and-a-half hours to accomplish, brags the group in the documents .

"The [Spanish] government is preparing to appoint Colonel Banos, known for his pro-Russian and pro-Putin positions in the Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts, as Director of the Department of Homeland Security, a key body located at the Moncloa," begins Nacho Torreblanca in a seven-part tweetstorm describing what happened.

Others joined in. Among them – according to the leaks – academic Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz, who wrote that "Mr. Banos is to geopolitics as a homeopath is to medicine." Appointing such a figure would be "a shame." - RT

The operation was reported in Spanish media, while Banos was labeled "pro-Putin" by UK MP Bob Seely.

In short, expect anything counter to predominant "open-border" narratives to be the Kremlin's fault - and not a natural populist reflex to the destruction of borders, language and culture.

[Nov 24, 2018] British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" ..."
"... "The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016." ..."
"... "Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele dossier..." ..."
"... this movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war ..."
"... Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same laws as the rest of the UK. ..."
"... The UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth ..."
"... British hypocrisy publicly called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me ..."
"... It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint does not bode well for such relations ..."
"... A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants? ..."
"... I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins. ..."
"... The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's explicit approval. ..."
"... Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda ..."
"... This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap. ..."
"... Pat Lang posted a report that strongly implies that charges of Russian influence on Trump are a deliberate falsification ..."
"... It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6 meddling ..."
"... As I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was the best candidate for the job. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love? ..."
"... They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass psychological pathology among the elites. ..."
"... The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist "order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation. ..."
"... Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is Strength." The three pillars of political power. ..."
"... Since UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK government. ..."
"... William Browder ..."
Nov 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns Steveg , Nov 24, 2018 11:43:44 AM | link

In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia propaganda into the western media stream.

We have already seen many consequences of this and similar programs which are designed to smear anyone who does not follow the anti-Russian government lines. The 'Russian collusion' smear campaign against Donald Trump based on the Steele dossier was also a largely British operation but seems to be part of a different project.

The ' Integrity Initiative ' builds 'cluster' or contact groups of trusted journalists, military personal, academics and lobbyists within foreign countries. These people get alerts via social media to take action when the British center perceives a need.

On June 7 it took the the Spanish cluster only a few hours to derail the appointment of Perto Banos as the Director of the National Security Department in Spain. The cluster determined that he had a too positive view of Russia and launched a coordinated social media smear campaign (pdf) against him.


bigger

The Initiative and its operations were unveiled when someone liberated some of its documents, including its budget applications to the British Foreign Office, and posted them under the 'Anonymous' label at cyberguerrilla.org .

The Initiative is nominally run under the (government financed) non-government-organisation The Institute For Statecraft . Its internal handbook (pdf) describes its purpose:

The Integrity Initiative was set up in autumn 2015 by The Institute for Statecraft in cooperation with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) to bring to the attention of politicians, policy-makers, opinion leaders and other interested parties the threat posed by Russia to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, across Europe and North America.

It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" and promises that:

Cluster members will be sent to educational sessions abroad to improve the technical competence of the cluster to deal with disinformation and strengthen bonds in the cluster community. [...] (Events with DFR Digital Sherlocks, Bellingcat, EuVsDisinfo, Buzzfeed, Irex, Detector Media, Stopfake, LT MOD Stratcom – add more names and propose cluster participants as you desire).

The Initiatives Orwellian slogan is 'Defending Democracy Against Disinformation'. It covers European countries, the UK, the U.S. and Canada and seems to want to expand to the Middle East.

On its About page it claims: "We are not a government body but we do work with government departments and agencies who share our aims." The now published budget plans show that more than 95% of the Initiative's funding is coming directly from the British government, NATO and the U.S. State Department. All the 'contact persons' for creating 'clusters' in foreign countries are British embassy officers. It amounts to a foreign influence campaign by the British government that hides behind a 'civil society' NGO.

The organisation is led by one Chris N. Donnelly who receives (pdf) £8,100 per month for creating the smear campaign network.


Chris Donnelly - Pic via Euromaidanpress

From its 2017/18 budget application (pdf) we learn how the Initiative works:

To counter Russian disinformation and malign influence in Europe by: expanding the knowledge base; harnessing existing expertise, and; establishing a network of networks of experts, opinion formers and policy makers, to educate national audiences in the threat and to help build national capacities to counter it .

The Initiative has a black and white view that is based on a "we are the good ones" illusion. When "we" 'educate the public' it is legitimate work. When others do similar, it its disinformation. That is of course not the reality. The Initiative's existence itself, created to secretly manipulate the public, is proof that such a view is wrong.

If its work were as legit as it wants to be seen, why would the Foreign Office run it from behind the curtain as an NGO? The Initiative is not the only such operation. It's applications seek funding from a larger "Russian Language Strategic Communication Programme" run by the Foreign Office.

The 2017/18 budget application sought FCO funding of £480,635. It received £102,000 in co-funding from NATO and the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense. The 2018/19 budget application shows a planned spending (pdf) of £1,961,000.00. The co-sponsors this year are again NATO and the Lithuanian MoD, but also include (pdf) the U.S. State Department with £250,000 and Facebook with £100,000. The budget lays out a strong cooperation with the local military of each country. It notes that NATO is also generous in financing the local clusters.

One of the liberated papers of the Initiative is a talking points memo labeled Top 3 Deliverable for FCO (pdf):

  • Developing and proving the cluster concept and methodology, setting up clusters in a range of countries with different circumstances
  • Making people (in Government, think tanks, military, journalists) see the big picture, making people acknowledge that we are under concerted, deliberate hybrid attack by Russia
  • Increasing the speed of response, mobilising the network to activism in pursuit of the "golden minute"

Under top 1, setting up clusters, a subitem reads:

- Connects media with academia with policy makers with practitioners in a country to impact on policy and society: ( Jelena Milic silencing pro-kremlin voices on Serbian TV )

Defending Democracy by silencing certain voices on public TV seems to be a self-contradicting concept.

Another subitem notes how the Initiative secretly influences foreign governments:

We engage only very discreetly with governments, based entirely on trusted personal contacts, specifically to ensure that they do not come to see our work as a problem, and to try to influence them gently, as befits an independent NGO operation like ours, viz;
- Germany, via the Zentrum Liberale Moderne to the Chancellor's Office and MOD
- Netherlands, via the HCSS to the MOD
- Poland and Romania, at desk level into their MFAs via their NATO Reps
- Spain, via special advisers, into the MOD and PM's office (NB this may change very soon with the new Government)
- Norway, via personal contacts into the MOD
- HQ NATO, via the Policy Planning Unit into the Sec Gen's office.
We have latent contacts into other governments which we will activate as needs be as the clusters develop.

A look at the 'clusters' set up in U.S. and UK shows some prominent names.


bigger

Members of the Atlantic Council, which has a contract to censor Facebook posts , appear on several cluster lists. The UK core cluster also includes some prominent names like tax fraudster William Browder , the daft Atlantic Council shill Ben Nimmo and the neo-conservative Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. One person of interest is Andrew Wood who handed the Steele 'dirty dossier' to Senator John McCain to smear Donald Trump over alleged relations with Russia. A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times, Neil Buckley from the FT and Jonathan Marcus of the BBC.


bigger - bigger

A ' Cluster Roundup ' (pdf) from July 2018 details its activities in at least 35 countries. Another file reveals (pdf) the local partnering institutions and individuals involved in the programs.

The Initiatives Guide to Countering Russian Information (pdf) is a rather funny read. It lists the downing of flight MH 17 by a Ukranian BUK missile, the fake chemical incident in Khan Sheikhoun and the Skripal Affair as examples for "Russian disinformation". But at least two of these events, Khan Sheikun via the UK run White Helmets and the Skripal affair, are evidently products of British intelligence disinformation operations.

The probably most interesting papers of the whole stash is the 'Project Plan' laid out at pages 7-40 of the 2018 budget application v2 (pdf). Under 'Sustainability' it notes:

The programme is proposed to run until at least March 2019, to ensure that the clusters established in each country have sufficient time to take root, find funding, and demonstrate their effectiveness. FCO funding for Phase 2 will enable the activities to be expanded in scale, reach and scope. As clusters have established themselves, they have begun to access local sources of funding. But this is a slow process and harder in some countries than others. HQ NATO PDD [Public Diplomacy Division] has proved a reliable source of funding for national clusters. The ATA [Atlantic Treaty Association] promises to be the same, giving access to other pots of money within NATO and member nations. Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow.

The programme has begun to create a critical mass of individuals from a cross society (think tanks, academia, politics, the media, government and the military) whose work is proving to be mutually reinforcing . Creating the network of networks has given each national group local coherence, credibility and reach, as well as good international access. Together, these conditions, plus the growing awareness within governments of the need for this work, should guarantee the continuity of the work under various auspices and in various forms.

The third part of the budget application (pdf) list the various activities, their output and outcome. The budget plan includes a section that describes 'Risks' to the initiative. These include hacking of the Initiatives IT as well as:

Adverse publicity generated by Russia or by supporters of Russia in target countries, or by political and interest groups affected by the work of the programme, aimed at discrediting the programme or its participants, or to create political embarrassment.

We hope that this piece contributes to such embarrassment.

Posted by b on November 24, 2018 at 11:24 AM | Permalink

Comments Perfidious ALbion!

When will we learn?


pretzelattack , Nov 24, 2018 11:44:00 AM | link

Coincidentally, or not, i just saw this article at the guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/23/robert-mueller-profile-donald-trump-russia-investigation.
Anya , Nov 24, 2018 11:57:00 AM | link
The British government has been running a serious meddling into the US affairs:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-23/mi6-scrambling-stop-trump-releasing-classified-docs-russia-probe

"The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016."

A Steele & Skrupal's anti-Russian / anti-Trump saga: https://spectator.org/big-dots-do-they-connect/

"Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele dossier..."

For M16 to expose this level of stupidity is stunning.

james , Nov 24, 2018 11:58:02 AM | link
thanks b....

this movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war.. i guess the idea is to get the ordinary people to think in terms of hating another country based on lies and that this would be a good thing... it is very sad what uk / usa leadership in the past century has come down to here.... i can only hope that info releases like this will hasten it's demise...

Ingrian , Nov 24, 2018 12:03:55 PM | link
Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same laws as the rest of the UK.

The UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth

james , Nov 24, 2018 12:15:31 PM | link
@6 ingrian... things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit Russia fully, as they'd intended...
et Al , Nov 24, 2018 12:20:09 PM | link

Let the Doxx wars begin! Sure, Anonymous is not Russian but it will surely now be targeted and smeared as such which would show that it has hit a nerve. British hypocrisy publicly called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me.

I think we've all noticed the euro-asslantic press (and friends) on behalf of, willingly and in cooperation with the British intelligence et al 'calling out' numerous Russians as G(R)U/spies/whatever for a while now yet providing less than a shred of credible evidence.

It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint does not bode well for such relations.

Meanwhile in Brussels they are having their cake and eating it, i.e. bemoaning Europe's 'weak response' to Russian propaganda:

https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/experts-lament-underfunding-of-eu-task-force-countering-russian-disinformation/

BTW, did anyone read Wired UK's current advertorial (nov 14) by Carl Miller for Brigade 77?

Forthestate , Nov 24, 2018 12:26:09 PM | link
"A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants?
worldblee , Nov 24, 2018 12:33:05 PM | link
Yet another example of the pot calling the kettle black when in fact the kettle may not be black at all; it's just the pot making up things. "These Russian criminals are using propaganda to show (truths) like the fact the DNC and Clinton campaigns colluded to prevent Sanders from being nominated, so we need to establish a clandestine propaganda network to establish that the Russians are running propaganda!"
psychohistorian , Nov 24, 2018 12:34:32 PM | link

....full cluster of smear merchants". May all the clusters of smear merchants be exposed to the public as the acolytes of evil they are.

plantman , Nov 24, 2018 12:36:48 PM | link
"In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia propaganda into the western media stream."

I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins.

The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's explicit approval.

Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda

BUT...the author assures us that the "deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow" Huh?? In other words, the fix is in. Mueller will pardon Trump on collusion charges but the propaganda campaign against Russia will continue...with the full support of both parties. I could be wrong, but that's how I see it...

m , Nov 24, 2018 12:40:07 PM | link
This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap.

A lot of sour grapes with this so-called 'integrity initiative', IMO. BP was behind a lot of this, I would also think. When Assad pulled the plug on the pipeline through the Levant in 2009, the Brits hacked up a fur ball. It's gone downhill for them ever since. Couldn't happen to a nicer lot. If you can't invade or beat them with proxies, you can at least call them names.

Jackrabbit , Nov 24, 2018 12:40:58 PM | link
Anya

Pat Lang posted a report that strongly implies that charges of Russian influence on Trump are a deliberate falsification: THE CHIMERA OF DONALD TRUMP, RUSSIAN MONEY LAUNDERER :

If Trump was taking dirty money or engaged in criminal activity with Russians then he was doing it with Felix Sater, who was under the control of the FBI... And who was in charge of the FBI during all of the time that Sater was a signed up FBI snitch? You got it -- Robert Mueller (2001 thru 2013) ...

It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6 meddling, including:

Steele dossier: To create suspicion in government, media, and later the public

Leaking of DNC emails to Wikileaks (but calling it a "hack"): To help with election of Trump and link Wikileaks (as agent) to Russian election meddling

Cambridge Analytica: To provide necessary reasoning for Trump's (certain) win of the electoral college.

Note: We later found that dozens of firms had undue access to Facebook data. Why did the campaign turn to a British firm instead of an American firm? Well, it had to be a British firm if MI6 was running the (supposed) Facebook targeting for CIA.

As I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was the best candidate for the job.
Cyril , Nov 24, 2018 1:10:13 PM | link
The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love?
Russ , Nov 24, 2018 1:16:21 PM | link
Posted by: james | Nov 24, 2018 12:15:31 PM | 7

"things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of russia after the fall of the soviet union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit russia fully, as they'd intended..."

They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass psychological pathology among the elites.

The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist "order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation.

GeorgeV , Nov 24, 2018 1:34:08 PM | link
Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is Strength." The three pillars of political power.
Sasha , Nov 24, 2018 1:38:39 PM | link
Since UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK government...and in this context, new empowerished sovereign governemts into the EU should consider the possibility expelling these traitors as spies of the UK....

http://www.voltairenet.org/article204051.html

Some of the "clusters" unmasked here....some, like Ignacio Torreblanca in Spain, are related to the CFR....

https://www.rt.com/news/444737-uk-funded-campaign-russia-leaks/

Zanon , Nov 24, 2018 2:12:45 PM | link
Country list of agents of influence according to the leak:
Zanon , Nov 24, 2018 2:13:28 PM | link
cresty , Nov 24, 2018 2:18:30 PM | link
Thank you very much for going through all the files, b. Will share far and wide

[Nov 24, 2018] Now we know created MH17 smear campaign, who financial Steele dossier and created Skripal affair ;-)

Highly recommended!
Nov 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Perfidious Albion: or yet another example of the pot calling the kettle black when in fact the kettle may not be black at all; it's just the pot making up things

In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia propaganda into the western media stream.

We have already seen many consequences of this and similar programs which are designed to smear anyone who does not follow the anti-Russian government lines. The 'Russian collusion' smear campaign against Donald Trump based on the Steele dossier was also a largely British operation but seems to be part of a different project.

The ' Integrity Initiative ' builds 'cluster' or contact groups of trusted journalists, military personal, academics and lobbyists within foreign countries. These people get alerts via social media to take action when the British center perceives a need.

[Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also. ..."
"... Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. ..."
"... This is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the WEST? This is nuts. ..."
Nov 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

HowdyDoody , 7 hours ago link

One of the documents lists a series of propaganda weapons to be used against Russia. One is use of the church as a weapon. That has already been started in Ukraine with Poroshenko buying off regligious leader to split Ukraine Orthodoxy from Russian Orthodoxy. It also explicitly states that the Skripal incident is a 'Dirty Trick' against Russia.

activisor , 10 hours ago link

The British political system is on the verge of collapse. BREXIT has finally demonstrated that the Government/ Opposition parties are clearly aligned against the interests of the people. The EU is nothing more than an arm of the Globalist agenda of world domination.

The US has shown its true colours - sanctioning every country that stands for independent sovereignty is not a good foreign policy, and is destined to turn the tide of public opinion firmly against global hegemony, endless wars, and wealth inequity.

The old Empire is in its death throes. A new paradigm awaits which will exclude all those who have exploited the many, in order to sit at the top of the pyramid. They cannot escape Karma.

smacker , 11 hours ago link

The Western world needs to come to terms with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath. Today, Russia is led by Putin and he obviously has objectives as any national leader has.

Western "leaders" need to decide whether Putin:

  1. Is trying to create Soviet Union 2.0, to have a 2nd attempt at ruling the world thru communism and to do this by holding the world to ransom over oil/gas supplies. OR
  2. Is wanting Russia to become a member of the family of nations and of a multi-polar world to improve the lives of Russian people, but is being blocked at every twist and turn by manufactured events like Russia-gate and the Skripal affair and now this latest revelation of anti-Russian propaganda campaigns being coordinated and run out of London.

Both of the above cannot be true because there are too many contradictions. Which is it??

Lokiban , 13 hours ago link

Yes because imagine that that we lived in 1940 without any means to inform ourselves and that media was still in control over the information that reaches us. We would already be in a fullblown war with Russia because of it but now with the Internet and information going around freely only a whimpy 10% of we the people stand behind their desperately wanted war. Imagine that, an informed sheople.
Can't have that, they cannot do their usual stuff anymore.... good riddance.

LOL123 , 14 hours ago link

"250,000 from the US State Department , the documents allege."....... Interesting.

"During the third Democratic debate on Saturday night, Hillary Clinton called for a "Manhattan-like project" to break encrypted terrorist communications. The project would "bring the government and the tech communities together" to find a way to give law enforcement access to encrypted messages, she said. It's something that some politicians and intelligence officials have wanted for awhile,"........

***wasn't the Manhatten project a secret venture?????? Hummmmm"

Hillary Clinton has all of our encryption keys, including the FBI's . "Encryption keys" is a general reference to several encryption functions hijacked by Hillary and her surrogate ENTRUST. They include hash functions (used to indicate whether the contents have been altered in transit), PKI public/private key infrastructure, SSL (secure socket layer), TLS (transport layer security), the Dual_EC_DRBG NSA algorithm and certificate authorities.

The convoluted structure managed by the "Federal Common Policy" group has ceded to companies like ENTRUST INC the ability to sublicense their authority to third parties who in turn manage entire other networks in a Gordian knot of relationships clearly designed to fool the public to hide their devilish criminality. All roads lead back to Hillary and the Rose Law Firm."- patriots4truth

artistant , 14 hours ago link

But, but some people keep getting away with it.

hooligan2009 , 15 hours ago link

When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also.

larryriedel , 15 hours ago link

FBI/Anonymous can use this story to support a narrative that social media bots posting memes is a problem for everybody, and it's not a partisan issue. The idea is that fake news and unrestricted social media are inherently dangerous, and both the West and Russia are exploiting that, so governments need to agree to restrict the ability to use those platforms for political speech, especially without using True Names.

Baron Samedi , 15 hours ago link

Oilygawkies in the UK and USSA seem to be letting their spooks have a good-humored (rating here on the absurd transparency of these ops) contest to see who can come up with the most surreal propaganda psy-ops.

But they probably also serve as LHO distractions from something genuinely sleazy.

headless blogger , 15 hours ago link

Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. Anything that is remotely like Nationalism is the true enemy of these Globalist/Internationalists, which is what the Top-Ape Bolshevik promoted: see Vladimir Lenin and his quotes on how he believed fully in "internationalism" for a world without borders. Ironic how they Love the butchers of the Soviet Union but hate Russia. It is ALL ABOUT IDEOLOGY to these people and "the means justify the ends".

They are frightening people.

Push , 15 hours ago link

Basically, if one acquires factual information from an internet source, which leads to overturning the propaganda to which we're all subjected, then it MUST have come from Putin. This is the direction they're headed. Anyone speaking out against the official story is obviously a Russian spy.

Xena fobe , 15 hours ago link

"Instutute for Statecraft"? Seriously?

OverTheHedge , 11 hours ago link

"Substitute for Statecraft"

Fify ;-)

koan , 16 hours ago link

The UK is waging psyop against their own people using the Russians as an excuse to further oppress the population, especially the white population.

FIFY.

East Indian , 16 hours ago link

Never thought Putin would be the symbol of free speech! The totalitarian EU and Deep State can come out of closet and denounce their predecessors.

brewing_it , 17 hours ago link

If you call ******** on the whole Russia cyberscare, you will be labeled a puppet of Putin.

The establishment is afraid of free thinking men and women that can call ******** when they see and hear it.

AriusArmenian , 17 hours ago link

Better to call it the Anti-Integrity Initiative. UK cretins up to their usual dirty tricks - let them choke on their poison. The judgement of history will eventually catch up with them.

Mike Rotsch , 17 hours ago link

A good 'ole economic collapse will give western countries a chance to purge their crazy leaders before they involve us all in a thermonuclear war. Short everything with your entire accounts.

RealistDuJour , 17 hours ago link

This is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the WEST? This is nuts.

Isn't it just as likely someone in the WEST planted this cache, intending Anonymous to find it?

HRClinton , 18 hours ago link

When two sides fight - especially white v white - the hidden 3rd party (((instigator))) wins.

How dumb and mallaleable can these goys be? Pretty dumb and mallaleable, it seems.

J S Bach , 18 hours ago link

Any propaganda coming from the UK or US is strictly zionist. EVERYTHING they put out is to the benefit of Israel and the "lobby". Russia isn't perfect, but if they're an enemy of the latter, then they should NOT be considered a foe to all thinking and conscientious people.

OverTheHedge , 11 hours ago link

Yesterday, the BBC had a thing on Thai workers in Israel, and how they keep dying of accidents, their general level of slavery etc. Very odd to have a negative Israel story, so I wonder who upset whom, and what the ongoing status will be.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-middle-east-46311922/thai-labourers-in-israel-tell-of-harrowing-conditions

Thai labourers in Israel tell of harrowing conditions

A year-long BBC investigation has discovered widespread abuse of Thai nationals living and working in Israel - under a scheme organized by the two governments.

Many are subjected to unsafe working practices and squalid, unsanitary living conditions. Some are overworked, others underpaid and there are dozens of unexplained deaths.

Herdee , 18 hours ago link

England and the U.S. don't like their very poor and rotten social conditions put out for the public to see. Both countries have severely deteriorating problems on their streets because of bankrupt governments printing money for foreign wars.

Quadruple_Rainbow , 18 hours ago link

More of the same fraudulent duality while alleged so called but not money etc continues to flow (everything is criminal) and the cesspool of a hierarchy pretends it's business as usual.

This isn't about maintaining balance in a lie this is about disclosing the truth and agendas (Agenda 21 now Agenda 2030 = The New Age Religion is Never Going To Be Saturnism). The layers of the hierarchy are a lie so unless the alleged so called leaders of those layers are publicly providing testimony and confession then everything that is being spoon fed to the pablum puking public through all sources is a lie.

Herdee , 18 hours ago link

They're afraid of stories like this: https://www.rt.com/news/444737-uk-funded-campaign-russia-leaks/

HRClinton , 17 hours ago link

Operating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of (((local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics))).

The (((team))) is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs, while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim.

gatorengineer , 18 hours ago link

Do Neocons get time and half for Overtime, they sure have been putting in a bunch lately.

[Nov 24, 2018] Russian Diplomacy Is Winning the New Cold War by Stephen F. Cohen

Notable quotes:
"... During the preceding Cold War with the Soviet Union, no attempt was made to "isolate" Russia abroad; instead, the goal was to "contain" it within its "bloc" of Eastern European nations and compete with it in what was called the "Third World." ..."
"... The notion of "isolating" a country of Russia's size, Eurasian location, resources, and long history as a great power is vainglorious folly. It reflects the paucity and poverty of foreign thinking in Washington in recent decades, not the least in the US Congress and mainstream media. ..."
"... Nationalism, that is, by whatever name, has long been a major political force in most countries, whether in liberal enlightened or reactionary right-wing forms. Russia and the United States are not exceptions. ..."
Nov 24, 2018 | www.thenation.com

Washington's attempt to "isolate Putin's Russia" has failed and had the opposite effect.

On the fifth anniversary of the onset of the Ukrainian crisis, in November 2013, and of Washington "punishing" Russia by attempting to "isolate" it in world affairs -- a policy first declared by President Barack Obama in 2014 and continued ever since, primarily through economic sanctions -- Cohen discusses the following points:

1. During the preceding Cold War with the Soviet Union, no attempt was made to "isolate" Russia abroad; instead, the goal was to "contain" it within its "bloc" of Eastern European nations and compete with it in what was called the "Third World."

2. The notion of "isolating" a country of Russia's size, Eurasian location, resources, and long history as a great power is vainglorious folly. It reflects the paucity and poverty of foreign thinking in Washington in recent decades, not the least in the US Congress and mainstream media.

3. Consider the actual results. Russia is hardly isolated. Since 2014, Moscow has arguably been the most active diplomatic capital of all great powers today. It has forged expanding military, political, or economic partnerships with, for example, China, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, India, and several other East Asian nations, even, despite EU sanctions, with several European governments. Still more, Moscow is the architect and prime convener of three important peace negotiations under way today: those involving Syria, Serbia-Kosovo, and even Afghanistan. Put differently, can any other national leaders in the 21st century match the diplomatic records of Russian President Vladimir Putin or of his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov? Certainly not former US presidents George W. Bush or Obama or soon-to-depart German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Nor any British or French leader.

4. Much is made of Putin's purportedly malign "nationalism" in this regard. But this is an uninformed or hypocritical explanation. Consider French President Emmanuel Macron, who recently reproached Trump for his declared nationalism. The same Macron who has sought to suggest (rather implausibly) that he is a second coming of Charles de Gaulle, who himself was a great and professed nationalist leader of the 20th century, from his resistance to the Nazi occupation and founding of the Fifth Republic to his refusal to put the French military under NATO command. Nationalism, that is, by whatever name, has long been a major political force in most countries, whether in liberal enlightened or reactionary right-wing forms. Russia and the United States are not exceptions.

5. Putin's success in restoring Russia's role in world affairs is usually ascribed to his "aggressive" policies, but it is better understood as a realization of what is characterized in Moscow as the "philosophy of Russian foreign policy" since Putin became leader in 2000. It has three professed tenets. The first goal of foreign policy is to protect Russia's "sovereignty," which is said to have been lost in the disastrous post-Soviet 1990s. The second is a kind of Russia-first nationalism or patriotism: to enhance the well-being of the citizens of the Russian Federation. The third is ecumenical: to partner with any government that wants to partner with Russia. This "philosophy" is, of course, non- or un-Soviet, which was heavily ideological, at least in its professed ideology and goals.

6. Considering Washington's inability to "isolate Russia," considering Russia's diplomatic successes in recent years, and considering the bitter fruits of US militarized and regime-change foreign policies (which long predate President Trump), perhaps it's time for Washington to learn from Moscow rather than demand that Moscow conform to Washington's thinking about -- and behavior in -- world affairs. If not, Washington is more likely to continue to isolate itself.

... ... ...

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com.)

[Nov 23, 2018] Kunstler Exposes The Core Truth Of The 2016 Russia Collusion Story

Notable quotes:
"... For decades, it has been rumored that the Clintons have FBI files on most members of Congress and use these files for blackmail purposes. Given the events of the past few years, I actually believe this rumor to be grounded in truth. ..."
"... For decades, it has been rumored that the Clintons have FBI files on most members of Congress and use these files for blackmail purposes. Given the events of the past few years, I actually believe this rumor to be grounded in truth. ..."
Nov 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Kunstler Exposes "The Core Truth" Of The 2016 Russia Collusion Story

by Tyler Durden Fri, 11/23/2018 - 15:25 23 SHARES Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com, Holiday Doings And Undoings

Somehow I doubt that this Christmas will win the Bing Crosby star of approval. Rather, we see the financial markets breaking under the strain of sustained institutionalized fraud, and the social fabric tearing from persistent systemic political dishonesty. It adds up to a nation that can't navigate through reality, a nation too dependent on sure things, safe spaces, and happy outcomes. Every few decades a message comes from the Universe that faking it is not good enough.

The main message from the financials is that the global debt barge has run aground, and with it, the global economy. That mighty engine has been chugging along on promises-to-pay and now the faith that sustained those promises is dissolving. China, Euroland, and the USA can't possibly meet their tangled obligations, and are running out of tricks for rigging, gaming, and jacking the bond markets, where all those promises are vested. It boils down to a whole lot of people not getting paid, one way or the other -- and it's really bad for business.

Our President has taken full credit for the bubblicious markets, of course, and will be Hooverized as they gurgle around the drain. Given his chimerical personality, he may try to put on an FDR mask -- perhaps even sit in a wheelchair -- and try a few grand-scale policy tricks to escape the vortex. But the net effect will surely be to make matters worse -- for instance, if he can hector the Federal Reserve to buy every bond that isn't nailed to some deadly derivative booby-trap. But then he'll only succeed in crashing the dollar. Remember, there are two main ways you can go broke: You can run out of money; or you can have plenty of worthless money.

On the social and political scene, I sense that some things have run their course. Is a critical mass of supposedly educated people not fatigued and nauseated by the regime of "social justice" good-think, and the massive mendacity it stands for , starting with the idea that "diversity and inclusion" require the shut-down of free speech. The obvious hypocrisies and violations of reason emanating from the campuses -- a lot, but not all of it, in response to the Golden Golem of Greatness -- have made enough smart people stupid to endanger the country's political future. A lot of these formerly-non-stupid people work in the news media. It's not too late for some institutions like The New York Times and CNN to change out their editors and producers, and go back to reporting the reality-du-jour instead of functioning as agit-prop mills for every unsound idea ginned through the Yale humanities departments.

Shoehorned into the festivity of the season is the lame-duck session in congress, and one of the main events it portends is the end of Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. The Sphinx-like Mueller has maintained supernatural silence about his tendings and intentions. But if he'd uncovered anything substantial in the way of "collusion" between Mr. Trump and Russia, the public would know by now, since it would represent a signal threat to national security. So it's hard not to conclude that he has nothing except a few Mickey Mouse "process" convictions for lying to the FBI. On the other hand, it's quite impossible to imagine him ignoring the well-documented evidence trail of Hillary Clinton colluding with Russians to influence the 2016 contest against Mr. Trump -- and to defame him after he won. There's also the Hieronymus Bosch panorama of criminal mischief around the racketeering scheme known as the Clinton Foundation to consider. Do these venal characters get a pass on all that?

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) has announced plans to call Federal Attorney John Huber (Utah District) to testify about his assignment to look into these Clinton matters. It's a little hard to see how that might produce any enlightenment, since prosecutors are bound by law to not blab about currently open cases. The committee has also subpoenaed former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former FBI Director James Comey, and others who have some serious 'splainin' to do. But if both Huber and Mueller come up empty-handed on the Clintons it will be one of the epic marvels of official bad faith in US history.

There is a core truth to the 2016 Russia collusion story, and the Clintons are at the heart of it. Failure to even look will have very dark consequences for the public interest.


XWeatherman , 40 seconds ago link

It ought to be obvious to just about everyone who is paying attention and not a Corporate-Whore Democrat that the "The Russians Did It" delusion and the accompanying Mueller "investigation" is only a distraction to draw attention away from the obvious and numerous crimeS of H. Clinton, including running an electronic drop-box for U.S. state secrets using a server in her basement, charity fraud, pay-to-play bribe-taking, the uranium to Russia case, etc. And, that's not counting the inexcusable Unprovoked War of Aggression WAR CRIME against Libya. (Of course, she had an excuse: "Destroy a country in order to save a few "protesters".

Mueller is the Deep State (Corporations [especially Military Industrial Complex Death-Merchants, who direct the politicians and foreign policy actions (continual War-For-Humongous-Profits that has taken and takes multiple trillions of dollars away from potential domestic programs & Wall Street bankster-fraudsters who bankrupted the country with the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2008-2009 financial fiasco and who sent U.S. industrial production jobs to other countries] and Oligarchs who reap the profits of such crimes and their results) operative who apparently was brought in the head the FBI to fail to prevent and to coverup the real actors and actions that occurred in association with the downing of buildings at the New York City World Trade center on 9/11.

Hapa , 5 minutes ago link

Sorry, nobodies going to jail and all will be swept under the rug. We will have war to cover their tracks along with all the other frauds. The political buddy buddy system at the upper levels is set up to protect the guilty, and nobody has to pay the price lest the whole thing crumble. It's built that way.

Our only way out is a crash and a reset, with no guarantee what happens on the other side.

I used to be optimistic, but the level of lies, double speak and university factories pumping out marxist leftists portends a bleak future. How anyone thinks we can reason our way out of this situation is fooling themselves about human nature.

SantaClaws , 6 minutes ago link

Nice to see Kunstler focusing on some serious issues like the Uranium One scandal for a change. He seems to be on the concluding end of a cold-turkey or other rehab from some long-term unholy influence. As a result, he has been producing increasingly readable articles for the past several months. Congratulations are due him but with the warning that recovery is always one day at a time.

VWAndy , 7 minutes ago link

Did the Clintons go on a world tour like some kinda rockstars selling us all out?

An nobody said ****!

He–Mene Mox Mox , 14 minutes ago link

" Remember, there are two main ways you can go broke: You can run out of money; or you can have plenty of worthless money". Both pretty much sums up America's predicament. Americans are deep in debt, and their money is worthless.

MarsInScorpio , 1 minute ago link

OK.let's try this for speculative prediction:

Mueller isn't going to touch the Clintons - they have way too much criminal dirt on him. And Huber is an unknown lightweight with no Malicious Seditious Media support.

Sooooo . . . there is only one thing to do once the new Congress takes its oath: Trump gets DOJ Acting AG to appoint the long-awaited Special Prosecutor.

There are more than enough recognized felonies to go after - unlike the Mueller fishing expedition. That will put the Democrat investigation on ice - mainly because lots of Demo chairs and members will be part of the investigation.

"Yes Virginia, Hillary is going to prison . . .:"

navy62802 , 34 minutes ago link

Any serious investigation of the Clinton Foundation would reveal that "Russian Collusion" has everything to do with distraction from the crimes of the Clinton family. The fact that Bill and Hillary have escaped accountability for their heinous crimes is one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in US history. It is truly quite frightening.

The Merovingian , 34 minutes ago link

There is a reason why the DOJ, Congress (both parties), MSM, the MIC, the Deep State don't want ANYONE to look into corruption ... because they are ALL ******* guilty as sin and buried neck deep in ****. Its long past time for the whole ******* thing to come down. We're all fucked.

Jim in MN , 13 minutes ago link

Weiner laptop For The Win. Give us that hard drive, Mr. President! We'll have it all analyzed in one weekend.

Meanwhile, Seth Rich awaits Mueller's OH SO DILIGENT investigation.

Can you believe that the 'core' of Mueller's 'case' ends up being about WIKILEAKS?

What the serious ****.

If he's done zero serious looks at Seth Rich all Mueller's work will just be thrown out of court anyway.

Ham sandwich my fat turkey-enriched ***.

For decades, it has been rumored that the Clintons have FBI files on most members of Congress and use these files for blackmail purposes. Given the events of the past few years, I actually believe this rumor to be grounded in truth.

chippers , 40 minutes ago link

This guy is dreaming if he thinks anything is going to happen to the clintons, the MSM/DOJ is protected those 2 scumbags with the line that if they are investigated trump is going after his political opponents, just like a banana republic. But truthfully nothing reaks more of banana repubicism more then letting the high and mighty of on crimes.

chunga , 12 minutes ago link

I'd like to give a shout out to the "opposition" red team that has sat by and done nothing for more than 30 years.

And for you dopes in Rio Linda, that doesn't mean I'd rather have Honest Hill'rey, for crying out loud.

Bricker , 41 minutes ago link

Theres only one truth...Hillary and Co (CIA) colluded to bring down Trump and Trump kicked the **** out of her.

If we had a true republic, Hillary, Holder, Lynch, Obama, Clapper, Brennan, Lerner would all be under indictment. I mean the ******* list is long

pissonmefico , 19 minutes ago link

If they weren't all on the same side, that of the international bankster cabal, Trump would order his justice department to prosecute those people you mentioned.

The purpose of the Russia investigation is to fool you into thinking there are two sides, and to demonized Russia to create public opinion in favor of attacking Russia because it is not on board with the jwo totalitarian world government. WTFU.

navy62802 , 28 minutes ago link

For decades, it has been rumored that the Clintons have FBI files on most members of Congress and use these files for blackmail purposes. Given the events of the past few years, I actually believe this rumor to be grounded in truth.

Teamtc321 , 24 minutes ago link

Mueller long ago gave up the fruitless hunt for Russian collusion involving President Trump and is now desperately seeking overdue library books or unpaid parking tickets on anyone remotely connected to President Trump to justify his mooching taxpayer dollars.

[Nov 23, 2018] One leaked document from UK Government 'Integrity Initiative' project launched in 2017 contains an interesting reference the the Skripal incident. The project team describe it as a 'Dirty Trick'. Given these documents all pass through the FCO for funding and overall project approval, that must also be the FCO view.

Nov 23, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Entropy Wins , Nov 22, 2018 7:04:54 PM | link

Anonymous have leaked some documents relating to a secretive (and Orwellian) UK Government 'Integrity Initiative' project launched in 2017. There are numerous PDF files detailing members, organizational structure, budgets, 'mission statements', etc. The backup documents are held at pdf-archive. The project has members from the FCO, MOD, journalists, academics, the usual thinktanks - Chatham House, Atlantic Council, Hermitage Foundation - and the usual suspects - Browder, Applebaum, Aaronovitch.

https://www.cyberguerrilla.org/blog/operation-integrity-initiative-british-informational-war-against-all/

One document contains an interesting reference the the Skripal incident. The project team describe it as a 'Dirty Trick'. Given these documents all pass through the FCO for funding and overall project approval, that must also be the FCO view. That suggests that the government is fully aware that Skripal wasn't poisoned by the Russians. If the Russians really had attempted to murder Skripal, it would be referred to as attempted murder, use of CW, act of war, etc. and not a 'dirty trick'.

https://www.pdf-archive.com/2018/11/02/iihandbookv2/

[Nov 23, 2018] Head Of Russian Military Intelligence Dies From Serious Illness

Embarrassing yellow paper journalism: attempt to connect the deal with Skripals false flag operation by British intelligence agencies. The Daily Mail story preudo-analyst from Bellingcat as a serious source, but provides no source at all for the alleged Russian quotes.
Nov 22, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

An official defense ministry statement called Korobov "a wonderful person, a faithful son of Russia and a patriot of his homeland."

Joiningupthedots , 5 hours ago link

This actually a quite interesting article ( [written] by the 5 eyes intelligence agencies)

Hot on the heels of proven Saudi state sanctioned murder under diplomatic immunity we have a completely UNFOUNDED accusation that Russia has essentially committed the same crime.

Saudi bad guy.....Russia bad guy. Two negatives equals a positive (kind of thing). See what I just did there? LMAO

surfing another apocalypse , 14 hours ago link

The US spent $824.6 billion in 2018 compared to Russia's budget of $46 billion (18 times the difference). Nevertheless, Congress recently declared, that in the event of a war with Russia, the US could lose! So, if a President (Obama, Trump, whoever) really wanted to "Make America Great Again" he would have to begin by firing 90% of the Military Industrial Complex.

Yen Cross 1 day ago

Polonium 210 rears its ugly head again?

The 1/2 life is sillier than the accusations.

/ s

Shemp 4 Victory 1 day ago

Polonium is a sign of British 'Intelligence' involvement, as they are also behind the killing then tried to blame on Putin.

Yen Cross 1 day ago

You caught the </sarc> tag?

I'm sure he just sacrificed himself for the Motherland.

Volkodav 23 hours ago (Edited)

Litvinenko - Ryan Dawson

https://www.voutube.com/watch?v=Hlalk2Fqd

Pandelis 1 day ago (Edited)

and Daily Mail knows this detail of how he emerged after the meeting because ...

more to come from BS factory ...

janus 1 day ago

Daily Mail will report that he died trying to slaughter a convention of journalists at Putin's behest.

So ******* sick of britain's ruling class i want to wretch, if we need to break Britain to get rid of them, so be it. They're all a bunch of decadent pedos and foppish fags matriculated on globalism. they're disgusting, and even though we'll never get to see the details, they actively tried to undermine our democracy (along with Tel Aviv).

And so it goes with our 'special relationships', special indeed, with friends like these...

janus

Shemp 4 Victory 1 day ago

And Daily Mail knows this detail of how he emerged after the meeting because. Because they read it from a script provided by a branch of MI6 known as OSF (Office of Substandard Fiction).

[Nov 21, 2018] I've been rolling on the floor with uncontrollable laughter (between episodes of schizoid lamentation) listening to Russophobes (e.g., David Sanger of the NYT) rant on in alarmism about the perils of RUSSIAN COLLUSION, all the while ignoring the elephant from Israel standing right next to their shoulders.

Nov 21, 2018 | www.unz.com

cassandra , says: November 20, 2018 at 6:59 pm GMT

Registering Israel's Useful Idiots

This is long overdue for so many reasons, but the corruption is so pervasive that reform is nigh impossible (which I'm sure will reassure certain hearts).

I've been rolling on the floor with uncontrollable laughter (between episodes of schizoid lamentation) listening to Russophobes (e.g., David Sanger of the NYT) rant on in alarmism about the perils of RUSSIAN COLLUSION, all the while ignoring the elephant from Israel standing right next to their shoulders.

Seriously, who can coherently argue that any hazard to democracy posed by Russia's election influence was remotely comparable to the interference of Israel and Britain? And why should the latter 2′s intentions any more than the former's?

[Nov 17, 2018] The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity US Midterms Expose Russia Hacker Myth

Nov 17, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

< Older US Midterms Expose Russia Hacker Myth Written by Finian Cunningham Wednesday November 14, 2018

Don't hold your breath for it, but there should be an abject apology coming from US politicians, pundits, media and intelligence agencies.

For months leading up to the midterm elections held last week, we were told that the Kremlin was deviously targeting the ballot, in a replay of the way Russian hackers allegedly interfered in the 2016 presidential race to get Donald Trump into the White House.

Supposedly reliable news media outlets like the New York Times and heavyweight Senate panels were quoting intelligence sources warning that the "Russians are coming – again".

So what just happened? Nothing. Where were the social media campaigns of malicious Russian-inspired misinformation "sowing division"? Whatever happened to the supposed army of internet bots and trolls that the Kremlin command? Where are the electoral machines tampered with to give false vote counts?

Facebook said it had deleted around 100 social media accounts that it claimed "were linked" to pro-Russian entities intent on meddling in the midterms. How did Facebook determined that "linkage"? It was based on a "tip-off" by US intelligence agencies. Hardly convincing proof of a Kremlin plot to destabilize American democracy.

If elusive Russian hackers somehow targeted the midterm Congressional elections they certainly seem to have a convoluted objective. Trump's Republican party lost the House of Representatives to Democrat control. That could result in more Congressional probes into his alleged collusion with Russia. It could also result in Democrats filing subpoenas for Trump to finally disclose his personal tax details which he has strenuously refused to do so far.

Moreover, having lost control of one of the two Congressional chambers, Trump will find his legislative plans being slowed down and even blocked.

Thus, if Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin are the purported "puppet masters" behind the Trump presidency, they have a very strange way of showing their support, as can be seen from the setbacks of the midterms.

A far simpler, more plausible explanation is that there was no Russian hacking of the midterms, just as there wasn't in the 2016 presidential election. Russian interference, influence campaigns, malign activity, "Russia-gate", and so on, are nothing but myths conjured up by Trump's domestic political opponents and their obliging media outlets.

Now that all the dire warnings of Russia hacking into the midterms have been shown to be a mirage, the US intelligence agencies seem to be adopting a new spin on events. We are told that they "prevented Russian interference".

In a Bloomberg article headlined 'One Big Loser of the Midterms – Russian Hackers', it is claimed: "Security officials believe [sic] they prevented cyberattacks on election day." However, they added, "it's hard to tell."

In other words, US security officials have no idea if putative Russian hackers were targeting the elections. The contorted logic is that if there were no hacking incidents, then it was because US cybersecurity prevented them. This is tantamount to invoking absence to prove presence. It's voodoo intelligence.

President Trump has a point when he lambastes Democrats and their supportive media for crying foul only when they lose an election. In various midterm races, it was apparent that Democrats would protest some alleged electoral discrepancy when their candidate lost against a Republican. But when Democrats came out on top, there were no irregularities.

One can imagine therefore that if the Democrats had failed to win control over the House of Representatives, then they and their intelligence agency and media supporters would have been clamoring about "Russian interference" to help Republicans retain the House.

As it turned out, the Democrats won the House, so there is no need to invoke the Russian bogeyman. In that case, it is claimed, Russian hackers "did not succeed" to penetrate the electoral system or pivot social media.

Nonetheless, there was indeed rampant interference in the recent US election. For one thing, some 28 pro-Israeli Political Action Committees and wealthy individuals spent around $15 million to promote 80 candidates in the Congressional elections, according to the organization If Americans Knew. This foreign influence on US voters in favor of Israeli interests is nothing new. It is standard practice in every election.

During the presidential campaign in 2016, the Israeli-American billionaire Sheldon Adelson reportedly donated $25 million to Trump's campaign. Undoubtedly that legalized bribery is why Trump on becoming president has pushed such a slavishly pro-Israeli Middle East policy, including his inflammatory declaration of Jerusalem as the sole capital of the Zionist state.

But there is no outcry about "Israeli influence campaigns" and "hacking" from the US media or from Democrats over this egregious interference in American democracy. No, they prefer to obsess about the phantom of Russian meddling.

Another evident source of electoral hacking was of the homegrown variety. There seem to be valid grievances among ordinary American voters about gerrymandering of electoral districts by incumbent parties, as well as voter disenfranchisement, especially among poor African-American and Latino communities. There were also reported cases of phone canvassers making malicious calls to discredit candidates, as was claimed by the beaten Democrat contenders in Florida and Georgia.

Clearly, there are huge flaws in the US electoral system. Most glaringly, the gargantuan problem of campaign funding by corporations, banks and other representatives of the oligarchic system.

A further chronic problem is yawning voter apathy. The recent midterms were said to have seen a "record turnout" of voters. The official figure is that only 48 per cent of voters exercised their democratic right. That is, over half the voting population view the ballot exercise as not worth while or something worse. This is a constant massive disavowal of American democracy expressed in every US election.

The midterm elections demonstrate once again that American democracy has its own inherent failings. But the political establishment and the ruling oligarchy are loathe to fix a system from which they benefit.

When the system becomes unwieldy or throws up results that the establishment does not quite like – such as the election of uncouth, big mouth Trump – then the "error" must be "explained" away by some extraneous factor, such as "Russian hacking".

However, the latest exercise in American democracy, for what it is worth, gave the salutary demonstration of the myth of Russian interference – at least for those who care to honestly see that.

Another valuable demonstration was this: if supposedly reliable news media and an intelligence apparatus that is charged with national security have been caught out telling spectacular lies with regard to "Russian hacking", then what credibility do they have on a host of other anti-Russia claims, or, indeed, on many other matters?

Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation .

[Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There is something very, very COINTELPRO about the idea of "protecting" Americans from "foreign influence", and that should give liberals the heebie-jeebies. There is also an ongoing structural witch-hunt effect, unchanged from the McCarthy era, when internet firm heads are called to testify before congress. ..."
"... Bottom line - the Russians may have had no more effect on the election than the loose change in your house has on your salary. ..."
"... "Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it." ..."
"... "While the extortionate salaries commanded by the BBC's biggest stars are justified by "market rates," this underlying premise is never challenged by the women who are leading the gender pay fight. They don't oppose the capitalist market; they just want a bigger slice of the pie, with the working class footing the bill via contributions to the Ł4 billion annual license fee." - BBC gender pay row: Selective outrage of wealthy women ..."
"... The greater the inequality, the greater the lie to enforce it. ..."
"... While WSWS was uniquely correct in exposing Bush, Powell, and the ruling-elite structure of the U.S. as using deceit and lies to start an 'aggressive war' (the ultimate war crime), your description of this corrupt system of global power headquartered in the U.S. did not fully diagnose and expose it for what it was; a disguised global capitalist EMPIRE. ..."
"... Your description could have more effectively warned American citizen/'subjects' and the world that "Rather, it is a war of colonial (Empire) conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global (Empire, not merely) hegemony." ..."
"... In any case, Andre and Joseph, thanks for reminding readers of this dark and deceitful moment of U.S. history in starting another 'aggressive war' almost two decades ago --- which wars will unfortunately continue until Americans themselves expose and ignite an essential Second America "Revolution Against Empire" [Justin duRivage] ..."
"... The Anglo-American-Israelite Empire is globally entrenched and enjoying expansion since 1945 ..."
"... I must admit myself I am disturbed by the sheer volume of unchallenged propaganda regarding these claims in the past few months. The media talking heads and various analysts don't ever really say what the implication of what their claims really mean-war. We are in an age of new mccarthyism ..."
"... What was amazing about Powell's charade was that even if Old Bad Ass as I call Saddam had had some Wombars of Mass Destruction they posed no danger whatsoever! It was obvious 9/11 had put the masses into a tizzy and they would have attacked Mars if told to! ..."
"... Yes, the "New Pearl Harbour" called for and carried out by the authors of the "Project for a New American Century" worked as planned. ..."
"... Quite right. My late father was a structural design engineer, specializing in large steel structures like the WTC and he called it as soon as the buildings imploded! ..."
"... Yes, Michael, the 'media/propaganda-sector' of this seven-sectored Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE is currently the most effective sector --- but the other six; corporate, financial, militarist, extra-legal, CFR 'Plot-Tanks', and of course the dual-party Vichy-political facade of the 'rougher-talking' neocon 'R' Vichy Party and the 'smoother-lying' neoliberal-con 'D' Vichy Party are all helping to keep the Empire sound, hidden, and empowered over the only American citizen/'subjects' who could possibly form a "Political Revolution against Empire" ..."
"... While it is true that D.C. is run by delusional psychotics that does not mean they are irrational as far as their greed is concerned. ..."
"... As R. Luxemburg pleaded that WWI was not "our" war but war of bunch of aristocrats wanting to divide colonies and bunch of bankers wanted their bad speculative loans repaid, using working class flesh and blood. ..."
Feb 20, 2018 | www.wsws.org

Wnt1a month ago

This is one of the most sensible editorials on the Russia issue I've seen, and it is true, insofar as it goes. There is something very, very COINTELPRO about the idea of "protecting" Americans from "foreign influence", and that should give liberals the heebie-jeebies. There is also an ongoing structural witch-hunt effect, unchanged from the McCarthy era, when internet firm heads are called to testify before congress.

That said, I wouldn't dismiss the effect of the Russian involvement, or the relevance of the charges against Trump and his people. Bear in mind that the Party of McCarthy has been all about spying on its opponents from the days of HUAC. Nixon's break-in at the Watergate Hotel didn't singlehandedly decide the election ... but who would believe that was the only underhanded tactic he used? Republicans believe that if you're not cheating, you're not trying -- holding out for any ethical standard makes you inherently disloyal and unworthy of support. Something like Kavanaugh's involvement in the hacking of Democrats in 2003 ( http://www.foxnews.com/poli... ) should be no surprise; neither should the "Guccifer" hack that put the Democrats' data in the hands of Wikileaks. (Their subsequent attempts to demand Wikileaks not publish such a newsworthy leak, of course, is the sort of thing that undermines their position with me!)

Bottom line - the Russians may have had no more effect on the election than the loose change in your house has on your salary.

But if you go back in your house after the Republicans were minding it, don't be surprised if together with the missing couch change you notice some missing silverware, your kitchen tap has been sawed off, and the laptop is short half its RAM. By the time you've catalogued everything missing, the stolen brass part from the gas main downstairs might have blown you to smithereens.

Greg8 months ago
"Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it."

There are many reasons the bourgeoisie is unfit to rule. Each one of them is bound up with the lies required to enforce its rule. The greater its unfitness, "the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it.

"While the extortionate salaries commanded by the BBC's biggest stars are justified by "market rates," this underlying premise is never challenged by the women who are leading the gender pay fight. They don't oppose the capitalist market; they just want a bigger slice of the pie, with the working class footing the bill via contributions to the Ł4 billion annual license fee." - BBC gender pay row: Selective outrage of wealthy women

The greater the inequality, the greater the lie to enforce it.

Alan MacDonald8 months ago
While WSWS was uniquely correct in exposing Bush, Powell, and the ruling-elite structure of the U.S. as using deceit and lies to start an 'aggressive war' (the ultimate war crime), your description of this corrupt system of global power headquartered in the U.S. did not fully diagnose and expose it for what it was; a disguised global capitalist EMPIRE.

Your description could have more effectively warned American citizen/'subjects' and the world that "Rather, it is a war of colonial (Empire) conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global (Empire, not merely) hegemony."

In any case, Andre and Joseph, thanks for reminding readers of this dark and deceitful moment of U.S. history in starting another 'aggressive war' almost two decades ago --- which wars will unfortunately continue until Americans themselves expose and ignite an essential Second America "Revolution Against Empire" [Justin duRivage]

Ambricourt -> Alan MacDonald8 months ago
The Anglo-American-Israelite Empire is globally entrenched and enjoying expansion since 1945. It is time radical critiques of its values, power and methods should call it by its right name.
Bob Marley8 months ago
I must admit myself I am disturbed by the sheer volume of unchallenged propaganda regarding these claims in the past few months. The media talking heads and various analysts don't ever really say what the implication of what their claims really mean-war. We are in an age of new mccarthyism
michaelroloff8 months ago
What was amazing about Powell's charade was that even if Old Bad Ass as I call Saddam had had some Wombars of Mass Destruction they posed no danger whatsoever! It was obvious 9/11 had put the masses into a tizzy and they would have attacked Mars if told to!
Terry Lawrence -> michaelroloff8 months ago
Yes, the "New Pearl Harbour" called for and carried out by the authors of the "Project for a New American Century" worked as planned.
michaelroloff -> Terry Lawrence8 months ago
don't tell me that you think that the blow-back that was 9/11 is a conspiracy - if you do, be so kind as to mention specific conspirators!
Terry Lawrence -> michaelroloff8 months ago
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, are a few obvious ones, . . . and that famous CIA asset, Bin Laden, to recruit the expendable hijackers.
michaelroloff -> Terry Lawrence8 months ago
just because it was a convenient act for them to do what they wanted in conquering iraq is not reason that idiots like that are capable of planning and concealing the numerous co-conspirators to arrange something like 9..11. imperialism can always count on blowback to have occasion for further crimes. there is the slim chance that they knew what was being planned and that they let it happen - except that none of those folks is evil enough for that. not even dick cheney. what i love about all conspiracy theories of the american kind is that they never nam or show an actual conspirator conspiring. look at one of the truly great failed conspiracy, that of the 20th july 1944 in germany that was meant to kill hitler and how many people were arrested in no time at all and executed..
Terry Lawrence michaelroloff8 months ago
A "conspiracy" is just any two or more people getting together to discuss something affecting one or more other people without them being party to the discussion. Like a surprise birthday party, for instance. Obviously the "official" version of the 9/11 events is also a "conspiracy theory" that 19 mostly Saudi Arabians led by a guy hiding in a cave in Afghanistan conspired to carry out co-ordinated attacks that just happened to coincide with most of the USAF being conveniently off in Alaska and northern Canada on an exercise that day, and another "coinciding exercise" simulating a multiple hijacking being carried out in the northeast US thereby confusing the Air Traffic Controllers as to whether the hijackings were "real world or exercise", significantly delaying the response, among other things.

Do you really believe that WTC 7, a steel frame building which was not adjacent to WTC 1 & 2, and was NOT hit by any airplanes, coincidentally collapsed due to low temperature paper and furniture office fires? Something that has never happened before or since? Or that such low temperature fires would cause the massive heavily reinforced concrete central core/elevator shaft to collapse first, pulling the rest of the building inward onto it in classic controlled demolition technique?

It is getting more difficult to find the videos showing that now as Google, as with WSWS articles, is pushing them off the front pages of results, while Snopes has put out a some very misleading reports that set up false "straw man" claims and then "disprove" them. Even the "disproofs" are false.

For instance, a Snopes report on the WTC 7 collapse states: "relied heavily on discredited claims, none of which were new, including:

Jet fuel cannot melt steel beams (This claim is misleading, as steel beams do to not need to melt completely to be compromised structurally).

A sprinkler system would have prevented temperatures from rising high enough to cause to cause structural damage. (This claim ignores the fact that a crash from a 767 jet would likely destroy such a system.)

The structural system would have been protected by fireproofing material (similarly, such a system would have been damaged in a 767 crash). "

Jet fuel, which is Kerosene, burns at around 575ş in open air, which was the case in WTC buildings 1 & 2. Most of it was vaporized by the impact with the buildings and burned of within minutes. At any rate, 575ş is far below the point at which structural steel specifically designed to withstand high temperature fires like that used in the World Trade Centre buildings is weakened.

All of which is irrelevant, as are the other "points" made by Snopes, because Building 7 was not hit by an airplane and there was no jet fuel involved. Something conveniently "overlooked" by Snopes and other similar misleading "disproofs". Not to mention that the Intelligence establishment is busy putting out false trails constantly which use, for instance, obviously faked photos or videos of the three WTC buildings collapsing to discredit the real videos and photos by setting up "straw men" they can then "disprove" and point to as "evidence" that people who don't believe the official version are "creating fake news".

liz_imp Terry Lawrence8 months ago
Brilliant points!! :)
Carolyn Zaremba Terry Lawrence8 months ago
Quite right. My late father was a structural design engineer, specializing in large steel structures like the WTC and he called it as soon as the buildings imploded!
Terry Lawrence michaelroloff8 months ago
"The perpetrators and their conspiracy is not a theory since it has been proved."

By "proved" I assume you are referring to "proofs" such as the fantastical claim that Mohammed Atta's passport was allegedly and fortuitously "found" when it supposedly survived the 600 mph impact of the 767 he was supposedly piloting with a huge steel and concrete building, survived the huge fireball it was supposedly in the middle of unscorched, and conveniently fluttered to the ground intact to land at the feet of an FBI agent who immediately realized it must have belonged to one of the hijackers!

Even Hans Christian Andersen couldn't invent Fairy Tales like that.

Carolyn Zaremba michaelroloff8 months ago
See my comment above. It is the "official" explanation that is a fantasy.
michaelroloff Carolyn Zaremba8 months ago
the best that conspiracy theorist can do is, invariably, to call proven facts "just another theory " which only proves that they are actually aware that they are full of hot air! zarembas father as a structural engineer unless a fantasy is certainly better off among the dead than among the living and perpetrating his ignorance of steel and weight and fire onto the world!
clubmarkgirard michaelroloff8 months ago
Just because all the details aren't known as to who conspired and why there's enough holes in the "official conspiracy theory" of 19 hijackers to conclude that this could not have been pulled off without some conspiring on the American side. Certainly the the neocons benefited greatly from these attacks. So motive is there for sure.
Alan MacDonald michaelroloff8 months ago
Yes, Michael, the 'media/propaganda-sector' of this seven-sectored Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE is currently the most effective sector --- but the other six; corporate, financial, militarist, extra-legal, CFR 'Plot-Tanks', and of course the dual-party Vichy-political facade of the 'rougher-talking' neocon 'R' Vichy Party and the 'smoother-lying' neoliberal-con 'D' Vichy Party are all helping to keep the Empire sound, hidden, and empowered over the only American citizen/'subjects' who could possibly form a "Political Revolution against Empire"
Kalen8 months ago
While it is true that D.C. is run by delusional psychotics that does not mean they are irrational as far as their greed is concerned.

There is nothing to win in global nuke war, all know it while the outcome would be surely the current global oligarchy loosing grip on population destroying the system that works for them so well giving chance to what they dread socialist revolution they would have been much weaker to counter.

Regional conflicts are just positioning of oligarchy for management of global oligarchic country club while strict class morality is maintained.

What I do not we are conditions for war (split of global ruling elites) while what I see is broad propaganda of war as a excuse to clamp down on fake enemy in order to control respective populations while there is factual unity among world oligarchy.

As R. Luxemburg pleaded that WWI was not "our" war but war of bunch of aristocrats wanting to divide colonies and bunch of bankers wanted their bad speculative loans repaid, using working class flesh and blood.

She died abandoned by those on the left who embraced the war for their political aspirations, she was murdered for her true internationalism i.e. No war fought between working people of one country and working people of another country.

Alan MacDonald Kalen8 months ago
Kalen, it's only effective to use the correct and understandable term 'Empire' in exposing, warning, and motivating average Americans --- since very few even know what words like; oligarchy, plutocracy, fascism, authoritarianism, corporate-state, or Wolin's 'inverted totalitarianism' mean --- let alone could ever serve as rallying cries for the coming essential Second American Revolution against EMPIRE.

As Pat would have shouted if Tom had taken the Paine to edit his call, "Give me Liberty over EMPIRE, or Give me Death!"

Carolyn Zaremba Alan MacDonald8 months ago
Do you really believe that average Americans are that stupid? Shame on you!
Alan MacDonald Carolyn Zaremba8 months ago
"Sweet Carolyn" OH OH OH --- Yes, only a very small percentage of Americans understand that our former country, the U.S. of America, is categorically, provably, and absolutely a new form of Empire, and is inexorably the first in world history an; 'effectively-disguised', 'truly-global', 'dual-party Vichy', and 'capitalist-fueled' EMPIRE --- an EMPIRE, really just an EMPIRE!

Just do an honest survey, "Sweet Carolyn", yourself, and if you're not a "Sweet Liarlyn", you will have to admit that essentially ZERO of the first 1000 people you ask, will say --- "Oh ya, Carolyn, of course I know that this whole effin 'system' that others less informed may still be so stupid that they think they live in a real country, when I (enter their name) do solemnly swear is just an effin EMPIRE, which is so well disguised, that these few idiots who don't understand that they are just citizen/'subjects' of this monsterous EMPIRE."

Do the survey, "Sweet Carolyn" and if you don't lie to yourself --- which maybe you do, because HELL, your job is to lie to others (so it's quite likely that you'll lie about anything) --- you'll find that exactly zero average Americans have the effin slightest idea in the world that their great 'country' is actually an effin EMPIRE.

HELL, Carolyn, almost half the Americans repeatedly yell, "We're number ONE", "We're number ONE", that their brains would rather rattle themselves to death than even let logic, history, knowledge, or anything into their addled and propaganda filled heads!

liz_imp Alan MacDonald8 months ago
Personal attacks are not allowed on this site.
Alan MacDonald liz_imp8 months ago
Sorry, Liz-imp, are you a friend of "Sweet Carolyn" --- or some other relation? Perhaps working together?
dmorista8 months ago
Excellent article, and it did a particularly good job of tying together the foreign policy and domestic policy stratagems of a major faction of the U.S. ruling class. I, for one, do not doubt that the Russians conduct some sort of cyber warfare against the U.S.; but that must be understood by considering the fact that every major governmental, political, military, and business organization on the face of the Earth must now operate in this manner. A friend of mine's son, who was in the Army, pointed out that the big players, by a wide margin, in spying on and to some degree interfering in the U.S. domestic scene are China and Israel. Kevin Barrett has written and said on various radio shows that much of what is attributed to the "Russians" are actually the actions of Russian/Israeli dual citizens, many of whom move freely between the U.S., Russia, and Israel. And, of course, the U.S. runs major spy and manipulation operations in more countries than any other nation of Earth, and U.S. based corporations are busy both inside the U.S. and in foreign places in similar activities.

It is clearly a desire of significant sectors, of the Capitalist rulers of the U.S., to repress dissent and political activities that oppose their agendas. It took them a few years to realize that their old methods using TV, hate radio, magazines, direct mail, and newspapers were losing their effectiveness. They have been increasing their attacks on leftist websites, hacking into websites, closing websites using phonied-up "national security" justifications, employing numerous trolls, and establishing and funding more far right websites, such as Breitbart and Infowars. These efforts are most effective when they are not overpowering and heavy handed.

The classic book on this was the 1988 book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" by Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann. Rob Williams has updated the concept for the internet age in
<http: www.vermontindependent.org ="" the-post-truth-world-reviving-the-propaganda-model-of-news-for-our-digital-age=""/>.

The strategy is nothing new, the methods are merely updated and use the latest technologies.

Maxwell dmorista8 months ago
Superb post.

I guess the lesson to be learned here is that rigging elections through byzantine electoral laws and billion dollar corporate slush funds is a thing of the past. All you need now is 13 amateur IT goomba's with a marketing scheme and twitter accounts. Well, sure is a fragile "World's Sole Superpower" we got here. Go Team?

[Nov 09, 2018] Trump What A Stupid Question That Is. You Ask A Lot Of Stupid Questions

Notable quotes:
"... Trump wasn't finished, however, and during the same gaggle, he suggested he could pull press credentials from other reporters who don't show him "respect" two days after the president suspended the press pass of CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta after a contentious exchange during a news conference. ..."
"... "I think Jim Acosta is a very unprofessional man," Trump explained and when asked how long Acosta's credentials will be suspended, the president replied: "As far as I'm concerned, I haven't made that decision. But it could be others also." ..."
"... On this one Trump needs to take a hint from Obozo, stop doing daily press briefings... Hold them once a month ..."
"... the stooge press/talking heads have made a cottage industry off of the press conferences. the msm sends stooges to sell their product. trump is 100% correct- the msm doesn't have the guts to cull their stooge legions- oh dear- the white house will do their job for them. ..."
Nov 09, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Having barred his CNN arch nemesis Jim Acosta from the White House, on Friday the president lashed out at another CNN reporter at the White House over his appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting AG as well as Whitaker's views towards the special counsel investigation.

During a Friday morning gaggle with White House reporters before Trump's trip to Paris, CNN's Abby Phillip asked the president if he was hoping Whitaker, who previously criticized Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation, would "rein in" the Russia probe. " Do you want [Whitaker] to rein in Robert Mueller?" Phillip asked.

Trump's response left the stunned reported speechless. "What a stupid question that is," Trump said and, just in case it was lost, repeated "what a stupid question."

"But I watch you a lot," Trump continued. "You ask a lot of stupid questions."

Trump then demonstrably walked away, leaving the shocked reporters screaming more questions in his wake.

Earlier, Trump said he has not spoken to acting AG Matt Whitaker about the Russia investigation, which Whitaker now oversees. Trump defended Whitaker as a "very well respected man in the law enforcement community" but claimed he does not know him personally. "I didn't speak to Matt Whitaker about it. I don't know Matt Whitaker," Trump told reporters at the White House before leaving for a trip to Paris.

While Trump sought to place personal distance between himself and Whitaker, he made it clear he stood by his decision to place a loyalist in charge of the Justice Department, a move many see as an effort to seize control of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe. The president also rejected suggestions that Whitaker is ineligible to serve as attorney general, a position held by some legal experts who say the Justice Department leader must be confirmed by the Senate.

The acting AG has raised eyebrows, and in some cases prediction of a constitutional crisis, because before joining the DOJ, Whitaker was an outspoken critic of Mueller's investigation and many Democrats and legal scholars have said he should recuse himself from leading the probe. Whitaker also claimed there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian interference efforts in the 2016 election, which is the central question of the Mueller probe.

Trump lamented the criticism of Whitaker's past commentary, saying "it's a shame that no matter who I put in, they go after him."

Trump then reiterated his plans to have Whitaker serve in an acting capacity, but declined to reveal who might be Sessions' permanent replacement. He said he likes Chris Christie, who is under consideration , but said he has not spoken to the former NJ governor about the post. Christie was at the White House on Thursday for an event on prison reform but Trump said he did not speak to him.

* * *

Trump wasn't finished, however, and during the same gaggle, he suggested he could pull press credentials from other reporters who don't show him "respect" two days after the president suspended the press pass of CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta after a contentious exchange during a news conference.

"I think Jim Acosta is a very unprofessional man," Trump explained and when asked how long Acosta's credentials will be suspended, the president replied: "As far as I'm concerned, I haven't made that decision. But it could be others also."

Trump also went after April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks as a "loser" who "doesn't know what the hell she is doing."

Keyser 15 minutes ago

On this one Trump needs to take a hint from Obozo, stop doing daily press briefings... Hold them once a month, then hand-pick which reporters you want in the room... And if a reporter publishes a story you don't like, prosecute them... What we have now is what happens when the lunatics are given free reign...

dcmbuffy 55 minutes ago remove

the stooge press/talking heads have made a cottage industry off of the press conferences. the msm sends stooges to sell their product. trump is 100% correct- the msm doesn't have the guts to cull their stooge legions- oh dear- the white house will do their job for them.

[Nov 06, 2018] US-British Threats Against Russia Have a Long History by T.J. Coles – Matthew Alford

Notable quotes:
"... Union Jackboot: What Your Media and Professors Don't Tell You About British Foreign Policy ..."
"... There seems to be a consensus that we need a strong military because Russia is on the rise. What do you think about that rationale? ..."
"... What about military threats? ..."
"... So we've extended NATO to pretty much the Russian border? But there's a hard border there. Everyone knows we're never going to attack Russia, both for reasons of morality and self-preservation. So maybe this situation is safer than you imply. ..."
"... Brexit White Paper ..."
"... T. J. Coles is a postdoctoral researcher at Plymouth University's Cognition Institute and the author of several books. ..."
"... Matthew Alford teaches at Bath University in the UK and has also written several books. Their latest is ..."
"... The Rise and Fall of the British Empire ..."
"... Bolshevism and Imperial Sedition ..."
"... Power without Responsibility ..."
"... Russian Roulette: A Deadly Game: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Global Plot ..."
"... Statement for the Record: Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community ..."
"... Vision for 2020 ..."
"... Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future ..."
"... The New Atlanticist ..."
"... The United Kingdom's relations with Russia ..."
Nov 06, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

In their new book Union Jackboot: What Your Media and Professors Don't Tell You About British Foreign Policy (Até Books), doctors T.J. Coles and Matthew Alford debate the rationale of Anglo-American policy towards Russia.

Alford: There seems to be a consensus that we need a strong military because Russia is on the rise. What do you think about that rationale?

Coles: There's no consensus, except among European and American elites. Europe and America are not the world.

There are a lot of issues to consider with regards to Russia. Is it a threat? If so to whom? What kind of threat is Russia? So let's consider these questions carefully. As far as the British establishment is concerned, Russia is an ideological threat because it is a major power with a substantial population. It's also self-reliant where oil and gas is concerned, unlike Britain. So there's lots of potential for Russian political ideology to undermine Britain's status. In fact, there are European Council on Foreign Relations papers saying that Putin's Russia presents an "ideological alternative" to the EU. [i] And that's dangerous.

Britain, or more accurately its policymaking elites, have considered Russia a significant enemy for over a century. Under the Tsar, the so-called Great Game was a battle for strategic resources, trading routes, and so on. The historian Lawrence James calls this period the first Cold War, which went "hot" with the Crimean War (1853-56). [ii] Britain had a mixed relationship with the Tsars because, on the one hand, theirs' were repressive regimes and Britain tended to favour repressive regimes, hence their brief alliance with Russia's enemy, the Ottomans. On the other hand, Russia was a strategic threat to Britain's imperial interests, and thus the Crimean War (1853-56).

When the Bolsheviks took over Russia, beginning 1917, the relationship became much less ambiguous – Russians, and especially Bolsheviks, were clearly the enemy. Their ideology posed a threat internally. So Winston Churchill, who began as a Liberal and became a Conservative, considered the Labour Party, which was formed in 1900, as basically a front for Bolsheviks. [iii] That shows the level of paranoia among elites. The Labour Party, at least at the beginning, was a genuine, working man's political organisation – women couldn't vote then, remember. So by associating this progressive, grassroots party representing the working classes as an ideological ally or even puppet of the brutal Bolshevik regime, the Tories had an excuse to undermine the power of organised, working people. So you had the Zinoviev letter in 1924, which we now know was a literal conspiracy between the secret services and elements of the Tory party to fabricate a link between Labour and Moscow. And it famously cost Labour the general election, since the right-wing, privately-owned media ran with the story as though it was real. It's an early example of fake news. [iv]

That's the ideological threat that Russia has posed, historically. But where there's a threat, there's an opportunity. The British elites exploited the "threat" then and as they do today by associating organised labour with evil Bolshevism and, in doing so, alienate the lower classes from their own political interests. Suddenly, we've all got to be scared of Russia, just like in 1917. And let's not forget that Britain used chemical weapons – M-Devices, which induced vomiting – against the Bolsheviks. Chemical weapons were "the right medicine for the Bolshevist," in Churchill's words. This was in 1919, as part of the Allied invasion of Russia in support of the White Army. [v]

So if we're talking about the historical balance of forces and cause and effect, Britain not Russia initiated the use of chemical weapons against others. But this history is typically inverted to say that Russia poses a threat to the West, hence all the talk about Novichok, the Skripals, and Dawn Sturgess, the civilian who supposedly came into contact with Novichok and died in hospital a few days later.

The next question: What sort of threat is Russia? According to the US Army War College, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and since pro-US, pro-"free market" President Boris Yeltsin resigned in 1999, Russia has pursued so-called economic nationalism. And the US doesn't like this because markets suddenly get closed and taxes are raised against US corporations. [vi] That's the real threat. But you can't tell the public that: that we hate Russia because they aren't doing what we say. If you look through the military documents, you can find almost nothing about security threats against the US in terms of Russian expansion, except in the sense that "security" means operational freedom. You can find references to Russia's nuclear weapons, though, which are described as defensive, designed "to counter US forces and weapons systems." [vii] Try finding that on the BBC. I should mention that even "defensive" nukes can be launched accidentally.

The real goal with regards to Russia is maintaining US economic hegemony and the culture of open "free markets" that goes with it, while at the same time being protectionist in real life. (US protectionism didn't start under Trump, by the way.) Liberal media like the New York Times run sarcastic articles about Russian state oil and gas being a front for Putin and his cronies. And yes, that may be true. But what threat is Russia to the US if it has a corrupt government? The threat is closing its markets to the US. The US is committed to what its military calls Full Spectrum Dominance. So the world needs to be run in a US-led neoliberal order, in the words of the US military, "to protect US interests and investment." [viii] But this cannot be done if you have "economic nationalism," like China had until the "reforms" of the '70s and '80s, and still has today to some extent. Russia and China aren't military threats. The global population on the whole knows this, even though the domestic US and British media say the opposite.

Alford: What about military threats?

Coles: The best sources you can get are the US military records. Straight from the horse's mouth. The military plans for war and defence. They have contingencies for when political situations change. So they know what they're talking about. There's a massive divide between reality, as understood from the military records, and media and political rhetoric. Assessments by the US Army War College, for instance, said years ago that any moves by NATO to support a Western-backed government in Ukraine would provoke Russia into annexing Crimea. They don't talk about Russia spontaneously invading Ukraine and annexing it, which is the image we get from the media. The documents talk about Russia reacting to NATO provocation. [ix]

If you look at a map, you see Russia surrounded by hostile NATO forces. The media don't discuss this dangerous and provocative situation, except the occasional mention of, say, US-British-Polish war-gaming on the border with Russia. When they do mention it, they say it's for "containment," the containment of Russia. But to contain something, the given thing has to be expanding. But the US military – like the annual threat assessments to Congress – say that Russia's not expanding, except when provoked. So at the moment as part of its NATO mission, the UK is training Polish and Ukrainian armed forces, has deployed troops in Poland and Estonia, and is conducting military exercises with them. [x]

Imagine if Scotland ceded from the UK and the Russians were on our border conducting military exercises, supposedly to deter a British invasion of Scotland. That's what we're doing in Ukraine. Britain's moves are extremely dangerous. In the 1980s, the UK as part of NATO conducted the exercise, Operation Able Archer, which envisaged troop build-ups between NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries. Now-declassified records show that the Russians briefly mistook this exercise for a real-world scenario. That could have escalated into nuclear war. This is very serious. [xi]

But the biggest player is the USA. It's using the threat of force and a global architecture of hi-tech militarism to shape a neoliberal order. Britain is slavishly following its lead. I doubt that Britain would position forces near Russia were it not for the USA. Successive US administrations have or are building a missile system in Europe and Turkey. They say it's to deter Iran from firing Scud missiles at Europe. But it's pointed at Russia. It's a radar system based in Romania and Turkey, with a battery of Patriot missiles based in Poland. The stationing of missiles there provoked Russia into moving its mobile nuclear weapons up to the border in its Kaliningrad exclave, as it warned it would do in 2008. [xii] Try to find any coverage of that in the media, except for a few articles in the print media here or there. If Western media were interested in survival, there would be regular headlines: "NATO provoking Russia."

But the situation in Ukraine is really the tipping point. Consider the equivalent. Imagine if Russia was conducting military exercises with Canada or Mexico, and building bases there. How would the US react? It would be considered an extreme threat, a violation of the UN Charter, which prohibits threats against sovereign states.

Alford: So we've extended NATO to pretty much the Russian border? But there's a hard border there. Everyone knows we're never going to attack Russia, both for reasons of morality and self-preservation. So maybe this situation is safer than you imply.

Coles: There's no morality involved. States are abstract, amorphous entities comprised of dominant minorities and subjugated majorities who are conditioned to believe that they are relatively free and prosperous. The elites of those states act both in their self-interests – career, peer-pressure, kickbacks, and so on – and in the interests of their class, which is of course tied to international relations because their class thrives on profiting from resource exploitation. So you can't talk about morality in this context. Only individuals can behave morally. The state is made up of individuals, of course, but they're acting against the interests of the majority. As we speak, they are acting immorally – or at least amorally – but creating the geopolitical conditions that imperil each and every one of us.

As for invasion, we're not going to invade Russia. This isn't 1918. Russia has nuclear weapons and can deter an invasion. But that's not the point. Do we want to de-escalate an already tense geopolitical situation or make it worse to the point where an accident happens? So while it's not about invading Russia directly, the issue is about attacking what are called Russia's "national interests." Russia's "national interests" are the same as the elites' of the UK. National interest doesn't mean the interests of the public. It means the interests of the policymaking establishment and the corporations. For example, the Theresa May government sacrificed its own credibility to ensure that its Brexit White Paper (2018) appeased both the interests of the food and manufacturing industries that want a soft Brexit – easy trade with the EU – and the financial services sector which wants a hard Brexit – freedom from EU regulation. Everyone else be damned. That's the "national interest."

So for its real "national interest," Russia wants to keep Ukraine in its sphere of influence because its oil and gas to Europe pass through Ukraine. About 80% of Russia's export economy is in the oil and gas sector. It's already had serious political tensions with Ukraine, which on several occasions hasn't paid its energy bills, so Russia has cut supplies. If Europe can bump Ukraine into its own sphere of influence it has more leverage over Russia. This is practically admitted in Parliamentary discussions by Foreign Office ministers, and so forth. [xiii] Again, omitted by the media. Also, remember that plenty of ethnic Russians live in eastern Ukraine. In addition, Russia has a naval base in Crimea. That's not to excuse its illegal action in annexing Ukraine, it's to highlight the realpolitik missing in the media's coverage of the situation.

T. J. Coles is a postdoctoral researcher at Plymouth University's Cognition Institute and the author of several books.

Matthew Alford teaches at Bath University in the UK and has also written several books. Their latest is Union Jackboot (Até Books).

SOURCES

[i] Mark Leonard and Nicu Popescu (2007) 'A Power Audit of EU-Russia Relations' European Council on Foreign Relations, Policy Paper, p. 1 http://www.ecfr.eu/page/-/ECFR-02_A_POWER_AUDIT_OF_EU-RUSSIA_RELATIONS.pdf .

[ii] 'Anglo-Russian relations were severely strained; what was in effect a cold war lasted from the late 1820s to the beginning of the next century'. The Crimean War seems to have set a precedent for today. James writes:

[It] was an imperial war, the only one fought by Britain against a European power during the nineteenth century, although some would have regarded Russia as essentially an Asiatic power. No territory was at stake; the war was undertaken solely to guarantee British naval supremacy in the Mediterranean and, indirectly, to forestall any threat to India which might have followed Russia replacing Britain as the dominant power in the Middle East.

Lawrence James (1997) The Rise and Fall of the British Empire London: Abacus, pp. 180-82.

[iii] Churchill said in 1920:

All these strikes and rumours of strikes and threats of strikes and loss and suffering caused by them; all this talk of revolution and "direct action" have deeply offended most of the British people. There is a growing feeling that a considerable section of organized Labour is trying to tyrannize over the whole public and to bully them into submission, not by argument, not by recognized political measures, but by brute force

But if we can do little for Russia [under the Bolsheviks], we can do much for Britain. We do not want any of these experiments here

Whether it is the Irish murder gang or the Egyptian vengeance society, or the seditious extremists in India, or the arch-traitors we have at home, they will feel the weight of the British arm.

Winston Churchill (1920) Bolshevism and Imperial Sedition . Speech to United Wards Club. London: The International Churchill Society https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1915-1929-nadir-and-recovery/bolshevism-and-imperial-sedition/ .

[iv] The fake letter says:

A settlement of relations between the two countries [UK and Russia] will assist in the revolutionising of the international and British proletariat, [and] make it possible for us to extend and develop the propaganda and ideas of Leninism in England and the colonies.

It also says that 'British workmen' have 'inclinations to compromise' and that rapprochement will eventually lead to domestic '[a]rmed warfare'. It was leaked by the services to the Conservative party and then to the media. Richard Norton-Taylor (1999) 'Zinoviev letter was dirty trick by MI6' Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/politics/1999/feb/04/uk.politicalnews6 and Louise Jury (1999) 'Official Zinoviev letter was forged' Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/news/official-zinoviev-letter-was-forged-1068600.html . For media coverage at the time, see James Curran and Jean Seaton (1997) Power without Responsibility London: Routledge, p. 52.

[v] Paul F. Walker (2017) 'A Century of Chemical Warfare: Building a World Free of Chemical Weapons' Conference: One Hundred Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences pp. 379-400 and Giles Milton (2013) Russian Roulette: A Deadly Game: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Global Plot London: Hodder, eBook.

[vi] 'The Russian Federation has shown repeatedly that common values play almost no role in its consideration of its trading partners', meaning the US and EU. 'It often builds relationships with countries that most openly thwart Western values of free markets and democracy', notably Iran and Venezuela. 'In this regard, the Russian Federation behaves like "Russia Incorporated." It uses its re-nationalized industries to further its wealth and influence, the latter often at the expense of the EU and the U.S.'. Colonel Richard J. Anderson (2008) 'A History of President Putin's Campaign to Re-Nationalize Industry and the Implications for Russian Reform and Foreign Policy' Senior Service College, US Army War College, Pennsylvania: Carlisle Barracks, p. 52.

[vii] Daniel R. Coats (2017) Statement for the Record: Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Washington, DC: Office of the Director of

National Intelligence, pp. 18-19 https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Testimonies/SSCI%20Unclassified%20SFR%20-%20Final.pdf .

[viii] US Space Command (1997) Vision for 2020 Colorado: Peterson Air Force Base https://ia802705.us.archive.org/10/items/pdfy-j6U3MFw1cGmC-yob/U.S.%20Space%20Command%20Vision%20For%202020.pdf .

[ix] The document also says: 'a replay of the West-sponsored coup against pro-Russian elites could result in a split, or indeed multiple splits, of the failed Ukraine, which would open a door for NATO intervention'.Pavel K. Baev (2011) 'Russia's security relations with the United States: Futures planned and unplanned' in Stephen J. Blank (ed.) Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future Strategic Studies Institute Pennsylvania: Carlisle Barracks, p. 170, www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB1087.pdf.

[x] Forces Network (2016) 'British troops to deploy to Poland' https://www.forces.net/news/tri-service/british-troops-deploy-poland .

[xi] For example, Nate Jones, Thomas Blanton and Christian F. Ostermann (2016) 'Able Archer 83: The Secret History' Nuclear Proliferation International History Project Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/able-archer-83-the-secret-history .

[xii] It was reported in the ultra-right, neo-con press at the time that:

[Russian] President Dmitri Medvedev announced in his first state-of-the-nation address plans to deploy the short-range SS-26 ("Iskander") missiles in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad if the U.S. goes ahead with its European Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS). Medvedev told parliament that the deployment would "neutralize" U.S. plans for a missile defense shield based in Poland and the Czech Republic [now in Romania), which the U.S. claims as vital in defending against missile attacks from 'rogue states' such as Iran.

Neil Leslie (2008) 'The Kaliningrad Missile Crisis' The New Atlanticist , available at http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-kaliningrad-missile-crisis.

[xiii] For example, a Parliamentary inquiry into British-Russian relations says of the newly-imposed US-British ally in Ukraine:

President Poroshenko's Government is more openly committed to economic reform and anti-corruption than any previous Ukrainian Administration. The reform agenda has made considerable progress and has enjoyed some successes including police reform, liberalisation of the energy market and the launch of an online platform for government procurement

The annexation of Crimea also resulted in a ban on importing products from Crimea, on investing in or providing services linked to tourism and on exporting certain goods for use in the transport, telecoms and energy sectors.

House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (2017) The United Kingdom's relations with Russia Seventh report of session 2016-17, HC 120 London: Stationary Office, pp. 28, 31 https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmfaff/120/120.pdf

[Nov 06, 2018] US-British Threats Against Russia Have a Long History by T.J. Coles – Matthew Alford

Notable quotes:
"... Union Jackboot: What Your Media and Professors Don't Tell You About British Foreign Policy ..."
"... There seems to be a consensus that we need a strong military because Russia is on the rise. What do you think about that rationale? ..."
"... What about military threats? ..."
"... So we've extended NATO to pretty much the Russian border? But there's a hard border there. Everyone knows we're never going to attack Russia, both for reasons of morality and self-preservation. So maybe this situation is safer than you imply. ..."
"... Brexit White Paper ..."
"... T. J. Coles is a postdoctoral researcher at Plymouth University's Cognition Institute and the author of several books. ..."
"... Matthew Alford teaches at Bath University in the UK and has also written several books. Their latest is ..."
"... The Rise and Fall of the British Empire ..."
"... Bolshevism and Imperial Sedition ..."
"... Power without Responsibility ..."
"... Russian Roulette: A Deadly Game: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Global Plot ..."
"... Statement for the Record: Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community ..."
"... Vision for 2020 ..."
"... Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future ..."
"... The New Atlanticist ..."
"... The United Kingdom's relations with Russia ..."
Nov 06, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

In their new book Union Jackboot: What Your Media and Professors Don't Tell You About British Foreign Policy (Até Books), doctors T.J. Coles and Matthew Alford debate the rationale of Anglo-American policy towards Russia.

Alford: There seems to be a consensus that we need a strong military because Russia is on the rise. What do you think about that rationale?

Coles: There's no consensus, except among European and American elites. Europe and America are not the world.

There are a lot of issues to consider with regards to Russia. Is it a threat? If so to whom? What kind of threat is Russia? So let's consider these questions carefully. As far as the British establishment is concerned, Russia is an ideological threat because it is a major power with a substantial population. It's also self-reliant where oil and gas is concerned, unlike Britain. So there's lots of potential for Russian political ideology to undermine Britain's status. In fact, there are European Council on Foreign Relations papers saying that Putin's Russia presents an "ideological alternative" to the EU. [i] And that's dangerous.

Britain, or more accurately its policymaking elites, have considered Russia a significant enemy for over a century. Under the Tsar, the so-called Great Game was a battle for strategic resources, trading routes, and so on. The historian Lawrence James calls this period the first Cold War, which went "hot" with the Crimean War (1853-56). [ii] Britain had a mixed relationship with the Tsars because, on the one hand, theirs' were repressive regimes and Britain tended to favour repressive regimes, hence their brief alliance with Russia's enemy, the Ottomans. On the other hand, Russia was a strategic threat to Britain's imperial interests, and thus the Crimean War (1853-56).

When the Bolsheviks took over Russia, beginning 1917, the relationship became much less ambiguous – Russians, and especially Bolsheviks, were clearly the enemy. Their ideology posed a threat internally. So Winston Churchill, who began as a Liberal and became a Conservative, considered the Labour Party, which was formed in 1900, as basically a front for Bolsheviks. [iii] That shows the level of paranoia among elites. The Labour Party, at least at the beginning, was a genuine, working man's political organisation – women couldn't vote then, remember. So by associating this progressive, grassroots party representing the working classes as an ideological ally or even puppet of the brutal Bolshevik regime, the Tories had an excuse to undermine the power of organised, working people. So you had the Zinoviev letter in 1924, which we now know was a literal conspiracy between the secret services and elements of the Tory party to fabricate a link between Labour and Moscow. And it famously cost Labour the general election, since the right-wing, privately-owned media ran with the story as though it was real. It's an early example of fake news. [iv]

That's the ideological threat that Russia has posed, historically. But where there's a threat, there's an opportunity. The British elites exploited the "threat" then and as they do today by associating organised labour with evil Bolshevism and, in doing so, alienate the lower classes from their own political interests. Suddenly, we've all got to be scared of Russia, just like in 1917. And let's not forget that Britain used chemical weapons – M-Devices, which induced vomiting – against the Bolsheviks. Chemical weapons were "the right medicine for the Bolshevist," in Churchill's words. This was in 1919, as part of the Allied invasion of Russia in support of the White Army. [v]

So if we're talking about the historical balance of forces and cause and effect, Britain not Russia initiated the use of chemical weapons against others. But this history is typically inverted to say that Russia poses a threat to the West, hence all the talk about Novichok, the Skripals, and Dawn Sturgess, the civilian who supposedly came into contact with Novichok and died in hospital a few days later.

The next question: What sort of threat is Russia? According to the US Army War College, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and since pro-US, pro-"free market" President Boris Yeltsin resigned in 1999, Russia has pursued so-called economic nationalism. And the US doesn't like this because markets suddenly get closed and taxes are raised against US corporations. [vi] That's the real threat. But you can't tell the public that: that we hate Russia because they aren't doing what we say. If you look through the military documents, you can find almost nothing about security threats against the US in terms of Russian expansion, except in the sense that "security" means operational freedom. You can find references to Russia's nuclear weapons, though, which are described as defensive, designed "to counter US forces and weapons systems." [vii] Try finding that on the BBC. I should mention that even "defensive" nukes can be launched accidentally.

The real goal with regards to Russia is maintaining US economic hegemony and the culture of open "free markets" that goes with it, while at the same time being protectionist in real life. (US protectionism didn't start under Trump, by the way.) Liberal media like the New York Times run sarcastic articles about Russian state oil and gas being a front for Putin and his cronies. And yes, that may be true. But what threat is Russia to the US if it has a corrupt government? The threat is closing its markets to the US. The US is committed to what its military calls Full Spectrum Dominance. So the world needs to be run in a US-led neoliberal order, in the words of the US military, "to protect US interests and investment." [viii] But this cannot be done if you have "economic nationalism," like China had until the "reforms" of the '70s and '80s, and still has today to some extent. Russia and China aren't military threats. The global population on the whole knows this, even though the domestic US and British media say the opposite.

Alford: What about military threats?

Coles: The best sources you can get are the US military records. Straight from the horse's mouth. The military plans for war and defence. They have contingencies for when political situations change. So they know what they're talking about. There's a massive divide between reality, as understood from the military records, and media and political rhetoric. Assessments by the US Army War College, for instance, said years ago that any moves by NATO to support a Western-backed government in Ukraine would provoke Russia into annexing Crimea. They don't talk about Russia spontaneously invading Ukraine and annexing it, which is the image we get from the media. The documents talk about Russia reacting to NATO provocation. [ix]

If you look at a map, you see Russia surrounded by hostile NATO forces. The media don't discuss this dangerous and provocative situation, except the occasional mention of, say, US-British-Polish war-gaming on the border with Russia. When they do mention it, they say it's for "containment," the containment of Russia. But to contain something, the given thing has to be expanding. But the US military – like the annual threat assessments to Congress – say that Russia's not expanding, except when provoked. So at the moment as part of its NATO mission, the UK is training Polish and Ukrainian armed forces, has deployed troops in Poland and Estonia, and is conducting military exercises with them. [x]

Imagine if Scotland ceded from the UK and the Russians were on our border conducting military exercises, supposedly to deter a British invasion of Scotland. That's what we're doing in Ukraine. Britain's moves are extremely dangerous. In the 1980s, the UK as part of NATO conducted the exercise, Operation Able Archer, which envisaged troop build-ups between NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries. Now-declassified records show that the Russians briefly mistook this exercise for a real-world scenario. That could have escalated into nuclear war. This is very serious. [xi]

But the biggest player is the USA. It's using the threat of force and a global architecture of hi-tech militarism to shape a neoliberal order. Britain is slavishly following its lead. I doubt that Britain would position forces near Russia were it not for the USA. Successive US administrations have or are building a missile system in Europe and Turkey. They say it's to deter Iran from firing Scud missiles at Europe. But it's pointed at Russia. It's a radar system based in Romania and Turkey, with a battery of Patriot missiles based in Poland. The stationing of missiles there provoked Russia into moving its mobile nuclear weapons up to the border in its Kaliningrad exclave, as it warned it would do in 2008. [xii] Try to find any coverage of that in the media, except for a few articles in the print media here or there. If Western media were interested in survival, there would be regular headlines: "NATO provoking Russia."

But the situation in Ukraine is really the tipping point. Consider the equivalent. Imagine if Russia was conducting military exercises with Canada or Mexico, and building bases there. How would the US react? It would be considered an extreme threat, a violation of the UN Charter, which prohibits threats against sovereign states.

Alford: So we've extended NATO to pretty much the Russian border? But there's a hard border there. Everyone knows we're never going to attack Russia, both for reasons of morality and self-preservation. So maybe this situation is safer than you imply.

Coles: There's no morality involved. States are abstract, amorphous entities comprised of dominant minorities and subjugated majorities who are conditioned to believe that they are relatively free and prosperous. The elites of those states act both in their self-interests – career, peer-pressure, kickbacks, and so on – and in the interests of their class, which is of course tied to international relations because their class thrives on profiting from resource exploitation. So you can't talk about morality in this context. Only individuals can behave morally. The state is made up of individuals, of course, but they're acting against the interests of the majority. As we speak, they are acting immorally – or at least amorally – but creating the geopolitical conditions that imperil each and every one of us.

As for invasion, we're not going to invade Russia. This isn't 1918. Russia has nuclear weapons and can deter an invasion. But that's not the point. Do we want to de-escalate an already tense geopolitical situation or make it worse to the point where an accident happens? So while it's not about invading Russia directly, the issue is about attacking what are called Russia's "national interests." Russia's "national interests" are the same as the elites' of the UK. National interest doesn't mean the interests of the public. It means the interests of the policymaking establishment and the corporations. For example, the Theresa May government sacrificed its own credibility to ensure that its Brexit White Paper (2018) appeased both the interests of the food and manufacturing industries that want a soft Brexit – easy trade with the EU – and the financial services sector which wants a hard Brexit – freedom from EU regulation. Everyone else be damned. That's the "national interest."

So for its real "national interest," Russia wants to keep Ukraine in its sphere of influence because its oil and gas to Europe pass through Ukraine. About 80% of Russia's export economy is in the oil and gas sector. It's already had serious political tensions with Ukraine, which on several occasions hasn't paid its energy bills, so Russia has cut supplies. If Europe can bump Ukraine into its own sphere of influence it has more leverage over Russia. This is practically admitted in Parliamentary discussions by Foreign Office ministers, and so forth. [xiii] Again, omitted by the media. Also, remember that plenty of ethnic Russians live in eastern Ukraine. In addition, Russia has a naval base in Crimea. That's not to excuse its illegal action in annexing Ukraine, it's to highlight the realpolitik missing in the media's coverage of the situation.

T. J. Coles is a postdoctoral researcher at Plymouth University's Cognition Institute and the author of several books.

Matthew Alford teaches at Bath University in the UK and has also written several books. Their latest is Union Jackboot (Até Books).

SOURCES

[i] Mark Leonard and Nicu Popescu (2007) 'A Power Audit of EU-Russia Relations' European Council on Foreign Relations, Policy Paper, p. 1 http://www.ecfr.eu/page/-/ECFR-02_A_POWER_AUDIT_OF_EU-RUSSIA_RELATIONS.pdf .

[ii] 'Anglo-Russian relations were severely strained; what was in effect a cold war lasted from the late 1820s to the beginning of the next century'. The Crimean War seems to have set a precedent for today. James writes:

[It] was an imperial war, the only one fought by Britain against a European power during the nineteenth century, although some would have regarded Russia as essentially an Asiatic power. No territory was at stake; the war was undertaken solely to guarantee British naval supremacy in the Mediterranean and, indirectly, to forestall any threat to India which might have followed Russia replacing Britain as the dominant power in the Middle East.

Lawrence James (1997) The Rise and Fall of the British Empire London: Abacus, pp. 180-82.

[iii] Churchill said in 1920:

All these strikes and rumours of strikes and threats of strikes and loss and suffering caused by them; all this talk of revolution and "direct action" have deeply offended most of the British people. There is a growing feeling that a considerable section of organized Labour is trying to tyrannize over the whole public and to bully them into submission, not by argument, not by recognized political measures, but by brute force

But if we can do little for Russia [under the Bolsheviks], we can do much for Britain. We do not want any of these experiments here

Whether it is the Irish murder gang or the Egyptian vengeance society, or the seditious extremists in India, or the arch-traitors we have at home, they will feel the weight of the British arm.

Winston Churchill (1920) Bolshevism and Imperial Sedition . Speech to United Wards Club. London: The International Churchill Society https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1915-1929-nadir-and-recovery/bolshevism-and-imperial-sedition/ .

[iv] The fake letter says:

A settlement of relations between the two countries [UK and Russia] will assist in the revolutionising of the international and British proletariat, [and] make it possible for us to extend and develop the propaganda and ideas of Leninism in England and the colonies.

It also says that 'British workmen' have 'inclinations to compromise' and that rapprochement will eventually lead to domestic '[a]rmed warfare'. It was leaked by the services to the Conservative party and then to the media. Richard Norton-Taylor (1999) 'Zinoviev letter was dirty trick by MI6' Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/politics/1999/feb/04/uk.politicalnews6 and Louise Jury (1999) 'Official Zinoviev letter was forged' Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/news/official-zinoviev-letter-was-forged-1068600.html . For media coverage at the time, see James Curran and Jean Seaton (1997) Power without Responsibility London: Routledge, p. 52.

[v] Paul F. Walker (2017) 'A Century of Chemical Warfare: Building a World Free of Chemical Weapons' Conference: One Hundred Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences pp. 379-400 and Giles Milton (2013) Russian Roulette: A Deadly Game: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Global Plot London: Hodder, eBook.

[vi] 'The Russian Federation has shown repeatedly that common values play almost no role in its consideration of its trading partners', meaning the US and EU. 'It often builds relationships with countries that most openly thwart Western values of free markets and democracy', notably Iran and Venezuela. 'In this regard, the Russian Federation behaves like "Russia Incorporated." It uses its re-nationalized industries to further its wealth and influence, the latter often at the expense of the EU and the U.S.'. Colonel Richard J. Anderson (2008) 'A History of President Putin's Campaign to Re-Nationalize Industry and the Implications for Russian Reform and Foreign Policy' Senior Service College, US Army War College, Pennsylvania: Carlisle Barracks, p. 52.

[vii] Daniel R. Coats (2017) Statement for the Record: Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Washington, DC: Office of the Director of

National Intelligence, pp. 18-19 https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Testimonies/SSCI%20Unclassified%20SFR%20-%20Final.pdf .

[viii] US Space Command (1997) Vision for 2020 Colorado: Peterson Air Force Base https://ia802705.us.archive.org/10/items/pdfy-j6U3MFw1cGmC-yob/U.S.%20Space%20Command%20Vision%20For%202020.pdf .

[ix] The document also says: 'a replay of the West-sponsored coup against pro-Russian elites could result in a split, or indeed multiple splits, of the failed Ukraine, which would open a door for NATO intervention'.Pavel K. Baev (2011) 'Russia's security relations with the United States: Futures planned and unplanned' in Stephen J. Blank (ed.) Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future Strategic Studies Institute Pennsylvania: Carlisle Barracks, p. 170, www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB1087.pdf.

[x] Forces Network (2016) 'British troops to deploy to Poland' https://www.forces.net/news/tri-service/british-troops-deploy-poland .

[xi] For example, Nate Jones, Thomas Blanton and Christian F. Ostermann (2016) 'Able Archer 83: The Secret History' Nuclear Proliferation International History Project Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/able-archer-83-the-secret-history .

[xii] It was reported in the ultra-right, neo-con press at the time that:

[Russian] President Dmitri Medvedev announced in his first state-of-the-nation address plans to deploy the short-range SS-26 ("Iskander") missiles in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad if the U.S. goes ahead with its European Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS). Medvedev told parliament that the deployment would "neutralize" U.S. plans for a missile defense shield based in Poland and the Czech Republic [now in Romania), which the U.S. claims as vital in defending against missile attacks from 'rogue states' such as Iran.

Neil Leslie (2008) 'The Kaliningrad Missile Crisis' The New Atlanticist , available at http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-kaliningrad-missile-crisis.

[xiii] For example, a Parliamentary inquiry into British-Russian relations says of the newly-imposed US-British ally in Ukraine:

President Poroshenko's Government is more openly committed to economic reform and anti-corruption than any previous Ukrainian Administration. The reform agenda has made considerable progress and has enjoyed some successes including police reform, liberalisation of the energy market and the launch of an online platform for government procurement

The annexation of Crimea also resulted in a ban on importing products from Crimea, on investing in or providing services linked to tourism and on exporting certain goods for use in the transport, telecoms and energy sectors.

House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (2017) The United Kingdom's relations with Russia Seventh report of session 2016-17, HC 120 London: Stationary Office, pp. 28, 31 https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmfaff/120/120.pdf

[Nov 06, 2018] The latest garbage issued by the yanks

Nov 06, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peter AU 1 , Nov 6, 2018 5:39:03 PM | link

The latest garbage issued by the yanks.

https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2018/08/285043.htm
"Following the use of a "Novichok" nerve agent in an attempt to assassinate UK citizen Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia Skripal, the United States, on August 6, 2018, determined under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991 (CBW Act) that the Government of the Russian Federation has used chemical or biological weapons in violation of international law or has used lethal chemical or biological weapons against its own nationals.

Following a 15-day Congressional notification period, these sanctions will take effect upon publication of a notice in the Federal Register, expected on or around August 22, 2018"
.....

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-sanctions/u-s-says-to-issue-chemical-weapons-related-sanctions-against-russia-idUSKCN1NB2M7?il=0
"The department in August had threatened Russia with added sanctions after 90 days unless it complied with the 1991 Chemical and Biological Weapons and Warfare Elimination Act.

Under the law, Russia had to end the use of the nerve agent Novichok, which was used in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in March, commit to not using chemical weapons against its own people, and allow on-site inspections by agencies like the United Nations.

"Today, the department informed Congress we could not certify that the Russian Federation met the conditions," U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement."

[Nov 05, 2018] Nuclear war threat is now real

Nov 05, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Northern Star November 5, 2018 at 2:25 pm

USA Psychopaths in Power WATCH:

"Phil Collins
The only thing that can stop this ever happening is if the American people stand up to these psychopaths running their country its called people power and would stop them in their tracks madmen now run the Whitehouse"

https://youtu.be/OpQuUMURex8

[Nov 05, 2018] Both in Skriplas affair and in Syria the UK is slowly sinking to its appropriate level of incompetence and self-delusion

Nov 05, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al November 5, 2018 at 8:22 am

I'm not surprised that you are such a fine shot with his harpoon considering your naval background, Mark! The UK is slowly sinking to its appropriate level of incompetence and self-delusion with the likes of former PM Dave Cameron declaring that he is 'shit bored' and would like to return to cabinet, preferably as Foreign Minister. That could be arranged, but as Foreign minister in Libya.

Still, the whole 'Russian corrupting in Britain' is the British government's perception management at its finest. As someone recently posted on the last thread, a Spanish case against RUSSIAN MAFIA collapsed for lack of evidence after ten years , which I suspect was partly provided by British Intelligence paid organized crime experts from Russia like Litvenenko & Skripal. Who's been bilked then?

Yes, this is a classic case of 'LOOK OVER THERE!' rather than the billions upon billions sunk in to London by the UK and the west's bestest Gulf buddies, you know, the one's who fear not their exposure for outrageous human rights abuses on a genocidal scale such as in Yemen, and a much smaller scale with the likes of their own citizens, sic Kashoggi. But, Chelsea & Westminster are such a fundamental part of British Life (coz its London, innit?) and does very well for itself. I have to admit, it is (mostly) nice around there where you can take a stroll along the Embankment, wander around Hyde Park and visit the museums.

Northern Star November 5, 2018 at 5:33 pm
"Like in the Wild West, betting in the saloon is also common when it comes to Syria. The US State Department under Obama placed all its bets on some entity they invented, which they liked to call "moderate rebels" (why not "respectable terrorists" or "polite criminals"?). They lost. Numerous left-wing academics signed on to regime change years ago, and because they only pretend to be seasoned analysts for their day jobs, they did not foresee the collapse of the anti-government forces in Syria. That list included noted "post-colonial" scholars and anthropologists, united in their belief in "democracy promotion" and remaking Syria into something palatable to them, with the right leaders in place. Five years later and a smaller group -- including feminists like Gloria Steinem and Judith Butler, anarchists like Noam Chomsky and the anthropologist David Graeber, the Marxist David Harvey, and advocates of recolonization like Michael Walzer -- placed their bets on socialist Kurdish militias, presumably increasing the value of their bet by the important sign value of their brand name authority. Ironically, in the process of reimagining legendary Rojava as the site of a second Spanish Civil War, they were openly collaborating with Donald Trump (not naming him directly, since "the US government" was more convenient). These signatories were thus complicit with the very same commander-in-chief of the armed forces they were calling on for support of Syrian Kurds. They wanted "the US government," whose President is Donald Trump, to impose sanctions on Turkey, and to develop a foreign policy that put Kurdish interests at the forefront. You can be sure that, elsewhere, in front of different crowds, they return to "the Resistance" by puffing up their little chests and sounding all "anti-Trump" -- but when it came to cheering their favourite band of ethnic anarchists, they could dispense with appearances. Less "prestigious" characters, publishing in a less "prestigious" outlet, countered the call to "defend Rojava", a call which appropriated "progressive" politics for the cause of imperialism (thus reigniting an old marriage). (David Harvey, by the way, having cashed in on abundant sales of his volume, The New Imperialism, has recently changed his mind: he has decided that imperialism is merely a metaphor, "rather than anything real". Out of curiosity, we have to wonder if "capitalism" is also a metaphor, rather than anything real, seeing how Marxists have linked capitalism with imperialism. Perhaps even socialism is a metaphor, rather than anything real."

This Canadian has a lot to say well worth reading!!!!!

https://zeroanthropology.net/2018/10/06/syria-the-new-terra-nullius/

https://syria360.wordpress.com/2018/11/04/syria-the-new-terra-nullius/

[Nov 02, 2018] By Way Of Deception - False Flag Terror Acts Press Europe To Sanction Iran by B

Looks like Iran was "Skripaled". Intelligence agencies are now capable to perform false flag operation in thier home countries and blame other government with absolute impunity.
Notable quotes:
"... Israels secret service Mossad, with the CIA behind it, is framing Iran with alleged assassination plots in Europe. ..."
"... It is unlikely that Iran would take action in Europe, which it urgently needs to reduce the damage of U.S. sanction, over an incident for which it already punished the Islamic State. ..."
"... The Danish claims are allegedly based on information provided by Mossad. That only increases the suspicion that the assassination plot is a false flag operation similar to a recent one in Belgium. More likely though is that the CIA is behind such false flag incidents. ..."
"... Bahram Ghasemi, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Iran "re-emphasized" to the diplomats a previous warning about the presence in their respective countries of members of a group that Iran classifies as a terrorist group and wants arrested and prosecuted. ..."
"... On October 30 Denmark suddenly accused Iran of an assassination plot against a leader of the ASMLA group ..."
"... It indeed seems that Danish government, led by the rightwing Venstre party, is collaborating with the U.S. and Britain to sabotage the European position against U.S. sanctions on Iran ..."
"... The former Secretary General of NATO and U.S. stooge Anders Fogh Rasmussen is the predecessor of the current Venstre party leader and Danish premier Lars Lřkke Rasmussen. Both are hawks. ..."
"... Yesterday Israeli journalist reported that the information on which Denmark acted came from Israel ..."
"... Iran's foreign minister accuses Israel of running false flag operations to frame Iran ..."
"... Times of Israel ..."
"... Iran has no interest in causing any upheaval with Europe shortly before the second round of U.S. sanctions, which threaten its economic well being, come into place early this month. Iran already took revenge for the Ahvaz attack. It has no need to tackle some unrelated separatist who resides in Denmark. Iran needs Europe to work around the U.S. sanctions. That aim prohibits any such operations. ..."
"... Both, the MEK plot as well as the case in Denmark, smell of false flag incidents. In both case no one was hurt. In both cases some stooges with no current relation to Iran were caught. Both cases came to light after information was allegedly provided by Mossad ..."
"... "Both, the MEK plot as well as the case in Denmark, smell of false flag incidents. In both case no one was hurt." Just like with the "bombs" shipped to a few US "liberals" recently. ..."
"... It was only going to be a matter of time until Iran got Skripalled. Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif Tweets a list : "Incredible series of coincidences. Or, a simple chronology of a MOSSAD program to kill the JCPOA?" ..."
Nov 02, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Israels secret service Mossad, with the CIA behind it, is framing Iran with alleged assassination plots in Europe.

In September a terror attack killed some 30 people in Iran. Two entities, an Arab separatist movement as well as the Islamic State terror group ISIS, took responsibility. After an investigation Iran found that it was ISIS which was responsible. It took revenge against the identified culprits.

Six weeks later Denmark claims, without providing evidence, that Iran tried to assassinate a leader of the Arab separatist movement over the incident. Iran denies any such attempt. The right wing Danish government uses the claim to urge other European countries to sanction Iran.

It is unlikely that Iran would take action in Europe, which it urgently needs to reduce the damage of U.S. sanction, over an incident for which it already punished the Islamic State.

The Danish claims are allegedly based on information provided by Mossad. That only increases the suspicion that the assassination plot is a false flag operation similar to a recent one in Belgium. More likely though is that the CIA is behind such false flag incidents.

The details:

On September 22 gunmen killed 29 and wounded more than 70 participants and onlookers of a veterans day parade in Ahvaz, Iran:

Three of the attackers were gunned down during clashes with the security forces and one other was arrested, news agencies reported.
...
"The terrorists disguised as Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) and Basiji (volunteer) forces opened fire to the authority and people from behind the stand during the parade," the governor of Khuzestan, Gholam-Reza Shariati, said, according to IRNA.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert also referred to the attack as terrorism. Nauert said on Saturday, "We stand with the Iranian people against the scourge of radical Islamic terrorism and express our sympathy to them at this terrible time".

The Islamic State as well as an Arab separatist movement claimed responsibility :

On 22 September 2018, Yaqoob Al-Ahvaz claimed responsibility for the 2018 Ahvaz military parade attack in comments to UK-based Iran International TV. He said that his group Ahvaz National Resistance, a part of Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz, has "no choice but to resist." On 23 September, a statement made in The Hague, Netherlands, on the ASMLA website, denied responsibility for the attack, saying that the claim was made by a "group that was expelled from the organization since 2015."

After Yaqoob Al-Ahvaz claimed responsibility Iran accused Saudi Arabia of involvement in the attack:

IRGC spokesman Ramezan Sharif said the attackers were affiliated with a terrorist group supported by Saudi Arabia, Iran's state-run Press TV said.

"The individuals who fired at the people and the armed forces during the parade are connected to the al-Ahvaziya group which is fed by Saudi Arabia," Sharif said. Saudi Arabia has yet to respond to the allegations.

The UK-based Iran International TV, where Yaqoob Al-Ahvaz claimed responsibility, is funded by a firm with ties to Prince Mohammed bin Salman .

Several years ago ASMLA aka Al-Ahvaziya committed several terror attacks in Iran. Its leaders live in the Netherlands and Denmark.

Iran immediately reminded those countries of their duties:

Iran's Foreign Ministry summoned the ambassadors of the Netherlands and Denmark, along with a senior British diplomat on Saturday to issue a strong protest the attack, Iran's state-run media reports.

Bahram Ghasemi, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Iran "re-emphasized" to the diplomats a previous warning about the presence in their respective countries of members of a group that Iran classifies as a terrorist group and wants arrested and prosecuted.

According to IRNA, Ghasemi said "it is unacceptable" that members of a terrorist group be allowed in those countries and not be included on the European Union's terror list only because they have not committed crimes on European soil.

A few days later though, Iran concluded that the attack was not committed by the Ahvaz movement, but by the Islamic State. On October 1 it responded with a missile salvo that hit Islamic State facilities in Syria:

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) announced they have bombed a site in eastern Syria in retaliation to the terrorist attack against a military parade in Iranian Ahvaz 10 days ago.

...

The IRGC confirmed that the targeted terrorist group was behind the terror attack that killed over a dozen and injured many more in the city of Ahvaz.

An additional operation against the planers of the attack took place on October 15 in Iraq:

Iran's Revolutionary Guards said on Tuesday they had killed the "mastermind" behind an attack on a military parade in the Iranian city of Ahvaz last month which left 25 people dead, nearly half of them members of the Guards.

The Guards said in a statement published on state media their forces had killed a man named Abu Zaha and four other militants in Diyala province in Iraq. One news website run by Iran's state television said Abu Zaha was a member of Islamic State.

That closed the issue for Iran.

On October 30 Denmark suddenly accused Iran of an assassination plot against a leader of the ASMLA group:

Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen described the alleged planned assassination by Iran of an exiled separatist leader in Denmark as "totally unacceptable"

The Iranian ambassador to Copenhagen was summoned to the foreign ministry over the allegations. A Norwegian citizen of Iranian origin was arrested in Sweden on 21 October in connection with the alleged plan. The man denies the charges. Authorities conducted a massive manhunt on 28 September which led to road closures, trains and ferries being cancelled, and bridges being shut across Denmark.

On Tuesday, Danish intelligence chief Finn Borch Andersen confirmed the measures had been taken to prevent the alleged plot.

The Danish intelligence accused the Norwegian citizens of taking pictures of a house where one of the ASMLA leader lives. It provide no evidence for its claims. Iran rejected the accusations:

An Iranian foreign ministry spokesman said such "biased reports" and allegations pursued " the enemy's plots and conspiracies" to harm the developing relations between Iran and Europe , according to Tasnim news agency.

It indeed seems that Danish government, led by the rightwing Venstre party, is collaborating with the U.S. and Britain to sabotage the European position against U.S. sanctions on Iran:

Mr Rasmussen said, after a meeting with his British counterpart Theresa May in Oslo, that he appreciated her support. "In close collaboration with UK and other countries we will stand up to Iran," he tweeted. Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen said Denmark would discuss further actions with European partners in the coming days.

The US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, congratulated Denmark on arresting "an Iranian regime assassin".

The former Secretary General of NATO and U.S. stooge Anders Fogh Rasmussen is the predecessor of the current Venstre party leader and Danish premier Lars Lřkke Rasmussen. Both are hawks.

Yesterday Israeli journalist reported that the information on which Denmark acted came from Israel:

Barak Ravid @BarakRavid - 10:12 utc- 31 Oct 2018

BREAKING: Israeli Mossad gave Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) the information about the assassination attempt planned by Iranian intelligence service against the leader of the Iranian opposition organization ASMLA, Israeli official tells me

Well - if Israeli officials says Iran did something bad that will surely be true. (Not.)

Iran's foreign minister accuses Israel of running false flag operations to frame Iran :

Javad Zarif @JZarif - 20:15 utc - 31 Oct 2018

Mossad's perverse & stubborn planting of false flags (more on this later) only strengthens our resolve to engage constructively with the world. [...]

The Times of Israel notes :

Denmark's accusations against Iran followed the unveiling of another suspected Iranian plot to target a Paris rally by an opposition group in June. According to Israeli reports, the Mossad helped thwart that attack as well , which led to the arrest of several Iranians in Europe, including a diplomat.

The earlier plot involved two members of the anti-Iranian terror cult MEK in Belgium who were caught with explosives that they allegedly wanted to use to blow up a MEK conference in Paris:

The allegation that an Iranian operative plotted an attack on French soil is jeopardizing Europe's support for the accord. As U.S. and Israeli officials ramp up pressure on Europe to sever ties with Tehran, they have cited it as a reason why Mr. Macron and other leaders should end their support for the deal.

On Tuesday, Denmark announced it had foiled an Iranian operation to kill a dissident, turning up the pressure on Europe to harden its posture toward Tehran. A spokesman for Iran's foreign ministry said Iran had no involvement in the case.

The most interesting question about such plots is always "Cui bono?". Who benefits from these incidents?

Iran has no interest in causing any upheaval with Europe shortly before the second round of U.S. sanctions, which threaten its economic well being, come into place early this month. Iran already took revenge for the Ahvaz attack. It has no need to tackle some unrelated separatist who resides in Denmark. Iran needs Europe to work around the U.S. sanctions. That aim prohibits any such operations.

Both, the MEK plot as well as the case in Denmark, smell of false flag incidents. In both case no one was hurt. In both cases some stooges with no current relation to Iran were caught. Both cases came to light after information was allegedly provided by Mossad .

But is it really Israel who set up these incidents? Both serve U.S. interest just as much. It is no secret that the U.S. wants to prevent European subversion of U.S. sanctions on Iran.

In June 2017 the Trump administration installed a new CIA group to plot and launch undercover operations against Iran. It is led by its most ruthless operator:

He is known as the Dark Prince or Ayatollah Mike, nicknames he earned as the Central Intelligence Agency officer who oversaw the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the American drone strike campaign that killed thousands of Islamist militants and hundreds of civilians.

Now the official, Michael D'Andrea, has a new job. He is running the C.I.A.'s Iran operations, according to current and former intelligence officials, an appointment that is the first major sign that the Trump administration is invoking the hard line the president took against Iran during his campaign.

Mr. D'Andrea's new role is one of a number of moves inside the spy agency that signal a more muscular approach to covert operations under the leadership of Mike Pompeo, the conservative Republican and former congressman, the officials said.

A year later the same Mike Pompeo, now Secretary of State, created the Iran Action Group within the State Department. It is a complementary entity to the CIA group. Little has been published about the action both groups have taken so far. What has Ayatollah Mike done since he set up shop 18 month ago?

It is likely that the false flag operations in Europe, like the ones in Belgium and Denmark, are run by the CIA with the Mossad only in an auxiliary role. The U.S. can hardly admit that it is faking terrorist incidents in Europe while the overrated Mossad loves to take credit for everything that happens on this world.

Europe has no interest in supporting or escalating Trump's war on Iran. EU countries should demand hard evidence from Denmark and other accusers of Iran and should not act on the basis of only vague accusations.

Posted by b on November 1, 2018 at 10:30 AM | Permalink

Comments Iran should sue the puppet state Denmark. End of story

worldblee , Nov 1, 2018 10:59:28 AM | link

Israel is regarded as a beneficent country with no ulterior motives by western governments and media. Every time, you can count on like clockwork, no matter how outrageous or self serving the claim.
Occidentosis , Nov 1, 2018 11:08:14 AM | link
@mark2 about yemen you should read peter konig's Khashoggi versus 50,000 Slaughtered Yemeni Children Peter Koenig
https://thesaker.is/khashoggi-versus-50000-slaughtered-yemeni-children-peter-koenig-26-october-2018/
james , Nov 1, 2018 11:17:21 AM | link
thanks b.. i agree with your analysis here.. the usa needs to keep its puppet states. on a string... cia has a long history of these types of actions.. i am surprised at how easily or convenient it is for the puppets to continue as puppets.. and of course as we approach the nov 5 th financial santion bs from the evil empire that claims equality for all (after usa and israel are cared for) will be trying to alienate the rest of the world to iran as much as possible.. the timing here is in line with that goal post.. very predictible, just like our local shill who will claim it is iran as opposed to usa-israel-ksa and etc, that pull this shit regularly.. the same ugly crew responsible for supporting terrorism as witnessed in syria, yemen and etc further back are at work here... predictible..

i suspect more bs to come from these same state sponsored liars....

Mark2 , Nov 1, 2018 11:50:38 AM | link
And just take a look at Britain's disgusting priority's money is more important than preventing / stopping US/UK genacide !
https://mobile.twitter.com/BaFana3/status/1057698127623438336/photo/1
Gary Weglarz , Nov 1, 2018 11:57:22 AM | link
The complete and utter amorality of the West on display yet again, as if we needed any more examples. There is certainly compelling evidence that a group of "extremists" are endangering all of humanity and the entire planet, the only problem for Western MSM in reporting on this is that those "extremists" are in fact the ruling elites of the West and their "allies" in Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Clueless Joe , Nov 1, 2018 11:59:44 AM | link
"Both, the MEK plot as well as the case in Denmark, smell of false flag incidents. In both case no one was hurt." Just like with the "bombs" shipped to a few US "liberals" recently.
WJ , Nov 1, 2018 12:01:42 PM | link
I thought the War on Terror dictated that the whole world was the battlefield. What's the difference between Iran trying to take down a terrorist in Denmark and the US trying to take one down in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Africa?
karlof1 , Nov 1, 2018 12:16:51 PM | link
It was only going to be a matter of time until Iran got Skripalled. Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif Tweets a list : "Incredible series of coincidences. Or, a simple chronology of a MOSSAD program to kill the JCPOA?"

Please note the last listed "coincidence."

Also on Zarif's Twitter is a video segment of his interview with Face The Nation and other important announcements. This is what he said about the Pittsburg attack:

"Extremism and terrorism know no race or religion, and must be condemned in all cases. The world deserves better than to have to live with weaponized demagoguery. Thoughts and prayers with victims of terrorist attack on Pittsburgh synagogue and their loved ones." [My Emphasis]

The nations of the world have had the following choice to make for awhile now, and I'd say the choice can no longer be kicked down the road:

Either blindly follow the two prevaricating Outlaw Nations--United States and Israel--or stand with Russia, China, and others in supporting proven truths and upholding the fundamental principles of International Law as expressed via the UN Charter. In other words, it's past time to review GW Bush's dicta: Either you're with us or against us--abet the lawbreakers or join the posse to contain them.

b , Nov 1, 2018 12:17:18 PM | link
@Mark2 - NO MORE ONE-LINERS FROM YOU or I will ban you.

Every time you come up to this site you disrupt all discussions here by posting 10+ one-line comments.

All those have the same characteristic. They are useless.

Stop this nonsense. Write decent comments that are on the subject of the post or just go away.

ben , Nov 1, 2018 12:19:24 PM | link
The evil empire and their bought minions are infecting the globe. They will never stop until their domination by organised $ brings surfs everywhere under their control.

These forces do not believe in a "middle class", they believe the wealthiest should rule because it creates a more stable and predictable society..

A society Charles Dickens wrote about. Wonderful...

Ger , Nov 1, 2018 12:29:25 PM | link
One needs a high level of stupid among the western population to sell bull s... by the buckets. But then again, that is US and allies. As was said: Too stupid to realize they are stupid. In the US the most trusted institution is the military. Proof enough?
Mark2 , Nov 1, 2018 12:35:54 PM | link
'B' that's o k i'll Just go away good bye good luck, and thanks for having me.
james , Nov 1, 2018 1:34:01 PM | link
about MEK, the terrorist group... our shithead exprime minister steven harper was singing the praises of them the past month.... apparenlty stevie just can't do enough for israel and zionism, and if the canuck media which is essentialy bought and paid for by the same interests has its way, we will get a similar insane gov't after trudeau light is finished his term... apparently canucks are one cycle behind the usa in electing its leaders... it will be a trump type israel subservient toad for next pm of cauckistan... i sure wish the western political players weren't so beholden to neoliberalism. and we had someone even half the leader putin is.... but, we don't....
Vitaliy , Nov 1, 2018 2:12:05 PM | link
East by not responding strongly to West provocations is begging for war.
East by crying for West for cooperation is begging for war.
And since East and West are controlled by the same same cabal - war is inevitable.
Just ask Mr. Kissinger...
hans , Nov 1, 2018 2:19:10 PM | link
The Edomites, who after Rome's extermination of the remnant of the House of Israel at Jerusalem began calling themselves "Jews" for "controlled opposition" for "the real Anti-Christ" "engine for enslaving mankind" we founded God's America to escape, become sex perverts, including incesting Sabbatean Frankists - hence the Manchu-baldness, as a consequence of their satanic cult's ritual sodomy of innocent toddlers while being rabbinically inculcated as "gods chosen by God to rule the world."

It is, in fact, the Synagogue of Satan.

notheonly1 , Nov 1, 2018 2:25:25 PM | link
Wow. Thank You for this one. After reading this excellent assessment of the present situation, of which we might only know the most shallow facts, I had to do a search (DDG) about Iran during the time of the first openly Fascist Europe - being described as having emanated from 3rd-Reich-Germany and Italy.
I was unaware that there was an Anglo-Soviet Invasion of Iran , because of the alleged sympathy of the Shah's Iran with Nazi-Germany. The Brits and the Russians were buddies then and wanted to prevent that Iranian oil is accessible to Nazi-Germany.

All over sudden I am confused that the Brits invaded shoulder to shoulder with Soviet forces Iran - while now, besides delivering the political ham theater of saber rattling against Russia, supporting terror and instigating sanctions against Iran again.

To make things much worse to comprehend, one is to wonder how many European countries actually did join Nazi Germany without much ado at the time, based on the fact that the Scandinavians and the Netherlands are now as Fascist as Nazi Germany was during its short 1000 years of glory. Does anybody else get the impression that this was always this way? That we have been lied to about everything regarding Fascism? That it was never Fascism that was the problem in Europe - as it appears to do very well there - but a strong Germany that could have easily governed its territory via effective 'bureaucracy'. All of Europe.

The truth is, that the stench of Fascism today, was already stinking badly in the 20th century, but was never really a problem. The problem were the Germans. And somehow, the Germans want to continue to have economic ties with Iran. Is this how history repeats itself - minus the marching Soviet/Russian and British buddy forces?

Quite ludicrous the whole theater.

Vitaliy , Nov 1, 2018 2:38:54 PM | link
19
Earth been damned and given to Worldmaster to rule - what else one needs to know?
craigsummers , Nov 1, 2018 2:48:11 PM | link
How many false flag operations have been invoked to explain unpopular events in recent years? The British government was behind the attempted murder of Skripal. All of the chemical attacks launched against the opposition in Syria were false flag operations to bring the US into the war (which amounted to nothing burgers anyway). Ray McGovern hypothesized the US used the Vault 7 tools as a false flag to blame Russia for the DNC hack. Is there any end to false flag speculation?

Who cares if the Iranians deny the charge? That means absolutely nothing. Russia has been lying and denying for years. Additionally, that Mossad would have provided the information to Denmark and France is completely logical since they have been collecting intelligence on Iran for years - and have been dealing with Iranian-supported terrorists for decades.

There is no evidence for a false flag operation. Sure it's a possibility (it's always a possibility), but the current evidence points toward Iranian plans to murder dissidents. The British were right about Skripal. The Dutch were right about MH17. Ray McGovern was wrong about the CIA hacking the DNC - and the likely result of this investigation is that Iran planned to murder a couple of dissidents. In lieu of the stupidity exhibited by the Saudis in the Khashoggi murder, it's completely believable.

With all of that said, this is a well thought out attempt to blame the US.

Red Ryder , Nov 1, 2018 3:00:44 PM | link
Denmark has become another UK, willing to perform any act and light any fuse against Russia, Iran or any nation that challenges the hegemony of US, EU and NATO.

Just a subservient vassal, self-degradating. I would compare Denmark to a whore, but that defames those poor souls.

The Danes are like Brits. There, I said it. Nothing worse than the official scumbags of Britain. Pity the good folks of both countries.

Such a little country desperately trying to hide their true Nazi soul, fabricating events and promulgating Fake News and bogus Intel.
In service to big Hegemon and little hegemon (Israel).

Just disgusting.

b , Nov 1, 2018 3:07:09 PM | link
@craig - With all of that said, this is a well thought out attempt to blame the US.

Thanks for acknowledging my geniality, and for the amusement. Shall we make you the house buffoon of the bar?

pretzelattack , Nov 1, 2018 3:10:54 PM | link
thanks for the analysis. we all see the pattern, but i guess it's still important to debunk the bullshit--it just never seems to stop the predetermined goals. it was widely seen that saddam's alleged wmd's didn't exist, but the invasion went on. now the u.s. wants war with iran. unless russia or china intervenes, what can stop it?
DontBelieveEitherPropaganda , Nov 1, 2018 3:15:48 PM | link
@10 - WJ: Difference is, USA has drones and some 19 yo teen can kill you with his joystick. ;)
I think false flag seems likely, but i also have some doubts about ISIS claiming to be resposible. The Iranian state is also pretty complex, with many different actors and power centers. So it cant be ruled out that those arab seperatists are resposible and that some rouge IRGC faction took action against reason of the state as a whole.
Like B said, the EU should demand evidence. Like with Skripal.. Not trust the Danish NATO proxys.
Nick Baam , Nov 1, 2018 3:33:01 PM | link
craigsummers:

The Dutch were not right about MH17, and neither are the Danes. Almost certainly another anti-Iranian false flag coming -- this on American soil -- w war soon to follow.

https://southfront.org/summing-up-russian-military-briefing-on-mh17-incident-missiles-serial-numbers-fake-videos-and-intercepted-radio-communications/

'The Russian military traced the Buk missile [9M38 missile], which shot down the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine in 2014, using serial numbers found on missile fragments showcased by an international team of investigators led by the Netherlands.

'Using the serial number of the nozzle cluster 9D13105000 No. 8-30-113 and the engine of the missile 9D131 with the serial number 8869032, the Russian military identified this missile as one produced by the Dolgoprudny plant – a Soviet/Russian designer and mass producer of surface-to-air missiles located in the city of Dolgoprudny, Moscow Oblast.

'The military said that the documentation for the aforementioned missile is still stored at the plant – the missile with the aforementioned engine and nozzle cluster has the manufacturing serial number of 8868720.

'According to the provided documents, the nozzle cluster was installed in the missile on December 24, 1986. The engine was installed to the missile on the same day.'

karlof1 , Nov 1, 2018 3:38:31 PM | link
Outlaw US Empire attacks Iran with new version of Stuxnet virus.

About the only difference between Trump and Hillary I can judge is he's not quite as reckless. Otherwise, their policy goal remains the same: Full Spectrum Dominance by any means necessary. The attack proves yet again the Outlaw US Empire would rather have destabilization and war in the region than peace, still thinking it remains the World's Boss.

Lozion , Nov 1, 2018 4:01:11 PM | link
@22 Nah, better make him the corner spit bowl..
sejomoje , Nov 1, 2018 4:12:36 PM | link
Thanks b, this is Journalism. Poor craigsummers appears to be in shock. It's ok craig.

We're in a really strange place vis a vis "Mossad" in the west. The average person on the street doesn't know whether to idolize them as superhuman kickass kravmaga-inventing Jason Bourne types, or diabolical creeps like Weinstein's "former Mossad" minions. Then Sacha Baron Cohen comes around and makes them funny again. Are they scary? Funny? When they appear in official media, it's usually in a display of mindblowing incompetence or fraud. So you can see how we're confused.

Bart Hansen , Nov 1, 2018 5:01:13 PM | link
25 - "USA has drones and some 19 yo teen can kill you with his joystick."

Yes, from a safe place in some place in the U.S. desert, but I wonder how the pilots of the aircraft refueling the KSA bombing runs to Yemen feel as they finish and do a 180 to return to base. Do they first look to see what their evil has done before heading back?

Kalen , Nov 1, 2018 5:31:34 PM | link
More likely it is Iran conveniently concluded that ISIS was responsible, only to get off the hook of EU countries that harbor terrorists not only anti Iran by anti Russia, so they closed the case not to wreck meek EU attempt to find the way around US sanctions with trade with Iran. Mossad did not like that and hence used another Russia Gate like provocation to stop EU Iran accommodation, this time claiming new Iranian terrorism issue Orwelian style blame victims.
Peter AU 1 , Nov 1, 2018 5:59:37 PM | link
karlof1 27 "About the only difference between Trump and Hillary I can judge is he's not quite as reckless."

I would agree with that, but I also think he will be willing to take big risks to see his plan through. He may well be like Putin's cornered rat if his plans are blocked.

Jen , Nov 1, 2018 6:14:52 PM | link
One question we should be asking is why all of a sudden is Denmark taking a leading role in accusing Iran of supporting terrorism and terrorist cells in Europe. Is Denmark's action as much to pressure Sweden and Finland into joining NATO as it is to pressure the EU into following the US in sanctioning Iran and tearing up the nuclear treaty the EU still adheres to?
Jen , Nov 1, 2018 6:20:00 PM | link
B @ 23, Lozion @ 28:

Craig's ambitions are rather more lofty than what you both have proposed. He aspires to be the President Trump of MoA.

Peter AU 1 , Nov 1, 2018 6:59:40 PM | link
This crap by the Danes is not without precedent. They were in on the US attack against the SAA at Deir Ezzor. US, UK, Australia and Denmark all took part in that attack.
hans , Nov 1, 2018 7:00:12 PM | link
One question we should be asking is why all of a sudden is Denmark taking a leading role

the danes swede and norway,netherlands folks have all been anglo zion borged.
the man leading this charge is a mr samuel son a proud son of a son i am sure he believes what he says i'm sure he has good reason.
wait for future headlines involving norways trillion dollar sovreign wealth fund vanishing just like gadaffi libya or ukraines gold..

country control via epstein lolita express blackmail.
young boys and girls in ritual cctv horror show as a form of soft power persuasion

Ninel , Nov 1, 2018 7:17:39 PM | link
I'm not entirely convinced b. The Iranian government has a long history of assassination attempts. And Denmark is not exactly a war mongering nation so your claims seem a bit shaky. I have never been impressed by analyses of Iran on this blog, as I think both b and many commentators here totally ignorant of the IRI's crimes against its own citizens. I am very knowledgable when it comes to Iran and so incidents like these do not surprise me. Of course I should make clear that it is possible to be against the IRI and western war mongering nations at the same time.
Circe , Nov 1, 2018 7:21:09 PM | link
I just can't stand responding to cs21 hasbara garbage; nothing is more annoying than hasbara. To quote Irish Nobel laureate GB Shaw: never wrestle with pigs, you both get dirty and the pig loves it!

Mossad used the MEK and another terrorist group, Jundallah in Iran when they didn't do the dirty job themselves to assassinate Iranian scientists extra-judicially. Imagine if JFK had done same when Israel was developing its nuclear weapons on the sly?

That's not all, Mossad used these terrorists like they used terrorists in Syria to foment manufactured revolution, specifically, in Iran, the Green Revolution and as for example what was done in Ukraine, terrorist snipers masquerading as basiji fired into the crowd of green protestors and killed a young women who the Western media elevated as the face of the Revolution hoping it would incite anger that would spread exponentially and trigger riots everywhere then civil war like in Syria and Ukraine, but they were very disappointed. This is playbook Mossad/CIA revolution engineering. All constituted criminal acts against sovereign nations, except in Iran their plan fizzled.

Mossad also used false flag against Gadaffi in Libya and years earlier against Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran that preceded the Shah. The Lavon Affair was a false flag comprised of multiple terrorist attacks that Israel planned and plotted to execute and blame on the Muslim Brotherhood and other Egyptian groups.

Mossad has assassinated what it considered to be terrorists in Europe, Syria, Lebanon, UAE, Jordan and on and on with total impunity. Some of these so-called terrorists were political leaders recent example Arafat, and attempted murder of Meschal, at least one or more were false flag to trigger civil war, i.e. in Lebanon, and some were what South African Apartheid victims would consider resistance and freedom fighters.

Israel also attacked the USSLiberty and no doubt had a hand in U.S. military sabotage in Lebanon not to mention murdering American journalists and activists.

ALL this was done with impunity. So in regards to these foiled terrorist attacks I have no doubt Mossad is up to no good and Israel has everything to gain in this dirty business they have executed many times before.

The truth lies in who benefits most and who has exhibited the most egregious pattern of behaviour. ISRAEL.

AriusArmenian , Nov 1, 2018 7:29:41 PM | link
Yes, it certainly smells like a false flag operation.
The CIA, MI6, and Mossad have been doing such operations in Europe since the end of WW2.
No surprise.
Ninel , Nov 1, 2018 7:30:56 PM | link
For those interested in the IRI, especially those uncritical, naive supporters, here is some light reading:


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_executions_of_Iranian_political_prisoners

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evin_Prison

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_murders_of_Iran

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_labor_law

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicate_of_Workers_of_Tehran_and_Suburbs_Bus_Company

Circe , Nov 1, 2018 8:16:27 PM | link
IRAN must be a hasbara trigger word. The Zionist web army recruits have arrived. Everything you pulled out of wiki I can double, triple, quadruple for Isra-hell. For starters, let's talk about Prison facility 1391 - torture, murder, perpetual isolation--dark ages stuff.

Let's talk about the kidnapping, imprisonment, even torture of children. Perhaps, the worst human rights record against children. 8000 Palestinian children arrested since 2000.

What about the two-tier justice system in Isra-hell?

Shall we discuss the murder of activists, journalists and protestors? What about political prisoners in Isra-hell? What about administrative detention. Detention without trial.

This is the tip of the iceberg regarding Isra-hell's human rights abuses. Don't get me started.

ben , Nov 1, 2018 8:34:13 PM | link
cs @ 21 said;"With all of that said, this is a well thought out attempt to blame the US."

For your perusal cs. Gee, I can't imagine why anyone would be suspicious of the U$A's motives
https://truthout.org/video/overthrow-100-years-of-us-meddling-and-regime-change-from-iran-to-nicaragua-to-hawaii-to-cuba/

craigsummers , Nov 1, 2018 9:27:36 PM | link
b @23
"......Thanks for acknowledging my geniality, and for the amusement. Shall we make you the house buffoon of the bar?......"

What ever suits you. I just appreciate you not deleting my account!

Thanks.

bokin , Nov 1, 2018 11:41:15 PM | link

As we approach the end of the year the big questions facing Europe are:

(1) Which country will win the prize for the most decapitations or slit throats? France or Germany?

With dozens of horrific crimes recently these two competitors are running neck and neck, however with Macron's France averaging close to one slit throat per day, France is probably going to win this contest

Which leaves us with the big question Germans are asking

(2) Which city will earn the distinction of being 2018's Rape Capital of Germany?

For a long time it seemed that the winner would surely be Berlin, but then Freiburg lurched into the lead a few weeks ago.

And now, with a 15-year-old being gang-raped by Afghan asylum seekers, Munich is hustling to take the title.

This crime and subsequent arrests were kept out of the media for a few weeks

-- coincidentally, until just after the recent local elections in Bavaria

The article below from Bild, also translated into English, contains additional details:

Suspects in Custody: Six Men Allegedly Raped Girl (15)

October 30, 2018

Munich -- The Munich police have arrested five Afghan refugees; according to Bayerischer Rundfunk another alleged perpetrator is on the run.

The allegation: They reportedly raped a 15-year-old girl.

The Munich public prosecutor confirmed to BILD upon request that there is an investigation involving a sexual assault and several people have been arrested. The spokesman did not want to comment further.

The case: The girl, who is being psychologically cared for, according to BILD's information, had filed charges against her "partner" at the end of September. The asylum seeker is said to have verbally threatened her and thereby forced her to have intercourse.

Also, he forced her to have intercourse with several his friends. She was so intimidated that she had to endure being abused by them all for several days. Each case is to be handled individually. Physical violence had played no role in the incidents.

In addition to the alleged victim's partner, four other refugees (all between 20 and 25 years old) were arrested. The alleged perpetrators are registered asylum seekers.

In the meantime, warrants have been issued against them on suspicion of rape. They are in custody.

The assaults are said to have occurred at the end of September. The first arrests were made four weeks ago.

Some interrogations remain to be conducted to substantiate the allegations made by the alleged victim, which is one explanation for why the authorities have not made the case public.

Some of the detainees admitted that they had intercourse with the minor, but said that it had taken place by mutual agreement."

Got that?

According to Bild, "Physical violence played no role in the incidents"

snedly arkus , Nov 2, 2018 12:43:12 AM | link
First their is money laundering charges by the US against Denmark's largest bank and now we have Denmark joining the Trump stomp on Iran project. Could it be the US cut a deal with Denmark to limit their investigations and penalties into this bank and maybe others, or possible involvement of Danish government officials, and the Dane's jumped at the chance to limit the damage to the country and it's economy and keep sanction happy Trump from sanctioning them into the poor house.
Steve , Nov 2, 2018 4:49:42 AM | link
Denmark, like Sweden and Norway are the biggest enablers of USA's imperial efforts more than any other nations in the whole world. I think it is only Russia which gets that fact. Nobel prizes are nothing but tooks of the US empire
james , Nov 2, 2018 4:54:55 AM | link
42 ben, ditto... cs has never heard of the cia and the past countless years of there horrors... in fact as far as cs is concerned, they never had any role to play in ghouta 2011 and afterwards either...cs thinks the letters stand for charity international association...usaid is another benevolent org as far as cs is concerned... if cs was ever to read john perkins 'confessions of an economic hit man' he would fall out of his chair and have his world turned upside down.... cs really needs to hang over at pat langs site where some of his love and ignorance of the usa's covert history has a place of acceptance.. it ain't here..
Laguerre , Nov 2, 2018 6:06:55 AM | link
44 bokin. German far-right propaganda reaches MoA.
Laguerre , Nov 2, 2018 7:24:45 AM | link
"It is likely that the false flag operations in Europe, like the ones in Belgium and Denmark, are run by the CIA with the Mossad only in an auxiliary role."

Very difficult to distinguish the two. Israel declared its campaign to internally destabilise Iran last spring (evidently having quailed at the risks of the open military attack), the US has been fruitlessly attempting the same for forty years. I suppose the new Israeli campaign has revived US efforts.

By the way, I was interested by Alastair Crooke's recent remark that Israeli air superiority has been broken by the S300s. Crooke's views are to take seriously.

https://www.rt.com/shows/rt-interview/442703-lavelle-crooke-middle-east/

That could be very grave for Israel, if so, and a context for what's happening.

Mina , Nov 2, 2018 7:51:49 AM | link
No one has picked up on this ?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/jamal-khashoggi-latest-news-saudi-arabia-turkey-embassy-washington-dc-a8601961.html
Did Khalid bin Salman return because might be accused of being part of the plot? There was a phonecall to the US apparently right after the killing.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11120629/Saudi-prince-and-Emirates-first-female-fighter-pilot-take-part-in-Syria-air-strikes.html
It is getting closer to Kushner.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/world/middleeast/with-saudi-prince-holding-on-to-power-us-seen-standing-by-him.html
"Two people close to the Saudi royal court said Mr. Kushner and Prince Mohammed communicate often, including by text message, and multiple times since Mr. Khashoggi's disappearance. A White House spokesman declined to comment about those communications."

The guy is said to have participated in some coalition attacks in Yemen and Syria
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11120629/Saudi-prince-and-Emirates-first-female-fighter-pilot-take-part-in-Syria-air-strikes.html
(I can't find anymore the recent paper where Yemen was mentioned).
Is this the new bigger than screen playstation for Saudi psychopaths? What about the enquiry into the non-identified plane that bombed civilians during an exchange of prisoners in northern Syria? Could it be a Saudi plane? How many of them have been used in Syria and Yemen?

Bandit , Nov 2, 2018 8:02:39 AM | link
Steve, how could you overlook the all time top lap dog: the UK? The UK would be first on most people's list of sycophant enablers of US terrorism, regime change, and false flag operations. Sometimes Macron tries to run ahead of the pack, but gets slapped back by Trump, but when all is said and done, the whole NATO crew are self-serving idiots and assholes.
mali , Nov 2, 2018 8:13:19 AM | link
Denmark, like Sweden and Norway are the biggest enablers of USA's imperial efforts more than any other nations in the whole world. I think it is only Russia which gets that fact. Nobel prizes are nothing but tooks of the US empire

Posted by: Steve | Nov 2, 2018 4:49:42 AM | 46
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well said!

I totally agree with you after saw the ghastly bully behaviour of Denmark on 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, who was actively trying to force down the throat of BRICS (EPS. China & India) and developing countries the schemes that US & Co wanted: 1): to strangle the development chance of third world and 2). to escape the accountability/ownership of the big messy pollution the Western countries has been emitted into the air and the world for centuries.

Another aggressive Dane who was in full swing to propagate the Empire's interests/schemes is Anders Fogh Rasmussen, ex-NATO Secretary General, who was so belligerent that I sometimes question how the peace-love Denmark can produce such an aggressive person......

Rhisiart Gwilym , Nov 2, 2018 8:43:10 AM | link
b, is there any way to highlight a 'Craig Summers' post at the top, so we can skip over his/her/their lying rubbish unread. Bad enough having to wade through the effusions of the sprinkling of religious loonies who seem to be posting now, without wasting time on this bellingcrap-style hasbarollocks.
Jormaaja , Nov 2, 2018 8:48:51 AM | link
Is Denmark going to "stand up to Turkey" also?

"In the beginning of 2017 the Danish Security Service PET had received information about planned political murder of individuals in Denmark who oppose the Turkish government. The PET acted on the information and put the would be targets in safety. This is revealed by Swedish Radio Ekot.
https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=83&artikel=6975341

And is Denmark going to stop doing this:"Denmark's foreign minister has for the first time acknowledged that the government allowed the sale of surveillance technology to authoritarian Arab governments, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE." "Mass surveillance during and after the Arab Spring was used to facilitate the mass incarceration of dissidents, leading to the eventual crushing of popular movements, the report alleged."

https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2017/8/21/danish-fm-admits-selling-mass-surveillance-technology-to-saudi-arabia

And what are the Syro-Ahwazian pro-FSA dudes up to in Denmark:"One battalion of the rebel Free Syrian Army is called the "Ahwaz Brigade", although the group says there are no foreign fighters in its ranks.

"We have relations with different factions of the (Syrian) rebels," said Habib Nabgan, the former head of a coalition of Ahwazi parties whose armed wing carried out last week's pipeline attack.
"They need information, which we give them, and we need some of their expertise, so there is cooperation and that is developing," he told Reuters via telephone from Denmark, where he took refuge in 2006."
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-iran-arabs-insight-idUKBRE97E0O620130815


Ahwazians in Syria:"Before the Syrian uprising, the Ahwazi community in Damascus was living in fear, but is now fully behind the revolutionary struggle.There have been frequent demonstrations in Syria by Ahwazi Arabs flying the opposition flag alongside their own."

https://www.alahwaz.info/en/?p=4642

EtTuBrute , Nov 2, 2018 9:26:51 AM | link
Interesting, the first time i heard of this story my instinct immediately was, why on earth would Iran conduct such risky and rather pointless operations where the downside would greatly outweigh any benefit if they were caught?? Add to that, no one was harmed, they got "caught".. and Mossad involved.. seems pretty clear to anyone who actually understands what's going on in the world.. but there aren't many of us who actually think when we read the news.. thanks again MR B for another insightful piece on analysis :)
Circe , Nov 2, 2018 10:24:00 AM | link
@43

Why? Because you think your Zionist propaganda claptrap is actually convincing and working to bring down surviving bastions of independent thought? It's laughable how hasbara-scripted you read; delivering superficially well-constructed neoliberal brainwash, whitewash material. Your disingenuous ilk courting the Left with liberal goodies, in one hand while unleashing double-standard neoconservative righteous destruction with the other is the main reason we now suffer Trump's fascist right-wing version of same. People protest vote neoliberalism and end up in the arms of the hard right-wing version. It's a no choice choice; an affront to real democracy. You play the desperation of the Left against the Right and then deliver it into the same neoconstruct. You're two sides of the same cult and neither can stand independent thought. After I read your Zionist-contrived claptrap, I feel like my mind has been abused and my time wasted. Once you're wise to the trap, you never go back to falling for whichever charismatic puppet is going to save us from the other side.

The goal becomes helping others break free of the vicious, cyclical no-choice duopoly to viably challenge and destroy it for good! You pretend at righeousness, but you're on the side of status quo darkness.

Circe , Nov 2, 2018 10:39:58 AM | link
Uh, just one more point, I still believe in GW Shaw's wisdom that you shouldn't wrestle with ignorance, ie pigs, but I just intended @56 as a Reader Beware CS for anyone who's out there only reading.
Peter AU 1 , Nov 2, 2018 11:31:43 AM | link
Laguerre 49

Perhaps of more importance was Crooke's remark on US debt. He said in August the cost of servicing the debt, for the first time, exceeded tax revenue. On top of that, the US must sell over a trillion of new debt each year for the next three years.

Laguerre , Nov 2, 2018 12:06:57 PM | link
Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Nov 2, 2018 11:31:43 AM | 58

Yes I too thought that was interesting. But Israel's problem is more fatal, in a permanent sense. Air superiority once lost won't be recovered, but the US could, if it wanted to, live more within its means.

Yul , Nov 2, 2018 12:13:06 PM | link
@b

Do you remember the Green revolution of 2009 that went pfttttt?
Well here is an edifying article wrt the CIA :

https://www.yahoo.com/news/cias-communications-suffered-catastrophic-compromise-started-iran-090018710.html?.tsrc=fauxdal

As usual, some former official has to include : Israeli intelligence tipped off the CIA that Iran had likely identified some of its assets, said the same former official.

james , Nov 2, 2018 12:24:36 PM | link
thanks b wise words as usual thanks for soft shoe shuffle i will of course let you know when you cross the antisemenetic line.
by the way
i love you
karlof1 , Nov 2, 2018 1:11:54 PM | link
58&59--

Regarding US Debt as a problem, Bolton sees it as a threat to national security:

"Bolton, speaking Wednesday at an event hosted by the Alexander Hamilton Society in Washington, said he expects U.S. defense spending "to flatten out" in the near term. He said he didn't anticipate major cuts to entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security.

""It is a fact that when your national debt gets to the level ours is, that it constitutes an economic threat to the society," Bolton said. "And that kind of threat ultimately has a national security consequence for it.""

Of course, he wants to cut support for citizens instead of support for the Deep State and its massively corrupt MIC. The massive cut in revenues caused by Trump's giveaways to corporations and the 1% were designed to exacerbate the problem and create an artificial crisis in discretionary spending. Most from all sides of the political spectrum can see this for what it is and are already pushing back, which will be the fundamental reason Trump won't get a 2nd term--his policies are proving to be a fiscal nightmare.

David Hollander , Nov 2, 2018 1:21:29 PM | link
The evidence provided by the author that the CIA was the primary driving agent in these incidents is not compelling. In fact, the US government under Obama supported the JCPOA against the wishes of the Netanyahu government. Thus the statement that "US interests" are necessarily defined by sanctions against Iran seems to me to be unfounded. Had the author replaced "US interests" with "Trump administration policies", which are clearly much more aligned with the interests of the Likud and Netanyahu the statement might be more supportable.
Laguerre , Nov 2, 2018 1:22:55 PM | link
re Yul

"Do you remember the Green revolution of 2009 that went pfttttt?"

Very interesting article, but the Green Revolution didn't go pfft because of that. 2009 failed because the middle class aren't very good at revolutions. They aren't the majority, and they didn't have popular support.

[Nov 02, 2018] 'We have met the enemy and he is us' Who's really 'undermining' US democracy asks Stephen Cohen

Notable quotes:
"... War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine To Trump and Russiagate ..."
"... undermine American democracy ..."
"... are engaging in an elaborate campaign of 'information warfare' to interfere with the American midterm elections ..."
"... public evidence ..."
"... arsenal of disruption capabilities... to sow havoc on election day ..."
"... Kremlin propaganda ..."
"... portraying Russian and Syrian government forces favorably as they battled 'terrorists' in what US officials for years have portrayed as a legitimate uprising against the authoritarian government of President Bashar al-Assad. ..."
"... Kremlin propaganda ..."
"... what US officials for years have ..."
"... undermining of American democracy ..."
"... We have met the enemy and he is us ..."
"... This article was originally published by The Nation . ..."
Nov 02, 2018 | www.rt.com

Allegations that Russia is still "attacking" US elections, now again in November, could delegitimize our democratic institutions. Summarizing one of the themes in his new book, ' War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine To Trump and Russiagate ,' Stephen F. Cohen argues that Russiagate allegations of Kremlin attempts to " undermine American democracy " may themselves erode confidence in those institutions.

Ever since Russiagate allegations began to appear more than two years ago, their core narrative has revolved around purported Kremlin attempts to " interfere " in the 2016 US presidential election on behalf of then-candidate Donald Trump. In recent months, a number of leading American media outlets have taken that argument even further, suggesting that Putin's Kremlin actually put Trump in the White House and now is similarly trying to affect the November 6 midterm elections, particularly House contests, on behalf of Trump and the Republican Party. According to a page-one New York Times "report," for example, Putin's agents " are engaging in an elaborate campaign of 'information warfare' to interfere with the American midterm elections ."

Despite well-documented articles by Gareth Porter and Aaron Mate effectively dismantling these allegations about 2016 and 2018, the mainstream media continues to promote them. The occasionally acknowledged lack of " public evidence " is sometimes cited as itself evidence of a deep Russian conspiracy, of the Kremlin's " arsenal of disruption capabilities... to sow havoc on election day ." (See the examples cited by Alan MacLeod .)

Lost in these reckless allegations is the long-term damage they may themselves do to American democracy. Consider the following possibilities:

Even though still unproven, charges that the Kremlin put Trump in the White House have cast a large shadow of illegitimacy over his presidency and thus over the institution of the presidency itself. This is unlikely to end entirely with Trump. If the Kremlin had the power to affect the outcome of one presidential election, why not another one, whether won by a Republican or a Democrat? The 2016 presidential election was the first time such an allegation became widespread in American political history, but it may not be the last.

Now the same shadow looms over the November 6 elections and thus over the next Congress. If so, in barely two years, the legitimacy of two fundamental institutions of American representative democracy will have been challenged, also for the first time in history.

And if US elections are really so vulnerable to Russian " meddling ," what does this say about faith in American elections more generally? How many losing candidates on November 6 will resist blaming the Kremlin? Two years after the last presidential election, Hillary Clinton and her adamant supporters still have not been able to do so.

We know from critical reporting and from recent opinion surveys that the origins and continuing fixation on the Russiagate scandal since 2016 have been primarily a product of US political-intelligence-media elites. It did not spring from the American people – from voters themselves. Thus a Gallup poll recently showed that 58 percent of those surveyed wanted improved relations with Russia. And other surveys have shown that Russiagate is scarcely an issue at all for likely voters on November 6. Nonetheless, it remains a front-page issue for US elites.

Indeed, Russiagate has revealed the low esteem that many US political-media elites have for American voters – for their ability to make discerning, rational electoral decisions, which is the bedrock assumption of representative democracy. It is worth noting that this disdain for rank-and-file citizens echoes a longstanding attitude of the Russian political intelligentsia, as recently expressed in the argument by a prominent Moscow policy intellectual that Russian authoritarianism springs not from the nation's elites but from the "genetic code" of its people .

US elites seem to have a similar skepticism about – or contempt for – American voters' capacity to make discerning electoral choices. Presumably this is a factor behind the current proliferation of programs – official, corporate, and private – to introduce elements of censorship in the nation's " media space " in order to filter out " Kremlin propaganda ." Here, it also seems, elites will decide what constitutes such " propaganda ."

The Washington Post recently gave such an example : " portraying Russian and Syrian government forces favorably as they battled 'terrorists' in what US officials for years have portrayed as a legitimate uprising against the authoritarian government of President Bashar al-Assad. " That is, thinking that the forces of Putin and Assad were fighting terrorists, even if closer to the truth, is " Kremlin propaganda " because it is at variance with " what US officials for years have " been saying. This was the guiding principle of Soviet censorship as well.

If the American electoral process, presidency, legislature, and voter cannot be fully trusted, what is left of American democracy? Admittedly, this is still only a trend, a foreboding, but one with no end in sight. If it portends the " undermining of American democracy ," our elites will blame the Kremlin. But they best recall the discovery of Walt Kelly's legendary cartoon figure Pogo: " We have met the enemy and he is us ."

Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University and a contributing editor of The Nation.

This article was originally published by The Nation .

Read more US invents new 'meddling' charges to play 'Russia card' ahead of midterms - Moscow FM official US Congress has no Russian policy other than sanctions' – Stephen Cohen Suspicious packages could be 'Russian operation,' says MSNBC host

[Nov 02, 2018] I discovered in Baghdad a group of British scientific technicians who had been sent by the UK Ministry of Defense to build outlawed biological weapons at Salman Pak. These included deadly anthrax and Q-fever but only for use against Iran if a second Iraq-Iran War erupted.

Nov 02, 2018 | www.wsws.org

Southern8 months ago

Here's a related article that's interesting.
Saddam Hussein had no nuclear weapons, contrary to US and British claims. I discovered in Baghdad a group of British scientific technicians who had been sent by the UK Ministry of Defense to build outlawed biological weapons at Salman Pak. These included deadly anthrax and Q-fever – but only for use against Iran if a second Iraq-Iran War erupted.
[Eric Margolis February 17, 2018]

[Nov 02, 2018] The Russian meddling fraud Weapons of mass destruction revisited by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

20 February 2018
Notable quotes:
"... World Socialist Web Site ..."
"... Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who rushed off a column before he could have examined Powell's allegations, declared, "The evidence he presented to the United Nations -- some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail -- had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise." ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... While the present campaign over Russian "meddling" has much in common with the claims about "weapons of mass destruction," the implications are far more ominous. The "war on terror" is exhausted, in part because the US is allied in Syria and elsewhere with the Islamic fundamentalist organizations it was purportedly fighting. ..."
"... The Mueller indictment is intended to provide an appropriate "narrative" for military aggression motivated by different aims. At the same time, it serves as a ready-made pretext for censorship and domestic repression that goes far beyond the extraordinary measures adopted under the framework of the "war on terror." Russia, the American people are supposed to believe, uses domestic social opposition to weaken the United States, rendering political dissent effectively treasonous. ..."
"... Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it. The target of the repressive measures is not Russia, but the American working class. The ruling elite is well aware that as it plots war abroad, it stands upon a social powder keg at home. ..."
Nov 02, 2018 | www.wsws.org

Fifteen years ago, on February 5, 2003, against the backdrop of worldwide mass demonstrations in opposition to the impending invasion of Iraq, then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell argued before the United Nations that the government of Saddam Hussein was rapidly stockpiling "weapons of mass destruction," which Iraq, together with Al Qaeda, was planning to use against the United States.

In what was the climax of the Bush administration's campaign to justify war, Powell held up a model vial of anthrax, showed aerial photographs and presented detailed slides purporting to show the layout of Iraq's "mobile production facilities."

There was only one problem with Powell's presentation: it was a lie from beginning to end.

The World Socialist Web Site , in an editorial board statement published the next day, declared the brief for war "the latest act in a diplomatic charade laced with cynicism and deceit." War against Iraq, the WSWS wrote, was not about "weapons of mass destruction." Rather, "it is a war of colonial conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global hegemony."

The response of the American media, and particularly its liberal wing, was very different. Powell's litany of lies was presented as the gospel truth, an unanswerable indictment of the Iraqi government.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who rushed off a column before he could have examined Powell's allegations, declared, "The evidence he presented to the United Nations -- some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail -- had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise."

The editorial board of the New York Times -- whose reporter Judith Miller was at the center of the Bush administration's campaign of lies -- declared one week later that there "is ample evidence that Iraq has produced highly toxic VX nerve gas and anthrax and has the capacity to produce a lot more. It has concealed these materials, lied about them, and more recently failed to account for them to the current inspectors."

Subsequent developments would prove who was lying. The Bush administration and its media accomplices conspired to drag the US into a war that led to the deaths of more than one million people -- a colossal crime for which no one has yet been held accountable.

Fifteen years later, the script has been pulled from the closet and dusted off. This time, instead of "weapons of mass destruction," it is "Russian meddling in the US elections." Once again, assertions by US intelligence agencies and operatives are treated as fact. Once again, the media is braying for war. Once again, the cynicism and hypocrisy of the American government -- which intervenes in the domestic politics of every state on the planet and has been relentlessly expanding its operations in Eastern Europe -- are ignored.

The argument presented by the American media is that the alleged existence of a fly-by-night operation, employing a few hundred people, with a budget amounting to a minuscule fraction of total election spending in the US, constitutes a "a virtual war against the United States through 21st-century tools of disinformation and propaganda" ( New York Times ).

In the countless articles and media commentary along this vein, nowhere can one find a serious analysis of the Mueller indictment of the Russians itself, let alone an examination of the real motivations behind the US campaign against Russia. The fact that the indictment does not even involve the Russian government or state officials is treated as a nonissue.

While the present campaign over Russian "meddling" has much in common with the claims about "weapons of mass destruction," the implications are far more ominous. The "war on terror" is exhausted, in part because the US is allied in Syria and elsewhere with the Islamic fundamentalist organizations it was purportedly fighting.

More fundamentally, the quarter-century of invasions and occupations that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union is rapidly developing into a conflict between major nuclear-armed powers. The effort of the American ruling class to offset its economic decline using military force is leading mankind to the brink of another world war. As the National Defense Strategy, published less than a month before the release of the indictments, declared, "Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security."

Russia is seen by dominant sections of the military-intelligence apparatus as a principal obstacle to US efforts to control the Middle East and to take on China -- and it is this that has been at the center of the conflict between the Democratic Party and the Trump administration.

There have already been a series of clashes in recent weeks between the world's two largest nuclear-armed powers. On February 3, a Russian close-air support fighter was shot down by al-Nusra Front fighters, which are indirectly allied with the United States in its proxy war against the government of Bashar Al-Assad. Then, on February 7 and 8, Russian soldiers were killed in US air and artillery barrages in Deir Ezzor, in what survivors called a "massacre." Both the US and Russian governments have sought to downplay the scale of the clash, but some sources have reported the number killed to be in the hundreds.

Even as US and Russian forces clashed in Syria, representatives of the Kremlin and the Pentagon sparred at the Munich security conference this weekend over the deployment and development of nuclear weapons. While accusing Russia of violating the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, Washington this month issued a nuclear posture review envisioning a massive expansion of the deployment of battlefield nuclear weapons.

The Mueller indictment is intended to provide an appropriate "narrative" for military aggression motivated by different aims. At the same time, it serves as a ready-made pretext for censorship and domestic repression that goes far beyond the extraordinary measures adopted under the framework of the "war on terror." Russia, the American people are supposed to believe, uses domestic social opposition to weaken the United States, rendering political dissent effectively treasonous.

Already, this campaign has led the major US technology firms to implement far-reaching measures to censor political speech on the Internet. Google is manipulating its search results and Facebook is manipulating its news feeds, while seeking to turn the social media platform it has developed into an instrument of corporate-state surveillance.

Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it. The target of the repressive measures is not Russia, but the American working class. The ruling elite is well aware that as it plots war abroad, it stands upon a social powder keg at home.

The working class must draw the necessary conclusions from its past experiences. In 2003, the Democratic Party supported the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq and provided it with the necessary political cover. Now, the Democrats, along with their appendages among the organizations of the upper-middle class, are at the forefront of the campaign for war, employing neo-McCarthyite tactics to criminalize opposition while seeking to subordinate all popular opposition to the Trump administration to its right-wing and militarist agenda.

The urgent task is to mobilize the working class, in the United States and internationally, against the entire apparatus of the capitalist ruling elite. The fight against war and dictatorship is at the same time the fight against inequality and exploitation, for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a global socialist society.

Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

[Nov 02, 2018] Moscow Shocked by French Cabinet Spokesman's Remarks Regarding RT

This is a typical projection. France is a member of "dirty four". Macron government is a typical neoliberal cabinet, not that different from Merkel government. As such it is controlled by the USA.
Nov 02, 2018 | sputniknews.com

"Honestly, to say that we were surprised or upset is to say nothing. I think this condition could be better described as 'shock' when we heard the spokesman for the French government, Mr. Griveaux, just recently said the following. I quote: there are two media outlets that I refuse to see in the press room of the Elysee Palace, they are RT and Sputnik because I do not consider them to be media, they are not journalists, they are engaged in propaganda," Zakharova said at a weekly news briefing.

According to Zakharova, such an approach is the result of "the unwillingness of the French authorities to hear alternative sources of information."

Last month, two French government's think tanks issued a report, which recommended the country's authorities to abstain from accrediting journalists of the RT broadcaster and the Sputnik news agency.

Last year, RT reporters were denied entry to the headquarters of then-French presidential candidate Macron twice in April, and in May, a Sputnik reporter was not allowed to enter the square in front of Paris' Louvre museum where Macron and his supporters were celebrating the victory in the presidential run-off. After Macron became French president, he accused RT and Sputnik of "spreading false information and slander."

READ MORE: US Homeland Security Recommends Public to 'Be Aware' of RT, Sputnik

The situation around RT and Sputnik in France is not unique for the European Union: in 2016, the European Parliament adopted a resolution claiming that Russia was waging information warfare and singled out RT and Sputnik. Russian President Vladimir Putin said the resolution proved that Western democracy was failing, but expressed hope that common sense would prevail and Russian media outlets would be able to work abroad without restrictions.

[Nov 02, 2018] MUST WATCH Shocking Video by Comedian Bill Maher - Russia Delusion Still Raging Among US Liberals

Nov 02, 2018 | russia-insider.com

MUST WATCH: Shocking Video by Comedian Bill Maher - Russia Delusion Still Raging Among US Liberals Richard Brandt 10 min ago | 600 words 10 131 RussiaHoax Bill Maher outdid himself recently with this video, but in doing so, he inadvertently showed how out of touch the Jewish Hollywood liberal elites like Maher are with most of the country, and even more so with the rest of the world.

Take the 5 minutes to watch the video, it is an eye-opener. Bullet points follow below:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/QhJIt4uv9x4

Somehow, Maher managed to pack the following into his monologue:

[Oct 31, 2018] British must have hours of footage on Skripals that they have chosen not to reveal. And as the article concludes, the only logical reason for that is that it does not support the official narrative, since one has obviously been decided upon and vigorously defended.

Oct 31, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al October 30, 2018 at 3:21 am

Sic Semper Tyrannis: "LOOPS OF LIES RE 'SIGINT'" by David Habakkuk
https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/10/loops-of-lies-re-sigint-by-david-habakkuk.html

LOOPS OF LIES RE 'SIGINT':

GIANNANGELLI'S CLAIMS, IN THE LIGHT OF

HIS EARLIER REPORTS ON GHOUTA, SKRIPALS.
####

Plenty of good stuff at the link including what we have read before.

The article leads me to this question: If whomever can fabricate Syrian Army messages, isn't there one small problem with it? I.e. The Brits may be hoovering up SIGNIT from Mount Troodos in Cyprus, but unless the radio signals are highly directional (and even then they emanate outwards), other nations are also recording these signals, such as Russia, which we never hear about.

Therefore, the Brits/8200 whomever must assume that the Russians have copies and would know if the former are putting up the bs and can call it out behind closed doors at the UN to other nations. So what's the point? Simply for building media outrage and DO SOMETHING! momentum, hoping to act first before it can be scotched? That's what used to happen in the past

Mark Chapman October 30, 2018 at 11:20 am
That's a really good piece, with loads of interesting information. What jumped out for me, though was what amounts to a professional acknowledgement of something that was introduced by commenters early on in the Skripal affair – the almost complete absence of CCTV footage of their movements and those of people close to them. As both sources point out, England is lousy with CCTV, you can barely move without being picked up on multiple cameras. Therefore the British must have hours of footage that they have chosen not to reveal. And as the article concludes, the only logical reason for that is that it does not support the official narrative, since one has obviously been decided upon and vigorously defended.

As an aside, it is tragic that intelligence is manipulated the way it is to present a desired conclusion. Because intelligence is supposed to be something like the irrefutable clue, the piece that doesn't fit, in detective stories. It is supposed to provide that epiphanous moment when you know what has transpired beyond any reasonable doubt. Every time that moment is discovered to have been brought about by fabrication and deceit so as to push an incorrect conclusion to the forefront, trust in the method diminishes. Consequently, the harder governments push this or that piece of evidence as the conclusive piece of proof which cannot be denied, the more likely it is to have been manufactured rather than discovered.

[Oct 28, 2018] Skripal and Khashoggi West Manufactures Absurd Fantasy to Pin on Russia, Lets Saudi Get Away With Chopping up WaPo Journalist by Finian Cunningham

Oct 28, 2018 | russia-insider.com

Two disappearances, and two very different responses from Western governments, which illustrates their rank hypocrisy.

When former Russian spy Sergei Skripal went missing in England earlier this year, there was almost immediate punitive action by the British government and its NATO allies against Moscow. By contrast, Western governments are straining with restraint towards Saudi Arabia over the more shocking and provable case of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The outcry by Western governments and media over the Skripal affair was deafening and resulted in Britain, the US and some 28 other countries expelling dozens of Russian diplomats on the back of unsubstantiated British allegations that the Kremlin tried to assassinate an exiled spy with a deadly nerve agent. The Trump administration has further tightened sanctions citing the Skripal incident.

London's case against Moscow has been marked by wild speculation and ropey innuendo. No verifiable evidence of what actually happened to Sergei Skripal (67) and his daughter Yulia has been presented by the British authorities . Their claim that President Vladimir Putin sanctioned a hit squad armed with nerve poison relies on sheer conjecture.

All we know for sure is that the Skripals have been disappeared from public contact by the British authorities for more than seven months, since the mysterious incident of alleged poisoning in Salisbury on March 4.

Russian authorities and family relatives have been steadfastly refused any contact by London with the Skripal pair, despite more than 60 official requests from Moscow in accordance with international law and in spite of the fact that Yulia is a citizen of the Russian Federation with consular rights.

It is an outrage that based on such thin ice of "evidence", the British have built an edifice of censure against Moscow, rallying an international campaign of further sanctions and diplomatic expulsions.

Now contrast that strenuous reaction, indeed hyper over-reaction, with how Britain, the US, France, Canada and other Western governments are ever-so slowly responding to Saudi Arabia over the Khashoggi case.

After nearly two weeks since Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, the Saudi regime is this week finally admitting he was killed on their premises – albeit, they claim, in a "botched interrogation".

... ... ...

Source: Strategic Culture

[Oct 28, 2018] Twitter was too busy banning 'Russians' to notice #MAGAbomber's threats

Notable quotes:
"... Whether Twitter had made an honest mistake, or scrambled to engage in damage control, is sort of immaterial at this point. Some of his posts have been archived , but not responses to them. All that suspending his account accomplished is to make it more difficult to parse the Florida man's motives. By the way, Sayoc's Facebook page was likewise taken down on Friday. ..."
"... Reprinted with permission from RT . ..."
Oct 28, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

The history of criminal behavior and online threats by Cesar Sayoc, the Florida man charged with sending suspicious packages to prominent Democrats, somehow went ignored by both government and social media police.

Sayoc, 56, was arrested on Friday, and stands accused of sending pipe bombs - 14, as of the last count - to former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, actor Robert De Niro, billionaire Democrat donors George Soros and Tom Steyer, and several Democrat lawmakers.

Federal authorities have refused to speculate on the suspect's motives, but news outlets quickly pored over Sayoc's social media feeds , finding photos and videos of pro-Trump memes, Trump rallies, and abusive language towards Democrats. A van in which he reportedly lived, after losing his home to foreclosure, was covered in pro-Trump decals. Twitter #Resistance activists, who had already coined the term "MAGAbomber" to describe the suspect, rejoiced.

It was Sayoc's prior run-ins with the law that allowed the FBI to find him, matching a fingerprint and DNA from some of the packages to samples they had on file. His criminal record shows charges of grand theft, misdemeanor theft, battery, felony steroid possession, and even threatening a bomb attack in 2002 - leaving an open question of how he kept getting away with it all, over and over again.

Then there is the matter of Sayoc's social media accounts. Over the past two years, under intense pressure by Democrats and drummed-up charges of "Russian meddling," Twitter and Facebook have cracked down on users left and right . Time and again, people engaging in protected free speech have been " shadowbanned " or suspended, permanently or until they deleted posts someone reported as "offensive."

Yet when Democratic strategist Rochelle Ritchie actually reported Sayoc's account to Twitter two weeks ago, over a threat she received from him after appearing on a Fox News show, Twitter did not find the post objectionable .

Richie then received an email from Twitter saying the previous response to her complaint had been "an error."

Whether Twitter had made an honest mistake, or scrambled to engage in damage control, is sort of immaterial at this point. Some of his posts have been archived , but not responses to them. All that suspending his account accomplished is to make it more difficult to parse the Florida man's motives. By the way, Sayoc's Facebook page was likewise taken down on Friday.

Both Twitter and Facebook claim they are trying to improve "conversations" on their platforms, and that their purges are nonpartisan. While technically correct, that's misleading. Establishment figures and outfits somehow always skate, while both critics of Clintonism on the left and Trump Republicans end up under the banhammer.

Meanwhile, the social media giants continue to insist they are not publishers, and delegate the dirty work of policing to quasi-NGOs like the National Endowment for Democracy and the Atlantic Council . They end up deciding who's a "Russian bot" or "Iranian troll" based on arbitrary criteria, which the mainstream media repeats uncritically.

That someone like Sayoc ended up under the radar of both the authorities and social media police suggests that he was either deliberately tolerated, or that their "defense of democracy" is a sham. It is perhaps fitting that none of Sayoc's bombs actually exploded; the only thing they blew up in the end seems to be some illusions.

Reprinted with permission from RT .

[Oct 25, 2018] DNC Emails--A Seth Attack Not a Russian Hack by Publius Tacitus

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Now there is new information, courtesy of the National Security Agency aka NSA, that confirms that the NSA has Top Secret and Secret documents that are responsive to a FOIA request for material on Seth Rich and his contacts with Julian Assange. While the content of these documents remain classified for now, they may provide documentary proof that Seth Rich "dropped boxed" the emails to Julian. If these documents are declassified, a big hole could be blown in the claim that Russia hacked the DNC. ..."
"... Another case of "Arkancide"? ..."
"... I came to this summary today after I had turned my T.V. off since all the news is now about the "bombs" being mailed to the Clintons and Obamas. (I was afraid a story line would soon continue that the bombs were from Russia via the White House. I can no longer feel certain that anything reported in the "news" is true and wonder what part of it is made up from thin air. ..."
"... And I am sad that such a huge number of American citizens simply no longer care what is true or what is not true. They believe only what they want to believe. Mostly I am sad that Seth Rich lived and died and few seem to want to know the facts surrounding his death. ..."
"... Guccifer 2.0 was nothing but an elaborate joke. ..."
Oct 25, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Tacitus01

If Russia had actually "hacked" the DNC emails then the National Security Agency would have had proof of such activity. In fact, the NSA could have tracked such activity. But they did not do that. That lack of evidence did not prevent a coordinated media campaign from spinning up to pin the blame on Russia for the "theft" and to portray Donald Trump as Putin's lackey and beneficiary.

Any effort to tell an alternative story has met with stout opposition. Fox News, for example, came under withering fire after it published an article in May 2017 claiming that Seth Rich, a young Democrat operative, had leaked DNC emails to Julian Assange at Wikileaks. The family of Seth Rich reacted with fury and sued Fox, Malia Zimmerman and Ed Butowsky, but that suit subsequently was dismissed.

Now there is new information, courtesy of the National Security Agency aka NSA, that confirms that the NSA has Top Secret and Secret documents that are responsive to a FOIA request for material on Seth Rich and his contacts with Julian Assange. While the content of these documents remain classified for now, they may provide documentary proof that Seth Rich "dropped boxed" the emails to Julian. If these documents are declassified, a big hole could be blown in the claim that Russia hacked the DNC.


Walrus , a day ago

Another case of "Arkancide"?
jnewman -> Walrus , 12 hours ago
Vince Foster?
DianaLC , 13 hours ago
PT, thank for the very detailed description of the entire story surrounding the supposed Russian hack of the DNC emails.

I always find myself screaming at the T.V. whenever a supposed reporter mentions the supposed Russian hack of the DNC computers as if such an event is settled history.

I came to this summary today after I had turned my T.V. off since all the news is now about the "bombs" being mailed to the Clintons and Obamas. (I was afraid a story line would soon continue that the bombs were from Russia via the White House. I can no longer feel certain that anything reported in the "news" is true and wonder what part of it is made up from thin air.

And I am sad that such a huge number of American citizens simply no longer care what is true or what is not true. They believe only what they want to believe. Mostly I am sad that Seth Rich lived and died and few seem to want to know the facts surrounding his death.

Snow Flake -> Lefty , 12 hours ago
Ellipsis, linguistically? Don't you automatically add what is omitted? ... Russia had (n't) anything ...

Guccifer 2.0 was nothing but an elaborate joke.

[Oct 24, 2018] 10-3-18 Gareth Porter on Trump and the American Empire

Notable quotes:
"... Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare ..."
"... This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Kesslyn Runs , by Charles Featherstone; NoDev NoOps NoIT , by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State , by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com ; Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. ; Zen Cash ; Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom ; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott ; and TheBumperSticker.com . ..."
Oct 08, 2018 | libertarianinstitute.org

Gareth Porter is interviewed on his article for Truthdig, " Can Trump Take Down the American Empire? " Porter talks about revelations in the Bob Woodward book "Fear", about the Trump presidency, and how they may pertain to the American Empire. Porter also talks about the Trump presidency, North Korea, and Iran.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on the national security state, and author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare . Follow him on Twitter @GarethPorter and listen to Gareth's previous appearances on the Scott Horton Show.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Kesslyn Runs , by Charles Featherstone; NoDev NoOps NoIT , by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State , by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com ; Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. ; Zen Cash ; Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom ; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott ; and TheBumperSticker.com .

[Oct 23, 2018] Putin's Puppet Advances Nuclear Missile Escalations Against...Putin by Caitlin Johnstone

Oct 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

Yesterday the news broke that Swamp Monster-In-Chief John Bolton has been pushing President Trump to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the 1988 arms control agreement between the US and the Soviet Union eliminating all missiles of a specified range from the arsenals of the two nuclear superpowers. Today, Trump has announced that he will be doing exactly as Bolton instructed.

This would be the second missile treaty between the US and Russia that America has withdrawn from since it abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002. John Bolton, an actual psychopath who Trump hired as his National Security Advisor in April, ran point on that move as well back when he was part of the increasingly indistinguishable Bush administration.

me title=

"This is why John Bolton shouldn't be allowed anywhere near US foreign policy," tweeted Senator Rand Paul in response to early forecasts of the official announcement.

"This would undo decades of bipartisan arms control dating from Reagan. We shouldn't do it. We should seek to fix any problems with this treaty and move forward."

"This is the most severe crisis in nuclear arms control since the 1980s," Malcolm Chalmers, the deputy director general of the Royal United Services Institute, told The Guardian .

"If the INF treaty collapses, and with the New Start treaty on strategic arms due to expire in 2021, the world could be left without any limits on the nuclear arsenals of nuclear states for the first time since 1972."

"A disaster for Europe," tweeted Russia-based journalist Bryan MacDonald. "The treaty removed Cruise & Pershing missiles, and Soviet ss20's from the continent. Now, you will most likely see Russia launch a major build up in Kaliningrad & the US push into Poland. So you're back to 1980, but the dividing line is closer to Moscow."

"Russia has violated the agreement. They've been violating it for many years and I don't know why President Obama didn't negotiate or pull out," Trump told reporters in Nevada.

"We're not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and do weapons and we're not allowed to. We're the ones that have stayed in the agreement and we've honored the agreement but Russia has not unfortunately honored the agreement so we're going to terminate the agreement, we're going to pull out."

What Trump did not mention is that the US has indeed been in violation of that agreement due to steps it began taking toward the development of a new ground-launched cruise missile last year. The US claims it began taking those steps due to Russian violations of the treaty with its own arsenal, while Russia claims the US has already been in violation of multiple arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament agreements.

me title=

So, on the one front where cooler heads prevailing is quite literally the single most important thing in the world, the exact opposite is happening. Hotter, more impatient, more violent, more hawkish heads are prevailing over diplomacy and sensibility, potentially at the peril of the entire world should something unexpected go wrong as a result. This is of course coming after two years of Democratic Party loyalists attacking Trump on the basis that he has not been sufficiently hawkish toward Russia, and claiming that this is because he is Putin's puppet.

In response to this predictable escalation the path for which has been lubricated by McResistance pundits and their neoconservative allies, those very same pundits are now reacting with horror that Putin's puppet is now dangerously escalating tensions with Putin.

"BREAKING: Trump announces that the United States will pull out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that the US has been in for 31 years," exclaimed the popular Russiagater Brian Krassenstein in a tweet that as of this writing has over 5,000 shares. "Welcome back to the Cold War. This time it's scarier And no, It's not Obama, or Hillary or the Democrat's fault. It's ALL TRUMP!"

"Hilarious to listen to all this alarmed screaming about US withdrawal from INF Treaty emanating from those who for 2 years have been demanding that Trump get tough with Russia," tweeted George Szamuely of the Global Policy Institute. "Now that they've got their arms race I hope they are pleased with themselves."

"Are those who have spent the past two years warning of a Trump-Kremlin conspiracy & cheering confrontation w/ Russia ready to shut the fuck up yet?" asked Aaron Maté, who has been among the most consistently lucid critics of the Russiagate narrative in the US.

me title=

Are they ready to shut the fuck up? That would be great, but this is just the latest escalation in a steadily escalating new cold war, and these blithering idiots didn't shut the fuck up at any of the other steps toward nuclear holocaust.

They didn't shut the fuck up after Trump's capitulation to the longstanding neoconservative agenda to arm Ukraine against Russia.

They didn't shut the fuck up after Americans killed Russians in Syria as part of their regime change occupation of that country .

They didn't shut the fuck up when this administration adopted a Nuclear Posture Review with greatly increased aggression toward Russia and blurred lines between when nuclear strikes are and are not appropriate.

They didn't shut the fuck up when Trump started sending war ships into the Black Sea "to counter Russia's increased presence there."

They didn't shut the fuck up when this administration forced RT and Sputnik to register as foreign agents.

They didn't shut the fuck up when this administration helped expand NATO with the addition of Montenegro, at the assigning of Russia hawk Kurt Volker as special representative to Ukraine, at the shutting down of a Russian consulate in San Francisco and throwing out Russian diplomats in August of last year, when Trump threw out dozens more diplomats in response to shaky claims about the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, or when he implemented aggressive sanctions on Russian oligarchs .

Why would they shut the fuck up now?

As signs point to Mueller's investigation wrapping up in the near future without turning up a single shred of evidence that Trump colluded with the Russian government, it's time for everyone who helped advance this toxic, suicidal anti-Russia narrative to ask themselves one question: was it worth it? Was it worth it to help mount political pressure on a sitting president to continually escalate tensions with a nuclear superpower and loudly screaming that he's a Putin puppet whenever he takes a step toward de-escalation? Was it worth it to help create an atmosphere where cooler heads don't prevail in the one area where it's absolutely essential for everyone's survival that they do? Or is it maybe time to shut the fuck up for a while and rethink your entire worldview?

* * *

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , checking out my podcast , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone , or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .

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[Oct 23, 2018] Russiagate 2.0 Now with more stupid

Notable quotes:
"... I've come to the realization that the MSM and our government are using a very different definition of "democracy" and "democratic institutions" than the one in the dictionary. Their version of "democracy" is all about national security and financial interests, and have very little to do with elections and popular will. ..."
"... ideas and opinions ..."
"... @The Voice In the Wilderness ..."
"... ideas and opinions ..."
"... @The Voice In the Wilderness ..."
"... @The Voice In the Wilderness ..."
"... @enhydra lutris ..."
"... @enhydra lutris ..."
"... @enhydra lutris ..."
"... @The Liberal Moonbat ..."
"... , surprised the special counsel in April when they actually showed up in court to fight the charges ..."
"... "There is no statute of interfering with an election. There just isn't," said Dubelier, who added that Mueller's office alleged a "made-up crime to fit the facts they have." ..."
Oct 23, 2018 | caucus99percent.com
gjohnsit
We can soon forget Russia's "meddling" in the 2016 election (or lack of meddling ), because the Justice Department is already throwing down indictments for meddling in the 2018 midterm elections.
Russians working for a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin are engaging in an elaborate campaign of "information warfare" to interfere with the American midterm elections next month, federal prosecutors said on Friday in unsealing charges against a woman whom they labeled the project's "chief accountant."

Information warfare? That sounds serious. So what exactly is her objectives?

But this time, prosecutors said the operatives appeared beholden to no particular candidate. Russia's trolls did not limit themselves to either a liberal or conservative position, according to the complaint. They often wrote from diverging viewpoints on the same issue.

Uh, that's called trolling, and if trolling is against the law then 4Chan should watch out.
It seems that trolling now equals fraud .

It isn't just Russia. China and Iran are meddling as well.

In a joint statement, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Justice Department, FBI and Department of Homeland Security said they "do not have any evidence" that foreign countries have disrupted the voting process or changed any tallies , but that the campaigns have spread "disinformation" and "foreign propaganda."

"We are concerned about ongoing campaigns by Russia, China and other foreign actors, including Iran, to undermine confidence in democratic institutions and influence public sentiment and government policies," the statement said. "These activities also may seek to influence voter perceptions and decision making in the 2018 and 2020 U.S. elections."

So how exactly are they defrauding the American public? As for "undermine confidence in democratic institutions", we already know that we are an oligarchy , not a democracy. So I think the burden of evidence is on our government to prove otherwise, not on Russia.

I've come to the realization that the MSM and our government are using a very different definition of "democracy" and "democratic institutions" than the one in the dictionary. Their version of "democracy" is all about national security and financial interests, and have very little to do with elections and popular will.

Leftists aren't cooperating on Russiagate

You would think from the MSM that Russiagate is "liberals" versus Trump, and that everyone on "the left" is OK with this.
But even some in the media have noticed that leftists that don't identify as Democrats are Russiagate skeptics.

Why Are So Many Leftists Skeptical of the Russia Investigation?

Why the left needs to wise up to the growing Trump-Russia scandal

and of course TOP is fully onboard

The Voice In th... on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 4:28pm
So what specifically was illegal?

@gjohnsit
AFAIK, all those facebook posts would be legal if posted by someone in the USA.
Are foreign ideas illegal now? are ideas and opinions illegal?

You would think from the MSM that Russiagate is "liberals" versus Trump, and that everyone on "the left" is OK with this.
But even some in the media have noticed that leftists that don't identify as Democrats are Russiagate skeptics.

Why Are So Many Leftists Skeptical of the Russia Investigation?

Why the left needs to wise up to the growing Trump-Russia scandal

and of course TOP is fully onboard

gjohnsit on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 5:33pm
Consider Russia's "crimes" with RT

@The Voice In the Wilderness
This is supposed to be bad from the official report

RT aired a documentary about the OccupyWall Street movement on 1, 2, and 4 November. RT framed the movement as a fight against "the ruling class" and described the current US political system as corrupt and dominated by corporations.

RT advertising for the documentary featured Occupy movement calls to "take back" the government. The documentary claimed that the US system cannot be changed democratically, but only through "revolution." After the 6 November US presidential election, RT aired a documentary called "Cultures of Protest," about active and often violent political resistance

RT's reports often characterize the United States as a "surveillance state" and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality, and drone use

RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt. Some of RT's hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome and have predicted that government corruption and "corporate greed" will lead to US financial collapse

#1 AFAIK, all those facebook posts would be legal if posted by someone in the USA. Are foreign ideas illegal now? are ideas and opinions illegal?

Linda Wood on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 11:19pm
Oh, come on.

@gjohnsit

alleged Wall Street greed

Alledged Wall Street greed?

leveymg on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 5:49pm
This criminalizes a practice that is commonplace and legal

@The Voice In the Wilderness @The Voice In the Wilderness
when carried out by employees of thousands of foreign-owned companies from countries other than Russia.

Basically, this Russian woman is being indicted for doing the books for a Russian entity that incorporated a number of US businesses. These businesses had persons write and post under pen names a number of articles dealing with political subjects. That has been interpreted by the Special Counsel as a conspiracy to violate a federal campaign law that forbids contributions to US election campaigns. That's right, the indictment construes written opinion to be the same as money contributions.

The case would probably be thrown out -- nobody has been prosecuted for this before -- however the woman indicted will never be in court to defend herself, as the prosecutor and FBI know. Mueller is getting desperate to come up with indictments to fill in his jig saw puzzle.

enhydra lutris on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 7:27pm
The supremes, infamusly, ruled that miney is speech. Hence,

@leveymg
speech must be money, n'est ce pas?
/s

leveymg on Sun, 10/21/2018 - 1:09pm
SCOTUS also found in the same case that even foreign corporate

@enhydra lutris @enhydra lutris @enhydra lutris speech is constitutionally protected and can't be limited by campaign finance legislation. Mueller appears to have decided on his own to abrogate the Citizens United decision.

That would be okay, if he applied it to prosecute political mouthpieces such as AIPAC, along with corporate fronts owned by the Saudis, Chinese, British and 100 other countries who similiarly post anonymously.

It's now undeniable: Mueller is the prosecutorial weapon of a very selective political vendetta.

snoopydawg on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 7:51pm
This is from your first link

@gjohnsit

But somewhere on the left, right around the fault line where Barack Obama is deemed to have been a bad president, opinion turns back again toward skepticism.

It gets worse from there. I'm betting that this was written by someone from the Atlantic Council or maybe Friedman's twin brother. This person sure went to a lot of work to deride anyone who doesn't believe in Russia Gate didn't he?

Facebook has almost admitted that they are censoring people and websites because of Russia's ads on it that they say affected the election. BTW. Didn't Obama also use Cambridge Analytics during his campaign and did the same things that Trump did? Pretty sure that he did. But I guess that was different because of reasons. Yep. That's why.

You would think from the MSM that Russiagate is "liberals" versus Trump, and that everyone on "the left" is OK with this. But even some in the media have noticed that leftists that don't identify as Democrats are Russiagate skeptics.

Why Are So Many Leftists Skeptical of the Russia Investigation?

Why the left needs to wise up to the growing Trump-Russia scandal

and of course TOP is fully onboard

snoopydawg on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 5:25pm
For gawd's sake!
We are concerned about ongoing campaigns by Russia, China and other foreign actors, including Iran, to undermine confidence in democratic institutions and influence public sentiment and government policies,

First off the GOP is doing a hell of a job undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the voting process by its gerrymandering and its voter ID policies. Look at what's happening in Georgia (?) where the guy running is in charge of the voting policies and is kicking thousands of people off the voting rolls.

Influence government policies you say? If millions of Americans can't do that then how could a foreign country do it? BTW. This is already happening what with all the lobbyists and super PACs. But sure. Let's blame the 3 countries that they want to war with. Anyone who believes this shit ... well I'll not finish this sentence.

gjohnsit on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 6:00pm
Russiagate is useful for crushing dissent

@snoopydawg
Look at this hit piece on Jill Stein

Months before the 2016 election they were already calling Jill Stein a "Nader spoiler" ( here , here , and here )

Funny how 3rd parties are demonized in this "democracy"

We are concerned about ongoing campaigns by Russia, China and other foreign actors, including Iran, to undermine confidence in democratic institutions and influence public sentiment and government policies,

First off the GOP is doing a hell of a job undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the voting process by its gerrymandering and its voter ID policies. Look at what's happening in Georgia (?) where the guy running is in charge of the voting policies and is kicking thousands of people off the voting rolls.

Influence government policies you say? If millions of Americans can't do that then how could a foreign country do it? BTW. This is already happening what with all the lobbyists and super PACs. But sure. Let's blame the 3 countries that they want to war with. Anyone who believes this shit ... well I'll not finish this sentence.

snoopydawg on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 6:35pm
Ugh!

@gjohnsit

There is so much BS in that article it's hard to choose which one is the worst but I'm going with this one.

But Stein's willingness to praise Russian propaganda outlets and push Kremlin talking points didn't end in Moscow. Indeed, she challenged – and arguably surpassed – Trump in crafting the most Moscow-friendly campaign of 2016.

For instance, Stein made the strange claim multiple times that NATO had "surrounded" Russia with nuclear weapons. As she told The Intercept, "This is the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse, on steroids – in fact, on crack." (Less than 10 percent of Russia's land border touches any NATO member-states.) She also said last year that NATO is only fighting "enemies we invent to give the weapons industry a reason to sell more stuff."

This is what she actually said about NATO and Russia.

Stein: I think this is an issue where something does need to be said--but it's important to understand where they are coming from. The United States, under Bush 1, had an agreement when Germany joined NATO--Russia agreed with the understanding that NATO would not move one inch to the east. Since then NATO has pursued a policy of basically encircling Russia--including the threat of nukes and drones and so on.

Okay and this one too.

Likewise, Stein claimed that Ukraine's 2014 revolution was, in reality, a "coup" that the U.S. "helped foment." Only two other leaders have described Ukraine's toppling of former president Viktor Yanukovych as a "coup": Putin and Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev, whose country remains a security ally of Russia. Stein even spent time last year saying that "Russia used to own Ukraine."

Pretty sure that during Obama's presidency the Ukraine government was overthrown by this country and now we're arming neo Nazis with some very bad weapons.

ThinkProgress says it's being targeted by ad networks for producing 'controversial political content'. I'm thinking it's more because they lie their asses off to people who read its website. This is the most blatant lying I've seen from a website. How many people believed every word written there?

divineorder on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 7:08pm
FWIW Jill Stein out campaigning for Greens

@gjohnsit

Join us on Sunday 10/28 to meet Jill Stein and Alameda/SF County Green candidates: Laura Wells, Saied Karamooz, Aidan Hill and Mike Murphy. to support our candidates. People,... https://t.co/EtWyo6fism

-- Santa Clara Greens (@SCCGreens) October 19, 2018

Deja on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 7:05pm
You left out the D establishment

@snoopydawg

First off the GOP is doing a hell of a job undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the voting process by its gerrymandering and its voter ID policies.

I agree with your whole comment. Just wanted to make sure we don't leave out the monster that is the Dem establishment, aka the other half of the single body that screws us every chance it gets. Supposed differences are only spoken, especially in election years. When it gets down to the meat and potatoes, our representatives are one big symbiotic meal -- the kind that gives you the shits until you're dead.

We are concerned about ongoing campaigns by Russia, China and other foreign actors, including Iran, to undermine confidence in democratic institutions and influence public sentiment and government policies,

First off the GOP is doing a hell of a job undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the voting process by its gerrymandering and its voter ID policies. Look at what's happening in Georgia (?) where the guy running is in charge of the voting policies and is kicking thousands of people off the voting rolls.

Influence government policies you say? If millions of Americans can't do that then how could a foreign country do it? BTW. This is already happening what with all the lobbyists and super PACs. But sure. Let's blame the 3 countries that they want to war with. Anyone who believes this shit ... well I'll not finish this sentence.

snoopydawg on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 7:24pm
Not for that comment

@Deja

The GOP has made it so that over 10% of the population can't vote this year. I think it's in Georgia where thousands are being kicked off the voting rolls almost every day by the dude that is in charge of it and he is also running for an office. They have been gerrymandering the country and other things. Of course the democrats don't seem to be doing much to make it easier for people to vote. But yeah, both parties are just as corrupt.

boriscleto on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 9:36pm
Georgia has purged 340,000

@snoopydawg @snoopydawg

Illinois purged 550,000...Indiana purged 20,000...etc...

snoopydawg on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 10:16pm
Thanks for the numbers and the links

@boriscleto

Isn't it Brian Kemp who is not only running for office, but he is also in a position to purge the voting rolls? This is a huge conflict of interest and some judge should have stopped him from being able to do that. I guess that's what people are suing him for?

Close to 500,000 people were not able to vote in one of the states that Trump won in. Not sure if they were Hillary's or Trump's voters though.

BTW. People are upset with Jill Stein because they think that her votes cost Hillary the election when the libertarian candidate got more votes than Jill did. And yet he's not blamed for her loss. I wonder why that is?

dervish on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 11:46pm
It's because they're sexist. n/t

@snoopydawg

#2.2.1.1

Isn't it Brian Kemp who is not only running for office, but he is also in a position to purge the voting rolls? This is a huge conflict of interest and some judge should have stopped him from being able to do that. I guess that's what people are suing him for?

Close to 500,000 people were not able to vote in one of the states that Trump won in. Not sure if they were Hillary's or Trump's voters though.

BTW. People are upset with Jill Stein because they think that her votes cost Hillary the election when the libertarian candidate got more votes than Jill did. And yet he's not blamed for her loss. I wonder why that is?

lotlizard on Sun, 10/21/2018 - 2:03am
The Dems only kick people off voting rolls in *primaries*

@Deja
That makes it all okay for "lesser of two evils" voters.

#2

First off the GOP is doing a hell of a job undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the voting process by its gerrymandering and its voter ID policies.

I agree with your whole comment. Just wanted to make sure we don't leave out the monster that is the Dem establishment, aka the other half of the single body that screws us every chance it gets. Supposed differences are only spoken, especially in election years. When it gets down to the meat and potatoes, our representatives are one big symbiotic meal -- the kind that gives you the shits until you're dead.

snoopydawg on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 5:34pm
From the ToP link
Robert Mueller's indictment of the Russians who interfered in our election is a milestone in an ongoing investigation. The charges focus on the Russians who used online social networking platforms to divide voters and disrupt the electoral process.

Changed any votes? Party affiliations? Removed people from the voting rolls? Closed down voting precincts? Didn't supply enough voting machines for high voting areas? Nope. Nope. Nope and nope. Just placed a few ads on Fakebook and most of them after the election was over. It's taken Mueller two years to look into this? If he hasn't found any evidence yet then why waste time and money worrying about China and Iran doing anything? I'm thinking that Mueller is just pretending to be investigating, but he's really spending his time golfing or whatever his favorite activities are.

Bisbonian on Sun, 10/21/2018 - 10:20am
No kidding

@snoopydawg , its like a nuclear submarine calling the teapot black.

Robert Mueller's indictment of the Russians who interfered in our election is a milestone in an ongoing investigation. The charges focus on the Russians who used online social networking platforms to divide voters and disrupt the electoral process.

Changed any votes? Party affiliations? Removed people from the voting rolls? Closed down voting precincts? Didn't supply enough voting machines for high voting areas? Nope. Nope. Nope and nope. Just placed a few ads on Fakebook and most of them after the election was over. It's taken Mueller two years to look into this? If he hasn't found any evidence yet then why waste time and money worrying about China and Iran doing anything? I'm thinking that Mueller is just pretending to be investigating, but he's really spending his time golfing or whatever his favorite activities are.

Bollox Ref on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 6:16pm
Remember all those wonderful presents

we were going to receive at Fitzmas? Hoping the Establishment is going to finally reveal its sausage-making, really is a flight of fancy. McSausage for the McResistance. The Public are to be seen at voting stations, and not heard.

divineorder on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 6:28pm
Great essay. Thanks!

Hell I am surprised they even mentioned that first part.

In a joint statement, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Justice Department, FBI and Department of Homeland Security said they "do not have any evidence" that foreign countries have disrupted the voting process or changed any tallies,

At any rate cracked up when I read Caitlin on FB this morning:

Politico Report Says Russiagaters Should Prepare To Kiss My Ass

"In a just world, everyone who helped promote this toxic narrative would apologize profusely and spend the rest of their lives being mocked and marginalized." #Mueller #TrumpRussia https://t.co/eN349xhjG3

-- Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 20, 2018

snoopydawg on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 7:28pm
In case you missed it

@divineorder

We had Great discussion about Caitlin's article. Lots of good comments.

Hell I am surprised they even mentioned that first part.

In a joint statement, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Justice Department, FBI and Department of Homeland Security said they "do not have any evidence" that foreign countries have disrupted the voting process or changed any tallies,

At any rate cracked up when I read Caitlin on FB this morning:

Politico Report Says Russiagaters Should Prepare To Kiss My Ass

"In a just world, everyone who helped promote this toxic narrative would apologize profusely and spend the rest of their lives being mocked and marginalized." #Mueller #TrumpRussia https://t.co/eN349xhjG3

-- Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 20, 2018

MrWebster on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 7:04pm
We are looking at the terminus point of the Russian hysteria.

Actually, I am thinking nuclear war with Russia may be the terminus point, but in terms of propaganda we are seeing it. I have followed the Russia hysteria since 2015 when it was in its infant stage here in the States, but advancing in Europe.

There are still some charges that Russians broke into certain accounts as Microsoft has claimed a few months back, but the claims go no where as they have to admit they had absolutely no proof. And the story fades away until a new charge is made, and those now are hard to make up.

As previous posters before in have commented above, basically the terminus point is ascribing all dissent within the Western powers as Russian created. In this charge it is impossible to to argue as no proof is needed except for the existance of dissent. No more charges which can be proved such as an actual hack. And that dissent can be for or against an issue. All issues lead to Moscow.

The huge censorship of various sites done by Facebook and Twitter begin and are justified by the Russia hysteria and "fan news".

divineorder on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 8:19pm
Aside from in your comment though, plenty wrong with Dems?

@MrWebster @snoopydawg

The long con that is #RussiaGate . https://t.co/HvTHam5Rlb pic.twitter.com/nxlRpYH26b

-- John "Squinty Forehead Man" Graziano (@jvgraz) October 18, 2018

Actually, I am thinking nuclear war with Russia may be the terminus point, but in terms of propaganda we are seeing it. I have followed the Russia hysteria since 2015 when it was in its infant stage here in the States, but advancing in Europe.

There are still some charges that Russians broke into certain accounts as Microsoft has claimed a few months back, but the claims go no where as they have to admit they had absolutely no proof. And the story fades away until a new charge is made, and those now are hard to make up.

As previous posters before in have commented above, basically the terminus point is ascribing all dissent within the Western powers as Russian created. In this charge it is impossible to to argue as no proof is needed except for the existance of dissent. No more charges which can be proved such as an actual hack. And that dissent can be for or against an issue. All issues lead to Moscow.

The huge censorship of various sites done by Facebook and Twitter begin and are justified by the Russia hysteria and "fan news".

snoopydawg on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 10:27pm
And the Vermont electrical grid that Russia hacked into the

@MrWebster

computer that wasn't even hooked up to the internet. Brennan said that Russia tried to meddle in 21?state's voting rolls, but the states said that never happened. But just like people are still saying that all 17 intelligence (3) agencies agree that Russia interfered with the election people still think that the other stuff is true. This is why spreading propaganda is so powerful. The lies are what they remember, not the retractions if they're ever given.

About those FB ads that swayed the election ...

The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election. We shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered it because it doesn't align with the main media narrative of Tump and the election. https://t.co/2dL8Kh0hof

-- Rob Goldman (@robjective) February 17, 2018

Actually, I am thinking nuclear war with Russia may be the terminus point, but in terms of propaganda we are seeing it. I have followed the Russia hysteria since 2015 when it was in its infant stage here in the States, but advancing in Europe.

There are still some charges that Russians broke into certain accounts as Microsoft has claimed a few months back, but the claims go no where as they have to admit they had absolutely no proof. And the story fades away until a new charge is made, and those now are hard to make up.

As previous posters before in have commented above, basically the terminus point is ascribing all dissent within the Western powers as Russian created. In this charge it is impossible to to argue as no proof is needed except for the existance of dissent. No more charges which can be proved such as an actual hack. And that dissent can be for or against an issue. All issues lead to Moscow.

The huge censorship of various sites done by Facebook and Twitter begin and are justified by the Russia hysteria and "fan news".

Bisbonian on Sun, 10/21/2018 - 10:25am
by the way

@snoopydawg , there are only sixteen intelligence agencies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Community

#6

computer that wasn't even hooked up to the internet. Brennan said that Russia tried to meddle in 21?state's voting rolls, but the states said that never happened. But just like people are still saying that all 17 intelligence (3) agencies agree that Russia interfered with the election people still think that the other stuff is true. This is why spreading propaganda is so powerful. The lies are what they remember, not the retractions if they're ever given.

About those FB ads that swayed the election ...

The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election. We shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered it because it doesn't align with the main media narrative of Tump and the election. https://t.co/2dL8Kh0hof

-- Rob Goldman (@robjective) February 17, 2018

The Liberal Moonbat on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 8:38pm
NOT FROM THE ONION - oh, wait, yes it is...wait, what?

Who's on first...?

https://www.theonion.com/mueller-ready-to-deliver-major-parts-of-finding...

Bisbonian on Sun, 10/21/2018 - 10:33am
I like the comment from the Lobster Murderer the best.

@The Liberal Moonbat

Who's on first...?

https://www.theonion.com/mueller-ready-to-deliver-major-parts-of-finding...

snoopydawg on Sat, 10/20/2018 - 11:06pm
Remember the Russian agencies that Mueller charged?

He still doesn't want to give their attorneys the evidence he has against them.

Judge Orders Mueller To Prove Russian Company Meddled In Election

A Washington federal judge on Thursday ordered special counsel Robert Mueller's team to clarify election meddling claims lodged against a Russian company operated by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Bloomberg.

Concord Management and Consulting, LLC. - one of three businesses indicted by Mueller in February along with 13 individuals for election meddling , surprised the special counsel in April when they actually showed up in court to fight the charges . Mueller's team tried to delay Concord from entering the case, arguing that thee Russian company not been properly served, however Judge Dabney Friedrich denied the request - effectively telling prosecutors 'well, they're here.'

* Concord pleaded not guilty in May. Their attorney, Eric Dubelier - a partner at Reed Smith, has described the election meddling charges as "make believe," arguing on Monday that Mueller's indictment against Concord "doesn't charge a crime."

"There is no statute of interfering with an election. There just isn't," said Dubelier, who added that Mueller's office alleged a "made-up crime to fit the facts they have."

Concord is one of the corporations that Mueller said placed ads on FB to sway people's opinion on Trump and Hillary. The ads that most were placed after the election.

[Oct 21, 2018] Where is Sergei Skripalt by Rob Slane

Oct 18, 2018 | www.sott.net

The Blogmire
According to an article in The Mail , the mother of Sergei Skripal, Yelena, has not heard from her son since the incident on 4th March , and the last time she heard from her granddaughter, Yulia, was on 24th July:

"Recalling her phone conversation with Yulia, Yelena told the Daily Mirror : 'The last time I ­actually spoke to Yulia was on the 24th of July on my 90th birthday. She rang - it was unexpected but it was so lovely to hear from her. She called and was actually with Sergei. She told me: "I'm with daddy he is beside me but he can't speak as he has a pain in his throat". She said he had been in some pain.'"
This is interesting for a number of reasons.

Firstly, we know that during the conversation on 24th July, according to a number of reports (for example here ), Yulia told her grandmother that the reason Sergei was unable to speak was because his voice was still weak due to a tracheostomy :

"Babushka, happy birthday, everything is fine, everything is perfect. I am in London with papa. He can't speak because he's got a tracheostomy, that pipe, which will be taken off in three days. Now when he speaks with that pipe, his voice is first of all very weak and secondly, he makes quite a lot of wheeze. So babushka with your poor hearing you would really struggle to understand him. He'll call after the tracheostomy is off. "
This was almost 3 months ago. So the tracheostomy was preventing Sergei from speaking; but it was coming off in three days; yet nearly 3 months later and still no call from Sergei? Is that not very odd? Indeed, especially given that Yelena states in the interview that she and Sergei used to speak every week .

Secondly, the call on 24th July is itself very odd. Notice that Yulia uses the phrases "everything is fine, everything is perfect." These are basically the same sorts of phrases that she repeated over and over in her call with her cousin Viktoria on 5th April :

"Everything is ok, everything is fine."

"Everything is fine, but we'll see how it goes, we'll decide later. You know what the situation is here. Everything is fine, everything is solvable, everyone is recovering and is alive."

"Everything is ok. He is resting now, having a nap. Everyone's health is fine, there are no irreparable things. I will be discharged soon. Everything is ok."

She seems very keen - some would say overly keen - to emphasise that everything is fine and okay and perfect etc. To me it sounds unnatural and forced. What do you think?

But more than this, imagine yourself in the same situation. Your father is next to you. He can speak, but not very well, and so can't communicate through the phone to his mother. What would you do? Well, I know what I would do. I would relay speech from the one to the other. "He says he's getting better and misses you very much grandma." "She says she loves you, dad." Isn't that what normal people would do in such circumstances?

But instead, Yulia speaks in a way that doesn't fill me with too much certainty that he was actually in the room with her. It's all very medical and somewhat officious. And even if his voice was a bit wheezy and hard to understand, his ears were okay, weren't they? Couldn't Yulia have held the phone to her dad's ear so he could hear his mother speak to him? Again, that would be what a normal person would do in such circumstances, wouldn't it? But of course they don't do normal in SkripalWorld.

Thirdly, we have to reckon with the fact that since that call, in which Yulia indicated that Sergei would call in as little as three days, there has been no communication at all . Not with grandma. Not with Viktoria. Not with anyone (apparently even Mark Urban got the cold shoulder).

Actually, that's not quite the case. We don't really have to reckon with this because the heroic journalism of The Mail gives us the answer. In the same piece that it mentioned a call between Yulia and her grandma, in which Sergei was apparently sat right next to Yulia, we get this:

"Since that solitary phone conversation, she [Yelena] has not heard from her the two targeted relatives as any contact could lead Russian forces to the pair."
Remarkable, isn't it? So according to The Mail , the reason that Sergei Skripal cannot call his mother, is because Russian forces might be able to trace his whereabouts and order a hit on him. Another one, apparently. And yet in the very same piece they report on Yulia Skripal calling her grandmother on 24th July, with Sergei Skripal at her side. See? It's obvious, isn't it?

Not for the first time in this case, I'm left scratching my head and wondering whether the journalists who write this sort of thing believe their readers to be so dim that they won't notice statements in the same article that utterly refute one another, or whether the journalists themselves are so witless that they simply don't realise that they are contradicting themselves in the space of a few sentences. Any thoughts?

The fact is that Yulia has phoned her cousin Viktoria a number of times since the beginning of April, and in most, if not all of those calls, her father was said to be close by. She even did a little film for Reuters in May, with her father apparently in the same compound. Why were these allowed, since according to The Mail , it could have led Russian forces to the pair? Or are we to believe that Russian forces have only just developed the capability to trace phone calls since 24th July? Worse still, have British Security Services forgotten how to prevent phone calls being traced by other intelligence agencies since 24th July, not to mention also losing the ability to stop Russian forces from coming and getting them?

Or is it more likely that The Mail cannot be bothered to ask the obvious questions that stem from their own report. Such as:

1. Why is the apparent victim in this case, Sergei Skripal, who is under the protection of British (and possibly US) intelligence services, unable to phone his mother, whom he used to speak to on a weekly basis?

2. Does this constitute a violation of his human rights?

3. Given that he has had no contact with his mother since 4th March, how can we be sure that he is alive, and if he is, whether he is not being held against his will?

[Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir

Highly recommended!
UK politicians in Skripal story behaved by cheap clowns. Their story with door knob was pathetic. They tried to invent the legend with poisoning on the fly and that shows. There is definitely something else brewing here and Shamir proposed his version with Skripal double dealings or something along those line is quite plausible.
We will never know, but I think British discredited themselves for the whole world in this story. Trump was not better will using this tory to impose additional sanctions on Russia. This is just another proof that he is another neocon who during election campaign like Obama played the role of isolationalist and then appointed Haley to UN and hired Pompeo as his Secretary of state and Bolton as his security advisor -- a typical "bat and switch" operation in US politics.
Notable quotes:
"... Vrublevsky thinks that British intelligence convinced the GRU (probably we should say that GRU is not called GRU anymore but GU, the Chief Directorate of the General Staff, but it hardly matters) that Mr Skripal wanted to return home to Russia. Probably they were told that Mr Skripal intended to bring some valuable dowry with him, including Porton Down data and the secrets of the Golden Rain dossier. It is possible that Skripal had been played, too; perhaps he indeed wanted to go back to Russia, the country he missed badly. ..."
"... As we had learned from videos and stills published by the Brits, the two men had been carefully followed from the beginning to the end. Meanwhile, British intelligence staged a 'poisoning' of Skripal and his daughter, and the two agents quickly returned home. ..."
"... There is not a single man close to Russian intelligence who thinks that Skripal had actually been poisoned by the Russians. First, there was absolutely no reason to do it, and second, if the Russians would poison him, he would stay poisoned, like the Ukrainian Quisling Stepan Bandera was. ..."
"... However, by playing this card, the British secret service convinced the Foreign Office to expel all diplomats who had contacts and connection to the exposed GRU agents. The massive expulsion of 150 diplomats caused serious damage to the Russian secret services. ..."
"... Such a massive operation against Russian agents and their contacts could signal forthcoming war. In normal circumstances, states do not reveal their full knowledge of enemy agents. ..."
"... I do not know what is the truth. At this point I no longer care because we will never know but it will be the British version that will be the most popular. I like most people like good stories. Unfortunately for Russia the Brits have better script writers, director and actors. ..."
Oct 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

... ... ...

Vrublevsky thinks that British intelligence convinced the GRU (probably we should say that GRU is not called GRU anymore but GU, the Chief Directorate of the General Staff, but it hardly matters) that Mr Skripal wanted to return home to Russia. Probably they were told that Mr Skripal intended to bring some valuable dowry with him, including Porton Down data and the secrets of the Golden Rain dossier. It is possible that Skripal had been played, too; perhaps he indeed wanted to go back to Russia, the country he missed badly.

Two GRU agents, supposedly experts on extraction (they allegedly sneaked the Ukrainian president Yanukovych from Ukraine after the coup and saved him from lynching mob) were sent to Salisbury to test the ground and make preparations for Skripal's return. As we had learned from videos and stills published by the Brits, the two men had been carefully followed from the beginning to the end. Meanwhile, British intelligence staged a 'poisoning' of Skripal and his daughter, and the two agents quickly returned home.

There is not a single man close to Russian intelligence who thinks that Skripal had actually been poisoned by the Russians. First, there was absolutely no reason to do it, and second, if the Russians would poison him, he would stay poisoned, like the Ukrainian Quisling Stepan Bandera was.

However, by playing this card, the British secret service convinced the Foreign Office to expel all diplomats who had contacts and connection to the exposed GRU agents. The massive expulsion of 150 diplomats caused serious damage to the Russian secret services.

Still, the Russians had no clue how the West had learned identities of so many diplomats connected to GRU. They suspected that there was a mole, and a turncoat who delivered the stuff to the enemy.

That is why Vladimir Putin decided to dare them. As he knew that the two men identified by the British service had no connection to the alleged poisoning, he asked them to appear on the RT in an interview with Ms Simonyan. By acting as village hicks, they were supposed to provoke the enemy to disclose its source. The result was unexpected: instead of revealing the name of a turncoat, the Belling Cat, a site used by the Western Secret Services for intentional leaks, explained how the men were traced by using the stolen databases. Putin's plan misfired.

The Russian secret service is not dead. Intelligence services do suffer from enemy action from time to time: the Cambridge Five infiltrated the upper reaches of the MI-5 and delivered state secrets to Moscow for a long time, but the Intelligence Service survived. Le Carre's novels were based on such a defeat of the intelligence. However they have a way to recover. Identity of their top agents remain secret, and they are concealed from the enemy's eyes.

But in order to function properly, the Russians will have to clean their stables, remove their databases from the market place and keep its citizenry reasonably safe. Lax, and not-up-to-date agents do not apparently understand the degree the internet is being watched. Considering it should have been done twenty years ago, and meanwhile a new generation of Russians has came of age, perfectly prepared to sell whatever they can for cash, it is a formidable task.

There is an additional reason to worry. Such a massive operation against Russian agents and their contacts could signal forthcoming war. In normal circumstances, states do not reveal their full knowledge of enemy agents. It made president Putin worry; and he said this week: we'll go to heaven as martyrs, the attackers will die as sinners. In face of multiple and recent threats, this end of the world is quite possible.


utu , says: October 20, 2018 at 4:23 am GMT

Great story. If told many people would believe it. But now it is kind of late. So why it wasn't told within few days or weeks of Skripal affair? Why it is the British media that has initiative and Russian media is reactive and defensive? The story that Skripal wanted to return and that two agents were lured in there should have been told right away and that it turned out be MI5 provocation should have been insinuated. And the two agents should have been interviewed on Russian media. Instead we get defensive inept and indolent Russian reactions.

I do not know what is the truth. At this point I no longer care because we will never know but it will be the British version that will be the most popular. I like most people like good stories. Unfortunately for Russia the Brits have better script writers, director and actors.

jilles dykstra , says: October 20, 2018 at 7:25 am GMT
@utu " Instead we get defensive inept and indolent Russian reactions."
The reaction 'if we want to kill somebody that somebody does not survive' I cannot see as inept and indolent.
Malaysian Truther , says: October 20, 2018 at 8:24 am GMT
Excellent piece by Israel Shamir which I think gives the correct explanation of the Skripal poisoning. This was a classic fishing, 'click bait' operation which produced a very valuable haul for Western Intelligence. The only question is whether Skripal cooperated with it – which I think he did – not knowing that both he and his daughter were meant to die. Hence Putin's rage against Skripal a few weeks ago ( calling him a scumbag traitor etc, etc) after the Russian operatives were identified because retired agents are supposed to stay retired.

Russia made a very serious mistake with the RT interview with the 2 operatives. Better not to say anything if you can't give the whole story. The GU weren't happy to show their incompetence, but compounded the original mistake with obvious lying. That was a propaganda gift to the Western media and has helped convince original disbelievers of Russian perfidy.

Russia needs to step up its game especially in the media dept.

Tom Welsh , says: October 20, 2018 at 9:38 am GMT
"Unfortunately for Russia the Brits have better script writers, director and actors".

Maybe, if your taste runs to "Dr Who" or "Carry On Spying". That's about the level of the Skripal nonsense.

If it was meant for public consumption, the British government's opinion of the British people is much lower than mine.

jilles dykstra , says: October 20, 2018 at 10:33 am GMT
@Anatoly Karlin " British or American human capital, but there are certainly consummate professionals relative to what passes for today's Russian intelligence services. "

On what this 'certainly' is based, I see no argument whatsoever.
Already a long time ago, I must admit, the CIA director had to admit to senator Moynihan that he had lied about the CIA not laying mines in Havana harbour.
A professional in espionage does not get caught.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 'Secrecy', New Haven 1998
Anyone acquinted with Sept 11 understands that the USA's secret army, the CIA, was involved.
Another blunder.
As far as I know British secret services never get caught.
How clever the Russians are, suppose quite clever, I for one do not think that the stupid stories about for example Skripal have any truth in them.
Until now the asserted Russian meddling in USA elections have not been proved.
Do not know of anything credible that Russian intelligence people are said to have done.
But of course Russian intelligence does exist.

Fatima Manoubia , says: October 20, 2018 at 11:18 am GMT
@Anatoly Karlin

"A related problem is that since there is now a free market economy, with many more attractive career options for talented people, the high quality people go to work in other spheres, leaving the intelligence agencies with the dregs;" .

A direct result of erasing ideology so as to erase personality cult towards highly respected people in former USSR .When you have no ideology ( or worst, share ideology with your opponent, i.e free market .) all what you have, from values to secrets, from scientific human capital to secret service officials, are out there in the global market for possible selling to the best postor .this is the principle of capitalism .. after all, it is said, almost everybody has a price .The challenge is finding out where that little bunch who have not are ..Obviously, in this scenario, the one who has the printing machine has a "little" advantage How to overcome this would be part of "what is to be done" ..

Ilyana_Rozumova , says: October 20, 2018 at 12:07 pm GMT
If the Russians wanted to kill them they would be dead. Period. It is all FN hoax.
The latest English came up with was that poison was smeared on the door handle and that both touched the door handle. Give me a break. Such a idiocy. Just imagine the exit procedure where both are touching the door knob.
And than both Russians went to garbage dump carrying the little bottle and thru it there.
What an exemplary citizen neat behavior by Russians,
All English story is such a stupid idiocy that it turns my stomach.
All we like sheep , says: October 20, 2018 at 12:14 pm GMT

However, the presence of Russian spies in Salisbury can be explained by its nearness to Porton Down, the secret British chemical lab and factory for manufacturing chemical weapons applied by the White Helmets in Syria in their false-flag operation in Douma and other places. It is possible that a resident of Salisbury (Mr Skripal?) had delivered samples from Porton Down to the Russian intelligence agents. This makes much more sense than the dubious story of Russians trying to poison an old ex-spy who did his stretch in a Russian jail.

If Mr. Skripal has been poisoned by the stuff of which he himself took samples in Porton Down, this would run completely parallel to the earlier poisoning of Mr. Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko, who also became ill because of carrying poison (polonium) around.

Eagle Eye , says: October 20, 2018 at 12:54 pm GMT

If [Yulia Skripal] had not had the courage to make this call while slipping the observance of British intelligence, she would probably be dead by now.

Both Skripals are most likely DEAD, murdered by British "intelligence" services.

The formulaic and curiously uninterested treatment of the matter in the British media seems inconsistent with the Skripals still being alive.

The article above suggests that the Skripals were unwitting or witting participants in a sting to expose Russian intelligence agents. More importantly, Sergey Skripal appears to have had a role in the creation of the DNC's "dossier" to undermine the Trump presidencey.

Whatever the background, Sergey Skripal became privy to important secrets that the Brits and their seditious allies in the U.S. Deep State do not want exposed.

macilrae , says: October 20, 2018 at 2:38 pm GMT
In the Skripal case the British have not explained why, after claiming to have found the closest approach to a smoking gun in the form of traces of novichok in that hotel room, the hotel was not then immediately quarantined.

And assuredly, with Putin's name on the line, the Russians have to do a better job if they are to refute the standing accusations – the RT interview was something of a PR disaster.

The Belloncat data, although superficially convincing, could so easily have been faked by anybody with reasonable knowledge of Russian internet infrastructure and some proficiency in Photoshop.

CalDre , says: October 20, 2018 at 3:21 pm GMT
@utu

But now it is kind of late. So why it wasn't told within few days or weeks of Skripal affair?

It's still not being told – believe it or not, Israel Shamir is not Sergei Lavrov. I hypothesized to the same state of affairs in early September re: Skripals.

But I did not know about these massive intelligence security breaches in Russia. Wow, that's huge. Even though it's not clear to me how this indicates Putin's plan misfired. If anything he got exactly what he wanted: confirmation that the "West" had access to the entire passport database. Knowing what your enemy has in intelligence is a huge win, now they can work on correcting it (hard as it may be, it would be impossible without knowing).

CalDre , says: October 20, 2018 at 3:24 pm GMT
@macilrae You are right, it could have been faked, anything can be faked today, even a video of Putin speaking (search for "deep fakes" and watch the video at https://www.wsj.com/articles/deepfake-videos-are-ruining-lives-is-democracy-next-1539595787 ).

But the fact is Russia has not really disputed the results so I am fairly confident that not only was Belling Cat right, but Israel is right, and now we have the situation where Russia knows that Western intelligence has full access to Russia's passport database.

wayfarer , says: October 20, 2018 at 3:55 pm GMT
@Tyrion 2 Had some experiences with Chinese and Mossad spies, not to mention Russian Jewish hard-drug dealers.

Here are a few examples.

There was an AMES postdoc at UCSD, a Chinese applied-math brain who had a 10-plus female handler. She'd stop by occasionally to check up on him. He always get extremely anxious when she was around. Couldn't figure out if it was fear, sexual excitement, or a combination of both.

There was an old Chinese man and his foxy young female protege, who enjoyed filming U.S. military maneuvers along the San Diego coast. I observed their operation for days.

There was a swing-shift cleaning crew in a Southern California high-tech mfg facility that was all Chinese, in an area that typically employed Latin American crews. Its head honcho was a beautiful Chinese lady. They made it their job to sort through trash bins and save papers. The feds busted them.

As far as the Mossad, I spent two years on a rental property in SD county, which was occupied by them as well. Mostly Israeli kids using the property and a local Israeli-owned vegetarian restaurant as their "scorpion den." Got fairly familiar with some of their espionage work and methods.

I don't go looking for this stuff. I'm just able to recognize it. As an empath I can read people, quite well. It's a natural gift.

Can't stomach Israel's insensitive nature. That's why you'll typically find me pointing out their self-serving bullshit.

source: https://themindunleashed.com/2013/10/30-traits-of-empath.html

FB , says: October 20, 2018 at 4:13 pm GMT
This is a pretty good article but also falls on its face at the end

Mr Shamir's 'inside' information confirms my own take on Petrov and Boshirov which I published a few days after that RT interview with Ms Simonyan I wrote this on Col Lang's blog on Sept 14

'Yeah those two 'tourists' do look the part don't they I would say they are probably GRU or something similar but nobody 'poisoned' the Skripals that's total kabuki theater another Potemkin village production from the reality masters

Something is afoot here though perhaps these two were lured to Salisbury as part of a frame up plot, perhaps by Skripal himself or perhaps the Brits caught wind of their plans to visit [on some standard spying mission, certainly not assassination] and put in motion the elaborate hoax

Everybody there protested loudly including Andrey Martyanov [Smoothie] I also added this

' I disagree with everyone here it seems these guys aren't tourists but they also didn't try to kill anyone that's stupid

It's some sort of spy game

Here's one scenario double agent Skripal makes convincing noises about flipping back someone at GRU [or some similar outfit] sends these two to Salisbury to check it out a very stupid move which is why Putin is now miffed enough to display these guys publicly and their field career surely over also a slap in the face to the silly Limeys for playing dirty pool even in the cloak and dagger game there are unwritten rules '

This is now exactly the story that Mr Shamir is presenting here but he is a day late and a dollar short

I also don't agree with his take that this is all somehow a big loss for Russian intel the Brits are the ones who have painted themselves in a corner their Skripal story is a wet paper bag waiting to fall apart the fact that they lured the Russians to Salisbury, under whatever pretext, be it Skripal or Porton Down/white helmets etc was their only small tactical victory because they could then later expose those two after months of Russian denials in order to show the Russians were in fact somehow involved

But that exposure came months later all that time the Russians would have known that Boshirov and Petrov had been captured on candid camera and would have had time to work on their countermove

Mr Shamir writes this like the game is over that is ridiculous the Brits have no way out of the Skripal hoax there was never any poisoning the original diagnosis of the Skripals in the Salisbury hospital was opioid overdose that came out in the first BBC interview with the hospital staff months after the 'poisoning'

It was not until 48 hours after the Skripals were admitted to hospital and the convenient intervention of Porton Down that the medical diagnosis was 'changed' to nerve agent poisoning

BUT this is an unsustainable story that WILL FALL APART the simple reason is medical and chemical fact both nerve agents and agricultural pesticides are based on the exact same chemical compound organophosphates

It just so happens that organophsphate poisoning is 'one of the most common causes of poisoning worldwide '

'There are nearly 3 million poisonings per year resulting in two hundred thousand deaths.'

That is the simple reason why emergency doctors EVERYWHERE are trained to recognize and treat this kind of poisoning especially in rural, agricultural areas like Salisbury

That is why it took months for media to gain access to the medical staff at that hospital the British spooks needed to do a lot of 'persuading' with medical professionals that would have wanted no part in such trickery and fakery

But this is a ticking time bomb that is bound to blow up in the faces of the very stupid Brits

So yes they pulled off a minor coup in luring those two to Salisbury but the game is very very far from over

As for Skripal he is in on it for sure as I speculated in my original comment on the matter..the Russian intel services are perfectly aware of this, yet Mr Shamir's supposedly well connected source has zero knowledge of this which tells me this source is actually a useless clown who 'knows' exactly what an internet commenter [myself] already knew two months ago

PS the fact that the Brits supposedly have all kinds of database info on the Russian intel apparatus and personnel files etc doesn't mean anything the author is a making a big deal out of this, but his story lacks meat on its bones most 'intel' is open source material anyway

As for sensitive stuff that may have been 'sold' by 'corrupt' bureaucrats one must ask if such 'info' is actually real or a clever plant providing fake info is the oldest spy trick in the book and this article simply takes for granted that such a trick would not have been employed why not ?

CalDre , says: October 20, 2018 at 5:30 pm GMT
@FB How would a fake database leak include the real data on the two GRU agents that just happened to be sent to UK? Maybe it was to make the data leak seem real?

In spycraft it is always impossible to know how deep the deception goes. That's why the very article to which you are responding started with:

It is hard to evaluate the exact measure of things in the murky world of spies and counter-spies, but it appears that the Western spies have had extraordinary success in the subterranean battle.

An acknowledgement you stubbornly ignore.

M Edward , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:01 pm GMT
None of this matters.

All governments are corrupt and have no interest in the welfare of the native populations.

All this he said she said crap is irrelevant, in the end we all will end up under a totalitarian police state run out of Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem.

Cyrano , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:06 pm GMT
I think that a clear strategy by the western "intelligence" services is starting to emerge vis-a-vis the Russians. By accusing any Russian that they can get their hands on, of being a spy, they want to scare the ordinary Russians from visiting the west, so afterwards any Russian actually caught traveling to the west can be safely assumed to be a spy – since by the calculations of the clever western intelligence – only someone who is actually a spy while at the same time being Russian, would dare to travel to the west. How smart is that?

Joking aside, it really is becoming unsafe for Russian nationals to travel to the west. Even though the west reserves the generosity of calling somebody equal only for those that are from the 3rd world – Russians clearly don't deserve such generosity.

Despite this, exceptions can be made and some unfortunate Russian soul could be accused of being equal with those highly evolved westerners and against their will can be offered protection from Mother Russia.

Pretty much like it happened to Yulia Skripal. She was only visiting her gastarbeiter father in GB, who apparently expressed desire to return to Russia, against pretty much everybody's wishes, and all of a sudden Yulia Skripal found herself bestowed with the western generosity of being declared equal, and was disappeared from public eye in order to protect her from those with whom she is clearly not equal – the Russians.

Thank God at least MI-6 proved equal to the task and discovered her equalness in a nick of time and saved her. The moral of the story: Only democracy has the power to recognize who is equal and who is not. Then, on the other hand, capitalism can keep acquiring new monikers such as "democracy" – all they want, Russia still has better quality of equality, despite ditching socialism.

FB , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:24 pm GMT
@CalDre Yes I 'stubbornly' refuse to take at face value this silly statement

it appears that the Western spies have had extraordinary success in the subterranean battle.'

Because it's not backed up by anything other than hot air as for that supposed 'data' about Petrov and Boshirov that was put out by Bellingcat

Ie mickey mouse stuff as with everything these clowns do, it is meant only to bamboozle the most utterly stupid bipeds

A very nice clue is the fact that a Russian website called 'The Insider' is Bellingcat's acknowledged partner here

If you read the article in English they claim to have 'dug' up a lot of info from various sources such the central Russian resident database and passenger check in data for their flight to the UK

Big deal that Shamir is building a mountain out of a molehill is more than clear

In fact this entire Shamir tale appears to have one subtle purpose to publicize and glorify the Bellingcat outfit

which irredeemably lost any credibility a few weeks back when illiterate poofter Eliott Higgins refused a debate challenge by the distinguished MIT physicist and former presidential advisor Ted Postol actually calling Postol an 'idiot' a move that astounded even those willing to entertain Higgins on a semi-credible level

peterAUS , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:39 pm GMT
@Anatoly Karlin Be that as it may, the "Western side" had (publicly known) Aldrich, Hanssen and Benghazi fiasco.

Boils down to, from the comment below:

When you have no ideology ( or worst, share ideology with your opponent, i.e free market .) all what you have, from values to secrets, from scientific human capital to secret service officials, are out there in the global market for possible selling to the best postor .this is the principle of capitalism .. after all, it is said, almost everybody has a price..

and

Obviously, in this scenario, the one who has the printing machine has a "little" advantage.

And, on top of it, in West, since the fall of The Wall, we've been having "Cooking the Intelligence to Fit the Political Agenda".

Incompetence vs blatant lying?
What a choice.

Kubarking , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:43 pm GMT
This commenter begs to differ with M. Karlin's assessment (8) of the relative competence of Russian sovok and CIA. "consummate professionals relative to what passes for today's Russian intelligence services"? Mais non.

CIA always gets caught. All they do is step on their crank, again and again. They depend not on professionalism but on what Russ Baker describes as a strange mix of ruthlessness and ineptitude. Both stem from impunity in municipal law.

For example: CIA torture and coercive interference got comprehensively exposed, worldwide, in the '70s. What happened? Don Gregg gave the Church and Pike committees an ultimatum: Back off or it's martial law. CIA got busted again in the '80s for the criminal enterprises under the Iran/Contra rubric. By then CIA had installed Tom Polgar, Former Saigon Station Chief, as chief investigator for the cognizant Senate Select committee, and Polgar assured Gregg that his hearings would not be a repeat of the abortive Pike and Church flaps.

So CIA are clowns. They can afford to be clowns because they know they can get away with it. Getting away with it is their only skill, and the only skill they need.

The persistent category error at this site is failing to realize that CIA is the state. They rule the USA.

[Oct 18, 2018] Skripal and Khashoggi West Manufactures Absurd Fantasy to Pin on Russia, Lets Saudi Get Away With Chopping up WaPo Journalist

Oct 18, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

Two disappearances, and two very different responses from Western governments, which illustrates their rank hypocrisy.

When former Russian spy Sergei Skripal went missing in England earlier this year, there was almost immediate punitive action by the British government and its NATO allies against Moscow. By contrast, Western governments are straining with restraint towards Saudi Arabia over the more shocking and provable case of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The outcry by Western governments and media over the Skripal affair was deafening and resulted in Britain, the US and some 28 other countries expelling dozens of Russian diplomats on the back of unsubstantiated British allegations that the Kremlin tried to assassinate an exiled spy with a deadly nerve agent. The Trump administration has further tightened sanctions citing the Skripal incident.

London's case against Moscow has been marked by wild speculation and ropey innuendo. No verifiable evidence of what actually happened to Sergei Skripal (67) and his daughter Yulia has been presented by the British authorities . Their claim that President Vladimir Putin sanctioned a hit squad armed with nerve poison relies on sheer conjecture.

All we know for sure is that the Skripals have been disappeared from public contact by the British authorities for more than seven months , since the mysterious incident of alleged poisoning in Salisbury on March 4.

Russian authorities and family relatives have been steadfastly refused any contact by London with the Skripal pair, despite more than 60 official requests from Moscow in accordance with international law and in spite of the fact that Yulia is a citizen of the Russian Federation with consular rights.

It is an outrage that based on such thin ice of "evidence", the British have built an edifice of censure against Moscow, rallying an international campaign of further sanctions and diplomatic expulsions.

Now contrast that strenuous reaction, indeed hyper over-reaction, with how Britain, the US, France, Canada and other Western governments are ever-so slowly responding to Saudi Arabia over the Khashoggi case.

After nearly two weeks since Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, t he Saudi regime is this week finally admitting he was killed on their premises – albeit, they claim, in a "botched interrogation".

Turkish and American intelligence had earlier claimed that Khashoggi was tortured and murdered on the Saudi premises by a 15-member hit squad sent from Riyadh.

Even more grisly, it is claimed that Khashoggi's body was hacked up with a bone saw by the killers, his remains secreted out of the consulate building in boxes, and flown back to Saudi Arabia on board two private jets connected to the Saudi royal family.

What's more, the Turks and Americans claim that the whole barbaric plot to murder Khashoggi was on the orders of senior Saudi rulers, implicating Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The latest twist out of Riyadh, is an attempt to scapegoat "rogue killers" and whitewash the House of Saudi from culpability.

The fact that 59-year-old Khashoggi was a legal US resident and a columnist for the Washington Post has no doubt given his case such prominent coverage in Western news media. Thousands of other victims of Saudi vengeance are routinely ignored in the West.

Nevertheless, despite the horrific and damning case against the Saudi monarchy, the response from the Trump administration, Britain and others has been abject.

President Trump has blustered that there "will be severe consequences" for the Saudi regime if it is proven culpable in the murder of Khashoggi. Trump quickly qualified, however, saying that billion-dollar arms deals with the oil-rich kingdom will not be cancelled. Now Trump appears to be joining in a cover-up by spinning the story that the Khashoggi killing was done by "rogue killers".

Britain, France and Germany this week issued a joint statement calling for "a credible investigation" into the disappearance. But other than "tough-sounding" rhetoric, n one of the European states have indicated any specific sanctions, such as weapons contracts being revoked or diplomatic expulsions.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was "concerned" by the gruesome claims about Khashoggi's killing, but he reiterated that Ottawa would not be scrapping a $15 billion sale of combat vehicles to Riyadh.

The Saudi rulers have even threatened retaliatory measures if sanctions are imposed by Western governments.

Saudi denials of official culpability seem to be a brazen flouting of all reason and circumstantial evidence that Khashoggi was indeed murdered in the consulate building on senior Saudi orders.

This week a glitzy international investor conference in Saudi Arabia is being boycotted by top business figures, including the World Bank chief, Jim Yong Kim, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and Britain's venture capitalist Richard Branson. Global firms like Ford and Uber have pulled out, as have various media sponsors, such as CNN, the New York Times and Financial Times. Withdrawal from the event was in response to the Khashoggi affair.

A growing bipartisan chorus of US Senators, including Bob Corker, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham and Chris Murphy, have called for the cancellation of American arms sales to Saudi Arabia, as well as for an overhaul of the strategic partnership between the two countries.

Still, Trump has rebuffed calls for punitive response. He has said that American jobs and profits depend on the Saudi weapons market. Some 20 per cent of all US arms sales are estimated to go to the House of Saud.

The New York Times this week headlined: "In Trump's Saudi Bargain, the Bottom Line Proudly Stands Out".

The Trump White House will be represented at the investment conference in Saudi Arabia this week – dubbed "Davos in the Desert" by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. He said he was attending in spite of the grave allegations against the Saudi rulers.

Surely the point here is the unseemly indulgence by Western governments of Saudi Arabia and its so-called "reforming" Crown Prince. It is remarkable how much credulity Washington, London, Paris, Ottawa and others are affording the Saudi despots who, most likely, have been caught redhanded in a barbarous murder.

Yet, when it comes to Russia and outlandish, unproven claims that the Kremlin carried out a bizarre poison-assassination plot, all these same Western governments abandon all reason and decorum to pile sanctions on Russia based on lurid, hollow speculation. The blatant hypocrisy demolishes any pretense of integrity or principle.

Here is another connection between the Skripal and Khashoggi affairs. The Saudis no doubt took note of the way Britain's rulers have shown absolute disregard and contempt for international law in their de facto abduction of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. If the British can get away with that gross violation, then the Saudis probably thought that nobody would care too much if they disappeared Jamal Khashoggi.

Grotesquely, the way things are shaping up in terms of hypocritical lack of action by the Americans, British and others towards the Saudi despots, the latter might just get away with murder. Not so Russia. The Russians are not allowed to get away with even an absurd fantasy.


Source: Strategic Culture

[Oct 16, 2018] Stormy Daniels Lawsuit Dismissed, Trump Entitled To Legal Fees

Oct 16, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

A statement from Trump's legal team reads:

United States District Judge S. James Otero issued an order and ruling today dismissing Stormy Daniels' defamation lawsuit against President Trump. The ruling also states that the President is entitled to an award of his attorneys' fees against Stormy Daniels. A copy of the ruling is attached. No amount of spin or commentary by Stormy Daniels or her lawyer, Mr. Avenatti, can truthfully characterize today's ruling in any way other than total victory for President Trump and total defeat for Stormy Daniels. The amount of the award for President Trump's attorneys' fees will be determined at a later date.

Daniels' attorney Michael Avenatti responded to the dismissal, tweeting: "We will appeal the dismissal of the defamation cause of action and are confident in a reversal," while stating that Daniels' other claims against Trump and Cohen "proceed unaffected."

Re Judge's limited ruling: Daniels' other claims against Trump and Cohen proceed unaffected. Trump's contrary claims are as deceptive as his claims about the inauguration attendance.

We will appeal the dismissal of the defamation cause of action and are confident in a reversal.

-- Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) October 15, 2018

Last week Trump's legal team argued that it made no sense for them to keep fighting in court over a $130,000 hush payment received by Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, as she invalidated the non-disclosure agreement she signed with Trump's longtime fixer and lawyer, Michael Cohen.

The lawsuit is moot because Trump has consented that the agreement, as she has claimed, was never formed because he didn't sign it and he has agreed not to try to enforce it, Trump said in his court filing. The company created by Cohen to facilitate the non-disclosure agreement, which initially said Clifford faced more than $20 million in damages for talking, said in September that it wouldn't sue to enforce the deal. - Yahoo

Michael Avenatti's terrible October

This month has not treated Stormy's attorney well. Michael Avenatti went from Democrat darling during his representation of Daniels, to scapegoat over Justice Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court after he introduced an 11th hour claim by a woman who said Kavanaugh orchestrated gang-rape parties in the early 1980s - an allegation thought by many to have derailed otherwise legitimate claims against the Judge.

Less than two weeks later Avenatti came under fire after he launched a now-deleted fundraising page for Texas Democratic Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke.

In the fine print, O'Rourke supporters discovered that half the proceeds went to Avenatti's Fight PAC , which he formed a little over seven weeks ago .

Avenatti called the criticism "complete nonsense," noting that Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris "do the same thing." Perhaps sensing he'd made a huge mistake, Avenatti deleted the page - telling the Daily Beast in a text message: "It wasn't worth the nonsense that resulted from people that don't understand how common this is."

The question now is; after three strikes, is Avenatti out?

Read the full order here .


NiggaPleeze , 6 minutes ago link

The Creepy **** Lawyer gets to pay that.

Given his free $50 million in publicity, and the amount of GoFundMe he's gonna get or has gotten, I'd say "losing" is entirely in the eye of the beholder, lol.

Davidduke2000 , 47 minutes ago link

going after a sitting president was a stupid idea, now the entire money she raised will go to trump's lawyers.

bowie28 , 59 minutes ago link

Avenatti is the best thing that has happened to Trump.

It's almost like he is intentionally doing stupid and outrageous things to make the dems look even more unhinged than they are.

I wouldn't be surprised if we find he has been secretly working for Trump all along. Trump did run a reality show after all so that would be a great plot twist ;)

khakuda , 1 hour ago link

The best thing about Avenatti and the Clintons is that they won't stop until they bring the entire Democratic Party down. It reminds me of Anthony Weiner and Elliot Spitzer, scumbags who keep coming back and discredit the entire party because of their own glorious egos.

[Oct 14, 2018] I don't think Trump cared much about the Skripal case either. He imposed a few more sanctions under pressure from the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, GOP Rep. Ed Royce of California.

Notable quotes:
"... Any scenario is possible coming from the Saudis or the Anglo media. The Skripal has been a successful one. ..."
Oct 14, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

dh , Oct 12, 2018 5:02:06 PM | link

@81 I don't think Trump cared much about the Skripal case either.

He imposed a few more sanctions under pressure from the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, GOP Rep. Ed Royce of California.


Virgile , Oct 12, 2018 5:07:49 PM | link

@71 Activist potatoe

We are in "Pulp Fiction" aren't we? Any scenario is possible coming from the Saudis or the Anglo media. The Skripal has been a successful one.
Thanks for completing the scenario with your own ideas of the beheading of witnesses that you mistakenly attributed to me.

I would suppose that Saudis have something usually convincing to shut off talkative people, like they will shut off Trump or even the Turks: Money

Activist Potato , Oct 12, 2018 6:08:40 PM | link

... ... ...

The Skripal hoax grew legs I never imagined possible. If people did quietly question it, those people were deprived of a public counter-narrative in the mainstream Press to nurture their skepticism. This could cause a dimwit to renounce natural suspicion and a sharpie to know when to shut-up if he/she did not wish to be laughed at or worse.

They have so many of us dangling on a string. Thank b and others for MoA!


Den Lille Abe , Oct 12, 2018 10:10:26 PM | link
Cool down! We had TWO GRU murderers walk into Salisbury, with no CCCTV ecidense yet that they were near Skripal's house, and no evidence from his house , which surely must have under surveillance. Do you believe this? OK you believe the official story too.
And apart from that, Kashroggis probable demise is all cool, as he was a head chopping advocate, a Wahabistst. Fuck him . Wahabists go in Class on camps which has on the entrance "Arbeit mach frei" which of course is a general lie, but the whe get to kill them in a humanely way (see instruction manual from CiA)
Or you just shoot them in the chest, less smatter and more blood. Headshots are messy, stuff everywhere., sometimetimes, if you accidentially hit a weak point in the cranium , you have brains everywhere , dont wan't that.
Den Lille Abe , Oct 13, 2018 8:46:30 AM | link
As another poster commented, something is missing...
It is like a well choreograhped drame, Skripals were the same, this also is tooooo nice fitting together... Hmfr!
Qui bono? Who makes money on this? I certainly cannot answer that, but lets play safe : The Russians did it!
They beamed up Kasshoggi to their base on the dark side of the moon, the re killed him in civilized manner, fucking him to death with nice looking whores and spoonfeeding him Beluga caviar and interjected wit sips of Russian Starka. He was then made to mush and beamed back into the Saudi consulate making a real mess. Now poor headchop promoter is all over the place! He must love that up in his muslum heaven with 72 old hags. There is no martyrdom in being beamed to the moon and put through a garden shredder, that is nothing special.
So now the Saudi's has Khassoggi al over their faces (literally :)) and the Turks eye a new way to betray someone (Putin, wake up!!). Ever since democracy was bestowed on these people, they have made a mess of it.
Back in the day (when I was gung ho Army boy), it was OK for a Turk officer to shoot dead a couple of conscripts a year, no problemo, the sentries with weapons had no live rounds hi-hi. Turkey does not need a hard shove and it will crumble, and the Americans will intervene, unless Russia is first.
This game is about Turkey, and not goat herders in Saudi Sodoma. They have hardly oil left and the plebs are angry.
Robert Snefjella , Oct 13, 2018 8:50:46 AM | link
Trivia?

Jared Kushner's friendship/affair with previously merely progressive war criminal MBS, who has progressed to now also beinted tainted with responsibility for the lurid butchery of an offensive to MBS 'journalist' who was but days from marriage and the arms of his love, does not elevate Kushner's already dubious standing in some circles.

Kushner, he who on one memorable occasion chatted til the early hours of the morning, "cultivating a close friendship", with the mass murdering progressive MBS, who (thus inspired?; coincidentally?) to Trumpian applause arrested and shook down many members of his billionaire-cult family. But is this a busom buddy friendship born of equality, two young men with so much in common?

MBS has been quoted as saying he has "Kushner in my pocket". Hmmm.

And then there's NYT's Tom Friedman's gushing rhapsody in purple over MBS: "... a genuine reformer, mega-popular dude, and an all-around super awesome guy." Friedman's love was stoked over what he presumed was a lamb dinner, but in the light of further developments, we are not so sure....

mali , Oct 13, 2018 9:30:32 AM | link
Trump vows 'severe punishment' if Saudi Arabia is behind killing of WaPo journalist Khashoggi . However, Trump stressed that even if the journalist was killed at the hands of Riyadh, he still wouldn't end the arms deal between the two countries .
Noirette , Oct 13, 2018 9:53:35 AM | link
Reminded me of the Sultan Bin Turki affair.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultan_bin_Turki_II_bin_Abdulaziz_Al_Saud

He was most critical of the Saudi Royals and ;) 'pro-reform.' He was kidnapped in Geneva, apparently as carried out or 'allowed' for a good part by the Saudi Ambassador.

He was, allegedly, 'rendered' back to KSA, drugged and tortured. Five masked men knocked him unconscious, anesthetized him, taken him to a Boeing 747 waiting at the Geneva airport, and flew him to the Saudi capital Riyadh

http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13940427000348

In F, closer to the events: Celui-ci s'éclipse de la pièce et peu après, des hommes armés font irruption, frappent Sultan ben Turki, le menottent, lui font une injection et le transportent inconscient jusqu'à l'aéroport de Cointrin, où il est embarqué à bord d'un Boeing médical arrivé plusieurs jours auparavant et toujours prêt à décoller, selon le récit qu'il en a fait plus tard.

https://www.letemps.ch/monde/ne-prince-saoudien-exile-europe

Prison > house arrest, > once freed - he was allowed to go to Boston for medical treatment - he fled - back to Geneva! - and a court case took place (2016.) Pierre de Preux, a well known lawyer here, represented him. Imho the state prosecutor (= DA) was brave to take on this case. It was nevertheless shelved for lack of evidence.

Killing off critics / potential trouble makers / other / takes different forms in different régimes.

In the US for ex. no big show is made, and the death is classed as suicide, car accident, druggie death, mystery fall / drowning, etc. no matter how weird the circumstances. In other lands, it is deemed necessary to demonstrate the power of the Overlords, who can organise 15 ppl, a stark warning is projected.

Piotr Berman , Oct 13, 2018 10:40:02 AM | link
Posted by: Den Lille Abe | Oct 13, 2018 8:46:30 AM | 118

On one hand, the quantity of black flag incidents is increasing, and that leads to low quality at many occasions. Ukrainians in particular excel in making most laughable incidents and the British seem to be influenced. Babchenko was killed, his murder condemned by Her Majesty Foreign Office and then got resurected. Brits seem to liked that, as exemplified by heroics of Sir Gavin, the Lord Defender of the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland, Island of Man etc. etc.) on the frontline of the Free Ukraine.

On the other hand, were Saudis innocent they should have means of proving it. Consulates have security systems including cameras near the entry. While they are attacked less frequently than convenience stores, they have a better budget for such systems. Thus it should not be hard to show that either (a) Jamal Khashoggi actually did not enter KSA consulate in Istanbul on the day in question or (b) he entered and exited. Barring the use of hitherto unknown types of beam weapons, I would conclude that he entered and did not exit by normal means.

That said, there were no reports on beam weapons capable of transporting material objects. At worst, Russians could focus microwave weapons reducing people inside the consulate to incontinent cricket hearing idiots, enter through the underground and get out carrying whatever they please. KSA could be reluctant to release videos showing their people as they looked like idiots who just pissed into their pants and worse. This is what I can imagine on the basis of stories from American press that include at least two of "Russia, consulate/embassy, microwave weapons", usually all three. If we restrict ourself to more corroborated stories, Russians could drill holes and saturate the air with "military grade fentanyl" and eschew microwaves. But it would be easier if it was done by Turks with the help of Russian experts who botched something like that at least once, so they have data how to drill, spray and calculate the dosage.

Surely, one should not deprecate the ability of Turks to concoct tales. For example, a typical tale from Tales of 1001 Nights features a beautiful Turkish princess that falls from one misfortune to another at the hands of a trio of bad characters: a Jewish merchant, a Christian magician and a Kurdish leader of a band of robbers, only to be eventually rescued by a dashing young Muslim Arab, and we may have such a tale suitable altered for the occasion -- perhaps despicable Kurds will show up later.

But really, offering Starka to a prisoner? Because of long aging time and the demand, it is surprisingly hard to buy, and it is hard to tell if it is popular in Russia at all, Poland and the Baltics have more of Starka tradition.

[Oct 13, 2018] Any sce nario is possible coming from the Saudis or the Anglo media. The Skripal has been a successful one

Notable quotes:
"... Any scenario is possible coming from the Saudis or the Anglo media. The Skripal has been a successful one. ..."
"... The Skripal hoax grew legs I never imagined possible. If people did quietly question it, those people were deprived of a public counter-narrative in the mainstream Press to nurture their skepticism. This could cause a dimwit to renounce natural suspicion and a sharpie to know when to shut-up if he/she did not wish to be laughed at or worse. ..."
"... It is like a well choreograhped drame, Skripals were the same, this also is tooooo nice fitting together... ..."
"... Jared Kushner's friendship/affair with previously merely progressive war criminal MBS, who has progressed to now also beinted tainted with responsibility for the lurid butchery of an offensive to MBS 'journalist' who was but days from marriage and the arms of his love, does not elevate Kushner's already dubious standing in some circles. ..."
"... And then there's NYT's Tom Friedman's gushing rhapsody in purple over MBS: "... a genuine reformer, mega-popular dude, and an all-around super awesome guy." Friedman's love was stoked over what he presumed was a lamb dinner, but in the light of further developments, we are not so sure.... ..."
"... Reminded me of the Sultan Bin Turki affair. ..."
"... He was most critical of the Saudi Royals and ;) 'pro-reform.' He was kidnapped in Geneva, apparently as carried out or 'allowed' for a good part by the Saudi Ambassador. ..."
"... On one hand, the quantity of black flag incidents is increasing, and that leads to low quality at many occasions. Ukrainians in particular excel in making most laughable incidents and the British seem to be influenced. Babchenko was killed, his murder condemned by Her Majesty Foreign Office and then got resurected. ..."
Oct 13, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Virgile , Oct 12, 2018 5:07:49 PM | link

@71 Activist potatoe

We are in "Pulp Fiction" aren't we? Any scenario is possible coming from the Saudis or the Anglo media. The Skripal has been a successful one.
Thanks for completing the scenario with your own ideas of the beheading of witnesses that you mistakenly attributed to me.

I would suppose that Saudis have something usually convincing to shut off talkative people, like they will shut off Trump or even the Turks: Money

Activist Potato , Oct 12, 2018 6:08:40 PM | link

... ... ...

The Skripal hoax grew legs I never imagined possible. If people did quietly question it, those people were deprived of a public counter-narrative in the mainstream Press to nurture their skepticism. This could cause a dimwit to renounce natural suspicion and a sharpie to know when to shut-up if he/she did not wish to be laughed at or worse.

They have so many of us dangling on a string. Thank b and others for MoA!

Den Lille Abe , Oct 12, 2018 10:10:26 PM | link
Cool down! We had TWO GRU murderers walk into Salisbury, with no CCCTV ecidense yet that they were near Skripal's house, and no evidence from his house , which surely must have under surveillance. Do you believe this? OK you believe the official story too.

And apart from that, Kashroggis probable demise is all cool, as he was a head chopping advocate, a Wahabistst. Fuck him . Wahabists go in Class on camps which has on the entrance "Arbeit mach frei" which of course is a general lie, but the whe get to kill them in a humanely way (see instruction manual from CiA)

Or you just shoot them in the chest, less smatter and more blood. Headshots are messy, stuff everywhere., sometimetimes, if you accidentially hit a weak point in the cranium , you have brains everywhere , dont wan't that.

Den Lille Abe , Oct 13, 2018 8:46:30 AM | link
As another poster commented, something is missing...

It is like a well choreograhped drame, Skripals were the same, this also is tooooo nice fitting together... Hmfr!

Qui bono? Who makes money on this? I certainly cannot answer that, but lets play safe : The Russians did it!

They beamed up Kasshoggi to their base on the dark side of the moon, the re killed him in civilized manner, fucking him to death with nice looking whores and spoonfeeding him Beluga caviar and interjected wit sips of Russian Starka. He was then made to mush and beamed back into the Saudi consulate making a real mess. Now poor headchop promoter is all over the place! He must love that up in his muslum heaven with 72 old hags. There is no martyrdom in being beamed to the moon and put through a garden shredder, that is nothing special.

So now the Saudi's has Khassoggi al over their faces (literally :)) and the Turks eye a new way to betray someone (Putin, wake up!!). Ever since democracy was bestowed on these people, they have made a mess of it.

Back in the day (when I was gung ho Army boy), it was OK for a Turk officer to shoot dead a couple of conscripts a year, no problemo, the sentries with weapons had no live rounds hi-hi. Turkey does not need a hard shove and it will crumble, and the Americans will intervene, unless Russia is first.

This game is about Turkey, and not goat herders in Saudi Sodoma. They have hardly oil left and the plebs are angry.

Robert Snefjella , Oct 13, 2018 8:50:46 AM | link
Trivia?

Jared Kushner's friendship/affair with previously merely progressive war criminal MBS, who has progressed to now also beinted tainted with responsibility for the lurid butchery of an offensive to MBS 'journalist' who was but days from marriage and the arms of his love, does not elevate Kushner's already dubious standing in some circles.

Kushner, he who on one memorable occasion chatted till the early hours of the morning, "cultivating a close friendship", with the mass murdering progressive MBS, who (thus inspired?; coincidentally?) to Trumpian applause arrested and shook down many members of his billionaire-cult family. But is this a busom buddy friendship born of equality, two young men with so much in common?

MBS has been quoted as saying he has "Kushner in my pocket". Hmmm.

And then there's NYT's Tom Friedman's gushing rhapsody in purple over MBS: "... a genuine reformer, mega-popular dude, and an all-around super awesome guy." Friedman's love was stoked over what he presumed was a lamb dinner, but in the light of further developments, we are not so sure....

mali , Oct 13, 2018 9:30:32 AM | link
Trump vows 'severe punishment' if Saudi Arabia is behind killing of WaPo journalist Khashoggi . However, Trump stressed that even if the journalist was killed at the hands of Riyadh, he still wouldn't end the arms deal between the two countries .
Noirette , Oct 13, 2018 9:53:35 AM | link
Reminded me of the Sultan Bin Turki affair.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultan_bin_Turki_II_bin_Abdulaziz_Al_Saud

He was most critical of the Saudi Royals and ;) 'pro-reform.' He was kidnapped in Geneva, apparently as carried out or 'allowed' for a good part by the Saudi Ambassador.

He was, allegedly, 'rendered' back to KSA, drugged and tortured. Five masked men knocked him unconscious, anesthetized him, taken him to a Boeing 747 waiting at the Geneva airport, and flew him to the Saudi capital Riyadh

http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13940427000348

In F, closer to the events: Celui-ci s'éclipse de la pičce et peu aprčs, des hommes armés font irruption, frappent Sultan ben Turki, le menottent, lui font une injection et le transportent inconscient jusqu'ŕ l'aéroport de Cointrin, oů il est embarqué ŕ bord d'un Boeing médical arrivé plusieurs jours auparavant et toujours pręt ŕ décoller, selon le récit qu'il en a fait plus tard.

https://www.letemps.ch/monde/ne-prince-saoudien-exile-europe

Prison > house arrest, > once freed - he was allowed to go to Boston for medical treatment - he fled - back to Geneva! - and a court case took place (2016.) Pierre de Preux, a well known lawyer here, represented him. Imho the state prosecutor (= DA) was brave to take on this case. It was nevertheless shelved for lack of evidence.

Killing off critics / potential trouble makers / other / takes different forms in different régimes.

In the US for ex. no big show is made, and the death is classed as suicide, car accident, druggie death, mystery fall / drowning, etc. no matter how weird the circumstances. In other lands, it is deemed necessary to demonstrate the power of the Overlords, who can organise 15 ppl, a stark warning is projected.

Piotr Berman , Oct 13, 2018 10:40:02 AM | link
@Den Lille Abe | Oct 13, 2018 8:46:30 AM | 118

On one hand, the quantity of black flag incidents is increasing, and that leads to low quality at many occasions. Ukrainians in particular excel in making most laughable incidents and the British seem to be influenced. Babchenko was killed, his murder condemned by Her Majesty Foreign Office and then got resurected. Brits seem to liked that, as exemplified by heroics of Sir Gavin, the Lord Defender of the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland, Island of Man etc. etc.) on the frontline of the Free Ukraine.

... ... ..

[Oct 12, 2018] 'Land of censorship home of the fake' Alternative voices on Facebook and Twitter's crackdown

Normal people do not browse Facebook, anyway.
Notable quotes:
"... "misleading users." ..."
"... Journalist Glenn Greenwald hit out at those on the left who cheered Facebook and Twitter's coordinated 'deplatforming' of right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in August. "Those who demanded Facebook & other Silicon Valley giants censor political content...are finding that content that they themselves support & like end up being repressed," he wrote. "That's what has happened to every censorship advocate in history." ..."
"... "a wider war on dissident narratives in online media." ..."
"... "eyes and ears" ..."
Oct 12, 2018 | www.rt.com

Alternative voices online are incensed after Facebook and Twitter closed down hundreds of political media pages ahead of November's crucial midterm elections. Facebook says they broke its spam rules, they say it's censorship. Some 800 pages spanning the political spectrum, from left-leaning organizations like The Anti Media, to flag-waving opinion sites like Right Wing News and Nation in Distress, were shut down. Other pages banned include those belonging to police brutality watchdog groups Filming Cops and Policing the Police.

Even RT America's Rachel Blevins found her own page banned for posts that were allegedly "misleading users."

Journalist Glenn Greenwald hit out at those on the left who cheered Facebook and Twitter's coordinated 'deplatforming' of right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in August. "Those who demanded Facebook & other Silicon Valley giants censor political content...are finding that content that they themselves support & like end up being repressed," he wrote. "That's what has happened to every censorship advocate in history."

In America, Conservatives were the first to complain about unfair treatment by left-leaning Silicon Valley tech giants. However, leftist sites have increasingly become targets in what Blumenthal calls "a wider war on dissident narratives in online media." In identifying enemies in this "war," Facebook has partnered up with the Digital Forensics Lab, an offshoot of NATO-sponsored think tank the Atlantic Council. The DFL has promised to be Facebook's "eyes and ears" in the fight against disinformation (read: alternative viewpoints).

[Oct 12, 2018] The Shaky Case That Russia Manipulated Social Media to Tip the 2016 Election by Gareth Porter

Russians under each Facebook account
Oct 12, 2018 | original.antiwar.com
adopted false US personas online to get people to attend rallies and conduct other political activities. (An alternative explanation is that IRA is a purely commercial, and not political, operation.)

Whether those efforts even came close to swaying US voters in the 2016 presidential election, as Shane and Mazzetti claimed, is another matter.

Shane and Mazzetti might argue that they are merely citing figures published by the social media giants Facebook and Twitter, but they systematically failed to report the detailed explanations behind the gross figures used in each case, which falsified their significance.

Their most dramatic assertions came in reporting the alleged results of the IRA's efforts on Facebook. "Even by the vertiginous standards of social media," they wrote, "the reach of their effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook alone."

Then, to dramatize that "eventual audience" figure, they observed, "That was not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016 presidential elections."

But as impressive as these figures may appear at first glance, they don't really indicate an effective attack on the US election process at all. In fact, without deeper inquiry into their meaning, those figures were grossly misleading.

A Theoretical Possibility

What Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch actually said in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last October was quite different from what the Times reporters claimed. "Our best estimate is that approximately 126,000 million people may have been served one of these [IRA-generated] stories at some time during the two year period," Stretch said.

Stretch was expressing a theoretical possibility rather than an established accomplishment. Facebook was saying that it estimated 126 million Facebook members might have gotten at least one story from the IRA –- not over the ten week election period but over 194 weeks during the two years 2015 through 2017. That, figure, in turn, was based on the estimate that 29 million people might have gotten at least one story in their Facebook feed over that same two-year period and on the assumption that they shared it with others at a particular rate.

The first problem with citing those figures as evidence of impact on the 2016 election is that Facebook did not claim that all or even most of those 80,000 IRA posts were election–related. It offered no data on what proportion of the feeds to those 29 million people was, in fact, election-related. But Stretch did testify that IRA content over that two–year period represented just four thousandths (.0004) of the total content of Facebook newsfeeds.

Thus each piece of IRA content in a twitter feed was engulfed in 23,000 pieces of non-IRA content.

That is an extremely important finding, because, as Facebook's Vice President for News Feed, Adam Moseri, acknowledged in 2016 , Facebook subscribers actually read only about 10 percent of the stories Facebook puts in their News Feed every day. The means that very few of the IRA stories that actually make it into a subscriber's news feed on any given day are actually read.

Facebook did conduct research on what it calls "civic engagement" during the election period, and the researchers concluded that the "reach" of the content shared by what they called "fake amplifiers" was "marginal compared to the volume of civic content shared during the US elections." That reach, they said, was "statistically very small" in relation to "overall engagement on political issues."

Shane and Mazzaetti thus failed to report any of the several significant caveats and disclaimers from Facebook itself that make their claim that Russian election propaganda "reached" 126 million Americans extremely misleading.

Tiny IRA Twitter Footprint

Shane and Mazzetti's treatment of the role of Twitter in the alleged Russian involvement in the election focuses on 3,814 Twitter accounts said to be associated with the IRA, which supposedly "interacted with 1.4 million Americans." Although that number looks impressive without any further explanation, more disaggregated data provide a different picture: more than 90 percent of the Tweets from the IRA had nothing to do with the election, and those that did were infinitesimally few in relation to the entire Twitter stream relating to the 2016 campaign.

Twitter's own figures show that those 3,814 IRA-linked accounts posted 175,993 Tweets during the ten weeks of the election campaign, but that only 8.4 percent of the total number of IRA-generated Tweets were election-related.

Twitter estimated that those 15,000 IRA-related tweets represented less than .00008 (eight one hundred thousandths) of the estimated total of 189 million tweets that Twitter identified as election-related during the ten-week election campaign. Twitter has offered no estimate of how many Tweets, on average were in the daily twitter stream of those people notified by Twitter and what percentage of them were election-related Tweets from the IRA. Any such notification would certainly show, however, that the percentage was extremely small and that very few would have been read.

Research by Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren of Clemson University on 2.9 million Tweets from those same 3,814 IRA accounts over a two year period has revealed that nearly a third of its Tweets had normal commercial content or were not in English; another third were straight local newsfeeds from US localities or mostly non-political "hashtag games", and the final third were on "right" or "left" populist themes in US society.

Furthermore, there were more IRA Tweets on political themes in 2017 than there had been during the election year. As a graph of those tweets over time shows, those "right" and "left" Tweets peaked not during the election but during the summer of 2017.

The Mysterious 50,000 'Russia-Linked' Accounts

Twitter also determined that another 50,258 automated Twitter accounts that tweeted about the election were associated with Russia and that they have generated a total to 2.1 million Tweets – about one percent of the total number election-related tweets of during the period.

But despite media coverage of those Tweets suggesting that they originated with the Russian government, the evidence doesn't indicate that at all. Twitter's Sean Edgett told the Senate Intelligence Committee last November that Twitter had used an "expansive approach to defining what qualifies as a Russian-linked account". Twitter considered an account to be "Russian" if any of the following was found: it was created in Russia or if the user registered the account with a Russian phone carrier or a Russian email; the user's display name contains Cyrillic characters; the user frequently Tweets in Russian, or the user has logged in from any Russian IP address.

Edgett admitted in a statement in January, however, that there were limitations on its ability to determine the origins of the users of these accounts. And a past log-in from a Russian IP address does not mean the Russian government controls an account. Automated accounts have bought and sold for many years on a huge market, some of which is located in Russia. As Scott Shane reported in September 2017, a Russian website BuyAccs.com offers tens and even hundreds of thousands of Twitter accounts for bulk purchase.

Twitter also observed that "a high concentration of automated engagement and content originated from data centers and users accessing Twitter via Virtual Private Networks ("VPNs") and proxy servers," which served to mask the geographical origin of the tweet. And that practice was not limited to the 50,000 accounts in question. Twitter found that locations of nearly 12 percent of the Tweets generated during the election period were masked because of use of such networks and servers.

Twitter identified over half of the Tweets, coming from about half of the 50,000 accounts as being automated, and the data reported on activity on those 50,000 accounts in question indicates that both the Trump and Clinton campaigns were using the automated accounts in question. The roughly 23,000 automated accounts were the source of 1.34 million Tweets, which represented .63 percent of the total election-related Tweets. But the entire 50,000 accounts produced about 1 percent of total election-related tweets.

Hillary Clinton got .55 percent of her total retweets from the 50,000 automated accounts Twitter calls "Russia-linked" and .62 percent of her "likes" from them. Those percentages are close to the percentage of total election-related Tweets generated by those same automated accounts. That suggests that her campaign had roughly the same proportion of automated accounts among the 50,000 accounts as it did in the rest of the accounts during the campaign.

Trump, on the other hand, got 1.8 percent of this total "likes" and 4.25 percent of his total Retweets for the whole election period from those accounts, indicating his campaign was more invested in the automated accounts that were the source of two-thirds of the Tweets in those 50,000 "Russia-linked" accounts.

The idea promoted by Shane and Mazzetti that the Russian government seriously threatened to determine the winner of the election does not hold up when the larger social media context is examined more closely. Contrary to what the Times' reporters and the corporate media in general would have us believe, the Russian private sector effort accounted for a minuscule proportion of the election-related output of social media. The threat to the US political system in general and its electoral system in particular is not Russian influence; it's in part a mainstream news media that has lost perspective on the truth.

Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book is Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare . He can be contacted at [email protected] . Reprinted from Consortium News with the author's permission.

[Oct 12, 2018] Sic Semper Tyrannis RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 11 OCTOBER 2018 by Patrick Armstrong

Notable quotes:
"... its russia and chinas job to assist america to reach the acceptance stage as peacefully as possible while allowing as much face saving as possible for washington and their ruling class. at the end of the day everyone wants to go on living. the next 15 years ought to be quite exciting. ..."
Oct 12, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

SKRIPALMANIA. Has now been completely outsourced to Bellingcat . Which tells the discerning observer two things: 1) there is no evidence 2) the truth is probably the opposite. (And for those of you who take Bellingcat seriously: become discerning .)


Araminta Smade , 16 hours ago

SKRIPALMANIA. Has now been completely outsourced to Bellingcat. Which tells the discerning observer two things: 1) there is no evidence 2) the truth is probably the opposite. (And for those of you who take Bellingcat seriously: become discerning.)

To those of you who are like myself deeply sceptical about this story can I recommend this article in the UK Independent newspaper.

We should be asking for answers about the Skripals and Bellingcat – and not just from Russia. Mary Dejevsky.

https://www.independent.co....

Snow Flake -> Araminta Smade , 5 hours ago
It has transatlantic connections.

Higgins has entered the polite academic space both in the Uk and the US in lightening speed. And as a result of that got special attention by media. Not only that, but in the US he additionally joined an important cog of the EU-US think thank world. The Atlantic Council made him a non-resident "Senior Fellow". As expert in digital forensics, open source and the future of Europe.

When the huge open source "gold rush" caught my attention in the early post 9/11 years, all the excited members I witnessed more close up were quite system conform. That was after the Iraq war intelligence expertise. That's why it made me wonder. Thus,the story of Eliot Higgins seems no outlier from my rather limited perspective.

And yes, I am with Paul Robinson, who a while ago noticed the same contradictions as Mary Dejevsky. On one hand the Russians seem to be omnipotent, on the other they have all these bungling secret service members that are so easy to out. But notice not by a bunch of laymen, but by a crowd led by a serious senior expert and academic. ;)

Peddling Certainty:

https://irrussianality.word...

Snow Flake -> Araminta Smade , 5 hours ago
It has transatlantic connections.

Higgins has entered the polite academic space both in the Uk and the US in lightening speed. And as a result of that got special attention by media. Not only that, but in the US he additionally joined an important cog of the EU-US think thank world. The Atlantic Council made him a non-resident "Senior Fellow". As expert in digital forensics, open source and the future of Europe.

When the huge open source "gold rush" caught my attention in the early post 9/11 years, all the excited members I witnessed more close up were quite system conform. That was after the Iraq war intelligence expertise. That's why it made me wonder. Thus,the story of Eliot Higgins seems no outlier from my rather limited perspective.

And yes, I am with Paul Robinson, who a while ago noticed the same contradictions as Mary Dejevsky. On one hand the Russians seem to be omnipotent, on the other they have all these bungling secret service members that are so easy to out. But notice not by a bunch of laymen, but by a crowd led by a serious senior expert and academic. ;)

Peddling Certainty:

https://irrussianality.word...

FB -> Snow Flake , an hour ago
I think some people here are actually taking Eliott Higgins far too seriously...he is still an uneducated underwear salesman...and acts like it...case in point his recent twitter outburst at Ted Postol, calling him an 'idiot'...that just shows what a substance free clown this guy is...

I briefly looked at that blog article linked to by snowflake and it is basically verbal diarrhea...bottom line is that Higgins and that Bellincat 'outfit' are best simply ignored...not worth the time or mental bandwidth to even think about...

smoothieX12 . -> Snow Flake , 2 hours ago
Atlantic Council has a very great Ph.D consultant, and strategists' strategist and tacticians' tactician, Dr. Blank. He, of all places, taught in US Army War College. He taught, of course, about Russia, since he has Ph.D in Soviet/Russian "history" or whatever passes as such in US "Russian Studies" field.

http://www.wikistrat.com/ex...

His strategic concepts are so devoid of even basic high school level knowledge of Russia (and her geography, BTW) that one is forced to ask how is it even possible to have this kind of "experts"? Among many outlandish ideas Dr. Blank proposed in his academic career dedicated to fighting evil Russians was to send US Navy to the Azov Sea to demonstrate the US Naval might.

http://www.atlanticcouncil....

This was one of the most profound facepalm moments of my life--I mean it. Not only Dr. Blank has no clue about Russia, he also has no clue about US Navy. Yet, he is an expert, alright.

TTG , 19 hours ago
You left the best part out of that State Department policy statement. He announced a new position, the Senior Advisor for Russian Malign Activities and Trends or SARMAT for short. That's straight out of the axis of evil mindset. How can we have a sober and productive policy towards Russia with crap like this?
PRC90 -> TTG , 8 hours ago
I thought that was from Duffleblog but you're right: https://www.state.gov/p/eur...
Third para from the bottom. Part of that $380 million must be Bellingcat's budget.
Timothy Hagios -> TTG , 9 hours ago
I can't wait to see what awful person is selected for this role. Also, Sarmat is also the name for Russia's newest ICBM, which makes one wonder what was on the back of their minds when they came up with this one.
ted richard , 4 hours ago
washingtons foreign policy visa vie russia and china is as yet unable to reach the psychological stage of sublimation. frustrated, angry and demoralised that they can not militarily atttack russia once and for all putting paid ....to who is the biggest dog in the yard...... american elites lash out ineffectually using various media, economic and financial games to assuage their inability to get their way.

each iteration of this plan becomes weaker and less effective than the previous one leading to more rage at being thwarted.

where the current crop of american ruling elites are concerned we are talking about 2 factors.... a profound lack of a really good cosmopolitan education and a near total lack of appreciation for how weak the american industrial base has become the past 30 years (you can not intimidate powerful nations if your military technology is 1 or more generations BEHIND)

an apt understanding of washingtons dilemma is best grasped reading the kubler-ross stages of grieving over a dying loved one. in this case the dying loved one is american exceptionalism and the l godlike power that goes with it for the 1/100 or 1%.

its russia and chinas job to assist america to reach the acceptance stage as peacefully as possible while allowing as much face saving as possible for washington and their ruling class. at the end of the day everyone wants to go on living. the next 15 years ought to be quite exciting.

[Oct 12, 2018] The Boy Who Cried "Bear!!": a Norwegian Folk Tale

Notable quotes:
"... Remember that back in 2002 it was discovered that the US bugged the 767 of then Chinese Premier Jian Xiao-Ping. ..."
Oct 12, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al October 4, 2018 at 9:06 am

The OPCW, like the Council of Europe, the OSCE, WADA and others have become deeply partizan and anti-Russian organizations since the 1990s. A handful of members put out a 'report' on whatever and claim that they have 'evidence' which they should be trusted on rather than provide. The rest of them go along with it. The only reason that makes sense for the attempted 'hack' on the OPCW is that Russia is being denied access to information. The argument, like everything else bullshit from the West is ' You don't show the evidence to the arsonist ' , sic MH17 because it has already been judged and found guilty.

So far WADA had to row back because of the Schimdt Report (which the media of course did not report) and all the reinstated athletes, Russia has suspended payments and may well pull out of the CoE because is it sick and tired of being bombarded with bs at every meeting as if medieval Bear baiting has returned in a modern form (it has).

All these organizations are destroying themselves. If anything all this shows how weak the West's soft power has become that they need to throw everything including the kitchen sink at Russia. They don't like resistance, let alone pushback. They're more careful about China of course and as we saw recently in the South Pacific the Chinese simply won't be cowed or intimidated.

As for the allegations about China, we'll most of us have followed the Snowden revelations about the USA and its Five Eyes global surveillance and infiltration, so its no surprise that China has been running its own operations. It's what countries do, though apparently they're not supposed to. Remember that back in 2002 it was discovered that the US bugged the 767 of then Chinese Premier Jian Xiao-Ping. * I think that all this reporting is a sign of desperation by the powers that be because all else has failed so far and they need to keep the narrative going.

By wrapping it all up together with a pretty pink bow it is to make it ' undeniable ' in the eyes of people who should know better.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1382116/China-finds-spy-bugs-in-Jiangs-Boeing-jet.html

et Al October 4, 2018 at 9:13 am
The temptation by Russia will be to publicly burn western spies in Russia, but it is just another in a long line of provocations to get Russia to respond angrily and make a big mistake. I can imagine RT being banned and other measures if things start to spiral.

This whole G(R)U story was ready to go at an appropriate moment, and I suspect one of the factors was Putin's recent comments about Skripal that had captured the world media's ear. By piling their report on shortly afterwards, they hope to hijack and amplify their narrative.

But, it's words, not meaningful actions. Either they will try and use this to kick off a whole new level of sanctions that they haven't before (high value, sensitive stuff like aerospace, tech etc.). It is possible the timing of this is a last ditch effort to try and get U-rope on board to stop NordSteam II or anything they think they can squeeze through. It's weakness through desperation and also to divert from their failures elsewhere.

et Al October 5, 2018 at 6:26 am
Or burn western spies in other countries that are far less friendly

It is interesting that one of the groups doxxing Russian 'spies' claim to be volunteers and patriots. No-one believes that in the slightest apart from morons. Like BellEnd cat, the number of cut-outs/plausible denial groups has mushroomed and ebb and flow with need. The volunteer claim is no protection.

James lake October 4, 2018 at 7:45 am
This all seems to coordinated distractions from domestic politics in the UK and the USA

Why are th Dutch going along with this nonsense?

kirill October 4, 2018 at 7:51 am
How can you ask such a question. Holland is a US vassal and the US uses its vassals to give its actions legitimacy by claiming that there is an "international" reaction to "Russian aggression". This is why the US always attacks countries around the world as part of some BS coalition of its own vassals. It is claiming its aggression is actually justified international action.
et Al October 4, 2018 at 8:48 am
The Dutch recently signed a big order to have 28 of their AH-64D Apache's 'upgraded' to the 'E' model which is really a re-manufactue and upgrade (from sand and heavy use in helping the US bomb tribesmen far away), & their Patriots to be modernized too.
moscowexile October 4, 2018 at 8:33 am
Because the so called chemical weapons watchdog, which the British government has recently made judge, jury and exucationer as regards all incidences of alleged uses of chemical agents as a weapon, namely it can now accuse and condemn whom it thinks are perpetrators of such chemical attacks, is based in The Hague, where the wicked Russians have allegedly been hacking etc. and, in general, up to their vile and nefarious deeds, as is, of course, in their nature of doing things, because they are vile barbarians, subhuman even
Moscow Exile October 4, 2018 at 9:51 am
I forget where I picked the following up ( from some Russian blog, because it is a translation). I saved it but forget to put in the source:

September 14, 2018
THE DUBIOUS ROLE OF THE OPCW
(OPCW NEVER uses the word "Novichok")
Even those people who are skeptical about what the British government says (and rightly so) tend to accept the „Novichok"-Psyop after they read that "OPCW confirms Novichok nerve agent in Amesbury". But if you actually read what the (summary) of the OPCW says, you will find the following:

"The team requested and received vials of biomedical samples COLLECTED BY THE BRITISH AUTHORITIES for delivery to the OPCW laboratory and subsequent analysis by OPCW designated laboratories for purposes of comparison and in order to verify the analysis conducted by the United Kingdom. (S 1671, Paragraph 6.)

This VIOLATES THEIR OWN RULES about ensuring a forensic "chain of custody" because they did not take bio-samples THEMSELVES but accepted the (2nd-hand) material that the 'authorities" had given them.

Regarding the "Premier Jour" perfume-story the OPCW has this to say:

"During the second deployment [6 weeks after Sturgess fell ill] the team collected a sample of the contents of a small bottle that the police had seized as a suspect item from the house of Charles Rowley in Amesbury" (P. 9)

In paragraph 10 they confirm that the results of the subsequent analysis "show that the sample consists of a toxic chemical at a concentration of 97-98% therefore considered to be "of high purity". (If Charly had got this on his skin he would not have survived )

Again, the chain of custody is non-existent: The OPCW did NOT collect the glass-vial in Rowley's flat, and could not verify its condition at the end of June, but they accepted what "the authorities" had told them about it and examined a sample of its content. There was plenty of time to tamper with the bottle before the OPCW arrived in Salisbury (so malfeasance cannot be ruled out).

(BTW, Sometimes you don't see the wood for the trees: WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND would transport a deadly nerve-agent in a GLASS-BOTTLE??????)

Again they accepted material from the British authorities (as if they were incapable of any deception )
What former (Iraq) weapons-inspector Scott Ritter wrote about the OPCW „fact-finding" mission in Syria is also to a certain extent relevant in the Skripal-Saga:

"The problem, however, is that the OPCW is in no position to make the claim it did. One of the essential aspects of the kind of forensic investigation carried out by organizations such as the OPCW -- namely the application of scientific methods and techniques to the investigation of a crime -- is the concept of "chain of custody" of any samples that are being evaluated. This requires a seamless transition from the collection of the samples in question, the process of which must be recorded and witnessed, the sealing of the samples, the documentation of the samples, the escorted transportation of the samples to the laboratory, the confirmation and breaking of the seals under supervision, and the subsequent processing of the samples, all under supervision of the OPCW. Anything less than this means the integrity of the sample has been compromised -- in short, there is no sample."
(Article: Ex-weapons-inspector: Trump's Sarin Claims built on „Lie" by Scott Ritter)

Here, Ritter was referring the fact that the OPCW was not able to actually visit the (terrorist-controlled) "crime-scene" in Khan Sheikhoun but instead went to Turkey (!) where they accepted testimonies and material given to them by the White Helmets and other artificial "NGOs" ("highly likely" paid and organized by MI6, DGSE and the CIA). There they were able to observe autopsies of the 3 alleged victims of the poison-gas attack.

"An NGO had delivered the bodies to the hospitals, though OPCW will not publicly comment on the identity of the NGO. Samples from the bodies were provided to two separate laboratories, which independently confirmed indications of sarin or sarin-like substances.

In criminal proceedings, though, which are similar to the process followed by the UN in determining a war crime, it is a fundamental principle that ALL EVIDENCE be under the control of investigators AT ALL TIMES. That didn't happen in this case."

By the way, the OPCW-FFM in Syria (regarding the Douma-incident) was led by two BRITISH "experts":
The work of the fact finding mission [FFM] was criticized by the Russian Permanent Representative to the OPCW who complained on 14 April 2017 that:

"Under the mandate defined for [the FFM], its membership should be approved by the Syrian government, and it should be balanced. For some time, these provisions were observed somewhat, but then the mission was split into two groups. One [Team Bravo], led by Steven Wallis from Britain, works in contact with the Syrian government, while the other one [Team Alpha], headed by his fellow countryman Leonard Phillips, deals with the claims filed by the Syrian armed opposition. THIS LATTER GROUP IS WORKING COMPLETELY NON-TRANSPARENTLY. ITS MEMBERSHIP IS CLASSIFIED, AND NO ONE KNOWS WHERE IT GOES OR HOW IT OPERATES. They are allegedly using the same methodology as Steven Wallis' group, but they are clearly working mostly remotely, relying on the internet and the fabrications provided by Syrian opposition NGOs, and never go to Syria. At least, we are not aware of a single such trip".

But the unspeakable "journalists" of the MSM (and RT is not much better the interview with the suspects is a joke ) do not bother with such complicated details. They just write "OPCW confirms use of Sarin" in Khan Sheikhoun (and "Novichok" in Salisbury) and ignore all contradicting evidence and the MOTIVE the UK gov has for demonizing Russia (spoiling their dirty game in Syria and "Sykes-Picot №2") so one can only agree with this comment:

"Professional journalism is now a wasteland. There is no public exposure of what we all know has happened and the threat it represents to us all . They have been disloyal to us, so we owe them no respect in return".

And finally – on the implied higher "morality" of UK politics:

The ECJ has just recently found that the UK's mass surveillance programmes, revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, did "not meet the 'quality of law' requirement" and were "incapable of limiting 'interference' to what is 'necessary in a democratic society'"'.(P.387 of the judgement: Case of Big Brother Watch & others vs .UK)

Mark Chapman October 4, 2018 at 11:51 am
The British evidently thought also about the lunacy of transporting a nerve agent in sufficient quantity to kill dozens if not hundreds in a glass bottle; that's why Hamish de Beegee chimed in with his article about how the FSB and the Kremlin had invested months of work and thousands of pounds developing a ceramic bottle which looked just like the real thing, but which you could stand a Volkswagen on top of. That's why I pointed out that they had already used the excuse that it broke to establish how Rowley was exposed.
Jen October 4, 2018 at 2:49 pm
I suspect The Netherlands are being targeted because among other things the International Court of Crimes and the International Court of Justice are based in The Hague. There may be other reasons as well: the Dutch must have a fair few skeletons in their collective closet and the US could very well target one of these and bring the entire wardrobe crashing down and exposing all its sordid secrets. One of these bone-shakers is that The Netherlands is a major corporate tax haven and as such competes with Britain and the US.
http://www.nomoretax.eu/netherlands-tax-haven/

[Oct 12, 2018] OPSW VIOLATES THEIR OWN RULES about ensuring a forensic "chain of custody" because they did not take bio-samples THEMSELVES but accepted the (2nd-hand) material that the 'authorities" had given them.

Oct 12, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile October 4, 2018 at 9:51 am

I forget where I picked the following up ( from some Russian blog, because it is a translation). I saved it but forget to put in the source:

September 14, 2018
THE DUBIOUS ROLE OF THE OPCW
(OPCW NEVER uses the word "Novichok")
Even those people who are skeptical about what the British government says (and rightly so) tend to accept the „Novichok"-Psyop after they read that "OPCW confirms Novichok nerve agent in Amesbury". But if you actually read what the (summary) of the OPCW says, you will find the following:

"The team requested and received vials of biomedical samples COLLECTED BY THE BRITISH AUTHORITIES for delivery to the OPCW laboratory and subsequent analysis by OPCW designated laboratories for purposes of comparison and in order to verify the analysis conducted by the United Kingdom. (S 1671, Paragraph 6.)

This VIOLATES THEIR OWN RULES about ensuring a forensic "chain of custody" because they did not take bio-samples THEMSELVES but accepted the (2nd-hand) material that the 'authorities" had given them.

Regarding the "Premier Jour" perfume-story the OPCW has this to say:

"During the second deployment [6 weeks after Sturgess fell ill] the team collected a sample of the contents of a small bottle that the police had seized as a suspect item from the house of Charles Rowley in Amesbury" (P. 9)

In paragraph 10 they confirm that the results of the subsequent analysis "show that the sample consists of a toxic chemical at a concentration of 97-98% therefore considered to be "of high purity". (If Charly had got this on his skin he would not have survived )

Again, the chain of custody is non-existent: The OPCW did NOT collect the glass-vial in Rowley's flat, and could not verify its condition at the end of June, but they accepted what "the authorities" had told them about it and examined a sample of its content. There was plenty of time to tamper with the bottle before the OPCW arrived in Salisbury (so malfeasance cannot be ruled out).

(BTW, Sometimes you don't see the wood for the trees: WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND would transport a deadly nerve-agent in a GLASS-BOTTLE??????)

Again they accepted material from the British authorities (as if they were incapable of any deception )
What former (Iraq) weapons-inspector Scott Ritter wrote about the OPCW „fact-finding" mission in Syria is also to a certain extent relevant in the Skripal-Saga:

"The problem, however, is that the OPCW is in no position to make the claim it did. One of the essential aspects of the kind of forensic investigation carried out by organizations such as the OPCW -- namely the application of scientific methods and techniques to the investigation of a crime -- is the concept of "chain of custody" of any samples that are being evaluated. This requires a seamless transition from the collection of the samples in question, the process of which must be recorded and witnessed, the sealing of the samples, the documentation of the samples, the escorted transportation of the samples to the laboratory, the confirmation and breaking of the seals under supervision, and the subsequent processing of the samples, all under supervision of the OPCW. Anything less than this means the integrity of the sample has been compromised -- in short, there is no sample."
(Article: Ex-weapons-inspector: Trump's Sarin Claims built on „Lie" by Scott Ritter)

Here, Ritter was referring the fact that the OPCW was not able to actually visit the (terrorist-controlled) "crime-scene" in Khan Sheikhoun but instead went to Turkey (!) where they accepted testimonies and material given to them by the White Helmets and other artificial "NGOs" ("highly likely" paid and organized by MI6, DGSE and the CIA). There they were able to observe autopsies of the 3 alleged victims of the poison-gas attack.

"An NGO had delivered the bodies to the hospitals, though OPCW will not publicly comment on the identity of the NGO. Samples from the bodies were provided to two separate laboratories, which independently confirmed indications of sarin or sarin-like substances.

In criminal proceedings, though, which are similar to the process followed by the UN in determining a war crime, it is a fundamental principle that ALL EVIDENCE be under the control of investigators AT ALL TIMES. That didn't happen in this case."

By the way, the OPCW-FFM in Syria (regarding the Douma-incident) was led by two BRITISH "experts":
The work of the fact finding mission [FFM] was criticized by the Russian Permanent Representative to the OPCW who complained on 14 April 2017 that:

"Under the mandate defined for [the FFM], its membership should be approved by the Syrian government, and it should be balanced. For some time, these provisions were observed somewhat, but then the mission was split into two groups. One [Team Bravo], led by Steven Wallis from Britain, works in contact with the Syrian government, while the other one [Team Alpha], headed by his fellow countryman Leonard Phillips, deals with the claims filed by the Syrian armed opposition. THIS LATTER GROUP IS WORKING COMPLETELY NON-TRANSPARENTLY. ITS MEMBERSHIP IS CLASSIFIED, AND NO ONE KNOWS WHERE IT GOES OR HOW IT OPERATES. They are allegedly using the same methodology as Steven Wallis' group, but they are clearly working mostly remotely, relying on the internet and the fabrications provided by Syrian opposition NGOs, and never go to Syria. At least, we are not aware of a single such trip".

But the unspeakable "journalists" of the MSM (and RT is not much better the interview with the suspects is a joke ) do not bother with such complicated details. They just write "OPCW confirms use of Sarin" in Khan Sheikhoun (and "Novichok" in Salisbury) and ignore all contradicting evidence and the MOTIVE the UK gov has for demonizing Russia (spoiling their dirty game in Syria and "Sykes-Picot №2") so one can only agree with this comment:

"Professional journalism is now a wasteland. There is no public exposure of what we all know has happened and the threat it represents to us all . They have been disloyal to us, so we owe them no respect in return".

And finally – on the implied higher "morality" of UK politics:

The ECJ has just recently found that the UK's mass surveillance programmes, revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, did "not meet the 'quality of law' requirement" and were "incapable of limiting 'interference' to what is 'necessary in a democratic society'"'.(P.387 of the judgement: Case of Big Brother Watch & others vs .UK)

Mark Chapman October 4, 2018 at 11:51 am
The British evidently thought also about the lunacy of transporting a nerve agent in sufficient quantity to kill dozens if not hundreds in a glass bottle; that's why Hamish de Beegee chimed in with his article about how the FSB and the Kremlin had invested months of work and thousands of pounds developing a ceramic bottle which looked just like the real thing, but which you could stand a Volkswagen on top of. That's why I pointed out that they had already used the excuse that it broke to establish how Rowley was exposed.
Aule Valar October 4, 2018 at 10:55 am
US forces out head of OPCW: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/23/world/us-forces-out-head-of-chemical-arms-agency.html

That's an actual title in NYT, they are not even hiding.

Step 1: give OPCW expanded powers
Step 2: install a US-friendly head of agency
Step 3: we shall see.

Mark Chapman October 4, 2018 at 11:56 am
Explosive. Nobody but Americans can be trusted to run international institutions, especially when they are bought and paid for by the USA. Hey, that'd be a good job for Travis Tygart. He has been chafing lately about the limits of his power to get at Russia from USADA.

The pace of events seems to be taking on momentum, as if it is leading up to something, and there's that kind of stillness in the air, while sounds seem far away and tinny, like just before a big storm breaks.

et Al October 4, 2018 at 12:38 pm
They're going for broke. Trans: going until it is broken.
Aule Valar October 4, 2018 at 3:36 pm
I must apologize for not noticing that the article is from 2002. Sorry.

Still, it does show how much more pull US has in those supposedly indpendent agencies than everyone else.

Mark Chapman October 4, 2018 at 10:41 pm
I didn't notice either. It felt so current, considering the ongoing situation.

[Oct 12, 2018] Jeez, those NATo propagandists are tough!

Oct 12, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile October 10, 2018 at 5:59 am

Reporting it like it is

Alexander Mishkin, the second man accused of involvement in the Skripal assassination plot, was likely to have been sent on the mission because he was a trained doctor capable of providing an antidote in case the novichok attack went wrong, according to security sources.

Dr Mishkin, like the GRU colleague who travelled with him to Salisbury, was made a 'Hero of the Russian Federation' with Vladimir Putin personally presenting him with the award, according to the investigative website Bellingcat.

Second Skripal suspect likely sent to Salisbury to administer novichok antidote, security sources say
'We know that novichok exposure needs immediate antidote so it makes eminent sense to have a military doctor, who is also a trained GRU operative, who can play his part in the operation'

Mark Chapman October 10, 2018 at 8:36 am
The 'antidote' to nerve-agent exposure is atropine, which is broadly marketed to world defense forces in an auto-injector. Your medical expertise in dispensing it is to remove the protective cap, and strike it against your thigh in the muscle, point-first – the internal spring does the rest, right through your clothing. We used to practice it regularly in NBCD training, except the fluid in training injectors is just water. Some crybaby pointed out the needle might pick up a fragment of cloth on its way in, and cause an infection, so we stopped doing it with real needles, and now you just get a thump against your leg from the spring.

https://chemm.nlm.nih.gov/antidote_nerveagents.htm

Military forces are also trained to administer atropine to stricken comrades who were overcome before they could react. Just be sure to give him his own atropine and not yours, and push the needle through his pocket-flap afterward and then bend it over, so that anyone happening on the scene after you have left will know he has already been given atropine and not administer another dose. Atropine overdose causes its own set of problems.

I think it's pretty clear that it does not 'make eminent sense' to have a 'qualified military doctor along in case something went wrong with the Novichok', since anyone can administer Atropine and there is an enormous worldwide base of soldiers and ex-soldiers who could do it as well as anyone else. Horseshit piled on top of horseshit.

kirill October 10, 2018 at 8:23 pm
For some bizarre reason this UK fairy tale requires many Russians. One isn't enough to smear some alleged top secret nerve agent on a door knob (at least in one of the dozens of contradictory theories spewed by Scotland Yard). Wearing gloves (e.g. store bought nitrile ones which would stop this poison, unlike latex ones) is clearly considered too much intellectual effort for Russian untermenschen and they need a doctor to tag along. This fictional doctor claim is patently absurd. A doctor without hospital facilities is nothing but a paramedic and as you rightly describe no such person is needed to administer atropine.

The average media sap in the UK and NATzO apparently can't be bothered to do any thinking. The best assassination plot would involve only a single agent and not a handful. Even freaking video games have the lone assassin meme repeated. One agent could also have a well established cover story. A gang of assassins would essentially be evidence against itself. A whole specially designed bottle of nerve agent is ridiculous and unnecessary. And having it disposed of in a way that it can be found by some homeless junkies is simply not credible. Don't they have sewer grates in the UK?

[Oct 12, 2018] if Russia is so incompetent- why are they deemed a threat? Why is NATO beating the war drums about such a country?

Oct 12, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

James lake October 5, 2018 at 4:07 am

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/05/string-of-own-goals-by-russian-gru-spies-reveals-new-trend-of-sloppiness

The secretive, daring GRU seems to have lost its way in the age of internet search

//if Russia is so incompetent- why are they deemed a threat?
//Why is NATO beating the war drums about such a country?

Moscow Exile October 5, 2018 at 4:15 am
Because it is dangerous in its incompetence?
yalensis October 5, 2018 at 1:48 pm
There is nothing more dangerous than a monkey armed with a hand grenade(?)
kirill October 5, 2018 at 6:02 am
As pointed out elsewhere there is no such agency called the GRU. Like there is no agency called the KGB. This in itself demonstrates that NATzO is spreading pure propaganda.
Mark Chapman October 5, 2018 at 9:14 am
It's probably not sloppiness, per se; it's more that Britain has reached a new level of dazzling investigative brilliance, so that normal GRU tradecraft can no longer withstand its piercing eye.

[Oct 11, 2018] Bellingcat has passed the CIA, MI5, Scotland Yard and the FBI and never looked back.

Oct 11, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile October 8, 2018 at 7:40 pm

Bellingcat exclusive!!!!!

Second Skripal Poisoning Suspect Identified as Dr. Alexander Mishkin

Gosh!

Moscow Exile October 8, 2018 at 7:41 pm
Bum link again!

Second Skripal Poisoning Suspect Identified as Dr. Alexander Mishkin

Mark Chapman October 8, 2018 at 8:02 pm
Where would we be without solid, honest citizen journalism like this? Bellingcat has passed the CIA, MI5, Scotland Yard and the FBI and never looked back. In fact, we have not heard Peep One from any of them since Bellingcat burst on the scene, and the British press goes straight to print from its reports, to hell with waiting for informed comment from the intelligence services or law enforcement.

Come to think about it, what are their countries paying them for?

Cortes October 8, 2018 at 11:15 pm
I'm looking forward to the first Bellingcat spin-offs.

Eliot Higgins – Special Invesigator featuring Tom Cruise and introducing Sparky his lovable mongrel dog which miraculously survived the Salisbury Novichok Massacre and can sniff out GRU agents a mile away.

Jen October 9, 2018 at 8:35 pm
How Sparky the lovable mongrel dog survived the Salisbury Novichok Massacre:

https://avatars.mds.yandex.net/get-pdb/881477/505e84f8-9835-4ab0-9a12-1d7ea375c032/orig

His weaknesses are sniffing power pylons and swallowing batteries.

Cortes October 9, 2018 at 11:41 pm
Excellent!
Moscow Exile October 9, 2018 at 3:08 am
And following temporary employment reviewing orders at a Leicester UK women's underwear manufacturer, the unemployed Higgins then "dispensed with looking for another job so that he could devote himself to blogging full-time" and has now pogressed to being a senior fellow in the "Digital Forensic Research Laboratory" and the "Future Europe Initiative", projects run by the Washington, D.C based "think tank" the "Atlantic Council".


Higgins hard at work researching

A "kept man"? His wife must bring home the bacon then.

Well, she would if she were not a Turk.

The then 32-year-old Higgins started blogging about the civil war in Syria from his home as Brown Moses: "He had no formal intelligence training or security clearance that gave him access to classified documents. He could not speak or read Arabic. He had never set foot in the Middle East, unless you count the time he changed planes in Dubai en route to Manila, or his trip to visit his in-laws in Turkey".

As far as I am aware, he still has no credentials for his chosen field, albeit he is now a "fellow" of this and that. He has also since bursting into the bloggosphere considerably put on weight:

Higgins belongs to an obsessive coterie of self-appointed military intelligence experts who use social media to piece together critical details of faraway conflicts, often well ahead of seasoned professionals. Frequently self-taught and operating far outside the military-industrial complex, these amateur analysts have honed a novel set of sleuthing skills that fuse old-fashioned detective work with new sources of intelligence generated by cell phone cameras and spread by social networks. Syria's war, widely considered the most documented conflict in history, has turned social media into a weapon of mass detection -- critical both for fighters on the ground and for faraway observers trying to make sense of the conflict.

The mind boggles: he and his fellow "amateur analysts" are often well ahead of seasoned professionals. Frequently self-taught and operating far outside the military-industrial complex !!!

See: Inside The One-Man Intelligence Unit That Exposed The Secrets And Atrocities Of Syria's War , by Bianca Boscar.

Bianca Bosker is the Executive Tech Editor of the Huffington Post.

Well who'd a-thowt!

Moscow Exile October 9, 2018 at 3:11 am
And Higgins is also an unabashed liar:

Eliot Higgins,: "I've not received funding from NED. Stop reading conspiracy websites"

Also Eliot Higgins "Bellingcat has received money from NED"

#BellingCrap #lieslieslies #UnderwearSalesman #CarpetSlippers pic.twitter.com/VvciGlaTtw

-- Emma (@emmadefano1) September 29, 2018

Mark Chapman October 9, 2018 at 3:29 pm
Once upon a time, nobody would dare to do what they are doing because of the danger of a ruinous lawsuit. But so long as he continues accusing the right people, the west will safeguard him from that as best it can. Maybe that's the way to go. They've left themselves without a retreat, saying this and that are 'confirmed'. Sue the outfit.
Jen October 8, 2018 at 9:05 pm
Bum link again? well it's Bellingcrap, what else could it be but a bum link?
Moscow Exile October 9, 2018 at 12:43 am
And now avidly reported by the British government organ, the "independent", non-Westminster-contolled BBC:

Skripal attack: Second Russian Salisbury suspect named

At least the BBC labels "Dr. Mishkin" as a "suspect"..

Moscow Exile October 9, 2018 at 1:06 am
Note how Bellingtwat states that it has "conclusively" established the real identity of Petrov on evidence gleaned from "multiple open sources" and "testimony from people familiar with the person" in question.

How do they do this?

First to the post again and well ahead of all the Western intelligence agencies, which are obviously understaffed with incompetents and not in possession of state-of-the-art means of gathering intelligence such as . errrr, Facebook?

Moscow Exile October 9, 2018 at 1:10 am

Moscow Exile October 9, 2018 at 1:41 am

I'm sick of Western European shite in general.

A few days ago, that lying old slag May appeared on stage at the Conservative Party annual conference with Abba's "Dancing Queen" playing in the bacground. May appeared to be trying to dance to the Abba hit. What a cupid old stunt!

And yesterday at an EUSSR Brussels conference, EU chief-executive and piss-artist Juncker appears to have been possibly trying to take the piss out of that old, lying bag May's gyrations:

Mark Chapman October 9, 2018 at 3:25 pm
Dear God. She gives new meaning to 'wooden', and makes Pinocchio look like he was made of quicksilver.
Mark Chapman October 9, 2018 at 3:09 am
Yes, their resources really do beat all, don't they? Able to trawl through Russians' private records at will, even those ominously marked, "Not for public release". But then, they have lots of willing helpers inside Russia, which the western intelligence agencies officially have not. Makes you wonder how Russia can miss catching them, innit, considering the intertubes are strictly controlled in Russia and all their intelligence transactions are in the public domain? I mean, with their troll farms and all their snoopy organizations?
Jen October 9, 2018 at 3:46 am
Bellingcrap could have just mentioned its sources during the course of its article instead of proclaiming that it's going to detail in another post to be supposedly published today (9 October 2018) the methodology it and The Insider Russia used and the information trail established. Perhaps a sign that Bellingcrap is starting to feel some pressure to lift its game to a level acceptable to its masters at The Atlantic Council?
kirill October 9, 2018 at 8:16 pm
I guess the belled cat thinks he's immune from some "GRU" hit. LOL.
et Al October 9, 2018 at 2:32 am
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. BellEndCat can only manage the former. Still, it's good enough for the BBC who this morning spoke to a (former?) Georgian minister who was saying that if the West was united and stopped Russia from invading Georgia in 2008, then Ukraine, Crimea, Skripals etc. wouldn't have happened, followed by BBC correspondent Norton who said that 'was about right'.
cartman October 9, 2018 at 10:14 am
Don't forget that Bellingcat is linked to the Stasi:

Forgot about this: Der Spiegel outed Bellingcat analyst as former full-time Stasi goon. https://t.co/kfB69NuQ6N

-- Yasha Levine (@yashalevine) October 9, 2018

[Oct 11, 2018] US military program could be seen as bioweapon: Using the US's own definitions that it has used to place sanctions on other countries, this is clearly a dual-use technology, i.e. civilian with military applications

Oct 11, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al October 5, 2018 at 4:18 am

crAP via Antiwar.com: Scientists: US military program could be seen as bioweapon
https://apnews.com/8ed74d87df524ab580d7fbd3b845d0c6/Scientists:-US-military-program-could-be-seen-as-bioweapon

A research arm of the U.S. military is exploring the possibility of deploying insects to make plants more resilient by altering their genes. Some experts say the work may be seen as a potential biological weapon.

In an opinion paper published Thursday in the journal Science, the authors say the U.S. needs to provide greater justification for the peace-time purpose of its Insect Allies project to avoid being perceived as hostile to other countries. Other experts expressed ethical and security concerns with the research, which seeks to transmit protective traits to crops already growing in the field .
####

The rest at the link.

Using the US's own definitions that it has used to place sanctions on other countries, this is clearly a dual-use technology, i.e. civilian with military applications (which is just about the same as any fancy satellited up in space etc.). Conclusion? The US must sanction itself!

kirill October 5, 2018 at 5:59 am
The US has been using insects as bioweapons for decades (including attacking Cuba and the USSR). The current development program is using this insect research as a cover. Its real function is to develop targeted genetic weapons designed to exterminate ethic groups. These weapons are beyond any "mass destruction" and are pure genocide devices. Anyone who thinks that this sort of research is unlikely is a retard without a clue. There is a reason why certain US companies were buying up Russian human bio-waste (e.g. amputated limbs, cadavers).

If anyone thinks that the US will care about collateral damage to neighbouring Slavic countries, then they are full on retarded as well. In 1990 Americans could not tell the difference between Ukrainians and Russians (and even Chechens). Now for purely political reasons they pretend to see every microscopic difference. The US has no love for Poland, Ukraine, or any other new Europe country. They are merely cannon fodder for its imperial ambitions. The hate that Poles and other Slavic states have for Russia is pathological. Poland is basically a German branch plant economy. Tell me why Poland should have more love for Germany than for Russia? And don't invoke communism since Russians were not privileged compared to Poles before 1991. It was, in fact, the other way around.

Mark Chapman October 5, 2018 at 9:22 am
The US is always asking to be trusted with some fearsome new capability, on the grounds that its values are a fail-safe – it is so innately good that it could never use such capabilities for evil. And it seems obsessed with modifications to achieve super-plants so that one potato will feed a family of eight, and suchlike – what's wrong with food the way nature intended it to be?

If you would decide whether a technology or process should be viewed as a threat, just imagine it was announced by Russia. The USA would scream its head off.

I can't help noticing as well that some of its changes seem geared toward not having to do anything about global warming, continuing to rely on a petroleum-dominated energy policy and so forth, by engineering a food supply that will flourish through as changing environment. If it is successful in that aim it is assured global domination, as the food supply of other countries could vanish if the country did not sign on to the US technology agenda. America would not have to threaten anyone's crops with secret-agent bugs. It could just go on as it is doing, and continue to contribute to global warming.

[Oct 11, 2018] Telegraph propaganda honchos as " "Highly likely" jerks

Oct 11, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

moscowexile

October 10, 2018 at 6:20 pm
A suspected third member of the Kremlin hit squad behind the Salisbury nerve agent attack has been named, according to a respected Russian news website.

Sergey Fedotov, 45, travelled to the UK on the same day as the two assassins already charged by British authorities – and boarded the same flight home.

The Telegraph had previously reported the existence of a third member of the Russian intelligence hit squad and a trawl of flight records by the Fontanka news agency matched it to Fedotov.

According to Fontanka, Fedotov flew to the UK on a passport whose number differs by only a few digits from those used by the two GRU military intelligence agents officially wanted for the nerve agent attack.

It is almost certain Fedotov is not the passenger's real name but an alias. No traces of Sergei Fedotov have been found in documentary databases or on social media. He has no property, vehicles or telephone numbers registered to his name in Russia, according to Fontanka.

Telegraph

No "alleged"in "Kremlin hit squad behind the Salisbury nerve agent attack but It is almost certain Fedotov is not the passenger's real name but an alias.

Highly likely indeed!

[Oct 09, 2018] The Skripals Are an MI6 Hoax - 'Not Worthy of Ladies' Detective Novels' - Israeli Expert Demolishes UK Case

Highly recommended!
Oct 09, 2018 | russia-insider.com

Very convincing. This Israeli expert blows up the UK's narrative in a few well-chosen one-liners.

"If the GRU acted, both the killers and the other participants in the operation would come to the UK on the passports of other countries that have visa-free relations with it. Here, two alleged GRU officers go to the embassy, ​​leave their fingerprints there, get a visa, stop at the hotel, pass under all the cells. This you will not find even in ladies' detective novels."

An Israeli expert on international terrorism, writer Alexander Brass, shared his view on the case of the Skripals poisoning in Salisbury. Brass draws parallels between the work of the special services of Israel and Russia – he believes that if to compare the British version with the practice of the special agents, then the absurdity becomes obvious.

"Alexander, so what, in your opinion, happened in Salisbury?"

-There was a rough provocation by the British special services. In my opinion, this is obvious.

"There's a lot of stupidity on stupidity." The story with Petrov and Boshirov does not hold up any professional peer review. According to the Brits, the Skripals were poisoned by GRU agents (this is what the department is called, although this is now the Main Directorate of the RF General Staff).

I want to explain how the special services work. If you need someone to eliminate, then this is a very serious operation, which is being prepared for a long time. A very significant material and human resource is allocated. We are talking about dozens of employees. On the territory of this state, an "advanced command post" is being created.

In the operation, a technical support group, a logistic group, a cover group, an external surveillance group and a group of performers are involved.

The performers themselves appear at the very last moment. They do not go anywhere, lighting up on cameras, do not use public transport, but move on rented cars, which they do not rent themselves. And the more they will not stop in hotels, but will live on safe houses provided by the logistics group.

Such groups do not come under the passport of their country, do not go to the embassy for obtaining a visa, leaving fingerprints. This is complete nonsense. Professionals do not work that way.

If the GRU acted, both the killers and the other participants in the operation would come to the UK on the passports of other countries that have visa-free relations with it. Here, two alleged GRU officers go to the embassy, ​​leave their fingerprints there, get a visa, stop at the hotel, pass under all the cells. This you will not find even in ladies' detective novels.

[Oct 09, 2018] US Russia Sanctions Are 'A Colossal Strategic Mistake', Putin Warns

Oct 09, 2018 | russia-insider.com

Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Washington of making a "colossal" but "typical" mistake by exploiting the dominance of the dollar by levying economic sanctions against regimes that don't bow to its whims.

"It seems to me that our American partners make a colossal strategic mistake," Putin said.

"This is a typical mistake of any empire," Putin said, explaining that the US is ignoring the consequences of its actions because its economy is strong and the dollar's hegemonic grasp on global markets remains intact. However "the consequences come sooner or later."

These remarks echoed a sentiment expressed by Putin back in May, when he said that Russia can no longer trust the US dollar because of America's decisions to impose unilateral sanctions and violate WTO rules.

... ... ...

With the possibility of being cut off from the dollar system looming, a plan prepared by Andrei Kostin, the head of Russian bank VTB, is being embraced by much of the Russian establishment. Kostin's plan would facilitate the conversion of dollar settlements into other currencies which would help wean Russian industries off the dollar. And it already has the backing of Russia's finance ministry, central bank and Putin.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin is also working on deals with major trading partners to accept the Russian ruble for imports and exports.

In a sign that a united front is forming to help undermine the dollar, Russia's efforts have been readily embraced by China and Turkey, which is unsurprising, given their increasingly fraught relationships with the US. During joint military exercises in Vladivostok last month, Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping declared that their countries would work together to counter US tariffs and sanctions.

"More and more countries, not only in the east but also in Europe, are beginning to think about how to minimise dependence on the US dollar," said Dmitry Peskov, Mr Putin's spokesperson. "And they suddenly realise that a) it is possible, b) it needs to be done and c) you can save yourself if you do it sooner."

[Oct 09, 2018] Some suggest that the British find it useful to paint an ongoing story for the public of Russian depravity and duplicity. If that were the case, why paint Russia as the gang that couldn't shoot straight - too inept to constitute a serious threat?

Notable quotes:
"... As many, including Murray have pointed out, the story the UK is telling displays none of the tradecraft that one would expect from a sophisticated intelligence service. ..."
Oct 09, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

smoke , 9 hours ago

So little about the mutating, public narrative makes sense, including motive, whether Russian or British. Some suggest that the British find it useful to paint an ongoing story for the public of Russian depravity and duplicity. If that were the case, why paint Russia as the gang that couldn't shoot straight - too inept to constitute a serious threat?

As many, including Murray have pointed out, the story the UK is telling displays none of the tradecraft that one would expect from a sophisticated intelligence service.

[Oct 08, 2018] British intelligence now officially is a by-word for organized crime by John Wight

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... And what about the possibility of MI5's involvement in, dare we use the term, false flag operations? ..."
"... As someone who abhors the premise of conspiracy theory on principle, the fact that more and more are turning to its warm embrace as an intellectual reflex against what is politely described as the 'official narrative' of events, well this is no surprise when we learn of the egregious machinations of Western intelligence agencies such as Britain's MI5. ..."
"... If any such investigation is to be taken seriously, however, it must include in its remit the power to investigate all possible links between Britain's intelligence community and organisations such as, let's see, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group ? ..."
"... The deafening UK mainstream media and political class silence over the trail connecting 2017 Manchester Arena suicide bomber Salman Abedi and MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence agency, leaves a lingering stench of intrigue that will not out. The work of investigative journalist Mark Curtis on this sordid relationship is unsurpassed. ..."
"... "The evidence suggests that the barbaric Manchester bombing, which killed 22 innocent people on May 22nd, is a case of blowback on British citizens arising at least partly from the overt and covert actions of British governments." ..."
"... "The evidence points to the LIFG being seen by the UK as a proxy militia to promote its foreign policy objectives. Whitehall also saw Qatar as a proxy to provide boots on the ground in Libya in 2011, even as it empowered hardline Islamist groups." ..."
"... "Both David Cameron, then Prime Minister, and Theresa May – who was Home Secretary in 2011 when Libyan radicals were encouraged to fight Qadafi [Muammar Gaddafi] – clearly have serious questions to answer. We believe an independent public enquiry is urgently needed." ..."
"... In words that echo down to us from ancient Rome, the poet Juvenal taunts our complacency with a question most simple and pertinent: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who will guard the guards themselves? ..."
Oct 08, 2018 | www.rt.com

An intelligence service given free rein to commit 'serious crimes' in its own country is an intelligence service that is the enemy of its people. The quite astounding revelation that Britain's domestic intelligence service, MI5, has enjoyed this very freedom for decades has only just been made public at a special tribunal in London, set up to investigate the country's intelligence services at the behest of a coalition of human rights groups, alleging a pattern of illegality up to and including collusion in murder.

The hitherto MI5 covert policy sanctioning its agents to commit and/or solicit serious crimes, as and when adjudged provident, is known as the Third Direction. This codename has been crafted, it would appear, by someone with a penchant for all things James Bond within an agency whose average operative is more likely to be 5'6" and balding with a paunch and bad teeth than any kind of lantern-jawed 007.

The Pat Finucane Centre , one of the aforementioned human rights groups involved in bringing about this tribunal investigation (Investigatory Powers Tribunal, to give it its Sunday name) into the nefarious activities of Britain's domestic intelligence agency, issued a damning statement in response to the further revelation that former Prime Minister David Cameron introduced oversight guidelines with regard to the MI5 covert third direction policy back in 2012.

Cameron's decision to do so, the group claims, was far from nobly taken:

"It can be no coincidence that Prime Minister David Cameron issued new guidelines, however flawed, on oversight of MI5 just two weeks before publication of the De Silva report into the murder of Pat Finucane. The PM was clearly alive to the alarming evidence which was about to emerge of the involvement of the Security Service in the murder. To date no-one within a state agency has been held accountable. The latest revelations make the case for an independent inquiry all the more compelling."

Pat Finucane, a Belfast Catholic, plied his trade as a human rights lawyer at a time when the right to be fully human was denied the minority Catholic community of the small and enduring outpost of British colonialism in the north east corner of Ireland, otherwise known as Northern Ireland. He was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries in 1989, back when the decades-long conflict euphemistically referred to as the Troubles still raged, claiming victims both innocent and not on all sides.

Unlike the vast majority of those killed and murdered in the course of this brutal conflict, Finucane's murder sparked a long and hard fought struggle for justice by surviving family members, friends and campaigners. They allege – rather convincingly, it should be said – that it was carried out with the active collusion of MI5.

Stepping back and casting a wider view over this terrain, the criminal activities of Britain's intelligence services constitute more than enough material for a book of considerable heft. How fortunate then that just such a book has already been written.

In his 'Dead Men Talking: Collusion, Cover Up and Murder in Northern Ireland's Dirty War', author Nicholas Davies "provides information on a number of the killings [during the Troubles], which were authorized at the highest level of MI5 and the British government."

But over and above the crimes of MI5 in Ireland, what else have those doughty defenders of the realm been up to over the years? After all, what is the use of having a license to engage in serious criminal activity, including murder and, presumably, torture, if you're not prepared to use (abuse) it? It begs the question of how many high profile deaths attributed to suicide, natural causes, and accident down through the years have been the fruits of MI5 at work?

And what about the possibility of MI5's involvement in, dare we use the term, false flag operations?

As someone who abhors the premise of conspiracy theory on principle, the fact that more and more are turning to its warm embrace as an intellectual reflex against what is politely described as the 'official narrative' of events, well this is no surprise when we learn of the egregious machinations of Western intelligence agencies such as Britain's MI5.

What we are bound to state, doing so without fear of contradiction, is this particular revelation opens up a veritable Pandora's Box of grim possibilities when it comes to the potential crimes committed by Britain's domestic intelligence agency, ensuring that a full and vigorous investigation and public inquiry is now both necessary and urgent.

If any such investigation is to be taken seriously, however, it must include in its remit the power to investigate all possible links between Britain's intelligence community and organisations such as, let's see, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group ?

The deafening UK mainstream media and political class silence over the trail connecting 2017 Manchester Arena suicide bomber Salman Abedi and MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence agency, leaves a lingering stench of intrigue that will not out. The work of investigative journalist Mark Curtis on this sordid relationship is unsurpassed.

As Curtis writes,

"The evidence suggests that the barbaric Manchester bombing, which killed 22 innocent people on May 22nd, is a case of blowback on British citizens arising at least partly from the overt and covert actions of British governments."

In the same report he arrives at a conclusion both damning and chilling:

"The evidence points to the LIFG being seen by the UK as a proxy militia to promote its foreign policy objectives. Whitehall also saw Qatar as a proxy to provide boots on the ground in Libya in 2011, even as it empowered hardline Islamist groups."

Finally: "Both David Cameron, then Prime Minister, and Theresa May – who was Home Secretary in 2011 when Libyan radicals were encouraged to fight Qadafi [Muammar Gaddafi] – clearly have serious questions to answer. We believe an independent public enquiry is urgently needed."

In words that echo down to us from ancient Rome, the poet Juvenal taunts our complacency with a question most simple and pertinent: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who will guard the guards themselves?

Edward R Murrow puts it rather more bluntly: "A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."

Sooner or later, people in Britain are going to have to wake up to who the real enemy is.

Read more

John Wight has written for a variety of newspapers and websites, including the Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and Foreign Policy Journal.

[Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There has been an ongoing campaign on the part of the US, to get out the idea that China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran have massive armies of hackers that are constantly looking to steal American secrets. The absurdity of the US' claims is pretty obvious. As I pointed out in my book The Myth of Homeland Security ..."
"... "The Great US/China Cyberwar of 2010" is one cyberwar that didn't happen, but was presaged with a run-up of lots of claims that the Chinese were hacking all over the place. I'm perfectly willing to accept the possibility that there was Chinese hacking activity, but in the industry there was no indication of an additional level of attack or significance. ..."
"... One thing that did ..."
"... US ideology is that "we don't start wars" -- it's always looking for an excuse to go to war under the rubric of self-defense, so I see these sorts of claims as justification in advance for unilateral action. I also see it as a sign of weakness; if the US were truly the superpower it claims it is, it would simply accept its imperial mantle and stop bothering to try to justify anything. I'm afraid we may be getting close to that point. ..."
"... My assumption has always been that the US is projecting its own actions on other nations. At the time when the US was talking the loudest about Chinese cyberwar, the US and Israel had launched STUXNET against the Iranian enrichment plant at Natanz, and the breeder reactor at Bushehr (which happens to be just outside of a large city; the attack took some of its control systems and backup generators offline). Attacks on nuclear power facilities are a war crime under international humanitarian law, which framework the US is signatory to but has not committed to actually follow. This sort of activity happens at the same time that the US distributes talking-points to the media about the danger of Russian hackers crashing the US power grid. I don't think we can psychoanalyze an entire government and I think psychoanalysis is mostly nonsense -- but it's tempting to accuse the US of "projection." ..."
"... All of this stuff happens against the backdrop of Klein, Binney, Snowden, and the Vault 7 revelations, as well as solid attribution identifying the NSA as "equation group" and linking the code-tree of NSA-developed malware to STUXNET, FLAME, and DUQU. ..."
"... the US has even admitted to deploying STUXNET -- Obama bragged about it. When Snowden's revelations outlined how the NSA had eavesdropped on Angela Merkel's cellphone, the Germans expressed shock and Barack Obama remarkably truthfully said "that's how these things are done" and blew the whole thing off by saying that the NSA wasn't eavesdropping on Merkel any more. [ bbc ] ..."
"... It's hard to keep score because everything is pretty vague, but it sounds like the US has been dramatically out-spending and out-acting the other nations that it accuses of being prepared for cyberwar. ..."
"... it's hard not to see the US is prepared for cyberwar, when both the NSA and the CIA leak massive collections of advanced tools. ..."
"... My observation is that the NSA and CIA have been horribly sloppy and have clearly spent a gigantic amount of money preparing to compromise both foreign and domestic systems -- that's bad enough. With friends like the NSA and CIA, who needs Russians and Chinese? ..."
"... The Russian and Chinese efforts are relatively tiny compared to the massive efforts the US expends tens of billions of dollars on. The US spends about $50bn on its intelligence agencies, while the entire Russian Department of Defense budget is about $90bn (China is around $139bn) -- maybe the Russians and Chinese have such a small footprint because they are much smaller operations? ..."
"... That brings us to the recent kerfuffle about taps on the Supermicro motherboards. That's not unbelievable at all -- not in a world where we discover that Intel has built a parallel management CPU into every CPU since 2008, and that there is solid indications that other processors have similar backdoors. ..."
"... There are probably so many backdoors in our systems that it's a miracle it works at all. ..."
"... So, with respect to "propaganda" I would say that the US intelligence community has been consistently pushing a propaganda agenda against the US government, and the citizens in order to justify its actions and defend its budget. ..."
"... What little I've been able to find out the new Trump™ cybersecurity plan is that it doesn't involve any defense, just massive retribution against (perceived) foes. ..."
"... Funny how those obsessed with "false flag" operations work so hard to invite more of same. ..."
Oct 07, 2018 | freethoughtblogs.com

Bob Moore asks me to comment on an article about propaganda and security/intelligence. [ article ] This is going to be a mixture of opinion and references to facts; I'll try to be clear which is which.

Yesterday several NATO countries ran a concerted propaganda campaign against Russia. The context for it was a NATO summit in which the U.S. presses for an intensified cyberwar against NATO's preferred enemy.

On the same day another coordinated campaign targeted China. It is aimed against China's development of computer chip manufacturing further up the value chain. Related to this is U.S. pressure on Taiwan, a leading chip manufacturer, to cut its ties with its big motherland.

It is true that the US periodically makes a big push regarding "messaging" about hacking. Whether or not it constitutes a "propaganda campaign" depends on how we choose to interpret things and the labels we attach to them -- "propaganda campaign" has a lot of negative connotations and one person's "outreach effort" is an other's "propaganda." An ultra-nationalist or an authoritarian submissive who takes the government's word for anything would call it "outreach."

There has been an ongoing campaign on the part of the US, to get out the idea that China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran have massive armies of hackers that are constantly looking to steal American secrets. The absurdity of the US' claims is pretty obvious. As I pointed out in my book The Myth of Homeland Security (2004) [ wc ] claims such as that the Chinese had "40,000 highly trained hackers" are flat-out absurd and ignore the reality of hacking; that's four army corps. Hackers don't engage in "human wave" attacks.

"The Great US/China Cyberwar of 2010" is one cyberwar that didn't happen, but was presaged with a run-up of lots of claims that the Chinese were hacking all over the place. I'm perfectly willing to accept the possibility that there was Chinese hacking activity, but in the industry there was no indication of an additional level of attack or significance.

One thing that did happen in 2010 around the same time as the nonexistent cyberwar was China and Russia proposed trilateral talks with the US to attempt to define appropriate limits on state-sponsored hacking. The US flatly rejected the proposal, but there was virtually no coverage of that in the US media at the time. The UN also called for a cyberwar treaty framework, and the effort was killed by the US. [ wired ] What's fascinating and incomprehensible to me is that, whenever the US feels that its ability to claim pre-emptive cyberwar is challenged, it responds with a wave of claims about Chinese (or Russian or North Korean) cyberwar aggression.

John Negroponte, former director of US intelligence, said intelligence agencies in the major powers would be the first to "express reservations" about such an accord.

US ideology is that "we don't start wars" -- it's always looking for an excuse to go to war under the rubric of self-defense, so I see these sorts of claims as justification in advance for unilateral action. I also see it as a sign of weakness; if the US were truly the superpower it claims it is, it would simply accept its imperial mantle and stop bothering to try to justify anything. I'm afraid we may be getting close to that point.

My assumption has always been that the US is projecting its own actions on other nations. At the time when the US was talking the loudest about Chinese cyberwar, the US and Israel had launched STUXNET against the Iranian enrichment plant at Natanz, and the breeder reactor at Bushehr (which happens to be just outside of a large city; the attack took some of its control systems and backup generators offline). Attacks on nuclear power facilities are a war crime under international humanitarian law, which framework the US is signatory to but has not committed to actually follow. This sort of activity happens at the same time that the US distributes talking-points to the media about the danger of Russian hackers crashing the US power grid. I don't think we can psychoanalyze an entire government and I think psychoanalysis is mostly nonsense -- but it's tempting to accuse the US of "projection."

The anti-Russian campaign is about alleged Russian spying, hacking and influence operations. Britain and the Netherland took the lead. Britain accused Russia's military intelligence service (GRU) of spying attempts against the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague and Switzerland, of spying attempts against the British Foreign Office, of influence campaigns related to European and the U.S. elections, and of hacking the international doping agency WADA. British media willingly helped to exaggerate the claims: [ ]

The Netherland [sic] for its part released a flurry of information about the alleged spying attempts against the OPCW in The Hague. It claims that four GRU agents traveled to The Hague on official Russian diplomatic passports to sniff out the WiFi network of the OPCW. (WiFi networks are notoriously easy to hack. If the OPCW is indeed using such it should not be trusted with any security relevant issues.) The Russian officials were allegedly very secretive, even cleaning out their own hotel trash, while they, at the same, time carried laptops with private data and even taxi receipts showing their travel from a GRU headquarter in Moscow to the airport. Like in the Skripal/Novichok saga the Russian spies are, at the same time, portrayed as supervillains and hapless amateurs. Real spies are neither.

The U.S. Justice Department added to the onslaught by issuing new indictments (pdf) against alleged GRU agents dubiously connected to several alleged hacking incidents . As none of those Russians will ever stand in front of a U.S. court the broad allegations will never be tested.

There's a lot there, and I think the interpretation is a bit over-wrought, but it's mostly accurate. The US and the UK (and other NATO allies, as necessary) clearly coordinate when it comes to talking points. Claims of Chinese cyberwar in the US press will be followed by claims in the UK and Australian press, as well. My suspicion is that this is not the US Government and UK Government coordinating a story -- it's the intelligence agencies doing it. My opinion is that the intelligence services are fairly close to a "deep state" -- the CIA and NSA are completely out of control and the CIA has gone far toward building its own military, while the NSA has implemented completely unrestricted surveillance worldwide.

All of this stuff happens against the backdrop of Klein, Binney, Snowden, and the Vault 7 revelations, as well as solid attribution identifying the NSA as "equation group" and linking the code-tree of NSA-developed malware to STUXNET, FLAME, and DUQU. While the attribution that "Fancy Bear is the GRU" has been made and is probably fairly solid, the attribution of NSA malware and CIA malware is rock solid; the US has even admitted to deploying STUXNET -- Obama bragged about it. When Snowden's revelations outlined how the NSA had eavesdropped on Angela Merkel's cellphone, the Germans expressed shock and Barack Obama remarkably truthfully said "that's how these things are done" and blew the whole thing off by saying that the NSA wasn't eavesdropping on Merkel any more. [ bbc ]

It's hard to keep score because everything is pretty vague, but it sounds like the US has been dramatically out-spending and out-acting the other nations that it accuses of being prepared for cyberwar. I tend to be extremely skeptical of US claims because: bomber gap, missile gap, gulf of Tonkin, Iraq WMD, Afghanistan, Libya and every other aggressive attack by the US which was blamed on its target. The reason I assume the US is the most aggressive actor in cyberspace is because the US has done a terrible job of protecting its tool-sets and operational security: it's hard not to see the US is prepared for cyberwar, when both the NSA and the CIA leak massive collections of advanced tools.

Meanwhile, where are the leaks of Russian and Chinese tools? They have been few and far between, if there have been any at all. Does this mean that the Russians and Chinese have amazingly superior tradecraft, if not tools? I don't know. My observation is that the NSA and CIA have been horribly sloppy and have clearly spent a gigantic amount of money preparing to compromise both foreign and domestic systems -- that's bad enough. With friends like the NSA and CIA, who needs Russians and Chinese?

The article does not have great depth to its understanding of the situation, I'm afraid. So it comes off as a bit heavy on the recent news while ignoring the long-term trends. For example:

The allegations of Chinese supply chain attacks are of course just as hypocritical as the allegations against Russia. The very first know case of computer related supply chain manipulation goes back to 1982 :

A CIA operation to sabotage Soviet industry by duping Moscow into stealing booby-trapped software was spectacularly successful when it triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian gas pipeline, it emerged yesterday.

I wrote a piece about the "Farewell Dossier" in 2004. [ mjr ] Re-reading it, it comes off as skeptical but waffly. I think that it's self-promotion by the CIA and exaggerates considerably ("look how clever we are!") at a time when the CIA was suffering an attention and credibility deficit after its shitshow performance under George Tenet. But the first known cases of computer related supply chain manipulation go back to the 70s and 80s -- the NSA even compromised Crypto AG's Hagelin M-209 system (a mechanical ciphering machine) in order to read global communications encrypted with that product. You can imagine Crypto AG's surprise when the Iranian secret police arrested one of their sales reps for selling backdoor'd crypto -- the NSA had never told them about the backdoor, naturally. The CIA was also on record for producing Xerox machines destined for the USSR, which had recorders built into them So, while the article is portraying the historical sweep of NSA dirty tricks, they're only looking at the recent ones. Remember: the NSA also weakened the elliptic curve crypto library in RSA's Bsafe implementation, paying RSADSI $13 million to accept their tweaked code.

Why haven't we been hearing about the Chinese and Russians doing that sort of thing? There are four options:

  1. The Russians and Chinese are doing it, they're just so darned good nobody has caught them until just recently.
  2. The Russians and Chinese simply resort to using existing tools developed by the hacking/cybercrime community and rely on great operational security rather than fancy tools.
  3. The Russian and Chinese efforts are relatively tiny compared to the massive efforts the US expends tens of billions of dollars on. The US spends about $50bn on its intelligence agencies, while the entire Russian Department of Defense budget is about $90bn (China is around $139bn) -- maybe the Russians and Chinese have such a small footprint because they are much smaller operations?
  4. Something else.

That brings us to the recent kerfuffle about taps on the Supermicro motherboards. That's not unbelievable at all -- not in a world where we discover that Intel has built a parallel management CPU into every CPU since 2008, and that there is solid indications that other processors have similar backdoors.

Was the Intel IME a "backdoor" or just "a bad idea"? Well, that's tricky. Let me put my tinfoil hat on: making a backdoor look like a sloppily developed product feature would be the competent way to write a backdoor. Making it as sneaky as the backdoor in the Via is unnecessary -- incompetence is eminently believable.

&

(kaspersky)

I believe all of these stories (including the Supermicro) are the tip of a great big, ugly iceberg. The intelligence community has long known that software-only solutions are too mutable, and are easy to decompile and figure out. They have wanted to be in the BIOS of systems -- on the motherboard -- for a long time. If you go back to 2014, we have disclosures about the NSA malware that hides in hard drive BIOS: [ vice ] [ vice ] That appears to have been in progress around 2000/2001.

Of note, the group recovered two modules belonging to EquationDrug and GrayFish that were used to reprogram hard drives to give the attackers persistent control over a target machine. These modules can target practically every hard drive manufacturer and brand on the market, including Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, Toshiba, Corsair, Hitachi and more. Such attacks have traditionally been difficult to pull off, given the risk in modifying hard drive software, which may explain why Kaspersky could only identify a handful of very specific targets against which the attack was used, where the risk was worth the reward.

But Equation Group's malware platforms have other tricks, too. GrayFish, for example, also has the ability to install itself into computer's boot record -- software that loads even before the operating system itself -- and stores all of its data inside a portion of the operating system called the registry, where configuration data is normally stored.

EquationDrug was designed for use on older Windows operating systems, and "some of the plugins were designed originally for use on Windows 95/98/ME" -- versions of Windows so old that they offer a good indication of the Equation Group's age.

This is not a very good example of how to establish a "malware gap" since it just makes the NSA look like they are incapable of keeping a secret. If you want an idea how bad it is, Kaspersky labs' analysis of the NSA's toolchain is a good example of how to do attribution correctly. Unfortunately for the US agenda, that solid attribution points toward Fort Meade in Maryland. [kaspersky]

Let me be clear: I think we are fucked every which way from the start. With backdoors in the BIOS, backdoors on the CPU, and wireless cellular-spectrum backdoors, there are probably backdoors in the GPUs and the physical network controllers, as well. Maybe the backdoors in the GPU come from the GRU and maybe the backdoors in the hard drives come from NSA, but who cares? The upshot is that all of our systems are so heinously compromised that they can only be considered marginally reliable. It is, literally, not your computer: it's theirs. They'll let you use it so long as your information is interesting to them.

Do I believe the Chinese are capable of doing such a thing? Of course. Is the GRU? Probably. Mossad? Sure. NSA? Well-documented attribution points toward NSA. Your computer is a free-fire zone. It has been since the mid 1990s, when the NSA was told "no" on the Clipper chip and decided to come up with its own Plan B, C, D, and E. Then, the CIA came up with theirs. Etc. There are probably so many backdoors in our systems that it's a miracle it works at all.

From my 2012 RSA conference lecture "Cyberwar, you're doing it wrong."

The problem is that playing in this space is the purview of governments. Nobody in the cybercrime or hacking world need tools like these. The intelligence operatives have huge budgets, compared to a typical company's security budget, and it's unreasonable to expect any business to invest such a level of effort on defending itself. So what should companies do? They should do exactly what they are doing: expect the government to deal with it; that's what governments are for. The problem with that strategy is that their government isn't on their side, either! It's Hobbes' playground.

In case you think I am engaging in hyperbole, I assure you I am not. If you want another example of the lengths (and willingness to bypass the law) "they" are willing to go, consider 'stingrays' that are in operation in every major US city and outside of every interesting hotel and high tech park. Those devices are not passive -- they actively inject themselves into the call set-up between your phone and your carrier -- your data goes through the stingray, or it doesn't go at all. If there are multiple stingrays, then your latency goes through the roof. "They" don't care. Are the stingrays NSA, FBI, CIA, Mossad, GRU, or PLA? Probably a bit of all of the above depending on where and when.

Whenever the US gets caught with its pants down around its ankles, it blames the Chinese or the Russians because they have done a good job of building the idea that the most serious hackers on the planet at the Chinese. I don't believe that we're seeing complex propaganda campaigns that are tied to specific incidents -- I think we see ongoing organic propaganda campaigns that all serve the same end: protect the agencies, protect their budgets, justify their existence, and downplay their incompetence.

So, with respect to "propaganda" I would say that the US intelligence community has been consistently pushing a propaganda agenda against the US government, and the citizens in order to justify its actions and defend its budget.

The government also engages in propaganda, and is influenced by the intelligence community's propaganda as well. And the propaganda campaigns work because everyone involved assumes, "well, given what the NSA has been able to do, I should assume the Chinese can do likewise." That's a perfectly reasonable assumption and I think it's probably true that the Chinese have capabilities. The situation is what Chuck Spinney calls "A self-licking ice cream cone" -- it's a justifying structure that makes participation in endless aggression seem like a sensible thing to do. And, when there's inevitably a disaster, it's going to be like a cyber-9/11 and will serve as a justification for even more unrestrained aggression.


Want to see what it looks like? A thousand thanks to Commentariat member [redacted] for this link. If you don't like video, there's an article here. [ toms ]

https://www.youtube.com/embed/_eSAF_qT_FY

Is this an NSA backdoor, or normal incompetence? Is Intel Management Engine an NSA-inspired backdoor, or did some system engineers at Intel think that was a good idea? There are other scary indications of embedded compromise: the CIA's Vault7 archive included code that appeared to be intended to embed in the firmware of "smart" flatscreen TVs. That would make every LG flat panel in every hotel room, a listening device just waiting to be turned on.

We know the Chinese didn't do that particular bug but why wouldn't they do something similar, in something else? China is the world's oldest mature culture -- they literally wrote the book on strategy -- Americans acting as though it's a great surprise to learn that the Chinese are not stupid, it's just the parochialism of a 250 year-old culture looking at a 3,000 year-old culture and saying "wow, you guys haven't been asleep at the switch after all!"

WIRED on cyberspace treaties [ wired ]

Comments
  1. Pierce R. Butler says

    October 6, 2018 at 1:31 pm

    What little I've been able to find out the new Trump™ cybersecurity plan is that it doesn't involve any defense, just massive retribution against (perceived) foes.

    Funny how those obsessed with "false flag" operations work so hard to invite more of same.

  2. Marcus Ranum says

    October 6, 2018 at 2:28 pm

    Pierce R. Butler@#1:
    What little I've been able to find out the new Trump™ cybersecurity plan is that it doesn't involve any defense, just massive retribution against (perceived) foes.

    Yes. Since 2001, as far as most of us can tell, federal cybersecurity spend has been 80% offense, 20% defense. And a lot of the offensive spend has been aimed at We, The People.

  3. Cat Mara says

    October 6, 2018 at 5:20 pm

    Your mention of Operation Sundevil and Kevin Mitnick in a previous post made me think that maybe the reason we haven't seen the kind of leaks from the Russian and Chinese hacking operations that we've seem from the NSA is that they're running a "Kevin Mitnick style" operation; that is, relying less on technical solutions and using instead old-fashioned "social engineering" and other low-tech forms of espionage (like running troll farms on social media). I mean, I've seen interviews with retired US intelligence people since the 90s complain that since the late 1980s, the intelligence agencies have been crippled by management in love with hi-tech "SIGINT" solutions to problems that never deliver and neglecting old-fashioned "HUMINT" intelligence-gathering.

    The thing is, Kevin Mitnick got away with a lot of what he did because people didn't take security seriously then, and still don't. On a similar nostalgia vibe, I remember reading an article by Keith Bostic (one of the researchers who helped in the analysis of the Morris worm that took down a significant chunk of the Internet back in 1988) where he did a follow-up a year or so afterwards and some depressing number of organisations that had been hit by it still hadn't patched the holes that had let the worm infect them in the first place.

  4. Marcus Ranum says

    October 6, 2018 at 9:20 pm

    Cat Mara@#3:
    Your mention of Operation Sundevil and Kevin Mitnick in a previous post made me think that maybe the reason we haven't seen the kind of leaks from the Russian and Chinese hacking operations that we've seem from the NSA is that they're running a "Kevin Mitnick style" operation; that is, relying less on technical solutions and using instead old-fashioned "social engineering" and other low-tech forms of espionage (like running troll farms on social media).

    I think that's right, to a high degree. What if Edward Snowden was an agent provocateur instead of a well-meaning naive kid? A tremendous amount of damage could be done, as well as stealing the US' expensive toys. The Russians have been very good at doing exactly that sort of operation, since WWII. The Chinese are, if anything, more subtle than the Russians.

    The Chinese attitude, as expressed to me by someone who might be a credible source is, "why are you picking a fight with us? We don't care, you're too far away for us to threaten you, we both have loads of our own fish to fry. To them, the US is young, hyperactive, and stupid.

    The FBI is not competent, at all, against old-school humint intelligence-gathering. Compared to the US' cyber-toys, the old ways are probably more efficient and cost effective. China's intelligence community is also much more team-oriented than the CIA/NSA; they're actually a disciplined operation under the strategic control of policy-makers. That, by the way, is why Russians and Chinese stare in amazement when Americans ask things like "Do you think Putin knew about this?" What a stupid question! It's an autocracy; they don't have intelligence operatives just going an deciding "it's a nice day to go to England with some Novichok." The entire American attitude toward espionage lacks maturity.

    On a similar nostalgia vibe, I remember reading an article by Keith Bostic (one of the researchers who helped in the analysis of the Morris worm that took down a significant chunk of the Internet back in 1988) where he did a follow-up a year or so afterwards and some depressing number of organisations that had been hit by it still hadn't patched the holes that had let the worm infect them in the first place.

    That as an exciting time. We were downstream from University of Maryland, which got hit pretty badly. Pete Cottrel and Chris Torek from UMD were also in on Bostic's dissection. We were doing uucp over TCP for our email (that changed pretty soon after the worm) and our uucp queue blew up. I cured the worm with a reboot into single-user mode and a quick 'rm -f' in the uucp queue.

  5. Bob Moore says

    October 7, 2018 at 9:18 am

    Thanks. I appreciate your measured analysis and the making explicit of the bottom line: " agencies, protect their budgets, justify their existence, and downplay their incompetence."

[Oct 08, 2018] The Holes in the Official Skripal Story by Craig Murray

British intelligence services have a lot of things to explain now. But who will ask them ?
Notable quotes:
"... The nub of the British government's approach has been the shocking willingness of the corporate and state media to parrot repeatedly the lie that the nerve agent was Russian made, even after Porton Down said they could not tell where it was made and the OPCW confirmed that finding. ..."
"... What is certainly untrue is that only Russia has a motive. The obvious motive is to attempt to blame and discredit Russia. Those who might wish to do this include Ukraine and Georgia, with both of which Russia is in territorial dispute, and those states and jihadist groups with which Russia is in conflict in Syria. The NATO military industrial complex also obviously has a plain motive for fueling tension with Russia. ..."
"... There is of course the possibility that Skripal was attacked by a private gangster interest with which he was in conflict, or that the attack was linked to Skripal's MI6 handler Pablo Miller's work on the Orbis/Steele Russiagate dossier on Donald Trump. ..."
"... Plainly, the British governments statements that only Russia had the means and only Russia had the motive, are massive lies on both counts. ..."
"... Yet no motive has been adduced for an attack on Yulia or why they would attack while Yulia was visiting – they could have painted his doorknob with less fear of discovery anytime he was alone ..."
"... The incompetence of the assassination beggars belief when compared to British claims of a long term production and training programme. The Russians built the heart of the International Space Station. ..."
"... With Skripal being resettled by MI6, and a former intelligence officer himself, it beggars belief that MI6 did not fit, as standard, some basic security including a security camera on his house. ..."
"... Why did they both touch the outside doorknob in exiting and closing the door? Why did the novichok act so very slowly, with evidently no feeling of ill health for at least five hours, and then how did it strike both down absolutely simultaneously, so that neither can call for help, despite their being different sexes, weights, ages, metabolisms and receiving random completely uncontrolled doses. The odds of that happening are virtually nil. And why was the nerve agent ultimately ineffective? ..."
"... Why was the Detective Sergeant affected and nobody else who attended the house, or the scene where the Skripals were found? Why was Bailey only lightly affected by this extremely deadly substance, of which a tiny amount can kill? ..."
"... I am, with a few simple questions, demolishing what is the most ludicrous conspiracy theory I have ever heard – the Salisbury conspiracy theory being put forward by the British government and its corporate lackies. ..."
"... During a visit to Salisbury and Amesbury, the UK home secretary said: "We don't want to jump to conclusions." but they sure were with the first poisoning. Time will tell. ..."
Oct 08, 2018 | southfront.org

Craig Murray: "The Holes in the Official Skripal Story"

... ... ...

" The nub of the British government's approach has been the shocking willingness of the corporate and state media to parrot repeatedly the lie that the nerve agent was Russian made, even after Porton Down said they could not tell where it was made and the OPCW confirmed that finding. In fact, while the Soviet Union did develop the "novichok" class of nerve agents, the programme involved scientists from all over the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia, as I myself learnt when I visited the newly decommissioned Nukus testing facility in Uzbekistan in 2002.

Furthermore, it was the USA who decommissioned the facility and removed equipment back to the United States. At least two key scientists from the programme moved to the United States. Formulae for several novichok have been published for over a decade. The USA, UK and Iran have definitely synthesised a number of novichok formulae and almost certainly others have done so too. Dozens of states have the ability to produce novichok, as do many sophisticated non-state actors.

As for motive, the Russian motive might be revenge, but whether that really outweighs the international opprobrium incurred just ahead of the World Cup, in which so much prestige has been invested, is unclear." Craig Murray

What is certainly untrue is that only Russia has a motive. The obvious motive is to attempt to blame and discredit Russia. Those who might wish to do this include Ukraine and Georgia, with both of which Russia is in territorial dispute, and those states and jihadist groups with which Russia is in conflict in Syria. The NATO military industrial complex also obviously has a plain motive for fueling tension with Russia.

There is of course the possibility that Skripal was attacked by a private gangster interest with which he was in conflict, or that the attack was linked to Skripal's MI6 handler Pablo Miller's work on the Orbis/Steele Russiagate dossier on Donald Trump.

Plainly, the British governments statements that only Russia had the means and only Russia had the motive, are massive lies on both counts.

The Russians had been tapping the phone of Yulia Skripal. They decided to attack Sergei Skripal while his daughter was visiting from Moscow.

In an effort to shore up the government narrative, at the time of the Amesbury attack the security services put out through Pablo Miller's long term friend, the BBC's Mark Urban, that the Russians "may have been" tapping Yulia Skripal's phone, and the claim that this was strong evidence that the Russians had indeed been behind the attack.

But think this through. If that were true, then the Russians deliberately attacked at a time when Yulia was in the UK rather than when Sergei was alone. Yet no motive has been adduced for an attack on Yulia or why they would attack while Yulia was visiting – they could have painted his doorknob with less fear of discovery anytime he was alone. Furthermore, it is pretty natural that Russian intelligence would tap the phone of Yulia, and of Sergei if they could. The family of double agents are normal targets. I have no doubt in the least, from decades of experience as a British diplomat, that GCHQ have been tapping Yulia's phone. Indeed, if tapping of phones is seriously put forward as evidence of intent to murder, the British government must be very murderous indeed.

Their trained assassin(s) painted a novichok on the doorknob of the Skripal house in the suburbs of Salisbury. Either before or after the attack, they entered a public place in the centre of Salisbury and left a sealed container of the novichok there.

The incompetence of the assassination beggars belief when compared to British claims of a long term production and training programme. The Russians built the heart of the International Space Station. They can kill an old bloke in Salisbury. Why did the Russians not know that the dose from the door handle was not fatal? Why would trained assassins leave crucial evidence lying around in a public place in Salisbury? Why would they be conducting any part of the operation with the novichok in a public area in central Salisbury?

Why did nobody see them painting the doorknob? This must have involved wearing protective gear, which would look out of place in a Salisbury suburb. With Skripal being resettled by MI6, and a former intelligence officer himself, it beggars belief that MI6 did not fit, as standard, some basic security including a security camera on his house.

The Skripals both touched the doorknob and both functioned perfectly normally for at least five hours, even able to eat and drink heartily. Then they were simultaneously and instantaneously struck down by the nerve agent, at a spot in the city centre coincidentally close to where the assassins left a sealed container of the novichok lying around. Even though the nerve agent was eight times more deadly than Sarin or VX, it did not kill the Skripals because it had been on the doorknob and affected by rain.

Why did they both touch the outside doorknob in exiting and closing the door? Why did the novichok act so very slowly, with evidently no feeling of ill health for at least five hours, and then how did it strike both down absolutely simultaneously, so that neither can call for help, despite their being different sexes, weights, ages, metabolisms and receiving random completely uncontrolled doses. The odds of that happening are virtually nil. And why was the nerve agent ultimately ineffective?

Detective Sergeant Bailey attended the Skripal house and was also poisoned by the doorknob, but more lightly. None of the other police who attended the house were affected.

Why was the Detective Sergeant affected and nobody else who attended the house, or the scene where the Skripals were found? Why was Bailey only lightly affected by this extremely deadly substance, of which a tiny amount can kill?

Four months later, Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess were rooting about in public parks, possibly looking for cigarette butts, and accidentally came into contact with the sealed container of a novichok. They were poisoned and Dawn Sturgess subsequently died.

If the nerve agent had survived four months because it was in a sealed container, why has this sealed container now mysteriously disappeared again? If Rowley and Sturgess had direct contact straight from the container, why did they not both die quickly? Why had four months searching of Salisbury and a massive police, security service and military operation not found this container, if Rowley and Sturgess could?

I am, with a few simple questions, demolishing what is the most ludicrous conspiracy theory I have ever heard – the Salisbury conspiracy theory being put forward by the British government and its corporate lackies.

My next post will consider some more plausible explanations of this affair.

South Front: Craig Murray The Holes in the Official Skripal Story


RamboDave 3 months ago ,

Has anyone considered if Rowley and Sturgess might in fact be the actual ones that put the novichok on the Skripal's doorknob four months ago? Perhaps paid to do so by Israel or Ukraine?

ruca RamboDave 3 months ago ,

I don't believe that it ever was novichok. All BS from a British hag

Douglas Houck 3 months ago ,

From yesterday's Guardian:

"Searches began on 6 July of Rowley's home and it was not until Wednesday (11th) that the bottle was discovered by officers, who were battling searing sunshine and protective suits to stop them being exposed to the lethal toxin." "...As a precaution Public Health England continues to advise the public not to pick up any strange items such as syringes, needles, cosmetics or similar objects made of materials such as metal, plastic or glass."

Obviously, the bottle was not simply lying around in plain sight. Would appear to be drug related? Strange. Would be nice if the British were more forthcoming. Another interesting bit is why are the British now, not jumping to conclusions?

"Sajid Javid has said there are no plans to impose fresh sanctions on Russia following the latest nerve agent poisoning in Wiltshire.

During a visit to Salisbury and Amesbury, the UK home secretary said: "We don't want to jump to conclusions." but they sure were with the first poisoning. Time will tell.

AM Hants Douglas Houck 3 months ago ,

They are now saying it looked like a bottle of perfume. The story just gets weirder.

Novichok nerve agent that killed a mother-of-three in Salisbury was in a PERFUME bottle she may have sprayed herself with, her poisoned lover's brother reveals
Charlie Rowley, 45, was left fighting for his life after he was exposed to Novichok
His partner Dawn Sturgess, 44, died after she was poisoned by the nerve agent
Matthew Rowley said the poison was in a perfume bottle his brother picked up ... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/...

So how did the homeless woman's partner come into contact with, but, nobody else? How long does Novochok last, once made up? Hours or months?

Douglas Houck AM Hants 3 months ago ,

Bases on VX (the most similar nerve agent to Novochok) it would last days, except if kept sealed.

It's beginning to look like someone from Porton Down is the source, unless the perfume bottle was used to transport the Novochok into the country and then tossed.

The key is the bottle.

AM Hants Douglas Houck 3 months ago ,

Wonder if the junkies were the source?

[email protected] 3 months ago ,

The fundamental flaw in the reasoning of this article is that it assumes the poisoning was meant to be kept secret. If you are going to poison someone with Polonium or Novichuk you are sending a distinct message about where the poison came from.

You could kill someone with alflatoxin and no one would know. There a loads of ways a state player can kill people in an untraceable way,

So the purpose of the poisoning was to send a message - not to eliminate a threat,

Once you see that as the purpose of the poisoning, the question becomes is who wants to tell the world that they can kill at long range and little detection with sophisticated neurochemical weapons. . . .

[Oct 08, 2018] Wilderness of mirrors MI6, the Cold War, spies and traitors from Gordievsky to Skripal by George Galloway

Notable quotes:
"... But Britain recruited Skripal in 1996 when not only was the Soviet Union dead but Russia was ruled by the West's performing bear Boris Yeltsin. And during his presidency, Russia was passed-out on the floor with everyone picking its pockets. ..."
"... What could possibly go wrong? ..."
Oct 03, 2018 | www.rt.com

That the USSR was an existential threat to Western capitalism and colonialism and war – of one kind or another – between these two camps was logical and inevitable. But the Soviet Union is 30 years dead.

Indeed, Gordievsky through Macintyre can – if he's telling the truth – claim that he helped bring about the (brief) end of history and the "final" victory. His claimed role in the rise and rise of Gorbachev's relationship with Mrs Thatcher and, by extension, President Reagan certainly hastened the downfall of the USSR.

But Britain recruited Skripal in 1996 when not only was the Soviet Union dead but Russia was ruled by the West's performing bear Boris Yeltsin. And during his presidency, Russia was passed-out on the floor with everyone picking its pockets.

Why was Britain still fighting the Cold War against Russia in 1996, and why is it still fighting the Cold War against Russia now?

Just this week, the rather effete British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson – a former fireplace salesman – said he was sending 800 shivering British soldiers to the Arctic to be ready to fight Russia there. Amidst the snow. And the ice.

As both Napoleon and Hitler must have said: " What could possibly go wrong? "

George Galloway was a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30 years. He presents TV and radio shows (including on RT). He is a film-maker, writer and a renowned orator.

[Oct 07, 2018] Everything Is A Hoax by Paul Craig Roberts

Notable quotes:
"... Bush and Cheney: How They Runed America and the World ..."
Oct 07, 2018 | www.unz.com

An Israeli expert on terrorism and covert assassination procedures explains that the alleged Russian GRU attack on the Skripals with a supposedly deadly nerve agent is a completely obvious hoax to anyone who knows anything at all. https://russia-insider.com/en/skripals-are-mi6-hoax-not-worthy-ladies-detective-novels-israeli-expert-demolishes-uk-case/ri24912

The official story, says the expert, is "stupidity on stupidity."

I agree with him.

The question is: Why did the British government think that they could get away with such an obvious hoax? The answer is that the people in Western countries don't know anything about anything. They live in a world in which their reality is a product of the propaganda fed to them by "news organizations" and Hollywood movies. They only receive controlled explanations. Therefore, they know nothing about how anything really functions. Read the account by the Israeli expert to understand the vast difference between the British government's hoax and the reality of how an assassination is conducted.

The Israeli expert got me to wondering why the British government thought anyone would fall for such a transparently false story. Having just read David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth's new book, 9/11 Unmasked , and David Ray Griffin's 2017 book, Bush and Cheney: How They Runed America and the World , the answer became obvious. The British government had watched the idiot Western populations fall for the official 9/11 conspiracy story in which a few Saudi Arabians, who could not fly airplanes and without the support of any intelligence agency, caused the entire security apparatus ot the United States to fail utterly, and no one was held responsible for the total failure. The British government concluded that anyone who could possibly believe such an obviously false story would believe anything.

I remember coming to that conclusion years ago before the official conspiracy theory in the 9/11 Commission Report was blown to pieces by thousands of scientists, structural engineers, high-rise architects, military and civilian pilots, first responders on the scene, and a large number of former high government officials both in the US and abroad.

At first I did not connect the zionist neoconservatives' plot, outlined in their public writings (for example, Norman Podhorttz in Commentary ) to destroy 7 Middle Eastern countries in five years (also described by General Wesley Clark) and their statement that they needed a "new Pearl Harbor" to implement their plan, with the attack on the World Trade Center. But as I watched the twin towers blow up floor by floor it was completely obvious that these were not builldings falling down due to asymetrical structural damage and limited, low temperature office fires that probably did not even warm the massive steel structure to the point of being warm to the touch. When you watch the videos you see buildings blowing up. It is as clear as day. You see each floor blow. You see steel beams and other debris fly out the sides as projectiles. It is amazing that any human is so completely stupid as to think what he is seeing with his own eyes are buildings falling down from structural damage. But it required many years before half of the American people realized that the official account was pure bullshit.

Today polls indicate that a majority of people do not believe the official 9/11 propaganda any more than they believe the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the alleged Gulf of Tonkin attack, or the report from Admiral McCain (father of John) erasing Israel's responsibility for the destruction of the USS Liberty and its crew during LBJ's administration, or that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, or Iran had nukes, or the many lies about about Syria, Libya's Gaddafi, or Somalia, or Yemen, or the "Russian invasion of Georgia," the "Russian invasion of Ukraine." But at each time the idiot population, no matter how many times they had learned that the governments lied to them initially believed the next lie, thereby permitting the lie to become fact. Thus, the idiot Western populations created their own world of controlled explanations.

Only a deranged person could believe anything any Western government says. But the Western world has a huge number of deranged people. There are plenty of them to validate the next official lie. The ignorant fools make it possible for Western governments to continue their policy of lies that are driving the world to extinction in a war with Russia and China.

Perhaps I am being too hard on the insouciant Western populations. Ron Unz is no moron. Yet he accepted the transparently false 9/11 story until he started to pay attention. Once he paid attention, he realized it was false. http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-911-conspiracy-theories/

Like myself, Ron Unz has noticed that the 9/11 Truth movement has succeeded in totally discrediting the official 9/11 story. But the unanswered question remains: Who did it?

Unz says it was Israel, not Bush & Cheney. This is also the position of Christopher Bollyn. It seems certain that Israel was involved. We have the fact of the Mossad agents caught celebrating as they filmed the collalpse of the WTC towers. Obviously, they knew in advance and were set up ready to film. Later they were shown on Israeli TV where they stated that they had been sent to film the destruction of the buildings.

We also have the fact of the large profits made by someone that the US government continues to protect on shorting the stock of the airlines, the planes of which were allegely hijacked.

In other words, the 9/11 attack was known in advance, as was the destruction of WTC building 7 as evidenced by the BBC reporter standing in front of the still standing building accouncing its destruction about a half hour before it occurred.

Unz and Bollyn's case against Israel is powerful. I agree with Unz that George W. Bush was not part of the plot. If he had been, he would have been on the scene directing America's heroic response to the first, and only, terrorist attack on America. lnstead, Bush was moved out of the way, and kept out of the way, while Cheney handled the situation.

I understand what Unz is doing by focusing attention on the main beneficiary of the hoax 9/11 story. However Cheney and his corporation, Halliburton, also benefitted. Halliburton received large municifient US government contracts for services in Afghanistan and Iraq. Cheney, as David Ray Griffen proves, achieved his aim of elevating the executive branch above the US Constitution and statutory US law.

Moreover, it was impossible for Mossad to pull off such an attack without high level support in the US government. Only a US official could have ordered the numerous simulations of the attack underway in order to confuse the air traffic controllers and the US Air Force.

I understand what Unz is doing by focusing attention on the main beneficiary of the hoax 9/11 story. However Cheney and his corporation, Halliburton, also benefitted. Halliburton received large municifient US government contracts for services in Afghanistan and Iraq. Cheney, as David Ray Griffen proves, achieved his aim of elevating the executive branch above the US Constitution and statutory US law.

Moreover, it was impossible for Mossad to pull off such an attack without high level support in the US government. Only a US official could have ordered the numerous simulations of the attack underway in order to confuse the air traffic controllers and the US Air Force.

The Israeli government could not have ordered the destruction of the crime scene, opposed by the New York fire marshall as a felony. This required US government authority. The steel beams, which showed all sorts of distortions that could only have been caused by nano-thermite were quickly sent to Asia for reprocessing. The intense fires and molten rubble in the buildings' remains six weeks after their collapse never received an official explanation. To this day, no one has explained how low-temperature, smothered office fires that burned for one hour or less melted or weakened massive steel beams and produced molten steel six weeks afterward.

Unz is correct that Israel made out like a bandit. Israel as a result of 9/11 got rid of half of the constraints on its expansion. Only Syria and Iran remain, and the Trump regime is pushing hard for Israel, even against Russia, a government that at its will can completely destroy the United States and Israel, something that much of the world wishes would happen.

Unz is correct that right now the totally evil and corrupt US and Israeli governments have the entire world on the path to extinction. However, he omits American responsibility, that of the evil Dick Cheney, the Zionist neconservatives who are Israel's Fifth Column in America, and the utter insouciance of the American people who do not show enough intelligence or awareness to warrant their survival.

[Oct 06, 2018] Scientists Raise Alarm Over U.S. Bio-Weapon Programs

Notable quotes:
"... Last week the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Russian Foreign Ministry accused the U.S. of illegal biological weapon research in the Tbilisi laboratory : ..."
"... The documents record the deaths of 73 people over a short period of time, indicating a test of "a highly toxic chemical or biological agents with high lethality rate," said Igor Kirillov, commander of the Russian military branch responsible for defending troops from radiological, chemical and biological weapons. ..."
"... The U.S. rejects the claims but it does not explain the documents , what kind of research is done near Tbilisi, and the unusual secrecy and security around the laboratory. ..."
"... It is not only the Russians and Georgians who are concerned about secret U.S. biological warfare research. German and French scientists recently raised alarm over another dubious Pentagon research project. ..."
Oct 06, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Yonatan , Oct 6, 2018 10:22:53 AM | link

Recent evidence about deadly tests of biological substances in Tbilisi, Georgia raised alarm about U.S. biological weapon research in foreign countries. European scientist are extremely concerned about a dubious research program, financed by the Pentagon, that seems designed to spread diseases to crops, animals and people abroad. The creation of such weapons and of special ways to distribute them is prohibited under national and international law.

The U.S. is running biological weapon research across the globe :

Bio warfare scientists using diplomatic cover test man-made viruses at Pentagon bio laboratories in 25 countries across the world. These US bio-laboratories are funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under a $ 2.1 billion military program– Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), and are located in former Soviet Union countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa.

Until the mid nineteen-seventies the U.S. military tested biological warfare weapons on U.S. people , sometimes over large areas and on specific races. After a Congress investigation revealed the wide ranging program such testing was moved abroad.

Private companies use U.S. government controlled laboratories in foreign countries for secret biological research under contract of the U.S. military, the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security. Last month the Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva reported of one of these U.S. controlled bio-laboratories:

The US Embassy to Tbilisi transports frozen human blood and pathogens as diplomatic cargo for a secret US military program. Internal documents, implicating US diplomats in the transportation of and experimenting on pathogens under diplomatic cover were leaked to me by Georgian insiders. According to these documents, Pentagon scientists have been deployed to the Republic of Georgia and have been given diplomatic immunity to research deadly diseases and biting insects at the Lugar Center – the Pentagon biolaboratory in Georgia's capital Tbilisi.

Al Mayadeen TV broadcasted a video reportage about the laboratory and its deadly effects on Georgian 'patients'.

Last week the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Russian Foreign Ministry accused the U.S. of illegal biological weapon research in the Tbilisi laboratory :

The question of what really might have taken place at the secretive US-sponsored research facility hosted by Russia's southern neighbor was raised by the Russian military on Thursday after they studied files published online by a former Georgian minister.

The documents record the deaths of 73 people over a short period of time, indicating a test of "a highly toxic chemical or biological agents with high lethality rate," said Igor Kirillov, commander of the Russian military branch responsible for defending troops from radiological, chemical and biological weapons.

The U.S. rejects the claims but it does not explain the documents , what kind of research is done near Tbilisi, and the unusual secrecy and security around the laboratory.

It is not only the Russians and Georgians who are concerned about secret U.S. biological warfare research. German and French scientists recently raised alarm over another dubious Pentagon research project.


by MPG/D.Duneka - bigger

In October 2016 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a new project called Insect Allies :

A new DARPA program is poised to provide an alternative to traditional agricultural threat response, using targeted gene therapy to protect mature plants within a single growing season. DARPA proposes to leverage a natural and very efficient two-step delivery system to transfer modified genes to plants: insect vectors and the plant viruses they transmit. In the process, DARPA aims to transform certain insect pests into "Insect Allies," the name of the new effort.

The scenario DARPA describes is quite complicate. If a crop, for example maize, were widely infected with some illness, a virus would be manipulated and applied to the crop. The itself genetically modified virus would genetically modify the crop to 'cure' the illness. Infected insects would be used to distribute the viruses across the fields.

The program is run by the Biological Technologies Office (BTO) of DARPA. It does not come cheap. At least $27 million have been committed to it. If the discussed program were for purely agricultural purposes why would the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is part of the Pentagon, propose and finance such research?

Scientist from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, and the Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier, France, along with legal scholars from the University of Freiburg point out that the method DARPA wants to apply makes little sense for the stated agricultural purposes.

The eminent U.S. magazine Science published their work. The scientists ask if the project is Agricultural research, or a new bioweapon system?

[A]n ongoing research program funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) aims to disperse infectious genetically modified viruses that have been engineered to edit crop chromosomes directly in fields.
...
In the context of the stated aims of the DARPA program, it is our opinion that the knowledge to be gained from this program appears very limited in its capacity to enhance U.S. agriculture or respond to national emergencies (in either the short or long term). Furthermore, there has been an absence of adequate discussion regarding the major practical and regulatory impediments toward realizing the projected agricultural benefits. As a result, the program may be widely perceived as an effort to develop biological agents for hostile purposes and their means of delivery , which -- if true -- would constitute a breach of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).

It its response to the Science paper DARPA again insists that the program is for purely agricultural purpose. But the response does not answer the questions the scientists put up.

The mechanism of spreading infectious genetically modified viruses to genetically modify and 'heal' plants in the fields is itself full of problems and dangers. To use insects for distributing such viruses borders on insane.

If one has access to the targeted crop fields and if one has a genetically modified virus to influence the plants why would one use insects to distribute it? Why not use the well known targeted process of spraying the affected fields, just like it is widely done today? Only when one does not have access to the fields, when these are situated in a foreign country the U.S. has no access to, does it make sense to use insects for such purposes.

The idea that the real (and illegal) purpose of such U.S. research is biological warfare is not far fetched at all.

During the Korea War the U.S. dropped infected insects and rodents over north Korea and China to infect people with deadly diseases. Various pathogens, including anthrax, were used against the civilian population. During the Vietnam war the U.S. sprayed thousand of square miles with poisonous defoliants. It tested biological weapons on the people of Hawaii, Alaska, Maryland, Florida, Canada and Britain. In 2002 weaponized anthrax spores from the U.S. biological warfare laboratory in Fort Derrick were used to scare U.S. politicians into agreeing to the Patriot Act. At least five people were killed. And why is the U.S. Air Force looking for synovial tissue and RNA samples collected specifically from Caucasian people in Russia?

Biological warfare programs are extremely dangerous. Not only to 'the enemy' but to ones own population. Infectious diseases and pathogens can spread around the globe within a few days. Genetic modifications can have unpredictable secondary effects. Viruses can jump over the species barrier. These are the sound reasons why such weapons, and research into using them, are prohibited.

The U.S. government should follow the law and stop all such programs. Even if only in the self interest of protecting its very own people.

Posted by b on October 6, 2018 at 10:02 AM | Permalink

Comments A picture speaks a thoudsand words. There are 49 bio-weapons research labs in 6 countries in close proximity to Russia.

https://cont.ws/uploads/pic/2018/10/1538709227_349754.jpg

The UK Porton Down labs are also involved in this process. They have conducted experiments on the general public travelling on the London Underground. More recently, they have received a nice £47 million funding boost for all their good work on the Skripal case.

"Biological warfare programs are extremely dangerous. Not only to 'the enemy' but to ones own population."

This may explain the US BW research program interest in genetic material of RUssians. They may hope to produce some kind of narrowly targetted (in theory) pathogen. Given the ethnic diversity of the Russian Federation, Russian-ness is largely cultural rather than genetic. Genetic effects would only likely to succeed in populations with a narrow genetic spread.


BM , Oct 6, 2018 11:00:10 AM | link

The sickness of these people knows no limits. The Nazis and the wartime Japanises were teddy bears by comparison.
psychohistorian , Oct 6, 2018 11:02:29 AM | link
@ b who ended with:
"
The U.S. government should follow the law and stop all such programs. Even if only in the self interest of protecting its very own people.
"
Your assumption is that the US government has the best interests of its citizens in mind. We know the US government is under the control of the global elite and yes, they do not have the best interests of global humanity at heart.

Western humans are being controlled by a parasite class that has historically operated in this manner. It is only with the advent of the intertubes that information is shared widely enough for these patterns of control to become clear. The mindset behind this control seems to be monotheism with the center held by private finance. Monotheism was perverted enough in in 1054 to insure that nowhere in Europe is the Crab Nebula supernova that was visible for 23 days and nights in the sky documented. This is a perverted mindset that denies reality so thoroughly, eh?

The spawn of the monotheistic elite continue to act as though they really are better than the rest of humanity and deserve to rule over everyone. They are having their position challenged and seem to have no moral center other than to themselves.

My only positive point to this situation is that it clearly brings out the entitled from under their rocks to push their bias. IF Western society cannot stand up and say that we don't want to live like this, then I suspect our extinction is closer than many think

BM , Oct 6, 2018 11:17:33 AM | link
B: ... To use insects for distributing such viruses borders on insane .

If one has access to the targeted crop fields and if one has a genetically modified virus to influence the plants why would one use insects to distribute it? Why not use the well known targeted process of spraying the affected fields, just like it is widely done today? Only when one does not have access to the fields, when these are situated in a foreign country the U.S. has no access to, does it make sense to use insects for such purposes.

It does NOT border on insanity, B, there is nothing remotely borderline about it. It is insane, full stop. (Borderline insanity means it is on the border, could be on either side).

Why not spray the fields? The compellingly obvious - and necessarily intended - feature of the insects is their ability to spread out of control.

BM , Oct 6, 2018 11:27:04 AM | link
Maybe this is one of the clues to the complex and so multifaceted Skripal saga - the British know the Russians had leads and would bring out this news, and were desperately trying to destroy their credibility in advance.
BM , Oct 6, 2018 11:46:36 AM | link
B/Psychohistorian

"The U.S. government should follow the law and stop all such programs. Even if only in the self interest of protecting its very own people."

Your assumption is that the US government has the best interests of its citizens in mind. We know the US government is under the control of the global elite and yes, they do not have the best interests of global humanity at heart.

Further than that - the elite expressly desire to reduce the global population - including the US population - to a tiny fraction of what it is at present.

As for the "law", well we see what is happening these days: Russiagate-FBI-DoJ criminality, US using terrorism as foreign policy, rapidly multiplying false flags, using sanctions to ban legtimate trade of competitors, Bolton's threats to ICC, threats to blockade Russia, ficticious sovereignty claims such as right to inspect Russian/Chinese ports and right to build bases in Syria ...

"LAW" is rapidly evaporating away - very soon it will not exist at all, in the West.
That appears to be a specific intention, and ties in with the mindless skripal fantasy/Syria chemical weapons fantasy/virtual reality/"we create our own reality" bullshit.

[B: My appologies for the string of short posts, it was not intentional as such!]

CD Waller , Oct 6, 2018 12:02:40 PM | link
The latest rash of hacking accusations against Russia appears timed to distract the public from this highly disturbing information.
One way or another, the old white men who are the self appointed ruling elite week appear determined to turn the planet into a monstrous, king sized Jonestown.
SlapHappy , Oct 6, 2018 12:11:34 PM | link
If you ask me, allowing our Ministry of War to be housed in a building that's shaped like a Satanic pentagram might not be the best idea.
ben , Oct 6, 2018 12:51:07 PM | link
Thanks b, for broaching this subject. Here is a video on this subject, posted by, I believe
Mark2, earlier last week.

http://dilyana.bg/diplomatic-viruses/

If this doesn't convince anyone of the depravity of empire, nothing will.

These are so truly sick MFers

ben , Oct 6, 2018 12:56:17 PM | link
PS- High five and a shout out to Anya, a poster here, for the contributions made for the same subject.

Hope my memory is correct, if not, apologies...

John Merryman. , Oct 6, 2018 12:58:12 PM | link
Psycho,
Which gets to the logical flaw in monotheism. A spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience from which life rises, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement from which humanity fell. More the new born babe, than the wise old man. It is just that for social control, it makes more sense to idolize wisdom over passion.
The deeper issue is that Western culture is ideals based, rather balance based, like Eastern culture. The basis of civilization is story telling and the most memorable and repeated stories are those with a focus, moral lesson and compelling narrative. So it becomes assumed there must be some goal, destination, or ideal state to which we strive, even if it's just the bottom line. Rather than to be in balance with nature and the community, absorbing and radiating the energy of the present.
Which also goes to the nature of time. As we have this narrative thought process, being mobile organisms, processing our motion, we think of time as a vector from past to future, but the reality is change turning future to past. Potential>actual>residual. There is only this state of dynamic energy and thermodynamics is a more elemental aspect of it than time. Expansion/consolidation.
Mark2 , Oct 6, 2018 1:02:02 PM | link
Thank you 'b' this subject is guaranteed to give us all nightmares on its own, but added in to the rest of the bigger equation ! We run out of strong enough words to do it justice ! It's to much for one to bare. We need to share this burden or we will go under.
This kind of depravity has always been there in mankind -- - napalm,agent orange, white phosphorus the human imagination is vast ! But now they have the power, technology, resources opatunity and motivation, that is new !
We here at present can spread this story as much as we possibly can ! Far and wide.

[Oct 05, 2018] Wilderness of mirrors MI6, the Cold War, spies and traitors from Gordievsky to Skripal -- RT Op-ed

Notable quotes:
"... What could possibly go wrong? ..."
Oct 05, 2018 | www.rt.com

Which brings me to the Skripal affair.

That the USSR was an existential threat to Western capitalism and colonialism and war – of one kind or another – between these two camps was logical and inevitable. But the Soviet Union is 30 years dead.

Indeed, Gordievsky through Macintyre can – if he's telling the truth – claim that he helped bring about the (brief) end of history and the "final" victory. His claimed role in the rise and rise of Gorbachev's relationship with Mrs Thatcher and, by extension, President Reagan certainly hastened the downfall of the USSR.

But Britain recruited Skripal in 1996 when not only was the Soviet Union dead but Russia was ruled by the West's performing bear Boris Yeltsin. And during his presidency, Russia was passed-out on the floor with everyone picking its pockets.

Why was Britain still fighting the Cold War against Russia in 1996, and why is it still fighting the Cold War against Russia now?

Just this week, the rather effete British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson – a former fireplace salesman – said he was sending 800 shivering British soldiers to the Arctic to be ready to fight Russia there. Amidst the snow. And the ice.

As both Napoleon and Hitler must have said: " What could possibly go wrong? "

[Oct 05, 2018] Opinion Russian Meddling Is a Symptom, Not the Disease - The New York Times

Oct 05, 2018 | www.nytimes.com

Given the credible evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, it's only natural that Americans are concerned about the possibility of further foreign interference, especially as the midterms draw closer.

But I worry that we're focusing too much on the foreign part of the problem -- in which social media accounts and pages controlled by overseas "troll factories" post false and divisive material -- and not enough on how our own domestic political polarization feeds into the basic business model of companies like Facebook and YouTube.

It's this interaction -- both aspects of which are homegrown -- that fosters the dissemination of false and divisive material, and this will persist as a major problem even in the absence of concerted foreign efforts.

Consider some telling exchanges from this year's Senate hearings involving high-level executives from Facebook and Twitter. (Google, which owns YouTube, didn't bother sending a comparable representative.) In April, Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, pressed Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, on how much money the company had made by ads placed by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll factory. Mr. Zuckerberg replied that it was about $100,000 -- a negligible amount of money for the company.

Advertisement

Last month, Ms. Harris further grilled Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, on this point, demanding to know how much inauthentic Russian content was on Facebook. Ms. Sandberg had her sound bite ready, saying that "any amount is too much," but she ultimately threw out an estimate of .004 percent, another negligible amount.

The exchange made for good viewing: a senator asking tough questions, chastised executives being forced to put exact numbers on the table. But the truth is that paid Russian content was almost certainly immaterial to Facebook's revenue -- and the .004 percent figure, though almost certainly rhetorical, does capture the relative insignificance of the paid Russian presence on Facebook.

Contrast this, however, with another question from Ms. Harris, in which she asked Ms. Sandberg how Facebook can "reconcile an incentive to create and increase your user engagement when the content that generates a lot of engagement is often inflammatory and hateful." That astute question Ms. Sandberg completely sidestepped, which was no surprise: No statistic can paper over the fact that this is a real problem.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have business models that thrive on the outrageous, the incendiary and the eye-catching, because such content generates "engagement" and captures our attention, which the platforms then sell to advertisers, paired with extensive data on users that allow advertisers (and propagandists) to "microtarget" us at an individual level.

Traditional media outlets, of course, are frequently also cynical manipulators of sensationalistic content, but social media is better able to weaponize it. Algorithms can measure what content best "engages" each user and can target him or her individually in a way that the sleaziest editor of a broadcast medium could only dream of.

... ... ...

It is understandable that legislators and the public are concerned about other countries meddling in our elections. But foreign meddling is to our politics what a fever is to tuberculosis: a mere symptom of a deeper problem. To heal, we need the correct diagnosis followed by action that treats the underlying diseases. The closer our legislators look at our own domestic politics as well as Silicon Valley's business model, the better the answers they will find.

Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) is an associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, the author of "Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest" and a contributing opinion writer.

[Oct 05, 2018] Wilderness of mirrors MI6, the Cold War, spies and traitors from Gordievsky to Skripal -- RT Op-ed

Notable quotes:
"... What could possibly go wrong? ..."
Oct 05, 2018 | www.rt.com

Which brings me to the Skripal affair.

That the USSR was an existential threat to Western capitalism and colonialism and war – of one kind or another – between these two camps was logical and inevitable. But the Soviet Union is 30 years dead.

Indeed, Gordievsky through Macintyre can – if he's telling the truth – claim that he helped bring about the (brief) end of history and the "final" victory. His claimed role in the rise and rise of Gorbachev's relationship with Mrs Thatcher and, by extension, President Reagan certainly hastened the downfall of the USSR.

But Britain recruited Skripal in 1996 when not only was the Soviet Union dead but Russia was ruled by the West's performing bear Boris Yeltsin. And during his presidency, Russia was passed-out on the floor with everyone picking its pockets.

Why was Britain still fighting the Cold War against Russia in 1996, and why is it still fighting the Cold War against Russia now?

Just this week, the rather effete British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson – a former fireplace salesman – said he was sending 800 shivering British soldiers to the Arctic to be ready to fight Russia there. Amidst the snow. And the ice.

As both Napoleon and Hitler must have said: " What could possibly go wrong? "

[Oct 05, 2018] Mueller now need to obey the roles of pre-trial discovery

Notable quotes:
"... A few months ago, a dozen Russian individuals were charged with cyber-crime offenses that Mueller knew would never be tested at trial b/c the charged individuals would never be extradited. However, the indictment included charges against two Russian corporations that cleverly hired American lawyers to appear on their behalf, and enter pleas of Not Guilty. ..."
"... This tactic should have set the pre-trial discovery process to begin, causing Mueller to be obliged to turn over evidence supporting the charges as well as any exculpatory information favoring the accused corporations. ..."
Oct 05, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

chet380 , Oct 5, 2018 1:37:53 PM | link

A few months ago, a dozen Russian individuals were charged with cyber-crime offenses that Mueller knew would never be tested at trial b/c the charged individuals would never be extradited. However, the indictment included charges against two Russian corporations that cleverly hired American lawyers to appear on their behalf, and enter pleas of Not Guilty.

This tactic should have set the pre-trial discovery process to begin, causing Mueller to be obliged to turn over evidence supporting the charges as well as any exculpatory information favoring the accused corporations.

As any reference to this case can't seem to be found, can anyone help with info as to the present status of the case?

[Oct 05, 2018] Putin take on Skripal false flag operation by UK: Nobody wanted to poison This Skripal is a traitor, as I said. He was caught and punished. He spent a total of five years in prison. We released him. That's it. He left. He continued to cooperate with and consult some security services. So what?

Oct 05, 2018 | en.kremlin.ru

Ryan Chilcote: Since you brought up the subject of sanctions, as you know after the Skripal poisoning, Russia is facing even more of them, perhaps as soon as November. What is Russia prepared to do to change the trajectory of relations with the United States and the West?

Vladimir Putin : We are not the ones introducing these sanctions against the United States or the West. We are just responding to their actions, and we do this in very restrained, careful steps so as not to cause harm, primarily to ourselves. And we will continue to do so.

As regards the Skripals and all that, this latest spy scandal is being artificially inflated. I have seen some media outlets and your colleagues push the idea that Skripal is almost a human rights activist. But he is just a spy, a traitor to the motherland. There is such a term, a 'traitor to the motherland,' and that's what he is.

Imagine you are a citizen of a country, and suddenly somebody comes along who betrays your country. How would you, or anybody present here, a representative of any country, feel about such a person? He is scum, that's all. But a whole information campaign has been deployed around it.

I think it will come to an end, I hope it will, and the sooner the better. We have repeatedly told our colleagues to show us the documents. We will see what can be done and conduct an investigation.

We probably have an agreement with the UK on assistance in criminal cases that outlines the procedure. Well, submit the documents to the Prosecutor General's Office as required. We will see what actually happened there.

The fuss between security services did not start yesterday. As you know, espionage, just like prostitution, is one of the most 'important' jobs in the world. So what? Nobody shut it down and nobody can shut it down yet.

Ryan Chilcote : Espionage aside, I think there are two other issues. One is the use of chemical weapons, and let's not forget that in addition to the Skripal family being affected in that attack, there was also a homeless person who was killed when they came in contact with the nerve agent Novichok.

Vladimir Putin: Listen, since we are talking about poisoning Skripal, are you saying that we also poisoned a homeless person there? Sometimes I look at what is happening around this case and it amazes me. Some guys came to England and started poisoning homeless people. Such nonsense. What is this all about? Are they working for cleaning services? Nobody wanted to poison This Skripal is a traitor, as I said. He was caught and punished. He spent a total of five years in prison. We released him. That's it. He left. He continued to cooperate with and consult some security services. So what? What are we talking about right now? Oil, gas or espionage? What is your question?

Let's move on to the other oldest profession and discuss the latest developments in that business. (Laughter.)

[Oct 05, 2018] MI5 can authorise agents to commit crimes, tribunal told . Maybe the UK should be sanctioned.

Oct 05, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Fran , Oct 5, 2018 2:01:34 PM | link

Funny how lowkey this topic is handled. It appeard in The Times. As the Times article is behind a paywall. I am linking to the Irish Times: MI5 can authorise agents to commit crimes, tribunal told . Maybe the UK should be sanctioned.

Makes my fantasy go a little wild and wonder if there might be any connection to Skripal.

[Oct 05, 2018] What I want and I am completely serious is that this nightmare about Russia's alleged interference with some election campaign in the United States ends. I want the United States, the American elite, the US elite to calm down and clear up their own mess and restore a certain balance of common sense and national interests, just like in the oil market

Oct 05, 2018 | en.kremlin.ru

Vladimir Putin: What I want – and I am completely serious – is that this nightmare about Russia's alleged interference with some election campaign in the United States ends. I want the United States, the American elite, the US elite to calm down and clear up their own mess and restore a certain balance of common sense and national interests, just like in the oil market. I want the domestic political squabbles in the United States to stop ruining Russia-US relations and adversely affecting the situation in the world.

[Oct 05, 2018] Of course the USA and coalition of imbeciles are busy projecting onto Russia and China what they themselves are guilty of

Notable quotes:
"... I think its far more likely that a friendly foreign intelligence agency or the US had something to do with it. ..."
Oct 05, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

james , Oct 5, 2018 3:44:18 PM | link

thanks b.. excellent information and insights as usual..

of course the USA and coalition of imbeciles are busy projecting onto Russia and China what they themselves are guilty of.. the use of propaganda has gone into overdrive and is now an accepted policy of the west.. screw facts.. who needs facts when you have a war to pursue... and that is just what it looks like to me, as there is no end in sight to any of this western madness...

the financial sanctions have not worked.. that much is clear.. another approach via propaganda is to be the new regular feature.. claim all sorts of lies and supposition on russia, china, iran, north korea, venezuela or any country that dares to get out of line with the official ''coalition'' and you will be targeted with propaganda and or worse..

Pft , Oct 5, 2018 5:36:22 PM | link
UncleTungsten@42

Companies in China, including foreign firms, are required by law to establish a party organization within their organization and party members head the mandatory unions in every company. Indeed some of the designers are no doubt party members. Significant pressure can be exerted on companies in China by the party, even foreign companies , especially with but not limited to Joint ventures.

In any other country your skepticism is warranted. Not China.

That said, given how little attention the Bloomberg story received yesterday by MSM web sites (havent checked today) beyond a denial story by msnbc I think its far more likely that a friendly foreign intelligence agency or the US had something to do with it. Blame China not Israel or CIA/NSA

But I doubt we will ever know

[Oct 05, 2018] How The U.S. Runs Public Relations Campaigns - Trump Style - Against Russia And China

Notable quotes:
"... I agree with Hoarsewhisperer that the elite are showing desperation but look at the sheer volume of BS they can spew out that is all over the map. ..."
"... The ... West is doubling down on Psychological Projection . Works like a charm with most peoples in the affected areas. ..."
"... A few months ago, a dozen Russian individuals were charged with cyber-crime offenses that Mueller knew would never be tested at trial b/c the charged individuals would never be extradited. However, the indictment included charges against two Russian corporations that cleverly hired American lawyers to appear on their behalf, and enter pleas of Not Guilty. ..."
"... This tactic should have set the pre-trial discovery process to begin, causing Mueller to be obliged to turn over evidence supporting the charges as well as any exculpatory information favoring the accused corporations. ..."
"... Russia has tried to negotiate with the US to avoid cyberspace being turned into another area of conflict. The US has rebuffed these requests. Likely too much money to be made by the MIC in another theater of warfare with that extortion racket called NATO and too much promise of the NSA scooping up even more data and adding it to the data already collected by the 5 eyes. ..."
"... Didn't WikiLeaks disclosed the fact that NSA can disguise any hack to look like some other actor was the culprit? All this shouting that Russia and China did these terrible deeds is to hide the fact that the west does this all the time as disclosed by WikiLeaks? And the Germans complaining? I hope they have improved security for the Chancellor's phone. Russia is a member of OPWC. Why do they have to sit out in cars in the parking lot of OPCW headquarters to hack into OPCW? Why not from the comfort of their office in the building. What is of more importance to me is an upcoming vote in the OPCW about investigation reports laying blame in the future. That will be a game changer in the false flag chemical attack be it Syria or the UK. currently reports don't lay blame. ..."
"... Going by the squealing noises coming out of the US and loyal vassals, the yanks are probably just pissed that they can't get into Russia or China's secure communications. ..."
Oct 05, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Yesterday several NATO countries ran a concerted propaganda campaign against Russia. The context for it was a NATO summit in which the U.S. presses for an intensified cyberwar against NATO's preferred enemy.

On the same day another coordinated campaign targeted China. It is aimed against China's development of computer chip manufacturing further up the value chain. Related to this is U.S. pressure on Taiwan, a leading chip manufacturer, to cut its ties with its big motherland.

The anti-Russian campaign is about alleged Russian spying, hacking and influence operations. Britain and the Netherland took the lead. Britain accused Russia's military intelligence service (GRU) of spying attempts against the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague and Switzerland, of spying attempts against the British Foreign Office, of influence campaigns related to European and the U.S. elections, and of hacking the international doping agency WADA. British media willingly helped to exaggerate the claims:

The Foreign Office attributed six specific attacks to GRU-backed hackers and identified 12 hacking group code names as fronts for the GRU – Fancy Bear, Voodoo Bear, APT28, Sofacy, Pawnstorm, Sednit, CyberCaliphate, Cyber Berku, BlackEnergy Actors, STRONTIUM, Tsar Team and Sandworm."

The "hacking group code names" the Guardian tries to sell to its readers do not refer to hacking groups but to certain cyberattack methods . Once such a method is known it can be used by any competent group and individual. Attributing such an attack is nearly impossible. Moreover Fancybear, ATP28, Pawn Storm, Sofacy Group, Sednit and Strontium are just different names for one and the same well known method . The other names listed refer to old groups and tools related to criminal hackers. Blackenergy has been used by cybercriminals since 2007. It is alleged that a pro-Russian group named Sandworm used it in Ukraine, but the evidence for that is dubious at best. To throw out such a list of code names without any differentiation reeks of a Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt (FUD) campaign designed to dis-inform and scare the public.

The Netherland for its part released a flurry of information about the alleged spying attempts against the OPCW in The Hague. It claims that four GRU agents traveled to The Hague on official Russian diplomatic passports to sniff out the WiFi network of the OPCW. (WiFi networks are notoriously easy to hack. If the OPCW is indeed using such it should not be trusted with any security relevant issues.) The Russian officials were allegedly very secretive, even cleaning out their own hotel trash, while they, at the same, time carried laptops with private data and even taxi receipts showing their travel from a GRU headquarter in Moscow to the airport. Like in the Skripal/Novichok saga the Russian spies are, at the same time, portrayed as supervillains and hapless amateurs. Real spies are neither.

The U.S. Justice Department added to the onslaught by issuing new indictments (pdf) against alleged GRU agents dubiously connected to several alleged hacking incidents . As none of those Russians will ever stand in front of a U.S. court the broad allegations will never be tested.

The anti-Russian campaign came just in time for yesterday's NATO Defense Minister meeting at which the U.S. 'offered' to use its malicious cyber tools under NATO disguise:

Katie Wheelbarger, the principal deputy assistant defense secretary for international security affairs, said the U.S. is committing to use offensive and defensive cyber operations for NATO allies, but America will maintain control over its own personnel and capabilities.

If the European NATO allies, under pressure of the propaganda onslaught, agree to that, the obvious results will be more U.S. control over its allies' networks and citizens as well as more threats against Russia:

NATO's chief vowed on Thursday to strengthen the alliance's defenses against attacks on computer networks that Britain said are directed by Russian military intelligence, also calling on Russia to stop its "reckless" behavior.

The allegations against Russia over nefarious spying operations and sockpuppet campaigns are highly hypocritical . The immense scale of U.S. and British spying revealed by Edward Snowden and through the Wikileaks Vault 7 leak of CIA hacking tools is well known. The Pentagon runs large social media manipulation campaigns. The British GHCQ hacked Belgium's largest telco network to spy on the data of the many international organizations in Brussels.

International organizations like the OPCW have long been the target of U.S. spies and operations. The U.S. National Security Service (NSA) regularly hacked the OPCW since at least September 2000 :

According to last week's Shadow Brokers leak, the NSA compromised a DNS server of the Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in September 2000, two years after the Iraq Liberation Act and Operation Desert Fox, but before the Bush election.

It was the U.S. which in 2002 forced out the head of the OPCW because he did not agree to propagandizing imaginary Iraqi chemical weapons:

José M. Bustani, a Brazilian diplomat who was unanimously re-elected last year as the director general of the 145-nation Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, was voted out of office today after refusing repeated demands by the United States that he step down because of his "management style." No successor has been selected.

The U.S. arranged the vote against Bustani by threatening to leave the OPCW. Day's earlier 'Yosemite Sam' John Bolton, now Trump's National Security Advisor, threatened to hurt José Bustani's children to press him to resign:

"I got a phone call from John Bolton – it was first time I had contact with him – and he said he had instructions to tell me that I have to resign from the organization, and I asked him why," Bustani told RT. "He said that [my] management style was not agreeable to Washington."
...
Bustani said he "owed nothing" to the US, pointing out that he was appointed by all OPCW member states. Striking a more sinister tone, Bolton said: "OK, so there will be retaliation. Prepare to accept the consequences. We know where your kids are. "

According to Bustani, two of his children were in New York at the time, and his daughter was in London.

Russia's government will need decades of hard work to reach the scale of U.S./UK hypocrisy, hacking and lying.


The propaganda rush against Russia came on the same day as a similar campaign was launched against China. A well timed Bloomberg story, which had been in the works for over a year, claimed that Chinese companies manipulated hardware they manufactured for the U.S. company SuperMicro. The hardware was then sold to Apple, Amazon and others for their cloud server businesses.

The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies :

Nested on the servers' motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn't part of the boards' original design.

Both Apple and Amazon denied the story with very strong statements . The Bloomberg tale has immense problems. It is for one completely based on anonymous sources, most of them U.S. government officials:

The companies' denials are countered by six current and former senior national security officials, who -- in conversations that began during the Obama administration and continued under the Trump administration -- detailed the discovery of the chips and the government's investigation.

The way the alleged manipulation is described to function is theoretical possible , but not plausible . In my learned opinion one would need multiple manipulations, not just one tiny chip, to achieve the described results. Even reliably U.S. friendly cyberhawks are unconvinced of the story's veracity. It is especially curious that such server boards are still in use in security relevant U.S. government operations:

Assuming the Bloomberg story is accurate, that means that the US intelligence community, during a period spanning two administrations, saw a foreign threat and allowed that threat to infiltrate the US military. If the story is untrue, or incorrect on its technical merits, then it would make sense that Supermicro gear is being used by the US military.

There might be financial motives behind the story:

Bloomberg reporters receive bonuses based indirectly on how much they shift markets with their reporting. This story undoubtedly did that.

When the story came out SuperMicro's stock price crashed from $21.40 to below $9.00 per share. It now trades at $12.60:

The story might be a cover-up for a NSA hack that was accidentally detected. Most likely it is exaggerated half truth, based on an old event , to deter the 'western' industry from sourcing anything from producers in China.

This would be consistent with other such U.S. moves against China which coincidentally (not) happened on the same day the Bloomberg story was launched.

One is a very hawkish speech U.S. Vice President Pence held yesterday :

Vice President Mike Pence accused China on Thursday of trying to undermine President Donald Trump as the administration deploys tough new rhetoric over Chinese trade, economic and foreign policies.
...
Sounding the alarm, Pence warned other nations to be wary of doing business with China, condemning the Asian country's "debt diplomacy" that allows it to draw developing nations into its orbit.

Pence also warned American businesses to be vigilant against Chinese efforts to leverage access to their markets to modify corporate behavior to their liking.

Another move is a new Pentagon report warning against the purchase of Chinese equipment and launched via Reuters in support of the campaign:

China represents a "significant and growing risk" to the supply of materials vital to the U.S. military, according to a new Pentagon-led report that seeks to mend weaknesses in core U.S. industries vital to national security.

The nearly 150-page report, seen by Reuters on Thursday ahead of its formal release Friday, concluded there are nearly 300 vulnerabilities that could affect critical materials and components essential to the U.S. military.
...
"A key finding of this report is that China represents a significant and growing risk to the supply of materials and technologies deemed strategic and critical to U.S. national security," the report said.

The Bloomberg story, the Pence speech and the Pentagon report 'leak' on the same day seem designed to scare everyone away from using Chinese equipment or China manufactured parts within there supply chain.

The allegations of Chinese supply chain attacks are of course just as hypocritical as the allegations against Russia. The very first know case of computer related supply chain manipulation goes back to 1982 :

A CIA operation to sabotage Soviet industry by duping Moscow into stealing booby-trapped software was spectacularly successful when it triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian gas pipeline, it emerged yesterday.
...
Mr Reed writes that the software "was programmed to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds".

Wikileaks list 27 cases of U.S. supply chain manipulation of computer hardware and software. A search for "supply chain" in the Snowden archives shows 18 documents describing such 'projects'.


The U.S. government under Trump - and with John Bolton in a leading position - copied Trump's brutal campaign style and uses it as an instrument in its foreign policy. Trump's victory in the 2016 election proves that such campaigns are highly successful, even when the elements they are build of are dubious or untrue. In their scale and coordination the current campaigns are comparable to the 2002 run-up for the war on Iraq.

Then, as during the Trump election campaign and as now, the media are crucial to the public effect these campaigns have. Will they attempt to take the stories the campaigns are made of apart? Will they set them into the larger context of global U.S. spying and manipulation? Will they explain the real purpose of these campaigns?

Don't bet on it.

Posted by b on October 5, 2018 at 08:27 AM


Timothy Hagios , Oct 5, 2018 8:52:41 AM | link

IMO the US Government's propaganda is structured to along the lines of a fantasy novel. The propaganda is designed to convince the public of two inherently contradictory ideas:

1) that the country is surrounded on vast sides by vast hostile empires that threaten everything we hold dear and

2) despite these dire threats, the country cannot really be harmed because of "our freedoms."

Like with a fantasy novel, the reader gets all the thrills of an epic battle while being certain that the evil empires will never triumph. An attractive form of propaganda, to be certain.

Steve , Oct 5, 2018 12:09:45 PM | link
Well, so far the propaganda is having very minor effect on the ordinary people. If you read the comment section of most of the corporate media you will see that people are just not buying the BS.
Hausmeister , Oct 5, 2018 12:22:26 PM | link
Steve | Oct 5, 2018 12:09:45 PM | 16

Indifference of the ordinary people does not mean much. Just that there is such indifference. The arguments against that claimed Chinese hardware hack are meta-arguments.

Hoarsewhisperer , Oct 5, 2018 12:25:28 PM | link
...
Got to wonder what the end game is here. WW3? Or up they expecting the Russian people to come begging for an end to sanctions?
Posted by: dh | Oct 5, 2018 11:49:07 AM | 11

Good question.

It's not WWIII. Putin has already said that if WWIII goes Nuclear, survival will be a lottery. Imo the Christian Colonial West, hypnotised by 30 years of its own bs and busily patting itself on the back and performing Victory Laps on the world stage, has been caught napping (asleep at the wheel) and now needs time to ponder the downside.

Hoarsewhisperer , Oct 5, 2018 12:48:30 PM | link
Imo this latest drivel-fest stems from the fact that Russia is now/again militarily unassailable. That doesn't mean that Russia can't be attacked but it does mean that anyone who tries it will wish they hadn't.

And it's driving the defunct Masters Of The Universe insaner.

psychohistorian , Oct 5, 2018 1:08:44 PM | link
Excellent journalism b....thanks

I agree with Hoarsewhisperer that the elite are showing desperation but look at the sheer volume of BS they can spew out that is all over the map.

The Supreme Court justice debacle is another example of so riling up the forces around the sex issue so that the rest of his moral standing that effects all of us is ignored.....the sex issue is marginalized and pop goes the weasel onto the Supreme Court to bring the US closer to feudalism.

notheonly1 , Oct 5, 2018 1:09:01 PM | link
The ... West is doubling down on Psychological Projection . Works like a charm with most peoples in the affected areas.

Although it is practically a symptom of a deeper sitting mental illness, it is still treated as some sort of cavalier's delinquency. Like it is to be expected that the rulers of said West resort to this kind of projection.

The only interesting part though - one that is next to never really understood by the gullible masses - is the Projection part of it. Because it means nothing else than the fact that the projector is the one who is perpetrating the crimes and malevolent activities it accuses the 'enemy'/opposing side of.

The West is mentally ill. Nothing new, the Eastern sages pointed to that a long time ago. Very much like the Native American Indians were flabbergasted by the moronity and cruelty the invaders displayed. The one that has adhered to my memory like fusion is: Only paleface would set a river on fire.

Last but not least, Nazi is as Nazi does. As can be verified perusing the story of this Nazi that never had to fear repercussions for his crimes against humanity. For the simple reason that the U.S. protected him to gain his knowledge about advanced biological and chemical warfare. The Nazi was Kurt Blome .

b , Oct 5, 2018 1:09:38 PM | link
@CE - There is no problem with the logo on the server side and with the clients I use. Suggestion: clear your cache.
AntiSpin , Oct 5, 2018 1:20:00 PM | link
And that's not all . . .

In early morning broadcasts yesterday, BBC and NPR accused China and Russia of projecting positive images of their countries, and of acting in accordance with their national interests.

I am so proud that my own country – USA – would never do either one of those things!

denk , Oct 5, 2018 1:33:47 PM | link
"On the same day another coordinated campaign targeted China. It is aimed against China's development of computer chip manufacturing further up the value chain. Related to this is U.S. pressure on Taiwan, a leading chip manufacturer, to cut its ties with its big motherland."

Gen William Looney, first gulf war.... "If they turn on their radars we're going to blow up their goddamn SAMs [surface-to-air missiles]. They know we own their country. We own their airspace We dictate the way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America right now. It's a good thing, especially when there's a lot of oil out there we need. [1]"

------------------------------------------------------

Trump the anti establishment maverick...

We'r a rule based system, Here'r the rules. We decide..... who'r terrorists, who'r 'freedom fighters. Whats a fair election, whats a farce. Whats a genocide, whats legit police action. Whats R2p, whats unprovoked aggression. Who can do biz with whom. Who's the right man for your prez. We own you. MAGA.

[1]
I dont like to use wiki but that's the only place I could retrieve this quote, they'r wiping the net clean, even images, videos.

Better be mentally prep for the day you wake up in the morning and cant find MOA,

Anya , Oct 5, 2018 1:37:06 PM | link
Back to sanctioning Russian under the flimsy pretext of Skripals' poisoning. The US has been poisoning Georgians (some died) and this is well documented. Are the UK prudes ready to sanction the US for the crime?

http://dilyana.bg/us-diplomats-involved-in-trafficking-of-human-blood-and-pathogens-for-secret-military-program/

"The US Embassy to Tbilisi transports frozen human blood and pathogens as diplomatic cargo for a secret US military program. Pentagon scientists have been deployed to the Republic of Georgia and have been given diplomatic immunity to research deadly diseases and biting insects at the Lugar Center – the Pentagon biolaboratory in Georgia's capital Tbilisi.

The Pentagon projects involving ticks coincided with an inexplicable outbreak of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) which is caused by infection through a tick-borne virus. In 2014 34 people became infected (amongst which a 4-year old child). A total of 60 cases with 9 fatalities have been registered in Georgia since 2009."

The above is an honest journalism and not some presstituting production by the eunuchs Luke Harding and George Monbiot. And don't forget Luke & George's comrade-in-arms, the "phenomenal expert" Eliot Higgins (a former salesman of ladies underwear and college dropout) who has zero training in engineering, chemistry, physics, mathematics, ballistics, foreign languages, biology, history and basically in any field of research. Zero. This is why Higgins is the best expert at the the ziocon Atlantic Council made of the scoundrels of the same caliber.

"This is a man who, with his agency Bellingcat, will absolutely always back the position of western governments, and powerful western organisations."

https://thetruthspeaker.co/2016/02/28/eliot-higgins-of-bellingcat-who-is-he-everything-you-need-to-know/

chet380 , Oct 5, 2018 1:37:53 PM | link
A few months ago, a dozen Russian individuals were charged with cyber-crime offenses that Mueller knew would never be tested at trial b/c the charged individuals would never be extradited. However, the indictment included charges against two Russian corporations that cleverly hired American lawyers to appear on their behalf, and enter pleas of Not Guilty.

This tactic should have set the pre-trial discovery process to begin, causing Mueller to be obliged to turn over evidence supporting the charges as well as any exculpatory information favoring the accused corporations.

As any reference to this case can't seem to be found, can anyone help with info as to the present status of the case?

Fran , Oct 5, 2018 2:01:34 PM | link
Funny how lowkey this topic is handled. It appeard in The Times. As the Times article is behind a paywall. I am linking to the Irish Times: MI5 can authorise agents to commit crimes, tribunal told . Maybe the UK should be sanctioned.

Makes my fantasy go a little wild and wonder if there might be any connection to Skripal.

Noirette , Oct 5, 2018 2:11:45 PM | link
For those who missed May's latest Brexit speech (which had zero content), here she is jiving to Dancing Queen by Abba for her glorified entrance. No need to make caricatures, she does it herself. Free of charge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbCDFNRA-Wo&frags=pl%2Cwn

The USA + GB have become totally unhinged. Seeking a 'safe' enemy *without* - as the Deplorables or Brexiteers *within* don't hit the spot, for many reasons - .. to explain and cover up Hillary's loss and the ugly Brexit mess with its clueless posturing pols, is one thing.

To continue to provoke Russia and China, particularly Russia, in this way is now skirting with danger beyond the .. ? Containable, ignorable, what ..?

Plus, the MSM, lousy as it is and was, has spinned off into even further mad realms, seemingly forced into a hyper, over-blown anti-Russian hysteria. Often far more strongly so than the pols. / others they seemingly quote.

This is all becoming seriously alarming. I'm getting very bad feelings.

karlof1 , Oct 5, 2018 2:22:25 PM | link
Seems like another episode of False Friday to bury all the crap made public during the week while pushing other news aside. Much of it's recycled crap from Obama's term and just as false.
Tent-A-Cles , Oct 5, 2018 3:03:03 PM | link
During the Cold War, the West contolled some 2/3 of the global economy.

If they again bring a "Free World" protective curtain down around themselves in defensive retrenchment, what percent would they control now? Which countries would be guaranteed to be inside the tent pissing out, and which would be outide the tent pissing in? And who would be non-aligned (with the exception of their military purchases.)

Pakistan, India, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Africa, etc. -- Where would the dominos fall? Is this what they are trying to accomplish? If you are not with us, you are against us, as the ever eloquent G. W. Shrub might have said. Any predictions?

james , Oct 5, 2018 3:44:18 PM | link
thanks b.. excellent information and insights as usual..

of course the USA and coalition of imbeciles are busy projecting onto Russia and China what they themselves are guilty of.. the use of propaganda has gone into overdrive and is now an accepted policy of the west.. screw facts.. who needs facts when you have a war to pursue... and that is just what it looks like to me, as there is no end in sight to any of this western madness...

the financial sanctions have not worked.. that much is clear.. another approach via propaganda is to be the new regular feature.. claim all sorts of lies and supposition on russia, china, iran, north korea, venezuela or any country that dares to get out of line with the official ''coalition'' and you will be targeted with propaganda and or worse..

is there a way to create an alternative internet??

Peter AU 1 , Oct 5, 2018 4:05:02 PM | link
Looking around the MSM, MH17 also comes into it. Dutch are accusing Russia of trying to hack the MH17 sham investigation. This propaganda attack comes only a week or two after Russia tracked the missile parts numbers, supplied by JIT, through records which led to Ukraine.
Tom , Oct 5, 2018 4:19:51 PM | link
Russia has tried to negotiate with the US to avoid cyberspace being turned into another area of conflict. The US has rebuffed these requests. Likely too much money to be made by the MIC in another theater of warfare with that extortion racket called NATO and too much promise of the NSA scooping up even more data and adding it to the data already collected by the 5 eyes.

Canada is being pressured into not buying Chinese for its military civilian hardware. Scare the politicians into buying US goods that have a backdoor for the CIA to use. Canada shouldn't complain. The Canadian government hacked into the Brazilian government computers for the benefit of Canadian mining interests.

Didn't WikiLeaks disclosed the fact that NSA can disguise any hack to look like some other actor was the culprit? All this shouting that Russia and China did these terrible deeds is to hide the fact that the west does this all the time as disclosed by WikiLeaks? And the Germans complaining? I hope they have improved security for the Chancellor's phone. Russia is a member of OPWC. Why do they have to sit out in cars in the parking lot of OPCW headquarters to hack into OPCW? Why not from the comfort of their office in the building. What is of more importance to me is an upcoming vote in the OPCW about investigation reports laying blame in the future. That will be a game changer in the false flag chemical attack be it Syria or the UK. currently reports don't lay blame.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/10/03/us-responsible-cyberspace-becoming-war-domain-instead-of-area-cooperation.html

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/arctic-patrol-ships-chinese-content-1.4849562

Jen , Oct 5, 2018 5:14:15 PM | link
Timothy Hagios @ 1:

An element of the Skripal poisoning saga in Britain (the Novichok) was lifted from the TV series "Strikeback" screening in the country in November 2017 and February 2018. I have seen something on the Internet (but can't find the link) that said the subplot with the abandoned perfume bottle that contained poison was also taken from a TV show.

Prepare to be unsurprised then when the people who write propaganda for The Powers That Should Not Be turn out to be the same people who write scripts for Hollywood films and TV shows. A lot of these people also write novels or teach creative writing courses.

We really do seem to be living in a society where mythology and fantasy are becoming more prominent than facts and analysis in decision-making.

Virgile , Oct 5, 2018 5:16:34 PM | link
Wherever it is the Russian government responsible or not, the UK and the Nederlands are admitting that they are impotent in front of attacks in the cyberworld. That wifi can be sniffed so easily at international organizations show total irresponsibility. These cyberattacks are simply humiliating for these countries as it shows that despite their military power, they are highly vulnerable. To dispel the humiliation, they respond aggressively by accusing countries, not to individuals, and they accuse the current boogeyman, Russia.

Maybe NATO's budget should be cut down on murdering weapons and allocate to Cyber Defense as this seems to become the new way of war.
In view of the lack of proper cyber defense worldwidee, anybody, any country can hack and play around with others. I would be surprised if Israel, the USA and the UK China are not stiffing in other countries organizations. They have not been found because they are the 'good' sniffers while Russia, Iran, China are the "bad' sniffers

Cold war is on with new technology, It is time for countries to realize that.

Considering what the military war has cost in money, death toll and destruction, maybe cold war would be less costly in human toll.

Peter AU 1 , Oct 5, 2018 8:01:47 PM | link
China has set up quantum internet via optic fiber linking a number of government departments.

Going by the squealing noises coming out of the US and loyal vassals, the yanks are probably just pissed that they can't get into Russia or China's secure communications.

[Oct 05, 2018] The USA + GB have become totally unhinged.

Oct 05, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Noirette , Oct 5, 2018 2:11:45 PM | link

For those who missed May's latest Brexit speech (which had zero content), here she is jiving to Dancing Queen by Abba for her glorified entrance. No need to make caricatures, she does it herself. Free of charge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbCDFNRA-Wo&frags=pl%2Cwn

The USA + GB have become totally unhinged. Seeking a 'safe' enemy *without* - as the Deplorables or Brexiteers *within* don't hit the spot, for many reasons - .. to explain and cover up Hillary's loss and the ugly Brexit mess with its clueless posturing pols, is one thing.

To continue to provoke Russia and China, particularly Russia, in this way is now skirting with danger beyond the .. ? Containable, ignorable, what ..?

Plus, the MSM, lousy as it is and was, has spinned off into even further mad realms, seemingly forced into a hyper, over-blown anti-Russian hysteria. Often far more strongly so than the pols. / others they seemingly quote.

This is all becoming seriously alarming. I'm getting very bad feelings.

[Oct 02, 2018] I m puzzled why CIA is so against Kavanaugh?

Highly recommended!
An interesting hypothesis. CIA definitly became a powerful political force in the USA -- a rogue political force which starting from JFK assasination tries to control who is elected to important offices. But in truth Cavanaugh is a pro-CIA candidate so to speak. So why CIA would try to derail him.
Notable quotes:
"... I think I've figured out why they had to go to couples counseling about an outside door and why she came up with claim that she needed an outside bedroom door because she'd been assaulted 37 years ago. The Palo Alto building codes for single family homes were created to make sure single family homes remained single family and weren't chopped up into apartments. ..."
"... An outside door into a master bedroom with attached bathroom is a red flag that it's intended for an illegal what's called in law apartment ..."
"... So she wants the door. Husband says waste of money and trouble. Contractor says call me when you're ready. So they go to counseling Husband explains why the door's unreasonable. Therapist asks wife why she " really deep down" needs the door. Wife makes up the story about attempted rape 35 years ago flashbacks If only there were 2 doors in that imaginary bedroom she could have escaped. ..."
"... Kacanaugh was nominated. CIA searched for sex problems in his working life. Found nothing Searched law school and college found nothing. In desperation searched high school found nothing. Searched CIA personnel records which go back to grade school and found one of their own employees was about Kavanaugh's age and attended a high school near his and the students socialized. ..."
"... She's 3rd generation CIA. grandfather assistant director. Father CIA contractor who managed CIA unofficial band accounts. And she runs a CIA recruitment office. ..."
Oct 02, 2018 | www.unz.com

Anon [257] Disclaimer says: September 29, 2018 at 8:28 am GMT 400 Words

I think I've figured out why they had to go to couples counseling about an outside door and why she came up with claim that she needed an outside bedroom door because she'd been assaulted 37 years ago. The Palo Alto building codes for single family homes were created to make sure single family homes remained single family and weren't chopped up into apartments.

Outside doors enter public areas kitchen sunroom living rooms not bedrooms. An outside door into a master bedroom with attached bathroom is a red flag that it's intended for an illegal what's called in law apartment

There's a unit It's a stove 2 ft counter space and sink. The stoves electric and plugs into an ordinary household electricity. It's backed against the bathroom wall. Break through the wall, connect the pipes running water for the sink. Add an outside door and it's a small apartment.

Assume they didn't want to make it an apartment just a master bedroom. Usually the contractor pulls the permits routinely. But an outside bedroom door is complicated. The permits will cost more. It might require an exemption and a hearing They night need a lawyer. And they might not get the permit.

So she wants the door. Husband says waste of money and trouble. Contractor says call me when you're ready. So they go to counseling Husband explains why the door's unreasonable. Therapist asks wife why she " really deep down" needs the door. Wife makes up the story about attempted rape 35 years ago flashbacks If only there were 2 doors in that imaginary bedroom she could have escaped.

Kacanaugh was nominated. CIA searched for sex problems in his working life. Found nothing Searched law school and college found nothing. In desperation searched high school found nothing. Searched CIA personnel records which go back to grade school and found one of their own employees was about Kavanaugh's age and attended a high school near his and the students socialized.

She's 3rd generation CIA. grandfather assistant director. Father CIA contractor who managed CIA unofficial band accounts. And she runs a CIA recruitment office.

I'm puzzled why CIA is so against Kavanaugh?

[Sep 27, 2018] The Bellingcat claim that Ruslan Boshirov = Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga.

Sep 27, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Debsisdead , Sep 27, 2018 2:30:46 AM | link

I flicked on the beeb news channel as I dragged meself outta the pit this am and caught the 'news' of the bellingcat claim that Ruslan Boshirov = Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga.

Now I'm fully cognisant of the fact that neither Russia nor Chepiga should feel obliged to prove this claim is untrue, but since whichever way you slice it Chepiga is now 'blown', They (Russia/Chepiga) may as well prove the claim is nonsense. The thing being that the boof heads at MI6/CIA would also have worked that out, unless it was a particularly boofed, boofhead who put this latest snippet together.

IMO in all likelihood Ruslan Boshirov = Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga is correct. Towards the end of one of the supporting articles that sets out the 'proof' Bellingcat mutters something rather odd which seems like it actually detracts from the story - if the ultimate target of this revelation is Colonel Chepiga.
But who really cares about some obscure military intelligence mid-level bloke? (Colonel is nowhere near the giddy heights of any military, something I discovered when working in the Oz public service & I was seconded to the department of defence to do a job. Since I was working with a bunch of uniformed saluters, it was claimed they would not "feel comfortable working with someone of unknown status in the hierarchy". So I was told that my position in the Public Service equated with the rank of colonel in the army. I can tell you, if it weren't totally apparent, that I was just an average sh1tkicker)
No one cares about Chepiga, this entire saga is about getting the masses to accept without any deep consideration, that "Putin" the figurehead who (according to western media) micromanages everything evil about russia, only cares about destroying the life of Jo/Joe Sh1tkicker where ever in the world Jo/Joe may be.
So the last two paras of the burble runs thusly:

Bellingcat has contacted confidentially a former Russian military officer of similar rank as Colonel Chepiga, in order to receive a reaction to what we found. The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed surprise that at least one of the operatives engaged in the operation in Salisbury had the rank of colonel. Even more surprising was the suspects' prior award of the highest military recognition.

In our source's words, an operation of this sort would have typically required a lower-ranked, "field operative" with a military rank of "no higher than captain." The source further surmised that to send a highly decorated colonel back to a field job would be highly extraordinary, and would imply that "the job was ordered at the highest level."


The logical flaw is obvious of course. If 'the job' had been ordered at the highest level surely sending some bloke who had been riding a desk for the last six years is not how it would handled, the most recently capable operative would be sent - either a relatively junior officer or a young but experienced NCO.

However assuming Boshirov = Colonel Chepiga is correct, while he would never be sent to supervise a hit on the ground much less carry it out; it doesn't take a great stretch to ruminate on the possible tasks a military intelligence colonel would be sent to england for.
There is one obvious task which would explain most credibly what he was in Salisbury for - to give Sergey Skripal confidence that his repatriation was a genuine offer, not some half arsed wish fulfillment plan dreamed up by Yulia and a low level intelligence operator eager to climb into Yulia's pants.
Two colonels of the GRU, one a highly decorated hero and the other a dodgy turncoat who had come to realise after the nonsense his immediate MI6 superior Pablo Miller, plus his big boss "Mr Steele" had put out about Moscow golden showers, whilst insinuating he, Skirpal was party to the fiction, that rapprochment between Russia and angland/amerika was never gonna happen. He was never going to be able to know any of his grandchildren or see his motherland again because usuk needed 'evil Russia' to distract their citizens away from the real evildoing 'at home'.
Someone used a chess mataphor elsewhere in a thread, well I would say that if the Bellingcat revelation that Ruslan Boshirov = Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga. if true sails close to a checkmate.
If Russia confesses that Ruslan Boshirov does = Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, citizens in the west would be denied any explanation as the fishwraps and talking heads would be too busy celebrating Russia's alleged 'defeat' to include any other portion of what Russia had said, especially not an exposition which dealt with everything from the fact that Chepiga & co arrived too late on Sunday for their poisoned doorknob to have tainted the Skirpals who had left the house for the last time hours before and that of all the english towns some idjit chose to squirt this muck around Salisbury was the one where assassination by chemical weapon was the town the least likely to give success since the proximity of Porton Downs guaranteed that some not all staff at Salisbury Hospital would have been trained in chem weapon detection and antidote.

On the other side of the coin - panic stations at MI6, on a quiet Sunday it has just been uncovered that an asset was 'going over'. So some duty officer sent the thug on call for the day over to Porton Downs to grab 'a little something' guaranteed to prevent any such nonsense.

[Sep 27, 2018] The BBC is heavily pushing Bellingcats Skripal nonsense

Sep 27, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

TJ , Sep 26, 2018 1:25:05 PM | link

THE BBC is heavily pushing Bellingcats Skripal nonsense on the 6PM main news, BBC story

To me the ears look very different in the 2 pictures presented.

Den Lille Abe , Sep 26, 2018 2:07:56 PM | link

Bellingcat is MI6, so what do you expect.

[Sep 25, 2018] Confirming Assange's Assertion That WikiLeaks' Source Was The DNC Itself Zero Hedge

Sep 25, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden Mon, 09/24/2018 - 21:25 119 SHARES Authored by Elizabeth Vos via DisobedientMedia.com,

Disobedient Media has closely followed the work of the Forensicator , whose analysis has shed much light on the publications by the Guccifer 2.0 persona for over a year. In view of the more recent work published by the Forensicator regarding potential media collusion with Guccifer 2.0, we are inclined to revisit an interview given by WikiLeaks Editor-In-Chief Julian Assange in August of 2016, prior to the publication of the Podesta Emails in October, and the November US Presidential election.

During the interview, partially transcribed below, Assange makes a number of salient points on the differentiation between the thousands of pristine emails WikiLeaks received, and those which had surfaced in other US outlets by that date. Though Assange does not name the Guccifer 2.0 persona directly throughout the interview, he does name multiple outlets which publicized Guccifer 2.0's documents.

The significance of revisiting Assange's statements is the degree to which his most significant claim is corroborated or paralleled by the Forensicator's analysis. This is of enhanced import in light of allegations by Robert Mueller (not to mention the legacy media), despite a total absence of evidence, that Guccifer 2.0 was WikiLeaks's source of the DNC and Podesta emails.

This author previously discussed the possibility that Assange's current isolation might stem in part from the likelihood that upon expulsion from the embassy, Julian Assange could provide evidential proof that the DNC emails and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks were not sourced from Russia, or backed by the Kremlin, all without disclosing the identity of their source.

Julian Assange told RT :

"In the US media there has been a deliberate conflation between DNC leaks, which is what we've been publishing, and DNC hacks, of the US Democratic Party which have occurred over the last two years, by their own admission what [Hillary Clinton] is attempting to do is to conflate our publication of pristine emails – no one in the Democratic party argues that a single email is not completely valid. That hasn't been done. The head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, has rolled as a result.

And whatever hacking has occurred, of the DNC or other political organizations in the United States, by a range of actors – in the middle, we have something, which is the publication by other media organizations, of information reportedly from the DNC, and that seems to be the case. That's the publication of word documents in pdfs published by The Hill, by Gawker, by The Smoking Gun. This is a completely separate batch of documents, compared to the 20,000 pristine emails that we have at WikiLeaks.

In this [separate] batch of documents, released by these other media organizations, there are claims that in the metadata, someone has done a document to pdf conversion, and in some cases the language of the computer that was used for that conversion was Russian. So that's the circumstantial evidence that some Russian was involved, or someone who wanted to make it look like a Russian was involved, with these other media organizations. That's not the case for the material we released.

The Hillary Clinton hack campaign has a serious problem in trying to figure out how to counter-spin our publication because the emails are un-arguable There's an attempt to bring in a meta-story. And the meta-story is, did some hacker obtain these emails? Ok. Well, people have suggested that there's evidence that the DNC has been hacked. I'm not at all surprised its been hacked. If you read very carefully, they say it's been hacked many times over the last two years. Our sources say that DNC security is like Swiss Cheese.

Hillary Clinton is saying, untruthfully, that she knows who the source of our emails are. Now, she didn't quite say "our emails." She's playing some games, because there have been other publications by The Hill, by Gawker, other US media, of different documents, not emails. So, we have to separate the various DNC or RNC hacks that have occurred over the years, and who's done that. The source: we know who the source is, it's the Democratic National Committee itself. And our sources who gave these materials, and other pending materials, to us. These are all different questions. "

The core assertion made by Assange in the above-transcribed segment of his 2016 interview with RT is the differentiation between WikiLeaks's publications from the altered documents released by Guccifer 2.0 (after being pre-released to US media outlets as referenced by Assange). This finer point is one that is corroborated by the Forensicator's analysis, and one which it seems much of the public has yet to entirely digest.

Disobedient Media previously wrote regarding the Forensicator's publication of Did Guccifer 2 Plant his Russian Fingerprints? :

"Ars Technica found "Russian fingerprints" in a PDF posted by Gawker the previous day. Apparently, both Gawker and The Smoking Gun (TSG) had received pre-release copies of Guccifer 2.0's first batch of documents; Guccifer 2.0 would post them later, on his WordPress.com blog site. Although neither Gawker nor TSG reported on these Russian error messages, some readers noticed them and mentioned them in social media forums; Ars Technica was likely the first media outlet to cover those "Russian fingerprints."

The Forensicator's analysis cannot enlighten us as to the ultimate source of WikiLeaks's releases. At present, there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Guccifer 2.0 was, or was not, WikiLeaks' source. There is no evidence connecting Guccifer 2.0 with WikiLeaks, but there is likewise no evidence to rule out a connection.

It is nonetheless critically important, as Assange indicated, to differentiate between the files published by Guccifer 2.0 and those released by WikiLeaks. None of the "altered" documents (with supposed Russian fingerprints) published by Guccifer 2.0 appear in WikiLeaks's publications.

It is also worth noting that, though Assange's interview took place before the publication of the Podesta email collection, the allegations of a Russian hack based on Guccifer 2.0's publication were ultimately contradicted by a DNC official, as reported by the Associated Press. Disobedient Media wrote:

" Ultimately, it is the DNC's claim that they were breached by Russian hackers, who stole the Trump opposition report, which directly belies their allegation – because the document did not come from the DNC, but from John Podesta's emails."

Again: The very document on which the initial "Russian hack" allegations were based did not originate within the DNC Emails at all, but in the Podesta Emails, which at the time of Assange's RT interview, had not yet been published.

Disobedient Media also noted in relation to the Forensicator's Media Mishaps report:

"The fact the email to which the Trump opposition report was attached was later published in the Podesta Email collection by WikiLeaks does not prove that Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks shared a source on the document. However, it does suggest that either the DNC, the operators of the Guccifer 2.0 persona, or both parties had access to Podesta's emails. This raises questions as to why the DNC would interpret the use of this particular file as evidence of Russian penetration of the DNC."

This creates a massive contradiction within the DNC's narrative, but it does not materially change Assange's assertion that the pristine emails obtained by WikiLeaks were fundamentally distinct and should not be conflated with the altered documents published by Guccifer 2.0, as the WikiLeaks publication of the Podesta emails contain none of the alterations shown in the version of the documents published by Guccifer 2.0.

Though no establishment media outlet has reported on this point, when reviewing the evidence at hand and especially the work of the Forensicator, it is evident that the Guccifer 2.0 persona never actually published a single email. The persona published documents and even screenshots of emails – but never the emails themselves. Thus, again, Guccifer 2.0's works are critically different from the DNC and Podesta email publications by WikiLeaks.

The following charts are included to help remind readers of the timeline of events relative to Guccifer 2.0, including the date specific documents were published:

Image Courtesy Of The Forensicator

Image Courtesy of the Forensicator

This writer previously opined on the apparent invulnerability of the Russiagate saga to factual refutation. One cannot blame the public for such narrative immortality, as the establishment-backed press has made every effort to confuse and conflate the alterations made to documents published by Guccifer 2.0 and the WikiLeaks releases. One can only hope, however, that this reminder of their distinct state will help raise public skepticism of a narrative based on no evidence whatsoever.

It is also especially important to reconsider Julian Assange's statements and texts in light of his ongoing isolation from the outside world, which has prevented him from commenting further on an infinite array of subjects including Guccifer 2.0 and the "Russian hacking" saga.

Winston S. contributed to the content of this report.


platyops , 22 minutes ago

The name was Seth Rich. They robbed him for his watch and money but forgot to take the watch and money. Yes that makes as much sense as Dr. Ford and her imagination party!

Dems lie and maybe kill people but they do lie for sure!

Nature_Boy_Wooooo , 33 minutes ago

All signs point to a young Bernie Sanders supporter at the DNC named Seth Rich.

Surftown , 2 hours ago

Brennan is Guccifer 2.0 using NSA Toolkit ( hacked and released) to feign Russia -- to promote the fake Russia interference narrative leading to the FISA warrant justification, or better yet, to the Direct Obama FISA approval/override to approve surveillance of Mr Trump.

Endgame Napoleon , 1 hour ago

There are a bunch of competing smartphone apps, letting you convert Word docs to PDFs, believe it or not.

Maybe, they only work in limited form, but you can write a resume (or whatever) into the app, saving it in Word, converting it to PDF and sending it to your email.

Real programmers seem to scoff at the technical precision of those apps, so maybe, they are not as sophisticated as they appear to non-techies.

The sequencing of this is weird. If I read it right, it sounds like several publications received the "converted" versions -- the screenshots or PDFs -- of some emails before Wikileaks released the actual, non-converted emails.

Who released those to the media organizations, and how did they have access to the machine containing the emails, enabling them to make screenshots, convert them to PDFs or whatever they did to provide representations of the emails, not the actual emails that Wikileaks later released?

bh2 , 2 hours ago

Actually, William Binney et al demonstrated the email transfer could not have been effected outside the four walls of the DNC because the required network speeds did not exist at that time to any external location, least of all one located outside the US.

The only way that transfer could happen in the time logged was onto a device located on the DNC LAN.

Seth Rich is the person Assange all but directly named as the source.

These two things, taken together, provide a compelling refutation of the DNC fairy tale that the emails were pilfered by Russia (or any other outside actor).

JimmyJones , 2 hours ago

Bunny said the download speed was indicating a USB thumb drive was used

medium giraffe , 2 hours ago

IIRC the transfer speed was similar to a USB bus speed, meaning it wasn't even transferred over a local network, but by a USB flash device directly connected to a DNC PC or laptop.

Endgame Napoleon , 1 hour ago

The US Congress is so unprofessional, allowing this circus about high-school parties to commandeer a SCOTUS confirmation hearing, but did you ever hear any of them trying to get to the bottom of this complex stuff, calling in technical experts to explain this evidence to voters?

[Sep 25, 2018] Now that UK's "resettling" White Helmet Terrorists within its borders, I wonder if they'll become the next victims of MI6 attempts to frame Russia for its assassinations using poison gas?

Sep 25, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Sep 24, 2018 6:35:12 PM | link

Now that UK's "resettling" White Helmet Terrorists within its borders, I wonder if they'll become the next victims of MI6 attempts to frame Russia for its assassinations using poison gas?

Semi OT--Now that UK's "resettling" White Helmet Terrorists within its borders, I wonder if they'll become the next victims of MI6 attempts to frame Russia for its assassinations using poison gas? What do UK-located MoA barflies think of May bringing her terrorists "home"? Plus, I thought there was a housing crisis of sorts within UK, and such scarce housing's to be allocated to terrorists?! What sort of light opera would Gilbert & Sullivan compose as a ripost? Unfortunately, it appears Corbyn's remained quiet on this issue, although there's plenty of other items of importance to UK citizens for him to use as issues to defeat Tories.

[Sep 23, 2018] UK Begged Trump Not To Declassify Russia Docs; Cited Grave Concerns Over Steele Involvement

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Steele also had extensive contacts with DOJ official Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie, who - along with Steele - was paid by opposition research firm Fusion GPS in the anti-Trump campaign. Trump called for the declassification of FBI notes of interviews with Ohr, which would ostensibly reveal more about his relationship with Steele. Ohr was demoted twice within the Department of Justice for lying about his contacts with Fusion GPS. ..."
"... Perhaps the Brits are also concerned since much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016 . Recall that Trump aid George Papadopoulos was lured to London in March, 2016, where Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud fed him the rumor that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was later at a London bar that Papadopoulos would drunkenly pass the rumor to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer (who Strzok flew to London to meet with). ..."
"... Papadopoulos accepted a flight to London and a $3,000 honorarium. He claims that during a meeting in London, Halper asked him whether he knew anything about Russian hacking of Democrats' emails. ..."
"... Papadopoulos had other contacts on British soil that he now believes were part of a government-sanctioned surveillance operation. - Daily Caller ..."
"... In total, Halper received over $1 million from the Obama Pentagon for "research," over $400,000 of which was granted before and during the 2016 election season. ..."
"... In short, it's understandable that the UK would prefer to hide their involvement in the "witch hunt" of Donald Trump since much of the counterintelligence investigation was conducted on UK soil. And if the Brits had knowledge of the operation, it will bolster claims that they meddled in the 2016 US election by assisting what appears to have been a set-up from the start . ..."
"... Steele's ham-handed dossier is a mere embarrassment, as virtually none of the claims asserted by the former MI6 agent have been proven true. ..."
"... Steele, a former MI6 agent, is the author of the infamous and unverified anti-Trump dossier. He worked as a confidential human source for the FBI for years before the relationship was severed just before the election because of Steele's unauthorized contacts with the press. ..."
"... That said, Steele hasn't worked for the British government since 2009, so for their excuse focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK soil, is curious. ..."
"... I find it interesting that the Theresa May Govt in UK has the temerity to interfere with US politics (until they got caught out!), yet can't find the spine to stand up to the EU. ..."
"... THE UNITED KINGDOM along with ISRAEL & SAUDI ARABIA have always been the ones behind US Politics making, pulling the strings behind the curtains since the Petrodollar Inception, The Greater Israel project & the NWO initiative - only this time around Trump was not the UK's pick... ..."
"... England dominates the offshore money laundering havens where the super rich hide their money and evade taxes. They need to be brought down. No more African dictators looting their nation's resources and hiding the money first in offshore banks and then in JP Morgan and Brit banks. ..."
"... It is a test. If Trump doesn't go ahead with declassification, we know for sure he is no better than the globalists and neocons whose goal has always been to destroy and depopulate America. ..."
"... 'focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK soil, is curious' ..."
"... Not at all. It's obvious - the problem ISN'T Steele. They're living in fear, as are many in DC and elsewhere, that Trump is going to pry the lid open and reveal at least some of their activities. If killing him would fix the problem, they would. It's too late, considering what Trump is threatening to do. I wonder if he'll back down, at least some? ..."
"... U.K. does not want the jurisdiction. U.S. spies lure you overseas then...compromise you. ..."
"... Duh. This Started In London! Britain is the "foreign country" involved in our elections. Wake up everyone. It's LONDONGATE ..."
"... May gonna owe Vlad an apology when Skripal is revealed to be Steele's source. Steele himself hadn't been to Russian in 15 years. Will he get life in prison for attempted murder? ..."
"... "t's hard to tell who's telling the truth and who isn't in this whole Russia narrative. Fact is, NOBODY is telling the truth. That is what I've determined after doing my own research.": https://youtu.be/2AA5BIfGj3g ..."
"... Trump made promises before being elected, then lied and sold America out, just like every other corrupted assklown politician. he is no different than clinton bush obama, just as arrogant, just as corrupt, and just as much a traitor. ..."
Sep 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

UK Begged Trump Not To Declassify Russia Docs; Cited "Grave Concerns" Over Steele Involvement

by Tyler Durden Sun, 09/23/2018 - 11:15 4.6K SHARES

The British government "expressed grave concerns" to the US government over the declassification and release of material related to the Trump-Russia investigation, according to the New York Times . President Trump ordered a wide swath of materials "immediately" declassified "without redaction" on Monday, only to change his mind later in the week by allowing the DOJ Inspector General to review the materials first.

The Times reports that the UK's concern was over material which "includes direct references to conversations between American law enforcement officials and Christopher Steele," the former MI6 agent who compiled the infamous "Steele Dossier." The UK's objection, according to former US and British officials, was over revealing Steele's identity in an official document, "regardless of whether he had been named in press reports."

We would note, however, that Steele's name was contained within the Nunes Memo - the House Intelligence Committee's majority opinion in the Trump-Russia case.

Steele also had extensive contacts with DOJ official Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie, who - along with Steele - was paid by opposition research firm Fusion GPS in the anti-Trump campaign. Trump called for the declassification of FBI notes of interviews with Ohr, which would ostensibly reveal more about his relationship with Steele. Ohr was demoted twice within the Department of Justice for lying about his contacts with Fusion GPS.

Perhaps the Brits are also concerned since much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016 . Recall that Trump aid George Papadopoulos was lured to London in March, 2016, where Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud fed him the rumor that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was later at a London bar that Papadopoulos would drunkenly pass the rumor to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer (who Strzok flew to London to meet with).

Also recall that CIA/FBI "informant" (spy) Stefan Halper met with both Carter Page and Papadopoulos in London.

Halper, a veteran of four Republican administrations, reached out to Trump aide George Papadopoulos in September 2016 with an offer to fly to London to write an academic paper on energy exploration in the Mediterranean Sea.

Papadopoulos accepted a flight to London and a $3,000 honorarium. He claims that during a meeting in London, Halper asked him whether he knew anything about Russian hacking of Democrats' emails.

Papadopoulos had other contacts on British soil that he now believes were part of a government-sanctioned surveillance operation. - Daily Caller

In total, Halper received over $1 million from the Obama Pentagon for "research," over $400,000 of which was granted before and during the 2016 election season.

In short, it's understandable that the UK would prefer to hide their involvement in the "witch hunt" of Donald Trump since much of the counterintelligence investigation was conducted on UK soil. And if the Brits had knowledge of the operation, it will bolster claims that they meddled in the 2016 US election by assisting what appears to have been a set-up from the start .

Steele's ham-handed dossier is a mere embarrassment, as virtually none of the claims asserted by the former MI6 agent have been proven true.

Steele, a former MI6 agent, is the author of the infamous and unverified anti-Trump dossier. He worked as a confidential human source for the FBI for years before the relationship was severed just before the election because of Steele's unauthorized contacts with the press.

He shared results of his investigation into Trump's links to Russia with the FBI beginning in early July 2016.

The FBI relied heavily on the unverified Steele dossier to fill out applications for four FISA warrants against Page. Page has denied the dossier's claims, which include that he was the Trump campaign's back channel to the Kremlin. - Daily Caller

That said, Steele hasn't worked for the British government since 2009, so for their excuse focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK soil, is curious.


StychoKiller , 54 minutes ago

I find it interesting that the Theresa May Govt in UK has the temerity to interfere with US politics (until they got caught out!), yet can't find the spine to stand up to the EU. If I were Trump, not only would the shoe be dropping re: UK Govt involvement in US politics, but said shoe would be making an imprint across her face! (stoopid twat!)

texantim , 1 hour ago

I say release the docs and put sanctions on UK.

BitchesBetterRecognize , 1 hour ago

So the Motherland ******* up with the ex-colony yet again, huh?

THE UNITED KINGDOM along with ISRAEL & SAUDI ARABIA have always been the ones behind US Politics making, pulling the strings behind the curtains since the Petrodollar Inception, The Greater Israel project & the NWO initiative - only this time around Trump was not the UK's pick...

Oh, but those "civilized" Allies backstabbing each other for more power grip on the USA....

Baron von Bud , 2 hours ago

England dominates the offshore money laundering havens where the super rich hide their money and evade taxes. They need to be brought down. No more African dictators looting their nation's resources and hiding the money first in offshore banks and then in JP Morgan and Brit banks.

Many hedge funds are deep into this game. I'd wager on Carlyle Group and the Bush clan. Billions of people can't get ahead because the super rich are ******* crooks running the banks and governments. They don't pay taxes but force a small dry cleaner to pay 45% in fed/state taxes. These criminals include Hillary Clinton and many members of congress. Feinstein, Pelosi, Maxine and many more of both parties need to be investigated. How do they get so rich on a congressman's salary. Deep into tax evasion and payoffs? Release the documents and let MI6 hang.

Malvern Joe , 3 hours ago

It is a test. If Trump doesn't go ahead with declassification, we know for sure he is no better than the globalists and neocons whose goal has always been to destroy and depopulate America. It would represent the biggest sellout of this country since the creation of the Fed in 1913, He will go down as the biggest fraud ever and his base will deport his *** to the sums of India where he can defecate in public.

Bricker , 3 hours ago

You dont get to supply a rogue agent, that was probably told to do it in the first place, and then tell Trump not to do it out of harm, harm is all you BRIT DEEP STATES deserve

Moving and Grooving , 3 hours ago

'focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK soil, is curious'

Not at all. It's obvious - the problem ISN'T Steele. They're living in fear, as are many in DC and elsewhere, that Trump is going to pry the lid open and reveal at least some of their activities. If killing him would fix the problem, they would. It's too late, considering what Trump is threatening to do. I wonder if he'll back down, at least some?

The sheer corruption of the Global Government is on display here, revealing itself, if you watch for it. Whether planned or not, the last 6 months or so have been astonishing to watch. The entire media has been shown to be liars, academia is shown to be an expensive provider of unprepared students, the corporate world is furiously rent-seeking and finding new ways to destroy humanity, and government is too busy selling Americans out to write a budget. In all countries around the world, adjusting for national status. Lawsuits in the west, machetes in the third world.

Ban KKiller , 4 hours ago

U.K. does not want the jurisdiction. U.S. spies lure you overseas then...compromise you.

John C Durham , 4 hours ago

Duh. This Started In London! Britain is the "foreign country" involved in our elections. Wake up everyone. It's LONDONGATE .

Anunnaki , 4 hours ago

May gonna owe Vlad an apology when Skripal is revealed to be Steele's source. Steele himself hadn't been to Russian in 15 years. Will he get life in prison for attempted murder?

PeaceForWorld , 4 hours ago

"t's hard to tell who's telling the truth and who isn't in this whole Russia narrative. Fact is, NOBODY is telling the truth. That is what I've determined after doing my own research.": https://youtu.be/2AA5BIfGj3g

I really like this woman "Shut the **** up!". She is a former Bernie supporter just like me. She has turned against Democrats just like me. She doesn't trust any of the Establishment parties.

Buddha71 , 4 hours ago

Trump made promises before being elected, then lied and sold America out, just like every other corrupted assklown politician. he is no different than clinton bush obama, just as arrogant, just as corrupt, and just as much a traitor. he has broken the promises upon which he was elected, just like all the other fkn liars before him. no different. just a pos. he has not made america great again, just more of the same, unemployment is a lie, it is closer to 17%.

[Sep 23, 2018] More on Something Rotten About the DOJ Indictment of the GRU

Sep 23, 2018 | www.unz.com

annamaria , says: July 14, 2018 at 4:56 pm GMT

Sic Semper Tyrannis has published a response to the Rosenstein fantastic "Indictment of Trolls" (Part II): "Something Rotten About the DOJ Indictment of the GRU," by Publius Tacitus http://www.turcopolier.typepad.com
"Assistant Attorney General Rosenstein announced a bizarre indictment against Russian military intelligence operatives today that, rather than confirming the case of "Russian meddling" in the U.S. 2016 Presidential election raises more questions. Here are the major oddities:
1. How did the FBI obtain information about activity on the DNC and DCCC servers when the DNC/DCCC refused to give the Feds access to the servers/computers?
2. Why does Crowdstrike get credit as being a competent computer security firm when, according to the indictment, they completely and utterly failed to stop the "hacks? "
3. Why does the indictment refuse to name Wikileaks by name as the Russian collaborator? Here is the bottomline–if US officials knew as early as April that Russia was hacking the DNC, why did it take US officials more than six months to stop the activity? The statement of "facts" contained in the indictment also raises another troubling issue–what is the source of the information? For example, if the FBI was not given access to the DNC/DCCC servers and computers then how do they know what happened on specific dates as alleged in the complaint?"
-- Why does the US national security hang on the opinions and concoctions of a visceral Russophobe Dm. Alperovitch (a ziocon) who is an "expert" (together with the badly uneducated Elliot Higgins) at the thoroughly corrupted and zionized Atlantic Council?
-- What kind of antisemite has been working hard to make the US Jewry at large suspected in a massive conspiracy and treason against the United States of America?
annamaria , says: July 14, 2018 at 5:06 pm GMT
Here is the context for the "Indictment of Trolls" (Paty II): https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/62c97j/the_awan_brothers_compromised_at_least_80/
"The Awan brothers compromised at least 80 congressional computers and got paid 5 million to do it. We may never know the extent of the breach.
After compromising the Congress' networks for 12 years they do a quick cleanup by breaking in to 20 congressional offices, store data in an off site server before running of to Pakistan and the D.C. Police are investigating. But wait there's more
Imran Awan has a longtime relationship with some members of Congress, including working for Meeks and Becerra starting in 2004 and joining Wasserman Schultz's office in 2005. The IT staffer position expanded to include more than 30 representatives, including work under congressional members who were members of top secret level congressional committees (DHS, Foreign affairs, Select intelligence committee).
Although personal office computers are not supposed to be used for Intelligence Committee business or classified material, accessing these computers is a high priority for foreign intelligence services because of the information they could glean about the committee's work from unclassified emails.
• The brothers are suspected of serious violations including accessing members' computer networks without their knowledge and stealing equipment from Congress, over billing congress for work and parts, transferring data to a remote server, and bypassing normal security protocols for IT staff. Their Democrat benefactors allowed the breech of policy for the sake of convenience.
• The Awans operated an external server, which is against all protocols concerning secured government information.
Further, there were instances where House information was discovered in an external "cloud" server. The contractors in question reportedly were sending and storing House-related information in that off-site server.
• The Awans had special access to the White House and for Visas.
• Multiple Democratic lawmakers have yet to cut ties with House staffers under criminal investigation for wide-ranging equipment and data theft."
– Hey, Mueller! Hey, Rosenstein! Do your job.

[Sep 23, 2018] Sun deletes model's 'Putin wants to kill me' story amid claims of Salisbury poisoning hoax -- RT UK News

Notable quotes:
"... for legal reasons, ..."
"... Putin wants me dead ..."
"... There was no sign of nerve agents being used, but The Sun claimed to have 'security sources' which told them rat poison may have been used against the couple, while claiming King was fighting for his life. Soon after the hospital confirmed that actually both had been discharged. ..."
"... Then the BBC reported that King, who was reportedly found foaming at the mouth in the restaurant's toilet, is a "convicted criminal who once hoaxed Prince Charles" and had previously been convicted of "distributing indecent photographs or pseudo-photographs of children." ..."
"... Then the Daily Mirror reported that King is an alleged drug dealer, and Shapiro is a high-class escort who told friends she was a " honeytrap spy ..."
"... Like any newspaper, we were keen to talk to those at the centre of the incident and give them the opportunity to share with the public their version of events ..."
"... Like this story? Share it with a friend! ..."
Sep 23, 2018 | www.rt.com

Sun deletes model's 'Putin wants to kill me' story amid claims of Salisbury poisoning hoax Published time: 20 Sep, 2018 14:05 Edited time: 21 Sep, 2018 13:28 Get short URL Sun deletes model's 'Putin wants to kill me' story amid claims of Salisbury poisoning hoax © missannawebb / Instagram In one of the least surprising developments in an ongoing story, the Sun newspaper has been forced to remove a report from its website in which a Russian model claims Vladimir Putin is trying to kill her. The article has since been removed " for legal reasons, " and, some are speculating, probably for some 'truth' reasons as well.

Russian-born Anna Shapiro and her British husband Alex King were at the center of another poisoning scare in Salisbury last Sunday in an incident that appeared at first to echo the attack on ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the very same city.

Read more © missannawebb 'Putin wants me dead': Russian 'model' seduces UK tabloids with new Salisbury poisoning claims

The details were compelling, a reported poisoning in another Italian eatery chain in Salisbury (this time Prezzo), a Russian was involved, and the police closed off streets and deployed specialists in hazmat suits.

The story also carried a hint of too-good-to-be-true, but The Sun was so seduced by Shapiro's claim that Putin was after her, it ran a front page splash. The fact she was willing to claim " Putin wants me dead " while at the same time doing a sexy photo shoot probably helped.

There was no sign of nerve agents being used, but The Sun claimed to have 'security sources' which told them rat poison may have been used against the couple, while claiming King was fighting for his life. Soon after the hospital confirmed that actually both had been discharged.

However, other details began to emerge after the Sun splashed. The police, who have not suggested any crime actually took place, admitted one of their lines of inquiry into what happened in Salisbury's Prezzo is now whether it may have been a hoax.

Then the BBC reported that King, who was reportedly found foaming at the mouth in the restaurant's toilet, is a "convicted criminal who once hoaxed Prince Charles" and had previously been convicted of "distributing indecent photographs or pseudo-photographs of children."

Then the Daily Mirror reported that King is an alleged drug dealer, and Shapiro is a high-class escort who told friends she was a " honeytrap spy " used by Israel's Mossad to seduce men.

A Russian 'model' has claimed that Putin tried to 'poison' her! 🐭🇷🇺👩 pic.twitter.com/9dYNeIWNZ3

-- #ICYMI (@ICYMIvideo) September 20, 2018

Essentially what appeared to be an extremely questionable story from the very start seems to be disintegrating, so why would a national newspaper decide to run this story at all without doing a basic background checks?

The obvious conclusion is simply that it's too easy to make any accusation you like about Russia because readers are willing to believe anything in the current political climate.

The Sun said in a statement: " Like any newspaper, we were keen to talk to those at the centre of the incident and give them the opportunity to share with the public their version of events ."

But were they keen to check whether any of it was accurate?

Like this story? Share it with a friend!

[Sep 23, 2018] Skripals is a demonstration of established British elite method of of slandering the non-obedient Russians

Sep 23, 2018 | www.unz.com

annamaria , says: July 14, 2018 at 3:49 pm GMT

@Mr. Hack I understand perfectly what I read, and even make a direct quotation:

Those in power in Kiev had several times already attempted to draw Moscow into the civil war, directly and through a NATO intervention
I then ridicule such mularkey for what it is, unsubstantiated ' gibberish '.

You want to defend this BS then go to it, otherwise put up or shut up! :-)

The same goes for Skeptikal. Here is a British 'method' of slandering the non-obedient Russians. In terms of dishonesty, it is about the same as the US/EU/Ukrainian version of the MH17 tragedy:
"The Holes in the Official Skripal Story," by Craig MURRAY:

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/07/14/holes-in-official-skripal-story.html

"The nub of the British government's approach has been the shocking willingness of the corporate and state media to parrot repeatedly the lie that the nerve agent was Russian made, even after Porton Down said they could not tell where it was made and the OPCW confirmed that finding. In fact, while the Soviet Union did develop the "novichok" class of nerve agents, the programme involved scientists from all over the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia, as I myself learnt when I visited the newly decommissioned Nukus testing facility in Uzbekistan in 2002."

[Sep 23, 2018] ClubOrlov Great, Britain!

Notable quotes:
"... The fake story that May has been pushing is that it is "highly likely" that the Kremlin ordered a hit on the former British spy Sergei Skripal (and his daughter) using a "Russian-made" chemical weapon called "Novichok." In turn, from what we already knew, it is highly likely that this story is a complete and utter fake. ..."
Sep 06, 2018 | cluborlov.blogspot.com

The Brits have just provided my previous article, The Truthers and The Fakers, with a tidy little case study: the very next day after I published it Theresa May's government stepped into its role as one of the world's premier Fakers and unleashed the next installment of fake news on the Skripal poisoning. We can use this as training material in learning how to spot and discard fakes.

The fake story that May has been pushing is that it is "highly likely" that the Kremlin ordered a hit on the former British spy Sergei Skripal (and his daughter) using a "Russian-made" chemical weapon called "Novichok." In turn, from what we already knew, it is highly likely that this story is a complete and utter fake. As I explained in the previous article, it is not our job to establish what really happened. We would be unable to do so with any degree of certainty without gaining access to state secrets. But we don't need to; all we need to do is establish with a reasonable degree of certainty that the British government's story is a foolishly, incompetently concocted fabrication. Doing so will then allow us to properly classify the British press, which repeats this nonsense as fact, and the British public, which accepts it unquestioningly at face value. Then we can drop the erroneous appellation "great" -- because great nations don't act so stupidly

[Sep 21, 2018] One party state: Trump's 'Opposition' Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsence by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... If the so-called "Resistance" to Trump was ever actually interested in opposing this administration in any meaningful way, this would be the top trending news story in America for days, like how "bombshell" revelations pertaining to the made-up Russiagate narrative trend for days. Spoiler alert: it isn't, and it won't be. ..."
"... The US Senate has just passed Trump's mammoth military spending increase by a landslide 92–8 vote . The eight senators who voted "nay"? Seven Republicans, and Independent Bernie Sanders. Every single Democrat supported the most bloated war budget since the height of the Iraq war . Rather than doing everything they can to weaken the potential damage that can be done by a president they've been assuring us is a dangerous hybrid of equal parts Benedict Arnold and Adolf Hitler, they've been actively increasing his power as Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen. ..."
"... They're on the same team, wearing different uniforms. ..."
"... US politics is pretty much the same; two mainstream parties owned by the same political class, engaged in a staged bidding war for votes to give the illusion of competition. ..."
"... In reality, the US political system is like the unplugged video game remote that kids give their baby brother so he stops whining that he wants a turn to play. No matter who they vote for they get an Orwellian warmongering government which exists solely to advance the agendas of a plutocratic class which has no loyalties to any nation; the only difference is sometimes that government is pretending to care about women and minorities and sometimes it's pretending to care about white men. In reality, all the jewelers work for the same plutocrat, and that video game remote won't impact the outcome of the game no matter how many buttons you push. ..."
"... The only way to effect real change is to stop playing along with the rigged system and start waking people up to the lies. As long as Americans believe that the mass media are telling them the truth about their country and their partisan votes are going somewhere useful, the populace whose numbers should give it immense influence is nullified and sedated into a passive ride toward war, ecocide and oppression. ..."
"... Reprinted with author's permission from Medium.com . ..."
"... Support Ms. Johnstone's work on Patreon or Paypal ..."
Sep 21, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

A new article from the Wall Street Journal reports that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lied to congress about the measures Saudi Arabia is taking to minimize the civilian casualties in its catastrophic war on Yemen, and that he did so in order to secure two billion dollars for war profiteers.

This is about as depraved as anything you could possibly imagine. US-made bombs have been conclusively tied to civilian deaths in a war which has caused the single worst humanitarian crisis on earth, a crisis which sees scores of Yemeni children dying every single day and has placed five million children at risk of death by starvation in a nation where families are now eating leaves to survive . CIA veteran Bruce Riedel once said that "if the United States of America and the United Kingdom tonight told King Salman that this war has to end, it would end tomorrow, because the Royal Saudi Airforce cannot operate without American and British support." Nobody other than war plutocrats benefits from the US assisting Saudi Arabia in its monstrous crimes against humanity, and yet Pompeo chose to override his own expert advisors on the matter for fear of hurting the income of those very war plutocrats.

If the so-called "Resistance" to Trump was ever actually interested in opposing this administration in any meaningful way, this would be the top trending news story in America for days, like how "bombshell" revelations pertaining to the made-up Russiagate narrative trend for days. Spoiler alert: it isn't, and it won't be.

It would be so very, very easy for Democratic party leaders and Democrat-aligned media to hurt this administration at the highest level and cause irreparable political damage based on this story. All they'd have to do is give it the same blanket coverage they've given the stories about Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort which end up leading nowhere remotely near impeachment or proof of collusion with the Russian government. The footage of the starving children is right there, ready to be aired to pluck at the heart strings of rank-and-file Americans day after day until Republicans have lost all hope of victory in the midterms and in 2020; all they'd have to do is use it. But they don't. And they won't.

The US Senate has just passed Trump's mammoth military spending increase by a landslide 92–8 vote . The eight senators who voted "nay"? Seven Republicans, and Independent Bernie Sanders. Every single Democrat supported the most bloated war budget since the height of the Iraq war . Rather than doing everything they can to weaken the potential damage that can be done by a president they've been assuring us is a dangerous hybrid of equal parts Benedict Arnold and Adolf Hitler, they've been actively increasing his power as Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen.

The reason for this is very simple: President Trump's ostensible political opposition does not oppose President Trump. They're on the same team, wearing different uniforms. This is the reason they attack him on Russian collusion accusations which the brighter bulbs among them know full well will never be proven and have no basis in reality. They don't stand up to Trump because, as Julian Assange once said , they are Trump.

In John Steinbeck's The Pearl, there are jewelry buyers set up around a fishing community which are all owned by the same plutocrat, but they all pretend to be in competition with one another. When the story's protagonist discovers an enormous and valuable pearl and goes to sell it, they all gather round and individually bid far less than it is worth in order to trick him into giving it away for almost nothing. US politics is pretty much the same; two mainstream parties owned by the same political class, engaged in a staged bidding war for votes to give the illusion of competition.

In reality, the US political system is like the unplugged video game remote that kids give their baby brother so he stops whining that he wants a turn to play. No matter who they vote for they get an Orwellian warmongering government which exists solely to advance the agendas of a plutocratic class which has no loyalties to any nation; the only difference is sometimes that government is pretending to care about women and minorities and sometimes it's pretending to care about white men. In reality, all the jewelers work for the same plutocrat, and that video game remote won't impact the outcome of the game no matter how many buttons you push.

The only way to effect real change is to stop playing along with the rigged system and start waking people up to the lies. As long as Americans believe that the mass media are telling them the truth about their country and their partisan votes are going somewhere useful, the populace whose numbers should give it immense influence is nullified and sedated into a passive ride toward war, ecocide and oppression.

If enough of us keep throwing sand in the gears of the lie factory, we can wake the masses up from the oligarchic lullaby they're being sung. And then maybe we'll be big enough to have a shot at grabbing one of the real video game controllers.

Reprinted with author's permission from Medium.com .

Support Ms. Johnstone's work on Patreon or Paypal

[Sep 21, 2018] Fact free propaganda

Notable quotes:
"... I still love the theater though. The meaningless political theater that last occurred when Clinton was President. What's most amusing this time is that it's only the hyper-partisans (many of whom are not self-aware enough to realize it) who identify (again, consciously or subconsciously) that even care. The rest of us simply get to see each party's idiotic followers on the "left" and the "right" get sucked into the media's chosen narrative. ..."
"... Meanwhile, the bombings and interventions can continue, Gitmo can remain open (btw, anyone else notice that unlike hurricanes that hit the mainland, nobody ever cares whether Gitmo will be evacuated?), the massive bank bailout can be relegated deeper and deeper into the memory hole and the two parties (including Trump's cabinet) continue to grow closer and closer together where the subjects of domestic surveillance and neocon warmongering are concerned. ..."
"... I love it. I laugh openly at anyone who mentions Russia to me from either angle. "No collusion!" is as entertaining as "Putin got Trump elected!" - Idiots. ..."
"... i do believe the proxy wars are really all about this same salient fact - the usa and us$ can not be challenged.. any challenge will be met with war, covert, or overt.. ..."
Sep 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

bevin , Sep 20, 2018 3:43:13 PM | link

The whole nonsense about Russian interference, which was obviously nonsense from Day One and has never, for a moment looked like anything but nonsense, seems to indicate that we have entered a post political era in which policy discussions and debates are forgotten and smears and false accusations take their place.
Currently in the US the Kavanaugh nomination which ought to be about the meaning of the law and the consequences of having a Supreme Court which will make Judge Taney look like Solomon at his most impressive. Instead it is about an alleged teenage incident in which the nominee is said to have caressed a girls breasts at a drunken party when all involved were at High School. Before that we had a Senatorial election in Alabama in which the Republican candidate was charged with having shown a sexual interest in teenage girls- whether this was a 'first' in Alabama is unknown but it is believed to have happened elsewhere, in the unenlightened past.
Then we have the matter of whether Jeremy Corbyn is such a danger to Jews that they will all leave the country if he is ever elected to power. This long campaign, completely devoid of evidence, like 'Russiagate' has the potential of going on forever, simply because there being no evidence it cannot be refuted.
Which is also the case with the Skripal affair, because of which even as we speak, massive trade and financial sanctions are being imposed against Russia and its enormous, innocent and plundered population.
In none of these cases has any real evidence, of the minimal quality that might justify the hanging of a dog, ever advanced. But that doesn't matter, the important thing is to choose a side and if it is Hillary Clinton's to believe or to pretend to believe and to convince others to believe (as Marcy at Emptywheel has been doing for close to three years now) in the incredible.
Who says that we no longer live in a Christian society in which faith is everything?

Alan Reid , Sep 20, 2018 3:44:44 PM | link

I wonder how many time i will see this, See everyone using the meme they want you to use, For example 'Election collusion' or 'Russian collusion' Etc.

A huge smoke screen allowing the main fleet to escape. The tide of votes going as it did sure did bring out the liars. From the first moment that the results showed that the huge behemoth of their interference blew flat and failed, they went all out to cast the loss as some sort of interference from what ever source, Fact is the entire process is constantly under attack from within by forces that it's ends in their sights and the loss of control of that process forced them into damage control, Today we are seeing the lofty heights they will stack the dung up to direct your attentions away from the FIRST and real interference in the election process.

Well folks say the Hillary creature as she is, What she was a token place marker for, The forces looting North America, The forces driving the 'Order out of Chaos' operation. This operation has been a monkey on the backs of the public outside the halls of modern powers and their use.

The process, even a rigged process FAILED. What ever the dirt they have on the eventual choice you made about your course, they will not allow you to subvert their plans even if you all come together and move the levers of power, I saw the photo that soon came out of Trump rather depressed looking, You say that photo, You knew exactly what it meant, From that picture to today everythng is back on THEIR track not YOURS.

The entire process is under their control as long as the many remain in their comfy places built for them. Fix is a dangerous and frightening path for a very good reason. The eventual outcome of their process is going to be a very hard place to live. Overcoming their control and domination is not going to be allowed, History is coming for the evil of this world and the fix is going to be a very devastating event.

When you have so many heads following your evil ways, It's hard not to have the response to evil fall on your actions and deal with your ways.

We live in a very interesting times. If you thought 9/11 was bad... You ain't seen nothing yet.

The Path towards evil demands BLOOD.

worldblee , Sep 20, 2018 4:04:02 PM | link
If you substitute "witches" or "the bogeyman" for "Russia" in most US and European news articles, you get a better sense for how ridiculous and unfounded they are. But as we witnessed in Salem, it's not hard to get mass hysteria going with a complete lack of evidence.

Once people are on the "Trump is a Russian tool" bandwagon it's extremely hard to get them off, as the absence of evidence is harder to prove--while people find the repeated assertion of imaginary evidence entirely convincing.

Sid2 , Sep 20, 2018 4:20:46 PM | link

@karlof1 #6: The narrative that has been promoted grows thinner all the time, with the emphasis switching from collusion to corruption and with that fading in the news on to his being deranged. Now we have resistance from Rosenstein to the House Investigative Committee and Trump to release the classified memos showing the shenanigans of Strzok, Comey, et al, plus emerging voices from inside. I do believe the collusion narrative is withering; more important "deplorables" don't give a damn anyway.

karlof1 , Sep 20, 2018 4:24:45 PM | link
John Zelnicker @8--

Well, it's a proven fact that millions of recycled US taxpayer's dollars were used by Zionists to influence the 2016 and most every previous election going back to 1968, if not further. Massive documentation of collusion exists between Zionists and US politicos at all levels of government. Furthermore, there's much publicly available evidence sufficient to indict and convict Hillary Clinton of numerous felonies along with several high officials within the DNC for election interference. Why not rant and rail against these very easily proven crimes?!

Mike , Sep 20, 2018 4:24:54 PM | link
Obviously. I still love the theater though. The meaningless political theater that last occurred when Clinton was President. What's most amusing this time is that it's only the hyper-partisans (many of whom are not self-aware enough to realize it) who identify (again, consciously or subconsciously) that even care. The rest of us simply get to see each party's idiotic followers on the "left" and the "right" get sucked into the media's chosen narrative.

Meanwhile, the bombings and interventions can continue, Gitmo can remain open (btw, anyone else notice that unlike hurricanes that hit the mainland, nobody ever cares whether Gitmo will be evacuated?), the massive bank bailout can be relegated deeper and deeper into the memory hole and the two parties (including Trump's cabinet) continue to grow closer and closer together where the subjects of domestic surveillance and neocon warmongering are concerned. We'll never see the PATRIOT ACT re-debated and the military budget will increase beyond all imagination while the hand wringing about "deficit spending" on the right stops so long as there's an "R" after the name of whomever sits in the White House.

I love it. I laugh openly at anyone who mentions Russia to me from either angle. "No collusion!" is as entertaining as "Putin got Trump elected!" - Idiots.

james , Sep 20, 2018 4:35:37 PM | link
@11 karlof1.. that also gets me... if one is looking for corruption in the political class, it is not hard to find! why start and stop only with russia? i think the answer is fairly obvious.. there has been an ongoing attempt to maintain the unipolar world with us$ and russia and china potentially interfere with this ongoing status... thus we are back to psychohistorians ongoing issue over finances - private verses public, and what we wish to see as a world hopefully moving forward here..

i do believe the proxy wars are really all about this same salient fact - the usa and us$ can not be challenged.. any challenge will be met with war, covert, or overt..

[Sep 20, 2018] The real target of Russiagate isn't Trump, it's you

Sep 20, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Sep 19, 2018 3:02:55 PM | link

Caitlin Johnstone on Russiagate : "The real target of Russiagate isn't Trump, it's you." If you haven't read her essay about controlling the narrative, you can find it here.

[Sep 19, 2018] 13 British hypothesis about Skripal poisoning

Sep 19, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile September 13, 2018 at 11:14 pm

The British Foreign Office almost immediately reacted to the RT scoop with its usual bluster: "Lies and obfuscation!"

Interesting accusation off HM government is that!

Since March 4 of this year, the British side has stated that:

  1. Yulia Skripal brought "Novichok" in her suitcase.
  2. The Skripals were poisoned with buckwheat.
  3. The Skripals were poisoned with bouquet of flowers at the cemetery. T
  4. he Skripals were poisoned with an UAV drone.
  5. The Skripals were poisoned through air conditioning in the car.
  6. The Skripals were poisoned with an aerosol.
  7. The Skripals were poisoned by Mikhail Savitskis (aka "Gordon") group, consisting of 6 killers.
  8. The killer/s poured "Novichok"onto a door handle.
  9. The Skripals were poisoned with "Novichok" in a form of a gel.
  10. The Skripals were poisoned with a perfume bottle (so it seems "Novichok" is still liquid).
  11. The killer/s poured "Novichok" in a public toilet.
  12. The killer/s poured "Novichok" in a hotel room.
  13. The Skripals were poisoned by 2 GRU* agents.

"Novichok" is a "5–8 times more lethal than VX nerve agent" and "the most deadly ever made", though it can't kill even 2 people.

*There has, in fact, been no such organization known as the GRU in Russia since 2010, when the official name of the unit was changed from ″GRU″ [ Главное разведывательное управление -- Glavnoye razvedyvatel'noye upravleniye ], namely "The Main intelligence Agency", to "The Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation", or ″GU″ [Главное управление Генерального штаба Вооружённых Сил Российской Федерации -- Glavnoye upravleniye General'nogo shtaba Vooruzhyonnykh Sil Rossiiskoi Federatsii ].

The Russian Embassy in London has been keeping a record of all the scenarios presented in the UK by the Govt/MSM and at the last count it was stated that there were 40 different, often contradictory, unproven scenarios.

Last week, the UK Ambassador to the UN, she who resembles a drag-queen well past his sell-by date, namely the inimitable Karen Pierce, attempted to take the piss out of Russia by stating at the UNSC that Russia had put forward 40 different accounts of what had happened, which ludicrous proposals simply proved how lacking in credibility the Russian government allegations are.

The reality was, however, that in presenting such accounts, Russia was taking the piss out of Her Majesty's Government and the sensationalist, Russophobic, warmongering British press and their more than 40 accounts of what happened in Salisbury last March.

The delectable Karen seemed unaware of this fact.

Recall, that Pierce is the woman, a high ranking British diplomat, no less, who believes that Russia (i.e. the Russian Federation that came into existence in 1991) was founded on many of Karl Marx's precepts.

yalensis September 14, 2018 at 2:13 am
Exactly! For Simonjan this unexpected interview was the scoop of the century.
The Russian press is going wild with this story.
One blogger wrote that some of the utterances of the 2 gopniki are rapidly becoming "winged phrases" compared only to snippets from Griboedov's "Woe from Wit".

Best example: "We returned to Salisbury to complete this business."
Simonjan (suspiciously): "What business?"
Gopnik: "To see the cathedral

[Sep 18, 2018] "Doorknob" version of Skripals poisoning was killed by Petrov - Boshirov story. Now UK authorities look really disingenuous.

Notable quotes:
"... The Gvmt. *slowly* latched onto the meme 'the Russians did it' thru pol. opportunism (Syria etc.) and/or as a cover up for some ugly and dismaying stuff. At every step of the way, they tardily re-calibrated, 'fixed' the narrative to jell with that script. A good ex. is DS Bailey: he was at first affected as a first responder to the Bench Scene, but much later, that was denied, and he was poisoned because he stole comatose Sergei's keys and went to his home where he "most likely" touched a Novichoked doornob. (Note the doornob tale leaves the door open (sic) to some mundane passers-by doing nefarious deeds.) ..."
"... After examining endless planeloads of Russian travellers to the UK, and thousands of hours of CCTV, they turned up these two (and kept their jobs and kiddies safe! Yay! ) ..."
"... The only link between the pair and the Skripal 'event' is the stated fact that 'minuscule traces of Novichok' were found in the Hotel in London they stayed in. This is complete BS, see for ex. even the Daily Mail! ..."
Sep 18, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Noirette , Sep 17, 2018 9:07:22 AM | link

Petrov - Boshirov. To me they were utterly convincing. Mostly because they were absolutely terrified and utterly naive about doing a TV interview and answering questions.

RT, the interviewer and setting - an office - and the number of cameras were their conditions, I have read, and I believe it. They wanted to appear in public, rather than hide (no doubt following some excellent advice, and Putin's public assurance, saying he hoped they would come forward..) but had little idea beyond that except that they wanted to avoid being Center in a media circus - storm. (They need a PR expert and top-class lawyer.)

Why their gayness / not or what business they run legally or not-so-much and lots of other topics are invoked and puzzled over is because ppl simply cannot believe what happened here. (Imho!)

(Some weird event, possibly fabricated, organised by X, or strange happenstance, or whatever) .. sent Sergei and Yulia 'queer -- ill', as well as DS Bailey, and later, Dawn and Charlie (All connected to some 'event' that remains cloudy.)

The Gvmt. *slowly* latched onto the meme 'the Russians did it' thru pol. opportunism (Syria etc.) and/or as a cover up for some ugly and dismaying stuff. At every step of the way, they tardily re-calibrated, 'fixed' the narrative to jell with that script. A good ex. is DS Bailey: he was at first affected as a first responder to the Bench Scene, but much later, that was denied, and he was poisoned because he stole comatose Sergei's keys and went to his home where he "most likely" touched a Novichoked doornob. (Note the doornob tale leaves the door open (sic) to some mundane passers-by doing nefarious deeds.)

The investigators behind the computers acted under orders and under the imposed assumption

"Some Russian undercover(s) flew in on or around March 1,2,3, and poisoned a door in Salisbury, find a match."

After examining endless planeloads of Russian travellers to the UK, and thousands of hours of CCTV, they turned up these two (and kept their jobs and kiddies safe! Yay! )

The only link between the pair and the Skripal 'event' is the stated fact that 'minuscule traces of Novichok' were found in the Hotel in London they stayed in. This is complete BS, see for ex. even the Daily Mail!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6139871/Owner-hotel-Russians-hid-novichok-told-police-killer-guests-YESTERDAY.html

(see also Grieved and Debsisdead above)

[Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There is less shame in being undone by a "master of deceit." When J. Edgar Hoover coined that description, he had Communists in mind. Back then, though, "Ruskies" and "Commies" – it was all the same. Americans were conditioned to live in fear that the Russians were coming. ..."
"... That nonsense should have ended when Communism more or less officially expired in 1989, followed two years later by the demise of the Soviet Union itself. For a long time, it seemed that it had. At first, the reaction in Western, especially American, political and media circles was triumphalist. The war was over and our side won. Beneath the surface, however, there was mourning in America. ..."
"... With the Cold War, the death merchants, the masters of war, the neocons, and a host of others had had a good thing going. Having been born into it, the political class was comfortable with the status quo too; and generations of Americans had grown up imbibing Russophobia in their mother's milk (or infant formula). ..."
"... Before long, it became clear that our economic and political masters had nothing to worry about, that Cold War anti-Communism was more robust than Communism itself. ..."
"... That suited Bill Clinton and his First Lady, the former Goldwater Girl. Boris Yeltsin, Russia's leader, was their man. He was a godsend, a Trump-like cartoon character and a drunkard to boot – with an economy in tatters, and no rightwing base egging him on. ..."
"... The time was therefore right for a return of the repressed -- for full-blooded, fifties-style, anti-Communist (= anti-Russian) hysteria, or, since that still seemed far-fetched, for anti-Communist (= anti-Chinese) hysteria. ..."
"... Exactly what "Putin," the shorthand name for all that is Russian and nefarious, did, or is still doing, remains unclear. But this does not seem to bother purveyors of the conventional wisdom. Neither is ostensibly informed public opinion fazed by the fact that the evidence supporting the consensus view comes mainly from American intelligence services and from their counterparts in the UK and other allied nations. ..."
"... How ironic therefore that nowadays it is mainly bamboozled Trump supporters in the Fox News demographic -- people who could care less about peace or, for that matter, about truth -- who are wary of the CIA and skeptical of the FBI's claims! ..."
"... They do not even seem to notice that what they allege, vague as it is, is trifling compared to the massive and very open meddling of American plutocrats, Republican vote suppressers and gerrymanderers, and the governments of supposedly friendly nations – like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, and Israel ..."
"... Cold War revivalists can therefore rest easy, confident that their propagandists will have at least a few facts with which they can work to restore the perils of their vanished youth. ..."
"... Even so, the level of their hypocrisy is appalling. Russia, along with former Soviet republics and former members of the Warsaw Pact, has been bearing the brunt of far worse American meddling for far longer than anything sanctimonious defenders of so-called American "democracy" can plausibly allege. ..."
"... Hypocrisy reigns here too. It was the Obama administration – run through with neocons, liberal imperialists, and other holdovers from Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State – that did all it could to exacerbate longstanding tensions between that country's Ukrainian and Russian speaking populations, the better to complete NATO's encirclement of the Russian federation. And it was American meddling that led to the empowerment of virulently anti-Russian, fascisant Ukrainian politicians, much to the detriment of Russian speaking Ukrainians in the east. ..."
"... The Cold War that began after World War II involved a clash of rival political economic systems. The Cold War that reignited a few years ago involves a clash of rival imperialist centers. Its world more nearly resembles the one that existed before World War I than the one that emerged after World War II. ..."
"... However, the difference may be more superficial than it seems. The ease with which Cold War revivalists have been able to get the Cold War up and running again, even without Communism, suggests what a few observers have long maintained -- that the Cold War, on Russia's part, had little, if anything, to do with spreading Communism around the world, and everything to do with maintaining a cordon sanitaire around Russia's borders in order to protect against a demonstrably aggressive "free world." ..."
"... That part of Brzezinski's plan was at least a partial success. But inasmuch as Bush's "they" are still there, still spreading murder and mayhem throughout the Greater Middle East, America and the world has been paying a high price for the benefits, such as they were, that ensued. ..."
"... The never-ending wars set in motion by the "pivot" towards radical Islamism decades ago never quite succeeded in producing an enemy as serviceable as the USSR. But now that Putin's Russia has been pressed into service, that problem is potentially "solved." ..."
"... Efforts to recycle Bush's "they hate our freedom" nonsense ought to be non-starters. But this is the best Cold War revivalists have come up with so far. The Russians, they say, simply cannot deal with the fact that we Americans are so damned free. ..."
"... From a geopolitical point of view, Russia does have an interest in doing all it can to ward off Western aggression. It also has an interest in undermining strategic alliances aimed at blocking anything and everything that challenges American supremacy. And, until sanity prevails in Washington and other Western capitals, it arguably also has an interest in aiding and abetting rightwing nationalists in order to exacerbate tensions within Western societies. ..."
"... Clinton is bad, but Trump is worse -- not just by most measures but by all. Her fondness for war and preparations for war was alarming; she was bellicosity personified. But it was plain even before the election that Trump, a mentally unhinged narcissist, would be even more likely than she to bring on massive devastation. A vote for Trump was and still is a vote for catastrophe. ..."
"... For now, though, the hard and very relevant fact is that Trump has done nothing to help, and quite a few things to harm, Russia. ..."
"... It isn't just ordinary Russians who have been made worse off. Trump has been at least as hard on oligarchs close to Putin as Clinton would have been. ..."
"... If those damned Russians were half as smart as they are made out to be, they would have realized long ago that, for getting anything done that bucks the tide, Trump is too inept to be of any use at all; and that anything he sets out to do is likely to turn out badly not just for America and its allies but for Russia too. ..."
Aug 03, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

There is less shame in being undone by a "master of deceit." When J. Edgar Hoover coined that description, he had Communists in mind. Back then, though, "Ruskies" and "Commies" – it was all the same. Americans were conditioned to live in fear that the Russians were coming.

That nonsense should have ended when Communism more or less officially expired in 1989, followed two years later by the demise of the Soviet Union itself. For a long time, it seemed that it had. At first, the reaction in Western, especially American, political and media circles was triumphalist. The war was over and our side won. Beneath the surface, however, there was mourning in America.

With the Cold War, the death merchants, the masters of war, the neocons, and a host of others had had a good thing going. Having been born into it, the political class was comfortable with the status quo too; and generations of Americans had grown up imbibing Russophobia in their mother's milk (or infant formula).

It turned out, though, that American triumphalism was only a phase. Before long, it became clear that our economic and political masters had nothing to worry about, that Cold War anti-Communism was more robust than Communism itself.

However, in the final days of Bush 41 and then at the dawn of the Clinton era, nobody knew that. Nobody gave America's propaganda system the credit it deserved.

Also, nobody quite realized how devastating Russia's regression to capitalism would be, and nobody quite grasped the savagery of the kleptocrats who had taken charge of what remained of the Russian state.

For more than a decade, the situation in that late great superpower was too dire to sustain the old fears and animosities. Capitalism had made Russia wretched again.

That suited Bill Clinton and his First Lady, the former Goldwater Girl. Boris Yeltsin, Russia's leader, was their man. He was a godsend, a Trump-like cartoon character and a drunkard to boot – with an economy in tatters, and no rightwing base egging him on.

But anti-Communism (without Communism) and its close cousin, Russophobia, could not remain in remission forever. The need for them was too great.

In the Age of Obama, the Global War on Terror, with or without that ludicrous Bush 43-era name, wasn't cutting it anymore. It was, and still is, good for keeping America's perpetual war regime going and for undoing civil liberties, but there had never been much glory in it, only endless misery for all. Also it was getting old and increasingly easy to see through.

The time was therefore right for a return of the repressed -- for full-blooded, fifties-style, anti-Communist (= anti-Russian) hysteria, or, since that still seemed far-fetched, for anti-Communist (= anti-Chinese) hysteria.

This was not the only factor behind the Obama administration's "pivot towards Asia," its largely failed attempt to take China down a notch or two, but it was an important part of the story.

However, by the time Obama and his team decided to pivot, China had become too important to the United States economically to make a good Cold War enemy. Worse still, it had for too long been an object of pity and contempt, not fear.

When the Soviet Union was an enemy, China was an enemy too, most glaringly during the Korean War. It remained an enemy even after the Sino-Soviet split became too obvious to deny. However, unlike post-1917 Russia, it had never quite become an historical foe.

Moreover, as Russia began to recover from the Yeltsin era, the Russian political class, and many of the oligarchs behind them, sensing the popular mood, decided that the time was ripe "to make Russia great again." Putin is not so much a cause as he is a symptom – and symbol – of this aspiration.

And so, there it was: the longed for new Cold War would be much like the one that seemed over a quarter century ago.

***

As everyone who has seen, heard or read anything about the 2016 election "knows," Russian intelligence services (= Putin) meddled. Everyone also "knows" that, with midterm elections looming, they are at it again.

This, according to the mainstream consensus view, is a bona fide casus belli , a justification for war. To be sure, what they want is a war that remains cold; ending life on earth, as we know it, is not on their agenda.

But inasmuch as cold wars can easily turn hot, this hardly mitigates the recklessness of their machinations. Humankind was extraordinarily lucky last time; there is no guarantee that all that luck will hold.

Exactly what "Putin," the shorthand name for all that is Russian and nefarious, did, or is still doing, remains unclear. But this does not seem to bother purveyors of the conventional wisdom. Neither is ostensibly informed public opinion fazed by the fact that the evidence supporting the consensus view comes mainly from American intelligence services and from their counterparts in the UK and other allied nations.

Time was when anyone with any sense understood that these intelligence services, the American ones especially, are second to none in meddling in the affairs of other nations, and that the American national security state – essentially our political police -- is comprised, by design, of liars and deceivers.

How ironic therefore that nowadays it is mainly bamboozled Trump supporters in the Fox News demographic -- people who could care less about peace or, for that matter, about truth -- who are wary of the CIA and skeptical of the FBI's claims!

Try as they might, the manufacturers and guardians of conventional wisdom have so far been unable to concoct a plausible story in which Russian meddling affected the outcome of the 2016 election in any serious way. The idea that the Russians defeated Hillary, not Hillary herself, is, to borrow a phrase from Jeremy Bentham, "nonsense on stilts." Leading Democrats and their media flacks don't seem to mind that either.

They do not even seem to notice that what they allege, vague as it is, is trifling compared to the massive and very open meddling of American plutocrats, Republican vote suppressers and gerrymanderers, and the governments of supposedly friendly nations – like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, and Israel.

Nevertheless, it probably is true that the Russians meddled. Cold War revivalists can therefore rest easy, confident that their propagandists will have at least a few facts with which they can work to restore the perils of their vanished youth.

Even so, the level of their hypocrisy is appalling. Russia, along with former Soviet republics and former members of the Warsaw Pact, has been bearing the brunt of far worse American meddling for far longer than anything sanctimonious defenders of so-called American "democracy" can plausibly allege.

Moreover, it should go without saying that the democracy they purport to care so much about has almost nothing to do with "the rule of the demos." It doesn't even have much to do with free and fair competitive elections – unless "free and fair" means that anything goes, so long as the principals and perpetrators are homegrown or citizens of favored nations.

Self-righteous posturing aside, Putin's real sin in the eyes of the American power elite is that, in his own small way, he has been defying America's "right" to run the world as it sees fit.

When Clinton was president, Serbia did that, and lived to regret it. Cuba has been suffering for nearly six decades for the same reason, and now Venezuela is paying its dues. The empire is merciless towards nations that rebel.

With Soviet support and then with sheer determination and grit, Cuba has been able to withstand the onslaught to some extent from Day One. Venezuela may not be so lucky – especially now that Republicans and Democrats feel threatened by the growing number of "democratic socialists" in their midst. Already, the propaganda system is targeting Venezuelan "socialism," blaming it for that country's woes, and warning that if our newly minted, homegrown socialists prevail, a similar fate will be in store for us.

This is ludicrous, of course – American hostility and the vagaries of the global oil market deserve the lion's share of the blame. But the on-going propaganda blitz could nevertheless pave the way for horrors ahead, should Trump decide to start a war America could actually win.

Inconsequential Russian meddling is a big deal on the "liberal" cable networks, on NPR, and in the "quality" press. Democrats and a few Republicans love to bleat on about it. But it is Ukraine that made Russia our "adversary" and its president Public Enemy Number One.

Hypocrisy reigns here too. It was the Obama administration – run through with neocons, liberal imperialists, and other holdovers from Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State – that did all it could to exacerbate longstanding tensions between that country's Ukrainian and Russian speaking populations, the better to complete NATO's encirclement of the Russian federation. And it was American meddling that led to the empowerment of virulently anti-Russian, fascisant Ukrainian politicians, much to the detriment of Russian speaking Ukrainians in the east.

But never mind: Putin – that is, the Russia government – violated international law by sending troops briefly into beleaguered Russian-speaking parts of the country. That they were generally welcomed by the people living there is of no importance.

Worst of all, Russia annexed Crimea – a territory integral to the Russian empire since the eighteenth century. Since long before the Russian Revolution, Crimea has been home to a huge naval base vital to Russia's strategic defense.

The story line back in the day was that anything that could be described as Russian aggression outside the Soviet Union's agreed upon sphere of influence had to do with spreading Communism. In fact, the Soviets did everything they could to keep Communist and other insurgencies from upending the status quo. The mainstream narrative was wrong.

Now Communism is gone and nothing has taken its place. Even so, the idea that Russia has designs on its neighbors for ideological reasons is hard to shake – in part because it is actively promoted by propagandists who have suddenly and uncharacteristically become defenders of international law.

Meanwhile, of course, the hypocrisies keep piling on. It is practically a tenet of the American civil religion that international law applies to others, not to the United States. This is why, when it suits some perceived purpose, America flaunts its violations shamelessly.

Thus nothing the Russians did or are ever likely to do comes close to the shenanigans Bill Clinton displayed – successfully, for the most part – in his efforts to tear Kosovo away from Serbia. Clinton even went so far as to bomb Belgrade; Putin never bombed Kiev.

The Cold War that began after World War II involved a clash of rival political economic systems. The Cold War that reignited a few years ago involves a clash of rival imperialist centers. Its world more nearly resembles the one that existed before World War I than the one that emerged after World War II.

However, the difference may be more superficial than it seems. The ease with which Cold War revivalists have been able to get the Cold War up and running again, even without Communism, suggests what a few observers have long maintained -- that the Cold War, on Russia's part, had little, if anything, to do with spreading Communism around the world, and everything to do with maintaining a cordon sanitaire around Russia's borders in order to protect against a demonstrably aggressive "free world."

George W. Bush claimed that 9/11 happened because "they hate our freedom." "They" would be radical Islamists of the kind stirred into action in Afghanistan by Zbigniew Brzezinski and his co-thinkers in the Carter administration. Their objective was to undermine the Soviet Union by getting it bogged down in a quagmire like the one that did so much harm to the United States in Vietnam.

That part of Brzezinski's plan was at least a partial success. But inasmuch as Bush's "they" are still there, still spreading murder and mayhem throughout the Greater Middle East, America and the world has been paying a high price for the benefits, such as they were, that ensued.

The never-ending wars set in motion by the "pivot" towards radical Islamism decades ago never quite succeeded in producing an enemy as serviceable as the USSR. But now that Putin's Russia has been pressed into service, that problem is potentially "solved."

However, the American public is not as naïve as it used to be, and it is impossible to say, at this point, how well this new story line will work.

Efforts to recycle Bush's "they hate our freedom" nonsense ought to be non-starters. But this is the best Cold War revivalists have come up with so far. The Russians, they say, simply cannot deal with the fact that we Americans are so damned free.

It is hard to believe, but there are people who are actually buying this but, with a lot of corporate media assistance, there are. No matter how clear it is that they are not worth being taken seriously, Cold War mythologies just won't die.

However, it is worth pondering why today's Russia would do what it is alleged to have done; and why, as is also alleged, it is still doing it.

From a geopolitical point of view, Russia does have an interest in doing all it can to ward off Western aggression. It also has an interest in undermining strategic alliances aimed at blocking anything and everything that challenges American supremacy. And, until sanity prevails in Washington and other Western capitals, it arguably also has an interest in aiding and abetting rightwing nationalists in order to exacerbate tensions within Western societies.

However, in view of prevailing power relations, these are interests it cannot do much to advance. Acting as if this were not the case only puts Russia in a bad light -- not for meddling, but for meddling stupidly.

No doubt, for reasons both fair and foul, Putin wanted Hillary to lose the election two years ago. So, but for one little problem, would anyone whose head is screwed on right. That problem's name is Donald Trump.

Clinton is bad, but Trump is worse -- not just by most measures but by all. Her fondness for war and preparations for war was alarming; she was bellicosity personified. But it was plain even before the election that Trump, a mentally unhinged narcissist, would be even more likely than she to bring on massive devastation. A vote for Trump was and still is a vote for catastrophe.

Putin's enemy was Trump's enemy, and it is axiomatic that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" -- except sometimes it isn't. Sometimes, my enemy's enemy is an enemy far worse.

For reasons that remain obscure, Putin and Trump seem to have a "thing" going on between them. Some day perhaps we will know what that is all about. For now, though, the hard and very relevant fact is that Trump has done nothing to help, and quite a few things to harm, Russia.

It isn't just ordinary Russians who have been made worse off. Trump has been at least as hard on oligarchs close to Putin as Clinton would have been.

If those damned Russians were half as smart as they are made out to be, they would have realized long ago that, for getting anything done that bucks the tide, Trump is too inept to be of any use at all; and that anything he sets out to do is likely to turn out badly not just for America and its allies but for Russia too.

Therefore, if there really was Russian meddling, as there probably was, Putin should be ashamed – not so much for the DNC reasons laid out 24/7 on MSNBC and CNN, but for overestimating Trump's abilities and for underestimating the extent to which what started out as a maneuver of Hillary Clinton's, concocted to excuse her incompetence, would take a perilously "viral" turn, becoming a major threat to peace in a political culture that never quite got beyond the lunacy of the First Cold War.

Andrew Levine is the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What's Wrong With the Opium of the People . He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

[Sep 15, 2018] BBC is skanky state propaganda

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The myth of BBC being some standard for news reporting died with the advent of the availability of international and independent news in Western countries ..."
"... Ironic when the BBC has been ceaselessly pushing fake news for at least 15 years, with disastrous results. (Iraq; Libya; what caused the deficit and who should be forced to pay it down; Russia/Syria false flags; Corbyn A/S.) ..."
"... I find it impossible to watch BBC News, primarily because most of the editorial staff and senior correspondents seem to be working for MI5/6 and are more interested in disseminating Geo-political propaganda than upholding their journalistic responsibilities as defined in the BBC charter. ..."
"... The book is obviously part of a propaganda campaign. It seems hugely fortuitous that Mark Urban should have had "hours" of interviews with Skripal before the poisoning incident. ..."
"... Isn't it much more likely that the Urban "interviews" would have happened after the event? But Urban can't say that because that would lead to demands from other journalists or news bodies to have access to Skripal. ..."
"... I'm open to alternative hypotheses but right now I think the most likely explanation for Urban's pre-poisoning contact with Sergei Skripal is that, at the time, it was assumed the Orbis dossier would be a key component of the successful takedown of Trump and Urban was putting together a mutually flattering account by interviewing the main players. ..."
"... With regard to your tongue-in-cheek point. Urban could have interviewed Skripal anytime after Trump was gone, unless he believed Skripal might be unavailable (for some reason). The fact he interviewed Skripal before does indicate foresight. If Urban really did interview Skripal before the event then he would be wiser to pull the book and burn every copy in existence (as well as all his notes). ..."
"... Urban pretends to research a book exposing Russia and part of his research is to interview Skripal. His objective is to find dirt on Putin in order to swing the war in Syria in favour of USUKIS bombing Assad to smithereens, bayonets bums etc. ..."
"... Interestingly Mark Urbans' book on Sergei Skripal was available to purchase on Amazon in July. I added it to my Amazon wishlist on 28/7/18. I've just looked at my wishlist and was rather surprised to find it is no longer available. It has been pulled. ..."
"... Can't help thinking that the answer to all this lies in Estonia. Sergei went to Estonia in June 2016, Pablo was in Estonia, the Estonians passed on sigint about Trump-Russian collusion in the summer of 2016. A Guardian article of 13 April 2017 said: ..."
"... No doubt in my mind that the Skripal affair is a planned operation carried out by US/UK intelligence. What has actually taken place is still to be determined, but the propaganda operation itself is clear. ..."
"... I know about Ireland, and I agree, it was NOT a nerve agent. That said, I don't believe anyone was 'attacked', including the Skripals. ..."
"... All foreign correspondents of major newspapers too work with MI6. Nobody who is close to them has any kind of doubt about this. ..."
"... I despise everyone who says that free markets are the solution for the problems of the third world. What they mean is mass starvation and an enormous population cull. There are international "foundations" that pay academics and politicians large amounts of money to spout this obscene line. One of them is called the John Templeton Foundation. They have had their fangs in to British universities for a long time. ..."
"... When the Tories talk about 'free markets', they are talking about markets free from democracy. ..."
Aug 30, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

Dave , August 28, 2018 at 17:41

BBC is skanky state propaganda. The myth of BBC being some standard for news reporting died with the advent of the availability of international and independent news in Western countries. The main thing that BBC used to have which propped up the illusion of it being a respectable news source is that there was no competition or alternative to compare its narratives against. Since that time is over, so is BBC's masquerading as an impartial or accurate news source.

Xavi , August 28, 2018 at 18:40

Agree, Dave. That's what's informing the push to rubbish dissenting sites as fake news and eventually have them removed.

Ironic when the BBC has been ceaselessly pushing fake news for at least 15 years, with disastrous results. (Iraq; Libya; what caused the deficit and who should be forced to pay it down; Russia/Syria false flags; Corbyn A/S.)

Ken Kenn , August 28, 2018 at 21:49

Well I was convinced of fake BBC news during 9/11 and not for the reasons of building 7 coming down too early but the fact that the female journalist was facing a camera standing in front of a glass window and there was no reflection of her or the camera person from the glass. Not even a faint shadow.

That's when I knew the BBC were employing vampires and have been ever since.

Green Screen technology I discovered later. All the On the spot reporters are at it apparently. Or repeating Reuters or PA.

Deb O'Nair , August 28, 2018 at 00:52

I find it impossible to watch BBC News, primarily because most of the editorial staff and senior correspondents seem to be working for MI5/6 and are more interested in disseminating Geo-political propaganda than upholding their journalistic responsibilities as defined in the BBC charter. People should not only boycott the BBC but refuse to pay the license fee on the grounds that it's a compulsory political subscription.

frankywiggles , August 28, 2018 at 09:48

Careful, Craig

BBC world affairs editor 'fed up' with complaints directed at the corporation's news output

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/aug/28/bbc-news-is-not-biased-in-brexit-reporting-says-john-simpson

D_Majestic , August 28, 2018 at 14:35

Of course BBC News is not biased. Most of the time it is not even factual.

Brendan , August 28, 2018 at 10:34

Dear Mark,
In a BBC article on 4 July 2018, you wrote: "I have not felt ready until now to acknowledge explicitly that we had met, but do now that the book is nearing completion."

Could you please explain that comment? I do not see why your acknowledgement of your meetings with Sergei Skripal should be delayed until your book is nearing completion.

If you felt that it was right to reveal those meetings in July, then why was it not right to do so in March, soon after the poisoning occurred? What difference would it have made if you had done so four months earlier?

I cannot think of any negative consequences of an earlier acknowledgement of the meetings. In fact, disclosures of any possible conflict of interest are generally considered to be desirable in journalism, regardless of whether the conflict of interest is real.

ADHD , August 28, 2018 at 11:00

The book is obviously part of a propaganda campaign. It seems hugely fortuitous that Mark Urban should have had "hours" of interviews with Skripal before the poisoning incident.

Isn't it much more likely that the Urban "interviews" would have happened after the event? But Urban can't say that because that would lead to demands from other journalists or news bodies to have access to Skripal.

And that can't happen because either Skripal would be asked about what happened on the day of the poisoning, or can't be guaranteed to stick to the script, or is no longer alive. And that leads to a suspicion that whatever Skripal is supposed to have said in his interviews with Urban has really just been made up by the British security services.

Kay , August 28, 2018 at 14:42

I'm open to alternative hypotheses but right now I think the most likely explanation for Urban's pre-poisoning contact with Sergei Skripal is that, at the time, it was assumed the Orbis dossier would be a key component of the successful takedown of Trump and Urban was putting together a mutually flattering account by interviewing the main players.

Tongue in cheek, it'd be worth asking Urban if his decision to cover the Skripal poisoning in his new book was made before or after the Skripals were actually poisoned.

ADHD , August 28, 2018 at 15:59

The consensus seems to be that it was an anti-Russia book, but that doesn't conflict with what you say (there is overlap, your view is just more specific). But, I just find it hard to believe that Urban and the conspirators would waste their time "counting their chickens ". Not least because such a book would form a handy list of traitors (together with confessions) if Trump were to prevail and it fell into the right hands. This is "101 – How to Organise a Revolution" (secrecy / don't put anything in writing); surely British security services know that?

With regard to your tongue-in-cheek point. Urban could have interviewed Skripal anytime after Trump was gone, unless he believed Skripal might be unavailable (for some reason). The fact he interviewed Skripal before does indicate foresight. If Urban really did interview Skripal before the event then he would be wiser to pull the book and burn every copy in existence (as well as all his notes).

Regardless, it looks like the master of the universe are losing their ability to create reality.

Brendan , August 28, 2018 at 10:37

Last month, Mark Urban was promoting the reports that the Russian assassins had been identified from CCTV footage:

"There are now subjects of interest in the police Salisbury investigation. ( ) analytic and cyber techniques are now being exploited against the Salisbury suspects by people with a wealth of experience in complex investigations."
https://twitter.com/MarkUrban01/status/1020366761848385536

That story originated with a report by PA, which Security Minister Ben Wallace called "ill informed and wild speculation". https://mobile.twitter.com/BWallaceMP/status/1019906962786484225

Or as Craig Murray put it, "Unnamed source close to unnamed British police officers tells unnamed Press Association journalist Britain knows the unnamed Russian agents ".
https://twitter.com/CraigMurrayOrg/status/1019854966327005184

Even Urban's colleagues had to admit that "The BBC has not been able to independently confirm the story."
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-44883803

Still, that didn't stop Mark Urban from reporting the story almost as fact.

Tom , August 28, 2018 at 10:38

The BBC relies on it's interpretation of the Act because it is held for the purposes of 'journalism, art or literature.' but this relies on a usually unrelated precedent and the opinions of a number of Judges which contradict this view. I'm in the process of challenging this with ICO but don't expect anything will change until another supreme court ruling:

https://medium.com/@tomcoady/bbc-foi-exemption-for-the-purposes-of-art-journalism-or-literature-c39e4fa3e36

Ian Fantom , August 28, 2018 at 10:41

I've put in a Freedom of Information request regarding meetings with Skripal other than any that were for the purpose of BBC news journalism. (https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/mark_urbans_non_journalistic_mee )

Made By Dom , August 28, 2018 at 11:04

Can I play Devil's Advocate ?

I can see the value in asking writers, journalists and artists to pose exactly the same questions as Eccles' original letter but I'm not convinced about Craig's email.

A quick google shows me that a man named Mark Urban has written a book on the Skripals. Isn't it likely that Urban was keeping the interviews to himself in order to keep his book alive?

It wouldn't surprise me if Urban cares far more about his writing career than his job at the BBC. I'm sure most journalists would rather be authors. He's written a number of books on war and military intelligence. If his sources have nothing to do with the BBC then why should he answer to an on line mob?

craig Post author , August 28, 2018 at 11:18

" Isn't it likely that Urban was keeping the interviews to himself in order to keep his book alive?"
No, entirely unlikely. a chance to plug his forthcoming book and his Skripal contacts to a massive worldwide televion audience was eschewed.
The book is now about the Skripal attack. Presumably that was not the original subject he was researching, as it hadn't happened yet. The book will just be a rehash of the "noble defector – Putin revenge" line and none of the questions I asked about the genesis of his involvement will be answered in it.

SA , August 28, 2018 at 11:29

"Presumably that was not the original subject he was researching, as it hadn't happened yet." Or it was prescience ie that it was part of the planning for the incident?

Chris Hemmings , August 28, 2018 at 14:41

@BBC, Summer 2017, in an executive office:
"Hey Mark, why don't you go down to have a chat with this guy in Salisbury. I have a hunch that a story might be going to happen involving him, you know, as an ex-Soviet spy. Spend time with him, get to know him, be able to write in depth about him. Say it's for a book ."

giyane , August 28, 2018 at 11:46

Urban is never one-sided in his BBC reports on the Middle East. I would rather have him as Foreign Secretary than a bumbling idiot like Hubris Johnson or a Tory racketeer Hunt, because however clunky the formula of BBC balance Urban is at least pretending to be governed by normal rules. After Thatcher went anyone with half a brain left the Conservative party, leaving dolts like Johnson and nasties like May and Cameron to pick up the pieces after Blair and Brown.

There's money to be made from Russian billionaires and tory shit will follow the money like flies on d**t**d.

Urban pretends to research a book exposing Russia and part of his research is to interview Skripal. His objective is to find dirt on Putin in order to swing the war in Syria in favour of USUKIS bombing Assad to smithereens, bayonets bums etc.

Tory shit Hubris Johnson finds this political research floating around the Foreign Office and decides to twist it into Russia murders Skripal by Novichok. Unfortunately Johnson is already known to be a liar and gravy-trainer Tory and nobody believes him at all. Mrs May , realising that Johnson, Fox, Rees-Mogg and Hunt are completely bonkers, does Chequers her own way.

ZigZag Wanderer , August 28, 2018 at 12:26

Interestingly Mark Urbans' book on Sergei Skripal was available to purchase on Amazon in July. I added it to my Amazon wishlist on 28/7/18. I've just looked at my wishlist and was rather surprised to find it is no longer available. It has been pulled.

From memory the books description said that Mark had interviewed Skripal 'extensively' during 2017 and also mentioned the 'new' spying war now happening between Britain and Russia.

A quick search revealed a new version of the book ( with an altered title ) will be available in early October .. details here. https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/mark-urban/the-skripal-files

Oh dear . panic stations !

Sharp Ears , August 28, 2018 at 11:16

Salisbury poisoning: Skripals 'were under Russian surveillance'
Mark Urban Diplomatic and defence editor, Newsnight

4 July 2018

'My meetings with Sergei Skripal

I met Sergei on a few occasions last summer and found him to be a private character who did not, even under the circumstances then prevailing, wish to draw attention to himself.

He agreed to see me as a writer of history books rather than as a news journalist, since I was researching one on the post-Cold War espionage battle between Russia and the West.

Information gained in these interviews was fed into my Newsnight coverage during the early days after the poisoning. I have not felt ready until now to acknowledge explicitly that we had met, but do now that the book is nearing completion.

As a man, Sergei is proud of his achievements, both before and after joining his country's intelligence service.

He has a deadpan wit and is remarkably stoical given the reverses he's suffered in his life; from his imprisonment following conviction in 2006 on charges of spying for Britain, to the loss of his wife Liudmila to cancer in 2012, and the untimely death of his son Alexander (or Sasha) last summer.'

...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44717835

Agent Green , August 28, 2018 at 12:27

Laughable given that the whole world and virtually all heads of State were under US surveillance by the NSA – at least until Edward Snowden made all his revelations.

KEVIN GLENNIE , August 28, 2018 at 11:18

I have pasted and copied your Email regarding the above with a few slight alterations, it will be interesting to see the response I receive if any being just a concerned citizen of the U.

Niki Henry , August 28, 2018 at 11:21

Is this not a matter for the Police? (Even if you're not too sure if they'd do anything about it) These would be files that are to do with an attempted murder case. And definitely not Journalism if the story is fabricated.

Paul Baker , August 28, 2018 at 11:28

It feels as if you are moving in the right direction in linking Sergei to Steele. I'm intrigued by the very early media references to Sergei wanting to return home to see his elderly mother for perhaps the last time. He had apparently written to Putin making his request but again according to newspapers hadn't received a reply.

I would suggest Julia was bringing the answer via her own secret services contacts, her boyfriend and his mother, apparently Senior in the Russian Intelligence Agency. Perhaps a sentimental man Sergei was aware his mother couldn't travel so the plea to Putin was his best bet.

Such a request must have disturbed MI6 if Sergei had anything at all to do with the Steele dossier because inevitably if he returned to Russia he'd be debriefed by his old colleagues. But how can you rely on a mercenary double agent? If he decided he might want to stay in Russia with his family that might well have been attractive, away from the lonely existence in a Salisbury cul de sac with only spies for company. But the Steele dossier has great potential to turn sour on the British.

It's author was a Senior spy and Head of the Russian Desk for some years. It is – perhaps you'd agree? – inconceivable that he didn't require permission to prepare it, especially as much of it was based on his experience as a spy in Russia. Yet it's equally inconceivable that the Agency bosses didn't know the identity of the commissioners or the use to which it would be put in the US election – to boost Clinton's bid. If she'd won everything would have been fine but as it is any discussion of foreign interference in that election would have to include MI6 leading the list (they probably didn't tell any politician?) To have Sergei supporting and highlighting that embarrassment would be problematic for US-UK relations. Of course Sergei may have had other nuggets to expose as well as Steele.

Soon after Julia's arrival the pair fell ill. They both survived but are now locked away, presumably for life and never able to explain their side of the story.

It was a bodged job with a poor cover story from the start and could only be carried because of D Notices and media complicity. Is his mother still alive? Would he still like to see her before she dies? Would Russia allow it? Would MI6 allow it? I think that's 3 yeses and a resounding No.

Sharp Ears , August 28, 2018 at 11:39

Following the deaths of 55 Palestinians on the Gaza 'border' and the wounding of thousands, in this video, Urban asks the questions but the Israeli government spokesman, David Keyes, is allowed to spout all the usual propaganda against Hamas.

Gaza deaths: Who's to blame? – BBC Newsnight
Published on 15 May 2018
Subscribe 256K
Fresh protests against Israel are expected in the Palestinian territories, a day after Israeli troops killed 58 people in the Gaza Strip.
David Keyes is the spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mark Urban asked him whether it was appropriate for the US to open their embassy on the 70th anniversary of Israel's creation, a day that is hugely controversial for the Palestinian people.

Newsnight is the BBC's flagship news and current affairs TV programme – with analysis, debate, exclusives, and robust interviews.
Website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsnight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1dec5XO53k

Mr Keyes' pronounced American accent was heard. The Occupation was not mentioned. A Palestinian voice was not heard.

This is another of his videos. On the same subject and on the opening of the Israeli Embassy in Jerusalem. This time, Jonathan Conricus spoke for the IDF.

Israel says. Same old. Same old. BBC. ZBC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WdqoPKKkD8

Charles Bostock , August 28, 2018 at 15:58

"Urban asks the questions but the Israeli government spokesman, David Keyes, is allowed to spout all the usual propaganda against Hamas."

Yes indeed : Urban asked the questions and allowed the interviewee to answer. Perhaps you would have preferred him to interrupt the interviewee continually 'a la Today programme, or to have shouted at him similarly to the way I understand some people shout at customers inside or outside supermarkets?

Peter , August 28, 2018 at 11:39

This may or may not be relevant regarding Russia, chemical weapons and BBC/MSM bovine effluent:

"US Poised to Hit Syria Harder: The Russian Defense Ministry issued a statement on Aug. 25 stating that the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham militants had brought eight containers of chlorine to Idlib in order to stage a false-flag attack with the help of UK intelligence agencies. A group of Tahrir al-Sham fighters trained to handle chemical warfare agents by the UK private military company Olive arrived in the suburbs of the city of Jisr ash-Shugur, Idlib, 20 km. from the Turkish border."

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/08/27/us-poised-to-hit-syria-harder.html

Jeremn , August 28, 2018 at 11:42

Can't help thinking that the answer to all this lies in Estonia. Sergei went to Estonia in June 2016, Pablo was in Estonia, the Estonians passed on sigint about Trump-Russian collusion in the summer of 2016. A Guardian article of 13 April 2017 said:

"Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump's inner circle and Russians, sources said. The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence – known as sigint – included Germany, Estonia and Poland."

Perhaps not the Dossier, as such, but some material on collusion?

Paul Greenwood , August 28, 2018 at 12:00

John Paul Jones also fought for the Russians and was a Rear-Admiral. He was buried in Paris 1792 and disinterred 1905 and relocated to USA

wonky , August 29, 2018 at 10:29

..then he met Jimmy Page in the 1960s and the rest is history..

Agent Green , August 28, 2018 at 12:11

No doubt in my mind that the Skripal affair is a planned operation carried out by US/UK intelligence. What has actually taken place is still to be determined, but the propaganda operation itself is clear.

Paul Carrom , August 28, 2018 at 12:12

Definitely done by the UK.

Doodlebug , August 28, 2018 at 14:53

What did the UK have against Dawn and Charlie? (Please don't say you subscribe to all that bottle-finding bullshit).

mark golding , August 28, 2018 at 17:40

Catch my last post Doodlebug, sadly MI6 diabolical elements can be traced back to Ireland in the 70's early 80's assassinations theRealTerror (theRealElvis) understands.

Doodlebug , August 28, 2018 at 18:06

I know about Ireland, and I agree, it was NOT a nerve agent. That said, I don't believe anyone was 'attacked', including the Skripals.

Jo , August 29, 2018 at 11:59

Being used as practice and to establish more "evidence"

N_ , August 28, 2018 at 12:24

Often it's been open. There was the BBC monitoring station at Caversham Park. The BBC's Foreign Broadcast Information Service split the world into two parts with the CIA.

All foreign correspondents of major newspapers too work with MI6. Nobody who is close to them has any kind of doubt about this.

N_ , August 28, 2018 at 12:20

Theresa May says a no deal Brexit "wouldn't be the end of the world".

  1. This is not a negotiating strategy. This is not a pantomime where one giant on the stage can wink to his supporters (using the British media) without his opponent (EU27) noticing.
  2. The subconscious doesn't work well with negation. Whatever you do, please DON'T imagine an elephant at this time.
  3. I would love to know what the preparations are at Trinity College, Cambridge, for food shortages. They own the port of Felixstowe, which handles more than 40% of Britain's containerised trade. They also own a 50% stake in a portfolio of Tesco stores. Soon food distribution will be what everyone is talking about. I am never going to stop making the point that the god of the Tory party is Thomas Malthus.
N_ , August 28, 2018 at 12:38

Oh dear.. Theresa May in Africa:

" As a Prime Minister who believes both in free markets and in nations and businesses acting in line with well-established rules and principles of conduct, I want to demonstrate to young Africans that their brightest future lies in a free and thriving private sector. "

I despise everyone who says that free markets are the solution for the problems of the third world. What they mean is mass starvation and an enormous population cull. There are international "foundations" that pay academics and politicians large amounts of money to spout this obscene line. One of them is called the John Templeton Foundation. They have had their fangs in to British universities for a long time.

They are keen on Prince Philip, the guy who said he wanted to come back as a virus so he could kill a large part of the population. Never trust anyone who has received a Templeton scholarship or prize or who has anything to do with these people or with the message that free markets and the private sector are the key to "development"

Nuno Strybes , August 28, 2018 at 12:43

When the Tories talk about 'free markets', they are talking about markets free from democracy.

May's rhetoric is laughable .basically all her speeches read : 'the sky is green, the snow is black etc etc' -- totally detached from reality and a spent political force, as their recent membership numbers showed, with more revenues from legacies left in wills than from actual living members.

Ros Thorpe , August 28, 2018 at 12:30

I agree with the Skripal relatives that Sergei is dead. He hasn't been seen or heard of and would have called his mother. Mind boggling deception at all levels and I struggle to believe any of it.

N_ , August 28, 2018 at 12:47

Sergei Skripal could be in US custody, either in the US itself or in a US facility somewhere.

If he is dead, then the rehospitalisation of Charlie Rowley may be to assist with the narrative. "Once you've had a drop of Novvy Chockk, you may recover but you can fall down ill at any time, and here's an Expert with a serious voice to confirm it."

Nuno Strybes , August 28, 2018 at 12:38

I follow this blog closely, particularly in relation to the Skripal case, but this is my first comment. I just watched Sky News piece on 'super recognisers' and couldn't help but wonder why, in an age of powerful facial recognition technology, the police and security services seem to have drawn such a blank. The surveillance state in the UK is known to be one of the most advanced in the world but when it comes to this highly important geopolitical crisis our technological infrastructure seems to be redundant to the point where 'human eyes' are deemed to be more accurate than the most powerful supercomputers available. Psychologically, all humans have an inherent facial recognition ability from a very young age, but the idea that some police officers have this ability developed to such an extent that they supercede computer recognition is, i feel, laughable. To me this announcement through the ever subservient Sky News reeks of desperation on the part of the ;official story'. Are we about to be shown suspects who, although facial recognition technology fails to identify them, a 'super recogniser' can testify that it actually is person A or person B and we are all supposed to accept that? Seems either a damning indictment of the judicial process, or a damning indictment of the ŁŁŁŁŁ's of taxpayers money that is spent on places like GCHQ etc whose technology is now apparently no better than a highly perceptive human brain. Give me a break !

Trowbridge H. Ford , August 28, 2018 at 13:08

Why no interest in how the Coopers died in Egypt? We will soon be told by HMG that the Russians somehow dd it too., thanks to Urban's research?

giyane , August 28, 2018 at 13:49

People do die Trowbridge. I know you haven't, but you have the motivation of outliving your persecutors. With Muckin about with Isis gone and covert operations isn't social work Kissinger looking as though he's on daily blood transfusions, you have rejected Trump for some reason. But Trump has undone much of John McCain's worst mischief in one year. If McCain was an example of a politician, we don't need politicians.

Trowbridge H. Ford , August 28, 2018 at 14:16

Give me an example, other than the Coopers. of a healthy couple one day that is found dying the next day like the Skripals.

And while i tried on another site to be generous about McCain. he got Navy Secretary John Lehman, Jr. to scare the Soviets for prevailing in the Vietnam War so much about what NATO was up to in the fallout from shooting Swedish PM Olof Palme that Moscow gave up the competition for fear that it would blow up the world, helping bring on the crappy one we have.

McCain was a continuing Cold Warrior who we don't need since we still have Trump who is just trying to do it another way.

Trowbridge H. Ford , August 28, 2018 at 15:03

Oh, I forget that couple in Amesbury. Looks like the Porton Down Plague is spread overseas.

Posting on this site in like playing bridge online – the cards are stacked against you.

Doodlebug , August 28, 2018 at 15:26

"Give me an example, other than the Coopers. of a healthy couple one day that is found dying the next day like the Skripals."

Will a 17 year old and his step-father do?

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6918378/brit-lad-17-in-a-coma-on-family-holiday-in-spain-may-have-been-poisoned-by-cockroach-pesticide/

They both survived, but one or other (quite possibly both) would have died without medical intervention.

[Sep 15, 2018] So now CNN is complicit in illegal leaking, disinformation laundering

Sep 15, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Newly revealed text messages between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page reveal that Strzok wanted to use CNN's report on the infamous "Steele Dossier" to justify interviewing people in the Trump-Russia investigation, reports CNN .


911bodysnatchers322 ,

So now CNN is complicit in illegal leaking, (dis)information laundering, citizen targetting, conspiracy against rights, subversion, sedition and treason?

No wonder it's a nonstop Trump hate fest. They aren't just trying to get Trump impeached in the court of public opinion, they're desperate to get rid of him before he 100% destroys him

Well it's too late. Impeach away. But we'll still hold CNN for treason. The two things aren't related. You can't steal from a store just because Trump set the one next to it on fire

BGO ,

Fatigue is setting in with this charade. Soon the (((pundits))) will respond with the obligatory ***yawn*** troll to all future allegations.

If Trump cannot or is unable to respond to this non-sense in the harshest terms possible, he should not be president. It's amazing no one in this drama has met their maker Hitlery style. If that cunt was in charge and dealing with this shit, bodies would have already hit the floor.

J Mahoney ,

This whole situation has to piss off anyone that is even 10% objective. How could any elected representative or senator still spew shit like "Leave Mueller Alone"

BOTTOM LINE -- If we do not get to work quickly to elect non establishment republicans in the midterms NOTHING will EVER be done and Trump may be forced out if Dems make gains

apocalypticbrother ,

All old news. No one in jail except Manafort. It really seems like Trump is powerless against agencys. He must hate being a powerless president.

squid ,

If, and I do mean IF, the GOP holds onto both houses of congress.....

Everyone of these fucks has to be indited with sedition, PERIOD.

its slam dunk. And, if the elected houses ever wants to get hold of the CIA, FBI and NSA and gain some control over those rogue agencies 20-50 agents from each will have to go down to spend the rest of their lives in Leavenworth.

These uncollected asshats have tried to change the government of the United States.

The only person on the left that appears to understand this is Glen Greenwald.

Squid

Save_America1st ,

the problem is that in my opinion the majority of the GOP is also so fucking corrupt that I don't think most of them actually want to hold control of the House. They never even wanted Trump to win in the first place. On top of that, I would say many of those treasonous scumbags probably actually wanted Hitlery to win the fucking thing even if Trump wasn't going to be her opponent!

Look at all the resignations. Never seen before in history. Why? Two reasons...Trump is using the evidence to push many of them out or they end up in Guantanamo for life. And others in the beginning were quitting in order to give up part of the majority in order to flip the House to the even more evil, treasonous Demoscums so that it would restrict Trump's full majority.

Just look how "No Name" McStain acted when voting down against repealing O-Fuck-You-Care, right???

He was a traitor, plain and fucking simple. We all know it. Fuck their bullshit funeral. That was a cathedral full of traitors to this country. Psychopaths and sociopaths. Except for General Kelly and General Mattis keeping a close eye on that room full of demons.

... ... ...

[Sep 15, 2018] Zakharova in extravagant dress claims on Russian talk show that US and UK are trying to "Iraq" Russia

Sep 15, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

kirill,

https://www.youtube.com/embed/zRNPVOAdQqk

Nice interview with Zakharova over the Skripal frame job. The good part is at around 14 minutes where the loud yapping chihuahua, the UK, is put in its place.

It is not a global player by any measure and has nothing useful to contribute aside from riding Uncle Scumbag's coat-tails to bomb civilians in Syria.

Moscow Exile September 13, 2018 at 2:08 am

Here's Zakharova in a less extravagant rig out:

https://youtu.be/8MNKqJxPcHg

Repeatedly referred to as an "Old Hag" by a noisome visitor to the previous Stooge site.

Mark Chapman September 13, 2018 at 8:30 am

That's an unfortunate outfit; I prefer the business-dominatrix look for her.
Jen September 13, 2018 at 10:30 pm
Here's Zakharova striding along in her red power dress and her power shoes:
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-moscow-russia-17th-aug-2017-russian-foreign-ministry-spokesperson-154195435.html
Moscow Exile September 13, 2018 at 11:17 pm
She is not displaying her thighs almost up to her crotch, though, as is Nauert often wont to do!
Mark Chapman September 13, 2018 at 11:42 pm
And I'm okay with that.
Moscow Exile September 13, 2018 at 11:58 pm
Get thee gone to a monastery, preferably a Russian Orthodox one, to purge thyself of thy wicked thoughts and deeds!

[Sep 15, 2018] Moscow is aware of who the people named as suspects in the Skripal case are, President Vladimir Putin said, adding that these people are civilians

Notable quotes:
"... The obvious thing for the British side to do would be to request Moscow to detain the two men so they could be interviewed as persons of interest. If this doesn't happen, it smacks of problems holding the official narrative together and I really can't see how the MSM could spin it away. Plus the surviving alleged victims or their families could have a case against the police for failing to investigate properly. ..."
"... They're already spinning it away by saying publicly that the responses they are getting from Russia are 'lies and obfuscation'. ..."
"... It will not make the slightest bit of difference in Britain; the British government will quickly announce, following any presentation of evidence by Russia, that it is all cleverly faked up, and remind people that these are professional intelligence agents, that's what they do, of course it looks convincing. All the more proof that they are what Britain says they are. ..."
Sep 15, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Warren September 12, 2018 at 12:41 pm

https://youtu.be/Rv7baKtUFAA

Fern September 12, 2018 at 3:44 pm

Moscow to London: Your move. This is an interesting development.

The obvious thing for the British side to do would be to request Moscow to detain the two men so they could be interviewed as persons of interest. If this doesn't happen, it smacks of problems holding the official narrative together and I really can't see how the MSM could spin it away. Plus the surviving alleged victims or their families could have a case against the police for failing to investigate properly.

Mark Chapman September 13, 2018 at 12:19 pm
They're already spinning it away by saying publicly that the responses they are getting from Russia are 'lies and obfuscation'.
Mark Chapman September 13, 2018 at 9:06 am
It will not make the slightest bit of difference in Britain; the British government will quickly announce, following any presentation of evidence by Russia, that it is all cleverly faked up, and remind people that these are professional intelligence agents, that's what they do, of course it looks convincing. All the more proof that they are what Britain says they are.

[Sep 15, 2018] On the meaning of the word "clearly"

Notable quotes:
"... 'Clearly' is an English term which is subject to national interpretations. In Canada – mostly English-speaking – it traditionally means, "supported by verifiable and compelling evidence", although I hasten to add that Canada cheerfully booted out 'Russian spies' to support its ally, Britain. ..."
"... But in England, 'clearly' might mean 'as required to serve in the cause of political necessity'. In this instance, if the passports/visas/whatever travel documents of the men concerned do not read "GRU Assassin Traveling on Business", then clearly there was an attempt to circumvent British checks. ..."
Sep 15, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile September 12, 2018 at 1:02 pm

Salisbury novichok attack: Russian spies smuggled chemical weapons through airport baggage checks, UK security minister admits

Two alleged Russian spies who launched the Salisbury attack smuggled novichok into the UK through Gatwick Airport, the security minister has confirmed.

I see! So now the disciplined and highly trained GRU assassins were spies as well.

Proper jack-of-all-trades!

Ben Wallace, who is currently Minister of State for Security and Economic Crime, " told the House of Commons there was 'clearly some form of attempt to create a legend to make sure that they circumvented our checks'.

'No doubt at the other end of that aeroplane journey [in Russia] there was some, I should think, the baggage checks weren't probably as good as they might be,' he added " -- because the Russians are all blithering incompetents stands ter reason, dunnit!

" Mr Wallace said requests for Russia to account for what happened in Salisbury had been met with 'obfuscation and lies', saying their response merely 'reinforces their guilt'. "

Of course it does! Why don't they just confess to what everyone knows they have done?

Jen September 12, 2018 at 8:18 pm
Were there no baggage checks by British customs officials at Gatwick International then?
Mark Chapman September 13, 2018 at 12:05 pm
'Clearly' is an English term which is subject to national interpretations. In Canada – mostly English-speaking – it traditionally means, "supported by verifiable and compelling evidence", although I hasten to add that Canada cheerfully booted out 'Russian spies' to support its ally, Britain.

But in England, 'clearly' might mean 'as required to serve in the cause of political necessity'. In this instance, if the passports/visas/whatever travel documents of the men concerned do not read "GRU Assassin Traveling on Business", then clearly there was an attempt to circumvent British checks.

[Sep 15, 2018] RT editor-in-chief's exclusive interview with Skripal case suspects Petrov Boshirov (TRANSCRIPT)

Notable quotes:
"... And the mockery from the Russophobes immediately kicks off in the British press! Travel all the way from Russia to visit Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge? What nonesense! Who are they trying to kid? That's because such a trip is barely imaginable for uncultured morons. ..."
Sep 15, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile September 13, 2018 at 5:11 am

RT editor-in-chief's exclusive interview with Skripal case suspects Petrov & Boshirov (TRANSCRIPT)
Published time: 13 Sep, 2018 11:32
Edited time: 13 Sep, 2018 12:29
James lake September 13, 2018 at 5:39 am
What a scoop! They don't look like the passport/ visa pictures which look like they were taken in bad light giving them a sinister air.

Scotland Yard should come over to interview them – they did say they were still investigating.

Moscow Exile September 13, 2018 at 6:16 am
And the mockery from the Russophobes immediately kicks off in the British press! Travel all the way from Russia to visit Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge? What nonesense! Who are they trying to kid? That's because such a trip is barely imaginable for uncultured morons.

When I last had the great misfortune to be in England with my family, and, to make matters worse, in London, my elder children begged and begged that we take a trip to Stonehenge. You see, they were fascinated by all that they had learnt about the place in their Russian schools.

We went on an excursion there, calling first at Windsor, then Salisbury, Stonehenge, and, finally, Bath for afternoon tea before heading off back to London.

Witness the moronity of some of my fellow countrymen in this comment published in today's Independent:

Well you can say a lot about our Russian friends: semi-educated, semi-civilised, pathological liars, undemocratic, authoritarian, crypto-fascist, mocked and despised the world over, but one thing we must concede is that they have a wonderful sense of humour.

So this delightful, oh-so intelligent looking couple flew all the way to Salisbury to have a look at the Cathedral clock, but the nasty inclement British weather (unlike tropical Moscow, of course) forced them to return with undue haste from whence they came.

May I suggest better acting classes and a credible script in future?

Doubtless the Indie's resident Putinite Mary Dejevsky, Comrade Corbyn and the brainless Prigozhin trolls infesting this site will try and sell it – because they are paid to, but anyone with an IQ higher than a daisy, ie. the rest of the sentient world, will shake their heads in disbelief at the knuckle-headed absurdity of this story.

Well, as regards the weather, moron, – for Russians, English snow is "inclement"', as it is wet shite. They were complaining of being wet to the knees. At the same time, in Russia it was minus 15C and there was plenty of deep, dry snow, which really would make Little Englanders like you whine.

Oh, and the person who owns that rag to which you wrote the above shite is owned by one of those "semi-educated, semi-civilised, pathological liars, undemocratic, authoritarian, crypto-fascist" Russians whom you so despise.

Moscow Exile September 13, 2018 at 6:29 am
Russians "semi-educated"?

In the years that I worked in England, in an English coal mine, I worked with quite a few fellow countrymen who were barely literate. I particularily remember one who often boasted that he had never read a book since he left school.

Fact :

Russia: The country with the highest literacy rate in Russia with almost 53% of the population has tertiary education. It is estimated that 95% of adults in Russia have higher secondary education and the country spends some 4.9% of GDP on education. 2.Jan 16, 2014

According to a study conducted in late April by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can't read. That's 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can't read.Jul 7, 2017

Adult Litercy UK :
Around 15 per cent, or 5.1 million adults in England, can be described as 'functionally illiterate.' They would not pass an English GCSE and have literacy levels at or below those expected of an 11-year-old. They can understand short straightforward texts on familiar topics accurately and independently, and obtain information from everyday sources, but reading information from unfamiliar sources, or on unfamiliar topics, could cause problems.

Many adults are reluctant to admit to their literacy difficulties and ask for help. One of the most important aspects of supporting adults with low literacy levels is to increase their self-esteem and persuade them of the benefits of improving their reading and writing.

Cortes September 13, 2018 at 7:51 am
(Awaits gnashing of teeth and rending of garments)
Moscow Exile September 13, 2018 at 7:01 am
And the British Foreign Office has replied as follows:

"The government is clear these men are officers of the Russian military intelligence service – the GRU – who used a devastatingly toxic, illegal chemical weapon on the streets of our country."

"We have repeatedly asked Russia to account for what happened in Salisbury in March. Today – just as we have seen throughout – they have responded with obfuscation and lies."

No obfuscation and lies from the FO, though!

Anything but a confession of guilt is "obfuscation and lies", it seems.

"We have repeatedly asked Russia to account for what happened in Salisbury in March

I tell you what happened: nothing that the Russian state had anything to do with!

I suggest you ask your Yukie nazi pals for an account of what happened there, and your pals in Tel-Aviv as well.

From the MP for Salisbury:

James lake September 13, 2018 at 8:26 am
What's the next move going to be in this saga.

The UK say they used fake names

The two guys say that this is not true – they used there true passports

They gave a reason for being in Salisbury.

can the uk police show CCTV of those places ?

Where are the Skripals

Fern September 13, 2018 at 4:33 pm
Russia, cleverly, has thrown down the gauntlet. If the FCO claims that the story of Petrov and Boshirov is simply 'obfuscation and lies', then why not ask Russia to help make these guys available for interview and send a couple of detectives plus interpreter on the next flight to Moscow?

No matter how the FCO and British government huffs, puffs and tries to blow houses down, ultimately they will be unable to explain why they haven't sought to question these guys.

yalensis September 14, 2018 at 2:31 am
Agreed, Fern. This was a very clever move on the chess board. Odd as these 2 characters are, the latest gambit serves to take this whole matter out of the Harry Potter world of geo-political magick, and put down to the mundane world of a detective story and criminal procedures. It pushes the politicians aside to make room for the gumshoes. From this point onward, the story is a police procedural.

[Sep 15, 2018] In a nutshell: Krutikov's theory is that these 2 "gopniki" earn their daily bread by illegal (or semi-legal) trade in European vitamins and supplement. This is what brings them to Europe and what brought them to Salisbury, most likely (i.e., the purchase of supplements, for resale in Russia).

Notable quotes:
"... In a nutshell: Krutikov's theory is that these 2 "gopniki" earn their daily bread by illegal (or semi-legal) trade in European vitamins and supplement. This is what brings them to Europe and what brought them to Salisbury, most likely (i.e., the purchase of supplements, for resale in Russia). ..."
Sep 15, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

yalensis September 13, 2018 at 11:42 am

Krutikov has an interesting take on these guys. I think I will probably do this story tomorrow, in my blog, as a "breaking news".

In a nutshell: Krutikov's theory is that these 2 "gopniki" earn their daily bread by illegal (or semi-legal) trade in European vitamins and supplement. This is what brings them to Europe and what brought them to Salisbury, most likely (i.e., the purchase of supplements, for resale in Russia).

While in Salisbury they decided to have a look at the sights; that part rings true; might as well see some sights.

The semi-legal nature of their "business" accounts for their nervousness; while their status in the Russian criminal underworld accounts for their horror at Simonyan's assuming them to be gay. An allegation which they rejected more vehemently than the accusations of being poisoners!

Krutikov also points attention to another instance of Vladimir Putin's subtle humor. Recall that when Putin announced the existence of these guys to the world, a couple of days ago, he used a strange phrase: "There is nothing particularly criminal there."
As usual, Putin is one step ahead of everybody in this ludicrous chess game.

yalensis September 13, 2018 at 11:46 am
P.S. "никакого особого криминала" was the phrase used by Putin. At the time nobody paid much attention and it was translated as "There is nothing criminal there," but the actual phrase is "There is nothing particularly criminal there."
yalensis September 13, 2018 at 1:37 pm
Okay, I have to make a factual correction, Krutikov wass wrong about Putin's quote, and one of his commenters who questioned it, turned out to be correct. (Which is sort of sad for Krutikov, because he built his blogpost around the humor of Putin's supposedly implication that the duo are petty thieves.)

So, I found the actual vid of Putin making this utterance, it can be seen on this link:

https://iz.ru/788502/video/delo-skripalei-deviat-mostov-i-dziudo-vtoroi-den-vladimira-putina-na-vef
at around 1:48 minutes in. What Putin actually says is:

ничего там особенного и криминального нет which translates as:
"There is nothing extraordinary there, nor criminal."

Sort of different slant, no?

yalensis September 13, 2018 at 12:10 pm
Update: The currently reigning theory in the Russian blogosphere is that Petrov and Boshirov earn their living buying and selling anabolic steroids on the grey market. Simonjan herself noted that Petrov has the build of a body-builder.

The theory that they are a "gay pair" is also highly plausible. When Simonjan asked them about their relationship, they spazzed out and refused to answer. Blog commenters point out that this would be the moment when a man would indignantly mention that he had a wife and kids, or a girlfriend; but nothing like that ensued.

Other commenters have noted that Salisbury is well-known in the gay subculture for having a large number of rather excellent gay bars. Something that might have also drawn this couple there, in addition to seeing the cathedral spire!

In general, Russian press and blogosphere are having a field day with this story.

James lake September 13, 2018 at 1:30 pm
This is rather nasty – accused by the British of being assassins – then subjected to all this negative intrusion into their private life.

The RT media behave like the gutter tabloids in the UK.

They don't deserve this nasty speculation.

yalensis September 14, 2018 at 2:27 am
Agree with James on that one point, namely that the Russian press is becoming too tabloid-y and going after the sensationalism.
I feel sorry for this duo in that, if they are indeed gay and have now been outed due to what they call a "horrendous coincidence", then their lives in Russia will be miserable from this point onward.

Russian society is simply not accepting of two grown men living together in a relationship.

To add insult to injury, the gutter-commenters on the Russian blogs continue to call them "pedophiles". Even though (duh!) they are both grown men.

Not sure if they live in Moscow or not. If in Moscow, they might still be able to survive, as the city is so Western now. But if they live out there in the sticks -- forget it.

Meanwhile, I just thought of something else. If these guys were sophisticated enough to play the Westie system, then they could adopt a tone of utter outrage, that the British government is harassing them for being gay. The Brits would have to cave on that one and issue a humble apology.

Fern September 13, 2018 at 4:22 pm
I've been thinking along similar lines – that their apparent shiftiness and caginess about the nature of their work suggests they could be involved in something that's semi-legal or which walks a fine line between the legal and the not.

We've seen lots of CCTV footage of Petrov and Boshirov in Salisbury but nothing has been said of their movements in London; what they did there is probably the reason why they flew to the UK. Either that or the GRU is deficient in training its would-be assassins on the reliability (non-existent) of British rail services in bad weather.

Mark Chapman September 13, 2018 at 11:36 pm
Once again, Britain is stiff with CCTV. We know from previous discussions that there is CCTV coverage of the Skripals' street and even their house. Where is the CCTV video of the two GRU assassins on Skripal's street, or near his house? The British say they have this evidence and are happily building timelines around it, but where is the proof? If they have it, why don't they show it? It would shut Russian defenses right down. All we've seen is evidence of the two being in Salisbury. Apparently being Russian In Salisbury is now like Driving While Black. Both automatically presuppose you are a criminal.
kirill September 13, 2018 at 5:06 pm
If they are gay, then the UK is going to have really bad optics with its setup. Gay GRU agents? According the UK MSM Russian gays are all being arrested and thrown in jail.

[Sep 15, 2018] Excellent review of the interview by Craig Murray, Well worth reading

Notable quotes:
"... The Russian Embassy in London has been keeping a record of all the scenarios presented in the UK by the Govt/MSM and at the last count it was stated that there were 40 different, often contradictory, unproven scenarios. ..."
Sep 15, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

James lake September 13, 2018 at 1:44 pm

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/09/the-strange-russian-alibi/

Excellent review of the interview by Craig Murray, Well worth reading

I agree with his assessment that RT did a very poor interview.

Moscow Exile September 13, 2018 at 10:18 pm
" Even more strange is the idea that it is wildly improbable for Russian visitors to wish to visit Salisbury cathedral and Stonehenge. Salisbury Cathedral is one of the most breathtaking achievements of Norman architecture, one of the great cathedrals of Europe. It attracts a great many foreign visitors. Stonehenge is world famous and a world heritage site. I went on holiday this year and visited Wurzburg to see the Bishop's Palace, and then the winery cooperative at Sommerach. Because somebody does not choose to spend their leisure time on a beach in Benidorm does not make them a killer. Lots of people go to Salisbury Cathedral. "

I had exactly the same thoughts! Holidays for most British moronic Tweeters means Benidorm and boooze in "British Pubs" that arte emblazoned with "Fish & Chips" signs.

I mentioned above that before setting off for London in June, 2016, my two eldest insisted that we include Stonehenge in our itinerary.

We were only in London for 3 days, though, before we set off for England, heading north to the English lakeland national park.

Moscow Exile September 13, 2018 at 10:23 pm
And saying that the RT interview was "poor" has now become a meme.

The interview was a scoop and not given the usual razzamatazz shite presention so beloved by the Western news media, such as FOX TV.

Moscow Exile September 13, 2018 at 11:14 pm
The British Foreign Office almost immediately reacted to the RT scoop with its usual bluster: "Lies and obfuscation!"

Interesting accusation off HM government is that!

Since March 4 of this year, the British side has stated that:

Yulia Skripal brought "Novichok" in her suitcase.

The Skripals were poisoned with buckwheat.

The Skripals were poisoned with bouquet of flowers at the cemetery.

The Skripals were poisoned with an UAV drone.

The Skripals were poisoned through air conditioning in the car.

The Skripals were poisoned with an aerosol.

The Skripals were poisoned by Mikhail Savitskis (aka "Gordon") group, consisting of 6 killers.

The killer/s poured "Novichok"onto a door handle.

The Skripals were poisoned with "Novichok" in a form of a gel.

The Skripals were poisoned with a perfume bottle (so it seems "Novichok" is still liquid).

The killer/s poured "Novichok" in a public toilet.

The killer/s poured "Novichok" in a hotel room.

The Skripals were poisoned by 2 GRU* agents.

"Novichok" is a "5–8 times more lethal than VX nerve agent" and "the most deadly ever made", though it can't kill even 2 people.

*There has, in fact, been no such organization known as the GRU in Russia since 2010, when the official name of the unit was changed from ″GRU″ [ Главное разведывательное управление -- Glavnoye razvedyvatel'noye upravleniye ], namely "The Main intelligence Agency", to "The Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation", or ″GU″ [Главное управление Генерального штаба Вооружённых Сил Российской Федерации -- Glavnoye upravleniye General'nogo shtaba Vooruzhyonnykh Sil Rossiiskoi Federatsii ].

The Russian Embassy in London has been keeping a record of all the scenarios presented in the UK by the Govt/MSM and at the last count it was stated that there were 40 different, often contradictory, unproven scenarios.

Last week, the UK Ambassador to the UN, she who resembles a drag-queen well past his sell-by date, namely the inimitable Karen Pierce, attempted to take the piss out of Russia by stating at the UNSC that Russia had put forward 40 different accounts of what had happened, which ludicrous proposals simply proved how lacking in credibility the Russian government allegations are.

The reality was, however, that in presenting such accounts, Russia was taking the piss out of Her Majesty's Government and the sensationalist, Russophobic, warmongering British press and their more than 40 accounts of what happened in Salisbury last March.

The delectable Karen seemed unaware of this fact.

Recall, that Pierce is the woman, a high ranking British diplomat, no less, who believes that Russia (i.e. the Russian Federation that came into existence in 1991) was founded on many of Karl Marx's precepts.

[Sep 14, 2018] The origin of Wikileak

Notable quotes:
"... From the outset, Wikileaks' geopolitical focus on "oppressive regimes" in Eurasia and the Middle East was "appealing" to America's elites, i.e. it seemingly matched stated US foreign policy objectives. Moreover, the composition of the Wikileaks team (which included Chinese dissidents), not to mention the methodology of "exposing secrets" of foreign governments, were in tune with the practices of US covert operations geared towards triggering "regime change" and fostering "color revolutions" in different parts of the World." ..."
"... Wikileaks is not a typical alternative media initiative. The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel are directly involved in the editing and selection of leaked documents. The London Economist has also played an important role. ..."
"... While the project and its editor Julian Assange reveal a commitment and concern for truth in media, the recent Wikileaks releases of embassy cables have been carefully "redacted" by the mainstream media in liaison with the US government. (See Interview with David E. Sanger, Fresh Air, PBS, December 8, 2010) ..."
"... This collaboration between Wikileaks and selected mainstream media is not fortuitous; it was part of an agreement between several major US and European newspapers and Wikileaks' editor Julian Assange" ..."
Aug 24, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

NORTHERN STAR August 22, 2018 at 1:56 pm

Hmmm ..When the limited hangout truth expose' is found to be MSM vetted lies:

"Wikileaks formulated its mandate on its website as follows:

"[Wikileaks will be] an uncensorable version of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their own governments and corporations," CBC News – Website wants to take whistleblowing online, January 11, 2007, emphasis added).

This mandate was confirmed by Julian Assange in a June 2010 interview in The New Yorker:

******"Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behavior in their own governments and corporations. (quoted in WikiLeaks and Julian Paul Assange : The New Yorker, June 7, 2010, emphasis added)*****

Assange also intimated that "exposing secrets" "could potentially bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality -- including the US administration." (Ibid)

From the outset, Wikileaks' geopolitical focus on "oppressive regimes" in Eurasia and the Middle East was "appealing" to America's elites, i.e. it seemingly matched stated US foreign policy objectives. Moreover, the composition of the Wikileaks team (which included Chinese dissidents), not to mention the methodology of "exposing secrets" of foreign governments, were in tune with the practices of US covert operations geared towards triggering "regime change" and fostering "color revolutions" in different parts of the World."

"The Role of the Corporate Media: The Central Role of the New York Times

Wikileaks is not a typical alternative media initiative. The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel are directly involved in the editing and selection of leaked documents. The London Economist has also played an important role.

While the project and its editor Julian Assange reveal a commitment and concern for truth in media, the recent Wikileaks releases of embassy cables have been carefully "redacted" by the mainstream media in liaison with the US government. (See Interview with David E. Sanger, Fresh Air, PBS, December 8, 2010)

This collaboration between Wikileaks and selected mainstream media is not fortuitous; it was part of an agreement between several major US and European newspapers and Wikileaks' editor Julian Assange"

https://www.globalresearch.ca/who-is-behind-wikileaks-2/22389

[Sep 14, 2018] British Are In Flight Forward, Frantic to Save the Empire

Sep 06, 2018 | larouchepac.com
Prime Minister Teresa May took to the floor of the Parliament today to report that the Crown Prosecution Service and Police had issued warrants for two Russian GRU officials who, they claim, had carried out the Skripal attacks last March. "We were right," she said with a stiff upper lip, "to say in March that the Russian State was responsible." Mugshots were released of two people whose names, she declared, were aliases (how they know they are GRU officials if they don't know their names was not explained). "This chemical weapon attack on our soil was part of a wider pattern of Russian behavior that persistently seeks to undermine our security and that of our allies around the world," she intoned.

At the same time, dire warnings have been issued to Syria and Russia that there will be a major military response if Syria uses chemical weapons in Idlib. This is despite the fact that Russia has presented the proof to the OPCW and to the UN that the British intelligence-linked Olive security outfit and the British-sponsored White Helmet terrorists have prepared a false flag chlorine attack in Idlib, to be blamed on the Syrian government, to trigger such a military atrocity by the US and the UK.

Also at the same time, in the US, Washington Post fraudster Bob Woodward released a book claiming that numerous Trump cabinet officials made wildly slanderous statements about Trump -- all third hand from anonymous sources, of course. Chief of Staff John Kelly called the claims "total BS," while Secretary of State Jim Mattis called it typical Washington DC fiction, adding that "the idea that I would show contempt for the elected Commander-in-Chief, President Trump, or tolerate disrespect to the office of the President from within our Department of Defense, is a product of someone's rich imagination."

Worse, the New York Times, apparently for the first time, printed an "anonymous" op-ed by someone claiming to be a "senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us," under the title: "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration -- I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations." Whether this person is or is not who they claim to be, it is clearly part of the British coup attempt, as proven in the op-ed itself. After calling Trump amoral, unhinged, and more, and claiming there is discussion within the Administration of using the 25th Amendment to remove him for mental incompetence, it then states: "Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations [read: the United Kingdom - ed.]. Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals. On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin's spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable."

And, while news about the British drive for war with Russia and their attempted coup against the government of the United States fills the airwaves and the press, not a single word -- repeat, not a single word -- has been reported in the US or British media about the truly historic conference which took place on Monday and Tuesday in Beijing, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAP). Helga Zepp-LaRouche declared this week that this event will be recognized in history as the end of the era of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Every African nation except one was represented at the conference in Beijing (the "one" was Swaziland, the last holdout on the African continent which still maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan rather than Beijing).

All but six were represented their head of state. They reviewed the transformation taking place across Africa due to the Belt and Road Initiative since the last FOCAP meeting in 2015, and laid out plans for the even more rapid development over the next three years, and on to 2063 -- the target year for full modernization over 50 years, adopted by the African Union in 2013. One after another the leaders of the African nations described the actual liberation taking place, finally seeing in China the example that real development and the escape from poverty is possible. The program launched at the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, where the formerly colonized nations met for the first time without their colonial masters, has finally been realized.

But no one reading the western press would even know that this transformative event had taken place.

Rather, there is only the new McCarthyism, trying to demonize Russia and China, to revive the "enemy image" which should have been eliminated with the fall of the Soviet Union and the recognition of the People's Republic of China.

Trump threatens this new McCarthyism, insisting that America should be friends with Russia and China. No longer will the U.S. accept Lord Palmerston's imperial dictate for the Empire, that "nations have no permanent friends or allies, only permanent interests." The "special relationship" is to be no more.

This is the cause of Theresa May's hysterical rant today in the Parliament. Better war, led by the "dumb giant" America, than to see the Empire destroyed in a world united through a shared vision of universal development.

Britain's drive for war must be exposed and stopped, along with their Russiagate coup attempt in the US. A victory for the common aims of mankind is within our grasp, but the danger is great, and the time is short.

[Sep 14, 2018] Skripals might well be a warning to Russia do not try to eliminate terrorists in Idlib or we will sink you in dirt

Some interesting insights. Looks like high stake political poker
Notable quotes:
"... While Britain crumbled in compliments of the OPCW experts it had bought for the act, Russia dealt the most powerful bomb attack in Idlib, clearing the way for the Syrian army to destroy the last enclave of American suckers. And thus it struck a blow to the British political elite. After all, all the dances around the Skripals and the subsequent sanctions are designed to prevent what Russia is doing now in Idlib. Not prevented. And this is a demonstration of the weakness of the British ruling class, capable only of biting stealthily behind its heels. ..."
Sep 09, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
pogohere , Sep 8, 2018 3:00:08 AM | link

...

Russia's asymmetric response is very painful.

https://cont.ws/@alex-haldey/1054552

machine translated from the original Russian; excerpted:

The fact is that Russia pursues its policy without regard to their provocations. She defeated the Wahhabis trained by the West in the Caucasus, snatched Crimea from under the nose. The US scenario in Ukraine broke. Restores the EAEC. In Syria, Russia completely threw the Anglo-Saxon West off the pedestal, which he held there all the post-war 50 years. That is, with its bombing of head choppers, Russia has broken the rigid "Full Spectrum Dominance" situation created and maintained by the Americans since the dissolution of the USSR. This is a disaster, which the Anglo-Saxon world has nothing to answer nuclear to Russia.

While Britain crumbled in compliments of the OPCW experts it had bought for the act, Russia dealt the most powerful bomb attack in Idlib, clearing the way for the Syrian army to destroy the last enclave of American suckers. And thus it struck a blow to the British political elite. After all, all the dances around the Skripals and the subsequent sanctions are designed to prevent what Russia is doing now in Idlib. Not prevented. And this is a demonstration of the weakness of the British ruling class, capable only of biting stealthily behind its heels.

But worst of all, the actions in Idlib demonstrate the US weakness. Trump is completely beaten down - by his neocon rivals, not Russia. Russia has revealed the preparations for the provocation of the Khimatki in Idlib, which the US rep in the United Nations has announced to the whole world. With all the details, such number of barrels of chorine delivered to headchoppers and their color, as well the path of those barrels to Idlib and places of their secret storage. Now with those revelation it make much less sense to launch this operation.

But the operation will be. The match will take place in any weather. The United States has already outlined the places on which they will strike rocket-bomb strikes. The assault will be more decisive than the previous time. Preparation is as if the US is confident - the chlorine attack will take place. Then, when they decide in the US. Not in Damascus, but in Washington. That is, in general, all masks are dropped and the States openly prepare for aggression with provocation in a sovereign country where they are open in the status of an occupier. And even if there is no chemotherapy at all, the American blow will take place. Too much Russian was battered by bombs of American protégés. They are too close to defeat, for which the reason for finding Americans in Syria will disappear. How can this be allowed? The impact of prestige is necessary and it will be, even if the Sun falls to the ground and the Mississippi will flow backwards. Only prestige is not visible.

The USA are increasingly falling down replacing the strategy with tactics. The attack on Syria is necessary for Americans not because they will decide the outcome of the campaign. But because the US needs to introduce its ground forces to change the course of the war, with all possible negative consequences such as possible the death of the military personnel and the open clash with Iran, Syria and Russia. And even with Turkey. With China silently standing behind them the global consequences of this action are unpredictable. One possible consequence can well be the collapse of NATO. This "Second Vietnam" might crush not only the American president, but the US itself. The other scenario is that the USA just want to "score a goal of prestige" and leave the lost match. They will strike at Syria, where again Russian intelligence will reveal in advance the alleged targets of the strike, withdraw the critical assets from there, and then we have a firework of exploding Tomahawks intercepted by defenders.

Russia in Idlib is now in a very difficult position due to Turkey, not so much the USA. The repelling of the USA attach is one thing, but the main danger that it can't achieve too much on the ground de to Turkish interests in the area. Trump attack would be mainly for domestic consumption, the show created on the4 eve of the congressional elections. And even repelling the attack can be counterproductive -- Russia risks drowning Trump, instead of somehow supporting his formidable image and helping to win. Simply because Trump is beneficial to Russia - it's too cool he breaks everything on what the American power of the past decades was based. Helping his impeachment is not in the national interests of Russia. That means that Trump must come out of those stupid and counterproductive Tomahawks salvos without losing his face.

The US remains the world hegemon and want to remain as such for a long time. That's why it beats Russia with sanctions. But Russia does not need to oppose the USA. It just need to help to build a countervailing power. And Berlin, supported by Moscow's cheap gas, can be countervailing force for London in Europe.

The threat of losing global hegemony is very painful for both the British and Americans. It is so painful that they organized the collapse of the ruble and this false flag operation in Salisbury. And then OPSW were intimidated by British special services.

Russia should responds asymmetrically -- by continuing to build up its economy and prosperity of its citizens and ignore such insane and ineffective actions by London and Washington.

Russia already had shown Erdogan how easily caravans with oil are bombed, Russia does not want to allow its exports from Syria. And the US will have to withdraw from Syria there sooner or later. Still, Russia should give Trump the opportunity to finish his term without outright humiliation in Syria. The United States might not have the second such president, as Russia will not have a second Gorbachev.

[Sep 14, 2018] Renowned French security expert Paul Barril revaled the existence of Operation Beluga, a covert Western intelligence scheme intended to undermine Russia and its leaders

Notable quotes:
"... "Renowned French security expert Paul Barril has let loose a bombshell: the existence of Operation Beluga, a covert Western intelligence scheme intended to undermine Russia and its leaders." ..."
"... Renowned French security expert Paul Barril, in an interview, alleges that Berezovsky was working closely with MI6 and the CIA to discredit Russia and Putin, and that large sums from these agencies were passing through Berezovsky's hands to be paid to individuals to cooperate in these efforts. Barril says Litvinenko was one of Berezovsky's bag men, who passed funds on to others. ..."
"... "Russia has nothing to do with the murder of Litvinenko. The case was fabricated from the beginning. Polonium was chosen as the poison due to its production in Russia, it would implicate Russia. The objective of the whole operation was to discredit president Putin and the FSB. It was done because Russia is blocking US interests around the world, especially in Syria. It was an attempt to weaken Putin's hold on power, to destabilize Russia." ..."
Aug 19, 2018 | www.theblogmire.com

Miheila says: August 19, 2018 at 9:39 am

"Polonium was chosen as the poison due to its production in Russia, it would implicate Russia". Exactly. Just as 'Novichok' was allegedly used in Salisbury, due to it allegedly being developed in Russia (Mirzyanov) – even though it wasn't actually used against the Skripals at all. Maybe this element of the hoax was inspired by Beluga's use of polonium in the Litvinenko affair.
Anonymous says: August 20, 2018 at 8:06 am
Miheila, the polonium story always seems crazy to me. It relies on Litvinenko being too mean not to buy his own cup of tea. Hardly a foolproof assassination method.
Anonymous-1 says: August 19, 2018 at 5:20 am
PAGE 4 OF 4
This follows a similar pattern to Alexander Litvinenko. Walter Litvinenko, his father, believes Alex received a second dose of agent whilst in hospital. It was a Worlds Apart interview but is now the subject of an Ofcom complaint. Walter said his suspicions were raised by the secrecy of the British government and the fact that they wouldn't let him see any reports. So he made his own investigations, and from initially thinking it was Russia, he now believes it was the British government. He returned to Russia in fear of his life.

OPERATION BELUGA

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2018/03/15/operation-beluga-the-plot-to-demonise-putin/

"Renowned French security expert Paul Barril has let loose a bombshell: the existence of Operation Beluga, a covert Western intelligence scheme intended to undermine Russia and its leaders."

The https://www.opednews.com is wrong link, should be: http://mirastnews.com/2016/03/operation-beluga-a-us-uk-plot-to-discredit-putin-and-destabilize-the-russian-federation.html

Renowned French security expert Paul Barril, in an interview, alleges that Berezovsky was working closely with MI6 and the CIA to discredit Russia and Putin, and that large sums from these agencies were passing through Berezovsky's hands to be paid to individuals to cooperate in these efforts. Barril says Litvinenko was one of Berezovsky's bag men, who passed funds on to others.

"Russia has nothing to do with the murder of Litvinenko. The case was fabricated from the beginning. Polonium was chosen as the poison due to its production in Russia, it would implicate Russia. The objective of the whole operation was to discredit president Putin and the FSB. It was done because Russia is blocking US interests around the world, especially in Syria. It was an attempt to weaken Putin's hold on power, to destabilize Russia."

Barril mentions the outspoken Putin foe, financier William Browder, as being in close cooperation with Berezovsky in the discreditation efforts. He also says he is sure Berezovsky was murdered by his secret service handlers after they realized he was behaving erratically and had to be silenced so that he wouldn't give them away.

[Sep 13, 2018] Looks like the UK police manipulated the images, i.e. fabricated the evidence. Very interesting to have this confirmed directly....

Notable quotes:
"... So they went through the same corridor just like I demonstrated in https://postimg.cc/image/pw7t667ch/ . This means the UK police manipulated the images, i.e. fabricated the evidence. Very interesting to have this confirmed directly.... ..."
Sep 13, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Norwegian , Sep 13, 2018 7:15:14 AM | link

@40 sejomoje:

"I'm with you Norwegian. Same tunnel, different times."

Yes, and now we have proof that this interpretation is correct. See their interview now on RT: https://www.rt.com/news/438350-petrov-boshirov-interview-simonyan/

I added bold in the quote below:
---
The RT editor-in-chief also touched upon the most puzzling picture of the two, the photo from the Gatwick airport.

"Here is the picture that puzzled the whole world, Gatwick airport, you are leaving through a gate literally in the same times, almost the same second. How did it happen?" she asked.

" We always go together through the same corridor and the same custom service officer or a policeman. One goes, the other waits. We went through the corridor together, we always [do it] together .

How did it happen? It's better to ask them [UK police]," Boshirov replied.
---

So they went through the same corridor just like I demonstrated in https://postimg.cc/image/pw7t667ch/ . This means the UK police manipulated the images, i.e. fabricated the evidence. Very interesting to have this confirmed directly....

[Sep 12, 2018] George Galloway made a couple of very interesting points, especially about the time stamp on the photo. He said the Skripals left the house in the morning, never to return. The "Russian agents" could not have arrived in Salisbury until noon or thereabouts

Sep 12, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

m , Sep 12, 2018 3:04:05 PM | link

To add to Norwegian@3, George Galloway made a couple of very interesting points, especially about the time stamp on the photo. He said the Skripals left the house in the morning, never to return. The "Russian agents" could not have arrived in Salisbury until noon or thereabouts...hmmmm...and they would have had to paint the doorknob with this deadliest of poisons in full view of everyone. Perhaps the Russians have learned to time travel or warp time. I wouldn't put it past them http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50231.htm

[Sep 12, 2018] UK Launches New Wave of Anti-Russia Hysteria to Pursue Its Own Hidden Agenda by Arkady SAVITSKY

Notable quotes:
"... "the full range of tools from across our national security apparatus." ..."
"... "We have heard or seen two names, these names mean nothing to me personally," ..."
"... "I don't understand why this was done and what sort of signal the British side is sending." ..."
"... "The US and UK stand firmly together in holding Russia accountable for its act of aggression on UK soil." ..."
Sep 08, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

Prime Minister Theresa May made a statement to accuse Russia of being behind the Skripal poisoning case . She went to address the parliament right after prosecutors accused two Russian men, allegedly military intelligence officers, to perpetrate the assassination attempt. These are the first criminal charges in the case that has spoiled the West-Russian relations so much. The British government has issued EU arrest warrants and Interpol red notices to have the two individuals arrested by police in any country should they leave Russia's territory.

According to the PM, Great Britain and its friends must step up collective efforts against Russia. Its military intelligence service (the GRU) is to be specifically targeted employing "the full range of tools from across our national security apparatus." Before making the speech that sounded hostile toward Moscow, the PM had talked the matter over with US President Trump and other friendly world leaders. Ms May is expected to raise the issue at the UN General Assembly later this month. No doubt, London will ask the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to investigate the case. The UK will probably impose sanctions of its own and call on others to join. As usual, media "leaks" will pour more fuel on the fire. Anti-Russia forces in the West will get the second wind.

Ben Wallace, Minister of State for Security at the Home Office, attributed direct blame on Russian President Vladimir, something Ms. May avoided to do. He said the Russian leader bears responsibility for the nerve agent attack.

The photos of two men that have visited the UK are not evidence to support the PM' claims. "We have heard or seen two names, these names mean nothing to me personally," Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters in Moscow. "I don't understand why this was done and what sort of signal the British side is sending." But one thing is curtain – the British government wants as much noise and publicity as possible. It raises hue and cry in an evident attempt to further deteriorate the West-Russia relations and it does it on purpose. Why now? Because this is the right time to pursue the hidden agenda.

US Ambassador to Britain Woody Johnson said on Twitter: "The US and UK stand firmly together in holding Russia accountable for its act of aggression on UK soil." He was quick to react. Evidently, Mr Johnson wasted no time on waiting for instructions. It had all been known, discussed and decided before.

By spearheading the anti-Russia campaign in the West, London increases its political weight before Brexit takes place. With its unity in peril, the West needs something to keep it together and the Russia's bogey comes in handy.

The second round of US sanctions imposed to punish Russia for the alleged, but never proven, use of nerve agents, is much tougher than the first one in force since August. It is to take effect in November – the same month US midterm elections take place.

The "Skripal sanctions" are not introduced by Congress but the State Department. It's up to the president to impose them or not. If President Trump's party keeps the majority in both houses, the pressure to prove he is tough on Russia will ease. The president may soften the sanctions or not impose them at all. The reinvigoration of "Skripal poisoning" campaign will make it much harder to do. Donald Trump as well as EU leaders will be under constant pressure to do more to counter Russia.

True, the EU is not interested in whipping up tensions in its relationship with Russia amid the sanctions war and other things to deteriorate its relationship with the United States. But on the other hand, Eurosceptics, who are friendly to Moscow, are predicted to win big in the European parliament election in May. They may get every third vote and have enough seats to stymie the functioning of the "unreformed" EU as we know it today. It will put into jeopardy the very survival of the bloc. Many of Eurosceptics want the relations with Russia normalized and the sanctions lifted. Be it Skripal or something else, an anti-Russia campaign is needed to attack them. They'll be painted as "useful idiots" or "traitors" promoting Russia's evil plans to destroy the West. Here again, the imaginary "Russia threat" serves the purpose perfectly.

The events in Syria are distorted to denigrate Russia but that's happening far away. Spreading around the stories about Moscow using chemical weapons in Europe may have the desired effect to keep voters away from throwing their support behind those who can change the European political landscape.

There is actually nothing new in what the British PM stated. It's not so important what exactly she said. It's timing that matters. The moment is right for anti-Russia hysteria to be given a fresh impetus. Will this tactics work? The November elections in the US and the European elections in May will show. The closer is the vote, the more concocted stories about the nefarious Russia's activities will come into the spotlight.

[Sep 12, 2018] We know who people named as suspects in Skripal case are, they are civilians Putin -- RT World News

Notable quotes:
"... "nothing criminal" ..."
"... "I want to address them [the suspects]... [I hope] they contact the media. I hope they appear and tell everything about themselves," ..."
"... "Neither Russia's top leadership nor those with lower ranks, and [Russian] officials, have had anything to do with the events in Salisbury," ..."
"... "It seems very strange that these people have absolutely left what seems to be a very reckless and clear trail of evidence, which almost seems to be designed, or at least would almost inevitably lead to, the conclusions that the police and the authorities have come to today, in other words that Russia were to blame," ..."
"... "bits of evidence that may look pretty compelling but will never be tested in a real court of law." ..."
"... "perfect cover for smuggling the weapon into the country and a perfect delivery method for the attack against the Skripal's front door." ..."
Sep 12, 2018 | www.rt.com

Home World News We know who people named as suspects in Skripal case are, they are civilians – Putin Published time: 12 Sep, 2018 06:56 Edited time: 12 Sep, 2018 12:57 Get short URL We know who people named as suspects in Skripal case are, they are civilians – Putin 'Alexander Petrov' and 'Ruslan Boshirov' are seen in an image handed out by the Metropolitan Police in London, Britain / Reuters Moscow is aware of who the people named as suspects in the Skripal case are, President Vladimir Putin said, adding that these people are civilians. Saying that there is "nothing criminal" about the two, Putin also hopes that the people in question will eventually come forward and talk to the media.

"I want to address them [the suspects]... [I hope] they contact the media. I hope they appear and tell everything about themselves," he said, addressing the audience during the Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) in the Russian city of Vladivostok.

Read more 'Alexander Petrov' and 'Ruslan Boshirov', are seen in an image handed out by the Metropolitan Police in London, Britain September 5, 2018 British prosecutors name the 2 Russians suspected of poisoning the Skripals

Earlier in September, UK prosecutors named two Russians they suspect of poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury this March. According to London, their names are Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. Russia denies any involvement and accuses Britain of spinning the case to stir anti-Russian sentiment.

Beyond identifying them as Russian nationals, the prosecutors gave no indication as to who the men are.

After London again blamed Russia, implying that officials at the highest levels of power could be responsible for the poisoning, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rebuffed the allegations.

"Neither Russia's top leadership nor those with lower ranks, and [Russian] officials, have had anything to do with the events in Salisbury," he said at that time.

The Kremlin spokesman added that Putin didn't personally speak to the two individuals identified by the British authorities as suspects in the case. Russian law enforcement has not made any moves to prosecute them, Peskov said.

According to the investigators, the suspects who arrived in Britain from Moscow left traces of the poison used in the attack in the hotel room they stayed in. They were also caught on CCTV cameras in Salisbury twice, including on the day of the attack, and traveled back directly to the Russian capital.

READ MORE: Skripal saga aimed to stir anti-Russia sentiment of Cold War - Ken Livingstone to RT

This trail of evidence from the supposedly highly-trained perpetrators casts doubt over Moscow's involvement, according to a number of security experts. "It seems very strange that these people have absolutely left what seems to be a very reckless and clear trail of evidence, which almost seems to be designed, or at least would almost inevitably lead to, the conclusions that the police and the authorities have come to today, in other words that Russia were to blame," Charles Shoebridge, a security expert and former British military officer, told RT. Annie Machon, a former MI5 intelligence officer, said the inquiry into the case has effectively turned into a trial by media, based on "bits of evidence that may look pretty compelling but will never be tested in a real court of law."

London also insists that a counterfeit Nina Ricci perfume box was used as container and delivery device for the chemical used in the poisoning. It was later found by Charlie Rowley in the town of Amesbury, not far from Salisbury. They also claim that the noxious agent was in a bottle that had been altered to make it "perfect cover for smuggling the weapon into the country and a perfect delivery method for the attack against the Skripal's front door."

Reacting to the prosecutors' statement, Russian envoy to the UN Vasily Nebenzya joked that the nerve agent attack has so far had only one benefactor – Nina Ricci.

[Sep 12, 2018] Explosive Skripal allegations may blow up in Syria by George Galloway

Sep 12, 2018 | www.unz.com

tac , says: Next New Comment September 11, 2018 at 4:51 pm GMT

@annamaria

... ... ...

Today's latest offering is that the 'Russians' in the 'mugshots' released last week are 'already dead' having been 'executed by Putin' to stop them talking, forever. Which neatly avoids the British state asking Russia for help in identifying them. London's failure to do so was already arousing suspicion amongst a cynical public. There is now no point, the would-be assassins are now six-feet below the permafrost of Anglo-Russian relations.

The media here have completely ignored the statement of the head of the anti-terrorist squad of Scotland Yard that he had "No" evidence of Russian state involvement in the crime in Salisbury, preferring instead the cheap barroom brawling of the British prime minister on the floor of the House of Commons cheered on by the vulgar popular press and their more refined elder sisters in the upmarket papers and on the BBC.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/438157-skripal-syria-allegations-russia/

annamaria , says: Next New Comment September 11, 2018 at 6:09 pm GMT
@tac

FSB arrests ISIS member 'who planned murder of a Donbass leader on behalf of Ukraine'

The Russian security service, the FSB, says it has arrested an Islamic State operative who was planning to murder one of the leaders of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) on behalf of the Ukrainian authorities.
The suspected terrorist was identified as Mejid Magomedov, who was born in 1988 in Russia's southern Dagestan republic. He was arrested on Sunday in Russia's Smolensk region in the west of the country.
https://www.rt.com/news/438028-fsb-isis-member-ukraine/


Explosive Skripal allegations may blow up in Syria - George Galloway

Today's latest offering is that the 'Russians' in the 'mugshots' released last week are 'already dead' having been 'executed by Putin' to stop them talking, forever. Which neatly avoids the British state asking Russia for help in identifying them. London's failure to do so was already arousing suspicion amongst a cynical public. There is now no point, the would-be assassins are now six-feet below the permafrost of Anglo-Russian relations.

The media here have completely ignored the statement of the head of the anti-terrorist squad of Scotland Yard that he had "No" evidence of Russian state involvement in the crime in Salisbury, preferring instead the cheap barroom brawling of the British prime minister on the floor of the House of Commons cheered on by the vulgar popular press and their more refined elder sisters in the upmarket papers and on the BBC.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/438157-skripal-syria-allegations-russia/

"the statement of the head of the anti-terrorist squad of Scotland Yard that he had "No" evidence of Russian state involvement in the crime in Salisbury "

Yes. The UK government has lost its marbles in the pursuit of power & money. They suffer the same disease as their Israeli and US counterparts -- the loss of the life-saving integrity and intelligence and the triumph of the life-threatening stupidity.
The western governments have become incompetent due to the lack of the populace' supervision. For any living organism, no feedback means no protective actions ensuring the survival of the organism.
The Cheneys and Bibis and Blairs of the world are not intelligent enough even to envision the future for their immediate progeny, nevermind grandkids. These stupid elders are covered in the blood of the innocent.

[Sep 10, 2018] It's amazing that so much crisp, instantly-recognizable footage exists of the hit men, almost as if they were laying out an easily-reconstructable route for observers

Notable quotes:
"... In fact, the quality of British evidence seems to go up markedly as soon as the preceding exhibits are the object of public derision. ..."
Sep 10, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile September 9, 2018 at 9:13 pm

Two Russian GRU hit men who apparently spent a considerable amount of their small amount of time whilst on a mission of death in Merry England mugging in front of CCTV cameras.

And they only killed one person, and not their intended target at that: a junky, drug pushing bum's alcoholic womanfriend, who unfortunatly was accidently contaminated with the deadliest nerve poison known to man.

As a Scotland counter-terrorist chief plod said, these were trained professionals in the killing trade, and as Prime Minister May said, they belong to a tightly disciplined organization whose orders come directly from the top, meaning the Dark Lord no less.

Simply sickening and despicable!

Good job Russians are a bunch of dickheads, otherwise the whole population of Salisbury might have been poisoned – or the South of England, even.

Who knows what these vile Russians will do next?.

Mark Chapman September 10, 2018 at 2:42 am
It's amazing that so much crisp, instantly-recognizable footage exists of the hit men, almost as if they were laying out an easily-reconstructable route for observers; at least, as contrasted with the blurry and ambiguous photo evidence of the Skripals, which seems to rely on happy snaps by friends as much as government resources. Until they get Yulia on camera to make her post-Novichok debut, of course – then, it's theatre-quality. In fact, the quality of British evidence seems to go up markedly as soon as the preceding exhibits are the object of public derision.
Moscow Exile September 10, 2018 at 4:06 am
This laying of a trail directly back to the Kremlin is a regular feature of Russian incompetents!

Harding, in his account of the Litvinenko poisoning , wrote:

The poison was polonium-210, a rare radioactive isotope, tiny, invisible, undetectable. Ingested, it was fatal. The polonium had originated at a nuclear reactor in the Urals and a production line in the Russian town of Sarov. A secret FSB laboratory, the agency's "research institute", then converted it into a dinkily portable weapon.

Lugovoi and Kovtun, however, were rubbish assassins. The quality of Moscow's hired killers had slipped since the glory days of the KGB.

It's because they're idiots, see!

Although Russians are a direct to Western civilization and against whom we must be ever on guard, they are also all congenital dickheads, doomed to failure -- always.

All of them!

Warren September 9, 2018 at 12:54 pm

[Sep 10, 2018] Metadata for the uk police photos show the airport pix used micro$oft photo editing app back on may 3rd

Sep 10, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

photofour , Sep 9, 2018 9:02:55 PM | link

< b,>

metadata for the uk police photos show the airport pix used micro$oft photo editing app back on may 3rd. check the direct download buttons at the police site pages and ignore the html embed.

cctv1 cctv2

fotoforensics site just pulled them directly from those download links (copied from fotoforensics)

cctv1
Creator Tool Windows Photo Editor 10.0.10011.16384
Create Date 2018:05:03 18:43:50.00
Date/Time Original 2018:05:03 18:43:50.00
Image Size 695x363
Megapixels 0.252

cctv2
Creator Tool Windows Photo Editor 10.0.10011.16384
Create Date 2018:05:03 13:46:30.00
Date/Time Original 2018:05:03 13:46:30.00
Image Size 692x366
Megapixels 0.253

full report at fotoforensics on cctv1
full report at fotoforensics on cctv2

i still don't buy the simultaneous timestamp explanation.

[Sep 09, 2018] Nina Ricci the only party to gain anything from Skripal poisoning case Russian envoy to UN

Notable quotes:
"... "There were plenty of baseless allegations against Moscow and concrete sanctions based on them. Apparently, the only winner in this continued theatre of absurdity is Nina Ricci, the product of which got some free ad as a container for the toxic chemical," ..."
Sep 09, 2018 | www.rt.com

The nerve agent attack in Salisbury has so far had only one benefactor – Nina Ricci, which got free advertising due to a disguise apparently used by the perpetrators to hide the poison, the Russian envoy to the UN joked. The British investigators said a counterfeit Nina Ricci bottle was used as a container and delivery device for the chemical used in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in March. The same container was found by a struggling couple from Amesbury, who got poisoned themselves. Read more

UK accusation of Russians in Skripal case 'cocktail of lies' timed with Idlib false flag op – Moscow

Speaking at a UN Security Council session on Thursday, Russian envoy Vasily Nebenzya, denounced Britain for accusing Russia of the crimes, saying that the allegations are not base on any hard evidence.

"There were plenty of baseless allegations against Moscow and concrete sanctions based on them. Apparently, the only winner in this continued theatre of absurdity is Nina Ricci, the product of which got some free ad as a container for the toxic chemical," he said.

Britain says two Russian military intelligence agents tried to kill Skripal with a weapons-grade chemical weapon, claiming the identification was made by the British intelligence. Russia denies any involvement and accuses Britain of spinning the case to stir anti-Russian sentiment.

[Sep 09, 2018] Skripal saga aimed to stir anti-Russia sentiment of Cold War by Ken Livingstone

Notable quotes:
"... The UK has stirred up the Skripal saga for the sake of waging a broader campaign to kowtow to the anti-Russian rhetoric inside the British government, ex-London mayor Ken Livingstone has told RT. ..."
"... "military intelligence agents" ..."
"... "What struck me over last couple of years seem to me ratcheting up of anti-Russian sentiment almost trying to recreate a Cold War," ..."
"... "a hidden political agenda here as part of broader anti-Russian campaign" ..."
Sep 09, 2018 | www.rt.com

The UK has stirred up the Skripal saga for the sake of waging a broader campaign to kowtow to the anti-Russian rhetoric inside the British government, ex-London mayor Ken Livingstone has told RT. The latest smoking gun of allegations against Russia fired by London, with the British Prime Minister Theresa May claiming that Russian "military intelligence agents" attempted to murder former spy Sergei Skripal, leaves too many questions and doubts, Livingstone believes.

"What struck me over last couple of years seem to me ratcheting up of anti-Russian sentiment almost trying to recreate a Cold War," the former mayor told RT. He stressed that London's turning its back to Moscow's constant readiness to cooperate and failure to present to the public a shred of evidence – if there is any – might be a sign of "a hidden political agenda here as part of broader anti-Russian campaign" inside the British government.

Livingstone is not the only one who doubts the narrative. Independent political analyst Dan Glazebrook, who also shared his views with RT, pointed how clumsy the alleged agents should have been – from taking a train to reach their target to allowing themselves to be caught on CCTV.

[Sep 09, 2018] Talking of neoliberal globalists 5th column, lest forget the solid one in the UK and Skripal's affair is thier work

Sep 09, 2018 | www.unz.com

Iris , says: September 5, 2018 at 10:12 pm GMT

Talking of 5th column, lest forget the solid one in the UK.

Deep State's mouthpiece "The Telegraph" had dedicated several articles to the identification of alleged Skripal Novichok poisoners, named as two Russian nationals who briefly entered the UK under the aliases Petrov and Beshorov.

http://www.crawleynews24.co.uk/shock-as-police-reveal-novichok-suspects-passed-through-gatwick/

Sycophantic PM Theresa May has gone as far as stating that the suspects are GRU agents, and pointing the finger at President Putin.

Jeremy Corbyn is being hounded because he is very reserved about the Novichok story.

The UK government is fully embedded with Zionist Israel. This cock-and-bull story, which details have been nonetheless very well presented, is a very alarming hint that something is in preparation against Russia, either directly in Syrian, or less directly in the Ukraine.

Iris , says: September 5, 2018 at 10:58 pm GMT
@Iris Talking of 5th column, lest forget the solid one in the UK.

Deep State's mouthpiece "The Telegraph" had dedicated several articles to the identification of alleged Skripal Novichok poisoners, named as two Russian nationals who briefly entered the UK under the aliases Petrov and Beshorov.

http://www.crawleynews24.co.uk/shock-as-police-reveal-novichok-suspects-passed-through-gatwick/

Sycophantic PM Theresa May has gone as far as stating that the suspects are GRU agents, and pointing the finger at President Putin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1VqSJCa7RA

Jeremy Corbyn is being hounded because he is very reserved about the Novichok story.

The UK government is fully embedded with Zionist Israel. This cock-and-bull story, which details have been nonetheless very well presented, is a very alarming hint that something is in preparation against Russia, either directly in Syrian, or less directly in the Ukraine. Novichock poisoning false flag (Continued).

A possible explanation of the Novichok story being spun at the moment in the UK is that a Western/Israeli military attack on Syria is in preparation to stop the Arab Syrian Army from entering Idlib, the last terrorist stronghold.

Such Western intervention requires the pretext of a chemical attack, that will be staged in the field by the proxy White Helmets, while UK public opinion will be subdued with terrorising stories of weapons of mass destruction.

This same pretext was used for the April 2018 Western bombing of Syria. This bombing was aimed at hitting key Syrian targets, but its scale was finally limited by the intervention of General Mattis, who dreaded reciprocated actions against the 3000 US servicemen present in Syria.

"The White Helmets (and an alleged chemical attack) are the last hope for regime change in Syria"

Very interesting interview of former UK Ambassador Ford by SyrianGirl:

Iris , says: September 6, 2018 at 11:00 pm GMT
One day after Theresa May's Novichok show at the British Parliament , France's Chief of Military Staff Francois Lecointre has declared that France is ready to strike Syria should she dare a "chemical attack" on Idlib.

https://www.lopinion.fr/edition/international/france-prete-a-frapper-en-syrie-en-cas-d-usage-d-arme-chimique-161248

Both poodles each side of the Channel are barking in synchronism; Israel is pulling on the leashes and something bad is in preparation.

Here is Francois Lecointre in his brown uniform. Unknown to us stupid plebeians, France must be surrounded by steppes and deserts for brown to have been chosen as camouflage colour.

[Sep 08, 2018] DNC Hacks Unproven by Gordon M. Hahn

Aug 14, 2018 | gordonhahn.com

Regarding the hacking of Democrats computers, nothing has been proven even on the margins or circumstantially on any of these counts. Moreover, the FBI failed to examine the affected computers, and we now know that FBI deputy head and other FBI top officials were scheming to undermine Trump in support of Hillary Clinton's election and that Clinton's campaign had colluded with the Russians to produce the Steele dossier, for which the FBI also paid for. Moreover still, independent research has demonstrated that the hack is most likely to have occurred from inside DNC headquarters.

Even if Russia did hack the DNC – and I am sure it has at least tried to hack US government computer systems as well – one needs to be beyond naïve to believe that US intelligence has not hacked Russian government computers. Indeed, the NSA has hacked the government computers of such close US allies as Germany and France (www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/04/us-nsa-gerhard-schroeder-surveillance and http://www.bbc.com/news/33248484 ). It is clear that much of the material in the recent indictment of 13 Russians was garnered by U.S. intelligence accessing Russian computer systems, perhaps some governmental systems. For example, the indictment references an intercepted email. One can be sure that some of the compromising materials on Russian officials that appear in American and perhaps even Russian media come from NSA hacking. Russian hacking is a drop in the bucket compared with the scale and scope of methods the West has used to target Russia and its allies in the former USSR since the end of the first cold war.

State Hacks Never Happened

All or most of the charges that the Kremlin hacked state voting systems have been retracted. Even if it did, ditto the previous paragraph.

Russia-Trump 'Collusion'

The Russia-Trump collusion charges have fallen flat on their face. The only semi-maningful result of former FBi Director Robert Mueller's 'counter-intelligence investigation' is that a one-time campaign advisor Paul Manafort was indicted for corrupt collusion with Ukraine's corrupt Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions that occurred before Manafort was on Trump's campaign staff. Furthermore, contrary to the Western view, Yanukovych was anything but a 'Putin puppet.' This fact is well-illustrated by then Ukrainian president's willingness to sign the EU Association Agreement in November 2013, a signing which was only aborted by an exorbitant offer by Putin of $15 billion in loans and natural gas price reductions on the background of Ukraine being on the verge of bankruptcy and the EU offering far less.

Russia's Troll Farm – An Inconsequential Spontaneous Experiment

The newest sensation in the 'hunt for Red October' is the Kremlin-tied troll farm. Assuming that Putin's close associate and cook is indeed tied to this small effort, then the US government has finally found an incident of 'Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election' in the United States. Unfortunately, the effort was minimal and nothing to write home about or worth a multi-million government investigation. It is more on the level of a research report farmed out to one of the government-oriented and often-funded DC think tanks with a small $5-10,000 grant attached. Indeed, RFERL already had written about the very same operation as did an Internet news site based, in all places, in 'Putin's Russia.' The 13 indictments were handed down not for the troll activity under an operation called 'Lakhta' – 99 percent of which was merely posting advertisements and comments on the Internet from "around" May 2014 to several months after the US presidential campaign – but for other crimes such as money-laundering. To be sure, the effort to pit American against American by calling opposing radical groups to the same location for potentially explosive counter-demonstrations is nasty stuff. But such cases amounted to less than a handful.

Ultimately, operation Lakhta appears to have been a rather inconsequential experiment, since prior to the US presidential campaign it had focused almost exclusively on trolling Russian politics, expanding to foreign issues like Ukraine and then to the US. The FBI indictment sites the budget of 'Lakhta' was several million dollars per year. Elsewhere the indictment states that by September 2016 'Lakhta' had a monthly budget of $1.3 million ( www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download , pp. 5 and 7). Again, this is a drop in the bucket compared to Western disinformation operations in general and the US political campaign expenditures. This is equivalent to about 10 percent of the cost of congressional campaign, about 1 percent of the the amount Trump and Clinton spent on Internet activity (much of which was similar trolling with ads and comments), and a fraction of a percent of the billions of dollars the two candidates paid on their campaigns. Moreover, this tactical campaign amounts to far less than the routine, much more strategic disinformation communications carried out by the US government and allied media on a continuing basis since the first cold war's end (see, for example, https://gordonhahn.com/2015/09/19/putin-is-crazy-and-sick-the-lows-of-american-rusology/ and https://gordonhahn.com/2015/11/11/the-myth-of-an-imminent-anti-putin-coup-rusological-fail-or-stratcomm/ ).

Opposition-Promotion

In imitation and exacting revenge against past Western support for democratic and other opposition organizations and individuals in Russia and elsewhere under various and sundry democracy-promotion programs and much else, Russia has turned to cooperating with nationalist and populist opposition parties in the West. However, that effort is, again, very limited and gravely overstated by Western pundits and politicians. It amounts almost entirely to an alleged one-time contribution to Marie Le Pen's nationalist-populist National Front party in France. Some in the US are making much noise about a forum of legal European nationalist and populist parties hosted in 2015 in St. Petersburg, Russia (www.kommersant.ru/doc/2683403 and www.interpretermag.com/the-far-right-international-russian-conservative-forum-to-take-place-in-russia/ ). A second conference is scheduled there on 8 April 2018 ( http://realpatriot.ru/en/ ). Presumably, these conferences could be held elsewhere. Is it crucial that they are hosted by Russia? Does it matter where such conferences are held? As a US presidential candidate once said: "Where's the beef?" Does it matter more than US-government RFERL whitewashing jihadi Caucasus terrorists who killed thousands of Russians over some six years or falsifying the reality of the 20 February 2014 Maidan snipers' massacre in Kiev? Does it matter more than the fact that Europeans have produced such parties and why they have produced them? Should Europeans be absolved of their agency, so blame can be redirected onto Russia? Moreover, one researcher has convincingly demonstrated that Russia's cooperation with such parties has more to do with an overlap or "confluence" of interests and ideology between some in Moscow and the Western far-right rather than the former's influence on the latter (www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/russian-and-american-far-right-connections-confluence-not-influence).

Moreover, the radical jihadist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir, regarded by almost all terrorism experts as a precursor and recruitment organization for jihdism and jihadi groups, holds an annual convention and several other events in the United States every year ( https://hizb-america.org/events/ ), with similar operations across the West. Weeks ago one of America's leading conservative political organizations, the Conservative Political Action Committee or CPAC, had Marie Le Pen's daughter Marion Marechal`-Le Pen, the United Kingdom's Independent Party's populist firebrand and former leader Nigel Farage, among other European populists speak at their annual convention.

Russia may move into more threatening territory, if it begins to support rising ethno-national separatism in places in Europe or the West more generally like Catalonia. The foreign ministry of South Ossetiya, the Russian-backed breakaway region of Georgia, opened up a "representative office" in Catalonia in October (www.eng.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/41274/). This could be even more dangerous territory for Moscow's 'me-two-ism' to tread on. On the other hand, the West violated its own UN-sponsored resolution on Kosovo committing to Yugoslavia's territorial integrity.

Conclusion

Russia is using the tools of the West, those the latter has deployed against Russia since the collapse of the Berlin wall, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the dawn of the new world order and a 'united Europe from Vancouver to Vladivostok.' The West moved first to back anti-Russian parties in the former USSR and opposition parties in Russia, so Russia has now begun to back anti-American parties and opposition parties in the West. The West first used the Internet against Russia and its allies, and Russia followed suit using it against the West. The West interfered in Russian presidential campaigns and other aspects of Russia's internal political life and that of its allies, and Russia is responding in kind. The West has backed revolutions (a priori facto and ex post facto) and separatism, including jihadism, against Russia and its allies, and Russia began to do the same (minus the support for jihadists) against the West.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

About the Author – Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, http://www.canalyt.com and a Senior Researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, San Jose, California, www.cetisresearch.org .

Dr. Hahn is the author of Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the 'New Cold War (McFarland Publishers, 2017) and three previously and well-received books: Russia's Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction Publishers, 2002); Russia's Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007); and The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia's North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland Publishers, 2014).He has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media and has served as a consultant and provided expert testimony to the U.S. government.

Dr. Hahn also has taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia. He has been a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Kennan Institute in Washington DC as well as the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

[Sep 08, 2018] Latest Skripal development is rocket fuel to existing anti-Russia fever in London by John Wight

Notable quotes:
"... working hypothesis ..."
"... The inkslingers of the jingo press ..."
"... The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that no past or future agreement with him was possible. ..."
Sep 05, 2018 | www.rt.com

John Wight has written for a variety of newspapers and websites, including the Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and Foreign Policy Journal. The recent development in the Skripals poisoning case is guaranteed to plunge already dire relations between Moscow and London through the floor. At a set-piece press conference in London, Neil Basu, head of the London Met's counter-terrorism police force, positively identified two Russian suspects in the case. He produced CCTV images of the two individuals along with their names and details of their movements from Russia to the UK and back again. He also alleged that according to a " working hypothesis " the suspects smuggled the Novichok substance used in the attempt on the lives of former Russia intelligence office and British spy Sergei Skripal, and daughter Yulia, into the country with them from Russia. Read more A handout picture allegedly taken in Salisbury, on March 4, 2018, and released by the British Metropolitan Police purportedly shows Alexander Petrov (R) and Ruslan Boshirov, September 5, 2018 © AFP Names of 'Russian suspects' in Skripal case published by UK don't mean anything to us – Moscow

The rocket fuel this very significant and very serious development adds to the already seething anti-Russia sentiment and feeling that dominates the minds of the British political and media establishment is self-evident. At a time of multiple crises involving Moscow and London – crises yet to be resolved around the conflict in Syria, tensions over Ukraine, the presence of NATO troops and military assets close to Russia's western border, sanctions, etc. – it is extraordinarily worrying that relations between both countries have now plunged to their lowest point since the end of the Cold War.

That the Russian state is capable of carrying out an attack of this nature is not in doubt. All states are capable of carrying out such attacks, and all states, including Britain, have carried them out at various points in their history. But the timing of this particular attack is key, given that it took place just a few months prior to the start of the World Cup in Russia, and at a time when the Russian government was extending itself in attempting to repair relations with the West with a view to achieving normalization.

Then, too, the motive remains impossible to discern. Sergei Skripal had been living openly under his own name in Salisbury, England, where the attack took place, for some time, so clearly did not believe that he was in any danger.

The international damage to Russia's reputation as a consequence of being behind such an attack is likewise not in any doubt.

These points are not, of course, made as infallible proof that the Russian government or intelligence was not responsible. But they are pertinent in of themselves, given the context.

Read more Two men accused of poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, are seen on CCTV at Salisbury Station. © Metroplitan Police handout British PM says two suspects in Skripals poisoning case are Russian military intelligence officers

Another point worth raising is the sheer crudity of two supposed Russian agents taking a direct flight to and from the UK to carry out the attack and travelling together both ways. Such amateurish planning is the stuff of your average Hollywood spy spoof movie rather anything you would associate with a serious intelligence agency.

Significantly, during his press conference and presentation, Mr Basu did not go as far as alleging Russian state involvement. Such restraint, however, has long been a foreign land where the prime minister is concerned.

In her statement to the Commons on this latest development, Theresa May wasted no time in unleashing a rhetorical artillery barrage against the Kremlin, buoyed by a feral chorus of MPs who almost to a man and woman had already embraced Russia as the officially designated enemy of all that is holy and good in the world.

Either the prime minister knows something that the head of the Met's counter-terrorism police force does not, or we have entered an age when blaming Russia for everything is an unofficial requirement of the duties of high political office in Westminster.

To be fair to the prime minister though, she's been blaming the Kremlin for this crime almost since the very day it took place, gleefully riding the wave of anti-Russia hysteria that had already been whipped up by a mainstream media whose denizens one James Connolly was once minded to describe as " The inkslingers of the jingo press ."

Read more Russian Oligarch Boris Berezovsky speaking to the media Aug. 31, 2012 - London © Ben Cawthra 'No cause for further investigation' into 14 deaths of people linked to Russia – May

With her leadership mired in crisis over Brexit, and with her errant former foreign secretary and putative prime minister, Boris Johnson, currently breathing down her neck with a looming challenge to her leadership, for the prime minister the timing of this development could not, politically, be more convenient. For at such moments she is able to give free rein to the appearance of the kind of strong and robust leadership qualities that are, in truth, grievously absent.

Going forward, this will only add more grist to the mill of a neocon firmament whose very existence is predicated on maintaining Russia in the role of existential threat to Western civilization. A frog's chorus of calls and demands for ever more stringent trade, financial and economic sanctions against Moscow will reach a crescendo, buttressed by an uptick in the deployment of troops and military assets to eastern Europe in a futile effort to intimidate and cow the Kremlin into accepting its prescribed status as a vassal of Washington and its allies.

Worryingly, in 2018 we have reached the stage that George Orwell described in his classic novel, 1984: " The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that no past or future agreement with him was possible. "

Western ideologues should take a moment to consider that Orwell wrote his classic work as a warning not a blueprint.

[Sep 08, 2018] British Assassination Campaign Targeting Russian Exiles by Finian CUNNINGHAM

Notable quotes:
"... Over the past decade or so, a disturbing number of Russian nationals living in Britain have met untimely deaths. The victims – at least 14 – have been high-profile individuals, such as oligarch businessman Boris Berezovsky or former Kremlin security agent Alexander Litvinenko. All were living in Britain as exiles, and all were viewed as opponents of President Vladimir Putin's government. ..."
"... Invariably, British politicians and news media refer to the deaths of Russian émigrés as "proof" of Russian state "malign activity". Putin in particular is accused of ordering "the hits" as some kind of vendetta against critics and traitors. ..."
"... The claims of Russian state skulduggery have been reported over and over without question in the British media as well as US media. It has become an article-of-faith espoused by British and American politicians alike. "Putin is a killer," they say with seeming certainty. There is simply no question about it in their assertions. ..."
Jul 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

Over the past decade or so, a disturbing number of Russian nationals living in Britain have met untimely deaths. The victims – at least 14 – have been high-profile individuals, such as oligarch businessman Boris Berezovsky or former Kremlin security agent Alexander Litvinenko. All were living in Britain as exiles, and all were viewed as opponents of President Vladimir Putin's government.

Invariably, British politicians and news media refer to the deaths of Russian émigrés as "proof" of Russian state "malign activity". Putin in particular is accused of ordering "the hits" as some kind of vendetta against critics and traitors.

The claims of Russian state skulduggery have been reported over and over without question in the British media as well as US media. It has become an article-of-faith espoused by British and American politicians alike. "Putin is a killer," they say with seeming certainty. There is simply no question about it in their assertions.

The claims have also been given a quasi-legal veracity, with a British government-appointed inquiry in the case of Alexander Litvinenko making a conclusion that his death in 2006 was "highly likely" the result of a Kremlin plot to assassinate. Putin was personally implicated in the death of Litvinenko by the official British inquiry. The victim was said to have been poisoned with radioactive polonium. Deathbed images of a bald-headed Litvinenko conjure up a haunting image of alleged Kremlin evil-doing.

Once the notion of Russian evil-doing is inculcated the public mind, then subsequent events can be easily invoked as "more proof" of what has already been "established". Namely, so it goes, that the Russian state is carrying out assassinations on British territory.

Read also: The Real Danger Behind The U.K. Elections

Thus, we see this "corroborating" effect with the alleged poisoning of a former Russian double-agent, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter in Salisbury back in March this year.

Read more at https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/07/20/british-assassination-campaign-targeting-russian-exiles.html

[Sep 07, 2018] But all those crazy US neocons still managed to imposed on Russia sanctions because of its interference in the elections. That tells us something about the US congress by Kononenko

Slightly edited Google translation
Notable quotes:
"... I am interested in another, a very simple question: why? Why would Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea interfere in the US midterm elections? What they want to achieve. All right, let's drop all the others, let's just talk about us, Russians. ..."
"... The same hackers who broke into the DNC and stole Hillary Clinton emails now will steal midterm elections. But from whom? Do you understand anything? Personally, I don't understand anymore. Which Party we support? Who is the target of our effort to interfere in the USA elections. Are we promoting Repubs or DemoRats ? ..."
"... Perhaps the head of the US national intelligence Daniel Coates is right when he declared that "their goal is to divide and undermine our democratic values." Well, let's suppose that we really are against those sacred values. ..."
"... But the midterm elections will still be held, despite any interference. And one of candidates will win, while the other will lose. If we see no difference in candidates why we should interfere? ..."
"... Looks like Daniel Coats think that the world government is us. No, I'd certainly like the idea, even if this requires smoking something really strong (let's use Musk as a lodestar ;-). But I'm afraid we're not capable to serve in this role. After economic rape of 1991 we are too poor. And to serve the role of world government you better be rich. ..."
"... why we Russians should interfere in already completely messed up US elections, which typically equal to a force choice between two equally unacceptable candidates, already chosen and vetted by neoliberal elite. Like Trump vs. Hillary. why we should play this game of "the lesser evil." It's plain vanilla stupidity. ..."
Sep 07, 2018 | kononenkome.livejournal.com

According to popular belief, the cold war ended with the victory of the United States of America. And, accordingly, the demice of the Soviet Union. However, what exactly represent such a victory is not that easy to understand. Instead of one conservative, and therefore predictable player, the United States received a half dozen countries, of which only three or four are loyal, with other living by "the laws of jungles" (sorry free market). The number of aimed at American cities Intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads remained approximately the same as before the infamous "victory." And strategic atomic submarines remained, and strategic bombers. There are less of them, for sure, but they are more modern and more dngerous with more sophisticated weaponry. In any ccase remaining are still enough to make the winner to feel like a loser after b=neclear apolaipsys. And the idfea of victory is that the victor is the master (in this case the master of the plant). Am I missing something ?

Of course, another inquisitive observer will tell us about the controlled chaos, about the growing influence and plans for the establishing of the world neoliberal government. I was impressed by the recent revelation of Senator John Tester, who said that Putin is promoting communism in America. As the idea that this senator is a complete idiot who does not understand the Russia rejected communism as a dead-born system is pretty absurd. I would venture to assume that it might be that Russia did something that can with some stretch be qualifies as an attempt to influence the USA election, but, alas, Putin has no strategic plan, not the intention. First of all this would be pretty idiotic idea as two candidates were equally bad for Russia and it was completely unclear who is worse.

But all those crazy US neocons still managed to imposed on Russia sanctions because of its "interference in the elections." That tells us something about the US congress. I do not want to write about the lack of evidence and absurdity of the arguments again. I've already written a lot about it. No, let's stop talking about the past and try to look into the future.

The US President's national security adviser John Bolton (who theoretically should be a sanest person in the administration) recently said that the US is concerned about the potential for interference in the midterm elections to the Congress of four countries. Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. "I will not go into details of what I saw or didn't see, but I tell you that in the 2018 elections, these four countries raise the greatest fears," proclaim this highly placed Presidential adviser.

Theoretically it make some sense. Any man with a knife has a potential to kill. Any country with nuclear weapons has the potential to strike at the US. Any country with developed IT has a potential opportunity to interfere in elections with the help of cyber attacks. For example, Israel. But it is not a good idea to scare the American voter with Israel. No, he/she should be confused, and he/she should be afraid of potential menace. And this external enemy should unite fragmented by neoliberal excesses country (for this purpose those good-for nothing people grazing in State Department and Spaso House (The US embassy in Moscow) should constantly accuse the Russian authorities of all sorts nefarious activities. So there is nothing new here: Great Britain uses similar dirty tricks against Russia for centuries. I am interested in another, a very simple question: why? Why would Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea interfere in the US midterm elections? What they want to achieve. All right, let's drop all the others, let's just talk about us, Russians.

What do we want? Let's say we want the midterms to be won by the Republicans. Then explain to me why Republican John Bolton fears this. If there's anything John Bolton should be afraid of, it's that Russia will intervene in the midterms in order to win the Democrats. But The Washington Post writes that "the leaders of the Democratic party of the United States fear the potential interference of Russia and start to increase its presence in anticipation of the interim election cycle on such platforms as Facebook and Twitter." President Trump writes on Twitter that Russia will" make a lot of effort " to intervene in the midterm elections on the side of the Democrats. Microsoft claims that Russian hackers created fake websites of Republican organizations in order to collect information about Republicans. The same hackers who broke into the DNC and stole Hillary Clinton emails now will steal midterm elections. But from whom? Do you understand anything? Personally, I don't understand anymore. Which Party we support? Who is the target of our effort to interfere in the USA elections. Are we promoting Repubs or DemoRats ?

Perhaps the head of the US national intelligence Daniel Coates is right when he declared that "their goal is to divide and undermine our democratic values." Well, let's suppose that we really are against those sacred values.

But the midterm elections will still be held, despite any interference. And one of candidates will win, while the other will lose. If we see no difference in candidates why we should interfere? If the net result for us anyway will be the same: more sanctions? Here we should go back to the idea of "controlled chaos" and world government. Looks like Daniel Coats think that the world government is us. No, I'd certainly like the idea, even if this requires smoking something really strong (let's use Musk as a lodestar ;-). But I'm afraid we're not capable to serve in this role. After economic rape of 1991 we are too poor. And to serve the role of world government you better be rich.

Again the question arise, why we should interfere in he USA elections. Only if we are out for revenge, "eye for eye" principle as they interfered in ours. There's no other reasonable answer. But even in this case, why we Russians should interfere in already completely messed up US elections, which typically equal to a force choice between two equally unacceptable candidates, already chosen and vetted by neoliberal elite. Like Trump vs. Hillary. why we should play this game of "the lesser evil." It's plain vanilla stupidity.

And before we get the answer to this fundamental question "Why?" there can be no further questions. None. Moreover, no other questions are needed. So let them just explain to us why we should interfere and how we can benefit from such an interference, and we will try our best. Before that, let's just watch.

And when they explain this to us, we can communicate the answer to China, Iran and North Korea free of charge.

[Sep 07, 2018] But all those crazy US neocons still managed to imposed on Russia sanctions because of its interference in the elections. That tells us something about the US congress by Kononenko

Slightly edited Google translation
Notable quotes:
"... I am interested in another, a very simple question: why? Why would Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea interfere in the US midterm elections? What they want to achieve. All right, let's drop all the others, let's just talk about us, Russians. ..."
"... The same hackers who broke into the DNC and stole Hillary Clinton emails now will steal midterm elections. But from whom? Do you understand anything? Personally, I don't understand anymore. Which Party we support? Who is the target of our effort to interfere in the USA elections. Are we promoting Repubs or DemoRats ? ..."
"... Perhaps the head of the US national intelligence Daniel Coates is right when he declared that "their goal is to divide and undermine our democratic values." Well, let's suppose that we really are against those sacred values. ..."
"... But the midterm elections will still be held, despite any interference. And one of candidates will win, while the other will lose. If we see no difference in candidates why we should interfere? ..."
"... Looks like Daniel Coats think that the world government is us. No, I'd certainly like the idea, even if this requires smoking something really strong (let's use Musk as a lodestar ;-). But I'm afraid we're not capable to serve in this role. After economic rape of 1991 we are too poor. And to serve the role of world government you better be rich. ..."
"... why we Russians should interfere in already completely messed up US elections, which typically equal to a force choice between two equally unacceptable candidates, already chosen and vetted by neoliberal elite. Like Trump vs. Hillary. why we should play this game of "the lesser evil." It's plain vanilla stupidity. ..."
Sep 07, 2018 | kononenkome.livejournal.com

According to popular belief, the cold war ended with the victory of the United States of America. And, accordingly, the demice of the Soviet Union. However, what exactly represent such a victory is not that easy to understand. Instead of one conservative, and therefore predictable player, the United States received a half dozen countries, of which only three or four are loyal, with other living by "the laws of jungles" (sorry free market). The number of aimed at American cities Intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads remained approximately the same as before the infamous "victory." And strategic atomic submarines remained, and strategic bombers. There are less of them, for sure, but they are more modern and more dngerous with more sophisticated weaponry. In any ccase remaining are still enough to make the winner to feel like a loser after b=neclear apolaipsys. And the idfea of victory is that the victor is the master (in this case the master of the plant). Am I missing something ?

Of course, another inquisitive observer will tell us about the controlled chaos, about the growing influence and plans for the establishing of the world neoliberal government. I was impressed by the recent revelation of Senator John Tester, who said that Putin is promoting communism in America. As the idea that this senator is a complete idiot who does not understand the Russia rejected communism as a dead-born system is pretty absurd. I would venture to assume that it might be that Russia did something that can with some stretch be qualifies as an attempt to influence the USA election, but, alas, Putin has no strategic plan, not the intention. First of all this would be pretty idiotic idea as two candidates were equally bad for Russia and it was completely unclear who is worse.

But all those crazy US neocons still managed to imposed on Russia sanctions because of its "interference in the elections." That tells us something about the US congress. I do not want to write about the lack of evidence and absurdity of the arguments again. I've already written a lot about it. No, let's stop talking about the past and try to look into the future.

The US President's national security adviser John Bolton (who theoretically should be a sanest person in the administration) recently said that the US is concerned about the potential for interference in the midterm elections to the Congress of four countries. Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. "I will not go into details of what I saw or didn't see, but I tell you that in the 2018 elections, these four countries raise the greatest fears," proclaim this highly placed Presidential adviser.

Theoretically it make some sense. Any man with a knife has a potential to kill. Any country with nuclear weapons has the potential to strike at the US. Any country with developed IT has a potential opportunity to interfere in elections with the help of cyber attacks. For example, Israel. But it is not a good idea to scare the American voter with Israel. No, he/she should be confused, and he/she should be afraid of potential menace. And this external enemy should unite fragmented by neoliberal excesses country (for this purpose those good-for nothing people grazing in State Department and Spaso House (The US embassy in Moscow) should constantly accuse the Russian authorities of all sorts nefarious activities. So there is nothing new here: Great Britain uses similar dirty tricks against Russia for centuries. I am interested in another, a very simple question: why? Why would Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea interfere in the US midterm elections? What they want to achieve. All right, let's drop all the others, let's just talk about us, Russians.

What do we want? Let's say we want the midterms to be won by the Republicans. Then explain to me why Republican John Bolton fears this. If there's anything John Bolton should be afraid of, it's that Russia will intervene in the midterms in order to win the Democrats. But The Washington Post writes that "the leaders of the Democratic party of the United States fear the potential interference of Russia and start to increase its presence in anticipation of the interim election cycle on such platforms as Facebook and Twitter." President Trump writes on Twitter that Russia will" make a lot of effort " to intervene in the midterm elections on the side of the Democrats. Microsoft claims that Russian hackers created fake websites of Republican organizations in order to collect information about Republicans. The same hackers who broke into the DNC and stole Hillary Clinton emails now will steal midterm elections. But from whom? Do you understand anything? Personally, I don't understand anymore. Which Party we support? Who is the target of our effort to interfere in the USA elections. Are we promoting Repubs or DemoRats ?

Perhaps the head of the US national intelligence Daniel Coates is right when he declared that "their goal is to divide and undermine our democratic values." Well, let's suppose that we really are against those sacred values.

But the midterm elections will still be held, despite any interference. And one of candidates will win, while the other will lose. If we see no difference in candidates why we should interfere? If the net result for us anyway will be the same: more sanctions? Here we should go back to the idea of "controlled chaos" and world government. Looks like Daniel Coats think that the world government is us. No, I'd certainly like the idea, even if this requires smoking something really strong (let's use Musk as a lodestar ;-). But I'm afraid we're not capable to serve in this role. After economic rape of 1991 we are too poor. And to serve the role of world government you better be rich.

Again the question arise, why we should interfere in he USA elections. Only if we are out for revenge, "eye for eye" principle as they interfered in ours. There's no other reasonable answer. But even in this case, why we Russians should interfere in already completely messed up US elections, which typically equal to a force choice between two equally unacceptable candidates, already chosen and vetted by neoliberal elite. Like Trump vs. Hillary. why we should play this game of "the lesser evil." It's plain vanilla stupidity.

And before we get the answer to this fundamental question "Why?" there can be no further questions. None. Moreover, no other questions are needed. So let them just explain to us why we should interfere and how we can benefit from such an interference, and we will try our best. Before that, let's just watch.

And when they explain this to us, we can communicate the answer to China, Iran and North Korea free of charge.

[Sep 07, 2018] The Coup Against Trump by CURT MILLS

Notable quotes:
"... Taken together, the two are the equivalent of a stiff left jab followed by a roundhouse right. The president has been left reeling, staring into the political abyss. ..."
"... The president is betrayed, openly, in the pages of America's paper of record and, according to the activist, "the senior people in the [administration] do nothing about it." ..."
"... A report of mine in the National Interest last year relayed the hiring procedures, or lack thereof, of Trump appointees on the campaign and in the administration; prospective employees were rarely asked about their policy preferences. Said Scott McConnell , founding editor of TAC , on Wednesday: "Trump's biggest weakness is lacking knowledge of the policy people who might have helped him with a realist/populist agenda. But he never evinced any interest in finding smart realists to staff his administration." ..."
"... "We're Watching an Antidemocratic Coup Unfold," says David Graham in The Atlantic . "How the 'resistance' in the White House threatens American democracy . ..."
"... There's more than one path to authoritarianism," posits Damon Linker in The Week. ..."
"... But it's also true that Trump openly ran on detente . Should actual voters' preferences just be tossed aside in the name of, as the author suggests, the preservation of democracy? "So let's see: Trump ran on closer relations with Russia," Fox News host Tucker Carlson opined on Wednesday night. "Voters agreed with that. And so they elected him president of the United States. And yet, the tiny and incompetent Washington foreign policy establishment -- the very same people who brought you Iraq and Libya -- do not agree with that. So they subvert his views, which are also the views of voters." ..."
Sep 07, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The Coup Against Trump One of his advisors tells TAC a plot is afoot. How far will the president go to ensure his political survival?

... ... ...

Donald Trump rose from pariah to president through politics, and now may be on the brink of being returned by the same means, the result of Bob Woodward's searing testimonial in Fear and a scathing New York Times op-ed from someone in his own ranks.

Taken together, the two are the equivalent of a stiff left jab followed by a roundhouse right. The president has been left reeling, staring into the political abyss.

A former senior administration official tells me that Wednesday's op-ed in the New York Times , by an anonymous senior administration official, is nothing short of an attempt at a "coup" against Trump himself. A veteran conservative activist who is close to the White House says the story here is one insiders have been identifying since the early days of the Trump administration (and that I've reported on ad nauseum ): personnel.

The president is betrayed, openly, in the pages of America's paper of record and, according to the activist, "the senior people in the [administration] do nothing about it."

Something tantamount to a national game of "Clue" is underway. It was Mike Pence, with an email to the Times , in the Naval Observatory. It was Ambassador Jon Huntsman, Jr., with the phone, in the bathroom of his Moscow apartment. This reporter is loathe to delve into conjecture, but the author of the op-ed seems clearly to be, first, interested in national security, and second, a traditional conservative. A preponderance of my sources argue that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. "[National Security Advisor John] Bolton would shock me," a State Department veteran says.

The op-ed author writes: "This isn't the work of the so-called deep state. It's the work of the steady state." He (or she) maligns the president as "amoral" and devoid of "first principles." A veteran watcher of Secretary of Defense James Mattis tells me that "'steady' is a favorite Mattis word. I think the McCain funeral hit Mattis hard." Yet even if the president suspected his defense chief, he would be loathe to quickly dispatch him -- and anyway Mattis may leave on his own after the midterms.

♦♦♦

A case of seismic duplicity -- or needed patriotism, depending on who you talk to -- is, of course, only half the story.

The other half is one that has been recurrent throughout this administration: the president and his apparatchiks expended little initial capital on staffing the White House with genuine loyalists, or true believers. They appointed neither longtime personal friends of the president nor policy hands faithful to anything resembling a populist-nationalist agenda. News reports abound of the president's surprising and depressing paucity of genuine friends.

As I relayed last week in TAC : "A former senior Department of Defense official [being considered] for top administration positions recalls meeting Jeff Sessions after the election. After hitting it off, the future AG asked the candidate: ' Where have you been? '"

A report of mine in the National Interest last year relayed the hiring procedures, or lack thereof, of Trump appointees on the campaign and in the administration; prospective employees were rarely asked about their policy preferences. Said Scott McConnell , founding editor of TAC , on Wednesday: "Trump's biggest weakness is lacking knowledge of the policy people who might have helped him with a realist/populist agenda. But he never evinced any interest in finding smart realists to staff his administration."

Donald Trump is Not the Manchurian Candidate 'Far From the Endgame' on Donald Trump's NAFTA Overhaul

The president suggested that the op-ed was perhaps "TREASON?" He routinely conflates national interest and personal interest, and thus now demands that the Times betray its source. In doing so, he denigrates a founding ideal of the republic, prepared to erode civic support for the First Amendment to dull the pain of an atrocious but largely self-inflicted news cycle.

The personal nature of the president's complaint convulses the persuasive authority of the arguments against his opposition. Since the publishing of the op-ed, there has been a steady trickle of concern, particularly among left-liberal writers, about the precedent being set. "We're Watching an Antidemocratic Coup Unfold," says David Graham in The Atlantic . "How the 'resistance' in the White House threatens American democracy . There's more than one path to authoritarianism," posits Damon Linker in The Week.

And indeed there are parts of the op-ed that are cause for genuine concern:

On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin's spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior.

Treating Russia as the adversarial power that it is and proportionately punishing its malign behavior smacks of sound policy. But it's also true that Trump openly ran on detente . Should actual voters' preferences just be tossed aside in the name of, as the author suggests, the preservation of democracy? "So let's see: Trump ran on closer relations with Russia," Fox News host Tucker Carlson opined on Wednesday night. "Voters agreed with that. And so they elected him president of the United States. And yet, the tiny and incompetent Washington foreign policy establishment -- the very same people who brought you Iraq and Libya -- do not agree with that. So they subvert his views, which are also the views of voters."

Beyond the substantive criticisms from both sides, of Trump and of his critics, is the diagnostic nature of the conspiracy -- and it is a conspiracy -- against the president. First and foremost, Trump, they say, is unwell or unfit. The case for invocation of the 25th Amendment is being made plainly in the pages of the United States' most-read newspapers.

What's truly remarkable is that, to a certain extent, the U.S. is already functioning as though the 25th Amendment has been invoked -- at least if the reporting of Bob Woodward, the premier journalist of his generation, is to be believed. In spring of 2017, after Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad reportedly murdered citizens in rebel-held territory with chemical weapons, Trump, according to Woodward, told Defense Secretary Mattis: "Let's f**ing kill him! Let's go in. Let's kill the f**king lot of them." Mattis replied, "We're not going to do any of that." (Mattis denies Woodward's accounts.) As the author of the op-ed gloats, this is "is a two-track presidency. Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly."

The debate, then, isn't about policy. It isn't as though Trump is trying to decimate the civil service, or staff the State Department with "realists" on Russia, or halve legal immigration. If he leaves office, his legacy will be tax cuts and (likely) two conservative Supreme Court justices; on policy, it's unlikely that a President Cruz or Rubio would have done much differently. But the paranoid style that Trump has mainstreamed is, of course, a separate matter and not a small one. Neither is the fealty, or at least feigned fidelity, to a populist-nationalism that is now likely a prerequisite to becoming the Republican presidential nominee for the foreseeable future. That's even though, at their core, the president's protestations of "treason" and a "deep state" are about personal survival, not the implementation of a nationalist revolution.

For his supporters, Trump's continued occupancy of the White House is more about cultural grievance -- a middle finger to a failed establishment -- than about a knock-down, drag-out fight over real political change.

As Steve Bannon told the Weekly Standard after his ouster last year: "The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over."

Curt Mills is the foreign affairs reporter at The National Interest, where he covers the State Department, National Security Council, and the Trump presidency.

[Sep 07, 2018] Harding book is an indirect proof the UK government did it

Sep 07, 2018 | off-guardian.org

Originally from: Skripal Case Luke Harding's latest work of fiction OffGuardian

uke Harding likes writing books about things that he wasn't really involved in and doesn't really understand. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, that covers pretty much everything. His book about Snowden, for example, was beautifully taken down by Julian Assange – a person who was actually there.

He's priming the traumatised public for another of his works, this time about Sergei Skripal. This one will probably be out by Christmas, unless he can find someone else's work to plagiarise , in which case he might get it done sooner.

It will have a snide and not especially clever title, perhaps a sort of pun – something like "A Poison by Any Other Name: How Russian assassins contaminated the heart of rural England" . It will relate, in jarring sub-sub-le Carre prose, a story of Russian malfeasance and evil beyond imagining, whilst depicting the whole cast as bumbling caricatures, always held up for ridicule by the author and his smug readership.

There's an extract in The Guardian today. It's not listed as one, but trust me, it will be in the book. It's title, as predicted above, is sort of a pun (and will probably be a chapter heading):

Planes, trains and fake names: the trail left by Skripal suspects

You see? Like that film? I don't really get it either but until someone else comes up with something clever he can copy, Luke is left to his own rather meagre devices.

It starts off surprisingly strong, waiting three whole sentences before lurching violently into totally unsupported conjecture:

The two men were dressed inconspicuously in jeans, fleece jackets and trainers as they boarded the flight from Moscow to Gatwick. Their names, according to their Russian passports, were Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. Both were around 40 years old. Neither looked suspicious.

This is, as far as we know so far, true.

The plane trundled down the icy runway. In Moscow the temperatures had fallen below -10C, not unusual for early March. In Britain it had been snowing.

and so is this. In fact, in googling "Moscow weather March 2018" Harding has displayed an uncharacteristically thorough approach to research that was rarely (if ever) evidenced in his previous works.

They had also packed a bottle of what appeared to be the Nina Ricci perfume Premier Jour. The box it came in was prettily decorated with flowers, it listed ingredients including alcohol and it bore the words "Made in France".

This is where truth ends and guesses take over: there is no evidence, at all, that these two men had anything to do with the "perfume bottle" allegedly found by Charlie Rowley on June 27th and allegedly containing a powerful nerve agent. There is (as far as we know) no fingerprint or DNA evidence on the bottle, nobody saw them with the bottle, and there's no released CCTV footage of them holding or carrying the bottle. Saying "it's in their backpack" is meaningless without any evidence to back it up.

According to the Metropolitan police, the bottle in fact contained novichok, a lethal nerve agent developed in the late Soviet Union. The bottle had been specially made to be leakproof and had a customised applicator.

Note he doesn't feel the need to examine, question or even verify the words of the Metropolitan Police. This is a recurring theme in Harding's works – there are people who tell the truth (US) and people who lie (RUSSIANS). Evidence is a complication you can live without.

Moscow's notorious poisons factory run by the KGB made similar devices throughout the cold war.

Did they? Because he doesn't show any evidence this is true. One thing you can be sure of, if there had ever been even a whisper about a "modified perfume bottle" in any Soviet archive or from any "whistleblower currently living in the United States", it would be on the front page in big black letters.

Petrov and Boshirov were aliases, detectives believe. Both men are suspected to be career officers with the GRU, Russia's powerful and highly secretive military intelligence service.

Note use of the word "believe", it makes regular appearances alongside it's buddies: "suspect" and "probably".

And yes, they "believe" they are aliases because IF they were assassins then obviously they used aliases. There's no evidence taken from their (currently totally theoretical) visa applications that point to forgery, nobody at the time questioned their passports. As of today, we have been given no reason to think they were aliases, except reasoning backwards from assumed guilt which isn't how deduction works.

In fact, there's more than enough reason to assume they aren't aliases – Firstly, they passed the visa check, secondly their passports were never questioned, thirdly they've used them before (see below), and finally just WHY would a Russian spy-come-assassin use a fake Russian name and a fake Russian passport? That's ridiculous.

The officers' assignment was covert. They were coming to Britain not as tourists but as assassins.

[citation needed]

Their target was Sergei Skripal, a former GRU officer who spied for British intelligence, got caught and was freed in a spy exchange in 2010. They were heading for his home in provincial Salisbury.

Luke doesn't feel the need to dig down into the nitty gritty here – motive is a trifle, to be added in the footnotes or made up on the spur of the moment when asked at a book signing. I'm a bit more fussy than that – I feel the need to ask "Why did they release him in 2010 and then try to kill him in 2018?" If they had wanted to kill him, why not just do it when he was in prison in Russia between 2006 and 2010? If they wanted to kill him why do it just weeks before the World Cup? What could they possibly have to gain?

Luke doesn't know, and neither do I.

Their Aeroflot flight SU2588 touched down at 3pm on Friday 2 March. They were recorded on CCTV going through passport control, Boshirov with dark hair and a goatee beard, Petrov unshaven and wearing a blue gingham shirt. Both were carrying satchels slung casually over the shoulder.

This is all true, and completely unnecessary. It's what we in the industry call "filler" or "padding". Totally meaningless and useless words that do nothing but take up space. Without it, a lot of Luke's books would only be about 700 words long.

According to police, the pair had visited the UK before.

Way to bury the lead there, Luke.

This is actually quite important isn't it? I mean, when did they visit the UK before? Did they visit Salisbury then too? Did they have any contact with Sergei Skripal? Were they travelling under the same names? Were these visits linked with other intelligence work? Were they just holidays? What kind of assassins would use the SAME FAKE IDS ON TWO DIFFERENT OCCASIONS?

These are all very important questions, but Luke doesn't ask them. Because Luke is a modern journalist, and they don't interrogate the claims of the state, just report them. To Guardian reporters a question mark is just that funny squiggle next to the shift key.

From Gatwick they caught the train to London Victoria station and then the tube to east London, where they checked in to the City Stay hotel in Bow. It was a low-profile choice of accommodation. The red-brick Victorian building is next to a branch of Barclays bank, a busy train line and a wall daubed with graffiti. Across the road is a car pound and a Texaco garage.

This just more filler. Totally meaningless packaging material. The prose equivalent of All-Bran.

On hostile territory, Boshirov and Petrov operated in the manner of classic intelligence operatives.

In this instance "the manner of classic intelligence operatives" means, flying direct to London from Moscow, using Russian names and Russian passports (which you've used before), checking into a hotel with a CCTV camera on the front door, going straight to the hometown of an ex-double agent, leaving a Russian poison his front door even though he's already gone out, dumping your unused poison in a charity bin on the high street, going back to your hotel, smearing poison around that too even though you already dumped it, and then flying directly back to Moscow without even waiting to see if the plan worked and the target is dead.

This, in Luke's head, is ace intelligence work.

On the day of the hit, according to detectives, the pair made a similar journey, taking the 8.05am train from Waterloo to Salisbury and arriving at 11.48am.

Yes, they arrived at 11.48, making it absolutely pointless to put poison on the Skripal's door, as they had already gone out.

The perfume bottle was probably concealed in a light grey backpack carried by Petrov.

It was "probably concealed" in that backpack because, as I said above, there's no evidence either of those men ever knew the perfume bottle existed. You never see it in their possession.

Oh, and the backpack would have to contain TWO bottles of perfume – because the police aren't sure the bottle Rowley found 3 months later was the same bottle, and Rowley reported it was unopened and wrapped in cellophane. Perhaps Luke should have read the details of the case instead of trolling IMDB looking for movie titles with "plane" in them or googling "insouciant" to see if he was using it right.

From Salisbury station the two men set off on foot. It was a short walk of about a mile to Skripal's semi-detached home in Christie Miller Road.

which doesn't matter, because the Skripals weren't there. They left at 9.15 and there is no evidence they ever returned.

At Skripal's house the Russians smeared or sprayed novichok on to the front door handle, police say.

which doesn't matter, because the Skripals weren't there. They left at 9.15 and there is no evidence they ever returned.

It doesn't matter if Borishov and Petrov re-tiled the bathroom with novichok grouting or hid novichok in the battery compartment of Sergei's TV remote or replaced all his lightbulbs with novichok bombs that explode when you use the clapper .according to everything we've been told so far Sergei and Julia were literally never in that house again.

Luke seems to write a lot about this case, considering he is barely acquainted with the most basic facts of it.

The moment went unobserved

True. There is not a single piece of footage, photograph or eyewitness placing these men within a hundred feet of the Skripals, or their house. The "moment went unobserved" is an incredibly dishonest way of phrasing this, "the moment is entirely theoretical" is rather fairer. Or, if you want to be honest "it's possible none of this happened".

At some point on their walk back they must have tossed away the bottle, which at this point was too dangerous to try to smuggle back through customs.

It's all falling into place perfectly isn't it?

At some point the two men, who we never see holding or carrying the bottle, must have thrown it away because three months later someone else found it.

They took it through customs once but couldn't a second time, because reasons.

Also one of them was smiling a sort of "I just poisoned somebody" smile:

At 1.05pm the men were recorded in Fisherton Street on their way back to the station. They appeared more relaxed, Petrov grinning even.

Those evil bastards.

By the time Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found collapsed on a park bench in the centre of Salisbury later that afternoon, the poisoners were gone.

No Luke: By the time Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found collapsed on a park bench in the centre of Salisbury later that afternoon, the ALLEGED poisoners were gone.

Alleged is an important word for example, there is a marked difference between being an ALLEGED plagiarist, and being a plagiarist .

The visitors were captured on CCTV one more time, at Heathrow airport. It was 7.28pm and both men were going through security, Petrov first, wheeling a small black case. In his right hand was a shiny red object, his Russian passport. Police believe the passport was genuine, his name not. In other words, that it was a sophisticated espionage operation carried out by a state or state entities.

You see? Nobody thought the passport was fake, which means it was a really good fake . So the Russian state must have been in on it. This is known as an unfalsifiable hypothesis. If the passport did look fake, that would be evidence that the men were spies and therefore the Russian state was in on it.

Harding has created a narrative where there is literally no development that could ever challenge his conclusions.

Seemingly, the GRU plan – executed two weeks before Russia's presidential election – had worked perfectly.

This is an example of the cum hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy – two things happen at the same time, therefore they happen for the same reason. It's a maneuver we at OffG refer to as "the Harding", where you state two separate assertions or facts one after the other in such a way as to imply a relationship, without ever making a solid statement. I'll give you an example:

Luke Harding was born in 1968, mere weeks before the brutal assassination of Robert Kennedy.

Harding is suggesting some sort of connection between the election and the poisoning. He can't STATE it, because then he has to explain his reasoning – and there isn't any. Putin, and Russia as a whole, had nothing to gain from poisoning an ex-spy they had released nearly a decade earlier, especially on the eve of a Presidential election and mere weeks before the World Cup. There's no argument to be made, so he doesn't attempt to make one, he just makes a snide and baseless insinuation.

In his defense, Luke might genuinely believe it, cum hoc ergo propter hoc is a favorite amongst paranoid personalities , of which Luke is definitely a prime example .

Vladimir Putin, the man whom a public inquiry found in 2016 had "probably" signed off on the operation to kill Litvinenko. The UK security services say a "body of evidence" points to the GRU.

"Probably" is also a big word. For example, there's a marked difference between "probably being a plagiarist" and "being a plagiarist" .

It seems clear that Moscow continues to view Britain as a playground for undercover operations and is relatively insouciant about the consequences, diplomatic and political. The Skripal attack may have misfired. But the message, mingling contempt and arrogance, is there for all to see: we can smite our enemies whenever and wherever we want, and there is nothing you can do about it.

This is the second time Luke has used the word "insouciant" in two days, which means that word of the day calendar was a probably sound investment, but he forgot to flip it over this morning.

Other than that, this final paragraph is nothing but paranoia.

The Russians were TRYING to make it obvious, to send a message. But were also lazy and arrogant. And yet also left no solid evidence because they are experts at espionage. They had no motive except being mean, and couldn't even be bothered to make sure they did it right. They want us all to know they did it, but will never admit it.

The actual truth of the situation can be summed up in a few bullet points. Currently:

There is no evidence these men were using forged documents. There is no evidence these men were travelling under aliases or assumed names. There is no evidence these men ever had any contact with Sergei Skripal's house. There is no evidence these men ever had any contact with Sergei Skripal or his daughter. There is no evidence these men were Russian intelligence assets or had any military training. There is no evidence these men ever possessed or had any contact with the perfume bottle found by Charlie Rowley on June 27th. They have visited the UK before, not on intelligence business (as far as we know). Their movements don't align with the timeline of Skripal's illness.

The entire narrative is created around half a dozen screen caps of two (allegedly) Russian men, not behaving in any way illegally or even suspiciously. All the rest is fiction, created by a hack to service an agenda. This isn't one of those "You couldn't make it up" stories, it's not that incredible. It's just insulting and stupid.

You could make it up, and he did.

[Sep 07, 2018] UK "identifies" Russian agents in attempted Skripal assassination by Robert Stevens

Theresa May demonstrated traits of a psychopath who cling to power using all available to her means, including criminal. Looks like British version of Hillary.
Notable quotes:
"... despite hysterical news broadcasts and front-page headlines regarding "Russian assassins," the public know nothing more substantively about the events of Sunday, March 4, than they did more than six months ago. ..."
"... May did not detail the intelligence she was supposedly acting on. Instead she singled out Russia as the main enemy of the West that had to confronted, declaring, "This chemical weapons attack on our soil was part of a wider pattern of Russian behaviour that persistently seeks to undermine our security and that of our allies around the world." ..."
"... "Back in March, Russia sought to sow doubt and uncertainty about the evidence we presented to this House -- and some were minded to believe them," May told parliament. "Today's announcement shows that we were right." Except that it doesn't. The new narrative is that "Petrov" and "Boshirov" flew into Gatwick airport on Friday, March 2. CCTV footage purportedly verifies this. They checked into a budget hotel in Bow, east London, and the next day, according to police, travelled to Salisbury, staying in the area for several hours, before returning to London. ..."
"... The pair then returned to Salisbury on Sunday, March 4. Police claim they are shown on CCTV at 11:58 a.m., on Wilton Road, "moments before the attack" on Sergei Skripal. ..."
"... Former UK ambassador Craig Murray asked: "1. Why did two alleged GRU agents travel under false names and fake passports, but still use Russian ..."
"... Murray retweeted a statement from a freelance journalist, Neil Clark, pointing out: "If the two men were identified coming through Gatwick, it is impossible that the police do not know what kind of visa they were travelling on. Something is very wrong here -- ties in with the fact that the photos released [showing grainy images of the men's faces on dark backgrounds] are not UK visa standard photos." ..."
"... at precisely the same second ..."
"... Murray points out that the Skripals left their home at 9:15 a.m. on March 4 and were assumed not to have returned home, before they were found collapsed. "But the Metropolitan Police state that Boshirov and Petrov did not arrive in Salisbury until 11.48 on the day of the poisoning. That means that they could not have applied a nerve agent to the Skripals' doorknob before noon at the earliest." ..."
"... An article on the Off Guardian website noted that the police said the Bow Hotel was "contaminated" with novichok, but no one has been reported ill in six months at the hotel. ..."
"... The government's narrative cannot be taken at face value, especially as it is supplied by the same security services that faked "evidence" of Iraq having "weapons of mass destruction" to justify pre-emptive war against Iraq. ..."
"... Moreover, the timing of the government's latest disclosure is highly suspect. Yesterday, the UK raised its new allegations against Moscow at the United Nations Security Council, after which the US, France, Germany and Canada issued a joint statement that the Russian government "almost certainly" approved the poisoning of the Skripals. ..."
"... The same day the European Union announced it was extending, for a further six months, the sanctions it had imposed on around 150 Russian individuals and 50 companies following the right-wing Western-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014. Complaints of Russian aggression in Crimea have been used to carry through a massive NATO build-up on Russia's borders. ..."
"... These measures unfold as the US renews threats over the operation by forces loyal to the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad against Al Qaeda affiliates that control the northwestern province of Idlib. Denouncing the "threat of an imminent Assad regime attack, backed by Russia and Iran," the White House stated that, in the event of a chemical weapons attack, "the United States and its Allies will respond swiftly and appropriately." ..."
Sep 07, 2018 | www.wsws.org

The UK government and media have doubled down on their anti-Russian campaign following Wednesday's announcement by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) that two men have been named as suspects in the poisoning of former Russian/British double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.

The police released passport photos and CCTV images of two men in various locations, including Gatwick Airport and Salisbury. But despite hysterical news broadcasts and front-page headlines regarding "Russian assassins," the public know nothing more substantively about the events of Sunday, March 4, than they did more than six months ago.

CPS Director of Legal Services Sue Hemming said that evidence from counter-terrorism police meant "it is clearly in the public interest to charge Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, who are Russian nationals," with the attempted murder of Sergei, Yulia and police officer Nick Bailey.

Prime Minister Theresa May then told parliament that, in addition to the police investigation, the security and intelligence agencies had conducted their own investigation and, "based on a body of intelligence, the Government has concluded that the two individuals named by the police and CPS are officers from the Russian military intelligence service, also known as the GRU."

She added: "So this was not a rogue operation. It was almost certainly also approved outside the GRU at a senior level of the Russian state."

The Russian Foreign Ministry has categorically rejected the UK's claims, stating the names of the two men "do not mean anything to us."

May did not detail the intelligence she was supposedly acting on. Instead she singled out Russia as the main enemy of the West that had to confronted, declaring, "This chemical weapons attack on our soil was part of a wider pattern of Russian behaviour that persistently seeks to undermine our security and that of our allies around the world."

"Back in March, Russia sought to sow doubt and uncertainty about the evidence we presented to this House -- and some were minded to believe them," May told parliament. "Today's announcement shows that we were right." Except that it doesn't. The new narrative is that "Petrov" and "Boshirov" flew into Gatwick airport on Friday, March 2. CCTV footage purportedly verifies this. They checked into a budget hotel in Bow, east London, and the next day, according to police, travelled to Salisbury, staying in the area for several hours, before returning to London.

The pair then returned to Salisbury on Sunday, March 4. Police claim they are shown on CCTV at 11:58 a.m., on Wilton Road, "moments before the attack" on Sergei Skripal.

The police say two more images show the "suspects at Salisbury train station at 13.50 on Sunday, 4 March, as they embark on their journey back to London." Another image shows the "suspects passing through passport control at London Heathrow at 19.28 on Sunday evening (4 March) -- in the image, 'Petrov' is at the front and 'Boshirov' at the back."

May's definitive assertion of Russian authorship was contradicted by Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, National Lead for Counter-Terrorism Policing. Asked by the press if he had any evidence that the two men were Russian State operatives, he said, "No." Basu said in his statement that "it is likely that they were travelling under aliases and that these are not their real names."

BBC Security Correspondent Gordon Corera reported that he understood the authorities identified the pair "a while back" and "may also know their real names." But if so, why are they not being made public?

Former UK ambassador Craig Murray asked: "1. Why did two alleged GRU agents travel under false names and fake passports, but still use Russian names and Russian passports? If they had used EU passports -- say from Lithuania or Estonia for example -- they wouldn't have needed a visa, thanks to EU freedom of movement agreements, and could still have spoken Russian without raising suspicion."

Murray retweeted a statement from a freelance journalist, Neil Clark, pointing out: "If the two men were identified coming through Gatwick, it is impossible that the police do not know what kind of visa they were travelling on. Something is very wrong here -- ties in with the fact that the photos released [showing grainy images of the men's faces on dark backgrounds] are not UK visa standard photos."

Among the glaring oddities in the new account is that the two photos released of "Petrov" and "Boshirov" shows them both in what appears to be the same space at Gatwick airport at precisely the same second (16:22:43 on March 2, 2018.) Raising the physically impossibility, Murray suggests the CCTV images may have been doctored . The police are now claiming that the two are in different but similar places passing CCTV cameras at exactly the same time.

The government's latest narrative fails to correspond with claims it has maintained for months that the Skripals were poisoned by "novichok" being applied to the front door knob of Sergei's house.

Murray points out that the Skripals left their home at 9:15 a.m. on March 4 and were assumed not to have returned home, before they were found collapsed. "But the Metropolitan Police state that Boshirov and Petrov did not arrive in Salisbury until 11.48 on the day of the poisoning. That means that they could not have applied a nerve agent to the Skripals' doorknob before noon at the earliest."

An article on the Off Guardian website noted that the police said the Bow Hotel was "contaminated" with novichok, but no one has been reported ill in six months at the hotel. Moreover, to contaminate the room "the suspects would have to physically apply the poison to it, and since they allegedly left [sic] country on March 4th -- the same day as the alleged attack -- the contamination must have happened BEFORE Sergei Skripal was poisoned."

Also, previously the Metropolitan Police said that it was connecting the poisoning of the Skripals with that of Dawn Sturgess and her partner Charley Rowley. Dawn died in hospital after being exposed to what was described as a novichok on July 8. Rowley is now seriously ill with reported meningitis.

Yet Basu commented, "We don't yet know where the suspects disposed of the Novichok they used to attack the door, where Dawn and Charlie got the bottle that poisoned them, or if it is the same bottle used in both poisonings."

The government's narrative cannot be taken at face value, especially as it is supplied by the same security services that faked "evidence" of Iraq having "weapons of mass destruction" to justify pre-emptive war against Iraq.

Moreover, the timing of the government's latest disclosure is highly suspect. Yesterday, the UK raised its new allegations against Moscow at the United Nations Security Council, after which the US, France, Germany and Canada issued a joint statement that the Russian government "almost certainly" approved the poisoning of the Skripals.

The same day the European Union announced it was extending, for a further six months, the sanctions it had imposed on around 150 Russian individuals and 50 companies following the right-wing Western-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014. Complaints of Russian aggression in Crimea have been used to carry through a massive NATO build-up on Russia's borders.

May wants the EU to go further and follow the US, which imposed additional sanctions from August 27 on the basis that Russia had used "chemical weapons in violation of international law or lethal chemical weapons against its own nationals." This include terminating aid, except on urgent humanitarian grounds, restricting access to US credit, ending aspects of financing and prohibiting exports to Russia of "restricted goods or technology." Russia has 90 days to allow inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to verify it does not have chemical weapons, or Washington will impose a far more severe set of sanctions.

These measures unfold as the US renews threats over the operation by forces loyal to the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad against Al Qaeda affiliates that control the northwestern province of Idlib. Denouncing the "threat of an imminent Assad regime attack, backed by Russia and Iran," the White House stated that, in the event of a chemical weapons attack, "the United States and its Allies will respond swiftly and appropriately."

Washington and London are not responding out of humanitarian concerns. They have backed the Al Qaeda-affiliated terror groups in Syria as part of their regime-change operations in the Middle East, and broader geostrategic objectives against Russia and Iran. As in previous instances -- Douma in April for example -- Washington's threats amount to an invitation to the Al Qaeda forces to stage an incident to justify military intervention by the US and its allies.


Ricky Kagayame2 hours ago

On the one hand, the ruling class want us to believe that Russian operations are highly sophisticated, that we should all live in suspense of when the next incident will occur, that we should hunger for vengeance, and yet when the media and government provide their "evidence" it shows that the so-called Russian operatives are incredibly inept. Of course, what else could be expected from manufactured narratives.
Skip3 hours ago
The British ruling class and it's security forces are cold blooded killers for hundreds of years. There is nothing too savage below them. Nothing they say can be taken at face value.

This whole affair has been a set up from the beginning. As we see know, it is used once again when needed. Russia is about to make a final push in Syria. This means, if they are victorious, America and Britain will have been stopped in the Middle East.

England has nothing left to lose. Nothing is off the table for their survival.

Jsut to assume tat two secret agents sent on an assassination plot from the Russian government would leave such obvious traces is absurd. Using Russian passports, needing a visa to enter, flying from Russia direct to London and then back... The British want us to think that the Russian secret service does not know about all the CCTV cameras in London, or England in general. Or the advanced level of security at Gatwick.

лидия4 hours ago
Anti-NATO Russians joke about this "new proof", I have read a funny short poem about it, and my favorite joke was - looks like there is not even Lestrade in Scotland Yard anymore.

[Sep 07, 2018] At some point you start to notice how DemoRats and neocons flood social media and every forum with their trash propaganda

Sep 07, 2018 | politics.slashdot.org
Anonymous Coward , Friday September 07, 2018 @11:46AM ( #57269458 )
Fake News ( Score: 1 )

Russians want a weak and divided US. Putin couldn't care less about who is running the nation.

Did they interfere with our election? Maybe.

Did illegals criminally vote in our elections after Obama asked them to? Did the Clintons and the DNC pay millions for the so-called research that led to Russia dossier? Yes. Did Clinton have her billionaire foreign friends funding her campaign? Yes.

But I guess direct foreign interference doesn't count if the Democrats were behind it. I think Democrats need to understand that people are starting to notice all the BS they are preaching.

You can't have it both ways....unless your a Democrat. People got tired of that and elected a clown over a corrupt political cult of blatant liars and criminals. Normal people don't like SJW types, hypocrites and habitually outraged race baiters.

At some point you start to notice how they flood social media and every forum with their trash propaganda. Even slashdot seems to get hit constantly.

[Sep 07, 2018] Are We Being Played by Caitlin Johnstone

Looks like this Iago-style false flag operation by NYT: the anonymous author does not exists and the the plot is to saw discord and mutual suspicion
Notable quotes:
"... The more I study US politics, the less useful I find it to think of it in political terms. The two-headed one party system exists to give Americans the illusion of choice while advancing the agendas of the plutocratic class which owns and operates both parties, yes, but even more importantly it's a mechanism of narrative control. ..."
"... If you belonged to a ruling class, obviously your goal would be to ensure your subjects' continued support for you. In a corporatist oligarchy, the rulers are secret and the subjects don't know they're ruled, and power is held in place with manipulation and with money. As such a ruler your goal would be to find a way to manipulate the masses into supporting your agendas, and, since people are different, you'd need to use different narratives to manipulate them. You'd have to divide them, tell them different stories, turn them against each other, play them off one another, suck them in to the tales you are spinning with the theater of enmity and heroism. ..."
"... As a result of the New York Times op-ed, if this administration engages in yet another of its many, many establishment capitulations (let's say by attacking the Syrian government again ), Trump's supporters won't see it as his fault; it will be blamed on the deep state insiders in his administration who have been working to thwart his agendas of peace and harmony. ..."
"... Would a billionaire WWE Hall of Famer and United States President understand the theater of staged conflict for the advancement of plutocratic interests, and willingly participate in it? I'm going to say probably. ..."
Sep 07, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

If any evidence existed to be found that Donald Trump had illegally colluded with the Russian government to rig the 2016 presidential election, that evidence would have been picked up by the sprawling surveillance networks of the US and its allies and leaked to the Washington Post before Obama left office.

Russiagate is like a mirage. From a distance it looks like a solid, tangible thing, but when you actually move in to examine it critically you find nothing but gaping plot holes, insinuation, innuendo, conflicting narratives, bizarre mental contortions to avoid acknowledging contradictory information, a few arrests for corruption and process crimes, and a lot of hot air. The whole thing has been held together by nothing but the confident-sounding assertions of pundits and politicians and sheer, mindless repetition. And, as we approach the two year mark since this president's election, we have not seen one iota of movement toward removing him from office. The whole thing's a lie, and the smart movers and shakers behind it are aware that it is a lie.

And yet they keep beating on it. Day after day after day after day it's been Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia. Instead of attacking this president for his many, many real problems in a way that will do actual damage, they attack this fake blow-up doll standing next to him in a way that never goes anywhere and never will, like a pro wrestler theatrically stomping on the canvass next to his downed foe.

What's up with that?

... ... ....

As you doubtless already know by now, the New York Times has made the wildly controversial decision to publish an anonymous op-ed reportedly authored by "a senior official in the Trump administration." The op-ed's author claims to be part of a secret coalition of patriots who dislike Trump and are "working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations." These "worst inclinations" according to the author include trying to make peace with Moscow and Pyongyang, being rude to longtime US allies, saying mean things about the media, being "anti-trade", and being "erratic". The possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment is briefly mentioned but dismissed. The final paragraphs are spent gushing about John McCain for no apparent reason.

I strongly encourage you to read the piece in its entirety, because for all the talk and drama it's generating, it doesn't actually make any sense. While you are reading it, I encourage you to keep the following question in mind: what could anyone possibly gain by authoring this and giving it to the New York Times ?

Seriously, what could be gained? The op-ed says essentially nothing, other than to tell readers to relax and trust in anonymous administration insiders who are working against the bad guys on behalf of the people (which is interestingly the exact same message of the right-wing 8chan conspiracy phenomenon QAnon, just with the white hats and black hats reversed). Why would any senior official risk everything to publish something so utterly pointless? Why risk getting fired (or risk losing all political currency in the party if NYTAnon is Mike Pence, as has been theorized ) just to communicate something to the public that doesn't change or accomplish anything? Why publicly announce your undercover conspiracy to undermine the president in a major news outlet at all?

What are the results of this viral op-ed everyone's talking about? So far it's a bunch of Democratic partisans making a lot of excited whooping noises, and Trump loyalists feeling completely vindicated in the belief that all of their conspiracy theories have been proven correct. Many rank-and-file Trump haters are feeling a little more relaxed and complacent knowing that there are a bunch of McCain-loving "adults in the room" taking care of everything, and many rank-and-file Trump supporters are more convinced than ever that Donald Trump is a brave populist hero leading a covert 4-D chess insurgency against the Deep State. In other words, everyone's been herded into their respective partisan stables and trusting the narratives that they are being fed there.

And, well, I just think that's odd.

Did you know that Donald Trump is in the WWE Hall of Fame ? He was inducted in 2013, and he's been enthusiastically involved in pro wrestling for many years, both as a fan and as a performer . He's made more of a study on how to draw a crowd in to the theatrics of a choreographed fight scene than anyone this side of the McMahon family (a member of whom happens to be part of the Trump administration currently).

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZBl6cL9GYs0

You don't have to get into any deep conspiratorial rabbit hole to consider the possibility that all this drama and conflict is staged from top to bottom. Commentators on all sides routinely crack jokes about how the mainstream media pretends to attack Trump but secretly loves him because he brings them amazing ratings. Anyone with their eyes even part way open already knows that America's two mainstream parties feign intense hatred for one another while working together to pace their respective bases into accepting more and more neoliberal exploitation at home and more and more neoconservative bloodshed abroad. They spit and snarl and shake their fists at each other, then cuddle up and share candy when it's time for a public gathering. Why should this administration be any different?

I believe that a senior Trump administration official probably did write that anonymous op-ed. I do not believe that they were moved to write it out of compassion for the poor Americans who are feeling emotionally stressed about the president. I believe it was written and published for the same reason many other things are written and published in mainstream media: because we are all being played.

The more I study US politics, the less useful I find it to think of it in political terms. The two-headed one party system exists to give Americans the illusion of choice while advancing the agendas of the plutocratic class which owns and operates both parties, yes, but even more importantly it's a mechanism of narrative control. If you can separate the masses into two groups based on extremely broad ideological characteristics, you can then funnel streamlined "us vs them" narratives into each of the two stables, with the white hats and black hats reversed in each case. Now you've got Republicans cheering for the president and Democrats cheering for the CIA, for the FBI, and now for a platoon of covert John McCains alleged to be operating on the inside of Trump's own administration. Everyone's cheering for one aspect of the US power establishment or another.

Whom does this dynamic serve? Not you.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Yw0qkvvSE7s

If you belonged to a ruling class, obviously your goal would be to ensure your subjects' continued support for you. In a corporatist oligarchy, the rulers are secret and the subjects don't know they're ruled, and power is held in place with manipulation and with money. As such a ruler your goal would be to find a way to manipulate the masses into supporting your agendas, and, since people are different, you'd need to use different narratives to manipulate them. You'd have to divide them, tell them different stories, turn them against each other, play them off one another, suck them in to the tales you are spinning with the theater of enmity and heroism.

As a result of the New York Times op-ed, if this administration engages in yet another of its many, many establishment capitulations (let's say by attacking the Syrian government again ), Trump's supporters won't see it as his fault; it will be blamed on the deep state insiders in his administration who have been working to thwart his agendas of peace and harmony. Meanwhile those who see Trump as a heel won't experience any cognitive dissonance if any of the establishment agendas they support are carried out, because they can give the credit to the secret hero squad in the White House.

Would a billionaire WWE Hall of Famer and United States President understand the theater of staged conflict for the advancement of plutocratic interests, and willingly participate in it? I'm going to say probably.

* * *

The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , checking out my podcast , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , or buying my book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .

[Sep 07, 2018] Guardian cheerleading of the NYT "resistance" op-ed by Richard Wolffe

What is interesting is that Wolffe links the op-ed and publishing Bob Woodward's latest book: "Woodward has cornered the panicked Trump rats into screeching about all the ways they prevented World War Three , or a massive trade war, by ignoring the ranting boss or snatching papers off his desk."
Notable quotes:
"... Nothing proved, unnamed sources, claims about this, claims about that. Until someone is prepared to step forward and reveal themselves this is a non story. Still, it gives the Trump haters comfort. ..."
"... Personally, I am not surprised or impressed by this White House insider's account. Nothing he or she has said should be a real revelation to anyone who has cast a critical eye on the Trump presidency. And whoever it is, this person is so enamored with tax cuts, deregulation, ramping up military spending and the usual Republican horse shit that he or she does not seem prepared to risk further discrediting the administration by identifying him/herself and resigning publicly. ..."
Sep 07, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

The madness is pouring out of the White House now, for all to see Richard Wolffe

... ... ...

If you really believe your boss is a threat to the constitution which you've taken an oath to protect, perhaps you should consider quitting or going public. As in: going on Capitol Hill to hold a press conference to urge impeachment.

In this regard, and only in this regard, our anonymous whistleblower has handed the crazy boss a degree of righteous indignation.

"If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist," tweeted the madman in the attic, "the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!"

Donald, we feel your pain, albeit briefly. Your internal enemies are indeed gutless, and if you feel better putting that in ALL CAPS, that's fine. Let it out.

But that bit about turning people over to you for national security reasons is kind of the point here. If you'll allow us to summarize the GUTLESS person's arguments: you are fundamentally a threat to democracy and national security yourself. You are indeed, as your lawyers have pointed out repeatedly, your own worst witness.

This much we know from this week's other bombshell in the shape of Bob Woodward's latest book. Woodward has cornered the panicked Trump rats into screeching about all the ways they prevented World War Three , or a massive trade war, by ignoring the ranting boss or snatching papers off his desk.

... ... ...

Mr or Ms GUTLESS describes Trump's decisions as "half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless", while chief of staff John Kelly says Trump is "an idiot" living in a place called "Crazytown". This revelation led to the priceless statement from Kelly where he had to deny calling the president an idiot.

Somewhere in Texas, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson is swirling a glass of bourbon muttering that he lost his job for calling Trump a moron.

Second, Trump's staffers are enabling the very horrors they claim to hate, while grandiosely pretending to be doing the opposite.

Mr or Ms GUTLESS says there were "early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th amendment" in what he imagines is a clear sign they can distinguish reality from reality TV.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Trump cabinet: please know that you will not be accepted into the next edition of Profiles in Courage for your early whispers. If you truly believe the president is incapacitated, you should perhaps consider raising your voice to at least conversational level, if you're not inclined to bellow from the mountaintops. Library rules are inoperative at this point.

Given the weight of evidence, even the most diehard Trump defenders are now conceding the obvious, by signing up to the GUTLESS gang's self-promotion. Brit Hume, a Fox News veteran, let the cat out of the bag when he tweeted that it was a "good thing" they were restraining Trump "from his most reckless impulses".

This is how the pirate ship Trump eventually sinks to the ocean's floor. You can fool some of Fox News's viewers all of the time, and you can fool all of them some of the time.

But no fool wants to drown with the captain we all know is plain crazy.

Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist

MoonlightTiger -> MoonlightTiger , 6 Sep 2018 10:02

It's someone high up that makes policy decisions, brags about everything they have done to help America despite Cheetos interfering. Why now? Pence wants it known that he is running the government not useless trump whom has passed nothing. Pence will come out as the author when Don is removed from office. Which could be nearing since this OPED is likely to expose him. Maybe he planned it that way.

Brutus is close now.

Carl123 -> MuttPretty , 6 Sep 2018 10:00

What's most remarkable to me is how closely the Michael Wolff's White House, Omarosa's White House, Bob Woodward's Whitehouse, and Anonymous Staffer's White House reflect each other.

Clearly a massive conspiracy. And one which Trump is helpfully participating in by constantly saying and doing stuff which accords with the pictures they're all painting.

MuttPretty , 6 Sep 2018 09:58
What's most remarkable to me is how closely the Michael Wolff's White House, Omarosa's White House, Bob Woodward's Whitehouse, and Anonymous Staffer's White House reflect each other. All these sources come together to display a rather coherent image of a chaotic White House led by a man who's not bright enough to realize he's in over his head.
Alun Jones , 6 Sep 2018 09:53
The New York Times attack piece was anonymous. It is therefore completely unverifiable and could have been written by anyone, including any of the politically biased NYT editorial team, or by Bob Woodward to publicize his new book. It's junk news.
OrangeLagoon -> JozzaBoy , 6 Sep 2018 09:49
I'm firmly convinced that when it's all said and done we'll be able to represent his presidency as an MMO boss fight. This is the bit where everyone concentrates fire on the glowy spot until the enrage mechanic kicks in. In fact it looks like the mad flailing has started and now everyone will try not to stand in the AoE as they DPS him down.
moranet , 6 Sep 2018 09:43
Mussolini was in power for twenty years before his functionaries deposed him to keep the regime intact while removing its newly-a-liability head. Mussolini was the legal (if abhorrent) premier of a coalition government in a liberal-democratic (both words with a pinch of salt) regime for his first two years, until winning a parliamentary majority of his own; indeed, after the leader of the Socialist Party was killed by his supporters, his coalition partners almost pulled out of government: that's not a totalitarian dictatorship, but what was then called "pre-fascism", and today we'd call it an 'illiberal democracy'. The dictatorship was informal (result of a supportive majority) until the constitional reform of 1928 - five years into his government.

Thinking that all will turn out fine because American democracy is under strain but generally intact, is a dangerous complacency. All interwar autocrats went through a transition of first governing under the old constitution, slowly undermining opposition, then installing a new organic law. Perhaps all will turn out well in the US, and Trump will leave office with the old 'rules of the game' untouched - but that can't be assumed, and we won't know until after he is gone.

Carl123 -> Finisterre , 6 Sep 2018 09:40

Pepperoni Pizza is absolutely correct. We DON'T know his staff are going behind his back - we have this anonymous bollocks as the totality of our evidence.

Truckloads of "anonymous bollocks" reported by credible, highly respected journalists with excellent reasons to protect their sources.

"Anonymous" bollocks" which syncs perfectly with events and pronouncements by the president himself - including numerous firings of so many of the "best people" he hired.

"Anonymous bollocks" confirmed in evidence/testimony presented publicly and under oath in court.

Otherwise, great point.

JozzaBoy , 6 Sep 2018 09:40
this is desperate stuff. Is this the thing that is finally going to bring down Trump?

The media cycle wrt Trump;

1. Trump is Crazy
2. Trump is Hitler
3. Trump is Losing
4. Go To Line 1.

babyboomer63 , 6 Sep 2018 09:38
Nothing proved, unnamed sources, claims about this, claims about that. Until someone is prepared to step forward and reveal themselves this is a non story. Still, it gives the Trump haters comfort.
imperious -> BLACKCAT66 , 6 Sep 2018 09:36
There is a segment of this country that is willfully ignorant because a con man told them to be. We really need to ignore this shrinking number of fuck-nuts and just out vote them.
We live in a democracy. If you choose to use facebook as your only source of news about the world, it is not because a con man told you to, it is because you are just too plain stupid to go looking elsewhere.
Cascais99 , 6 Sep 2018 09:36
I'm surprised that no one has compared the author of the anonymous article in the New York Times with "Deep Throat", who anonymously met Bernstein and Woodward in an underground parking garage in Washington to spill the beans about Watergate. Deep Throat turned out to be Mark Felt, a high-ranking official in the FBI who kept working against Nixon under cover and whose name was revealed only a few years ago.
FeliciorAugusto , 6 Sep 2018 09:31
Personally, I am not surprised or impressed by this White House insider's account. Nothing he or she has said should be a real revelation to anyone who has cast a critical eye on the Trump presidency. And whoever it is, this person is so enamored with tax cuts, deregulation, ramping up military spending and the usual Republican horse shit that he or she does not seem prepared to risk further discrediting the administration by identifying him/herself and resigning publicly.

Screw whoever it is, they are obviously no hero to the American people.

James Steel , 6 Sep 2018 09:31
Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo have denied writing the op-ed -- but that's exacta guilty person would say :)

[Sep 07, 2018] Now we Know 'The Resistance' is The Establishment by Brendan O'Neill

Notable quotes:
"... bête noire ..."
Sep 03, 2018 | www.sott.net

So now we know what 'the resistance' really is. It's the establishment. It's the old political order. It's that late 20th-century political set, those out-of-touch managerial elites, who still cannot believe the electorate rejected them. That is the take-home message of the bizarre political spectacle that was the burial of John McCain, where this neocon in life has been transformed into a resistance leader in death: that while the anti-Trump movement might doll itself up as rebellious, and even borrow its name from those who resisted fascism in Europe in the mid 20th-century, in truth it is primarily about restoring the apparently cool, expert-driven rule of the old elites over what is viewed as the chaos of the populist Trump / Brexit era.

The response to McCain's death has bordered on the surreal. The strangest aspect has been the self-conscious rebranding of McCain as a searing rebel. In death, this key establishment figure in the Republican Party, this military officer, senator, presidential candidate and enthusiastic backer of the exercise of US military power overseas, has been reimagined as a plucky battler for all that is good against a wicked, overbearing political machine. 'John McCain's funeral was the biggest resistance meeting yet', said a headline in the New Yorker , alongside a photo of George W Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and soldiers from the US Army, the most powerful military machine on Earth. This is 'the resistance' now: the former holders of extraordinary power, the invaders of foreign nations, the Washington establishment.

The New Yorker piece, like so much of the McCain commentary, praises to the heavens the anti-Trump theme of McCain's funeral. McCain famously said Trump couldn't attend his funeral. And that in itself was enough to win him the posthumous love of a liberal commentariat that now views everything through the binary moral framework of pro-Trump (evil, ill-informed, occasionally fascistic) and anti-Trump (decent, moral, on a par with the warriors against Nazism). Even better, though, was the fact that orators at the funeral, including McCain's daughter Meghan and both Bush and Obama, used the church service to slam Trumpism, without explicitly mentioning it, and in the process to big-up what came before Trumpism, which of course was their rule, their politics, their establishment. The Washington political and media set might seem bitterly bipartisan, said the New Yorker writer, but it is also 'more united' in one important sense - 'in its hatred of Donald Trump'.

Hatred of Trump has become the moral glue of the bruised elites who have been either pushed aside or at least dramatically called into question by the populist surge taking hold in the West. And so motored are these people by the shallow moralism of Anti-Trumpism that they are happy to marshal even a life as complex and interesting and flawed as McCain's to the service of hurting Trump. A former Al Gore adviser, Carter Eskew, wrote in the Washington Post: 'In death, John McCain is about to exact revenge on Donald Trump.' Unwittingly revealing the Old Testament streak to the new elite religion of Hating Trump, Eskew said that as 'McCain ascends to heaven on an updraft of praise, Trump's political hell on Earth will burn hotter'. On why it suddenly started to rain when McCain's coffin was brought into the Capitol, a CNN journalist said: 'The angels were crying.' What century is this?

The religious allusions, the talk of vengeance against Trump, the misremembering of McCain's life so that it becomes a moral exemplar against the alleged crimes of Trumpism, exposes the infantile moralism of the so-called resistance. Albert Burneko, assessing some of the madder McCain commentary, says there is now a 'condition' that he calls 'Resistance Brain', where people display an 'urge to grab and cling on to anything that seems, even a little bit, like it might be the thing that Finally Defeats Donald Trump'. Even if the thing they're grabbing on to is actually a bad thing. Like a seemingly endless FBI investigation into the elected presidency. Or George W Bush, whose moral rehabilitation on the back of Anti-Trumpism has been extraordinary. Or neoconservatism: this was the scourge of liberal activists a decade ago, yet now its architects are praised because they subscribe to the religion of Anti-Trumpism. Being against Trump washes away all sins.

Some on the left have criticised the moral rehabilitation of McCain. 'Let's not forget that he wanted war with Iran and lots of other places too!', they cry. Yet the truth is they paved the way for his posthumous rebranding as one of the great Americans of the late 20th century. Since 2016 they have talked about Trump as a uniquely wicked president, a shocking aberration, the closest thing to Hitler since the 1930s. Their anti-Trump hyperbole, driven by their own political disorientation and increasing sense of distance from the electorate, has allowed any politician who is not Trump to mend their reputations and gloss over their own destructive behaviour. The transformation of Trump into the bête noire of all right-minded people, a pillar of unrivalled wickedness that we all have a duty to protest against in our pussy hats and orange wigs, has been a boon to the wounded pre-Trump political class keen both to whitewash its own crimes and to prepare for its return to the position of power it enjoyed before the electorate was corrupted by 'post-truth' hysteria.

'The resistance' is the fightback of the establishment against the people. As it is in Britain, too, where the rich and influential people fuelling the war on Brexit - the largest act of democracy in British history - like to refer to themselves as 'insurgents'. It is the height of Orwellianism for these acts of elitist reaction against democratic dissent to dress themselves up as forms of resistance. But it is not surprising. From the get-go, the so-called resistance has been more a pining for the old establishment, for Hillary's rule and for the continued domination of Britain by the EU, than it has been any kind of daring strike for a new politics. Look closely at the funereal elitism of McCain's burial and you will see one of the saddest and most striking political developments of our time: how self-styled radicals preferred to throw their lot in with the old establishment under the umbrella of 'the resistance' rather than heed ordinary people who were saying: 'Let's tear up the old order.'

Brendan O'Neill is editor of spiked. Find him on Instagram: @burntoakboy

[Sep 07, 2018] "Fake it till you make it" is the slogan they clutch tight to their heart the consequences however are far far reaching. My only hope is that should any of them leave here - they will get found out in a week.

Sep 07, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

Red1729 -> mattblack81 , 6 Sep 2018 09:16

Nice post and well put.
I am currently sitting in an office where 30% are blaggers of the highest order. They talk and kiss ass - but ultimately - deep down - know they cannot do they do not know the job. The responsibiltiy they have will make you shudder. I have told friends and they are visibly shaken that this can happen. But I think it is the way of the world at the moment. They dare not argue with me for full knowledge they will be sent packing, they already have been but on "minor" non work related items.

"Fake it til you make it" is the slogan they clutch tight to their heart the consequences however are far far reaching. My only hope is that should any of them leave here - they will get found out in a week.

Yes the likes of Trump are a reflection of just that.

The mad thing is - I now am of the belief that I could do that job ie President of the US. That is madness.

MonsieurPumpernickel -> teppictoo , 6 Sep 2018 09:16

to foil the wishes of the elected members of government.

No. Just one member. And that one member isn't a supreme leader. You need to look elsewhere for those types of leaders - they're usually standing next to Trump while he fawns over them.

Personally I'm grateful for a bureaucracy that frustrates bad ideas - wherever they come
from. That's part of their role.

HiramsMaxim -> SolentBound , 6 Sep 2018 09:16
"If the author of the Op-Ed piece is telling the truth,"

Ay, there's the rub. But, still no existential threat.

HiramsMaxim -> aussieinjapan , 6 Sep 2018 09:15
Yes, I do read The Guardian, and I never watch Fox (cut the cable years ago)
Gojettgo , 6 Sep 2018 09:15
Everything, with the exception of Steve Bannon in Michael Wolf's book, has been anonymous. These people write things, attribute them to, say, John Kelly, then Kelly says I NEVER SAID THAT and we're left to believe whom?

If there is genuine resistance inside the White House to Trump- If it is at all like anybody says- then I would imagine that a genuine top level appointee would go on camera, throw themselves on their sword, and speak to the American people. Until such a time I question what is Woodward's agenda? Do I trust Omarosa? Is Michael Wolf credible? What are their goals? I'm not blind but I want to see more than anonymous. And until then... I don't believe it.

Daniel Ferris -> bonhiver , 6 Sep 2018 09:15
When the crowd screams, just join them. It's tremendous fun!
MoonlightTiger , 6 Sep 2018 09:15
Its Pence and trump can't fire him
imperious -> Nialler , 6 Sep 2018 09:15
I'm not going to attempt to defend Trump.

I agree, I'd hate to defend him either, but you can't help thinking he has a point by calling this person gutless. Either stand up in public and say it or, if s/he really is working in the background to save us from Trump's excesses, then surely you're better off (and the country as a whole) staying there and not alerting him?

CaptainHogwash , 6 Sep 2018 09:14
In any functioning household the adults would have sent Trump to his (preferably padded) room
KevinFinn -> Nepochtitelnikov , 6 Sep 2018 09:14
"Maybe electing a big stupid toddler as president was a bad idea after all you guys"

Still better than the alternative!!

Take a look at how the donations to the Clinton Foundation have dried up since they no longer have any influence to peddle.

AbFalsoQuodLibet -> John Edwin , 6 Sep 2018 09:13
It's the New York Times, and no, they certainly haven't been against Trump since his election.

Their lead White House correspondent, Maggie Haberman, still writes extremely understanding pieces of Trump. And she's been covering the man for almost 15 years, so one would think she had the measure of the man long ago.

More importantly, the NYT threw the election for Trump by first exonerating Trump of any Russian collusion - which was false - and by covering the last-minute Comey statements on the Clinton emails in the worst negative light possible for the Democratic candidate. The NYT turned out to be wrong, but the damage was done.

The NYT even tried to put new faces on their opinion staff with close connections to actual American neo-Nazis (!) and only failed when old tweets came to light.

I'm not quite sure what the NYT is playing at - I guess it's easy to play the devil's advocate in artsy-fartsy, liberal New York - but they most certainly have not been against Trump from January 2017 at all.

charlieblue -> John Edwin , 6 Sep 2018 09:13
Does that tinfoil hat pinch?

Trump is not a freedom fighter, he is not your Great White Messiah, he's not an advocate for blue collar American citizens. Trump is a stupid, vulgar, greedy old fat racist who conned his way into the White House. There has been a lot of talk in all mediums about his unsuitability for the office, and his obvious ties to the Kremlin, but there has been no organized effort to remove him from office, no matter what you might have read on Qanon.

Daniel Ferris -> bonhiver , 6 Sep 2018 09:13
His deregulation tendencies clinch it. No one could deregulate like Hitler!
Sixp__ -> teppictoo , 6 Sep 2018 09:12
Garbage.

Treason is defined as "The betrayal of one's own country by waging war against it or by consciously or purposely acting to aid its enemies".

Mueller should be considering indicting Trump for treason.

cacaMBa -> ctdahle , 6 Sep 2018 09:12
You think the entire population is incapable of thinking about serious issues because there's some tittle-tattle on twitter? When did that happen? No-one would work because there's always fluffy kittens on YouTube.
Pushk1n , 6 Sep 2018 09:12
Its Probably Donald himself, he has form on spoofing , pretending to be someone else.

The giveaway is the bit where it says a lot of good stuff has been done.

It could also be Giuliano creating a myth that Donald is such a muddle head he could not possibly have conspired with anyone about anything .

PaulBowyer -> Graeme48 , 6 Sep 2018 09:12
But not when Russia (who back Assad) retaliated.

And Putin has the nuts on Trump.

[Sep 07, 2018] The Strange Timestamp In The New Novichok 'Evidence'

The plot now turned into smuggling operation run by older Skripal, possibly with some participation of this daughter. There were similar hypothesis about Litvinenko death -- that he was involved n polonium smuggling operation.
The behaviour of two people involved is unprofessional -- they took public transport so they were strictly bounded by train schedule. But that's logical if they were mules -- used for smuggling some substance to GB.
Notable quotes:
"... As with the fraudulent "Mueller investigation" in the US, despite the united efforts of government officials and a colluding, servile mass-media insisting that there's a (sinister Russian) "there" there, I foolishly thought that the overall absence of actual evidence, or even a plausible rationale connecting the dubious dots, was an overreach that would rapidly reach a fatal point of diminishing returns. ..."
"... But I underestimated the staying power of Big Lies, and the Big Liars who tell them ..."
"... Another oddity, the hotel the men stayed at, which was supposedly contaminated by Novichok as discovered on May the 4th - I did a news search for this hotel for the period March - September 4th and couldn't find a single reference to it being cordoned off or investigated by the police. Did they let people continue to use the hotel without telling them it could be contaminated? ..."
"... EVERYONE knows it's all BS. BUT, everyone talking about it gives it traction. I find this no different than the USA scoundrels worried about Syrian citizens in Idlib. ..."
"... The most worrying angle, as far as I am concerned, is the utter unbelievability of these stories. Exactly in line with 9/11 (three buildings knocked down by two planes), the Boston Marathon bombing, countless supposed multiple murders in the USA that do not seem to have taken place as officially described, MH17, and the Syrian "chemical weapons" attacks. ..."
"... So we had Bolton clearly stating in the media time and time again --- if chemical weapons are found in Idlib it would be a game changer to US policy in Syria, thus prompting those desperate cornered brutal rebels, offering a last way out of there situation. Now we have the prime minister. UK giving a statement about new evidence re Salisbury, chemical Russia. I would put a weeks wage on there being a chemical attack in Syria Idlib enytime now ! This is the UK prime minster aiding a massive brutal crime. ..."
"... It is obvious this whole novichok thing is a false flag op. The only question is why did the UK government did this. ..."
"... UK agencies have a long track record back to before WW2 running operations to get the US into a war. Their recent false flag operations inside the UK are to soften up the US/UK public in advance of the UK managed chemical weapon false flag attack in Syria they are clearly threatening in advance. ..."
"... There are times of the day when 2 passengers could arrive at an empty passport control, enter two different tunnels at the same time and arrive at exactly the same second at equivalent gates. Not many times, because it means that there is no queue at either tunnel. And 16:22 is not one of these times. ..."
"... You think that two members of a highly trained hit squad are going to walk through Heathrow together? You've got to be dreaming. Have you no concept of Operational Security? Dear oh dear... ..."
"... Historian and political analyst Vladimir Kornilov wrote an article for RIA Novosti comparing the famous 1924 SIS forgery, "Zinoviev letter", to the ongoing Skripal affair: https://ria.ru/analytics/20180905/1527822792.html ( machine translation ; the translation is good, except that "the Violins" should read as "the Skripals"). ..."
"... And with all due respect to b I don't think the airport pictures prove much. Who were these two? Why did they go to Salisbury? It looks too sloppy to be GRU. Russian Mafia contract killers is my guess. Unless the whole story is an elaborate MI6 concoction and all the CCTV photos are fake. ..."
"... A beautiful story, this Skripal affair...designed and timed to draw the public into emotional judgments, against reason and logic, immediately prior to the Russian pummeling of jihadi scum. One wonders what sort of blowback arises from such psychological conditioning. Hmmm... ..."
"... As I wrote before, the case reeks of planted evidence. A normal logic of investigation would be to inspect "probable leads" ASAP, and to perform tests ASAP. Instead, the famous door knob was tested with one month delay, and the hotel room, with two month delay. But planting evidence in an improvised mode requires planning and debates how to do it. The logistics of planting evidence are the most plausible explanation why it was done at the place where Skripals lived rather than close to the place where they together lost consciousness. Planting evidence in the hotel is simplicity itself, because it is very easy to do it in a secret lab. ..."
"... Two men (traveling together on Russian passports) are seen leaving a flight from Moscow and (in the most heavily CCTV monitored country in the world), immediately take public transport directly to and from the scene of the crime. ..."
"... Its very hard to imagine that any intelligence agency would be so sloppy as to use their own nationals, own passports, travel together, take direct flights from their own capital, use public transport, make no effort to avoid CCTV, casually dispose of vital evidence where it was certain to be found (a deadly poison left in a brandname perfume box at a charity donation bin? someone was going to open it eventually), etc. There are many more flaws but there are also more significant questions. ..."
"... Is there any strong reason to believe that US or UK intelligence were less likely to poison Skripal than Russia? Did he perhaps have evidence regarding the Steele Dossier they wanted to silence? If so, is there any reason we should not suspect the men in the picture of working for non-Russian intelligence who are deliberately trying to point the finger of blame at Russia? ..."
"... Personally, I think relity is much more mundane: the UK, given its objective reality post-Brexit, simply decided to (re)synchronize (update) its geopolitical position with the USA's. When the USA decided to jump into the madness of Russophobia after Trump's victory, the UK simply had to jump after because it is so dependent on the Americans they kinda didn't have a choice. ..."
"... They need something to try to put pressure on Russia. What tools do they have? "Skripal case", "Russian meddling in elections" (aka "Russian hackers"), "Russian doping", situation in Donbass, illegal detentions/abductions of Russian citizens (Ukraine did it with Kirill Vyshinsky in May, the US did it with Maria Butina recently etc.), cheap provocations with chemical weapons in Syria to accuse Assad/Russia. ..."
"... I would pick three directions - the "Skripal case", fake "chemical attacks" in Syria and deliberate aggravation of the situation in Donbass (terrorist act against DPR head Alexander Zakharchenko is just the beginning) are, apparently (in their opinion), the most effective measures to influence Russia to change its policy in Syria. These tools will be used. Simultaneously, or in a particular order. ..."
"... The key proposition that the police are asserting is that the Skripals were poisoned by 'delayed reaction'. The alleged suspects were out of Salisbury 3 hours before the Skripals exhibited signs of poisoning, nerve agents, however, act immediately. If the 'door handle theory' is not physically possible, which it is not, then that leaves out the assassin hypothesis. Most likely, as I have always said, is that this is about Sergei's skulduggery, he took delivery of the agent from these guys for eventual passing over to the White Helmets via their MI6 handlers. All went pear shaped because of a leaky bottle. Sergei realised something was wrong so hurried his meal so he could check it out, reached the park bench with Julia and the saw that the bottle was leaking and began to feel ill, Julia through the thing away and went down herself. ..."
Sep 07, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Ort , Sep 5, 2018 2:41:45 PM | link
FYI, Craig Murray has a new post on the same subject: "The Impossible Photo" .

Some commenters there who claim to be familiar with the airport have already noted that the men were surely exiting from parallel walkways ("channels"), and/or that the CCTV clock was simply malfunctioning.

Even if both claims are true, it doesn't explain away the remarkable congruence between the men's supposedly separate and independent progress through the walkways. Again, some commenters who purport to be personally familiar with the location assert that there are visible differences in the "two" walkways shown in the photos-- but to me they look identical.

This is still another dodgy, ambiguous piece of "evidence" to prop up the ongoing Big Lie. In the weeks following the Skripal event, the UK officials began making such ludicrous and incredible assertions that I naïvely expected that their colossal deceit would blow up in their faces sooner than later.

As with the fraudulent "Mueller investigation" in the US, despite the united efforts of government officials and a colluding, servile mass-media insisting that there's a (sinister Russian) "there" there, I foolishly thought that the overall absence of actual evidence, or even a plausible rationale connecting the dubious dots, was an overreach that would rapidly reach a fatal point of diminishing returns.

But I underestimated the staying power of Big Lies, and the Big Liars who tell them.

Teganjovnka , Sep 5, 2018 2:42:29 PM | link

Another oddity, the hotel the men stayed at, which was supposedly contaminated by Novichok as discovered on May the 4th - I did a news search for this hotel for the period March - September 4th and couldn't find a single reference to it being cordoned off or investigated by the police. Did they let people continue to use the hotel without telling them it could be contaminated? Did nobody notice police and men in hazmat suits there? Or was the name of the hotel d noticed?
ken , Sep 5, 2018 2:42:47 PM | link
Everyone,,, EVERYONE knows it's all BS. BUT, everyone talking about it gives it traction. I find this no different than the USA scoundrels worried about Syrian citizens in Idlib. Anything the West says or does is USDA Grade AAA horse hockey.
james , Sep 5, 2018 2:51:56 PM | link
and the timing for this now is?? c'mon..
Tom Welsh , Sep 5, 2018 2:58:07 PM | link
As to the UK government being able to fake the involvement of GRU agents - remember that Sergei Skripal himself was a British spy while working for the GRU. Why not others?

The most worrying angle, as far as I am concerned, is the utter unbelievability of these stories. Exactly in line with 9/11 (three buildings knocked down by two planes), the Boston Marathon bombing, countless supposed multiple murders in the USA that do not seem to have taken place as officially described, MH17, and the Syrian "chemical weapons" attacks.

The official explanations of all those stories are so weak and inconsistent that they would be rejected as plot lines for Dr Who or CSI. So what is their little game? I can think of two unpleasant possibilities.

  1. They are trying to calibrate exactly how grotesque a set of lies they can pass off without any public protest or outcry.
  2. They are compiling a list of the few people who are both intelligent and bold enough to point out the obvious discrepancies in public.
rndmdude , Sep 5, 2018 3:16:12 PM | link
Clearly those timestamps are planted on the pictures taken from screen.. Well maybe they thought that they only need 24 hours or something.
Hermius , Sep 5, 2018 3:37:26 PM | link
How do the British know they were false name?
Mark2 , Sep 5, 2018 3:45:06 PM | link
So we had Bolton clearly stating in the media time and time again --- if chemical weapons are found in Idlib it would be a game changer to US policy in Syria, thus prompting those desperate cornered brutal rebels, offering a last way out of there situation. Now we have the prime minister. UK giving a statement about new evidence re Salisbury, chemical Russia. I would put a weeks wage on there being a chemical attack in Syria Idlib enytime now ! This is the UK prime minster aiding a massive brutal crime.

This prime minister got in to power by a slim margine on the back of 3 false flag terror attacks 2 in London one in Manchester persuading the public to go for the get tough vote . Are we gulable or what ?

vk , Sep 5, 2018 3:56:16 PM | link
It is obvious this whole novichok thing is a false flag op. The only question is why did the UK government did this.
AriusArmenian , Sep 5, 2018 4:00:47 PM | link
UK agencies have a long track record back to before WW2 running operations to get the US into a war. Their recent false flag operations inside the UK are to soften up the US/UK public in advance of the UK managed chemical weapon false flag attack in Syria they are clearly threatening in advance.

This is beyond ridiculous that the dried out husk of the UK is beating its chest for war with Russia. I almost wish that they would get their war and be beaten flat.

Anonymous , Sep 5, 2018 4:04:48 PM | link
Just yesterday the Russian embassy in the UK released this statement: Today marks exactly six months since the Russian citizens Sergei and Yulia Skripal were taken to Salisbury District Hospital under obscure circumstances...
mdroy , Sep 5, 2018 4:06:42 PM | link
There are times of the day when 2 passengers could arrive at an empty passport control, enter two different tunnels at the same time and arrive at exactly the same second at equivalent gates. Not many times, because it means that there is no queue at either tunnel. And 16:22 is not one of these times.
TJ , Sep 5, 2018 4:07:41 PM | link
Putin's Novichok assassins identified. Pictured smiling, walking UK streets -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBaVe19amhU
Circe , Sep 5, 2018 4:12:03 PM | link
@16

My experience through those boarding bridges is that when boarding people walk normal pace and when exiting they do so at a faster pace down the bridge. I guess they want get to their luggage quickly.

Deltaeus , Sep 5, 2018 4:16:44 PM | link
Køn @ 14 "In fact anyone insisting that this timestamp is some gotcha loses a lot of credibility in my eyes."

Don't be a gallah, Køn! You think that two members of a highly trained hit squad are going to walk through Heathrow together? You've got to be dreaming. Have you no concept of Operational Security? Dear oh dear...

Lochearn , Sep 5, 2018 4:30:37 PM | link
The two strong-looking men take it in turns to carry what looks like a light backpack which is kind of odd in itself. If nerve gas had either been sprayed or smeared, one or both would have to have used a full protective suit, which consists of a bulky gas mask, jacket, trousers and substantial boots, which would have called for a much bigger backpack.
eyespy , Sep 5, 2018 4:33:10 PM | link
These photos show the same time but different locations. These are the security barriers between passport control and the baggage reclaim hall, there are a number of parallel gates that open automatically and are monitored by CCTV. The high resolution photos on the Met website show a different camera angles: The Petrov photo shows a white flat surface with a thin red stripe in the lower right corner and the top of the wall panels on the upper left. The Boshirov picture show a much wider red stripe (and no white surface) and the top of the panels is not visible. So you have two different gates entered at the same time.
Circe , Sep 5, 2018 4:44:50 PM | link
I'm no expert but allow me to play devil's advocate. What if they have two cameras on different angles with separate receivers in case one goes offline and their clock is not in sync so the second camera stamps same time when it's one second later on first. It just seems that if there was Photoshop involved they would think of changing the timestamp and inserting person in precisely same angle. Of course it doesn't explain why they would take pictures from two different cameras, but maybe face appeared clearer?
Norwegian , Sep 5, 2018 4:46:24 PM | link
One of the images may have been flipped: https://postimg.cc/image/n0oijez53/
rac , Sep 5, 2018 4:46:28 PM | link
Which airports have parallel disimabarkation tunnels then? I've been through 4 airports in 3 different countries in the past two months and each time it was a single tunnel. The only time I've seen two tunnels was when I was on a flight witha first class and even then it sort of branched off, near the door of the plane.
Pictorex , Sep 5, 2018 4:58:53 PM | link
Could it be the same corridor at two different locations at the same moment? This would explain the different angles of the cameras, which maybe were placed at a similar location to the railings etc.
Circe , Sep 5, 2018 4:59:23 PM | link
The door of the plane only accommodates one boarding bridge. Whoever has been through that airport can clear this up.
Circe , Sep 5, 2018 5:03:10 PM | link
@ 37

And how would they manage to pass at the exact same time through two different corridors?

S , Sep 5, 2018 5:10:46 PM | link
Historian and political analyst Vladimir Kornilov wrote an article for RIA Novosti comparing the famous 1924 SIS forgery, "Zinoviev letter", to the ongoing Skripal affair: https://ria.ru/analytics/20180905/1527822792.html ( machine translation ; the translation is good, except that "the Violins" should read as "the Skripals").
Køn , Sep 5, 2018 5:16:47 PM | link
Deltaeus... kindly please desist from insulting me in anitpodean. I make no assertions about trained or untrained hit squads or how they might behave. I am merely saying that anyone who thinks these timestamps represent anything suspicious or out of the ordinary is chasing their own tails.

The UK authorities present pictures of two men that travelled together on a flight from Moscow to London Gatwick. They went through parallel security sluices at the same time as they were walking together. At which point they were automatically photographed. It could just as easily have been that the time stamp was 1 second apart or even 2 seconds, or as is in fact the case, less than 1 second apart. NOTE: They may have triggered the automatic camera 999ms apart and still had the same timestamp so it is not strictly accurate to say that they were pictured at exactly the same time. The sluice appears to be about 4 metres long up to the point where the camera is triggered. I can walk 4 metres in less than 2 seconds. Which does not give a large time frame in which the walking pace of these two men can diverge.

There is so much more suspicious and contentious in todays UK announcement that it is ridiculous and counter productive to waste time on an easily explained time stamp.

james , Sep 5, 2018 5:18:44 PM | link
interesting article in russia on this ..it goes into the 2 men and what they know of them.. i ran it thru google translate..
Occidentosis , Sep 5, 2018 5:24:45 PM | link
They are not even trying anymore. I wonder if it has a direct correlation to the gullibility and intelligence of the West's public.
Norwegian , Sep 5, 2018 5:29:46 PM | link
This is an obvious fabrication of evidence. What they did was to take 2 photos from the same tunnel using the same camera at different times, but with the camera rotated about 20 degrees between them (notice the slightly different fish-eye lens distortions). Afterwards they flipped one of the images horizontally and added time-stamps to the images, but forgot to change the times between them.

I reversed the above process, aligned the images and made a GIF animation to prove it, see https://postimg.cc/image/x1ixk7r4x/

These people are stupid.

Alaric , Sep 5, 2018 5:36:15 PM | link
The timing is interesting. This is an attempt to buttress a future claim that Assad used chem weapons in Idlib. Lame. Who believes this stuff?

Good catch on the time stamp B.

karlof1 , Sep 5, 2018 5:52:02 PM | link
Gatwick not Heathrow. I highly suggest reading the comments to Craig Murray's blog post. Yes, as here there're some repetitive comments, but many good points are also raised. Perhaps the best is the lack of a "tag" identifying the camera location as at the security station you have many CCTV images that are very similar: Something like Jetway2 Customs4, or some such. IMO, the photos and story are contrived just as the rest of the hoax is--except for the fact that at least one person has died and likely the Skripals most certainly--she wanted to return to Russia and take Sergei with her.
uncle tungsten , Sep 5, 2018 6:00:03 PM | link
Well done UK comrades! So now you will release all the cctv from the original Salisbury incident so we can see every detail of the cunning ruskies eh! including the entire street videos, Mill pub and park videos too; and in high resolution this time please. Plus as the case is solved would you be so kind as to release the complete OPCW reports and the Porton Down reports too.

Can't have enough open government in the worlds foremost democracy now, can we?

Bart Hansen , Sep 5, 2018 6:03:11 PM | link
Sy Hersch blames the poisoning of Skripals on the Russian mafia who found out he was working with MI6 to reveal their European operations.

Could these two guys be of the Russian mafia? Them being not of the Russian IC might explain how the poison was less than lethal for all who came in contact.

dh , Sep 5, 2018 6:17:48 PM | link
@49 Sorry Sy but your theory doesn't hold up. Teresa May has said they were from the GRU. Here are her exact words...

"Based on this work, I can today tell the House that, based on a body of intelligence, the Government has concluded that the two individuals named by the police and CPS are officers from the Russian military intelligence service, also known as the GRU.

The GRU is a highly disciplined organisation with a well-established chain of command. So this was not a rogue operation. It was almost certainly also approved outside the GRU at a senior level of the Russian state."

Please try harder.

Laguerre , Sep 5, 2018 6:23:59 PM | link
dh
Sorry Sy but your theory doesn't hold up. Teresa May has said they were from the GRU.
Incredible. You believe that what May said is true, because she said it!
Angry Panda , Sep 5, 2018 6:27:41 PM | link
Here is an interesting side note, relating to the statement made by "Sue Hemming, the CPS director of legal services" (e.g. as in this Guardian piece .

We will not be applying to Russia for the extradition of these men as the Russian constitution does not permit extradition of its own nationals. Russia has made this clear following requests for extradition in other cases. Should this position change then an extradition request would be made.

This is a blatant lie. Russia's Constitution (available here in Russian states the following in Article 63, Section 2:

В Российской Федерации не допускается выдача другим государствам лиц, преследуемых за политические убеждения, а также за действия (или бездействие), не признаваемые в Российской Федерации преступлением. Выдача лиц, обвиняемых в совершении преступления, а также передача осужденных для отбывания наказания в других государствах осуществляются на основе федерального закона или международного договора Российской Федерации.

Which means (my own translation, but Google Translate is your friend if you do not believe me):

In the Russian Federation it is not permitted to extradite to other states individuals who are persecuted for their political beliefs, as well as for actions (or inaction) that are not deemed criminal in the Russian Federation. Extradition of individuals accused of committing a crime, as well as transfer of convicts to serve their sentences in other states, is performed on the basis of federal law or international agreements of the Russian Federation.

I must confess that I am not up on the most current version of Russian criminal law, but I believe "attempted murder utilizing a banned chemical weapon" does still qualify as a crime over there, and, moreover, is not considered "political beliefs". But, of course, an official extradition requests would entail also handing over the Crown's evidence against the accused, which...well, clearly there is so much of it that the Crown just doesn't wish to share any.

Anyhow, something to ponder.

Norwegian , Sep 5, 2018 6:28:15 PM | link
@47 karlof1
Perhaps the best is the lack of a "tag" identifying the camera location as at the security station you have many CCTV images that are very similar: Something like Jetway2 Customs4, or some such.
Se my post @45 (animation link). The camera location is the same in both images, they just rotated the camera, and flipped one image horizontally. If you download the MET "originals" and repeat what I did you find the match to be 100%. With identical time stamps, you know this is fabricated evidence. There is really no other plausible or (even possible) explanation.

It is virtually a confession from the police.

james , Sep 5, 2018 6:28:20 PM | link
i think dh is being sarcastic!
lysias , Sep 5, 2018 6:29:40 PM | link
It isn't the GRU (Glavnoye Razdevyvatel'noye Upravleniye, Main Intelligence Directorate) any more. In 2010, the name was changed to GU (Glavnoye Upravleniye, Main Directorate).
sejomoje , Sep 5, 2018 6:44:10 PM | link
"Norwegian" is correct. These pics have been tampered with bigly. "Kon" points out that one has a "red line" while one has a more solid looking red area. That is explained by the picture flipping and tilting. The red line is a framelike border of something. In one pic we see that part that's further from the camera and it looks like a slim red line. In the other pic we see the part of it which is closer to the camera, and is ALSO the corner of the line, so it appears to be something completely different when it's actually just 2 parts of the same puzzle.

My bet is that they were taken at different times of day, those tunnels always let natural light in. Unless a filter was intentionally applied(to further suggest two tunnels). There has been some photoshop fussing with the other identifying blobs - like the dirt on the camera lense and on the floors have been erased or blurred in the flipped pic! It's mad obvious.

Thanks Norwegian, I am posting that gif all over the place.

karlof1 , Sep 5, 2018 6:46:54 PM | link
Norwegian @53--

Thanks for your reply! Another comment mentioned the ability of such digital cameras to self-crop as both pics are cropped as someone provided the pixel dimensions. IMO, this is just more BigLie piled atop the preceding BigLies--doubling-down is the Neocon way after all. All timed with Idlib, no doubt. My question along with many others: Where are the other passengers having to travel through the same portals?

My explanation: Human images were added to an image(s) of an empty portal(s).

sejomoje , Sep 5, 2018 6:47:28 PM | link
"It is virtually a confession from the police". Yes, one doesn't know whether to be hopeful of a whistleblower, or just devastated at the incompetence of the so-called intelligence agencies behind these fabrications. It's hardly ever the former unfortunately.
Norwegian , Sep 5, 2018 6:49:18 PM | link
@57 sejomoje

Thanks. Please share far and wide.

Bart Hansen , Sep 5, 2018 6:52:04 PM | link
James, I agree about the sarcasm. But when May brings her "resolute" voice to bear, one bows before her gravitas.

After all, it is "highly likely" that Putin decided to queer the time-honored rule not to mess with a spy swap.

MadMax2 , Sep 5, 2018 7:02:05 PM | link
@Norwegian

Nice work with the gif, it appears exactly how you describe it... just amazing fuckery. Re: the timestamp, its so sloppy it pretty much a taunt: 'none of you sheep give a toss cos there's not a critical thought amongst ya'

sejomoje , Sep 5, 2018 7:06:07 PM | link
I agree Madmax, so much taunting in these things. This seems ahole 'nother level though. A virtual middle finger to the "conspiracy theorists".
dh , Sep 5, 2018 7:06:08 PM | link
@54 Thank you james. Obviously I am going to have to work harder on my sarcasm mode. Or maybe just quit posting.
Virgile , Sep 5, 2018 7:07:18 PM | link
How can May be so sure they belong to the GRU if they do not know the real identity of the two guys?
somebody , Sep 5, 2018 7:09:59 PM | link
Posted by: karlof1 | Sep 5, 2018 6:46:54 PM | 58

That is what it looked like to me (I work with photoshop), but then, why would they do this?

Russian journalists did find the corresponding flight bookings

Only reason would be that the people on the airport CCTV looked different from the people on CCTV in Salisbury.

So the departing image would have to be fake , too. Or it is real but of people who did not arrive the Friday before.

dh , Sep 5, 2018 7:22:25 PM | link
@65 Good question. And with all due respect to b I don't think the airport pictures prove much. Who were these two? Why did they go to Salisbury? It looks too sloppy to be GRU. Russian Mafia contract killers is my guess. Unless the whole story is an elaborate MI6 concoction and all the CCTV photos are fake.
jayc , Sep 5, 2018 7:27:59 PM | link
It may be the release of this material was scheduled to coincide with the US sanctions announced a few weeks ago, as those were said to be motivated by the Skripal case, but then held back for domestic political reasons, as May's position has weakened just the past two weeks. The bonus gratuitous finger-pointing at Corbyn would serve its purpose today or back in August.
Kane , Sep 5, 2018 7:33:18 PM | link
It all relies ultimately on" a body of evidence gathered by intelligence" and we know from recent past experiences of anglo/ ameriocan Intelligence that that cannot be trusted to be either valid or reliable .
cdvision , Sep 5, 2018 7:41:25 PM | link
dh @50 the Met policeman in charges of the investigation was asked at a press conference if he has any evidence the 2 in the images were GRU. He said NO. https://www.rt.com/op-ed/437729-skripal-poisoning-suspects-russia/
dh , Sep 5, 2018 7:57:09 PM | link
@69 Very honest of him. As with the original Skripal 'poisoning' it looks like another case of blaming Russia, i.e Putin, on flimsy evidence.
corkie , Sep 5, 2018 8:10:40 PM | link
Please people these photos were taken in exactly the same place. Nothing has been rotated. Notice on the right hand side there is a a small piece of a red security notice in the two photos. You will need to see the original police photos to see this. In only one of the four lanes is that possible. The one on the right as viewed from the exit. notice that this is the only lane where the steel handrail on the right extends so far on the white panel. Two different photos of the same lane with the same timestamp. ???? I'd say in both images are fake.
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.1570429,-0.1626642,2a,89.7y,192.36h,83.5t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s5aRAGxER5MlF-9kpw8ZyRQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
gully , Sep 5, 2018 8:16:00 PM | link
@norwegian
there are four staggered gateways. almost identical and with almost identical camera positions.

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.1570157,-0.1626565,2a,90y,182.51h,64.06t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1svV47ixbwSQnbQjlwIUFvnQ!2e0!3e2!7i13312!8i6656

so i am not 100% convinced by your theory.

MadMax2 , Sep 5, 2018 8:18:32 PM | link
Ort 17
Yes, it appears, like me, you are enjoying our latest visit to Wonderland where a great many things are possible... all you need to do is believe. Christopher Steele has done a smackdown job of reinvigorating the Non Fiction shelves at my library. Who knew high treason and golden showers could ever work together.

A beautiful story, this Skripal affair...designed and timed to draw the public into emotional judgments, against reason and logic, immediately prior to the Russian pummeling of jihadi scum. One wonders what sort of blowback arises from such psychological conditioning. Hmmm...

Julian , Sep 5, 2018 8:21:13 PM | link
I wouldn't say these images prove anything either way. Perhaps they are doctored, but what if they were from customs entry points side-by-side? The two men have been walking together so presumably they'd go through the customs walkways at exactly the same time. These are not photos from the walkway off the plane - that much is clear.

On the spectrum of what is going on you have to go from one end (all this evidence is completely fabricated - these might be images of 'dead men' so no one can step forward to personally refute them) all the way over to the Brits are telling the truth.

Most likely, it's somewhere in the middle, but impossible to say exactly where.

Pft , Sep 5, 2018 8:25:58 PM | link
Even without the time stamp discrepancy I am at loss to understand what the photos prove. Absolutely nothing. I suppose they just want to keep the story in the publics mind in preparation for the next "Russia did it " false flag. Coming soon to a theater near you. Ever notice September-November makes for the most exciting times? No wonder many season premiers start in winter/spring now
Panopticon , Sep 5, 2018 8:28:57 PM | link
Why now, when the CCTV 'evidence' must have been available for months? Just like the Douma pantomime and subsequent bombing of Syria, this is clearly setting the scene for a western assault on Idlib, possibly this weekend.

https://syrianobservatoryforhumanwrongs.wordpress.com/2018/07/09/an-idiots-guide-to-the-skripal-affair/

Yeah, Right , Sep 5, 2018 8:39:00 PM | link
@71 Nice theory, except that the security notice in those police photos appear to be mounted far too low to correspond with their location in that google maps image, even on the one lane that you nominate. You can see that best in the "Boshirov" photo where the top-left of the notice can be seen.

In the google maps image the signs are at head-height, so a line drawn from the ccd to a "pretend eyeline" in Google Maps would suggest that the security camera would be recording the bottom-left of that sign, not the top-left corner.

That walk-though was recorded in September 2017.
The security footage was filmed in March 2018.

It isn't a stretch to believe that between these two dates the signs were moved lower and closer to the guardrail.

Anyone in Ol' Blighty want to walk up to those gates at Gatwick and tell us?

Julian , Sep 5, 2018 8:41:03 PM | link
Re: Posted by: Bob | Sep 5, 2018 2:13:08 PM | 7

Presumably they were on the same flight? If they have identified the flights - presumably the Russians would be able to ID these guys at the other end - in some way at least.

gully , Sep 5, 2018 8:46:19 PM | link
@77
different but pretty similar gateway @gatwick airport with lower mounted signs. imo this is where the pictures were taken:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.1611377,-0.1773794,2a,75y,163.05h,72.21t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sVwMbNKWSg8PjuWKakaOeaA!2e0!3e2!7i13312!8i6656

Brian , Sep 5, 2018 8:46:30 PM | link
Russia needs to do more to get back their national Yulia Skripal . She's been brazenly abducted by UK regime. If Brit Sh disappear na Russian imagine the fate of Julian Assange if he steps out of that embassy
Jen , Sep 5, 2018 8:47:26 PM | link
Corkie @ 71, Gully @ 72:

If you compare the photos you posted with the photos in Bernhard's post, you will notice something missing from the photos in Bernhard's post.

Where are the security doors with the white-barred red circles on the glass in Bernhard's photos?

Yeah, Right , Sep 5, 2018 8:51:35 PM | link
@71 Just to be clear about what I am saying, because my previous post may be confusing: if you look at the two security shots and note the top-left corner ("Boshirov") and left-flank ("Petrov") of those signs then both suggest that the bottom-left corner of that security notice will be just above (as in almost but not quite level-with) the top of the guardrail.

Yet if you look here:
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.1570429,-0.1626642,2a,75y,198.05h,91.84t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s5aRAGxER5MlF-9kpw8ZyRQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
you can see that the bottom-left of the security sign is nearly a metre above the level of the guardrail.

Unless there is massive foreshortening and distortion in those security camera feeds then I would suggest that those signs have been moved between September 2017 and March 2018.

In which case, of course, your observation is not going to be valid.

Brian , Sep 5, 2018 8:52:13 PM | link
Two Russian nationals . Brits decide they are Russian assassins . Were they seem committing an assassination ? Imagine any Russian tourist now could be labelled an assassin and abducted like Yulia Skripal and held incommunicado . Russia should take Britain to court over this behaviour
Piotr Berman , Sep 5, 2018 8:54:10 PM | link
As I wrote before, the case reeks of planted evidence. A normal logic of investigation would be to inspect "probable leads" ASAP, and to perform tests ASAP. Instead, the famous door knob was tested with one month delay, and the hotel room, with two month delay. But planting evidence in an improvised mode requires planning and debates how to do it. The logistics of planting evidence are the most plausible explanation why it was done at the place where Skripals lived rather than close to the place where they together lost consciousness. Planting evidence in the hotel is simplicity itself, because it is very easy to do it in a secret lab.

OTH, pictures have semi-plausible explanation and Ruslan Boshirov is not a frequent name, probably Muslim (Boshir/Bashir is an Arabic name, ev/ov is a Russian ending).

Bran , Sep 5, 2018 9:08:08 PM | link
Two men (traveling together on Russian passports) are seen leaving a flight from Moscow and (in the most heavily CCTV monitored country in the world), immediately take public transport directly to and from the scene of the crime.

Its very hard to imagine that any intelligence agency would be so sloppy as to use their own nationals, own passports, travel together, take direct flights from their own capital, use public transport, make no effort to avoid CCTV, casually dispose of vital evidence where it was certain to be found (a deadly poison left in a brandname perfume box at a charity donation bin? someone was going to open it eventually), etc. There are many more flaws but there are also more significant questions.

Is there any strong reason to believe that US or UK intelligence were less likely to poison Skripal than Russia? Did he perhaps have evidence regarding the Steele Dossier they wanted to silence? If so, is there any reason we should not suspect the men in the picture of working for non-Russian intelligence who are deliberately trying to point the finger of blame at Russia?

Leaving that aside, is there any reason not to think the men n the picture may have been members of organized crime for some reason upset with Skripal? This might explain the lack of professional tradecraft.

In short, even if we accept that the people in the photographs were responsible for the poisonings, there has been no evidence presented to link them to the Russian government other than the fact that they travelled directly from Moscow on Russian passports, a fact that should actually be seen as making it less likely they were Russian agents.

MadMax2 , Sep 5, 2018 9:17:42 PM | link
Fyi, there are 2 terminals at Gatwick, north and south. Though, as Pft, Julian and others have said, what do these pictures really say at this stage...? Only guilty by the logic of highly likely.
Jen , Sep 5, 2018 9:27:29 PM | link
Piotr Berman @ 84:

"Ruslan Boshirov" is supposed to be Tajik. I noticed the last name "Boshirov" too ("Boshir" = Tajik rendering of "Bashir" or "Bashar").

Bashar / Bashir is a common boys' name and surname in some Muslim countries (but maybe not Iran). Also a common surname among Christian communities in Lebanon. A former governor of New South Wales had that surname. Both her parents were of Lebanese background.

Ruslan is a common boys' name in Russia and countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union. It is derived from the Turkic name Arslan. As Tajiks are an Iranian-speaking people, I am not sure if the name is popular with them. From what I have been able to find out online, Tajiks seem to prefer Persian names.

Hmm, someone in Britain didn't do their homework terribly well.

Dr. Wellington Yueh , Sep 5, 2018 9:36:16 PM | link
Heh...it seems to be working. We're now talking about this instead of the Idlib campaign.
vk , Sep 5, 2018 9:41:30 PM | link
@ Posted by: Bart Hansen | Sep 5, 2018 6:03:11 PM | 49

Well, if Hersh has the evidence for this, I won't be doubting him. I'm sincerely open to any good theory -- the only thing I'm certain is that it wasn't the Kremlin: there's simply no gain for Russia in this.

Personally, I think relity is much more mundane: the UK, given its objective reality post-Brexit, simply decided to (re)synchronize (update) its geopolitical position with the USA's. When the USA decided to jump into the madness of Russophobia after Trump's victory, the UK simply had to jump after because it is so dependent on the Americans they kinda didn't have a choice.

Maybe, in a parallel universe, if Corbyn had won the 2017 snap election, we could visualize a different position from the British. But that door is definitely close now -- and even if he had won, we have to face the fact the UK is simply the natural ally of the USA in the European Peninsula (the most stable one -- of course there are valuable American satrapies in Poland, the ex-Yugoslavian republics not-named Serbia, the Baltic States and the new, desintegrated, nazi-Ukraine; but they are of the military outpost-type, nearer the "danger").

alaff , Sep 5, 2018 9:41:50 PM | link
This is nothing more but an endless conglomeration of lies. Not just mistakes or fallacies, but a deliberate lies. It is clear for all adequate people who have brains.

Why it is now the British authorities decided to shake off the dust from the forgotten "Skripal case" and to revive it? Well, Syria is the answer, of course. In particular, upcoming (in fact, already started) Idlib liberation.

They need something to try to put pressure on Russia. What tools do they have? "Skripal case", "Russian meddling in elections" (aka "Russian hackers"), "Russian doping", situation in Donbass, illegal detentions/abductions of Russian citizens (Ukraine did it with Kirill Vyshinsky in May, the US did it with Maria Butina recently etc.), cheap provocations with chemical weapons in Syria to accuse Assad/Russia.

I would pick three directions - the "Skripal case", fake "chemical attacks" in Syria and deliberate aggravation of the situation in Donbass (terrorist act against DPR head Alexander Zakharchenko is just the beginning) are, apparently (in their opinion), the most effective measures to influence Russia to change its policy in Syria. These tools will be used. Simultaneously, or in a particular order.

By the way, one must not exclude possible chemical provocations in Ukraine. Ukrainian terrorist regime has not used it yet, but all is possible. Especially now, after "Skripal case" is revived and some fake "chemical attacks" are definitely will happen in Idlib (giving FUKUS a "legitimate reason" to launch aggression on Syria again). The CyberBerkut hacker team (a kind of Fancy Bears) recently reported that chemical provocations in Ukraine (in Donbass) are in preparation stage, and that American instructors participate in organizing of this provocation. Not a fact that this will happen, of course, but still this possibility must not be ruled out.

As for these two men, "discovered" a half of a year after the incident... For any sane person, the proposal to believe that these two are GRU agents is an insult to his intellectual abilities. "GRU agents", who flew direct(!) Flight from Moscow, and flew back the same direct(!) Flight. "GRU agents", who in general did not even tried to disguise themselves, and, as if specifically, tried to be caught by all surveillance cameras in the UK. "GRU agents", who used their passports(!) instead of coming to the UK secretly (for example, through Ireland). "GRU agents", who left the "Novichok" traces wherever possible, and then carelessly threw the bottle on the street. "GRU agents", who for some reason decided to use such a strange, dangerous and uncomfortable method as "poisoning the victim with a chemical warfare agent(!)" instead of easily and unnoticeably shoot a victim from a gun with a silencer (or strangle the victim at home). "GRU agents", who did not notice anything for eight(!) years, and then suddenly woke up and realized that they released Skripal from Russia "without punishment"...

I can continue this endlessly. The longer the list of lies becomes, the longer the list of disproof.

james , Sep 5, 2018 9:43:49 PM | link
@48 uncle tungsten.. lol.. so true!

@65 virgile.. that is what some of us have concluded from the start.. phony passports or phony characters - hard to know what one is looking at here, isn't it?

@83 brian.. it is the court of public opinion, brought to us via the western msm... guess who is winning? msm with ignoramus's in tow, or not? - i agree with your comments @85.. no evidence whatsoever, but that doesn't stop the russian smearing, which may be the main motive here on the part of the uk..

@84 piotr.. i agree - planted and long after the fact..

@87 jen.. that is what i got from someone sharing a russian story via translation - which i shared @42..


from my link at 42 which is a translation from a russian news outlet.. see the link @42 for more..

"According to official data, Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov flew on March 2, 2018 from Sheremetyevo to London Gatwick Airport. According to Fontanka, 150 passengers were registered for the flight of Aeroflot SU2588.

The suspects bought tickets on foreign passports of the "65" series, the document numbers differ by the last digit: ... 1297 and ... 1294.

Apparently, in the hands of Boshirov and Petrov already had return tickets, and for two consecutive flights from Heathrow to Sheremetyevo - evening on March 4 and night 5-th. The British authorities believe that the suspects used the first.

There are almost no open sources of information about Boshirov. According to the "Fontanka", he was born on April 12, 1978 in Dushanbe, was registered in Moscow in a 25-storey house on Bolshaya Naberezhnaya street.

In 2015, he was brought into two executive proceedings for automobile fines received with a difference of three days, on July 20 and 23. The oddity is that the production numbers are not in order. The first assigned 433048, the second - 432322, although they were issued by one unit - the interdistrict department of bailiffs to collect administrative fines number 1 in Moscow. On the portal of the magistrates of the capital there are no cases of administrative violations against Ruslan Boshirov. Also it is not in the database of executive production.

"Fontanka" phoned long-term residents of the "Boshiro" house on the Great Embankment. They live on the same stairwell. "In the apartment you named, only an elderly woman lives," the correspondent replied. "We carry her money, she collects for cleaning the cleaner." A man was never seen in the apartment and was not seen at the entrance. We can only assume that this is the son of the hostess, who is registered at the address, but who has never lived here. "

Boshirov's network activity is no different either. The pages created under this name and last name in 2014 are empty. On Facebook, Boshirova has one friend registered, a girl from Ukraine. The profile "VKontakte" contains information that Boshirov graduated in 2004 from the geography department of Moscow State University in the direction "Hydrology of the land".

jayc , Sep 5, 2018 9:52:40 PM | link
The shoulder bags held by the two "suspects", as seen in the CCTV stills from the two airports, are not seen in the Salisbury CCTV footage from the Sunday. Instead, in Salisbury, the suspect in the black jacket wears a light-coloured backpack on arrival at the train station, and the suspect in the blue jacket wears what appears to be that same backpack in the stills from an hour later as they return to the Salisbury train station. Presumably the backpack carried the applicator and then was later ditched.... but looking at the applicator itself it is hard to fathom how it would not leak, either in flight or in the backpack, even inside its alleged box. The Met police report claims that the bottle allegedly discovered later "contained a significant amount of Novichok."

On the Sunday morning in question, the suspects allegedly walked directly to the Skripal household from the train station (approximately 25 minutes), poisoned the Skripal door within minutes of arrival, then immediately returned to the train station. This operation was allegedly facilitated by a 90 minute "reconnaissance" mission the previous day, although there are no CCTV images from this mission. Why and how the men knew they would not be seen at the doorway on Sunday is not explained.

According to the Met Police report, swabs at the suspect's hotel room were done on May 4. Porton Down alone confirmed the presence of Novichok from these swabs. The Met report adds: "Two swabs showed contamination of Novichok at levels below that which would cause concern for public health." ???? As far as I am aware, that Russian suspects may have flown in and out of Britain on that weekend has been discussed since March, but a positive ID of "Novichok" in a suspect's London hotel room is new information - strangely never referred to before. The otherwise entirely circumstantial case depends on the presence of the chemical in the hotel room, as there is otherwise no direct connection of these men to "Novichuk", perfume bottles, or the Skripal house (the CCTV footage can only place them in the "vicinity").

This case retains its improvised nature. Something seems to have been botched somewhere in the original March events, and the proclamation of Russian guilt was announced too soon and too unequivocally to back down from. The Novichok in the perfume bottle and now the two alleged suspects with the alleged trace Novichok in the hotel room appear to be semi-clumsy additions to the evidence designed to buttress the faulty story after the fact.

blues , Sep 5, 2018 9:53:01 PM | link
This is simply another fine example of the Theory of Tells. The Dark Agents NEVER allow the strange evidence that they release to the public to be totally coherent or rational. They always insert impossible artifacts. If the narratives they create were reasonably coherent, they would never have the proper effect of causing profound cognitive dissonance in the mind of the public, they could therefor never achieve the necessary degree of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

That would invite people to ask pertinent questions. There must always be a few strategic red herrings. So they always leave strategic tells.

Burt , Sep 5, 2018 10:24:20 PM | link
They are different photographs a few seconds apart as can be seen by the figures at the very back of the jetway who move a tiny bit closer to the camera after the first suspect passes.

However, the timestamps are then fake and represent a mistake on the part of the person *creating* the evidence. He fucked up and put the same stamp on both pictures.

These pictures were taken a short time apart, but not at the time stamped... i.e. boarding a different flight. A different flight. The timeline is hokum . They did not fly in and out at the times stated or on the flights stated.

It is even conceivable that the person cooking the books wanted to include something that would show it was hokum, that he or she wasn't completely on board. I wonder who it was?

Circe , Sep 5, 2018 10:43:32 PM | link
@81

The doors that have those "Do not enter" symbols facing us or the greeting area are open in b's pictures because the individuals have just passed thru them. Therefore you only faintly see the grey back of the symbols.

Also, note how in one Google photo the steel guardrails are on paneling right beside the security signs while in the other Google photos it shows the guardrail separated from the security signs with an empty panel except for the corridor furthest to the right. So the correct photo is the former one and the individuals went through two exactly similar side-by-side corridors simultaneously, which means the photos might be legit. Also, there are at least two or more cameras on the ceiling facing corridors which explains the different angles. It looks like photos are authentic.

TheBAG , Sep 5, 2018 10:52:08 PM | link
Dr. Wellington Yueh @88

Great observation! Lot of stuff going on in Idlib being reported in Al Masdar News...

Circe , Sep 5, 2018 10:55:10 PM | link
@86 Well that explains why in one photo there's an extra glass panel and in the other the panel with the guardrail is beside the panel with the security signs! There are two sets of corridors in the airport.

The photos in the article are Therefore most likely authentic.

Phillip O'Reilly , Sep 5, 2018 11:28:16 PM | link
The key proposition that the police are asserting is that the Skripals were poisoned by 'delayed reaction'. The alleged suspects were out of Salisbury 3 hours before the Skripals exhibited signs of poisoning, nerve agents, however, act immediately. If the 'door handle theory' is not physically possible, which it is not, then that leaves out the assassin hypothesis. Most likely, as I have always said, is that this is about Sergei's skulduggery, he took delivery of the agent from these guys for eventual passing over to the White Helmets via their MI6 handlers. All went pear shaped because of a leaky bottle. Sergei realised something was wrong so hurried his meal so he could check it out, reached the park bench with Julia and the saw that the bottle was leaking and began to feel ill, Julia through the thing away and went down herself.
Phillip O'Reilly , Sep 5, 2018 11:56:02 PM | link
Interesting that Theresa May brought up and then dismissed the possibility of a rogue operation. This tells me she is determined to pin the blame on Putin no matter what. I am sure that the smarter elements of British security have a pretty good idea of what has occurred. They will say nothing and they would be quite happy to keep Theresa Mays narrative out in the public domain. Cooperation from Sergei is guaranteed, he has been caught once again in a betrayal, as he always does because he is one of lifes losers.

[Sep 06, 2018] Breaking!! Trump Treated as Mental Patient, Staff Steals-Hides Papers "Out of Patriotism"

Notable quotes:
"... WARNING: This story contains graphic language. ..."
Sep 06, 2018 | www.veteranstoday.com

Even "Bad Dog" Mattis says he's nutzo

By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor - September 4, 2018 25 2633

By Jeremy Herb , Jamie Gangel and Dan Merica , CNN

"He's an idiot. It's pointless to try to convince him of anything. He's gone off the rails. We're in crazytown," Kelly is quoted as saying at a staff meeting in his office. "I don't even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I've ever had."

(CNN) WARNING: This story contains graphic language.

President Donald Trump 's closest aides have taken extraordinary measures in the White House to try to stop what they saw as his most dangerous impulses, going so far as to swipe and hide papers from his desk so he wouldn't sign them, according to a new book from legendary journalist Bob Woodward.

Woodward's 448-page book, " Fear: Trump in the White House, " provides an unprecedented inside-the-room look through the eyes of the President's inner circle. From the Oval Office to the Situation Room to the White House residence, Woodward uses confidential background interviews to illustrate how some of the President's top advisers view him as a danger to national security and have sought to circumvent the commander in chief.

Many of the feuds and daily clashes have been well documented, but the picture painted by Trump's confidants, senior staff and Cabinet officials reveal that many of them see an even more alarming situation -- worse than previously known or understood. Woodward offers a devastating portrait of a dysfunctional Trump White House, detailing how senior aides -- both current and former Trump administration officials -- grew exasperated with the President and increasingly worried about his erratic behavior, ignorance and penchant for lying.

Chief of staff John Kelly describes Trump as an "idiot" and "unhinged," Woodward reports. Defense Secretary James Mattis describes Trump as having the understanding of "a fifth or sixth grader." And Trump's former personal lawyer John Dowd describes the President as "a fucking liar," telling Trump he would end up in an "orange jump suit" if he testified to special counsel Robert Mueller.

[Sep 06, 2018] Sounds like a palace coup to me: first, news of the forthcoming Woodward book (and excepts); then-coincidentally-today's "anonymous" and 'Gutless' article in the Times

NYT practices digital lynching...
Sep 06, 2018 | theguardian.com

Michronics42, 6 Sep 2018 06:46

Sounds like a palace coup to me: first, news of the forthcoming Woodward book (and excepts); then-coincidentally-today's "anonymous" and 'Gutless' article in the Times.

As far as I'm concerned, this entire hellish administration is sheer "madness" and a very clear indication that this country is in its agonizing twilight.

Each and every senior official in this administration is an enabler of this "shithole" human being and current president, so there is no such thing as bravery here, just covering one's tail if a coup were to occur.

Not once, as has been mentioned here and elsewhere, has this 'Gutless' wonder decried the immorality of family separation, employing white racists as policy makers, shredding the social safety net for millions of this nation's most vulnerable; an outlandish Pentagon budget and etcetera.

What is solidly on display in this unfolding miasma is a firmly entrenched kleptocracy, enabled and supported by U.S. corporations and the death of democracy.

TheChillZone , 6 Sep 2018 06:36
The Woodward book seems to me just more kiss and tell stories of the Michael Wolff ilk (remember him?). The juiciest quotes - Trump being called an idiot by Kelly - is denied by Kelly himself and most of the others are ex-employees.

A better - more objective - book would get past the unconventional, apparent chaos of the Whitehouse and perhaps investigate whether Trumps methods have or will bear fruit.

That perhaps, as David Lynch said, traditional politicians can't take the country or the world forward - they can't get things done anymore because they are afraid of political consequences or media backlash. Trump and his ego doesn't seem to care about that - is that a good thing or a bad thing? Trump has turned everything on it's head and liberals find themselves allying with establishment politicians and business groups. It is a fascinating period of political change and time - and better journalism - will eventually judge Trump more objectively.

SolentBound -> uncleike , 6 Sep 2018 08:26
"The point of the op-ed is to continue to build popular support for removal of Trump by confirming the more detailed account of Woodward."

It was submitted to the Times before info on Woodward's book came out.

TezB -> HippoMan , 6 Sep 2018 08:22

'Pence... not a dangerous, mentally ill megalomaniac'

Pence is more dangerous – make that outright terrifying – than Trump. Yes. Trump is a senile vulgarian oaf – but he doesn't really believe in anything and is motivated only by his greed and pathological need for self-aggrandizement. He's mentally incompetent in a very obvious way, which renders him laughably inept at trying to bring his more odious policy objectives to fruition (in fact, inept at everything, pretty much).

Pence is far more sinister, because he's a dementedly fanatical believer in a fundamentalist and authoritarian mutation of religion – a crazed zealot. While sometimes able to imitate the superficial demeanour of a person of sound mind, he is in truth utterly deranged.

While Trump lies and denies obvious specific facts almost as a reflex, he doesn't really sustain his warped world view consistently or with conviction that lasts longer than it takes to play his next round of golf.

Pence vehemently espouses a whole alternative reality based upon his religious fantasies, and believes he has a mission to impose his delusional ideas in a punitive and repressive manner on his country's entire population, permanently. He may have the cunning to be chillingly effective at realising his most ghastly ambitions.

Trump represents a temporary aberration; a collective brain fart. Pence could be the instigator of a new dark age for the USA

Meerkatz , 6 Sep 2018 08:17
Having seen this type of character assassination visited on Bill and Hillary Clinton, character assassination before any reported crimes have been proven against them or for that matter any sexual misdemeanors as president are proven, what exactly is going on here?

I totally disagree with this type of thing even if the person is someone I don't understand much. The world has come to a dangerous place where digital lynching without reference to law seems to be the prevailing modus operandi.

Jessp , 6 Sep 2018 08:13
A little word of warning. Be careful what you wish for. If Don can be removed prior to the next election, (and I don't believe that would happen), then Mike Pence takes the reins. He has just as many crazy notions as his current boss, but is an experienced politician who knows the ins and outs of Congress. He may get more of the programme through than little Don can. And that would not be good.
BritinNormandy -> NameIcallme , 6 Sep 2018 08:12
He's done it before. Lots of times. Example: one of his posts back in April: "Trump is a genius. Nobody can take him down, the man is a fighter, you punch him and he'll punch you back 10 times harder. The FBI, Democrats and MSM have tried to take him down since he decided to run for president, yet he's standing tall and with a 50% approval rating."

There's no point in engaging in discussion with folks like that ...

malibudebumbum , 6 Sep 2018 08:09
Welcome to postmodernist politics folks. It will continue to degenerate until, in despair, people turn toward an orderly system of politics; the Chinese system, the Russian system or even a coherent religious system. Counsellors will be on hand for those who feel hurt or upset by the return to authoritarianism -- they will be able to get great treatment in re-education centres. Just a matter of time before our current system just crumbles from within.
sl0thp0pe -> littlepump , 6 Sep 2018 08:08
Yeah they're sucking it direct from Ayn Rand's teat. Bunch of sociopaths. And I think most political scientists are well aware that citizens united was the death of American democracy as a representative political system. The illusion of functionality has collapsed under the weight of corruption. Trump is really just a symptom of that. A giant orange enema of the state.
ID3866144 -> stuart255 , 6 Sep 2018 07:51
LOL. The west is about to collapse. There is no more money to finance the Ponzy Scheme of the everlasting growth you seem to think is natural. while everyone is distracted in this dualistic BS, the planet is slowly shutting down her ressources.

The Russia after years of sanctions have developed an economy that make them less dependant on other countries. So They will probably less affected by what is coming.

Unless you live in you own bubble, maybe you noticed that Occidental countries have become empty shells...gutted from their skills at making stuff. It is all virtual production now...all banking stuff, numbers insurance...most skilled stuff are either in Germany or in Asia...what is going on?

stuart255 -> HippoMan , 6 Sep 2018 07:47
Trump is a megalomaniac I agree, but he is not dangerous and is not mentally ill. Mental illness is a real thing and you shouldn't casually trivialize it in this way.

Finally anyone who runs for office as President of the USA is by very definition a pretty extreme megalomaniac. So you have two points that are not real and/or could be considered erroneous discrimination and one point that is a prerequisite for any POTUS candidate.

Looking for a reason to impeach him is a ridiculous back to front thing to do and is itself proof that any impeachment will fail. To impeach someone you must first start with a very obvious reason.

It's simply not possible to impeach a president because you don't like their politics or their personality. This whole searching for a reason to impeach is itself evidence that any impeachment is politically motivated and the very optics of this serve only to strengthen Trump's own political support in direct opposition.

Trump is President because the DNC was captured by very stupid and deeply corrupt people.

[Sep 06, 2018] Use of rather uncommon "lodestart" trace can be a false flag operation similar to Russian traces in DNC hack

I think people attributing the letter to Pence are confused as for which side the rogue CIA operatives are on :-)
Sep 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

j. von Hettlingen , 6 Sep 2018 07:16

Many say Mike Pence could have been the one behind the op-ed, because the unidentified author singled out the late John McCain as "a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue." The word isn't that commonly used. But Pence has used the word with some regularity. Yet the word could have been a ploy to divert attention from the real author, who claimed to support many of the GOP policies – "effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more."
No doubt the current crisis works for Pence: "Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president." Of course he and the GOP didn't want to "precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until -- one way or another -- it's over." But they don't want Trump to finish his term and hope that he'll soon be gone.
Finisterre -> Carl123 , 6 Sep 2018 06:53
Pepperoni Pizza is absolutely correct. We DON'T know his staff are going behind his back - we have this anonymous bollocks as the totality of our evidence.

This op-ed is going to absolutely confirm, in the eyes of Trump supporters, all his whines about being thwarted by the Deep State. It's going to increase his support among the crazies, and it's also useful for the Republicans who want to ditch him in favour of Mike Pence.

The whole thing stinks to high heaven and for the Democrats or the 'resistance' to see it as some kind of bonus is insane. Even if you take it at face value it's a disgusting piece of authoritarian, we-know-best hypocrisy. If you look at its actual effects, the net result is not likely to benefit the forces of sanity in any way.

The media's complacency about all of this, and their failure to actually report on the Republican trajectory and the bigger picture, is criminal. Instead we get YET ANOTHER bit of 'oh look the wheels are just about to come off the bus!', and all the while the Republicans are gerrymandering and purging voter rolls like crazt before the midterms, and of course refusing to change their unaccountable electronic voting machines and - did you read THIS one in the news? - blocking a bill which would have audited the election results.

Tl;dr: The US, and by extension the planet via environmental destruction and possibly war on top, is utterly fucked.

CharlieApples -> solarights , 6 Sep 2018 06:48
I think you've confused whose side the CIA are on :-)

[Sep 06, 2018] What is wrong with you American people ? Why such level of jingoism and fake national security concerns is possible ?

Notable quotes:
"... Mr anonymous also concedes that the administration has done some good things .. like .. a robust military. Now call me old fashioned, but having a military with twice(three times .. four times) the capability of the rest of the world put together and spending enough yearly to run the whole of Africa .. probably India too, just on a means of killing .. and this even before the US military became .. robust?.. ..."
Sep 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

Blenheim , 6 Sep 2018 06:10

Mr anonymous also concedes that the administration has done some good things .. like .. a robust military. Now call me old fashioned, but having a military with twice(three times .. four times) the capability of the rest of the world put together and spending enough yearly to run the whole of Africa .. probably India too, just on a means of killing .. and this even before the US military became .. robust?..

What is wrong with you people .. national security?.. Laughable .. when is your security ever, ever, ever threatened! And yet people starve, people don't have clean water to drink ..
Perhaps were the US to help lift the basic burdens of millions who have bugger all, then there wouldn't be so many suposed 'enemies'. I do believe film maker Michael Moore has voiced this very same thing .. but then, what purpose all those shiny new expensive killing machines?..
Something is seriously wrong in America .. and it ain't just Trump!

CosmoCrawley , 6 Sep 2018 05:56
This is a very poor op-ed piece. Simply calling the President "a crazy loon " isn't political analysis, or at least not the sort of political analysis I would be willing to pay for. Nor do I think the thesis that certain members of the administration are busy trying to shore up their reputations in the face of a sinking presidency holds water. Firstly, unless the current investigations provide incontrovertible evidence that the President was engaged in criminal activity I don't think there is any change that he will be impeached. Secondly, if you wanted to protect your reputation surely the thing to do would be to resign and maintain a dignified silence while you are writing your memoirs. Or if you really were part of a secret clique protecting the American constitution against a reckless President you would keep quiet and get on with your important business. It seems to me that this anonymous piece was either a clumsy attempt to further damage the President or a sophisticated attempt to galvanise his support base by "proving" that the President is being undermined by unelected traitors. Or something else completely might be going on. That's why I would like to read a thoughtful opinion piece by an informed observer.
StGeorge , 6 Sep 2018 05:51
Sounds like there's a treasonous public servant there, doing their best to subvert the will of the people. And of course loudly supported by the squealing hard left guardian mob. Looking at the type of far left fascists crawling‭ out of the woodwork, I would say Trump is provoking utter derangement in all the right people.
Densher -> kent_rules , 6 Sep 2018 05:45
"the corrupt metropolitan elites have swindled them again"
-Who appointed these 'corrupt metropolitan elites' if it was not Trump himself? Who are these people-Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross and Steve Mnuchin- quite apart from Jeff Sessions and the now disgraced Michael Flynn? Trump appointed them, they weren't forced on him by the "corrupt metropolitan elites". Is Trump to be given a free pass for his own mistakes?
Throwawaythekey , 6 Sep 2018 05:44
What many commentators here seem to fail to recognise, because of their political bias I suppose, is that there is a ground swell of dissatisfaction with the political consensus that has seen the working class and lower middle class disenfranchised or at least their perceived interests ignored. As a result, populist ideologies, as espoused by Steven Bannon, and others, and exemplified by leaders like Donald Trump have thrown away the rule book with all its aims to support the extremely wealthy and have reached out to those that want jobs before green policies, law and order before gender diversity programs and so on.
I doubt that many of the readers here will receive the message but we are witnessing a revolution that I see as significant as the rise of the sans-culottes in the early part of the French Revolution. That didn't end well for the sans-culottes or their aims but we can hardly blame them for trying. Today the retrenched car worker in the US can hardly be blamed for being unhappy that the CEO of a car company receives a huge pay rise and bail outs from the government and similar stories in other areas.
Vive la revolution.
Stone Jones , 6 Sep 2018 05:43
Some of this stuff is clearly nonsense. Example: the insider claimed Trump is an admirer of dictators:

"In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And yet the forthcoming Bob Woodward book claims Trump told his defence secretary he wanted to kill Assad:

Donald Trump ordered his defence secretary to assassinate Syria's president Bashar al-Assad and "kill the f****** lot of them" in the leader's regime, in the wake of a chemical attack against civilians, according to a new book.

Defence secretary James Mattis is said to have told the president during a phone call he would "get right on it" before hanging up the phone and instead telling an aide: "We're not going to do any of that. We're going to be much more measured." In the wake of the chemical attack in April 2017, the president's national security team developed options that included the more conventional airstrike that Mr Trump eventually ordered.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The anti-Trump lot can't have it both ways. He can't be a fan of dictators but also want to kill them! It's clear there is lying or exaggeration on both sides. The people out to impeach Trump (or sell books!) will lie too.

[Sep 06, 2018] Was John McCain The Senior Official in The Trump Administration Who Wrote The Infamous Letter by Adam Garrie

This is plausible as McCain was involved in Steele dossier saga
Notable quotes:
"... In this sense, the author may well have felt the need to plant the red herring in question in this very part of the letter so as to create the 'Pence diversion' in the very place that one might otherwise being looking for someone associated with John McCain. ..."
"... The next logical question would then be: how did he do it? The answer to this is quite simple. Just as he meticulously arranged his own funeral prior to his death, apparently down to the seating arrangements for guests, McCain could have easily handed the letter to a highly trusted associate or family member who would then present the letter to an ideological ally at the infamously anti-Trump New York Times. ..."
"... It is therefore not beyond the realm of the possible to consider that the infamous letter was not actually drafted by a Trump White House official but instead was drafted by John McCain as the final salvo in his long war against Donald Trump. Stranger things have happened and this without a doubt is a strange era in American political life. ..."
Jan 01, 2018 | www.eurasiafuture.com
Not only was John McCain never in the Trump administration but at the time when the infamous anonymous New York Times op-ed from a reportedly disgruntled senior Trump White House official was published, John McCain had been dead for eleven days. Therefore to suggest that McCain wrote the letter isn't to suggest a belief in time travel or the supernatural. Instead it is to suggest a calculated scheme from beyond the grave by a man who famously choreographed every detail of his own funeral during his final weeks or possibly months of life.

Whoever wrote the letter was clever enough to include in the text a red herring designed to convince the public and possibly Donald Trump himself that the letter's author was none other than Vice President Mike Pence. But as Andrew Kroybko rightly illustrates in his piece on the subject in Eurasia Future, Pence would never be so foolish as to include in the letter the word "lodestar" as the highly obscure word is frequently used by Pence while not being a part of the daily vocabulary of most English speakers anywhere in world. Such an obvious giveaway could have only been planted by design considering that whoever did write the letter most likely penned the most important epistle in his or her life.

Making matters more curious, the word "lodestar" appears in the ed-op in the paragraph where the author negatively compares Trump with John McCain. This itself is an indication that McCain and his much anticipated death were clear sources of inspiration for the content of the letter and the timing of its publication. The paragraph in question reads as follows:

"We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example -- a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them".

In this sense, the author may well have felt the need to plant the red herring in question in this very part of the letter so as to create the 'Pence diversion' in the very place that one might otherwise being looking for someone associated with John McCain.

While not casting judgment on the reality that John McCain was indeed a surviving prisoner of war, it is factually true that unlike many prisoners of war, McCain tended to publicly revel in his status as a survivor and even used the fame derived from his harrowing experience to launch a long political career. Because of this, it is not by any means unreasonable to think that the kind of egotism one associates with McCain might have led him to devise such a 'parting shot' at his powerful and more politically successful rival. This was after all the man who flew to all corners of the earth even in old age to rally various armed rebellions of one sort or another from Georgia and Ukraine to Syria and Iraq. It is also instructive to realise that McCain is the man who without a second thought handed the hoax Steele dossier to then FBI Director James Comey and later said the following about his actions:

"I discharged that obligation, and I would do it again. Anyone who doesn't like it can go to hell".

The next logical question would then be: how did he do it? The answer to this is quite simple. Just as he meticulously arranged his own funeral prior to his death, apparently down to the seating arrangements for guests, McCain could have easily handed the letter to a highly trusted associate or family member who would then present the letter to an ideological ally at the infamously anti-Trump New York Times.

While Donald Trump has suggested that he will use legal pressure to force the New York Times to divulge the source of the letter, such a matter could take years of back and forth in the courts, by which time the relevance of the letter would have been greatly reduced by the passage of time. In any case, as the drafting of the letter may well be a seditious or treasonous act, unlike an actual member of the Trump White House staff, McCain is currently in a place where no judge, jury or executioner can reach him.

It is therefore not beyond the realm of the possible to consider that the infamous letter was not actually drafted by a Trump White House official but instead was drafted by John McCain as the final salvo in his long war against Donald Trump. Stranger things have happened and this without a doubt is a strange era in American political life.

[Sep 06, 2018] The "Deep State" Planted A Red Herring To Set Up A Showdown Between Trump Pence

Notable quotes:
"... The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution. ..."
Sep 06, 2018 | www.eurasiafuture.com

The Mainstream Media's latest reports that internet sleuths think that Vice President Pence probably wrote yesterday's "Resistance" op-ed in the New York Times because of the anonymous writer's use of the word "lodestar" is nothing more than a red herring by the "deep state" to provoke a showdown between Trump & Pence ahead of this November's midterms and possibly even push the President to trigger a constitutional crisis by trying to fire him.

Everyone in the world is wondering which high-level official in the Trump Administration penned yesterday's "Resistance" op-ed in the New York Times, but the Mainstream Media is running with the story that internet sleuths think that it's Vice President Pence because of the anonymous writer's use of the word "lodestar", which he's publicly used on at least five separate occasions before. He probably wasn't behind the piece, however, but his idiosyncratic use of a relatively uncommon word was likely picked up by the "deep state" well in advance and deliberately inserted into the preplanned infowar provocation that was just published in order to pin the blame on him as part of a larger scheme to sow discord in the White House.

The "deep state" wants to provoke Trump to unleash one of his famously scathing and unscripted tweets against Pence, which would irreparably ruin their professional relationship but also throw the President into a constitutional conundrum because he can't legally fire his Vice President no matter how much the two might come to hate each other as a result of this devious psy-op. Running with this scenario for a moment, whether Trump tries to fire a publicly insulted Pence or seethes with rage because he can't, the resultant turmoil that would play out in the Mainstream Media would be enough to seemingly confirm all of the accusations of chaos that Bob Woodward alleged in his upcoming book, therefore potentially tipping the midterm electoral scales to the Democrats' favor.

Reviewing the fast-moving developments of the past couple of days, it's inarguable that The Establishment planned for all of this to happen far in advance as part of their plot to undermine Trump ahead of the midterms, with the phased escalation of their infowar campaign so far moving from Woodward's book to the anonymous "Resistance" op-ed and finally to the claims that Pence is somehow involved because the unknown author cleverly inserted a very uncommon word that he's known to occasionally use. While Trump will probably display more common sense that he's regularly given credit for and likely won't fall for the trap of jumping the gun and publicly condemning Pence, he's in a dilemma when it comes to identifying who's behind the scandalous op-ed.

Trump has no choice but to order an immediate investigation on national security grounds after it was revealed that a high-ranking official in his administration is supposedly conspiring with others to sabotage the policies of the democratically elected and legitimate President of the United States, but this is predictably being framed by the Mainstream Media as a "witch hunt" that they'll soon try to compare to a "Stalinist purge" (if they haven't done so already). Actually, they seem to secretly hope that Trump becomes paranoid to the point of overreacting and punishes or publicly embarrasses innocent members of his staff in order to counterproductively create an internal "Resistance" where there might not have even really been one to begin with.

Whatever ends up happening, and the latest "deep state" coup attempt against Trump has only just begun, this much is certain, and it's that the inclusion of the word "lodestar" was a red herring designed to manipulate the President's mind after he finds out that the Mainstream Media is promoting internet sleuths who apparently "discovered" that Pence used this uncommon word on several occasions. The whole point at this stage is to provoke Trump, who they mistakenly believe to be an unhinged maniac incapable of controlling his actions and prone to lashing out at whoever and whenever at the slightest hint of an affront, to publicly attack Pence and then trigger a constitutional crisis by trying to fire him, all of which would be taking place in front of the entire nation ahead of the upcoming midterms.

Trump's much too clever to fall for this trap, and the fact that something so blatantly obvious has been attempted speaks to just how much his opponents underestimate him, but he nevertheless needs to be careful that he doesn't take action against any innocent members of his administration who might get caught up in the current investigation to find the traitor and their ilk, if they even exist. This means that he has to trust whoever it is that he's dispatched to dig up evidence on this issue and won't doubt the findings that they present to him, after which he'll have to determine whether they're also being set up just like Pence is or if they're actually guilty as charged. Trump's toughest tests are therefore ahead of him and could make or break his presidency in the coming days.

DISCLAIMER: The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution.

[Sep 06, 2018] Is there is anything to admire in Trump record?

Sep 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

pretzelattack -> Densher , 6 Sep 2018 05:38

he reversed the war in afghanistan? drones? did he prosecute bankers? does he favor increasing offshore drilling? now it looks like he's renegotiating clinton's nafta and pushing for some version of obama's trade treaties. trump is the invading python, and the democrats and establishment republicans are the alligators; whichever wins, the small furry animals get eaten. i just hope they don't start world war 3 while they're settling things--trump looks to be doubling down on obama's syria policy too, and support of the current ukrainian government.
Bazster -> ImMovedToAdd , 6 Sep 2018 05:33
'Fraid so. Every new generation of neocons regurgitates the same discredited lies from the previous generation, and suckers believe them all over again. Even the title "neocon" or "neoliberal" is a lie: there's nothing new about them.
Densher -> simonsaint , 6 Sep 2018 05:25
Trump was not only openly attacked during the nomination process, the Republican Party nominee who was selected to fight Obama in 2012 -Mitt Romney- delivered a savage attack in which he described Trump as a con-man and a chronic liar -yet the same people who could, there and then have told Trump to get lost backed him. Trump has been attacked from the start and every time and all of the time said to his attackers: so what? I dare you to remove me from the nomination, I dare you to remove me from the Office of President. This is a man who is challenging the governance of the US in a manner no other President has done before, and so far, he is still winning. That is the scary part.
Freedom4UK2019 -> Jessie Welsh , 6 Sep 2018 05:24
Well of course you could list other benefits in addition to some I listed like. "transform the economy, get people back in work.

Peace on the Korean peninsula, end of US involvement in SYRIA etc...

" You could get a nice big house like Obama got. Or $500K for doing speeches for Russian companies like Bill Clinton did.

RichWoods -> raindancer68 , 6 Sep 2018 05:24
Trump is threatening Deep State corruption by placing his own family members in positions of power and profiting from charging the nation for his and his staff's repeated use of Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago? That's a bizarre way of draining the swamp.
ID6314850 -> raindancer68 , 6 Sep 2018 05:19
The US political system has many flaws, not least that the President can be elected on an apparent electoral college landslide while losing the popular vote. But then again no country's political system is perfect, human nature being what it is.
However, Trump is clearly not up to the job. Not by intellect, understanding of world affairs, honesty, temperament, respect for the law, nor constitution. The list goes on frankly.
The system has gone bad. Trump hasn't "drained the swamp", he's made it far deeper. That said, "the system" such as it is should work in the hands of honest men and women of integrity. The trouble is they're few and far between in the GOP as it wilfully ignores issues in which they would be clamouring for a Democrat president to be impeached.
I sincerely hope the GOP get a thrashing in the mid-terms which may, just may, give them pause for thought. A Democrat Congress might also actually hold Trump to account. The only danger there is that he lashes out with even less self control.
Dangerous times.

[Sep 06, 2018] I Know Who the "Senior Official" Is Who Wrote the NY Times Op-Ed by Paul Craig Roberts

Notable quotes:
"... Dear Readers: Your website needs your support. It cannot exist without it. ..."
"... When you read my column below, you will read what you cannot find anywhere else–a clear, concise, correct explanation of who the author is of the New York Times op-ed falsely attributed to a "senior Trump official." ..."
"... Anonymous dissent has no credibility. ..."
"... A real dissenter would use his reputation and the status of his high position to lend weight to his dissent. ..."
"... thwart his and his fellow co-conspirators' plot by revealing it! ..."
"... This forgery is an attempt to break up the Trump administration by creating suspicion throughout the senior level. If Trump falls for the New York Times' deception, a house cleaning is likely to take place wherever suspicion falls. A government full of mutual suspicion cannot function. ..."
"... Why is resolving dangerous tensions a "preference for dictators" and not a preference for peace? ..."
"... removing a president for his unwillingness to worsen the dangerously high tensions between nuclear powers? ..."
Sep 06, 2018 | www.paulcraigroberts.org

Dear Readers: Your website needs your support. It cannot exist without it.

When you read my column below, you will read what you cannot find anywhere else–a clear, concise, correct explanation of who the author is of the New York Times op-ed falsely attributed to a "senior Trump official."


I know who wrote the anonymous "senior Trump official" op-ed in the New York Times. The New York Times wrote it.

The op-ed ( http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50194.htm ) is an obvious forgery. As a former senior official in a presidential administration, I can state with certainty that no senior official would express disageeement anonymously. Anonymous dissent has no credibility. Moreover, the dishonor of it undermines the character of the writer. A real dissenter would use his reputation and the status of his high position to lend weight to his dissent.

The New York Times' claim to have vetted the writer also lacks credibility, as the New York Times has consistently printed extreme accusations against Trump and against Vladimir Putin without supplying a bit of evidence. The New York Times has consistently misrepresented unsubstantiated allegations as proven fact. There is no reason whatsoever to believe the New York Times about anything.

Consider also whether a member of a conspiracy working "diligently" inside the administration with "many of the senior officials" to "preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting" Trump's "worst inclinations" would thwart his and his fellow co-conspirators' plot by revealing it!

This forgery is an attempt to break up the Trump administration by creating suspicion throughout the senior level. If Trump falls for the New York Times' deception, a house cleaning is likely to take place wherever suspicion falls. A government full of mutual suspicion cannot function.

The fake op-ed serves to validate from within the Trump administration the false reporting by the New York Times that serves the interests of the military/security complex to hold on to enemies with whom Trump prefers to make peace. For example, the alleged "senior official" misrepresents, as does the New York Times, President Trump's efforts to reduce dangerous tensions with North Korea and Russia as President Trump's "preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un" over America's "allied, like-minded nations." This is the same non-sequitur that the New York Times has expressed endlessly. Why is resolving dangerous tensions a "preference for dictators" and not a preference for peace? The New York Times has never explained, and neither does the "senior official."

How is it that Putin, elected three times by majorities that no US president has ever received, is a dictator? Putin stepped down after serving the permitted two consecutive terms and was again elected after being out of office for a term. Do dictators step down and sit out for 6 years?

The "senior official" also endorses as proven fact the alleged Skripal poisoning by a "deadly Russian nerve agent," an event for which not one scrap of evidence exists. Neither has anyone explained why the "deadly nerve agent" wasn't deadly. The entire Skripal event rests only on assertions. The purpose of the Skripal hoax was precisely what President Trump said it was: to box him into further confrontation with Russia and prevent a reduction in tensions.

If the "senior official" is really so uninformed as to believe that Putin is a dictator who attacked the Skripals with a deadly nerve agent and elected Trump president, the "senior official" is too dangerously ignorant and gullible to be a senior official in any administration. These are the New York Times' beliefs or professed beliefs as the New York Times does everything the organization can do to protect the military/security complex's budget from any reduction in the "enemy threat."

Do you remember when Condoleezza Rice prepared the way for the US illegal invasion of Iraq with her imagery of "a mushroom cloud going up over an American city"? Iraq had no nuclear weapons, and everyone in the government knew it. There was no prospect of such an event. However, there is a very real prospect of mushroom clouds going up over many American and European cities if the crazed Russiaphobia of the New York Times and the other presstitutes along with the Democratic Party and the security elements of the deep state continue to pile lie after lie, provocation after provocation on Russia's patience. At some point, the only logical conclusion that the Russian government can reach is that Washington is preparing Americans and Europeans for an attack on Russia. Propaganda vilifying and demonizing the enemy precedes military attacks.

The New York Times' other attack on President Trump -- that he is unstable and unfit for office -- is reproduced in the fake op-ed: "Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president," writes the invented and non-existent "senior official."

Americans are an insouciant people. But are any so insouciant that they really think that a senior official would write that the members of President Trump's cabinet have considered removing him from office? What is this statement other than a deliberate effort to produce a constitutional crisis -- the precise aim of John Brennan, James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, the DNC, and the New York Times. A constitutional crisis is what the hoax of Russiagate is all about.

The level of mendacity and evil in this plot against Trump is unequaled in history. Have any of these conspirators given a moment's thought to the consequences of removing a president for his unwillingness to worsen the dangerously high tensions between nuclear powers? The next president would have to adopt a Russophobic stance and do nothing to reduce the tensions that can break out in nuclear war or himself be accused of "coddling the Russian dictator and putting America at risk."

The reason that America is at risk is that the CIA and the presstitute media have put America -- and Europe -- at risk by frustrating President Trump's intention to reduce the dangerous level of tensions between the two major nuclear powers. Professor Steven Cohen, America's premier Russian expert, says that never during the Cold War were tensions as high as they are at this present time. As a former member of The Committee on the Present Danger, I myself am a former Cold Warrior, and I know for a fact that Professor Cohen is correct.

In America today, and in Europe, people are living in a situation in which the liberal-progressive-left's blind hatred of Donald Trump, together with the self-interested power and profit of the military security complex and election hopes of the Democratic Party, are recklessly and irresponsibly risking nuclear Armageddon for no other reason than to act out their hate and further their own nest.

This plot against Trump is dangerous to life on earth and demands that the governments and peoples of the world act now to expose this plot and to bring it to an end before it kills us all.

[Sep 06, 2018] If NYT made up fake news pretending to be a senior white house official, OR, there really is somebody in his inner circle anonymously stabbing POTUS in the back, it is very bad news and there should be serious hell to pay

This is a classic color revolutions trick, usually called "Diplomats letter". Used many times in many color revolutions worldwide. In EuroMaydan it preceded "sniper massacre".
Notable quotes:
"... I think he has to do it ASAP because the NYT editorial looks like an act of desperation and I expect Mueller to pile on soon, so beat them to the punch and put them on their heels for a change. No doubt, this is hardball. ..."
Sep 06, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Lumberjack -> chunga Thu, 09/06/2018 - 15:31 Permalink

History repeats. Be ready.

nmewn -> Lumberjack Thu, 09/06/2018 - 15:54 Permalink

Yeah I was thinking the same thing as chunga.

Now that ridiculously juvenile NYT's "op-ed" starts to make sense...they were given a heads up on the GJ proceedings against this "stellar public servant" and wanted to knock it off the front page.

UmbilicalMosqu -> nmewn Thu, 09/06/2018 - 16:03 Permalink

..."stellar public serpent"

chunga -> nmewn Thu, 09/06/2018 - 16:28 Permalink

What's in my head is declassifying a bunch of nasty shit.

Either way, if NYT made up fake news pretending to be a senior white house official, OR, there really is somebody in his inner circle anonymously stabbing POTUS in the back, it is very bad news and there should be serious hell to pay. I do not like nor trust a single one of his appointees so I'm guessing it's somebody. It would be suicide for NYT getting caught making this all up, that would be risky business IMO.

This isn't a complicated timeline of he said, she said over this piss dossier that glosses people's eyes over. This is very simple stuff people can understand and Trump could make a very rational case that the swamp is so damn deep he can't even put together a staff without it being infiltrated and say "here look" and declassify shit that would encompass ALL the recent scandals and ensnare the fake news experts colluding to make this happen.

That would light a big fire in DC that would be very hard to put out.

nmewn -> chunga Thu, 09/06/2018 - 16:45 Permalink

Well personally I don't believe for one second that the "op-ed" was anything other than Fake Nuuuz.

As far as ordering the release/declassification of everything the DoJ & FBI has on the Hillary Dossier I believe it's getting close but it's a hardball kind of swamp, it would be before the midterms for maximum effect I would think.

chunga -> nmewn Thu, 09/06/2018 - 16:51 Permalink

I think he has to do it ASAP because the NYT editorial looks like an act of desperation and I expect Mueller to pile on soon, so beat them to the punch and put them on their heels for a change. No doubt, this is hardball.

[Sep 06, 2018] An Army Of #Resisters Dozens Of White House Staffers Say Wish We Had Written NYT Op-Ed

Sep 06, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

As was no doubt their intent, the mainstream media has succeeded in overshadowing the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing with a flurry of stories about a mutiny allegedly brewing inside the West Wing that has set more than a few tongues wagging about the possibility of Trump's cabinet invoking the 25th amendment (an eventuality that was once reportedly discussed by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon ). But while White House officials have already vehemently denied the quotes gathered by Bob Woodward in the strategically leaked (to his own newspaper) excerpts from the Watergate reporter's upcoming book, speculation is shifting to who might be the mystery author of a scathing NYT op-ed reportedly penned by a "senior administration official" that portrays Trump as unfit for office.

Fortunately for Trump, several voices of moderation have come forward to condemn the attacks (amid speculation that the Times' "senior" source may not be so senior after all). But this incipient backlash didn't deter Axios (a media org that, like the Times, is notoriously critical of Trump) from piling on with a story about President Trump's intensifying distrust of those in his inner circle. Trump, Axios claims, is "deeply suspicious of much of the government he oversees" from federal agency grunts all the way up to those privileged few with unfettered access to the Oval Office. The piece even goes so far as to quote yet another anonymous "senior administration official" as saying that "a lot of us are wishing we'd been the writer."

"I find the reaction to the NYT op-ed fascinating - that people seem so shocked that there is a resistance from the inside," one senior official said. "A lot of us [were] wishing we'd been the writer, I suspect ... I hope he [Trump] knows - maybe he does? - that there are dozens and dozens of us."

And in case you couldn't figure out why this is important, allow Axios to elaborate:

Why it matters: Several senior White House officials have described their roles to us as saving America and the world from this president.

A good number of current White House officials have privately admitted to us they consider Trump unstable, and at times dangerously slow.

But the really deep concern and contempt, from our experience, has been at the agencies -- and particularly in the foreign policy arena.

In what was perhaps the most bombastic claim included in the piece, Trump reportedly once carried around with him a list of suspected leakers. "The snakes are everywhere but we're getting rid of them," he reportedly told Axios.

For some time last year, Trump even carried with him a handwritten list of people suspected to be leakers undermining his agenda.

"He would basically be like, 'We've gotta get rid of them. The snakes are everywhere but we're getting rid of them,'" said a source close to Trump.

Trump would often ask staff whom they thought could be trusted. He often asks the people who work for him what they think about their colleagues, which can be not only be uncomfortable but confusing to Trump: Rival staffers shoot at each other and Trump is left not knowing who to believe.

And just in case you haven't read enough about Trump's purported obsession with "snakes" - here's some more.

"When he was super frustrated about the leaks, he would rail about the 'snakes' in the White House," said a source who has discussed administration leakers with the president.

"Especially early on, when we would be in Roosevelt Room meetings, he would sit down at the table, and get to talking, then turn around to see who was sitting along the walls behind him."

"One day, after one of those meetings, he said, 'Everything that just happened is going to leak. I don't know any of those people in the room.' ... He was very paranoid about this."

All of this reinforces the idea that Trump truly believes that there is an organized "deep state" conspiracy to take him down. Of course, what Axios neglects to say, is that he's not wrong.


Adolfsteinbergovitch Thu, 09/06/2018 - 11:55 Permalink

Idiots giving the stick to get beaten.

Epic Darwin moment.

Now is an excellent time to re-watch the Caine mutiny. Very inspiring.

css1971 -> Adolfsteinbergovitch Thu, 09/06/2018 - 13:17 Permalink

Free to quit at any time.

ardent -> css1971 Thu, 09/06/2018 - 13:17 Permalink

Snakes or Patriots?

That is the question .

IridiumRebel -> ardent Thu, 09/06/2018 - 13:18 Permalink

Sedition

toady -> IridiumRebel Thu, 09/06/2018 - 13:18 Permalink

They say it publicly? Mass firings dead ahead!

Otherwise, they're a bunch of backstabbing cowards.

Hopefully this is a major step in the "drain the swamp" meme. Gotta make sure to include a "never work in/for the government again" clause.

wee-weed up -> toady Thu, 09/06/2018 - 13:23 Permalink

"Wish We Had Written NYT Op-Ed"

Brave talk whilst hiding behind anonymity...

But none have the balls to tell that to Trump to his face!

cheoll -> wee-weed up Thu, 09/06/2018 - 13:31 Permalink

"Trump flopped as an owner of a professional football team, effectively killing not only his own franchise but the league as a whole... He bankrupted his casinos five times over the course of nearly 20 years. His eponymous airline existed for less than three years and ended up almost a quarter of a billion dollars in debt. And he has slapped his surname on a practically never-ending sequence of duds and scams (Trump Ice bottled water, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump magazine, Trump Mortgage, Trump University -- for which he settled a class-action fraud lawsuit earlier this year for $25 million)."

And Kruse didn't even mention The Donald's sixth bankruptcy, the one he filed for the debt-ridden Plaza Hotel in 1992.

So, people, what do you think Trump, the bankrupter-in-chief, is gonna do to the good old US of A?

Shitonya Serfs -> cheoll Thu, 09/06/2018 - 13:36 Permalink

If he bankrupts us out of the debt we owe to the (((FED))), I would accept that.

toady -> Shitonya Serfs Thu, 09/06/2018 - 13:41 Permalink

That's one of my major hopes for this presidency. That Trump can get us through the coming bankruptcy without a large scale war/depression breaking out.

He has the experience after all....

JimmyJones -> toady Thu, 09/06/2018 - 13:43 Permalink

So more anonymous sources....

"one senior official said"... oh really, why should I believe that? When something is obvious BS, repeating it just makes you look foolish, it doesn't make it true, Hitlers propaganda play book is dated and no longer functions in the age of the internet. At least we know that Operation Mocking Bird is alive and well.

HopefulCynical -> JimmyJones Thu, 09/06/2018 - 13:46 Permalink

It wasn't his playbook.

It was his description of the playbook of those seeking to destroy Germany.

The same ones currently seeking to destroy (what's left of) America.

Slaytheist -> HopefulCynical Thu, 09/06/2018 - 14:24 Permalink

^Underrated post^

Stan522 -> Slaytheist Thu, 09/06/2018 - 14:43 Permalink

This just shows us how they keep recycling the same shit bureaucrat's over and over again and they become an animal that lives within and outside of whomever is POTUS.

Perhaps it's time to burn the whole thing down and start over again.....

Oldwood -> Stan522 Thu, 09/06/2018 - 14:49 Permalink

They love and expouse democracy until it yields the incorrect result. Like everything else, just another useful tool

King of Ruperts Land -> Oldwood Thu, 09/06/2018 - 15:04 Permalink

Mutiny is a hanging offence.

swmnguy -> King of Ruperts Land Thu, 09/06/2018 - 15:57 Permalink

On a Navy ship at sea, sure. But flipping off your boss; not so much. Even going upside your boss's head with a 2"x4" is just assault.

We don't live in a Monarchy.

King of Ruperts Land -> swmnguy Thu, 09/06/2018 - 16:13 Permalink

We the People are not so schooled in the finer points. We have rope and can see treason with our own eyes, and figure to do our part, be civic minded for the greater good and all.

Not Goldman Sachs -> King of Ruperts Land Thu, 09/06/2018 - 16:42 Permalink

Same swamp, different snakes.

dirty fingernails -> Oldwood Thu, 09/06/2018 - 15:27 Permalink

That is our gov in a nutshell!

wadolt -> dirty fingernails Thu, 09/06/2018 - 15:53 Permalink

SPAMMER IN CONVERSATION WITH HIMSELF

Cheoli / King Rupert

Adolfsteinbergovitch/ HopefulCynical

>>> VIRUS ALERT - VIRUS ALERT <<<

(above) Biblicism SPAMMER (above)

==ardent -- LOOP -- bobcatz ==

=== inosent ===

>>> VIRUS ALERT - VIRUS ALERT <<<

!!! !!! --Do Not CLICK on his LINKS-- !!! !!!

JRobby -> JimmyJones Thu, 09/06/2018 - 13:48 Permalink

Long pink paper

Get rid of all of them

Raymond K Hessel -> JRobby Thu, 09/06/2018 - 14:04 Permalink

A senior Clinton official has reported to me that he likey to sticky his wicky where it don't belicky often.

MrSteve -> JRobby Thu, 09/06/2018 - 14:16 Permalink

Can't do that , who would be serving the butterscotch pudding in the cafeteria???

chunga -> JRobby Thu, 09/06/2018 - 14:53 Permalink

If he has the power to do it, the time is right to declassify some major bombs on the swamp.

It sounds sensational but it's also a step in the right direction to move the capital out of DC. It really is the nerve center of raunch, deceit, fraud and an irredeemable shit hole.

dirty fingernails -> chunga Thu, 09/06/2018 - 15:10 Permalink

Agreed, but moving won't help. The problem is the concentration of money and power. You could move the capitol every day and the swamp would follow like remoras follow a shark

Albertarocks -> JRobby Thu, 09/06/2018 - 15:10 Permalink

Long 'rope'.

Get rid of all of them properly .

spqrusa -> JimmyJones Thu, 09/06/2018 - 14:29 Permalink

Trump knew from the get-go that firing everyone in the Deep State (they knew most of the players) would not accomplish his long-term objective.

The Dopes needed to stay in office so all their traffic could be lawfully monitored. The take down is getting close.

Not Goldman Sachs -> spqrusa Thu, 09/06/2018 - 16:45 Permalink

Apologist.

Nuttin gonna happen. Dick Tater too busy twattering.

Kayman -> toady Thu, 09/06/2018 - 16:25 Permalink

The only way to deal with the Debt, is to grow the economy and shrink it on a relative basis. So much of the past debt was incurred on non-productive expenditures that yield no returns.

Trump knows that. Amazing what he gets done with all the snipers outside and all the cockroaches inside. A lesser man would have said fuck it a long time ago.

Creative_Destruct -> Shitonya Serfs Thu, 09/06/2018 - 13:43 Permalink

"Trump, Axios claims, is 'deeply suspicious of much of the government he oversees' "

And that's supposed to be a criticism?

JimmyJones -> Creative_Destruct Thu, 09/06/2018 - 13:46 Permalink

Its as if they think the people actually support the Deep State Establishment and don't loath them. Please tell me how I should really love John McCain again now that he's dead.

Never One Roach -> JimmyJones Thu, 09/06/2018 - 13:55 Permalink

When Trump picked Sessons and Wray, he had to be aware they were anti-Trumpsters.

So part of this is his own fault.

He should have fired Comey on Day#1 for example.

He should never have met with all those journalists in an attempt top "be nice" or "make peace."

They are all toxic slime balls who need to be fired and/or arrested.

hardmedicine -> Never One Roach Thu, 09/06/2018 - 14:46 Permalink

"Trump, Axios claims, is 'deeply suspicious of much of the government he oversees' "

Again, if people believed the corporate media Trump wouldn't be president right now, HIllary would be, so that fight is pretty much over.

Also, just because you are paranoid and think they are all out to get you doesn't mean it isn't true!. Of course the deep state hates Trump. It's all just a circus and a show until it's not. I really don't know what Trump is waiting for. Call Bill Binney in and get your heads together and take down all the deep state.

PUT THEM ALL IN PRISON.

Yes, it will wipe out the whole government as we know it.... but that is why Trump was elected in the first place.

just the tip -> Never One Roach Thu, 09/06/2018 - 15:06 Permalink

So part of this is his own fault.

a very big part. rub is, i don't think he knew. i think wray came in on a "if you don't appoint him, the FIB is going to be without a director" sort of threat. i think sessions totally ass raped trump.

as for the remainder of his administration, if you turn the white house into goldman south, what exactly do you expect for an economic plan.

as for the pre-election dumbfucks saying trump is an executive, he will appoint good people, and let them do their jobs. i haven't seen one good appointment yet out of trump. out of all of his appointments, scott pruitt was the best and trump should have backed him up, but didn't. he was sacrificed to the environmentalists.

holee shit!!!!!

have i got an off topic comment to make.

i clicked on the globalintelhub link at the top of the page about the possible source of the op-ed.

what i found about one fourth of the way into the article stopped me dead in my tracks. this is the comment that did it:

But what is news in this disclosure are the newly released emails between Mark Mazzetti, the New York Times's national security and intelligence reporter, and CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf.

you see it? do you see it? MARIE HARF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

does that name ring a bell? it damn well should. she was a long time spokeshole in the HNIC state department. she is the one who uttered the phrase:

We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it's a lack of opportunity for jobs,

jobs for jihadists!!!! and this whore still has a job in gov't? as a CIA spokeshole? RUFKM

my fucking gawd get rid of these fucking people!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

dirty fingernails -> just the tip Thu, 09/06/2018 - 15:14 Permalink

So if they go 25th Amendment on him will Trump supporters chimp out or wait for the proof to be presented and evaluate if his staff have a vaild point?

Edit: I mostly agree with your post and thats why I have been so critical. What I saw early on, and since, has been one big clusterfuck of "you keep making decisions that in no way reflect a person who is as awesome as you promised."

Kayman -> JimmyJones Thu, 09/06/2018 - 16:27 Permalink

Mob funeral. Watching Huma hug Lynnsey Graham was a sight to behold.

east of eden -> Shitonya Serfs Thu, 09/06/2018 - 13:54 Permalink

Figures. When you are blocked from pillaging foreign nations, you of course turn to the idea of bankruptcy. You people just don't seem to understand that you are not kings and queens, but common folk and you should pay your debts, and tighten your belts. It would be relatively short term pain for long term gain.

That, more than anything else, speaks to the absence of any character in the American make up.

By the way, hate your fucking handle, prick.

847328_3527 -> east of eden Thu, 09/06/2018 - 14:11 Permalink

I'll not believe it until Woof Shitzer and/or Rachel Madcow confirm these rumors.

Radical Left Plagiarist Farheed Diarrhea has evidently been preoccupied by being dumped by his wife after 21 years of hardship so we won't be hearing his inane comments bashing Trump for awhile.

Zakaria was suspended for a week in August 2012 while Time and CNN investigated an allegation of plagiarism [46] involving an August 20 column on gun control with similarities to a New Yorker article by Jill Lepore . In a statement Zakaria apologized, saying that he had made "a terrible mistake."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fareed_Zakaria

Wife of CNN 'GPS' host Fareed Zakaria suing for divorce; dumps him after 21 years of marriage

https://heightline.com/paula-throckmorton-family-bio-facts/

DaiRR -> 847328_3527 Thu, 09/06/2018 - 14:30 Permalink

What do you expect when 80+ percent of the D.C. area federal workers are DemoRats ?

spqrusa -> 847328_3527 Thu, 09/06/2018 - 14:32 Permalink

"Paula Throckmorton is of white descent". WOW - White isn't a Race - morons.

just the tip -> east of eden Thu, 09/06/2018 - 15:08 Permalink

go fuck yourself you dickheaded motherfucker.

you wouldn't know character if it ass raped you everyday.

and as a canadian, you would enjoy it.

thank you sir may i have another?

thank you sir may i have another?

Kayman -> east of eden Thu, 09/06/2018 - 16:42 Permalink

Go back to Chinese Tire and buy some "made in Canada" crap. Tell me again how the "Canadians" co-opted the British in 1812 . Watch some more Franz Kafka on the CBC, the Chinese Broadcasting Corporation and explain to the CAW in southern Ontario how Justine Twinklesocks traded auto worker jobs for the Quebec Milk Quota.

There are Canadians with character, but you ain't one of them.

QuantumEasing -> Shitonya Serfs Thu, 09/06/2018 - 14:04 Permalink

The US went into receivership in 1933, so I guess "make it bankruptier?"

I have no problem with this, since it's going to be interesting to see how the debtors (The US and its employees) are going to pay the creditors (that would be the Citizens) back for the $17 trillion they owe us.

Going to have to be one helluva bake sale.

But my guess is they will just throw another woar and kill off another generation of Creditors like they have done for the past century. (And collect the insurance premiums, since Social Security Insurance pays out to the primary beneficiary first..and that would be...The US GOv).

What? You thought Social Security was for YOUR benefit?! Hahah, silly wabbits.

LadyAtZero -> Shitonya Serfs Thu, 09/06/2018 - 15:58 Permalink

These are (probably) all federal employees.

If they are so miserable working in the Trump administration, why don't they simply apply for transfers into a farther corner of the government?

How difficult can this really be?

hooligan2009 -> cheoll Thu, 09/06/2018 - 13:42 Permalink

now now diddums - you lost because of the incompetence and corruption of clinton and her supporters, that are just like you.

so, "suck it up, pussy".

we know that you just want someone to say "Trump is gonna fuck people up like you".

so, when you eat shit, before you die, know it's from a deplorable's bowels.

Calvertsbio -> hooligan2009 Thu, 09/06/2018 - 13:58 Permalink

LOL @ Trumpturds.... Never ends, I actually love watching the weak and feeble cover for the weak and feeble..

Juggernaut x2 -> Calvertsbio Thu, 09/06/2018 - 14:08 Permalink

Trumptards in denial.

847328_3527 -> Juggernaut x2 Thu, 09/06/2018 - 14:12 Permalink

Dems don't like him 'cause he's not a pedophile or rapist.

youshallnotkill -> 847328_3527 Thu, 09/06/2018 - 15:49 Permalink

Actually, he is right up there with his former golf buddy Clinton.

Kayman -> Juggernaut x2 Thu, 09/06/2018 - 16:46 Permalink

D-tards, so bright they get a participation ribbon for polishing Hillary's turds.

[Sep 06, 2018] Opinion I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration

The author clearly supports a neocon foreign policy. just look at his stance about Russia. Can this me MI6 false flag designed to paralyze Trump administration by sowing suspicion among the top officials.? British clearly resent Trump attempt to shrink the US led global neoliberal empire created by his predecessors.
See The British Are In Flight Forward, Frantic to Save the Empire LaRouchePAC
The idea to remove the President via 25 amendment was floated before. It probably will not work.
Sep 06, 2018 | www.nytimes.com

Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.

In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the "enemy of the people," President Trump's impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.

Don't get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.

But these successes have come despite -- not because of -- the president's leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.

From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief's comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.

Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.

"There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next," a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he'd made only a week earlier.

The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren't for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what's right even when Donald Trump won't.

The result is a two-track presidency.

Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.

Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.

On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin's spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better -- such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.

This isn't the work of the so-called deep state. It's the work of the steady state.

Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until -- one way or another -- it's over.

The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.

Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter . All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.

We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example -- a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.

There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.

The writer is a senior official in the Trump administration.

[Sep 06, 2018] What better way of stirring up the base ahead of the mid-terms than talk of undemocratic factions within the administration and fifth columnists to be rooted out for the cause.

Sep 06, 2018 | profile.theguardian.com

charlieblue -> Johnstu9876 6 Sep 2018 09:08

I assumed it was an effort at creating some sort of record of resistance. Does anybody really believe Paul Ryan is retiring from the 3rd most powerful position in the US Government to "spend more time with family"? The rats are fleeing a sinking ship. Even if Trump serves out a full four years, anybody too closely tied to this stupid shit-storm of an Administration will be tarred in public eyes. But, American voters are notoriously forgetful, and getting out before the ship goes down will probably work.
charlieblue -> John Edwin , 6 Sep 2018 09:00
Funny shit. "the mole" wrote an Op/Ed piece, that contains no information of a sensitive nature. S/he wrote of their own personal observations working in the White House. There is nothing illegal in that.

I get that you might not have any functional understanding of US law, but it is deeply disturbing that the President of the United States is calling for the arrest of a citizen exercising their constitutionally guaranteed rights.

Jonathan Bailey , 6 Sep 2018 08:54
The op-ed piece being anonymous makes me wonder if Mr Trump himself put someone up to do it. What better way of stirring up the base ahead of the mid-terms than talk of undemocratic factions within the administration and fifth columnists to be rooted out for the cause. It also offers the president another cudgel against the press that will appeal to his core constituencies.

Even if Mr Trump isn't capable of coming up with such a scheme, there are certainly those around him who are.

crossedseven , 6 Sep 2018 08:27
The statements in the opinion piece are horribly anti-pluralist anti-democratic in themselves. The writer's nationalist appeal to 'American' unity at the end is based on everyone uniting around US Republican principles of neo-liberalism, inequality and militarism. S/he would use a false unity against Trump to impose the worst kind of conservative fundamentalism and eliminate anything more progressive from the political spectrum.

Maybe this is mainstream neo-liberal thinking but it's the end of a plural, democratic state. There would be no more room to discuss inequality, climate change, race or gender discrimination or new welfare provisions. Just an offer of false unity around hard neoliberal principles. I guess it's a very similar game to Brexit, which is a choice between life-threatening asset striping of the UK or May's 'hard right soft Brexit' super Thatcherism.

[Sep 06, 2018] One Word Has People Convinced That Mike Pence Is Mystery Author Of Scathing NYT Op-Ed

Sep 06, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Is Vice President Mike Pence trying to pull off a "House of Cards"-style scheme to undermine Trump and increase his own chances of assuming the presidency?

Apparently, more than a few journalists believe that might be the case. According to the Huffington Post, some believe that the use of a single word - "lodestar" - is a crucial tell pointing toward Pence as the op-ed's author. During the op-ed's final paragraphs the mystery author refers to John McCain as "a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue."

Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.

We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example - a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.

There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.

Pence has, of course, categorically denied these allegations and affirmed his loyalty to the president.

me title=

Still, one video circulating on twitter shows Pence using the word in eight different speeches dating back to 2001, when he was a Congressman from Indiana.

me title=

me title=

Others pointed out that the op-ed's praise for McCain would rule out Trump hardliners like Stephen Miller as the author.

me title=

At the very least, there's some evidence to suggest that the author is a man. As Bloomberg's Jennifer Jacobs pointed out yesterday, the Times' official Twitter feed may have inadvertently revealed their gender.

me title=

Though Jacobs also reported that several officials have told her that they suspect the author's "seniority" isn't as ironclad as the Times implied.

me title=

For those who aren't familiar with the word, Merriam-Webster defines "lodestar" as "a star that leads or guides" or a person who "serves as an inspiration, model, or guide."

To be sure, the Pence theory isn't without its holes. Trump staffers have said previously that they pay attention to the idioms employed by others as a defense mechanism when speaking to the press under the guise of anonymity.

"To cover my tracks, I usually pay attention to other staffers' idioms and use that in my background quotes. That throws the scent off me," one White House official told Axios .

But online betting markets have put Pence at the top of the list of suspects, with MyBookie currently reflecting 2-to-3 odds on Pence as the culprit, per the New York Post . The favorite right now, at 1-3 odds, is "the field" - i.e. someone not listed among the 18 most likely senior admin officials, according to the Costa-Rica-based betting operation.

Still, at first brush, the theory makes a degree of sense: As first in line for the throne, Pence undoubtedly has the most to gain from the collapse of the Trump presidency. But it's equally likely that a more junior official could've intentionally included these cues to sow discord in the ranks.

As the Trump administration has proved time and time again, anything is possible in the West Wing.


Took Red Pill -> thereasonablei Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:30 Permalink

Based on one word? Someone else could have used that word to throw them off to think it was Pence or someone who works for Pence.

Pandelis -> Took Red Pill Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:31 Permalink

one thing is for sure ... pency has been groomed for this job ... a small minded person who follows instructions ... carefully selected

Cognitive Dissonance -> Pandelis Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:32 Permalink

One must admire, or at least respect the power of, such a brilliant divide and conquer psyops.

Almost as good as 'QAnon'.

Pandelis -> Cognitive Dissonance Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:34 Permalink

not sure pence is entirely a team member ... he has been told to wait for more ... being around the trump tower, you can see why pence would believe it besides the fact that he must have been talking to real players that he knows they are real players ...

having said all that, 100% this is coordinated ... it is no coincidence it comes out at the same time with Bob Woodwards book, Theresa May verdict on assailant of the failed attempt to kill in salisbury soil, big offensive in Idlib (where trimp is doing a 180 degrees and being a team member again ... to name just a few ... it is the end of the line ... that economist magazine "prediction" from 1988 on 30 years later comes to mind ... time for the US to come down hard i suppose ...

Delving Eye -> pods Thu, 09/06/2018 - 09:22 Permalink

No way is the op-ed writer VP Pence. It doesn't have his boring Midwestern tone. It seems much more likely that the letterbomb was written by a group -- not in the administration. Rather, a group of Deep State crybabies who aren't getting their way and have devised this lame, transparent effort akin to Valley girls passing notes in homeroom ... "like, I mean, um, whatever" ... because they're too dumb to do anything else. And the NYTimes ate it up.

PrivetHedge -> The First Rule Thu, 09/06/2018 - 09:13 Permalink

But he's not a Moron

But he IS a moron. All the war mongering pharisees are morons.

Pence is a pro war psychopath who is very much disconnected from his tortured soul and is a simple biological robot devoid of higher levels of thought.

Pence is literally a moron. Only humans have souls and access to imagination, inspiration, intuition, empathy: pharisees DO NOT. They are all robotic machines: morons.

Grandad Grumps -> The First Rule Thu, 09/06/2018 - 10:10 Permalink

Circuses for the masses.

GeezerGeek -> Pandelis Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:52 Permalink

There being so many convoluted theories floating around, here's mine. Trump, Pence and friends arranged this whole editorial/reaction incident. As you point out, many other stories were suddenly demoted to by-the-way status. This gives Trump another reason to urge his supporters to be enraged. It also could provide courage for purges within the administration, someqthing it has long needed. Diverse elements of the MSM are even attacking each other. Ultimately, ask yourselves: cui bono? Who benefits?

It is all too confusing. I'm getting a headache. Back to munching on dark chocolate and watching cat videos.

Solomonpal -> Cognitive Dissonance Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:38 Permalink

Deep state

nmewn -> Solomonpal Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:42 Permalink

lol...what a "lode" of horseshit...now they're trying to take out Pence based on what very well be a completely fabricated op-ed run in the NYT's.

#Desperation ;-)

Future Jim -> nmewn Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:43 Permalink

Millions were beginning to think that that Trump wasn't really leading the charge against the NWO and that he was really part of the NWO himself --just like the NYT and the person who wrote the op-ed, but by attacking Trump, these NWO stooges proved Trump is leading the charge against the NWO, and proved (after the Sarah Jeong scandal ) to just as many others that the NYT really is the most trustworthy institution in America ... just when both the NYT and Trump needed some street cred the most ... and there's no way we are getting played ... and there's no way this could be just theater ... or a psyop ... oh wait ...

divingengineer -> Took Red Pill Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:41 Permalink

Wasn't there a ZH article a few weeks ago about an algorithm that could predict the author of a text, to a very high 90's percentile, based on speech patterns?

I say we try it out and root out this "saboteur".

However, I think we'd find that they are a fake.

Something about it feels contrived, why would a deep spate functionary expose the apparatus that controls power regardless of who is elected? What is the first rule of Fight Club?

I have a suspicion it is a plant, in an effort to convince the masses that the deep state does exist. They are preaching to the choir here at ZH, but 98% of the country has absolutely no idea what the fuck Deep State even means. This makes it real for the common man, In that respect, I guess it's a good thing. It just feels fake though.

LaugherNYC -> thereasonablei Thu, 09/06/2018 - 10:26 Permalink

This whole year is playing out like the script from "House of Cards." Now the MSM is calling for Trump to be removed as "unfit to hold office." Liberals have hated Donald Trump since he first appeared on the scene oil the 1970s as a loudmouth trust fund developer. They fought every project he undertook and mocked him. Famously, "Spy" Magazine belittled him as a "short-fingered vulgarian and Queens-born casino operator" every time they mentioned his name, which was often. The magazine's editor, Graydon Carter, despised Trump. Trump predicted the magazine would fail within a year. So Carter put a calendar in the back of the magazine, tearing off the days to prove Trump wrong. Alas, Trump was right, and Spy shuttered before the year was out. It was a shame, because the magazine was terrific and funny, but it had that typical liberal New York Ivy League snottiness and superiority.

As embarrassing as Trump may be, and he is certainly that, he is not insane, nor unable to do the job. You may hate the job he is doing, but this country has laws. If Mueller proves Trump committed real crimes that mandate his indictment and removal, then so be it. But until then, just because he runs a chaotic ship doesn't mean he can simply be taken out.

rgraf -> Adolfsteinbergovitch Thu, 09/06/2018 - 09:59 Permalink

Trump is just another bankster stooge. Like Pence, Shillary, McCain, Sessions, Obama, etc. Grow up.

[Sep 06, 2018] Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo deny writing explosive op-ed attacking Trump by Ben Jacobs

Sep 06, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

The op-ed represents a shocking critique of Trump and is without precedent in modern American history. Former CIA Director John Brennan , who has sparred fiercely with the president, called the op-ed "active insubordination born out of loyalty to the country, not to Donald Trump".

"This is not sustainable to have an executive branch where individuals are not following the orders of the chief executive," Brennan told NBC's "Today" show. "I do think things will get worse before they get better. I don't know how Donald Trump is going to react to this. A wounded lion is a very dangerous animal, and I think Donald Trump is wounded."

In it, the anonymous author describes Trump as amoral, "anti-trade and anti-democratic" and prone to making "half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions".

The writer claims aides had explored the possibility of removing Trump from office via the 25th amendment , a complex constitutional mechanism to allow for the replacement of a president who is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office", but had decided against it.

[Sep 06, 2018] Trump Saboteur Op-Ed Backfires LA Times Calls A Coward; Greenwald Unelected Cabal

Sep 06, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Trump Saboteur Op-Ed Backfires: LA Times Calls "A Coward"; Greenwald: "Unelected Cabal"

by Tyler Durden Thu, 09/06/2018 - 07:45 672 SHARES

An op-ed written in the New York Times by an anonymous "senior official in the Trump administration" has drawn harsh rebuke from both sides of the aisle and beyond - after everyone from President Trump to Glenn Greenwald to the Los Angeles Times chimed in with various criticisms.

The author, who claims to be actively working against Trump in collusion with other senior officials in what they call a "resistance inside the Trump administration," has now been labeled everything from a coward, to treasonous, to nonexistent.

Trump, as expected, lashed out at the "failing" New York Times - before questioning whether the the mystery official really exists, and that if they do, the New York Times should reveal the author's identity as a matter of national security.

Trump supporters, also as expected, slammed the op-ed as either pure fiction or treason - a suggestion Trump made earlier Wednesday.

What we don't imagine the anonymous author or the Times saw coming was the onslaught of criticism coming from the center and left - those who stand to benefit the most from Trump's fall from grace, or at least probably wouldn't mind it.

In an op-ed which appeared hours after the NYT piece, Jessica Roy of the Los Angeles Times writes: " No, anonymous Trump official, you're not 'part of the resistance.' You're a coward " for not going far enough to stop Trump and in fact enabling him.

If they really believe there's a need to subvert the president to protect the country, they should be getting this person out of the White House. But they're too cowardly and afraid of the possible implications . They hand-wave the notion thusly:

"Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis."

How is it that utilizing the 25th Amendment of the Constitution would cause a crisis, but admitting to subverting a democratically elected leader wouldn't?

...

If you're reading this, senior White House official, know this: You are not resisting Donald Trump. You are enabling him for your own benefit. That doesn't make you an unsung hero. It makes you a coward. - LA Times

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald - the Pulitzer Prize Winning co-founder of The Intercept, also called the author of the op-ed a "coward" whose ideological issues "voters didn't ratify."

Greenwald continues; "The irony in the op-ed from the NYT's anonymous WH coward is glaring and massive: s/he accuses Trump of being "anti-democratic" while boasting of membership in an unelected cabal that covertly imposes their own ideology with zero democratic accountability, mandate or transparency. "

So who is the "coward" in the White House?

While the author remains anonymous, there are a couple of clues in the case. For starters, Bloomberg White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs points out that the New York Times revealed that a man wrote the op-ed, which rules out Kellyanne Conway, Nikki Haley, Ivanka and Melania (the latter two being CNN's suggestions ).

me title=

A second clue comes from the language used in the op-ed, and in particular " Lodestar " - a rare word used by Mike Pence in at least one speech. Then again, someone trying to make one think it's pence would also use that word (which was oddly Merriam-Webster's word of the day last Tuesday).

A pence-theory hashtag has already emerged to support this theory; #VeepThroat

Given the Op-Ed's praise of the late Senator John McCain, never-Trumper and Iraq War sabre-rattler Bill Kristol tweeted that it was Kevin Hassett, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Of course, Kristol and whoever wrote the op-ed are ideologically aligned, so one might question why he would voluntarily work against this person.

So while we don't know who wrote the op-ed, it appears to be backfiring spectacularly on its author(s) amid wild theories and harsh rebuke from all sides of the aisle.

We're sure Carlos Slim - the largest owner of the New York Times and once the richest man on earth, is having a good laugh at Trump's expense either way... for now.

Perhaps Trump can push the "fabrication" angle longer than NYT can retain the moral high ground - especially after they hired, then refused to fire, Sarah Jeong - a new addition to the NYT editorial board who was revealed in old tweets to be an openly bigoted, with a particularly deep hatred of "old white men."

The New York Times stood by Jeong - claiming she was simply responding to people harassing her for being an Asian lesbian - only to have their absurd theory shredded within hours . Jeong in fact has a multi-year history of unprovoked and random comments expressing hatred towards white men.

And now she's right on the front lines of perhaps the greatest attempt to smear Trump yet. Not exactly a good look for the Times at a time when MSM credibility has already taken a hit. How many broke bread with the Clinton campaign leading up to the 2016 election? Vote up! 158 Vote down! 2


mtl4 Thu, 09/06/2018 - 07:47 Permalink

Coup d'etat, in every sense of the word.......Constitution? What's that? Roaches aren't even scurrying when you turn the lights on anymore. Trying to overthrow an elected standing government is the very definition of treason.

RAT005 -> Keyser Thu, 09/06/2018 - 09:12 Permalink

My vote/guess is the author is nonexistent.

Super Sleuth -> RAT005 Thu, 09/06/2018 - 09:21 Permalink

Headlines across Alt Media now look like this:

TREASON : The New York Times Conspires with Deep State to Galvanize the Coup Against Trump

http://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=103270

This seditious op-ed by the NYT is really great news as it will produce all sorts of unintended consequences.

It's now official: "The Gray Lady commits T R E A S O N in broad daylight!"

Super Sleuth -> RAT005 Thu, 09/06/2018 - 09:21 Permalink

Headlines across Alt Media now look like this:

TREASON : The New York Times Conspires with Deep State to Galvanize the Coup Against Trump

http://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=103270

This seditious op-ed by the NYT is really great news as it will produce all sorts of unintended consequences.

It's now official: "The Gray Lady commits T R E A S O N in broad daylight!"

Cursive -> Freeze These Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:17 Permalink

Ever heard the term "Teflon Don"? Honestly, the take on this should be that the Trump team leaked it to the dumbasses at the NYT. Sun Tzu is laughing.

Ha. Ha. I see IridiumRebel has heard the term.

Government nee -> Cursive Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:48 Permalink

That is an interesting angle. . . Trump creating his own narratives by using agents to leak to the blatently bias NYT. Jeebus, but the trouble that strategy could cause. Millions out there are wound tight across Amerika. Wouldnt take much of a spark to get a good fire going. .

Squid-puppets -> Government nee Thu, 09/06/2018 - 09:03 Permalink

either Trump himself or the Q anon team setting the NYT up for entrapment to show how easily they fall for & promote fake news

Raymond K Hessel -> Squid-puppets Thu, 09/06/2018 - 09:23 Permalink

Bush did a similar thing with WMDs and the WSJ

BennyBoy -> Government nee Thu, 09/06/2018 - 10:03 Permalink

Treason?: What state secrets did the asshole writer reveal. What lives endangered? What enemies were helped, besides dems?

seryanhoj -> Cursive Thu, 09/06/2018 - 09:41 Permalink

Hard to see Trump doing something clandestine and subtle like that.

shemite -> Freeze These Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:20 Permalink

These are all staged irrelevances designed to distract people...the few remaining people who are not addicted to their screens. Remember - all media, all members of both parties, all white house employees and especially Trump work for the same cabal. No one can step out of line and stay alive. The cabal knows everything.

pods -> shemite Thu, 09/06/2018 - 09:39 Permalink

If people yell loud and often enough, many will actually forget that they are now knee deep in ice-cold saltwater.

#Titanic

Let's focus on the important things, like a scripted reality show fight, versus, idk, the fact that we are again on the precipice of yet another meltdown, only this time the Fed is fucked cause nobody can borrow anymore $$, interest rates are still way too low, and we are on our way to a Maunder Minimum.

I could go on and on with REAL issues, but it seems we just don't talk about them anymore. No need to see how medical is bankrupting us, pensions are fucked, "students" are quickly on their way to being skullfucked with no way out.

We are setup for a calamity that will be 10x worse than 2008, and the only thing I hear is the ever increasing volume of "Everything is Awesome."

Cloud9.5 -> Freeze These Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:37 Permalink

My dear, you don't really quite realize what you have given the Trump Administration. What the Times have done is assured their readers that there is a counter coup currently underway to bring down this sitting President. Back up and let that reality marinate. Understand that now any failings or short comings that come out of this administration can be laid at the feet of the saboteurs working to bring down the government. So if the economy rolls over and dies, it's the saboteur's fault. If gas prices spike, it's the senator's fault. If a nuke goes off in an American city, it's the saboteur's fault. If the President is impeached, it is the saboteur's fault. Any opposition to this President from this point on is the result of a concerted effort on the part of a gang of saboteurs to bring down the government.

Merry Christmas, you have just added the raison d'eter for a purge of all Obama appointees in every executive agency.

Pollygotacracker -> FireBrander Thu, 09/06/2018 - 09:47 Permalink

President Trump thought that he could 'go along to get along'. He is a slow learner. Taking credit for a ginormous stock market bubble created by cheap credit and buybacks, no real effort to build a wall, massive tax cuts to millionaires/billionaires, kissing Israel's ass, the list goes on and on. The man hasn't done much of anything to really help the middle class. And, he hasn't done enough to even protect himself. The op-ed is a hit piece. So what. But, Trump better get up to speed sooner rather than later.

rgraf -> Cloud9.5 Thu, 09/06/2018 - 09:50 Permalink

Are you really this stupid? The Trump administration is owned by the banksters, every bit as much as the 'saboteur'. You really don't understand the game at all.

Killtruck -> BaBaBouy Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:12 Permalink

No "anonymous" source.

CIA hit piece to discredit Trump and sow division in the cabinet shortly before midterms.

If Trump fires half of his cabinet, or locks everyone down hunting for the mole - "Seee?! We told you he was tyrannical!" If he doesn't react or address it, it hangs out there, continuing to make everyone believe he's an unstable bumbling moron. And as he's stated previously, he's a "very stable genius".

Either way, what may have been a clever ploy is a ham-fisted CIA plot that misjudged it's audience (like they've never done THAT before) and will continue to backfire. People are so sick of the virtue signalling horseshit (Nike and Kuntpaernik come to mind) that it's almost a guaranteed backfire when you try to do it.

Cloud9.5 -> FireBrander Thu, 09/06/2018 - 10:21 Permalink

Imagine for a moment that you win the lottery and are appointed the director of the CIA. Do you have any idea what the CIA does? Do you have any inkling beyond what you have read in the media and the alternate media of what agendas are afoot? Do you have any idea of what's at stake? Do you have a clue about who you can trust? Are the lower echelons for you or against you? Who do you talk to just to find out what is going on? Once you are informed can you trust the information? Are the options you are offered real options or are the serving someone's private agenda?

Now imagine that you are President of the United States and half the electorate wants to remove you from office. Who do you tap on the shoulder to initiate the purge? How do you know they won't purge you?

Governing is easy out here in the peanut gallery.

Cloud9.5 -> rgraf Thu, 09/06/2018 - 10:36 Permalink

I never said I was smart but I worked for one of the most corrupt bureaucracies in the world for about a decade, and I learned a few things about political tools and how to manipulate the narrative. What the Times has done is publicly assert that there are saboteurs working in the Trump administration who are actively attempting to bring down this President. The Resistance i.e. the Democratic Party through its mouth piece has openly stated that they are participating in an ongoing coup to bring down the government. Do you not realize what kind of club that has just been handed to Trump to beat down his opposition? Any opposition is now aiding and abetting the attempted coup.

As for government, the banks lent the money to purchase it in 1913. The banks running the show is old news.

Killtruck -> BaBaBouy Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:12 Permalink

No "anonymous" source.

CIA hit piece to discredit Trump and sow division in the cabinet shortly before midterms.

If Trump fires half of his cabinet, or locks everyone down hunting for the mole - "Seee?! We told you he was tyrannical!" If he doesn't react or address it, it hangs out there, continuing to make everyone believe he's an unstable bumbling moron. And as he's stated previously, he's a "very stable genius".

Either way, what may have been a clever ploy is a ham-fisted CIA plot that misjudged it's audience (like they've never done THAT before) and will continue to backfire. People are so sick of the virtue signalling horseshit (Nike and Kuntpaernik come to mind) that it's almost a guaranteed backfire when you try to do it.

just the tip -> BabaLooey Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:37 Permalink

syria had a legitimately elected government too, and look what's gone on for the last seven years there.

you think these fuckers at CIA see any difference between what they are able to do there and here in the US?

over there they drop pallets of weapons from the sky. over here they drop what passes for information from their mockingbird operations. same difference.

most america haters here at ZH are laughing because they think this is the US getting their comeuppance. the comeuppance we are getting is for challenging those who have been doing this to others for all these years. it's not other nations turning around and doing this to the US. it is those who have done this to others, are now doing it to the citizens of the US. those america haters better hope we citizens win, if not, that hell trump said would be unleashed on iran, will be unleashed on the world. and all the hyperweapons invented or dreamed of will not be able to stop it.

upvoted you for calling it what it is. sedition.

seryanhoj -> just the tip Thu, 09/06/2018 - 09:52 Permalink

Government , its representatives and its agencies are unscrupulous and immoral beyond the imagination of a normal person.

Northwoods, Iraq WMD, Vietnam chemical weapon campaign, The Lusitania, Grenada, Tonkin, kennedy assassinations.

The amazing thing is how people swallow all that and trot off to the polls and never ask for any murderous corrupt bastard to be held to account.

Meanwhile we lost the free press so now no lone voice questions the moves of the real powers. The waste their voice on partisan bickering over people who are only puppets leaving real power to play its global killing games un remarked.

thereasonablei -> cankles' server Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:01 Permalink

TREASON!

http://www.invtots.com

blindfaith -> thereasonablei Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:11 Permalink

The New York Times is OWNED BY A MEXICAN. Carlos Simms, big bed buddy with Hillery.

Chupacabra-322 -> blindfaith Thu, 09/06/2018 - 08:27 Permalink

Thus, Operation Presstitute Mocking Bird.

Koba the Dread -> blindfaith Thu, 09/06/2018 - 09:27 Permalink

No, it's owned by Jewish Zionist interests. Carlos Slim just has an interest in it.

[Sep 06, 2018] 'Trump will go nuclear' Pundits respond to anonymous 'coup' published by NYT

Notable quotes:
"... "In other countries... they sometimes call this a coup," ..."
"... "unelected aides have staged a slo-mo coup." ..."
"... "frenzy, mutiny and rumors" ..."
"... "swamp sewer creature who can't stand that there is a new sheriff in town." ..."
"... "repudiated our whole constitutional process." ..."
"... "When you think about it it's an amazing statement of their willingness to make themselves bigger than the entire American system," ..."
"... "extremely self-indulgent." ..."
"... "You should not be lapping up the benefits of being a senior administration official, no doubt while scouting for lucrative opportunities for when you leave your post," ..."
"... "If you are this person, you really should resign tonight." ..."
"... "just made things worse," ..."
"... "Anonymous leaking won't take down Trump. A person of honor speaking openly would have far more impact." ..."
"... "The thing about the op-ed is that reading its text, you can think the writer is 'principled,' as the NYT did. But in context, the author is a coward confessing to a coup and daring Trump to get worse," ..."
"... "Trump will go nuclear, making the efforts of this 'internal resistance' far harder," ..."
"... "What is the point of a secret cabal if you don't keep it secret?" ..."
"... "We all know Putin wrote the op-ed and the NYT claimed it's a senior Trump official because they think that's true," ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
Sep 06, 2018 | www.rt.com

Press Pundits are lining up to weigh in on a salacious New York Times op-ed allegedly penned by an anonymous #Resister in the Trump administration, with some experts on television calling the piece an all-out coup against the president. The opinion piece in question, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration," has spawned a level of frenetic punditry not seen since George W. Bush was spotted sneaking Michelle Obama a cough drop. Only this time the stakes are allegedly much higher.

MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace said on Wednesday the stunning claims made in the anonymous op-ed – for example, that there is a group of "adults" in the White House who believe Trump is unfit to hold office and are trying to shape policy behind the president's back – are akin to "a coup."

READ MORE: 'Wasn't me!': White House officials deny involvement in New York Times 'resistance' piece

"In other countries... they sometimes call this a coup," Wallace said on MSNBC's Deadline: White House, referring to the article's assertion that there is a "resistance" made up of administration officials which aims to protect the republic from Trump's "amorality."

Another MSNBC talking head, Howard Fineman, said that he was troubled by the fact that the op-ed appears to describe how "unelected aides have staged a slo-mo coup." Impeachment – not "frenzy, mutiny and rumors" – is the antidote to Trump's criminal unfitness for public service, he added.

The @nytimes essay is troubling. Why? 1. The dangerous, ignorant volatility of @realDonaldTrump . 2. The claim by UNELECTED aides to have staged a slo-mo coup. 3. The NYT letting the accuser hide. #Trump 's unfit, but caution: impeachment -- not frenzy, mutiny and rumor -- is the answer.

-- Howard Fineman (@howardfineman) 6 сентября 2018 г.

But others were even less impressed by the anonymous scoop-provider. Fox News host Sean Hannity called the author of the op-ed a "swamp sewer creature who can't stand that there is a new sheriff in town."

Hannity calls the senior Trump administration official who wrote the NYT op-ed a "swamp sewer creature."

So, yeah.

-- Chris Cillizza (@CillizzaCNN) September 6, 2018

Speaking with Hannity on his program, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich said that the anonymous author had "repudiated our whole constitutional process."

Read more © Leah Millis 'Treason or fake news?' Trump urges NYT to reveal its White House 'resistance' insider

"When you think about it it's an amazing statement of their willingness to make themselves bigger than the entire American system," Gingrich said .

Dana Perino, the former White House press secretary under George W. Bush, called the mysterious author of the op-ed "extremely self-indulgent."

"You should not be lapping up the benefits of being a senior administration official, no doubt while scouting for lucrative opportunities for when you leave your post," she said .

"If you are this person, you really should resign tonight."

Almost all of the nation's sharpest political minds were in agreement on one point, however: This mystery senior government official should reveal him/herself, in order to save America from fascism, or hokey #Resistance claptrap, depending on whom you ask.

The op-ed "just made things worse," conservative commentator and National Review senior fellow David French said. "Anonymous leaking won't take down Trump. A person of honor speaking openly would have far more impact."

1) The guy is real (no way the NYT puts forth a fake source);

2) His story is likely largely true (perhaps exaggerated at the margins);

3) He's just made things worse.

4) Anonymous leaking won't take down Trump. A person of honor speaking openly would have far more impact

-- David French (@DavidAFrench) September 6, 2018

"If you are the author of this and you truly want to effectuate change... you want to do something in service to the nation, you have to come forward and sign your name to this.. Come forward. You could change the fate of the country..."- @DavidJollyFL w/ @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/d9l7PMnzkj

-- Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) September 5, 2018

"The thing about the op-ed is that reading its text, you can think the writer is 'principled,' as the NYT did. But in context, the author is a coward confessing to a coup and daring Trump to get worse," veteran journalist Dan Froomkin said. He added that he thought it was wrong of the Times not to identify the piece's author.

The thing about the op-ed is that reading its text, you can think the writer is "principled," as the NYT did. But in context, the author is a coward confessing to a coup and daring Trump to get worse. They shouldna granted anonymity.

-- Dan Froomkin (@froomkin) September 6, 2018

Much has also been discussed about Trump's reaction to the article.

"Trump will go nuclear, making the efforts of this 'internal resistance' far harder," predicted Washington Post contributor Carlos Lozada‏. "What is the point of a secret cabal if you don't keep it secret?"

Gut reaction to NYT oped:
1) Feeds/confirms Trump's worst fears about the deep state plots
2) Trump will go nuclear, making the efforts of this "internal resistance" far harder
3) What is the point of a secret cabal if you don't keep it secret?

-- Carlos Lozada (@CarlosLozadaWP) September 5, 2018

Not everyone is calling for the anonymous author to come forward, however: At least one pundit claims to already know who penned the troubling opinion piece.

"We all know Putin wrote the op-ed and the NYT claimed it's a senior Trump official because they think that's true," Ben Shapiro tweeted.

We all know Putin wrote the op-ed and the NYT claimed it's a senior Trump official because they think that's true.

-- Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) September 6, 2018

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

[Sep 06, 2018] The Strange Anonymous 'Resistance' Op-Ed by Daniel Larison

This really smells with coup d'état. Trump may be a threat but so is this covert coup to impose these policies. The op ed suggests the existence of anti-Trump 'sleeper cells' within the government"
The author also claimed that the administration's achievements had included some "bright spots" such as "effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more".
Notable quotes:
"... The New York Times ..."
"... is required by their own oath ..."
"... If Anonymous=Deep State, then Trump brought this Deep State with him. These are his appointees ..."
Sep 05, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com
By Daniel LarisonSeptember 5, 2018, 6:30 PM

The New York Times published a strange op-ed purportedly written by a "senior official" in the Trump administration:

The dilemma -- which he does not fully grasp -- is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them.

To be clear, ours is not the popular "resistance" of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.

But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.

The author of the op-ed flatters himself by claiming to be acting in the best interests of the country, but there is something very wrong with having self-appointed guardians assuming that they have the right to sabotage certain policies of the elected president. For one, they have no authority to do what they're doing, and no one voted for them. It is one thing to argue that professionals should be willing to serve a bad president in the interests of public service, and it is quite another to argue that the officials working for the president are entitled to disregard and override the president's decisions because the president happens to be an ignorant buffoon. The "two-track presidency" that the official boasts about is an affront to our system of government. It is not reassuring that U.S. foreign policy continues as if on autopilot no matter what the electorate votes for.

Perversely, the more that Trump administration officials "frustrate parts of his agenda," the more likely it is that Trump remains in power longer than he otherwise would. The official says that the core of the problem is the president's "amorality." That raises the obvious question: how can someone acknowledge that the president has no principles or scruples of any kind and still in good conscience try to help him succeed? These officials are not only enabling a president whose behavior they consider to be "detrimental to the health of our republic," but they are helping to make sure that he stays in office instead of hastening his defeat. They want credit for "resisting" Trump when their "resistance" amounts to manipulating the policies of the government to their own liking.

There are legitimate political and constitutional remedies for an unfit president, but the anonymous "resistance" official isn't interested in any of that. He prefers to keep the administration from completely imploding because it also happens to be advancing a mostly conventional Republican agenda that he likes. There is nothing particularly admirable about that, and he should not have been granted anonymity to write his self-congratulatory article. If this official feels so strongly that the president endangers the health and well-being of the country, he should put his name on a statement to that effect when he announces his resignation.

Posted in foreign policy , politics . Tagged The New York Times , Donald Trump . MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR Missing The Point Entirely The Week's Most Interesting Reads Hide 24 comments 24 Responses to The Strange Anonymous 'Resistance' Op-Ed

Donald September 5, 2018 at 6:45 pm

This anonymous official just confirmed there is a Deep State of some sort.
carcin , says: September 5, 2018 at 7:03 pm
Who knew the Deep State (tm?) included Trump's political appointees? (see Times guidelines on who that attribute as "senior administration officials" )
Irony Abounds , says: September 5, 2018 at 7:18 pm
Donald: Yes, but that Deep State was brought in by Trump and is trying to keep their jobs. I agree with Daniel's analysis, but I am not at all confident that our Constitution is equipped to deal with a sociopath as President when you also have a legislative branch that knows it but refuses to do it's constitutional duty.
G , says: September 5, 2018 at 8:04 pm
It is my understanding from carefully listening to Trump Supporters (I am not one) that this is exactly the reason why he was elected. There is a feeling (particularly strongly felt among Trump supporters, but a lot of Bernie supporters felt a version of it too) that although we continue to have elections in this country, that we are ceasing to be a democracy because decision-making is increasingly being taken away from or being delegated away from elected officials.

Supporters of a very powerful Executive Branch might argue "hey, it's not exactly the way that our Founder Fathers envisioned our Federal System to work, but if the Executive takes decision-making power away from unelected bureaucrats, lifetime-appointed judges, and a deadlocked Congress, then at least we get to vote every 4 years on kicking the bum out of the White House or not".

A White House that has decision-making taken power away from the person of the Executive, thus devolving power back to unelected officials, is a true crisis for democracy. Impeachment or the 25th Amendment are Constitutional remedies for a corrupt or incapacitated Executive because they take power away from an elected official and invest them in a new official subject to election. White House officials secretly undermining the President doesn't pass Constitutional muster, no matter how bad the President is.

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." – H. L. Mencken

Ray Woodcock , says: September 5, 2018 at 9:45 pm
It's a remarkable editorial. It appears to be a confession of treason. Similar words, written in response to a popular president, would hopefully trigger an investigation leading to conviction and imprisonment of those involved.

Every indication is that the writer is correct: Trump is a disaster. But if the writer wants to live up to his/her claim of putting country first, s/he and the other cafeteria Republicans (i.e., selective co-conspirators) should stop trying to have it both ways, keeping their salaries and their positions of power in the name of the Trump administration while simultaneously reserving the right to undermine it. Instead, they should find the courage to step forward en masse.

An independent investigator could help them to find that courage. The process of exploring and publicizing what has gone on, in that White House, may help to push the nation toward a serious discussion of an appropriate replacement for its present corrupted and dysfunctional form of democracy.

Janek , says: September 5, 2018 at 9:53 pm
I have some reservations about this so called 'Resistance' Op-Ed in the NYT. This whole 'resistance' affair sounds hollow and not very authentic to me. I also have reservation about the new book 'Fear' by Bob Woodward. The book as such probably is needed, but naming who said what is counterproductive, to put it mildly. I do not think B. Woodward got permission to assign names to who said what because if he had permission the people to whom some statements are assigned would not deny them. I suspect that B. Woodward in reality conscientiously works for D. Trump. Why I do think so: because I can not imagine that he in his book could not anticipate what D. Trump will do next with those named. The book by B. Woodward will only help to purge the rest of the moderate people from trump administration and put in their place his favorites so he will have free hand to do whatever he wants probably until 2024.
Ken T , says: September 5, 2018 at 9:57 pm
I suspect this op-ed is nothing more than someone trying to establish their own personal defense for when the whole thing comes crashing down. "No no no – don't blame me! I wasn't really part of it. In fact I was really trying to stop it the whole time." If what this person is writing is true, then there is a constitutional remedy that he or she is required by their own oath to implement. Failing to do that, and just trying to undermine Trump secretly is making them just as guilty. I despise Trump as much as anyone, but this is not the way to deal with him.
David Prejean , says: September 5, 2018 at 9:58 pm
I agree up to a point. If Trump got up one morning and decided he was tired of arguing with North Korea and ordered a first nuclear strike, I'd hope that there'd be people around him who would stop him, as that would, no doubt, be in the best interest of the country. To assume that they'd have time to go through the constitutional removal procedure in time to stop the needless deaths of millions of people is absurd.

Now, I'm not saying what they are doing is preventing nuclear war. I'm just making the point that there are limits to your principled position.

a spencer , says: September 5, 2018 at 10:00 pm
Not much of a "deep state" if it can't produce his tax returns.
DC Reader , says: September 5, 2018 at 10:13 pm
"They want credit for "resisting" Trump when their "resistance" amounts to manipulating the policies of the government to their own liking. "

Yes. Creepy. Especially in light of Trump's about-turn on foreign policy, in which this administration has used our money and military power to serve Israeli and Saudi Arabian interests instead of America's.

Now we know where the "America First" policy of the campaign went. It went down the Deep State rabbit hole. We're still mired in the Middle East, still doing favors for Israel and Saudi Arabia. Things didn't get better. They got far worse.

Lenny , says: September 5, 2018 at 10:15 pm
Anonymous is doing what Congress refuses to do

Next, the Generals will take over, unless we elect a Congress willing to perform its constitutional duty

Stephen J. , says: September 5, 2018 at 10:26 pm
Hiding behind anonymity I believe shows a lack of courage and conviction. I am surprised a genuine "newspaper" would even publish the article. How can anyone be believed when they don;t have the courage to sign their name?
Mercy Seat , says: September 5, 2018 at 10:26 pm
This basically confirms what many have suspected and feared. Neocon Establishment types worked their way into the White House and have been pursuing their own foreign policy agenda, exploiting the President's ignorance, stupidity, and impulsiveness.
muad'dib , says: September 5, 2018 at 10:30 pm

"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron" – H. L. Mencken

And that day arrived in November 2016

lamplighter , says: September 5, 2018 at 11:03 pm
Some at TAC have suggested for quite a while that Trump was "hijacked" by his staff at some point. While most of what he's done is clearly down to Trump himself, those who have suggested that he has been manipulated and controlled by advisors just got whopping corroboration from the Woodward book and NYT op/ed.

Under the circumstances, there's obviously concern that foreign countries have been exploiting the situation. FBI counterespionage agents, a small army of them, should be checking and re-checking the foreign connections of his current staff, to the extent that isn't already being done by Mueller.

And it isn't just Russia. China, Israel and Saudi Arabia are obvious suspects, if for no other reason that they spy on and attempt to influence us with at least the same intensity as Russia. The investigators should look where Trump has been spending his time in the foreign policy arena. He has been threatening and pressuring some countries, but he is also doing favors for others. For what countries has he been doing favors? And in threatening certain countries is he doing the will of others?

The spies and traitors will be at that nexus.

E Kent , says: September 6, 2018 at 12:08 am
Reminds me of the story of the last days of the Nixon White House, when the pressure was driving him to drunken wanderings punctuated by near unhinged rants. Senior officials became so worried that they contacted the pentagon and told them to ignore nuclear launch orders unless confirmed by someone else.

In all seriousness though, this is less some kind of "deep state" and more of what you get when you run the White House the way Trump apparently has. He's packed his administration with people of dubious ability for the most part, with the highest qualification apparently being how he perceives their loyalty to him. Then he sets them all at odds against each other, fighting for the scraps of his attention to get their own agendas enacted.

In that kind of environment it's inevitable that someone will believe that One, the emperor has no clothes, and Two, the agenda they are fighting so hard to shepherd through this administration is more important than the administration itself. So why not just do an end run around the moron and do whatever they want.

Stephen , says: September 6, 2018 at 12:40 am
Ray Woodcock: " It appears to be a confession of treason. "

Only if you regard the US president as a monarch to whom his minions owe a duty of personal allegiance. Because that is the way treason is typically defined in monarchies. (For example, in the UK.) In the United States treason has a very different definition. You can find it in section 3 of article 3 of the Constitution. There allegiance is not to any one person but to the United States as a whole, and more specifically to the Constitution.

In other words, in the US it isn't treason to betray a president, although I will grant you many Americans do treat treason as if that WERE the case. But then just how many of them have even read their nation's Constitution?

The Archivist Next Door , says: September 6, 2018 at 2:29 am
Re treason : "There allegiance is not to any one person but to the United States as a whole, and more specifically to the Constitution."

Yes. There may be treason if a foreign country has infiltrated Trump's staff with operatives who persuaded Trump to do things against the national security interests of the United States – actions on behalf of a foreign country that imperil American persons or property, civilian or military.

Mark Barsotti , says: September 6, 2018 at 3:03 am
"Mr. President, we've traced the call. The Deep State is in the White House!"
Jon Rale , says: September 6, 2018 at 4:36 am
The idea that the ethical problem at the White House is not Pr. Trump is pretty odd.

Pr. Trump says GOP legislators shouldn't be prosecuted by DOJ, voting is rigged, FBI is corrupt, 3 million Mexicans voted, orders economic deal with S. Korea to end, apparently forgets about it, and etc, and somehow Mr. Larison, David Frum, and David Graham think a bureaucrat ratting on the President and other bureaucrats frustrating the President's desires is a constitutional crisis?

When members of the President's own cabinet are taking the same actions as these bureaucrats, because they think the President is immature, not stable, or immoral?

They work with the President. They would know.

Apparently no one wants to work for Pr. Trump. Why can't he find people who agree with him and respect him?

Go after Pr. Trump's cabinet members for a deep state, not petty bureaucrats who could be fired and replaced any time.

Ask yourself why the President can't find good people to work for him.

The answer is tweeting at you every day and the finger should be pointing back at him.

Jon Rale

Naval Observatory , says: September 6, 2018 at 6:27 am
"It's a remarkable editorial. It appears to be a confession of treason. "

But Trump has been spectacularly disloyal to the people who work for him. Is there anyone other than family members who he hasn't belittled and attacked? Hell, he's even betrayed those who voted for him (see long list of broken promises).

Given his own treacherous nature, how much loyalty can he reasonably expect? He must have already fired half of those he hired, so it's not too surprising that many are now writing books or telling tales to the NYT or WaPo.

That said, there are probably some real traitors in there. I'd guess most of the real traitors are spies working for foreign countries, taking advantage of the chaos to get things done for their foreign masters. That's a real cause for concern.

Christian Chuba , says: September 6, 2018 at 7:35 am
Clearly this is an admission of a Deep State. Many of you might agree with the politics of the Deep State operative below but keep in mind he is phrasing the issue in the most political way possible but that's the point. We don't resolve political disagreements by using the power if the bureaucracy to tie the President up in say, 'collusion investigations' in combination with what entrenched agencies want. If we did so we would still be enemies of Great Britain. Those rogues burned down the White House and armed the Confederates.

The Deep State is trying to get us into battle against the Russians in Syria to create Iraq 2.0 and is cheering on his mania against Iran for Iraq 3.0.

"Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.

Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.

On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin's spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better -- such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable"

Liam , says: September 6, 2018 at 9:07 am
If Anonymous=Deep State, then Trump brought this Deep State with him. These are his appointees .
Jon , says: September 6, 2018 at 9:28 am
All of this is well and good as the expression goes. The anonymous author of the Op Ed piece should come forward and cease serving in an administration which is at odds with his or her sensibilities except for one thing that above all else must be considered in this respect: The Chief Executive has his finger on the button.

The case made by Mr. Larison is correct except for this one major consideration. One individual can launch a nuclear strike and that individual no matter who it has been and no matter who it is today and will be tomorrow has that power. Perhaps the time is past due to reconsider granting one individual with this capacity to act which with one directive sent directly to our nuclear warhead tipped missile silos may bring the end to our species on this planet.

[Sep 06, 2018] Glenn Greenwald view on "resistance" op-ed in NYT

Sep 06, 2018 | mobile.twitter.com

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald, 2:19 PM - 5 Sep 2018

Many of the complaints from the NYT's anonymous WH coward - not all, but many - are ideological: that Trump deviates from GOP orthodoxy, an ideology he didn't campaign on & that voters didn't ratify. Trump may be a threat but so is this covert coup to impose these policies. pic.twitter.com/4Qf54JJHN9

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald, Sep 5

Replying to @ggreenwald The irony in the op-ed from the NYT's anonymous WH coward is glaring and massive: s/he accuses Trump of being "anti-democratic" while boasting of membership in an unelected cabal that covertly imposes their own ideology with zero democratic accountability, mandate or transparency

View conversation

[Sep 06, 2018] British Assassination Campaign Targeting Russian Exiles

Sep 06, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

British Assassination Campaign Targeting Russian Exiles?

Over the past decade or so, a disturbing number of Russian nationals living in Britain have met untimely deaths. The victims – at least 14 – have been high-profile individuals, such as oligarch businessman Boris Berezovsky or former Kremlin security agent Alexander Litvinenko. All were living in Britain as exiles, and all were viewed as opponents of President Vladimir Putin's government.

Invariably, British politicians and news media refer to the deaths of Russian émigrés as "proof" of Russian state "malign activity". Putin in particular is accused of ordering "the hits" as some kind of vendetta against critics and traitors.

The claims of Russian state skulduggery have been reported over and over without question in the British media as well as US media. It has become an article-of-faith espoused by British and American politicians alike. "Putin is a killer," they say with seeming certainty. There is simply no question about it in their assertions.

The claims have also been given a quasi-legal veracity, with a British government-appointed inquiry in the case of Alexander Litvinenko making a conclusion that his death in 2006 was "highly likely" the result of a Kremlin plot to assassinate. Putin was personally implicated in the death of Litvinenko by the official British inquiry. The victim was said to have been poisoned with radioactive polonium. Deathbed images of a bald-headed Litvinenko conjure up a haunting image of alleged Kremlin evil-doing.

Once the notion of Russian evil-doing is inculcated the public mind, then subsequent events can be easily invoked as "more proof" of what has already been "established". Namely, so it goes, that the Russian state is carrying out assassinations on British territory.

Thus, we see this "corroborating" effect with the alleged poisoning of a former Russian double-agent, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter in Salisbury back in March this year.

What actually happened to the Skripals is not known – who are said to have since recovered their health, but their whereabouts have not been disclosed by the British authorities. Nevertheless, as soon as the incident of their apparent poisoning occurred, it was easy for the British authorities and media to whip up accusations against Russia as being behind "another assassination attempt" owing to the past "established template" of other Russian émigrés seeming to have been killed by Kremlin agents.

For its part, the Russian government has always categorically denied any involvement in the ill-fate of nationals living in exile in Britain. On the Skripal case, Moscow has pointed out that the British authorities have not produced any independently verifiable evidence against the Kremlin. Russian requests for access to the investigation file have been rejected by the British.

On the Litvinenko case, Russia has said that the official British inquiry was conducted without due process of transparency, or Russia being allowed to defend itself. It was more trial by media.

A common denominator is that the British have operated on a presumption of guilt. The "proof" is largely at the level of allegation or innuendo of Russian malfeasance.

But let's turn the premise of the argument around. What if the British state were the ones conducting a campaign of assassination against Russian émigrés, with the cold-blooded objective of using those deaths as a propaganda campaign to blacken and criminalize Russia?

In a recent British media interview Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was typically harangued over alleged Russian malign activity in Britain. Lavrov rightly turned the question around, and said that the Russian authorities are the ones who are entitled to demand an explanation from the British state on why so many of its nationals have met untimely deaths.

The presumption of guilt against Russia is based on a premise of Russophobia, which prevents an open-minded inquiry. If an open mind is permitted, then surely a more pertinent position is to ask the British authorities to explain the high number of deaths in their jurisdiction.

As ever, the litmus-test question is: who gains from the deaths? In the case of the alleged attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, would Russia risk such a bizarre plot against an exile who had been living in Britain undisturbed for 10 years? Or would Britain gain much more from smearing Moscow at the time of President Putin's re-election in March, and in the run-up to the World Cup?

The more recent alleged nerve-agent poisoning of two British citizens – Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess – in the southern English town of Amesbury revived official anti-Russia accusations and public fears over the earlier Skripal incident in nearby Salisbury.

The Amesbury incident in early July occurred just as a successful World Cup tournament in Russia was underway. It also came ahead of US President Donald Trump's landmark summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.

Again, who stands to gain most from these provocative events? Russia or Britain?

Another revealing twist in the presumed narrative of "Kremlin criminality" came from a recent interview given to Russian news media by the daughter of the deceased oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Of course, her side of the story received no coverage in the British media.

Liza Berezovsky believes that her father's death in 2013, while living in exile in Britain, was the dirty work of British state assassins. The case has added importance because it links directly to the previous death of Alexander Litvinenko, who was also living as an exile in Britain.

Berezovsky's daughter believes that her father wanted to return from Britain to Russia so that he could live out his old age in his native country. She claims that the oligarch had vital information on how the death of Litvinenko in 2006, reportedly from radioactive polonium poisoning, had actually been staged as a smear against Putin and the Kremlin.

Boris Berezovsky, his daughter claims, played a key role along with the British state in orchestrating the demise of Litvinenko to look like an assassination plot carried out by the Kremlin. It was Berezovsky who apparently suggested that Litvinenko, with whom he was an associate, shave off his hair in order to drum up the suspicion of Kremlin poisoning.

Liza Berezovsky contends that, seven years after Litvinenko died, her father was preparing to divulge the dirty tricks involving the British state and their anti-Russian campaign. She said the oligarch wanted to atone for his past misdeeds and to make his peace with Mother Russia. She believes that British state agents got wind of his plans to come clean, which would have caused them an acute international scandal.

In March 2013, just days before he was due to depart from Britain, the oligarch was found dead in his mansion near Ascot, in the English countryside, apparently from suicide caused by a ligature around his neck.

In the end, however, a British civil coroner did not conclude suicide, and left an "open verdict" on the death. An eminent German pathologist hired by Liza Berezovsky provided post-mortem evidence that her father's body showed signs of his death having not been self-inflicted. He was, in their view, murdered.

It is not beyond the realms of possibility that British secret services are running an assassination program on Russian exiles. These exiles are often used for a time by the British state as media assets, presented as high-profile critics of the Kremlin and lending testimonies to much-publicized allegations of "authoritarianism" and "human rights abuses" under Putin.

At some opportune later time, these Russian dissidents can be liquidated by British agents. Their deaths are then presented as "more proof" of Russian malign activity and in particular for the purpose of criminalizing President Putin and his government.

Considering how London has become an international haven for Russian oligarchs whose wealth is often tainted as being proceeds from criminal activity against Russian laws and who therefore are easily framed as Putin opponents – the British state has ample opportunities for setting up "assassinations" and anti-Putin provocations.

Such a nefarious British program is by no means unprecedented. During the 30-year armed conflict in Northern Ireland ending in the late 1990s, it is documented that the British state ran clandestine assassination campaigns against Irish republican figures, as well as ordinary citizens, as a coldly calculated political instrument of state-sponsored terrorism. It was an instrument honed by the British from other colonial-era conflicts, such as in Kenya, Myanmar (formerly Burma), Malaysia (formerly Malaya), and in several Arab countries like Bahrain and Yemen, as detailed by British historian Mark Curtis in his book Web of Deceit.

Adapting such heinous techniques for a contemporary propaganda war against Russia wouldn't cost any qualms to British state grandees and their agents. Indeed, for them, it would be simply Machiavellian business-as-usual.

Tags: Skripal case

[Sep 06, 2018] Skripals The Mystery Deepens by Craig Murray

Notable quotes:
"... The time that "Boshirov and Petrov" were allegedly in Salisbury carrying out the attack is all entirely within the period the Skripals were universally reported to have left their home with their mobile phones switched off. ..."
"... But the Metropolitan Police state that Boshirov and Petrov did not arrive in Salisbury until 11.48 on the day of the poisoning. That means that they could not have applied a nerve agent to the Skripals' doorknob before noon at the earliest. ..."
"... But there has never been any indication that the Skripals returned to their home after noon on Sunday 4 March. If they did so, they and/or their car somehow avoided all CCTV cameras. Remember they were caught by three CCTV cameras on leaving, and Borishov and Petrov were caught frequently on CCTV on arriving. ..."
"... The Skripals were next seen on CCTV at 13.30, driving down Devizes road. After that their movements were clearly witnessed or recorded until their admission to hospital. ..."
"... In general it is worth observing that the Skripals, and poor Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley, all managed to achieve almost complete CCTV invisibility in their widespread movements around Salisbury at the key times, while in contrast "Petrov and Boshirov" managed to be frequently caught in high quality all the time during their brief visit. ..."
"... This is especially remarkable in the case of the Skripals' location around noon on 4 March. The government can only maintain that they returned home at this time, as they insist they got the nerve agent from the doorknob. But why was their car so frequently caught on CCTV leaving, but not at all returning? It appears very much more probable that they came into contact with the nerve agent somewhere else, while they were out. ..."
"... they may have been meeting them, outside the home. The evidence points to that, rather than doorknobs. Such a meeting might explain why the Skripals had turned off their mobile phones to attempt to avoid surveillance. ..."
"... If "Boshirov and Petrov" are secret agents, their incompetence is astounding. They used public transport rather than a vehicle and left the clearest possible CCTV footprint. They failed in their assassination attempt. They left traces of novichok everywhere and could well have poisoned themselves, and left the "murder weapon" lying around to be found. Their timings in Salisbury were extremely tight – and British Sunday rail service dependent. ..."
Sep 06, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

The time that "Boshirov and Petrov" were allegedly in Salisbury carrying out the attack is all entirely within the period the Skripals were universally reported to have left their home with their mobile phones switched off.

A key hole in the British government's account of the Salisbury poisonings has been plugged – the lack of any actual suspects. And it has been plugged in a way that appears broadly convincing – these two men do appear to have traveled to Salisbury at the right time to have been involved.

But what has not been established is the men's identity and that they are agents of the Russian state, or just what they did in Salisbury. If they are Russian agents, they are remarkably amateur assassins. Meanwhile the new evidence throws the previously reported timelines into confusion – and demolishes the theories put out by "experts" as to why the Novichok dose was not fatal.

This BBC report gives a very useful timeline summary of events.

At 09.15 on Sunday 4 March the Skripals' car was seen on CCTV driving through three different locations in Salisbury. Both Skripals had switched off their mobile phones and they remained off for over four hours, which has baffled geo-location.

There is no CCTV footage that indicates the Skripals returning to their home. It has therefore always been assumed that they last touched the door handle around 9am.

The Skripals Have Survived but They Are Not Safe: The Novichok Fraud Should Bring Down the UK Government

But the Metropolitan Police state that Boshirov and Petrov did not arrive in Salisbury until 11.48 on the day of the poisoning. That means that they could not have applied a nerve agent to the Skripals' doorknob before noon at the earliest.

But there has never been any indication that the Skripals returned to their home after noon on Sunday 4 March. If they did so, they and/or their car somehow avoided all CCTV cameras. Remember they were caught by three CCTV cameras on leaving, and Borishov and Petrov were caught frequently on CCTV on arriving.

The Skripals were next seen on CCTV at 13.30, driving down Devizes road. After that their movements were clearly witnessed or recorded until their admission to hospital.

So even if the Skripals made an "invisible" trip home before being seen on Devizes Road, that means the very latest they could have touched the doorknob is 13.15. The longest possible gap between the novichok being placed on the doorknob and the Skripals touching it would have been one hour and 15 minutes. Do you recall all those "experts" leaping in to tell us that the "ten times deadlier than VX" nerve agent was not fatal because it had degraded overnight on the doorknob? Well that cannot be true. The time between application and contact was between a minute and (at most) just over an hour on this new timeline.

In general it is worth observing that the Skripals, and poor Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley, all managed to achieve almost complete CCTV invisibility in their widespread movements around Salisbury at the key times, while in contrast "Petrov and Boshirov" managed to be frequently caught in high quality all the time during their brief visit.

This is especially remarkable in the case of the Skripals' location around noon on 4 March. The government can only maintain that they returned home at this time, as they insist they got the nerve agent from the doorknob. But why was their car so frequently caught on CCTV leaving, but not at all returning? It appears very much more probable that they came into contact with the nerve agent somewhere else, while they were out.

"Boshirov and Petrov" plainly are of interest in this case. But only Theresa May stated they were Russian agents: the police did not, and stated that they expected those were not their real identities. We do not know who Boshirov and Petrov were. It appears very likely their appearance was to do with the Skripals on that day. But they may have been meeting them, outside the home. The evidence points to that, rather than doorknobs. Such a meeting might explain why the Skripals had turned off their mobile phones to attempt to avoid surveillance.

It is also telling the police have pressed no charges against them in the case of Dawn Sturgess, which would be manslaughter at least if the government version is true.

If "Boshirov and Petrov" are secret agents, their incompetence is astounding. They used public transport rather than a vehicle and left the clearest possible CCTV footprint. They failed in their assassination attempt. They left traces of novichok everywhere and could well have poisoned themselves, and left the "murder weapon" lying around to be found. Their timings in Salisbury were extremely tight – and British Sunday rail service dependent.

There are other possibilities of who "Boshirov and Petrov" really are, of which Ukrainian is the obvious one. One thing I discovered when British Ambassador to Uzbekistan was that there had been a large Ukrainian ethnic group of scientists working at the Soviet chemical weapon testing facility there at Nukus. There are many other possibilities.

Yesterday's revelations certainly add to the amount we know about the Skripal event. But they raise as many new questions as they give answers.

[Sep 02, 2018] Russian Oligarch And Putin Pal Admits To Collusion, Secret Meetings

Sep 01, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden Sat, 09/01/2018 - 19:30

Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a close associate of Vladimir Putin, has gone on record with The Hill 's John Solomon - admitting to colluding with Americans leading up to the 2016 US election, except it might not be what you're thinking.

https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=2381

me title=

Deripaska, rumored to be Donald Trump's " back channel " to Putin via the Russian's former association with Paul Manafort, says he "colluded" with the US Government between 2009 and 2016.

In 2009, when Robert Mueller was running the FBI , the agency asked Deripaska to spend $25 million of his own money to bankroll an FBI-supervised operation to rescue a retired FBI agent - Robert Levinson, who was kidnapped in 2007 while working on a 2007 CIA contract in Iran. This in and of itself is more than a bit strange.

Deripaska agreed, however the Obama State Department, headed by Hillary Clinton, scuttled a last-minute deal with Iran before Levinson could be released. He hasn't been heard from since.

FBI agents courted Deripaska in 2009 in a series of secret hotel meetings in Paris; Vienna; Budapest, Hungary, and Washington . Agents persuaded the aluminum industry magnate to underwrite the mission. The Russian billionaire insisted the operation neither involve nor harm his homeland. -The Hill

In other words - Trump's alleged "back channel" to Putin was in fact an FBI asset who spent $25 million helping Obama's "scandal free" administration find a kidnapped agent. Deripaska's admitted

Steele, Ohr and the 2016 US Election

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me title=

As the New York Times frames it, distancing Deripaska from the FBI (no mention of the $25 million rescue effort, for example), the Russian aluminum magnate was just one of several Putin-linked Oligarchs the FBI tried to flip.

The attempt to flip Mr. Deripaska was part of a broader, clandestine American effort to gauge the possibility of gaining cooperation from roughly a half-dozen of Russia's richest men, nearly all of whom, like Mr. Deripaska, depend on President Vladimir V. Putin to maintain their wealth, the officials said. - NYT

Central to the recruiting effort were two central players in the Trump-Russia investigation; twice-demoted DOJ #4 official Bruce Ohr and Christopher Steele - the author of the largely unverified "Steele Dossier."

Steele, a longtime associate of Ohr's, worked for Deripaska beginning in 2012 researching a business rival - work which would evolve to the point where the former British spy was interfacing with the Obama administration on his behalf - resulting in Deripaska regaining entry into the United States, where he visited numerous times between 2009 and 2017.

The State Department tried to keep him from getting a U.S. visa between 2006 and 2009 because they believed he had unspecified connections to criminal elements in Russia as he consolidated power in the aluminum industry. Deripaska has denied those allegations...

Whatever the case, it is irrefutable that after he began helping the FBI, Deripaska regained entry to the United States . And he visited numerous times between 2009 and 2017, visa entry records show. - The Hill

Deripaska is now banned from the United States as one of several Russians sanctioned in April in response to alleged 2016 election meddling.

In a September 2016 meeting, Deripaska told FBI agents that it was "preposterous" that Paul Manafort was colluding with Russia to help Trump win the 2016 election . This, despite the fact that Deripaska and Manafort's business relationship "ended in lawsuits, per The Hill - and the Russian would have every reason to throw Manafort under the bus if he wanted some revenge on his old associate.

So the FBI and DOJ secretly collaborated with Trump's alleged backchannel over a seven-year period , starting with Levinson, then on Deripaska's Visa, and finally regarding whether Paul Manafort was an intermediary to Putin. Deripaska vehemently denies the assertion, and even took out newspaper advertisements in the US last year volunteering to testify to Congress, refuting an AP report that he and Manafort secretly worked on a plan to "greatly benefit the Putin government" a decade ago.

Soon after the advertisements ran, representatives for the House and Senate Intelligence Committees called a Washington-based lawyer for Mr. Deripaska, Adam Waldman, inquiring about taking his client up on the offer to testify, Mr. Waldman said in an interview.

What happened after that has been in dispute. Mr. Waldman, who stopped working for Mr. Deripaska after the sanctions were levied, said he told the committee staff that his client would be willing to testify without any grant of immunity, but would not testify about any Russian collusion with the Trump campaign because "he doesn't know anything about that theory and actually doesn't believe it occurred." - NYT

In short, Deripaska wants it known that he worked with the FBI and DOJ, and that he had nothing to do with the Steele dossier.

Today, Deripaska is banned anew from the United States, one of several Russians sanctioned in April by the Trump administration as a way to punish Putin for 2016 election meddling. But he wants to be clear about a few things, according to a statement provided by his team. First, he did collude with Americans in the form of voluntarily assisting and meeting with the FBI, the DOJ and people such as Ohr between 2009 and 2016.

He also wants Americans to know he did not cooperate or assist with Steele's dossier, and he tried to dispel the FBI notion that Russia and the Trump campaign colluded during the 2016 election . - The Hill

Interestingly, Steele's dossier which was partially funded by the Clinton campaign, relied on senior Kremlin officials .

[Sep 01, 2018] We live in times in which the media elites and academia are fully insane. That means that the 'normal' levels of insanity and venality for career politicians will be ramped up

Notable quotes:
"... My favorite part of this article: "And on and on, and on, it goes and will continue to go until 2020, unless Trump decides to attack Iran, which I doubt The Resistance® will let him do, because that would get extremely weird, as they would somehow have to simultaneously support another US war of aggression and condemn Trump as Adolf Hitler for starting it. ..."
"... Oh, and also, they would have a hard time explaining why Putin had ordered his stooge in the White House to attack Russia's ally in the Middle East." ..."
Sep 01, 2018 | www.unz.com

Johnnie Walker Read , says: September 1, 2018 at 12:11 pm GMT

@Bennis Mardens

"A certain tribe hates Trump"

Wow, you must live on a different planet than the rest f us. Israhell has never had a greater friend in the White House than Donald Trumpenstien.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/when-it-comes-to-jewish-ties-no-gop-candidate-trumps-trump/

Jake , says: September 1, 2018 at 12:18 pm GMT

My favorite part of this article: "And on and on, and on, it goes and will continue to go until 2020, unless Trump decides to attack Iran, which I doubt The Resistance® will let him do, because that would get extremely weird, as they would somehow have to simultaneously support another US war of aggression and condemn Trump as Adolf Hitler for starting it.

Oh, and also, they would have a hard time explaining why Putin had ordered his stooge in the White House to attack Russia's ally in the Middle East."

We live in times in which the media elites and academia are fully insane. That means that the 'normal' levels of insanity and venality for career politicians will be ramped up.

factjis , says: September 1, 2018 at 12:24 pm GMT
@Bennis Mardens

So this "tribe" (as you call them) are the folks leading the criticism of the President? These folks "own the media" you aver -- yes?

Hmmm, then that clearly can't be a "tribe" which includes Netanyahu, his likudniks and neo-cons and militant right-wing, American billionaire Zionists -- because they've never had it so good under any U.S. President.

As for the Palestinians (let alone the American middle class), well, things are rather different.

Moi , says: September 1, 2018 at 12:27 pm GMT
@Bennis Mardens

How so? Mr. T is a crypto Jew himself who loves Israel almost as much as Bibi.

anon , [317] Disclaimer says: September 1, 2018 at 12:42 pm GMT
@Bennis Mardens

unilateral private media ownership is the problem, not privatized tribal hate for Trump or whomever..

Government vs Private Parallel Media can solve many, many problems created by Deep State it can quickly turn the tables on the deep state or strongly support it.. Since 1492 when Martin Luther exposed unilateral backroom power, massive singularities of accumulated wealth, and controlled, filtered propaganda to the masses. government has become the responsibility of the governed, and the governors have become the servants of the masses. However, those same powers Luther exposed have done everything in their power to deny the masses the right to self determination

Trump has a plan to nationalize the media, but I think he should merely parallel the private media with open source government media ( no rules to use it, none, not any, sex weird stuff, criminal stuff, whatever ,just let anyone with something to say say it on their own website hosted by the government). Produce a government media hosting site, allow anyone, foreign or local, to present on the public media. use government developed search engine and indexing technology (no private party no private contractors, everything and everyone involved at the government host site is a government employee and all technology is developed by government for government use only) and let the masses decide for themselves both 1) form of government and 2) degree of corruption they will accept. Everyone can then select do they want to view the Deep State Media or one of the millions of content providers visible on the government media host.

Johnnie Walker Read , says: September 1, 2018 at 12:42 pm GMT
@Bennis Mardens

"Zionism(A.K.A. Neo-Cons, and all "Israeli Firsters") is a political ideology based upon the suspension of reason and common sense, rooted upon a macabre death wish that worships the state of Israel.

Israel-First loyalists do not have to be Jewish. Christian-Zionists routinely forgo faithfulness to our country, when they place Israel above the interests of our own nation. The notion that Israel is a trusted ally is the most absurd illusion that exists in a demented political culture. This is the "Big Lie", an invention of Zionist subversion, which is the cause of an insane American foreign policy. Israel-First zealots control every aspect of political power in the United States. An actual American holocaust that stares us directly in our faces stems from sick fraudulent propaganda and phony guilt deceit that only benefits Zionists and Israel."

http://batr.org/gulag/051605.html

Trump praising Israel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-ZadGhAo5M

Anonymous , [321] Disclaimer says: September 1, 2018 at 1:20 pm GMT
@jilles dykstra

South America, North America .. is there still a difference?

Anonymous , [321] Disclaimer says: September 1, 2018 at 1:23 pm GMT
@Sean

I hope not. If Trump wants to go down a hero, he can be the monkey wrench that wrecks so much damage on the machine that it's no longer capable of threatening the world. If he can perform a controlled demolition of the USA, the rest of the world will continue just fine without them. We'll remember him as a hero for preventing WW3.

HallParvey , says: September 1, 2018 at 1:40 pm GMT
@Brabantian

None of this makes any difference. The MSM still control 98 percent of the information transmission systems in the western world. Indeed, (((they))) are beginning to prohibit other information systems such as the internet.

What you don't hear about never happened. The flip side of that coin is that what you hear about over and over comes to be reality, regardless. Think Tawana Brawley. Think Duke sports teams.

Where there's smoke there must be fire, right?

Trump has a talent for feeding the MSM red meat. Always with a good dose of poison mixed in so they are happy to shoot themselves in the foot. Think Roseanne Roseannadanna. Nevermind

Anonymous , [795] Disclaimer says: September 1, 2018 at 1:55 pm GMT
@Sean

That is why Trump will attack Iran.

Well, he can't attack Syria because Israel, ya know, might get hot grease spattered on them. And besides, Israel wants Syria with as little additional damage as possible, leaving an attack on Iran as the only method of "attacking" Russia. But, it cannot be done directly, with flimsy excuses. The excuses are just too damn flimsy.

Also, life is too damn good for American Army mercenaries to have to risk life and limb for another meaningless ME conflict. Nope, the Army needs another five years, at the very least, before another round of medals and benefit-increases justifies their personal risk. US Army take-home, "combat" pay and massive health-and-living benefits amount to the best living any white American boy can experience, but there is a limit.

Now, limited-scope attack by proxy? Iraq border conflict? Afghanistan border conflict? Both good, plus there is already umpty-ump bajillion $ of US taxpayer-paid military equipment in Afghanistan. Good excuse to junk it all and get new stuff. That's what taxpayers are for, after all.

Anonymous , [795] Disclaimer says: September 1, 2018 at 1:58 pm GMT
@Ilyana_Rozumova

Hypocrisy will end, and somebody will have to tell the American people the naked truth.

Don't be silly. Hypocrisy will increase, and the American people are never told any truth, ever.

DESERT FOX , says: September 1, 2018 at 1:59 pm GMT

The fact is that the U.S. is a Zionist controlled plantation and there is no difference at the top levels between the demonrats and the republicons as both are Zionist controlled and are traitors to America, as proof of this is the Israeli and Zionist controlled deep state attack on 911 which killed 3000 Americans and Israel and the Zionists got away with it and every thinking America knows they did it.

The only difference between Trump and Helliary is their plumbing, both are Zionist puppets and the ziocons run the U.S. gov..

[Aug 31, 2018] We can reasonably conclude that the Scripals were poisoned by the British government by Joe Quinn

Notable quotes:
"... Novichok is a group of agents developed only by Russia and not declared under the CWC ..."
"... This is part of a group of nerve agents known as 'Novichok' ..."
"... positive identification ..."
"... or related compound ..."
"... or closely related agent. ..."
"... "Scientific peer review is the only thing separating us from chaos!" ..."
Mar 28, 2018 | www.sott.net

By now anyone with an opinion on the Skripal poisoning has already decided if they believe the official narrative or not. Still, the event and the ongoing media coverage around it presents an opportunity to understand more than we might think.

The British government claim is that a "military-grade nerve agent", one of a group of nerve agents supposedly called 'novichok' (which simply means 'newcomer'), was used by Russia on Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury. They reach the conclusion that Russia is to blame because, they claim, the nerve agent used is "of a type developed by Russia."

Russian daily newspaper Kommersant recently released a 6-page document they claim constitutes the British government's official case against Russia. They summed up the 'evidence' as follows:

Military-grade Novichok nerve agent positively identified at the UK's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down, an OPCW-accredited and designated laboratory Novichok is a group of agents developed only by Russia and not declared under the CWC A violation of the fundamental prohibition on the use of chemical weapons (Art. 1 CWC) First offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War We are without doubt that Russia is responsible. No country bar Russia has combined capability, intent and motive. There is no plausible alternative explanation As of Sunday 18 March, we count over thirty parallel lines of Russian disinformation
Note the 2nd point, that " Novichok is a group of agents developed only by Russia and not declared under the CWC ."

In 2016, Iranian scientists synthesized five 'Novichok' agents and the data was added to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons' Central Analytical Database (OCAD).

In an interview with AFP, the former Russian scientist who participated in the development of "Novichok" in Russia in the 70s and 80s, Vil Mirzayanov, stated that if Russia was not responsible for the poisoning:

"The only other possibility would be that someone used the formulas in my book to make such a weapon.
Mirzayanov's book, published in 2008 , contains the formulas he alleges can be used to create "Novichoks". In 1995, he explained that "the chemical components or precursors" of Novichok are "ordinary organophosphates that can be made at commercial chemical companies that manufacture such products as fertilizers and pesticides."

So the British government claim that this type of nerve agent can only be Russian, and was only developed by Russia, is demonstrably false. In fact, in her statement to the House of Commons on 12th March 2018 , British Prime Minister Theresa May contradicted that claim when she said:

"It is now clear that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia. This is part of a group of nerve agents known as 'Novichok' . Based on the positive identification of this chemical agent by world-leading experts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down. "
In the world of nerve agents, in order to positively identify a sample, you must have your own sample for comparison and positive identification.

In a judgement at the British High Court on 22nd March on whether to allow blood samples to be taken from Sergei and Yulia Skripal for examination by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), evidence submitted by the Porton Down laboratory to the court (Section 17 i) stated:

"Blood samples from Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal were analysed and the findings indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound . The samples tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent or closely related agent. "
Again, Porton Down must have had a sample of the alleged nerve agent used to poison Skripal and his daughter. That can mean only one of two things: that Porton Down obtained the nerve agent from some other party, or manufactured it on site . Porton Down is, after all, in the business of producing chemical weapons (ostensibly to test them on anti-chemical weapon equipment).

Note also that the wording used in the quote above includes the possibility that the agent used on Skripal was not even 'Novichok' but rather a "related compound" or something "closely related." So even Theresa May's statement that the British MoD had "positively identified" 'Novichok' seems false.

In an interview with German Deutsch Welle , bumbling UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson was directly asked if scientists at Porton Down had samples of 'Novichok', to which he replied:

" They do . And they were absolutely categorical and I asked the guy myself, I said, 'Are you sure?' And he said there's no doubt."
So the only thing we can presume to be 100% certain of in the poisoning of Skripal and his daughter is that the nerve agent used was in stock at Porton Down, 8 miles from the site of the poisoning.

In the 5th point in the British government 6-page 'dossier', the British establishment claims:

"We are without doubt that Russia is responsible. No country bar Russia has combined capability, intent and motive. There is no plausible alternative."
We know that other countries have the capability. Claiming to have no doubt about someone's intent is nonsense. So we're left with motive. Did Russia have a motive to poison Skripal and his daughter? Motives for a course of action are intrinsically linked to the result of the action. The obvious and predictable result of using a nerve agent that was originally developed in Russia in the 1970s to poison a former Russian spy living in the UK and working for British intelligence is that Russia would be blamed and universally condemned for it. So if Russia was motivated to further downgrade its reputation on the international stage, then sure, Russia had motivation to poison Skripal and his daughter.

The problem is that there is no evidence that Russia desires to damage its own reputation in this way. Is there evidence that anyone else has such motivation? For those that have been paying attention to world affairs over the past 6 or 7 years, I'll presume that you don't need me to answer that one.

So when we remove the unfounded and contradictory claims around the Skripal poisoning, the actual facts of the case are rather limited:

Skripal lived in Salisbury, England, and had been working for MI5 for 8 years. It is reasonable to assume that he may, therefore, have had access to sensitive material, possibly useful to foreign governments, including Russia. As such, he may have posed an 'intelligence threat' if he returned to Russia. According to a close friend , Skripal had recently decided that he wanted to go back to live in Russia and petitioned the Russian government to that end. Not long thereafter, Skripal was poisoned with a substance that was in stock at a British Ministry of Defense facility, 8 miles from where he was living. The British government blamed Russia for his poisoning. This accusation must be seen in the context of a years-long anglo-American black propaganda campaign designed to marginalize Russia and thereby limit its ability to effectively assert itself as a globally influential player. I've heard people make the argument that any investigations of what really happened in Salisbury can only ever be guesswork, that we can never be 100% sure. Of course, that's true to a degree, especially when dealing with evidence which may be held back from public disclosure because of reasons of "national security". But such people tend to use this line of thinking simply to avoid taking a position, because taking a position scares some people, especially if it is not the official position. It's also not very realistic or practical. If we were to hold all statements and claims to the same level of proof, our court systems would become obsolete. Rarely is there enough evidence to find a criminal guilty with a 100% degree of certainty. That's why courts hold the standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" and allow for circumstantial evidence.

Insistence on absolute proof fails to recognize that, as humans, we don't navigate our lives and make decisions on the basis of 100% proof. Instead, we use something akin to 'past form'. For example, if I intend to take the train at 9.15am from platform 1 in the morning, I cannot be 100% certain that the train will be there at 9.15am, or that it will be there at all that day. Instead, I actively assume that it will be there based on the circumstantial evidence I have accrued through repeated observations that when I go there at that time the train is there. You could even say that the train is very likely to be there because it has the means, motive and opportunity.

That's how we go about our daily lives, at least. But in cases of guilt and innocence we probably need a higher standard. Many suspects may have means, motive and opportunity at the same time. That doesn't mean they're all guilty. And a history of similar crimes does not necessarily mean that a suspect is guilty of one particular crime. So what to do in a case like the Skripal poisoning? The only thing we can do is compare competing hypotheses and the degrees to which they are consistent with all the facts available. In other words, which scenario is more likely given the known facts?

In answering the question of who poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter, we lack 100% proof that the British government (or some element thereof) was responsible for the attack, just as we lack 100% proof that the Russian government was responsible. In fact, the evidence and reasoning provided by the British government does not actually support the Russian hypothesis over competing hypotheses, because we would see the same evidence if the attack were carried out in order to frame Russia. If evidence applies equally to two or more competing hypotheses, naturally that evidence cannot be used to support one hypothesis over the other, which is precisely what the British government is doing.

In contrast, the British government's apparent access to the precise nerve agents in question, close to where Skripal lives, their full access to Skripal himself, their past form in fabricating evidence of chemical weapons usage by other states, and their clear intent to wage a vicious and underhanded demonization campaign against Russia, all combine to allow us to actively assume that the poisoning of Skripal and his daughter was the work of the British government itself. Is it beyond a reasonable doubt? Perhaps not, but it is currently the only hypothesis that makes sense given the evidence available. And until more evidence is made available, it is the only reasonable conclusion to make.

Joe Quinn is the co-author of 9/11: The Ultimate Truth (with Laura Knight-Jadczyk, 2006) and Manufactured Terror: The Boston Marathon Bombings, Sandy Hook, Aurora Shooting and Other False Flag Terror Attacks (with Niall Bradley, 2014), and the host of Sott.net's The Sott Report Videos and co-host of the 'Behind the Headlines' radio show on the Sott Radio Network .

An established web-based essayist and print author, Quinn has been writing incisive editorials for Sott.net for over 10 years. His articles have appeared on many alternative news sites and he has been interviewed on several internet radio shows and has also appeared on Iranian Press TV . His articles can also be found on his personal blog JoeQuinn.net .


BlackCartouche · 5 months ago

"By now anyone with an opinion on the Skripal poisoning has already decided if they believe the official narrative or not."

Lol. Is there anyone on SOTT who believes the official narrative?

HashAttack2 · 5 months ago
BlackCartouche Believes?

It's hard to even decipher the official narrative, it's an incoherent mess, lacking any motive, lacking any factual content.

Where we have facts, e.g. 3 actual admissions to hospital and compare with the narrative, 130 lives threatened, it's makes May's announcements appear total nonsense

It's all very well western MSM and governments asking us to believe their narratives but their story lines never make sense ... they just lack logical consistency and tend to have glaring plot holes .... it's all hypocritical BS

BlackCartouche · 5 months ago
HashAttack2 Apparently Novichok is at least several times deadlier than the very deadly VX nerve agent.

Why isn't anyone dead?

parallax · 5 months ago
Lol. Is there anyone on SOTT who believes the official narrative?
I've been knitting a sweater waiting for some really good 'official' evidence; I'm about to start in on a new one and perhaps a blanket after that.

The thing about official narratives is that they try to appeal to the 'plausible lie' (repeated often enough on the news - and nothing new here to SOTT readers), and in a court of law (or world opinion) this type of lie, as we know, can do the trick in peoples heads. Double-down on it all with rolled out authoritarians and the MSN public can be like putty - moldable.

Thanks for writing such a good article - nice work!

HashAttack2 · 5 months ago
parallax Can you knit me one too ... plenty of time before any evidence turns up
Joan · 5 months ago
This whole episode disgusts me, and that is what is, an episode, in the pathological drama that is enfolding in the world today.

It has no bearing or relevance to what is occurring in the real world, it's a staged political act.

These so called politicians in the west are so inept, they are no longer able to judge or respond to the will of the people, for which they have been elected I might add, they resort to extraordinary measures to keep the electorate on side.

Unfortunately, it seems to be missing the mark, evidence all the mass unrest in the US, UK and Europe.

The so called Austerity measures have done nothing more than to create more chaos on an already chaotic situation, fueled by emotional fervor.

And of course, we have the MSM fueling the fire. At one time it was described as the 5 th Estate, No longer, it is a collaborator and cooperator in the message that the political elite want to send to the masses.

Well it's a free choice one can believe the evidence that is presented from whatever news source one wants to watch, read or listen to. Personally I think there should be a warning message, like on food labels, that if one listens, watches or reads the MSM, it is a case of buyer beware, in the case of MSM, it is a case of your mind beware, and that is the most important thing as far as I am concerned, ones own personal integrity is not compromised, the ability to discern truth from lies.

system · 5 months ago
Joan ''...These so called politicians in the west are so inept,...''

The politicians are not the ones running the show. Big money is. Really big money. Consortiums of major banks and oil companies for example. The Rockerfeller family is another one. I forgot the number but I do remember their fortune is unbelievably colossal. They are in everything. Just a handful of people are running the show from behind the scene. Surely you know that.

Chase · 5 months ago
Nobody elected the current British pm.
Joan · 5 months ago
demore Yes I do know that. And what we are witnessing is a show for public consumption

It has no relation to what is happening in th real world. Business with Russia continues, although they may have to jump more hurdles, the space station continues, banking and finance continues. trade continues, cultural exchanges continues.

So this is a purely a staged political event to sway the peoples to back a pathological ideology.

They live in a bubble of there own reality and unfortunately they are trying to get people to pierce the bubble and enter that reality.

Will they succeed, lord I hope not.

Xerox · 5 months ago
Consider for example this picture which shows Mr. Skripal and his daughter Yulia presumably in the pub or the restaurant they visited before they collapsed. Who is the third person, visible in the mirror between them, who took the picture?

Is this third person the MI6 agent Pablo Miller who in 1995 recruited Skripal as British double agent. Miller who was also involved in handling the MI6 assets Boris Berezovski and Alexander Litvinenko. Pablo Miller who lives close to Sergej Skripal in Salisbury and is considered to be his friend? The same Pablo Miller who worked with former MI6 agent Christopher Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence which created the 'dirty dossier' about Donald Trump? How deep were the Skripals involved in making up the fake stories in the anti-Trump dossier for which the Clinton campaign paid more than $168,000 dollars. Did the Skripals threaten to talk about the issue? Is that why the incident happened?

George L · 5 months ago
Without going too far into the gymnastics of the Skripals' poisoning, it is quite probable Theresa May may have known there was going to be a poisoning of the Skripals, before the actual poisoning took place. Check the timings of the released 'certainty' data.

Her unprotected visit to the sites should also be a clear indication of 'something'.

What is the name of the 'containing' hospitals, and where is it located?

Isn't this scenario following a distinct parallel path to Iraq's WMD, starting with the very similar vial, and posture?

Shalom

locust · 5 months ago
i see no evidence that there even were victims. Therefore, I assume that the whole thing is fake.
Ned Ludd · 5 months ago
I appreciate the good analysis that Joe here and others elsewhere have done to lay bare the dishonesty and fraud of this staged incident. However, after so many such faked affairs I think another response is necessary.

1. The First Response by Russia and others should be to flatly and bluntly say it is a bunch of lying shit. By this I mean that Russia et al should stop being so damned reasonable. That this sort of stuff should be flung back at the accusers with defiance.

2. Russia et al should inflict immediate and painful measure on the perpetrators. Hit them hard where it counts. Seize assets, arrest nationals, attack economically, impose sanctions. Make it clear that whatever they do to Russia can be taken in stride. But the west is fragile and weak and greedy and so not able to receive return blows. Do this with an air of 'we can take it, we will dish it out, you can't hadle it'.

3. Split the Europeans. Pitch soft to some countries like Italy but pound others like the UK. They are weak, they will fold.

4. Announce bold new military undertakings. Up the building of weapon systems. Increase the reserves, deployment. Make it very clear there will be a price and Russia is prepared to inflict serious pain.

5. Continue to buddy up to China. Dramatically increase economic protection measure. Prepare to attack and undermine western currencies and markets.

The bragging and posturing of the west is a gambler's last throw. They cannot maintain by force or any other means cohesion. Faced with painful resistance parts of the regime will grow fearful and capitulate. Make for civil war. Let them destroy themselves. This is the cheapest and safest way to put the lot out of business.

But, China, Russia and honest people in the west need to show some teeth to set this in motion.

Illusionoffreedom · 5 months ago
Yeah Ned, but I think that's exactly what they want Russia to do, and they ain't playing that game. it must be maddening to them to poke and prod them and they are, like you say, so damn reasonable,
Rebel · 5 months ago
Did anyone miss this!?:

So where is the 'Novichok' talk coming from? Well, someone in the British government propaganda staff watched the current seasons of the British-American spy drama Strike Back. (reverse causality IMO - it was planned, possibly predictive programming and conditioning)

Nina Byzantina points to the summaries of recent episodes:Episode 50 ran in the U.K on November 21 2017 and in the U.S. on February 23 2018:

Meanwhile, General Lázsló shuts down Section 20, forcing Donovan to work in secret. She discovers that Zaryn is in fact Karim Markov, a Russian scientist who allegedly killed his colleagues with Novichok, a nerve agent they invented.

Episodes 51 ran in the U.K on November 28 2017 and in the U.S. on March 2 2018:

Section 20 track Berisovich's meth lab in Turov where Markov is making more Novichok and destroy it, though Berisovich escapes with Markov.

Episodes 52 ran in the U.K on January 31 2018 and in the U.S. on March 9 2018:

Section 20 track down Maya, a local Muslim woman Lowry radicalised, to a local airport. When she attempts to release the Novichok, Reynolds shoots her. The Novichok is fake however, as Berisovich does not want an attack committed in his country. ... By the time Section 20 arrives, Berisovich had already called in the FSB to extract Markov and confiscate the Novichok. Yuri resurfaces to kill McAllister and Wyatt. However they turn the tables and strangle him to death. They then manage to engage the FSB and contain the gas. But in the process Reynolds is exposed. Markov works on an antidote but is killed by the Russians before he can complete. McAllister improvises and saves Reynolds, before Novin blows up the lab. Lowry uses the remainder of the gas to kill Berisovich for trying to betray her.

Here is a clip from the series: [ Link ]
See article here: [ Link ]

Rowan Cocoan · 5 months ago
Rebel Excellent point, and, IMHO, likely true.

Sadly, however, facts and logic are not being used by the masses here as the proles have been sufficiently programmed, that they will 'knee jerk' without analysis, without open minds, and will do what the PTB's MSM tells them to do.

When absolute proof beyond reasonable doubt that the official story of 9/11 came out; to wit: the proof of explosive Alumino Sulfate? Nano sized unexploded particles in the dust of WTC, a friend, newly introduced to the 'bigger truths', asked, 'Well how are they going to explain this away?"

I told him, just like they did in not talking about WTC7. You never knew about it until 2003 when I told you. Same approach here."

Well, assuming your point is true, the more valid it is, the more it will be ignored.

Sad, true. But good thinking!!! Good point!

R.C.

Ryan · 5 months ago
Q.E.D.

Given that Russia had ample chance to kill Skripal when he was imprisoned there for several years, there's obviously a complete lack of a motive on Russia's part. And further given the abundant means, motive and opportunity of, by, and available to, the British government, it looks beyond reasonable doubt to me.

Nice summation Joe!

lysna · 5 months ago
They are arising for Easter celebrations...[ Link ]
ant22 · 5 months ago
The logic behind the official narrative that Russia did it because Skripal was Russian and 'novichok' was originally developed by Russians is not far off believing that standing in a garage makes you a car. But clearly this is how the UK gov & Co see it.

Well, they're not much of 'intellectual Ferraris', are they. More like three-wheel bicycles ridden by a child with special educational needs.

Woodsman · 5 months ago
By now anyone with an opinion on the Skripal poisoning has already decided if they believe the official narrative or not. Still, the event and the ongoing media coverage around it presents an opportunity to understand more than we might think.
I don't even get eye-rolls these days when I talk with True Believers.

I've been noticing that the tactic now employed most often, (other than simply avoiding eye contact and scurrying away), is to interrupt, be louder, to spin anxious, meandering and waaaaay-off point diatribes which go on for many minutes at a time without letup, repeatedly referencing totems and touchstones like, "Scientific peer review is the only thing separating us from chaos!" -and canned talking points which may or may not have any bearing on the subject.

... ... ...

[Aug 30, 2018] ALEXANDER GOLDFARB

Aug 30, 2018 | www.theblogmire.com

Liane Theuer says: August 20, 2018 at 9:57 pm

ALEXANDER GOLDFARB

Goldfarb is a big player : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Goldfarb_(biologist)

Alexander Goldfarb is/was a friend of Sergei Skripal, Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Berezovsky and Nikolai Glushkov.

Associated with George Soros :

Goldfarb was among the first group of Russian exiles in New York whom Soros invited to brainstorm his potential Foundation in Russia. In 1991 Goldfarb persuaded Soros to donate $100 million to help former Soviet scientists survive the hardships of the economic shock therapy adopted by the Yeltsin government. From 1992 to 1995, Goldfarb was Director of Operations at Soros' International Science Foundation, with many more Soros projects to follow.

Here is a chronology of Goldfarb's press statements. One gets the impression that he has prompted TM how to argue.

March 6

Quote : Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme, Mr Goldfarb said:

"The Russian secret services and the regime of Mr Putin had the motive and the opportunity to do this. And they did it before. I mean, it's only natural for any reasonable person to suspect them."

Mr Goldfarb, a close friend of killed dissident Alexander Litvinenko, said he has a theory as to why Russia could be behind the latest alleged poisoning.

The microbiologist and activist said it is not a spy theory but instead a political move.

He said: "It is a political motivation and it has to do with the elections of the President, which will happen in Russia in about ten days from now and the major problem for Putin is the turnout because his main opponent has been barred from participating and he has called for a boycott of the elections.

"So Mr Putin is worried there are few people who come people who are apathetic in Russia so this will be used regardless of whether Putin did it or not.

"He has a way to invigorate his nationalistic and extremely anti-western rhetoric."

Mr Goldfarb said the "majority" of Russians would perceive the "poisoning" as the right thing to do as they view Putin as a leader that can "get his enemies wherever they are across the globe."

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/927751/Russian-spy-poisoned-Salisbury-London-Alexander-Litvinenko-Sergei-Skripal-Putin-spy-swap

March 8

Quote : Former-spy Sergei Skripal, his daughter and a policeman have been poisoned in Salisbury in what is suspected to be a state-sponsored hit.

But it is not the first time this has happened as Alexander Litvinenko, who was former Russian secret service officer who defected to the west, died in November 2006 after he drank tea laced with radioactive polonium-210 at the Millenium Hotel in Mayfair.

His friend Alex Goldfarb appeared on Newsnight to warn that it was the inaction from the UK on the Litvinenko murder which led to the recent suspected attempted assassination.

Mr Goldfarb said: "For 10 years the British Government refused to admit that the Litvinenko murder was a state-sponsored crime and up to the very public inquiry which happened in 2016 they maintained this is just a regular criminal matter.

"The moment an English judge ruled that it was a state-sponsored murder and in all probability ordered by Putin David Cameron went on TV and said, 'we knew it from day one'.

"So they were trying to keep it quiet to not to annoy Putin and they invited other attacks like this.

"If the response now will be the same, only words without any actions, there will be a third and a fourth attempt."

He added: "I would pick the Putin theory because he is the only one who had a motive and an opportunity too and he has been shown beyond any reasonable doubt to be involved in the previous assassination – I mean Litvinenko who was my friend.

"He has a motive. His motive is the elections which are coming in about 10 days and there is a very low turnout expected and he needs to energise his nationalistic, anti-western electorate."

"So, he wants to portray himself as a tough guy who can get his enemies anywhere in the world and who has been presenting himself as the only thing that is protecting Russia and the Russians from the plotting and the scheming of the west."

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/928729/bbc-newsnight-russia-spy-war-bbc-news-Sergei-Skripal-assassination-latest-Putin

March 14 by Luke Harding

Quote : Alex Goldfarb, who knew Glushkov, said he thought his death was highly suspicious. "I think it's fairly clear it wasn't an accident or disease. It's either suicide or strangulation, like with Boris [Berezovsky]," Goldfarb said.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/14/russian-exiles-nikolai-glushkov-death-london-suspicious-friends-claim

March 17 DailyNewsUSA

Quote : Alex Goldfarb, a friend of both men as well as a prominent critic of Russia, insisted Vladimir Putin must have ordered both hits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwpV7n-rLTU

March 18

Quote : Police insist they have discovered no connection between the strangling of former businessman Nikolai Glushkov, 68, at his London home last Monday and the nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury a fortnight ago.

But Alex Goldfarb, a friend of both men as well as a prominent critic of Russia, insisted Vladimir Putin must have ordered both hits.

Mr Goldfarb told BBC Radio 4: 'There is no connection in a forensic sense probably, but if you look at the larger picture of politics, I am convinced that no murder of this sort could have happened without the personal approval of Putin or some of his immediate deputies.'

Mr Goldfarb was also close to former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who was murdered with radioactive polonium-210 in London, and exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who was found dead at his Surrey home in suspicious circumstances.

'All of these in my view have the common denominator of Mr Putin flexing his muscle,' said Mr Goldfarb, a scientist who lives in New York.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5514213/Murder-Putin-critic-linked-Skripal-nerve-agent-attack.html

[Aug 30, 2018] The 10 Main Holes in the Official Narrative on the Salisbury Poisonings: #1 The Motive

Aug 30, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

fredi , August 28, 2018 at 16:46

The 10 Main Holes in the Official Narrative on the Salisbury Poisonings: #1 – The Motive

When I began writing about the Skripal case, I was moved to do so by three main considerations.

Firstly, I really am passionate for the truth, and whatever the truth happens to be in this case, I strongly desire it to be made manifest. It was clear to me fairly early on that this was not happening.

Secondly, I am also very passionate about concepts such as the rule of law, innocent until proven guilty, and the apparently quaint notion that investigations should precede verdicts, rather than the other way around. And so when I saw accusations being made before the investigation had hardly begun, verdicts being reached before the facts were established, I was appalled -- appalled that this was happening in what we British pride ourselves is the Mother of Parliaments, and equally appalled that this meant the investigation was inevitably prejudiced and – pardon the expression – poisoned from the off.

Thirdly, the incident happened to have taken place pretty much on my doorstep, which made it of even more interest to me.

Nothing I have seen in the intervening time has persuaded me that my initial impressions were wrong. In fact, the whiff of rodent I first detected has only become stronger as time has gone on and the case has become -- frankly -- farcical.

http://www.theblogmire.com/the-10-main-holes-in-the-official-narrative-on-the-salisbury-poisonings-1-the-motive/

[Aug 30, 2018] The 10 Main Holes in the Official Narrative on the Salisbury Poisonings: #1 – The Motive by Rob Slane

Notable quotes:
"... the United States expelled 60 diplomats back in March, and more recently they have effectively declared economic war on the Russian Federation – all in response to unproven and inconsistent assertions of a botched assassination attempt against an old spy in a quiet Wiltshire City. Such a response ought to raise the suspicions of any sentient being that all is not what it appears. ..."
"... The first question to be asked is this: What exactly does she mean by "the motive"? By including that definite article before the word "motive", she implies that there is only one "motive" – the ..."
"... it is known -- although woefully unreported because of a media ban -- that Mr Skripal was connected to the man behind the so-called Trump Dossier, Christopher Steele. Personally, I am reasonably convinced that Mr Skripal had a hand in putting this dossier together, given his connections to Steele, and since it was almost certainly authored by a Russian "trained in the KGB tradition" . ..."
"... Might this give a motive to some very powerful groups who are nervous about the origins and details of this dossier coming to light? Yes, of course. Then why is it not a line of possible enquiry? Answers on a postcard to the Department of the Blindingly Obvious. ..."
"... Mrs May had no right to state that the Russian Federation had "the motive". The best she could have said at that stage, without taking other possibilities into account, was that they had "a motive". The motive she does present is particularly feeble and does not explain why the Russian Federation would have wanted Mr Skripal in particular dead, and at that particular time. Mr Skripal's recent activities indicate that there were others with possible motives to assassinate or incapacitate him. dmonished 2 February 2016 by his FBI handler. This was in vault dump. ..."
"... If Sergei was Steele's only "source" obviously his disappearance was essential. ..."
"... My first question is : who is protecting Chris Steele right now ? I think it´s MI6. But I don´t think that they are happy to be forced to do that. Maybe there was an order of UK government to hide Steele. Because he meddled in some other things not related to the Dossier, but to Cambridge Analytica and Brexit and Fifa and . ..."
"... Don't understand why standard clean-up operations for fentanyl poisoning are ignored here. it includes protective clothing and hosing down public areas where the fentanyl may be present. Sunday evening clean-up at Maltings was SOP for fentanyl. This is not mysterious. ..."
"... Moving from a fentanyl od diagnosis to an unknown agent occurred Sunday evening. SDH stated that in the announcements on Monday. ..."
"... I am beginning to wonder if Bailey was even poisoned at all. Was it all just a PR exercise? Was he told to get himself to hospital on Tuesday morning so that the nerve agent story would have at least one other person involved. If he was feeling ill, why did he drive himself to hospital – he could have collapsed at any second! ..."
"... Two SDH physicians had a completed training in a highly specialized program at Porton Down shortly before 4 Mar. It's been hinted that one or both were on duty 4 Mar. ..."
"... Having followed your excellent blog for some weeks now, I've become convinced that there are four distinct elements to this affair: two opposing clandestine ops, an almost unbelievably idiotic false flag charade, and a random death:- ..."
"... 1. Operation 'Let's Keep Tabs on Sergei'. Run by MI5/6/SB to make sure their double agent doesn't come to any harm or become a triple agent. Electronic tagging, email monitoring, phone tapping, and friendly chats ever now and then. Worked well for years, then the wheels fell off on 4th March. ..."
"... 2. Operation 'Let's Extract Skripal'. Run by an unknown security agency but possibly contracted out to another. Deniable soft extraction so he could be wheeled out later to give evidence concerning the Trump Dossier, with or without his co-operation. The plan included his daughter, because she was needed to ensure Sergei said what he was supposed to say when the time came. Phase One carried out successfully on 4th March. Phase Two delayed by HMG playing silly games, but eventually mission was accomplished. ..."
"... 3. The 'Let's Blame Putin' Charade. When MI6 reported to its ultimate boss that an ex-Russian spy had been poisoned, Boris would have rightly assumed the culprits were probably Russian. But then, remembering how Lavrov humiliated him at that press conference in Moscow last December, he decided to make sure Russia did get the blame and take the rap for it. With the help of the new inexperienced Defence Secretary and others, he came up with a hastily and ill-conceived plan to show that the poison could have only come from Russia, ensuring Russia's guilt. The Home Secretary at the time, Amber Rudd, did not buy into it so had to be replaced, but others – including the overworked Theresa May – were taken in. The narrative quickly fell apart, but having persuaded the world and his wife of Putin's guilt, there was no going back. The hole Boris dug just got deeper. And all the evidence – or the lack of it – had to be destroyed. No wonder Boris resigned. ..."
Aug 30, 2018 | www.theblogmire.com

When I began writing about the Skripal case, I was moved to do so by three main considerations.

Nothing I have seen in the intervening time has persuaded me that my initial impressions were wrong. In fact, the whiff of rodent I first detected has only become stronger as time has gone on and the case has become -- frankly -- farcical. Not only that, but the reaction to the case has been simply incredible. For instance, the United States expelled 60 diplomats back in March, and more recently they have effectively declared economic war on the Russian Federation – all in response to unproven and inconsistent assertions of a botched assassination attempt against an old spy in a quiet Wiltshire City. Such a response ought to raise the suspicions of any sentient being that all is not what it appears.

I still do not have any clear idea of what happened on that day, but what I am certain of is that the official narrative is not only untrue, but it is manifestly inconceivable that it could be true. There are simply too many inconsistencies, too many holes and far too many unexplained events for it to be true. And whilst part of me would dearly love to leave this wretched case behind for a while, whilst it is still ongoing, and especially as it is now being used to push us even closer to the brink of war (economic warfare is often a prelude to military warfare), I find that hard to do.

What I would therefore like to do in a series of 10 short pieces over the next couple of weeks or so, is attempt to expose some of the very many holes in the official narrative. At the end of it, I may well put it all together into one PDF, so that it can be sent somewhere, where it can be completely ignored by those that matter. Enjoy!


Number 1: The Motive

In her speech to the House of Commons on 26 th March , the Prime Minister, Theresa May, said this:

"In conclusion, as I have set out, no other country has a combination of the capability, the intent and the motive to carry out such an act."

For the purposes of this piece, I am not interested in her comments on capability or intent, but simply what she describes as "the motive".

The first question to be asked is this: What exactly does she mean by "the motive"? By including that definite article before the word "motive", she implies that there is only one "motive" – the motive – and that only one party – the Russian Federation – possessed this. Which is of course manifest nonsense. She might at that stage have said that they possessed "a motive", but without looking into what Mr Skripal was up to, and the contacts he had, she was in no position to state that they had " the motive".

Imagine the following scenario: A farmer called Boggis is found shot dead in his barn. It is known that a week earlier, he had a very public quarrel with another landowner, Bunce, about the boundaries between their lands, and that the two of them had to be separated before they came to blows. Could it be said of Bunce that he had "the motive"? Well, it would be reasonable to suggest that he had "a motive", but without looking into other circumstances and other characters connected with Boggis, it would be disingenuous to claim that he had "the motive" as if only he might have had one.

As it happens, Boggis had been committing adultery with the wife of another neighbouring farmer called Bean, and Bean had found out about this two days before Boggis was found dead. What now? Does Bean have a motive? Very possibly. So too might Boggis' wife. Perhaps even Bunce's wife. Who knows without examining the facts more closely?

And so herein lies the first whiff of rodent. Mrs May asserted that the Russian Federation possessed "the motive", implying that there was only one possibility, which is something that could only be ascertained by proper investigation of Mr Skripal, his circumstances and what he was up to. She therefore committed what is a most basic fallacy in the investigative process.

The second question to ask is this: she says she set out "the motive" in her speech, but what actually was that? Here is what she presented as the motive in her speech:

"We know that Russia has a record of conducting state-sponsored assassinations – and that it views some former intelligence officers as legitimate targets for these assassinations."

This won't do. Firstly, many countries have records of conducting state-sponsored assassinations, and not always against their own nationals. But secondly, the claim that the Russian Federation "views some former intelligence officers as legitimate targets for these assassinations" is not a motive. At best it is a claim, but it is not a motive. A motive for an attempted murder, such as this, would need to give a reason for carrying it out on that particular person at that particular time. Simply saying that they view some former intelligence officers as legitimate targets for these assassinations does not explain why they are supposed to have decided to assassinate this particular man, at this particular time, especially since they released and pardoned him in 2010. It also does not explain why they apparently decided to wreck all possible future spy swaps, since Mr Skripal had been part of such a deal, and assassinating him would put an end to such deals.

But the most important question to ask is this: are there any other parties with a possible motive for this crime? Even without a particularly careful investigation of the details of Mr Skripal's life, contacts and circumstances, I can say assuredly that there were. For instance, it is known -- although woefully unreported because of a media ban -- that Mr Skripal was connected to the man behind the so-called Trump Dossier, Christopher Steele. Personally, I am reasonably convinced that Mr Skripal had a hand in putting this dossier together, given his connections to Steele, and since it was almost certainly authored by a Russian "trained in the KGB tradition" .

Might this give a motive to some very powerful groups who are nervous about the origins and details of this dossier coming to light? Yes, of course. Then why is it not a line of possible enquiry? Answers on a postcard to the Department of the Blindingly Obvious.

In summary:

Mrs May had no right to state that the Russian Federation had "the motive". The best she could have said at that stage, without taking other possibilities into account, was that they had "a motive". The motive she does present is particularly feeble and does not explain why the Russian Federation would have wanted Mr Skripal in particular dead, and at that particular time. Mr Skripal's recent activities indicate that there were others with possible motives to assassinate or incapacitate him. dmonished 2 February 2016 by his FBI handler. This was in vault dump.

Fusion GPS only got contract from Hillary April 2016, who then subcontracted to Steele. But Steele was FBI asset prior to dossier being started. Was he an asset or a feeder of MI6 disinformation into US politics/intelligence?

That McCain ended up giving the dossier to Comey, when that dossier was written by a supposed FBI "asset" would indicate the latter. If Sergei was Steele's only "source" obviously his disappearance was essential.


Jo says: August 22, 2018 at 10:12 am

"CC Pritchard said officers at the scene underwent a "decontamination process" at Salisbury District Hospital overnight on Sunday and into Monday morning, after details of the attack became clearer."

But didn't Bailey drive himself in only because he said he didn't feel well sometime on Monday evening?

lissnup says: August 23, 2018 at 8:48 am
@Jo. Yes, one version of the story says Bailey and two colleagues were checked out at the hospital and then discharged, but that Bailey drove himself back after feeling unwell and was readmitted.
Liane Theuer says: August 21, 2018 at 10:23 am
I want to present my own thoughts on party A and B, that some posters here have developed.

My first question is : who is protecting Chris Steele right now ? I think it´s MI6. But I don´t think that they are happy to be forced to do that. Maybe there was an order of UK government to hide Steele. Because he meddled in some other things not related to the Dossier, but to Cambridge Analytica and Brexit and Fifa and .

MI6 has to hide the Skripals, too. The reason is simply to prevent that Steele, Miller and the Skripals will ever be interrogated by the Trump fraction.

The dodgy dossier became a heavy burden on the UK Government since Steele became known as the author. It is an open secret that the UK Government has secretly done everything possible to prevent Trump's presidency. Who knows what else will come to light ?

In another post I had mentioned the role of Alexandra Chalupa and her Ukraine connection. She's an ambassador to the Ukraine for the DNC. Chalupa collected dirt on Paul Manaford for a long time.She emailed DNC that she'll share sensitive info about Paul Manafort "offline" including "a big Trump component that will hit in next few weeks" (which never happened, at least by Alexandra Chalupa). Then her private Yahoo email account was hacked and a few days later DNC fired Chalupa. WHY ? Maybe because DNC needed to keep her activities off-site, where a FOIA can't touch them ?

But what happened on the very day Chalupa is fired ? Oh, Christopher Steele is hired. What a coincidence. And what happens FIVE DAYS after Christopher Steele was hired ? Oh, he publishes his first report on his dossier, a report that discusses FIVE YEARS of investigation.

I mention Chalupa, because I strongly suspect that much of the Trump dossier goes back to Chalupa's research. These, in turn, are based largely on information provided by the Ukrainian intelligence service SBU.

The DNC wanted to use this information against Trump, but they couldn´t use Chalupa as the source. So the idea was born to hire Steele for the job. Outsourcing.

The FBI has probably contacted its loyal vassal MI6 and discreetly referred to "common interests". Steele then changed the dossier to obfuscate Chalupa's authorship. But he made decisive mistakes. One mistake may have been to involve Sergei to some extent.

So I'm assuming that FBI and MI6 have a common interest in preventing Steele, Miller and the Skripals from speaking. Maybe MI6 contacted Sergei some time before and offered him to change his identity. But Sergei refused. However, he was now alarmed and made plans to return to Russia. A dilemma for FBI and MI6. They now had to find another way to prevent Sergei from speaking. The idea of a Russian nerve agent was born. That killed two birds with one stone.

Who executed the plan ?

Bailey's job was to shadow the Skripals and report it. But he knew nothing of the plan. I think, the attack itself happened in or around the Mill Pub and Bailey witnessed it. However, I have no idea if the attack was done open or hidden. I guess hidden. Something contaminated was being smuggled into the red bag, perhaps already in the Zizzi, which the Skripals then discovered, wondering how it came in the bag, and what both were touching. Bailey was contaminated later, when he touched the same item (maybe a perfume in gift wrapping) inside the red bag ?

Peter Beswick says: August 21, 2018 at 9:36 am
Not just two groups

In the run up to and including the war of the Iraq II WMD Debacle, Mi6 were fractured, even the bosses Dearlove and Scarlett that were running their own pro Blair operations in conflict with the rest of the service. Dearlove and Scarlett had their own objectives which were not comparable with each other (personal and professional but mainly personal) or the rest of their service.

Mi6, Mi5, DiS (or whatever they are all called now) with GCHQ have their own infighting and conflicts of interest; within themselves, their sister services, commercial / pension interests and those of the government .. And of course what is in the best interest of the nation. (the police forces are inconvenient uneducated, unfocussed rabbles that get in the way if they involve themselves in anything more than issuing speeding fines)

Add to that Ministers fighting each other, Labour MP's trying harder to bring down Corbyn than May, the Israeli and US interests ever present wherever you look.

And top that with the US shambolic lessons to all other developed governments in the world and the examples they display of their own decorum. Clinton v Trump. FBI v CIA. (How many intelligence services are there? How many agendas have they got?) And the Sickly twisted occultist hand the CIA has in global drug production / distribution, unmetered oil windfalls, blackmail scams (honey traps, murder, vice, paedophilia). An organisation with limitless wealth and income streams, zero conscience, morality or single objective other than to control the surf / goyim / proletariat. No objectives other than to invoke misery, pain, suffering and death with crime, wickedness, fear and perpetual global wars so the elite can remain that way and enjoy their rewards.

And we wonder why Salisbury happened, what it is about, who is doing something about it, why are they lying and covering up, who is to blame?

The last question is the easy one to answer.

We are!

Cascadian says: August 21, 2018 at 7:11 am
The broth in the Amesbury pot is being stirred once again:
https://sputniknews.com/europe/201808211067351473-amesbury-alleged-poisoning-charlie-rowley-hospital/
John Bull says: August 21, 2018 at 8:12 am
Whoops! I hope they take good care of him
lissnup says: August 21, 2018 at 10:55 am
Sputnik makes an unfortunate choice of words in trying to paraphrase the Guardian article: "The spokesman for Salisbury district hospital, where Charlie Rowley was taken, told The Guardian that *none* of the hospital's patients was receiving any nerve agent-related treatment at the moment."

The Guardian article actually says, "The hospital said it could not speak about individual cases but stressed it was not treating anyone for the effects of novichok poisoning at the moment."

So, nine, not nether.

More interesting is that the truth of the strained relationship between Charlie and his brother is becoming more apparent. A mutual friend told me a few weeks back that Charlie was estranged from his family by choice. Hearing that put a very different perspective on his brother's effusively confusing statements to the press.

CharlieFreak says: August 21, 2018 at 11:21 am
Regarding the family relationship, when Charlie was in court for drug dealing last year (?) he was additionally charged with stealing Ł2,000 (I think that was the amount) from Mr Matthew Rowley. So I too remain to be convinced of the 'brotherly love'.
Cascadian says: August 21, 2018 at 12:17 pm
" he was additionally charged with stealing Ł2,000 (I think that was the amount) from Mr Matthew Rowley". That, to me, is a very odd fact. We are told that Charlie is a drug addict on his uppers (i.e. skint), yet he had Ł2000 that his brother (perhaps with an underlying motive to put Chalie on cold turkey – oh, wait, oink, , flap, , oink, , flap, ) sought to relieve him of responsibility for it.

As to the mangling of the message mentioned by lissnup, both the Guardian and Sputnik would probably have got the original story from PA, following which they would then have put their own brand of spin on it.

Anonymous-1 says: August 21, 2018 at 5:51 am
The identity of the Skripals in contained in the witness statements – those who were present at the time and clearly saw them:

FEMALE DOCTOR: "A doctor who was one of the first people at the scene has described how she found Ms Skripal slumped unconscious on a bench, vomiting and fitting. She had also lost control of her bodily functions. The woman, who asked not to be named, told the BBC she moved Ms Skripal into the recovery position and opened her airway, as others tended to her father. She said she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying there was no sign of any chemical agent on Ms Skripal's face or body. The doctor said she had been worried she would be affected by the nerve agent but added that she "feels fine."

She clearly states that she found Ms Skripal slumped unconscious on a bench, vomiting and fitting and that she had lot control of her bodily functions. I don't know of anyone who has the ability to spontaneously evacuate their bladder and bowl at will, more especially a female in front of a crowd on onlookers. The doctor put her in the recovery position, that means on her side, so there would have been visible evidence of Yulia having lost control of her bodily functions.

FREYA CHURCH: "Sixteen minutes later [that is, after being seen on CCTV], personal trainer Freya Church, 27, came across the victims slumped on a bench. She said they seemed 'out of it' and assumed they were on drugs. "It was a young, blonde and pretty girl and it was definitely the man that's been pictured in the news – the guy that's a spy. She was passed out and he was looking up to the sky and I tried to get eye contact to see if they were okay. They didn't seem with it. To be honest I thought they were just drugged out as they were in a weird state. There are lots of homeless people here so I just thought they were homeless."

Freya Church clearly identifies them, "It was a young, blonde and pretty girl and it was definitely the man that's been pictured in the news – the guy that's a spy." She also says "I tried to get eye contact to see if they were okay", so she had a clear view of their faces.

Destiny Reynolds, 20, who works in Ganesha Handicrafts in the centre, said: "I saw quite a lot of commotion – there were two people sat on the bench and there was a security guard there. They put her on the ground in the recovery position, and she was shaking like she was having a seizure. It was a bit manic. There were a lot of people crowded round them. It was raining, people had umbrellas and were putting them over them."

She says "It was raining, people had umbrellas and were putting them over them." so these too would have had a clear view of the Skripal's faces.

Not one of these people, or the other witnesses, has come forward to say it wasn't the Skripals, unlike DS Bailey, they are not subject to a gagging order by way of the The Official Secrets Act.

Miheila says: August 21, 2018 at 6:33 am
All these witnesses would have assumed they were the Skripals because the media claimed that they were. So did the Wiltshire police at least, at that time. This is not of evidential value.

Freya Church has been proven to be an unrelaible witness. Destiny Reynolds may not have had a clear view of their faces at all, especially as she said that there was quite a lot of commotion, and "There were a lot of people crowded round them. It was raining, people had umbrellas and were putting them over them." How far away was she?

I'm also suspicious of that anonymous 'female nurse'. I had read that this first responder was a 'male nurse' too. Apparently, s/he was a military nurse, and had had experience with the African Ebola outbreak. S/he apparently spent 30 minutes with the Skripals! Was it her who made the original emergency call?

Besides, descriptions differ. CCTV evidence has been suppressed, and that alone suggests that they were not the Skripals, and so does the police interest in the Market walk footage. So, no, I'm not at all convinced.

Miheila says: August 21, 2018 at 2:56 am
I've not read any posts here since last night, so this post must be read bearing that in mind.

I briefly replied to John Bull's four points, but I'd like to say more on this. His first point related to the surveillance op being conducted on Sergei. I said more or less that this would have been standard procedure in this type of case, and the work would have been carried out by MI5 watchers. In 2006 Special Branch was merged with the Met's Anti Terrorism Branch to become the Counter Terrorism Command, and I'm pretty sure that DS Bailey would have been seconded to that organisation, and that he was Sergei's 'front-line' case officer. His roles would be to protect Sergei (an SIS asset) and to pass on intelligence to MI5's regional liaison officer at Bristol.

Now John Bull was assuming that those involved in this operation were one of two competing parties. The second party being covered in his second point. This is where I disagree. I don't count MI5's role here as being one of the two parties, for it is at least theoretically neutral.

The other party is not neutral, and that is MI6. It is MI6 who were (and still probably are) acting in competition with the unknown group. Both groups were involved in planning a their own Skripal operations prior to 4th March. Let's call this unknown group, Group X – This shadowy group represents certain US political interests.

This is what I said in my original post (19th at 3.50pm) that first brought the dual-party theory into the light:

"Let's suppose [the film] was their source of poisoning inspiration. Let's also suppose that two competing groups became involved at different stages. Let's say there was a pre-planned, well-organised operation prepared by group A, but when group B somehow learnt of it, a hurried attempt was made by group B to scupper group A's plan – which might have failed. Just speculation, but it would account for many anomalies. These two groups could be two different intelligence agences, or one of them possibly being a rogue faction within an intelligence agency".

This remains the bare bones of my theory, and I was deliberately being rather coy about it at the time. Of course, another party that quickly became involved in all this is the British parliament itself, and I suspect that MI6 sought urgent advice from government ministers when they realised Group X's intentions. (They would have only given them information on a need-to-know basis). MI6, wanting to protect their assets as well as Britain's interests, attempted to neutralise Group X's plan at short notice. It was the hurried nature of all this, along with extreme political pressure, that caused mistakes to be made. Secret heated discussions between the US, UK and *French* governments have no doubt been going on about this situation ever since 4th March.

I could say much more, but for now, I'll try and catch up with a long backlog of posts !

Zee Piers says: August 21, 2018 at 3:15 am
Competing groups might explain the 15:47 CCTV image if it was indeed Sturgess and Rowley, not the Skripals. If the Skripals were to be whisked away alive, a couple who could be mistaken for them, walking in a direction away from the point of disappearance and after it could be used, should the need arise, to deflect from the real circumstances by Group A. However, Group B, hastily interfering with Group A's plan, causes a public scene, making the red herring couple a liability instead of an asset – which might explain the release of the footage (part of Group A's original plan) but the lack of an appeal for help by local authorities (because the plan was FUBAR, making the pre-planned release of the CCTV footage a mistake).
Anonymous says: August 21, 2018 at 6:38 am
Miheila, I am not surprised to hear MI5 are in Bristol. Two other odd occurrences doing to mind. The cricketer Ben Stokes' charging decision being inexplicably sent to London.

And the mystery of "Gordon the Stalker". Arrested nearly six months ago but not charged. A complete fabrication by extremely well-connected people in Bristol to save their bacon, with security services help.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5825971/avon-somerset-police-arrest-stalker-man-sent-notes/

Noone says: August 21, 2018 at 1:16 am
Note I had a lot of trouble trying to post here today!

-- –

Very interesting read. A deep dive into the history behind the British/Obama Administration conspiracy. https://tinyurl.com/yavnxvmm

Miheila says: August 21, 2018 at 3:22 am
Thanks Noone very interesting. I signed this too, about ending the 'special relationship', (which in my opinion was toxic and one-sided ever since it began): https://action.larouchepac.com/declassifyukdocs

Brexiteers go on so much about 'British sovereignty', yet they ignore the fact that Britain has effectively been a vassal of the USA for decades.

Peter Beswick says: August 20, 2018 at 10:56 pm
I'm not saying Kier Prichard did it on his own, and the Met have their burden to carry, but what this man has achieved in such a short time is truly breathtaking.

Wilts police are now a laughing stock, not just in Salisbury or Wilts but the UK and internationally. The public trust level must be as low as it can possibly get. The rank and file must be suffering humiliation, worthlessness, shame and depression. Motivation must be zero.

What a jerk, why do that to yourself, your reputation, your family, your colleagues, your force of 20 20 years ? Is he really that thick, so stupid that he couldn't see this coming and when he did he had a chance to say enough is enough or is that side of his character so flawed that he is either too cowardly or just unaware of what people think of him?

"ACC Pritchard said: "I have a huge sense of pride taking over the reigns as Temporary Chief Constable for a force I have served for more than 20 years.

At least Basu has had the good grace to keep his mouth shut and go into hiding.

I can't see how he (and others ) can avoid criminal prosecutions but it won't be long until the civil prosecutions begin which will cost the tax payers dear. But those who are involved can expect (if they do manage to stay out of jail) to now spend much of the rest of their lives fighting litigation

They brought it on themselves and unfortunately us but none more so than Dawn.

Justice for Dawn!

"Mike has been a fantastic leader and he leaves us in great shape – both in terms of engagement amongst officers and staff and, externally, as evidenced in our strong Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) gradings.

"We are blessed with outstanding officers, staff and volunteers across our organisation who achieve great things every day and who strive to provide an excellent service to all of our communities.

"Now is the time to look forward and to continue, as we've always done, with our values and communities at the heart of everything we do.""

https://indexwiltshire.co.uk/wiltshire-police-to-get-temporary-chief-constable/

Paul says: August 20, 2018 at 11:17 pm
Peter, They are all useless. It seems to be the only qualification needed these days. Now Jeremy Hunt is calling for more sanctions on Russia – this simply proves that he is ignorant as well as useless.

For years Russia has been dedollarising; Russia will manage just fine with more British sanctions (and American sanctions for that matter) and the most damage will be done to British companies that will be shut out of Russia – not because of anything Russia has done but because of what their own idiotic government has done.

TPTB are cretins!

With immediate effect, I am starting a personal 'buy Russian' campaign. If I find anything in the shops that is 'made in Russa', I will buy it in preference to anything made in the EU. Every little helps!

CharlieFreak says: August 21, 2018 at 9:27 am
Ditto. There is another country that I and my relatives never buy fresh produce from, always going for South African or South American alternatives, or – if they're unavailable – going without. I can't say publicly which country as I might get a visit from the boys in blue!
CF
Liane Theuer says: August 20, 2018 at 9:57 pm
ALEXANDER GOLDFARB

Goldfarb is a big player :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Goldfarb_(biologist)

Alexander Goldfarb is/was a friend of Sergei Skripal, Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Berezovsky and Nikolai Glushkov.
Associated with George Soros :
Goldfarb was among the first group of Russian exiles in New York whom Soros invited to brainstorm his potential Foundation in Russia. In 1991 Goldfarb persuaded Soros to donate $100 million to help former Soviet scientists survive the hardships of the economic shock therapy adopted by the Yeltsin government.
From 1992 to 1995, Goldfarb was Director of Operations at Soros' International Science Foundation, with many more Soros projects to follow.

Here is a chronology of Goldfarb's press statements.
One gets the impression that he has prompted TM how to argue.

March 6
Quote : Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme, Mr Goldfarb said:
"The Russian secret services and the regime of Mr Putin had the motive and the opportunity to do this. And they did it before. I mean, it's only natural for any reasonable person to suspect them."
Mr Goldfarb, a close friend of killed dissident Alexander Litvinenko, said he has a theory as to why Russia could be behind the latest alleged poisoning.
The microbiologist and activist said it is not a spy theory but instead a political move.
He said: "It is a political motivation and it has to do with the elections of the President, which will happen in Russia in about ten days from now and the major problem for Putin is the turnout because his main opponent has been barred from participating and he has called for a boycott of the elections.
"So Mr Putin is worried there are few people who come people who are apathetic in Russia so this will be used regardless of whether Putin did it or not.
"He has a way to invigorate his nationalistic and extremely anti-western rhetoric."
Mr Goldfarb said the "majority" of Russians would perceive the "poisoning" as the right thing to do as they view Putin as a leader that can "get his enemies wherever they are across the globe."
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/927751/Russian-spy-poisoned-Salisbury-London-Alexander-Litvinenko-Sergei-Skripal-Putin-spy-swap

March 8
Quote : Former-spy Sergei Skripal, his daughter and a policeman have been poisoned in Salisbury in what is suspected to be a state-sponsored hit.
But it is not the first time this has happened as Alexander Litvinenko, who was former Russian secret service officer who defected to the west, died in November 2006 after he drank tea laced with radioactive polonium-210 at the Millenium Hotel in Mayfair.
His friend Alex Goldfarb appeared on Newsnight to warn that it was the inaction from the UK on the Litvinenko murder which led to the recent suspected attempted assassination.
Mr Goldfarb said: "For 10 years the British Government refused to admit that the Litvinenko murder was a state-sponsored crime and up to the very public inquiry which happened in 2016 they maintained this is just a regular criminal matter.
"The moment an English judge ruled that it was a state-sponsored murder and in all probability ordered by Putin David Cameron went on TV and said, 'we knew it from day one'.
"So they were trying to keep it quiet to not to annoy Putin and they invited other attacks like this.
"If the response now will be the same, only words without any actions, there will be a third and a fourth attempt."
He added: "I would pick the Putin theory because he is the only one who had a motive and an opportunity too and he has been shown beyond any reasonable doubt to be involved in the previous assassination – I mean Litvinenko who was my friend.
"He has a motive. His motive is the elections which are coming in about 10 days and there is a very low turnout expected and he needs to energise his nationalistic, anti-western electorate."
"So, he wants to portray himself as a tough guy who can get his enemies anywhere in the world and who has been presenting himself as the only thing that is protecting Russia and the Russians from the plotting and the scheming of the west."
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/928729/bbc-newsnight-russia-spy-war-bbc-news-Sergei-Skripal-assassination-latest-Putin

March 14 by Luke Harding
Quote : Alex Goldfarb, who knew Glushkov, said he thought his death was highly suspicious. "I think it's fairly clear it wasn't an accident or disease. It's either suicide or strangulation, like with Boris [Berezovsky]," Goldfarb said.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/14/russian-exiles-nikolai-glushkov-death-london-suspicious-friends-claim

March 17 DailyNewsUSA
Quote : Alex Goldfarb, a friend of both men as well as a prominent critic of Russia, insisted Vladimir Putin must have ordered both hits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwpV7n-rLTU

March 18
Quote : Police insist they have discovered no connection between the strangling of former businessman Nikolai Glushkov, 68, at his London home last Monday and the nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury a fortnight ago.
But Alex Goldfarb, a friend of both men as well as a prominent critic of Russia, insisted Vladimir Putin must have ordered both hits.
Mr Goldfarb told BBC Radio 4: 'There is no connection in a forensic sense probably, but if you look at the larger picture of politics, I am convinced that no murder of this sort could have happened without the personal approval of Putin or some of his immediate deputies.'
Mr Goldfarb was also close to former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who was murdered with radioactive polonium-210 in London, and exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who was found dead at his Surrey home in suspicious circumstances.
'All of these in my view have the common denominator of Mr Putin flexing his muscle,' said Mr Goldfarb, a scientist who lives in New York.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5514213/Murder-Putin-critic-linked-Skripal-nerve-agent-attack.html

Liane Theuer says: August 20, 2018 at 10:04 pm
Look at actual pictures of Nikolai Glushkov. I see certain similarities between Glushkov and the man on the red bag CCTV.
PasserBy says: August 20, 2018 at 11:18 pm
Could you elaborate on those similarities please? I've had a look but didn't see any. The CCTV footage is terrible quality but what "image" I get does not coincide with available photos of Glushkov.

Goldfarb is certainly a person to be avoided – with friends like that who needs enemies? Litvinenko's dad suspects Goldfarb was his son's assassin.

The claim is made in that youtube video that Goldfarb was Skripal's friend as well. It would not be a surprise but it would be good to obtain confirmation.

Liane Theuer says: August 20, 2018 at 11:22 pm
PasserBy, if I could post photos here, I would be able to show the similarity in a collage. But it´s just a guess.
PasserBy says: August 20, 2018 at 11:25 pm
Understood, Liane.
lissnup says: August 21, 2018 at 11:31 am
I agree, Liane, and have commented here about it. Glushkov has a young, pretty, blonde daughter. I am not sure if it was the same daughter who reportedly discovered his body.
Paul says: August 20, 2018 at 8:19 pm
Statement from Chief Constable Kier Pritchard and PCC Angus Macpherson on injured officer
http://archive.is/Wo4lE#selection-1413.0-1413.89

"I would like to reassure you all that Nick is receiving medical intervention and care from highly specialist medical practitioners experienced in these matters."

Why did Pritchard say "highly specialist medical practitioners experienced in these matters" instead of something less specific? Who are these "highly specialist" and "experienced" practitioners? The medics at SDH were quite humble in the Newsnight programme – I am sure none of them would regard themselves as 'highly specialist and experienced' in treating a nerve agent.

Duncan says: August 20, 2018 at 8:28 pm
And then.

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NEWS5th JuneKier Pritchard says DS Nick Bailey poisoned at Skripal house

Exclusive by Rebecca Hudson @JournalRebecca

EXCLUSIVE

Dt Sgt Nick Bailey.

DETECTIVE Sergeant Nick Bailey was poisoned with a nerve agent when he and other officers attended Sergei Skripal's home looking for evidence including signs of drug use or suicide notes.

9

Chief Constable Kier Pritchard told the Journal he had watched evidence from body-worn cameras used by officers who first attended the scene on March 4, and that their response to the incident was "first class".

"We would not have known from those first hours what we were dealing with. At that time we didn't know, and why would they, if there was anything other than a medical incident, or something that was drug-related or something more sinister," he said.

CC Pritchard said DS Bailey was one of a team of officers who attended Mr Skripal's home in Christie Miller Road, after the Russian former-spy and his daughter were found slumped on a bench in the city three months ago.

He said officers were looking for information to establish a timeline of events and explain why the Skripals had fallen "gravely ill", as well as making sure there was nobody else affected.

"That [information] could be a suicide note, it could be evidence of drugs, it could be evidence of some form of substance," CC Pritchard added.

And he said DS Bailey (pictured) and his family are still receiving support from Wiltshire Police.

CC Pritchard said: "Nick has been to Wiltshire Police headquarters, he came in last week and that was a very positive step forward.

"This has been a long three months for many of us can you just imagine the impact on your children and your wife and your family life when all you're trying to do is your job? My heart absolutely goes out to Nick and his family over all that they've suffered."

CC Pritchard said officers at the scene underwent a "decontamination process" at Salisbury District Hospital overnight on Sunday and into Monday morning, after details of the attack became clearer.

And, following that, Wiltshire Police set up a "welfare cell" to help affected officers understand and work through the psychological effects of the attack.

"We have supported over 90 members of our staff in either one to one sessions or group meetings," CC Pritchard revealed. "Of course one of those 90 will be Nick Bailey".

CC Pritchard shared his pride in Wiltshire Police, and the citizens of Salisbury, for their response to the "colossal events".

"We [Wiltshire Police] have the ability and the confidence to be able to deal with international and global issues. I hope that provides real confidence to the public of how proud they can be.

"And I want to put on record how proud I am of the community of Salisbury. They have demonstrated the true brilliance of a community.

"Despite a global issue, and despite the massive impact, the way the Salisbury general public has responded has been exemplary."

By Rebecca Hudson @JournalRebeccaHead of News

Paul says: August 20, 2018 at 8:48 pm
'Spacemen' in The Maltings on Sunday evening officers at the scene underwent a "decontamination process" at Salisbury District Hospital overnight on Sunday and into Monday morning

Why would that be? SDH suspected a nerve agent by 6am Monday morning, not Sunday evening.

The only way anyone could have suspected more than a drug overdose on Sunday would have been prior knowledge but if someone had prior knowledge and did not ensure that ALL emergency responders were protected, that would not just be negligent

Marie says: August 20, 2018 at 9:58 pm
The only way anyone could have suspected more than a drug overdose on Sunday would have been prior knowledge

Yes and no. Don't understand why standard clean-up operations for fentanyl poisoning are ignored here. it includes protective clothing and hosing down public areas where the fentanyl may be present. Sunday evening clean-up at Maltings was SOP for fentanyl. This is not mysterious.

Moving from a fentanyl od diagnosis to an unknown agent occurred Sunday evening. SDH stated that in the announcements on Monday.

Paul says: August 20, 2018 at 10:13 pm
Liane, it wasn't just protective clothing it was the full 'moonsuit' but not everyone wore one. When I mentioned prior knowledge, I was thinking of Rob's idea that British intelligence might have got wind of an FBI/CIA plot to use an agent from Porton Down. If there been any prior knowledge, then allowing any first responders to be at the scene not wearing full hazmat gear, would have been a crime in itself.
Liane Theuer says: August 20, 2018 at 9:41 pm
Remember that Kier Pritchard had his first day on duty on March 5. Maybe he was not well informed about Bailey´s part in the case.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu has taken over from Mark Rowley as the new Assistant Commissioner responsible for leading counter terrorism nationally on March 5.

March 1 a new temporary assistant chief constable has been selected at Wiltshire Police. ACC Craig Holden joined Kier Pritchard.

So who was Bailey´s supervisor on March 4 ? Deputy Chief Constable Paul Mills ?

Paul says: August 20, 2018 at 10:21 pm
I am beginning to wonder if Bailey was even poisoned at all. Was it all just a PR exercise? Was he told to get himself to hospital on Tuesday morning so that the nerve agent story would have at least one other person involved. If he was feeling ill, why did he drive himself to hospital – he could have collapsed at any second!

If it was a bit of LARPing, that would at least explain why he didn't need a tracheostomy.

Marie says: August 21, 2018 at 2:23 am
I am beginning to wonder if Bailey was even poisoned at all.

My guess is that he wasn't. He felt ill and as instructed went to the hospital on Tuesday to get checked out. Game was on at that point; so, he was put in a bed for observation and not allowed to leave. Drugged. That would be surreal, wouldn't it?

As I followed this segment in real time, there was a sense of elation in the media that they had a third victim. A first responder. Then they scrambled trying to explain what a DS would have been doing at Maltings; so, they switched it to he was at the house. Then there were questions as to why it took so long for the alleged poison to effect him. Somehow that got dropped as they continued to make different claims about where he'd been; finally settling on both Maltings and the house.

Liane Theuer says: August 21, 2018 at 8:37 am
Paul and Marie, if Bailey was not poisoned the OPCW has to lie ! They took blood samples of all three on March 22. After that Bailey was released. I´m convinced that Bailey was poisoned with the same nerve agent, whatever agent that might be.
Anonymous says: August 21, 2018 at 8:53 am
The OPCW did not lie – but they were deceived. The OPCW says they checked the identities of the individuals they tested against IDs. How hard would it be for the government to issue a passport on the 'name' of Nicholas Bailey?
CharlieFreak says: August 21, 2018 at 9:40 am
This raises the question again of how the OPCW acquired the samples they took away with them. As I understand it the OPCW scientists who came to the UK are not clinically trained – they are effectively lab technicians – so they do not have the training to "take" samples from patients. They are reported as "collecting samples" but to my knowledge from reading other reports and articles it was UK medical staff who "took" the samples – and then handed them over to the OPCW. Even if they took the samples in front of the OPCW, I bet at some point they said something along the lines of "Oh hang on a minute, I just need to go and put labels on these phials back in a minute".
John Bull says: August 21, 2018 at 4:27 pm
In his interview on German TV, Boris said: "[The OPCW] are coming in today to look at the sample we have of the nerve agent."
CharlieFreak says: August 22, 2018 at 10:34 am
Thanks, John. Even more reason to be doubtful about the whole process.
CF
Marie says: August 20, 2018 at 9:49 pm
Two SDH physicians had a completed training in a highly specialized program at Porton Down shortly before 4 Mar. It's been hinted that one or both were on duty 4 Mar.
Paul says: August 20, 2018 at 10:22 pm
But Bailey did not check in until 6 March. Were PD specialists there throughout? Why didn't they just take the patients to PD instead of risking contaminating a public hospital?
Liane Theuer says: August 20, 2018 at 11:18 pm
Paul, if Bailey really checked in March 6, why was his police car cordoned off in the morning of March 5 at the parking lot SDH ?
Paul says: August 20, 2018 at 11:37 pm
Because the official story is all lies Liane.

I recall reading at some point that Bailey drove himself to SDH on Monday morning. Try as I might, however, I couldn't find it again. I know there is a comment on MoonOfAlabama mentioning the same thing but it does not have a link.

Then Mark Urban said in the Newsnight programme that Bailey drove himself there on Tuesday morning .

Take you pick!

Marie says: August 21, 2018 at 2:31 am
Were PD specialists there throughout?

Those were not PD specialists but SDH physicians that had received PD training. That might be in addition to PD scientists that SDH spokespersons have said were there as well. So, plenty of professionals focused on nerve agent poisoning could have been there during the first 36 hours.

SDH had a whole new unoccupied wing they could have commandeered to isolate the patients. Also to keep regular SDH staff and their eyes away from the patients as well. Wouldn't that be preferable to transporting them to PD with so many eyes watching?

Paul says: August 21, 2018 at 7:39 am
But that was my original point. A training course does not make anyone: "highly specialist medical practitioners experienced in these matters" Where does the 'experience in the matters' come from?
Miheila says: August 20, 2018 at 6:20 pm
I'm posting this reply to Max_B here because this is the second time that there's been no 'reply' option to his posts. No idea why, but the blue word inthe corner is missing.

If you really "don't care", Max_B, then why on earth are you making such a fuss over it ? I do care. And after accusing me of getting my facts wrong (over Lavrov) you apologise to newcomer (Новичoк) Cherrycoke only when s/he corrected you. Maybe you forgot.

Anyway, you say: "Fentanyl's and Carfentanil *are* nerve agents, I understand you want to rely on a much narrower definition of nerve agent that only includes Organophosphates, but that definition is just not accurate".

In your opinion only; not professional opinion which has for decades treated organophosphate agents as nerve agents, and fentanyls as (narcotic-analgesic type) incapacitants.

You said, "The substance responsible for the Salisbury and Amesbury incidents isn't an Organophsophate, that's why they are scrabbling around for a redefinition".
I agree with this, although we are only surmising that the Salisbury/Amesbury substance is not an organophosphate (due to symptoms), for no-one has actually specified its nature. And yes, I can see that they are scrabbling around, and so are you ! Fair enough. But how can this explain why nobody has officially specified what this chemical is ? As far as I can tell, it doesn't. Why can't they simply be open about its nature and honest about their scrabbling ?

Yes, of course opioids depress the CNS, but so do lots of substances such as alcohol, and, yes Peter, even axes ! This does not make them nerve agents for they do not inhibit acetylcholinestaerase – crucial to the definition.

Wikipedia: "Nerve agents, sometimes also called nerve gases, are a class of organic chemicals that disrupt the mechanisms by which nerves transfer messages to organs. The disruption is caused by the blocking of acetylcholinesterase".

I perfectly understand the argument over BZ versus Carfentanyl, but surely, rather than redefine the latter as a nerve agent, why not simply redefine it as an opioid chemical weapon ? Organophosphate and carbamate pesticides are officially (and biochemically) nerve agents, but they're not chemical weapons. In the same way, most opioids are not chemical weapons but some, such as the fentanyls should be. Salisbury has highlighted this failing, hence the scrabbling about.

To include certain opioids as nerve agents (rather than opioid CW's), then the official, long-established and generally-accepted scientific definition must be changed which would only invite more confusion.

Duncan says: August 20, 2018 at 8:03 pm
Agreed.
Opioid receptor agonists are not nerve agents.
However, if carfentanil was suspected then unprotected contact with the victims would not be the protocol.
The true first responders were the heroes.
Unless they knew enough ahead of time to not be afraid.
Cascadian says: August 20, 2018 at 8:20 pm
"The true first responders were the heroes." And they were who ? By the testimony of some who were aware of them (i.e. the unfeeling Freya Church) just walked on like The Good Samaritans they most certainly are not!

Perhaps there was an assumption that in an, allegedly, druggie infested town like Salisbury, most people would ignore the histrionics of the pair on the bench and walk on, leaving it to 'the first responders' to deal with it. Convenient, if it worked.

Duncan says: August 21, 2018 at 7:05 am
If, and it is an if, the lady doctor and the nurse rushed to give the two prone figures first aid without considering their own safety then these two are the only heroic ones in this shambles.
Marie says: August 20, 2018 at 10:09 pm
As of 4 Mar, there has been no known fentanyl overdose in Salisbury. First responders would have been trained in what to look for and how to proceed in a fentanyl od situation, but practice makes perfect. There's not that much difference in the emergency response protocols for fentanyl and carfentanil. The difference is in the medical treatment in the hours and days after the first couple of hours, and symptoms, treatments, and responses rather than tests for the presence of carfentanil is the guide for physicians.
John Bull says: August 20, 2018 at 1:09 pm
Rob, you are a great one for making lists of questions. You may have this one on a list already:-

If HMG knew that Russia had declared death to all traitors, what measures did they take to protect Sergei Skripal, a confirm traitor but also a member of our security services. And why were those measures so lamentably unsuccessful?

Duncan says: August 20, 2018 at 12:32 pm
Rob,

Look who is the Home Secretary's right hand man. Front bencher? Is he tresspassing?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-44728026/amesbury-novichok-poisoning-sajid-javid-asks-russia-for-explanation

Listen to Javid. The UK has never said what happened, (that's why we have the Blogmire) and I don't recall ANY Russian account, other than denial and show us evidence.
Glen needs to improve on his nodding skills. He is about three seconds too slow.
Time and practice will no doubt improve this.

Miheila says: August 20, 2018 at 6:29 pm
"Hear, hear, honourably learned friend, Duncan !" Nod, nod, wink, wink

Those pontificating, sycophantic buffoons sicken me. What a charade. Fancy having beings like that running the show !

John Bull says: August 20, 2018 at 11:15 am
Rob, as ever good stuff.

Having followed your excellent blog for some weeks now, I've become convinced that there are four distinct elements to this affair: two opposing clandestine ops, an almost unbelievably idiotic false flag charade, and a random death:-

1. Operation 'Let's Keep Tabs on Sergei'. Run by MI5/6/SB to make sure their double agent doesn't come to any harm or become a triple agent. Electronic tagging, email monitoring, phone tapping, and friendly chats ever now and then. Worked well for years, then the wheels fell off on 4th March.

2. Operation 'Let's Extract Skripal'. Run by an unknown security agency but possibly contracted out to another. Deniable soft extraction so he could be wheeled out later to give evidence concerning the Trump Dossier, with or without his co-operation. The plan included his daughter, because she was needed to ensure Sergei said what he was supposed to say when the time came. Phase One carried out successfully on 4th March. Phase Two delayed by HMG playing silly games, but eventually mission was accomplished.

3. The 'Let's Blame Putin' Charade. When MI6 reported to its ultimate boss that an ex-Russian spy had been poisoned, Boris would have rightly assumed the culprits were probably Russian. But then, remembering how Lavrov humiliated him at that press conference in Moscow last December, he decided to make sure Russia did get the blame and take the rap for it. With the help of the new inexperienced Defence Secretary and others, he came up with a hastily and ill-conceived plan to show that the poison could have only come from Russia, ensuring Russia's guilt. The Home Secretary at the time, Amber Rudd, did not buy into it so had to be replaced, but others – including the overworked Theresa May – were taken in. The narrative quickly fell apart, but having persuaded the world and his wife of Putin's guilt, there was no going back. The hole Boris dug just got deeper. And all the evidence – or the lack of it – had to be destroyed. No wonder Boris resigned.

4. A Tragic Death. Four months after Skripal, a couple in Amesbury were hospitalised for drug misuse; just two of the many cases SDH would have dealt with during the year. But having been persuaded by HMG that the Skripals had been poisoned with Novichok-that-only-comes-from-Russia, the local authorities took no chances and assumed the two from Amesbury had been likewise affected. HMG, desperate to keep their narrative alive, leapt on the incident to re-ignite the anti-Russian rhetoric and claim Dawn's death was 'murder', 'a terrorist act', 'a war crime' etc. etc. The narrative was even more idiotic than the first one (a scent bottle in a litter bin for four months!) – and ironically, it blew the gaff. They said Dawn was poisoned by the very same Novichok-that-only-comes-from-Russia and died because she received 10-times the dose Skripal got. But we know she took eight days to die. It could not have been Novichok.

Perhaps the police should stop trying to hunt down non-existent assassins and investigate Boris Johnson. The crime? Misconduct in public office, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Duncan says: August 20, 2018 at 12:01 pm
Indeed John,

When I was writing my scenario below, I started to realise that rather than satirical it could be factual. Little Gavin might be working under that man who would be king's tutelage. Gavin having told the Russians to shut up, does not do well under questioning.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2018/may/29/richard-madeley-gavin-williamson-dodges-question-on-russia-video

John Bull says: August 20, 2018 at 12:31 pm
Duncan – I read your excellent piece after posting my 'Four Elements' bit. I think you're right. You've hit some good points.
Paul says: August 20, 2018 at 12:04 pm
'A tragic death' If Salisbury and the aftermath was not already crazy, Amesbury hit new heights of idiocy. A woman was taken from a house with poisoning in the morning but others in the house were not taken to hospital for observation.

Later the same day, the other occupant of the same house fell ill. Decontamination tents were sent to the location but were not used. Instead police put the second victim in an ambulance with no protection whatsoever.

Just watch this short video and ask yourself – what were the police thinking!!**??

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-44729888/footage-of-amesbury-poisoning-victim-entering-ambulance

Max_B says: August 20, 2018 at 2:14 pm
Two days after Dawn and Charlie had been admitted to hospital, and as a direct result of the Amesbury incident, Detective Sergent Erin Martin of Salisbury CID took the " unusual step " of issuing an official warning via Wiltshire Constabulary to " drug users " in south Wiltshire "to be extra cautious" , . "We are asking anyone who may have information about this batch of drugs to contact the Police", " where the drugs may have been bought from, or who they may have been sold to."
John Bull says: August 20, 2018 at 3:24 pm
Thanks, Max_B. That's interesting. So at least Salisbury CID didn't fall for the Novichok nonsense.

By the way, I agree that any agent which attacks the central nervous system can be termed a 'nerve agent'.

Peter Beswick says: August 20, 2018 at 4:55 pm
So do I, including a well placed axe
Miheila says: August 20, 2018 at 6:49 pm
John, you're poaching my theory ! The one I hinted at in an earlier post (yesterday I think).

Like you, I'm convinced that two opposing covert ops are involved.

Your point 1. would be standard practice. Sergei would have been subjected to discreet surveillance by MI5 watchers and GCHQ throughout his British exile. Most likely heroic DS Bailey was his local case officer. But let's not forget that Sergei was still working for MI6 and that Pablo Miller was probably still his controller (line manager). There's a saying, 'once an intelligence officer; always an intelligence officer' – a saying which certainly holds true for many ex-SIS folk. It was his covert activities that lead to your next point.

Your point 2. is more or less exactly what I had worked out myself, and I'll be working on the finer details for some time yet.

Your point 3. is spot on too. This is the opportunistic 'political capital' angle I mentioned in an earlier post.

Your point 4. I see this as a crude continuation of the above. A further opportunity. Nothing more.

Eventually, we'll be joining more and more dots together. Good work, John !

Paul says: August 20, 2018 at 10:13 am
Rob,
You said:

"Party A is British Intelligence, whereas Party B is perhaps some sort of Trump supporting element of US Intelligence/military. The Skripals are therefore currently under their protection. Have I got that right?"

Broadly yes; that is the bare bones of what I currently think.

You counter with:

"Party A would be FBI/CIA Intel with nerve agent from US part of Porton Down, and Party B would be British Intelligence believe what Party A is about to do is potentially disastrous, and so try to stop it."

I have two particular issues with that idea. I mention them, to see whether they can be answered in a way that allows us to build a scenario around your idea.

Firstly, when you say FBI/CIA, what you really mean is Cabal. The FBI/CIA would be acting on behalf of HRC/DNC/Obama/etc. to remove an individual who could expose them and throw light on their illegal activities – specifically spying on Trump. Why would May/M_5/M_6 want to stop that? They are in exactly the same boat and do not want their role to be disclosed either. Also Sergei was nothing but an expense for HMG; they already had all the information he was ever going to give them.

Ah, you say, British intelligence didn't like the idea of a nerve agent being set loose in Salisbury. OK, well why not just have a word with the FBI/CIA and agree to do it in a way that keeps everyone (except Sergei) happy. I am sure that between FBI/CIA/M_5/M_6/HMG, there was something that they could all agree would do the job and not threaten the whole of Salisbury. Why not just get him at home?

But that isn't my biggest problem.

Secondly, Sergei was on British soil. If HMG/M_5/M_6 got wind of a plan to kill him, why would they not just take him off the streets immediately? Get him into protective custody. He had already been to the police to say he was in fear of his life, so get him somewhere safe. Then there is no need for any 'nerve agent' attack at all. The FBI/CIA might be a bit miffed but Trump would not complain; he would say British intelligence did a great job!

In this case, Bailey visits Sergei on Saturday morning and says: "Right Sergei, go and get Yulia and then we will take you in. You will be safe for the rest of your life. All you have to do is give me the SD card and we will take care of the rest." Job done and it would have saved an awful lot of ferreting around in rubbish bins ever since.

So if party A was indeed some black op of the FBI/CIA, why did party B let it proceed right up to 4 March and then try to thwart it at the last moment, instead of just killing it stone dead? If party B didn't stop the FBI/CIA earlier and Bailey was sent in to save the Skripals, it rather looks like they didn't get the SD card anyway

Rob Slane says: August 20, 2018 at 10:37 am
Good points Paul. For now, the only thing I'll say is with regard to the second problem, which is this. It would all depend on when this plot was discovered. If it was days or weeks in advance, then yes, you're absolutely correct. But if it was some time on the morning or even early afternoon of 4th March, then that would change things. And to be frank, even if there was a "cover up" of a "cover up" it doesn't look like it was very well thought through.

Rob

Paul says: August 20, 2018 at 10:57 am
Rob,

If party B discovered the plot on Sunday morning, they would have had the whole day to find Sergei and take him in. Sergei wasn't trying to hide; they would have found him easily on council CCTV. There would also have been police cars all day outside Sergei's house, waiting for him and police would have been crawling all over the city.

If party B discovered the plot at, say, 2pm and Sergei was not at home, they still had options. Surely the police would have launched their procedures for something like a bomb threat. The city would be closed off immediately and police would have been everywhere. People would have been told to evacuate the city and get to safety. Given 2 or 3 hours, procedures would exist to minimise the risk to the general public.

Even if they only had one hour's notice, I can't see the police doing nothing and allowing a nerve agent to be deployed.

Paul says: August 20, 2018 at 11:05 am
I should add that I still believe that on the Sunday and Monday, the Wiltshire police were honest and did a proper job. Some very funny details emerged very quickly by Monday evening they knew that this was a scam and on Tuesday the Met was brought in to cover it all up.
Marie says: August 20, 2018 at 2:41 pm
I should add that I still believe that on the Sunday and Monday, the Wiltshire police were honest and did a proper job.

Agree.

on Tuesday the Met was brought in to cover it all up.

Disagree. The Met or Met CT was in the lead as early as 7:00 PM on Sunday and no later than 9:00 PM. Publicly for the next day and a half SFD and SDH referred to the Met as a 'partner,' but one of the local police seniors did say on Monday or Tuesday that they were relieved of command on Sunday.

Paul says: August 20, 2018 at 3:04 pm
"The investigation into the possible poisoning of the Russian spy Sergei Skripal gained new momentum on Tuesday, as Scotland Yard announced its counter-terrorism police would take charge.."
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/06/counter-terrorism-take-on-russian-spy-sergei-skripal-poison-case
Marie says: August 20, 2018 at 11:36 pm
Okay – so what do you do with the subsequent statements from SDH/NHS that have clearly stated that on Sunday evening, SDH contacted NHS "Radiation, poison, etc." and NHS "Radiation, poison, etc" promptly contacted Met CT?

Did Met CT respond with, "We're busy with our tea and crumpets and it's not our patch anyway?"

The Monday announcements were issued by SDH and hours later the SPD, but we now also know that by 06:00 on Monday buzz about unknown agent and Skripal had spread throughout several UK agencies. Do you seriously think that SDH and SPD were in the lead that day? That referring to 'partners' was a simple nicety?

Is there not even a semi-automatic communication link from SPD to Wiltshire PD and the Met? Shortly after the incident, if we accept a Skripal neighbor eyewitness, a SPD patrol car stopped at Skripal's house. That indicates that Skripal has been preliminarily identified as one of the bench people. Even if that eyewitness is wrong, nobody disputes that a team of police arrived at Skripal's house sometime between 7:00 and 8:00 PM and by all accounts gained access to the house and searched it. If the Met or Met CT had any boots on the ground by then, they wouldn't have had enough to handle the search on its own. So, of course, local police assets were involved in this.

Do you think Craig Holden and Cara Charles-Barkwrote the statements they read on camera on Monday evening? Statements that only covered the barest of information,

https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/video/sergei-skripal-suspected-poisoning-police-and-hospital-news-footage/929998464

You honestly believe that SPD operated exclusively on this matter from Sunday evening until Tuesday? Seemed to me that there was a bit of chaos at the law enforcement end on Monday as they didn't get much done by that evening statement and when national reporters were beginning to show up. SPD couldn't ascertain that a crime had been committed. Was Met CT pushing for a crime? Somebody behind the scenes with power sure was.

Boris had his script ready to go as soon as Rowley (Met CT) announced that Skripal was one of the victims.

Paul says: August 20, 2018 at 11:51 pm
Marie, I don't know why you are ranting at me, all I did was post a link – that is the official story! Anyway, just to correct a couple of things for you:

" police arrived at Skripal's house sometime between 7:00 and 8:00 PM" No Bailey was there by 5pm.

" by 06:00 on Monday buzz about unknown agent" No the buzz by 6am on Monday was about a former Russian spy. The news of an unknown agent came later on Monday morning.

Marie says: August 21, 2018 at 2:53 am
I find it helpful to be as precise as possible when so much possible evidence is mushy or conflicts.

SPD has stated that the team of officers including Bailey went to Skripals house Sunday evening. I don't recall that SPD has given the time of they arrived. Skripals neighbors reported seeing several police cars and officers at Skripals house at 7:00. As eyewitnesses aren't generally all that reliable as to the precise time they observed something, I merely accepted 7:00 as the earliest and allowed that it could have been as late as 8:00. Either of which are good enough for a reconstructed timeline.

As to the report from one neighbor that a police car arrived at Skripal's house at 5:00, there's no other evidence to support that. I'm sort of accepting a 5:00-5:30 visit by a lone police car because checking on a home of a patient whose identity would not have been firmly established at that point is sort of what police do. I could have been Bailey, but I doubt it because it's too routine. That person wouldn't have entered the house. Likely knocked on the door and reported back that nobody was home. It's relevance for me is that it gives a time as to when Skripal had first been identified as one of the two possible patients.

Peter Beswick says: August 20, 2018 at 9:49 am
Key Elements of the Hoax (I say key because a big part of the Hoax has been to throw in distractions, red herrings and a ton of irrelevant stuff to confuse and overload the story – It is Not meant to be understood)

The Conflicting advice of Novichoks that Public Health England (PHE) promulgated compared with that of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on Nerve Agents (the OPCW hadn't put anything out on Novichok specifically for the simple reason they didn't know anything)

https://www.opcw.org/about-chemical-weapons/types-of-chemical-agent/nerve-agents/

The Director of Public Health England (PHE) Paul Cosford saying that Novichok actually does take a minimum of 3 hours to take effect after contact with a large dose

"If you become ill with this stuff (Novichok) from actually coming into contact with a significant amount of it then its within 6-12 hours, maximum (that symptoms would occur) – 3 hours is the minimum but you have to be in touch with a large dose.""

https://www.spirefm.co.uk/news/local-news/2630419/amesbury-incident-novichok-could-be-active-for-50-years/

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/phe-statement-on-incident-in-amesbury

Summary

PHE – Risk to public remains low (Despite being dead). "This Stuff" (Novichok) take effect in not less than 3 hours IF you get a very large dose through the skin

OPCW – Nerve Agents are deadly, the more toxic they are the deadlier they are. They are designed to kill. Through Skin contact will present symptoms in 20 – 30 mins, (inhalation much quicker)

No CCTV released by police.

Which would establish the actual Time Line rather than that of the Fake Official Narrative.

It would establish what the Skripals looked like that day and what actually occurred at the bench (the police don't want us to know either)

It could have saved the lives of the 3 children that Sergei gave bread to in the park when he first arrived in Salisbury that day if the boys had been poisoned by Novichok.

Bailey's Body Cam would establish what he did at the bench and Skripal home.

The Government Lie that it was the Russians that did it and could only have been them.

Peter Beswick says: August 20, 2018 at 9:51 am
PHE – Risk to public remains low (Despite Dawn being dead)
Duncan says: August 20, 2018 at 9:21 am
Dear Readers,

I have a tome which addresses means and opportunity, and when I can paste it to the Blog you will hopefully see it. I will still bang on about Skripals and only Skripals being the park bench victims. We know that they were in Zizzi's after the duck feed with the boys, then onto the Mill Pub. As many of the recent posts had pointed out the Mill Pub has lots of CCTV footage and the police spent quite a long time interviewing the staff. (As one does in a terror investigation.

The Telegraph was still reporting that the Mill Pub was the last port of call before the park bench. I think that is true. However, TPTB want us to "ignore" that location and focus on the Novichok that dripped from Zizzi's table. Why?

Liane Theuer says: August 20, 2018 at 9:09 am
The US media has send journalists to Salisbury very early. For example Ellen Barry, NYT. These journalists have influenced the official narrative to a decisive extent.

On March 9 ABC News has send their chief reporter Terry Moranto to Salisbury. This is the video : https://abcnews.go.com/International/video/soldiers-heading-scene-poisoning-attack-england-53638197

He used the Snap Fitness CCTV to establish the „fact" that the Skripals went from Zizzis through Market Walk to the bench.

Rob, just another false translation of what Putin said about traitors. Listen to Moran´s interpretation at 2:00 in the video. Quote : Vladimir Putin's held a town hall session and he was asked about this five's that had been traded and he said, and this is almost a direct quote : „They will kick the bucket. Trust me. They betrayed their colleagues, their brothers in arms. And they took thirty pieces of silver and are gonna choke on all that." [End quote]

At 3:00 Terry Moran shows the CCTV of Snap Fitness. It´s outside at the right side of the entrance.

Noone says: August 20, 2018 at 5:03 am
Paul Craig Roberts: The CIA Owns the US and European Media

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/08/18/the-cia-owns-the-us-and-european-media/

Liane Theuer says: August 20, 2018 at 7:38 am
One of the best books I have ever read is "Bought Journalists" :
https://www.globalresearch.ca/english-translation-of-udo-ulfkottes-bought-journalists-suppressed/5601857
Miheila says: August 20, 2018 at 10:01 am
Noone & Liane:
Excellent articles, thanks.
I recommend everyone to watch the video on Liane's link:
https://youtu.be/sGqi-k213eE
15 minutes well worth watching.
Cascadian says: August 20, 2018 at 11:16 am
"Flat Earth New" by Nick Davies. It provides a plausible reason for the phenomena where all the new media carry the same headline and column with minor changes – it all comes from one source via a single feed that they all subscribe to (the Press Association, or sometimes Reuters).
john_a says: August 19, 2018 at 10:44 pm
Hi Rob and all,

We keep talking about the "official narrative". But actually, what is the official narrative and where does one find it?

I do try to keep up with events around the Skripal case. The media regularly and frequently cite "sources", official or otherwise. But have there been any actual authorized statements from the government containing anything like an "official" version of the events? There was Theresa May's statement to Parliament in March, but has there been anything since? If so, I must have missed it (which is quite possible).

For sure there's a media narrative. The media keeps floating new stories or bits of new information. But the media stories are often either self-contradictory or just plain nonsensical. Does this amount to an "official narrative"? Is the "perfume bottle" official for example? Or the novichok in the public toilets? Or are these only media stories?

I read in earlier posts that the police have issued an "official" timeline (contradicting earlier eye-witness accounts). Is this the case? Is there really a police timeline that one can look up in any official source, or is it just another media story?

Most recently the fact (?) was reported – apparently as a Guardian exclusive – that the government is "poised" (whatever that means) to submit an extradition request to Moscow. If true, it would be a very serious act. Has it been officially documented, or is even this simply another media story?

I apologise if I'm talking rubbish here, but I have the impression that there no such thing as an "official narrative" beyond what May told Parliament in March. Everything since then has been media smoke and mirrors. Or an I missing something?

Anonymous says: August 19, 2018 at 10:55 pm
I totally agree with you. And it seems none of the media is inclined to pin down and demand the official story. It is to the government's advantage to allow the media to run with unnamed sources to reinforce the Russia dunnit scenario, without themselves committing to it
Rob Slane says: August 19, 2018 at 11:35 pm
Hi John,

When I use the term "official narrative", which I do a lot, I am basically referring to three simple claims:

  1. That Sergei and Yulia Skripal, along with D.S. Nick Bailey, were poisoned by a "military grade nerve agent" known as a Novichok.
  2. That responsibility for this act lies with the Russian state.
  3. That the poisoning took place at the home of Mr Skripal, specifically by the application of the nerve agent to the handle of his front door.

The first two claims have been expressly made by Her Majesty's Government, whilst the third one has expressly been made by those in charge of the investigation.

There are of course other sub-claims that form a part of this (such as the day that Yulia and then Sergei were discharged from hospital) but these three claims are substantially it.

The main problem with the first claim is that the Skripals are alive and well. The main problem with the second is Russia is absolutely not the only country or entity that could have produced the alleged substance. And the main problem with the third claim is that it is a physical impossibility that 2 people could have come into contact with the alleged substance, and then collapsed at exactly the same time 4 hours later.

Everything else follows from those three basic, but demonstrably false claims.

chris says: August 20, 2018 at 5:36 am
Aren't " those in charge of the investigation" the only ones authorized to make "official statements"?
Miheila says: August 20, 2018 at 5:59 am
I agree with you completely, Rob, except for you saying that the Skripals are 'alive and well'. In truth, we can't be sure of this. All we know for certain is that Yulya was alive at the time the Reuters video was recorded.
Anonymous says: August 20, 2018 at 9:35 am
Hi Rob,

I definitely agree with you. Almost nothing is "official" except that Putin did it (whatever it was).

On your Point 3, what do we make of this post by CharlieFreak ?
I was discussing the 'door handle' theory with a relative about five or six weeks ago and he was telling me that he had been listening to a BBC Radio 4 'Today' interview with a Govt Security Minister the previous week (Ben Wallace?) in which he was asked if Novichok residue had actually been found by investigators on the door handle. According to my relative – who has been following the case and assumed from all the publicity that nerve agent residue had been found on the door handle – the Minister said it hadn't but it was a plausible the theory they were working with. As I understand it the interviewer then rhetorically remarked (without any obvious hint of irony or incredulity) that presumably it was quite possible that the 'assassins' came back after seeing the Skripals leave the house and wiped the door handle clean to remove the evidence!!
https://www.theblogmire.com/bbc-crimewatch-reconstruction-of-salisbury-poisonings-shelved/#comment-8643

Can this be? Not even the door handle is "official" ???

john_a says: August 20, 2018 at 9:43 am
Sorry, the above post was from me. The comment box has forgotten to save my user name.
Brendan says: August 20, 2018 at 9:24 pm
john_a,
"Is the "perfume bottle" official for example?"

Officially the Novichok was found in a "small glass bottle" in Charlie Rowley's flat. No further details were officially given about the container. It was Charlie who said that he had found a perfume bottle with a known brand name, which Dawn sprayed on her wrists, and that the contents somehow got onto Charlie's hands.

Brendan says: August 20, 2018 at 9:27 pm
– "Or the novichok in the public toilets?"

Nothing official as far as I know, except that the Hazmat guys searched the public toilets in QEM park. Some tabloid published a ludicrous story about Russia using that public toilet as a CW lab.

Brendan says: August 20, 2018 at 9:38 pm
QEG park
Brendan says: August 20, 2018 at 9:32 pm
– "Is there really a police timeline that one can look up in any official source, or is it just another media story?"

The Metropolitan Police published a timeline a number of times.
http://news.met.police.uk/news/update-incident-in-salisbury-298351
http://news.met.police.uk/news/renewed-appeal-for-information-from-anyone-who-saw-salisbury-victims-car-298912
http://news.met.police.uk/news/ongoing-investigation-into-incident-in-salisbury-on-4-march-309256

This has been said many times before, but it's worth repeating that the police did not say when the Skripals visited the Mill pub, only that it was "at some time after" they arrived at Sainsbury's car park in Salisbury city centre. The police must have known more about the exact timing, since they had plenty of timestamped CCTV footage available to them. 'Unofficially' according to media reports, they went to Mill before they went to Zizzis, but there does not appear to be anything to support that version of events.

Brendan says: August 20, 2018 at 9:34 pm
– "Most recently the fact (?) was reported – apparently as a Guardian exclusive – that the government is "poised" (whatever that means) to submit an extradition request to Moscow. If true, it would be a very serious act. Has it been officially documented, or is even this simply another media story?"

I guess that this is the story that originated from the Press Association that the Russian assassins were identified from CCTV images. Nothing official about that, in fact the Security Minister called it "ill informed and wild speculation". However, the BBC has treated the report very seriously.
https://twitter.com/MarkUrban01/status/1020366761848385536
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43643025

If the BBC continues to say that, it must have been leaked from some senior official source that wants the public to believe it, even if that source does not commit to it publicly.

Brendan says: August 20, 2018 at 9:36 pm
– You ask in another post "Not even the door handle is "official" ???"

The British authorities have not explicitly stated that the Novichok was found on the door knob, only on the front door: "Specialists have identified the highest concentration of the nerve agent, to-date, as being on the front door of the address.".

However, there have been various media reports that the nerve agent was found on the door handle. Furthermore, Sir Mark Sedwill, the UK's national security adviser stated in a publicly released letter that Russia had previously tested the use of door handles as a way of delivering nerve agents.

Brendan says: August 21, 2018 at 7:43 am
Sedwill says "DSTL established that the highest concentrations were found on the handle of Mr Skripal's front door. These are matters of fact." So I suppose you could call that official.
Liane Theuer says: August 19, 2018 at 10:28 pm
My thesis: The Skripals did not walk through the Market Walk to the bench.
I want to substantiate this thesis:

We have two CCTVs of people that are NOT the Skripals :
15:47:43 Snap Fitness shows the couple with the red bag. First published on March 6.
Cain Prince, 28, runs Snap Fitness.
16:08:00 Jenny's restaurant shows three people. First published on March 9.
Mustafa Dalangal, 57, runs Jenny's restaurant .

How did these two CCTVs find their way into the public ?
We know that the police didn´t publish a single CCTV. Why should they release this two ?
No, it were some journalists who found the CCTV earlier than the police.

Look at this timeline of March 5 and 6 (Reporter Liam Trim) :
Monday March 5
6pm The BBC reports the man is Sergei Skripal, 66, an ex-military intelligence colonel who was convicted in Russia of passing state secrets to Britain
7pm At a press conference Temporary Assistant Chief Constable Craig Holden tells reporters it is not being treated as a counter-terror incident.
Tuesday March 6
09:07 The BBC named Skripal as the man who was found along with a woman in her 30s, believed to be known to him, on a bench near a shopping centre shortly after 4pm on Sunday.
09:37 Both supermarkets are open but there are national media providing coverage close to the police tape.
10:34 Sergei Skripal, 66, was found slumped on a bench in Salisbury alongside a 33-year-old woman, who the BBC understands is his daughter, Yulia Skripal.
10:53 The latest from the Press Association: „As CCTV believed to show the pair in the moments before they were found slumped on a bench emerged, the UK's top counter-terrorism officer, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, said: "We have to be alive to the fact of state threats."
10:56 Freya Church, 27, the gym worker, from Salisbury, told the Press Association: (..)
15:37 BBC home affairs correspondent sums up press conference
He's quite brutally frank here but it's true – we did not learn much from that press conference.
https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/salisbury-russian-spy-police-substance-1302045

I guess that Craig Holden in the evening of March 5 told reporters about a man in his 60th and a woman in her 30th were the couple found slumped on the bench. And I suspect he also mentioned the red bag.
This gave the Press Association the idea to look for the couple on private CCTVs.
PA was looking for a couple with a red bag and they found it at Snap Fitness.

We know for a fact that PA found the wrong pair.
Had there been another couple on the CCTV with a red bag, then they would certainly have copied it, too ! So there was no second pair with a red bag in Market Walk at that time !

Later on March 6 the police arrived at Snap Fitness :
Quote : Snap Fitness manager Cain Prince, aged 28, said: "Police had a good look at the footage and were interested in these two people. It was the only image they took away."
Mr Prince added that police said Skripal was "wearing a green coat". [End quote]

"Police had a good look at the footage" – so, the police too didn´t see the Skripals in market Walk !
But they found it suspicious that there was a couple who also had a red bag. So they took it away.

The same with Jenny's restaurant CCTV on March 9.
First the CCTV was discovered by The Sun.
Police came later :
Quote : Counter terror cops from SO15 Special Operations have seized new CCTV footage that shows two people who fit the description of the victims.
Cops seized the pictures from a local business yesterday (Fri) – two days after the proprietor told them he had it.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5767001/cctv-video-ex-russian-spy-sergei-skripal-daughter-yulia-walking-mystery-woman-before-poisoned/

The Sun knew about the Snap Fitness CCTV and the red bag. Why did they focus on another couple ? Was the red bag couple not on Jenny's restaurant CCTV ? But they can not have fallen from the sky. I have no logical explanation other than this : Certain media wanted to create the illusion that the Skripals walked the Market Walk, although they didn´t.

Conclusion : Two different reporters have spotted CCTV. But no one has discovered the Skripals. In short, the Skripals didn´t walk through the Market Walk.

Paul says: August 19, 2018 at 10:47 pm
Liane, I think you are right. And why did the police take away that image from Snap Fitness? Because it was the couple on the bench! When the police searched the CCTV they knew what the bench couple looked like and that was who they were looking for.

If it had been the real Skripals on the bench, why on earth would the police have taken away CCTV of a random couple with a red bag, yet not bothered to take any images of the Skripals?

"Yes Mr Cain, Mr Skripal was wearing a green coat but never mind about that; I think I will have this picture of these two other people if that's alright with you."

Paul says: August 19, 2018 at 10:57 pm
Another thought, this may explain the switch in the Mill/Zizzi or Zizzi/Mill timeline. The CCTV couple were clearly not coming from the direction of the Mill, they were coming from Zizzi.

As the police had made a mistake in releasing the CCTV image, they may have switched the story round and said it was the Mill first to cover up the fact that they had (ridiculously) issued a CCTV image of 2 otherwise random people coming from the wrong direction. By switching it round perhaps they thought it provided some cover for having issued images of people that were not the Skripals and left the idea in everyone's mind that the Skripals had come from the same direction.

Liane Theuer says: August 20, 2018 at 7:45 am
Paul, both CCTVs were NOT released by the police but by the press ! This fact forced them to change the story. Why on earth was the time when the Skripals were in Mill Pub never given, neither by police nor journalists ?
Peter Beswick says: August 20, 2018 at 8:40 am
Something very significant happened in the Mill. It had 12 CCTV cameras operating that day the recordings were all seized by the police. The Manager was was treated as a terror suspect and interviewed by police 8 times in the first week of the investigation. The Skripals went to the Mill before Zizzis

"As further details of Col Skripal's movements emerged, a source close to Greg Townsend, manager of The Mill, revealed that he served the Russians last Sunday afternoon and had since been treated like a "terror suspect", interviewed by police up to eight times last week.

He said The Mill had 12 CCTV cameras, covering the large open-plan bar area as well as the upstairs balcony and lavatories overlooking it.

"The pub has obviously remained closed for more than a week and the cordon widened, but Greg feels like he has been kept completely in the dark, they're not telling him anything.

"He actually served them. He's had a bit of a time of it all and is a pending terror suspect.

"He certainly said he's being treated like one. He's had around eight police interviews.""

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/13/salisbury-car-park-ticket-machine-cordoned-expert-warns-dusty/

Peter Beswick says: August 20, 2018 at 8:53 am
Sorry the Telegraph has the opposite to the "Official Narrative" (as it was then)

"From the car park, it was just a short walk through The Maltings shopping precinct to Zizzi, where they ate lunch before heading to The Mill pub for a drink."

The "Official Narrative" was never changed on Dr Davies, the Duck Boys park location, the cctv pair being one and the same as the bench people

And the Helicopter taking Yuia and / or Sergie changed 3 weeks l was corrected later in the leading MSM news provider the Spire FM website.

The Official Narrative is a tool of the Hoaxer and because of its unreliability it means Pants.

Independent Tested Evidence is what is forming the Facts, if they are false they can easily be refuted abd corrected by New Evidence eg Mill and Council CCTV

Peter Beswick says: August 20, 2018 at 8:58 am
This is a Major Witness but the Official Narrative has forgotten about her

"The source said the CCTV cameras covered the whole bar and had been seized by police.

"Skripal and his daughter sat just to the right of the front door.

"One of the young bar staff who was on a break sat really near them and has also been interviewed.""

Peter Beswick says: August 20, 2018 at 9:06 am
Sorry both the "Source" and "One of the young bar staff"

Are Major witnesses.

So is Mill Manager Greg Townsend .

Lots of witnesses dropped out of the "Official Narrative" did they know the wrong type of stuff?

It's a HOAX !

I Will start to put a list of the elements of the Hoax together at the top.

Rob Slane says: August 20, 2018 at 9:04 am
Peter, this prompted me to look at Mr Townend's Facebook page and there was a link to a piece about his rabbits, which were locked up behind the police cordon, with no food or water. But thanks to his raising of awareness on social media, the police stepped in:

"Luckily, the Luckily, Wiltshire Police stepped into the rescue the rabbits after pub manager's plea was shared more than 100 times across Facebook. The force today tweeted: 'We have an update on the rabbits stuck at an address in one of [the] cordons. They have now been given food and water and are OK. Thanks for everyone's concern.'"

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5485721/Race-save-floppy-eared-Salisbury-two.html

Sadly the cat and the guinea pigs at 47 Christie Miller Road were not treated with the same care. "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" it seems.

Cascadian says: August 20, 2018 at 11:39 am
Or, possibly, 'all police are dumb, but some are dumber than others'.

Or, one could change 'dumb' to 'unfeeling', or 'callous', or some other derogatory term.

The cat and the guinea pigs in the Skripal's house would have been raising hell and the cat would have been trying everything in its repertoire to get out. Then there's the defecation and urination, the smell must have been quite ripe. So please tell me how the officers posted outside the Skripals and Townsend's ignored all this without comment to their superiors?

Rob Slane says: August 20, 2018 at 12:14 pm
No idea. The two things that baffle me about the whole incident are:

a) If you look at the photos of police officers standing near the house, there are three windows that are open. I would have thought the cat could have got through one of those, and there's probably a catflap on the back door. The cat, if not the guinea pigs, could surely have gotten away.

b) Why on earth the authorities let on about the condition of the animals. They're not above being economical with the actualite. Why then did they not just say, "The cat and the guinea pigs are now safely residing at a secure location. They do not wish to avail themselves of the services of the RSPA, or Russian Embassy, and they ask that their privacy be respected."

Bizarre, no???

Miheila says: August 20, 2018 at 4:08 pm
The affair of the pets was only made public when the Russian embassy began enquiring about them. Until then it was the Skripals' vet who'd contacted the police about the pets, and this happened within hours of the poisoning.

Once it became public, the government had to come up with a plausible cover story – claiming that DSB had found them on 4th March. I don't believe this. The DEFRA vet allegedly involved was, as far as I know, never named, and the best they could come up with was that the Persian cat, Nash van Drake (brought over from Russia), had been found in a 'distressed' state, taken to PD, humanely put to sleep and incinerated. No vet should euthanise an animal simply because it is distressed. The guinea pigs (also from Russia) had been found dead due to lack of food and water were also taken off to PD. I don't believe this story. Rumours of a second cat, Masyanya, bought in England, began to circulate and it was assumed that this cat had escaped. Neighbours will know more.

I would like to think that all the pets survived and are now safe. This may even be true if the Skripals had been 'disappeared' according to a pre-planned operation. If so, the pets would have been moved elsewhere shortly before the fateful day, or on that very morning.

HMG hadn't taken into account a second cat, because they weren't aware of one, but there certainly were two cats and I have videos of them both. The embassy were only aware of one cat and two guinea pigs, information that I believe came from Viktoria. As for the rabbits and fish, another later rumour, perhaps they had been taken away earlier too. The whole pet story strikes me as very odd. Maybe Howard Taylor, the vet, knows more than we do. He said, "We phoned the police on day one to offer to help if they needed it. I thought it unlikely the police would have gone to the house and not done anything."

On 17th March it was only reported that the animals had been taken away. It was only on 6/7th April that HMG admitted that the guinea pigs were dead and the had been suffering.

According to The Sun: Taylor said of Mr Skripal: "He was a nice chap and we got on well. He never said he was in fear for his life. He used the vets for some years and I had seen his cat and his guinea pigs." Note: only one cat mentioned.

"We contacted the police straightaway upon hearing the news that Mr Skripal had been admitted to hospital, and a number of times afterwards, to make them aware of Mr Skripal's pets and their needs.
We contacted Porton Down – in case the animals may have been taken into isolation. We also offered to take care of Mr Skripal's pets in his absence. We were never contacted by the police or Porton Down in return regarding Mr Skripal's pets".

If we believe this official story, then why haven't the RSPCA prosecuted the police fotr animal neglect? I'm disgusted by the RSPCA's apparent lack of interest in this affair. Their press officer, Nicola Walker said:

"It is very sad to hear that these animals have died in such tragic circumstances. However, we appreciate the emergency services were working in extreme and dangerous conditions in an incredibly fast-moving operation in an attempt to keep the public safe. We don't currently know the details of what happened but, as part of our ongoing working relationship with police, we would like to see if there is any learning for future operations."

Suzanne Norbury, their South-West Press Officer came up with the same wording, and:
"Emergency services working in extreme and dangerous conditions incredibly fast-moving operation an attempt to keep the public safe'

I go along with this assessment: "It's a string of shallow excuses. It's nonsense. And it comes, not from the police themselves, but from the royal body supposed to prevent cruelty to animals".

john_a says: August 20, 2018 at 12:51 pm
According to one press report the pets were already removed from Skripal's house on 17 March: https://metro.co.uk/2018/03/17/poisoned-russian-agents-cat-guinea-pigs-taken-away-tests-7394516/

This report may have been inaccurate, but nobody can claim that the existence of the pets was not known as early as mid March. The family vet also raised questions at an early stage. The report also shows that somebody thought the animals were worth "testing".

To me, this is one of the most bizarre inconsistencies in the whole case. Were the animals removed in mid March (alive) or early April (dead)? Why are there two different and mutually contradictory stories? What possible interest could be served by leaving the pets inside the house? And does it really mean that the police or counter-terror guys never entered the house before early April? After (supposedly) finding novichok on the door handle?

What's going on here? Did somebody calculate that a heartbreak story about starving pets would make us all hate Russia even more? If so, I suspect it backfired badly. British people love pets, and the story really just makes the British authorities look inhuman. Especially because it was the Russians who raised the issue.

Or is the whole sorry saga of the pets just a symptom of the British authorities losing interest in the whole affair and just trying to walk away from it in embarrassment?

Also, do the Skripals know the fate of their pets? What have they been told, and how did they take it?

Liane Theuer says: August 20, 2018 at 2:03 pm
As I wrote before, it looks like a punishment of Sergei. He really loved his pets. Or does anybody here has the impression, that the Skripals were treated like innocent victims ?
Milda says: August 19, 2018 at 9:46 pm
With regard to the Amesbury case:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/wiltshire-salisbury-amesbury-major-incident-victims-dawn-sturgess-charlie-rowley-latest-a8431376.html
An excerpt:
A specialist "decontamination shower" was taken to the scene [Rowley's place] by Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service on Saturday [30 June], but a crew from Swindon later tweeted that "thankfully the incident wasn't serious and our decontamination shower wasn't required". The tweet has since been deleted.
Peter Beswick says: August 19, 2018 at 8:10 pm
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20090128233607/http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/content/tvp/tvp_3_0110.pdf
Peter Beswick says: August 19, 2018 at 10:07 pm
Sterling work as always Paul, thank you. The note was sent from Frank Beswick (no relation) to Dr David Kelly the week before he died. Beswick was a colleague of Kelly's at Porton Down

Sorry I only have the B & W image

Peter Beswick says: August 19, 2018 at 10:11 pm
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/porton-down-scientists-escape-charges-for-poisoning-soldiers-95378.html
Liane Theuer says: August 19, 2018 at 10:43 pm
French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7415082/French-bread-spiked-with-LSD-in-CIA-experiment.html
Peter Beswick says: August 20, 2018 at 11:14 am
The writer of the letter was Frank Beswick (no relation) to Dr david Kelly, I don't know whether it was his own letter header (the crest and coat of arms) or that of the CDE Porton Down but this seems to indicate it was his own personal crest & Arms

"Frank's scientific work did not interfere with his enthusiasm for voluntary work with the St John Ambulance, in which he was a senior figure. The promotion to the rank of commander brother within the Order of St John in 1995 delighted him and allowed him to design his own coat of arms. This included the badge of the Chemical Defence Establishment and a heart, a nod back to his early work in cardiac physiology."

I Hadn't realised before but Beswick and Kelly had worked on detoxing the island of Gruinard together

"In 1979, following the closure of the Microbiological Research Establishment, the small microbiology programme fell into his bailiwick and this stimulated the work to rehabilitate the Island of Gruinard, which had been contaminated with anthrax in the early 1940s."

https://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d6425

Peter Beswick says: August 20, 2018 at 12:16 pm
https://thegenealogyguide.com/what-are-the-symbols-on-a-coat-of-arms

http://www.hasbrouckfamily.org/coatarms.htm

Miheila says: August 20, 2018 at 4:44 pm
Well, there's no heart in the arms on that letterhead so I can't see how they can be the arms that Beswick chose for himself. Nor do I understand why the crest is placed separately on the left. It's only the colour and charges in the escutcheon (shield) that makes a coat-of-arms unique to a particular family, individual or corporate body. In a sense, the rest is mere traditional ornament – the supporters, crest, helm, motto

Yes, I saw that Hasbrouck one when I did a quick search, but the chevron is not engrailed and the difference is crucial. It MUST be engrailed (the internet is still not the best way to search for these things). By the way the Hasbouck arms would is described as "Purpure, a chevron between three flambeaus or, flamed proper", so our friend's arms would then be:

"????, a chevron engrailed between three flambeaus (not torches) or (probably), flamed proper (probably)". I can't guess the field colour (????), and I'm guessing the likely colours of the torches.

Denise says: August 19, 2018 at 2:05 pm
I had forgotten about Ross Cassidy and was checking him out again after Miheila mentioned him for the list of people who know more that they are saying and found this from Sky News March 28 2018

Mr Cassidy, 61, has spent many hours with counter-terror detectives investigating the poisoning, but would not discuss the police operation.

Mr Cassidy got to know Sergei, his wife Lyudmila, his son Alexandr (who was known as Sasha) and Yulia.

Sergei spent a lot of time out of the country and there were times when I didn't see him, but he used to call me his English friend. He was very generous and never forgot my birthday, usually buying me an expensive bottle of whisky.

On Saturday 3 March, Mr Cassidy drove Mr Skripal to Heathrow to collect Yulia, who had moved back to Moscow and was visiting her father. It had been snowing and Sergei asked his pal if they could use his four-wheel-drive pick-up truck.

Last week, in a court ruling about the Skripals' medical needs, a judge quoted the consultant treating them in Salisbury district hospital: "The hospital has not been approached by anyone known to the patients to enquire of their welfare."

Mr Cassidy was upset by the suggestion there wasn't anyone who cared enough to want to go and see the Skripals.

He said: "That is misinformation, because we care. I asked the police several times if we could go and see them, quietly and away from the media, but I was told quite categorically that we were not allowed. We asked the question and the answer was 'no'.

"We were also upset that if his family and friends in Russia got to hear about this lack of concern it would cause them extra anguish."

My questions:

Why wouldn't Ross Cassidy discuss the police operation?

Why wouldn't the police let Sergei's best friend in England, visit him in hospital?

Did the SDH consultant know that the police were preventing Sergei and Yulia from having visitors?

If the SDH consultant did know that, then why didn't he tell the judge that?

I've shortened the story. Here's the link:
https://news.sky.com/story/salisbury-nerve-agent-attack-sergei-skripal-and-daughter-yulia-should-be-allowed-to-die-11306692

Miheila says: August 19, 2018 at 3:15 pm
Hi Denise,

I'm glad you picked up on his name. I included him, because outside the spook community, he's the only person in England who appears to have known the Skripal family well – all four. No wonder he was questioned for so long. I'll try to answer your questions as I see the situation. Just my opinion.

1.Why wouldn't Ross Cassidy discuss the police operation? Because he'd been threatened with dire consequences if he did. Whatever they were, they were most likely fabricated. 'National interest' springs to mind as the justification.

2. Why wouldn't the police let Sergei's best friend in England, visit him in hospital? Either because he wasn't there or because – later- they were afraid that Sergei would speak. I suspect he was never there at all.

3. Did the SDH consultant know that the police were preventing Sergei and Yulia from having visitors? Probably none of the SDH staff did.

4. If the SDH consultant did know that, then why didn't he tell the judge that? SDH declined to be represented in court due to feeling 'uncomfortable'. As I said in an earlier post, whoever that unnamed doctor was, he/she was 'highly unlikely' to be from SDH, but was rather an MoD 'specialist' brought in from elsewhere – PD or a military hospital.

Ross Cassidy may not have been willing to talk to the media, but I'm sure he said more to family and friends. Perhaps he'd be willing to talk to an impartial investigator, but then he might be too afraid of the consequences – which could have been direct threats to him or his family.

He needs to be asked about police activity and visitors at the Skripals, Sergei's pets (including the alleged rabbits and fish, not to mention Manyúnya, the cat who allegedly escaped), any concerns he may have had leading up to the fateful day, and so much more.

Anonymous says: August 19, 2018 at 3:54 pm
2. Why wouldn't the police let Sergei's best friend in England, visit him in hospital?

In the US and absent a signed directive by a patient that's either unconscious or incompetent, only next of kin are allowed to visit the patient. So, it would be the hospital that denies a friend access to a patient. No need for police involvement on this matter in this case.

The police, naturally, were looking for information on the patients and at any conceivable culprits. A double whammy for Cassidy.

Miheila says: August 19, 2018 at 4:56 pm
According to Ross Casssidy, it was the police who told him that he wasn't allowed to visit Sergei. Have they any right to do this? If conscious and talking, Sergei could ask to see any visitor he liked, but this didn't happen – either because he wasn't there, didn't ask, had no friends or because friends had been prohibited from visiting. We know RC had tried to, but without success.

In normal circumstances a hospital wouldn't be prohibiting visitors. Presumably RC had no means of contacting Sergei by phone either, and vice versa. As far as we know, Sergei has been kept incommunicado ever since 4th March, if indeed he is still alive. A very worrying situation.

Anonymous says: August 19, 2018 at 6:49 pm
According to Ross Casssidy, it was the police who told him that he wasn't allowed to visit Sergei. Have they any right to do this?

Cassidy's Sky News interview was published on 3/28; so, his interview took place on or before 3/28. As of that date, both Yulia and Sergei were officially unconscious or not able to communicate meaningfully. At the direction of a hospital or for other reasons determined by law enforcement, police do have that right.

Also, we don't have any idea if at any time Yulia and/or Sergei requested to see Cassidy.

Miheila says: August 20, 2018 at 6:12 am
I see now. As you say the Skripals (or 'bench people') were still officially unconscious at that time, so it would make sense that no visitors were allowed.

If the Skripals were there and after they had regained consciousness, it's surely likely that they would have wanted visitors, especially a visit from Ross Cassidy, Sergei's best friend. But I'm pretty certain that the authorities would have prevented this at all costs, hence the lack of phone access and Cassidy's remarks.

Jo says: August 20, 2018 at 9:34 am
Didn't stop family seeing Dawn sturgess. She couldn't consent to visitors either, but had them.
Miheila says: August 20, 2018 at 4:47 pm
Really? That's interesting.
CharlieFreak says: August 20, 2018 at 9:35 pm
These exchanges about whether friends were allowed to visit the Skripals in hospital inspired me to refresh my memories of the gross deception of HMG regarding whether the Skripals had any relatives in Russia. At the High Court ruling by Mr Justice Williams on 22 March, granting permission to provide the OPCW with samples, he stated "Given the absence of any contact having been made with the NHS Trust by any family member and the limited evidence as to the possible existence of family members in Russia, I accept that it is neither practicable nor appropriate in the special context of this case to consult with any relatives [of the Skripals] who might fall into the category identified in s.4(7)(b) of the Act". ('The Act' being the Mental Capacity Act 2005, and s.4(7)(b) states that before delivering what is in an incapacitated person's best interests the person ruling (in this case Mr Justice Williams) must: take into account, in order to consult them, the views of anyone engaged in caring for the person or INTERESTED IN HIS WELFARE"). (my emphasis).

This statement was delivered in spite of the fact that the Sun had carried an interview with Viktoria Skripal on 14 March about her concerns and desire to visit/make contact with the Skripals. And in spite of the fact that the Russian Embassy have records that on 6 March "the Embassy informed the FCO of the request it had received from Viktoria Skripal to provide information on the condition of her relatives. https://rusemb.org.uk/fnapr/6481

CharlieFreak says: August 20, 2018 at 9:50 pm
Apologies for the misplacement of a couple of quotation marks in the above post. I usually intend to proof read what I have written before sending but didn't on this occasion as I am conscious that if I exceed a certain period of time composing my message (I haven't worked out what the time limit is) the system refuses to post it and I have to start again. That aside, I think my meaning is clear.
Marie says: August 21, 2018 at 12:06 am
family

Friends do not enjoy the same privileges to visit patients in hospital as family does. (This has been a huge factor in why same-sex marriage was so necessary.)

Paul says: August 21, 2018 at 12:31 am
I think that is a very innappropriate comment but I shall say no more.
Liane Theuer says: August 19, 2018 at 11:08 pm
Quote : The colonel's close friend Ross Cassidy, who lives just a few doors from the property the Russian rented when he first arrived in Salisbury, said he "was not at liberty to talk."
He declined to say whether his friend had spoken of fears for his life, adding: "It's a very sensitive investigation of some gravitas. I really am unable to divulge any information at the moment."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/06/did-treacherous-past-russian-colonel-finally-catch-salisbury/

I agree with you that Cassidy knows more, but is forbidden to talk about.

Miheila says: August 20, 2018 at 6:16 am
Thanks Liane. Scary.
Duncan says: August 19, 2018 at 6:06 pm
I will reply to this, but simply as a test as I can't seem to post this afternoon, Maybe Rob is doing some site maintenance.

I do not think SDH were involved in bad practices. The Terror Team and PD took over. In fact going to the courts for the second blood sample might have been required due to SDH "resistance". Anyone else with posting issues? If I see that you are posting then it must be my PC or possibly the big van with a dish on the roof at the end of my street.

Peter Beswick says: August 19, 2018 at 11:33 am
A some point people stopped trying to prove the Earth was an irregular ball shape thing and was spinning around, doing laps of our nearest star at close on 66k mph.

They didn't stop because it wasn't true, it had just been proven beyond doubt and there was other stuff to get on with.

Flat Earthers did come along, many having their own reasons, some just didn't want to believe we were on a ball floating in space and prefer to live with the idea that we live on a gurt plate.

The Hoax has been proven, the motive is not the most important feature, murderers go to jail whether their motives are known or not.

The most important thing is to identify who was responsible for Dawn Sturgess' death and bring them to Justice along with those that have attempted to cover up the wicked and depraved crime.

The motives may or may not flow from that process but it is rather academic at the moment to say the least.

Those responsible for Dawn's death are also responsible for the cover up of the Salisbury Incident. That is what led to Dawn's death.

People responsible include

Mrs May and some of her Ministers

Salisbury and Met Police Chiefs.

These are not wild "Conspiracy Theories". They are cold, hard facts. And we have the proof that will convict. Beyond reasonable doubt proof that those people I have mentioned above are involved in the death of Dawn Surgess and the cover up of the Salisbury and Amesbury Incidents.

Paul says: August 19, 2018 at 12:45 pm
Whenever governments bury facts, they are never up to any good. History is full of examples of facts been hidden and whenever the lid is finally raised, it is was never for a good reason:
Vietnam war
JFK
Iraq WMD
etc
etc

The problem for TPTB this time is that they are in a different class to prior events – they are completely incompetent, utterly useless, self-important fools and obvious liars. This is what 'equal opportunity' hiring does! The good liars are gone.

Just look at all the 'officials' involved and wonder how they ever came to get the job

I continue to believe that this saga was the reason for Johnson's resignation. He could have survived May's Chequers debacle but he knows this story will ruin the rest of his career, so he has done a runner. He will get as much distance between himself and these events as he possibly can.

CharlieFreak says: August 19, 2018 at 1:48 pm
Paul,
Once again, I agree with everything you say.

Digressing to a different topic, it is the sheer "incompetence etc etc" that also explains the shambles that is 'Brexit'. And these incompetents – as I have alluded to elsewhere – are these days supported by many incompetent civil servants. I could see the way things were heading many years ago and that was one of my reasons for leaving the civil service 15 years ago after more than 20 years service in the company of many intelligent and honourable civil servants who were gradually retiring and were also expressing concerns about the deterioration in standards at all levels. I saw the rot begin when, about 20 years ago, the civil service opened up vacancies at all levels of responsibility to people with administrative or managerial experience but not civil service experience, so they hadn't acquired the ability to work alongside and in conjunction with legal advisers or technical experts (e.g. in my case, veterinarians and structural engineers at different times) which is an ability that develops and improves over an extended period of time and is integral to the successful functioning of the CS. When I joined the CS you would attend meetings and observe how such relationships developed and were used to achieve the intended aim many years before you yourself might find yourself having to do it. That no longer happens – people are just thrown in at the deep end, managed by incompetent staff and told to get on with it, with nobody providing knowledge-based 'quality control'. Whether or not you are a 'Remainer' or a 'Brexiteer' in principle, there was no hope for negotiations from the outset with the useless shower that we have in power (scope for a limerick there!). The Brexit considerations and negotiations have been in the hands of pathetic amateurs who are at sixes and sevens and who, after so many decades of relying on the EU to tell them what to do, have completely foregone any ability to think for themselves. That is the key problem, not the principle of Brexit, which could have resulted in far more encouraging prospects had it been in the right hands.
CF

Peter Beswick says: August 19, 2018 at 1:56 pm
It didn't happen by apathy, stupidity or accident it happened by design.

The people that control our politicians and civil / public servants don't want troublesome people that can actually think or care

CharlieFreak says: August 19, 2018 at 5:24 pm
Peter,
Exactly – one quality I found to be completely absent in 'newcomers' was initiative. I inherited someone at middle management level who had been in that particular policy job for about a year. I routinely asked him to draft a straightforward (but not 'standard') letter for one of our Ministers to send to an MP answering questions raised by a constituent about aspects of our Department's legislation. After all, that was part of his job description. As a middle manager responsible for that policy area he and even his subordinate officer should be able to quote chapter and verse and why it had been formulated in the way it had (e.g. 'based on Article X of EU Council Directive ABC'); at the very least he should have been able to work out the answers from information to hand or by consulting expert colleagues. We had been given the standard week or so to produce the draft reply which I could have knocked up in a couple of hours at most. So when I hadn't been given the draft for clearance by the morning of the required day and asked him about it he told me I had been unreasonable to ask him to do it without telling him what he needed to say! Needless to say, I knocked up the reply in a couple of hours but had to forego other tasks I was supposed to do that afternoon. When I joined the CS a Clerical Officer (2 grades below this chap) would have been asked to provide a first draft. I could bore you with other examples but, you'll be pleased to hear,I won't. Unfortunately that level of intellect is all too common nowadays.
Paul says: August 19, 2018 at 1:57 pm
Charlie, You hit that nail very firmly, right on the head!

I have seen it myself. Not only have standards dropped but wherever you look, people just don't care anymore. Second rate is now 'good enough'.

Marie says: August 19, 2018 at 3:07 pm
Charlie, you've described an operational organizational change that isn't limited to public institutions. It exists in corporations as well and began to take hold about thirty years ago. Instead of promoting from within line staff – those who had spent years doing and moved up slowly in managerial positions as they demonstrated management skills – into the managerial ranks, the concept of 'universal manager' gained a foothold. As if managerial skills are a special talent and nothing more is required to manage any operation. In the US, business and government had to absorb all those newly minted MBAs and those people weren't about to start at the bottom of the operational ladder.

The two best managers I ever had the pleasure to work for didn't complete an undergrad college degree. Yes, they did have people skills but they were also solid in their line technical skills as well. Highly respected by employees, colleagues, and in the industry. They had a firm grasp of the skill-sets of their employees, how trustworthy each of their employees were, and were immune to the sycophants.

CharlieFreak says: August 19, 2018 at 5:46 pm
Marie
Another change in infrastructure policy that had dire consequences and contributed to the problems you refer to was the principle that 'no one could be deemed a failure or to not have the aptitude to succeed with the appropriate training'. When I began my CS employment the annual report procedure was quite emphatic and honest about abilities. As a manager there was a range of five graded boxes you could tick against all aspects of performance, the lowest of which was 'not good enough', and, if repeated, this could warrant a warning from personnel (sorry, 'human resources' now) and potentially demotion. There was also a box where the manager had to enter what grade they thought the member of staff would have the inherent capability of achieving by the end of their career! For many people of all ages this was often the grade they were in at the time but they were realistic and honest enough to accept that it was probably right. It's arguable whether this last box served a positive purpose for the majority of staff but, rightly or wrongly, the intention was to motivate the best staff to continue in the CS rather than become despondent and quit. It was decided by forward thinking, liberal minded individuals many years ago now that annual reports should never say anything negative, and if anything negative needed to be said then the line management must be at fault for not overcoming their staff member's deficiencies.

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1980/may/07/central-and-local-government

CharlieFreak says: August 21, 2018 at 10:12 am
George,
Yep. Another problem we are creating for the future – although the Govt will welcome this 'problem' – is that in 'the good old days' and up until the 1990s EVERY single official communication whether written or verbal had to be recorded on a single officially registered uniquely numbered registry file. Each file, where documents and 'minutes' were sequentially numbered in date order, expanded to about 2.5″ thick and some subjects would have multiple A,B, C etc files. If someone in Office A sent a note to someone in Office B about a Govt issue it was obligatory to send a paper photocopy (or carbon copy) to HQ for them to place on the file. Nothing went unrecorded. Even internal discussions between staff would be summarised on a minute sheet afterwards, signed by the staff involved and placed on file. The system had to be run really strictly but it worked and we can look back and identify why certain decisions were made and by whom. But now, with the advent of computers and email the significance of keeping central records has gone and I can guarantee nobody in HQ has a complete historical record of all deliberations and communications. In years to come, conveniently for the Govt, key information about what has been going on in this case and other important matters will be missing.
anotheridea says: August 19, 2018 at 10:54 am
The motive – creating a rift between the Russian and Western states – is obvious. The perpetrators – including Yulia in the attack for publicity – too. It is possible that Skripal was following money laundering via real estate for Christopher Steele and the mafia did not like it. But the whole thing was planned for publicity.

Anybody interested in tax havens and investment .

"Perhaps the greatest challenge, with respect to Russia and more generally, concerns the anonymity of global offshore finance. On this front, the US administration would find some cooperation from Moscow. Economically, the Russian treasury has been losing vast sums to offshores. Politically, the Kremlin is keen to strengthen its control over bureaucrats and oligarchs, two groups for whom offshore nest eggs provide an alternative to Putin's Russia. Since 2013, the Kremlin has pursued a "deoffshorization" campaign encouraging businesses to repatriate capital and stop registering companies offshore; additional legislation has restricted the Russian state employees' foreign asset ownership. A joint US-Russian effort, however limited, at ending the anonymity of corrupt cash flows in Western jurisdictions would serve the interests of both countries."

https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=061081024013114025070021112009099014032053053031010004101020097030127019026095077124054054025045018036026018068123094118116000018000070045050020000067096088012001093050076009017065071029007077103075120081103085117022024076098096068006010030031030095031&EXT=pdf

anidea says: August 19, 2018 at 9:28 am
Christopher Steele worked for Glenn Simpson, and – ex Wallstreet Journal – Glenn Simpson is a specialist on Russian corruption and Western money laundering. Transcript of Glenn Simpsons testimony – interesting in what he says about Bill Browder
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4345537/Fusion-GPS-Simpson-Transcript.pdf
Marie says: August 19, 2018 at 2:20 pm
In the interests of accuracy, Simpson has never claimed to have expertise on Russia. His major calling card is the series of investigative articles he wrote on Ukraine, circa 2005-2008, when he was a WSJ reporter. In 2014 or 2015 he was hired by Prevezon, the plaintiff in a UK lawsuit against Browder, and later a defendant in a DOJ lawsuit. When Fusion GPS was hired by the Washington Beacon to do oppo research on Trump, he knew nothing about Trump. It was after the Beacon contract ended and approximately two months after the DNC/HRC campaign hired Fusion and they outsourced the Trump-Russia oppo research to Steele. (Personally, I suspect that Steele had been engaged on this long before then but not by Fusion.)
Miheila says: August 19, 2018 at 7:40 am
Dylan Martinez who operated the camera at Yulia's post-Novihoax debut, and who is described as the chief Reuters photographer for UK and Ireland, has an amusing quote heading his profile page: "When editing photos I look for the truth told in the most beautiful way."

Yulya Skripal, the embodiment of truth and beauty!

Miheila says: August 19, 2018 at 7:52 am
I forgot to mention that Mr Martinez covers "news, sport and the odd feature". Regardless of a possible fake tracheotomy scar, I suppose his Skripal assignment was highly likely to be the oddest feature of his career. https://widerimage.reuters.com/photographer/dylan-martinez
Anonymous says: August 19, 2018 at 7:35 am
'In another curious detail in the filing, the special counsel team said Papadopoulos had been given $10,000 in cash "from a foreign national whom he believed was likely an intelligence officer of a foreign country." The filing noted that the country was "other than Russia." ' CNN

Mueller strangely coy about who gave Papa 10k in cash. Was he an Orbis collector too?

Liane Theuer says: August 19, 2018 at 8:23 am
UK Government and intelligence all over the place :

Quote : Since Trump was surging ahead in the polls and scaring the pants off the foreign-policy establishment by calling for a rapprochement with Moscow, the agencies figured that Russia was somehow behind it. The pace accelerated in March 2016 when a 30-year-old policy consultant named George Papadopoulos joined the Trump campaign as a foreign-policy adviser. Traveling in Italy a week later, he ran into Mifsud, the London-based Maltese academic, who reportedly set about cultivating him after learning of his position with Trump. Mifsud claimed to have "substantial connections with Russian government officials," according to prosecutors. Over breakfast at a London hotel, he told Papadopoulos that he had just returned from Moscow where he had learned that the Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails."

This was the remark that supposedly triggered an FBI investigation. The New York Times describes Mifsud as "an enthusiastic promoter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia" and "a regular at meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual conference held in Sochi, Russia, that Mr. Putin attends," which tried to suggest that he is a Kremlin agent of some sort. But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange later tweeted photos of Mifsud with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and a high-ranking British intelligence official named Claire Smith at a training session for Italian security agents in Rome. Since it's unlikely that British intelligence would rely on a Russian agent in such circumstances, Mifsud's intelligence ties are more likely with the UK.

After Papadopoulos caused a minor political ruckus by telling a reporter that Prime Minister David Cameron should apologize for criticizing Trump's anti-Muslim pronouncements, a friend in the Israeli embassy put him in touch with a friend in the Australian embassy, who introduced him to Downer, her boss. Over drinks, Downer advised him to be more diplomatic. After Papadopoulos then passed along Misfud's tip about Clinton's emails, Downer informed his government, which, in late July, informed the FBI. (..)

In early September, Halper sent Papadopoulos an email offering $3,000 and a paid trip to London to write a research paper on a disputed gas field in the eastern Mediterranean, his specialty. "George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?" Halper asked when he got there, but Papadopoulos said he knew nothing.
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/05/31/spooks-spooking-themselves/

Anonymous-1 says: August 19, 2018 at 5:16 am

PAGE 3 OF 4
Within 30 minutes (15.47 to 16.15) they are in critical condition. Charlie Rowley describes a similar time-frame for Dawn Sturgess.

7th March – Scotland Yard Chief Medical Officer statement
"As your Chief Medical Officer, my message to the public is that this event poses a low risk to us, the public, on the evidence we have."

METHOD OF DELIVERY
Spray: too risky, the assailants run the risk of contaminating themselves. Also the doctor said "There was no sign of any chemical agent on Ms Skripal's face or body".

High pressure syringe: the pressure is so great the vaccine (or nerve agent) is pumped through the skin and immediately enters the blood stream. The beauty of this method of delivery is there's no evidence. I think the assailants grabbed them from behind and delivered the nerve agent directly into the jugular vein, the site of the attack being at the corner of G&T'S. The Skripals wouldn't have known what had just happened to them.

DS BAILEY
DS Bailey will have attended a First-Aid course, so his first action would be to loosen any clothing round Sergei's neck and clear his airway. If you look at photos of Sergei, he's got quite a thick neck, so DS Bailey probably had to fiddle a bit with his clothing and this is probably how he was contaminated. He'd unknowingly come into direct contact with a small amount of residue nerve agent at the delivery site.

ANTON UTKIN former UN Chemical Weapons Expert in Iraq
Worlds Apart Interview 29th April 2018 – Breaking with Conventions?

"Why was Novichok agent determined undecomposed only in the blood of Yulia Skripal? It was undecomposed. It's supposed to be decomposed under the metabolism of the body, but they found undecomposed agent in her blood, but not in the blood of Sergei Skripal, who got heavier exposure to the chemical agent. That was very strange because it is not clear how it happened that a fresh agent was in Yulia's blood."

Sounds like he suspects Yulia received a second dose while in hospital. She was making an unexpected recovery, partly because she's healthy and partly because of the medical treatment, so somebody gave her another dose.

Sergei wasn't expected to survive because as Anton Utkin said, he "got heavier exposure to the chemical agent", that combined with any existing health issues, he was simply expected to die.

Anonymous-1 says: August 19, 2018 at 5:15 am
PAGE 2 OF 4
"Georgia Pridham, 25, also saw the couple slumped on the bench. She said: "He was quite smartly dressed. He had his palms up to the sky as if he was shrugging and was staring at the building in front of him. He had a woman sat next to him on the bench who was slumped on his shoulder. He was staring dead straight. He was conscious, but it was like he was frozen and slightly rocking back and forward."

"Graham Mulcock said: "The paramedics seemed to be struggling to keep the two people conscious. The man was sitting staring into space in a catatonic state".

"Destiny Reynolds, 20, who works in Ganesha Handicrafts in the centre, said: "I saw quite a lot of commotion – there were two people sat on the bench and there was a security guard there. They put her on the ground in the recovery position, and she was shaking like she was having a seizure. It was a bit manic. There were a lot of people crowded round them. It was raining, people had umbrellas and were putting them over them."

Other reports: "Two police officers helped the pair before emergency services were called at 4.15pm."

Emergency services: "There were several emergency calls."

Channel 4 "Russian Spy Assassination", 26th March 2018
Male witness: "There was a man being sick on the floor, leant over, and a woman laying on the floor. I didn't see the woman, she was surrounded by paramedics, but they both looked fairly ill."

EFFECTS OF NERVE AGENT POISONING
Craig Murray's article Knobs and Knockers quote from a scientist "Unlike traditional poisons, nerve agents don't need to be added to food and drink to be effective. They are quite volatile, colourless liquids (except VX, said to resemble engine oil). The concentration in the vapour at room temperature is lethal. The symptoms of poisoning come on quickly, and include chest tightening, difficulty in breathing, and very likely asphyxiation. Associated symptoms include vomiting and massive incontinence. Eventually, you die either through asphyxiation or cardiac arrest".

EVENTS FROM 15.47 ONWARDS
15.47 CCTV footage, if you analyse the shape of Sergei's head and hairline with clearer pictures it matches. Two witnesses describe Yulia as having blonde hair. At this point, neither is showing any signs of nerve agent poisoning.

16.03 (16 minutes later) Freya Church sees them slumped on the bench.

Minutes later, both are becoming critically ill. From witness statements, Yulia is worse affected so the doctor attends to her and DS Bailey attends to Sergei. The reports say two police officers, but I think it was the security guard.

Anonymous-1 says: August 19, 2018 at 5:13 am
PAGE 1 OF 4
I think I've worked out how it was done and why DS Bailey was the only other person affected. It's all down to METHOD OF DELIVERY. The attack took place between 15.47 and 16.03 near to where they were found. The door handle is a diversionary technique to draw attention away from this. There's someone else calling themselves Anonymous, I'll call myself Anonymous-1 see what happens.

TIMINGS
13.40 Arrive at car park
Feed ducks and walk to pub
Mill Pub (30 minutes)
Walk to Zizzi's
(40 mins have elapsed from arriving at the car park to arriving at Zizzi's)
14.20-15.35 Zizzi's (1 hour 15 minutes, there's specific timings)
(12 minutes after leaving Zizz's they are picked up on CCTV)
15.47 CCTV footage (older man with blonde haired younger woman with red bag)
(16 minutes later they fall ill from nerve agent poisoning)
16.03 Freya Church see them slumped on bench
(5 other witnesses all see them on bench, with two 'police' officers and a doctor in attendance)
16.15 Emergency service call(s)

WITNESS STATEMENTS FROM NEWS REPORTS
FREYA CHURCH: "Sixteen minutes later [that is, after being seen on CCTV], personal trainer Freya Church, 27, came across the victims slumped on a bench. She said they seemed 'out of it' and assumed they were on drugs. "It was a young, blonde and pretty girl and it was definitely the man that's been pictured in the news – the guy that's a spy. She was passed out and he was looking up to the sky and I tried to get eye contact to see if they were okay. They didn't seem with it. To be honest I thought they were just drugged out as they were in a weird state. There are lots of homeless people here so I just thought they were homeless."

FEMALE DOCTOR: "A doctor who was one of the first people at the scene has described how she found Ms Skripal slumped unconscious on a bench, vomiting and fitting. She had also lost control of her bodily functions. The woman, who asked not to be named, told the BBC she moved Ms Skripal into the recovery position and opened her airway, as others tended to her father. She said she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying there was no sign of any chemical agent on Ms Skripal's face or body. The doctor said she had been worried she would be affected by the nerve agent but added that she "feels fine."

"Witness Jamie Paine told the BBC yesterday: "Her eyes were just completely white, they were wide open, but just white and she was frothing at the mouth. And then the man went stiff, his arms stopped moving and still looking dead straight."

Denise says: August 19, 2018 at 2:40 am
Now here is someone who knows where Yulia is. The photographer in the Reuters video is of Yulia making her statement is Dylan Martinez.

Reuters written reporters may know where she is as well. Reporting is by Guy Faulconbridge. Additional reporting by Alistair Smout. Editing by Simon Robinson and Nick Tattersall. There will be a video cameraman who knows as well and a video editor.

Do you think you might write to them Rob and ask where she is?

And if they wont tell you, what is their reason for not telling you?

It will be interesting to see how they reply.

Miheila says: August 19, 2018 at 3:20 am
Not necessarily where Yulia is, Liane, but where she was at that time. The difference is crucial.
Denise says: August 19, 2018 at 7:00 am
As you know any information we can get is useful Miheila. We could learn a lot about who has Yulia, by were she was for the Reuters video and yes you are correct to suggest that she probably isn't there anymore. Thank you. I think they will slip up soon, its getting to be a way too tangled web now with far to many people to keep silent.
Miheila says: August 19, 2018 at 7:27 am
So tangled, Denise, that I feel it's tangling the neurones in my brain!

Does anyone know when exactly that video was recorded (rather than released), after all, the statement was mysteriously undated? Could there have been some kind of embargo on its release until a later date?

Yulia was allegedly released on 10th April, 43 days before the video was broadcast. According to The Sun, a 'source' claimed that she'd been released from SDH into another hospital: ''She is in hospital on a military base for her own protection and to monitor her health." Was the video recorded at that military base?
Was it USAF Fairford?

Could the CIA have pre-empted MI6's hasty plans for the disappearance of the Skripals? Perhaps MI6 had nothing planned. Maybe it was a CIA operation from the beginning. I'll need to think about these scenarios a lot more.

Anonymous says: August 19, 2018 at 7:49 am
Miheila, if you listen to the Daily Mail version of the video there are a lot of police sirens at the end including bull horns. That and the aircraft noise would point to London. It could be US Ambassadors residence in Regents Park.

In my opinion, it was a rogue FBI op to stop "our guy" going back to Russia.

I think UK authorities knew it was happening and organised medical cavalry to save Skripals.

HMG are caught out, to admit it would be proof MI6 surrogates were interfering in US presidential election.
So the Feds made it look like Russia and HMG have to follow the pretence.

Patrick Mahony says: August 19, 2018 at 8:17 am

In my scenario some of them could be genuine. If the emergency services were told extra medical/police/fire resources were available for that Sunday due to the " CBW exercise" that was going on they wouldn't publicly question it.
Maybe when the Skripals were on the bench they thought it was not "real world" and that is why they dashed in.
But I think HMG knew Yulia had come to extricate Sergei and knew rogue elements in UK and US "intelligence community" were trying to assassinate him.
Peter Beswick says: August 19, 2018 at 12:16 am
Rob Willing I will make a heart felt plea.

Any contributors on here offering an alternative theory to the Hoax should be aware (although they may be blissfully unaware) that the Hoax has been proven.

It is a fact.

So before putting out new theories please recognise that fact and possibly try the refute / debunk / disemble the fact before you put forward your take.

Don't get me wrong (although a few will) I think that brainstorming and testing theories is fine, more than fine it is essential to test ideas and testament to the progress that this blog has contributed, advanced and assisted public understanding in the unravelling of the case.

If you have an alternative theory please let it coincide with at least a few facts.

Cascadian says: August 19, 2018 at 10:32 am
@Peter
The scientific method (a la Popper): observe, deduce, theorize, predict (i.e. show how the theory matches/predicts the things observed). And, if necessary, adduce (i.e. defend the hypothesis).

What is never done is to insist dogmatically that one's pet theory is the only explanation. This is because it is the duty of every scientifist to, having produced a theory, seek to demolish it. You aren't doing that, Peter, instead you are challenging others to demolish it.

I wonder at your motives.

PRFilms says: August 18, 2018 at 11:07 pm
I think fact that Sergei Skripal an ex spy may have confused issues? He may or may not still have been actively doing intelligence but all evidence points to accidental poisoning by drug addicts sleeping rough.
1. Reported that 40/50 rough sleepers including drug addicts, living in area at time of Skripal poisoning.
2. Contaminated public lavatories and a "drug den" in park.
3. Council blocked off rough sleepers area and rehomed drug addicts after Skripal poisoning.
4. Charlie Rowley rehoused at about that time?
5. OPCW not permitted to analyse all ingredients associated with poisoning which they say makes it very difficult identifying substance
6. Two men (Kim Ferguson and Jamie Knight) forced their way through police barricade to get to bench where Skripals had been sitting
6. Dawn Sturgess's poisoning looks like classic One Pot Shake and Bake methamphetamine accident. Fact that fire brigade called and she was in bath suggests explosion and burns.
7. One Pot Shake and bake produces large amounts of toxins which are dumped. Public loos in park reported contaminated and report of a drug den there.
8. Skripals, Sturgess and Rowley did not respond to naloxone so not opioid poisoning, this fits with it being poison from waste left from one pot shake and bake meth.
9. Salisbury Hospital Doctor said no-one was suffering from nerve agent poisoning.

[Aug 30, 2018] Skripals affair might be linked to Steele dossier and color revolution against Trump

Notable quotes:
"... "Steele notes that he is concerned about the stories in the media about the bureau delivering information to Congress 'about my work and relationship with them. Very concerned about this. *People's lives may be endangered*.'" ..."
"... If Rosenstein knew of Steele's relationship with the Ohrs prior to signing FISA, he already knew that he was signing a BS FISA application – which would be perjury. But if Rosenstein was a 'firewall', it becomes an attempted coup and sedition awkward. ..."
Aug 30, 2018 | www.theblogmire.com

Rob Slane says: August 18, 2018 at 10:12 pm

Key quote from Sara Carter's revelations about text messages from Christopher Steele to Bruce Ohr in October 2017:

"Steele notes that he is concerned about the stories in the media about the bureau delivering information to Congress 'about my work and relationship with them. Very concerned about this. *People's lives may be endangered*.'"

https://saraacarter.com/breaking-bruce-ohr-texts-emails-reveal-steeles-deep-ties-to-obama-doj-fbi/

Now, this might seem a bit of an aside, but does anyone reading this blog have any idea when Yulia last came to England prior to 3rd March this year? I'm trying to get an idea of whether she is likely to have had any idea prior to this visit of what her father was involved in, or whether she is likely to have learnt about this on this particular visit.

uncle tungsten says: August 18, 2018 at 11:19 pm
Thanks Rob and we are all grateful for your capacity to harness all the contributors into a sane dialogue.

Motive indeed:

There are the pleadings by Steele to Ohr for reassurance that the "firewall" is solid! Not sure what that intends but surely there are a few firewalls in this saga going all the way back on the US side to the favorite candidate, the candidates party, the party legal team that employed Fusion GPS, Fusion GPS itself, Orbis, Steele, Sergei, and perhaps Yulia. What might have been her potential role other than innocent visitor. We now have a clearer view of her employment trajectory. I would bet the firewalls on the UK side are fully aluminium clad too, and I anticipate this site and a few other emerging lines of inquiry will penetrate those.

The furious mother in law angle is a good one and potentially worth a serious look.

Sometimes murders deliver conveniences to unforeseen parties.

The overreach of British interference in the USA election and May's complicity in that exercise needed a very good redeeming cover and here is a dandy.

The mafiosi angle cannot be ruled out and nor can the Ukrainian possibility given their intense penetration of the EU playing ground. Perhaps Sergei was investigating things there too and annoyed the new mafiosi now free to roam.

But I am sure that closer to home there are others that employed Orbis to do interesting work. How's Bill Browder these days?

Anonymous says: August 20, 2018 at 6:54 pm
"Firewalls":

https://vault.fbi.gov/d1-release/d1-release/view

>Who signed pg 380? Peter Strzok

>Who signed pg 389? Andrew McCabe

>Who signed pg 391? Rod Rosenstein

Firewalls:

Strzok
Rosenstein
McCabe
Comey

Only Rosenstein is left

Paul says: August 20, 2018 at 6:55 pm
Me again!
Paul says: August 20, 2018 at 7:11 pm
Correction – >Who signed pg 392? Lisa Page

Page was the fourth firewall (not Comey), but she is already gone too.

If Rosenstein knew of Steele's relationship with the Ohrs prior to signing FISA, he already knew that he was signing a BS FISA application – which would be perjury. But if Rosenstein was a 'firewall', it becomes an attempted coup and sedition awkward.

[Aug 30, 2018] The people that know more than they are saying

Aug 30, 2018 | www.theblogmire.com

Denise says: August 19, 2018 at 12:54 am

The people that know more than they are saying:

Nick Bailey
Charlie Rowley
Helicopter pilot
Helicopter paramedics
Land ambulance paramedics
Doctors at Salisbury Hospital
Nurses at Salisbury Hospital
Head of Porton Down
Porton Down scientists
Porton Down workers

These may know more than they are saying:

The Mill staff
Zizzi's staff
Main stream media journalists (D noticed)
Salisbury Journal journalists (D noticed)

It only takes one to talk for the whole house of cards to come crashing down.

Please feel free to add to this list.

Paul says: August 19, 2018 at 1:04 am
All the named witnesses
The ebola nurse
Whoever orgainsed the rapid response from the emergency vehicles
All the police 'searching' for something
Everyone who has seen the CCTV
The guys in hazmat suits on 4 March

Dozens and dozens of people

Miheila says: August 19, 2018 at 3:37 am
People 'highly likely' to know the most, and are saying nothing:
Chris Steele
Pablo Miller (aka Antonio Alvarez de Hidalgo)
MI6 people
GCHQ people
Probably CIA, NSA, US State Dept, SBU, Mossad, etc. (take your pick!)
MI5 people, including any watchers who may have been deployed
FCO people

People who know more than they are saying:
certain people in the Russian Foreign Ministry
GRU, FSB, FAPSI people

People who may know more, and may be willing to speak:
Various Salisbury witnesses, named and unnamed
Ross Cassidy
The Filmers of Distillery Farm??

[Aug 30, 2018] Deliberate misinterpretation of Putin's statement to support Skripals false falg

Aug 19, 2018 | www.theblogmire.com

Bob says: August 19, 2018 at 4:03 am

Regarding "the/a motive", wouldn't Putin's alleged statement of vengeance towards the defector, Skripal, be enough to convince the UK government of there being at least "a motive" if not also "the motive"? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/06/traitors-will-kick-bucket-vladimir-putin-swore-revenge-poisoned/
Also, I guess I need it spelled out for me. Why would Skripal's assassination put an end to all future spy swaps?
I don't think Putin did it -- he's not so foolish as to have such poor timing politically -- but I'm not so sure the UK government can't legitimately show a possible Russian motive, for the purpose of helping the UK's own political timing.

Lastly, the commentators' list of complicit conspirators is just too long to make this a real conspiracy.

francesca says: August 19, 2018 at 4:50 am
Putin didn't promise revenge on spies, he basically said that such traitors would die miserable deaths because they had no homeland and had lost their soul. There is a very full answer on this website if you scroll down https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/40900/did-putin-threaten-to-have-traitors-assassinated

Like most of Putin's speeches this one has been deconstructed , mistranslated, then put back together to give the necessary slant

There has never ever been a case of a spy who has been pardoned as part of a spy swap(as Skripal was)then later assassinated.And the last time that Moscow harmed the child of a target was when Trotsky's son was killed in one of Stalin's purges. This all can be found in a Sunday Times article , but be aware there is a pay wall
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/salisbury-hit-on-sergei-skripal-would-rewrite-the-rules-of-espionage-6t89w9v9c

Rob Slane says: August 19, 2018 at 6:51 am
Hi Bob,

But the UK Government must know that Putin's alleged promise to "choke" traitors was nothing of the sort. It was in fact one of the most blatant propaganda pieces I have ever seen.

The video in which he allegedly said this appeared on BBC's Newsnight and can be seen at this link:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5735518/vladimir-putin-choke-traitors-video-russian-spy-sergei-skripal-poisoning/

But the original can be found at his 2010 Q&A session when he was PM. The relevant section begins at just after 3 hours 12 minutes, and lasts for about 3 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8B9wGcDWVI

As you will see, his answer is basically the diametric opposite to the one the BBC piece leads you to believe. They basically took what he said, hacked it about to extract the bits they didn't want their audience to hear, and then put it back together (with some scary music) to make it sound like he said something he didn't actually say.

Bob says: August 19, 2018 at 3:18 pm
Rob, thanks for the satisfactory explanation of Newsnight's deceitfulness. It appears that Putin didn't give his potential future defector-spies a pass while at the same time shaming those caught at it as being like a Judas. I wonder, though, how those thinking about possibly selling out would read Putin's deflecting the former practice of assassination decisions as resting on a head of state. He said it had evolved to being the decision of a special group in the security services. Of course he (probably rightly) dissociates his government from now operating that way. How are we to know apart from there being sufficient evidence to the contrary? But if Putin and his security services are in truth completely innocent I don't see how his response could have been any better.

I still don't see why an assassination would put the damper on future spy swaps. Help my reasoning abilities.

Regarding the claim of there being a growing multitude of unwilling conspirators, I wonder if this isn't a case, at times, of commentators taking every thought captive to the obedience of "The Conspiracy Theory".

It might be beneficial for some agency to create a very public internet place where those caught up as witnesses to the case can come to make their clear statements or confessions without fear of reprisal. Possible attempts at reprisal could also be broadcast.

Marie says: August 19, 2018 at 6:35 pm
I still don't see why an assassination would put the damper on future spy swaps. Help my reasoning abilities.

Tradition, it's (p)art of the deal. Country A holds a country B spy and country B holds a country A spy. Both want its own spy back home for any one or more reasons. Why would country A release the spy it holds in exchange for the one that country B holds if country B reserved the option to at a later date take out Country A's spy? Spy (or alleged spy) swaps only work with an implicit agreement that there will be no retaliation by either country against the individuals included in the swap.

All the ins and outs involved in a spy swap are carefully considered. The swap must appear as of equal value to the two countries. The inclusion of Skripal in the US-Russia spy swap appeared odd to those that follow such matters as he had been a UK asset and by 2010 not of any particularly high-value to the UK. Nothing further has been said about this by the US, UK, or Russia; so, we're free to concoct a devious plot where none existed.

Paul says: August 19, 2018 at 7:48 pm
Marie, Reading what you wrote just triggered a thought usually a spy swap is where, say, US spies caught and imprisoned in Russia, are exchanged for Russian spies caught and imprisoned in the US. Each country gets their own nationals back. The individuals were guilty of espionage in another country and get to go home.

That is not what Sergei was. He was a Russian national, caught and imprisoned in Russia for treason. How did he ever get to become part of a spy swap?

Why would the UK want to take him? He had no more value to them, he had already been paid for the information he had handed over so why would the UK agree to take him and pay for his upkeep? What did the UK get out of the deal?

On the other side of Sergei's deal in 2010, Russia got Anna Chapman back – a Russian national caught and imprisoned in the US

Have we been fed a pile of BS about what or who Sergei was?

Marie says: August 19, 2018 at 9:46 pm
Wondered if anyone would catch that oddity in the Skripal case. Likely contributed to the head-scratching back in 2010. However, Skripal wasn't the only Russian national released to the west in that swap. (And I'm not sure all those held by the US were Russian nationals – nor interested enough to research that.) We're weren't fed BS about Skripal because he was hardly ever mentioned at all. Remember, Skripal was a walk-in and for the money. Not important enough to recruit and while he had access to confidential personnel lists he was useful. (Not as useful as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen were to the USSR but those two were also walk-ins and the money is important to both.)

My two guesses on this – probably not worth anything –

1) Russia held too few spies to make the deal work. So, he threw in some that were of no value to Russia and would be of some interest to the west to sweeten the offer. As Obama was already under criticism for giving up more than he got in his deals, he needed numbers (spies) to make this one look okay. The UK was told and not asked to accept Skripal. He, after all, was their guy even if he'd screwed up and exposed the fake rock and blew up the UK Moscow spy ring (I may be exaggerating on this point). IOW didn't need, didn't want, and had no use for Skripal. (Also meant they had devote assets to insure he hadn't been turned into a triple-agent.)

2) The UK asked the US to get Skripal out because they still needed to know exactly what Skripal had told the Russian investigators. That would mean that they weren't competent enough to figure that out and/or Skripal was given a far larger role in the UK spy operation than Russia was able to determine.

I don't have a high opinion of MI6, the CIA, etc., but it's still tough for me to buy scenario #2. So, I've been going with #1.

Anonymous says: August 19, 2018 at 10:15 pm
So the UK was fulfilling its role as a vassal state

You comment just gave me another thought. Cameron became PM in May 2010 and the spy swap was in July 2010, so Cameron was then PM. It is a tradition (not a rule) that the next Tory PM hands out a knighthood to the previous Tory PM – and May hasn't done that yet I wonder why?

The last time it happened (and that was the first time to the best of my knowledge) was Margaret Thatcher who refused to give one to Ted Heath – he had to wait until 1992 for John Major to give him one (if you will pardon the expression!)

At that time, apart from the fact that Thatcher despised Heath politically, it was a very poorly kept secret that Thatcher's refusal was driven by her knowledge that Heath was a paedophile.

Nothing to do with the Skripals but it will be interesting to see how long Cameron has to wait.

Paul says: August 19, 2018 at 10:16 pm
That was me! Forgot to put my name in again!
Marie says: August 19, 2018 at 11:00 pm
So the UK was fulfilling its role as a vassal state

Only if there's truth in my fiction.

May was Home Secretary as of May 2010; so, also probably on board with the spy swap -- or it was too far along to being a done deal for she and Cameron to nix it when they came into office.

Miheila says: August 20, 2018 at 7:17 am
It was the British government who insisted on Skripal being included in the spy-swap made between 10 'illegals' (placed as sleepers in the USA at the time, and led by Anna Chapman) and four national traitors.

These four were of more use to the West than the 10 illegals. Alexander Zaporozhsky and Igor Sutyagin had spied spying for the USA. Gennady Vasilenko was involved in illegal weapons possession, and the reasoning for him being included in the swap has never been disclosed.

"Skripal is considered the more important of the two as far as Britain's security and intelligence agencies are concerned. He is likely to be debriefed for weeks, if not months. He will be given a home and pension if he decides to stay in Britain. The future of Sutyagin [in Britain] is less certain He could yet return to Russia".

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/11/british-security-services-debrief-russians-spy-swap

Marie says: August 20, 2018 at 5:14 pm
Pardon, but where does it say that the UK requested Skripal in the US-Russia spy swap?

Two Russians exchanged in a high-profile "spy swap" were today being debriefed by MI5 and MI6 officers at a secret location close to London.

SOP – wouldn't want to let a triple-agent into the country.

Skripal is considered the more important of the two as far as Britain's security and intelligence agencies are concerned. He is likely to be debriefed for weeks, if not months. He will be given a home and pension if he decides to stay in Britain.

Well, Skripal did help to blow up the UK's fake rock spy communication set-up in Moscow. And the UK wouldn't pass on an opportunity to have Skripal tell them exactly what he'd spilled to Russian authorities (likely everything). But that "home and pension" not only fills in a gap about what is publicly known about Skripal but also that the UK accepted that they were stuck with him as part of the spy swap.

Britain and the US say they have got more out of the spy swap than Russia because the four men released by Moscow were far more serious individuals than the 10 agents handed over by the US.

Do you think the UK and US would say they got the short end of the stick in the deal? Superficially (the ordinary person's level of geo-political understanding), getting for Russian four nationals (three convicted of espionage, spying for the west and serving sentences of 15 to 18 years) for eleven low value Russians held by the west doesn't look like the better part of the bargain. And in the US this could easily have become another anti-Obama rallying cry for the GOP and their right-wing crazies. That seemed not to have happened. Probably a too esoteric for that audience.

This is interesting:

One of those released to the US, Alexander Zaporozhsky, was a KGB colonel whose spying for the US is understood to have led to the unmasking of Robery Hanssen, an FBI officer, and Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer, two of Russia's most important spies in the US.

If true, the CIA and FBI were in debt to Zaporozhsky and the official FBI and CIA stories of the unmasking of these two moles if fiction. I suspect that the above claim is the fiction. Designed to add weight to why Zaporozhsky was accepted in the swap and preserved the secrecy of whatever info he had actually passed to the US.

For now, I'll stick with my guess that the UK wasn't keen on being stuck with Skripal.

Bob says: August 20, 2018 at 1:38 pm
Thanks for your reply, Marie. Just so you know, I don't think the evidence supports the poisoning having been ordered by Putin. I would only contend that if he had ordered it Putin would have been anticipating a positive effect. It would have limited the number of UK spy candidates willing to risk spying against Russia. (Putin probably wouldn't have foreseen the success of the sanctions campaign.) But, in my opinion, both parties –in the future -- would continue their interest in spy swaps. In spite of the negative consequences of exposing them to murder, why not get ones spy back and better protect them?
Miheila says: August 20, 2018 at 4:59 pm
Russia (government, businesses and people) doesn't consider the sanctions campaign very successful at all.
Milda says: August 19, 2018 at 8:15 pm
It might be that an imprisoned spy will prefer to complete his prison term than to get swapped and thus to become a potential target for assassination.

I wonder what Sergei is thinking now. His daughter's life is ruined and may be in danger.

Miheila says: August 20, 2018 at 5:13 pm
I often wonder about how they and their family in Russia feel about this awful affair. We tend to forget the human side of the story, but we shouldn't. Sergei, from all I hear about him, seemed a decent kind of man. He may have been foolish for being talked into betraying his country by Pablo Miller, but I don't see him as a bad man at heart. Maybe he was desperate for money at the time or goinf throufgh a bad patch which would have made him more susceptible to manipulation. Who knows?

But now his acts have somehow caused lives to fall apart and much I'm sure suffering. It's my view that all governments are essentially evil (greedy, ruthless and self-serving), and don't work in the interests of ordinary people – often working against them. The evidence of history bears this out.

Marie says: August 20, 2018 at 5:19 pm
Craig Murray has been adamant that PM didn't recruit Skripal and that Skripal was known as a walk-in. (It is generally accepted that at some point and for some undefined period of time that PM was Skripal's handler.)

A "nice" man doesn't endanger the lives of his colleagues for money.

Denise says: August 19, 2018 at 7:11 am
Hi Bob,

All those on the list aren't conspirators as you think of them. More like further victims of the conspiracy. They dont know the whole story. They each only know a tiny bit of it. A bad bit, but have been frightened so badly that they are scared to tell that little bit, which will lead to the conspiracy unfolding. And make no mistake this is a conspiracy, a swamp conspiracy of the tallest order.

Paul says: August 19, 2018 at 12:23 pm
Bob, it is not a list of "list of complicit conspirators" – it is a list of 'people who know more than they have said'.

They are not all involved in a conspiracy, they are witnesses to the conspiracy. They each have a story to tell that would open the lid on a part of what happened – not the whole story.

Are they silent? I don't know, the MSM has not tried to ask them what they know, maybe they will be happy to talk, if anyone asks.

Mrs Cooper told Rob that Sergei was wearing leather jacket and jeans – she was happy to tell what she knew, all Rob had to do was ask. The Sun newspaper which broke the 'duck' story and went to interview Mrs Cooper did not even bother to ask that question – or if they did they did not reveal what she said.

The conspiracy continues through indifference of the MSM – sooner of later that will change.

[Aug 30, 2018] Skripals, BBC and Ukranians by craig

Notable quotes:
"... "A Ukrainian political consultant has revealed to Sputnik that former MI6 agent Christopher Steele sought and paid for researchers in Ukraine to concoct fake stories about Donald Trump prior his election as US president to use in the now-infamous dossier that supposedly contained damning evidence of Russia-Trump collusion. ..."
"... Radio Sputnik's Lee Stranahan spoke previously with Ukrainian political consultant and former diplomat Andrii Telizhenko about his connections to a Democratic National Committee (DNC) operative named Alexandra Chalupa who also worked for clients in Ukrainian politics. Chalupa told Politico in January 2017 that beginning in 2015, she pulled on a network of sources she'd established in Kiev and Washington to try and turn up dirt on Trump ..."
"... The BBC is a propaganda organisation. It has even admitted it. http://viewsandstories.blogspot.com/2018/04/bbc-asserts-it-is-propaganda.html ..."
"... The door handle application is a crock. If, as is claimed the alleged Novichok was pure then who made it should be known because of its purity. ..."
"... Browder just wants us to go to war with Russia so he can keep his stolen money, that's not too much to ask! ..."
Aug 27, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

On 8 July 2018 a lady named Kirsty Eccles asked what, in its enormous ramifications, historians may one day see as the most important Freedom of Information request ever made. The rest of this post requires extremely close and careful reading, and some thought, for you to understand that claim.

Dear British Broadcasting Corporation,

1: Why did BBC Newsnight correspondent Mark Urban keep secret from the licence payers that he had been having meetings with Sergei Skripal only last summer.

2: When did the BBC know this?

3: Please provide me with copies of all correspondence between yourselves and Mark Urban on the subject of Sergei Skripal.

Yours faithfully,

Kirsty Eccles

The ramifications of this little request are enormous as they cut right to the heart of the ramping up of the new Cold War, of the BBC's propaganda collusion with the security services to that end, and of the concoction of fraudulent evidence in the Steele "dirty dossier". This also of course casts a strong light on more plausible motives for an attack on the Skripals.

Which is why the BBC point blank refused to answer Kirsty's request, stating that it was subject to the Freedom of Information exemption for "Journalism".

10th July 2018

Dear Ms Eccles

Freedom of Information request – RFI20181319

Thank you for your request to the BBC of 8th July 2018, seeking the following information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000:

1: Why did BBC Newsnight correspondent Mark Urban keep secret from the licence payers that he had been having meetings with Sergei Skripal only last summer.

2: When did the BBC know this?

3: Please provide me with copies of all correspondence between yourselves and Mark Urban on the subject of Sergei Skripal.

The information you have requested is excluded from the Act because it is held for the purposes of 'journalism, art or literature.' The BBC is therefore not obliged to provide this information to you. Part VI of Schedule 1 to FOIA provides that information held by the BBC and the other public service broadcasters is only covered by the Act if it is held for 'purposes other than those of journalism, art or literature".

The BBC is not required to supply information held for the purposes of creating the BBC's output or information that supports and is closely associated with these creative activities.

The BBC is of course being entirely tendentious here – "journalism" does not include the deliberate suppression of vital information from the public, particularly in order to facilitate the propagation of fake news on behalf of the security services. That black propaganda is precisely what the BBC is knowingly engaged in, and here trying hard to hide.

I have today attempted to contact Mark Urban at Newsnight by phone, with no success, and sent him this email:

To: [email protected]

Dear Mark,

As you may know, I am a journalist working in alternative media, a member of the NUJ, as well as a former British Ambassador. I am researching the Skripal case.

I wish to ask you the following questions.

1) When the Skripals were first poisoned, it was the largest news story in the entire World and you were uniquely positioned having held several meetings with Sergei Skripal the previous year. Yet faced with what should have been a massive career break, you withheld that unique information on a major story from the public for four months. Why?
2) You were an officer in the Royal Tank Regiment together with Skripal's MI6 handler, Pablo Miller, who also lived in Salisbury. Have you maintained friendship with Miller over the years and how often do you communicate?
3) When you met Skripal in Salisbury, was Miller present all or part of the time, or did you meet Miller separately?
4) Was the BBC aware of your meetings with Miller and/or Skripal at the time?
5) When, four months later, you told the world about your meetings with Skripal after the Rowley/Sturgess incident, you said you had met him to research a book. Yet the only forthcoming book by you advertised is on the Skripal attack. What was the subject of your discussions with Skripal?
6) Pablo Miller worked for Orbis Intelligence. Do you know if Miller contributed to the Christopher Steele dossier on Trump/Russia?
7) Did you discuss the Trump dossier with Skripal and/or Miller?
8) Do you know whether Skripal contributed to the Trump dossier?
9) In your Newsnight piece following the Rowley/Sturgess incident, you stated that security service sources had told you that Yulia Skripal's telephone may have been bugged. Since January 2017, how many security service briefings or discussions have you had on any of the matter above.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Craig Murray

I should very much welcome others also sending emails to Mark Urban to emphasise the public demand for an answer from the BBC to these vital questions. If you have time, write your own email, or if not copy and paste from mine.

To quote that great Scot John Paul Jones, "We have not yet begun to fight".


A Traub , August 29, 2018 at 08:21

Not going in to the details of the Skripals etc but what this goes to show is the limitations of the FOI Act. The FOI Act was brought in by the Blair Govt but of course was very much weakened in its final version. Even this was very much regretted by Blair in his autobiography who said what an 'idiot' he had been to bring it in. Tony, you need have no fear – powerful institutions like the BBC can block any meaningful probing because of the limitations of the law.

Reply ↓
Jo , August 29, 2018 at 10:53

Spotted this yesterday .5103
"A Ukrainian political consultant has revealed to Sputnik that former MI6 agent Christopher Steele sought and paid for researchers in Ukraine to concoct fake stories about Donald Trump prior his election as US president to use in the now-infamous dossier that supposedly contained damning evidence of Russia-Trump collusion.

Radio Sputnik's Lee Stranahan spoke previously with Ukrainian political consultant and former diplomat Andrii Telizhenko about his connections to a Democratic National Committee (DNC) operative named Alexandra Chalupa who also worked for clients in Ukrainian politics. Chalupa told Politico in January 2017 that beginning in 2015, she pulled on a network of sources she'd established in Kiev and Washington to try and turn up dirt on Trump , once his star began to rise in the Republican primary campaign." Etc etc

Steve Hayes , August 29, 2018 at 11:32

The BBC is a propaganda organisation. It has even admitted it. http://viewsandstories.blogspot.com/2018/04/bbc-asserts-it-is-propaganda.html

Mick Robson , August 29, 2018 at 17:11

I can't add any cogency to the (so-far) fruitless quest for information from the BBC, but last weeks R4 programme (still available on iPlayer) The Reunion, in which the Skripal, and more recent 'nerve agent' attacks, were discussed and, I thought, neatly tied in with the 'Murder of Georgi Markov in the 1950s, apparently by Bulgarian secret agents, perhaps deserves examination by listeners and researchers more interested in BBC propaganda.

A panel of 'experts', diplomats, security people, some of whom you may very well knowand who laid claim to being 'there or thereabouts', concluded that The Skripal's incident bore all the markings of 'state sponsored' action, though, of course, they would never know until "the Russian archives are opened".

It all sounded thoroughly convincing (radio does when you're driving on a long-haul, I find) but it did occur to me that the programme, though ostensibly about the 'murder of Markov' was intended to draw the listener to inevitable conclusions about the perpetrators of Salisbury and Amesbury 'poisonings'.

The BBC is very good at obfuscation and I felt this was a good example. Sorry I cannot be more 'relevant' to your blog of 27/08/18. Good luck, and please. as they say, keep up the good work.

PleaseBeleafMe , August 29, 2018 at 17:47

http://www.theblogmire.com/the-10-main-holes-in-the-official-narrative-on-the-salisbury-poisonings-1-the-motive/

Interesting link with alot of great info in the commemts on this story.

Garth Carthy , August 28, 2018 at 15:04

I remember the excellent 'Media Lens' team have complained about Mark Urban in the past with his blatant Western bias. For example, like the other overpaid political analysts and presenters on the BBC, he doesn't question the stated but transparently dishonest premise of the West – that they are intervening in other nations on a humanitarian basis. Like the other wastes of space in the mainstream media, he is also quick to mention civilian deaths by the Russians but not so quick to mention those killed by the West.

As I recall, Urban completely failed to reply to or to address the concerns of Media Lens in a reasonable way.

Charles Bostock , August 28, 2018 at 15:34

Garth

"I remember the excellent 'Media Lens' team have complained about Mark Urban in the past with his blatant Western bias."

Mark Urban is from a Western country and the broadcaster he works for is in a Western country. Why are you so surprised that both he and the organisation he works for have a "Western bias"? Is that so abnormal? Would you expect him to have a pro-Chinese or a pro-Russian or, for that matter, a pro-Brazilian bias and would you be happy if he had? Would you expect a journalist who works for RT to have an anti-Russian, pro-Western bias?

Sharp Ears , August 28, 2018 at 13:55

Ramifications.
'Recently Aeroflot has been affected by US sanctions and its flights to America face possible suspension by Washington, as the US government seeks to punish the Kremlin for its alleged involvement in the poisoning of former double agent and Russian national Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in March.'
https://www.rt.com/trends/aeroflot-russia-airlines-international/

Russian skies could become too expensive for US airlines if Washington targets Aeroflot
American carriers would face huge financial losses if Russia increases tariffs for the use of its airspace in response to possible US sanctions targeting the country's largest airline Aeroflot, an expert has told RT.
https://www.rt.com/business/435599-russia-aeroflot-us-sanctions/

SA , August 28, 2018 at 09:24

So are the pieces starting to fall into place?

One can join the dots and it all points to one direction. Other conspiracy theories pale into insignificance.

uncle tungsten , August 28, 2018 at 09:53

Great SA but I must add this link: Stefan Halper
https://saraacarter.com/whistleblower-exposes-key-player-in-fbi-russia-probe-it-was-all-a-set-up/

Klutzes all! and now the entire story is unravelling thanks to that idiot Alexander Downer and his mate Halper. I guess their little maltese buddy Joe Mifsud is deeply underground for a decade or two.

ADHD , August 28, 2018 at 11:22

I hadn't really followed the implications until' your list. So there will be a chemical attack and the OPCW will assign blame to Syria (but also possibly Syria/Russia).

The US have been making it clear that they would hold Russia accountable for any "further" chemical weapons attacks carried out by Syria. This could used then to remove Russia form the UN Security Council. Even for the UN to no longer recognise the Russian Government as legitimate and instead recognise an alternative Russian Government (under Mikhail Khardovsky). Will China fall in line?

This looks awfully close to the start of a full scale war.

giyane , August 28, 2018 at 13:24

The UN has been turning a blind eye to neo-con murder since 9/11. They are a busted flush. There is no residual value or purpose for the UN in an age that backs Saudi Arabi to train terrorists in Myanmar.

As to Senator John McCain the world will be a safer place when this terrorist is finally removed. The UN is wholly owned by the US. The US neo-cons have sucked every particle of respectability out of it.

" Those who antagonise the believing Muslim men and women and do not repent will be consigned to the Fire, to dwell forever therein. " Qur'an. I am immensely proud of Donald trump for refusing to honour him.

George K , August 28, 2018 at 13:36

Frightening, and probably part of the plan. I have been reading for the last 2 days a series of warnings by the Russians that a chemical "attack" is imminent. Not many translations of this in the MSM. One would think that they wouldn't dare after such warnings, but I am not optimistic. After all, how many people have read the warnings?

Borncynical , August 28, 2018 at 18:08

George K

I've seen posts on Twitter about this warning by the Russians and you know what the counter-argument is that they are putting forward? They contend that it's a double bluff by the Syrians/Russians. Well, if you're intending to use chemical weapons why wouldn't you make out that the other side are planning it as a false flag? Trouble is, Western governments will be more than happy to go along with that in the public eye – let's face it, they know the real truth of the situation. I note however that the Russian warning mentions the active role in the planned false flag played by British security firm Olive. I haven't seen any denial from them so that would suggest to a neutral observer that the Russian allegations do have some foundation and hopefully will be enough to 'put the wind up' those planning the event.

Borncynical , August 28, 2018 at 22:56

Further to my post at 18.08 I see a short and sweet statement on the Sputnik website that "Olive Group has no involvement" Suzanne Piner, the company's marketing director said. So there we have it, who are we to disbelieve them??

SA , August 29, 2018 at 03:29

Borncynical
I personally never believe rumours unless they are officially denied.

John Bull , August 28, 2018 at 09:39

A great blog, Craig, and lots of good comments. I have two contributions.

1. A recent Spectator blog talked of a 'Stockade of D-notices'. Surely that means more than the two we know about. So I guess that anyone working in the MSM must have to tread carefully.

2. We are swimming in a sea of fake news, disinformation, misinformation, deliberate lies and speculation. I have found only one rock worth clinging onto and it's this. The Porton Down analyst (CC) who gave evidence to the high court which heard the blood sample application said the analysis of the Skripals blood indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound (para 17 of the judge's report). It is reasonable to assume they used the term 'nerve agent' correctly, i.e. belonging to the group of organo-phosphorus compounds (from the OPCW website). On the assumption CC told the truth, there are only three possibilities:-

a. The Skripals were exposed to a nerve agent, or
b. They were exposed to a related compound that was not a nerve agent, or
c. The analysis was unable to say whether it was a nerve agent or a related compound.

If it was 'a', why did CC muddy the waters by saying 'or a related compound? Very unlikely, bearing in mind the sensitivety of the issue.

If it was 'c', is it credible that Porton Down, world leaders in chemical weaponry, were not able to tell if a substance was a nerve agent or not? I think not.

Which leaves 'b'. That the Skripals were not poisoned by a nerve agent.

I think we should all write to our MPs pointing this out and request a Parliamentary Question be put to the Secretary of State for Defence (who oversees PD) asking for full details of those blood tests and for Theresa to be briefed accordingly. She would then be required under the Ministerial Code to correct her misleading statements to the House which claimed the Skripals were poisoned by a nerve agent.

Robert , August 28, 2018 at 10:10

John Bull at 09:39

" why did CC muddy the waters by saying 'or a related compound? "

Maybe because they couldn't be sure from their measurements whether the truth was a. or b.?
The CC statement seems to rule out only c.

John Bull , August 28, 2018 at 12:06

Hi Robert – if CC knew for sure they Skripals were exposed to a nerve agent, CC would not have added 'or a related compound' as it only serves to confuse. CC might have said it because he/she couldn't tell from the findings – most unlikely – so the only reason he/she said the words 'or a related compound' was to avoid lying under oath to the high court.

In my view.

Terence Wallis , August 28, 2018 at 14:59

It all comes down to contaminated crack or whatever they used, especially the Amesbury folk. They're well known imbibers a friend living there has told me. I pass this on merely as a possible explanation from 'people who know'.

Paul Greenwood , August 28, 2018 at 11:48

Yes and whose lab tested the blood ? Maybe Porton Down offered their services ?

John Bull , August 28, 2018 at 12:11

Hi Paul – yes. At the court hearing, CC was referring to the initial blood analyses carried out by Porton Down a day or so after the poisoning. But clearly the doubt sown by the words 'or a related compound' remained at least until 20th March when CC gave that evidence.

Sandra , August 28, 2018 at 13:29

I remember reading that Court of Protection judgement wording at the time and made some notes about it, plus how this wording compared with that of Gary Aitkenhead's and the OPCW's:

When comparing the wording from three sources – interview with head of Porton Down, court hearing and OPCW documents – I think that there is room for the absence of Novichok in blood samples taken from the Skripals before 22/03.

The Court of Protection judgement before Mr Justice Williams (22/03), (regarding an application to take blood samples for the OPCW to confirm Porton Down's earlier analysis), states that earlier blood tests carried out by Porton Down "indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound. The samples tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent or closely related agent." (Please note the "or".) The statement comes at point 17 i):

https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/sshd-v-skripal-and-another-20180322.pdf

Then, Gary Aitkenhead, CEO of Porton Down, told Sky News (04/04) that the substance they found was "..Novichok or from that family.." (Again, please note the "or".) The statement comes 1:27mins in on this YouTube video, which has a less edited version than on the Sky News site, plus some interesting notes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R23AQAFvZ-4

And the OPCW's executive summary, which has been made public, does not mention Novichok by name, but it says that the results of their tests confirm the findings of the UK relating to the chemical's identity, and show that the toxic chemical is of high purity. It says that the name and structure of the toxic chemical are contained in the full classified report of the Secretariat, available to the state parties of the OPCW.
Taken from points 10, 11 and 12 at:

https://www.opcw.org/fileadmin/OPCW/S_series/2018/en/s-1612-2018_e_.pdf

Cherrycoke , August 28, 2018 at 15:52

I have been thinking about this as well. Please note that "nerve agent or related compound" leaves open the possibility that the compound is not even a nerve agent.

It would be interesting to know the expert definitions of "closely related" and "family" with regard to "nerve agent" and "novichok".

The general understanding is that it was A-234. This has never been confirmed in a public statement, however.

James , August 28, 2018 at 15:02

Expressions like "nerve agent" subconsciously conjure up dark and sinister evildoing in the world of James Bond and his "licence to kill", at least in the minds of most British English speakers. The same psychology is at work when you see "Polite Notice" and subconsciously read it as "Police Notice". Such notices are invariably unofficial, and often impolite!

For the mischief makers, however, mere "nerve agent", with its ambiguity and murky undertones, was not enough; "novichok" will soon be a novichok entry for 2018 in the OED. ("Новичо́к" means "newcomer", "new guy"–as in freshman, rookie, novice.)

Modern nerve agents were first discovered in the 1930s by German industrial chemists experimenting with organophosphorus compounds (which are defined by containing a particular grouping of carbon, phosphorus and oxygen atoms). They were trying to make new insecticides which would be powerful but safe(ish), but stumbled across tabun, which was powerful but very unsafe. Given the political situation, and realising the military potential, these chemists then pursued their research with emphasis on the extremely unsafe, and with huge success. After 1945, having had no such success themselves, the victorious allies' chemists "inherited" this German research; the Soviets did particularly well here, as there was much German manufacturing infrastructure in Poland. Exactly what happened next is obviously kept very secret, but some refinements were certainly achieved such as VX, and–allegedly–the Novichoks. Per Chalmers Johnson: "we knew Saddam had WMD; we had the receipts".
All very interesting (not really), and probably well-understood by a few reading this. A problem in getting a real understanding of all this novichok/Skripal malarkey lies in some misunderstandings of the details about the foregoing, of which few will be properly aware, Craig included. He read history.

Firstly organophosphorus compounds are certainly not inherently toxic; DNA is an organophosphate, as is RNA, ATP, etc. Boat loads of other basic biochemistry involves this chemical grouping. To equate "nerve agent" (or "insecticide") with "organophosphate" is a good start, but nothing more.

Secondly, the idea that nerve agents are new is misleading. Curare (poison) tipped arrows have been used in South America for millenia, secretions by bufotenine toads similarly used elsewhere, with many many other examples throughout recorded history (and beyond). These chemicals could all semantically correctly be termed nerve agents.

Interestingly, although tabun's potency was discovered in the 30s by Schrader er al, it had been unwittingly synthesised 40-odd years earlier. There's nothing new under the sun.

Thirdly, poisoning by ACE nerve agents (which, allegedly, includes Новичо́к) is quick and easy(ish) to detect and interpret in an unambiguous way. Less so more exotic and novel toxins (so obviously not eg curare or bufotoxins, but along those lines). However, given time, a good analysis is doable using mass spectrometry, SEM, X-ray crystallography (and other) methods.

In reply to John Bull, I wouldn't say we're "swimming in a sea of fake news, et seq", more bobbing around like corks. Love the moniker, by the way! It works on so many levels.

John Bull , August 28, 2018 at 15:12

Very good summary. Thanks, James.
Glad you like it!

mark golding , August 28, 2018 at 17:24

It was NOT a nerve agent that is why somebody had to die – to enforce the lie. Life in this universe is cheap

Rhys Jaggar , August 28, 2018 at 18:30

John

I suspect the reason for the wording is that what was identified was an acetylcholineesterase (ACE) inhibitor, which covers the major nerve agents and other compounds as well.

uncle tungsten , August 28, 2018 at 09:43

Here is one of the really stupid things about the official british story line on the Skripals. Sergei and Yulia are supposed to have left their home at around 1:30 and both swiped their hands on the door lever and were then novihoaxed. They drove to town and parked their car ten minutes later. They then walked through the park and stopped to hand feed the ducks in the stream and handed bread to the young boys to also feed the ducks. They then went on to act 2 scene 1 at zizzis or the pub and then act 2 scene two collapsed on the bench.

No young boy or duck was harmed making this play. The military grade novihoax is incapable of killing a duck, let alone a child as this pair smeared military grade nerve poison on everything! They have incinerated the zizzi table and heaven knows what has been incinerated at the pub. They incinerated the Skripals front door, who knows what fate was delivered to the BMW.

But they cant kill a duck! Mind you they can starve Skripal pets.

Are we to believe this story?

Hatuey , August 28, 2018 at 10:35

How do you know that ducks didn't suffer or die?

SA , August 28, 2018 at 11:23

Brilliant diversion. How do you prove a negative? Of course very simple, no dead ducks were reported.

Hatuey , August 28, 2018 at 14:32

I wasn't trying to divert. I know quite a bit about the habits of ducks. You'll very rarely see a dead duck anywhere in the natural world. Same with swans. They like to die in private.

I can tell you that it's very unlikely that you'd have any reports of dead ducks in Salisbury parks.

Before anyone puts this down to more high level trolling, I used to be a wildlife photographer. And I mean a proper one, i.e one that crawled around in mud for days at a time filming and photographing ducks.

SA , August 28, 2018 at 14:39

Even more brilliant as now, because of your marvellous personal experience, this is almost unprovable one way or another. Well done.

ADHD , August 28, 2018 at 15:15

The ducks were an obvious joke (of derision). The joke has a second level (not hidden); the young boys didn't die because everyone knows the novichok poisoning story is not true?

"No ducks or young boys were harmed in the making of this movie!"

All of the above just paraphrases/repeats what uncle tungsten said

You jobs sounds like it was really great, I envy you. But your contribution (here) sucks big time!

Ken Kenn , August 28, 2018 at 10:40

Good thoughts.

There appears to be a distinct lack of cross contamination.

The Skripal car should be riven with this poison – on the steering wheel- gear stick etc etc. If so, then reports of it being burned should follow like the table – as the guinea pigs and the cat were.

It should be all over the bread and all over the assistant duck feeders and the ducks should have been legion with their webbed feet up in the air.

The door handle application is a crock. If, as is claimed the alleged Novichok was pure then who made it should be known because of its purity.

If it's Russian that should be provable. So far the proof that it is Russian made has not been shown.

SA , August 28, 2018 at 11:25

"So far the proof that it is Russian made has not been shown." Nonsense, the very name novichok is a giveaway, nobody would use a novichok except Russians.

ADHD , August 28, 2018 at 12:42

Thanks, SA, that wouldn't have occurred to me!

Doodlebug , August 28, 2018 at 14:44

And Dawn Sturgess' perfume bottle had 'Moscow © Browder Enterprises' moulded underneath.

ADHD , August 28, 2018 at 15:25

Browder just wants us to go to war with Russia so he can keep his stolen money, that's not too much to ask!

SA , August 28, 2018 at 18:02

I forgot to add Browder to one of the dots I mentioned earlier.

Terence Wallis , August 28, 2018 at 15:04

I'd say you're suffering from novichock poisoning with your addled thinking

SA , August 28, 2018 at 18:01

Also novichok seems to cause acute sense of humour failure in observers.

ADHD , August 28, 2018 at 18:15

Terence, It's a serious issue but derision is a powerful weapon; certainly stronger than the novichok used against the Skripals.

Rod , August 28, 2018 at 10:50

It adds a new dimension to the saying : "You couldn't make it up". They, obviously couldn't.

Borncynical , August 28, 2018 at 12:19

"They have incinerated the Zizzi table " The significance of the table in this saga intrigues me. I recall when the 'details' (!!) of events were revealed by the MSM at the outset we were informed that the table had been covered in nerve agent in the form of a fine white powder and had to be incinerated. [ In fact it was so badly contaminated even Porton Down didn't have the capability of storing it safely – that's my facetious 'take' on it before anyone asks where I read that!]

On the assumption that it was indeed incinerated as a 'risk' item it begs a couple of obvious questions which the official narrative hasn't explained. First, the time lapse between the Skripals leaving Zizzis, being identified and their movements traced back to the restaurant and 'lockdown' being applied to everything in the restaurant: we don't know but I would hazard a guess an hour minimum. Are we really supposed to believe that the plates, dishes and cutlery left by the Skripals weren't cleared away in all that time, and the table wasn't wiped down? Irrespective of whether the nerve agent residue that we are supposed to believe was being spread all over Salisbury was visible or not, surely whoever cleared the table and washed up the dishes would definitely have been contaminated if we are to believe what we have been told about the door handle theory.

Borncynical , August 28, 2018 at 12:26

Adding to my comment at 12.19, we mustn't also forget that glasses and dishes would also have been removed from the table during the course of the Skripals' meal as well, not to mention money or credit cards or card reading machines etc exchanging hands. And the drinking glasses used at the pub. The more you think about it, the more ridiculous the official line becomes.

[Aug 29, 2018] Nothing to See Here

Aug 29, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk
Willie Wobblestick , August 28, 2018 at 14:04

Nothing to See Here

Rather like Janet Jackson's nipples,
It's been a while since we've seen the Skripals.
Not so long ago they were all over the news
As official drones droned their official views.
They said that in Salisbury wherever you look
Lurked sinister types splashing novichuk.
Door handle specialists had been imported,
Or so the BBC unquestioningly reported.
A laundry list of despicable acts
Only vaguely coincident with the salient facts.
Boris Johnson wasn't sitting on the fence,
He don't need no stinkin' evidence.
'It was them Russkies wot dunnit, no doubt about that',
Said the country's pre-eminent diplomat.
KGB thugs sent to put the boot in,
By Mr. Evil, Vladimir Stalin Putin.
Novichuk's lethality was re-emphasised again,
More deadly than others by a factor of ten.
Yet somehow miraculously the Skripals survived,
In Salisbury General they inconveniently revived.
And that was all we heard for a while
Bar a weird statement in machine-prose style.
Then a curious video right out of the blue
That looked like an advert for flyaway shampoo.
A chilled out Yulia said she was contented,
And consular access had not been prevented,
But no, she didn't want to meet up with her kin
(Not that the government would let them in).
The whole production was charmingly informal,
As though poisoning and exile were perfectly normal.
This remarkable young woman's taken it all in her stride,
Seemingly happy to go along with the ride.
Her boyfriend, her job, her dog and her flat
All peremptorily dumped at the drop of a hat.
The un-fake corporate media performed as tasked
Ensuring awkward questions remained unasked.
And all this ludicrous b-movie rigmarole
Was discreetly d-noticed down the memory hole.
The legal and diplomatic situation's now clear:
'Move along sir, nothing to see here.'

[Aug 29, 2018] The Sun Does Not Revolve Around the US by Jean Ranc

Most of US Russiagate charges are projection. Russiagate is a color revolution of the block of neoliberals and neocons to depose Trump. They are afraid of too many skeletons in the closet to allow Trump to finish his term. And for a right reason. Trump is unpredictable and he at one moment can turn on them and start revealing unpleasant truth about Bush II and Obama.
But rumors about the demise of the US neoliberal empire are slightly exaggerated ;-). Without providing an alternative model to neoliberalism and without ethnological superiority China does not stand a chance.
Notable quotes:
"... Through endless repetition, allegations are transformed into "facts." Sanctions are loaded upon sanctions, based on these unsubstantiated charges in an economic war against Russia. ..."
"... Today's propaganda tool is named "RussiaGate," a campaign to bring down a deeply flawed U.S. president for possibly trying to mend U.S. relations with Russia. ..."
"... Nations, such as Russia, China & others just want to determine their own futures & keep their National sovereignty's! It's America, with it's unbelievable arrogance & hubris, that wants to dominate & impose its sovereignty on every Country on Earth! ..."
"... Their claim to One Truth (no alternate facts tolerated in NYT/WaPo Land) that they've enjoyed for more than 100 years has fallen victim to the Internet, a creation of the American war technology development system (DARPA) ..."
"... other Nations may reach a saturation point when enough is enough & they finally come to the realization that this crooked American Empire is to dangerous to be allowed too continue & must be stopped, once & for all time! ..."
Aug 29, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

... ... ...

Continuing Empire

It was around 1898, when America first starting thinking it was the center of the universe. In that year the U.S. intervened in Cuba's war for independence and proceeded to take over parts of the decrepit Spanish Empire, from Latin America to the Philippines. Shortly before, in 1893, the U.S. overthrew the Queen of Hawaii on behalf of U.S.-backed sugar and pineapple plantation owners.

That led to a long history of political interference in other countries, in the form of destabilization, coups and invasions. Once the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, a narrative was fostered to justify expanding NATO to Russia's borders.

In the last four years, anti-Russian propaganda has reached a fever pitch: lies about Russia's "expansionism" in Ukraine; hype about Russia's "meddling" in the U.S. elections, creating an existential "threat to democracy;" unproven allegations of Russia using chemical weapons to poison the Skripals in London. Experts are trotted out on major media to further the narrative without hard evidence. Together with think-tanks, the American and British media run these stories daily with almost no counter news or opinions. Through endless repetition, allegations are transformed into "facts." Sanctions are loaded upon sanctions, based on these unsubstantiated charges in an economic war against Russia.

In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind wrote in The New York Times magazine that a top White House strategist for President George W. Bush -- identified later as Karl Rove, Bush's Deputy White House Chief of Staff -- told him, "We're an empire now; we create our own reality."

Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in his 2017 book, Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria , writes that the West's psycho-social pathology about Russia dates back over 1,000 years to the division of Christendom between the Orthodox and Roman churches. The U.S. is a relative newcomer to this, but seeks perhaps its biggest role.

" More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history," Mettan says.

Myth of Russian Expansionism

The astute University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer exposed how the West provoked the Ukraine crisis in his 2014 Foreign Affairs article, "Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin." But the American foreign policy establishment and media remain committed to the suppression of facts about the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev and the resulting escalating tensions with Russia.

Ignoring or fabricating evidence, the U.S. and NATO persist in lying that Russia has expansionist goals in Ukraine, Crimea and Syria. Russia is helping ethnic Russians in the east of Ukraine who are resisting the coup, Crimea (which had been part of Russia since 1783 and transferred by the Soviets to Ukraine in 1954) held a referendum in 2014 in which the public voted to rejoin Russia. The Syrian government invited Russia in to help fight Western and Gulf-backed jihadists trying to violently overthrow the government, as even then Secretary of State John Kerry admitted .

Another scholar, Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, writes in his latest book, Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order , that the Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences between Russia and the West, differences that are not just a replay of the "Cold War."

Simply put, under the banner of the indispensable "liberal world order," neo-conservative warriors and "democracy"-spreading-"humanitarian-interventionists" are promoting the Russophobia "reality" to justify American hegemony.

Ditching Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn : Ditched when he turned on America. (Wikimedia Commons)

One of the greatest illustrations of the centuries-old Russophobia, says Mettan in his 2017 book, is the case of Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

" During the 1990s, I was shocked by the way the West treated Solzhenitsyn," Mettan wrote. "For decades, we had published, celebrated, and acclaimed the great writer as bearing the torch of anti-Soviet dissidence," but only when he criticized his communist Russia. But after moving to the U.S., when Solzhenitsyn showed a preference for privacy "rather than attending anticommunist conferences, western media and academics began to distance themselves."

And when Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia and spoke out against Russian 'westernizers' and liberals who denied Russian interests, he was labeled "an outdated, senile writer," though he had not changed his fundamental views on freedom.

After the mid-July, Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, there were countless mass media delusions and hysteria against U.S.-Russia ties, reminiscent of the Hearst newspaper empire's propaganda that whipped up a frenzy to support the empire-building war against Spain in 1898. Professor Stephen Kinzer vividly described the unsuccessful battle by prestigious anti-imperialists against the power of the Hearst propaganda in his latest book, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire ."

Today's propaganda tool is named "RussiaGate," a campaign to bring down a deeply flawed U.S. president for possibly trying to mend U.S. relations with Russia.

Do we have enough good sense left to follow the advice of Henry David Thoreau: "Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality."

Or, as I thought when I visited Galileo's house that day in the Florentine hills: the world does not revolve around America.

Jean Ranc is a retired psychologist/research associate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.


Gary Weglarz , August 28, 2018 at 7:42 pm

Wonderful observations that challenge the complete and utter madness of our times here in the U.S., and the West in general. The inquisitorial "accusations" leveled against Putin and Russia by the West bear no more resemblance to "reality" than the lunatic accusations that the Holy Inquisition leveled against "witches," "heretics" and "non-believers" for centuries as it used terror to consolidate power. Given the ever more shrill and painfully persistent nature of these ongoing nonsense anti-Russian accusations – it would appear more and more of us in the West are falling into the category of – "non-believers."

jose , August 28, 2018 at 8:45 pm

A very good post Gary. The West is decadent and corrupt.Whatever high moral grounds the West once held, I am afraid they are either forgotten or totally gone.

Jessika , August 28, 2018 at 6:43 pm

Delightful piece to read, great comments as usual. I can only add that the neocolonialists who don't want to give up leading the US over the edge, as mike says "into the abyss", will be forced to change their ways, well stated by Babylon and others. The tragedy of what they have done by their narcissistic, egoistic, delusional misleading, is that they have wrecked the lives of millions worldwide. But of course, that is the story of deluded conquerors until they meet their own end. I welcome the sun setting on the "American Century"; a sharp reset awaits us all but we should welcome it.

jose , August 28, 2018 at 8:48 pm

Jessika: the saddest part in all this is that they still continue to wreck and decimate lives worldwide. It is like a cancer eating and obliterating every thing in their path. A very incisive post.

Diana Lee , August 29, 2018 at 12:08 am

The cancer is psychopathy! These people have no conscience or empathy. They are liars and manipulators. They treat people like objects to be used and abused. Until America admits that we've had a substantial percentage of psychopathic leaders and mentality, from the Puritans forward, we will never recover from the psychological, social, economic, political, legal, religious destruction this ilk has forced upon the rest of us. It took me deep research and therapy to discover that psychopaths project themselves onto the rest of us and then claim we are somehow damaged, flawed or have sinful human nature. The problem has always been the psychopaths among us (1%) who have created hierarchies and placed themselves atop them. They have bamboozled most of us with their lies but as we wake up to their games, we can kick them out of power and we can create a country of the 99% with conscience and empathy rather than a country of slaveowners and deluded "Israelites" who believed they had the right to exploit, enslave, kill

KiwiAntz , August 29, 2018 at 1:36 am

It's not sad, it's what's deathcult tyrants & dying Empires do, they take as many victims as they can, once they realise the end is nigh! It's a mass shooter mentality & it's disgraceful!

JR , August 28, 2018 at 9:14 pm

HI Jessika,
I tried to find you while I was still living in NH as I got the idea you live there as well. I had lived in the Dartmouth area in the 70's but the brutal winters were too much! this time around so I returned to my home base here in Chapel Hill. If you'd like to be in touch, you can reach me at my old-but-still-good Santa Fe address: [email protected]

mike k , August 28, 2018 at 5:37 pm

American egotism is legendary. It is the defining mark of the breed. Ignorant know-it-alls lead us confidently into the abyss.

jose , August 28, 2018 at 8:53 pm

Mike: If American leaders that are in control of the country have studied history of any empire, they would come to the realization that empires do not last forever. The illogical part is that empire's life expectancy has been more or less the same worldwide. And like an opened book the end is closing in and they know it.

Realist , August 28, 2018 at 5:00 pm

Excellent bit of necessary truth-telling. Too bad it won't be read in most of America, not because the people would reject its premise, but because their keepers just won't let them see it in the highly manipulated mass media.

America has repeatedly become what it most professes to hate: first an onerous empire like Spain, then a pack of fascists like Nazi Germany, and now totalitarian tyrants like the Soviets. Welcome to the truth, the one NOT fabricated by Rove's inheritors of empire.

Babyl-on , August 28, 2018 at 4:32 pm

This thought is so important to understand if you are to make any sense of the new multi-polar world which does not revolve around the failing Western empire.

China's Belt and Road is a catalyst but China will benefit only through the interconnection of the entire Eurasian land mass – sooner than you think, high-speed trains will cross the steppes. That is the new world the Enlightenment era is dead the Eurasian era is opening. Eurasia will trade most naturally with Africa and it will prosper because The US Empire is the last of the Enlightenment white European empires.

When you consider the integration of the great Eurasian land mass for the first time is history (the ancient Silk Road writ large) it's easy to forget about a US over there separated by all that water from the thriving markets.

Those oceans which protected the center of power from attack now are a big disadvantage in trade.
We are witnessing the end of the Enlightenment and the end of Empire which it spawned.

China is not imperial, Russia is not imperial – no country today seeks empire but the US and they are failing in every way. Western Liberal Democracy also died with the Enlightenment, new forms of governance and culture will develop, the sky really is the limit, now that the old dead Enlightenment is moving out of the way.

It would be a brighter future if not for that pesky climate.

KiwiAntz , August 29, 2018 at 1:51 am

Nations, such as Russia, China & others just want to determine their own futures & keep their National sovereignty's! It's America, with it's unbelievable arrogance & hubris, that wants to dominate & impose its sovereignty on every Country on Earth!

Russia & China are the future with the one belt, one road initiative & America is being left in the rear view mirror & is on the path to total oblivion thanks to its warmongering ways! The end of this corrupt American Empire can't come soon enough for people who want to live in peace!

O Society , August 28, 2018 at 4:12 pm

Well done, Jean Ranc! BTW, I am a Wolfpack grad

Egocentrism isn't just a Donald Trump thing, it's an American thing. America's never-ending RussiaGate narrative is a classic example of psychological projection. It can't be US who has the problem, it must be THEM who has the problem. Time to own it.

Donald Trump is an All-American Gangster

dick Spencer , August 28, 2018 at 3:07 pm

paraphrasing J. Pilger -- America should leave the rest of the world alone -- leave it alone

KiwiAntz , August 29, 2018 at 2:15 am

Yes, I second what Mr Pilger stated & I will add a few more requests? "Leave the World" alone! Stop your Warmongering interference in other Countries affairs! Immediately stop all your murderous Wars, Coups & Financial & Economic terrorism such as weaponising the dollar & Trade sanctions to illegally punish other Nations! Abide by International Laws & the U.N. charter! Remove your 800 bases from around the World & stick to your own backyard! Stop being the Worlds Policeman because no one asked you to perform this role! Look after your own people first & stop wasting trillions of dollars on the pointless & stupid Military Industrial Complex! Ban Campaign lobbyists & big money from Politics! Jail all corrupt Corporates & thieving Bankers, Politicians & seize their assets! These are a few things for a start! There are many more things you could do more numerous to name here, but the main thing is LEAVE THE WORLD ALONE! We are sick to death of this American Empire!

Sally Snyder , August 28, 2018 at 2:28 pm

Here is what Americans really think about the anti-Russia hysteria coming from Washington:

https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/08/americans-on-russia-will-of-people.html

Less than half of Americans believe that Russia's interference in the 2016 election made a difference to the final outcome and nearly six in ten Americans believe that it is important that Washington continue to improve relations with Moscow.

Jeff Harrison , August 28, 2018 at 2:25 pm

When you get to the end of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, six volumes of dense, erudite prose which details the failings of a decadent society, Gibbon lets you in on a secret. The Roman Empire was militarily defeated. Not all at once, mind. But militarily defeated nonetheless. Consider what that means for the US.

RnM , August 28, 2018 at 9:27 pm

Rome became a victim of its success, being overstretched beyond their war technology (horses, shields, swords and siege machines.)
My inability and unwillingness to predict the end of the rise of The Empire of "We the People" and its brand of War Technologies, is due to my close perspective and life-long Bernaiseian (?sp) brainwashing by the mass media, which, thankfully, has, since 2016, been dealt a blow to the mask on their (the corporate media's) Totalitarian nature.

Their claim to One Truth (no alternate facts tolerated in NYT/WaPo Land) that they've enjoyed for more than 100 years has fallen victim to the Internet, a creation of the American war technology development system (DARPA). So, in the American attempt to surpass the Romans, the Empire of We the People (as a Totalitarian dystopia) may well be thwarted by the spread of open information. I hope so. The alternative might be very difficult to defeat.

Diana Lee , August 29, 2018 at 12:23 am

Jeff, if you enjoyed Gibbons, I think you would really enjoy Michael Parenti's, "The Assassination of Julius Caesar". There are so many parallels between the late Roman Republic and today's America. Michael got his PhD in political science and history from Yale and writes "people's history". He argues convincingly that Caesar was assassinated -- - not for being an egomaniac and dictator -- - but because he stood up against the most elite in the senate by seeking reforms that would benefit the masses. He actually argues that Gibbons wrote as a historian from the priviledged class and therefore never condemned the senate for exploiting the masses.

KiwiAntz , August 29, 2018 at 2:34 am

Yes, what it means,& if History is anything to go by, that other Nations may reach a saturation point when enough is enough & they finally come to the realization that this crooked American Empire is to dangerous to be allowed too continue & must be stopped, once & for all time!

The Roman Empire never saw the Barbarian hordes such as the Visigoth's, Huns & Vandals coming until it was to late! Will the American Empire see there downfall coming? 9/11 proved the arrogant American Empire couldn't even see that event coming, due to their own hubris & complacency!

[Aug 29, 2018] Roger Waters: That the attack on the Skripals was nonsense is clear to a person with half a brain. But some don't even have one half, that's why they believe in this absurd

Aug 29, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk
fredi , August 28, 2018 at 21:32

Pink Floyd Legend Roger Waters Slams Skripal Case as 'Nonsense'

The former leader of Pink Floyd has also blasted the White Helmets, a dubious Syrian volunteer organization which has been accused of staging videos of chemical attacks, as part of the "propaganda war," echoing the dismissive comments he made earlier this year.

The UK's Momentary Lapse of Reason

In an interview with the Russian newspaper Izvestiya, former Pink Floyd member Roger Waters dismissed the infamous Skripal case as "nonsense." "That the attack on the Skripals was nonsense is clear to a person with half a brain. But some don't even have one half, that's why they believe in this absurd," he was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/08/no_author/pink-floyd-legend-roger-waters-slams-skripal-case-as-nonsense/

[Aug 29, 2018] Nothing to See Here

Aug 29, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk
Willie Wobblestick , August 28, 2018 at 14:04

Nothing to See Here

Rather like Janet Jackson's nipples,
It's been a while since we've seen the Skripals.
Not so long ago they were all over the news
As official drones droned their official views.
They said that in Salisbury wherever you look
Lurked sinister types splashing novichuk.
Door handle specialists had been imported,
Or so the BBC unquestioningly reported.
A laundry list of despicable acts
Only vaguely coincident with the salient facts.
Boris Johnson wasn't sitting on the fence,
He don't need no stinkin' evidence.
'It was them Russkies wot dunnit, no doubt about that',
Said the country's pre-eminent diplomat.
KGB thugs sent to put the boot in,
By Mr. Evil, Vladimir Stalin Putin.
Novichuk's lethality was re-emphasised again,
More deadly than others by a factor of ten.
Yet somehow miraculously the Skripals survived,
In Salisbury General they inconveniently revived.
And that was all we heard for a while
Bar a weird statement in machine-prose style.
Then a curious video right out of the blue
That looked like an advert for flyaway shampoo.
A chilled out Yulia said she was contented,
And consular access had not been prevented,
But no, she didn't want to meet up with her kin
(Not that the government would let them in).
The whole production was charmingly informal,
As though poisoning and exile were perfectly normal.
This remarkable young woman's taken it all in her stride,
Seemingly happy to go along with the ride.
Her boyfriend, her job, her dog and her flat
All peremptorily dumped at the drop of a hat.
The un-fake corporate media performed as tasked
Ensuring awkward questions remained unasked.
And all this ludicrous b-movie rigmarole
Was discreetly d-noticed down the memory hole.
The legal and diplomatic situation's now clear:
'Move along sir, nothing to see here.'

[Aug 27, 2018] Trump Lied About His Intentions Toward Russia

Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Trump's surprising new position ..."
"... that the U.S. should rethink whether it needs to remain in the seven-decades-old NATO alliance with Europe. ..."
"... Sounding more like a CFO than a commander-in-chief, Trump said of the alliance, "We certainly can't afford to do this anymore," adding, "NATO is costing us a fortune and yes, we're protecting Europe with NATO, but we're spending a lot of money." ..."
"... U.S. officials, including former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, have said that European allies have to shoulder a bigger burden of NATO's cost. But calling for the possible U.S. withdrawal from the treaty is a radical departure for a presidential candidate -- even a candidate who has been endorsed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... Withdrawing from NATO would leave European allies without a forceful deterrent to the Russian military, which invaded and annexed portions of Ukraine in 2014. That would arguably be a win for Putin but leave U.S. allies vulnerable. ..."
"... It also wasn't clear how Trump's arguably anti-interventionist position on the alliance squared with his choice of advisers. ..."
"... One other Trump adviser had previously been reported. Retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn had told The Daily Beast that he "met informally" with Trump. Flynn was pushed out of his post as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and has since spoken out publicly about the need for the U.S. to forge closer ties with Russia. ..."
"... I have two problems with NATO. No. 1, it's obsolete. When NATO was formed many decades ago we were a different country. There was a different threat. Soviet Union was, the Soviet Union, not Russia, which was much bigger than Russia, as you know. And, it was certainly much more powerful than even today's Russia, although again you go back into the weaponry. But, but – I said, I think NATO is obsolete, and I think that – because I don't think – right now we don't have somebody looking at terror, and we should be looking at terror. And you may want to add and subtract from NATO in terms of countries. But we have to be looking at terror, because terror today is the big threat. Terror from all different parts. You know in the old days you'd have uniforms and you'd go to war and you'd see who your enemy was, and today we have no idea who the enemy is. ..."
"... I'll tell you the problems I have with NATO. No. 1, we pay far too much. We are spending -- you know, in fact, they're even making it so the percentages are greater. NATO is unfair, economically, to us, to the United States. Because it really helps them more so than the United States, and we pay a disproportionate share. Now, I'm a person that -- you notice I talk about economics quite a bit, in these military situations, because it is about economics, because we don't have money anymore because we've been taking care of so many people in so many different forms that we don't have money -- and countries, and countries. So NATO is something that at the time was excellent. Today, it has to be changed. It has to be changed to include terror. It has to be changed from the standpoint of cost because the United States bears far too much of the cost of NATO. And one of the things that I hated seeing is Ukraine. Now I'm all for Ukraine, I have friends that live in Ukraine, but it didn't seem to me, when the Ukrainian problem arose, you know, not so long ago, and we were, and Russia was getting very confrontational, it didn't seem to me like anyone else cared other than us. And we are the least affected by what happens with Ukraine because we're the farthest away. But even their neighbors didn't seem to be talking about it. And, you know, you look at Germany, you look at other countries, and they didn't seem to be very much involved. It was all about us and Russia. And I wondered, why is it that countries that are bordering the Ukraine and near the Ukraine – why is it that they're not more involved? Why is it that they are not more involved? Why is it always the United States that gets right in the middle of things, with something that – you know, it affects us, but not nearly as much as it affects other countries. And then I say, and on top of everything else – and I think you understand that, David – because, if you look back, and if you study your reports and everybody else's reports, how often do you see other countries saying "We must stop, we must stop." They don't do it! And, in fact, with the gas, you know, they wanted the oil, they wanted other things from Russia, and they were just keeping their mouths shut. And here the United States was going out and, you know, being fairly tough on the Ukraine. And I said to myself, isn't that interesting? We're fighting for the Ukraine, but nobody else is fighting for the Ukraine other than the Ukraine itself, of course, and I said, it doesn't seem fair and it doesn't seem logical. ..."
"... Even Barack Obama, despite his pretenses for ' a reset in U.S.-Russia relations ', had had actually the opposite of that pretension in mind -- a doubling-down on the Cold War . And Obama's successor, Donald Trump, doubles down on his predecessor's double-down, there. ..."
"... the Koch brothers' Doug Bandow, who represents his sponsors' bet against neoconservativsm, headlined on 27 April 2017 "Donald Trump: The 'Manchurian (Neoconservative) Candidate'?" and he itemized what a terrific Trojan Horse that Trump had turned out to be, for the war-lobby, the 'neocons', or, as Dwight Eisenhower had called them (but carefully and only after his Presidency was already over), "the military-industrial complex." ..."
"... Other people (the masses) fight, kill, die, get maimed, and are impoverished, while these few individuals at the very top in the U.S. profit, from those constant invasions, and military occupations ..."
"... bête noire ..."
"... I will say this about Iran. They're looking to go into Saudi Arabia, they want the oil, they want the money, they want a lot of other things having to do they took over Yemen, you look over that border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, that is one big border and they're looking to do a number in Yemen. Frankly, the Saudis don't survive without us, and at what point do we get involved? And how much will Saudi Arabia pay us to save them? ..."
"... the stockholders in those American war-making corporations ..."
"... America's Founders ..."
"... Donald Trump just wants for Europeans to increase military spending (to buy U.S.-made weapons) even more than the U.S. is doing against Russia, and for the Sauds and Israelis also to buy more of these weapons from America's weapons-firms, to use against Iran and any nation friendly toward it. Meanwhile, America's own military spending is already at world-record-high levels.That's Trump's economic plan; that's his jobs-plan; that's his 'national security' plan. That is Trump's Presidency. ..."
"... He lied his way into office, just like his predecessors had been doing. This is what 'democracy' in America now consists of: lies -- some colored "liberal"; some colored "conservative"; but all colored "profitable" (for the 'right' people); and another name for that, in foreign affairs, is "neoconservative." ..."
Aug 27, 2018 | countercurrents.org

in Imperialism -- by Eric Zuesse -- August 21, 2018

On August 20th, Gallup headlined "More in U.S. Favor Diplomacy Over Sanctions for Russia" and reported that, "Americans believe it is more important to try to continue efforts to improve relations between the countries (58%), rather than taking strong diplomatic and economic steps against Russia (36%)." And yet, all of the sanctions against Russia have passed in Congess by over 90% of Senators and Representatives voting for them -- an extraordinarily strong and bipartisan favoring of anti-Russia sanctions, by America's supposed "representatives" of the American people . What's happening here, which explains such an enormous contradiction between America's Government, on the one side, versus America's people, on the other? Is a nation like this really a democracy at all?

Donald Trump understood this disjunction, when he was running for President, and he took advantage of the public side of it, in order to win, but, as soon as he won, he flipped to the opposite side, the side of America's billionaires, who actually control the U.S. Government.

While he was campaigning for the U.S. Presidency, Donald Trump pretended to want to soften, not harden, America's policies against Russia. He even gave hints that he wanted a redirection of U.S. Government expenditures away from the military, and toward America's economic and domestic needs.

On 31 January 2016 , Donald Trump -- then one of many Republican candidates running for the Republican U.S. Presidential nomination -- told a rally in Clinton Iowa, "Wouldn't it be nice if we actually got along with Russia and China and all these countries?"

On 21 March 2016 , he was published in the Washington Post as having told its editors, that "he advocates a light footprint in the world. In spite of unrest abroad, especially in the Middle East, Trump said the United States must look inward and steer its resources toward rebuilding domestic infrastructure. 'I do think it's a different world today, and I don't think we should be nation-building anymore,' Trump said. 'I think it's proven not to work, and we have a different country than we did then. We have $19 trillion in debt. We're sitting, probably, on a bubble. And it's a bubble that if it breaks, it's going to be very nasty. I just think we have to rebuild our country.'" On that same day, The Daily Beast's Shane Harris wrote that:

Trump's surprising new position [is] that the U.S. should rethink whether it needs to remain in the seven-decades-old NATO alliance with Europe.

Sounding more like a CFO than a commander-in-chief, Trump said of the alliance, "We certainly can't afford to do this anymore," adding, "NATO is costing us a fortune and yes, we're protecting Europe with NATO, but we're spending a lot of money."

U.S. officials, including former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, have said that European allies have to shoulder a bigger burden of NATO's cost. But calling for the possible U.S. withdrawal from the treaty is a radical departure for a presidential candidate -- even a candidate who has been endorsed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Withdrawing from NATO would leave European allies without a forceful deterrent to the Russian military, which invaded and annexed portions of Ukraine in 2014. That would arguably be a win for Putin but leave U.S. allies vulnerable.

It also wasn't clear how Trump's arguably anti-interventionist position on the alliance squared with his choice of advisers.

One other Trump adviser had previously been reported. Retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn had told The Daily Beast that he "met informally" with Trump. Flynn was pushed out of his post as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and has since spoken out publicly about the need for the U.S. to forge closer ties with Russia.

Five days later, on March 26th

, the New York Times bannered, "Transcript: Donald Trump Expounds on His Foreign Policy Views" and David Sanger and Maggie Haberman presented their discussion with Trump about this, where Trump said:

I have two problems with NATO. No. 1, it's obsolete. When NATO was formed many decades ago we were a different country. There was a different threat. Soviet Union was, the Soviet Union, not Russia, which was much bigger than Russia, as you know. And, it was certainly much more powerful than even today's Russia, although again you go back into the weaponry. But, but – I said, I think NATO is obsolete, and I think that – because I don't think – right now we don't have somebody looking at terror, and we should be looking at terror. And you may want to add and subtract from NATO in terms of countries. But we have to be looking at terror, because terror today is the big threat. Terror from all different parts. You know in the old days you'd have uniforms and you'd go to war and you'd see who your enemy was, and today we have no idea who the enemy is.

I'll tell you the problems I have with NATO. No. 1, we pay far too much. We are spending -- you know, in fact, they're even making it so the percentages are greater. NATO is unfair, economically, to us, to the United States. Because it really helps them more so than the United States, and we pay a disproportionate share. Now, I'm a person that -- you notice I talk about economics quite a bit, in these military situations, because it is about economics, because we don't have money anymore because we've been taking care of so many people in so many different forms that we don't have money -- and countries, and countries. So NATO is something that at the time was excellent. Today, it has to be changed. It has to be changed to include terror. It has to be changed from the standpoint of cost because the United States bears far too much of the cost of NATO. And one of the things that I hated seeing is Ukraine. Now I'm all for Ukraine, I have friends that live in Ukraine, but it didn't seem to me, when the Ukrainian problem arose, you know, not so long ago, and we were, and Russia was getting very confrontational, it didn't seem to me like anyone else cared other than us. And we are the least affected by what happens with Ukraine because we're the farthest away. But even their neighbors didn't seem to be talking about it. And, you know, you look at Germany, you look at other countries, and they didn't seem to be very much involved. It was all about us and Russia. And I wondered, why is it that countries that are bordering the Ukraine and near the Ukraine – why is it that they're not more involved? Why is it that they are not more involved? Why is it always the United States that gets right in the middle of things, with something that – you know, it affects us, but not nearly as much as it affects other countries. And then I say, and on top of everything else – and I think you understand that, David – because, if you look back, and if you study your reports and everybody else's reports, how often do you see other countries saying "We must stop, we must stop." They don't do it! And, in fact, with the gas, you know, they wanted the oil, they wanted other things from Russia, and they were just keeping their mouths shut. And here the United States was going out and, you know, being fairly tough on the Ukraine. And I said to myself, isn't that interesting? We're fighting for the Ukraine, but nobody else is fighting for the Ukraine other than the Ukraine itself, of course, and I said, it doesn't seem fair and it doesn't seem logical.

The next day, March 27th, on ABC's "The Week," Trump said, "I think NATO's obsolete. NATO was done at a time you had the Soviet Union, which was obviously larger, much larger than Russia is today. I'm not saying Russia's not a threat. But we have other threats. We have the threat of terrorism and NATO doesn't discuss terrorism, NATO's not meant for terrorism. NATO doesn't have the right countries in it for terrorism."

It's easy to see why Trump was opposed by not only Hillary Clinton and other Democratic Party neoconservatives, but also by all Republican Party neoconservatives. The main target of neoconservatives -- ever since that movement (which only in the 1970s came to be called "neoconservatives") was founded by Democratic U.S. Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson back in the 1950s -- has been to conquer Russia . That's the ultimate objective, toward which they all and always have striven.

Even Barack Obama, despite his pretenses for ' a reset in U.S.-Russia relations ', had had actually the opposite of that pretension in mind -- a doubling-down on the Cold War . And Obama's successor, Donald Trump, doubles down on his predecessor's double-down, there.

Of course, neocons aren't only against Russia; they also are against any country that Israel and Saudi Arabia hate -- and, of course, Israel and Saudi Arabia are large purchasers of American-made weapons, such as weapons from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics. In fact: Saudi Arabia is the world's largest purchaser (other than the U.S. 'Defense' Department itself) of their products and services. In fact, soon after coming into office, Trump achieved the all-time-world-record-largest international weapons-sale, of $350 billion to the Sauds, and it was quickly hiked yet another $50 billion to $400 billion . It's, as of yet, his jobs-plan for the American people. Instead of Trump's peaceing the American economy, he has warred it. Consequently, for example, the Koch brothers' Doug Bandow, who represents his sponsors' bet against neoconservativsm, headlined on 27 April 2017 "Donald Trump: The 'Manchurian (Neoconservative) Candidate'?" and he itemized what a terrific Trojan Horse that Trump had turned out to be, for the war-lobby, the 'neocons', or, as Dwight Eisenhower had called them (but carefully and only after his Presidency was already over), "the military-industrial complex."

They're all actually the same people; they serve the same billionaires, all of whom are heavily invested in these war-makers -- all against two main targets: first, Russia (which America's aristocracy hate the most); and, then, Iran (which Israel's and Saudi Arabia's aristocracies hate the most). Any nation that's friendly toward those, gets destroyed. Other people (the masses) fight, kill, die, get maimed, and are impoverished, while these few individuals at the very top in the U.S. profit, from those constant invasions, and military occupations -- which Americans admire (their nation's military, America's invasion-forces) above all else .

On the Bill O'Reilly Show, 4 January 2016, Trump was asked to announce, before even the Presidential primaries, what would cause him as the U.S. President, to bomb Iran, and Trump then was panned everywhere for refusing to answer such an inappropriate question -- to announce publicly what his strategy, as the U.S. President, would be in such a matter of foreign affairs (in which type of matter only the President himself should be privy to such information about himself, namely his strategy) -- but Trump did reveal there his sympathy for the Sauds, and his extreme hostility toward Iran, a nation which is a bête noire to neocons:

I will say this about Iran. They're looking to go into Saudi Arabia, they want the oil, they want the money, they want a lot of other things having to do they took over Yemen, you look over that border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, that is one big border and they're looking to do a number in Yemen. Frankly, the Saudis don't survive without us, and at what point do we get involved? And how much will Saudi Arabia pay us to save them?

The Sauds have already answered that question, with their commitment to paying $400 billion, and they're already using some of this purchased weaponry and training, to conquer Yemen. But who gets that money? It's not the American people; it is only the stockholders in those American war-making corporations (and allied corporations) who receive the benefits.

And what's this, from Trump, about "at what point do we get involved" if Saudi Arabia's tyrants "don't survive without us"? America is now supposed to be committed to keeping tyrannical hereditary monarchies in control over their countries? When did that start? Certainly not in 1776. Today's America isn't like the country, nor the culture, that America's Founders created, but instead is more like the monarchy that they overthrew. This was supposed to be an anti -imperialist country. Today's American rulers are traitors , against the nation that America's Founders had created. These traitors, and their many agents, are sheer psychopaths. The American public are not their citizens, but their subjects -- much like the colonists were, who overthrew the British King.

Donald Trump just wants for Europeans to increase military spending (to buy U.S.-made weapons) even more than the U.S. is doing against Russia, and for the Sauds and Israelis also to buy more of these weapons from America's weapons-firms, to use against Iran and any nation friendly toward it. Meanwhile, America's own military spending is already at world-record-high levels.That's Trump's economic plan; that's his jobs-plan; that's his 'national security' plan. That is Trump's Presidency.

He lied his way into office, just like his predecessors had been doing. This is what 'democracy' in America now consists of: lies -- some colored "liberal"; some colored "conservative"; but all colored "profitable" (for the 'right' people); and another name for that, in foreign affairs, is "neoconservative."

About Russia, he's continuing Obama's policies but even worse ; and about Iran, he's clearly even more of a neocon than was his predecessor. However, as a candidate, he had boldly criticized neoconservatism. Democracy cannot be based on lies, and led by liars.


Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 , and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity .

see also Eric Zuesse – Countercurrents

[Aug 27, 2018] Russian Threat

Aug 27, 2018 | www.unz.com

Book Review- The Russian Peace Threat by Ron Ridenour by The Saker

Ron Ridenour's latest book (this is his 10 th book on international relations and politics) takes a direct shot at one of the most prevailing myths in the western political discourse: the thesis that Russia and its USSR predecessor have been uniquely aggressive and generally bellicose states. At a time when rabid russophobia is the order of the day (again -- chronic russophobia has been a regular feature of western political culture for many centuries now), this is a very timely and important book which I highly recommend to those interested in history.

The book is separated into three parts. In the first part of the book ( The Great Capitalist Socialist Divide ), Ridenour looks at the Cuban Missile Crisis in some detail and uses it to debunk the many myths which the "official" US historiography has been presenting as dogma for decades. In this first section, Ridenour also provides many fascinating details about Captain Vasili Arkhipov "the man who prevented WWIII". He also recounts how the US propaganda machine tried, and still tries, to blame the murder of JFK on the Russians. The second part of the book ( Peace, Land, Bread ) goes back in history and looks into the ideological and political struggle between the collective West and the Soviet Union from the revolution of 1917 and well into the Cold War. The third part of the book ( Russia At the Crossroads -- the Putin Era ) conclude with very recent events, including the western backed coup d'etat in the Ukraine and the Russian intervention in Syria.

The first and the third parts of the book are extremely well researched and offer a rock-solid, fact-based, and logical analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis and its modern equivalent, the AngloZionist "crusade" against modern Russia. This is a very important and good choice because the two crises have a lot in common. I would even argue that the current crisis is much more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis because of the extremely low personal and intellectual qualities of the current US ruling elites. Ridenour shows that in 1962 it was not the Soviets, but the US which pushed the world to the edge of a nuclear war, and in the third section of his book he shows how, yet again, the Empire is cornering Russia into a situation which very much risks resulting in a nuclear conflict.

For those who would have a knee-jerk rejection of Ridenour's crimethink, the book, on page 438-444, offers a list of governments the USA has overthrown since WWII (50), countries which the USA has bombed (30), foreign leaders it has murdered (50+), suppressed populist/nationalist movements (20), and subverted democratic elections (30). Ridenour then asks how it is that with a tally like that the US gets to moralize about Russia. He is absolutely right, of course. Compared to the USA, the Soviet Union was a peace-loving, non-interventionist and generally international law respecting country. Oh sure, the USSR had its share of horrors and evil deeds, but compared with the "land of the free and the home of the brave" these are minor, almost petty, transgressions.

The book is not without its faults. Sadly, in the second part of his book Ridenour repeats what I can only call the "standard list of western clichés" about the 1917 Revolution, it's causes and effects. Truth be told, Ridenour is most certainly not to be singled out for making such a mistake: most of the books written in English and many of those written in Russian about this period of Russian history are basically worthless because they are all written by folks (from all sides of the political spectrum) with a vested ideological interest in presenting a completely counter-factual chronology of what actually took place (Russian author Ivan Solonevich wrote at length about this phenomenon in his books). Furthermore, such a process is inevitable: after decades of over-the-top demonization of everything and anything Soviet, there is now a "return of the pendulum" (both in Russia and outside) to whitewash the Soviet regime and explain away all its crimes and atrocities (of which there were plenty). For these reasons I would recommend that readers skip chapter 7 entirely (the description of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions are particularly bad and sound like a rehash of Soviet propaganda clichés of the early 1980s).

This weakness of this historical analysis of the two Russian revolutions is, of course, rather disappointing, but it in no way affects the pertinence of the fundamental thesis of this book: that, for all its very real faults, the "Evil Empire" was a gentle and timid regime when compared to the AngloZionist "Axis of Kindness" and its never-ending violent rampages all over the world (literally) and its orgy of subversion and violence in the name of democracy, freedom, human rights and all the rest of the western propaganda buzzwords.

The book's afterworld begins with the following words " WAITING AND WAITING! Waiting for the end of the world! Waiting for Godot! Although, unlike in Samuel Beckett's Theater of the Absurd play, in which Godot never arrives, the mad men and mad women leaders of the US, France and UK (and Israel) are bringing us their bombs ". Having been warning about the very risks of war for at least 4 years now, and having, along with others, posted a special " Russian Warning " to warn about this danger, I can only wholeheartedly welcome the publication of an entire book aimed at averting such a cataclysmic outcome.

My other big regret with this book is that it does not have an index. This is particularly frustrating since the book is packed with over 500 pages of very interesting information and can be used as a very good reference book.

Still, these criticisms should not distract from the very real value of this book. One of the most frightening phenomena today is that the Empire and Russia are currently headed directly for war and that, unlike what took place during the Cuban Missile Crisis, almost nobody today speaks about this. The western corporate media is especially guilty in this regard, as it encourages a constant escalation of rabid anti-Russian rhetoric (and actions) without ever mentioning that if brought to its logical conclusion such policies will result in a devastating war which the West cannot win (neither can Russia, of course, but that is hardly much of a consolation, is it?).

There have been courageous voices in the West trying to stop this crazy slide towards a nuclear apocalypse (I especially think of Professor Stephen Cohen and Paul Craig Roberts) but theirs were truly "cries in the wilderness". And it doesn't matter one bit whether somebody identifies himself as a conservative, liberal, progressive, libertarian, socialist, anarcho-capitalist or by another other (mostly meaningless) political label. What matters is as simple as it is crucial: preventing the Neocons from triggering a war with Russia or with China, or with Iran, or with the DPRK, or with Venezuela, or with ( fill in the blank ). The list of countries the US is in conflict with is very long (just remember Nikki Haley berating and threatening the entire UN General Assembly because the vast majority of its members dared to disagree with the US position on Jerusalem), but Russia is (yet again) the designated arch-villian, the Evil Empire, Mordor -- you name it! Russia is the country which wants to murder everybody with poison gas, from the Skripals in the UK, to the innocent children of Syria. Russia is the country which shoots down airliners and prepares to invade all her western neighbors. Finally, Russia is the place which hacks every computer in the "Free World" and interferes with every single election. The longer that list of idiotic accusations stretches, the bigger the risk of war becomes, because words have their weight and you cannot have normal, civilized relations with the Evil Empire of Mordor which is "highly likely" to invade, nuke or otherwise subvert the peace-loving peoples of the West.

Except that there never was any such thing as a "peace loving West" -- that is truly a self-serving and 100% false myth. The historical record shows that in reality the collective West has engaged in a 1000 year long murderous rampage all over the planet and that each time it designated its victim as the culprit and itself as the defender of lofty ideals. Ridenour's The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert (alongside with Guy Mettan's " here ) does a long way towards debunking this myth.

With the few caveats mentioned above, I highly recommend this book.

JVC , says: August 24, 2018 at 10:24 pm GMT

I tend to agree with Saker–that yes, the Soviet Empire, and the current Russian government have had their"nasty" moments, but it is not those governments that made their very existence depend on creating chaos, death and destruction across the globe. The American people have been too complacent–at least through out my life time (far side of 70) -- because they really have had no struggle as most of the rest of the world has. Mostly good economic conditions, not having to rebuild after invading armies have passed through, plenty of meat and potatoes–and all the other consumer goods. As long as that has been the case, we have not really cared about what the government in DC has been doing "over there" Consequently, the war industry has won control of the country.

So the possibility of nuclear war is closer now than ever before. It seems to me that the neocon mentality that has been dominant for the past 25-30 years (the fall of the Soviet empire?) comes with an erroneous belief that some how as was the case in the two previous "great wars" conus will be spared any pain. However, it is my belief that there can not possible be a limited nuclear exchange–one bomb will have everyone with the capacity using them, and even if the "elite" manage to survive in their extensive underground shelters, when they finally do have to come out, the idiots will have no idea at all as to how to survive in an alien world.

Anyway, hope it doesn't happen, but arrogance has caused more than it's share of trouble, and the neocons are nothing if not arrogant.

peterAUS , says: August 26, 2018 at 5:10 am GMT

Good article.

Especially:

.rabid russophobia is the order of the day .

..the current crisis is much more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis because of the extremely low personal and intellectual qualities of the current US ruling elites ..

.The longer that list of idiotic accusations stretches, the bigger the risk of war becomes ..

I do place a bit of the blame for unhappy outcome on Kremlin , though.
Had it acted more assertively, and decidedly, maybe US elite wouldn't have been acting so recklessly.

Sharp and decisive intervention in Syria; overwhelming intervention in Ukraine.
And last but not least, a couple of missiles towards those two destroyers recently. With training warheads, calculate for just one, two tops, to make through, and make a hole.

"They" believe that whenever they push Kremlin will step back. As so far.
Can anyone point as to where is that "red line"? I can't. But I am sure there is somewhere.
And, it's highly likely we'll recognize it only when ICMBs start flying.
Much good it will do to all of us then.

Here we are.

[Aug 27, 2018] Empire Spymongering and Elite Conspiracy Practioners by James Petras

Notable quotes:
"... The greatest success of the US conspiracy practitioners has been in convincing the US mass media to act as an arm of the CIA-Pentagon-Congressional and Presidential interventionist agenda. ..."
"... Conspiratorial plots have a narrow audience, mostly the US mass media and elite . They seem to have a short-term impact in justifying sanctions and trade wars. The media plotters having called wolf and proved nothing ,have lost credibility among a wide swath of the public. ..."
Aug 23, 2018 | www.unz.com

Introduction

The mass media and political leaders of the US have resorted to denouncing competitors and adversaries as spies engaged in criminal theft of vital political, economic and military know-how.

The spy-mania has spread every place and all the time, it has become an essential element in driving national criminal hearings, global economic warfare and military budgets.

In this paper we will analyze and discuss the use and abuse of spy-mongering by (1) identifying the accused countries which are targeted; (2) the instruments of the spy conspiracy; (3) the purpose of the 'spy attacks'.

Spies, Spies Everywhere: A Multi-Purpose Strategy

Washington's 'spy-strategy' resorts to multiple targets, focusing on different sectors of activities.

Russia has been accused of poisoning adversaries, using overseas operatives in England. The evidence is non-existent. The accusation revolves around an instant lethal poison which in fact did not lead to death.

No Russian operative was identified. The only 'evidence' was that Russia possessed the poison- as did the US and other countries. The events took place in England and the British government played a major role in pointing the finger toward Russia and in launching a global media campaign which was amplified in the US and in the EU.

The UK expelled Russian diplomats and threatened sanctions. The Trump regime picked up the cudgels, increasing economic sanctions and demanding that Russia 'confess' to its 'homicidal behavior'. The poison plot resonated with the Democratic Party campaign against Trump , accusing Russia of meddling in the Presidential election, on Trump's behalf. No evidence was presented. But the less the evidence, the longer the investigation and the wider the conspiratorial net; it now includes overseas business people, students and diplomats.

US conspiracy officials targeted China, accusing the Chinese government of stealing US technology, scientific research and patents. China's billion dollar "Belt and Road" agreement with over sixty countries was presented as a communist plot to dominate countries, grab their resources, generate debt dependency and to recruit overseas networks of covert operatives. In fact, China's plans were public, accepted by most of the US allies and membership was even offered to the US.

Iran was accused of plotting to establish overseas terrorist military operations in Yemen, Iraq and Syria – targeting the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia. No evidence was ever presented. In fact, massive US and EU supplied arms and advisors to Saudi Arabia's overt terror bombing of Houthi-led Yemen cities and populations. Iran backed the Syrian government in opposition to the US backed armed mercenaries. Iranian advisers in Syria were bombed by Israel – and never retaliated.

The US policy elite resort to conspiratorial plots and spying depends heavily on the mass media to repeat and elaborate on the charges endlessly, depending on self-identified experts and ex-pats from the targeted country. In effect the media is the message. Media-state collaboration is reinforced by the application of sanctions -- the punishment proves guilt!

In the case of Russia, the conspirators demonize President Putin; he is 'guilty' because he was an ex-official of the police; he was accused of 'seizing' Crimea which voted to rejoin Russia. In other words, plots are linked to unrelated activity, personality disorders and to US self-inflicted defeats!

Labeling is another tool common to conspiracy plotters; China is a 'dictatorship' intent on taking over the world -- therefore, it could only defeat the US through spying and stealing secrets and assets from the US.

Iran is labelled a 'terrorist state' which allows the US to violate the international nuclear agreement and to support Israeli demands for economic sanctions. No evidence is ever presented that Iran invaded or terrorized any state.

The Political Strategy Behind Conspiracy Terrorists

There are several important motives for the US government to resort to conspiracy plots.

By accusing countries of crimes, it hopes that the accused will respond by revealing their inability or unwillingness to engage in the action falsely attributed to them. Pentagon plots put adversaries on the defensive – spending time and energy answering to the US agenda rather than pursuing and advancing their own.

For example, the US claims that China is stealing economic technology to promote its superiority, is designed to pressure China to downplay or modify its long-term plan for strategic growth. While China will not give general credence to US conspiracy practitioners, it has downplayed the slogans designed to motivate its scientists to "Make China Great'.

Likewise, the US conspiracy practitioners accusation that Iran is 'meddling' in Yemen and Syria is designed to distract world opinion from the US military support for Saudi Arabia's terror bombing in Yemen and Israel's missile attacks in Syria.

Plot accusations have had some effect in Syria. Russia has demanded or asked Iran to withdraw fifty miles from the Israeli border. Apparently Iran has lowered its support for Yemen.

Russia has been blanketed with unsubstantiated accusations of intervening in the Ukraine, which distracts attention from Washington's support for the mob-led coup.

The UK claim that Russia planted a deadly poison, was concocted in order to distract attention from the Brexit fiasco and Prime Minister May's effort to entice the US to sign a major trade agreement.

How Successful are Conspiratorial Politics?

The greatest success of the US conspiracy practitioners has been in convincing the US mass media to act as an arm of the CIA-Pentagon-Congressional and Presidential interventionist agenda.

Secondly, the conspiracy has had an impact on both political parties – especially the Democratic leadership, which has waged a political war accusing Trump of plotting with Russia, to defeat Clinton in the presidential elections. However, Democratic conspiracy advocates have sacrificed their popular electorate who are more interested in economic issues then in regime plots – and may lose to the Republicans in the fall 2018 Congressional elections.

Thirdly, the plot and spy line has some impact on the EU but not on their public. Moreover, the EU is more concerned with President Trump's trade war and made overtures to Russia.

Fourthly, China , Iran and Russia have moved closer economically in response to the conspiracy plots and trade wars.

Conclusion: The Perils of Power Grabbers

Conspiratorial plots have a narrow audience, mostly the US mass media and elite . They seem to have a short-term impact in justifying sanctions and trade wars. The media plotters having called wolf and proved nothing ,have lost credibility among a wide swath of the public.

Moreover, the conspiracy has not resulted in any basic shifts in the orientation of their adversaries, nor has it shaped the electoral agenda for the majority of US voters.

The conspiracy advocates have discredited themselves by the transparency of their fabrications and the flimsiness of their evidence. In the long-run, historians will provide a footnote on the bankruptcy of US foreign and domestic policy based on plots and conspiracies.

[Aug 26, 2018] The okeydoke that Americans were supposed to get

Notable quotes:
"... @travelerxxx @travelerxxx ..."
"... @detroitmechworks ..."
"... @Bob In Portland ..."
Aug 26, 2018 | caucus99percent.com

... ... ...

The first tell was last summer when the first word of Russia allegedly hacking the DNC's computers became public. As we have come to find out, the DNC announced that it had been hacked but refused the FBI access to its servers. Why? Because the DNC preferred to have its own cybercrime experts examine them. And who were their cybercrime experts? CrowdStrike, owned by Dmitri Alperovitch, a Moscow-born immigrant who settled in the US as a youth. Curiously, he has a chair at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank that spends a lot of time thinking of reasons to go to war against Russia. How much do they want to go to war with Russia? A lot. Saudi Arabia and the Ukrainian World Congress are among their funders.

Well, sure enough, as could have been predicted, CrowdStrike did indeed find that Russia was hacking the DNC, although subsequently the hack information turned out to be unpersuasive. One piece of malware misidentified by Crowdstrike as Russian was actually Ukrainian. That's a rather big mistake, if a malware's country of origin proves anything at all, and in fact when the software's country of origin was alleged to be Russian that was the logic in charging the Russians as the hackers. With recent Wikileaks revealing that the CIA has in its toolbox the ability to create hacks using others' malware and then pinning the blame elsewhere, any claim of hacking and who authored the hacking should be open to question, as we've had enough proof to suspect all along. And, as always, the CIA is the last institution to trust when seeking the truth. This does not even address whether one of our moles in the Russian bureaucracy was aiding this okeydoke.

At the same time that the first indications of the Russian hack were announced, Alexandra Chalupa, a self-described "proud Ukrainian American" employed at the DNC, was doing opposition research on Trump, Manafort et al for their "connections" to Russia. In interviews last summer Chalupa was throwing around the words "treason" and "capital crime" in the direction of Manafort and Trump.

Note what we have: A self-contained scandal within the DNC, not open to contradiction by law enforcement (the FBI was kept out), pointing the finger at Russia for interfering with the "democratic process". Our sacred democratic process!

Current-day Russia, and formerly when it existed as the Soviet Union, has been the number one target for US intelligence since President Roosevelt died and generally by the West since the Russian Revolution. I don't have enough space to describe the decades of the history of propaganda directed against Russians, but I will briefly describe one, the shootdown of Indonesia Airlines MH-17. I will include a few pieces of evidence reported in "fake news" outlets and ignored in the mainstream US press, just to give the reader an idea of what the campaign against "fake news" is all about.

In July 2014 Malaysia Flight MH-17 was shot down over a battle zone in the eastern part of Ukraine that had refused to recognize the coup government in Kiev. That's correct, depending on how you want to define it, the Donbass region either seceded from the greater Ukraine or the greater Ukraine was taken over in a fascist coup backed by the US and the Donbass region refused to recognize the fascists in Kiev.

The weapon generally blamed for the shootdown was a BUK missile, an old Soviet anti-aircraft missile long taken out of service in Russia but still in use around the world in countries once armed by the old Soviet Union, like Ukraine.

Within hours of the shootdown Ukrainians produced a recording of rebel chatter on radio where it appeared that the rebels were talking about shooting down the plane. A few days later it was determined that the recording was manufactured, using some rebel dialogue regarding shooting down a military supply plane that had been landing at a contested airport on the front lines of battle. What happened to the story of the recording? In the west the story about the recording being faked was ignored, but the original story wasn't defended. It was allowed to disappear, leaving behind its residue.

Several days after the incident the Russians released radar readings of the event. It showed two Ukrainian fighter planes accompanying the airliner as it changed course and flew over the battle area in the minutes before the plane was attacked. What did Ukraine say about those two fighters? Nothing. What did the flight tower recordings with MH-17 say about those two jet fighters? Nothing, because, depending on the version of the story you read, either all the recordings of conversations between the control tower and the plane were made top-secret immediately after the incident, or were lost or otherwise missing, thereby giving Ukraine the ability to never have to answer what appeared on Russian radar to be two Ukrainian fighters steering the civilian airliner right to the place where it was to be shot down.

At this point it should be noted that Russian BUK anti-aircraft batteries are generally obsolete, but are complicated to operate. A BUK consists of the actual missile launcher carrying a battery of rockets and a separate truck that operates the radar targeting aspects of the weapon. The initial reports in the West said that it had been rebel forces that had shot down the airliner, but the rebel forces had no operable BUK weapon and it was unlikely that the infantry on the front lines had gone through the months of training to even operate one.

This problem was counteracted in the West by a "study" by "Bellingcat". Bellingcat is supposed to be a somewhat anonymous citizen investigator operating from his home in Britain and reviewing "evidence" online. Bellingcat claimed that the BUK battery used in the shootdown had been secretly moved across the border from Russia into the rebel-occupied territory overnight, was used to shoot down the airliner, and then was snuck back into Russia. Sound preposterous? Of course, but not in the fog of propaganda. If it had been well known in the West that the Ukrainian army had seventeen (!) BUK anti-aircraft batteries in the battle area while the rebels had none, or the one "snuck in and out of the area by those tricky Russians", perhaps the charge against the rebels and/or Russians would not have had the same effectiveness in the West. It might further weaken the western version of events if some talking head had pointed out that since the rebels had no air force, having anti-aircraft weapons in a battle theater where its enemy had no aircraft was useless unless the Ukrainians planned on shooting down someone else's aircraft.

Armies actually keep track of their ordinance. But when Russia asked for records of whether any BUK missiles had been fired from any of the seventeen Ukrainian batteries in the battle zone Ukraine refused.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media operated as if it had to be the Russians, or the rebels backed by Russia. The Secretary of State, John Kerry, the weekend after the incident, declared on Sunday morning talk shows that the US had absolute proof via its spy satellites who had fired that missile. And, in truth, the US did know. It has spy satellites parked over Ukraine that have the capability to read the insignia on soldiers' uniforms. One problem: the US never released their photos. In the years since the incident the US has never released those photographs. There have been investigations across Europe and in Australia, and yet the US refuses to release those photographs. The family of the only American on Flight 17 has personally asked for the photos to be released. Nothing.

Essentially, what the US intelligence and military has told the world is, "Trust us." And most Americans do.

And while Kerry was making the rounds on the Sunday morning talk shows claiming he had evidence of Russian guilt the rest of the media were doing their work. From the morning show to late night TV, everyone was talking about Putin! Jimmy Kimmel and the other various cohosts across the dial were making Putin the target of jokes, another very effective propaganda tool. Even the darling of the Left, John Oliver, was taking his turn whacking Putin. Based on what?

Most Americans believe that Russia shot down MH-17. For what purpose? A clue to many of the false flags presented to the public is that they do not have a coherent motive. Why would Russia want to smuggle a rather large, obsolete missile battery into a battle zone in the middle of the night to shoot down an airliner? However, if in fact Ukraine shot down that airliner and used the Mighty Wurlitzer of the CIA to promote Russia's guilt it makes much more sense. A false flag.

What is the truth in the matter? I wasn't there, and neither were you. Who do you trust, that evil caricature Putin, or America?

Propaganda often appears on parallel tracks. As the story of the Russian hack got more play in the mainstream media we had stories about Russia hacking voting machines and Russia even hacking a nuclear plant, all debunked. But because of the nature of propaganda truth was irrelevant. A good portion of the public never hears the retractions and more often than not there are no retractions. That fog of propaganda swirls on, and in the age of the internet there are millions ready to repeat the propaganda. Residue.

There was a second, parallel story in the wind last fall, the Washington Post's "fake news" story and its promotion of PropOrNot. The author of the story, Craig Timberg, is the son of Robert Timberg, who's written a hagiography of Senator John McCain, a strong supporter of war generally and specifically of the fascist elements in power in Ukraine.

PropOrNot designated hundreds of news sites as "fake news" sites. Considering the decades-long history of the Washington Post working hand in hand with the CIA in disseminating information (often false) some of us found WaPo calling the alarm on fake news to be at the very least ironic. PropOrNot generally identified any news source that was not onboard with the mainstream media, and not heavily against Russia, as fake.

Who is PropOrNot? They are officially anonymous, but they've left some hints, if you're willing to look. For example, in posts at their website before the attention of WaPo, someone on the site used the term "Heroiam Slava!" What?

"Heroiam Slava" was a fascist salute that originated in Kiev in 1942, when the Nazis put their Banderite allies in power during their march east against the Soviet Union. In the months afterwards the new slogan was used by Ukrainian military units during Operation Nightingale, the local version of Germany's Holocaust. The German command had found that the constant slaughter of civilians was taking its toll on the esprit de corps of German soldiers, so the work mass murder was passed to the Ukrainian fascists. During their time in power it is estimated that a million Jews were gassed, shot, garroted and shoved into mass graves. At the same time the Banderites also slaughtered uncounted numbers of Poles, ethnic Russians and pretty much anyone else who did not conform to Ukrainian ideas of racial purity.

So the Washington Post's source for defining fake news were anonymous people who liked to repeat wartime slogans of the Nazis' allies. It should be noted that since the fascists came to power in Ukraine in 2014 they have been shutting down all opposition press, frequently by assassination. Reporters who have troubled the regime have been identified by name, address, phone numbers et al. The Ukrainians have established an actual Ministry of Truth and have begun rewriting the history of World War II.

Craig Timberg had another source for his story: Clint Watts of The Foreign Policy Research Institute. The FPRI is an ultra-rightwing think tank created during The Depression which traffics in racialist eugenics and anti-Soviet/Russian proclamations. Their founder, Robert Strausz-Hupé, actually wrote a deranged op-ed piece for the New York Times condemning the movie "Doctor Strangelove" as Soviet propaganda. In short, Timberg's sources of false news were old hands at anti-Russian propaganda.

Early on I said there was something missing. Hillary Clinton isn't the President. Everyone expected her to win. When the story of Russia hacking the DNC was first floated, the world expected Clinton to be President. But why use only parts of the hacking story when you are already going to win the election? As we have seen, the majority of "news" about the Russian hacks actually occurred too close to the election to have any effect on the voting (if the DNC leaks had any effect at all), or after the election when the hacking stories could do nothing at all for Clinton's election chances. (Timberg's story appeared weeks after the election.) If you are going to use this "Russia hack-Trump traitor" story to win the election, why hold any of it back for release until after the contest was won or lost?

The hack story wasn't created to get Clinton elected. It was done to give President Clinton her war in 2017.

Imagine now how the entire sitting government would have been behind President Clinton. We have the dastardly Russians going so low as to try to sabotage the elections to get their buddy Trump elected. Granted, Congress would still be completely in Republican control, as could be estimated prior to the election, but what's the one thing Republicans stalwarts like John McCain and Lindsay Graham can agree on? War. And the Russians hacking the DNC and tampering with American Democracy? Outrageous. Clinton versus Putin, and this time it's personal!

As I've asked before, what is the one thing that Hillary was falling over herself to deliver to the Deep State that Trump wouldn't and couldn't? A war with Russia. Trump is apparently too constrained by his business dealings with various Russians (I don't think he's constrained by any kind of loyalty; Trump has never displayed much loyalty to anyone). When Clinton announced she would create a "no-fly zone" in Syria early on in the primary debates, it was essentially her saying, "When I'm President I will go to war with Russia."

The "Russian hack" story was going to be our Deep State's casus belli, our reason to go to war with Russia. With Hillary's failure in November the okeydoke was left without the most important part, a President ready to go to war. What we see now is the okeydoke being used against Trump. I doubt the Deep State thinks it can push Trump out for a more malleable chief of state (like they did with Nixon and JFK). You can probably consider the public scandal to be private negotiation behind the scenes. And the final tell will be if we are in some kind of hot war with Russia this time next year, or living in the rubble in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange. Tags: fake news up 45 users have voted.

Comments

ubmitted by Alligator Ed on Sun, 04/02/2017 - 8:04pm

Thanks for the education and analysis

The progressive frenzy of beating war drums proceeded all our recent wars. Books have been written about the very art of propagandizing a public, which is very much the way you depicted. The analysis of what really happened to the MH-17 is quite enlightening. The similarities puts this false flag right up there with Assad gassing his civilians with Sarin--unfortunately for all concerned, Jug Ears and Medusa siphoned off some spare Sarin and gave it to the "moderate extremists".

The Ukrainians have established an actual Ministry of Truth and have begun rewriting the history of World War II.

Now we have our own Ministry of Truth, aided and abetted by those unbiased folks at Facebook, Twitter, WaPo and NYT.

War on drugs--not if they're gouging us via Big Pharma. War on Terror--not if that enriches the MIC.

Legalize marijuana? Hell no, that would cut into alcohol, tobacco, opioid revenues too much--can't have that can we? Discussion of single-payer at this point, considering this is c99, is pointless--but the issue is not forgotten.

Hot War with Russia? No, no, no. We must have an appetizer before the entreé" and how do you like your Persian delicacies nuked: rare or crispy?

ubmitted by snoopydawg on Sun, 04/02/2017 - 9:39pm
Great essay Bob, thanks

You did a great job deconstructing the Russian propaganda and why they are creating more each day.

I am pretty sure that I read that Malaysia Flight MH-17 was flying to an AIDS convention and a lot of the passengers were AIDS experts. If that is true then that is much more than a war crime, it's a crime against humanity. I know, redundant, but it makes the false flag that much worse in my opinion. They don't care who they kill as long as they can get their agendas done.
(ETA: "Among the passengers were delegates en route to the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne, including Joep Lange, a former president of the International AIDS Society, which organised the conference.[35] Many initial reports had erroneously indicated that around 100 delegates to the conference were aboard, but this was later revised to six.[36] Also on board were Dutch Senator Willem Witteveen,[37] Australian author Liam Davison,[38] and Malaysian actress Shuba Jay.[39]")
I didn't realize that the report was revised

And if Trump isn't gung ho on a war with Russia then who is calling the shots and continuing the military buildup in the countries that surrounds Russia? The troops and the equipment is still arriving in those countries. And who is in charge of NATO? Anyone who can help me out with this?
I know that he has given the pentagon more authority to wage war and that is why there are more civilians being killed in Mosul and other war areas. Is it the joint chiefs of staff who have taken over the military? Or someone else?

As to Alligator Ed's comment, just thinking that Obama, Hillary and everyone else who was involved with the sarin gas attack has got to be sociopaths. The inhumane indifference of killing innocent civilians including children with the gas is another thing beyond my comprehension. It just is.

ubmitted by snoopydawg on Sun, 04/02/2017 - 9:29pm
I posted some of Caitlyn's article in another essay

I think it fits here because she goes after the democrats who can't see that they are drinking the Russian propaganda hook line and sinker.
It's the democrat's WMDs to get people on board with their war against Russia that has been planned for over a year or more.

This is who you've allied yourselves with, Democrats. This is where you've decided to take your stand. With war criminals like Dick Cheney, who should have stood trial at the Hague many years ago. With John McCain, Graham and all the Bush era neocons who were supporting Hillary over Trump because they knew that she would create their no fly zone over Syria in order to get their war with Russia.
I look in liberal discussion circles and I see these bloodthirsty war criminals being celebrated as heroes for standing up to Donald Trump as though they oppose his vile human rights policies, when really they only oppose his resistance to the neocon policy of regime-change invasions.What have you become, Democrats? How did you get here? I think it's worth taking a few steps back to reassess your situation.
What happened to you? I've been watching you my whole life and I can honestly say I've never seen you so crazy. You used to care about the poor, the working class, economic justice, taking care of everyone, but now whenever I look in your direction I get blasted in the face with McCarthyist vitriol and George W. Bush prancing around on the Ellen show while you all cheer and talk about how you wish he could be president again instead of Trump.

https://www.newslogue.com/debate/417/CaitlinJohnstone
A lot of these people are the ones who flocked to DK during the ramp up to the Iraq war and were against everything that Bush and the republicans were pushing. But they are also the same people who went silent when Obama continued PNAC's policies in the Middle East and expanded the number of countries that he used drones on.
Oh there were a few push backs against him like when he bombed the hospital in Afghanistan, but any time I spoke out against his use of the drones I was told that by using them it saved our troop's lives. No thought at all about the number of people who were killed only because they lived in the area where they dropped the bombs.
I don't believe that they don't know that by pushing the Russian propaganda that they are saying that it's okay if there is a war with Russia because they didn't allow Hillary to become president.

ubmitted by CB on Sun, 04/02/2017 - 9:54pm
ubmitted by travelerxxx on Mon, 04/03/2017 - 12:52am
Superb work!

Thanks for your work, Bob. This essay is concise, clear, and accurate.

This push for war with Russia is total insanity.

A year ago, if one had told the average Democrat that in twelve months they would be:
1) Acting as though George Bush was a hero,
2) Believing every word from the CIA and FBI as God's Own Truth,
3) Holding the evil Dick Cheney as a paragon of virtue,
4) Doing McCarthyism better than McCarthy, etc., etc. -
they would have suggested you be locked up for your own good, as you were clearly crazy.

Look who's crazy now...

Submitted by TB mare on Mon, 04/03/2017 - 10:07am
Perfect summary of the descent to madness.

@travelerxxx @travelerxxx In one year the Dems have lost their collective mind.

May I cut and paste your comment to FB with attribution?

Submitted by travelerxxx on Mon, 04/03/2017 - 10:07am
Go for it

@TB mare

No need to attribute (unless it's to bring folks to c99p) -- in fact, I'm certain others can make that list quite long. That's just what popped into my head in a few seconds.

Submitted by Dr. John Carpenter on Mon, 04/03/2017 - 10:25am
I keep hoping

@travelerxxx @travelerxxx that the Democrats might someday be aware of the blazing irony of the points your are making but (to appropriate a Simpsons quote) the mainstream Democrats turned into the Republicans so gradually, they didn't even notice.

ubmitted by humphrey on Mon, 04/03/2017 - 2:52am
Here is what I think.

The head honchos at the Pentagon and those at the MIC are having multiple orgasms since Trump has given them free reign to Play War .

I fear North Korea will be the first victim and it will be gory. Better buy a Hyundai now as there won't be much left of South Korea.

John McCain will be happy!

ubmitted by riverlover on Mon, 04/03/2017 - 3:40am
I seem to have a semi-good nose for propaganda.

Best to be insulated from TV noise (news), some is picked up on FB by clueful writers. If my father were alive now, he would be 98 and an anarchist, I am sure. Never rolling in his grave, cremains are in control of his second wife, same age as me. Now our mother's ashes sit on a closet shelf at my sister's house.

The future looks bleak. TV noise is a diversion from the causes that should be engaged, but won't. Circus diversions, the elephants are gone from them and living in Texas.

ubmitted by Lookout on Mon, 04/03/2017 - 8:20am
Most Americans...

can't even name all the countries we are currently drone bombing...mostly because of the lack of reporting. Hollering Russia keeps the people distracted. They have no idea of our (NATO) aggression against Russia.

The Ukraine story is obscured. Oliver Stone's movie is difficult to find in the US (2 min trailer)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVdvp188rk4
In fact I had to watch a sub-scripted version.

The Yemen story is shameful - killing the poorest people of the middle east at the behest of our pals the Saudis (who oppress women, have weekly beheadings, and beat you half to death if you say anything about it).

The blindness is pervasive. Thanks for shining some light.

Submitted by dkmich on Mon, 04/03/2017 - 10:28am
We R the terrorists & R ideology is $$ anyway we can get it.

@Lookout @Lookout

Why Did the US Drop 26,171 Bombs on the World Last Year?
Our endless wars have destroyed nations and warped our own political culture.

The United States started bombing Iraq on January 16, 1991, and, except for a few brief intervals, hasn't stopped since. Twenty-six years this Monday, more than a quarter of a century, and four US presidents, all of whom have bombed Iraq. Last year, the rate of bombing increased over 20,105. The lion's share of the 26,171 bombs dropped by the United States on the world was split evenly between Iraq and Syria, though we did reserve a dollop for Yemen. And the United States dropped more on Libya, about 500, in 2016, than in 2015. Trump, and Trumpism, is a symptom of the sickness, not the source.

ubmitted by detroitmechworks on Mon, 04/03/2017 - 8:52am
Yeah... it's bullshit.

Pure unadulterated bullshit.

Why do we even bother to give the politicians "The Respect of the Office"?

They certainly didn't earn it. I didn't vote for war and neither did anybody I respect. Why does lying your way into office, and having your bawds screaming into the airwaves about how wonderful you are equate to respect?

The positions only have as much worth as the value we ascribe to them. We need to treat the offices with the respect those that hold them show.

Zero.

Submitted by Wink on Tue, 04/04/2017 - 3:17pm
"They" (office holders) need

@detroitmechworks
to be shamed every chance we get. Granted they feel no shame, but people /media will hear it.

ubmitted by dkmich on Mon, 04/03/2017 - 10:36am
Great read. Thanks....

shared it to FB and Twitter....

ubmitted by karl pearson on Mon, 04/03/2017 - 11:26am
Great summary

Thanks for the information. I wasn't aware of all the facts.

ubmitted by native on Mon, 04/03/2017 - 3:24pm
Thanks Bob, for this superb compendium

of ongoing US propaganda techniques, and for such a clear explanation of how and why they work. I only wish all Americans could read it... it certainly deserves as wide a distribution as possible.

Excellent work!

ubmitted by Bob In Portland on Tue, 04/04/2017 - 12:24pm
Surprise surprise

The drums get louder.

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/trump-russia-putin-milita...

Submitted by Ellen North on Tue, 04/04/2017 - 3:29pm
@Bob In Portland

@Bob In Portland

OMdearbloodyG... these pathological fruitcakes have to be stopped - I swear they're set on destroying both any concept of civilization and planetary life and I'm not sure which they'll achieve first. I'd ask 'what are they thinking!?' except they clearly aren't capable of thinking - or of anything but manifesting greed, death and destruction.

This is far worse than yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre in order to watch people being trampled to death, far worse than setting a fire to burn a theatre full of people to a horrible death, because they're trying to manipulate people into supporting this being done to everything on Earth, all in the name of lunatic corporate/billionaire greed and their urge for totalitarian power over any temporarily surviving remains.

Why can't all parties knowingly involved in propagating this lunatic projection be charged with treason? Oh, right, because all levels of the US government almost entirely consist of the treasonous madmen conspiring at this...

And Obama 'legalized' the use of propaganda by the US government against The People who their public offices exist to serve... as if defying/ignoring Constitutional protections and governmental limitations somehow over-rides them, which they cannot do unless The People are propagandized - yet again - into accepting it as a 'done deal' and allowing it.

This is the last chance - never vote for evil again and make it obvious exactly why, while you still can.

[Aug 26, 2018] NEO- RussiaGate, the Fox in the Hen House

Aug 26, 2018 | www.veteranstoday.com

Reporting on RussiaGate, as it is called, goes on day after day, always something new, more hacks, more targets, more election rigging or is it all more fake news? Who controls the news, who really controls the news? Perhaps the news itself rigs elections and spreads rumors, promotes fakery and serves foreign interests as well, let's take a look.

First of all, we might ask why no one, certainly not anyone in the paid media, noted that "non-state actors" as they are called in intelligence and counter-terrorism, are the big players nowadays. After all, it is the media that creates reality, that defines truth, though that effort has now migrated to Silicon Valley moguls who now hire failed academics and journalists who have set up "truth panels."

Before that, the fake press reported lies, and any academic who taught otherwise or wrote otherwise was a "conspiracy theorist" and faced loss of tenure, though tenure seldom exists in today's world of rapidly declining academic standards, in the US at least.

A case study for infiltration of US government by a foreign intelligence service, other than Russia, is easy to find. When Australian Rupert Murdoch and his media empire came to America, they clearly bought House Speaker Newt Gingrich in order to have laws changed.

[Aug 25, 2018] Be Careful What You Ask For- Wasting Time with Manafort, Cohen, and Russiagate by Jim Kavanagh

Notable quotes:
"... First of all, the Democrats will now face increasing demands for impeachment from the impassioned members of their base whom they have riled up to see Trump as the epitome of the Putin-Nazi evil that threatens "our democracy." ..."
"... It would deeply undermine any notion that the political system holds the confidence of the people, and intensify division, disruption, and the sense of incipient civil war in the country more than any number of Russian Facebook posts. ..."
Aug 25, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

But these crimes are tax fraud, money laundering, and credit app padding that have nothing to do with Donald Trump, and campaign-finance violations related to what a critic of Trump aptly describes as "a classic B-team type of bumbling screw-up of covering up mistresses." I question the level of word play, if not fantasizing, necessary to claim that these crimes validate " this investigation of foreign subversion." None of them has anything to do with that. The perils of this, that, these, and those.

Do these results disprove that the Mueller probe is "a political investigation"? I think they imply quite the opposite, and quite obviously so.

Why? Because these convictions would not have occurred if Hillary Clinton had been elected president. There would be no convictions because there would have been no investigation.

If Hillary had been elected, all the crimes of Manafort and Cohen -- certainly those that took place over many years before the election, but even, I think, those having to do with campaign contributions and mistress cover-ups -- would never have been investigated, because all would have been considered right with the political world.

The Manafort and Cohen crimes would have been ignored as the standard tactics of the elite financial grifting -- as well as of parasitism on, and payoffs by, political campaigns -- that they are. Indeed, there would have been no emergency, save-our-democracy-from-Russian-collaboration, Special Counsel investigation, from which these irrelevant charges were spun off, at all.

... ... ...

Have you heard of the Podestas? The Clinton Foundation? Besides, the economic purpose of American electoral politics is to funnel millions to consultants and the media. Campaign finance law violations? We'll see how the lawsuit over $84 million worth of funds allegedly transferred illegally from state party contributions to the Clinton campaign works out. Does the media report, does anybody know or care, about it? Will anybody ever go to prison over it?

... ... ...

First of all, the Democrats will now face increasing demands for impeachment from the impassioned members of their base whom they have riled up to see Trump as the epitome of the Putin-Nazi evil that threatens "our democracy." If the Democrats insist these convictions are not just matters of financial hijinx, irrelevant to Mueller's "Russia collusion" investigation, and irrelevant in fact to anything of political substance; if they assert that the payoffs to Stormy and Karen (the only acts directly involving Trump) disqualify Trump for the presidency, then they will have no excuse but to call for Trump's impeachment, and act to make it happen. Their base will demand that Democratic candidates run on that promise, and if the Democrats re-take the House, that they begin impeachment proceedings immediately.

... ... ...

If they try to impeach and fail (which is likely), well, then, as happened to the Republicans with Clinton, they will just look stupid, and will be punished for having wasted the nation's political time and energy foolishly. And Trump will be strengthened.

If they were to impeach, convict, and remove Trump (even by forcing a resignation), a large swath of the population would conclude, correctly, that a ginned-up litigation had been used to overturn the result of the 2016 election, that the Democrats had gotten away with what the Republicans couldn't in 1998-9. That swath of the population would likely withdraw completely from electoral politics, leaving all their problems and resentments intact -- hidden for a while, but sure to erupt in some other ways. It would deeply undermine any notion that the political system holds the confidence of the people, and intensify division, disruption, and the sense of incipient civil war in the country more than any number of Russian Facebook posts.

. .. ... ...

...if they do move forward, that will initiate a political battle that will tear the country apart and end up either with their defeat or the victory of Mike Pence.

... ... ...

By the way, for those who think that Manafort's conviction portends a smoking gun, based on his work for "pro-Kremlin Viktor Yanukovych," as the NYT and other liberals persistently call him, I would suggest looking at this Twitter thread by Aaron Maté. It's a brilliant shredding of Rachel Maddow's (and, to a lesser extent, Chris Hayes's) version of the deceptive implication -- presented as an indisputable fact -- that Manafort's work for Yanukovych is proof that he (and by extension, Trump) was working for Putin. As Maté shows, that is actually indisputably false. Manafort was working hard to turn Yanukovych away from Russia to the EU and the West, and the evidence of that is abundant and easily available. It was given in the trial, though you'd never know that from reading the NYT or listening to MSNBC. As a former Ukraine Foreign Ministry spokesman said: "If it weren't for Paul, Ukraine would have gone under Russia much earlier. He was the one dragging Yanukovich to the West." And the Democrats know this.

And if you think Cohen is harboring secret knowledge of Trump-Russia collusion that he's going to turn over to Mueller, take look at Maté's thread on that.

We are now entering a new period of intense political maneuvering that's the latest turning point in the bizarre and flimsy "Russiagate" narrative. I've been asked to comment on that a number of times over the past two years, and each time I or one of my fellow commentators would say, "Why are we still talking about this?" It was originally conjured up as a Clinton campaign attack on Trump, but, to my and many others' surprise and chagrin, it somehow morphed into the central theme of political opposition to Trump's presidency.

... ... ...

Russiagate was a pretext to dig around everywhere in his closet. Trump was clueless about the trap he was setting for himself, and has been relentlessly foolish in dealing with it. It is a witch hunt, and he's riding around on his broom, skywriting self-incriminating tweets.

There are a thousand reasons to criticize Donald Trump -- his racism, his stupidity, his infantile narcissism, his full embrace of Zionist colonialism with its demand to attack Iran, his enactment of Republican social and economic policies that are destroying working-class lives, etc. That he is a Kremlin agent is not one of them. His election was a symptom of deep pathologies of American political culture that we must address, including the failure of the "liberal" party and of the two-party system itself. That Donald Trump is a Russian agent is not one of them. There are a number of very good justifications for seeking his impeachment, starting with the clear constitutional crime of launching a military attack on another country without congressional authorization. That he is a Kremlin agent is not one of them.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party and its allied media do not want to center the fight on these substantive political issues. Instead, they are centering on this barrage of Russiagate litigation -- none of which yet proves, or even charges, Russian "collusion" -- which they are using as a substitute for politics. And, in place of opposition, they're substituting uncritical loyalty to the heroes of the military-intelligence complex and "our democracy" that only a complete fantasist could stomach. I mean, when you get to the point that you're suspecting John Bolton's " ties to Russia " .

[Aug 25, 2018] How to interfere in a foreign election by Stephen Kinzer

Notable quotes:
"... "I guess we've just got to pull up our socks and back ol' Boris again," Clinton told an aide. "I know the Russian people have to pick a president, and I know that means we've got to stop short of giving a nominating speech for the guy. But we've got to go all the way in helping in every other respect." Later Clinton was even more categorical: "I want this guy to win so bad it hurts." With that, the public and private resources of the United States were thrown behind a Russian presidential candidate. ..."
"... Four months before the election, Clinton arranged for the International Monetary Fund to give Russia a $10.2 billion injection of cash. Yeltsin used some of it to pay for election-year raises and bonuses, but much quickly disappeared into the foreign bank accounts of Russian oligarchs. The message was clear: Yeltsin knows how to shake the Western money tree. In case anyone missed it, Clinton came to Moscow a few weeks later to celebrate with his Russian partner. Oligarchs flocked to Yeltsin's side. American diplomats persuaded one of his rivals to drop out of the presidential race in order to improve his chances. ..."
"... Yeltsin won the election with a reported 54 percent of the vote. The count was suspicious and Yeltsin had wildly violated campaign spending limits, but American groups, some funded in part by Washington, rushed to pronounce the election fair. The New York Times called it "a victory for Russia." In fact, it was the opposite: a victory by a foreign power that wanted to place its candidate in the Russian presidency. ..."
"... American interference in the 1996 Russian election was hardly secret. On the contrary, the press reveled in our ability to shape the politics of a country we once feared. When Clinton maneuvered the IMF into giving Yeltsin and his cronies $10.2 billion, the Washington Post approved: "Now this is the right way to serve Western interests. . . It's to use the politically bland but powerful instrument of the International Monetary Fund." After Yeltsin won, Time put him on the cover -- holding an American flag. Its story was headlined, "Yanks to the Rescue: The Secret Story of How American Advisors Helped Yeltsin Win." The story was later made into a movie called "Spinning Boris." ..."
"... This was the first direct interference in a presidential election in the history of US-Russia relations. It produced bad results. Yeltsin opened his country's assets to looting on a mass scale. ..."
"... It is a delightful irony that shows how unwise it can be to interfere in another country's politics. If the United States had not crashed into a presidential election in Russia 22 years ago, we almost certainly would not be dealing with Putin today. ..."
Aug 19, 2018 | www.bostonglobe.com

FOR ONE OF THE world's major powers to interfere systematically in the presidential politics of another country is an act of brazen aggression. Yet it happened. Sitting in a distant capital, political leaders set out to assure that their favored candidate won an election against rivals who scared them. They succeeded. Voters were maneuvered into electing a president who served the interest of the intervening power. This was a well-coordinated, government-sponsored project to subvert the will of voters in another country -- a supremely successful piece of political vandalism on a global scale.

The year was 1996. Russia was electing a president to succeed Boris Yeltsin, whose disastrous presidency, marked by the post-Soviet social collapse and a savage war in Chechnya, had brought his approval rating down to the single digits. President Bill Clinton decided that American interests would be best served by finding a way to re-elect Yeltsin despite his deep unpopularity. Yeltsin was ill, chronically alcoholic, and seen in Washington as easy to control. Clinton bonded with him. He was our "Manchurian Candidate."

"I guess we've just got to pull up our socks and back ol' Boris again," Clinton told an aide. "I know the Russian people have to pick a president, and I know that means we've got to stop short of giving a nominating speech for the guy. But we've got to go all the way in helping in every other respect." Later Clinton was even more categorical: "I want this guy to win so bad it hurts." With that, the public and private resources of the United States were thrown behind a Russian presidential candidate.

Part of the American plan was public. Clinton began praising Yeltsin as a world-class statesman . He defended Yeltsin's scorched-earth tactics in Chechnya, comparing him to Abraham Lincoln for his dedication to keeping a nation together. As for Yeltsin's bombardment of the Russian Parliament in 1993, which cost 187 lives, Clinton insisted that his friend had "bent over backwards" to avoid it. He stopped mentioning his plan to extend NATO toward Russia's borders, and never uttered a word about the ravaging of Russia's formerly state-owned economy by kleptocrats connected to Yeltsin. Instead he gave them a spectacular gift.

Four months before the election, Clinton arranged for the International Monetary Fund to give Russia a $10.2 billion injection of cash. Yeltsin used some of it to pay for election-year raises and bonuses, but much quickly disappeared into the foreign bank accounts of Russian oligarchs. The message was clear: Yeltsin knows how to shake the Western money tree. In case anyone missed it, Clinton came to Moscow a few weeks later to celebrate with his Russian partner. Oligarchs flocked to Yeltsin's side. American diplomats persuaded one of his rivals to drop out of the presidential race in order to improve his chances.

RELATED

Four American political consultants moved to Moscow to help direct Yeltsin's campaign. The campaign paid them $250,000 per month for advice on "sophisticated methods of polling, voter contact and campaign organization." They organized focus groups and designed advertising messages aimed at stoking voters' fears of civil unrest. When they saw a CNN report from Moscow saying that voters were gravitating toward Yeltsin because they feared unrest, one of the consultants shouted in triumph: "It worked! The whole strategy worked. They're scared to death!"

Yeltsin won the election with a reported 54 percent of the vote. The count was suspicious and Yeltsin had wildly violated campaign spending limits, but American groups, some funded in part by Washington, rushed to pronounce the election fair. The New York Times called it "a victory for Russia." In fact, it was the opposite: a victory by a foreign power that wanted to place its candidate in the Russian presidency.

American interference in the 1996 Russian election was hardly secret. On the contrary, the press reveled in our ability to shape the politics of a country we once feared. When Clinton maneuvered the IMF into giving Yeltsin and his cronies $10.2 billion, the Washington Post approved: "Now this is the right way to serve Western interests. . . It's to use the politically bland but powerful instrument of the International Monetary Fund." After Yeltsin won, Time put him on the cover -- holding an American flag. Its story was headlined, "Yanks to the Rescue: The Secret Story of How American Advisors Helped Yeltsin Win." The story was later made into a movie called "Spinning Boris."

This was the first direct interference in a presidential election in the history of US-Russia relations. It produced bad results. Yeltsin opened his country's assets to looting on a mass scale. He turned the Chechen capital, Grozny, into a wasteland. Standards of living in Russia fell dramatically. Then, at the end of 1999, plagued by health problems, he shocked his country and the world by resigning. As his final act, he named his successor: a little-known intelligence officer named Vladimir Putin. It is a delightful irony that shows how unwise it can be to interfere in another country's politics. If the United States had not crashed into a presidential election in Russia 22 years ago, we almost certainly would not be dealing with Putin today.

[Aug 25, 2018] CIA's Kremlin Spies Suddenly Go Dark

Aug 25, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

CIA spies operating within the Kremlin have suddenly "gone to ground" according to the New York Times , citing American officials clearly abusing their security clearances.

The officials do not think their sources have been compromised or killed - rather, they've been spooked into silence amid "more aggressive counterintelligence by Moscow, including efforts to kill spies," according to the Times, pointing to the still-unsolved March poisoning of former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal in the UK.

Curiously, the Times immediately suggests that the lack of intelligence is " leaving the CIA and other spy agencies in the dark about precisely what Mr. Putin's intentions are for November's midterm elections. "

But American intelligence agencies have not been able to say precisely what are Mr. Putin's intentions : He could be trying to tilt the midterm elections, simply sow chaos or generally undermine trust in the democratic process . - NYT

There it is. Of course, buried towards the end of the article is this admission:

But officials said there has been no concrete intelligence pointing to Mr. Putin ordering his own intelligence units to wade into the election to push for a certain outcome , beyond a broad chaos campaign to undermine faith in American democracy.

Meanwhile, "current and former officials" tell the Times that the outing of FBI spy Stefan Halper, who infiltrated the Trump campaign, had a " chilling effect on intelligence collection ."

[Aug 24, 2018] After the election, coverage of the Russian "collusion" story was relentless, and it helped pressure investigations and hearings on Capitol Hill and even the naming of a special counsel, which in turn has triggered virtually nonstop coverage.

Notable quotes:
"... "Within 24 hours of her concession speech, [campaign chair John Podesta and manager Robby Mook] assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument." ..."
"... The investigation is based on a lie. Therefore it is unconstitutional and nothing more than an attempt to cover up MASSIVE crimes committed by the pplayers now losing their security clearance and their puppet masters ..."
Aug 24, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

AnthraxSleuth , August 18, 2018 at 12:57 am

@GkJames.

MMMM mmmm, tasty kool-aid you're drinking bruh.

From the book shattered:

"Within 24 hours of her concession speech, [campaign chair John Podesta and manager Robby Mook] assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument."

The plan, according to the book, was to push journalists to cover how "Russian hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign," and it succeeded to a fare-thee-well. After the election, coverage of the Russian "collusion" story was relentless, and it helped pressure investigations and hearings on Capitol Hill and even the naming of a special counsel, which in turn has triggered virtually nonstop coverage.

https://nypost.com/2017/10/26/how-team-hillary-played-the-press-for-fools-on-russia/

And now you want to talk about trying to shoe horn reality into your fantasy outcome.

Anyone with with 2 brain cells to rub together is laughing at you and your ilk pushing this complete horse chit.

The investigation is based on a lie. Therefore it is unconstitutional and nothing more than an attempt to cover up MASSIVE crimes committed by the pplayers now losing their security clearance and their puppet masters.

Do yourself a favor and turn off that freak Rachel Madcow!

[Aug 24, 2018] Do Democrats Want an Impeachment Fight by Pat Buchanan

Cohen / Manafort mess creates a whole other level of problems for the current Administration. So Mueller got Trump in an old fashioned way by digging the personal and business related dirt and going after people who were close to Trump. This is how prosecutors approach mafia cases ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... Cohen claims he and Trump thus conspired to violate federal law. But paying girlfriends to keep past indiscretions private is neither a crime nor a campaign violation. And Trump could legally contribute as much as he wished to his own campaign for president. ..."
"... Hence the high-fives among never-Trumpers are premature. ..."
"... But if Cohen's guilty plea and Tuesday's conviction of campaign manager Paul Manafort do not imperil Trump today, what they portend is ominous. For Cohen handled Trump's dealings for more than a decade and has pledged full cooperation with prosecutors from both the Southern District of New York and the Robert Mueller investigation. ..."
"... Also, Manafort, now a convicted felon facing life in prison, has the most compelling of motives to "flip" and reveal anything that could be useful to Mueller and harmful to Trump. Then there is the Mueller probe itself. ..."
"... Twenty-six months after the Watergate break-in, President Nixon had resigned. Twenty-six months after the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, Mueller has yet to deliver hard evidence the Trump campaign colluded with Putin's Russia, though this was his mandate. ..."
"... However, having, for a year now, been marching White House aides and campaign associates of Trump before a grand jury, Mueller has to be holding more cards than he is showing. And even if they do not directly implicate the president, more indictments may be coming down. ..."
"... And as this Congress has only weeks left before the 2018 elections, it will be the new House that meets in January, which may well be Democratic, that will receive Mueller's report. ..."
"... Trump is not going to resign. To do so would open him up to grand jury subpoenas, federal charges and civil suits for the rest of his life. To resign would be to give up his sword and shield, and all of his immunity. He would be crazy to leave himself naked to his enemies. ..."
"... No, given his belief that he is under attack by people who hate him and believe he is an illegitimate president, and seek to bring him down, he will use all the powers of the presidency in his fight for survival. And as he has shown, these powers are considerable: the power to rally his emotional following, to challenge courts, to fire Justice officials and FBI executives, to pull security clearances, to pardon the convicted. ..."
"... if Democrats capture the House, then they will be the ones under intolerable pressure from their own media auxiliaries to pursue impeachment. ..."
"... Instead, he's embarked on a massively ambitious nation-building project in northeast Syria and is otherwise scouring the globe for new wars to start, while mostly catering to his rich friends at home. And Israel, Israel, Israel all the time. ..."
"... What has he done that's actually useful? Ditching TTIP? OK let's grant him that one. Meeting Kim? Mayyybe, but at the same time he chose to appoint Bolton and Pompeo who are predictably sabotaging the Singapore understanding. Meanwhile, American finances are going off the cliff at an ever-accelerating pace. ..."
"... All of which is the perfect mirror image of an equally true statement: if Obama hadn't been such a lousy president (which his supporters are in denial about), a known charlatan like Trump would've never had a shot at the office. ..."
Aug 24, 2018 | www.unz.com

"If anyone is looking for a good lawyer," said President Donald Trump ruefully, "I would strongly suggest that you don't retain the services of Michael Cohen." Michael Cohen is no Roy Cohn.

Tuesday, Trump's ex-lawyer, staring at five years in prison, pled guilty to a campaign violation that may not even be a crime. Cohen had fronted the cash, $130,000, to pay porn star Stormy Daniels for keeping quiet about a decade-old tryst with Trump. He had also brokered a deal whereby the National Enquirer bought the rights to a story about a Trump affair with a Playboy model, to kill it.

Cohen claims he and Trump thus conspired to violate federal law. But paying girlfriends to keep past indiscretions private is neither a crime nor a campaign violation. And Trump could legally contribute as much as he wished to his own campaign for president.

Would a Democratic House, assuming we get one, really impeach a president for paying hush money to old girlfriends?

Hence the high-fives among never-Trumpers are premature.

But if Cohen's guilty plea and Tuesday's conviction of campaign manager Paul Manafort do not imperil Trump today, what they portend is ominous. For Cohen handled Trump's dealings for more than a decade and has pledged full cooperation with prosecutors from both the Southern District of New York and the Robert Mueller investigation.

Nothing that comes of this collaboration will be helpful to Trump.

Also, Manafort, now a convicted felon facing life in prison, has the most compelling of motives to "flip" and reveal anything that could be useful to Mueller and harmful to Trump. Then there is the Mueller probe itself.

Twenty-six months after the Watergate break-in, President Nixon had resigned. Twenty-six months after the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, Mueller has yet to deliver hard evidence the Trump campaign colluded with Putin's Russia, though this was his mandate.

However, having, for a year now, been marching White House aides and campaign associates of Trump before a grand jury, Mueller has to be holding more cards than he is showing. And even if they do not directly implicate the president, more indictments may be coming down.

Mueller may not have the power to haul the president before a grand jury or indict him. After all, it is Parliament that deposes and beheads the king, not the sheriff of Nottingham. But Mueller will file a report with the Department of Justice that will be sent to the House.

And as this Congress has only weeks left before the 2018 elections, it will be the new House that meets in January, which may well be Democratic, that will receive Mueller's report.

Still, as of now, it is hard to see how two-thirds of a new Senate would convict this president of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Thus we are in for a hellish year.

Trump is not going to resign. To do so would open him up to grand jury subpoenas, federal charges and civil suits for the rest of his life. To resign would be to give up his sword and shield, and all of his immunity. He would be crazy to leave himself naked to his enemies.

No, given his belief that he is under attack by people who hate him and believe he is an illegitimate president, and seek to bring him down, he will use all the powers of the presidency in his fight for survival. And as he has shown, these powers are considerable: the power to rally his emotional following, to challenge courts, to fire Justice officials and FBI executives, to pull security clearances, to pardon the convicted.

Democrats who have grown giddy about taking the House should consider what a campaign to bring down a president, who is supported by a huge swath of the nation and has fighting allies in the press, would be like.

Why do it? Especially if they knew in advance the Senate would not convict.

That America has no desire for a political struggle to the death over impeachment is evident. Recognition of this reality is why the Democratic Party is assuring America that impeachment is not what they have in mind.

Today, it is Republicans leaders who are under pressure to break with Trump, denounce him, and call for new investigations into alleged collusion with the Russians. But if Democrats capture the House, then they will be the ones under intolerable pressure from their own media auxiliaries to pursue impeachment.

Taking the House would put newly elected Democrats under fire from the right for forming a lynch mob, and from the mainstream media for not doing their duty and moving immediately to impeach Trump.

Democrats have been laboring for two years to win back the House. But if they discover that the first duty demanded of them

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. "

Copyright 2018 Creators.com.


Sally Snyder , says: August 24, 2018 at 11:47 am GMT

Here's what the United States would look like under a Pence presidency:

http://viableopposition.blogspot.ca/2017/09/impeaching-trump-and-america-under.html

President Pence would do little to undo the political polarization that America has experienced over the past two decades since his voting record suggests that he leans rather heavily to the right side of the political spectrum.

Sir Launcelot Canning , says: August 24, 2018 at 12:00 pm GMT

Maybe this is payback for the other impeachment attempt 20 years ago. Perhaps some dems have been waiting two decades for vengeance. Whatever Clinton's faults, the GOP should not have opened that can of worms back then.

Johnny Smoggins , says: August 24, 2018 at 12:14 pm GMT

One of two things will likely happen in November.

Either the Republicans come out ahead in which case the left will say it was because of "Russian" interference and the election results are thus illegitimate. Or the Democrats will and they will not only be under pressure to impeach Trump but also to punish the deplorables who voted for him.

Either way things are going to be ugly.

Stick , says: August 24, 2018 at 1:28 pm GMT

Well, this would constitute a real civil war. All because Obama and Hillary failed at rigging an election and failed at launching a coup. Good Times. Keep your powder dry.

Anonymous , [363] Disclaimer says: August 24, 2018 at 2:11 pm GMT
@Stick

Well, this would constitute a real civil war. All because Obama and Hillary failed at rigging an election and failed at launching a coup. Good Times. Keep your powder dry.

Meh. Who are you going to shoot at? Your neighbors? The local messican ghetto? Cops in general?

IMO, just like always throughout history, the key is to nab "elected representatives" from local, state and federal positions, and hang them. You don't have to hang very many -- they're smarter than they look; they're merely corrupt slimebags. Kill a few, and the rest scatter, awaiting future opportunity.

Ma Laoshi , says: August 24, 2018 at 6:04 pm GMT

Mr. Buchanan somehow manages to make it through the entire article without reminding us that, in fact, the GOP did impeach a president over a blowjob–what goes around, comes around. And while I doubt that Pat is among his fans, Bill Clinton at the time was a good deal more popular than Trump is now.

Which brings us to something basic: Democrats and liberals in general have jumped the shark for everyone to see, they're stark raving mad. Granted, the GOP is not exactly Trump's party, but in an environment where Republicans face no substantial opposition, Trump could potentially do something for his voters and there would be no possibility of a blue wave.

Instead, he's embarked on a massively ambitious nation-building project in northeast Syria and is otherwise scouring the globe for new wars to start, while mostly catering to his rich friends at home. And Israel, Israel, Israel all the time.

What has he done that's actually useful? Ditching TTIP? OK let's grant him that one. Meeting Kim? Mayyybe, but at the same time he chose to appoint Bolton and Pompeo who are predictably sabotaging the Singapore understanding. Meanwhile, American finances are going off the cliff at an ever-accelerating pace.

All of which is the perfect mirror image of an equally true statement: if Obama hadn't been such a lousy president (which his supporters are in denial about), a known charlatan like Trump would've never had a shot at the office.

For an outsider, the sentimental attachment of this supposedly forward-looking country to its two officially allowed parties which haven't served their stated purpose for decades already is a curious thing to behold.

Longfisher , says: August 24, 2018 at 6:18 pm GMT

Although I lean conservative, I despair for my country. If Trump's election "unauthorized by the real powers that be" proves to be the match that sets alight the country then we're all in for a form of Hell that few of us have seen.

I sense that it's coming. So, I despair.

Corvinus , says: August 24, 2018 at 10:37 pm GMT
@Stick

"Well, this would constitute a real civil war."

Note that someone whose supposed level of intimacy with violence is someone who would not know the first thing to do if war actually broke out. Exactly why you, the armchair warrior, who waits with bated breath to jackboot your "enemies", will be staying at home rather than being on the front lines, just like yourself, dear.

Now, onto Patrick's post.

"Michael Cohen is no Roy Cohn."

Patrick is partially right. They are both Jewish, and they both engaged in illegal activity, but one was a closet homosexual.

"But paying girlfriends to keep past indiscretions private is neither a crime nor a campaign violation "

Obviously if that was the case, Cohen would not have pled guilty. And clearly Patrick has not been keeping up with the Mueller investigation on this particular development.

"Cohen claims he and Trump thus conspired to violate federal law."

No, Cohen is offering to corroborate the evidence collected by prosecutors as to what constitutes illegal activities.

"No, given his belief that he is under attack by people who hate him and believe he is an illegitimate president, and seek to bring him down, he will use all the powers of the presidency in his fight for survival."

Well, we know for a fact that if Shitlery or Obama was in the SAME SITUATION, Patrick would NOT be advocating this course of action. Rather, he would call for either of them to step aside.

"Twenty-six months after the Watergate break-in, President Nixon had resigned. Twenty-six months after the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, Mueller has yet to deliver hard evidence the Trump campaign colluded with Putin's Russia, though this was his mandate."

The Mueller investigation is a sore spot for Buchanan, who had to endure an eerily similar experience with Nixon. So it is other than surprising that Buchanan is defending Trump. Patrick ought to know better here, as Mueller is carefully gathering evidence from one of the most complex cases in our nation's political history.

Justice in this instance has no time table. Mueller is under no obligation to show his cards, that is not how prosecutions work.

[Aug 24, 2018] With Cohen as a cooperating witness Trump attempt to hush up Stormy can lead to his impeachment

Notable quotes:
"... "Perhaps the greatest political damage came not from the felony charges, all of them related to various forms of financial chicanery, including five counts each for Cohen and Manafort of income tax evasion, but from Cohen's public statement in the courtroom of Judge Kimba Wood. In confessing his guilt to the eight counts, Cohen declared that in two instances, violating federal laws by using personal funds to suppress politically inconvenient statements by Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult film actress Stormy Daniels, he was acting "in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office." ..."
"... My point is that Cohen's admissions implicating Trump in carrying out either himself or in concert with others willful ongoing acts violative of Federal Campaign Finance laws are CLEARLY sufficient-if substantiated-to oust him from office. ..."
"... "Mueller's strategy of focusing on Cohen and Manafort's white-collar crimes is perfectly reasonable, even in a probe directed at Russian interference in the 2016 election. "It's not unusual for prosecutors to use charges -- Al Capone is the primary example -- to bring down a criminal conspiracy in any way they can," Waxman pointed out." ..."
"... Cohen's guilty plea effectively makes Trump an unindicted co-conspirator. Current Justice Department guidelines say a sitting president cannot be indicted -- but building a legitimate criminal case against Trump would make it harder for Republicans to stand united in opposition to impeaching the president ..."
"... Cohen would be a prosecutor's "dream cooperator: one who had special insider access to the leader of a powerful, closed, corrupt organization," former prosecutors Mimi Rocah and Elie Honig wrote last month. "We used to prosecute mafia cases. We both know that in the mob -- and perhaps in this White House -- the right cooperator can bring down the entire hierarchy." ..."
Aug 24, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

NORTHERN STAR August 22, 2018 at 2:44 pm

Frankfurter NS here:

"Perhaps the greatest political damage came not from the felony charges, all of them related to various forms of financial chicanery, including five counts each for Cohen and Manafort of income tax evasion, but from Cohen's public statement in the courtroom of Judge Kimba Wood. In confessing his guilt to the eight counts, Cohen declared that in two instances, violating federal laws by using personal funds to suppress politically inconvenient statements by Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult film actress Stormy Daniels, he was acting "in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office."

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/22/trum-a22.html

My point is that Cohen's admissions implicating Trump in carrying out either himself or in concert with others willful ongoing acts violative of Federal Campaign Finance laws are CLEARLY sufficient-if substantiated-to oust him from office.

Don't think so??

If the following transgressions were sufficient to 'nail' their intended targets -which is what happened - then Trump's acts in attempting to hush up Stormy (supra) COULD achieve the same result. Whether or not some faction of TPTB has the WILL to impeach him is another matter.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/president-clinton-impeached https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Capone

NORTHERN STAR August 22, 2018 at 2:56 pm
"Mueller's strategy of focusing on Cohen and Manafort's white-collar crimes is perfectly reasonable, even in a probe directed at Russian interference in the 2016 election. "It's not unusual for prosecutors to use charges -- Al Capone is the primary example -- to bring down a criminal conspiracy in any way they can," Waxman pointed out."

Yup!!!

" Cohen's guilty plea effectively makes Trump an unindicted co-conspirator. Current Justice Department guidelines say a sitting president cannot be indicted -- but building a legitimate criminal case against Trump would make it harder for Republicans to stand united in opposition to impeaching the president .

When President Richard Nixon was named an unindicted co-conspirator by a grand jury, he opted to resign instead of face impeachment proceedings. Trump seems unlikely to step down, however. Any further efforts on his part to block the investigation into his campaign would put the Justice Department in uncharted territory"

Cohen would be a prosecutor's "dream cooperator: one who had special insider access to the leader of a powerful, closed, corrupt organization," former prosecutors Mimi Rocah and Elie Honig wrote last month. "We used to prosecute mafia cases. We both know that in the mob -- and perhaps in this White House -- the right cooperator can bring down the entire hierarchy."

From links I've already posted , getting a USC Title 18 conviction of Trump is not necessarily that required to charge him with "High Crimes and Misdemeanors". Although there is some dispute in legal circles as to what exactly constitutes a sufficent basis of facts upon which impeachment can be based.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/michael-cohen-paul-manafort-convictions-trouble-for-trump_us_5b7c9cc9e4b0cd327df79e44

MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 4:36 pm
But it will establish an unsavory precedent – that any sitting president can be taken out merely by selecting one of his/her aides and then threatening them with crushing penalties for some silly transgression or other or they can turn state's evidence. Anyone who ever dreamed of ascending to the nation's highest office would have to know that, by facilitating this process, they were handing the lawmakers the means to remove any future president.

But, as I said, I don't care. Hillary can't win it now, Pence is a dink, The Donald would dig in his heels and fight all the way out, probably causing great damage, but if he went, so what? He's a dreadful president. And the USA would be in political chaos.

KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 5:23 pm
Trump should have fired Sessions for recusing himself from this Congress instituted witch-hunt. The job of Sessions is to be over-seer of the Special Counsel investigation. Mueller cannot have special rights, he must follow the rules. Shaking down people around Trump for tax evasion or assorted other unrelated crimes is not following the rules. It is pure Inquisition tactics.

I would not be so quick to write Trump off as dreadful. He basically sabotaged the two hyped up cruise missile attacks on Syria. Even though his hands are tied and his mouth is gagged by US corporate-run "freedom", he managed to make both those attacks totally ineffective. If he was a loyal servant of the US elites, he would have kept sending more and more missiles and actually ordered NATzO or "coalition" jets to bomb Syrian targets seriously. The sporadic Israeli and coalition attacks have been basically irrelevant.

He is rocking the boat as much as he can. This creates are sorts of noise. This noise is not a metric of his efforts and success.

MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 4:28 pm
We'll see. If the Democrats are successful at having him impeached, they will probably create a special holiday recognizing Stormy Daniels, or give her the Presidential Medal of Freedom or something. I frankly don't care – he beat Hillary, and that's something she can never erase or cover up.
MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 4:17 pm
I imagine they sweated him with the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison; all the newspaper accounts of his testimony spoke of his shaky voice, and it's typically pretty hard to scare a lawyer. They likely told him that he could just disappear into the prison system and that there would be nothing at all he could do about it.
KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 4:58 pm
Any testimony under such coercion is utterly worthless. It is basically a show trial signed "confession".
PATIENT OBSERVER August 22, 2018 at 6:57 pm
He was probably reminded that lawyers do not do well in prison.

[Aug 24, 2018] Look at the Skripal affair. The British government's account of what happened is hilariously unconvincing

Aug 24, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Look at the Skripal affair. The British government's account of what happened is hilariously unconvincing, and the Foreign Minister himself was caught red-handed in a lie of such monstrous proportions that he was hopelessly compromised and his remaining audience of five true believers could no longer take anything he said as factual. Far from the only example of his instinctive lying, I might add. But the British government demands you take them at their word: they can't show anyone any evidence – 'coz it's National Security, innit? – but any alternate narrative other than the official account of what happened is fake news. Horrific misinformation. Any western authority granted the mandate to rule on what is misinformation is going to abuse that power to ensure only its side of a story (which always has at least two) is the one that is heard. Period. You would like to believe they're above that, but they're not.

Well, that was a longer diversion than I planned; let's get back to Caitlin Johnstone. Here's what she said, in one of those dozy tweets I dislike so much. "Friendly public service reminder that John McCain has devoted his entire political career to slaughtering as many human beings as possible at every opportunity, and the world will be improved when he finally dies".

I'm sure it was that last bit that sent the 'fake news' crowd over the precipice, because we are conditioned as western citizens to never speak ill of the dead, and the prohibition plainly extends to the almost-dead. The Undead, if you prefer. That's not the first time Ms. Johnstone, who is nothing if not plain-spoken, has expressed the conviction that the expiration of John McCain is an event which is long overdue. It may well be regarded as insensitive, although I honestly cannot disagree with it, as his continued persistence on this mortal coil means a continued manifestation of his malign influence, and he continues to exercise his privilege to speak on behalf of his constituents to vote for the most destructive course every time it is offered as an option.

If I may be allowed one more tiny diversion, one I have certainly advanced before on the unaccountable American fascination with free speech, I believe it bears directly on Ms. Johnstone's legal right to say insensitive things, according to established legal precedent. On October 18th, 1998, the Westboro Baptist Church – aka Lunatic Space-Cadets Anonymous – picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard , a gay man who was beaten unconscious, tied to a fence and left for dead by a couple of homophobic assailants, and who died of his injuries. The congregation carried signs which bore such inflammatory slogans as "No Tears for Queers", "Fag Matt Burns in Hell", and the more perennial but generalized "God Hates Fags". No action was taken against the church. The family of a decorated US Marine who died in Iraq later took Westboro Baptist Church to court for their provocative baiting at solemn occasions like their son's funeral, and lost. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled Westboro's right to free speech did not infringe on the family's right to conduct a funeral without interference.

So any prohibition on publicly wishing John McCain would cease his irritating evasion of the Grim Reaper is imaginary, faith-based and entirely without legal merit.

Getting back to the issue, Ms. Johnstone's initial antagonist – Patrick – tweeted in response; "What a miserable, despicable person. You are the definition of deplorable. I may frequently disagree with Senator John McCain and Meghan McCain with all due criticism, but they should sue you for libel. This is disgusting."

What is libel ? Libel is "to publish in print (including pictures), writing or broadcast through radio,television or film, an untruth about another which will do harm to that person or his/her reputation, by tending to bring the target into ridicule, hatred, scorn or contempt of others. Libel is the written or broadcast form of defamation, distinguished from slander which is oral defamation. It is a tort (civilwrong) making the person or entity (like a newspaper, magazine or political organization) open to a lawsuit for damages by the person who can prove the statement about him/her was a lie. "

Hey, I know – let's play lawyer, wanna? No costly law degree required; I already said we were playing. But since we've already demonstrated that Ms. Johnstone can't be (successfully) sued for libel for expressing the opinion that the world will be a better place once John McCain has popped his pricey tasseled clogs, then the point of libelous contention must be the allegation that John McCain has availed himself of every opportunity to vote for policies or undertakings which contributed to the slaughter of human beings. A customary and absolute defense against the charge of libel is establishment that the allegedly libelous statement is, in fact, true. Can we do that? I'll bet we can.

Although he was very much a part of the Vietnam War, John McCain was not a politician at that time, and Ms. Johnstone specified that he had used his political career to press for military action which resulted in many casualties. I don't think the modification of 'as many as possible' would be enforceable under libel laws, as it would be too difficult to prove. Could there have been even more casualties, on both sides, in any military action in which Senator McCain had a vote? Probably, but there is no realistic way to determine if they were either limited or aggravated by his direct participation in the vote. By the same token, the contribution of his vote to any casualties which did take place is, I think, inarguable.

So let's start with America's next big war – the Gulf War against Iraq, Take One. John McCain voted for war . Were there casualties? You could say that; 294 Americans died in the Gulf War. The UK lost 47. It's worth noting, as an aside, that Syria was a US ally in the Gulf War, and had 2 of its soldiers killed. How about Iraqis? Well, nobody seems to have kept a very accurate count – they were, after all, the enemy, and killing them was encouraged – and the official American count is established from Iraqi prisoner-of-war records, and was featured in a report commissioned by the US Air Force. It estimates 20,000-22,000 combat deaths overall, in both the air and ground campaigns. Was that a slaughter? You tell me. And before we move on from the Gulf War, John McCain voted (after the war was over) against providing automatic annual cost-of-living adjustments for certain veterans' benefits. Four years later, McCain supported an appropriations bill that underfunded the Departments of Veterans Affairs and other federal agencies by $8.9 billion. The following year, McCain voted against an amendment to increase spending on veterans programs by $13 billion. As of the year 2000, 183,000 U.S. veterans of the Gulf War, more than a quarter of the U.S. troops who participated, had been declared permanently disabled by the Department of Veterans Affairs. You may only be 'slaughtered' if you are dead, but the irrevocable changes for the worse in the quality of life for thousands of Americans who were only doing what their country ordered them to do should count for something, what do you say?

This from the American senator who famously could not remember how many houses he and his wife owned . For the record, the number of homes, ranches, condos, and lofts, together worth a combined estimated $13,823,269.00, was ten.

Gee; I'm starting to get a little mad at McCain. Well, let's move on.

In 2003, the US government of the day decided that Saddam Hussein had not learned his lesson the first time, and so this time he had to go. Accordingly, the USA polled its allies for military forces who were not otherwise occupied, and had another go at it. John McCain said hell yes, let's get it on. American military casualties , 4,287 killed, 30,187 wounded. A bit more of a slaughter than the first attempt. The advent of ceramic-plate body armor protected the soldier's body core, so that many more survived injuries that would have been so horrific they would surely have killed them. The downside is that many lived who lost limbs too badly damaged to save, and were crippled for whatever life remained to them. The Iraqi casualty figures were again an estimate, although better documented; by the most reliable count, somewhere between 182,000 and 204,000 Iraqis were killed. Needlessly and pointlessly slaughtered, many of them; American troops grew so fearful as a result of the steady drip of casualties among their own that they frequently opened fire on families in cars with children simply because they did not obey instructions in a language they did not speak or understand. At Mahmudiya, in March 2006, Private Steven Green and his co-conspirators raped and killed 14-year-old Abeer Qassim Hamza, killed her family and set her body afire to blur the details of the crime. When Iraqi soldiers arrived on the scene, Green and his fellow murderers blamed it on Sunni insurgents.

The following year, President Bush approved a 'surge' of 20,000 additional troops, which John McCain so energetically agitated for that it became known informally as 'the McCain doctrine'. That's after he claimed in 2004 that if an elected government in Iraq asked that US forces leave, they would have to go even if they were not happy with the security situation. He also recognized, the following year, that Iraqis resented the American military presence, and the sooner and more dramatically it could be reduced, the better it would be for everyone. I guess if you lay claim to both sides of the argument, you're bound to convince someone that you know what you're doing.

That same year, 2007, John McCain voted against a requirement for specifying minimum time periods between deployments for soldiers deployed to Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. When they need you back in the meat-grinder, you go, never mind how many times you've already been there. Let's just keep in mind, before we leave Iraq, that the entire case for war the second time around was fabricated with wild tales of awful weapons Saddam supposedly had which could kill Americans while they were still in America , and so he had to be dealt with. When it was suggested to the Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, that America should concentrate on Afghanistan, since that is where the backers of the 9-11 strike against America had fled, he mused that there were 'no good targets in Afghanistan' , although there were 'lots of good targets in Iraq'. Some researchers suggest he was after a 'teachable moment' for America's enemies which would convince them of America's irresistible power. While John McCain assessed that Donald Rumsfeld was the worst Secretary of Defense ever, his complaint was not that Rumsfeld was not killing enough people, but that he showed insufficient commitment to winning the war.

Libya. Hoo, boy. In 2009, John McCain – together with fellow die-faster-please senators Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham – visited Tripoli , to discuss Libya's acquisition of American military equipment. John McCain assured Gadaffi (his son, actually) that America was eager to provide Libya with the equipment it needed. Hardly more than a year later, he espoused the position that Gadaffi must be removed from power because he had American blood on his hands from the Lockerbie bombing. In 2011, he visited the Libyan 'rebels', and publicly urged Washington to consider a ground attack to forcibly remove Gaddafi from power. Just a friendly public service reminder; the Lockerbie bombing was most likely carried out by Syria, was – according to pretty reliable testimony – rigged by the American intelligence services to finger Libya , and probably the stupidest thing Gaddafi ever did was to admit to it anyway and pay compensation, in an effort to move on.

Anyway, more war. What the fuck is it with this guy?

Well, even something so grim as war has its comic moments. What else would you call it when NATO claims, with a straight face, that the enemy is hiding his tanks and artillery from its watchful eye inside the water pipes of the Great Man-Made River? What they actually wanted was an excuse to bomb it – which they did, as well as the pumping stations which brought abundant fresh water to the coastal region, in the certain knowledge that it would create a crisis for the civilian population. Which, by the bye, is against just about every convention on the subject ever written.

Here are some of the pipe sections, when they were being trucked to the assembly point. As the article suggests, these sections are 4 meters across; but remember, that's at their widest point. They are only 4 meters for about a foot, because a water pipe is a circle.

Libya mostly used the T-72 Main Battle Tank, and those would be the ones NATO wanted to eliminate, since the others were considerably older. A T-72, width-wise, would just fit in a 4-meter water pipe, as it is 3.6 meters wide . However, it's also over 45 tons in weight. The concrete rings were designed to carry free-flowing water, not a 45-ton tank. Would they take that kind of weight, distributed only over a 7-meter length? Where is there an entry point to the water-pipe that is the same width as the widest diameter of the pipe? As discussed, the water pipe is 4 meters wide at its widest point. But the T-72 is 2.3 meters high. The tank would only fit if it was as high as a lunchbox, because the 4-meter width narrows dramatically from the widest point; it's a circle. Even where it did fit, it would be supported only on the outer edges of its tracks, and you have to cut the 4-meter measurement approximately in half, because the upper portion of the tank would have to be above the point where the tracks touched on each side. The idea was preposterous from the outset, and it speaks to what fucking simpletons western government believes make up its populations that they would dare to put such nutjobbery in print. A T-72 could not fit in a 4-meter water pipe. The notion was demonstrably foolish. But NATO wanted to destroy the water system, so it made up a reason that would allow it to be a well-meaning potential victim of deadly violence.

According to The Guardian – the same source that told you Gadaffi was hiding his tanks in the plumbing – the death toll in the Libyan civil war prior to the NATO intervention was about 1000-2000. According to the National Transitional Council, the outfit the west engineered to rule post-Gaddafi Libya, the final butcher's bill was about 30,000 dead . The very day after NATO folded its tents – figuratively speaking, as the western role was entirely air support for the flip-flop-wearing rebels – and went home, al Qaeda raised its black flag over the Benghazi courthouse .

Caitlin Johnstone claimed John McCain used his political career to advocate for military interventions which resulted in the slaughter of large numbers of human beings. Is that accurate? What say you, members of the jury? In each of the cases above, John McCain used his political influence, over and above his vote, to argue, advocate, hector and plead for military intervention by the armed forces of the United States of America and such coalition partners as could be rounded up. In each of the cases above, the necessity of toppling the evildoing dictator was exaggerated out of all proportion, portrayed as an instant and refreshing liberation for his people, and as only the first phase of a progressive plan which would turn the subject country into a prosperous, western-oriented market democracy. In each of the cases above the country is now a divided and ruined failed state whose pre-war situation was significantly better than its miserable present. And in each of the cases above, a lot of people were killed who could otherwise have reasonably expected to be alive today.

Also, each of the cases above is chronologically separated from the others by a sufficient span for it to be quite evident what a cluster-fuck the previous operation was, so that anyone disposed to learn from his mistakes might have approached the situation differently as it gained momentum, argued for caution based on previously-recorded clusterfuckery, pleaded for reason to prevail and for improved dialogue to be a priority. Not John McCain. He learned precisely the square root of nothing from previous catastrophes, and plunged into the next catastrophe with the enthusiasm most remarked among those who are not all there, as the vernacular describes it. He not only voted for war every time, he expended considerable effort in cajoling and persuading the reluctant to go along.

Perhaps the introduction here of the definition for 'warmonger' would be helpful to the jury. To wit; "O ne who advocates or attempts to stir up war. A person who fosters warlike ideas or advocates war." Synonyms: hawk, aggressor, belligerent, militarist, jingoist, sabre-rattler. There, John; I just saved you the trouble of writing an epitaph.

Will the world be a better place once John McCain is gone? Difficult to say, really, and the present state of affairs in the world argues strongly that it will not. But it will certainly be no poorer for his passing, and if he were to be replaced politically by an individual who took the trouble to do a little research, muse on previous experience, and review all the available options before voting to send in the Marines why, that would be a victory for everyone in a world where victory is increasingly not even a possibility.

Was Caitlin Johnstone right? Broadly speaking, and going on the information available at the time her statement was made, yes; she was.

151 THOUGHTS ON " IN THE MATTER OF THE PEOPLE VS. CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, THE DEFENSE RESTS. " Reply

KIRILL August 21, 2018 at 4:31 pm

@Mark

Good article. The same 2000 dead hysteria (a number that included 800 dead Serbs) was used in 1999 to justify the bombing of Serbia. After the UCK terrorists took over Kosovo together with NATzO, many more Serbs were butchered than the mostly 1200 terrorists that NATzO was so worried about. I suspect that McShitStain was a big time proponent of the gang rape of Serbia as well.

McShitStain is merely a dumb US attack dog. He does his masters' bidding well and thankfully there is some justice in this world that he gets cancer. I really do hope he pops off this mortal coil. I have seen very good people die from brain cancer and it would be very unfair if this sick nutjob recovered.

We are living through a rather nasty time. The so-called PC left in the US is totally unhinged and engaged in witch hunts togther with the lie factory US MSM. I refuse to believe that "antifa" and all these so-called social justice warriors are real leftists. They are engaged in fascism and their backers are the corporate oligarchy of the USA. At this stage it looks like Germany during the 1930s (no, Trump is not the Hitler equivalent) in that a state of hysteria has taken over the US political scene. All the Hillary worshippers (the Democrats are fake "leftists") actually believe the Russia conspiracy theory crap and want revenge. They also believe CNN and the rest of the MSM that they can roll over Russia with little effort. CNN has been a critical booster for all of the US wars since its formation. It incites Americans to support whatever war criminal enterprise that the US elites want to engage in. McShitStain is a cog in this war machine.

JEN August 21, 2018 at 6:53 pm

The world definitely will be a better place after Jurassic John goes the way of the dinosaurs if only because whoever replaces him as Senator for Arizona won't have anything like the grubby contacts he has all over the world (let alone the scale of such a network) and will have to build up his/her own set.

Thanks Mark for another fiery post. Be careful you don't combust.

Meanwhile back in La-La-Land:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-20/chelsea-clinton-says-she-might-run-office-one-day

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MARK CHAPMAN August 21, 2018 at 7:29 pm

Her sequential-talking-points delivery certainly suggests she is being groomed, or at a minimum has been prepared for the question as it is sure to come up. But for someone who claims that nobody has any idea what the future might bring, she certainly got a lot of mileage out of her answer.

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JEN August 22, 2018 at 3:17 am

Amazing how she looks more and more like her mother with each passing day. By the time she decides that, yes, she will run for the Presidency, not only will she be a virtual physical clone but her brain will also have remodelled itself into Klintonator Killer Kranium Version 2.0.

It would be most ironic if Bubba-hotep had been cuckolded himself, given his skirt-chasing habit.

http://blackbag.gawker.com/is-this-chelsea-clintons-real-father-1780376180

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 3:59 pm

Hearsay suggests that she is already so broadly disliked among those who have had to work for or with her that it seems probable she would have a really hard time building a base. Before she could get seriously into running for public office she would have to convince the kingmakers that she has real star potential, and I just don't see it.

But I'm not American, so you never know.

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JEN August 22, 2018 at 4:57 pm

Need more than hearsay need evidence!

Richard Johnson, "Staff quit Clinton Foundation over Chelsea"
https://pagesix.com/2015/05/18/chelsea-sends-clinton-foundation-staff-running/?_ga=1.267366988.395622878.1421150023

Daniel Halper, "Aide calls Chelsea Clinton a 'spoiled brat' in leaked emails"
https://nypost.com/2016/10/11/aide-calls-chelsea-clinton-a-spoiled-brat-in-leaked-emails/

Incredible: one Clinton Foundation employee nearly committed suicide due to the stress caused by Bubba-Hotep and his li'l princess through their constant meddling and raising issues that staff were expected to chase.

Eric Wemple "What did NBC News's Chelsea Clinton do for her $600,000 salary?"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/06/13/what-did-nbc-newss-chelsea-clinton-do-for-her-600000-salary/?utm_term=.59f6cf7ef09a

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YALENSIS August 23, 2018 at 1:19 pm

The Kennedy clan had formerly attempted the same gambit by pushing Caroline into running for office; but she failed miserably and retreated back into private life.

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MOSCOW EXILE August 21, 2018 at 7:29 pm

Shock horrors!

Russia is soon to hold military exercises:

Russia prepares for 'largest war games' since Cold War

Galeotti gets a few words in:

" Despite furious Western attempts to isolate the Kremlin, countries still want to collaborate with Russia. By arms sales and cooperation, Russia is using its military strength to increase its geopolitical presence in the world".

You don't say!

Interestingly, the commenters to the article (so far) seem just to say "So what?":

Silly article WE have exercises all the time, including "Live" firing in the North of Scotland

not to mention the live exercises in which my nephew regularly participates with his and other British army armoured regiments on the Canadian prairie.

Of course, there are not a few head-banger readers of the Independent:

I would even doubt [Europe's] capacity to remove Russia from Poland never mind the Baltics if Russia decided to take them and the only reason they have not decided to do so is the big stick that is the US military which is especially potent under Trump. Same with China and Taiwan, Iran and Saudi etc etc.

Only Uncle Sam can hold the Red Beast at bay!

Pentagonbot?

Why not?

If anyone dare argue the "Kremlin" case in the British press, he is promptly accused of being a "Kremlinbot" and asked such inane questions as "What's the weather like in St. Petersburg today, Vladimir?"

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MOSCOW EXILE August 21, 2018 at 7:57 pm

These Kremlin war games preparations and the reactions of Western hysterics have already been given a mention further above, by the way.

I'm rather out of sync at the moment, as I am spending most of the present time out in the sticks, where I have no Internet connection.

And the abscence of Internet on my country estate is not because outside Moscow is the real, 3rd-world Russia: it's my choice!

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MOSCOW EXILE August 21, 2018 at 8:57 pm

Not "further above" but in comments to Mark's previous article.

I have just noticed that this is a new article on the alleged Twitter libel made Johnstone against John McCain.

And it is "absence"!

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MOSCOW EXILE August 21, 2018 at 8:46 pm

Galeotti uses the expression "collaborate with Russia" and not "do business with Russia".

Collaborate?

With the "Evil Empire" against the "Exceptional Nation", whose "manifest destiny" is to bring freedom and democracy to the rest of the world -- and billions of dollars to the USA?

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 3:46 pm

It's like the difference between an 'administration' and a 'regime'. Obviously, there is one.

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YALENSIS August 23, 2018 at 1:25 pm

Even "collaborate" is a spineless term when referring to Russia.
The proper word is "appease". As in "appeasing" Hitler, while also tossing in a Munich reference!

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MOSCOW EXILE August 21, 2018 at 8:31 pm

Well argued article, Mark.

More dirt on McCain, whose source I now forget, but, if I rightly recall, it was a comment made by a US citizen on some blog way back. I have posted it before:

Allow me to disparage Mr. McCain (again), with facts. By several accounts ("Why Does the Nightingale Sing", for example), he only got into the Naval Academy for a free college degree because Dad and GrandDad were Admirals, and he should have been kicked out several times if not for that too. He was a lousy pilot who got into trouble often and crashed two aircraft because of neglect. He was shot down on his third mission over Vietnam, and getting captured is not heroic.

What happened over there is difficult to pin down, but upon returning from POW status, he passed a physical and regained flight status as a pilot. Yet after he finished 20 years of service that allowed generous retirement pay, he obtained a 100% VA disability rating allowing him to collect some $40,000 a year tax free too! The LA Times mentioned this when McCain was insisting he was fit to serve as commander in Chief. He now hauls in over $240,000 a year from the Feds for military retirement, 100% VA disability, social security retirement, while all the while working full-time in the US Senate. So is he retired, or disabled, or gainfully employed? He is all three! This is textbook case of abuse and why or system needs reform to protect workers against rich welfare kings like McCain.

McCain's loyal wife was disabled in a serious auto accident while he was a POW. Soon after he returned, McCain dumped her for a wealthy woman 20 years younger. The Reagans were so angry they never spoke to him again. He then married his new babe before he officially got divorced, so there's that bigamy thing.

I don't know why any Arizonian votes for this crazed man, especially since he's a big advocate for open borders. At a union meeting, he told workers illegals are needed because Americans are too lazy to work farm fields, even for $50 an hour.

McCain has never labored his entire life, always on the government dole now earning ten times minimum wage worker pay, whose increase he opposes.

McCain grew up wealthy and enjoyed free government health care his entire life, yet thinks it's nothing commoners deserve. While running for president and attacking the poor a rare good reporter asked how many houses he owned. He was unsure, but thought maybe seven.

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CORTES August 21, 2018 at 9:53 pm

Thanks, Mark, for another analysis of the opinion-management being rolled out across the media.

The stand-out memory I have of the great Ken Kesey novel "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" is the description of a "pecking party" inside a battery hen building in which one bird is injured, a speck of blood appears and the crazed neighbours peck it to death. Unfortunately they get spattered and their neighbours take up the pecking a bloodbath ensues. That seems like a decent analogy to the current attempts to close down any alternative to official narrative promotion.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 3:55 pm

Thanks, Cortes, and to all my well-wishers. I loved 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', it was at least as memorable as 'Flowers for Algernon' for me, and I read them both at around the same point in my life, when I was in my early 20's.

If it's really true that the centre cannot hold, The Empire is going to have an increasingly hard time cloaking its lies. Of course, the west could simply return to the values of brotherhood and the common struggle it continues to espouse but never really seriously practiced. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

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CORTES August 22, 2018 at 9:53 pm

"Flowers For Algernon" is such a stunning work it's a real shame that it's not better known (at least in the UK).
On the news management front, I get the sense that the narrative is slipping away from control. Over a couple of months I've noticed that the free "Metro" papers have been left unread in largish amounts on some buses (busy routes) – when they were being snaffled up until recently. People can sense that they are being herded, I think, and resent it.

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MOSCOW EXILE August 22, 2018 at 2:12 am


Where we are -- there is the Ukraine

There are now 160 thousand army first reservists.

This was stated by President Petro Poroshenko, speaking at an international volunteer and the veterans' forum: "Where we are -- there is the Ukraine."

"Almost 160 thousand combatants remain as operational first reservists", said Poroshenko.

According to him, all who are in the reserve are ready to take up arms again and "to do this professionally and with a high degree of training".

He added that the day after tomorrow, the Ukraine will celebrate 27 years of Independence, but added that the clockr could have stopped at year 23 if defenders of the Ukraine had not acted against the aggressor and not defended the Ukrainian land: "The guarantor of the independence of the Ukraine are the armed forces of the Ukraine! The guarantor of our freedom, of our statehood, our independence are 344 thousand combatants in the east of our state."

In Mistecka Arsenal in Kiev has started an international volunteer and the veteran's forum "Where we are -- there is the Ukraine". The event will run for two days, on August 22 and 23. The purpose of the forum is to highlight the need for the formation of a correct and effective state policy as regards the reintegrating veterans into society in general and to bring the authorities into this process. Among the participants are representatives of more than 120 veterans and volunteer organizations from different regions of the Ukraine and from abroad.

Got to help all those volunteer batallion fighters to get back to leading a normal, civilian life after killing civilians at the front!

Source: В резерве ВСУ находится почти 160 тысяч из 344 тысяч участников боевых действий на Донбассе

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TROND August 22, 2018 at 3:04 am

"Just a friendly public service reminder; the Lockerbie bombing was most likely carried out by Syria, was – according to pretty reliable testimony – rigged by the American intelligence services to finger Libya, and probably the stupidest thing Gaddafi ever did was to admit to it anyway and pay compensation, in an effort to move on."

Most likely carried out by Syria?

Why is it most likely that Syria was behind the bombing?

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 4:42 am

I don't know that it was; that was the judgment arrived upon in the article, and that it was retaliation for something or other which I also forget. So they probably just put two and two together and assessed that it was a Syrian payback (or perhaps had other evidence of which I am unaware), but it suited the events of the day for it to be Libya. So Libya got framed up for it.

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RONALD THOMAS WEST August 22, 2018 at 6:25 am

Funny how the stars line op to look like elements of a reprise of the Dag Hammarskjold hit:

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103

GCHQ spy:

"We and the Americans bombed Pan Am Flight 103 to persuade South African foreign minister Pik Botha to sign the Tripartite Accord; thus with the Americans protecting our vested interests both political and financial. The destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 with the Americans demonstrated our intent and was also a threat, and removing Bernt Carlsson was a convenient and powerful signal, i.e. nobody is untouchable"

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RONALD THOMAS WEST August 22, 2018 at 6:27 am

This piece is a bit more unassailable:

https://www.scotsman.com/news/police-chief-lockerbie-evidence-was-faked-1-1403341

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JEN August 22, 2018 at 2:27 pm

Googling "Lockerbie" and "Syria", I found this link to a Wikispooks article on the Syrian connection:
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:Lockerbie_-_The_Syrian_Connection

Five passengers on the Pan Am 103 flight were a Defense Intelligence Agency team carrying a suitcase that contained a large amount of heroin, documents, cash and travellers' cheques. The DIA team had been in Lebanon searching for US hostages held by Hezbollah and had stumbled across a heroin-trafficking ring led by a Syrian drug baron, Monzer al Khassar, who was linked to Colonel Oliver North's activities in ferrying weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua. Al Khassar himself was close to Rifat al Assad, a brother of the then Syrian President Hafez al Assad and apparently a CIA asset.

At the same time there were people in the Iranian government looking for revenge against the US for the USS Vincennes' shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus passenger jet. A bomb expert (Ahmed Jibril) from a Syrian-based Palestinian rebel group was hired. Jibril knew of al Khassar's dope scheme and persuaded him to fit a bomb inside the heroin suitcase that the DIA took onto the plane. Another possibility is that al Khassar and his CIA connections knew that the Iranians were planning revenge and saw an opportunity to kill two birds (appeasing the Iranians, wiping out the DIA whistle-blowers who would have revealed the CIA connection with dope-smuggling) with one stone.

So if Lockerbie was payback, then it was CIA payback against the DIA and if it was retaliation, then it was Iranian retaliation against the USS Vincennes' attack on the Iranian Airbus.

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CARTMAN August 22, 2018 at 5:44 am

So, old Theresa personally profited from a terrorist attack to kill dozens of children.

MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 4:13 pm

Ooooooo damn you, RT!!!! They're trying to steal Britain's democracy!! Take their license away!!!

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KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 10:36 am

A question for all the impeach Trump for colluding with Russia weenies:

How would Cohen know anything about Trump's collusion with Russia? Why would Trump need a lawyer for this illegal activity? If you are going to claim that Trump just happened to share this information with Cohen, then why not anyone else? Is Cohen some sort of consigliere or confession booth priest for Trump?

This whole farce with Cohen is pathetic BS. Cohen will be told to say this and that my Mueller and this will be deemed "evidence". Americans are really a few cards short of a full deck to swallow this drivel.

BTW, the new consensus emerging amongst the "deplorables" who do not share the official CNN fake news narrative, is that the dirty dossier produced by Steele was a Russian machination. This is truly overwhelming in its retardation. Why the f*ck would Russia undermine Trump by colluding with Hillary when Hillary was basically foaming at the mouth to start a war over Russia's intervention in Syria. Hillary's Democratic Party has ignited the current anti-Russian hysteria in America, so there is no way that Russia was colluding with her or her party. Americans are apparently too brainwashed or dumb to distinguish between the involvement of Russian nationals and the Russian state. You can find dozens of nationals from any country to do anything with the right motivation.

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NORTHERN STAR August 22, 2018 at 2:44 pm

Frankfurter NS here:

"Perhaps the greatest political damage came not from the felony charges, all of them related to various forms of financial chicanery, including five counts each for Cohen and Manafort of income tax evasion, but from Cohen's public statement in the courtroom of Judge Kimba Wood. In confessing his guilt to the eight counts, Cohen declared that in two instances, violating federal laws by using personal funds to suppress politically inconvenient statements by Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult film actress Stormy Daniels, he was acting "in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office."
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/22/trum-a22.html

My point is that Cohen's admissions implicating Trump in carrying out either himself or in concert with others willful ongoing acts violative of Federal Campaign Finance laws are CLEARLY sufficient-if substantiated-to oust him from office.

Don't think so??

If the following transgressions were sufficient to 'nail' their intended targets -which is what happened-
then Trump's acts in attempting to hush up Stormy (supra) COULD achieve the same result.

Whether or not some faction of TPTB has the WILL to impeach him is another matter.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/president-clinton-impeached
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Capone

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NORTHERN STAR August 22, 2018 at 2:56 pm

"Mueller's strategy of focusing on Cohen and Manafort's white-collar crimes is perfectly reasonable, even in a probe directed at Russian interference in the 2016 election. "It's not unusual for prosecutors to use charges -- Al Capone is the primary example -- to bring down a criminal conspiracy in any way they can," Waxman pointed out."

Yup!!!

"Cohen's guilty plea effectively makes Trump an unindicted co-conspirator. Current Justice Department guidelines say a sitting president cannot be indicted -- but building a legitimate criminal case against Trump would make it harder for Republicans to stand united in opposition to impeaching the president.

When President Richard Nixon was named an unindicted co-conspirator by a grand jury, he opted to resign instead of face impeachment proceedings. Trump seems unlikely to step down, however. Any further efforts on his part to block the investigation into his campaign would put the Justice Department in uncharted territory"

Cohen would be a prosecutor's "dream cooperator: one who had special insider access to the leader of a powerful, closed, corrupt organization," former prosecutors Mimi Rocah and Elie Honig wrote last month. "We used to prosecute mafia cases. We both know that in the mob -- and perhaps in this White House -- the right cooperator can bring down the entire hierarchy."

From links I've already posted , getting a USC Title 18 conviction of Trump is not necessarily
that required to charge him with "High Crimes and Misdemeanors". Although there is some dispute in legal circles as to what exactly constitutes a sufficent basis of facts upon which impeachment can be
based.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/michael-cohen-paul-manafort-convictions-trouble-for-trump_us_5b7c9cc9e4b0cd327df79e44

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KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 3:12 pm

There is simply no evidence of Russia collusion. Anything that Cohen says is pure fabrication. It is tiresome for this "witness" BS to be "sufficient". Last year CNN et al. were all hot and bothered by the supposed bank trail proving Trump's financial links to Putin. That would have been a story. Cohen can sing anything that Mueller wants him to as his testicles are twisted harder.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 4:36 pm

But it will establish an unsavory precedent – that any sitting president can be taken out merely by selecting one of his/her aides and then threatening them with crushing penalties for some silly transgression or other or they can turn state's evidence. Anyone who ever dreamed of ascending to the nation's highest office would have to know that, by facilitating this process, they were handing the lawmakers the means to remove any future president.

But, as I said, I don't care. Hillary can't win it now, Pence is a dink, The Donald would dig in his heels and fight all the way out, probably causing great damage, but if he went, so what? He's a dreadful president. And the USA would be in political chaos.

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KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 5:23 pm

Trump should have fired Sessions for recusing himself from this Congress instituted witch-hunt. The job of Sessions is to be over-seer of the Special Counsel investigation. Mueller cannot have special rights, he must follow the rules. Shaking down people around Trump for tax evasion or assorted other unrelated crimes is not following the rules. It is pure Inquisition tactics.

I would not be so quick to write Trump off as dreadful. He basically sabotaged the two hyped up cruise missile attacks on Syria. Even though his hands are tied and his mouth is gagged by US corporate-run "freedom", he managed to make both those attacks totally ineffective. If he was a loyal servant of the US elites, he would have kept sending more and more missiles and actually ordered NATzO or "coalition" jets to bomb Syrian targets seriously. The sporadic Israeli and coalition attacks have been basically irrelevant.

He is rocking the boat as much as he can. This creates are sorts of noise. This noise is not a metric of his efforts and success.

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RKKA August 23, 2018 at 3:05 am

"But it will establish an unsavory precedent – that any sitting president can be taken out merely by selecting one of his/her aides and then threatening them with crushing penalties for some silly transgression or other or they can turn state's evidence."

Precedent set by Bill Clinton's personal Jauvert Ken Starr, in his multiple indictments of Webster Hubble.

"Indict my dog. Indict my cat."

A lot of it is Dems paying rethuglicans back in their own coin.

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YALENSIS August 23, 2018 at 1:32 pm

Clinton's "personal Jauvert" – did you mean Inspector Javert of Les Misérables?
Much as I appreciate any literary reference, especially involving Victor Hugo, this allusion would only hold if Bubba had managed to turn his life around, become a virtual saint like Valjean, and devoted his remaining years to the cause of the oppressed masses.
hahahahahha

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 4:28 pm

We'll see. If the Democrats are successful at having him impeached, they will probably create a special holiday recognizing Stormy Daniels, or give her the Presidential Medal of Freedom or something. I frankly don't care – he beat Hillary, and that's something she can never erase or cover up.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 4:17 pm

I imagine they sweated him with the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison; all the newspaper accounts of his testimony spoke of his shaky voice, and it's typically pretty hard to scare a lawyer. They likely told him that he could just disappear into the prison system and that there would be nothing at all he could do about it.

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KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 4:58 pm

Any testimony under such coercion is utterly worthless. It is basically a show trial signed "confession".

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PATIENT OBSERVER August 22, 2018 at 6:57 pm

He was probably reminded that lawyers do not do well in prison.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 8:40 pm

Mmmmm. And historically, on average, that's true.

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MOSCOW EXILE August 22, 2018 at 11:47 am

Credit Suisse freezes $5 billion of Russian money due to U.S. sanctions
AUGUST 22, 2018 / 5:53 PM / UPDATED 5 HOURS AGO

ZURICH (Reuters) – One of Switzerland's largest banks, Credit Suisse, has frozen roughly 5 billion Swiss francs ($5 billion) of money linked to Russia to avoid falling foul of U.S. sanctions, according to its accounts, further increasing pressure on Moscow .

Credit Suisse is being cautious in part because of earlier bad experiences. In 2009, it reached a $500 million settlement with U.S. authorities over dealings with sanctions-hit Iran.

There have been other instances where European banks have been punished. In 2014, France's BNP Paribas ( BNPP.PA ) agreed to pay a record $8.9 billion for violating U.S. sanctions against Sudan, Cuba and Iran.

Switzerland's banking watchdog FINMA does not require Swiss banks to enforce foreign sanctions, but has said they have a responsibility to minimize legal and reputational risks.

I hope the present Russian administration and those yet to come remember this.

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CARTMAN August 22, 2018 at 3:42 pm

Sounds like the rich Russians who refused to believe their wealth wouldn't be confiscated in the West just learned a hard lesson. The "rule of law" is for suckers.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 5:39 pm

I doubt very many ordinary Russians lost anything, but they got a pretty useful lesson for free. The west wants Putin gone so badly that there is no law they will not break, no amount of hard-earned soft power they will not throw away, no western business they will not throw under the bus if they think they will realize that goal.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 4:21 pm

Surely there is something Russia can seize to pay them back, or a bank they can close down and kick out in reprisal.

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KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 5:01 pm

I wonder whose money this was. Russian offshoring is rather sneaky and uses all sorts of places like Cyprus and the Cayman Islands through various instruments. As of 2014, simply keeping money in a western bank was no longer an option.

So this is either illegal money or Credit Suisse is simply lying.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 5:51 pm

That's a good point; some time ago (you're probably correct that it was 2014, or around there) the Russian government did somewhat formalize its advice to not keep money in western banks. As I best remember, it was only mandatory for members of government. But it seems unlikely the government would order all its ministers and senators to move all monies held in western banks out of those banks, and then leave government funds there itself. So perhaps some oligarch/s got burned.

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JEN August 23, 2018 at 3:08 am

Could some of this money that Credit Suisse has frozen be Mikhail Khodorkovsky's?

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MARK CHAPMAN August 23, 2018 at 1:45 pm

Possibly, but I doubt it. Saint Mikhail's money, what there is left of it, is transparent to western investigations, and if they could think of a good reason they would give him a lot more, especially if he were even remotely popular in Russia and they thought he might be a candidate for insertion into Putin's role.

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MOSCOW EXILE August 23, 2018 at 4:02 am

Now Credite Suisse says that Russian accounts have not been frozen, that the Bank had reclassified certain assets placed under sanctions. By these actions no Russian customers have been affected, reports TASS .

Meanwhile, in the world's greatest dirty money laundry, it has been revealed that the London branch of Deutsche Bank has issued threats to the Russian government.

Deutsche Bank London Threatens to End Business With Russia
Bloomberg, 3 hours ago

Deutsche Bank AG threatened to end business with Russia's government earlier this year in a letter sent to the state demanding that it provide more information related to know-your-customer records.

The lender's London branch sent the correspondence in June saying the business relationship could be terminated if Russia failed to submit the documents within 30 days. While that deadline has long since elapsed, Russia never answered the letter and the German bank hasn't followed up on the initial request, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

Arschlöcher!

I was working only yesterday and last week as well in the main office of Deutsche Bank here in Moscow.

Never saw no Fritzes there, only Ivans. Seemed to be business as usual to me..

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NORTHERN STAR August 22, 2018 at 1:56 pm

Hmmm ..When the limited hangout truth expose' is found to be MSM vetted lies:

"Wikileaks formulated its mandate on its website as follows:

"[Wikileaks will be] an uncensorable version of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their own governments and corporations," CBC News – Website wants to take whistleblowing online, January 11, 2007, emphasis added).

This mandate was confirmed by Julian Assange in a June 2010 interview in The New Yorker:

******"Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behavior in their own governments and corporations. (quoted in WikiLeaks and Julian Paul Assange : The New Yorker, June 7, 2010, emphasis added)*****

Assange also intimated that "exposing secrets" "could potentially bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality -- including the US administration." (Ibid)

From the outset, Wikileaks' geopolitical focus on "oppressive regimes" in Eurasia and the Middle East was "appealing" to America's elites, i.e. it seemingly matched stated US foreign policy objectives. Moreover, the composition of the Wikileaks team (which included Chinese dissidents), not to mention the methodology of "exposing secrets" of foreign governments, were in tune with the practices of US covert operations geared towards triggering "regime change" and fostering "color revolutions" in different parts of the World."

"The Role of the Corporate Media: The Central Role of the New York Times

Wikileaks is not a typical alternative media initiative. The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel are directly involved in the editing and selection of leaked documents. The London Economist has also played an important role.

While the project and its editor Julian Assange reveal a commitment and concern for truth in media, the recent Wikileaks releases of embassy cables have been carefully "redacted" by the mainstream media in liaison with the US government. (See Interview with David E. Sanger, Fresh Air, PBS, December 8, 2010)

This collaboration between Wikileaks and selected mainstream media is not fortuitous; it was part of an agreement between several major US and European newspapers and Wikileaks' editor Julian Assange"

https://www.globalresearch.ca/who-is-behind-wikileaks-2/22389

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NORTHERN STAR August 22, 2018 at 2:24 pm

https://syria360.wordpress.com/2018/08/21/which-war-for-mesopotamia/

"In the coming month, following Eid al-Adha (August 21st), Iraq will be on the horns of a dilemma. The Federal Court has confirmed the results of the manual recount of the May parliamentary elections with insignificant changes to the previously announced results. After the holiday the Iraqi coalition that can assemble more than 165 parliamentary seats will have to choose the new ruler of the country. Whoever is selected as Prime Minister, whether he is pro-US, pro-Iran or even a neutral personality, will not save Iraq from serious consequences and difficult years ahead. If the new government implements the sanctions on Iran announced by interim PM Abadi, internal unrest and insecurity can be expected in the country. Many Iraqis, including some armed groups, will refuse what is perceived as US interference, and US forces themselves will likely come under fire. If the sanctions are not implemented, Iraq will face serious US sanctions in turn, international companies will pull out, and the return of the terrorist group ISIS (ISIL, Daesh) cannot be excluded. Any decision will certainly have a major effect on the economy of Mesopotamia, and perhaps even on its security."

"In Iraq, there is no political consensus over strategic decisions: the unilateral decision on Iran sanctions taken by interim Prime Minister Haidar Abadi needs parliamentary approval so that the representative of the Iraqi people can assume responsibility for taking the country into an unknown future. The Iraqi Foreign Ministry has rejected Abadi's unilateral decision, and so did most Iraqi political groups with Ministers in the government. The Iraqi Vice President Nouri al-Maliki, Abadi's Da'wa party, and many others, rejected the Prime Minister's action against Iran and in favour of the US. Many said overtly that "Iraq will certainly not be part of the US plan to hit Iran."

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KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 3:07 pm

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-22/us-navy-releases-video-system-counter-russia-and-china-ship-killer-missiles

Before the infallible, exceptional chauvinists get too smug, they should consider that this missile has essentially no chance against a maneuvering (i.e. non ballistic) missile with a speed of Mach 20 such as the "Kinzhal".

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KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 3:08 pm

Oops, Mach 10 not 20. Even a Mach 4 non-ballistic missile would render the ESSM ineffective.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 4:48 pm

The ESSM has been around for quite awhile; even Canada has it.

https://www.naval-technology.com/projects/halifax/

The amazing new capability owes much to an active seeker in the missile rather than the traditional semi-active homing. What's the drawback to an active seeker? That's right; it is vulnerable to jamming and decoys.

https://www.wearethemighty.com/gear-tech/sea-sparrow-sam-upgrade

It's still only a medium-range missile, good out to about 27 nautical miles. It's quite capable, but it's not a new revolution.

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KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 5:15 pm

Active seeking a randomly varying trajectory target is not a guarantee of success. In addition, Russia is not some rinky dink banana republic which cannot give the Kinzhal active trajectory modification capability. It would be a rather tractable upgrade. The key here is response lag. A Mach 4+ missile engaging a Mach 10 missile does not have the time to overcome its response lag.

Also, think of the ESSM as standing still as the Kinzhal moves at Mach 5+. So there is a narrow cone of interception that limits the ESSM; it has to attack the Mach 10 missile from the front. So it must detect it early enough. The standard design feature of Soviet and Russian anti-ship missiles is near surface flight below radar detection altitude. The Kinzhal could be undetected until 14 km from the target. At Mach 10 this gives it 14000/3320 = 4.2 seconds to impact. During this small window the ESSM has to launch and reach top speed. That would take at least 2 seconds. In the remaining 2.2 seconds the Kinzhal can deflect its trajectory much more easily than the ESSM can respond and thus can effectively delay it from interception. This requires a trajectory animation to make vivid. But the US Navy is clearly compensating for the shock of the Kinzhal characteristics.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 5:59 pm

That's true, and it's true of all SAMs that their weakest intercept profile is that against a crossing target; the textbook approach is head-on. Which presupposes the unit firing the ESSM is itself the target. If it's anyone else, the chances of a successful intercept are reduced, and the higher the crossing rate, the less the probability, although frankly it would be zero from the get-go against something so fast. So ESSM cannot protect another unit unless it is right alongside the firing unit, and bunching up like that would be inadvisable for any number of reasons.

However, soft-kill measures enjoy a considerable advantage over hard-kill, although most of the money goes to hard-kill because it's so much more glamorous. In most navies. Not in Russia, though, where ESM, ECM and decoys are among the most effective and best-tested in the world. Such systems are made specifically for active homers, although jammers are effective against surveillance and acquisition radars as well.

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KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 6:59 pm

Indeed, a wall of shrapnel from some sort of "curtain" defense system would go a long way to shredding the incoming missile. The speed on the incoming missile makes the shredding easier.

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PATIENT OBSERVER August 22, 2018 at 6:48 pm

In that the US likely does not have a missile that is in the same league as the Kinzhal, I wonder what they used as a target for their testing? Or, its just a sop to make us Americans feel exceptional?

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KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 7:00 pm

The US does not have any hypersonic missiles. It would not have any dummy target that would have the characteristics of the Kinzhal. Much like all of its vaunted ABM system tests were against purely ballistic targets.

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PATIENT OBSERVER August 22, 2018 at 7:28 pm

.. that carried flares for a strong infrared signal and radar reflectors plus having foreknowledge of the timing of launch and general trajectory.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 8:36 pm

They probably ran the numbers in a simulator, and said sure, we could stop it. They fly missiles as targets all the time, missiles they have either captured or bought through third parties. They just fasten it to the rails on the bottom of a fighter, turn on the seeker head, and use the plane to simulate a missile. The plane doesn't fly as fast, of course, but that is an artificiality that is built into the test. They simply assume it was flying at the correct speed, and assess whether you got your chaff into the air in time to stop the real thing, or whether your jammer successfully decoyed the seeker. They can play that one out regardless how fast the 'missile' is going – if the head loses lock, it probably would miss. In that scenario, the 'missile' flying slower than real time actually works to its advantage; the real thing would have less time to reacquire you, if it has that capability, because its run to the target is a lot shorter.

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KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 3:18 pm

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/russias-strikes-on-terrorists-in-syria-killed-over-86000-militants-mod/

"A total of 830 gang leaders, more than 86,000 militants, including 4,500 immigrants from the Russian Federation and the CIS countries, were eliminated,"

Excellent job! Especially in the case of the vermin from the ex-USSR.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 5:37 pm

That seems a little arbitrary, considering that British rug-dealer or whatever he is from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights keeps saying a little over 10,000 civilians were killed. Is it possible Russian strikes were so accurate that more than 8 times as many militants were killed as civilians, even with Uncle Sam helping?

Mind you, I don't think anyone really knows with very much certainty, because some outfit calling itself the Syrian Center for Policy Research claims there were over 470,000 killed in Syria.

KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 5:58 pm

I think that there was sufficient sampling by the SAA and Russian special forces of the various attack locations to make these numbers credible. Russia was using precision guided bombing so it had to identify viable targets. Satellites are not enough. Drones can get a good sense of the militant count if they are given enough time.

I guess the could put error bars on these numbers. But the average citizen wouldn't know what to make of them.

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KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 5:55 pm

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-22/john-bolton-warns-assad-we-will-respond-if-chemical-weapons-used-idlib

Expect more White Helmet jihadi theater. Idlib is basically the last terrorist enclave of note left in Syria. Assad apparently is a masochist since he will stage some small and totally pointless chemical weapons attack to give the US and its minions all sorts of pretexts to do more harm than this chemical weapons "win" could ever produce. The SAA now does not have to be spread thin to deal with a thousands of kilometers long frontline so the Idlib operation should be a mop up and not some epic battle.

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KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 6:40 pm

https://sana.sy/en/?p=145238

More from SANA on this issue.

It appears that HRW and other western war enabling organizations have been running around claiming that Syria uses cluster bombs. Yeah, if that was the case there would be vast amounts of evidence. Like there was in Serbia in 1999 after NATzO used cluster munitions.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 8:28 pm

Using cluster bombs is bad? Gosh; who knew?

https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/05/06/yemen-saudis-using-us-cluster-munitions

Maybe Syria should consider buying its cluster bombs from Uncle Sam. Those ones are apparently approved for use.

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TROND August 23, 2018 at 1:28 pm

Sometimes Nobel Peace Prize winners use those weapons

Al-Majalah camp attack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Majalah_camp_attack

"The al-Majalah camp attack also referred to as the al-Majalah massacre[1] occurred on December 17, 2009 when the United States military launched Tomahawk cruise missiles from a ship off the Yemeni coast on a Bedouin camp in the southern village of al-Majalah in Yemen, killing 14 alleged Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula fighters and 41 civilians,[2][3][4][5][6] including 14 women and 21 children."

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KIRILL August 23, 2018 at 3:45 pm

Who cares about 41 faceless innocent civilians when crooks like Litvinenko and Skripal are made into some sort of heavenly martyrs. Apparently, it is OK for Mossad to off opponents of Israel, but if Russia HYPOTHETICALLY does it, then it is the crime of the millennium. The west is a sick joke.

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PATIENT OBSERVER August 22, 2018 at 6:55 pm

I think that train has sailed. No more embarrassingly feeble cruise missile attacks and no-fly zones are a distant memory. The main efforts may be focused on sabotaging reconstruction and unleashing saturation propaganda attacks as cover during the retreat from Syria.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 8:39 pm

Maybe, but the American hawks have not just gone to sleep, and are always trying out a new 'red line' to see if it will win public support. You're right that they're mostly just going through the motions, but I get the feeling that if they ever came up with the right message – another Iraqis-ripping-babies-out-of-incubators story – that would resonate with the public, they'd be pretty glad to get back in there, and it wouldn't take them long because they haven't actually left yet. They're just marking time and hoping for a break.

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PATIENT OBSERVER August 23, 2018 at 3:46 am

They can and will likely try an over-the-top propaganda hit piece but a majority of Americans have drama-fatigue. We are saturated with BS news and no longer care.

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KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 6:57 pm

https://t.co/ADQS6HoJji

The first batch of 100 Armata T-14 tanks have been ordered. Extensive testing of these tanks will be initiated in 2019. Given all the testing that has been done already, this is nothing like the case with ships. This is some sort of formality likely focusing on the unit failure rate out in the field.

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PATIENT OBSERVER August 22, 2018 at 7:08 pm

That is a significant number. So much for the theory that the tank was to be put on ice. I suppose that perhaps 1,000 would be needed to have a strategic impact but 100 is a pretty good start. The other related systems (the self-propelled artillery, armored personnel carrier, etc.) may be of equal significance. I wonder how many of those will be ordered. The self-propelled artillery sytem in particular seemed to be a breakthrough in capability.

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KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 7:41 pm

Apparently there are 32 T-15 units in this package. I have not seen numbers on the latest MSTA howitzer.

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MOSCOW EXILE August 22, 2018 at 7:00 pm

Poroshenko has promised to make the Ukrainian army the strongest in Europe
August 23, 2018, 01:49


Porky and the boys

The Ukrainian army will be the strongest in Europe, said the President of the Ukraine Petro Poroshenko at a veterans' forum in Kiev.

According to him, nobody can prevent the Ukraine from joining NATO, and the army will be so strong, because the Ukrainians are "fighting for peace".

"We have been completely re-engineering the entire security sector, including the armed forces, fully to NATO standards. And the main message that I have brought back from the NATO summit : the doors of NATO are open for the Ukraine, no matter what Russia says. And the key message for Russia is: you cannot stop the Euro-Atlantic integration of our country", Poroshenko is quoted as having said on the August 22 edition of "NewsOne".

The Ukrainian President noted that the country has to do a lot of work to do in order to achieve such objectives .

Porky, you fat twat! Russia need say nothing whenever you open your filthy snout!

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KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 7:03 pm

When will these retarded fucks ever shut up. Even his vaunted 160,000 strong "reservist" army is certain to be a joke. It will be a generation before Ukraine can get its army shit together. That is assuming its economy does not implode. The chances of economic failure are increasing by the hour.

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PATIENT OBSERVER August 22, 2018 at 7:04 pm

Looks photo shopped.

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YALENSIS August 23, 2018 at 1:41 pm

You beat me to the punch, P.O.! Most of the troops look like the same, and the Porky figure is clearly a photoshopped cut-out. The real Porky would not be so stupid as to stand in front of all those guns.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 8:46 pm

In that picture you can see about 160 people. How do we know that's not all of them, just pulled in tight for the shot?

Porky has to keep broadcasting that we're-gonna-be-in-NATO signal to reassure the Ukrainian public that he's not getting paid for doing nothing. I am pretty sure the encouragement he hears for Ukraine to be in NATO is all in his imagination, or he's just making it up. Ukraine would be an enormous liability, and I am sure Europe is only too conscious that the United States would be the most likely to provoke an Article-5 situation using Ukraine, but it would be Europe who would have to fight the war.

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MOSCOW EXILE August 22, 2018 at 10:17 pm

Isn't that Chipmunk Prince William of the UK standing first left and his clone at 4th right?

There are several chipmunks there, as a matter of fact.

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YALENSIS August 23, 2018 at 1:42 pm

And they are all wearing, like, Lone Ranger masks!

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JEN August 22, 2018 at 9:47 pm

What happened to Porky wearing army fatigues? Couldn't he get any in his size?

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MOSCOW EXILE August 22, 2018 at 7:03 pm

The BBC continues to fight the good fight:

The memes that might get you jailed in Russia
3 hours ago

Oh doooo fahk orrrf!

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MARK CHAPMAN August 22, 2018 at 8:57 pm

Memes that can get you kicked off an airplane in America.

https://fox2now.com/2015/03/23/man-kicked-off-southwest-flight-over-language-on-t-shirt/

But but .muh FREEDOM!!!

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PATIENT OBSERVER August 22, 2018 at 7:03 pm

McCain is walking talking proof that sociopaths are fast-tracked for success. There never was a man, in my opinion, in US politics that was more exploitative, coldly calculating and utterly ruthless than that bag of shit.

But, Mark said it much better with style, slashing wit and evidence.

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KIRILL August 22, 2018 at 7:04 pm

The problem with such talented men is that they have no talent in anything else. They get to the top and then poop on our heads.

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MOSCOW EXILE August 22, 2018 at 10:11 pm

The Russian Ministry of Defence has published previously classified documents about the Battle of Kursk on the eve of the 75th anniversary of that huge Soviet victory over the invading Nazi forces in August 1943.

Of course, the Germans suffered a defeat at Kursk because of the horrendous cold that is common in Western Russia during the summer months, not to mention the imported from the USA cans of Spam that the Red Army infantry chucked between the German armour track idler wheels so that the tracks would jam.

See: Kursk

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MARK CHAPMAN August 23, 2018 at 8:31 am

That would be General Winter and Colonel Spam.

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MOSCOW EXILE August 22, 2018 at 10:34 pm

ARSEHOLES!

https://i1.wp.com/off-guardian.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/embassy-tweet.jpg?ssl=1

See: The Welsh Orchestra Defying the Ukrainian Coup Regime

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CORTES August 23, 2018 at 11:47 am

So, in as neat an inversion of reality as possible in BizarroWorld Ukraine no longer needs a definite article in English but "the Russia" does?

Mighty Ukraine, cradle of western humanity!

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MOSCOW EXILE August 22, 2018 at 10:36 pm

What sad fucks!

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MARK CHAPMAN August 23, 2018 at 8:35 am

Maybe the Welsh are visiting Crimea to show their support for Ukraine! And to blow their symphonic brass instruments of hope to encourage the prisoners there to pluck up their courage, against the day they will at last be free.

I would just tell them that, anyway. What could be the answer to that? Should I show my support for Kiev by staying away from it?

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MOSCOW EXILE August 23, 2018 at 1:53 am

Tomorrow is Ukraine Independence Day.

Verkhovna Rada Deputy Oleg Barna of the "Blok Petro Poroshenko" has said live on air on the Ukrainian TV channel NewsOne that the Ukraine armed forces parade in honour of Independence Day "could give rise to an earthquake in the Kremlin".

We have something to boast about. The parade is a measure of the patriotism of all citizens who want to see the fighting efficiency of our army I think that our military march and the rumble of our armoured vehicles should cause an earthquake in the Kremlin.

Source: RT [Russian]

Stupid prick!

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MARK CHAPMAN August 23, 2018 at 8:37 am

Any time you feel like trying.

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MOSCOW EXILE August 23, 2018 at 2:02 am

And get this:

Украинские спецслужбы, украинцы должны уделить внимание, возможно через наших союзников на Кавказе, уничтожению Крымского моста.
-- Игорь Мосийчук

Perhaps with the help of our allies in the Caucusus, the Ukraine intelligence services and Ukrainians should focus their attention on the destruction of the Crimea Bridge
-- Ihor Mosiychuk [Ukrainian Supreme Rada Deputy]

Source: RIA Novosti [Russian]

Now if Mosiychuk were to waddle by the Kremlin, then there well might be an earthquake there.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 23, 2018 at 1:09 pm

I thought they wanted Russia to present it to them as a gift? As an expression of good will?

If Ukraine wants a massive war so badly, then perhaps that is what is in the cards. But if there is a third World War, Ukraine will be utterly destroyed, razed to its foundations. Its self-satisfied fat-cat leaders do not appear to grasp this, because life is actually pretty good for them the way it is.

If there is no war, and things go on as they are, eventually there will be another revolution in Ukraine and the fat oligarch who runs it will flee for his life. If past performance is any standard of measure, then the Ukrainians will elect another rich oligarch, and settle down to hope that things will get better.

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JEN August 23, 2018 at 2:12 pm

The Yukies decided instead to follow Tom Rogan's recommendation to destroy the bridge. After all, if the opinion comes from an American, then it must be the right opinion and the best option.

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KIRILL August 23, 2018 at 3:41 pm

The best that Banderastan can do is engage in terrorism. They can send car bombs or plant IEDs on the road and create havoc. If they try a military solution, their military will be heavily degraded.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 23, 2018 at 4:47 pm

If 'heavily degraded' means 'run through a meat grinder and then rolled flat', then yes. The Ukrainian Army is no match for the Russian Army, and could not even slow it down, never mind stop it.

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PATIENT OBSERVER August 23, 2018 at 6:37 pm

Bringing down the bridge is a Ukie wet dream (ha ha).

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MOSCOW EXILE August 23, 2018 at 2:16 am

Rehearsal of tomorrow's Independence Day parade in Kiev:

Independence Day they say?

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PATIENT OBSERVER August 23, 2018 at 3:42 am

Nicely said.

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CARTMAN August 23, 2018 at 4:16 am

The Ukrainian flag is also in the wrong shade of blue.

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MOSCOW EXILE August 23, 2018 at 4:40 am

They must be running out of the correct dyestuff.

Rehearsals for last year's Independence Day:

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YALENSIS August 23, 2018 at 1:54 pm

It is American law that Old Glory must always be held higher than any other nation's flag. So there!

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KIRILL August 23, 2018 at 3:39 pm

Reality is relative. One man's crawling up the ass of a foreign power is the purest expression of freedom, for another it is the depth of repression.

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ET AL August 23, 2018 at 2:22 am

Consequently I have only a handful of tweets, and almost no followers.

Careful there Mark, that's how Jesus started and look what's happened since! 😉

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MARK CHAPMAN August 23, 2018 at 1:12 pm

Jesus was never on Twitter. He would not be possessed of inexhaustible patience if he were.

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YALENSIS August 23, 2018 at 1:56 pm

My father, who was a professor, used to say: "Jesus was a great teacher, but he didn't publish enough to get tenure."

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ET AL August 24, 2018 at 1:30 am

That's true, but

JEN August 23, 2018 at 2:18 pm

Jesus would not stay very long on Twitter. People would take his tweets all too literally and he would get tired of having to explain for the umpteenth time that he didn't believe that a camel really could walk through the eye of a needle.

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ET AL August 23, 2018 at 2:24 am

Moon of Alabama: Facebook Kills "Inauthentic" Foreign News Accounts – U.S. Propaganda Stays Alive
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/08/facebook-kills-inauthentic-foreign-news-accounts-us-propaganda-stays-alive.html

####

Diaspora , an open alternative to Facebook, has already been around for quite a few years but as you can imagine is not so slick. How long until other alternatives start vying for attention (advertizing)?

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MARK CHAPMAN August 23, 2018 at 1:41 pm

FireEye is the same outfit that claimed to have busted a ring of Russian hackers trying to gain access to American military secrets. They could tell because the 'cyberweapon' was built on Russian-language machines, and during working hours in Moscow. As if Russians smart enough to build an electronic weapon that evades detection and spreads itself to firewalled machines kept off the internet would be stupid enough to code in Russian and leave clues like that which pointed back straight at them. These days nothing says 'CIA' like use of the Russian language in contested online communication.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hacking-trail-leads-to-russia-experts-say-1414468869

It's curious that we have two emerging narratives, one factual and one offered as fact. The factual one; the USA has been involved for decades in dominating the internet, and for generations in spreading American influence around the world by all available means, frequently disguised and often under the control if its intelligence agencies. No country in the world places as high a priority as the United States on maintaining American control over the internet and everything that happens on it; the biggest browsers and the giants of social media are all American. Now the second narrative – suddenly every country which is declared an enemy of 'American values' is attacking America with sophisticated social-media and hacking attacks online. Every time an American security firm 'busts' a new effort, the evidence is always stupidly obvious, like "Americans should not vote for the Jezebel Hillary Clinton; if you know what is good for you, you will vote for Trump, insh' Allah".

Suddenly Iran is launching sophisticated cyber-attacks against the USA, although they have never done it before and Iran has only a tiny presence on the internet. Just at the moment when Washington is looking for a reason to impose crippling sanctions upon them and institute regime change. A little convenient, isn't it?

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MOSCOW EXILE August 23, 2018 at 4:50 am

Here's that Porky pic again, published by the official Ukrainian media:

Beautiful background -- great, but someone has spotted something strange about it .

Take a closer look

and even closer

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MOSCOW EXILE August 23, 2018 at 4:54 am

It Is believed that this small person is one of the tactical combat dwarfs that sit in the backpacks of airborne troops.

On the other hand, he could be a spy from Moscow.

source

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CORTES August 23, 2018 at 1:19 pm

To me .to you

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-45074955

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MOSCOW EXILE August 23, 2018 at 5:54 pm

Sad news, that. They made me chuckle.

Someone once said or wrote: "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there".

I remember how where the Chuckle Brothers came from was just like my old neck of the woods, but now, in both these places, heavy industry has come and gone.

It was L.P. Hartley whom I quoted above: just looked it up.

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YALENSIS August 23, 2018 at 1:58 pm

It's the dwarf Chernomor, in Ruslan's backpack. [Pushkin literary allusion]

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KIRILL August 23, 2018 at 3:37 pm

Come on, it's obviously Satan!

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PATIENT OBSERVER August 23, 2018 at 4:49 pm

Close but not quite Alfred E. Neuman.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 23, 2018 at 5:44 pm

Looks to me like Danny Woodburn , who played Mickey Abbot on 'Seinfeld'.

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JEN August 23, 2018 at 8:50 pm

More likely, this employment of tactical combat dwarves is evidence of Australian military advice to Ukrainians.

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MOSCOW EXILE August 23, 2018 at 5:07 am

Did I read this right?

Moscow Times, Aug. 20 2018 – 17:08

More Than 100 Fan ID Holders Are Seeking Asylum in Russia, Aid Group Says

Scores of asylum seekers who entered Russia with World Cup fan identity documents are seeking legal help in Moscow, in an attempt to escape war, political repression and homophobia, a refugee assistance group has said.

Russia introduced visa-free travel for holders of Fan IDs during the football tournament this summer, later extending the measure until the end of 2018 on President Vladimir Putin's orders. During the tournament, dozens of Fan ID holders reportedly tried to enter Europe illegally using Fan IDs.

Seeking asylum to escape homophobia ?

In RUSSIA ???

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JAMES LAKE August 23, 2018 at 9:00 am

These hundred people must have bought tickets to the World Cup to get the visa. Plus the cost of a flight

Flying over how many safe countries to get to Russia?

Then claimed asylum ?

Shows the danger of visa free travel

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CORTES August 23, 2018 at 11:51 am

Sponsored by the Gaydars, presumably.

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CORTES August 23, 2018 at 1:51 pm

It's always tempting to think that pieces which resonate mean that one's suspicions have some merit, but, hey, give it up for Gilbert Doctorow's conclusions

https://russia-insider.com/en/trump-pushing-germany-and-russia-settle-their-differences-and-he-doing-it-purpose/ri24544

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NORTHERN STAR August 23, 2018 at 2:05 pm

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/23/dung-a23.html

"The family of David Dungay Jr, a 26-year-old Aboriginal killed at Sydney's Long Bay jail in 2015, have stepped-up their campaign for justice after footage was played at the New South Wales Coroner's Court last month revealing the violent assault that led to his tragic death.

The video was played in the course of an ongoing coronial inquest into Dungay's killing. It showed that in the moments before he died five immediate action team (IAT) prison officers stormed Dungay's cell, restraining him and smothering him face-down on a bed. Dungay could be heard crying out 12 times that he "couldn't breathe." (SOUND FAMILIAR??)

The guards attacked Dungay because he allegedly refused to stop eating biscuits. After being smothered Dungay was hauled into another cell. Multiple officers once again forced him face-down on the bed to prevent him from struggling.

Dungay was administered an injection of midazolam, a powerful sedative that also produces anterograde amnesia. A few minutes later he had stopped breathing. The officers were still holding him down."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-16/warning-harrowing-video-dungay-being-restrained-by-officers/9999426

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NORTHERN STAR August 23, 2018 at 2:33 pm

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/23/pers-a23.html

Human6 • 11 hours ago
Much as I despise him, Orwell did make a valuable observation about euphemisms and the English language:

****"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. ***

Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness."

Spot on!!!!

Oh .and Stooges

"You better watch out, you better not cry
Better not pout, I'm telling you why
Santa Claus is comin' to town
He's making a list and checking it twice
Gonna find out who's naughty and nice
Santa Claus is comin' to town
He sees you when you're sleepin'
He knows when you're a wake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake"

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NORTHERN STAR August 23, 2018 at 2:50 pm

"Le principal résultat de la présente vague d'accusations de harcčlement sexuel est l'érosion des droits démocratiques élémentaires aux États-Unis, incluant la présomption d'innocence et l'équité procédurale, l'obligation légale de la poursuite de faire la preuve de la culpabilité de l'accusé hors de tout doute raisonnable. Ces "gauchistes" qui célčbrent cet assaut jouent un jeu trčs dangereux et réactionnaire. Comme Léon Trotsky l'a déjŕ dit: "La théorie, aussi bien que l'expérience historique, témoigne du fait que toute restriction démocratique dans la société bourgeoise est éventuellement dirigée contre le prolétariat, de la męme maničre que les taxes tombent éventuellement sur les épaules du prolétariat." "

Yup!!!

However when contemplating the growth of the ME Too movement, it's interesting to note the commensurate near deification of vapid sluts and whores by the MSM whereby manufactured 'celebrity' women-aka Divas-market the wholesale debasement and sexualization of women as cnts for sale ..

http://www.wsws.org/fr/articles/2018/08/23/chap-a23.html

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PATIENT OBSERVER August 23, 2018 at 5:19 pm

Here is my take on the priorities of the deep state and its public face – the MSM:
– stopping the deplorable rebellion
– cutting off the head of the rebellion – perceived as Trump
– reinstating the Cold War in an effort to derail Rusisa's recovery and international leadership role
– bitch slapping China

The rest involves turning unsustainable debt into establishment of a feudal world comprised of elites living on Mount Olympus, legions of vassals and a vast sea of cerebrally castrated peasants to serve as a reservoir for any imaginable exploitation.

Won't happen, not even close.

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KIRILL August 23, 2018 at 6:03 pm

My impression is that around the year 2000 there was supposed to a new world order. Communism was sabotaged and brought down. That left the imperialist capitalists in charge, like they were before 1917. Globalism is a dirty word, since it means global domination by the USA and its NATzO minions and the countries that depend on the US empire. This would include, or should include China and the vanquished Russia (ex-USSR). We saw NATzO supplant the UN as the world police.

Instead we have Russia in a truly phoenix resurgence into superpower status. Don't let the clowns try to argue that Russia's economy is small. It is bigger than Germany's regardless of the PPP correction, which fails to properly weight the whole economy since it is fixated on consumer goods and makes a load of implicit assumptions about which sectors are the biggest. Militarily, Russia is a match for the USA. Difference in the number of aircraft carriers mean bupkis. The Syria campaign shows that the US cannot do anything to stop Russia from severely undermining its agenda. We saw this 2013 when Russia stopped the US planned Libya and Serbia style attack on Syria. This was achieved through deployment of a serious number of Russian missile cruisers and other navy assets to the Mediterranean. The US went foaming mad and pulled its Ukraine card. (I am not sure about the planned timeline for the coup, but I suspect that a more "democratic" approach to regime change was probably more desired, this would have frustrated the return of Crimea).

Since 2013, the US and its minions have lost the initiative. All their big regime change plans are unraveling and they keep losing the ball. Crimea was a serious loss for these clowns. The Khuyiv regime is no prize and its day are numbered since it is watching over an economic collapse. Now they have lost Syria and Russia will establish a moderate Islamic belt from Lebanon to Iran to keep the Wahabbi nutjobs at bay. There were big plans in Washington for Central Asia to be taken over by Saudi managed jihadis. Russia would be stuck in a religious war quagmire on its doorstep. But that evil Putin is f*cking up those plans on a epic scale.

The US deep excrement state is feeling the loss of its promised dominion of the planet. There was never supposed to be any opposition after 1991. The 21st century was supposed to be the American century. But instead we have an economic pole shift to Asia. The shrinkage of NATzO in the global GDP is not stopping but accelerating. By 2050, the precious west will be less than 20% of the world economy. It will cease being an economic Mecca and all the developing country elites will orient themselves to the new economic power locus. This is a nightmare for western capitalist imperialists.

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PATIENT OBSERVER August 23, 2018 at 6:27 pm

Yes, that seems the case. The strategy to promote moderate Islam is a brilliant and humane countermove to the Western games of manipulation of the unfortunate deranged.

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ET AL August 24, 2018 at 1:42 am

For me, I would say that the ' few days of bombing Serbia ' in 1999 ripped any last vestiges of belief that the West was here to help mega violently (deliberate bombing of the Chinese embassy) away from everyone. Of course plenty happened in the years running up to that event The other is when China joined the WTO on 11/12/2001 and hit the ground running – they were expected to behave meekly and ask the great white men for their advice and follow it.

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PATIENT OBSERVER August 23, 2018 at 7:29 pm

Upon further reflection, Trump is being promoted by the MSM as the leader of the deplorables – an orange straw man. I support him to the degree that he is confounding the deep state elites and social engineering.

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MOSCOW EXILE August 23, 2018 at 5:23 pm

Front-page story headline and sub-heading, "The Independent":

ANTI-VACCINE MYTHS ARE BEING PROMOTED BY SOCIAL MEDIA BOTS AND RUSSIAN TROLLS, STUDY
Malicious characters look to use arguments to divide the American public and exploit them
ANDREW GRIFFIN
@_andrew_griffin
2 hours ago

Now read the article.

Anyone find any reference to "Russian trolls" in it, apart from this: " It found many tweets that were posted by the same bots thought to have been used to influence the 2016 election, as well as marketing and malware bots "?

I see: "thought to have been used", writes the "journalist".

And on that supposition the Independent "journalist" rests his case.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 23, 2018 at 6:45 pm

It turns out that many anti-vaccine tweets come from accounts whose provenance is unclear ," said David Broniatowski, an assistant professor in GW's School of Engineering and Applied Science.

"These might be bots, human users or 'cyborgs' – hacked accounts that are sometimes taken over by bots. Although it's impossible to know exactly how many tweets were generated by bots and trolls, our findings suggest that a significant portion of the online discourse about vaccines may be generated by malicious actors with a range of hidden agendas."

Equivocation central – it's amazing what can pass as a 'study' these days. What is even more incredible is that we have arrived at a point in our history when the appearance of debate on a point is suspicious, and inspires 'researchers' to 'study' the problem to see who is behind it rather than focusing on why the point generated debate in the first place. We have arrived at a point where it is actually unpatriotic to disagree with the official narrative.

Many more Americans believe vaccines are safe than the astroturfed 'debate' suggests, found the study. Google says bullshit. A recent Zogby poll of a claimed representative sample group found only 32% of respondents said they were 'very confident' vaccines were safe. The same or a similar question was posed 10 years ago, and the proportion who said they were 'not too confident has risen 3% since then, while those who said they were 'not at all confident' in the safety of vaccines went up by 2%. People are not getting more confident, they're getting less confident. There; that's my study – where's my research grant?

https://thevaccinereaction.org/2018/06/nearly-20-percent-of-americans-think-vaccines-may-be-unsafe-and-45-percent-are-not-sure/

Once again, as soon as the mainstream media finds an argument, it is quick to blame it on unidentified 'Russian trolls', rather than addressing the problem. The state narrative is the law. And the pace is quickening.

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PATIENT OBSERVER August 23, 2018 at 5:32 pm

Stratolaunch – a front for the US military to develop a rapid satellite launch capability?

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a22802701/does-stratolaunch-have-a-top-secret-purpose/

Same for SpaceX? Yeehaw! Catch those Russki's napping!

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KIRILL August 23, 2018 at 5:46 pm

No. Just no. The time for this thing to take off, reach altitude and then fire off its small missile variants is much longer than any ground based LEO interceptor. The only value of this system is that it uses cheaper rockets. But cruising at well under 22 km (U-2 and M-55 top altitude) this flying launch point is still within the deep of the Earth's geopotential well. Its speed is also nothing of interest so that the initial velocity of the rockets it carries are not big enough to matter. May as well just launch from the ground.

This thing can only loft small sized satellites into orbit. An example of such a satellite is Scisat-I which is still in orbit gathering science data.

http://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/satellites/scisat/about.asp

I smell ulterior motives for this platform. Aside from the pork barrel aspect, it is a dual use weapons system. It is probably designed to fly near the border of the "enemy" and carry long range supersonic missiles and cruise missiles.

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PATIENT OBSERVER August 23, 2018 at 6:10 pm

As a launcher of satellite interceptor, it might have some value given its ability to launch closer to the satellite's ground track (if that is a factor). On the other hand it or its facilities can be taken out with a single cruise missile. Russia's mobile anti-satellite interceptors would seem to be much more survivable.

I suppose the idea is that a number of rockets can be prepped and then launched at perhaps at a rate of 3-4 per day – perhaps to replenish destroyed satellites as suggested by the article. But such activities would suggest a general war and we are back to its vulnerability to a modest attack.

The idea of the plane serving as a cruise missile platform is interesting but the plane has a fairly short range and probably is a maintenance nightmare. Wait, that makes it perfect fit for most defense programs.

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KIRILL August 23, 2018 at 5:38 pm

The people yelling loudest about myths can be the biggest myth spreaders out there.

In order to make vaccines useful, they are mixed with adjuvants which are primarily aluminum based. This creates inflammation at the location the vaccine is administered with a needle. The macrophages then consume the pieces of no-active virus or bacteria and the immune system learns to make antibodies that for that strain. During future infections the response time is vastly shorter and any mutation is more likely to not take too long to respond to before effective antibodies are produced.

The problem with the above is that inducing inflammation involving aluminum and other molecules in the vaccine concoction can trigger an auto-immune syndrome in some fraction of a percentage of the population. Their immune systems are too hyperactive and not particularly precise in identifying actual foreign molecules instead of similar ones in the body. A variation on this theme is that Type I diabetics lose their beta cells due to an auto-immune response triggered by milk product intake.

The kooks would have everyone not use vaccines. That is not the solution. But it is a fact that no procedure exists to tag people with a predisposition to auto-immune reactions and have them dealt with in a safer way. The real myth is that vaccines are universally safe. And I have not even gotten into the whole issue of the use of ethyl-mercury as a vaccine preservative. Both ethyl- and methyl-mercury are potent neurotoxins.

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PATIENT OBSERVER August 23, 2018 at 5:55 pm

An update on an old topic:

https://www.thesourcemagazine.org/how-the-water-sector-helps-to-map-drug-abuse/?utm_source=IWA-NETWORK&utm_campaign=167938470d-The_Source_newsletter_19April2019_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c457ab9803-167938470d-158917901

Released in early 2018, the study's findings found methamphetamine usage highest in Cyprus, eastern Germany, Finland and Norway. Cocaine, on the other hand, was both on the rise and most concentrated in cities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK.

Surprising almost no one, wastewater epidemiologists confirmed "cocaine and psychedelic MDMA (ecstasy) levels rose sharply at weekends in most cities, while amphetamine use appeared to be more evenly distributed throughout the week."

The above data is lacking quantification so not as interesting as it could have been.

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MOSCOW EXILE August 23, 2018 at 6:30 pm
KIRILL August 23, 2018 at 8:01 pm

Thick and rich coming from backstabbers. K hohlu schas net bolshe doverya, i bolshe nikogda ne budet. Eat shit banderite morons.

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MURDOCK August 23, 2018 at 9:15 pm

Looks like they are well suited to one another and should get along splendidly.

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MOSCOW EXILE August 23, 2018 at 6:34 pm

Should have been "I invite everyone " above.

Porky's personal invitation to come and watch representatives of the greatest army in Europe on parade.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 23, 2018 at 9:05 pm

Gazprom leads the world in capital expenditure (capex) on global energy projects, by a wide, wide margin – $160 Billion to be spent on 84 projects worldwide, including Nord Stream II and Turkish Stream. That's nearly double the spending of its next-closest competitor, Sinopec, at $87 Billion. Royal Dutch Shell is third, and Exxon a distant fourth.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2018/08/22/russias-gazprom-is-worlds-biggest-energy-investor/#5a7465fb3553

If you add Rosneft, that's another $50 Billion in capex for Russia. Odd behaviour for an isolated country whose economy is in tatters. One whose government debt is 12.6 % of GDP and declining.

https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/government-debt-to-gdp

Speaking of government debt, how's that parameter looking for The Exceptional Nation? Whoa: that's exceptional. Not even much point in expressing it as a percentage of GDP, I guess.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-debt

Just to drive the point home for any who might not have gotten it, Russia – friendless, alone against the world, and reeling from the bite of American sanctions – is outspending the USA nearly three to one on global energy investments, although its debt is a tiny fraction of America's out-of-control spending on other important things, like its bloated defense budget.

Oh, that's right – Vladimir Putin is a tyrant and a dictator, squeezing the country dry in neverending pursuit of self-enrichment. I almost forgot.

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MURDOCK August 23, 2018 at 9:11 pm

Very well written Mark! It would seem I enjoy your writing most when you are on a sass and sarcasm roll, of which this particular piece is a great example. Bravo!

Incidentally this particular issue is something that I had completely missed. Though it does seem to be part of the recent purge of opposition voices in social media. A development that I fear may be just starting.

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MARK CHAPMAN August 23, 2018 at 9:31 pm

Thanks, Murdock! And I sort of missed it as well, although I think we cannot be blamed as it seems to have gone into overnight overdrive based on a silent admission to itself by the west that it is not winning the propaganda war by simply shouting "Russians!!!" every time something goes wrong for it. Like many a fool before, it has gone to the well too many times, and the audience for that sort of guff is dwindling. So the new game is restrict what the people read and hear.

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[Aug 24, 2018] ANTI-VACCINE MYTHS ARE BEING PROMOTED BY SOCIAL MEDIA BOTS AND RUSSIAN TROLLS, STUDY

Aug 24, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOW EXILE August 23, 2018 at 5:23 pm

Front-page story headline and sub-heading, "The Independent":

ANTI-VACCINE MYTHS ARE BEING PROMOTED BY SOCIAL MEDIA BOTS AND RUSSIAN TROLLS, STUDY
Malicious characters look to use arguments to divide the American public and exploit them
ANDREW GRIFFIN
@_andrew_griffin
2 hours ago

Now read the article.

Anyone find any reference to "Russian trolls" in it, apart from this: " It found many tweets that were posted by the same bots thought to have been used to influence the 2016 election, as well as marketing and malware bots "?

I see: "thought to have been used", writes the "journalist".

And on that supposition the Independent "journalist" rests his case.

Like

MARK CHAPMAN August 23, 2018 at 6:45 pm

It turns out that many anti-vaccine tweets come from accounts whose provenance is unclear ," said David Broniatowski, an assistant professor in GW's School of Engineering and Applied Science.

"These might be bots, human users or 'cyborgs' – hacked accounts that are sometimes taken over by bots. Although it's impossible to know exactly how many tweets were generated by bots and trolls, our findings suggest that a significant portion of the online discourse about vaccines may be generated by malicious actors with a range of hidden agendas."

Equivocation central – it's amazing what can pass as a 'study' these days. What is even more incredible is that we have arrived at a point in our history when the appearance of debate on a point is suspicious, and inspires 'researchers' to 'study' the problem to see who is behind it rather than focusing on why the point generated debate in the first place. We have arrived at a point where it is actually unpatriotic to disagree with the official narrative.

Many more Americans believe vaccines are safe than the astroturfed 'debate' suggests, found the study. Google says bullshit. A recent Zogby poll of a claimed representative sample group found only 32% of respondents said they were 'very confident' vaccines were safe. The same or a similar question was posed 10 years ago, and the proportion who said they were 'not too confident has risen 3% since then, while those who said they were 'not at all confident' in the safety of vaccines went up by 2%. People are not getting more confident, they're getting less confident. There; that's my study – where's my research grant?

https://thevaccinereaction.org/2018/06/nearly-20-percent-of-americans-think-vaccines-may-be-unsafe-and-45-percent-are-not-sure/

Once again, as soon as the mainstream media finds an argument, it is quick to blame it on unidentified 'Russian trolls', rather than addressing the problem. The state narrative is the law. And the pace is quickening.

Like

DRUTTEN August 24, 2018 at 2:27 am

This is how you can tell Americans (and media as a whole, for that matter) truly are stupid.

Okay, first of all: The whole anti-vaccine hysteria is as American as apple pie, going way back to at least 1998 and to a research paper in the medical journal The Lancet linking MMR vaccines to autism spectrum disorders (a paper that was lated found to be severely lacking in scientific rigor) and certain people raising concern about the mercury content in the thiomersal vaccines. This sparked numerous anti-vaccination campaigns all over the US, ranging from concerned but ignorant parent groups all the way to the Alex Jones type of conspiracy guzzlers, and many of these are alive and kicking to this day.

The vaccine controversy rose to new prominence the widely publicized Jenny McCarthy crap in 2007-2008 and was further fueled by the (legitimate, as it happens) swine flu vaccine-linked narcolepsy cases a few years later.

This stuff trends from time to time, and apparently this clickbait farm (that is what it actually is) caught a whiff of it and thus posted a grand total of 253 (!) short-worded tweets with a vaccination hashtag, out of which according to these so-called researchers 43% were "pro-vaccination", 38% "anti-vaccination" and the remainder were neutral.

And they're "sewing division", "threatening our health" and so on Good god, I'm not sure how much more of this I can take to be honest.

This reminds me of a piece of news here in Sweden the other day, namely that the Swedish Social Democrats got their website DDoS-ed twice. I mean, that's to be expected (the elections are coming up shortly, some of these "establishment" parties are not held in high regard in certain demographics and regularly get their election posters torn down or vandalized and so on, DDoS attacks are cheap to order online and so on and so forth. Fine. The "IT expert" at the Social Democratic Party said they'd tracked down the IPs from which the attack came, and these were random IPs in Japan, in South Africa, in Spain, in Korea and in Russia.

Well, duh , it's a distributed denial-of-service attack, using botnets consisting of infected personal computers all over the world, and it's all available for hire on various onion/darknet market websites for a couple of bucks an hour or so. But of course, the media just disregarded the blatantly obvious and instead decided to illustrate the news with a great Russian flag and some hooded hacker-type fellow superimposed.

It just blows my mind. The info war is real, no doubt about it

Like

YALENSIS August 24, 2018 at 3:00 am

Most Americans simply don't understand how science works. In school they are not taught the scientific method, how experiments are conducted, how statistical sampling works, or even anything about statistics period.
Without such knowledge they are left to the human "default" state of mind, which is magical thinking coupled with basic empiricism. As in "My best friend's daughter got the polio vaccine and then was diagnosed with autism " etc etc.

The ignorance is colossal. I have a friend at work who is actually quite brilliant in her own way, but I discovered, in a conversation, that she doesn't understand how computers work, or how language works. She bought some product and is now convinced that computers "understand human speech". I almost despaired in trying to explain to her that computers are only machines and cannot understand human language.

Apparently she was suckered by some of these "AI" products like Siri, Cortana, etc. People don't learn in school how the "natural language" computer processing works. I don't claim to understand these algorithms myself, as this is a very specialized field of Computer Science, and I never really studied it that much. The only bit that I know, is that "Natural Language" algorithms are based on massive database searches coupled with statistical probabilities in the formation of phrases.
Apparently the Computer Science developments in this field were held back for about 10 years due to reliance on Chomsky's theories (of Transformational Grammar), which turned out to be false and fruitless. As people should have known from the start, if only they had read their Alan Turing in school.

Once the wrong-headed Chomskyite approach was abandoned and a more empirical methodology was introduced, then progress started to be made more quickly in the arenas of computer translation, voice recognition, and "natural language" algorithms.
But the main point here is that computers are just machines and cannot actually speak or understand human languages. And yet Americans apparently think that they can. All part of the "magical thinking" mode which is encouraged by The Powers That Be.

Like

ET AL August 24, 2018 at 9:59 am

I was recently told to turn off my mobile/cellphone because of storms and told that more than one person had been hit by lightning not so far away. I asked where it was. A kid outside in a field. I was indoors. I didn't turn it off. I do though unplug stuff if it's going to be a biggie.

Like

NORTHERN STAR August 24, 2018 at 11:31 am

"Apparently the Computer Science developments in this field were held back for about 10 years due to reliance on Chomsky's theories (of Transformational Grammar), which turned out to be false and fruitless. As people should have known from the start, if only they had read their Alan Turing in school."

Ummm Followed by a thorough familiarization Searle's work

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

Like

YALENSIS August 24, 2018 at 4:08 pm

Thanks for the post, it is an interesting article. However, I believe that it misrepresents the fundamental point of Turing's work in his development of the Turing Machine. Turing's legacy is actually (I believe) the opposite of what the layperson thinks it is, since Turing had proved mathematically that "computer" languages are not the same as "natural" languages and cannot be mapped out nor parsed. Turing's proofs basically dismiss (in advance) all of Chomsky's research in the field of so-called transformational grammar.

I would also point out that Roger Schank was a con-man who received unwarranted grant money based on his fictitious research into so-called "Artificial Intelligence".

I put Chomsky in a different category: His work was well-meaning but incorrect. His theories went against Turing's proofs and led researchers down a blind alley. Which resulted in the loss of approximately one decade of what could have been fruitful empirical work. But is catching up now. I notice, for starters, that google translation is getting better than it used to be. But these products like "Siri" and "Alexa" are simply toys, they are like the dancing dolls of the wizard Coppelius.

Like

MARK CHAPMAN August 24, 2018 at 8:21 am

You can also tell the writer is a son of of the uneducated and doltish media himself (I think it was a man, I don't have time now to go back and look); it's 'sowing division', as if division were seeds, rather than 'sewing', as if it were thread.


[Aug 23, 2018] What the Brennan Affair Really Reveals by Stephen Cohen

"My strong suspicion is that 'Russiagate' is a kind of nemesis, arising from the fact that key figures in British and American intelligence have, over a protracted period of time, got involved in intrigues where they are way out of their depth. The unintended consequences of these have meant that people like Brennan and Younger, and also Hannigan, have ended up having to resort to desperate measures to cover their backsides."
Brennan exposed "intelligence community" as a forth branch of government. The branch more powerful that then the other three combined.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that powerful, connected people in the intelligence community and in politics worried that a wildcard Trump presidency, unlike another Clinton or Bush, might expose a decade-plus of questionable practices. Disrupt long-established money channels. Reveal secret machinations that could arguably land some people in prison.
The main suspicion is that Steele's involvement may have been less in crafting the dossier, than making it possible to conceal its actual origins while giving it an appearance of credibility. It could also be the case that Nellie Ohr's sudden interest in radio transmissions had to do with communications inside the United States, rather than with Steele.
Notable quotes:
"... Los Angeles Times ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... It's a misnomer to term these people representatives of a hidden "deep state." In recent years, they have been amply visible on television and newspaper op-ed pages. Instead, they see and present themselves as members of a fully empowered and essential fourth branch of government. ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... To be fair, Brennan may only be a symptom of this profound American crisis, some say the worst since the Civil War. ..."
Aug 23, 2018 | www.thenation.com

Brennan's allegation was unprecedented. No such high-level intelligence official had ever before accused a sitting president of treason, still more in collusion with the Kremlin. (Impeachment discussions of Presidents Nixon and Clinton, to take recent examples, did not include allegations involving Russia.) Brennan clarified his charge : "Treasonous, which is to betray one's trust and to aid and abet the enemy." Coming from Brennan, a man presumed to be in possession of related dark secrets, as he strongly hinted , the charge was fraught with alarming implications. Brennan made clear he hoped for Trump's impeachment, but in another time, and in many other countries, his charge would suggest that Trump should be removed from the presidency urgently by any means, even a coup. No one, it seems, has even noted this extraordinary implication with its tacit threat to American democracy. (Perhaps because the disloyalty allegation against Trump has been customary ever since mid-2016, even before he became president, when an array of influential publications and writers -- among them a former acting CIA director -- began branding him Putin's "puppet," "agent," "client," and "Manchurian candidate." The Los Angeles Times even saw fit to print an article suggesting that the military might have to remove Trump if he were to be elected, thereby having the very dubious distinction of predating Brennan.)

Why did Brennan, a calculating man, risk leveling such a charge, which might reasonably be characterized as sedition? The most plausible explanation is that he sought to deflect growing attention to his role as the "Godfather" of the entire Russiagate narrative, as Cohen argued back in February. If so, we need to know Brennan's unvarnished views on Russia.

They are set out with astonishing (perhaps unknowing) candor in a New York Times op-ed of August 17. They are those of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover in their prime. Western "politicians, political parties, media outlets, think tanks and influencers are readily manipulated, wittingly and unwittingly, or even bought outright, by Russian operatives not only to collect sensitive information but also to distribute propaganda and disinformation. I was well aware of Russia's ability to work surreptitiously within the United States, cultivating relationships with individuals who wield actual or potential power. These Russian agents are well trained in the art of deception. They troll political, business and cultural waters in search of gullible or unprincipled individuals who become pliant in the hands of their Russian puppet masters. Too often, those puppets are found." All this, Brennan assures readers, is based on his "deep insight." All the rest of us, it seems, are constantly susceptible to "Russian puppet masters" under our beds, at work, on our computers. Clearly, there must be no "cooperation" with the Kremlin's grand "Puppet Master," as Trump said he wanted early on. (People who wonder what and when Obama knew about the unfolding Russiagate saga need to ask why he would keep such a person so close for so long.)

And yet, scores of former intelligence and military officials rallied around this unvarnished John Brennan, even though, they said, they did not entirely share his opinions. This too is revealing. They did so, it seems clear enough, out of their professional corporate identity, which Brennan represented and Trump was degrading by challenging the intelligences agencies' (implicitly including his own) Russiagate allegations against him. It's a misnomer to term these people representatives of a hidden "deep state." In recent years, they have been amply visible on television and newspaper op-ed pages. Instead, they see and present themselves as members of a fully empowered and essential fourth branch of government. This too has gone largely undiscussed while nightingales of the fourth branch -- such as David Ignatius and Joe Scarborough in the pages of the The Washington Post -- have been in full voice.

The result is, of course -- and no less ominous -- to criminalize any advocacy of "cooperating with Russia," or détente, as Trump sought to do in Helsinki with Putin. Still more, a full-fledged Russophobic hysteria is sweeping through the American political-media establishment, from Brennan and -- pending actual evidence against her -- those who engineered the arrest of Maria Butina (imagine how this endangers young Americans networking in Russia) to the senators now preparing new "crippling sanctions" against Moscow and the editors and producers at the Times , Post , CNN, and MSNBC. (However powerful, how representative are these elites when surveys indicate that a majority of the American people still prefer good relations with Moscow?)

As the dangers grow of actual war with Russia -- again, from Ukraine and the Baltic region to Syria -- the capacity of US policy-makers, above all the president, are increasingly diminished. To be fair, Brennan may only be a symptom of this profound American crisis, some say the worst since the Civil War.

Finally, there was a time when many Democrats, certainly liberal Democrats, could be counted on to resist this kind of hysteria and, yes, spreading neo-McCarthyism. (Brennan's defenders accuse Trump of McCarthyism, but Brennan's charge of treason without presenting any actual evidence was quintessential McCarthy.) After all, civil liberties, including freedom of speech, are directly involved -- and not only Brennan's and Trump's. But Democratic members of Congress and pro-Democratic media outlets are in the forefront of the new anti-Russian hysteria, with only a few exceptions. Thus a generally liberal historian tells CNN viewers that "Brennan is an American hero. His tenure at the CIA was impeccable. We owe him so much." Elsewhere the same historian assures readers , "There has always been a bipartisan spirit of support since the CIA was created in the Cold War." In the same vein, two Post reporters write of the FBI's " once venerated reputation ."

[Aug 23, 2018] One thing to remember about the FBI is Sy Hersh. Hersh claims the FBI has been sitting on a report for two years that fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the Wikileaks DNC email leaker (or one of them, at least.)

Notable quotes:
"... One thing to remember about the FBI is Sy Hersh. Hersh claims the FBI has been sitting on a report for two years that fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the Wikileaks DNC email leaker (or one of them, at least.) ..."
"... That right there is obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Literally everyone at the FBI who can't PROVE he didn't know about that report will be going to jail. The entire top administration of the FBI is going to go down. ..."
"... And how many people at the Department of Justice are aware of that report? Did Rosenstein know? Who else in the Obama administration knew? ..."
"... That would be motivation for a lot of desperate maneuvering. Add to that who was really behind the Steele Dossier and even more people are likely to end up in jail. ..."
Aug 23, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

richardstevenhack , 3 days ago

One thing to remember about the FBI is Sy Hersh. Hersh claims the FBI has been sitting on a report for two years that fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the Wikileaks DNC email leaker (or one of them, at least.)

Now can we imagine that not everyone in a senior position at the FBI knows about that report? I can't. Literally everyone from the supervisor of the Special Agent or computer forensic investigator who examined Rich's computer right up to the Director HAD to know that report exists - and covered it up.

That right there is obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Literally everyone at the FBI who can't PROVE he didn't know about that report will be going to jail. The entire top administration of the FBI is going to go down.

And how many people at the Department of Justice are aware of that report? Did Rosenstein know? Who else in the Obama administration knew?

That would be motivation for a lot of desperate maneuvering. Add to that who was really behind the Steele Dossier and even more people are likely to end up in jail.

Pat Lang Mod -> richardstevenhack , 3 days ago

What is the link for Hersh saying that?

richardstevenhack -> Pat Lang , 3 days ago

You haven't heard that yet? It's the infamous audio tape that Hersh was caught on discussing it. He's since obfuscated what he said, but the tape stands on its own, and he has never said that anything he said on the tape wasn't true, despite that a lot of Democrats and Trump-bashers claim he has.

Here's one source on Youtube:

Seymour Hersh discussing Wikileaks DNC leaks Seth Rich & FBI report

https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FgYzB96_EK7s%3Ffeature%3Doembed&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DgYzB96_EK7s&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FgYzB96_EK7s%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=21d07d84db7f4d66a55297735025d6d1&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube

Pat Lang Mod -> richardstevenhack , 3 days ago

I have told you several times and I will tell you again probably hopelessly that Hersh PERSONALLY has told me that the "tape" was made without his permission or knowledge when he was aimlessly speculating on possibilities.

richardstevenhack -> Pat Lang , 3 days ago

I am unaware of your explicitly telling me that he personally told you that the tape was "aimless speculation." My apologies if I missed that response.

Of course the tape was made without his permission. We all know that. It's irrelevant to what he said on the tape.

What I'm saying is that despite what he may have told you, nothing on that tape sounds like "aimless speculation".

When you consider that he has four good reasons for dissembling about the tape, I view it as far more likely that everything he said was true.

1) If what he said is true, he may have compromised his FBI contact. Not good for his line of work.

2) If what he said is true, compromising that contact may well make all his other contacts wary about talking to him in the future - a bad deal for a journalist who relies on his contacts.

3) If what he said is true, he may have compromised his ability to get his "long form journalism" article published - a problem he already has had in the past.

4) If what he said is true, he's accusing the FBI of sitting on that report for two years, which might well make him a target of retaliation in some way.

If you believe that everything he said on the tape is untrue and that is what he explicitly told you, fine. I'm waiting for his "long form journalism" report to explain it. So far everything he has said publicly about it has not contradicted what he said on the tape, but merely waved his hands about it.

Pat Lang Mod -> richardstevenhack , 3 days ago

Sy Hersh talks a lot both loudly and profanely. He never intended to tell Buttowski that there was more than a possibility that the FBI held more than a rumor that this might be true. He talked to Buttowski because a mutual friend of him and me asked him to do so for no good reason. Please go talk to all the other people you pester and not on SST. You are an argumentative nuisance.

Aukuu Makule -> Pat Lang , 3 days ago

I have no stake in the debate about Rich, DNC, wikileaks.
But I do notice some loose ends. Hersh may well have engaged in speculation, but it is interesting speculation:
quote:
55. During his conversation with Butowsky, Mr. Hersh claimed that he had received information from an "FBI report." Mr. Hersh had not seen the report himself, but explained: "I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. And I know this person is unbelievably accurate and careful. He's a very high level guy."

56. According to Mr. Hersh, his source told him that the FBI report states that, shortly after Seth Rich's murder, the D.C. police obtained a warrant to search his home. When they arrived at the home, the D.C. police found Seth Rich's computer, but were unable to access it.The computer was then provided to the D.C. police Cyber Unit, who also were unable to access the computer. At that point, the D.C. police contacted the Cyber Unit at the FBI's Washington D.C. field office. Again, according to the supposed FBI report, the Washington D.C. field office was able to get into the computer and found that in "late spring early summer [2016], [Seth Rich][made] contact with Wikileaks." "They found what he had done. He had submitted a series of documents, of emails. Some juicy emails from the DNC." Mr. Hersh told Butowsky that Seth Rich "offered a sample [to WikiLeaks][,] an extensive sample, you know I'm sure dozens, of emails, and said I want money."
. . .
"I hear gossip," Hersh tells NPR on Monday. "[Butowsky] took two and two and made 45 out of it."
. . .
The clip is definitely worth listening to in its entirety if you haven't already. Hersh is heard telling Butowsky that he had a high-level insider read him an FBI file confirming that Seth Rich was known to have been in contact with WikiLeaks prior to his death, which is not even a tiny bit remotely the same as having "heard rumors". Hersh's statements in the audio recording and his statement to NPR cannot both be true.
endquote
https://medium.com/@caityjo...

[Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post foreign policy reporter: ..."
"... For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And, yes, it's bias, not "fake news" that's the main problem – Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast? Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that when they do it can seem rather weird. ..."
"... Regard these indictments in proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So we're still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at determining the winner. ..."
"... However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day believe the official stories about the Russians. They're particularly impressed with the fact that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II ..."
"... And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor (2014-2017) – last year he reported that Putin had "charged that the U.S. government had interfered 'aggressively' in Russia's 2012 presidential vote," claiming that Washington had "gathered opposition forces and financed them." Putin, wrote Malinowski, "apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would interfere in the other's elections." ..."
"... We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED's wings wrote: "A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow's campaign of political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance." ..."
"... "Democracy assistance", you see, is what they call NED's election-interferences and government-overthrows ..."
Aug 18, 2018 | www.unz.com

William Blum shares with us his correspondence with Washington Post presstitute Michael Birnbaum. As you can tell from Birnbaum's replies, he comes across as either very stupid or as a CIA asset.

When I received my briefing as staff associate, House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which required top secret clearance, I was told by senior members of the staff that the Washington Post was a CIA asset. Watching the Washington Post's takedown of President Richard Nixon with the orchestrated Watergate story, that became obvious. President Nixon had made too many overtures to the Soviets and too many arms limitations agreements, and he opened to China. Watching President Nixon's peace initiatives water down the threat level from the Soviet Union and Maoist China, the military/security complex saw a threat to its budget and power and decided that Nixon had to go. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy had resulted in far too much skepticism about the Warren Commission Report, so the CIA decided to use the Washington Post to get rid of Nixon. To keep the clueless American left hating Nixon, the CIA used its assets in the leftwing to keep Nixon blamed for the Vietnam war, a war that Nixon inherited and did not want.

The CIA knew that Nixon's problem was that he could not exit the war without losing his conservative base, which was convinced of the nonsensical "Domino Theory." I have always wondered if the CIA concocted the "Domino Theory," as it so well served them. Unable to get rid of the war "with honor," Nixon was driven to brutal methods to force the North Vietnamese to accept a situation that he could depart without defeat and soiling America's "honor" and losing his conservative support base. The North Vietnamese wouldn't bend, but the US Congress did, and so the CIA succeeded in discrediting among both the leftwing and righwing Nixon's war management. With no one to defend him, Nixon was an easy target for the CIA.

Here is Blum's exchange with Birnbaum. It is possible that Birnbaum is neither stupid nor a CIA asset, but just a person wanting to hold on to a job. The last thing he can afford to do is to disabuse readers of the "Russian Threat" when Bezos' Amazon and Washington Post properties are dependent on the CIA's annual subsidy of $600 million disquised as a "contract." https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-20/cia-washington-post-and-russia-what-youre-not-being-told

The Anti-Empire Report # 159
Willian Blum

The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post foreign policy reporter:
July 18, 2018

Dear Mr. Birnbaum,

You write Trump "made no mention of Russia's adventures in Ukraine". Well, neither he nor Putin nor you made any mention of America's adventures in the Ukraine, which resulted in the overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014, which led to the justified Russian adventure. Therefore ?

If Russia overthrew the Mexican government would you blame the US for taking some action in Mexico?
William Blum

Dear Mr. Blum,

Thanks for your note. "America's adventures in the Ukraine": what are you talking about? Last time I checked, it was Ukrainians in the streets of Kiev who caused Yanukovych to turn tail and run. Whether or not that was a good thing, we can leave aside, but it wasn't the Americans who did it.

It is, however, Russian special forces who fanned out across Crimea in February and March 2014, according to Putin, and Russians who came down from Moscow who stoked conflict in eastern Ukraine in the months after, according to their own accounts.
Best, Michael Birnbaum

To MB,

I can scarcely believe your reply. Do you read nothing but the Post? Do you not know of high State Dept official Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador in Ukraine in Maidan Square to encourage the protesters? She spoke of 5 billion (sic) dollars given to aid the protesters who were soon to overthrow the govt. She and the US Amb. spoke openly of who to choose as the next president. And he's the one who became president. This is all on tape. I guess you never watch Russia Today (RT). God forbid! I read the Post every day. You should watch RT once in a while.
William Blum

To WB,

I was the Moscow bureau chief of the newspaper; I reported extensively in Ukraine in the months and years following the protests. My observations are not based on reading. RT is not a credible news outlet, but I certainly do read far beyond our own pages, and of course I talk to the actual actors on the ground myself – that's my job.

And: yes, of course Nuland was in the Maidan – but encouraging the protests, as she clearly did, is not the same as sparking them or directing them, nor is playing favorites with potential successors, as she clearly did, the same as being directly responsible for overthrowing the government. I'm not saying the United States wasn't involved in trying to shape events. So were Russia and the European Union. But Ukrainians were in the driver's seat the whole way through. I know the guy who posted the first Facebook call to protest Yanukovych in November 2013; he's not an American agent. RT, meanwhile, reports fabrications and terrible falsehoods all the time. By all means consume a healthy and varied media diet – don't stop at the US mainstream media. But ask yourself how often RT reports critically on the Russian government, and consider how that lacuna shapes the rest of their reporting. You will find plenty of reporting in the Washington Post that is critical of the US government and US foreign policy in general, and decisions in Ukraine and the Ukrainian government in specific. Our aim is to be fair, without picking sides.
Best, Michael Birnbaum

======================= end of exchange =======================

Right, the United States doesn't play indispensable roles in changes of foreign governments; never has, never will; even when they offer billions of dollars; even when they pick the new president, which, apparently, is not the same as picking sides. It should be noticed that Mr Birnbaum offers not a single example to back up his extremist claim that RT "reports fabrications and terrible falsehoods all the time." "All the time", no less! That should make it easy to give some examples.

For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And, yes, it's bias, not "fake news" that's the main problem – Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast? Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that when they do it can seem rather weird.

To the casual observer, THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA indictments of July 14 of Russian intelligence agents (GRU) reinforced the argument that the Soviet government interfered in the US 2016 presidential election. Regard these indictments in proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So we're still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at determining the winner.

The Russians did it (cont.)
Each day I spend about three hours reading the Washington Post. Amongst other things I'm looking for evidence – real, legal, courtroom-quality evidence, or at least something logical and rational – to pin down those awful Russkis for their many recent crimes, from influencing the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election to use of a nerve agent in the UK. But I do not find such evidence.

Each day brings headlines like these:

These are all from the same day, August 9, which led me to thinking of doing this article, but similar stories can be found any day in the Post and in major newspapers anywhere in America. None of the articles begins to explain how Russia did these things, or even WHY. Motivation appears to have become a lost pursuit in the American mass media. The one thing sometimes mentioned, which I think may have some credibility, is Russia's preference of Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016. But this doesn't begin to explain how Russia could pull off any of the electoral magic it's accused of, which would be feasible only if the United States were a backward, Third World, Banana Republic.

There's the Facebook ads, as well as all the other ads The people who are influenced by this story – have they read many of the actual ads? Many are pro-Clinton or anti-Trump; many are both; many are neither. It's one big mess, the only rational explanation of this which I've read is that they come from money-making websites, "click-bait" sites as they're known, which earn money simply by attracting visitors.

As to the nerve agents, it makes more sense if the UK or the CIA did it to make the Russians look bad, because the anti-Russian scandal which followed was totally predictable. Why would Russia choose the time of the World Cup in Moscow – of which all of Russia was immensely proud – to bring such notoriety down upon their head? But that would have been an ideal time for their enemies to want to embarrass them.

However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day believe the official stories about the Russians. They're particularly impressed with the fact that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II.

But we're the Good Guys, ain't we?

For a defender of US foreign policy there's very little that causes extreme heartburn more than someone implying a "moral equivalence" between American behavior and that of Russia. That was the case during Cold War I and it's the same now in Cold War II. It just drives them up the wall.

After the United States passed a law last year requiring TV station RT (Russia Today) to register as a "foreign agent", the Russians passed their own law allowing authorities to require foreign media to register as a "foreign agent". Senator John McCain denounced the new Russian law, saying there is "no equivalence" between RT and networks such as Voice of America, CNN and the BBC, whose journalists "seek the truth, debunk lies, and hold governments accountable." By contrast, he said, "RT's propagandists debunk the truth, spread lies, and seek to undermine democratic governments in order to further Vladimir Putin's agenda."

And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor (2014-2017) – last year he reported that Putin had "charged that the U.S. government had interfered 'aggressively' in Russia's 2012 presidential vote," claiming that Washington had "gathered opposition forces and financed them." Putin, wrote Malinowski, "apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would interfere in the other's elections."

"Is this moral equivalence fair?" Malinowski asked and answered: "In short, no. Russia's interference in the United States' 2016 election could not have been more different from what the United States does to promote democracy in other countries."

How do you satirize such officials and such high-school beliefs?

We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED's wings wrote: "A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow's campaign of political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance."

"Democracy assistance", you see, is what they call NED's election-interferences and government-overthrows. The authors continue: "This narrative is churned out by propaganda outlets such as RT and Sputnik [radio station]. it is deployed by isolationists who propound a U.S. retreat from global leadership."

"Isolationists" is what [neo]conservatives call critics of US foreign policy whose arguments they can't easily dismiss, so they imply that such people just don't want the US to be involved in anything abroad.

And "global leadership" is what they call being first in election-interferences and government-overthrows.

https://williamblum.org/aer/read/159

[Aug 19, 2018] Due to an astonishing coincidence, two doctors on duty had just returned from a course at Porton Down, Britain's world-leading equivalent to Shikhany, when Scripals were brought in

Aug 19, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Jen August 15, 2018 at 4:59 pm

For anyone still interested in the Skripal poisoning incident, Rob Slane at The Blogmire has a new article where he draws attention to this paragraph lifted from The Daily Telegraph:

"Dr Stephen Jukes, intensive care consultant at Salisbury District Hospital, where the Skripals were treated (and where Rowley and Sturgess were taken), has described trying 'all our therapies' to keep Sergei and Yulia alive. Due to an astonishing coincidence, two doctors on duty had just returned from a course at Porton Down, Britain's world-leading equivalent to Shikhany, when the pair were brought in. Recognising what looked like symptoms of nerve-agent poisoning, they made sure to include diazepam and atropine in their battery of treatments -- the drugs compensate for some of the effects of acetylcholinesterase blockage -- and plunged the Skripals into an artificial coma to prevent brain damage."
https://www.theblogmire.com/are-any-mps-prepared-to-ask-the-prime-minister-why-she-appears-to-have-made-a-deeply-misleading-statement-on-26th-march/

Astonishing coincidence, that the two doctors were fresh from a training course at Porton Down? Maybe not.

Elsewhere Slane states that the Skripals, and Julia especially, made rapid recoveries after coming out of their induced comas, and that by the time Theresa May made her statement in Parliament, she may have been aware (or was deliberately left uninformed) that Julia at least was improving and nowhere remotely near pushing up daisies.

kirill August 15, 2018 at 8:44 pm
This story is BS like the rest of this hoax. Neurotoxins are not 100% treatable. There is nerve damage and any military grade toxin such as VX would leave vast amounts of it, regardless of intervention. So the recovery of the Julia proves she was never exposed to a neurotoxin.

The average media consumer has never done any research on the subject of various subjects that are relevant. They think of treatments in cartoon fashion. Take this magic pill and you are fully cured. No long lasting effects, no lack of cures, etc. A common trope in TV and movies is the magical antibody. You have a horde of zombies (yet more deep insight into disease) and some vaccine is going to cure their disorder. Complete and utter rubbish.

An example to show what a failure the common perceptions are about disease is Necrotizing Fasciitis. It is not the bacteria (strep B type) that consume the "flesh". It is a runaway cytokine inflammation induced necrosis of cells on a massive scale. Basically it is a genetic disorder even if bacteria trigger the disease. So how the metabolism responds to a neurotoxin should be considered. In the case of military nerve agents, the design of the toxin is to result in rapid death. This prevents various secondary, metabolism-associated pathologies from manifesting themselves. But in the case of the Skripals, which are pure fiction, we would have all of these secondary pathologies manifesting themselves.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3648782/

"Moreover, the effects of nerve agents are very long lasting and cumulative (increased by successive exposures), and survivors of nerve agent poisoning usually suffer chronic neurological damage that can lead to continuing psychiatric effects [109]."

[Aug 18, 2018] How Syria and Ukraine Drove the Russia Hawks Insane

Notable quotes:
"... also mentioned adversary ..."
"... veritable demon ..."
Aug 18, 2018 | russia-insider.com

In Part 1 we referenced the infamous hysteria triggered in Salem Massachusetts by Betty Parris (age 9) and Abigail Williams (age 12).

In 1692 their prepubescent imaginations were apparently more than capable of detecting the evil doings of witches at loose in their community; and a population hopped up with Calvinist enthusiasm for the supernatural works of the Almighty apparently was also capable of lapsing into collective madness – at least for a spell.

But who would have thought that in the year 2018 the grizzled adults and racketeers who populate the Imperial City would fall prey to the same momentary outbreak of deliriums?

After all, Vladimir Putin was the very same Putin who made a mere cameo appearance in the 2012 presidential debates. He got an honorable mention when Barack Obama appropriately schooled Mitt Romney on the fact that Russia was not America's principal national security threat.

Indeed, the MSM commentators who are shrieking about Trump's parlay with Vlad today were knowingly furrowing their brows about Romney's alleged gaffe back then.

So the question at hand is what changed? How did the politics as usual debating points about the status of Russia and Putin only 69 months ago turn into a veritable Salem style hysteria?

We'd suggest two pivotal events turned the Imperial City upside down. To wit, Barry lost his nerve in August 2013 on the Syrian red line and Donald Trump won the 2016 election in the red zones of Flyover America.

In between, the mainstream media completely lost its grasp on reality as the Imperial City dove headlong into it latest and greatest Indispensable Nation adventures by intervening in Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Yemen, and Iraq for the third time.

The Indispensable Nation conceit, of course, is the ultimate cover story for the work of Empire and is the polar opposite of the rudimentary America First notions on which Donald Trump rode into the White House.

As it happened, the Indispensable Nation meme flourished when the neocons and liberal interventionists became ascendant during the Clinton and early Bush 43 era; and they virtually ran the policy tables after 9/11 as the full-throated War on Terrorism cranked up a powerful head of steam.

Nevertheless, the acolytes of Empire nearly lost their political lunch when Shock & Awe in Iraq turned into a bloody quagmire and the retaliation against the Taliban for harboring the 9/11 conspirators ended up as an endless trillion dollar war in the Hindu Kush.

That's why the peace candidate won in 2008. And it didn't matter that Barrack Obama was an utterly unqualified greenhorn Senator and former part-time law professor and community organizer who had no more claim to the Oval Office in his day than the Donald did this time around.

But Barry was too much the quick study by half. Rather than dismantle the rogue postwar Empire of the neocons and militarists, he sought to make it smarter and more deft. So he populated his national security team with moderate neocons like Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, David Petraeus and Victoria Nuland and a posse of liberal interventionists including Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power.

Our point here is not simply that peace never had a chance with that crowd in charge of policy; it's that the outbreak of the so-called Arab Spring in early 2011 triggered a toxic brew of interventionist enthusiasm among Barry's foreign policy team that quickly metastasized into R2P (responsibility to protect) madness in Libya and Syria.

Needless to say, even a newly arrived Martian visitor in 2011 what have been scratching his head about Libya.

In his advancing old age, Khadafy had turned himself into a model non-proliferator and exclusively inward focused tyrant. Libya thus posed a threat to exactly no one outside its own borders; and it was just plain laughable as a matter of concern to the security of the American homeland.

But Hillary and her posse famously danced on Khadafy's grave after NATO-enabled terrorists brought about his brutal demise. So doing, they learned a dangerously erroneous lesson.

Namely, that uncooperative dictators who purportedly threatened their citizens with genocidal repression could be clinically removed for a few billions worth of bombs, drones and aid to local rebels.

That proposition really had nothing to do with homeland security in America and was belied by the fiascoes in Iraq and Afghanistan. But now the "smart" people were in charge, and both Libya and Egypt were proof they knew how to make Regime Change happen with a minimum of muss and fuss.

Yet any intelligent reading of the impossible sectarian politics of Syria put the lie to that conceit in a heartbeat.

Indeed, given the 40-year history of the Assad family business built around Baathist secularism and a protective umbrella for Syria's numerous minority confessions – Alawite, Druse, Shiite, Christian, Jewish, Kurd etc. – the very idea of arming Sharia-spouting Sunni Arabs to overthrow the Assad regime was sheer lunacy.

So whatever the immediate origins and allegedly peaceful intentions of the anti-Assad uprising in the spring of 2011, it did not take long for these clashes to degenerate into bloody urban warfare.

And it did not take a lot of figuring to also see that arming Muslim Brotherhood sectarians was absolutely guaranteed to generate a violent response from Damascus. That's because the Brotherhood had been the historic vanguard of Sunni religious opposition to the Baathist secularism of the Assad regime; and had been brutally suppressed by the senior Assad in the 1980s.

Beyond that, it was also a given that the Shiite polities on either side of Syria's borders would likely come to Assad's aid. That is, the Iranians in the east and Hezbollah across the southwest border in Lebanon – to say nothing of the regime's longtime Russian patrons, whose only naval base in the Mediterranean was located on Syria's tiny slice of coastline.

In any event, Obama's neocons and R2P liberals threw every caution to the wind. In going all in for regime change and demonizing Assad as a butcher who used barrel bombs and chemical weapons against innocent civilians, they maneuvered Obama – newly feisty as the slayer of Osama bin-Laden – into drawing his famous red line on the use of chemical weapons.

Needless to say, that was catnip to the Nusra Front and ISIS jihadists who dominated the armed opposition. It did not take long for them to mount a false flag attack in Ghouta in August 2013, which horrified the social media connected world when 1300 civilians suffered gruesome deaths from what was apparently sarin gas.

Only later did rocket experts demonstrate that the sarin had been delivered by short-range projectiles launched from jihadist controlled areas outside of Damascus, not by Assad's forces 15-20 miles away. But at the moment, the job was done: Obama was on the hot-seat of his own foolishly drawn red line – exactly where the jihadist and his own interventionists wanted him.

When he attempted to escape the trap by punting the decision to bomb Assad to Capitol Hill, however, Cool Hand Vlad saw his opening. To wit, he quickly brokered a deal with Assad to have his entire chemical weapons arsenal removed and destroyed under international supervision.

That was operationally executed by the acknowledged neutral experts at the OPCW (Organization For The Prevention of Chemical Weapons) and there is little doubt that the preponderant share of Assad's arsenal was eliminated.

Yet for that act of constructive statesmanship, the neocons and liberal interventionists never forgave Putin. Then and there he became Bad Vlad because his action on chemical weapons but the kibosh on Washington's excuse for regime change in Damascus.

In fact, the War Party interventionists of both stripes – neocons and R2P liberals – went on the all-out attack in September 2013, transforming Putin from the also mentioned adversary of the Obama-Romney debate one year earlier into a veritable demon . Hillary now even insisted his was a modern day Adolph Hitler.

As it happened, the duly elected President of Ukraine chose that same fall to pursue an economic bailout deal with Moscow to rescue his country's debt-laden, corruption ridden post-Soviet economy; and he did so in lieu of the far less attractive deal that had been offered by the west through the EC, IMF and Washington.

Not surprisingly, that wholly appropriate decision by the leader of a sovereign nation became exactly the opening for the Washington interventionists to strike hard at Putin and Russia.

We have detailed elsewhere how the so-called Maidan uprising on the streets of Kiev in February was funded, organized and enabled by Washington and its cadres of operators from the CIA, NED, State and sundry NGOs; and how that divided the country to the quick politically when Washington installed and recognized a radical nationalist government that immediately moved against the Russian speaking populations of the Donbas and Crimea.

Indeed, enabling the Kiev coup and instantly recognizing the crony capitalists, ruffians and neo-Nazi nationalists who formed the new government was the single stupidest act of peace candidate Barry's entire presidency.

But by then the interventionists were in high dudgeon. So there was no stopping their virtually instantaneous demonization of Russia and Putin for actions which were self-evidently driven by Russia's vital national interests in it own backyard – not some kind of aggressive quest for territory or lebensraum.

To wit, Putin did not "seize" Crimea like it was some country in the Benelux that he coveted. To the contrary, Crimea was virtually Russian to the core after it was purchased by Catherine the Great in 1783 and thereafter when Sevastopol become the homeport for the great black sea fleet of czars and commissars alike.

For crying out loud, Crimea was never part of Ukraine until Khrushchev had the Soviet Presidium transfer it in 1954 from the Russian Soviet Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic as a gift to his Ukrainian compatriots who had stood with him the bloody struggle for Stalin's succession.

So Washington decided to declare economic war on Russia through Obama's idiotic sanctions in order to make sure that the dead hand of the Soviet Presidium's writ is enforced 64 years later.

Besides, Russia did conduct a referendum which was fair by all objective accounts; and under which 83% of the eligible voters elected to return to Mother Russia after what had been an historical short interlude of rule by the Ukrainian state. Among other things, the overwhelmingly Russian speaking population of Crimea as not enthusiastic about being culturally "cleansed" the Ukrainian nationalists who now ruled in Kiev.

Likewise with the Donbas and the other nearby Russian speaking provinces on the eastern border. Many of them had been put there generations earlier by Stalin to man what was the industrial maw – coal, iron, steel, chemicals and heavy engineering – of the Soviet Union.

And all of them knew of the terrors that had occurred during WWII when the Hitler's Wehrmacht marched through the Donbas and destroyed everything and everyone in sight on its way to the siege of Stalingrad, and how it had been accompanied by legions of Ukrainian collaborators during the terror.

They also knew that the region had eventually been liberated from the Nazi terror by the Red Army as it returned through the region on its way to Berlin.

Yet the interventionist fools in Washington ignored all of this and proclaimed Putin menace to peace and the rule of law because he came to the aid of the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking population, which did not want to be ruled by the Ukrainian nationalists who had illegally sized power in Kiev.

The obvious solution all along was partition – just like happened when Washington forced Serbia to give up Kosovo; or when the artificial country of Czechoslovakia, created by backroom intrigue at Versailles in 1919 peacefully decided to separate into two sovereign countries a few year back.

In short, there is no there, there. The Ukraine/Crimea "aggression" is nothing of the kind, and Putin was in Syria because he was invited to be there by its sovereign government.

In fact, the whole demonization campaign, the sweeping economic sanctions and NATO's provocative encroachments on Russia's borders in the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea are nothing more than retaliation for Putin's wise rescue of Barrack Obama from his own stupid red line.

But this isn't the end of the stupidity. In part 3 we will strip the bark off the Russian election meddling meme by laying out the simple fact that a country which is no threat to the security of the American homeland, but which has been viciously attacked by Washington, might will seek to make it's case for a different policy.

That is to say, none of this is about espionage or stealing military secrets. It actually boils down to the obvious fact that Donald Trump had an open mind about Russia and had not been party to Obama's cabal of neocon and R2P interventionists and their campaign of revenge against Vlad Putin.

That Putin preferred Trump was a no brainer and he admitted as such at the Helsinki Summit. But that Putin's preference for Trump had absolutely nothing to do with the outcome of the election is also patently obvious.

Nevertheless, the Deep State has cooked up a massive fiction that claims Moscow made every effort to do so.
We intend to tear that Big Lie limb-for-limb in Part 3, but suffice it here to consider the take below from CIA veteran Philip Giraldi . It does remind that Salem on the Potomac is actually happening in the here and now:

Beyond what is or is not contained in the document itself, there is a clear misunderstanding regarding how a sophisticated intelligence organization, which certainly includes the GRU, operates. If there had been a large-scale Kremlin sanctioned plan to disrupt the US election, it would not be run by twelve identifiable GRU officers working with what appears to be only limited cover and resources. If the facts are correct, the activity might have been a routine probing, collecting and selective dissemination of information effort that all intelligence agencies engage in. The United States does so routinely in many countries, interfering in elections worldwide, far more than Russia with its limited resources, and even carrying out regime change.

If the Kremlin's objective were truly to undermine American democracy, a task that is already being undertaken very ably by the GOP and Democrats, hundreds of officers would be involved, all working under deep cover and operating securely out of dispersed sites. And no one involved would be using computers connected to networks that could be penetrated to enable personal identification or discovery of the ultimate source of the activity. Everyone would be working in alias on stand-alone machines and the transmission of information would be done using cutouts to break any chain of custody. A cutout might consist of using thumb drives to transmit information from one computer to another, for example. There would be no sending or receiving of information by channels that could be identified by NSA or CIA and compromised.

So the idea that the United States government identified twelve culprits who were responsible for trying to overthrow American democracy is by any measure ludicrous, if indeed there was a major plan to disrupt the election at all. The indictment is little more than a political document seeking to undermine any effort by Donald Trump to establish rapprochement with Vladimir Putin. It will also serve to give fuel to the Democrats, who are still at a loss to understand what happened to Hillary Clinton, and Republican hawks like John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse who persist in seeking to refight the Cold War. As Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin said in their Helsinki press conference, the coming together of the leaders of the world's two most powerful nuclear armed countries is too important an opportunity to let pass. Cold Warriors in Washington should take note.

[Aug 18, 2018] In A Corporatist System Of Government, Corporate Censorship Is State Censorship -- Consortiumnews

Notable quotes:
"... Scott Horton Show ..."
"... This commentary was originally published on ..."
"... Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers ..."
Aug 18, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

In A Corporatist System Of Government, Corporate Censorship Is State Censorship August 10, 2018 • 92 Comments

In a corporatist system of government, wherein there is no meaningful separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship, argues Caitlin Johnstone in this commentary.

By Caitlin Johnstone

Last year, representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed on the US Senate floor that it is their responsibility to "quell information rebellions" and adopt a "mission statement" expressing their commitment to "prevent the fomenting of discord."

" Civil wars don't start with gunshots, they start with words," the representatives were told. "America's war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America."

Yes, this really happened.

Today Twitter has silenced three important anti-war voices on its platform: it has suspended Daniel McAdams, the executive director of the Ron Paul Institute, suspended Scott Horton of the Scott Horton Show , and completely removed the account of prominent Antiwar.com writer Peter Van Buren.

I'm about to talk about the censorship of Alex Jones and Infowars now, so let me get the "blah blah I don't like Alex Jones" thing out of the way so that my social media notifications aren't inundated with people saying "Caitlin didn't say the 'blah blah I don't like Alex Jones' thing!" I shouldn't have to, because this isn't actually about Alex Jones, but here it is:

I don't like Alex Jones. He's made millions saying the things disgruntled right-wingers want to hear instead of telling the truth; he throws in disinfo with his info, which is the same as lying all the time. He's made countless false predictions and his sudden sycophantic support for a US president has helped lull the populist right into complacency when they should be holding Trump to his non-interventionist campaign pledges, making him even more worthless than he was prior to 2016.

But this isn't about defending Alex Jones. He just happens to be the thinnest edge of the wedge.

Infowars has been censored from Facebook, Youtube (which is part of Google), Apple, Spotify, and now even Pinterest, all within hours of each other. This happens to have occurred at the same time Infowars was circulating a petition with tens of thousands of signatures calling on President Trump to pardon WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, who poses a much greater threat to establishment narratives than Alex Jones ever has. Assange's mother also reports that this mass removal of Infowars' audience occurred less than 48 hours after she was approached to do an interview by an Infowars producer.

In a corporatist system of government, wherein there is no meaningful separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. Because legalized bribery in the form of corporate lobbying and campaign donations has given wealthy Americans the ability to control the U.S. government's policy and behavior while ordinary Americans have no effective influence whatsoever, the U.S. unquestionably has a corporatist system of government. Large, influential corporations are inseparable from the state, so their use of censorship is inseparable from state censorship.

This is especially true of the vast mega-corporations of Silicon Valley, whose extensive ties to U.S. intelligence agencies are well-documented . Once you're assisting with the construction of the US military's drone program , receiving grants from the CIA and NSA for mass surveillance, or having your site's content regulated by NATO's propaganda arm , you don't get to pretend you're a private, independent corporation that is separate from government power. It is possible in the current system to have a normal business worth a few million dollars, but if you want to get to billions of dollars in wealth control in a system where money translates directly to political power, you need to work with existing power structures like the CIA and the Pentagon, or else they'll work with your competitors instead of you

Censorship Through Private Proxy

And yet every time I point to the dangers of a few Silicon Valley plutocrats controlling all new media political discourse with an iron fist, Democratic Party loyalists all turn into a bunch of hardline free market Ayn Rands. "It's not censorship!" they exclaim. "It's a private company and can do whatever it wants with its property!"

They do this because they know their mainstream, plutocrat-friendly "centrist" views will never be censored. Everyone else is on the chopping block, however. Leftist sites have already had their views slashed by a manipulation of Google's algorithms, and it won't be long before movements like BDS and Antifa and skeptics of the establishment Syria and Russia narratives can be made to face mass de-platforming on the same exact pretext as Infowars.

This is a setup. Hit the soft target so your oligarch-friendly censorship doesn't look like what it is, then once you've manufactured consent, go on to shut down the rest of dissenting media bit by bit.

Don't believe that's the plan? Let's ask sitting US Senator Chris Murphy: " Infowars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart," Murphy tweeted in response to the news. "These companies must do more than take down one website. The survival of our democracy depends on it."

That sure sounds an awful lot like the warnings issued to the Silicon Valley representatives on the Senate floor at the beginning of this article, no? This is headed somewhere dark.

We're going to have to find a way to keep the oligarchs from having their cake and eating it too. Either (A) corporations are indeed private organizations separate from the government, in which case the people need to get money out of politics and government agencies out of Silicon Valley so they can start acting like it, and insist that their owners can't be dragged out on to the Senate floor and instructed on what they can and can't do with their business, or (B) these new media platforms get treated like the government agencies they function as, and the people get all the First Amendment protection that comes with it. Right now the social engineers are double-dipping in a way that will eventually give the alliance of corporate plutocrats and secretive government agencies the ability to fully control the public's access to ideas and information.

If they accomplish that, it's game over for humanity. Any hope of the public empowering itself over the will of a few sociopathic, ecocidal, omnicidal oligarchs will have been successfully quashed. We are playing for all the chips right now. We have to fight this. We have no choice.

This commentary was originally published on CaitlinJohnstone.com .

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium . Follow her work on Facebook , Twitter , or her website . She has a podcast and a new book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers . This article was re-published with permission.


gininitaly , August 14, 2018 at 6:59 am

https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-344-problem-reaction-solution-internet-censorship-edition/

Skip Scott , August 14, 2018 at 8:23 am

Cal-

Caitlin is still on medium.
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/latest

glitch , August 14, 2018 at 10:17 pm

She also has her own website now https://caitlinjohnstone.com/

Herman , August 13, 2018 at 11:07 am

Ms. Johnstone is right. Government pressure on corporations works but the media in all its forms does a pretty good job of sowing discord without government interference. There are so few instances where the government and the major media are not in sync, they are hard to find. As to allowing the lonely voices of worthy organizations like Consortium News, why should they bother. Allowing them creates the pretense of free speech. If they become dangerous, the mood of our elected officials is to fix the problem as Ms. Johnstone rightly notes. The defense of freedom of speech by government and the major media is very selective, and the use of the calling fire in a loaded theatre standard is a big enough vehicle for suppression to drive a truck through, a whole convoy in fact.

As an aside, watching Sixty Minutes on their hit piece about Russian interference in our elections was an example of sloppy journalism that seems to be the norm. when it is about Russia. I was about to say they never used to be like that, but I think that is probably not true.

uncle bob , August 13, 2018 at 12:42 am

https://therealnews.com/series/max-blumenthal-on-the-silicon-valley-dc-internet-police

peon d. rich , August 12, 2018 at 6:19 pm

Bulls-eye!!!! especially on Democratic party loyalists who perform a much more important function for plutocracy than the Republicans and the Tea Party – to rally around fake progressive politics dripping out of the DNC, and effectively drain off the pressure building for true progressive politics.

cjonsson1 , August 12, 2018 at 1:50 pm

This is a good example of Caitlin explaining what is going on in the American media wars which is crucial for people to know.
Our access to information, other than government propaganda, is becoming very limited because the few major social network corporations are owned by a few wealthy individuals or private government contractors. They are monopolies which should be designated public utilities, and regulated as such, or broken up into smaller entities, allowing for competition.
It is important to preserve what is left of our freedom of expression and our free press. The ability to comment on reporting and discuss it with others is diminishing while sources are becoming more and more restricted.
Government and big business fight the public for control of information and opinion. We have to collectively save our stake in democracy by rejecting censorship.

Karl Pomeroy , August 11, 2018 at 8:55 pm

You make some very good points. Alas, I disagree about Alex Jones. The very few times I've listened to his videos, it seemed to me every last thing he said was absolutely true and correct. So I don't know where the idea comes from that he speaks disinformation. He's sometimes obnoxious and hard to watch. But that's a different thing. His words are accurate, particularly about the globalists, the deep state, US-Russia relations, and Trump.

Arby , August 11, 2018 at 12:01 pm

"It is possible in the current system to have a normal business worth a few million dollars, but if you want to get to billions of dollars in wealth control in a system where money translates directly to political power, you need to work with existing power structures like the CIA and the Pentagon, or else they'll work with your competitors instead of you."

Actually, If companies get big, they become potential big tools/weapons for the war-making State, at which point they will be offered a deal that they can't refuse, as one would expect within this gangster Corporatocracy. Look at Wikileaks. Mozilla simply jumped on the fake news bandwagon, so they are now safe, as Aaron Kesel at Activist Post points out. Lavabit's owner, Ladar Levinson had principles and was loyal to his customers (including Edward Snowden) whom he didn't want to betray just because the Corporatocracy State demanded it, and so he shut down. He revived his company once he figured out ways to shield his customers from the war-making State that attacks us all in the name of 'national security'.

So, it's a little more dire than the government just deciding to favor your competitors, which of course the amazing Caitlin knows.

With all of this capture by tech giants, innovators, by the war-making State (Randolph Bourne), How will end? I have more than one answer to that. One of those answers is the obvious one: Ramped up counterrevolution, in the area of cyberspace mainly, in the State's war against the people. And such a war is underway as any number of authors have demonstrated thoroughly. And its not (just) Russia attacking the people. Jeff Halper wrote "War Against The People." Nick Buxton and Ben Hayes edited "The Secure And The Dispossessed." Douglas Valentine wrote "The Phoenix Program," which he notes wasn't confined to Vietnam. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman wrote the devastating two-volume "Political Economy Of Human Rights," which included "The Washington Connection And Third World Fascism." And Edward Herman wrote: "The Real Terror Network." All of those books and many others talk about counterrevolution and the counterinsurgency (State terrorism) that goes with it.

And counterrevolution and counterinsurgency doesn't have to be of the extreme variety, such as in South Vietnam when the US was torturing that country to death. Caitlin has talked about how the State (New Zealand) went to work on her friend, Suzie Dawson. Read the account. It's quite illuminating.

What do you call 'thinking' that is against 'thinking' (and what we consider to be a part of innovation that leads to inventions that elevate society? It's called counterrevolution. That's where our corrupt tech giants have gone. It won't end well for them, even if they think otherwise and even if they feel safe because they are with the big guy. There's a bigger guy who has that big guy in his sights.

"Thinking About Thinking" – https://arrby.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/thinking-about-thinking/

"41 Tags, 17 Entries And No Views. Bookmark Me Maybe?" – https://arrby.wordpress.com/2018/08/11/41-tags-17-entries-and-no-views-bookmark-me-maybe/

vinnieoh , August 11, 2018 at 10:14 am

"We Do What We're Told" – Peter Gabriel; "So"

Somehow I had missed those words from our elected "representatives" in Congressional hearing. What these political pimps and whores don't want us to do is get together and agree to dispel the bullshit that we're up to our necks in right now.

As far as I know this is the first piece I've read by Caitlin Johnstone, and I agree with her general premise that this is more than just ominous. More and more of our elected "representatives" talk and act like alien totalitarians.

The good news is that Trump's "trade" and saber-rattling belligerence is finally awakening the rest of humanity to the fundamental non-starter of a unipolar anything. That one entity so militarily, politically, and economically dominant that it can cause pain and suffering wherever and whenever it decides. It is ironic that Trump's MAGA is the act in this play that will dethrone the USA. The downside is that the 99% control NOTHING (this is true across most of the planet.) Another downside is that the megalomaniacs in power will not concede power without a cataclysmic conflict. But nothing is set in stone, though the indications don't look promising.

Jerry Alatalo , August 11, 2018 at 8:57 am

"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."

"But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose what is always a great benefit – the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."

– JOHN STUART MILL (1806-1873) English political economist, philosopher

Realist , August 11, 2018 at 3:12 am

Something must be getting into the water supply either by accident or design to induce the mass hypnosis that has so many presumably intelligent people believing that we must all walk in lockstep on every policy the elites want. Maybe we are all zombified from the massive amounts of Xanax, Valium, Oxycontin and other mind-numbing psychoactive agents our population consumes and pisses, unmetabolized, into the water table to be recycled into our drinking water, obviating the need for a personal prescription to enjoy (suffer) the effects.

It's a real pity if the totally transparent sham scare stories they have disseminated are alone enough to convince most of the people to give up their constitutional rights and privacy. Clearly the tactic of the big lie doesn't work on every last individual or sites like this one would not have an audience. That is why they want to shut us down, and Alex Jones, though not a member of this journal club, is just the first step towards an outcome that will encompass everyone remaining outside an all pervasive Groupthink.

Ideas, beliefs, memes, values, customs, habits and such are not received universally from some inspirational force on high. (You are simply told to believe that from earliest childhood.) They are spread through the population like a virus from mind-to-mind contact, whether in person or via some modality of mass communication, like the TV or the internet. The object of censorship, as per Alex Jones or Ron Paul most recently, is to extirpate the source of "infection" as close to its point of origin as possible, before it can be spread to too many carriers for transmission to others. People tend to believe what they hear and what they hear comes from their regular contacts. Shut down their favorite talk show host or internet site and they become starved for new "seditious" ideas. If they never hear a truth, chances are they won't think it up themselves and certainly not act upon it.

Another thing I am pretty sure of: if their attempts at propaganda, psy-ops and mind control do not work to their satisfaction, unadorned thuggery will become the new standard. I know, I know, some of our number already get a taste of that.

Dave P. , August 11, 2018 at 5:46 pm

Realist –

"Another thing I am pretty sure of: if their attempts at propaganda, psy-ops and mind control do not work to their satisfaction, unadorned thuggery will become the new standard . . . "

You have it absolutely right. There have been markers all along since G.W. Bush/Cheney rule, clear indicators of this new Future.

But some of us are so desperate to have a better and peaceful future for the humanity on this planet that we get our hopes high for any silver lining in the sky – Obama's hope and change, now Trump's getting along with Russia and stopping interventions abroad.

Now it seems like there is this new hoax the Democrats are going to perpetrate, candidates with some type of socialist orientation, like Bernie Sanders supposedly has been or is. The politicians in both parties are accomplished ConMen, in service of the real Masters – MIC, Wall Street Finance, Media and Entertainment, working to bring this new Future. Bernie Sanders is no different.

Skip Scott , August 12, 2018 at 7:08 am

"Now it seems like there is this new hoax the Democrats are going to perpetrate, candidates with some type of socialist orientation, like Bernie Sanders supposedly has been or is. "

I have noticed this ploy as well. They are willing to have a few faux progressives to keep the progressive wing of the party from abandoning them altogether. They use Sanders, and now this new Ocasio-Cortez, to sell their "big tent" narrative, and then co-op them when it comes to all the important issues. They also constantly sell the idea that voting for third party candidates is a waste of time, so you have to settle for "the lesser of evils" when it comes time for a new president. I don't know how long they can keep playing the same con-game before people see through it, but if it happens again in 2020, I think we are doomed.

Realist , August 12, 2018 at 10:01 am

The Democratic incumbent running for the senate in Florida (Bill Nelson) has made me so angry by yet again using the party con against Russia that I could never vote for him even though his opponent is the horrendous Governor Rick Scott (who plead guilty to defrauding Medicare to the tune of a billion dollars for his Columbia HMO system prior to his election). I cannot abide such theft of taxpayer money in broad daylight, but I also cannot accept Nelson's spewing lies that Russia has actively hacked the Florida voter roles, plans to delete registrations and disrupt the November elections. You know who's really more likely to do those things? The Democratic and Republican parties.

Nelson is just making pre-emptive excuses for the loss that he sees coming. If he believes his desperate gambit can work, he must think the voters are damned idiots to believe that Russia would persist in perpetrating sabotage against American interests putting them constantly in the crosshairs of our politicians and media. He must think that Floridians will buy any tall tale that their elected officials tell them, totally unsupported by any evidence. We are to believe that Assad never stops trying to poison his own people and that Putin never stops interfering in American elections. (Why should Putin favor Rick Scott? Because he admires American crooks?) If you truly believe such accusations, it is probably logical that you would favor WAR with that country. I will vote for someone from the Baader-Meinhof gang or the Taliban Party (if there is such a beast) before either Nelson or Scott. Or I won't vote at all.

Jessika , August 10, 2018 at 6:23 pm

Zero Hedge tonight has an interesting article by Charles Hugh Smith, "The Grand Irony of Russiagate: US Becomes More Like USSR Every Day". The clampdown in the old Soviet Union before its collapse has parallels to what's going on in US now.

Jeff Harrison , August 10, 2018 at 5:12 pm

From Wikipedia. Fascism:
Fascism (/?fæ??z?m/) is a form of radical authoritarian ultranationalism,[1][2] characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy.

The Cheetos-in-chief would love to wield dictatorial power and has tried to do so in the past as have his predecessors (Obama, yeah, well, we had to torture some folks::Shrub you're with us or against us.). Senator Chris Murphy essentially telling these companies who to kick off their platforms, the regimentation of society and the economy is continuing apace as companies are forced to comply with government demands that the government should never be able to make but they do for "national security reasons"

Pfui. As I've said before the US has become a fascistic police state.

MBeaver , August 11, 2018 at 10:50 pm

Many other western countries, too. The only thing missing to "fit" fascism is the nationalism. They completely gave up their national identity for neoliberal agendas. I wont look for a new term, because its as close to fascism as anything else, especially since the definition of leftism and socialism has changed a lot since fascism was invented (by a socialist), so why shouldnt the definition of fascism a tiny bit?
But it exposes people who always cry "its not fascism" because nationalism is missing, as accomplices at the very least.

Also, as an objective person, you should at least admit, that "cheeto-in-chief" is actually trying hard to keep the promises he made. I havent seen that in a western leader in a very VERY long time. Its just very obvious that the president isnt almighty and the deep state is very powerful. Thanks to Trump its become evident to even fools, that the USA is much more corrupt than even any conspiracy theorist would have thought just a few years ago.

jaycee , August 10, 2018 at 4:27 pm

The idea that discordant speech is somehow a threat to the nation or democracy is so looney and bereft of fact that it is actually painful to contemplate how many otherwise intelligent persons seem to have internalized the notion. Obviously, Trump's election victory severely damaged the Establishment's confidence in the ability to "manufacture consent" to the degree that fundamental concepts of free speech are now in the cross-hairs. They will destroy the Republic in order to save it.

Gary Weglarz , August 10, 2018 at 3:58 pm

When the corporate state speaks of "hate speech" and "community standards" – one can be sure they are not referring to Madeline Albright's stunning defense for killing of a half a million Iraqi children with sanctions as "worth it." Nor would the corporate state ever categorize as "hate speech" the daily attack by a wide variety of U.S. officials and media pundits, not only on the Russian government, but on the very – "character" – of the Russian people as a whole.

Our actual and very real – "community standards" – in the U.S. include the complete normalization of illegal immoral endless aggressive war-making in violation of international law (not to mention regime change by jihadists, drone murders, economic warfare, political assassinations, etc.) – along with the despicable demonization of official enemies – in other words the total "normalization of hate-speech."

"Violations" of these widely held U.S. "community standards" & "hate-speech standards" involves plain and simply any – "challenge" – to them or deviation from them. In other words to speak words not sufficiently 'anti-Russian' today is considered a form of "hate speech" in MSM and in political discourse. To suggest peace rather than war with Russia might be a good idea is to violate precious "community standards" which today tolerate only mindless fact-free warmongering in public discourse. You really can't make this stuff up!

Dave P. , August 10, 2018 at 5:48 pm

Excellent comments. So true.

We are heading towards some sort of dark ages, and at very fast pace.

Maxwell Quest , August 10, 2018 at 10:00 pm

Gary, pointing out the shameless and bald-faced hypocrisy as you did can sometimes shake the stupefaction from an open-minded reader. Sadly, though, arguments such as these just seem to bounce off the Russiagaters, having no effect. Conversely, these very same people couldn't lavish enough praise on the peace prize winner Obama, whether he was bailing out the corrupt banks, letting the lobbyists craft Obamacare, trafficking arms through Benghazi, or droning some wedding party in the desert.

What do both of these examples have in common? Easy, the state media was able to control the narrative in each case, and these same hypnotized drones ate it up hook, line and sinker. This brings us right back to why internet-based censorship is the hot topic of the day, since it is the single most threat to complete state control over the public mind.

Dave P. , August 10, 2018 at 11:09 pm

Well said. Obama is not gone yet. He is still out there selling his philosophy of promoting the Wall street and corrupt banks, and droning and killing the weak and innocents all over the world , for the right cause so to speak – spreading freedom and democracy. And liberals buy it. What a World we live in!

He, along with Clintons, is the main instigator of "Russia Gate", which may lead the human life to extinction on Earth.

Realist , August 11, 2018 at 2:24 am

Dave

Yes, anything is permitted (by Washington) as long as it is in the name of "freedom and democracy." So say the leaders of our exceptional country.

Realist , August 11, 2018 at 2:22 am

Damn straight, Maxwell.

Mildly Facetious , August 11, 2018 at 4:16 pm

Yes, anything is permitted (by Washington) as long as it is in the name of "freedom and democracy." So say the leaders of our exceptional country.
??????????????????????????

They do this because they know their mainstream, plutocrat-friendly "centrist" views will never be censored.

Everyone else is on the chopping block, however.

Leftist sites have already had their views slashed by a manipulation of Google's algorithms, and it won't be long before movements like BDS and Antifa and skeptics of the establishment Syria and Russia narratives can be made to face mass de-platforming on the same exact pretext as Infowars.

-- - compare that, if you've a clue, (not to obfuscate your subject), Caitlan Johnstone, with, not mere censorship, but the Protection of 'Confidential' information such as the Industrial Pharma INDUSTRY OF DEATH (shades -of -nazi-germany??? )via INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION and PRESCRIBING OF OPIOIDS as if Huxley's "Soma" or/and a preview of " The Chemical and Bacteriological Conditioning of the Embryo. – Practical Instructions for Beta Embryro-Store Workers /// as in government forced vaccinations along with Facebook enforced capitulation of any/all -- Personal Sovereign Belief/s massively defaulting and bowing the knee and Becoming Persuaded and Trapped into inescapable Autocracy, by reason of Darwin-esk dissembling and a dis-informed election to Dissent Into The Maelstrom of the sinking ship of American Exceptionalism, -- as if God could/would "forgive" all-of-the-collective Brutality of Bombs, bullets, Uranium Munitions / CRIPPLING Sanctions imposted -- support of brutal dictators Who massacred INNOCENT Civilians in order to obtain/secure US MILITARY FUNDS, in order to secure autocratic/authoritative CONTROL

We are engulfed in a Molding Faze of acceptance of/into a totally new Reality strangely built upon Nazi science/experiments, now Entering an/the Age of Space-Age manipulation of DNA, Gene Manipulation -- origins of species ordered inside test tubes.

George Gilder prophetically saw this in this and more in his prescient 1990's book, MICROCOSM. --
George Gilder and his Discovery Institute were far Ahead – of -the -curve in this 'Facebook" era of Futurisms .

Please find and consider his book, esp as it relates to technological possibilities and the New Wonders (Brave New Worlds) of Gene splicing / manipulation .

[Aug 18, 2018] Too Big to Fail Russia-gate One Year After VIPS Showed a Leak, Not a Hack by Patrick Lawrence

Notable quotes:
"... Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century ..."
"... "Democrats are lipstick on a neocon pig. " ..."
"... The headline says it all? The Russiagate lie is "to big too fail" because if this shellgame hoax concocted by the Democratic Party to mask the very thing they are accusing Russia of doing, election meddling was ever exposed, the'd be finished, as a Political Party! ..."
Aug 13, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

One year later, the VIPS memo contending that the DNC emails were leaked and not hacked has yet to be successfully challenged. Meanwhile, the country sinks deeper into the morass of the new McCarthyism, comments Patrick Lawrence.

A year has passed since highly credentialed intelligence professionals produced the first hard evidence that allegations of mail theft and other crimes attributed to Russia rested on purposeful falsification and subterfuge. The initial reaction to these revelations -- a firestorm of frantic denial -- augured ill, and the time since has fulfilled one's worst expectations. One year later we live within an institutionalized proscription of proven reality. Our discourse consists of a series of fence posts and taboos. By any detached measure, this lands us in deep, serious trouble. The sprawl of what we call "Russia-gate" now brings our republic and its institutions to a moment of great peril -- the gravest since the McCarthy years and possibly since the Civil War. No, I do not consider this hyperbole.

Much has happened since Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity published its report on intrusions into the Democratic Party's mail servers on Consortium News on July 24 last year. Parts of the intelligence apparatus -- by no means all or even most of it -- have issued official "assessments" of Russian culpability. Media have produced countless multi-part "investigations," "special reports," and what-have-yous that amount to an orgy of faulty syllogisms. Robert Mueller's special investigation has issued two sets of indictments that, on scrutiny, prove as wanting in evidence as the notoriously flimsy intelligence "assessment" of January 6, 2017.

Indictments are not evidence and do not need to contain evidence. That is supposed to come out at trial, which is very unlikely to ever happen. Nevertheless, the corporate media has treated the indictments as convictions.

Numerous sets of sanctions against Russia, individual Russians, and Russian entities have been imposed on the basis of this great conjuring of assumption and presumption. The latest came last week, when the Trump administration announced measures in response to the alleged attempt to murder Sergei and Yulia Skripal, a former double agent and his daughter, in England last March. No evidence proving responsibility in the Skripal case has yet been produced. This amounts to our new standard. It prompted a reader with whom I am in regular contact to ask, "How far will we allow our government to escalate against others without proof of anything?"

This is a very good question.

Cover of 2001 book that looks back on the earlier period of anti-Russia hysteria.

There have been many attempts to discredit VIPS50 as the group's document is called. There has been much amateurish journalism, false reporting, misrepresentation, distortion, misquotation, and omission. We have been treated to much shoddy science, attempts at character assassination, a great deal of base name-calling, and much else. Russia is routinely advanced as the greatest threat to democracy Americans now face. Is there any denying that we live amid an induced hysteria now comparable to the "Red under every bed" period of the 1950s?

None of this has altered the basic case. VIPS and forensic scientists working with it have continued their investigations. New facts, some of which alter conclusions drawn last year, have come to light, and these are to be addressed. But the basic evidence that Russia-gate is a false narrative concocted by various constituents of national power stands, difficult as this is to discern. Scrape back all that is ethically unacceptable and unscrupulously conveyed into the public sphere and you find that nothing has changed: No one "hacked" the Democratic party's mail in the summer of 2016. It was leaked locally. From what one can make out, it was done to expose the party leadership's corrupt efforts to sink Bernie Sanders' insurgent campaign to win the Democratic nomination.

But in another, very profound way, more has changed since VIPS50 was published than one could have imagined a year ago. American discourse has descended to a dangerous level of irrationality. The most ordinary standards of evidentiary procedure are forgone. Many of our key institutions -- the foreign policy apparatus, the media, key intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, the political leadership -- are now extravagantly committed to a narrative none appears able to control. The risk of self-inflicted damage these institutions assume, should the truth of the Russia-gate events emerge -- as one day it surely will -- is nearly incalculable. This is what inspires my McCarthy and Civil War references. Russia-gate, in a phrase, has become too big to fail.

This column is an attack on no one. However it may be read, it is not intended as another round of vituperative argument adding to the din and fog we already suffer daily. No shred of ideology informs it. I write a lament -- this for all we have done to ourselves and our institutions this past year, and to the prospect of an orderly world, and for all that must somehow be done to repair the damage once enough of us indeed recognize what has been done.

New VIPS Findings

Binney: Dares anyone to prove remote speeds .

The forensic scientists working with VIPS continued their research and experiments after VIPS50 was published. So have key members of the VIPS group, notably William Binney, the National Security Agency's former technical director for global analysis and designer of programs the agency still uses to monitor internet traffic. Such work continues as we speak, indeed. This was always the intent: "Evidence to date" was the premise of VIPS50. Over the past year there have been confirmations of the original thesis and some surprises that alter secondary aspects of it. Let us look at the most significant of these findings.

At the time I reported on the findings of VIPS and associated forensic scientists, that the most fundamental evidence that the events of summer 2016 constituted a leak, not a hack, was the transfer rate -- the speed at which data was copied. The speed proven then was an average of 22.7 megabytes per second. That speed matches what is standard when someone with physical access uses an external storage device to copy data from a computer or server and is much faster than a remote hack, reliant on communications topology available at the time, could achieve.

Binney experimented into the autumn. By mid-autumn he had tested several routes -- from East Coast locations to cities in eastern Europe, from New Jersey to London. The fastest internet transfer speed achieved, during the New Jersey–to–Britain test, was 12.0 megabytes of data per second. Since this time it has emerged from G-2.0's metadata that the detected average speed -- the 22.7 megabytes per second -- included peak speeds that ran as high as 49.1 megabytes per second, impossible over the internet. "You'd need a dedicated, leased, 400–megabit line all the way to Russia to achieve that result," Binney said in a recent interview.

To my knowledge, no one with an understanding of the science involved, including various former skeptics, any longer questions the validity of the specific finding based on the observed transfer rate. That remains the bedrock evidence of the case VIPS and others advance without qualification. " No one -- including the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA -- has come out against this finding," Binney said Monday. "Anyone who says the speed we demonstrated can be achieved remotely, our position is 'Let's see it. We'll help any way we can.' There hasn't been anyone yet."

There is also the question of where and when leaks were executed. Research into this has turned out differently.

Evidence last year, based on analysis of the available metadata, showed that the copy operation date-stamped July 5, 2016, took place in the Eastern U.S. time zone. But Forensicator, one of the chief forensic investigators working on the mail-theft case anonymously, published evidence in May showing that while there was activity in the Eastern zone at the time of that copy, there was also a copy operation in the Pacific time zone, where clocks run three hours earlier that EST. In an earlier publication he had also reported activity in the Central time zone.

Plainly, more was awaiting discovery as to the when and where of the copy operations. The identity of Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be a Romanian hacker but which the latest Mueller indictment claims is a construct of the GRU, Russian military intelligence, has never been proven. The question is what G–2.0 did with or to the data in question. It turns out that both more, and less, is known about G–2.0 than was thought to have been previously demonstrated. This work has been completed only recently. It was done by Binney in collaboration with Duncan Campbell, a British journalist who has followed the Russia-gate question closely.

Peak Speed Established

Binney visited Campbell in Brighton, England, early this past spring. They examined all the metadata associated with the files G–2.0 has made public. They looked at the number of files, the size of each, and the time stamps at the end of each. It was at this time that Binney and Campbell established the peak transfer rate at 49.1 megabytes per second.

But they discovered something else of significance, too. At some point G–2.0 had merged two sets of data, one dated July 5, 2016, which had been known, and another dated the following September 1, which had not been known. In essence, Campbell reverse-engineered G–2.0's work: He took the sets of data G–2.0 presented as two and combined them back into one. "G–2.0 used an algorithm to make a downloaded file look like two files," Binney explained. "Those two shuffled back together like a deck of cards."

G–2.0 then took another step. Running another algorithm, he changed all the dates on all the files. With yet another algorithm, he changed the hours stamped on each file. These are called "range changes" among the professionals. The conclusion was then obvious: G–2.0 is a fabrication and a fabricator. Forensicator had already proven that the G–2.0 entity had inserted Russian "fingerprints" into the document known as the "Trump Opposition Report," which G-2.0 had published on June 15, 2016. It is clear that no firm conclusions can be drawn at this point as to when or where G–2.0 did what he did.

" Now you need to prove everything you might think about him," Binney told me. "We have no way of knowing anything about him or what he has done, apart from manipulating the files. We detected activity in the Eastern time zone. Now we have to ask again, 'Which time zone?' The West Coast copy operation [discovered by Forensicator] has to be proven. All the data has been manipulated. It's a fabrication."

This throws various things into question. The conclusions initially drawn on time and location in VIPS50 are now subject to these recent discoveries. "In retrospect, giving 'equal importance' status to data pertaining to the locale was mistaken," Ray McGovern, a prominent VIPS member, wrote in a recent note. "The key finding on transfer speed always dwarfed it in importance."

The indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officers announced in mid–July by Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney-general, also come into question. They rest in considerable part on evidence derived from G–2.0 and DCLeaks, another online persona. How credible are those indictments in view of what is now known about G–2.0?

Binney told me: "Once we proved G–2.0 is a fabrication and a manipulator, the timing and location questions couldn't be answered but really didn't matter. I don't right now see a way of absolutely proving either time or location. But this doesn't change anything. We know what we know: The intrusion into the Democratic National Committee mail was a local download -- wherever 'local' is." That doesn't change. As to Rosenstein, he'll have a lot to prove."

What Role does Evidence Play?

Rosenstein at the Justice Department on July 13 announcing indictments against 12 GRU agents. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Rosenstein's predicament -- and there is no indication he understands it as one -- brings us to an essential problem: What is the place of evidence in American public discourse? Of rational exchange?

The questions are germane far beyond the Russia-gate phenomenon, but it is there that answers are most urgent. What is implicit in the Rosenstein indictments has been evident everywhere in our public sphere for a year or more: Make a presumption supported by circumstantial evidence or none and build other presumptions upon it until a false narrative is constructed. The press has deployed this device for as long as I have been a practitioner: "Might" or "could" or "possibly" becomes "perhaps," "probably" and "almost certainly," and then moves on to unqualified fact in the course of, maybe, several weeks. Now this is how our most basic institutions -- not least agencies of the Justice Department -- routinely operate.

This is what I mean when I refer to ours as a republic in peril.

There is the argument that certain things have been uncovered over the past year, and these are enough to conclude that Russia plots to undermine our democracy. I refer to the small number of Facebook advertisements attributed to Russians, to strings of Twitter messages, to various phishing exercises that occur thousands of times a day the world over. To be clear, I am no more satisfied with the evidence of Russian involvement in these cases than I am with the evidence in any other aspect of the Russia-gate case. But for the sake of argument, let us say it is all true.

Does this line up with the Russophobic hysteria -- not too strong a term -- that envelops us? Does this explain the astonishing investments our public institutions, the press, and leading political parties have made in advancing this hysteria as they did a variant of in the 1950s?

As global politics go, some serious thought should be given to a reality we have created all by ourselves: It is now likely that America has built a new Cold War division with Russia that will prove permanent for the next 20 to 30 years. All this because of some Facebook ads and Twitter threads of unproven origin? Am I the only one who sees a weird and worrisome gap between what we are intent on believing -- as against thinking or knowing -- and the consequences of these beliefs?

There was an orthodoxy abroad many centuries ago called Fideism. In the simplest terms, it means the privileging of faith and belief over reason. It was the enemy of individual conscience, among much else. Fideism has deep roots, but it was well around in the 16 th century, when Montaigne and others had to navigate its many dangers. Closer to our time, William James landed a variant on American shores with an 1896 address called "The Will to Believe." Bertrand Russell countered this line of thinking a couple of decades later with "Free Thought and Official Propaganda," a lecture whose title I will let speak for itself. Twenty years ago, none other than Pope John Paul II warned of a resurgence of Fideism. It is still around, in short.

Do we suffer from it? A variant of it, I would say, if not precisely in name. There seems to be a givenness to it in the American character. I think we are staring into a 21 st century rendition of it.

To doubt the hollowed-out myth of American innocence is a grave sin against the faith. It is now unpatriotic to question the Russia-gate narrative despite the absence of evidence to support it. Informal censorship of differing perspectives is perfectly routine. It is now considered treasonous to question the word of intelligence agencies and the officials who lead them despite long records of deceit. Do we forget that it was only 15 years ago that these same institutions and people deceived us into an invasion of Iraq the consequences of which still persist?

This was the question Craig Murray, the former British diplomat (who has vital information on the DNC mail theft but who has never been interviewed by American investigators) posed a few weeks ago. Eugene Robinson gave a good-enough reply in a Washington Post opinion piece shortly afterward: "God Bless the Deep State," the headline read.

How we got here deserves a work of social psychology, and I hope someone takes up the task. Understanding our path into our self-created crisis seems to me the first step to finding our way out of it.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author, and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century (Yale). Follow him @thefloutist. His web site is www.patricklawrence.us . Support his work via www.patreon.com/thefloutist .


Gerry L Forbes , August 16, 2018 at 4:14 pm

  1. Can the DNC server be used to convict anybody but the DNC and Crowdstrike since they refused to let the FBI examine the server, breaking the chain of custody? About the indictments handed down so far all one can really say is "luncheon is served!" ("Any good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich"). And how is lying to the FBI a crime unless it meets the standard of obstruction of justice? Do they put you under oath before questioning you? Isn't this just an infringement of Fifth Amendment rights? Must be one of Schumer's six ways from Sunday.
  2. The amount of discord sown by Russian trolls probably pales in comparison to that sown by American trolls and wouldn't even register compared to the discord sown by daily headlines screaming about Russian meddling.
  3. The solution is to teach critical thinking but this will not happen because it is not in the interests of politicians, lobbyists, or advertisers and the businesses that these groups serve.Even Harvard University prefers to protect its students from "fake news' by censorship rather than education.
Rob , August 17, 2018 at 12:50 pm

"Lying" to the FBI is exactly how they indicted Michael Flynn. His interrogators asked questions to which they already had the answers (via telephone taps), and when he gave them wrong information, they nailed him. For all we know, he simply forgot specific details in giving his answers and was not trying to deceive, but that possibility seems to be beside the point. This is a common tactic that the FBI uses to induce suspects and witnesses to cooperate. Clever, but backhanded, IMO

irina , August 16, 2018 at 9:07 pm

1981 is not 2018.

And you might want to google 'Clinton Body Count' if you're worried about politicos offing people. In fact, a young woman investigating Bill Clinton's sexual shenanigans just got dead rather suspiciously . . .

For those who are so vituperative about Vladimir Putin, I say "Be careful what you wish for". We can only hope his successor is as unflappable as he seems to be. (By the way, during your trip did you learn anything about the Siege of Leningrad in WW2 ?) Did you know that Putin's parents lived through that siege, and that his older brother died in childhood as a result of being young and starving during the siege ?

I live in Alaska and remember the 'Golden Samovar Service' offered by Alaska Airlines in the late 1980's (direct flights to the Russian Far East). Now, we must fly almost all the way around the world to get to Siberia. How does that make sense ?

Kay , August 15, 2018 at 11:39 am

What is astonishing to me is how anyone could have believed this hoax in the first place, particularly when the Democratic party literally admitted it chooses candidates in backroom deals. It is lobbyists, defense contractors, corporations & the Israeli lobby that owns our politicians. Russia gate is also a smokescreen that covers up another foreign government interfering in our own & in our elections. Trumps largest donor is Sheldon Adelson, Israeli billionaire. We have 89 members of Congress who are dual Israelis and we just gave that fascist, genocidal state 38 BILLION in welfare. All our wars have been for the colonial expansion of greater Israel and the new NDAA literally authorizes war with Iran, on behalf of Israel & Saudi Arabia of course.

I was present throughput the 2016 election and witnessed the fraud by Clinton the DNC & the FBI's downgrading of Clinton crime was obvioua. Where in the hell was everyone else? Democrats wanted Clinton & her intelligence agency crowd because WAR WAS ASSURED. Democrats are addicted to war & militarism. I still meet people who had no idea that Obama was involved in five wars, with Clinton help!! And if they do know they don't CARE.

Democrats are lipstick on a neocon pig. Their love for war & continued denial about their corruption will continue to see them lose election after election. In a recent Gallop poll, Russia was at the bottom of the list of concerns for respondents. Democrats do not talk to their base. They talk at them with Russiagate. It's old. I do believe the lies will be revealed and I believe that more in America know what's really going on than not. 62 percent of Americans don't vote. There is a reason for that. In another recent poll 56 percent of Americans want normalized relations with Russia. It's the elite that are,driving us to war.

The question is what will we do to stop it

Ed , August 16, 2018 at 11:25 pm

"Democrats are lipstick on a neocon pig. "

True, and let's not forget that the original neocons were Scoop Jackson democrats who infiltrated the GOP and now infest both parties.

KiwiAntz , August 14, 2018 at 8:16 pm

The headline says it all? The Russiagate lie is "to big too fail" because if this shellgame hoax concocted by the Democratic Party to mask the very thing they are accusing Russia of doing, election meddling was ever exposed, the'd be finished, as a Political Party!

So the lie must go on using Russia as the scapegoat to divert public attention from Democrats colluding with the Intelligence Agencies to firstly get rid of Bernie Saunders as a Presidential Candidate then to get dirt on Trump in a attempt to conduct a soft coup to oust him from office! The corruption of the Democratic Party & the entire American establishment, comprised of its Corporate, Financial, Political, MIC & Intelligence Agencies in lockstep with a insidious MSM propagandist arm is now, so corrupt, evil & ingrained, that there's no hope for its citizens who now live in a Stasi, Gestopo, Fascist Country whose Leaders are blaming Russia for everything to distract attention away from their race to the bottom, deathcult ambitions & their willing to risk Nuclear War with Russia too advance their lunatic plans! America is lost as a Country with no hope, no values & certainly has no moral compass or conscience

exiled off mainstreet , August 15, 2018 at 2:22 am

This is exactly how it is at present. It is a signal disgrace and war crimes, such as the Yemen thing and suggested wars with Iran and elsewhere are the inevitable outgrowth of this situation.

Jean , August 14, 2018 at 10:00 pm

Hillary Clinton's record is of mass murder and chaos and coups

What do you think all of this is about

Afghanistan Iraq Syria Libya Iran Etc

It all a proxy war with Russia It's about pipelines and Europe and keeping the USA in the Middle East

Top US General Warns Syrian "No-Fly" Zone Means War with Russia

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.globalresearch.ca/top-us-general-warns-syrian-no-fly-zone-means-war-with-russia/5547581/amp https://www.google.com/amp/ Hillary wanted the no fly zone and called Putin Hitler

michael , August 15, 2018 at 5:30 am

The Clintons abrogated the Reagan agreements with Gorbachev to keep NATO to the west of reunified Germany, ringing Russia with NATO bases and provoking Russian actions. American and British oligarchs (like Bill Browder) descended on Russia under American puppet Yeltsin to plunder Russia, along with quick study Russian oligarchs (many of whom fled to the West, particularly to London, with the money). Putin put an end to that, and the Clintons had a conniption, since they were counting on fortunes for themselves. Clintons delivered the meaningless Kosova war, as well as in Chinagate, offshoring our technology technology jobs to permanent free trade status China, which was designed to further pressure Russia but may come back to haunt us, as did the Clintons' repeal of Glass Steagall in 2008. Putin is popular for reversing much of what the Clintons' did to Russia, and Russian life expectancy has gone up by 5 years since 2005 (American life expectancy has declined, and is below the OECD countries in aggregate).

GKJames , August 15, 2018 at 6:53 am

I recognize that hyperbole is the order of the day. But to lay at Clinton's feet responsibility for "mass murder [really??] and chaos and coups" in the countries you identify surely is carrying your highly selective rage too far. If memory serves, it was some other guy who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. As for her "call[ing] Putin Hitler," what she in fact said was that Putin's actions in Ukraine -- the purported protection of the ethnic Russian minority in the east of the country in order to justify the use of military force there -- was similar to what Hitler h

Keith , August 14, 2018 at 4:41 pm

According to Bill Binney in an interview with Jimmy Dore ( https://youtu.be/JHZXVWUxxDU ), Guccifer 2.0 released two batches of data, one on 5 July 2016 and a second on 1 Sept 2016. "But if you look at that data a little closer," Binney said, "and you ignore the hour and the day, and just look at minutes, seconds, and milliseconds, [you can take those] two data sets and shuffle them like a deck of cards. They fit together into one dataset without conflict." So there was one continuous set of data. In other words, G-2.0 got hold of one dataset, but wanted it to appear as two different hacks. Binney doesn't deviate from the claim that the speed of the download means it was done "locally"–not over the internet–but that we don't know where "local" was (it wasn't necessarily done at the DNC). As for the possibility that the dataset was hacked over the internet, then moved locally at the much faster speed, I'd guess that the VIPS would have identified that possibility. If G-2.0 were so unsophisticated as to change dates and hours, but ignore minutes, seconds, and milliseconds, G-2.0 might have overlooked any evidence that the dataset had also been moved previously over a slower internet transfer–and VIPS is sharp enough to have picked that up. If such evidence could easily be removed, surely VIPS would have pointed out that possibility.

JWalters , August 14, 2018 at 9:02 pm

The main defense against the VIPS download speed analysis is the claim that the files might have been stolen from the DNC server over the internet at the slower speed, and then copied to a thumb drive at the faster speed. I'd like to hear how VIPS would dispute that theory.

In any case, there is a great deal of additional evidence that the theft was an inside job, including Julian Assange and Craig Murry saying the emails came to Wikileaks from a disgruntled insider, and even Leon Podesta speculating that it was insider.

Rob Roy , August 14, 2018 at 10:56 pm

The were leaked. JULIAN ASSANGE HAS SAID SO MANY TIMES. Why do you think he is now isolated from the world? Now I hear he's considering taking an offer to testify and I'm worried about his mental state. Maybe someone in isolation who goes "stir crazy" would be willing to do anything to get out of it. No, that can't be right. He's never caved before.

michael , August 15, 2018 at 5:55 am

As Federal judge William Zloch told Bernie supporters when they sued the Hillary DNC for stealing the primaries and their donations, the DNC is NOT a government entity. The DNC is NOT a public institution. The DNC IS a private club which by some arcane corrupt rule befitting a Banana Republic allows it to put forth one of essentially only two candidates for President. If there was any crime committed in this "matter" the FBI would have been all over those servers and computers like white on rice. You cannot have it both ways. As it is, there is no chain of custody for any possible evidence, and as Hillary has said many times, No Evidence Means No Crime.

Gary Weglarz , August 14, 2018 at 4:37 pm

It is quite interesting how many uninformed posters and/or trolls would love to find a way to show the "Russiagate" nonsense is somehow plausible in spite of the evidence. They're kind of like a five year old child who desperately wants to keep believing in Santa Claus, even though he just found dad's Santa costume in the closet and he's holding it in his own hands.

I will say that the amount of mental gymnastics required to continue not believing evidence that is right in front of one's eyes is quite impressive – but I'd never underestimate the American people's creativity when they want to maintain their illusions/delusions. And I'd certainly never underestimate the Russiagate troll army's persistence.

At this rate I expect to soon encounter some version of the following "observation" in the comments section for this article: – "maybe space aliens hired by the Russians downloaded the files to a to a new fangled thig-a-ma-jig and then shape-shifted so Craig Murray would be fooled into thinking a real-like-human insider provided him the files on a flash drive." – "oh, oh, wait, maybe the aliens abducted Murray too, and then just made him "think" a fellow human gave him the drive in person." "yeah, yeah, and maybe Assange just says he didn't get the files from the Russians because "he's a space alien too." "Yeah, prove to me that it didn't happen this way – you can't – ha! there! I win!"

Sorry, but two years into this we should be way beyond this kind of – "I can't believe Santa's not real"- denying, dissembling, rationalizing nonsense. Then again, this is America.

michael , August 15, 2018 at 6:06 am

"Two years after the Iraq War began, 70 per cent of Americans still believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks, according to a Washington Post survey." The Big Lie works, and since Obama gutted Smith-Mundt, the CIA/ State Department can legally keep Americans tracking on their propaganda narratives.

[Aug 18, 2018] "DNC server hack" was an insider transfer. Insider dead. Dead men tell no tales and so far, neither does Wikileaks

Aug 18, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

StarGate -> valjoux7750 Fri, 08/17/2018 - 06:41 Permalink

Double pronged exercise: 1) Start war with Russia, steal its oil, break into tiny States to destroy its power; 2) Destroy Trump as enemy of globalist world domination and USA disintegration plan.

MSM propaganda arm to sell (1) and (2).

These retired Intel specialists keep interfering in the game and interjecting inconvenient facts:

DNC server never hacked by Russia or anyone. It was an insider transfer. Insider dead. Dead men tell no tales and so far, neither does Wikileaks.

currency Thu, 08/16/2018 - 22:12 Permalink

VIPS is doing some excellent work and they show what really happened while Rosenstein is out to Lunch, Sessions is deaf dumb and blind - useless - both Sessions and Rosenstein need to go.

Muller does not care and he is not interested in the truth and is ignoring the facts and the corruption in the FBI/DOJ - Muller and his band of Clinton Loyalist are trying to frame Trump.

StarGate -> currency Fri, 08/17/2018 - 06:50 Permalink

Rosenstein and Mueller KNOW the DNC server was not hacked by Russia or by anyone. Insider transfer. So are they working for HilBarry? Or is this a magic act?

What Sessions is doing is unknown. He knows he was set up by Barry sending the Russian ambassador to his office and by (FBI? Spy) Paul Ericsson offering to connect campaign thru him to Russia. He had to recuse or be in the midst of the mess. Does he have a plan? - we don't know.

quasi_verbatim Thu, 08/16/2018 - 22:28 Permalink

It's not Russiagate, it's Americagate and it's your problem, not ours.

The only significant remaining question is whether you fade gracefully from the page of History or whether you take the Samson Option and we all go out flash-bang.

Taras Bulba Thu, 08/16/2018 - 22:28 Permalink

I have a ton of respect for Binney. Regardless as to how fucked up this country is and its govt, there are still people who will step up and try to set the record straight.

Cloud9.5 Thu, 08/16/2018 - 22:30 Permalink

Joseph Goebbels was indeed a genius. Tell a lie long enough and loud enough and it becomes the accepted truth.

TradingTroll -> Cloud9.5 Thu, 08/16/2018 - 22:42 Permalink

Not really true, that statement.

If you put a camera in front of a bunch of randomly selected Americans and ask them to state their name and where they live, before answering if they voted for Trump, you get a lot of No replies.

Now do the same questioning anonymously. The number of Nos drops.

This is the gaping hole in Goebbels argument. Anonymous polls can get closer to the truth. Then the "accepted truth" is challenged, as in 9-11.

Goebbels=too much hubris.

bh2 -> Cloud9.5 Thu, 08/16/2018 - 23:12 Permalink

It was Hitler who endorsed the Big Lie technique. Goebbels was much more subtle.

He would laugh at amateurs whose propaganda is so absurdly vulnerable to conclusive falsification by objective facts.

MrBoompi Thu, 08/16/2018 - 22:34 Permalink

"There has been much amateurish journalism, false reporting, misrepresentation, distortion, misquotation, and omission." In other words, the CIA was behind this.

hooligan2009 Thu, 08/16/2018 - 22:43 Permalink

so... the upshot is that G.2 and DCLeaks fabricated the leak as a hack AND the tools to do this and to fabricate signatures/date stamps etc existed in the CIA (proven here: https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/index.html ) and possibly MI6, but not in Russia, or Romania?

the CIA has "stations" all over the world?

looks like a few facebook and twitter posts have resulted in the alphabet soup, deep state, DNC and MSM spending tens of billions of dollars pushing a false agenda against russia AND have caused hundreds of billions of exra dollars on military expenditure and extra security globally.

in which case, they have won by further diverting taxes away from taxpayers and increasing debt where insufficient taxes remain/ed.

bh2 -> hooligan2009 Thu, 08/16/2018 - 23:15 Permalink

Binney has said if the evidence shows the Russians did it, the Russians didn't do it.

This may be a good principle to apply even to things like Facebook ads, etc.

malcolmevans Fri, 08/17/2018 - 01:00 Permalink

The fact that the files were downloaded from the DNC computer, and not hacked from abroad, should be the key to unlocking Clinton conspiracies that would destroy large portions of the Democrat establishment if revealed.

schroedingersrat Fri, 08/17/2018 - 05:01 Permalink

I can achieve up to 1 Gbit/s up & downstream. The average up/downstream is probably quite a bit lower but +50mb/s is probably average. So i lol at the VIPS LOL

JerseyJoe -> schroedingersrat Fri, 08/17/2018 - 06:32 Permalink

Really!?! From what point to what point? Compressed or uncompressed? Fiber or Coax drop?

Laugh all you want - you come off as an idiot because you probably are.

Misean -> schroedingersrat Fri, 08/17/2018 - 15:13 Permalink

Ignorance is bliss. 1 Gb/s = 128MB/s. 50mb/s = 6.25MB/s.

http://www.netmeter.eu

Server:Russia Moscow

Download speed (down)

on 1 thread:0,64 Mbit/s (0,08 MB/s | 640,82 kbit/s)

on more threads:33,84 Mbit/s (4,23 MB/s | 33 838,65 kbit/s)

Upload speed (upload)

on 1 thread:8,47 Mbit/s (1,06 MB/s | 8 467,03 kbit/s)

Sorry dipshit. Just because a connection from your ISP to pr0nHub is fast doesn't make it fast worldwide. 8.47Mb/s = ~1MB/s.

VIPS is very clear they are talking MEGABYTES / s not megaBITS /s. 1BYTE = 8BITS.

Go pull your head out of your ass dumbf*ck

onasip123 Fri, 08/17/2018 - 07:18 Permalink

The Russia-gate narrative pushers aren't interested in the truth.

They're only interested in sowing discord and chaos to distract from crimes of sedition.

East Indian Fri, 08/17/2018 - 18:35 Permalink

The poison of partisan propaganda dumped into American polity to prevent the prosecution of the guilty (for illegally spying on Trump campaign and the assorted crimes associated with it, including the murder of Seth Rich) will continue to foul the atmosphere for decades. The fight is certainly between an unelected octopus that has captured all the three wings of American polity, and a determined if not well armed citizens. The end is not near.

There is a small, nice book by C Northecote Parkinson, "The Law and the Profits". He describes how in 1909 the British empire started a simultaneous course of welfare state and empire building warfare state bureacracy, and how it eventually bankrupted the people by 1945. America started its own version with L B Johnson's Great Society and Vietnam War. Since American economy was much bigger the dichotomous struggle has lasted much longer. But now the time to choose one over another is at hand. Candidate Trump advocated trimming the warfare state more and first. But President Trump is sending mixed signals.

The only saving grace is the self aware American citizenry and its capacity to reform itself.

[Aug 17, 2018] The Department N of the Ministry of Truth is upset about Trump revelations

Aug 17, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Thursday, the New York Times decried Trump's accusation that the media are "the enemy of the people." "Insisting that truths you don't like are 'fake news' is dangerous to the lifeblood of democracy. And calling journalists 'the enemy of the people' is dangerous, period," said the Times .

[Aug 17, 2018] What is definitely conclusive is the Gucci 2 entity forged the inclusion of Russian fingerprints in the leaked version of the documents by pasting it into a Russian language Word template.

Notable quotes:
"... What is definitely conclusive is the Gucci 2 entity forged the inclusion of Russian fingerprints in the leaked version of the documents by pasting it into a Russian language Word template. With 70 years of experience in espionage, there is no way Russian spy agencies are that sloppy and moreover, and if they were it would be absolutely unprecedented. ..."
"... the central conclusion of William Binnery's forensic analysis: that Gucifer 2.0 was a fabrication, and that the DNC emails were downloaded, not hacked by Russia. ..."
"... Were Assange be allowed to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee later this month, the lid could be blown off the entire sordid operation. ..."
"... From before the CIA's formation the US intelligence activities have been the province of the Republican Party (there are plenty of exceptions, but please follow). Allen Dulles and his ilk were friends with and shared goals with German industrialists long before World War II. These relationships continued through WWII and afterwards. The CIA has functioned as an international coal and iron police, overthrowing governments around the world that have stood in the way of corporate profits. ..."
"... This edition of Covert Action Information Bulletin, in 1990, happened just before a shift in Washington. Almost all of the operations run by our government to destabilize Eastern Europe and the USSR in 1990 were organized by the political right and run by people such as Paul Weyrich. But the nineties showed a rise in Democratic activity in these settings. I would guess that a mental image of this would be our then-First Lady lying about dodging bullets on an airstrip during the destruction of Yugoslavia. It marked the successful CIA takeover of the Democratic Party. ..."
"... The 2016 Russiagate hysteria has been an intelligence operation which has been by all measures successful. I presumed initially that the scam was done to put Hillary into the White House, but now wonder if having Trump as President was part of the long-term strategy. ..."
"... Please note that the DNC backed over fifty new candidates for Congress who have intelligence backgrounds. How do you think they will vote for the coming war resolution against Russia? ..."
"... Not sure about the theory of installing Trump in the WH is part of a long term strategy of the deep state, but the latter seems to be adapting to the disruption quite well. ..."
"... Additional info: Stephen Kinzer's "The Brothers" which documents the Dulles brother's creation of the Cold War mentality and activities. Shouldn't we add Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski. ..."
"... Citing a book from almost 30 years ago that implicated ONLY the Republicans in the CIAs machinations ignores LBJ and the CIA's involvement in Vietnam and possibly in the JFK assassination. ..."
"... One suspects that the President has revealed far less than he knows, perhaps wary of being accused of "obstruction" by Mueller in concert with the controlled media. He actually requested that William Binney present his analysis to then CIA Director Pompeo, who has since sat on it. ..."
"... But actually, to your point, the reverse is true. If the DNC and Podesta were hacked by Russians, the NSA would have been able to demonstrate that fact through evidentiary proof, a point made repeatedly by Binney. ..."
"... No such proof was or has ever been offered. Instead the main document presented to the American public was the January 6, 2017 "assessment" by analysts hand-picked by John Brennan, who has played a key role in the illegal operation against President Trump. ..."
"... I was struck by one comment particularly, why not ask Assange about the leak. ..."
"... Keeping him incommunicado certainly serves the leaders of the lynch mob and thanks goes to the new Ecuadorian President. He was asked to shut the guy up and he did. ..."
"... Herman, Assange has been asked about the identity of the leaker and replied that he couldn't comment because Wikileaks has a strict policy of maintaining sources' confidentiality. No potential source would ever trust Assange if he violated that policy. Instead, Assange offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Seth Richards' murderer. So this was his way of answering the question indirectly. ..."
Aug 17, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Paul N August 14, 2018 at 2:36 pm

I don't believe the Russians did this. I think there are perhaps millions of people in the US capable of carrying out this action and many more with motive. Furthermore, if they did, I am happy that the information was made available so I can't see why I would care.

That said, I am unconvinced by this evidence. I am quite familiar with file systems on different operating systems and I would at least need to know what device we are talking about here. Did it come from Assange? Why doesn't somebody say so? What sort of device is it? The simple fact that it was copied from a computer doesn't prove that the computer was the DNC server. It might have been copied from Putin's iMac. I believe in one reading the writer acknowledged that the dates on the drive could be manipulated and I am certain that this is true. While this may still leave it above the level of evidence that the FBI or "intelligence" agencies have presented (or even claimed to have) it is not conclusive. Reply

GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:10 pm

What is definitely conclusive is the Gucci 2 entity forged the inclusion of Russian fingerprints in the leaked version of the documents by pasting it into a Russian language Word template. With 70 years of experience in espionage, there is no way Russian spy agencies are that sloppy and moreover, and if they were it would be absolutely unprecedented.

Furthermore, I have no reason to disbelieve Craig Murray that the docs were handed to him directly and transferred by him to Wikileaks. Quite the contrary, in fact, since his reputation would undoubtedly be irreconcilably demolished for all time if the Russiagaters ever came up with hard proof to support their conspiracy theory.

GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:12 pm

Please forgive all the typos, posted on my little bitty phone :)

j. D. D. , August 14, 2018 at 2:21 pm

The crucial premise of the ongoing British-instigated coup against President Trump and the chief legal ground for Robert Mueller's operation against the President, is the claim that the Russians hacked the emails of the DNC and, John Podesta, and provided the results to WikiLeaks which published them. The authenticity of such emails showing Hillary Clinton to be a craven puppet of Wall Street who had cheated Bernie Sanders of the nomination were never disputed, by Clinton, or anyone else.

Nor has the central conclusion of William Binnery's forensic analysis: that Gucifer 2.0 was a fabrication, and that the DNC emails were downloaded, not hacked by Russia.

Furthermore, the only people who really know where and by whom the download occurred are Julian Assange, whose life is now in peril, and former British Ambassador Craig Murray.

Were Assange be allowed to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee later this month, the lid could be blown off the entire sordid operation.

paul g. , August 14, 2018 at 3:03 pm

Craig stated he was merely a go between, who was given the data in the woods by American University by probably another go between. Lots of cut outs here but the data was transferred physically by thumb drive(s).

David G , August 15, 2018 at 8:27 am

"The crucial premise is the claim that the Russians hacked the emails of the DNC and, John Podesta, and provided the results to WikiLeaks which published them."

Don't forget about the Facebook puppy videos. https://consortiumnews.com/2017/10/04/the-mystery-of-the-russia-gate-puppies/

Bob In Portland , August 14, 2018 at 1:25 pm

I would like to call attention to a little slice of history of US the destabilization of Eastern Europe and the USSR that would help to explain what is happening today.

From before the CIA's formation the US intelligence activities have been the province of the Republican Party (there are plenty of exceptions, but please follow). Allen Dulles and his ilk were friends with and shared goals with German industrialists long before World War II. These relationships continued through WWII and afterwards. The CIA has functioned as an international coal and iron police, overthrowing governments around the world that have stood in the way of corporate profits.

Russ Bellant's book, Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, points to the political relationship between the Republican Party and fascists around the world. You can read a short article by Bellant here: https://archive.org/details/CovertActionInformationBulletinNo35TheCIAInEasternEurope

This edition of Covert Action Information Bulletin, in 1990, happened just before a shift in Washington. Almost all of the operations run by our government to destabilize Eastern Europe and the USSR in 1990 were organized by the political right and run by people such as Paul Weyrich. But the nineties showed a rise in Democratic activity in these settings. I would guess that a mental image of this would be our then-First Lady lying about dodging bullets on an airstrip during the destruction of Yugoslavia. It marked the successful CIA takeover of the Democratic Party.

The 2016 Russiagate hysteria has been an intelligence operation which has been by all measures successful. I presumed initially that the scam was done to put Hillary into the White House, but now wonder if having Trump as President was part of the long-term strategy.

Please note that the DNC backed over fifty new candidates for Congress who have intelligence backgrounds. How do you think they will vote for the coming war resolution against Russia?

GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:16 pm

Not sure about the theory of installing Trump in the WH is part of a long term strategy of the deep state, but the latter seems to be adapting to the disruption quite well.

Diana Lee , August 14, 2018 at 8:52 pm

Additional info: Stephen Kinzer's "The Brothers" which documents the Dulles brother's creation of the Cold War mentality and activities.
Shouldn't we add Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

michael , August 15, 2018 at 6:33 am

Citing a book from almost 30 years ago that implicated ONLY the Republicans in the CIAs machinations ignores LBJ and the CIA's involvement in Vietnam and possibly in the JFK assassination. Later, Carter was the only Democrat President who may or may not have been heavily involved with the CIA. The Clintons were likely involved with the CIA early on in their Mena, Arkansas drug-smuggling schemes, and the CIA was definitely closely involved in their presidential anti-Slavic foreign policy. The Clintons' neoliberal agenda fit well with the older neocons and consolidated the Duopoly support for the crazed think tank ideas in DC.

jeff montanye , August 17, 2018 at 7:45 am

all perhaps true, but the cia, etc. have terribly neglected their republican base (ftr: registered democrat, sanders and trump voter) and it is baying at their heels, drool swinging from gnashing fangs. that is a political change as profound and radical as anything i observed around the tear gas and batons of the sixties.

Dan Kuhn , August 14, 2018 at 1:19 pm

"They have passed the point of no return; there is no walking it back now. If it fails heads will roll, but most importantly these trusted institutions will have flushed their last vestiges of credibility down the drain. Then what?"

Then nothing. It puts one mind of the comment made by one of the Robber Barons when they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar. His comment " All that was lost was honour" In the present mess even if eventually it all comes to light no one is going to be held answerable. No one is going to jail. Truth does not matter. The propaganda is what matters. if it is proven wrong it is merely swept under the rug. With the short attention spans of Americans it would be forgotten in a New York Minute.

GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:19 pm

Perhaps this explains the need for the likely false flag poison attack in Britain and the fake Douma nerve gas attack. Russiagate hasn't really been panning out so well and too much info has been emerging to challenge the narrative.

David G , August 15, 2018 at 8:29 am

I fully agree.

Peter de Klerk , August 14, 2018 at 1:06 pm

If Russian hacking is a hoax, why has it not been exposed by all the Trump appointed intelligence and FBI heads? Trump's people could shut it down with a public single statement. Y'all are deep into a conspiracy theory that makes no sense.

AnthraxSleuth , August 14, 2018 at 1:27 pm

Pffft!

It was shown to be a hoax by Clinton's own campaign staff in their book released after the election titled "shattered".

"Within 24 hours of her concession speech, [campaign chair John Podesta and manager Robby Mook] assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument."

The plan, according to the book, was to push journalists to cover how "Russian hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign," and it succeeded to a fare-thee-well. After the election, coverage of the Russian "collusion" story was relentless, and it helped pressure investigations and hearings on Capitol Hill and even the naming of a special counsel, which in turn has triggered virtually nonstop coverage.

https://nypost.com/2017/10/26/how-team-hillary-played-the-press-for-fools-on-russia/

Guess the only conspiracy theororist here is you. Goebbels would be so proud. You drank the kool-aid bruh!

Peter de Klerk , August 14, 2018 at 2:19 pm

My comment applies equally well to your response. Why doesn't Nunes, Pompeo, or Coates, etc ever say anything about these theories?

AnthraxSleuth , August 14, 2018 at 4:28 pm

It's no longer a theory when the conspirators confess to it in their own writing. Which I demonstrated to you in the previous post.

Peter de Klerk , August 14, 2018 at 6:18 pm

This very slanted article amplifies a few post-election statements. I'm sure Podesta and Mook wanted to play this up. Some of that was sour grapes but most people are inclined to think it was also true. These guys controlling most media outlets and most of the intelligence community seems absurd to me. But I guess we all believe what we want to believe now.

jdd , August 14, 2018 at 2:30 pm

One suspects that the President has revealed far less than he knows, perhaps wary of being accused of "obstruction" by Mueller in concert with the controlled media. He actually requested that William Binney present his analysis to then CIA Director Pompeo, who has since sat on it.

But actually, to your point, the reverse is true. If the DNC and Podesta were hacked by Russians, the NSA would have been able to demonstrate that fact through evidentiary proof, a point made repeatedly by Binney.

No such proof was or has ever been offered. Instead the main document presented to the American public was the January 6, 2017 "assessment" by analysts hand-picked by John Brennan, who has played a key role in the illegal operation against President Trump.

jeff montanye , August 17, 2018 at 7:54 am

And Donald Trump has more training in show business than most politicians or even internet commenters. I suspect there is a fall premiere of quite an extravaganza leading up to the midterm elections.

Herman , August 14, 2018 at 1:03 pm

Read half the most intelligent commentary and had to quick. I was struck by one comment particularly, why not ask Assange about the leak. Too simple but too much to ask, I guess. Keeping him incommunicado certainly serves the leaders of the lynch mob and thanks goes to the new Ecuadorian President. He was asked to shut the guy up and he did.

Modawg , August 14, 2018 at 3:28 pm

I think he has been asked and has politely refused to reveal. But his innuendo is that it was from inside the US and definitely not the Russkies.

alley cat , August 14, 2018 at 4:44 pm

Herman, Assange has been asked about the identity of the leaker and replied that he couldn't comment because Wikileaks has a strict policy of maintaining sources' confidentiality. No potential source would ever trust Assange if he violated that policy. Instead, Assange offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Seth Richards' murderer. So this was his way of answering the question indirectly.

A Solomonic solution that is technically not a violation of confidentiality

Andy Wilcoxson , August 14, 2018 at 12:36 pm

Can I play devil's advocate and ask a question. Can we rule out the possibility that a hacker in Russia, China, or wherever had remote control of a computer in the United States that they used to hack the DNC?

49.1 megabytes per second is almost 400 mbps, which is a very fast transfer speed, but there were one gigabit (1000 mbps) connections available in several US markets when these e-mails were stolen. You might not have been able to transfer the files directly from Washington D.C. to Russia at those speeds, but you certainly could have transferred them between computers within the United States at those speeds using gigabit internet connections.

Is there something I'm missing? How does the file transfer speed prove this was a USB download and not a hack when gigabit internet connections existed that could have accommodated those transfer speeds -- maybe not directly to Russia or Europe, but certainly to another US-based computer that foreign hackers may have have remotely controlled.

Desert Dave , August 14, 2018 at 6:09 pm

Actually a byte is 10 bits total because there is overhead (start and stop bits). So 49.1 MBps is about 491 Mbps. The question of whether the DNC server was attached to a network that fast would be easy to answer, if the FBI or anybody else wanted to check.

AnthraxSleuth , August 15, 2018 at 1:11 am

A byte is 8 bits.

[Aug 17, 2018] The Department N of the Ministry of Truth is upset about Trump revelations

Aug 17, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Thursday, the New York Times decried Trump's accusation that the media are "the enemy of the people." "Insisting that truths you don't like are 'fake news' is dangerous to the lifeblood of democracy. And calling journalists 'the enemy of the people' is dangerous, period," said the Times .

[Aug 17, 2018] The roll-out of Cold War 2.0 and the concerted demonizing of Putin and the Russian Federation began with the Ukraine Coup in February 2014, as was well covered here at Consortium News

Notable quotes:
"... I would say the first turning point was the imprisonment of Khodorkovsky and the restoration of Russian sovereignty in the energy sphere. Subsequent major inflection points have been: the 2008 war with Georgia, the 2014 events in Ukraine, and the post-2016- election manufactured anti-Russia hysteria/neo-McCarthyism. ..."
"... Kees van der Pijl fills in the details here (ignore the title of the piece): https://www.unz.com/article/why-was-malaysian-airlines-flight-mh17-shot-down/ ..."
"... the "Putin is a *thug*" meme has been successfully promulgated as shorthand that acts as a justification for anything done or said against both Putin and Russia. ..."
"... Meanwhile, the thugs are those in our Congress and executive branch and such as Mueller, who are pushing the country beyond its tolerance levels or, shall we say, ability to right itself after a knockdown (maritime metaphor is intended). ..."
"... I think the rollout of the new cold war actually began when Putin stopped the looting of his country that was occurring under Yeltsin. The evil empire only accepts vassals, not partners. Maximum capital must accrue to the one percent, and be free to flee the country to the tax haven of choice. Any world leader who tries to build an economy for the benefit of its nation's citizens becomes a target. ..."
"... I figure it was the Magnitsky ruse that got the ball rolling. It predates Ukraine and was grounds for the first round of sanctions. ..."
Aug 17, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

jaycee , August 13, 2018 at 9:51 pm

I would say the roll-out of Cold War 2.0 and the concerted demonizing of Putin and the Russian Federation began with the Ukraine Coup in February 2014, as was well covered here at Consortium News. The policy – isolate Russia as a pariah nation – was set before the Maidan events reached their resolution. Victoria Nuland's "f -- - the EU" rant was in response to efforts to mediate the situation and possibly spoil or derail the plans. IMHO, the Russian response to the violent coup was fully expected by the Americans to have been a tanks-in-the streets-Czechoslovakia-1968 scenario, and yet all they got was a Crimean referendum and a frozen stalemate in eastern Ukraine. Still, policy being policy, NATO reacted as if there had been a full invasion regardless.

Anecdotally, conversations I've had with intelligent, progressive, good-hearted persons suggests the election of Trump has in effect destabilized their critical thinking abilities. This has opened up the space in which the worst aspects of Cold War 2.0 have flourished. In their minds, the urgent need to remove Trump by any means, fair or foul, fully overwhelms any other priorities, including objective consideration of the current moment.

Joe Tedesky , August 13, 2018 at 10:14 pm

I think you are right about Ukraine. I also recall that everything went downhill after Putin negotiated for Assad to give up all Syria's chemical weapons. Which gave cause to believe Putin was being punished for interfering in the Coalitions schemes. I think Robert Parry sighted that as well.

No matter jaycee I too believe that Ukraine was where the U.S. fired the first bullet. This New World Order the U.S. represents doesn't negotiate, no instead it's either our way or no way, is the mantra of the tribe. Joe

Joe Tedesky , August 13, 2018 at 11:08 pm

I wrote a response jaycee that went to the wind . What I was saying was Putin got punished with the uprising in Ukraine after he pulled Assad out of the chemical weapons debate. Joe

Suggestion the Consortium needs to get this comment boards algorithm problem figured out.

Sibiriak , August 14, 2018 at 2:55 am

Jaycee:

"I would say the roll-out of Cold War 2.0 and the concerted demonizing of Putin and the Russian Federation began with the Ukraine Coup in February 2014 "
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I would say the first turning point was the imprisonment of Khodorkovsky and the restoration of Russian sovereignty in the energy sphere. Subsequent major inflection points have been: the 2008 war with Georgia, the 2014 events in Ukraine, and the post-2016- election manufactured anti-Russia hysteria/neo-McCarthyism.

Kees van der Pijl fills in the details here (ignore the title of the piece): https://www.unz.com/article/why-was-malaysian-airlines-flight-mh17-shot-down/

OlyaPola , August 14, 2018 at 4:42 am

"I would say the roll-out of Cold War 2.0 and the concerted demonizing of Putin and the Russian Federation began with the Ukraine Coup in February 2014,"

As in statistics perceived trajectories are functions of framing including evaluation horizons.

From inception, and through declarations such as the Monroe doctrine, some in the misrepresentation "United States of America" have perceived others as simultaneously existential threats and existential opportunities.

These existential threats and opportunities have been facilitated and acted upon as functions of perceived needs and opportunities.

The targets and modes of activation of these perceived needs and opportunities have varied according to perceived needs and opportunities, sometimes using the tactics of "hot wars" and sometimes using the tactics of "cold wars".

Some in the misrepresentation "United States of America" have correctly perceived others as existential threats and opportunities to/for them given their socio-economic system and its perceived requirements – the functions of the "other" being multi-various – the definition of the "others" include but are not necessarily restricted to those of difference within and without the "United States of America".

Some in the Soviet Union in the early 1970's attempted to conflate "strategy" with "tactics" and decided to forget notions of existential threat and perceive only existential opportunity through conflation, thereby facilitating detente on the basis of spheres of influence.

War is not restricted to things that go bang but restricted to forms of coercion.

The misrepresentation "cold war", which was never cold but sometimes engaged through proxies, was/is a context specific tactic.

Some are of the view that the ends justify the means instead of understanding that means condition ends, and consequently some facilitate and rely upon increasing the conflation of strategy with tactics increasing the sum, motivations, and resolve of the "others", thereby conditioning strategy through accelerating, continuing and expanding existential threats.

Those who engage in such self-delusion were not/are not restricted to the misrepresentation "United States of America" but as Thucydides and others were aware, have been/are generally restricted to those who perceive others as existential opportunities and threats.

Some others correctly assess the misrepresentation "United States of America" to be more a land of opportunity than an existential threat.

Litchfield , August 14, 2018 at 7:48 am

I agree with your comment. A good precis. And the "Putin is a *thug*" meme has been successfully promulgated as shorthand that acts as a justification for anything done or said against both Putin and Russia.

Meanwhile, the thugs are those in our Congress and executive branch and such as Mueller, who are pushing the country beyond its tolerance levels or, shall we say, ability to right itself after a knockdown (maritime metaphor is intended).

Skip Scott , August 14, 2018 at 11:47 am

jaycee-

I think the rollout of the new cold war actually began when Putin stopped the looting of his country that was occurring under Yeltsin. The evil empire only accepts vassals, not partners. Maximum capital must accrue to the one percent, and be free to flee the country to the tax haven of choice. Any world leader who tries to build an economy for the benefit of its nation's citizens becomes a target.

Aime Duclos , August 14, 2018 at 1:50 pm

Yes, Skip, when the West's pillaging and looting of Putin's country was stopped, the one percent was not amused. Add to that NATO's constant march up to Russia's borders, the threat to and actual placement of "defensive" missles on Russia's border.

The last straw was the US orchestrated coup in it's next NATO prize for acquisition Ukraine. Putin reacted as any leader would, and with restraint I might add.

Yet somehow all this proves Putin is a thug? It's been a calculated drive to this new Cold War. The MIC is having it's way.

GM , August 14, 2018 at 6:12 pm

I figure it was the Magnitsky ruse that got the ball rolling. It predates Ukraine and was grounds for the first round of sanctions.

[Aug 17, 2018] It is quite interesting how many uninformed posters and/or trolls would love to find a way to show the Russiagate nonsense is somehow plausible in spite of the evidence

Notable quotes:
"... They're kind of like a five year old child who desperately wants to keep believing in Santa Claus, even though he just found dad's Santa costume in the closet and he's holding it in his own hands. ..."
"... Sorry, but two years into this we should be way beyond this kind of – "I can't believe Santa's not real"- denying, dissembling, rationalizing nonsense. Then again, this is America. ..."
"... America is after all a country in which half the population believe in the creation myth. ..."
"... "Two years after the Iraq War began, 70 per cent of Americans still believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks, according to a Washington Post survey." The Big Lie works, and since Obama gutted Smith-Mundt, the CIA/ State Department can legally keep Americans tracking on their propaganda narratives. ..."
"... I agree with Lawrences point that this is an issue of social psychology. Rational argument over the facts is simply over taken by some kind of mass hysteria. There certainly precedent for this kind of behavior. Indeed this was described in 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds' 180 years ago. In my lifetime I have witnessed two episodes of this kind of mass hysteria. The first was the red scare of the early 1950's (I not so much witnessed that as experienced it) and the second was the day care hysteria of satanic cults abusing our children that flared between the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now this is a third manifestation of mass hysteria. ..."
Aug 17, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Gary Weglarz August 14, 2018 at 4:37 pm

It is quite interesting how many uninformed posters and/or trolls would love to find a way to show the "Russiagate" nonsense is somehow plausible in spite of the evidence. They're kind of like a five year old child who desperately wants to keep believing in Santa Claus, even though he just found dad's Santa costume in the closet and he's holding it in his own hands.

I will say that the amount of mental gymnastics required to continue not believing evidence that is right in front of one's eyes is quite impressive – but I'd never underestimate the American people's creativity when they want to maintain their illusions/delusions. And I'd certainly never underestimate the Russiagate troll army's persistence.

At this rate I expect to soon encounter some version of the following "observation" in the comments section for this article: – "maybe space aliens hired by the Russians downloaded the files to a to a new fangled thig-a-ma-jig and then shape-shifted so Craig Murray would be fooled into thinking a real-like-human insider provided him the files on a flash drive." – "oh, oh, wait, maybe the aliens abducted Murray too, and then just made him "think" a fellow human gave him the drive in person." "yeah, yeah, and maybe Assange just says he didn't get the files from the Russians because "he's a space alien too." "Yeah, prove to me that it didn't happen this way – you can't – ha! there! I win!"

Sorry, but two years into this we should be way beyond this kind of – "I can't believe Santa's not real"- denying, dissembling, rationalizing nonsense. Then again, this is America.

Reply

GM , August 14, 2018 at 4:51 pm

America is after all a country in which half the population believe in the creation myth.

jeff montanye , August 17, 2018 at 7:11 am

but if i had to bet, the creationists are less likely to believe in Russiagate than the evolutionists.

Just Plain Scott , August 14, 2018 at 6:14 pm

Please don't give Rachel Maddow any more ideas.

michael , August 15, 2018 at 6:06 am

"Two years after the Iraq War began, 70 per cent of Americans still believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks, according to a Washington Post survey." The Big Lie works, and since Obama gutted Smith-Mundt, the CIA/ State Department can legally keep Americans tracking on their propaganda narratives.

ToivoS , August 14, 2018 at 4:26 pm

I agree with Lawrences point that this is an issue of social psychology. Rational argument over the facts is simply over taken by some kind of mass hysteria. There certainly precedent for this kind of behavior. Indeed this was described in 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds' 180 years ago. In my lifetime I have witnessed two episodes of this kind of mass hysteria. The first was the red scare of the early 1950's (I not so much witnessed that as experienced it) and the second was the day care hysteria of satanic cults abusing our children that flared between the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now this is a third manifestation of mass hysteria.

It all began with Hillary's shocking defeat. Many millions of her supporters knew that she was so good that she had to win. But then she lost. Those millions of Democrats could not accept that in fact their assessment of her talents were totally wrong and that she lost because she has to be one of the worst candidates in American history. That is a reality those people refused to accept. Instead they had to concoct some crazy conspiracy to explain their break with reality. This is a classic case of cognitive dissonance which often leads to mass hysteria.

GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:01 pm

People choose to believe what they feel that they most need to believe to assuage their insecurities fostered by what they perceive to be the dangerous and scary world in which they exist. The simple fact that we know that life is finite by the time we're three years old fosters the creation of such constructs as that of the myth of everlasting life in the kingdom of heaven complete with a mortgage-free condo and an extra parking space for all repentant sinners are mainstream beliefs.

Rob Roy , August 14, 2018 at 11:07 pm

ToivoS, you are right about Hillary. She simply couldn't accept her defeat. She was the one who began Russiagate by the lie, "17 intelligence agencies" said the Russians hacked the emails.
As for times of mass-swallowing of a lie in the 1930s every German thought that Poland was about to invade Germany and they were scared so much that they believed their leaders who "false flagged" them into invading Poland "first." Of course, Poland had no intention of invading Germany.
Notice every time the US attacks another sovereign country, there's a false flag waved for the citizens to follow?
Don't you appreciate that we have consortiumnews?

[Aug 17, 2018] The Russian meddling fraud Weapons of mass destruction revisited by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

Notable quotes:
"... There was only one problem with Powell's presentation: it was a lie from beginning to end. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
Feb 20, 2018 | www.wsws.org

Fifteen years ago, on February 5, 2003, against the backdrop of worldwide mass demonstrations in opposition to the impending invasion of Iraq, then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell argued before the United Nations that the government of Saddam Hussein was rapidly stockpiling "weapons of mass destruction," which Iraq, together with Al Qaeda, was planning to use against the United States.

In what was the climax of the Bush administration's campaign to justify war, Powell held up a model vial of anthrax, showed aerial photographs and presented detailed slides purporting to show the layout of Iraq's "mobile production facilities."

There was only one problem with Powell's presentation: it was a lie from beginning to end.

... ... ...

...War against Iraq, the WSWS wrote, was not about "weapons of mass destruction." Rather, "it is a war of colonial conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global hegemony."

The response of the American media, and particularly its liberal wing, was very different. Powell's litany of lies was presented as the gospel truth, an unanswerable indictment of the Iraqi government.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who rushed off a column before he could have examined Powell's allegations, declared, "The evidence he presented to the United Nations -- some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail -- had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise."

The editorial board of the New York Times -- whose reporter Judith Miller was at the center of the Bush administration's campaign of lies -- declared one week later that there "is ample evidence that Iraq has produced highly toxic VX nerve gas and anthrax and has the capacity to produce a lot more. It has concealed these materials, lied about them, and more recently failed to account for them to the current inspectors."

Subsequent developments would prove who was lying. The Bush administration and its media accomplices conspired to drag the US into a war that led to the deaths of more than one million people -- a colossal crime for which no one has yet been held accountable.

Fifteen years later, the script has been pulled from the closet and dusted off. This time, instead of "weapons of mass destruction," it is "Russian meddling in the US elections." Once again, assertions by US intelligence agencies and operatives are treated as fact. Once again, the media is braying for war. Once again, the cynicism and hypocrisy of the American government -- which intervenes in the domestic politics of every state on the planet and has been relentlessly expanding its operations in Eastern Europe -- are ignored.

[Aug 17, 2018] The Ruling Establishment are accomplished in the art of manipulating the public into believing whatever they want them to believe in. In fact, they have world wide reach

Notable quotes:
"... The people behind advancing the Russiagate fraud are not concerned about the widening chaos it has engendered. On the contrary, it is playing out exactly as they hoped. ..."
"... Fast growing censorship of dissent, isolation of a major geopolitical competitor, providing an explanation for the rise of Trump and the precipitous decline in public faith in establishment institutions. ..."
Aug 17, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

GM , August 14, 2018 at 4:48 pm

The people behind advancing the Russiagate fraud are not concerned about the widening chaos it has engendered. On the contrary, it is playing out exactly as they hoped.

Fast growing censorship of dissent, isolation of a major geopolitical competitor, providing an explanation for the rise of Trump and the precipitous decline in public faith in establishment institutions.

Hell, it's even being leveraged to explain away racism. Win win win win. I'd say they are right where they want to be at this juncture.

Dave P. , August 14, 2018 at 6:21 pm

GM – Excellent observations. Very true.

I would add that they – the Ruling Establishment – are accomplished in the art of manipulating the public into believing whatever they want them to believe in. In fact, they have world wide reach.

[Aug 17, 2018] New York Times exploits Parkland tragedy to escalate anti-Russian campaign - World Socialist Web Site

Notable quotes:
"... But it is worth noting that, particularly in recent decades, and under the auspices of Editorial Page editor James Bennet, there has been a remarkable integration of the Times ..."
"... The logic of the Times ..."
"... Imperial Messenger ..."
Feb 21, 2018 | www.wsws.org

Less than four days after the Parkland school shooting, the New York Times has found a way to turn a national tragedy that claimed the lives of 17 high school students into an opportunity to escalate its unrelenting campaign of anti-Russian propaganda, involving the continuous bombardment of the public with reactionary lies and warmongering.

Against the backdrop of a major escalation of military tensions between the two countries, the Times seized upon the Justice Department indictment of Russian nationals over the weekend to claim that Russia is at "war" with the United States. Now, the Times has widened this claim into an argument that Russia somehow bears responsibility for social divisions over the latest mass shooting in America.

Its lead headline Tuesday morning blared: "SHOTS ARE FIRED, AND BOTS SWARM TO SOCIAL DIVIDES - Florida School Shooting Draws an Army Ready to Spread Discord"

According to the Times , Russian "bots," or automated social media accounts, sought "to widen the divide" on issues of gun control and mental illness, in order to "make compromise even more difficult." Russia sought to exploit "the issue of mental illness in the gun control debate," and "propagated the notion that Nikolas Cruz, the suspected gunman" was "mentally ill."

The absurd claim that Russia is responsible for the existence of social divisions in America is belied by the shooting itself, which is a testament to the fact that American society is riven by antagonisms that express themselves, in the absence of a progressive outlet, in outpourings of mass violence.

The aim of this campaign is to target anyone who would criticize the underlying social causes of the shooting -- the violence of American society, the nonexistence of mental health services, or even the social psychology that gives rise to mass shootings -- as a "Russian agent" seeking to "sow divisions" in American society. The Times lead is based entirely on a "dashboard" called Hamilton 68 created by the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy, whose lead spokesman is Clint Watts, the former US intelligence agent and censorship advocate who declared in November that social media companies must "silence" sources of "rebellion."

Without naming any of the accounts it follows, Hamilton 68 claims to track content tweeted by "Russian bots and trolls." But most of the trends leading the dashboard are news stories, many posted by Russia Today and Sputnik News , that are identical with the trending topics followed by any other news agency. Thus, Hamilton 68 provides an instant New York Times headline generator: Any major news story can be presented as the result of "Russian bots."

The New York Times is making its claims about "Russian meddling" with what is known in the law as "unclean hands." That is, the Times practices the very actions of which it accuses others.

Here is not the place to deal with the long and bloody history of American destabilization campaigns and their horrific consequences in Latin America and the Middle East, or to review the fact that many American journalists serving abroad had dual functions -- as reporters and as agents.

But it is worth noting that, particularly in recent decades, and under the auspices of Editorial Page editor James Bennet, there has been a remarkable integration of the Times with the major operations of the US intelligence agencies.

This is particularly true with regard to Russia, in regard to which the Times acts as an instrument of US foreign policy misinformation, practicing exactly what it accuse the Kremlin of.

Take, for example, the so-called political "dissident" Aleksei Navalny. This proponent of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, with deep ties to Russia's fascistic right, and extensive connections to US intelligence agencies, has been championed by the Times as the voice of social dissent in Russia. Despite his miniscule support within Russia, Navalny's activities generate front-page headlines in the Times , which has mentioned him in over 400 separate articles.

Another example is the Times ' promotion of the "feminist" rock band Pussy Riot, which makes a habit of getting themselves arrested by taking their clothes off in Russian Orthodox churches, and whose fate the Times holds up as a horrific example of Russian oppression. The very name "Pussy Riot," which in typical usage is not even translated into Russian, expresses the fact that this operation aims to influence American, and not Russian, public opinion.

In 2014, the Times met with members of Pussy Riot at their editorial offices, and have since extensively promoted the group, having mentioned it in over 400 articles. The term "anti-Putin opposition" is mentioned in another 600 articles.

The logic of the Times ' campaign was expressed most clearly by its columnist Thomas Friedman, the personification of the pundit as state intelligence mouthpiece whose career was aptly summed up in a biography titled Imperial Messenger . In a column published on February 18 ("Whatever Trump is Hiding is Hurting All of US Now"), Friedman declares a "code red" threat to the integrity of American democracy.

"At a time when the special prosecutor Robert Mueller -- leveraging several years of intelligence gathering by the F.B.I., C.I.A. and N.S.A. -- has brought indictments against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian groups -- all linked in some way to the Kremlin -- for interfering with the 2016 U.S. elections," Friedman writes, "America needs a president who will lead our nation's defense against this attack on the integrity of our electoral democracy."

This "defense," according to Friedman, would include "bring[ing] together our intelligence and military experts to mount an effective offense against Putin -- the best defense of all." In other words, war.

The task of all war propaganda is to divert internal social tensions outwards, and the Times ' campaign is no different. Its aim is to take the anger that millions of people feel at a society riven by social inequality, mass alienation, police violence, and endless war, and pin it on some shady foreign adversary.

The New York Times ' claims of Russian "meddling" in the Parkland shooting set the tone for even more hysterical coverage in the broadcast evening news. NBC News cited Jonathan Morgan, another collaborator on the Hamilton 68 project, who declared that Russia is "really interested in sowing discord amongst Americans. That way we're not focused on putting a unified front out to foreign adversaries."

The goal of the ruling class and its media accomplices is to put on "a unified front" through the suppression of social opposition within the United States. Along these Lines, NBC added, "Researchers tell us it's not just Russia deploying these attacks on social media," adding "many small independent groups are trying to divide Americans and create chaos."

Who are these "small independent groups" seeking to "create chaos"? By this, they no doubt mean any news or political organization that dares question the official line that everything is fine in America, and that argues that the horrendous levels of violence that pervade American society are somehow related to social inequality and the wars supported and justified by the entire US political establishment

[Aug 17, 2018] Just like the establishment of long TSA lines pushing us travelers through airport security like inspected cattle, was an example of 911 reforms to our system, this Russia Gate Investigation and all its trappings are doing the same destruction to our liberties on the Internet

Notable quotes:
"... The erosion of the American society is on track, and its stay the course until this corporate owned government cannot govern no more. ..."
"... In a real rule of law world Jeff Sessions would take all this evidence the VIPS have produced and present it into the Mueller Investigation as just that evidence, or proof of lack there of. ..."
"... For a possibly useful parsing of what is actually going in the Mueller investigation, check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEt4kwAvNqU The delivery is a bit inelegant, but the main takeaway is that the Mueller investigation is meant to hide what really went down between the Dems and the Russians. ..."
"... Here you can read to how far the U.S. is willing to go with nothing but allegations. http://www.unz.com/akarlin/russia-sanctions/ This insanity has to end. ..."
Aug 13, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Joe Tedesky, August 13, 2018 at 8:59 pm

Russia Gate has given us one thing for sure, and that it is now ravishing the internet of all of its corporate controlled First Amendment Rights. Just like the establishment of long TSA lines pushing us travelers through airport security like inspected cattle, was an example of 911 reforms to our system, this Russia Gate Investingation and all its trappings are doing the same destruction to our liberties.

What memories of a free and liberal society have we all seen swirl ever so slowly, but deliberately down the memory hole of our once civil liberties? The erosion of the American society is on track, and its stay the course until this corporate owned government cannot govern no more.

In a real rule of law world Jeff Sessions would take all this evidence the VIPS have produced and present it into the Mueller Investigation as just that evidence, or proof of lack there of.

Good to hear Patrick Lawrence get down with it, that's what we need more of. At the rate the internet is going, say it now, or forever hold your peace, is now in force.

Joe Tedesky , August 13, 2018 at 10:26 pm

Here is a link to something that at first seems a little unrelated, but after reading it ask yourself, is it? Moon Jae in of S Korea may just have the answer for the way of dealing with past government malpractices.

https://journal-neo.org/2018/08/13/military-plot-in-south-korea-mayhem-in-defense-intelligence-agency/

Hey want to drain the swamp? call Moon Jae in ASAP.

Joe Tedesky , August 13, 2018 at 10:40 pm

Read this, it will piss you off.

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/armstrongeconomics101/regulation/senator-mark-warner-proposes-the-end-of-free-speech-the-revenge-of-hillary/

Litchfield , August 14, 2018 at 7:53 am

For a possibly useful parsing of what is actually going in the Mueller investigation, check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEt4kwAvNqU The delivery is a bit inelegant, but the main takeaway is that the Mueller investigation is meant to hide what really went down between the Dems and the Russians.

Joe Tedesky , August 13, 2018 at 11:06 pm

Here you can read to how far the U.S. is willing to go with nothing but allegations. http://www.unz.com/akarlin/russia-sanctions/ This insanity has to end.

Joe Tedesky , August 13, 2018 at 11:27 pm

I can't help myself, you need to read Caitlin Johnston's take on how it's okay to run with scissors in your hand . just brilliant. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50024.htm

Dave P. , August 14, 2018 at 1:29 am

Excellent observations, Joe. I hope this – Russia gate – does not lead to a much more dangerous zone as it appears to be heading to with these sanctions against Russia slated to go into effect in November. There was this rather very disquieting article the other day in Strategic Culture by Finnian Cunningham.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/08/11/us-sanctions-pushing-russia-war.html

As you said this insanity must end or else. . .

[Aug 17, 2018] The Russia-gate narrative has become "too big to fail

If this is true it is hard to see Russiagate collapsing...
Notable quotes:
"... The ruling establishment has pushed all their chips onto the table in a do-or-die effort to make this allegation stick. ..."
"... How many times has the U.S. "national security" establishment brazenly deceived the country and the world, at incalculable cost, without being held to account in a way that seriously discomfited the perpetrators? ..."
"... From the bomber gap, to the missile gap, through Vietnam from beginning to end, to Iran-Contra, to Iraqi WMDs, and so much more. ..."
"... It's hard to see Russia-gate collapsing in a way that would force its architects and proponents to acknowledge its fictitiousness: it is too much of an irrational miasma to actually be falsifiable in the sort of concrete way that led to even such perfunctory admissions of error as we got when Saddam's "WMDs" failed to exist. ..."
"... Bush Jr. was able to make a White House Correspondents Dinner joke about those derned elusive WMDs – and get laughs – *one year* after the invasion of Iraq. Why would this time be any different? ..."
"... People often wonder why psychopathic sadists enjoy torturing their victims, when presumably they have enough cognitive empathy to appreciate how terrible the suffering is. ..."
"... But that is WHY the sadists enjoy their activities so much. What they do to their victims is so unendurable, yet someone is having to endure it – and that somebody is not the perpetrator. ..."
"... It's hard to know if the American people will ever see a full explanation of this, Church Committee or FOIA style, ..."
Aug 17, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Maxwell Quest August 13, 2018 at 9:38 pm Excellent article! I was particularly jolted by the reference that the Russia-gate narrative has become "too big to fail." So true!

The ruling establishment has pushed all their chips onto the table in a do-or-die effort to make this allegation stick.

They have passed the point of no return; there is no walking it back now. If it fails heads will roll, but most importantly these trusted institutions will have flushed their last vestiges of credibility down the drain. Then what? Reply


David G , August 14, 2018 at 2:45 am

Or, as Patrick Lawrence puts it: "The risk of self-inflicted damage these institutions assume, should the truth of the Russia-gate events emerge -- as one day it surely will -- is nearly incalculable."

However, I disagree with both Mr. Lawrence and you, Maxwell Quest. I think that assessment is actually too optimistic.

How many times has the U.S. "national security" establishment brazenly deceived the country and the world, at incalculable cost, without being held to account in a way that seriously discomfited the perpetrators?

From the bomber gap, to the missile gap, through Vietnam from beginning to end, to Iran-Contra, to Iraqi WMDs, and so much more.

It's hard to see Russia-gate collapsing in a way that would force its architects and proponents to acknowledge its fictitiousness: it is too much of an irrational miasma to actually be falsifiable in the sort of concrete way that led to even such perfunctory admissions of error as we got when Saddam's "WMDs" failed to exist.

But even if that somehow does happen, and the whole Beltway official and media establishment has to suck it up and emit a feeble "my bad" about Russia-gate, what makes you think it will have any lasting consequences in terms of the dispensation of power and privilege among the U.S. elites?

Bush Jr. was able to make a White House Correspondents Dinner joke about those derned elusive WMDs – and get laughs – *one year* after the invasion of Iraq. Why would this time be any different?

AnthraxSleuth , August 14, 2018 at 4:07 am

"Bush Jr. was able to make a White House Correspondents Dinner joke about those derned elusive WMDs – and get laughs" – *one year* after the invasion of Iraq. Why would this time be any different?

Yup, got lots of laughs from his fellow members of the club that were coconspirators.

Had he tried that joke around veterans and the families of casualties of that whole criminal adventure I doubt he would have made it out alive.

Tom Welsh , August 14, 2018 at 8:57 am

Had he tried that joke around any of the millions of victims of his criminal aggression or their familes and friends, I am sure he would not have made it out alive.

But if you have ever managed to think yourself into the criminal mind, you will understand that it is precisely the fact that he was NOT subject to any comeback that made the whole thing such fun.

People often wonder why psychopathic sadists enjoy torturing their victims, when presumably they have enough cognitive empathy to appreciate how terrible the suffering is.

But that is WHY the sadists enjoy their activities so much. What they do to their victims is so unendurable, yet someone is having to endure it – and that somebody is not the perpetrator.

AnthraxSleuth , August 15, 2018 at 4:51 am

I've never tried to think myself into the criminal mind. And, I thank you for the insight. I have had someone try to kill me. Someone that has killed at least one person before by his own admission. It changes you forever.

Anne Jaclard , August 14, 2018 at 10:33 am

Agreed. The American corporate press has been running what are essentially press releases and "dossiers" of evidence for a year now, mostly from shady private firms (Twitter trolls "discovered" by Graphika, Fusion GPS's "Dirty Dossier," CrowdStrike's initial investigation of the DNC).

Many of these firms aren't neutral parties either, head of CrowdStrike is rabidly anti-Russia and just put together another package of "research" that was debunked on Ukraine.

It's hard to know if the American people will ever see a full explanation of this, Church Committee or FOIA style, given that these are companies with no public obligations .not good.

Jeff Harrison , August 13, 2018 at 8:51 pm

Well, Patrick, I"m glad to see that you're writing for a reputable organization for a change. I don't have a hell of a lot to add to what you've said but I'll say this. I saw an article about the DefCon in Las Vegas this AM or yesterday. I don't remember where and I can't find it again but the gist of it is – they had like 39 kid volunteers who they told to go hack the election systems in some number of "battleground" states. The upshot? 35 of the 39 kids successfully hacked several election systems. The champ was an 11 yo girl who broke in in 10 minutes. If our election systems are so poorly designed that kids can break into them in just a few minutes, I'm sure it's just a walk in the park for an actual pro.

Jeff Harrison , August 13, 2018 at 10:45 pm

Hah! I found it. It was on RT, of course. Here's the link -https://www.rt.com/usa/435824-us-midterms-hacking-children/

Jessika , August 13, 2018 at 8:29 pm

Good comments to this very good article. I agree with Gary that the US is in decline, perhaps terminal, and that rising Eurasia led by China and Russia is the reason for the Deep State's frantic need to try to focus the people on Russia, and now the biggie, China, to avoid the reality of the social decay within from not addressing the people's needs for well over 30 years. However, i also don't think as many Americans are swallowing this lie as MSM and politicos would have us believe. What we now call the "alt-left", perhaps, may take it seriously. It was Mme Clinton herself who is at the top of chain of this manufactured story.

But I don't think we'll see this fixation around for the next 20-30 years, as Mr. Lawrence speculates, because I don't think we'll have that much time for such political nonsense as we are confronted by massive Earth changes, not all human-caused, that are now manifesting.

Tom Kath , August 13, 2018 at 8:28 pm

The correction of "illusions" often has the appearance of being too horrendous to contemplate. Be it the delusion that we can get wealthy on debt, or the delusion that we are invincible. These are all able to be traced back to a fundamental belief which has long been proven to be inconsistent with reality.

mike k , August 13, 2018 at 7:29 pm

How did we get here? The stupefication of the American people was well advanced before the pilgrims landed. The idea that this continent only really began when we "discovered" it was the beginning of our idiocy. That this land was waiting for the blessing of our special role in "civilizing' it was a continuation of our delusional thinking.

[Aug 17, 2018] Teleology means to view things by the purpose they serve rather than by postulated causes . If we are to look at Russiagate from a teleological perspective we can see eight puposes of Russiagate

Aug 17, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Ian Brown, August 13, 2018 at 7:20 pm

In philosophy there is a concept called Teleology which means to view things "by the purpose they serve rather than by postulated causes". If we are to look at Russiagate from a teleological perspective, and indeed we should, as the evidentiary and proportional justification is severely lacking, we see a distinct organism with a broad purpose. So let's examine, what purposes are being served by Russiagate, what agendas being driven, and interests being advanced?

  1. Control of information by imperial, establishment and corporate interests
  2. Control of discourse and dissent being stigmatized
  3. Restriction of democracy by third parties and anti-establishment candidates being smeared as "Kremlin supported'
  4. The enlargement of the military industrial complex
  5. The ideological alignment of the nominal left and center with authoritarianism
  6. The justification of imperialism and aggressive foreign policy
  7. The deflection from widespread issues of discontent
  8. The projection of issues in the 2016 election, particularly primary rigging, voting irregularities, voter suppression, candidate funded troll operations like Correct the Record, widespread collusion between candidates and the mainstream media, and outsized influence of Israeli, Saudi and Ukrainian lobbies

Considering how much of an impact Russiagate has had towards these ends, in comparison how meagerly it has tackled these phantom Russian meddlers and "active measures", I think it's fair to say that Russiagate has NOTHING to do with it's stated cause. If Russiagate can be described by what it does, and not what allegedly caused it, what it is is an authoritarian push to broadly increase control of society by establishment elites, and to advance their imperialistic ambitions. In this way, it does not look dissimilar to the way previous societies have succumbed to authoritarian and imperialist rule, nor do the flavors of propaganda, censorship and nationalism differ greatly. The 2016 election represented the ruling Establishment losing control of the narrative, and to a lesser degree, not getting their preferred candidate. And in response the velvet glove is slipping. Reply

mike k , August 13, 2018 at 7:33 pm

Excellent analysis!

Dunderhead , August 13, 2018 at 9:12 pm

You nailed that one man, Kudos

Maxwell Quest , August 13, 2018 at 9:32 pm

9. The delegitimization of Trump's presidency, and a false justification for removing him from office, or in the very least crippling his ability to function as the executive.

O Society , August 14, 2018 at 2:52 pm

Ian Brown ~

Indeed. The Shit Snowball keeps gaining size and momentum because so many groups get various benefits from propagating the Russiagate narrative.

I xeroxed your list of 8 – as well as an excerpt from Patrick Lawrence's original article – then added references and artwork to set it off in a classy way.

Please let me know what the two of you think of the results:

Russiagate: Too Big to Fail

exiled off mainstreet , August 15, 2018 at 3:00 am

This analysis is spot on.

Kevin Huxford , August 13, 2018 at 7:18 pm

Duncan Campbell's article is embarrassing, especially in that it took him so long to even slightly correct his misrepresentation of Binney's position on the matter.

Dunderhead , August 13, 2018 at 7:00 pm

This article touches on such a fundamental truth which is the new paradigm of US disunity, the fracturing of both US political parties and a greater General dysfunction of the American body politic not to mention the US's Image of itself.

Gary Weglarz , August 13, 2018 at 6:41 pm

A truly excellent and very important post! Thank you.

"To doubt the hollowed-out myth of American innocence is a grave sin against the faith." – author

Absolutely! The current "Russiagate" lunacy renders anyone a "heretic" who might engage in such "doubt"
– or who engages in any independent critical thinking on this matter. I've never seen the political class, the deep state psychopaths, and the MSM more irrational, nor more out of touch with and more contemptuous of – simple basic verifiable physical "reality" – than at this historical moment. The current state of affairs suggests the American empire may not simply be in decline, but is instead perhaps in free fall with the hard ground of reality rapidly approaching. The current level of absolute public lunacy also suggests the landing will be neither graceful nor pleasant, and may actually come as a shock to the true believers.

O Society , August 13, 2018 at 5:42 pm

Terrific article, Patrick Lawrence. Too Big Too Fail is exactly correct. Just as the banks in the 2008 mortgage crisis got bailed out, so the Russiagate narrative is cultivated by the US government. Both are insults to the American people.

As you know, there has been some recent discussion of this leak vs. hack topic. To wit:

There is a response by William Binney in video form at the end of this article:

How to Understand this Russian Hacking Thing

To a recent challenge of the VIPS "leak" evidence presented in this article in Computer Weekly:

Duncan Campbell alleges Bill Binney changes mind about the leak

[Aug 16, 2018] Isn't it extremely Orwellian to say that 'information isn't really information/should be censored or disregarded if it comes from a subversive (Russia) source'?

Aug 16, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Sisera August 16, 2018 at 3:44 pm

@Collin-
Isn't it extremely Orwellian to say that 'information isn't really information/should be censored or disregarded if it comes from a subversive (Russia) source'?

Naturally, it allows for a very easy way to control and censor information.

Now, as far as pure security threats, aside from information that should've been public anyway, experts deem that the DNC information came from on site:

https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/

Now this is also an appeal to authority, but VIPs has a better track record and I've seen them actually elaborate on their claims, not just assert them.

[Aug 15, 2018] McFaul and Browder are on the same team, playing different positions

Aug 15, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile August 8, 2018 at 3:10 am

McFaul is talking shit:

First rule of diplomacy– respect the culture and traditions of your your [sic] host country, aka as [sic] the place where you were born.

In Seagal's case, the "host" country to which the "academic" McFaul refers is not "also known as the place where you were born", where "you" is Seagal, to whom McFaul is proffering unsolicited advice.

The place where Seagal was born is the USA: Seagal's host country in this instance is Russia.

If Seagal had truly wished to respect the culture and traditions of his host country, he should have made his statement of acceptance of the post in Russian:

Я глубоко потрясен и польщен назначением специальным представителем российского Министерства иностранных дел по гуманитарным связям с США. Надеюсь, что мы сможем достичь мира, гармонии и положительных результатов в мире. Я очень серьезно отношусь к этой чести.

However, as far as I am aware, Mr. Seagal does not speak Russian, but McFaul does, albeit он несет полную хуйню!

Jen August 8, 2018 at 4:58 am
I see Seagal writes better English than McFaul does.
Mark Chapman August 8, 2018 at 4:06 pm
Oh, yeah, uh huh, McFaul speaks Russian. In fact, he is some kind of jive-talkin' Russian homie, telling his audience that he looked forward to seeing them in 'Yoburg', which is the culture-respectful term for "Yekaterinburg'. That's what got him dubbed "McFuck'. if I recall correctly.

http://exiledonline.com/mister-mcfahk-goes-to-fuckberg-the-continuing-saga-of-amb-michael-mcfauls-epic-struggle-with-language/

Samenleving August 8, 2018 at 4:56 am
McFaul shredded for his hypocrisy here:

https://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2018/05/ex-us-ambassador-to-russia-mcfaul-dissembles-then-reveals-about-magnitsky-act/

McFaul is a long time friend of Browder. In 2011, when he was Obama's advisor and architect of the "Russian reset" policy, he disagreed with the proposed Magnitsky bill and wrote this memo:
https://www.scribd.com/document/60996722/Administration-Comments-on-S1039-Final

Then off he went as US Ambassador to Russia, where he almost immediately invited a host of Russian opposition figures to the US embassy. According to Olga Romanova (& wikipedia) they discussed the recent Russian protests and "the United States Presidential election campaign" with McFaul.

While McFaul was away fostering Democrat collusion with Russian opposition figures, Browder rammed the Magnitsky Act through Congress because of the legislative anomaly that the Jackson-Vanik Amendment had to be repealed and Congress wouldn't give away something for nothing.

McFaul and Browder are on the same team, playing different positions.

kirill August 8, 2018 at 3:33 pm
But ultimately they are impotent chimps. This ain't 1917 and not Sorosite and similar funding of regime change is going to work in Russia. All these US laws and sanctions are blowhard vapidity. They only generate healthy stimulus for Russia to clean up the last vestiges of Yeltsin's 1990s era distortions in its economy and legal system.
et Al August 8, 2018 at 6:24 am
History Extra Al Beeb s'Allah GONAD (God's Own News Agency Direct): Britain's foreign policy secrets
https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/britains-foreign-policy-secrets/

Rory Cormac investigates Britain's use of spies and special forces for covert operations in the postwar period

Historian Rory Cormac discusses his new book Disrupt and Deny, which investigates Britain's use of spies and special forces for covert operations in the postwar period
####

Podcast at the link.

There's plenty not mentioned within, but still interesting. I would question though the veracity of official reports released under (Freedom of Information) requests and would assume that some of those documents are fabricated. After all, if keeping secrets is your business, then you have have whole range of options for obfuscation, from complete release to none at all.

Curiously having spoken of the Mau Maus, no mention is made of the discovery a few years ago of MoD dossiers discovered in a skip (UK gov selling off real estate) detailing the torture and abuse of them which until then had been completely denied, and ultimately went before the high court and was fully exposed

[Aug 15, 2018] Russia is one of only 7 nation states to have verifiably dismantled and destroyed their chemical weapon stockpiles as ratified by the OPCW and in compliance to the CWC. After Skripal false flag they probably have a second thought.

Notable quotes:
"... What can I say – perhaps now Russia will batten down the hatches and stop all this pandering to western partners. ..."
Aug 15, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

James lake August 8, 2018 at 12:21 pm

Breaking news here in the UK.

USA say that Russia did poison the Skripals in Salisbury.

"The US blamed the attack on Vladimir Putin and said they would be issuing fresh sanctions in response to the deadly attack.

The state department says Wednesday the sanctions will be imposed on Russia because it used a chemical weapon in violation of international law.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said: "The United States determined under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991 (CBW Act) that the government of the Russian Federation has used chemical or biological weapons in violation of international law, or has used lethal chemical or biological weapons against its own nationals."

Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned by Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent, in the British town of Salisbury in March."

What can I say – perhaps now Russia will batten down the hatches and stop all this pandering to western partners.

kirill August 8, 2018 at 3:28 pm
No need to batten down the hatches. Just ignore the yapping NATzO chihuahuas. We have not even had a proper trial to determine guilt. The US leadership is not some ultimate judicial body. They can make as many political judgements as they want, but that will do Jack to Russia.

At this point all the hysterical US-driven sanctions against Russia are totally self defeating. The monkeys in Washington clearly think that Russia is a banana republic and that it needs to have access to foreign money and technology to function. They are cleared fucked in the head.

Patient Observer August 8, 2018 at 3:56 pm
More on the above per RT:

It would reportedly include more drastic measures, such as downgrading diplomatic relations, banning the Russian airline Aeroflot from flying to the US and cutting off nearly all exports and imports.

So, are we talking about RD-180 rocket engines and Americans traveling to the ISS on Russian rockets? Are we talking about titanium fabrications that Boeing needs for its aircraft manufacturing?

This Russian hysteria is masking something, something big. My one-track mind suggests fixated on the idea of an approaching economic collapse and subsequent imposition of martial law and/or massive levels of censorship; all to be blamed on Russia. The increasingly frenetic pace of Russian hysteria suggests a near-term sh!t-storm is on the way.

James lake August 8, 2018 at 4:18 pm
The Russian hysteria is scary as so many citizens over there believe in the Russiagate nonsense and have been manipulated to feel they have been attacked.

It means therefore that conditions have been created whereby the USA has the support to attack back.

Putin should never have gone to Helsinki as that escalated the madness.

Trump is emasculated just as obama was and has no power to do anything to block this pathway to outright confrontation

The Europeans will sit by and watch – Russia has no allies there.,

Patient Observer August 8, 2018 at 5:27 pm
Europe will stay on the porch and let the big boys duke it out. In the red corner, we have Vlad – the Terminator. In the other corner, we have Donald – the Orange Haystack. In another corner we have Bruce – the Red Dragon.

Haystack lumbers out of his corner before the bell rings, makes some nasty gestures and starts his victory dance. The Terminator stands in his corner, muscular arms folded across his chest with a wry smile across his face. The Red Dragon is closely studying Haystack with an inscrutable stare. Haystack exhausts himself and collapses mid-ring. The Terminator and Red Dragon leave the arena as the Haystack fans seek their autographs. Something like that.

Mark Chapman August 8, 2018 at 4:41 pm
Perhaps a boxed piano will fall from a ninth-floor balcony and crush Nauert to a rectangular pizza. I'd pay to see that.

Define 'pandering'. Can you name some concessions the United States has wrung from Russia in the last two years? I seem to recall the British investigators said there was no proof that anyone in the Russian government was involved – they simply speculated that because Novichok could only be made in a state facility, there must be state involvement. Does the USA have some evidence that the British have not seen yet? Perhaps they found it in the same place they filed their satellite photography of the Buk missile taking out MH17.

Murdock August 9, 2018 at 1:05 pm
You mean the same Russia that is one of only 7 nation states to have verifiably dismantled and destroyed their chemical weapon stockpiles as ratified by the OPCW and in compliance to the CWC? That Russia?

I can't wait for this determination to be made public along with the coinciding evidence as released by an official judiciary body wielding the requisite jurisdiction and authority under official auspices of the UN. That's what is meant by determined right? Pretty unambiguous terminology there.

This entire charade has gone so far beyond farce it's not even comical anymore, just depressing.

Mark Chapman August 9, 2018 at 3:51 pm
That's an interesting point, because a likely consequence of the continued hysterical hostility from the west will be opacity where there once was transparency; ie: if the United States wants to know something about Russian unconventional weapons programs, it will have to go to extensive and complicated labour to insert a deep-cover spy or persuade an asset that it can trust to find out the information, never knowing if it is being fed disinformation deliberately by a double agent, where once it could simply have asked and been invited to verify the truth itself. International organizations controlled by Washington will be less and less likely to have a free pass to come in and poke about as they see fit.

[Aug 15, 2018] Putin, Lavrov, Shoigu have been there for years and yet they seem to wear rose coloured glasses when it comes to America

Notable quotes:
"... Peskov made a statement about how unfriendly this action was after the two presidents met and got on – is this guy for real? The Americans are aiming to crush Russia and Peskov thinks it's unfriendly. This is what I mean by pandering ..."
"... What was the cost to Russia? Nada. What did it do to the US – more comical flailing, posturing and noise. Russia clearly understood what they were doing and the repercussions to the US political system – more dysfunction and misdirection. Score: Russia 1, USA 0. ..."
Aug 15, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

James lake August 9, 2018 at 7:48 am

Mark asked what I meant by Russian pandering

When I used the term pandering I mean the following

– Agreeing to meet in Helsinki with no agenda.
The meeting btw Lavrov and Pompeo was cancelled.
But Russia went along and has now escalated the Russophobia attacks against itself – this behaviour by Russia is pandering – let's meet with America whatever the cost, since at least 2014 and the latest Ukrainian coup; USA has proved untrustworthy yet Russia turns up when the USA asks. Putin was even going to Washington.

Is the Kremlin living in a bubble?

Putin lavrov Shoigu have been there for years and yet they seem to wear rose coloured glasses when it comes to America

Now with the latest sanctions – there is a protest and vague threat to respond –

Peskov made a statement about how unfriendly this action was after the two presidents met and got on – is this guy for real? The Americans are aiming to crush Russia and Peskov thinks it's unfriendly. This is what I mean by pandering

I really think the government needs fresh people – doing what they have been doing is not working.

Patient Observer August 9, 2018 at 2:21 pm
let's meet with America whatever the cost

What was the cost to Russia? Nada. What did it do to the US – more comical flailing, posturing and noise. Russia clearly understood what they were doing and the repercussions to the US political system – more dysfunction and misdirection. Score: Russia 1, USA 0.

Cortes August 9, 2018 at 4:41 pm
Spot on.
Northern Star August 9, 2018 at 11:36 am
USA psycho vermin continue to poke the Bear putting ALL our lives at risk::

https://www.afp.com/fr/infos/334/la-russie-promet-une-riposte-apres-les-sanctions-inadmissibles-de-washington-doc-1889cy3

Mark Chapman August 9, 2018 at 7:35 pm
If the situation eventually resolves itself without a major war, and things go back to something more like normal, when American manufacturers like Caterpillar and Ford are looking to expand into Russia, they will say "Waaahhhhh!!! Why do they hate us?"

Well, for your freedom, of course.

Cortes August 9, 2018 at 12:53 pm
Review of the cravatovore's glorious campaign of 2008 with thoughts on milestones in the recovery of the RF:

http://thesaker.is/the-war-of-08-08-08-and-ten-years-of-struggle-for-russian-sovereignty/

One comment makes the clearly valid point that recovery began in Chechnya.

Moscow Exile August 9, 2018 at 8:15 pm

Media: "We would like to have better relations with the Russian government. And sanctions are one tool from a whole set, through which we can try to set up some kind of government that shows an improvement in its behavior", the head of the State Department press service has said.

What kind of tool-set is this, "through which governments are set up to improve their behaviour for the betterment of their relations with the US": 🦇 🗜 🧟 ♀️ 🕷 🐍 ☄️ 🌪 🦂 💨 🤹🏻 ♂️ 🌋 🔫 💣 🔪 ⚰️ 🕳 💉 ⛓ ⚔️ 📌 🔞 🃏?
And I should like a couple of examples of where and how this "set" has worked.

Mark Chapman August 9, 2018 at 8:30 pm
I daresay there are a few countries in the world which would like to use various tools against the United States until those countries managed to set up a government in America which showed an improvement in its behavior. Would that be regarded as just another avenue of diplomacy by America? Surely not, in the Shining City On A Hill? Then what's all this talk of 'meddling' in America's democracy? Either the people of the country get to pick its leader, or the international community decides who would be appropriate and then uses the tools at its disposal to maneuver a satisfactory government into power. Make up your mind, but stop babbling about 'democracy', what say?

Amazingly enough, some people believe this nonsense. There are a handful of Russian liberals who allow that the country deserves to be sanctioned, and express hope that there will be more until the government is cast down, and a new American-style – possibly even American-picked – government takes power. This, to the US State Department, is the very distilled essence of democracy and freedom. However, the electoral process in America is evidently flawless, as no tampering with it is either required or permitted, and any result which does not meet with the approval of the corporate lobbyists is obviously an engineered takeover attempt by Russia.

Jen August 9, 2018 at 9:17 pm
1/ Third from the left of the tool-set: zombie.
As in zombie politicians leading zombie governments throughout the West.

2/ Fifth from the left of the tool-set: tarantula.
As in Gavin Williamson's soul brother.

There, I answered Maria Zakharova's query.

[Aug 15, 2018] Legendary journalist Seymour Hersh on novichok, Russian links to Donald Trump and 9/11

Aug 15, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al August 4, 2018 at 12:15 pm

From three days ago.

Independent: Legendary journalist Seymour Hersh on novichok, Russian links to Donald Trump and 9/11
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/seymour-hersh-interview-novichok-russian-hacking-9-11-nerve-agent-attack-a8459596.html

In a rare interview, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh talks about his illustrious career and how he believes the official versions of some the biggest news stories of our time just don't add up

Youssef El-Gingihy

[Aug 15, 2018] Curious thing also is that police officers were initially posted outside the front door there were quite a few photos of the two women police officers (one chubby, the other not so chubby) standing near the driveway for some time without being affected by any fumes, until the doorknob story became prominent.

Aug 15, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Mark Chapman August 10, 2018 at 12:11 pm

Here's quite a good collection of references and commentary on the Skripal 'poisoning'. Every time I read over one of these summaries – and I by no means read this one over in detail, just skimmed it – some new incongruity jumps out that sailed right past me on the initial run-through. In this instance, Nick Bailey. The Skripals were supposedly poisoned by Novichok daubed on the doorknob of their front door, and Bailey was supposedly affected by the same vector. Yet the Skripals lived it up for about four hours before they showed any symptoms, while Bailey was affected almost immediately.

http://www.softpanorama.org/Skeptics/Political_skeptic/Corporatism/National_security_state/Intelligence_services/False_flag_operations/False_flag_poisonings/scripal_poisoning.shtml

Jen August 10, 2018 at 2:06 pm
Curious thing also is that police officers were initially posted outside the front door – there were quite a few photos of the two women police officers (one chubby, the other not so chubby) standing near the driveway – for some time without being affected by any fumes, until the doorknob story became prominent.

One of the more sinister aspects of the "poisoning" is that all major evidence – the Zizzi restaurant table, the park bench, the pet animals that starved – has been or is being destroyed by the British authorities. Even Dawn Sturgess was cremated without anything in the press about whether her body had been autopsied. If someone blames somebody else for a murder or some other serious crime, and then covers up or gets rid of important evidence, what does such behaviour suggest?

Mark Chapman August 10, 2018 at 2:19 pm
Too true, blue. Although the police officers might have stood there until the clap of doom and not been affected if the agent was present as a gel, and slathered on the doorknob. But that story always sounded like a crock, because both of them likely would not have touched the doorknob on the way out, probably only one of them, and the supposed Russian assassins would not have known if it might have been Yulia. Good assassination plots, as we have been told the Russians have practiced for decades, ensure that the target is taken out. They're not particularly squeamish about collateral damage, but in this instance only Yulia might have succumbed. But assuming it was a gel and it was on the doorknob, much of it might be assumed to have been removed by the target on the way out, and still Bailey was overcome in less than half the time of the Skripals, both of whom appear to have been simultaneously afflicted around four hours after leaving the house.

It's kind of comical, the stubborn and progressive destruction of evidence by the British authorities, the buying of Skripal's and Bailey's houses at taxpayers' expense, and so on – it's as if after a brief blink of bewilderment that the official narrative is not being accepted at face value, the British government is trying to get a do-over.

Fern August 10, 2018 at 3:56 pm
My God, what has Salisbury done to the Dark Lord? When will his fearful shadow be lifted from this unhappy city? There has been an explosion in a 'military factory' (not sure what that means) in Salisbury which has killed at least one person. The MSM has not yet announced the Russian connection but Luke Harding/The Guardian/The Independent/the Foreign Office/the entire US State Department/ are, no doubt, manufacturing one as we speak.

Maybe the Russian agents who poisoned the Skripals by smearing a non-lethal fatal nerve agent on a door handle after pumping it through a car ventilation system after sneaking it into Yulia's luggage and who then high-tailed it back to Moscow but not before decanting some of it into a gift-wrapped bottle which they left in a local park where it could be recovered in a pristine state after four months and used to poison a couple of dumpster-foragers, made a hitherto unknown deviation from the Kremlin's master plan and hid the remaining nerve agent in a factory along with a time-controlled detonator so all evidence of their evil doing was destroyed.

Hey, I've just written Harding's copy for him .

Cortes August 10, 2018 at 7:02 pm
Beat me to it, Fern:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-45151856

I blame Cubby Broccoli: only a shape-shifting shuper Shoviet shpy could be behind thish latesht Shalishbury outrage.

Jen August 11, 2018 at 3:31 am
Now the authorities will be telling people that Novichok is highly inflammable and children should not be allowed to play with Novichok and matches or cigarette lighters.
Mark Chapman August 11, 2018 at 7:10 am
The Russians engineered it to be that way – a fatal nerve agent that seldom kills, persistent for months if wrapped in cellophane, explosive and flammable, eats dreams and makes you lose your job.
et Al August 11, 2018 at 5:23 am
My God, what has Salisbury done to the Dark Lord?

Does Stonehenge count? Maybe Putin used a time machine.

[Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov

Highly recommended!
This is an interesting analysis shedding some light on how the US intelligence services have gone rogue...
Notable quotes:
"... Most recently, British "special services," which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr. Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no evidence. ..."
"... the Americans are doing their best to break the unwritten rule against dragging spies through the courts, but their best is nowhere near good enough. ..."
"... That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn't have hacked into the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft Windows, and that operating system has more holes in it than a building in downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done bombing that city to rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this alleged hacking by Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his previous career) had trouble keeping a straight face and clearly enjoyed the moment. ..."
"... He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a clear pattern of wrongdoing: DNC officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in the Democratic Primary from Bernie Sanders, and after this information had been leaked they were forced to resign. If the Russian hack did happen, then it was the Russians working to save American democracy from itself. So, where's the gratitude? Where's the love? Oh, and why are the DNC perps not in jail? ..."
"... The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere to the traditional definitions of espionage and counterespionage -- "intelligence" in US parlance -- which is to provide validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on best ways of defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we disabuse ourselves of such quaint notions and accept the reality of what we can actually observe: the purpose of US "intelligence" is not to come up with or to work with facts but to simply "make shit up." ..."
"... The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on. ..."
"... "What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course they are lying! They were caught lying more than once, and therefore they can never be trusted again. In order to claim that they are not currently lying, you have to determine when it was that they stopped lying, and that they haven't lied since. And that, based on the information that is available, is an impossible task." ..."
"... "The US intelligence agencies made an outrageous claim: that I colluded with Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The burden of proof is on them. They are yet to prove their case in a court of law, which is the only place where the matter can legitimately be settled, if it can be settled at all. Until that happens, we must treat their claim as conspiracy theory, not as fact." ..."
"... But no such reality-based, down-to-earth dialogue seems possible. All that we hear are fake answers to fake questions, and the outcome is a series of faulty decisions. Based on fake intelligence, the US has spent almost all of this century embroiled in very expensive and ultimately futile conflicts. ..."
"... Thanks to their efforts, Iran, Iraq and Syria have now formed a continuous crescent of religiously and geopolitically aligned states friendly toward Russia while in Afghanistan the Taliban is resurgent and battling ISIS -- an organization that came together thanks to American efforts in Iraq and Syria. ..."
"... Another hypothesis, and a far more plausible one, is that the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than "a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. ..."
Jul 28, 2018 | russia-insider.com
In today's United States, the term "espionage" doesn't get too much use outside of some specific contexts. There is still sporadic talk of industrial espionage, but with regard to Americans' own efforts to understand the world beyond their borders, they prefer the term "intelligence." This may be an intelligent choice, or not, depending on how you look at things.

First of all, US "intelligence" is only vaguely related to the game of espionage as it has been traditionally played, and as it is still being played by countries such as Russia and China. Espionage involves collecting and validating strategically vital information and conveying it to just the pertinent decision-makers on your side while keeping the fact that you are collecting and validating it hidden from everyone else.

In eras past, a spy, if discovered, would try to bite down on a cyanide capsule; these days torture is considered ungentlemanly, and spies that get caught patiently wait to be exchanged in a spy swap. An unwritten, commonsense rule about spy swaps is that they are done quietly and that those released are never interfered with again because doing so would complicate negotiating future spy swaps.

In recent years, the US intelligence agencies have decided that torturing prisoners is a good idea, but they have mostly been torturing innocent bystanders, not professional spies, sometimes forcing them to invent things, such as "Al Qaeda." There was no such thing before US intelligence popularized it as a brand among Islamic terrorists.

Most recently, British "special services," which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr. Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no evidence.

There are unlikely to be any more British spy swaps with Russia, and British spies working in Russia should probably be issued good old-fashioned cyanide capsules (since that supposedly super-powerful Novichok stuff the British keep at their "secret" lab in Porton Down doesn't work right and is only fatal 20% of the time).

There is another unwritten, commonsense rule about spying in general: whatever happens, it needs to be kept out of the courts, because the discovery process of any trial would force the prosecution to divulge sources and methods, making them part of the public record. An alternative is to hold secret tribunals, but since these cannot be independently verified to be following due process and rules of evidence, they don't add much value.

A different standard applies to traitors; here, sending them through the courts is acceptable and serves a high moral purpose, since here the source is the person on trial and the method -- treason -- can be divulged without harm. But this logic does not apply to proper, professional spies who are simply doing their jobs, even if they turn out to be double agents. In fact, when counterintelligence discovers a spy, the professional thing to do is to try to recruit him as a double agent or, failing that, to try to use the spy as a channel for injecting disinformation.

Americans have been doing their best to break this rule. Recently, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted a dozen Russian operatives working in Russia for hacking into the DNC mail server and sending the emails to Wikileaks. Meanwhile, said server is nowhere to be found (it's been misplaced) while the time stamps on the files that were published on Wikileaks show that they were obtained by copying to a thumb drive rather than sending them over the internet. Thus, this was a leak, not a hack, and couldn't have been done by anyone working remotely from Russia.

Furthermore, it is an exercise in futility for a US official to indict Russian citizens in Russia. They will never stand trial in a US court because of the following clause in the Russian Constitution: "61.1 A citizen of the Russian Federation may not be deported out of Russia or extradited to another state."

Mueller may summon a panel of constitutional scholars to interpret this sentence, or he can just read it and weep. Yes, the Americans are doing their best to break the unwritten rule against dragging spies through the courts, but their best is nowhere near good enough.

That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn't have hacked into the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft Windows, and that operating system has more holes in it than a building in downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done bombing that city to rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this alleged hacking by Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his previous career) had trouble keeping a straight face and clearly enjoyed the moment.

He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a clear pattern of wrongdoing: DNC officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in the Democratic Primary from Bernie Sanders, and after this information had been leaked they were forced to resign. If the Russian hack did happen, then it was the Russians working to save American democracy from itself. So, where's the gratitude? Where's the love? Oh, and why are the DNC perps not in jail?

Since there exists an agreement between the US and Russia to cooperate on criminal investigations, Putin offered to question the spies indicted by Mueller. He even offered to have Mueller sit in on the proceedings. But in return he wanted to question US officials who may have aided and abetted a convicted felon by the name of William Browder, who is due to begin serving a nine-year sentence in Russia any time now and who, by the way, donated copious amounts of his ill-gotten money to the Hillary Clinton election campaign.

In response, the US Senate passed a resolution to forbid Russians from questioning US officials. And instead of issuing a valid request to have the twelve Russian spies interviewed, at least one US official made the startlingly inane request to have them come to the US instead. Again, which part of 61.1 don't they understand?

The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere to the traditional definitions of espionage and counterespionage -- "intelligence" in US parlance -- which is to provide validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on best ways of defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we disabuse ourselves of such quaint notions and accept the reality of what we can actually observe: the purpose of US "intelligence" is not to come up with or to work with facts but to simply "make shit up."

The "intelligence" the US intelligence agencies provide can be anything but; in fact, the stupider it is the better, because its purpose is allow unintelligent people to make unintelligent decisions. In fact, they consider facts harmful -- be they about Syrian chemical weapons, or conspiring to steal the primary from Bernie Sanders, or Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden -- because facts require accuracy and rigor while they prefer to dwell in the realm of pure fantasy and whimsy. In this, their actual objective is easily discernible.

The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on.

One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag operations, à la 9/11, to fake false flag operations, à la fake East Gouta chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story is perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were harmed in the process of concocting this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips. It is now a pure confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a conspiracy theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.

Trump was recently questioned as to whether he trusted US intelligence. He waffled. A light-hearted answer would have been:

"What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course they are lying! They were caught lying more than once, and therefore they can never be trusted again. In order to claim that they are not currently lying, you have to determine when it was that they stopped lying, and that they haven't lied since. And that, based on the information that is available, is an impossible task."

A more serious, matter-of-fact answer would have been:

"The US intelligence agencies made an outrageous claim: that I colluded with Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The burden of proof is on them. They are yet to prove their case in a court of law, which is the only place where the matter can legitimately be settled, if it can be settled at all. Until that happens, we must treat their claim as conspiracy theory, not as fact."

And a hardcore, deadpan answer would have been:

"The US intelligence services swore an oath to uphold the US Constitution, according to which I am their Commander in Chief. They report to me, not I to them. They must be loyal to me, not I to them. If they are disloyal to me, then that is sufficient reason for their dismissal."

But no such reality-based, down-to-earth dialogue seems possible. All that we hear are fake answers to fake questions, and the outcome is a series of faulty decisions. Based on fake intelligence, the US has spent almost all of this century embroiled in very expensive and ultimately futile conflicts.

Thanks to their efforts, Iran, Iraq and Syria have now formed a continuous crescent of religiously and geopolitically aligned states friendly toward Russia while in Afghanistan the Taliban is resurgent and battling ISIS -- an organization that came together thanks to American efforts in Iraq and Syria.

The total cost of wars so far this century for the US is reported to be $4,575,610,429,593. Divided by the 138,313,155 Americans who file tax returns (whether they actually pay any tax is too subtle a question), it works out to just over $33,000 per taxpayer. If you pay taxes in the US, that's your bill so far for the various US intelligence "oopsies."

The 16 US intelligence agencies have a combined budget of $66.8 billion, and that seems like a lot until you realize how supremely efficient they are: their "mistakes" have cost the country close to 70 times their budget. At a staffing level of over 200,000 employees, each of them has cost the US taxpayer close to $23 million, on average. That number is totally out of the ballpark! The energy sector has the highest earnings per employee, at around $1.8 million per. Valero Energy stands out at $7.6 million per. At $23 million per, the US intelligence community has been doing three times better than Valero. Hats off! This makes the US intelligence community by far the best, most efficient collapse driver imaginable.

There are two possible hypotheses for why this is so.

First, we might venture to guess that these 200,000 people are grossly incompetent and that the fiascos they precipitate are accidental. But it is hard to imagine a situation where grossly incompetent people nevertheless manage to funnel $23 million apiece, on average, toward an assortment of futile undertakings of their choosing. It is even harder to imagine that such incompetents would be allowed to blunder along decade after decade without being called out for their mistakes.

Another hypothesis, and a far more plausible one, is that the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than "a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars."

[Aug 14, 2018] Does mere accusation now stand for "truth" in this inmates-running-the-asylum charade USA is putting on?

Aug 14, 2018 | www.unz.com

skopros , August 13, 2018 at 6:46 pm GMT

Has anybody in comments noted how far we have swung from absence of actual PROOF Russia did the Skripal "poisonings" (or even Litvenenko for that matter?!) to what seems like complete acceptance of "guilt," even as major international bodies (OPCW, etc., even Porton Down) have not been able to tie Russia/Putin to these alleged acts of terror or isolate the "novichoks" genre of nerve agent ? The Red Queen triumphs.

Does mere accusation now stand for "truth" in this inmates-running-the-asylum charade USA is putting on? If the "big lie" (Lenin, BTW not Goebbels, originally) works this easily, we are indeed down the chute & over the brink. Orwell is spinning in his grave (gnashing his teeth).

Mitleser , August 13, 2018 at 7:05 pm GMT

Does mere accusation now stand for "truth" in this inmates-running-the-asylum charade USA is putting on?

It was the same when the Iraq was the enemy.

[Aug 14, 2018] Litvinenko affair now looks like a dressed rehearsal of Skripals

Notable quotes:
"... Therefore, we have to deal with facts in the matter. Among the facts, I'd like to point out to the behavior of the investigating party, i.e. the British authorities. "We have proof but won't show them to you, because they are secret" attitude; bypassing normal investigative and judicial channels; unreasonable demands towards Russia they knew full well won't be met and total refusal to cooperate on realistic terms – we saw it for the first time in the Litvinenko affaire. ..."
Aug 14, 2018 | www.unz.com

EugeneGur , August 13, 2018 at 7:25 pm GMT

@Mr. Hack

All I was pointing out was that there were many reasons why Litvinenko was a target for unfriendly Russian actions

I am pretty sure Litvinenko wasn't particularly loved in Russia: he was a traitor, after all, and, judging by his actions, a pretty miserable human being. However, building a case on motive alone is not possible, if for no other reason than because a motive is by definition subjective. You could analyze until your face turns blue how Putin felt about Litvinenko's accusations but you'd never come to any firm conclusion, for only Putin can possibly know that.

Therefore, we have to deal with facts in the matter. Among the facts, I'd like to point out to the behavior of the investigating party, i.e. the British authorities. "We have proof but won't show them to you, because they are secret" attitude; bypassing normal investigative and judicial channels; unreasonable demands towards Russia they knew full well won't be met and total refusal to cooperate on realistic terms – we saw it for the first time in the Litvinenko affaire.

The same patters was repeated exactly in the Skripal case. This tells you who is the "highly likely" culprit, doesn't it? These two scenarios are so much alike, the have the same author – not necessarily the same person, but definitely the same office.

[Aug 14, 2018] There was a news that in early July, Viktoria Skripal was invited by A Just Russia Party to run for a seat in Yaroslavl regional elections and she accepted.

Aug 14, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jen , Aug 12, 2018 8:25:50 PM | 22

No idea though if the elections have been held and Viktoria won or lost.

https://en.crimerussia.com/gover/niece-of-skripal-runs-for-yaroslavl-regional-duma-deputy/

Viktoria Skripal spoke to her cousin Julia by phone twice in July: the first time on the 4th, when the two argued and Julia blamed Viktoria for the publicity over the poisoning; the second time towards the end of the month, when Julia apologised to Viktoria after getting Internet access and reading what had been reported in the media. In one of these phone calls, Julia revealed her father was still using a breathing tube.

https://www.theblogmire.com/if-yulia-skripal-now-understands-everything-what-did-they-tell-her-before/

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/sergei-skripal-still-breathing-machine-12987411

[Aug 14, 2018] Skripals affair now looks like a prologue to Russian sanctions imposed by the USA. And that probably was by design like was Magnitsky afair.

Notable quotes:
"... The area of contest is now the rest of the world. America will try to convince the rest of the world to join its sanctions against Russia. Russia will try to convince them not to. ..."
Aug 14, 2018 | russia-insider.com

MarcS • 4 hours ago ,

Hello,
All of this revolves around the imminent fact that the "honest" British spooks are about to get exposed when Trump declassifies the hoax documents about Russian interference (lol) in elections.

I don't understand why Russian economists believe they have to belong to the corrupt, bankrupt us monopoly dollar system? stop all exports of gas, oil to the europe cowards, and any other country that continues to steal the wealth of the Russian resources from its people. A very sick bunch in DC and London.

Turn all of these resources inward to allow the Russian people to prosper, with energy infrastructure, farming techniques with heated greenhouses, etc... hey you have a lot of real farmers in Africa that could spawn new agricultural developments in the east Russian territory, about 15,000 farmers, unbelievable opportunity and resources for Russia to help people from a racially, evil to the core, government in Africa. Boycott all of Africa. There are real people getting killed there, no fake news .

commonsenseadvocate 4 hours ago ,

Does anyone know whether the Skripals are Jewish?

Guy 7 hours ago ,

This is exactly how the West operates ,especially the US and UK. There you have it , right out in open for everyone to see.They have been doing this for a long time , especially since the CIA , part of the shadow government , took control of the Western world. Now it is no longer covert ,it is right in our face. And why they had JFK assassinated ,because he saw what he was up against . Kennedy wanted to smash these covert and corrupted organizations into pieces.

hellen • 10 hours ago ,

Colluding with West for so many years to put down smaller countries is certainly not a quality of an angelic government and the country as Russia has been sometimes painted. Why do we forget tens of millions of Russians abused just across Russian borders, never mentioned by the government that seems only to care about wellbeing of the criminal oligarchs? Why do we forget the collusion against Serbian people that lasted for approximately 20 years and led to the destruction of that small nation? Why do we forget Russian support to numerous UN ( Western) sanctions against many nations around the world? Why do we forget betrayal of Cuba in such devious way by Mr. Putin? Why such contempt towards own nation and its heroes by honouring a Nazi-like figure like Netanyahu on the Victory Parade? Why strangulation of N. Korea? Why ,why.. I actually tend to believe that God is finally acting upon many curses cast on Russian government and is using the US as his chosen tool. Quite a justice.

Truth Teller 11 hours ago ,

I was excoriated and accused of being a liar on RI over the weekend because I quoted this article, originally published in Pravda. The point was made by the one who did this that no Russian or Russian sympathizer (such as the author of this article would want additional sanctions on Russia.

The comparison was that a small amounts of certain types of medicine can be beneficial, but in large doses can be fatal. The gist of the comment was that a small amount of sanctions can be good to bring more independence to the Russian economy, but additional sanctions would be harmful.

Well, now RI itself publishes the article from the idiot Hinchey in asking for more and more sanctions because of how wonderful they will be for Russia.

wimroffel 12 hours ago ,

The area of contest is now the rest of the world. America will try to convince the rest of the world to join its sanctions against Russia. Russia will try to convince them not to.

[Aug 14, 2018] Rand Paul Stands Up for Peace by Justin Raimondo

Please support antiwar.com -- a unique antiwar site in the climate of rabid militarism and jingoism...
Notable quotes:
"... "the unlikely, unholy alliance between Rand Paul and Donald Trump, one a libertarian iconoclast, the other the cancerous center of the Republican party" is upsetting to writer Tina Nguyen because the "far left and the far right" are "converging." Or something. Peace with nuclear-armed Russia? That qualifies the Senator as a "wacko bird" and "Putin's perfect stooge." ..."
"... Rand Paul has gone from being an overly cautious presidential candidate who seemed scared of his own noninterventionist shadow to a principled statesman unafraid to take a stand for peace. He is a living example of how people – yes, even politicians – learn and change. His trip to Russia to bring a message of peace and détente at a time when the wolves of the War Party are howling ever louder was an act of courage that should have every person of good will standing and applauding. Bravo, Senator! ..."
Aug 14, 2018 | original.antiwar.com

Libertarians are largely lost in the wilderness of the present era: wandering without a compass, either moral or ideological, and without a clue as to how to get home, never mind reach their ultimate goal of "freedom in our time." Yes, that was the old slogan that we libertarians started out with: an optimistic battle-cry that, today, seems unrealistic, at best. But is it? And if it isn't, who can show us the way forward?

My answer is simple: look at what Sen. Rand Paul is doing, and take a lesson. Instead of weeping and wailing about the loss of a "libertarian moment" that never really happened, Sen. Paul is making a difference. As Politico reports :

" Rand Paul has the ear, and the affection, of the most important person in the White House: President Donald Trump.

"Once bitter rivals on the Republican campaign trail, the Kentucky senator and the commander-in-chief have bonded over a shared delight in thumbing their noses at experts the president likes to deride as 'foreign policy eggheads,' including those who work in his own administration."

When Trump appointed the hawkish John Bolton as his National Security Advisor, the usual suspects crowed that "the neocons have taken over the White House." Never mind that a) Bolton is no neocon, and b) Trump is known for encouraging vigorous debate among his policy advisors while not necessarily agreeing with one or the other – these people, mostly alleged non-interventionists, hate the President for other reasons, and merely seized on the appointment as a convenient talking point. However, this narrative is contradicted by the reports of Sen. Paul's increasing influence in the Oval Office:

"While Trump tolerates his hawkish advisers, the aide added, he shares a real bond with Paul: 'He actually at gut level has the same instincts as Rand Paul.'"

"Paul has quietly emerged as an influential sounding board and useful ally for the president, who frequently clashes with his top advisers on foreign policy. The Kentucky senator's relationship with Trump, developed via frequent cellphone calls and over rounds of golf at the president's Virginia country club, became publicly apparent for the first time on Wednesday when the senator announced he had hand-delivered a letter to the Kremlin on Trump's behalf."

While the Beltway apparatus put together by the Kochs has jumped on the NeverTrump bandwagon with both feet, publicly declaring war on the administration and announcing a de facto alliance with the Democrats, Sen. Paul has made a difference in a key area that the Koch machine has largely abandoned or reversed itself: foreign policy. Here's Politico again:

"Both Paul and Trump routinely rail against foreign entanglements, foreign wars, and foreign aid – positions characterized as isolationist by critics and as 'America first' by the president and his supporters. Even on points of where they disagree, Paul has extracted small victories."

That one area is Iran, and even there it looks like Sen. Paul has his finger in the dike:

"But Trump has stopped short of calling for regime change even though Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and Bolton support it, aligning with Paul instead, according to a GOP foreign policy expert in frequent contact with the White House. '

Rand Paul has persuaded the president that we are not for regime change in Iran,' this person said, because adopting that position would instigate another war in the Middle East."

As the President launches peace initiatives from the Korean peninsula to the steppes of Russia, the virtue-signalers among us pretend that none of that is happening and obsessively descry the decision to exit the Iran deal. Yet where has all their moaning and groaning gotten them? Sen. Paul is single-handedly doing more for peace than any of these bloviating nonentities could dream of.

The hysteria aimed at the President is now directed at Sen. Paul, with the New York Times in what is perhaps mistakenly presented as a "news" article describing the Senator's relationship with the White House in words that are clearly over the top:

"Suddenly, in the mind of the junior senator from Kentucky, Mr. Trump has soared from lower than that speck of dirt to high enough for Mount Rushmore."

One imagines the foam-flecked computer screen of the author was quite a mess well before she reached the end of her jeremiad. Hatred for the President blends and merges with hatred for Russia as the Fourth Estate becomes an instrument in the hands of the War Party. Vanity Fair – that bastion of foreign policy expertise – shrieks that

"the unlikely, unholy alliance between Rand Paul and Donald Trump, one a libertarian iconoclast, the other the cancerous center of the Republican party" is upsetting to writer Tina Nguyen because the "far left and the far right" are "converging." Or something. Peace with nuclear-armed Russia? That qualifies the Senator as a "wacko bird" and "Putin's perfect stooge."

Yeah, suuure it does, Tina: anything you say. Just like those who wanted to end the Vietnam war were "stooges" of Ho Chi Minh. Just like Ronald Reagan getting rid of a whole category of nukes made him a "stooge" of Gorbachev.

And to get down to the real intellectual heavyweight: S. E. Cupp, whose credentials seem to be phony glasses and blondness, vomits up her considered opinion that Sen. Paul is now Putin's "errand boy." Which is far better than being Max Boot's errand girl , but don't anyone tell Iraq war-supporting Ms. Cupp that she has blood on her hands. She feels no need to apologize.

Oh yes, the heavies are out in force, sliming Sen. Paul for defending the President's Helsinki peace initiative with nuclear-armed Russia. Vanity Fair , S. E. Cupp – who's next? Madonna? Women's Wear Daily ?

Rand Paul has gone from being an overly cautious presidential candidate who seemed scared of his own noninterventionist shadow to a principled statesman unafraid to take a stand for peace. He is a living example of how people – yes, even politicians – learn and change. His trip to Russia to bring a message of peace and détente at a time when the wolves of the War Party are howling ever louder was an act of courage that should have every person of good will standing and applauding. Bravo, Senator!

[Aug 14, 2018] Latest Sanctions Against Russia Show Trump Not in Control of His Administration by F. Michael Maloof

It could be the Trump was already deposed as a President by Pompeo.
I never understood appointment of Haley and appointment of Bolton if we assume that Trump is not a neocon and does not want to continue previous administration policies. Haley is kind of Sikh variant of Samantha Power. Bolton is probably as bad as Wolfowitz. Pompeo also can be viewed as Hillary 2.0.
Notable quotes:
"... In addition, the US has delivered an ultimatum, saying that if Russia does not give assurances within 90 days that it will no longer use chemical weapons and allow international inspectors to inspect its production facilities, further sanctions will be implemented. But Russia denies it used chemical weapons. Unlike the US, it destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile in accordance with international treaties. ..."
"... The legislation gave a 60-day window to begin implementation of sanctions after the Trump administration determined that the now-British citizen Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned by a strain of the Novichok nerve-agent. The US came to that conclusion following an initial determination by the British government. ..."
"... However, the US administration missed the deadline by more than a month. That prompted Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, to write a letter to Trump some two weeks ago slamming the president for ignoring the deadline. ..."
"... Strangely, a government research facility at Porton Down in Amesbury, not far from Salisbury where the alleged March poisoning took place, examined the strain of Novichok. Porton Down lab does work for British Defense Science and Technology Laboratory, run by the Ministry of Defense, and the Public Health England. ..."
"... All of this makes makes the issue as to why Britain, and even the US, never wanted to share samples taken from the poisoning of the Skripals with Moscow more concerning. Yet, they all went ahead in lock-step to condemn Moscow for the poisoning, without any evidence, suggesting a more sinister reason for lobbying increased sanctions against Russia with the goal of further isolating the country. ..."
"... It reflects the need especially by the US to have a demon in an effort to justify its defense spending to bolster NATO up to the border of the Russian Federation in the form of a new containment policy that launched the Cold War in the first place. ..."
"... With even further sanctions against Russia in the recently passed Defense Department Authorization Bill about to go into effect, it is becoming apparent that the allegations against Russia are politically-motivated, false flag allegations to be used as an excuse for a greater geostrategic reason -- to contain Russia just as the Trump administration is increasingly finding its US-led unilateral world order being challenged more than ever. ..."
"... Trump talks about better relations with Russia, but the actions of his own administration in demonizing Moscow dictate otherwise. ..."
Aug 10, 2018 | russia-insider.com
Forget about running the Empire or the American state. Trump isn't even in control of his team US President Donald Trump is not in control of his own administration, as evidenced by the latest round of sanctions imposed against Russia for the alleged involvement in the poisoning of the Skripals in the UK in March.

The sanctions came the same day that US Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., announced on a trip to Moscow that he had handed over a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin from Trump calling for better relations between the two countries. For that reason, the timing appears to be suspect, suggesting strongly that Trump has his own foreign policy while the Trump administration, comprised mainly of bureaucrats referred to as the Deep State, have their own. Right now, they appear to be in control, not President Trump, over his own administration, and it is having the adverse effect of further alienating Washington and Moscow.

The neocons, led by National Security Advisor John Bolton, along with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, comprise the Trump " war cabinet " ostensibly aimed at directing a harder line toward Syria, North Korea, Iran but also Russia. Bolton, in particular, has been outspoken in calling for regime change in some of these countries. Trump not so much so. In fact, he has said just the opposite. Nevertheless, their anti-Russian flair in Washington has breathed new life into the neocons who, along with the Democrats, Deep State and much of the mainstream media, have pushed the false narrative of collusion between Russia and Trump.

This persistent anti-Russian rant and repeated sanctions which have been imposed have had the effect of leading to further threats of sanctions for questionable reasons, raising the potential prospect of suspension of diplomatic ties.

Even at the height of the Cold War, relations between the US and Russia never reached such low depths as they have now. The latest sanctions affect primarily dual-use technologies which are civilian products with potential military applications. They include gas turbine engines, electronics and integrated circuits which will now be denied. Previous sanctions going back to the Obama administration, however, already imposed bans on many of these dual-use technologies.

In addition, the US has delivered an ultimatum, saying that if Russia does not give assurances within 90 days that it will no longer use chemical weapons and allow international inspectors to inspect its production facilities, further sanctions will be implemented. But Russia denies it used chemical weapons. Unlike the US, it destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile in accordance with international treaties.

Implementation of the sanctions stem from provisions of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991.

The legislation gave a 60-day window to begin implementation of sanctions after the Trump administration determined that the now-British citizen Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned by a strain of the Novichok nerve-agent. The US came to that conclusion following an initial determination by the British government.

However, the US administration missed the deadline by more than a month. That prompted Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, to write a letter to Trump some two weeks ago slamming the president for ignoring the deadline.

Curiously, the British government hasn't implemented similar sanctions, although the US has. It may reflect the continued uncertainty among some British politicians and experts over the origin of the Novichok and concern with Britain's trade dependency on Russia. But since the Americans opted to implement sanctions due to existing legislation, there was apparently no objection from London even though it initially implemented sanctions by kicking out Russian diplomats from the country.

Moscow, however, vehemently denied that it was involved in the poisoning of Skripal and his daughter. Novichok was created by Russian scientists during the Cold War but never used on the battlefield. Russian officials asked Britain for evidence of Russian involvement and called for a joint investigation to be conducted by the Kremlin and British governments.

The British government repeatedly turned down the offer, as did other Western members of the United Nations Security Council, the US and France, when Moscow sought such a joint investigation.

The US claimed that the information linking the poison to Russia was " classified ."

Strangely, a government research facility at Porton Down in Amesbury, not far from Salisbury where the alleged March poisoning took place, examined the strain of Novichok. Porton Down lab does work for British Defense Science and Technology Laboratory, run by the Ministry of Defense, and the Public Health England.

Results from the examination confirmed the poison was a form of Novichok but – importantly – could not determine where the poison had been created or who had used it. This development created further confusion and prompted disputes among politicians.

It is known that samples of Novichok have been in the hands of many NATO countries for years after the German foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND, had reportedly obtained a sample from a Russian defector in the 1990s.

The formula was later shared with Britain, the US, France, Canada and the Netherlands, where small quantities of Novichok reportedly were produced in an effort to develop countermeasures. Porton Down labs similarly had received samples to study. Czech President Milos Zeman recently admitted that his country synthesized and tested a form of Novichok. Sweden and Slovakia also have the technical capability to produce the nerve agent, according to Russian officials.

All of this makes makes the issue as to why Britain, and even the US, never wanted to share samples taken from the poisoning of the Skripals with Moscow more concerning. Yet, they all went ahead in lock-step to condemn Moscow for the poisoning, without any evidence, suggesting a more sinister reason for lobbying increased sanctions against Russia with the goal of further isolating the country.

It reflects the need especially by the US to have a demon in an effort to justify its defense spending to bolster NATO up to the border of the Russian Federation in the form of a new containment policy that launched the Cold War in the first place.

With even further sanctions against Russia in the recently passed Defense Department Authorization Bill about to go into effect, it is becoming apparent that the allegations against Russia are politically-motivated, false flag allegations to be used as an excuse for a greater geostrategic reason -- to contain Russia just as the Trump administration is increasingly finding its US-led unilateral world order being challenged more than ever.

The reason, however, isn't due to anything that Moscow initiated but by Trump himself who isn't in control of his own administration, and maybe never has been. Many of his campaign promises such as dropping out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or Iranian nuclear agreement, the threat of sanctions against any company that trades with Iran, his tariff war with US allies are in conflict with each other, leading to increased world instability. At the same time, Trump talks about better relations with Russia, but the actions of his own administration in demonizing Moscow dictate otherwise.

F. Michael Maloof is a former Pentagon security analyst.

[Aug 13, 2018] FBI Reveals Maria Butina Traded Sex In Exchange For All 62,984,828 Votes Trump Received In 2016

Jul 19, 2018 | politics.theonion.com
WASHINGTON -- Saying that their investigation indicated her involvement in election interference went deeper than previously believed, the FBI revealed Thursday that Russian agent Maria Butina traded sex in exchange for all 62,984,828 votes Donald Trump received for president in 2016. "Our inquiry into Ms. Butina

[Aug 13, 2018] Cold War in the Sauna Notes From a Russian American by Pavel Kozhevnikov

Aug 13, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

I had just finished exercising and went to the sauna. The gym I go to is a modern facility with new equipment and is very popular in our city.

My favorite parts are the sauna and the steamer. Both remind me of my old country – Russia. Though, to be politically and geographically correct – I never lived in Russia: I was born and raised in one of the fifteen republics of the former USSR – the republic of Kazakhstan.

So, I am a Russian from Kazakhstan. It's kind of confusing for Americans, and when twenty-six years ago my American wife brought me here, the customs official gave me an alien card where my nationality was stated not Russian but Kazakh. My friends make fun of me, because Russians and Kazakhs are like apples and oranges. We look different

In 1992, when I arrived in America, the relationship between the two cold war rivals was excellent: Americans traveled to Russia, opening McDonalds, KFC's, Burger Kings, and other businesses, and Russians were opening not only their hearts but even the secrets of the overthrown KGB. Millions of Russians and Americans enjoyed such a "romance" between the two most powerful nuclear countries in the world.

Not anymore! Every morning I wake up to the words, "Russia is terrible," and go to sleep with the humiliating jokes of the "night-show-clowns" about "the dictator" Putin and "barbaric" Russians, whose 13 hackers changed the electoral minds of millions of naïve Americans. Wow! What a powerful "gasoline station country"- Russia, as Senator McCain calls it.

If in 1992 the people in my city who heard my accent were very nice to me and to Russia, now the usual reaction is to stare at me like a goat at the newly painted gates. One of my neighbors even yelled at me when I answered his question about my recent trip to Russia. I told him: "Russians like Putin because he saved their country from collapse. I saw with my own eyes how Russia has changed since my last trip there. I didn't see the impact of Obama's sanctions, Russians have better roads, than we have in Colorado; the shops, are filled with all kinds of products; the churches are restored "

My neighbor who didn't like Trump yelled at me: "If you like Russia go back to your country!" My answer was: "I love Russia but I am American – like your immigrant wife, like you. I love America for a lot of reasons, one of them – the right to speak! Nobody should privatize this right." He ran away, later coming to apologize

My wife, knowing my hard-tempered character asks me not to talk about policy – Putin-Trump anymore. And I don't, to a certain degree. However, when someone asks me about Russia or Putin I usually answer, giving my point of view; I just cannot be silent. I was silent for 40+ years living in the USSR, not anymore! Of course, not everyone likes my answers, like the man I am going to tell you about.

So, I went into the sauna; a stout man was sitting on the upper bench. He was the same age as I. Many of the older men in America call ourselves "old farts." The name is not offensive to us, because we really do not care about our image, and because we like to make jokes about everything, mostly about ourselves. Usually, we old farts are nice, we love to talk, even in the sauna. Young people nowadays do not talk. They turn on their phones even in the sauna – I bet they do not know how to talk with other people. They cover their "secrets" in towels while we do not – we do not have any secrets anymore.

Anyway, the man said hello to me, I answered, and he caught my slight accent.

"Where are you from?" It's a question I am usually asked.

"From here." I answered.

He was a little confused. I knew what usually followed if I had said – "from Kazakhstan." Usually, there would be an exchange of this type: "Where is it?" – "Between Russia and China," – "How do you like it here?" The silly film "Borat" helped me for a short period of time. People were smiling, as if they met Sasha Cohen, and I was happy that at least they knew some geography, though the film was silly and the geography in it was completely mistaken.

"No, I mean originally where are you from?" The guy, let's call him Tony, found the right question.

I decided not to check his geography skills and said that I came from Russia. The dialog that followed was remarkable. Here it is.

"Welcome to America! Your English is pretty good!"

"Yours, too." He didn't get my humor. "Just joking," I said, "As for welcoming, it's a little late: I have lived here for 25 years."

"Have you been in Russia lately?" He asked.

"Yes, I go there every year."

"Wow. So, what do you think about that crazy guy , Pyutin?"

"Sorry, honey," – I apologized to my wife in my thoughts and picked up the gauntlet. "You mean Putin? He is not crazy. Actually, he is one of the smartest rulers Russia ever had." I said.

Tony's eyes nearly leaped from their sockets. "But he is a dictator and kills people!"

"I wouldn't call him a dictator – he was just last week elected by nearly 67% of Russians. I would call him an authoritarian, strong ruler; but a weak ruler in Russia wouldn't survive a day. Besides, there were seven people opposed him in the election!"

Tony smiled. "You call it an election? He chose the opponents himself from his friends. The whole world knows that elections in Russia are a sham!"

"Who told you this nonsense, Tony? Did you listen to the debates? Did you hear how these people yelled at each other and cursed Putin, asking people to vote for them not for Putin. They really were as tough as Hillary to Donald! And besides, there were a lot of observers from 110 countries. They claimed the election was legitimate."

"No, I do not believe you."

"You may not believe me but I am citing the international organizations reports. You may check their reports on the Internet yourself. You may even sue these organizations if you wish."

Tony was silent for a minute, then turned his head to me and asked: "You know that Pyutin is evil even to his own people?"

"You mean Putin? Who told you? How many Russians share your opinion?"

"McCain."

"Is he Russian?"

"No, but he knows that Pyutin is KGB."

"His name is Putin!" I tried to correct at least this in his mind. "So, you do not believe me, a Russian, who just returned from Russia, but you believe this Senator, who hates Putin and Russia? Besides, there are no KGB anymore."

"But he used to be KGB?"

"Yes, and Bush H. was also a CIA agent. So, what? After the collapse of the Soviet Union there were no people who didn't work for government in that country, we all worked for government! Putin is good for Russia, he is the brightest politician nowadays. He is like a great Chess-master, and he is a dangerous player. We must be careful with him. Some Congressmen are underestimating Russia, calling it "a gasoline station with nukes," but I was there this summer and saw with my own eyes how much people love Putin, and how much he is doing to make that country great again."

"Yeh, yeh, yeh " Tony didn't know what to say. Then he recalled something and turned his red face to me. "Well, he invaded Crimea, and Ukraine!"

"No, he did not. Crimea was a harbor for the Russian navy, and according to the treaty between Ukraine and Russia there were sixteen thousand Russian troops stationed there on a permanent base. There were about twenty-three thousand Ukrainian troops there, too. So, when the thugs in Kiev took power, illegally kicking out president Yanukovych and killing the political opponents, the Crimean people decided to organize a referendum. Ninety-six percent decided to reunite with Russia, as they were Russians for nearly 400 years before the Communist dictator Khrushchev gave that peninsula to Ukraine as a present to his native land."

"But they had no right to secede from the main land of Ukraine!"

"Yes, they did. International law gives the right for self-determination to people. Remember, we split from the British Empire."

"But it was so long ago!"

"Okay, what about East and West Germany or Kosovo? The people in these countries also exercised their right of self-determination, but they didn't have any referendum as far as I know."

Tony looked at me attentively. "I don't believe you."

"You have the right not to believe me. You asked, I answered."

Tony was silent for a while. Then he threw out his last argument. "I hope you wouldn't deny that Putin killed British citizens recently, using KGB gas!"

Wow, he pronounced "Putin" correctly! I smiled. The nice face of my American wife appeared in my head again, and she was not happy! I kissed her in my thoughts and finished the conversation with my last knockout blow:

"I wouldn't deny it if the poisoning by Russians had been proved!"

"But it was proved by Teresa May!"

"Really? What did she say?"

"She said that it was Putin who poisoned the British citizens!"

"Not really, my friend. She said that it was "highly likely" that Russia did it! Besides, only Mr. Skripal is a British citizen, his daughter is a Russian citizen"

"Does it make any difference?"

"You mean, "highly likely" is proof to punish somebody? What about one of the main pillars of democracy – innocent until proven guilty?"

"But we believe our allies, not the Russians!"

That statement made me laugh. "You believe not facts but political statements without any facts? Wow! What kind of democracy is that?"

Tony's face became so red that I was afraid it would melt. He stood up from the bench and without looking at me firmly said:

"Russians are our enemies, and democracy does not apply to them."

He left, leaving me with a sudden fear of approaching nuclear war.

At night I prayed for peace. I prayed for American and Russian people-in-power who could easily destroy this fragile planet. If people refuse to understand each other, they fight. Kennedy and Khrushchev fortunately understood this. Will Putin and Trump understand?

Pavel Kozhevnikov was born in Kazakhstan. In 1992 he married an American woman and relocated to Colorado, USA, where he worked in a variety of business ventures and taught various subjects including Russian at Mitchell High School as well as at Pikes Peak Community College and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Pavel continues to enjoy teaching Russian at the local community college and university and devotes his free time to writing. He has published four books of stories and poems as well as numerous articles for newspapers and journals in Russia, Germany, Kazakhstan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

[Aug 13, 2018] FBI Reveals Maria Butina Traded Sex In Exchange For All 62,984,828 Votes Trump Received In 2016

Jul 19, 2018 | politics.theonion.com
WASHINGTON -- Saying that their investigation indicated her involvement in election interference went deeper than previously believed, the FBI revealed Thursday that Russian agent Maria Butina traded sex in exchange for all 62,984,828 votes Donald Trump received for president in 2016. "Our inquiry into Ms. Butina

[Aug 13, 2018] Cold War in the Sauna Notes From a Russian American by Pavel Kozhevnikov

Aug 13, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

I had just finished exercising and went to the sauna. The gym I go to is a modern facility with new equipment and is very popular in our city.

My favorite parts are the sauna and the steamer. Both remind me of my old country – Russia. Though, to be politically and geographically correct – I never lived in Russia: I was born and raised in one of the fifteen republics of the former USSR – the republic of Kazakhstan.

So, I am a Russian from Kazakhstan. It's kind of confusing for Americans, and when twenty-six years ago my American wife brought me here, the customs official gave me an alien card where my nationality was stated not Russian but Kazakh. My friends make fun of me, because Russians and Kazakhs are like apples and oranges. We look different

In 1992, when I arrived in America, the relationship between the two cold war rivals was excellent: Americans traveled to Russia, opening McDonalds, KFC's, Burger Kings, and other businesses, and Russians were opening not only their hearts but even the secrets of the overthrown KGB. Millions of Russians and Americans enjoyed such a "romance" between the two most powerful nuclear countries in the world.

Not anymore! Every morning I wake up to the words, "Russia is terrible," and go to sleep with the humiliating jokes of the "night-show-clowns" about "the dictator" Putin and "barbaric" Russians, whose 13 hackers changed the electoral minds of millions of naïve Americans. Wow! What a powerful "gasoline station country"- Russia, as Senator McCain calls it.

If in 1992 the people in my city who heard my accent were very nice to me and to Russia, now the usual reaction is to stare at me like a goat at the newly painted gates. One of my neighbors even yelled at me when I answered his question about my recent trip to Russia. I told him: "Russians like Putin because he saved their country from collapse. I saw with my own eyes how Russia has changed since my last trip there. I didn't see the impact of Obama's sanctions, Russians have better roads, than we have in Colorado; the shops, are filled with all kinds of products; the churches are restored "

My neighbor who didn't like Trump yelled at me: "If you like Russia go back to your country!" My answer was: "I love Russia but I am American – like your immigrant wife, like you. I love America for a lot of reasons, one of them – the right to speak! Nobody should privatize this right." He ran away, later coming to apologize

My wife, knowing my hard-tempered character asks me not to talk about policy – Putin-Trump anymore. And I don't, to a certain degree. However, when someone asks me about Russia or Putin I usually answer, giving my point of view; I just cannot be silent. I was silent for 40+ years living in the USSR, not anymore! Of course, not everyone likes my answers, like the man I am going to tell you about.

So, I went into the sauna; a stout man was sitting on the upper bench. He was the same age as I. Many of the older men in America call ourselves "old farts." The name is not offensive to us, because we really do not care about our image, and because we like to make jokes about everything, mostly about ourselves. Usually, we old farts are nice, we love to talk, even in the sauna. Young people nowadays do not talk. They turn on their phones even in the sauna – I bet they do not know how to talk with other people. They cover their "secrets" in towels while we do not – we do not have any secrets anymore.

Anyway, the man said hello to me, I answered, and he caught my slight accent.

"Where are you from?" It's a question I am usually asked.

"From here." I answered.

He was a little confused. I knew what usually followed if I had said – "from Kazakhstan." Usually, there would be an exchange of this type: "Where is it?" – "Between Russia and China," – "How do you like it here?" The silly film "Borat" helped me for a short period of time. People were smiling, as if they met Sasha Cohen, and I was happy that at least they knew some geography, though the film was silly and the geography in it was completely mistaken.

"No, I mean originally where are you from?" The guy, let's call him Tony, found the right question.

I decided not to check his geography skills and said that I came from Russia. The dialog that followed was remarkable. Here it is.

"Welcome to America! Your English is pretty good!"

"Yours, too." He didn't get my humor. "Just joking," I said, "As for welcoming, it's a little late: I have lived here for 25 years."

"Have you been in Russia lately?" He asked.

"Yes, I go there every year."

"Wow. So, what do you think about that crazy guy , Pyutin?"

"Sorry, honey," – I apologized to my wife in my thoughts and picked up the gauntlet. "You mean Putin? He is not crazy. Actually, he is one of the smartest rulers Russia ever had." I said.

Tony's eyes nearly leaped from their sockets. "But he is a dictator and kills people!"

"I wouldn't call him a dictator – he was just last week elected by nearly 67% of Russians. I would call him an authoritarian, strong ruler; but a weak ruler in Russia wouldn't survive a day. Besides, there were seven people opposed him in the election!"

Tony smiled. "You call it an election? He chose the opponents himself from his friends. The whole world knows that elections in Russia are a sham!"

"Who told you this nonsense, Tony? Did you listen to the debates? Did you hear how these people yelled at each other and cursed Putin, asking people to vote for them not for Putin. They really were as tough as Hillary to Donald! And besides, there were a lot of observers from 110 countries. They claimed the election was legitimate."

"No, I do not believe you."

"You may not believe me but I am citing the international organizations reports. You may check their reports on the Internet yourself. You may even sue these organizations if you wish."

Tony was silent for a minute, then turned his head to me and asked: "You know that Pyutin is evil even to his own people?"

"You mean Putin? Who told you? How many Russians share your opinion?"

"McCain."

"Is he Russian?"

"No, but he knows that Pyutin is KGB."

"His name is Putin!" I tried to correct at least this in his mind. "So, you do not believe me, a Russian, who just returned from Russia, but you believe this Senator, who hates Putin and Russia? Besides, there are no KGB anymore."

"But he used to be KGB?"

"Yes, and Bush H. was also a CIA agent. So, what? After the collapse of the Soviet Union there were no people who didn't work for government in that country, we all worked for government! Putin is good for Russia, he is the brightest politician nowadays. He is like a great Chess-master, and he is a dangerous player. We must be careful with him. Some Congressmen are underestimating Russia, calling it "a gasoline station with nukes," but I was there this summer and saw with my own eyes how much people love Putin, and how much he is doing to make that country great again."

"Yeh, yeh, yeh " Tony didn't know what to say. Then he recalled something and turned his red face to me. "Well, he invaded Crimea, and Ukraine!"

"No, he did not. Crimea was a harbor for the Russian navy, and according to the treaty between Ukraine and Russia there were sixteen thousand Russian troops stationed there on a permanent base. There were about twenty-three thousand Ukrainian troops there, too. So, when the thugs in Kiev took power, illegally kicking out president Yanukovych and killing the political opponents, the Crimean people decided to organize a referendum. Ninety-six percent decided to reunite with Russia, as they were Russians for nearly 400 years before the Communist dictator Khrushchev gave that peninsula to Ukraine as a present to his native land."

"But they had no right to secede from the main land of Ukraine!"

"Yes, they did. International law gives the right for self-determination to people. Remember, we split from the British Empire."

"But it was so long ago!"

"Okay, what about East and West Germany or Kosovo? The people in these countries also exercised their right of self-determination, but they didn't have any referendum as far as I know."

Tony looked at me attentively. "I don't believe you."

"You have the right not to believe me. You asked, I answered."

Tony was silent for a while. Then he threw out his last argument. "I hope you wouldn't deny that Putin killed British citizens recently, using KGB gas!"

Wow, he pronounced "Putin" correctly! I smiled. The nice face of my American wife appeared in my head again, and she was not happy! I kissed her in my thoughts and finished the conversation with my last knockout blow:

"I wouldn't deny it if the poisoning by Russians had been proved!"

"But it was proved by Teresa May!"

"Really? What did she say?"

"She said that it was Putin who poisoned the British citizens!"

"Not really, my friend. She said that it was "highly likely" that Russia did it! Besides, only Mr. Skripal is a British citizen, his daughter is a Russian citizen"

"Does it make any difference?"

"You mean, "highly likely" is proof to punish somebody? What about one of the main pillars of democracy – innocent until proven guilty?"

"But we believe our allies, not the Russians!"

That statement made me laugh. "You believe not facts but political statements without any facts? Wow! What kind of democracy is that?"

Tony's face became so red that I was afraid it would melt. He stood up from the bench and without looking at me firmly said:

"Russians are our enemies, and democracy does not apply to them."

He left, leaving me with a sudden fear of approaching nuclear war.

At night I prayed for peace. I prayed for American and Russian people-in-power who could easily destroy this fragile planet. If people refuse to understand each other, they fight. Kennedy and Khrushchev fortunately understood this. Will Putin and Trump understand?

Pavel Kozhevnikov was born in Kazakhstan. In 1992 he married an American woman and relocated to Colorado, USA, where he worked in a variety of business ventures and taught various subjects including Russian at Mitchell High School as well as at Pikes Peak Community College and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Pavel continues to enjoy teaching Russian at the local community college and university and devotes his free time to writing. He has published four books of stories and poems as well as numerous articles for newspapers and journals in Russia, Germany, Kazakhstan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

[Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement

Highly recommended!
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @ nytimes , @ NBCNews , @ ABC , @ CBS , @ CNN ) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People! ~ Donald Trump
On Thursday, Mr. Trump expressed his distaste for journalists in more populist terms, saying, "much of the media in Washington, D.C., along with New York, Los Angeles in particular, speaks not for the people, but for the special interests."
"The public doesn't believe you people anymore," Mr. Trump added. "Now, maybe I had something to do with that. I don't know. But they don't believe you."
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Financial Times, NBC, CNN, ABC ..."
Aug 11, 2018 | www.unz.com

President Trump has denounced and exposed the repeated deceits and ongoing fabrications of the mass media. Never before has a President so forcefully identified the lies of the leading print and TV outlets. The NY Times , Washington Post , the Financial Times, NBC, CNN, ABC and CBS have been thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the larger public. They have lost legitimacy and trust. Where progressives have failed, a war monger billionaire has accomplished, speaking a truth to serve many injustices.

[Aug 11, 2018] US State Dept sanctions against Russia aimed at 'undercutting' Trump, analysts say

Aug 11, 2018 | www.legitgov.org

US State Dept sanctions against Russia aimed at 'undercutting' Trump, analysts say | 09 Aug 2018 | The US State Department decision to blame Russia for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal without any evidence amounts to "flicking matches in a gasoline-filled room," former US diplomat Jim Jatras told RT.

The announcement of sanctions on Wednesday came despite the fact that the US is entirely aware that Russia was not responsible for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, UK in March, he said.

"This is a political demand... this is designed to undercut the overtures from the Trump administration for President Trump directly and also Senator Rand Paul - now in Moscow - to warm relations with Russia." Former Pentagon official Michael Maloof echoed that sentiment, telling RT that "you have Donald Trump's foreign policy and you now have the Trump administration's foreign policy."

He added that the sanctions are being orchestrated by the deep state to "make the president look bad and basically to corner him."

[ Exactly. Poisoning was likely executed by MI6 or CIA, to sabotage the US relationship with Russia at the behest of the Deep State .]

[Aug 10, 2018] US slanders Russia with new sanctions over Skripal poisoning hoax

This is attack on ruble. Kind of Magnitsky II set of moves. Strange if view of Trump supposed attempt to split Russia and China in Helsinki. You should chose a single target in such cases.
Sanctions weaken the effect of Iranian sanctions. While the goal is to undermine the Russian economy -- the effect of negative expectations is always stronger than a onetime action -- 90 days allow to avoid big financial losses for major banks. The requirement of inspection of Russia objects is from Iraq war textbook.
Notable quotes:
"... Russian Ruble has fallen to a new 2018 low against the American dollar. Trading went over 66 rubles to the dollar. ..."
"... This marks almost a 20% devaluation in the currency since April of this year, and the worst valuation since mid-November, 2016. ..."
"... For our part, we reiterated our principle [sic] stands on the events in the UK, which the Embassy had been outlining in corresponding letters to the State Department. We confirmed that we continue to strongly stand for an open and transparent investigation of the crime committed in Salisbury and for bringing the culprits to justice , ..."
"... This pattern of throwing out destructive slander while refusing to provide opportunity for a real answer has permeated American policy towards the Russian Federation with increasing intensity since 2013. ..."
Aug 10, 2018 | theduran.com
sanctions was apparently enough to create jitters on the Russian stock exchanges, and the Russian Ruble has fallen to a new 2018 low against the American dollar. Trading went over 66 rubles to the dollar.

This marks almost a 20% devaluation in the currency since April of this year, and the worst valuation since mid-November, 2016.

This incident has not gone unanswered in Moscow. The Russian Embassy in the United States called for documentation about the source and reasoning behind these new sanctions, as reported by TASS:

The Russian embassy in the United States has called on the US Department of State to publish correspondence on the introduction of new sanctions on Moscow over the Skripal incident, the embassy said in a statement.

" For our part, we reiterated our principle [sic] stands on the events in the UK, which the Embassy had been outlining in corresponding letters to the State Department. We confirmed that we continue to strongly stand for an open and transparent investigation of the crime committed in Salisbury and for bringing the culprits to justice , " the statement reads.

"We suggested publishing our correspondence on this issue. No answer has followed so far," the Russian embassy added.

This pattern of throwing out destructive slander while refusing to provide opportunity for a real answer has permeated American policy towards the Russian Federation with increasing intensity since 2013. It reveals the machinations of a very divided American government, with the "deep State" or establishment politicians and foreign policy makers completely unwilling to even give Russia a fair shake at representing itself. This policy is shared by the United Kingdom, as this piece by The Duran's Editor in Chief, Alexander Mercouris shows, with this summary of violations of due process the British authorities are committing with regard to Russia:

(1) The British government is interfering in the conduct of a criminal investigation, with Prime Minister Theresa May and especially Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson pointing fingers at who they say is guilty (Russia) whilst the criminal investigation is still underway;

(2) The British government has said that unless Russia proves itself innocent within a specific time the British government will conclude that it is guilty. As I have explained previously this reverses the burden of proof : in a criminal case it is the prosecution which is supposed to prove the defendant's guilt, not the defendant who must prove his innocence;

(3) The British government refuses to share with Russia -- the party it says is guilty -- the 'evidence' upon which it says it has concluded that Russia is guilty, the evidence in this case being a sample of the chemical with which it says Sergey and Yulia Skripal was poisoned.

This violates the fundamental principle that the defendant must be provided with all the evidence against him so that he can properly prepare his defence;

(4) The British government is not following the procedure set out in Article IX (2) of the Chemical Weapons Convention to which both Britain and Russia are parties. This reads as follows

States Parties should, whenever possible, first make every effort to clarify and resolve, through exchange of information and consultations among themselves, any matter which may cause doubt about compliance with this Convention, or which gives rise to concerns about a related matter which may be considered ambiguous. A State Party which receives a request from another State Party for clarification of any matter which the requesting State Party believes causes such a doubt or concern shall provide the requesting State Party as soon as possible, but in any case not later than ten days after the request, with information sufficient to answer the doubt or concern raised along with an explanation of how the information provided resolves the matter.

(5) The British authorities are denying the Russians consular access to Yulia Skripal, though she is a Russian citizen who the British authorities say was subjected to a criminal assault on their territory.

This is a potentially serious matter since by preventing consular access to Yulia Skripal the British authorities are not only violating the interstate consular arrangements which exist between Britain and Russia, but they are preventing the Russian authorities from learning more about the condition of one of their citizens who has been hospitalised following a violent criminal assault, and are preventing the Russian authorities from carrying out their own investigation into the assault on one of their citizens which the British authorities say has taken place.

I would add that this obstruction of Russian consular access to Yulia Skripal has gone almost entirely unreported in the British and Western media.

The Americans are playing the same game here, and, regrettably, President Trump's overtures towards repairing this relationship are almost sure to be torn out from under him by the actions of this virulent group of people. It is quite possible that this is the very reason for these new sanctions.

The perspective of the American government as one divided, with a rabid force in favor of continuing to isolate and vilify a great power in the world for no good reason, is sure to have repercussions. However, given the gradual realignment of Russia and China to be in closer and closer partnership, and Russia's increasing prominence in Asian and Eastern Hemisphere affairs, the end result of this behavior is likely to damage the United States and its standing in the world over the long run.

Shadow1275 Thu, 08/09/2018 - 23:21 Permalink

The National Socialist Workers Party:

1. Implemented Health care

2. Outlawed firearms

3. Froze Wages

4. Focused on government work projects

5. Implemented controls on Free Speech

6. Focused on violence through brownshirt stormtroopers who beat up any who disagreed

7. Had an intelligence service which focused on crushing dissent and spying on its own people

8. Placed more power in the central government and state then any Nation before it.

All of the above are things proposed or carried out by leftists. It is almost as if the true parties espoused by people are those who support individualism and those who support collectivism. Spoiler alert for the Leftist retards: Power corrupts and Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Your Statist Sanders Utopia will never come to fruition. The "Kind Socialist Politicians" will sell you out to the elite in a heartbeat.

All you are doing is focusing the power of your society into one single glass for the Elite to sip as they assfuck you into oblivion, Death toll of all of these Statist Nations, IE Imperial Japan, Soviet Union, Communist China, the People's "Republic" of Korea, etc is over 200,000,000 and counting.

How is it that the acronym NAZI Literally has the word SOCIALIST in it and people still think they were right wing??? Why is this such a hard concept to grasp for the average individual?

.....And how is Trump like Hitler exactly???????

[Aug 10, 2018] Butina Case Neo-McCarthyism Engulfs America

Several US lobbing organizations leadership should probably also be arrested if the same criteria is applied...
Aug 10, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Phillip Giraldi via The Stratgeic Culture Foundation,

The United States Department of Justice would apparently have you believe that the Kremlin sought to subvert the five-million-member strong National Rifle Association (NRA) by having two Russian citizens take out life memberships in the organization with the intention of corrupting it and turning it into a mouthpiece for President Vladimir Putin.

Both of the Russians – Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin – have, by the way, long well documented histories as advocates for gun ownership and were founders of Right to Bear Arms, which is not an intelligence front organization of some kind and is rather a genuine lobbying group with an active membership and agenda.

Contrary to what has been reported in the mainstream media, Russians can own guns but the licensing and registration procedures are long and complicated, which Right to Bear Arms, modeling itself on the NRA, is seeking to change.

Maria Butina, a graduate student at American University, is now in solitary confinement in a federal prison, having been charged with collusion with Torshin and failure to register as an agent of the Russian Federation. It is unusual to arrest and confine someone who has failed to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, but she has not been granted bail because, as a Russian citizen, she is considered to be a "flight risk," likely to try to flee the US and return home. It is to be presumed that she is being pressured to identify others involved in her alleged scheme to overthrow American democracy through NRA membership.

Indeed, in any event, it would be difficult to imagine why anyone would consider the NRA to be a legitimate intelligence target. It only flexes its admitted powerful legislative muscles over issues relating to gun ownership, not regarding policy on Russia. In short, Butina and by extension Torshin appear to have done nothing wrong. Both are energetic advocates for their country and guns rights, which they appear to believe in, and Butina's aggressive networking has broken no law except not registering, which in itself assumes that she is a Russian government agent, something that has not been demonstrated. To put the shoe on the other foot, will every American who now travels to Russia and engages in political conversations with local people be suspected of acting as an agent of the US government? Once you open the door, it swings both ways.

One might dismiss the entire Affair Butina as little more than a reflection of the anti-Russia hysteria that has been sweeping the United States since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, but that would be unfair to those remaining honest FBI agents who may have investigated Butina and Torshin and come up with what they believed to be a plausible case for an indictment . There were possibly suspicious money transfers as well as email intercepts that might be interpreted as incriminating.

But two important elements are clearly missing.

The first is motive. Did the Kremlin seriously believe that it could get anything substantial out of having a gun totin' attractive young Russian woman as a life member in the NRA? What did the presumed puppet masters in Moscow expect to obtain apart from the sorts of group photos including Butina that one gets while posing with politicians at the annual NRA convention? Sure, the photo might even evolve into a cup of coffee together, but what is the end game?

Second is the lack of any of the hallmarks of an intelligence operation, which is referred to in the business as tradecraft. Spies meet secretly or at least outside the public eye with prospective agents whereas Maria operated completely in the open and she made no effort to conceal her love for her country and her desire that Washington and Moscow normalize relations. Spies also communicate securely, which means that they use encrypted systems or various cut-outs, i.e. mis-directions, when maintaining contact with those who are running them. Again, Maria did none of that, which is why the FBI has her emails. Also spies work under what is referred to as an "operating directive" in CIA-speak where they have very specific information that they seek to obtain from their contacts. There is no indication that Maria Butina in any way sought classified information or intelligence that would relate either to the security of the United States or to America's political system. And finally, Maria made no attempt to recruit anyone and turn them into an actual controlled Russian agent, which is what spies eventually seek to do.

It has come down to this: if you are a Russian and you are caught talking to anyone in any way influential, there is potentially hell to pay because the FBI will be watching you. You are automatically assumed to be part of a conspiracy. Once "evidence" is collected, you will be indicted and sent to prison, mostly to send a message to Moscow.

It is the ultimate irony that how the old Soviet Union's judiciary used to function is now becoming standing operating procedure in the United States.

[Aug 08, 2018] Sergei Skripal was linked to a consultant with former UK spy Christopher Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence

Highly recommended!
"Door handle" theory is dead on arrival. the main theory now is that UK government gave Skripals different agent BX (similar to LSD and which caused hallucinations) and they voluntarily took it in order to start preplanned Skripal false flag provocation. That's why military nurse accidentally appeared near Skripals soon after poisoning.
Notable quotes:
"... Following the attack on the Skripals, European and US allies took Britain's side on the attack, ordering the largest expulsion of Russian diplomats since the height of the Cold War, reports Reuters . In response, Russia retaliated by expelling Western diplomats, while the Kremlin has repeatedly denied involvement in the attacks - while accusing the UK intelligence agencies of staging the attack in order to inflame anti-Russia tensions. ..."
"... Prior to the investigation's focus on the door handle, for a period of almost three weeks there were at least nine other theories proposed by the authorities as to where the Skripals came into contact with the poison. These included the restaurant, the pub, the bench, the cemetery, the car, the flowers, the luggage, the porridge and even a drone. During that time, police officers and investigators were entering and leaving the house, by the door, since it was not known to be the place where the poison was located. ..."
"... Once the door handle theory was established, those who had been in and out of the property during the previous three weeks would naturally have been concerned about the possibility that they had been contaminated. ..."
"... Every officer who entered the house after 4th March, and before the door handle became an object of interest, should have been given a medical examination to check for signs of poisoning. ..."
"... Initial reports about Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey stated that he was poisoned at the bench, after coming to the aid of Mr Skripal and Yulia. However, on 9th March, Lord Ian Blair stated that D.S. Bailey had actually become poisoned after visiting Mr Skripal's house. Since he was thought to have been poisoned with a military grade nerve agent, and since it was thought that this had occurred at Mr Skripal's house, the immediate next step should have been to seal off the house and set up a mobile decontamination unit outside. However, numerous photographs show officers in normal uniforms standing close to the door long after Lord Blair's claim ..."
"... Can the authorities explain how these decisions did not put the health and even the lives of those officers in jeopardy? ..."
"... Before the door handle theory was settled on, the majority of competing theories put out by the authorities tended to assume that Mr Skripal was poisoned long before he went to Zizzis. For example, the flowers, the cemetery, the luggage, the porridge and the car explanations all assume this to be the case. What this means is that according to the assumptions of police at that time, when Mr Skripal fed the ducks near the Avon Playground with a few local boys, at around 1:45pm, he was already contaminated. Yet although this event was caught on CCTV camera, it was more than two weeks before the police contacted the parents of these boys. ..."
"... Can the authorities comment on why they did not air the CCTV footage on national television, in an effort to appeal to the boys or their parents to come forward, and whether the delay in tracking them down might have put them in danger? ..."
"... If the door handle was the place of poisoning, it is extremely likely that the bread handed by Mr Skripal to the boys would have been contaminated. Certainly, areas that he visited after this incident were deemed to be so much at risk that they were either closed down (for example, The Mill and Zizzis, which are both still closed), or destroyed (for instance, the restaurant table, the bench and – almost certainly – the red bag near the bench have all been destroyed). ..."
"... It has been said that one of the reasons the Government is/was so sure that the ultimate culprit behind the poisoning was the Russian state, is the apparent existence of an "FSB handbook" which, amongst other things, allegedly features descriptions of how to apply nerve agent to a door handle. Given that the Prime Minister first made a formal accusation of culpability on 12th March in her speech to the House of Commons, the Government must therefore have been in possession of this manual prior to that day. However, claims about the door handle being the location of the poison did not appear until late March (the first media reports of it were on 28th March). What this means is there was a delay of several weeks between the Government making its accusation, based partly on the apparent existence of the "door handle manual", and the door handle of Mr Skripal's house being a subject of interest to investigators. ..."
"... "We are learning more about Sergei and Yulia's movements but we need to be clearer around their exact movements on the morning of the incident. We believe that at around 9.15am on Sunday, 4 March, Sergei's car may have been in the areas of London Road, Churchill Way North and Wilton Road. Then at around 1.30pm it was seen being driven down Devizes Road, towards the town centre. We need to establish Sergei and Yulia's movements during the morning, before they headed to the town centre. Did you see this car, or what you believe was this car, on the day of the incident? We are particularly keen to hear from you if you saw the car before 1.30pm. If you have information, please call the police on 101." ..."
"... Now that Sergei and Yulia Skripal have been awake and able to communicate for around four months, these details are presumably now all known to investigators. In the normal course of such a high profile investigation, details such as these would be relayed to the public in the hope of jogging memories to prompt more information. And in fact, many such details have been released to the public in this case. Yet, confirmation of Mr Skripal's and Yulia's movements that day remain conspicuous by their absence. ..."
"... These questions have nothing to do with any conspiracy theory. On the contrary, they are all based on the assumption that the two central claims made by the authorities regarding the mode and the method used in this incident are correct. They are, however, very serious and perfectly legitimate questions about the way the authorities have dealt with this incident, on their own terms and on the basis of their own claims . ..."
"... "Reports that the United Kingdom is planning to ask Russia to extradite suspects in a Salisbury poisoning incident are nothing more than a "speculation," a spokesperson for the UK Foreign Office told Sputnik on Monday. ..."
Aug 06, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

The British government has prepared an extradition request to Moscow for two Russians they claim carried out the Salisbury nerve agent attack, according to The Guardian , citing Whitehall and security sources.

Former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a public bench in Salisbury in early March - which UK authorities believe was due to a nerve agent called Novichok.

Months later on June 30, nearby residents Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess, a 44-year-old mother of three, were subsequently treated for exposure to the nerve agent. Rowley recovered while Sturgess died.

Authorities are operating on the assumption that the Skripals were poisoned using a novichok-laced perfume bottle or a door handle smeared with the nerve agent, while Rowley may have picked up said bottle and given to Sturgess, who applied it to her wrists.

Sturgess received a much higher dose than the other three after apparently smearing the substance on her wrists, having sprayed it from the bottle. Rowley's recovery was helped, according to a source, by one of the first responders being familiar with the nerve agent, having been involved in helping the Skripals.

The Porton Down military defence laboratory near Salisbury has examined the novichok found on the Skripals' doorknob and the perfume bottle, but police have not yet said whether they are from the same batch. - The Guardian

UK authorities believe they have pieced together the movements of the two Russians, from their entry into the UK to their departure after the alleged assassination attempt.

Following the attack on the Skripals, European and US allies took Britain's side on the attack, ordering the largest expulsion of Russian diplomats since the height of the Cold War, reports Reuters . In response, Russia retaliated by expelling Western diplomats, while the Kremlin has repeatedly denied involvement in the attacks - while accusing the UK intelligence agencies of staging the attack in order to inflame anti-Russia tensions.

Oddly, Sergei Skripal was linked by The Telegraph to a consultant with former UK spy Christopher Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence, who he reportedly had repeated contacts with.

The motive for trying to assassinate the 66-year-old skripal is unknown. Skripal moved to the UK in a Kremlin-approved "spy swap" in 2010, causing many to question why they would suddenly try to take him out a decade later.

In July, journalist Rob Slane compiled 10 questions for the UK authorities on the ever-confusing Skripal case:

***

The two most basic claims made by the Government and investigators regarding the method and the mode in the Salisbury poisoning are these:

  1. That military grade nerve agent was used to poison Mr Skripal
  2. That it was applied to the door handle of his house

These claims raise a number of very obvious questions. For example, how did the assassin(s) apply such a powerful chemical without wearing protective clothing? How did the people who are said to have come into contact with the substance not die immediately, or at the very least suffer irreparable damage to their Central Nervous Systems? How did this military grade nerve agent manage not only to have a delayed onset, but also managed to affect a large 66-year-old man and his slim 33-year-old daughter, both of whom would have vastly different metabolic rates, at exactly the same time?

These are perfectly reasonable questions that deserve reasonable answers. I am aware, however, that no matter how obvious and rational such questions might be, doing so places one – at least in the eyes of the authorities – in the camp of the conspiracy theorist. This is disingenuous. One of the marks of a true conspiracy theorist is that he is someone who refuses to accept an explanation for an event, even after being presented with facts which fit and explain it coherently . But when the "facts" presented in a case do not fit the event they are supposed to explain, and are neither rational nor coherent -- as in the Salisbury case -- then calling the person who raises legitimate questions a "conspiracy theorist" is a bit rich, is it not?

Nevertheless, for the purposes of this piece, what I'd like to do is work on the assumption that the "Military Grade Nerve Agent on the Door Handle" claim is correct. And working from this assumption, I want to ask some questions about how the authorities have handled the case. The point is this: These questions are not really intended to challenge the official claims; rather the intention is to ask whether the authorities have handled the case correctly on their own terms .


1. Prior to the investigation's focus on the door handle, for a period of almost three weeks there were at least nine other theories proposed by the authorities as to where the Skripals came into contact with the poison. These included the restaurant, the pub, the bench, the cemetery, the car, the flowers, the luggage, the porridge and even a drone. During that time, police officers and investigators were entering and leaving the house, by the door, since it was not known to be the place where the poison was located.

Can the authorities explain how these officers and investigators were not poisoned?

2. Once the door handle theory was established, those who had been in and out of the property during the previous three weeks would naturally have been concerned about the possibility that they had been contaminated.

Can the authorities tell us what steps were taken to reassure these officers?

3. Every officer who entered the house after 4th March, and before the door handle became an object of interest, should have been given a medical examination to check for signs of poisoning.

Can the authorities confirm that this took place for every officer?

4. Initial reports about Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey stated that he was poisoned at the bench, after coming to the aid of Mr Skripal and Yulia. However, on 9th March, Lord Ian Blair stated that D.S. Bailey had actually become poisoned after visiting Mr Skripal's house. Since he was thought to have been poisoned with a military grade nerve agent, and since it was thought that this had occurred at Mr Skripal's house, the immediate next step should have been to seal off the house and set up a mobile decontamination unit outside. However, numerous photographs show officers in normal uniforms standing close to the door long after Lord Blair's claim.

Can the authorities confirm why the house was not sealed off and a decontamination unit set up immediately after it became known that D.S. Bailey had been there, and why officers with no protective clothing on were allowed to continue standing guard outside the house for the next few weeks?

5. Can the authorities explain how these decisions did not put the health and even the lives of those officers in jeopardy?

6. Before the door handle theory was settled on, the majority of competing theories put out by the authorities tended to assume that Mr Skripal was poisoned long before he went to Zizzis. For example, the flowers, the cemetery, the luggage, the porridge and the car explanations all assume this to be the case. What this means is that according to the assumptions of police at that time, when Mr Skripal fed the ducks near the Avon Playground with a few local boys, at around 1:45pm, he was already contaminated. Yet although this event was caught on CCTV camera, it was more than two weeks before the police contacted the parents of these boys.

Can the authorities explain why it took more than two weeks to track down the boys, who – as the CCTV apparently shows – were given bread by Mr Skripal?

7. Can the authorities comment on why they did not air the CCTV footage on national television, in an effort to appeal to the boys or their parents to come forward, and whether the delay in tracking them down might have put them in danger?

8. If the door handle was the place of poisoning, it is extremely likely that the bread handed by Mr Skripal to the boys would have been contaminated. Certainly, areas that he visited after this incident were deemed to be so much at risk that they were either closed down (for example, The Mill and Zizzis, which are both still closed), or destroyed (for instance, the restaurant table, the bench and – almost certainly – the red bag near the bench have all been destroyed).

Can the authorities comment on how the boys, who were handed bread by Mr Skripal, managed to avoid contamination?

9. It has been said that one of the reasons the Government is/was so sure that the ultimate culprit behind the poisoning was the Russian state, is the apparent existence of an "FSB handbook" which, amongst other things, allegedly features descriptions of how to apply nerve agent to a door handle. Given that the Prime Minister first made a formal accusation of culpability on 12th March in her speech to the House of Commons, the Government must therefore have been in possession of this manual prior to that day. However, claims about the door handle being the location of the poison did not appear until late March (the first media reports of it were on 28th March). What this means is there was a delay of several weeks between the Government making its accusation, based partly on the apparent existence of the "door handle manual", and the door handle of Mr Skripal's house being a subject of interest to investigators.

Can the authorities therefore tell us whether the Government's failure to pass on details of the "door handle manual" put the lives of the officers going in and out of Mr Skripal's house from 5th March to 27th March in jeopardy?

10. On 17th March, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu said:

"We are learning more about Sergei and Yulia's movements but we need to be clearer around their exact movements on the morning of the incident. We believe that at around 9.15am on Sunday, 4 March, Sergei's car may have been in the areas of London Road, Churchill Way North and Wilton Road. Then at around 1.30pm it was seen being driven down Devizes Road, towards the town centre. We need to establish Sergei and Yulia's movements during the morning, before they headed to the town centre. Did you see this car, or what you believe was this car, on the day of the incident? We are particularly keen to hear from you if you saw the car before 1.30pm. If you have information, please call the police on 101."

Now that Sergei and Yulia Skripal have been awake and able to communicate for around four months, these details are presumably now all known to investigators. In the normal course of such a high profile investigation, details such as these would be relayed to the public in the hope of jogging memories to prompt more information. And in fact, many such details have been released to the public in this case. Yet, confirmation of Mr Skripal's and Yulia's movements that day remain conspicuous by their absence.

Can the authorities confirm that the movements of the Skripals that day are now understood, and that they will be made known shortly, in order that more information from the public might then be forthcoming?

These questions have nothing to do with any conspiracy theory. On the contrary, they are all based on the assumption that the two central claims made by the authorities regarding the mode and the method used in this incident are correct. They are, however, very serious and perfectly legitimate questions about the way the authorities have dealt with this incident, on their own terms and on the basis of their own claims .

We await their explanations.

besnook Mon, 08/06/2018 - 14:22 Permalink

the brits want to embarrass themselves.

EuroPox -> besnook Mon, 08/06/2018 - 14:25 Permalink

They already have - that was just more lies:

"Reports that the United Kingdom is planning to ask Russia to extradite suspects in a Salisbury poisoning incident are nothing more than a "speculation," a spokesperson for the UK Foreign Office told Sputnik on Monday.

"This is just more speculation. The police investigation is ongoing and anything on the record will need to come from the Police," the spokesperson said."

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201808061067000089-uk-no-request-salisbu

[Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography

Highly recommended!
Aug 08, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Here are ten bombshell revelations and fascinating new details to lately come out of both Sy Hersh's new book, Reporter , as well as interviews he's given since publication...

1) On a leaked Bush-era intelligence memo outlining the neocon plan to remake the Middle East

(Note: though previously alluded to only anecdotally by General Wesley Clark in his memoir and in a 2007 speech , the below passage from Seymour Hersh is to our knowledge the first time this highly classified memo has been quoted . Hersh's account appears to corroborate now retired Gen. Clark's assertion that days after 9/11 a classified memo outlining plans to foster regime change in "7 countries in 5 years" was being circulated among intelligence officials.)

From Reporter: A Memoir pg. 306 -- A few months after the invasion of Iraq, during an interview overseas with a general who was director of a foreign intelligence service, I was provided with a copy of a Republican neocon plan for American dominance in the Middle East. The general was an American ally, but one who was very rattled by the Bush/Cheney aggression. I was told that the document leaked to me initially had been obtained by someone in the local CIA station. There was reason to be rattled: The document declared that the war to reshape the Middle East had to begin "with the assault on Iraq. The fundamental reason for this... is that the war will start making the U.S. the hegemon of the Middle East. The correlative reason is to make the region feel in its bones, as it were, the seriousness of American intent and determination." Victory in Iraq would lead to an ultimatum to Damascus, the "defanging" of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, and other anti-Israeli groups. America's enemies must understand that "they are fighting for their life: Pax Americana is on its way, which implies their annihilation." I and the foreign general agreed that America's neocons were a menace to civilization.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/nUCwCgthp_E

* * *

2) On early regime change plans in Syria

From Reporter: A Memoir pages 306-307 -- Donald Rumsfeld was also infected with neocon fantasy. Turkey had refused to permit America's Fourth Division to join the attack of Iraq from its territory, and the division, with its twenty-five thousand men and women, did not arrive in force inside Iraq until mid-April, when the initial fighting was essentially over. I learned then that Rumsfeld had asked the American military command in Stuttgart, Germany, which had responsibility for monitoring Europe, including Syria and Lebanon, to begin drawing up an operational plan for an invasion of Syria. A young general assigned to the task refused to do so, thereby winning applause from my friends on the inside and risking his career. The plan was seen by those I knew as especially bizarre because Bashar Assad, the ruler of secular Syria, had responded to 9/11 by sharing with the CIA hundreds of his country's most sensitive intelligence files on the Muslim Brotherhood in Hamburg, where much of the planning for 9/11 was carried out... Rumsfeld eventually came to his senses and back down, I was told...

3) On the Neocon deep state which seized power after 9/11

From Reporter: A Memoir pages 305-306 -- I began to comprehend that eight or nine neoconservatives who were political outsiders in the Clinton years had essentially overthrown the government of the United States -- with ease . It was stunning to realize how fragile our Constitution was. The intellectual leaders of that group -- Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle -- had not hidden their ideology and their belief in the power of the executive but depicted themselves in public with a great calmness and a self-assurance that masked their radicalism . I had spent many hours after 9/11 in conversations with Perle that, luckily for me, helped me understand what was coming. (Perle and I had been chatting about policy since the early 1980s, but he broke off relations in 1993 over an article I did for The New Yorker linking him, a fervent supporter of Israel, to a series of meetings with Saudi businessmen in an attempt to land a multibillion-dollar contract from Saudi Arabia . Perle responded by publicly threatening to sue me and characterizing me as a newspaper terrorist. He did not sue.

Meanwhile, Cheney had emerged as a leader of the neocon pack. From 9/11 on he did all he could to undermine congressional oversight. I learned a great deal from the inside about his primacy in the White House , but once again I was limited in what I would write for fear of betraying my sources...

I came to understand that Cheney's goal was to run his most important military and intelligence operations with as little congressional knowledge, and interference, as possible. I was fascinating and important to learn what I did about Cheney's constant accumulation of power and authority as vice president , but it was impossible to even begin to verify the information without running the risk that Cheney would learn of my questioning and have a good idea from whom I was getting the information.

4) On Russian meddling in the US election

From the recent Independent interview based on his autobiography -- Hersh has vociferously strong opinions on the subject and smells a rat. He states that there is "a great deal of animosity towards Russia. All of that stuff about Russia hacking the election appears to be preposterous." He has been researching the subject but is not ready to go public yet.

Hersh quips that the last time he heard the US defense establishment have high confidence, it was regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He points out that the NSA only has moderate confidence in Russian hacking. It is a point that has been made before; there has been no national intelligence estimate in which all 17 US intelligence agencies would have to sign off. "When the intel community wants to say something they say it High confidence effectively means that they don't know."

5) On the Novichok poisoning

From the recent Independent interview -- Hersh is also on the record as stating that the official version of the Skripal poisoning does not stand up to scrutiny. He tells me: "The story of novichok poisoning has not held up very well. He [Skripal] was most likely talking to British intelligence services about Russian organised crime." The unfortunate turn of events with the contamination of other victims is suggestive, according to Hersh, of organised crime elements rather than state-sponsored actions –though this files in the face of the UK government's position.

Hersh modestly points out that these are just his opinions. Opinions or not, he is scathing on Obama – "a trimmer articulate [but] far from a radical a middleman". During his Goldsmiths talk, he remarks that liberal critics underestimate Trump at their peril.

He ends the Goldsmiths talk with an anecdote about having lunch with his sources in the wake of 9/11 . He vents his anger at the agencies for not sharing information. One of his CIA sources fires back: "Sy you still don't get it after all these years – the FBI catches bank robbers, the CIA robs banks." It is a delicious, if cryptic aphorism.

* * *

6) On the Bush-era 'Redirection' policy of arming Sunni radicals to counter Shia Iran, which in a 2007 New Yorker article Hersh accurately predicted would set off war in Syria

From the Independent interview : [Hersh] tells me it is "amazing how many times that story has been reprinted" . I ask about his argument that US policy was designed to neutralize the Shia sphere extending from Iran to Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon and hence redraw the Sykes-Picot boundaries for the 21st century.

He goes on to say that Bush and Cheney "had it in for Iran", although he denies the idea that Iran was heavily involved in Iraq: "They were providing intel, collecting intel The US did many cross-border hunts to kill ops [with] much more aggression than Iran"...

He believes that the Trump administration has no memory of this approach. I'm sure though that the military-industrial complex has a longer memory...

I press him on the RAND and Stratfor reports including one authored by Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz in which they envisage deliberate ethno-sectarian partitioning of Iraq . Hersh ruefully states that: "The day after 9/11 we should have gone to Russia. We did the one thing that George Kennan warned us never to do – to expand NATO too far."

* * *

7) On the official 9/11 narrative

From the Independent interview : We end up ruminating about 9/11, perhaps because it is another narrative ripe for deconstruction by sceptics. Polling shows that a significant proportion of the American public believes there is more to the truth. These doubts have been reinforced by the declassification of the suppressed 28 pages of the 9/11 commission report last year undermining the version that a group of terrorists acting independently managed to pull off the attacks. The implication is that they may well have been state-sponsored with the Saudis potentially involved.

Hersh tells me: "I don't necessarily buy the story that Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. We really don't have an ending to the story. I've known people in the [intelligence] community. We don't know anything empirical about who did what" . He continues: "The guy was living in a cave. He really didn't know much English. He was pretty bright and he had a lot of hatred for the US. We respond by attacking the Taliban. Eighteen years later How's it going guys?"

8) On the media and the morality of the powerful

From a recent The Intercept interview and book review -- If Hersh were a superhero, this would be his origin story. Two hundred and seventy-four pages after the Chicago anecdote, he describes his coverage of a massive slaughter of Iraqi troops and civilians by the U.S. in 1991 after a ceasefire had ended the Persian Gulf War. America's indifference to this massacre was, Hersh writes, "a reminder of the Vietnam War's MGR, for Mere Gook Rule: If it's a murdered or raped gook, there is no crime." It was also, he adds, a reminder of something else: "I had learned a domestic version of that rule decades earlier" in Chicago. "Reporter" demonstrates that Hersh has derived three simple lessons from that rule:

  1. The powerful prey mercilessly upon the powerless, up to and including mass murder.
  2. The powerful lie constantly about their predations.
  3. The natural instinct of the media is to let the powerful get away with it.

* * *

... ... ...

[Aug 08, 2018] God Bless Stephen Cohen

Notable quotes:
"... Max Boot believes that Donald Trump should have threatened (Boot's word, not mine) Vladimir Putin. How does one go about threatening a country with inter-continental nuclear weapons systems that are proven to work? ..."
Aug 04, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Let me stipulate at the outset that the phrase, "Max Boot," should be consider as a new synonym in the Oxford English Dictionary for the word inane moron or imbecile are other plausible possibilities.

Not since the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy have we witnessed such a bizarre, vicious level of red-baiting and smearing. Max Boot, have you no decency?

You will understand the context of my introductory observations after you view the following video. Max Boot believes that Donald Trump should have threatened (Boot's word, not mine) Vladimir Putin. How does one go about threatening a country with inter-continental nuclear weapons systems that are proven to work?

[Aug 08, 2018] The Utility of the RussiaGate Conspiracy

Images deleted...
Notable quotes:
"... The election of Donald Trump came as a shock to many ( Independent , 11/5/16 ). ..."
"... The Washington Post ( 11/24/16 ) was one of the first media outlets to blame the election results on Russian "fake news." ..."
"... Thomas Friedman ( Morning Joe , 2/14/18 ) pointedly compared email hacking to events that the US responded to with major wars. ..."
"... Outlets like Slate ( 5/11/18 ) warned of a sinister connection between Black Lives Matter and Russia. ..."
"... "We are at war," Morgan Freeman assures us on behalf of the Committee to Investigate Russia. ..."
Jul 27, 2018 | fair.org

New McCarthyism allows corporate media to tighten grip, Democrats to ignore their own failings Alan MacLeod

The election of Donald Trump came as a shock to many ( Independent , 11/5/16 ).

To the shock of many, Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential elections, becoming the 45th president of the United States. Not least shocked were corporate media, and the political establishment more generally; the Princeton Election Consortium confidently predicted an over 99 percent chance of a Clinton victory, while MSNBC 's Rachel Maddow ( 10/17/16 ) said it could be a "Goldwater-style landslide."

Indeed, Hillary Clinton and her team actively attempted to secure a Trump primary victory, assured that he would be the easiest candidate to beat. The Podesta emails show that her team considered even before the primaries that associating Trump with Vladimir Putin and Russia would be a winning strategy and employed the tactic throughout 2016 and beyond.

With Clinton claiming , "Putin would rather have a puppet as president," Russia was by far the most discussed topic during the presidential debates ( FAIR.org , 10/13/16 ), easily eclipsing healthcare, terrorism, poverty and inequality. Media seized upon the theme, with Paul Krugman ( New York Times , 7/22/16 ) asserting Trump would be a " Siberian candidate," while ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden ( Washington Post , 5/16/16 ) claimed Trump would be Russia's "useful fool."

The day after the election, Jonathan Allen's book Shattered detailed, Clinton's team decided that the proliferation of Russian-sponsored "fake news" online was the primary reason for their loss.

Within weeks, the Washington Post ( 11/24/16 ) was publicizing the website PropOrNot.com , which purports to help users differentiate sources as fake or genuine, as an invaluable tool in the battle against fake news ( FAIR.org , 12/1/16 , 12/8/16 ). The website soberly informs its readers that you see news sources critiquing the "mainstream media," the EU, NATO, Obama, Clinton, Angela Merkel or other centrists are a telltale sign of Russian propaganda. It also claims that when news sources argue against foreign intervention and war with Russia, that's evidence that you are reading Kremlin-penned fake news.

The Washington Post ( 11/24/16 ) was one of the first media outlets to blame the election results on Russian "fake news."

PropOrNot claims it has identified over 200 popular websites that "routinely peddle Russian propaganda." Included in the list were Wikileaks , Trump-supporting right-wing websites like InfoWars and the Drudge Report , libertarian outlets like the Ron Paul Institute and Antiwar.com , and award-winning anti-Trump (but also Clinton-critical) left-wing sites like TruthDig and Naked Capitalism . Thus it was uniquely news sources that did not lie in the fairway between Clinton Democrats and moderate Republicans that were tarred as propaganda.

PropOrNot calls for an FBI investigation into the news sources listed. Even its creators see the resemblance to a new McCarthyism, as it appears as a frequently asked question on their website. (They say it is not McCarthyism, because "we are not accusing anyone of lawbreaking, treason, or 'being a member of the Communist Party.'") However, this new McCarthyism does not stem from the conservative right like before, but from the establishment center.

That the list is so evidently flawed and its creators refuse to reveal their identities or funding did not stop the issue becoming one of the most discussed in mainstream circles. Media talk of fake news sparked organizations like Google , Facebook , Bing and YouTube to change their algorithms, ostensibly to combat it.

However, one major effect of the change has been to hammer progressive outlets that challenge the status quo. The Intercept reported a 19 percent reduction in Google search traffic, AlterNet 63 percent and Democracy Now! 36 percent. Reddit and Twitter deleted thousands of accounts, while in what came to be called the "AdPocalypse," YouTube began demonetizing videos from independent creators like Majority Report and the Jimmy Dore Show on controversial political topics like environmental protests, war and mass shootings. (In contrast, corporate outlets like CNN did not have their content on those subjects demonetized.) Journalists that questioned aspects of the Russia narrative, like Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Maté, were accused of being agents of the Kremlin ( Shadowproof , 7/9/18 ).

The effect has been to pull away the financial underpinnings of alternative media that question the corporate state and capitalism in general, and to reassert corporate control over communication, something that had been loosened during the election in particular. It also impels liberal journalists to prove their loyalty by employing sufficiently bellicose and anti-Russian rhetoric, lest they also be tarred as Kremlin agents.

Thomas Friedman ( Morning Joe , 2/14/18 ) pointedly compared email hacking to events that the US responded to with major wars.

When it was reported in February that 13 Russian trolls had been indicted by a US grand jury for sharing and promoting pro-Trump and anti-Clinton memes on Facebook , the response was a general uproar. Multiple senior political figures declared it an "act of war." Clinton herself described Russian interference as a " cyber 9/11 ," while Thomas Friedman said that it was a " Pearl Harbor–scale event ." Morgan Freeman's viral video, produced by Rob Reiner's Committee to Investigate Russia, summed up the outrage: "We have been attacked," the actor declared ; "We are at war with Russia." Liberals declared Trump's refusal to react in a sufficiently aggressive manner further proof he was Putin's puppet.

The McCarthyist wave swept over other politicians that challenged the liberal center. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein refused to endorse the Russia narrative, leading mainstream figures like Rachel Maddow to insinuate she was a Kremlin stooge as well. After news broke that Stein's connection to Russia was being officially investigated, top Clinton staffer Zac Petkanas announced :

"Commentary" that succinctly summed up the political atmosphere.

In contrast, Bernie Sanders has consistently and explicitly endorsed the RussiaGate theory, claiming it is "clear to everyone (except Donald Trump) that Russia was deeply involved in the 2016 election and intends to be involved in 2018." Despite his stance, Sanders has also been constantly presented as another Russian agent, with the Washington Post ( 11/12/17 ) asking its readers, "When Russia interferes with the 2020 election on behalf of Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders, how will liberals respond?" The message is clear: The progressive wave rising across America is and will be a consequence of Russia, not of the failures of the system, nor of the Democrats.

Outlets like Slate ( 5/11/18 ) warned of a sinister connection between Black Lives Matter and Russia.

It is not just politicians who have been smeared as Russian agents, witting or unwitting; virtually every major progressive movement challenging the system is increasingly dismissed in the same way. Multiple media outlets, including CNN ( 6/29/18 ), Slate ( 5/11/18 ), Vox ( 4/11/18 ) and the New York Times ( 2/16/18 ), have produced articles linking Black Lives Matter to the Kremlin, insinuating the outrage over racist police brutality is another Russian psyop. Others claimed Russia funded the riots in Ferguson and that Russian trolls promoted the Standing Rock environmental protests.

Meanwhile, Democratic insider Neera Tanden retweeted a description of Chelsea Manning as a "Russian stooge," writing off her campaign for the Senate as "the Kremlin paying the extreme left to swing elections. Remember that." Thus corporate media are promoting the idea that any challenge to the establishment is likely a Kremlin-funded astroturf effort.

The tactic has spread to Europe as well. After the poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal, the UK government immediately blamed Russia and imposed sanctions (without publicly presenting evidence). Jeremy Corbyn, the pacifist, leftist leader of the Labour Party, was uncharacteristically bellicose, asserting , "The Russian authorities must be held to account on the basis of the evidence and our response must be both decisive and proportionate."

The British press was outraged -- at Corbyn's insufficient jingoism. The Sun 's front page ( 3/15/18 ) attacked him as "Putin's Puppet," while the Daily Mail ( 3/15/18 ) went with "Corbyn the Kremlin Stooge." As with Sanders, the fact that Corbyn endorsed the official narrative didn't keep him from being attacked, showing that the conspiratorial mindset seeing Russia behind everything has little to do with evidence-based reality, and is increasingly a tool to demonize the establishment's political enemies.

The Atlantic Council published a report claiming Greek political parties Syriza and Golden Dawn were not expressions of popular frustration and disillusionment, but "the Kremlin's Trojan horses," undermining democracy in its birthplace. Providing scant evidence, the report went on to link virtually every major European political party challenging the center, from right or left, to Putin. From Britian's UKIP to Spain's Podemos to Italy's Five Star Movement, all are charged with being under one man's control. It is this council that Facebook announced it was partnering with to help promote "trustworthy" news and weed out "untrustworthy" sources ( FAIR.org , 5/21/18 ), as its CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with representatives from some of the largest corporate outlets, like the New York Times , CNN and News Corp , to help develop a system to control what content we see on the website.

"We are at war," Morgan Freeman assures us on behalf of the Committee to Investigate Russia.

The utility of this wave of suspicion is captured in Freeman's aforementioned video . After asserting that "for 241 years, our democracy has been a shining example to the world of what we can all aspire to" -- a tally that would count nearly a century of chattel slavery and almost another hundred years of de jure racial disenfranchisement -- the actor explains that "Putin uses social media to spread propaganda and false information, he convinces people in democratic societies to distrust their media, their political process."

The obvious implication is that the political process and media ought to be trusted, and would be trusted were it not for Putin's propaganda. It was not the failures of capitalism and the deep inequalities it created that led to widespread popular resentment and movements on both left and right pressing for radical change across Europe and America, but Vladimir Putin himself. In other words, "America is already great."

For the Democrats, Russiagate allows them to ignore calls for change and not scrutinize why they lost to the most unpopular presidential candidate in history. Since Russia hacked the election, there is no need for introspection, and certainly no need to accommodate the Sanders wing or to engage with progressive challenges from activists on the left, who are Putin's puppets anyway. The party can continue on the same course, painting over the deep cracks in American society. Similarly, for centrists in Europe, under threat from both left and right, the Russia narrative allows them to sow distrust among the public for any movement challenging the dominant order.

For the state, Russiagate has encouraged liberals to forego their faculties and develop a state-worshiping, conspiratorial mindset in the face of a common, manufactured enemy. Liberal trust in institutions like the FBI has markedly increased since 2016, while liberals also now espouse a neocon foreign policy in Syria, Ukraine and other regions, with many supporting the vast increases in the US military budget and attacking Trump from the right.

For corporate media, too, the disciplining effect of the Russia narrative is highly useful, allowing them to reassert control over the means of communication under the guise of preventing a Russian "fake news" infiltration. News sources that challenge the establishment are censored, defunded or deranked, as corporate sources stoke mistrust of them. Meanwhile, it allows them to portray themselves as arbiters of truth. This strategy has had some success, with Democrats' trust in media increasing since the election.

None of this is to say that Russia does not strive to influence other countries' elections, a tactic that the United States has employed even more frequently ( NPR , 12/22/16 ). Yet the extent to which the story has dominated the US media to the detriment of other issues is a remarkable testament to its utility for those in power.

[Aug 08, 2018] George Stephanopoulos is trying to criminalize any contacts with Russia

Notable quotes:
"... STEPHANOPOULOS: And I gave you a chance to explain all the irregularities you thought you saw in the investigation. I asked you about that. You said no collusion. At first the White House said that there were no contacts with Russians. We now know there were at least 80 contacts. If the White House or anyone connected to the Trump campaign accepted information from the Russians, that could potentially be collusion. That would be -- that could be considered collusion, could be considered participating with a conspiracy. ..."
Aug 08, 2018 | crooksandliars.com

STEPHANOPOULOS: And I gave you a chance to explain all the irregularities you thought you saw in the investigation. I asked you about that. You said no collusion. At first the White House said that there were no contacts with Russians. We now know there were at least 80 contacts. If the White House or anyone connected to the Trump campaign accepted information from the Russians, that could potentially be collusion. That would be -- that could be considered collusion, could be considered participating with a conspiracy.

So that's also -- that's also the possibility of a legal violation there as well. But I do want to ask you about --

(CROSSTALK)

SEKULOW: -- in that allegation, though, you'd have to -- the -- the so-called collusion, which by the way is not a legal term, that's now what results in a -- a-- a issue of criminality. I mean, that's just one theory (ph). And by the way, you know, the phrasing here, especially at this late date is very important. So everyone is still talking about this collusion concept. And when Rudy Giuliani said collusion's not a crime, that was again rather unremarkable.

What was the fact? I mean what was the fact? Well the facts that we know is what is the violation or what violation has anybody put forward of an actual federal statute that's been violated by the – by the president of the United States?

And we've yet to seen (ph) it, and as I said, we've seen an awful lot of it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well that's one of the things that Robert Mueller's investigating. I agree with you on that.

[Aug 08, 2018] Soros the 400k Question What constitutes 'foreign interference' in democracy

Notable quotes:
"... "Unproven Russian involvement in Brexit -- terrible! Impose more sanctions on Moscow! A £400k check from an American billionaire for an anti-Brexit campaigning group -- that's no problem; it's helping our democracy!" ..."
"... "By quitting Europe, I fear that we are hastening Putin's dream of the break-up of the EU -- and with it, potentially, western civilisation," ..."
"... "propaganda arms of the Russian government," ..."
"... "at the back of the queue" ..."
"... "This is not foreign interference This is not foreign interference!" ..."
"... " highly probable " ..."
"... "had conducted a thorough investigation around the Brexit referendum and found no evidence of Russian interference ." ..."
"... "Russian troll factory," ..."
"... "very low levels of engagement" ..."
"... "conspiracy theorist" ..."
"... "Just what does George Soros think he is doing pouring £400,000 into a campaign to stop Brexit. For a start he is not actually a resident of this country so it has nothing to do with him." ..."
"... "I don't know that the public understands the gravity of what the Russians were able to do and continue to do here in the United States. They've attacked us. They're trying to undermine our democracy," ..."
"... "I looked at them and said: 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money " ..."
"... "I said, 'I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars," ..."
"... "Well, son of a b***h. He got fired." ..."
www.rt.com

You'd have to have a real sense of humor failure not to laugh. The news that US billionaire Soros donated £400k to an anti-Brexit group came on the day that YouTube said they found no evidence of Russian interference in Brexit. Repeat After Me (with robotic arm movements): "Unproven Russian involvement in Brexit -- terrible! Impose more sanctions on Moscow! A £400k check from an American billionaire for an anti-Brexit campaigning group -- that's no problem; it's helping our democracy!"

You don't have to own a brand new £999 state-of-the art Hypocrisy Detector from Harrods, to pick up on the double standards. Just having a few functioning brain cells and thinking for yourself will do. For months in the UK we've been bombarded with Establishment-approved conspiracy theories -- peddled in all the 'best' newspapers -- that Russia somehow 'fixed' Brexit. Getting Britain to leave the EU was all part of a cunning plot by Vladimir Putin, aka Dr. Evil, to weaken Europe and the 'free world.'

Read more Soros-backed anti-Brexit group is 'undemocratic' -- cofounder Gina Miller

Even West End musical composer Andrew Lloyd-Webber, who knows quite a bit about phantoms, seemed taken in by it. "By quitting Europe, I fear that we are hastening Putin's dream of the break-up of the EU -- and with it, potentially, western civilisation," the noble Lord declared in July.

Never mind that we don't have a single statement from Putin or other senior Kremlin figures saying that they actually supported Brexit. These Establishment Russia-bashers know exactly what The Vlad is thinking.

And never mind that RT and Sputnik, which we are repeatedly told are "propaganda arms of the Russian government," ran articles by pro- and anti-Brexit writers. The same people who told us Iraq had WMDs in 2003 were absolutely sure it was those dastardly Russkies who had got Britain to vote 'leave.' The irony is of course that there was significant foreign interference in Brexit. But it didn't come from Moscow.

Or Obama actually visiting the U.K. to urge people to vote Remain. Imagine if Putin did the same for Leave!

-- jeffreydujon (@vanremny) February 8, 2018

The US has always wanted Britain to stay in the EU. In April 2016, two months before the Referendum, President Obama made it clear what he wanted when he visited the UK. He warned that if Britain exited the EU it would be "at the back of the queue" for trade deals with the US .

Just imagine if Putin had said that. The Russophobes would have spontaneously combusted.

Then of course there was the backing the Remain camp had from the giants of US capital. Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan donated £500,000 each to the 'Britain Stronger in Europe' group, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley -- £250,000 each.

Again, repeat after me (with robotic arm movements): "This is not foreign interference This is not foreign interference!"

You've got to see the funny side of this: all that hysterical fake news about 'Russian interference' in Brexit & here we have one side receiving £400K from a US billionaire who is part of the US political establishment. Is that not 'interference' ?!! https://t.co/URzrB3ciLd

-- Neil Clark (@NeilClark66) February 8, 2018

The point is not whether we are for or against Brexit. Or whether we think George Soros is a malign influence who only acts out of self-interest or an old sweetie-pie with the good of humanity at heart. The point is the double standards that are causing our Hypocrisy Detectors to explode.

Let's think back to December 2016. Then, the pro-war and fiercely anti-Russian Labour MP Ben Bradshaw told Parliament that it was " highly probable " that Russia had interfered with Brexit.

Fourteen months on, what have we got? On Thursday, the global head of You Tube's public policy, Juniper Downs, said her company "had conducted a thorough investigation around the Brexit referendum and found no evidence of Russian interference ."

Read more © Sophia Kembowski / Global Look Press No Russian interference in Brexit referendum - YouTube exec tells parliamentary committee (VIDEO)

Twitter meanwhile says it detected 49 (yes, 49) accounts from what it claimed to be a "Russian troll factory," which sent all of 942 messages about Brexit -- amounting to less than 0.005% of all the tweets about the Referendum. Twitter said the accounts received "very low levels of engagement" from users. If the Kremlin had planned to use tweets to persuade us to vote 'leave,' they didn't really put much effort into it, did they?

Finally, Facebook said that only three "Kremlin-linked" accounts were found which spent the grand sum of 72p (yes, 72p) on ads during the Referendum campaign. Which amounts to the greater "interference" ? 72p or £400K? Erm tough call, isn't it?

You might have thought, given his concern with 'foreign interference' in British politics, that Ben Bradshaw would have been urging 'Best for Britain' to return George Soros' donation. Au contraire! His only tweets about it were retweets of two critical comments about the Daily Telegraph, and the BBC's coverage of the story. Conclusion: Those who rail about 'Russia meddling in Brexit' but not Soros' intervention aren't concerned about 'foreign interference' in UK politics, only 'foreign interference' from countries they don't approve of.

Those who are quite happy peddling ludicrous conspiracy theories about Russians shout "conspiracy theorist" (or worse) at those who report factually on proven meddling from others. The Daily Express hit the nail on the head in their Friday editorial which said: "Just what does George Soros think he is doing pouring £400,000 into a campaign to stop Brexit. For a start he is not actually a resident of this country so it has nothing to do with him."

That really is the rub of the matter. And Bradshaw and co. have no adequate response except to shoot the messenger.

If we look at the affair with an even wider lens, the hypocrisy is even greater. The US has been gripped by an anti-Russian frenzy not seen since the days of Senator Joe McCarthy. The unsubstantiated claim that Russia fixed the election for Donald Trump is repeated by 'liberals' and many neocons too, as a statement of fact. "I don't know that the public understands the gravity of what the Russians were able to do and continue to do here in the United States. They've attacked us. They're trying to undermine our democracy," film director Rob Reiner said .

But the number one country round the world for undermining democracy and interfering in the affairs of other sovereign states is the US itself.

Read more The US Vice President Joe Biden (L) jokes that Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko (R) is buying lunch, before sitting down to their bilateral meeting at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington March 31, 2016. © Jonathan Ernst 'Son of b***h got fired': Joe Biden forced Ukraine to sack prosecutor general 'in six hours'

While Establishment journos and pundits have been foaming at the mouth over 'Russiagate' and getting terribly excited over 'smoking guns' which turn out -- surprise, surprise -- to be damp squibs, there's been less attention paid to the boasts of former Vice President Joe Biden on how he got the allegedly 'independent' Ukrainian government to sack its prosecutor general in a few hours. "I looked at them and said: 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money "

"I said, 'I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars," Biden said during a meeting of the US' Council on Foreign Relations. "Well, son of a b***h. He got fired."

Again, just imagine the furore if a leading Russian government figure boasted about how he used financial inducements to get another country's Prosecutor General to be sacked. Or if a tape was leaked in which the Russian Ambassador and a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson could be heard discussing who should or shouldn't be in the new 'democratic' government of another sovereign state. But we had the US Ambassador to Ukraine and the US Assistant Secretary of State doing exactly that in 2014 -- and the 'Russia is interfering in the Free World!' brigade were as silent as a group of Trappist monks.

It's fair to say that Orwell would have a field day with the doublespeak that's currently on show. The cognitive dissonance is there for all to see. Repeat After Me: Unproven Russian interference -- Bad. Proven interference from other external sources -- Good. What's your problem?

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. He has written for many newspapers and magazines in the UK and other countries including The Guardian, Morning Star, Daily and Sunday Express, Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Spectator, The Week, and The American Conservative. He is a regular pundit on RT and has also appeared on BBC TV and radio, Sky News, Press TV and the Voice of Russia. He is the co-founder of the Campaign For Public Ownership @PublicOwnership. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

[Aug 07, 2018] Comrade Stalin speaks from the grave, in support of Kommissar Hillary Clinton

Notable quotes:
"... First, the wrecking and diversionist-espionage work of agents of foreign countries , among whom a rather active role was played by the Trotskyists, affected more or less all, or nearly all, of our organizations-economic, administrative, and Party. ..."
"... Second, agents of foreign countries, among them the Trotskyites , penetrated not only into lower organizations, but also into certain responsible posts. ..."
Aug 07, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

clarky90 , August 3, 2018 at 5:15 pm

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1937/03/03.htm

Defects in Party Work and Measures for Liquidating Trotskyite and Other Double Dealers : March 3, 1937

"Comrades!

From the reports and the debates on these reports heard at this plenum, it is evident that we are dealing with the following three main facts.

First, the wrecking and diversionist-espionage work of agents of foreign countries , among whom a rather active role was played by the Trotskyists, affected more or less all, or nearly all, of our organizations-economic, administrative, and Party.

Second, agents of foreign countries, among them the Trotskyites , penetrated not only into lower organizations, but also into certain responsible posts.

Third, some of our leading comrades, both at the center and at the periphery, not only failed to discern the face of these wreckers, diversionists, spies, and killers, but proved to be so careless, complacent, and naive that at times they themselves assisted in promoting agents of foreign states to responsible posts.

These are the three incontrovertible facts which naturally emerge from the reports and the discussions on them "

[Aug 07, 2018] It s very profitable to be an anti-Russian talking head.

Aug 07, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

New Cold War

"Ex-FBI agent: Trump got elected, thanks to Russia" [ Yahoo News ]. • One thing to remember about RussiaRussiaRussia -- R 3 ? -- is that it's very profitable to be a talking head.

"DOJ Announces Public Release of the Cyber-Digital Task Force's First Report; Impact on and Role of the Private Sector Likely to be a Focus in the Coming Months" [ Compliance and Enforcement ]. "[Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein] lauded 'self-policing' efforts to remove 'fake accounts' and encouraged companies to 'consider the voluntary removal of accounts and content' that are linked by the FBI to foreign agents' activities, which he said 'violate terms of service and deceive customers.'" • What could go wrong?

flora , August 6, 2018 at 2:44 pm

re: Living in the Age of the Big Lie.

"The Death of Truth" by Pulitzer-Prize winning book critic Michiko Kakutani explores the waning of integrity in American society, particularly since the 2016 elections. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's observation that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts," is more timely than ever, Kakutani says: "polarization has grown so extreme that voters have a hard time even agreeing on the same facts." And no wonder: Two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news through social media -- a platform that has been overwhelmed by trolls and bots, and which uses algorithms to decide what each of us gets to see.

Executives ignore the cultural shift away from honesty at their peril.

I would put the start date for the cultural shift away from honest at 2008; every one knew what caused the financial disaster, knew who the culprits were (and are), saw them get away with grand theft and govt protection, and knew they were being lied to by the sort of bs excuses like WF's "it was a computer glitch" that done it. Once it was clear the govt was going to protect the robbers, the new paradigm of dishonesty in high places trickled down. Ohhh, so that's how trickle down works.

[Aug 07, 2018] People. Don t miss out this recent and fascinating Interview featuring Bill Binney, former NSA IT guy and whistle blower . The host made him the right Questions. He speak on very important issues In Particular The Russian Hacking of the DNC, and even 9-11.

See more bout him at William Binney (intelligence official) - Wikipedia
Aug 07, 2018 | therealnews.com

neoconbuster Doug Latimer 8 hours ago ,

People. Don't miss out this recent and fascinating Interview featuring Bill Binney, former NSA IT guy and whistle blower . The host made him the right Questions. He speak on very important issues In Particular The Russian "Hacking" of the DNC, and even 9-11.

Binney is "The Expert" , Nobody can dispute his integrity.

-Bill Binney in His Own Words-

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPqDmTftW94

Play Hide

[Aug 07, 2018] Comrade Stalin speaks from the grave, in support of Kommissar Hillary Clinton

Notable quotes:
"... First, the wrecking and diversionist-espionage work of agents of foreign countries , among whom a rather active role was played by the Trotskyists, affected more or less all, or nearly all, of our organizations-economic, administrative, and Party. ..."
"... Second, agents of foreign countries, among them the Trotskyites , penetrated not only into lower organizations, but also into certain responsible posts. ..."
Aug 07, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

clarky90 , August 3, 2018 at 5:15 pm

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1937/03/03.htm

Defects in Party Work and Measures for Liquidating Trotskyite and Other Double Dealers : March 3, 1937

"Comrades!

From the reports and the debates on these reports heard at this plenum, it is evident that we are dealing with the following three main facts.

First, the wrecking and diversionist-espionage work of agents of foreign countries , among whom a rather active role was played by the Trotskyists, affected more or less all, or nearly all, of our organizations-economic, administrative, and Party.

Second, agents of foreign countries, among them the Trotskyites , penetrated not only into lower organizations, but also into certain responsible posts.

Third, some of our leading comrades, both at the center and at the periphery, not only failed to discern the face of these wreckers, diversionists, spies, and killers, but proved to be so careless, complacent, and naive that at times they themselves assisted in promoting agents of foreign states to responsible posts.

These are the three incontrovertible facts which naturally emerge from the reports and the discussions on them "

[Aug 06, 2018] It's very profitable to be an anti-Russian talking head.

Aug 06, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

New Cold War

"Ex-FBI agent: Trump got elected, thanks to Russia" [ Yahoo News ]. • One thing to remember about RussiaRussiaRussia -- R 3 ? -- is that it's very profitable to be a talking head.

"DOJ Announces Public Release of the Cyber-Digital Task Force's First Report; Impact on and Role of the Private Sector Likely to be a Focus in the Coming Months" [ Compliance and Enforcement ]. "[Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein] lauded 'self-policing' efforts to remove 'fake accounts' and encouraged companies to 'consider the voluntary removal of accounts and content' that are linked by the FBI to foreign agents' activities, which he said 'violate terms of service and deceive customers.'" • What could go wrong?

[Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... I'm somewhat puzzled why Trump and his people, when referring to the "fake news" and answering questions from hostile journalists, especially about the idea that the media are "enemies of the American people", fail to bring up the fact that the "fake news" and the "enemies of the people" are not the journalists themselves, but rather the management and ownership of the media. ..."
Aug 05, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
paul malfara , a day ago
I posted this one to my facebook page three or four days ago. It's brilliant. I have a few comments. First, I disagree with the analysis given by the fellow from the Duran in the introduction, something along the lines of "even Anderson Cooper was smirking because Cohen was demolishing Boot so badly".

If you pay attention to the questions and statements, you find that Cooper is equally as unhinged as Boot is, first hammering on the point that nobody knows what was discussed in the meeting, then after Cohen rattles off a list, Cooper shifts to the "you're believing Vladimir Putin on this" tactic, a nail that Cohen wisely smashes with a hammering statement, "I don't want to shock you, but I believe Vladimir Putin on several things."

Cooper continues to insist that the content of the meeting is unknown and unconfirmed, regardless of what Putin and Trump say. The sheer hubris of journalists today is unprecedented and outrageous.

I do admit that Cooper shuts up after being schooled by Cohen a second and third time and after Boot makes the mistake of calling Cohen an apologist for Putin and Russia. This leads me to a second point.

I'm somewhat puzzled why Trump and his people, when referring to the "fake news" and answering questions from hostile journalists, especially about the idea that the media are "enemies of the American people", fail to bring up the fact that the "fake news" and the "enemies of the people" are not the journalists themselves, but rather the management and ownership of the media.

\This would accomplish two important things, both necessary, in my opinion. First, it would put the front line journalists into their correct place, telling them that they are really nothing but mouthpieces, and we know that the real decisions on content are not made by them.

What a blow to their narcisstic self-esteem that would be!

Second, it would give the American people more information on how their consent is engineered, how the media has owners who have an agenda, and that agenda is not related to improving the lives of the American people, or even keeping them informed with accurate information.

[Aug 05, 2018] The Skripals' misadventure (contretemps, dust up, theater, bit of bother) is absurd but did the U.K. government embrace it with alacrity and a vengeance or what? by Ron Unz

Aug 05, 2018 | www.unz.com

Ace , August 1, 2018 at 3:39 pm GMT

@Jeff Stryker

The Skripals' misadventure (contretemps, dust up, theater, bit of bother) is absurd but did the U.K. government embrace it with alacrity and a vengeance or what?

The only thing missing was narration by Edgar R. Murrow. Not to mention the Skripals.

The very absurdity of it calls into question anything that preceded it with the same story line, viz., "Russians are animals."

What anyone needs to be wary of is the people who push this and other "narratives": "Animal Assad," "religion of peace," "multiculturalism," "propositional nation," "comprehensive immigration law reform," "living Constitution," "equality," "hate speech," "Iranchiefsponsorofterror," "regime change," "treason," "collusion," "McCarthyism," "humanitarian intervention," "global/climate freeze/warming/change/disruption," "anti-Semitism," "Judeo-Christian," "target civilians/hospitals," and such like.

[Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake.

Notable quotes:
"... I'm somewhat puzzled why Trump and his people, when referring to the "fake news" and answering questions from hostile journalists, especially about the idea that the media are "enemies of the American people", fail to bring up the fact that the "fake news" and the "enemies of the people" are not the journalists themselves, but rather the management and ownership of the media. ..."
Aug 05, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
paul malfara , a day ago
I posted this one to my facebook page three or four days ago. It's brilliant. I have a few comments. First, I disagree with the analysis given by the fellow from the Duran in the introduction, something along the lines of "even Anderson Cooper was smirking because Cohen was demolishing Boot so badly".

If you pay attention to the questions and statements, you find that Cooper is equally as unhinged as Boot is, first hammering on the point that nobody knows what was discussed in the meeting, then after Cohen rattles off a list, Cooper shifts to the "you're believing Vladimir Putin on this" tactic, a nail that Cohen wisely smashes with a hammering statement, "I don't want to shock you, but I believe Vladimir Putin on several things."

Cooper continues to insist that the content of the meeting is unknown and unconfirmed, regardless of what Putin and Trump say. The sheer hubris of journalists today is unprecedented and outrageous.

I do admit that Cooper shuts up after being schooled by Cohen a second and third time and after Boot makes the mistake of calling Cohen an apologist for Putin and Russia. This leads me to a second point.

I'm somewhat puzzled why Trump and his people, when referring to the "fake news" and answering questions from hostile journalists, especially about the idea that the media are "enemies of the American people", fail to bring up the fact that the "fake news" and the "enemies of the people" are not the journalists themselves, but rather the management and ownership of the media.

\This would accomplish two important things, both necessary, in my opinion. First, it would put the front line journalists into their correct place, telling them that they are really nothing but mouthpieces, and we know that the real decisions on content are not made by them.

What a blow to their narcisstic self-esteem that would be!

Second, it would give the American people more information on how their consent is engineered, how the media has owners who have an agenda, and that agenda is not related to improving the lives of the American people, or even keeping them informed with accurate information.

[Aug 05, 2018] Soros the 400k Question What constitutes 'foreign interference' in democracy -- RT Op-ed

Notable quotes:
"... "Unproven Russian involvement in Brexit – terrible! Impose more sanctions on Moscow! A £400k check from an American billionaire for an anti-Brexit campaigning group – that's no problem; it's helping our democracy!" ..."
"... "By quitting Europe, I fear that we are hastening Putin's dream of the break-up of the EU – and with it, potentially, western civilisation," ..."
"... "propaganda arms of the Russian government," ..."
"... "at the back of the queue" ..."
"... "This is not foreign interference This is not foreign interference!" ..."
"... " highly probable " ..."
"... "had conducted a thorough investigation around the Brexit referendum and found no evidence of Russian interference ." ..."
"... "Russian troll factory," ..."
"... "very low levels of engagement" ..."
"... "conspiracy theorist" ..."
"... "Just what does George Soros think he is doing pouring £400,000 into a campaign to stop Brexit. For a start he is not actually a resident of this country so it has nothing to do with him." ..."
"... "I don't know that the public understands the gravity of what the Russians were able to do and continue to do here in the United States. They've attacked us. They're trying to undermine our democracy," ..."
"... "I looked at them and said: 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money " ..."
"... "I said, 'I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars," ..."
"... "Well, son of a b***h. He got fired." ..."
"... Follow Neil Clark @NeilClark66 ..."
Aug 05, 2018 | www.rt.com

Soros & the £400k Question: What constitutes 'foreign interference' in democracy? Neil Clark Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. He has written for many newspapers and magazines in the UK and other countries including The Guardian, Morning Star, Daily and Sunday Express, Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Spectator, The Week, and The American Conservative. He is a regular pundit on RT and has also appeared on BBC TV and radio, Sky News, Press TV and the Voice of Russia. He is the co-founder of the Campaign For Public Ownership @PublicOwnership. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66 Published time: 9 Feb, 2018 16:32 Edited time: 19 Feb, 2018 09:39 Get short URL Soros & the £400k Question: What constitutes 'foreign interference' in democracy? © Wiktor Dabkowski / Global Look Press You'd have to have a real sense of humor failure not to laugh. The news that US billionaire Soros donated £400k to an anti-Brexit group came on the day that YouTube said they found no evidence of Russian interference in Brexit. Repeat After Me (with robotic arm movements): "Unproven Russian involvement in Brexit – terrible! Impose more sanctions on Moscow! A £400k check from an American billionaire for an anti-Brexit campaigning group – that's no problem; it's helping our democracy!"

You don't have to own a brand new £999 state-of-the art Hypocrisy Detector from Harrods, to pick up on the double standards. Just having a few functioning brain cells and thinking for yourself will do. For months in the UK we've been bombarded with Establishment-approved conspiracy theories – peddled in all the 'best' newspapers – that Russia somehow 'fixed' Brexit. Getting Britain to leave the EU was all part of a cunning plot by Vladimir Putin, aka Dr. Evil, to weaken Europe and the 'free world.'

Read more Gina Miller(R), George Soros(L) © Global Look Press Soros-backed anti-Brexit group is 'undemocratic' – cofounder Gina Miller

Even West End musical composer Andrew Lloyd-Webber, who knows quite a bit about phantoms, seemed taken in by it. "By quitting Europe, I fear that we are hastening Putin's dream of the break-up of the EU – and with it, potentially, western civilisation," the noble Lord declared in July.

Never mind that we don't have a single statement from Putin or other senior Kremlin figures saying that they actually supported Brexit. These Establishment Russia-bashers know exactly what The Vlad is thinking.

And never mind that RT and Sputnik, which we are repeatedly told are "propaganda arms of the Russian government," ran articles by pro- and anti-Brexit writers. The same people who told us Iraq had WMDs in 2003 were absolutely sure it was those dastardly Russkies who had got Britain to vote 'leave.' The irony is of course that there was significant foreign interference in Brexit. But it didn't come from Moscow.

Or Obama actually visiting the U.K. to urge people to vote Remain. Imagine if Putin did the same for Leave!

-- jeffreydujon (@vanremny) February 8, 2018

The US has always wanted Britain to stay in the EU. In April 2016, two months before the Referendum, President Obama made it clear what he wanted when he visited the UK. He warned that if Britain exited the EU it would be "at the back of the queue" for trade deals with the US .

Just imagine if Putin had said that. The Russophobes would have spontaneously combusted.

Then of course there was the backing the Remain camp had from the giants of US capital. Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan donated £500,000 each to the 'Britain Stronger in Europe' group, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley – £250,000 each.

Again, repeat after me (with robotic arm movements): "This is not foreign interference This is not foreign interference!"

You've got to see the funny side of this: all that hysterical fake news about 'Russian interference' in Brexit & here we have one side receiving £400K from a US billionaire who is part of the US political establishment. Is that not 'interference' ?!! https://t.co/URzrB3ciLd

-- Neil Clark (@NeilClark66) February 8, 2018

The point is not whether we are for or against Brexit. Or whether we think George Soros is a malign influence who only acts out of self-interest or an old sweetie-pie with the good of humanity at heart. The point is the double standards that are causing our Hypocrisy Detectors to explode.

Let's think back to December 2016. Then, the pro-war and fiercely anti-Russian Labour MP Ben Bradshaw told Parliament that it was " highly probable " that Russia had interfered with Brexit.

Fourteen months on, what have we got? On Thursday, the global head of You Tube's public policy, Juniper Downs, said her company "had conducted a thorough investigation around the Brexit referendum and found no evidence of Russian interference ."

Read more © Sophia Kembowski / Global Look Press No Russian interference in Brexit referendum - YouTube exec tells parliamentary committee (VIDEO)

Twitter meanwhile says it detected 49 (yes, 49) accounts from what it claimed to be a "Russian troll factory," which sent all of 942 messages about Brexit – amounting to less than 0.005% of all the tweets about the Referendum. Twitter said the accounts received "very low levels of engagement" from users. If the Kremlin had planned to use tweets to persuade us to vote 'leave,' they didn't really put much effort into it, did they?

Finally, Facebook said that only three "Kremlin-linked" accounts were found which spent the grand sum of 72p (yes, 72p) on ads during the Referendum campaign. Which amounts to the greater "interference" ? 72p or £400K? Erm tough call, isn't it?

You might have thought, given his concern with 'foreign interference' in British politics, that Ben Bradshaw would have been urging 'Best for Britain' to return George Soros' donation. Au contraire! His only tweets about it were retweets of two critical comments about the Daily Telegraph, and the BBC's coverage of the story. Conclusion: Those who rail about 'Russia meddling in Brexit' but not Soros' intervention aren't concerned about 'foreign interference' in UK politics, only 'foreign interference' from countries they don't approve of.

Those who are quite happy peddling ludicrous conspiracy theories about Russians shout "conspiracy theorist" (or worse) at those who report factually on proven meddling from others. The Daily Express hit the nail on the head in their Friday editorial which said: "Just what does George Soros think he is doing pouring £400,000 into a campaign to stop Brexit. For a start he is not actually a resident of this country so it has nothing to do with him."

That really is the rub of the matter. And Bradshaw and co. have no adequate response except to shoot the messenger.

If we look at the affair with an even wider lens, the hypocrisy is even greater. The US has been gripped by an anti-Russian frenzy not seen since the days of Senator Joe McCarthy. The unsubstantiated claim that Russia fixed the election for Donald Trump is repeated by 'liberals' and many neocons too, as a statement of fact. "I don't know that the public understands the gravity of what the Russians were able to do and continue to do here in the United States. They've attacked us. They're trying to undermine our democracy," film director Rob Reiner said .

But the number one country round the world for undermining democracy and interfering in the affairs of other sovereign states is the US itself.

Read more The US Vice President Joe Biden (L) jokes that Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko (R) is buying lunch, before sitting down to their bilateral meeting at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington March 31, 2016. © Jonathan Ernst 'Son of b***h got fired': Joe Biden forced Ukraine to sack prosecutor general 'in six hours'

While Establishment journos and pundits have been foaming at the mouth over 'Russiagate' and getting terribly excited over 'smoking guns' which turn out – surprise, surprise – to be damp squibs, there's been less attention paid to the boasts of former Vice President Joe Biden on how he got the allegedly 'independent' Ukrainian government to sack its prosecutor general in a few hours. "I looked at them and said: 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money "

"I said, 'I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars," Biden said during a meeting of the US' Council on Foreign Relations. "Well, son of a b***h. He got fired."

Again, just imagine the furore if a leading Russian government figure boasted about how he used financial inducements to get another country's Prosecutor General to be sacked. Or if a tape was leaked in which the Russian Ambassador and a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson could be heard discussing who should or shouldn't be in the new 'democratic' government of another sovereign state. But we had the US Ambassador to Ukraine and the US Assistant Secretary of State doing exactly that in 2014 – and the 'Russia is interfering in the Free World!' brigade were as silent as a group of Trappist monks.

It's fair to say that Orwell would have a field day with the doublespeak that's currently on show. The cognitive dissonance is there for all to see. Repeat After Me: Unproven Russian interference – Bad. Proven interference from other external sources – Good. What's your problem?

Follow Neil Clark @NeilClark66

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

[Aug 05, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude

Notable quotes:
"... cordon sanitaire ..."
"... ANDREW LEVINE is the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What's Wrong With the Opium of the People . He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). ..."
Aug 05, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

There is less shame in being undone by a "master of deceit."

When J. Edgar Hoover coined that description, he had Communists in mind. Back then, though, "Ruskies" and "Commies" – it was all the same. Americans were conditioned to live in fear that the Russians were coming.

That nonsense should have ended when Communism more or less officially expired in 1989, followed two years later by the demise of the Soviet Union itself. For a long time, it seemed that it had.

At first, the reaction in Western, especially American, political and media circles was triumphalist. The war was over and our side won.

Beneath the surface, however, there was mourning in America.

With the Cold War, the death merchants, the masters of war, the neocons, and a host of others had had a good thing going. Having been born into it, the political class was comfortable with the status quo too; and generations of Americans had grown up imbibing Russophobia in their mother's milk (or infant formula).

It turned out, though, that American triumphalism was only a phase. Before long, it became clear that our economic and political masters had nothing to worry about, that Cold War anti-Communism was more robust than Communism itself.

However, in the final days of Bush 41 and then at the dawn of the Clinton era, nobody knew that. Nobody gave America's propaganda system the credit it deserved.

Also, nobody quite realized how devastating Russia's regression to capitalism would be, and nobody quite grasped the savagery of the kleptocrats who had taken charge of what remained of the Russian state.

For more than a decade, the situation in that late great superpower was too dire to sustain the old fears and animosities. Capitalism had made Russia wretched again.

That suited Bill Clinton and his First Lady, the former Goldwater Girl. Boris Yeltsin, Russia's leader, was their man. He was a godsend, a Trump-like cartoon character and a drunkard to boot – with an economy in tatters, and no rightwing base egging him on.

But anti-Communism (without Communism) and its close cousin, Russophobia, could not remain in remission forever. The need for them was too great.

In the Age of Obama, the Global War on Terror, with or without that ludicrous Bush 43-era name, wasn't cutting it anymore. It was, and still is, good for keeping America's perpetual war regime going and for undoing civil liberties, but there had never been much glory in it, only endless misery for all. Also it was getting old and increasingly easy to see through.

The time was therefore right for a return of the repressed -- for full-blooded, fifties-style, anti-Communist (= anti-Russian) hysteria, or, since that still seemed far-fetched, for anti-Communist (= anti-Chinese) hysteria.

This was not the only factor behind the Obama administration's "pivot towards Asia," its largely failed attempt to take China down a notch or two, but it was an important part of the story.

However, by the time Obama and his team decided to pivot, China had become too important to the United States economically to make a good Cold War enemy. Worse still, it had for too long been an object of pity and contempt, not fear.

When the Soviet Union was an enemy, China was an enemy too, most glaringly during the Korean War. It remained an enemy even after the Sino-Soviet split became too obvious to deny. However, unlike post-1917 Russia, it had never quite become an historical foe.

Moreover, as Russia began to recover from the Yeltsin era, the Russian political class, and many of the oligarchs behind them, sensing the popular mood, decided that the time was ripe "to make Russia great again." Putin is not so much a cause as he is a symptom – and symbol – of this aspiration.

And so, there it was: the longed for new Cold War would be much like the one that seemed over a quarter century ago.

***

As everyone who has seen, heard or read anything about the 2016 election "knows," Russian intelligence services (= Putin) meddled. Everyone also "knows" that, with midterm elections looming, they are at it again.

This, according to the mainstream consensus view, is a bona fide casus belli , a justification for war. To be sure, what they want is a war that remains cold; ending life on earth, as we know it, is not on their agenda.

But inasmuch as cold wars can easily turn hot, this hardly mitigates the recklessness of their machinations. Humankind was extraordinarily lucky last time; there is no guarantee that all that luck will hold.

Exactly what "Putin," the shorthand name for all that is Russian and nefarious, did, or is still doing, remains unclear. But this does not seem to bother purveyors of the conventional wisdom.

Neither is ostensibly informed public opinion fazed by the fact that the evidence supporting the consensus view comes mainly from American intelligence services and from their counterparts in the UK and other allied nations.

Time was when anyone with any sense understood that these intelligence services, the American ones especially, are second to none in meddling in the affairs of other nations, and that the American national security state – essentially our political police -- is comprised, by design, of liars and deceivers.

How ironic therefore that nowadays it is mainly bamboozled Trump supporters in the Fox News demographic -- people who could care less about peace or, for that matter, about truth -- who are wary of the CIA and skeptical of the FBI's claims!

Try as they might, the manufacturers and guardians of conventional wisdom have so far been unable to concoct a plausible story in which Russian meddling affected the outcome of the 2016 election in any serious way. The idea that the Russians defeated Hillary, not Hillary herself, is, to borrow a phrase from Jeremy Bentham, "nonsense on stilts." Leading Democrats and their media flacks don't seem to mind that either.

They do not even seem to notice that what they allege, vague as it is, is trifling compared to the massive and very open meddling of American plutocrats, Republican vote suppressers and gerrymanderers, and the governments of supposedly friendly nations – like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, and Israel.

Nevertheless, it probably is true that the Russians meddled. Cold War revivalists can therefore rest easy, confident that their propagandists will have at least a few facts with which they can work to restore the perils of their vanished youth.

Even so, the level of their hypocrisy is appalling. Russia, along with former Soviet republics and former members of the Warsaw Pact, has been bearing the brunt of far worse American meddling for far longer than anything sanctimonious defenders of so-called American "democracy" can plausibly allege.

Moreover, it should go without saying that the democracy they purport to care so much about has almost nothing to do with "the rule of the demos." It doesn't even have much to do with free and fair competitive elections – unless "free and fair" means that anything goes, so long as the principals and perpetrators are homegrown or citizens of favored nations.

Self-righteous posturing aside, Putin's real sin in the eyes of the American power elite is that, in his own small way, he has been defying America's "right" to run the world as it sees fit.

When Clinton was president, Serbia did that, and lived to regret it. Cuba has been suffering for nearly six decades for the same reason, and now Venezuela is paying its dues. The empire is merciless towards nations that rebel.

With Soviet support and then with sheer determination and grit, Cuba has been able to withstand the onslaught to some extent from Day One. Venezuela may not be so lucky – especially now that Republicans and Democrats feel threatened by the growing number of "democratic socialists" in their midst. Already, the propaganda system is targeting Venezuelan "socialism," blaming it for that country's woes, and warning that if our newly minted, homegrown socialists prevail, a similar fate will be in store for us.

This is ludicrous, of course – American hostility and the vagaries of the global oil market deserve the lion's share of the blame. But the on-going propaganda blitz could nevertheless pave the way for horrors ahead, should Trump decide to start a war America could actually win.

Inconsequential Russian meddling is a big deal on the "liberal" cable networks, on NPR, and in the "quality" press. Democrats and a few Republicans love to bleat on about it. But it is Ukraine that made Russia our "adversary" and its president Public Enemy Number One.

Hypocrisy reigns here too. It was the Obama administration – run through with neocons, liberal imperialists, and other holdovers from Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State – that did all it could to exacerbate longstanding tensions between that country's Ukrainian and Russian speaking populations, the better to complete NATO's encirclement of the Russian federation. And it was American meddling that led to the empowerment of virulently anti-Russian, fascisant Ukrainian politicians, much to the detriment of Russian speaking Ukrainians in the east.

But never mind: Putin – that is, the Russia government – violated international law by sending troops briefly into beleaguered Russian-speaking parts of the country. That they were generally welcomed by the people living there is of no importance.

Worst of all, Russia annexed Crimea – a territory integral to the Russian empire since the eighteenth century. Since long before the Russian Revolution, Crimea has been home to a huge naval base vital to Russia's strategic defense.

The story line back in the day was that anything that could be described as Russian aggression outside the Soviet Union's agreed upon sphere of influence had to do with spreading Communism. In fact, the Soviets did everything they could to keep Communist and other insurgencies from upending the status quo. The mainstream narrative was wrong.

Now Communism is gone and nothing has taken its place. Even so, the idea that Russia has designs on its neighbors for ideological reasons is hard to shake – in part because it is actively promoted by propagandists who have suddenly and uncharacteristically become defenders of international law.

Meanwhile, of course, the hypocrisies keep piling on. It is practically a tenet of the American civil religion that international law applies to others, not to the United States. This is why, when it suits some perceived purpose, America flaunts its violations shamelessly.

Thus nothing the Russians did or are ever likely to do comes close to the shenanigans Bill Clinton displayed – successfully, for the most part – in his efforts to tear Kosovo away from Serbia. Clinton even went so far as to bomb Belgrade; Putin never bombed Kiev.

The Cold War that began after World War II involved a clash of rival political economic systems. The Cold War that reignited a few years ago involves a clash of rival imperialist centers. Its world more nearly resembles the one that existed before World War I than the one that emerged after World War II.

However, the difference may be more superficial than it seems. The ease with which Cold War revivalists have been able to get the Cold War up and running again, even without Communism, suggests what a few observers have long maintained -- that the Cold War, on Russia's part, had little, if anything, to do with spreading Communism around the world, and everything to do with maintaining a cordon sanitaire around Russia's borders in order to protect against a demonstrably aggressive "free world."

George W. Bush claimed that 9/11 happened because "they hate our freedom." "They" would be radical Islamists of the kind stirred into action in Afghanistan by Zbigniew Brzezinski and his co-thinkers in the Carter administration. Their objective was to undermine the Soviet Union by getting it bogged down in a quagmire like the one that did so much harm to the United States in Vietnam.

That part of Brzezinski's plan was at least a partial success. But inasmuch as Bush's "they" are still there, still spreading murder and mayhem throughout the Greater Middle East, America and the world has been paying a high price for the benefits, such as they were, that ensued.

The never-ending wars set in motion by the "pivot" towards radical Islamism decades ago never quite succeeded in producing an enemy as serviceable as the USSR. But now that Putin's Russia has been pressed into service, that problem is potentially "solved."

However, the American public is not as naïve as it used to be, and it is impossible to say, at this point, how well this new story line will work.

Efforts to recycle Bush's "they hate our freedom" nonsense ought to be non-starters. But this is the best Cold War revivalists have come up with so far. The Russians, they say, simply cannot deal with the fact that we Americans are so damned free.

It is hard to believe, but there are people who are actually buying this but, with a lot of corporate media assistance, there are. No matter how clear it is that they are not worth being taken seriously, Cold War mythologies just won't die.

However, it is worth pondering why today's Russia would do what it is alleged to have done; and why, as is also alleged, it is still doing it.

From a geopolitical point of view, Russia does have an interest in doing all it can to ward off Western aggression. It also has an interest in undermining strategic alliances aimed at blocking anything and everything that challenges American supremacy. And, until sanity prevails in Washington and other Western capitals, it arguably also has an interest in aiding and abetting rightwing nationalists in order to exacerbate tensions within Western societies.

However, in view of prevailing power relations, these are interests it cannot do much to advance. Acting as if this were not the case only puts Russia in a bad light -- not for meddling, but for meddling stupidly.

No doubt, for reasons both fair and foul, Putin wanted Hillary to lose the election two years ago. So, but for one little problem, would anyone whose head is screwed on right. That problem's name is Donald Trump.

Clinton is bad, but Trump is worse -- not just by most measures but by all.

Her fondness for war and preparations for war was alarming; she was bellicosity personified. But it was plain even before the election that Trump, a mentally unhinged narcissist, would be even more likely than she to bring on massive devastation. A vote for Trump was and still is a vote for catastrophe.

Putin's enemy was Trump's enemy, and it is axiomatic that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" -- except sometimes it isn't. Sometimes, my enemy's enemy is an enemy far worse.

For reasons that remain obscure, Putin and Trump seem to have a "thing" going on between them. Some day perhaps we will know what that is all about. For now, though, the hard and very relevant fact is that Trump has done nothing to help, and quite a few things to harm, Russia.

It isn't just ordinary Russians who have been made worse off. Trump has been at least as hard on oligarchs close to Putin as Clinton would have been.

If those damned Russians were half as smart as they are made out to be, they would have realized long ago that, for getting anything done that bucks the tide, Trump is too inept to be of any use at all; and that anything he sets out to do is likely to turn out badly not just for America and its allies but for Russia too.

Therefore, if there really was Russian meddling, as there probably was, Putin should be ashamed – not so much for the DNC reasons laid out 24/7 on MSNBC and CNN, but for overestimating Trump's abilities and for underestimating the extent to which what started out as a maneuver of Hillary Clinton's, concocted to excuse her incompetence, would take a perilously "viral" turn, becoming a major threat to peace in a political culture that never quite got beyond the lunacy of the First Cold War. Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: Andrew Levine

ANDREW LEVINE is the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What's Wrong With the Opium of the People . He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

[Aug 05, 2018] Bernie Sanders did everything he was told he should do. He supported the Democratic establishment candidate, and now he believes the Russiagate story.

Notable quotes:
"... While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than " a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. ..."
"... So you plan to continue this McCarthy Russian BS? You didn't speak out when you got cheated in the primaries, and you didn't seem to care that Hillary was using her own paid troll army. Integrity matters Bernie and you are losing yours. ..."
"... You stopped speaking for me and millions of others when you caved to crooked HRC. No it was NOT clear that Russia was "deeply involved in the election. What is CLEAR is your betrayal of your followers and cover up of the election fraud perpetrated by DNC! Everybody knows... ..."
"... Bernie, that's MIC propaganda. Stop helping it. There are millions of reasons Trump should not be president. We don't need a hyped up corporate fairytale to make that point https://t.co/7FAwb47LtB ..."
"... Democratic party jingoism in 2020 will be extra-ordinary with candidates each trying to out do each other how they will fuck over Putin and the Russian nation. There will be a shit load of public loyalty testing against any third party candidate by the democrats. ..."
Aug 05, 2018 | caucus99percent.com

It has been clear to everyone (except Donald Trump) that Russia was deeply involved in the 2016 election and intends to be involved in 2018. It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the Russian oligarchs.

-- Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 16, 2018

However, Sanders had already committed the unforgivable sin of criticizing the Democratic establishment candidate from the left. There is simply no way of coming back from that treason.

Despite his stance, Sanders has also been constantly presented as another Russian agent, with the Washington Post (11/12/17) asking its readers, "When Russia interferes with the 2020 election on behalf of Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders, how will liberals respond?" The message is clear: The progressive wave rising across America is and will be a consequence of Russia, not of the failures of the system, nor of the Democrats.

It isn't just progressive politicians that are all traitors. Movements like Black Lives Matter are also traitors for Russia.

Slate: Russian Trolls Were Obsessed With Black Lives Matter
CNN: Her son was killed -- then came the Russian trolls
NY Times: The Propaganda Tools Used by Russians to Influence the 2016 Election

snoopydawg on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 6:32pm
Bernie's tweet is hysterical
It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the Russian oligarchs.

Hey, Bernie. The American people were the ones who should have decided who won the primary, not Hillary, the DNC and the delegates. That you are blaming Her loss on Russia instead of admitting that the American people rejected her makes you nothing more than a democratic puppet. How embarrassing for you.

Every Black voter should abandon the DP until they apologize for their disrespect for the BLM and saying that they only started protesting cops killing Blacks because Russia manipulated them into doing so.

Eichenwald thinks that our intelligence agencies are patriots who have spent their lives working on keeping us safe does he? I agree with Dmitry Orlov's take on them.

US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the

The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on.

....

the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself.

While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than " a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. "

And let's not forget how many coups and false flag events they had a hand in creating that have cost so much misery and death.

One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag operations, ŕ la 9/11, to fake false flag operations, ŕ la fake East Gouta chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story is perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were harmed in the process of concocting this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips.

It is now a pure confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a conspiracy theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.

The real puppets are the ones who believe in this silly story that Russia is pulling Trump's strings and that the GOP are also Russian puppets. Good grief!

snoopydawg on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 6:55pm
The first tweet shows how people twist events

The others show that there are others out there that have seen through this propaganda crap. I'd like to see the breakdown of Hillary supporters that believe Russia Gate and the Bernie supporters that don't. Most of the Trump supporters think it's phony so what made Hillary's believe in something that everyone should be laughing at?

You deserve a lot of credit. Russia interfered in your favor, yet you are man enough to admit that they interfered. Thank you Bernie!

-- Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) February 16, 2018

So you plan to continue this McCarthy Russian BS? You didn't speak out when you got cheated in the primaries, and you didn't seem to care that Hillary was using her own paid troll army. Integrity matters Bernie and you are losing yours.

-- Underdawg47 (@Underdawg47) February 17, 2018

You stopped speaking for me and millions of others when you caved to crooked HRC. No it was NOT clear that Russia was "deeply involved in the election. What is CLEAR is your betrayal of your followers and cover up of the election fraud perpetrated by DNC! Everybody knows...

-- Logan (@KOMBUCHABABY) February 17, 2018

Bernie, that's MIC propaganda. Stop helping it. There are millions of reasons Trump should not be president. We don't need a hyped up corporate fairytale to make that point https://t.co/7FAwb47LtB

-- SanBernieDingDong (@noreallyhowcome) February 17, 2018

MrWebster on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 7:19pm
2020 dem candidates will try to out do each other on Russia

Democratic party jingoism in 2020 will be extra-ordinary with candidates each trying to out do each other how they will fuck over Putin and the Russian nation. There will be a shit load of public loyalty testing against any third party candidate by the democrats.

The democrats (and media cohorts) have become an apocolyptic death cult. The language that comes from them is infused with the language of conspiracies, violence, treason, aggression and demonization.

And here is the thing, Bernie to survive electorally will have to become a cult member. Effectively he will have to be pro-war with Russia. He will be giving from the the Left supposed support for aggressive action andmilitarism toward Russia.

I fear that if a democrat becomes president in 2020 (it won't be Bernie), is elected president that in the year of the midterms in 2022, the US will start a real war with Russia which has a highly likehood of going nuclear.

[Aug 05, 2018] Are you a Russiagate traitor by gjohnsit

Notable quotes:
"... There was NO hack. ..."
"... emphasis in original. ..."
"... "inside job" ..."
"... "Who's the insider?" ..."
"... -- William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook (1971), from memory ..."
"... @thanatokephaloides ..."
"... Finally there's the meeting that Assange's lawyer set up with congress for him to testify to congress and tell them where he got the DNC emails that showed how they rigged the primary. Comey and Schaffer shot that down because it would have killed Russia Gate. Dead and buried and the country could move on. ..."
"... In this case, it is NOT a matter of opinion. It is a matter of FACT. The physical proof that we have right now tells us that the Wikileaks documents did not come from a "hack." We also have physical evidence that someone (no doubt Crowdstrike) manipulated copies of the leaked documents and embedded awkward amateurish evidence to make them look like they were taken by a "Russian" hacker. Here's how we know that: ..."
"... Assange's diplomatic trip to the US in mid-2017 to testify before Congress and prove where the documents came from was emergency-blocked by Comey and Rosenstein. As a consequence, Assange immediately released the extensive Vault 7 documents to the American people so we could forensically recognize the signature techniques that the US intelligence agencies would use to alter downloaded DNC documents and embed fake Russian "fingerprints." We have seen the physical evidence that that occurred. ..."
"... The US has no real physical evidence of a Russian hack or they would never have released the fake evidence. Yet they continue their attack to harm Russia's economy and the continue their attempts to provoke a hot war with Russia. The US motive for this has nothing to do with their fake hacking narrative; it is about crippling Russia (and China) to forestall the rapid rise of Eurasia, which is stripping the Neocons and war-profiteering corporations of their dream for the US to achieve total domination over all other nations. The Entitled Elite want their New American Century back! Their Empire was supposed to rule the world.... ..."
"... @Pluto's Republic ..."
"... While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than " a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. ..."
"... third run ..."
"... ~~Author Unknown ..."
"... ~~Martin Luther King Jr. ..."
"... @Unabashed Liberal ..."
"... @Unabashed Liberal ..."
"... ~~Martin Luther King Jr. ..."
"... Democratic party jingoism in 2020 will be extra-ordinary with candidates each trying to out do each other how they will fuck over Putin and the Russian nation. There will be a shit load of public loyalty testing against any third party candidate by the democrats. ..."
Aug 04, 2018 | caucus99percent.com

Russiagate may technically be about Trump, but in fact most of the "traitors" and Putin Puppets are progressives on the left. Russiagate officially started in 2015 long before the DNC hack and the Democratic primaries.

From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Date: 2015-12-21 12:09

Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin

Russiagate never was actually about Russia. It's the Democrats' version of Obama's birth certificate. As Caitlin Johnstone puts it, Russiagate is 9/11 minus 9/11.

TWIT:

Kurt Eichenwald

@kurteichenwald

Bottom line: You either support the patriots in our intelligence community and law enforcement who work endlessly for our national security, and all of the intelligence agencies of our allies, or you support Putin.

You're either a patriot, a traitor or an idiot. Choose.

10:51 AM-16 Jul 2018

In reality, Russiagate started with Ralph Nader and the 2000 election .

They said a vote for Nader was a vote for Bush. You have a moral duty to vote for the Democrat and to be pragmatic. Your Naderite purity came at the expense of the poor. Only affluent selfish white guys could afford this type of virtue signaling. In fact, maybe some of these people were really Republicans in disguise. There were no Russian bots to blame just yet, but clearly some liberals are unable to imagine good faith criticism of Democrats coming from the left.

The terms " virtue signaling", " purity pony", and of course "White Berniebro" weren't coined yet, but the the stereotype they describe was formed in 2000. Gore lost and Nader and all his voters, in swing states or not, were vilified. They were worse than Republicans. They were traitors. Of all the factors that caused Gore's loss, the only one that Democratic partisans really cared about was Nader.

People that voted for Nader became responsible for the Iraq War, while Democrats who voted for Bush and the Iraq War got a free pass. Liberals, besides their obvious double-standards when allocating responsibility, made the dubious claim that morality requires being pragmatic in your voting. And then, as if to prove the basis of their claims to be false, they approach their target audience in a non-pragmatic way.

The anger on open display is the opposite of pragmatic politics. They don't try to persuade people to vote for the Democrat. They demand it. It is a moral litmus test, or rather, a judgement of one's very soul. Good people know they have to vote for the Democrat. Bad people vote for Republicans and the very worst people of all claim to be left, but vote for Stein or maybe even voted for Clinton, but criticized her. Democratic partisans have no interest in what you say about an issue if they perceive it as in any way an attack or a criticism of a Democrat. If you are a third party advocate you can forget about being taken seriously on any issue because you have already self identified as a Satanist and you need to be exorcised from the body politic. Even if you say you support the Democrat as the lesser evil, you speak as one of the damned and deserve no mercy. Sanders played the game in 2016 exactly the way people said Nader should have played it and he and his supporters were still dismissed.

Like Nader before her, Stein is the absolute worst traitor of all . Worse than Trump himself.

Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent. https://t.co/qkDUe6yADd

-- Zac Petkanas (@Zac_Petkanas) 18 December 2017

Maddow cast suspicion on Stein's silence over alleged Russian attempts to interfere with the election to benefit Donald Trump, who she claimed during her own campaign would govern no differently than Hillary Clinton.

"So everybody's like, 'Wow, how come this like super, super aggressive opposition that we saw from these third-party candidates -- how come they haven't said anything since this scandal has broken?'" Maddow said.

"I don't know, Jill -- I can't pronounce it in Russian," Maddow said, with apparent sarcasm.

. @maddow spots something fishy going on between Jill Stein and Vladimir Putin. pic.twitter.com/Cah10YWx8p

-- DESUS & MERO (@desusandmero) 15 February 2017

Bernie Sanders, OTOH, did everything he was told he should do. He supported the Democratic establishment candidate, and believed the Russiagate story.

It has been clear to everyone (except Donald Trump) that Russia was deeply involved in the 2016 election and intends to be involved in 2018. It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the Russian oligarchs.

-- Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 16, 2018

However, Sanders had already committed the unforgivable sin of criticizing the Democratic establishment candidate from the left. There is simply no way of coming back from that treason.

Despite his stance, Sanders has also been constantly presented as another Russian agent, with the Washington Post (11/12/17) asking its readers, "When Russia interferes with the 2020 election on behalf of Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders, how will liberals respond?" The message is clear: The progressive wave rising across America is and will be a consequence of Russia, not of the failures of the system, nor of the Democrats.

It isn't just progressive politicians that are all traitors. Movements like Black Lives Matter are also traitors for Russia.

Slate: Russian Trolls Were Obsessed With Black Lives Matter
CNN: Her son was killed -- then came the Russian trolls
NY Times: The Propaganda Tools Used by Russians to Influence the 2016 Election

That's because you, Russia, funded riots in Ferguson. See 0 hour I have your connections to Trump archived via Schiller and Scavino https://t.co/aTUDlCGkYi

-- Louise Mensch (@LouiseMensch) April 9, 2017

If you are still confused about what is treason and what isn't, ask yourself the question: Does the issue advance the narrative that the Democratic Party is a force for absolute good?

Oh my god: this is how deranged official Washington is. The President of the largest Dem Party think tank (funded in part by dictators) genuinely believes Chelsea Manning's candidacy is a Kremlin plot. Conspiracy theorists thrive more in mainstream DC than on internet fringes pic.twitter.com/e8g314iQHT

-- Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 15, 2018

We still have the 2018 election, and then the long lead-up to the 2020 election. There is nothing to indicate that the rhetoric won't get a lot more insane. The general indifference of the public doesn't seem to discourage the media and pundits. So how will it likely look in Fall 2020? Probably like it looked in 1952 .

The purpose of advancing the Communist issue was not to fix the Communist problem -- it was to exploit that problem for political and ideological advantage. That is how the Republican Party could produce its unhinged 1952 platform, which charged that the Democrats "have shielded traitors to the Nation in high places," "work unceasingly to achieve their goal of national socialism," and "by a long succession of vicious acts, so undermined the foundations of our Republic as to threaten its existence." (Does that kind of talk strike you as overheated? Then you, too, are failing to take the Russia issue seriously.)

There is little to no danger for conservatives and Republicans. All of the danger is for progressives and socialists, and the angry mob is the Democratic establishment trying to silence left-wing ideas. In comparison, the danger of the GOP to the left-wing is trivial.

Deja on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 5:04pm

Ffs, there was NO "hack"

Russiagate officially started in 2015 long before the DNC hack and the Democratic primaries.

I'm finding it harder and harder to believe that people keep posting it as common knowledge and factual -- especially on this site. Old dkos habits are hard to break, I guess. The speed at which the files were STOLEN prove it was done from within the network. Not from Russia, or from a van parked down the street. I can only guess that the DNC can't reveal whose network account was used to do so, because it would blow the bullshit lie of a hack out of the water.

There was NO hack.

thanatokephaloides on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 5:21pm
inside job

@Deja

The speed at which the files were STOLEN prove it was done from within the network. Not from Russia, or from a van parked down the street. I can only guess that the DNC can't reveal whose network account was used to do so, because it would blow the bullshit lie of a hack out of the water.

There was NO hack.

emphasis in original.

The term usually used by the perpetrator classes for this sort of thing is: "inside job" . And, as with all other inside jobs, the question really is: "Who's the insider?"

"The easiest way to raise a revolutionary army is to use someone else's; especially if it belongs to your enemy."
-- William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook (1971), from memory

Deja on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 5:27pm
Dead men tell no tales

@thanatokephaloides
R.I.P. Seth Rich

Side note: I find it odd that his parents sued Fox News for saying he was murdered by the DNC. The judge sided with Fox.

gjohnsit on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 5:51pm
It makes no difference

@Deja

I've seen an article debunking the "hack was a leak" story, but it makes no difference anyway. In my book, the leak/hack just created a more informed electorate, and that's good for American democracy.

gjohnsit on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 6:25pm
"care about the truth"

@Deja
The truth is contained in the emails, not in their journey. Remember who else is telling you that the contents of the emails is less important than how they got there - the Democrats.

divineorder on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 8:22pm
Yes, 'shill' equals bad imo. I too, have read that the 'leak'

@Deja hypothesis has problems. Don't get me wrong, I think it holds more promise than the 'hack' hypothesis. But right now, really, we got shit for proof either way? Would honestly look forward to your proof either way, sans the critique of the essayist. Might I suggest that you criticize the point, not the person, please? Questions remain.

- DNC leak vs hack remains unproven (servers not provided)
- one party consent is complicated. On the tape, there was 3rd party on speaker phone. Were they in one party consent jurisdiction as well?
- How was CNN able to confirm that this tape was recorded in NY?

-- John LeFevre (@JohnLeFevre) July 25, 2018

snoopydawg on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 10:09pm
Leak or hack - there's no evidence that Russia was involved

@divineorder

in it. This is the point that matters to me. Assange has stated that the emails didn't come from Russia. Craig Murray said that he was involved with the person who got the information from the DNC computers and that there was no connection to Russia.

The CIAs Vault 7 shows how evidence on computers can be manipulated to make it seem like someone's dawg did the deed. I think it'd be very sloppy for trained hackers to leave their own footprints on the scene don't you think?

Finally there's the meeting that Assange's lawyer set up with congress for him to testify to congress and tell them where he got the DNC emails that showed how they rigged the primary. Comey and Schaffer shot that down because it would have killed Russia Gate. Dead and buried and the country could move on.

Pluto's Republic on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 10:34pm
Absolutely right.

@Deja

It matters profoundly. Knowing the facts surrounding critical political events or social earthquakes can be epigenetic events. Hard truths can trigger conscious evolution while we are alive and your advanced gene expressions can be physically inherited, changing the species.

By exercising our own critical thinking and working very hard to see through narratives to the core realities in the universe and in all things -- we are physically evolving the species into better and more enlightened generations of humans.

In this case, it is NOT a matter of opinion. It is a matter of FACT. The physical proof that we have right now tells us that the Wikileaks documents did not come from a "hack." We also have physical evidence that someone (no doubt Crowdstrike) manipulated copies of the leaked documents and embedded awkward amateurish evidence to make them look like they were taken by a "Russian" hacker. Here's how we know that:

Assange's diplomatic trip to the US in mid-2017 to testify before Congress and prove where the documents came from was emergency-blocked by Comey and Rosenstein. As a consequence, Assange immediately released the extensive Vault 7 documents to the American people so we could forensically recognize the signature techniques that the US intelligence agencies would use to alter downloaded DNC documents and embed fake Russian "fingerprints." We have seen the physical evidence that that occurred.

The US has no real physical evidence of a Russian hack or they would never have released the fake evidence. Yet they continue their attack to harm Russia's economy and the continue their attempts to provoke a hot war with Russia. The US motive for this has nothing to do with their fake hacking narrative; it is about crippling Russia (and China) to forestall the rapid rise of Eurasia, which is stripping the Neocons and war-profiteering corporations of their dream for the US to achieve total domination over all other nations. The Entitled Elite want their New American Century back! Their Empire was supposed to rule the world....

If that is what your instincts tell you, you should trust them. It's a biological imperative.

on the cusp on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 10:22pm
Perfect.

@Pluto's Republic At the very least, we should call it "alleged" hacks. I want some proof before we drop nukes.

Mickt on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 5:57pm
I saw this today

Just to lighten things up?

https://www.theonion.com/the-onion-reviews-christopher-robin-1828056997

The Aspie Corner on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 6:17pm
This whole thing is starting to look like

the plot to Beavis and Butt-head Do America.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3eTqb_fgTAA

snoopydawg on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 6:32pm
Bernie's tweet is hysterical
It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the Russian oligarchs.

Hey, Bernie. The American people were the ones who should have decided who won the primary, not Hillary, the DNC and the delegates. That you are blaming Her loss on Russia instead of admitting that the American people rejected her makes you nothing more than a democratic puppet. How embarrassing for you.

Every Black voter should abandon the DP until they apologize for their disrespect for the BLM and saying that they only started protesting cops killing Blacks because Russia manipulated them into doing so.

Eichenwald thinks that our intelligence agencies are patriots who have spent their lives working on keeping us safe does he? I agree with Dmitry Orlov's take on them.

US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the

The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on.
....
the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your
own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than " a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. "

And let's not forget how many coups and false flag events they had a hand in creating that have cost so much misery and death.

One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag operations, ŕ la 9/11, to fake false flag operations, ŕ la fake East Gouta chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story is perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were harmed in the process of concocting this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips. It is now a pure confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a conspiracy theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.

The real puppets are the ones who believe in this silly story that Russia is pulling Trump's strings and that the GOP are also Russian puppets. Good grief!

Unabashed Liberal on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 6:53pm
Say it, Sister! ;-) The entire exercise--

@snoopydawg

meaning the 'Russia Ruse'--IMO, has been an exercise in setting up a scenario under which the PtB can put in place a system geared toward major social media 'censorship,' and, a face-saving exercise for FSC--just in case she decides to make a third run in 2020. Heaven forbid!

Mollie/Blue Onyx (Reverting to my original handle)

"Every time I lose a dog, he takes a piece of my heart. Every new dog gifts me with a piece of his. Someday, my heart will be total dog, and maybe then I will be just as generous, loving, and forgiving." ~~Author Unknown

"Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way." ~~Martin Luther King Jr.

"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong." ~~W. R. Purche

MrWebster on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 7:51pm
Coates said the Russias are engaged in "messaging campaign"

@Unabashed Liberal @Unabashed Liberal

"... has been an exercise in setting up a scenario under which the PtB can put in place a system geared toward major social media 'censorship,'

Yup. Dan Coates directory of national intelligence came out and accused Russsia of engaging in a "messaging campaign". So how does one stop this messaging campaign. Well, back in the day, the answer was to answer bad speech with more and better speech.

Well, with Russiagate both the media and dem/gop establishment have to come to demand censorship from the major social media platforms. And they have responded. At first they actually didn't and thought the Russia charges were trivial. Until that is, they were theatened by House and Senate reps. And then they hopped to it.

And just a number of days ago, Facebook proudly announced they took down some nefarious pages who seemed to be engaging in a message campaign. And turns out they shut down a real group organizing an anti-fascist rally. There are other examples like this.

The censorship will continue becoming more and more brazen. (BTW, youtube started ths process earlier demonitizing and hurting a lot of popular, but alternative voices.)

BTW--the Young Turks showed the Coats clip and claimed "see the Russians are still hacking our elections".

Unabashed Liberal on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 8:17pm
Hi, Mr W!--good to see you. I couldn't

@MrWebster

agree more with all of your comments/sentiments.

I'm truly getting concerned regarding the direction our government appears to be taking when it comes to 'freedom of expression/speech.' Strangely, many on the 'left' don't seem very concerned. Indeed, because the MSM is so intent on going after DT, many so-called progressives--including the supposedly more liberal (cough, cough) lawmakers--have become major cheerleaders of the corporatist media. Go figure.

Mollie/Blue Onyx (Reverting to my original handle)

"If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die, I want to go where they went." ~~Will Rogers

"Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way." ~~Martin Luther King Jr.

"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong." ~~W. R. Purche

snoopydawg on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 8:35pm
Dan Coates should be fired

@MrWebster

as well as every other person in Trump's administration that is working against him. This is insubordination and if Trump continues to let them run their mouths then I believe that he is in on this scam and is playing along with it. Why? Look at what has been happening since he became president. From the increasing Russian sanctions to the internet censorship to the increased military budget with money that goes to fighting cyber warfare and many other things that are being done because of this new and improved false flag.

As you stated YouTube has been removing lots of videos, Facebook and Twitter have been censoring alternative media sites that are not playing along with Russia Gate and Google changed its algorithms so that traffic to those sites are down up to 90% according to WSWS.

I once thought that this would eventually be exposed for the scam it is, but not any more. It's here to stay. And just like in 1984 where there was that place where history was changed to fit the narrative of the day, we are seeing that here. Things that happened last decade are being blamed on Russia hacking. I wouldn't be surprised if the KKK and Jim Crow were blamed on Russia. This is how out of control it's gotten. And I was so looking forward to seeing Rachel trying to explain to her viewers how she got things so wrong.

The Aspie Corner on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 8:46pm
Trumpy Boy is as complicit in this as the rest of the pigs.

@snoopydawg His erratic actions are the perfect distraction for the capitalist pigs the same as the "Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Marxist Communist Fascist Socialist Radical Leftist Feminazi SJW" crap that went on during the last capitalist puppet presidency. Either way, the world still burns and the pigs make out like bandits in the process. Keeping the plebs at each other's throats is just a bonus for them.

Alligator Ed on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 9:41pm
Rachel will never admit she's wrong.

@snoopydawg Remember whom you are discussing. Alas, you must be a Russian wolfhound to think R. Madcow could ever be wrong. Apologize, then stand in the corner until after the midterms when the GRU hauls off recalcitrant Dims and Repugnants failing to swear fealty to Vladimir Vladimirovich.

divineorder on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 7:18pm
sd yes Orlov calls it like it is.

@snoopydawg

Caitlin J. Interesting Twitter thread:

https://mobile.twitter.com/caitoz/status/1025482696628137986

"Russiagate is like a mirage. It looks so real from a distance you'll swear it's there and mock anyone who says otherwise, but once you get up close and examine its component parts you find it's made of nothing but innuendo, spin, unsubstantiated claims and dishonest omissions.
2:45 PM · Aug 3, 2018"

And....

https://mobile.twitter.com/caitoz/status/1025489710594945024Caitlin Johnstone

"
@caitoz
·
Aug 3
Nothing wrong with wanting a full investigation. There's something very, very wrong with pressuring a US president to continually escalate dangerous cold war tensions with a nuclear superpower without ever backing down based on an "idea" with no evidence. "

MrWebster on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 8:11pm
In 2020 Bernie will be a "strong" pro-war candidate

@snoopydawg Bernie will not be able to say "Oh evil Russia but let's not go to war with them." Diplomacy itself finally became full criminalized and made tresonous when Trump meet Putin in Finland. Any level of moderation will be attacked as soft on Putin and treasonous.

And I write "pro-war" and not "anti-Russian". One cannot be anti-Russian in any moderate way. Being anti-Russian means supporting a harsh and aggressive military stance toward their nation. The Russians are after all destroying Western civilization and this cannot be meant with diplomacy.

And from what I can, every national democratic candidate for House and Senate will follow suite.

divineorder on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 10:25pm
Hard to know what will happen by then but your guess

@MrWebster is as good as mine.

I wonder if this list is correct?

For reference, these are the only 10 senators who voted AGAINST giving Trump a $717 billion war budget:

Bernie Sanders
Elizabeth Warren
Ed Markey
Kirsten Gillibrand
Dick Durban
Kamala Harris
Jeff Merkley
Ron Wyden
Mike Lee (R)
Marco Rubio (R)
So much for #Resistance huh?

-- Clayton Farris (@ClaytonRFarris) August 3, 2018

Wars and rumours of wars...

This is OT, and some will say Bernie is sheepdogging these kids.

Thank you to the young people standing up to fossil fuel corporations and leading the movement to combat climate change. #ThisIsZeroHour pic.twitter.com/77f9KvY4og

-- Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 24, 2018

... ... ...

snoopydawg on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 6:55pm
The first tweet shows how people twist events

The others show that there are others out there that have seen through this propaganda crap. I'd like to see the breakdown of Hillary supporters that believe Russia Gate and the Bernie supporters that don't. Most of the Trump supporters think it's phony so what made Hillary's believe in something that everyone should be laughing at?

You deserve a lot of credit. Russia interfered in your favor, yet you are man enough to admit that they interfered. Thank you Bernie!

-- Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) February 16, 2018

So you plan to continue this McCarthy Russian BS? You didn't speak out when you got cheated in the primaries, and you didn't seem to care that Hillary was using her own paid troll army. Integrity matters Bernie and you are losing yours.

-- Underdawg47 (@Underdawg47) February 17, 2018

You stopped speaking for me and millions of others when you caved to crooked HRC. No it was NOT clear that Russia was "deeply involved in the election. What is CLEAR is your betrayal of your followers and cover up of the election fraud perpetrated by DNC! Everybody knows...

-- Logan (@KOMBUCHABABY) February 17, 2018

Bernie, that's MIC propaganda. Stop helping it. There are millions of reasons Trump should not be president. We don't need a hyped up corporate fairytale to make that point https://t.co/7FAwb47LtB

-- SanBernieDingDong (@noreallyhowcome) February 17, 2018

MrWebster on Sat, 08/04/2018 - 7:19pm
2020 dem candidates will try to out do each other on Russia

Democratic party jingoism in 2020 will be extra-ordinary with candidates each trying to out do each other how they will fuck over Putin and the Russian nation. There will be a shit load of public loyalty testing against any third party candidate by the democrats.

The democrats (and media cohorts) have become an apocolyptic death cult. The language that comes from them is infused with the language of conspiracies, violence, treason, aggression and demonization.

And here is the thing, Bernie to survive electorally will have to become a cult member. Effectively he will have to be pro-war with Russia. He will be giving from the the Left supposed support for aggressive action andmilitarism toward Russia.

I fear that if a democrat becomes president in 2020 (it won't be Bernie), is elected president that in the year of the midterms in 2022, the US will start a real war with Russia which has a highly likehood of going nuclear.

[Aug 04, 2018] The US establishment behind the Helsinki Summit, by Manlio Dinucci

So the US neoliberal establishment tried to sabotage Trump-Putin summit in doer to pursue "business as usual". In other words military-industrial complex is in control of the USA government...
Notable quotes:
"... It's no coincidence that, at the very moment when the President of the United States was about to meet with the President of Russia, special prosecutor Robert Mueller III charged twelve Russians with having manipulated the US presidential elections by hacking into the data networks of the Democratic party in order to hinder candidate Hillary Clinton. The twelve Russians, accused of being agents of the military secret services (GRU), were officially defined as " conspirators ", and found guilty of " conspiracy to the detriment of the United States ". Simultaneously, Daniel Coats, National Director of Intelligence and principal advisor to the President in these matters, accused Russia of working to " undermine our basic values and our democracy ". He then sounded the alarm about the " threat of cyber-attacks which have arrived at a critical point " similar to that which preceded 9/11, on behalf not only of Russia, " the most aggressive foreign agent ", but also China and Iran. ..."
"... At the same time, in London, British " investigators " declared that the Russian military secret service GRU, which had sabotaged the Presidential elections in the USA, is the same service which poisoned ex-Russian agent, Sergueď Skripal and his daughter, who, inexplicably, survived contact with an extremely lethal gas. ..."
"... The political objective of these " enquiries " is clear – to maintain that at the head of all these " conspirators " is Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom President Donald Trump sat down at the negotiating table, despite vast bi-partisan opposition in the USA. After the " conspirators " had been charged, the Democrats asked Trump to cancel the meeting with Putin. Even though they failed, their pressure on the negotiations remains powerful. ..."
"... In opposition to the easing of tension with Russia are not only the Democrats (who, with a reversal of formal roles, are playing the " hawks "), but also many Republicans, among whom are several highly-important representatives of the Trump administration itself. It is the establishment, not only of the US, but also of Europe, whose powers and profits are directly linked to tension and war. ..."
"... Even if an agreement on these questions were reached between Putin and Trump, would the latter be able to implement it? Or will the real deciders be the powerful circles of the military-industrial complex? ..."
Aug 04, 2018 | www.voltairenet.org

While the International Press distorted the content of the NATO Summit, the US establishment perfectly understood the unique issue – the end of enmity with Russia. Thus disturbing the bilateral summit in Helsinki between the USA and Russia became its priority. By all means possible, it had to prevent any rapprochement with Moscow.

We need to talk about everything, from commerce to the military, missiles, nuclear, and China " - this was how President Trump began at the Helsinki Summit. " The time has come to talk in detail about our bilateral relationship and the international flashpoints ", emphasised Putin.

But it will not only be the two Presidents who will decide the future relationships between the United States and Russia.

It's no coincidence that, at the very moment when the President of the United States was about to meet with the President of Russia, special prosecutor Robert Mueller III charged twelve Russians with having manipulated the US presidential elections by hacking into the data networks of the Democratic party in order to hinder candidate Hillary Clinton. The twelve Russians, accused of being agents of the military secret services (GRU), were officially defined as " conspirators ", and found guilty of " conspiracy to the detriment of the United States ". Simultaneously, Daniel Coats, National Director of Intelligence and principal advisor to the President in these matters, accused Russia of working to " undermine our basic values and our democracy ". He then sounded the alarm about the " threat of cyber-attacks which have arrived at a critical point " similar to that which preceded 9/11, on behalf not only of Russia, " the most aggressive foreign agent ", but also China and Iran.

At the same time, in London, British " investigators " declared that the Russian military secret service GRU, which had sabotaged the Presidential elections in the USA, is the same service which poisoned ex-Russian agent, Sergueď Skripal and his daughter, who, inexplicably, survived contact with an extremely lethal gas.

The political objective of these " enquiries " is clear – to maintain that at the head of all these " conspirators " is Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom President Donald Trump sat down at the negotiating table, despite vast bi-partisan opposition in the USA. After the " conspirators " had been charged, the Democrats asked Trump to cancel the meeting with Putin. Even though they failed, their pressure on the negotiations remains powerful.

What Putin tried to obtain from Trump is both simple and complex – to ease the tension between the two countries. To that purpose, he proposed to Trump, who accepted, to implement a joint enquiry into the " conspiracy ". We do not know how the discussions on the key questions will go – the status of Crimea, the condition of Syria, nuclear weapons and others. And we do not know what Trump will ask in return. However, it is certain that any concession will be used to accuse him of connivance with the enemy. In opposition to the easing of tension with Russia are not only the Democrats (who, with a reversal of formal roles, are playing the " hawks "), but also many Republicans, among whom are several highly-important representatives of the Trump administration itself. It is the establishment, not only of the US, but also of Europe, whose powers and profits are directly linked to tension and war.

It will not be the words, but the facts, which will reveal whether the climate of détente of the Helsinki Summit will become reality - first of all with a de-escalation of NATO in Europe, in other words with the withdrawal of forces (including nuclear forces) of the USA and NATO presently deployed against Russia, and the blockage of NATO's expansion to the East.

Even if an agreement on these questions were reached between Putin and Trump, would the latter be able to implement it? Or will the real deciders be the powerful circles of the military-industrial complex?

One thing is certain – we in Italy and Europe can not remain the simple spectators of dealings which will define our future. Manlio Dinucci

Translation
Pete Kimberley

Source
Il Manifesto (Italy)

Manlio Dinucci

Geographer and geopolitical scientist. His latest books are Laboratorio di geografia , Zanichelli 2014 ; Diario di viaggio , Zanichelli 2017 ; L'arte della guerra / Annali della strategia Usa/Nato 1990-2016 , Zambon 2016. The warmonger The warmonger's response to negotiation
"The Art of War"

[Aug 04, 2018] The warmonger s response to negotiation, by Manlio Dinucci

Aug 04, 2018 | www.voltairenet.org

The conflict between transnational financial capitalism and productive national capitalism has entered into a paroxystic phase. On one side, Presidents Trump and Putin are negotiating the joint defence of their national interests. On the other, the major daily newspaper for the US and the world is accusing the US President of high treason, while the armed forces of the US and NATO are preparing for war with Russia and China.

You have attacked our democracy. Your well-worn gamblers' denials do not interest us. If you continue with this attitude, we will consider it an act of war." This is what Trump should have said to Putin at the Helsinki Summit, in the opinion of famous New York Times editorialist Thomas Friedman, published in La Repubblica . He went on to accuse the Russian President of having "attacked NATO, a fundamental pillar of international security, destabilised Europe, and bombed thousands of Syrian refugees, causing them to seek refuge in Europe."

He then accused the President of the United States of having " repudiated his oath on the Constitution " and of being an " asset of Russian Intelligence " or at least playing at being one.

What Friedman expressed in these provocative terms corresponds to the position of a powerful internal and international front (of which the New York Times is an important mouthpiece) opposed to USA-Russia negotiations, which should continue with the invitation of Putin to the White House. But there is a substantial difference.

While the negotiations have not yet borne fruit, opposition to the negotiations has been expressed not only in words, but especially in facts.

Cancelling out the climate of détente at the Helsinki Summit, the planetary warmongering system of the United States is in the process of intensifying the preparations for a war reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific:

When Trump meets Chinese President Xi Jinping, Friedman will no doubt accuse him of connivance not only with the Russian enemy, but also with the Chinese enemy. Manlio Dinucci

Manlio Dinucci Geographer and geopolitical scientist. His latest books are Laboratorio di geografia , Zanichelli 2014 ; Diario di viaggio , Zanichelli 2017 ; L'arte della guerra / Annali della strategia Usa/Nato 1990-2016 , Zambon 2016.

[Aug 03, 2018] Katrina vanden Heuvel We Need "Robust Debate" in Reporting on Russia, Not "Suffocating Consensus"

Notable quotes:
"... The vilification of alternative, dissenting views or linking those views to a foreign power -- in many people's views, an implacably hostile foreign power -- is the degradation of our political media culture. When Rand Paul, who is interesting on foreign policy, reminds, as The New York Times has over the last -- you know, that America has meddled in other countries' elections, has interfered, has overthrown countries' governments, and MSNBC contributors tweet "traitor"? ..."
"... - it's dangerous when you have a suffocating consensus instead of a full, robust debate. ..."
"... But I think what -- the tweeting, to call someone a traitor because they have a point of you don't agree with, we're in a dangerous territory. ..."
Aug 03, 2018 | www.democracynow.org

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL : I think what Trump did on this trip, between Europe and the Helsinki summit, is he played to his base. He's reconfiguring the Republican Party so that it becomes more consistent with its isolationist roots, its roots as going it alone, not tethered by international institutions, and also sympathetic to strongmen. I mean, I think Trump is more a con man than a strongman, but he certainly has an affinity. I don't have much use for those who say, "Look, he's guilty, because he never says a bad word about Putin." Problem is, he never says a bad word about Bibi Netanyahu, doesn't say a bad word about the Saudi leaders, nor does he say a bad word about the murderous Duterte in the Philippines. So he does have an affinity for those strongmen, which I think does lead him and guide a kind of foreign policy. So we need, as small-D democrats, to counter and not accept -- what I talked to Amy about last week -- the failed bipartisan foreign policy establishment as our default. We should not go back to policing the world, indispensable nation, but instead have a demilitarized foreign policy that truly deals with the challenges of our time, which most of are not going to be met with a military solution.

... ... ...

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL : The vilification of alternative, dissenting views or linking those views to a foreign power -- in many people's views, an implacably hostile foreign power -- is the degradation of our political media culture. When Rand Paul, who is interesting on foreign policy, reminds, as The New York Times has over the last -- you know, that America has meddled in other countries' elections, has interfered, has overthrown countries' governments, and MSNBC contributors tweet "traitor"?

And I would also mention Glenn Greenwald. We talked of him earlier. Malcolm Nance, a very ubiquitous commentator on MSNBC on intelligence and other issues, said Glenn was -- I'm going to read it, because it's so outrageous -- "an agent of Trump & Moscow deep in the Kremlin's pocket." This is -- we've seen this in our history before. And I think it is -- it's dangerous when you have a suffocating consensus instead of a full, robust debate.

And it should be about issues. Juan is right. When we fix so much on personalities, we're feeding the beast, we've seen, of media malpractice, this obliteration of the line between news and entertainment, the conglomeratization, the decimation of local news.

These are issues which collide with an administration which does want to delegitimize public accountability, if they know public accountability journalism, delegitimize any check on abuses. And we, as representatives of a media which seek to speak to the issues, seek debate, to foster, not police, debate, need to stand up and continue to do our work despite these fake news and -- people are despairing about the issue of news, about facts, about -- anyway.

But I think what -- the tweeting, to call someone a traitor because they have a point of you don't agree with, we're in a dangerous territory.

[Aug 03, 2018] Anglo America Russophobes as Fake Miracle workers; the Post Christ Resurrections

Jun 05, 2018 | www.unz.com

Extracted from: Appeasement as Global Policy, by James Petras - The Unz Review

As part of the propaganda campaign to discredit and isolate Russia, the UK and the Ukraine, stalwart flunkies of Washington, accused Moscow of assassinations by poison and bullets. Both alleged victims appeared live and well in due time!

On March 4, 2018, the Prime Minister of the UK Theresa May claimed that Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned by Russian secret agents. Foreign Secretary Boris "Bobo" Johnson called the poison, 'the most-deadly agent known to man' (sic) – Novichok. According to "Terry and Bobo" the poison kills in 30 seconds. Two months later Sergei and Yulia were seen taking a stroll in a park.

The fake charges were promoted by the entire Anglo-Americans mass media. The UK proceeded to charge Putin with 'crimes against humanity' , backed additional diplomatic and economic sanctions, increased military spending for homeland defense and urged President Trump to take forceful action. Once the 'victims' 'rose from the dead' the media never questioned the regime's claim of a Russian conspiracy planned at the highest level.

The UK scored a few trivial merit points from Washington, which, however, did not prevent President Trump from slapping a double-digit tariff on British steel and aluminum exports (with more to come)!

The Ukraine joined the line of toadies trying to secure President Trump's approval by cooking up another Russian murder plot. This time Ukraine leaders claimed Kremlin agents assassinated one Arkady Babchenko, an anti-Russian journalist and self-proclaimed exile in Kiev.

On May 29, 2018, Arkady was found 'murdered' or so said the Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko and repeated, embellished and circulated by the entire western mass media.

On May 31, a wide-eyed 'Arkady' turned up alive and claiming his 'resurrection' was a planned plot to catch a Russian agent!

Western regimes systematic use of lies, plots and conspiracies are central to the imperial drive for world power.

In Syria, the US accused Damascus of using poisonous gas against its own people in order to justify NATO's terror bombing of Aleppo's civilian population!

In Libya, Obama and Clinton claimed President Gaddafi distributed Viagra to his armed forced to rape innocent civilians, precipitating the US-EU terror bombing of the country and rape and murder of President Ghaddafi.

The question is whether western leaders will seek papal recognition of CIA directed resurrections to coincide with Easter?

[Aug 02, 2018] Cohen - who Trump has severed ties with, was either a terrible unregistered lobbyist or ran a bait and switch operation

Notable quotes:
"... Authorities are investigating whether Mr. Cohen engaged in unregistered lobbying in connection with his consulting work for corporate clients after Mr. Trump went to the White House, according to people familiar with the probe ..."
"... Investigators are also examining potential campaign-finance violations and bank fraud surrounding, among other deals, Mr. Cohen's October 2016 payment to Stephanie Clifford , the former adult-film star called Stormy Daniels, to keep her from discussing an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the probe. Mr. Trump denies any encounter took place. - WSJ ..."
Aug 02, 2018 | www.youtube.com

Authorities are investigating whether Mr. Cohen engaged in unregistered lobbying in connection with his consulting work for corporate clients after Mr. Trump went to the White House, according to people familiar with the probe .

Investigators are also examining potential campaign-finance violations and bank fraud surrounding, among other deals, Mr. Cohen's October 2016 payment to Stephanie Clifford , the former adult-film star called Stormy Daniels, to keep her from discussing an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the probe. Mr. Trump denies any encounter took place. - WSJ

[Aug 02, 2018] Neocon media Russiagate sham

Notable quotes:
"... It is a sham since no evidence of election influence by the Russians was provided and no preventive or corrective measures our government is taking to prevent Emmanuel Goldstein (The Russians) from further attacking and usurping our elections was put forth. ..."
Aug 02, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

CitizenOne , July 29, 2018 at 9:26 pm

Today on ABC Martha Raddatz hosted "This Week" which featured James Lankford a Republican from Oklahoma describing how Russia and Putin were actively trying to ruin our democracy and also were trying to influence elections at every possible turn. The Russian Bear and Putin according to Lankford were also trying to rewrite the Constitution, trying to upend every election and were seeking to disrupt our national electrical grid not to be confused with our national election grid which they were also trying to destroy as well as to control the most local elections by a means of electronic control that was beyond any means to control.

Of course no mention was made about possible solutions to thwart the Russians was mentioned and it is doubtful that there are any serious efforts to counteract the alleged Russian hacking of US elections since not one single preventive action to stop the Orwellian monster of Russia, like Emmanuel Goldstein in Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty Four" was put forth.

Apparently ABC and the other media are trying to convince Americans that there is an overwhelming force in Russia that is somehow able to infiltrate and control all our national elections. Apparently the Russians are unstoppable.

It is a sham.

It is a sham since no evidence of election influence by the Russians was provided and no preventive or corrective measures our government is taking to prevent Emmanuel Goldstein (The Russians) from further attacking and usurping our elections was put forth.

Instead the publishers of "This Week" on ABC were content to provide evidence-free incriminations of Russia and attribute all manner of influence in our elections to the incredibly sneaky and unstoppable Russian-Putin election Influencing machine which is unstoppable by our intelligence agencies.

What is missing from Martha Radditz's show? There will never be any admission that they have jobs because of Citizens United, their corporate benefactors (Koch Industries), Gerrymandering, Dark Money, Media Bias which ensures that the Iron Triangle of corporate election dark money flows to hand picked political candidates that will support conservative causes or that these are the real election influencing mechanisms which have the most power in our country to influence elections.

As long as ABC, NBC, CBS and other cable news shows fail to correctly identify the real reasons of election corruption which is our very near and dear corporate money funded political organizations we will continue to be duped by the free press to believe that Russia has control over our national elections and not believe that US Corporations hold all the power.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , July 29, 2018 at 5:51 am

Yes, but the great Putin Scare is not just the tactic of a political interest group or party

It feeds off of something more fundamental and much more pervasive and dangerous.

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/21/john-chuckman-comment-trump-is-out-maneuvering-his-enemies-on-russia-official-u-s-russophobia-is-epidemic-it-serves-real-interests-trump-does-not-have-leverage-he-cant-even-build-his-silly/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/john-chuckman-comment-putin-orders-air-force-to-prepare-for-a-time-of-war-he-is-wise-to-do-so-america-and-russia-today-a-completely-unnecessary-conflict-thanks-to-obama/

rosemerry , July 28, 2018 at 6:39 pm

Thanks to Norman for reminding us of the continued waste of time and effort on the 'russiagate' stories based on allegations and indictments, NOT evidence or possible reasons for such behavior. The USA is fully capable of unfair election practices, helped by the undemocratic system of electoral college, partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, lack of response to voter desires .plus of course Israel being the very large external factor.
Trump's influence on workers, environment, USA's reputation are negative, but blaming Russia when this is in nobody's real interest is hardly the way forward for the Democratic Party.

Realist , July 27, 2018 at 9:26 pm

All those loons you mentioned are effectively practicing a religion, in which there is a dogma everyone must believe to be virtuous and a set of commandments every believer must live by to gain salvation. Don't toe the line on every bit of it and you are rejected as an apostate.

I'm surprised that some of those folks, notably Thom Hartmann, choose not to practice what they preach -- you know, the platitudes about studying the facts and coming to your own conclusions rather than following the herd. They rightly condemn acting on prejudice, out of pure self-interest, without verifiable facts (indeed at odds with empirical fact) and using group intimidation, as per McCarthyist tactics, and then they go ahead and embrace those vices to their own ends.

It is my process on everything in this life to learn as much as I can on my own, without being brainwashed by any group or movement, and only backing a cause if it is congruent with my own conclusions. Unfortunately, most people do the opposite: they are joiners first and analysts only if their biases are not threatened.

I feel entirely justified in agreeing with movements on some things and not others. I doubt that human beings have arrived at definitive answers about most phenomena in the real world or that any single organised group of us has it all down accurate and pat on everything. Listen to any casual debate on the questions big and small in science: the give and take, back and forth, can go on as long as the participants have the interest and energy. I never give my interlocutors any respite, because there is always one more thing to be considered or one more way of looking at a problem. I'm sure I would have been burned at the stake in many previous lives and so would a lot of the readers here.

Eddie , July 27, 2018 at 11:26 pm

Yes, good points Drew. I view Maddow as a liberal Rush Limbaugh, trying to win a Leni Riefenstahl award from the DNC, and having to be satisfied with her purported $9M/yr salary (which definitely DOES buy a LOT of co-opting).

In support of your argument, I would add that ultimately we should be voting for a candidate based on his/her POLICIES, as evidenced by their prior political voting record and whatever political actions they've taken, NOT based on what they SAY they believe -- that's 1st period high school civics as I recall. It's too easy for candidates to say this or that during a campaign. Trump's policy of detente w/Russia, is -- like the proverbial 'blind squirrel who occasionally finds a nut' -- probably random chance or perhaps a way to penetrate a relatively untapped market with his hucksterism. But so what?? For something as IMPORTANT as NOT having a nuclear war, I'm all for any honest, significant efforts in that direction. Even Nixon, whose presidency I disliked greatly, did a good thing by 'going to China' -- I don't recall anybody on the liberal side at that time saying he was Mao's dupe or foolishness like that. Did Nixon do it as a cynical ploy to draw attention away from other political problems, and did he previously help aggravate/perpetuate a lot of the conflict w/China? Sure, but the act of rapprochement w/China was in-and-of-itself desirable and laudable in that it moved the world a major step AWAY from possible nuclear war. And full-scale nuclear war trumps (no pun intended) virtually all other problems, with the possible exception of climate change, so a POTUS should devote extra energy to that task. Ideally, they should be ramping down the militarism and nationalism, but unfortunately those are campaign tactics that are too easy for either major party to set aside (with 1/2 the fault lying in the electorate who too often endorses those 'isms).

Nik , July 28, 2018 at 9:10 am

Is not Maddow well compensated for her anti-Russian stance that is so valued by the Military-Industrial Complex? She is a profiteer.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-27/paul-craig-roberts-exposes-all-pervasive-military-security-complex

Jeff Harrison , July 27, 2018 at 1:56 pm

Re-reading this today for some reason really popped a few things up for me. The first one right in my face was: "Now, after a remarkable 46-minute news conference on foreign soil where Trump stood side by side with a former KGB agent to praise his 'strong' denials of election interference and criticize the FBI, those strategists believe the ground may have shifted."

Can someone explain to me what the hell "foreign soil" has to do with the price of tea in China? Trump has given plenty of pressers "on foreign soil" but that phrase nor anything like it is ever mentioned. Trump stood side by side with a former KGB agent.

Talk about a lack of respect and blatant bias. He stood side by side with the democratically elected President of the Russian Federation who, by the way, won his election by a clear majority of the vote unlike Mr. Trump who would have lost the election had it been held in Russia. One wonders what would have happened had WaPo and the NYT said something like Russian President Gorbachev stood side by side with the former head of the KGB I mean CIA without ever saying President Bush?

It's also blindingly obvious how screwed we are. We really only have one political party in the US -- the US Corporate Party. There is, indeed, very little reason to vote as a recent survey pointed out Congressional votes correspond to the people's preferences as determined by polling only about 5% of the time.

Gregory Herr , July 27, 2018 at 12:08 pm

Progressives, particularly those few taken tokens the Democrats allow for, should have realised long ago that MSNBC is all in on the corporatist controlled economy and leans heavily forward in the quest for War and Profits.

FAIR is correct to point to the "traditional centers of power" that MSNBC services, but the farcical "coverage" of Russiagate inanity certainly doesn't "preserve" a "progressive image" and is not "elegant" in any way.

The war on Yemen and the weapons contracting with the Saudi terrorist regime was already "steroidal" during Obama's Administration. In October 2016, warplanes bombed a community hall in Yemen's capital, Sana'a, where mourners had gathered for a funeral, killing at least 140 people and wounding hundreds. We should note that the U.S. provided intelligence assistance in identifying targets and mid-air refueling for Saudi aircraft and helped blockade the ports of Yemen during Obama's tenure.

[Aug 02, 2018] The plot thins How gel became a liquid and the whole Novichok affair began to smell to high heaven by George Galloway

Notable quotes:
"... "military-grade lethal nerve agent" ..."
"... Moreover, so little of their "training" ..."
"... "training manual" ..."
"... Some things are now clearer though. The settled narrative has been for months that the initial 'Novichok' attack on the Skripals had been via a "gel" ..."
"... The government claims that the #Novichok poison was a "gel" smeared onto Sergei Skripal's "front door handle". If the #Novichok was in the form of a gel, how could it be in a perfume bottle which are only designed to hold liquids? pic.twitter.com/BV0pUY5uAM ..."
"... More importantly, if this narrative were to be accepted, it doesn't explain how long (several hours) the substance took to work, nor the fact that it became effective on both Skripals at precisely the same moment – despite the huge divergence in their size, weight, age, and state of health. ..."
"... Mr Rowley of course was a criminal – he had been imprisoned for possession of 11 wraps of heroin in Salisbury only a couple of years before – and is still a daily drug-user. In those circumstances, in any normal police investigation, Mr Rowley would himself be a suspect rather than only a victim in this crime. So far as we know this is not the case, though no-one can ask him in his safe house, even through his non-existent television or undelivered newspapers. ..."
"... American filmmaker and radio host Lee Stranahan, who works out of Washington DC, was a house guest of mine last week. During his brief visit to England, he took his camera to Salisbury. Without wishing to spoil the documentary he's working on, I know he won't mind me saying that of the dozens of people he spoke to at the heart of the crime scene, not a single one of them believed the state version of events. ..."
"... "Russian criminals," ..."
"... "Not the Russian state then?" ..."
"... "They are the least likely suspects," ..."
"... "It was Ukraine." ..."
"... "military-grade deadly nerve agent." ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
Jul 24, 2018 | www.rt.com
'Novichok' survivor Charlie Rowley is in a "safe house" but has been denied access to television and newspapers, according to his brother. The ever-stranger case of the Salisbury-Amesbury poisonings gets curiouser and curiouser. Whoever said 'Novichok' was a "military-grade lethal nerve agent" doesn't know their tables.

For a program which Boris Johnson told us had been 10 years in the making, had cost (presumably) millions of dollars to develop (and "train" agents to put poison on a doorknob), a 20-percent success rate must have been a bitter disappointment.

Four out of five of those affected by 'Novichok' – Sergei and Yulia Skripal, Detective Sergeant Bailey, and Charlie Rowley – have survived the contact, with only poor Dawn Sturgess, a homeless alcoholic, succumbing to its "deadly" effects.

Read more 'Curiouser and Curiouser': Salisbury, the Skripals & the epic failure of the British Fairy Tale

A polythene bag would have been a rather more effective method of assassination.

Moreover, so little of their "training" had the assassins absorbed that they apparently "discarded" this valuable deadly nerve agent in a perfume bottle in a park, coincidentally close to the bench on which the Skripals had been found slumped four months previous. The bottle miraculously evaded the dragnet of "hundreds of anti-terror police" working on the case. Thus discarded, the perfume bottle carelessly provided evidence which could well lead to the indictment of the criminals involved. Doubtless such carelessness was not in the Russian "training manual" that Mr Johnson said was in the possession of British intelligence.

No information has emerged as to when or where Mr Rowley and/or the late Ms Sturgess happened upon this perfume bottle, or why in the middle of the swirl of the Salisbury events they picked it up, took it home, but either waited until the fateful day to spray it or alternatively the bottle had lain unattended for weeks – even months – despite the fine-tooth-comb search of the park by the authorities.

Some things are now clearer though. The settled narrative has been for months that the initial 'Novichok' attack on the Skripals had been via a "gel" on their front doorknob (in accordance with the manual and the 10-year training program). Not many believe this any longer, although unfortunately the taxpayer is committed to a way-above-market-price compulsory purchase of the house.

Apart from anything else, it is difficult to envisage a gel being dispensed via a spray from a perfume bottle.

The government claims that the #Novichok poison was a "gel" smeared onto Sergei Skripal's "front door handle".
If the #Novichok was in the form of a gel, how could it be in a perfume bottle which are only designed to hold liquids? pic.twitter.com/BV0pUY5uAM

-- Ian56 (@Ian56789) July 19, 2018

More importantly, if this narrative were to be accepted, it doesn't explain how long (several hours) the substance took to work, nor the fact that it became effective on both Skripals at precisely the same moment – despite the huge divergence in their size, weight, age, and state of health.

It has always seemed much more plausible to me that the Skripals were attacked either in the restaurant where they had a leisurely full lunch, and where Mr Skripal was initially reported as behaving oddly towards the end of the restaurant experience, or on the short walk from the restaurant to the park bench, or on the bench itself. This would be far more consistent with their simultaneous collapse and, of course, would explain the perfume bottle discarded nearby.

Read more We want to hear from Scotland Yard, not media reports on Skripals' case – Russian envoy to UK

The perfume bottle being thrown away at all casts significant doubt that this attack was by a state (any state) actor at all, unless that state actor wanted the substance to be found and wanted false inferences of its provenance to be drawn. It makes it much more likely to me at least that the assailants sprayed something at the Skripals for criminal rather than political purposes and for reasons we can only, for now, speculate upon.

Mr Rowley of course was a criminal – he had been imprisoned for possession of 11 wraps of heroin in Salisbury only a couple of years before – and is still a daily drug-user. In those circumstances, in any normal police investigation, Mr Rowley would himself be a suspect rather than only a victim in this crime. So far as we know this is not the case, though no-one can ask him in his safe house, even through his non-existent television or undelivered newspapers.

It will be evident that I think little of the official state narrative in the Salisbury-Amesbury affair, but you'd be surprised at the kind of people who agree with me.

American filmmaker and radio host Lee Stranahan, who works out of Washington DC, was a house guest of mine last week. During his brief visit to England, he took his camera to Salisbury. Without wishing to spoil the documentary he's working on, I know he won't mind me saying that of the dozens of people he spoke to at the heart of the crime scene, not a single one of them believed the state version of events.

I myself spoke to a senior British Army officer at a black-tie event in London last week. There were hundreds of them there, so I'm not giving his identity away. He asked me, who did I really think was responsible for the 'Novichok' affair?

"Russian criminals," I answered. "Not the Russian state then?" he pressed. "They are the least likely suspects," I said. At which point this heavily decorated soldier leant over and whispered in my ear, "It was Ukraine."

He offered no evidence, I should say, and – but for his rank and position – I wouldn't even bother relaying it. But that is what he said.

Finally, I wish to place on record another of my dissident views on this matter. I do not believe that the substance used to attack the Skripals, and which we are told killed Ms Sturgess, was 'Novichok' at all – or any other kind of "military-grade deadly nerve agent." I am on the trail of this matter and you will be the first to know when I've found it.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

George Galloway was a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30 years. He presents TV and radio shows (including on RT). He is a film-maker, writer and a renowned orator.

[Aug 02, 2018] Did God Send Us Donald Trump by Nick Pemberton

Notable quotes:
"... I Thought About Killing You ..."
"... No, my new theory about why Americans want conflict with Russia is because we know in our heart of hearts that the world is ending soon because of climate change. ..."
"... Nick Pemberton is a student at Gustavus Adolphus College. He is currently employed by Gustavus Dining Services. Nick was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. He can be reached at [email protected] ..."
Jul 27, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org
Did God Send Us Donald Trump?

Photo by Durán | CC BY 2.0

And I think about killing myself
And I love myself way more than I love you, so

-- Kanye West, I Thought About Killing You

For the past two years, I have been wondering why Americans have been so ready, if not eager, to reengage the Cold War with Russia, despite Russia showing no desire to do so. A war between Russia and the United States, given the nuclear arsenals, political allegiances around the world, and the unhinged nature of our President, could destroy the entire species. And for what? Russia's alleged crime of election meddling, is negligible at best when in comparison to what America has done in Russia, or what rich Americans have done in America. Xenophobia, historical revisionism, and an embrace of fake news are all on the rise in the age of Trump, and are surely all factors for blaming Russia. But lying and bigotry, while practiced routinely, is often shameful, not something to get excited about.

No, my new theory about why Americans want conflict with Russia is because we know in our heart of hearts that the world is ending soon because of climate change. Just as born-again Christians flock to Trump as they yearn for a Revelations-style apocalypse, liberals want a showdown with Russia. If the world is ending anyways, let's end it on our own terms seems to be the rationale. Other countries have reacted with a more rational response to the potential of the world ending -- namely doing something about it. The Republican Party stands alone, in terms of rich countries, in its blatant denial of climate change. This is why Noam Chomsky correctly calls them the most dangerous organization in human history. The Democratic Party, their hapless and willing enablers, are a close second.

The Republican Party though has seemed to stand alone in their tendency to live in an 'alternative facts' universe. As bad as Democrats are, they know better ways to lie. But since the election of Donald Trump, the Democrats have become just as paranoid and dishonest as their friends across the aisle. The Republicans may see a communist behind every corner, but the Democrats see a Russian behind every corner. This makes sense because Russia, or at least the Soviet Union, was seen as communist the first time around. And the Democrats have always been scared of communism too. Now Russia isn't communist, or even close, but what world power is? Poor Mr. Putin. He has tried so hard to be a ruthless capitalist, in fact he has succeeded at this goal, but it appears that America is too hotheaded to care.

In the age of Barack Obama, those who deal with life superficially could forget the coming Armageddon. If one could get by his arrogance and kill lists, Mr. Obama seemed like a pretty cool guy. And when it came to Russia, a better diplomat. One has to wonder if the fear of Trump has become so irrational that we are scared of anything he does, and that by simply forcing him into the opposite, we will be better off. There also is surely a part of the American psyche that is just rooting for Mr. Trump to fail. And who wouldn't want that? Anything that gets him out of office as soon as possible should be welcomed, no matter the undemocratic implications of Robert Mueller's agenda. Trump failing while in office though? It is unclear who this helps besides the anti-Trump resistance who may be more interested in being morally superior than stopping Trump's vicious agenda.

Regardless, what Donald Trump brings to America is the sense that we are powerless. He is unpredictable, reckless, stupid and vengeful. We now live in constant fear, and for good reason. But the legitimate fear of Trump manifests as illegitimate fear of Putin, even though there is little implication they actually like each other. We fear Putin's authoritarian state, when it is Donald Trump who is bringing authoritarianism home. Why? Well, many of the resistance are imperialists. We want an enemy we can bomb and scapegoat, not one that pervades all of our own crumbling American institutions. It is the same reason why Republicans blame immigrants that Democrats blame Russia. Someone to blame, not something to change.

This powerlessness we feel may remind us of our powerless future that can easily be forgotten in the age of mass distraction. However, with Donald Trump, he is both the distraction and the problem. He is useful to the rich because he distracts, but perhaps he is a little too close to the real problem to be the calming relaxer that our smartphones are. One can turn on the TV and see Trump said blank, or Russia did that, but any person could quickly be reminded that not only is Trump a petty scandal, but a serious one.

Such is the reason for this extreme level of neurosis. There is endless piffling Trump material to focus on, but the material is based in something far more alarming not yet examined in a serious way. Thus, Trump, while ever present, remains enticing simply because we are not yet at the root of our fear. Many Americans may fear Donald Trump will grope them, insult them or embarrass them but the real fear is that he is deregulating and privatizing everything, and killing us all in the process. This is not the focus of discourse though. In part because mass media and their ties to polluting companies won't allow it. But also in part because it is no longer fun gossip.

Russia somehow remains fun gossip. The game of bringing down Donald Trump continues. He messes up, we scold, nothing happens. Until we drop the bomb, it's all fun and games. It's endless flirtation without a lot of action. I imagine it is how Ted Cruz deals with his sexual urges. It is a whole lot of fun talking about them, but he knows he is going to hell if he ever does them. Likewise, Russia is fun to talk about, but if we ever act on our claim that they are the greatest threat to democracy since 9/11, we will be bringing the end times early.

If Donald Trump was impeached, what would war-mongering corporate liberals talk about? Expect them to ask Russia to rig it even harder in 2020 for Mr. Trump.

Trump has reminded us of the real cause for alarm: the mass extinction thundering towards us. We feel so uneasy, but what can we do? Climate change is depressing and horrifying and we can seemingly do nothing about it on an individual level. We then opt for the only thing that we have left to control: how we all die. Foolish, I think. As bad as Trump is, there is something left to live for, and if Trump were to blow up Russia, it would not be on our terms, but on his. In fact, he is only likely to blow up Russia if he feels he is being out-machoed by the neoliberal corporate class in combative rhetoric. As it stands, America is egging on this madman for no other purpose than a sense of control over our own demise. If anything lets Trump and the corporate overlords win, this is it.

It is worth detailing what has happened in the Russia scandal, if only to show nothing has really happened. The first charge, which is denied by the accused firm, is that a Russian company known as Internet Research Agency funded 'millions of dollars' in advertisements. There has been no link established between this company and the Russian government. The accusation, if it is true, is no different from the private American companies who invest billions in elections, sometimes illegally, but often legally. The second charge is related to the Russian government and the alleged hacking of the Democratic National Committee. Once again, this is only a charge, but the information released by hackers was potentially damaging to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, simply because it was true. The irony is that the damaging information for the DNC was that they had rigged their own primary. The accused riggers only crime is exposing the proven riggers. There are allegations of state and local hacking too, but those were present before 2016. Did Russia do it? is hardly our biggest story now. For whatever it is, even if it did prevent the corporate warmonger Hillary Clinton from winning, it should be far less concerning than the obsessive, neurotic, fear-mongering, scapegoating, ominous mood in the United States since the 2016 election.

Why were Democrats tearing their hair out over a Trump-Putin meeting last week that seemed to offer zero conclusions about how Trump felt about anything? The whole week, which was typical Donald, was just another week of bullying the weak and submitting to the strong. Putin may be able to push some buttons in his own country, but when Trump, who never apologizes for anything, ran back his own words, it was clear that NATO would live to see another day, no matter the scattered thoughts of a wimpy man in over his head. The deranged response to the deranged Donald was enough for me to think long and hard about a theory given to me by a right-wing woman this past week.

Her theory was that God had in fact sent us Donald Trump. My first thought: highly unlikely. This man lacks the morals of the people God sends to us. In fact, I can hardly think of a worse human being. There may actually be no human being worse than Trump, save maybe Charles Koch, David Koch and whoever funds Adam Sandler movies. But I thought of the alternative the corporate media was telling me: Vladimir Putin is the real President of America and the real reason the entire country is undemocratic, poor, hungry, and in prison. Also, highly unlikely.

Yet the pamphlet this woman handed me at least admitted there was no rhyme or reason to this theory other than some guy hearing it from God: "I, like many of you, was shocked by the word I received regarding Donald Trump. Trust me when I say it was given with fear and trembling." Has the fear and trembling gone away?

The only biblical evidence of this theory the pamphlet provided was 1 Corinthians 15:52: "In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed." and 1 Thessalonians 4:16: " For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first." The problem with being a fundamentalist in the age of Trump is that you are taking a book word for word that you haven't even read. If you are going to take it literally, at least look for that capital T in trump, otherwise you have to take every trumpet player as a prophet. Next thing you know Trumpettes will be swapping out their Johnny Rebel records and replacing them with Lee Morgan. Still, the trail left by the Trumpettes was no less convincing than Robert Mueller's. There was as much evidence of Trump in the Bible as Trump in Putin's pocket.

It should come to no one's surprise that Donald Trump has not exactly been pro-Russia. A broken clock may strike right twice a day, but a doomsday clock never strikes right. Glen Greenwald points out that Barack Obama was actually more pro-Russia than Trump: "you look at President Obama versus President Trump, there's no question that President Obama was more cooperative with and collaborative with Russia and the Russian agenda than President Trump. President Trump has sent lethal arms to Ukraine -- a crucial issue for Putin -- which President Obama refused to do. President Trump has bombed the Assad forces in Syria, a client state of Putin, something that Obama refused to do because he didn't want to provoke Putin. Trump has expelled more Russian diplomats and sanctioned more Russian oligarchs than [Obama] has. Trump undid the Iran deal, which Russia favored, while Obama worked with Russia in order to do the Iran deal." Once again, liberals give Mr. Trump too much credit. He has no friends. He gets along with no one. There is no coherent plan here other than corruption.

As liberals resist Putin-Trump with homophobic memes, one has to wonder, how mad are these people? Do they realize that Donald Trump is crazy, even crazier than them? Why on earth do they want Trump armed and angry?

Anyone who can still bear to follow the news knows that the corporate media is still attempting to paint Russia as an aggressive and unreasonable foe. This is all with Mr. Trump as the President! It is hard to believe that anyone is more unreasonable and aggressive than Trump, but once again, the liberals let him off the hook. Despite military on Russia's borders, years of war-mongering rhetoric and hostile economic activity, meddling in Russia's own elections, and constant racism, Russia remains a reasonable actor in its relation to the United States. One wonders why Russia tries to reason with us at all, but the nuclear weapons certainly make things a little more complicated.

For all the talk about Putin destroying American democracy, no one mentions the real threats to U.S. democracy that led to Trump's election -- absurd campaign financing, a sensationalist profit-driven corporate media, and voter suppression. No one mentions that there was a proven election scandal in the United States in 2016. This scandal was the DNC rigging its primary for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. If the United States was a democracy, Bernie Sanders would be President right now.

Finding no comfort or coherence in the liberal narrative, I turned once again to my new right-wing friend. She told me that all these recent storms were punishment for the sins of a liberal society. Almost, actually. But her anti-choice, anti-immigrant complaints showed me she was as far from the truth as anyone else. Still, I found this to be a fascinating denial of climate change. It was not so much that she denied that it is happening, she just denied human involvement. Which goes to show, as climate change becomes increasingly hard to ignore, religion may be the only method left to explain it away.

I have always thought the war over public opinion is a losing battle though. After all, what is the prize if you win? It is far more rewarding to fight hunger, poverty, deregulation, incarceration and war. Beat those things and we will all be too cozy to have a worthwhile opinion anyways.

The public opinion debate too often turns into a qualification of other people's mental health, as if any skepticism deserves to be medicated by the liars who tell you that you need their drugs. Climate change skeptics should have a place in public discourse. The skeptics do at times have a financial interest in keeping us fooled, but then their problem isn't their skepticism, but their dishonesty, which almost proves the real skeptics right. Otherwise, these are sincere believers who are right to be skeptical of science, which has brought us eugenics, unnecessary mental health treatments, nuclear power, and the very pollutants we now oppose, and would have kept at it without government checks and populist skeptics. If only the same amount of skepticism could be applied to Fox News and the corporate hacks Donald Trump appoints.

In the spirit of skepticism, let's look at what Trump has done on climate change and the coming end of the world. As Noam Chomsky puts it, the Republicans are racing to the precipice. Among the recent sins by Mr. Trump:

1. Rolling back the Endangered Species Act.

2. Cutting NASA Climate monitoring.

3. A move to make details of scientific studies public, making sure that scientists will have to choose between privacy rights and conducting a study.

4. Rollback of car emissions standards

5. Repeal of Water of the United States rule, which threatens clean water for 117 million Americans.

6. Repeal of lead-risk reduction program

7. Reduction of chemical bans for methylene chloride, trichloroethylene and N-Methylpyrrolidone

8. Stripping rules for coal ash waste removal.

9. Pardoning despicable ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond

10. Appointing anti-EPA Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court

11. Pushing for drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

If anything, God sent us Trump to punish us for our sins, not to save us from them.

Alas, while a worthwhile exercise to imagine that God indeed sent us Donald Trump, I was only reminded that the right-wing is just as bonkers as the neoliberal wing. A week of watching CNN will have you believing anything; even pushing one to believe that God really did send Donald Trump. But I will confirm, for anyone so tempted by a new way of thinking, the glove just doesn't fit. God did not send us Donald Trump. I can't prove it, but I am fairly certain. I then was left with one mystifying question: if God did not send Donald Trump, what does the corporate media have against him?

The common variable between Trumpettes and Russiaphobes is the end of the world narrative. Is it a reaction to climate change that both must make up stories about how the world will end? Is it the only power any of us have left? Is it the cancer patient learning they have a year to live and then shooting up a school just so they can end it on their own terms? Sorry, to all Cold War Warriors and all Donald Doomers, some of us just are not ready to die. There is, one has to believe, a rose growing in the concrete somewhere that makes these prophecies not worth an early exit. At the very least, must we go out on such fabricated and petty terms? Surely there is something worth dying for besides hating political correctness or Putin's soccer ball.

What is that nuclear taste? Is reviving Hillary's corpse really worth it? Or has the entire country given up and opted for a death they can blame on someone else? It is not so dissimilar from the apocalypse envisioned by the Trumpettes, who can blame every storm that Trump makes worse on the sins of a liberal society. If Trump and Putin were to blow each other up tomorrow, liberals would die on top. However, if we are to die slightly slower due to climate change, the entire industrialized world will have to know we played a part. And there will be those pesky Trumpettes who blame it on liberalism, not capitalism. To all this I say, who cares. Yes, we messed up. We shouldn't have drained the earth of all its resources, we shouldn't have elected Trump. But no need to feel guilty and embrace the end of the world! There is still good work to be done. Who will be laughing when the world dies by nuclear (a Russiaphobe wet dream) or fire (a Trumpette wet dream). There will be no moral high ground at that point. The apocalypse will be the great equalizer. Even in the age of Trump, the world is worth sticking around for, although She might as well be done with us as soon as She can be.

Surely the principle of lesser evilism still has a place, no? Can't we all agree that dying tomorrow is better than dying today? Who is more looney, the apocalyptic Trumpettes or the Russiaphobic corporate class? We will find out soon enough. While it is very likely that Trump will win reelection (poll numbers in the Republican Party for him are very positive), it is just as likely that the new Cold War will continue until Trump is gone, whether that be in 2 years, 6 years, or 14 years (Ivanka). The premise is that we will either have Trump's apocalypse or we will blow up Russia. There must be a winner. Given Trump's flair for winning and upending the liberal class, who would be surprised if it was he who ended up blowing up Russia, not for our reasons, but for his own. Therefore, it is equally important to get Trump, the Republicans and Democrats out of power as quickly as possible.

We are once again pawns to the powers that be. Sensing the end is coming, they wish to go out with a bang. It is true, the end is coming, whether that be by climate change, nuclear weapons or God Himself. The battle over how we end is worth fighting for. I for one have no interest in being killed by Trump, the neocons, or the ecocide maniacs. If God must take me, I will let Him, but giving the establishment the satisfaction of having the last word is too much to bear. To hear Hillary's cackle at my funeral with the words "We came, we saw, he died" across the headstone would be a tragedy too great for even a species sprinting towards the precipice. If Donald were to preside over my grave, he would simply say "I won, you tiny loser", but I would resent this option equally. If God exists, and wants the last word for Himself, He should start by kicking all with nuclear fever to the curb. For we all are dangerously close to becoming the latest item on America's war-mongering resume. Let's just hope Donald doesn't take the bait and one-up the liberals one last time.

Even if God doesn't exist, one would have a better chance reasoning with Him than either Donald or his yuppy resistance groupies. So I thanked my right-wing friend today. For even if she was no more sane than the neoliberals prattling to the abyss, she at least had a nice place to send me after the world ended; that is assuming, I was born in America, had as many babies as ejaculations, and voted for God's unconventional servant, Donald J. Trump. Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: Nick Pemberton

Nick Pemberton is a student at Gustavus Adolphus College. He is currently employed by Gustavus Dining Services. Nick was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. He can be reached at [email protected]

[Aug 01, 2018] The word McCarthyism came to mean making accusations of treason without sufficient evidence

Aug 01, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

To some, that fear was not a problem but a tool -- one could defeat political enemies simply by accusing them of being Russian sympathizers. There was no need for evidence, so desperate were Americans to believe; just an accusation that someone was in league with Russia was enough. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy fired his first shot on February 9, 1950, proclaiming there were 205 card-carrying members of the Communist Party working for the Department of State. The evidence? Nothing but assertions .

Indeed, the very word " McCarthyism " came to mean making accusations of treason without sufficient evidence. Other definitions include a ggressively questioning a person's patriotism, using accusations of disloyalty to pressure a person to adhere to conformist politics or discredit an opponent, and subverting civil and political rights in the name of national security.

Pretending to be saving America while he tore at its foundations, McCarthy destroyed thousands of lives over the next four years simply by pointing a finger and saying "communist." Whenever anyone invoked his Fifth Amendment right to silence, McCarthy answered that this was "the most positive proof obtainable that the witness is communist." The power of accusation was used by others as well: the Lavender Scare , which concluded that the State Department was overrun with closeted homosexuals who were at risk of being blackmailed by Moscow for their perversions, was an offshoot of McCarthyism, and by 1951, 600 people had been fired based solely on evidence-free "morals" charges. State legislatures and school boards mimicked McCarthy. Books and movies were banned. Blacklists abounded.

The FBI embarked on campaigns of political repression (they would later claim Martin Luther King Jr. had communist ties), even as journalists and academics voluntarily narrowed their political thinking to exclude communism.

[Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?

Highly recommended!
Jul 31, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Nik , July 28, 2018 at 9:22 am

Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?" http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2017/07/what-are-the-democrats-hiding-by-publius-tacitus.html

For several years, a family of foreign nationals (and not only Wassermannn-Schultz) has been surfing the congressional computers while having no security clearance.

Then there was a criminal negligence by H. Clinton who made her emails, filled with the highest-level classified information, available to Chinese (not the Russians). http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/07/httpstruepunditcomfbi-lisa-page-dimes-out-top-fbi-officials-during-classified-house-testimony-bureau-bos.html

Both Debbie and Hillary should be in federal prison already. Clinton used to be fond of droning Assange for divulging the criminal and illegal activities of the state. What Debbie and Hillary did has been much more dangerous to the US national security.

[Jul 31, 2018] The question re the Russians still targeting our elections? belongs to the same category as Are you still beating your wife? Both suggest kangaroo court in action

Jul 31, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

STEPHEN COHEN: ...Are the Russians still targeting our elections?" This is in the category "Are you still beating your wife?" There is no proof that the Russians have targeted or attacked our elections. But it's become axiomatic. What kind of media is that, are the Russians still, still attacking our elections.

And what Michael McFaul, whom I've known for years, formerly Ambassador McFaul, purportedly a scholar and sometimes a scholar said, it is simply the kind of thing, to be as kind as I can, that I heard from the John Birch Society about President Eisenhower when he went to meet Khrushchev when I was a kid growing up in Kentucky.

...to stage a kangaroo trial of the president of the United States in the mainstream media, and have plenty of once-dignified people come on and deliver the indictment, is without precedent in this country

[Jul 31, 2018] The Comey, Brennan, Mueller claim - indeed a central one upon which the recent indictment rests- that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian State agent that hacked the DNC- was discredited and put to rest last year by the forensics conducted by Bill Binney and his colleagues.

Jul 31, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

mlnw , 13 days ago

The Comey, Brennan, Mueller claim - indeed a central one upon which the recent indictment rests- that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian State agent that hacked the DNC- was discredited and put to rest last year by the forensics conducted by Bill Binney and his colleagues. The Guccifer 2.0 metadata was analyzed for its transmission speed, and based on the internet speeds to and from numerous test locations abroad and in the U.S., it was determined to have been impossible for the so-called Guccifer 2.0 to have hacked the DNC computers over the internet. The transmission speed however did correspond to the speed of the transfer to a thumb drive. Additionally, it was found that the data had been manipulated and split into two parts to simulate a July and a September transfer, when in fact the parts merge perfectly as single file, and where, according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence would be 100 to the 50th power.

As for the crude trace fingerprints (e.g. the referencing of Dzerzinsky), one of the Wikileaks data dumps (Vault 7 Marble) during a period when Assange was negotiating with the Administration - there were two at the time (Vault 7 Marble and Vault 7 Grasshopper), the release of which apparently enraged Mike Pompeo- was designed to obfuscate, fabricate and frame countries such as Russia, Iran or North Korea by pretending to be the target country, including in the use of target's alphabet and language.

VIPs has written numerous articles on this in Consortium News. See also the report by Patrick Lawrence Smith in The Nation at: https://www.thenation.com/a... . (It was apparently so hot at the time- and disputed by several other VIPs members- that The Nation sought an independent assessment by third party, though those comments were easily addressed and dismissed in seriatim by Binney in an annex to the article.)

Binney has explained his forensic analysis and conclusions at numerous forums, and in a sit-down with Secretary Pompeo in October, 2017- though Mueller, the FBI, and mainstream and some of the alternative press seem either deaf, dumb and blind to it all, or interested in discrediting the study. The irony is, I'd venture to guess, that Binney, with his 40 years of experience, including as Technical Director and technical guru at the NSA, is, even in retirement, more sophisticated in these matters than any one at the Agency, or the FBI, or CIA, or certainly, the Congressional Intelligence Committees. So, it is astounding that any or all of them could have, but did not, invite him to testify as an expert.

Moreover, the NSA has a record of every transmission, and also would have it on backup files. And, the FBI has been sitting on Seth Rich's computer and his communications with Wikileaks, and presumably has a report that it has not released. And of course, as Trump asked in his press conference, where's the DNC server, any or all of which would put this question to rest.

A recent interview with Binney can be found at:

Play Hide
mlnw -> mlnw , 11 days ago
The last clause of the first paragraph should have said: "according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence would be one over 100 to the 50th power

[Jul 31, 2018] Guccifer 2.0 and GCHQ

Notable quotes:
"... There is a pattern of abuse of formerly well regarded institutions to achieve the propaganda aims of the Deep State establishment. The depths that were plumbed to push the Iraq WMD falsehoods are well known. Yet no one was held to account nor was there any honest accounting of the abuse. There have been pretenses like the Owen inquiry that you note. ..."
"... We see the same situation of sweeping under the rug malfeasance and even outright criminality through obfuscation and obstruction in the case of the meddling in the 2016 election by top officials in intelligence and law enforcement. Clearly less and less people are buying what the Deep State sells despite their overwhelming control of the media channels. ..."
"... What is to be gained by the leadership in Britain in promoting these biological weapons cases since Litvinenko? In the US it is quite apparent that the Deep State have become extremely powerful and the likelihood that Trump recognizes that resistance is futile is very high. Schumer may be proven right that they have six ways from Sunday to make you kowtow to their dictats. ..."
Jul 31, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

If you look at the 'Lawfare' blog, in which a key figure is James Comey's crony Benjamin Wittes, you will find a long piece published last Friday, entitled 'Russia Indictment 2.0: What to Make of Mueller's Hacking Indictment.'

Among the authors, in addition to Wittes himself, is the sometime GCHQ employee Matt Tait. It appears that the former head of that organisation, the Blairite 'trusty' Robert Hannigan, who must know where a good few skeletons are buried, is a figure of some moment in the conspiracy.

(See https://www.lawfareblog.com... .)

It was Matt Tait who, using the 'Twitter' handle @pwnallthethings, identified the name and patronymic of Dzerzhinsky in the 'metadata' of the 'Guccifer 2.0' material on 15 June 2016, the day after Ellen Nakashima first disseminated the BS from 'CrowdStrike' in the 'WP.'

The story was picked up the following day in a report on the 'Ars Technica' site, and Tait's own account appeared on the 'Lawfare' site, to which he has been a regular contributor, on 28 July.

(See https://arstechnica.com/inf... ; https://www.lawfareblog.com... .)

According to the CV provided in conjunction with the new article:

'Matt Tait is a senior cybersecurity fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously he was CEO of Capital Alpha Security, a consultancy in the UK, worked at Google Project Zero, was a principal security consultant for iSEC Partners, and NGS Secure, and worked as an information security specialist for GCHQ.'


blue peacock , 13 days ago

How does the objective truth get disclosed in an environment of extreme deceit by so many parties?

How to trust western intelligence when they have such a long and sordid track record of deceit, lies and propaganda? At the same time there is such a long history of Russian and Chinese intelligence and information operations against the west.

Then there is the nexus among the highest levels of US law enforcement and intelligence as well as political elites in both parties and key individuals in the media complex.

We are living in a hall of mirrors and it seems the trend is towards confirmation bias in information consumption.

richardstevenhack , 13 days ago
Excellent post, especially the debunking of the 'Gerasimov doctrine' which I always thought was more hand-waving and Russian mind-reading.

It's important to realize that there are a number of people in the infosec community who have biases against Russia, just as there are in the general population. Then there are more cautious people, who recognize the difficulty in attributing a hack to any specific person absent solid, incontrovertible, non-circumstantial and non-spoofable (and preferably offline) evidence.

Tait doesn't appear to be one of the latter. Thomas Rid would be another. There are others.

Jeffrey Carr is one of the latter, and his familiarity with intelligence matters is clear from his organization of the annual "Suits and Spooks" Conference. I believe he was the first to raise questions about the DNC hack which didn't pass his smell test.

There are also a number of companies in infosec who rely on latching onto a particular strain of hacker, the more publicly exploitable for PR purposes the better, as a means of keeping the company name in front of potential high-profile and highly billable clients. CrowdStrike and its Russia obsession isn't the only one that's been tagged with that propensity.

Mandiant could be referred to as the "Chinese, all the time" company, for example. Richard Bejtlich was at Fireeye and the became Chief Security Officer when they acquired Mandiant. He spent quite a bit of effort on his blog warning about the Chinese military buildup as a huge threat to the US. He's former USAF so perhaps that's not surprising.

Bottom line: Confirmation bias is a real thing.

Barbara Ann , 13 days ago
Glad David's comment has been reproduced as a post in its own right, this is a critically important topic.

IMO Matt Tait plays the role of midwife in this conspiracy. His Twitter thread

View Hide
mlnw , 13 days ago
The Comey, Brennan, Mueller claim - indeed a central one upon which the recent indictment rests- that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian State agent that hacked the DNC- was discredited and put to rest last year by the forensics conducted by Bill Binney and his colleagues. The Guccifer 2.0 metadata was analyzed for its transmission speed, and based on the internet speeds to and from numerous test locations abroad and in the U.S., it was determined to have been impossible for the so-called Guccifer 2.0 to have hacked the DNC computers over the internet. The transmission speed however did correspond to the speed of the transfer to a thumb drive. Additionally, it was found that the data had been manipulated and split into two parts to simulate a July and a September transfer, when in fact the parts merge perfectly as single file, and where, according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence would be 100 to the 50th power.

As for the crude trace fingerprints (e.g. the referencing of Dzerzinsky), one of the Wikileaks data dumps (Vault 7 Marble) during a period when Assange was negotiating with the Administration - there were two at the time (Vault 7 Marble and Vault 7 Grasshopper), the release of which apparently enraged Mike Pompeo- was designed to obfuscate, fabricate and frame countries such as Russia, Iran or North Korea by pretending to be the target country, including in the use of target's alphabet and language.

VIPs has written numerous articles on this in Consortium News. See also the report by Patrick Lawrence Smith in The Nation at: https://www.thenation.com/a... . (It was apparently so hot at the time- and disputed by several other VIPs members- that The Nation sought an independent assessment by third party, though those comments were easily addressed and dismissed in seriatim by Binney in an annex to the article.)

Binney has explained his forensic analysis and conclusions at numerous forums, and in a sit-down with Secretary Pompeo in October, 2017- though Mueller, the FBI, and mainstream and some of the alternative press seem either deaf, dumb and blind to it all, or interested in discrediting the study. The irony is, I'd venture to guess, that Binney, with his 40 years of experience, including as Technical Director and technical guru at the NSA, is, even in retirement, more sophisticated in these matters than any one at the Agency, or the FBI, or CIA, or certainly, the Congressional Intelligence Committees. So, it is astounding that any or all of them could have, but did not, invite him to testify as an expert.

Moreover, the NSA has a record of every transmission, and also would have it on backup files. And, the FBI has been sitting on Seth Rich's computer and his communications with Wikileaks, and presumably has a report that it has not released. And of course, as Trump asked in his press conference, where's the DNC server, any or all of which would put this question to rest.

A recent interview with Binney can be found at:

Play Hide
mlnw -> mlnw , 11 days ago
The last clause of the first paragraph should have said:
"according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence would be one over 100 to the 50th power
David Habakkuk , 11 days ago
All,

More evidence for the at least passive complicity of GCHQ – for which Matt Tait used to work, and which Robert Hannigan used to run – in corrupt 'information operations' comes in a report yesterday on CNN.

(See https://edition.cnn.com/201... )

It opens:

'Police have identified two suspects in the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, a source with knowledge of the investigation told CNN on Thursday.

'The pair left the UK in the wake of the attack on what is believed to have been a commercial flight, the source added.

'Their departure was revealed in a coded Russian message to Moscow sent after the attack, which was intercepted by a British base in Cyprus, the source said. The British government blames the Skripals' poisoning on Russia.'

The base in question is high up in the Troodos mountains, and is formally run by the RAF but actually a key resource for both GCHQ and NSA in monitoring communications over a wide area. According to an internal document from the former organisation, it has 'long been regarded as a 'Jewel in the Crown' by NSA as it offers unique access to the Levant, North Africa, and Turkey'.

(See https://theintercept.com/20... .)

That the quote comes a report in 'The Intercept' in January 2016 revealing that one of the uses of the Troodos facility is to intercept live video feeds from Israeli drones and fighter jets brings out how paradoxical the world is. For it also appears to have emerged as an important resource in 'information operations' in support of 'Borgist' agendas.

The claim about intercepts incriminating the Russians over the Salisbury incident was first made in a piece by Marco Giannangeli in the Daily Express on 9 April, which followed up the claims which Colonel de Bretton-Gordon had been instrumental in disseminating, and was then widely picked up by the MSM.

(See https://www.express.co.uk/n... .)

It was headlined: 'REVEALED: The bombshell Russian message intercepted on DAY of Skripal poisonings,' and opened: 'AN ELECTRONIC message to Moscow sent on the day former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a nerve agent in Salisbury included the phrase "the package has been delivered".'

Supposedly, this 'prompted a young Flight Lieutenant to recall a separate message that had been intercepted and discounted on the previous day.' The messages were 'understood to have formed "just one part" of the intelligence packet which later allowed Prime Minister Theresa May to state it was "highly likely" that Russia was behind the attacks.'

As it happens, the same writer – Marco Giannangeli – had disseminated a parallel piece of palpable fiction on 1 September 2013, in the 'Sunday Express', in relation to the Ghouta 'false flag.'

(See https://www.express.co.uk/n... .)

This one was headlined, even more melodramatically, 'Senior Syrian military chiefs tell captain: fire chemicals or be shot; BRITISH intelligence chiefs have intercepted radio messages in which senior Syrian military chiefs are heard ordering the use of chemical weapons.'

Part of the story of how bogus claims about 'smoking gun' evidence from 'SIGINT' were used to support the attempt to use the Ghouta 'false flag' to inveigle the British and Americans into destroying the Syrian government was told in my SST post on the incident. However, to mix metaphors, I only scratched the surface of a can of worms.

In a report on the 'Daily Caller' site on 29 August 2013, Kenneth Timmerman claimed that the sequence had started with an actual intercept by Unit 8200 – the Israeli equivalent of GCHQ and NSA.

(See http://dailycaller.com/2013... .)

Claiming to base his account on Western intelligence sources, he suggested that:

'According to these officers, who served in top positions in the United States, Britain, France, Israel, and Jordan, a Syrian military communication intercepted by Israel's famed Unit 8200 electronic intelligence outfit has been doctored so that it leads a reader to just the opposite conclusion reached by the original report.'

While I am not in a position to establish whether his claim is or is not accurate, an AP report on the same day quoted 'U.S. intelligence officials' explaining that 'an intercept of Syrian military officials discussing the strike was among low-level staff, with no direct evidence tying the attack back to an Assad insider or even a senior Syrian commander'.

(See https://www.salon.com/2013/... )

Meanwhile, Timmerman's claim that 'The doctored report was picked up on Israel's Channel 2 TV on Aug. 24, then by Focus magazine in Germany, the Times of Israel, and eventually by The Cable in Washington, DC' is supported by links to the relevant stories, which say what he claims they say.

Moreover, it seems clear that the 1 September 2013 report was an attempt to counter a – somewhat devastating – critique made in a 31 August post entitled 'The Troodos Conundrum' by the former British Ambassador Craig Murray, who had been closely involved with the facility during his time at the Foreign Office (and has written invaluable material on the Salisbury incident.)

(See https://www.craigmurray.org... .)

Precisely because of the closeness of the GCHQ/NSA collaboration, Murray brought out, there was indeed a major problem explaining why claims about 'SIGINT' had been central to the case made in the 'Government Assessment' released by the White House on 30 August 2013, but not even mentioned in the Joint Intelligence Community 'Assessment' produced two days before.

The answer, Murray suggested, was that the 'intelligence' came from Mossad, and so would not have been automatically shared with the British. But, given the superior capabilities of Troodos, if Mossad had it, the British should have also. So his claims 'meshed' with those by Timmerman and the AP, and the 'Express' report looks like a lame attempt at a cover-up.

Again however, one finds the world is a paradoxical place. As I noted in my SST post, detailed demolitions of the claims about 'SIGINT' in relation to Ghouta were provided both Seymour Hersh, in the 'Whose sarin?' article, and also on the 'Who Attacked Ghouta?' site masterminded by one 'sasa wawa.'

Later, it became clear that this was likely to be the Israeli technology entrepreneur Saar Wilf, a former employee of Unit 8200. So this may – or may not – be an indication of deep divisions within Israeli intelligence.

Between 18 March and 31 April, a fascinating series of posts on the Salisbury incident appeared on the 'Vineyard of the Saker' blog. The author, who used the name 'sushi', was a self-professed IT professsional, who had however obviously acquired an extensive familiarity with 'chemical forensics' and appeared to have some experience of 'SIGINT.'

(See https://thesaker.is/tag/sushi/ .)

In a 14 April post, 'sushi' produced a dismissal of the claims about 'SIGINT' implicating the Russians over the Salisbury incident quite as contemptuous as that which 'sasa wawa' had produced in relation to the claims about it incriminating the Syrian government over Ghouta. Pointing to the implausibility of the story disseminated by the 'Express', he remarked that:

'It is doubted that any message traffic is processed on Cyprus. It is more likely that the entire take is transmitted back to GCHQ in Cheltenham via a fibre optic link. There exabytes of take are processed, not by a bored flight lieutenant, but by banks of high speed computers.

'Clearly someone in Cheltenham has committed a programming error. Anyone with any knowledge of secret communications knows that the code phrase used to confirm a murder in Salisbury is "small pizza, no anchovies." '

Interestingly, another paper in the 'Express' group made a parallel claim in relation to the Khan Sheikhoun incident to that about the Ghouta incident, but the story was not picked up and may indeed have been suppressed.

On 9 April, the paper published a report headlined 'Brit spies' lead role in Syrian air strikes; RAF BASE IS 'WEAPON.' This claimed that 'within an hour of the airstrike', Troodos had intercepted communications revealing that nerve gas had been used, and had been delivered by jets from the Syrian Arab Air Force's Shayrat Air Base.

(See

View Hide
David Habakkuk , 12 days ago
All,

I was drafting a response to the comment by 'Barbara Ann' – thanks for the link to the recent posts by Adam Carter – before going out. Returning and reading some very interesting comments, I think what I wanted to say has more general relevance.

One reason I am reading so much into 'this Dzerzhinsky thing' is the body of accumulating evidence that people like Tait are part of a system of networks which combine sanctimoniousness, corruption and stupidity in about equal measures. So some more examples may be to the point.

Different cases in which I have taken an interest come together in a post by Tait on the 'Lawfare' site on 13 March, entitled 'U.K. Prime Minister's Speech on the Russian Poisoning of Sergei Skripal: Decoding the Signals.'

(See https://www.lawfareblog.com... .)

In support of the claim that in accusing Russia of a pioneering act of chemical terrorism Theresa May was relying upon accurate analysis from the 'U.K. intelligence community', Tait wrote that:

'May then explained that Skripal was poisoned by a "military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia one of a group of nerve agents known as 'Novichok.'" She is laying out the basic groundwork for the government's attribution to a nation state and, more specifically, Russia. At Porton Down, the U.K. has one of the world's best forensic labs for analyzing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. With the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, this lab not only established that Polonium-210 was used but also which reactor in Russia it came from.'

In the event, as is by now well know, Boris Johnson's claim that Porton Down scientists had told him that the agent which poisoned the Skripals came from Russia was specifically repudiated by the head of that organisation, Gary Aitkenhead, on 3 April. Our Foreign Secretary told a flagrant lie, and was exposed.

(See https://www.craigmurray.org... .)

As I have shown in previous posts on this site, the 'Inquiry' conducted by Sir Robert Owen into the death of Litvinenko was patently corrupt. Moreover, it seems highly likely that, in fabricating 'evidence' to cover up what actually happened, Christopher Steele was doing a 'dry-run' for the fabrication of material in the dossier published by 'BuzzFeed.'

In fact, however, Owen's report made quite clear that the role of Porton Down was marginal. Furthermore, 'Scientist A1' from the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston quite specifically rejected the claim that 'impurity profiling' made it possible to establish that the source of the polonium was the Avangard facility at Sarov, her arguments being accepted by Owen. Either Tait has not bothered to read the report or very much of the coverage, or he is lying.

(For the report, see http://webarchive.nationala... . For some of the mass of evidence which Owen chose to ignore, see my discussions at http://turcopolier.typepad.... ; http://turcopolier.typepad....

What Porton Down did do was to use 'impurity profiling', which can produce 'spectra' identifying even the tiniest traces of substances, to frustrate the attempt to use the 'false flag' attack at Ghouta on 21 August 2013 to inveigle the American and British governments into destroying the Assad 'régime' and handing the country over to jihadists.

It may well be that this display of competence and integrity led to a 'clampdown' at the organisation, which encouraged Boris Johnson to believe he could get away with lying about what its scientists told him.

(See my defence and development of the crucial reporting by Seymour Hersh, at http://turcopolier.typepad.... .)

A general pattern which emerges is that the same small group of 'disinformation peddlers' resurfaces in different contexts – and the pattern whereby 'private security companies' are used to create a spurious impression of independence also recurs.

As I bring out in my piece on Ghouta, two figures who were critical in shaping the 'narrative' acccording to which Syrian government responsibility for the atrocity had been conclusively proved, were Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, formerly the former commanding officer of the UK Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment, and also NATO's Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion, and Dan Kaszeta.

Immediately after the story of the poisoning of the Skripals on 4 March broke, the same duo reappeared, and have been as critical to shaping the 'narrative' about the later incident as they were to that about the former.

(For the piece by Kaszeta on 'Bellingcat' which introduced the 'Novichok' theme four days later, see https://www.bellingcat.com/... .)

This makes it particular interesting to look at the website of Kaszeta's consultancy, 'Strongpoint Security Limited', in conjunction with the 'Companies House' documentation on the company.

(See http://strongpointsecurity.... ; https://beta.companieshouse... .)

One would have thought from the website that his company was a small, but hardly insignificant, player, in the field of 'physical and operational security.' As it happens, having filed 'Total exemption small company accounts' since its incorporation in May 2011, last December it filed 'Micro company accounts' for the year to 31 May 2017.

With a turnover of Ł20,000, staff costs of a bit more than half of that, and a profit of Ł394, we can see that although unlike Matt Tait's, Kaszeta's company did trade, if indeed it was his sole source of income, this pivotal figure in Anglo-American 'disinformation operations' was living on something less than $15,000 a year, at current exchange rates. (Pull the other one, as we say in Britain.)

This is all the more ironic, as the website brings out quite how critical a figure Kaszeta has been in obscuring the truth. From the bio he gives, we learn that having started as a Chemical Officer in the U.S. Army, he worked for 12 years in the White House, dealing with CBRN matters, before moving to Britain in 2008.

Among the articles to which he links on the site, we see his response in 'NOW Lebanon' in December 2013 to Hersh's original 'Whose sarin?' piece on Ghouta, -- in which Kaszeta first introduced the famous 'hexamine hypothesis.'

This – patently preposterous – suggestion that the presence of a single 'impurity' is a 'smoking gun' incriminating the Syrian government has echoed on into the clearly corrupt OPCW documents purporting to demonstrate that it was responsible for the 4 April 2017 Khan Sheikhoun attack.

Of some interest in understanding where Kaszeta he is coming from is what he describes as his 'oldest (and most footnoted on Wikipedia)' piece, which is an article published in 1988 on a site called 'Lituanus', on 'Lithuanian Resistance to Foreign Occupation 1940-52.'

(See http://www.lituanus.org/198... .)

As to Colonel de Bretton-Gordon, it is of interest to look at the attempt to 'finger' the GRU over the Skripal poisoning published under the title 'UK Poisoning Inquiry turns to Russian Agency in Mueller Indictments' in the 'New York Times' last Sunday, and the response by the Russian Embassy in London to a question about it.

(See https://www.nytimes.com/201... ; https://www.rusemb.org.uk/f... .)

The response objects that 'while the British authorities keep concealing all information concerning the investigation into the Salisbury incident, the newspaper has quoted "one former US official familiar with the inquiry".'

It also asserts that that crucial evidence which has not been made available to the Russians – and here, as with Ghouta and Khan Sheikhoun, the results of 'impurity profiling' are critical – appears to have been shared not just with inappropriate Americans, but with all kinds of others.

And indeed, the Embassy is quite right in suggesting that the claim made by the supposed creator of 'Novichok', Vladimir Uglev, to the BBC in April about 'all the spectrum data I was sent recently' has neither been confirmed nor denied. This seems a general pattern – the 'spectra' which may actually be able to provide definitive answers to questions of responsibility are only provided to people who can be relied upon to give the 'right' answers.

The Embassy response also quite fairly refers to a report in the 'Times' also in April, about the 'intelligence' which had been 'used to persuade world leaders that Moscow was behind the poisoning' and that the 'Novichok' had been manufactured at the Shikhany facility at in southwest Russia, which stated that de Bretton-Gordon, 'who had seen the intelligence, called it very compelling.' He has a long history of lying about CW in Syria – so is obviously the right person to lie about them in the UK.

(See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/... ; https://www.thetimes.co.uk/... .)

It thus becomes interesting to probe into what lies behind the opening of de Bretton-Gordon's entry on the 'Military Speakers' website ('Real Heroes; Real Stories.') According to this, he is 'Chief Operating Office of SecureBio Ltd a commercial company offering CBRN Resilience, consultancy and deployable capabilities.'

(See http://www.militaryspeakers... .)

From 'Companies House', we learn that the liquidation of 'Secure Bio', which started in in June 2015, was concluded in August last year. The really interesting thing about the records, however, is that at the time of the liquidation the company had very large debts, which were written off, of a kind and in a manner which suggested that de Bretton-Gordon's activities may have been largely funded by loans from untraceable sources which were not meant to be repaid.

(See https://beta.companieshouse... – in particular the 'Statement of affairs' dated 30 June 2015.)

Actually, with the 'NYT' report we come full circle. Among those quoted is Mark Galeotti – apparently his admission that he had totally misrepresented the thinking of the Russian General Staff has not him made more cautious about making extravagant claims about its Main Intelligence Directorate (misreported as Main Directorate by the 'NYT.')

Also quoted are two figures who play key roles in Owen's Report – the Soviet era-GRU defector 'Viktor Suvorov' (real name 'Vladimir Rezun') and the former KGB operative Yuri Shvets. Both of these feature prominently in the posts on the Litvinenko affair to which I have linked, and both were key members of the 'information operations' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky. This now seems to have taken control of American policy, as of British.

The role of 'Suvorov'/Rezun in attempting to defend the interpretations of Stalin's policy put forward by MI6 in the run-up to the Second World War, and those asserted later by General Keitel, and the way he was demolished by the leading American historian of the War in the East, Colonel David Glantz, and the Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky, is too large a subject to go into here.

(For a brief review, see https://networks.h-net.org/... .)

However, it provides further reason to wonder whether the misreadings of Stalin's policy which caused MI6 to give advice to Chamberlain which helped destroy the last chances of preventing the Nazi-Soviet Pact, may still be the 'house view' of that organisation. It was, obviously, the Pact which spelled 'curtains' both for Poland and the Baltics.

Jack -> David Habakkuk , 12 days ago
David

There is a pattern of abuse of formerly well regarded institutions to achieve the propaganda aims of the Deep State establishment. The depths that were plumbed to push the Iraq WMD falsehoods are well known. Yet no one was held to account nor was there any honest accounting of the abuse. There have been pretenses like the Owen inquiry that you note.

We see the same situation of sweeping under the rug malfeasance and even outright criminality through obfuscation and obstruction in the case of the meddling in the 2016 election by top officials in intelligence and law enforcement. Clearly less and less people are buying what the Deep State sells despite their overwhelming control of the media channels.

It seems that we are marching towards a credibility crisis similar to what was experienced in the Soviet Union when no one trusted the contents in Pravda.

What is to be gained by the leadership in Britain in promoting these biological weapons cases since Litvinenko? In the US it is quite apparent that the Deep State have become extremely powerful and the likelihood that Trump recognizes that resistance is futile is very high. Schumer may be proven right that they have six ways from Sunday to make you kowtow to their dictats.

Fred -> Jack , 12 days ago
Jack,

"Yet no one was held to account"

That was one of the changes being hoped for when Obama was first elected. Instead we got little, except for things such as bailed out bankers and the IRS scandal which lasted until the end of his 2nd term. The panic from the left over the 2016 election issues the are still going on is that the expected candidate isn't in office and they are being exposed. Whether they get prosecuted is another story.

http://taxprof.typepad.com/...

[Jul 31, 2018] Matt Tait may play the role of midwife in DNC hack conspiracy.

Notable quotes:
"... the error message in Cyrillic can only be generated via some technical contortions with the explicit intention of doing so. ..."
"... I would challenge anyone reading Adam Carter's work to conclude that the G2 persona is anything other than misdirection specifically designed to point to Russia. The indictment itself has zero new evidence that can be analyzed and I suspect all the GRU detail is aimed at giving it the appearance of authenticity - even when subject to scrutiny by the IC itself. I think John Helmer is closest to the truth when he says: "...it may be a signal that US cyber agents can fabricate Russian tracks to deceive other US cyber agents; Mueller too." ..."
Jul 31, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
Barbara Ann , 13 days ago
Glad David's comment has been reproduced as a post in its own right, this is a critically important topic.

IMO Matt Tait plays the role of midwife in this conspiracy. His Twitter thread

View Hide

Now THIS is a really interesting development in #DncHack:
@Gawker has & is publishing the DNC's Trump oppo research

gawker.com/this-looks-lik...

4:33 PM - Jun 15, 2016

This Looks Like the DNC's Hacked Trump O...
A 200+ page document that appears to be a
Democratic anti-Trump playbook compiled by the
Democratic National Committee has leaked

gawker.com

Q? 398 Q 269 people are talking about this

of June 15th 2016 mentions several "opsec fail"s in respect of 'Russian' metadata which, as you say, were then picked up by Ars Technica & others. So the meme was born. A key claim is that an error message in Cyrillic script appeared because one of the leaked docs was converted to pdf before being sent to Gawker - one of 2 press outlets to get a preview before Guccifer 2.0 published the docs on his blog. Adam Carter (@with_integrity), at http://g-2.space/ citing theforensicator (link below) says this is not true and that the error message in Cyrillic can only be generated via some technical contortions with the explicit intention of doing so.

I would challenge anyone reading Adam Carter's work to conclude that the G2 persona is anything other than misdirection specifically designed to point to Russia. The indictment itself has zero new evidence that can be analyzed and I suspect all the GRU detail is aimed at giving it the appearance of authenticity - even when subject to scrutiny by the IC itself. I think John Helmer is closest to the truth when he says: "...it may be a signal that US cyber agents can fabricate Russian tracks to deceive other US cyber agents; Mueller too."

https://theforensicator.wor...

[Jul 31, 2018] More evidence for the at least passive complicity of GCHQ for which Matt Tait used to work, and which Robert Hannigan used to run in corrupt 'information operations' comes in a report yesterday on CNN.

Notable quotes:
"... As it happens, the same writer – Marco Giannangeli – had disseminated a parallel piece of palpable fiction on 1 September 2013, in the 'Sunday Express', in relation to the Ghouta 'false flag.' ..."
Jul 31, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

David Habakkuk , 11 days ago

All,

More evidence for the at least passive complicity of GCHQ – for which Matt Tait used to work, and which Robert Hannigan used to run – in corrupt 'information operations' comes in a report yesterday on CNN.

(See https://edition.cnn.com/201... )

It opens:

'Police have identified two suspects in the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, a source with knowledge of the investigation told CNN on Thursday.

'The pair left the UK in the wake of the attack on what is believed to have been a commercial flight, the source added.

'Their departure was revealed in a coded Russian message to Moscow sent after the attack, which was intercepted by a British base in Cyprus, the source said. The British government blames the Skripals' poisoning on Russia.'

The base in question is high up in the Troodos mountains, and is formally run by the RAF but actually a key resource for both GCHQ and NSA in monitoring communications over a wide area. According to an internal document from the former organisation, it has 'long been regarded as a 'Jewel in the Crown' by NSA as it offers unique access to the Levant, North Africa, and Turkey'.

(See https://theintercept.com/20... .)

That the quote comes a report in 'The Intercept' in January 2016 revealing that one of the uses of the Troodos facility is to intercept live video feeds from Israeli drones and fighter jets brings out how paradoxical the world is. For it also appears to have emerged as an important resource in 'information operations' in support of 'Borgist' agendas.

The claim about intercepts incriminating the Russians over the Salisbury incident was first made in a piece by Marco Giannangeli in the Daily Express on 9 April, which followed up the claims which Colonel de Bretton-Gordon had been instrumental in disseminating, and was then widely picked up by the MSM.

(See https://www.express.co.uk/n... .)

It was headlined: 'REVEALED: The bombshell Russian message intercepted on DAY of Skripal poisonings,' and opened: 'AN ELECTRONIC message to Moscow sent on the day former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a nerve agent in Salisbury included the phrase "the package has been delivered".'

Supposedly, this 'prompted a young Flight Lieutenant to recall a separate message that had been intercepted and discounted on the previous day.' The messages were 'understood to have formed "just one part" of the intelligence packet which later allowed Prime Minister Theresa May to state it was "highly likely" that Russia was behind the attacks.'

As it happens, the same writer – Marco Giannangeli – had disseminated a parallel piece of palpable fiction on 1 September 2013, in the 'Sunday Express', in relation to the Ghouta 'false flag.'

(See https://www.express.co.uk/n... .)

This one was headlined, even more melodramatically, 'Senior Syrian military chiefs tell captain: fire chemicals or be shot; BRITISH intelligence chiefs have intercepted radio messages in which senior Syrian military chiefs are heard ordering the use of chemical weapons.'

Part of the story of how bogus claims about 'smoking gun' evidence from 'SIGINT' were used to support the attempt to use the Ghouta 'false flag' to inveigle the British and Americans into destroying the Syrian government was told in my SST post on the incident. However, to mix metaphors, I only scratched the surface of a can of worms.

In a report on the 'Daily Caller' site on 29 August 2013, Kenneth Timmerman claimed that the sequence had started with an actual intercept by Unit 8200 – the Israeli equivalent of GCHQ and NSA.

(See http://dailycaller.com/2013... .)

Claiming to base his account on Western intelligence sources, he suggested that:

'According to these officers, who served in top positions in the United States, Britain, France, Israel, and Jordan, a Syrian military communication intercepted by Israel's famed Unit 8200 electronic intelligence outfit has been doctored so that it leads a reader to just the opposite conclusion reached by the original report.'

While I am not in a position to establish whether his claim is or is not accurate, an AP report on the same day quoted 'U.S. intelligence officials' explaining that 'an intercept of Syrian military officials discussing the strike was among low-level staff, with no direct evidence tying the attack back to an Assad insider or even a senior Syrian commander'.

(See https://www.salon.com/2013/... )

Meanwhile, Timmerman's claim that 'The doctored report was picked up on Israel's Channel 2 TV on Aug. 24, then by Focus magazine in Germany, the Times of Israel, and eventually by The Cable in Washington, DC' is supported by links to the relevant stories, which say what he claims they say.

Moreover, it seems clear that the 1 September 2013 report was an attempt to counter a – somewhat devastating – critique made in a 31 August post entitled 'The Troodos Conundrum' by the former British Ambassador Craig Murray, who had been closely involved with the facility during his time at the Foreign Office (and has written invaluable material on the Salisbury incident.)

(See https://www.craigmurray.org... .)

Precisely because of the closeness of the GCHQ/NSA collaboration, Murray brought out, there was indeed a major problem explaining why claims about 'SIGINT' had been central to the case made in the 'Government Assessment' released by the White House on 30 August 2013, but not even mentioned in the Joint Intelligence Community 'Assessment' produced two days before.

The answer, Murray suggested, was that the 'intelligence' came from Mossad, and so would not have been automatically shared with the British. But, given the superior capabilities of Troodos, if Mossad had it, the British should have also. So his claims 'meshed' with those by Timmerman and the AP, and the 'Express' report looks like a lame attempt at a cover-up.

Again however, one finds the world is a paradoxical place. As I noted in my SST post, detailed demolitions of the claims about 'SIGINT' in relation to Ghouta were provided both Seymour Hersh, in the 'Whose sarin?' article, and also on the 'Who Attacked Ghouta?' site masterminded by one 'sasa wawa.'

Later, it became clear that this was likely to be the Israeli technology entrepreneur Saar Wilf, a former employee of Unit 8200. So this may – or may not – be an indication of deep divisions within Israeli intelligence.

Between 18 March and 31 April, a fascinating series of posts on the Salisbury incident appeared on the 'Vineyard of the Saker' blog. The author, who used the name 'sushi', was a self-professed IT professsional, who had however obviously acquired an extensive familiarity with 'chemical forensics' and appeared to have some experience of 'SIGINT.'

(See https://thesaker.is/tag/sushi/ .)

In a 14 April post, 'sushi' produced a dismissal of the claims about 'SIGINT' implicating the Russians over the Salisbury incident quite as contemptuous as that which 'sasa wawa' had produced in relation to the claims about it incriminating the Syrian government over Ghouta.

Pointing to the implausibility of the story disseminated by the 'Express', he remarked that:

'It is doubted that any message traffic is processed on Cyprus. It is more likely that the entire take is transmitted back to GCHQ in Cheltenham via a fibre optic link. There exabytes of take are processed, not by a bored flight lieutenant, but by banks of high speed computers.

'Clearly someone in Cheltenham has committed a programming error. Anyone with any knowledge of secret communications knows that the code phrase used to confirm a murder in Salisbury is "small pizza, no anchovies." '

Interestingly, another paper in the 'Express' group made a parallel claim in relation to the Khan Sheikhoun incident to that about the Ghouta incident, but the story was not picked up and may indeed have been suppressed.

On 9 April, the paper published a report headlined 'Brit spies' lead role in Syrian air strikes; RAF BASE IS 'WEAPON.' This claimed that 'within an hour of the airstrike', Troodos had intercepted communications revealing that nerve gas had been used, and had been delivered by jets from the Syrian Arab Air Force's Shayrat Air Base.

(See

View Hide
David Habakkuk , 12 days ago
All,

I was drafting a response to the comment by 'Barbara Ann' – thanks for the link to the recent posts by Adam Carter – before going out. Returning and reading some very interesting comments, I think what I wanted to say has more general relevance.

One reason I am reading so much into 'this Dzerzhinsky thing' is the body of accumulating evidence that people like Tait are part of a system of networks which combine sanctimoniousness, corruption and stupidity in about equal measures. So some more examples may be to the point.

Different cases in which I have taken an interest come together in a post by Tait on the 'Lawfare' site on 13 March, entitled 'U.K. Prime Minister's Speech on the Russian Poisoning of Sergei Skripal: Decoding the Signals.'

(See https://www.lawfareblog.com... .)

In support of the claim that in accusing Russia of a pioneering act of chemical terrorism Theresa May was relying upon accurate analysis from the 'U.K. intelligence community', Tait wrote that:

'May then explained that Skripal was poisoned by a "military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia one of a group of nerve agents known as 'Novichok.'" She is laying out the basic groundwork for the government's attribution to a nation state and, more specifically, Russia. At Porton Down, the U.K. has one of the world's best forensic labs for analyzing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. With the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, this lab not only established that Polonium-210 was used but also which reactor in Russia it came from.'

In the event, as is by now well know, Boris Johnson's claim that Porton Down scientists had told him that the agent which poisoned the Skripals came from Russia was specifically repudiated by the head of that organisation, Gary Aitkenhead, on 3 April. Our Foreign Secretary told a flagrant lie, and was exposed.

(See https://www.craigmurray.org... .)

As I have shown in previous posts on this site, the 'Inquiry' conducted by Sir Robert Owen into the death of Litvinenko was patently corrupt. Moreover, it seems highly likely that, in fabricating 'evidence' to cover up what actually happened, Christopher Steele was doing a 'dry-run' for the fabrication of material in the dossier published by 'BuzzFeed.'

In fact, however, Owen's report made quite clear that the role of Porton Down was marginal. Furthermore, 'Scientist A1' from the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston quite specifically rejected the claim that 'impurity profiling' made it possible to establish that the source of the polonium was the Avangard facility at Sarov, her arguments being accepted by Owen. Either Tait has not bothered to read the report or very much of the coverage, or he is lying.

(For the report, see http://webarchive.nationala... . For some of the mass of evidence which Owen chose to ignore, see my discussions at http://turcopolier.typepad.... ; http://turcopolier.typepad....

What Porton Down did do was to use 'impurity profiling', which can produce 'spectra' identifying even the tiniest traces of substances, to frustrate the attempt to use the 'false flag' attack at Ghouta on 21 August 2013 to inveigle the American and British governments into destroying the Assad 'régime' and handing the country over to jihadists.

It may well be that this display of competence and integrity led to a 'clampdown' at the organisation, which encouraged Boris Johnson to believe he could get away with lying about what its scientists told him.

(See my defence and development of the crucial reporting by Seymour Hersh, at http://turcopolier.typepad.... .)

A general pattern which emerges is that the same small group of 'disinformation peddlers' resurfaces in different contexts – and the pattern whereby 'private security companies' are used to create a spurious impression of independence also recurs.

As I bring out in my piece on Ghouta, two figures who were critical in shaping the 'narrative' acccording to which Syrian government responsibility for the atrocity had been conclusively proved, were Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, formerly the former commanding officer of the UK Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment, and also NATO's Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion, and Dan Kaszeta.

Immediately after the story of the poisoning of the Skripals on 4 March broke, the same duo reappeared, and have been as critical to shaping the 'narrative' about the later incident as they were to that about the former.

(For the piece by Kaszeta on 'Bellingcat' which introduced the 'Novichok' theme four days later, see https://www.bellingcat.com/... .)

This makes it particular interesting to look at the website of Kaszeta's consultancy, 'Strongpoint Security Limited', in conjunction with the 'Companies House' documentation on the company.

(See http://strongpointsecurity.... ; https://beta.companieshouse... .)

One would have thought from the website that his company was a small, but hardly insignificant, player, in the field of 'physical and operational security.' As it happens, having filed 'Total exemption small company accounts' since its incorporation in May 2011, last December it filed 'Micro company accounts' for the year to 31 May 2017.

With a turnover of £20,000, staff costs of a bit more than half of that, and a profit of £394, we can see that although unlike Matt Tait's, Kaszeta's company did trade, if indeed it was his sole source of income, this pivotal figure in Anglo-American 'disinformation operations' was living on something less than $15,000 a year, at current exchange rates. (Pull the other one, as we say in Britain.)

This is all the more ironic, as the website brings out quite how critical a figure Kaszeta has been in obscuring the truth. From the bio he gives, we learn that having started as a Chemical Officer in the U.S. Army, he worked for 12 years in the White House, dealing with CBRN matters, before moving to Britain in 2008.

Among the articles to which he links on the site, we see his response in 'NOW Lebanon' in December 2013 to Hersh's original 'Whose sarin?' piece on Ghouta, -- in which Kaszeta first introduced the famous 'hexamine hypothesis.'

This – patently preposterous – suggestion that the presence of a single 'impurity' is a 'smoking gun' incriminating the Syrian government has echoed on into the clearly corrupt OPCW documents purporting to demonstrate that it was responsible for the 4 April 2017 Khan Sheikhoun attack.

Of some interest in understanding where Kaszeta he is coming from is what he describes as his 'oldest (and most footnoted on Wikipedia)' piece, which is an article published in 1988 on a site called 'Lituanus', on 'Lithuanian Resistance to Foreign Occupation 1940-52.'

(See http://www.lituanus.org/198... .)

As to Colonel de Bretton-Gordon, it is of interest to look at the attempt to 'finger' the GRU over the Skripal poisoning published under the title 'UK Poisoning Inquiry turns to Russian Agency in Mueller Indictments' in the 'New York Times' last Sunday, and the response by the Russian Embassy in London to a question about it.

(See https://www.nytimes.com/201... ; https://www.rusemb.org.uk/f... .)

The response objects that 'while the British authorities keep concealing all information concerning the investigation into the Salisbury incident, the newspaper has quoted "one former US official familiar with the inquiry".'

It also asserts that that crucial evidence which has not been made available to the Russians – and here, as with Ghouta and Khan Sheikhoun, the results of 'impurity profiling' are critical – appears to have been shared not just with inappropriate Americans, but with all kinds of others.

And indeed, the Embassy is quite right in suggesting that the claim made by the supposed creator of 'Novichok', Vladimir Uglev, to the BBC in April about 'all the spectrum data I was sent recently' has neither been confirmed nor denied. This seems a general pattern – the 'spectra' which may actually be able to provide definitive answers to questions of responsibility are only provided to people who can be relied upon to give the 'right' answers.

The Embassy response also quite fairly refers to a report in the 'Times' also in April, about the 'intelligence' which had been 'used to persuade world leaders that Moscow was behind the poisoning' and that the 'Novichok' had been manufactured at the Shikhany facility at in southwest Russia, which stated that de Bretton-Gordon, 'who had seen the intelligence, called it very compelling.' He has a long history of lying about CW in Syria – so is obviously the right person to lie about them in the UK.

(See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/... ; https://www.thetimes.co.uk/... .)

It thus becomes interesting to probe into what lies behind the opening of de Bretton-Gordon's entry on the 'Military Speakers' website ('Real Heroes; Real Stories.') According to this, he is 'Chief Operating Office of SecureBio Ltd a commercial company offering CBRN Resilience, consultancy and deployable capabilities.'

(See http://www.militaryspeakers... .)

From 'Companies House', we learn that the liquidation of 'Secure Bio', which started in in June 2015, was concluded in August last year. The really interesting thing about the records, however, is that at the time of the liquidation the company had very large debts, which were written off, of a kind and in a manner which suggested that de Bretton-Gordon's activities may have been largely funded by loans from untraceable sources which were not meant to be repaid.

(See https://beta.companieshouse... – in particular the 'Statement of affairs' dated 30 June 2015.)

Actually, with the 'NYT' report we come full circle. Among those quoted is Mark Galeotti – apparently his admission that he had totally misrepresented the thinking of the Russian General Staff has not him made more cautious about making extravagant claims about its Main Intelligence Directorate (misreported as Main Directorate by the 'NYT.')

Also quoted are two figures who play key roles in Owen's Report – the Soviet era-GRU defector 'Viktor Suvorov' (real name 'Vladimir Rezun') and the former KGB operative Yuri Shvets. Both of these feature prominently in the posts on the Litvinenko affair to which I have linked, and both were key members of the 'information operations' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky. This now seems to have taken control of American policy, as of British.

The role of 'Suvorov'/Rezun in attempting to defend the interpretations of Stalin's policy put forward by MI6 in the run-up to the Second World War, and those asserted later by General Keitel, and the way he was demolished by the leading American historian of the War in the East, Colonel David Glantz, and the Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky, is too large a subject to go into here.

(For a brief review, see https://networks.h-net.org/... .)

However, it provides further reason to wonder whether the misreadings of Stalin's policy which caused MI6 to give advice to Chamberlain which helped destroy the last chances of preventing the Nazi-Soviet Pact, may still be the 'house view' of that organisation. It was, obviously, the Pact which spelled 'curtains' both for Poland and the Baltics.

Jack -> David Habakkuk , 12 days ago

David

There is a pattern of abuse of formerly well regarded institutions to achieve the propaganda aims of the Deep State establishment. The depths that were plumbed to push the Iraq WMD falsehoods are well known. Yet no one was held to account nor was there any honest accounting of the abuse. There have been pretenses like the Owen inquiry that you note.

We see the same situation of sweeping under the rug malfeasance and even outright criminality through obfuscation and obstruction in the case of the meddling in the 2016 election by top officials in intelligence and law enforcement. Clearly less and less people are buying what the Deep State sells despite their overwhelming control of the media channels.

It seems that we are marching towards a credibility crisis similar to what was experienced in the Soviet Union when no one trusted the contents in Pravda.

What is to be gained by the leadership in Britain in promoting these biological weapons cases since Litvinenko? In the US it is quite apparent that the Deep State have become extremely powerful and the likelihood that Trump recognizes that resistance is futile is very high. Schumer may be proven right that they have six ways from Sunday to make you kowtow to their dictats.

[Jul 31, 2018] The question re the Russians still targeting our elections? belongs to the same category as Are you still beating your wife? Both suggest kangaroo court in action

Jul 31, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

STEPHEN COHEN: ...Are the Russians still targeting our elections?" This is in the category "Are you still beating your wife?" There is no proof that the Russians have targeted or attacked our elections. But it's become axiomatic. What kind of media is that, are the Russians still, still attacking our elections.

And what Michael McFaul, whom I've known for years, formerly Ambassador McFaul, purportedly a scholar and sometimes a scholar said, it is simply the kind of thing, to be as kind as I can, that I heard from the John Birch Society about President Eisenhower when he went to meet Khrushchev when I was a kid growing up in Kentucky.

...to stage a kangaroo trial of the president of the United States in the mainstream media, and have plenty of once-dignified people come on and deliver the indictment, is without precedent in this country

[Jul 31, 2018] Donald Trump is Not the 'Manchurian Candidate' The American Conservative

Notable quotes:
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Vanity Fair ..."
"... The Washington Post , ..."
"... With impeachment itself on the table, Mueller has done little more than issue the equivalent of parking tickets to foreigners he has no jurisdiction over. Intelligence summaries claim the Russians meddled, but don't show that Trump was involved. Indictments against Russians are cheered as evidence, when they are just Mueller's uncontested assertions. ..."
Jul 31, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

An answer was needed, so one was created: the Russians. As World War II ended with the U.S. the planet's predominant power, dark forces saw advantage in arousing new fears . The Soviet Union morphed from a decimated ally in the fight against fascism into a competitor locked in a titanic struggle with America. How did they get so powerful so quickly? Nothing could explain it except traitors. Cold War-era America? Or 2018 Trump America? Yes, on both counts.

To some, that fear was not a problem but a tool -- one could defeat political enemies simply by accusing them of being Russian sympathizers. There was no need for evidence, so desperate were Americans to believe; just an accusation that someone was in league with Russia was enough. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy fired his first shot on February 9, 1950, proclaiming there were 205 card-carrying members of the Communist Party working for the Department of State. The evidence? Nothing but assertions .

Indeed, the very word " McCarthyism " came to mean making accusations of treason without sufficient evidence. Other definitions include a ggressively questioning a person's patriotism, using accusations of disloyalty to pressure a person to adhere to conformist politics or discredit an opponent, and subverting civil and political rights in the name of national security.

Pretending to be saving America while he tore at its foundations, McCarthy destroyed thousands of lives over the next four years simply by pointing a finger and saying "communist." Whenever anyone invoked his Fifth Amendment right to silence, McCarthy answered that this was "the most positive proof obtainable that the witness is communist." The power of accusation was used by others as well: the Lavender Scare , which concluded that the State Department was overrun with closeted homosexuals who were at risk of being blackmailed by Moscow for their perversions, was an offshoot of McCarthyism, and by 1951, 600 people had been fired based solely on evidence-free "morals" charges. State legislatures and school boards mimicked McCarthy. Books and movies were banned. Blacklists abounded. The FBI embarked on campaigns of political repression (they would later claim Martin Luther King Jr. had communist ties), even as journalists and academics voluntarily narrowed their political thinking to exclude communism.

John Brennan, Melting Down and Covering Up Real Takeaway: The FBI Influenced the Election of a President

Watching sincere people succumb to paranoia again, today, is not something to relish. But having trained themselves to intellectualize away Hillary Clinton's flaws, as they had with Obama, about half of America seemed truly gobsmacked when she lost to the antithesis of everything that she had represented to them. Every poll (that they read) said she would win. Every article (that they read) said it too, as did every person (that they knew). Lacking an explanation for the unexplainable, many advanced scenarios that would have failed high school civics, claiming that only the popular vote mattered, or that the archaic Emoluments Clause prevented Trump from taking office, or that Trump was insane and could be disposed of under the 25th Amendment .

After a few trial balloons during the primaries under which Bernie Sanders' visits to Russia and Jill Stein's attendance at a banquet in Moscow were used to imply disloyalty, the fearful cry that the Russians meddled in the election morphed into the claim that Trump had worked with the Russians and/or (fear is flexible) that the Russians had something on Trump. Everyone learned a new Russian word: kompromat .

Donald Trump became the Manchurian Candidate. That term was taken from a 1959 novel made into a classic Cold War movie that follows an American soldier brainwashed by communists as part of a Kremlin plot to gain influence in the Oval Office. A Google search shows that dozens of news sources -- including The New York Times , Vanity Fair , Salon , The Washington Post , and, why not, Stormy Daniels' lawyer Michael Avenatti -- have all claimed that Trump is a 2018 variant of the Manchurian Candidate, controlled by ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin.

The birth moment of Trump as a Russian asset is traceable to MI-6 intelligence officer-turned-Democratic opposition researcher-turned FBI mole Christopher Steele , whose "dossier" claimed the existence of the pee tape. Supposedly, somewhere deep in the Kremlin is a surveillance video made in 2013 of Trump in Moscow's Ritz-Carlton Hotel, watching prostitutes urinate on a bed that the Obamas had once slept in. As McCarthy did with homosexuality, naughty sex was thrown in to keep the rubes' attention.

No one, not even Steele's alleged informants, has actually seen the pee tape. It exists in a blurry land of certainty alongside the elevator tape , alleged video of Trump doing something in an elevator that's so salacious it's been called "Every Trump Reporter's White Whale." No one knows when the elevator video was made, but a dossier-length article in New York magazine posits that Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987.

Suddenly no real evidence is necessary, because it is always right in front of your face. McCarthy accused Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower of being communists or communist stooges over the "loss" of China in 1949. Trump holds a bizarre press conference in Helsinki and the only explanation must be that he is a traitor.

Nancy Pelosi ("President Trump's weakness in front of Putin was embarrassing, and proves that the Russians have something on the president, personally, financially, or politically") and Cory Booker ("Trump is acting like he's guilty of something") and Hillary Clinton ("now we know whose side he plays for") and John Brennan ("rises to and exceeds the threshold of 'high crimes and misdemeanors.' It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump's comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin") and Rachel Maddow ("We haven't ever had to reckon with the possibility that someone had ascended to the presidency of the United States to serve the interests of another country rather than our own") and others have said that Trump is controlled by Russia. As in 1954 when the press provided live TV coverage of McCarthy's dirty assertions against the Army, the modern media uses each new assertion as "proof" of an earlier one. Snowballs get bigger rolling downhill.

When assertion is accepted as evidence, it forces the other side to prove a negative to break free. So until Trump "proves" he is not a Russian stooge, his denials will be seen as attempts to wiggle out from under evidence that in fact doesn't exist. Who, pundits ask, can come up with a better explanation for Trump's actions than blackmail, as if that was a necessary step to clearing his name?

Joe McCarthy's victims faced similar challenges: once labeled a communist or a homosexual, the onus shifted to them to somehow prove they weren't. Their failure to prove their innocence became more evidence of their guilt. The Cold War version of this mindset was well illustrated in movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the classic Twilight Zone episode " The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street ." Anyone who questions this must themselves be at best a useful fool, if not an outright Russia collaborator. (Wrote one pundit : "They are accessories, before and after the fact, to the hijacking of a democratic election. So, yes, goddamn them all.") In the McCarthy era, the term was "fellow traveler": anyone, witting or unwitting, who helped the Russians. Mere skepticism, never mind actual dissent, is muddled with disloyalty.

Blackmail? Payoffs? Deals? It isn't just the months of Mueller's investigation that have passed without evidence. The IRS and Treasury have had Trump's tax documents and financials for decades, even if Rachel Maddow has not. If Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987, or even 2013, he has done it behind the backs of the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and NSA. Yet at the same time, in what history would see as the most out-in-the-open intelligence operation ever, some claim he asked on TV for his handlers to deliver hacked emails. In The Manchurian Candidate , the whole thing was at least done in secret as you'd expect.

With impeachment itself on the table, Mueller has done little more than issue the equivalent of parking tickets to foreigners he has no jurisdiction over. Intelligence summaries claim the Russians meddled, but don't show that Trump was involved. Indictments against Russians are cheered as evidence, when they are just Mueller's uncontested assertions.

There is no evidence the president is acting on orders from Russia or is under their influence. None.

As with McCarthy, as in those famous witch trials at Salem, allegations shouldn't be accepted as truth, though in 2018 even pointing out that basic tenet is blasphemy. The burden of proof should be on the accusing party, yet the standing narrative in America is that the Russia story must be assumed plausible, if not true, until proven false. Joe McCarthy tore America apart for four years under just such standards, until finally public opinion, led by Edward R. Murrow , a journalist brave enough to demand answers McCarthy did not have, turned against him. There is no Edward R. Murrow in 2018.

When asking for proof is seen as disloyal, when demanding evidence after years of accusations is considered a Big Ask, when a clear answer somehow always needs additional time, there is more on the line in a democracy than the fate of one man.

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well : How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People and Hooper's War : A Novel of WWII Japan. Follow him on Twitter @WeMeantWell .

[Jul 29, 2018] The Helsinki Debacle and US-Russian Relations

MIC is a cancer, and looks like there is no cure
Notable quotes:
"... Improving the relationship with Moscow has been and continues to be a worthwhile goal, but Trump has made it politically impossible to pursue that goal in the near term. ..."
"... I do think the credit for this goes to the Clinton campaign, the "intelligence" agencies, the neoconlib biparty and individuals like McCain, who have gone to McCarthyite lenghts since before the GOP primaries ended to prevent Trump from attempting *any* change of the status quo on foreign policy. Granted, the man might be ineffectual no matter what, but we will never know. The US establishment and the retainees of the war profiteering classes have made any negotiations with Russia impossible long before Trump even announced his campaign. ..."
"... We also should not forget to credit the GOP for test-driving the whole "weak on Russia" playbook during the Obama years. ..."
"... Additionally there has yet to be any actual evidence presented re significant election interference. Indictments are accusations, not evidence. ..."
"... I'm no Trump fan, but he was just saying he believed Putin rather than the people who are clearly trying to bring his administration down. Can't really blame him. ..."
"... CNN even used Putin's dearly departed Labrador, Konni making her look like Cujo stating that Putin use her to terrorize Angela Merkel. A U.S. Congressman fumed that the 50,000 children died in Syria because this fiend supported Assad when Syria was about to be liberated (a number suspiciously close to the true number of Yemeni children we helped to kill). ..."
"... As flawed as Trump may be, he is merely holding up a mirror to what we have become. Had we elected a conventional candidate it would just be business as usual with these seething hatreds buried just below the surface. ..."
"... No one better suggest that we should tarnish ourselves talking to the likes of a Russian leader unless we are discussing terms of surrender. We want Yeltsin or maybe Medvedev. ..."
Jul 18, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Improving the relationship with Moscow has been and continues to be a worthwhile goal, but Trump has made it politically impossible to pursue that goal in the near term. The U.S. and Russia could and should have a more constructive relationship, but it can't be based on the denial of reality and ignoring the genuine disagreements that exist between our governments.

If there is to be genuine improvement in U.S.-Russian relations, it will come from facing up to these disagreements and finding a way to work through or around them.


b. July 16, 2018 at 9:35 pm

"Trump has made it politically impossible to pursue that goal in the near term."

I do think the credit for this goes to the Clinton campaign, the "intelligence" agencies, the neoconlib biparty and individuals like McCain, who have gone to McCarthyite lenghts since before the GOP primaries ended to prevent Trump from attempting *any* change of the status quo on foreign policy. Granted, the man might be ineffectual no matter what, but we will never know. The US establishment and the retainees of the war profiteering classes have made any negotiations with Russia impossible long before Trump even announced his campaign.

We also should not forget to credit the GOP for test-driving the whole "weak on Russia" playbook during the Obama years.

Rob , says: July 16, 2018 at 11:21 pm
I agree with b. While Trump may not be savvy enough to calibrate his engagement with Putin in a way that would allow a proper dialogue with Russia in spite of the political backdrop in the US, the primary blame for any failure to allow such dialogue rests for those responsible for creating that political backdrop that makes it so difficult in the first place (hint: it's not Trump, unless you blame him for winning the election – rather it is the unholy alliance of Democrats looking for an excuse for them losing the election and Cold War hawk neocons who have Russia-hate in their DNA (and their stock portfolios)).
a spencer , says: July 17, 2018 at 1:33 am
That Putin talked up the Iran deal in the press conference makes me wonder what was said in the one-on-one. Couldn't have pleased the Adelson/Bolton wing.
Erik , says: July 17, 2018 at 2:35 am
I also agree with b.

Additionally there has yet to be any actual evidence presented re significant election interference. Indictments are accusations, not evidence.

I saw nothing particularly wrong with the press conference. I'm no Trump fan, but he was just saying he believed Putin rather than the people who are clearly trying to bring his administration down. Can't really blame him.

Christian Chuba , says: July 17, 2018 at 9:59 am
The embarrassment was the reaction in the MSM showcasing how they are now CIA state run media.

They trot out former high ranking CIA officers now employed by them recycling every meme to reinforce that we are the forces goodness and light and anyone strong enough to oppose us is evil.

CNN even used Putin's dearly departed Labrador, Konni making her look like Cujo stating that Putin use her to terrorize Angela Merkel. A U.S. Congressman fumed that the 50,000 children died in Syria because this fiend supported Assad when Syria was about to be liberated (a number suspiciously close to the true number of Yemeni children we helped to kill). These are just two random examples in a very long day. It was
a show worthy of the priests of Baal who confronted Elijah.

As flawed as Trump may be, he is merely holding up a mirror to what we have become. Had we elected a conventional candidate it would just be business as usual with these seething hatreds buried just below the surface.

No one better suggest that we should tarnish ourselves talking to the likes of a Russian leader unless we are discussing terms of surrender. We want Yeltsin or maybe Medvedev.

DanJ , says: July 18, 2018 at 1:07 am
The summit was announced by the White House and the Kremlin on June 28. The Finnish hosts probably knew about it a few days earlier. That leaves only three weeks for preparation.

The summit itself lasted one day. Putin arrived late and after lunch and diplomatic niceties there was only 2-3 hours for actual talks.

That's not a problem if everything is already carefully negotiated and the presidents just sign documents and smile for the cameras. But it seems very little was agreed on beforehand.

I'm all for world leaders meeting and talking. The more the better. But I really don't see the point of hastily calling a summit where nothing is agreed upon. At least not that we know of.

[Jul 29, 2018] Russophobic madness of the US neoliberal elite after Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki

The "uncivil war" within the US neoliberal elite is getting a lot hotter... The problem for the American establishment is that it doesn't like the way democracy worked out.
The bloated US intelligence industry fears that Trump may slash its budgets, power and perks.
Notable quotes:
"... Written by Eric Margolis ..."
"... But after the presidential meeting, Trump replied to reporters' questions by saying he believed Russia had no role in attempts to bug the Democratic Party during the election. Outrage erupted across the US. 'Trump trusts the Russians more than his own intelligence agencies' went up the howl. Trump is a traitor, charged certain of the wilder Democrats and neocon Republicans. Few Americans wanted to hear the truth. ..."
"... In fact, so intense was the outrage at home that Trump had to backtrack and claim he had misspoken. Yes, he admitted, the Russians had meddled in the US election. But then he seemed to back away again from this claim. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton did not lose the election due to Russian conniving. She lost it because so many Americans disliked and mistrusted her. When the truth about her rigging of the Democratic primary emerged, she deftly diverted attention by claiming the Russians had rigged the election. What chutzpah (nerve). ..."
"... Besides, compared to US meddling in foreign politics, whatever the Ruskis did in the US was small potatoes. Prying into US political and military secrets is precisely what Russian intelligence was supposed to do. Particularly when the US Democratic Party was pushing a highly aggressive policy towards Russia that might lead to war. ..."
"... For the US to accuse Russia of meddling is the ultimate pot calling the kettle black. The neocon former US Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, admitted her organization had spent $5 billion to overthrow Ukraine's pro-Russian government. US undercover political and financial operations have recently been active in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, Somalia, Uganda, Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan, to name but a few nations. ..."
"... It's also clear that Trump's most ardent foes are the big US intelligence agencies whose mammoth $78 billion combined budget exceeds total Russian military spending. The bloated US intelligence industry fears that Trump may slash its budgets, power and perks. ..."
"... The uproar over Putin has revealed just how fanatic and far to the right were the heads of the US national security state operating under the sugarcoating of the Obama administration. Straight out of the wonderful film, 'Dr. Strangelove.' We now see them on CNN, snarling away at President Trump. ..."
"... Speaking of far right generals, one is also reminded of the brilliant film, `Seven Days in May,' in which a cabal of generals tries to overthrow the president because of a peace deal he made with Moscow. Could there be a real plot against the president? Watching US TV one might think so. ..."
"... Now, completing the childish 'Reds Under Our Beds' hysteria comes the final touch, the evil Russian temptress-spy who managed to infiltrate the National Prayer Breakfast, of all silly things. This dangerous Jezebel is now in the hands of the FBI. If this is the best KGB or GRU can come up with they need urgent help from Congolese intelligence. ..."
Jul 21, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

Originally from: Madness in Moscow Written by Eric Margolis Saturday July 21, 2018

Comedy? Disaster? Mental disorder? Hearing loss? Even days after President Donald Trump's bizarre appearance in Moscow alongside a cool, composed President Vladimir Putin, it's hard to tell what happened. But it certainly was entertaining. In case anyone in the universe missed this event, let me recap. Trump met in private with Putin, which drove bureaucrats on both sides crazy. So far, Trump won't reveal most of what was said between the two leaders.

But after the presidential meeting, Trump replied to reporters' questions by saying he believed Russia had no role in attempts to bug the Democratic Party during the election. Outrage erupted across the US. 'Trump trusts the Russians more than his own intelligence agencies' went up the howl. Trump is a traitor, charged certain of the wilder Democrats and neocon Republicans. Few Americans wanted to hear the truth.

In fact, so intense was the outrage at home that Trump had to backtrack and claim he had misspoken. Yes, he admitted, the Russians had meddled in the US election. But then he seemed to back away again from this claim.

The whole thing was black comedy. Maybe it was due to Trump's poor hearing or to jet lag and travel fatigue.

Hillary Clinton did not lose the election due to Russian conniving. She lost it because so many Americans disliked and mistrusted her. When the truth about her rigging of the Democratic primary emerged, she deftly diverted attention by claiming the Russians had rigged the election. What chutzpah (nerve).

Yet many Americans swallowed this canard. If Russia's GRU military intelligence was really involved in the run-up to the election, as US intelligence reportedly claimed, it's alleged buying of social media amounted to peanuts and hardly swung the election.

Back in the 1940's, GRU managed to penetrate and influence Roosevelt's White House. Now that's real espionage. Not some junior officers and 20-somethings on a laptop in Moscow.

Besides, compared to US meddling in foreign politics, whatever the Ruskis did in the US was small potatoes. Prying into US political and military secrets is precisely what Russian intelligence was supposed to do. Particularly when the US Democratic Party was pushing a highly aggressive policy towards Russia that might lead to war.

For the US to accuse Russia of meddling is the ultimate pot calling the kettle black. The neocon former US Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, admitted her organization had spent $5 billion to overthrow Ukraine's pro-Russian government. US undercover political and financial operations have recently been active in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, Somalia, Uganda, Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan, to name but a few nations.

Democrats and Republican neocons are in full-throat hysteria over an alleged Russian threat – Russia, whose total military budget is smaller than Trump's recent Pentagon budget increase this year.

What we have been seeing is the fascinating spectacle of America's war party and neocons clamoring to oust President Trump. Included in their ranks are most of the US media, led by the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and TV's war parties, CNN and NBC.

It's also clear that Trump's most ardent foes are the big US intelligence agencies whose mammoth $78 billion combined budget exceeds total Russian military spending. The bloated US intelligence industry fears that Trump may slash its budgets, power and perks.

The uproar over Putin has revealed just how fanatic and far to the right were the heads of the US national security state operating under the sugarcoating of the Obama administration. Straight out of the wonderful film, 'Dr. Strangelove.' We now see them on CNN, snarling away at President Trump.

Speaking of far right generals, one is also reminded of the brilliant film, `Seven Days in May,' in which a cabal of generals tries to overthrow the president because of a peace deal he made with Moscow. Could there be a real plot against the president? Watching US TV one might think so.

Now, completing the childish 'Reds Under Our Beds' hysteria comes the final touch, the evil Russian temptress-spy who managed to infiltrate the National Prayer Breakfast, of all silly things. This dangerous Jezebel is now in the hands of the FBI. If this is the best KGB or GRU can come up with they need urgent help from Congolese intelligence.

Reprinted with permission from EricMargolis.com .

[Jul 29, 2018] Debbie Wasserman Schultz s Awan Family Scandal Raises Troubling Questions by Jerry Iannelli

Notable quotes:
"... The Awan family was banned from the House IT network February 2, but Wasserman Schultz kept Imran on her payroll until he was arrested last week. Infamously, when Capitol Police seized a laptop from Wasserman Schultz's office, she later threatened the cops with "consequences" at a hearing if the police didn't return the device. ..."
Aug 01, 2017 | Miami New Times
Last week, Democratic IT staffer Imran Awan was arrested for alleged bank fraud. In and of itself, that news would rate as a relatively minor political scandal. But Awan worked for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who inspires some of the weirdest conspiracy theories on Capitol Hill. Her disastrous stint as Democratic National Committee chair has turned the centrist South Florida congresswoman into a punching bag for the left, which accuses her of "rigging" the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton, and the far right, which has spent 2017 accusing her of murdering one of her own staffers. Now the Awan scandal is shaping up to be a classic Wasserman Schultz snafu. While Awan was involved in a litany of shady business dealings, the congresswoman has made the case 1,000 percent worse for herself by refusing to talk to reporters and openly feuding with police. A conservative ethics group is now calling for a full probe . According to Politico, U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler first hired Imran Awan in 2004.

Related Stories

Unfortunately, much of the reporting on the case so far has come from Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller, which is well known for pushing bogus stories about climate change and spewing fact-free nonsense. According to the Daily Caller's Luke Rosiak , House staffers continued paying the family despite a series of red flags and security issues that likely should have been addressed long before 2017. Earlier this year, the U.S. Capitol Police revealed they are investigating the Awans for alleged data and equipment theft, but no one knows yet what might have been stolen; charges haven't been filed in that case. But once news of that investigation broke, every Democratic office -- except Wasserman Schultz's -- fired the Awans. Wasserman Schultz continued funneling money to Imran Awan. The Daily Caller has reported that Imran began liquidating his assets and trying to sell his properties. Then, last week, he was caught at Washington Dulles International Airport trying to leave the country.

He was arrested on bank fraud charges, a case that's apparently separate from the ongoing Capitol Police probe. All of this paints an extremely confusing picture that isn't helped by Rosiak's stories, which are full of speculation and hearsay. The Daily Caller has speculated that the Awans could have been involved in a thousand scams, including stealing money from the government, data from Homeland Security, or emails from the Democratic National Committee. (Rosiak's stories also consistently mention the Awans are Pakistani Muslims, which seems irrelevant.) Wasserman Schultz's involvement has led right-wing pundits, including Fox News ham-brains Sean Hannity and Geraldo Rivera, to baselessly speculate that the Awans were behind the WikiLeaks hack that forced Wasserman Schultz to step down as Democratic National Committee chair last year...

For Fox figureheads, the story has provided a convenient distraction to suck time away from addressing the crippling failure that has been the Trump White House. But flaws aside, Rosiak's reporting has uncovered some genuinely troubling details. Here's a breakdown of the biggest unanswered questions about Wasserman Schultz and the Awan scandal:

1. How many Democratic lawmakers are involved? According to Rosiak, the family members worked for at least 80 House Democrats in their decade-plus on the Hill. Though Wasserman Schultz is certainly the highest-profile House member ensnared in the scandal and did herself no favors by keeping Awan on her payroll long after everyone else canned him, she's far from the only lawmaker who could have been the target of data theft or, as Rosiak claimed in a later story, blackmail. The Daily Caller released a handy chart showing how many other Democrats were tied to the Awans: The list includes South Florida's Ted Deutch and Frederica Wilson, and Lois Frankel.

2. What is the actual extent of the Awans' alleged data theft? Here's where things also get muddy. So far, there's no indication as to what the Awans might have downloaded from Democratic networks. According to Rosiak, the Awans might have been funneling someone's data to an offsite server, but the public still has no clue who might have been victimized. BuzzFeed News reported that after six months, charges still have not been filed against the family.

3. Why did Wasserman Schultz refuse to fire Imran Awan when everyone else did, threaten the Capitol Police, and then continue paying him? Here's where Wasserman Schultz's dreadful media presence, along with what appear to be some true red flags, really comes into focus. Once the Awans were outed as targets of a Capitol Police criminal probe, every other Democrat in Washington immediately kicked them to the curb. (According to federal data, Imran Awan earned $164,000 in 2016, and his wife, Hina Alvi, earned $168,300. That's a lot of cash for government IT employees.) Also: Who in hell hires an entire family of IT employees? If, say, a local lawmaker or someone like Gov. Rick Scott handsomely paid a husband, wife, and two of their brothers to run, say, janitorial services, every newspaper in the nation would cry nepotism. Likewise, while multiple mainstream outlets, including the Washington Post and BuzzFeed, have published "explainers" about the burgeoning scandal, they've glossed over major legal red flags that Rosiak uncovered in court records, including allegations made in court that the Awans threatened to kidnap their own family members . Rosiak also reported that the family members seem to have filed false financial disclosures in order to obtain their government jobs and either misreported or outright lied about their debts to foreign businesspeople.

Anonymous sources also told Rosiak that the FBI seized smashed hard drives from Imran Awan's house, which certainly doesn't look good.

The Awan family was banned from the House IT network February 2, but Wasserman Schultz kept Imran on her payroll until he was arrested last week. Infamously, when Capitol Police seized a laptop from Wasserman Schultz's office, she later threatened the cops with "consequences" at a hearing if the police didn't return the device.

4. Are the bank fraud charges and data theft allegations connected? This is where the case really gets confusing. Despite the brouhaha over the Capitol Police investigation, that case hasn't resulted in any charges yet. Awan was arrested last week for simple bank fraud, which doesn't appear to be a smoking gun pointing to WikiLeaks or blackmail. According to the criminal complaint, Awan and his wife are charged with attempting to defraud the Congressional Federal Credit Union by receiving a $165,000 loan by claiming one property was their primary residence when, in fact, they were renting the place out . (The Awans have pleaded not guilty.) That's bad, but it's not exactly House of Cards -level political material.

5. Why are the Democrats so hush-hush about all of this? This, more than anything, is the classic Wasserman Schultz flaw: hubris in the face of negative press. In the face of adversity, she tends to double-down and dig in her heels, which has rarely helped her (or any lawmaker) when confronted with legitimately negative news. The Awan case is no different: She has shied away from TV appearances and has neglected to explain why the family was hired a decade ago. So has every Democrat tied to the family. Granted, it's difficult to say much to the media during an open criminal investigation, but the public deserves more answers than it has gotten.

Jerry Iannelli is Miami New Times ' daily-news reporter. He graduated with honors from Temple University. He then earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. He moved to South Florida in 2015.

[Jul 29, 2018] Bill Maher Leads Attack on Larry Wilkerson over Trump Meeting with Putin

Notable quotes:
"... After Bush I's James Baker's verbal agreement with Russia to not expand NATO was proven "inoperative", the Russians should be very skeptical of American verbal promises/agreements, anyway. ..."
"... BILL MAHER: All our intelligence agencies said that Russia attacked us in 2016. Yes, it was cyber. It wasn't with armaments. But it was still-. ..."
"... not the only time Wilkerson has failed to stop the discussion cold until such points can be countered and clarified ..."
"... no examples or links to ..."
"... left sites will fade if the left doesn't get it's act together. The liberals are about gone already -- and the conservatives are riding a temporary wave ..."
"... and the conservatives are riding a temporary wave. Capitalism is dying. Everything in the empire is falling apart as contradictions of thesis and antithesis transform into some foggy synthesis, or destruction ..."
Jul 29, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Yves here. As Lambert might say, the behavior of the enforcers of Liberal Goodthinking has been wonderfully clarifying. Despite the fact that there is a catalogue-full of reasons to be deeply disturbed about the Trump presidency, prominent media figures are regularly resorting to the screeching, pearl-clutching, straw manning, and other forms of "any stick to beat a dog" strategies even faced with people like Lawrence Wilkerson, who is expressing only mild opposition to their views. That sort of behavior is usually the behavior of someone who does not have astrong case. Of course, on RussiaRussia! that is par for the course. The fact that Wilkerson was effectively silenced by Bill Maher is a disgrace. Don't invite people on your show if you aren't prepared to let them have their say. This Real News Network segment reviews the particulars.

Note that Wilkerson was ridiculed for making what should have been an utterly uncontroversial point: that US leaders need to, and always have, had a dialogue with our strategic opponents. Wilkerson doesn't add, perhaps because he does not have corroborating information, or alternatively, does not want to appear to be talking Russia's book, that Putin announced that Russia has weapon systems that the US appeared to have been unaware of, such as a nuclear-powered missile that can fly over the South Pole. If even half of them are real, they are game changers.

There's a sour note at the very end, where Wilkerson says he expects the Democrats to impeach Trump if they win both houses of Congress in the fall. As regular readers know, Nancy Pelosi has taken that off the table .

Bill Maher Leads Attack on Larry Wilkerson over Trump Meeting with Putin - YouTube

... ... ...

SHARMINI PERIES: Now, Larry, from what I understand from this morning's announcement that the invitation that Trump had issued to Vladimir Putin to come to Washington is now rescinded, or it's off. Apparently there was no movement on either side to make sure this happens. Now, are you surprised by that move?

LARRY WILKERSON: Not at all, politically. Because most of everything Donald Trump has done of substance since he was elected is based on his reading of his domestic political needs. As the German foreign minister said so aptly, I think, about his withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear agreement with Iran, it was all based on domestic politics in the United States. It had nothing to do with strategy, nothing to do with security, nothing to do with NATO or the security of Western Europe. It had everything to do with Donald Trump and his political base. I think the German foreign minister was absolutely correct.

So I have to look at everything that Trump does from that perspective, because that's his first consideration. So what he saw was what you cited at the beginning; 46 percent thought he was treasonous, and he said, ooh, John- talking to John Bolton, his national security adviser- walk this bit back about a meeting, and put it out that we're walking it back because we want the brouhaha about the meeting to subside. We want the accusations about the meeting to subside a bit before we invite Mr. Putin to come to Washington. This is bad on two levels. One, Mr. Putin should come to Washington, and we should continue the talks, and hopefully, in the way that I describe, good meaningful talks earlier. That's how we should continue them, particularly the nuclear issues. And two, because we do not need a war in Europe. And it's increasingly apparent that both sides are looking very hard at the potential for that war.

And if you want a war that will pale- make all the other prospects, Iran, Syria, North Korea and everything else, pale in comparison, let's have one break out in Europe, and let's have one go nuclear. This is bad stuff. So I really would like to see Mr. Putin come to Washington and meaningful talks take place. But to answer your question, and to reiterate, the reason this delay or maybe even cancellation altogether has occurred is because Trump read the domestic political signals and said, oop, can't get caught in this mess. The midterms are coming up.

These midterms, Sharmini, are going to determine the fate of the Republican Party. If the Democrats were to win both houses of the U.S. Congress in November, I think impeachment would be on the table for a majority of Republicans, and certainly Democrats, almost instantly. So Trump has got to start thinking about these midterms. And so I think that's the reason he canceled it, or at least told John Bolton to tell the Russians that it'll be later.


The Rev Kev , July 28, 2018 at 4:29 am

A word about that video. I couldn't play it at first but the clip can also be on YouTube found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79oymCf_pRk
I noticed that when Larry Wilkerson stated that the US had also interfered in countries since 1947 the audience agreed as there was a lot of clapping about that. Maybe the audience was getting jack over Maher's obstinacy.

I also note that it was not Maher that said in reply "But that doesn't make it right" but Michael Moore who until then had said nothing (How the mighty have fallen). Maher's comment was basically that it was "it's still us" which of course made it different.

You just wish that they had a speaker that would be more direct and say something like: "Well Bill Maher, should we attack and sink a Russian ship in the Black sea to show them who's boss? Maybe attack that Russian airbase in Syria to show how hurt our feelings are?". Probably find that footage like that would hit the editing floor in the same way that guest that give opinions that don't agree with the main stream get cut off and the same happens even with their own reporters.

There is a reason why newspapers are dying of irrelevancy over the past few decades and I would not be surprised if the same fate followed television if this performance is typical fare. The good ones on TV end up like Phil Donahue so all you get left with are the shrills or neocons like Rachel Maddow.

John Wright , July 28, 2018 at 11:34 am

If one goes to Youtube and looks at the readers' comments, there is little support for Bill Maher. An occasional "Trump should not have had secret conversation with Putin".. I may be naive, but I still do not understand why a private conversation with Putin was a problem.

Even if Trump made some concession with Putin during this private talk, wouldn't it have to be backed up with formal written agreements?

After Bush I's James Baker's verbal agreement with Russia to not expand NATO was proven "inoperative", the Russians should be very skeptical of American verbal promises/agreements, anyway.

see https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/newly-declassified-documents-gorbachev-told-nato-wouldnt-23629

I worked at a company that advocated for "Management by walking around". Part of the advantage of the higher ups talking with workers well down the organization chart was that the entire organization knew there was an alternate path for information to flow outside of the hierarchy.

I believe this improved the accuracy of information flowing in the normal management path as a consequence.

Trump's wandering to Russia might have the same positive effect. The Democrats/Republicans/MIC seem to want to control the Russia narrative by telling Trump, "trust us, you should not try to determine anything about Russia on your own, we will tell you what to do".

Trump, to his credit, ignored them and did not cancel the trip.

witters , July 28, 2018 at 5:16 am

May I ask, how is it in the US that Bill Maher is a "comedian"?

Lee , July 28, 2018 at 9:37 am

Maher has a particularly severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. The condition seems to have seriously impaired that part of the brain where his sense of humor resides, not to mention perspective, at least insofar as the topic of Trump is concerned. His calling for the U.S. intelligence community to save us from Trump is particularly unfunny.

Brooklin Bridge , July 28, 2018 at 10:58 am

That may be, but irrespective of Trump, Maher has always been sneaky, underhanded and whiney. He is at his most palatable when he covers a topic where one tends to be of the same mind, (which, of course, gets one to wonder about objectivity in general) and even then just barely. Scratch beneath superficial agreements and he is but one self indulgent spoiled brat.

Big River Bandido , July 28, 2018 at 11:26 am

IMNSHO, Maher has never been funny, nor particularly bright. I've never understood the appeal, and ever since the whole anti-science anti-vax campaign nonsense (which he pushed) I've come to feel Maher is dangerous, every bit a part of the problem. Certainly he's no friend of the left.

Brooklin Bridge , July 28, 2018 at 9:45 am

BILL MAHER: All our intelligence agencies said that Russia attacked us in 2016. Yes, it was cyber. It wasn't with armaments. But it was still-. -Idiot

As far as I know, ONE: this, "Russia attacked us in 2016" claim is still only claimed by three (3) agencies, not all of them, and TWO: the claim is still simply a set of allegations regarding origin and not hard established facts.

Because people like Wilkerson do not call Macarthyites out on such claims, the allegations have taken on the aspect of established fact to most Americans. If it's still allegations and not facts (that is, if I haven't missed important updates), then much as I like Wilkerson, I fault him for this kind of acquiescence to weapons of mass deception. Perhaps not so much with such a slimy shill as this particular comedic disease, who doesn't let Larry get a word in edgewise and is brain dead enough to think he's being clever, but the Maher episode is not the only time Wilkerson has failed to stop the discussion cold until such points can be countered and clarified.

pretzelattack , July 28, 2018 at 1:14 pm

well he is a conservative, he was colin powell's chief of staff when powell was lying to the u.n. about wmd's in iraq. he tells the truth sometimes, and admits some responsibility, but i don't really trust him.

Brooklin Bridge , July 28, 2018 at 2:07 pm

Yes, agreed

He has done a number of interviews for The Real News Network that were quite good where he has seemed far more impervious to spin (I think the experience with weapons of mass destruction fiasco, including Powell, represented a sea-change for him). I'm pretty sure that includes the realization that Ukraine was a US backed coup, that Syria and Assad wasn't so cut and dry, that Putin is a remarkable strategist, our part in the horrible fiasco in Lebanon, the brutal nature of Saudia Arabia, Israel criminality and on and on. But I may well be giving him more credit than he is due (by process of projection from a given interview I saw to a topic I thought I had heard him discuss).

And for sure, every now and then, it's as if his military training or background kicks in and he goes into obtuse mode though still making sense.

As to the Maher incident, I suspect he avoids (and/or gets put off balance by) cat claw scrabbles, as undignified.

blennylips , July 28, 2018 at 2:00 pm

> not the only time Wilkerson has failed to stop the discussion cold until such points can be countered and clarified

perhaps the colonel needs to milk the system for a bit. Any company boards clamouring for his services? That's the whole point: many returns, much clarification for as long as possible, with suitably deep yellow hip waders.

Bill Smith , July 28, 2018 at 6:06 pm

"The Russians attacked us." Depending on what parts of the 'attack' you are talking about there is little doubt about who did it.. For example – you can read interviews in the Russian newspapers with people who worked in the Internet Research Agency about what they did in the US social media. I don't really see the big deal. We have done it to many other countries. There was blow back and we got the same thing done to us. The real issue is that we where not very well prepared.

witters , July 28, 2018 at 9:04 pm

""The Russians attacked us." Depending on what parts of the 'attack' you are talking about there is little doubt about who did it."

Yes, it was "The Russians!" – all of them, anyone of them, some of them, and certainly (for it is their genes) the Russian State and so PUTIN.

So no, "The real issue is" not "that we where not very well prepared."
Unless you mean intellectually prepared for serious analysis.

Brooklin Bridge , July 28, 2018 at 9:55 pm

Right, the attribution of agency to the Kremlin and Putin has not, and almost certainly can not, be made.

Newton Finn , July 28, 2018 at 9:57 am

Many years ago, when I was a college freshman, there was one fraternity on campus that was looked down upon as a collection of losers. But it had at least one very sharp and enterprising brother named Jack, who was a counselor in the freshman dorm. As pledge time approached, he would talk to the most popular freshmen, one by one, and tell us that he had a proposition for us. Why, he asked, would we want to join one of the cool frats and find ourselves at the bottom of the pecking order? Why not instead join his struggling frat, en mass, take it over, and run things ourselves? If we did so, he assured us, this loser frat would become the coolest one on campus, and new students would be beating down the doors to join. Believe it or not, his scheme actually worked, and, one by one, the most popular freshmen agreed to go along with the concept. The key to his success was that he would put it to us this way: Look, I know this is a difficult choice to make, and I'm not asking you to do it on your own. But would you do it these other guys did it? If Jim and Steve and Pete and John and Bill, etc., all agreed to pledge with you, will you now give me your promise that you'd join them? That's all I want you to promise right now, that if these other guys do this, you will too. And by God, it worked, and at pledge time he had a huge group of popular freshmen lined up to join his loser fraternity. Had his conscience not bothered him and caused him to release us from our promises right before pledge day, the greatest and most sudden transformation in my college's frat history would have occurred. I tell this true story because I don't see why it couldn't apply to the Green Party, if only it had enough Jacks in its ranks, with the insight and savvy to reach out in similar fashion to progressives and minorities, one by one or group by group.

Wukchumni , July 28, 2018 at 10:00 am

We stopped watching his show when he let his guests talk over each other on a regular basis, and besides that, he's slower on the uptake of what's really going on, as opposed to any NC reader.

Quentin , July 28, 2018 at 10:24 am

Bill Maher is just disrespectful. He's not even qualified to shine Larry Wilkerson's shoes. Arrogant twat, Bill Maher.

David Carl Grimes , July 28, 2018 at 10:31 am

I watch Bill Maher's show regularly. I normally watch just the beginning and the end. The opening monologue and the New Rules segment at the end. I normally skip the panel in the middle of the show because it's so one-sided. Two or three liberals versus one conservative plus Bill Maher. So the conservative constantly gets drowned out and interrupted. He has little to no airtime because he can barely get a sentence in before the panel devolves to a hysterical shouting match. And this was before Trump even ran for President. Now, it's even worse. They don't even allow anyone else to have a contrarian opinion to the Beltway consensus.

tegnost , July 28, 2018 at 11:12 am

defining the boundaries of the veal pen

Bill , July 28, 2018 at 10:58 am

I find Maher odious in general. However, it does puzzle me as to why he was a strong Sanders supporter (kind of the opposite of a Libertarian) and he also clearly wasn't thrilled about Hillary, although he supported her over Trump.

Brooklin Bridge , July 28, 2018 at 11:09 am

What ever scruples Maher may have, they come along with a heaping helping of playing to what he thinks his perceived public wants to hear. It's possible that he actually does have a soft spot for Sanders (though that could be influenced by shared religious tribe).

tegnost , July 28, 2018 at 11:40 am

yeah, I love my doddering uncle, and I use him as an example to my kids of what they should not be like /s

jrs , July 29, 2018 at 8:35 am

but pretty much never had him on the show at least until the primaries were over

polecat , July 28, 2018 at 11:05 am

Network TV is still a thing ?? Guess I've been missin out .. well, not really. It's such that whenever I happen to be in proximity to a set that's 'on', which is rather rare, it just seems loud, obnoxious, and stupifying .. whether it be the programmed 'entertainment', or the commercial klaxons whailing away. If one thinks of Corpse-rated TV as a virus, then maher et. al. are the phomites of obsfucation, psychopathy and spite !

Blue Pilgrim , July 28, 2018 at 12:13 pm

Wilkerson was in with Powell when the phony reasons for the attack on Iraq were being mounted, and was deep into the military, and MIC. Maher, and Moore are both psychopaths, which Wilkerson, for all his faults, is not. The Republicans and conservatives are insane. The Democrats and liberals are even worse now. It's like watching two groups of insane, childish, drug-crazed, chimps flinging feces at each other as they both set the jungle on fire. The level of stupidity, ignorance, and lunacy is astounding. None of this makes sense.

I think I understand why elves and flying saucer people are not seen: "What? You want to try to contact these creatures? Are you on drugs? They would kill you without thinking twice. Better to interact with hyenas or grizzly bears."

Help! I've fallen into this insane nightmare and can't wake up. The best I've been able is to ignore some of it and hide in my 'cave' with the cats while I still can. It's hard to even find a good reason for thinking or talking about it any more: pissing into the wind.

Yves Smith Post author , July 28, 2018 at 1:09 pm

From Terry Practhett:

"I meant," said Ipslore bitterly, "what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?"
Death thought about it.

"CATS," he said eventually. "CATS ARE NICE."

Blue Pilgrim , July 28, 2018 at 1:39 pm

I just happened upon this and started reading it -- seems relevant:

https://journal-neo.org/2018/07/27/liberals-leap-to-defend-neo-con-henchmen-mcfaul/
27.07.2018 Author: Tony Cartalucci
Liberals Leap to Defend Neo-Con Henchmen McFaul
https://journal-neo.org/2018/07/27/liberals-leap-to-defend-neo-con-henchmen-mcfaul/

He sums it up in the last three paragraphs:
"
This troubling trend of the Western public gravitating toward and supporting individuals like McFaul and Browder solely out of their perceived hatred for President Trump and Russia is pushing Western political discourse further from rational debate and deeper toward hysteria.

That powerful special interests can easily manipulate sections of the Western public to support virtually anyone or anything, including unsavory characters like McFaul and Browder or the notion of expanding NATO or continued war abroad in nations like Syria simply by invoking "Trump" or "Russia" represents a predictable but dangerous Pavlovian phenomenon likely to leave deep scars, permanently disfiguring American politics and society much in the way the so-called "War on Terror" has.

The increasing lack of political sophistication in America is a reflection of a much wider deterioration of American economic and geopolitical strength both at home and around the globe. While one would expect sound leadership to begin preparing America for an orderly transition from a once global hegemon to a constructive member of a more multipolar world order, history has proven the lack of grace that generally accompanies an empire's decline.
"

athena , July 28, 2018 at 9:14 pm

I've thought since 2011 that "Tony Cartalucci" is a Kremlin writers-group operation thing, or something like that. Those writings are always group projects of some sort, not just one dude, kind of like "Tyler Durden" at zerohedge, but much, much higher quality. I'm not saying to not listen to or to disregard everything "Cartalucci" says. There's a lot of genuinely insightful and useful information in there. But be aware of how "not exactly for America's 99%" the bias is. "They" seem to think we should all give up on democracy and become preppers and wait on techno-utopian solutions to solve all of our problems.

Blue Pilgrim , July 29, 2018 at 3:47 am

I see at https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Tony_Cartalucci he is
"Tony Cartalucci is a geopolitical researcher and writer based in Bangkok, Thailand. His work covers world events from a Southeast Asian perspective and promotes self-sufficiency as one of the keys to true freedom."

I see no reason to doubt that right now, but I don't care. I read things for content, and his content is often good, so I pay attention when I see something from him. Other names I recognize as rubbish and don't wast my time or energy with it. I take no one without skepticism, fact checking, etc. Sometimes I could learn something from an idiot, but it's generally not worth the effort to try.
I also read some, such as Paul Craig Roberts, who has some good material and also some blind spots and obvious bias or flaws.

It all goes into the box from which I assemble my own take on the probabilities of which models and narratives are most accurate and useful.

Scott1 , July 28, 2018 at 2:30 pm

"Sex is Funny, but Love isn't." Hence it is that shopping cart traffic conflict is funny, but empty shelves isn't. Most I've done as a stand-up is the pro set time of 45 minutes. I've heard of Maher doing 2 hours. Someone like Eddie Murphy did movie length stand-up. People pay to see Maher live. Carlin was better at being serious. There is the Lenny Bruce tradition for which few can handle, and the Will Ferrell silly genus. If you want to see fine comedy watch Kate McKinnon do Kelly Ann Conway on SNL. I understand Bill Maher as a successful producer.

What do we mean by "BiPartisan". What it best means is neither Left or Right. Best it means American, Eclectic, Ethical, Pragmatism. In fact this is easiest achieved when it is an issue of Defense in Foreign Policy. GOP domestic policy is essentially selfish and mean. Makes the right answer hard to get near. Philosophy of leading GOP figures like Paul Ryan who has terrific power as Speaker is Objectivism not American Pragmatism. Ayn Rand makes what would be wonderful bleak.

You will have reasons to feel safer when you hear that the US & NATO have put 3 thousand Tanks along the Fronts where Russian Tanks would roll into Europe. It is either that or you know that Russian Tanks can all be bazooka blasted away by lots of mobile tank killing crews and their missiles. Nukes exist to kill tanks and their crews. US doctrine is still to use nukes to kill tanks.
When Carter saw he was going to fail to "rid all nuclear weapons from the face of this earth." -Inaugural Address) he came up with the neutron bomb. For some unfathomable reason this flipped people out. We would prefer the Neutron bomb since it would not destroy farmland.

In the time of Trump and the open assault on Democracy characterized by failures of the TV Press distorted by profits and personalities I look at the famines that are associated with One Party Rule, and the Dictators such as Stalin and Mao. Maybe there is a way to make it funny in how I might say "Democracy & a Free Press, No Famine!. One Party Rule & a Dictator & Famine. Don't vote for Famine Folks!"

If I was even negotiating with Russia and China I would be pointing out they are Food Insecure and the US is not. Russia and China need to be wary and fair if they want the US to sell them food at a price the US can maintain its farmers from.

Soybean Tariffs threaten to cause farmland in the US to be taken out of food production making the US take one turn itself towards less food insecurity. It is too much to expect that US Grants to Farmers would prevent some good high number of farmers selling their land for other uses when they are forced to fail on price competition.

William Burroughs who gave us sci fi phrases like "Heavy Metal", & the art he produced from heroin, Scientology's E Meter, pills, guns, spiritually justified murder? and Methadone in Kansas, ended his life saying all he cared about were his 11 cats.

Expat , July 28, 2018 at 1:17 pm

I understand that very few Americans have any objectivity left or imagination, but let's try a thought experiment. Substitute Hillary Clinton and Clinton Advisor for every time we hear Trump or Trump Advisor and tell me that the rabid right would not be foaming at the mouth, demanding impeachment (along with waterboarding and lynching) and threatening to round up all registered democrats as a precaution.

Hillary Clinton is a terrible thing. She should never have been allowed to run or even held any position in anyone's administration for a variety of reasons. But that does not absolve Trump from being everything HE is. And it does not absolve Trump from appearing to collude with Russia and be Putin's puppet. I cannot and will not buy the 9 Dimensional Chess argument or the He's a Business Genius Argument when both are patently false. He is admittedly incredibly ignorant and lacking any attention span. He is a narcissistic liar. A proven racist. A misogynist. A womanizer. A serial cheater. An unfaithful husband and business partner.

How have we gotten to the point where we are defending Donald Trump? How are we giving him the benefit of the doubt in anything when every past lie and action indicates he is incompetent and merits no trust whatsoever.

The Trump Spin Team has done an amazing job turning a megalomaniac serial liar into a victim. And America rolls over and takes it again.

Yves Smith Post author , July 28, 2018 at 6:57 pm

With all due respect, you have this wrong. Please tell me for starters who this "Trump spin team" is. The media is united against him, as is all of the Democratic party and big swathes of the GOP. Helsinki is a case study. Trump does something which every president has done, including the sainted Ronald Reagan, when "Russia" was not Russia but the far more threatening USSR, and no one got bent out of shape about it. All Trump did was high five Putin. He didn't make any commitments. And even when Trump makes commitments, he reneges on them a high proportion of the time. Oh, and Saint Ronnie also got on personally with Gorbachev.

The Republicans made clear they would impeach Hillary. They had both her server and the Clinton Foundation taking foreign cash as issues. They could get her alone on what amounted to taking kickbacks for brokering uranium to Russia.

As for RussiaRussia, you totally misrepresent the issue. What readers and many on the left are upset about is:

1. Disregard for facts or evidence. No one has yet to provide any solid evidence against Trump regarding his supposed dalliance with Russia. The stuff coming from Team Dem is on the order of the birther charges re Obama. Just read this discussion of the Steele dossier as an example:

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/07/an-updated-trump-dossier-cheat-sheet-by-publius-tacitus.html

Or card carrying Putin opponent Masha Gessen on the famed 17 agency report:

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/01/09/russia-trump-election-flawed-intelligence/

Or the evidentiary standard that RussiaRussia! theory proponents have to meet and have yet to meet:

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/07/22/the-burden-of-proof-is-on-the-russiagaters/

If you don't demand accuracy from the press, you are volunteering to be propagandized all the time.

2. The effort to demonize Trump has moved into New McCarthyism. And you are actively promoting it. Standing up for the idea of integrity of information and accurate reporting is now being mischaracterized as defense of Trump. This is tantamount to a loyalty test and is crass authoritarianism.

3. In case you missed it, various parties are now treating the left as a threat and using RussiaRussia to up the ante. See this telling Comey tweet as an example,

me title=

And recall the PropOrNot witch hunt, which the Washington Post had to disavow.

athena , July 28, 2018 at 9:32 pm

Yeah.

I'm usually more or less immune to groupthink and propaganda, at least compared to many, but even I had to take a few days away from all internet communications last week and just re-read old Orwell essays to get my mind straight again regarding Helenski.

"One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that 'bourgeois liberty' is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who 'objectively' endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."

"These people don't see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won't stop at Fascists. Soon after the suppressed Daily Worker had been reinstated, I was lecturing to a workingmen's college in South London. The audience were working-class and lower-middle class intellectuals -- the same sort of audience that one used to meet at Left Book Club branches. The lecture had touched on the freedom of the press, and at the end, to my astonishment, several questioners stood up and asked me: Did I not think that the lifting of the ban on the Daily Worker was a great mistake? When asked why, they said that it was a paper of doubtful loyalty and ought not to be tolerated in war time. I found myself defending the Daily Worker, which has gone out of its way to libel me more than once. But where had these people learned this essentially totalitarian outlook?"

http://orwell.ru/library/novels/Animal_Farm/english/efp_go

Unna , July 28, 2018 at 2:05 pm

What am I missing? Why does a guy like Wilkerson lower himself to appear on this show? Once maybe. More than that, why? No one is perfect including Wilkerson and he has a "past" but don't we all?

athena , July 28, 2018 at 9:38 pm

They lower themselves to be able to communicate to people like us, I think. Kind of a media narrative wars Jujutsu move.

Chauncey Gardiner , July 28, 2018 at 2:23 pm

There is a possibility that Maher's behavior reflects an expanded role of the BBG (Broadcasting Board of Governors), who controls it, concentration of media ownership in a few large corporate hands, and the recent modifications of the Smith-Mundt Act to allow domestic propaganda. IMO "RussiaRussia!" and "IranIran!" would not have been and continue to be relentlessly injected into our MSM diet for the past year and a half without the table having been set.

Unfortunately, as other readers have noted, this misdirection is also damaging in the sense that it serves to divert attention away from issues of genuine public concern such as climate change, the sad state of our nation's infrastructure, public education, erosion of civil liberties, transitioning from a war-based economy, extreme economic inequality, meaningful campaign finance reform, etc.

john c. halasz , July 28, 2018 at 3:08 pm

Where did Wilkerson pick up that it is now Russian military doctrine to use nukes? Every analysis I've read is that Putin's aim in weapons development, real or imaginary, is to restore deterrence, which the U.S. has been steadily eroding.

integer , July 28, 2018 at 11:21 pm

Why would we want a world without Russia?' Putin on Moscow's nuclear doctrine RT

Russia's latest edition of its nuclear doctrine allows the use of nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack against Russia or its allies, or to a conventional attack that threatens the existence of Russia.

Bill Smith , July 29, 2018 at 5:59 am

Sounds a lot like the US nuclear doctrine.

john c. halasz , July 29, 2018 at 8:45 am

Only the "or its allies" bit isn't straightforward deterrence doctrine. That would be "extended deterrence", a contradictory doctrine that the U.S. has adopted since virtually the start of the Cold War. McNamara's "ladder of escalation" doctrine was its explicit formulation. ("Full spectrum dominance" is its lineal descendant). And the fact of the matter is that the U.S. military has never really fully accepted the straight-forward notion of deterrence, but has always been pressing further, seeking some obscure advantage or leverage. I think it's clear from his statements over many years, that Putin is attempting to respond to the erosion of deterrence by the U.S., (while the Soviet Union itself never explicitly embraced deterrence doctrine, originally crudely understanding nukes as just high powered artillery).

Blue Pilgrim , July 28, 2018 at 5:02 pm

Here is yet another 'liberal' or 'leftist' who has fallen into Trump Derangement Syndrome, complete with hurling names and insults at any who disagree with him and spouting a host of logical and rhetorical fallacies -- and another who has fallen out of list of people who I think are worth listening to.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/27/the-curious-case-of-pro-trump-leftism/
July 27, 2018
The Curious Case of Pro-Trump Leftism
by Eric Draitser

"It's true that the number of self-professed "analysts" and dementia-addled lefties spouting the Trump-as-peacenik line is relatively small
Indeed, because of the Dotard's doting on Putin, we should all sing hosannas as we erect cheaply made gold-plated monuments in his honor.

But back on Planet Earth, even the specious notion that Trump is somehow a peacemaker cannot fake news its way into being true. In fact, if anything, Trump has been the most bellicose president in recent memory. But don't tell those Trumpy lefties that. "

Counterpunch itself is teetering on the edge of that 'worth reading' list such that I rarely bother going there any more. Have these clowns been listening to what Clinton and the Dems have been saying and doing? -- "treason" for a president to talk to Russian leaders ("doting on Putin")? They think Clinton, who laughed when she destroyed Libya, would be better?

Lambert Strether , July 28, 2018 at 5:19 pm

An inventory of verbal tics .

Adding, I just reread the thing, and I found no examples or links to these supposed "Left Trumpists." So it's a smear, plain and simple, left lying about for future use.

Kurt Sperry , July 28, 2018 at 11:46 pm

Re: "Left Trumpists" If anyone from the left agrees with *any* of the hundreds, if not thousands, of policies opinions espoused by Trump. Is a "Left Trumpist". He is evil, to give support to evil in any way is evil. It's politics driven almost purely by ad hominem fallacy. Therefore any person of the left who is capable of independent thought will necessarily be presumptively labeled a "Left Trumpist" by the absurd definition of the #resistance. I won't even bother pointing out to them that always disagreeing with someone puts you in their complete control. if I can make you always contradict me, I can make you think or say almost whatever I like.

Carolinian , July 28, 2018 at 6:32 pm

The world is full of Trump mind readers .wish I had their extra sensory powers.

And some of us who consider ourselves "leftists" do hope Trump makes peace with Russia and others. Since these are things he talked about before he was president it's not impossible. If you think Trump's main goal in life is to build his brand it's also not illogical. Starting a war with, say, Iran would be very unpopular–one new poll says 23 percent support–and bad for brand building. The public now wants peace IMO. Most of Trump's current mayhem is grandfathered in from Obama or at least too much under the radar to be noticed (except for those trash talking tweets of course).

Counterpunch publishes all sorts of views. I don't think we should condemn the site because of one article. However they do publish authors who like to say things like "dotard." Name calling is so childish (unless it's about Hillary).

Blue Pilgrim , July 28, 2018 at 9:10 pm

A view is one thing; this is something else: a tirade of insults is not a view. I regularly listen to Crosstalk, for example, and appreciate Lavelle and most of his guests, even if I disagree with the conservative positions, but they don't rant and rave and insult me with phrases such as "depraved" or "dementia-addled". This is not just unpleasant to read, but demonstrates a fundamental weakness in his analytical, and his writing, ability. If that's the best Draitser can manage then I don't want to take time to see what he has to say -- and there is really not much more there, but a litany of complaints about Trump which most everyone not in the matrix are aware of. It's not just name-calling which is childish, but his thinking and perception. And that's something I find increasingly common in Counterpunch, and other western publications. I have no need or time for more crude propaganda.

The idea of defending Trump is not defending Trump and his ogrish ways, but defending law, legitimate process, open inquiry and dialogue, sophisticated analysis, and even truth. That's not about Trump; that's about us.

Carolinian , July 28, 2018 at 9:30 pm

If it helps I agree they do accept some articles that aren't very good. I think they may be struggling since Cockburn died. I don't think they actually pay people to write there.

But that site has been around a long time and it would be a shame to see it go. Too many lefty sites have bitten the dust.

witters , July 28, 2018 at 9:19 pm

For me, Counterpunch has gone over the edge.

It started with Alexander Cockburn's weird "Climate Science is a fraud! A man on the Nation cruise told me this!" and achieved its defining moment with Andrew Levine, who went on endlessly as to how Trump was necessarily, inevitably, "unelectable in American Democracy," but could be a source of wry amusement to the enlightened liberal.

I suspect an upcoming merger between Counterpunch and the Guardian.

Carolinian , July 28, 2018 at 9:39 pm

Cockburn was a contrarian who liked to provoke. He was also a vehement opponent of nuclear power and thought the AGW warnings were a Trojan horse to restart nuclear power–which is to say even if true the proposed cure could be worse than the disease.

And while AGW is now more widely accepted it's hard to say that much is being done about it. It's not so much an inconvenient truth as a problem from hell. Bandaid solutions make us feel better but may not change the outcome. Fortunately nuclear still seems to be on the skids.

Blue Pilgrim , July 28, 2018 at 10:24 pm

Whether global warming is a hoax or not, nuclear is expensive and dangerous, and can be replaced with solar, wind, hydro, etc. with some good side effects for employment and other economic factors. Beat your swords into plowshares and your soldiers into energy technicians. Just do it -- make the investment (and remember MMT) -- and the survival of the ecology and civilization could well be a nice side effect. There is enough with that to make a decision with. Other countries are managing it.

The old Counterpunch was worth saving, I guess, but for the new one it isn't so clear. Many more left sites will fade if the left doesn't get it's act together. The liberals are about gone already -- and the conservatives are riding a temporary wave. Capitalism is dying. Everything in the empire is falling apart as contradictions of thesis and antithesis transform into some foggy synthesis, or destruction.

witters , July 28, 2018 at 10:53 pm

"Whether global warming is a hoax or not"

Whether we breathe oxygen is a hoax or not Whether water is H20 is a hoax or not Whether the earth is a spheroid is a hoax or not

I really can't see how this is a reasonable place to begin anything.

Blue Pilgrim , July 29, 2018 at 12:30 am

It's a place to begin where there is a not a crowd of climate change deniers and proponents breaking out into avoidable fights which would derail plans and efforts to go sustainable.

It doesn't matter whether the sun goes around the earth and actually sets, or if the earth rotates out of the light, to decide that when it gets dark one needs to light a lamp to see and not fall down the steps. It is being in the dark which is sufficient reason for the decision to light it.

A sufficient decision to do away with coal fired plants is that the pollution makes us sick -- we don't need to consider CO2 or albedo warming effects to not want to breath in the junk.

tegnost , July 29, 2018 at 12:19 am

left sites will fade if the left doesn't get it's act together. The liberals are about gone already -- and the conservatives are riding a temporary wave
you shouldn't ignore the belly of the beast, the working class, losing their divide that was the big risk to the status quo from sanders, he could have bridged that divide

and the conservatives are riding a temporary wave. Capitalism is dying. Everything in the empire is falling apart as contradictions of thesis and antithesis transform into some foggy synthesis, or destruction
the only quibble I have with this perfect description is that many democrats are conservative, and the democrat conservatives got, well, served, and the compass is kind of spinning right now

Seamus Padraig , July 29, 2018 at 10:03 am

Eric Draitser is a deeply, deeply meretricious commentator. In the essay you linked to, Blue, note how he tries to have it both ways. First, he criticizes us for, in effect, being the dupes of Russian propaganda:

Left Trumpists focus their ire on the opponents of Trumpism. Ostensibly, it's because the anti-Trump activists are hypocrites who only form political opposition against Republicans while letting Democrats eat live babies on YouTube and roll wheelchair-bound pensioners into oncoming traffic. But, seen from a more realistic perspective, it seems this chorus of silliness is based more on Trump's words, and those of openly pro-Putin media , than on reality. [Emphasis mine]

Next, he himself begins to spout what–only a few short months ago–would have been roundly dismissed by the MSM as Russian propaganda:

Well, it wasn't particularly inspiring when the Trump Administration decided to escalate Obama's already insane policy vis-à-vis Ukraine by providing lethal weapons to the US-backed Kiev regime which continues to be partnered with, and in some ways captive to, Ukrainian Nazis and other fascist, er um, "ultra-nationalist," forces.

Nazis in Ukraine! Why, that's so very RT of you, Eric.

So, to recap: Eric Draitser can switch sides in an argument whenever he wants, while still claiming that we are the ones who are being inconsistent.

Draitser, along with the rest of the 'Gang of Four' (Louis Proyect, Yoav Litvin, Jeffrey St. Clair), is the reason I now find CounterPunch to be basically unreadable. Sad for years it was my absolute favorite website–head and shoulders above the other alt-left sites back then. But I guess it was just Alexander Cockburn who made it what it was. Over the past two years, they've lost so many of their best writers that I've taken to calling it CounterPurge. Not to worry, though: most of their best writers have turned up at Unz.com.

Mark Ó Dochartaigh , July 28, 2018 at 6:45 pm

I'm far to the left of Bill Maher, but in a general way I agree with him more often than with Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer. However on what is apparently an attempt at a show with thoughtful discussion from a variety of perspectives, the way Col. Larry Wilkerson was treated was not helpful for any side. Col. Wilkerson is one of the last republicans on the national stage who is reasonable, or even rational at this point in time. And certainly one of the very few who have the backbone to stand up even for what they personally believe is "right". A real lost opportunity by Mr Maher. And regarding "tRump derangement syndrome" how SAD is it that we live in a world where we have to discuss whether it is worse to have a willfully ignorant and egomaniacal dotard with his finger on the nuclear button or whether the real problem is a country where forty per cent of the voters support an authoritarian party willing to steal elections so that they can pass laws to steal wages and savings at home and abroad, destroy the biosphere, and wage war for profit.

On a related note at 51 minutes into this video by the excellent journalist Egberto Willies,Col. Larry Wilkerson, says that the military is being told that the worst case scenario (and IPCC "worst case" scenarios are routinely exceeded) is that "by the end of 2100" there will be less than enough arable land on the planet for 400 MILLION people.
https://egbertowillies.com/2015/09/25/lawrence-wilkerson-the-travails-of-empire-lone-star-college-kingwood-video/

The Rev Kev , July 28, 2018 at 9:20 pm

Something that you will never see. Bill Maher on the Jimmy Dore Show. It would be a massacre.

athena , July 28, 2018 at 10:09 pm

Oh, wow. You're right. My god , would that be a great episode if Maher wasn't Maher and had the courage to do it, though.

tegnost , July 29, 2018 at 12:07 am

no such thing as bad pr, it'd probably be great for both of them, must see youtube tm tv /s !
can't wait to watch

athena , July 29, 2018 at 4:41 am

"No such thing as bad publicity" is one of those truisms that isn't true. For example, this interview was very bad publicity indeed for Donna Brazile. https://youtu.be/GQtu1VsH_0s?t=47s

RBHoughton , July 28, 2018 at 11:02 pm

It looks as though the Pentagon is agreeing with the War Hawks in the Administration (Bolton) and Legislature (Graham) that nuclear war is the way ahead. They must disbelieve the Russian revelation of new weapons. That's a bold position to take when your entire country and its population is likely to be bombed.

I disagree with Colonel Wilkerson's apparent expectation that the war will be restricted to Europe. The day something falls on Russia is the day something falls on the continental USA.

The survivors will be those hundreds of thousands of US soldiers serving in Asia and Africa and South America. The recruiting offices might be able to make something of that but how will they keep the PXs supplied?

[Jul 29, 2018] Political Appointees who should be fired

Notable quotes:
"... I'll second Rod Rosenstein, I couldn't stand his performance before Congress. He played it both ways, 'we are working day and night to get you the documents', same as saying, I don't have enough people and then said he didn't know because ..., 'I can't watch everyone, I have thousands of people working under me'. A first class weasel. ..."
"... It appears that some senior FBI Cybersecurity leaders are retiring. Just when they are needed most - to explain how they let China run rampant through the Secretary of State's email server. They should be fired rather than allowed to collect a retirement check. ..."
"... https://www.wsj.com/article... ..."
"... I wonder which one of the three is Sy Hersh's source for the Seth Rich report. Because that came directly from the FBI cyber division and clearly would have been so explosive that anyone senior at that division would have been aware of it and had access to it. Of course, it could have come from some other agency but Hersh was clear that his source was very good. "I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. This person is unbelievably accurate and careful. He's a very high level guy. He'll do a favor." ..."
"... Since Globalization and President Obama giving out "get out of jail" cards, the Elite can do what they want. Government is secondary. The rule of law for Multinationals is dead. Fines are the cost of doing business. Courtiers use the revolving door to climb the ladder and accumulate power ..."
"... Chris Christie and Wray- two Jersey Republicans. Sessions knew Rosenstein from DoJ and the courts. This tells me that Trump did not know government people. ..."
Jul 29, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

The government of the United States is not a parliamentary government. There are three co-equal branches in the federal government; the Executive, the Legislative and the Judiciary. The president is the "line and block chart" boss of everyone in the Executive Branch. All of the categories of political appointees listed above plus the actual department heads in the cabinet serve at the pleasure of the president acting as head of the Executive Branch of the US Government. He does not have such a free hand in disposing of civil servants who are below these political appointees and whose employment is protected by law. They generally work for the political appointees. For the record - I was a career SES after retirement from the army and not a presidential appointee. The Department of Justice is part of the Executive Branch of the federal government and all its political appointees are subject to presidential discipline as are all others in the Executive Branch. Presidents, like the heads of all executive teams have the right to expect the loyalty of the subordinates below them. It is expected that these subordinates should carry out all policies that are not illegal, nor grossly contrary to the interests of the United States. If an Executive Branch civilian employee believes that a policy is illegal or so contrary to US interests then this person should resign his or her position. In no instance should an Executive Branch employee act as a member of a "resistance" to the lawfully elected president. With that in mind I would suggest that the following officials should be dismissed by President Trump:

  1. DNI Dan Coats - He has made it clear by his utterances at the Aspen security conference this week that he is not loyal to the president. For a supposed member of the president's inner team to communicate in public by words or body language his rejection of presidential policy is a firing offense.
  2. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. This man is an obvious affiliate of the "resistance." His arrogance in dealing with the Congress clearly indicates that he thinks that all power is rightfully in the hands of the lawyer bureaucrats at the DoJ and that both the Congress and the president will get what he chooses to give them.
  3. FBI Director Christopher Wray. His performance at Aspen indicates that he thinks that as head of the FBI he is the consecrated protector of the Knights of the Round Table reborn as the FBI. IMO that comes before loyalty to the president for him. The FBI is in no legal or constitutional sense independent of presidential authority.
Others are candidates for this list, but time will develop the case. IMO it is clearly suicidal to retain such people in office when they are proceeding through action or inaction to undermine the administration. The argument will be made that there will be cries of Obstruction of Justice. So be it. pl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_appointments_in_the_United_States

Pat Lang Mod , a day ago

The US Armed Forces are headed by commissioned officers whose appointments at each level of rank are confirmed by the US Senate. They can be removed at will from positions by superiors including of course the president/commander in chief but cannot be deprived of rank or expelled from the services except by court-martial. The armed forces understand very well that within the limits of US law they are completely subordinated to the commander in chief and will not speak against him or his policies unless they wish to risk conviction under the Punitive Article in UCMJ that forbids such speech. (Article 88)
chris chuba , a day ago
I'll second Rod Rosenstein, I couldn't stand his performance before Congress. He played it both ways, 'we are working day and night to get you the documents', same as saying, I don't have enough people and then said he didn't know because ..., 'I can't watch everyone, I have thousands of people working under me'. A first class weasel.
Fred , a day ago
It appears that some senior FBI Cybersecurity leaders are retiring. Just when they are needed most - to explain how they let China run rampant through the Secretary of State's email server. They should be fired rather than allowed to collect a retirement check.

https://www.wsj.com/article...

richardstevenhack -> Fred , a day ago
I wonder which one of the three is Sy Hersh's source for the Seth Rich report. Because that came directly from the FBI cyber division and clearly would have been so explosive that anyone senior at that division would have been aware of it and had access to it. Of course, it could have come from some other agency but Hersh was clear that his source was very good. "I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. This person is unbelievably accurate and careful. He's a very high level guy. He'll do a favor."
VietnamVet , 21 hours ago
Colonel,

You are correct. Except at this point the only people the President can trust are his family members. He went off to Helsinki and did his thing without senior staff.

Since Globalization and President Obama giving out "get out of jail" cards, the Elite can do what they want. Government is secondary. The rule of law for Multinationals is dead. Fines are the cost of doing business. Courtiers use the revolving door to climb the ladder and accumulate power .

Donald Trump slammed that door shut. Climbers can not work for him and risk pissing off future bosses. Andrea Mitchell (Mrs. Greenspan), Don Coats, Rod Rosenstein and Christopher Wray were at the Aspen Security Forum bonding and networking. If they lose their jobs and power, they face Paul Manafort's fate; jail before trial.

Donald Trump was elected because of American voters lost their jobs and homes, immigration, plus the endless wars. The Aspen Four's mission is to elevate VP Mike Pence and avoid a second Civil War while allowing the continued exploitation of the American people and environment to get richer. Will the global corporate propaganda and coup succeed? We are Americans. "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

Pat Lang Mod -> VietnamVet , 20 hours ago
No. There all kinds of patriotic Americans with great experience who would answer the call to serve. I can suggest some if Trump asks me.
David Schuler , a day ago
Maybe I'm painting with too broad a brush but I honestly don't understand why President Trump didn't demand the resignations of all of the Obama political appointees the moment he took the oath of office.
Pat Lang Mod -> David Schuler , a day ago
That would have been a good idea.
FB Ali , a day ago
"...it is clearly suicidal to retain such people in office..."

Why doesn't Trump do it? What is he waiting for?

semiconscious -> FB Ali , a day ago
but who does he replace them with? because i think it's this, primarily - the fact that he has no bullpen - that's his single biggest problem afa this issue's concerned...
JJackson -> semiconscious , 19 hours ago
I think you are right but this seems to be changing. He was not part of the Borg (in it's wider sense i.e not just re. FP) and therefore was not the GOP's man. As such it must have been a problem to find enough like minded people to fill all these positions who were not part of the status quo and had the experience to effectively operate within the beltway. Had any of the GOP's boys won they would have been able to dip into the establishment think-tank pool and pick the clones they wanted - not so easy for a boat rocker like President Trump. The unrelenting attacks from the Dems seem to be rallying more of the old Republicans in line behind the President.

We have a very similar problem here in the UK. Corbyn won an overwhelming victory from the Labour party rank and file but Blair had been PM for so long almost all of the senior positions were held by Blairites (AKA 'New Labour') and Corbyn is having a hard time finding 'Traditional Labour' ideologues with experience. Again, like Trump, he is having to try and restructure his party while under constant attack from the MSM and backstabbing from the Blairites. It is not easy trying to steer a Juggernaut like Westminster or Washington on a new course when all the existing crew only know, or want, the old way.

Should our current Brexit meltdown end PM May's Government we could end up with a Trump/Corbyn 'special relationship'. Now that really would be something very interesting to watch, preferably from a safe distance.

Fred -> semiconscious , 21 hours ago
There are a lot of lawyers in the DOJ and FBI. DNI wouldn't be too hard either. Maybe he should recall Martin Dempsey to active duty and give him the job.
semiconscious -> Fred , 18 hours ago
yeah, i'm not saying that there aren't any, i'm sure there're a number of very qualified people. but trump, personally, has no background in government, & just doesn't seem to have any kind of substantial, trustworthy inner circle who's judgments he can rely on when it comes to separating the wheat from the chaff, & filling positions like these...
Fred S -> semiconscious , 5 hours ago
If only he had been a community organizer.....
Rob , a day ago
I have no idea why Rosenstein is still there, it really is astonishing to behold.
seesee2468 -> Rob , a day ago
Rosenstein is a member of SES. I wonder if that is having an effect. Comey was also an SES member, but he was fired, although I guess that was for malfeasance. Or was Comey fired simply because DOJ members can be fired by the president? BTW, a cursory search showed that Jeff Sessions, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, Bill Priestap, Valerie Jarrett, and Bruce Ohr are also members of SES.
Pat Lang Mod -> seesee2468 , a day ago
That is not correct. A cabinet member cannot be a member of the SES. What is the citation for your assertion that these people were members of the SES? I think you are lying.
blue peacock , a day ago
Col. Lang

I completely concur with you and will add AG Sessions and DCIA Ms. Gina to the list. Anyone recommended by the traitor and avowed Communist Brennan should go. Jeff Sessions is a disgrace for hiding under his desk. If he had any decency he would have resigned long ago.

Are all SES employees of the federal government, "at will" employees? Or can they only be fired for "cause"?

IMO, a significant purge of the top echelons of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies is required to restore the rule of law and confidence in the integrity and competence of these institutions.

If guys like Andy McCabe, Peter Strzok, Sally Yates can rise up to the levels they did something is wrong with these institutions. I would even go further and shut them all down and re-build from scratch. These agencies are a bigger threat to our constitutional republic than our foreign adversaries.

Pat Lang Mod -> blue peacock , a day ago
To get rid of a career SES you either have to remove him for malfeasance and make it stick or give him a poor annual rating three years in a row. The president can remove them from position and let them sit in a bare office with a telephone until you have three poor ratings. That was always true.
seesee2468 -> Pat Lang , a day ago
Just to be sure, is it the president who gives this rating, or is it other SES members? Thank you.
Pat Lang Mod -> seesee2468 , a day ago
Whoever is immediately above them in the chain of command.
bonami , a day ago
I for one and all in favor. My favorite possible action which I am sure we will never see is the complete closure of the CIA, but we all know how that idea yielded unfortunate results the last time it was proposed by a President.
FarNorthSolitude , 16 hours ago
At what point do we declare Treason? My personal redline is Trump's Presidency. I don't pretend to know what Trump faces everyday. I do not like his rudeness, his incivility, and several of his policies, but I also don't doubt that he cares about America. And I know that he was legally elected.

Right after the election we saw an incredible social media push against the electoral college, the Constitution. It was the beginning of a coup d'etat here in the USA. That attempt has not ended.

The Constitution will stand or not, but it will not go easy and not without the blood of Patriots. Millions can moan whatever blather the TV tells them but it was a few that created this country and it will be a few that defend it and continues it into the future.

A few passionate and moral people can outweigh millions.

Not advocating revolution here but if needed and and we can get 1% to show up in Washington that is 3.3 million people. 5X current population. D.C. rolled out the tanks and used Patton for only 17,000 vets in 1932.

DianaLC , 16 hours ago
From where I sit and knowing the absolute disgust I am hearing from so many people around me, both those who are old moderates, those who are avid Trump supporters, and the ones around here who always vote for what I call "white 'bread" Republicans all the time, it's time for draining and hosing out the swamp. Even a few of the Democrats I know are a little embarrassed about what is going on in D.C.

I think you would be able to hear the cheering from the West clear out there in D.D. if your recommendations were put into place.

How do we get Trump to ask you for suggestions?

Nobby Stiles , a day ago
Quite so sir. This is an attempt to set aside the Constitution of the US. It is a mutiny and should be put down.
Patrick Armstrong , 3 hours ago
The Saker suggests he do what Putin did. (Maybe this is something the two of them talked about) "When Putin came to power he inherited a Kremlin every bit as corrupt and traitor-infested as the White House nowadays."
https://www.paulcraigrobert...

BTW what did they talk about? There's asyory going around that VVP gave him terabytes of coded US messages by and about the conspirators and the key to reading the codes. Don't know what to make of that but we should be alert for sudden revelations.

Bill Herschel , 6 hours ago
I humbly suggest that Trump supporters can stop hyperventilating. Your required reading should be the series of ten articles on the 2016 election by surely the most astute pollster on the political scene, Nate Silver. Among many, many money quotes, here is one of the most brutal,

""Coverage rarely mentioned the parallels between Clinton and Al Gore, for instance, who had failed to win a third consecutive term for Democrats in 2000 under similar conditions to the ones Clinton faced."
-- Nate Silver

Realistically, we're looking at eight years of Trump... and the transformation of U.S. society under malign Russian rule, because I firmly believe the bromance between Trump and Putin is based on one of the two things that Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards said could defeat him.

This is a reverse Yeltsin if you will. What goes around comes around. Given that it may end the horror of American military adventure across the globe, I intend to sit back and enjoy it. States' rights is thankfully a two-edged sword.

Pat Lang Mod -> Bill Herschel , 2 hours ago
Nate Silver predicted a Clinton victory. Yes, we may be headed for the '50s. I remember them fondly.
Jack , 12 hours ago
Trump has very limited support among the GOP establishment in the House and Senate. Just look at the response to the meeting with Putin from Flake, Corker, McCain and Rubio. Who does he have in the White House that shares his views on foreign policy? At least on trade policy he has Ross, Navarro and Lighthizer.

He clearly needs another team to lead the intelligence and law enforcement functions. I think he realizes it but it seems from recent interviews that he feels constrained due to Mueller and the obstruction of justice charge. Maybe he acts after the mid-terms. In the mean time the assault by the TDS crowd will continue.

O rly , 14 hours ago
while i agree with your sentiment that these people all need the axe, it seems like a trend where presidents putting key official in places where they sabotage themselves.

i mean i don't like obama, but what ever good instincts he had, were totally derailed by his own appointments. particularly on the foreign policy side of things.

Eugene Owens , 21 hours ago
All three Republicans. Why leave off Jeff Sessions?
Pat Lang Mod -> Eugene Owens , 20 hours ago
RINO party allegiance means nothing. They are swamp creatures. No reason to remove him. He is inert.
Eugene Owens -> Pat Lang , 20 hours ago
Dan Coats was pushed for DNI by Mike Pence. You have to wonder where Pence now stands in regards to Coats' statements? Wray was pushed for his job by NJ governor Chris Christie. Not sure who was Rosenstein's patron. My guess is Sessions.

Couldn't Sessions fire two of the three?

Pat Lang Mod -> Eugene Owens , 18 hours ago
Yes. Coats and Pence - two Hoosiers. Chris Christie and Wray- two Jersey Republicans. Sessions knew Rosenstein from DoJ and the courts. This tells me that Trump did not know government people.

[Jul 29, 2018] The Putin-Trump Helsinki summit by The Saker

Notable quotes:
"... This is the proverbial case where the real " action is in the reaction " and, in this case, the reaction of the Neocon run US deep-state and its propaganda machine (the US corporate media) was nothing short of total and abject hysterics. ..."
"... What Trump is facing today is not a barrage of criticism but a very real lynch mob! And what is really frightening is that almost nobody dares to denounce that hysterical lynch mob for what it is. ..."
"... Even such supposed supporters of President Trump like Trey Gowdy who has fully thrown his weight behind the "Russia tried to attack us" nonsense . With friends like these... ..."
"... What has been taking place after this the summit is an Orwellian "two minutes of hatred" but now stretched well into a two weeks of hatred. And I see no signs that this lynch mob is calming down. In fact, as of this morning, the levels of hysteria are only increasing . ..."
"... By the way, these are typical Neocon-style tactics: double-down, then double-down again, then issue statements which make it impossible for you to back down, then repeat it all as many times as needed. This strategy is useless against a powerful and principled enemy, but it works miracles with a weak and spineless foe like Trump. ..."
"... The process which is taking place before our eyes splits the people of the US into two main categories: first, the Neocons and those whom the US media has successfully brainwashed and, second, everybody else. That second group, by the way, is very diverse and it includes not only bona fide Trump supporters (many of whom have also been zombified in their own way), but also paleo-conservatives, libertarians, antiwar activists, (real) progressives and many other groups. ..."
"... I am also guessing that a lot of folks in the military are watching in horror as their armed forces and their country are being wrecked by the Neocons and their supporters. Basically, those who felt "I want my country back" and who hoped that Trump would make that happen are now horrified by what is taking place. ..."
"... I believe that what we are seeing is a massive and deliberate attack by the Neocons and their deep state against the political system and the people of the United States. Congress, especially, is now guilty of engaging on a de-facto coup against the Executive on so many levels that they are hard to count (and many of them are probably hidden from the public eye) including repeated attempts to prevent Trump from exercising his constitutional powers such as, for example, deciding on foreign policy issues. ..."
"... By now there is overwhelming evidence that a creeping Neocon coup has been in progress from the very first day of Trump's presidency and that the Neocons are far from being satisfied with having broken Trump and taken over the de-facto power in the White House: they now apparently also want it de-jure too. ..."
"... From the Russian point of view, it matters very little whether Trump is removed from office or not – the problem is not one of personalities, but one of the nature of the AngloZionist Empire. ..."
"... the infighting of the US elites does and, if not, then at the very least the current crisis will further weaken the US, hence the Russian willingness to participate in this summit even if by itself this summit brought absolutely no tangible results: the action was in the reaction. ..."
"... The Deep State has opposed him at every turn, choosing to favor the policies of the Neocons and their enablers in the Democratic Party. Hence, having no team of his own, he has been saddled with personnel from the ranks of his most virulent enemies at every level. ..."
"... the Neocons and the Clinton gang are willing to say anything, no matter how destabilizing, to hurt Trump even if the US political system by itself is also put at risk. ..."
"... Saker, something is not adding up. If Trump is truly as pathetic a pushover, as "weak and spineless," as you say, why all the hysteria? If, on the other hand, he is a rather successful wrecking ball, already having put in jeopardy half the key resources of the empire, that's another story. ..."
"... He's laying waste to the Empire in the most peaceful process possible – in large part by so embarrassing the Empire's elites, allies and vassals that they withdraw first their active support, and then finally even their consent. Inducing hysteria, both foreign and domestic, is a non-trivial component of the forces giving the wrecking ball an extra push as it heads for the edifice. ..."
"... I don't think that Trump is the fool on the hill. I think that mostly all those around him are. The latest hysteria over Russia is not about any "meddling" in any "democracy". It's about throwing tantrums that Russia won't submit to US hegemony. In my opinion, they don't deserve to be in charge of their own country, let alone to be asking to be in charge of Russia. ..."
"... It is not just "unanimity of hatred and chaos", "abject hysterics", "hate-filled hysteria", "two minutes of hatred stretched well into a two weeks of hatred" etc. It's something else and, I feel, simply much worse and dangerous. ..."
Jul 29, 2018 | www.unz.com

Oh sure, there were a number of general statements made about "positive discussions" and the like, and some vague references to various conflicts, but the truth is that nothing real and tangible was agreed upon. Furthermore, and this is, I believe, absolutely crucial, there never was any chance of this summit achieving anything. Why? Because the Russians have concluded a long time ago that the US officials are " non-agreement capable " (недоговороспособны). They are correct – the US has been non-agreement capable at least since Obama and Trump has only made things even worse: not only has the US now reneged on Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (illegally – since this plan was endorsed by the UNSC ), but Trump has even pathetically backtracked on the most important statement he made during the summit when he retroactively changed his " President Putin says it's not Russia. I don't see any reason why it would be " into " I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be Russia " (so much for 5D chess!).

If Trump can't even stick to his own words, how could anybody expect the Russians to take anything he says seriously?! Besides, ever since the many western verbal promises of not moving NATO east " by one inch eastward " the Russians know that western promises, assurances, and other guarantees are worthless, whether promised in a conversation or inked on paper. In truth, the Russians have been very blunt about their disgust with not only the western dishonesty but even about the basic lack of professionalism of their western counterparts, hence the comment by Putin about " it is difficult to have a dialogue with people who confuse Austria and Australia ".

It is quite obvious that the Russians agreed to the summit while knowing full well that nothing would, or even could, come out of it. This is why they were already dumping US Treasuries even before meeting with Trump (a clear sign of how the Kremlin really feels about Trump and the US).

So why did they agree to the meeting? Because they correctly evaluated the consequences of this meeting. This is the proverbial case where the real " action is in the reaction " and, in this case, the reaction of the Neocon run US deep-state and its propaganda machine (the US corporate media) was nothing short of total and abject hysterics. I could list an immense number of quotes, statements and declarations accusing Trump of being a wimp, a traitor, a sellout, a Putin agent and all the rest. But I found the most powerful illustration of that hate-filled hysteria in a collection of cartoons from the western corporate media posted by Colonel Cassad on this page:

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/4330355.html

What we see today is a hate campaign against both Trump and Russia the likes of which I think the world has never seen before: even in the early 20th century, including the pre-WWII years when there was plenty of hate thrown around, there never was such a unanimity of hatred as what we see today. Furthermore, what is attacked is not just "Trump the man" or "Trump the politician" but very much so "Trump the President". Please compare the following two examples:

The US wars after 9/11: many people had major reservations about the wars against Afghanistan, Iraq and the entire GWOT thing. But most Americans seemed to agree with the "we support our troops" slogan. The logic was something along the lines of "we don't like these wars, but we do support our fighting men and women and the military institution as such". Thus, while a specific policy was criticized, this criticism was never applied to the institution which implement it: the US armed forces. Trump after Helsinki: keep in mind that Trump made no agreement of any kind with Putin, none. And yet that policy of not making any agreements with Putin was hysterically lambasted as a sellout. This begs the question: what kind of policy would meet with the approval of the US deep state? Trump punching Putin in the nose maybe? This is utterly ridiculous, yet unlike in the case of the GWOT wars, there is no differentiation made whatsoever between Trump's policy towards Putin and Trump as the President of the United States. There is even talk of impeachment, treason and "high crimes & misdemeanors" or of the "KGB" (dissolved 27 years ago but nevermind that) having a hand in the election of the US President.

What Trump is facing today is not a barrage of criticism but a very real lynch mob! And what is really frightening is that almost nobody dares to denounce that hysterical lynch mob for what it is. There are a few exceptions, of course, even in the media (I think of Tucker Carlson), but these voices are completely drowned out by the hate-filled shrieks of the vast majority of US politicians and journalists. Even such supposed supporters of President Trump like Trey Gowdy who has fully thrown his weight behind the "Russia tried to attack us" nonsense . With friends like these...

What has been taking place after this the summit is an Orwellian "two minutes of hatred" but now stretched well into a two weeks of hatred. And I see no signs that this lynch mob is calming down. In fact, as of this morning, the levels of hysteria are only increasing .

By the way, these are typical Neocon-style tactics: double-down, then double-down again, then issue statements which make it impossible for you to back down, then repeat it all as many times as needed. This strategy is useless against a powerful and principled enemy, but it works miracles with a weak and spineless foe like Trump. This is particularly true of US politicians and journalists who have long become the accomplices of the deep state (especially after the 9/11 false flag and its cover-up) and who now cannot back down under any circumstances or treat President Trump as a normal, regular, President. The anti-Trump rhetoric has gone way too far and the US has now reached what I believe is a point of no return.

The brewing constitutional crisis: the Neocons vs the "deplorables"

I believe that the US is facing what could be the worst crisis in its history: the lawfully elected President is being openly delegitimized and that, in turn, delegitimizes the electoral process which brought him to power and, of course, it also excoriates the "deplorables" who dared vote for him: the majority of the American people.

The process which is taking place before our eyes splits the people of the US into two main categories: first, the Neocons and those whom the US media has successfully brainwashed and, second, everybody else. That second group, by the way, is very diverse and it includes not only bona fide Trump supporters (many of whom have also been zombified in their own way), but also paleo-conservatives, libertarians, antiwar activists, (real) progressives and many other groups.

I am also guessing that a lot of folks in the military are watching in horror as their armed forces and their country are being wrecked by the Neocons and their supporters. Basically, those who felt "I want my country back" and who hoped that Trump would make that happen are now horrified by what is taking place.

I believe that what we are seeing is a massive and deliberate attack by the Neocons and their deep state against the political system and the people of the United States. Congress, especially, is now guilty of engaging on a de-facto coup against the Executive on so many levels that they are hard to count (and many of them are probably hidden from the public eye) including repeated attempts to prevent Trump from exercising his constitutional powers such as, for example, deciding on foreign policy issues. A perfect example of this can be found in Nancy Pelosi's official statement about a possible invitation from Trump to Putin:

"The notion that President Trump would invite a tyrant to Washington is beyond belief. Putin's ongoing attacks on our elections and on Western democracies and his illegal actions in Crimea and the rest of Ukraine deserve the fierce, unanimous condemnation of the international community, not a VIP ticket to our nation's capital. President Trump's frightened fawning over Putin is an embarrassment and a grave threat to our democracy. An invitation to address a Joint Meeting of Congress should be bipartisan and Speaker Ryan must immediately make clear that there is not – and never will be – an invitation for a thug like Putin to address the United States Congress."

Another example of the same can be found in the unanimous 98-0 resolution by the US Senate expressing Congress's opposition to the US government allowing Russia to question US officials. Trump, of course, immediately caved in, even though he had originally declared "fantastic" the idea of actually abiding by the terms of an existing 1999 agreement on mutual assistance on criminal cases between the United States of America and Russia. The White House "spokesperson", Sarah Sanders, did even better and stated : (emphasis added)

"It is a proposal that was made in sincerity by President Putin, but President Trump disagrees with it. Hopefully, President Putin will have the 12 identified Russians come to the United States to prove their innocence or guilt "

Talk about imperial megalomania! The US will not allow the Russians to interrogate anybody, but it wants Putin to extradite Russian citizens. Amazing

As for Nancy Pelosi, her latest "tweet" today is anything but subtle. It reads:

Every single day, I find myself asking: what do the Russians have on @realDonaldTrump personally, financially, & politically? The answer to that question is that only thing that explains his behavior & his refusal to stand up to Putin. #ABetterDeal.

Pretty clear, no? "Trump is a traitor and we have to stop him".

By now there is overwhelming evidence that a creeping Neocon coup has been in progress from the very first day of Trump's presidency and that the Neocons are far from being satisfied with having broken Trump and taken over the de-facto power in the White House: they now apparently also want it de-jure too. The real question is this: are there any forces inside the US capable of stopping the Neocons from completely taking all the reins of power and, if yes, how could a patriotic reaction to this Neocon coup manifest itself? I honestly don't know, but my feeling is that we might soon have a "President Pence" in the Oval Office. One way or another, a constitutional crisis is brewing.

What about the Russian interests in all this?

I have said it many times, Russia and the AngloZionist Empire (as opposed to the United States as a country) are at war, a war which is roughly 80% informational, 15% economic and only 5% "kinetic". This is a very real war nonetheless and it is a war for survival simply because the Empire cannot allow any major country on the planet to be truly sovereign. Therefore, not only does the AngloZionist Empire represent an existential threat to Russia, Russia also represents an existential threat to the Empire. In this kind of conflict for survival there is no room for anything but a zero-sum game and whatever is good for Russia is bad for the US and vice-versa.

The Russians, including Putin, never wanted this zero-sum game, it was imposed upon them by the AngloZionists, but now that they have been forced into it, they will play it as hard as they can. It is therefore only logical to conclude that the massive systemic crises in which the Neocons and their crazy policies have plunged the US are to the advantage of Russia.

To be sure, the ideal scenario would be for Russia and the US (as opposed to the AngloZionst Empire) to work together on the very long list of issues where they share common interests. But since the Neocons have seized power and are sacrificing the US for the sake of their imperial designs, that is simply not going to happen, and the Russians understand that. Furthermore, since the US constitutes the largest power component of the AngloZionist Empire, anything weakening the US also thereby weakens the Empire and anything which weakens the Empire is beneficial for Russia (by the way, the logical corollary of this state of affairs is that the people of the US and the people of Russia have the same enemy – the Neocons – and that makes them de-facto allies).

It is not my purpose here to discuss when and how the Neocons came to power in the US, so I will just say that the delusional policies followed by the various US administrations since at least 1993 (and, even more so, since 2001) have been disastrous for the United States and could be characterized as one long never-ending case of imperial hubris (to use the title of here ). The long string of lost wars and foreign policy disasters are a direct result of this lack of even basic expertise. What passes for "expertise" today is basically hate-filled hyperbole and warmongering hysterics, hence the inflation in the paranoid anti-Russian rhetoric.

The US armed forces are only good at three things: wasting immense sums of money, destroying countries and alienating the rest of the planet. They are still the most expensive and bloated armed forces on the planet, but nobody fears them anymore (not even relatively small states, nevermind Russia or China). In technological terms, the Russians (and to a somewhat lesser degree the Chinese) have found asymmetrical answers to all the key force planning programs of the Pentagon and the former US superiority in the air, on land and on the seas is now a thing of the past. As for the US nuclear triad, it is still capable of accomplishing its mission, but it is useless as an instrument of foreign policy or to fight Russia or China (unless suicide is contemplated).

[Sidebar: this inability of the US military to achieve desired political goals might explain why, at least so far, the US has apparently given up on the notion of a Reconquista of Syria or why the Ukronazis have not dared to attack the Donbass. Of course, this is too early to call and these zigs might be followed by many zags, especially in the context of the political crisis in the US, but it appears that in the cases of the DPRK, Iran, Syria and the Ukraine there is much barking, but not much biting coming from the supposed sole "hyperpower" on the planet] The US is now engaged in simultaneous conflicts not only with Iran or Russia but also with the EU and China. In fact, even relationships with vassal states such as Canada or France are now worse than ever before. Only the prostituted leaders of "new Europe", to use Rumsfeld's term , are still paying lip service to the notion of "American leadership", and only if they get paid for it.

The US "elites" and the various interest groups they represent have now clearly turned on each other which is a clear sign that the entire system is in a state of deep crisis: when things were going well, everybody could get what they wanted and no visible infighting was taking place. The Israel Lobby has now fully subordinated Congress, the White House, and the media to its narrow Likudnik agenda and, as a direct result of this, the US has lost all their positions in the Middle-East and the chorus of those with enough courage to denounce this Zionist Occupation Government is slowly but steadily growing (at least on the Internet). Even US Jews are getting fed up with the now openly Israeli apartheid state (see here or here ). By withdrawing from a long list of important international treaties and bodies (TPP, Kyoto Protocol, START, ABM, JCPOA. UNESCO, UN Human Rights Council, etc.) the United States has completely isolated themselves from the rest of the planet. The ironic truth is that Russia has not been isolated in the least, but that the US has isolated itself from the rest of the planet.

In contrast, the Russians are capitalizing on every single US mistake – be it the carrier-centric navy, the unconditional support for Israel or the simultaneous trade wars with China and the EU. Much has been made of the recent revelation of new and revolutionary Russian weapon systems (see here and here ) but there is much more to this than just the deployment of new military systems and technologies: Russia is benefiting from the lack of any real US foreign policies to advance her own interests in the Middle-East, of course, but also elsewhere. Let's just take the very latest example of a US self-inflicted PR disaster – the following "tweet" by Trump: (CAPS in the original)

To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!

This kind of infantile (does he not sound like a 6 year old?) and, frankly, rather demented attempts at scaring Iranians (of all people!) is guaranteed to have the exact opposite effect from the one presumably sought: the Iranian leaders might snicker in disgust, or have a good belly-laugh, but they are not going to be impressed .

The so-called "allies" of the US will be embarrassed in the extreme to be "led" by such a primitive individual, even if they don't say so in public. As for the Russians, they will happily explore all the possibilities offered to them by such illiterate and self-defeating behavior.

Conclusion one: a useful summit for Russia

As a direct consequence of the Helsinki summit, the infighting of the US ruling classes has dramatically intensified. Furthermore, faced with a barrage of hateful attacks Trump did what he always does: he tried to simultaneously appease his critics by caving in to their rhetoric while at the same time trying to appear "tough" – hence his latest "I am a tough guy with a big red button" antics against Iran (he did exactly the same thing towards the DPRK). We will probably never find out what exactly Trump and Putin discussed during their private meeting, but one thing is sure: the fact that Trump sat one-on-one with Putin without any "supervision" from his deep-state mentors was good enough to create a total panic in the US ruling class resulting in even more wailing about collusion, impeachment, high crimes & misdemeanors and even treason. Again, the goal is clear: Trump must be removed.

From the Russian point of view, it matters very little whether Trump is removed from office or not – the problem is not one of personalities, but one of the nature of the AngloZionist Empire. The Russians simply don't have the means to bring down the Empire, but the infighting of the US elites does and, if not, then at the very least the current crisis will further weaken the US, hence the Russian willingness to participate in this summit even if by itself this summit brought absolutely no tangible results: the action was in the reaction.

Conclusion two: the Clinton gang's actions can result in a real catastrophe for the US

Trump's main goal in meeting with Putin was probably to find out whether there was a way to split up the Russian-Chinese strategic partnership and to back the Israeli demands for Syria. On the issue of China, Trump never had a chance since the US has really nothing to offer to Russia (whereas China and Russia are now locked into a vital symbiotic relationship ). On Syria, the Russians and the Israelis are now negotiating the details of a deal which would give the Syrian government the control of the demarcation line with Israel (it is not a border in the legal sense) and Trump's backing for Israel will make no difference. As for Iran, the Russians will not back the US agenda either for many reasons ranging from basic self-interest to respect for international law. So while Trump did the right thing in meeting with Putin, it was predictable at least under the current set of circumstances, that he would not walk away with tangible results.

For all his very real failings, Trump cannot be blamed for the current situation. The real culprits are the Clinton gang and the Democratic Party which, by their completely irresponsible behavior, are creating a very dangerous crisis for the United States: the Neocons and the Clinton gang are willing to say anything, no matter how destabilizing, to hurt Trump even if the US political system by itself is also put at risk. Furthermore, the Neocons have now completely flipped around the presumption of innocence – both externally (Russian "attack" on the US elections) and internally (Trump's "collusion" with Putin). As for Trump, whatever his good intentions might have been, he is weak and cannot fight the entire US deep state by himself. The Neocons and the US deep state are now on a collision course with Russia and the people of the United States and while Russia does have the means to protect herself from the Empire, it is unclear to me who, or what could stop the Neocons from further damaging the US. Deep and systemic crises often result in new personalities entering the stage, but in the case of the US, it is now undeniable that the system cannot reform


exiled off mainstreet , July 26, 2018 at 4:47 am GMT

All of this seems profoundly depressing, but it appears to be how things are. I was disappointed by Trump's efforts to cave into the deep state on his statements. The fact he can't even control his justice ministry reveals his weakness. I'm of the view history shows that once spy agencies reach a critical mass in power they become the absolute rulers of a structure and the rule of law becomes a facade, then is sidelined completely.
Anonymous [333] Disclaimer , July 26, 2018 at 10:55 am GMT
@exiled off mainstreet

Trump was a complete outsider to politics when he decided to run for the presidency in 2015. He had no team or political allies. He really didn't have much of a philosophy of governance, a solid foundation of history and facts, a first rate vocabulary or the debating skills of an 8th grader. He has consistently failed to win over any Democratic and probably not even a majority of Republican politicians.

The Deep State has opposed him at every turn, choosing to favor the policies of the Neocons and their enablers in the Democratic Party. Hence, having no team of his own, he has been saddled with personnel from the ranks of his most virulent enemies at every level.

His lack of knowledge and primitive persuasive skills, which might work in big business but not under the microscope of politics, have not won him any converts but only encouraged a vicious escalation of antipathy from his opponents, who, controlling the media from top to bottom, are openly calling him a traitor on no objective grounds, unless trying to do the job of the office, maintain the peace, and explore possible avenues for reducing international tensions is now considered treasonous. The charge of treason is clearly bombastic but with virtually everyone of influence nodding in agreement, it's difficult for the man to retain his credibility before the public.

Actually, a smidgen south of half the public are the only base of his support. And a very eclectic base they are, including numerous liberals, progressives, intellectuals and peaceniks, in addition to conservatives, Republicans and Libertarians, who prefer to deal with the real world rather than Hillary's deliberate misrepresentation of it.

Will that be enough for him to survive? The way the maniacs are raving in the media, expect the country to throw a big celebration if he gets "taken out" one way or another tomorrow. The situation is really dangerous and utterly shameful. Most of the blame goes to Hillary Clinton and her insurrectionists for not accepting the outcome of our system of ersatz "democracy." Her husband won with something like 43% of the popular vote in 1992. I'm pretty sure Trump had a higher number. Cry me a river, Hillary, but stop trying to destroy what you can't have like a petulant child.

(I'm a liberal Democrat.)

Johnny Rottenborough , Website July 26, 2018 at 11:20 am GMT
the logical corollary of this state of affairs is that the people of the US and the people of Russia have the same enemy – the Neocons – and that makes them de-facto allies

I think it would be more accurate to say that the people of Russia had the same enemy.

Anonymous [346] Disclaimer , July 26, 2018 at 1:37 pm GMT

By the way, these are typical Neocon-style tactics: double-down, then double-down again, then issue statements which make it impossible for you to back down, then repeat it all as many times as needed.

It's like trial lawyers say: if the facts are on your side and the law is not, then argue the facts; if the law is on your side and the facts are not, then argue the law; and if neither the facts nor the law are on your side, then bang your fists on the table and shout as loud as you can! That's exactly what the neo-clowns are doing here.

the Neocons and the Clinton gang are willing to say anything, no matter how destabilizing, to hurt Trump even if the US political system by itself is also put at risk.

All of which just helps to further discredit the empire. Even with all the insanity in the media, I still thank God every day that Hellary did not become president.

War for Blair Mountain , July 26, 2018 at 2:25 pm GMT
The Paradox:

The above h0moerotic caricature of Putin and Trump is quite revealing in what it tells us about what drives the emotional life of White Liberals and White Leftist. They are driven by powerful urges to impose homosexuality-pedophilia-pederasty on both Christian Russia and the Working Class Native Born White American Christians.

sarz , July 26, 2018 at 3:28 pm GMT
Saker, something is not adding up. If Trump is truly as pathetic a pushover, as "weak and spineless," as you say, why all the hysteria? If, on the other hand, he is a rather successful wrecking ball, already having put in jeopardy half the key resources of the empire, that's another story.
Carlo , July 27, 2018 at 12:08 am GMT
@sarz

I think because Trump postulated himself as a candidate, then got nominated the Republican candidate and worst of all, despite the huge campaign against him, won the elections, without the blessing of the Deep State and the neocons. So now they want to teach him (and anyone else who might think about doing the same) a lesson: "Anyone who tries to become president without our approval will be crushed", so it never happens again.

Erebus , July 27, 2018 at 2:12 am GMT
@sarz

something is not adding up. If Trump is truly as pathetic a pushover, as "weak and spineless," as you say, why all the hysteria?

And nobody seems to like him
They can tell what he wants to do
And he never shows his feelings

But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning around

That Trump is a wrecking ball is a hypothesis I've held since the first GOP debate, when I also realized he would (probably) win not only the election, but may even succeed at the far more difficult challenge of bringing the Empire to a sufficiently soft landing that the nation survives. I'm less convinced of the latter now, largely because I underestimated the centrifugal forces driving the fault lines in the American body politic. The nation, tragically may not survive the Empire's twilight, but I've seen nothing that makes me want to change my hypothesis.

He's laying waste to the Empire in the most peaceful process possible – in large part by so embarrassing the Empire's elites, allies and vassals that they withdraw first their active support, and then finally even their consent. Inducing hysteria, both foreign and domestic, is a non-trivial component of the forces giving the wrecking ball an extra push as it heads for the edifice.

As for the summit, I frankly wouldn't be surprised to learn that much of it was staged for maximum hysteria-inducing effect. Their 2hrs spent alone probably was little more than comparing notes. After all, what can Trump promise that he can also deliver under the circumstances? He can only promise to keep doing what he's doing.

In any case, they both know the Empire has to go, and they both want the American nation to be a player after it goes. A vibrant America is as critical to the multipolar world as it is to Americans. Maybe more so.

Collusion? Maybe, but the Trump phenomena, IMHO, has all the earmarks of regime change done right. With or without collusion, the hystericals can't quite put their finger on what happened, which drives further hysteria, which pushes the wrecking ball even faster, which drives....

Franz , July 27, 2018 at 6:13 am GMT
now undeniable that the system cannot reform itself

Yes, Saker and that puts US politics behind European fascism of 70+ years ago. Mussolini was booted out by a fascist committee, Franco paved the way for a constitutional monarchy, but all Americans get is Bozo the Clown/President.

The destruction of the US working class amazes me in its absence from all serious debate. First subverted by the CIA then rendered null by outsourcing (which is still undercounted) the "deplorables" have no mechanism for resistence except the unthinkable one: Hope for total breakup of the United States. Or hope for a foreign invasion.

Makes one wonder. When Egyptians greeted Alexander the Great as a liberator as he conquered them, it was a fairly pungent comment on the ruling Persians. Will blue-collar former-Yanks be cheering for liberating Chinese or Russian troops anytime soon? Henry Kissinger once predicted something of the sort.

We do live in interesting times.

Cyrano , July 27, 2018 at 7:10 pm GMT
@Erebus

Well on the way, head in a cloud
The man of a thousand voices talking perfectly loud
But nobody ever hears him
Or the sound he appears to make
And he never seems to notice

He never listens to them
He knows that they're the fools
They don't like him

I don't think that Trump is the fool on the hill. I think that mostly all those around him are. The latest hysteria over Russia is not about any "meddling" in any "democracy". It's about throwing tantrums that Russia won't submit to US hegemony. In my opinion, they don't deserve to be in charge of their own country, let alone to be asking to be in charge of Russia.

All they come up with is terrible ideas which they in their generosity are way too eager to share with the world – against the wishes or the best interests of the world. Like the multiculturalism. It's bad enough that they came up with that awful idea, but then they had to force it down the throats of the stupid Europeans.

Then when Merkel showed enough brains to challenge their idea, they forced her to make 180 turn and to welcome over a 1 million refugees from the imperial misadventures.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/10/18/frum.merkel.multicultural

peterAUS , July 28, 2018 at 7:14 am GMT
Well, Saker did put, this time, some good points here. Of course, they were well mixed with the usual Kremlin propaganda, but that's now like "good morning" with his writing. Probably all public members of "Team Russia" have that clause in their contract. The usual spin "Russia is great, winning, and all is not only good but simply getting better for Kremlin and the Great Leader".

He does point to this "thing" with MSM and public figures in West re the summit. I agree, it's surreal. If I were watching this in a serious movie I'd change the channel/walk out. If I were reading a serious book with the "thing" as a part of the plot I'd stop reading. I think there IS something there.

It is not just "unanimity of hatred and chaos", "abject hysterics", "hate-filled hysteria", "two minutes of hatred stretched well into a two weeks of hatred" etc. It's something else and, I feel, simply much worse and dangerous.

I guess we have entered a zone beyond geopolitics into mass psychology. Not my area of expertise at all, but simply feel there is something there. It feels as watching, hard to express it, hysterical people? Now, on my level, whenever I dealt with such people I simply walked away, most of the time. A couple of times, when I couldn't walk away I simply floored them (or so I say). Both men and women (talking about being a gentleman , a). With women, it's even easier, just one strike, weak hand even. With men a full combination, even with a takedown and ..anyway. Joking. Sort of. Besides, I was younger then. But how can you take out people who control, in essence, US power, nuclear weapons in particular? You simply can't . That is what makes, IMHO, this so dangerous. I simply can't recollect anything similar in relationship between superpowers. I am not so optimistic re the collapse of The Empire, multipolar world etc.

This "thing" can, I concede, deliver a couple of goods: People, at last, realizing who, or better what, are our "betters". The real power of The Empire diminishing because of the mess and chaos those species ..created. Those two things creating an opportunity to, somehow, do something about this abomination.

But, and a big but, there is the flip there. People simply not paying attention. And, those hysterics really getting the levers of power in their hands. While they are in that state, that is.

As I've said several times here so far (doesn't matter a bit, of course) Trump supporters fucked up. Not him; he didn't expect to win and when he did he found himself in a really bad position. His supporters. As soon as he won they walked home. A mistake. A terrible mistake. I feel we'll all pay, dearly, for it.

[Jul 29, 2018] FBI Never Inspected DNC Server - Seriously!

The difference between image and real server is that image is just a little bit more easy to manipulate. In other words it does not necessary truthfully reflect that hard drive information.
There are also subtle things like the ability to restore erased files which can be done only on physical hardware using special equipment. You still can see some erased files on the image if it was done byte wise (using dd) if the space was not reused)
Chain of custody is also important. As the requirement of working is not longer present, files and programs on it can more easily manipulated to prove whatever you need to prove even in such a way that would not work on a real server. If you want to stage false flag operation it is better to pass only images.
In reality neither real server not images proves anything. Both can be "staged" like fake video in poisoning false flag operations. Cyberspace is perfect environment for false flag operations. As soon as FBI was not the first to get to the servers and can be assured that nobody touched the server "in between" (which most easily is achieved by disconnected server from the network and shutting it done even if this wipes out memory on the server, all bets are off
Another relevant question is why Awan case was swiped undr the carpet.
Notable quotes:
"... the DNC servers were never inspected by the FBI and Crowdstrike's involvement is still suspect. ..."
"... Anyone who thinks that CrowdStrike; a group whose majority investor is Google's Eric Schmidt, who also formed "Groundwork," which was the tech group for the Clinton campaign; & whose co-founder (CrowdStrike) is a senior fellow of the openly anti-Russian Atlantic Council who is funded by Ukrainian billionaire who "donated" millions to the Clinton Foundation & even gave Hillary a frickin' award in 2013.....if you think that that group; who produced a report in exchange for money from the DNC at a time when we now know Clinton had control of DNC finances.....if you think that this report which aaaallllll this is based on would hold up in court.......you're out of your goddamn mind. ..."
"... Doing forensics on a physical machine is rarely encouraged because data can be corrupted, accidentally erased, etc, and that data is lost forever. An image can be copied and stored securely in case a forensics analysts makes a mistake, they can just restore the image and start again. Sorry Jimmy, I know you hate Russia-gate but this specific case is not a strong argument against it. ..."
Jul 20, 2018 | www.youtube.com

Despite recent claims by the media, and despite the fact Trump is parroting the same claims, the DNC servers were never inspected by the FBI and Crowdstrike's involvement is still suspect.


Brad Bloom , 4 hours ago

Anyone who thinks that CrowdStrike; a group whose majority investor is Google's Eric Schmidt, who also formed "Groundwork," which was the tech group for the Clinton campaign; & whose co-founder (CrowdStrike) is a senior fellow of the openly anti-Russian Atlantic Council who is funded by Ukrainian billionaire who "donated" millions to the Clinton Foundation & even gave Hillary a frickin' award in 2013.....if you think that that group; who produced a report in exchange for money from the DNC at a time when we now know Clinton had control of DNC finances.....if you think that this report which aaaallllll this is based on would hold up in court.......you're out of your goddamn mind. Keep up the good work Jim. #rEVOLution #NotMeUs #NinaBernie2020

Luke Moloney , 4 hours ago

The irony that the same people in the media crying 'Russian collusion' in regards to Trump do not have the integrity ( or are not allowed) to cry over Clinton/DNC collusion to railroad Bernie Sanders out of the Democratic Primary. George Orwell looks smarter everyday.

Mark LaDoux , 4 hours ago

As someone who works in IT, an image in this context is not a picture like you would take with your phone, but rather a perfect copy of the system state, which you could deal with forensically, or load up in a virtual machine. With that, there's no need to have the servers. You have a clone of the servers along with all their data and their memory state at the time the snapshot was taken. What that article says actually makes perfect sense to me, because by powering down machine, you destroy whatever exists only in RAM.

Patrick T , 4 hours ago

Jimmy, I have much love for your show and no love for the DNC, but you got this one wrong. An 'Image' in this context does not mean picture, it is a copy of the file system(s) on the machine (server in this case). Having done some digital forensics, this is the norm. Doing forensics on a physical machine is rarely encouraged because data can be corrupted, accidentally erased, etc, and that data is lost forever. An image can be copied and stored securely in case a forensics analysts makes a mistake, they can just restore the image and start again. Sorry Jimmy, I know you hate Russia-gate but this specific case is not a strong argument against it.

Erik Itter , 4 hours ago

Good example of people talking about things they have no idea what they are talking about... Most likely the "servers" where virtual servers meaning images are the closest thing to what you guys believe to be physical. Of course you could ask the provider to hand over the hosts. They would have to decide if flipping a bird or laughing out loud is more appropriate.

If you have no idea how applied computer science works today do not assume your intuition to be more appropriate than expert statements without asking another expert about it...

But doing nothing of that kind keeps the grounds for conspiracy theories intact, so just go on while I load another image in one of the by now several commonly used virtualization solutions (uuups, a "server" appears out of thin air... And if I click 140 times 140 "servers" will appear [and the swaping would kill this computer in no time...]).

[Jul 29, 2018] Trump is being beaten down by the propaganda arm of the deep state (the MSM) but his tenacity is paying off. Already poles are indicating that the majority of people are not taken in by the charade

Notable quotes:
"... The Deep State has opposed him at every turn, choosing to favor the policies of the Neocons and their enablers in the Democratic Party. Hence, having no team of his own, he has been saddled with personnel from the ranks of his most virulent enemies at every level. ..."
"... His lack of knowledge and primitive persuasive skills, which might work in big business but not under the microscope of politics, have not won him any converts but only encouraged a vicious escalation of antipathy from his opponents, who, controlling the media from top to bottom, are openly calling him a traitor on no objective grounds, unless trying to do the job of the office, maintain the peace, and explore possible avenues for reducing international tensions is now considered treasonous. The charge of treason is clearly bombastic but with virtually everyone of influence nodding in agreement, it's difficult for the man to retain his credibility before the public. ..."
"... Neocons have seized power and are sacrificing the US for the sake of their imperial designs ..."
"... Private corporations have become global, have acquired many public resources, and are now in control of whole segments of the profit potential in the entire world. This makes them as big as or bigger than the nations states that gave birth to them. America is just a small part of the private corporate wealth generating reach of the private domain. What corporations don't control is left to government. What's wrong with that? ..."
"... The USA has become a transfer mechanism and a transport company. Those in power are transferring massive arrays of public rights, duties, and resources to private corporate opulence. The elite (Pharaoh and his private corporation) have not been more secure, but Americans have reached the extended edge of insecurity. Leadership now consist of two masters: Public elected government 40% and privately owned corporations 60%. ..."
"... Every empire in history, after conquering its future colonies, ruled those colonies with a good degree of acceptance by the colonised population. Now the US claims that it is a global empire, the biggest one in history, but I know of no country which likes to be even man-handled let alone managed by US. ..."
"... Here is the specific threat to CIA impunity behind the US propaganda hysterics. Russia is turning over the rocks where CIA hides its moles in the US government. Russia knows what the perps are up to, so US state secrets don't protect them as they do at home. ..."
"... The CIA focal points that Fletcher Prouty told us about decades ago, they're still infesting the government, dug in deeper than ever. Russia proposes to question them. It's the American public's first look at the secret dotted-line reports CIA uses to control the US government. ..."
"... The US agents Russia singled out for questioning: Browder, Steele, McFaul (CIA war propaganda against Russia,) Jonathan Wiener (Lockerbie fabricator and DoS focal point,) David J. Kramer (ran Russian agents from DoS DRL and CIA's Freedom House), Kyle Parker (CIA mole on Senate staff) Todd Hyman, Schvartsman (CIA's DHS moles.) and Jim Rote, a garden-variety CIA spook rather than an agent, and CIA's transnational organized crime boss Robert Otto. ..."
"... Many millions of patriotic conservative, nationalist, and libertarian people working in "white-collar" jobs voted for Trump (as well as some more lefty white-collar folks who couldn't abide the DNC's rigging the primaries against Sanders and/or her obvious personal corruption, incessant warmongering, and loyalty to very rich folks in the finance/banking and entertainment fields). ..."
Jul 29, 2018 | www.unz.com

Anonymous

Trump was a complete outsider to politics when he decided to run for the presidency in 2015. He had no team or political allies. He really didn't have much of a philosophy of governance, a solid foundation of history and facts, a first rate vocabulary or the debating skills of an 8th grader. He has consistently failed to win over any Democratic and probably not even a majority of Republican politicians.

The Deep State has opposed him at every turn, choosing to favor the policies of the Neocons and their enablers in the Democratic Party. Hence, having no team of his own, he has been saddled with personnel from the ranks of his most virulent enemies at every level.

His lack of knowledge and primitive persuasive skills, which might work in big business but not under the microscope of politics, have not won him any converts but only encouraged a vicious escalation of antipathy from his opponents, who, controlling the media from top to bottom, are openly calling him a traitor on no objective grounds, unless trying to do the job of the office, maintain the peace, and explore possible avenues for reducing international tensions is now considered treasonous. The charge of treason is clearly bombastic but with virtually everyone of influence nodding in agreement, it's difficult for the man to retain his credibility before the public.

Actually, a smidgen south of half the public are the only base of his support. And a very eclectic base they are, including numerous liberals, progressives, intellectuals and peaceniks, in addition to conservatives, Republicans and Libertarians, who prefer to deal with the real world rather than Hillary's deliberate misrepresentation of it.

Will that be enough for him to survive? The way the maniacs are raving in the media, expect the country to throw a big celebration if he gets "taken out" one way or another tomorrow. The situation is really dangerous and utterly shameful. Most of the blame goes to Hillary Clinton and her insurrectionists for not accepting the outcome of our system of ersatz "democracy." Her husband won with something like 43% of the popular vote in 1992. I'm pretty sure Trump had a higher number. Cry me a river, Hillary, but stop trying to destroy what you can't have like a petulant child.

(I'm a liberal Democrat.)


chris , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 12:09 pm GMT

If Trump can't even stick to his own words, how could anybody expect the Russians to take anything he says seriously?!

I think this is tanken too seriously; the Russians definitely appreciate Trump's courage in taking a step toward them in an era of such hysteria. Trump is being beaten down by the propaganda arm of the deep state (the MSM) but his tenacity is paying off. Already poles are indicating that the majority of people are not taken in by the charade. As with the 2016 election, a sizable portion of the population just ain't buying it.

Anonymous [157] Disclaimer , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 12:17 pm GMT
I dunno whether citing Nancy Pelosi on anything is relevant. Never had courage on anything during the Dubya Years, and now she's pretty gone, a political career robot with decaying functions.

You can practically see the cabling coming out of the spine, she's probably having herself dominated remotely via TeamViewer by MS-13 members, too.

animalogic , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 12:25 pm GMT
I agree with your comments. I wish to emphasize one point: Trump was NEVER given a chance. The establishment HATED him from his candidacy. That hatred has become more pathological by the day.
It's gone beyond "agreeing"/ "disagreeing" with Trump: this is a sickening assault on U.S democracy.
The Democratic Party IS guilty of treason. The US establishment – the deep state, if you like is -- criminally INSANE.
animalogic , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 12:33 pm GMT
@War for Blair Mountain

I think there is an element of truth to your views. However, I can't get past the fact that the head of this Trump hating psychotics are native born white Americans. Yes, they pander to "minorities" but it's merely a means to their own piggish elite ends. Minorities are also "useful idiots" .

chris , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 12:39 pm GMT

the people of the US and the people of Russia have the same enemy – the Neocons – and that makes them de-facto allies

There's definitely something to this statement. I think the Russian people can definitely commensurate with the "deplorables" as they too have (and to some extent continue to) spend many decades under Jewish dominated Nomenklatura.

anastasia , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 12:49 pm GMT
Trump did not do anything different in this meeting with Putin than any other leader, who had in the past met with the Russian leader. It was not what was done; it was the reaction to what was presumed to have been done, and wasn't..

The entire Mueller investigation is being conducted, and will continue for all the years of the Trump Presidency, to be sure, to insure that Trump does not do what he promised to do during his campaign – cooperate with Putin and get out of the mid-east. It is very obvious that so far, Trump has shown to have completely reneged on his campaign promises in this regard (eg. putting military bases in Syria, evacuating ISIS commandos, bombing Syria, recognizing Jerusalem as the state capital, continuing the war in Afghanistan, arming to the teeth Saudi Arabia, etc. and some of the actions he has taken were based upon patent and obvious lies (eg. bombing Syria ..twice).

If one listens carefully to the concerns of Trump in the Putin meeting, it was predominantly the "security" of Israel vis a vis Iran. It was not the Untied States, but Israel that was his major concern, and if you listen even more carefully, anyone could have heard some key words, "Putin is a big fan of BeeBee", which means what? It means that these mid-eastern wars are never, never. never going to end.

All this noise coming from the right and left is only that .noise. Because really nothing under the sun has changed.

anon [317] Disclaimer , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 12:56 pm GMT
@Anonymous

the lawfully elected President is being openly delegitimized and that, in turn, delegitimizes the electoral process which brought him to power and, of course, it also excoriates the "deplorables" who dared vote for him: the majority of the American people.

Neocons have seized power and are sacrificing the US for the sake of their imperial designs, that is simply not going to happen, and the Russians understand that.

transition from ::to

But I think the ruling classes intensity is a result of copyright and patent laws and other devices too numerous to list here have been taken to privatize the public resources held in trust by the USA into the hands of Pharaoh and his right arm corporations. Essentially American public assets were entrusted to the USA, and its corporate elected leaders pieced the public assets up, and sold them to the highest bidder. Now the successful bidders are trying to get control or ownership over the remaining few assets that still held in the public [USA} trust, when that is finished America will be wasted and the USA will become a dictatorship.

Privatization is the first and foremost internal problem; unless it is fixed, nothing will change.

What do I mean by privatization? Whole segments of the national USA and global economy now belong to one or a few private enterprises: by contract, by rule of some law, or by ownership of assets that were taken, or that are controlled by contract, or agreement, the public domain was reduced and the private domain was increased. Substantial economic power and most political power h\b transferred into private hands.

Private corporations have become global, have acquired many public resources, and are now in control of whole segments of the profit potential in the entire world. This makes them as big as or bigger than the nations states that gave birth to them. America is just a small part of the private corporate wealth generating reach of the private domain. What corporations don't control is left to government. What's wrong with that?

Private corporations (PCs) conduct their affairs independent of national laws and politics, but the political systems and the people that depend on those political systems are highly dependent, not on government, but on these private corporations.

Privatization means a part of the public domain has been transferred to the private domain (mostly corporations). Water franchises, health care, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, military arms production, transportation (airlines and ships used to be public owned or highly controlled quasi-governmental entities), energy production and distribution, private armies, public research discoveries converted by rule of law and investment capital into private properties, global manufacturers of important and necessary software or hardware systems or components ; energy, water, gas production and distribution, and services such as garbage, jail management, education, and so on, are public services provided by private corporations.

Just as British Colonial Aristocrats and their massive corporations were doing in 1776, today's elites are busy transferring public government and American assets, resources, and governing powers to their private selves.

The USA has become a transfer mechanism and a transport company. Those in power are transferring massive arrays of public rights, duties, and resources to private corporate opulence. The elite (Pharaoh and his private corporation) have not been more secure, but Americans have reached the extended edge of insecurity. Leadership now consist of two masters: Public elected government 40% and privately owned corporations 60%.

Pieces of the public government were carved out and given to private corporate enterprises. Each transfer from public government to private corporate government; provides elites more power, and the government that represents the public less power.

The problems the Saker presents are all results of the private taking from public.

anonymous [128] Disclaimer , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 1:05 pm GMT
If the media truly hated Trump as much as they say they did, they would never have put him front and center during the primary and given him all that publicity. They would have Ron Pauled him into public oblivion. They had complete control, but instead of ignoring him, they put him front of center.

And those polls? If they were rigged, the media knew they were rigged, and would have conducted one in secret. And why would Hillary have a schedule of campaign stops, half of which were lies. Why was she lying about her campaign schedule? His election was a surprise to no one, except those they wanted to fool – the public.

The "surprise" of his election was nothing more than part of the grand theatre we see being played now.

There was collusion all right during this election, but it certainly wasn't with the Russians.

Kiza , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 1:07 pm GMT
Every empire in history, after conquering its future colonies, ruled those colonies with a good degree of acceptance by the colonised population. Now the US claims that it is a global empire, the biggest one in history, but I know of no country which likes to be even man-handled let alone managed by US.

Therefore, I fail to understand where this claim to empire comes from. Yes, the behaviour appears empirial (for example requesting delivery of some "12 Russians" that some third-rate US horse-face pretend-policeman identified as perpetrators of a crime which never happened), but every Napoleon in my local asylum for the insane behaves empirially.

As to Pellosi and the gang who suck the dicks of Netanyahoo and MbS, the real mass murderers, like little bunny rabbits suck bottles of milk, their words on Putin are words of frustration due to the fact that Putin will never offer his member to be similarly sucked.

Let me summise it simply: what an amazing fuck up US is under its Jewish ownership.

HO-LY COWW , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 1:22 pm GMT
Here is the specific threat to CIA impunity behind the US propaganda hysterics. Russia is turning over the rocks where CIA hides its moles in the US government. Russia knows what the perps are up to, so US state secrets don't protect them as they do at home.

The CIA focal points that Fletcher Prouty told us about decades ago, they're still infesting the government, dug in deeper than ever. Russia proposes to question them. It's the American public's first look at the secret dotted-line reports CIA uses to control the US government.

From Meduza: "The list of names also includes Homeland Security Department official Todd Hyman (who testified in a deposition against Prevezon, a Russian company accused of laundering proceeds from the fraud uncovered by Sergey Magnitsky), Svetlana Engert (who supposedly stole criminal case materials from Russia), Alexander Shvartsman (who supposedly oversaw Browder's stay in the U.S.), Jim Rote (a supposed CIA agent acting as Browder's "financial manager"), Robert Otto (who supposedly served as deputy director of a U.S. intelligence agency until January 2017), David Kramer (who recently served as an adviser to the U.S. State Department), Jonathan Wiener (a long-time aide to John Kerry and an adviser on national security), and Kyle Parker (a recent U.S. State Department official), according to Kurennoi."

http://www.interfax.ru/russia/621432

The US agents Russia singled out for questioning: Browder, Steele, McFaul (CIA war propaganda against Russia,) Jonathan Wiener (Lockerbie fabricator and DoS focal point,) David J. Kramer (ran Russian agents from DoS DRL and CIA's Freedom House), Kyle Parker (CIA mole on Senate staff) Todd Hyman, Schvartsman (CIA's DHS moles.) and Jim Rote, a garden-variety CIA spook rather than an agent, and CIA's transnational organized crime boss Robert Otto.

Russia is showing us how CIA infiltrates and controls the entire US government.

anonymous [128] Disclaimer , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 1:36 pm GMT
Trump's accomplishments:

(1) continuing indefinitely the war in Afghanistan
(2) bombing Syria twice for reasons which he knew or should have known were false.
(3) putting a military base in Syria as an invader https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/syria/u-s-forces-set-up-new-base-in-syria-s-manbij-despite-turkish-threats-1.6073192 something no President dared do in the past.
(4) appointing neo-con war mongers in all key cabinet positions
(5) telling police (on video for all the world to hear) to confiscate guns and "worry about due process later" (13 states have followed this advice) This statement tramples upon not only the second amendment, but the fifth and fourteenth as well
(6) saying absolutely nothing about Google, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, censuring all right wing groups, showing that he doesn't give a hoot about anyone's lst amendment rights, including his supporters.
(7) recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel (at a cost of thousands injured and dead Palestinians during Israel's celebration)
(8) sanctioning Russia at least three times since he has been in office; with sanctions more severe than those imposed by Obama.
(9) having the US military evacuate ISIS commandos in Syria
(10) breaching the agreement with Iran at a time when the only party with continuing contract obligations was Iran who was abiding by the contract (he certainly was not going to get back the Obama money,w hich is the only thing he complained about during his campaign)
(11) fully funding planned parenthood (now trying to undo this Congressional action with an Executive Order which compounds the problem in his attempt to usurp the powers of Congress, violating Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution)
(12) not building the wall
(13) lying about his gross immorality (keep in mind that if the Senate impeached Clinton for committing fellatio in the Oval Office with a foolish young girl in her early twenties, Trump would never have dared to run for office with his background)
(14) lying about the economy (saying there was 4 percent unemployment when all the big retailers employing hundreds of thousands went out of business on the heels of his statement)
(15) proposing to reward millions of immigrants who have broken our laws

Yet, his supporters are still on the street with those silly hats reciting their mantra that he is making America great again.

What he is doing in fact is continuing unjustified wars (military Keynesian economics that will destroy the US) while simultaneously and quietly taking away our constitutional rights. Those are his biggest "accomplishments"

Z-man , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 1:48 pm GMT
An example has to be made of one or two Neocons/Deep State'rs .
RadicalCenter , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 1:55 pm GMT
@War for Blair Mountain

Sound analysis, WBC.

I'd just quibble that it's unlikely that the majority of Trump's voters were "blue collar", if that's what we mean by working class.

Many millions of patriotic conservative, nationalist, and libertarian people working in "white-collar" jobs voted for Trump (as well as some more lefty white-collar folks who couldn't abide the DNC's rigging the primaries against Sanders and/or her obvious personal corruption, incessant warmongering, and loyalty to very rich folks in the finance/banking and entertainment fields).

Unfortunately, if we're counting manufacturing and assembly jobs as "blue collar" or "working class", there just aren't enough of those jobs left in the USA for their holders to constitute a majority even of Trump voters. That was part of Trump's appeal, right, the endless loss of good-paying jobs actually making things of tangible usefulness and value?

animalogic , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 1:58 pm GMT
@peterAUS

What "we" have is a corrupt US (global) elite. An elite, primed in the 80′s & let entirely off the leash in '91. Benevolent despots ? A concept with only the vaguest comprehension.

No – these US/ Globalist elites just KNEW history was on THEIR side. Take the brakes off, & spin the capitalist coin: heads – class war; tails imperialism. Win -win. (Can't remember his name – guy who runs Hathaway-something: "there is class war, & my class is winning". Damn few business men are as worshipped as this bloke) And yes, just look at the 90′s, the Yeltsin years, the Clinton years looked like it was all working out.

Well, contradictions will "out". And here we are. A ruling class descending into sociopathology. A public unable to fully comprehend the toxic brew bubbling just beneath the surface ( the 6 o'clock news, comfortable, day in day out, pay the damn bills, the kid's teeth need braces & the car a new exhaust).

I won't mention climate change – few here who believe, let alone give a fuck ? We are in diabolical trouble but fuck it – instinctively we all know it's a Panglossian universe .& the devil take the hindmost.

RadicalCenter , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 1:59 pm GMT
@War for Blair Mountain

Both the USA and Russia are much less "Christian" than you make out. But you're right, of course, that our enemies seem especially motivated to destroy any nation with a meaningful vestige of Western (Greco-Roman-Anglo-European) Civilization and/or Christian mores.

Miro23 , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 2:01 pm GMT
@War for Blair Mountain

The Democratic Party Voting Bloc is now effectively-demographically majority post-1965 nonwhites+American Blacks .

True enough but they aren't necessarily against the "Deplorables". For example Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez who recently won a Democratic primary in New York (against heavy odds) describes herself as a "Democratic Socialist" for affordable single-payer national healthcare, tuition free education in high schools and universities ,with a downsized MIC & Deep State and realistic corporate taxation helping pay for it.

And on the Gaza border shooting of Palestinians she recently said, "This is a massacre. I hope my peers have the moral courage to call it such. No state or entity is absolved of mass shootings of protesters. There is no justification. Palestinian people deserve basic human dignity, as anyone else. Democrats can't be silent about this anymore." She opposes the Likudniks, AIPAC, Netanyahu and wants a two state solution.

Democratic Socialism and Elite Globalist Zionism seem to have a problem living together in the Democratic Party.

The strains are also visible in the UK where Jeremy Corbyn could also be described as a Democratic Socialist with much the same platform as Ocasio-Cortez and a good chance of becoming Prime Minister.

animalogic , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 2:04 pm GMT
@Erebus

Trump – good & evil. But his base need to take to the streets before he has a "problem in Dallas" or the dickless wonders in Congress finally get the gumption to impeach (hard as that's to believe of the Dem-castrartie party .)

Imperial myths , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 2:11 pm GMT
The US has been a very succesful country, an amazing empire . In barely a century and a half expanded enormously thanks to Northern European protestant immigration and to the occupation of Mexican territories .

In 1945 the USA was on top of the world , it was " the shining city of the hill " , the only city shining in the hill in fact , it had 50% of the world GDP . while the rest of the world was in ruins . The decadent Europeans had destroyed themselves in two world wars . . The Russians had suffered the horrors of the communist revolution and the two world wars . The Japanese although defeated had destroyed Asia , specially China which also endured a civil war and a communist revolution .

So , in 1945 the world was in ruins , and the USA was indeed the only "shining city on the hill " . The USA never suffered the world wars destruction on its own territory , had few casualties in the world wars , and had 50% of the world GDP. Besides the USA inherited economically and politically the British Empire that England, exhausted by the two world wars could not maintain .

In the 60`s the USA was still the " shining city on the hill ", Kennedy wanted to do some changes , I do not know which ones, and he was killed ( by the deep State ? ), the world was shocked .

In the 70`s Nixon finished the Vietnam war ( a colonial heritage of the French ) it was an American defeat, and the " shining city in the hill " impeached him ( the deep State does not accept defeat ) . Europe , the USSR , Japan , China , had recovered from the wars and wanted to have their shining little villages in the hills too.

Presently the USA has 20% of the GDP , that`s a lot , the USA is a very powerful country , probably the most powerful country of the world , but 20% is not 50% . Probably Kennedy and Nixon realized that this day would come , and Trump sees that this day is arrived . Probably the american deep State would like to freeze time in 1945 , as well as the french deep State would like it to freeze history in 1805 in Austerlitz with Napoleon , or the Spanish deep State would like to freeze history in 1492 when Spain completely expelled the moors from Spain after seven centuries of fighting and discovered America , with the Catholic Kings .

The deep States are always sick of imperial nostalgia , they are the war party , they would like to make war to anyone to threatens its 1945 imperial glorious moment . And the Kennedys , Nixons and Trumps of this world are the party of peace, they want to adapt to a changing reality less glorious than the magic orgasmic moments that all empires have had , but more constructive, more adapted to an ever changing world .

All the Empires that the earth has seen have passed though this dilemma : party of war vs party of peace . At the end the parties of peace end up prevailing, but the parties of war can make a lot of damage both to their own country and to others .

jilles dykstra , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 2:22 pm GMT
@Cyrano

I still think the best explanation of Merkel's immigration policy is her belief that indeed the Germans are guilty of two world wars and the holocaust. Therefore 'ein neuer Mensch', a new German, must be created through mass immigration, as a German commentator explains. His book should be ready by now. His prediction is that just the E European countries, Hungary, Poland, etc., will remain European. Writing this, one may expect that they will turn politically to Russia, also a catholic white country.

jilles dykstra , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 2:29 pm GMT
@Imperial myths

" The decadent europeans had destroyed themselves in two world wars . . "

The USA destroyed Europe in two world wars. Do not remember if it was here that I read what Mark Twain said or wrote 'it is easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled'.
About WWI:
Charles Callan Tansill, 'Amerika geht in den Krieg', Stuttgart 1939 (America goes to War, 1938)
FDR's preparations for WWII:
Charles A. Beard, 'American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932 – 1940, A study in responsibilities', New Haven, 1946
Charles A. Beard, 'President Roosevelt and the coming of the war 1941, A study in appearances and realities', New Haven, 1948

animalogic , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 2:45 pm GMT
@Been_there_done_that

"Russian leaders provoked popular sentiment in numerous countries to join NATO, no doubt abetted by their unfavorable experiences under Russian occupation"

You mean USSR occupation, of course. Perhaps Russia might discuss any number of issues when the US removes it's illegal forces in Syria, stops supporting the crypto--Nazi coup government in Ukraine, withdraws it's missiles from Poland etc (oh, we'll protect you from non existent Iranian nuclear weapons) & pulls back it's conventional forces, stops proving up invasions like the Georgian invasion of Sth Iapetus, stops interfering in what remains of the democratic processes of the former USSR states, stops supporting terrorists across the ME, stops interfering in the energy business of its allies in the EU, stops it's lies & threats against Russian allies such as Iran & stops iys criminal sanctions on Russia .Well, that scratches the surface, anyway .

Anon [235] Disclaimer , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 2:54 pm GMT

3.The US armed forces are only good at three things: wasting immense sums of money, destroying countries and alienating the rest of the planet.

Alienating the rest of the planet: Wasting immense sums of money: The U.S. War Industry Raked in $5+ Billion Worth of Foreign Military Sales in June 2018

July 27, 2018 / Christian Sorensen /

"The U.S. war industry raked in $5,408,112,575 worth of foreign military sales (FMS) during June 2018. Notable items included $1.12 billion worth of Lockheed Martin F-16 aircraft for Bahrain and "

iseeit , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 3:04 pm GMT
@Anonymous

An uncommonly excellent analysis. High quality comment threads and sites that allow for reactions/debate/introduction of public discourse are my gold standard. Unz is exceptional and much appreciated. Just because it's unlikely that I might post here often

I would like to suggest Dr. Judith Curry's blog to anyone like me who enjoys going deeper into subjects than most 'normal' people would ever find time for. It's a climate blog. It's brilliant. Curry is a genuinely exceptional human and scientist. The comment threads are pure mind candy..

Comanche , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 3:07 pm GMT
@Been_there_done_that

are u ok ? Russia occupying her province of Kaliningrad ? maybe your country is occupying illegally California , Arizona , Nevada , Colorado , Utah , New Mexico , Oklahoma and Texas ? Get your nato out of Europe , Europe is fed un with your 80.000 yankee occupation troops .

Even baltics are missing Russians, Baltics` population is going down since they left CCCP , they are fed up with American warmongers , they do not want to be cannon fodder for the well paid eccentric American militarists .

TomSchmidt , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 3:20 pm GMT
@War for Blair Mountain

Trump won 20% of the Black male electorate. If he can increase that percentage, then the Democratic coalition becomes black females, post-1965 immigrants, and white New Class managerial types. He might get blacks to side with him over immigration, which has cut out the support for lower-skilled wages across the board.

linguistic smiles , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 3:26 pm GMT
It is very funny for the French speaking the American word neocon , for neo conservative. In French con means idiot , dumb , stupid , silly

so, neocon neoidiot , hehehhehehehehhehe

El Dato , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 3:39 pm GMT
@jilles dykstra

The USA destroyed Europe in two world wars.

That's kinda over the top. Continental suicide was on the books for the Great Continental War (I don't know how it comes it is called "World War") as general desire of revanchism, political nastiness, prussian militarism, yougoslav apsirations, decaying empires and the British desire for a continental balance of power met head-on with war tool mechanization. The US came online rather late.

As for "Word War II", it was mainly about two socialist systems facing off, and Japan irking the US with a bout of late-onset colonialism. Also everyone going crazy with operations research and even more mechanization. So it should be called "Socialist War I with Colonialism on the side.".

El Dato , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 3:40 pm GMT
@Anon

Something out of a Kubrick Movie or out of Borat. Release the Nouveau Cheque!

TomSchmidt , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 3:42 pm GMT
@Ilyana_Rozumova

They should have destroyed Germany after WWI, or come to a just Peace. They did neither, slightly weakening it and strongly pissing it off.

After the Soviets went out of business, the US neither welcomed it to the brotherhood of nations, nor destroyed it so it could not be a threat. Letting the looters loose upon it sure did piss a lot of people off though. Your point is well taken.

karakulaitis , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 3:56 pm GMT
@Been_there_done_that

You logorrheic schmuck , do you know the evolution of population in the baltic countries after they left the Soviet Union in 1990 ?

1990 : Estonia 1,600.000 2017 : Estonia 1,200.00

1990 : Letonia 2,700.000 2017 : Letonia 1,900.000

1990 : Lituania 3,700.000 2017 : Lituania 2,800.000

Looks like they are being exterminated by the new NATO/EU regime , don`t you think so ?

It is a new version of the plan Ost ?

Colin Wright , Website Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 4:18 pm GMT
Two reactions.

First reaction. All I can think of whenever I read another allegation of Russia influence, control of Trump or anyone else, or of Putin coming to Washington is Israel. Over and over: these people simply keep ignoring the elephant in the room. I don't care about the Pekinese: there's an elephant right there! Look at it! Yes, a Russian businessman once gave a Trump advisor (since dismissed) fifty thousand dollars. Israel partisans were the leading contributors to both candidates; Sheldon Adelson alone gave Donald Trump thirty five million dollars. Shall we talk about what we're doing as a consequence; how we're remorselessly driving Iran to the point where there will be no choice but war -- and at whose behest we're doing this?

No let's fret and fantasize about 'Russian influence.' Never mind that the body bags won't be coming back from Latvia, but from Iran.

Second reaction: this one's more optimistic. Yes, the attacks are increasingly hysterical; but they're also coming from an increasingly narrow base. More and more, people on both the right and the left just don't buy them anymore: see, for example, the denunciation of all this nonsense at the impeccably 'progressive' Mondoweiss.

I perceive the remaining anti-Trump partisans as still possessing a grip on the traditional media outlets. However, more and more, they simply speak for no one but themselves. In fact, this may account for the note of hysterical exaggeration; underneath it all is the sneaking suspicion that no one believes them, or is even listening. After all, look at Trump's poll numbers. The media keeps announcing that 'now he's blown it' -- and his numbers keep inching up. I like tracking a rolling average of the last ten polls. When I started the figure was around 38. Now it's moving past 43. Neither 'babygate' nor 'Russiagate' perceptibly affected this at all.

So to sum up, 'Russiagate' isn't the problem, and it's questionable if many actual Americans even think it is. This remains true whatever the ravings coming out of The Washington Post, or The New Yorker , or USA Today . All the evidence is that these organs speak for fewer and fewer people, and fewer and fewer are even listening.

Colin Wright , Website Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 4:32 pm GMT
Basically, I think most Americans don't even care about all this nonsense.

They know that if Trump is awful, the alternatives were even worse, and they know that the economy's doing well. No one's saying 'if only Hillary coulda won '

jilles dykstra , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 4:48 pm GMT
@El Dato

The USA came into WWI from the very beginning. Without buying USA food and weapons on credit GB and France could not have fought at all. Moreover, the USA was not neutral, the USA allowed the British blockade of Germany. As to continental suicide, there was no such thing.
GB wanted war.

WWII, how many times must be repeated what Lindbergh already said before Pearl Harbour, that 'jewry and GB wanted war'. FDR was brought into politics by Bernard Baruch, who already in 1928 prevented his friend Churchill from going into business, because 'he saw great things for Churchill in the future'. These great things came, Churchill waged an unnecessary war, and destroyed the empire.

ploni almoni , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 4:54 pm GMT
@Quartermaster

This is the best the CIA can do?

chris , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 5:09 pm GMT
@Anon

maybe they're singing: "We Arm the World"

Been_there_done_that , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 5:24 pm GMT
@karakulaitis

Quote:
" do you know the evolution of population in the baltic countries after they left the Soviet Union in 1990 ?"

Yes, the decreases in population can easily be explained primarily by Russians, who used to live there, having moved back to Russia. Additionally, there might have been small population flows of Lithuanias to Poland, Latvians to Sweden, and Estonians to Finland, given the close relationships. Nothing nefarious.

anon [317] Disclaimer , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 5:51 pm GMT
@HO-LY COWW

interesting that Russia has been called to defend itself in England. There its Novichok the instant death substance arguably produced in London by USA controlled labs or taken from the old USSR when it fell apart.

Putin vs British government case: Putin charged with poisoning an ex Russian spy and his daughter, unfortunately for the media and the British corporate Zionist both Russians survived, Russia has called the British liars to the carpet.. Russia demands an investigation but the Banksters and their corporations refuse to allow the British Government to open its "so-called" investigation to Russian questioning.

Keep your eyes focused on Nord II. the one road one belt, Turkey moving in support of Syria and Yemen against Saudi Arabia, BRICS and concern yourself with the fact that Russia not only does not own any USA debt, but Russia also has a non federal reserve approved monetary exchange operation, SCO is growing in strength, China Gold backed bonds are available for anyone to buy and convert the face value of the bond to gold. These are game changers.

Stay tuned for more privately owned advertising supported corporate media productions showing on "FREE THEATER". M 16, (criminal instigating Association) CIA and Mossad employees are busy writing new propaganda, budget is not a problem, the Russian's will be made to pay for the articles, movies etc. so everything is free. Enjoy!

HO-LY COWW , Next New Comment July 29, 2018 at 6:41 pm GMT
@anon

Yes indeed, first Britain, and now Russia has pantsed the US too. In a virtuosic dick move, they exposed a CIA spook who's implicated not only in Secret Agent Browder's war propaganda ( http://russiahouse.org/current_news.php?language=eng&id_current=1454 ) but in CIA crimes against humanity – specifically, 'legal pretexts for manifestly illegal acts."

David Kramer, Tufts/Harvard Political Science/Russian studies, **PNAC** , DoS focal point, then CIA's famous captive NGO **Freedom House** , and a featherbed job at the McCain Institute for Freedom, Democracy, and Abandoning Thousands of MIAs in Vietnam to Die Slow Agonizing Deaths in Penal Camps.

Here he is talking to his co-conspirator Robert Otto, "Only idiots like Kerry think we have common interests in Syria."

https://freeworld556.wordpress.com/2017/07/12/us-state-department-official-robert-otto-got-hacked/

Needless to say, Kramer wouldn't know a human right from a bar of soap. He's a knuckledragger. CIA sent Kramer to DRL when Alfreda Bikowsky got her tit caught in the crimes-against-humanity wringer for systematic and widespread torture. The US was five years late reporting to the Committee Against Torture and got a mind-boggling eight (8) follow-on inquiries for urgent derogations of non-derogable rights. So Kramer had to think fast and make up some bullshit why simulated live burial, object rape, death by dryboard suffocation, and penis-slitting is not torture. Kramer is not the brightest bulb, but that's not a hard job. During the Bush administration all the delegation did was say, "The US does not Torture," robotically over and over.

So Kramer is a good example of how CIA runs the State Department. When a CIA vital interest like impunity comes up, they parachute a mole in to get their criminals off the hook.

peterAUS , July 29, 2018 at 7:02 pm GMT
@animalogic

.A public unable to fully comprehend .

Really? Why? What's to hard to fully comprehend? This ain't quantum physics. Not enough time in busy lives to spend some effort on the topic?
Yeah .But enough time for shopping, social media, online entertainment and such. Etc.

No. Yes, the elites are corrupted. But, the masses are corrupted too. THAT is the problem here.

Or, Trump support base is corrupted too. Not as bad/evil/malicious. As weak. W ..e a k. And weak always get ruled by strong.

What did/do they think? That the same people who can slaughter hundreds of thousands Iraqis without missing their lunch are just going to give up their power like that? That the half an hour of voting "effort" will change that game of power?

What are they doing now? How can one expect to challenge that power by sitting at home and waiting for one man to go against all that? Bullshit.

I've been told that "Trump base" doesn't do mass demonstrations. I still don't get why not? What's so hard to do, WHENEVER Dems/progs pull their numbers on the street, the "Trump base" does the same? That's reactive. Go active. Whenever Trump pulls some of his moves which flips the Dems/progs his support base floods the streets From the little town in Midwest to New York.

What's so hard about that? The same people have no problem going out .watching games being outdoors..whatever. Oh, yes, it could get what .dangerous? Really? What? Fistfights? Shooting? What happened to that "brave" in the "land of ."?

Don't get this post wrong. Not directed at you. It's directed at lazy and weak people who are out of their depth. Wouldn't be a problem save what's going to happen when Dems/progs get their person in White House.

Then, all of us, will have fun times I am sure.

[Jul 29, 2018] The Helsinki summit, CIA-run media and U.S.-Russian Relations

MIC is a cancer, and looks like there is no cure
Notable quotes:
"... I do think the credit for this goes to the Clinton campaign, the "intelligence" agencies, the neoconlib biparty and individuals like McCain, who have gone to McCarthyism lengths since before the GOP primaries ended to prevent Trump from attempting *any* change of the status quo on foreign policy. Granted, the man might be ineffectual no matter what, but we will never know. The US establishment and the retainers of the war profiteering classes have made any negotiations with Russia impossible long before Trump even announced his campaign. ..."
"... it is the unholy alliance of Democrats looking for an excuse for them losing the election and Cold War hawk neocons who have Russia-hate in their DNA (and their stock portfolios)). ..."
"... The embarrassment was the reaction in the MSM showcasing how they are now CIA state run media. They trot out former high ranking CIA officers now employed by them recycling every meme to reinforce that we are the forces goodness and light and anyone strong enough to oppose us is evil. ..."
Jul 18, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

b. July 16, 2018 at 9:35 pm

"Trump has made it politically impossible to pursue that goal in the near term."

I do think the credit for this goes to the Clinton campaign, the "intelligence" agencies, the neoconlib biparty and individuals like McCain, who have gone to McCarthyism lengths since before the GOP primaries ended to prevent Trump from attempting *any* change of the status quo on foreign policy. Granted, the man might be ineffectual no matter what, but we will never know. The US establishment and the retainers of the war profiteering classes have made any negotiations with Russia impossible long before Trump even announced his campaign.

We also should not forget to credit the GOP for test-driving the whole "weak on Russia" playbook during the Obama years.

Rob , says: July 16, 2018 at 11:21 pm
I agree with b. While Trump may not be savvy enough to calibrate his engagement with Putin in a way that would allow a proper dialogue with Russia in spite of the political backdrop in the US, the primary blame for any failure to allow such dialogue rests for those responsible for creating that political backdrop that makes it so difficult in the first place (hint: it's not Trump, unless you blame him for winning the election – rather it is the unholy alliance of Democrats looking for an excuse for them losing the election and Cold War hawk neocons who have Russia-hate in their DNA (and their stock portfolios)).
a spencer , says: July 17, 2018 at 1:33 am
That Putin talked up the Iran deal in the press conference makes me wonder what was said in the one-on-one. Couldn't have pleased the Adelson/Bolton wing.
Erik , says: July 17, 2018 at 2:35 am
I also agree with b.

Additionally there has yet to be any actual evidence presented re significant election interference. Indictments are accusations, not evidence.

I saw nothing particularly wrong with the press conference. I'm no Trump fan, but he was just saying he believed Putin rather than the people who are clearly trying to bring his administration down. Can't really blame him.

Christian Chuba , says: July 17, 2018 at 9:59 am
The embarrassment was the reaction in the MSM showcasing how they are now CIA state run media. They trot out former high ranking CIA officers now employed by them recycling every meme to reinforce that we are the forces goodness and light and anyone strong enough to oppose us is evil.

CNN even used Putin's dearly departed Labrador, Konni making her look like Cujo stating that Putin use her to terrorize Angela Merkel. A U.S. Congressman fumed that the 50,000 children died in Syria because this fiend supported Assad when Syria was about to be liberated (a number suspiciously close to the true number of Yemeni children we helped to kill). These are just two random examples in a very long day. It was
a show worthy of the priests of Baal who confronted Elijah.

As flawed as Trump may be, he is merely holding up a mirror to what we have become. Had we elected a conventional candidate it would just be business as usual with these seething hatreds buried just below the surface.

No one better suggest that we should tarnish ourselves talking to the likes of a Russian leader unless we are discussing terms of surrender. We want Yeltsin or maybe Medvedev.

[Jul 28, 2018] When Your Story Implodes, Call Me – I m an American Chemical Weapons Expert! by Mark Chapman

Notable quotes:
"... Look at the case, frequently discussed here, of British intelligence services and the fake rock , which had the guts of a Blackberry cellular telephone inside it, in Moscow. This 'rock' was strategically situated so that intelligence assets (you only call them 'traitors' if they are western citizens; Russians who betray their country are dissident heroes) could stroll past and flip messages to the rock, and every so often, British intelligence services could remotely extract it; the 'rock' only had to be touched to charge the batteries. ..."
"... But that was six years after the fact. For six years the British stonewalled and denied, and acted hurt that anyone would believe such an obvious Russian-bullshit story ..."
"... Tony Blair, for example, has never to the best of my knowledge admitted to having lied to influence public opinion in the UK in favour of committing with its partner, the United States, to the Iraq War, which was such a smorgasbord of lies that the weapons-of-mass-destruction whopper was only the biggest. Iraq was wrecked, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, and the liars were never punished, nor ever in fact admitted their guilt. In cases where the guilty must begrudgingly admit they lied, nobody does anything about it, the firebolts of celestial retribution never appear, and the liars go on to lie some more with increased confidence. An eager and gullible audience is always ready to swallow some more horseshit. ..."
"... Like now, with the Skripal case. We are supposed to believe mysterious Russian assassins daubed Novichok nerve agent on the Skripals' front doorknob, which transferred to their hands, and then they drove downtown, enjoyed a good meal in a restaurant, and then started feeling poorly, and collapsed on a public bench, victims of a nerve agent much more toxic than VX. Five to eight times, says FOX News . ..."
"... But the Skripals did not die. They were carefully shielded and monitored by the British security services so that they could not be questioned by the public, but they did not die. ..."
"... Perhaps of greatest concern, if chemical-weapons professionals were aware that Novichok could persist in deadly concentrations for months – that it was specially engineered to be not only virtually undetectable by NATO sensors, but to remain deadly through the deleterious effects of the elements why did they say nothing when the dozy police assured the public that it was in absolutely no danger? ..."
"... This article is a timely reminder that the UK never stopped fighting the Cold War. I had forgotten about the embarrassing spy rock incident. The (labour) government lies were accepted without question by the media. ..."
"... The Novichok issue – fits into this pattern of behaviour. ..."
Jul 28, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Uncle Volodya says, "Stupidity is the same as evil, if you judge by the results."

I've been waiting for something to happen
for a day, or a week, or a year;
with the blood in the ink of the headlines
and the roar of the crowd in my ears.
You might ask what it takes to remember
but you know that you've seen it before;
when a government lies to a people
and a country is drifting to war

Jackson Browne, from "Lives in the Balance"

"People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election."

Otto von Bismarck

During an hour or so of poring over quotes about lying (of course I don't make these up myself), before the snatch of lyric from "Lives in the Balance" floated into my memory unbidden, I was struck as never before by the prevalence of belief in the truth always coming out. Lyric after quote after stanza has it that you can lie and lie and lie, but eventually the truth will always surface, and the liar will be caught.

Is that true? Was it ever true? Perhaps among the congenitally stupid, who labour simultaneously under their guilt and a suspicion that smarter people (which is everybody else) can read minds; I'm reminded of a story which was set in the American southern states, in which the probable perpetrator of some petty crime or other was brought into the rural sheriff's office for questioning. He was told that he must take a lie-detector test. Accordingly, a metal colander, such as is used for washing salad ingredients, was placed on his head, with wires from it leading to the photocopier. The deputies had put a piece of paper in the copier which read, "He's Lying!!", and whenever they asked the suspect a question, they would press the 'print' button following the answer, and out would come a paper which averred that the answer was a lie, which they would show to him. Eventually, confronted with his tapestry of falsehoods and under the apprehension that he was being measured by other-worldly technology, he confessed. But the local law enforcement was already well aware that he was guilty – they just wanted a confession.

So, perhaps in circumstances like that, in which the liar is a desperate fool, perhaps then the truth always comes out. But in reality, not only does truth almost never come out, it only does when all possibility of further elaboration on existing lies has been exhausted. But here's the real kicker – when the truth does come out, we are led by philosophers to believe that evangelical vengeance will be swift to follow. Does that really happen? Perhaps after the liar is dead, he or she goes someplace featuring a dancing-flames motif, where he or she is prodded the livelong day by imps with little pitchforks. But that sort of forestalls the satisfaction of justice done in the here and now – punishment delayed is punishment denied, am I right?

Look at the case, frequently discussed here, of British intelligence services and the fake rock , which had the guts of a Blackberry cellular telephone inside it, in Moscow. This 'rock' was strategically situated so that intelligence assets (you only call them 'traitors' if they are western citizens; Russians who betray their country are dissident heroes) could stroll past and flip messages to the rock, and every so often, British intelligence services could remotely extract it; the 'rock' only had to be touched to charge the batteries.

But that was six years after the fact. For six years the British stonewalled and denied, and acted hurt that anyone would believe such an obvious Russian-bullshit story; the Foreign Office scornfully retorted , "We are concerned and surprised at these allegations. We reject any allegation of improper conduct in our dealing with Russian NGO's ." So receiving surreptitious messages through a styrofoam rock is just the above-board, in-plain-sight honest dialogue in which foreign embassies everywhere engage; why the outrage? And when Britain finally admitted what had been going on, minus all the holier-than-thou gilding of trying to build a better world with Russia through an active and engaged civil society absolutely nothing was done. Not only does the truth not necessarily ever come out – Tony Blair, for example, has never to the best of my knowledge admitted to having lied to influence public opinion in the UK in favour of committing with its partner, the United States, to the Iraq War, which was such a smorgasbord of lies that the weapons-of-mass-destruction whopper was only the biggest. Iraq was wrecked, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, and the liars were never punished, nor ever in fact admitted their guilt. In cases where the guilty must begrudgingly admit they lied, nobody does anything about it, the firebolts of celestial retribution never appear, and the liars go on to lie some more with increased confidence. An eager and gullible audience is always ready to swallow some more horseshit.

Like now, with the Skripal case. We are supposed to believe mysterious Russian assassins daubed Novichok nerve agent on the Skripals' front doorknob, which transferred to their hands, and then they drove downtown, enjoyed a good meal in a restaurant, and then started feeling poorly, and collapsed on a public bench, victims of a nerve agent much more toxic than VX. Five to eight times, says FOX News . Ten times more deadly than its better-known predecessors, says Anne Applebaum. But the Skripals did not die. They were carefully shielded and monitored by the British security services so that they could not be questioned by the public, but they did not die.

And that's possible – in the case of a mild dose of, say, VX (much less deadly than Novichok, remember), as a liquid through a skin-contact vector, it might take up to two hours for symptoms (local sweating and muscular twitching) to appear, according to the US Army's Armament, Munitions and Chemical Command Chemical Research, Development and Engineering Center's Reigle Report . The trouble with that scenario as applied to the Skripals is that the duration of those effects would be about 3 days for a mild exposure, and 5 days for a severe exposure. The Skripals showed no such effects; they ate dinner in what must have been to all appearances a normal fashion, and then collapsed unconscious on a bench outside. Some accounts suggested they had a quantity of foam around their mouths, which might result from salivation. At least one report says Yulia Skripal had vomited. No reports mentioned excessive sweating and muscular twitching, both of which are hallmarks of nerve-agent poisoning via liquid (as opposed to gas) exposure through the skin.

There are a couple of other problems with the British approach. We've all seen the pictures of the chemical-warfare types in their green dung-beetle suits, meticulously taking samples, while unprotected firemen in simple turnout gear with no masks or breathing apparatus stood just a couple of feet away. VX as a liquid could become a gas, but it'd have to be pretty hot. If that happened, it would not be persistent beyond a couple of hours. VX as a liquid, under very cold conditions, can actually persist for a couple of months. Quite a bit colder than it typically is in even England, though, in spring and summer. Daily averages for Salisbury, UK in March are above freezing, an average of about 45F, and it customarily gets much warmer going into summer. So you can't have it both ways – if it's a liquid, it's more persistent in its toxicity over time, but that effect is greatly attenuated by temperature. If it's a gas, breathing apparatus for anyone who might be exposed is an absolute rule.

Another discrepancy came up, in a timeline of the Skripals' movements . They left the father's home at some time close to but prior to 1:30 PM, and drove into town. This, it is estimated, would take about 10 to 15 minutes. They are observed by CCTV entering a multi-story car park in Salisbury at around 1:32 PM. Here one of the Skripals – both of whom apparently touched the front doorknob on the way out, the second one perhaps just for luck – then touched the ticket machine with their bare hand. This machine remained unchecked for 8 days after the event. How many other people touched it between that time and the time anyone checked it for toxicity? Yet nobody else showed any symptoms.

It was an extremely oddball event, which continues to inspire skeptical questions and scornful refutations. But I don't want to get too bogged-down in the Skripal affair – instead, I want to focus a bit on the more recent incident, the 'poisoning' of Dawn Sturgess and Charles Rowley, in nearby Amesbury. This incident, also, has featured a wildly-improbable British-government narrative and skeptical questioning, and one of the foremost skeptical questions has been "How the hell could a nerve agent that did not kill the people who were its targets accidentally kill a chance victim four months later?"

Enter, stage left, the American Chemical Weapons Expert, who announces that Novichok was specially engineered to remain persistent over a long time . So that it could, you know, kill incidental victims months later and further incriminate the country where it is supposed to have originated. That's why it is the go-to poison for Russian assassins. It might not kill the people you wanted to kill, but it could kill someone totally unrelated, months later. True story.

There are a few things you should know about the expert quoted, Dan Kaszeta. One, he's the Managing Director of Strongpoint Security (it seems like all the UK's go-to commentators are executives in the security industry, like FireEye or Crowdstrike). Sounding off in the media, taking a position which unreservedly supports the government narrative – no matter how nutty it is – is a good way to get noticed in the security business, and Strongpoint is a fairly new operation. Two, he's the resident CBRN expert at Bellingcat . Three, he is not a Trump fan, broadcasting for his anti-Trump audience how the President of the United States' motorcade and security detail might be confused, frustrated and sidetracked so that he would get the message he was not welcome. I can hardly fault Kaszeta for that, since Trump is over-the-top unpopular just about everywhere he goes, but it's a little unusual to see a former White-House consultant handing out advice on how to screw up a White House visit.

Four, he is a much bigger noise on the CBRN front than you might have imagined if you've never heard of him before, confidently chatting up the wide-eyed press corps on all things chemical-warfare. And always supporting the UK government's contention that Novichok was always Russian, only Russian, and that it could not have been anyone else. Here he is, letting the WBUR Boston audience know in no uncertain terms, "I don't know anybody who knows how to make it except these guys in Russia. They've been a deep, dark secret." But their purported engineer, Vil Marzayanov, claimed their precursors were ordinary organophosphates which are commercially available; "One should be mindful that the chemical components or precursors of A-232 and its binary version novichok-5 are ordinary organophosphates that can be made at commercial chemical companies that manufacture fertilizers and pesticides [nerve agents, after all, arose from research into pesticides and are really advanced versions of pesticides]. In my opinion, this research program was premised on the ability to hide the production of precursor chemicals under the guise of legitimate commercial chemical production of agricultural chemicals . And if America was concerned that its manufacture was devious and covert, it is kind of difficult to imagine why an American publisher published a book which featured the formula for making it, courtesy of Marzayanov, and which anyone can obtain for around $30.00. Is that how you keep something a deep, dark secret? And obviously the Defense Research establishment at Porton Down, only a couple of miles from the site of the Salisbury poisoning, had samples of Novichok, since they were able to identify it in a couple of hours. It's beginning to shape up like the worst-kept deep dark secret in the world.

According to Dan, the Soviets wanted to engineer chemical agents that NATO equipment could not detect. Gosh! Those tricky sons of bitches. So then they engineered it to be extra-persistent, so it would stay around for months, just to make it fair, so NATO could have lots of time to take more samples. The thing is, the whole raison d'etre of a nerve agent is that it be non -persistent; you want it to rapidly and efficiently kill off the enemy, but you want to move your own troops into that same area in a matter of days, to consolidate your gains and establish your own military presence. Months just doesn't cut it.

Asked why an assassin would use such a distinctive agent, pointing straight back at his own country, Dan suggests that given the historic secrecy of the project, someone might have reasoned that it would go undetected. Uh huh; sure – the Stimson Report came out in 1995. And the agent used is 'specially engineered to remain a toxic menace for months'.

Here's Dan again , backstopping the White House's assertion that only Assad could have been behind an alleged sarin gas attack at Khan Sheikhoun; the Russian version, he says, is "highly implausible". "Nerve agents are the result of a very expensive, exotic, industrial chemical process -- these are not something you just whip up." Oh, dear – put John Gilbert, senior science fellow at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, in the "Disagree" column: he says all you would need to make sarin is about a 200 square-foot room and a competent chemist.

Two other attributes compound sarin's insidiousness. First, it's not especially hard to produce, in terms of both resources and expertise. "A competent chemist could make it, and possibly very quickly, in a matter of days," says John Gilbert, a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, who spent much of his Air Force career assessing countries' WMD capabilities. Producing sarin doesn't require any kind of massive facility; a roughly 200 square foot room would do.

According to Dan – yet again, this time in the Los Angeles Times – one form of Novichok is as a solid at normal temperatures, and it might have been deployed as a dust or powder. Uh huh, might have been. But (a) that would have been the least-persistent method except for as a gas, it would never have lasted four months outside, through rain, and (b) not even a rummy like Charles Rowley would have tried to pawn off a bottle of dust to his girlfriend as perfume.

Because here we are again, at another 'Novichok' poisoning, and Dan helpfully dispels the myth that Novichok would not still be around and deadly after four months, by announcing the Soviets specially engineered it to do just that. And not only that – they made it especially for contaminating large areas of land, such as ports, and equipment, like tanks, so that they would be dangerous for months. That was supposedly 'the idea' when they were developed.

Horseshit. Nerve agents are most effective against unprotected troops in the open, and if you want to contaminate an area the size of a port, the only possible way you could do it would be with a spray – the least persistent form of all. All organophospate-based nerve agents can be effectively dealt with – before unprotected personnel are exposed – by spraying and washing contaminated areas with water; moisture makes them break down quickly. Nobody has engineered a miracle waterproof organophosphate nerve agent. Once nerve agents are known to have been used, troops in the field are in TOPP (Threat-Oriented Protective Posture) Medium at least, in full chem suits with breathing apparatus available for rapid donning. Nerve agents were not developed as a weapon of covert assassination, although they have definitely been used in that role; they were developed as a weapon of mass destruction to be used against a military adversary who presumably is trained in CBRN countermeasures. They were not developed to spray tanks, in the hope that some mook would put his bare hand on it two months later, and fall over jerking and drooling. How the fuck would you disperse enough nerve agent to contaminate an airfield? Fly over with a water-bomber and drench it from end to end? You don't think that might offer a bit of a clue? If you want to disperse a large amount of nerve agent, it will have to be vaporized, and it will have to be carried in the dispersal vehicle as a liquid. Liquids are heavy – the more you want to disperse, the bigger your dispersal vehicle will have to be. The Soviet Union developed gas warheads, to be used on a ballistic missile, but if you can land a gas warhead next to an airfield you might as well go the whole nine yards and blow it up, because a warhead that lies there hissing and dispersing a cloud of vapour is kind of a giveaway. Unless, of course, you only want to kill the military personnel in the area, and not damage the airfield, so you can quickly take it over and deploy your own aircraft from it. In which instance you would have been pretty stupid to envelope it in a toxic nerve agent that is still going to be active next spring. And the whole idea of a nerve agent is to deploy a small amount of it, using an unobtrusive dispersal vehicle, so as not to call attention to it until personnel in the target area are affected.

It's nice of Dan to try and fill in the blanks the way he did, but there are just too many blanks. The latest story from HM government is that a perfume bottle was found in Charles Rowley's home, and tests revealed – surprise! – that it contained Novichok. The story is that Rowley found it in Queen Elizabeth Park. Somehow, Dawn Sturgess is supposed to have sprayed the contents of the bottle on her wrists and face, like perfume. Oops! now it's an aerosol, the fastest-acting form of nerve agent, and she probably would have been affected in minutes at most, not hours. But she was not at Rowley's home, where the bottle was supposedly discovered. So he either took the bottle with him to meet her, and after noticing her exhibiting symptoms of nerve-agent poisoning, took the bottle home with him and put it in his house, or they were both affected at roughly the same time, and somebody thoughtfully posted the bottle to his home address. If she was poisoned at his house, she would not likely have made it out.; remember, it was dispersed as a vapor. So there is a question as to how the bottle got there, and another as to how it laid there in the park for nearly four months, until Rowley discovered it.

And how it remained powerful enough to kill after all that time, when the fresh-off-the-shelf Novichok, four months previously, failed to kill the Skripals. Not to mention how it got there in the first place – are we supposed to believe that highly-trained assassins straight from the Kremlin did the Skripal job, and then tossed away their backup supply in a local park?

Perhaps of greatest concern, if chemical-weapons professionals were aware that Novichok could persist in deadly concentrations for months – that it was specially engineered to be not only virtually undetectable by NATO sensors, but to remain deadly through the deleterious effects of the elements why did they say nothing when the dozy police assured the public that it was in absolutely no danger?

Mark Chapman says: July 20, 2018 at 7:53 am

Thanks, Al! Yes, Britain – like the USA – has a reliable stable of current and ex-military officers to call upon whenever the broader public starts getting inquisitive or uncomfortable with the official storyline, to get us back on the path with the uncompromising guarantee of military experience and exotic knowledge the average yokel can never hope to possess.

General (Ret'd) Wesley Clark, for example, the affable and polished talking head for CNN during the Iraq War and onetime presidential candidate.

Yes, the term CBRN replaced the old NBCD, Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defense.

James lake says: July 20, 2018 at 2:17 am
This article is a timely reminder that the UK never stopped fighting the Cold War. I had forgotten about the embarrassing spy rock incident. The (labour) government lies were accepted without question by the media.

The Novichok issue – fits into this pattern of behaviour.

[Jul 27, 2018] What Everyone Seemed To Ignore In Helsinki by Jon Basil Utley

Jul 27, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Jon Basil Utley via The American Conservative,

We continue careening towards more conflicts which can always lead to unintended consequences, ever closer to nuclear war. Meanwhile efforts for a dialogue with Russia are thwarted by our internal politics and dysfunction in Washington.

Sifting through the cacophony of commentary from the Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki, here are four key points missed, ignored or glossed over by the Washington establishment and mainstream news coverage - and they require a good airing.

They are:

1) It's clear now that Europeans will increase their contributions to NATO. But Big Media totally ignored the trillion dollar gorilla in room: Why does anyone have to spend so much on NATO in the first place?

Are we planning a ground attack on Russia because we really think the former Soviet Empire will invade Poland or the Baltic nations? Are we planning for a land war in Europe to intervene in the Ukraine? What for is the money? The Trump administration and Big Media, for all their noise, mainly argue that more spending is good. There is no debate about the reasons why. Meanwhile Russia is cutting its military spending.

Washington is so dominated by our military-industrial-congressional complex that spending money is a major intent. Remember when Washington first insisted that putting up an anti-missile system in Poland and Romania was supposed to protect Europe from an Iranian attack? Of course, it was really directed against Russia. Washington was so eager to spend the money that it didn't even ask the Europeans to pay the cost even though it was supposedly for their defense. As of 2016 Washington had spent $800 million on the site in Romania. Now it appears that Poland and Romania will pay billions to the Raytheon Corporation for the shield to comply with their commitment to increase military spending to 2 percent of gross national product.

2) There was no focus on the real, growing threat of nuclear war, intentional or accidental. No one, including journalists at the joint press conference, spoke about the collapsing missile treaties (the only one who reportedly seemed keen to discuss it was ejected beforehand). Scott Ritter details these alarming risks here on TAC .

The U.S. is now funding new cruise missiles with nukes which allow for a surprise attack on Russia with only a few minutes of warning, unlike the ICBMs which launch gives a half an hour or more. This was the reason Russia opposed the anti-missile system in Eastern Europe, because they could have little warning if cruise missiles were fired from the new bases. Americans may think that we don't start wars, but the Russians don't. The old shill argument that democracies don't start wars is belied by American attacks on Serbia, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen.

3) For all the Democratic and Big Media attacks on Trump for supposedly caving in to Putin, he gave Putin nothing. His administration is still maintaining an increasingly stringent economic attack on Russian trade and banking, announcing (just days after his meeting) $200 million of new aid to Ukraine's military and threatening Europeans with sanctions if they go ahead with a new Baltic pipeline to import Russian natural gas. Consequently, some analysts believe that Putin has given up on wanting better relations with the U.S. and instead is just trying to weaken and discredit America's overwhelming power in the world. In a similar vein Rand Paul writes how we never think about other nations' interests.

4) The release of intelligence agency findings about Russians' intervention in the last election just a day before the conference precisely shows the strength of the "Deep State" in dominating American foreign policy. An article by Bruce Fein in TAC argues we should "Forget Trump: The Military-Industrial Complex is Still Running the Show With Russia, " showing how Washington wants to keep Russia as an enemy because it's good for business.

Furthermore, releasing the accusations and indictments via a press already out for Trump's blood is explained away by pointing out that the special prosecutor has separate authority to that of the president. But the timing, a day before the Helsinki meeting, obviously shows intent to cause disarray and to prevent meaningful dialogue with Russia. It's interesting to note that TAC has been criticizing the "Deep State" since at least 2015.

The casualness with which much of Washington regards conflict and starting wars is only comparable to the thoughtlessness of Europeans when they started World War I. Like now, that war followed nearly a century of relative peace and prosperity. Both sides thought a war would be "easy" and over quickly and were engulfed in it because of minor incidents instigated by their small nation allies. It was started with a single assassination in Serbia. The situation is similar now. America is hostage to the actions of a host of tiny countries possibly starting a war. Think of our NATO obligations and promises to Taiwan and Israel.

America has become inured to the risks of escalation and Congress has ceded its war powers to the president. The authority of war power was one of the most important tenets of our Constitution, designed to prevent our rulers from irresponsibly launching conflicts like the European kings. Witness now how casually Trump talks about starting a war with Iran, with no thought of possible consequences, including blowing up oil facilities in the Persian Gulf, oil and gas vital for the world economy.

For most Americans, war means sitting in front of their TVs watching the bombs fall on small nations unable to resist or respond to our power. "We" kill thousands of "them" in easy battles and then worry if a single American soldier is harmed. We don't viscerally understand the full threat of modern weapons because they've never been used against us. This is not unlike World War I, for which the countries engaged were wholly unprepared for a protracted siege war against the lethality of new modern artillery and chemical weapons. All had assumed the war would be over in weeks. I wrote about these issues after visiting the battlefields of the Crimean war. (See " Lessons in Empire")

And so we continue careening towards more conflicts which can always lead to unintended consequences, ever closer to nuclear war. Meanwhile efforts for a dialogue with Russia are thwarted by our internal politics and dysfunction in Washington.

Son of Loki Thu, 07/26/2018 - 23:45 Permalink

Pompeo told those democrat Senators where to shove it at the hearing.

"Did You Ask Obama About His Private Meeting With Putin?", Mike Pompeo SILENCES Arrogant Dem Senator

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqcefW2F1DI

That Menendez is a total anti-American prick.

[Jul 26, 2018] What Everyone Seemed to Ignore in Helsinki by Jon Basil Utley

Notable quotes:
"... Mr. Utley is the publisher of ..."
Jul 25, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The Washington establishment came to their own conclusions about Russia and NATO -- but this is what they missed.

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump during the recent summit in Helsinki. (Office of the Russian Presisdent/Kremin.ru) Sifting through the cacophony of commentary from the Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki, here are four key points missed, ignored or glossed over by the Washington establishment and mainstream news coverage -- and they require a good airing.

They are:

It's clear now that Europeans will increase their contributions to NATO. But Big Media totally ignored the trillion dollar gorilla in room: Why does anyone have to spend so much on NATO in the first place?

Are we planning a ground attack on Russia because we really think the former Soviet Empire will invade Poland or the Baltic nations? Are we planning for a land war in Europe to intervene in the Ukraine? What for is the money? The Trump administration and Big Media, for all their noise, mainly argue that more spending is good. There is no debate about the reasons why. Meanwhile Russia is cutting its military spending.

Trump Needs to Put Up or Shut Up on Russian Arms Race Let's See Who's Bluffing in the Criminal Case Against the Russians

Washington is so dominated by our military-industrial-congressional complex that spending money is a major intent. Remember when Washington first insisted that putting up an anti-missile system in Poland and Romania was supposed to protect Europe from an Iranian attack? Of course, it was really directed against Russia. Washington was so eager to spend the money that it didn't even ask the Europeans to pay the cost even though it was supposedly for their defense. As of 2016 Washington had spent $800 million on the site in Romania. Now it appears that Poland and Romania will pay billions to the Raytheon Corporation for the shield to comply with their commitment to increase military spending to 2 percent of gross national product.

There was no focus on the real, growing threat of nuclear war, intentional or accidental. No one, including journalists at the joint press conference, spoke about the collapsing missile treaties (the only one who reportedly seemed keen to discuss it was ejected beforehand). Scott Ritter details these alarming risks here on TAC .

The U.S. is now funding new cruise missiles with nukes which allow for a surprise attack on Russia with only a few minutes of warning, unlike the ICBMs which launch gives a half an hour or more. This was the reason Russia opposed the anti-missile system in Eastern Europe, because they could have little warning if cruise missiles were fired from the new bases. Americans may think that we don't start wars, but the Russians don't. The old shill argument that democracies don't start wars is belied by American attacks on Serbia, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen.

For all the Democratic and Big Media attacks on Trump for supposedly caving in to Putin, he gave Putin nothing. His administration is still maintaining an increasingly stringent economic attack on Russian trade and banking, announcing (just days after his meeting) $200 million of new aid to Ukraine's military and threatening Europeans with sanctions if they go ahead with a new Baltic pipeline to import Russian natural gas. Consequently, some analysts believe that Putin has given up on wanting better relations with the U.S. and instead is just trying to weaken and discredit America's overwhelming power in the world. In a similar vein Rand Paul writes how we never think about other nations' interests. TAC argues we should "Forget Trump: The Military-Industrial Complex is Still Running the Show With Russia, " showing how Washington wants to keep Russia as an enemy because it's good for business.

Furthermore, releasing the accusations and indictments via a press already out for Trump's blood is explained away by pointing out that the special prosecutor has separate authority to that of the president. But the timing, a day before the Helsinki meeting, obviously shows intent to cause disarray and to prevent meaningful dialogue with Russia. It's interesting to note that TAC has been criticizing the "Deep State" since at least 2015.

The casualness with which much of Washington regards conflict and starting wars is only comparable to the thoughtlessness of Europeans when they started World War I. Like now, that war followed nearly a century of relative peace and prosperity. Both sides thought a war would be "easy" and over quickly and were engulfed in it because of minor incidents instigated by their small nation allies. It was started with a single assassination in Serbia. The situation is similar now. America is hostage to the actions of a host of tiny countries possibly starting a war. Think of our NATO obligations and promises to Taiwan and Israel.

America has become inured to the risks of escalation and Congress has ceded its war powers to the president. The authority of war power was one of the most important tenets of our Constitution, designed to prevent our rulers from irresponsibly launching conflicts like the European kings. Witness now how casually Trump talks about starting a war with Iran, with no thought of possible consequences, including blowing up oil facilities in the Persian Gulf, oil and gas vital for the world economy.

For most Americans, war means sitting in front of their TVs watching the bombs fall on small nations unable to resist or respond to our power. "We" kill thousands of "them" in easy battles and then worry if a single American soldier is harmed. We don't viscerally understand the full threat of modern weapons because they've never been used against us. This is not unlike World War I, for which the countries engaged were wholly unprepared for a protracted siege war against the lethality of new modern artillery and chemical weapons. All had assumed the war would be over in weeks. I wrote about these issues after visiting the battlefields of the Crimean war. (See " Lessons in Empire")

And so we continue careening towards more conflicts which can always lead to unintended consequences, ever closer to nuclear war. Meanwhile efforts for a dialogue with Russia are thwarted by our internal politics and dysfunction in Washington.

Mr. Utley is the publisher of The American Conservative 15 Responses to What Everyone Seemed to Ignore in Helsinki



Fran Macadam July 25, 2018 at 1:56 am

"And so we continue careening towards more conflicts which can always lead to unintended consequences, ever closer to nuclear war. Meanwhile efforts for a dialogue with Russia are thwarted by our internal politics and dysfunction in Washington."

Careful with such cavalier use of the truth. Someone is sure to point out Vlad said just the same, which means according to D.C. war profiteer sponsored consensus we should do exactly the opposite.

S , , July 25, 2018 at 2:01 am
Lovely article. One aspect of going to war for conquest over and over, is that it leads to moral deterioration. Defensive wars aren't that bad. I am not sure why we haven't seen any articles on TAC about this aspect -- is it that it's not a popular idea?
John S , , July 25, 2018 at 8:57 am
What an awful piece. Here's why:

"1) It's clear now that Europeans will increase their contributions to NATO."

No, they are not. Defense budgets are increasing -- very different, and it was happening already before Trump's tweets came along.

"2) There was no focus on the real, growing threat of nuclear war, intentional or accidental."

How do you know, since Trump hasn't told anyone what was discussed in Helsinki?

"3) For all the Democratic and Big Media attacks on Trump for supposedly caving in to Putin, he gave Putin nothing."

Trump abased himself before Putin. That's not nothing. And who knows what else he gave Putin behind closed doors. One must assume a lot since Trump is not out bragging about particulars.

"4) The release of intelligence agency findings about Russians' intervention in the last election just a day before the conference precisely shows the strength of the "Deep State" in dominating American foreign policy."

Trump personally approved the release of that intelligence.

TAC sure carries a lot of water for Trumpistan.

Johann , , July 25, 2018 at 9:10 am
The myth that NATO has kept Europe at peace since WWII (except for the Balkan war) is still alive and well. But really, it was the fear of nuclear weapons that kept the peace.
Christian Chuba , , July 25, 2018 at 9:21 am
It is the risk of war vs. the hidden agenda of trying to break Russia a second time.

The people who want to break Russia a second time really do believe that Russia is weak and unwilling to risk war under any circumstances. So they want to expand NATO, get into another arms race and wait for Russia to go bankrupt again. Rinse repeat China.

If we expand NATO, pull out of INF and even START, we can build missile bases near Russia's borders, reduce or eliminate their exports, we can drive their economy into overdrive. But this requires an information war to make it look like they are the aggressors while we are the ones implementing this strategy.

By 'we' I mean our entrenched Foreign Policy Establishment that blathers about the 'rules based world order' while we bomb any country we want whenever we want. Queue up another story on how they encroached on NATO airspace while flying to their enclave in Kaliningrad, look at a map, it's impossible not to so so.

Tying it back, they do not believe that there is any risk of war. They are wrong.

sean mcauliffe , , July 25, 2018 at 9:28 am
4 is not true.

https://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/russia-indictment-timing-trump-approved-not-mueller-attack.html

Kurt Gayle , , July 25, 2018 at 9:46 am
Jon Basil Utley makes an important point:

"The release of intelligence agency findings about Russians' intervention in the last election just a day before the conference precisely shows the strength of the 'Deep State' in dominating American foreign policy Releasing the accusations and indictments via a press already out for Trump's blood a day before the Helsinki meeting, obviously shows intent to cause disarray and to prevent meaningful dialogue with Russia."

To be sure, the 6-4-3 (Mueller to Rosenstein to Mainstream Media) double play appeared at first to be a real beauty. However, the video replay showed that the pitcher had not yet pitched the ball to the batter and that the shortstop Mueller, the second baseman Rosenstein, and the MSM first baseman had carried out their double play with a ball that Mueller had pulled out of his hip pocket. ("Hip pocket" is a polite euphemism for the proximate area of the Mueller anatomy from whence the ball was actually pulled.)

hetro , , July 25, 2018 at 11:00 am
@John S.

*"abased himself" is the popular demon meme of the moment -- how did he do that?

*you say we don't know what he said to Putin then assume you know he gave Putin something he should not have.

This is irrational assumption apparently born from a deep prejudice of some sort.

Michael Kenny , , July 25, 2018 at 11:49 am
The real question is what did Putin give Trump? Nothing, as far as can be seen. Efforts for a dialogue with Russia are thwarted by Putin's continued occupation of Ukrainian territory, with its implicit denial of the principle of the sovereign nation-state, which has been the building block of the European political order since the French Revolution. For Americans, given the history of the American continent, European nationalism and the nation-state are wholly incomprehensible concepts but they're very real to us in Europe. Those Americans who promote a poorly-understood European nationalism in the hope of destroying the EU are promoting the very war they so piously claim to oppose.
balconesfault , , July 25, 2018 at 12:30 pm
It's clear now that Europeans will increase their contributions to NATO. But Big Media totally ignored the trillion dollar gorilla in room: Why does anyone have to spend so much on NATO in the first place?

Why would you top post a commentor who so clearly doesn't understand the details of what he's discussing?

I mean -- such fundamental misunderstanding of the issues might qualify him to be the Republican nominee for President (and thanks to the Electoral College, the President) but it is beneath your editorial standards.

CLW , , July 25, 2018 at 1:41 pm
Enough of this "Deep State" nonsense: stop lambasting U.S. Federal law enforcement and intelligence professionals for calling out Trump's willful ignorance/intentional lies about Russia's malicious actions. Russian belligerence against the U.S. is a predictable and manageable problem, but only by a President (e.g., Reagan, Bush 41) who grasps the complexity of the issue and who can balance targeted confrontation and selective cooperation with Russia. Trump is inherently incapable of striking that balance, as Putin clearly understands, therefore U.S.-Russian relations will remain (usefully for Putin) confrontational for the near term.
One Guy , , July 25, 2018 at 2:57 pm
Why is it up to the media to address the elephant in the room? Shouldn't the media simply report what happened? Why doesn't Trump address the elephant in the room?
Freestater , , July 25, 2018 at 4:02 pm
Our grandparents and parents fought the Commies.
GOP throws that away in search of lower taxes and less regulation.
GOP elites belong to the international elite, namely the highest bidder.
Shame.
b. , , July 25, 2018 at 4:02 pm
"The release of intelligence agency findings about Russians' intervention in the last election just a day before the conference precisely shows the strength of the 'Deep State' in dominating American foreign policy"

Others have already pointed out that the facts might not back up that the timing was some elaborate plot, but even if this was a Derp State conspiracy on full display, it would probably be proof of the opposite -- this would have not been an indication of influence, control, domination, but a sign of weakness.

Like all conspiracy theories, "Deep State" implies competence, coordination, capability. Our problem appears to be that we have too many bureaucracies infighting with each other, and filled with too many shallow minds. Indeed, one could argue that 9/11 happened precisely because of this.

That said, the first half of the article makes a compelling case of the foreign policy aspect of the manufactured "Russia!" hysteria, and the existential threat originating with the nuclear sector of the war profiteering presidential-congressional-military-industrial complex -- "We end the world for money!" -- and the Great Gambler faction of the nelibcon biparty -- "We can win nuclear war!".

The other half of the national, collectivized insanity that is "Russia!" is the domestic fraud: the biggest threat to the integrity of our elections and the functions of our institutions of government is not Russia, but ourselves.

The semi-organized biparty mob -- the "Derp State" -- that is pushing the "Russia!" narrative as the Grant Unified Theory of US American Home-Made Failure is systematically destroying whatever is left of The People's confidence in our processes and institutions -- confidence in our ruling class had to have died before anybody considered voting for Trump -- and soon, we will find ourselves in a nation in which nobody can profess any trust in any elected representative without being accused of being a traitor or useful idiot.

Putin, for one, could never accomplish that. American Excess: Hamstring your political opponent? Worth It. Destroy democracy to protect it from The People? Priceless.

Ken Zaretzke , , July 25, 2018 at 4:34 pm
I wasn't aware that the U.s. Is finding new niclear-armed cruise missiles that would give Russia only minutes to respond to an attack, as opposed to a half hour with ICBMs. Russia only has to recalibrate its fully automated Doomsday Machine to target Warsaw, Berlin, and Cracow along with U.S. cities, and to shorten the time of response.

We have to ask whether the exponentially greater likelihood of nuclear holocaust by accident, which is what the U.S. would be bringing about by nuclear-arming cruise missiles, proves that the Deep State's lust for power is irrational bordering on madness.

[Jul 24, 2018] Reader Coping Strategies for Engaging With Committed Liberals by Yves Smith

Notable quotes:
"... By contrast, Americans, who pretend to fetishize individualism, are conformists. Dissent is not well tolerated at work or social spheres. And its only gotten worse as media fragmentation and political strategies based on hitting voter hot buttons means that many people are deeply invested in their political views, whether they are well founded or not. Punitive unfriending and other forms of ostracism have become a new normal. ..."
"... She said the "fake news" campaign has been extremely effective in discrediting non-mainstream views. And since her friends are also PhDs, she was also frustrated at their refusal to consider evidence, or entertain the idea that their preferred sources were biased. ..."
"... One approach she has used that worked was to find information from other sources they could not reject, like Reuters and the Associated Press, that had not been covered in the New York Times or better yet, contradicted what they wanted to believe, such as a Reuters story describing how Germany opposed sanctions against Russia. But she clearly found it taxing to find these informational nuggets. ..."
"... Saying early on that Hillary was an awful alternative to Trump can lower the temperature considerably. Going on to talk about issues and staying away from Trump bashing is a follow through. ..."
"... Speaking as a member of the clergy, I have a suggestion about how to use the teachings of Jesus to reach Team Blue, whether or not they subscribe to Christianity in some form. ..."
"... One of the most radical of Jesus' teachings, one that is often given lip service but is extremely difficult to put into practice, is the commandment that we love our enemies and pray for them ..."
"... I am increasingly encountering extremism as the base line for discussions, really arguments, in my daily encounters. This comes from both ends of the political spectrum. This I perceive as a sign of desperation. ..."
"... Fair enough, Chuck, but I think you might be missing a very important bit: the fact that many people who are otherwise staunch rank-and-file supporters might also have an otherwise invisible breakpoint, or fault line. I say this as a former Dem Party supporter, who did the full song and dance – supported Hillary, supported Kerry before that, and was a total devotee to Obama. I was as tied to the Dem party as anyone not getting a paycheck could be, and when Obama won, I was elated. I thought that things would really change. ..."
"... The Financial Crisis was a rude, rude awakening. The pretty speeches meant little, and did even less. If anyone had a hand in setting fire to my generally moderate viewpoint, it was Obama himself, his worship for Wall Street, and his inability to put up a fight about anything. It was a weird time for me, politically, but 2008-2016 was what set the stage, while the last set of primaries only confirmed what I had felt in my gut for many years. ..."
"... Listen is first. Would you expect to walk into any fundamentalist church or mosque and change minds? Conversation among strangers gets more specific along commonalities until it hits a split point, then drops down a level. If nothing in common, there's always the weather. That's universal. ..."
"... On Russia – the biggest "liberal" fake new angle for years now – I say "Not one single piece of evidence has ever been presented that Russia meddled in the election. Not one single piece. The same agencies that said WMD in Iraq are now telling us Russia meddled. This is Democrat's WMD in Iraq moment." ..."
"... The Making of the President 2016 ..."
"... my point is that she enforces dogma and insinuates disloyalty in any heretic. ..."
"... It would be great if the one group of unthinking believers cancelled out the other group of unthinking believers, but of course the adherents are so blind to reality that that can't see that the difference between Bush's Goldman Sachs' Treasury Secretary and Obama Goldman Sachs' Treasury Secretary is .???? ..."
"... I wonder, sadly, if "engaging with liberals" might be, in fact, a lost cause. Struggling to find common cause with the delusional amidst the collapse of empire, environmental catastrophe, and financial ruin might not be the best use of limited resources. ..."
"... Americans, who pretend to fetishize individualism, are conformists ..."
"... fairness and decency ..."
"... Arguing with entrenched people is a lost cause but sarcasm = mercilessly tearing right into their own hypocrisy does the work of shaming them for a while, especially if you make the point about a topic they are virtue signalling about. These people do not have a policy idea in mind, they are pure virtue signallers. ..."
"... knows what he is talking about ..."
Jul 24, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

An oft-repeated bit of advice in America is never to talk about religion or politics. Sadly, the reason is that Americans are dreadful at talking across political lines. When I lived in Australia in the early 2000s and adopted a pub, by contrast, I found the locals to be eager to debate the topics of the day yet remain civil about it. That may be because Australians in generally have mastered the art of being confrontational by lacing it with humor and/or self deprecation.

By contrast, Americans, who pretend to fetishize individualism, are conformists. Dissent is not well tolerated at work or social spheres. And its only gotten worse as media fragmentation and political strategies based on hitting voter hot buttons means that many people are deeply invested in their political views, whether they are well founded or not. Punitive unfriending and other forms of ostracism have become a new normal.

And now that we have anger over Trump directed at not the best or most useful objects, like Russia! Russia! as opposed to his packing of the Federal bench, or his environmental policies, or even his push to privatize Federal parks, a lot of educated people expect, even demand, that their friends be vocal supporters of the #Resistance.

For instance, at the San Francisco meetup, I spent a fair bit of time with a woman who had held elected offices in her community. She was clearly distressed by the fact (without using such crass terms) that her friends had turned into pod people. They all believe that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New Yorker are authoritative. When she tried arguing with them about what they've read in these outlets, they shoot back, "Oh, so you believe in fake news?" She said the "fake news" campaign has been extremely effective in discrediting non-mainstream views. And since her friends are also PhDs, she was also frustrated at their refusal to consider evidence, or entertain the idea that their preferred sources were biased.

One approach she has used that worked was to find information from other sources they could not reject, like Reuters and the Associated Press, that had not been covered in the New York Times or better yet, contradicted what they wanted to believe, such as a Reuters story describing how Germany opposed sanctions against Russia. But she clearly found it taxing to find these informational nuggets. She also said they would not consider foreign sources, even the BBC or Der Spiegel or Le Monde.

Readers also discussed their frustrations in Links over the weekend. For instance:

Montanamaven , July 22, 2018 at 8:28 am

"Shame" looks to me like the word of the week. I've heard from liberal/Democrat friends that they are "ashamed" of this President. They are embarrassed by his behavior at NATO and Helsinki. I asked, "Who are you embarassed in front of? What does that mean?" Then I got a link to a Thomas Friedman article .

I'm not sure how to answer my friends with grace. I don't want to be condescending by saying "Really, you read Tom Friedman without a red pen in your hand?" What should I say? "I had no idea you were a globalist although you are kind of anti labor, right?" Any suggestions for talking to Dems about this last week?

My usual answer is "I don't know why we need NATO now that the Cold War is over. Bush I promised Gorbachev not to expand NATO into the former Warsaw Pact countries. Putin wanted to join NATO. Russia, especially the populous West is more European than Asian. So why don't we have Russia join NATO. Wouldn't that solve the problem?

Amfortas the Hippie , July 22, 2018 at 10:06 am

on talking to democrats. LOL. you and me both. Haldol as a prophylactic, perhaps. The Berners are a lot easier but the "mainstream" dem people have been difficult to talk to for some time too many triggers and blind spots. They've become as reactionary as the tea party.. The aversion to figuring out what we're FOR must be overcome.

... ... ...

Hamford , July 22, 2018 at 6:10 pm

Montanahaven, great post, and I don't know the answer on how to talk to Dems or the general gammit of duopoly supporters, but I have been working on refining a technique I heard Tim Black talking about: "drop a few lines, and walk away". I am working on inserting a few judgment free comments without argument, however it requires patience in listening to the ramble of the other side. A few examples in my recent life:
  1. Hillary Dem: "But Mueller found Russia was hacking. Blah Blah, Blah, 17 intelligence agencies"

    Me: Did you know in 2003 Mueller helped lead us into Iraq and testified before Congress pushing WMD intel. [I did not follow with anything about along the lines of "Is this guy trustworthy."]

  2. Trump Repub: "People are killing each other in the streets, blah blah freeloaders, murder rate going up, blah blah, this country is not the same, what happened to our country"

    Me: "People are desperate, Americans are addicted to opiates and will get it however they can, but someone peddling marajuana will get 10 years in prison, but the Sackler family who wantonly pushed opiates on all of America are worth billions" [I could have argued that American crime rate has gone down since the 80's, but I just wanted to divert their attention to a part of the current problem, not to start an argument]

    A few weeks later these folks repeated these talking points as their own, which is a win in my book. I have been trying to drop stuff as subtly as possible and hope they find their own way. People get more entrenched on their viewpoint while arguing, and more words often means less average impact per word. My sample size is admittedly low right now, so I will continue observation.

Another approach, although it takes a great deal of patience, is to go Socratic and ask the true believers in your circle to provide the support for their views. You may still be stuck with the problem that they regard people like Louise Mensch or Timothy Synder or (gah) James Clapper as unimpeachable.

Of course, not everyone is dogmatic. On my way back to New York, I sat next to a Google engineer (PhD, possibly even faculty member at Cornell since he'd gotten some major grant funding for his research, now on an H1-B visa and on track to have to leave the US in the next year+ due to Trump changes in the program) who held pretty orthodox views. He wanted to chat and we were able to discuss the Dems and even Russia. He even thanked me for the conversation as he was getting off the plane. But I knew I was lucky to find someone who wasn't deeply invested in his views, or perhaps merely not invested in winning arguments.

Any further tips or observations would be helpful to everyone. Things will only get more heated as the midterms approach.

MassBay , July 24, 2018 at 6:25 am

Nice comments. It is all about ego. Most of us become invested in our own position and will not surrender, because it is OURS!!

Quanka , July 24, 2018 at 8:25 am

This is true. This is why I like Hamford's idea of information nuggets. You have to let people think you are on their side while they come around to your ideas more or less on their own. If you give someone a good nugget that they take in as their own, then you have more leverage to convince them of something grander.

And listen. Just listen. You don't have to agree with people to give them time and space to be heard. They are more likely to reciprocate if you do.

ScottS , July 24, 2018 at 12:14 pm

Letting people "talk it out" works for strangers and acquaintances. They'll eventually run out of road or realize they've monopolized the conversation and give you a chance to react, even if only out of politeness.

I find closer friends and family will chew your ear off mercilessly, and once they start, you're trapped. If you start poking holes in their beliefs after they've gone on for a while, they'll feel betrayed. I find it best to say "that's nice" and walk away to maintain your sanity. Don't mess with tribalism, you'll always lose.

David Miller , July 24, 2018 at 6:31 am

Ha ha these posts resonate with me – my mother is a committed Rachel Maddow watcher and my best friend is a Trump supporter.

And both of them are otherwise very nice people and rather similar in terms of personality, interests, and outlook aside from red team/blue team foolishness.

What I like to do with both of them is use the term BushBamaTrump. And at the slightest bit of pushback just jump right in to all the things that have been done more or less the same under all three. It never gets through and you really can't change people, but still. Gives me a bit of pleasure to at least throw a little wrench into their silly partisan blinkered world view

notabanker , July 24, 2018 at 8:26 am

If you can't shift out of the partisan mentality, then all hope is really lost. My brain just does not compute this way and I find it really hard to understand how someone else's does.

I find it difficult to break this construct without coming off as arrogant or cynical. I readily admit this feature in myself could be a bug.

hemeantwell , July 24, 2018 at 8:31 am

jump right in to all the things that have been done more or less the same under all three

Yes. Even though disagreements appear to be about issues, there's an underlying personal partisanship that often drives conversational breakdown. This is particularly true for people on the right. Saying early on that Hillary was an awful alternative to Trump can lower the temperature considerably. Going on to talk about issues and staying away from Trump bashing is a follow through.

Amfortas the Hippie , July 24, 2018 at 6:47 am

Hamford's approach is one that I have used with the people I live around(supermajority Repubs, altho much of that is habit and/or single issue apathy is the only growing demograph)

Introducing doubt, "short, sharp shock", and then they worry over it for a day or a week, and later they seem to have incorporated it into their weltanshauung.

That is, indeed, a win.

I've much more experience, given my habitus(central texas wilderness) with culture jamming and otherwise undermining the orthodoxy of republicans. To talk about important things with them, one must avoid numerous trigger words that cause salivation or violent conniptions.

Finding these rhetorical paths has been enlightening, to say the least. like talking about unionism by using the Chamber of Commerce as an example, or playing on their own memories of the Grange or the Farmer's Co-Op or even going directly at the cognitive dissonance, as in "hey, wait a minute if we have freedom of religion, aren't I by necessity free to be a Buddhist?"

Similarly, I've found that using the language of Jesus gets results, unless my interlocutor is too far gone into the whole warrior Christ thing. I'm still working on how to do this with Team Blue.

Like with the R's, the D's have an emotional attachment, and a psychological need, to avoid believing that their party is in any way less than pristine and above board.

Similarly, I remember a discussion of the Puma's (Hillary's 08 supporters) wherein they were so caught up with Herstory(!) that an attack on (or even criticism of) Hillary was an attack on their Identity.

Stages of Grief applies the acceptance we wish for is a big step for most people, because the manifest problems are so huge and complex and intertwined that acknowledging them feels like giving in and even giving up.

It's a big problem, and I thank you for addressing it.

The forces arrayed against civil discourse are huge and well funded(which is, in itself, a sort of indictment and indicator)

Newton Finn , July 24, 2018 at 10:45 am

Speaking as a member of the clergy, I have a suggestion about how to use the teachings of Jesus to reach Team Blue, whether or not they subscribe to Christianity in some form.

One of the most radical of Jesus' teachings, one that is often given lip service but is extremely difficult to put into practice, is the commandment that we love our enemies and pray for them.

I have come to believe that the Russiagate attacks on Trump are driven not by reason but by pure hatred, a sin which always blinds. While there are many reasons to oppose much of Trump's policies and actions, we must not allow ourselves to wallow in personal hatred of the man himself. If Jesus doesn't work here for some of Team Blue, MLK, who taught the same message, is an excellent alternative. Take away the visceral hatred of Trump, and he will be opposed, much more reasonably, ethically, and effectively.

Michael Fiorillo , July 24, 2018 at 11:44 am

I agree: whenever possible, Trump the individual should be ignored, since too many people seem unable to separate the man from the systems, processes and interests in play.

When it's all about Trump, he wins. You'd think people would have realized that by now, but take a look at Alternet, where it's literally "All Trump All The Time," and you see how trapped in their fears and illusions liberals are.

As Lambert and others insist, make it about issues and policy; that's how people can (eventually, hopefully) be reached over time. As the saying goes, they lose their minds in crowds/herds, and will only regain their sanity one at a time.

The added benefit is that ignoring Trump's provocations goes a ways toward depriving him of oxygen. Ignoring him is one of the few ways to drive him crazy(er), takes away much of his effectiveness, and provides the personal satisfaction of being able to do something against him, even if just passively.

readerOfTeaLeaves , July 24, 2018 at 12:06 pm

I'm really hopeful that Michael Hudson's upcoming book on the roots of Christianity will open up a whole new conversation for people of all views, particularly the role of debt and 'what we owe to one another'. Or when we should, and what we shouldn't, owe one another.

IMVHO, Trump is the apotheosis of a debt-based form of greed, which conventional politics mostly exalts and exacerbates, but doesn't seem to really understand -- and papers over its social costs [see also: FoxNews, CNBC]. In this form of (leveraged) debt, the debtor owes absolutely nothing to society, irrespective of the social dislocations that his/her debt creates.

I find that people who get caught up in Dem/Repub conflicts are unreachable on political terms, but if the conversation shifts to economics, to outrage at financial shenanigans, to who 'owes' what to whom, the emotional tone shifts and the conversations are much more engaged.

The R's that I know tend to affiliate with 'lenders', but have an abhorrence of debt. They seem weirdly incapable of grappling with the social and political implications of debt. To them, debt is a sign of weakness. I find myself struggling to grapple with their worldview on the general topic of 'debt'.

The D's that I know tend to at least be able to think about debt as a means to an end: an education, a home, a business idea. But they seem to experience debt as a form of guilt, or powerlessness, a lot of the time. The people in my life who fall into this category are very careful with money, but they are also capable of carrying on a conversation about social meaning of debt.

I don't think it is any accident that the two most articulate, informed voices in current politics are on the 'left', and their expertise and focus is on debt: Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. I suspect that is because debt is one of the most fundamental social-political-cultural issues of our time.

ambrit , July 24, 2018 at 6:50 am

I do come across as a bit of a nutter, and bloodthirsty to boot. However, in my defense, I am increasingly encountering extremism as the base line for discussions, really arguments, in my daily encounters. This comes from both ends of the political spectrum. This I perceive as a sign of desperation.

The Third Way 'faux left' movement is running out of steam as the inequality that it was designed to enable takes hold, and disenchants those that the movement required to at least be neutral in order for it to do its 'work.' The Right wing has always cultivated a sense of being oppressed in order to cultivate the sense of 'belonging' to a 'special' and 'chosen' people. I have been called "dirty socialist" and even less salubrious terms so many times, I've developed somewhat of a thick skin to the insult. The problem with that is that those who are doing the insulting are dead serious in their obloquy. This can escalate into actions. Therein lies the rub. the step from verbal abuse to physical abuse must be guarded against and, if encountered, short circuited. Hence, the comment about the probable bad results of trying to crash someone's SHTF refuge.

I have worked with several ex-cons during my work life. Jail is the pressure cooker of power relations for Western society. All the ex-cons said that threats, even when coming from obviously superior physical specimens must be responded to quickly and decisively. As one man put it, "Even if you have to take a beat down. Make the point that you will fight. Once is usually enough. After that, people in jail will leave you alone." Another man related the tale of a small man in prison who was being groomed for 'bitchdom' by a much bigger man. "The big guy poked the little guy in the chest and started to say something. The little guy grabbed the finger and broke it. Then this tiny tornado tore into the big guy. Man! Nobody f -- -d with the little guy again. He was crazy everybody said. Some of the older cons said that he was smart."

It may not be relevant yet, but America certainly does seem to be sliding into a full blown Police State. As such, the etiquette of prison is slowly being imposed on the civil society. Pure power relations are becoming the norm. This manifests in our more genteel disputations.
So, my present reply to people who take me to task for not voting for Her Royal Highness is to say; "Thank you for giving us Trump. Without your gallant efforts, we would have had a decent government, under Bernie." Then, as one of the above comments suggests, I walk away, and make sure our Urban Bug In Bag is ready.

Bugs Bunny , July 24, 2018 at 7:02 am

That is a frightening observation and I believe it is unfortunately accurate. Relations in the workplace certainly have resembled this since 2008. Civil society was next.

ambrit , July 24, 2018 at 6:52 am

Skynet ate a longer comment. Short version: "Thank you for running Hillary so Trump could win."

Brooklin Bridge , July 24, 2018 at 10:01 am

A brilliant compaction. And nice (fascinating being even better desc.) to see the longer version as well. Skynet apparently liked it too.

My poor wife has somewhat 'come around' (been dragged along) because many of the predictions (that I get from NC)seem to materialize in one way or another, but on the flip side we have lost what we thought were real friends (fortunately few), largely because of my inability to shut up (at least I don't do it until asked some hard to get out of question) combined with insufficient command of a given subject – alas, all given subjects it seems.

ambrit , July 24, 2018 at 11:37 am

We do find out who our 'real' friends are when we go a little 'off the reservation' with subjects having a significant emotional content. I have found that I also discover personal biases by observing what subjects being 'rejected' by others give me pain. I have been surprised at some of my personal biases. Don't be too hard on yourself about those things that you need to study more. Everyone has those kinds of subjects. I certainly do. Yesterday's thread on the lowly apostrophe was such a wake up call to me.

ex-PFC Chuck , July 24, 2018 at 6:57 am

It seems to me that the longer the person has supported the Democratic Party the more they are resistant to changing their views. The affiliation comes to resemble that of a football fan to her favorite team. People who've changed their political affiliation over the course of their lives, and especially those who have done so relatively recently, are more open-minded and willing to consider evidence contrary to their current views.

ambrit , July 24, 2018 at 7:10 am

Not to quibble, but your observation takes on the appearance of a 'chicken or egg' problem. As the Political Fundamentalists showed, politics is a long term game. That's one reason that Lamberts comment about the Democrat party and their 'missing' ground game is so pertinent.

Di Modica's Dumb Steer , July 24, 2018 at 10:12 am

Fair enough, Chuck, but I think you might be missing a very important bit: the fact that many people who are otherwise staunch rank-and-file supporters might also have an otherwise invisible breakpoint, or fault line. I say this as a former Dem Party supporter, who did the full song and dance – supported Hillary, supported Kerry before that, and was a total devotee to Obama. I was as tied to the Dem party as anyone not getting a paycheck could be, and when Obama won, I was elated. I thought that things would really change.

The Financial Crisis was a rude, rude awakening. The pretty speeches meant little, and did even less. If anyone had a hand in setting fire to my generally moderate viewpoint, it was Obama himself, his worship for Wall Street, and his inability to put up a fight about anything. It was a weird time for me, politically, but 2008-2016 was what set the stage, while the last set of primaries only confirmed what I had felt in my gut for many years.

I think there are many out there, struggling like I did. They'll show. Eventually. I'd say that the famous line about the center not holding applies here, but I'm likely missing a ton of context.

polecat , July 24, 2018 at 11:58 am

My 'turn' was when Nancy P. swiped "impeachment" off the gilded table in 2006, Right • After • The • House • Elections. So, when shortly there after, while listening to Obama give his inaugural address, all I could say was "we'll see ??" . Then came his cabinet appointments, and from then on the d-party lost me with their passive-aggressive "We'll have to $ee what's in it AFTER WE VOTED FOR IT" FU tactics.

Steve H. , July 24, 2018 at 6:58 am

Mediation in kindergarten words: Listen, Talk, Ask, Agree, Write.

Listen is first. Would you expect to walk into any fundamentalist church or mosque and change minds? Conversation among strangers gets more specific along commonalities until it hits a split point, then drops down a level. If nothing in common, there's always the weather. That's universal.

Which blogger was it, trying to change the world when he realized he was only reaching the 5% who thought like he did, & stopped? Think how hard it is to undo economics class learnin' and understand MMT.

Politically, these are not going to be new customers. I can't find number of new voters for AOC, but turnout was less than 1 in 5. She gained trust by knocking on doors. You can't reach the frontal lobes if the amygdala is signalling threat.

If you find points of agreement, you can move the conversation to universal. Then to concrete and material.

ChiGal in Carolina , July 24, 2018 at 8:38 am

This dovetails with hamsher above, whose defiines success as hearing his talking points adopted by those he has dropped them on. The key is to be nonjudgmental .

kimyo , July 24, 2018 at 6:59 am

there are two statements which have worked in my recent exchanges with liberals:
1) Obama has bombed more nations than Bush
2) no one person did more to put donald trump in office than hillary clinton (extreme, indisputable malfeasance against sanders in the primary)

although many seem completely ready to discard 'russian collusion' i still hear 'why is he trying to be friends with putin?' on a regular basis.

any criticism of obamacare is immediately discarded, even though many know someone who has health insurance but doesn't have health care.

i keep trying to argue that democrats are best served if abortion is constantly under threat. that most democratic politicians strongly prefer this situation, as it would otherwise be close to impossible to motivate people to get out to the polls. (or, likewise, republicans and gun rights) so far, this doesn't seem to work.

calling out tesla as a nonsense scam is working pretty well, though. (monorail!)

also, pointing out that new research shows that wifi/cellphone exposure increases miscarriage risk is starting to gain traction. i cringe everytime i see a toddler playing with an i-pad. (obviously not a liberal issue, but it helps to dispel the fog of complacency)

timbers , July 24, 2018 at 7:01 am

Here is my general approach, good or bad towards Hillary "liberal" or establishment think or whatever you may call it. I think it helps put the burden of proof to the fake news'ers

On Russia – the biggest "liberal" fake new angle for years now – I say "Not one single piece of evidence has ever been presented that Russia meddled in the election. Not one single piece. The same agencies that said WMD in Iraq are now telling us Russia meddled. This is Democrat's WMD in Iraq moment."

I ask them to "show me the money" if they can point to any evidence to support the claim Russia hacked. Depending on how much time I have, I can shoot it down (like the click bait social media example that is full of holes) but there is so much non-sense out their I am always up on the latest.

Chris , July 24, 2018 at 7:01 am

Long time NC reader in the DC/Maryland area.

Re: discussing what's happening with people I just gave up. Partially because I couldn't keep calm in the face of being labeled a "white cis gendered Russia loving hate monger." Partially because the medium for debate my friends and I were using was Facebook, which is really not a great tool for serious discussions. Partially because it took so much time and energy and garnered no rewards.

Most of my circle of friends ardently believe the following:

(1) the Democrats are significantly different from the Republicans and suggesting otherwise is lying. This gets you the most violent reactions from most people.

(2) all or most of what Trump is doing is a significant departure from the Obama administration.

(3) withholding votes or voting for other candidates than "electable Democrats" is equivalent to voting for fascists.

(4) US citizens who live in depressed economic areas are to blame for their own problems because they vote against their own interests and won't move to better places.

(5) increased immigration, increased globalism, and free trade agreements like TPP are policies we should support.

(6) Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, etc. are not monopolies and anti-trust law should not be used to break them up.

(7) solutions to inequality in public education should not include busing children from poor areas to wealthy areas. Or vice versa.

(8) our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan must continue.

(9) we need identity politics in this country.

(10) the world would be better off if Hillary was president. P.S. she was robbed by Russians, misogynists, and electoral manipulation from the fascistic Trump campaign.

When I try to mention that all of those points are debatable at best, and admittedly I do that with varying degrees of success, they do not accept it. Any of it. They find discussions of what happened during the Obama administration which either lead to, or was similar to, what Trump is doing now tiring and painful. Mentioning how poorly the HRC campaign was run, how HRC laundered money through local state dem orgs, the wasted millions in consultants, the lack of campaigning in key states, globalism, etc. get you a soulful vomiting of Russia/Misogyny/Fascism. They will ask why you focus on the Democrats, and not the Republicans. It's the Republicans fault we're here and their voters deserve rock suffer.

Humor or analogy doesn't work on this topic either. If you mention something like both parties blame outsiders for their troubles, except Republicans blame people from Mexico and Democrats blame people from Michigan, you get angry stares. If you mention both parties want to go back in time to a better, safer place, except for Republicans it's an imaginary 1950 something and for Democrats is an imaginary 2006, you'll end up drinking alone.

I realized that the only thing I was doing was aggravating my friends and hurting my cause. They're all too high strung to have discussions. They don't want to consider that the status quo ante that they think was great was only "great" for a select portion of the country. They might have admitted that progressives and leftists weren't happy with the Obama administration in 2016. They have no space for that kind of thinking now. So I logged out of FB and Twitter, deleted the apps and spend the time doing other things. I will talk to people about this stuff if they're interested and if it's in person. I stop when I see their body language shift to 'uncomfortable.'

The other thing I've been doing is working to support local candidates who believe in th kind of policies I want to see in my community. I think that's a much better way to use my time and political energy.

Good luck to anyone who wants to try and fight this battle with words. No one is reading or listening anymore. They just want red meat and a torch to join their preferred mob. And with what's happening if you post something a boss or other person finds objectionable, I strongly recommend the virtues of self censorship and keeping your mouth shut until this time passes.

Marshall Auerback , July 24, 2018 at 9:19 am

"being labeled a 'white cis gendered Russia loving hate monger'" Welcome to the club!

Shane Mage , July 24, 2018 at 9:27 am

Please. When mentioning Facebook bots, *always* put the scare quotes about the word "friend."

Chris , July 24, 2018 at 11:02 am

These were all people who I know and associate with off line. What surprised and saddened me was that they couldn't leave an argument behind.

I can leave an FB discussion on FB. I have other topics to discuss when I'm with my friends. They can't do that anymore.

It was that fact more than anything that lead me to believe there was no benefit in trying to post articles or participate in social media discussions. No one is listening. Everyone in my socal circle is feeling too raw to have measured discussions about how we got here and where we could go next.

flora , July 24, 2018 at 11:29 am

I've experienced the same from long time friends or who I thought were friends. For months after the election all they could talk about was 'Hillary was robbed.' I let them vent because it seemed like a grieving time for them. After six months or so, when they still could not talk about anything else even if I tried shifting the conversation to family or gardening or something, then I knew they were caught up in more than grieving. I'm starting to wonder if this is the fury of people who suspect they've been conned and are determined to prove they were not conned. 'The most qualified candidate ever' was a terrible campaigner.
From 2016:
https://www.businessinsider.com/clinton-losing-wisconsin-results-2016-11

My outlook now is that people determined to prove they were not conned then will need to find their way back to calmness.

Reply
flora , July 24, 2018 at 11:39 am

adding: she couldn't turn out the vote. simple as that. imo. but not something people who are determined to prove they were not conned want to hear.

Arizona Slim , July 24, 2018 at 11:40 am

In Roger Stone's book, The Making of the President 2016 , there was a passage about people, many of them on the left, who view those who disagree with them as truly evil people.

What comes next explains a lot about what we've seen since the election. Quoting Stone:

"This is a very immature worldview that produces no coping skills."

Hence, the meltdowns that go on and on and on

christy , July 24, 2018 at 7:01 am

Yes! Plz someone tell me a way to discuss immigration at the border and separating families. The word on the street that 10k of those 12k children being separated were ACTUALLY being 'trafficked' and WITHOUT their REAL parents in the first place.

There are a lot of Dem Nuts on facebook that harrassed the heck out of me and since I posted #walkaway, as an astute BERNIE supporter, this has SHOCKED many and I been unfriended 5 times.

8 million MISSING children and our FBI has only reunited/found 526?

Someone plz tell me wth?

marym , July 24, 2018 at 8:56 am

Please don't post such serious charges about trafficked children without sources. As far as I know not even the Trump administration in its own defense is claiming to have identified trafficked children at those levels.

I'm going to try to put together a comment later today about what we know of the current situation, the need to understand what was happening pre-Ttrump, and what may be happening to the children now after separation. It will probably be on the links thread, as it's not directly related to the coping issue of this thread.

Carla , July 24, 2018 at 10:02 am

Thank you, marym. Hope I can find your comment later.

christy , July 24, 2018 at 7:10 am

Joker Hitler Burgler Spy https://t.co/LA9pTj0jQ0 This is how he does it.

Reply
fresno dan , July 24, 2018 at 7:40 am

So, I made the below comments in today's LINKS. But I will emphasize a different aspect here – in the Links comment my point was the reporter was wrong (about Obama representing the 1% – I think he did). Here my point is that she enforces dogma and insinuates disloyalty in any heretic.

fresno dan
July 24, 2018 at 7:25 am
Why So Many Reporters Are Missing the Political Story of the Decade Washington Monthly. Versailles 1788.

Frankly, someone needs to tell this guy (i.e., Bernie Sanders) to sit down and shut up for a while. Reinforcing the notion that a party that was led by Barack Obama for eight years has merely been representing the one percent contributes to the divide and reinforces Republican lies.
====================================================
party that was led by Barack Obama for eight years has merely been representing the one percent
BESIDES believing that Obama DIDN'T represent the 1%, I'm sure this reporter believes:
1. The earth is flat
2. Elvis is alive
3. The living head of John F. Kennedy is kept at the CIA
4. There are 2 Melania Trumps
5. that Hillary got more white women voters than Trump .
other examples are welcome

Amfortas the Hippie , July 24, 2018 at 8:29 am

on that inability to confront the less stellar record of Obama: it's the same process that happened(and is happening, I'd argue) on the Right .and that happens, over and over, when science chips out another block in the wall of religious certainty.
Fear of the disenchantment of having been wrong, or fooled they'll resist tooth and claw from admitting being descendants of apes .even when they feel/know in their secret hearts that it's true.
With the Dems(non-Berner subspecies), it's acute right now.
They must defend the paradigm at all costs, because to do otherwise is to open the door to a frightening and incomprehensible world that would demand their attention and resolve. For so long, the ire was safely directed at the Right it's their fault we can't have nice things, they are a regressive existential threat, omgomgomg. This is rendered tolerable by the belief that the Dems are their team, on their side and the polar opposite of the hateful Right.
This latter set of assumptions was thrown into existential even ontological doubt by numerous reports, surveys and even by plain old look-out-the-window observation.
The belief and the Reality couldn't be reconciled(America is not already great for a whole bunch of folks) and the Nature of the newly perceived Reality was so ugly, and so huge, that they recoil into paradigm defense.
a giant edifice of bullshit is inherently unstable, it turns out.

The challenge, as I see it, is to acknowledge that the Way We Do Things is falling apart, and that it should fall apart, if we really believe all the high minded rhetoric we perform to each other and then to try to figure out what system/paradigm we'd like to replace it to use the chaos and destruction of the trump era to our advantage.
So more and more, in lib/dem/prog* social spaces, I'm asking "what are we for?"

(* the confusion of tongues here is both instructive and disheartening and encouraging(!). asking folks to define such things is resulting in less fury and spittle and froth, and more with either silence or thought and honest questioning. at least in my little circles )

Reply
fresno dan , July 24, 2018 at 11:37 am

Amfortas the Hippie
July 24, 2018 at 8:29 am

I can't beat what notabanker said:
notabanker
July 24, 2018 at 8:26 am
If you can't shift out of the partisan mentality, then all hope is really lost. My brain just does not compute this way and I find it really hard to understand how someone else's does ..
==============================================
"Independent" self sufficient Americans .join groups called political parties that as a rite of passage evidently require the adherents to believe idiotic, inconsistent things.
But another thing is that the number of people who even belong to political parties isn't that great. But they set the agenda.

It would be great if the one group of unthinking believers cancelled out the other group of unthinking believers, but of course the adherents are so blind to reality that that can't see that the difference between Bush's Goldman Sachs' Treasury Secretary and Obama Goldman Sachs' Treasury Secretary is .????
NOW, of course there were real differences between Obama and Bush .Obama droned a LOT more.

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Colonel Smithers , July 24, 2018 at 7:53 am

Thank you, Yves and the community. This situation applies in the UK, too. It's amazing to meet people who took time off to protest against Trump, but won't against homelessness or austerity.

PlutoniumKun , July 24, 2018 at 11:59 am

Yes, the Irish media used to be moderately independent, but they are getting in line too. Over the weekend I nearly threw my copy of the Irish Times away in disgust at reading some of the articles from writers I'd consider pretty clear minded normally. They are just gradually absorbing the message by osmosis I think.

When someone here rants about Trump, I usually say something like 'well,what exactly has he done thats worse than anything Obama did to, say for example, Libya, or Honduras?' I'd love to say I get a thoughtful response, but thats rarely the case. Interestingly, I find that its the people who profess themselves as non-political or don't read the newspapers much who are more open to discussion.

Watt4Bob , July 24, 2018 at 8:15 am

I'm sure that a lot of NC readers have, over time, experienced some amount of pain associated with the dissolution of long-held beliefs surrounding the American dream, and faith in our economic, and political systems abilities to ' self-correct '.

It's been very painful to realize that ' things ' are not going to get better if we simply vote for the other team.

Over many decades, both the ' other teams ' have pointed fingers at each other and invited us to believe that our problems originated on the other side of the fence, when in reality, as many of us now understand, our two political parties have all the while, worked in collusion to forward the interests of the rich and powerful, the result of which has been wide spread, and extreme economic hardship for most of us.

This failure of our politics has engendered a wide spread visceral hatred of our leadership class, that so far, has remained loosely in the control of the two political parties, but, and I think this a good thing, there is a dawning understanding among a significant number of us, that the hatred of Hillary, and her party, is well deserved, and rooted in exactly the same reality as the hatred of George 'W', and his party.

All that hatred of the political parties and their leadership has so far, resulted in Trump, which in an odd sense is evidence supporting optimism that the two parties strangle-hold on our lives is not invincible, and that there exists a wide-spread thirst for change.

I think that thirst for change is the point where we have an opportunity to make conversation fruitful, and find common ground.

fresno dan , July 24, 2018 at 11:45 am

Watt4Bob
July 24, 2018 at 8:15 am

I'm sure that a lot of NC readers have, over time, experienced some amount of pain associated with the dissolution of long-held beliefs surrounding the American dream, and faith in our economic, and political systems abilities to 'self-correct'.

It's been very painful to realize that 'things' are not going to get better if we simply vote for the other team.
================================================
I don't know how many times I have heard that voting for a third party is "throwing your vote away"
REALITY, that voting for a democrat* or a republican is throwing your vote away, never seems to sway anyone.
* maybe there are individual democrats that are worth voting for, but that is usually due to some screw up by the party apparatchiks

festoonic , July 24, 2018 at 8:34 am

I wonder, sadly, if "engaging with liberals" might be, in fact, a lost cause. Struggling to find common cause with the delusional amidst the collapse of empire, environmental catastrophe, and financial ruin might not be the best use of limited resources. There's a guy running for local city council whose campaign I intend to work for, and anyone campaigning on Medicare-for-All (free at the point of care, of course!), a minimum wage humans can live on, and anything else beneficial to people who work for a living will get my jealously-guarded vote. But the rest looks more and more like the re-arranging the proverbial deck chairs.

macnamichomhairle , July 24, 2018 at 8:39 am

I also think that this is not the time to try to argue. Many people (liberals) seem to have been shocked to their core by Clinton's loss and the arrival of the barbarians. The world has come unhinged, it appears to them.

That is a deeply unsettling feeling that can induce a deep distress and panic. I think it's also new to most liberals because things in America had proceeded pretty much sensibly, even during the Bush years. Also, I suspect many are at a stage in life when they have settled their own sense of their lives on a platform of comfort with the status quo as personified by the liberal consensus; or they are deeply committed ideologically for other reasons of self-identity.

The liberal establishment everyday is whipping the flames of people's panic and resulting outrage, and has created a huge firestorm. The "resistance" gives people a way to make sense of the world again. They will hold onto the "resistance" with all their power because admitting that the "resistance" is in any way flawed throws them back into a chaotic world. So any argument about this stuff derives from a deep place and is not conducive to reasoning. You threaten them, if you try to take away their "resistance" bear.

I also think it is better to put energy into other things, like building positive political movements or structures of life that extend "under" the current debate. (If you go down below general political buzz words, you can sometimes find agreement across political barriers.)

I still make general comments non-locally, but I do not engage with people individually about this. It's useless right now.

Eric , July 24, 2018 at 8:41 am

IMO, these factors contribute to the problem:

Some additional tribes: Wall St bankers, corporate CEOs, police, teachers, Congress, your town, your state, sports fans, etc.

GeorgeOrwell , July 24, 2018 at 8:41 am

Very relevant commentary to which I can completely relate. I had to leave a certain FB group because it became increasingly apparent that these mostly PhD, higher education types were not really interested in being the resistance or fighting fascism. No, what they really want is a safe space/echo chamber in which they can whine about everything that has gone to shit while completely ignoring how they themselves and the 'Democrat' party facilitated said shit's construction. The level of cognitive dissonance was simply mind boggling.

No rational thought about how going along to get along contributed to the current situation, that the lesser of two evils still gets you to the same destination. My working theory is they suffer from social detachment disorder due to their comfortable government (many tenured professors) jobs. As I attempted to explain to one of them, the economic damage created by the policy responses following the GR directly contributed to the door opening for Trump or something like him. These PhD types seem to be completely willing to overlook the social injustice of the Obama tenure, growth of the surveillance state, economic monopolies etc.

Many of these people have not had to worry about a paycheck for some time, thus the complete disconnect from the realities of the current economy. They talk a good game about fighting for social & economic equality, but when push comes to shove many of them are willing to throw their working neighbor under the bus so they can keep their comfortable (not rich mind you) tenured positions and lifestyles. If nothing else, the level of cognitive dissonance in this group certainly made me think about tenure from a much different perspective. Certainly not an encouraging picture of higher ed for sure.

TroyMcClure , July 24, 2018 at 10:45 am

Thomas Frank has repeatedly pointed out that credentialed professionals were the most reliably Republican voting block in America for decades. Now they're firmly democrat. Did their politics/interests change? Doubtful

The decades-long purge of any hint of leftists from the American university system (which started right here in California in the 50's then spread out) has led to our extremely conservative tenure class of professors.

I've had the same experience with these credential class types. Their politics are uniformly anti-labor and elitist. There's no convincing them.

jrs , July 24, 2018 at 11:37 am

I think that it is seldom clear in discussions what differentiates credentialed class from not. Just a bachelors degree? Bachelors degree attainment is over 30% now among young people. They are luckier than many who don't have the degree, but with every white collar job wanting a bachelors degree (often for fairly lowly work that didn't used to) and with a bachelors degree no guarantee of anything (nope not even that white collar job) I'm not sure its all that. (BTW I don't have a bachelors degree, but I'm in no good shape economically at all, if I had a degree maybe I'd be allowed to live, that is all .. so I consider it but without illusion at 40 something).

I think what really protects people's jobs etc. is licensed professions (lawyers, doctors, CPAs, landscape architects etc.) and in some cases those requiring post-bachelors attainment including years of additional training (physical therapists etc.). Well and unionization in the public sector obviously and tenure in academia.

jrs , July 24, 2018 at 11:23 am

it's not in their class interest to care, well the tenured ones, the adjuncts it depends on who they identify with, with the working class or with the tenured ones whose life they can't get anyway.

The average office worker would be more likely to care, although usually not political, and though they usually pretend otherwise, and though they are taught to sympathize with the bosses, there is a chance they might at some level ultimately know the are pawns in a game that they don't control and that can eat them alive (unlike those protected with tenure).

TroyMcClure , July 24, 2018 at 11:39 am

Ask the professors at Vermont Law School, 75% of whom just had tenure stripped unceremoniously. It's coming for them all. I give it less than 10 years. These tenured types total lack of solidarity within their group or any other will finally come home to roost.

My dear friend has been slogging through the trenches of the adjunct lifestyle for the better part of a decade and it's only now at this late date starting to dawn on him that he'll never get regular work at the university. Those waves and easy smiles from tenured faculty hid what they were thinking all along, "Better you than me pal!"

David , July 24, 2018 at 8:45 am

Not my country, but this is less a question of talking to "liberals" (who have their own problems) than of talking to conspiracy theorists. All over the world, certain groups of people are finding that history has suddenly, in the last few years, veered off in directions it has no right to. Since they refuse to believe they are responsible, however distantly, and since they seek, as we all do, simple explanations for complex problems, it must be a conspiracy. And anyone who questions the existence of a conspiracy is by definition part of it.

Because conspiracy theories serve essentially emotional and ideological purposes, rational discussion is by definition useless, and studies show that pointing out that people are factually wrong actually makes them more likely to cling to their beliefs.

I'd recommend a site which discusses and dissects conspiracy theories (www.metabunk.org), and which has discussion threads on how to argue with conspiracy theorists.

Darius , July 24, 2018 at 8:47 am

I was a Keynesian. I thought that meant the same as being a Democrat. Obama cured me of that mistake. Now, I'm in the Modern Money camp. Explaining that to paygo liberals is an even bigger chore.

Jeff N , July 24, 2018 at 10:33 am

Yes, although I've found that when I simply explain basic MMT concepts to either repub or dem friends, I come across as non-political. Because neither dems or repubs support it.

And I gain instant credibility/solidarity with them when I agree with their knee-jerk reaction that state/local governments ARE constrained.

Carolinian , July 24, 2018 at 8:59 am

Americans, who pretend to fetishize individualism, are conformists

That's spot on. Perhaps it has to with out lack of a set class structure which makes people socially insecure. Plus the rise of the meritocracy means that the worse thing you can call someone these days is "stupid" meaning uneducated. Life experience gets little credit at a time when knowledge has been overly formalized.

However we can take some comfort in a history where periods of intense conformity such as the 1950s provoke periods of more liberated thinking as in the 1960s. Things do seem to be changing–hopefully not for the worse. Patience with those vehement NYT and WaPo readers may be necessary until the fever breaks.

Amber Waves , July 24, 2018 at 9:02 am

My concern is that we have a poisoned public space, as it is hard to find the facts in the press or the body politic. Hard to find common ground to discuss or solve problems. I think our democracy, what is left of it, is in deep trouble. I agree that we need to talk to our neighbors about issues of the day. It is hard to overcome the do not talk about politics meme of the last 30 years.

Utah , July 24, 2018 at 9:02 am

I try really hard these days to talk about the system. Trump is a product of the system that we created and we need to change to better everyone.
I try to be compassionate above all else. Trump supporters are not evil or selfish. They believed the lies of someone telling them he was going to save jobs. We, as a nation, believed the lies of Obama's "hope and change" and it got us nowhere except a little more hopeless. Its not about political affiliation. Its about the world oligarchs having entire control. I refuse to be divided by what they want me to be divided by.

Brooklin Bridge , July 24, 2018 at 9:10 am

A fascinating and often painful subject. Being mostly a dismal failure in my own attempts, I've been keenly interested in and come up with several 'types' (hardly exhaustive) that seem gifted with varying degrees of success in communicating though I'm not sure about convincing others. Making others sit up and think (I should say 'having that effect' rather than 'making') might be as far as most in this select group will ever get but I strongly suspect such exchanges can ultimately be very powerful (meaning the 'other' will almost always do the changing of pov, or the expansion of understanding, under their own steam and in their own time).

Trite as it may seem, those who have a strong core of honesty, or who always tend to gravitate toward truth, have the most success in the above. They are the ones who seem to make headway under the most ridiculously difficult or impossible conditions. That they often have a strong command of their subject seems (to me) to be a natural outcome of the affinity for truth rather than truth being a result of knowledge breadth. They aren't always likeable but are often admirable.

After that, there are the 'warm intellectuals' and note that this categorization does not preclude honesty. My father was such. He had a way of making all present feel welcome and valuable despite the intricacy of the discussion. One usually had to ferret out his opinions or his 'take' on something as he rarely made an issue of it. But his conversation and 'presence' always made fairness and decency seem cool; the natural order of things, and I know for a fact he had a profound influence on at least some people – some hard core ones as well.

The ability to bend and compromise for a greater good (or in some cases for another purpose) is yet another 'type' who I see as potentially having considerable power in their exchanges with others. I see them as having emotional energy and an ability to see through the 'facts' or to 'suspend' them for a period. This is obviously a tricky – perhaps flawed (although in reality they are all flawed) – category, home to intellectuals inclined toward the Machiavellian as well as do-gooders quickly judged and relegated -not always justly- to the lot of suck-asses, and I image it has mixed results. It includes but is not the sole domain of those with the facility to put themselves in anther's shoes (and occasionally get lost in so doing).

I am only describing those who can influence others of extreme or highly contrary positions and beliefs, not the relatively larger group who can be eloquent in their own right but are not of note in dealing with made-up minds. Since we are all banging about under varying degrees of illusion , the truly or profoundly successful ambassador, along with his/her close cousin the successful negotiator, even the mundane every-man commenting on a blog or at a social gathering that provokes others to reassess, is a rather unusual individual indeed. That there is some preponderance of such individuals on NC does not contradict the rarity in general.

Perhaps just a very long winded way of saying, "Don't be too hard on yourself."

Brooklin Bridge , July 24, 2018 at 9:38 am

What I meant to say in the last sentence is, "I won't be too hard on myself ", but put in the general form while thinking of it applying to me. I don't presume to give others such advice (though I imagine it holds for others as well ).

Also, since the process of changing or simply being influenced, always takes time, it is almost impossible to see or assess; an unhappy circumstance for those who try at it rather than let it be an outcome..

Bite hard , July 24, 2018 at 9:11 am

Arguing with entrenched people is a lost cause but sarcasm = mercilessly tearing right into their own hypocrisy does the work of shaming them for a while, especially if you make the point about a topic they are virtue signalling about. These people do not have a policy idea in mind, they are pure virtue signallers.

Sarcasm is not to be confused with irony, which allows people to react mildly along "ha, ha, ha, oh my, what a world we live in". You can always escape from irony but a good, hard sarcasm put the moral dilemma right out there and people cannot escape their own crap poorly founded opinions.

danpaco , July 24, 2018 at 9:23 am

Political talk has really become a competition as opposed to a conversation. If the conversation decends into competition I'll try to ask "are there are any rules to this game?". When all else fails, go Socratic. Their answers can be enlightening.

Skip Intro , July 24, 2018 at 9:24 am

I think it can be effective to do a virtual cannonball into the kiddie pool of their belief system. Like Maddow squared but willing to connect the dots.

'Of course the Russians put Trump in, but the whole hacking story is part of a scam and a distraction. There's barely a connection between the leaked emails and the election results. They are a sideshow to get Assange. No, the real story is that the Russians had a high level operative inside the DNC. That's how the emails leaked. That is why the campaign was diverted away from Wisconsin, for example, in favor of Arizona. It is why the campaign pulled strings to get airtime for Trump during the GOP primary. It is why the DNC relied on bad software models and ignored experienced campaigners. Heck, it is why the DNC ran Hillary, even though she was over 43% animatronic by the end of the primary.'

Then you reveal that the mole is Mook.

The more facts you can weave into an acceptable narrative, the more secret landmines you can slip into their bubble, until the critical mass of cognitive dissonance causes a rupture

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ambrit , July 24, 2018 at 11:58 am

Watch out for the response being a psychotic break. I have had that happen when I got too carried away with 'weaponized humour' in my arguments.
I mean not just angry outbursts directed in my direction but actual punches. These times are becoming physically dangerous.

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William Hunter Duncan , July 24, 2018 at 9:24 am

I will generally, when I encounter a true believer Left or Right, let them get comfortable, agreeing with their critique of the Other until they say something grotesquely hypocritical or patently false or deranged, and then I will call out the hypocrisy/bs by way of pointing to it in their own party, then segway into something like 'MSNBC is part of the DNC, CNN is mockingbird CIA/DEEP STATE, and FOX is Rupert Murdoch's geriatric limp dick. Sometimes I call myself an anarchist, because I am liberal about some things and conservative about others and hypocrisy sucks. Wtf are Americans left and right going to pull their heads out of their buttz and realize the country has been gutted and the people put in debt servitude to globalist corp, bank, billionaire and eternal profiteering war/surveillance machine? Oh, and capitalism looks like a death cult if you are a pollinator or an ecosystem, so wtf about your bloody party ."

Which rant I can sustain as long as the person can hear it. Sometimes with liberals though I just ask why they think Hillary would have been a better president, and they usually realize at some point they have tied themselves in knots.

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voteforno6 , July 24, 2018 at 9:26 am

One quibble: It should be "Russia!Russia!Russia!", not "Russia!Russia!" – it makes the Jan Brady jokes a little funnier.

Anyway, with some people, I'm not sure if people should really be trying to "talk to" liberals, with the intent of changing their minds. I remember similar discussions going on in Daily Kos around 2006 or so, but there they discussed how to "talk to" conservatives, or people in rural areas, or "low information voters," as they liked to call them. It does seem a little condescending – some people believe what they believe, and you're not going to be able to argue them out of their positions. As macnamichomhairle posted above, the election of Trump really seems to have caused a psychic break in certain segments of society. I'm not sure if agitating them any further would really be that helpful. It's gotten to the point that I wonder (only half-jokingly) if Trump Derangement Syndrome will be included in the next volume of the DSM.

So, if you want to argue with people about something, make it sports. It seems that Americans are much more civil and mature when it comes to arguing about that topic. That is, unless they're from Philadelphia.

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Arizona Slim , July 24, 2018 at 11:44 am

From Philadelphia? Whatsa matter with that?

Says Slim, who was born in Pittsburgh and raised outside of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

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fresno dan , July 24, 2018 at 11:52 am

http://dailysnark.com/vikings-fans-claim-eagles-fans-took-hats-off-peed/

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vidimi , July 24, 2018 at 9:28 am

thank the lord i don't live in the united states.

when facing russia! putin! arguments, i usually retort with a big "i don't care" and paraphrase Mohammed Ali: "ain't no vladimir putin ever set the middle east on fire and crash the global economy".

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Newton Finn , July 24, 2018 at 11:11 am

Utter genius line.

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Arizona Slim , July 24, 2018 at 11:45 am

Me? I use these arguments as an opportunity to practice my Russian language skills.

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Carolinian , July 24, 2018 at 10:10 am

Caitlin Johnstone has a column on how to respond to the Russiagaters.

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/the-burden-of-proof-is-on-the-russiagaters-eb0b5e3602a3

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pretzelattack , July 24, 2018 at 10:58 am

thanks for that link. the debate is very familiar to me.

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The Rev Kev , July 24, 2018 at 10:20 am

At first I was going to suggest using a lead pipe on so-called liberals as a coping strategy but I think that this is too serious to joke about. Think about this. The US midterms take place on Tuesday, November 6, 2018 and only 16 days later you will have Thanksgiving in the US. If you think that people are on edge now can you imagine what it will be like around Thanksgiving tables this year?
Look, it is a real bad idea to tie your identity to any political party. Too much putting your faith in princes here – or princesses too for that matter. I don't think that the US voting system helps either where they want you to register for Party A or Party B which, when you think about it, kinda defeats the purpose of a secret ballet.
If people with phds are drinking the kool-aid and are not using their critical thinking skills, then how can you expect average people to be convinced? I am not sure that you can but what you can do is undermine their beliefs. Don't let them shape the battlefield of argument ('Or course everybody knows Russia did it!') or else it is a losing game. In any case, this whole thing reeks of the old identity game where those in power set two sides to fiercely combat each other while skimming profits all the way to the bank. An example of this? Democrats and Republicans hate each other's guts but when it come time to vote $1.5 trillion to the wealthiest people in the country then it was bipartisan all the way, baby.

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Arizona Slim , July 24, 2018 at 11:47 am

My birthday comes shortly after the election. I'm thinking of throwing a party for myself and inviting liberal Democrats, libertarians, Republicans, Greens, independents, and those who refuse to be classified.

It'll be fun!

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flora , July 24, 2018 at 12:18 pm

Thanksgiving in the US. If you think that people are on edge now can you imagine what it will be like around Thanksgiving tables this year?

hmmm if the MSM determine too many of the midterm winners are the *wrong* sort of people then watch out for more MSM, Thanksgiving weekend, crazy stories, as in 2016. Properly speaking or not. ;)

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vlade , July 24, 2018 at 10:21 am

For a discussion to occur, both sides have to be willing and able to listen. While most people claim both, in my experience especially the latter (able to) is a learned skill which majority lacks (of all bents, not just liberals etc.).

Hence after this was tested, I do not discuss anymore, I rant, if I feel like it.

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tokyodamage , July 24, 2018 at 10:27 am

Talk about small, but 'respectably' sourced news stories instead of whatever's dominating the current news cycle – stories where the DNC spokespeople haven't already poisoned the well by telling people "This is your team's official position, there's no need to make up your own mind."

Give the liberal a chance to make up their own mind on the small story. Chances are that they sympathize with the underdog in that story – showing how 'liberals care'.

Then – if you're in the mood – spring the trap:

"You're absolutely right to be concerned about the underdog in [story A]. The compassion -that's why people like liberals! By the way, why do you think that [famous dem spokesperson] doesn't show the same compassion regarding [morally analogous but more mainstream news controversy B]?"

That's all i got.

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tokyodamage , July 24, 2018 at 10:32 am

"Russian meddling, eh? That's a scary country. I've been reading about Russia in the 90s. The average life expectancy of the whole country went down by years after the communist government collapsed. Old people dying alone in their apartments from easily treatable illnesses. Yeah, it IS terrible. Yeah it IS disgusting and immoral. Oh by the way, that's around the time they switched to a for-profit medical system like we have. Weird huh?"

Brooklin Bridge , July 24, 2018 at 10:39 am

The inability to talk politics with others of differing views is hardly limited to the US even if it expresses itself in different ways. I have family in France (je suis une pičce rapportée – in-law) and it's almost identical to the US. As even my wife is somewhat of a 'guest' when we go over now, You simply avoid subjects where you know it could get too hot and so do they among themselves. Things are not at all as cut and dry as they were (at least seemed) back in the late 60's early 70's when students AND workers united massively in common cause.

A few years ago, I had a discussion that turned into an argument with a friend visiting from France who is an economist by training but made his pile (of comfortable not gargantuan size) in real estate. It turned around Jeremy Corbyn with my argument that as long as people are really hurting, social/political/economic justice movements will thrive and often succeed in radical change and his argument that 1) he is an economist and therefore knows what he is talking about and 2) Corbyn is simply unacceptable and unworkable in todays economy , c'est tout!

How horribly frustrating for me not to have a good command of the subject, getting hot under the collar is not a compelling argument, (though I didn't let him get away with the, being an economist, braggadocio), but on the good side, our friendship survived the bout and we holstered our pistols for the rest of their visit.

Eureka Springs , July 24, 2018 at 10:57 am

I find arguments of systemic problems, corruption, absence of actual solutions, divide conquer, class war, rather than D vs R work best.

Example:
Ask anyone who has a problem with immigrants why not one politician demands an arrest of a ceo and board members for illegal hiring practices. Put them in jail just for a weekend and things would dramatically change over night. We don't need to cage many thousands of desperate people, just a few greedy ones. Like them or not, quit blaming desperate poor people for crawling through a nasty river and horrific desert to get a crappy job. If the illegal hiring didn't exist they wouldn't come. As for children and adults, once 'we' have them captured, under our control, how they exist is all about us, not them.

And then I shut up. You have to know when to shut up.

At other times I love reminding D's or R's and especially those who are neither, the D's and R's are at best 27 percent of the eligible voters. Independents are far greater in number than they are and 'refuse to vote' for any of them are greatest of all. The D's and R's both have a super majority against them for good reasons which are being ignored at all our peril. That they are not listening, not asking, not representing. They are owned and we are all being played like a two dollar banjo. Fighting for either one of them is exactly what they want and need to keep the con alive.

I keep reminding people this is not professional football, you don't have to watch, much more you are not forced to pick between two teams, please choose neither like most of us are doing because we need an entirely new game. Issues, not personality. Because all owners are always a winner, cashing in, if you do.

Adam Eran , July 24, 2018 at 11:01 am

More generally speaking, there are actually clinical trials of ways to be persuasive. Doctors need this for the difficult patients: the heart patients who don't want to take their meds, the addicts who don't want to quit, etc. It's worth looking up: Motivational Interviewing . The link is to a course offered by Citizens' Climate Lobby, designed to help their members deal with climate change denial.

The key, they say, is forming partnerships. Disagreement can take the form of fights, arguments or partnerships, with only the last providing some prospect for relief.

So providing the "perfect squelch" or putting down one's opponent is the very last thing you want to do. Finding areas of agreement and building on those is the royal road to something more positive.

I've also found some of the worst offenders in the environmental community. These are often former bureaucrats who want to keep the (bankrupt) process in place, but encourage a different outcome. They want to be the "good guys," and judge the environmental "bad guys" rather than make a significant change.

Ah, the human ego! Gotta love it!

Quite Likely , July 24, 2018 at 11:11 am

I tend towards the Socratic approach, both for establishment Democrats and the larger universe of people I disagree with in person. It generally means doing more listening than talking, which I know is a downside for some, but letting people talk things out in front of you with occasional nudges in the right direct does a decent job of moving them gradually in the right direction, and leaves them with an impression of you as a friendly good-listener with whom they have some disagreements rather than that asshole yelling about nonsense.

JohnnyGL , July 24, 2018 at 11:12 am

I'm going to throw out my tips that I've used for years to talk politics in various environments (office, family gatherings, etc).

1) Keep context in mind if you're in the office, keep encounters brief and cordial, couple of news headlines as you breeze by for a couple of minutes. Crack a couple of jokes and try to keep it light. But choose your topics with care, especially if you don't know the person really well.

2) Find common ground: with trumpers you can rail against clintons, obamas, and dem hypocrisy. with clintonites you can talk about how excited you are that Ted Cruz has a real challenge, Paul Ryan's retiring, all the damage Trump is doing to the establishment repubs, etc. Tell them the positive thing about Trump winning is that ALL THE OTHER REPUBS LOST .badly!

3) As far as genuinely changing minds .THESE THINGS TAKE TIME! Some minds aren't open to being changed, some will periodically open and close, and some of us are genuinely trying to figure out WTF is going on in the world (which is why we come to NC!) In any case, minds get changed over weeks and months, not a couple of hours.

4) Understand and remember that you DO NOT have all the answers and think about all things you've changed your mind about over the years and it helps to open minds to SHARE stories with people about what changed your mind and why. If you're not sure why you think what you think, go figure out why! :)

5) Once you've got a certain comfort level, don't be afraid to crack a joke that aggravates the other person, but don't overdo it and don't do a lot of public mocking/shaming.

6) When someone else uses 5) on you, practice to make sure you DO NOT get too mad about it. Get thicker skin, if you can't do it .then you aren't ready to talk politics.

7) Yes, that includes people saying ignorant stuff. That doesn't mean you have to grin and bear it, you don't and you shouldn't. Drop a mild rebuke (no more and no less) and change the subject. Don't ostracize or shame. Keep interacting with people, as much as they want to do so. We've all said stupid $h!t at one time or another, we can and should all be able to forgive/forget. I've certainly said my fair share. But also, people do change their minds over time. It's helpful if you can guide them in a positive direction.

8) Talk about the context in which things happen and put yourself in other people's shoes. This is something I've learned a lot in the last few years and people forget to step back and look at things from a high level. I've been amazed at how much more sense things can make when you think more about context.

marym , July 24, 2018 at 11:34 am

My coping method is mostly avoidance, but if I did intervene it would be something like this:

I agree Trump is ill-suited to the job and has horrible policies.

If Russia (or Russians) interfered with the election, if Trump and his cronies participated in that, or if Trump and cronies had other dealings with Russian that are illegal, Mueller is the right person to figure it out. His whole career has been defending and strengthening the pre-Trump status quo, the "norms" of the military-industrial-corporatist-security complex. If there's a way to push us back in that direction, there may be no one on earth more committed to that job.

Our job is to examine the impacts of current Trump policy, the roots where applicable in those status quo "norms", issues other than Russia that weaken and corrupt our electoral system, failures of centrist Democrat policies to solve problems; and to promote alternative policies and politicians. None of this will be adddressed by any negative Mueller consequences to Trump, and maybe to a few of those around him.

RUKidding , July 24, 2018 at 11:39 am

Whether it's committed liberals (eg, super strong Big D voters) or committed conservatives, there's really not much point in "talking."

I accidentally said something truthful about Trump's/the Republicans' recent tax law, and my super conservative sister launched into a tirade that came right out of Rush Limbaugh's mouth. I hadn't meant to stir the pot, either, and what I said was pretty nothingburger. I let her rant for a few minutes; explained my side very graciously and calmly (mainly that MY taxes have been raised, not lowered as advertised), and then I changed the topic.

I know a very few D voter friends who are starting to pay more attention – it's taken a while but they are – and they're starting to see that Big D is NOT their savior, at least, not as they currently exist. Of course, I have Big D friends who revile Bernie Sanders as the worst of the worst, and they're HORRIFIED that he's a socialist!!!111!!!!! Well, there's nothing to say there.

Mostly if I'm thinking about it, I'll drop in a few salient points – as some other commenters have suggested, above – and then mostly walk away.

The Big Fat Propaganda Wurlizter has done it's job, and HOW. And it's not just about conservatives ranting out the usual Fox/Rush rightwing talking points. Now it's so-called liberals ranting out the latest from, I guess (no tv, never watch), Rachael Maddow and similar.

I can barely ever listen to what passes for "nooz" on NPR, but possibly they get their talking points from there, as well. Some of those talking points now come up regularly in the weekend game shows. I duly noted that "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" had James EFFEN Comey on last weeked. R U Kidding ME???? Of course, I didn't listen.

So, go figure.

Both sides are being heavily brainwashed by our M$M. For me: No TV at all and precious little radio (mostly music stations). And judicious nooz paper reading.

Get my real info at sites like this one.

Thanks to all who comment logically here in reality-land.

timbers , July 24, 2018 at 11:41 am

In general, the way I deal with the liberals, partisan Dems, Hillary crowd or whatever you call it, is in person (I'm not on FB) with this type of statement:

"Not one single piece of evidence has every been presented showing Russia meddled in the election. Not one. We don't even have grounds to investigate such a thing. And what evidence we do have points away from Russia. The same agencies that said WMD in Iraq are now saying Russia meddled in the election, have you learned nothing? Russiagate is Democrat's WMD in Iraq moment."

That usually silences them because they don't have any evidence and some even know that. If they offer "evidence" (like the social media click bait adds) I am usually familiar enough show how silly the examples given are.

meadows , July 24, 2018 at 12:02 pm

I hike regularly w/my buddy who is a 73 year old Nam vet, I am a 65 year old conscientious objector he is blue collar for generations, I am college educated family for generations New Deal Dems forever.

Our concerns in life are the same, the well being of our adult children and grandchildren, our relationships w/our spouses, how to manage our retirements. But Oh do we talk politics! He teases me that I'm a Trumpster because of my deserved critiques of Clinton, Obama and my anger at that gang of liars, as if that means I think Trump and his band of "obligerant" oligarchs are great! (oblivious and belligerent)

The executive branch is a huge about-to-become-extinct dinosaur w/the brain of a tiny reptile, little realizing only the little mammals will survive, while still imagining itself to be king of the place forever.

[Jul 24, 2018] CNN Leaks Confidential Trump-Cohen Recording

Jul 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden Tue, 07/24/2018 - 21:26 52 SHARES

The attorney for President Trump's former longtime personal attorney has given CNN a copy of a secretly recorded conversation between Trump and Cohen, in which they discuss purchasing the rights to a Playboy model's claim that she and Trump had an affair.

McDougal, claims to have had a nearly yearlong affair with Trump in 2006, right before Melania Trump gave birth to their son Barron. McDougal sold her story to the National Enquirer for $150,000 as the 2016 presidential campaign was in its final months, however the tabloid sat on the story which kept it from becoming public in a practice known as "catch and kill."

Cohen told Trump about his plans to set up a company and finance the purchase of the rights from American Media, which publishes the National Enquirer.

"I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David," Cohen said in the recording, likely a reference to American Media head David Pecker.

Trump interrupts Cohen asking, "What financing?" according to the recording. When Cohen tells Trump, "We'll have to pay." Trump is heard saying "pay with cash" but the audio is muddled and it's unclear whether he suggests paying with cash or not paying. Cohen says, "no, no" but it is not clear what is said next. - CNN

me title=

The Enquirer's chairman, David J. Pecker, is a personal friend of Trump's, and McDougal has accused Cohen of taking part in the deal.

By burying Ms. McDougal's story during the campaign in a practice known in the tabloid industry as "catch and kill," A.M.I. protected Mr. Trump from negative publicity that could have harmed his election chances, spending money to do so.

The authorities believe that the company was not always operating in what campaign finance law calls a "legitimate press function," according to the people briefed on the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. That may explain why prosecutors did not follow typical Justice Department protocol to avoid subpoenaing news organizations when possible, and to give journalists advance warning when demanding documents or other information. - New York Times

While Trump never paid for the rights, Lanny Davis says that the recording, made in 2016, shows Trump knew about the payment.

On Saturday, President Trump broke his silence over the recording, tweeting: "Inconceivable that the government would break into a lawyer's office (early in the morning) - almost unheard of. Even more inconceivable that a lawyer would tape a client - totally unheard of & perhaps illegal. The good news is that your favorite President did nothing wrong!" Trump tweeted.

me title=

The release of the tape has sparked a widespread debate about the sanctity of attorney-client privilege, and its use in "one-party" consent states.

me title=

Meanwhile, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani confirmed with the New York Times last week that Trump and Cohen had discussed payments - and that " there was no indication on the tape that Mr. Trump knew before the conversation about the payment from the Enquirer's parent company, American Media Inc., to Ms. McDougal ."

" Nothing in that conversation suggests that he had any knowledge of it in advance ," said Giuliani, adding that Trump had previously told Cohen that if he were to make a payment related to the woman, to write a check instead of sending cash so that the transaction could be properly documented. "In the big scheme of things, it's powerful exculpatory evidence," Giuliani added.

Cohen made a similar payment of $130,000 to porn star and stripper Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. Cohen said at the time "In a private transaction in 2016, I used my own personal funds to facilitate a payment of $130,000 to Ms. Stephanie Clifford."

Clifford - whose husband just filed for divorce , is suing Trump over a nondisclosure agreement so that she can "tell her story" (in the form of a book, we imagine), while she is also suing both Trump and Cohen for libel after Trump called her statements "fraud" over Twitter, while claiming that Clifford fabricated a story that she was threatened by a man after she went to journalists with the story of her affair.

Shortly before the 2016 election, former Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said that McDougal's allegations were "totally untrue."

Tags Politics Software - NEC Comments Vote up! 13 Vote down! 4

TeamDepends Tue, 07/24/2018 - 21:27 Permalink

Powder, aka Vanderbilt Jr., aka Anderson Cooper, approves this message.

vortmax -> TeamDepends Tue, 07/24/2018 - 21:27 Permalink

Still don't care tbh. He hasn't even shot anyone on Fifth Avenue yet. MAGA

Stan522 -> vortmax Tue, 07/24/2018 - 21:29 Permalink

They really HATE Trump, don't they.....

johngaltfla -> Stan522 Tue, 07/24/2018 - 21:30 Permalink

Further proof that Mueller's office leaks like a sieve. Now shut this shitshow circus down the day after election in November.

NoDebt -> johngaltfla Tue, 07/24/2018 - 21:32 Permalink

"The Enquirer's chairman, David J. Pecker..."

Oh, come on. You're making that shit up. There's no fucking way that's his real name.

NoDebt -> NoDebt Tue, 07/24/2018 - 21:34 Permalink

And, by the way, thank God we finally have a President who nails hot chicks. Clinton went after some real woofers. It was embarrassing.

NoDebt -> NoDebt Tue, 07/24/2018 - 21:38 Permalink

Uh oh. This article just became the top-kick post on the site. Here we go. Off to the races again.

Son of Loki -> NoDebt Tue, 07/24/2018 - 21:40 Permalink

Honestly, no one cares except the libtards and democrats if there is a difference. The men and women I know love Trump because, among other things, he is not limp-wristed like Bush and Obama were.

Americans care about jobs, immigrants and terrorists.

IridiumRebel -> Son of Loki Tue, 07/24/2018 - 21:41 Permalink

Uh oh! They have Trump on tape negotiating a contract for nothing illegal!

Son of Loki -> IridiumRebel Tue, 07/24/2018 - 21:43 Permalink

CNN ignores Uncle Joe Biden being "creepy" being women "uncomfortable" and the way he acts around kiddies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy07yHAgM4E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ-YjGmpO4Q

ebworthen -> IridiumRebel Tue, 07/24/2018 - 22:08 Permalink

F.B.I. Witch Hunt > Attorney-Client Privilege Shattered > C.N.N. Propaganda mill

If that isn't a banana republic progression of events I don't know what is.

What's next, Trump's Pastor's church raided during Sunday service?

Little Barron taken in by Mueller for questioning?

monkeyshine -> IridiumRebel Tue, 07/24/2018 - 22:11 Permalink

"pay with cash" probably is just a response to the word "financing". Just my guess of course, but from the dialogue it flows logically, as in Trump saying to himself "why finance it, just pay her cash". Doesn't necessarily mean pay with currency just means don't borrow the money. Besides, it doesn't matter much in this context since the lawyer said no, and there is no crime here unless he said "pay her with campaign contributions".

Clinton paid Paula Jones, what, $850,000? And he didn't even get the rights to the story.
Trump's negotiating genius on display lol.

LetThemEatRand -> monkeyshine Tue, 07/24/2018 - 22:15 Permalink

"'pay with cash' probably is just a response to the word 'financing'."

I would say 99% probability that's what he meant. Lawyer: "we need to talk about financing" Trump: "pay with cash." He didn't mean a suitcase full of bills. He meant "just write a check." Anyone in business knows the terminology. Plus it's not even clear WTF they are talking about.

I have no love for Trump, in fact I think he's an asshole. But this is all so much ado about nothing.

Sanity Bear -> IridiumRebel Tue, 07/24/2018 - 22:18 Permalink

I have to admit I'm confused as to why he should pay anything at all. Why not let the smoking hot model tell the world you scored with her? What's the downside here?

Free This -> Sanity Bear Tue, 07/24/2018 - 22:25 Permalink

Just to get rid of it, people like to sue to settle, who knows though?

nmewn -> Son of Loki Tue, 07/24/2018 - 21:48 Permalink

So this is the tape that Trump said he doesn't give a crap about the release of, outside of the larger question of EVERYONE'S RIGHT of lawyer-client privilege?

Well just damn, it must be a smoker that will finally lead to his impeachment ;-)

nmewn -> chunga Tue, 07/24/2018 - 21:58 Permalink

Well yeah...but these days ya just roll with what they present, like..."past and former government officials who are in a position to know have confirmed that"...which invariably leads to, abuse of authority, presenting falsified/manufactured evidence to a court, withholding exculpatory evidence to a court, stolen classified documents after being fired, obstruction of justice, perjury...ya know, the normal regular things progs do to put their heads in the noose ;-)

chunga -> nmewn Tue, 07/24/2018 - 22:08 Permalink

It was FBI that raided Cohen's office so I'll presume that's where this tape came from.

I'm not going to start sticking up for the maverick's lapses in fidelity, but holy crap, the FBI/DOJ have been blatantly weaponized against him and in charge of those outfits are....Sessions and Wray?

What the fuck?

nmewn -> chunga Tue, 07/24/2018 - 21:58 Permalink

Well yeah...but these days ya just roll with what they present, like..."past and former government officials who are in a position to know have confirmed that"...which invariably leads to, abuse of authority, presenting falsified/manufactured evidence to a court, withholding exculpatory evidence to a court, stolen classified documents after being fired, obstruction of justice, perjury...ya know, the normal regular things progs do to put their heads in the noose ;-)

chunga -> nmewn Tue, 07/24/2018 - 22:08 Permalink

It was FBI that raided Cohen's office so I'll presume that's where this tape came from.

I'm not going to start sticking up for the maverick's lapses in fidelity, but holy crap, the FBI/DOJ have been blatantly weaponized against him and in charge of those outfits are....Sessions and Wray?

What the fuck?

Never One Roach -> nmewn Tue, 07/24/2018 - 22:38 Permalink

Time to release all 589 pages of FISA docs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxlO4Fjvvy8

GeezerGeek -> MrAToZ Tue, 07/24/2018 - 22:05 Permalink

At least DJT has shown generosity toward his, um, friends. What did JFK do to Marilyn? What did Teddy do to Mary Jo? LBJ had at least one mistress. What did Bill Clinton call the gal in the blue dress, wasn't it "that woman"? What did Obama call his wife, Michael if I recall correctly.

Poor Jimmy Carter. All he ever had was a killer rabbit. He may have been totally incompetent, but at least he was a decent guy while in office. Afterward, unfortunately, not so much.

seek -> Stan522 Tue, 07/24/2018 - 22:03 Permalink

Hate is an understatement.

Seriously, here we have :

Any one of these is a federal felony. The people behind this are willing to break a lot of laws to make it happen. All to release a recording that on the face of it is regarding a legal activity (a forebearance contract.)

These people are desperate.

[Jul 24, 2018] NEO Russiagate, the Comedy of Errors - Veterans Today News - Military Foreign Affairs Policy

Notable quotes:
"... "Why have you done this to us?" ..."
"... "Look elsewhere." ..."
"... Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He's a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today , especially for the online magazine " New Eastern Outlook ." https://journal-neo.org/2018/07/21/russiagate-the-comedy-of-errors/ ..."
Jul 24, 2018 | www.veteranstoday.com

https://us-u.openx.net/w/1.0/pd?plm=6&ph=2857f3e0-a998-4d70-b5c1-b19a3d6766a1&gdpr=0

NEO: Russiagate, the Comedy of Errors - Veterans Today | News - Military Foreign Affairs Policy The 2018 Helsinki summit has left Americans puzzled, some terrified, others feign outrage but few have stood back and taken a breath. Always stand back, always take a breath, always keep the mouth shut and the hand off the keyboard.

A quick review of the facts, such as they are, such as we can assume them to be, is a place to begin. Donald Trump, despite his denials and obfuscation, really did side with Russia against America's intelligence agencies.

Let's take a breath, on one hand you have the CIA, NSA and 14 other agencies, all heavily politicized, all with long histories of abuses, of lying, of even drug trafficking, rigging elections, assassinations – this is the "one hand."

On the other, you have Russian President Vladimir Putin saying, "I didn't do it."

Then you have Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller telling us he has evidence of Russian wrongdoing – evidence he got from the CIA, NSA and 14 other agencies.

Then again, I forgot to mention that these agencies generally get their intelligence from Israel, about half of it – a nation that is seldom an unbiased or disinterested party – or from open source intelligence.

They see it on TV.

Then again, they have been accused, from time to time, of making it all up.

Add to this Donald Trump , a man who would lie about what day it was; he doesn't seem to be able to help himself – the mouth opens and out they come – an endless stream of them, many of them bizarre and quite unnecessary. It is as though he is testing us.

There is a simple answer here. Based on reason, Trump may well have been quite correct in his assessment that Putin wasn't lying. Putin was right there; Trump only told the audience what he was told. Trump wasn't making that part up.

As you can note, we are now testing one or more hypotheses, hoping we might end up with something resembling truth, a lonely effort in the best of cases.

Robert Mueller

We can assume Robert Mueller was telling the truth also. He said, through indictments of Russian intelligence personnel, that he had "evidence" received from "intelligence sources" and "witnesses," some of whom are already convicted criminals, that support his hypothesis. Mueller says his evidence proves "the Russians did it."

This doesn't mean Putin lied. It doesn't even mean Trump lied, though in his recent denials, he has begun lying, and quite embarrassingly; nothing new there.

Here is what it hinges down to – the American judicial system, an adversarial system that can be manipulated and in many cases, as Trump has claimed over and over, can be used to target innocent victims.

Then again, we aren't saying Trump is an innocent victim, only that Putin didn't lie.

Then we ask, is it possible for Russian intelligence officers to do exactly what Mueller has claimed – steal identities, hack computers, pay off stooges – the normal things intelligence officers are paid to do anyway, without Putin knowing?

The answer to this is yes; but the answer is also mitigated, in that the likelihood of "yes" being correct is poor. Putin should have known. He says he didn't and, thus, based on his character, or at least his history of blatant fearlessness, he is unlikely to lie over something where he has little or nothing to lose nor does lying serve the interests of the Russian people and their welfare.

Then we look at the real weak link, the sources of the evidence, witness statements from admitted criminals and reports from intelligence agencies.

Past this , we look at who has something to gain in destroying American institutions, discrediting President Trump even more than usual, and worsening relations between the US and Russia.

It isn't Iran. It isn't Syria. It isn't Germany.

We then step back again and assess which nations have the power to fake evidence or corrupt the output of American intelligence reports even more than they are usually faked or corrupted.

Three nations come to mind, in order; Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Each have powerful lobbies in Washington, each could potentially gain through weakening both Russia and the United States, and each has a long history of using black propaganda and even false flag terrorism to achieve gains.

I like this list.

We then take an anecdotal look at a couple of minor aspects of the Mueller inquiry. We begin with internet manipulation of fake news stories attacking Hillary Clinton.

It is one thing putting out a fake story; it is quite another featuring it on Facebook with extremely strong preferences and making sure any and every Google search, for cabbage recipes or vacation spots, gives results that attack the Clinton campaign.

Assuming that "Zuckerberg" of Facebook would work with Israeli intelligence, simply because of his name might well be considered anti-Semitism. However, when examining how Zuckerberg dealt with Cambridge Analytica during an election year and his relationship with Israeli spy contractor, Black Cube, Israel comes to the top of the list.

Jared Cohen at Google Ideas

Google also has things to hide. Behind Google is a regime-change organization, formerly known as Google Idea Groups, now called Google Jigsaw.

Jigsaw, a powerful military and intelligence contractor owned by Google Corporation, is headed by former Bush White House clandestine intelligence chief, Jared Cohen.

Cohen has been active in operations against Russian interests in Crimea, he has run operations inside Iran and has a number of organizations under his command in Turkey aimed at ousting President Assad of Syria.

After all , Cohen's job is "regime change" and Russia, Iran and Syria are long targets of the "Russia bashers" in Washington, many of whom, if not most, are also powerful members of the Israel lobby as well.

We will let Saudi Arabia off the hook this time.

Time to step back again. Note that even if Russia were guilty, but guilty of what? Spying is not illegal. There is no international convention against spying.

America's troops in Syria are illegal. Drone killings are illegal. Recognizing Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel is illegal. Russia rigging an American election is not a violation of international law.

It's not nice, but then again, American sanctions against Russia aren't nice either. America's rightist coup against Ukraine wasn't so nice. America's invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and a few other countries, wasn't so nice.

America's efforts to flood Russia with heroin from Afghanistan isn't nice either, but we don't have to get into that right now.

What we are saying, and a case we are making, there was no reason for Putin to lie. However, there is reason for a nation, let's take Israel for instance, to fake Russia as a "bad guy," putting an American president in office who, as Trump has proven, does what Israel tells him to do 100% of the time.

Does Israel have the muscle, the capability or, using the legal term, the "means" to fake evidence?

We already established they have a motive and they have opportunity.

We then have it – Mueller told the truth, Putin told the truth, even Trump told the truth before he started lying.

Should the Russian people take solace in the fact that America is poorly governed? America has hurt Russia, over and over, though few Americans realize it.

Peace could and should have broken out decades ago, except America has been ruled by Russia-haters for a hundred years – Russia-haters that are alive and well and in control in Washington, even now.

I am not saying Putin is perfect or above sin. I am only saying he would not have bothered lying about anything this stupid or minor; it isn't worth it. He has nothing to gain. Putin is not stupid, though he may well be poorly informed. Is he so poorly informed that his own intelligence agencies might well have acted with blatant stupidity against the United States and gotten caught?

The Russia of the Cold War, the old Soviet Union, would never have been so stupid.

Then again, how much has Russia gained from Trump?

As the ire of the first 48 hours after Helsinki dies down, and some real rage among a population of Americans – no one knows how big – burns on, we ask why?

To many Americans , perhaps a majority that ebbs and flows according to fake pollsters, Russia foisted a dangerous clown into the Oval Office as a sick joke – perhaps a punishment for some crime Americans would never admit to anyway.

"Why have you done this to us?"

When asked, Vladimir Putin simply said, "Look elsewhere."

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He's a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today , especially for the online magazine " New Eastern Outlook ."
https://journal-neo.org/2018/07/21/russiagate-the-comedy-of-errors/

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[Jul 23, 2018] Chickens with Their Heads Cut Off, Coming Home to Roost. The "Treason Narrative" by Helen Buyniski

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Congress wasted no time jumping on the Treason bandwagon, led by Chuck Schumer conjuring the spectre of the KGB, Marco Rubio as neocon point-man (one imagines Barbara Bush rolling in her grave at his usurpation of Jeb's rightful role) proposing locked-and-loaded sanctions in case of future "meddling," and John McCain , still desperate to take the rest of the world with him before he finally kicks a long-overdue bucket, condemning the "disgraceful" display of two heads of state trying to come to an agreement about matters of mutual interest. The Pentagon has invested a lot of time and money in positioning Russia as Public Enemy #1, and for Trump to put his foot in it by making nice with Putin might diminish the size of their weapons contracts – or the willingness of the American people to tolerate more than half of every tax dollar disappearing down an unaccountable hole . Peace? Eh, who needs it. Cash , motherfucker. ..."
"... The Intelligence Community believes it is God, and it hath smote Trump good. Smelling blood in the water, the media redoubled their shrieking for several days, and crickets. ..."
Jul 23, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

... ... ...

The Helsinki hysteria shone a spotlight on the utter impotence of the establishment media and their Deep State controllers to make their delusions reality. Never before has there been such a gaping chasm visible between the media's "truth" and the facts on the ground. Pundits compared the summit to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 , with some even reaching for the brass ring of the Holocaust by likening it to Kristallnacht , while polls revealed the American people really didn't care .

Worse, it laid bare the collusion between the media and their Deep State handlers – the central dissemination point for the headlines, down to the same phrases, that led to every outlet claiming Trump had "thrown the Intelligence Community under the bus" by refusing to embrace the Russia-hacked-our-democracy narrative during his press conference with Putin. Leaving aside the sudden ubiquity of "Intelligence Community" in our national discourse – as if this network of spies and murderous thugs is Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood – no one seriously believes every pundit came up with "throws under the bus" as the proper way of describing that press conference.

The same central control was apparent in the unanimous condemnations of Putin – that he murders journalists , breaks international agreements , uses banned chemical weapons , kills women and children in Syria , and, of course, meddles in elections . For every single establishment pundit to exhibit such a breathtaking lack of insight into their own government's misdeeds is highly unlikely. Many of these same talking heads remarked in horror on Sinclair Broadcasting's Orwellian "prepared statement" issuing forth from the mouths of hundreds of stations' anchors at once. Et tu, Anderson Cooper?

Helsinki – Trump and Putin – a Showdown for Summer Doldrums or a Genuine Attempt Towards Peace?

The media frenzy was geared toward sparking a popular revolt, with tensions already running high from the previous media frenzy about family separation at the border (though only one MSNBC segment seemed to recall that they should still care about that, and belatedly included some footage of kids behind a fence wrapped in Mylar blankets). Rachel Maddow , armed with the crocodile tears that served her so well during the family-separation fracas, exhorted her faithful cultists to do something . Meanwhile, national-security neanderthal John Brennan all but called for a coup, condemning the president for the unspeakable "high crimes and misdemeanors" of seeking to improve relations with the world's second-largest nuclear power. He called on Pompeo and Bolton, the two biggest warmongers in a Trump administration bristling with warmongers, to resign in protest. This would have been a grand slam for world peace, but alas, it was not to be. Even those two realize what a has-been Brennan is.

Congress wasted no time jumping on the Treason bandwagon, led by Chuck Schumer conjuring the spectre of the KGB, Marco Rubio as neocon point-man (one imagines Barbara Bush rolling in her grave at his usurpation of Jeb's rightful role) proposing locked-and-loaded sanctions in case of future "meddling," and John McCain , still desperate to take the rest of the world with him before he finally kicks a long-overdue bucket, condemning the "disgraceful" display of two heads of state trying to come to an agreement about matters of mutual interest. The Pentagon has invested a lot of time and money in positioning Russia as Public Enemy #1, and for Trump to put his foot in it by making nice with Putin might diminish the size of their weapons contracts – or the willingness of the American people to tolerate more than half of every tax dollar disappearing down an unaccountable hole . Peace? Eh, who needs it. Cash , motherfucker.

Trump's grip on his long-elusive spine was only temporary, and he held another press conference upon returning home to reiterate his trust in the intelligence agencies that have made no secret of their utter loathing for him since day one. When the lights went out at the climactic moment, it became clear for anyone who still hadn't gotten the message who was running the show here (and Trump, to his credit, actually joked about it). The Intelligence Community believes it is God, and it hath smote Trump good. Smelling blood in the water, the media redoubled their shrieking for several days, and crickets. On to the Playmates .

Sacha Baron Cohen 's latest series, "Who is America," targeted Ted Koppel for one segment. Koppel cut the interview short after smelling a rat and expressed his high-minded concern that Cohen's antics would hurt Americans' trust in reporters. But after a week of the entire media establishment screaming that the sky is falling while the heavens remain firmly in place, Cohen is clearly the least of their problems. At least he's funny.

*

Helen Buyniski is a journalist and photographer based in New York City. She covers politics, sociology, and other anthropological/cultural phenomena. Helen has a BA in Journalism from New School University and also studied at Columbia University and New York University. Find more of her work at http://www.helenofdestroy.com and http://medium.com/@helen.buyniski .

[Jul 23, 2018] America On It s Way to Being Stalin s Soviet Union by Publius Tacitus

Notable quotes:
"... PT is correct. Any Russian anywhere who has ever spoken to any American for any reason is now considered attempting to "undermine American democracy." When in reality, we're doing it just fine ourselves. The hypocrisy and paranoia is breathtaking - and extremely dangerous. ..."
Jul 23, 2018 | /turcopolier.typepad.com

richardstevenhack a day ago ,

I noticed this situation some months ago when Torshin was accused of donating money to the NRA in order to help Trump get elected. Apparently he is a member of the NRA and as such is perfectly entitled to make donations to the organization.

What I noticed in the article about this is that the one piece of information left out was the amount of the donation. Since the NRA spent $50 million trying to get Trump elected, unless Torshin's donation was some significant percentage of that $50 million, it would make no sense for his donation to be considered significant, if it was little more than what a normal NRA member might be expected to contribute.

Which is, of course, why that figure was deliberately left out of the article - and several other articles on the subject.

An article at ABC News finally acknowledged what the "donation" was:

Last month, a lawyer for the NRA told ABC News that Torshin had, indeed, donated membership dues of between $600 and $1,000 to the organization.But the lawyer, J. Steven Hart, said that was the extent of money coming from Russians.

"We have one contribution from a Russian," Steven Hart, outside counsel to the NRA, said in an interview with ABC News before Friday's sanctions announcement.

Hart said it was the "life membership payment" made by Torshin, which went to the NRA's non-profit parent organization, which is not required by law to disclose the donation. Hart added, "The donation was the person's membership dues" and was not used for election-related activities. "That was not a major donor program," he said.

PT is correct. Any Russian anywhere who has ever spoken to any American for any reason is now considered attempting to "undermine American democracy." When in reality, we're doing it just fine ourselves. The hypocrisy and paranoia is breathtaking - and extremely dangerous.

william mcdonald richardstevenhack 16 hours ago ,

A Russian donating to the NRA - that is going to make liberal heads explode! Snowflakes, run do not walk to the campus safe spaces before they fill up!

RaisingMac richardstevenhack 10 hours ago ,

"Since the NRA spent $50 million trying to get Trump elected, unless Torshin's donation was some significant percentage of that $50 million, it would make no sense for his donation to be considered significant, if it was little more than what a normal NRA member might be expected to
contribute."

And just how significant was the $100,000 that clickbait firm from St. Petersburg spent on Facebook ads in 2016? We're through the looking-glass now, friend! Logic doesn't matter anymore.

Grazhdanochka 20 hours ago ,

The Narrative here faces serious Questions... Poor Trade-craft is obvious using insecure Communications, Chit Chat with supposed 'Handler' to name a few... The Note left about the FSB - FSB being INTERNAL Agency of RF begs yet more Questions...

The NYT Article about it brings up another one I think I should Highlight:

https://www.nytimes.com/201...

"Prosecutors sought criminal charges after agents reported over the weekend that she was moving money out of the country, had her boxes packed, looked into renting a moving truck and had terminated her apartment lease. "

If she was an Agent of the Government and preparing to leave the Country due to increased Attention - she would hardly waste her Time sorting her Affairs and Possessions in the US - This would be considered Government write off effectively.

Her actions however screams someone trying to preserve personal Possessions and Earnings..

I can suggest two 'soft' theories on this whole Affair -

A) She is a naive Girl who genuinely believed what she was doing, found a sponsor whom guided her, maybe even persuaded her to thinking she was working for Russian Government or elements within and thus her naive and very unprofessional behavior has obvious explanation.

B) Much of what is suggested she wrote has been playful Jest, the Types of Jokes my Friends and I have made countless Times when visiting Foreign Countries and taken for whatever reason utmost seriously by Investigators....

Even this Explanations feels forced - The alternative hard Theories may be something far worse as PT suggests

Having lived in a few Western Countries for varied Times, I feel vindicated having returned to Russia - Though I still travel constant for work, this serves as careful reminder that the very qualities I once admired in the Western World are potentially at highest risk and as a Russian - maybe best to be careful...

Harlan Easley 13 hours ago ,

This poor naive girl has been imprison by a bunch of cowards. This insanity has gone so far over the top with this relentless drive toward armed conflict with a nuclear superpower that it forces me to believe there is a more organizing principle than just TDS. They openly defy a elected President and plan his coup. Assange will be arrested next. The conspiracy will use his arrest against Trump as a bludgeoning tool and force his extradition to the US. Just another political prisoner in the Land of the Free.

RaisingMac Harlan Easley 10 hours ago ,

I'm sure you're right: there's more at work here than just TDS. The establishment was obviously planning something big, and Hillary was in on it. I can't say for sure what it was, but if I had to take a wild guess, I would say she was going to invade Syria, which would have almost certainly led to a war with Russia. But now that Trump is president instead, they're threatened with the specter of peace!

Fred S 13 hours ago ,

By this indictment's logic every foreign national helping planned parenthood is trying to "influence American politics". I wonder if speeches to chambers of commerce or economic clubs or universities by former Presidents of Mexico also make one guilty of this crime?

James Thomas 15 hours ago ,

It is worth remembering that the Soviet Union purported to be a democracy - the country held elections and the government and the news media told the people that they lived in the greatest democracy in the world.

I have a friend who grew up in the Soviet Union. Until he was 12 years old he believed he lived in the greatest country in the world. Then his mother went to England on a trade mission (an opportunity that very few Soviet citizens ever had), and when she came back she told her son what she had seen there. It was only then that he started to figure out the truth.

English Outsider 15 hours ago ,

Scarey. Foreign nationals will no doubt take note. But she is getting a court hearing, at least. Will it extend to Western citizens living and working in their home countries?

It already has. In England, in Australia, on the Continent and in the States there are many such examples. Seldom coming before the Courts. The use of government agencies to harass undesirables has long been standard - using the tax authorities mostly, as far as one can see, but sometimes other agencies.

For the average citizen it's never made a lot of odds. Those targeted are usually big names who are making waves or might do. The ordinary citizen has no fear that because he or she holds the view that Government's activities are wrong some official's going to turn up on the doorstep.

If ordinary people are vulnerable, as this case indicates even though this particular ordinary person is a foreigner, then we may begin to feel a trifle uneasy. But these are uneasy times in any case.

Timothy Hagios 17 hours ago ,

We are already seeing censorship of social media under the pretext of protecting the country from the supremely powerful Russian bots. I do not see this de-escalating, despite the best efforts of the Russians not to escalate.

Since the general consensus among Russia "experts" in policy-making circles is that they'll get regime change if only Russia's wealthy are harassed sufficiently, the logical next step would be to start arresting the children of wealthy Russians who are studying at US universities.

PRC90 Timothy Hagios 16 hours ago ,

Trump's intent for dialogue with the Russians and Putin's intent to maintain his 'Putin the Statesman' brand should preclude a very dangerous spiral of retaliation. We think.

[Jul 23, 2018] Report Former FBI Lawyer Lisa Page Revealed Under Oath That There Was No Basis for Mueller's Appointment

Notable quotes:
"... The Mueller special counsel investigation was launched to probe charges that the key FBI officials developing evidence in the case thought were baseless. That's a bombshell accusation that appears to have been confirmed by former FBI lawyer Lisa Page , according to John Solomon . It tends to confirm the suspicion that the Mueller probe is a cover-up operation to obscure the criminal use of counterintelligence capabilities to spy on a rival presidential campaign and then sabotage the presidency that resulted. ..."
"... she offered a bombshell confirmation of the meaning of one of the most enigmatic text messages that the public has seen (keep in mind that there are many yet to be released). ..."
"... The truth behind the Mueller probe is looking uglier and uglier. Pursuing bogus accusations without foundation is the very definition of a witch hunt – President Trump's term for Mueller's team of Hillary-supporters. ..."
"... We don't know anything at all about the activities of Utah U.S. attorney Peter Huber , who is investigating the potential abuse of U.S. intelligence apparatus for political purposes. That is the proper procedure for grand jury probes. But if Lisa Page is honestly answering questions under oath for a congressional committee, she probably is doing so in grand jury sessions, if summoned. ..."
Jul 23, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

By Thomas Lifson Global Research, July 23, 2018 American Thinker 20 July 2018

The Mueller special counsel investigation was launched to probe charges that the key FBI officials developing evidence in the case thought were baseless. That's a bombshell accusation that appears to have been confirmed by former FBI lawyer Lisa Page , according to John Solomon . It tends to confirm the suspicion that the Mueller probe is a cover-up operation to obscure the criminal use of counterintelligence capabilities to spy on a rival presidential campaign and then sabotage the presidency that resulted.

Earlier reports indicated that Page has been answering questions from the House Judiciary Committee quite frankly and may even have cut a deal selling out her ex-lover Peter Strzok over their professional misbehavior (and quite possibly worse) in targeting the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump with the intelligence-gathering tools of the FBI.

Last night, John Solomon of The Hill revealed that he has obtained information from sources who heard Page's testimony in two days of sworn depositions behind closed doors that she offered a bombshell confirmation of the meaning of one of the most enigmatic text messages that the public has seen (keep in mind that there are many yet to be released).

Writing in The Hill , Solomon explains :

[T]here are just five words, among the thousands of suggestive texts Page and Strzok exchanged, that you should read.

That passage was transmitted on May 19, 2017. "There's no big there there," Strzok texted.

The date of the text long has intrigued investigators: It is two days after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein named special counsel Robert Mueller to oversee an investigation into alleged collusion between Trump and the Russia campaign.

Since the text was turned over to Congress, investigators wondered whether it referred to the evidence against the Trump campaign.

This month, they finally got the chance to ask. Strzok declined to say – but Page, during a closed-door interview with lawmakers, confirmed in the most pained and contorted way that the message in fact referred to the quality of the Russia case, according to multiple eyewitnesses.

The admission is deeply consequential. It means Rosenstein unleashed the most awesome powers of a special counsel to investigate an allegation that the key FBI officials, driving the investigation for 10 months beforehand, did not think was "there."

The truth behind the Mueller probe is looking uglier and uglier. Pursuing bogus accusations without foundation is the very definition of a witch hunt – President Trump's term for Mueller's team of Hillary-supporters.

We don't know anything at all about the activities of Utah U.S. attorney Peter Huber , who is investigating the potential abuse of U.S. intelligence apparatus for political purposes. That is the proper procedure for grand jury probes. But if Lisa Page is honestly answering questions under oath for a congressional committee, she probably is doing so in grand jury sessions, if summoned.

The glacial pace of this probe is frustrating for Trump-supporters. But doing it right and observing the ethical and legal constraints takes time and does not generate leaks. Nevertheless, I am deeply encouraged by this leak to Solomon, as it seems to indicate that the truth will come out.

Appearing on Hannity last night, Solomon elaborated: watch video here .

[Jul 23, 2018] "Summitgate" screaming comes not only from the US mainstream, but also from that European elite

Jul 23, 2018 | www.unz.com

Giuseppe , Next New Comment July 23, 2018 at 1:01 pm GMT

This screaming comes not only from the US mainstream, but also from that European elite which has been housebroken for seventy years as obedient poodles, dachshunds or corgis in the American menagerie, via intense vetting by US trans-Atlantic "cooperation" associations.

They are CIA assets who do what they're told.

[Jul 23, 2018] Brennan, Hayden, Panetta, Morell, might well be children of parents who supported Joseph McCarthy

Kind of long-term effect of childhood intoxication with anti-communism...
Jul 23, 2018 | www.unz.com

FKA Max , Website July 22, 2018 at 10:33 pm GMT

So those Facebook ads posted by Russians in 2016 were just like Pearl Harbor, just like 9/11. It's war, says General Hertling! Get those boats in the water! And Trump is Putin's tool!

I just put forth a hypothesis in the other comments thread which could also apply to General Hertling, in my opinion, since he appears to be Catholic:

Hertling was born on September 29, 1953 in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended Christian Brothers College High School in Clayton, Missouri, graduating in 1971 -- he is also a member of the CBC Alumni Hall of Fame, having been elected in 2010.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Hertling#Early_life_and_education

Christian Brothers College High School (CBC High School) is a Lasallian Catholic college preparatory school for young men in St. Louis, Missouri . It is located in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Saint Louis and is owned and operated by the De La Salle Christian Brothers Midwest District.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Brothers_College_High_School

Here my hypothesis:

Most of these guys are Catholic; Brennan, Hayden, Panetta, Morell, etc.

I just wanted to explain why, I believe, them being Catholic is relevant in this context.

My guess is that most of these guys' parents were likely supporters of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, since his biggest support base was among Catholic Democrats, so they probably grew up in a very anti-Soviet/Communist/Russian environment and households.

I believe their obsession with alleged, large-scale Russian interference in the election and their McCarthy-like attitude and tactics might stem from and be a carryover from their upbringing.

-- http://www.unz.com/imercer/doubting-the-intelligence-of-the-intelligence-community/#comment-2427738

Joseph McCarthy on Democrats

"This war in which we are now engaged is not -- cannot -- be a war between America's two great political parties. As I have often said in the past, certainly the millions of loyal Americans who have long voted the Democrat ticket love America just as much and hate Communism just as much as the average Republican." -- McCarthy speech to the Irish Fellowship Club, 1954

[Jul 23, 2018] Roaming Charges: Are You Putin Me On? by Jeffrey St. Clair

Notable quotes:
"... If Trump is serious about a dramatic realignment of US relations with Russia, why did he surround himself with people who are implacably opposed to his approach: Nikki Haley, John Bolton, Mad Dog Mattis, Pompeo Maximus, Bloody Gina Haspel, Christopher Wray, and Dan Coats, who undermined him before Air Force One lifted off from Helsinki? Either Trump should fire them for insubordination or they should resign. Otherwise, this is all psychology not politics ..."
"... What kind of tyrant would appoint all of his own "deep state" coup plotters? ..."
"... Trump's doltish prevarications have done more to boost Mueller's deflating investigation than 1000 hours of the hyperventilating Rachel Maddow . ..."
"... Trump didn't do Putin any favors. The political over-reaction to Trump's obsequiousness will almost certainly prevent the removal of sanctions on the Russian economy. It may even prompt the imposition of more onerous measures. Russian civilians will almost certainly bear most of the price. ..."
Jul 20, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org
Name this politician

He is pathologically narcissistic and supremely arrogant. He has a grotesque sense of entitlement, never doubting that he can do whatever he chooses. He loves to bark orders and to watch underlings scurry to carry them out. He expects absolute loyalty, but he is incapable of gratitude. The feelings of others mean nothing to him. He has no natural grace, no sense of shared humanity, no decency.

He is not merely indifferent to the law; he hates it and takes pleasure in breaking it. He hates it because it gets in his way and because it stands for a notion of the public good that he holds in contempt. He divides the world into winners and losers. The winners arouse his regard insofar as he can use them for his own ends; the losers arouse only his scorn. The public good is something only losers like to talk about. What he likes to talk about is winning.

He has always had wealth; he was born into it and makes ample use of it. But though he enjoys having what money can get him, it is not what excites him. What excites him is the joy of domination. He is a bully. Easily enraged, he strikes out at anyone who stands in his way. He enjoys seeing others cringe, tremble, or wince with pain. He is gifted at detecting weakness and deft at mockery and insult. These skills attract followers who are drawn to the same cruel delight, even if they know that is dangerous, the followers help him advance to his goal, which is the possession of supreme power.

His possession of power includes the domination of women, but he despises them far more than desires them. Sexual conquest excites him, but only for the endlessly reiterated proof that he can have anything he likes. He knows that those he grabs hate him. For that matter, once he has succeeded in seizing the control that so attracts him, in politics as in sex, he knows that virtually everyone hates him. At first that knowledge energizes him, making him feverishly alert to rivals and conspiracies. But it soon begins to eat away at him and exhaust him.

Sooner or later, he is brought down. He dies unloved and unlamented. He leaves behind only wreckage.

Donald Trump? Not exactly. This is Stephen Greenblatt's psychological profile of Richard the Third in his briskly readable new book, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics .

[Jul 22, 2018] Tucker Carlson SLAMS Intelligence Community On Russia

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... After the Creation of the "CIA" Unelected, Unconstitutional CIA Intelligence Agency Interfered In Foreign Presidential Elections At Least 81 Times In 54 Years. The US was found to have interfered in foreign elections at least 81 times in 31 countries between 1946 and 2000 – not counting Libya, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, The US-backed military coups or regime change efforts, Proxy-Wars. Just saying ..."
"... Tucker Carlson has been analyzing policies/ideas on a deeper level this year. He is painting US a big picture for us to see. It's quite refreshing to see Fox News actually allow objective truth be aired on on occasion. ..."
"... The Intelligence Agencies are the Praetorian Guard in the United States. ..."
"... Party politics is a means of control. When you come to realize that we all have a tendency to agree that the major issues have no party loyalty, and we're all on the same side, you can look past minor differences and move forward to working for the greater good... ..."
"... I just saw another Tucker Carlson news clip that Tony Podesta is offered immunity to testify against Paul Manafort? WTF? Why aren't Podestas charged?! ..."
"... Neocons, military industrial complex and liberal leftists have penetrated deeply into the government intelligence communities, wall street banking, both houses of Us congress, mainstream media as well as Hollywood people, even in an academia. This country is deep sh*t. I am surprised liberal leftists have not crucified Tucker Carlson yet for speaking out. ..."
"... Russiagate is DemoKKKrat horse cookies. Putin is correct. DemoKKKrats are bad losers. $1.2 billion gone, servers gone! ..."
Jul 22, 2018 | www.youtube.com

Jaime Tapia , 5 hours ago (edited)

Guys Did you know: After the Creation of the "CIA" Unelected, Unconstitutional CIA Intelligence Agency Interfered In Foreign Presidential Elections At Least 81 Times In 54 Years. The US was found to have interfered in foreign elections at least 81 times in 31 countries between 1946 and 2000 – not counting Libya, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, The US-backed military coups or regime change efforts, Proxy-Wars. Just saying. ¯\_(^)_/¯

Boycott israeli products , 5 hours ago

Tucker Carlson is a special character. 95% of time i disagree with Tucker but 5% of time he's just exceptionally good. In April his 8 minute monologue was epic. I love Jimmy Dore's passion... specially when he pronounes "they're lying!!!" Jimmy clearly hates liars ;-) We love you Jimmy for your integrity and intelligence.

Sooner Mac , 5 hours ago

Weapons of mass destruction, 9/11, Bin Laden, Lybia, Gulf of Tonkin, Opium fields in Afghanistan, Operation Mockingbird, Operation Paperclip..... A few reasons not to trust your CIA and FBI. I am sure you guys can name some more.

The Alienated TV , 5 hours ago

I think Tucker Carlson and Jimmy are two of the most responsible journalists on the planet. Keep up the good work.

Connor Phillip , 5 hours ago

"Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex" FZappa

Guillermo Rivas , 5 hours ago

Tucker Carlson has been analyzing policies/ideas on a deeper level this year. He is painting US a big picture for us to see. It's quite refreshing to see Fox News actually allow objective truth be aired on on occasion.

Kunal Sharma , 6 hours ago

The Intelligence Agencies are the Praetorian Guard in the United States.

Joe Boyko , 5 hours ago

Pulling off the partisan blinders is the first step toward enlightenment... Party politics is a means of control. When you come to realize that we all have a tendency to agree that the major issues have no party loyalty, and we're all on the same side, you can look past minor differences and move forward to working for the greater good...

Pisstrooper pan shaker , 5 hours ago

THE CIA HAS BEEN OVERTHROWING GOVERMENTS FOR DECADES,and you wonder why Trump doesn't trust them? It's because he doesn't want war. He ain't no saint but at least we have an anti war President.

Poseidon Cichlidon , 5 hours ago (edited)

Morning Joe's panel said today that the Democrats need to run on this Russia conspiracy theory, and nothing else, in order to win the midterms. If they bring up free college or medicare for all it will "weaken their message and confuse the voters". Once again the corporate neoliberal warmonger Democrats and their rich TV puppets are setting us up for failure, no voter gives a damn about Russia, MSNBC wants our progressive candidates to lose instead of reform their corrupt party!

SONIX , 7 minutes ago

I just saw another Tucker Carlson news clip that Tony Podesta is offered immunity to testify against Paul Manafort? WTF? Why aren't Podestas charged?!

Cynthia Johnson , 5 hours ago (edited)

Yep, Bernie is pushing the Russiagate story and Tucker Carlson on Fox News nails it. The world isn't upside down, it's doing back flips.

Vegan4ThePlanet , 4 hours ago (edited)

"So this is the Hostage Tape" CLASSIC LINE, Great one, LMAO

DlchMcV , 4 hours ago (edited)

I think what has happened to the Liberals, is that for decades and decades they were the most progressive, tolerant party. They really did want to do more for the people and tried to introduce things that the right would instantly point to and call "socialist!!" Corporations started to look at these liberals as representatives they could pay off but without suspect, unlike Republicans, who were widely known to accept money from Corporations, Big Pharma and huge construction companies (Haliburton anyone?).

Over time, Liberals saw the benefits of being chummy with these same big $$ companies and voted on bills, etc in the ways that would make these corps very happy and more profitable. No one wanted to believe that Liberals were doing the same thing as Republicans but now we know they are. It's not a secret anymore. Most politicians aren't in it to make their country, their state or their cities better; they're in it to make their bank accounts unbelievably huge and that's it. They're greedy people with no integrity, pretending to serve the people.

Louis-Ferdinand Féline , 1 hour ago

I'm a righty, and I'm so surprised to see a liberal agree with Tucker in all the things I care about! Imagine what we could accomplish if we put aside our differences for a time and work on what we agree on! No more immoral wars for Israel! TRY BUSH, CHENEY, AND ALL NEOCONS THAT LED US TO WAR WITH IRAQ FOR TREASON!!

Dosh cratonin , 5 hours ago

You are so right. Thank you for bringout the truth. Neocons, military industrial complex and liberal leftists have penetrated deeply into the government intelligence communities, wall street banking, both houses of Us congress, mainstream media as well as Hollywood people, even in an academia. This country is deep sh*t. I am surprised liberal leftists have not crucified Tucker Carlson yet for speaking out.

swiSSy Schweizer , 6 hours ago

Russiagate is DemoKKKrat horse cookies. Putin is correct. DemoKKKrats are bad losers. $1.2 billion gone, servers gone! DmoKKKrats cannot even prove climate change

[Jul 22, 2018] Mass Dementia in the Western Establishment by Diana Johnstone

Notable quotes:
"... The Russians could do nothing to build support for Trump, and there is not a hint of evidence that they tried. They might have done something to harm Hillary, because there was so much there: the private server emails, the Clinton foundation, the murder of Moammer Gaddafi, the call for a no-fly zone in Syria they didn't have to invent it. It was there. So was the hanky panky at the Democratic National Committee, on which the Clintonite accusations focus, perhaps to cause everyone to forget much worse things. ..."
"... When you come to think of it, the DNC scandal focused on Debbie Wasserman Schultz, not on Hillary herself. Screaming about "Russian hacking the DNC" has been a distraction from much more serious accusations against Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders supporters didn't need those "revelations" to make them stop loving Hillary or even to discover that the DNC was working against Bernie. It was always perfectly obvious. ..."
Jul 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

Mass Dementia in the Western Establishment Diana Johnstone July 20, 2018 1,600 Words 7 Comments Reply Email This Page to Someone

Where to begin to analyze the madness of mainstream media in reaction to the Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki? By focusing on the individual, psychology has neglected the problem of mass insanity, which has now overwhelmed the United States establishment, its mass media and most of its copycat European subsidiaries. The individuals may be sane, but as a herd they are ready to leap off the cliff.

For the past two years, a particular power group has sought to explain away its loss of power – or rather, its loss of the Presidency, as it still holds a predominance of institutional power – by creation of a myth. Mainstream media is known for its herd behavior, and in this case the editors, commentators, journalists have talked themselves into a story that initially they themselves could hardly take seriously.

Donald Trump was elected by Russia ?

On the face of it, this is preposterous. Okay, the United States can manage to rig elections in Honduras, or Serbia, or even Ukraine, but the United States is a bit too big and complex to leave the choice of the Presidency to a barrage of electronic messages totally unread by most voters. If this were so, Russia wouldn't need to try to "undermine our democracy". It would mean that our democracy was already undermined, in tatters, dead. A standing corpse ready to be knocked over by a tweet.

Even if, as is alleged without evidence, an army of Russian bots (even bigger than the notorious Israeli army of bots) was besieging social media with its nefarious slanders against poor innocent Hillary Clinton, this could determine an election only in a vacuum, with no other influences in the field. But there was a lot of other stuff going on in the 2016 election, some for Trump and some for Hillary, and Hillary herself scored a crucial own goal by denigrating millions of Americans as "deplorables" because they didn't fit into her identity politics constituencies.

The Russians could do nothing to build support for Trump, and there is not a hint of evidence that they tried. They might have done something to harm Hillary, because there was so much there: the private server emails, the Clinton foundation, the murder of Moammer Gaddafi, the call for a no-fly zone in Syria they didn't have to invent it. It was there. So was the hanky panky at the Democratic National Committee, on which the Clintonite accusations focus, perhaps to cause everyone to forget much worse things.

When you come to think of it, the DNC scandal focused on Debbie Wasserman Schultz, not on Hillary herself. Screaming about "Russian hacking the DNC" has been a distraction from much more serious accusations against Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders supporters didn't need those "revelations" to make them stop loving Hillary or even to discover that the DNC was working against Bernie. It was always perfectly obvious.

So at worst, "the Russians" are accused of revealing some relatively minor facts concerning the Hillary Clinton campaign. Big deal.

But that is enough, after two years of fakery, to send the establishment into a frenzy of accusations of "treason" when Trump does what he said he would do while campaigning, try to normalize relations with Russia.

This screaming comes not only from the US mainstream, but also from that European elite which has been housebroken for seventy years as obedient poodles, dachshunds or corgis in the American menagerie, via intense vetting by US trans-Atlantic "cooperation" associations. They have based their careers on the illusion of sharing the world empire by following U.S. whims in the Middle East and transforming the mission of their armed forces from defense into foreign intervention units of NATO under U.S. command. Having not thought seriously about the implications of this for over half a century, they panic at the suggestion of being left to themselves.

The Western elite is now suffering from self-inflicted dementia.

Donald Trump is not particularly articulate, navigating through the language with a small repetitive vocabulary, but what he said at his Helsinki press conference was honest and even brave. As the hounds bay for his blood, he quite correctly refused to endorse the "findings" of US intelligence agencies, fourteen years after the same agencies "found" that Iraq was bursting with weapons of mass destruction. How in the world could anyone expect anything else?

But for the mainstream media, "the story" at the Helsinki summit, even the only story, was Trump's reaction to the, er, trumped up charges of Russian interference in our democracy. Were you or were you not elected thanks to Russian hackers? All they wanted was a yes or no answer. Which could not possibly be yes. So they could write their reports in advance.

Anyone who has frequented mainstream journalists, especially those who cover the "big stories" on international affairs, is aware of their obligatory conformism, with few exceptions. To get the job, one must have important "sources", meaning government spokesmen who are willing to tell you what "the story" is, often without being identified. Once they know what "the story" is, competition sets in: competition as to how to tell it. That leads to an escalation of rhetoric, variations on the theme: "The President has betrayed our great country to the Russian enemy. Treason!"

This demented chorus on "Russian hacking" prevented mainstream media from even doing their job. Not even mentioning, much less analyzing, any of the real issues at the summit. To find analysis, one must go on line, away from the official fake news to independent reporting. For example, "the Moon of Alabama" site offers an intelligent interpretation of the Trump strategy , which sounds infinitely more plausible than "the story". In short, Trump is trying to woo Russia away from China, in a reverse version of Kissinger's strategy forty years ago to woo China away from Russia, thus avoiding a continental alliance against the United States. This may not work because the United States has proven so untrustworthy that the cautious Russians are highly unlikely to abandon their alliance with China for shadows. But it makes perfect sense as an explanation of Trump's policy, unlike the caterwauling we've been hearing from Senators and talking heads on CNN.

Those people seem to have no idea of what diplomacy is about. They cannot conceive of agreements that would be beneficial to both sides. No, it's got to be a zero sum game, winner take all. If they win, we lose, and vice versa.

They also have no idea of the harm to both sides if they do not agree. They have no project, no strategy. Just hate Trump.

He seems totally isolated, and every morning I look at the news to see if he has been assassinated yet.

It is unimaginable for our Manichean moralists that Putin might also be under fire at home for failing to chide the American president for U.S. violations of human rights in Guantanamo, murderous drone strikes against defenseless citizens throughout the Middle East, the destruction of Libya in violation of the UN mandate, interference in the elections of countless countries by government-financed "non-governmental organizations" (the National Endowment of Democracy), worldwide electronic spying, invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the world's greatest prison population and regular massacres of school children. But the diplomatic Russians know how to be polite.

Still, if Trump actually makes a "deal", there may be losers – neither the U.S. nor Russia but third parties. When two great powers reach agreement, it is often at somebody else's expense. The West Europeans are afraid it will be them, but such fears are groundless. All Putin wants is normal relations with the West, which is not much to ask.

Rather, candidate number one for paying the price are the Palestinians, or even Iran, in marginal ways. At the press conference, asked about possible areas of cooperation between the two nuclear powers, Trump suggested that the two could agree on helping Israel:

"We both spoke with Bibi Netanyahu. They would like to do certain things with respect to Syria, having to do with the safety of Israel. In that respect, we absolutely would like to work in order to help Israel. Israel will be working with us. So both countries would work jointly."

In political terms, Trump knows where political power lies, and is counting on the influence of the pro-Israel lobby, which recognizes the defeat in Syria and the rising influence of Russia, to save him from the liberal imperialists – a daring bet, but he does not have much choice.

On another subject, Trump said that "our militaries" get along with the Russians "better than our politicians". This is another daring bet, on military realism that could somehow neutralize military industrial congressional complex lobbying for more and more weapons.

In short, the only chance to end the nuclear war threat may depend on support for Trump from Israel and the Pentagon!

The hysterical neoliberal globalists seem to have ruled out any other possibility – and perhaps this one too.

"Constructive dialogue between the United States and Russia forwards the opportunity to open new pathways toward peace and stability in our world" Trump declared "I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics."

That is more than his political enemies can claim.


exiled off mainstreet , July 20, 2018 at 7:02 am GMT

This is a frightening, accurate commentary on what we face as a result of an unaccountable power structure resorting to any and all means to retain power which, if this structure continues to exercise it, will lead to our extinction.
AnonFromTN , July 22, 2018 at 3:30 am GMT
In the establishment, it's not dementia as such, it's just serving the highest bidder. You can accuse only the elites of dementia: they forgot that to enjoy the fruits of your thievery you have to be alive. If only they die, it would be a great service to the humanity. Unfortunately, the way things go, they might take us all with them.
Cyrano , July 22, 2018 at 8:42 am GMT
This mass hysteria over a country hostile to both democracy and gay rights (it's hard to tell which one is worse) has been seen in the west before.

It's very reminiscent of the lead-up to Iraq war in 2003. I mean what's next? Are they gonna accuse Russia of having WMD's too?

They are pretty good at providing false evidence...

...

Cagey Beast , July 22, 2018 at 11:18 am GMT
Thank you, this is an excellent summary of the situation right now. It's worth noting too just how disconnected the establishment is from the wider public. They have enormous financial resources and access to the entire legacy media but seem to have almost no real base of support. Remember how the Never Trumpers had no one more prominent and well-known than Evan McMullan (!!) to run as their candidate? Note too the tiny number of views the YouTube videos of the Aspen Institute get: https://www.youtube.com/user/AspenInstitute/videos .

On its own, these things aren't conclusive proof but together they add up. The Aspen Institute crowd is an almost entirely self-contained subculture. They seem to have no base of support, beyond their stacks of money, job titles and the power that come with the various offices they hold. That's probably why they can never stop calling their opponents "populists" or why Bill Kristol keeps tweeting about encountering scrappy shoeshine boys who shout "give Trump hell, Mr Kristol!" as he goes about his urban peregrinations.

Anonymous [115] Disclaimer , July 22, 2018 at 11:54 am GMT
OT

Diana Johnstone is not alone. Others on the alt-Left are starting to wake up, too. This is Joaquín Flores:

People are seeing through dishonesty, and the old language traps are used up and done for. If reconquista is the goal, then we need to have an honest conversation about that. If there's a Latino nation with self determination in the south-west US, or rights 'back' to the south-west US, then let's speak of it in such terms. Because then we'd be looking at a Euro-American nation also. Now of course there's issues of interpenetrated peoples, and identities we carry in our minds in diverse urban centers. But the point here is that we have to have an honest discourse, and stop hiding reconquista sentiments under the rubric of 'human rights'. Because European-Americans don't have right of return to Europe, so the left is promoting what will ultimately be a race war, full scale, if they don't chill the fuck out and back off this disingenuous approach to policy-wonkism on immigration.

The paradigmatic question today is, how is wealth made, and where does wealth come from? What is the balance of trade and debts, and how is that is no longer manageable? The US empire and NATO is no longer manageable. Trump is unwinding NATO. That can't be a bad thing.

https://www.fort-russ.com/2018/07/explaining-trump-to-socialist-liberals-flores/

Fort Russ News is really turning out to be a leading voice of the Third Way movement.

[Jul 22, 2018] How eerie and unsettling it can be when people change their minds by Corey Robin

Jul 22, 2018 | crookedtimber.org

Jul 5, 2018

I just finished reading the letters of Thomas Mann, who's an exemplary figure in this regard. Leading up to World War I, he was a fairly standard old-school conservative militarist/nationalist. That continued until the end of the war. After the war, he became a dedicated liberal defender of Weimar. Once the Nazis took over, his liberalism morphed into a humanist anti-fascism. By the end of the war, that antifascism had come to include overt sympathy with communism and the Soviet Union (he even praised Mission to Moscow on aesthetic grounds!) That continued into the late 1940s, when he supported Henry Wallace for president and was outspoken in his opposition to HUAC .

But then, around 1950 or so, you begin to see, ever so slightly and subtly, Mann's opinions starting to change once again. He never comes out in defense of McCarthyism, but you begin to feel a chill and distance toward the left. His criticisms of the repression in the US begin to modulate and moderate. Till finally, in a 1953 letter to Agnes Meyer, his close friend and matriarch of The Washington Post, he confesses that he has decided not to publicly oppose McCarthyism in the New York Times. He reports to her that when he was asked -- "probably by someone on the 'left'" -- what he thinks about the censorship and restrictions on freedom in the US, this was his reply: "American democracy felt threatened and, in the struggle for freedom, considered that there had to be a certain limitation on freedom, a certain disciplining of individual thought, a certain conformism. This was understandable." Though he adds some sort of anodyne qualification at the end of that.

It just about broke my heart. That "left" in scare quotes (previously Mann had seen himself as a part of the left), the clichés about freedom and the Cold War, the betrayal of all that he had said and done in the preceding decades -- and most important, the seeming inability to see that he was betraying anything at all.

... ... ....

During the McCarthy years, Arendt wrote in a letter to Jaspers how terrified she was of the repression. It wasn't just the facts of the coercion she saw everywhere. It was how quickly it happened, how the mood of the moment had gone so suddenly from a generous and capacious liberalism to a cramped anticommunism. "Can you see," she wrote, "how far the disintegration has gone and with what breathtaking speed it has occurred? And up to now hardly any resistance. Everything melts away like butter in the sun." Victor Klemperer notices and narrates a similar shift among his friends and colleagues in his diaries of Nazi Germany.


Adam Roberts 07.05.18 at 7:12 am (no link)

One of the core truths about clever people is that they are very good at coming-up with clever justifications for whatever it is they happen to believe.
Z 07.05.18 at 9:27 am (no link)
People who were lambasting that kind of politics in 2016 are now embracing it -- without remarking upon the change, without explaining it, leaving the impression that this is what they believed all along.

Amusingly, and for essentially the same reasons, a symmetric movement has taken place in France, with many people self-identifying as socialist (at least nominally) two years ago now fully behind flat taxes on capital gains, detention of minors up to 90 days if their parents are undocumented and privatization of passenger trains (three ideas that have historically been considered outside of the spectrum of reasonnable political opinion, even by the former mainstream right-wing party).

But coincidentally, I was re-reading Bourdieu's On the State these last weeks so I'm not so surprised, especially as I don't think that believe is quite the right word to describe how political and social positions are embraced (and in that respect, I believe that intellectuals are different only in their vociferous protestations to the contrary, and their somewhat superior ability to identify with the domineering side).

"In modern societies, the State makes a decisive contribution towards the production and reproduction of the instruments of construction of social reality. [ ] The State thereby creates the conditions for an immediate orches­tration of habitus which is itself the foundation for a consensus on this set of shared self-evidences which constitute common sense ."

So when shifts and breaks in the structure of the field of State power happen, it is perhaps not so surprising that schemes of perceptions also quickly change so that single-payer universal health care/the suppression of a capital gain tax can move in a couple of months from worthy to mention only to summarily dismiss as absurd to common sense.

Glen Tomkins 07.05.18 at 1:48 pm (no link)
I don't understand the problem. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Always. Simple fact. What's to explain?
Alex Ameter 07.05.18 at 1:49 pm (no link)
American culture is terrifyingly guilty of this. The inability for an empire's people to understand the concept of blowback when their nation's military incursions into the surrounding world create deep sources of instability and trauma is one marker of empire in decline.

That being said, the fact that free will is tenuous at best and humans are so easily manipulated en masse gives me hope that the species might pull off long-term survival if it finds the right balance between setting up mutually reinforcing beneficial mechanisms to guide most human psyches and cultures into generally sustainable behavior and the chaos of a free reality without socially enforced categorizations or narratives.

Bard the Grim 07.05.18 at 2:02 pm (no link)
I've never liked the wording of the proverbial "When the facts change ." Speaking as a scientist and pedant, facts don't change. Circumstances, which are facts as a function of time, can change. Evidence, which is fact revealed by observation, can change. When discussing how opinions and interpretations change, it's helpful to make those distinctions.
Yan 07.05.18 at 2:50 pm (no link)
Political football @32: "we'd need to know who has changed "in the media, on social media, among politicians, activists, and citizens"."

Exhibit A:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/opinion/radical-democrats-are-pretty-reasonable.html

For Twitter readers, exhibit B:
https://mobile.twitter.com/peterdaou

William Uspal 07.05.18 at 2:55 pm (no link)
"A couple of comments reprimanded me about how Thomas had moved to the right in the 1950s, on a path similar to Thomas Mann's. [ ] The pressure exerted during McCarthyism was immense and it took almost superhuman strength to resist it"

I recently read a biography of Bayard Rustin, partially in the hope of getting some insight into how to integrate civil rights / racial justice and comprehensive social-democratic reform into one program. One might object: Rustin drifted towards the neoconservative right in his later years -- did his theoretical framework already carry the germ of accommodation in the 1960s/70s? But: how easy was it to resist the neoliberal/Reaganite tide?

SusanC 07.05.18 at 3:37 pm (no link)
Yes, I agree the phenomenon is really interesting.

On the other hand, what other people think can be one of the facts that changed. This is particularly true of variants of the "lesser evil argument" which were very much in evidence before the last UK general election and the US presidential election.

If someone was saying, "Look, I know the left of the Democrats prefer Sander's policies, but the important thing is defeating Trump, and Clinton has the best chance of doing that", then they can in good faith claim that new facts -- we now know that Clinton didn't win against Trump -- has caused them to have changed tactics, but their overall objective -- supporting anyone who looks like they could defeat Trump -- is basically unchanged.

The Guardian newspaper became significantly less anti-Corbyn once the general election results were out (although it still regularly features attack pieces), which looks like another instance of this.

Joseph Brenner 07.05.18 at 6:10 pm (no link)
This entire piece seems to be about big changes in attitude and opinion, leaving me a little puzzled by the remark about "micro-shifts". But I guess the general drift is this:

the subtle coercions of new opinion, the ever-finer movements we all make to keep up with the flow, so as not to be left behind.

You want to be engaged with the world, to be part of the conversation, which means you can be influenced by the conversation, which means you may very well be exposed to some pressures to conform.

Much like the later Thomas Mann, I have difficulty talking about the left without quotations (though I'm more likely to use the adjective "lefty"). The present-day right is certainly a mess, it may indeed have always been a mess (which as I take it is Corey Robin's main theme) but there were times in the past when the left was also decidedly a mess (and in some respects it still is [1])–

Why would you be shocked at the lack of intellectual integrity of someone who was a Stalinist on into the 1940s? Myself, I have a lot of respect from someone like Chomsky who's managed to be left-wing his entire life without indulging in apologies for Stalin or Mao.

These days, periodically you see someone try to do a i-was-a-righty-until-trump piece but many people seem to view these with suspicion and regard them as phony ploys for attention of some sort. We pay lip service to the idea that people should be open to intellectual change– who could forget the genre where the author demonstrates open-mindedness with ritual lists of "things I've changed my mind about" (um I see John Quiggin went there)– but when actually confronted with someone who has changed their mind, the reaction is often not very positive.

I have a tendency to use the Iraq war as a pundit-litmus test: In principle I'm willing to continue reading a pro-invasion pundit, but I want to see them recant, and I want to read their excuses– but really there isn't anything they can say that's going to impress me. If they're blowing in the wind this badly, if they can ignore the obvious for the sake of fitting in with the pack, it's unlikely they've got anything of value to add on anything.

[1] my standard example of present-day left-wing madness is the anti-nuclear power stance: if Jerry Brown were really serious about global warming, he would not have had the Diablo Canyon plant closed. I would feel happier about Ocasio-Cortez if she were in favor of clean energy, rather than just "renewable".

Lee A. Arnold 07.05.18 at 7:50 pm (no link)
Corey: "mainstream liberal opinion -- in the media, on social media, among politicians, activists, and citizens micro-shifts that happen under the pressure of events the most pressing fact that seems to change people's opinions is other people's opinions."

1. Most intellectuals aren't guided by intellect but by emotion like everyone else, and so there is a lot of herd instinct especially in regard to politics.

2. I am not convinced that the media catalogue of mainstream opinion truly reflects the most widely-held opinions. What is happening out here in the low-income suburbs seems more amorphous and changeable.

3. A lot of the microshifts are evidence of a political emergence because a compromising centrist Democrat failed, the new President is no such animal, and the Republican Party is revealed to centrists as policy obstructionists with lots of false promises, now freely aiming to destroy the safety-net and distort the justice system. My sense of it is that consequently a lot more people now see that the time for compromising moderation is over because it will never be reciprocated by the Republicans in Congress.

This goes along with our old thesis that both parties are breaking up; the only question was which one would go first. Trump is destroying the Republicans and it opened the cracks wider in the Democratic Party. Question now is whether the centrist Democrats have the brains to accept the newbies.

4. Little noticed is that the "intellectuals" and Bernie supporters committed malpractice by never emphasizing, enough to make it through the media noise, that Sanders' and now Ocasio-Cortez's "socialism" is not "gov't ownership of the means of production" but rather New Deal-style social democracy like any sane country. (Bernie's people acted as if everybody should know this already, but of course they don't.) Next up, will the "intellectuals" continue to commit malpractice by not helping Ocasio-Cortez explain through the media noise how it can work?

engels 07.06.18 at 1:31 am (no link)
Liberal pundits are twisting themselves into pretzels trying to explain away Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's victory.
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-liberal-pundits
Helen 07.06.18 at 4:17 am (no link)
Speaking as a social democrat who is anti – everything to do with neoliberalism and its destruction of labour relations and economic safety nets, I was scolded relentlessly by a brogressive pro-Sanders friend throughout the year of the US election (I'm an Australian, so is he, so the level of animus was astonishing.) Some of the tropes thrown at me were: Since you think HC is the least worst candidate, it means you endorse everything she's ever done, it means you are in favour of neoliberalism, it means you just want to vote for a woman even though we say Bernie's a better candidate, it means you are pro-war and want to kill Syrian children, it means you're an elitist who just wants to support the haute bourgeoisie.. on and on and on.
So fast forward to last week and guess what? of course I'm delighted by a self-described social democratic (or democratic socialist which seems to be the current wording) winning a primary. My principles haven't changed. They were just distorted and misrepresented by the brogressive left. My friend would eagerly adopt the framing employed in the OP (that I've belatedly seen the light about preferring a social democratic candidate), because of course that makes him look wise and consistent, and me uneducated and fickle. I completely reject that frame; it's false.
Mario 07.06.18 at 10:42 pm (no link)
The problem with the modern left is that it has very little political capital (oh, the word!) apart from principles and morals. Back in the day there was a realistic alternative political project, which, in principle, had something for everyone. Nowadays though there just isn't such a project and the result is that all that is left really just is bare morals and principles, and the resulting piety contests.

As a consequence, the left has, in practice, accepted capitalism as the baseline scenario and is playing by its rules while pretending something else. (Back when the Damore memo hit the waves, what really struck me was the idea that the google campus was a "liberal environment". That was like reading that the death star in star wars was staffed by budhists.)

The modern left can't provide a constructive answer to the problems of, say, the working class. Such things are not even much on the radar. Note how trans rights and gender issues (issues completely irrelevant to the wider population) absolutely dominate the discussion, while the plight of the working poor, or the well-being of families, is mostly ignored.

Furthermore, many on the modern left use principles and morals as branding tokens (like wearing Nike shoes, being vegan or driving a hybrid), and don't give much of a damn about outcomes. That's why they can change opinions overnight without feeling much remorse: it's not as if these ever were sincere opinions.

Mario 07.06.18 at 10:52 pm ( 112 )
Lobsterman @106,

But gender is still a construct, no matter how desperately attached to performing their preferred gender a given person is. That's where people go off the rails. We'll get back there fairly soon, I'm sure. There are far too many cis men who want to be nice to their kids and cis women who have ambition toward their careers for us to put up with this gender role nonsense much longer.

If you pardon me – how do you suggest we negotiate who gets to get pregnant and/or breast feed?

That "role nonsense" you so attack has reasons to exist. It's not just a whim of the folks that just happened to be around recently on the planet. A political project that does not acknowledge that is just plain misanthropy.

mclaren 07.08.18 at 2:23 am (no link)
Does Corey Robin admit how colossally and stupendously wrong he got the entire 2016 zeitgeist?

http://crookedtimber.org/2016/03/22/historically-liberals-and-the-left-have-underestimated-the-right-today-they-overestimate-it/

No? Well, then maybe we shouldn't listen to anything Corey Robin says.

One aspect of his argument that's completely unfair and unrealistic is that people have to decide on whether to elect a politician or enact a social policy or an economic scheme before they have any real experience-based empirical information of what the consequences will be.

Consider: neoliberal globalization was proposed and debated on the basis of books like the Toffler's Future Shock which got the future entirely wrong. The theory behind these kind of futurist predictions sounded plausible. Ever-increasing rates of technological change will result in people constantly moving around the country to new jobs, work will shift from manufacturing to knowledge work, industries will die off and constantly be replaced by new ones, the U.S. will offload its manufacturing to 3rd world countries and move to high-profit knowledge work that will vastly increase the income of the average U.S. worker, and so on. All completely wrong.

Mobility of workers in the USA has dropped to record lows because the interior of the USA is now depopulating and mired in poverty and chronic drug addiction due to the destruction of the middle class by shipping all the high-paid blue collar jobs overseas. Meanwhile, the areas with high-paying jobs are on both coasts, where housing and everything else has become so expensive average people can't afford to live there. But the high-paying coastal jobs are really only for people with artificial licensing barriers to entry that protect their professions, like doctors or lawyers or lobbyists or defense contractor liaisons who need special security clearance or financial traders who need to live within 10 blocks of the stock exchange because any farther away and their high-speed trading internet links will have too much latency to execute 50,000 trades per second. And so on.

Nobody foresaw that knowledge work would collapse because entire movies or ebooks or music CDs could be digitized and downloaded and sprayed all over the world with bittorrent. Nobody foresaw that textbooks and tutorial videos could be digitized and sent to third world countries where their population would whip our asses by producing centers of technological innovation like Shenzen or Guangdong or the whole island of Taiwan. No one foresaw that manufacturing processes prove essential to the very act of technological innovation, so that when America offshored its factories to Asia, we also lost our ability to innovative technologically, to the point where even if the USA wanted to bring back industries like iPad manufacturing to the continential U.S., we couldn't do it because we don't have the essential process technology engineering knowledge and skills.

So globalization sounded completely reasonable and sensible when it was proposed in the 1970s. Converting the USA to knowledge work seemed like a good economic model. Only in retrospect does it become clear what a gigantic trainwreck it turned out to be, and why.

Likewise, I supported Obama when he ran in 2008. Obama ran on a bunch of progressive policies. Single-payer healthcare. Shutting down the drug war. "Not doing stupid stuff." Then Obama abandons single-payer for a disastrous mandate for-profit ACA system with zero cost controls guaranteed to raise health insurance premiums limitless forever, and he starts blowing up wedding parties with drones and prosecutes more whistleblowers than all other presidents put together. That's not what I signed up for.

But how are voters supposed to know what a politician will really do until he's in office? The people who voted for FDR voted for a moderate pol who ran on a policy of balancing the budget. They got a radical progressive who experimented with all sort of wild policies, including packing the Supreme Court, to find something that would work. That's not what voters signed up for but it happened to be very successful.

The people who voted for Herbert Hoover voted for a world-famous humanitarian who was renowned for his 1921 famine relief efforts. Anyone who studied Hoover's life would predict that he would do a great job spearheading relief efforts for impoverished average workers thrown onto the street when the Great Depression hit. Instead, Hoover sat around and tried to rein in the tidal flow of red ink while the U.S. economy crashed and burned.

People change their minds because we live in a fog of uncertainty. No one has the slightest idea of what the actual results of social or economic policies will be. For example: crime has plummeted since 1990 in the U.S., but no one has the slightest idea why. Crime was a huge issue in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, and now it's turned out to be a problem that mysteriously disappeared on its own. No experts predicted this, no experts have been able to explain it. An awful lot of American history seems to work like this. People convulse in frenzies of worry over some huge problem that then just disappears. (Cue the deadly threat of the USSR or Erlich's "population bomb" of the 1960s or Thomas Malthus' dire predictions or the myth of "future shock" or the worries of eugenics prophets of the 1920s or the "yellow peril" predictions of late 19th century colonialis or our allegedly inevitable rush toward thermonuclear armageddon because of the arms race of the 1950s/60s etc.)

Highly-educated experts with PhDs have demonstrated zero ability to predict the actual real-world results of current trends or technology or socioeconomic policies. We live in a world dominated by the Cobra Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

Efforts to pass this off on the high-school-educated population of the USA as some kind of irrationality ("How eerie and unsettling it can seem when people change their minds") seem infantile and jejune. How about: "How eerie and unsettling it can seem when highly educated Ivy League PhDs' predictions and policies turn out to be gigantic trainwrecks that produce the exact opposite of what was claimed and what was calculated in highly sophisticated mathematical models"?

Larry Summers, anyone? The man responsible both for the rise of Putin (Summers and his Harvard team blew up & wrecked the Russian economy in an epic debacle from 19911-1998) _and_ Trump (Summers infamously urged Bill Clinton to deregulate the financial system and ram through bad "free trade" agreements like NAFTA that turbocharged globalization and destroyed the U.S. middle class, leading to a 1930s-style financial crash and mass impoverishment of Americans exactly the kind of circumstances which, in the 1930s, led to the rise of fascism. Which of course is what's happening today.

Yet our leaders still listen to ignorant incompetent clowns like Larry Summers with the utmost respect and reverence. Maybe that's what really "eerie," not people changing their minds when they discover that the results of the policies proposed by our elites turn out to be the kind of destructive idiocy at which even a brain-damaged three-year-old would rebel.

nastywoman 07.08.18 at 7:33 am (no link)
– and the following might be really worth repeating:

"Ever-increasing rates of technological change will result in people constantly moving around the country to new jobs, work will shift from manufacturing to knowledge work, industries will die off and constantly be replaced by new ones, the U.S. will offload its manufacturing to 3rd world countries and move to high-profit knowledge work that will vastly increase the income of the average U.S. worker, and so on. All completely wrong".

Mobility of workers in the USA has dropped to record lows because the interior of the USA is now depopulating and mired in poverty and chronic drug addiction due to the destruction of the middle class by shipping all the high-paid blue collar jobs overseas. Meanwhile, the areas with high-paying jobs are on both coasts, where housing and everything else has become so expensive average people can't afford to live there".

Yes?

"Converting the USA to knowledge work seemed like a good economic model".

Not – for anybody who know how few jobs "knowledge work" creates.

"So 'globalization sounded completely reasonable and sensible when it was proposed in the 1970s".

It's still "completely reasonable" for any "Producing Country" – where well paying manufacturing jobs were kept.

"Only in retrospect does it become clear what a gigantic trainwreck it turned out to be, and why".

Only in "Consuming Countries" -(like the US) – where the inequality of high paying "knowledge work" and "Finance" and poor paying "service jobs" let to the trainwreck and the funny idea that it is the fault of "trade" – while trade created million an million of better and better paying jobs in "Producing Countries" – which could lead us to Mario and @135

"For example, while it is mostly an illusion, the right offers jobs"

Yes –
it's mostly a illusion – as only "Producing Countries" offer jobs – while "Consuming Countries" -(with their right wing idiots) – don't – or better said they NEVER-EVER will offer enough "good" jobs to make our workers happy -(again)- and that's why we need politicians like AOC!

And that IS – because we actually DON'T live in a fog of uncertainty??!
-(saying: Nearly everybody on CT knows how well "Social-Democratic Producing Countries" work)

bruce wilder 07.11.18 at 8:53 am (no link)
many very interesting comments, but i find myself puzzled by the OP's implicit premises concerning what politics as philosophical discourse is (the nature of the beast), and what it would mean for an individual person to be "consistent" over time.

it seems to me that political discourse is a stream into which it is not possible to step into at the same place twice. and, it also seems to me that political discourse always reflects the panoply of human ambivalence amidst deep uncertainty about the consequences of public choices conditioned against private actions. could anyone strive to either embody the full range of ambivalence or be "right"? i think not.

our political opinions are in the nature of hedges: expressions of some thing we think we "know" balanced against a background of things we choose not to focus on or fully consider. and we bet our hedges socially, aligning with others on the basis of some portfolio of salients, and in historical time, ephemeral salients at that. dare i add, for and against? push-pull marching in step

the split that opened in the Democratic coalition in the 2016 primaries was just as startling and rapid as the current spate of coming together.

[Jul 22, 2018] America's Derangement Syndrome A Danger To World Peace

Jul 22, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

It is significant that Presidents Putin and Trump have both spoken out against "haters" among America's political establishment who would rather see conflict between Russia and the United States instead of a normalization of bilateral relations.

Following their landmark, successful summit this week in Helsinki, Putin and Trump separately made public comments deploring the hostile hysterical reaction emanating from broad sections of the US political establishment and its dutiful, controlled news media.

Speaking in Moscow to his diplomatic corps, President Putin warned that there were "powerful forces" within the US which are ready to sacrifice the interests of their country and indeed the interests of world peace in order to pursue selfish ambitions.

For his part, Trump also slammed opponents in the US who "hated" to see him having a good meeting with Putin. "They would rather see a major confrontation with Russia, even if that could lead to war," said the American president.

That's it in a nutshell. Rather than welcoming the opening of a cordial dialogue between the US and Russia, the American political establishment seems to desire the deepening of already dangerous tensions between the world's two nuclear superpowers. If that's not deranged, then what is?

Significantly, the hostile reaction was overwhelmingly on the American side. Russians, by and large, welcomed the long-overdue summit between Trump and Putin, and the potential beginning of a new spirit of dialogue and partnership on a range of urgent global problems. Problems including arms control, nuclear proliferation, and working out political settlement to conflicts in the Middle East, Ukraine and the Korea Peninsula.

Few people would believe that these problems can be resolved easily. But the main thing is that the leaders of the US and Russia are at least attempting to open a dialogue for understanding and political progress. That in itself is a breakthrough from the impasse in bilateral relations which have frozen into a new Cold War since the previous US administration.

We dare say that most citizens of the world would also endorse this effort by Trump and Putin at improving the relations between the US and Russia.

Significantly too, according to recent polls, most ordinary Americans seem to be agreeable or neutral about Trump's diplomatic engagement with Russia. According to a Gallup poll out this week, the vast majority of US citizens are far more concerned by economic woes than they are by anything untoward in American-Russian relations.

Thus, what we are seeing in the explosion of hostility towards the Trump-Putin summit is twofold. It is an American phenomenon, and secondly, it is an angst that animates only the political class in Washington and the news media corporations. This constituency, it is fair to say, is an elite faction within the US, albeit extremely powerful, made up of Washington politicos, the state intelligence apparatus, the corporate media and think tanks, and the deep state establishment of imperial planners and strategists. In short, this constituency is what some observers call the "War Party" that transcends the US ruling class.

Any reasonable person would have to welcome the friendly rapport engendered between Trump and Putin, and at least their initial commitment to working together on major matters of global security. The dangerous impasse of recent years in which dialogue was absent must be overcome for the sake of world peace.

Nevertheless, what has become crystal clear this week following the Helsinki summit is the "War Party" within the US is more determined than ever to sabotage any rapprochement with Russia.

No sooner had Trump returned to the US, he was assailed with a tidal wave of vilification for having met Putin in a mutual, agreeable manner. The most disturbing aspect was the recurring slander denigrating Trump as a "traitor". The hysterical name-calling was conveyed by all the major news media, citing former intelligence officials and politicians from both Democrat and Republican parties.

Which again shows that in the US there is really only one party, the War Party.

President Trump was evidently forced into making an embarrassing U-turn over his views expressed in Helsinki. He made an unconvincing disavowal of statements made alongside Putin. Trump had been pilloried for appearing to dismiss allegations of Russian interference in the US elections while he was in Helsinki. Within 24 hours, he was forced into making a retraction, saying that he did – kind of – believe that Russia had meddled in US democracy.

What Trump was subjected to by the US establishment was akin to the worst years of McCarthyite Red-Baiting as seen during the Cold War in the 1950s and 60s, when Americans were mercilessly humiliated and ostracized for being "Communist sympathizers". Today, official American paranoia is back with a vengeance. In truth, it never went away.

To be fair to Trump he has not completely capitulated to the American derangement syndrome. He has since said that he is looking forward to holding a second meeting with his Russian counterpart and continuing their promises of partnership as announced in Helsinki.

However, it is instructive that the American president is, in effect, being held hostage by powerful elements in the US ruling class who view any kind of detente with Moscow as an unforgivable betrayal.

Trump's instincts are correct that the whole so-called Russia-gate mania is a phony contrivance. That has been orchestrated by the US establishment based on its refusal to accept Trump's democratic mandate, as well as being based on an abiding hostility towards Russia as an independent world power.

The object lesson here is that the scope for improving US-Russia relations is limited, in spite of Trump's favorable personal inclinations.

An entrenched animosity towards Russia remains among the American War Party, and the current president has evidently little room for implementing his avowed policy of normalizing relations.

Russia therefore cannot place too much faith in making progress towards peaceful relations, because all-too apparently President Trump has actually very little freedom to exercise his democratic mandate. That is a damning indictment on the charade of American formal democracy. A president is elected partly on the basis of peaceful engagement, but the unelected powers-that-be have another agenda of conflict which they are pursuing come hell or high water.

What's more, the American derangement syndrome is becoming even more virulent, as can be adjudged from this week's hysterical backlash over the successful Helsinki summit.

Trump's willingness for dialogue with Russia is a welcome development. But the far more disturbing development is the full-tilt belligerence and derangement on display among the American political class. This American political chizophrenia is a clear and present danger to world peace. American citizens are as much a victim of the madness as are Russians and the rest of the world.

One positive aspect of the new phase of Cold War is that before it was largely concealed, and deceived, as a simplistic bifurcated confrontation of Americans versus Russians. Today it is evidently a situation of an American deranged elite versus the rest of the world, with the latter including ordinary American citizens who have much more to gain from standing in solidarity with Russian citizens.

[Jul 21, 2018] Debbie Wasserman Schultz Accidentally Tweets Perfect Metaphor For Our Broken Politics

YouTube
Jimmy Dore: [Debbie say that ] "I eat the left Twix first", pretending that one identical side is different from other. Both sides brought to her by same corporation."
There is no price to pay if you lie in defense of the US neoliberal establishment
Notable quotes:
"... I can't believe she beat Canova. There's some fuckery going on there. ..."
Jul 21, 2018 | www.youtube.com
George Diaz , 1 year ago

Debbie ate the left one first, meaning she ate Bernie Sanders campaign

Gnarl Sagan , 1 year ago

I can't believe she beat Canova. There's some fuckery going on there.

[Jul 21, 2018] Debbie Wasserman Schultz Colluding w- Republicans To Cheat Progressive

Jul 21, 2018 | www.youtube.com

Published on Jul 21, 2018

Tim Canova explains the corruption that took place in his race against Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Fortunately, there is an organization that can help.

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Photo Credit: "Debbie Wasserman Schultz", © 2011 Gage Skidmore, Flickr | CC-BY-SA


Twostones00 , 8 hours ago

It was Debbie who headed the corruption of the 2016 presidential primary with fraud and vote rigging to keep Bernie from the presidency. It was Debbie's corruption that handed the presidency to Trump. Debbie belongs in prison for election rigging and treason. Russia is being investigated yet Debbie is not? Why?

Michael Wallingford , 7 hours ago

Little Debbie is a psychopath. Paper ballots destroyed?!

Jeffery Fenton , 8 hours ago

What's new. The Dems courted moderate Republicans over progressives, rigged primaries, disinfranchised half the base, colluded with the media to elevate Trump & lost in the general for supporting NAFTA & TPP and not campaigning in rust belt. On top of that, they blamed Russia, caused mass hysteria and public discontent to avoid taking responsibility.

T Timeler , 8 hours ago

I wouldn't be surprised. Schultz IS a Republican. There's TONS of Republicans in the democratic party. They did the divide and conquer method. And it worked

Sean P , 8 hours ago (edited)

Wasserman is a horrible and crooked and evil person, take her down take her down she will scream loudly, she knows where many many bones are buried, she is an extension of HRC

[Jul 21, 2018] A pox on neoliberals in both of their houses

Notable quotes:
"... Maybe we can stop with the apologetics and demand he stop funding nazis in Ukraine, terrorists in Syria, "color revolutionaries" in Venezuela and Nicaragua and mostly secret "dirty wars" in Africa. Maybe we can demand he actually serve the interests of the 99% in the US, and not the globalist banksters, MIC contractors and extraction industries who are his real beneficiaries. ..."
"... Who knows? Maybe we can even force him to stop "Making Greater Israel Again" at great cost to the US in prestige, blood and gold. ..."
"... "Admittedly, Trump has many flaws and much of his foreign policy is in keeping with the usual criminal conduct of American imperialism." "The problem for the American establishment is that it doesn't like the way democracy worked out." ..."
"... USA deep state's Russian gambit expires on November 4th when the embargo on Iran goes into effect. It is already clear that China will support Iran. ..."
"... Anyone noticed how much personal wealth Obama has gained since he was president? Someone, anyone, please grab a clue... ..."
"... Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Surely the Borg understand this? ..."
"... Mark Blyth is one of my favorite economists. He coined the great phrase, that once the 0.01% screw us bad enough, "The Hamptons is not a defensible position." ..."
"... " The weapon industry and the military recognize that the 'war of terror' is nearing its end. To sell more they need to create an new 'enemy' that looks big enough to justify large and long-term spending. " ..."
"... Trump is being given way too much credit. If Russia would have flown all their jets home right after the fake chemical attack in eastern Ghouta, Damascus and the rest of Syrian government controlled areas would lay in rubles by American bombs with jihadi scum committing the most unimaginable atrocities. ..."
"... The whole idea of splitting Russia and China sure, maybe 20 years ago but those days are long gone. The two nations now have deep wide and strategic agreements and interests. Besides, what does the US have to offer? ease sanctions wow how kind. A project to split them can only fail. ..."
"... LOL! Do you really think the US is a democracy? Do you think a real "outsider" populist can be elected via the money-centered US election process? Do you think Obama kept his campaign promises? Do think Trump has? (Prosecute "crooked" Hillary? Eliminated Obamacare "on day one"? Build a wall (and have Mexico pay for it)? Drained the swamp? Pull US troops out of the Middle East?) ..."
"... Consider: The US is NOT a democracy and "the borg" controls the narrative AND the counter-narrative. Obama and Trump were selected and made into the most appealing choice ("lesser evil"). ..."
"... Within days of this press conference, Trump OK'd another $200 million in military aid for the neo-nazis we planted on Russia's border. ..."
"... But all I see is Trump executing the policies of the 0.01% sponsors of the US duopoly. ..."
"... I'm not sure that the borg haven't already won long ago. The hysterical verbal attacks against Trump by the MSM and the swamp are worrying, but I'm starting to notice a similarity between this and Trump's own rhetoric. Trump's "fire and fury," his attacks on journalists, European allies, and "very unfair trade" make a lot of people uncomfortable. ..."
"... The US political circus has been cranked up to maximum volume. The question is whether there are any real actions happening to justify this noise. ..."
"... I would like to see Trump fire some people, but I'm not sure it's necessary (from Trump's perspective) because I'm not sure that the level of conflict is as serious as what is portrayed. Same thing with impeachment. It won't happen, because pretty soon the people would realize that their lot hasn't improved, that Trump wasn't the problem, and the MSM and the swamp would end up with even less credibliity. And if one president can be impeached, the calls for impeachment will continue with the next president and the next... ..."
"... Was it Rosenstein who ordered the arrest of the Russian gun lobbyist woman the day after the summit? ..."
"... There is much to suggest that Special Counsel Mueller takes his orders from Rosenstein, but who does Rosenstein answer to, and is he untouchable within the USA legal system? How much cognitive dissonance is the public supposed to handle in relation to Rosenstein not being held accountable for his crimes, including high treason? ..."
"... regarding your last line - i am not so sure.. it looks dicey to me and he is creating a lot of uncertainty with the countries - europe - that typically go along with everything the usa says.. maybe his stirring up stuff is a part of his plan, but he doesn't seem to have a genuine plan... he comes across like a loose cannon mostly.. ..."
"... No one in their right-fucking mind would willingly drag themselves through the festering piles of all possible mammalian fecal matter that DJT has had to endure since the start of his presidency. You're gonna tell me that he didn't mind that they were going to drag his philandering ass through the mud so that his YOUNG BOY and family would know what kind of a real piece of garbage this two-timer is? ..."
Jul 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Virgile , Jul 21, 2018 3:04:13 PM | 1

Whisper it but despite his terrible week, Trump may be absolutely RIGHT to pursue this new bromance with Putin PIERS MORGAN
When I interviewed him a week ago on Air Force One, Trump explained why he's getting in the room with traditional US enemies like North Korea and Russia.

'I'd like to see peace. A lot of people thought we're going to be at war with Trump as President. Well here it is - we're getting rid of wars. We're actually getting out of wars.'

'Look, if we can get along with Russia that's a good thing. For the United States to get along with Russia and China and all these other places . Piers that's a good thing, that's not a bad thing. That's a really good thing.'

Peter AU 1 , Jul 21, 2018 3:30:40 PM | 3
Like the takfiri's of Idlib killing each other off, this war going on inside the US can only be a good thing. Just needs to get a bit hotter.
Daniel , Jul 21, 2018 3:40:24 PM | 4
For 8 years, I argued with Obama-bots who remained convinced that President CareBear really wanted to do all these wonderful things he said, but was forced to do the opposite by "Republican Obstructionism" (ignoring the Democratic super-majority in his first years), and by threats against him and his family by the very agencies now branded by the MSM as the "Deep State."

When I pointed out that CitiBank picked his Wall Street revolving door Cabinet, I was told that this was a "4-D Chess move," and that the brilliant Obama had to hire insiders who knew how "the system" worked so that he could dismantle that system and bring rainbows and unicorns to the 99%.

Now we are almost 1/2 way through the (first) term of President Trump®, and even b is promoting this exact same narrative for the Orange Führer.

Well, I was only able to win over a small percentage of Obama-bots with my pleas to look at what he was actually doing, and not the pretty words he spoke. Let alone my insistence that if he was really being threatened then the right thing to do would have been to say so, and either call for the people to rise up to overthrow the PTSB or resign. If a President is afraid to serve USAmerican interests, he doesn't deserve to be President.

So maybe I should change tacks for those sucked into either pole of this Trump Derangement Syndrome. Maybe I should jump on the wagon barreling down the abyss, but try to help steer that wagon towards the conclusion that we must push our beloved leader (or despised Putin Puppet) to actually execute those "mumbles, such are promises All lies and jests."

Maybe we can stop with the apologetics and demand he stop funding nazis in Ukraine, terrorists in Syria, "color revolutionaries" in Venezuela and Nicaragua and mostly secret "dirty wars" in Africa. Maybe we can demand he actually serve the interests of the 99% in the US, and not the globalist banksters, MIC contractors and extraction industries who are his real beneficiaries.

Who knows? Maybe we can even force him to stop "Making Greater Israel Again" at great cost to the US in prestige, blood and gold.

Yeah, I know. All we'll see is another round of the copyrighted "You're Fired" trope of our first Reality TV Show President.

Peter AU 1 , Jul 21, 2018 4:00:33 PM | 5
A couple of quotes from the Finian Cunningham piece b has linked to.

"Admittedly, Trump has many flaws and much of his foreign policy is in keeping with the usual criminal conduct of American imperialism."
"The problem for the American establishment is that it doesn't like the way democracy worked out."

The only two choices the world faces in US leadership is the Russia hating fanatics that may quickly bring on WWIII, or an imperialist realist US that goes back to attacking countries that are no match for US military power.
The longer this internal war in the US lasts, the better off the world will be.

Curtis , Jul 21, 2018 4:15:26 PM | 7
Daniel 4
When Trump announced the Goldman boys in his group - after campaigning against Wall Street - I pointed this out to friends only to have them tell me the exact same thing, that Trump had to have insiders to help him do what he needed to do. Bah! A pox on both their houses R and D.
Jackrabbit , Jul 21, 2018 4:25:27 PM | 8
Daniel @4

Agreed.

Alternative theory: Trump got NOTHING from Putin and that angered the deep state. The peace initiative known as "Trump" will be withdrawn (impeach/resign) if Putin doesn't come around by this fall. The late invitation for Putin to visit Washington - coming after (not before) the firestorm of deep-state protest is the tell.

USA deep state's Russian gambit expires on November 4th when the embargo on Iran goes into effect. It is already clear that China will support Iran.

<> <> <> <> <> <> <>

One more thing. MIC wants weapons contracts, sure. But that doesn't mean that US and Israel doesn't have strategic goals that go beyond enriching MIC.

james , Jul 21, 2018 4:26:04 PM | 9
really good post b.. thank you! grieved posted a link on the Helsinki thread that aligns with your view in many regards... others would enjoy watching it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUK5g6v5zrg

@1 virgile.. good quote from trump.. thanks for that.. a moment of sanity and clarity from the unpredictable usa president!

@3 peter.. good comparison / analogy! and i agree with your last paragraph @5 too. thanks..

@4 daniel.. some aspects of trumps presidency look very promising... check out that video grieved shared if you haven't already.. it conforms to your thinking and it especially interesting coming from a russian! opps - it must be a russian set up!!

james , Jul 21, 2018 4:27:40 PM | 10
and i agree with the analysis that trump does have to fire some of these folks, or it will get much worse..
Jackrabbit , Jul 21, 2018 4:32:57 PM | 11
Correction @8:

But that doesn't mean that US and Israel don't have strategic goals that go beyond enriching MIC.

ben , Jul 21, 2018 4:39:45 PM | 13
Such naivete b, it's very alarming. DJT, despite all his rhetoric, is just another empire puppet. He'll do what he must to further his, and his families ambitions, throwing the workers and the "little people" under the bus, along with the rule of law, the constitution, and anything else that gets in his way. The globalists own him, just like rest of our modern day presidents. His increase in personal wealth, is just the price he charges for being "owned" by them.

Anyone noticed how much personal wealth Obama has gained since he was president? Someone, anyone, please grab a clue...

james , Jul 21, 2018 4:46:21 PM | 14
instead of mic, pl likes 'globalist corporate bankster elites.' i can't see the difference frankly...

@13 ben... on the one hand i agree - another empire puppet, but on another level he isn't... now, just what is intentional and what isn't is hard to say.. see virgiles quote @1.. is that the voice of an empire puppet? well - maybe it is and he is fooling his base and plans to start ww3 sometime soon... why would he want to piss off the globalist corporate bankster elites - or mic as others refer to it here? okay.. maybe he isn't going to, but whatever one wants to say about trump, i think the most outstanding thing about him is his unpredictability and the fact he doesn't appear to give a shit what the msm - that brianwashing channel - thinks.. he does his own thing and for that - i admire him.. i still think he is a creep, but i admire that aspect of his.. he does lead, even if one doesn't like his style..

c1ue , Jul 21, 2018 4:48:02 PM | 15
Friends close and enemies closer?
Daniel , Jul 21, 2018 4:49:01 PM | 16
Curtis @7: "When Trump announced the Goldman boys in his group..."

And last week we read that Goldman Sachs' profits rose 44% since Trump took up (part time) residence in the White House.

Just a coincidence, I'm sure. And dontcha know, GS is now part of the "resistance" against the globalists! lol

et Al , Jul 21, 2018 4:56:45 PM | 17
Two things I keep in mind:

1: Actions, not words.

2: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

But I come back to the voter. Part of the reason O-Bomber and the Dems were elected was due to US public weariness of W's non-stop wars after pronouncing 'Mission Accomplished'.

Part of the reason Trump got in (apart from it was a change election) was the same. The Borg wants what the Borg wants, but if Trump and his base is the symptom, and Trump is neutered, what will voters do? The Dems aren't offering anything compelling apart anti-Trump guff.

Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Surely the Borg understand this?

jsn , Jul 21, 2018 4:56:45 PM | 18
Other than the nasty, superior tone, I agree with Ivan @13, would love to see Sessions discover a pair.
Daniel , Jul 21, 2018 5:03:06 PM | 19
Ivan @12

Mark Blyth is one of my favorite economists. He coined the great phrase, that once the 0.01% screw us bad enough, "The Hamptons is not a defensible position."

But to imagine that Trump is all alone with just his family is to be blind to the big money interests that have propped him up and promoted him at least since the Rothschilds (who are never to be called "globalists") pumped $billions into his failing real estate and gambling businesses back in the 1980s.

Mercers. Adelson. Princes (including the de Vos branch). It goes on and on.

ben , Jul 21, 2018 5:04:46 PM | 20
james @ said in part:"even if one doesn't like his style.."

IMO "his style", is nothing more, nothing less than distraction. Everything of any substance he's done has benefited the giant corporate forms he serves.

"Globalists" are nothing more than the huge multi-national corporations. Through their massive profits they buy the politicians like DJT and others that do their bidding. It's not rocket science. They now own the U$A.

When DJT and his minions propose ANYTHING that benefits the working classes, maybe I'll change my mind, but, as of now, that hasn't happened.

james , Jul 21, 2018 5:05:43 PM | 21
@18 jsn - ivan @12 spoken like a typical jack ass American - talking to other Americans and probably thinks this is an American website too.... the freak could start by getting up to speed..
james , Jul 21, 2018 5:07:31 PM | 22
@20 ben... trump talking with putin and suggesting that peace would be a good thing is a start! But i hear what you are saying.. Watch peoples actions, not their words.. fully concur..
Hoarsewhisperer , Jul 21, 2018 5:15:40 PM | 23
Nice appraisal, b.
I'm still in Recovery Mode after the shock of reading Pat Lang's "Political Appointees who should be fired" musings. I expected to be waiting for Trump's 2nd term before any serious slime-removal began. But PL makes a persuasive case that time's a-wasting and Trump needs to grab a fire hose ASAP and flush some muck from the stables, now.
xor , Jul 21, 2018 5:17:59 PM | 24
" The weapon industry and the military recognize that the 'war of terror' is nearing its end. To sell more they need to create an new 'enemy' that looks big enough to justify large and long-term spending. "

I bet Donald John Trump being such a douchebag bigot will go for Iran (or else Venezuela) just like his Republican predecessor went for Iraq. To be honest I don't believe Trump will go for Iran but the "shadow government" (if I can call it like that) will effectively go for a hot war with Iran. USA presidents are just some nice faces on a plutocratic system who need to sell policies to the masses and make them feel they have a say.

" Trump does not buy the nonsense claims of 'Russian meddling' in the U.S. elections and openly says so. " Imagine he does believe it and says it out loud. "Dear US citizens, the Russians have tampered with our beloved free and fair democratic voting system so now you have me!" Of course there was no Russian meddling. But if it were so, who would ever admit it?

Trump is being given way too much credit. If Russia would have flown all their jets home right after the fake chemical attack in eastern Ghouta, Damascus and the rest of Syrian government controlled areas would lay in rubles by American bombs with jihadi scum committing the most unimaginable atrocities.

Babyl-on , Jul 21, 2018 5:21:59 PM | 25
The whole idea of splitting Russia and China sure, maybe 20 years ago but those days are long gone. The two nations now have deep wide and strategic agreements and interests. Besides, what does the US have to offer? ease sanctions wow how kind. A project to split them can only fail.

On another point, it has been my understanding that Pentagon policy sinse WWII assumed war with one would mean war with the other even when they were at odds.

Sasha , Jul 21, 2018 5:24:30 PM | 26
@Daniel,

You are right, this is a reality TV intended to try to implant in the US a Nazi regime through a military junta. As soon as they have tested that people has become increasingly aware that everything remains the same, they are willing to throw the American people against each other as a last resort to impose the so pursued martial law which will allow cutting all rights and liberties at root, to be able to requisition funds, at whatever price the US workers would have to pay, and go after the needed wars, for US continuing hegemony, against Iran, Russia and China....

This is why Trump is playing the card of opposing the DS policies and the others the role of fighting back to the limit of asking his impeachment, so as enrage his followers enough to get them rising in arms....In fact there are some "alt-media" just calling for this online at unison....These was the outcome wished since the beginning of the election campaign and such aggressive stance by Trump and Nazi and KKK followers, and this is what lays behind the attack and intends of slamming and undermining every and each US institutions, so as that people gets enraged and disoriented enough, unable to trust the government or any of its agencies, and this way easy to fall into chaos and the arms of extremists armed gangs...

That the US is calling for a genuine revolution of the people to the shouts does not mean that this one in the making has anything to do with genuine US people at all. I bet that it is the MIC ( which Pat Lang denies existing, btw...!!!) which directs the scene from behind...

Just found this video posted at other blog in which a man tells it as it is...This is the perception of the people around the muslim world...( and no muslim as well ), also increasingly aware...and they know it....Notice that the message Sheik Sudair is advancing follows the same script than Trump and his, at least part, administration....But so as that not permeate anybody any more...

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6pmgla

Jackrabbit , Jul 21, 2018 5:24:42 PM | 27
et Al @17: But I come back to the voter.

LOL! Do you really think the US is a democracy? Do you think a real "outsider" populist can be elected via the money-centered US election process? Do you think Obama kept his campaign promises? Do think Trump has? (Prosecute "crooked" Hillary? Eliminated Obamacare "on day one"? Build a wall (and have Mexico pay for it)? Drained the swamp? Pull US troops out of the Middle East?)

Consider: The US is NOT a democracy and "the borg" controls the narrative AND the counter-narrative. Obama and Trump were selected and made into the most appealing choice ("lesser evil").

=

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

- Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes
Babyl-on , Jul 21, 2018 5:25:05 PM | 28
I just want to say that the phrase "cold war" or "new cold war" has far outlived its usefulness and meaning. If there is an indecisive battle and the sides return to base then it becomes a cold war it just has no meaning in relation to current events. That was then this is now.
Daniel , Jul 21, 2018 5:43:49 PM | 30
James @9.

Well, I have to say there is no better person than Karen Shakhnazarov to promote the standard narrative of our first Reality TV Show President to a Russia audience. He is, after all a famous TV and film director who brags about being able to sway huge masses of people to do his bidding.

And he presented quite a performance. He had few, if any actual evidences to back up his soliloquy, but he presented it with the force of a true believer.

I would have liked to hear the rebuttals of the other guests, but they don't seem to be online.

For no matter who is promoting it, I find the standard narrative to be specious. Trump is not, and never was an "outsider." He is not opposing the PTSB, but enriching them.

I don't care what he, or anyone says; I watch what they actually do. Within days of this press conference, Trump OK'd another $200 million in military aid for the neo-nazis we planted on Russia's border.

I don't know why some in Russian media promote the US MSM narrative about this "war" between Trump and "the establishment" and "Deep State." I want to keep believing that President Putin is acting in the best interests of the Russian people and their allies.

Perhaps they believe that promoting the narrative gives Trump some room to actually execute the policies which I think Shakhnazarov is correct in saying the US public backs.

But all I see is Trump executing the policies of the 0.01% sponsors of the US duopoly.

gogaijin , Jul 21, 2018 5:43:58 PM | 31
I'm not sure that the borg haven't already won long ago. The hysterical verbal attacks against Trump by the MSM and the swamp are worrying, but I'm starting to notice a similarity between this and Trump's own rhetoric. Trump's "fire and fury," his attacks on journalists, European allies, and "very unfair trade" make a lot of people uncomfortable.

The US political circus has been cranked up to maximum volume. The question is whether there are any real actions happening to justify this noise.

Trump's public opponents have offered endless predictions of doom and gloom which have not come to pass. Pulling out of the Iran deal and the climate deal, the nomination of BK for SCOTUS, and the tariffs have all been condemned but we are still waiting to see how these situations play out.

The Trump administration's internal dissenters have cried about his gestures toward peace and nonintervention, at the same time the "defense" spending and the drone strikes continue as strong as ever.

I would like to see Trump fire some people, but I'm not sure it's necessary (from Trump's perspective) because I'm not sure that the level of conflict is as serious as what is portrayed. Same thing with impeachment. It won't happen, because pretty soon the people would realize that their lot hasn't improved, that Trump wasn't the problem, and the MSM and the swamp would end up with even less credibliity. And if one president can be impeached, the calls for impeachment will continue with the next president and the next...

Daniel , Jul 21, 2018 5:56:50 PM | 33
xor @24, "Of course there was no Russian meddling. But if it were so, who would ever admit it?"

Actually, The Donald has said publicly on several occasions that the accepts the story that Russia meddled in our election. He just says (as did the Republican committee) that they didn't change the results.

I believe they're keeping that story alive so they can impose even more draconian restrictions on voting, and install even more opaque election systems so future rigging is even less obvious.

VietnamVet , Jul 21, 2018 5:58:22 PM | 34
Thanks, this is an important post. The coup will be a success when Dissidents are labeled Russian Collaborators and the internet goes black. Even if Donald Trump doesn't resign or isn't impeached, the splintering apart will continue. Money making chaos is spreading across Europe and North America. The counter is to restore government by and for the people and secure borders.
veto , Jul 21, 2018 6:14:27 PM | 35
Who is actually in charge over there, among the Borg? And how much in charge? They cannot function yet as the collective electronic mind of science fiction, can they?

Was it Rosenstein who ordered the arrest of the Russian gun lobbyist woman the day after the summit? That looks very much like an act of desperation. There is much to suggest that Special Counsel Mueller takes his orders from Rosenstein, but who does Rosenstein answer to, and is he untouchable within the USA legal system? How much cognitive dissonance is the public supposed to handle in relation to Rosenstein not being held accountable for his crimes, including high treason?

Who are the 'globalists' actually and which is their chain of command? Which positions do Soros, Bezos, CIA-MI6 have? What is the role of Mossad?

As it appears, after the ascendance of Trump, the actors are not sure themselves anymore about any of this, that is about who is in charge, or in particular about how much authority and insurance their actual real-life handlers do possess and vouch for. They waver, in the case of media hysterically so.

"The Intelligence Community", in particular CIA, is a central executive force in the circus, in collaboration with MI6 and the obedient assets in the NATO sphere, but they have grown so incompetent due to incessant politicizing and sycophantism that they are perhaps little more a paper tiger by now? If this fact, with the help of Trump and allies, would be perceived clearer by the political classes of the USA, much good would be the result.

Ghost Ship , Jul 21, 2018 6:17:35 PM | 36
Nah, Trump shouldn't sack them yet but give them more rope to hang themselves.

The only thing he must do is beef up his security detail with some really mean mofos. Spetsnaz or Hezbollah main force might be best but would be politically unacceptable. I suspect he could get enough ex-US SF volunteers willing to die for him to ensure his safety when the Washington Borg goes postal as they will in the next year or so when it dawns on them how completely Trump has fucked them over. The last week or so has done much to convince me that Trump is a revolutionary.

james , Jul 21, 2018 6:22:45 PM | 37
@29 ivan.. you're a bit of a lun - short for lunatic.. henceforth, i am skipping your inanities..

@30 daniel.. i hear what you are saying.. he was and probably still is, a real estate developer.. he dreams trump towers around the world.. but, he was never a politician until very recently.. that he won the election came as a surprise to many.. yes - he had powerful backing - just how much he owes to that, i don't know.. but it is a plutocracy as i see it.. he has very little wiggle room.. he is also a live wire and unpredictable.. i can't think of a president who was this off script, forthright, ignorant and on and on the characteristics go.. but i don't see him towing the line exactly... so, maybe i am wrong on trump..

as for the interview, yes - would have been nice to hear some of the other guests rebut his comments.. the host did a very small bit, but that wasn't much... yes - the guy is in entertainment - he shares that with trump, lol... but the guy wasn't fickle.. i find trump quite capricious..

regarding your last line - i am not so sure.. it looks dicey to me and he is creating a lot of uncertainty with the countries - europe - that typically go along with everything the usa says.. maybe his stirring up stuff is a part of his plan, but he doesn't seem to have a genuine plan... he comes across like a loose cannon mostly.. i know one when i see one, lol... he is more of an outsider then an insider as i see it, but time will tell.. obviously people and politicians have to be a bit of both to move forward..as with so much - a simple black and white breakdown is impossible as i see it..

et Al , Jul 21, 2018 6:30:48 PM | 38
@17 Jackrabbit

I don't know what the United States is. A quilt? ;)

Trump simply shouldn't have been elected in the first place if the system of political filtration was working properly. The Borg appears to have done some deft footwork since it became clear he was a serious contender and prepared for him becoming President. The Christopher Steele Dossier, courtesy of the UK, looks like just one strand of this.

I'm just not ready to call it. I don't know what will happen. Traditionally it takes two terms for a President to leave a clear mark, but I don't know if this applies anymore.

I'm also wary of treating the voter as an easily managed moron as much of the media and many pols do. I think that is an error. There will be fallout.

My head is pessimist, my heart it optimist. Does not compute.

Daniel , Jul 21, 2018 6:32:17 PM | 39
Sasha @26. That's an amazing video! Thanks. The people are awakening.

Frank Zappa observed 30 or 40 years ago that the facade of "democracy" in the US will be dropped whenever it becomes expedient to do so. And that facade became a lot thinner 3 days after "the event that changed everything."

The US has been under a form of "Martial Law" since President Bush II signed Executive Order 13223 on September 14, 2001.

Exactly what this EO established is classified, but even the changes since 9/11 that are public are horrifying. No more habeas corpus. US military permitted to police the streets. "Kill lists" of US citizens, even on US territory. Imagine what powers are still classified!

Since then, every year, each President has extended it for another year. President Trump extended, and expanded it last year , giving him the authority to recall into service any "retired member of the Regular Army, Regular Navy, Regular Air Force, or RegularMarine Corps."

This is in addition to Trump's EO on December 21, giving Steven Mnuchin the authority to confiscate any and all private property.

Starting with some posts at 4-Chan, some in the "alt-right" were claiming that the purpose of this power to confiscate private property is Trump's "4-D Chess Move" to eviscerate the Clinton "Deep State" Globalists.

That 4-Chan thread evolved into "Q" and QAnon which are serving to keep Trump fans chasing squirrels, and ignoring what this Administration is actually doing.

NemesisCalling , Jul 21, 2018 6:45:07 PM | 41
Oh, dear lord.

b has the courage (finally) to admit that passing a summary judgment against Trump at this juncture is absurd and would exhibit symptoms of TDS and immediately people are here to remind us (program us) into thinking that this is all theatre and there is no daylight btw Obama and Trump.

Bullshit.

No one in their right-fucking mind would willingly drag themselves through the festering piles of all possible mammalian fecal matter that DJT has had to endure since the start of his presidency. You're gonna tell me that he didn't mind that they were going to drag his philandering ass through the mud so that his YOUNG BOY and family would know what kind of a real piece of garbage this two-timer is? You're going to tell me that he willfully signed on for death threats and to be publically shamed and turned on by all his orchestrated advisor-elections?

For what? So he could sell more steaks post-presidency or build towers in Pyongyang?

So this is all theater and it doesn't even matter, huh?

Poor DJT. The loneliest dumbass in the world right now. His wife even "shooed" his hand away on camera at a tarmac meet-and-greet. Gosh...who wouldn't sign up for that?!

And surely he must really be having a lot of fun backstage sniggering at all the gullibles in his deplorable army. Gosh, do I feel like a twit.

Daniel , Jul 21, 2018 6:50:00 PM | 42
gogaijin @31.

I wouldn't say "the borg have won," because that means the game is over. I'd say this borg are in power, and are playing us with awesome finesse.

But I still believe that once enough of us see through the deceptions, and unite to take them down, that we can beat them. The real PTSB are a tiny percentage. Additionally, they have a few percent of enforcers (cops/militaries/paramilitaries). And a few more percent who believe that they're benefiting from this borg-dominance enough to support it.

But it really won't take that many dedicated revolutionaries to topple their house of cards. Once we convince even a significant minority of the enforcers to refuse orders and stand with us, I expect their rule will fall quickly, as it has in other instances.

Ash , Jul 21, 2018 7:04:30 PM | 43
Ben @20: said "When DJT and his minions propose ANYTHING that benefits the working classes, maybe I'll change my mind, but, as of now, that hasn't happened."

I'd have thought that proposing peace with Russia, rather than risking nuclear war with them as his would-be deposers seemingly want, is a policy that benefits the working classes.

Daniel , Jul 21, 2018 7:15:17 PM | 45
James @37.

You seem to have good instincts, but continue to fall back into the MSM narratives.

"i can't think of a president who was this off script,"

Have you seen the script? I haven't. I just watch what his Administration actually does. The only change in US policies have been escalations of the worst and stripping of the better ones.

"he doesn't seem to have a genuine plan... he comes across like a loose cannon mostly"

Yep. That is precisely what we see our First Realty TV Show President doing. Especially through those Tweets that we're told he writes, his character is all those things you say. But again, what is his Administration actually doing?

" but time will tell.. "

We're almost halfway through his (first) term, and what have we seen? We've seen war escalated. We're up to one bomb every 12 minutes! That's 3x as many as Obama and 6x as many as Bush II. We now have unknown thousands of regular troops occupying more than 1/3 of the sovereign state of Syria, replacing a few hundred Special Ops guys Obama had.

We're still working to overturn countries that displease the 0.01%/globalists/elites/Deep State/borg or whatever one wants to call them. Within weeks of his Administration floating the idea that we may need to send troops into Venezuela, we welcome their neighbor, Colombia into NATO. Article V anyone?

Continuing to "wait and see" benefits whom?

Really, you do see it. You're just letting yourself get swept up into the squirrel cage. Almost everyone out there is. Heck, even our beloved b is chasing that squirrel today.

But you see it, and several barflies are describing it quite well.

jsn , Jul 21, 2018 7:21:26 PM | 46
For some reason my screen confused 12&13, it still reads that way on my monitor while the numbers shift one on my hand held. It was Ivan's content with which I agreed while not liking his tone.
NemesisCalling , Jul 21, 2018 7:24:16 PM | 47
@39 Daniel

As far as I could tell, the EO to confiscate property is to mitigate the loss of funds/assets "instantaneously" transferred by bad guys to unreachable destinations by the US Treasury. It is a way to beat tipping off confiscations with a warrant. The people affected by this EO would still have recourse to prove their legitimate and lawful holdings of those assets.

Daniel, the Federal Gov't already has the law on its side to confiscate your private property: your gold. Please provide more than this paltry EO to prove DJT's fascist-cred.

ben , Jul 21, 2018 7:27:07 PM | 48
Ash @ 43: If me and my family owed mega-money to a group of billionaires, I'd kiss a little ass also.

I don't believe anyone on these threads has intimated that peace with Russia is a bad idea, it's DJT's motives that are in question..

ben , Jul 21, 2018 7:38:46 PM | 49
For Ash @ 43: An excerpt from a Times article..

"Because many American banks wouldn't lend money to Trump's debt-soaked company, he had to look elsewhere, like Russia. "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets," Donald Trump Jr. said in 2008, specifically mentioning projects in SoHo and Dubai.

Trump could clear up this issue by releasing his tax returns. That he has not, unlike every other modern presidential candidate, means that he deserves no benefit of the doubt. The fairest assumption is that he has Russian business ties he wants to keep hidden.

Full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/opinion/trumps-russia-motives.html

Peter AU 1 , Jul 21, 2018 7:42:26 PM | 50
ben 49

By the looks of the war that has been going on in the US that involves the intelligence agencies, if there was dirt in trumps tax returns or any other part of his business career, it would have been 'leaked'. There would have been no need for a fictional 'dossier'.

YY , Jul 21, 2018 7:45:38 PM | 51
US to alert public to foreign operations targeting Americans

The question should be whether the US would alert the US public of domestic operations, disguised "cleverly", by keyboards and spoof IP's as foreign, especially Russian entities. The best cover for US intelligence, particularly if politically motivated and even if it is for testing purposes, is to hide behind Russian identities if only to stay out of legal problems. The argument that every country hacks and steals, so therefore no big deal, misses the most obvious reasons of motivation. Elements of US intelligence would and logically should have the biggest motivations to meddle in US politics. Seriously, if you were Pootin, would you really be interested in getting involved in US electoral politics? I'd run the other way.

ben , Jul 21, 2018 7:56:23 PM | 52
@ 50: True that Peter, but, DJT could end the speculation by just releasing his tax returns

Secrecy always breeds speculation...

V , Jul 21, 2018 7:58:06 PM | 53
The people you see are marionettes; the people you don't see are pulling the strings.
If you don't know who's running the marionettes, you can't stop the show...
les7 , Jul 21, 2018 8:03:44 PM | 54
I never cease to be amazed...

Trump and Deep state... what is it about NA people who analyse NA politics/power that they almost always resort to dualisms?

Recently (a couple years ago) in N. Syria there were 4 or 5 different factions all supported by rival power centers in the US, all fighting each other - ignoring their stated enemy - the SAA, and fighting each other in order to gain points back in Washington!

It is meaningless to talk about either the US, the US government, the US military, The Corporate world, etc, as if they are single actors. Even the bankers will at times square off against each other.

Before Obama, each president had a relative stable configuration of power-factions backing him (in exchange for special access to the public trough). With Obama, they all were all at the trough, each of them trying to elbow another couple groups out of the way. That is why there was little ideological coherance to what he actual did legislatively (other than buying off the faction-flavor of the day for a limited bounce in the polls). Still, the factions gave nominal assent to Obama as an icon of US power.

With Trump, the factions that under Obama consolidated their control over a sector of power (Pentagon, Neo-Cons, CIA, Special Ops, Media, Tech/Silicon Valley, Finance, Oil, Health Care, DHS/FBI, State, EPA, etc) have come out from the shadows and fight for dominance. Why at this time? Is it the perception of pending collapse that propels them? If so they hasten their own end.

Trump's antics (ie Verbal welcome to Putin while immediately sending 200 million of offensive arms to Ukraine) are all a smokescreen, distraction from the real changes to law that benefit the elite and punish the wage earner. Don't listen to what he says, or what the media says he says, or what the media says about him. It is all a con.

Look at what is done. By way of example look at the world military scene. Trump talks withdrawl. What did he do?

- highest budget ever for the Pentagon, more than they asked for!
- more US troops on the ground in Syria
- more US funds for Ukraine
- more US/Nato forces & $costs on the border with Russia
- more confrontation with China in the south China sea
- more US involvement in Yemen
- expanded special ops role in Africa
- expanded economic-military role against Venezuela

Notice too that each of those actions benefits a different power faction
- Pentagon budget rewards republican/conservative supporters
- Syria rewards the Neo-cons/Israel, while controlling EU access to ME energy.
- Nato patrols in Estonia etc play to the anti-Russia MSM and the US as world policeman meme.
- Confronting China is all about US dollar dominance - which is why the trade war will evolve into a currency war
- US involvement in Yemen is about supporting the Saudi's
- Like Big Pharma, special ops get a whole continent to play games in & test their toys.
- Venezuela is ultimately about controlling the worlds second largest oil resource.

My point is that like many presidents before him, Trump actually controls very little. What he does control is rapidly being eroded by both his actions and the actions of others. The net effect invariably benefits US elites and penalizes all others.


viviana , Jul 21, 2018 8:06:07 PM | 55
Karen Shakhnazarov, Vladimir Soloviev, 17.07.2018

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZqIdZK91Og

james , Jul 21, 2018 8:13:11 PM | 56
@41 nemesis calling.. lol.. good post! thanks..

@45 daniel.. maybe so.. i dunno.. i can tell you i don't partake of any msm, so my sources are limited, lol.. lets use syria as an example.. how has it worked out since trump has been in power? now, how much of that is trumps doing, or as a consequence of russia and irans doing and etc. etc.? i don't know if i see it, but it seems to me trump, or the usa - are not in the same position they were around the time trump got the presidency... i don't doubt more bombs and drones are being released... i am not sure how much of that falls at trumps doorstep.. i would like it if he stopped the madness on yemen, thanks saudi arabia.. he seems partly paralyzed with regard to ksa, but i too liked the video that @26 sasha linked to..

as for continuing to wait and see... i don't know what other options i have! i don't believe waxing eloquent on moa is going to make any difference! i am happy to consider others ideas and explore the possibilities.. no one so far as i know has made a convincing argument that trump is the consummate insider... i think he is more of a mix of both.. i guess that is the basis for my wait and see approach here..


@49 ben.. that is the constant insinuation on trump - needed money so he went to russia... what if we find out he got it from the mercers, sheldon adelson, the rothchilds, ksa, israel and etc etc? it is only that he could get it from russia that gets repeated ad nauseam in the msm.. i have a problem with that..

james , Jul 21, 2018 8:16:42 PM | 57
@55 viviana... thanks, but it is in russian with no english subtitles.. that is the video both daniel and i would like to see more fully and that grieved shared on a previous thread - but only part of it.. if an english translation comes available, let us know.. thanks.
Schmoe , Jul 21, 2018 8:20:20 PM | 58
Did I read this correctly? Fire Mattis and keep Bolton? How someone can be so perceptive in their foreign policy thoughts but so off the reservation on US politics is incredible.
ben , Jul 21, 2018 8:23:46 PM | 59
james @ 56: I say again, if DJT just released his tax returns, the speculation, at least about his financial situation, would go away..

les7 @ 54 said:"The net effect invariably benefits US elites and penalizes all others."

There's the bottom line on DJT. Thanks for the summation les.

Jackrabbit , Jul 21, 2018 8:24:12 PM | 60
NemesisCalling @41:
... immediately people are here to remind us (program us) into thinking that this is all theatre and there is no daylight btw Obama and Trump .

Allow me to clarify. It's true that Trump isn't "like" Obama as in facing the same issues and obstacles. It would be foolish to make that claim.

Instead, what Daniel and I (and I think ben and a few others) have pointed out is that they both follow a similar faux populist political model. They make populist appeals (which appears genuine because we are told they are "outsiders") but govern for the benefit of the establishment.

= = = = = =

hopehely @44:

It is kinda double negative . :-D

Yes. And just how a native speaker would say it.

= = = = = =

ben @49:

The fairest assumption is that he has Russian business ties he wants to keep hidden.

No. There are many other possibilities.

>> Doesn't want crazed antifa/anti-Russians to attack his business interests

>> Israeli, Saudi, Quatari, Ukranian investors?

CarlD , Jul 21, 2018 8:25:17 PM | 61
It is certainly an act of great courage for a POTUS to go against the PTB. The Kennedy's fate pops into ones mind.

Standing up against his party's opinion, against the MSM narratives is truly a
remarkable thing.

We live in doxocracy and what governments or leaders do normally is create news that will entail a reaction from the masses that will implore the government to do exactly what the Government wanted to do in the first place.

IN other words, as Rove says, the (empire) government creates a reality that the people gets to study and this entails a reaction which favours the entity taking the action it wanted to take.

Say for example you want dictatorial powers, you create 9/11 and you get to have all the dictatorial powers you dreamed off with the blessing and the urgings of the oppressed.

All PsOTUS since G.W.Bush have been granted absolute power by acts of Congress through the war on terror legislation.

So, Trump can arrest anybody he wants without any process in any form, sequester anybody he wants to, kill anyone who stands in his way, all this absolutely legally. The legislation authorises it. Nobody in and out of the US is above it or beyond what Congress has adopted. He can seize any property, any assets of anyone including and not limited to the Rockefellers et al and all the banksters.

To do this he only needs a loyal battallion commander.

So the swamp is planning a coup? DT can act swiftly and in his one night of the long knives do away with his critics, detractors, pursuers, the Clintons, the Soroses etc.

He and his loyalists must prepare a list of enemies and in one night round all of them up including the newspapers and TV editors, broadcasters et al.

DT's night of the long knives. He might not have the courage to do it. but it's either him or them.

He has the Congress legislation to back him up. He only needs to prepare a good Speech to the Nation afterwards.

Pft , Jul 21, 2018 8:28:33 PM | 62
People believe what they want to believe. Trump of course has many personal business reasons to want sanctions removed from Russia since quite of lot of money looted from Russia and the FSU ended up in his pocket by way of loans or investments in his projects. Tracing this money puts his Empire at risk. He is what they call "Kompromat" in Russia, so he must do the bidding of the Cold War forces. To say he is sabatoged by people he himself appointed is curious.

Part of the reason for all this is the drying up of capital flight from Russia and FSU since 2005 or so. Over a trillion USD flowed into Eurodollar accounts from 1990-2005 and much of it ended up in the US as multiples of this as these dollars in offshore banks were loaned 10-20 times this amount to the US and European clients/banks. Some of it flowed directly into US via these tax havens, legally or otherwise. This huge source of cash fueled asset inflation in that period and when it dried up we had the Great Recession starting in 2006 -2007, and coincidentally that was shortly after Browder was kicked out of Russia

Browder may be an MI6/CIA/Mossad agent that helped facilitate and track this looting in partnership with the Israeli Safra who owned the Republican Bank of New York and was said to be Mossad/Mafia connected. At the same time Hermitage Capital began operations Safras bank was selling up to 1 billion dollars a day in 100 dollar bills to Russian "entities" and flying it to Russia in what was called the "Money Plane". This obviously was with the support of the Fed Reserve and Clinton administration which helped to get Yeltsin reelected with IMF money. Funny how billions of that IMF money still ended up getting sent to the Bank of New York and Safras Republican Bank before Safra blew the whistle as he neared a deal to sell his bank and Hermitage holdings to the notorious HSBC

He was killed days after agreeing to sell under mysterious circumstances (fire) in Monaco despite using a top security company that used ex-Mossad agents, similar to the company he used in Moscow to protect his "Money Plane" and Browder. Someone was obviously unhappy about his blowing the whistle. Perhaps Semyon Mogilevitch, who was implicated and is reportedly the top Don of the Russian mafia

Trumps ex-partner Felix Sater and a number of tenants in the Trump Tower have been connected to Semyon Mogilevitch

So anyways , now the Fed and ECB plan to end the QE of the last 8 years and must find a way to replace toxic assets on the balance sheet with quality assets . Otherwise the next crash, and they seem to happen every 10 -11 years now, will be a whopper.

Thats where Browder and the Magnitsky Act come in. Cold War II besides propping up the MIC and replacing the fizzling GWOT may be an excuse to seize assets to prop up the Fed

Putin however might like to recover some of those assets from enemy oligarchs in exile for Russia and himself, and must protect the oligarchs in his camp who have a lot to lose, not to mention the RCB , Gazprom and oil companies who keep a lot of reserves /assets offshore . Thats why he has requested interviews with Browder associates and officials that know about such transfers so he can recover them, or at least provide some leverage as protection


Putin like Trump has his own Deep State he must satisfy.

From this link

https://thesaker.is/no-5th-column-in-the-kremlin-think-again/

"Now let's connect all the dots: there is a pro-western (in realty, western-controlled) faction inside the government which is financing those who are attempting to overthrow Putin by making him unpopular with the Russian general public (which overwhelmingly opposes "(neo)liberal" economic policies and which despises the Russian liberal elites) by constantly forcing him into (neo)liberal economic policies which he clearly does not like (he declared himself categorically opposed to such policies in 2005) and the so-called "patriotic media" is covering it all up. And Putin cannot change this without shedding blood........

Just like in the West, in Russia the media depends first and foremost on money. Big financial interests are very good at using the media to promote their agenda, deny or obfuscate some topics while pushing others. This is why you often see the Russian media backing WTO/WB/IMF/etc policies to the hilt while never criticizing Israel or, God forbid, rabidly pro-Israel propagandists on mainstream TV (guys like Vladimir Soloviev, Evgenii Satanovsky, Iakov Kedmi, Avigdor Eskin and many others). This is the same media which will gladly criticize Iran and Hezbollah but never wonder why the Russian main TV stations are spewing pro-Israeli propaganda on a daily basis.

And, of course, they will all mantrically repeat the same chant: "there is no 5th column in Russia!! None!! Never!!"

This is no different than the paid for corporate media in the USA which denies the existence of a "deep state" or the US "Israel Lobby".

And yet, many (most?) people in the USA and Russia realize at an almost gut-level that they are being lied to and that, in reality, a hostile power is ruling over them."

Jackrabbit , Jul 21, 2018 8:33:01 PM | 63
Peter AU 1 @50:
By the looks of the war that has been going on in the US that involves the intelligence agencies, if there was dirt in trumps tax returns or any other part of his business career, it would have been 'leaked' .

Good point!

It actually helps to make the case that Trump is part of the establishment. They protect his business interests by not leaking his tax returns and other info.

This is an insight akin to when Qanon started promoting war with Irran.

= = = = = =

les7 @54: It is all a con.

Good summary.

Peter AU 1 , Jul 21, 2018 8:36:03 PM | 64
Trump and the people behind realize that to be a great power in the coming era, the US must once again become a manufacturing power. This I believe is behind Trump's push, tarrifs and so forth, to rebuild US manufacturing. He is pushing for a lower US dollar which means imported items will be more expensive compared to domestically produced goods.
although there is a lot of automation in todays manufacturing, this overall effort will create a lot of jobs within the US.
In looking into domestic oil production in the US, one field is held up from expanding output until a second pipeline is completed. Trucking the oil out in the interim was also a problem as US trucking is now very busy and in short supply with all sectors in the US.
This is far more than giving money to banks trickle down crap. It is physical rebuilding of US domestic manufacturing capability.
Circe , Jul 21, 2018 8:40:39 PM | 65
@1

Trump wants peace my ass! What about IRAAAAAN??? Did you all conveniently forget about his obsession with Iran, or is everyone back on the Trump juice?

_________________

He wants to pull Russia out of the alliance with China, neutralize it in a political sense, to then be able to better tackle China which is the real threat to the American (economic) supremacy.

To neutralize China in any sense is a fool's errand and failed mission from the get-go.

China is a threat to the Empire? And that's a bad thing?...exactly why???

I, for one, will not compromise my soul, and sell out Iran and China and the well-being of this planet for a fantasy peace with Russia that will never last or come to fruition with the devious, duplicitous Zionist American Empire.

Daniel , Jul 21, 2018 8:49:42 PM | 66
Trump's tax forms.

I ridiculed the "Show Us Your Tax Forms" protests as diversionary and useless. He's not going to listen to a bunch of "liberals" and his fans have already accepted he's not releasing them.

But let us remember that he promised his fans several times during the campaign that he would release them. He made up the excuse of being audited, but he (or his handlers) felt it necessary to make that promise.

Yet he hasn't. Why? Is it because he's so shy about his wealth? Doesn't want to rub in our faces how much income he makes? Hardly.

It should be pretty clear there's stuff in there he doesn't want to make public. Chances are, it's stuff that might turn off some of his fan base (because Trump haters gonna hate no matter what).

So, the point that the "Deep State" hasn't leaked them came up. That's absolutely true, and should tell us something.

It tells us that this "Deep State" has chosen not to hurt Trump by releasing them. Maybe there really is this "war" the MSM shows us daily, and they're waiting for the right time. Or maybe, this "war" is a psyop.

Daniel , Jul 21, 2018 9:03:56 PM | 67
Thanks James @56 for a reasoned and reasonable reply.

First, we are all enmeshed in the MSM narrative even if we don't read or watch MSM outlets. Even here at MoA, we are given samples of them, and discuss their meaning. In fact, personally exposing oneself to the MSM directly may give one a better idea of what narratives they're trying to sell.

What's happened in Syria since Trump came in is that SAA and its allies have retaken most of the south, and the US has firmly militarily taken the north, while NATO ally Turkey has conquered significant portions along their border.

What's happened is the US has killed as many as 200 Russians for daring to get too close to the US proxy fighters on "their" side of the country. That's separate from the at least 4 times the US has bombed Syrian forces, and the Syrian jet it shot down.

By some accounts, the US coalition killed 40,000 civilians in "liberating" Raqqa, while firing more artillery shells than any time in the past 1/2 century. We've established about 12 military bases.

Which all boils down to an escalation of Obama's war, with the apparent admission that the "regime change" failed (which even during Obama's reign, was an on again/off again issue).

But I grant you that you and I are not in positions to do much about any of this. You could try to affect your government, and i mine, but we know we have no influence. So, perhaps just accepting that sitting back and watching the horror show is all we can do anyway.

Peace to you and yours.

[Jul 21, 2018] The Trump-Putin summit Russophrenia explained

Notable quotes:
"... When Trump himself calls the establishment's attitude toward Russia a " rigged witch hunt ," the question must arise: What is going on ..."
"... China is the world's second-largest economy and the top US creditor. It owns 19% of the US debt, more than any other nation. China's military expenditures are almost four times Russia's. Most experts agree that China is about to displace the US as the world's largest and most influential economy. Why Russia, and not China, is being painted as America's chief geopolitical foe is hard to grasp. ..."
Jul 21, 2018 | www.atimes.com

As expected, the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki produced a media circus across the Atlantic. Western commentators were hell-bent on insulting President Donald Trump as a traitor and denigrating President Vladimir Putin as an " autocrat ," "dictator" and the "enemy" of the free world, the United States in particular.

Never mind that Putin is an elected president and the whole of Russia is dreaming about normalizing relations with the United States. Never mind that with all Robert Mueller's indictments there's a long way to go to make a case for a Trump/Putin conspiracy. The point is, Putin has become the Western media's devil incarnate, and Trump the same media's favorite whipping boy.

In one astute observation, Western media exhibit a "Russophrenia" – " a condition where the sufferer believes Russia is both about to collapse, and take over the world ."

When Trump himself calls the establishment's attitude toward Russia a " rigged witch hunt ," the question must arise: What is going on and why does Russia have the honor of being singled out in a world of dozens of real autocrats who hate the West and murder their political opponents?

Yes, Russia is a big country with nuclear weapons, which allows it to shoot above its weight in international politics. Yes, it openly supported the pro-Russian referendum in Crimea and annexed the peninsula soon thereafter. And yes, it does provide military support to the pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine. But given all the secessionist movements supported by outside forces across the world, none of this (save nuclear weapons) is remarkable enough to merit the special treatment.

At the same time, be it in politics or in the economy, Russia's real impact on the United States is minuscule. Hacking or not, nobody can seriously claim that Moscow could sway the outcome of the US presidential elections.

Russia does not make it to the list of the top 10 economies in the world, trailing South Korea and Canada. The value of US goods exports to Russia in 2017 was less than US$7 billion, while goods imports from Russia were valued at slightly more than $17 billion. The total trade turnover was barely above 0.1% of the US gross domestic product.

China is the world's second-largest economy and the top US creditor. It owns 19% of the US debt, more than any other nation. China's military expenditures are almost four times Russia's. Most experts agree that China is about to displace the US as the world's largest and most influential economy. Why Russia, and not China, is being painted as America's chief geopolitical foe is hard to grasp.

Why Russia, and not China, is being painted as America's chief geopolitical foe is hard to grasp. It is also hard to grasp the intensity of vilification of either Putin or Trump in Western media

It is also hard to grasp the intensity of vilification of either Putin or Trump in Western media. The Obama-era director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, calls the summit " nothing short of treasonous " – an accusation never applied to Trump's admittedly one-sided concessions to Kim Jong-un. The Washington Post talks of appeasement . The Daily Mirror calls Trump " Putin's poodle ." The New York Times has muddied itself enough to carry a cartoon depicting the two leaders as gay lovers .

Such a level of hostility was not even demonstrated against the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. It is clearly unimaginable with regards to Communist Party-led China or even one-man-ruled North Korea. Yet it is acceptable and encouraged with respect to the third-rate capitalist country that Russia has now become.

And it is here, perhaps, where the key to the puzzle lies. It is not wise to hurl street-level insults at a country that is your real geopolitical competitor and has enough power to make you regret your behavior. That was the case with the USSR yesterday, and this is the case with the People's Republic of China today.

The ideological challenge presented to freewheeling capitalist individualism by stern communist collectivism also helped to maintain a modicum of respect throughout the Cold War years. It was only when Russia went capitalist, and conspicuously failed to advance into the ranks of the top economies, that former respect gave way to contempt. It was only after Russia abandoned its communist ethics that it became subject to the Western media hooliganism exemplified by The New York Times' distasteful satire.

Western hatred of Putin cannot be explained by Crimea, or Donbass, or the alleged poisoning of four individuals of no interest to the Kremlin by a military-grade nerve toxin with a recognizably "Russian" signature. It can be explained by one thing only – Russia's successful opposition to the US world-domination machine.

Were Russia still a Soviet socialist state, this hatred could yet be complemented by respect. But a capitalist Russia trying to oppose the world's leading capitalist nation, while falling ever further behind in trade and economy – such a Russia can only elicit hatred complemented with contempt. Which makes for ever more vitriolic Russophrenia.

[Jul 21, 2018] The John Brennans of the world and the lib-Dem-media-neocon mob of which he is a member now routinely traffic in hyperventilating accusations of treason, have forfeited any claim to credibility or respect.

Jul 21, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Gerard July 20, 2018 at 11:00 am

We're at a point now where it's really difficult to have an intelligent conversation, a serious discussion, a rational debate about this stuff.

The reason being that the John Brennans of the world and the lib-Dem-media-neocon mob of which he is a member, which now routinely traffic in hyperventilating accusations of treason, have forfeited any claim to credibility or respect.

Having concocted the conspiracy-fantasy of Trump being a puppet of Putin and having contrived a farcical criminal investigation of imaginary "collusion," that same mob staged the latest ludicrous meltdown -- over Trump's bumbling, stumbling press conference in Helsinki with the Evil Monster Putin.

The only appropriate response now to people like John Brennan and his cabal of fools is sarcasm, mockery, and contempt. They are beyond the reach of reason or evidence or facts. Indeed, they have zero interest in evidence or facts. They simply emote and spew.

The main question in my mind is this: are the John Brennans of the world really stupid enough to believe their vicious nonsense or are they so hopelessly dishonest and lacking in conscience that they propagate poisonous falsehoods for the simple reason they know it advances their political agenda of delegitimizing Trump's presidency.

I'm guessing more the second than the first.

And if in the process, they whip up an atmosphere of venomous hysteria and damage U.S.-Russia relations to the point where scholars like Stephen Cohen and John Mearsheimer call the environment as dangerous as that which existed at the time of the U.S.-Soviet Cuban missile crisis and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves their Doomsday Clock to two minutes before midnight (as recently happened) well, you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette, right?

Honest to God, the dimension and character of this vast circus of corruption and lies is breathtaking. It's downright freaking biblical.

[Jul 21, 2018] Either Trump Fires These People Or The Borg Will Have Won

Notable quotes:
"... The borg, financed and sworn to the agenda of globalists and the military-industrial-media complex, has its orders and is acting on them. The globalists want more free trade agreements, no tariffs and more immigration to prevent higher wages. Capital does not have a national attachment. It does not care about the 'deplorables' who support Trump and his policies: ..."
"... Nearly three-fourths, or 73 percent, of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who responded to a Pew Research survey out this week said they felt increased tariffs would benefit the country. ..."
"... Donald Trump is, indeed, a kind of traitor to the Washington Consensus, a hyper-militarized capitalist utopia of corporate dominated global supply chains that doubled the international wage-slave workforce in the last two decades of the 20th century and herded these desperate billions into a race to the bottom. The leadership of both corporate parties conspired to force U.S. workers into the global meat-grinder. ..."
"... The weapon industry and the military recognize that the 'war of terror' is nearing its end. To sell more they need to create an new 'enemy' that looks big enough to justify large and long-term spending. Russia, the most capable opponent the U.S. could have, is the designated target. A new Cold War will give justification for all kinds of fantastic and useless weapons. ..."
"... Trump grand foreign policy is following a realist assessment . He sees that previous administrations pushed Russia into the Chinese camp by aggressive anti-Russian policies in Europe and the Middle East. He wants to pull Russia out of the alliance with China, neutralize it in a political sense, to then be able to better tackle China which is the real thread to the American (economic) supremacy. ..."
Jul 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

President's Trump successful summit with President Putin was used by the 'resistance' and the deep state to launch a coup-attempt against Trump. Their minimum aim is to put Trump into a (virtual) political cage where he can no longer pursue his foreign policy agenda.

One does not have to be a fan of Trump's policies and still see the potential danger. A situation where he can no longer act freely will likely be worse. What Trump has done so far still does not add up to the disastrous policies and crimes his predecessor committed.

The borg, financed and sworn to the agenda of globalists and the military-industrial-media complex, has its orders and is acting on them. The globalists want more free trade agreements, no tariffs and more immigration to prevent higher wages. Capital does not have a national attachment. It does not care about the 'deplorables' who support Trump and his policies:

[P]olls show that Trump appears to still have the support of the bulk of Republican voters when it comes to tariffs. Nearly three-fourths, or 73 percent, of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who responded to a Pew Research survey out this week said they felt increased tariffs would benefit the country.

His 'isolationist' economic policies make Trump an enemy of the globalists :

Donald Trump is, indeed, a kind of traitor to the Washington Consensus, a hyper-militarized capitalist utopia of corporate dominated global supply chains that doubled the international wage-slave workforce in the last two decades of the 20th century and herded these desperate billions into a race to the bottom. The leadership of both corporate parties conspired to force U.S. workers into the global meat-grinder.

The weapon industry and the military recognize that the 'war of terror' is nearing its end. To sell more they need to create an new 'enemy' that looks big enough to justify large and long-term spending. Russia, the most capable opponent the U.S. could have, is the designated target. A new Cold War will give justification for all kinds of fantastic and useless weapons.

Trump does not buy the nonsense claims of 'Russian meddling' in the U.S. elections and openly says so. He does not believe that Russia wants to attack anyone. To him Russia is not an enemy.

Trump grand foreign policy is following a realist assessment . He sees that previous administrations pushed Russia into the Chinese camp by aggressive anti-Russian policies in Europe and the Middle East. He wants to pull Russia out of the alliance with China, neutralize it in a political sense, to then be able to better tackle China which is the real thread to the American (economic) supremacy.

This week was a prelude to the coup against Trump :

Former CIA chief John Brennan denounced Trump as a "traitor" who had "committed high crimes" in holding a friendly summit with Putin.

It can't get more seditious than that. Trump is being denigrated by almost the entire political and media establishment in the US as a "treasonous" enemy of the state.

Following this logic, there is only one thing for it: the US establishment is calling for a coup to depose the 45th president. One Washington Post oped out of a total of five assailing the president gave the following stark ultimatum: "If you work for Trump, quit now".

Some high ranking people working for Trump followed that advice. His chief of staff John Kelly rallied others against him:

According to three sources familiar with the situation, Kelly called around to Republicans on Capitol Hill and gave them the go-ahead to speak out against Trump. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan held televised press conferences to assert that Russia did meddle in the election.

Others who attacked Trump over his diplomatic efforts with Russia included the Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats who used an widely distributed interview for that:

The White House had little visibility into what Coats might say. The intelligence director's team had turned down at least one offer from a senior White House official to help prepare him for the long-scheduled interview, pointing out that he had known Mitchell for years and was comfortable talking with her.

Coats was extraordinarily candid in the interview, at times questioning Trump's judgment -- such as the president's decision to meet with Putin for two hours without any aides present beyond interpreters -- and revealing the rift between the president and the intelligence community.

FBI Director Wray also undermined his boss' position:

FBI Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday defended Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a "straight shooter," and said the Russia investigation is no "witch hunt."

Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, Wray said he stood by his view that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election in some capacity and that the threat remained active.

A day latter Secretary of Defense Mattis also issued a statement that contradicted his president's policy:

Secretary of Defense James Mattis took his turn doing the implicit disavowing in a statement about new military aid to Ukraine:

"Russia should suffer consequences for its aggressive, destabilizing behavior and its illegal occupation of Ukraine. The fundamental question we must ask ourselves is do we wish to strengthen our partners in key regions or leave them with no other options than to turn to Russia, thereby undermining a once in a generation opportunity to more closely align nations with the U.S. vision for global security and stability."

Pat Lang thinks that Trump should fire Coats, Wary and Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General who is overseeing the Mueller investigation.

My advice is to spare Rosenstein, for now, as firing him would lead to a great uproar in Congress. The Mueller investigation has not brought up anything which is dangerous to Trump and is unlikely to do so in the immediate future. He and Rosenstein can be fired at a latter stage.

But Wray and Coats do deserve a pink slip and so do Kelly and Mattis. They are political appointees who work 'at the pleasure of the President'.

The U.S. has the legislative and the judicative as a counterweight to the president who leads the executive. The 'deep state' and its moles within the executive should have no role in that balance. The elected president can and must demand loyalty from those who work for him.

Those who sabotage him should be fired, not in a Saturday night massacre but publicly, with a given reason and all at the same time. They do not deserve any warning. Their rolling heads will get the attention of others who are tempted by the borg to act against the lawful policy directives of their higher up.

All this is not a defense of Trump. I for one despise his antics and most of his policies. But having a bad president of the United States implementing the policies he campaigned on, and doing so within the proper process, is way better than having unaccountable forces dictating their policies to him.

It will be impossible for Trump to get anything done if his direct subordinates, who work 'at his pleasure', publicly sabotage the implementation of his policies. Either he fires these people or the borg will have won.

[Jul 21, 2018] Solomon Climb Down From The Summit Of Hostile Propaganda Zero Hedge

Jul 21, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Solomon: Climb Down From The Summit Of Hostile Propaganda

by Tyler Durden Fri, 07/20/2018 - 22:25 7 SHARES Authored by Norman Solomon via TruthDig.com,

Throughout the day before the summit in Helsinki, the lead story on the New York Times home page stayed the same: "Just by Meeting With Trump, Putin Comes Out Ahead." The Sunday headline was in harmony with the tone of U.S. news coverage overall. As for media commentary, the Washington Post was in the dominant groove as it editorialized that Russia's President Vladimir Putin is "an implacably hostile foreign adversary."

Contempt for diplomacy with Russia is now extreme. Mainline U.S. journalists and top Democrats often bait President Donald Trump in zero-sum terms. No doubt Hillary Clinton thought she was sending out an applause line in her tweet Sunday night: "Question for President Trump as he meets Putin: Do you know which team you play for?"

A bellicose stance toward Russia has become so routine and widespread that we might not give it a second thought -- and that makes it all the more hazardous. After President George W. Bush declared "You're either with us or against us," many Americans gradually realized what was wrong with a Manichean view of the world. Such an outlook is even more dangerous today.

Since early 2017, the U.S. mass media have laid it on thick with the rough political equivalent of a painting technique known as chiaroscuro -- "the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition," in the words of Wikipedia. The Russiagate frenzy is largely about punching up contrasts between the United States (angelic and victimized) and Russia (sinister and victimizer).

Countless stories with selective facts are being told that way. But other selectively fact-based stories could also be told to portray the United States as a sinister victimizer and Russia as an angelic victim. Those governments and their conformist media outlets are relentless in telling it either way. As the great journalist I.F. Stone observed long ago, "All governments lie, and nothing they say should be believed." In other words: don't trust, verify.

Often the biggest lies involve what remains unsaid. For instance, U.S. media rarely mention such key matters as the promise-breaking huge expansion of NATO to Russia's borders since the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the brazen U.S. intervention in Russia's pivotal 1996 presidential election, or the U.S. government's 2002 withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, or the more than 800 U.S. military bases overseas -- in contrast to Russia's nine.

For human survival on this planet, an overarching truth appears in an open letter published last week by The Nation magazine:

"No political advantage, real or imagined, could possibly compensate for the consequences if even a fraction of U.S. and Russian arsenals were to be utilized in a thermonuclear exchange. The tacit pretense that the worsening of U.S.-Russian relations does not worsen the odds of survival for the next generations is profoundly false."

The initial 26 signers of the open letter " Common Ground: For Secure Elections and True National Security " included Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, writer and feminist organizer Gloria Steinem, former UN ambassador Gov. Bill Richardson, political analyst Noam Chomsky, former covert CIA operations officer Valerie Plame, activist leader Rev. Dr. William Barber II, filmmaker Michael Moore, former Nixon White House counsel John Dean, Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, former U.S. ambassador to the USSR Jack F. Matlock Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winning writers Alice Walker and Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, former senator Adlai Stevenson III, and former longtime House Armed Services Committee member Patricia Schroeder. (I was also one of the initial signers.)

Since its release five days ago, the open letter has gained support from a petition already signed by 45,000 people . The petition campaign aims to amplify the call for protecting the digital infrastructure of the electoral process that is now "vulnerable to would-be hackers based anywhere" -- and for taking "concrete steps to ease tensions between the nuclear superpowers."

We need a major shift in the U.S. approach toward Russia. Clearly the needed shift won't be initiated by the Republican or Democratic leaders in Congress; it must come from Americans who make their voices heard. The lives -- and even existence -- of future generations are at stake in the relationship between Washington and Moscow.

Many of the petition's grassroots signers have posted comments along with their names. Here are a few of my favorites:

* From Nevada: " We all share the same planet! We better learn how to do it safely or face the consequences of blowing ourselves up! "

* From New Mexico: "The earth will not survive a nuclear war. The weapons we have today are able to cause much more destruction than those of previous eras. We must find a way to common ground."

* From Massachusetts: " It is imperative that we take steps to protect the sanctity of our elections and to prevent nuclear war anywhere on the earth ."

* From Kentucky: "Secure elections are a fundamental part of a democratic system. But this could become meaningless in the event of thermonuclear war."

* From California: " There is only madness and hubris in talk of belligerence toward others, especially when we have such dangerous weapons and human error has almost led to our annihilation already more than once in the past half-century ."

Yet a wide array of media outlets, notably the "Russiagate"-obsessed network MSNBC , keeps egging on progressives to climb toward peaks of anti-Russian jingoism . The line of march is often in virtual lockstep with GOP hyper-hawks like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The incessant drumbeat is in sync with what Martin Luther King Jr. called "the madness of militarism."

Meanwhile, as Dr. King said, "We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation."

Zorba's idea Fri, 07/20/2018 - 22:38 Permalink

My Father in law is one of the last of the Iwo Jima Marines...he is still of sound mind, enough to say, it takes far more courage for a man to solve a conflict peacefully then to end it violently. What sickness lies in the hearts and minds of these people beating the drums of war is beyond me, especially knowing none of them would ever risk their own lives. Add that to your definition of Tyranny.

[Jul 21, 2018] "Fun experiment: of those old enough, how many today who believe the "Trump is a Russian asset" story, in 2003 believed the Iraq has WMD story? 'Cause the source who lied to you in 2003, the intel community, is your same source today."

Jul 21, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

BobS July 20, 2018 at 3:43 pm

"Fun experiment: of those old enough, how many today who believe the "Trump is a Russian asset" story, in 2003 believed the Iraq has WMD story? 'Cause the source who lied to you in 2003, the intel community, is your same source today."

Growing up as I did in the Nixon/Vietnam era, I developed a skepticism of the 'official' story, something that served me well through Iran contra, incubator babies being tossed to the floor, and WMD's (a skepticism reinforced at the time by Scott Ritter, among others). As I recall, the WMD story was less a failure of intelligence as much as an administration insisting on so-called 'stovepiped' intelligence to sell their war to an American public through a mostly compliant MSM.
Regardless, my conclusion that Trump is a "Russian asset" is a result of my belief that Trump- who has yet to disclose the financial information that would disprove that belief- is reliant on Russian money, some or all of it organized crime related, to sustain his 'empire', and that there is significant overlap between the Russian mob and the Russian government.
His actions as president haven't done anything to dispel me of my belief that he is a 'Russian asset', including his traitorous behavior this past week.

[Jul 20, 2018] So many (ex-) MI6 operators (Steele, Tait, etc) involved in the story. It is interesting that the media don t question the intense involvement of the British in all this. And of course, the British haven t been laggards in adding fuel to the fire by the whole novichok hoax

Highly recommended!
So British were involved in fabricating of 'Guccifer 2.0' persona. Nice...
Notable quotes:
"... It was Matt Tait who, using the 'Twitter' handle @pwnallthethings, identified the name and patronymic of Dzerzhinsky in the 'metadata' of the 'Guccifer 2.0' material on 15 June 2016, the day after Ellen Nakashima first disseminated the BS from 'CrowdStrike' in the 'WP.' ..."
"... 'Matt Tait is a senior cybersecurity fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously he was CEO of Capital Alpha Security, a consultancy in the UK, worked at Google Project Zero, was a principal security consultant for iSEC Partners, and NGS Secure, and worked as an information security specialist for GCHQ.' ..."
"... As I have noted before on SST, a cursory examination of records at 'Companies House' establishes that 'Capital Alpha Security', which was supposed to have provided Tait with an – independent – source of income at the time he unearthed this 'smoking gun' incriminating the GRU, never did any business at all. So, a question arises: how was Tait making ends meet at that time: busking on the London underground, perhaps? ..."
"... The document, when available, may clarify a few loose ends, but the general picture seems clear. Last November, Tait filed 'dormant company accounts' for the company's first year in existence, up until February 2017. One can only do this if one has absolutely no revenue, and absolutely no expenditure. Not even the smallest contract to sort out malware on someone's computer, or to buy equipment for the office. ..."
"... He then failed to file the 'Confirmation statement', which every company must is legally obliged to produce annually, if it is not to be struck off. This failure led to a 'First Gazette notice for compulsory strike-off' in May. ..."
"... However, Tait may well anticipate that there is there will never be any call for him to go back into the big wide world, as the large organisation in which he has now found employment is part of a 'Borgist' network. So much is evident from another entry on the 'Lawfare' site: ..."
"... Also relevant here is the fact that, rather transparently, this placing of the GRU centre stage is bound up with the attempt to suggest that there is some kind of 'Gerasimov doctrine', designed to undermine the West by 'hybrid warfare.' Unfortunately, the original author of this claptrap, Mark Galeotti, who, I regret to say, is, like Tait, British, has now recanted and confessed. In March, he published a piece on the 'Foreign Policy' site, under the title: 'I'm Sorry for Creating the 'Gerasimov Doctrine'; I was the first to write about Russia's infamous high-tech military strategy. One small problem: it doesn't exist.' ..."
"... Quite clearly, the 'Guccifer 2.0' persona is a crude fabrication by someone who has absolutely no understanding of, or indeed interest in, the bitter complexities of both of the history of Russia and of the 'borderlands', not only in the Soviet period but before and after. ..."
"... Jeffrey Carr is one of the latter, and his familiarity with intelligence matters is clear from his organization of the annual "Suits and Spooks" Conference. I believe he was the first to raise questions about the DNC hack which didn't pass his smell test. ..."
"... One quick way to know their bias is the AC test. Google their name plus "Atlantic Council". Ridd fails badly. ..."
"... The Comey, Brennan, Mueller claim - indeed a central one upon which the recent indictment rests- that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian State agent that hacked the DNC- was discredited and put to rest last year by the forensics conducted by Bill Binney and his colleagues. The Guccifer 2.0 metadata was analyzed for its transmission speed, and based on the internet speeds to and from numerous test locations abroad and in the U.S., it was determined to have been impossible for the so-called Guccifer 2.0 to have hacked the DNC computers over the internet. The transmission speed however did correspond to the speed of the transfer to a thumb drive. Additionally, it was found that the data had been manipulated and split into two parts to simulate a July and a September transfer, when in fact the parts merge perfectly as single file, and where, according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence would be 100 to the 50th power. ..."
"... There is a pattern of abuse of formerly well regarded institutions to achieve the propaganda aims of the Deep State establishment. The depths that were plumbed to push the Iraq WMD falsehoods are well known. Yet no one was held to account nor was there any honest accounting of the abuse. There have been pretenses like the Owen inquiry that you note. ..."
"... It seems that we are marching towards a credibility crisis similar to what was experienced in the Soviet Union when no one trusted the contents in Pravda. ..."
"... What is to be gained by the leadership in Britain in promoting these biological weapons cases since Litvinenko? In the US it is quite apparent that the Deep State have become extremely powerful and the likelihood that Trump recognizes that resistance is futile is very high. Schumer may be proven right that they have six ways from Sunday to make you kowtow to their dictats. ..."
"... I agree that taken by itself, the Dzerzinsky thing would be an anomaly only and could be dismissed as "black humor" of a kind often found in hackers. However, taken with all the other evidence produced by Adam Carter, it becomes much more obviously an attempt to support a false flag "Russian hacker" narrative that otherwise is porous. ..."
"... You want us to believe that the GRU are so sloppy and so inexperienced that they would launch a hack on the DNC and not take every measure to ensure there was no link whatsoever to anything Russian? Any former intel officer worth a damn knows that an operation to disrupt the election in a country the size of the United States would start with a risk/reward assessment, would require a team of at least 100 persons and would not be writing any code that could in any way be traced to Russia. ..."
"... Doctrine-mongering and repeating birth of new faux-academic "entities", such as a "hybrid war" (any war is hybrid by definition), is a distinct feature of the Western "political science-military history" establishment. Galeotti, who for some strange reason passes as Russia "expert" is a perfect example of such "expertise" and doctrine-mongering. Military professionals largely met this "hybrid warfare" BS with disdain. ..."
"... I have to say that the more I look into this whole Russiagate affair, which is mostly in the minds of democrats (and a few republicans) and the MSM, the more it seems that there is indeed a foreign conspiracy to meddle in the internal affairs of the US (and in the presidential elections) but the meddling entity is not Russia. It is the British! ..."
"... So many (ex-) MI6 operators (Steele, Tait, etc) involved in the story. It is interesting that the media don't question the intense involvement of the British in all this. And of course, the British haven't been laggards in adding fuel to the fire by the whole novichok hoax. ..."
Jul 20, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

As some commenters on SST seem still to have difficulty grasping that the presence of 'metadata' alluding to 'Iron Felix' in the 'Guccifer 2.0' material is strong evidence that the GRU were being framed over a leak, rather than that they were responsible for a hack, an update on the British end of the conspiracy seems in order.

If you look at the 'Lawfare' blog, in which a key figure is James Comey's crony Benjamin Wittes, you will find a long piece published last Friday, entitled 'Russia Indictment 2.0: What to Make of Mueller's Hacking Indictment.'

Among the authors, in addition to Wittes himself, is the sometime GCHQ employee Matt Tait. It appears that the former head of that organisation, the Blairite 'trusty' Robert Hannigan, who must know where a good few skeletons are buried, is a figure of some moment in the conspiracy.

(See https://www.lawfareblog.com... .)

It was Matt Tait who, using the 'Twitter' handle @pwnallthethings, identified the name and patronymic of Dzerzhinsky in the 'metadata' of the 'Guccifer 2.0' material on 15 June 2016, the day after Ellen Nakashima first disseminated the BS from 'CrowdStrike' in the 'WP.'

The story was picked up the following day in a report on the 'Ars Technica' site, and Tait's own account appeared on the 'Lawfare' site, to which he has been a regular contributor, on 28 July.

(See https://arstechnica.com/inf... ; https://www.lawfareblog.com... .)

According to the CV provided in conjunction with the new article:

'Matt Tait is a senior cybersecurity fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously he was CEO of Capital Alpha Security, a consultancy in the UK, worked at Google Project Zero, was a principal security consultant for iSEC Partners, and NGS Secure, and worked as an information security specialist for GCHQ.'

As I have noted before on SST, a cursory examination of records at 'Companies House' establishes that 'Capital Alpha Security', which was supposed to have provided Tait with an – independent – source of income at the time he unearthed this 'smoking gun' incriminating the GRU, never did any business at all. So, a question arises: how was Tait making ends meet at that time: busking on the London underground, perhaps?

(See https://beta.companieshouse... .)

Actually, there has been a recent update in the records. Somewhat prematurely perhaps, there is an entry dated 24 July 2018, entitled 'Final Gazette dissolved via compulsory strike-off. This document is being processed and will be available in 5 days.'

The document, when available, may clarify a few loose ends, but the general picture seems clear. Last November, Tait filed 'dormant company accounts' for the company's first year in existence, up until February 2017. One can only do this if one has absolutely no revenue, and absolutely no expenditure. Not even the smallest contract to sort out malware on someone's computer, or to buy equipment for the office.

He then failed to file the 'Confirmation statement', which every company must is legally obliged to produce annually, if it is not to be struck off. This failure led to a 'First Gazette notice for compulsory strike-off' in May.

It is, of course, possible that at the time Tait set up the company he was genuinely intending to try to make a go of a consultancy, and simply got sidetracked by other opportunities.

However – speaking from experience – people who have set up small 'one man band' companies to market skills learnt in large organisations, and then go back into such organisations, commonly think it worth their while to spend the minimal amount of time required to file the documentation required to keep the company alive.

If one sees any realistic prospect that one may either want to or need to go back into the big wide world again, this is the sensible course of action: particularly now when, with the internet, filing the relevant documentation takes about half an hour a year, and costs a trivial sum.

However, Tait may well anticipate that there is there will never be any call for him to go back into the big wide world, as the large organisation in which he has now found employment is part of a 'Borgist' network. So much is evident from another entry on the 'Lawfare' site:

'Bobby Chesney is the Charles I. Francis Professor in Law and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Texas School of Law. He also serves as the Director of UT-Austin's interdisciplinary research center the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law. His scholarship encompasses a wide range of issues relating to national security and the law, including detention, targeting, prosecution, covert action, and the state secrets privilege; most of it is posted here. Along with Ben Wittes and Jack Goldsmith, he is one of the co-founders of the blog.'

(See https://www.lawfareblog.com... .)

Also relevant here is the fact that, rather transparently, this placing of the GRU centre stage is bound up with the attempt to suggest that there is some kind of 'Gerasimov doctrine', designed to undermine the West by 'hybrid warfare.' Unfortunately, the original author of this claptrap, Mark Galeotti, who, I regret to say, is, like Tait, British, has now recanted and confessed. In March, he published a piece on the 'Foreign Policy' site, under the title: 'I'm Sorry for Creating the 'Gerasimov Doctrine'; I was the first to write about Russia's infamous high-tech military strategy. One small problem: it doesn't exist.'

(See https://foreignpolicy.com/2... .)

If anyone wants to grasp what the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, General Valery Gerasimov, was actually saying in the crucial February 2013 article which Galeotti was discussing, and how his thinking has developed subsequently, the place to look is, as so often, the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth.

Informed discussions by Charles Bartles and Roger McDermott are at https://www.armyupress.army... ; http://www.worldinwar.eu/wp... ; and https://jamestown.org/progr... .

In relation to the ongoing attempt to frame the GRU, it is material that, in his 2013 piece, Gerasimov harks back to two pivotal figures in the arguments of the interwar years. Of these, Georgy Isserson, the Jewish doctor's son from Kaunas who became a Civil War 'political commissar' and then a key associate of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, was the great pioneer theorist of 'deep operations.'

The ideas of the other, Aleksandr Svechin, the former Tsarist 'genstabist', born in Odessa into an ethnically Russian military family, who was the key opponent of Tukhachevky and Isserson in the arguments of the 'Twenties, provided key parts of the intellectual basis of the Gorbachev-era 'new thinking.'

The 'Ars Technica' article in which Tait's claims were initially disseminated opened:

'We still don't know who he is or whether he works for the Russian government, but one thing is for sure: Guccifer 2.0 – the nom de guerre of the person claiming he hacked the Democratic National Committee and published hundreds of pages that appeared to prove it – left behind fingerprints implicating a Russian-speaking person with a nostalgia for the country's lost Soviet era.'

In his 2013 article, Gerasimov harks back to the catastrophe which overcame the Red Army in June 1941. Ironically, this was the product of the Stalinist leadership's disregard of the cautions produced not only by Svechin, but by Isserson. In regard to the latter, the article remarks that:

'The fate of this "prophet of the Fatherland" unfolded tragically. Our country paid in great quantities of blood for not listening to the conclusions of this professor of the General Staff Academy.'

As it happens, while both Svechin and Tukhachevsky were shot by the heirs of 'Felix Edmundovich', the sentence of death on Isserson was commuted, and he spent the war in prison and labour camps, while others used his ideas to devastating effect against the Germans.

Quite clearly, the 'Guccifer 2.0' persona is a crude fabrication by someone who has absolutely no understanding of, or indeed interest in, the bitter complexities of both of the history of Russia and of the 'borderlands', not only in the Soviet period but before and after.

Using this criterion as a 'filter', the obvious candidates are traditional Anglo-Saxon 'Russophobes', like Sir Richard Dearlove and Christopher Steele, or the 'insulted and injured' of the erstwhile Russian and Soviet empires, so many of them from the 'borderlands', of the type of Victoria Nuland, or the various Poles, Ukrainians and Balts and Jews who have had so much influence on American policy.

(I should note that other Jews, not only in Russia, but outside, including in Israel, think quite differently, in particular as they are very well aware, as Isserson would have been, of the extent to which 'borderlands' nationalists were enthusiastic collaborators with the Germans in the 'Final Solution'. On this, there is a large and growing academic literature.)

It is not particularly surprising that many of the victims of the Russian and Soviet empires have enjoyed seeing the tables turned, and getting their own back. But it is rather far from clear that this makes for good intelligence or sound policy. We were unable to load Disqus. If you are a moderator please see our troubleshooting guide .


blue peacock , 2 days ago
How does the objective truth get disclosed in an environment of extreme deceit by so many parties?

How to trust western intelligence when they have such a long and sordid track record of deceit, lies and propaganda? At the same time there is such a long history of Russian and Chinese intelligence and information operations against the west.

Then there is the nexus among the highest levels of US law enforcement and intelligence as well as political elites in both parties and key individuals in the media complex.

We are living in a hall of mirrors and it seems the trend is towards confirmation bias in information consumption.

richardstevenhack , 2 days ago
Excellent post, especially the debunking of the 'Gerasimov doctrine' which I always thought was more hand-waving and Russian mind-reading.

It's important to realize that there are a number of people in the infosec community who have biases against Russia, just as there are in the general population. Then there are more cautious people, who recognize the difficulty in attributing a hack to any specific person absent solid, incontrovertible, non-circumstantial and non-spoofable (and preferably offline) evidence.

Tait doesn't appear to be one of the latter. Thomas Rid would be another. There are others.

Jeffrey Carr is one of the latter, and his familiarity with intelligence matters is clear from his organization of the annual "Suits and Spooks" Conference. I believe he was the first to raise questions about the DNC hack which didn't pass his smell test.

There are also a number of companies in infosec who rely on latching onto a particular strain of hacker, the more publicly exploitable for PR purposes the better, as a means of keeping the company name in front of potential high-profile and highly billable clients. CrowdStrike and its Russia obsession isn't the only one that's been tagged with that propensity.

Mandiant could be referred to as the "Chinese, all the time" company, for example. Richard Bejtlich was at Fireeye and the became Chief Security Officer when they acquired Mandiant. He spent quite a bit of effort on his blog warning about the Chinese military buildup as a huge threat to the US. He's former USAF so perhaps that's not surprising.

Bottom line: Confirmation bias is a real thing.

David Blake -> richardstevenhack , 5 hours ago
One quick way to know their bias is the AC test. Google their name plus "Atlantic Council". Ridd fails badly.
Barbara Ann , 2 days ago
Glad David's comment has been reproduced as a post in its own right, this is a critically important topic. IMO Matt Tait plays the role of midwife in this conspiracy. His Twitter thread

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mlnw , 2 days ago
The Comey, Brennan, Mueller claim - indeed a central one upon which the recent indictment rests- that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian State agent that hacked the DNC- was discredited and put to rest last year by the forensics conducted by Bill Binney and his colleagues. The Guccifer 2.0 metadata was analyzed for its transmission speed, and based on the internet speeds to and from numerous test locations abroad and in the U.S., it was determined to have been impossible for the so-called Guccifer 2.0 to have hacked the DNC computers over the internet. The transmission speed however did correspond to the speed of the transfer to a thumb drive. Additionally, it was found that the data had been manipulated and split into two parts to simulate a July and a September transfer, when in fact the parts merge perfectly as single file, and where, according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence would be 100 to the 50th power.

As for the crude trace fingerprints (e.g. the referencing of Dzerzinsky), one of the Wikileaks data dumps (Vault 7 Marble) during a period when Assange was negotiating with the Administration - there were two at the time (Vault 7 Marble and Vault 7 Grasshopper), the release of which apparently enraged Mike Pompeo- was designed to obfuscate, fabricate and frame countries such as Russia, Iran or North Korea by pretending to be the target country, including in the use of target's alphabet and language.

VIPs has written numerous articles on this in Consortium News. See also the report by Patrick Lawrence Smith in The Nation at: https://www.thenation.com/a... . (It was apparently so hot at the time- and disputed by several other VIPs members- that The Nation sought an independent assessment by third party, though those comments were easily addressed and dismissed in seriatim by Binney in an annex to the article.)

Binney has explained his forensic analysis and conclusions at numerous forums, and in a sit-down with Secretary Pompeo in October, 2017- though Mueller, the FBI, and mainstream and some of the alternative press seem either deaf, dumb and blind to it all, or interested in discrediting the study. The irony is, I'd venture to guess, that Binney, with his 40 years of experience, including as Technical Director and technical guru at the NSA, is, even in retirement, more sophisticated in these matters than any one at the Agency, or the FBI, or CIA, or certainly, the Congressional Intelligence Committees. So, it is astounding that any or all of them could have, but did not, invite him to testify as an expert.

Moreover, the NSA has a record of every transmission, and also would have it on backup files. And, the FBI has been sitting on Seth Rich's computer and his communications with Wikileaks, and presumably has a report that it has not released. And of course, as Trump asked in his press conference, where's the DNC server, any or all of which would put this question to rest.

A recent interview with Binney can be found at:

Play Hide
mlnw -> mlnw , 2 hours ago
The last clause of the first paragraph should have said: "according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence would be one over 100 to the 50th power
Jack -> David Habakkuk , a day ago
David

There is a pattern of abuse of formerly well regarded institutions to achieve the propaganda aims of the Deep State establishment. The depths that were plumbed to push the Iraq WMD falsehoods are well known. Yet no one was held to account nor was there any honest accounting of the abuse. There have been pretenses like the Owen inquiry that you note.

We see the same situation of sweeping under the rug malfeasance and even outright criminality through obfuscation and obstruction in the case of the meddling in the 2016 election by top officials in intelligence and law enforcement. Clearly less and less people are buying what the Deep State sells despite their overwhelming control of the media channels.

It seems that we are marching towards a credibility crisis similar to what was experienced in the Soviet Union when no one trusted the contents in Pravda.

What is to be gained by the leadership in Britain in promoting these biological weapons cases since Litvinenko? In the US it is quite apparent that the Deep State have become extremely powerful and the likelihood that Trump recognizes that resistance is futile is very high. Schumer may be proven right that they have six ways from Sunday to make you kowtow to their dictats.

Fred -> Jack , a day ago
Jack,

"Yet no one was held to account"

That was one of the changes being hoped for when Obama was first elected. Instead we got little, except for things such as bailed out bankers and the IRS scandal which lasted until the end of his 2nd term. The panic from the left over the 2016 election issues the are still going on is that the expected candidate isn't in office and they are being exposed. Whether they get prosecuted is another story.

http://taxprof.typepad.com/...

TTG , a day ago
I think Matt Tait, David Habakkuk and many others are reading far more into this Dzerzinsky thing than what it warrants. The government dependent ID cards used by my family while I was working as a clandestine case officer overseas were signed by Robert Ludlum. Intelligence officers often have an odd sense of humor.

On a different note, I fully endorse David Habakkuk's recommendation of the writings of Bartles, McDermott and many others at the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth. They are top notch. I learned a lot from Tim Thomas many years ago.

richardstevenhack -> TTG , a day ago
I agree that taken by itself, the Dzerzinsky thing would be an anomaly only and could be dismissed as "black humor" of a kind often found in hackers. However, taken with all the other evidence produced by Adam Carter, it becomes much more obviously an attempt to support a false flag "Russian hacker" narrative that otherwise is porous.

I believe there is a phrase going something like "an attempt to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."

Publius Tacitus -> TTG , a day ago
TTG,

You want us to believe that the GRU are so sloppy and so inexperienced that they would launch a hack on the DNC and not take every measure to ensure there was no link whatsoever to anything Russian? Any former intel officer worth a damn knows that an operation to disrupt the election in a country the size of the United States would start with a risk/reward assessment, would require a team of at least 100 persons and would not be writing any code that could in any way be traced to Russia.

smoothieX12 . , a day ago
Unfortunately, the original author of this claptrap, Mark Galeotti, who, I regret to say, is, like Tait, British, has now recanted and confessed.

Doctrine-mongering and repeating birth of new faux-academic "entities", such as a "hybrid war" (any war is hybrid by definition), is a distinct feature of the Western "political science-military history" establishment. Galeotti, who for some strange reason passes as Russia "expert" is a perfect example of such "expertise" and doctrine-mongering. Military professionals largely met this "hybrid warfare" BS with disdain.

ancient archer , a day ago
I have to say that the more I look into this whole Russiagate affair, which is mostly in the minds of democrats (and a few republicans) and the MSM, the more it seems that there is indeed a foreign conspiracy to meddle in the internal affairs of the US (and in the presidential elections) but the meddling entity is not Russia. It is the British!

So many (ex-) MI6 operators (Steele, Tait, etc) involved in the story. It is interesting that the media don't question the intense involvement of the British in all this. And of course, the British haven't been laggards in adding fuel to the fire by the whole novichok hoax.

This needs to be looked at in more detail by the alternative media and well informed commentators like the host of this site.

[Jul 20, 2018] What exactly is fake news caucus99percent

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... @The Voice In the Wilderness ..."
"... @Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal ..."
"... By creating an extremely anti-communist state, the elite will never have to worry about losing control over society because their wealth and power remains safe and sound. ..."
Jul 20, 2018 | caucus99percent.com

k9disc on Wed, 07/18/2018 - 11:12pm

Fake News = 21st Century Conspiracy Theory Fake News is the 21st century version of Conspiracy Theory.

It is an evolution of conspiracy theory, not requiring any kind of convoluted logic or story telling that used to be required for conspiracy theory to stick. Fake News allows for simple, truthful, and logical information to be dismissed out of hand, without examination.

divineorder on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 5:58am
Yes, and then...

@edg @k9disc

Fake News allows for simple, truthful, and logical information to be dismissed out of hand, without examination.

and then they use that as justification for MIC actions.

The 'outrage' is fake. The focus on 'fake news' is fake news.

It's actually about defending the corporate media's monopoly on producing fake news serving elite state-corporate interests. https://t.co/uunJF9lj5r

-- Media Lens (@medialens) July 19, 2018

Here's an ad about COCs (PDF) from 1942. They're used for tanning leather, in soaps and perfumes, as insect repellents, for dying cloth, as antiseptics, and for many, many other commercial and industrial purposes.

Damn those Syrian butchers for dropping perfume on civilians!

Fake News is the 21st century version of Conspiracy Theory.

It is an evolution of conspiracy theory, not requiring any kind of convoluted logic or story telling that used to be required for conspiracy theory to stick. Fake News allows for simple, truthful, and logical information to be dismissed out of hand, without examination.

Cant Stop the M... on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 11:10am
@The Voice In the Wilderness In the dim reaches of

@The Voice In the Wilderness In the dim reaches of pre-history, when Walter Cronkite was reporting, a real journalist wouldn't report that someone launched a chemical weapons attack unless the journalist had at least two credible, independent sources providing solid evidence that the story was true. Newspaper editors and television producers knew their reputations were on the line and that their competitors would make sure the egg on their face stuck if they reported something blatantly wrong.

Nowadays, there are no competitors, because journalists and news outlets are mostly hanging out together in one big cheery cartel, every member of which will defend every other member to protect the reputation of the whole. The goal is not to outdo competitors and gain more eyeballs or a greater distribution or greater authority over public opinion. The goal is to defend the status quo by any means necessary, while somehow maintaining the credibility of the press.

But no, they shouldn't have published a story that Assad had launched a chemical weapons attack unless they had a significant amount of solid evidence that it was true.

I have a hard time understanding how people can even begin to credit this crap, given how close it is to what they told us about Saddam Hussein. But it's actually even worse, because at least Hussein did, at one time, use chemical weapons on the Kurds. I mean, at least he did it once, even if he didn't have weapons of mass destruction ready to aim at Israel, or the Saudis, or the U.S.

#7
It was big news. But failure to report it as false with just as much (or more) attention and timing was journalistic malpractice. They should have been outraged to have been conned into spreading false propaganda. IF they were legitimate journalists.

The Voice In th... on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 6:00pm
That was then, this is now.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
I don't know that anyone waits for confirmation anymore. And the two sources could be the CIA and VOA or one of their tame journalists.
Credibility is in the eye of the beholder. After they all jumped on Saddam's WMD one can hardly compare them with Cronkite.

I do remember web blogs asking to please wait for the UN inspectors report. When that report did come out, anyone with integrity, even if not a professional journalist, would have highlighted that report and retracted the original and not figuratively bury it on page 56.

But we are substantially together on this. They reported is as fact not as an unsubstantiated claim.

fakenews on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 7:02am
I know FakeNews when I see it.

Chomsky's Five News Filters: A little dated but a good starting point.

Peace
FN

lotlizard on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 8:15am
Regrettably fails to name a huge part of Flak and the Enforcers

@fakenews
namely big, opinion-policing non-profits and their lobbyists and followers, ranging from religious denominations, to AIPAC and the NRA, to the ADL and SPLC.

[Jul 20, 2018] Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia by Paul Craig Roberts

Highly recommended!
Looks like MIC is a cancel of the society for which there is no cure....
While this jeremiad raises several valid point the key to understanding the situation should be understanding of the split of the Us elite into two camp with Democratic party (representing interests of Wall Street) and large part of intelligence communality fighting to neoliberal status quo and Pentagon, some part of old money, part of trade unions (especially rank and file members) and a pert of Republican Party (representing interests of the military) realizing that neoliberalism came to the natural end and it is time for change which includes downsizing of the American empire.
This bitter internal struggle in which neoliberals so far have an upper hand over Trump administration and forced him into retreat.
Notable quotes:
"... Trump is a traitor because he wants peace with Russia. ..."
"... The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North Koreans, as well as the rest of the world, desperately need to notice the extremely hostile reaction to peace on the part of the US Democratic Party, many members of the Republican Party, including the despicable US Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and the Western Presstitute Media, a collection of people on the CIA payroll according to the German newspaper editor, Udo Ulfkotte, and the CIA itself. ..."
"... Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and the rest of the corrupt filth that rules over us are all in the pay of the military/security complex. Just go and investigate the donations to their re-election campaigns. The 1,000 billion dollar budget of the military/security complex, amplified by the CIA's front corporations and narcotics business, provides enormous sums with which to purchase the senators and representatives that the insouciant American voters think that they elect. ..."
"... Therefore, the American public gets not representation, but lies that justify war and conflict. The military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned the American people to no effect, is in desperate need of an enemy. In obedience to the military/security complex, the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes have made Russia that enemy. If Trump and Putin do not understand this, they will easily be made irrelevant. ..."
"... They both can be assassinated, and that is what the statements from Pelosi, Schumer, McCain, Lindsey Graham, et. al., repeated endlessly in the propaganda ministry that is the Western press, encourages. ..."
"... The Supply-Side Revolution ..."
"... When the combination of tax cuts with defense budget cuts came up for a vote, the legendary senator Strom Thurmond, a 48-year member of the US Senate from South Carolina, tapped me on the shoulder. He said: "son, never set your senator up against the military/security complex. He will not be re-elected, and you will be out of a job." I replied that we were just establishing for the record that under no conditions would the Democrats, who wanted more government, vote for a tax rate reduction even if there was a case that it would cure stagflation. He replied: "son, the military/security complex doesn't care." ..."
"... Later as a member of a secret presidential committee, I saw how the CIA attempted to prevent President Reagan from ending the Cold War. ..."
"... Today, right now, at this moment, we are faced with a massive effort of the military/security complex, the neoconservatives, the Democratic Party, and the presstitute media to discredit the elected President of the United States and to overthrow him in order that the utterly corrupt elite that rule American can continue to hold on to power and to protect the massive budget of the military/security complex that, along with the Israel Lobby, funds the elections of those who rule us. ..."
"... There is no institution in America, government or private, that can be trusted. Any government or person who trusts America or any Western country is stupid beyond belief. ..."
"... The entire Russiagate hoax is an orchestration by the military/security complex, led by John Brennen, Comey, and Rosenstein. The purpose is to discredit President trump for two reasons. One is to prevent any normalization of relations with Russia. The other is to remove Trump's agenda as an alternative to the agenda of the Democratic Party. ..."
"... President Trump is almost powerless. Putin, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North Koreans should recognize this before it is too late for them. President Trump cannot fire and arrest for high treason Mueller and Rosenstein. ..."
"... Reckless and irresponsible comments about treason from former CIA director Brennan, and other ranking public figures, echo similar inflammatory rhetoric from far-right-wing rabble rouser Gen. Edwin Walker, and other members of the John Birch Society, in the days before Pres. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. ..."
"... What's going on in the United States of America beats the band what happened under Joe McCarthy. The witch hunt against a sitting President by 95 percent of the media, major government institutions such as the criminal CIA, FBI, DOJ and the rest of the crooked Intel community plus the rascals in the US Congress can only happen in a totalitarian society, which the US is. ..."
"... The Brennan, Clappers, Obamas, Clintons, Comeys, Rosenstein and their many subordinate political Mafiosi should be put behind bars instead of running from one TV station to the next and lay the ground for a possibly Trump assassination. ..."
"... As Mr. Rogers correctly states, President Trump is almost powerless. These US fools even try to breed discord between the so-called nationalists and the globalists in Russia for which Medvedev stays. He once served US interests more than Russian ones when he was Prime Minister and got flattered by the ineffable Bill Clinton. ..."
"... So what do we see now ? Putin aiding Trump in steering the USA away from trying to control the whole world, an effort that is destroying the USA, but Deep State does not mind. In this way Russia indeed meddles in USA politics. Trump now invited Putin to come to Washington, the MH17 statement is withheld, the hysteria at CNN is such that MH17 is not even mentioned. In stead: Trump must be mentally deranged. ..."
"... Gore Vidal said there's only one party in America, it's the Money Party and it has two branches. It is even more true today than when he said it. There is no Left or Right anymore, only the question, is it good for Israel? And the American people be damned. ..."
"... Trump is completely powerless to do anything about these two. And this has gone on for a year and a half. ..."
"... It's clear though that Trump believes he has forced his opponents to play a bad hand in their outlandish craze the past week. It's why he doubled down and invited Putin to Washington near the 2018 election time. He perceives this as a chance to re-enact the 2016 election and coast to victory. The establishment is insane, and if he brings their insanity out it plays to his favor. ..."
Jul 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

The US Democratic Party is determined to take the world to thermo-nuclear war rather than to admit that Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election fair and square. The Democratic Party was totally corrupted by the Clinton Regime, and now it is totally insane. Leaders of the Democratic Party, such as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, my former co-author in the New York Times, have responded in a non-Democratic way to the first step President Trump has taken to reduce the extremely dangerous tensions with Russia that the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes created between the two superpowers.

Yes, Russia is a superpower. Russian weapons are so superior to the junk produced by the waste-filled US military/security complex that lives high off the hog on the insouciant American taxpayer that it is questionable if the US is even a second class military power. If the insane neoconservatives, such as Max Boot, William Kristol, and the rest of the neocon scum get their way, the US, the UK, and Europe will be a radioactive ruin for thousands of years.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (CA), Minority Leader of the US House of Representatives, declared that out of fear of some undefined retribution from Putin, a dossier on Trump perhaps, the President of the United States sold out the American people to Russia because he wants to make peace: "It begs the question, what does Vladimir Putin, what do the Russians have on Donald Trump -- personally, politically and financially that he should behave in such a manner?" The "such a manner" Pelosi is speaking about is making peace instead of war.

To be clear, the Democratic Minority Leader of the US House of Representatives has accused Donald Trump of high treason against the United States. There is no outcry against this blatantly false accusation, totally devoid of evidence. The presstitute media instead of protesting this attempt at a coup against the President of the United States, trumpet the accusation as self-evident truth. Trump is a traitor because he wants peace with Russia.

Here is Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer (NY) repeating Pelosi's false accusation: "Millions of Americans will continue to wonder if the only possible explanation for this dangerous behavior is the possibility that President Putin holds damaging information over President Trump." If you don't believe that this is orchestrated between Pelosi and Schumer, you are stupid beyond belief.

Here is disgraced Obama CIA director John Brennan, a leader of the fake Russiagate campaign against President Trump in order to prevent Trump from making peace with Russia and, thus, by making the world safer, threatening the massive, unjustified budget of the military/security complex: "Donald Trump's press conference performance in Helsinki rises to and exceeds the threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors. It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump's comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???"

Here are many more: https://www.infowars.com/meltdown-left-seething-over-trump-putin-summit/

And here is more from the CIA bought-and-paid-for BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44852812

NOTICE THAT NOT ONE WESTERN MEDIA SOURCE IS CELEBRATING AND THANKING TRUMP AND PUTIN FOR EASING THE ARTIFICIALLY CREATED TENSIONS THAT WERE LEADING TO NUCLEAR WAR. HOW CAN THIS BE? HOW CAN IT BE THAT THE WESTERN MEDIA IS SO OPPOSED TO PEACE? WHAT IS THE EXPLANATION?

The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North Koreans, as well as the rest of the world, desperately need to notice the extremely hostile reaction to peace on the part of the US Democratic Party, many members of the Republican Party, including the despicable US Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and the Western Presstitute Media, a collection of people on the CIA payroll according to the German newspaper editor, Udo Ulfkotte, and the CIA itself.

Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and the rest of the corrupt filth that rules over us are all in the pay of the military/security complex. Just go and investigate the donations to their re-election campaigns. The 1,000 billion dollar budget of the military/security complex, amplified by the CIA's front corporations and narcotics business, provides enormous sums with which to purchase the senators and representatives that the insouciant American voters think that they elect.

Do you know how large 1,000 billion is? You would have to live for thousands of years and do nothing for 24/7 except count to reach that figure. It is a sum that nurtures the recipients, and the recipients regard it as worth protecting.

Therefore, the American public gets not representation, but lies that justify war and conflict. The military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned the American people to no effect, is in desperate need of an enemy. In obedience to the military/security complex, the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes have made Russia that enemy. If Trump and Putin do not understand this, they will easily be made irrelevant.

They both can be assassinated, and that is what the statements from Pelosi, Schumer, McCain, Lindsey Graham, et. al., repeated endlessly in the propaganda ministry that is the Western press, encourages. Trump can be assassinated or overthrown in a political coup for selling out America to Russia, as members of both political parties claim and as the media trumpets endlessly. Putin can be easily assassinated by the CIA operatives that the Russian government stupidly permits to operate throughout Russia in NGOs and Western/US owned media and among the Atlanticist Integrationists, Washington's Firth Column inside Russia serving Washington's purposes. These Russian traitors serve in Putin's own government!

ORDER IT NOW

Americans are so unaware that they have no idea of the risk that President Trump is taking by challenging the US military security complex. For example, during the last half of the 1970s I was a member of the US Senate staff. I was working together with a staffer of the US Republican Senator from California, S. I. Hayakawa, to advance understanding of a supply-side economic policy cure to the stagflation that threatened the US budget's ability to meet its obligations. Republican Senators Hatch, Roth, and Hayakawa were trying to introduce a supply-side economic policy as a cure for the stagflation that was threatening the US economy with failure. The Democrats, who later in the Senate led the way to a supply-side policy, were, at this time, opposed (see Paul Craig Roberts, The Supply-Side Revolution , Harvard University Press, 1984). The Democrats claimed that the policy would worsen the budget deficit, the only time in those days Democrats cared about the budget deficit. The Democrats said that they would support the tax rate reductions if the Republicans would support offsetting cuts in the budget to support a balanced budget. This was a ploy to put Republicans on the spot for taking away some groups' handouts in order "to cut tax rates for the rich."

The supply-side policy did not require budget cuts, but in order to demonstrate the Democrats lack of sincerety, Hayakawa's aid and I had our senators introduce a series of budget cuts together with tax cuts that, on a static revenue basis (not counting tax revenue feedbacks from the incentives of the lower tax rates) kept the budget even, and the Democrats voted against them every time.

When the combination of tax cuts with defense budget cuts came up for a vote, the legendary senator Strom Thurmond, a 48-year member of the US Senate from South Carolina, tapped me on the shoulder. He said: "son, never set your senator up against the military/security complex. He will not be re-elected, and you will be out of a job." I replied that we were just establishing for the record that under no conditions would the Democrats, who wanted more government, vote for a tax rate reduction even if there was a case that it would cure stagflation. He replied: "son, the military/security complex doesn't care."

My emergence from The Matrix began with Thurmond's pat on my shoulder. It grew with my time at the Wall Street Journal when I learned that some truthful things simply could not be said. In the Treasury I experienced how those outside interests opposed to a president's policy marshall their forces and the media that they own to block it. Later as a member of a secret presidential committee, I saw how the CIA attempted to prevent President Reagan from ending the Cold War.

Today, right now, at this moment, we are faced with a massive effort of the military/security complex, the neoconservatives, the Democratic Party, and the presstitute media to discredit the elected President of the United States and to overthrow him in order that the utterly corrupt elite that rule American can continue to hold on to power and to protect the massive budget of the military/security complex that, along with the Israel Lobby, funds the elections of those who rule us. Trump, like Reagan, was an exception, and it is the exceptions that accumulate the ire of the corrupt leftwing, bought off with money, and the ire of the media, concentrated into small tight ownership groups indebted to those who permitted the illegal concentration of a once independent and diverse American media that once served, on occasion, as a watchdog over government. The rightwing, wrapped in the flag, dismisses all truth as "anti-American."

If Putin, Lavrov, the Russian government, the traitorous Russian Fifth Column -- the Atlanticist Integrationists -- the Chinese, the Iranians, the North Koreans think that any peace or consideration can come out of America, they are insane. Their delusions are setting themselves up for destruction. There is no institution in America, government or private, that can be trusted. Any government or person who trusts America or any Western country is stupid beyond belief.

The entire Russiagate hoax is an orchestration by the military/security complex, led by John Brennen, Comey, and Rosenstein. The purpose is to discredit President trump for two reasons. One is to prevent any normalization of relations with Russia. The other is to remove Trump's agenda as an alternative to the agenda of the Democratic Party.

President Trump is almost powerless. Putin, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North Koreans should recognize this before it is too late for them. President Trump cannot fire and arrest for high treason Mueller and Rosenstein. And Trump cannot indict Hillary for her numerous unquestionable crimes in plain view of everyone, or Comey or Brennan, who declares Trump "to be wholly in the pocket of Putin," for trying to overthrow the elected president of the United States. Trump cannot have the Secret Service question the likes of Pelosi and Schumer and McCain and Lindsey Graham for false accusations that encourage assassination of the President of the United States.

Trump cannot even trust the Secret Service, which accumulated evidence suggests was complicit in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.

If Putin and Lavrov, so anxious to be friends of Washington, let their guards down, they are history.

As I said above, Russiagate is an orchestratration to prevent peace between the US and Russia. Leading military/security complex experts, including the person who provided the CIA's daily briefing of the President of the United States for many years, and the person who devised the spy program for the National Security Agency, have proven conclusively that Russiagate is a hoax designed for the purpose of preventing President Trump from normalizing relations between the US and Russia, which has the power to destroy the entirety of the Western World at will.

Here is the report from the retired security professionals who, unlike those still in office, cannot be fired and deprived of a careet for telling the truth: https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2018/07/15/memo-to-the-president-ahead-of-mondays-summit/

Here is what the clued-in Russian Defense Minister Shoigu has to say about the aggressive actions of the West against the Russian homeland: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/07/13/defense-minister-shoigu-on-moscow-vision-security-problems.html

If Putin doesn't listen to him, Russia is in the trash can of history.

Keep in mind that no media informs you better than my website. If my website goes down, you will be left in darkness. No valid information comes from the US government or the Western presstitutes. If you sit in front of the TV screen watching the Western media, you are brainwashed beyond all hope. Not even I can rescue you. Nor God himself.

Americans, and indeed the Russians themselves, are incapable of realizing it, but there is a chance that Trump will be overthrown and a Western assault will be launched against the handful of countries that insist on sovereignty.

I doubt that few of the Americans who elected Trump will be taken in by the anti-Trump propagana, but they are not organized and have no armed power. The police, militarized by George W. Bush and Obama, will be set against them. The rebellions will be local and suppressed by every violation of the US Constitution by the private powers that rule Washington, as always has been the case with rebellions in America.

In the West, which the Russians are so anxious to join, all freedoms are dead -- freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of inquiry, freedom of privacy, freedom from arbitrary search, freedom from arbitrary arrest, along with the Constitutional protections of due process and habeas corpus. Today there are no countries less free than the United States of America.

Why do the Russian Atlanticist Integrationists want to join an unfree Western world? Are they that brainwashed by Western Propaganda?

If Putin listens to these deluded fools, Putin will destroy Russia.

There is something wrong with Russian perception of Washington. Apparently the Russian elite, with the exception of Shoigu and a few others are incapable of comprehending the neoconservative drive for US world hegemony and the neoconservative determination to destroy Russia as a constraint on US unilateralism. The Russian government somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, believes that Washington's hegemony is negotiable. (Republished from PaulCraigRoberts.org by permission of author or representative)


nagra , July 20, 2018 at 4:46 am GMT
is big question even if Trump wants peace at all. Trump has shown his real face on the very beginning when he said that they are going to talk about "his friend" Xi, making Putin very uncomfortable and throwing some worms in Russia~China relationship in front of cameras for all to see

Trump came to the meeting in hope to impress Putin with his cowboy arrogance, He now says that he'll be Putin's worst enemy ( if he don't bow to him I guess : ). all Trump cares about is his ego, nothing else too sweat mouthed sleazy person

Sparkon , July 20, 2018 at 4:57 am GMT
Reckless and irresponsible comments about treason from former CIA director Brennan, and other ranking public figures, echo similar inflammatory rhetoric from far-right-wing rabble rouser Gen. Edwin Walker, and other members of the John Birch Society, in the days before Pres. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
RobinG , July 20, 2018 at 5:10 am GMT
@geokat62

Okay then! Cue the real story of [lying filth] Bill Browder, a film by Andrei Nekrasov. Watch and share before it disappears!

https://www.bitchute.com/embed/lQ3qEwX66pIL/

The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes

Ludwig Watzal , Website July 20, 2018 at 5:41 am GMT
What's going on in the United States of America beats the band what happened under Joe McCarthy. The witch hunt against a sitting President by 95 percent of the media, major government institutions such as the criminal CIA, FBI, DOJ and the rest of the crooked Intel community plus the rascals in the US Congress can only happen in a totalitarian society, which the US is.

The Brennan, Clappers, Obamas, Clintons, Comeys, Rosenstein and their many subordinate political Mafiosi should be put behind bars instead of running from one TV station to the next and lay the ground for a possibly Trump assassination. Trump is portrayed by these crooks as a "traitor." In the US, traitors usefully deserve death. If these political Mafiosi don't bring down Trump "legally," they will hire a kind of Lee Harvey Oswald who "shot" JFK.

As Mr. Rogers correctly states, President Trump is almost powerless. These US fools even try to breed discord between the so-called nationalists and the globalists in Russia for which Medvedev stays. He once served US interests more than Russian ones when he was Prime Minister and got flattered by the ineffable Bill Clinton.

Let's wait and see what happens in the upcoming mid-term elections. If the Dems win both Houses of Congress, Trump is done. The obstructionists will have the upper hand. If they can't remove him from office "legally," there will be a hitman out there somewhere.

RealAmericanValuesCirca1776Not1965 , July 20, 2018 at 6:49 am GMT
President smugly making peace with the Russian nation that was supposed to be the evil enemy in a 3rd and final brother war to devastate the white race beyond recovery.

Little upstart in the Democrat party making left wing politics less palatable to the masses with her heavy handed socialist rhetoric. All while preaching BDS and anti-Israel sentiment too, representing Frankenstein's CultMarx monster turning on it's creator.

And fewer and fewer people on all sides buying what the American Pravda is selling with each passing day. The resulting hysteria is both par for the course and downright delectable.

jilles dykstra , July 20, 2018 at 7:24 am GMT
" Apparently the Russian elite, with the exception of Shoigu and a few others are incapable of comprehending the neoconservative drive for US world hegemony and the neoconservative determination to destroy Russia as a constraint on US unilateralism. " My idea is that many in Russia understand quite well, this is why they demonstrate Russia's military capabilities frequently. Why does Putin support Assad and Syria ? Not because he likes these countries, but because he understands that if these countries also get the USA yoke the position of Russia and China deteriorate.

Putin is careful not to give USA public opinion more 'reason' to fear Russia. Already a few years ago something fell into the E part of the Mediterranean. It was asserted that Russia had intercepted a USA missile fired from Spain to Syria. USA and Israel declared that an excercise had been held. Putin said nothing.

Despite all that NATO does at Russia's borders Putin does not let himself be provoked. MH17, I suppose Putin knows quite well what happened, Russia has radar and satelites, yet Putin never gave the Russian view.

So what do we see now ? Putin aiding Trump in steering the USA away from trying to control the whole world, an effort that is destroying the USA, but Deep State does not mind. In this way Russia indeed meddles in USA politics. Trump now invited Putin to come to Washington, the MH17 statement is withheld, the hysteria at CNN is such that MH17 is not even mentioned. In stead: Trump must be mentally deranged.

Tsar Nicholas , July 20, 2018 at 7:48 am GMT
Another fine piece from PCR. It is a shame that trolls have caused him to avoid comments.
NoseytheDuke , July 20, 2018 at 8:03 am GMT
Good to see PCR accepting comments again. It's not just the Dumbocruds, it's the Rupuglicunts too. Follow the money, it's coming from the same sources. Gore Vidal said there's only one party in America, it's the Money Party and it has two branches. It is even more true today than when he said it. There is no Left or Right anymore, only the question, is it good for Israel? And the American people be damned.
Anonymous [337] Disclaimer , July 20, 2018 at 8:20 am GMT

Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace with Russia?
The Democrats say he is

The Democrats -- and their wholly-owned MSM -- will call Trump any name that'll stick. It means little. Even if Trump got everything he wanted on immigration, that particular toothpaste is already out of the tube and unless we send back some of the millions of illegal third-world squatters we've no hope of recovering the United States of America.

If you want to talk treason, you need look no further than the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, whereby the plan was laid to replace the population of this nation with third-world refuse, which guaranteed cheap labor for GOP capitalists and endless political support for Democrat traitors.

Oh yeah, it's going swimmingly.

Robert Magill , July 20, 2018 at 9:36 am GMT
Fact 1: Russia's Defense Dept. IS a defense dept. Our alleged Defense Dept. is a War Dept. Nuff said.
Fact 2: Don't invade Russia.
Fact 3: Don't invade Russia.
RobertMagill.wordpress.com
Biff , July 20, 2018 at 9:47 am GMT

HOW CAN THIS BE? HOW CAN IT BE THAT THE WESTERN MEDIA IS SO OPPOSED TO PEACE? WHAT IS THE EXPLANATION?

Money

Moi , July 20, 2018 at 11:08 am GMT
@Tsar Nicholas

For a country that cares little about morality, it really does not matter whether Trump, Hillary, Obama or anyone else is the leader.

geokat62 , July 20, 2018 at 11:13 am GMT
@RobinG

As the saying goes "timing is everything." I have to admit I was incredulous that you were somehow able to link to a functioning version of the Nekrosov film. I've been trying to get my hands on that documentary for the last few years, but to no avail. I finally managed to read a comment on another blog that recommended that people who were interested in viewing the film could do so by reaching out to the producer to request a personalized link, after which you had to request a password from another individual affiliated with the film.

I managed to do all of that a few weeks ago and was able to watch the video on Vimeo for the full 2 hours. It was riveting, to say the least. After viewing it again, I thought about making it available to others. Due to the pressures by Browder and his lawyers, however, Nekrosov was prevented from making his film available to a wider audience. He got around this limitation by making it available for private viewing only. And to prevent a private viewer from uploading it onto the internet he cleverly placed a watermark on each film, indicating the owner of each copy of the video by displaying a number on the screen. I was surprised to see the version you linked to indeed has this watermark shown on the screen. Somehow, this did not deter the individual tied to that number from uploading it and being the one identified as doing so. That said, I'm glad the film is more widely available as it should be viewed by as many people as possible so that they can realize what a despicable liar Browder really is and how the passage of The Magnitsky Act was a travesty of justice which must be reversed.

Reactionary Utopian , July 20, 2018 at 11:35 am GMT
"Do you know how large 1,000 billion is? You would have to live for thousands of years and do nothing for 24/7 except count to reach that figure. It is a sum that nurtures the recipients, and the recipients regard it as worth protecting."

Tens of thousands of years. At one count per second, 31,687 years and a few months.

Sally Snyder , July 20, 2018 at 11:39 am GMT
Here is an interesting look at how the anti-Russian narrative began in the United States and who really rigged the 2016 U.S. election:

https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-genesis-of-russian-interference.html

Main Street America is being manipulated into believing that Russia is the enemy, giving Washington a complete...

Jake , July 20, 2018 at 11:49 am GMT
"In the West, which the Russians are so anxious to join, all freedoms are dead -- freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of inquiry, freedom of privacy, freedom from arbitrary search, freedom from arbitrary arrest, along with the Constitutional protections of due process and habeas corpus."

True. That is the Anglo-Zionist Empire. That is what the WASP Empire delivers, and it does so to destroy more conservative national and local cultures so their peoples are tossed into the melting pot and reduced into a goop easy to rule.

Oliver Cromwell taking Jewish money, allying with Jews so he would have the funds to wage permanent war against the vast, vast majority of non-WASP whites within his reach: that is the definition of WASP culture; that picture tells you what it always will do.

nagra , July 20, 2018 at 12:14 pm GMT
@RobinG

to everyone who make such movies

make something serious about Obama and Hillary destroying whole African country of Libya killing Colonel Gaddafi on the street, which is greatest war crime in the 21st century so far or, Bill Clinton bombing Bosnian Serbs '95 opening the door to jihadis to continue behead people in the middle of the Europe or, Bill Clinton and Nato bombing Serbia '99 to give "Kosovo" independence killing many civilian and destroying infrastructure on purpose or Madeline Albright confessing killing half of million Iraqi kids on the camera or, Bush and or Bushes or those such Bill Browder are just small dirty fish who in comparison is almost not worth filming I appreciate the effort but get seriously real if you are about to get truth to people

annamaria , July 20, 2018 at 12:22 pm GMT
@Ludwig Watzal

"The Brennan, Clappers, Obamas, Clintons, Comeys, Rosenstein and their many subordinate political Mafiosi "

What is going on in the US is systematic. Assange, an investigative journalist who became the light of truth worldwide, is under a grave danger from US' and UK' Intelligence Communities of the non-intelligent opportunists and real traitors: https://www.rt.com/news/433783-wikileaks-assange-ecuador-uk/

Meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton, who was criminally negligent with regard to the most important classified information, has been protected by the politicking Brennan, Clapper, and Mueller: " it was over 30,000 emails , emails that were sent through to Hillary Clinton through the unauthorized server and unsecured server and every email she sent out.

There were highly classified -- beyond classified -- top secret-type stuff that had gone through that server. an instruction embedded, compartmentalized data embedded in the email server telling the server to send a copy of every email that came to Hillary Clinton through that unauthorized server and every email that she sent out through that server, to send it to this foreign entity that is not Russia." http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/07/congressional-record-transcript-on-chinagate.html

The Awan Affair, the most serious ever violation of national cybersecurity, has demonstrated the spectacular incompetence of the CIA and FBI, which had allowed a family of Pakistani nationals to surf congressional computers of various committees, including Intelligence Committee, for years. None of the scoundrels had a security clearance! Their ardent protector, Wasserman-Schultz (who threatened the DC Marschall) belongs to the untouchables, unlike Assange: https://www.theepochtimes.com/awan-congressional-scandal-in-spotlight-as-president-suggests-data-could-be-part-of-court-case_2500703.html

Ilyana_Rozumova , July 20, 2018 at 12:27 pm GMT
Trump and Putin made a mistake. I do not understand how it could have happened. They should have issued communiqué that they have agreed to work toward peace and relieve tensions and suppress conflicts around the world. (I do not have a time for now to write more.) (sorry)
Carroll Price , July 20, 2018 at 12:30 pm GMT
@Eagle Eye

Don't give FDR too much credit. He didn't approve the Normandy invasion until well after Russia had destroyed the German army.

Zogby , July 20, 2018 at 12:36 pm GMT
If Rosenstein & Mueller had done what they did with the publication of the indictments a few days before the summit -- and were North Koreans -- they'd be in front of a firing squad within 24 hours. Trump is completely powerless to do anything about these two. And this has gone on for a year and a half. This is not a strength of democracy.

The US today is like Venezuela was shortly after Maduro was elected (by a narrow margin) -- after Chavez's death -- and before violence eventually broke out. The losing opposition refused to accept the result and tensions simmered for a long time.

Or after Morsi was elected in Egypt and before the military coup. The victory was narrow, the opposition refused the to accept the result and tensions simmered for a long time.

Or maybe like Bush vs Gore. Bush was kinda saved by 9/11 which completely changed the atmosphere.

Who knows what will happen. It's clear though that Trump believes he has forced his opponents to play a bad hand in their outlandish craze the past week. It's why he doubled down and invited Putin to Washington near the 2018 election time. He perceives this as a chance to re-enact the 2016 election and coast to victory. The establishment is insane, and if he brings their insanity out it plays to his favor.

Russ , July 20, 2018 at 1:04 pm GMT
@Sparkon

https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/3975-deep-state-delirium

Brennan, the Communist. The linked article begins with that and proceeds from there in a first-rate deep-state summary.

Den Lille Abe , July 20, 2018 at 1:04 pm GMT
The reception of the Trump- Putin meeting is breathtaking. I have in my 61 years never witnessed such a hate and slander in the MSM. I have after this begun to actually dismiss that Americans are sensible people! They have completely forgotten the cost of the Civil War. We in Europe have not forgotten the cost of war and are not going there again. Ever.

The US has become a lunatic asylum with nuclear weapons, never mind Kim Jong Un, look a squirrel! But the US is a threat to humanity, included it's protegé Israel, the new Apartheid state.

Harold Smith , July 20, 2018 at 1:43 pm GMT
"Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace with Russia?"

Wait; what?

From badmouthing Russia to appointing Russophobes to high office, to imposing sanctions, to illegally seizing Russian diplomatic property, to committing war crimes in Syria, to a provocative military buildup in Europe, to arming the illegitimate Ukrainian "government," etc., presidential poseur Orange Clown has spent 99% of his "presidency" so far antagonizing Russia; apparently trying to provoke some kind of Russian military response.

If it was anyone else other than Vladimir Putin calling the shots in Russia, WW3 probably would've happened already. Yet PCR claims Orange Clown wants peace with Russia?

Note to PCR: It is Vladimir Putin who wants peace, not presidential poseur Orange Clown. If Orange Clown has had some kind of spiritual epiphany/change of heart, he's going to have to show good faith by taking some kind of unambiguous action; posturing won't suffice.

Mike P , July 20, 2018 at 1:48 pm GMT
@NoseytheDuke

There is a lot of truth in what you say, but it does not account for the fight we are currently witnessing. Two factions in the Money Party are at war with each other. Neither one is willing to level with the public as to its true aims and motives -- they are fighting viciously but under the bed sheets, which is why the spectacle looks so unhinged and silly.

AnonFromTN , July 20, 2018 at 2:28 pm GMT
It appears that he is trying to save the US from financial collapse. Hence, he is a traitor to MIC, particularly to the obscenely greedy Pentagon contractors. The US presidents and Congress always pandered to MIC first and foremost. He broke (or at least tried to break) the pattern.
Anonymous [166] Disclaimer , July 20, 2018 at 4:48 pm GMT
@Den Lille Abe

Don't blame all Americans. Forty-eight percent of us voted for Trump; it is very likely that more than half of the rest voted for Hellary only with great reluctance, owing largely to the unprecedented campaign of vilification directed at Trump. The point is: a very large majority of people in this country are nowhere near as insane as the media and elites are -- in fact, we're still nowhere near insane enough for their taste!

[Jul 20, 2018] The Day That Guccifer 2.0 Quit Hacking The DNC

So the DNC announced Russia hacked them, and "proved" it with a file they say was stolen. But that file was not the DNC's. So the "proof" of Russia hacking the DNC is nonexistent.
Notable quotes:
"... they cite an anonymous former DNC official who asserts that Guccifer 2.0's first document (the Trump opposition report) did not originate in the DNC as initially reported. ..."
"... The importance of this contradiction, combined with earlier allegations of hacking the DNC made by Guccifer 2.0, cannot be overstated. ..."
"... " There were signs of dishonesty from the start. The first document Guccifer 2.0 published on June 15 came not from the DNC as advertised but from Podesta's inbox, according to a former DNC official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press." ..."
"... By classifying Guccifer 2.0's claim to have obtained the Trump Opposition Report through a breach of the DNC as a sign of dishonesty, the Associated Press uses the Guccifer 2.0 persona's widely held claim as an example of contradiction with their new version of the 'official' Russian hacking narrative. In so doing, the AP makes the hacking allegations entirely nebulous: a fantasy narrative that can be neither proven nor disproven but easily edited and rearranged when convenient. Incredibly, the AP's article also contradicts the claims made by the DNC themselves, and so-called papers of record, including the Washington Post. ..."
"... [Fancy Bear] broke into the network in late April and targeted the opposition research files. It was this breach that set off the alarm. The hackers stole two files,[Shawn] Henry said." ..."
"... "Investigators would have been able to rapidly determine if there were textual differences between Guccifer 2.0's document and the DNC's. If there were no textual differences, an initial determination might have been difficult, because Guccifer 2.0 went to some trouble to obscure internal metadata, known as Revision Save ID's (RSID's), which can be used to uniquely identify sections of text that have been changed and added into a Word document. However, when the Podesta emails were published in October 2016, investigators should have been able to source Guccifer 2.0's document to the Podesta emails quickly. They would have been able to do this before the 2016 election, a full year ahead of the AP report." [Emphasis Added] ..."
"... Ultimately, it is the DNC's claim that they were breached by Russian hackers, who stole the Trump opposition report, which directly belies their allegation - because the document did not come from the DNC, but from John Podesta's emails. ..."
"... What is interesting here is that the AP admits that such elements of the document's publication had been fabricated, but did not then follow that realization by questioning other possibly fabricated elements of the documents, such as the Russian-language error messages. The AP certainly did not concern themselves with why a Russian state-sponsored hacker would benefit from airbrushing "confidential" onto such a report. Their claim that it was to attract media attention seems quite weak. ..."
"... AP surmised that Guccifer 2.0 "air-brush[ed]" the word "confidential" into the document to "catch the reporter's attention." Both Carter and the Forensicator have explained that Guccifer 2.0 used a complex process, involving an intermediate template document, to inject this "alluring" fake. The Forensicator told this author that they take the position that this intermediate template file (ostensibly needed to add "CONFIDENTIAL" to the document) had an additional purpose. ..."
"... The Forensicator explained that, for some readers and researchers, the copy/paste of an intermediate (RTF) copy of the Trump opposition report into a template document might be interpreted simply as an unconventional method for injecting "confidential" into 1.doc. However, the Forensicator added, it can also be interpreted as a "cover" for the final copy/paste operation which was a necessary step in the evolution of Guccifer 2.0's first document. It was needed to embed the Russian error messages into the final document (1.doc). ..."
"... In their full analysis, the Forensicator wrote that it was surprising that neither outlet reported on the easily viewed "Last Saved By" property, which listed "Феликс Эдмундович" (aka "Iron Felix") as the user who last saved the document. This unique name was noticed by various social media observers that same day and by Ars Technica the following day. How did the journalists miss this, and why? ..."
"... Both Gawker and The Smoking Gun published Guccifer 2.0's Trump opposition report in full as a PDF file. Their PDF files have the now infamous Cyrillic error messages in them; they appear in the last few pages of their PDF files. Ars Technica dubbed these error messages, "Russian fingerprints." ..."
"... Ars Technica reported on Guccifer 2.0's publication of the Trump Opposition Report the day after Guccifer 2.0 arrived on the scene. They quickly noted that there were Russian language error messages in the PDF file posted by Gawker. They also noticed that when they viewed 1.doc themselves, they didn't see the Russian error messages. The Forensicator told Disobedient Media that this was because Ars Technica used Word for Windows, which displayed the error messages in English. ..."
"... So the DNC announced Russia hacked them, and "proved" it with a file they say was stolen.But that file was not the DNC's. So the "proof" of Russia hacking the DNC is nonexistent. ..."
May 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Disobedient Media recently reported on discoveries made by the Forensicator in their report, Media Mishaps: Early Guccifer 2 Coverage . In our previous coverage of the Forensicator's work, we discussed the essential role played by the media in ensuring that the Guccifer 2.0 persona received wide recognition by successfully linking Guccifer 2.0's documents with the DNC's claims that Russian state-sponsored hackers had breached their servers.

This report will focus on an unreported story: After the fact, the DNC quietly changed an important theme in their Russian hacking narrative. Initially, the DNC passively supported the notion that Guccifer 2.0 stole a copy of a Trump opposition report by penetrating the DNC at the behest of the Russian state. Then over a year later, an un-named ex-DNC official tells us that this document in fact came from Podesta's emails, not the DNC. This single statement by a DNC official invalidated the circumstantial evidence that had been used to support the DNC's Russian hacking claims, and represents a groundbreaking contradiction that has gone unobserved by establishment press outlets.

This report will also discuss numerous mistakes made by various legacy press outlets in their obsessive focus on the Russian hacking narrative and their rush to judgment in the matter.

A Late (and Quiet) Change in the DNC Russian Hacking Narrative

In November 2017, the DNC changed their Russian hacking narrative via their proxies in the legacy media. The Associated Press published, Inside story: How Russians hacked the Democrats' emails ; they cite an anonymous former DNC official who asserts that Guccifer 2.0's first document (the Trump opposition report) did not originate in the DNC as initially reported.

The importance of this contradiction, combined with earlier allegations of hacking the DNC made by Guccifer 2.0, cannot be overstated.

The Associated Press wrote in November 2017:

" There were signs of dishonesty from the start. The first document Guccifer 2.0 published on June 15 came not from the DNC as advertised but from Podesta's inbox, according to a former DNC official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press."

By classifying Guccifer 2.0's claim to have obtained the Trump Opposition Report through a breach of the DNC as a sign of dishonesty, the Associated Press uses the Guccifer 2.0 persona's widely held claim as an example of contradiction with their new version of the 'official' Russian hacking narrative. In so doing, the AP makes the hacking allegations entirely nebulous: a fantasy narrative that can be neither proven nor disproven but easily edited and rearranged when convenient. Incredibly, the AP's article also contradicts the claims made by the DNC themselves, and so-called papers of record, including the Washington Post.

By returning to the genesis of the Russian hacking narrative, we find that the AP's November report runs contrary to the DNC's initial claims, as reported by The Washington Post , in an article titled, Russian Government Hackers Penetrated DNC, Stole Opposition Research On Trump . When reviewing this early history of the matter, it becomes clear that it is logically impossible to separate the Guccifer 2.0 persona from the allegations of a Kremlin-backed hack of the DNC. Critical statements in that initial report by the Washington Post are highlighted below for emphasis:

"Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP Presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach

[Fancy Bear] broke into the network in late April and targeted the opposition research files. It was this breach that set off the alarm. The hackers stole two files,[Shawn] Henry said."

By taking this later (2017) stance, the Associated Press contradicts the "official" Russian hacking narrative involving Guccifer 2.0 (as implied by the DNC's own security firm) and which had, until that point, been characterized by the corporate press as Russian-hacking-gospel-truth. By seamlessly excising Guccifer 2.0 from culpability within a new timeline of events, the Associated Press makes the entire hacking story a fantasy narrative that can be neither proven nor disproven but must not be questioned.

The Forensicator explained to Disobedient Media:

"Investigators would have been able to rapidly determine if there were textual differences between Guccifer 2.0's document and the DNC's. If there were no textual differences, an initial determination might have been difficult, because Guccifer 2.0 went to some trouble to obscure internal metadata, known as Revision Save ID's (RSID's), which can be used to uniquely identify sections of text that have been changed and added into a Word document. However, when the Podesta emails were published in October 2016, investigators should have been able to source Guccifer 2.0's document to the Podesta emails quickly. They would have been able to do this before the 2016 election, a full year ahead of the AP report." [Emphasis Added]

The Forensicator then referred this author to a table in his report, depicting the metadata for Podesta's version of the Trump opposition report:

As we can see, the document was saved by Tony Carrk, who worked as Research Director for Hillary for America at the time. This document was attached to this Podesta email .

The Forensicator continued, saying: "We can see that Mr. Carrk made some change that took less than one minute to complete. If investigators compared Carrk's version of the document to the original DNC document, they should have been able to quickly determine that Guccifer 2's document is sourced from Podesta's emails and not directly from the DNC. For this, an RSID correlation would have probably been telling."

Why did the DNC, their security consultant firm Crowdstrike, and government investigators wait so long to tell us that Guccifer 2.0 did not obtain their copy of the Trump opposition report directly from the DNC? Why did Crowdstrike tell the Washington Post that the opposition report files had been stolen specifically from the DNC network if that were not the case?

The legacy press chorus had initially linked Guccifer 2.0's first document, and the "Russian fingerprints" therein to the Trump opposition report that the DNC claimed to have been stolen by Russian state-sponsored hackers. What prompted them to change their story, contradicting not only Guccifer 2.0 but the DNC themselves? Should we now assess the DNC's claim that the document had been taken by Russian hackers to be untrue?

Ultimately, it is the DNC's claim that they were breached by Russian hackers, who stole the Trump opposition report, which directly belies their allegation - because the document did not come from the DNC, but from John Podesta's emails.

Is it possible that Mueller's investigation may have taken a closer look into the origin of Guccifer 2.0's initial document, realizing that it was sourced from Podesta's email? The DNC and government investigators may have then decided that the best way to obscure the resulting contradictory evidence was by letting it quietly leak via a "former DNC official who spoke on the condition of anonymity," in the November 2017 article published by the Associated Press.

Given the repeated contradictions from the DNC and corporate media in their description of Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential race, how can the public be expected to believe that their other claims have any legitimacy whatsoever?

The AP's November 2017 article also noticed that Guccifer 2.0's first published document contained the word CONFIDENTIAL, while the original document did not. This was old news to anyone who had been paying attention; Adam Carter analyzed this artifact nine months earlier:

What is interesting here is that the AP admits that such elements of the document's publication had been fabricated, but did not then follow that realization by questioning other possibly fabricated elements of the documents, such as the Russian-language error messages. The AP certainly did not concern themselves with why a Russian state-sponsored hacker would benefit from airbrushing "confidential" onto such a report. Their claim that it was to attract media attention seems quite weak.

AP surmised that Guccifer 2.0 "air-brush[ed]" the word "confidential" into the document to "catch the reporter's attention." Both Carter and the Forensicator have explained that Guccifer 2.0 used a complex process, involving an intermediate template document, to inject this "alluring" fake. The Forensicator told this author that they take the position that this intermediate template file (ostensibly needed to add "CONFIDENTIAL" to the document) had an additional purpose.

The Forensicator explained that, for some readers and researchers, the copy/paste of an intermediate (RTF) copy of the Trump opposition report into a template document might be interpreted simply as an unconventional method for injecting "confidential" into 1.doc. However, the Forensicator added, it can also be interpreted as a "cover" for the final copy/paste operation which was a necessary step in the evolution of Guccifer 2.0's first document. It was needed to embed the Russian error messages into the final document (1.doc).

Once again, establishment media failed to pursue their cited evidence with due diligence. This is a grave mistake, especially given the way in which Guccifer 2.0's alleged 'hacking' has been used as a major bolstering point for increased tensions between the United States and Russia.

Initially, Gawker and The Smoking Gun Didn't Notice Iron Felix

Guccifer 2.0 made his noisy debut on June 15, 2016 (the day after the DNC publicly claimed it had been breached by Russian state-sponsored hackers). It also appears that Guccifer 2.0 gave advanced copies of their doctored version of the Trump opposition report to two media outlets, The Smoking Gun and Gawker.

In their full analysis, the Forensicator wrote that it was surprising that neither outlet reported on the easily viewed "Last Saved By" property, which listed "Феликс Эдмундович" (aka "Iron Felix") as the user who last saved the document. This unique name was noticed by various social media observers that same day and by Ars Technica the following day. How did the journalists miss this, and why?

Initially, Gawker and The Smoking Gun Didn't Notice the Russian Error Messages

Both Gawker and The Smoking Gun published Guccifer 2.0's Trump opposition report in full as a PDF file. Their PDF files have the now infamous Cyrillic error messages in them; they appear in the last few pages of their PDF files. Ars Technica dubbed these error messages, "Russian fingerprints."

Although both outlets reviewed this document in some detail, neither outlet noticed the Russian error messages in their first reports. The Forensicator suggests that, given their choice of word processing applications, they would have seen the Russian error messages, if only they had viewed the last few pages of each file. That is, unless (perhaps) they received their PDF's directly from Guccifer 2.0 or another third party and they just passed them along.

Ars Technica was Confused When They Didn't See the Russian Error Messages in Guccifer 2.0's Word Document

Ars Technica reported on Guccifer 2.0's publication of the Trump Opposition Report the day after Guccifer 2.0 arrived on the scene. They quickly noted that there were Russian language error messages in the PDF file posted by Gawker. They also noticed that when they viewed 1.doc themselves, they didn't see the Russian error messages. The Forensicator told Disobedient Media that this was because Ars Technica used Word for Windows, which displayed the error messages in English.

Ars Technica suggested that The Smoking Gun's PDF may have been generated by Guccifer 2.0 on a system that had Russian language settings enabled.

While this explanation appears reasonable, it is surprising (if that was the case) that Gawker didn't tell us that their PDF came directly from Guccifer 2.0 . The Smoking Gun also published a PDF with Russian error messages in it. Are we to believe that The Smoking Gun also received their PDF from Guccifer 2.0 or a third party, and failed to report on this fact?

IVN: Did Gawker Outsource Their Analysis to Russia?

An obscure media outlet, Independent Voter Network , raised various theories on the initial reporting done by The Smoking Gun and Gawker. One of their wilder theories suggested that Gawker had outsourced their analysis to a Russian sub-contractor. The Forensicator evaluated that claim, ultimately concluding that Independent Voter Network had gone on a wild goose chase because the "clue" they followed pointed to Gawker's document management service known as "DocumentCloud." DocumentCloud uses a technology that they call "CloudCrowd," which is what IVN saw in the PDF that Gawker uploaded. The Forensicator referred to a DocumentCloud job advertisement for confirmation of his conclusion.

The Forensicator told Disobedient Media: "We found CloudCrowd; it is not an outsourcing company. Probably not Russian, either."

Business Insider: Did Guccifer 2.0 Photoshop "Confidential" Into his Document Screenshots?

When Business Insider noted the presence of "CONFIDENTIAL" in Guccifer 2.0's document, they claimed that Guccifer 2.0 might have "photoshopped" his screenshots (placed on his blog site) to create the watermark and page footer with "confidential" in them.

The Forensicator countered that claim by pointing out that the Business Insider journalist likely viewed the document with "Full-Screen Reading" selected.

This mode will disable the display of the watermark and page headers and footers when viewed by the journalist, but they will be displayed when printed to PDF. No Photoshop required.

Conclusion

The close timing of the DNC announcement and Guccifer 2.0's publication of the Trump report, as well as reports of "Russian fingerprints" in those documents, created a strong link between Guccifer 2.0 and the Russian hackers who allegedly stole DNC files. Over a year later, the Associated Press tells us that this first narrative was wrong, contradicting the DNC's claims as well as much of the early legacy press reports on the issue. Must we concurrently accept the narrative that Russians hacked the DNC if claims that they had done so were not only based on flimsy evidence but have now been contradicted completely?

As far as documented evidence of election interference goes, one does not have to stray far from the actors in the Russian hacking saga to discover that the DNC and establishment Democrats were, instead of victims of meddling, the perpetrators of such abuse of the American Democratic process. In 2017 the NYC Board of Elections admitted that it had illegally purged hundreds of thousands of Democratic voters from the election roles, preventing them from voting in the 2016 Democratic primaries. This abuse of power represents just one in a constellation of legitimate examples of abuse that took place at the hands of corporatized Democrats in order to unfairly and illegally ensure a Clinton nomination.


GunnyG Wed, 05/23/2018 - 18:28 Permalink

Podesta the Molesta gets the Vince Foster invitation to jog at Fort Marcy Park very soon.

honest injun Wed, 05/23/2018 - 18:57 Permalink

This is too complicated for the average demon rat nitwit to follow. They don't want to know this so showing them facts has to be dumbed down. Otherwise, all new revelations will be ignored.

DrLucindaX Wed, 05/23/2018 - 19:10 Permalink

Really good work and reporting here that will never be understood by the masses. Everything that's going on is far too complex, too many moving parts, too much compartmentalization. Trump is doing a good job dumbing it down.

Justapleb Wed, 05/23/2018 - 19:54 Permalink

So the DNC announced Russia hacked them, and "proved" it with a file they say was stolen.But that file was not the DNC's. So the "proof" of Russia hacking the DNC is nonexistent.

Gotta dumb it down.

[Jul 20, 2018] A comment from Spooks Spooking Themselves

Notable quotes:
"... Guccifer 2.0's American Fingerprints Reveal An Operation Made In The USA: https://disobedientmedia.com/2018/05/guccifer-2-0s-american-fingerprints-reveal-an-operation-made-in-the-usa/ ..."
"... Sez who, ask I? Sez the trustworthy American media that would never lie to the public, sez they. You know, professional paragons of virtue like Rachel Maddow and her merry band. ..."
"... These old pols recognise a good demonizing when they see it, especially when directed at them. ..."
"... our democracy WAS hijacked, but it was NOT by the Russians. ..."
Jun 09, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Paul E. Merrell, J.D. , May 31, 2018 at 4:53 am

Guccifer 2.0's American Fingerprints Reveal An Operation Made In The USA: https://disobedientmedia.com/2018/05/guccifer-2-0s-american-fingerprints-reveal-an-operation-made-in-the-usa/

Realist , May 31, 2018 at 9:21 am

Unfortunately, what this guy says is what most Americans still seem to believe. When I ask people what is the actual hard evidence for "Russiagate" (because I don't know of any that has been corroborated), I get a response that there have been massive examples of Russian hacks, Russian posts, tweets and internet adverts–all meant to sabotage Hillary's candidacy, and very effective, mind you. Putin has been an evil genius worthy of a comic book villain (to date myself, a regular Lex Luthor). Sez who, ask I? Sez the trustworthy American media that would never lie to the public, sez they. You know, professional paragons of virtue like Rachel Maddow and her merry band.

Nobody seems aware of the recent findings about Halpern, none seem to have a realistic handle on the miniscule scope of the Russian "offenses" against American democracy. Rachel, the NY Times and WaPo have seen to that with their sins of both commission and omission. Even the Republican party is doing a half-hearted job of defending its own power base with rigorous and openly disseminated fact checking. It's like even many of the committee chairs with long seniority are reluctant to buck the conventional narrative peddled by the media. Many have chosen to retire rather than fight the media and the Deep State. What's a better interpretation of events? Or is one to believe that the silent voices, curious retirements and political heat generated by the Dems, the prosecutors and the media are all independent variables with no connections? These old pols recognise a good demonizing when they see it, especially when directed at them.

Personally, I think that not only the GOPers should be fighting like the devil to expose the truth (which should benefit them in this circumstance) but so should the media and all the watchdog agencies (ngo's) out there because our democracy WAS hijacked, but it was NOT by the Russians.

Worse than that, it was done by internal domestic enemies of the people who must be outed and punished to save the constitution and the republic, if it is not too late. All the misinformation by influential insiders and the purported purveyors of truth accompanied by the deliberate silence by those who should be chirping like birds suggests it may well be far too late.

[Jul 20, 2018] In the event, as is by now well know, Boris Johnson's claim that Porton Down scientists had told him that the agent which poisoned the Skripals came from Russia was specifically repudiated by the head of that organisation, Gary Aitkenhead, on 3 April. Our Foreign Secretary told a flagrant lie, and was exposed.

Jul 20, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

David Habakkuk , a day ago

All,

I was drafting a response to the comment by 'Barbara Ann' – thanks for the link to the recent posts by Adam Carter – before going out. Returning and reading some very interesting comments, I think what I wanted to say has more general relevance.

One reason I am reading so much into 'this Dzerzhinsky thing' is the body of accumulating evidence that people like Tait are part of a system of networks which combine sanctimoniousness, corruption and stupidity in about equal measures. So some more examples may be to the point.

Different cases in which I have taken an interest come together in a post by Tait on the 'Lawfare' site on 13 March, entitled 'U.K. Prime Minister's Speech on the Russian Poisoning of Sergei Skripal: Decoding the Signals.'

(See https://www.lawfareblog.com... .)

In support of the claim that in accusing Russia of a pioneering act of chemical terrorism Theresa May was relying upon accurate analysis from the 'U.K. intelligence community', Tait wrote that:

'May then explained that Skripal was poisoned by a "military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia one of a group of nerve agents known as 'Novichok.'" She is laying out the basic groundwork for the government's attribution to a nation state and, more specifically, Russia. At Porton Down, the U.K. has one of the world's best forensic labs for analyzing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. With the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, this lab not only established that Polonium-210 was used but also which reactor in Russia it came from.'

In the event, as is by now well know, Boris Johnson's claim that Porton Down scientists had told him that the agent which poisoned the Skripals came from Russia was specifically repudiated by the head of that organisation, Gary Aitkenhead, on 3 April. Our Foreign Secretary told a flagrant lie, and was exposed.

(See https://www.craigmurray.org... .)

As I have shown in previous posts on this site, the 'Inquiry' conducted by Sir Robert Owen into the death of Litvinenko was patently corrupt. Moreover, it seems highly likely that, in fabricating 'evidence' to cover up what actually happened, Christopher Steele was doing a 'dry-run' for the fabrication of material in the dossier published by 'BuzzFeed.'

In fact, however, Owen's report made quite clear that the role of Porton Down was marginal. Furthermore, 'Scientist A1' from the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston quite specifically rejected the claim that 'impurity profiling' made it possible to establish that the source of the polonium was the Avangard facility at Sarov, her arguments being accepted by Owen. Either Tait has not bothered to read the report or very much of the coverage, or he is lying.

(For the report, see http://webarchive.nationala... . For some of the mass of evidence which Owen chose to ignore, see my discussions at http://turcopolier.typepad.... ; http://turcopolier.typepad....

What Porton Down did do was to use 'impurity profiling', which can produce 'spectra' identifying even the tiniest traces of substances, to frustrate the attempt to use the 'false flag' attack at Ghouta on 21 August 2013 to inveigle the American and British governments into destroying the Assad 'régime' and handing the country over to jihadists.

It may well be that this display of competence and integrity led to a 'clampdown' at the organisation, which encouraged Boris Johnson to believe he could get away with lying about what its scientists told him.

(See my defence and development of the crucial reporting by Seymour Hersh, at http://turcopolier.typepad.... .)

A general pattern which emerges is that the same small group of 'disinformation peddlers' resurfaces in different contexts – and the pattern whereby 'private security companies' are used to create a spurious impression of independence also recurs.

As I bring out in my piece on Ghouta, two figures who were critical in shaping the 'narrative' acccording to which Syrian government responsibility for the atrocity had been conclusively proved, were Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, formerly the former commanding officer of the UK Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment, and also NATO's Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion, and Dan Kaszeta.

Immediately after the story of the poisoning of the Skripals on 4 March broke, the same duo reappeared, and have been as critical to shaping the 'narrative' about the later incident as they were to that about the former.

(For the piece by Kaszeta on 'Bellingcat' which introduced the 'Novichok' theme four days later, see https://www.bellingcat.com/... .)

This makes it particular interesting to look at the website of Kaszeta's consultancy, 'Strongpoint Security Limited', in conjunction with the 'Companies House' documentation on the company.

(See http://strongpointsecurity.... ; https://beta.companieshouse... .)

One would have thought from the website that his company was a small, but hardly insignificant, player, in the field of 'physical and operational security.' As it happens, having filed 'Total exemption small company accounts' since its incorporation in May 2011, last December it filed 'Micro company accounts' for the year to 31 May 2017.

With a turnover of £20,000, staff costs of a bit more than half of that, and a profit of £394, we can see that although unlike Matt Tait's, Kaszeta's company did trade, if indeed it was his sole source of income, this pivotal figure in Anglo-American 'disinformation operations' was living on something less than $15,000 a year, at current exchange rates. (Pull the other one, as we say in Britain.)

This is all the more ironic, as the website brings out quite how critical a figure Kaszeta has been in obscuring the truth. From the bio he gives, we learn that having started as a Chemical Officer in the U.S. Army, he worked for 12 years in the White House, dealing with CBRN matters, before moving to Britain in 2008.

Among the articles to which he links on the site, we see his response in 'NOW Lebanon' in December 2013 to Hersh's original 'Whose sarin?' piece on Ghouta, -- in which Kaszeta first introduced the famous 'hexamine hypothesis.'

This – patently preposterous – suggestion that the presence of a single 'impurity' is a 'smoking gun' incriminating the Syrian government has echoed on into the clearly corrupt OPCW documents purporting to demonstrate that it was responsible for the 4 April 2017 Khan Sheikhoun attack.

Of some interest in understanding where Kaszeta he is coming from is what he describes as his 'oldest (and most footnoted on Wikipedia)' piece, which is an article published in 1988 on a site called 'Lituanus', on 'Lithuanian Resistance to Foreign Occupation 1940-52.'

(See http://www.lituanus.org/198... .)

As to Colonel de Bretton-Gordon, it is of interest to look at the attempt to 'finger' the GRU over the Skripal poisoning published under the title 'UK Poisoning Inquiry turns to Russian Agency in Mueller Indictments' in the 'New York Times' last Sunday, and the response by the Russian Embassy in London to a question about it.

(See https://www.nytimes.com/201... ; https://www.rusemb.org.uk/f... .)

The response objects that 'while the British authorities keep concealing all information concerning the investigation into the Salisbury incident, the newspaper has quoted "one former US official familiar with the inquiry".'

It also asserts that that crucial evidence which has not been made available to the Russians – and here, as with Ghouta and Khan Sheikhoun, the results of 'impurity profiling' are critical – appears to have been shared not just with inappropriate Americans, but with all kinds of others.

And indeed, the Embassy is quite right in suggesting that the claim made by the supposed creator of 'Novichok', Vladimir Uglev, to the BBC in April about 'all the spectrum data I was sent recently' has neither been confirmed nor denied. This seems a general pattern – the 'spectra' which may actually be able to provide definitive answers to questions of responsibility are only provided to people who can be relied upon to give the 'right' answers.

The Embassy response also quite fairly refers to a report in the 'Times' also in April, about the 'intelligence' which had been 'used to persuade world leaders that Moscow was behind the poisoning' and that the 'Novichok' had been manufactured at the Shikhany facility at in southwest Russia, which stated that de Bretton-Gordon, 'who had seen the intelligence, called it very compelling.' He has a long history of lying about CW in Syria – so is obviously the right person to lie about them in the UK.

(See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/... ; https://www.thetimes.co.uk/... .)

It thus becomes interesting to probe into what lies behind the opening of de Bretton-Gordon's entry on the 'Military Speakers' website ('Real Heroes; Real Stories.') According to this, he is 'Chief Operating Office of SecureBio Ltd a commercial company offering CBRN Resilience, consultancy and deployable capabilities.'

(See http://www.militaryspeakers... .)

From 'Companies House', we learn that the liquidation of 'Secure Bio', which started in in June 2015, was concluded in August last year. The really interesting thing about the records, however, is that at the time of the liquidation the company had very large debts, which were written off, of a kind and in a manner which suggested that de Bretton-Gordon's activities may have been largely funded by loans from untraceable sources which were not meant to be repaid.

(See https://beta.companieshouse... – in particular the 'Statement of affairs' dated 30 June 2015.)

Actually, with the 'NYT' report we come full circle. Among those quoted is Mark Galeotti – apparently his admission that he had totally misrepresented the thinking of the Russian General Staff has not him made more cautious about making extravagant claims about its Main Intelligence Directorate (misreported as Main Directorate by the 'NYT.')

Also quoted are two figures who play key roles in Owen's Report – the Soviet era-GRU defector 'Viktor Suvorov' (real name 'Vladimir Rezun') and the former KGB operative Yuri Shvets. Both of these feature prominently in the posts on the Litvinenko affair to which I have linked, and both were key members of the 'information operations' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky. This now seems to have taken control of American policy, as of British.

The role of 'Suvorov'/Rezun in attempting to defend the interpretations of Stalin's policy put forward by MI6 in the run-up to the Second World War, and those asserted later by General Keitel, and the way he was demolished by the leading American historian of the War in the East, Colonel David Glantz, and the Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky, is too large a subject to go into here.

(For a brief review, see https://networks.h-net.org/... .)

However, it provides further reason to wonder whether the misreadings of Stalin's policy which caused MI6 to give advice to Chamberlain which helped destroy the last chances of preventing the Nazi-Soviet Pact, may still be the 'house view' of that organisation. It was, obviously, the Pact which spelled 'curtains' both for Poland and the Baltics.

David Habakkuk , 6 hours ago
All,

More evidence for the at least passive complicity of GCHQ – for which Matt Tait used to work, and which Robert Hannigan used to run – in corrupt 'information operations' comes in a report yesterday on CNN.

(See https://edition.cnn.com/201... )

It opens:

'Police have identified two suspects in the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, a source with knowledge of the investigation told CNN on Thursday.

'The pair left the UK in the wake of the attack on what is believed to have been a commercial flight, the source added.

'Their departure was revealed in a coded Russian message to Moscow sent after the attack, which was intercepted by a British base in Cyprus, the source said. The British government blames the Skripals' poisoning on Russia.'

The base in question is high up in the Troodos mountains, and is formally run by the RAF but actually a key resource for both GCHQ and NSA in monitoring communications over a wide area. According to an internal document from the former organisation, it has 'long been regarded as a 'Jewel in the Crown' by NSA as it offers unique access to the Levant, North Africa, and Turkey'.

(See https://theintercept.com/20... .)

That the quote comes a report in 'The Intercept' in January 2016 revealing that one of the uses of the Troodos facility is to intercept live video feeds from Israeli drones and fighter jets brings out how paradoxical the world is. For it also appears to have emerged as an important resource in 'information operations' in support of 'Borgist' agendas.

The claim about intercepts incriminating the Russians over the Salisbury incident was first made in a piece by Marco Giannangeli in the Daily Express on 9 April, which followed up the claims which Colonel de Bretton-Gordon had been instrumental in disseminating, and was then widely picked up by the MSM.

(See https://www.express.co.uk/n... .)

It was headlined: 'REVEALED: The bombshell Russian message intercepted on DAY of Skripal poisonings,' and opened: 'AN ELECTRONIC message to Moscow sent on the day former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a nerve agent in Salisbury included the phrase "the package has been delivered".'

Supposedly, this 'prompted a young Flight Lieutenant to recall a separate message that had been intercepted and discounted on the previous day.' The messages were 'understood to have formed "just one part" of the intelligence packet which later allowed Prime Minister Theresa May to state it was "highly likely" that Russia was behind the attacks.'

As it happens, the same writer – Marco Giannangeli – had disseminated a parallel piece of palpable fiction on 1 September 2013, in the 'Sunday Express', in relation to the Ghouta 'false flag.'

(See https://www.express.co.uk/n... .)

This one was headlined, even more melodramatically, 'Senior Syrian military chiefs tell captain: fire chemicals or be shot; BRITISH intelligence chiefs have intercepted radio messages in which senior Syrian military chiefs are heard ordering the use of chemical weapons.'

Part of the story of how bogus claims about 'smoking gun' evidence from 'SIGINT' were used to support the attempt to use the Ghouta 'false flag' to inveigle the British and Americans into destroying the Syrian government was told in my SST post on the incident. However, to mix metaphors, I only scratched the surface of a can of worms.

In a report on the 'Daily Caller' site on 29 August 2013, Kenneth Timmerman claimed that the sequence had started with an actual intercept by Unit 8200 – the Israeli equivalent of GCHQ and NSA.

(See http://dailycaller.com/2013... .)

Claiming to base his account on Western intelligence sources, he suggested that:

'According to these officers, who served in top positions in the United States, Britain, France, Israel, and Jordan, a Syrian military communication intercepted by Israel's famed Unit 8200 electronic intelligence outfit has been doctored so that it leads a reader to just the opposite conclusion reached by the original report.'

While I am not in a position to establish whether his claim is or is not accurate, an AP report on the same day quoted 'U.S. intelligence officials' explaining that 'an intercept of Syrian military officials discussing the strike was among low-level staff, with no direct evidence tying the attack back to an Assad insider or even a senior Syrian commander'.

(See https://www.salon.com/2013/... )

Meanwhile, Timmerman's claim that 'The doctored report was picked up on Israel's Channel 2 TV on Aug. 24, then by Focus magazine in Germany, the Times of Israel, and eventually by The Cable in Washington, DC' is supported by links to the relevant stories, which say what he claims they say.

Moreover, it seems clear that the 1 September 2013 report was an attempt to counter a – somewhat devastating – critique made in a 31 August post entitled 'The Troodos Conundrum' by the former British Ambassador Craig Murray, who had been closely involved with the facility during his time at the Foreign Office (and has written invaluable material on the Salisbury incident.)

(See https://www.craigmurray.org... .)

Precisely because of the closeness of the GCHQ/NSA collaboration, Murray brought out, there was indeed a major problem explaining why claims about 'SIGINT' had been central to the case made in the 'Government Assessment' released by the White House on 30 August 2013, but not even mentioned in the Joint Intelligence Community 'Assessment' produced two days before.

The answer, Murray suggested, was that the 'intelligence' came from Mossad, and so would not have been automatically shared with the British. But, given the superior capabilities of Troodos, if Mossad had it, the British should have also. So his claims 'meshed' with those by Timmerman and the AP, and the 'Express' report looks like a lame attempt at a cover-up.

Again however, one finds the world is a paradoxical place. As I noted in my SST post, detailed demolitions of the claims about 'SIGINT' in relation to Ghouta were provided both Seymour Hersh, in the 'Whose sarin?' article, and also on the 'Who Attacked Ghouta?' site masterminded by one 'sasa wawa.'

Later, it became clear that this was likely to be the Israeli technology entrepreneur Saar Wilf, a former employee of Unit 8200. So this may – or may not – be an indication of deep divisions within Israeli intelligence.

Between 18 March and 31 April, a fascinating series of posts on the Salisbury incident appeared on the 'Vineyard of the Saker' blog. The author, who used the name 'sushi', was a self-professed IT professsional, who had however obviously acquired an extensive familiarity with 'chemical forensics' and appeared to have some experience of 'SIGINT.'

(See https://thesaker.is/tag/sushi/ .)

In a 14 April post, 'sushi' produced a dismissal of the claims about 'SIGINT' implicating the Russians over the Salisbury incident quite as contemptuous as that which 'sasa wawa' had produced in relation to the claims about it incriminating the Syrian government over Ghouta.

Pointing to the implausibility of the story disseminated by the 'Express', he remarked that:

'It is doubted that any message traffic is processed on Cyprus. It is more likely that the entire take is transmitted back to GCHQ in Cheltenham via a fibre optic link. There exabytes of take are processed, not by a bored flight lieutenant, but by banks of high speed computers.

'Clearly someone in Cheltenham has committed a programming error. Anyone with any knowledge of secret communications knows that the code phrase used to confirm a murder in Salisbury is "small pizza, no anchovies." '

Interestingly, another paper in the 'Express' group made a parallel claim in relation to the Khan Sheikhoun incident to that about the Ghouta incident, but the story was not picked up and may indeed have been suppressed.

On 9 April, the paper published a report headlined 'Brit spies' lead role in Syrian air strikes; RAF BASE IS 'WEAPON.' This claimed that 'within an hour of the airstrike', Troodos had intercepted communications revealing that nerve gas had been used, and had been delivered by jets from the Syrian Arab Air Force's Shayrat Air Base.

(See

View Hide

[Jul 20, 2018] 'Make them pariahs': how shaming Trump aides became a resistance tactic by Sam Wolfson

Hat tip to caucus99percent.com
Notable quotes:
"... @snoopydawg ..."
"... @gulfgal98 ..."
"... The Russians Are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce. ..."
Jul 11, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

After another week saw leading Republicans accosted in public places, many on the left are arguing that harassment is legitimate

The day after Sarah Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia, Maxine Waters, the representative for the California 43rd who has become a leader of the anti-Trump resistance within Congress, addressed a rally in Los Angeles. Up until that point, national Democratic leaders had mostly urged respectful protest in response to the Trump administration.

"Let's make sure we show up wherever we have to show up," she said to cheers from the crowd. "And if you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they're not welcome any more, anywhere."

In the days that followed, other leading Democrats, among them Nancy Pelosi and David Axelrod, distanced themselves from the comments and called for civility. Trump personally attacked Waters, calling her an "extraordinarily low IQ person". But Waters gave voice, and perhaps legitimacy, to what has become a prominent form of activism since Trump took office: accosting members of his team in public places.

Over the weekend, Steve Bannon was called "a piece of trash" by a heckler at a bookstore; a bartender gave Stephen Miller the middle finger, apparently causing Miller to throw away $80 of sushi he'd just bought in disgust; and Mitch McConnell was chased out of a restaurant in Kentucky by protesters, who followed him to this car yelling "turtle head" and "we know where you live".

These follow similar encounters for other members of Trump's top team. The homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, was confronted by protesters chanting "shame" while she ate at a Mexican restaurant. Last week, Scott Pruitt was accosted by Kristin Mink while he was eating lunch. Mink, a teacher, held her two-year-old child as she asked him to resign "before your scandals push you out". Days later, Pruitt did resign, and although he was probably asked to do so by Trump, in his letter he cited "the unrelenting attacks on me" as his reason for leaving.

After each case, the merits of such an approach have been debated – many have called for civility or argued that protesters leave themselves open to attack if they pursue Trump-like techniques. There has been some consensus that encounters like Mink's, which are eloquent and non-aggressive, are more acceptable than when protesters chant personal attacks or use threatening language

... ... ...

Submitted by edg on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 2:08pm
If you stand with Markos ... @Wink

... you don't stand with most of C99 and most of progressive society. He is wrong, on this and many other things. Where was his (and your) outrage when Obama was droning American citizens, destroying Libya and creating Europe's current refugee crisis, and helping Saudi Arabia wreak havoc on Houthi civilians? How many pies did he throw then? How many Obama administration officials did he publicly shame?

Submitted by snoopydawg on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 1:37pm Would that have gone for shaming members of Obama's @Wink

administration too? He did many of the same things that Trump is doing to immigrants. He deported more of them then any president including 56% of them who hadn't committed any crimes. How about shaming them for his drone policies, killing 3 Americans without due process, bombing wedding parties and then the people who came to their rescue? Or the many, many other things he and his admin members did that were absolutely heinous?

Should we have done that to the people in the Bush administration too or how far back should we have been shaming people who worked in a president's administration?

Maybe we should be shaming the democrats who have been voting with the republicans to pass Trump's legislation, cabinet picks and justices? Where would it stop?


Submitted by thanatokephaloides on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 5:49pm

where it stops @snoopydawg

Maybe we should be shaming the democrats who have been voting with the republicans to pass Trump's legislation, cabinet picks and justices? Where would it stop?

Where it should -- with the non-voluntarily-complicit.

Submitted by Amanda Matthews on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 9:50pm When political life is reduced to @Wink

the publicly harassing, embarrssing, and running off the oposition then we're really fucked. Or do you seriousy think those tactics won't be repaid in kind?

on public shaming.
#7
Especially in public restaurants.
There is no better way to protest this admin than to shame them in a public place, confront them while they attempt to swallow a bite of pork chop.

up 0 users have voted. --

I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa Submitted by gulfgal98 on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 12:00pm Critical thinking skills seem to be non-existent over there.

Again, Markos and his staff refuse to discuss policy from a positive perspective. Instead, they focus their readers on the outrage de jour and tribalism. The entire purpose of that site is a massive propaganda push designed to keep us divided. And the narrative they keep pushing are not only divisive, but extremely dangerous.

I rarely go there any more, mostly because I would like to keep as many of my remaining brain cells intact. But when I have visited that place, it is a very frightening place to see how Markos (post purge) has herded the remaining members into a small corral, all of them nodding in agreement with whatever gruel Markos and his front pagers are serving up. Submitted by snoopydawg on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 6:29pm Daily Kos should change its name to @gulfgal98

The Daily Tabloid. Or The Daily Gossip because of some of the topics covered there. The new McCarthyism will destroy this country even more:

BAR Book Forum: Jeremy Kuzmarov's and John Marciano's "The Russians are Coming, Again"
"The American people have been constantly manipulated and made to fear the Russian threat when it is the United States that has been the aggressive power."

In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week's featured authors are Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano . Kuzmarov is Jay P. Walker Assistant Professor of American History, University of Tulsa. Marciano is Professor Emeritus at SUNY Cortland. Their book is The Russians Are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce.

Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?

Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano: Our book provides a historical perspective on contemporary affairs by showing how the Russo-phobia that has been prevalent in our political discourse over the last four to five years has deep and long historical roots, and has often been used by government leaders to turn public attention away from domestic inequalities by channeling societal resources towards the military sector. During the early Cold War, a period of labor militancy and momentum for the expansion of the New Deal was destroyed by McCarthyism and the Cold War.The Korean War brought on huge military budgets that have never left us and an expansion of the U.S. overseas military base network. These policies were underlain by exaggerated views about the Soviet Union which were stoked by political elites, who had worked for companies that reaped enormous profit from the permanent warfare state. The same forces are behind the renewed efforts to demonize Russian President Vladimir Putin and exaggerate the Russian threat, with serious adverse consequences for society that have already been evident. The consequences include a revitalization of the arms race, waging of proxy wars, and a further poisoning of the domestic political culture through the reinvigoration of a McCarthyist discourse and tactics.

"During the early Cold War, a period of labor militancy and momentum for the expansion of the New Deal was destroyed by McCarthyism and the Cold War."

More: https://www.blackagendareport.com/bar-book-forum-jeremy-kuzmarovs-and-john-marcianos-russians-are-coming-again up

[Jul 20, 2018] If GRU list is not authentic this will backfire as conditions of working of US diplomats in Moscow will be became much worse. There might be some other forms of revenge. If the GRU list is authentic, it exposes the USA ability to penetrate that organization, leading to Moscow tightening up security to the detriment of American intelligence by Philip Giraldi

The "Deep state" honchos who created this indictment have a working assumption that the USA remain a sole superpower and that everything is permitted, even if this is a provocation/false flag operation conducted solely for internal consumption. That might be the assumption that is no longer true.
Notable quotes:
"... The document itself also provides no information on how the Russian officers and their positions were identified, which suggests that it could have been a US hack or agent in place, either run by CIA or NSA, that came up with a list of those individuals connected to GRU cyber operations. That would be information involving sources and methods, codeword protected material beyond Top Secret. ..."
"... Beyond what is or is not contained in the document itself, there is a clear misunderstanding regarding how a sophisticated intelligence organization, which certainly includes the GRU, operates. ..."
"... Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation . ..."
Jul 19, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

The quote was extracted from: The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity The Establishment Strikes Back

... ... ...

The document itself also provides no information on how the Russian officers and their positions were identified, which suggests that it could have been a US hack or agent in place, either run by CIA or NSA, that came up with a list of those individuals connected to GRU cyber operations. That would be information involving sources and methods, codeword protected material beyond Top Secret.

If the GRU list is authentic, it would expose US ability to penetrate that organization, leading to Moscow tightening up security to the detriment of American intelligence. But it might alternatively be suggested that the drafters needed a group of plausible Russians and used a generic list provided by either CIA or NSA to come up with the culprits and then used those identities and the detailed information regarding them to provide credibility to their account. What they did not do, however, is provide the actual evidence connecting the individuals to the "hack/interference" or to connect the same to the Russian government. If the information in the indictment is completely accurate, which may not be the case, there is some suggestion that alleged Moscow linked proxies may have deliberately sought to undermine the campaign of Hillary Clinton to favor Bernie Sanders, but absolutely no evidence that they did anything to help Donald Trump.

Beyond what is or is not contained in the document itself, there is a clear misunderstanding regarding how a sophisticated intelligence organization, which certainly includes the GRU, operates. If there had been a large-scale Kremlin sanctioned plan to disrupt the US election, it would not be run by twelve identifiable GRU officers working with what appears to be only limited cover and resources. If the facts are correct, the activity might have been a routine probing, collecting and selective dissemination of information effort that all intelligence agencies engage in. The United States does so routinely in many countries, interfering in elections worldwide, far more than Russia with its limited resources, and even carrying out regime change.

If the Kremlin's objective were truly to undermine American democracy, a task that is already being undertaken very ably by the GOP and Democrats, hundreds of officers would be involved, all working under deep cover and operating securely out of dispersed sites. And no one involved would be using computers connected to networks that could be penetrated to enable personal identification or discovery of the ultimate source of the activity. Everyone would be working in alias on stand-alone machines and the transmission of information would be done using cut-outs to break any chain of custody. A cut-out might consist of using thumb drives to transmit information from one computer to another, for example. There would be no sending or receiving of information by channels that could be identified by NSA or CIA and compromised.

So the idea that the United States government identified twelve culprits who were responsible for trying to overthrow American democracy is by any measure ludicrous, if indeed there was a major plan to disrupt the election at all. The indictment is little more than a political document seeking to undermine any effort by Donald Trump to establish rapprochement with Vladimir Putin. It will also serve to give fuel to the Democrats, who are still at a loss to understand what happened to Hillary Clinton, and Republican hawks like John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse who persist in seeking to refight the Cold War. As Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin said in their Helsinki press conference, the coming together of the leaders of the world's two most powerful nuclear armed countries is too important an opportunity to let pass. Cold Warriors in Washington should take note.

Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation .

[Jul 20, 2018] Inside WikiLeaks Working with the Publisher that Changed the World by Stefania Maurizi

Jul 20, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

For instance, I was a partner in the publication of the emails of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign manager, which were published by WikiLeaks shortly after the infamous Access Hollywood video revealed candidate Donald Trump making rude remarks about women.

Many media outlets continue to report that the Podesta emails were released only minutes after the Access Hollywood video aired, hinting at some sort of coordination between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign. In a indictment issued last Friday, Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, charged 12 officers of the Russian military intelligence service, GRU, for having allegedly hacked both the DNC and Podesta emails and allegedly passed them on to WikiLeaks for publication.

I have no idea who WikiLeaks' sources were for the Podesta emails: the whole concept of WikiLeaks is based on the submission of secret or otherwise restricted documents by anonymous sources. Assange said numerous times that his source for the Clinton emails was not the Russian government nor a state party.

As I worked on the Podesta emails, I do know that their publication was not a last-second decision. I had been alerted the day before, and their staggered release was a choice WikiLeaks made after the organization was harshly criticized by mainstream media for publishing the DNC documents all at once. This time the emails would trickle out to make them easier for the public to digest. But that was criticized too by the U.S. media and the Democrats as an attempt to leave Clinton bleeding a few weeks before the elections.

... ... ...

Russia perceives Assange as a sort of Western dissident. The country definitely loves the idea of "Western dissidents" and is happy to stick a finger in the eyes of the West by assuring wide coverage for Assange and his organization. Russia media highlights the contradictions in Western democracies which, while preaching aggressive journalism and the protection of journalistic sources, have instead put Chelsea Manning in prison, charged Snowden, investigated WikiLeaks for the last eight years and has kept its editor arbitrarily detained with no end in sight.

Stefania Maurizi works for the Italian daily La Repubblica as an investigative journalist, after ten years working for the Italian newsmagazine l'Espresso. She has worked on all WikiLeaks releases of secret documents, and partnered with Glenn Greenwald to reveal the Snowden files about Italy. She has also interviewed A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani atomic bomb, revealed the condolence payment agreement between the US government and the family of the Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto killed in a US drone strike, and investigated the harsh working conditions of Pakistani workers in a major Italian garment factory in Karachi. She has started a multi-jurisdictional FOIA litigation effort to defend the right of the press to access the full set of documents on the Julian Assange and WikiLeaks case. She authored two books: Dossier WikiLeaks. Segreti Italiani and Una Bomba, Dieci Storie, the latter translated into Japanese. She can be reached at [email protected]

[Jul 20, 2018] Trump Stays Defiant Amid a Foreign Policy Establishment Gone Mad The American Conservative

Notable quotes:
"... New York Times ..."
"... Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, ..."
"... . To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com. ..."
Jul 20, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Trump Stays Defiant Amid a Foreign Policy Establishment Gone Mad By Patrick J. Buchanan July 20, 2018, 12:01 AM

lev radin / Shutterstock.com "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."

Under the Constitution, these are the offenses for which presidents can be impeached.

And to hear our elites, Donald Trump is guilty of them all.

Trump's refusal to challenge Vladimir Putin's claim at Helsinki that his GRU boys did not hack Hillary Clinton's campaign has been called treason, a refusal to do his sworn duty to protect and defend the United States, by a former director of the CIA.

Famed journalists and former high officials of the U.S. government have called Russia's hacking of the DNC "an act of war" comparable to Pearl Harbor.

The New York Times ran a story on the many now charging Trump with treason. Others suggest Putin is blackmailing Trump, or has him on his payroll, or compromised Trump a long time ago.

Wailed Congressman Steve Cohen: "Where is our military folks? The Commander in Chief is in the hands of our enemy!"

Apparently, some on the left believe we need a military coup to save our democracy.

Not since Robert Welch of the John Birch Society called Dwight Eisenhower a "conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy" have such charges been hurled at a president. But while the Birchers were a bit outside the mainstream, today it is the establishment itself bawling "Treason!"

What explains the hysteria?

The worst-case scenario would be that the establishment actually believes the nonsense it is spouting. But that is hard to credit. Like the boy who cried "Wolf!" they have cried "Fascist!" too many times to be taken seriously.

A month ago, the never-Trumpers were comparing the separation of immigrant kids from detained adults, who brought them to the U.S. illegally, to FDR's concentration camps for Japanese Americans.

Other commentators equated the separations to what the Nazis did at Auschwitz.

If the establishment truly believed this nonsense, it would be an unacceptable security risk to let them near the levers of power ever again.

Using Occam's razor, the real explanation for this behavior is the simplest one: America's elites have been driven over the edge by Trump's successes and their failures to block him.

Trump is deregulating the economy, cutting taxes, appointing record numbers of federal judges, reshaping the Supreme Court, and using tariffs to cut trade deficits and the bully pulpit to castigate freeloading allies.

Worst of all, Trump clearly intends to carry out his campaign pledge to improve relations with Russia and get along with Vladimir Putin.

"Over our dead bodies!" the Beltway elite seems to be shouting.

Hence the rhetorical WMDs hurled at Trump: liar, dictator, authoritarian, Putin's poodle, fascist, demagogue, traitor, Nazi.

Such language approaches incitement to violence. One wonders whether the haters are considering the impact of the words they so casually use. Some of us yet recall how Dallas was charged with complicity in the death of JFK for slurs far less toxic than this.

The post-Helsinki hysteria reveals not merely the mindset of the president's enemies, but the depth of their determination to destroy him.

They intend to break Trump and bring him down, to see him impeached, removed, indicted, and prosecuted, and the agenda on which he ran and was nominated and elected dumped onto the ash heap of history.

Thursday, Trump indicated that he knows exactly what is afoot, and threw down the gauntlet of defiance: "The Fake News Media wants so badly to see a major confrontation with Russia, even a confrontation that could lead to war," he tweeted. "They are pushing so recklessly hard and hate the fact that I'll probably have a good relationship with Putin."

Spot on. Trump is saying: I am going to call off this Cold War II before it breaks out into the hot war that nine U.S. presidents avoided, despite Soviet provocations far graver than Putin's pilfering of DNC emails showing how Debbie Wasserman Schultz stuck it to Bernie Sanders.

Then the White House suggested Vlad may be coming to dinner this fall.

Trump is edging toward the defining battle of his presidency: a reshaping of U.S. foreign policy to avoid clashes and conflicts with Russia and the shedding of Cold War commitments no longer rooted in the national interests of this country.

Yet should he attempt to carry out his agenda -- to get out of Syria, pull troops from Germany, and take a second look at NATO's Article 5 commitment to go to war for 29 nations, some of which, like Montenegro, most Americans have never heard of -- he is headed for the most brutal battle of his presidency.

This Helsinki hysteria is but a taste.

By cheering Brexit, dissing the EU, suggesting NATO is obsolete, departing Syria, trying to get on with Putin, Trump is threatening the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment with what it fears most: irrelevance.

For if there is no war on, no war imminent, and no war wanted, what does a War Party do?

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever . To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

[Jul 20, 2018] Russophobia is running amok in this country

Jul 20, 2018 | twitter.com

VICE News ‏ Verified account @ vicenews Jul 17

There's a small but vocal group of American scholars who say that anti-Russian hysteria is on the rise. We met with two of them to hear their admittedly unpopular case for the rightness of Russia.

(via @HBO ) pic.twitter.com/sm6pmhmEkO

-- VICE News (@vicenews) July 17, 2018

[Jul 19, 2018] Trump-Putin summit induced the neoliberal ruling classes hysteria or How to Stop Worrying and Love the New McCarthyism

So it appears America and democracy have miraculously survived the dreaded Trump-Putin summit or Trump's meeting with his Russian handler, as the neoliberal ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media would dearly like us all to believe. NATO has not been summarily dissolved. Poland has not been invaded by Russia.
Notable quotes:
"... So it appears America and democracy have miraculously survived the dreaded Trump-Putin summit or Trump's meeting with his Russian handler, as the neoliberal ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media would dearly like us all to believe. NATO has not been summarily dissolved. Poland has not been invaded by Russia. ..."
"... And so, once again, Western liberals, and others obsessed with Donald Trump, having been teased into a painfully tumescent paroxysm of anticipation of some unimaginably horrible event that would finally lead to Trump's impeachment ..."
"... In the days and weeks leading up to the summit, the global capitalist ruling class Resistance deployed every weapon in its mighty arsenal to whip the Western masses up into a frenzy of anti-Putin-Nazi fervor ..."
Jul 18, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

Extracted from: Trump's Treasonous Traitor Summit or How Liberals Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the New McCarthyism by CJ Hopkins

So it appears America and democracy have miraculously survived the dreaded Trump-Putin summit or Trump's meeting with his Russian handler, as the neoliberal ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media would dearly like us all to believe. NATO has not been summarily dissolved. Poland has not been invaded by Russia.

The offices of The New York Times , The Washington Post , CNN, and MSNBC have not been stormed by squads of jackbooted Trumpian Gestapo.

The Destabilization of the Middle East, the Privatization of Virtually Everything, the Conversion of the Planet into One Big Shopping Mall, and other global capitalist projects are all going forward uninterrupted. Apart from Trump making a narcissistic, word-salad-babbling jackass of himself, which he does on a more or less daily basis, nothing particularly apocalyptic happened.

And so, once again, Western liberals, and others obsessed with Donald Trump, having been teased into a painfully tumescent paroxysm of anticipation of some unimaginably horrible event that would finally lead to Trump's impeachment (or his removal from office by other means) were left standing around with their hysteria in their hands. It has become a sadistic ritual at this point like a twisted, pseudo-Tantric exercise where the media get liberals all lathered up over whatever fresh horror Trump has just perpetrated (or some non-story story they have invented out of whole cloth), build the tension for several days, until liberals are moaning and begging for impeachment, or a full-blown CIA-sponsored coup, then pull out abruptly and leave the poor bastards writhing in agony until the next time which is pretty much exactly what just happened.

In the days and weeks leading up to the summit, the global capitalist ruling class Resistance deployed every weapon in its mighty arsenal to whip the Western masses up into a frenzy of anti-Putin-Nazi fervor. While continuing to flog the wildly popular baby concentration camp story (because the Hitler stimulus never fails to elicit a Pavlovian response from Americans, regardless of how often or how blatantly you use it), the corporate media began hammering hard on the "Trump is a Russian Agent" hysteria. (Normally, the corporate media alternates between the Hitler hysteria and the Russia hysteria so as not to completely short-circuit the already scrambled brains of Western liberals, but given the imminent threat of a peace deal , they needed to go the whole hog this time and paint this summit as a secret, internationally televised assignation between Hitler and well, Hitler).

[Jul 19, 2018] Putin Asked Trump Permission to Interrogate Obama's Ambassador

Notable quotes:
"... McFaul: "Russia made the whole story up." Typical projection. And Browder only became a critic of Putin (the russian justice system) after his criminal enterprise was uncovered. ..."
"... As a "red blooded, Bible believing American", one who has served under oath, and know the duties and penalties, I suggest it's perhaps the best "diplomatic move" seen since Mr. Putin took up the Secretary of State's offer, took Syria's chemical weapons, and took up truly ridding the Nation of terrorists, both those of Saudi, and those my own government made. ..."
Jul 19, 2018 | russia-insider.com

This is pure brilliance on Russia's part. It wont happen, but it draws attention to the Browder story, and discredits McFaul by association. Very smart. Update : It appears Michael McFaul is really getting nervous, tweeting like a teenager on meth tonight:

"I hope the White House corrects the record and denounces in categorical terms this ridiculous request from Putin. Not doing so creates moral equivalency between a legitimacy US indictment of Russian intelligence officers and a crazy, completely fabricated story invented by Putin"

me title=

With The White House flip-flopping back and forth on what was actually said - and meant to be said - in Helsinki, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dropped the latest tape-bomb to blow the establishment's mind during to today's press conference.

Sanders reported that President Trump is open to a proposal from Vladimir Putin to let Russian authorities question the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul .

While Trump reportedly made no commitments to Putin, the Russian president offered to allow Special Counsel Robert Mueller to observe interrogations of the 12 Russian intelligence agents indicted by a U.S. grand jury last week for hacking Democratic Party email accounts.

Trump called it an "interesting idea" and an "incredible offer" at the news conference.

Sanders left the press corps dangling by concluding that:

"The president will work with his team and we'll let you know if there's an announcement on that front."

As The Hill reports, Russia state-owned outlet RT reported that Russia wanted to question McFaul and the author of the so-called Steele dossier, Christopher Steele, among others in its investigation into American financier Bill Browder.

Browder is a prominent critic of Putin who lobbied on behalf of the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions against Russia.

McFaul has denounced the possibility of his being questioned by Russian officials, and has called on Trump to condemn the proposal .

"Putin has been harassing me for a long time," McFaul said on Twitter on Wednesday.

"That he now wants to arrest me, however, takes it to a new level. I expect my government to defend me and my colleagues in public and private ."

And went on...

Does he seem nervous to you?


Source: Zero Hedge Putin Asked Trump Permission to Interrogate Obama's Ambassador This is pure brilliance on Russia's part. It wont happen, but it draws attention to the Browder story, and discredits McFaul by association. Very smart. Tyler Durden 11 hours ago | 1,727 41 MORE: Politics Update : It appears Michael McFaul is really getting nervous, tweeting like a teenager on meth tonight:

"I hope the White House corrects the record and denounces in categorical terms this ridiculous request from Putin. Not doing so creates moral equivalency between a legitimacy US indictment of Russian intelligence officers and a crazy, completely fabricated story invented by Putin"

With The White House flip-flopping back and forth on what was actually said - and meant to be said - in Helsinki, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dropped the latest tape-bomb to blow the establishment's mind during to today's press conference.

Sanders reported that President Trump is open to a proposal from Vladimir Putin to let Russian authorities question the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul .

While Trump reportedly made no commitments to Putin, the Russian president offered to allow Special Counsel Robert Mueller to observe interrogations of the 12 Russian intelligence agents indicted by a U.S. grand jury last week for hacking Democratic Party email accounts.

Trump called it an "interesting idea" and an "incredible offer" at the news conference.

Sanders left the press corps dangling by concluding that:

"The president will work with his team and we'll let you know if there's an announcement on that front."

As The Hill reports, Russia state-owned outlet RT reported that Russia wanted to question McFaul and the author of the so-called Steele dossier, Christopher Steele, among others in its investigation into American financier Bill Browder.

Browder is a prominent critic of Putin who lobbied on behalf of the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions against Russia.

McFaul has denounced the possibility of his being questioned by Russian officials, and has called on Trump to condemn the proposal .

"Putin has been harassing me for a long time," McFaul said on Twitter on Wednesday.

"That he now wants to arrest me, however, takes it to a new level. I expect my government to defend me and my colleagues in public and private ."

And went on... Does he seem nervous to you?


Source: Zero Hedge

ole • 11 hours ago ,

McFaul: "Russia made the whole story up." Typical projection. And Browder only became a critic of Putin (the russian justice system) after his criminal enterprise was uncovered.

mis dos centavos • 11 hours ago ,

Considering McFaul is just another Pyatt, all his 'Russia made up" nonsense is hardly worth an afterthought. He's in dirt up to his ears.

mis dos centavos mis dos centavos 11 hours ago ,

Only reason he couldn't get to square one pulling off a Pyatt was because he had no banderite fascist-style goon squads in Russia under his command.

mis dos centavos mis dos centavos 11 hours ago ,

Think about that one, Mr. McFoul. It's not only Russia that can read you like a book.

mis dos centavos mis dos centavos 9 hours ago ,

I did like this one review of your insightful book, Mr. McFoul. If I send you the review, will you sign it? I'd be honored. Russia's Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin By Michael McFaul, Cornell University Press, 2001
http://exiledonline.com/mik...

This book is a four-hundred page testimonial to the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the American Russia-watching mafia. In its pages, Michael McFaul condemns himself again and again with staggering non-sequiturs, self-serving lies, crude misrepresentations of his own past and the recent history of Russia, and repeated failures to meet even the most basic standards of academic rigor.

tom 11 hours ago ,

Mr McFaul seems to be unfamiliar with the concept of law and a justice system. If he is indicted by the Russian courts and required for questioning, why is that any different from Russian "suspects" being indicted by US courts and required for questioning? Until the justice system has made its inquiries and run its course, no one can know for sure whether Mr McFaul is guilty of crimes or not. So why does he demand total immunity from justice in such a peremptory, entitled way?

Surely it can't be because he feels that Americans are in any way "superior", "exceptional", or immune from justice? Surely Mr McFaul isn't a crude common-or-garden racist? Surely...?

jsinton tom 8 hours ago ,

The rub here is the ambassador enjoys diplomatic immunity from prosecution for events that might have occurred during his tenure in Moscow from Russian courts. If the Trump DOJ decides he should face the music then he has no immunity.

Bad boy!! Otto!! tom 6 hours ago ,

Your third question answers your second question almost perfectly. Because he feels that Americans are in every way "superior", "exceptional", and should be immune from justice, no matter how heinous the crimes they have committed. There fixed it for ya. :-)

Brian Eggar 5 hours ago ,

What a circus and what a lot of clowns. As they say, nobody is above the law or at least they shouldn't be. I would say that Mr McFaul does protest too much and judging by his rattled statements appears that he has something to hide. Getting back to basics where is the $400K and how did it get there and did any go missing on the way?

David James 7 hours ago ,

Bonobo Administration exempt from Law, Prosecution or scrutiny---via the CIA.

Truth • 11 hours ago ,

McFaul is a bag boy shabbos goy for the Jooz that are trying to re-steal (1917, 1991, 2014) Russian wealth. Browder was a discarded Rothschild foreskin.

Constantine BMWA1 6 hours ago ,

Earl Browder was lauding Soviet Russia and its successes. He didn't fleece the Russian people. His grandson is a parasite that hates Russia and has siphoned his ill-gotten gains from the country. No comparison.

Kjell Hasthi 8 hours ago ,

The interesting side of the story is Trump can say yes as president. Not much Michael McFaul can do then? It will turn MSM Media upside down. Btw. NSA can give tips to the Russians about what to ask. They know everything. Assad probably would also like to question McCain regarding illegal stay in Syria

Tommy Jensen Kjell Hasthi 5 hours ago ,

What I like most of all is Trump´s comment "an interesting idea and an incredible offer". ha ha ha ha ha ha. It will probably not be possible to realize, but it shows Trump is not stupid at all.

Merijn 10 hours ago ,

Pay Back Time: Puppeticians will be taken out... One at the time...the Longer the Fun will Last...Russia just make all their Lies Visible... it is a very Strong Weapon... People are Tired and fed up with Liars, Traitors & Deceivers... Yesterday they caught our Foreign Minister Blok with some nice Statements...He's like a gut-Shot animal at the moment...one more Trick and He is Exit....just keep an eye on him...

https://www.aljazeera.com/n...
Stef Blok... You are a complete idiot... take your stuff and Buzz Off...the IMF or the European Union always can use Some Retarded Ex-Puppeticians Like You...

Ray Douglas 4 hours ago ,

I wouldn't advise Trump to go to Dallas.

Koroviev,Behemoth&Woland LLP 5 hours ago ,

View Hide

Snowglobe 20 minutes ago ,

Lee Stranahan Exposes Bill Browder, The Man Mentioned By Putin In Helsinki Summit Play Hide

Solzhenitsyn fan • an hour ago ,

Putin is not 8 Dan for nothing! Absolutely brilliant!

In the news:
https://www.smh.com.au/worl...

"Trump invited Putin to Washington for summit: White House". Washington: President Donald Trump invited Russian leader Vladimir Putin to Washington for a summit in the northern autumn. "In Helsinki, @POTUS agreed to ongoing working level dialogue between the two security council staffs," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said in a tweet on Thursday. "President Trump asked @AmbJohnBolton to invite President Putin to Washington in the fall and those discussions are already underway.

Sanders announced the invitation less than an hour after the Republican-led Senate effectively rebuked President Donald Trump for considering Russia's request to question US officials, giving voice to growing unease over the president's relationship with Putin following their summit in Helsinki on Monday...

Bobbie Taylor an hour ago ,

Russia should be allowed to question McFaul. We should honor the treaty. Unfortunately, the intelligence agencies have more power than the president at this point. They want to assassinate him.

Haut 4 hours ago ,

Everything about this guy just smells, Foul Lol

John McClain 4 hours ago ,

As a "red blooded, Bible believing American", one who has served under oath, and know the duties and penalties, I suggest it's perhaps the best "diplomatic move" seen since Mr. Putin took up the Secretary of State's offer, took Syria's chemical weapons, and took up truly ridding the Nation of terrorists, both those of Saudi, and those my own government made.

I was afraid for a bit, Syria was going to be broken, and I've served beside Syrian Army in Beirut, I respect them highly, consider them among the best professionals, as the world can easily see they are, and I hate what a criminal cadre are doing to my Country, while we enjoy our sit/coms and beer, and eat snacks and get fat.

God Bless Russia and President Putin, "it take's a man to make a man", is an old saying, and the same is true for Nations, I expect.
Semper Fidelis,
John McClain
Vanceboro, NC, USA

Snowglobe 4 hours ago ,

LOL! Thank you Mr. Putin! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Keep poking these idiots with a stick. :-)

Tommy Jensen Lycan Thrope 5 hours ago ,

There is only one solution for uncle Sam.
View Hide

Maria Angelica Brunell Solar Lycan Thrope 4 hours ago ,

You did not understand the proposal. Russian police interrogates the indicted Russian officials, and Mueller and team can be given permission to enter Russia and watch the interrogations. American police interrogates Browder and accomplices, and Russian police can be given permission to enter the US and watch the proceedings. Completely fair and transparent, according to existing Treaty between the 2 countries. Nobody can be extradited, because there is no extradition treaty between the countries.

Leon • 6 hours ago ,

If Russia is doing killing and poisoning, how come Soros and Browder are not killed, if anybody deserves - here are two biggest criminals and both of them are Joos.

[Jul 19, 2018] America Overrules Trump No Peace with Russia by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Notable quotes:
"... The governments of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, if their countries are to survive, must give up their deluded hopes of reaching agreements with the United States. No such possibility exists on terms that the countries can accept. ..."
"... American foreign policy rests on threat and force. It is guided by the neoconservative doctrine of US hegemony, a doctrine that is inconsistent with accepting the sovereignty of other countries. ..."
"... The Russians -- especially the naive Atlanticist Integrationists -- should take note of the extreme hostility, indeed, to the point of insanity, directed at the Helsinki meeting across the entirety of the American political, media, and intellectual scene ..."
"... There is no support for Trump's agenda of peace with Russia in the US foreign policy arena. The president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, spoke for them all when he declared that "We must deal with Putin's Russia as the rogue state it is." Russia is a " rogue state" simply because Russia does not accept Washington's overlordship. ..."
"... There is no support even in Trump's own government for normalizing relations with Russia unless the neoconservative definition of normal relations is used. By normal relations neoconservatives mean a vassal state relationship with Washington. That, and only that, is "normal." Russia can have normal relations with America only on the basis of this definition of normal. Sooner or later Putin and Lavrov will have to acknowledge this fact. ..."
"... A lie repeated over and over becomes a fact. That is what has happened to Russiagate. Despite the total absence of any evidence, it is now a fact in America that Putin himself put Trump in the Oval Office. That Trump met with Putin at Helsinki is considered proof that Trump is Putin's lackey, as the New York Times and many others now assert as self-evident. That Trump stood next to "the murderous thug Putin" and accepted Putin's word that Russia did not interfere in the election of the US president is regarded as double proof that Trump is in Putin's pocket and that the Russiagate story is true. ..."
Jul 19, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

The governments of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, if their countries are to survive, must give up their deluded hopes of reaching agreements with the United States. No such possibility exists on terms that the countries can accept.

American foreign policy rests on threat and force. It is guided by the neoconservative doctrine of US hegemony, a doctrine that is inconsistent with accepting the sovereignty of other countries. The only way that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea can reach an agreement with Washington is to become vassals like the UK, all of Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia.

The Russians -- especially the naive Atlanticist Integrationists -- should take note of the extreme hostility, indeed, to the point of insanity, directed at the Helsinki meeting across the entirety of the American political, media, and intellectual scene. Putin is incorrect that US-Russian relations are being held hostage to an internal US political struggle between the two parties. The Republicans are just as insane and just as hostile to President Trump's effort to improve American-Russian relations as the Democrats, as Donald Jeffries reminds us .

The American rightwing is just as opposed as the leftwing. Only a few experts, such as Stephen Cohen and Amb. Jack Matlock , President Reagan's ambassador to the Soviet Union, have spoken out in support of Trump's attempt to reduce the dangerous tensions between the nuclear powers. Only a few pundits have explained the actual facts and the stakes.

There is no support for Trump's agenda of peace with Russia in the US foreign policy arena. The president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, spoke for them all when he declared that "We must deal with Putin's Russia as the rogue state it is." Russia is a " rogue state" simply because Russia does not accept Washington's overlordship. Not for any other reason.

There is no support even in Trump's own government for normalizing relations with Russia unless the neoconservative definition of normal relations is used. By normal relations neoconservatives mean a vassal state relationship with Washington. That, and only that, is "normal." Russia can have normal relations with America only on the basis of this definition of normal. Sooner or later Putin and Lavrov will have to acknowledge this fact.

A lie repeated over and over becomes a fact. That is what has happened to Russiagate. Despite the total absence of any evidence, it is now a fact in America that Putin himself put Trump in the Oval Office. That Trump met with Putin at Helsinki is considered proof that Trump is Putin's lackey, as the New York Times and many others now assert as self-evident. That Trump stood next to "the murderous thug Putin" and accepted Putin's word that Russia did not interfere in the election of the US president is regarded as double proof that Trump is in Putin's pocket and that the Russiagate story is true.

[Jul 19, 2018] The Russian US Election Meddling Big Lie Won't Die by Stephen Lendman

Notable quotes:
"... Propaganda works, proved effective time and again – why it's a key tool in America's deep state playbook. ..."
"... Virtually anything repeated enough, especially through the major media megaphone, gets most people to believe it – no matter how preposterous the claim. ..."
"... Normalized relations with Russia and world peace are anathema notions in Washington. Bipartisan neocons infesting the US political establishment want none of it. America's hegemonic aims matter most – wanting dominance over planet earth, its resources and populations. Endless wars of aggression, color revolutions, and other unlawful practices harmful to human rights and welfare are its favored strategies. ..."
Jul 19, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

Propaganda works, proved effective time and again – why it's a key tool in America's deep state playbook.

Virtually anything repeated enough, especially through the major media megaphone, gets most people to believe it – no matter how preposterous the claim.

Not a shred of evidence suggests Russia meddled in America's political process – nothing.

Yet an earlier NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed most Americans believe the Russia did it Big Lie. A months earlier Gallup poll showed three-fourths of Americans view Vladimir Putin unfavorably.

Americans are easy marks to be fooled. No matter how many times they were deceived before, they're easily manipulated to believe most anything drummed into their minds by the power of repetitious propaganda – fed them through through the major media megaphone – in lockstep with the official falsified narrative.

America's dominant media serve as a propaganda platform for US imperial and monied interests – acting as agents of deception, betraying their readers and viewers time and again instead of informing them responsibly.

CNN presstitute Poppy Harlow played a clip on air of Reuters reporter Jeff Mason asking Putin in Helsinki the following question:

"Did you want President Trump to win the election and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?"

Putin said: "Yes," he wanted Trump to win "because he talked about bringing the US-Russia relationship back to normal," as translated from his Russian language response.

Here's the precise translation of his remark:

"Yes, I wanted him to win, because he talked about the need to normalize US-Russia relations," adding:

"Isn't it natural to have sympathy towards a man who wants to restore relations with your country? That's normal."

Putin did not address the fabricated official narrative notion that he directed his officials to help Trump win. Yet CNN's Harlow claimed otherwise, falsely claiming he ordered Kremlin officials to help Trump triumph over Hillary.

He did nothing of the kind or say it, nor did any other Kremlin officials. No evidence proves otherwise – nothing but baseless accusations supported only by the power of deceptive propaganda.

Time and again, CNN, the NYT, and rest of America's dominant media prove themselves untrustworthy.

They consistently abandon journalism the way it's supposed to be, notably on geopolitical issues, especially on war and peace and anything about Russia.

After rejecting, or at least doubting, the official narrative about alleged Russian meddling in the US political process to aid his election, Trump backtracked post-Helsinki – capitulating to deep state power.

First in the White House, he said he misspoke abroad – then on CBS News Wednesday night, saying it's "true," deplorably adding:

Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election, and he "would" hold Russian President Vladimir Putin responsible for the interference – that didn't occur, he failed to stress.

Here's his verbatim exchange with CBS anchor Jeff Glor :

GLOR: "You say you agree with US intelligence that Russia meddled in the election in 2016."

TRUMP: "Yeah and I've said that before, Jeff. I have said that numerous times before, and I would say that is true, yeah."

GLOR: "But you haven't condemned Putin, specifically. Do you hold him personally responsible?"

TRUMP: "Well, I would, because he's in charge of the country. Just like I consider myself to be responsible for things that happen in this country. So certainly as the leader of a country you would have to hold him responsible, yes."

GLOR: "What did you say to him?"

TRUMP: "Very strong on the fact that we can't have meddling. We can't have any of that – now look. We're also living in a grown-up world."

"Will a strong statement – you know – President Obama supposedly made a strong statement. Nobody heard it."

"What they did hear is a statement he made to Putin's very close friend. And that statement was not acceptable. Didn't get very much play relatively speaking. But that statement was not acceptable."

"But I let him know we can't have this. We're not going to have it, and that's the way it's going to be."

There you have it – Trump capitulating to America's deep state over Russia on national television.

From day one in power, he caved to the national security state, Wall Street, and other monied interests over popular ones.

The sole redeeming part of his agenda was wanting improved relations with Russia and Vladimir Putin personally – preferring peace over possible confrontation, wanting the threat of nuclear war defused.

Despite tweeting post-Helsinki that he and Putin "got along well which truly bothered many haters who wanted to see a boxing match," his remarks on CBS News showed he'll continue dirty US business as usual toward Russia.

Anything positive from summit talks appears abandoned by capitulating to deep state power controlling him and his agenda.

Normalized relations with Russia and world peace are anathema notions in Washington. Bipartisan neocons infesting the US political establishment want none of it. America's hegemonic aims matter most – wanting dominance over planet earth, its resources and populations. Endless wars of aggression, color revolutions, and other unlawful practices harmful to human rights and welfare are its favored strategies.

Will Americans go along with sacrificing vital freedoms for greater security from invented enemies – losing both? Will US belligerent confrontation with Russia inevitably follow? Will mushroom-shaped denouement eventually kill us all?

*

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org ( Home – Stephen Lendman ). Contact at [email protected] .

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III. http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html "

[Jul 19, 2018] A Tale of Two Poisonings by Philip Giraldi

Notable quotes:
"... Repeated requests by Russia to obtain a sample of the alleged nerve agent for testing were rejected by the British government in spite of the fact that a military grade nerve agent would have surely killed both the Skripals as well as anyone else within 100 yards. As the latest British account of the location of the alleged poison places it on the door handle of the Scripals' residence, the timetable element was also unconvincing. That meant that the two would have spent three hours, including a stop at a pub and lunch, before succumbing on a park bench. Military grade nerve agents kill instantly. ..."
"... Nevertheless, the politically weak May government, desperately seeking a formidable foreign enemy to rally around against, insisted that Russia, almost certainly acting under orders from Vladimir Putin himself, carried out the killing of a former British double agent who had been released from a Kremlin prison in a spy swap and who was no longer capable of doing any damage to Russia. Putin apparently did all that in spite of the fact that he had an election coming up and would be the host of the World Cup in the summer, an event that would be an absolute top priority to have go smoothly. ..."
Jul 17, 2018 | www.unz.com

Poisoning enemies has a long history with Augustus Caesar's wife Livia allegedly a master of the art, as were the Borgias in Renaissance Italy. Lately there has been a resurgence in allegations regarding the use of poisons of various types by several governments. The claims are particularly damaging both morally and legally as international conventions regard the use of poisonous chemical compounds as particularly heinous, condemning their use because they, when employed in quantity, become "weapons of mass destruction," killing indiscriminately and horribly, making no distinction between combatants and civilians. Their use is considered to be a "war crime" and the government officials who ordered their deployment are "war criminals," subject to prosecution by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

There are two important poisoning stories that have made the news recently. Both are follow-ups to reporting that has appeared in the news over the past few months and both are particularly interesting because they tend to repudiate earlier coverage that had been largely accepted by several governments as well as the media and the chattering class of paid experts that appears on television.

The first story relates to the poisoning of former Russian intelligence agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in March. There was quite a bit that was odd about the Skripal case, which relied from the start " on circumstantial evidence and secret intelligence." And there was inevitably a rush to judgment. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson blamed Russia less than forty-eight hours after the Skripals were found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury England, too soon for any chemical analysis of the alleged poisoning to have taken place.

British Prime Minister Theresa May threw gasoline on the fire when she addressed Parliament shortly thereafter to blame the Kremlin and demand a Russian official response to the event in 36 hours, declaring that the apparent poisoning was "very likely" caused by a made-in-Russia nerve agent referred to by its generic name novichok. The British media was soon on board with a vengeance, spreading the government line that such a highly sensitive operation would require the approval of President Vladimir Putin himself. The expulsion of Russian diplomats soon followed with the United States and other countries following suit.

Repeated requests by Russia to obtain a sample of the alleged nerve agent for testing were rejected by the British government in spite of the fact that a military grade nerve agent would have surely killed both the Skripals as well as anyone else within 100 yards. As the latest British account of the location of the alleged poison places it on the door handle of the Scripals' residence, the timetable element was also unconvincing. That meant that the two would have spent three hours, including a stop at a pub and lunch, before succumbing on a park bench. Military grade nerve agents kill instantly.

The head of Britain's own chemical weapons facility Porton Down even contradicted claims made by May, Foreign Minister Boris Johnson, and British Ambassador in Moscow Laurie Bristow. The lab's Chief Executive Gary Aitkenhead testified that he did not know if the nerve agent was actually produced in Russia, a not surprising observation as the chemical formula was revealed to the public in a scientific paper in 1992 and there are an estimated twenty countries capable of producing it. There are also presumed stocks of novichok remaining in independent countries that once were part of the Soviet Union, to include Russia's enemy du jour Ukraine, while a false flag operation by the British themselves, the CIA or Mossad, is not unthinkable.

Nevertheless, the politically weak May government, desperately seeking a formidable foreign enemy to rally around against, insisted that Russia, almost certainly acting under orders from Vladimir Putin himself, carried out the killing of a former British double agent who had been released from a Kremlin prison in a spy swap and who was no longer capable of doing any damage to Russia. Putin apparently did all that in spite of the fact that he had an election coming up and would be the host of the World Cup in the summer, an event that would be an absolute top priority to have go smoothly.

Now there has been an actual death in Amesbury near Salisbury that has been attributed to novichok. On June 30 th , Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess were admitted to hospital after being found unconscious. Sturgess died eight days later. The May government has not yet blamed it on Putin or even on a clumsy Russian operative that might have inadvertently left behind a vial of poison or a used syringe, though Home Secretary Sajid Javid came close to that when he suggested that Russia was using Britain as a "dumping ground for poisons." Police suggestions that the poisoned couple appear to have handled novichok infused material of some kind before succumbing appears to be contradicted by inability to find the actual source of the alleged exposure.

British government dancing around the issue notwithstanding, there have been suggestions that the closest source of more novichok might well be the U.K. government labs at nearby Porton Down, only seven miles from Salisbury and Amesbury, which increases suspicion about the original story promulgated by Downing Street. Would the British government actually poison an expendable ex-Russian spy and his daughter to divert attention from a domestic political problem at home? It's worth considering as the "blame it all on Putin narrative" becomes even less credible.

The second story comes from Syria, where there is also a Russian hand as Moscow is aiding the government of Bashar al-Assad. The by now notorious April 7, 2018 alleged chemical attack on the rebel-held Syrian city of Douma was widely blamed by Western countries and the mainstream media on Assad's forces. This resulted in a decision by U.S. President Donald Trump to order massive U.S.-led retaliatory airstrikes against targets reportedly involved in chemical production in and around Damascus.

Trump blamed "animal Assad" for "using nerve agents" and both the media and most European governments followed that line, concluding that Damascus had ordered the chemical attacks a mere moments after videos purporting to show scores of chemical attack victims first surfaced from rebel sources, long before U.S. intelligence could have made its own assessment. A 5-page White House assessment released on April 13th, just days after the alleged attack asserted that sarin was used at Douma , claiming that "A significant body of information points to the regime using chlorine in its bombardment of Duma, while some additional information points to the regime also using the nerve agent sarin."

Independent sources warned at the time that not a single neutral observer was on the ground to confirm that chemical agents launched by the Syrian government had, in fact, been used, but were ignored. All of the sources reporting the attack were either affiliated with the rebels who occupied the area or were not physically present in Douma.

Now, finally, three months later, there has been a credible independent report on what was determined about the attack through chemical analysis of traces recovered in Douma. A preliminary report published last Friday by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) found no traces of any nerve agent like sarin at the site. The OPCW report states this clearly : "No organophosphorous nerve agents or their degradation products were detected in the environmental samples or in the plasma samples taken from alleged casualties."

This means that the Trump Administration claimed to have details relating to an event in a foreign country that it did not know and could not actually confirm to be true. And it used that as a justification for ordering an airstrike that killed people and destroyed targets in Syria. Will the White House respond to the OPCW report and apologize, possibly to include reparations for an unjustified attack on another sovereign nation? Don't hold your breath.

The Salisbury and Douma attacks are illustrative of just what happens when a government is prepared to dissimulate or even lie to go the extra mile to make a case to justify preemptive action that otherwise might be challenged. Theresa May is, unfortunately, still in power and so is Donald Trump. In a better world an outraged public would demand that they be thrown out of office and even possibly subjected to the tender ministrations of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. With power comes accountability, or at least that should be the rule, but it is a dictum that has for some time been ignored. Even given that, one might hope that the blunders will not be repeated, but there is not even any assurance that either May or Trump is much given to "lessons learned" or that a Mike Pence or Boris Johnson would be any better. That is our tragedy.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].


FKA Max , Website July 17, 2018 at 4:29 am GMT

Putin apparently did all that in spite of the fact that he had an election coming up and would be the host of the World Cup in the summer, an event that would be an absolute top priority to have go smoothly.
[...]
Would the British government actually poison an expendable ex-Russian spy and his daughter to divert attention from a domestic political problem at home? It's worth considering as the "blame it all on Putin narrative" becomes even less credible.

Mr. Giraldi,

these were my thoughts at first too, but I looked into the case quite extensively over the last several weeks and came to the conclusion that Putin actually had more of a motive than the British government, et al.

This is my evolution on the Skripals' case:

On Skripal I'm not entirely certain, since I haven't really looked into the case. Also the timing of the incident seems to be not what Putin would have chosen, in my opinion, since it was too close to the soccer World Cup events/celebrations in Russia, and Putin usually tries to be conciliatory with the West before big sporting events like that in Russia, e.g. when he released Khodorkovsky early before the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, for example.

https://www.unz.com/article/revisiting-litvinenko-what-really-happened/#comment-2401031

As I said before, I was agnostic about the Skripal case and tried to keep an open mind about it and not reflexively blame it on (the) Russians (government), but you providing me with this additional information makes me actually more of a believer in the official Western narrative now.

https://www.unz.com/article/revisiting-litvinenko-what-really-happened/#comment-2401541

I'm reaching here, and this is pure speculation on my part, but could it be that the Skripals were poisoned ( March 4, 2018 ) by Putin, et al. to distract from the 200+ Russian mercenaries allegedly killed by U.S. airstrikes in Syria ( February 7, 2018 ) http://www.unz.com/tsaker/book-review-losing-military-supremacy-the-myopia-of-american-strategic-planning-by-andrei-martyanov/#comment-2406731 before the Russian election ( March 18, 2018 )?

https://www.unz.com/article/revisiting-litvinenko-what-really-happened/#comment-2407120

Repeated requests by Russia to obtain a sample of the alleged nerve agent for testing were rejected by the British government in spite of the fact that a military grade nerve agent would have surely killed both the Skripals as well as anyone else within 100 yards.

They mention that only 3 known cases of Novichok agent poisoning had been treated before the cases of the Skripals, so there was very little guidance and experience to go on in how to treat Yulia and her father. https://www.unz.com/article/revisiting-litvinenko-what-really-happened/#comment-2401824

Skripals doctor: 'We expected them not to survive' – BBC News

tac , July 17, 2018 at 5:25 am GMT
@FKA Max

You should watch a recent interview with Walter Litvinenko (father of the deceased Alexander Litvinenko) to hear his startling admissions:

jilles dykstra , July 17, 2018 at 7:17 am GMT
It was hilarious to watch yesterday evening, as the presidential plane had been underway for two and a half hours, the consternation on CNN.
As I expected, the vague accusations about Russian meddling in the elections continued this morning, on CNN.
I remember an interview on CNN before the elections, someoen said 'if Trump wins', the two of CNN burst into laughter.
I do hope Trump survives, politically and fysically.
Luckily is it not very ease to murder a president these days.
On top of that, Sept 11 made many all over the world quite suspicious.
I for one never believed that Russia would be so stupid as to try to murder two former spies in such a stupid way, and without any motive.
MH17 is a similar case.
Assad also is not stupid, he had no interest whatsoever to use poison gas in Syria.
How Arafat died we still do not know, that was done professionally, or maybe not, if I had to kill him I would try to make his death look natural, a clear cause.
Who had a motive is quite clear.
Greg Bacon , Website July 17, 2018 at 9:18 am GMT
Until the unhinged May lets Yulia go free–if she's still alive–and go back to Russia and tell her side of the story, nothing will change.

The so-called Deep State and its willing toady, the corrupt, lying MSM are accomplices in this False Flag and they are the ones that should be in the dock at the ICC. But since the ICC is part of the Deep State, don't expect this to happen.

This Russian bashing has gotten completely out of hand. And now that Putin has stated that the sleazy Russian thief oligarch Browder helped launder 400 million to the DNC-Clinton Mob, it's going to get very interesting, if not dangerous for humanity.

They need a BIG distraction to get the sheeple's thought off the truth that there is NOTHING to the Putin-Trump election meddling, anything might happen, even a repeat of the Israeli masterminded 9/11 False Flag.

Does 'Lucky Larry' own anymore asbestos-laden skyscrapers?

EliteCommInc. , July 17, 2018 at 10:02 am GMT
i would love to make a formal complaint about conspiracies because there are people who will and do make trouble for others. it has taken me a long time to come to that place – but it is no joke as dr. geraldi no doubt knows.

however, one needs the evidence and what has been lacking in all these accusations whether its russia and us elections, chemical weapons in syria, or supposed poisoning of three people formerly associated with russia, there is suspicion, and there is narrative, but little in the way of facts. and if any of these accusations were concerning single individual battling mere gossip and innuendo or other nefarious behaviors, i have learned to discount nothing. look if you can't bring a coupon into a store, wait for coffee without people launching into fits of fear of life . . . then who knows what triggers people's self defense. it apparently dos not take much for the supposed superior people to make their inferiors look off kilt. i just take it granted that when i leave my house, on occasion, i have visitors – as "nutty" as that sounds.

but these cases have multiple researchers and resources to bar on the matter and yet, the evidence is either mere narrative, contradicted or has a variety of explanations just as reasonable or more reasonable. but what we have is an entire population engaged in manufacturing not one but several cases in which the president of the us actually engaged in treason based on sketchy financial dealings with russian banks and financial elites.

and i think this article makes the case that people with power who engage in wielding accusations should be held to the standard of providing evidence. and while i am a little uncomfortable with our president engaging in open debate with our intel community from overseas, his objection is well put. the process of evidence collection and by independent objective observers is unreasonable. yet he found it quite convenient to buy the argument by the same intel agencies for said use in syria. the election is over, but the war about the election, the level of dislike of the elected , i think it is fair to say has never been so widespread and deep such that members of the government or government agencies would sign up to press the matter.

and quip reflctions about the damage being done and "it's all in one's head" just are insufficient to address the issues.

frankly, i think the country's not outraged because they are "drama fatigued" last week in attempting to capture a stray kitten who disappearance has me overly stretched – i never used to like cats – bells rang and doors closed indicating that she had in fact been enclosed on the patio – around two am or so – only to discover a cute little skunk was the detainee. whose release required navigating around the house twice because the door locked actually worked. sometimes the evidence doesn't doesn't reveal what was expected.

as for the kitten, evidence suggests she managed to punch her way through a steel mesh garage vent. now i suspect that someone recently punched a hole in those mesh barriers, but that is speculation on my part, even likely speculation. however, minus the proof that is all it is. a mysterious frustrating event.

who knows maybe the cat and the skunk are pals.

All we like sheep , Website July 17, 2018 at 10:47 am GMT
With the sad demise of the woman of the couple, the continuing make-up story in MSM makes the twist that the nerve agent was found in a perfume bottle. While of these two non-Russian people (who allegedly were former drug-addicts) one may suspect that they pick up any strange bottle from the ground and have a sniff at it, this is completely surrealistic in the case of the Skripals. The difference couldn't be bigger between these two couples. Anyhow, the clue that brings them four together is the vicinity of Porton Down, where chemical weapons are stored & tested.
dearieme , July 17, 2018 at 10:55 am GMT
If I had to guess at what's been going on in Salisbury I'd wonder if a lunatic/evil employee at Porton Down has smuggled out something nasty and is amusing himself with it.
Moi , July 17, 2018 at 11:15 am GMT
Mr. Giraldi, you're telling me the American and Brit governments lie. Who'd have thunk

ps: do we still have people locked up in Gitmo without being charged of a crime? Just wondering

prusmc , Website July 17, 2018 at 11:52 am GMT
@All we like sheep

The author laments that May and Trump are still in office.
She will last longer than he will. Trump will be out in three months either by impeachment and conviction or by other means. None of this clandestine stuff like poisoning but by a military coup. I remember the era of 7 Days in May but that was not serious just a storey teller weaving a good yarn. Today, we have members of Congress and large numbers of the media(probably over 50 percent) calling for a Armed Forces take over.
The probable stumbling block is how to skip Pense and go directly to Speaker Paul Ryan. Or how to dispense with the chain of succession entirely and enshrine Hilary or recall Obama until the emergency is over.
Is Mad Dog the man or will McMaster lead the coup? Remember, anyone wearing more than one star made the elite grade during the Obama regime and some of the one stars had formative years as O-6 and O-5 while Obama ruled supreme.

The Alarmist , July 17, 2018 at 11:52 am GMT

"Military grade nerve agents kill instantly."

Quickly, not instantly. If you had an atropine pen handy, you might survive, though it would leave you immobilised and dazed. If the Skripals were dosed, it would likely have been at or near the bench where they were found. Residue on their clothing might be weak enough to not kill the constable.

Michael Kenny , July 17, 2018 at 12:34 pm GMT
Clearly, Putin's American supporters see the summit as a flop from their champion's point of view.
Tyrion 2 , Website July 17, 2018 at 12:58 pm GMT
@The Alarmist

The only thing the Salisbury incidents provide evidence for is that our culture is prone to hysterical outrage over anything relating to Russia or Putin.

And that's true even if it were rogue elements in the Russian security services.

ploni almoni , July 17, 2018 at 1:44 pm GMT
@FKA Max

Similarly, I was initially skeptical about the Moon landings but with time I have to the conclusion that they are plausible.

rbc , July 17, 2018 at 1:47 pm GMT
What I really loved about the coverage of the Skripal "poisoning" were the pictures of the cops wearing hazmat suits to clean up the park bench. In the same shot birds were hopping around apparently unaffected by the deadly nerve gas. So we're to believe that this stuff could kill a big cop but not a 2 pound pigeon .
Jake , July 17, 2018 at 3:16 pm GMT
British secret service and its 3 main children – CIA, Mossad, Saudi General Intelligence Agency – are morally capable of committing any horror imaginable against civilians, even their own.

The Anglo-Zionist Empire is desperate to find the One Ring That Rules Them All.

Jake , July 17, 2018 at 3:18 pm GMT
@rbc

That's no more absurd than thousands of things promoted as truth by the WASP empires over the past 400 years.

Felix-Culpa , July 17, 2018 at 4:15 pm GMT
@Jake

Yes, like that the Protestant Revolt which still gets called a "Reformation" was anything other than a looting operation.

AnonFromTN , July 17, 2018 at 4:22 pm GMT
@Biff

That's so naďve. When you commit a crime and have witnesses in your custody, you make sure they never talk. "Elementary, Watson", as Holmes used to say.

jacques sheete , July 17, 2018 at 4:24 pm GMT

Shaping a story to fit the agenda

That's why we have "journalists" and "historians," mass media and skoolink (yooniversities included), and I find it amazing that the stories change as fast as the agendas.

edNels , July 17, 2018 at 5:32 pm GMT
@NoseytheDuke

Oh "These Kids today" that old refrain again, and it's getting old too, all the emphasis on kids anyway, from concerns about posterity, to the unending posturing about faux parent related concerns sublimated in one way or another to the other mantra: " oh the Children" thing that phony liberal types do.

But to the point:

What a pity Western "Intelligence" seems to have never heard the story of The Boy Who Cried 'Wolf'.

When do these little monsters ever get a chance to hear childhood stories nowadays glued to their carry style devices, wearable devices, soon inserted devices , to hear any of the old wisdom? It now isn't all that likely. It is more the kids teaching the kids in a modern high tech reality version of Lord of the Flies scenario.

When they are inevitably inducted into the professions as they will, replacing remnants of earlier generations that maybe still had been somewhat exposed to folk tales and stories, or better TV of earlier times, well, don't be surprised that the rank and file of the intelligence industry, like elsewhere is unable personally to easily navigate anything, much less possessing inborn sensibility gained from age old culture and all that. Could it be in the whole Fake News genre too, it seems to indicate some dialectic flaw in thinking, (a priori as it were.) I feel like it's coming from youngsters lacking any frame of reference/experience blundering, not being held to account!
The Brat Pack was given free reign and away they go arrogant to a fault

What was folk knowledge is a cumbersome, anachronistic, vestigial relic of another era, sought to be replaced soon, by robots.

Who needs the f'n brats ?

Bill jones , July 17, 2018 at 5:47 pm GMT
The political filth really have no shame, do they?
chris , July 17, 2018 at 6:12 pm GMT
@jilles dykstra

I think we know that Arafat was poisoned.

exudd1 , July 17, 2018 at 6:39 pm GMT
@Fran Macadam

Well said. Agree completely. Thanks.

Z-man , July 17, 2018 at 6:41 pm GMT
@prusmc

None of this clandestine stuff like poisoning but by a military coup. I remember the era of 7 Days in May but that was not serious just a storey teller weaving a good yarn. Today, we have members of Congress and large numbers of the media(probably over 50 percent) calling for a Armed Forces take over.

Watching too many old movies now , haven't we? LOL!!

The probable stumbling block is how to skip Pense and go directly to Speaker Paul Ryan. Or how to dispense with the chain of succession entirely and enshrine Hilary or recall Obama until the emergency is over.

Ok, now you need to be put down or at least committed. LOL

FKA Max , Website July 17, 2018 at 7:00 pm GMT
@tac

I'm glad Litvinenko Sr. is taken care of in his old age by the Russian state:

BAD CHEMISTRY? Ft. Walter Litvinenko, Father of Alexander Litvinenko

Although he chose to leave Russian of his own will, the authorities were unlikely to welcome him back and his dramatic u-turn looks like a calculated attempt to smooth the way for his return to the country of his birth.

Clearly relishing Mr Litvinenko senior's propaganda gift in the run-up to a presidential election expected to be won by Vladimir Putin next month, Russian state TV said the unhappy exile had run out of money and that electricity and gas had been cut off to his tiny Italian flat for non-payment of bills.
[...]
Alexander Goldfarb, the co-author of a book about the murder and a friend of the late Litvinenko, accused Russian TV of acting in an irresponsible and inhumane manner, saying the Kremlin's propaganda chiefs had exploited his grief and troubled psychological condition.

"They used the troubled psychological state of an elderly man for propaganda purposes in order to whitewash Alexander's killers," he said.

"Walter is going through a really tough time in connection with his wife's death a few months ago and feels lonely. It happens with old people."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/9057560/Alexander-Litvinenkos-father-calls-his-son-a-traitor.html

Salisbury poisoning: Skripals 'were under Russian surveillance' – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44717835

http://www.unz.com/article/revisiting-litvinenko-what-really-happened/#comment-2403171

Skripals 'were under Russian surveillance' – BBC Newsnight

Newsnight's Diplomatic and Defence Editor, Mark Urban, reveals that the Skripals 'were under Russian surveillance' and that he personally had several meetings with Sergei Skripal last year.

AnonFromTN , July 17, 2018 at 7:01 pm GMT
@Bill jones

Did they ever have shame? The world would be much better place if they did.

Bill Jones , July 17, 2018 at 7:40 pm GMT
@FKA Max

"Newsnight's Diplomatic and Defence Editor, Mark Urban, reveals"

Newsnight's Diplomatic and Defence Editor, Mark Urban, claims

there, fixed that for you.

Sean , July 17, 2018 at 8:52 pm GMT
Did you hear the one about the couple who found a bottle of perfume?

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6794418/police-have-grainy-cctv-of-russian-spooks-who-carried-out-novichok-attack-on-ex-spy-sergei-skripal-and-his-daughter/

As Mad Frank said, two men together always looks suspicious. https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2018/mar/06/russian-spy-mystery-cctv-emerges-of-two-people-police-are-looking-for-video

I am very embarrassed for the GRU , they are even more incompetent than the French Secret Service combat swimmers who blew up the that Greenpeace ship. Russia should have sent a Spetsnaz veteran with his trusty entrenching tool to deal with Skripal. Or maybe one of their Kamikazi exploding dogs.

ThreeCranes , July 17, 2018 at 9:18 pm GMT
@tac

Maybe Putin did have them killed or poisoned because Russian intelligence had uncovered their plot to explode a dirty bomb in London which had been set up so as to implicate the Russians. The plotters were foiled and hoist by their own petard.

AnonFromTN , July 17, 2018 at 10:10 pm GMT
@Sean

I tell you a secret. GRU agents, on direct orders from Putin, killed JFK, burnt Giordano Bruno, crucified Christ, and poisoned Socrates. What's more, they are also responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Didn't you suspect that?

Sean , July 17, 2018 at 10:16 pm GMT
@Tyrion 2

Rogue elements once, but not twice. Why is anyone's guess, the eliciting of hysterical outrage ?

Sean , July 17, 2018 at 10:29 pm GMT
@ThreeCranes

Russia seems to be burning its bridges with the West, which may be a deliberate long term strategy by Putin.

Sean , July 17, 2018 at 10:45 pm GMT
@AnonFromTN

I did not even know those you named had ever been in the GRU, let alone they were British moles.

If you wake up and there is snow all over the ground, that is circumstantial evidence that it snowed in the night. When a Russian poisons Russians there is not all this Technical Tom sophistry, and motive is important especially when it supports the circumstantial evidence.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/indepth/brilliant-russian-engineer-poisoned-dozens-of-his-colleagues-at-top-secret-defence-plant-and-left-them-bald-in-botched-revenge-plot-aimed-at-his-boss/ar-AAvHyBm

Prison is full of people who say they are innocent.

unseated , July 18, 2018 at 12:20 am GMT
@prusmc

Trump will be out in three months either by impeachment and conviction or by other means.

I have a friend who said that to me a year ago and another who said it six months ago.

Colin Wright , Website July 18, 2018 at 2:13 am GMT
' Theresa May is, unfortunately, still in power and so is Donald Trump. In a better world an outraged public would demand that they be thrown out of office '

At least in the case of Trump, the problem with rejecting him is, as it always has been, the alternative.

It's literally oppressive that to date, no superior alternative to Trump has emerged. However, like it or not, one hasn't.

bjondo , July 18, 2018 at 2:45 am GMT
@FKA Max

Alexander Goldfarb the promoter of Pussy Riot?

He's certainly legit.

AnonFromTN , July 18, 2018 at 2:55 am GMT
@Colin Wright

Is there a superior alternative to May? If there is, why didn't Brits get rid of that embarrassment? Next to her even John Major looks like an outstanding statesman.

Wally , July 18, 2018 at 2:58 am GMT
@Colin Wright

said:
"It's literally oppressive that to date, no superior alternative to Trump has emerged. However, like it or not, one hasn't."

You mean that little rich 'Marxist' Latina is not a viable alternative?

'Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 'girl from the Bronx,' raised in one of wealthiest US counties'

https://www.theblaze.com/news/2018/06/30/report-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-the-girl-from-the-bronx-raised-in-one-of-wealthiest-us-counties

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says: 'Occupy All ICE Offices, Borders, U.S. Airports', 'Occupy All of It'

https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/07/17/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-occupy-all-ice-offices-borders-u-s-airports-occupy-all-of-it/

Intelligent Dasein , Website July 18, 2018 at 3:03 am GMT
Every time I think about it, I do find it truly astonishing that we (the USA) launched a missile salvo into Syria based on an obvious and now proven false flag, and very few people seem to care. This is one of those glaring, "hidden in plain sight" contradictions to the narrative which tells me that, while the Deep State is finally losing some ground, its liquidation is far, far from over and all kinds of things are going to fall apart as this thrashing monster slowly sinks beneath the waves.
Wally , July 18, 2018 at 3:07 am GMT
@prusmc

said:
"Trump will be out in three months either by impeachment and conviction or by other means. "

Yawn. Heard that on election night

'The Left needs to face reality: Trump is winning' : https://nypost.com/2018/06/30/the-left-needs-to-face-reality-trump-is-winning/

Wizard of Oz , July 18, 2018 at 3:24 am GMT
@dearieme

Yes, interesting that PG has only now brought to a UR article that rather obvious possible connection between Porton Down and the nearby poisonings.

I don't think it is one of his major areas of attention. Why else would he include with Trump the unfortunate May as someone he would like to see people rise up against and throw out of office for offences unstated?

Wizard of Oz , July 18, 2018 at 3:27 am GMT
@AnonFromTN

Her performance on Skripal right or wrong is hardly worth mentioning when deciding whether and when she has to go. Compared to Brexit give it a 2 per cent weighting.

Colin Wright , Website July 18, 2018 at 3:29 am GMT
@Wally

My guess is that we haven't heard the last of Ms. Hyphen-Cortez.

"Ocasio-Cortez hedges criticisms of Israel– 'I may not use the right words'
US Politics Philip Weiss on July 15, 2018

Rising Democratic star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex, soon to go to Congress from NY, all but apologized for using words "massacre" and "occupation" about Israel, saying she spoke as an "activist," and she is no expert on the Middle East and is willing to "learn and evolve." '

She's trainable.

NoseytheDuke , July 18, 2018 at 4:26 am GMT
@Wizard of Oz

Her performance has included telling bald-faced lies, lies that are easily exposed as lies too. This is rarely if ever going to add weight to any personal brand, let alone that of a political leader. She's toast!

byrresheim , July 18, 2018 at 11:45 am GMT
@Felix-Culpa

Indeed, sir.
Indeed.

L Garou , July 18, 2018 at 12:55 pm GMT
The sun never sets on the crimes of the British Empire..

[Jul 19, 2018] Have Mueller and Rosenstein Finally Gone Too Far by Thomas Knapp

Notable quotes:
"... They secured and and announced the indictments "with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States." ..."
"... That language is from 1799's Logan Act (18 U.S.C. § 953). Its constitutionality is suspect and no one has ever been indicted under it in the 219 years since its passage. Rosenstein and Mueller aren't likely to be the first two, and may not even technically have violated its letter. But I'd be hard put to name a more obvious, intentional, or flagrant act in violation of its spirit. ..."
Jul 16, 2018 | original.antiwar.com
Friday the 13th is presumably always someone's unlucky day. Just whose may not be obvious at the time, but I suspect that "Russiagate" special counsel Robert Mueller and Deputy US Attorney General Rod Rosenstein already regret picking Friday, July 13 to announce the indictments of 12 Russian intelligence officers on charges relating to an embarrassing 2016 leak of Democratic National Committee emails. They should.

Legally, the indictments are of almost no value. Those indicted will never be extradited to the US for trial, and the case that an external "hack" – as opposed to an internal DNC leak – even occurred is weak at best, if for no other reason than that the DNC denied the FBI access to its servers, instead commissioning a private "cybersecurity analysis" to reach the conclusion it wanted reached before hectoring government investigators to join that conclusion.

Diplomatically, on the other hand, the indictments and the timing of the announcement were a veritable pipe bomb, thrown into preparations for a scheduled Helsinki summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

House Republicans, already incensed with Rosenstein over his attempts to stonewall their probe into the Democratic Party's use of the FBI as a proprietary political hit squad, are planning a renewed effort to impeach him. If he goes down, Mueller likely does as well. And at this point, it would take a heck of an actor to argue with a straight face that the effort is unjustified.

Their timing was clearly intentional. Their intent was transparently political. Mueller and Rosenstein were attempting to hijack the Trump-Putin summit for the purpose of depriving Trump of any possible "wins" that might come out of it.

They secured and and announced the indictments "with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States."

That language is from 1799's Logan Act (18 U.S.C. § 953). Its constitutionality is suspect and no one has ever been indicted under it in the 219 years since its passage. Rosenstein and Mueller aren't likely to be the first two, and may not even technically have violated its letter. But I'd be hard put to name a more obvious, intentional, or flagrant act in violation of its spirit.

Rosenstein and Mueller are attempting to conduct foreign policy by special prosecutor, a way of doing things found nowhere in the US Constitution. Impeachment or firing should be the least of their worries. I'm guessing that there are laws other than the Logan Act that could, and should, be invoked to have them fitted for orange coveralls and leg irons pending an appointment with a judge.

That they even have defenders is proof positive that some of Trump's most prominent opponents consider "rule of law" a quaint and empty concept – a useful slogan, nothing more – even as they continually, casually, and hypocritically invoke it whenever they think doing so might politically disadvantage him.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism . He lives and works in north central Florida. This article is reprinted with permission from William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

[Jul 19, 2018] Trump-Putin summit induced the neoliberal ruling classes hysteria or How to Stop Worrying and Love the New McCarthyism

So it appears America and democracy have miraculously survived the dreaded Trump-Putin summit or Trump's meeting with his Russian handler, as the neoliberal ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media would dearly like us all to believe. NATO has not been summarily dissolved. Poland has not been invaded by Russia.
Notable quotes:
"... So it appears America and democracy have miraculously survived the dreaded Trump-Putin summit or Trump's meeting with his Russian handler, as the neoliberal ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media would dearly like us all to believe. NATO has not been summarily dissolved. Poland has not been invaded by Russia. ..."
"... And so, once again, Western liberals, and others obsessed with Donald Trump, having been teased into a painfully tumescent paroxysm of anticipation of some unimaginably horrible event that would finally lead to Trump's impeachment ..."
"... In the days and weeks leading up to the summit, the global capitalist ruling class Resistance deployed every weapon in its mighty arsenal to whip the Western masses up into a frenzy of anti-Putin-Nazi fervor ..."
Jul 18, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

Extracted from: Trump's Treasonous Traitor Summit or How Liberals Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the New McCarthyism by CJ Hopkins

So it appears America and democracy have miraculously survived the dreaded Trump-Putin summit or Trump's meeting with his Russian handler, as the neoliberal ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media would dearly like us all to believe. NATO has not been summarily dissolved. Poland has not been invaded by Russia.

The offices of The New York Times , The Washington Post , CNN, and MSNBC have not been stormed by squads of jackbooted Trumpian Gestapo.

The Destabilization of the Middle East, the Privatization of Virtually Everything, the Conversion of the Planet into One Big Shopping Mall, and other global capitalist projects are all going forward uninterrupted. Apart from Trump making a narcissistic, word-salad-babbling jackass of himself, which he does on a more or less daily basis, nothing particularly apocalyptic happened.

And so, once again, Western liberals, and others obsessed with Donald Trump, having been teased into a painfully tumescent paroxysm of anticipation of some unimaginably horrible event that would finally lead to Trump's impeachment (or his removal from office by other means) were left standing around with their hysteria in their hands. It has become a sadistic ritual at this point like a twisted, pseudo-Tantric exercise where the media get liberals all lathered up over whatever fresh horror Trump has just perpetrated (or some non-story story they have invented out of whole cloth), build the tension for several days, until liberals are moaning and begging for impeachment, or a full-blown CIA-sponsored coup, then pull out abruptly and leave the poor bastards writhing in agony until the next time which is pretty much exactly what just happened.

In the days and weeks leading up to the summit, the global capitalist ruling class Resistance deployed every weapon in its mighty arsenal to whip the Western masses up into a frenzy of anti-Putin-Nazi fervor. While continuing to flog the wildly popular baby concentration camp story (because the Hitler stimulus never fails to elicit a Pavlovian response from Americans, regardless of how often or how blatantly you use it), the corporate media began hammering hard on the "Trump is a Russian Agent" hysteria. (Normally, the corporate media alternates between the Hitler hysteria and the Russia hysteria so as not to completely short-circuit the already scrambled brains of Western liberals, but given the imminent threat of a peace deal , they needed to go the whole hog this time and paint this summit as a secret, internationally televised assignation between Hitler and well, Hitler).

[Jul 19, 2018] Peter van Buren on Trump-Russia Hysteria by Scott

Notable quotes:
"... We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People ..."
"... This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Zen Cash ; The War State , by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com ; Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. ; NoDev NoOps NoIT , by Hussein Badakhchani; LibertyStickers.com ; and ExpandDesigns.com/Scott . ..."
Jul 18, 2018 | scotthorton.org

Peter van Buren discusses the media reaction to President Trump's recent meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. He compares the entire story of Russian collusion to the birther conspiracy movement , in that swaths of Americans have been swept up in a campaign against the president with very little real evidence presented to support the claims. Van Buren argues that the divisiveness about Trump being a Russian agent is harmful for the country, and at this point Robert Mueller and the intelligence community need to "put up or shut up" -- either present the clear evidence that Trump worked with the Russians, or admit that there is no such evidence. He goes on to discuss the DNC email leak, Hillary Clinton's private email server, and the recent indictment of 12 Russian operatives.

Discussed on the show:

Peter Van Buren worked for 24 years at the Department of State including a year in Iraq. He is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People and the novel Hooper's War . He is now a contributing editor at The American Conservative magazine. Follow him on Twitter @WeMeantWell .

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Zen Cash ; The War State , by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com ; Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. ; NoDev NoOps NoIT , by Hussein Badakhchani; LibertyStickers.com ; and ExpandDesigns.com/Scott .

Check out Scott's Patreon page.

[Jul 18, 2018] The neoliberal elite and MSM turned the majority of Western liberals into paranoid McCarthyite fanatics denouncing anyone who questions the honesty of the US Intelligence Community as a "traitor," and seeing Russians and Nazis coming out of the woodwork

Notable quotes:
"... The New York Times ..."
Jul 18, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

Extracted from: Trump's Treasonous Traitor Summit or How Liberals Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the New McCarthyism by CJ Hopkins

On the morning of the summit, Charles M. Blow, maestro of alliteration and subtlety, in The New York Times (which, we must remember, holds itself to the highest journalistic standards and in no way resembles a rabble-rousing tabloid), published this impassioned piece entitled " Trump, Treasonous Traitor ," accusing the President of "betraying the nation," and basically demanding that he be tried for treason. "America is under attack," Blow announces, "and its president absolutely refuses to defend it."

If Mother Jones ' David Corn has his way, Senator Rand Paul, who Corn denounces as "a traitor," would also be taken outside and shot for the crime of noting that the Attack on America® Russia allegedly perpetrated is fairly standard clandestine behavior, engaged in by most developed nations, including the United States of America, whose history of election interference, coup-fomenting, assassinations, and other, more hamfisted forms of regime change is common knowledge, or at least it was, until the ruling classes and the corporate media turned the majority of Western liberals into paranoid McCarthyite fanatics denouncing anyone who questions the honesty of the US Intelligence Community as a "traitor," and seeing Russians and Nazis coming out of the woodwork.

[Jul 18, 2018] US Media is Losing Its Mind Over Trump-Putin Press Conference

Notable quotes:
"... Special to Consortium News ..."
"... was no longer online ..."
"... If you enjoyed this original article please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one. ..."
Jul 18, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Consortiumnews Volume 24, Number 199 -- –Independent Investigative Journalism Since 1995 -- –July 18, 2018

US Media is Losing Its Mind Over Trump-Putin Press Conference July 16, 2018 • 316 Comments

The media's mania over Trump's Helsinki performance and the so-called Russia-gate scandal reached new depths on Monday, says Joe Lauria

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News

The reaction of the U.S. establishment media and several political leaders to President Donald Trump's press conference after his summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday has been stunning.

Writing in The Atlantic , James Fallows said :

" There are exactly two possible explanations for the shameful performance the world witnessed on Monday, from a serving American president.

Either Donald Trump is flat-out an agent of Russian interests -- maybe witting, maybe unwitting, from fear of blackmail, in hope of future deals, out of manly respect for Vladimir Putin, out of gratitude for Russia's help during the election, out of pathetic inability to see beyond his 306 electoral votes. Whatever the exact mixture of motives might be, it doesn't really matter.

Or he is so profoundly ignorant, insecure, and narcissistic that he did not realize that, at every step, he was advancing the line that Putin hoped he would advance, and the line that the American intelligence, defense, and law-enforcement agencies most dreaded.

Conscious tool. Useful idiot. Those are the choices, though both are possibly true, so that the main question is the proportions never before have I seen an American president consistently, repeatedly, publicly, and shockingly advance the interests of another country over those of his own government and people."

As soon as the press conference ended CNN cut to its panel with these words from TV personality Anderson Cooper: "You have been watching perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president at a summit in front of a Russian leader, surely, that I've ever seen."

David Gergen, who for years has gotten away with portraying himself on TV as an impartial political sage, then told CNN viewers:

" I've never heard an American President talk that way but I think it is especially true that when he's with someone like Putin, who is a thug, a world-class thug, that he sides with him again and again against his own country's interests of his own institutions that he runs, that he's in charge of the federal government, he's in charge of these intelligence agencies, and he basically dismisses them and retreats into this, we've heard it before, but on the international stage to talk about Hillary Clinton's computer server "

" It's embarrassing," interjected Cooper.

" It's embarrassing," agreed Gergen.

Cooper: "Most disgraceful performance by a US president."

White House correspondent Jim Acosta, ostensibly an objective reporter, then gave his opinion: "I think that sums it up nicely. This is the president of the United States essentially taking the word of the Russian president over his own intelligence community. It was astonishing, just astonishing to be in the room with the U.S. president and the Russian president on this critical question of election interference, and to retreat back to these talking points about DNC servers and Hillary Clinton's emails when he had a chance right there in front of the world to tell Vladimir Putin to stay the HELL out of American democracy, and he didn't do it."

In other words Trump should just shut up and not question a questionable indictment, which Acosta, like nearly all the media, treat as a conviction.

The Media's Handlers

The media's handlers were even worse than their assets. Former CIA director John Brennan tweeted : "Donald Trump's press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of 'high crimes & misdemeanors,.' It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump's comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???"

Here's where the Republican Patriots are, Brennan: " That's how a press conference sounds when an Asset stands next to his Handler," former RNC Chairman Michael Steele tweeted.

Representative Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president, said on Twitter: " As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, I am deeply troubled by President Trump's defense of Putin against the intelligence agencies of the U.S. & his suggestion of moral equivalence between the U.S. and Russia. Russia poses a grave threat to our national security."

All these were reactions to Trump expressing skepticism about the U.S. indictment on Friday of 12 Russian intelligence agents for allegedly interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election while he was standing next to Russian President Vladimir Putin at the press conference following their summit meeting in Helsinki.

" I will say this: I don't see any reason why it would be" Russia, Trump said. "I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today."

The indictments, which are only unproven accusations, formally accused 12 members of the GRU, Russian military intelligence, of stealing Democratic Party emails in a hacking operation and giving the materials to WikiLeaks to publish in order to damage the candidacy of Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton. The indictments were announced on Friday, three days before the summit, with the clear intention of getting Trump to cancel it. He ignored cries from the media and Congress to do so.

Over the weekend Michael Smerconish on CNN actually said the indictments proved that Russia had committed a "terrorist attack" against the United States. This is in line with many pundits who are comparing this indictment, that will most likely never produce any evidence, to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. The danger inherent in that thinking is clear.

Putin said the allegations are "utter nonsense, just like [Trump] recently mentioned." He added: "The final conclusion in this kind of dispute can only be delivered by a trial, by the court. Not by the executive, by the law enforcement." He could have added not by the media.

Trump reasonably questioned why the FBI never examined the computer servers of the Democratic National Committee to see whether there was a hack and who may have done it. Instead a private company, CrowdStrike, hired by the Democratic Party studied the server and within a day blamed Russia on very dubious grounds.

" Why haven't they taken the server?" Trump asked. "Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee? I've been wondering that. I've been asking that for months and months and I've been tweeting it out and calling it out on social media. Where is the server? I want to know, where is the server and what is the server saying?"

But being a poor communicator, Trump then mentioned Clinton's missing emails, allowing the media to conflate the two different servers, and be easily dismissed as Gergen did.

At the press conference, Putin offered to allow American investigators from the team of special counsel Robert Mueller, who put the indictment together, to travel to Russia and take part in interviews with the 12 accused Russian agents. He also offered to set up a joint cyber-security group to examine the evidence and asked that in return Russia be allowed to question persons of interest to Moscow in the United States.

" Let's discuss the specific issues and not use the Russia and U.S. relationship as a loose change for this internal political struggle," Putin said.

On CNN, Christiane Amanpour called Putin's clear offer "obfuscation."

Even if Trump agreed to this reasonable proposal it seems highly unlikely that his Justice Department will go along with it. Examination of whatever evidence they have to back up the indictment is not what the DOJ is after. As I wrote about the indictments in detail on Friday:

" The extremely remote possibility of convictions were not what Mueller was apparently after, but rather the public perception of Russia's guilt resulting from fevered media coverage of what are after all only accusations, presented as though it is established fact. Once that impression is settled into the public consciousness, Mueller's mission would appear to be accomplished."

Still No 'Collusion'

The summit begins. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

The indictments did not include any members of Trump's campaign team for "colluding" with the alleged Russian hacking effort, which has been a core allegation throughout the two years of the so-called Russia-gate scandal. Those allegations are routinely reported in U.S. media as established fact, though there is still no evidence of collusion.

Trump emphasised that point in the press conference. "There was no collusion at all," he said forcefully. "Everybody knows it."

On this point corporate media has been more deluded than normal as they clutch for straws to prove the collusion theory. As one example of many across the media with the same theme, a New York Times story on Friday , headlined, "Trump Invited the Russians to Hack Clinton. Were They Listening?," said Russia may have absurdly responded to Trump's call at 10:30 a.m. on July 27, 2016 to hack Clinton's private email server because it was "on or about" that day that Russia allegedly first made an attempt to hack Clinton's personal emails, according to the indictment, which makes no connection between the two events.

If Russia is indeed guilty of remotely hacking the emails it would have had no evident need of assistance from anyone on the Trump team, let alone a public call from Trump on national TV to commence the operation.

More importantly, as Twitter handle "Representative Press" pointed out: "Trump's July 27, 2016 call to find the missing 30,000 emails could not be a 'call to hack Clinton's server' because at that point it was no longer online . Long before Trump's statement, Clinton had already turned over her email server to the U.S. Department of Justice." Either the indictment was talking about different servers or it is being intentionally misleading when it says "on or about July 27, 2016, the Conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third party provider and used by Clinton's personal office."

This crucial fact alone, that Clinton had turned over the server in 2015 so that no hack was possible, makes it impossible that Trump's TV call could be seen as collusion. Only a desperate person would see it otherwise.

But there is a simple explanation why establishment journalists are in unison in their dominant Russian narrative: it is career suicide to question it.

As Samuel Johnson said as far back as 1745: "The greatest part of mankind have no other reason for their opinions than that they are in fashion since vanity and credulity cooperate in its favour."

Importance of US-Russia Relations

Trump said the unproven allegation of collusion "has had a negative impact upon the relationship of the two largest nuclear powers in the world. We have 90 percent of nuclear power between the two countries. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous what's going on with the probe."

The American president said the U.S. has been "foolish" not to attempt dialogue with Russia before, to cooperate on a range of issues.

"As president, I cannot make decisions on foreign policy in a futile effort to appease partisan critics or the media or Democrats who want to do nothing but resist and obstruct," Trump said. "Constructive dialogue between the United States and Russia forwards the opportunity to open new pathways toward peace and stability in our world. I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics."

This main reason for summits between Russian and American leaders was also ignored: to use diplomacy to reduce dangerous tensions. "I really think the world wants to see us get along," Trump said. "We are the two great nuclear powers. We have 90 percent of the nuclear. And that's not a good thing, it's a bad thing."

Preventing good relations between the two countries appears to be the heart of the matter for U.S. intelligence and their media assets. So Trump was vilified for even trying.

Ignoring the Rest of the Story

Obsessed as they are with the "interference" story, the media virtually ignored the other crucial issues that came up at the summit, such as the Middle East.

Trump sort of thanked Russia for its efforts to defeat ISIS. "When you look at all of the progress that's been made in certain sections with the eradication of ISIS, about 98 percent, 99 percent there, and other things that have taken place that we have done and that, frankly, Russia has helped us with in certain respects," he said.

Trump here is falsely taking credit, as he has before, for defeating ISIS with only some "help" from Russia. In Iraq the U.S. led the way against ISIS coordinating the Iraqi and Kurdish security forces. But in the separate war against ISIS in Syria, Russia, the Syrian Arab Army, Kurdish forces, Iranian troops and Hizbullah militias were almost entirely responsible for ISIS' defeat.

A grand deal? (Photo: Sputnik)

Also on Syria, Trump appeared to endorse what is being reported as a deal between Russia and Israel in which Israel would accept Bashar al-Assad remaining as Syrian president, while Russia would work on Iran to get it to remove its forces away from the northern Golan Heights, which Israel illegally considers its border with Syria.

After a meeting in Moscow last week with Putin, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he accepted Assad remaining in power.

" President Putin also is helping Israel," Trump said at the press conference. "We both spoke with Bibi Netanyahu. They would like to do certain things with respect to Syria, having to do with the safety of Israel. In that respect, we absolutely would like to work in order to help Israel. Israel will be working with us. So both countries would work jointly."

Trump also said that the U.S. and Russian militaries were coordinating in Syria, but he did not go as far as saying that they had agreed to fight together there, which has been a longstanding proposal of Putin's dating back to September 2015, just before Moscow intervened militarily in the country.

" Our militaries have gotten along probably better than our political leaders for years," Trump said. "Our militaries do get along very well. They do coordinate in Syria and other places."

Trump said Russia and the U.S. should cooperate in humanitarian assistance in Syria.

" If we can do something to help the people of Syria get back into some form of shelter and on a humanitarian basis that's what the word was, a humanitarian basis," he said. "I think both of us would be very interested in doing that."

Putin said he had agreed on Sunday with French President Emmanuel Macron on a joint effort with Europe to deliver humanitarian aid. "On our behalf, we will provide military cargo aircraft to deliver humanitarian cargo. Today, I brought up this issue with President Trump. I think there's plenty of things to look into," Putin said.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent for T he Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe , Sunday Times of London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @unjoe .

If you enjoyed this original article please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.

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Show Comments


Gary Weglarz , July 18, 2018 at 1:06 am

I'm really hard pressed to come up with anything to be optimistic about given the dire nature of our current global and national predicaments combined with the bat-sheet crazy nature of our current version of the mass psyche. About the only bright spot I can find is that it is really encouraging to read the overall high quality of the comments here at CN, which suggest that I can look forward to taking part in some wonderful future conversations in "the camps."

Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 9:36 pm

new Reuters poll: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-voters/majority-of-americans-think-trump-mishandling-russia-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKBN1K72T1?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter

AnthraxSleuth , July 17, 2018 at 10:15 pm

What an unbelievably slanted poll.

"The Reuters/Ipsos poll gathered responses from 1,011 registered voters throughout the United States, including 453 Republicans and 399 Democrats. The poll has a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of 4 percentage points."

Independents/anaffiliated make up more than 42% of the registered voters currently in the USA.

irina , July 17, 2018 at 11:09 pm

"medium = Social / source = Twitter"

Babyl-on , July 17, 2018 at 9:35 pm

I think we should take heart that they are such a small group – loud yes, they have the corporate press, but it is not a big group and they have already lost the narrative. This has to be the end for them, they have no political support for impeachment after all this screeching articles can't even get introduced mostly the "resistance" isn't even trying – they know they don't have evidence.

The scream these words TREASON and COLLUSION but they are powerless politically to do anything. So a "treasonous" president goes on. Clearly they are at their wits end their heads have actually exploded. The powerful "liberal" cabal which has run Washington for decades is disintegrating before there very eyes. Clinton is the witch – Trump is the water.

A , July 17, 2018 at 11:33 pm

Okay , I get it, I will go down , but I am not going down by the orange shit head. You guys win, you wanted your Cheeto to give us some love, and tax breaks , favorable trade deals, get rid of people like me , be besties with Russia, kill everyone from central America. Cool. You guys win. I hope you are happy , apparently you have achieved what you wanted.

Jessika , July 17, 2018 at 8:45 pm

Thanks, Drew and Realist, i just read Finian Cunningham's essay at Information Clearing House. Yes, this is indeed scary. It does appear a coup is being planned. All the more reason for us to speak up. The thought of Mike Pence is scarier than Trump.

willow , July 17, 2018 at 9:30 pm

I was a Sanders supporter and donor who voted for Trump because he promised diplomacy, whereas Hillary wanted a no-fly zone in Syria, and her proven track record of supporting illegal regime change in Iraq, Honduras, Libya, Ukraine and Syria. She was a faux progressive and ultimate racist in that she has the blood of countless brown people (mostly women and children) on her hands. What is really scary and disheartening is that the pro-WW3 propaganda seems to be working if the reader comments from the NYT and WaPo are accurate gauges of public perception. The verdict of commenters in corporate media websites is unanimous: Trump is a traitor for committing the crime of détente. Consortium news readers are informed because we search truth in alternative media. I hope it's not naďve to believe we are the silent majority and most Americans still possess the common sense and critical thinking skills necessary to see through the hysteria even if they don't venture to sites like Consortium news.

AnthraxSleuth , July 17, 2018 at 10:19 pm

Don't worry yourself too much. The highest rated MSM news shows only garner about 1.2 million viewers. That's far less than 1% of the American population.
The MSM fancy themselves what they have not been in decades; Relevant.

Jessika , July 17, 2018 at 7:44 pm

That was good, mrbt (not enough vowels for me). Yes, we are in a jalopy headed for a cliff. Instead we get a cliffhanger with this Mueller intel fiasco. I misspoke with the bank bailout, of course, it was 2009 just after Obama got into office; he told those banksters, "I'm the only one between you and the pitchforks". Now it seems like we're on a roller coaster ready to jump the track!

mrtmbrnmn , July 17, 2018 at 7:33 pm

This disgraceful and obscene display of pants-wetting by the MSM over the Trump-Putin meeting and press conference was pre-planned and essentially pre-scripted to advance the deep state regime change op against Trump (and ultimately Putin). I was trying to imagine these journalistic malpracticers prepped to embarrass and humiliate Obama in a similar setting by asking questions like: "Mr Obama, which do you prefer, watermelon or chicken bones?"

It is clear beyond doubt that we are helpless passengers in the back seat of the out of control jalopy that is America, barreling helter skelter down the highway bound to hell and total collapse. The Dementedcrats need to get off the crack pipe and the unconscionable CIA thug John Brennan might benefit from a frontal lobotomy to get him to chill out.

irina , July 17, 2018 at 8:32 pm

the best description i've read of this insanity is : 'the MSM is (p-faced) drunk on its own p . . . " with appreciation to the commentor who wrote that !

It sounds like Lisa Page is, unlike Strzok (remember him, from late last week ?) cooperatively providing information which might implicate China as the 'party which got the 30,000 emails'. Perhaps this is what Trump & Putin talked about ? In which case, The Donald's walking back his press conference comments may be only a temporary feint. If true, Lisa will need excellent protection and a new name !

irina , July 17, 2018 at 8:38 pm

Link to above :

https://truepundit.com/fbi-lisa-page-dimes-out-top-fbi-officials-during-classified-house-testimony-bureau-bosses-covered-up-evidence-china-hacked-hillarys-top-secret-emails/

If true, that would make a nice hangover for the MSM !

Jessika , July 17, 2018 at 7:29 pm

Something big may be in the works, as Stephen says. Now Veterans Today says that a move on Iran by the US was discussed at Helsinki, and they think that Putin would capitulate in some sort of trade-off -- what, to get off their backs? Putin is much smarter than that. Zero Hedge just reports that Russia has dumped all their US Treasury bonds, further stating that Russia's close ties to China indicate a trial run on the market preparatory to China dumping their pile, too. What many feel the big event is really another economic meltdown, as nothing was done in the 2008 Obama crisis except bail out the banks, which went right back to their chicanery. The western Deep State always sets up for war to divert attention from internal crisis.

Deniz , July 17, 2018 at 6:59 pm

I get far more concerned when the press, intelligence agencies and various other DC gangsters lavish praise on Trump. Judging by their reactions, it seems likely that Trump must have actually brought us closer to peace.

Jessika , July 17, 2018 at 6:46 pm

Stephen J, excellent verse as usual, "Blame It On Putin". It was reported that "the lights went out" in the White House when Trump did his U-turn on Russian election meddling. Was that supposed to be symbolic of something?

Stephen J. , July 17, 2018 at 7:06 pm

Thanks Jessika. I believe something big is in the works. The powers that be have had things their own way for so long. The corporate media monopoly are their mouthpieces and are barking like dogs in a frenzy in case they lose their bones. The bones being the millions dead from planned wars and blood soaked profits that attained to the corporate cannibals. Enemies are needed to continue the corrupt system. The War Criminals are getting desperate, the gangsters war is just starting. Unfortunately we are all Prisoners of "Democracy"
https://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-prisoners-of-democracy.html

Antiwar7 , July 17, 2018 at 6:22 pm

David Gergen says Trump acts "against his [Trump's] own country's interests of his own institutions [including] these intelligence agencies."

There's the rub, isn't it? The interests of our country and of those institutions: are they the same?

Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 6:59 pm

Also worth, sorry for broken record but, using Trump's unique "awfulness" as justification for vigilante-style "trial in the press" or manipulated/propagandized "public opinion" there's a deep deep antidemocratic anti-due process or rule-of-law desperation here which has had "liberal" (or "illiberal") precedent we've already seen in "political correctness" and #metoo (emanating from the "progressive camp" often justified by the awfulness / despicable-ness of those they despise.

This is a very very sad devolution (or arguably the unmasking) of the Democratic Party (I vote the latter).

mike k , July 17, 2018 at 6:13 pm

Trump mumbled some sort of half maybe apology about questioning Russian meddling. But he will contradict that apology just as quickly. They are really having trouble pinning this guy down on anything. His enemies want to nail him, but he just keeps moving. For a fat guy, he is pretty nimble.

Jessika , July 17, 2018 at 5:52 pm

Now, Trump says he misspoke and "accepts US intel on Russian election meddling"! I guess he got anothet 'trip to the woodshed', as Skip Scott has often said. James Howard Kunstler is right, it's a "Clusterfuck Nation". Well, the Russians are smart enough never to trust the US.

irina , July 17, 2018 at 9:49 pm

He got the truth out first and for that I have to give him kudos.
He probably knew backtracking and its attendant issues was
Inevitable. Very nice that power went out while he said he misspoke.

as WaPo itself says, "Truth Dies in Darkness".

Drew Hunkins , July 17, 2018 at 5:18 pm

Look, this is getting frightening.

Never in my lifetime have I witnessed a group think/mob mentality like what's occurring over Russiagate and the overriding Russophobia fueling it all. This is washing over virtually all planks of the political spectrum. We just had a damaged and awful president try to do one of the very few things he actually gets right: make rapprochement with Moscow; he was subsequently browbeaten, smeared and viciously attacked by every single mainstream Western media outlet on the planet. Not just news media, but also the entertainment media are completely on board -- Kimmel, Fallon, Colbert, Maddow, etc.

To say one kind word about Putin or the modicum of detente that Trump just unsuccessfully tried to pull off is to be mocked, ridiculed, scoffed at and laughed at by liberal leaning friends, colleagues and acquaintances.

The militarist-corporate propaganda during the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War pales in comparison to this new and scary McCarthyism that has permeated everything.

I'm 47 y.o. and never experienced anything like this.

The liberal intelligentsia who are falling for this and propagating this have some of the hottest places in heII waiting for them.

Deniz , July 17, 2018 at 5:31 pm

If you think the overwhelming majority of the US cares about what the press and politicians think, then I would suggest you spend less time with Democrats. I dont agree with many Republican platforms, but on the reliability of media, they are far more prescient than the Democrats. I wonder if it is because they have more first-hand knowledge than the Democrats because they tend to send their kids to the meat grinder oil, wars more frequently than Democrats.

Drew Hunkins , July 17, 2018 at 5:40 pm

The best thing we have going right now Deniz is the cynical and skeptical attitude of much the hardworking American population.

The Russians certainly aren't the ones who foisted this unconscionable inequality on the U.S. population, nor was it the Russians who caused the American heartland to deteriorate into a wasteland of service sector employment and Oxy dependence. It wasn't Putin who mired recent American college grads in deplorable debt in the range of $30,000 to $400,000, nor was it Putin who demanded that millions of Americans go without adequate healthcare coverage.

It's economic inequality and it's political enablers who are stalking the towns and cities of America, not the Russian military.

John P , July 17, 2018 at 6:37 pm

That is the real problem, so why arn't kids, their parents and the poor out on the streets like those of my generation during the Vietnam war stiring things up. Is it social media which kills the urge to go out and protest and make yourself heard? Get the money and business influence out of modern day politics, Raise hell !

irina , July 17, 2018 at 8:15 pm

There was a DRAFT during the Vietnam war. That made a huge difference.
And, I think we were actually better informed than today's young people.
Bringing the war live into people's living rooms was New Thing back then,
and we paid attention. Now, we are habituated and just tune out bad news,
unless it happens to be a domestic shooting spree or other home turf stuff.

willow , July 17, 2018 at 9:36 pm

Irina below is right. The draft was the difference. People would wake up and engage if we had the draft. We have an economic draft today. It's the only option for poor and lower class kids who will never afford college. It's unfortunate that identity politics doesn't include the socioeconomic bias of targeting of poor kids being used as cannon fodder

irina , July 17, 2018 at 11:12 pm

And moreover, the draft was based on a birthdate lottery.

All in the luck of the draw. (And of course, economic standing
since there were college deferments, etc. etc.)

Realist , July 17, 2018 at 5:49 pm

I'm 71, Drew, and can tell you that the darkest days of the Vietnam War were not as scary. Our power structure has taken McCarthyism as practiced during the Korean Conflict and doubled down on it, directing its kinetics at the office of the presidency. This is as close to a civil war or an actual coup d'etat that I have ever seen, much more divisive and explosive than Nixon and Watergate. Someone claiming authority they do not have may soon make a move against Trump. They've stirred up enough hate by the mob to mask their motives.

Drew Hunkins , July 17, 2018 at 6:02 pm

Thanks for kicking some historical info to this Gen Xer. You make some very interesting (and quite scary) points.

Over at 'Information Clearing House' the always excellent Finian Cunningham has just penned a dynamite and trenchant essay on a possible pending coup against Trump.

Realist , July 17, 2018 at 6:32 pm

Thanks. I always read your spot-on posts at the ICH website, Drew.

Drew Hunkins , July 17, 2018 at 8:36 pm

Thanks Realist.

In solidarity,

Drew Hunkins
Madison, WI

Dave P. , July 17, 2018 at 7:13 pm

Yes. This excellent article by Finian Cunningham really nails it.

Monoloco , July 17, 2018 at 6:49 pm

Trump derangement syndrome is so powerful, it turns liberals into neocons.

KiwiAntz , July 17, 2018 at 7:27 pm

Drew your absolutely correct, this is a unprecedented groupthink & dangerous propaganda on a scale that's never existed before! It's mass hysteria on steroids! And all because of the simple fact that Trump, a man who was never supposed to win the Election over the anointed candidate, crooked Hillary Clinton occurred! Trump must be removed by a slow motion coup by any means possible? Whether it's by undermining his authority or belittering his character. If that doesn't work they will take the JFK removal method? As Stalin stated, death is the solution to all problems, no man, no problem? It's frightening where all this fake Russiagate nonsense is going to lead us, it's almost as if they want to start the next great extinction event by starting WW3 & a Nuclear War with Russia? The arrogance of America & its Deepstate, Propagandist MSM & political system is going to be the death of us all!

Miranda Keefe , July 17, 2018 at 4:58 pm

I guess Trump is now caving into the Deep State and the media.

Maybe he's afraid if he doesn't he'll die of a 'heart attack'- no way they'd do it with a bullet from a patsy- they don't want him to be a martyr.

https://www.facebook.com/CBSNews/videos/10155975560905950/?t=20

Banger , July 17, 2018 at 4:08 pm

I don't know that to say. Whatever was left of the republic is either gone or doomed. If we have a mainstream media that is so nakedly attempting a coup d'état or calling for one with such universal fury based on little evidence and just embroidering one myth over another then I will have to just focus my energy elsewhere. My comrades on most of the left have, despite decades of proof that the media is deeply dishonest and constantly howling for one war after another the only hope is to batten down the hatches and just survive the next decade through local efforts. The sad part is I oppose many of Trump's policies but this isn't about policies–this is about re-invigorating American militarism and imperialism.

I've been around a lot of crises but nothing like this madness.

Stephen J. , July 17, 2018 at 3:53 pm

As usual the "media impostors" and propaganda pushers blame Putin.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -
January 10, 2017
"Blame It" On Putin

There is endless wars and devastation around the world
Western war criminals have their war banners unfurled
Millions dead and many millions uprooted
And the financial system is corrupted and looted
"Blame it" on Putin

The war criminals are free and spreading bloody terror
And their dirty propaganda says Putin is an "aggressor"
These evil plotters of death and destruction
Should be in jail for their abominable actions
But, "Blame it" on Putin.

The American election is won by Donald Trump
Hillary Clinton loses and gets politically dumped
The media is frenzied and foaming at their mouths
They are crying and lying, these corporate louts
They "Blame it" on Putin

Hollywood, too, is getting in on the act
The B.S. merchants are able to twist facts
In their fantasy world of channel changers
They do not approve of a political stranger
They "Blame it" on Putin

The spymasters and their grovelling politicians
All agree that "their democracy" is "lost in transmission"
Their comfortable and controlled system is now in danger
And these powerful parasites are filled with anger
They "Blame it" on Putin

One loose canon talks and babbles of "an act of war"
Could nuclear hell be started by a warmongering whore?
If the madmen of the establishment get their way
Could we all be liquidated in the nuclear fray?
"Blame it" on Putin

There is no doubt that the ruling class
Are all worried about saving their ass
Could there be huge changes and still more coming?
Is the sick and depraved society finally crumbling?
Hey, "Blame it" on Putin
[more info at link below]
http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2017/01/blame-it-on-putin.html

Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 3:46 pm

This just in: (NYT headline / top of page)

Trump Backtracks on Russian Meddling
Under Fire, He Says He Accepts U.S. Intelligence Reports

Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 4:03 pm

and then
Guardian:

Trump flips – then flips again – a day after downplaying Russian interference
President says he supports US intelligence consensus on 2016 election – but then says 'it could be other people also'

(oh, nevermind)

Miranda Keefe , July 17, 2018 at 5:39 pm

I heard him say that. He meant that Russia did it and others could also have been involved.

Will , July 17, 2018 at 3:30 pm

Perhaps New York magazine has it right? "The president isn't a traitor: He's just constitutionally incapable of processing simple information, or prioritizing the national interest above his own egoistic desires." or more maybe New York's earlier article from last week suggesting Trumpkin has been a Russian intelligence asset since 1987 is true.

One thing's for sure: Trumpkin borrowed 100's of millions from shady Russian bankers and other oligarchs, some of whom seem to have laundered a bunch of money through Trump's real estate holdings by buying condos for dollars on the penny. If you foliks don't see that as being at least somewhat on the same level as Dick Cheney holding those un-exercised Halliburton stock options at the time Haliburton was servicing the Iraq invasion

michael , July 17, 2018 at 7:06 pm

Or Hillary exchanging access to the State department for donations

Gregory Herr , July 17, 2018 at 7:40 pm

"Cheney has pursued a political and corporate career to make himself very rich and powerful. He is the personification of a war profiteer who slid through the revolving door connecting the public and private sectors of the defense establishment on two occasions in a career that has served his relentless quest for power and profits."

https://www.commondreams.org/views05/1117-22.htm

Profiting from the death and destruction of a heinous war of aggression that Cheney himself played a key role in instigating can in no way be compared with shady business dealings. I harbour disdain for shady businessmen who cheat property owners, honest contractors or workers. But that type of wrongdoing pales in comparison to the wicked malfeasance of Cheney (or the Bush family for that matter).

Before you "process" any more simple "information" from New York magazine Will, I suggest you take note of the GIGO truism and check yourself for leakage.

Jerry Alatalo , July 17, 2018 at 3:28 pm

It seems President Lenin Moreno of Ecuador might have the perfect solution for his "problem" in London.

Free Julian Assange, Allow him to walk out of the Ecuadorian Embassy with all the proper rights available for any innocent man or woman on Earth.

Immediately upon Mr. Assange's exit, allow William (Bill) Browder to enter and occupy the same room at the Ecuadorian Embassy – whereupon Mr. Browder will reside at that address until July 2024, punished under the identical treatment and conditions as Julian Assange.

"Problem solved" – President Moreno!

David Otness , July 17, 2018 at 2:50 pm

Not much to say but the USA has gone bat-shit cray-cray.
I'm going to be delighted to be excised from many so-called "friends" – friends of mob mentality.
The US media and Intel complex have induced a national psychosis and a likely Constitutional crisis.
Keep yer powder dry.

Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 3:04 pm

I'd guess half the country considers this -- in the end -- just more partisan theatrics sad to suspect that they actually are the "sane ones" It's ennui versus cynicism as to which is more deadly .

KiwiAntz , July 17, 2018 at 7:47 pm

The scary thing is, Americans second amendment right to bear arms against enemies both domestic & foreign! There's a Edward Abbey saying that a days "a Patriot must always be ready to defend his Country against his Govt"! How long will it be before American citizens reach a tipping point where they recognise that it's enemies are its own domestic leaders & institutions such as the false corporate propagandist MSM & corrupt Politicians in both Republican & Democratic Parties who are undermining & sabotaging their human rights as free people! How long will it be before they say enough's enough we can't stomach this anymore?

Larry Gates , July 17, 2018 at 2:37 pm

In the Odyssey a witch-goddess named Circe turned Odysseus' men into pigs. I think Trump is a modern day sorcerer. In the GOP primaries he turned his more intelligent and more experienced competitors into incoherent cartoon characters. He has done the same to the entire Democratic establishment, and he has done it to the entire mainstream press. There is no effective opposition because politicians and the media have become stark-raving mad – wild swine, just as dangerous as the monster they oppose. We are in America's darkest hour and only half the blame goes to the vulgarian in the White House.

The Ministry of Truth has declared that seeking détente with Russia is an act of treason. And peace is war. Long live Oceania!

jsinton , July 17, 2018 at 6:14 pm

I love it.

BobS , July 17, 2018 at 2:37 pm

The POTUS stood on foreign soil and announced to the world that the leader of one of our historical adversaries was more credible than the US intelligence services.
If it walks like a traitorous duck, and quacks like a traitorous duck, ..

anon , July 17, 2018 at 4:25 pm

Then it is a traitorous troll.

Gregory Herr , July 17, 2018 at 7:47 pm

That's rich! Do please grace us with an explanation as to why "credible" is an adjective aptly applied to either the FBI or the CIA.

Dario Zuddu , July 17, 2018 at 2:33 pm

Excellent piece. Fortunately, there is still someone here retaining sanity.
The only thing I have to add is that, most regrettably, it is not only the media and opportunistic politicians that have lost their minds on this matter.
Large segments of the public appear to have too.
Just take a look at the readers' comments on the very same type of press coverage that is indicted by Mr. Lauria.
They overwhelmingly level the same one sided, unbalanced, shallow, wrong-headed and hysterical attacks on Trump as the press articles they comment – and for the same completely questionable reasons.
Accusations of Trump "surrendering to Putin", being a "traitor" for siding with Russia instead of the US intelligence community (on a totally unproven matter, by the way; and since when the US intelligence community is necessarily more reliable than foreign leaders on these matters?) are the norm in the readers' comment (as well as in the mostly recommended ones).
Incredibly, the same public that lambasted at the intelligence community for its appalling record on Iraq, now does not even want to consider that same community's obvious self interest in Russia-bashing.
In the USA, who stands the most to loose from a possible pacification of foreign relations with the biggest military counterpart, i.e., well, Russia?
This question just rings as troubling now as it did at the onset of the cold war.
Yet, nobody seems to wonder it.

Banger , July 17, 2018 at 4:23 pm

It's just over for those of us on the old left. The Orwellian nature of the media has taken hold and we are powerless against it. We have a population utterly uncurious of facts or history, logic or science, rationality or erudition. It's over. People want to belong, want to share their anger at whatever enemy there is no matter how ludicrous is that threat from the enemy. This is how the oligarch has decided to use Trump's election–first to divide us on tribal grounds and second to invent some enemy that uses all the mythology of Hollywood villains with Russian accents. It's working and it means the oligarchs are unassailable and now are able to control public opinion with a bunch of gestures on the screen and the population will bark on command. Goebbels is, somewhere, cackling with delight.

We will be lucky if we avoid war, fortunately the professional military understands the situation much better than the civilian leaders and have put brakes on our drift into permanent major war everywhere.

Paula Densnow , July 17, 2018 at 2:19 pm

The US media tries to browbeat Trump into saying that he stole the 2016 election with the help of Putin, and when he refuses to do that, they call him a traitor.
We live in an insane asylum.

Will , July 17, 2018 at 3:31 pm

No, trump is clearly a traitor.

Beard681 , July 17, 2018 at 9:07 pm

To who? The military industrial complex? Bill Browder who renounced his citizenship to avoid Taxes? Certainly not average US people for whom Russia poses no credible threat.

Robin Harper , July 17, 2018 at 10:31 pm

Gee, if this is all made up, explain this: (And keep in mind, to get an indictment, you MUST have proof.)

The full list of known indictments and plea deals in Mueller's probe:

Total of indictments (so far) – 35.

1) George Papadopoulos, former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, pleaded guilty in October to making false statements to the FBI.

2) Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser, pleaded guilty in December to making false statements to the FBI.

3) Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chair, was indicted in October in Washington, DC on charges of conspiracy, money laundering, and false statements -- all related to his work for Ukrainian politicians before he joined the Trump campaign. He's pleaded not guilty on all counts. Then, in February, Mueller filed a new case against him in Virginia, with tax, financial, and bank fraud charges.

4) Rick Gates, a former Trump campaign aide and Manafort's longtime junior business partner, was indicted on similar charges to Manafort. But in February he agreed to a plea deal with Mueller's team, pleading guilty to just one false statements charge and one conspiracy charge.

5-20) 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies were indicted on conspiracy charges, with some also being accused of identity theft. The charges related to a Russian propaganda effort designed to interfere with the 2016 campaign. The companies involved are the Internet Research Agency, often described as a "Russian troll farm," and two other companies that helped finance it. The Russian nationals indicted include 12 of the agency's employees and its alleged financier, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

21) Richard Pinedo: This California man pleaded guilty to an identity theft charge in connection with the Russian indictments, and has agreed to cooperate with Mueller.

22) Alex van der Zwaan: This London lawyer pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI about his contacts with Rick Gates and another unnamed person based in Ukraine.

23) Konstantin Kilimnik: This longtime business associate of Manafort and Gates, who's currently based in Russia, was charged alongside Manafort with attempting to obstruct justice by tampering with witnesses in Manafort's pending case this year.

24-35) 12 Russian GRU officers: These officers of Russia's military intelligence service were charged with crimes related to the hacking and leaking of leading Democrats' emails in 2016.

Two ex-Trump advisers lied to the FBI about their contacts with Russians:
Michael Flynn Mario Tama/Getty

No, Trump didn't 'steal' the election. The presidency was handed to him – by Putin.

skipNclair , July 17, 2018 at 2:01 pm

The US media lost its mind long ago.

didi , July 17, 2018 at 1:46 pm

What has happened on this trip of President Trump is simple. The axis Washington-EU/NATO has been thrown under the bus., It has been replaced by the axis Washington-Moscow. Whether that is a cause to rejoice remains to be seen. Rejoicing now is wildly premature. Axes can break.
There will be expectations of better lives by the Russian people. What if that does not happen? There have been far more uprisings and revolutions in Russian history than in ours.

lizzie dw , July 17, 2018 at 1:34 pm

To respond to one commenter's suggestion that the US get rid of the electoral college; if one looked at the map of the US on post-election morning, one saw that practically the entire country was coloured red – only the coasts were blue. If we went the "popular vote" route, every president would be elected by the coastal states because that is where most of the people live. The coastal population does not represent the country. In my opinion, since we want to have a representative government we need the electoral college so that each state gets to vote. The people in each state can direct the vote of their state.

didi , July 17, 2018 at 1:51 pm

Sorry Lizzie. The population of all states represent our nation. That is why the vote count, while it does not elect the President and Vice President, is not wholly without meaning. Governing totally against the views of the majority of voters implies that they are wrong and stupid. That is my view. It is also arrogant.

strngr-tgthr , July 17, 2018 at 2:32 pm

Thanks you! The MAJORITY should ALWAYS rule. There should be no acceptions especially for President of the United States. Too few people speak this TRUTH! In this day an age there is no reason to have any system or institutions in place that does not speak for the MAJORITY! Electoral College down!

Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 2:52 pm

Never heard of the "tyranny of the majority", eh? It's a genuine problem with democracy it's quite possible that many issues would never have reached majority status -- slavery would never have been abolished (so much fuss about a regional "peculiar institutution"),

""The notion of the tyranny of the majority was popularised by the 19th century political thinkers Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America) and John Stuart Mill (On Liberty). It refers to a situation in which the majority enforces its will on a disadvantaged minority through the democratic process.""

The vote of far too many would be rendered irrelevant if there were no proportional representation mechanism in place too much of those disenfranchised by the elimination of the electoral college are already amongst the have-nots of our country, at the further hungry end of income inequality (some do better than other by providing "services" -- vacation homes/destinations and cheap labor -- to the oligarchs. -- those coasts are where the money and jobs are wealth

Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 3:08 pm

handy maps . Trump won 85% of the land mass .
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/16/us/politics/the-two-americas-of-2016.html

JoeD , July 17, 2018 at 3:12 pm

The electoral college DOES NOT prevent the "tyranny of the majority" because you do not have equal voting. If every state cast the same number of votes then you have equal voting. Because each state has different number of electoral votes based on their populations, candidates can spend their time in a few states while ignoring others.

A national popular vote restores equality

A national popular vote means 3rd party candidates can win because there is no more electoral strategy or asinine argument of red state / blue state.

Realist , July 17, 2018 at 5:12 pm

We've never had such a system, wise guy. The Senate is inherently undemocratic, based on states' rights, not one man one vote. Moreover, judges are not elected but appointed by the executive and confirmed by the legislature. Having the president chosen by the Congress, as is done in all parliamentary systems, would be "tidier" ("fairer?") than the present system, but we've lived with this mess since 1789 and several times have been governed by a "minority president" without the world coming to an end. The rules were no excuse for a coup d'etat then, nor are they now.

michael , July 17, 2018 at 7:22 pm

The Constitution allows Amendments to change with changing times. The vote has been given to free men without property, freed slaves and women. More than 10% of Presidents did not win the plurality of votes. If people truly want their votes to count more, they can work to amend the Constitution, or vote with their feet and move to states where their votes count more.
A much bigger issue is the lack of proportional voting practiced by most real Democracies around the world. Gerrymandering districts can result in the party getting the least votes (of the two) in a state still winning the most representatives. Proportional voting would eliminate this problem, but was outlawed by LBJ in favor of first-past-the-post, winner takes all Districts.

Jim in NH , July 17, 2018 at 3:18 pm

Sorry, Didi, but our federal constitutional republican form of government is neither stupid nor arrogant.

It is a well designed construct that binds together the entire nation, not only the people but the states, into an organic being. The electoral college consciously factors in the fact that we are a union of states, not only a union of "demos" (people). That is why the "New Jersey plan" at the Federal Convention was a high point in your high school civics class. The states are intended to mean something in our federal republican form of government.

Indeed, for those who view the massive growth of our federal government into an imperial hegemon over the past century or so, it is no small coincidence that the balance constructed by the founders was tipped in favor of Washington, and BIG MONEY, by the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1912. That amemdment (for the popular election of Senators instead of their being appointed by state legislatures as written in the constitution) inexorably led to the growth of our imperial state; immediately thereafter came the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, enactment of a the personal income tax to replace import tariff's to fund the federal government, our engagement in WW 1, and increasing alliance with the British Empire that lasts today in our "special relationship", the NATO alliance, and the Anglo American hegemon.

It is also no coincidence that the root source of "Russia-gate" and "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is a sustained effort by British Intelligence, in cahoots with US deep state intelligence that works not for the people of the US but for the Anglo-American empire of western capital centered on Wall Street and the medieval City of London. That is why the "golden shower dossier" was written by a British intelligence officer (Steele), that the basis for the deep state rat Strzok to spy on Trump was an Australian "diplomat" (read spy) Downer, friend of the globalist Clintons, and US deep state intelligence operatives attempted entrapment of Trump campaign supporters (such as by Stefan Halper, an Mi-6 and CIA asset).

The entire attack to undermine the results of the Electoral College triumph of Donald Trump is directed by Anglo-American deep intelligence assets, working for the globalist western capitalist cabal, that cannot permit a mere president to alter their globalist plans; ergo, deep state rats Brennan and 10 hand picked analysts come up with "Russian collusion", unleasigh Mueller (protector of the Whitey Bulger Winter Hill Gang), Strzok, Rosenstein, etc. to to find a basis to neuter, if not impeach, the constitutionally elected President.

Indeed, Pres. Washington foresaw such an eventuality of foreign influence tainting our Republic; see his Farewell Address at Paragraphs 32-39. Indeed, his prescience amazing; read these warnings:

"So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite
nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing
into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without
adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which
is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained,
and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it
gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or
sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of
a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or
foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.

As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened
and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of
seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils. Such an attachment of a small or weak towards
a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter.

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people
ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of
republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence
to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another
cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on
the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its
tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests."

Indeed, if any nation can be found to be interfering in our domestic politics and seeking to influence the actions of the President, or more precisely to have him removed from power, it's not Russia, its the United Kingdom.

Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 3:59 pm

Interesting, thank you. I will read up on the 17th. I've blamed the "federalization" of politics for a lot of the apparent decline in citizen interest in Democracy as state and local influence "on people's lives" seemed to have been ceded over to the fed not entirely a bad thing (when it comes to civil rights, equal opportunity and federal funding for stuff states could never afford) still, I think something encouraged a complacent electorate even if the educational values of unions (voting for your interests rather than against) signifies.

backwardsevolution , July 17, 2018 at 4:31 pm

Jim in NH – brilliant post! Thank you. Everybody should read it.

Fred , July 17, 2018 at 10:08 pm

If three million more voted for Hillary than Trump, then majority of voters are wrong and stupid. Good thing the Electoral College saved us from ourselves.

Dave P. , July 18, 2018 at 1:26 am

A very good observation indeed.

BobS , July 17, 2018 at 2:42 pm

" one saw that practically the entire country was coloured red – only the coasts were blue."
Right, "only the coasts". The ones where nearly 50% of the US population live.

irina , July 17, 2018 at 8:09 pm

And that 50% mostly live in big cities which would not survive long
without the rural areas which provide the resources to support them.

Fred , July 17, 2018 at 10:09 pm

They actually think food comes from the supermarket Irina.

irina , July 17, 2018 at 11:17 pm

And you buy it with EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) cards.

JoeD , July 17, 2018 at 3:06 pm

The coasts were not blue. Clinton got the west coast. Trump won most of the east: FL, GA, SC, NC and they split Maine. Trump won 30 out of 50 states. There were also less people who voted in 2016 than did in 2012 and in 2008.

So it does not follow Clinton would win if there was a National Popular vote.

Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 3:22 pm

It's actually worse than it appears on a state-by-state map Clinton won densely populated areas of California, but on a precinct by precinct map https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/04/is-this-the-ultimate-2016-presidential-election-map/521622/ (note says map was an "amateur effort" but there may be others) ..

Our electoral system(s) have very serious problems voter access (and apathy) and gerrymandering probably top the list, but that "neoliberal income inequality" appears to color/overlay everything

Bob Van Noy , July 17, 2018 at 1:33 pm

Great article and commentary CN, many thanks. There is an excellent comment by Craig Murray at his site and one should not miss the commentary there either

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/07/detente-bad-cold-war-good/#tc-comment-title

Jamie , July 17, 2018 at 1:20 pm

Liberals should be ashamed of themselves. They voted a Russian bribery hag Hillary and now go far-right John Birch in drumming up war with Russia -- just because Trump hurt their feelings by beating Hillary. Sad!

Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 12:42 pm

couple of polls .
from the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/poll-prri-republican-democratic-voter/565328/
appears to be at 68% for democrats, / 22% for Republicans

from Gallop (H/T Dave Sirota Twitter): https://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/most-important-problem.aspx (bit unsure of unsure of date, looks like May 2018) (doesn't reach full integer)

I was impressed on the eve of 2016 election how ineffective Clinton's constant beating on Obama's drum wrt to Russia-Russia-Russia had been I don't remember the polls but the numbers for "major concern" iirc were low, around maybe 12% (after months and months)

I think the media is drunk on their own piss . I remember feeling frustrated when Gore (who had a better case for "stolen electoin" imho) walked away my suspicion is that on completion of the Mueller inquiry this is going backfire badly . even if Manafort gets decades in prison for money laundering

Anon , July 17, 2018 at 12:22 pm

Debate: Is Trump-Putin Summit a "Danger to America" or Crucial Diplomacy Between Nuclear Powers?

Glenn Greenwald and another thoughtful dude, Joe Cirincione. All substance and strong disagreements without shouting or personal attacks.

Greenwald:

I also think that that last point that Joe made is actually an important one, and it does put people like me into a difficult position, which is, you know, on the one hand, of course I don't think that Donald Trump is well intentioned and is going to have the diplomatic skill to negotiate complicated new agreements of trade and of arms control with very sophisticated regimes like the one in North Korea, or at least complicated regimes in North Korea, or in Russia. On the other hand, as we've been discussing, unfortunately, he's the only game in town. There is nobody else who's saying that we ought to question NATO. Democrats, when you say we ought to question NATO, act like you've committed blasphemy. There is nobody else talking about tariffs and the unfairness of free trade agreements, except for a couple of fringe people within the Democratic Party. Just like this week, when he said that the European Union was a foe, what he said was something that for a long time on the left was really kind of just uncontroversial orthodoxy, which is that of course the European Union is an economic competitor of the U.S., and a lot of what their trade practices are do harm the American worker. We put up barriers against Chinese products entering the U.S., and yet the EU buys them and then sells them into the U.S., indirectly helping China circumvent those barriers in a way that directly harms U.S. workers. This is something that people like Robert Reich and Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders have been talking about for a long time. So it does make it very difficult when the only person who's raising these kinds of issues and talking about these things-we need to get along better with Russia and China, we need to reform these old, archaic, destructive institutions-is a megalomaniac, somebody who's completely devoid of any positive human virtue, which is Donald Trump. So it puts you in the position of kind of trying to agree with him, while knowing that he's really not going to be able to do anything about those in a positive way.

On the other hand, I don't feel comfortable being aligned with people like Bill Kristol and David Frum and all of those Bush-era hawks who are now the best friends of MSNBC and the Democratic Party, either, because they're not well intentioned, either. And so, what I try and do is use Donald Trump and the kind of shifting alliances, that we started off by talking about, to open up a lot of the debates, that will remain closed if you only look at U.S. politics through the prism of the 2016 election and Republicans versus Democrats. And I think the most important point is the one that, as I said, Joe made just this week, which is that until the Democratic Party figures out-and this is true not just of Democrats but of center-left parties all throughout Europe and here in Brazil-until they figure out how again to reconnect, not with the highly educated class and the rich and the metropolitan enclaves, but with the working class of these countries, that feel trampled on and ignored, and for that reason are turning to demagogues, we're going to have more Donald Trumps and worse Donald Trumps, not just in the United States, but throughout the world. And that is, for me, the greatest problem that we face politically

Democracy Now

Part One – There's an intro of about 2 min before debate starts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK_D4yaTae4

Part Two
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1iq_c3AyGs

TIEDE , July 17, 2018 at 11:03 am

This is the best article I've read on the topic, hands down.

Realist , July 17, 2018 at 11:38 am

No question about that, TIEDE, but considering the pitifully low standards applied to what emanates from the wreckage of the American mass media, Mr. Lauria really didn't have much competition to beat. Of course, no matter how deserved, he will not be winning any Pulitzers, since mediocre groupthink, especially of the warmongering variety, is the new standard of excellence in American letters.

Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 12:45 pm

As others have noted, it "treason" isn't impeachable, what is? If not now, when?

Should we go off and invade Somalia in retaliation? The anti-Trump/Democrats are undermining their own credibility -- not to mention the press, whose credibility might reach nosedive if they still had much of an audience .

More ridiculous than GWB after 09/11 . which reminds me that Trump keeps reminding me of want-to-share-a-beer-with GWB but stupider and with less "fund of knowledge"

Realist , July 17, 2018 at 5:26 pm

And how are these "others" defining "treason?" Whatever they say it is, and without any evidence that it genuinely occurred? This is not a case of treason, it is a case of attempted mob rule, like the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. The vile media acts as the bull horn of the seditionists, they show some insurrectionists making a hullabaloo on your television screen, and the coup plotters point and say, "see, it's treason, off with his head!" Meanwhile, your government has been stolen yet again because some insiders didn't like the results.

michael , July 17, 2018 at 7:42 pm

To have treason you must have a declared war and a declared enemy. If you look at the list of people convicted of treason in the US, there are what, a dozen?
The President has broad powers of foreign policy (and immigration) which may be a bad thing, but I applaud Trump's peace overtures to North Korea and Russia as well as Obama's (reviled by many of the same warmongers) deal with Iran. Unfortunately all these deals are President-specific and undercut by un-elected Intelligence agencies with agendas of their own, and politicians taking money from the MIC and foreign lobbyists with war profiteering agendas. No one can believe a President no matter how well meaning and sincere. Clinton abrogated Reagan's deal with Gorbachev, almost destroying Russia, as did Obama reneging on the deal with Gaddafi, destroying Libya. Clearly the best option is to build up a cache of nuclear arms and to use them if necessary to protect sovereignty.

gailstorm , July 17, 2018 at 10:53 am

At least Cooper used a small window – there haven't been many U.S. Russia summits – but Fallows? Uh, 9/11 and the Saudis anyone? More evidence there than Russian collusion and three Presidents – including Trump – have given that a pass.

Jessika , July 17, 2018 at 10:50 am

Treason-schmeason, Dave! You don't seem to know much about the real history of the US government, only the manufactured one of the powers in charge. Pick up a copy of Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick's book "The Untold History of the United States".

As for the vaunted democracy these talking bobbleheads and puppet politicians go on about, we don't hear them speaking about lobbying, do we, or Citizens United or McCutcheon vs Buckley decisions of the Supreme Court? It's not even the Electoral College that skews the vote and takes democracy out of the citizens' decisions -- it's lobbying, which is legalized fraud and bribery. No, they go on and on about Russia, Russia, Russia, all to make sure folks look somewhere else while they continue the hijacking.

Dave , July 17, 2018 at 10:35 am

What is amazing is how you and so many GOP are actually defending Russia! This was treason!

Deniz , July 17, 2018 at 10:53 am

What is amazing is the extent that the Democrats are lied to, and the extent that they believe those lies. I am awestruck by the complete and utter brainwashing of a democratic, educated country by the CIA. Getting Republicans, who are inclined to think negatively of foreigners is one thing, but Liberal Democrats, who profess to believe in education and equality becoming the brown shirts, it never occurred to me that was possible.

By the way, i am speaking as a former Democrat, Obama voter.

gailstorm , July 17, 2018 at 10:58 am

Yes, it is quite frightening. I think Trump is dangerously inept but reading the intelligence report on Russia released Jan., 2017 was the most frightened I have ever been as an American. It provided no evidence (apparently keeping things top secret is more important than alleged election tampering which should give cause to thought right there) and instead laid out a game plan for attacking dissenters of U.S. foreign policy.

Realist , July 17, 2018 at 11:18 am

Maybe it's just wishful thinking, because I am one too, but it seems the country must be full of former Democrats (and thoroughly disillusioned Obama voters), or at least we should be if we want to survive over the long term. Hillary was just another pack of lies (and threatened violence) too far, which is why she lost. Had NOTHING to do with Russians hacking elections, influencing the vote or stealing our democracy. That is simply the revisionist bullshit in the aftermath of her self-inflicted debacle, as she persists in dragging down the party, the country and maybe the world out of self-centered petulance.

Realist , July 17, 2018 at 11:24 am

Unless you are trying to be sarcastic, Dave, you added an extraneous letter to the word you should really want. What Mr. Lauria has written here is pure "reason," not "treason." Go back and consider all the relevant issues again, this time accurately.

Daniel , July 17, 2018 at 1:12 pm

I guess Dave forgot that our intelligence agencies have lied us into war in the past.

Realist , July 17, 2018 at 5:29 pm

And YOU are prosecuting Russia on what EVIDENCE? None! That is madness and the ticket to war. You are just the sort of pawn to make Goebbels tremble with delight, Dave.

Samuel , July 18, 2018 at 12:34 am

I am not American but like so many out there, am concerned by what is going on in your once beautiful country. It amazes to realize that people have chosen to bury truth and reason for hatred's sake. How can one hope to build a secure, prosperous democracy based on a fraudulent lie? If one can pick a leaf from the Iraqi war it is that one should never believe unquestioningly everything that comes from the intelligence community. That deception resulted in perhaps millions dead. This time round it might result in billions dead including Americans. Is that what people like Dave want? Could this be a secret conspiracy to bring destruction to the entire universe? To what ends?

David G , July 17, 2018 at 10:00 am

Trump's actual treason:
-- turning environmental policy over to the biggest polluters
-- turning financial regulation over to parasitic elites
-- turning education policy over to anti-public, pro-charter grifters
-- turning the FCC over to the big telecoms
-- turning the Iran-nuke deal over to Netanyahu

What gets Trump called a traitor by the Beltway blob:
-- wanting to talk with Russia, and holding a Soviet/Russia summit just like every president since FDR

Wotta country!

Karen , July 17, 2018 at 11:06 am

Exactly!

BrianS , July 17, 2018 at 7:54 pm

Don't relish the me too, or "same here" moniker, but: Exactly!

mike k , July 17, 2018 at 9:39 am

The enemies of Peace, having failed to prevent the Putin/Trump summit, are now busy saying that it was a disaster, and that it was meaningless – two seemingly discordant observations. The real religion of America is WAR. Anything that smacks of peace is Heresy!

David G , July 17, 2018 at 10:08 am

"The stories of how North Korea is now violating an imaginary pledge by Kim to Trump in Singapore are even more outrageous, because big media had previously peddled the opposite line: that Kim at the Singapore Summit made no firm commitment to give up his nuclear weapons and that the 'agreement' in Singapore was the weakest of any thus far."

-- Gareth Porter

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/07/13/the-medias-brazen-dishonesty-about-north-korean-nuclear-violations/

Realist , July 17, 2018 at 11:02 am

Yeah. The lunatics would have the world believe that Trump was a cowardly traitor because he didn't i) berate President Putin to his face for rigging the election in his favor (as did the impertinent network goon Chris Wallace whom Putin totally pwned, though absolutely unbeknownst to the American jingoist corp) and ii) summarily declare war on the Russian Federation to cap everyone's day of fun and games. Insults and war seem to be what the imbeciles so passionately want. I wish I could give them their suicidal war that didn't involve me, my relatives, friends and other innocent bystanders, but that's not how it works and they will eagerly take us all down if given the chance. We are seeing war fever sweep across a crazed nation led astray by the worst demagogues to come down the pike since the "Greatest Generation" got an invite from Uncle Sam to Hitler's big dance. Everybody is a flag waving blood-lusting maniac, from the corporate boardrooms, to the residue of what is left skulking around the fake newsrooms, to the cocky stand-up comedians now inhabiting every late night channel spewing trash and attitude without having the first clue. Must be as invigorating as sucking in the cordite-perfumed air of Berlin circa 1939. The pity is that this time the glorious experience will be so short once the rockets are launched. Almost seems a waste to squander the experience on a bunch of lame brains who probably assume they can get their ticket price back if they don't fully enjoy the show.

Dave P. , July 17, 2018 at 1:35 pm

Realist, As always, your comments are stunningly accurate, and have literary flavor as well. It is really getting there as you have described.

As Gore Vidal wrote long ago, this brainwashing started long time ago during the nineteenth century when they started inoculating the innocent American population against socialism and all that, the ideas which were sweeping across Europe in that century. Here we are now, it is almost a crazed Nation. My wife reads L.A. Times religiously and being a Hillary fan has been watching CNN, MSNBC, Judy Woodruff and other channels like these.

It is not going to end up pretty, the atmosphere is frightening.

Doran Zeigler , July 17, 2018 at 9:32 am

I consider my politics as beyond progressive, and I am definitely not a Trump cheerleader, but I must say that this article by Consortium News is by far the most balanced and fair article I have read on the Trump/Putin press conference. Did the Russians hack Clinton's emails? Most likely. Were the hacks responsible for Clinton's defeat -- not on your life. Hillary offered nothing other than the same old tired rhetoric and hostilities toward Russia. She basically defeated herself.

The fact that Clinton won the popular vote by three million should dispel any notion that the Russian hacks were effective. What this does say is that we should get rid of the antiquated and unfair Electoral College. The press conference was not the venue to grill or attempt to embarrass Putin, besides, Putin could hurl those same accusations at the US for not only interfering in the Ukraine election, but also contributing millions of dollars to it. Putin, if he wanted, could point to NATO creeping up to Russian borders when NATO had promised years ago not to go beyond unified Germany. The Russians have a multitude of complaints, but are more diplomatic than the provocative Americans and would rather not solve these problems in the press.

Is Trump a bumbler -- no doubt. The conference was not the place to air America's dirty laundry or bring up his usual complaints. All of this hoopla is a dog and pony show, a theatrical media event to distract the American people from their real problems like a collapsing economy made worse by Trump's tariffs, like the bloated military budget, the horrific income inequality, the rise of poverty, and an endless stream of worsening problems of which neither party has a solution. It is the old sleight of the hand trick -- watch the hand I wave in front of you face, but pay no attention to the hand that is stealing you blind.

I am at least happy to see a media outlet that has broken from the pack of running lemmings that are not heading for a cliff, but are running in a small circle.

Daniel , July 17, 2018 at 1:16 pm

Where is the evidence that Russia, rather than an insider like Seth Rich, released the emails?

Assange has all but verbally confirmed it was Seth Rich, not Russia.

Zinny , July 17, 2018 at 1:44 pm

Begs the question; Why doesn't the NSA either confirm or deny the download?

michael , July 17, 2018 at 7:50 pm

Why doesn't Mueller offer Assange immunity to testify? Sounds like Mueller may offer the Podestas (Manafort's partners in crime in the Ukraine) immunity to testify against Manafort.

TragiCom , July 17, 2018 at 9:28 am

You'd be forgiven if you thought Brennan's rant was an episode from 'Who is America'!!

Brennan & co. behaving absolutely like unaccountable gangsters. Very dangerous gangsters. Nuclear armed gangsters.

Herman , July 17, 2018 at 9:25 am

"The indictments, which are only unproven accusations, formally accused 12 members of the GRU, Russian military intelligence, of stealing Democratic Party emails in a hacking operation and giving the materials to WikiLeaks to publish in order to damage the candidacy of Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton. The indictments were announced on Friday, three days before the summit, with the clear intention of getting Trump to cancel it. He ignored cries from the media and Congress to do so."

The most blatant and desperate effort to date to sabotage détente, any effort to cooperate on crucial issues. The media and its sources are hysterical but scary as hell. Using words like treason without a peep from the media or anyone in Washington is also scary as hell.

Didn't watch much of the news but curious about CNN, turned it on to watch Blitzer and Rand Paul exchange. Last question do you trust our security folks or Putin. The patriots versus the devil. Rand Paul ignored it and earlier pointed to our less than Simon pure history of trying to meddle in elections. Hell we ran the campaign of the greatest thief in Russian history, Yeltsin.

Bottom line, folks will do anything to stop the President's efforts to improve relations with Russia. It began before the inauguration and has not let up since.

There is reason to use the word treason but it is not Trump's.

Nancy , July 17, 2018 at 11:12 am

It's a bizarre world when Donald Trump is actually the voice of reason in the USA. The corporate media (including our "public" networks) are running around with their hair on fire at the thought of the two nuclear nations having a rational relationship. Why can't the public see the insanity of what's going on?

michael , July 17, 2018 at 7:53 pm

Sedition is the more accurate word for those in the Intelligence agencies seeking a soft coup.

richard vajs , July 17, 2018 at 8:54 am

The US Media lost its mind about two years ago. After all this time they are still trying to change the 2016 election. It was plain then – a dirt-bag vs. a fool. The US Media had a dog in that fight – the dirt-bag. What is driving them insane is that the "fool" has survived their best efforts to destroy him – should have been easy, but it is not. So the insane manipulators are going for the throat now – TREASON. It is all ridiculous – America has deep economic problems that need to be addressed, namely the terminal income inequality that exists. Killing the fool and re-elevating the dirt-bag will accomplish nothing but give the U S Media and the elites they represent another fifteen minute stroll on the decks of the Titanic

Charron , July 17, 2018 at 8:24 am

The corporate press has been shocked that President Trump would not believe the findings of his own intelligence. Never once has anyone in the Corporate press ever noted that out intelligence sources, the CIA in particular lied when they said Iraq had WMDS. It was a terrible lie. And even if you prefer to believe that the intelligence community had merely made a mistake, our invasion cost us over 3trillion dollars, cost thousands of American soldiers their lives, and ended up causing the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and has ignited the middle east, resulting in the rise of ISIS. But no one in the corporate press sees fit to even mention the fact that the CIA claimed were a "slam dunk." Nor has anyone in the corporate press mentioned the fact that James Come, when he was in the FBI, who headed up the Anthrax investigation fingered the wrong man, though he had said when questioned if he had the right man, said he was absolutely certain that Hatfiield was the man who spread the Anthrax. The government settled the false charges against Hatfiled for 5.82 million, as it turned out a fellow named ivans. P.S. Robert Mueller was the head of the FBI during most of the investigation. And let me make this clear, I also think Trump is a scoundrel, but the members of our corporate press are scoundrels too.

gailstorm , July 17, 2018 at 11:09 am

That the parroted information that got us into Iraq was a lie was widely reported and the intelligence debunked in independent media at the time. There was no mistake. The information was out there but went ignored by the mainstream media. But it goes back further. Yugoslavia, the first Gulf War erroneous reporting on such issues has been consistent at CNN.

AnthraxSleuth , July 17, 2018 at 3:18 pm

You could not be more wrong about the Anthrax.
Comey and co. ignored a material witness in that case (me) that caught Hatfill snooping around my house in November of 2001. Approx. a month and a half after I received an anthrax letter. Mr Comey's Anthrax investigation was no such thing. It was just like Hillary's email investigation. It was a "matter" not an investigation.
An investigation would have included having agents pay a visit to the man (me) that gave them Hatfill's last name 7 months before his name became public. I was able to do that b/c I when I caught him snooping around my house he was arrogant enough to wear his army jacket. Guess what is on your army jacket? Your last name.
MR. Comey's Anthrax matter also ignored when I informed the FBI that Ottillie Lundgren and Cathy Nugyen had posted on the same internet message board at the same time and to the same article that I did.
Mr. Comey and Mr. Mueller lied then and are lying now.

For kicks and giggles you can hear Hatfill admit that he was in North Carolina at the time I caught him snooping around my house in NC here .
https://youtu.be/fSfcIh1WCdg?t=1640

Mike , July 17, 2018 at 8:01 am

"The queen of diamonds the queen of diamonds"

padre , July 17, 2018 at 7:41 am

You ain't seen nothing yet, wait till your allies come tot their senses!

Alcuin , July 17, 2018 at 7:38 am

Who is Bill Browder and what was his role in the election and the new cold war? A very incomplete answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgPQZCkkMZo (38:00-48:00)

Alcuin , July 17, 2018 at 12:58 pm

Well now I feel silly. I just saw the ZeroHedge piece and understand that Robert Parry wrote often about Browder, so presumably most visitors of this site are familiar with the name. I'll have to look for those articles. Is Browder in the same league as Soros?

Alcuin , July 17, 2018 at 1:25 pm

Webb: "Trump and Putin are closing in on this Brennan/Browder gang; that's why you had that incredible reaction from Brennan "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjvVeS_vPQw

Alcuin , July 17, 2018 at 1:32 pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRFy-hoFsck

Alcuin , July 17, 2018 at 6:46 am

Stephen Cohen: Relations between US and Russia more dangerous than ever before, including during Cuba Crisis. (!!)

(starting ca. 5:00) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0UiEYK7Es4

Wendi , July 17, 2018 at 3:47 am

Ditto what (almost) everyone else says.

Putin tried to make the point that private citizens are not the state in a country. A private citizen doesn't speak official government words.
Russian billionaires perhaps poured money into election campaigns. If so, the head of state is not to blame, nor is the crime done by authority of the government.
Putin said Browder evaded Russian taxes and laundered $1.2 bn into USA, and moved one-third = $400 mn to Clinton's campaign.
Netted him $800 mn. With one-eighth of that Browder bribed Congress to enact Magnitsky (sp) proclamation to spur sanctions.

Russia filed criminal warrants with US under the 1999 treaty (Putin cited) to question Browder and bring charges; unlawfully ignoring them, US violated treaty.

Browder money 'meddling' in 2016 campaigns is NOT 'Putin dunnit' and NOT 'Kremlin dunnit' and NOT 'Russia dunnit.' Only truthfully, 'Russian Browder dunnit.'

In reflection, is Warren Buffett the US Gov't or are his actions the USG acting? Whatabout Bezos, is he USG Authority?; he owns the WashPost. Sulzberger, Mercers, Kochs, Murdoch(!), frickin Bill Kristol, Rash Lamebrain, Bloomberg, Bill Gates fer gawdsakes -- are they 'America' or 'the President/Administration?'
Is what's good for Mary Barra's security good for our National Security? No, no, and see this:
http://www.businessinsider.com/sun-valley-conference-2018-attendees-photos-2018-7#youtube-ceo-susan-wojcicki-is-already-decked-out-in-a-sun-valley-2018-hat-2

Trump's right for peace, but deplorable (almost) every other way.

If he did 'collude and conspire' that seems the least of his crimes. Impeach him for being morally unfit. Cripes, he was named in Florida court indictments as co-defendant against charges of rape and abuse of 13- and 14-yo girls; his partner Jeffrey Epstein was convicted and did time. Forget Russia, Trump's is a sex pervert, racist, and fascist -- unfit for office.
https://www.justice-integrity.org/1445-welcome-to-waterbury-the-city-that-holds-secrets-that-could-bring-down-trump

No link but find July 10 item at ClubOrlov.com titled, Taking Refuge in Insanity. It may be solace for Joe, in a way, and moreover a general understanding of media cohort insanity.
If understanding is possible.

And MOST I stopped to say Thank You, thank you Joe Lauria. Your work brought me deep relief and it's refreshing.
_____

PS, I predict the 12 indicted Russians do get their day in US courtroom to defend themselves with lawyers rightfully allowed to question (Mueller's) prosecution witnesses and testimony, and to present defense , and (Mueller's) prosecution loses there.

PPS, any rich moneybags domestic or foreign who aimed to spend in 2016 to hurt Hillary or help Donald be elected,
put all the money into Bernie's campaign: split the left vote and the rightist candidate skulks into office. Vice versa, Dems in 2020 may prop up a Republican candidate on the left of Trump; split the R's vote between soft and hard rightwingers.

exiled off mainstreet , July 17, 2018 at 2:25 am

Who are the traitors? Those who seek war with a nuclear power or those who wish to solve the problems. What about Browder's $400,000,000 to the Clinton campaign. Putin wouldn't make such a statement if there were nothing to back it up, though Mueller is willing to lay unsubstantiated charges which go against proven evidence that the DNC leak was from a thumb drive, not internet transmission. In any event, why is it so bad that the crimes of the DNC were revealed? I guess the truth is dangerous to the yankee form of "managed democracy."

Alcuin , July 17, 2018 at 2:10 am

I don't know if it's true or not, but I once read that Nicholas II actually ordered the de-mobilization of the Russian army on the eve of WWI, but that his order was ignored by his subordinates who were eager for war. Trump in his interview with Hannity implies at one point that he doesn't have full control over the military -- that the belligerent rhetoric has been having practical and dangerous consequences. Frightening. Starting at ca. min. 5. https://youtu.be/dRMW4knpiUo

Zhu Ba Jie , July 17, 2018 at 1:22 am

Just for sh*ts & giggles, try listening to prophecy preachers like Bro. Stair at http://www.overcomerministry.org (Do NOT belive them!) Such folks have radically different assumptions. Listening will clear your intellectual pallette, so to say.

David G , July 17, 2018 at 1:11 am

Others may not feel the connection strongly, but watching today's (yesterday's now) media meltdown flashed me back to the day of Colin Powell's Iraqi WMD presentation to the U.N.

I watched that live, and even at the time – before the specific fabrications were exposed – it was such a self-evidently lame effort that I was genuinely surprised and confused when all the media people instantly hailed the its supposedly irresistible power in making the case for the coming war. And it's not like I went into the day with such a high opinion of the corporate media.

As with Trump in Helsinki, it was clear the media was activating a pre-arranged narrative (approval then, opprobrium now) rather than genuinely reacting to what they had seen and heard.

Jared , July 17, 2018 at 6:48 am

That is an excellent assesment.
That is the dumbfound aspect the blatantly preconceived and coordinated attack on the public dialog.
I feel certain the media is being required to sacrifice its reputation for the purpose of distracting the public from some issue. I dont thing the anderson coopers realise that this is the purpose they belive they are simply acting as political assasins of the enemy.
Maybe is niave of me but is it possible this is simply to defray discussion of dnc communications and dnc conspiring by which they pretty much destroyed the democratic brand? Of course there are also the globalists concern with nationalism and populism and mic with concern fear of outbreak of peace.

gailstorm , July 17, 2018 at 11:23 am

The average journalist, mostly print but even regional TV, statistically makes less money than school teachers. It's quite different at the national TV level. They are paid ridiculously well and maybe coincidentally (maybe not) removed from the ground work among the masses. The system has rewarded them so there is natural bias toward the status quo (something that exists to a degree in objective journalism to begin with). They likely aren't aware but they are hired and keep their jobs based on questions they are not likely to ask. It's corporate America. Just as in low level administrative job hiring at large companies, blandness and safe get the jobs.

Chumpsky , July 16, 2018 at 11:23 pm

"Constructive dialogue between the United States and Russia forwards the opportunity to open new pathways toward peace and stability in our world. I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics."

A page taken out of JFK's playbook.

No wonder the democrats/MSM/Deep State are so disturbed and ready to shoot the messenger. He's encroaching on their sanctified turf!

Jean , July 16, 2018 at 11:43 pm

Actually they now work for those who killed JFK

The ironies never end

David G , July 17, 2018 at 12:25 am

The full Trump quote, as it appears above:

"As president, I cannot make decisions on foreign policy in a futile effort to appease partisan critics or the media or Democrats who want to do nothing but resist and obstruct Constructive dialogue between the United States and Russia forwards the opportunity to open new pathways toward peace and stability in our world. I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics."

Question for those who have seen the video: were these prepared remarks, or were they spontaneous?

I appreciate them either way, but if Trump crafted those lines on the fly I really might have to give the cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon (thank you, Scotland!) a fresh look.

Nora De Groote , July 17, 2018 at 3:44 am

I was thinking the exact same thing when reading that quote. That doesn't seem like his rhetoric at all. The "good thing bad thing" is where you have his level of "eloquence" again. Regardless, even if he had to memorize the statement beforehand, he still scored in my book.

Vivian O'Blivion , July 17, 2018 at 7:10 am

"cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing, shitgibbon" as a Scotsman I can only apologise for my compatriots sickeningly sycophantic language. We are normally less diplomatic in our appraisals. In Scotland, if you hear the word "f**k", it's just to let you know a noun is coming.

Zim , July 17, 2018 at 9:00 am

It's hard to believe that statement came out of Trumps mouth. But I believe it to be spot on.

Tom Van Meurs , July 17, 2018 at 2:38 am

To Chumpsky : A very courageous statement of Trump! He is no fool . You can't tell a bonk from its cover,

David G , July 16, 2018 at 11:12 pm

Lauria: "The media's handlers were even worse than their assets."

Zing! Props to you, Joe.

David G , July 16, 2018 at 11:00 pm

I haven't read the article or the comments yet, but I want to chime in now:

I've been watching MSNBC on and off all day, and the summit has clearly caused their brains (already in parlous condition) to completely liquefy.

"Treason! Worse than Watergate *and* 9/11!!"

Demented.

tom , July 17, 2018 at 10:07 am

+1

Lois Gagnon , July 16, 2018 at 10:38 pm

Once again, the hypocrisy of the media is on full display. Every president including this one pays total fealty to the criminal state of Israel which we know has interfered in the US political process, not to mention sinking a US naval vessel. But heaven forbid there be diplomatic talks with Putin who has bent over backwards to accommodate the US when he can. So far all he's gotten is sand kicked in his face.

The behavior of the media and its fellow juvenile delinquents in Washington are an embarrassment. They are without realizing it, making Trump look presidential. You can't make this sh*t up.

mike k , July 16, 2018 at 10:35 pm

The Evil Monsters destroying our world with their greed and violence are being flushed into the open. But will the brainwashed masses be able to see this? That is the crucial test that humanity faces at this time. The Rulers will go all out to spin this in their favor, and if that fails, they will probably try to assassinate this dangerous man, President Donald Trump.

Joe Tedesky , July 16, 2018 at 10:33 pm

Meanwhile, while everyone is focused on Trump and Putin's summit, the real power of collusion is hard at work.

https://ahtribune.com/us/israelgate/2369-useful-idiot-trump.html

I'm posting this, because while it's appropriate we talk at length about the disgraceful reception Trump got for his trying to wage peace, we should not lose sight to what country is using the U.S, as it's useful idiot.

Besides that, an article such as what Phil Giradi wrote should not go unnoticed thank you once again MSM for being the jerks you are. Did the MSM ever hear of the word 'reporting'? Thank you Joe Lauria & the Parry family for being here when we need you the most. I don't know what I'd do without the Consortium. Hey kudos to you too Robert Parry, your still number one with me.

Joe Tedesky , July 17, 2018 at 9:14 am

Moonofalabama has the strategy right.

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/07/helsinki-talks-how-trump-tries-to-rebalance-the-global-triangle.html#more

Joe Tedesky , July 17, 2018 at 9:17 am

Surprisingly Professor Coke, says this

https://www.juancole.com/2018/07/shocked-bromance-netanyahu.html

Howard Mettee , July 16, 2018 at 10:09 pm

Thank you Joe,

For trying to restore a note of sanity and balance in the crucible of journalistic/political dialogue between Russia and the US centers of power, where we sense the truth will be lost in white hot bombast, and the accepted narrative of reality will be decided by the heads pushing the correct emotional buttons to fit their nationalistic needs, and their needs for continued employment. Who can forget the last time all 17 intelligence services were of one mind on weapons of mass destruction – that turned out to be nonexistent! Let's hope we can catch our breath before we trip into a patriotic war that destroys civilization.

John P , July 16, 2018 at 11:20 pm

Excuse me, but the intelligence service was turned upside down by Bush and his team inserting their own officials to sensor what was released. The Agencies were very upset that the truth wasn't coming out, and you had the Valerie Plame incident also.
From Slate: "Trump and Putin Met in Helsinki's Hall of Mirrors. Here Are the Highlights." ends with the following:
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- –
On a related note, Rob Goldstone, the British publicist who set up that Trump Tower meeting by promising Trump's son that it was "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump," just tweeted that Putin had lied earlier in the day when he said he did not know that Trump would be in Moscow for the 2013 Miss Universe pageant.
Rob Goldstone @GoldstoneRob
President Putin just stated that he had no idea Donald Trump was in Moscow in 2013. I know for sure that he did and tell the full story in my soon to be released book "Pop Stars, Pageants & Presidents: How an Email Trumped My Life"
1:16 PM – Jul 16, 2018
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -
There may not have been collusion but I think we can say there probably was interference, voting machines and misinformation spread by agents throughout the social communications media of today. And Putin did admit late, that he was for Trump not Hillary.

If there was funding from Russia to the Democrats as some say, and Putin is truthful that he preferred Trump then why did they give money to the Democrats? Was it to designed to undermine Hillary through its exposure.

Others complain about the timing of the 12 Russian agents, but that was no different from the timing of the Hillary email story release shortly before the election.

Zhu Ba Jie , July 17, 2018 at 1:44 am

"Putin Stole the Election" is fantasy fiction, just like "Obama is a Kenyan" was.

Typingperson , July 17, 2018 at 1:46 am

So you're OK with Hillary using an illegal, off-the-books email server to do pay-to-play arms deals with shitty countries like Saudi Arabia–that gave millions of $$ to Clinton Foundation in return?

If lawfully using a govt server, Hillary"s emails would be subject to FOIA petitions. By USA citizen taxpayers and reporters. Her emails as Sec of State are the property of the American people, who paid her salary. That's what people still don't get.

She used a private server to keep secret the illegal, pay-to-play arms deals–in return for payola bucks to Clinton Foundation.

And Obama turned a blind eye for 4 years. His specialty: Suck-up talking while turning a blind eye.

To Hillary"s incompetence and murderous corruption, to his weekly drone-murders, and to accelerated deportation of innocent immigrants–and ICE separating parents from kids.

While starting 5 new wars on top of Iraq and Afghanistan–including ongoing genocide of Yemen.

Obama was a good boy for the deep state / war profiteers. And he collected his $60M "book contract." Bribe.

Bill , July 17, 2018 at 3:59 pm

"So you're OK with Hillary using an illegal, off-the-books email server to do pay-to-play arms deals with shitty countries like Saudi Arabia–that gave millions of $$ to Clinton Foundation in return?"

How is that different from Trumpkin or Bush doing much the same thing?

Tony Frede , July 17, 2018 at 1:50 am

Maybe it doesn't make sense because Russia never really worked for either side.

Ron Johnson , July 17, 2018 at 6:48 am

Tracing who, exactly, did the hacking is always difficult because the evidence left behind is usually impossible to trace. In the case of the hacking or attempted hacking of certain states' data, the only evidence that it was the Russians came from Russian language characters in the code. Slam dunk, right? Well no, since our CIA/NSA admitted to using exactly such techniques to misdirect researchers away from their own hacking.

If you read deeper into the story of how the Russians funded Clinton, you'll find that it was not the Russian government. Putin pointed out that the money was made 'illegally' in Russia and sent out of the country 'illegally', ending up in Clinton's campaign.

There are a number of differences between the indictments of the Russians and the release of information in the Hillary e-mail investigation. First, there is no chance the Russians will ever end up in a U.S. court so it is an indictment with no future. Second, Comey, a supporter of Hillary, made the announcement and subsequently cleared her, probably to save his own career because the field office that was doing the investigating was about to go public with his dereliction of duty in the Clinton investigation. Subsequent investigations have revealed how the highly politicized FBI and DOJ went out of their way to protect Clinton. Mueller's indictments, on the other hand, are just pure political malfeasance.

John P , July 17, 2018 at 7:20 pm

Zhu Ba Jie, I never said that Russia influnced the results of the election. It probably didn't. But what I do think is that the Russians are probably laughing at how didvided America has become. Neoliberalism which caters to busines rather than liberalism which caters to the people and the country as a whole is destroying society. People need to get on the streets and voice their concerns, Get together and form rallies like those who spoke out against the Vietnam War.
Is it social media that makes people babble and rave rather than be active out there getting the much needed attention?
Gather fo support a greener world, a fairer more benevolent world. To get local economies going putting money in needy people's pockets is far better than trickle down or financing and support for big business. The poor will spend it locally and that's good.
Get out there and make a stir. Trump ain't going to help you. Get rid of PACs, superPACs and other big donor money pots for a start start. Bernie Sanders and now some new young people are seeing the light. Get in there and help them along. Get out on the streets and shout for change!
Throw away the smart phone and get marching!

John P , July 17, 2018 at 7:34 pm

Also, Ron Johnson , I'm not American, I didn't know the full story of the mob money and Hillary. My choice was Bernie Sanders never Hillary or Trump. My fear is, the way things are going, it's like the period between the great wars and the effects of poverty and big business. Support for the needy and the busting up of big business were two steps which helped the world climb out of the mire. Perhaps we need to add robotics to the list. People need work and a purpose.

Larry Gates , July 16, 2018 at 9:59 pm

Donald Trump is a vile human being, and I disagree with 98% of what he says and does, but today he was right and everyone else was wrong. I've been on a trip in my car most of the day, listening to public radio. It was an endless orgy of misinformation and deep-state propaganda. PRI was as insane and dangerous as Fox News on a really bad day. I'm starting to think that nuclear war is a more immanent danger than global warming. It isn't just Rachel Maddow who has gone off the deep end. It is the entire national media. What kind of country have we become? Pray for peace.

strngr-tgthr , July 16, 2018 at 10:45 pm

Larry – Don't buy the Trump CoolAid He is completely wrecking are world order. Last month was Kim, this month was Putin and now this! Look:

White House Orders Direct Taliban Talks to Jump-Start Afghan Negotiations

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/15/world/asia/afghanistan-taliban-direct-negotiations.html

He is meeting with all the dictators of the world now! Guaranteed he will have Assad at the White House before we can get him impeached. This is 100% out of Putin's play book. He is a trader to American Values. Never have we sunk so low, dissing are true allies and honoring thugs, killers and despots! 110% vile!

Joe Lauria , July 16, 2018 at 11:00 pm

Do you mean like Pinochet, Somoza, Galtieri, Rios Montt, Suharto, Mobuto, shall I go on?

Joe Lauria , July 16, 2018 at 11:02 pm

And it is about time there are direct talks with the Taliban. The U.S. has lost in Afghanistan. It has to try to get something out of it.

strngr-tgthr , July 16, 2018 at 11:23 pm

We are in Afghanistan for woman's rights! "Hillary: justified by the desire to emancipate Afghan women." And we have all seen the concern that Trump has for woman (Billy Bush – Babies at the Border, shall I go on?) 120% vile!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/20/hillary-clinton-afghan-women-taliban

Realist , July 17, 2018 at 3:54 am

You are totally deluded, Mr. Man Without Vowels in His Name, if you think we are in Afghanistan to promote women's rights. I'm sure you still faithfully watch the Jay Leno Show to stay apprised of Mrs. Leno's featured assessment of that crusade. Ranking light years ahead of your purported reason for the last 17 years of war in the Hindu Kush are i) the planned oil and gas pipelines*, ii) the proven deposits of rare earth elements essential to modern electronic devices, and iii) the immediate proximity to Iran, Russia, China and Pakistan giving Washington the ability to raise hell from its many military bases in Afghanistan on a moment's notice (all part of Obama's infamous "Pivot to Asia," which implied far more than a new cadre of Peace Corp workers–more like, we can buy any locals we need with the pallets of Franklins we now air drop on a routine schedule).

* Read "Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden" by Brisard and Dasquie, it's still relevant 17 years later, while Hillary's "feminist" credentials remain completely irrelevant.

Gene Poole , July 17, 2018 at 5:48 am

An analysis of this contributor's writing style reports a 98.3% likelihood that he/she is Donald Trump.

Larry Gates , July 17, 2018 at 8:04 am

The United States has been "honoring thugs, killers, and despots" at least since Allen Dulles became the director of the CIA in the 1940s. America is an expansive empire, controlled by our corporate oligarchy. It's all about their money and power. They talk about human rights, but that is just a cover for their greed. Much of Trump's foreign policy is bad, but it is simply a logical continuation of the foreign policies of Obama, Bush, and Clinton. Negotiations with Putin is a step in the right direction and the Orange Beast deserves credit for it. It looks to me like it is you, not me that has swallowed the Kool-Aid.

Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 11:02 am

The Taliban, in the last week – 10 days, has said they will not negotiate as long as the USA occupies Afghanistan This was abbreviated in most headlines to say that the Taliban refuse to negotiate.

The Americans have launched the "time to negotiate with the Taliban" trial balloon before -- "tragically" coming to nothing.

We (USA) interfere when the Baghdad government attempts their own negotiations. (or simply do things that encourage retaliatory attacks) . Now ISIS in the mix.

Zhu Ba Jie , July 17, 2018 at 1:47 am

We've become a theater state. A powerful performance is what matters.

Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 11:08 am

Indeed. The histrionics of the last 48 hours have been beyond belief and credulity. The hardcore news-as-scandal-addicted will stay tuned, but I lost respect for some "stars" of the news in ways that won't be forgotten I keep expecting Maddow to either use hand puppets or present "crime reenactment" videos, along with her other show-and-tell visual aids.

BBC is just as bad in terms of prejudice but at least present a professional facade .DW and France 24 are alternatives as is the (much too short, almost every hour on the hour) RT headline news. RT's interview and talk shows are excellent and quite sober. It's not that they aren't slanted, they're just not insulting to the audience.

HiggBo , July 17, 2018 at 10:10 am

Maybe now you will think about the things these very same people said about him. Maybe they arent true either.
Hint: The vast majority arent.

Deniz , July 16, 2018 at 9:59 pm

They are losing their minds over Putins announcement of the $400 milion that was transferred Clinton through Browder.

michael , July 17, 2018 at 7:01 am

Seems Hillary learned a lot from Chinagate (where the Clintons paid the illegal donations from a foreign nation back AFTER winning the Election). And China only received military technology, offshored jobs and permanent favored nation trading status in return. Win-win.
You can be sure Hillary will claim that $400 million, if ever traced to her despite bleach bitting all her records, was for the Clinton Foundation Campaign and it was just an inadvertent mixup.

PuddinNTain , July 16, 2018 at 9:54 pm

Thank you for this reasoned piece amidst a plethora of madness. Most of my friends and colleagues who identify as Democrats, liberals, progressives, haters of Trump, etc, people I have the most in common with, politically speaking, have completely lost their freaking minds over this stuff. Critical thinking? Who needs it! Mueller and the intelligence community have surely seen the light since the "Iraq has WMDs" days.
Exactly when did the intelligence community, the sellers of lies and perpetrators of regime change world-wide, become a friend to the American people?

Drew Hunkins , July 16, 2018 at 9:49 pm

"He had a chance right there in front of the world to tell Vladimir Putin to stay the HELL out of American democracy,.."

What democracy? 99% of the candidates' campaigns have been almost completely funded by Wall Street, the blood thirsty giant defense contractors, or paranoid and hegemonic Zionist sociopaths.

It's been proven in a recent academic study by Princeton political scientists (and long lamented before these guys got on the case by such luminaries as Michael Parents, S. Wollin, James Petras, N. Chomsky, Vidal, Hedges) that the American citizenry has absolutely no influence whatsoever regarding poltico-economic decisions that emanate from Washington, they're drowned out by big business and the imperialist ruling elites.

So I ask this warmongering Russophobic talking head once again: what democracy? What democracy do you speak of? The same democracy that mires millions of newly college grads with $30,000 to $500,000 in student loan debt, or the same democracy that's witnessing close to 50% of the entire population living close to the poverty level, or that has tens of millions of its denizens without adequate healthcare coverage

Drew Hunkins , July 16, 2018 at 9:55 pm

typo: such luminaries as Michael Parenti, S. Wollin, James Petras

The editor regrets the error.

John P , July 16, 2018 at 11:26 pm

Trump ain't going to help you on that one. You need to get together with others work to get rid of PACs and Super PACs. In most western countries they wouldn't be allowed.

Sam F , July 17, 2018 at 7:20 am

The political parties are also corrupt, taking donations fed back directly or indirectly from government funding of contractors. These are extensive rackets supported by half the population, who have never worked for anything but a political gang operation, and really believe in gangs.

michael , July 17, 2018 at 7:11 am

Why are you bringing up "ponies" that we will never have, when Hillary's private club (or so the judge ruled when Bernie's supporters tried to fight their fraud, saying private clubs can do what they please, particularly picking potential presidents) was hacked into by those supercompetent Russians? Much akin to the Nigerian guy who's been trying to help me collect money from some dead rich relative I didn't know I had. Still waiting, but I'm sure if this was a fraud Mueller and our Intelligence agencies would be all over it, just like Hillary's Private Club, the DNC. The Russians didn't steal any money from Hillary, as far as I know, or there would have been War!

gcw919 , July 16, 2018 at 9:29 pm

These media "pundits" are truly an embarrassment. They become apoplectic about "possible" Russian hacking in our elections, but one can search in vain for their comments about our own interference in Ukrainian politics, and many other countries around the globe. (eg, Victoria Nuland, Hillary's pit bull, gloating about the US spending $5 billion in "support" of Ukrainian democracy). Its as if real concerns, such as nuclear annihilation, or catastrophic climate change, were afterthoughts. We are certainly living in mystifying times.

Mike From Jersey , July 16, 2018 at 10:16 pm

I think the same thing. The whole "election meddling" hoopla, even if it was true, pales to insignificance in light of what we are actually doing.

We have a base – a military base – in Syria. We weren't invited. We didn't get permission to set up a base. But we set up a military base in another country while announcing that that country's leader "must go." And now – with a total absence of evidence – we have the gall to condemn Russia for "meddling in our democracy."

What is wrong with these people? Can't they see the utter hypocrisy in it all?

AZ_bob , July 16, 2018 at 11:29 pm

I tell people all the time, if Russia did put their thumb on the scale, then hey – I guess "What Goes Around, Comes Around" huh? If you CAN'T take it, DON'T dish it out. Quite simple, really

irina , July 17, 2018 at 1:28 am

The US media's hysterical (in the unfunny sense) response to "Russian meddling"
is very like the husband who catches his wife cheating on him and goes totally postal,
although he himself has been cheating on her ever since their courting days . . .

Tony Frede , July 17, 2018 at 1:53 am

No they don't see the hypocrisy. A large percentage of the population suffers from a severe Irony Deficiency and that can't be cured.

Layne , July 17, 2018 at 6:55 am

I beat my head against the wall with the very same question! Thanks for sharing..

Tristan , July 16, 2018 at 9:26 pm

Thank you for doing the real journalism needed for readers to gain perspective and understanding. It is important to call out propaganda in the face of facts. One thing that stands out significantly is the statement by Trump, "I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics." Even if only partially pursued, the goal of peace is indeed a very worthy endeavor. In fact, this is one of the first times in recent memory that a US president has used the word "Peace".

I don't like the majority of what the Trump administration is doing, it is important to stick to the facts and support efforts that could lead to a reduction of the tensions and hostility which dominate current US / Russia relations.

F. G. Sanford , July 16, 2018 at 9:22 pm

"A productive dialogue is not only good for the United States and good for Russia, but it is good for the world."

I could hear in the inflection of that sentence the profoundly courageous and confidently certain voice of John F. Kennedy. Gergen, Amanpour, Cooper, Cheney, Brennan, Clapper and the rest of them be damned. The usual suspects, the bought and paid-for mouthpieces of the "deep state" raised their reptilian ire in the expected reprehensible fashion. War is what keeps them on the "payroll", and they'll tell any lie it takes to keep those checks rolling in. Despicable. It seems likely that their vitriol may stem as much from fear of exposure as anything else.

I think President Trump gave a laudable and compelling performance. It's a tragedy that this article will probably not get the circulation it deserves. Thanks to Joe Lauria for having the guts to write it.

Litchfield , July 16, 2018 at 9:43 pm

Amen.

jaycee , July 16, 2018 at 10:15 pm

Cheers. I noticed the same JFK echo in that sentence.

Brennan and the whole lot of those pundits sound exactly like the paleolithic right from the 50s and 60s, the ones who insisted MLK was a communist and were so effectively personified by Sterling Hayden in the Dr Strangelove film.

Joe Tedesky , July 16, 2018 at 10:35 pm

Here ya go F.G. your on par with Paul Craig Roberts.

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/07/16/is-president-trump-a-traitor-because-he-wants-peace-with-russia/

Enjoy my man. Joe

Dave P. , July 16, 2018 at 11:52 pm

Yes. I agree completely.

W. R. Knight , July 16, 2018 at 9:22 pm

I recall about 16 years ago when the U.S. media almost unanimously reported, with absolute certainty, that Saddam Hussein was harboring numerous weapons of mass destruction. I also recall their fervent calls for regime change because Hussein was a threat to our national security. There were a few voices who spoke against it, but they were drowned out by MSM. It would appear that U.S. media is adamantly against anyone who is opposed to war. Is it because war is so profitable for the media, or is it because war is so profitable for their masters?

Jessika , July 16, 2018 at 9:08 pm

Hey, Johnmichael, you must know that the US is headed by an oligarchy, UK too, France, etc. What runs the world is banks and multinational corporations. The US could actually be called a corporatocracy, because the people have very little say in their government. Yes, media bashers do bash media when they lie because they are supposed to ferret out facts but they don't, they serve their money masters. They all use "Goebbels style" messaging, Putin the least, i notice. It's a western script.

Steve , July 16, 2018 at 9:08 pm

Everything the Main Stream media says about Trump applies ten times over to themselves, the presstitutes that they are useful Idiots of the Corrupt New World Order.

Bob In Portland , July 16, 2018 at 9:03 pm

A look at Mueller's career will go far in explaining why Mueller is handling this and what he won't see while investigating:

https://caucus99percent.com/content/what-mueller-wont-find

If you haven't read this, please do.

Joe Tedesky , July 16, 2018 at 9:40 pm

I did Bob, and I'm encouraging more to read it. Joe

Dave P. , July 17, 2018 at 3:30 am

Bob – Yes, I have read the article about Mueller's career.

backwardsevolution , July 17, 2018 at 5:08 am

Bob in Portland – excellent read! Thank you. Mueller is like a fixer, a sweeper, someone who cleans up and, as you said, moves investigations away from the CIA.

"He knew where to look and where not to look."

No doubt he's a valuable asset to the Deep State. Not a nice man.

Seer , July 17, 2018 at 8:39 am

Great work!

Yes, Mueller's a master of misdirection. Was it Parry who noted (likely others as well) that reporting is now less about lying than deliberate omission. Hard to fact-check what ain't there (vs. a lie which lays out data which can be tested) Knowledge IS power: we are not to have knowledge.

Bob Van Noy , July 17, 2018 at 9:34 am

Thanks to all in this thread. I filed this statement recently here, and it was edited out. I'll try again because it's appropriate.

A relatively vibrant Press was modified violently in the days and weeks following November 22, 1963. Some careers were enhanced, some lives were lost. If some contemporary student of History or Journalism wanted to study the decline of American Democracy they might begin by reading all of the linked article below about a Journalist named Penn Jones

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKjonesP.htm

W. R. Knight , July 16, 2018 at 8:59 pm

As much as I loathe Trump, I have to admit this is one time I agree with him. No matter how much Trump screws up, the simple fact is that no one is 100% wrong, and it's important to recognize when they are not wrong.

I don't agree that the Russians are our enemy. I don't believe they are our friends, but there's a large gap between an enemy and a friend and I place the Russians somewhere in that gap. I don't deny that they hacked into the DNC database, but that doesn't rise above my threshold of significance and certainly doesn't hold a candle to all the U.S. interference in the politics of most of the world's nations (which includes deposing democratically elected presidents). And finally, I don't believe in gunboat diplomacy and I agree that it's better to talk with the Russians than it is to beat the war drums and seek more confrontation.

Having said that, I deplore Trump's behavior toward our European, Canadian and Mexican friends, and his domestic policies are the worst of any in the last 100 years. But as much as I deplore this buffoon, I believe that he is right in attempting to normalize relations with Russia.

Litchfield , July 16, 2018 at 9:49 pm

"I don't deny that they hacked into the DNC database,"

Well, you should, because there is zero evidence of a Russian hack.
On what basis in the world do you so confidently assert that you "do not deny" something that is untrue?
The evidence is of an inside leak.
Please, learn the difference between the two, a hack and a leak.

Nancy , July 17, 2018 at 11:38 am

Another indication of the insidious power of the media over common sense.

Realist , July 17, 2018 at 3:22 am

Of course it is entirely within the interests of America to have free and friendly relations with Russia. Why? Not only because peace beats the hell out of war, especially the nuclear variety, but because we, along with the rest of the world, need Russia's vast resources in a planet rapidly being depleted of everything essential to modern technology. If they don't sell their products to the West on the open market because Washington thinks it can steal them after some kind of "regime change," all those essential goodies will go to China, India and the other peoples of the East whom we look down upon, and are also fixing to mess with.

From all I have gleaned, Russia has always aspired to be a part of the West, ever since Peter the Great opened Russia to Europe, but Washington thinks that being a member of team West means being a totally subservient vassal to it and only it. Look at how shamelessly Washington has abused the interests of the EU in its efforts to subjugate Russia. There is mostly one party that threatens the future of Western prosperity and moral values: the United States, or rather its government. Its motives are uncontested power and greed to benefit its small clique of decadent aristocrats.

Zhu Ba Jie , July 16, 2018 at 8:51 pm

Why would anyone believe the Liars' Club (the CIA) about anything? Their successes are more shameful than their failures.

Seer , July 17, 2018 at 8:43 am

Ah, but successes and failures are not ours to judge, no, it is for the ruling elite to judge, and given that their power and wealth has but steadily increased it is safe to say, under their measuring, that the CIA has been quite successful.

Johnmichael2 , July 16, 2018 at 8:45 pm

Putin brilliantly heads an Oligarchy. Trump obsequiously admires Putin because he too, by all of his actions to date, aspires to the same power. To all of you media bashers, who are on a very strange campaign of denial, don't forget that Trump and his Goebbels style messaging received prime time from the electronic media throughout the campaign and was probably key to the win.

The real Deep State is the multinational world order of capitalism, which doesn't care what type of government it owns. Yet CN seems totally oblivious to their existence. If the media is to blame for anything, it is that their coverage tends to be controlled by ratings; in other words, by money, and the Deep State controls the money.

Zhu Ba Jie , July 16, 2018 at 8:52 pm

The US has oligarchic since 1789.

Zhu Ba Jie , July 16, 2018 at 8:53 pm

Goebbels was far smarter and articulate than Trump.

Danny , July 17, 2018 at 9:57 pm

the free $2B from the same media now screeching for his head? (Fox excepted) the 35-40 minutes dedicated to his empty podium while Sanders talked? I have some REALLY bad news for you 'bout who was behind that

http://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strategy/

Jessika , July 16, 2018 at 8:44 pm

I highly recommend reading James Howard Kunstler's piece on Russia Insider, "Idiotic Russia Meddling Hoax Kept Alive by Trump-Putin Summit". On his blog 'Clusterfuck Nation' he titles it "12 Ham Sandwiches with Russian Dressing". Kunstler is a great cynicist humorist called a dystopian by the NYT. This piece he just published is one of the best and will undoubtedly be picked up by others. Has a funny cartoon on Russia Insider for a musical based on the Mueller never-ending saga. At least it's a few cynical laughs for this sorry affair.

Gregory Herr , July 16, 2018 at 10:00 pm

https://russia-insider.com/sites/insider/files/styles/1200xauto/public/russia_follies_mueller_trump_hillary-1024x751_0.jpg?itok=mrheD4D_

Lester D , July 16, 2018 at 8:41 pm

Mass hysteria is a frightening spectacle to behold. The power with which it grips the minds of virtually everyone is beyond belief. As I watched the media coverage of Helsinki unfold, it seemed the media minions were perceptibly working themselves into a collective frenzy, a totally berserk, bonkers group who were bidding the price of tulips up to a million each. The ironic aspect of all this to me is that even if the commie bastards did what we say they did would it have made any difference? And if indeed it was they who hacked HC's "personal" email files and made them available to Wikileaks, I'm glad as Hell they did.

Zhu Ba Jie , July 16, 2018 at 8:56 pm

It would not make any difference. We Americans are to blame for our own follies and mistakes.

KiwiAntz , July 16, 2018 at 9:03 pm

It's Washington & the MSM's mass hysteria, not the common folk who couldn't give a rats ass about this lunacy? Ask the ordinary citizen in the US or Worldwide what they care about? It's not the never ending Russiagate BS spewed out by the MSM or corrupt DEMS! It's about, how will my Family be housed, Fed, & cared for! How will I support myself & my Family's needs & wants! THATS WHAT WE CARE ABOUT, WE DON'T CARE ABOUT THE FAKE RUSSIAGATE NONSENSE & it's BS! But what do these MSM idiots know, they think their smarter than those who voted for change & are getting that with Mr Trump!

David G , July 17, 2018 at 12:01 am

Right on, Lester D.

JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 8:39 pm

I'm starting to get hopeful about Trump after a lot of doubts.
Whatever his limitations, he at least has some common sense. This is something we would never have seen happen with Crooked Hillary Clinton, ever. Somebody had to listen to Putin, who actually has quite a lot of sensible things to say about this, and is a very intelligent and articulate politician.
Given enough time, Trump might actually figure things out in Washington before he leaves office and sees all the treasonous forces in the permanent security state. I didn't vote for either Clinton or Trump in '16 but if he listens to Putin and gives peace a chance, this will mend all cracks with me.
Maybe they should put up a fence around CNN headquarters and call in a battalion of psychs to provide mental health treatments to the war profiteers and talking heads.
I voted for peace. I want to see peace. Kudos to Trump and Putin for bringing an oasis of sanity to the world. Nuclear war is bad for our kids. I am very relieved to see this happening. Even General Eisenhower could not buck the Military Industrial Complex in 1959 when he tried to reach detente with Khrushchev. Trump will go down in history as a great president if he can pull this off.

mike k , July 16, 2018 at 8:38 pm

The incredible ugliness of the media, spy agencies, military figures, and politicians is unfortunately only the tip of a huge iceberg. Underneath all that is the deep state oligarchs, who are willing to sacrifice billions of lives and the very continuation of life on our precious planet – just to fulfill their insatiable greed for wealth and power. These evil monsters are the real enemies of Humanity.

Lolita , July 16, 2018 at 8:29 pm

Not only the U.S. Media, but also the Canadian, French, British etc that is, the agitprop tools for NATOland/Soros, ready for selective and well rehearsed indignation, on cue.

Frances , July 16, 2018 at 10:06 pm

Yes, Australian media and politicians too.

Lolita , July 17, 2018 at 12:17 am

Tonight CBC The National managed to invite a "balanced" panel to discuss the Trump-Putin press conference: a researcher from Stratfor and a journalist from the Washington Post!!!! LOL

Lolita , July 17, 2018 at 5:32 pm

And when CBC's narrative and their fake-debate in the National is challenged in the comment section the CBC sycophants know only one action:

"Your account has been banned until 10/15/2018. Reason: We have banned this account for 90 days because we believe it is in violation of our Terms of Use, specifically repeated off-topic comments, uncivil comments, and personal attacks. For more information, please visit: http://www.cbc.ca/aboutcbc/discover/submissions.html ."

All of this to mask political censorship
In my last posts, I quoted Joe Lauria and they did not like it one bit:
"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."

Good Bye ICIJ

KiwiAntz , July 17, 2018 at 2:16 am

And add NZ's Media to that shameful list of Propagandists telling lies & expecting us to belithis tripe!

Mike Lamb , July 16, 2018 at 8:23 pm

The calls of President Trump being a traitor mimic those of the calls that President Eisenhower was a traitor back in the 1950s.
But what can you expect from the cult followers of the former Goldwater girl who have done their best to turn the Party of Gene McCarthy into the Party of Joe McCarthy?

Zhu Ba Jie , July 16, 2018 at 8:59 pm

Dems have GOP lite for a long time, at least since Reagan.

Pandas4peace , July 16, 2018 at 8:22 pm

Americans need to turn off their damn television sets.

JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 8:45 pm

I canceled my cable subscription three months ago and haven't missed it one bit.

Realist , July 17, 2018 at 2:53 am

One needs to keep apprised of the lies that the enemies of humanity so effectively spread through their propaganda in order to counter them.

Besides, if you ever need a good emetic, there is always the opportunity to tune in Rachel Maddow until your stomach upchucks its contents.

Seer , July 17, 2018 at 8:51 am

Ha ha! The Rachel Maddow weight loss program!

Zhu Ba Jie , July 16, 2018 at 9:01 pm

Good idea. I quit watching regularly in the '70s. But does make one somewhat alienated from everyone else.

Freedom lover , July 16, 2018 at 10:32 pm

Actually I have Direct TV and for a change I can tune in to channel 321 RT America and listen to some real news instead of the 24-hr fake news on the rest of the channels.

Skip Scott , July 17, 2018 at 6:55 am

Last night I blocked CNN on the TV where I am currently forced to reside. I am the only one with the p/w to unblock it. Take that CNN!!!

Jessika , July 16, 2018 at 8:13 pm

Well said, as always, Realist, but the scary part is to read the vitriolic anti-Trump responses indicating the 'liberals' would actually rather risk war! I just read a few of them and honestly wonder if there's any hope for this country, maybe we will have to take some harsh lessons that will be meted out. They do not realize that they are assisting in bringing down every one of us with their hate. The controllers who play them love it.

JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 8:47 pm

The danger is that they will bring their war hysteria into the next election and get someone elected that is even worse than Hillary would have been.

Zhu Ba Jie , July 16, 2018 at 9:02 pm

I'm not convinced that anyone is control. "Time and chance come to them all."

Realist , July 17, 2018 at 2:46 am

My, how we have come full circle, Jessika. So, now it's the "liberals" who would rather be "dead" than "red?" That used to be the far right John Birchers back in my youth. (Not that anyone anywhere on the planet is a genuine "communist" any longer, not even in Cuba or North Korea.) I just wish there was some mechanism to allow them to self-immolate without killing or harming the rest of us nearly 8 billion human beings. They have some potent demons colonizing what passes for their minds. Perhaps they could use a convincing exorcist to drive the Hillary entity out of their system.

Seer , July 17, 2018 at 8:54 am

All comes in cycles. Dixiecrats, anyone?

Brad Owen , July 17, 2018 at 12:09 pm

EXACTLY. Actually, FDR was the "Bernie Sanders" of his day, and completely turned the Party upside down with his "New Deal for the forgotten man" (Labor and farmers). The traditional D-Party was the party of southern plantation aristocracy and their money handlers on Wall Street, and the original R-Party contained the fire-breathing radicals within its ranks.

jose , July 16, 2018 at 8:10 pm

It is my understanding that Russia and US are holding approximately 90% of nuclear weapons worldwide. In a sane world, The US media should be commending Trump for trying to reach an agreement regarding denuclearization with Putin. Nonetheless, Trump is being grilled for doing what almost the entire planet is seeking: a world free of nuclear weapons. Indubitably, US national media are very busy undermining Trump's efforts to reduce the scorch of nuclear war. Do the US media think that in a nuclear exchange humans will survive? We will all lose.

JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 8:54 pm

No, the elites on both sides of the political spectrum are living in a mythical Hollywood rich man's fantasy world believing that the worst that can happen to them is they will retreat to their luxury underground cities and live out the nuclear war, communicating with their nuclear subs, while the rest of us paeons fry. They don't care about us, at all. They are congenital psychopaths.
It sounds crazy because it is, and it is hard for the rest of us to believe they could be so foolish. They are fatally misguided in their beliefs that this would ever work and be good for them.

Joe Tedesky , July 16, 2018 at 9:34 pm

I think your right. Joe

Jean wyman , July 16, 2018 at 9:53 pm

Good comment Jose. In answer to your observations, I'd pose a question: what was Obusha thinking when he proposed a 3TRILLION dollar upgrade of America's nukes? Who exactly was it that he was placating and that T-rump isn't.

Skip Scott , July 16, 2018 at 8:09 pm

When the talking heads said that Trump trusted Putin more than his own Intelligence Agencies, I screamed at the TV, "ME TOO!". I can think of no clearer sign that the CIA is still embedded with the MSM. Discussion of the history of our Intelligence Community in both the near and distant past, and it's utter lack of trustworthiness, is a forbidden topic. My only hope is that enough people actually listened to what Putin said, instead of the talking heads' rantings, and saw for themselves that Putin is a rational and fair-minded leader. The near hysteria of Anderson Cooper and his ilk is a sure sign that their grip on the narrative is slipping.

jose , July 16, 2018 at 8:15 pm

I concur with your post. Personally, I rather listen to Putin than the US national media. You are correct to assert that "Putin is a rational and fair-minded leader" You would have to be mentally retarded to pay any heed to US national media that have proven to be a tool of those controlling the livers of power. Well done, Skip.

Joe Lauria , July 16, 2018 at 9:04 pm

"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."

JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 9:07 pm

Anderson Cooper, the grandson of Gloria Vanderbilt, and great-grandson of robber baron railroad mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt is CIA trained in Operation Mockingbird.
https://youtu.be/w8NTLVOjas8

Joe Tedesky , July 16, 2018 at 9:33 pm

I said that once, and got booed out of the room. Joe

Joe Tedesky , July 16, 2018 at 9:28 pm

Skip I hear ya, but allow me to tell you what I saw, and heard today. So after Trump made his remarks about trusting, or not trusting, certain intelligence data, I while driving in my car heard callers calling in to the local talk show. The callers who expressed themselves the way we do on this comment board were berated by the callers who thought this kind of talk (like we here on CN talk) was treasonous by all known treasonous standards. The callers who sounded like we do here were labeled as their being crazed Trump supporters, and yet all of them said of how they don't even necessarily like Trump, but right is right and left is now warmongering. None of the other opposing callers bought this denial of Trump, as they just fluffed it off, as Trump supporters hiding behind whatever it was their suppose to be hiding behind. Facts are painfully ignored, especially when it comes to analyzing Trump.

I see the MSM pundits and the strongly patriotic lying legislators taking Trump's remarks while calling him a trader, as the launching of a great American vs American social confrontation. This new confrontation will pit brother against brother, child against parent, and wife against husband . just ask my wife. The discontent is about where we were back during the Vietnam years, as the only thing missing are the peace marchs. This time our civil war will be fought strictly on a social level, aided by an instigating MSM, as division messes up any real citizen advocacy as the citizen may require to straighten out any of this disconnection of their society or that's at least the way I see it.

We citizens are officially at war with each other. We will all look back upon this period of our evolvement, and laugh over the Facebook censorship, and dream of a time when it was merely just about politics, and taxes. We are moving in a direction where the National Security Deep State is beating up an outsider maverick, and this maverick is now in the Deep States crosshairs. It's darn strange, and I swear if something awful were to happen to President Trump that the MSM would encourage us Americans to make Trump's ugly fate a new national holiday . I think there are many among this Deep State cabal who still celebrate with joy the sad happenings of November 22nd, 1963.

The empire is finally going down, and we are all witnessing it first hand. Joe

Dave P. , July 17, 2018 at 4:14 am

"I see the MSM pundits and the strongly patriotic lying legislators taking Trump's remarks while calling him a trader, as the launching of a great American vs American social confrontation. This new confrontation will pit brother against brother, child against parent, and wife against husband . just ask my wife. . . ."

Good observation Joe. It already started happening some time back in our home. A truce was reached with a compromise that my wife would not watch CNN, MSNBC . . . when I am around the house and I will not read CN and make comments, at least when she is around. This morning my wife went to our retired neighbor's house to watch these channels with her. Both of them have been feeling today as if some tragedy has happened.

That is what this two years of Russia Gate hysteria fueled by the Media and Politicians has done to the people. Today was probably the worst day; they are really messing up the population. It is even worse than those cold war days of 1950's which I have read about. And there is no end in sight.

Joe Tedesky , July 17, 2018 at 9:02 am

Dave I swear we live in the same house. Joe

Tristan , July 16, 2018 at 9:34 pm

Aye aye! Well put, I concur.

Lyle Courtsal , July 16, 2018 at 8:09 pm

Killary had a crap platform. That is why she lost. If the platform was something progressives could support, then people would come out and vote for her. Her record of dependability is crap; just a double talking republican liar. No good. That's why she lost. I didn't vote for her and won't vote for her if she is forced on us again. Lyle Courtsal http://www.3mpub.com

jose , July 16, 2018 at 8:20 pm

You are correct Lyle about Hillary's lost. I would like to add the following:Vladimir Putin has not meddled in the US election, Hillary Clinton has. Leaked emails reveal that the popular socialist Bernie Sanders had his chance of becoming president stolen from him by Hillary Clinton and her associates at the Democratic National Committee. If defrauding democracy is worth going to war over, certainly it is worth going to jail over. Millions of Americans had their votes stolen.

Litchfield , July 16, 2018 at 10:34 pm

Yes, I listened to some of her campaign speeches, and they were embarrassingly awful, and empty of ideas except inciting horror of "Le Trump"! She was truly pathetic in her confidence that she was in the in-group, addressing others in the "in-group," thus not needing to actually campaign.
Recently Hillary was awarded the Radcliffe medal, and she spoke at Radcliffe Day. I was horrified that she was given this honor. I heard that she read from a Teleprompter. That indicates to me that she was and is indeed not physically up to the challenges of the office, quite apart from her many other deficits.

Seer , July 17, 2018 at 9:07 am

I wouldn't vote for a mass murderer. If you cannot fundamentally be for peace then all else, no matter how wonderful it sounds (it could be) has nowhere to anchor.

John V. Walsh , July 16, 2018 at 8:05 pm

Great column.
There is no doubt that the Summit moved us away from confrontation with Russia which holds the grave danger of going nuclear.
Bravo for Trump and the brave words he spoke.
Now it is up to us.
If we wish the process to continue which these meetings with Putin initiated, let us raise our voices in support.
If we wish to let the neocons, "Deep State," Dem and GOP elites to stop the process, let us stay silent.

Dan Kuhn , July 16, 2018 at 8:05 pm

I read the New York times and the comments to the editorial. This is my comment.

The comments here sound like a lynch mob working themselves into a frenzy to hang someone. Proof? Who needs any dang proof. Clapper the guy who admitted lying to Congress under oath said Trump was guilty and thats good enough for the people who commented here. The Intelligence Agencies that lied to get the USA to invade Iraq with their WMD claims say he is guilty, well that must be proof then.
This goes to show that Barnum was right, there is a sucker born every minute. But a whole nation suckered into believing this nonsence about Russia having Trump elected with not one shred of evidence presented? Even Barnum would have been shocked and surprised at that one.

Dan Kuhn , July 16, 2018 at 8:06 pm

Sorry the reply was to a story on the front page.

backwardsevolution , July 16, 2018 at 8:29 pm

Good comment, Dan Kuhn.

Realist , July 17, 2018 at 2:27 am

Well, I guess that influential people on the inside figure that the "reign of terror" worked out so well in effecting regime change during the French Revolution that they'd give it another go approximately two centuries later approximately a hundred years after the Bolshevik Revolution, so maybe this is a natural phenomenon with a periodicity of about 100 years. Perhaps Hillary thinks she's gonna pick up the pieces as the next Napoleon after the revolution burns itself out. More like her fate will be as the next Robespierre, hoisted on her own guillotine.

Seer , July 17, 2018 at 9:11 am

Yes, the cycle is tied to the controlling currency, the USD in current day form. That control is rapidly slipping away. The crooks are pulling the fire alarms in the bank and running out the back door and the public is looking for safety from the crooks' army (MSM, "authority figures" etc.).

George , July 16, 2018 at 8:00 pm

There is nothing left to say.
The summit only leaves one to speculate.

Realist , July 16, 2018 at 7:57 pm

It would seem that there is not a single independent, unbought, honest, objective journalist left working for the corporate mass media in America. They are all mere puppets delivering the propaganda and fake analysis demanded of them by the oligarchy that owns them. It's absolutely stunning how lock-step they all are in maintaining the false narrative cooked up by the careless and arrogant tyrants who threw away a sure thing (Hillary's coronation) by pressing too hard to give her what they thought was the biggest patsy (Trump) in the clown show called the presidential election. They were so confident they actually allowed the ballots to be counted and have been scrambling to undo the results using every possible mechanism and pretext ever since. If there is one thing the American people can count on in the future, it is that no election will ever again be semi-free, fair and not rock-solid rigged with the contrived results agreed upon months before the charade of elections ever goes on.

A rational mind might say, well, give us more reasonable candidates, those in tune with the problems of the voters (mostly caused by government), and give us more of them, more parties, more platforms, more options. That is exactly what they intend to avoid. They tried to force feed us Hillary as the only acceptable figure running for the position, but enough people saw through that and chose the fellow they wanted us to abhor after they deliberately built him up to help the despised Hillary. Now absolutely every loyal apparatchik in the elite establishment, and most especially the media–the essential propagandists, are working 24/7 for regime change in Washington, what they perceive as the necessary first step towards regime change in Moscow and later Beijing. Only then will the NWO–in which they give all the orders and control everything and everybody–be complete.

I tell you, the reach of their tentacles and the uniformity of response amongst their minions is impressive in a most foreboding way. They will brook NO peaceful co-existence with any geopolitical "partners" or competitors and will not give even the slightest iota of respect to our own elected leader, not even to his office out of formal courtesy. Rather than "going high" when he "goes low," they choose to up the ante in ad hominem insults and political thuggery. The power structure in this country has become irretrievably warmongering neo-con and ruthlessly imperialistic. The most catastrophic consequence will be to see the dissolution of civilisation itself as the myriad of environmental, population and resource crises hit the planet full on as the century unfolds, for thuggery, tyranny and simplistic political slogans are not the solutions for escaping the impending bottleneck with an actual future still remaining for humanity.

Joe Tedesky , July 16, 2018 at 8:42 pm

Hey Realist you brought back memories of the 2016 presidential election to when Trump was given 4.9 billion dollars worth of free air time (JP Sottile quoted the 4.9). As it has been written about of how early on the Clinton campaign thought Trump was the best to run up against, because who in their right mind would take the Trumpster serious, was the go to mindset among the DNCer's. So the MSM turned on the cameras at Trump rallies believing that given enough rope that Trump would hang himself. The backlash that came from this, was mind boggling on many levels. One no one likes Hillary, number two no one likes the MSM. So with that the MSM, and Hillary's bend strategy was what loss the election for the Democrats, and oh yeah then there's Bernie.

I don't think in total we Americans are all living on the same planet. Joe

Mike From Jersey , July 16, 2018 at 8:55 pm

I am absolutely appalled by the behavior of the American media. They are acting like Trump is a disgrace to the country but the MSM is a disgrace to journalism.

I don't even like Trump but – to me – he is coming out better in this exchange.

JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 9:17 pm

Excellent statement.

Sam F , July 16, 2018 at 9:29 pm

Indeed the US mass media are no more than propagandists for the arrogant tyrants of its government. But despite US bluster and economic arm-twisting, educated people know that BRICS cannot be dominated so imperialism is theater not policy. Over 20-40 years, the US can only choose cooperation or self-embargo. Few educated people believe the recycled hysteria of invisible threats.

The enmity of the PTB toward Russia and Korea always starts with and returns to the Mideast and centers upon Israel, which controls the US mass media and both political parties, and thereby appoints the politicians who control the military budget and agenda. Indeed "no election will ever again be semi-free." The MIC is large and will attack small countries anywhere, but it is the servant of Israel.

Zhu Ba Jie , July 17, 2018 at 2:22 am

People who complain aboutIsrael somehow never mention Dispensationalism, Christian Zionism, etc.

Sam F , July 17, 2018 at 6:26 am

Thank you for mentioning those; I did not have room in that comment.
Israel also substantially controls the Christian z leaders.

Dave P. , July 17, 2018 at 4:28 am

Wow! Great comments Realist.

j michael king , July 16, 2018 at 7:54 pm

I thought Mueller was playing politics to announce the indictments of 12 Russians mere hours before Trump met Putin more and more I'm losing faith in Mueller and the Democrats who have damn near destroyed their party themselves

Seer , July 17, 2018 at 9:17 am

If the fact that the Dems managed to undermine the people's choice for president (Sanders) isn't enough to convince you that the Dems are destroyed then I don't know what to tell you.

I'm almost certain that the CIA had a hand in that: consider their infiltration into the MSM (ensuring that Sanders was not talked about). Not only was the CIA involved in trying to derail Trump, but it was active in preempting Sanders. For sure, having meddling in BOTH parties would likely bring out real pitch forks: when it's just one party it's easy to use the other party to offset the anger. Joe, if you're reading these comments (still), I'd love to get your take on this "theory."

jean , July 16, 2018 at 7:52 pm

I never imagined I would cheer on Trump ..but that took guts .

Don DeBar , July 16, 2018 at 7:52 pm

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1018955906690584576

robira , July 16, 2018 at 7:27 pm

Thanks for this report, Mr. Lauria; you're certainly of stronger mettle than me. I would not have withstood the noxious exhalations of the US newsmedia (which itself now openly includes newly "retired" intelligence agents as commentators) you've described in this article; the anecdotes alone almost had me hurling my phone across the room.
Thank you for performing a valuable public service with this report. Peace.

Gary Weglarz , July 16, 2018 at 7:21 pm

Welcome to what passes for "reality" in 2018 America. If the stakes for humanity were not so frightfully high these bizarre, slapstick, nonsense comments from the MSM talking heads would be knee-slapping hilarious in their total off the charts lunacy and patent absurdity. What can one say? Wow – off the freaking charts! You simply can't make this stuff up! Words are inadequate in an age of mass delusion posing as sanity!

Gregory Herr , July 16, 2018 at 7:34 pm

I think your words "total off the charts lunacy and patent absurdity" are as adequate as they come in this situation.

Litchfield , July 16, 2018 at 10:42 pm

Not only absurd, though, but also deeply isulting, treasonous, really horrendous that our national-level journalists arrogate to themselves the right to diss, insult, accuse, charge, condemn, vilify, etc. the president of the United States. I don't like trump either, I hate waht he is doing in Israel, supporting the rabid Zionists there and here. BUT, standing up to the media and intelligence onslaught took guts, and he came out of the meeting looking pretty good, I think. The meeting also gave Putin an opportunity to score a few points for reason, thus an international platform he might otherwise not have had.

I LOVE the Putin points re Browder $$$ (rather, rubles) to Hillary. I do so hope that this topic is taken up and richly sucked and considered and tasted and finally chewed and swallowed and digested and the real . . . finally is delivered to the AMerican people regarding Hill's $$$ shenanigans. If that happens it could point once again to an investigation of her emails and those of her assistant Huma Abedin. Remember her? When do we get the full investigation of this very compromised woman?

James , July 16, 2018 at 11:25 pm

Well said.

Jessika , July 16, 2018 at 7:16 pm

What, did Trump say that, Gregory? I am impressed, if he did!

Gregory Herr , July 16, 2018 at 7:30 pm

By the CNN video of the entire press conference, Trump says this at the 13:54 mark.

And for a complete transcript of the presser:

https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/transcript-trump-putin-press-conference-in-helsinki/

Jessika , July 16, 2018 at 7:14 pm

Yes, it is critical to support Trump's talks with Putin and not let these Deep State agents control.

Jessika , July 16, 2018 at 7:05 pm

These people have no shame, as they take their massive paychecks for lying to keep the fools in line. Well, thanks to websites like this one and others, there aren't so many fools anymore. They are pathetic, and days of Cronkite, Murrow et al who reported news objectively are dead and buried.

Zhu Ba Jie , July 16, 2018 at 9:38 pm

Probably they believe their own nonsense, at least when they say. Much as crooked preachers do.

Jean , July 16, 2018 at 10:30 pm

Cronkite wasn't so objective, Jessika. He was pretty bought into the glory of our Viet nam adventuring until the war protesters (whom he did not represent objectively either) opened Amerika's eyes.

mike k , July 16, 2018 at 7:01 pm

FOR ONCE, I AM PROUD TO STAND WITH OUR PRESIDENT.

irina , July 16, 2018 at 7:17 pm

Roger That.

Mike From Jersey , July 16, 2018 at 8:14 pm

Ditto

JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 9:21 pm

Me, too. An act of extraordinary political courage.

mike k , July 16, 2018 at 6:59 pm

That took guts, Mr. Trump. I didn't know you had it in you. Congratulations for standing up to your (deadly) opponents. They are now showing themselves to be the evil scum they really are.

Rohit , July 16, 2018 at 6:57 pm

There is one small problem with this article. While I trust Consortium News far more than the New York Times, there are those who trust the latter. And the article is far too long for those who already believe that Trump is guilty of collusion with Russia. A shorter article by Consortium News with a one two punch is what is needed.

JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 9:22 pm

Oh, go pound sand, would you?

Zhu Ba Jie , July 16, 2018 at 9:40 pm

People don't change their minds because of rational arguments. Russiagate will go on, in spite of logic and evidence, much as Birther nonsense does.

mike k , July 16, 2018 at 6:54 pm

I just listened to NBC nightly news, and CNN. They are screaming treason! And the end of America! They are absolutely aghast that Trump is making peace moves with Putin. Doesn't he know that America is a Warfare State?? To talk peace is against everything we hold sacred. Beware Mr. Trump, the CIA hit squads will be champing at the bit to field one of their "lone assassins on you". Pray for the Donald not being gunned down for doing the right thing (for once).

JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 9:37 pm

I still fear someone will do the president harm as a result of this. Trump is taking chances with the mafia that runs this shadow permanent government, given this level of hysteria. They just have too much at stake. They are used to getting their way. I hope I'm wrong. The last time a president took on the entire establishment to this extent was JFK. I wish I could be more optimistic.

Litchfield , July 16, 2018 at 10:44 pm

"They are screaming treason! "

How dare they???
they are the treasonous ones.
These crazed zombies are terrifying.

Gregory Herr , July 16, 2018 at 6:52 pm

"I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace, than risk peace in pursuit of politics."

Bravo Mr. President.

Joe Tedesky , July 16, 2018 at 8:27 pm

Great quote Gregory. Joe

Bruce Dickson , July 16, 2018 at 8:51 pm

A JFK-worthy quote, that.

And, to quote its deliverer, "Who would think..?"

JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 9:23 pm

That one statement will go down in history, mark my words.

Jeff Harrison , July 16, 2018 at 6:40 pm

"never before have I seen an American president consistently, repeatedly, publicly, and shockingly advance the interests of another country over those of his own government and people."

Really? You obviously haven't been paying attention to the US's obeisance to Israel. I can think of no other country that puts another country's wishes ahead of their own the way the US does with Israel.

"he had a chance right there in front of the world to tell Vladimir Putin to stay the HELL out of American democracy, and he didn't do it."

And he was wise not to do so. The United States has far more blatantly interfered with Russian elections than what the idiots in our alphabet soup of intelligence agencies are accusing Russia of now. The reason you call Putin a thug is not because he is one but because he won't let you get away with that kind of crap. Putin has made it clear that American regime change is off the table and he intends to see to it that it stays off the table.

Rohit , July 16, 2018 at 7:30 pm

""never before have I seen an American president consistently, repeatedly, publicly, and shockingly advance the interests of another country over those of his own government and people.""

Is that why he wants NATO to beef up? Is that why he complained about Germany's energy dependence on Russia?

He is not putting Putin above the American people. He is just not accepting the lies told by the FBI which is really pretty much still controlled by Obama.

JesseJean , July 16, 2018 at 10:33 pm

Bravo, Jeff!

David Hamilton , July 16, 2018 at 6:34 pm

If the allegations are true – of GRU officers successfully phishing for HRC campaign dirt from Chairman Podesta's emails – then the officers are guilty as charged. As I understand it, this was the avenue through which Wikileaks obtained the content of Hillary Clinton's speeches to Goldman Sachs. That confirmation of what most already suspected to be true – that Hillary had been pledging fealty to Wall Street bankers at the expense of the people – probably contributed to Hillary's defeat at the polls. So, I say "more power to 'em". Those officers show common cause with the common man and woman in America. Hillary was never going to release those transcripts on her own!

And that same phishing – if true – was certainly no "terrorist attack" or "act of war' or other hyperbolic nonsense like "the undermining of democracy in America". We have no democracy – only an oligarchy – much like the Russians under Boris Yeltsin. Maybe the phishing undermined oligarchy here, which would be a good thing. Oligarchy is at the heart of the cruel neo-liberal order which tyrannizes the people.

Jeff Harrison , July 16, 2018 at 6:42 pm

Julian Assange has consistently said he did not get the files from Russia. Assange has yet to be caught in a lie. The US is a serial liar and doesn't even look embarrassed when caught in a lie.

David Hamilton , July 16, 2018 at 6:49 pm

Thanks Jeff, maybe I don't understand the transfers to Wikileaks very well. I wonder if the FBI/Justice Department really knows, like they say they do.

LarcoMarco , July 16, 2018 at 7:41 pm

Well, if DNC's servers and Hillarious' stealth servers and Podesta's email were hacked, the NSA has Hooverd up all the evidence (if it exists). The Dumpster should demand this material be revealed and also demand disclosure of proof that RussiaGate is more than Deep State designs.

Frederike , July 16, 2018 at 7:58 pm

Something must be done to release Assange! Trump: do something.

backwardsevolution , July 16, 2018 at 8:57 pm

Frederike – I think Trump will release Assange. Patience.

JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 9:33 pm

911 ushered in the post-truth era.

JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 9:25 pm

Maybe they got the information because Hillary took home classified documents and recklessly-knowingly exposed them to hackers in her private basement server?

Freedom lover , July 16, 2018 at 10:56 pm

"If the allegations are true". Well we probably will never find out will we. Putin was shrewd to offer to have Mueller and his investigators come to Russia to investigate the indited GRU officers and offering full cooperation with Russian Law enforcement. Putin and Trump both know that Mueller will make every excuse in the book of why that can't happen. Mueller must be craping his pants wondering if he will somehow be forced to take his investigation to Russia and have it publically exposed for the fraud that it is.

backwardsevolution , July 17, 2018 at 3:42 pm

Freedom lover – yes, what a great move by Putin! "Come on, let's work together to get to the bottom of this." Mueller must just be dying! Unfortunately, Trump is really in danger now.

Alcuin , July 16, 2018 at 6:04 pm

Why no mention of the most explosive claim at the press conference? https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/07/putin-blows-apart-russia-collusion-probe-says-russian-group-gave-400000000-to-hillary-clinton-video/

Alcuin , July 16, 2018 at 6:21 pm

"I have GREAT confidence in MY intelligence people." Translation: He has little confidence in Obama and Bush intelligence people. Good for him.

JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 9:32 pm

Wow, that was explosive! Just imagine how bad things would be right now if someone other than Putin were in charge of Russia. We should count ourselves as lucky.

[Jul 18, 2018] Let's See Who's Bluffing in the Criminal Case Against the Russians The American Conservative

Jul 18, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

It was a remarkable moment in a remarkable press conference. President Donald Trump had just finished a controversial summit meeting in Helsinki with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, and the two were talking to the media . Jeff Mason, a political affairs reporter with Reuters, stood up and asked Putin a question pulled straight out of the day's headlines: "Will you consider extraditing the 12 Russian officials that were indicted last week by a U.S. grand jury?"

The "12 Russian officials" Mason spoke of were military intelligence officers accused of carrying out a series of cyberattacks against various American-based computer networks (including those belonging to the Democratic National Committee), the theft of emails and other data, and the release of a significant portion of this information to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The names and organizational affiliations of these 12 officers were contained in a detailed 29-page indictment prepared by special prosecutor Robert Mueller, and subsequently made public by Assistant Attorney General Rob Rosenstein on July 13 -- a mere three days prior to the Helsinki summit.

Vladimir Putin responded, "We have an existing agreement between the United States of America and the Russian Federation, an existing treaty, that dates back to 1999, the mutual assistance on criminal cases. This treaty is in full effect. It works quite efficiently."

Putin then discussed the relationship between this agreement -- the 1999 Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty -- and the Mueller indictment. "This treaty has specific legal procedures," Putin noted, that "we can offer the appropriate commission headed by special attorney Mueller. He can use this treaty as a solid foundation and send a formal and official request to us so that we would interrogate, we would hold the questioning of these individuals who he believes are privy to some crimes and our enforcement are perfectly able to do this questioning and send the appropriate materials to the United States."

Trump Calls Off Cold War II Ron and Rand Paul Call Out Foreign Policy Hysteria

In the uproar that followed the Trump-Putin press conference , the exchange between Mason and Putin was largely forgotten amidst invective over Trump's seeming public capitulation on the issue of election interference. "Today's press conference in Helsinki," Senator John McCain observed afterwards in a typical comment, "was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory."

It took an interview with Putin after the summit concluded , conducted by Fox News's Chris Wallace, to bring the specific issue of the 12 indicted Russians back to the forefront and give it context. From Putin's perspective, this indictment and the way it was handled by the United States was a political act. "It's the internal political games of the United States. Don't make the relationship between Russia and the United States -- don't hold it hostage of this internal political struggle. And it's quite clear to me that this is used in the internal political struggle, and it's nothing to be proud of for American democracy, to use such dirty methods in the political rivalry."

Regarding the indicted 12, Putin reiterated the points he had made earlier to Jeff Mason. "We -- with the United States -- we have a treaty for assistance in criminal cases, an existing treaty that exists from 1999. It's still in force, and it works sufficiently. Why wouldn't Special Counsel Mueller send us an official request within the framework of this agreement? Our investigators will be acting in accordance with this treaty. They will question each individual that the American partners are suspecting of something. Why not a single request was filed? Nobody sent us a single formal letter, a formal request."

There is no extradition treaty between the U.S. and Russia, which makes all the calls for Trump to demand the extradition of the 12 Russians little more than a continuation of the "internal political games" Putin alluded to in his interview. There is, however, the treaty that Putin referenced at both the press conference and during the Wallace interview.

Signed in Moscow on June 17, 1999, the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty calls for the "prevention, suppression and investigation of crimes" by both parties "in accordance with the provisions of this Treaty where the conduct that is the subject of the request constitutes a crime under the laws of both Parties."

It should be noted that the indicted 12 have not violated any Russian laws. But the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty doesn't close the door on cooperation in this matter. Rather, the treaty notes that "The Requested Party may, in its discretion, also provide legal assistance where the conduct that is the subject of the request would not constitute a crime under the laws of the Requested Party."

It specifically precludes the process of cooperating from inferring a right "on the part of any other persons to obtain evidence, to have evidence excluded, or to impede the execution of a request." In short, if the United States were to avail itself of the treaty's terms, Russia would not be able to use its cooperation as a vehicle to disrupt any legal proceedings underway in the U.S.

The legal assistance that the treaty facilitates is not inconsequential. Through it, the requesting party can, among other things, obtain testimony and statements from designated persons; receive documents, records, and other items; and arrange the transfer of persons in custody for testimony on the territory of the requesting party.

If the indictment of the 12 Russians wasn't the "dirty method" used in a domestic American "political rivalry" that Putin described, one would imagine that Assistant Attorney General Rob Rosenstein would have availed himself of the opportunity to gather additional evidence regarding the alleged crimes. He would also have, at the very least, made a request to have these officers appear in court in the United States to face the charges put forward in the indictment. The treaty specifically identifies the attorney general of the United States "or persons designated by the Attorney General" as the "Central Authority" for treaty implementation. Given the fact that Jeff Sessions has recused himself from all matters pertaining to the investigation by the Department of Justice into allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the person empowered to act is Rosenstein.

There are several grounds under the treaty for denying requested legal assistance, including anything that might prejudice "the security or other essential interests of the Requested Party." However, it also requires that the reasons for the any denial of requested assistance be put in writing. Moreover, prior to denying a request, the Requested Party "shall consult with the Central Authority of the Requesting Party to consider whether legal assistance can be given subject to such conditions as it deems necessary. If the Requesting Party accepts legal assistance subject to these conditions, it shall comply with the conditions."

By twice raising the treaty in the context of the 12 Russians, Putin has clearly signaled that Russia would be prepared to proceed along these lines.

If the indictment issued by the Department of Justice is to be taken seriously, then it is incumbent upon Rosenstein to call Putin's bluff, and submit a detailed request for legal assistance per the mandate and procedures specified in the treaty -- in short, compel Russia to either put up or shut up.

Any failure to do so would only confirm Putin's assertion that the indictment was a political game to undermine the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of Deal of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West's Road to War .


Rob July 17, 2018 at 11:03 pm

Very cogent analysis. Putin, who's incredibly well briefed, knew exactly what he was offering, and thought that by doing so, would force the DoJ/Mueller to either take him up on his offer or otherwise display the overt politicism of the indictments. But the American anti-Trump mindhive is so completely addled, they of course miss the point entirely. The absence of reason among the anti-Trump/anti-Russia collective is truly something to behold – it's scary.
Janek , says: July 17, 2018 at 11:29 pm
The request V. Putin proposed and Scot Ritter writes about, if send to Russia, would be equivalent to 'go and whistle' and would be treated the same way the Russians treat the requests from Poland to return the remains of the Polish plane that crashed in controversial and strange circumstances near Smolensk on April 10, 2010. They, the Russians, did not return the remains of the plane up until today and the place where the plane crashed they bulldozed the ground and paved with very thick layer of concrete.

Such request would only give the Russians propaganda tools to delay and dilute any responsibility from the Russian side and at the end they would blame the USA for the whole mess with no end to their investigation, because they would investigate until the US investigators would drop dead. Anybody who seriously thinks about V.

Putin offer to investigate anything with Russia should first have his head examined by a very good, objective, and politically neutral head specialist.

b. , says: July 17, 2018 at 11:50 pm
"If the indictment issued by the Department of Justice is to be taken seriously, then it is incumbent upon Rosenstein to call Putin's bluff, and submit a detailed request for legal assistance per the mandate and procedures specified in the treaty -- in short, compel Russia to either put up or shut up.

Any failure to do so would only confirm Putin's assertion that the indictment was a political game to undermine the presidency of Donald J. Trump."

That was one long-winded way of recognizing that Putin just told the US biparty establishment behind the manufactured "Russia!" hysteria to put up or shut up.

EliteCommInc. , says: July 18, 2018 at 2:57 am
I don't think that Pres Putin has anything to lose here.

"ARTICLE 4 DENIAL OF LEGAL ASSISTANCE

The Central Authority of the Requested Party may deny legal assistance if:

(1) the request relates to a crime under military law that is not a crime under general criminal law;

(2) the execution of the request would prejudice the security or other essential interests of the Requested Party; or "whether accurate or not the treaty permits a denial of request, if said requests threaten Russian security."

Almost by definition, an investigation interrogation by the US of the personnel in question because said questioning might very well stray into other areas , unrelated to the hacking charge. Now Pres. Putin has played two cards: a treaty is in place that deals with criminal matters between the two states and surely must have known that and should have already made the formal requests in conjunction with the treaty or he didn't know either way, the rush to embarrass the president may very well backfire. As almost everything about this investigation has.

Realist , says: July 18, 2018 at 3:16 am
"The DOJ should call his bluff."

Right! That's not going to happen .the DOJ has no proof .their indictment was a ploy to queer any deal with Russia. Anybody that believes anything the 'intelligence' agencies say, without proof, is an idiot.

[Jul 18, 2018] Russiagate A CIA Concocted Hoax. Trump Knows It By Stephen Lendman

Notable quotes:
"... No Russian interference in America's political process occurred in 2016, earlier, or is being cooked up for the nation's November midterm elections. ..."
"... Trump knows it and said so in Helsinki. When asked if he holds Russia accountable for anything, he said: ..."
"... Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago. ..."
"... VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected]. My newest book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III." http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html ..."
Jul 18, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

No Russian interference in America's political process occurred in 2016, earlier, or is being cooked up for the nation's November midterm elections.

Trump knows it and said so in Helsinki. When asked if he holds Russia accountable for anything, he said:

"I hold both countries responsible (for dismal bilateral relations). I think that the United States has been foolish. I think we've all been foolish And I think we're all to blame."

Regarding election meddling, he said:

"There was no collusion at all. Everybody knows it. And people are being brought out to the fore. So far that I know, virtually none of it related to the campaign. And they're going to have to try really hard to find somebody that did relate to the campaign."

"My people came to me and some others (T)hey think it's Russia President Putin said it's not Russia. I will say this: I dont see any reason why it would be."

" President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today."

Trump is wrong about most things, not this. No evidence, nothing, proves Russian meddling in the US political process.

If it existed, it would have been revealed long ago. It never was and never will be because there's nothing credible to reveal, Big Lies alone.

Trump's above remarks were in Helsinki. In response to a raging Russophobic firestorm of criticism back home, he backtracked from his above comments, saying he misspoke abroad.

He accepts the intelligence community's claim about Russian US election meddling – knowing it didn't occur.

Russiagate was cooked up by Obama's thuggish Russophobic CIA director John Brennan , media keeping the Big Lie alive.

DNC/John Podesta emails were leaked, not hacked – an indisputable fact media scoundrels suppress to their disgrace.

Former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray earlier explained that

"(t)he source of these emails and leaks has nothing to do with Russia at all," adding:

"I discovered what the source was when I attended the Sam Adam's whistleblower award in Washington."

"The source of these emails (came) from within official circles in Washington DC. You should look to Washington, not to Moscow."

"WikiLeaks has never published any material received from the Russian government or from any proxy of the Russian government. It's simply a completely untrue claim designed to divert attention from the content of the material" and its true source.

The Big Lie alone matters when it's the official narrative. The Russian meddling hoax and mythical Kremlin threat to US security are central to maintaining adversarial relations with America's key invented enemy.

It's vital to unjustifiably justifying the nation's global empire of bases, its outrageous amount of military spending, its belligerence toward all sovereign independent states, its endless wars of aggression, its scorn for world peace and stability, its neoliberal harshness to pay for it all, along with transferring the nation's wealth from ordinary people to its privileged class.

America's deeply corrupted political process is far too debauched to fix, rigged to serve wealth, power and privilege exclusively, at war on humanity at home and abroad.

It's a tyrannical plutocracy and oligarchy, a police state, not a democracy, a cesspool of criminality, inequity and injustice, run by sinister dark forces – monied interests and bipartisan self-serving political scoundrels, wicked beyond redemption, threatening humanity's survival.

Today is the most perilous time in world history. What's going on should terrify everyone everywhere.

Washington's rage for global dominance, its military madness, its unparalleled recklessness, threatens world peace, stability, and survival.

*

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

[Jul 18, 2018] Ron and Rand Paul Call Out Foreign Policy Hysteria by Jack Hunter

Notable quotes:
"... New York Magazine ..."
"... Manchurian Candidate ..."
"... Cutting through the crap on foreign policy is something of a Paul family tradition. ..."
"... When Ron Paul suggested on a Republican presidential primary debate stage in 2008 that U.S. foreign policy created " blowback " that led to 9/11, fellow GOP candidate Rudy Giuliani accused Paul of blaming America and defending the attackers. Paul didn't relent: "Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we've been over there. We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years." ..."
"... The American Conservative ..."
"... There are neocons in both parties who still want Ukraine and Georgia to be in NATO. That's very, very provocative. It has stimulated and encouraged nationalism in Russia. George Kennan predicted this in 1998 when we still had Yeltsin and Russia was coming in our direction. He said, "If you push NATO up against Russia's borders, nationalism will arise and their militarist tendencies will increase, and you may get someone like a Putin," basically. ..."
"... "It's a big mistake for us, not to say that we're morally equivalent or that anything Russia does is justified," Paul told Tapper. "But if we don't understand that everything we do has a reaction, we're not going to be very good at understanding and trying to have peace in our world." ..."
"... "Most Americans are understandably shocked by what they view as an unprecedented attack on our political system," the New York Times ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... Rand Paul said Sunday, "People need to think through these things before they get so eager to rattle their sabers about wanting to have a confrontation with Russia." ..."
"... Jack Hunter is the former political editor of ..."
"... co-authored the 2011 book ..."
"... with Senator Rand Paul. ..."
Jul 17, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Ron and Rand Paul Call Out Foreign Policy Hysteria And like his father, the senator found himself on the wrong end of the media mob this week.

When Mitt Romney called Russia America's " number one geopolitical foe " during the 2012 election campaign, Barack Obama mocked him: "The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back." Vice President Joe Biden dismissed Romney as a "Cold War holdover." Hillary Clinton said Romney was "looking backward." John Kerry said "Mitt Romney talks like he's only seen Russia by watching Rocky IV ."

Romney's Russia warning came at a time when Republicans were eager to exploit President Obama's hot mic comments to Russian president Dmitri Medvedev where he promised " more flexibility " on missile defense issues after the election. Romney, to the delight of Republican hawks and neoconservatives , was eager to portray Obama as capitulating , weak , and dangerous . For his part, Obama, who once vowed to " reset " U.S.-Russia relations, painted Romney as outdated for disparaging diplomacy.

But that was then. This week the Cold War seemed to be back in full force for many former Obama supporters, as President Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the wake of 12 Russian agents being indicted for allegedly meddling in the 2016 election.

Democrats have joined forces with Republican hawks and neoconservatives to declare Trump " weak " for engaging Russia. One MSNBC pundit said Trump's NATO criticisms were the president " doing Vladimir Putin's bidding ." New York Magazine 's Jonathan Chait went full Alex Jones when he suggested that Trump may have been a Putin agent since 1987 -- a Manchurian Candidate -esque spin reminiscent of the original Red Scare . #TraitorTrump even trended on Twitter.

In the midst of this hysteria, Senator Rand Paul was asked by CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday whether he thought Trump should demand that Putin acknowledge Russia's meddling.

"They're not going to admit it in the same way we're not going to admit that we were involved in the Ukrainian elections or the Russian election," Paul replied . "So all countries that can spy do. All countries that want to interfere in elections and have the ability to, they try." Paul insisted that U.S. and Russian meddling are not "morally equivalent," but said we must still take into account that both nations do this.

That's when "Rand Paul" began trending on Twitter.

"Rand Paul is on TV delivering line after line of Kremlin narrative, and it is absolutely stunning to watch," read one tweet with nearly 5,000 likes. Another tweet, just as popular, said , "Between McConnell hiding election interference and Rand Paul defending it, looks like Russia's already annexed Kentucky." A Raw Story headline on Paul's CNN interview read, " Stunned Jake Tapper explains why NATO exists to a Russia-defending Rand Paul ."

But was Paul really "defending" Russia? Was he even defending Russian meddling in U.S. elections? Or was he merely trying to pierce through the hysteria and portray American-Russian relations in a more accurate and comprehensive context -- something partisans left and right won't do and the mainstream media is too lazy to attempt?

Cutting through the crap on foreign policy is something of a Paul family tradition.

When Ron Paul suggested on a Republican presidential primary debate stage in 2008 that U.S. foreign policy created " blowback " that led to 9/11, fellow GOP candidate Rudy Giuliani accused Paul of blaming America and defending the attackers. Paul didn't relent: "Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we've been over there. We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years."

No one in the GOP wanted to hear what Ron Paul had to say because it challenged and largely rebutted Republicans' entire political identity at the time. Paul was roundly denounced. FrontPageMag's David Horowitz called him a " disgrace ." RedState banned all Paul supporters. The American Conservative 's Jim Antle would recall in 2012: "The optics were poor: a little-known congressman was standing against the GOP frontrunner on an issue where 90 percent of the party likely disagreed with him . Support for the war was not only nearly unanimous within the GOP, but bipartisan."

Rand Paul now poses a similar challenge to Russia-obsessed Democrats. Contra Jake Tapper sagely explaining "why NATO exists" to a supposedly ignoramus Paul, as the liberal Raw Story headline framed it, here's what the senator actually said:

There are neocons in both parties who still want Ukraine and Georgia to be in NATO. That's very, very provocative. It has stimulated and encouraged nationalism in Russia. George Kennan predicted this in 1998 when we still had Yeltsin and Russia was coming in our direction. He said, "If you push NATO up against Russia's borders, nationalism will arise and their militarist tendencies will increase, and you may get someone like a Putin," basically.

Do you think Jake Tapper Googled "George Kennan"? That's about as likely as Giuliani Googling "blowback."

"It's a big mistake for us, not to say that we're morally equivalent or that anything Russia does is justified," Paul told Tapper. "But if we don't understand that everything we do has a reaction, we're not going to be very good at understanding and trying to have peace in our world."

As for Russian spying -- was Paul just blindly defending that, too? Or did he make an important point in noting both sides do it?

"Most Americans are understandably shocked by what they view as an unprecedented attack on our political system," the New York Times reported in February. "But intelligence veterans, and scholars who have studied covert operations, have a different, and quite revealing, view."

The Times continued: "'If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all,' said Steven L. Hall, who retired in 2015 after 30 years at the C.I.A., where he was the chief of Russian operations. The United States 'absolutely' has carried out such election influence operations historically, he said, 'and I hope we keep doing it.'"

The U.S. will no doubt keep meddling in foreign elections. Russia will do the same, just as it did during the Obama administration and years prior . The cries against diplomacy and for war will ebb, flow, flip, and flop, depending on who sits in the White House and how it makes the screaming partisans feel. Many Democrats who view Trump's diplomacy with Russia as dangerous would have embraced it (and did) under Obama. Many Republicans who hail Trump's diplomatic efforts wouldn't have done so were he a Democrat. President Hillary Clinton could be having the same meeting with Putin and most Democrats would be fine with it, Russian meddling or no meddling.

So many headlines attempted to portray Paul as the partisan hack on Sunday when the opposite is actually true. It's the left, including much of the media, that's now turned hawkish towards Russia for largely partisan reasons, while Paul was making the same realist foreign policy arguments regarding NATO and U.S.-Russia relations long before the Trump presidency.

Responding to Romney's anti-Russia, anti-Obama comments in 2012, Thomas de Waal, a Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the New York Times , "There's a whole school of thought that Russia is one you need to work with to solve other problems in the world, rather than being the problem." Rand Paul said Sunday, "People need to think through these things before they get so eager to rattle their sabers about wanting to have a confrontation with Russia."

But think they won't and sabers they'll rattle, as yesterday's villains become today's heroes and vice versa.

Just ask Mitt Romney .

Jack Hunter is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Senator Rand Paul.


Come On July 17, 2018 at 1:51 am

There's the elephant in the room, of course. Nobody seems to want to touch it yet, but everybody knows that Israeli meddling in US elections puts Russian meddling in the shade. Still, it's fascinating watching the reporting and waiting to see who will break the silence.

In the meantime, wake me up when there's something called "the Russia-American Political Action Committee" in DC. Wake me up when US politicians vie to win its favor, as they vie to win the favor of AIPAC, and win the huge financial contributions that result from getting its support. Wake me up when Russian oligarchs contribute even a fraction of what Israel donors like Sheldon Adelson already contribute to US political campaigns – and wake me up when they get results like an American president moving the US embassy to Jerusalem or an America president sending American troops to stand between Israel and its enemies Russia may have moved a few thousand votes here or there, but Israel gets American politicians to send America's children to die in Middle East wars. At the moment, Russia can only dream of meddling with that degree of success.

Yep – American elections have been corrupted by foreign countries for a long time. Russia's only problem is that it hasn't learned who to pay off, and how much. Next time Mr. Netanyahu visits Mr. Putin (and he visits him fairly often), he can give him a few pointers. And then Mr. Putin will be invited to give speeches to joint sessions of Congress. Just like Mr. Netanyahu. And freshmen US congressmen will be frog-marched to Russia for instructions, just like they're already frog-marched to Israel.

cynthia , says: July 17, 2018 at 7:50 am
President Trump took a slice out of the Military Industrial Complex yesterday. John McCain and war mongers went crazy. The SWAMP IS ANGRY!
connecticut farmer , says: July 17, 2018 at 8:26 am
Russia has been engaging in international espionage dating back at least to Peter the Great. As such, they play the game as well as, or possibly better, than anyone. They, like we, will do what is necessary-even to the point of injecting themselves in the internal affairs of another country–if they deem it in their interest to do so or, as the cliche has it, "in the interest of state". Not very nice but–that's the way the game is played.

Thank you, Rand Paul and Mr. Hunter, for injecting some much needed sanity into this debate.

Youknowho , says: July 17, 2018 at 8:49 am
I said it before, and I will repeat it here:

There is no need to demonize the Russians. Their country has national interests and goals. If they are patriots, the Russians will seek to advance those interests and goals.

We also have interests and goals, and if we are patriots, we seek to advance them (though we disagree on what our real interests are and what our goals should be).

When our interests concide with that of Russia we collaborate. When they clash, we seek to undermine each other.

The Russians seem to have been doing it, as their interests now clash with ours. Nothing to be worked out about. That's how the game is played.

Which does not mean that we should defend ourselves strenuously from such undermining. And the President is precisely tasked with defending this country and advance its interests. This he seems to be unable to do.

Do not hate the Russians. Do not demonize them. But be aware of what they are doing, because we are NOT in a Kumbayah moment with them.

Andy Johnson , says: July 17, 2018 at 8:56 am
Well done, Mr. Hunter. It's a shame that the Pauls' position on foreign policy is not shared by ostensibly "libertarian" commentators who value DC cocktail parties above all principles.
Johann , says: July 17, 2018 at 10:27 am
The left's hatred of Russia goes even deeper than US partisan politics. They hate them because they gave up their world-wide communism ideology. And they hate them because they are not fully on board with the LGBQTXYZ movement.
David Smith , says: July 17, 2018 at 11:08 am
The real problem with Russia is that it exists, and it is too big for us to control. The real problem with Putin is that he is the first strong leader Russia has had since the fall of the Soviet Union, and he is messing up our plans for world hegemony.

As one who grew up during the Cold War (the real one) and lived through the whole thing (the Iron Curtain, the Warsaw Pact, the crushing of Hungary, communists behind every door and under every bed), I find it very hard to take all the current hysteria about Russia very seriously.

connecticut farmer , says: July 17, 2018 at 11:19 am
@Youknowwho

Sane, reasonable comments. Totally agree with your sentiments. Unfortunately, since we live in a 3-ring media circus, so few people will listen or pay heed. In a world possibly even more dangerous than any time since the Cold War, the act of demonizing one of the two greatest nuclear powers on earth is surely madness.

General Manager , says: July 17, 2018 at 11:26 am
CNN etc. headlines are not even thinly veiled editorials against Trump. Not related to just publishing the news. But telling readers how to think. Mainstream media has an M&M type coating. Remove the outer shell and you find the good old boys and girls as ever-lurking and ever vigilant Neocon Nation pushing their one and only agenda on the American people. They are insatiable as long as they do not do the fighting and dying. Stay tough Trump and realize short of complete capitulation you cannot satisfy these people.
Ryszard Ewiak , says: July 17, 2018 at 11:37 am
Donald Trump took a step towards peace. Of course, not everyone likes this. As can be seen, Donald Trump has many enemies, even among Republicans. They want war. These are people dangerous to America and the world.

What is better: peace with Russia, or a global nuclear war?

The Book of Revelation warns: "And another horse, fiery red, came out, and the one who rode it was granted permission to take peace from the earth, so that people would butcher one another, and he was given a huge sword." (6:4) "The great sword" – what does it mean?

Jesus gave many important details: "Terrors [φοβητρα] both [τε] and [και] unusual phenomena [σημεια – unusual occurrences, transcending the common course of nature] from [απ] sky [ουρανου] powerful [μεγαλα] will be [εσται]." (Luke 21:11)

Some ancient manuscripts contain the words "and frosts" [και χειμωνες] (we call this today "nuclear winter"), and in Mark 13:8 "and disorders" [και ταραχαι] (in the sense of confusion and chaos). There will be also significant tremors, food shortages and epidemics along the length and breadth of the regions as a result of using this weapon.

This weapon will also cause climate change, catastrophic drought and global famine. (cf. Revelation 6:5, 6)

So here we have a complete picture of the consequences of the global nuclear war. Is there any sense in speeding up this war?

Angolo , says: July 17, 2018 at 11:38 am
Trump's "treason"? What a laugh.

He called out the perfidy and incompetence of American intelligence and foreign policy officials during the Obama era, as he should have. He wants a productive relationship with a declining nuclear and regional power, as he should have. Is Putin a nice man? No. But neither is he a pusillanimous Leftist eurotwit.

I'm glad to see adults in the room, at long last. The Sixties are over, baby. Good riddance.

Countme-a-Demon , says: July 17, 2018 at 11:44 am
"Of course the Paul's are right as they always are."

Always?

"A number of the newsletters criticized civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., calling him a pedophile and "lying socialist satyr".[2][15] These articles told readers that Paul had voted against making Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a federal public holiday, saying "Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for that pro-communist philanderer, Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day."[2][16][17] During the 2008 and 2012 presidential election campaigns, Paul and his supporters said that the passages denouncing King were not a reflection of Paul's own views because he considers King a "hero".[18][19][20″

That last sentence is a hoot. Talk about "hysteria", but, go ahead, repeat Paul's lies that he knew nothing about his own newsletter.

Johann:

"The left's hatred of Russia goes even deeper than US partisan politics. They hate them because they gave up their world-wide communism ideology. And they hate them because they are not fully on board with the LGBQTXYZ movement."

Do fake news much?

https://medium.com/@FreisinnigeZtg/did-the-kremlin-support-ron-paul-in-2008-f6b6ca4b58f9

Like the NRA, The American Conservative needs to open "The Russian Conservative" chapters in Putin's conservative Russia to protect Putin's murderous government.

It could be that the "Left", whatever that is in addlepated minds, merely desires a little real politik in our relations with relations with Putin's Russia.

It's hard to tell the difference between ex-KGB Putin and ex-republicans like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan.

The latter two make "full of crap" seem mild praise.

Clifford , says: July 17, 2018 at 12:08 pm
You lost me at "Ron Paul." Sorry.
Reader , says: July 17, 2018 at 12:17 pm
Off the top of my head, a few egregious examples in which the US government has "meddled" in other countries during the last 100 years:

Mexico (Woodrow Wilson had thousands of US troops occupying Mexico until calling them back to "meddle" in Europe's War to End All Wars, setting the stage for an even worse war 20 years later.)

Russia (Woodrow Wilson used the US military to "meddle" in the Russian revolution after the War to End All Wars.)

Korea (undeclared war)

Vietnam (undeclared war)

Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Chile, and much of the rest of Central and South America.

Iran (helped overthrow its government in the 1950s and install the Shah of Iran, setting the stage for the Iranian revolution.)

Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Egypt.

Yemen (huge humanitarian disaster as I write this. US government fully supporting head-chopping Saudi Arabians in their campaign to starve, sicken and blow to bits hundreds of thousands of people. Support includes US planes in-flight fueling of Saudi fighter/bomber jets.)

And let us not forget the enormous "meddling" in numerous US government elections and policy debates by . . . Israel.

Good Reason , says: July 17, 2018 at 1:19 pm
I vote with Angolo's comment:

"He called out the perfidy and incompetence of American intelligence and foreign policy officials during the Obama era, as he should have. He wants a productive relationship with a declining nuclear and regional power, as he should have. Is Putin a nice man? No. But neither is he a pusillanimous Leftist eurotwit."

It's important to understand what the US intelligence community is calling "interference in our election." There has been no accusation that the Russians hacked into our electronic voting and changed results. Rather, they did what we have done in other countries–the Russians ran an influence campaign. They bought ads and created bots to spread the word. This is so utterly tame . . . there is nothing out of the ordinary US playbook here.

Hacking the DNC server and revealing underhanded DNC doings? Hey, that's on the DNC for being both venal and incompetent.

anonymous , says: July 17, 2018 at 2:21 pm
Anybody in 1962 shouting wild paranoid conspiracy theories about

THERE ARE RUSSIAN SPIES EVERYWHERE, THEY'RE TRYING TO TAKE OVER AMERICA

These people in 1962 would be (correctly) dismissed as Right Wing conspiracy kooks, now it's just standard Lib Dems, RINOs, Neo Conservatives and fake news lying press.

We commissioned this Farstar comics with this theme – I mean like who in 2018 is really scared that Russians like Anna Kournikova are going to take over America –

Who's in bed with the Russians?

I wish that was me!

https://goo.gl/images/3HbsbS

b. , says: July 17, 2018 at 2:23 pm
Unfortunately, Rand Paul is acting, but not on principle or in good faith. If he really wanted to stand against manufactured hysteria, he would not accept the US "intelligence" agency claims and refer to their record – e.g. on Iraq and before regarding stability of the Soviet Union – he would question the staggering difficulties of attribution and forensics for networked, digital attacks (the main reason why any claims about who hacked whom have to be read with skepticism), he would point to the corruption of our foreign politics by Saudi and Israeli interests and money within the Trump-Kushner clan, and both parties, and he would compare the alleged – and allegedly ineffectual – attempts to influence an already ridiculous election to the very real, pervasive and corrupting impact of GOP voter disenfranchisement and bipartisan gerrymandering in service of incumbents and their networks.

Rand Paul is the man who was going to stand against the Haspel appointment. He is a phoney, but he serves as a weather vane for niche politicians on how the winds are turning.

You can find the same token opposition here:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/07/11/russia-nato-editorials-debates/36799277/

Nothing about New START, no word about how George Bush made a promise that might have been in bad faith, how Gorbachev was foolish enough to accept it, and how Bill Clinton broke it across the board, and piled on by targeting Serbia in the Balkan conflict. Kennan did not refer to the Ukraine on his missive.

If Rand Paul is our last best hope, we are in deep trouble.

Kurt Gayle , says: July 17, 2018 at 2:41 pm
Jack Hunter " Senator Rand Paul was asked by CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday whether he thought Trump should demand that Putin acknowledge Russia's meddling."

(0:01) TAPPER: 48 hours ago the US government, the Trump administration, said the top Russian military intelligence officers orchestrated a massive hack to affect the US election. How much do you want President Trump to try to hold Putin accountable for that?

PAUL: I think really we mistake our response if we think it's about accountability from the Russians. They're another country. They're going to spy on us. They do spy on us. They're going to interfere in our elections. We also do the same. Dov Levin at Carnegie Mellon studied this over about a 50-year period in the last century and found 81 times that the US interfered in other countries' elections. So we all do it. What we need to do is to make sure that our electoral process is protected. And I think because this has gotten partisan and it's all about partisan politics we have forgotten that really the most important thing is the integrity of our election. And there are things we can do and things that I've advocated: Making sure it's decentralized all the way down to the precinct level; making sure we don't store all the data in one place, even for a state, and that there's a back-up way so that someone in a precinct can say, 'Two thousand people signed in, this was the vote tally I sent to headquarters.' There's a lot of ways that we can back-up our election. Advertising, things like that, it's tricky. Can we restrict the Russians? We might be able to in some ways, but I think at the bottom line we wanted the Russians to admit it. They're not going to admit it in the same way we're not going to admit that we were involved in the Ukrainian elections or the Russian elections. So all countries that can spy do. All countries that want to interfere in elections and have the ability to, they try."

TAPPER: It sounds as though you are saying that the United States has done the equivalent of what the Russians did in the 2016 election, and it might sound to some viewers that you're offering that statement as an excuse for what the Russians did.

PAUL: No, what I would say is it's not morally equivalent, but I think in their mind it is. And I think it's important to know in your adversary's mind the way that they perceive things. I do think that they react to our interference in both their elections. One of the reasons they really didn't like Hillary Clinton is they found her responsible for some of the activity by the US in their elections under the Obama administration. So I'm not saying it's justified

TAPPER: But surely, Senator Paul, the United States has never done what the Russians did.

PAUL: I'm not saying they're equivalent, or morally equivalent, but I am saying that this is the way that the Russians respond. So if you want to know how we have better diplomacy, or better reactions, we have to know their response. But it's not just interference in elections that I think has caused this nationalism in Russia. Also, I think part of the reason is is we promised them when James Baker, at the end when Germany reunified, we promised them that we wouldn't go one inch eastward of Germany with NATO, and we've crept up on the borders, and we still have neocons in both parties who want Ukraine and Georgia to be in NATO.

That's very, very provocative and it has stimulated and encouraged nationalism in Russia. George Kennan predicted this. In 1998 when we still had Yeltsin and Russia was coming in our direction, he said, if you push NATO up against Russia's borders, nationalism will arise and their militarist tendencies will increase, and you may get someone like a Putin, basically.

George Kennan predicted the rise of Putin in 1998. And so we have to understand that for every action we have, there is a reaction. And it's a big mistake for us -- not to say that we're morally equivalent or that anything that Russia does is justified – but if we don't realize that everything we do has a reaction, we're not going to be very good at understanding and trying to have peace in the world (3:38)

Coupon Cutter , says: July 17, 2018 at 3:32 pm
It's pretty weird to read articles about "meddling" in US elections and not see the word "Israel" anywhere.

How much pro-Russia money was spent on "meddling" in 2016? How much pro-Israel money was spent "meddling" in 2016?

[Jul 18, 2018] Everyone messes with everyone in their elections around the world. My first question is why is the media on both sides still pounding the American public with the Russia did it bullhorn. What exactly does Russia gain ? They're 9 times smaller than NATO. China has the most to gain.

Jul 18, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com


I am Groot -> ThePhantom Mon, 07/16/2018 - 19:15 Permalink

Everyone messes with everyone in their elections around the world. My first question is why is the media on both sides still pounding the American public with the "Russia did it" bullhorn. What exactly does Russia gain ? They're 9 times smaller than NATO. China has the most to gain.

The Ukrainians were working with Hillary against Trump. The Deep State has the ability to make every act of espionage look like Russia did it. The DNC didn't turn over their server to the FBI. The Awan server disappeared too. Something smells terrible, like Kankles Huma hole.

ThePhantom -> I am Groot Mon, 07/16/2018 - 19:26 Permalink

jesus they can accuse you of being a putin puppet if you don't... and how do you defend yourself.. "how dare you insult every branch of our intelligence agencies"( and the lying james clapper!!!! )how dare you...?

MrBoompi -> I am Groot Mon, 07/16/2018 - 22:30 Permalink

Hey Groot, I think these countries hack and spy on each other 24/7. It's bullshit. They appoint a special prosecutor and with the exceptions of the BS Flynn and Manafort charges the only others he's charged are non-americans. Nothing about the elephant in the room, the billion dollar + money laundering schemes and treason of the Obama/Clinton and their lackeys.

[Jul 18, 2018] A strong stench of a false flag operation

Jul 18, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

likbez , July 17, 2018 at 1:43 am

Looks like it was actually China which implemented forwarding of all 30K email to controlled by them account. See sic_semper_tyrannis blog for details. This is a bombshell revelation, if true,

For debunking of the information presented in the indictment see

https://disobedientmedia.com/2018/07/muellers-latest-indictment-ignores-evidence-in-the-public-domain/

To me Mueller fiction sounds like a second rate Crowdstrike "security porn" -- a bragging about non-existent capabilities.

And I agree that the "Le Carre level of details" with names (which are obviously classified) are extremely suspicious. It also invites a nasty retaliation, because it breaks de-facto mode of work of intelligence agencies with each other and undermines any remnant of trust (if such exists in respect to CIA; it probably existed for NSA).

As sessions were encrypted so to decode them you need to steal SSH key, or break SSH encryption. Both are not very realistic, and, if realistic, disclosing such NSA capabilities greatly damages those capabilities.

Also Guccifer 2.0 Internet personality looks more and more to me like a false flag operation with the specific goal to implicate Russians. Mueller is actually pretty adept in operating in such created for specific purpose "parallel reality" due to specifics of his career. So nothing new here. Just a strong stench of a false flag operation

Another weak point is the use of CCcleaner. This is not how professionals from state intelligence agencies operate. Any Flame-style exfiltration software (and Flame was pioneered by the USA ;-) has those capabilities built-in, so exposing your activities in Windows logs is just completely stupid.

[Jul 18, 2018] Clinging to Collusion Why Evidence Will Probably Never Be Produced in the Indictments of 'Russian Agents'

Notable quotes:
"... If you enjoyed this original article please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one. ..."
Jul 18, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

... ... ...

The Russian government on Friday strongly denied the charges. In a statement, the Foreign Ministry called the indictments "a shameful farce" that was not backed up by any evidence. "Obviously, the goal of this 'mud-slinging' is to spoil the atmosphere before the Russian-American summit," the statement said.

The Ministry added that the 12 named Russians were not agents of the GRU.

" When you dig into this indictment there are huge problems, starting with how in the world did they identify 12 Russian intelligence officers with the GRU?" said former CIA analyst Larry Johnson in an interview with Consortium News. Johnson pointed out that the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency was not allowed to take part in the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on alleged interference by the GRU. Only hand-picked analysts from the FBI, the NSA and the CIA were involved.

" The experts in the intelligence community on the GRU is the Defense Intelligence Agency and they were not allowed to clear on that document," Johnson said.

" When you look at the level of detail about what [the indictment is] claiming, there is no other public source of information on this, and it was not obtained through U.S. law enforcement submitting warrants and getting affidavits to conduct research in Russia, so it's clearly intelligence information from the NSA, most likely," Johnson said.

CrowdStrike's Role

The indictment makes clear any evidence of an alleged hack of the DNC and DCCC computers did not come from the FBI, which was never given access to the computers by the DNC, but instead from the private firm CrowdStrike, which was hired by the DNC. It is referred to as Company 1 in the indictment.

" Despite the Conspirators' efforts to hide their activity, beginning in or around May 2016, both the DCCC and DNC became aware that they had been hacked and hired a security company ("Company 1") to identify the extent of the intrusions," the indictment says.

Dimitri Alperovitch, a CrowdStrike co-founder, is also a senior fellow at the anti-Russian Atlantic Council think tank.

The indictment doesn't mention it, but within a day, CrowdStrike claimed to find Russian "fingerprints" in the metadata of a DNC opposition research document, which had been revealed by DCLeaks, showing Cyrillic letters and the name of the first Soviet intelligence chief. That supposedly implicated Russia in the hack.

CrowdStrike claimed the alleged Russian intelligence operation was extremely sophisticated and skilled in concealing its external penetration of the server. But CrowdStrike's conclusion about Russian "fingerprints" resulted from clues that would have been left behind by extremely sloppy or amateur hackers -- or inserted intentionally to implicate the Russians.

One of CrowdStrike's founders has ties to the anti-Russian Atlantic Council raising questions of political bias. And the software it used to determine Russia's alleged involvement in the DNC hack, was later proved to be faulty in a high-profile case in Ukraine, reported by the Voice of America.

The indictment then is based at least partially on evidence produced by an interested private company, rather than the FBI.

Evidence Likely Never to be Seen

Other apparent sources for information in the indictment are intelligence agencies, which normally create hurdles in a criminal prosecution.

" In this indictment there is detail after detail whose only source could be intelligence, yet you don't use intelligence in documents like this because if these defendants decide to challenge this in court, it opens the U.S. to having to expose sources and methods," Johnson said.

If the U.S. invoked the states secret privilege so that classified evidence could not be revealed in court a conviction before a civilian jury would be jeopardized.

Such a trial is extremely unlikely however. That makes the indictment essentially a political and not a legal document because it is almost inconceivable that the U.S. government will have to present any evidence in court to back up its charges. This is simply because of the extreme unlikelihood that arrests of Russians living in Russia will ever be made.

In this way it is similar to the indictment earlier this year of the Internet Research Agency of St. Petersburg, Russia, a private click bait company that was alleged to have interfered in the 2016 election by buying social media ads and staging political rallies for both Clinton and Trump. It seemed that no evidence would ever have to back up the indictment because there would never be arrests in the case.

But Special Counsel Robert Mueller was stunned when lawyers for the internet company showed up in Washington demanding discovery in the case. That caused Mueller to scramble and demand a delay in the first hearing, which was rejected by a federal judge. Mueller is now battling to keep so-called sensitive material out of court.

In both the IRA case and Friday's indictments, the extremely remote possibility of convictions were not what Mueller was apparently after, but rather the public perception of Russia's guilt resulting from fevered media coverage of what are after all only accusations, presented as though it is established fact. Once that impression is settled into the public consciousness, Mueller's mission would appear to be accomplished.

For instance, the Times routinely dispenses with the adjective "alleged" and reports the matter as though it is already established fact. It called Friday's indictments, which are only unproven charges, "the most detailed accusation by the American government to date of the [not alleged] Russian government's interference in the 2016 election, and it includes a litany of [not alleged] brazen Russian subterfuge operations meant to foment chaos in the months before Election Day."

GRU Named as WikiLeak's Source

The indictment claims that GRU agents, posing as Guccifer 2.0, (who says he is a Romanian hacker) stole the Democratic documents and later emailed a link to them to WikiLeaks, named as "Organization 1." No charges were brought against WikiLeaks on Friday.

Assange: Denied Russia was his source. (CNBC screenshot)

" After failed attempts to transfer the stolen documents starting in late June 2016, on or about July 14, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, sent Organization 1 an email with an attachment titled 'wk dnc linkl.txt.gpg,'" the indictment says. "The Conspirators explained to Organization 1 that the encrypted file contained instructions on how to access an online archive of stolen DNC documents. On or about July 18, 2016, Organization 1 confirmed it had 'the 1Gb or so archive' and would make a release of the stolen documents' this week.'"

WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange, who is in exile in the Ecuador embassy in London, has long denied that he got the emails from any government. Instead Assange has suggested that his source was a disgruntled Democratic Party worker, Seth Rich, whose murder on the streets of Washington in July 2016 has never been solved.

On Friday, WikiLeaks did not repeat the denial that a government was its source. Instead it tweeted: "Interesting timing choice by DoJ today (right before Trump-Putin meet), announcing indictments against 12 alleged Russian intelligence officers for allegedly releasing info through DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0."

Assange has had all communication with the outside world shut off by the Ecuadorian government two months ago.

Since the indictments were announced, WikiLeaks has not addressed the charge that GRU agents, posing as Guccifer 2.0, were its source. WikiLeaks' policy is to refuse to disclose any information about its sources. WikiLeaks' denial that the Russian government gave them the emails could be based on its belief that Guccifer 2.0 was who he said he was, and not what the U.S. indictments allege.

Those indictments claim that the Russian military intelligence agents adopted the personas of both Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks to publish the Democratic Party documents online, before the Russian agents, posing as Guccifer 2.0, allegedly supplied WikiLeaks.

The emails, which the indictment does not say are untrue, damaged the Clinton campaign. They revealed, for instance, that the campaign and the Democratic Party worked to deny the nomination to Clinton's Democratic Party primary challenger Bernie Sanders.

The indictments also say that the Russian agents purchased the use of a computer server in Arizona, using bitcoin to hide their financial transactions. The Arizona server was used to receive the hacked emails from the servers of the Democratic Party and the chairman of Clinton's campaign, the indictment alleges. If true it would mean the transfer of the emails took place within the United States, rather than overseas, presumably to Russia.

Some members of the Veterans' Intelligence Professionals for Sanity argue that metadata evidence points to a local download from the Democratic computers, in other words a leak, rather than a hack. They write the NSA would have evidence of a hack and, unlike this indictment, could make the evidence public: " Given NSA's extensive trace capability, we conclude that DNC and HRC servers alleged to have been hacked were, in fact, not hacked. The evidence that should be there is absent; otherwise, it would surely be brought forward, since this could be done without any danger to sources and methods."

That argument was either ignored or dismissed by Mueller's team.

The Geopolitical Context

US enabled Yeltsin's reelection.

It is not only allies of Trump, as the Times thinks, who believe the timing of the indictments, indeed the entire Russia-gate scandal, is intended to prevent Trump from pursuing detente with nuclear-armed Russia. Trump said of the indictments that, "I think that really hurts our country and it really hurts our relationship with Russia. I think that we would have a chance to have a very good relationship with Russia and a very good chance -- a very good relationship with President Putin."

There certainly appear to be powerful forces in the U.S. that want to stop that.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Wall Street rushed in behind Boris Yeltsin and Russian oligarchs to asset strip virtually the entire country, impoverishing the population. Amid widespread accounts of this grotesque corruption, Washington intervened in Russian politics to help get Yeltsin re-elected in 1996. The political rise of Vladimir Putin after Yeltsin resigned on New Year's Eve 1999 reversed this course, restoring Russian sovereignty over its economy and politics.

That inflamed American hawks whose desire is to install another Yeltsin-like figure and resume U.S. exploitation of Russia's vast natural and financial resources. To advance that cause, U.S. presidents have supported the eastward expansion of NATO and have deployed 30,000 troops on Russia's borders.

In 2014, the Obama administration helped orchestrate a coup that toppled the elected government of Ukraine and installed a fiercely anti-Russian regime. The U.S. also undertook the risky policy of aiding jihadists to overthrow a secular Russian ally in Syria. The consequences have brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

In this context, the Democratic Party-led Russia-gate appears to have been used not only to explain away Clinton's defeat but to stop Trump -- possibly via impeachment or by inflicting severe political damage -- because he talks about cooperation with Russia.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent for T he Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe , Sunday Times of London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @unjoe .

If you enjoyed this original article please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.


Mary V , July 15, 2018 at 9:39 pm

They can't allow Assange to speak now, because if he should decide to reveal that Seth Rich was the leaker, that would create a whole new set of circumstances. Incredible article, Joe.

Jerry Alatalo , July 15, 2018 at 3:13 pm

Real estate mogul Leona Helmsley is remembered for infamously stating, "Rich people don't pay taxes. Taxes are for the little people."

Similarly, "Rich people hide evidence (real – or alleged (non-existent) for criminal or propaganda purposes) under the umbrella of 'national security'. Evidence is for the little people."

And the great war between truth and lies moves forward

Hank , July 15, 2018 at 9:51 am

As with the last indictment of 'Russian hackers' these GRU officers should retain an American attorney who can then demand Mueller hand over whatever evidence he has (aka: discovery). Last time that happened Mueller was forced to refuse (because he had none). That was embarrassing for Mueller and you'd think he would've learned his lesson not to try the gimmick again. You'd think.

Sam F , July 15, 2018 at 9:07 am

The entire Russia-gate invention is a diversion from Israel-gate, the control of US elections and mass media by zionists. That is the story here, not silly disputes over who did what to reveal DNC emails.

Red_Dog , July 15, 2018 at 8:03 am

1. Lauria is correct when he says, "Some members of the Veterans' Intelligence Professionals for Sanity argue that metadata evidence points to a local download from the Democratic computers, in other words a leak, rather than a hack." But he fails to give the full story. William Binney and some members of the VIPS wrote a memo stating that computer data showed that the files were downloaded locally to a flash drive because of transmission speeds. This memo was challenged in a separate memo by Thomas Drake and other members of the VIPS. To try and resolve the problem The Nation hired an independent computer expert, Nathanial Freitas, to analyze the memos and date. He concluded that the data did fit the Binney analysis. But it also fit several other possibilities that used remote access. So the data could not be used to prove that the files were locally downloaded. https://www.thenation.com/article/a-leak-or-a-hack-a-forum-on-the-vips-memo/

2. Perhaps the most important part of the indictments is not in the Lauria article. 500,000 voters had their data stolen and, because most state-local voter systems are running on outdated and dilapidated computers, it may be impossible to tell if other systems had been hacked. Unfortunately, very few people are considering this part of the indictment. It means that if we want a fair election in 2018 paper ballots should be used. In any case all voting systems must be auditable.

3. Finally, the level of detail and attribution in the indictments indicates to me that the NSA and CIA were consulted. And it was worth providing this detail because of the incredible threat our country is under. The fact that we can now track down hacks with such precision should give others pause.

Skip Scott , July 15, 2018 at 8:18 am

I think you are jumping to a false conclusion about the "level of detail". The NSA and the CIA have now had enough time to cut the entire indictment out of whole cloth. Are we supposed to trust their so called "evidence" at this point, when the entire RussiaGate theater of the absurd was created to cover their ass and hamstring detente with Russia?

Piotr Berman , July 15, 2018 at 5:11 pm

I did not read the indictment, so I do not know if the level of detail rose to heights exhibited by Gen. Colin Powell in his famous "white powder vial" speech. Today we know that the white powder he showed to the entire world could be indeed harmful, as the baby powder of Johnson and Johnson was revealed to have traces of asbestos. But then again, it could be genuinely harmless.

On top of that, Innocence Project revealed that surprising number of successful prosecutions leading to the death penalty were based on hoaxes. For example, the "culprit" was implicated by his blood being found on a seat of the escape car, however when the defense examined the vial of the sentenced person blood that was in police possession, it had DNA of two people -- some blood was removed (presumably, splashed in the escape car) and to mask it, blood of another person was added. This is stuff done without any political motivation, just to get good number of solved cases -- the race and prior criminal record of the "culprit" probably being the bonus.

Creating compelling narratives is what prosecutors do for living. I hope that more often than not these narratives are true, but a true professional is not bound by such constraints.

j. D. D. , July 15, 2018 at 7:44 am

Thank you for a thorough and damning report on the indicttments by the cowardly and thuggish Mueller who, as the author notes, is confident that they nevr be answered in a court of law. Moreover, with all the hullabaloo attached to Robert Mueller's stunt, the fact remains that the DNC and John Podesta emails revealed a stunning and irrefutable truth: Hillary Clinton and the DNC were rigging the election against her Democratic primary opponent, Bernie Sanders. However, I would add two aspects which place into context the timing of Mueller's publicity stunt. First, that it came on the heels of embattled FBI Agent Peter Strzok's appearance before a joint House hearing on Thursday at which Strzok claimed that the Republicans on the House Judiciary and Government Oversight Committees were doing "Putin's work" by continuing to examine the British and Obama Administration/Democratic Party origins of Russiagate. Strzok's charge, obviously choreographed with Congressional Democrats, wasendlessly cycled in the news media. The Democrats otherwise sought to obstruct the discredited FBI agent's testimony by any and all means necessary to the delight of the "resist" social media universe. While the Justice Department's independent IG found that Strzok's prioritization of the Trump Russiagate investigation over the Clinton email investigation was not free from bias, an inconvenient fact largely glossed over in Thursday's staged event, it noted that Strzok and his mistress, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe counsel, Lisa Page, exchanged daily texts vowing to stop Trump's election, disparaging Trump's s supporters, and declaring themselves the saviors of the nation from the current President. The third element,of this assault on the prospect of peace was meant to cooincide with Trump's visit to the UK, i.e.the discovery of a bottle or vial of the so-called Novichok nerve agent allegedly used to poison former British spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter. The bottle was discovered at the home of Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess in Amesbury, England. The British went on an international rampage around the March 4, 2018, Skripal poisoning claiming Putin was conducting a murder of a long-retired British spy on British territory in some form of retaliaton, demanding war-like sanctions against Russia. When their claims failed to achieve substantive credibility, even with the British bioweapons lab, Porton Down, Rowley and Sturgess appeared as new victims of the nerve gas poisoning on June 30th and Sturgess subsequently died. The British press is filled with the imputation that the found vial will somehow be traceable back to Russia, a fact which eluded the original Skripal hoax Yet despite all of this, it appears that the desperate attempt of Mueller and his allies in the US and British intel community to block or ruin the Helsinki summit lack the suficient credibiltiy to succeed.

Gary Weglarz , July 15, 2018 at 1:19 am

I guess I'm showing my age with this comment, but our military & intelligence communities, our politicians and our corporate media's non-stop, fact-free, free-association, paranoid delusional drivel about "Russian election interference" has all the solidity, yet none of the charm, of a bad acid trip circa 1972. Offered the choice I'd certainly opt for the bad acid flashback – especially given what is actually at stake in terms of the prospects for human survival if this absurd and dangerous nonsense continues. The institutions of the West have shown themselves to be completely, totally and utterly corrupt! To bear witness to such complete corruption is absolutely breathtaking! Expecting anything rational, ethical, fact-based or simply honest to emanate from any of our Western institutions at this point requires an almost child-like level of trust – or – lacking that – a willingness to enter into and embrace the world of these mad delusions and their purveyors!

Bjorn Jensen , July 15, 2018 at 12:52 am

This is worth reading as a summary of grand jury proceedings, the prosecutor's case presentatation and the proposal for indictment through the summary of evidence either oral or via documents.

I think it is important to remember that grand juries are comprised of ordinary citizens and are independent of the courts.

http://law.jrank.org/pages/1261/Grand-Jury-Screening-procedures.html

Sam F , July 15, 2018 at 9:02 am

Yes, this era of total corruption of the US government is unprecedented.
The disputes between one corrupt branch and another condemn them all.

mrtmbrnmn , July 15, 2018 at 12:09 am

This is not breaking news anymore, but worth repeating:

The odious NY Times inadvertently stepped on its own shtick (and everyone else's) when it front-paged the FBI's "Operation Hurricane Crossfire" against the Trump campaign. This whole farcedy was conceived as a rolling scheme to regime change Putin when Hillary ascended the throne, with Trump as merely a mug and patsy. When the moo-cow Hillary lost, the plan had to be repurposed to uckfay with Putin AND regime change Trump. If it looks like a Federal crime, smells like a Federal crime and quacks like a Federal crime, well You be the judge. There are so many organs of the Federal Gov and the MSM in on this criminal conspiracy, they are going to need a new wing at Gitmo to house all these scoundrels

Nabi , July 14, 2018 at 10:40 pm

Great right up to the last few paragraphs. Too hard for a logical conservative to swallow that the prime reason we have troops (small assets at that) near the Russia border is because of the greed of Wall Street. Up 'til then not a bad piece.

Joe Lauria , July 14, 2018 at 11:10 pm

Nabi, I suggest you read War is a Racket by General Smedley Butler if you think such a thing is unheard of.

https://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated-ebook/dp/B00P8OEFFY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1531624171&sr=8-1&keywords=war+is+a+racket+smedley+butler

Mary V , July 15, 2018 at 9:54 pm

Everyone should read "War is a Racket".

Alcuin , July 15, 2018 at 3:01 am

Yes, greed of Wall Street. And perhaps this is the most important motive. But many former Warsaw Pact countries (or at least the ruling classes and opinion makers in those countries) wanted to become members of NATO because they apparently feared, perhaps not without reason, Russian domination in the future. And there's also the sheer libido dominandi of some people in Washington, not exclusively neoconservatives. So greed, fear, and love of power.

bobzz , July 14, 2018 at 10:08 pm

In all likelihood, we'll never know who killed Seth Rich who probably leaked the emails. The CIA did not have time to create patsies like Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, or Sirhan Sirhan. So RIP Rich.

jsinton , July 14, 2018 at 9:28 pm

Wouldn't it be a hoot if the alleged GRU agents decide to defend themselves in court against the indictments and demand discovery evidence?

Skip Scott , July 15, 2018 at 8:01 am

The problem with that is that you'd be buying into a stage play that the Deep State players get to direct. Let's not forget about the abilities detailed in the Vault 7 releases. Unfortunately it is just as Karl Rove has stated: they can create "reality" now, and they've had plenty of time to "create" their asses off.

jsinton , July 15, 2018 at 11:41 am

Did you not hear about the St Petersburg click-bait operation that Mueller indicted with great fanfare back in February? Well, the 13 Russians sent lawyers to answer the indictment and plead not guilty, much to the shock of Mueller and the investigation. The problem is when you indict someone, they now have the right to examine the EVIDENCE against them . a process know as "discovery". Mueller has been trying to suppress the evidence in that case ever since. Will the GRU agents send a lawyer? I'd be laughing if they did.

Skip Scott , July 15, 2018 at 12:12 pm

Yes, I recall the click-bait operation and the demand for discovery, and Mueller's being caught by surprise. This time will be a little different:
"Seemingly overlooked by most, Rosenstein said the indictment will now be passed-off (code word for "buried") to the DOJ National Security Division." The public will never even get to see any evidence due to "National Security".

This indictment is nothing but a propaganda ploy timed to undermine the Helsinki summit.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/07/13/rosenstein-delivers-indictments-for-12-russians-then-buries-in-lock-box-of-doj-national-security-division/#more-151777

rosemerry , July 14, 2018 at 4:04 pm

Considering the actions of the USA elsewhere,and the accepted, even encouraged, interference by Israel in all elections in the USA (as Chuck Schumer knows very well!), the whole process is a complete put-up job. Since the emails were true, and Wikileaks is reputed to keep to valid reports, the emphasis on finding a suitable scapegoat for the election of DJT is to steer people away from the genuine actions now destroying the USA.

fred54 , July 14, 2018 at 3:11 pm

They won't have to arrest and extradite the Russians because they will show up in court just like the two indicted Russians did back in May. Mueller had a heart attack and asked the Judge to deny the defendants right in discovery to see the evidence. He thought the Russians wouldn't show and he'd get his judgement exparte without having to produce the non-existent evidence. The Russians knew the evidence didn't exist just like in this latest lie on the part of Mueller where there is no evidence. The judge denied the motion and Mueller had no choice to quietly drop the charges. The same thing will happen here. Only this time the Russians aren't going to be so sanguine.

GM , July 14, 2018 at 7:02 pm

i don't believe that's accurate. Last I heard the judge agreed to deny the defendant discovery to the bulk of the prosecution's purported evidence based on Mueller's fatuous assertions of "national security", though he added that it is temporary and subject to change in the future.

D3F1ANT , July 14, 2018 at 2:35 pm

Democrat smoke and mirrors. Sad that it's worked for so long. This entire Russia collusion fantasy has blown up in their faces though. Not only has it failed spectacularly it's exposed the depth and scope of their corrution and the insidious way in which they've coopted critical components of the Federal government to their exclusive service–at taxpayer expense (DOJ/FBI)! It really is staggering. Especially since its allowed to continue even now!

jsinton , July 15, 2018 at 9:00 pm

Not to mention the credibility of the Deep-State MSM apparatus, which has exposed itself at purveyors of propaganda without investigation

Jeff Harrison , July 14, 2018 at 11:57 am

A couple of things occur to me. One. Have the Russian government respond to the indictments with discovery as occurred with the other inane indictments that Mueller produced. Two. Have Putin respond to the Democrat's demands by demanding the same from the US. On the one hand, the US only has alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election. On the other, Russia has proof of US meddling in essentially every Russian election since the collapse of the old SovU. The US won't like this. It was absolutely hilarious when that blonde bubble head of a State Department spokeswoman complained about VOA, RFE, etc being required to register as foreign agents only to be told by Russia to take RT off the foreign agent list. The Russians could also repay the favor by indicting Americans who interfered in Russian elections. They could start with Slick Willie.

Bob In Portland , July 14, 2018 at 11:41 am

To understand for whom Robert Swan Mueller works for, look at his record. Here: https://caucus99percent.com/content/what-mueller-wont-find

alley cat , July 14, 2018 at 11:07 am

In 1745, Samuel Johnson published a commentary entitled Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth :

"Thus the doctrine of witchcraft was very powerfully inculcated; and as the greatest part of mankind have no other reason for their opinions than that they are in fashion, it cannot be doubted but this persuasion made a rapid progress, since vanity and credulity cooperate in its favor. The infection soon reached the Parliament, who, in the first year of King James, made a law, by which it was enacted, Chapter XII: That "if any person shall use any invocation or conjuration of any evil or wicked spirit; 2. or shall consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed or reward any evil or cursed spirit to or for any intent or purpose; 3. or take up any dead man, woman or child out of the grave, –or the skin, bone, or any part of the dead person, to be employed or used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment; 4. or shall use, practice, or exercise any sort of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment; 5. whereby any person shall be destroyed, killed, wasted, consumed, pined, or lamed in any part of the body; 6. that every such person being convicted shall suffer death."

"Thus, in the time of Shakespeare, was the doctrine of witchcraft at once established by law and by the fashion, and it became not only unpolite, but criminal, to doubt it; and as prodigies are always seen in proportion as they are expected, witches were every day discovered and multiplied so fast in some places that Bishop Hall mentions a village in Lancashire where their number was greater than that of the houses."

From Through the Looking Glass , by Lewis Carroll:

"I can't believe that!" said Alice.
"Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."
Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Two quick comments on the Russiagate hoax:
1. Julian Assange has always refused to compromise his sources, but did the next best thing by offering a $20,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of Seth Rich's killer(s). There's only one possible reason he would do this.
2. The truth of the leaked information has never been challenged. For those who insist on believing in witches and Russiagate, the 12 Russian defendants are guilty only of defending U.S. democracy, since the content of Clinton's emails helped save the U.S. from a Clinton presidency.

O Society , July 15, 2018 at 7:38 pm

Here you are. Wrote it this afternoon. Thanks for the inspiration!

https://opensociet.org/2018/07/15/russiagate-through-the-lookinglass/

Tom Roche , July 14, 2018 at 10:43 am

Excellent article, but it could be improved by including a link to the indictment text: https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download . It's a 29-page PDF, but it's double-spaced with large margins, so only requires a few minutes to read.

[Jul 18, 2018] Mueller Grand Jury Indictment Does Not Prove Russia Hacked DNC caucus99percent

Notable quotes:
"... @chuckutzman ..."
Jul 18, 2018 | caucus99percent.com

Mueller Grand Jury Indictment Does Not Prove Russia Hacked DNC Steven D on Tue, 07/17/2018 - 1:37pm

="username">detroitmechworks
I'd disagree, since it's one singular action. @chuckutzman While the PTB want to think of it as OOOH, 12 indictments, when he actually just got one group of people to agree with him. Not even ALL of them. Just most of them. And he could get rid of any he didn't think were going to agree with him. Because of course he fucking can.

Ugh, I'll go with my own BS stories than the government's rather boring line of same old shit.

[Jul 18, 2018] Considerable evidence points to Guccifer 2,0 as being an affiliate of the DNC

Jul 18, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Mark F. McCarty , July 14, 2018 at 9:48 am

At the crux of the indictment is an outright absurdity – Assange announced that he would be releasing Clinton-related material on June 10th, 2016, whereas the indictment claims that Guccifer 2.0 gave him access to the DNC emails on July 14th. Moreover, considerable evidence points to Guccifer 2,0 as being an affiliate of the DNC.

https://medium.com/@markfmccarty/muellers-new-indictment-do-the-feds-take-us-for-idiots-5406ef955406

https://www.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/comments/8yri14/julian_assange_crowdstrike_and_the_russian_hack/

http://g-2.space/

[Jul 18, 2018] Mish Mass Hysteria

Mish - Six Questions: (1) Is this a trial or a witch hunt? (2) Do we need to see the evidence or do we believe known liars? (3) Is Trump guilty of treason? Before we even see proof Putin was involved? (4) Is the CIA incapable of fabricating evidence? (5) Even if Russia interfered in the election, why should anyone have expected otherwise? (6) Has everyone forgotten the US lies on WMDs already?
Notable quotes:
"... Sending lethal arms to Ukraine, bordering Russia, is a really serious adverse action against the interest of the Russian government. Bombing the Assad regime is, as well. Denouncing one of the most critical projects that the Russian government has, which is the pipeline to sell huge amounts of gas and oil to Germany, is, as well. ..."
"... The United States funds oppositional groups inside Russia. The United States sent advisers and all kinds of operatives to try and elect Boris Yeltsin in the mid-1990s, because they perceived, accurately, that he was a drunk who would serve the interests of the United States more than other candidates who might have won. The United States interferes in Russian politics, and they interfere in their cyber systems, and they invade their email systems, and they invade all kinds of communications all the time. And so, to treat this as though it's some kind of aberrational event, I think, is really kind of naive ..."
"... And so, I would certainly hope that we are not at the point, which I think we seem to be at, where we are now back to believing that when the CIA makes statements and assertions and accusations, or when prosecutors make statements and assertions and accusations, unaccompanied by evidence that we can actually evaluate, that we're simply going to believe those accusations on faith, especially when the accusations come from George W. Bush's former FBI Director Robert Mueller, who repeatedly lied to Congress about Iraq and a whole variety of other issues. So, I think there we need some skepticism. ..."
Jul 17, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Congratulations to President Trump for an Excellent Summit with Putin spawned numerous some I could not tell if they were sarcastic or not.

For example, reader Brian stated " There is zero doubt now that Putin stole the election from Hillary. So much so that she MUST be given the nomination again in 2020. All potential challengers must step aside. To refuse her the 2020 nomination would be evidence of traitorous activities with Putin."'

I congratulated Brian for brilliant sarcasm but he piled on. It now seems he was serious. Mainstream media, the Left an the Right were in general condemnation. Numerous cries of treason emerged from the Left and the Right (see the above link)

It Happened - No Trial Necessary

A friend I highly respect commented " There is simply no question that they did it. You can legitimately claim that it's not important or that there has been no tie to Trump shown. On the Russians' side, they can say, screw off, we were pursuing our interests. But you can't take the view it did not happen. It happened. "

There is a question who did it. Indictments are just that, not proof.

The US fabricated evidence to start the Vietnam war and the US fabricated WMD talk on the second war in Iraq. US intelligence had no idea the Berlin Wall was about to fall. The US meddled in Russia supporting a drunk named Yeltsin because we erroneously thought we could control him.

They Are All Liars

It's a mystery why anyone would believe these proven liars. That does not mean I believe Putin either. They are all capable liars. Let's step back from the absurd points of view to reality.

US Meddling

The US tries to influence elections in other countries and has a history of assisting the forcible overthrow of governments we don't like.

All of the above are massive disasters of US meddling. They are all actions of war, non-declared, and illegal. I cannot and do not condone such actions even if they were legal.

911 and ISIS resulted from US meddling. The migration crisis in the EU is a direct consequence of US meddling. The Iranian revolution was a direct consequence of US meddling.Now we are pissing and moaning that Russia spent a few million dollars on Tweets to steal the election. Please be serious.

Let's Assume

Let's assume for one second the DNC hack was Russia-based. Is there a reason to not be thankful for evidence that Hillary conspired to deny Bernie Sanders the nomination? Pity Hillary? We are supposed to pity Hillary? The outrage from the Right is amazing. It's pretty obvious Senator John McCain wanted her to win. Neither faced a war or military intervention they disapproved of.

Common Sense

Let's move on to a common sense position from Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept.

  1. Debate: Is Trump-Putin Summit a "Danger to America" or Crucial Diplomacy Between Nuclear Powers?
  2. Greenwald vs. Cirincione: Should Trump Have Canceled Summit After U.S. Indictment of Russian Agents?

Greenwald vs. Joe Cirincione

GLENN GREENWALD : In 2007, during the Democratic presidential debate, Barack Obama was asked whether he would meet with the leaders of North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria and Iran without preconditions. He said he would. Hillary Clinton said she wouldn't, because it would be used as a propaganda tool for repressive dictators. And liberals celebrated Obama. It was one of his greatest moments and one of the things that I think helped him to win the Democratic nomination, based on the theory that it's always better to meet with leaders, even if they're repressive, than to isolate them or to ignore them. In 1987, when President Reagan decided that he wanted to meet with Soviet leaders, the far right took out ads against him that sounded very much just like what we just heard from Joe, accusing him of being a useful idiot to Soviet and Kremlin propaganda, of legitimizing Russian aggression and domestic repression at home.

GLENN GREENWALD : It is true that Putin is an authoritarian and is domestically repressive. That's true of many of the closest allies of the United States, as well, who are even far more repressive, including ones that fund most of the think tanks in D.C., such as the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia. And I think the most important issue is the one that we just heard, which is that 90 percent of the world's nuclear weapons are in the hands of two countries -- the United States and Russia -- and having them speak and get along is much better than having them isolate one another and increase the risk of not just intentional conflict, but misperception and miscommunication, as well.

JOE CIRINCIONE : Right. Let's be clear. Glenn, there's nothing wrong with meeting. I agree with you. Leaders should meet, and we should be negotiating with our foes, with those people we disagree with. We're better off when we do that. And the kind of attacks you saw on Barack Obama were absolutely uncalled for, and you're right to condemn those.

JOE CIRINCIONE : What I'm worried about is this president meeting with this leader of Russia and what they're going to do. That's what's so wrong about this summit coming now, when you have Donald Trump, who just attacked the NATO alliance, who calls our European allies foes, who turns a blind eye to what his director of national intelligence called the warning lights that are blinking red. About what? About Russian interference in our elections. So you just had a leader of Russia, Putin, a skilled tactician, a skilled strategist, interfere in a U.S. election. To what? To help elect Donald Trump.

GLENN GREENWALD : I think this kind of rhetoric is so unbelievably unhinged, the idea that the phishing links sent to John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee are the greatest threat to American democracy in decades. People are now talking about it as though it's on par with 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, that the lights are blinking red, in terms of the threat level. This is lunacy, this kind of talk. I spent years reading through the most top-secret documents of the NSA, and I can tell you that not only do they send phishing links to Russian agencies of every type continuously on a daily basis, but do far more aggressive interference in the cybersecurity of every single country than Russia is accused of having done during the 2016 election. To characterize this as some kind of grave existential threat to American democracy is exactly the kind of rhetoric that we heard throughout the Bush-Cheney administration about what al-Qaeda was like .

JOE CIRINCIONE : Why does Donald Trump feel that he has to meet alone with Putin? What is going on there? I mean, that -- when Ronald Reagan met with Gorbachev at Reykjavik, at least he had George Shultz with him. The two of them, you know, were meeting with Gorbachev and his foreign minister at the time. This is -- it's deeply disturbing. It makes you feel that Trump is hiding something, that he is either trying to make a deal with Putin, reporting something to Putin. I tell you, I know U.S. intelligence officials -- I'm probably going right into Glenn's wheelhouse here. But U.S. intelligence officials are concerned about what Donald Trump might be revealing to the Russian leader, the way he revealed classified information to the Russian foreign minister when he met privately with him in the Oval Office at the beginning of his term. No, I don't like it one bit.

GLENN GREENWALD : I continue to be incredibly frustrated by the claim that we hear over and over, and that we just heard from Joe, that Donald Trump does everything that Vladimir Putin wants, and that if he were a paid agent of the Russian government, there'd be -- he would be doing nothing different. I just went through the entire list of actions that Donald Trump has taken and statements that he has made that are legitimately adverse to the interest of the Russian government, that Barack Obama specifically refused to do, despite bipartisan demands that he do them, exactly because he didn't want to provoke more tensions between the United States and Russia.

Sending lethal arms to Ukraine, bordering Russia, is a really serious adverse action against the interest of the Russian government. Bombing the Assad regime is, as well. Denouncing one of the most critical projects that the Russian government has, which is the pipeline to sell huge amounts of gas and oil to Germany, is, as well.

So is expelling Russian diplomats and imposing serious sanctions on oligarchs that are close to the Putin regime. You can go down the list, over and over and over, in the 18 months that he's been in office, and see all the things that Donald Trump has done that is adverse, in serious ways, to the interests of Vladimir Putin, including ones that President Obama refused to do. So, this film, this movie fairytale, that I know is really exciting -- it's like international intrigue and blackmail, like the Russians have something over Trump; it's like a Manchurian candidate; it's from like the 1970s thrillers that we all watched -- is inane -- you know, with all due respect to Joe. I mean, it's -- but it's in the climate, because it's so contrary to what it is that we're seeing. Now, this idea of meeting alone with Vladimir Putin, the only way that you would find that concerning is if you believed all that.

JOE CIRINCIONE : So, Trump knew that this indictment was coming down, before he went to Europe, and still he never says a word about it. What he does is continue his attacks on our alliances, i.e. he continues his attacks on our free press, he continues his attacks on FBI agents who were just doing their job, and supports this 10-hour show hearing that the House of Representatives had. It's really unbelievable that Trump is doing these things and never says one word about it. He still has not said a word about those indictments.

GLENN GREENWALD : That's because the reality is -- and I don't know if Donald Trump knows this or doesn't know this, has stumbled into the truth or what -- but the reality is that what the Russians did in 2016 is absolutely not aberrational or unusual in any way. The United -- I'm sorry to say this, but it's absolutely true. The United States and Russia have been interfering in one another's domestic politics for since at least the end of World War II, to say nothing of what they do in far more extreme ways to the internal politics of other countries. Noam Chomsky was on this very program several months ago, and he talked about how the entire world is laughing at this indignation from the United States -- "How dare you interfere in our democracy!" -- when the United States not only has continuously in the past done, but continues to do far more extreme interference in the internal politics of all kinds of countries, including Russia .

GLENN GREENWALD : The United States funds oppositional groups inside Russia. The United States sent advisers and all kinds of operatives to try and elect Boris Yeltsin in the mid-1990s, because they perceived, accurately, that he was a drunk who would serve the interests of the United States more than other candidates who might have won. The United States interferes in Russian politics, and they interfere in their cyber systems, and they invade their email systems, and they invade all kinds of communications all the time. And so, to treat this as though it's some kind of aberrational event, I think, is really kind of naive .

GLENN GREENWALD : It wasn't just Hillary Clinton in 2016 who lost this election. The entire Democratic Party has collapsed as a national political force over the last decade. They've lost control of the Senate and of the House and of multiple statehouses and governorships. They're decimated as a national political force. And the reason is exactly what Joe said. They become the party of international globalization. They're associated with Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires and corporate interests, and have almost no connection to the working class. And that is a much harder conversation to have about why the Democrats have lost elections than just blaming a foreign villain and saying it's because Vladimir Putin ran some fake Facebook ads and did some phishing emails. And I think that until we put this in perspective, about what Russia did in 2016 and the reality that the U.S. does that sort of thing all the time to Russia and so many other countries, we're going to just not have the conversation that we need to be having about what these international institutions, that are so sacred -- NATO and free trade and international trade organizations -- have done to people all over the world, and the reason they're turning to demagogues and right-wing extremists because of what these institutions have done to them. That's the conversation we need to be having, but we're not having, because we're evading it by blaming everything on Vladimir Putin. And that, to me, is even more dangerous for our long-term prospects than this belligerence that's in the air about how we ought to look at Moscow.

Indictments and First Year Law

Mish : I now wish to return to a statement my friend made regarding the idea " No question Russia did it ".

From Glenn Greenwald

As far as the indictments from Mueller are concerned, it's certainly the most specific accounting yet that we've gotten of what the U.S. government claims the Russian government did in 2016. But it's extremely important to remember what every first-year law student will tell you, which is that an indictment is nothing more than the assertions of a prosecutor unaccompanied by evidence. The evidence won't be presented until a trial or until Robert Mueller actually issues a report to Congress.

And so, I would certainly hope that we are not at the point, which I think we seem to be at, where we are now back to believing that when the CIA makes statements and assertions and accusations, or when prosecutors make statements and assertions and accusations, unaccompanied by evidence that we can actually evaluate, that we're simply going to believe those accusations on faith, especially when the accusations come from George W. Bush's former FBI Director Robert Mueller, who repeatedly lied to Congress about Iraq and a whole variety of other issues. So, I think there we need some skepticism.

But even if the Russians did everything that Robert Mueller claims in that indictment that they did, in the scheme of what the U.S. and the Russians do to one another and other countries, I think to say that this is somehow something that we should treat as a grave threat, that should mean that we don't talk to them or that we treat them as an enemy, is really irrational and really quite dangerous.

Mish - Six Questions

  1. Is this a trial or a witch hunt?
  2. Do we need to see the evidence or do we believe known liars?
  3. Is Trump guilty of treason? Before we even see proof Putin was involved?
  4. Is the CIA incapable of fabricating evidence?
  5. Even if Russia interfered in the election, why should anyone have expected otherwise?
  6. Has everyone forgotten the US lies on WMDs already?

Irrational and Dangerous

I don't know about you, but I have no reason to believe known liars and hypocrites. I disagree with Trump all the time, in fact, more often than not. The amount of venom on Trump over this is staggering. Adding a missing word, I stand by my previous statement: " Nearly every political action that generates this much complete nonsense and hysteria from the Left and Right is worthy of immense praise."

If you disagree please provide examples. The only two I can come up with are Pearl Harbor and 911. In both, the US was directly attacked. For rebuttal purposes I offer Vietnam, Syria, Iraq, Russia, Iran, WWI, treatment of Japanese-American citizens in WWII, and McCarthyism. Greenwald accurately assesses the situation as "really irrational and really quite dangerous." Indeed. And if indictments and accusations were crimes, we wouldn't need a jury.


Free This -> clymer Tue, 07/17/2018 - 07:25 Permalink

No bitch here but you, bulgars!

If the DNC servers were hacked, they are evidence, where is the fucking evidence now? At the bottom of the Hudson River with concrete shoes that's where! Where are the Anwan servers, Podesta's, Wieners....where are Hillary's emails?

Fuck this is getting out of hand. All of the top spooks in the alphabet agencies are complicit, DOJ too, right up to the skinny faggot in the rainbow house!

Getting close to the time for some real fucking justice in America!

Sic Semper Tyrannis

Here is an update to the map I posted yesterday about where not to be, not sure I agree one way or the other, you decide:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn5Io6mZqXM

And Preper Nurse on wild medcines:

Don't forget to watch "Lifesaving Advice From Dirty Rotten Survival's Dave Canterbury" I posted yesterday, of all watch that.

One way to zero in iron sights on your AR-15:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=934LFFsC5Dw

And my all time favorite Uncle Ted, baby, what an interview, a must watch as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5NelZNtw_U

freedommusic -> HockeyFool Tue, 07/17/2018 - 07:37 Permalink

Rule 101 of the upside down - project un to others the crimes that YOU commit...

eclectic syncretist -> 847328_3527 Tue, 07/17/2018 - 09:09 Permalink

Even if it were found to be true that Russia (and not Seth Rich) was the source of the info that revealed to the American people (and the world) that the DNC conspired to rig its own primary election, my response would be one of gratitude for shining a light on the cockroaches.

Laowei Gweilo -> Miskondukt Tue, 07/17/2018 - 09:35 Permalink

the zeal with which MSN and especially CNN Wolf Blitzer now defend the 'Intelligence Community' as a singular infallible flawless entity is incredible ...

... in the context of the war they waged on that very same 'Intelligence Community' in light of it being wrong about WMD in Iraq

... or the Snowden-gate about it spying on Americans.

most two-faced biased blindly-agended-based manipulative thing I've ever seen on CNN

inosent -> Snaffew Tue, 07/17/2018 - 10:48 Permalink

Russian hack? hahaha, as if. Everybody knows it was an inside job. That sort of thing with all the emails is inside -> Seth Rich is a good place to look.

BESIDES! LET'S NOT FORGET ABOUT THE CONTENT OF THOSE EMAILS!!!

This guy in the article above that says Hellary "must" be given the nomination because Russia 'hacked' the election. Great! I'll be very happy to see that nasty bitch go down a second time, based on the substance of her twisted, hypocritical, and consummately evil character.

Super Sleuth -> css1971 Tue, 07/17/2018 - 13:55 Permalink

BILL BROWDER: The CIA Asset and Neocon Zionist Who Was Used to Restart the Cold War with Russia

---

http://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=101126

" Deep State agent Bill Browder operated at the very nexus of the
U.S. and U.K. Intelligence Communities that conspired to produce
both the fake Russiagate and very real Spygate ."

-- Intelligence Analyst & Former Military Officer

janus -> Super Sleuth Tue, 07/17/2018 - 15:24 Permalink

***It is a tale, full of sound and fury, told by idiots, signifying nothing***

how can we be expected to take any of this shit seriously?

-- avowed globalist-communists opposed to any nation's sovereignty, repulsed at the faintest wiff of patriotism scolding us for our lack of patriotism?

-- political parties, intelligence agencies, the media and much of the judiciary attempting to undermine the democratic process for over a year and a half, delegitamize a Presidency, vilify half the nation, stoke the flames of enmity...now they kvetch about our skepticism?

no, langley, we do not trust you. no, media, your agitprop has no currency.

of all the reasons for hillary's defeat, no one ever mentions the fact that she campaigned on a platform of war...WWIII, no less. starting in May/June of 2016, cankles started pounding the war drums. in a scenario so stale and overused as to threadbare, the left initiated the process of demonizing russia and russians.

Trump supporters are not only pro-American, they/we are anti-war. forever spinning in a manic and frenzied swirl of hysterics, the left often loses sight of this...but as much is to be expected, in that the left doesn't think, they instead parrot the tropes fed to them on a daily basis, forever unable to assemble the fragments of these disparate priorities into a cogent whole. but if they were able to arrange this mess into coherence, the image would terrify them with its ghastliness. the left openly and earnestly serves the forces of evil -- in fact, they are the forces of evil. they depend on the idiocy and credulity of their minions to keep this reality obscured. fortunately for the left, their supporters are sufficiently dull and benighted to keep the truth forever blighted.

maybe we should play the victoria nuland tapes again...as a refresher:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QxZ8t3V_bk

we not only interfered with Ukranian/Russian politics, we overtly overthrew a democratically elected government, attempted to provoke Russia to respond militarily, started a civil war in the Ukraine, (downed a commercial airliner in a disgusting FF), funded and trained Nazis and left the nation in shambles. these are the same people calling Trump a traitor. these are the same forces who demand faith and fidelity.

it's gone...no one trusts (((you))) anymore...we know you're nothing but a bunch of bloodthristy satanists...your time is in eclipse, the more you struggle, the tighter the constraints.

"fuck the EU (for balking at WWIII)" Victoria Nuland, Clinton apparatchik, globalists, communist, satanist, kike.

janus

I Am Jack's Ma -> MoreSun Tue, 07/17/2018 - 14:44 Permalink

Zionists are a large part of the problem (and remember what Biden said) but not at all the whole problem. Don't hyperfocus - the 'Deep State' is chock full of non-Jewish warmongers and traitors. In fact the top traitors are guys like Brennan, Comey, McCabe, Clapper, Clinton, Obama, and Strozk.

Creative_Destruct -> King of Ruperts Land Tue, 07/17/2018 - 10:23 Permalink

" The US fabricated evidence to start the Vietnam war and the US fabricated WMD talk on the second war in Iraq. US intelligence had no idea the Berlin Wall was about to fall. The US meddled in Russia supporting a drunk named Yeltsin because we erroneously thought we could control him."

YUP! AMEN.

It's amusing to me that the Leftist's NOW have a blind-faith trust in government, whereas during the Vietnam war, and at the start of the Iraq war the opposite was (justifiably) the case.

And remember, the [neoliberal] Left was all OVER how we manipulated Russia into an Oligarchy:

https://www.thenation.com/article/harvard-boys-do-russia/

Radical Marijuana -> HopefulCynical Tue, 07/17/2018 - 12:34 Permalink

"Marxists" ???

Follow the money to its source.

There is nothing in either the dictionary definition of "Marxism," nor the social facts, which justifies using that label for the ruling classes, the pyramidion people of the globalized social pyramid systems.

The root of the runaway "mass hysteria" is the long history of the control over the public money supplies being captured by the best organized gangsters, the banksters. There is an overwhelming amount of historical evidence regarding how that happened. See Excellent Videos on Money Systems .

Some of that evidence indicates some of those banksters were behind the promotion of messianic Marxism through the Russian Revolution which resulted in the Soviet Union. (Less compelling evidence indicates similar factors were at play in the later Chinese Revolution.)

The original Marxism was relatively scientific, for its time and place in history. However, it was messianic Marxism which became the ideologies of so-called "communist" movements, all of which necessarily ended up being dominated by their own kinds of best available professional hypocrites, resulting in even steeper social pyramid systems than previously.

It is RIDICULOUS to label the banksters as "Marxists." The comment posted above by HopefulCynical only begins to make some sense AFTER one substitutes some label which refers to the banksters , rather than to some ideologies which those banksters used to covertly advance their overall agenda.

Ideologies which become publicly significant are always systems of organized lies, which operate robberies. There is actually only one political system: organized crime. Therefore, contemporary geopolitical events make more sense after one recognizes who are the best organized gangsters , which are dominating civilization, including dominating the mass media's public presentation of those events.

While President Trump is correctly presenting the degree to which the mainstream media is based on "fake news," President Trump deliberately does not engage in deeper analysis of that phrase "fake news," but rather, used his oratory skill to capture that phrase, and thereby turn it against those who originally intended to use that phrase against President Trump.

The comment above by HopefulCynical was overwhelmingly up-voted by its readers. Tragically, the indicates the degree to which so many people want to believe in bullshit.

"The Marxists who've run America (and the rest of the world) into the ground for so many decades ..."

It was NOT "Marxists," but rather the banksters, who've run America (and the rest of the world) ... for so many decades. In particular, since 1971, when the American Dollar lost its last connection with the material world, after the last vestiges of money backed by precious metals were cut, the banksters have been able to astronomically amplify their frauds, as enforced by governments, to become about exponentially more fraudulent.

That about exponentially increasing fraudulence, as demonstrated by debt slavery systems generating numbers which have become debt insanities, is at the root of the runaway manifestation of "mass hysteria" in America (and the rest of the world.)

The debt slavery systems were made and maintained by the international bankers, as the best organized gangsters, the banksters, whose persistent and prolonged participation in the funding of all aspects of the political processes (including schooling and mass media) has resulted in the public powers of government being primarily used to back up the privatized interests of big banks, and the big corporations that grew up around those big banks being able to issue the public money supplies out of nothing as debts.

Those real social facts do NOT correspond to the dictionary definition of Marxism, nor to any other goofy ideologies which were popularized to conceal the real social facts, and permit public discussion of those facts to be drowned under the bullshit of false fundamental dichotomies and the related impossible ideals.

There continues to be a lot of awful nonsense presented in articles and comments published on Zero Hedge , because of the degree to which the authors of those like to continue to believe in their favourite kinds of impossible ideals, by mislabeling what they do not like in erroneous ways, which ignore both the actual facts and definitions of those labels.

BANKSTERS' "psychopathic dreams of total control" require that it will be possible for systems based on being able to enforce frauds can continue to become about exponentially more fraudulent. However, endless exponential growth is absolutely impossible.

Rising popular awareness and resistance to the banksters is manifesting through various political movements. However, so far, those movements continue to mostly be forms of controlled "opposition." Anyone who continues to misuse the labels such as "capitalism versus communism," or abuses the label "Marxist," etc., is still actually a form of controlled "opposition," because of the degree to which their thinking and communication is still based on taking for granted the biggest bullies' bullshit, which has become the banksters' bullshit .

After the banksters kicked the shit out of Russia during the 20th Century, Russia has returned having learned something from those experiences. The results are that Russia is slightly more able and willing to advance its national interests against the international banksters. That is the main reason why Russia is being demonized by those who are still almost totally the banksters' puppets.

President Trump appears to be a relative anomaly, whose social successfulness was based on the apparently increasing anomalies, due to the systems based on enforced frauds becoming about exponentially more fraudulent. It was that diffuse awareness of mass media propaganda being systematic lying, serving the interests of the owners of those mass media, that was one of the factors which enabled President Trump to win the election.

Some of his most significant campaign promises were to diminish the demonization of Russia, and thereby diminish the threat of war with weapons of mass destruction spinning out of control, which continues to potentially be the greatest of threats, which are somewhat under human control, but which look like those are going more and more out of control.

However, in my opinion, President Trump tends to NOT go beyond superficially correct analysis of the accumulating apparent anomalies, whose root causes are the systems of enforced frauds being amplified by about exponentially advancing technologies to become about exponentially more fraudulent, which factors are at the root of the accumulating "mass hysteria."

The best overall ways to approach understanding current geopolitical events are that the excessively successful applications of the methods of organized crime through the political processes are resulting in civilization manifesting runaway criminal insanities, which situation is so serious that people who attempt to reduce that insanity are attacked by those who want to increase that insanity.

The deeper reasons for the underlying issues are that there must be some death control systems, precisely because endless exponential growth is absolutely impossible, and therefore, death control systems develop to stop that happening, which drives those death control systems to become murder systems which maximize maliciousness.

The longer term consequences of the social successfulness of maximized maliciousness are that the biggest bullies' bullshit almost totally dominates civilization, including the layers of controlled "opposition" that surround the central core of the best organized gangsters, which have become the banksters . Hence, most of those who believe that they are "resisting" continue to think and communicate in ways which still take for granted most of that bullshit .

VWAndy -> Radical Marijuana Tue, 07/17/2018 - 12:57 Permalink

Yep. These false ideologies are just cover stories to keep people from focusing on the corruption.

Turns out Hypocrisy is the only form of government we have ever known.

[Jul 18, 2018] This indictment is nearly identical to the Jan. 6, 2017 ODNI Report, which came from a handful of unnamed analysts from the CIA and FBI. There is very little new information in well over a year. Right there, this raises red flags. Who were these analysts?

Looks like both Rosenstein and Mueller are pawn in a larger game...
Jul 18, 2018 | consortiumnews.com
Pandas4peace , July 14, 2018 at 8:40 am

Two points:
1. This indictment is nearly identical to the Jan. 6, 2017 ODNI Report, which came from a handful of unnamed analysts from the CIA and FBI. There is very little new information in well over a year. Right there, this raises red flags. Who were these analysts?

2. Did Mueller/Rosenstein consult with any foreign policy advisors? Does meddling in the president's national security affairs put the country at ris?

It's a dangerous game and a slippery slope. For the sake of the country, they better be right.

[Jul 18, 2018] Mueller should be prosecuted for violating the Logan Act. The timing of this is an illegal attempt to interfere with Foreign Policy.

Jul 18, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

O Society July 14, 2018 at 6:20 am Rosenstein makes the announcement. 8 minutes into this video he states:
There are no allegations in the indictment any American knew they were in contact with Russians or with a Russian operation,
any American committed a crime in relation to this,
or that the operation changed or influenced the election.

http://youtu.be/mYXCsxf9TsE

Fist thoughts:
If there is no allegation (evidence) the operation influenced the election, then why do we care about any of this?
Seems odd no Americans did anything worthy of investigating. Exonerating the DNC/ DCCC of all wrong doing?
How does Rosenstein (or anyone in the FBI) know Russians did this "hack" without having access to examine the DNC computers? Are we going by what CrowdStrike says they found? John McCarthy , July 14, 2018 at 5:08 am

Mueller should be prosecuted for violating the Logan Act. The timing of this is an illegal attempt to interfere with Foreign Policy.

Mike Lamb , July 14, 2018 at 6:12 am

Right on!
Apparently Mueller couldn't get a U-2 to fly over Russia and get shot down (which in 1960 scuttled a summit between President Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Khrushchev).

[Jul 18, 2018] Fugitive Cop Says He's Behind the DNC Leaks

Notable quotes:
"... Webb (for what it's worth): "They're really not Trump's Russians; they're really not Putin's Russians -- they're really Rosenstein and Comey's Russians." ..."
Jul 18, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Marko , July 14, 2018 at 6:40 am

How coincidental that just the day before the announcement of the indictments , The Daily Beast published an extensive hit-piece on John Mark Dougan , who has admitted setting up the DCLeaks website that was used to release some of the earlier leaks :

"Fugitive Cop Says He's Behind the DNC Leaks. It's His Latest Hoax. A Florida cop turned hacker who fled to Russia to escape the FBI claims Seth Rich leaked him DNC documents. But his story is full of holes."

https://www.thedailybeast.com/fugitive-cop-says-hes-behind-the-dnc-leaks-its-his-latest-hoax?ref=scroll

Also , True Pundit suspects some of the language used in the indictments was cribbed from a related lawsuit filed by George Webb :

"Mueller Plagiarizes Right-Wing YouTube Journalist's Lawsuit Against Podesta in New Russian Indictments; DOJ's Big Splash Appears Fabricated"

https://truepundit.com/mueller-plagiarizes-right-wing-youtube-journalists-lawsuit-against-podesta-in-new-russian-indictments-dojs-big-splash-appears-fabricated/

Gen Dao , July 14, 2018 at 8:09 am

George Webb is not a right-winger. He is a Bernie supporter. LOL. Still, the similarity of the wording suggests that the indictment is meant not only as an attempt to bolster the Russiagate fiction but also to defend Hillary and Podesta against charges of corruption, rigging the Dem primary, and incompetence and perhaps allow Hillary to run in 2020 or at lease to choose who the Dem candidate will be. It is also, of course, meant to sabotage detente with Russia and damage both Trump and Bernie Sanders. Sanders is probably regarded as even more dangerous than Trump by the deep state and by the corrupt, no-talent leaders of the pathetic Dem party -- just look at Shumer's ridiculous and unpatriotic demand that Trump cancel the summit. The current Dem leaders have absolutely nothing positive to offer the American people in terms of foreign policy and do nothing but repeat neocon nonsense, but the deep state supports the Dems at the moment because they want to see Trump impeached and Bernie make a fool of himself by criticizing Russia with no evidence. Bernie lost a lot of support with his recent uninformed Russophobic statement. The strong implied focus on defending Podesta and by further implication Hillary, obvious from the similarities with the Webb lawsuit, shows the real aim of the indictments. As Lauria points out, it's all for internal consumption. But there are several apparent contradictions in the indictment, and those contradictions will be no doubt be pointed out in the coming days by computer experts, so this indictment may have no lasting effect outside of people who are already True Believers in Russiagate. Even so, the failure to interview Assange and Craig Murray is truly shocking and disappointing.

Alcuin , July 14, 2018 at 10:49 am

George Webb has talked with Bill Binney and despite being somewhat eccentric should not be dismissed out of hand. He is rumored to be former Mossad. From his videos of the last three days (days 15, 16, 17) it appears that he thinks Russian-born hackers living in the USA were indeed involved, but that they were not working for the Russian government but rather for various Americans (including well-known American politicians), concentrating on economic espionage.

Remember that Assange when questioned repeatedly emphasized that that the emails did not come from Russian "state" actors. Putin recently seems to have wanted to imply the same point.
According to Webb the hackers received their training from Russian military intelligence.
Webb also ties the hacking and espionage to the wider picture of pipeline politics in Europe and the Middle East. Even if Webb is wrong, or if he represents Israeli interests, it's an interesting view that is worth investigating.

Alcuin , July 16, 2018 at 2:18 am

Webb (for what it's worth): "They're really not Trump's Russians; they're really not Putin's Russians -- they're really Rosenstein and Comey's Russians."

Ben , July 14, 2018 at 8:13 am

Forensic analysis from forensicator:

https://theforensicator.wordpress.com/
http://g-2.space/

His analysis of the metadata indicates the information was copied to a USB.

[Jul 18, 2018] The Publicly Available Evidence Doesn't Support Russian Gov Hacking of 2016 Election

Notable quotes:
"... Crowdstrike's Danger Close report , which was supposed to be the nail in the coffin that proved the GRU was involved in the DNC hack, has been repudiated by the Ukrainian government, the IISS whose data they misused, and the builder of the military app that they claimed was compromised. ..."
"... The Reality Winner leak of a classified NSA document contained a graphic that used different colors of lines to qualify the data (confirmed, analyst judgment, contextual information). The line that connected the "actors" who sent out the spearphishing email to various electoral organizations with the GRU was yellow (analyst judgment) and included the words "probably within"; meaning that this was not a communications intercept. ..."
"... There are many other problems with the DNC investigation starting with the fact that no government agency actually did the forensics work. It was done by a company with strong ties to the Clinton campaign and an economic incentive to blame foreign governments for cyber attacks on evidence that was either flimsy or non-existent. ..."
"... Does any of this mean that the Russian government didn't do it? No. It only means that there is insufficient public evidence to say that it did. ..."
Jul 18, 2018 | medium.com

Three days ago, the Washington Post ran this article by Philip Bump  --  " Here's the public evidence that supports the idea that Russia interfered in the 2016 election ".

This gist of the article was, since we can't know what the classified evidence is that supports the U.S. government's finding in favor of Russian government intereference, there is plenty of public evidence which should convince us.

Bump is wrong about that. The public evidence isn't enough to identify Russian government involvement, or even identify the nationality of the hackers involved. That doesn't mean that the Russian government isn't responsible. It means that we don't know enough to say who is responsible based solely on the publicly known evidence, including classified evidence that's been leaked.

Here's a recap:

The X-Agent malware used against the DNC is not exclusive to Russia. The source code has been acquired by at least one Ukrainian hacker group and one European cybersecurity company, which means that others have it as well. "Exclusive use" is a myth that responsible cybersecurity companies need to stop using as proof of attribution.

The various attacks attributed to the GRU were a comedy of errors ; not the actions of a sophisticated adversary.

The FBI/DHS Grizzly Steppe report was a disaster ( here , here , here , and here ).

Crowdstrike's Danger Close report , which was supposed to be the nail in the coffin that proved the GRU was involved in the DNC hack, has been repudiated by the Ukrainian government, the IISS whose data they misused, and the builder of the military app that they claimed was compromised.

The Arizona and Illinois attacks against electoral databases that were blamed on the Russian government were actually conducted by English-speaking hackers .

The Reality Winner leak of a classified NSA document contained a graphic that used different colors of lines to qualify the data (confirmed, analyst judgment, contextual information). The line that connected the "actors" who sent out the spearphishing email to various electoral organizations with the GRU was yellow (analyst judgment) and included the words "probably within"; meaning that this was not a communications intercept.

There are many other problems with the DNC investigation starting with the fact that no government agency actually did the forensics work. It was done by a company with strong ties to the Clinton campaign and an economic incentive to blame foreign governments for cyber attacks on evidence that was either flimsy or non-existent.

Does any of this mean that the Russian government didn't do it? No. It only means that there is insufficient public evidence to say that it did.

[Jul 18, 2018] That information was no more the private property of the DNC and Clinton Campaign than a plan to rob a bank belongs to the robbers. Isn't that so, Mr. Mueller?

Jul 18, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

ill-gotten goods are undeserving of protection of law. The DNC and Podesta had no legitimate expectation of privacy in their combinations to defraud the public and steal elections.

It's been imputed that the Russians did this to damage the reputation of Hillary Clinton. To take the alleged damage to reputation angle to its conclusion, truth is an entirely sufficient defense to any charge of libel. What was revealed by an alleged hack was the truth, something that is entirely lacking in the rest of this affair.

As for the alleged theft and public release of email, ill-gotten goods are undeserving of protection of law. The DNC and Podesta had no legitimate expectation of privacy in their combinations to defraud the public and steal elections.

The Russian GRU is accused of revealing that the people who run the DNC and Clinton campaign committee colluded with each other to steal the nomination. The allegedly hacked emails show what they really did and thought during the fraudulent nomination of Hillary Clinton. It might be argued, that whomever revealed the truth actually did a public service for the American people. An odd sort of "act of war," that.

Finally, individual officials and military officers have a limited immunity and are not normally indicted by foreign states for intelligence activities such as electronic surveillance and hacking across borders. That is where the element of harm comes in. The only real precedent for this is the Rainbow Warrior case. In 1985, French intelligence officers blew up and sank a Greenpeace ship by that name anchored in Auckland, NZ harbour, killing a passenger, a Dutch photographer. A UN arbitrator held in that case the French agents were not immune under customary international law to prosecution in a New Zealand court and could be individually tried and jailed, but only because of the death of the victim as part of "a criminal act of violence against property in New Zealand . . . done without regard for innocent civilians." Greenpeace was additionally awarded damages in the UK under international Maritime Law because the vessel was a British-flagged ship.

Also bear in mind, the US and UK both provide immunity to their own intelligence officers and law enforcement officers for hacking and related computer crimes committed against foreign powers. The UK takes that a step further and exempts police officers for domestic hacking:

See, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/15/intelligence-officers-ha...

This is a dangerous precedent, and the likely result is to ignite retaliation and further exacerbate U.S.-Russian tensions. The entire staffs of the NSA, GCHQ and GRU could be similarly "prosecuted," but what will that accomplish? Even if every word of the indictment is fact, the indictment itself violates the norms of international law and this latest "Russiagate" escalation by Mueller seems intended to ratchet up the New Cold War.

That is why "Russiagate" is a legal sham, in my opinion. Even if the alleged Russian hack of the DNC email actually happened as claimed, and even if the hack was with bad intent, there was no real crime or harm in the release of that information. That information was no more the private property of the DNC and Clinton Campaign than a plan to rob a bank belongs to the robbers. Isn't that so, Mr. Mueller?

[Jul 18, 2018] Tomorrow, I am going to get in contact with Special Counsel Robert Mueller and tell him that I have found the real people behind the hacking of the 2016 US election and they aren't Russian they are Chinese!

Jul 18, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

The Rev Kev , July 16, 2018 at 8:25 am

Tomorrow, I am going to get in contact with Special Counsel Robert Mueller and tell him that I have found the real people behind the hacking of the 2016 US election and they aren't Russian – they are Chinese! I am prepared to give names and so to give everybody the scoop, here they are-

Li Keqiang, Zhang Dejiang, Yu Zhengsheng, Zhou Qiang, Cao Jianming, Li Yuanchao, Han Zheng, Sun Chunlan, Hu Chunhua and Liu He.

They are all real names of real Chinese government officials but unfortunately, as they are Chinese, they cannot be extradited out of China in the same way that Russians can't be extradited out of Russia. And like Special Counsel Robert Mueller, I have no real proof that they did it and cannot bring them to a US court for trial so you will all have to take my word for it so we're cool, right?

[Jul 18, 2018] Has Mueller Caught the Hackers

Notable quotes:
"... Rosenstein, Mueller and Strozk are clever, privileged boys who have always been able, to bamboozle their way out of a jam. So we have this scary, claptrap yarn about twelve ethereal "Russian Agents" ((1) Boris (2) Natashia (3) ..) who, being in Russia, can never be extradited or interrogated. Therefore, the narrative can be endlessly developed. The only constraint is the imagination of the second-rate story writers. An ongoing serial wow ..."
"... Credit to Isikoff for having the courage to face a skeptic, even if his attitude is indignant that Mate ain't buying what he's selling. ..."
"... The Guardian ..."
Jul 18, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

clarky90 , July 16, 2018 at 8:14 am

Rosenstein, Mueller and Strozk are clever, privileged boys who have always been able, to bamboozle their way out of a jam. So we have this scary, claptrap yarn about twelve ethereal "Russian Agents" ((1) Boris (2) Natashia (3) ..) who, being in Russia, can never be extradited or interrogated. Therefore, the narrative can be endlessly developed. The only constraint is the imagination of the second-rate story writers. An ongoing serial wow

I believe that Seth Rich was the leaker. What are the FBI/CIA/DOJ doing to investigate Seth's murder? Not much.

However, the FBI/CIA/DOJ, ARE consumed with The Hunting of the Russian Snark ."It's a Snark!" was the sound that first came to their ears,
And seemed almost too good to be true.
Then followed a torrent of laughter and cheers:
Then the ominous words "It's a Boo -- "

Then, silence. Some fancied they heard in the air
A weary and wandering sigh
That sounded like "-jum!" but the others declare
It was only a breeze that went by.

They hunted till darkness came on, but they found
Not a button, or feather, or mark,
By which they could tell that they stood on the ground
Where the Baker had met with the Snark.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away --
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43909/the-hunting-of-the-snark

I have watched Rosenstein, Mueller and Strozk testifying over the last months. Creeps. I wouldn't leave a pet Labradoodle in their care, much less entrust them with the defense of "Our" Democracy

DJG , July 16, 2018 at 8:20 am

An important point:

AARON MATE: I have no idea. Whoever it is, I think Guccifer is very sloppy. And given how sophisticated we're told Russian military intelligence is supposed to be, they didn't do a very good job of covering their tracks.

Maté makes an excellent observation here. Further, if you go to Guccifer's site, his style is U.S. hipster English. It is possible that the Russians are that adept at U.S. hipster English, or have suborned some hipster from Brooklyn, or, maybe, that Guccifer is an American who has some other agenda.

Interestingly, in all of this hacking, we haven't heard what happened to Hillary Clinton's 30,000 yoga e-mails, which would be a masterpiece of contemplation of yoga, on the level of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. We read repeated allegations that the Clinton Family server was hacked. How is it that the injured party here is only the Democratic National Committee?

And how many of these dangerous Russians will be extradited to the U S of A? You can't have a finding of fact without a trial, and conveniently for aggrieved people like Isikoff, there isn't going to be a trial.

Quanka , July 16, 2018 at 8:47 am

Aaron Mate does a fine job in this interview of pushing back against unproven claims. No hysteria, no yelling. But point by point he just takes Isikoff to task, calmly. He even manages two separate digs without staking a high moral ground: Isikoff's own previous reporting on (lack of) WMD, and a clip from a lying Robert Mueller in front of congress in 2003.

So I was very impressed with this interview. As someone who's taught myself the read the lies in the MSM this was a clinic in how to get a major journalist (Isikoff) to make concessions that essentially wipe out his argument without getting into a yelling match.

JohnnyGL , July 16, 2018 at 1:48 pm

He's done some of the best reporting on this story that I can recall. Credit to Isikoff for having the courage to face a skeptic, even if his attitude is indignant that Mate ain't buying what he's selling.

It kills me that the only 'evidence' supporting Russia-gate is the public statements and testimony of a bunch of high level government officials that are 1) proven liars and 2) have reason to believe they'll never be held to account for these lies.

If you saw Strzok's testimony the other day, you'd have seen a number of Dems absolutely willing to lay down in front of oncoming traffic to 'protect' the FBI. If my reps were that dedicated to protecting me from the horror of facing a series of probing questions, I'd feel pretty comfortable that I was untouchable, too!

Brooklin Bridge , July 16, 2018 at 5:08 pm

Credit to Isikoff for having the courage to face a skeptic, even if his attitude is indignant that Mate ain't buying what he's selling.

Good catch! I noticed this also, though I'm not as sure it's to Isikoff's credit. Mate has positively ripped to shreds at least one other Isikoff like stooge (Luke Harding of The Guardian ) in this interview: https://therealnews.com/stories/wheres-the-collusion-2 which really makes one wonder why Isikoff accepted such a challenge. (I include the link for the benefit of others – it looks like you are already aware of it). After all, he has basically nothing the other one didn't have other than perhaps a conviction he knows some secret alchemy that: when lies reach a certain volume, or quantity, or momentum, they miraculously transform to truth.

If anything, I suspect Isikoff is simply as full of himself as Luke Harding. Their basic argument (it must be true because of the sheer volume and detail of all the allegations) is exactly the same with Isikoff only having the advantage of yet another heaping helping of allegation pudding that he knows full well will never see the light of verification.

As an aside, did you notice Isikoff's sour sign off? I think he was quite aware Mate had served him some serious egg on the chin and was none too happy about it. Just my take on it.

[Jul 18, 2018] Mueller's Latest Indictment Contradicts Evidence In The Public Domain Disobedient Media

Notable quotes:
"... NOTE: There will likely be various amendments made to this article over the next 24 hours. ..."
"... So, in fairness, there is actually circumstantial evidence to suggest an overlap as Guccifer 2.0 clearly had Podesta's emails and it looks like the spearphishing attack used to snare Podesta's emails was identical to one that was attributed to the acquisition of emails published by DCLeaks. ..."
"... (NOTE: CrowdStrike decided to start investigating the NGP-VAN breach within a week of Podesta's emails being acquired, three months after the December 2015 incident) ..."
"... (using the publicly accessible default server in France) ..."
"... (in which he used ":)" at a far higher frequency) ..."
"... (in one of the documents, change tracking had been left on and recorded someone in a PST timezone saving one of Guccifer 2.0's documents after the documents had being manipulated in the Russian timezones!) ..."
"... (which was actually inconsistent with aspects of English language that Russians typically struggle with). ..."
Jul 18, 2018 | disobedientmedia.com

July 15, 2018 July 15, 2018 Adam Carter

NOTE: There will likely be various amendments made to this article over the next 24 hours.

On July 13th, 2018, an indictment was filed by Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III.

This author is responding to the indictment because it features claims about Guccifer 2.0 that are inconsistent with what has been discovered about the persona, including the following:


The first piece of malware at the DNC identified by Crowdstrike as relating to "Fancy Bear," was compiled on 25 April, 2016. This used a C2 (command and control) IP address that, for the purposes of the APT group, had been inoperable for over a year. It was useful mostly as a signature for attributing it to "Fancy Bear."

Two additional pieces of malware were discovered at the DNC attributed to the same APT group. These were compiled on 5 May 2016 and 10 May 2016 while Robert Johnston was working with the DNC on CrowdStrike's behalf to counter the intrusion reported at the end of April and install Falcon.

References to the evidence covering all of this are available in the article: " Fancy Fraud, Bogus Bears & Malware Mimicry ".

This could be inferred from a number of things. DCLeaks was re-registered on 19 April 2016, however, what they published included Republicans and individuals that were not connected to the DNC. In fact, DCLeaks didn't start publishing anything relating to Clinton campaign staff until June/July 2016. There was also the fact that the daily frequency of emails in the DNC emails released by WikiLeaks increased dramatically from around 19 April 2016 , however, this wasn't indicative of the start of hacking activity but rather caused by a 30 day email retention policy combined with the fact that the emails were acquired between May 19th and May 25th.

There has been no technical evidence produced by those who had access to the DNC network demonstrating files were being manipulated or that malware was engaging in activity prior to this and by CrowdStrike's own admissions, many of the devices at the DNC were wiped in June. As such, it's unclear where this may have come from.

There's an issue here with the conflation of Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks. Why would Guccifer 2.0 have had an account at DCLeaks with which he had restricted access and could only manage a subset of the leaks (and only those relating to the DNC) while DCLeaks featured leaks covering those unconnected to and even opposing the DNC?

It also appears there may have been an effort to have people perceive Guccifer 2.0 as being associated with someone that claimed to have root access to DCLeaks too, however, this could only be demonstrated through the use of multimedia props.

It makes no sense that the GRU would have even used Guccifer 2.0 in the manner we now know he operated – it only caused any harm to Trump and served to undermine leaks due to the deliberate placement of Russian metadata that would give a false perception of Russians mishandling those documents (including the Trump research document found in Podesta's emails).

However, there is one interesting thing that does connect Podesta being phished with DCLeaks. As spotted by Stephen McIntyre – the syntax in the spearphishing emails for both Podesta and Rhinehart (whose leaked emails were published at DCLeaks) were identical .

So, in fairness, there is actually circumstantial evidence to suggest an overlap as Guccifer 2.0 clearly had Podesta's emails and it looks like the spearphishing attack used to snare Podesta's emails was identical to one that was attributed to the acquisition of emails published by DCLeaks.

Is there a reason for ambiguity when referencing WikiLeaks?

While he clearly had access to the Podesta emails (NOTE: CrowdStrike decided to start investigating the NGP-VAN breach within a week of Podesta's emails being acquired, three months after the December 2015 incident) , Guccifer 2.0 used those materials to fabricate evidence on 15 June 2016 implicating Russians and which, coincidentally appeared to support (but ultimately helped refute) multiple assertions made by CrowdStrike that the Trump Opposition report (actually sourced from Podesta's emails) was targeted by Guccifer 2.0 at the DNC in April 2016 – and that the theft of this specific file from the DNC – which, again, could not have been stolen from the DNC – had set off the " first alarm " indicating a security breach.

On 6 July 2016, Guccifer 2.0 released a batch of documents that were exclusively attachments to DNC emails that would later be released by WikiLeaks.

Guccifer 2.0 certainly didn't make a genuine effort to "conceal a Russian identity," far from it. The persona made decisions that would leave behind a demonstrable trail of Russian-themed breadcrumbs, examples include:

How have these identities been connected to the respective GRU officers? This query applies to additional identities mentioned throughout the indictment.

Where have these pseudonyms been cited in any of the research or evidence published in the past two years? Most seem to be new and were never referenced by the firms specifically investigated the relevant phishing campaigns in the past.

Unfortunately, the indictment itself provides no reference for us to ascertain what the individual attributions are based on.

We already know "X-Agent" has been used by Ukrainian hackers and its source code has been in the wild since 2013, it's entirely feasible others have acquired it's source code too.

How do we know for sure Morgachev was developing a version of it and that this is related to the DNC?

Again, everything found on Google relating to "blablabla1234565" is in relation to the indictment, where were these details during the past 2 years, where have they come from and how has X-Agent development/monitoring been traced back to this individual?

It's unlikely technical evidence of his testing was left behind in deployed malware.

Again, "Djangomagicdev" appears to be new .

There is a "realblatr" profile at https://djangopackages.org/profiles/realblatr/ but this doesn't indicate anything relevant to this and other results for "realblatr" seem to be about the indictment.

We know that whoever had the Podesta emails had far more damaging content on Hillary than that produced by Guccifer 2.0 or DCLeaks and we know Guccifer 2.0 had access to Podesta's emails. If it was the GRU and they wanted to harm Hillary, they had FAR better material do that with than what they chose to release.

DCLeaks featured leaks from those that were not involved in the US presidential election. Guccifer 2.0 only released content relating to the Democratic party and only content that was of little harm to the DNC leadership and Clinton's campaign.

Yandex.com is the domain usually given to people outside of Russia that use the Yandex service, in Russia it's yandex.ru by default.

This was something covered by Jeffrey Carr in " The Yandex Domain Problem ".

These started to appear in July, though it's still unclear how/why it was these individuals responsible.

[Jul 18, 2018] If Putin's people have wanted to "undermine our democracy", they must be enjoying a good laugh. Because Mueller and his team are doing a far better job of that than anything alleged in the indictment could have done.

Notable quotes:
"... I have read the entire indictment, more than once. As a lawyer, I suspect that little to none of what it asserts about supposed illegal activities could possibly be proven beyond a reasonable doubt according to the rules of evidence (unless some judge decides that actual evidence need not be presented, on "national-security" grounds, in which event the whole case would be exposed as nothing but a "show trial" or "kangaroo court"). The indictment appears to be little more than political theater, timed to embarrass Trump and Putin. Even Mueller cannot expect that there will ever be an actual trial of the defendants he has named. ..."
"... Even Stalin's show trials (to use a "Russian" analogy) were more credible than what Mueller has produced in the two indictments of Russians which he has obtained so far. ..."
"... More revealing is that the FBI supposedly is able to break through a maze of computer obfuscation and backtrack a highly convoluted e-conspiracy to named individuals in one of the (if not the) premier espionage outfits in the world -- the GRU -- but finds itself helpless in case after case in tracking down various perpetrators of "ransom ware" who have done significant economic damage to Americans over the last several years. How can one believe both of these observations to be true? ..."
"... Also, the indictment claims that the FBI has also broken through the maze of "anonymity" surrounding transactions in bitcoin (and apparently some other e-currencies). If this is true, that selling point for such currencies has now been exposed as hype. ..."
Jul 18, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Edwin Vieira , July 14, 2018 at 11:18 pm

I have read the entire indictment, more than once. As a lawyer, I suspect that little to none of what it asserts about supposed illegal activities could possibly be proven beyond a reasonable doubt according to the rules of evidence (unless some judge decides that actual evidence need not be presented, on "national-security" grounds, in which event the whole case would be exposed as nothing but a "show trial" or "kangaroo court"). The indictment appears to be little more than political theater, timed to embarrass Trump and Putin. Even Mueller cannot expect that there will ever be an actual trial of the defendants he has named.

If Putin's people have wanted to "undermine our democracy", they must be enjoying a good laugh. Because Mueller and his team are doing a far better job of that than anything alleged in the indictment could have done. Mueller is making "our democracy" the laughing stock of the entire thinking world with this drivel. Even Stalin's show trials (to use a "Russian" analogy) were more credible than what Mueller has produced in the two indictments of Russians which he has obtained so far.

More revealing is that the FBI supposedly is able to break through a maze of computer obfuscation and backtrack a highly convoluted e-conspiracy to named individuals in one of the (if not the) premier espionage outfits in the world -- the GRU -- but finds itself helpless in case after case in tracking down various perpetrators of "ransom ware" who have done significant economic damage to Americans over the last several years. How can one believe both of these observations to be true?

Also, the indictment claims that the FBI has also broken through the maze of "anonymity" surrounding transactions in bitcoin (and apparently some other e-currencies). If this is true, that selling point for such currencies has now been exposed as hype. Will the bitcoin market now react (as it should) in a violently negative manner? If it does not, would that not be a further indication that knowledgeable people consider the indictment fatuous?

[Jul 18, 2018] There really is no credibility left of the FBI. Why should I believe the Russians hacked the DNC and not a disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporter named Seth Rich leaked them to Wikileaks. The former British Ambassador Craig Murray says that is the case

Jul 18, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Mark , 2 hou rs ago

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) said at the time that their personal analysis indicated the data transfer rate was far too high to have occurred over the internet (22.7 Mbps). The organization concluded the 'hack' favoured an external device such as a thumb drive, used by someone who had physical access to the DNC server. That does not necessarily exclude the Russians, but it puts them near the back of a very large pack of possibilities, and VIPS' explanation is far more compelling than the serving intelligence agencies with their 'May haves' and 'Probablys'.

https://consortiumnews.com/...

The story has always been that Russia slipped the information to Wikileaks, who are an arm of Kremlin foreign policy. It could just as easily have been the Chinese, but it is more likely whoever took the data passed it directly to Wikileaks without going through another country. Regardless who took the information, it was all true, and if it made Mrs. Clinton look bad, that is a natural consequence of her having done bad things. The sort of bad things the electorate should know when making its decision. To suggest it should have been kept under wraps until after the election is monstrous, and Clinton made her case much worse by lying about the circumstances over and over in an attempt to keep the truth from the voters until after their decision was registered. It almost worked - she won the popular vote.

Pat Lang Mod -> Mark , 2 hours ago
It is not a question of could it have been the Chinese. It WAS the Chinese.
Biggee Mikeee , 6 hours ago
Just one question.

Is this bigger than Watergate?

smoothieX12 . -> Biggee Mikeee , 5 hours ago
Way bigger, once real bets and implications are considered both for the US and globally.
Fred -> TTG , 3 hours ago
"federal law states that gross negligence in handling the nation's intelligence can be punished criminally with prison time or fines." ....

"Memos show that at least three top FBI officials were involved in helping Comey fashion and edit the statement, including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, General Counsel James Baker and chief of staff Jim Rybicki."

http://thehill.com/homenews...

I'd say there are plenty of people who need to be charged for their conscious conduct as well as the cover up. The usual suspects seem to be happy to be talking abut Putin rather than putt'n her and her associates in jail.

Eric Newhill , 8 hours ago
I have been expecting this under the theory of a scorned and frightened woman with a career as a lawyer at risk (deals made?). Now there is concrete evidence of political bias by Strzok and others. Inference and speculation based on text message content is over. Not so sure that it derails Mueller though. He can claim that he dropped Strzok when the bias became obvious. However, it certainly brings heavy suspicion onto his special investigation. Very interesting situation.
Barbara Ann -> TTG , 5 hours ago
TTG

Can we infer that you consider Mueller's latest indictment factually correct - specifically wrt the GRU hacking the DNC & DCCC rather than it being a leak & false flag to try and "taint anything WikiLeaks might later publish", as VIPS allege? Very interested in your POV, as I am currently drawn towards Adam Carter's view that G2 is someone deliberately leaving Russian breadcrumbs.

https://disobedientmedia.co...

Harlan Easley -> TTG , 6 hours ago
I enjoy reading your comments on this blog. First, for your experience and second you seem to try to come to conclusions that are fair even if they are not the conclusions you desire.

If the Chinese Government stole Hillary Clinton's emails. That is proof that this whole narrative of "yea she had a server but so what. Nobody penetrated it so it doesn't matter". This is all I have heard for 2 plus years.

Now this. There really is no credibility left of the intelligence agency's if this can be covered over. So why should I believe the Russians hacked the DNC and not a disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporter named Seth Rich leaked them to Wikileaks. The former British Ambassador Craig Murray says that is the case. And if anything he seems almost too honest.

This is becoming a much bigger issue than Left versus Right. Right is right and wrong is wrong. Donald Trump's thought process is to disorganized and ADD to have colluded with the Russians.

If ideology is a cover for crime then this country is over.

[Jul 18, 2018] I can't even buy something from amazon with an account password Password . Yet Podesta can control the entire DNC without one security question?

Jul 18, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

SybilDefense -> inosent Tue, 07/17/2018 - 11:58 Permalink

One question could clear this up:

Mr Podesta, how long have you used "PASSWORD" as a password for your access to the DNC?

Ons24-%&@yy zfo-%78 - password the day before the hack, changed daily

Password - password use the day of the hack

I can't even buy something from amazon with an account password "Password". Yet he can control the entire DNC without one security question?

Trusting the gov since Reagan is laughable. Thinking Bush didn't create 9-11 is inexcusable. Simply Believing anything said by Strozck, FBI, CIA, DOJ Clinton clapper, comer Brennen et al is idiotic to the level of drinking koolaid at the church retreat. It just isn't being done (successfully).

Frogs gonna boil.

Say goodbye to your Dem friends or help them see the light of reason. Stupid does not last long in Darwin's evolutional theory.

[Jul 18, 2018] No one has refuted what was exposed in the hacks

Jul 18, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Stackers -> HockeyFool Tue, 07/17/2018 - 07:40 Permalink

Let's give these morons the point of "ok, Russia did interfere, they did hack DNC and Podesta, and it did cost Hillary election"

No one has refuted what was exposed in the "hacks"

So they "interfered" by exposing just how corrupt the DNC, Hillary, and her legions of career cronies actually are .... uh - Thank You ?

Free This -> Stackers Tue, 07/17/2018 - 07:45 Permalink

No proof of any hacks that I have seen, leaks are more likely the case - Seth Rich?!

Maybe Hillary's unsecured server was hacked, but she was allowed to wipe it with a fucking cloth ROFLMAO

Son of Loki -> Free This Tue, 07/17/2018 - 07:53 Permalink

Americans care about:

1) immigration;

2) jobs;

3) health care costs;

4) terrorism;

5) fbi corruption.

Americans do NOT care about:

1) Russia;

rejected -> Son of Loki Tue, 07/17/2018 - 09:35 Permalink

Americans care about:

1) immigration;

2) jobs;

3) health care costs;

4) terrorism;

5) fbi corruption.

You're right,,, and they are all still doing just fine.

1) immigration; up

2) jobs; unemployed... unchanged / up

3) health care costs; up

4) terrorism; up

5) fbi corruption. maxed.

[Jul 18, 2018] Page confirmed China penetration of Hillary bathroom server e-mail.

Notable quotes:
"... Sir, in my cynical old age, I have a hard time believing there will be any prosecution of the Deep State top echelons. The DOJ and FBI it seems are very focused on protecting their own. If Rosenstein is impeached then one could say the tide is turning. Otherwise it would appear to be more kabuki. ..."
Jul 18, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

"Former top FBI lawyer Lisa Page testified during two days of closed-door House hearings, revealing shocking new Intel against her old bosses at the Bureau, according the well-placed FBI sources.

Alarming new details on allegations of a bureau-wide cover up. Or should we say another bureau-wide cover up.

The embattled Page tossed James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and Bill Priestap among others under the Congressional bus, alleging the upper echelon of the FBI concealed intelligence confirming Chinese state-backed 'assets' had illegally acquired former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's 30,000+ "missing" emails, federal sources said.

The Russians didn't do it. The Chinese did, according to well-placed FBI sources.

And while Democratic lawmakers and the mainstream media prop up Russia as America's boogeyman, it was the ironically Chinese who acquired Hillary's treasure trove of classified and top secret intelligence from her home-brewed private server.

And a public revelation of that magnitude -- publicizing that a communist world power intercepted Hillary's sensitive and top secret emails -- would have derailed Hillary Clinton's presidential hopes. Overnight. But it didn't simply because it was concealed." True Pundit

------------

A woman scorned? Maybe, but Page has done a real job on these malefactors. And, who knows how many other penetrations of various kinds there were in Clinton's reign as SecState?

"You mean like with a towel?" Clinton mocked a reporter with that question when asked if her servers had been wiped clean. It is difficult to believe that there won't be prosecutions. pl

https://truepundit.com/fbi-lisa-page-dimes-out-top-fbi-officials-during-classified-house-testimony-bureau-bosses-covered-up-evidence-china-hacked-hillarys-top-secret-emails/

richardstevenhack , 8 hours ago

Putin offered to allow Mueller's team to go to Russia and interrogate the suspects in the Mueller indictment provided 1) that Russian investigators could sit in on the interrogations, and 2) that the US would allow Russian investigators to investigate people like Bill Browder in the US.

This would be done until the existing treaty which allows the US and Russia to cooperate in criminal investigation cases.

Vladimir Putin just made an unexpected offer to Mueller's team
http://theduran.com/vladimi...

Quote:

Now, let's get back to the issue of this 12 alleged intelligence officers of Russia. I don't know the full extent of the situation. But President Trump mentioned this issue. I will look into it.

So far, I can say the following. Things that are off the top of my head. We have an existing agreement between the United States of America and the Russian Federation, an existing treaty that dates back to 1999. The mutual assistance on criminal cases. This treaty is in full effect. It works quite efficiently. On average, we initiate about 100, 150 criminal cases upon request from foreign states.

For instance, the last year, there was one extradition case upon the request sent by the United States. This treaty has specific legal procedures we can offer. The appropriate commission headed by Special Attorney Mueller, he can use this treaty as a solid foundation and send a formal, official request to us so that we could interrogate, hold questioning of these individuals who he believes are privy to some
crimes. Our enforcement are perfectly able to do this questioning and send the appropriate materials to the United States. Moreover, we can meet you halfway. We can make another step. We can actually permit representatives of the United States, including the members of this very commission headed by Mr. Mueller, we can let them into the country. They can be present at questioning.

In this case, there's another condition. This kind of effort should be mutual one. Then we would expect that the Americans would reciprocate. They would question officials, including the officers of law enforcement and intelligence services of the United States whom we believe have something to do with illegal actions on the territory of Russia. And we have to request the presence of our law enforcement.

End Quote

Putin then proceeds to stick it to Hillary Clinton with the bombshell accusation that Bill Browder - possibly with the assistance of US intelligence agencies - contributed a whopping $400 million dollars to Clinton's election campaign!

Quote:

For instance, we can bring up Mr. Browder in this particular case. Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over $1.5 billion in Russia. They never paid any taxes. Neither in Russia nor in the United States. Yet, the money escapes the country. They were transferred to the United States. They sent huge amount of money, $400 million as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton. [He presents no evidence to back up that $400 million claim.] Well, that's their personal case. It might have been legal, the contribution itself. But the way the money was earned was illegal. We have solid
reason to believe that some intelligence officers guided these transactions. [This allegation, too, is merely an unsupported assertion here.] So we have an interest of questioning them. That could be a first step. We can also extend it. There are many options. They all can be found in an appropriate legal framework.

End Quote

This article mentions the above and provides background information on Browder and the US Magnitsky Act which he finagled Congress into passing which were the original Russian sanctions.

Putin Bombshell: US Intelligence Funneled $400 Million to Clinton Campaign From Russia
https://russia-insider.com/...

Despite Putin's claim that this was "off the top of his head", I'd say this was a calculated response to the Mueller indictment as well as a calculated attack on Hillary Clinton and the US intelligence agencies who were clearly in support of her election campaign. Frankly, it's brilliant. It forces Mueller to "put up or shut up" just as much as the company which challenged the previous indictment over Russian ads.

Lillll -> richardstevenhack , 4 hours ago
"US would allow Russian investigators to investigate people like Bill Browder in the US."

The example would be a good one, except, the US has no power to allow anybody to investigate Bill Browder (grandson of the head of the American Communist Party, btw) because Browder gave up his US citizenship, it is said, to avoid paying taxes

Andrey Subbotin -> richardstevenhack , 5 hours ago
Putin since then stated that he misspoke and the number was $400K not 400 million
Valissa Rauhallinen -> Eric Newhill , 4 hours ago
Skepticism is always prudent when it comes to any news source.

Regarding the issue of "trust"... Putin himself said that he and Trump shouldn't be basing their discussions on trust of each other. While I trust Putin to be skillful and strategic that doesn't mean I trust all of his words. After all, he is a politician and a powerful leader. Respect is the key here, not trust.

From a transcript http://time.com/5339848/don...
PUTIN (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): As to who is to be believed and to who's not to be believed, you can trust no one if you take this.

Where did you get this idea that President Trump trusts me or I trust him? He defends the interests of the United States of America, and I do defend the interests of the Russian Federation.

We do have interests that are common. We are looking for points of contact. There are issues where our postures diverge, and we are looking for ways to reconcile our differences, how to make our effort more meaningful.
-----------------

Of course both countries spy on each other and engage in various forms of cyber warfare, as do many other countries. It's business as usual. That's why the Mueller investigation is bullshit. It doesn't acknowledge that most basic fact of geopolitics. It posits Russia as the only bad actor in the relationship. I was very pleased that Trump acknowledge that both sides created the issues the countries have with each other, though of course the Borg and their media puppets went wild over that.

Trump and Putin both have excellent trolling skills. I very much enjoy this aspect of the great Game!

Though perhaps Putin botched his trolling of Hillary by getting the number wrong. Or may be he pulled a Trump maneuver and purposely gave the wrong number to force reporters to research it and post the correction.

VietnamVet , 5 hours ago
Let's see if "China hacked Clinton's server and got the 30,000 e-mails" goes mainstream. This would nail the Borg dead. What has been peculiar about the last four years is that there are concerted proxy operations to take down the Iranian and Russian governments to get at their resources at the risk of crashing the world economy; let alone, a nuclear war that would destroy the earth. But, nothing against China other than bleating about freedom of passage in South China Sea. China is #2 and rising by all criteria. It is restoring its ancient Imperial power to rule the civilized world. Europe has much more in common with Russia. Over the centuries they keep battling the Kremlin over Crimea.
Jack , 2 hours ago
. It is difficult to believe that there won't be prosecutions.

Sir, in my cynical old age, I have a hard time believing there will be any prosecution of the Deep State top echelons. The DOJ and FBI it seems are very focused on protecting their own. If Rosenstein is impeached then one could say the tide is turning. Otherwise it would appear to be more kabuki.

I don't get why President Trump does not declassify the documents that the DOJ are withholding from Congress rather than tweet "witch hunt".

[Jul 18, 2018] It is hard to reconcile the fact that "Chinese state-backed 'assets' had illegally acquired Hillarys 30,000+ "missing" emails with the fact that the US "defense" budget is approximately 1.2 trillion dollars a year

Notable quotes:
"... There was also the stunning Awan affair when a family of Pakistanis (with no security clearance) had been surfing congressional computers for years and perhaps selling the obtained classified information to the third parties. So much for the mighty mice CIA and FBI. ..."
Jul 18, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

It is hard to reconcile this, "Chinese state-backed 'assets' had illegally acquired former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's 30,000+ "missing" emails" with that, "the US "defense" budget is approximately 1.2 trillion dollars a year."

There was also the stunning Awan affair when a family of Pakistanis (with no security clearance) had been surfing congressional computers for years and perhaps selling the obtained classified information to the third parties. So much for the mighty mice CIA and FBI.

Posted by: Anya | Jul 17, 2018 7:06:41 PM | 147

[Jul 17, 2018] I think there is much more to the comment made by Putin regarding Bill Browder and his money flows into the DNC and Clinton campaign. That would explain why the DNC didn t hand the servers over to the FBI after being hacked.

Highly recommended!
Jul 17, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

NumNutt -> 847328_3527 Tue, 07/17/2018 - 11:41 Permalink

I think there is much more to the comment made by Putin regarding Bill Browder and his money flows into the DNC and Clinton campaign. That would explain why the DNC didn't hand the servers over to the FBI after being hacked. If you follow the money a lot of what happened during the election and afterwards in regards to Russia and Trump start to make sense. Could it be that we are finally witnessing the removal the last layers of the center of the onion?

[Jul 17, 2018] Trump meets Putin officially in a summit: he's called traitor. By media. So what do we call Russia's opp filing into US embassy 2012 an election year ?

Jul 17, 2018 | moonofalabama.org

brian | Jul 17, 2018 5:51:31 PM | 127

its the BBC! and they claim:

James Cook
‏Verified account @BBCJamesCook
3h3 hours ago

BREAKING Under intense pressure, accused of treachery, President Trump now says he accepts the conclusion of US intelligence that Russia 'meddled' in the US election. A lot of damage has already been done though.

----------
however....

Trump meets Putin officially in a summit: he's called traitor. By media. So what do we call Russia's opp filing into US embassy 2012 an election year ?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j9FfX0B8ujA

isn't that treason ? Isn't Navalny a traitor as well for his US support ?

[Jul 17, 2018] Mueller's Indictment Isn't Worth Squat by Jacob G. Hornberger

Jul 16, 2018 | www.fff.org

I sure wish the mainstream media and all those critics of Donald Trump had had better civics teachers in high school. If they had, they would understand that special counsel Robert Mueller's indictment against those Russian officials for supposedly illegally meddling in America's presidential election doesn't mean squat. Instead, the media and the Trump critics have accepted the indictment as proof, even conclusive proof, that the Russians really did do what Mueller is charging them with doing.

Of course, it's not really Mueller's indictment. It's a federal grand jury that has returned the indictment. But, in reality, it's Mueller's indictment. He drafts it up and the grand jury dutifully signs whatever he presents to them. As the old legal adage goes, prosecutors can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.

A prosecutor can say whatever he wants in an indictment. It's not sworn to. Neither the prosecutor nor the grand jury can be prosecuted for perjury or false allegations in an indictment.

In this particular case, the matter is even more problematic because Mueller knows that those Russian officials who he has indicted will never be brought to trial. That's because there is no reasonable possibility that the Russian government would ever turn them over to the U.S. government. That means that Mueller knows that whatever he says in that indictment is never going to be tested in a court of law. He can say whatever he wants in that indictment knowing full well that he will never be required to prove it.

If only the mainstream media and the Trump critics would just attend one single criminal case, they would learn that criminal indictments don't mean squat and are not evidence of anything. Here is what judges always tell juries, in one way or another, in criminal cases:

An indictment is not evidence; it is simply the formal notice to the defendants of the charges against each of them. The mere fact of an indictment raises no suspicion of guilty. The government has the burden to prove the charges against the defendants beyond a reasonable doubt, and that burden stays with the government from start to finish. The defendants have no burden or obligation to prove anything at all. They are presumed innocent. The defendants started this trial with a clean slate, with no evidence at all against them, and the law presumes that they are each innocent. This presumption of innocence stays with each defendant unless and until the government presents evidence here in court that overcomes the presumption, and convinces you beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendants are guilty.

Is that the standard that the mainstream media and Trump critics are applying in response to the Mueller indictment? Are you kidding? They are applying the standard that is used in communist and other totalitarian regimes. They are pointing to the accusation as proof that those Russian officials really are guilty! After all, their argument goes, if they weren't guilty, former FBI Director Mueller would never have secured an indictment against them.

Anyway, everybody knows that the Russians are guilty because America's deep state -- i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA -- say they are. What more proof does anyone need than that? What even needs a trial? Case closed! Grab them, take them to Gitmo, torture them, and hang them!

Pardon me, but I thought the special counsel was appointed to determine whether President Trump somehow illegally "colluded" with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton for president. What's Mueller doing wasting time and money indicting Russian officials who he knows will never stand trial? Isn't it time for Mueller to put up or shut up with respect to President Trump and let the Justice Department handle other criminal prosecutions?

Maybe it's just a coincidence that Mueller announced his indictment on the eve of Trump's meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Or maybe not.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. deep state has done everything it can to gin up another Cold War with Russia. Recall that at the end of the Cold War in 1989, the U.S. deep state was caught flat-footed. They had fully expected the Cold War to last forever, which would guarantee ever-increasing budgets for the deep state and its army of bureaucrats, contractors, and subcontractors.

In fact, people were talking about a "peace dividend," which would have entailed deep cuts in expenditures for the military-industrial complex, which was President Eisenhower's term for the deep state. That threw all elements of the deep state into a full-blown panic.

That's when they went into the Middle East and began poking hornet's nests, knowing full well that their violent and destructive interventionism would produce terrorist blowback. It did and the terrorist blowback was then used as the excuse for continuing out of control deep-state expenditures in order to "keep us safe" from the enemies that their interventionism was producing. In fact, it's probably worth mentioning that Russia's supposed hacking of some email accounts pales to insignificance compared to massive U.S. interventionism, including the destruction of democratic regimes, in the political affairs of other countries since the advent of the U.S. deep state, including bribery, kidnappings, assassinations, coups, embargoes, sanctions, and invasions.

At the same time they were intervening in the Middle East, they never gave up hope of revitalizing the Cold War crisis environment with Russia. That is what NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, including the hope of absorbing Ukraine into NATO, was all about. The U.S. deep state knew that the closer NATO got to Russia's border, the more likely it would be that Russia would have to respond. When Russia finally did respond by taking over Crimea, before the U.S. deep state could, U.S. officials responded predictably: "We are shocked -- shocked! -- at this act of aggression, which shows that Russia is preparing to attack and invade Eastern Europe, the Baltics, Germany, France, and undoubtedly even the United States.

It's really just a repeat of the fears that the U.S. deep state inculcated into the American people throughout the Cold War, as a way to get Americans to support the conversion of the federal government from a limited-government republic to a national-security or deep states. The only thing missing is the communist part: Instead of the Reds coming to get us, it's now just Putin and the Russkies.

What nonsense. Mueller should do the country a favor and shut down his ridiculous and ridiculously expensive investigation. No matter how much one might dislike Donald Trump, the fact is that he won the election, fair and square, and Hillary Clinton lost it. Accept it. Deal with it. Wait until the 2020 election to try to oust Trump from office. Time to shut down all the regime-change operations, including those of the U.S. deep state.

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This post was written by: Jacob G. Hornberger Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show Freedom Watch . View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context . Send him email .

[Jul 17, 2018] The Mueller Indictments and the Trump-Putin Summit Triumph of the Deep State by Ron Paul

Notable quotes:
"... Did the Russian government seek to interfere in the 2016 US presidential elections? It's certainly possible, however we don't know. None of the Justice Department's assertions have been tested in a court of law, as is thankfully required by our legal system. It is not enough to make an allegation, as Mueller has done. You have to prove it. ..."
"... That is why we should be very suspicious of these new indictments. Mueller knows he will never have to defend his assertions in a court of law so he can make any allegation he wants. ..."
"... It is interesting that one of the Russian companies indicted by Mueller earlier this year surprised the world by actually entering a "not guilty" plea and demanding to see Mueller's evidence. The Special Counsel proceeded to file several motions to delay the hand-over of his evidence. What does Mueller have to hide? ..."
"... Meanwhile, why is no one talking about the estimated 100 elections the US government has meddled in since World War II? Maybe we need to get our own house in order? ..."
Jul 17, 2018 | original.antiwar.com

July 17, 2018 The term "deep state" has been so overused in the past few years that it may seem meaningless. It has become standard practice to label one's political adversaries as representing the "deep state" as a way of avoiding the defense of one's positions. President Trump has often blamed the "deep state" for his political troubles. Trump supporters have created big conspiracies involving the "deep state" to explain why the president places neocons in key positions or fails to fulfill his campaign promises.

But the "deep state" is no vast and secret conspiracy theory. The deep state is real, it operates out in the open, and it is far from monolithic. The deep state is simply the permanent, unelected government that continues to expand its power regardless of how Americans vote.

There are factions of the deep state that are pleased with President Trump's policies, and in fact we might say that President Trump represents some factions of the deep state.

Other factions of the deep state are determined to undermine any of President Trump's actions they perceive as threatening. Any move toward peace with Russia is surely something they feel to be threatening. There are hundreds of billions of reasons – otherwise known as dollars – why the Beltway military-industrial complex is terrified of peace breaking out with Russia and will do whatever it takes to prevent that from happening.

That is why Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's indictment on Friday of 12 Russian military intelligence officers for allegedly interfering in the 2016 US presidential election should immediately raise some very serious questions.

First the obvious: after more than a year of investigations which have publicly revealed zero collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, why drop this bombshell of an allegation at the end of the news cycle on the last business day before the historic Trump/Putin meeting in Helsinki? The indictment could not have been announced a month ago or in two weeks? Is it not suspicious that now no one is talking about reducing tensions with Russia but is all of a sudden – thanks to Special Counsel Robert Mueller – talking about increasing tensions?

Unfortunately most Americans don't seem to understand that indictments are not evidence. In fact they are often evidence-free, as is this indictment.

Did the Russian government seek to interfere in the 2016 US presidential elections? It's certainly possible, however we don't know. None of the Justice Department's assertions have been tested in a court of law, as is thankfully required by our legal system. It is not enough to make an allegation, as Mueller has done. You have to prove it.

That is why we should be very suspicious of these new indictments. Mueller knows he will never have to defend his assertions in a court of law so he can make any allegation he wants.

It is interesting that one of the Russian companies indicted by Mueller earlier this year surprised the world by actually entering a "not guilty" plea and demanding to see Mueller's evidence. The Special Counsel proceeded to file several motions to delay the hand-over of his evidence. What does Mueller have to hide?

Meanwhile, why is no one talking about the estimated 100 elections the US government has meddled in since World War II? Maybe we need to get our own house in order?

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity .

[Jul 17, 2018] Lisa Page confirms FBI cover-up

Notable quotes:
"... The embattled Page tossed James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and Bill Priestap among others under the Congressional bus, alleging the upper echelon of the FBI concealed intelligence confirming Chinese state-backed 'assets' had illegally acquired former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's 30,000+ "missing" emails, federal sources said. ..."
Jul 17, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Anya , Jul 17, 2018 6:16:04 PM | 133

More on the Chinese President Mrs. Clinton and her retinue at the CIA and FBI:

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/07/httpstruepunditcomfbi-lisa-page-dimes-out-top-fbi-officials-during-classified-house-testimony-bureau-bos.html

"Former top FBI lawyer Lisa Page testified during two days of closed-door House hearings, revealing shocking new Intel against her old bosses at the Bureau, according the well-placed FBI sources.

Alarming new details on allegations of a bureau-wide cover up. Or should we say another bureau-wide cover up.

The embattled Page tossed James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and Bill Priestap among others under the Congressional bus, alleging the upper echelon of the FBI concealed intelligence confirming Chinese state-backed 'assets' had illegally acquired former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's 30,000+ "missing" emails, federal sources said.

The Russians didn't do it. The Chinese did, according to well-placed FBI sources." True Pundit

[Jul 17, 2018] Biney and his colleagues in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity asserted that it was not an intrusion from the outside over the Internet, but rather was a very high speed data transfer that could be done onto a storage device like a thumb drive (or, I think, onto another nearby device that permitted a very high transfer rate). Assuming the material they are analyzing is genuine, I agree with them.

Notable quotes:
"... The discussion made by William Binney (former NSA Technical Director for World Geopolitical and Military Analysis), Ed Loomis (computer scientist and former NSA Technical Director for the Office of Signals Processing), and some others, is about data taken from a computer of the DNC. They assert that it was not an intrusion from the outside over the Internet, but rather was a very high speed data transfer that could be done onto a storage device like a thumb drive (or, I think, onto another nearby device that permitted a very high transfer rate). Assuming the material they are analyzing is genuine, I agree with them. ..."
"... Note: Always remember that Google Gmail is "free" because you are not the customer, you are the product. ..."
Jul 17, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
robt willmann -> Mark , July 17, 2018
Mark,

There are at least 3 computers, computer servers, and/or computer systems involved in the 2016 election campaign controversy: Hillary Clinton's e-mail server at her residence that violated federal law about the handling of classified information, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) computer system, and Google's Gmail computer system (used by John Podesta, Hillary's campaign chairman).

TTG also mentioned a little earlier that multiple systems are involved.

The discussion made by William Binney (former NSA Technical Director for World Geopolitical and Military Analysis), Ed Loomis (computer scientist and former NSA Technical Director for the Office of Signals Processing), and some others, is about data taken from a computer of the DNC. They assert that it was not an intrusion from the outside over the Internet, but rather was a very high speed data transfer that could be done onto a storage device like a thumb drive (or, I think, onto another nearby device that permitted a very high transfer rate). Assuming the material they are analyzing is genuine, I agree with them.

Numerous governments and private computer scientists, programmers, and "hackers" could have gotten into Hillary Clinton's personal e-mail server from the outside through the Interrnet and probably did. Furthermore, that does not end the problem. Data can be intercepted as it goes from one location to another, whether going over a copper phone line, a fiber optic cable, a computer network cable, the air, and so forth.

Note: Always remember that Google Gmail is "free" because you are not the customer, you are the product.

[Jul 17, 2018] IMHO believing in the Crowdstrike analysis is like believing in Santa Claus

Putin statement about $400 million 'donation' to Hillary Clinton by MI6-connected Bill Browder in his Helsinki presser is obviously of great interest. This has given some new insights into the DNC false flag operation dynamics.
Notable quotes:
"... The FBI would get info about these hackers through the CrowdStrike team's disk images, memory dumps, network logs and other reports. CrowdStrike's Robert Johnston also said he worked with FBI investigators during his work at the DNC so the FBI also got some of their info directly. ..."
"... IMHO believing in the Crowdstrike analysis is like believing in Santa Claus. They did propagate unsubstantiated "security porno" like a hack of Ukrainians for a while. After this incident, Dmitry Alperovich looks like a sleazy used car salesman, not like a real specialist and, in any case, his qualification is limited to the SMTP protocol. ..."
"... What if it was Crowdstrike which compiled and planted the malware using Vault 7 tools and then conducted full-scale false flag operation against Russians to deflect allegations that Bernie was thrown under the bus deliberately and unlawfully. They have motivation and means to do this. ..."
Jul 17, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Keith Harbaugh , a day ago

PT, regarding your questions: "How did the FBI obtain information about activity on the DNC and DCCC servers", "what is the source of the information?",
"how do they know what happened on specific dates as alleged in the complaint?", I believe the answers are implicit in the first part of this news article:

"The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S." By Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger and Scott Shane, New York Times , 2016-12-13.

It describes in considerable detail how, STARTING IN SEPTEMBER 2015, the FBI tried strenuously to alert the DNC to the fact that it was being hacked by Russia, but the DNC, remarkably, chose to ignore these warnings.

Here's how the article begins:

When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally [ sic! ], to the help desk.

His message was brief, if alarming. At least one computer system belonging to the D.N.C. had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named "the Dukes," a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government.

The F.B.I. knew it well: The bureau had spent the last few years trying to kick the Dukes out of the unclassified email systems of the White House, the State Department and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the government's best-protected networks.

BTW, I sincerely thank TTG for providing this link in one of his previous comments.

TTG -> Keith Harbaugh , 8 hours ago
Keith et al,

The FBI warned the DNC of the Dukes (aka APT29, Cozy Bear) in September 2015. These are the hackers that the Dutch AIVD penetrated and warned the NSA in real time when they attacked Pentagon systems in 2015. Their goal seemed to be intelligence collection as one would expect as the Dutch said they are affiliated with the SVR.

The Fancy Bear hackers (aka APT28) are the ones referred to in the recent indictment of the GRU officers. They penetrated the DNC systems in April 2016 and weren't discovered until CrowdStrike identified them. They're the ones who took data and released it through DCLeaks, Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks as part of a coordinated information operation (IO). I'm not at all surprised that the GRU would lead this IO as a military operation. The FBI would get info about these hackers through the CrowdStrike team's disk images, memory dumps, network logs and other reports. CrowdStrike's Robert Johnston also said he worked with FBI investigators during his work at the DNC so the FBI also got some of their info directly. There is absolutely no need to take physical possession of the servers.

The detail of some of the GRU officers' online activity indicates their computers were penetrated by US or allied IC/LEA much like the Dutch AIVD penetrated the FSB computers. This was probably a main source for much of the indictment's evidence. That the IC would release information about this penetration for this indictment is extraordinary. Normally this stuff never sees the light of day. It sets the precedent for the release of further such intelligence information in future indictments.

Likbez -> TTG
TTG,

IMHO believing in the Crowdstrike analysis is like believing in Santa Claus. They did propagate unsubstantiated "security porno" like a hack of Ukrainians for a while. After this incident, Dmitry Alperovich looks like a sleazy used car salesman, not like a real specialist and, in any case, his qualification is limited to the SMTP protocol.

What if it was Crowdstrike which compiled and planted the malware using Vault 7 tools and then conducted full-scale false flag operation against Russians to deflect allegations that Bernie was thrown under the bus deliberately and unlawfully. They have motivation and means to do this.

Now we also see a DNC motivation of keeping the content of affected servers from FBI eyes -- Browder money.

[Jul 17, 2018] FBI agents walk into DNC HQ and leave without the server...cause of Hillary you know that right.

Notable quotes:
"... Fucking bought and paid for by her, just like everything else in America! ..."
"... Trump just broke a tabu by failing to do homage to the sacred cow of our intelligence community. ..."
"... From Strzok testimony we saw (what we knew already) that Shillary's server was compromised by a 'foreign actor' and Strzok and Comey did nothing. What about that?!?!?!? ..."
Jul 17, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Free This -> Bulgars Tue, 07/17/2018 - 07:25 Permalink

Our intel agencies ARE corrupt...they walk into DNC HQ and leave without the server...cause of Hillary you know that right. Fucking bought and paid for by her, just like everything else in America!

Lookit, Trump is on the up and up, and all the little fags are crying foul? fuck 'em!

Sic Semper Tyrannis

otschelnik -> Free This Tue, 07/17/2018 - 07:38 Permalink

Trump just broke a tabu by failing to do homage to the sacred cow of our intelligence community.

From Strzok testimony we saw (what we knew already) that Shillary's server was compromised by a 'foreign actor' and Strzok and Comey did nothing. What about that?!?!?!?

[Jul 17, 2018] I can t believe the drivel I m reading about this Putin thing. The US is losing its mind, and rapidly becoming a major risk to the world.

Jul 17, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

vladiki -> Free This Tue, 07/17/2018 - 08:51 Permalink

I can't believe the drivel I'm reading about this Putin thing. The US is losing its mind, and rapidly becoming a major risk to the world. A mad country of 320 million armed to the teeth is dangerous. Russia is a minnow by comparison. Putin's not our problem, China's not our problem, they may not be 'nice'; we don't need them to be nice; WE'RE NOT NICE. But they're sane and predictable. WE ARE OUR PROBLEM. The madness started in Congress and our appalling phony brainless opinionated media, where we have passionate imbeciles foaming at the mouth about supposed foreign interference in our elections when it's clear that (1) we don't know if it's true (2) the result was unaffected anyway, so (3) it doesn't matter a fuck whether they interfered or not and (4) the major nations have been steaming open each others envelopes forever. Sense would be that even if we think Putin's lying, we pretend to believe him and move on.

The US is arrogant and has zero insight, so doesn't understand that it's no longer a beacon to the word but loathed by the world - and that long precedes Trump. The very politicians, like that fool McCain, who urged and organised regime change (not just cyberfiddling and 'interference' but actually the sending of SOLDIERS to KILL PEOPLE WE DIDN'T LIKE) .. in Central America, Asia, the Middle East over a long period .. are now ranting and indignant that Russia might be doing what we know we've been doing for a century.

So the CIA would stop its cyberwarfare if Putin said "please don't"? For Christ's sake. We have to grow up and stop this nonsense, or some lunatic will do something really stupid and we'll descend into anarchy, which is inevitably and rapidly followed by an authoritarian 'solution'. This is a terrible time. Right now, in the military, some will be making plans in case the wheels fall off and we'll need them to replace the 242yr of self-control that we're now incapable of, with external control.

scribe1 -> Free This Tue, 07/17/2018 - 10:38 Permalink

yes. we have 3 eyewitnesses and verifiable proof that Seth Rich leaked the files. Russia had nothing to do with it. real question is who ordered the murder of seth rich.

Dickweed Wang -> Stackers Tue, 07/17/2018 - 08:32 Permalink

Another example of a common tool used by sociopaths and psychopaths . . . if information comes to light that can damage you attack the messenger and ignore the message. That's high school level psychology. What's interesting is that there is a large segment of the population that are too stupid to realize what's really going on . . . or maybe they just want to believe the bullshit regardless.

Tarheel -> Stackers Tue, 07/17/2018 - 09:22 Permalink

but Russians didn't hack the DNC or expose the crimes of Killary. His name was Seth Rich

blindfaith -> HockeyFool Tue, 07/17/2018 - 08:01 Permalink

Someone is at the center of the destruction of the Democratic Party, but who and why? Soros? Comey? Brennan? Muller? Rothchild? Rockerfells?, Bezo, Fuckerbergs? Finesteein, McStain? Obamer? All, plus 1,000 more?

Think about all the unified media to make the Democrats look like out of control morons (yes, yes, I know what is new). But this is a clean sweep of all of them with no voice countering this crazy aunt syndrome. Moderates and even what used to be called liberal Democrats are leaving this extremely radicle party and the party does not seem to care one bit. Is two party time ending?

Nothing makes any sense. The Stock market doesn't either, but folks keep buying it.

Will Bezo or Fuckerberg be the new lords of the land with Schultz of Google? Are these the new kings of America? They are helping to destroy the Republic from the ground up with their activities. Or Am I the moron?

duo -> HockeyFool Tue, 07/17/2018 - 08:06 Permalink

The same libs that are screaming about Russia, Russia are also against voter ID and paper ballots. Hypoicrite much?

Greed is King -> HockeyFool Tue, 07/17/2018 - 08:35 Permalink

The problem is, (to the American Deep State that is) is that Trump is not a member of the Puppet Political Cartel that has been bought and paid for by the shadow rulers, Trump is his own man, and the shadow rulers don`t tolerate disobedience.

Robert of Ottawa -> HockeyFool Tue, 07/17/2018 - 09:12 Permalink

Our mildly Conservative Prime Minister once said of the press: "If I were to walk on water, they would say I could not swim".

[Jul 17, 2018] Sic Semper Tyrannis Editorial - China hacked Clinton s e-mail

This is a real bombshell, if true.
Jul 17, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Editorial - China hacked Clinton's e-mail I have some inside information.

Looks like a hacking operation by China. They nailed Clinton's completely unprotected system and then inserted code that gave them all her traffic over e-mail subsequent to that.

That included all her State Department classified traffic which she had her staff illegally scan and insert in her private e-mail. We are talking about 30,000+ messages.

Strzok was told that by the Intelligence Community Inspector General WHILE he was running the Clinton e-mail investigation and chose to ignore it. pl


Valissa Rauhallinen , an hour ago

Given the likely culprits, China made the most sense. Thanks for the confirmation!

Meanwhile, under the radar, another segment of the "Gordian knot" is getting ready to be cut.

White House Orders Direct Taliban Talks to Jump-Start Afghan Negotiations https://www.nytimes.com/201...
The Trump administration has told its top diplomats to seek direct talks with the Taliban, a significant shift in American policy in Afghanistan, done in the hope of jump-starting negotiations to end the 17-year war.

The Taliban have long said they will first discuss peace only with the Americans, who toppled their regime in Afghanistan in 2001. But the United States has mostly insisted that the Afghan government must take part.

The recent strategy shift, which was confirmed by several senior American and Afghan officials, is intended to bring those two positions closer and lead to broader, formal negotiations to end the long war.
-----------------------

Bring home the troops!

Jay M , 2 hours ago
Glad to hear we are vassals of China and others. That multipolar world must have been part of someone's 13 dim chess?
Harlan Easley , 3 hours ago
I am an independent. I voted for Obama twice because his opponents were so unappealing. I am starting to hate the left. I view them and the neocon establishment behavior nothing short of treasonous.
Mark McCarty , 3 hours ago
So China was the "non-Russian foreign power" that Gohmert referred to when interrogating Strozok. Veeeery interesting!
Fred S , 4 hours ago
To ask the obvious question: when did the IC inform President Obama?

[Jul 16, 2018] Five Things That Would Make The CIA-CNN Russia Narrative More Believable

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... How much proof would I need to lend my voice to the escalation of tensions between two nuclear superpowers? Mountains. I personally would settle for nothing less than hard proof which can be independently verified by trusted experts like the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. ..."
"... Is that a big ask? Yes. Yes it is. That's what happens when government institutions completely discredit themselves as they did with the false narratives advanced in the manufacturing of support for the Iraq invasion. You don't get to butcher a million Iraqis in a war based on lies, turn around a few years later and say "We need new cold war escalations with a nuclear superpower but we can't prove it because the evidence is secret." That's not a thing. Copious amounts of hard, verifiable proof or GTFO. So far we have no evidence besides the confident-sounding assertions of government insiders and their mass media mouthpieces, which is the same as no evidence. ..."
Jul 15, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

As we just discussed , some major news stories have recently dropped about what a horrible horrifying menace the Russian Federation is to the world , and as always I have nothing to offer the breathless pundits on CNN and MSNBC but my completely unsatisfied skepticism. My skepticism of the official Russia narrative remains so completely unsatisfied that if mainstream media were my husband I would already be cheating on it with my yoga instructor.

I do not believe the establishment Russia narrative. I do not believe that Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government to rig the 2016 election. I do not believe the Russian government did any election rigging for Trump to collude with. This is not because I believe Vladimir Putin is some kind of blueberry-picking girl scout, and it certainly isn't because I think the Russian government is unwilling or incapable of meddling in the affairs of other nations to some extent when it suits them. It is simply because I am aware that the US intelligence community lies constantly as a matter of policy, and because I understand how the burden of proof works.

At this time, I see no reason to espouse any belief system which embraces as true the assertion that Russia meddled in the 2016 elections in any meaningful way, or that it presents a unique and urgent threat to the world which must be aggressively dealt with. But all the establishment mouthpieces tell me that I must necessarily embrace these assertions as known, irrefutable fact. Here are five things that would have to change in order for that to happen:

1. Proof of a hacking conspiracy to elect Trump.

The first step to getting a heretic like myself aboard the Russia hysteria train would be the existence of publicly available evidence of the claims made about election meddling in 2016, which rises to the level required in a post-Iraq invasion world. So far, that burden of proof for Russian hacking allegations has not come anywhere remotely close to being met.

How much proof would I need to lend my voice to the escalation of tensions between two nuclear superpowers? Mountains. I personally would settle for nothing less than hard proof which can be independently verified by trusted experts like the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

Is that a big ask? Yes. Yes it is. That's what happens when government institutions completely discredit themselves as they did with the false narratives advanced in the manufacturing of support for the Iraq invasion. You don't get to butcher a million Iraqis in a war based on lies, turn around a few years later and say "We need new cold war escalations with a nuclear superpower but we can't prove it because the evidence is secret." That's not a thing. Copious amounts of hard, verifiable proof or GTFO. So far we have no evidence besides the confident-sounding assertions of government insiders and their mass media mouthpieces, which is the same as no evidence.

2. Proof that election meddling actually influenced the election in a meaningful way.

Even if Russian hackers did exfiltrate Democratic party emails and give them to WikiLeaks, if it didn't affect the election, who cares? That's a single-day, second-page story at best, meriting nothing beyond a "Hmm, interesting, turns out Russia tried and failed to influence the US election," followed by a shrug and moving on to something that actually matters.

After it has been thoroughly proven that Russia meddled in the elections in a meaningful way, it must then be established that that meddling had an actual impact on the election results.

3. Some reason to believe Russian election meddling was unwarranted and unacceptable.

The US government, by a very wide margin , interferes in the elections of other countries far, far more than any other government on earth does. The US government's own data shows that it has deliberately meddled in the elections of 81 foreign governments between 1946 and 2000, including Russia in the nineties. This is public knowledge. A former CIA Director cracked jokes about it on Fox News earlier this year.

If I'm going to abandon my skepticism and accept the Gospel According to Maddow, after meaningful, concrete election interference has been clearly established I'm going to need a very convincing reason to believe that it is somehow wrong or improper for a government to attempt to respond in kind to the undisputed single worst offender of this exact offense. It makes no sense for the United States to actively create an environment in which election interference is something that governments do to one another, and then cry like a spanked child when its election is interfered with by one of the very governments whose elections the US recently meddled in.

This is nonsense. America being far and away the worst election meddler on the planet makes it a fair target for election meddling by not just Russia, but every country in the world. It is very obviously moral and acceptable for any government on earth to interfere in America's elections as long as it remains the world's worst offender in that area. In order for Russia to be in the wrong if it interfered in America's elections, some very convincing argument I've not yet heard will have to be made to support that case.

4. Proof that the election meddling went beyond simply giving Americans access to information about their government.

If all the Russians did was simply show Americans emails of Democratic Party officials talking to one another and circulate some MSM articles as claimed in the ridiculous Russian troll farm allegations , that's nothing to get upset about. If anything, Americans should be upset that they had to hear about Democratic Party corruption through the grapevine instead of having light shed on it by the American officials whose job it is to do so. Complaints about election meddling is only valid if that election meddling isn't comprised of truth and facts.

5. A valid reason to believe escalated tensions between two nuclear superpowers are worthwhile.

After it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Russia did indeed meddle in the US elections in a meaningful way, and after it has then been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Russia actually influenced election results in a significant way, and after the case has been clearly made that it was bad and wrong for Russia to do this instead of fair and reasonable, and after it has been clearly proven that the election meddling went beyond simply telling Americans the truth about their government, the question then becomes what, if anything, should be done about it?

If you look at the actions that this administration has taken over the last year and a half, the answer to that question appears to be harsh sanctions, NATO expansionism, selling arms to Ukraine, throwing out diplomats, increasing military presence along Russia's border, a Nuclear Posture Review which is much more aggressive toward Russia, repeatedly bombing Syria, and just generally creating more and more opportunities for something to go catastrophically wrong with one of the two nations' aging, outdated nuclear arsenals, setting off a chain of events from which there is no turning back and no surviving.

And the pundits and politicians keep pushing for more and more escalations, at this very moment braying with one voice that Trump must aggressively confront Putin about Mueller's indictments or withdraw from the peace talks. But is it worth it? Is it worth risking the life of every terrestrial organism to, what? What specifically would be gained that makes increasing the risk of nuclear catastrophe worthwhile? Making sure nobody interferes in America's fake elections? I'd need to see a very clear and specific case made, with a 'pros' and 'cons' list and "THE POTENTIAL DEATH OF LITERALLY EVERYTHING" written in big red letters at the top of the 'cons' column.

Rallying the world to cut off Russia from the world stage and cripple its economy has been been a goal of the US power establishment since the collapse of the Soviet Union, so there's no reason to believe that even the people who are making the claims against Russia actually believe them. The goal is crippling Russia to handicap China , and ultimately to shore up global hegemony for the US-centralized empire by preventing the rise of any rival superpowers. The sociopathic alliance of plutocrats and intelligence/defense agencies who control that empire are willing to threaten nuclear confrontation in order to ensure their continued dominance. All of their actions against Russia since 2016 have had everything to do with establishing long-term planetary dominance and nothing whatsoever to do with election meddling.

Those five things would need to happen before I'd be willing to jump aboard the "Russia! Russia! Russia!" train. Until then I'll just keep pointing to the total lack of evidence and how very, very far the CIA/CNN Russia narrative is from credibility.

* * *

Internet censorship is getting pretty bad, so the best way to keep seeing the stuff I publish is to get on the mailing list for my website , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader and listener-funded, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , checking out my podcast , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , or buying my book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .

[Jul 16, 2018] I kept waiting for the day RussiaGate most perople reslize that ot was a neocon farce

Money quote: "This is just a softer "Saddam has WMDs [scam]" And people fell for it."
The cat fight between two factions of the US elite would be funny, if it was not so dangerous.
Notable quotes:
"... The greatest irony in all this is we have hard evidence that the Clinton machine swayed the MSM to promote T-rump in the primary and squash Bernie. Isn't that election tampering? ..."
"... We also witness the blatant privilege when Comey didn't indict the $hill when she obviously and without a doubt broke the law. So we have the Clinton's above the law laundering money through their foundation But it's Russia's fault....come on. ..."
"... You have totally taken the wind out of the sails of Russia Gate. As you stated, what was the crime? The information that came from the DNC computers and Podesta's emails showed that there was a plan to rig the primary against Bernie so that Hillary would win it. I've said numerous times that was the real election interference. ..."
"... Brennan who had admitted in Jan 2017 that there was no evidence that Russia affected the election in any way has since been prattling on about Russia Gate without every offering any evidence, but that is why this country has been peddling propaganda since Wilson decided it was a great way to get people on board with anything their government want to do. Here is the latest from Brennan. ..."
"... While standing next to the American president, Putin accuses Hillary Clinton of accepting illegal Russian campaign contributions. Trump doesn't push back. ..."
"... Propaganda baby. It works. Every person I have spoken with since Her Majesty lost the election really believes that this country is being run by Putin directly and with the full knowledge and help from the GOP. Because Putin has blackmailed them too or something ..."
"... @lizzyh7 ..."
"... What this episode really proves is that the US finally has joined the USSR as a broken, bankrupt empire that is run by shifting coalitions of international bankers and splinter groups of spooks. The facade of law and democratic norms in America has fallen and shattered on Washington steps. ..."
"... Personally, I accept that in modern times all major intelligence agencies and military general staffs routinely spy on each other and meddle in politics, including elections in their own countries. That's a given and should be obvious to everyone since Yuri Andropov succeeded Brezhnev and Director George H.W Bush had three terms as President of the United States. ..."
"... What is most significant about the current spectacle is how it reveals the polarization and breakdown in discipline within US military and intelligence agencies. The internal policy dispute over Syria and Ukraine and botched election tampering has led to open infighting among the spooks. That's what "Russiagate" is really all about and it's why Flynn and Manafort were the first Mueller indicted. ..."
"... The Mueller investigation is an extension of politics by other means. ..."
"... Social media is completely insane. I've got a very large demographic of fairly open minded people given my trade, and it's unanimous: Drumpf is a Traitor and has committed Treason - both with capital Ts. ..."
Jul 16, 2018 | caucus99percent.com
all with no evidence

The FBI never examined the DNC server. And even if they had, we learned from the vault 7 wikileaks that the CIA can leave evidence of any country they choose when they hack into a system. I can't believe my normally rational friends can be so brainwashed as to buy into the whole Russiagate narrative. T-rump has caused them to lose their ability to think.

Risen has a piece up on the intercept that convinces me he's a CIA mouthpiece...
https://theintercept.com/2018/07/13/indictment-of-russian-intelligence-o...

Aaron Mate continues his rounds with Russiagate cheerleader Michael Isikoff (video or text)
https://therealnews.com/stories/has-mueller-caught-the-hackers

The greatest irony in all this is we have hard evidence that the Clinton machine swayed the MSM to promote T-rump in the primary and squash Bernie. Isn't that election tampering?

We also witness the blatant privilege when Comey didn't indict the $hill when she obviously and without a doubt broke the law. So we have the Clinton's above the law laundering money through their foundation But it's Russia's fault....come on.

Jimmy accuse people of thinking with their lizard brains...I fear he is right.

snoopydawg on Mon, 07/16/2018 - 1:05pm Well done!
You have totally taken the wind out of the sails of Russia Gate. As you stated, what was the crime? The information that came from the DNC computers and Podesta's emails showed that there was a plan to rig the primary against Bernie so that Hillary would win it. I've said numerous times that was the real election interference. As to what Russia is accused of doing Obama, Brennan and others have stated that no votes were changed from Hillary to Trump no were any voting machines hacked. Funny thing about that though. 3 states have said that they did see signs of some entity trying to hack into their state's voting data bases but it came from the DHS. Not a foreign country.

Could it be that Mueller is acknowledging something important here without stating it? There is no real victim in "Russiagate." So, where is the crime? Was anyone harmed? No. Was a U.S. Navy battleship resting at anchor blown up? No, again. Not a scratch to anything except the reputations of those who were shown to have rigged the Democratic primaries so that the DNC Chair's favored candidate won.

Putin said that he would welcome the US investigation into those 12 military officers if the US would send someone to interview them in Russia since the two countries have a treaty to do just that. Will anyone take him up on that offer? Anyone? Bueller?

After Trump's meeting with Putin neocons are doubling down and accusing Trump of doing all kinds of shady things.

Mueller indictments strengthen case that Trump's win was stolen. What's new? a) Strong possibility Russians monkeyed w/ voter rolls, affecting the 11/8/16 outcome and b) Trump's fall strategy may have been driven by stolen Democratic analytics. My column: https://t.co/io2B8Nhjs7

-- Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) July 15, 2018

Brennan who had admitted in Jan 2017 that there was no evidence that Russia affected the election in any way has since been prattling on about Russia Gate without every offering any evidence, but that is why this country has been peddling propaganda since Wilson decided it was a great way to get people on board with anything their government want to do. Here is the latest from Brennan.

Donald Trump's press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of "high crimes & misdemeanors." It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump's comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???

-- John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) July 16, 2018

A few other tweets from the joint press conference.

I'm pretty sure that no one will ask Putin a follow up question about what he meant by this.

While standing next to the American president, Putin accuses Hillary Clinton of accepting illegal Russian campaign contributions. Trump doesn't push back. pic.twitter.com/dDt2TTV24E

-- Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 16, 2018

Debunked? I don't see that this was debunked. In fact I don't remember anyone ever talking about the content of the emails that showed that the primary was rigged.

Asked if he believes US intel agencies or Putin about Russia's interference in the 2016 election, Trump immediately starts pushing debunked DNC & Hillary conspiracy theories.

"I don't see any reason why it would be" Russia, Trump says, affirming he believes Putin's denials. pic.twitter.com/uciAoRxbxA

-- Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 16, 2018

????

PUTIN doesn't deny having blackmail material on Trump

"When Trump was in Moscow back then, I didn't even know that he was there. I treat him with utmost respect, but back then when he was private person, a businessman, nobody informed me"

Trump ends presser by bashing the FBI pic.twitter.com/Zc2hXRd0BS

-- Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 16, 2018

One more idiot heard from.

Worth stating this as clearly as possible:

What we saw *today* was collusion. Trump's refusal to treat Russian sabotage of our democracy as the crime that it is encourages Putin to keep it up. https://t.co/9OTDPQUmpW pic.twitter.com/efyNriYSwy

-- Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) July 16, 2018

Propaganda baby. It works. Every person I have spoken with since Her Majesty lost the election really believes that this country is being run by Putin directly and with the full knowledge and help from the GOP. Because Putin has blackmailed them too or something ....

snoopydawg on Mon, 07/16/2018 - 5:53pm
Ditto, lizzy

@lizzyh7

I kept waiting for the day Russia Gate exploded and became known for the farce it is. I really wanted to see Rachel's reaction and see how she would explain to her viewers that she had just made everything up. But now I'm don't think that is going to happen. The PTB have invested to much into it and they won't let their agendas be derailed. This is just a softer "Saddam has WMDs." And people fell for it.

leveymg on Mon, 07/16/2018 - 1:45pm
Convergence theory

What this episode really proves is that the US finally has joined the USSR as a broken, bankrupt empire that is run by shifting coalitions of international bankers and splinter groups of spooks. The facade of law and democratic norms in America has fallen and shattered on Washington steps.

Personally, I accept that in modern times all major intelligence agencies and military general staffs routinely spy on each other and meddle in politics, including elections in their own countries. That's a given and should be obvious to everyone since Yuri Andropov succeeded Brezhnev and Director George H.W Bush had three terms as President of the United States.

What is most significant about the current spectacle is how it reveals the polarization and breakdown in discipline within US military and intelligence agencies. The internal policy dispute over Syria and Ukraine and botched election tampering has led to open infighting among the spooks. That's what "Russiagate" is really all about and it's why Flynn and Manafort were the first Mueller indicted.

The Mueller investigation is an extension of politics by other means.

k9disc on Mon, 07/16/2018 - 2:09pm
American Perestroika. Our Oligarchs Will Hollow US Out the Same way

Any move Left and the Oligarchs will light the match and start the firesale. We're zombie consumers at this point in time anyway.

k9disc on Mon, 07/16/2018 - 2:30pm
I Smell a Coup Coming. And If That Happens, We're All Going to

see Martial Law. With a capital M and capital L.

Social media is completely insane. I've got a very large demographic of fairly open minded people given my trade, and it's unanimous: Drumpf is a Traitor and has committed Treason - both with capital Ts.

I could see Civil War in weeks. Completely terrifying.

Alligator Ed on Mon, 07/16/2018 - 3:42pm
On point with your comment is how Pompeo gamed HRC

@detroitmechworks He ostensibly went to seek advice on how to do his confirmation hearing for SOS. What actually happened is the Medusa told him who to retain and what policies to pursue. Pompeo had no intention of adopting her policies (except Neocon points) but he got valuable clues as to Clinton allies in the DOS. He then began purging them. Stupid HRC! But I hope she runs in 2020.

[Jul 16, 2018] What is the journalism equivalent for 'regulatory capture'

Notable quotes:
"... The Dems. and journalists are jumping all over themselves to fawn over the intelligence services as the defenders of democracy. ..."
Jul 16, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Louis Fyne , July 16, 2018 at 9:15 am

The Dems. and journalists are jumping all over themselves to fawn over the intelligence services as the defenders of democracy.

What is the journalism equivalent for 'regulatory capture'?

And even assuming that everything in the indictments are 100% true, then the DNC were grossly negligent in handling their communications. And Clinton too, with her email server. And the Obama administration for letting this happen.

Arizona Slim , July 16, 2018 at 12:48 pm

I just finished reading Donna Brazile's book, Hacks .

According to Brazile, the DNC's IT department was alerted by the FBI. This was back in 2015 when a G-man called the DNC headquarters and was transferred to the DNC's help desk, which had been outsourced to a Chicago-based company called The MIS Department. And, you guessed it, this company had connections to Obama.

Well, it gets worse. The help desk guy who answered the phone thought it was a crank call. And, after a cursory examination of the DNC computer network, he concluded that there was no hack.

[Jul 16, 2018] Politicas around the "12 Russiand" whi leike 12 Spartens prevent Hillary corronation divedes media along partican lines again.

Notable quotes:
"... as Isikoff says, "everything the US government says is a lie, or is concocted, or is made up out of 'whole cloth'." Even the Republican Senate Intelligence Committee report blames the Russians for interference. ..."
Jul 16, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

RWood , July 16, 2018 at 10:29 am

This surprise (to me):
https://theintercept.com/2018/07/13/indictment-of-russian-intelligence-operatives-should-quell-harebrained-conspiracy-theories-on-dnc-hack/
My!
and this reply, substantiated (for me) by its source:
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/07/14/clinging-to-collusion-why-evidence-will-probably-never-be-produced-in-the-indictments-of-russian-agents/
and this:
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/07/14/five-things-that-would-make-the-ciacnn-russia-narrative-more-believable/
with this most recent:
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/07/15/memo-to-the-president-ahead-of-mondays-summit/

Blue Pilgrim , July 16, 2018 at 10:34 am

This is obviously more horse poop, timed to mess up the Trump-Putin summit. Hardly worth time to pay any attention to.
I could read about this, or I can read a nifty book I found in PDF format,
https://kalamkopi.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/utsa-patnaik-the-agrarian-question-in-the-neoliberal-era.pdf
The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
Utsa Patnaik and Sam Moyo with Issa G. Shivji

Read chapters 4 and 5 so far -- very good stuff. Talks about the fallacy of Ricardo's 'comparative advantage' concept.
It was worth including in a link in my comments at
https://www.fort-russ.com/2018/07/us-senator-duma-mp-and-ukraine-mp-agree-sanctions-useless/
US Senator, Duma MP, and Ukraine MP agree: Sanctions useless

What do you think I'll spend my time doing? (And also finding other material from Utsa Patnaik.) No, the deep state does not want people reading about these neoliberal and imperialist frauds, but wants to distract them from understanding what it is really up to. Let them keep their fairy tales or tell them to the mystified -- I'm going to keep exploring the reality.

rps , July 16, 2018 at 11:15 am

Mueller the ultimate connoisseur of ham sandwiches. How's the indictment of three Russian companies coming along? Federal judge slaps Robert Mueller with humiliating fact check in courtroom over massive 'error' :
U.S. Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey asked one of Concord's attorneys, Eric Dubelier, if he was also representing Concord Catering. They were not because the company did not exist during the time period Mueller alleges, Dubelier said.

"What about Concord Catering? The government makes an allegation that there's some association. I don't mean for you to -- do you represent them, or not, today? And are we arraigning them as well?" the judge asked. Dubelier responded: "We're not. And the reason for that, Your Honor, is I think we're dealing with a situation of the government having indicted the proverbial ham sandwich."

"That company didn't exist as a legal entity during the time period alleged by the government.

Yawn I'm waiting for Mueller to take the fifth prior to indicting foreign interference of Christopher Steele- former British M16 spy, for the Steele dossier during a presidential election. Oh lest not we forget who the players were and who funded that too .

edmondo , July 16, 2018 at 11:57 am

Now that Mueller has solved the mystery of the Russians "hijacking" an election that the Democrats wanted to hijack, maybe he could turn his attention to helping OJ find out who killed Nicole and Ron. The National Enquirer is now our newspaper of record. Adios America. 200 years wasn't a bad run but it's over

Wukchumni , July 16, 2018 at 12:15 pm

Whose hacking the hackers?

(with apologies to Juvenal )

redleg , July 16, 2018 at 12:18 pm

Indictments for hacking the election?

Until there's a call for changing the vote tabulation system to something secure and public, DOJ can indict every single person in Russia and its nothing but tilting at windmills. It doesn't address the problem at all.
WMD in 2003 = Remember the Maine in 1898 = Russia Russia Russia.

Disturbed Voter , July 16, 2018 at 12:34 pm

Since we know that CIA has tools to make hacks look like it came from any suspect source, and this technology has been leaked (after the DNC problem though) we will never know anything true about this, not the public, not the prosecutors. They don't have the technical ability, if anyone has, at this point, to distinguish a real from a fake hack.

I wouldn't be surprised now, if the Russians did the hacking, because they were paid by the Clintons to do it. Certainly the NSA and GCHQ has it all too.

Ashburn , July 16, 2018 at 1:37 pm

I don't get why so many commenters are willing to see some grand conspiracy behind charges that the Russians tried to influence the voting public against Hillary. It make perfect sense to me that they wouldn't want such a warmonger in the White House. If you haven't read the full indictment I urge you to. It is an incredibly detailed document. https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/80-netyksho-et-al-indictment/ba0521c1eef869deecbe/optimized/full.pdf?action=click&module=Intentional&pgtype=Article

I certainly believe that many folks would like to use this Russian meddling to advance a neocon agenda and start a new cold war, but that doesn't invalidate the fact that Russians might have done this. The US certainly does it (and far worse). Israel certainly meddles in our elections as do the Saudis, most likely. So does the Supreme Court, as do the Republicans with their gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts. I believe that is what the Left should be protesting, not joining in to the belief that this is all some giant frame-up of Putin and Russia.

I've been a cautious skeptic about this whole collusion issue up to now, but after reading the latest indictment it seems to me that Mueller is very close to closing the ring on Trump. Perhaps I'm wrong but I find it hard to believe that Mueller, after a lifetime of mostly very honorable public service, would join in to such a conspiracy. I find it easy to believe Trump and Co. would.

Pat , July 16, 2018 at 2:24 pm

I can't comment for others, but frankly I have two reasons for not believing "The Russians Did It!" boondoggle.

1st: Of Course Russia was using the technology available to them to influence the election. So was Israel, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, France, Great Britain, etc. Any major nation whose intelligence services were not 'hacking' into our system, using Facebook, and every other claim against Russia was not doing their job. The idea that this was limited to Russia, and untenable to any other nation is BS on its face. Just like the idea that we aren't doing it everywhere else is. It is the job of our intelligence community to either shut down intelligence breeches. I'm amazed at the everyone who looks at the stories put out about this who doesn't recognize the level of incompetence of the CIA, FBI, NIS, etc.

2nd: The more that has come out about the so-called hacks has made it clear that the DNC was largely responsible for being an open sieve. And most of the most the items that were most damaging to Clinton and the Democrats were, well true, and frankly items that our so-called free press should have been hunting down if they weren't so captured.

3rd: This truly only became a problem when Clinton wasn't running away with the polls. The breathless announcement with the Bull about the 17 different agencies when it was a organization that speaks for the 17 agencies that reported it. Once again what was the Coast Guard intelligence service doing investigating a hack of DNC servers? It was all PR again. There still wasn't all that much concern on any one's part because no one was really worried about the actual election. What were the agencies and the DNC doing to secure things?

4th: The hysteria involved in this hit high gear when Clinton lost because she and her campaign was incompetent. They had to find an excuse besides Clinton being intensely disliked by almost half the country, her campaign being stupid and the policies of the Democratic Party being disliked. They didn't lose all those state houses and governorships and both Houses of Congress because of the Russians, but the Presidency, nope that was because of interference.

IOW, sure there was interference, interference that no one much cared about until the guy willing to upset the apple cart got elected. And the interference that everyone recognizes was the one that supports further Military action beloved by our NeoCon/NeoLiberal political class and the MIC. Gosh. Recognizing the overwhelming finger of Israel on our political system (including with Trump) isn't being addressed at all.

It is like not recognizing that Clinton was treated differently for actual illegal activity regarding her security breeches at State, but pretending she was cleared. All show and little actual concern for the problems at hand.

redleg , July 16, 2018 at 2:51 pm

Excellent.

Saudi, Israeli, corporate interference is OK, but not alleged Russian interference.

Election tampering/hacking in 2000, 2004, 2008, 2016 is OK only if it wasn't the Russians.

Blue Pilgrim , July 16, 2018 at 4:57 pm

There was a preference by Putin and many others, Russians and other nationalities, for Trump based on, as Putin said, Clinton wanting to start a war (she said she would do a 'no fly zone' in Syria) and Trump wanting normal relations -- but that was not tampering or hacking. Also, as Putin said, he would deal with whoever was elected, it could not be predicted with confidence what either would do when in office, and it is Russian policy not to interfere with the sovereignty of other countries. Some Russians preferred Trump and some Clinton, like most everyone in the world. Most everyone would have preferred Sanders if the primary hadn't been rigged against him.

Just having a preference is not the same as tampering, or everyone who voted could be accused of tampering or hacking by casting his/her vote. I don't Russia had anything to do with swaying the election, and it is only just now, going on two years after, that Putin even let it be known he preferred Trump and normalization of relations over Clinton and war. Putin is diplomatic but he plays it straight.

ChrisPacific , July 16, 2018 at 5:52 pm

Isikoff's responses made me curious so I went and looked it up (PBS has it as well). It's a bit under 30 pages long and relatively easy to read. I encourage anyone following the story to do so.

Of all the Russia theories, the bit about the Russians being behind the DNC e-mail hack has always seemed the most credible to me, if only because they were apparently able to convince Trump of it when they presented the evidence to him. The indictment is very detailed and implies the existence of considerable hard evidence that would have been used to create it. There are names, dates and times, aliases, specific servers and tasks performed on them, and so on. Either Mueller is going all in on a bluff or he actually has this stuff. The former would be very risky because there is so much detail in the indictment that he would rapidly need to put up or shut up in order to maintain any kind of credibility in court. If he tried to handwave then it would all fall apart like a house of cards. I don't completely rule it out (especially given that they did exactly that for the Iraq WMDs) but in this case I think a legal challenge from one of the accused would expose things pretty quickly. It will be interesting to see whether anyone does that.

So suppose it's true and Mueller has the evidence. That would mean that agents of the Russian military were involved in the DNC server hacks. That's it. There have to date been no claims from the intelligence community that the election itself was compromised, and the only dirt on the Trump campaign was from the discredited Steele dossier. I think this falls within the realm of things that big countries do all the time (the US probably did something similar to obtain the evidence referenced in the indictment). It might have been a bit more serious because it was politically sensitive material during an election campaign, which likely merited some kind of response (Obama's "I told the Russians to cut it out" would seem appropriate). "OMG the Russians stole our democracy!" is a hysterical overreaction.

The other thing is that the activities described in the indictment are nothing particularly special or unusual. There are bad actors out there doing this kind of thing all the time, and the DNC would be a high value target. Having a robust security policy and ensuring it was followed would have been enough to thwart pretty much all of it. The real story here is that DNC security practices were sloppy enough to allow this to happen. The fact that it was the Russians that ended up doing it (if it was) is almost incidental.

JTMcPhee , July 16, 2018 at 7:21 pm

The "real story" behind all the current brouhaha and kayfabe, is that the DNC is a vastly corrupt, organized mob (sorry, the court said they are a "private club or association), their candidate was and is an evil POS, and they played not hardball but dirty tricks all the way through the 2016 campaign. They are the ones who make a mockery of 'democracy," however loosely it might be defined, and the electoral process. And one little piece of the rot has fortuitously been uncovered, all those emails and the existence of that "public-private partnership" server and the rest.

(If it was) the Russians, and not some little person, maybe an unpaid intern, within the DNC, with a residue of conscience, or just building some credit with the potential prosecutorial futures Trying to lay it off as just a failure of the DNC to "have a robust security policy, what do they call it, "gaslighting?"

travy , July 16, 2018 at 2:21 pm

i value this site and community but you guys have a real blind spot on this russia issue and i hope you'll own up to it when the truth is known. i hate the current milquetoast dems as much as anyone but if you can't smell the rot on this story or see that something big is lurking under the surface, then you are willfully blind in my opinion.

Brooklin Bridge , July 16, 2018 at 3:55 pm

Of course that's always possible (blind spots), but do you have any particular reasons or evidence you can point to or link to that support your accusation? Is your opinion based on the "overwhelming detail" in the current indictment? Doesn't it bother you that these allegations (for they ARE only allegations) will likely never have to be proven since the possibility of getting the 12 Russians extradited to the US is virtually nil (meaning no trial where the facts must be presented)? Doesn't the timing of this indictment also strike you as suspicious?

travy , July 16, 2018 at 5:52 pm

i don't want to start a scrum but i'll just say i find chait's recent piece, marcy wheeler and tpm's coverage very convincing. too many "innocent explanations" don't add up when taken as a whole and trump's behavior surrounding russia is simply troubling. also, too, he's pretty clearly a money launderer and criminal with ties to russian money. pile on me if you will but we'll have to agree to disagree until more facts come out

Duke of Prunes , July 16, 2018 at 6:48 pm

Help me out, please. What has Trump done that is so beneficial to Russia? I'm asking a serious question and not trolling whatsoever. I can't follow all of the news, and maybe I have a blind spot and missed where Trump sold us out to the Russians. All these people are convinced that "Russia has something on Trump". How are they leveraging this something?

What is Trump doing to the benefit of Russia and the detriment of the USA? If it benefits both, IMHO, then it doesn't necessarily require Russian leverage.

Brooklin Bridge , July 16, 2018 at 7:53 pm
No pile on :-).
Angry Panda , July 16, 2018 at 5:12 pm

Well this wasn't very insightful. Was it.

From the get-go there are two questions that I haven't seen anyone address. This is before you get to any "substantive" bits of the indictment, or of the whole Evil Russian Hacker scandal.

1. Why GRU. WHY GRU.

GRU is the Russian military intelligence agency reporting to the General Staff. While it has many different units and functions, the common denominator is that these have something to do with MILITARY intelligence or activities. Battlefield intelligence, counter-terrorism units, special forces, saboteurs, et cetera.

Meanwhile, the Russians also have the SVR – "Service of Foreign Intelligence" – which is what the foreign intelligence departments of the KGB were folded into in the 1990s (the domestic departments went into the FSB – hence creating a CIA-FBI type duality). Although much of the structure is classified, the SVR does have an entire department dedicated to "information systems".

In principle, an operation against a political target with the view of affecting a political process should involve the SVR – not the GRU. It, in fact, makes absolutely no sense for the GRU to get involved in this, as hacking Podesta's Gmail has no discernible military intelligence objective. And yet, the only acronym various US publications (and indictments) have been pushing since 2017 is the GRU while the SVR does not exist?

This continues to perplex me.

2. Technically speaking, the GRU operates under a very heavy classification regime. Meaning the names of their operatives themselves are classified information. And yet, here we have an indictment with not less than a dozen names.

Which means that either the US has infiltrated the GRU top to bottom and sideways, and Mueller is somehow not gun shy to reveal this fact to the world – or someone is making stuff up. Unless someone wants to point out to me some other explanation for a dozen classified – top secret and all that – names showing up in a public US document

-- -

But hey, I am not a professional journalist, so what do I know about asking questions.

Ashburn , July 16, 2018 at 5:30 pm

My fear is that many on the Left are jumping into a rabbit hole where, as Isikoff says, "everything the US government says is a lie, or is concocted, or is made up out of 'whole cloth'." Even the Republican Senate Intelligence Committee report blames the Russians for interference. This from Charles Blow's column in today's NYT:

As a May report from the Republican-run Senate Intelligence Committee pointed out:
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/publications/russia-inquiry

"In 2016, cyber actors affiliated with the Russian Government conducted an unprecedented, coordinated cyber campaign against state election infrastructure. Russian actors scanned databases for vulnerabilities, attempted intrusions, and in a small number of cases successfully penetrated a voter registration database. This activity was part of a larger campaign to prepare to undermine confidence in the voting process."

Rather than be distracted with whether Mueller and DOJ and the Intel Community is making it all up let's wait and see what the special counsel ultimately finds and the evidence he produces to support it. In the meantime, the Left should be shining the light on our own, well documented, interference in other countries' elections, our illegal regime change operations and calling out the neocons and their fellow travelers for trying to start a new Cold War with Russia.

[Jul 16, 2018] Christopher Steele got "fired from the fbi," and isikoff, claiming he didn't do nuthin' "wrong," apparently got a book deal

Jul 16, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Katniss Everdeen , July 16, 2018 at 8:55 am

isikoff has been in on this from the git go. (Remember judy miller?)

He's the one who wrote a "yahoo" article, after talking to christopher steele of dossier fame, that was cited as "confirmation" of the dossier "evidence" when it was used to get a fisa warrant on Carter Paige to justify the Trump campaign "wiretapping" that "never happened."

christopher steele got "fired from the fbi," and isikoff, claiming he didn't do nuthin' "wrong," apparently got a book deal. He now seems to have decided that his mission in life is advocating for nuclear war with Russia because john podesta got sucked in by a phishing email and gave away his password which was, in perfect keeping with the stupidity of it all, "password."

[Jul 16, 2018] Indictment of 12 Russians: Under the Shiny Wrapping, a Political Act by Scott Ritter

Scott Ritter is not buying this,: "this indictment would ever go to trial. It simply couldn't survive the discovery to which any competent defense would subject the government's assertions." This clearly was a political act by neocons.
Rosenstein and Mueller claim that 12 Russians like 12 Spartan manage to keep Hillary from the coronation is questionable political backstabbing at best, the act of sedition at worst.
Notable quotes:
"... Rosenstein, by the timing and content of the indictment he publicly released Friday, committed an act that undermined the president of the United States' ability to conduct critical affairs of state -- in this case, a summit with a foreign leader the outcome of which could impact global nuclear nonproliferation policy. The hue and cry among the president's political foes for him to cancel the summit with Putin -- or, failing that, to use the summit to confront the Russian leader with the indictment -- is a direct result of Rosenstein's decision to release the Mueller indictment when he did and how he did. Through its content, the indictment was designed to shape public opinion against Russia. ..."
Jul 15, 2018 | www.truthdig.com

... ... ...

While the impeachment of Rosenstein is highly unlikely and the likelihood of the FBI being found guilty of its investigations being corrupted by individual bias is equally slim, in the world of politics, perception creates its own reality and the Mueller investigation had been taking a public beating for some time. By releasing an indictment predicated upon the operating assertion that 12 named Russian military intelligence officers orchestrated a series of cyberattacks that resulted in information being stolen from computer servers belonging to the Democratic Party, and then facilitated the release of this information in a manner designed to do damage to the candidacy of Clinton, Rosenstein sought to silence once and for all the voices that have attacked him, along with the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Mueller investigation, as a participant in a partisan plot against the president.

There is one major problem with the indictment, however: It doesn't prove that which it asserts. True, it provides a compelling narrative that reads like a spy novel, and there is no doubt in my mind that many of the technical details related to the timing and functioning of the malware described within are accurate. But the leap of logic that takes the reader from the inner workings of the servers of the Democratic Party to the offices of Russian intelligence officers in Moscow is not backed up by anything that demonstrates how these connections were made.

That's the point of an indictment, however -- it doesn't exist to provide evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, but rather to provide only enough information to demonstrate probable cause. No one would, or could, be convicted at trial from the information contained in the indictment alone. For that to happen, the government would have to produce the specific evidence linking the hacks to the named Russians, and provide details on how this evidence was collected, and by whom. In short, the government would have to be willing to reveal some of the most sensitive sources and methods of intelligence collection by the U.S. intelligence community and expose, and therefore ruin, the careers of those who collected this information. This is something the government has never been willing to do, and there is much doubt that if, for some odd reason, the Russians agreed to send one or more of these named intelligence officers to the United States to answer the indictment, this indictment would ever go to trial. It simply couldn't survive the discovery to which any competent defense would subject the government's assertions.

Robert Mueller knew this when he drafted the indictment, and Rob Rosenstein knew this when he presented it to the public. The assertions set forth in the indictment, while cloaked in the trappings of American justice, have nothing to do with actual justice or the rule of law; they cannot, and will never, be proved in a court of law. However, by releasing them in a manner that suggests that the government is willing to proceed to trial, a perception is created that implies that they can withstand the scrutiny necessary to prevail at trial.

And as we know, perception is its own reality.

Despite Rosenstein's assertions to the contrary, the decision to release the indictment of the 12 named Russian military intelligence officers was an act of partisan warfare designed to tip the scale of public opinion against the supporters of President Trump, and in favor of those who oppose him politically, Democrat and Republican alike. Based upon the media coverage since Rosenstein's press conference, it appears that in this he has been wildly successful.

But is the indictment factually correct? The biggest clue that Mueller and Rosenstein have crafted a criminal espionage narrative from whole cloth comes from none other than the very intelligence agency whose work would preclude Rosenstein's indictment from ever going to trial: the National Security Agency. In June 2017 the online investigative journal The Intercept referenced a highly classified document from the NSA titled "Spear-Phishing Campaign TTPs Used Against U.S. And Foreign Government Political Entities." It's a highly technical document, derived from collection sources and methods the NSA has classified at the Top Secret/SI (i.e., Special Intelligence) level. This document was meant for internal consumption, not public release. As such, the drafters could be honest about what they knew and what they didn't know -- unlike those in the Mueller investigation who drafted the aforementioned indictment.

A cursory comparison of the leaked NSA document and the indictment presented by Rosenstein suggests that the events described in Count 11 of the indictment pertaining to an effort to penetrate state and county election offices responsible for administering the 2016 U.S. presidential election are precisely the events captured in the NSA document. While the indictment links the identity of a named Russian intelligence officer, Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev, to specific actions detailed therein, the NSA document is much more circumspect. In a diagram supporting the text report, the NSA document specifically states that the organizational ties between the unnamed operators involved in the actions described and an organizational entity, Unit 74455, affiliated with Russian military intelligence is a product of the judgment of an analyst and not fact.

If we take this piece of information to its logical conclusion, then the Mueller indictment has taken detailed data related to hacking operations directed against various American political entities and shoehorned it into what amounts to little more than the organizational chart of a military intelligence unit assessed -- but not known -- to have overseen the operations described. This is a far cry from the kind of incontrovertible proof that Mueller's team suggests exists to support its indictment of the 12 named Russian intelligence officers.

If this is indeed the case, then the indictment, as presented, is a politically motivated fraud. Mueller doesn't know the identities of those involved in the hacking operations he describes -- because the intelligence analysts who put the case together don't know those names. If this case were to go to trial, the indictment would be dismissed in the preliminary hearing phase for insufficient evidence, even if the government were willing to lay out the totality of its case -- which, because of classification reasons, it would never do.

But the purpose of the indictment wasn't to bring to justice the perpetrators of a crime against the American people; it was to manipulate public opinion.

And therein lies the rub.

The timing of the release of the Mueller indictment unleashed a storm of political backlash directed at President Trump, and specifically at his scheduled July 16 summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. This summit was never popular with the president's political opponents, given the current state of affairs between Russia and the U.S., dominated as they are by events in Syria and Ukraine, perceived Russian threats against the northern flank of NATO, allegations of election meddling in the U.S. and Europe, and Russia's nuclear arsenal. On that last point, critics claim Russia's arsenal is irresponsibly expanding, operated in violation of existing arms control agreements, and is being used to underpin foreign policy objectives through the use of nuclear blackmail.

President Trump has publicly stated that it is his fervent desire that relations with Russia can be improved and that he views the Helsinki summit as an appropriate venue for initiating a process that could facilitate such an outcome. It is the president's sole prerogative to formulate and implement foreign and national security policy on behalf of the American people. While his political critics are free to criticize this policy, they cannot undermine it without running afoul of sedition laws.

Rosenstein, by the timing and content of the indictment he publicly released Friday, committed an act that undermined the president of the United States' ability to conduct critical affairs of state -- in this case, a summit with a foreign leader the outcome of which could impact global nuclear nonproliferation policy. The hue and cry among the president's political foes for him to cancel the summit with Putin -- or, failing that, to use the summit to confront the Russian leader with the indictment -- is a direct result of Rosenstein's decision to release the Mueller indictment when he did and how he did. Through its content, the indictment was designed to shape public opinion against Russia.

This indictment, by any other name, is a political act, and should be treated as such by the American people and the media.

[Jul 16, 2018] It's Trump vs the War Party by Justin Raimondo

Jul 16, 2018 | original.antiwar.com

July 16, 2018

"This isn't about Trump, his personality, or his other policies. It's about whether a bunch of unelected bureaucrats are going to be granted a veto power over who sits in that chair in the Oval Office" 7 hours ago | 2,546 75 MORE: Politics If there was ever any doubt that the Russia-gate hoax is a scheme by the War Party to salvage their bankrupt foreign policy, and depose a democratically-elected President, then Robert Mueller's indictment of twelve alleged GRU agents for "interfering" in the 2016 election settles the matter once and for all. Are we supposed to believe it was just a coincidence that the indictment was made public just as Trump was about to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki?

An indictment of twelve individuals who will never contest the charges, and which will not have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law – to whom is it addressed? Not to any jury, but to the court of public opinion. It is, in short, pure propaganda, meant to sabotage Trump's Helsinki peace initiative before it has even convened.

Yet the brazenness of this borderline treason is what makes it so ineffective. The American people aren't stupid: to the extent that they're paying attention to this Beltway comic opera they can figure out the motives and meaning of Mueller's accusations without too much difficulty.

The indictment reads like a fourth-rate spy thriller: we are treated to alleged "real time" transcripts of Boris and Natasha in action, draining the DNC's email system as well as our precious bodily fluids. This material, perhaps supplied by the National Security Agency, contains no evidence that links either Russia or the named individuals to the actions depicted in the transcripts. We just have to take Mueller's word for it.

What Mueller is counting on is that the defendants will never show up in court. If they did, following the example of representatives of the indicted Internet Research Agency – accused of running Facebook ads on Russia's behalf – Mueller would have to provide real evidence of the defendant's guilt. In that case, the indictment would have to be dropped, because the alleged evidence is classified.

Ominously, the indictment points to unnamed US individuals alleged to have collaborated with supposed Russian agents: Roger Stone has been identified as one of them, and no doubt others have been targeted by the special prosecutor's office. Anyone who thought the anti-Russian inquisition would be content with mini-big fish Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort, and the little tadpoles they'd managed to corral, is about to be proven dead wrong. This fishing expedition has barely begun.

The whole shoddy affair is meant to distract attention away from the President's ambitious foreign policy initiatives, the twin diplomatic outreach campaigns to two of our old cold war enemies. These efforts demonstrate the overarching significance of the President's "America First" foreign policy: Trump means to abandon the old cold war structures. In their place he means to build a new so-called international order, one that is not overseen by any one "superpower" but that is self-regulating, like the market order that has brought unparalleled prosperity to this country and to the world.

That's the big picture. Focusing in on specifics, what is likely to come out of this summit is:

· A settlement of the Syrian conflict as a prelude to US withdrawal.

· An agreement to renew and revitalize the INF treaty, which is in danger of being nullified, and the initiation of new joint efforts to limit nuclear weapons.

· An acknowledgment of the need to normalize Russo-American relations in the interest of world peace.

I might add that efforts to trace and capture "rogue" nukes, perhaps left over from the immediate post-Soviet collapse, should also be on the agenda.

The disgusting – and depressing – response of the Democrats to the Helsinki summit has been a concerted campaign to cancel it. Yes, that's how myopic and in thrall to the Deep State these flunkies are: world peace, who cares ? Never mind that we're still on hair-trigger alert, with our nukes aimed at their cities and their nukes targeting ours. The slightest anomaly could spark a nuclear exchange – the end of the world, the extinction of human life, and probably of most life, for quite some time to come.

And yet -- what does the survival of the human race matter next to the question of how and why Hillary Clinton was denied her rightful place in history? I mean, really !

The American people are not blaming Russia for their problems. They don't want conflict with the Kremlin, they don't care about Ukraine, and the question of sanctions never comes up at the dinner table of ordinary Americans. That's why Russia-gate and the war propaganda coming out of the neocon and liberal thinktanks has had little effect on public opinion, in marked contrast to its dominance of elite discourse inside the Beltway bubble.

This latest effort to discredit the President's peace project and sabotage a summit with a foreign leader underscores the battle lines in this country. On one side is the Deep State, with its self-interested globalist leadership so invested in our interventionist foreign policy that even Trump's limited (albeit surprisingly radical) critique poses a deadly threat to their power. On the other side is Trump, the outsider, who often has to work against and around his own government in order to pursue his preferred policies.

Yet this isn't about Trump, his personality, or his other policies. It's about whether a bunch of unelected bureaucrats are going to be granted a veto power over who sits in that chair in the Oval Office. It's as simple as that.

I know what side I'm on. Do you?


Source: Antiwar.com

[Jul 16, 2018] Is it just me, or does Dimitri Alperovitch look like a guy who's making p*rn movies in a van that drives all round the city?

Alperovich is a specialist on special flavor of porn -- security porn...
Jul 16, 2018 | consortiumnews.com
O Society , July 14, 2018 at 8:29 am

Is it just me, or does Dimitri Alperovitch look like a guy who's making p*rn movies in a van that drives all round the city?

https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/dmitri.jpg

[Jul 16, 2018] America's Russia Derangement Syndrome by Publius Tacitus

Jul 16, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Watching the various media commentary on Russia and Vladimir Putin I am beyond stunned by the ignorance, insanity and stupidity that grips the vast multitude of talking heads and so-called reporters as they opine on the upcoming summit. The memes are simple:

You got the drift. Now let us get back to reality.

Putin and Russia will welcome improved relationships with the West, especially the United States. But they will not sell out their soul and they will not acquiesce to our lies. Here is one simple truth and reality that lurks in the background--despite all of our chest thumping about Russia involvement in Syria, we are in daily coordination with the Russian military on deconflicting air space and upcoming ground operations. This does not get covered in the media therefore it does not exist within the consciousness of the American public.

Russia is appropriately and correctly leery of the United States and its sanctimonious bullshit. Consider the uproar here over "Russian meddling." The U.S. has a long and blood soaked history of intervening in other countries and ousting elected leaders. Prominent on that list are Iran, Guatemala, Chile and Vietnam. Our protests against alleged Russian meddling are like a whore protesting the fact that a high school cheerleader lost her virginity on prom night.

The Russians have not forgotten our role in developing and launching the Stuxnet virus in 2010. Although it was supposed to only target the Iranian nuclear reactors, it infected the Russian Space Station and a Russian nuclear plant . The ground truth is that the United States, through the activities of the CIA, the NSA and the Department of Defense, has the largest, most robust computer network operations aka hacking activity, in the world. We live in the biggest damn glass house.

Syria? We, the United States, along with the Brits, the Turks, the Saudis and the Qataris, funded, organized and armed Islamic extremists in Syria. We were giving arms to terrorists. It was the Russians who intervened to stablize the Syrian regime and turn the tables on all of the rebel groups. We are just sore damn losers. We were out fought and out thought by Russia in Syria and have been loath to admit the facts.

How about the question of foreign intervention? Let's put Syria to the side. The U.S. has a far more disgraceful, shameful history on this point. Since December of 1989, we have invaded Panama, Iraq (twice), Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria. At the same time we have broken our promise to the Russians to not expand NATO into the former member of the Soviet Union. In fact, U.S. and British intelligence operatives played a crucial (albeit covert role) in organizing the Euromaidan:

a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine , which began on the night of 21 November 2013 with public protests in Maidan Nezalezhnosti ("Independence Square") in Kiev . The protests were sparked by the Ukrainian government's decision to suspend the signing of an association agreement with the European Union , instead choosing closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union .

These protest led ultimately to the ouster of the democratically and legally elected Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych. In stark contrast to the alleged meddling of Russia in our 2016 election, the United States actually succeeded in helping oust an elected President. Vladimir Putin has not forgotten that fact.

The Deep State keeps harping on the "Russian invasion" of Crimea. As I noted in my previous piece, Nato, A Naked Emperor , the Russians did not invade. There was a referendum. I am sure that Putin will point out the fact that the United States continues to "lease" Guatanamo Bay in Cuba without the legitimacy of an election. The Cubans want us out but we insist that we have a legal right to be there. Unlike Crimea, which historically was part of Russia, we have no historic claim to Cuba other than our own greed.

The Deep State also wants Trump to get the Russians to do something about Iran. Do not be surprised if Vladimir Putin takes time to explain to Donald that Iran's rise in the Middle East is not because of Russian support. Nope. It is a direct consequence of the U.S. 2003 invasion of Iraq.

How about future cooperation? The Russians already are playing Lyft driver for U.S. astronauts as they ferrying us to and from the Space Station. On the nuclear front, Putin withdrew in 2016 from a treaty , on the disposal of plutonium, in anger over the U.S. breaking of its promise to not grow NATO and increase military exercises on Russias border. Putin does not have alzheimer's. He is not going to back off on this point.

At the core of the U.S. mythology about Russia is the lingering resentment of how the Soviets treated Jews in the former Soviet Union and our self-delusion that we, the United States, defeated the Nazis. The largest tank battle in history was not the Battle of the Bulge. It was Kursk and that was led by a Russian General. The West has refused to acknowledge the critical role that Russia played in defeating the Nazis. Without the incredible stands at Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad, the West probably would have lost the war and we would be living under a true fascist regime.

History is not a strong suit for Americans. Embarrassing ignorance is our currency. And we our flush with that cash.

[Jul 16, 2018] This is all about freako psychopaths and their money, nothing more: lot's of blackmail to keep the gravy train running

Debsisdead provides some consideration why the level of Mueller investigation is so low and finding are so pathetic...
Notable quotes:
"... I'm always gobsmacked at the cognitive dissonance of those who on the one hand shout that the American empire is on its last legs but as they do that they also claim that America's dumb as a rock alphabet intelligence agencies are successfully developing incredibly arcane and complicated strategies that would require having foresight to the point of omnipotence to successfully manage the plot/s. ..."
"... All that despite the fact that the known measurable outcomes that these agencies and their 'pointy end' the American military do deliver in conflicts mostly of their design and instigation reveal a miserable success rate of I would say, less than 1 in 10. ..."
"... That nonsense just does not compute. Yes they are violent crooks, but they are stupid violent crooks who cannot succeed at the simplest plan much less the intricate tactics outlined by so many here. ..."
Jul 16, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

a bee , Jul 15, 2018 10:42:53 AM | 164

this is all about freako psychopaths and their money, nothing more. lot's of blackmail to keep the gravy train running

they cannot charge the Russians with what they have actually done due to a lot of these little deep state sh%$ts would go to jail and possibly branches of government shut down if it ever came out what the various "kompromats" were that the Russians targeted

the Russians are offensive and no innocents, however the US Gov is just disgusting

Debsisdead , Jul 15, 2018 12:50:07 PM | 166
I'm always gobsmacked at the cognitive dissonance of those who on the one hand shout that the American empire is on its last legs but as they do that they also claim that America's dumb as a rock alphabet intelligence agencies are successfully developing incredibly arcane and complicated strategies that would require having foresight to the point of omnipotence to successfully manage the plot/s.

All that despite the fact that the known measurable outcomes that these agencies and their 'pointy end' the American military do deliver in conflicts mostly of their design and instigation reveal a miserable success rate of I would say, less than 1 in 10.

That nonsense just does not compute. Yes they are violent crooks, but they are stupid violent crooks who cannot succeed at the simplest plan much less the intricate tactics outlined by so many here.

Once people begin believing the DC airheads' nonsense posturing , they may as well pack their bags, throw in the towel and take off for parts unknown because falling for scumbag tosh indicates an inability to accurately perceive the world - just the same as these DC derps, but with less naked self interest on display.

[Jul 15, 2018] Sic Semper Tyrannis HILLARY CLINTON S COMPROMISED EMAILS WERE GOING TO A FOREIGN ENTITY – NOT RUSSIA! FBI Agent Ignored Evide

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "an unauthorized source that was a foreign entity unrelated to Russia." ..."
Jul 15, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

HILLARY CLINTON'S COMPROMISED EMAILS WERE GOING TO A FOREIGN ENTITY – NOT RUSSIA! FBI Agent Ignored Evidence Report from Decameron

FBI Peter Strzok – the philandering FBI chief investigator who facilitated the FISA surveillance of Trump campaign officials in 2016 – has been exposed for ignoring evidence of major Clinton-related breaches of national security and has been accused of lying about it.

Hillary Clinton's emails, "every single one except for four, over 30,000 of them, were going to an address that was not on the distribution l ist," Texas Congressman Louis Gohmert said on Friday. And they went to "an unauthorized source that was a foreign entity unrelated to Russia." The information came from Intelligence Community Inspector General Chuck McCullough, who sent his investigator Frank Rucker, along with an ICIG attorney Janette McMillan, to brief Strzok.

Gohmert nailed Strozk at the open Congressional hearing on Friday the 13 th in Washington, but Strzok claimed no recollection. Gohmert accused him of lying. Maybe Strzok's amnesia about the briefing on Hillary Clinton's email server is nothing but standard FBI training: i.e., when in doubt, don't recall. It's far more likely that there is a campaign of deliberate obstructing justice, selective prosecution, and political targeting by top officials embedded in the permanent bureaucracy of the Justice Department, FBI, and broader IC. Strzok is not alone.

And what "foreign entity" got Hillary's classified emails? Trump haters in British Intelligence and those in Israel who want to manipulate the US presidency – whatever party prevails – come to mind. Listen closely and you may hear rumors around Washington that it was Israel, not Russia, that was the foreign power involved in approaching Trump advisers. Time to follow that thread.

Both Representatives Gohmert (TX) and Trey Gowdy (SC) did a great job trying to pierce the veil of denials. But, right after Strzok's amnesia in Congress, the Justice Department announced the indictment of GRU members. Change of subject. The same foul stench noted by Publius Tacitus about the GRU indictment filled Congress as Agent Strzok testified.

... ... ...

Congressional hearing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXTAlUormPA

Gohmert on Fox: http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/5808969622001/?#sp=show-clips


Pat Lang Mod , 24 minutes ago

So, a foreign power (not Russia but "hostile" according to Gohmert) modified internal instructions in HC's server so that a blind copy went to this other country, all 30,000 e-mails. I wonder what was different about the four that were not so copied. What are likely countries? The UK, China and Israel would be at the top of my list
James Thomas , 9 hours ago
So the emails were being bcc-ed or the server was set up to copy all emails passing through it to some foreign server? I am curious about the mechanics.
Pat Lang Mod -> James Thomas , 42 minutes ago
It seems that the server was the mechanism. Whether that was by physical access to the server or electronically at a distance. Her entire system was not secure and could be easily penetrated.

[Jul 15, 2018] Peter Strzok Ignored Evidence Of Clinton Server Breach

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... In December, a letter from Senate Homeland Security Committee Chair Ron Johnson (R-WI) revealed that Strzok and other FBI officials effectively "decriminalized" Clinton's behavior through a series of edits to James Comey's original statement. ..."
"... The letter described how outgoing Deputy Director Andrew McCabe exchanged drafts of Comey's statement with senior FBI officials , including Strzok, Strzok's direct supervisor , E.W. "Bill" Priestap, Jonathan Moffa, and an unnamed employee from the Office of General Counsel (identified by Newsweek as DOJ Deputy General Counsel Trisha Anderson) - in a coordinated conspiracy among top FBI brass. ..."
"... In summary; the FBI launched an investigation into Hillary Clinton's private server, ignored evidence it may have been hacked, downgraded the language in Comey's draft to decriminalize her behavior, and then exonerated her by recommending the DOJ not prosecute. ..."
"... Meanwhile, a tip submitted by an Australian diplomat tied to a major Clinton Foundation deal launched the FBI's counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign - initially spearheaded by the same Peter Strzok who worked so hard to get Hillary off the hook. ..."
Mar 06, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
216 SHARES

FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok reportedly ignored "an irregularity in the metadata" indicating that Hillary Clinton's server may had been breached, while FBI top brass made significant edits to former Director James Comey's statement specifically minimizing how likely it was that hostile actors had gained access.

Sources told Fox News that Strzok, who sent anti-Trump text messages that got him removed from the ongoing Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe, was told about the metadata anomaly in 2016, but Strzok did not support a formal damage assessment. One source said: " Nothing happened. "

In December, a letter from Senate Homeland Security Committee Chair Ron Johnson (R-WI) revealed that Strzok and other FBI officials effectively "decriminalized" Clinton's behavior through a series of edits to James Comey's original statement.

The letter described how outgoing Deputy Director Andrew McCabe exchanged drafts of Comey's statement with senior FBI officials , including Strzok, Strzok's direct supervisor , E.W. "Bill" Priestap, Jonathan Moffa, and an unnamed employee from the Office of General Counsel (identified by Newsweek as DOJ Deputy General Counsel Trisha Anderson) - in a coordinated conspiracy among top FBI brass.

It was already known that Strzok - who was demoted to the FBI's HR department for sending anti-Trump text messages to his mistress - downgraded the language describing Clinton's conduct from the criminal charge of "gross negligence" to "extremely careless."

Notably, "Gross negligence" is a legal term of art in criminal law often associated with recklessness. According to Black's Law Dictionary, it is defined as " A severe degree of negligence taken as reckless disregard ," and " Blatant indifference to one's legal duty, other's safety, or their rights ." "Extremely careless," on the other hand, is not a legal term of art.

18 U.S. Code § 793 "Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information" specifically uses the phrase "gross negligence." Had Comey used the phrase, he would have essentially declared that Hillary had broken the law.

In order to justify downgrading Clinton's behavior to "extremely careless," however, FBI officials also needed to minimize the impact of her crimes. As revealed in the letter from Rep. Johnson, the FBI downgraded the probability that Clinton's server was hacked by hostile actors from " reasonably likely " to " possible ."

"Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal e-mail account," Comey said in his statement.

By doing so, the FBI downgraded Clinton's negligence - thus supporting the "extremely careless" language.

The FBI also edited Clinton's exoneration letter to remove a reference to the "sheer volume" of classified material on the private server, which - according to the original draft "supports an inference that the participants were grossly negligent in their handling of that information." Furthermore, all references to the Intelligence Community's involvement in investigating Clinton's private email server were removed as well.

Director Comey's original statement acknowledged the FBI had worked with its partners in the Intelligence Community to assess potential damage from Secretary Clinton's use of a private email server. The original statement read:

W]e have done extensive work with the assistance of our colleagues elsewhere in the Intelligence Community to understand what indications there might be of compromise by hostile actors in connection with the private email operation.

In summary; the FBI launched an investigation into Hillary Clinton's private server, ignored evidence it may have been hacked, downgraded the language in Comey's draft to decriminalize her behavior, and then exonerated her by recommending the DOJ not prosecute.

Meanwhile, a tip submitted by an Australian diplomat tied to a major Clinton Foundation deal launched the FBI's counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign - initially spearheaded by the same Peter Strzok who worked so hard to get Hillary off the hook.

And Strzok still collects a taxpayer-funded paycheck.

[Jul 15, 2018] Something Rotten About the DOJ Indictment of the GRU by Publius Tacitus

Highly recommended!
Jul 15, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Assistant Attorney General Rosenstein announced a bizarre indictment against Russian military intelligence operatives today that, rather than confirming the case of "Russian meddling" in the U.S. 2016 Presidential election raises more questions. Here are the major oddities:

  1. How did the FBI obtain information about activity on the DNC and DCCC servers when the DNC/DCCC refused to give the Feds access to the servers/computers?
  2. Why does Crowdstrike get credit as being a competent computer security firm when, according to the indictment, they completely and utterly failed to stop the "hacks?"
  3. Why does the indictment refuse to name Wikileaks by name as the Russian collaborator?

Please go read the indictment ( here ) for yourself. I have taken the time to put together a timeline based on the indictment and other information already on the public record. Here is the bottomline--if US officials knew as early as April that Russia was hacking the DNC, why did it take US officials more than six months to stop the activity? The statement of "facts" contained in the indictment also raise another troubling issue--what is the source of the information? For example, if the FBI was not given access to the DNC/DCCC servers and computers then how do they know what happened on specific dates as alleged in the complaint?

Here is the timeline:

18 April 2016--The Russians hacked into the DNC using DCCC computers and installed malware on the network. (p. 10, para 26)

22 April 2016--The GRU (Russian military intelligence) compressed gigabytes of data using X-tunnel and moved it to a GRU computer located in ILLINOIS. (p. 11, para 26a)

28 April 2016--The Russians stole documents from the DCCC and moved them on to the computer in Illinois. (p. 11, para 26b).

Late April - 5 May 2016--DNC leaders were tipped to the hack in late April. Chief executive Amy Dacey got a call from her operations chief saying that their information technology team had noticed some unusual network activity. That evening, she spoke with Michael Sussmann, a DNC lawyer who is a partner with Perkins Coie in Washington. Soon after, Sussmann, a formerfederal prosecutor who handled computer crime cases, called Henry, whom he has known for many years. ( Ellen Nakashima's 14 June Washington Post article ) (see p. 12, para 32 of th

13 May 2016--The Russians deleted logs and files from a DNC computer. (p. 11, para 31)

25 May - 1 June 2016--the Russians hacked the DNC Microsoft Exchange Server and stole thousands of emails from DNC employees. (p. 11, para 29).

8 June 2016--DCLeaks.com set up, allegedly by the GRU (no proof offered). Also created Facebook and Twitter accounts (pp. 13-14, paras. 35, 38, 39)

10 June 2016--Ultimately, the [Crowdstrike] teams decided it was necessary to replace the software on every computer at the DNC. Until the network was clean, secrecy was vital. On the afternoon of Friday, June 10 , all DNC employees were instructed to leave their laptops in the office. ( Esquire Magazine offers a different timeline )

22 June 2016--Wikileaks contacts Guccier 2.0 stating, "send any new material here for us to review and it will have a much higher impact than what you are doing."

14 July 2016--The GRU, under the guise of Guccifer 2.0, sent Wikileaks an attachment with an encrypted file that explained how to access an online archive of "stolen" documents.

15 August 2016--Guccifer, alleged to be the GRU, has email exchange with Roger Stone.

22 July 2016--Wikileaks publishes 40,000 plus emails (note, the Indictment INCORRECTLY states that the number was 20,000).

September 2016--The GRU obtained access to a DNC server hosted by a third party and took "data analytics" info. (p. 13, para 34)

October 2016--A functioning Linux-based version of X-agent remained on the DNC server until October. (p. 12, para 32)

Another great curiosity is the timing of the announcement of the indictments. Why today? There was no urgency. No one was on the verge of fleeing the United States. All of the defendants are in Russia and beyond our reach.

A careful read of the indictment reveals a level of detail that could only have been obtained from intelligence sources (which means that information would be invalidated if the defendants ever decide to challenge the indictment) or it was provided by an unreliable third party.

I was shocked to discover, thanks to the indictment, how inept Crowdstrike was in this entire process. Not only did more than 30 days lapse before they attempted to shutdown the Russian hacking by installing new software and issuing new email passwords, but their so-called security fix left the Russians running an operation until October 2016. How can you be considered a credible cyber security company yet fail to shutdown the alleged Russian intrusion? It does not make sense.

The most glaring deficit in the indictment is the lack of supporting evidence to back up the charges levied in the indictment. How do we know that computer files were erased if the FBI did not have access to the computers and the servers? How do we know the names of the 12 Russian GRU officers? The Russians do not publish directories of secret organizations. Where did this information come from?

It would appear that the release of the indictment today was a deliberate political act designed to detract and distract from the Trump visit to the UK and to put pressure on him to confront Vladimir Putin. I have heard from many of my former colleagues who are hoping that Putin calls the Rosenstein bluff. If forced to reveal the "evidence" behind this indictment because of a challenge from a defendant, the results will be a disaster for the prosecution.

Posted at 11:26 PM in As The Borg Turns , Publius Tacitus , Russia , Russiagate | Permalink


David Habakkuk , 9 hours ago

PT and all,

A report appeared yesterday on the 'True Pundit' site entitled 'Mueller Plagiarizes Right-Wing YouTube Journalist's Lawsuit Against Podesta in New Russian Indictments; DOJ's Big Splash Appears Fabricated.'

(See https://truepundit.com/muel... .)

According to the report:

''George Webb sued John Podesta in 2017, along with other elected and public officials including Justice Department personnel but today, exact language, accusations and content from Webb's suit appeared in the Justice Department's indictment. Beyond strange.

'Mueller swiped Webb's hacking allegations against Imran Awan and simply flipped them -- almost word for word – and made the exact allegations against Russian operatives.'

The reference is to a class action brought last November against John Podesta and others by one George Webb Sweigert and so far anonymous others against John Podesta and others.

The complaint by Sweigert is at https://www.classaction.org... .

A record to the proceedings to date is at https://www.pacermonitor.co... .

It has long seemed to me that it is likely that we have only seen the tip of the iceberg in relation to the activities of the Awans. However, I do not feel able to take an informed view on whether the 'True Pundit' report and the material presented by Sweigert reflect accurate information fed by discontented insiders, genuine 'fake news', or some combination of both.

I would be most interested in what others make of this.

Artemesia -> David Habakkuk , 7 hours ago
Steven Wasserman, Brother of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to Oversee Awan Family Investigation Jul 27, 2017 https://squawker.org/all/st...

Louie Gohmert, June 5, 2018

"'We need someone assigned to the Awan case that will protect congress from further breaches and from the Awan crime family... for heavens sake, we need someone in the FBI to step up and do their job'"

www.c-span.org/video/?c4733...

In his opening remarks, Gohmert, a former prosecutor, argued that Rosenstein was "disqualified from being able to select or name" a special counsel because he had counseled Trump on the matter; therefore, Rosenstein would be a material witness.

Barbara Ann -> David Habakkuk , 8 hours ago
The truepundit article is fake news IMO. The only 'plagiarism' cited in it is the use of a domain name similar to the Dems fundraiser site; actblue.com . The class action against Podesta alleges the domain was set up by Awan and the DOJ indictment alleges it was set up by the GRU. Having now read them both, aside from references to 'spearphishing' - a well know hacking technique - I cannot see another example of significant repeat language.
Valissa Rauhallinen -> Barbara Ann , 5 hours ago
Thanks for researching! My eyes glaze over whenever I try to read thru generally boring legal docs. Since I had not encountered Truepundit before, I read some of the other articles on their front page and realized it's a conservative news site. There are more and more of those lately. Much needed as a balance to the mostly liberal MSM. I put on my "skeptical spectacles" for both.
OhGodI'veWastedMyLifeOnline , 12 hours ago
My educated guess as to the answer to your three questions is the same as you imply: 1. everything they have they have through hearsay from Crowdstrike. 2. See #1. 3. Wikileaks is the only party who would actually respond to the indictment and seek discovery, so leaving them out means they're not in danger of actually having to produce any evidence.
Valissa Rauhallinen , 6 hours ago
The timing of this announcement illustrates how badly the deep state desires to sabotage Trump's plan to improve US-Russia relations. Since they have been playing the Russia card for so long with no real results and to the detriment of their credibility, the urge to try to obstruct Trump at the 11th hour must have been overwhelming.

Between Trumps experience dealing with shady characters in his prior career (esp the casino industry) and what he has no doubt learned about his enemies in the borg since getting elected, I'm guessing he has contingency plans. And if not, he has great Road Runner-like instincts :)

Catapulta

Play Hide
Walrus , 19 hours ago
I have a sneaking suspicion that Mr. Mueller, Rosenstein and others are a stalking horse for a complete reorganization of the DOJ and FBI. By that I mean it appears to now be beyond reasonable doubt that the above have demonstrated that they are highly political organizations, dripping with partisan agendas.

The question then becomes "how can justice be blind in the USA in the face of incontrovertible evidence it ain't?". To me that sounds like a call to action for President Trump.

Bill H -> Walrus , 9 hours ago
I suspect it is more a case of ineptitude than political bias. They were charged with finding meddling, so they are finding meddling by using imagination rather than evidence. Can you imagine the uproar if they were to conclude a two-year investigation by saying, "Sorry, we found nothing" at the end? We don't have to imagine, since that's what happened after the Clinton email investigation.
EEngineer -> Walrus , 5 hours ago
I think you could be right. If any agreements are made at the Helsinki summit, Trump will have to reign in the deep state to implement them. I've been wondering why there hasn't been a complete house cleaning at DOJ and FBI yet. Perhaps Trump is waiting for them to "jump the shark" so blatantly that when it finally comes it will be seen as the end of their long farce by everyone but the true believers, who by that point will be seen as delusional by the general public. Trump is the master of the game of perception. If he pulls it off the Democrats get crushed this fall. If not, we get president Pence next spring. Game on.
Michael Stojanovic , 7 hours ago
I think Rosenstein is bucking to be fired by Trump. This will then allow the Democrats, to claim obstruction of justice, justifying impeachment. ( Assumption being the Democrats win control of Congress and Senate ) He's been deeply provocative giving ample reason for said dismissal, Trump has resisted up until now. As long as he resists the temptation Congress will eventually impeach Rosenstein. As this article went to print documents for his impeachment are being drawn up for release on Monday possibly, of course subject to politics. ( Please edit the link if you feel it's inappropriate ) https://www.zerohedge.com/n...
Eric Newhill , 18 hours ago
PT,
Please excuse me if this is a far out idiotic thought re the timing of the indictment, but doesn't this at least possibly give Putin some power over Trump? Putin could threaten Trump with having one of the accused "confess" to the hacking per a "collusion" agreement between Russia and the Trump campaign. If that happened, Trump would be promptly impeached. It would be a whirlwind circus.
Barbara Ann -> Eric Newhill , 10 hours ago
Spot on. The DOJ has just provided the best kompromat on Trump (regardless of any factual basis to it) that Putin could ever hope for.
Eric Newhill -> Barbara Ann , 5 hours ago
Thx for the confirmation. Sometimes I "war game" these things over a couple of Scotches. I come up with all sorts of notions, but this one seemed reasonable.
blue peacock , 8 hours ago
Few observations and questions:

1. How did Mueller arrive at his conclusions? There is no exposition of that in the indictment.
2. Has Mueller established a precedent? Wouldn't other countries use this indictment as an example to indict NSA and other US intelligence personnel for conducting "normal" intelligence activities.
3. Rosenstein in his press conference reiterated what is written in the indictment that no US person was involved, and that it did not change the outcome of the election. Does that imply that Mueller & the DOJ are stating that there was no collusion between the Russian government & the Trump campaign? If that is the case what is the remit of the Mueller special counsel?
4. Why is this indictment handed over to DOJ NSD for prosecution rather than Mueller taking it to the court? Isn't the DOJ NSD implicated in the FISA abuse being investigated by IG Horowitz?
5. The Russian intelligence agents are innocent until convicted by a court. An indictment is only the prosecution's story. In this case the prosecution has yet to provide the level of evidence required for a conviction.
6. As is the case with the Russian trolls indicted by Mueller, these agents could ostensibly hire counsel and cause Mueller much embarrassment by requesting evidentiary discovery. Mueller is now backtracking on the Russian troll case as he either has no evidence to back the indictment or is unwilling to provide defense counsel with the same which means the prosecution goes no where.
7. Was this indictment primarily a political document for the TDS afflicted media and people at large? Are Mueller and the Deep Staters assuming that this indictment goes no where as the Russians will not contest the indictment, so it is a cost free, politically beneficial indictment?

Patrick Armstrong , 9 hours ago
My personal favourite part is this one :"All twelve defendants are members of the GRU, a Russian Federation
intelligence agency within the Main Intelligence Directorate of the
Russian military." Mueller & Co haven't a clue.
Felix -> Patrick Armstrong , 6 hours ago
Beyond that, I admittedly found this domain name interesting. Russians seem to have a lot of humor.

linuxkrnl.net

Michael Stojanovic -> Patrick Armstrong , 7 hours ago
No trial, no disputing the narrative. Purely propaganda. Although that completely backfire previously.
Felix -> Patrick Armstrong , 8 hours ago
I agree. But Tump has?
mourjou , 14 hours ago
For example, if the FBI was not given access to the DNC/DCCC servers and computers then how do they know what happened on specific dates as alleged in the complaint?

I believe the NSA records and stores metadata for all Internet traffic, so the FBI asked the NSA for whatever the NSA has for the DNC/DCCC computers then excluded legitimate sources/destinations for the data before analyzing the rest. Once you have loaded all the data into a database, it's not difficult.

I have heard from many of my former colleagues who are hoping that Putin calls the Rosenstein bluff. If forced to reveal the "evidence" behind this indictment because of a challenge from a defendant, the results will be a disaster for the prosecution.

The GRU is part of the military so Putin should order one or two "over the top" to "attack" the Mueller organization. Russia should be able to afford the best defense lawyers in the United States and should be able to circumvent all and any Treasury Dept. attempts to block any funding.

DianaLC , 16 hours ago
Thank you.

I thought immediately that Rosentstein's announcement of this indictment was strangely timed. Your analysis indicates it was put together hurriedly. Therefore, my first thought was that perhaps Rosenstein was attempting to prevent Trump from meeting with Putin, as many of the opposition media have suggested Trump should not meet with Putin because of the announcement of the indictment. After all, they say a POTUS should not hang around with the likes of Putin.

However, most anyone who has followed Trump lately would guess that Trump would not change his planned schedule and would surely keep his schedule and would indeed confront Putin about the indictment.

Then, if that is what they were hoping, it puts Trump in a spot. If Putin denies the entire story and provides Trump with a plausible denial and Trump then wants to investigate further, Trump could be accused of doing what the opposition has claimed all along--"colluding." with the baddest Russian of all.

I think Trump would not be stupid enough to accept either Rosensteein's story or Putin's denial without investigating.

It's Rosentstein's word against the Russians' word in that case, and Trump is caught in the middle and in the same place he's been all along.

I do hope one or all of the accused do ask for a trial. No way, however, would I look forward to that media circus for weeks and weeks.

I personally felt the story was made up when Grucifer was mentioned and purported to be Russian. I thought it convenient that the Russians in America who had been first reported as harmlessly trying to meddle while in the U.S. would be back in Russia and accused just now. Our FBI is truly inept if that is the case. They let the Boston bombers get away with their attack. They let the Pulse night club jihadist get away with his, and they let the "professional school shooter" fulfill his destiny.

There are so many tangled webs from those who have practiced to deceive that we are faced with never finding the truth in our lifetimes.

My only hope for relief from this now, strangely,Lisa Page. I do hope she has been burned badly enough by being stupid enough to become involved with a married co-worker, who is obviously in love with only himself, that she somehow provides us some answers.

I know that I will surely be happier when this horror story is over.

Johnboy4546 , 17 hours ago
If the 12 indicted are actually Russian military intelligence officers then wouldn't it be a simple matter for their superior to order them to front up and demand their day in court?

Sure, there is a risk that they will be convicted, but spooks willingly undertake far more hazardous missions than this. A promise could be made that if they are found guilty the Russian government will move heaven and earth to arrange a spy-swap to get them back and a fabulous recompense for their trouble, so the reward is worth the risk.

Honestly, the prosecutor showed terrible judgement when he included Concord Management in a previous indictment, only to see that company's lawyer calling his bluff. He appears to be under the impression that naming only Russian persons and not Russian companies will prevent that from happening again.

Pretty big risk that his confidence is misplaced.

Pat Lang Mod -> Johnboy4546 , 10 hours ago
yes
akaPatience , 17 hours ago
Thank you PT for your analysis and commentary on this subject.

It seems this indictment is similar to the indictment filed earlier this year against the Russian astroturfers. And in that instance, one of the companies charged is defending itself in US court. Not only that, it opted to exercise its right to a speedy trial!!!

From what I've read, the Mueller team was totally caught off guard since it didn't expect any of the Russians to mount a defense. According to Andrew McCarthy at National Review who's been diligently commenting on the Mueller probe and related matters, the special counsel's team made the mistake of filing the indictment when it was evidently unprepared to go to trial. Mueller's team has consequently asked for delays because it can't produce the DISCOVERY that the defendant has a right to review. I don't know what the latest news is about the case but at one point the Mueller team provided a HUGE cache of internet postings allegedly made by the defendant BUT THEY WERE IN RUSSIAN. How on earth did that influence American voters?

EEngineer , 19 hours ago
Desperation. Fair bet the MSM starts calling Trump's summit with Putin treason by the end of next week.
Bill H -> EEngineer , 9 hours ago
Overcome by events. They already are, and the event in question hasn't even happened yet. They are also claiming the this indictment "proves" treason by Trump, even though it does not even suggest that Trump was involved.
im cotton -> Bill H , 5 hours ago
One can only imagine the reaction if Trump were to announce US curtailing support of planned Nato maneuvers on the "eastern front".
Timothy Hagios , 2 hours ago
Are these even real people? Because that's one way to keep them from showing up in court...
richardstevenhack , 3 hours ago
It's complete drivel (the indictment, that is.)

They waited TWO YEARS to produce this "evidence" - which is without evidence, merely assertions.? That in itself condemns it to complete hogwash.

As for the NSA, they could have produced this stuff at any time in the last two years without compromising any "methods and sources" since we all know since Snowden and Binney how much they capture and retain. Instead, they had only "moderate confidence" of Russian "meddling" in the January, 2017, "assessment."

They allegedly had to rely on the Dutch to penetrate the hackers? And that story was hogwash from the get-go.

As for how they "know" that certain files were erased, that could have come from the "certified true images" provided by CrowdStrike to the FBI - but since CrowdStrike is utterly compromised due to the anti-Russian status of its CEO, that's worthless "evidence."

If Wikileaks was in contact with Guccifer 2.0, then why did James Clapper expend effort trying to shut down the DoJ negotiations with Assange who offered "technical evidence" that would prove the Russians had nothing to do with the Wikileaks DNC emails?

Sincerely hope Sy Hersh gets his hands on an actual copy of that FBI Seth Rich report, because if he does, the FBI and the DoJ are going down. Literally everyone in top management of those agencies (and likely at CIA as well, and possibly NSA) will be up on charges and headed to jail for actual treason.

They have no choice now but to go all in on this stuff because otherwise everyone involved is going to jail.

PeterVE , 3 hours ago
You missed the obvious corollary: CrowdStrike is obviously a subsidiary of the GRU. Clever moves disguised as bumbling incompetence!
I second the motion to have one of the Russians "volunteer" to come to the US to clear his name, except that the poor guy will probably end up in Gitmo.
Felix , 7 hours ago
Why does the indictment refuse to name Wikileaks by name as the Russian collaborator?

Great Collage:

View Hide
Barbara Ann , 7 hours ago
Good work PT

The Witchfinder General has excelled himself this time. Would I be correct in concluding that more sources & methods have been burnt here? "KOVALEV deleted his search history" for example is intel that has to have come from inside a GRU computer, assuming it is true of course.

I'd also just like to highlight that a significant part of this indictment is dedicated to the involvement of both Wikileaks and Bitcoin. It appears to me that a secondary aim here is to bolster Congressional support to outlaw both.

Felix -> Barbara Ann , 5 hours ago
BA, you don't delete your 'search history' occasionally? Maybe even using ccleaner?
Kelli K , 9 hours ago
So, the DOJ is operating as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party in politicking against the President and Congress controlled by the other party. Is this correct?

How else is one to read this indictment, its coordination with the Democratic leadership ("he must pull out of the Putin meeting" squawk), and the "unrelated" matter of attacking Rep. Jordan about 25 year old "abuse" charges dating from his time at OSU? Who was responsible for those "untraceable" attacks-the MSM, the DOJ, the Democratic Party? Is there any light between these institutions at this point? The attack seems to have been successfully fought off, and Jordan is now parrying with a direct attack at Rosenstein.

The pace of all this is dizzying. Is anyone else wondering where it leads to?

FarNorthSolitude , 9 hours ago
Crowdstrike is the weak link in all this. A recap of their next op - trying to pin another hack on the Russians that failed badly -

https://medium.com/@REEL_IC...

Mike Ring , 10 hours ago
By indicting foreign intelligence agents has the USA crossed a line so that now USA intelligence agents are fair game in the courts of foreign lands?
Looking at this deception over the past few years I have always believed its a game of tit-for-tat where the USA hands are not clean either and that there was a mutual understanding amongst parties that there is a limit to retribution.

[Jul 15, 2018] As if the Donald did not sanctioned to death the Russians on every possible level. How is this different from Mueller's and comp witch hunt against the Russians?

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Donald likes to complain about fake news when these implicate him, but on the other hand he creates and acts on fake news himself: see the Russian sanctions, Skripal case, the two Syrian attacks based on fake news created by the White Helmets, paid by the State Department. ..."
Jul 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

veritas semper vincit , Jul 14, 2018 5:07:00 PM | 103

As if the Donald did not sanctioned to death the Russians on every possible level. How is this different from Mueller's and comp witch hunt against the Russians?

The Donald likes to complain about fake news when these implicate him, but on the other hand he creates and acts on fake news himself: see the Russian sanctions, Skripal case, the two Syrian attacks based on fake news created by the White Helmets, paid by the State Department.

I have new posts and new portraits at my sites:

-Givi, the hero of Donbass

-Asma al -Assad

-Houthi fighters

https://me582.wordpress.com/
https://artisticexpressions394454247.wordpress.com/

[Jul 15, 2018] Effect of the US TV on a parrot

Jun 15, 2018 | www.unz.com

anonymous [739] Disclaimer , June 14, 2018 at 12:31 pm GMT

Can't believe any sane American thinks Russians – including beautiful Russian tennis players are more of a threat to us in 2018 then say M13 Gang banger invaders, Chicago Black street gangs, Afghan and Pakistani child rapists or just the sub Saharan Black African mobs with their machetes.

We commissioned some Farstar cartoons on this theme – seems pretty basic to me, but the J media mafia simply goes on and on – there is supposedly a Russian spy behind every bush, some Russians posted anti Hillary posts on Facebook – oh the horror!

https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=wYcqmOzk&id=3B43263DD48F82D1FEC205044FBE66DCDA30A42F&thid=OIP.wYcqmOzkZCrNMrWlfuDUigHaJu&mediaurl=http%3a%2f%2fwww.occidentaldissent.com%2fwp-content%2fuploads%2f2017%2f06%2frussians-out.jpg&exph=1280&expw=974&q=occidental+dissent+farstar&simid=607993335092480560

[Jul 15, 2018] Effect of the US TV on a parrot

Jun 15, 2018 | www.unz.com

anonymous [739] Disclaimer , June 14, 2018 at 12:31 pm GMT

Can't believe any sane American thinks Russians – including beautiful Russian tennis players are more of a threat to us in 2018 then say M13 Gang banger invaders, Chicago Black street gangs, Afghan and Pakistani child rapists or just the sub Saharan Black African mobs with their machetes.

We commissioned some Farstar cartoons on this theme – seems pretty basic to me, but the J media mafia simply goes on and on – there is supposedly a Russian spy behind every bush, some Russians posted anti Hillary posts on Facebook – oh the horror!

https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=wYcqmOzk&id=3B43263DD48F82D1FEC205044FBE66DCDA30A42F&thid=OIP.wYcqmOzkZCrNMrWlfuDUigHaJu&mediaurl=http%3a%2f%2fwww.occidentaldissent.com%2fwp-content%2fuploads%2f2017%2f06%2frussians-out.jpg&exph=1280&expw=974&q=occidental+dissent+farstar&simid=607993335092480560

[Jul 15, 2018] Deep State Sideswipes Helsinki Summit With Mueller Indictments by Tom Luongo

Notable quotes:
"... "In my mind, this is a level of panic and desperation unseen in the annals of Washington D.C. coverups...this is a desperate move by Mueller...this does nothing at all to strengthen Mueller's investigation of Trump himself. It actually weakens his mandate as Special Counsel" ..."
"... Tom is a regular contributor not only here at Russia Insider but also at Seeking Alpha and Newsmax . Check out his blog, Gold Goats 'n Guns and please support his work through his Patreon where he also publishes his monthly investment newsletter. ..."
"... isolationist, conspiracy theorist, nativist and racist ..."
"... Please support my work by joining my Patreon. ..."
Jul 14, 2018 | russia-insider.com

"In my mind, this is a level of panic and desperation unseen in the annals of Washington D.C. coverups...this is a desperate move by Mueller...this does nothing at all to strengthen Mueller's investigation of Trump himself. It actually weakens his mandate as Special Counsel"

Tom is a regular contributor not only here at Russia Insider but also at Seeking Alpha and Newsmax . Check out his blog, Gold Goats 'n Guns and please support his work through his Patreon where he also publishes his monthly investment newsletter.


So, imagine my shock, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted twelve Russian intelligence officers on the eve of a summit between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Despite his oh-so-earnest protestations to the contrary, Rod Rosenstein, of all people, knows there are no coincidences in politics.

Trump is on a search and destroy mission all across Europe right now attacking the pillars of the post-WWII institutional order.

While in Washington, Congress devolved into an episode of Jerry Springer during the Peter Strzok hearings yesterday. Both Strzok and Rosenstein have literally destroyed their credibility by stonewalling Congress over the investigations into Hillary Clinton's email server, which, conveniently Mueller now has enough information to take to the Grand Jury.

In my mind, this is a level of panic and desperation unseen in the annals of Washington D.C. coverups. Both Strzok and Rosenstein know that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is completely compromised and can do nothing to stop them from obstructing investigations and turning our justice system into something worse than farce.

And why do I think this is a desperate move by Mueller? Because the indictments go out of their way to preclude any Americans having any involvement in these 'hacking events' at all.

So, this does nothing at all to strengthen Mueller's investigation of Trump himself. It actually weakens his mandate as Special Counsel.

On the other hand, it does a bang-up job of shifting the news cycle away from Trump's heavy-handed but effective steam-rolling Germany and the UK over NATO spending, energy policy and Brexit.

Trump continues, in his circuitous way, to stick a fork in the eye of the globalists whose water politicians like Angela Merkel and Theresa May have carried for years.

Now with Trump prepared to sit down with Putin and potentially hammer out a major agreement on many outstanding issues like Syria, arms control, NATO's purpose, energy policy and terrorism the Deep State/Globalist/Davos Crowd needed something to saddle him with to prevent this from happening.

The reasoning will be (if not already out there as I write this) that Trump would be a traitor for sitting down with Putin after these indictments.

These indictments are not of some Russian private citizens Internet trolls like the last batch. These are Russian military intelligence officers. And the irony of this, of course, is that the intelligence officers involved in collating and disseminating demonstrably false information about Trump which led to all this in the first place hail from the country that Trump is currently visiting, the U.K.

So, the trap is set for the Democrats, Never Trumpers and media to hang Trump next week with whatever agreement he signs with Putin. In fact, at this point Trump could shoot Putin in the face with a concealed Derringer and they'd say he killed Putin to shut him up.

There is no rationality left to this circus. And that's what these indictments represent.

This is not about right and wrong, it never was. It is, was and always will be about maintaining power. If this week shows people anything it should show just how far these powerful people will go to maintain that power, pelf and privilege.

Because winning isn't everything, it's the only thing in politics. Unfortunately, for them, people all over the West are getting tired of it. And the more they smirk, shuck, jive and cry "Point of Order!" the angrier the people will get.

As one of my savvy subscribers said to me this morning, the Strzok hearings are brilliant. They are shifting the Overton Window so far away from the status quo that it will never shift back to where it was.

I'm sure Mueller, et.al. are thinking they are so smart in doing this today. Just like Angela Merkel continues to think she's survived the challenge to her power and Theresa May hers.

They think they've managed these crises.

They haven't. All they are doing is ensuring the next opportunity the people get to rise up against them at the ballot box the worse it will be for them. And if the ballot box doesn't work, then pitchforks and torches come out.

It is the way of things. It has happened before and it will happen again.

Those in power and their quislings in the media and the legislatures continue to decry this growing sense of unfairness as dangerous. Terms like isolationist, conspiracy theorist, nativist and racist are all used as bludgeons to shame people for feeling outraged at the corruption they see with their own eyes.

The problem for people like Strzok, Rosenstein and Mueller is that they are simply expendable pawns. And when the time is right they will be sacrificed to ensure the real perpetrators walk without a scratch.


Please support my work by joining my Patreon.

[Jul 15, 2018] CIA stooges who believe that Russia Gate nonsense mudguards prepare for horrible withdraw symptoms coming soon.

Notable quotes:
"... They also pointed out that it was likely leak not as hack as their copying/transmission speeds of alleged email file transfers were high above those possible to achieve via internet file transfer and hence hinting of local transfer via USB 3.0 or better. ..."
"... That was confirmed by former British diplomat who stated that he received from unidentified person FD copy of those Podesta emails while visiting D.C. in 2016. Assange himself stated that the source of those emails were not Russian at all. ..."
"... So what we got cooked by Mueller here. Allegedly stolen/fake identities, possibly some Bitcoin transactions, maybe some rented laptops, perhaps some rented servers, and probably some phishing,and suspicion of some hacking emails, websites that cannot be ruled out, with absolutely no hint of any connection to Russian government. ..."
"... In fact indictment describes nothing that any computer savvy teenager would not be able to do ..... to do what? RIG US ELECTIONS, not at all as it is clearly stated in this nonsensical indictment, there was no impact of anything listed above on US elections outcome nor any collusion. ..."
"... In other words, completely internet illiterate US grand jury after hearing extremely entangled tech jargon ridden fantastic tale of supposed crime with no hard evidences at all, indicted blindly some shadowy likely made up figures of straight from Russophobia instigated obsession Dream, in last ditch effort to revive long dead corpse of Russia Gate like a drug dealer giving last credit to hurting client out of money. ..."
"... CIA stooges who believe that Russia Gate nonsense mudguards prepare for horrible withdraw symptoms coming soon. ..."
"... n fact Mueller himself deepen the absurd by FBI own admission that alleged crime had no material impact on electoral campaign and election results beyond informing public about never repudiated truth of Dems machinations, which truth if fact was irrelevant to voting outcome as most of those who were exposed to Podesta emails were in states Hillary won while in those critical for Trump voters were largely unaware of them or their content. ..."
"... Mueller who already defrauded US government of $200 millions desperately looking for cover of his own futility and waste of FBI resources as he is ready to make grand jury indict a ham sandwich as long as pig from which the ham came from watch Putin on TV once. ..."
Jul 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Tom Zychowski , Jul 15, 2018 1:53:43 AM | 137

Another conspiracy theory becomes conspiracy fact. I remember when MSM in EU dismissed as conspiracy theory Assange and Wikileaks claims the secret indictment is being prepared for Assange and that warrant for Julian would be issued immediately upon arriving in Sweden for pre trial interview as accused ? No, as a person of interest.

Now, after this recent indictment we know for a fact that Assange was or will be indicted for treason regardless of fact that statute does not apply to him as non US citizen.

Returning to this phony indictment and baseless accusation contained in it.

The same wild accusation as in 2017 CIA report and the same utter lack of any shred of evidence whatsoever as pointed out by former CIA, NSA directors and agents whistleblowers who back then demanded hard evidences of hacking (trace routing log) as these would not in anyway have disclosed any classified information or methods of collection by doing so.

They also pointed out that it was likely leak not as hack as their copying/transmission speeds of alleged email file transfers were high above those possible to achieve via internet file transfer and hence hinting of local transfer via USB 3.0 or better.

That was confirmed by former British diplomat who stated that he received from unidentified person FD copy of those Podesta emails while visiting D.C. in 2016. Assange himself stated that the source of those emails were not Russian at all.

So what we got cooked by Mueller here. Allegedly stolen/fake identities, possibly some Bitcoin transactions, maybe some rented laptops, perhaps some rented servers, and probably some phishing,and suspicion of some hacking emails, websites that cannot be ruled out, with absolutely no hint of any connection to Russian government.

In fact indictment describes nothing that any computer savvy teenager would not be able to do ..... to do what? RIG US ELECTIONS, not at all as it is clearly stated in this nonsensical indictment, there was no impact of anything listed above on US elections outcome nor any collusion.

In other words, completely internet illiterate US grand jury after hearing extremely entangled tech jargon ridden fantastic tale of supposed crime with no hard evidences at all, indicted blindly some shadowy likely made up figures of straight from Russophobia instigated obsession Dream, in last ditch effort to revive long dead corpse of Russia Gate like a drug dealer giving last credit to hurting client out of money.

CIA stooges who believe that Russia Gate nonsense mudguards prepare for horrible withdraw symptoms coming soon.

I n fact Mueller himself deepen the absurd by FBI own admission that alleged crime had no material impact on electoral campaign and election results beyond informing public about never repudiated truth of Dems machinations, which truth if fact was irrelevant to voting outcome as most of those who were exposed to Podesta emails were in states Hillary won while in those critical for Trump voters were largely unaware of them or their content.

Mueller who already defrauded US government of $200 millions desperately looking for cover of his own futility and waste of FBI resources as he is ready to make grand jury indict a ham sandwich as long as pig from which the ham came from watch Putin on TV once.

What is going on with the Mueller indictments is open public demonstration of how US court system is submissive to political control and expediences and serves solely as a political tool in class war and in this case psychological class warfare aimed exactly in sowing divisions among population along phony partisan or Identity politics lines exactly what they accused Putin of doing.

Like Hitler shouting murder while he was murdering Jews , as Israel shouting murder while IDF is murdering Palestinians, not Mueller shouting treason, collusion, attack on democracy while while doing the same or worse.

[Jul 15, 2018] It is amazing to see the detail with which the US supposedly knows of the names and actions of cyber spy organizations personnel in Russia

FBI did not have the evidence, as they were pushed aside and not allowed to look into it. Crowdstrike was hired by DNC (read Clinton family) and handles (or more correctly botched)the investigation. No evidence from Crowdstrike is probably admissible in court as they are clearly played the role Clinton family pawns. NSA can't have such a detailed evidence because of encryption. So where did it came from? CIA?
The accusations are worded different this time around. No more of "we assess" like the last time. Direct Le Carre style of fiction ;-)
Jul 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Curtis, Jul 14, 2018 3:38:00 PM | 92

It is amazing to see the detail with which the US supposedly knows of the names and actions of cyber spy organizations personnel in Russia. If not the NSA, why not the Mossad cyber units? They have a lot of skill and connections with telecom eqpt and companies. Are these the only spearfishers to be indicted? And did any go into team Trump?

But don't look at other things like how stupid team Clinton is with cyber security whether HRC's handling of classified emails with her private server or her campaign's handling of important matters. And what of the comment of those emails.

Our MSM told us not to look. These things only lead to more uncomfortable questions and tend to drag us into the morass ... while they do ... what?

[Jul 15, 2018] Mueller as a new Alan Dulles in Warren Commission: 's indictments are not just fraudulent, but easily discoverable as such (as they are plagiarized). I'm frankly baffled as to why, even if Mueller felt compelled to fabricate something to blow up Trump's meeting with Putin, he'd go this route

Mueller is a CIA man in FBI and always was.
Notable quotes:
"... The rising power of China and Russia has been a threat to US power for some time, no matter if its the US globalists trying their useless hegemon crap to stop them or the US nationalists that have scrapped the old hegemonic empire. The nationalists are more dangerous as their thinking is not confined to the box of the last era. ..."
"... They also pointed out that it was likely leak not as hack as their copying/transmission speeds of alleged email file transfers were high above those possible to achieve via internet file transfer and hence hinting of local transfer via USB 3.0 or better. ..."
"... That was confirmed by former British diplomat who stated that he received from unidentified person FD copy of those Podesta emails while visiting D.C. in 2016. Assange himself stated that the source of those emails were not Russian at all. ..."
"... So what we got cooked by Mueller here. Allegedly stolen/fake identities, possibly some Bitcoin transactions, maybe some rented laptops, perhaps some rented servers, and probably some phishing,and suspicion of some hacking emails, websites that cannot be ruled out, with absolutely no hint of any connection to Russian government. ..."
"... In fact indictment describes nothing that any computer savvy teenager would not be able to do ..... to do what? RIG US ELECTIONS, not at all as it is clearly stated in this nonsensical indictment, there was no impact of anything listed above on US elections outcome nor any collusion. ..."
"... In other words, completely internet illiterate US grand jury after hearing extremely entangled tech jargon ridden fantastic tale of supposed crime with no hard evidences at all, indicted blindly some shadowy likely made up figures of straight from Russophobia instigated obsession Dream, in last ditch effort to revive long dead corpse of Russia Gate like a drug dealer giving last credit to hurting client out of money. ..."
"... CIA stooges who believe that Russia Gate nonsense mudguards prepare for horrible withdraw symptoms coming soon. ..."
"... n fact Mueller himself deepen the absurd by FBI own admission that alleged crime had no material impact on electoral campaign and election results beyond informing public about never repudiated truth of Dems machinations, which truth if fact was irrelevant to voting outcome as most of those who were exposed to Podesta emails were in states Hillary won while in those critical for Trump voters were largely unaware of them or their content. ..."
"... Mueller who already defrauded US government of $200 millions desperately looking for cover of his own futility and waste of FBI resources as he is ready to make grand jury indict a ham sandwich as long as pig from which the ham came from watch Putin on TV once. ..."
Jul 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Guerrero , Jul 14, 2018 10:50:07 PM | 126

The Mueller investigation started with a script allegedly authored by Sergei Skripal; two tall blonde moscow hotel-room prostitutes peeing on obama's bed; this is genius.

However the hoax unravelled; (the tale was too thin and needed filling out because Trump had not even been impeached according to Peter Strozk's dungeon master's original plan.)

The love story of Dawn and Charlie is not Skripal's best work, yet we sense that the hand of the master is there somewhere, and look forward to the next episode of his new novela.

V , Jul 14, 2018 11:38:46 PM | 130
mauisurfer | Jul 14, 2018 11:03:02 PM | 129

Adam Curtis' Bitter Lake, is a facinating look, about how we arrived at our present.

anti_republocrat , Jul 15, 2018 12:17:53 AM | 131
In part, this indictment is preparation to drop charges in the Concord Management case, which will make discovery in the Concord case moot. If they issued these indictments after dropping the charges in Concord Management, it would be too obvious that this is just a replacementfor those charges. Won't it be fun if one of the Russians indicted patriotically volunteers to travel to the use and likewise demands discovery?

Of course, we're all aware that William Binney has analyzed the metadata of the files and concluded that their transfer was too rapid to have occurred over the internet and must have been downloaded to a USB drive.

Peter AU 1 , Jul 15, 2018 12:56:36 AM | 133

The rising power of China and Russia has been a threat to US power for some time, no matter if its the US globalists trying their useless hegemon crap to stop them or the US nationalists that have scrapped the old hegemonic empire. The nationalists are more dangerous as their thinking is not confined to the box of the last era.
Tom Zychowski , Jul 15, 2018 1:53:43 AM | 137
Another conspiracy theory becomes conspiracy fact. I remember when MSM in EU dismissed as conspiracy theory Assange and Wikileaks claims the secret indictment is being prepared for Assange and that warrant for Julian would be issued immediately upon arriving in Sweden for pre trial interview as accused ? No, as a person of interest.

Now, after this recent indictment we know for a fact that Assange was or will be indicted for treason regardless of fact that statute does not apply to him as non US citizen.

Returning to this phony indictment and baseless accusation contained in it.

The same wild accusation as in 2017 CIA report and the same utter lack of any shred of evidence whatsoever as pointed out by former CIA, NSA directors and agents whistleblowers who back then demanded hard evidences of hacking (trace routing log) as these would not in anyway have disclosed any classified information or methods of collection by doing so.

They also pointed out that it was likely leak not as hack as their copying/transmission speeds of alleged email file transfers were high above those possible to achieve via internet file transfer and hence hinting of local transfer via USB 3.0 or better.

That was confirmed by former British diplomat who stated that he received from unidentified person FD copy of those Podesta emails while visiting D.C. in 2016. Assange himself stated that the source of those emails were not Russian at all.

So what we got cooked by Mueller here. Allegedly stolen/fake identities, possibly some Bitcoin transactions, maybe some rented laptops, perhaps some rented servers, and probably some phishing,and suspicion of some hacking emails, websites that cannot be ruled out, with absolutely no hint of any connection to Russian government.

In fact indictment describes nothing that any computer savvy teenager would not be able to do ..... to do what? RIG US ELECTIONS, not at all as it is clearly stated in this nonsensical indictment, there was no impact of anything listed above on US elections outcome nor any collusion.

In other words, completely internet illiterate US grand jury after hearing extremely entangled tech jargon ridden fantastic tale of supposed crime with no hard evidences at all, indicted blindly some shadowy likely made up figures of straight from Russophobia instigated obsession Dream, in last ditch effort to revive long dead corpse of Russia Gate like a drug dealer giving last credit to hurting client out of money.

CIA stooges who believe that Russia Gate nonsense mudguards prepare for horrible withdraw symptoms coming soon.

I n fact Mueller himself deepen the absurd by FBI own admission that alleged crime had no material impact on electoral campaign and election results beyond informing public about never repudiated truth of Dems machinations, which truth if fact was irrelevant to voting outcome as most of those who were exposed to Podesta emails were in states Hillary won while in those critical for Trump voters were largely unaware of them or their content.

Mueller who already defrauded US government of $200 millions desperately looking for cover of his own futility and waste of FBI resources as he is ready to make grand jury indict a ham sandwich as long as pig from which the ham came from watch Putin on TV once.

What is going on with the Mueller indictments is open public demonstration of how US court system is submissive to political control and expediences and serves solely as a political tool in class war and in this case psychological class warfare aimed exactly in sowing divisions among population along phony partisan or Identity politics lines exactly what they accused Putin of doing.

Like Hitler shouting murder while he was murdering Jews , as Israel shouting murder while IDF is murdering Palestinians, not Mueller shouting treason, collusion, attack on democracy while while doing the same or worse.

Pft , Jul 15, 2018 3:15:20 AM | 142
Interesting article here on Mr "Cover It Up " Mueller

https://caucus99percent.com/content/what-mueller-wont-find

Might want to rethink that "straight and arrow"

Kind of like Dulles being appointed to the Warren Commision


Peter AU 1 , Jul 15, 2018 5:09:14 AM | 144
On Mueller it's worth watching the congressional hearings. The shit he is trying to keep covered will come out there.
fairleft , Jul 15, 2018 6:34:53 AM | 146
Let's get real here. I don't know if it was part of the original indictment, but there are now claims that the government, using secret and likely illegal NSA surveillance, _has_ been able to show a 'trail' from the Russian officers to Guccifer 2.0 and then on to Wikileaks. Is this true or just more claims without evidence? U.S. indictments show technical evidence for Russian hacking accusations
metamars , Jul 15, 2018 8:58:22 AM | 156
Regarding @146, I think I get it now. Mueller can claim anything he wants in this indictment, including pseudofacts generated through illegal international data collection, because he knows he will never be asked to present such evidence in a court of law.

Posted by: fairleft | Jul 15, 2018 7:50:08 AM | 149

Mueller's indictments are not just fraudulent, but easily discoverable as such (as they are plagiarized). I'm frankly baffled as to why, even if Mueller felt compelled to fabricate something to blow up Trump's meeting with Putin, he'd go this route.

(TRUMP RELATED) (SUGGESTION BOX TRUMP) Truepundit.com: Mueller Plagiarizes Right-Wing YouTube Journalist's Lawsuit Against Podesta in New Russian Indictments; DOJ's Big Splash Appears Fabricated https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald_GoodAndBad/comments/8z1eql/trump_related_suggestion_box_trump_truepunditcom/

This rabbit hole is very deep, indeed.....

[Jul 15, 2018] Russia says U.S. indictment over election meddling is groundless

Jul 15, 2018 | uk.reuters.com

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's foreign ministry said there was no evidence the 12 people indicted by the United States on Friday were linked to military intelligence or hacking into the computer networks of the U.S. Democratic party.

The U.S. indictment named 12 Russian officers and indicted them on charges of hacking the computer networks of 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her party.

The Russian ministry said the indictment was meant to damage the atmosphere before the summit between the Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump in Helsinki on Monday.

Reporting by Denis Pinchuk; Editing by Andrew Heavens Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

[Jul 15, 2018] 'Breitbart News' And 'Infowars' Under FBI Investigation For Ties To Russia

Jul 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Zanon , Jul 14, 2018 10:50:41 AM | 78

Also, I think this will become focus sooner or later, perhaps even MoA will be attacked and we who comment here:

'Breitbart News' And 'Infowars' Under FBI Investigation For Ties To Russia
https://www.good.is/articles/info-wars-under-fbi-investigation

lysias , Jul 14, 2018 11:45:50 AM | 79
Lee Stranahan, a host on a Radio SPUTNIK Show, and a former reporter for BREITBART, has said on air that people have told him that the FBI has been questioning them about him. He says he thinks that it is possible that he may be indicted.
Daniel , Jul 14, 2018 3:54:04 PM | 97
Zanon @78

Both Breitbart and Alex Jones are Zionist propaganda and disinformation creations. Any "threats" to them by "the Deep State" are subterfuge.

Oh look! Another Squirrel!

[Jul 15, 2018] Mueller has politicized the Special Prosecutor and the timing is obviously meant to hamstring Trump in Helsinki

Notable quotes:
"... Exactly what I was thinking, he can create multiple indictments and nothing will get to court, he's knows that. What this really is, is a giant PSYOP, crazy propaganda going on in front of us. And how many people protest? Nothing but a witch hunt as Trump have pointed out. ..."
"... I am sure Mueller could create a collusion indictment too, there is no stop against these lying neocons. After all, this is the same guy that was part of the Iraq WMD lies, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEqTZF6nyCY ..."
Jul 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Anunnaki , Jul 14, 2018 9:58:55 AM | 75

'Creepiest person in America': Peter Strzok's bizarre congressional testimony goes viral

Mueller has politicized the Special Prosecutor and the timing is obviously meant to hamstring Trump in Helsinki

Trump should listen to Vlad: the dogs bark but the caravan rolls on

Bob In Portland , Jul 14, 2018 12:08:33 PM | 81
To understand Mueller, look at his career in the Justice Department:

https://caucus99percent.com/content/what-mueller-wont-find

Zanon , Jul 14, 2018 10:21:28 AM | 76
@V 74

Exactly what I was thinking, he can create multiple indictments and nothing will get to court, he's knows that. What this really is, is a giant PSYOP, crazy propaganda going on in front of us. And how many people protest? Nothing but a witch hunt as Trump have pointed out.

I am sure Mueller could create a collusion indictment too, there is no stop against these lying neocons. After all, this is the same guy that was part of the Iraq WMD lies, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEqTZF6nyCY

[Jul 15, 2018] The FBI still hasn't even looked at the DNC's computer or server, but Mueller's indicted 12 Russians for 'hacking' them.

Jul 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

John Anthony La Pietra , Jul 14, 2018 5:56:13 PM | 107

Just saw a would-be meme on my Facebook feed . . . to the general effect that the FBI still hasn't even looked at the DNC's computer or server, but Mueller's indicted 12 Russians for 'hacking' them.

Of course, there is that old quote from a New York state judge that a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. (Which also reminds me of a riddle: Why is a ham sandwich better than perfect happiness? Well, nothing is better than perfect happiness, right? -- and a ham sandwich is certainly better than nothing. . . .)

[Jul 15, 2018] The sheer arrogance of the yankee presumption to issue such an indictment is breathtaking

Jul 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

exiled off mainstreet , Jul 14, 2018 6:54:10 PM | 109

The sheer arrogance of the yankee presumption to issue such an indictment is breathtaking. As soon as the summit is over, why shouldn't Russia issue an indictment of the yankee agents involved in subverting their country? Italy has already, in the past, under governments more to the liking of the yankee regime, charged CIA agents for crimes committed in that country. Since I am sure the yankees favoured those cinque stella and the Lega defeated in the past election, why shouldn't Italy issue a similar indictment?

The yankees are relying on their hegemony to insulate themselves from the consequences of their own much more unambiguous much more provable acts of subversion. After the imperium declines, which is inevitable, this indictment provides an analogous precedent for any of the former satellites to rise up and smite the yankee aggressors with similar indictments. Perhaps they should also ignore diplomatic immunity to snag those agents acting within the country.

The indictment, meanwhile, since it is obviously aimed at preventing the Trump administration from achieving its foreign policy goals, is arguably an act of treason, particularly since no real proof is offered and the allegations are trivial and/or absurd. According to the concepts of the Nuremberg four power trial, since the indictment is intended to provide support for elements within the yankee regime favouring aggressive war, it also renders Mueller, Rosenstein and their operatives factually guilty of war crimes.

[Jul 15, 2018] The blame Russia game is very much a sub-rosa contemp. war between corporate + mafia-like factions for control of parts of the NWO.

Clinton criminal family vs whom?
Notable quotes:
"... The obvious plan in a potentially so-called 'multipolar' World is to ally with the third power -- it is weaker than the second, and in any case it is more congenial, and ultimately most important! it is Energy-Land rich. ..."
"... IMHO personal interests don't weigh heavily here (as some have suggested) however the Tillerson - Oil axis was and remains a supreme consideration (minus Tillerson.) ..."
"... The blame Russia game is very much a sub-rosa contemp. war between corporate + mafia-like factions for control of parts of the NWO. BOA and power-sharing (in the W) is now very vulnerable, or is even being destroyed, (even NATO is at risk!), everyone is scrambling, therefore the over-the-top moves and fights. ..."
"... Any evidence blaming Russia is good to go - the aim is: a) to convince the public, who will absorb some headlines and 'hate' Russia even more, b) to re-assure the players on the anti-R side, we are doing it, and the public is on our side, etc. having the most powerful propaganda organ(S) is a guarantee of the ultimate 'win' it is said so they make up things out of whole cloth. ..."
Jul 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Noirette , Jul 14, 2018 12:15:24 PM | 82

IMO Trump isn't trying to achieve anything more than to negotiate an agreement that is favorable to USA/NATO. The Deep State would be happy if an acceptable agreement could be reached as it would split Russia from China. Jackrabbit at 13.

I suppose Jackr means achieving 'nothing specific' (e.g. Iran's future role in Syria, etc.), .. OK. Second part IMHO, Trump was/is trying to organise the New World Order (as the old order, set up at Bretton Woods, is dead or dying) and he means to ensure or create a 'favorable' position for the US. The obvious plan in a potentially so-called 'multipolar' World is to ally with the third power -- it is weaker than the second, and in any case it is more congenial, and ultimately most important! it is Energy-Land rich.

IMHO personal interests don't weigh heavily here (as some have suggested) however the Tillerson - Oil axis was and remains a supreme consideration (minus Tillerson.)

One reason, not mentioned, for Trump's pro-Russia stance is that his base is pro-R and détente or even strong cooperation with Russia was a heavily implied electoral promise. Russians are White and they are Orthodox, Christians of a kind (in the popular US imagination..) and Putin is seen as a strong, competent and 'savvy' leader. 90% of evangelicals in the US voted for Trump for ex. (Catch the Boers (white) in S Africa wanting to emigrate to Russia..see news.) Nothing slant-eyed about the Russkies! (apologies to sensitive US souls on 'race' issue - i am not up to date re PC speech.)

DT's seeming 'ban' of Muslims (the entry / visa hoopla, hardly an attack that provoked deaths) also satisfied the base and was a strong and direct jab at the support, payment for and exploitation of islamists (Muslim brotherhood / mercenary forces / terrorists etc. Killed off and still feared by Russia on their turf )

Russia always makes positive noises about the presumed / known winner of the US elections. This worked fine with Bush (remember Georgie glommed Putin's soul), was difficult with Obama (a secret muslim, not a US citizen, it was said, etc.), link, but a sure fire thing with Trump, as Putin-Russia knew DT would win (imho.)

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-putin-usa/russias-putin-makes-warm-overtures-to-obama-idUSTRE4B328D20081204

The blame Russia game is very much a sub-rosa contemp. war between corporate + mafia-like factions for control of parts of the NWO. BOA and power-sharing (in the W) is now very vulnerable, or is even being destroyed, (even NATO is at risk!), everyone is scrambling, therefore the over-the-top moves and fights.

Any evidence blaming Russia is good to go - the aim is: a) to convince the public, who will absorb some headlines and 'hate' Russia even more, b) to re-assure the players on the anti-R side, we are doing it, and the public is on our side, etc. having the most powerful propaganda organ(S) is a guarantee of the ultimate 'win' it is said so they make up things out of whole cloth.

[Jul 15, 2018] Word searches in the inditement suggest that it is iether a false flag operation or Russians are completely incompetent.

Jul 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Curtis , Jul 14, 2018 3:54:13 PM | 98

Read the Indictment: Its HILARIOUS!


The high point of FBI incompetence:

- Page 14 and 15: This is hilariously stupid! These Russian super spy agents on June 15, 2016, 4:19 MOSCOW TIME and they DID NOT HACK, BUT LOGGED INTO the DNC server and spent 37 minutes to search for files or that included words (that is for the techo's out there, they "grep") for the following words:
* some hundred sheets
* some hundreds of sheets
* dcleaks
* illuminati
* широко известный перевод (meaning: widely known translation)
* worldwide known
* think twice about
* company's competence

So what kind of super spies, and super hackers would use "some hundred sheets" and "some hundreds of sheets" as two separate searches. Every computer geek knows that if you don't waste time to do virtually two identical searches like those. Who ever did these searches (after they logged in!) knows nothing about searching. The whole tech. world knows if you are going to do hacking, you use things like Linux grep/sed tools and you wouldn't waste your time doing pointless duplicitous searches. Why doesn't FBI state what tools were used, every is logged, or it should be. Thus this person whom ever it was, was naive.

So here is the big one! Foreign hackers are looking for about people talking about the Illuminati! ARE YOU KIDDING ME!...BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!

Another stupid one! Russian hackers searching DNC files for RUSSIAN STRINGS This is turning into a circus.

So you mean to tell me Russian hackers that logged into a computer (that is they didn't hacked, the FBI stated as much), are looking about for files about nonsensical matter including Russian Word Strings. You can't even make this stuff up. THE FBI ARE CLOWNS!!!

So it goes on page 15 and 16, that these search words to comprise the breathtaking proof that the culprit then was to admit these words:

Worldwide known cyber security company XXXX announced that the DNC servers have been hacked by "sophisticated" hacker groups. I'm very please the company appreciated my skill highly . Some hundred sheets! This's a serious case, isn't it?

I guess XXXX Customers should think twice about company's competence.

F*** the illuminati and their conspiracies

And when did this happen? Some 2 hours later, at 7:02pm.

So think about this! They wrote that paragraph AFTER the search! So how do you search for something in 37 minutes that you don't know it exists, and with such meaningless words to write a bragging paragraph, that was supposedly ON the DNC server itself! Meaning, the person who logged in knew it existed and quickly went looking for where it was to extract it, and then use later as to frame the Russians!

Look at the time line. The FBI only found that it was a DNC employee that logged in, looking for something that shouldn't exist in anyway on his server, unless of course he wrote it himself, and that was to use it frame the Russians. Remember that paragraph was ON THE DNC Server!!!!

The FBI are morons! This indictment will be thrown out quick smart, and the FBI should be brought up on charges of aiding and abetting a crime!


Posted by: Dorian | Jul 13, 2018 4:19:03 PM | 9

Dorian 9
Yeah. That part was funny, too. Why would they launch some oddball searches and then later use those same words in a post at WordPress? It's like they were trying to get caught ... unless something else is going on.

[Jul 15, 2018] Deep State Head Rod Rosenstein Debunked By Former NSA Head Bill Binney

"The only thing worse than fake news is, fake indictments."
Notable quotes:
"... Was Pissgate gray-snatched, Russian-speaking/Russian-writing, garage ham radio-operating Nellie Ohr the head of the Russian hackers? ..."
Jul 15, 2018 | www.infowars.com

Rod Rosenstein had a press conference on July 13th, 2018 where he broke the news that 12 Russians were being indicted for hacking into the DNC server. This was all debunked by former NSA and father of the surveillance state Bill Binney.

https://youtu.be/ae9v-1WBMu8

https://youtu.be/1Q_aW_YVbX4

[Jul 15, 2018] There is that old quote from a New York state judge that a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich

Jul 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

John Anthony La Pietra , Jul 14, 2018 5:56:13 PM | 107

Just saw a would-be meme on my Facebook feed . . . to the general effect that the FBI still hasn't even looked at the DNC's computer or server, but Mueller's indicted 12 Russians for 'hacking' them.

Of course, there is that old quote from a New York state judge that a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. (Which also reminds me of a riddle: Why is a ham sandwich better than perfect happiness? Well, nothing is better than perfect happiness, right? -- and a ham sandwich is certainly better than nothing. . . .)

[Jul 15, 2018] Mueller shout "Oh look! A squirrel! Gotta go chase that squirrel! "

Notable quotes:
"... Yes, this indictment is an obvious poison pill meant to ruin or postpone the summit. Chuck Shumer immediately called for cancelling the summit after Rod Rosenstein made his indictment announcement. ..."
"... Also consider that the House was just about to impeach Rod Rosenstein for obstruction. He has refused to release evidence to Congress regarding the FBI and it's motivations during the Hillary email investigation and also the Russiagate investigation. ..."
"... Item 38 of the Indictment claims that the "Alice Donovan" persona - which as a journalist submitted articles to CounterPunch and other sites - was used by the alleged Conspirators to set up a DCLeaks Facebook page in June 2016. ..."
"... While I anticipate the MSM Russophobes have already declared a slam dunk, the question, in my mind, is whether the "loyal opposition" (various DNC astrotuf) will actually even ATTEMPT to mobilize protests. (I think there may be ongoing Sunday family demonstrations to "attach" to). ..."
"... The DNC "resistance" has promised that if Mueller is fired, there will be thousands in the street ... Forcing Trump to cancel Helsinki would be an impressive wielding of "power" (numbers) they claim to have ... If they make no effort (my guess), well, that would be predictable ... ..."
"... So we're to believe that the Russian CIA does not have any access to English speaking translators and that when it wants to write a fake email in English as part of an elaborate plot against the United States, it uses Google? This sounds much more like the actions of a lone rogue hacker or small group of private hackers than the action of the secret intelligence agency of a major power. ..."
"... ""SERVERS The hackers used a server in AZ but then ran that through a server "overseas." The hackers leased a DCCC computer in Illinois. The use of infrastructure within the US suggests much of the hot air around transfer times -- one of the key attempts to debunk the hack -- is just that, hot air."" https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/07/13/the-russian-hack/ . ..."
"... it would have been impossible had the alleged victims not been idiotically, criminally negligent in handling their email accounts. What's more, it's incredible that US intelligence services and the Dem Party apparatus are willing to reveal how easily their systems were compromised and how helpless they were in reacting to it. ..."
"... Most of the information revealed from the DNC emails was either rather innocuous or confirmed what everyone already knew (that the entire Dem political and media establishment had pre-anointed HRC). Anyone who believes that the "Deep State" is some cabal of demonic masterminds is a giant fool. The best and brightest in DC are cack-handed sociopathic gangsters of middling intelligence and no imagination . ..."
"... It does appear that the whole Russian influence/DNC-Gluccifer/etc. stuff is bullshit. Just like the Trump dossier, White Helmets, Assange rape allegations, Skripal poisoning by Russia, and more. Sickening. ..."
"... It occurred to me that while HRC was Secretary of State, one reason to run her business on private servers was to avoid exposing her mix of private/public activities to open view. The same factor would apply at the DNC. Not that the DOS would have state-of-the-art tech security, but playing outside the field leads to depending on savvy conspirators or naive duds for your operations. So, in order to keep things quiet, Crowdstrike is the provider of cover. I would not want to be the provider of record for the Clinton gang or the DNC. Total fail. Although, Podesta was an idiot to be phished. ..."
"... One side of the current indictment scenario that could play into Trump's upcoming meeting with Putin, is that trashing the opposite party prior to negotiations is Trump's modus operandi. ..."
"... On the other hand, this entire kerfuffle has diverted attention away from those individuals, industries and countries that absolutely did collude with both Candidates, and absolutely did influence not just the election, but also US policies ever since. ..."
Jul 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

ger , Jul 13, 2018 6:30:09 PM | 26

Cost $95,000 to pull off this 'conspiracy' to interfere in the 2016 presidential election? Less than took in by Clinton at a single Wall Street Banker cocktail party. Seriously, you Russian folks need to understand, it will take at least a billion to rig an election in America ... we don't come cheap.


Yonatan , Jul 13, 2018 6:43:47 PM | 27

The whole thing relies on the Russians not turning up for their day in court - because discovery will be a bitch.
Zanon , Jul 13, 2018 6:47:15 PM | 28
mike k

Correct, he obviously is fed up with this bs witch hunt, he wont give in to deepstate nor MSM now even though he will say he raised this issue with Putin and so forth.

George Lane , Jul 13, 2018 6:47:37 PM | 29
Hope the indicted sue for discovery.
Librul , Jul 13, 2018 7:01:20 PM | 30
Yes, this indictment is an obvious poison pill meant to ruin or postpone the summit. Chuck Shumer immediately called for cancelling the summit after Rod Rosenstein made his indictment announcement.

Also consider that the House was just about to impeach Rod Rosenstein for obstruction. He has refused to release evidence to Congress regarding the FBI and it's motivations during the Hillary email investigation and also the Russiagate investigation.

Now if the House starts impeachment proceedings they will be seen as trying to impeach a person that just indicted 12 Russians. In other words, they will be seen as protecting Russians.

Jason , Jul 13, 2018 7:19:34 PM | 31
11 - I'd like to see VIPS respond to this line by line, it looks ridiculous from first glance but I'm not technically knowledgeable enough to comment further. Is there any chance that Assange could prove the source was an internal leak through a release without losing face? My immediate reaction is that they really played them selves out on this one, its too flimsy of a production; but than I said the same thing about every chemical attack in Syria, Skribals, etc, etc.
uncle tungsten , Jul 13, 2018 7:23:11 PM | 32
Thank you Dorian @9 I loved your rant and can absolutely sympathise with your astonishment. The FBI is clueless and ridiculous and so it should be. The more I follow this Mueller and Rosenstein circus, the more I see them as Putin's senior agents in the USA. This latest leak looks to me to be an attempt to do Putin's bidding to derail any meaningful meeting with the President of the USA. (Not saying that there can ever be a "meaningful meeting with any USA President") Who in their right mind wants to meet with a lying, thieving yankee? let alone make a deal with one!

I say Mueller and Rosenstein are Putin's puppets and the whole damn circus is designed for ridicule. But then I might be way too far down the rabbit hole to see clearly.

karlof1 , Jul 13, 2018 7:23:55 PM | 33
Yes, this was certainly for the domestic audience as we have Sanders jumping on the wagon declaring the indictment a guilty verdict:

""We must speak with one voice in making clear to Vladimir Putin: 'We will not allow you to interfere in our democratic processes or those of our allies,'" Sanders wrote in a tweet on Friday."

Gee, I seem to recall the HRC Campaign and the DNC doing far more proven damage to the electoral process than anything Russia's allegedly done. Where was Sanders denouncement of HRC and the DNC then?! Clearly, even more than in 2016, Bernie Sanders is a gigantic fraud every bit as disgusting as HRC, perhaps even more so given the number of people deluded by his actions. People like him a big part of the problem and have no part in the solution.

Perimetr , Jul 13, 2018 7:32:56 PM | 34
agree with karlofi @33, Sanders is a just a tool for the MIC
Jackrabbit , Jul 13, 2018 7:38:25 PM | 35
karlof1 and Perimeter

Yup! He is controlled opposition. An empty suit. A tool.

jayc , Jul 13, 2018 7:40:09 PM | 36
Item 38 of the Indictment claims that the "Alice Donovan" persona - which as a journalist submitted articles to CounterPunch and other sites - was used by the alleged Conspirators to set up a DCLeaks Facebook page in June 2016.
Daniel , Jul 13, 2018 7:41:05 PM | 37
b exclaims: "Note: The indictment reinforces the author's hunch that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are creations and playgrounds of secret services just like Tor and other 'cool' internet 'privacy' stuff are. Its the very reason why one should avoid their use."

YES!

One of the things that rings my irony alarm is that the sort of "right wing" "Liberty Movement" crowd has been warning for decades now of the One World Government plans for a "cashless society." They feared that all transactions would be done via computer entries, which the NWO could manipulate to either prevent a dissident from being able to buy something, track every purchase, or simply to steal all of anyone's money.

And now, many of those same Liberty Movement voices are out there selling BitCoin, etc.... and selling it HARD.

This same Liberty Movement has been totally freaked out about the "Jack-Booted Thugs" of the Police State for decades, too. Some USAmericans might even remember G. Gordon Liddy telling his Radio Show followers to "go for headshots" when the coppers come (because the police started wearing body armor).

And now, those same folks are cheering on the Pigs cracking skulls of Black Lives Matter and anti-Trump hysterics. In fact, the LM is upset that more illegal surveillance, unwarranted searches and extrajudicial killings aren't being done.

It still looks to me like the PTSB are tearing us apart.

Susan Sunflower , Jul 13, 2018 8:10:48 PM | 38
While I anticipate the MSM Russophobes have already declared a slam dunk, the question, in my mind, is whether the "loyal opposition" (various DNC astrotuf) will actually even ATTEMPT to mobilize protests. (I think there may be ongoing Sunday family demonstrations to "attach" to).

The DNC "resistance" has promised that if Mueller is fired, there will be thousands in the street ... Forcing Trump to cancel Helsinki would be an impressive wielding of "power" (numbers) they claim to have ... If they make no effort (my guess), well, that would be predictable ...

Daniel , Jul 13, 2018 8:12:47 PM | 39
As the most interesting man in the world, I don't always agree with Jackrabbit, but when I do, I am in complete concurrence with:

Jackrabbit @13

(an obscure in joke for those drunk on these) )

Daniel , Jul 13, 2018 8:25:10 PM | 40
A big yes to Emily Dickinson @19

Does anyone know if these latest charges are still based on that CrowdStrike "report?"

That is, DNC refused to let FBI have access to their servers so that FBI could run their own forensics. All previous IC claims have been based on CrowdStrike claims.

Did FBI finally get ahold of those servers, and if so, could they possibly still have had such evidence on them? Weren't they professionally scrubbed years ago?

John555 , Jul 13, 2018 8:34:12 PM | 41
See Item 41 in the indictment. "On or about June 15th 2016, the 'Conspirators ...' looked up certain words and phrases on Google Translate, phrases which were later used by "Guccifer 2.0".

So we're to believe that the Russian CIA does not have any access to English speaking translators and that when it wants to write a fake email in English as part of an elaborate plot against the United States, it uses Google? This sounds much more like the actions of a lone rogue hacker or small group of private hackers than the action of the secret intelligence agency of a major power.

Susan Sunflower , Jul 13, 2018 8:39:19 PM | 42
I have read that the indictment says that different offices/locations were targeted, so no.
""SERVERS The hackers used a server in AZ but then ran that through a server "overseas." The hackers leased a DCCC computer in Illinois. The use of infrastructure within the US suggests much of the hot air around transfer times -- one of the key attempts to debunk the hack -- is just that, hot air."" https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/07/13/the-russian-hack/ .

about Crowdstrike:

CROWDSTRIKE
The indictment describes Crowdstrike's efforts to oust the hackers, but notes that a Linux based version of X-Agent remained on DNC's network until October 2016.

Part of the "big reveal" (with apparent date discrepancies) is that "the hackers" had a lot of targets over a long period of time.

I still think Trump was joking when he suggested "the Russians" could help him out by finding the missing (HRC deleted) e-mails not recovered / found during the server investigation .... poppycock ... but his "joke" was leapt on at the time and (embarassingly) is claimed to be a "smoking gun" or "trigger" for the hacking.

Yeah, there seems to be very very little there there

Daniel , Jul 13, 2018 8:47:23 PM | 43
jayc @38

I posted the following in response to Debsisdead wondering what was going on at CounterPunch.

Then there was that whole thing where they were publishing articles written by an avatar going by the name of Alice Donovan. I don't know what to make that whole thing. I will say that some of her articles did discuss inconvenient truths that the MSM tries to play up as "conspiracy theories" (eg. Obama Administration sent weapons to Syria that ISIL received). But, she also wrote really bizarre stuff indicating she was not whom she claimed to be.

For any who care: Democratic Party organ, "Think Progress" on the Alice scandal: https://thinkprogress.org/why-did-so-many-alternative-media-outlets-publish-russian-propaganda-a8f22773bc50/

CounterPunch's mea culpa: https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/25/go-ask-alice-the-curious-case-of-alice-donovan-2/

So, what's happened to CounterPunch since the Cockburn Dynasty splintered? I don't know, but it's weird.

Daniel , Jul 13, 2018 8:53:12 PM | 44
Susan Sunflower @38 ponders:

"...the question, in my mind, is whether the "loyal opposition" (various DNC astrotuf) will actually even ATTEMPT to mobilize protests. (I think there may be ongoing Sunday family demonstrations to "attach" to)."

I've been assigned to a 'Two Minutes Hate" for Saturday morning. ;-)

Almand , Jul 13, 2018 9:21:37 PM | 45
Honestly, I wouldn't put it past the ruthless and perfidious Russian intel services to have actually done this, but it would have been impossible had the alleged victims not been idiotically, criminally negligent in handling their email accounts. What's more, it's incredible that US intelligence services and the Dem Party apparatus are willing to reveal how easily their systems were compromised and how helpless they were in reacting to it.

Most of the information revealed from the DNC emails was either rather innocuous or confirmed what everyone already knew (that the entire Dem political and media establishment had pre-anointed HRC). Anyone who believes that the "Deep State" is some cabal of demonic masterminds is a giant fool. The best and brightest in DC are cack-handed sociopathic gangsters of middling intelligence and no imagination .

And even if this accusation is true, they have yet to find any actual collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government officials, which is the entire (official anyway) point of the investigation. They have yet to prove that there was any effect on the outcome of the election. If the Russians are guilty of hacking they will deny, if they are innocent they will deny. This is Whitewater Redux, where flimsy allegation of criminal activity is used to dig and dig and dig until they find something juicy that can be used to prosecute. Ironic!

If Mueller is so sure the 12 intelligence officers are guilty and Putin is so sure they are innocent, he ought to fly them to DC to stand trial. Professional courtesy from one secret policeman to another.

Merlin2 , Jul 13, 2018 9:26:32 PM | 46
Check out this great recap and article:

https://medium.com/@markfmccarty/muellers-new-indictment-do-the-feds-take-us-for-idiots-5406ef955406

The indictment flies in the face of the great research of the meta data carried out by the Forensicator and Adam Carter. Which practically proves the leaks were a download from the US.

The article above has many links referring to that research and the backdrop.

I - and everyone else here - agree that this pathetic "indictment" is an act of complete desperation, designed to fool the foolables.

ben , Jul 13, 2018 9:32:26 PM | 47
Hello, more theater, meanwhile, more devolution in protections for the working classes, and mother earth.
imo , Jul 13, 2018 9:47:18 PM | 48
Re: "The indictment reinforces the author's hunch that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are creations and playgrounds of secret services just like Tor and other 'cool' internet 'privacy' stuff are. Its the very reason why one should avoid their use."

Wise counsel, imo.

Jackrabbit , Jul 13, 2018 9:52:58 PM | 49
Merlin2

Great link. Thanks.

It does appear that the whole Russian influence/DNC-Gluccifer/etc. stuff is bullshit. Just like the Trump dossier, White Helmets, Assange rape allegations, Skripal poisoning by Russia, and more. Sickening.

daffyDuct , Jul 13, 2018 10:02:02 PM | 50
Trisha at 1

To clarify, the following is from Rosenstein's announcement, not the indictment.

"There is no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime. There is no allegation that the conspiracy changed the vote count or affected any election result. The special counsel's investigation is ongoing and there will be no comments on the special counsel at this time.""

Stumpy , Jul 13, 2018 10:08:16 PM | 51
@45 Almand

What's more, it's incredible that US intelligence services and the Dem Party apparatus are willing to reveal how easily their systems were compromised and how helpless they were in reacting to it. Most of the information revealed from the DNC emails was either rather innocuous or confirmed what everyone already knew (that the entire Dem political and media establishment had pre-anointed HRC)

Exactly. It occurred to me that while HRC was Secretary of State, one reason to run her business on private servers was to avoid exposing her mix of private/public activities to open view. The same factor would apply at the DNC. Not that the DOS would have state-of-the-art tech security, but playing outside the field leads to depending on savvy conspirators or naive duds for your operations. So, in order to keep things quiet, Crowdstrike is the provider of cover. I would not want to be the provider of record for the Clinton gang or the DNC. Total fail. Although, Podesta was an idiot to be phished.

One side of the current indictment scenario that could play into Trump's upcoming meeting with Putin, is that trashing the opposite party prior to negotiations is Trump's modus operandi. See his comments re: Brexit a day ago, then the gushing with May over the special nature of their most special of special relationships. What looks like a dagger to the back by Rosenstein, while the boss was out of town, will likely get chuckles at the summit.

Virgile , Jul 13, 2018 10:11:41 PM | 52
Trump knows very well that this "Breaking News" is meant to disrupt the meeting with Putin. Trump hates Mueller, so I guess he will briefly mentioned the 'crime' to Putin who will ask for tangible proofs and Trump will throw the request to Mueller and pass to another more important issue. Trump does care about been criticized for that, he know that he would be criticized anyway.,
Daniel , Jul 13, 2018 10:30:09 PM | 53
Almand @45

"And even if this accusation is true, they have yet to find any actual collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government officials, which is the entire (official anyway) point of the investigation. They have yet to prove that there was any effect on the outcome of the election. "

Yep. On the other hand, this entire kerfuffle has diverted attention away from those individuals, industries and countries that absolutely did collude with both Candidates, and absolutely did influence not just the election, but also US policies ever since.

Oh look! A squirrel! Gotta go chase that squirrel!

Peter AU 1 , Jul 13, 2018 10:35:27 PM | 54
Trump will most likely just let the Russia dunnit garbage run. It doesn't bother him or slow him down in any way, it is a thorn in the side for Russia, and gives Trump media cover while setting up energy dominance.
To Trump, Russia is a competitor in the energy business.
Pft , Jul 13, 2018 10:42:23 PM | 55
So everyone got what they wanted. Trump can claim he has been proven free of collusion with Russia. Dems and neocons can claim they were right that Russia did it, even though the indictment lacks any proof of this.

Trump can use indictments to justify his backtracking on his campaign promises to improve relations with Russia , and justify continued sanctions, increase military spending, push NATO allies to buy more from American weapons dealers, and push EU members to block Russian gas lines

Meanwhile the real elephant in the room continues to be ignored and control both parties, influence elections, dictate foreign policy and economic decisions , disseminate fake news to alter public perceptions, etc....

As they say, the "winning" continues.

Mark McCarty , Jul 13, 2018 10:43:47 PM | 56
The indictment is evident BS - see my comments:

https://medium.com/@markfmccarty/muellers-new-indictment-do-the-feds-take-us-for-idiots-5406ef955406

V , Jul 13, 2018 10:46:32 PM | 57
The distractions abound: Look, a squirrel...
Yeah, Right , Jul 13, 2018 11:04:24 PM | 58
Well, heck, the list of defendants is itself proof that Mueller is desperate that this case never comes before a court.

How do I know that?

Easy. His previous indictment named persons AND companies, which allowed Concord Management to surprise everyone by demanding its day in court.

This time around he has only indicted individuals.
He pointedly does not indicted any companies.

This means that a Russian individual has to put their freedom at risk by taking up the challenge, and Mueller obviously believes that nobody will be willing to do that.

I think he is going to be proved wrong yet again.

I predict that one or more of those defendants does, indeed, step foot on US soil and demands to be put on trial, and this is going to shake the Mueller investigation to its core.

The reason I am confident that this will happen is that
a) it is likely that at least one of those defendants does indeed work for Russian intelligence, and
b) Russian intelligence knows full well that Mueller has nothing and is bluffing

So they will take that person aside and say: Boris/Dimitry/Ivan/baby, go over there and call their bluff. If they fold then you come home and live like a king. If they convict you then sit tight and we'll arrange a spy-swap, then you come home and live like a king. What do you say?

ben , Jul 13, 2018 11:24:56 PM | 59
Let's not take a look at the U$A's corrupt and horribly broken "election" systems, suppression of voters, and outright bought and paid for "representatives". That, would be too much trouble..

The REAL culprits are Americans...

Guerrero , Jul 13, 2018 11:45:29 PM | 60
George Steele penned many a masterful dossier, some extraordinarily clever counterfeit
handwritten memoirs, and a pot-boiling John LaCarre spin-off cold-war spy-novel or two.

Steel's drinking has paralyzed his brain; he can't think of anything, he lauds Skripal's
brilliant descriptions of the two russian prostitutes peeing on barak obama's hotel bed.

WHAT does Skripal do for a living? he writes. Sergei sees himself as a new dostoyevski !

I agree with those who have argued that whole the Skripal meme is Hillary's gang goofing
on the Brits. This pee-pee dossier is THE evidentiary source of the Mueller investigation

Yeah the Rowdy Lion has blocked and bearded Russia historically, that's why they make
great patsies for the Yankees whose criminal minds can not get over losing that election!

Put yourself in the place of a maniac primed to be a coddled goddess President of the USA

¿Wouldn't YOU call reliable old insider George Steele (not knowing the man is ossified)?

Once the gang realized that Steele's brain was fried, they could not let Sergei Skripal die.

MadMax2 , Jul 14, 2018 4:18:45 AM | 61
The always sober Prof. Stephen Cohen warned this would happen on the 11/07, and so it came to pass. He picked these guys like a dirty nose. The Mueller investigation needs to be shut down, the cloak of what it is pretending to be has fallen off.

***

Summitgate and the Campaign vs. 'Peace'
Not surprisingly, Trump's meetings with NATO and Putin are being portrayed as ominous events by Russiagaters.
By Stephen F. Cohen

Excerpt


Also not surprisingly, and unlike in the past, mainstream media have found little place for serious discussion of today's dangerous conflicts between Washington and Moscow: regarding nuclear-weapons-imitation treaties, cyber-warfare, Syria, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the Black Sea region, even Afghanistan. It's easy to imagine how Trump and Putin could agree on conflict-reduction and cooperation in all of these realms. But considering the traducing by the Post, Times, and Maddow of a group of senators who visited Moscow around July 4, it's much harder to see how the defamed Trump could implement such "peace deals." (There is a long history of sabotaging or attempting to sabotage summits and other détente-like initiatives. Indeed, a few such attempts have been evident in recent months and more may lie ahead.)

https://www.thenation.com/article/summitgate-campaign-vs-peace/


ralphieboy , Jul 14, 2018 4:43:18 AM | 62
This is just another small and incremental step.

There is nothing illegal in and of itself about influencing an election in a foreign country. Unless doing so is in violation of other laws, such as hacking or violating campaign financing laws.

And it is most certainly illegal for people to collude with foreign nationals to interfere in an election, and I suspect that Mueller's next step will be to connect these 12 indicted Russians with members of the Trump campaign.

Mueller is proceeding very slowly and keeping his cards close to his chest, he knows that any case he presents has to be fully free of flaws or contradictions as it will be attacked from all sides.

Shakesvshav , Jul 14, 2018 5:43:42 AM | 63
William Binney has already debunked all this and has now commented further (excuse the source): https://www.infowars.com/deep-state-head-rod-rosenstein-debunked-by-former-nsa-head-bill-binney/
jadez , Jul 14, 2018 6:37:20 AM | 64
the comments here range from delusional to outright psychotic

Trump has no ability to outsmart anyone let alone Putin.....take a look at north Korea...where he declared the threat of nuclear war was over....he mouths a few slogans and fools try to spin and interpret for the masses of fools what he is talking about.

his choice of staff and advisors were so comical they have all been removed and in their place are the lowest slime of any swamp..reflecting the attitudes and racism of their leader who seeks only to enrich himself which he has been doing through foreign affairs....now with Russia where there is still enthusiasm for america....and where he gets a lot of cash...he seeks to cozy up to Putin at the expense of NATO partners where he deflects his ignorance by creating distraction.....again relying on others to explain.

if you all don't think Mueller is developing a real case because he doesn't expose it while seeking indictments...that is your choice...but don't go on from there to assert it someone makes the idiocy of Trump legitimate...it does not!

V , Jul 14, 2018 6:40:13 AM | 65
"They" really don't want Trump talking to Putin. Since they can't stop it; sabotage the meeting. This harkens back to the Gary Powers shoot down... That one worked.
V , Jul 14, 2018 6:44:56 AM | 66
#64
In your hate/vitriol lingers blindness. Given a relatively short time, we'll see...
Den Lille Abe , Jul 14, 2018 7:03:16 AM | 67
It's hilarious really! But also frightening. As Dorian pointed out, nobody doing "hacking" are that amateurish, and certainly not the Russians or Chinese for that matter. It pobably the clods in Cheltenham that are responsible, it bears all the marks of failure, so its probably British.
Den Lille Abe , Jul 14, 2018 7:08:16 AM | 68
Look a squirrel, its foaming at the mouth! Run, you fools, run!!
Den Lille Abe , Jul 14, 2018 7:15:46 AM | 69
I think the Russians got me last night! I woke up this morning, with tremors and shaking, not feeling well at at all. I was not foaming at the mouth, but I did have a greenish tinge to the skin and i looked bad in the mirror. I am sure it is Novichok.

How did the Russians know that i would buy that particular single malt! They probably spied, and knew I would get an Oban and they poisoned me. If I do not comment again, know, that I too have fallen victim to their devious games. In the meantime I will try to self medicate with a stout or too. Pray for me. Donations accepted BTW.

V , Jul 14, 2018 7:16:22 AM | 70
# 68
Squirrel? Where, what kind, what are its politics?
Is it Russian? ;-)

[Jul 15, 2018] Forensic evidence has already proven that the data on the DNC server was downloaded on a USB thump drive.

Jul 15, 2018 | www.unz.com

Jared Eliot , Next New Comment July 14, 2018 at 5:01 pm GMT

Forensic evidence has already proven that the data on the DNC server was downloaded on a USB thump drive. The bombshells in Robert Mueller's indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers, hackers of DNC server, put a damper on Trump's one on one visit with Putin.

[Jul 15, 2018] Trump Marches Onward and Downward, by James Petras - The Unz Review

Jul 15, 2018 | www.unz.com

AnonFromTN , Next New Comment July 14, 2018 at 5:51 pm GMT

@Jared Eliot

Well, you start by blurting out a secret about DNC hack: there was no hack, there was a leak, but the leaker Seth Rich was conveniently killed during "botched robbery". Guess who ordered this murder? Obviously, it couldn't have been someone low in the food chain, as the "investigation" of Seth Rich murder is going exactly nowhere in two years. The Dems via Mueller just keep whipping the dead horse of "Russiagate" out of desperation.

But next you undermine your credibility claiming that Putin installed Trump. Unfortunately for Putin, he does not have the resources to do that. Ludicrous sums allegedly spent by mysterious Russians bandied about by Mueller's "investigation" show that Putin did not have the money to affect the billion-dollar show that the US presidential elections have become. Of course, corrupt mad witch, who outspent Trump 2:1 and still lost, would like to blame someone other than herself, but her story is dead in the water. The Dems betrayed their own electorate, white working-class people, and lost it forever. The fringe groups they gained cannot offset that loss.

Trump won the elections not because he was so good, but because his opponent was utterly repulsive. However, in contrast to Obama and the witch, Trump shows some street smarts: he prefers to make deals with strong competitors, rather than fight them and sustain huge losses.

BTW, you forgot that Trump's inclination to make deals includes China, which is certainly not Christian. Basically, his is a common-sense approach that even an average Joe can understand. Hence the hysterics of establishment-owned Dems and Republicans. So, I'd say God bless common sense and the people possessing it.

[Jul 13, 2018] False flag operation covering DNC leaks now involves Mueller and his team

Highly recommended!
Looks like another Steele dossier and it has Brennan fingertips all over. Looks like another exercise in creation of a parallel reality. The content of the document implies that malware was installed in GRU computers and those computers were monitored 24/7 by CIA. The documents describes both GNU officers and DNC employees as unsophisticated idiots. DNC employees who who should undergo some basic security training were easily deceived by fishing emails from a foreign country. And a good practice is to disable hotlinks in emails.
I always suspected that Guccifer 2.0 was a false flag operation to hide the leak of DNC documents. If this is true this was really sophisticated false flag.
BTW GRU is military intelligence unit, so to hack into civil computers is kind of out of their main sphere of activities. They also should be aware about NSA capabilities of intercepting the traffic.
I especially like the following tidbit: "On or about June 1,2016, the Conspirators attempted to delete traces of their presence on the DCCC network using the computer program CCleaner." This is how third rate hackers (wannabes) behave.
Link to the original document: https://www.scribd.com/document/383793520/Netyksho-Et-Al-Indictment#fullscreen&from_embed
First of all the investigation of DNC was botched by hiring a private, connected to Democratic Party security company (Crowdstrike), so no data from it are acceptable in court. FBI did not have any access to the data.
Which means that Mueller is a patsy of more powerful forces
How about speed of download that proved to be excessive for Internet connection? Nothing is said about Dmitri Alperovitch role is all this investigation, which completely discredit all that results? See for example diuscusstion at Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart- Say Hello to Fancy Bear And, again, the question is: Was Guccifer 2.0 in itself a USA false flag operation ?
Looks like Mueller is acting as an operative of Democratic Party. Could not dig up enough dirt on Trump, so he now saddled his beloved horse, trying to provoke Russia to respond.
And this John Le Carre style details about individuals supposedly involved. Probably were provided by CIA ;-)
Jul 13, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

... ... ...

4. By in or around April 2016, the Conspirators also hacked into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ("DCCC") and the Democratic National Committee ("DNC"). The Conspirators covertly monitored the computers of dozens of DCCC and DNC employees, implanted hundreds of files containing malicious computer code ("malware"), and stole emails and other documents from the DCCC and DNC.

5. By in or around April 2016, the Conspirators began to plan the release of materials stolen from the Clinton Campaign, DCCC, and DNC.

6. Beginning in or around June 2016, the Conspirators staged and released tens of thousands of the stolen emails and documents. They did so using fictitious online personas, including "DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0."

7. The Conspirators also used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release additional stolen documents through a website maintained by an organization ("Organization Iй), that had previously posted documents stolen from U.S. persons, entities, and the U.S. government The Conspirators continued their U.S. election-interference operations through in or around November 2016.

8. To hide their connections to Russia and the Russian government, the Conspirators used false identities and made false statements about their identities. To further avoid detection, the Conspirators used a network of computers located across the world, including in the United States, and paid for this infrastructure using cryptocurrency.

... ... ...

13. Defendant ALEKSEY VIKTOROVICH LUKASHEV (Лукашсв Алексей Викторович) was a Senior Lieutenant in the Russian military assigned to ANTONOV's department within Unit 26165. LUKASHEV used various online personas, including "Den Katenberg" and "Yuliana Martynova." In on around 2016, LUKASHEV sent spcarphisliing emails to members of the Clinton Campaign and affiliated individuals, including the chairman of the Clinton Campaign.

14. Defendant SERGEY ALEKSANDROVICH MORGACHEV (Моргачев Сергей Александрович) was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Russian military assigned to Unit 26165. MORGACHEV oversaw a department within Unit 26165 dedicated to developing and managing malware, including a hacking tool used by the GRU known as "X-Agent." During the hacking of the DCCC and DNC networks, MORGACHEV supervised the co-conspirators who developed and monitored the X-Agent malware implanted on those computers.

15. Defendant NIKOLAY YURYEVICH KOZACHEK (Козачек Николай Юрьевич) was a Lieutenant Captain in the Russian military assigned to MORGACHEV's department within Unit 26165. KOZACHEK used a variety of monikers, including "kazak" and "blablablal234565 " KOZACHEK developed, customized, and monitored X-Agent malware used to hack the DCCC and DNC networks beginning in or around April 2016.

16. Defendant PAVEL VYACHESLAVOVICH YERSHOV (Ершов Павел Вячеславович) was a Russian military officer assigned to MORGACHEV's department within Unit 26165. In or around 2016, YERSHOV assisted KOZACHEK and other co-conspirators in testing and customizing X-Agent malware before actual deployment and use.

17. Defendant ARTEM ANDREYEVICH MALYSHEV (Малышев Арт е м Андреевич) was a Second Lieutenant in the Russian military assigned to MORGACHEV's department within Unit 26165. MALYSIIEV used a variety of monikers, including "djangomagicdev" and "realblatr." In or around 2016, MALYSHEV monitored X-Agent malware implanted on the DCCC and DNC networks.

18. Defendant ALEKSANDR VLADIMIROVICH OSADCHUK (Осадчук Александр В ладимирович) was a Colonel in the Russian military and the commanding officer of Unit 74455. Unit 74455 was located at 22 Kirova Street, Khimki, Moscow, a building referred to within the GRU as the 'Tower." Unit 74455 assisted in the release of stolen documents through the DC Leaks and Guccifer 2.0 personas, the promotion of those releases, and the publication of anti-Clinton content on social media accounts operated by the GRU.

19. Defendant ALEKSEY ALEKSANDROVICH POTEMKIN (Потемкин Алексей Александрович) was an officer in the Russian military assigned to Unit 74455. POTEMKIN was a supervisor in a department within Unit 7445f responsible for the administration of computer infrastructure used in cyber operations. Infrastructure and social media accounts administered by POTEMKIN'S department were used, among other things, to assist in the release of stolen documents through the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2 0 personas.

21, ANTONOV, BADIN, YKRMAKOV, LUKASHEV, and their co-conspiratore targeted victims using a technique known as spearphishing to steal victims' passwords or otherwise gain access to their computers. Beginning by at least March 2016, the Conspirators targeted over 300 individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign, DCCC, and DNC.

a. For example, on or about March 19, 2016, LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators created and sent a spearphishing email to the chairman of the Clinton Campaign. LUKASHEV used the account "John356gh" at an online service that abbreviated lengthy website addresses (referred to as a "URL-shortcning service"). LIJKASHEV used the account to mask a link contained in the spearphishing email, which directed the recipient to a GRU-created website. LUKASHEV altered the a security notification from Google (a technique known as "spoofing"), instructing the user to change his password by clicking the embedded link. Those instructions wore followed. On or about March 21, 2016, LUKASHEV, YERMAKOV, and their co-conspirators stole the contents of the chairman's email account, which consisted of over 50,000 emails.

Starting on or about March 19, 2016, LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators sent spearphishing emails to the personal accounts of other individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign, including its campaign manager and a senior foreign policy advisor. On or about March 25, 2016, LUKASHEV used the same john356gh account to mask additional links included in spearphishing emails sent to numerous individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign, including Victims 1 and 2. LUKASliEV sent these emails from the Russia-based email account [email protected] that he spoofed to appear to be from Google. On or about March 28,2016, YERMAKOV researched the names of Victims 1 and 2 and their association with Clinton on various social media sites. Through their spearphishing operations, LUKASHEV, YERMAKOV, and their co-conspirators successfully stole email credentials and thousands of emails from numerous individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign. Many of these stolen emails. Including those from Victims 1 and 2, were later released by the Conspirators through DCLeaks.

On or about April 6, 2016, the Conspirators created an email account in the name (with a one-letter deviation from the actual spelling) of a known member of the Clinton Campaign. The Conspirators then used that account to send spearphishing emails to the work accounts of more than thirty different Clinton Campaign employees. In the spearphishipg emails, LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators embedded a link purporting to direct the recipient to a document titled "hillary-clinton-favorable-rating.xlsx " In fact, this link directed the recipients' computers to a GRU-crcatcd website.

22. The Conspirators spearphished individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign throughout the summer of 2016. For example, on or about July 27, 2016, the Conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-
party provider and used by Clinton's personal office. At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign.

Hacking into the DCCC Network

23. Beginning in or around March 2016, the Conspirators, in addition to their spearphishing efforts, researched the DCCC and DNC computer networks to identify technical specifications and vulnerabilities.

  1. For example, beginning on or about March 15,2016, YERMAKOV ran a technical query for the DNC's internet protocol configurations to identify connected devices.
  2. On or about the same day, YERMAKOV searched for opcn-source information about the DNC network, the Democratic Party, and Hillary Clinton.
  3. On or about April 7. 2016. YKRMAKOV ran я technical query for the DNC's internet protocol configurations to identify connected devices.

24. By in or around April 2016, within days of YERMAKOV's searches regarding the DCCC, the Conspirators hacked into the DCCC computer network. Once they gained access, they installed and managed different types of malware to explore the DCCC network and steal data.

a. On or about April 12,2016. the Conspirators used the stolen credentials of a I )CCC On or about April 12,2016, the Conspirators used the stolen credentials of a DCCC Employee ('"DCCC Employee 1") to access the DCCC network. DCCC Employee 1 had received a spearphishing email from the Conspirators on or about April 6,2016, and entered her password after clicking on the link.

b. Between in or around April 2016 and June 2016, the Conspirators installed multiple versions of their X-Agent malware on at least ten DCCC computers, which allowed them to monitor individual employees' computer activity, steal passwords, and maintain access to the DCCC network.

c. X-Agent malware implanted on the DCCC network transmitted information from the victims' computers to a GRU-leased server located in Arizona. The Conspirators referred to this server as their "AMS" panel. KOZACHEK, MALYSHEV, and their со-conspirators logged into the AMS panel to use X-Agent's keylog and screenshot functions in the course of monitoring and surveilling activity on the DCCC computers. 'Ibe keylog function allowed the Conspirators to capture keystrokes entered by DCCC employees. The screenshot function allowed the Conspirators to take pictures of the DCCC employees' computer screens.

d. For example, on or about April 14, 2016, the Conspirators repeatedly activated X-Agent's keylog and screensiot functions to surveil DCCC Employee 1's computer activity over the course of eight hours. During that time, the Conspirators captured DCCC Employee 1 's communications with co-workers and the passwords she entered while working on fundraising and voter outreach projects. Similarly, on or about April 22, 2016, the Conspirators activated X-Agcnt's keylog and screenshot functions to capture the discussions of another DCCC Employee ("DCCC Employee 2") about the DCCC's finances, as well as her individual banking information and other personal topics.

25. On or about April 19, 2016, KOZAC1IEK, YERSIIOV, and their co-conspirators remotely configured an overseas computer to relay communications between X-Agent malware and the AMS panel and then tested X-Agent's ability to connect to this computer. The Conspirators referred to this computer as a "middle server." The middle server acted as a proxy to obscure the connection between malware at the DCCC and the Conspirators' AMS panel. On or about April 20, 2016, the Conspirators directed X-Agent malware on the DCCC computers to connect to this middle server and receive directions from the Conspirators.

Hacking into the DNC Network

26. On or about April 18, 2016, the Conspirators hacked into the DNC's computers through their access to the DCCC network. The Conspirators then installed and managed different types of malware (as they did in the DCCC network) to explore the DNC network and steal documents, a. On or about April 18, 2016, the Conspirators activated X-Agent's keylog and screenshot functions to steal credentials of a DCCC employee who was authorized
to access the DNC network. The Conspirators hacked into the DNC network from the DCCC network using stolen credentials. By in or around June 2016, they gained access to approximately thirty-three DNC computers.

In or around April 2016, the Conspirators installed X Agent malware on tho DNC network, including the same versions installed on the DCCC network.
MALYSHEV and his co-conspifators monitored the X-Agent malware from the AMS panel and captured data from the victim computers. The AMS panel collected thousands of keylog and screenshot results from the DCCC and DNC computers, such as a screenshot and keystroke capture of DCCC Employee 2 viewing the DCCC's online banking information.

Theft of DCCC and DNC Documents

27. The Conspirators searched for and identified computers within the DCCC and DNC networks that stored information related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, for example, on or about April 15, 2016, the Conspirators searched one hacked DCCC computer for terms that included "hillary," "cruz," and "trump." The Conspirators also copied select DCCC folders, including "Benghazi Investigations." The Conspirators targeted computers containing information such as opposition research and field operation plans for the 2016 elections.

28. To enable them to steal a large number of documents at once without detection, the Conspirators used a publicly available tool to gather and compress multiple documents on the DCCC and DNC networks. The Conspirators then used other GRU malware, known as "X-Tunncl," to move the stolen documents cutside the DCCC and DNC networks through encrypted channels.

a. For example, on or about April 22, 2016, the Conspirators compressed gigabytes of data from DNC computers, including opposition research. The Conspirators later moved the compressed DNC data using X-Tunnel to a GRU-leased computer located in Illinois.

b. On or about April 28, 2016, the Conspirators connected to and tested the same computer located in Illinois. Later that day, the Conspirators used X-Tunnel to connect to that computer to steal additional documents from the DCCC network.

29. Between on or about May 25, 2016 and June 1, 2016, the Conspirators hacked the DNC Microsoft Exchange Server and stole thousands of emails from the work accounts of DNC employees. During that time, YERMAKOV researched PowerShell commands related to accessing and managing the Microsoft Exchange Server.

30. On or about May 30, 2016, MALYSHEV accessed the AMS panel in order to upgrade custom AMS software on die server. That day, the AMS panel received updates from approximately thirteen different X-Agent malware implants on DCCC and DNC computers.

31. During the hacking of the DCCC and DNC networks, the Conspirators covered their tracks by Intentionally deleting logs and computer flies. For example, on or about May 13, 2016, the Conspirators cleared the event logs from a DNC computer. On or about June 20, 2016, the Conspirators deleted logs from the AMS panel that documented their activities on the panel, including the login history. Efforts to Remain on the X'CC and PNC Networks

32. Despite the Conspirators' efforts to hide their activity, beginning in or around May 2016, both the DCCC and DNC became aware that they had been hacked and hired a security company ("Company 1") to identify the extent of the intrusions. By in or around June 2016, Company 1 took steps to exclude intruders from the networks. Despite these efforts, a Linux-based version of X-Agent, programmed to communicate with the GRU-registercd domain linuxkml.net, remained on the DNC network until in or around October 2016.

33. In response to Company Ts efforts, the Conspirators took countermeasures to maintain access to the DCCC and DNC networks.

a. Oil 01 about May 31, 2016, YERMAKOV searched for opcn-sourcc information about Company 1 and its reporting on X-Agent and X-Tunnel. On or about June 1,2016, the Conspirators attempted to delete traces of their presence on the DCCC network using the computer program CCleaner.
b. On or about June 14, 2016, the Conspirators registered the domain actblues.com,
which mimicked the domain of a political fundraising platform that included a
DCCC donations page. Shortly thereafter, the Conspirators used stolen DCCC
credentials to modify the DCCC website and redirect visitors to the actblucs.com

On or about June 14, 2016, the Conspirators registered the domain actblues.com,
which mimicked the domain of a political fundraising platform that included a
DCCC donations page. Shortly thereafter, the Conspirators used stolen DCCC
credentials to modify the DCCC website and redirect visitors to the actblucs.com
domain.
On or about June 20, 2016, after Company 1 had disabled X-Agent on the DCCC
network, the Conspirators spent ever seven hours unsuccessfully trying to connect
to X-Agent. The Conspirators also tried to access the DCCC network using
previously stolen credentials.

34. In or around September 2016, the Conspirators also successfully gained access to DNC
computers hosted on a third-party cloud-computing service. These computers contained test
applications related to the DNC's analytics. After conducting reconnaissance, the Conspirators
gathered data by creating backups, or "snapshots," of the DNC's eloud-based systems using the
cloud provider's own technology. The Conspirators then moved the snapshots to cloud-based
accounts they had registered with the same service, thereby stealing the data from the DNC.
Stolen Documents Released through DCLcaks

35. More than a month before the release of any documents, the Conspirators constructed the online persona DCLeaks to release and publicize stolen election-related documents. On or about April 19, 2016, after attempting to register the domain clcctionleaks.com, the Conspirators registered the domain dcleaks.com through a service that anonymizcd the registrant. The funds used to pay for the dcleaks.com domain originated from an online cryptocutrrecy service that the Conspirators also used to fund the lease of a virtual private server registered with the operational email account [email protected]. The dirbinsaabol email account was also used to register the john356gh URL-shortening account used by LUKASHEV to spearphish the Clinton Campaign chairman and other campaign-related individuals.

36. On or about June 8,2016, the Conspirators launched the public website dcleaks.com, which they used to release stolen emails. Before it shut down in or around March 2017, the site received over one million page views. The Conspirators falsely claimed on the site that DCLeaks was started by a group of "American hacktivists," when in fact it was started by the Conspirators.

37. Starting in or around June 2016 and continuing through the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Conspirators used DCLeaks to release emails stolen from individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign. The Conspirators also released documents they had stolen in other spearphishing operations, including those they had conducted in 2015 that collected emails from individuals affiliated with the Republican Party.

38. On or about June 8,2016, and at approximately the same time that the dcleaks.com website was launched, the Conspirators created a DCLeaks Facebook page using a preexisting social media account under the fictitious name "Alice Donovan." In addition to the DCLeaks Facebook page, the Conspirators used other social media accounts in the names of fictitious U.S. persons such as "Jason Scott" and "Richard Gingrey" to promote the DCLeaks website. The Conspirators accessed these accounts from computers managed by POTEMKFN and his co-conspirators.

39. On or about June 8, 2016, the Conspirators created the Twitter account @dcleaks_. The Conspirators operated the @dclcaks_ Twitter account from the same computer used for other efforts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. For example, the Conspirators used the same computer to operate the Twitter account @BaltimorcIsWhr, through which they encouraged U.S. audiences to "[j]oin our flash mob" opposing Clinton and to post images with the hashtag #BlacksAgainstHillary.

Stolen Documents Released through Guccifer 2.0

40. On or about June 14, 2016, the DNC -- through Company 1 -- publicly announced that it had been hacked by Russian government actors. In response, the Conspirators created the online persona Guccifer 2.0 and falsely claimed to be a lone Romanian hacker to undermine the allegations of Russian responsibility for the intrusion.
41. On or about June 15,2016, the Conspirators logged into a Moscow-based server used and managed by Unit 74455 and, between 4:19 PM and 4:56 PM Moscow Standard Time, searched for certain words and phrases, including:

Search terms

42. Later that day, at 7:02 PM Moscow Standard Time, the online persona Guccifer 2.0 published its first post on a blog site created through WordPress. Titled "DNC's servers hacked by a lone hacker," the post used numerous English words and phrases that the Conspirators had searched for earlier that day (bolded below):

Worldwide known cyber security company [Company 1] announced that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers had been hacked by
"sophisticated" hacker groups.

I'm very pleased the company appreciated my skills so highly))) [...]

Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking
into DNC's network. [...]

Some hundred sheets! This's a serious case, isn't it? [...]

I guess [Company 1] customers should think twice about company's competence.

F[***J the Illuminati and their conspiracies! МШШ F[***]

[Company 1] !!!!!!!!

43. Between in or around June 2016 and October 2016, the Conspirators used Guccifer 2.0 to release documents through WordPrcss that they had stolen from the DCCC and DNC. The Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, also shared stolen documents with certain individuals.

a. On or about August 15,2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, received a request for stolen documents from a candidate for the U.S. Congress. The Conspirators responded using the Guccifer 2.0 persona and sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate's opponent. On or about August 22,2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, transferred approximately 2.5 gigabytes of data stolen from the DCCC to a then-registered state lobbyist and online source of political news. The stolen data included donor records and personal identifying information for more than 2,000 Democratic donors.

On or about August 22, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, sent a reporter stolen documents pertaining to the Black Lives Matter movement. The reporter responded by discussing when to release the documents and offering to write an article about their release.

44. The Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, also communicated with U.S. persons about the release of stolen documents. On or about August 15, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, wrote to a person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. TVump, "thank u for writing back... do u find anyt[h]ing interesting in the docs i posted?" On or about August 17, 2016, the Conspirators added, "please tell me if i can help u anyhow ... it would be a great pleasure to me." On or about September 9,2016, the Conspirators, again posing as Guccifer 2.0, referred to a stolen DCCC document posted online and asked the person, "what do u think of the info on the tunout model for the democrats entire presidential campaign." The person responded, "[p]retty standard."

45. The Conspirators conducted operations as Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks using overlapping computer infrastructure and financing.

a. For example, between on or about March 14, 2016 and April 28. 2016, the Conspirators used the same pool of bitcoin funds to purchase a virtual private network ("VPN") account and to lease a server in Malaysia. In or around June 2016, the Conspirators used the Malaysian server to host the dcleaks.com website.

On or about July 6, 2016, the Conspirators used the VPN to log into the @Guccifcr_2 Twitter account. The Conspirators opened that VPN account from
the same server that was also used to register malicious domains for the hacking of the DCCC and DNC networks.

On or about June 27, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, contacted a U.S. reporter with an offer to provide stolen emails from "Hillary Clinton's staff." The Conspirators then sent the reporter the password to access a nonpublic, password-protected portion of dc.eaks.com containing emails stolen from Victim 1 bу LUKASHEV, YERMAKOV, and thier co-conspirators in or around March 2016.

46. On or about January 12,2017, the Conspirators published a statement on the Guccifer 2.0 WordPrcss blog, falsely claiming that the intrusions and release of stolen documents had "totally no relation to the Russian government"

Use of Organization 1

47. In order to expand their interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Conspirators transferred many of the documents they stole from the DNC and the chairman of the Clinton Campaign to Organization 1. The Conspirators posing as Guccifer 2.0, discussed the release of the stolen documents and the timing of those releases with Organization 1 to heighten their impact on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

a. On or about Juno 22, 2016, Organization 1 sent a private message to Guccifer 2.0 to "[s]end any new material [stolen from the DNC] here for us to review and it will have a much higher impact than what you are doing." On or about July 6, 2016, Organization 1 added, "if you have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after." The Conspirators responded, "ok... i see." Organization I explained, "we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary ... so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting "

b After failed attempts to transfer the stolen documents starting in late June 2016, on or about July 14, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, sent Organization 1 an email with an attachment titled "wk dnc linkl.txt.gpg." The Conspirators explained to Organization 1 that the encrypted file contained Instructions on how to access an online archive of stolen DNC documents. On or about July 18, 2016, Organization 1 confirmed it had "the 1Gb or so archive" and would make a release of the stolen documents "this week."

48. On or about July 22, 2016, Organization 1 released over 20,000 emails and other documents stolen from the DNC network by the Conspirators. This release occurred approximately three days before the start of the Democratic National Convention. Organization 1 did not disclose Guccifer 2.0's role in providing them. The latest-in-time email released through Organization 1 was dated on or about May 25,2016, approximately the same day the Conspirators hacked the DNC Microsoft Exchange Server.

49. On or about October 7, 2016, Organization 1 released the first set of emails from the chairman of the Clinton Campaign that had been stolen by LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators. Between on or about October 7, 2016 and November 7, 2016, Organization 1 released approximately thirty-three tranches of documents mat had been stolen from the chairman of the Clinton Campaign. In total, over 50,000 stolen documents were released.

... ... ...

[Jul 13, 2018] Mueller Indicts 12 Russian Intel Officers Just Days Before Summit by Jason Ditz

Notable quotes:
"... Indictment fuels new calls to cancel Trump-Putin summit ..."
"... Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) demanded substantial changes to the summit saying that complaining to Putin about the indictments needs to be the focus of the entire summit, and that Putin and Trump should never be allowed to be alone in a room during the meeting. ..."
"... Warner was one of the few to not call for the talks to be cancelled outright, with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) saying the meeting needed to be cancelled "now," and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) saying that even shaking Putin's hand would be "a moment of historic cowardice." ..."
Jul 13, 2018 | news.antiwar.com
Indictment fuels new calls to cancel Trump-Putin summit

On Friday, special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 12 Russian GRU officers. The 12 are accused of conspiring to hack Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC computers to leak information ahead of the 2016 election.

This was the second substantial set of indictments coming out of the investigation. In February, the Justice Department indicted 13 other "conspirators" claiming that they had stolen the identities of US citizens to manipulate the campaigns. Russia has denied all the charges.

While indictments aren't surprising, as a chance to try to show that the investigation in progressing, the timing is extremely unfortunate, to the point that it must raise suspicions . The indictment, after all, comes just days before President Trump is to hold a summit with Russia's President Vladimir Putin.

Trump was already facing bipartisan opposition to having a summit with Putin at all, based on the allegations of election meddling. The indictments are adding fuel to the fire, sparking more calls from opponents of diplomacy to pull out of the summit at the last minute.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) demanded substantial changes to the summit saying that complaining to Putin about the indictments needs to be the focus of the entire summit, and that Putin and Trump should never be allowed to be alone in a room during the meeting.

Warner was one of the few to not call for the talks to be cancelled outright, with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) saying the meeting needed to be cancelled "now," and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) saying that even shaking Putin's hand would be "a moment of historic cowardice."

Of course, these lawmakers were all attacking the summit long before these indictments dropped, and this simply is the new excuse for opposing the plan. With the growing sense that the Mueller investigation is designed to just keep going, there is also concern it's going to keep being used as a source of excuses to not talk to Russia.

[Jul 13, 2018] No Evidence In Mueller's Indictment Of 12 Russians - Release Now May Sabotage Upcoming Summit

Jul 13, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

No Evidence In Mueller's Indictment Of 12 Russians - Release Now May Sabotage Upcoming Summit

The Special counsel Robert Mueller issued an indictment (pdf, 29 pages) against 12 Russian people alleged to be officers or personal of the Russian Military Intelligence Service GRU. The people, claims the indictment, work for an operational (26165) and a technical (74455) subunit of the GRU.

A Grand Jury in Washington DC issued 11 charges which are described and annotated below. A short assessment follows.

The first charge is for a "Conspiracy to Commit an Offense Against the United States" by stealing emails and leaking them. The indictment claims that the GRU units sent spearfishing emails to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party organizations DNC and DCCC. They used these to get access to email boxes of John Podesta and other people. They are also accused of installing spyware (X-agent) on DNC computers and of exfiltrating emails and other data from them. The emails were distributed and published by the online personas DCLeaks, Guccifer II and later through Wikileaks. The indictment claims that DCLeaks and Guccifer II were impersonations by the GRU. Wikileaks, "organization 1" in the indictment, is implicated but so far not accused.

Note: There is a different Grand Jury for the long brewing case against Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Assange has denied that the emails he published came from a Russian source. Craig Murray, a former British ambassador, said that he received the emails on a trip to Washington DC and transported them to Wikileaks.

The indictment describes in some detail how various rented computers and several domain names were used to access the DNC and DCCC computers. The description is broadly plausible but there is little if any supporting evidence.

Charge 2 to 9 of the indictment are about "Aggravated Identity Theft" for using usernames and passwords for the personal email accounts of others.

Charge 10 is about a "Conspiracy to Launder Money". This was allegedly done "through a web of transaction structured to capitalize on the perceived anonymity of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin". It is alleged that the accused mined bitcoins, channeled these through dozens of accounts and transactions and then used them to rent servers, virtual private network access and domain names used in the operation.

Note : The indictment reinforces the author's hunch that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are creations and playgrounds of secret services just like Tor and other 'cool' internet 'privacy' stuff are. Its the very reason why one should avoid their use.

Cont. reading: No Evidence In Mueller's Indictment Of 12 Russians - Release Now May Sabotage Upcoming Summit

Posted by b at 02:39 PM | Comments (25)

Comments


Trisha Driscoll , Jul 13, 2018 3:10:56 PM | 1

From the end of the indictment:

"There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the vote count or changed the outcome of the 2016 election."

Just another nothing-burger.

CD Waller , Jul 13, 2018 3:15:27 PM | 2
Such a convoluted tale in fact authored by the NSA?. Most of what the Russians are accused of can be attributed to the NSA activities.
As Putin pointed out when the accusations were first made, no matter who is elected, US policies remain the same. There is no motivation for RUssia to interfere.
Zanon , Jul 13, 2018 3:24:51 PM | 3
Russian FM: No Evidence Indicted Hackers Linked to Military Intelligence, aims to destroy mood for Trump and Putin meeting
https://sptnkne.ws/jaPw

Deep state doing everything to stop the talks and a good result from it.

Pnyx , Jul 13, 2018 3:46:35 PM | 4
Obviously a desperate move to torpedo the Helsinki meeting. Given that the indicted lot is in Russia the judicial consequences will be nill.

By the way B, what do you say about the Novi-bottle found in a house surely searched over and over? What took the searchers about ten days to found it?

Ken , Jul 13, 2018 3:50:03 PM | 5
One small point. Craig Murray has said he met with one of the individuals who were involved with the DNC email release. Although he's been somewhat hazy on it, on the Scott Horton radio show, Murray said the emails were already in the possession of Wikileaks before he met with the individual involved.
https://scotthorton.org/?powerpress_pinw=23500-podcast
karlof1 , Jul 13, 2018 4:01:39 PM | 6
Good job by Concord Management to challenge the previous bullshit. That makes it likely these charges will also be challenged. The best thing you can do when someone living in a glass house accuses you of doing something is to force them to expose themselves to the entire world via evidentiary discovery; and as with the first case, it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle. This ought to be seen as the equivalent of Novichok/Skripal debacle in UK, which I trust people continue to follow Craig Murray's reporting .

As we've seen, the number of Big Lies produced that end up driving policy has dramatically increased since the USSR's disillusion, while trillions of dollars are stolen from taxpayers and given to the global .01%--OWS clearly aimed at the heart of the beast. The indictment will further roil domestic chaos within the Outlaw US Empire making solidarity more difficult to obtain.

Meanwhile in other legal news, Assange has won a court order demanding he be unmolested as he goes from Ecuadorian Embassy to airport for his flight into Asylum. Bet the UK doesn't obey this ruling either further making it a Banana Republic.

WorldBLee , Jul 13, 2018 4:04:27 PM | 7
Same ol' Deep State playbook, preaching to the converted while having little effect on anything else. This will give Rachel Maddow many hours of profitable air time as she and her ilk require no evidence.

However, ordinary people with lazy minds will see the headlines and think they're true and there will be more pressure NOT to have any productive, mutually beneficial discussions with Russia, so mission accomplished for Mueller, I guess. Anything to keep people from realizing that Hillary was a horrible, corrupt, dangerous candidate who kept herself from winning the election (which was easily winnable for the Democrats going in) all on her own.

Babyl-on , Jul 13, 2018 4:05:44 PM | 8
How much hot and stinking air can an Empire blow before it blows itself out? Sadly, no doubt, much more.

They have lost the narrative and don't even know it, they go on with Putin the Poisoner and Russia did it and they keep it up because they have no choice and they live in fear because we don't believe them any more.

This is good for us - we are making progress.

Dorian , Jul 13, 2018 4:19:03 PM | 9
Read the Indictment: Its HILARIOUS!


The high point of FBI incompetence:

- Page 14 and 15: This is hilariously stupid! These Russian super spy agents on June 15, 2016, 4:19 MOSCOW TIME and they DID NOT HACK, BUT LOGGED INTO the DNC server and spent 37 minutes to search for files or that included words (that is for the techo's out there, they "grep") for the following words:
* some hundred sheets
* some hundreds of sheets
* dcleaks
* illuminati
* широко известный перевод (meaning: widely known translation)
* worldwide known
* think twice about
* company's competence

So what kind of super spies, and super hackers would use "some hundred sheets" and "some hundreds of sheets" as two separate searches. Every computer geek knows that if you don't waste time to do virtually two identical searches like those. Who ever did these searches (after they logged in!) knows nothing about searching. The whole tech. world knows if you are going to do hacking, you use things like Linux grep/sed tools and you wouldn't waste your time doing pointless duplicitous searches. Why doesn't FBI state what tools were used, every is logged, or it should be. Thus this person whom ever it was, was naive.

So here is the big one! Foreign hackers are looking for about people talking about the Illuminati! ARE YOU KIDDING ME!...BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!

Another stupid one! Russian hackers searching DNC files for RUSSIAN STRINGS This is turning into a circus.

So you mean to tell me Russian hackers that logged into a computer (that is they didn't hacked, the FBI stated as much), are looking about for files about nonsensical matter including Russian Word Strings. You can't even make this stuff up. THE FBI ARE CLOWNS!!!

So it goes on page 15 and 16, that these search words to comprise the breathtaking proof that the culprit then was to admit these words:

Worldwide known cyber security company XXXX announced that the DNC servers have been hacked by "sophisticated" hacker groups. I'm very please the company appreciated my skill highly . Some hundred sheets! This's a serious case, isn't it?

I guess XXXX Customers should think twice about company's competence.

F*** the illuminati and their conspiracies

And when did this happen? Some 2 hours later, at 7:02pm.

So think about this! They wrote that paragraph AFTER the search! So how do you search for something in 37 minutes that you don't know it exists, and with such meaningless words to write a bragging paragraph, that was supposedly ON the DNC server itself! Meaning, the person who logged in knew it existed and quickly went looking for where it was to extract it, and then use later as to frame the Russians!

Look at the time line. The FBI only found that it was a DNC employee that logged in, looking for something that shouldn't exist in anyway on his server, unless of course he wrote it himself, and that was to use it frame the Russians. Remember that paragraph was ON THE DNC Server!!!!

The FBI are morons! This indictment will be thrown out quick smart, and the FBI should be brought up on charges of aiding and abetting a crime!


jayc , Jul 13, 2018 4:41:19 PM | 10
So obviously timed to meddle with the Trump-Putin meeting. The United States and its 5 Eyes partners intercept and store the emails of everyone on the planet, and throws a hissy fit over the alleged same treatment. No doubt the politicians and media personalities will ascend their soapboxes to play wounded victims. What a farce. Sad that the public, to a degree, has now been trained to confuse mere allegations with established fact.
John Zelnicker , Jul 13, 2018 4:43:15 PM | 11
The evidence that the DNC hacks were a local download by someone with legitimate access is persuasive as shown by the group of former intel professionals who analyzed the metadata. John Podesta's email was hacked by a phishing email that convinced him to give up his password. Any half-competent hacker could pull this off, so blaming the Russians is pure speculation. But, it is consistent with the attempts to blame Russia for the incompetence and corruption of the Clinton campaign.

The social media efforts by the Internet Research Agency, besides being mostly a commercial effort as b has shown, are also a rather insignificant portion of the billions of messages and posts that are posted daily. That these could have had any significant effect is really stretching the point.

All that being said, I'm still not convinced that Russian intelligence did nothing at all to attempt to influence the election. Certainly, the US has interfered with many elections all over the world going back decades, one of the most egregious being our interference in the Russian elections of 1991. So, there is no logical reason to believe that the Russians are not doing the same thing.

In addition, I believe that Trump has commercial and financial reasons for being as friendly as possible with Putin, i.e., Trump Tower Moscow. Trump is not particularly interested in the politics or diplomacy of detente with Russia (which I would support, in general), he is purely transactional in his approach and seems to have no interest other than being the center of attention on media and making as much money as he can.

Dorian , Jul 13, 2018 4:58:30 PM | 12
Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is clear that the FBI in an act of desperation, tried to hoodwink the public and the world, with a false flag operation to blame the Russians for DNC incompetence and criminal behaviour by Hillary Clinton.

In this attempt of a cover up and foolish attempt of technical miss direction, they have been caught red handed in gross malfeasance and high crimes.

President Putin should be made immediately aware of this attempt (if he hasn't been already), and should take Trump to task on these grave crimes and attempts of sedition and outright treason by US personnel in attempt to trigger a war with Russia.

Under US Code 2381, whomever owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death , or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

This treasonous behaviour by the FBI and DNC, should be investigated by Military Court. And those responsible for attempt to start a war, with another super power, should be held to the fullest account of US Code 2381. Attempting to precipitate a war, is a war crime and those guilty should face a military court and held to highest punishment available, namely, execution by firing squad.

High office demands high responsibility. If we do not hold government officials, especially officials of the Executive Branch of the USA, then we are allowing a government, like what is happening Washington DC today, to become a rouge nation. These evil merchants of death, must face prosecution for their hatred, bigotry and lust for war. Warmongers must not be tolerated in government. And the FBI and DNC have now shown absolutely they are prepared to lie, however incompetently, to protect the warmongers and evil doers in government.

This act by the FBI is an act of treason: US Code 2381 must now be applied to all those part of this treason.

Jackrabbit , Jul 13, 2018 5:00:15 PM | 13
b: The detente with Russia which U.S. president Donald Trump tries to achieve will now be more difficult to implement and to sustain.

-

IMO Trump isn't trying to achieve anything more than to negotiate an agreement that is favorable to USA/NATO. The Deep State would be happy if an acceptable agreement could be reached as it would split Russia from China.

AFAICT, the depiction of Trump as pro-Russian is a fantasy concocted by Hillary-Obama and their deep-state flunkies.

The entire anti-Russia campaign serves two purposes:

1) distraction
- from illegal wars, CIA color revolutions, Syrian occupation, etc.
what has been done is many times worse than temporarily separating families at the border

- from an undemocratic political system
Hillary's collusion with DNC against Sanders and the overall failure of the Democratic Party to represent the people

2) negotiation
Trump is the 'good cop' to the anti-Russian deep-state 'bad cop'
Rick Sterling , Jul 13, 2018 5:00:53 PM | 14
Yes, this "indictment" is truly pathetic.
1) According to Mueller the "infrastructure" cost "over $95000" obtained by "money laundering" using bitcoin etc.. Wow. It does not cost much to threaten "US democracy".
2) "Conspirators attempted to delete traces of their presence on the DCCC network using the computer program Ccleaner". I wonder if they used the free version of CCleaner or the premium version available for $35. Another dubious if not laughable accusation.
Patrick Armstrong , Jul 13, 2018 5:10:51 PM | 15
As I understand it the GRU does not do these things -- it's pure military intelligence. The Russian intelligence services are 1) very (very) good 2) born in real war. So they don't run little independent operations like hacking US politics just for fun.
That struck me right from the get-go. The hacking would have been done by Служба специальной связи и информации (Special Service of Communications and Information ie their NSA/CSE/GCHQ) which is now owned by Федеральная служба охраны (Federal Protection Service). No way would military intelligence have run this.
In Russia int/security organs are not quasi-independent agencies that do what they want.
Sasha , Jul 13, 2018 5:15:27 PM | 16
2) negotiation

Trump is the 'good cop' to the anti-Russian deep-state 'bad cop'

Posted by: Jackrabbit | Jul 13, 2018 5:00:15 PM | 13

Exactly, he is going to test the Russian aims to overcome more bullying either in Syria itself, even after offering to withdraw, or, better, and most probably, in Afghanistan

marcyincny , Jul 13, 2018 5:28:05 PM | 17
The whole thing is horrifying, that government agencies can be so inept while having so much power. It's one thing when they try to apply it to individuals thousands of miles away but to think they operate this way in regard to US citizens. And it just gets worse...
Winston , Jul 13, 2018 5:30:53 PM | 18
Sasha
Not much of an offer, the occupation is untenable with Pakistan in the SCO camp.
Trump has no chips to offer except Crimea.Putin/Xi may offer a face saving way out of Afghanistan and Syria, but even the venue shows who the supplicant is.
You have to be exceptional not to see that is is far more than symbolic that the mountain
has to go to Mohamed.Trump wanted DC or Vienna.
Emily Dickinson , Jul 13, 2018 5:36:31 PM | 19
This may have some connection to Ken @5:

Paragraph 47 of the indictment -- regarding "Organization 1," presumably Wikileaks -- cites intercepted messages showing that Guccifer 2.0 engaged in "failed attempts" to deliver the docs to Organization 1 "starting in late June 2016." The problem is that Assange had announced on June 12, 2016 that Wikileaks already had such documents. Given his history, it is simply beyond belief that Assange would rely on a promise of unvetted docs.

Moreover, that June 12, 2016 announcement was just two days before the Crowstrike news story of Russian hacking (June 14), followed by the debut of Guccifer 2.0 (June 15). Independent analysts have long suggested that the latter events were a ploy by partisans (Clintonites and their national security state supporters) trying to get ahead of the Wikileaks release by tainting the source of any such documents as Russian.

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/

The greatest threat to mankind is the ability of otherwise intelligent people to believe unfounded absurd nonsense. Without critical thinking and diversity of opinion the window to the truth becomes opaque.

Posted by: Dick , Jul 13, 2018 5:51:39 PM | 20

The greatest threat to mankind is the ability of otherwise intelligent people to believe unfounded absurd nonsense. Without critical thinking and diversity of opinion the window to the truth becomes opaque.

Posted by: Dick | Jul 13, 2018 5:51:39 PM | 20 /div

mike k , Jul 13, 2018 5:52:39 PM | 21
Trump should just refuse to discuss this nonsense with Putin or anyone else. Don't take the bait. Do your deals with Putin, and ignore the kibitzers. Of course Donald has trouble keeping his mouth shut.
Anya , Jul 13, 2018 5:52:54 PM | 22
Mueller messed up the proven information on the illegal access to the DNC (and congressional) computers by Awan family and the alleged trolling by the alleged Russian spies.
If Mueller has any worries about nationals security, he must investigate Wasserman and Clinton.
By the way, the Awans were never cleared for having to access the classified information. Almost 30 congressional computers had been compromised, and the classified information obtained, by the fraudsters on the US government payroll.
karlof1 , Jul 13, 2018 5:53:56 PM | 23
Must laud Dorian for his enthusiasm @12, but any such trial would be conducted in a Federal Court. Of course, since its inception, the FBI's played both sides of the legality street, and it's quite obvious that Obama's Justice Department and its FBI agency obstructed justice with the entire Clinton/Server fiasco in 2016 and has continued to do so.

As for Russia trying to sway a US presidential election, IMO they're telling the truth that they don't since they can't hope to compete with all the corrupt interests actually doing so, like AIPAC and the US Chamber of Commerce. Hell, US policy interferes in US elections when monies sent to Zionistan get recycled into the election cycle through AIPAC or other sources. What was HRC's Pay-to-Play Foundation if not a method to influence the election? Dozens of good books are written about the influence of Big Money on US elections at every level, yet an extremely "conservative" Supreme Court said all that Big Money's just another form of speech, so say all you want.

Essentially, all levels of US government and elections have become more corrupt annually since 1866 and the result is today's indictments, providing ever more proof that they're under Oligarchical control. And unfortunately for the rest of the planet, it's up to the USA's citizenry to resolve the problem--really, some of us actually do try. Sadly, we lack the presence of a US Embassy to train and finance our Color Revolution as is done within every other nation.

curious2 , Jul 13, 2018 6:07:08 PM | 24
@11
Re: phishing attack on Podesta email

You said "Any half-competent hacker could pull this off. "

Don't you mean "any totally incompetent kiddie-scripter could cut/paste a phishing attack from the dark net, and pull this off , provided the recipient was dumb enough to respond"?

Hoarsewhisperer , Jul 13, 2018 6:09:11 PM | 25
Imo Trump went into the Prez campaign with his eyes wide open. How else does one explain his (seemingly premature) drain the Swamp declaration? I understand from the multitude of Trump docos I've recorded since the campaign began that He had been contemplating the notion of running for POTUS for at least a decade before he decided to dive in. So he's had at least 10 years to investigate The Swamp, find its flaws and weaknesses, and work out whether he would be able to find and recruit powerful 'Patriots' willing to lend a hand when (not if) the going (for a lone wolf) gets tough.

He'll turn this latest slice of Intellectual Pygmy-ism to his advantage. One really obvious way to do so would be to "prove" that no time should be wasted in getting as close as possible to 'dangerous' Putin, as soon as possible. And who better to do that than... Ta Da! MAGA Trump!

Trump seems to have explored every possibility and evolved umpteen solutions to each. The Swamp is going to regret trying to outsmart him.

[Jul 13, 2018] The Holes in the Official Skripal Story by Craig Murray

Notable quotes:
"... In my last post I set out the official Government account of the events in the Skripal Case. Here I examine the credibility of this story. Next week I shall look at alternative explanations. ..."
Jul 12, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

In my last post I set out the official Government account of the events in the Skripal Case. Here I examine the credibility of this story. Next week I shall look at alternative explanations.

Russia has a decade long secret programme of producing and stockpiling novichok nerve agents. It also has been training agents in secret assassination techniques, and British intelligence has a copy of the Russian training manual, which includes instruction on painting nerve agent on doorknobs.

The only backing for this statement by Boris Johnson is alleged "intelligence", and unfortunately the "intelligence" about Russia's secret novichok programme comes from exactly the same people who brought you the intelligence about Saddam Hussein's WMD programme, proven liars. Furthermore, the question arises why Britain has been sitting on this intelligence for a decade and doing nothing about it, including not telling the OPCW inspectors who certified Russia's chemical weapons stocks as dismantled.

If Russia really has a professional novichok assassin training programme, why was the assassination so badly botched? Surely in a decade of development they would have discovered that the alleged method of gel on doorknob did not work? And where is the training manual which Boris Johnson claimed to possess? Having told the world – including Russia -the UK has it, what is stopping the UK from producing it, with marks that could identify the specific copy erased?

The Russians chose to use this assassination programme to target Sergei Skripal, a double agent who had been released from jail in Russia some eight years previously.

It seems remarkable that the chosen target of an attempt that would blow the existence of a secret weapon and end the cover of a decade long programme, should be nobody more prominent than a middle ranking double agent who the Russians let out of jail years ago. If they wanted him dead they could have killed him then. Furthermore the attack on him would undermine all future possible spy swaps. Putin therefore, on this reading, was willing to sacrifice both the secrecy of the novichok programme and the spy swap card just to attack Sergei Skripal . That seems highly improbable.

Only the Russians can make novichok and only the Russians had a motive to attack the Skripals.

The nub of the British government's approach has been the shocking willingness of the corporate and state media to parrot repeatedly the lie that the nerve agent was Russian made, even after Porton Down said they could not tell where it was made and the OPCW confirmed that finding. In fact, while the Soviet Union did develop the "novichok" class of nerve agents, the programme involved scientists from all over the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia, as I myself learnt when I visited the newly decommissioned Nukus testing facility in Uzbekistan in 2002.

Furthermore, it was the USA who decommissioned the facility and removed equipment back to the United States. At least two key scientists from the programme moved to the United States. Formulae for several novichok have been published for over a decade. The USA, UK and Iran have definitely synthesised a number of novichok formulae and almost certainly others have done so too. Dozens of states have the ability to produce novichok, as do many sophisticated non-state actors.

The Skripal Affair: Smearing "Evidence" on a Door Handle

As for motive, the Russian motive might be revenge, but whether that really outweighs the international opprobrium incurred just ahead of the World Cup, in which so much prestige has been invested, is unclear.

What is certainly untrue is that only Russia has a motive. The obvious motive is to attempt to blame and discredit Russia. Those who might wish to do this include Ukraine and Georgia, with both of which Russia is in territorial dispute, and those states and jihadist groups with which Russia is in conflict in Syria. The NATO military industrial complex also obviously has a plain motive for fueling tension with Russia.

There is of course the possibility that Skripal was attacked by a private gangster interest with which he was in conflict, or that the attack was linked to Skripal's MI6 handler Pablo Miller' s work on the Orbis/Steele Russiagate dossier on Donald Trump.

Plainly, the British governments statements that only Russia had the means and only Russia had the motive, are massive lies on both counts.

The Russians had been tapping the phone of Yulia Skripal. They decided to attack Sergei Skripal while his daughter was visiting from Moscow.

In an effort to shore up the government narrative, at the time of the Amesbury attack the security services put out through Pablo Miller's long term friend, the BBC's Mark Urban , that the Russians "may have been" tapping Yulia Skripal's phone, and the claim that this was strong evidence that the Russians had indeed been behind the attack.

But think this through. If that were true, then the Russians deliberately attacked at a time when Yulia was in the UK rather than when Sergei was alone. Yet no motive has been adduced for an attack on Yulia or why they would attack while Yulia was visiting – they could have painted his doorknob with less fear of discovery anytime he was alone. Furthermore, it is pretty natural that Russian intelligence would tap the phone of Yulia, and of Sergei if they could. The family of double agents are normal targets. I have no doubt in the least, from decades of experience as a British diplomat, that GCHQ have been tapping Yulia's phone. Indeed, if tapping of phones is seriously put forward as evidence of intent to murder, the British government must be very murderous indeed.

Their trained assassin(s) painted a novichok on the doorknob of the Skripal house in the suburbs of Salisbury. Either before or after the attack, they entered a public place in the centre of Salisbury and left a sealed container of the novichok there.

The incompetence of the assassination beggars belief when compared to British claims of a long term production and training programme. The Russians built the heart of the International Space Station. They can kill an old bloke in Salisbury. Why did the Russians not know that the dose from the door handle was not fatal? Why would trained assassins leave crucial evidence lying around in a public place in Salisbury? Why would they be conducting any part of the operation with the novichok in a public area in central Salisbury?

Why did nobody see them painting the doorknob? This must have involved wearing protective gear, which would look out of place in a Salisbury suburb. With Skripal being resettled by MI6, and a former intelligence officer himself, it beggars belief that MI6 did not fit, as standard, some basic security including a security camera on his house.

The Skripals both touched the doorknob and both functioned perfectly normally for at least five hours, even able to eat and drink heartily. Then they were simultaneously and instantaneously struck down by the nerve agent, at a spot in the city centre coincidentally close to where the assassins left a sealed container of the novichok lying around. Even though the nerve agent was eight times more deadly than Sarin or VX, it did not kill the Skripals because it had been on the doorknob and affected by rain.

Why did they both touch the outside doorknob in exiting and closing the door? Why did the novichok act so very slowly, with evidently no feeling of ill health for at least five hours, and then how did it strike both down absolutely simultaneously, so that neither can call for help, despite their being different sexes, weights, ages, metabolisms and receiving random completely uncontrolled doses. The odds of that happening are virtually nil. And why was the nerve agent ultimately ineffective?

Detective Sergeant Bailey attended the Skripal house and was also poisoned by the doorknob, but more lightly. None of the other police who attended the house were affected.

Why was the Detective Sergeant affected and nobody else who attended the house, or the scene where the Skripals were found? Why was Bailey only lightly affected by this extremely deadly substance, of which a tiny amount can kill?

Four months later, Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess were rooting about in public parks, possibly looking for cigarette butts, and accidentally came into contact with the sealed container of a novichok. They were poisoned and Dawn Sturgess subsequently died.

If the nerve agent had survived four months because it was in a sealed container, why has this sealed container now mysteriously disappeared again? If Rowley and Sturgess had direct contact straight from the container, why did they not both die quickly? Why had four months searching of Salisbury and a massive police, security service and military operation not found this container, if Rowley and Sturgess could?

I am, with a few simple questions, demolishing what is the most ludicrous conspiracy theory I have ever heard – the Salisbury conspiracy theory being put forward by the British government and its corporate lackies.

My next post will consider some more plausible explanations of this affair.

The original source of this article is Craig Murray Copyright © Craig Murray , Craig Murray , 2018

[Jul 13, 2018] Liberals' Trump-Russia fever dreams have reached parody status by Matthew

Jul 13, 2018 | theweek.com

Walther

July 10, 2018

Does Jonathan Chait know about Basil, I wonder?

If, like me, you were impressed by the magisterial comprehensiveness of a chart that accompanied New York 's cover story , in which Chait outlined his theory that President Trump has been an agent of the Russian government since 1987, you might assume that he cannot have missed this crucial personage and is sitting on the info until more becomes clear.

Noble as his intentions might seem, I am not so sure that the revelations can wait this long. Allow me, in the interest of national security, to rehearse the facts. On April 5, 2013, more than two years before he announced his candidacy for the presidency, Donald Trump made a cryptic reply to a tweet from an account with the handle @_Mickey_Mouse. "Thanks Basil," the then-businessman wrote. Unfortunately the tweet to which our future president was responding seems to have disappeared, along with any information about the account's provenance. Whoever this "Basil" was, he seems to have covered his tracks exceedingly well.

But not well enough. Consider the clues that remain in plain sight. "Basil" is, of course, a Westernized version of "Vasily," one of the most common Russian male first names. St. Basil, who has given his name to the cathedral that is the single most iconic piece of Russian architecture, is also the patron saint of Russia and a popular symbol of reactionary nationalism. A Kremlin operative, of course, would be careful not to select a Twitter handle easily associated with his employer; he would pick something anodyne and American-sounding. What could answer better to these descriptions than a cartoon character who helped to win World War II? If only, you might be thinking, Trump himself were more careful, he would have avoided using this operative's actual codename in a public forum.

But this is a misapprehension. If there is anything we have learned about the pattern of Trump-Russia collusion and the antics of the coterie of online nationalists, white supremacists, anime Nazis, and 4chan memers, it is that they cannot resist making their little in-jokes and dropping seemingly clever references into their communications. Consider the wider significance of the date of Trump's tweet. On April 5, in the Year of Our Lord 1242, the great Russian general Alexander Nevsky defeated the Teutonic Knights at Lake Pepius in the famous Battle of the Ice, an event of enormous significance for nationalists who see the knights as representative of a proto-liberal globalizing tendency already present in the European culture of the Middle Ages.

But why that day in 2013, of all years? What is the significance of that gap of some 771 years? Please. To the uninitiated layman this no doubt seems baffling. To someone who understands the tech-obsessed culture of online neoreactionary pranksters, it is an obvious (and somewhat amusing) throwback. As any programmer knows, 771 is the code page used in DOS to produce text in the Russian alphabet. It is, in other words, a retro racist joke, the kind of thing whose importance would no doubt have been lost on Trump himself while seeming hugely important (and absolutely hilarious) to "Basil."

But all of this is a distraction from the real question of what exactly Trump and Basil were discussing. Alas, it may be a long time indeed before most of us know, but that doesn't mean Bob Mueller doesn't already. It appears that Basil's account has been suspended by Twitter, which may be the result of a subpoena. It is possible that sources close to Mueller have told Chait that it would be for the best if Basil, whose communications with the president and other Kremlin-linked Twitter accounts are in the process of being recovered and analyzed, remained a secret for the time being. On the other hand, it is possible that this exchange has escaped both Chait's and Mueller's attention, in which case I draw attention to it here in the hope of a little-noticed but obvious example of collusion -- one more piece in the giant, seemingly unsolvable puzzle.

I give voice to the above lunatic fancy, which I was able to concoct with almost minimal effort in a matter of about 30 seconds with the use of Twitter, Google, and Wikipedia, in the hope of reminding readers how easy it is to put together a plausible-sounding hypothesis if you are already convinced of certain premises. In this case, that premise is the fact that despite the lack of any real evidence, there exists or existed a high-level conspiracy between Trump and various members of his 2016 campaign and various agents of the Russian government, up to and potentially including Vladimir Putin himself, to elect Trump president of the United States two years ago.

This premise has been widely adopted and reiterated in American media on the basis of a six degrees of Kevin Bacon-like game involving persons as unlikely as a model who once had an affair with an oligarch who was acquainted with a former Soviet-era ambassador who knows the president of Ukraine, for whom Paul Manafort once did lobbying many years before his brief employment by the Trump campaign (phew), and by the appellation of vague but sinister-sounding adjectives ("Kremlin-linked," "Russia-backed").

Add to this perfervid climate of speculation people's concerns about the species of online nerd culture known as the "alt-right" and you can pretty much accuse anybody who has ever had anything to do with Trump of anything. A week before Chait's article appeared, thousands of persons became convinced that a hitherto-unnoticed press release from the Department of Homeland Security was actually a coded neo-Nazi message because the brief declarative sentence in the headline reminded some observers of a racist slogan that also contains 14 words and because in one statistic used in the story the natural number 88, which is associated with admirers of Adolf Hitler, appeared. Did I mention that, like neo-Nazism, which, has its so-called "14 words," the press release also contained 14 of what could be considered points, although only 13 of them appear alongside typographical bullets? Even MSNBC's Chris Hayes, a vociferously anti-Trump but otherwise level-headed journalist, briefly fell for this nonsense.

The easy flow of ill-gotten Russian money into the economies of Western Europe and the United States is one of the great unsung evils of the post-Cold War era. The oligarchs do not particularly care who does their dirty laundry or sells them luxury apartments. This is why it would be just as easy , if not in fact easier , to make a chart like Chait's showing the connections between Hillary Clinton, Russian business interests, and the Kremlin. Barack Obama's insistence to Dmitry Medvedev that he would have "more flexibility" after the 2012 election is, considered out of context, subject to the least generous or responsible interpretation, far more sinister than anything of which Trump or anyone in his circles has been accused. But the truth is that none of these connections are especially significant. We are all connected somehow to Russia, just as we are all complicit in the spoliation of the Third World and the abuse of indigenous peoples because we all buy products made abroad and use the internet and own stock.

More Perspectives Ryan Cooper Trump vs. the West Damon Linker How conservative media taught Trump to trash NATO

Likewise, there is so much information available about so many people that it has never been easier to insinuate connections and intentions and conspiracies into meaningless coincidences. Imagine what Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney who unsuccessfully prosecuted an area businessman for his supposed involvement in a nonexistent conspiracy to assassinate President John K. Kennedy, would have been able to accomplish with the resources of the internet at his disposal. The ease with which we can access information has made it easier than ever for semi-intelligent persons to concoct lurid stories. It should also make it easier for those of us who are sensible to dismiss them out of hand.

This is why I do not think it is worth calling New York magazine irresponsible for publishing conspiracy theories. Bores and scolds might suggest that at a time when the president seems to be getting away with painting any media outlet that criticizes him as "fake news," it might be a good idea to stick to facts and leave this kind of thing to ResistanceHole . I disagree. New York has no duty to its readers except that of entertainment. If squinting to try to tell the difference between the red line connecting two oligarchs and the green one linking an unknown Florida-based GOP hack to a longtime party donor is your idea of fun, knock yourself out. But don't pretend that what you're reading is journalism.

[Jul 13, 2018] Trump, Putin, Marine Le Pen, the AfD, and a variety of other globalist-hating Hitler-alikes form "the Alliance of Authoritarian and Reactionary States" (the "AARS ) conspired to disband the European Union and NATO by C.J. Hopkins

Notable quotes:
"... C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org . ..."
Jul 13, 2018 | www.unz.com

Here it comes, the moment we've been waiting for, when Trump and Putin meet in Helsinki to officially launch the Destruction of Democracy, and very possibly the Apocalypse itself. That's right, folks, once again, it appears we're looking at the end of everything, because according to the corporate media, on July 16, 2018, Trump is probably going to disband NATO so that Putin can invade the Baltic states, then Germany, then the rest of Europe, and then presumably order an all-out thermonuclear strike on the United States, which will pretty much end civilization as we know it. Or perhaps the plan is to do away with NATO, withdraw all American troops from Poland , let Putin rape and pillage Western Europe, and then have North Korea nuke both coasts of the US mainland (and Canada, of course) so that a Putin-Nazified Middle Amerika will have carte blanche to exterminate the Mexicans and make women wear those "Handmaid" costumes, or some other ridiculously paranoid scenario, possibly involving Susan Sarandon as some kind of Putin-Nazi triple agent.

Tragically, the global neoliberal establishment is completely powerless to stop Trump and Putin from carrying out this evil scheme (whatever it turns out to be in the end), because even the US Intelligence Community has to obey the law, after all, and not do anything sneaky, or unethical, not even with the fate of democracy at stake. No, unlike the Russians, who go around blatantly poisoning people with novichok oatmeal more or less whenever they like, the global capitalist ruling classes' hands are tied by their own integrity. All they can do is watch in horror as these two Hitlerian megalomaniacs destroy their entire global empire and establish a thousand-year Putin-Nazi Reich.

Thank God at least the corporate media are raising their collective voices in protest. In a recent piece in The Washington Post , Max Bergmann of the Center for American Progress warns that "this is a summit about appeasement, and we should be terrified that Trump is going to sell out America and its allies." According to Bergmann, Trump might "accidentally" share state secrets with Putin, or promise to reduce support for our freedom-loving Ukrainian Nazis , or stop trying to overthrow the Syrian government so that Syria, with the help of Russia and Iran, can launch a sneak attack on Israel and drive "the Jews" into the sea. Worse still, Bergmann speculates, he might make "secret agreements" with Putin without telling the editors of The Washington Post , which God help us all if that ever happened.

Not to be out-apocalypsed by The Post , Roger Cohen of The New York Times published a full-blown dystopian vision wherein Trump, Putin, Marine Le Pen, the AfD, and a variety of other globalist-hating Hitler-alikes form "the Alliance of Authoritarian and Reactionary States" (the "AARS"), disband the European Union and NATO, impose international martial law, and start ethnically cleansing the West of immigrants. Matteo Salvini and Horst Seehofer, decked out in full Putin-Nazi regalia, personally supervise the genocidal purges, which frightened Europeans come to support after Putin's irresistible "fake news" bots brainwash them into believing that a little Russian girl named "Tatiana" has been abducted by Moroccan migrants off a beach along the Costa del Sol.

... ... ...

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .

[Jul 12, 2018] Are The Russia-Gate Fanatics Crazy, Or Just Cynical by Justin Raimondo

Jul 12, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Justin Raimondo via AntiWar.com,

The kookification of the "mainstream" continues, with none other than Jonathan Chait – the most conventional sort of boring corporate liberal – producing an unhinged diatribe purporting to prove that Donald Trump has been a Russian agent since 1987 – and that his path to the presidency was paved by his Russian handlers, who were planning it all along. And not to be outdone, formerly rational person Marcy Wheeler, whose investigations as "emptywheel" won her some renown, is now claiming that she not only has definitive proof of Trump's collusion with the Kremlin, but that, as a result, she was forced to turn one of her sources into the FBI for some vague cloak-and-dagger-ish reason.

I looked in on the Chait production, and came upon his reiteration of the Alfa Bank computer link – this was a story, you'll recall, that claimed there was a stream of communications between this "Kremlin-connected" bank and the Trump organization. This, we were told, was almost certainly Vladimir Putin sending instructions to his zombie-agents in the Trump White House. Yes, this was actually the story, backed up by several computer "experts" – except it turned out to be advertising spam . Chait repeats this story, adding it on top of the several dozen other conspiracy factoids he throws in the mix – but without mentioning that the computer signals were simply ad-bots. On the basis of this, and a string of other "interactions" with Russians, we are supposed to believe that the omnipotent Russian intelligence agencies hatched a plot 30 years ago to put Trump into the White House. This is a conspiracy theory that's so shoddy and far-fetched that not even Alex Jones would touch it with a ten-foot pole.

Which brings us to an interesting question: do these people really believe their own craziness?

In some instances, it's pure psychopathology. That's the case, I believe, for Marcy Wheeler, Louise Mensch, and the more active online Twitter-paranoids. These people have been so shocked by the unexpected – the election of Trump – that they have been forced into a dubious mental state bordering on insanity.

However, in the case of Jonathan Chait, it's pure viciousness and cynicism. He even says of his own theory that it's "unlikely but possible." It's just a show for the suckers. The same is true for most of the other journalists who have enlisted in #TheResistance and given up any pretense at objectivity: they are simply doing what they do best, and that is taking dictation from their spookish sources. The treatment of Russia-gate in the media parallels precisely what occurred with Iraq's storied "weapons of mass destruction" – reporters are taking it all on faith, and they don't even necessarily believe it. Thus the biggest hoax since Piltdown Man is reported as "fact." And of course all this is coming to the fore as Trump takes on NATO and our European "allies."

For anti-interventionists, Trump's trip to Europe could not be more timely or enlightening. He went to the NATO meeting with a few admonitory tweets up front , complaining that America pays far more than a fair share of the alliance's monetary costs, and no sooner does he get off the plane than he notes that for all the anti-Russian rhetoric coming out of our allies, the Germans are cuddling up to the Russians on the energy front with the Nord Stream II pipeline. Merkel shot back that Germany is, after all, an independent country and can do what it likes. True, but then why the weird contradiction between claiming that Russia is a military threat and also setting up the mechanism of energy dependence?

Before getting on the plane for his European sojourn, the President reiterated his longstanding position:

"We pay far too much and they pay far too little. The United States is spending far more on NATO than any other country. This is not fair, nor is it acceptable."

And the cost is not just measured in monetary terms: there's also the incalculable cost of risking war, under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which obligates us to come to the aid of a NATO ally that's under attack, or at least that claims to be under attack. In which case, the government of tiny Montenegro, with a population of a bit over half a million, could declare that the Russians are trying to pull off a coup, and US troops would be in country "defending" it against an incursion that may not even exist.

Take a look at the Euro-weenies squirming in their seats at that "bilateral breakfast," which was turned into a lecture by the President about why the burden of empire should not fall only on our shoulders. Pompeo and Kay Bailey Hutchinson don't look happy, either, but that's just too bad, now isn't it? The President is speaking truth to the once high-and-mighty – and more power to him!

Meanwhile, the main event is going to be in Helsinki: NATO is just a sideshow. After all, militarily the alliance is really nothing but the United States and a few Brits: the Europeans carry little actual weight. The really serious business will take place with Putin, although there is a relentless propaganda campaign in progress to prevent Trump from making the Helsinki summit a success.

What must be addressed in Helsinki is the backsliding of both countries when it comes to preventing a nuclear catastrophe. The program to find and secure loose nukes, which became a problem after the breakup of the Soviet Union, needs to be renewed, in addition to the mutual disarmament agreements that have fallen by the wayside , with the US and the Russians re-arming . As tensions between Washington and Moscow rise, the possibility of a nuclear conflict increases, along with the chances of an accidenta l nuclear exchange. The nuclear death machine is on automatic, with all kinds of scenarios where it could be set off by something other than an enemy attack : a terrorist strike in Washington, D.C., or anywhere, involving nuclear material, or simply a computer software glitch. Americans would be horrified to learn just how close we are to an extinction event.

The Trump-haters would rather the President fail than give him credit for securing the peace. They would much prefer to wage a new cold war with Russia than put an end to the horrific threat of utter annihilation that's cast a dark shadow over the world for all this time. In preferring universal ruin to the vindication of their enemies, they fit the very definition of what it means to be evil.

Trump is out to transform US foreign policy by – finally! – recognizing the reality that's been in place since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The old structures that served us when Communism was thought to be a threat to Europe are no longer functional, and haven't been for quite some time. NATO today is nothing but a gigantic subsidy to two major beneficiaries: our European "allies" and the big arms manufacturers such as Boeing, Raytheon, etc. The current arrangements allow the European welfare states to huddle under the US nuclear shield while dispensing all kinds of goodies to their citizens. It's quite a racket for all concerned: as NATO countries must continually update their military equipment to meet rising standards, American taxpayers are footing most of the bill.

Whether Trump succeeds in getting the incubus of NATO off our backs, or not, this outmoded institution is bound to wither away no matter who is in the White House, for the simple reason that it no longer serves any useful purpose. Those howls of outrage you're hearing are all coming from self-interested parties being cut off from the gravy train – and, as such, all that noise should be music to our ears. Tags Politics War Conflict Commercial Banks Commercial Aircraft Manufacturing Oil Related Services and Equipment - NEC Aerospace & Defense - NEC

Comments Vote up! 27 Vote down! 3

GunnyG Thu, 07/12/2018 - 16:45 Permalink

Unhinged loons all. The only collusion seems to be between the Magic Nigger and Putin along with Hellery and Mueller and Uranium One.

President Obama : "This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility."

President Medvedev : "I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir, and I stand with you."

jm -> GunnyG Thu, 07/12/2018 - 16:46 Permalink

We're over it.

Dickweed Wang -> jm Thu, 07/12/2018 - 16:48 Permalink

More projection from the left . . . accusing Trump of the very thing(s) they themselves are guilty of. It's really getting obvious.

Automatic Choke -> Dickweed Wang Thu, 07/12/2018 - 16:53 Permalink

I have a good friend. Intelligent, usually quite well balanced, but a bad case of TDS. She keeps falling back on "where there is smoke there must be fire....we keep hearing about Russia and Trump, so it must be true."

I have yet to point out to her that is precisely what was behind Goering's philosophy of "tell a lie often enough and people will believe it to be true". After all, she is also jewish, and the Goering reference might make her head explode.

Billy the Poet -> Automatic Choke Thu, 07/12/2018 - 16:55 Permalink

Have you shown her the Steele dossier which lists Kremlin agents and Russian spies as sources A, B, C and G?

DingleBarryObummer -> Billy the Poet Thu, 07/12/2018 - 16:58 Permalink

let's get some Likud/Chabad Lubavitch-gate articles

Boing_Snap -> DingleBarryObummer Thu, 07/12/2018 - 17:23 Permalink

RussiaGate was spawned as Trump was calling her out for her crimes, the ties to the Uranium One scam were obvious and public. So in typical fashion she paints her opponent with the the false brush of her crimes to deflect the reality.

Besides the MI6 need to smear the Russians was first on the agenda anyway, can't have the Russians looking good on anything.

lazarusturtle -> Boing_Snap Thu, 07/12/2018 - 19:05 Permalink

Thank Q for exposing all the closet zionists. When you replace the word "Russiagate" with "Israelgate", then all the 'fire & fury' over the Trump presidency actually starts to make sense.

MillionDollarButter -> lazarusturtle Thu, 07/12/2018 - 20:25 Permalink

To the new owners of ZH. Everyone knows what's up.

TBT or not TBT -> MillionDollarButter Thu, 07/12/2018 - 20:56 Permalink

Crazy OR cynical? Embrace the healing power of and.

Rapunzal -> DingleBarryObummer Thu, 07/12/2018 - 17:23 Permalink

No it's just a hollow divide and conquer meme, to keep the sheeple arguing about nonsense and keep the flow of fake news at a high level. Don't give the sheeple a moment of a break, they might start to think for themselves.

WallHoo -> Rapunzal Thu, 07/12/2018 - 17:34 Permalink

Come on rapu dont say that,you can do better!!

Life rule number one if someone supports something beyond reason that means that they benefit from it.

Nature_Boy_Wooooo -> Automatic Choke Thu, 07/12/2018 - 16:56 Permalink

I think deep down these people know it's nonsense, they just hate Trump so much they feel the need to be dishonest just to try and hurt him.

It blows my mind because these are the same people who would have a meltdown if a prosecutor went after a black man with these tactics. Somehow they feel that a malicious prosecution is acceptable just this one time.

stant -> Automatic Choke Thu, 07/12/2018 - 17:00 Permalink

the tribe has a cult following. the crack pipe has second hand smoke

Consuelo -> Automatic Choke Thu, 07/12/2018 - 18:05 Permalink

Ancient hatred of ethnic Russians from the old Khazarian empire, now known as 'Ukraine'...

It is no wonder, nor surprise that Khazarian cockroaches who infest the halls of U.S. foreign policy are apoplectic regarding any warming of common-sense relations with Russia.

Consuelo -> Automatic Choke Thu, 07/12/2018 - 18:05 Permalink

Dup.

Is-Be -> Automatic Choke Thu, 07/12/2018 - 18:13 Permalink

Her head will explode with Guilt.

https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Tell_the_Truth_and_Shame_the_De

TeamDepends -> jm Thu, 07/12/2018 - 16:51 Permalink

Trump Acceptance Resistance Disorder induced hysteria. So, crazy. And yet, many are some of the most cynical creatures you'll ever meet- true misanthropes. So there's that.

lookslikecraptome -> TeamDepends Thu, 07/12/2018 - 17:03 Permalink

how about something interesting.You know about dick eater McAffe and the crypto world.We all know the dem/lib shit about Russia and Trump is already complete bullshit.

Boing_Snap -> TeamDepends Thu, 07/12/2018 - 17:30 Permalink

Yes, the Libtards that think they're smarter than everyone else are the most trapped by their ego.

Present fact, logic and reasonable discourse and these geniuses lose their sheet and produce fallacy, fake news, and eventually run away from the conversation or end up in tears.

Funny and sad at the same time.

I Am Jack's Ma -> jm Thu, 07/12/2018 - 18:28 Permalink

The anti-Russia hysteria comes from all over the Left as well as parts of the Right...

But as with Chait, Mensch, Kristol, Appelbaum, Gessen and on and on and on you find Jews wildly over-represented in the Putin bashing (which is one thing - he's a politician in bed with some bad hombres and not at all above criticism) and Russia itself.

https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/hating-russia-is-a-full-time-job/

new game -> GunnyG Thu, 07/12/2018 - 17:09 Permalink

i was just up at a lake in northern mn and there was two loons going nutso on the lake! guess what i was thinking?

lol...

it was pretty cool. it was like a spat on the water, or a sexual experience. don't know cept they were making a hell-of-a-lot of cool sounds...

GunnyG -> new game Thu, 07/12/2018 - 17:22 Permalink

The Americanus Liberalum Loonicus does not make cool sounds. It screeches, mewls, whines, and bitches and moans.

esum -> GunnyG Thu, 07/12/2018 - 18:40 Permalink

DEMS/LIBTARDS

suk ya dick for a dolla

N0TME -> GunnyG Thu, 07/12/2018 - 19:32 Permalink

I have a question. Why is this still an issue?

I thought it was over.

LawsofPhysics Thu, 07/12/2018 - 16:48 Permalink

War is Peace

Freedom is Slavery

Ignorance is Strength

Get in line comrade!

1 Alabama -> LawsofPhysics Thu, 07/12/2018 - 17:25 Permalink

ignorance is also bliss, far from strength

LawsofPhysics -> 1 Alabama Thu, 07/12/2018 - 17:33 Permalink

Still nothing useful to add and completely ignorant of history...

expected.

louiedafag -> LawsofPhysics Thu, 07/12/2018 - 18:00 Permalink

small is big. big is small.

Biggy Small

NukeChinaNow -> LawsofPhysics Thu, 07/12/2018 - 21:17 Permalink

Sexual deviance is pride.

Infanticide is choice.

Invader is undocumented migrant.

It's a hell of a LONG list the evil bastards have going-to try to destroy western civilization with cutesy little names to deflect from the truth about what they REALLY support.

But hey, what do I know?

I'm sure there are a lot people who can easily add to my list. Have at it.

attah-boy-Luther Thu, 07/12/2018 - 16:48 Permalink

only ones that believe russsia-gate rev.1.0/2.0/3.0 etc are:

______________________________________________

Copy and paste and fill-in!

cheech_wizard -> attah-boy-Luther Thu, 07/12/2018 - 16:54 Permalink

only ones that believe russsia-gate rev.1.0/2.0/3.0 etc are:

Congressman Adam Schiff-for-brains -or- the thoroughly rabid idiots over on Democratic Underground

Copy and paste and fill-in!

What did I win?

TeamDepends -> cheech_wizard Thu, 07/12/2018 - 17:17 Permalink

A Full Del Monte from Stormy Daniels and parting gifts.

shovelhead -> TeamDepends Thu, 07/12/2018 - 17:30 Permalink

Is that a melon salad?

Consuelo -> cheech_wizard Thu, 07/12/2018 - 18:07 Permalink

Doesn't Schiff have some Epstein to diddle with at the Pizza joint...?

Lost in translation Thu, 07/12/2018 - 16:49 Permalink

I'll take demonically-possessed for $800, Alex.

TeamDepends -> Lost in translation Thu, 07/12/2018 - 17:20 Permalink

Bingo! Communism is merely thinly-veiled Luciferianism. Take the Alinskyites, please.

1 Alabama -> Lost in translation Thu, 07/12/2018 - 17:27 Permalink

What is the U.S. gvt?

geno Thu, 07/12/2018 - 16:49 Permalink

Meanwhile look at this "elite" Russian military tech FAILURE..:

http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-admits-defeat-su-57-not-going-int

geno -> geno Thu, 07/12/2018 - 16:50 Permalink

I actually like Russia and hope for a good relationship with them, but the US must fail and Russia is the best cheer-leading on this site has become unbearable.

Billy the Poet -> geno Thu, 07/12/2018 - 16:59 Permalink

I see lots of folks here who want both the US and Russia to succeed. That's one of the reasons we support the President and his policy of peace, commerce and honest friendship with old Cold War enemies. It's not 1949/1950 anymore.

chestergimli -> Billy the Poet Thu, 07/12/2018 - 19:04 Permalink

I'd like to see them get together with CHIna and do the Jews in.

Is-Be -> geno Thu, 07/12/2018 - 18:23 Permalink

Get it through your thick skull,

Just because Russia exists, does not imply any action is required from the USA.

As the ancient and venerable ancestral religions of Asatru and Vanatru say, "There are many ways of Being in the world, and this is natural and Good".

Tend to the mote in your own eye.

cheech_wizard -> geno Thu, 07/12/2018 - 16:58 Permalink

So the Russians realized that US equipment is crap and can be handled by what they already have.

No real surprise there. U.S. military equipment is in many cases relying on electronic components from the 70's and 80's rather than upgrading their electronic systems.

new game -> cheech_wizard Thu, 07/12/2018 - 17:16 Permalink

grift and graft has succeeded in making the military a pork barrel of overprice inferior stuffs.

quantity but not quality. sooooo many problems associated with uuuuuge budgets..

don't know where to go-just so many issues that could be solve by shrinkage.

half it and see what happens for strters...

shovelhead -> cheech_wizard Thu, 07/12/2018 - 17:40 Permalink

Russia won't waste money on an impractical design that's really not worth the enormous cost? Why, that's crazy.

Instead of spending millions to make a pen write in 0 G, they use a 2 cent pencil?

Barbarians.

Is-Be -> cheech_wizard Thu, 07/12/2018 - 18:29 Permalink

US. military equipment is in many cases relying on electronic components from the 70's and 80's rather than upgrading their electronic systems.

That's a surprisingly pertinent observation.

So where did the $21 TRILLION dollars that Catherine Austin Fitts found missing Go, if not into weapons upgrades?

That sort of coin buys you a whole new civilization.

Incredulity is not an argument.

dietrolldietroll Thu, 07/12/2018 - 16:49 Permalink

Crazy, cynical, moronic. Yeah.

GoHillary2016 Thu, 07/12/2018 - 16:50 Permalink

they are very similar to Trump fanatics, they will believe any crazy shit.

Is-Be -> GoHillary2016 Thu, 07/12/2018 - 18:30 Permalink

If you say so, it must be true, O great Oracle.

[Jul 09, 2018] Senate Intelligence Committee Prostitutes Itself In Behalf Of Russiagate, by Paul Craig Roberts

Jul 09, 2018 | www.unz.com

Are you stupid enough to believe that American voters elected Trump president because Vladimir Putin influenced them to vote for Russia's candidate? The US Senate Intelligence (sic) Committee is that stupid. This collection of nitwits actually produced a report that a few ads allegedly placed online on Putin's instructions, ads that did not cost one-hundredth of one percent of the huge sum spent by the candidates themselves, both national committees and everyone else, were decisive in influencing voters who never saw the ads in the first place or read or responded to tweets.

That a Senate Committee would expect anyone to believe such a far-fetched story shows that the Senate Intelligence (sic) Committee has no respect whatsoever for the people who elected President Trump, or, for that matter, for anyone else at home or abroad.

This Senate report is the most incredible bullshit I have every encountered in my life. There is no evidence whatsoever in the report. Only assertions. And most of these are based on "open-source" internet postings by trolls and bots financed by the military/security complex and Democratic Party.

What the report actually tells us is that no member of the Senate Intelligence Committee has enough intelligence or integrity to serve in the US Senate. It is the Senate Intelligence Committee that is a disgrace to America and to the entire human race.

RT has great fun with the collection of nitwits that comprise the Senate Intelligence Committee: https://www.rt.com/usa/431661-senate-intelligence-assessment-russia/

On this Fourth of July, how can anyone be a Proud American?

[Jul 09, 2018] Alt-media websites that you probably can mostly trust

Jul 09, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

SomeGuy , Jul 8, 2018 2:43:11 PM | 1

Hello, everyone.

In the July 07, 2018 edition of Moon of Alabama, I asked everyone for links and alt-media websites to go to. The way I did it seemed to be disruptive, given the reactions that I got. I wanted to apologize for that. I simply wanted to learn more about alt-media websites, not to troll, but I could have done it in a better way.

Anyway, let's share some alt-media websites that we know of.

http://www.wsws.org

https://thefreethoughtproject.com

https://www.globalresearch.ca

https://consortiumnews.com

https://www.youtube.com/user/corbettreport/videos?disable_polymer=1

Got a host of leftwing websites and rightwing websites and alt-media websites that I don't think are either leftwing or rightwing, so if you want anymore, just ask me.

Anyway, please, if you've got any alt-media websites you'd like to share, I think that the Open Thread is the best place to do it. I'm always on the look-out for any alt-media websites, so if you've got any, please tell me. The reason why I ask is because it's going to get harder and harder to find these websites, I think. So with that in mind, I'd like to learn more about what's out there in terms of the alt-media.

You got any alt-media websites to share, please do.

And thanks to anyone that have already shared what they knew in yesterday's thread.

Glad to be here by the way. I've known about Moon of Alabama for some time and I've decided to drop into the comments. I didn't really keep track of all the links that you guys posted, but I will now. Thank you.

[Jul 08, 2018] NBC Hires News Faker

Jul 08, 2018 | www.g2mil.com

Jul 4, 2018

In my last post, I mentioned the fake news that suddenly appeared to undermine President Trump's peace effort with North Korea. I now learn the sole source of this "news" is Ken Dilanian, the former national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He was fired for having a "collaborative relationship" with the CIA . Ken Dilanian was publicly fired from a major newspaper for inventing fake news in collaboration with the CIA, yet was hired by NBC News! Now NBC allows him to write national security articles citing unnamed intelligence sources! The worst part is that dozens of other corporate news organizations cite his NBC stories. If they insist on repeating fake news, they should print this disclaimer at the beginning of his articles:

Warning: This writer was fired by the Los Angeles Times for producing fake news in secret cooperation with the CIA.

[Jul 06, 2018] It used to be that the only things one could be certain of were "death taxes." Now of course we must add to that list the very dependable presence of CIA / State Dept lies parroted by MSM all over the West.

Jul 06, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Gary Weglarz , July 5, 2018 at 1:01 pm

It used to be that the only things one could depend on were "death & taxes." Now of course we must add to that list the very dependable presence of CIA / State Dept lies parroted by MSM all over the West. Lies which are endlessly repeated in defiance of all physical reality and often in direct opposition to actual events in the actual world we live in.

From the Ukraine coup, to Russia-gate, to the "Assad's gassing his own people" regime change propaganda, to the totally surreal Alice in Wonderland Skripnal poisoning nonsense in the U.K, the Western MSM have been as dependable as the rising sun.

They can and do provide fact-free, evidence-free reporting directly from the bowels of the deep state in support of the neocolonial West, including unending support for the never ending resort to mass violence the West relies upon to keep the rest of the planet subjugated -- just as it has for the last 500+ years.

[Jul 06, 2018] Unfortunately, probably due to 'American Exceptionalism', most Americans think the MSM is bringing them 'the truth'. But nothing could be further from The Truth

Jul 06, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

irina , July 5, 2018 at 2:06 pm

It's not just the media. The late night talk show hosts are doing their bit too, as I heard last night on a Jimmy Kimmel rerun (of a recent show). Can't remember the context as I was doing the dishes, but did hear him say the usual "Russian illegally annexed Crimea" standard phrase, immediately followed by "and then invaded Ukraine". The latter just casually tossed off as a given. People hear these memes constantly repeated and, regardless of their veracity (suspect to say the least) it becomes part of their worldview.

Who is behind the political preaching of hosts like Jimmy Kimmel ? Inquiring minds want to know !

Joe Tedesky , July 5, 2018 at 2:43 pm

You know what irina, seeing these late night talk shows go all crazy over Putin makes me think of the Zio-Media executives, and where their allegiance to power resides. Joe

Gary Weglarz , July 5, 2018 at 6:28 pm

irina -- I quite agree. The same is true of the former Daily Show crew members who now have their own shows. Several have shown themselves to be quite the little imperialist war mongers when it comes to gleefully repeating the CIA sponsored Syrian regime change and Russiagate propaganda. Samantha Bee & John Oliver kept triggering my gag reflex with their propaganda lines until I found a simple but effective solution and stopped watching them altogether. We have an amazingly seamless propaganda system here in the U.S. One can chose to either get one's "pro-war regime change propaganda" delivered with barely concealed racism and misogyny from Fox News, or instead opt for hearing the same nonsense delivered with pretentious blather and catchy jazz interludes at PBS. American democracy is all about having "choices."

Jeff Harrison , July 5, 2018 at 7:57 pm

I quite agree. I knew the minute that they started calling RT a propaganda outlet that, in fact, the USG was running a full scale propaganda operation. I don't know if I simply wasn't paying enough attention or if they have, in fact ramped the operation up, but I can hardly read any MSM outlet's output without calling bullshit on it.

irina , July 6, 2018 at 2:55 am

Jimmy Kimmel actually used to be funny and there is a really good clip (somewhere on youtube no doubt) of him reading a 'doctored' Dr. Seuss
book to The Donald (a live guest) during his primary candidacy.

But since The Donald's election Kimmel has opened almost every show with 'ten minutes hate' segment on The Donald. I still watch (or at least listen) occasionally because I want to know what is being fed to The Public.

You are absolutely right though, "we have an amazingly seamless propaganda system here in the US". The average person maybe has 30 minutes to devote to the news, between getting home and having dinner; they watch some sort of news show and think they are 'informed'. But it actually takes MANY hours and a knowledge of alternative websites to even begin to piece together an approximation of what might, in reality, be going on.

The Russians used to say that, at least they knew they were being propagandized.

Unfortunately, probably due to 'American Exceptionalism', most Americans think the MSM is bringing them 'the truth'. But nothing could be further from The Truth.

[Jul 06, 2018] Geopolitical geo-economic challenges that the US West faces compels even good old-fashioned Anglo-Imperialists to say nasty things about Russia.

Notable quotes:
"... "Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power." ..."
"... Wolfowitz's document was leaked before release, and its bald-faced call for Imperial conquest caused enough of a noise that it was hastily rewritten before its official release a month later. ..."
Jul 06, 2018 | www.unz.com

Erebus , June 15, 2018 at 9:26 am GMT

The personal viciousness of the Neocons' attacks on Putin and Russia may have something to do with ancient memories (however false they may be), but the geopolitical & geo-economic challenges that the US & West faces compels even good old-fashioned Anglo-Imperialists to say nasty things about Russia.

Since Putin came to power, Russia has been working the Plan. Its strategic objectives are to rejuvenate and consolidate the "Russian World" in Mackinder's Heartland, and from there to leverage its enormous geographical size & natural resource base to become the central power on the Eurasian continent. It's unique position culturally and geographically allows it to aspire to being the Grand Arbiter of Eurasian affairs, the only nation able to link the two ends of the continent geographically, economically and culturally.

When Wolfowitz wrote his now infamous words

"Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power."

he was channelling Mackinder who said

who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
who rules the World-Island commands the world.

Wolfowitz's document was leaked before release, and its bald-faced call for Imperial conquest caused enough of a noise that it was hastily rewritten before its official release a month later.

The manner of the Wolfowitz Doctrine's emergence was a harbinger of the sort of half-assed attempt at empire the US embarked on. When it comes to Empire building, one is well advised to either Go Big, or Go Home. In the event, stretching its half-baked, incoherent doctrines to the breaking point, a series of inevitable fiascos followed and what we're seeing now is the last desperate attempts to keep its satraps onside by bamboozling their publics and making it difficult for clear sighted politicians to lead their countries away from the increasingly loud sucking sound coming out of Washington. As even that tactic is now failing, the US will soon face another Go Big, or Go Home moment.

DanFromCt , June 15, 2018 at 12:31 pm GMT
@Rurik

Exactly. "Elites" are doing it. They own Hollywood, too. Republicans like Trump, Ryan, Graham aren't groveling before organized Int'l Jewry when they take orders from "billionaires," not at all. It's Chamber of Commerce nerds they secretly answer to, you see, not Int'l Jewry's Wall Street and Fed, whose business is tricking a profit from honest American labor wherever it's found, while (apparently for laughs) calling this extortion the efficient allocation of scarce financial resources. It's all so farcically obvious at this point yet Conservatism Inc is telling us it's all MAGA magic. Have to love this new face of Conservatism Inc, too -- a fruitcake whose sexuality derives from an obsession with male defecation to the extent his kind ingest feces and genital excreta and call it luv. Nonetheless, the CUFIs will be sending their sons to die and lose their limbs to turn the ME into one big Tel Aviv and in the process leave poor Moloch seeming like Mickey Mouse in comparison.

Andrei Martyanov , Website June 15, 2018 at 3:22 pm GMT
@Erebus

the US will soon face another Go Big, or Go Home moment.

US doesn't have resources anymore of "going big". It is not realistically an option, unless one wants to start a global war. But I in general agree with your thesis.

EliteCommInc. , June 15, 2018 at 3:30 pm GMT
@anonymous

laughing -- you forgot russian gangs, italian gangs, irish gangs, polish gangs, corrupt law enforcement, etc, etc . . . .

I don't have any unique beef with Russia. I think is it is great that they no longer outlaw acknowledging that god exists.

AriusArmenian , June 15, 2018 at 3:57 pm GMT
Many liberals and progressives walked straight into a Russophobia trap initiated by the CIA.

And there they remain.

Andrei Martyanov , Website June 15, 2018 at 5:04 pm GMT
@Rurik

Yes, Stalin was not Jewish, but what would you say was the Jewish role (if any) with the Bolshevik revolution (and the Holodomor and the rest of the horrors visited upon Russia and beyond, -as described by Solzhenitsyn- by Jewish finance, intrigue, treachery and genocidal villainy)?

Look first at the list of first Sovnarkom, for starters. Jewish finance and interests were important but only, again, as part of the puzzle. I do not consider Solzhenitsyn a good writer, even less a competent Russia historian, not to mention him being a complete amateur in any affairs pertaining defining military and political factors which led to two Russian Revolutions (in fact, three, once 1905 is considered). So, I am not interested in discussing the work of falsifiers.

Rurik , June 15, 2018 at 5:15 pm GMT
@Andrei Martyanov

Look first at the list of first Sovnarkom, for starters.

Anonymous [144] Disclaimer , June 15, 2018 at 6:01 pm GMT
@Andrei Martyanov

You didn't answer his question:

If the ECB, (an extension of Rothschild's Fed) were in the hands of Gentiles, do you think Europe would be committing ethnic suicide?

The ongoing White Goyim Genocide project is proof positive that the Tribe is holding the reigns. Our own gentile "elites" are getting played into this suicide just like everyone else. Only the lies differ. They don't know that their seat of "power" is at the kiddie table and that it has an expiration date.

Rurik , June 15, 2018 at 6:24 pm GMT
@Andrei Martyanov

Russia's history is a bit more complex than some Manichean struggle between evil Jews and noble Russian Orthodox Christians.

obviously

In fact, it is infinitely more complex.

I've delved a bit into it. Read some books and such. But my education is always incomplete, and I'm an eternal student.

But if you want to view it as one unstoppable Jewish juggernaut against Christ-loving Russians, who am I to suggest to you otherwise.

naw, that's not how I see it.

The reason I bring up Jews is because I see them as often times bad actors that are causing dire problems right now, today, in this world. And menacing things I value, like peace, when peace is practicable.

When you talk about the infinite complexity of Russia's history, so too is that history tied to her neighbors, and Ukraine's history as well. (I suspect you know where I'm going with this ; )

So what some very clever and sinister people might do, is use that history and certain fault lines in the Russian and Ukrainian narratives, to foist strife and death and misery and war. You see?

Now you may say that Poroshenko is not a Jew, and as far as I know, that's right, (or not, I don't really know or care), but what I do know, and do care about, is the way neocon Jews (and goyim stooges) in my country have cynically used those historic fault lines to foment strife and war.

The way I see contemporary Russian history is one that following the collapse of the SU, Russia was looted during Yeltin's drunken reign by Rothschild agents known as the "Russian" oligarchs, (a few of which seem to have been actual ethnic Russians), and from there how Putin heroically wrested the destiny of Russia from these bad actors.

Then it was on to a bright future, except then Putin grew alarmed by what he saw happening to Libya, to be followed by Syria and what was it Gen. Clark said.., seven other countries?

So he put the kibosh in Syria's destabilization, and by doing so, earned the wrath of the Zionists.

Whereupon neocon Jews like Nuland installed Jews like Yatz in a coup that here in the ZUS they called "democracy".

The reason ((they)) did that, was to stick a pointed stick into the Russian bear, for defying ((their)) agenda in the greater Levant.

That's why they blamed Putin for MH17.

That's (probably) why they lowered the price of oil, to harm Putin (and Venezuela and others)

That's why our media are 24/7, 365 screeching that PUTIN IS HITLER!!!

Because, as far as I can tell, it is Putin that is the only resistance to whatever Bibi wants.

Because what I can tell you, is that Russia or no Russia, Bibi gets what ever he wants from "our" fecal government, always.

And so because of this dire paradigm, I do sometimes mention that it is Jewish supremacists that are foisting these wars. And causing great strife between Russia and the rest of the world.

I don't fulminate about Jewish supremacists because they stole my twinkle, no.

I talk about Zionist intrigue because that is exactly why the world is demanding that Putin return Crimea. And pay for the deaths on MH17, and why thousands have died in Donbas, etc..

These things didn't happen in a vacuum. There are actors involved, and geopolitics, and Machiavellian intrigues and machinations that should be exposed IMHO.

Andrei Martyanov , Website June 15, 2018 at 6:29 pm GMT
@Anonymous

You didn't answer his question:

If the ECB, (an extension of Rothschild's Fed) were in the hands of Gentiles, do you think Europe would be committing ethnic suicide?

Western Liberalism doesn't have Jewish roots, unless one wants to associate capitalism with Jews only, which is not the case. This liberalism is flesh and blood of the Enlightenment and Europe's current problems have roots in this liberalism, together with the post-WW II cultural shock. It is also rooted in the United States emerging from this war unscathed. So, no it is not just the tribe, it is the whole clockwork of Western Civilization and its leader, the United States, which drives it into the gutter. Jews here are just for the ride and chutzpa–US and Jews were created for each-other. "Rothschild's Fed" in this case but one of many institutions which was created to enrich a rather substantial (to put it mildly) American strata of radically not-Jewish waspies who are now trying to find any justification (and excuses) for them screwing their own country into the increasingly grim future. Per tribe, ask yourself a question WHO owns this site and who allows, including very many openly mental people, to freely and openly express their opinions? Is Ron Unz, who is a real cultural American asset (even though I do not always agree with him) a tribe or not? Guess who is the most vocal and courageous fighter against anti-Russian madness in US? Professor Stephen Cohen, is he a tribe?

Here is a great British historian for ya:

"This swift decline in British vigor at home and the failure to exploit the empire were not owing to some inevitable senescent process of history .That cause was a political doctrine .The doctrine was liberalism, which criticized and finally demolished the traditional conception of the nation-state as a collective organism, a community, and asserted instead the primacy of individual. According to liberal thinking a nation was no more than so many human atoms who happened to live under the same set of laws .It was Adam Smith who formulated the doctrine of Free Trade, the keystone of liberalism, which was to exercise a long-live and baneful effect on British power .Adam Smith attacked the traditional "mercantilist" belief that a nation should be generally self-supporting "

"The Collapse Of British Power", Correlli Barnett. William Morrow & Company, Inc. New York, 1972. Page 91.

Now ask yourself a question–IS the United States a nation-state?

Andrei Martyanov , Website June 15, 2018 at 11:15 pm GMT
@Rurik

The liberalism of the Enlightenment meant that we should all use our rationality to question the dogmas (and the leaders) of the day, and put them to the test of reason. That's why it's also known as the Age of Reason.

You obviously intent on ignoring economics of the issue and transition from one mode of production to another. It was this thing which predetermined all others. I do have 1929 (IIRC) version of Paine's Age of Reason.

Erebus , June 16, 2018 at 2:25 am GMT
@Andrei Martyanov

US doesn't have resources anymore of "going big". It is not realistically an option

I know, and should probably have made it clearer that when faced with that decision, the US will have to go home. The top levels of the USM pyramid know well the limits of the box they've gotten themselves into. They've built the wrong force structure for the world as it is and will be.

Madeleine Albright's famous question to Gen. Powell 'What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?' can now be re-worded to ask "What's the point of having this enormous military edifice and expenditure if it isn't superb, or even effective?" The answer is that there is no point. Much of it can be jettisoned without affecting the US' real strategic situation, and almost all of it if its mandate were to be shrunk to defence of its homeland and close allies.

The recent 6hr meeting in Finland between Gerasimov and Dunford, is (I believe) likely to have dealt with some of the parameters governing the USM's "going home". I can't even imagine how they're gonna do this in an organized way, but it's in everybody's interest that it happens as smoothly as possible. That those two seem to have built a professional rapport and even understanding is heartening.

Andrei Martyanov , Website June 16, 2018 at 4:00 am GMT
@Erebus

The recent 6hr meeting in Finland between Gerasimov and Dunford, is (I believe) likely to have dealt with some of the parameters governing the USM's "going home"

Most likely, at least Dunford, unlike most of US establishment is professional. Look up Rostislav Ishenko's latest excellent piece yesterday:

http://actualcomment.ru/tak-nachinayutsya-voyny-1806150926.html

Google translate should help.

Meanwhile, Russia since March 31 this year got rid off 50% of her US treasuries–today's news.

https://ria.ru/economy/20180616/1522835784.html

AnonFromTN , June 16, 2018 at 3:59 pm GMT
@Sergey Krieger

Frankly, I always read Rostislav Ischenko with interest. After all, he worked for the Ukrainian government, including Ukrainian Foreign Affairs ministry, until 2014, when it became abundantly clear that project "Ukraine" is an abject failure. He has a lot of inside knowledge, although he sometimes predicts as imminent things that happen a year or two after his predictions. But in most things he tends to be right.

RICHARD BRAVERMAN , June 17, 2018 at 2:13 am GMT
jumping the shark ...revealing files on the Tsarnaev brothers (Boston bombing) were not received .. For all your research can you not see a false flag, i.e. manufactured event for public consumption confused see Operation Gladio

[Jul 05, 2018] Britain's Most Censored Stories (Non-Military)

Highly recommended!
Jul 01, 2018 | truepublica.org.uk

TruePublica

In this article, we have attempted to identify the most censored stories of modern times in Britain. We have asked the opinions of one of the most famous and celebrated journalists and documentary film-makers of our time, a high-profile former Mi5 intelligence officer, an investigative journalist with one of the most well-known climate-change organisations, a veteran journalist of the Iraq war, an ex-army officer, along with the head of one of the worlds largest charities working against injustice.

One comment from our eclectic group of experts said; "the UK has the most legally protected and least accountable intelligence agencies in the western world so even in just that field competition is fierce, let alone all the other cover-ups."

So true have we found this statement to be that we've had to split this article into two categories – military and non-military, with a view that we may well categorise surveillance and privacy on its own another time.

Without further ado – here are the most non-military censored stories in Britain since the 1980s, in no particular order. Do bear in mind that for those with inquisitive minds, some of these stories you will have read something about somewhere – but to the majority of citizens, these stories will read like conspiracy theories.

Consequences of American corporate influence over British welfare reforms

The demolition of the welfare state was first suggested in 1982 by the Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Using neoliberal politics, every UK government since 1982 has covertly worked towards that goal. It is also the political thinking used as justification for the welfare reforms of the New Labour government, which introduced the use of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) for all out-of-work disability benefit claimants. Neoliberal politics also justified additional austerity measures introduced by the Coalition government since 2010, and the Conservative government(s) since 2015, which were destined to cause preventable harm when disregarding the human consequences. Much of this is known and in the public domain.

However, what is less known is a story the government have tried very hard to gag . The American healthcare insurance system of disability denial was adopted, as was the involvement of a US healthcare company to distance the government from the preventable harm created by its use. The private sector was introduced on a wide scale in many areas of welfare and social policy as New Labour adopted American social and labour market policies – and the gravity of its effects cannot be understated.

The result? In one 11 month study 10,600 deaths were attributed to the government disability denial system of screening, with 2,200 people dying before the ESA assessment was even completed. Between May 2010 and February 2014, an astonishing total of 40,680 people died within 12 months of going through a government Work Capability Assessment. The government department responsible has since refused to publish updated mortality totals.

This political and social scandal has been censored, with the author of THIS truly damning report in trouble with the government for publishing it.

Climate Change, what a British oil giant knew all along

For decades, tobacco companies buried evidence that smoking was deadly, the same goes for the fossil fuel industry. As early as 1981, big oil company Shell was aware of the causes and catastrophic dangers of climate change. In the 1980s it was acknowledging with its own research that anthropogenic global warming was a fact. Then, as the scientific consensus became more and more clear, it started introducing doubt and giving weight to a "significant minority" of "alternative viewpoints" as the full implications for the company's business model became clear.

By the mid-90s, the company started talking about "distinguished scientists" that cast aspersions of the seriousness of climate change. THIS REPORT provides proof of Shell's documentation including emails of what they knew and what they were hiding from the public domain. One document in 1988 confirms that: "By the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even stabilise the situation."

It was not until 2007 that scientific research eventually took a grip of the problem and proved what was known all along. However, as Shell did say – it's probably too late to take effective countermeasures now anyway. There is still persistent quoting of climate science deniers by the fossil fuel industries.

Government Surveillance

In 2016, the UK was identified as the most extreme surveillance state in the Western world. However, legislation really only came about to legalise its use because of the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013. Prior to that, the British government had created a secret 360-degree mass surveillance architecture that no-one, including most members of parliament, knew anything about. And much of it has since been deemed illegal by the highest courts in both Britain and the European Union.

From operation Optic Nerve which took millions of sexually explicit images of an unknowing public through their devices to a hacking operation called Gemalto – where GCHQ stole the keys to a global encryption system with 700 million subscribers. The unaccountable spymasters of the UK have undertaken breathtaking operations of illegality with absolute impunity.

Some other programmes included; Three Smurfs – an operation to turn on any mobile device so it could listen to or activate the camera covertly on mobile phones. XKeyScore was basically a Google search engine for spies to find any data about anyone. Upstream and Tempora hacked into the worlds main cable highway, intercepting everything and anything globally with a leaked presentation slide from GCHQ on this programme expressly stating they were intent on "Mastering the Internet". Royal Concierge identified diplomatic hotel reservations so GCHQ could organise a surveillance operation against dignitaries either domestic or foreign, in advance.

In truth, Britain is classed as an endemic surveillance state and right now, we only know what has been uncovered by whistleblowers. This is why people like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and others are nothing less than political prisoners of Western governments. They don't want you to know what they know about you. They also don't want you to know about them, which is why the architecture is there in the first place. It is not for catching terrorists because if it was the courts would not deem these surveillance systems as illegal.

Evidence-Based Medical Studies

Over the last few years, medical professionals have come forward to share a truth that, for many people, proves difficult to swallow. One such authority is Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet – considered to be one of the most well respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world.

Dr. Horton recently released a statement declaring that a lot of published medical research is in fact unreliable at best , if not completely false.

"The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness."

Across the pond, Dr Marcia Angell , a physician and longtime Editor-in-Chief of the New England Medical Journal (NEMJ), which is also considered another one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals in the world, makes her view of the subject quite plain:

"It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine".

Many newspapers in Britain take the opportunity to indulge in some shameless click baiting and report completely false stories simply to gain visitor numbers onto their website – as in this example by the Mail Online HERE or HERE.

The Skripal poisoning and Pablo Millar

D-notice's (Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice) are used by the British state to censor the publication of potentially damaging news stories. They are issued to the mainstream media to withhold publication of damaging information. One such case was the widespread use of D-notices regarding the British ex-spy deeply involved in the Skripal/Novichok poisoning case in Salisbury.

(Here are the official D-Notices to the Skripal Affair )

Mainstream journalists, the press and broadcast media were issued with D-notices in respect of a former British intelligence officer called Pablo Miller. Miller was an associate of Christopher Steele, first in espionage operations in Russia and more recently in the activities of Steele's private intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence .

Steele was responsible for compiling the Trump–Russia dossier, comprising 17 memos written in 2016 alleging misconduct and conspiracy between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the Putin administration. The dossier paid for by the Democratic Party, claimed that Trump was compromised by evidence of his sexual proclivities (golden shower anyone?) in Russia's possession. Steele was the subject of an earlier D-notice, which unsuccessfully attempted to keep his identity as the author of the dossier a secret.

Millar is reported to be Skripal's handler in Salisbury and if Miller and by extension, Skripal himself were involved in Orbis' work on the highly-suspect Steele-Trump dossier, which is thought to be the case (for all sorts of reasons – including these D-notices) alongside representatives of British and possibly US intelligence, then the motivations for the attempted assassination on the ex-Russian double agent was very wide at best. As it turned out, blame could not be pinned on Russia's intelligence service, the FSB, no matter how hard the government tried. This particular part of the Skripal poisoning story remains buried by the mainstream media.

The City of London – A global crime scene

For over a hundred years the Labour party tried in vain to abolish the City of London and its accompanying financial corruption. In 1917, Labour's new rising star Herbert Morrison, the grandfather of Peter Mandelson made a stand and failed, calling it the "devilry of modern finance." And although attempt after attempt was made throughout the following decades, it was Margaret Thatcher who succeeded by abolishing its opponent, the Greater London Council in 1986.

Tony Blair went about it another way and offered to reform the City of London in what turned out to be a gift from God. He effectively gave the vote to corporations which swayed the balance of democratic power away from residents and workers. It was received by its opponents as the greatest retrograde step since the peace treaty of 1215, Magna Carta. The City won its rights through debt financing in 1067, when William the Conqueror acceded to it and ever since governments have allowed the continuation of its ancient rights above all others.

The consequence? It now stands as money launderer of the world , the capital of global crime scene with Britain referred to by the global criminal fraternity to be the most corrupt country in the world.

A 'watchman' sits at the high table of parliament and is its official lobbyist sitting in the seat of power right next to the Speaker of the House who is "charged with ensuring that its established rights are safeguarded." The job is to seek out political dissent that might arise against the City.

The City of London has its own private funding and will 'buy-off' any attempt to erode its powers – any scrutiny of its financial affairs are put beyond external inspection or audit. It has it's own police force – and laws. Its dark and shadowy client list includes; terrorists, drug barons, arms dealers, despots, dictators, shady politicians, corporations, millionaires and billionaires – most with something to hide. The shocking Panama Papers, Paradise Papers and Lux Leaks barely scratching the surface even with their almost unbelievable revelations of criminality.

Keith Bristow Director-General of the UK's National Crime Agency said in June 2015 that the sheer scale of crime and its subsequent money laundering operations was "a serious strategic threat to Britain." And whilst much of this activity is indeed published – the scale of it is not. It is now believed by many investigative journalists that the City of London is managing "trillions in ill-gotten gains" – not billions as we have all been told.

State propaganda – manipulating minds, controlling the internet

Reading this you would think this was the stuff of a conspiracy theory – sadly, it's not. The government, through its spying agent GCHQ developed its own set of software tools to infiltrate the internet to shape what people see, hear and read, with the ability to rig online polls and psychologically manipulate people on social media. This was what Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept confirmed through the Snowden files in 2014. It was not about surveillance but about manipulating public opinion in ever more Orwellian ways.

These 'tools' now constitute some of the most startling methods of propaganda delivery systems and internet deception programmes known to mankind. What the Snowden files show are that the government can change the outcome of online polls (codenamed Underpass), send mass delivery of emails or SMS messages (Warpath) at will, disrupt video-based websites (Silverlord) and have tools to permanently disable PC accounts. They can amplify a given message to push a chosen narrative (GESTATOR), increase traffic to any given website" (GATEWAY) and have the ability to inflate page views on websites (SLIPSTREAM). They can crash any website (PREDATORS FACE), reduce page views and distort public responses, spoof any email account and telephone calls they like. Visitors to WikiLeaks are tracked and monitored as if an inquiring mind is now against the law.

Don't forget, the government has asked no-one for permission to do any of this and none of this has been debated in parliament where representative democracy is supposed to be taking place. There is no protective legislation for the general public and no-one is talking about or debating these illegal programmes that taxpayers have been given no choice to fund – costing billions. This is government sponsored fake news and public manipulation programmes on a monumental scale.

Chris Huhne, a former cabinet minister and member of the national security council until 2012 said – "when it comes to the secret world of GCHQ, the depth of my 'privileged information' has been dwarfed by the information provided by Edward Snowden to The Guardian."

The Guardian's offices were then visited by MI5 and the Snowden files were ordered to be destroyed under threats that if they didn't, it would be closed down – a sign of British heavy-handedness reminiscent of the East-German Stasi.

Censorship – Spycatcher

'Spycatcher' was a truly candid autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer published in 1987. Written by Peter Wright, a former MI5 officer, it was published first in Australia after being banned by the British government in 1985. Its allegations proved too much for the authorities to allow it to be in the public domain.

In an interesting twist of irony, the UK government attempted to halt the book's Australian publication. Malcolm Turnbull, current Prime Minister of Australia, was a lawyer at the time and represented the publisher that defeated the British government's suppression orders against Spycatcher in Australia in September 1987, and again on appeal in June 1988. This is the same man that refuses to assist Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, from his hellhole existence in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

The book details plans of the MI6 plot to assassinate Egyptian President Nasser during the Suez Crisis; of joint MI5-CIA plotting against British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and of MI5's eavesdropping on high-level Commonwealth conferences. Wright also highlights the methods and ethics of the spying business.

Newspapers printed in England, attempting proper reportage of Spycatcher's principal allegations were served gag orders. If they continued, they were tried for contempt of court. However, the book proved so popular many copies were smuggled into England. In 1987, the Law Lords again barred reportage of Wright's allegations or sale of books.

The ruling was then overturned, but Wright was barred from receiving royalties from the sale of the book in the United Kingdom. In November 1991, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the British government had breached the European Convention of Human Rights in gagging its own newspapers. The book has sold more than two million copies. In 1995, Wright died a millionaire from proceeds of his book.

Censorship – The Internet

To the inquisitive and knowledgeable, censorship of the internet by the British government is not news. In addition, there have been many reports, especially from independent outlets complaining about search engines and social media platforms censoring oppositional and dissenting voices.

Already described earlier in this article is the involvement of the authorities in strategies to manipulate public opinion and disseminate false narratives in their aims for control of the internet itself.

A few months ago, the government changed the law to block online content deemed as either pornographic or of an extremist nature to protect those under 16 years of age. It was anticipated that approximately 50 websites would be banned altogether. What subsequently happened was that thousands of websites disappeared from the internet with no court orders, injunctions, notices or justification. Even finding out which websites are on that list is a secret.

Over time, like many pieces of legislation that has been abused by the state, websites and online content that the government of the day does not like will have the perfect tool to simply press the 'delete' button, pretty much as they have already started doing.

On another, but related matter, just last week, The Independent had the headline: " Today's vote will change the face of the internet forever, from an open platform to a place where anything can be removed without warning ." The articles first line reads; "The idea of instituting a regime of petty everyday censorship, that randomly and unfairly damages campaigns, artists and the denizens of the Internet, ought to fill you with rage." This is how the state slowly takes control of what you read, see and hear.

In the meantime, Britain's current Prime Minister has refused to rule out censoring the internet like China in future.

Dark Money Taking Power

Soon after the Second World War, some of America's richest people began setting up a network of thinktanks to promote their interests. These purport to offer dispassionate opinions on public affairs. But they are more like corporate lobbyists, working on behalf of those who founded and fund them. These are the organisations now running much of the Trump administration . These same groups are now running much of Britain. Liam Fox and what was the Atlantic Bridge and the Adam Smith Institute are good examples.

They have control of the Conservative party and are largely responsible for years of work that steered Britain through the EU referendum that ended with Brexit. Tens of £millions have been spent, mostly undisclosed on making this dream to exploit Britain and its people a reality. In fact, almost everything in this article is about such organisations. Those hugely powerful individuals that own search engines and social media platforms along with the banking industry, the pharmaceutical and medical business, the fossil fuel and arms industries – they have reached a pinnacle of unprecedented corporate power.

Some of those fully censored stories pushed below the radar by these corporations include; how over 100,000 EU citizens die every year because of lobbying against workplace carcinogens, how corporate profits and taxes are hidden, the Tory-Trump plan to kill food safety with Brexit – to name but a few. And don't forget the corporate media who are complicit. There are a handful of offshore billionaires that have the ability to decide what millions should read or see.

The Adam Smith Institute referred to earlier is a good example. It is a mouthpiece for right-wing extreme neoliberal capitalists. With a turnover of over £130 million and an operating profit of nearly £17 million, it has received millions of pounds in UK government funding. That is taxpayers money being used against taxpayers because the ASI does not believe in the likes of the NHS or civil society in general.

Talking of Dark Money – Brexit and the climate deniers

We recently reported about a transatlantic network of lobbyists pushing against action on climate change and (latterly) for Brexit? This group are all based out of one building around the corner from the Palace of Westminster.

The network is funded by shadowy elites in the UK and US and lobbies for rampant market deregulation while pushing the myth that climate change is a hoax.

What is much less known is that more recently, these groups have lobbied for a Hard Brexit , hoping the UK's withdrawal from the EU will lead to a weakening of those environmental regulations that hinder future profits. These same groups are also behind the Tory-DUP pact , currently keeping Theresa May in her job while allowing hard-line Northern Irish social conservatives to dictate significant parts of the UK's political agenda, themselves climate change deniers. These are just some of Britain's most censored stories. There are so many of them that we have had to categorise them, which says something about how democracy, free speech, civil liberty and human rights are performing in Britain right now. truepublica.org.uk

[Jul 05, 2018] Ms. May is a poodle for the UK's intelligence agencies i.e. MI5 and MI6. The swift movement of her to get on board with the totally discredited blaming of Novichok and Putin/Russia for the nerve agent attack on the Skripals means she is very evil

Notable quotes:
"... she's following the lead of the UK's evil intelligence agencies which are waging a psychological and economic war on Russia and Putin just because the oligarchs in the West don't like Putin doing good things for Russia. ..."
Jul 05, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Deniz , July 4, 2018 at 5:07 pm

On behalf of this side of the pond, I would like to formally apoligize for calling Mr. Blair, Mr. Bush's poodle. I am also certain that Ms. Skripal, sorry Ms. May, with her fiery independence, is nobody's poodle either.

Tom , July 5, 2018 at 5:42 am

R U kidding me? Ms. May is a poodle for the UK's intelligence agencies i.e. MI5 and MI6. The swift movement of her to get on board with the totally discredited blaming of Novichok and Putin/Russia for the nerve agent attack on the Skripals means she is very evil -- she's following the lead of the UK's evil intelligence agencies which are waging a psychological and economic war on Russia and Putin just because the oligarchs in the West don't like Putin doing good things for Russia.

[Jul 04, 2018] The former empire known as Great Britain, was struck again by bad luck: Novichok jumped on another couple

Notable quotes:
"... Novichok , the magic Russian military nerve agent jumped on another couple after it stayed low-key for weeks, in order to recover from the humiliation of being unable to kill the Skripals, in spite of being "the most powerful and deadly military agent". ..."
"... I May be wrong regarding this theory, but it is highly unlikely. ..."
Jul 04, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

veritas semper vincit , Jul 4, 2018 7:16:47 PM | 43

The former empire known as Great Britain, was struck again by bad luck:

Novichok , the magic Russian military nerve agent jumped on another couple after it stayed low-key for weeks, in order to recover from the humiliation of being unable to kill the Skripals, in spite of being "the most powerful and deadly military agent".

Britain lost the Empire's colonies, its greatness (even if this was built on murder and theft) , its economic power, and now has lost its mind and its shame .

Britain is currently a pedophile island, full of third world immigrants and given refuge to all the dictators, criminals, crooks and terrorists in the world. It is laundering money through its City of London, and this is the only thing keeping that island afloat. It's a huge latrine with a Crown on top, as I like to describe it.

Now the Russians are randomly "poisoning" ordinary British subjects, because this is what Brits are. The British government and media immediately knew it was Novichok and the Russians were behind it. Maybe even Mr. Putin found time to do this.

The Russian team just qualified in the FIFA World Cup quarters ; like Britain did after beating Columbia. Mr. Putin is practicing on poor Brits. If the Russian team will meet the Brits in the finals, he may pull a Novichok on them and brazenly win this way, the finals.

I May be wrong regarding this theory, but it is highly unlikely.

flamingo , Jul 4, 2018 6:01:40 PM | 34
Mad cow disease again. Theresa being the lead mad cow.

[Jul 04, 2018] MoA - British Government Peddles Warmed Over Novichok Muck

Notable quotes:
"... Craig Murray pointed out that when actions are discussed or carried out, strategies laid out, Trident is never even mentioned. ..."
"... Britain is a failing Western Democracy just as the US is -- they are getting desperate and trying all kinds of stuff under the general heading of evil Russia. Britain is pathetic when you think about it hollow empty country with no vision or concern for anything but the elites. The entire Western democratic ideal has failed utterly, we live in a multi-polar world now the SCO is far more important than the G7 but May probably doesn't even know what it stands for. Without its association with the US and out of the EU the UK will be about as important as Uruguay or Nauru. ..."
"... I can only conclude the the Ruling Class in GB looks at its own public as completely dimwitted morons, as they apparently believe them willing to swallow this crap. ..."
"... It is just over a week since OPCW was given more powers. Put forward by Britain and backed by the usual coalition of the killing. Pulling another Skripal so soon after that is more than a bit sus. ..."
"... And the unknown substance is now Novichuk. But that 4 day lag, not to worry, 1 day ago the suspects were already identified tying in with the Skripals. The 2 Hitmen with close ties to Russia. ..."
"... Take it from me 90 percent of the British public are dim witted morons that's official from me! No exaggeration! Half just regurgitate what the tv / papers say with out question or thought. The other half have just switched off entirely. Tell them 8,000000 could die in Yemen. There eyes glaze over. ..."
"... Britain was never a democracy. It was masquerading as one in order to placate the unwashed masses. They're definitely in panic mode and whatever they do makes them look insane. ..."
"... I love Guerrero's concept that these stories are prepared more like Novellas... especially the implication that the script for the next episode is written after gauging reaction to the former episode. ..."
"... "I think the take home point is to not live near a chemical weapons lab." Methinks it may be worse than that: just don't live in Britain, these days. Says this sympathetic anglophile. ..."
"... The British can't seem to put the lid back on the vial btw was this the same one used by US Secr of State Colin Powell in 2003 at the UN Security Council before the invasion and occupation of Iraq? The Ayatollahs of Persia be forewarned! ..."
"... After researching everything I could find on Novichok, the only rational and logical conclusion one can draw is the Skripals and this latest couple should be dead. The sad part of this incident and the Skripal affair is how many people actually believe the government's claims. ..."
"... Imagine being Yulia Skripal at this moment. She had a job, a boyfriend, a dog and a home in Russia she may never be able to see again, because the UK government cannot allow her to return home and spill the beans on this sordid affair. If their is any justice in this world, every rational individual should be demanding "FREE Yulia"! ..."
"... I don't think this latest version of the novichok case helps the British case at all as it strongly suggests that there is something else out there killing people than a military grade nerve agent. ..."
"... As for the report in the Daily Telegraph "Salisbury couple are fresh victims of the Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal", I suspect that is pure bullshit. ..."
"... I've been wondering how The Swamp's inner circle are feeling about the likelihood that Trump and Putin will get along like a house (of cards) on fire. It looks as though the reptiles are more than just a little bit worried... ..."
"... The capacity of some people to believe these lies is seemingly limitless, otherwise they would not bother. Must be hundreds of people fall ill and require emergency treatment each day. Are the Russians to be suspects in each illness requiring workers to go into home wear Hazmat gear and shut down the neighborhood pending tests? ..."
Jul 04, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

British Government Peddles Warmed Over Novichok Muck

It seems that Theresa May felt a need to stoke some more Russia hate :

Just as the World Cup had forced the British media to grudgingly acknowledge the obvious truth that Russia is an extremely interesting country inhabited, like everywhere else, by mostly pleasant and attractive people, we have a screaming reprise of the "Salisbury incident" dominating the British media.

All British media outlets report of a middle-aged British couple, Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley, who fell seriously ill in Amesbury, a town near Salisbury and near the British chemical weapon site Proton Down. The couple were transported to the Salisbury hospital. They were first suspected to have taken drugs but the police now speaks (vid) of a "potential exposure to an unknown substance" and that they "remain in a critical condition".

The parallels to the poisoning of the British-Russian spy Sergej Skripal and his daughter four month ago are obvious. The government alleged they were poisoned by a nerve agent of the Novichok series. Like back in March the British government will soon name the evildoer of this new drama.

The most curious issue of the current case is that it happened Saturday morning and that since a lot of local police action took place. But news of the incident emerged only early today. None of the pieces I read explains the four day long lack of reporting. The British government obviously prohibited all news of the case until early today and now prohibits to explain the censoring.

Why?

A "friend of the couple", who has been together with them, was interviewed by several outlets:

Cont. reading: British Government Peddles Warmed Over Novichok Muck

Posted by b at 02:21 PM | Comments (47)


Michael , Jul 4, 2018 2:30:35 PM | 1

Applying Occam's Razor,I think the take home point is to not live near a chemical weapons lab, or you'll end up being one of the test rats.
daffyDuct , Jul 4, 2018 2:45:20 PM | 4
Here's a link to Newsnow's aggregator for the "major incident". FYI: Newsnow and Wikipedia are fighting the Copyright Directive of the European Parliament tomorrow (July 5th) - so get the news while you can...

http://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/?search=%22major+incident%22&lang=en&searchheadlines=1

Inquirer , Jul 4, 2018 2:46:43 PM | 5
Sam Hobson said: "His eyes were wide open and red, his pupils were like pinpricks." Yes, exposition to some toxic agents can make the pupils like pinpricks (and newspapers said that novichok has this effect), but this contraction is not so easy to note, because the pupil is not the whole iris and the iris doesn't contract.
daffyDuct , Jul 4, 2018 2:59:25 PM | 6
June 30:

"A police spokesman said: "At the moment it is not a police incident it is being led by the fire and the ambulance. It appears that there are three people who have taken drugs and had a medical incident. They have all been taken to hospital."

A cordon was put in place as a precaution but police say there is "no danger" to anyone else in the area.

A spokesman for South Western Ambulance Service later told the Journal that only one patient had been taken to Salisbury District Hospital.

http://www.salisburyjournal.co.uk/news/16325525.person-taken-to-hospital-after-incident-in-amesbury/

June 30th
---------

"An incident in the Kings Gate area of Amesbury on Saturday evening (June 30th) is thought to have been a drug-related medical episode.

...

One patient has been taken to Salisbury District Hospital by land ambulance.

They also tell us the response from the emergency services has been 'precautionary'.

Wiltshire Police have told us they are 'certain there's no risk to the public' following the drug-related incident."

https://www.spirefm.co.uk/news/local-news/2622250/incident-at-amesburys-archers-gate/

daffyDuct , Jul 4, 2018 2:59:25 PM | 6 Guerrero , Jul 4, 2018 3:03:00 PM | 7
Fascinating!
But what is it that really happened here?

Might it be useful to think in terms of the structuring of TV-novelas? Are such media content events designed for a similiar/identical purpose? Unlike a literary novel, a soap opera series can be produced without having an idea as to how artistic unity will be achieved with some universal meaning.

Are serial tear-jerker episodes the product of private storyboard conferences? Their requirements would be much simpler and less demanding than those of art. Each episode ends with the equivalent of a lewd embrace of an illicit couple viewed by an interested, emotionally involved third-party who happens to come in the door. (this point-of-view would be that of peeping-tom reflex of a mass-media consumer)

The camera is focusing mostly on skin, and a tear in the eye of the intruder, or else it is a glare of rage... An advantage to the commercial TV content producers is that they would be able to gauge reaction before publishing succeeding episodes.

Is it the story of some homeless recreational drug users who were accidently poisoned by a dose of novichalk that Putin intended for a spy sheltering in the British isles accidently deposited as spare-change into guitar-case of strung-out subway musician...

Babyl-on , Jul 4, 2018 3:13:52 PM | 8
Maybe it is the case that cops are trained to look at pupils and can easily determine their size. I could never do that and I doubt anyone who says so without being trained to do so, and eve then eyesight and lighting needs to be close to to ideal.

Britain must be desperate or they really believe they are pulling this off. They must be getting backing from factions in Washington, they must have unspoken permission for this. Britain doing its humble part in the Russia demonizing to support Trident spending.

Craig Murray pointed out that when actions are discussed or carried out, strategies laid out, Trident is never even mentioned.

Britain is a failing Western Democracy just as the US is -- they are getting desperate and trying all kinds of stuff under the general heading of evil Russia. Britain is pathetic when you think about it hollow empty country with no vision or concern for anything but the elites. The entire Western democratic ideal has failed utterly, we live in a multi-polar world now the SCO is far more important than the G7 but May probably doesn't even know what it stands for. Without its association with the US and out of the EU the UK will be about as important as Uruguay or Nauru.

GM , Jul 4, 2018 3:34:10 PM | 9
So, uhm. How does a door handle on Skripal's front door end up contaminating the area near the bar. Legit curious to see how they'll spin this to tie it all together now
SteLe/TheDarkCornerInUrBrain , Jul 4, 2018 3:59:07 PM | 12
Now that me being an ex-Junkie is out in the open here, i will provide some possible explanations:

-Contaiminated Class A drugs: Heroin sold on the street is maximum 10% heroin, and 90% various more or less toxic filler stuff. That may be strychnin (Which is used as rat poison, and fits the symptoms well expect for hallucinating, valium or related opiates, paracetamol, aspirin, or 1000 other chemicals the dealer has lying around.

-"Legal highs": in UK and in EU, those new synthetic drugs that are marketed as legal substitute for cannabis, XTC, cocaine etc. are quite popular, and they are highly dangerous because of their synthetic nature, and are known to cause severe health problems up to death. In prisons also in UK those are popular, because inmates can pass drug tests easily. This couple seems to have prison and hard drugs experience, and is therefore likely, to have known or used those substances.

Additionally, being homeless, drug users/addicts, they are likely to have trouble with police, and are an easy target for manipulation by intelligence operatives.

And why should evil Putin try to kill some UK Junkies? Even BBC will have a pretty hard time to spin this..

the pessimist , Jul 4, 2018 4:04:05 PM | 13
Hard to believe the Brits are going for a second bite of the poison apple. Bad TV drama released into the wild...
Brendan , Jul 4, 2018 4:20:14 PM | 14
They look a bit like the couple in the Salisbury CCTV recording who were originally identified as the Skripals.
Ort , Jul 4, 2018 4:22:43 PM | 15
Oh, goody! Now we can have another round of UK authorities spewing ominous ambiguities, full of Russia-blaming sound and fury, in the Gorgon PM and her rotten Tory government's ongoing desperate struggle to keep its depraved nose above water.

I can't wait for UK Village Idiot Laureate Boris Johnson to provide another definitive briefing.

Meanwhile, hmm... I suspect one of those lost, stolen, strayed, or liquidated Skripal pets might be the perpetrator here.

I certainly agree that this story is worth reporting as farce . At this stage, though, I hope people will resist that catnip-like intoxication of sifting through the allegations and factoids to speculate on what it's "really" all about.

I wish this latest afflicted pair well, though. And just to flout my own suggestion and engage in hypotheticals-- who knows, maybe next thing we know the UK government will pay top dollar pound to purchase the crime-scene house!

dan , Jul 4, 2018 4:49:16 PM | 16
The dude sounds like me, having a good time. Eyes rolling back, dilated pupils, hallucinating. Its my average party. Meanwhile, in England....
james , Jul 4, 2018 4:49:52 PM | 17
thanks b...

no one really believes the uk anymore... if this doesn't make them a laughing stock, nothing will..apparently people like bad re-runs and are happy to watch them.. this is the new 2018 version of coronation street i guess..

Piotr Berman , Jul 4, 2018 4:52:59 PM | 18
Today I was totally surprised. Headline in The Guardian: There is a cloud hanging over this World Cup and Fifa must not ignore it

An otherwise brilliant World Cup has been cheapened by the kind of histrionics witnessed in England's game with Colombia and they have become a cancer in the game

Imagine: nothing in the article refers to Russia! Additionally "otherwise brilliant World Cup".

Tom Welsh , Jul 4, 2018 4:56:17 PM | 19
"...near the British chemical weapon site Proton Down".

I think you mean Porton Down. Proton Down, as any fule kno, is the British government's high-energy physics lab.

vk , Jul 4, 2018 5:03:00 PM | 20
I still stick with the food poisoning hypothesis (that doctor's letter sealed the deal for me).

Both were near the restaurant the Skripals went right before they showed their symptoms. They were homeless people. The simplest explanation is that they ate the same poisoned batch in the garbage of the restaurant; or that the restaurant has an unreliable supplier, which gave them more than one poisoned batch, or the restaurant simply pushes its luck with spoiled food which, in seafood case, can result in some kind of toxins liberation (the practice of recycling expired and sometimes even rotten expensive ingredients is common in sofisticated restaurants).

In the case of the Skripals, the British government got lucky they were Russians, and seized the opportunity. I don't see how they're going to use this now, since both victims are British. Unless they want to declare war.

daffyDuct , Jul 4, 2018 5:03:08 PM | 21
He described taking Mr Rowley to collect a prescription from Boots in Amesbury and on to eat lunch at Amesbury Baptist Church fair, before returning to his friend's home in Muggleton Road.

Boots, the church and the green outside it are among several sides in the town and nearby Salisbury that have been cordoned off by police.

Mr Hobson said Mr Rowley started falling ill around four hours after Ms Sturgess was taken to hospital, while they were preparing clothes to take to her. "He felt ill and went for a shower. Then his eyes went bloodshot and like two pin pricks, he began garbling incoherently and I could tell he was hallucinating.

"He was making weird noises and acting like a zombie. It was a zombie-like state. He slumped against the wall."

Mr Hobson said he called an ambulance and that when paramedics arrived they initially believed the illness was drugs-related because of his friend's struggle with addiction.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/wiltshire-salisbury-amesbury-major-incident-victims-dawn-sturgess-charlie-rowley-latest-a8431376.html

dan , Jul 4, 2018 5:03:46 PM | 22
By the way, SteLe/TheDarkCornerInUrBrain @ 12,

There are a plethora of substances that have those effects. Novichock is not one. That just kills you, straight away. No passing out, no hallucinating, and definitely no park benches. Done. Finished. Dead. Even cyanide kills very quickly. Although Jim Jones might not agree. If anybody wanted to kill anybody else through poisoning, they could do it very easily. Ratex (strychnine), takes days, weeks to kill. Whoever adds that to their product would be killing their market anyway. Capitalism hasn't gone full circle yet...

Den Lille Abe , Jul 4, 2018 5:08:06 PM | 23
Yhis "poisoning" meme is not funny anymore, nor comical, that has worn off. It is in fact tragic. It is tragic that the lies are so stupid, thick and unbelievable, that the whole narrative is so crudely pieced together, that it make Pravda' 1970 articles look like Voltaire's writings.

I can only conclude the the Ruling Class in GB looks at its own public as completely dimwitted morons, as they apparently believe them willing to swallow this crap.

Peter AU 1 , Jul 4, 2018 5:18:28 PM | 24
It is just over a week since OPCW was given more powers. Put forward by Britain and backed by the usual coalition of the killing. Pulling another Skripal so soon after that is more than a bit sus.
Brian , Jul 4, 2018 5:19:39 PM | 25
Hi All,

First post here - the only blog worth the time and effort to contribute to in my opinion. Seems to me that as the UK and friends bought the OPCW last week, this incident has been strategically timed so that the OPCW can investigate the 'poisoning' and apportion blame to Russia just in time for the WC final, or am I being too cynical?

james , Jul 4, 2018 5:21:45 PM | 26
@ p24/25 peter / brian - no, i think one has to be especially cynical given where we are at presently...
Likklemore , Jul 4, 2018 5:23:28 PM | 27
Thanks b for catching the 4 days lag in timeline. Early morning, July 4th, British time, it was on the Daily Express as "Breaking News" as in just happening. And the unknown substance is now Novichuk. But that 4 day lag, not to worry, 1 day ago the suspects were already identified tying in with the Skripals. The 2 Hitmen with close ties to Russia.

UK Police Allege Two Hitmen 'With Close Ties to Russia' Involved in Skripals LINK

Britain and its allies continue to blame Moscow for being behind the March 2018 attack on former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter with what UK experts claim was the A234 nerve agent, although the accusations have not been substantiated. Russian authorities vehemently reject the allegations as groundless.

The Sun has cited sources in Scotland Yard as saying that "a two-man hit team with close ties to Russia" orchestrated the alleged poisoning of ex-Russian security agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the UK earlier this year.

Mark2 , Jul 4, 2018 5:31:41 PM | 28
Den Lille Abe @ 23

Take it from me 90 percent of the British public are dim witted morons that's official from me! No exaggeration! Half just regurgitate what the tv / papers say with out question or thought. The other half have just switched off entirely. Tell them 8,000000 could die in Yemen. There eyes glaze over.

Ian , Jul 4, 2018 5:31:55 PM | 29
Babyl-on @8:

Britain was never a democracy. It was masquerading as one in order to placate the unwashed masses. They're definitely in panic mode and whatever they do makes them look insane.

I find it amusing there is no mention on why China is not part of the G7/8. If you believe the official narrative that China's economy is the second largest in the World, then one would think China would have a seat at the table. I was half expecting Russia's seat to be given to China to create a wedge between China and Russia. But we all know why.

Daniel , Jul 4, 2018 5:45:36 PM | 30
James. How I wish nobody believed these fairy tales anymore.

I love Guerrero's concept that these stories are prepared more like Novellas... especially the implication that the script for the next episode is written after gauging reaction to the former episode.

One of the witnesses in the BBC article I read reported believing the gas leak story because electricity to the neighborhood had been cut off. Wonder what that's about?

Did y'all catch " False Flag Fail: How Syrian Civilians Derailed White Helmet 'Chemical' Stunt in Eastern Ghouta?"

wendy davis , Jul 4, 2018 5:56:29 PM | 33
ah, well...the verdict is in: 'Wiltshire pair poisoned by nerve agent novichok, say police; Substance deemed responsible for severe illness of Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley'

"Basu added: "I would add that the complex investigation into the attempted murders of Yulia and Sergei remains ongoing and detectives continue to sift through and assess all the available evidence and are following every possible lead to identify those responsible, for what remains a reckless and barbaric criminal act."

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/04/wiltshire-couple-poisoned-by-nerve-agent-police-announce-dawn-sturgess-charlie-rowley

oh, that evil putin!

flamingo , Jul 4, 2018 6:01:40 PM | 34
Mad cow disease again. Theresa being the lead mad cow.
Scotch Bingeington , Jul 4, 2018 6:17:14 PM | 35
Re Michael | 1

"I think the take home point is to not live near a chemical weapons lab." Methinks it may be worse than that: just don't live in Britain, these days. Says this sympathetic anglophile.

Oui , Jul 4, 2018 6:21:17 PM | 36
UK Nerve Center Porton Down: 'Putin Strikes Again!'

The British can't seem to put the lid back on the vial btw was this the same one used by US Secr of State Colin Powell in 2003 at the UN Security Council before the invasion and occupation of Iraq? The Ayatollahs of Persia be forewarned!

Must have forgotten to scrub the home front door knop of the Skripals or was Yulia's luggage returned via FedEx? Sloppy work by British Intelligence

Lightning never strikes twice, except near Porton Down. In fact, this second case will prove the first case was bogus. Were the two KGB agents from the Cold War still around?

Dick , Jul 4, 2018 6:21:39 PM | 37
After researching everything I could find on Novichok, the only rational and logical conclusion one can draw is the Skripals and this latest couple should be dead. The sad part of this incident and the Skripal affair is how many people actually believe the government's claims.

Imagine being Yulia Skripal at this moment. She had a job, a boyfriend, a dog and a home in Russia she may never be able to see again, because the UK government cannot allow her to return home and spill the beans on this sordid affair. If their is any justice in this world, every rational individual should be demanding "FREE Yulia"!

Babyl-on , Jul 4, 2018 6:37:50 PM | 38
Ian @28

Oh, but a communist dictatorship can't be in a club with the superior Western Democracies. Just because they lifted over 700 million people out of poverty who tonight have something to eat while Western Democracy is starving millions of people deliberately in Yemen, clearly communists don't understand the free market.

Western Liberal Democracy is an utter and contemptible failure.

Ghost Ship , Jul 4, 2018 6:47:57 PM | 39
>>>> Mark2 | Jul 4, 2018 3:34:26 PM | 10

That was me - I was being facetious as Putin is not into gangsterism unlike Obama, Cameron, May, Macron etc.

I don't think this latest version of the novichok case helps the British case at all as it strongly suggests that there is something else out there killing people than a military grade nerve agent.

Amesbury is about eight miles from Salisbury and I just can't see how a limited release of a chemical would create a hot spot several miles away and almost four months later. A few days later perhaps but not almost four months although I doubt that'd stop some wanker a bellingcat coming up with some dumb theory that's picked up by the MSM.

As for the report in the Daily Telegraph "Salisbury couple are fresh victims of the Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal", I suspect that is pure bullshit.

Hoarsewhisperer , Jul 4, 2018 6:50:19 PM | 40
I've been wondering how The Swamp's inner circle are feeling about the likelihood that Trump and Putin will get along like a house (of cards) on fire. It looks as though the reptiles are more than just a little bit worried...
Pft , Jul 4, 2018 6:53:51 PM | 41
The capacity of some people to believe these lies is seemingly limitless, otherwise they would not bother. Must be hundreds of people fall ill and require emergency treatment each day. Are the Russians to be suspects in each illness requiring workers to go into home wear Hazmat gear and shut down the neighborhood pending tests?


Mark2 , Jul 4, 2018 7:13:05 PM | 42
Ghost ship @ 39
Thanks for owning up to that joke ! Hell in these times a bit of humour is good therapy. So can I stop digging my bunker now !
On a serious note- whether this latest incident proves to be drug over dose or nerve agent is pretty secondary to how it's being used to beat the Russians with. What this actually is,is dog whistle politics. A deliberate attempt again to ferment Hate for Russia in the eyes of the British public. The only trick they know is hate.
veritas semper vincit , Jul 4, 2018 7:16:47 PM | 43
The former empire known as Great Britain, was struck again by bad luck:
Novichok , the magic Russian military nerve agent jumped on another couple after it stayed low-key for weeks, in order to recover from the humiliation of being unable to kill the Skripals, in spite of being "the most powerful and deadly military agent".

Britain lost the Empire's colonies, its greatness (even if this was built on murder and theft) , its economic power, and now has lost its mind and its shame .
Britain is currently a pedophile island, full of third world immigrants and given refuge to all the dictators, criminals, crooks and terrorists in the world.
It is laundering money through its City of London, and this is the only thing keeping that island afloat.
It's a huge latrine with a Crown on top, as I like to describe it.

Now the Russians are randomly "poisoning" ordinary British subjects, because this is what Brits are.

The British government and media immediately knew it was Novichok and the Russians were behind it.
Maybe even Mr. Putin found time to do this.

The Russian team just qualified in the FIFA World Cup quarters ; like Britain did after beating Columbia.
Mr. Putin is practicing on poor Brits.
If the Russian team will meet the Brits in the finals, he may pull a Novichok on them and brazenly win this way, the finals.

I May be wrong regarding this theory, but it is highly unlikely.

https://me582.wordpress.com/
https://artisticexpressions394454247.wordpress.com/


Paul , Jul 4, 2018 7:32:14 PM | 44
Brendan @ 14

I think they look more than a "bit like"!

Here are pictures of the 2 people in the latest incident:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/04/wiltshire-unknown-substance-leaves-pair-critically-ill-in-salisbury-hospital

And this is the CCTV from 4 March:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/russian-spy-poisoned-hunt-for-blonde-woman-seen-on-cctv-minutes-before-sergei-skripal-was-found-a3783386.html

The woman has the same hairline (off her forehead) and the shape of the man's face looks a reasonable match.

The CCTV is from a local gym and it was reported, back in March, that the police were only interested in that part of the CCTV. They must have known who these people were for a long time, which makes the 4 day delay even more ridiculous.

Jason , Jul 4, 2018 7:53:22 PM | 45
Can you imagine if they follow this up with another one in Syria? That would be too stupid but at this point not unfathomable. Seems like they would have tried to make us forget about Novichok and the lies that were told by May and the MSM about it being something only Russia could possibly produce. I guess when nobody is held accountable for spreading dangerous criminal misinformation like that than they just try it again. Even now that there is still zero evidence and no suspects in the Skirpal incident, none of the countries who expelled diplomats have apologized and the news hasn't stopped referring to Russia as the only culprit, so why not give it another go I suppose? Anything to put some smear on the World Cup maybe, though the details of this story don't seem to make sense yet. As far as Syria, the NeoCons like Bolton maybe panicking if the rumors that the Syrian government has made some preliminary deals in regards to lite-reunification and a peace plan with the YPG/SDF. They may do a "back to back" again and do something drastic in Syria while blaming both on Russia indirectly..
dh , Jul 4, 2018 8:27:08 PM | 46
I've been expecting another Steele dossier. If England make the finals it wouldn't surprise me if the team get propositioned by some attractive ladies. Of course they will gallantly resist.
james , Jul 4, 2018 9:38:25 PM | 47
@30 /31 daniel... one can dream, lol... thanks for the videos.. teh vanessa beeley one is very good.. which brings me to the comment peter mentioned on a previous thread, or maybe there were a few mentioning it.. the changes to the opcw - to quote the keyphrase from the usa daily propaganda briefing yesterday "The decision calls on the technical secretariat to establish arrangements for identifying the perpetrators of chemical weapons attacks in Syria by using all potentially relevant information..." which essentially means this... all the money the usa/uk have spent on propaganda to fund the white helmets, syrian civil defense, 'save our syria', chatham house and etc etc - will be accepted as fact, unless proven otherwise... this will be the grounds for making war on syria with macron, may and trump being the good poodles for saudi arabia and israel, that they continue to be.. well - that is what i get from that..

https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2018/07/283773.htm

@34 flamingo - thanks for that! just when you think britian can't get any more crazy and whacked out then it already is - this comes along... a better view on britian at this point is the whole country has been subject to some form of mind altering drug.. we are witnessing the byproduct in their msm and political leadership vacuum...

[Jul 04, 2018] Imran Awan Gets Sweetheart Plea Deal; DOJ Won't Prosecute Alleged Spy Ring, Cybercrimes Zero Hedge

Jul 04, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Imran Awan Gets Sweetheart Plea Deal; DOJ Won't Prosecute Alleged Spy Ring, Cybercrimes

by Tyler Durden Tue, 07/03/2018 - 16:00 2.0K SHARES

The Department of Justice won't prosecute Imran Awan, a former IT administrator for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and dozens of other Democrats, for allegations of cybersecurity breaches, theft and potential espionage, as part of a plea agreement one one count of unrelated bank fraud.

After the entry of your client's plea of guilty to the offense identified in paragraph 1 above, your client will not be charged with any non-violent criminal offense in violation of Federal or District of Columbia law which was committed within the District of Columbia by your client prior to the execution of this Agreement -Awan Plea Agreement

Awan withdrew hundreds of thousands of dollars after lying on a mortgage application and pretending to have a medical emergency that allowed him to drain his wife's retirement account. He then wired large sums of money to Pakistan in January, 2017.

me title=

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When word of a plea agreement emerged last week, President Trump was none too pleased:

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Awan and several family members worked for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz along with 20% of House Democrats as IT staffers who held - as the House Inspector General called it - the " keys to the kingdom ," when it came to accessing confidential information on Congressional computer systems.

And while ample evidence of potential crimes were found by the House Inspector General, the DOJ says they found no evidence of wrongdoing.

The Department of Justice said it "found no evidence that [Imran] illegally removed House data from the House network or from House Members' offices, stole the House Democratic Caucus Server, stole or destroyed House information technology equipment, or improperly accessed or transferred government information ."

That statement appears to take issue -- without explaining how -- with the findings of the House's Nancy Pelosi-appointed inspector general, its top law enforcement official, the sergeant-at-arms, and the statements of multiple Democratic aides.

In September 2016, the House Office of Inspector General gave House leaders a presentation that alleged that Alvi, Imran, brothers Abid Awan and Jamal Awan, and a friend were logging into the servers of members who had previously fired him and funneling data off the network. It said evidence "suggests steps are being taken to conceal their activity" and that their behavior mirrored a "classic method for insiders to exfiltrate data from an organization."

Server logs show, it said, that Awan family members made "unauthorized access" to congressional servers in violation of House rules by logging into the servers of members who they didn't work for. - Daily Caller

me title=

Awan was arrested at Dulles airport while attempting to flee the country - one day after reports emerged that the FBI had seized a number of "smashed hard drives" and other computer equipment from his residence. While only charged with bank fraud, there is ample evidence that the Awans were spying on members of Congress through their access to highly-sensitive information on computers, servers and other electronic devices belonging to members of Congress.

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Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller has compiled the most comprehensive coverage of the Awan situation from start to finish - and outlines exactly why the Awans' conduct warranted serious inquiry.

On Feb. 3, 2017, Paul Irving, the House's top law enforcement officer, wrote in a letter to the Committee on House Administration that soon after it became evidence, the server went "missing."

The letter continued: "Based upon the evidence gathered to this point, we have concluded the employees are an ongoing and serious risk to the House of Representatives, possibly threatening the integrity of our information system s."

Imran, Abid, Jamal, Alvi and a friend were banned from the House network the same day Kiko sent the letter.

The alleged wrongdoing consisted of two separate issues.

The first was the cybersecurity issues. In an April 2018 hearing spurred by the Awan case, Chief Administrative Officer Phil Kiko testified : "The bookend to the outside threat is the insider threat. Tremendous efforts are dedicated to protecting the House against these outside threats, however these efforts are undermined when these employees do not adhere to and thumb their nose at our information security policy, and that's a risk in my opinion we cannot afford."

The second was a suspected theft scheme. Wendy Anderson, a former chief of staff for Rep. Yvette Clarke, told House investigators she believed Abid was working with ex-Clarke aide Shelley Davis to steal equipment, and described coming in on a Saturday to find so many pieces of equipment, including iPods and Apple TVs, that it "looked like Christmas. "

Meanwhile, as we noted i n June, the judge in the Awan case, Tanya Chutkan, was appointed to the D.C. US District Court by President Obama on June 5, 2014, after Chutkan had contributed to him for years .

Opensecrets.org

Prior to her appointment to the District Court, she was a partner at law firm Boies Schiller & Flexner (BSF) where she represented scandal-plagued biotechnology company Theranos - which hired Fusion GPS to threaten the news media . Because of this, Chutkan had to recuse herself from two cases involving Fusion GPS .

Meanwhile, BSF attorney and crisis management expert Karen Dunn - who prepped Hillary Clinton for debates and served as Associate White House Counsel to Obama - represents Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin . Another BSF attorney, Dawn Smalls , was John Podesta's assistant while he was Obama's Chief of Staff. And if you still had doubts over their politics, BSF also republished an article critical of Donald Trump in their "News & Events" section.

In short, the Judge in the Awan case - appointed by Obama after years of contributing to him, was a partner at a very Clinton-friendly law firm . It should also be noted that Obama appointed Chutkan's husband, Peter Krauthammer, to the D.C. Superior Court in 2011.

The left has, of course, seized upon the plea deal to suggest that there was no wrongdoing.

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Comments Vote up! 154 Vote down! 12

Uchtdorf Tue, 07/03/2018 - 16:00 Permalink

Then who goes down due to his deal? Was his deal just a freebie? Are there any politicians or swampers (pardon my redundancy) who are not dirty?

Why can't Trump supporters see how he goes along with these outrages? This ain't no stinkin' 4D chess.

Just like Obama, who, even in his 2nd term, would read his teleprompter and talk about a national issue and pretend that it was somebody else's fault.

Trump is no better than the rest of the puppets who have lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Obama = Trump = Clinton = The Shrubs... all alike.

The other thing to remember is that Trump and his puppetmasters knew that the optics on this Awan deal would look bad. And they let it happen anyway. Folks, the elites don't give a rat's hind end what we think. They think they've won. They believe that we cannot resist. It's only going to get worse from here. Therefore, prepare accordingly.

BennyBoy -> Uchtdorf Tue, 07/03/2018 - 16:01 Permalink

Knows too much.

StackShinyStuff -> BennyBoy Tue, 07/03/2018 - 16:02 Permalink

Imagine my complete lack of surprise

SamAdams -> wee-weed up Tue, 07/03/2018 - 16:14 Permalink

So, if the "deal" is to turn Awan against his former employers, why would you pardon him of all previous "non-violent" crimes? Seems to me, if the deal is not public and he refuses to testify, they have nothing by which to motivate his testimony. Is this not true? Else, it is exactly as it appears, the deep state got their way and justice is again the victim.

bigkahuna -> JRobby Tue, 07/03/2018 - 16:39 Permalink

Seth Rich

Save_America1st -> NidStyles Tue, 07/03/2018 - 19:12 Permalink

LICENSED TO LIE: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice

https://www.sidneypowell.com/shop/books/licensed-to-lie-book/

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"I have covered hundreds of court cases over the years and have witnessed far too often the kind of duplicity and governmental heavy-handedness Ms. Powell describes in her well-written book, Licensed to Lie." –Hugh Aynesworth, journalist, historian, four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, author, November 22, 1963: Witness to History

Richard Chesler -> Big Creek Rising Tue, 07/03/2018 - 22:18 Permalink

Soweeto's legacy of corruption and chicanery.

Save_America1st -> Richard Chesler Tue, 07/03/2018 - 23:35 Permalink

just keep being patient and give this shit more time...they have to take down a whole lot of powerful monsters all over the world all at once and it all has to be air-tight. All while trying to keep some kind of peace without these fuckers creating a world war.

https://www.neonrevolt.com/2018/07/03/divide-they-try-fail-they-will-th

https://www.thegoldwater.com/news/30325-Imran-Awan-Cuts-Deal-with-DOJ-T

https://thegoldwater.com/news/16210-Tick-Tock-The-Complete-History-of-t

ChiangMaiXPat -> Freeze These Tue, 07/03/2018 - 20:29 Permalink

Fake outrage over Russia hacking our election as the Israhell & US infiltrate and spur regime change inside of Iran. It's the juice, stupid...Always the lying parasitic juice...

nsurf9 -> BidnessMan Tue, 07/03/2018 - 20:11 Permalink

What, no immunity! Where's that green puking clowning when you need one!

el buitre -> topspinslicer Tue, 07/03/2018 - 16:50 Permalink

Was this one of Q Anus' unsealed unindictments? Trust the plan?

Only the prosecution, i.e. the DOJ, can sign off on a plea bargain. This POS judge should have recused herself, but plea bargains are essentially between a defendant and the DOJ. Under the constitution, the president, i.e. Trump, can hire and fire any level AG or attorney (read prosecutor) in the DOJ. So instead of tweeting in protest like one of us useless eaters, why doesn't Trump kick some ass. He could start by firing the prosecutor who signed this POS plea bargain to set an example.

Chupacabra-322 -> dirty fingernails Tue, 07/03/2018 - 19:22 Permalink

@ Dirty,

Ask and, ye shall receive.

Debbie is not going to say one word. Her brother Steve Wasserman, Assistant U.S. Attorney, will keep her informed of every step of the investigation, and if it looks like its getting to hot, she'll be on the next flight to Tel-Aviv. This whole thing will get buried, as it most likely involves the blackmail of, and breach of US National Security by several dozen Idiotic democratic members of Congress. No doubt these pakistani spies are somehow tied to israeli intelligence.

###

*Attention - The Awans & Pakistani ISI are only "sub contractors" for Hillary (CIA since young/operative/ratline field commander) & Israeli Mossad (Debbie Wasserman, Weiner, Shumer & any other affiliated Zionist Jews). Both the CIA (Rockefeller>Kissinger down the line to CIA-op Hillary/all presidents except Trump) + Israel (Rosthchild) & Mossad (Rothschild private intel/military army) have compromised and co-opted the White House/US Presidency, US Congress, US Senate and much of state government.

Both CIA & Mossad farm out dirty work ops to other international Intelligence agencies & military, as well as criminal organizations in order to created a spider web of hard to prove 3rd, 4th, 5th party connections to their illegal operations in order limit their exposure to being outed by real journalists like the dead Michael Hastings.

Pakistan ISI, the Muslim Brotherhood or any other seemingly bad actors have 'not' infiltrated and taken over Congress nor anything else. The Awans and the Pakistani ISI were 'invited' & brought here by Mossad-Anthony Weiner & Mossad-Debbie Wasserman-Schultz here to run operations for CIA-international-crime-boss-Hillary Clinton.

Blackmail, compromise, threaten & Murder is the name of the game with these Pure Evil War Criminal Treasonous Seditious Psychopaths.

hongdo -> SamAdams Tue, 07/03/2018 - 20:10 Permalink

the deal is so he does not testify that all of the democrat members committed felonies. Can't arrest half the govt and the law enforcement personnel that are supposed to arrest them. There are not enough FBI to arrest all the FBI.

dirty fingernails -> tmosley Tue, 07/03/2018 - 18:28 Permalink

Despite your unwavering adulation and constant fawning, Trump cares only for Trump. He is a narcassist and most likely a 'path of some flavor. He doesn't give a fuck about you or me. All he has ever wanted was power. His supporters are largely tired of the US gov BS and wanted it to change for the better. If he betrays that, he betrays them and suddenly you go from being counted as a supporter to being a domestic terrorist. Do you have more than 3 days of food, anti-gov beliefs, and a gun? Welcome to being the enemy.

Get your head out of your ass and grow a fucking spine. While I'm being hyperbolic, it can, and has, happened that fast before.

tmosley -> dirty fingernails Tue, 07/03/2018 - 19:58 Permalink

If Trump cares about Trump, why the FUCK would he arrest the people who like and support him?

GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER.

Blankone -> valerie24 Tue, 07/03/2018 - 17:11 Permalink

Everyone is trying to blame Sessions, the Judge, the democrates etc.

TRUMP Is Playing those who support him. The Dept of Justice is Under Trump. The judge did not do this deal, but the Dept of Justice. So, TRUMP did this deal and is now playing he supporters for fools with his tweets about being upset (and being unable to do anything about it).

Trump could force a real investigation and prosecution. Trump is a zionist swamp creature. During the election Trump said he would investigate the Clinton's. After the election Trump said the Clinton's were good people and that he would NOT pursue them.

It is Trump who will make a major move to remove gun rights. While crying out in protest.
(The jew cries out as he strikes you, type thing.)

am Groot -> chunga Tue, 07/03/2018 - 22:48 Permalink

Everyone in Congress including Trump on the red side acts like a slack jawed faggot. I'm just stunned there isn't one fucking set of brass balls on any of them. There has been a nonstop treason and sedition show since before Trump was even elected being perpetrated by the Democrats. Trump is probably happy with the leaks coming out of the White House. It's more press and tv time for him.

One fucking person has gone to jail ! One ! That stupid NSA dyke skank Reality Loser. Nobody else has even gotten a jaywalking ticket. This falls squarely on Trump and his abortion of an crooked administration.

Uchtdorf -> Blankone Tue, 07/03/2018 - 17:41 Permalink

Bingo! Why can't Trump supporters see this?

Just like Obama, who, even in his 2nd term, would read his teleprompter and talk about a national issue and pretend that it was somebody else's fault.

Trump is no better than the rest of the puppets who have lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Obama = Trump = Clinton = The Shrubs

The other thing to remember is that Trump and his puppetmasters knew that the optics on this Awan deal would look bad. And they let it happen anyway. Folks, the elites don't give a rat's hind end what we think. They think they've won. They believe that we cannot resist. It's only going to get worse from here. Therefore, prepare accordingly.

I am Groot -> Blankone Tue, 07/03/2018 - 17:45 Permalink

I'm starting to agree with you. Here's why:

1. Trump could have sealed the US borders and put the military on them by Executive Order.

2. Trump hasn't put up any resistance to 2nd Amendment rights being eroded away in his year and a half in office.

3. His Attorney General Sessions is more useless than a set of tits on a nun, and hasn't been fired for refusing to do his job of prosecuting criminals and rooting out corruption.

4. Sessions has been increasingly vocal about increasing civil asset forfeiture which is totally unconstitutional.

5. Trump hasn't pulled any troops out of Syria or Afghanistan.

6. Trump hasn't made Mexico pay for the wall when he could easily do it by taxing wire transfers to Latin America.

7. Trump hasn't put any pressure on his own justice dept to cooperate with Congress.

8. Trump still has done nothing to make NATO pay its fair share of defense spending.

9. Cops are still being praised by Trump even though they routinely stand down when Antifa are attacking his own supporters, or showing total cowardice under fire when lives are at stake.

10. Only 1 person has been prosecuted for sedition, treason and high crimes in the past year and half in spite of these crimes being committed on a near daily basis.

Billy the Poet -> I am Groot Tue, 07/03/2018 - 17:50 Permalink

The president is one man. One man's head can be blown apart in front of a national audience with no repercussions.

What might the Founders have meant when they said, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed?"

If Trump isn't able to do what he was elected to do maybe instead of attacking him we should thank him for leading us as far as he has and consider doing our own Constitutional duty.

Just a thought.

Thomas Paine -> Billy the Poet Tue, 07/03/2018 - 18:30 Permalink

We have the 'lost' server...now we have first-person, factual witnesses and the technical perps to prosecute top swamp criminal links most conclusively, without a shred of doubt even unto fanatics and trolls. It's happening, it's coming down worldwide...there will be no civil war. Ignore the fake news. They are supremely desperate.

RedBaron616 -> wee-weed up Tue, 07/03/2018 - 18:39 Permalink

So why is the GOP Department of Justice giving me a free pass? Answer that, please.

Trump is like all the rest. Just like Hillary never seeing the inside of a jail cell.

The UniParty are all crooks. STOP voting for them!!!!!

Abaco -> Muddy1 Tue, 07/03/2018 - 16:42 Permalink

And Rosenstein, Wray, and as far down the line as you need to go to get rid of all the traitors. This is complete bullshit. Some fucking Pakistani comes and spys on that whore Wasserman and passes intelligence to who the fuck knows who, and he get's a pass? Might was well open up the doors to all of the BOP prisons becuase if Hillary, Comey, McCabe, Strozk, etc. are still wandering out free then no one in federal prison should be there. These fuckers have done more damage than any drug dealer, spy, or muderer in federal custody.

Stan522 -> Ghost of Porky Tue, 07/03/2018 - 16:17 Permalink

This plea deal is given because they are out to protect the democrat party and all of the bureaucrats who run the government.... It would show their ineptitude..... and we can't have that, can we......?

DeathMerchant -> NoDebt Tue, 07/03/2018 - 18:09 Permalink

And the big issue is that they expected everyone to buy the bullshit excuse of" We were just talking about grand kids, blah, blah" And perhaps even bigger is that there is no actual representative of the people who calls bullshit and has the power to demand evidence and demand processing through the justice system. I know that is the supposed job of the DOJ but if the DOJ is part of the scam, there needs to be something like a full time independent prosecutor who is not under anyone.

kiwidor -> DeathMerchant Tue, 07/03/2018 - 20:09 Permalink

but they wuzz talking about grandkids

Bill: "Now, Miss Lowretta, I know you are as smart as a whip, and being that smart, you would know the consequences of Mr. Trump being elected...think of your grandchillens; you want those lil piccaninnies to have a good life...and they will not be so fortunate under Mr. Trump's administration."

Lowretta: "Yessah Mr Clinton, I do unnerstan' what you saying. I sho' will work hard to stop that"

Bill: "Miss Lowretta, it's a pleasure meeting with you again. I figure if you work real hard you may even get to be a Justice in the Supreme Court"

FreedomWriter -> BennyBoy Tue, 07/03/2018 - 17:30 Permalink

Case settled in the face of overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing, check

obama appointed judge, check

judge worked with clinton law firm, fusion gps, check

Dws protects Awan till the bloody end, check

hard to imagine how it can get much worse in these United States. The prior administration and its holdover lackeys are making a mockery of the criminal justice system

incredible

LaugherNYC -> BennyBoy Tue, 07/03/2018 - 22:23 Permalink

Allowed to take plea so the details of all the compromising info he had on half of Congress would not come out. THIS is how the DEEP STATE protects itself, and the DOJ goes along, because that's, simply the deal. There is no possible explanation for this guy getting a deal unless he is going to hand over the entire Dem leadership now. Of course, he won't.

Gumint at work. Do some bad stuff, get paid, investigate, quash, move on.

Isz next, SVIMVEAR!! (10 points for the attribution)

Kelley -> Uchtdorf Tue, 07/03/2018 - 20:32 Permalink

Trump has no control over what a court decides! No President does. Even a foreigner ought to know that much, in case you aren't American.

Sid Davis -> Uchtdorf Tue, 07/03/2018 - 21:23 Permalink

Rule by the elite is one of the cornerstones of government. When has the elite not ruled us, except perhaps in times immediately following the collapse of the then current government?

You can't leave steaks sitting on the kitchen counter and not expect these dogs to take the biggest one and leave scraps for the general population.

Given that Trump is the chief law enforcement officer in the government, how is it that his underlings are able to get away with such egregious corruption?

prudent1nvestor Tue, 07/03/2018 - 16:05 Permalink

TIP OF THE ICEBERG - https://www.reddit.com/r/greatawakening/comments/8vutyw/q_1673_matters_

WWG1WGA

[Jul 04, 2018] Just another day in bizarro world.

Jul 04, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com


hooligan2009 Tue, 07/03/2018 - 16:34 Permalink

now who gets to make an appeal about this seditious corrupt legal proceeding that is a cover for the direct transmission of the secret workings of congressional committees and private communications of congress members DIRECT TO HOSTILE FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS like iran, via pakistan.

this is treason.

Dickguzinya Tue, 07/03/2018 - 16:36 Permalink

Just another day in bizarro world. The good guys are treated like shit, the bad guys are treated like heroes. There's no rule of law. There are no borders. This duplicitous scumbag should be sent to prison, for a long time.

. . . _ _ _ . . . Tue, 07/03/2018 - 16:37 Permalink

So, commit one crime, go to jail.
Commit several crimes, plead and walk.
But who are they going after by letting him plead?
Who's the bigwig up above who's so valuable that the Awan minions (if they are minions) can be let go?

I wonder what they'll get HRC to plead to in order to unlawfully ignore the rest of her crimes.

Kelley Tue, 07/03/2018 - 16:37 Permalink

Announced on the eve of the nation's biggest holiday.

This has to be the biggest "f**k you" by the DOJ to the American people in the history of this country.

Note that the prosecuting attorney in this case had someone pinch hit for him at the actual hearing:

"Only one person sat at the prosecutors' table: J.P. Coomey, who...was only added to the case Monday. There was no sign of Michael Marando, who had previously led the prosecution."

http://dailycaller.com/2018/07/03/awan-cybersecurity-not-charged/?utm_m

It looks like Marando didn't want his name in the court record.

P.S. Added on Monday to a huge complicated case?? Today is Tuesday!!

Taras Bulba Tue, 07/03/2018 - 16:48 Permalink

Hard to overcome the violent atk of nauseous rage at this headline. The stench from the DOJ is overwhelmingly strong on this one.

One must step back and ask, WTF is going on. Do we have a justice system or not-I tthink the answer is clear that it is prob a two tiered system or more.

I would guess the clintons and mossad are in this big time. DWS seems to be a poster child for mossad and the clintons.

Consuelo Tue, 07/03/2018 - 16:50 Permalink

Not being one to say 'I told you, blah-blah', but...

I have maintained all along the journey here regarding Queen Madame DeFarge , that this is simply 'Too Big' to prosecute for the simple reason that there are too many key individuals in .gov and the business community for the nation to absorb the socio-political fallout. This in no way infers that prosecution shouldn't happen, only that the corruption is so deep & wide that it was never a realistic view to begin with. That said, things have a way ironing themselves out, and we're seeing it nearly every day with the implosion of politics-as-usual.

Know thy enemy Tue, 07/03/2018 - 17:00 Permalink

Oh my, have you seen this important tidbit in today's news cycle?

Add another to the list.
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/03/625581627/another-top-justice-department-lawyer-steps-down-following-earlier-departures 📁
CONSPIRACY?
COINCIDENCE?

bunnyswanson Tue, 07/03/2018 - 17:01 Permalink

Not only was he a spy but he probably opened the door to every other entity which wanted to spy on the USA - wide open. There is no country if this is not treason.

The Harlequin Tue, 07/03/2018 - 17:06 Permalink

Whatever it is that this plea bargain is covering up, it must be pretty bad for that cohort of criminals to accept that it's NOT A GOOD LOOK either way! They're choosing the lesser of evils, but it will put another nail in their coffin anyway, and they know it. Be prepared for yet another flash of violent distraction or somesuch to drive it out of the press. Wait for the mid-terms to find out if this dodgy strategy pays off...or NOT!

MedTechEntrepreneur Tue, 07/03/2018 - 17:07 Permalink

General Flynn is a Patriot and under the Mueller hachet. Awan and DWS are treasonous pigs and WALK....WTF! Time to get a pound of flesh from FedGov

JackMeOff Tue, 07/03/2018 - 17:42 Permalink

This is called a "states witness" move in my circles. Giddie up Deep State and establishment, we got a live one for a Grand Jury. Brilliant!

No Time for Fishing -> JackMeOff Tue, 07/03/2018 - 17:47 Permalink

Sorry but no. This is not a deal in exchange for cooperation. This deal requires nothing of Awan. When you are giving a deal in exchange for cooperation that deal is in writing in "the deal" and the Judge decides after you are finished cooperating if you met your end of the deal. This is a get out of jail free deal.

slice Tue, 07/03/2018 - 18:04 Permalink

Awan has a deal from a Bank Fraud case in DC. Awan is not the target and Bank Fraud certainly isn't our big complaint. Huber is outside DC and has a prosecution witness. Another pawn moved into position.

Wait for it...

Look at what Ramenhead looks like these days. The horror of it is eating her from within:

https: // www.theblaze.com/news/2018/07/03/wasserman-schultz-staffer-pleads-guilt

navy62802 Tue, 07/03/2018 - 18:28 Permalink

A couple of notes. First, here's the plea agreement as quoted by Luke Rosiak at the Daily Caller:

After the entry of your client's plea of guilty to the offense identified in paragraph 1 above, your client will not be charged with any non-violent criminal offense in violation of Federal or District of Columbia law which was committed within the District of Columbia by your client prior to the execution of this Agreement and about which this Office was made aware by your client prior to the execution of this Agreement, all of which is contained in the attached Statement of Offense.

Note 1: While the federal government and Washington DC government are restricted from prosecuting Awan for any previous non-violent crime, other state jurisdictions can prosecute him for these crimes. He could be prosecuted in Florida, Virginia, Maryland or any other state. Remember, Awan ran most of his money laundering operations (disguised as used car businesses) outside of the Washington DC jurisdiction. In fact, most of the evidence that was discovered by independent investigators has been found at locations in both Maryland and Virginia (both of which would still be free to prosecute per this plea agreement).

Note 2: This seems to be an illegitimate plea deal which is really just an immunity agreement by any other name. We'll see how this all shakes out, but the plea deal accepted by this judge will probably not stand up to even the weakest legal scrutiny. I don't even know if there's any precedent for such a deal in American law.

No Time for Fishing -> navy62802 Tue, 07/03/2018 - 18:57 Permalink

There is a lot that smells very funny about this agreement. It does not provide any leverage to get him to be a states witness and it does not prevent him from claiming the 5th in any Grand Jury testimony because the issue of State Charges remains. I sure hope sometime in the future we say that Justice knew what they were doing and people start going to jail. At the moment I don't see it, I don't smell it and I don't believe it. I have no problem with this slimeball skating if the Politicians are prosecuted and convicted. If he spills all Hillary's crew will punish him better than a jail cell ever will.

waknup..wtfhapnd Tue, 07/03/2018 - 19:04 Permalink

No plea deal was given to Awan. This is a movie.

Wetting Normies' appetites.

We're still in foreplay, But its Game Day!

Q1671: "Plea: Deal - No Charges for NON-Violent crime."

Awan still liable for VIOLENT Crimes, either committed by himself, or by being witness to Crimes, or while serving as a hub in a Criminal Enterprise, where VIOLENT Crimes are monetized???

Awan's Case is based on 18 U.S. Code § 1344 Bank Fraud.

https: // www.scribd.com/document/356566097/Imran-Awan-Complaint

This gave investigators access to his bank accounts, AND the bank accounts Awan transacted with.

Did they discover more evidence than necessary to fulfill § 1344?

Perhaps a network, or an Enterprise?

RICO?

The Swamp is inner-connected in ways we currently cannot see.

90% Voted Dem in DC in 2016

Thing IG Report

g = Gmail Server, (Unsent Drafts!)?

Do you think this was going to be litigated in this setting?

Treason must be held in Military Tribunals.

Where can these be held? Kansas? Pompeo?

/oh hello/

https: // en-volve.com/2017/05/10/a-federal-judge-just-issued-massive-ruling-against-barack-obama-and-hillary-clinton-for-treason/

We goin places turday

hooligan2009 Tue, 07/03/2018 - 19:48 Permalink

innocent of all non-violent cimes?

so will be prosecuted for this violent crime? is the FBI investigating this?

https://steemit.com/pizzagate/@v4vapid/seth-rich-crime-scene-awan-broth

Chief Joesph Tue, 07/03/2018 - 19:50 Permalink

U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan is the judge presiding over Imran Awan's case. She is an Obama appointee! But, she allowed the case to get really ridiculous.

She was a Crony of Obama, and kept postponing the Imran Awan trial, which allowed him to flee to Pakistan, where co-defendant and wife Hina Alvi has already fled, with the blessing of the FBI. It's really unheard of, for a federal criminal 'bank fraud' case to be granted 5 or 6 delays and continuances, as she has in this case. Its apparent she is running cover for the Democrats.

Records confirm, she was appointed to the federal bench by Obama after she kicked thousands in campaign donations to his presidential campaign when he was a U.S. Senator in Illinois. Obama also appointed Chutkan's husband, Peter Krauthamer, a judge to the bench in the District of Columbia Superior Court in 2011.

She a prime example of why judges should never be politically appointed, voted into office, or have any political affiliation with any political party.

Now, we have some of the trashiest people on the bench. Her and her husband needs their asses tossed into jail.

navy62802 Tue, 07/03/2018 - 20:37 Permalink

BTW ... neither Imran nor his wife were ever charged with the most obvious and verifiable crime. Imran intended to carry and his wife did carry more than $10,000 in undeclared moneys onboard an international flight. Strangely (which seems to be the theme of this case), neither was ever charged with this felony crime.

Kelley Tue, 07/03/2018 - 22:30 Permalink

Why is the DOJ protecting members of Congress or staff members of Congress?? It appears to be outrageous, yet whoever made this decision has a calculus. What is the real reason for the DOJ to protect the illegal actions of the Awans and those that hired him?

There is a logic behind it. What is it? If we can find that out we can understand why this crime was committed by the DOJ.

JLee2027 Tue, 07/03/2018 - 23:11 Permalink

No no no no, fake news. Plea deal does not cover Federal crimes.

From Awan plea

Your client further understands that this Agreement is binding only upon the Criminal and Superior Court Divisions of the United States Attomey's Office for the District of Columbia. This Agreement does not bind the Civil Division of this Office or any other United States Attomey's Office, nor does it bind any other state, local, or federal prosecutor. It also does not bar or compromise any civil, tax, or administrative claim pending or that may be made against your client.

Bang, he's dead Jim. Utah, think Utah.

Source:

https: // assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4572468/Imran-Awan-Plea-Agreement.pdf

momololo Wed, 07/04/2018 - 00:16 Permalink

Deep state manipulated the 2016 'election'. They had corporate mass media pump Trump 247 as their 'populist' candidate since their identity politics candidate Clinton couldn't attract even fleas to her rallies. They wanted to kill any attention to the masses of Americans countrywide who were packing arenas & auditoriums to see the old socialist Sanders.

This plea deal is really a burying of how much corruption actually occurs on Capitol Hill to keep the phony 2 party system intact.

Cabreado Wed, 07/04/2018 - 00:17 Permalink

No matter what you think of Trump...

We're already where We don't want to be, with no recourse...

a broken DOJ (and so, Executive), a thoroughly corrupt and defunct Congress,

and a populace now firmly in Dear Leader mode...

Happy Birthday, America.

[Jul 04, 2018] Ep. 629 Pulitzer Prize-winning Sy Hersh Questions Official Line on NATO, Skripal ISIS - YouTube

Jul 04, 2018 | www.youtube.com

Published on Jun 30, 2018

In this episode, we are joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sy Hersh who exposed NATO nation war crimes of the military-industrial complex. From Abu Ghraib prison in the Anglo-American war on Iraq to the Mee Lai Massacre, Sy Hersh has exerted a damning scepticism of the official line. His new book "Reporter - A Memoir" is out now.

LIKE Going Underground http://fb.me/GoingUndergroundRT
FOLLOW Going Underground http://twitter.com/Underground_RT
FOLLOW Afshin Rattansi http://twitter.com/AfshinRattansi
FOLLOW on Instagram http://instagram.com/officialgoingund...


Jonathan Bailey , 3 days ago

Sy Hersh is the embodiment of integrity. He's coming from a really good place. One hell of a journalist.

Rob Vann , 3 days ago

In the age of Fake News Sy is one of the few people you can depend on for accurate information..No wonder he rarely appears on corporate media...

00Billy , 3 days ago

Sy Hersh is a laser in the land of darkness.

Ana Suri , 3 days ago

Seymour Hirsch is based on reality but Western media is based on perception. They don't report news, they sell news.

John B. , 3 days ago

What does Seymour say about 9/11? Anyone, including seymour Hersh and Noam Chomski, isn't worth a damn if they gloss over 9/11. If he's written a book about Dick Cheney and omitted his major role in making sure 9/11 was the success it was for the neocons, he's a limited hangout.

Chris Weinert , 1 day ago

Isn't that "Russian mob" truly Jewish?

Kronos Transmission , 3 days ago

RT has more investigative journalists in a week than the BBC has in a decade.

Boris Tabare Ag , 3 days ago

Only RT dares to bring real bold journalists as John Pilger and Seymour Hersh, and let them speak freely. Congrats.

Sergei , 1 day ago (edited)

RT should bring Hersh on the show as much as possible. The guy is a legend and he is not allowed to publish his articles anywhere in the US except in a German newspaper.

Astraea Shaw , 2 days ago

Is he sure about tht chemical weapons in Syria? What happened then when it was taken out of Syria by the Authorities - whose name I have forgotten - and verified by the UN? He should have a chat with Vanessa Bealey.

Alexis Wilmot Porter , 2 days ago

Good to see Sy on the rounds again - it's been a while. I guess he was finishing his book. That point about the Russian sample being what proved to Obama that Nusra probably did the WMD attack - "Red Line" - and called it off - I bet that had a lot to do with the move to make Russia "beyond the pale" regarding official OPCW reports. Since then, all the tests have been done remotely, by Turkey, by the UK, by anyone but Russia. I believe that the balance of the evidence in the entire Syria aggression suggests that the Syrian government never conducted any chemical attacks, and that any real attacks that took place were done by the terrorists.

It should be just common sense - groups which are happy to massacre men, women and children, keep women as slaves, eat livers, etc would have no moral qualms about using chemical weapons whatsoever. The Syrian government, on the other hand, has always been in control of the majority of the population in Syria - even in their worst moments before the Russians came to help - and so any use of such barbaric methods would risk revolt from the masses.

No president under such a long conflict could remain in power if he were capable of such brutal and callous methods - in fact, the evidence shows that they have made every effort to either arrange the surrender or evacuate the belligerents, while allowing for civilian escape wherever possible.

The whole "brutal dictator" libel never made any sense about Assad - he remains popular, mingles with the people, has full support from the military. He is also a rarity for so-called dictatorships in the Middle East - not a military man, but a civilian doctor. If there were the slightest doubts about him, the military would have removed him by now - instead, his government and military appear to have both high morale and widespread support from the people.

Of course, the facts are never a big concern for the "regime change" crew - but thankfully, their ability to "create facts on the ground" has weakened immensely over the 20 years of terror the US rulers began in 2001.

[Jul 03, 2018] Russia has a lot of information about Lybia that could dig a political grave for Hillary. They did not release it

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The fact of the matter is, if Russia wanted to do, cause lot of difficulty to the American election they could have. Instead, they went and talked privately to us. So when the government says Russia intercepted stuff that was very important to us, I'm being very fuzzy about it, it wasn't about the election. They told us that there were certain people in America doing things that were very deleterious to the War on Terrorism for personal and financial gain, and they could have blown it publicly but they went internally to us." ..."
"... I haven't listened to that particular interview yet, but can say the the HRC emails with Sid Blumenthal show the reason we got in bed with Sarkozy (and Britain) to destroy Libya was: ..."
"... To steal the nationalized oil ..."
"... To steal the hundreds of tons of gold and silver. ..."
"... To prevent Libya from developing a pan-African gold dinar and development bank to complete with the Federal Reserve petrodollar and the IMF. ..."
"... I can also say that Hersh documented that Ambassador Stevens was an arms dealer, smuggling Libyan military weapons into Syria to finish the "regime change" operation still ongoing there. Also, HRC knew her "rebels" were hunting down and murdering any black Libyans they could find even before Gaddafi was anally bayonet raped. ..."
Jul 03, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peter L. | Jul 1, 2018 11:21:17 PM | 23

Hello There! I'm curious to know if any readers have comments about a recent Sy Hersh interview. In response to a question about Russian interference in the last US presidential election Hersh replied:

"I have been reporting something, I've been watching something since 2011 in Libya, when we had a secretary of state that later ran for president, and I will tell you: Some stories take a long time. And I don't know quite how to package it. I don't know how much to say about it. I assure you that there's no known intelligence that Russia impacted, cut into the DNC, Podesta e-mails. That did not happen. I can say that.

I can also say Russia learned other things about what was going on in Libya with us and instead of blowing -- [. . . lots cut out here before returning to the topic . . . ] The fact of the matter is, if Russia wanted to do, cause lot of difficulty to the American election they could have. Instead, they went and talked privately to us. So when the government says Russia intercepted stuff that was very important to us, I'm being very fuzzy about it, it wasn't about the election. They told us that there were certain people in America doing things that were very deleterious to the War on Terrorism for personal and financial gain, and they could have blown it publicly but they went internally to us."

The full text is at the Intercept: https://theintercept.com/2018/06/27/intercepted-live-from-brooklyn-with-sy-hersh-mariame-kaba-lee-gelernt-and-narcy/

Does anyone have any comments on what Sy Hersh is discussing? Who is he talking about?

Daniel , Jul 2, 2018 2:24:48 AM | 31
Peter L. @23

I haven't listened to that particular interview yet, but can say the the HRC emails with Sid Blumenthal show the reason we got in bed with Sarkozy (and Britain) to destroy Libya was:

  1. To steal the nationalized oil
  2. To steal the hundreds of tons of gold and silver.
  3. To prevent Libya from developing a pan-African gold dinar and development bank to complete with the Federal Reserve petrodollar and the IMF.

I can also say that Hersh documented that Ambassador Stevens was an arms dealer, smuggling Libyan military weapons into Syria to finish the "regime change" operation still ongoing there. Also, HRC knew her "rebels" were hunting down and murdering any black Libyans they could find even before Gaddafi was anally bayonet raped.

If I come up with more after listening, I'll post again.

[Jul 03, 2018] Musings II The "Intelligence Community," "Russian Interference," and Due Diligence

Highly recommended!
Looks like Brennan abused his power as a head of CIA and should be held accountable for that.
Notable quotes:
"... Did the U.S. "Intelligence Community" judge that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election? ..."
"... it is not that ..."
"... even that is misleading ..."
"... the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence Research did, in fact, have a different opinion but was not allowed to express it ..."
"... The second thing to remember is that reports of the intelligence agencies reflect the views of the heads of the agencies and are not necessarily a consensus of their analysts' views. The heads of both the CIA and FBI are political appointments, while the NSA chief is a military officer; his agency is a collector of intelligence rather than an analyst of its import, except in the fields of cryptography and communications security. ..."
"... Among the assertions are that a persona calling itself "Guccifer 2.0" is an instrument of the GRU, and that it hacked the emails on the Democratic National Committee's computer and conveyed them to Wikileaks. What the report does not explain is that it is easy for a hacker or foreign intelligence service to leave a false trail. In fact, a program developed by CIA with NSA assistance to do just that has been leaked and published. ..."
"... Retired senior NSA technical experts have examined the "Guccifer 2.0" data on the web and have concluded that "Guccifer 2.0's" data did not involve a hack across the web but was locally downloaded. Further, the data had been tampered with and manipulated, leading to the conclusion that "Guccifer 2.0" is a total fabrication. ..."
"... "Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries." ..."
"... DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying ..."
"... Prominent American journalists and politicians seized upon this shabby, politically motivated, report as proof of "Russian interference" in the U.S. election without even the pretense of due diligence. They have objectively acted as co-conspirators in an effort to block any improvement in relations with Russia, even though cooperation with Russia to deal with common dangers is vital to both countries. ..."
Jun 29, 2018 | jackmatlock.com

Musings II The "Intelligence Community," "Russian Interference," and Due Diligence Posted on by Jack Did the U.S. "Intelligence Community" judge that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election?

Most commentators seem to think so. Every news report I have read of the planned meeting of Presidents Trump and Putin in July refers to "Russian interference" as a fact and asks whether the matter will be discussed. Reports that President Putin denied involvement in the election are scoffed at, usually with a claim that the U.S. "intelligence community" proved Russian interference. In fact, the U.S. "intelligence community" has not done so. The intelligence community as a whole has not been tasked to make a judgment and some key members of that community did not participate in the report that is routinely cited as "proof" of "Russian interference."

I spent the 35 years of my government service with a "top secret" clearance. When I reached the rank of ambassador and also worked as Special Assistant to the President for National Security, I also had clearances for "codeword" material. At that time, intelligence reports to the president relating to Soviet and European affairs were routed through me for comment. I developed at that time a "feel" for the strengths and weaknesses of the various American intelligence agencies. It is with that background that I read the January 6. 2017 report of three intelligence agencies: the CIA, FBI, and NSA.

This report is labeled "Intelligence Community Assessment," but in fact it is not that . A report of the intelligence community in my day would include the input of all the relevant intelligence agencies and would reveal whether all agreed with the conclusions. Individual agencies did not hesitate to "take a footnote" or explain their position if they disagreed with a particular assessment. A report would not claim to be that of the "intelligence community" if any relevant agency was omitted.

The report states that it represents the findings of three intelligence agencies: CIA, FBI, and NSA, but even that is misleading in that it implies that there was a consensus of relevant analysts in these three agencies. In fact, the report was prepared by a group of analysts from the three agencies pre-selected by their directors, with the selection process generally overseen by James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Clapper told the Senate in testimony May 8, 2017, that it was prepared by "two dozen or so analysts -- hand-picked, seasoned experts from each of the contributing agencies." If you can hand-pick the analysts, you can hand-pick the conclusions. The analysts selected would have understood what Director Clapper wanted since he made no secret of his views. Why would they endanger their careers by not delivering?

What should have struck any congressperson or reporter was that the procedure Clapper followed was the same as that used in 2003 to produce the report falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein had retained stocks of weapons of mass destruction. That should be worrisome enough to inspire questions, but that is not the only anomaly.

The DNI has under his aegis a National Intelligence Council whose officers can call any intelligence agency with relevant expertise to draft community assessments. It was created by Congress after 9/11 specifically to correct some of the flaws in intelligence collection revealed by 9/11. Director Clapper chose not to call on the NIC, which is curious since its duty is "to act as a bridge between the intelligence and policy communities."

During my time in government, a judgment regarding national security would include reports from, as a minimum, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) of the State Department. The FBI was rarely, if ever, included unless the principal question concerned law enforcement within the United States. NSA might have provided some of the intelligence used by the other agencies but normally did not express an opinion regarding the substance of reports.

What did I notice when I read the January report? There was no mention of INR or DIA! The exclusion of DIA might be understandable since its mandate deals primarily with military forces, except that the report attributes some of the Russian activity to the GRU, Russian military intelligence. DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, is the U.S. intelligence organ most expert on the GRU. Did it concur with this attribution? The report doesn't say.

The omission of INR is more glaring since a report on foreign political activity could not have been that of the U.S. intelligence community without its participation. After all, when it comes to assessments of foreign intentions and foreign political activity, the State Department's intelligence service is by far the most knowledgeable and competent. In my day, it reported accurately on Gorbachev's reforms when the CIA leaders were advising that Gorbachev had the same aims as his predecessors.

This is where due diligence comes in. The first question responsible journalists and politicians should have asked is "Why is INR not represented? Does it have a different opinion? If so, what is that opinion? Most likely the official answer would have been that this is "classified information." But why should it be classified? If some agency heads come to a conclusion and choose (or are directed) to announce it publicly, doesn't the public deserve to know that one of the key agencies has a different opinion?

The second question should have been directed at the CIA, NSA, and FBI: did all their analysts agree with these conclusions or were they divided in their conclusions? What was the reason behind hand-picking analysts and departing from the customary practice of enlisting analysts already in place and already responsible for following the issues involved?

As I was recently informed by a senior official, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence Research did, in fact, have a different opinion but was not allowed to express it . So the January report was not one of the "intelligence community," but rather of three intelligence agencies, two of which have no responsibility or necessarily any competence to judge foreign intentions. The job of the FBI is to enforce federal law. The job of NSA is to intercept the communications of others and to protect ours. It is not staffed to assess the content of what is intercepted; that task is assumed by others, particularly the CIA, the DIA (if it is military) or the State Department's INR (if it is political).

The second thing to remember is that reports of the intelligence agencies reflect the views of the heads of the agencies and are not necessarily a consensus of their analysts' views. The heads of both the CIA and FBI are political appointments, while the NSA chief is a military officer; his agency is a collector of intelligence rather than an analyst of its import, except in the fields of cryptography and communications security.

One striking thing about the press coverage and Congressional discussion of the January report, and of subsequent statements by CIA, FBI, and NSA heads is that questions were never posed regarding the position of the State Department's INR, or whether the analysts in the agencies cited were in total agreement with the conclusions.

Let's put these questions aside for the moment and look at the report itself. On the first page of text, the following statement leapt to my attention:

We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election. The US Intelligence Community is charged with monitoring and assessing the intentions, capabilities, and actions of foreign actors; it does not analyze US political processes or US public opinion.

Now, how can one judge whether activity "interfered" with an election without assessing its impact? After all, if the activity had no impact on the outcome of the election, it could not be properly termed interference. This disclaimer, however, has not prevented journalists and politicians from citing the report as proof that "Russia interfered" in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

As for particulars, the report is full of assertion, innuendo, and description of "capabilities" but largely devoid of any evidence to substantiate its assertions. This is "explained" by claiming that much of the evidence is classified and cannot be disclosed without revealing sources and methods. The assertions are made with "high confidence" or occasionally, "moderate confidence." Having read many intelligence reports I can tell you that if there is irrefutable evidence of something it will be stated as a fact. The use of the term "high confidence" is what most normal people would call "our best guess." "Moderate confidence" means "some of our analysts think this might be true."

Among the assertions are that a persona calling itself "Guccifer 2.0" is an instrument of the GRU, and that it hacked the emails on the Democratic National Committee's computer and conveyed them to Wikileaks. What the report does not explain is that it is easy for a hacker or foreign intelligence service to leave a false trail. In fact, a program developed by CIA with NSA assistance to do just that has been leaked and published.

Retired senior NSA technical experts have examined the "Guccifer 2.0" data on the web and have concluded that "Guccifer 2.0's" data did not involve a hack across the web but was locally downloaded. Further, the data had been tampered with and manipulated, leading to the conclusion that "Guccifer 2.0" is a total fabrication.

The report's assertions regarding the supply of the DNC emails to Wikileaks are dubious, but its final statement in this regard is important: "Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries." In other words, what was disclosed was the truth! So, Russians are accused of "degrading our democracy" by revealing that the DNC was trying to fix the nomination of a particular candidate rather than allowing the primaries and state caucuses to run their course. I had always thought that transparency is consistent with democratic values. Apparently those who think that the truth can degrade democracy have a rather bizarre -- to put it mildly–concept of democracy.

Most people, hearing that it is a "fact" that "Russia" interfered in our election must think that Russian government agents hacked into vote counting machines and switched votes to favor a particular candidate. This, indeed, would be scary, and would justify the most painful sanctions. But this is the one thing that the "intelligence" report of January 6, 2017, states did not happen. Here is what it said: " DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying ."

This is an important statement by an agency that is empowered to assess the impact of foreign activity on the United States. Why was it not consulted regarding other aspects of the study? Or -- was it in fact consulted and refused to endorse the findings? Another obvious question any responsible journalist or competent politician should have asked.

Prominent American journalists and politicians seized upon this shabby, politically motivated, report as proof of "Russian interference" in the U.S. election without even the pretense of due diligence. They have objectively acted as co-conspirators in an effort to block any improvement in relations with Russia, even though cooperation with Russia to deal with common dangers is vital to both countries.

This is only part of the story of how, without good reason, U.S.-Russian relations have become dangerously confrontational. God willin and the crick don't rise, I'll be musing about other aspects soon.

Thanks to Ray McGovern and Bill Binney for their research assistance.

Jack F. Matlock, Jr.
Booneville, Tennessee
June 29, 2018

[Jul 03, 2018] Just over a year ago, supposed Wikileaks source Seth Rich was assassinated

Jul 03, 2018 | www.unz.com

Carlton Meyer , Website July 2, 2018 at 4:36 am GMT

And it goes on today. Just over a year ago, Wikileaks source Seth Rich was assassinated. Fox News and lefty Jimmy Dore reported this, until the Deep State put the screws on and they both retracted with bogus stories to "correct" their errors. No one talks about this anymore.

[Jul 03, 2018] MoA - British Parliament Confirms 'Conspiracy Theory' - Torture and Renditions Continue

Other patterns on behaviour of British government suggest their nefarious role in Skripal poisoning scandal
Notable quotes:
"... What else to expect from "Christian colonialists" but hypocrisy and double speak! "Many commit the same crime with a very different result. One bears a cross for his crime; another a crown." ― Juvenal, The Satires ..."
"... Most Christian Colonial wars are fake wars against weak, or weakened, countries for 2 streams of Private Profit using Public Funds. ..."
"... Western looting of Libya netted "someone"(s) more than $1 Trillion in gold and currency reserves alone. Iraq lost historical artifacts of inestimable value. The Friends & Relatives crowd will be perpetually pissed with Putin for ruining Christian Colonialism's plan to loot Damascus. ..."
"... I hate to add another layer of shit on a very deep pile, when it comes to my u k but ! Could the academics here take a look at the time lines concerning the last general election and referendum compared to the 3 terrorist attacks about the same time. That is what kept may in power! Compare to for instances the fake Salisbury incident and east Douma Chem incident. All same patten ! I dug deep but don't let me influence enyone. To add, look at the timing of the grenfail tower fire, re election. I'l just leave this here. ..."
"... Talking about fake wars, bombing functioning ME countries back to the Stone Age and looting them, and "Israel" being a vociferous promoter of the Iraq & Syria Fake Wars, does anyone know how 'lootable' Iran is? ..."
"... Another astonishing thing about all this is the "liberal" media MSM or however you choose to call the corporate establishment press has always gone along with all the coverups. But things have changed and things are changing. ..."
Jul 03, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Jun 29, 2018 11:39:28 AM | 1

Read Murray's blog entry prior to b's, and it's extremely damning. The May government must be thrown out and the notables from all post-911 UK governments must be charged with over the crimes they've committed--including the obstruction of those crimes investigations. This report also shows we ought to consider Skripal Affair as 100% falsehood as the May government has less than zero credibility on anything, which is one of the reasons it must be tossed. I wonder if there're enough Corbynites capable of unseating the "Blue Tories" to bring a new revitalized People's Labour Party back into power so that justice can be served.
james , Jun 29, 2018 12:16:26 PM | 4
craig murray and b are to be commended for addressing this ongoing issue..

we're back to the issue of accountability and again - nothing has changed..as karlof1 and worldblee note - this must be addressed and someone must be held accountable for this, or it will continue.

so - is the uk trying to be like the uae/ksa of the north? maybe they could take up headchopping as well? i am not sure what country is more backward - uk or usa... in this race to the bottom, both countries are fully supportive of these regressive regimes in uae/ksa and fully onside with the war on yemen which they must profit from in order for them to justify it... for me - justifying murder and mayhem based on profit is a sign of a really sick culture, but it is fully embraced by many of the so called democratic western countries, including the one i live in - canada... as far as leadership is concerned - there is a huge gap and no one is speaking out on any of it in the political spectrum as i know of... meanwhile we have to thank b and craig murray for shining a light on this as a constant reminder of just how backward the so called civilized countries are here in 2018..

james , Jun 29, 2018 12:18:54 PM | 5
and - Theresa May is a complete sleazeball.. Trump isn't much different or he would be addressing this too...
ex-SA , Jun 29, 2018 1:02:55 PM | 9
What else to expect from "Christian colonialists" but hypocrisy and double speak! "Many commit the same crime with a very different result. One bears a cross for his crime; another a crown." ― Juvenal, The Satires
Hoarsewhisperer , Jun 29, 2018 1:23:08 PM | 11
There are two aspects of this Christian Colonial (Western) clusterfuck which are particularly galling for The People in whose name these crimes are committed:

1. Torture was used to extract false confessions.
2. Most Christian Colonial wars are fake wars against weak, or weakened, countries for 2 streams of Private Profit using Public Funds.
----(a) The M-IC makes vast profits from Weapons (win or lose).
----(b) Their wealthy Friends & Relatives get first pick of the spoils of Looting, at a big discount.

Western looting of Libya netted "someone"(s) more than $1 Trillion in gold and currency reserves alone. Iraq lost historical artifacts of inestimable value. The Friends & Relatives crowd will be perpetually pissed with Putin for ruining Christian Colonialism's plan to loot Damascus.

Mark2 , Jun 29, 2018 1:45:03 PM | 12
I hate to add another layer of shit on a very deep pile, when it comes to my u k but ! Could the academics here take a look at the time lines concerning the last general election and referendum compared to the 3 terrorist attacks about the same time. That is what kept may in power! Compare to for instances the fake Salisbury incident and east Douma Chem incident. All same patten ! I dug deep but don't let me influence enyone. To add, look at the timing of the grenfail tower fire, re election. I'l just leave this here.
Hoarsewhisperer , Jun 29, 2018 2:03:06 PM | 13
Talking about fake wars, bombing functioning ME countries back to the Stone Age and looting them, and "Israel" being a vociferous promoter of the Iraq & Syria Fake Wars, does anyone know how 'lootable' Iran is?

Rumors says that Iran has very ancient roots and one imagines it may have artifacts going back 5000+ years, although I've never heard them talked about.

Babyl-on , Jun 29, 2018 2:12:11 PM | 14
Another astonishing thing about all this is the "liberal" media MSM or however you choose to call the corporate establishment press has always gone along with all the coverups. But things have changed and things are changing.

There is a not quite parallel story to this. The child separations - did you ever hear from the corp. media about the 5,100+ children separated from their families in 2011 by Obama. Nor much about how Obama had deported more than Trump at this point in his term.

I try to follow press from several countries and what I notice now is that EVEN MODI is moving away from the US. The general views is - hay, we want to trade and get along we want development but we have to deal with this big pain in the ass we have to spend a lot if time and energy dealing with the US that we could use for development.

Trump is doing the world a favor by bringing all the criminal behavior of the US into the open, its been there all along.

The liberal press which is hounding Trump over the issue now were silent for a decade when "liberals" were in power have a Pyrrhic victory, it will come back on them.

If this trade crazy stuff drives Modi to join the B&R the US commercial/corporate global empire is well and truly over.
Let us appeal to the gods.

[Jul 03, 2018] Donald Trump has been business partners with George Soros in at least $6 Billion in properties for more than a decade before his candidacy. They were even codefendants in a RICO suit (organized crime, as in the Jewish Mafia).

Jul 03, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

integer @35. Not a fan of George Soros? Ready to peak into the rabbit hole?

Donald Trump has been business partners with George Soros in at least $6 Billion in properties for more than a decade before his candidacy. They were even codefendants in a RICO suit (organized crime, as in the Jewish Mafia).

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2004-10-28/news/0410280265_1_donald-trump-soros-fund-management-blackacre-institutional-capital-management

http://www.pionline.com/article/20081009/ONLINE/810099993/developer-sues-soros-fortress-cerberus

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/realestate/commercial/the-kushner-companies-deal-for-666-fifth-avenue-avoids-foreclosure.html

After spending 17 years at Goldman Sachs, Trump's new Treasure Secretary, Steven Mnuchin ran OneWest Bank in CA. Guess who he worked for? George frigging Soros.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2014/07/22/john-paulson-and-george-soros-score-big-selling-onewest-bank-for-3-4-billion/#32e7ee635ab0

So, Trump is partners with infamous globalist atheist George Soros, Orthodox Jews, Islamic Extremists, Goldman Sachs and GHW Bush's Carlyle Group.

And one more morsel to ponder. The CEO of CNN (portrayed as rabidly anti-Trump) is one of a long list of Globalist Zionists who have been Trump supporters for decades.

http://nojeveje.net/2017/01/23/trumps-jewish-elite-mafia-5-dancing-israelis/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RplnqsLas0g

Posted by: Daniel | Jul 2, 2018 4:05:48 PM | 55

[Jun 28, 2018] What is John Bolton s role in Trump s ME drama?

With Mueller Trump is on a very short leash indeed, so I doubt that he has great freedom of maneuver.
Notable quotes:
"... Trump has a free hand from his base to negotiate peaceful coexistence with Russia, but he nevertheless must successfully deal with the passion of the neocon wing of the Borg (foreign policy establishment). They still swoon at the thought of the ongoing renewal of the Cold War. ..."
"... John Bolton is an arch-neocon, a neocon's neocon. Trump has sent him to Moscow to arrange an agenda, date and location for a meeting with Vladimir Putin. IMO this is a stroke of genius. What it does is put an enemy of good US-Russia relations in charge of arranging the schedule for discussions to improve US-Russia relations. In LBJ's vulgarism, Bolton is going to be inside the tent peeing out rather than outside peeing in. Having arranged the meeting, he will be personally invested in its success. How sweet that is! ..."
"... People want to believe so badly. I also want to believe, but I live in the real world. What happened the last time Trump made noises about leaving Syria to its own devices, most recently in April? Instant false flag, that's what. With Trump, it's worked twice already, I see no reason that it will not work a third or fourth time, or as often as needed. ..."
"... Without Russia as a selected enemy the US Army, with its expanding budget and end-strength has no important raison d'ętre , and what will the Borg do about that? First we can expect a large increase in the "Russia-bad" propaganda, similar to that on Iran (the greatest state sponsor of this and that). So I suppose Bolton is busy on his back-channel, etc. ..."
"... Between the end of Peace of Vienna and the start of Peace of Yalta there was a 50-year interval - filled with 2 world wars. Let us hope it be different this time. ..."
"... My biggest concern remains that Bibi's support itself will not guarantee acquiescence from the ultra-nationalist elements in Israel and their supporters elsewhere, who want to drag the US into the war. If the folks that carried out Khan Sheikhoun & other false flag CW attacks can be controlled, peace may have a chance. Otherwise, Trump's hand could still be forced. ..."
"... A stroke of genius. Bolton either demonstrates his obedience or is sacked, along with most of other neocons, for trying to spike the upcoming Putin summit. ..."
Jun 28, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

(editorial)

On a gestalt basis it seems to me from all the bits and pieces of information and rumor that DJT is attempting "The Deal of the Century!" (an episode or two of his soon to be award winning series on the subject of "The Greatest President.")

Russian cooperation in this is clearly needed. Trump is blessedly lacking in ideological fervor. His Deplorable base is also a bit short on ideology being focused on wages, prices, taxes and other everyday living issues. Their patriotism expresses itself in devotion to the flag and the anthem and a willingness to serve in the armed forces, something increasingly absent in the "resistance."

Trump has a free hand from his base to negotiate peaceful coexistence with Russia, but he nevertheless must successfully deal with the passion of the neocon wing of the Borg (foreign policy establishment). They still swoon at the thought of the ongoing renewal of the Cold War.

John Bolton is an arch-neocon, a neocon's neocon. Trump has sent him to Moscow to arrange an agenda, date and location for a meeting with Vladimir Putin. IMO this is a stroke of genius. What it does is put an enemy of good US-Russia relations in charge of arranging the schedule for discussions to improve US-Russia relations. In LBJ's vulgarism, Bolton is going to be inside the tent peeing out rather than outside peeing in. Having arranged the meeting, he will be personally invested in its success. How sweet that is!

Trumps is IMO trying for a grand ME bargain to be achieved with Russian help:

  1. Peace in Syria in the context of abandonment of regime change. Trump the pragmatist recognizes that the R+6 forces have won the civil war and, therefore he wishes to accept the sunk costs of previous American ineptitude in Syria and to walk away. US Embassy Amman has signaled to the FSA rebels in SW Syria that they should not expect the US to defend them. This is a traditional American stab in the back for guerrilla allies but the warning indicates to me that some group in the US Government (probably the CIA) has enough conscience to want to give warning. As soon as that warning was issued the rate of surrenders to the SAA rose.
  2. The US has thus made it clear that the SAA and Russian forces in Syria have a free hand in the SW and it seems that Israeli air and missile attacks are unlikely against the SW offensive. This has been insured through a Russian mandate that Hizbullah and IRGC dominated Shia militias stay out of the fight in Deraa and Quneitra Provinces.
  3. The Egyptians have been talking to Hamas about their willingness to enter into a hudna (religiously sanctioned truce) with Israel. Hamas has frequently offered this before. Such truces are renewable and are often for 10 years. Kushner's team thinks it has attained Natanyahhu's support for this. The deal would supposedly include; a Gaza-Egyptian industrial zone in the area of Raffa, an airport, a seaport. In return Hamas would be expected to police the truce from their side of the border. People on SST who have deep access in Israel doubt the sincerity of apparent Israeli assent, but there is little doubt I think that DJT considers this part of the Grand Bargain he is attempting to forge.

Nowhere in any of this is anything concerning Iran and I assume that regime change remains the policy. Nor is there anything about Saudi Arabia and the UAE's mercenary manned war in Yemen. Ah, well, pilgrims, everything in its time. pl


Sid Finster , 9 hours ago

People want to believe so badly. I also want to believe, but I live in the real world. What happened the last time Trump made noises about leaving Syria to its own devices, most recently in April? Instant false flag, that's what. With Trump, it's worked twice already, I see no reason that it will not work a third or fourth time, or as often as needed.
Don Bacon , 9 hours ago
Without Russia as a selected enemy the US Army, with its expanding budget and end-strength has no important raison d'ętre , and what will the Borg do about that? First we can expect a large increase in the "Russia-bad" propaganda, similar to that on Iran (the greatest state sponsor of this and that). So I suppose Bolton is busy on his back-channel, etc.
Pat Lang Mod -> Don Bacon , 9 hours ago
I suppose you mean the US Armed Forces, not the US Army.
Don Bacon -> Pat Lang , 6 hours ago
No, I mean the Army is especially invested in Europe and has been. I attended C&GSC at the peak of Vietnam and in exercises they were still mostly concerned with the Fulda Gap, division trains, etc. Big Army. Similar to how Army is going now, back to their roots so to speak. Even when they claimed they were short of funds, they found a way to send forces to Europe based on the claims that after Crimea, Russia was (and is) a threat to. . .the U.S.?

Peace with Russia would be a severe blow to Army especially with the shift to Indo-Pacific which involves Navy and Marines, and Army not much. I know Army was greatly involved with island operations in WWII, but China is not Japan regarding imperialism, IMO, and anyhow island invasions are not popular in Army.

So I look for a beefed up "Russia threat" campaign to counter Trump, and insider Bolton to be a big part of it.

Terra Cotta Woolpuller -> Pat Lang , 4 hours ago
Good analysis of the political implications of having Bolton establishing a summit as it worked with Pompeo. Always keep your friends close and your enemies closer good way to clean up the nest of venomous asps.
Michael Stojanovic , 9 hours ago
Qatar/Turkey may be an impediment/wild card, given it's Muslim brotherhood connections and leanings and strong backing for Hamas.
Pat Lang Mod -> Michael Stojanovic , 8 hours ago
It seems that Hamas has agreed.
Michael Stojanovic -> Pat Lang , 6 hours ago
Gen Sisi must have made an offer too good to resist. We know the House of Saud will finance it. Are they going to political legitimatize Hamas, turn Gaza in a statelet ? Perhaps Hamas sees, or is being threaten with the money spigot being turned off ? The only way to get money will be their share of offshore Natural Gas ? All for Hamas perhaps ? Nothing buys peace faster then lining a whole lot of pockets. With more money and Airports and a Shipping port, opens dangerous doors. Is Israel ready for that ? How will that be monitored ? So many damn questions. This may prove more problematic then the status quo, in the long run. Something does have to be done, the conditions in Gaza are unacceptable.
smoothieX12 . , 10 hours ago
Excellent analysis. In related news, a week or so ago semi-official Russian Vzglyad made a first media shot across the bow for Iran in which it stressed that the manner of Iran's "presence" in Syria is a complicating factor.
Babak Makkinejad -> smoothieX12 . , 9 hours ago
Russia cannot dislodge Iran out of Syria. And why should she try? And to what purpose?

Is there a new ABM Treaty in the works? Another SALT? Another Peace of Yalta?

smoothieX12 . -> Babak Makkinejad , 8 hours ago
Russia doesn't want to "dislodge" Iran from Syria but she needs Iran out of the border area with Israel. This is the key to a new arrangement, including, in the long run, Iran's security.

Is there a new ABM Treaty in the works? Another SALT? Another Peace of Yalta?

First two are important but are not clear and present danger for Russia for a number of reasons. Militarization of space is more important now. The last point, however, is extremely important because either there will be some kind of new geopolitical arrangement or we will see probability of a global military conflict grow exponentially.

Babak Makkinejad -> smoothieX12 . , 7 hours ago
Iranians do not need to be at the border area. All they need is to deploy their true and tested method of arming Syria with tens of thousands of precision rockets aimed at Haifa and Tel-Aviv. It worked for North Koreans.

No global peace is in the works.

Between the end of Peace of Vienna and the start of Peace of Yalta there was a 50-year interval - filled with 2 world wars. Let us hope it be different this time.

smoothieX12 . -> Babak Makkinejad , 5 hours ago
Between the end of Peace of Vienna and the start of Peace of Yalta there
was a 50-year interval - filled with 2 world wars. Let us hope it be
different this time.

It must be different, plus I disagree with historic parallel--two entirely different paradigms both in warfare, geopolitical balance and media.

Barbara Ann , 10 hours ago
Well I certainly wish The Greatest President luck. Who knows, I'm done underestimating the guy.

My biggest concern remains that Bibi's support itself will not guarantee acquiescence from the ultra-nationalist elements in Israel and their supporters elsewhere, who want to drag the US into the war. If the folks that carried out Khan Sheikhoun & other false flag CW attacks can be controlled, peace may have a chance. Otherwise, Trump's hand could still be forced.

The point of maximum danger appears to be at hand, given your characterization of the Daraa op as "betting the farm". Today's grant of new powers to the OPCW to apportion blame (designed to side-step the Russian veto at the UNSC) now means this body can effectively determine casus belli . Let us pray the OPCW will not have reason to exercise its new powers in Syria.

Tony , 11 hours ago
Let the hand wringing begin...
https://www.bbc.com/news/wo...
EEngineer , 12 hours ago
A stroke of genius. Bolton either demonstrates his obedience or is sacked, along with most of other neocons, for trying to spike the upcoming Putin summit.

On topic #2. If the SAA isn't feeling it's oats by now, forcing them fight a major battle that culminates a campaign by themselves would seem to be the ideal way to exorcise any remaining self doubts and engender a lasting esprit de corps. Stupid is what stupid does... Once these guys finish up in the SW and head east enforce it'll be show time.

[Jun 28, 2018] Why FBI was not able to examine DNC server ? Was it Lorettaa Lynch that prevented this

Jun 28, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden Thu, 06/28/2018 - 08:13 43 SHARES

After Peter Strzok failed to address the concerns of Republicans by trying to explain away his anti-Trump texts as "just an intimate conversation" with his mistress (former FBI lawyer Lisa Page) during yesterday's marathon closed-door session, President Trump chimed in this morning with a tweet claiming that Strzok had been given "poor marks" on the hearing because he "refused to answer many questions."

The president also reaffirmed that there was "no Collusion and the Witch Hunt, headed by 14 Angry Democrats and others who are totally conflicted, is Rigged!"

me title=

The president then turned his attention to the DNC Server, asking once again why the FBI wasn't allowed to closely examine it? The DNC never furnished an explanation, despite Wikileaks emails revealing that former spy Christopher Steele had once filed a memo claiming that " Russian agents within the Democratic party structure itself" were involved with the theft.

me title=

What's even more suspicious is the fact that the DOJ is refusing to release intercepted material that could reveal that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch conspired to rig the Clinton investigation. This, even as Senate is trying to subpoena her.


TBT or not TBT -> IridiumRebel Thu, 06/28/2018 - 09:02 Permalink

This guy. This fucking guy. Still drawing a salary. That's what is incredible here.

gregga777 -> TBT or not TBT Thu, 06/28/2018 - 09:23 Permalink

This guy. This fucking guy. Still drawing a salary. That's what is incredible here.

The wheels of justice grind slowly and exceedingly fine. As a Marine I sometimes escorted Marines to courts martial hearings. They were still drawing their pay, still eating in the mess hall, maybe they were sleeping on a bunk in a holding cell. But, they were still Marines until the sentence was pronounced and any appeals exhausted. Some were still Marines afterwards just a little poorer and missing some stripes. But, they got what were largely fair hearings for the military. Strzok is going to get his Justice unless someone a little more impatient splatters his brains all over the sidewalk.

MK ULTRA Alpha -> gregga777 Thu, 06/28/2018 - 10:17 Permalink

Gregg, yesterday you were raising hell saying the Marines will save the day. I need to tell you and I know it's hard to believe. There are young Marine social justice warrior communist. I've met them. Not one or two many Marines and Army, vets in general.

So not all of the Marine Corps is right wing conservative. That was the impression you gave and I didn't have time to add the data of the Marines that I've met who are in the activist movement of the social justice warrior communist. This is a generational issue, our generation is in conflict with their generation.

I don't blame them because of the high level of corruption in this nation, perhaps the shock of 9/11 being a fraud, I don't know, but I noticed this back in 2010.

The 9/11 event had a big impact on many young peoples mind, the trust of government issue is big.

And another anecdotal is a young 82nd Airborne soldier who kept asking me at work about what was behind the curtain, like one world government etc. he wanted to know everything, so young people are not following the line of reasoning we followed and MSM parrots.

Yes, prior service older vets like you are important to us, but I want to make sure you understand, just because someone is a Marine or 82nd soldier doesn't mean they're politically reliable for our way of thinking. That's concerning when five police officer were killed and many wounded in Dallas by a radicalized vet.

That's the danger, and we think the army of vets in this nation will automatically side with us in a race/civil war. The military skills demonstrated in Dallas was a warning of things to come. The other component, the number of vets still killing themselves each day is around 30-40 and suicide is increasing, not decreasing in the overall population.

Good Luck

boattrash -> TBT or not TBT Thu, 06/28/2018 - 09:24 Permalink

" What's even more suspicious is the fact that the DOJ is refusing to release intercepted material that could reveal that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch conspired to rig the Clinton investigation."

As to the WJC/Lynch tarmac meeting..."If you handle this properly Loretta, rest assured you'll get that SCOTUS Appointment after the election."

chubbar -> pc_babe Thu, 06/28/2018 - 09:28 Permalink

So much for the idea that Strzok is co-operating with the investigation. It's pretty clear that he isn't and that this whole meme that Priestap, Page, et al are co-operating witnesses is pretty much bullshit, unfortunately.

OCnStiggs -> Deep Snorkeler Thu, 06/28/2018 - 09:45 Permalink

Watch and weep you "Useless Idiot."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cYZ8dUgPuU&feature=youtu.be

DjangoCat -> OCnStiggs Thu, 06/28/2018 - 10:15 Permalink

Great video by Joe Masepoes "Q - The Plan to Save the World". This is the best synopsis of what is actually going down that I have seen yet.

Many of us have followed Q for some time. For those who have not, watch this video. 13 minutes only.

+1000

PS For those who have been following Q, this video will make you weep.

Tristan Ludlow -> Miskondukt Thu, 06/28/2018 - 08:49 Permalink

PS "Texts taken out of context"
PS "While emotional over the election, I conduct myself w/ upmost integrity w/o bias while undertaking any such investigation, especially a high-profile case against the POTUS."
PS "In hindsight, it was a bad idea to openly discuss my feelings, but, in no way did those feelings impact my ability to conduct a fair and proper investigation - we followed where the "facts" took us."
PS "I decline to answer that question on advice from counsel."
: When you state "where 'facts' led us" - what 'facts' are you referring to? To date, there has been zero evidence of any such collusion or connections between the Trump campaign and Russia." In fact, the only facts discovered thus far have been between the Clinton camp and Russia and other foreign groups ."
PS "On advice of counsel, I decline to answer that question"
PS "Because of the ongoing investigation, such answers may violate the security of such investigations ."
: "Mr S, I believe nobody here is buying what you are selling. I believe there was/is a serious effort on the part of people more senior than you to remove Mr Trump from office out of fear of what this Administration may uncover. I believe you are being dishonest in your answers and frankly shocked you agreed to come here today. I believe everyone on this panel (minus those from the other side of the aisle) knew exactly what your answers would be and if you think we are going to sit here and accept these answers you would be a foolish. We are also following the facts and once we uncover more (which we will) we will act accordingly. I'm glad you retained counsel - you'll need one and hopefully they are very good."
.

Q

[Jun 28, 2018] Did Senator Warner and Comey 'Collude' on Russia-gate by Ray McGovern

Notable quotes:
"... The U.S. was in talks for a deal with Julian Assange but then FBI Director James Comey ordered an end to negotiations after Assange offered to prove Russia was not involved in the DNC leak, as Ray McGovern explains. ..."
"... Special to Consortium News ..."
"... The report does not say what led Comey to intervene to ruin the talks with Assange. But it came after Assange had offered to "provide technical evidence and discussion regarding who did not engage in the DNC releases," Solomon quotes WikiLeaks' intermediary with the government as saying. It would be a safe assumption that Assange was offering to prove that Russia was not WikiLeaks' source of the DNC emails. ..."
"... If that was the reason Comey and Warner ruined the talks, as is likely, it would reveal a cynical decision to put U.S. intelligence agents and highly sophisticated cybertools at risk, rather than allow Assange to at least attempt to prove that Russia was not behind the DNC leak. ..."
"... On March 31, 2017, though, WikiLeaks released the most damaging disclosure up to that point from what it called "Vault 7" -- a treasure trove of CIA cybertools leaked from CIA files. This disclosure featured the tool "Marble Framework," which enabled the CIA to hack into computers, disguise who hacked in, and falsely attribute the hack to someone else by leaving so-called tell-tale signs -- like Cyrillic, for example. The CIA documents also showed that the "Marble" tool had been employed in 2016. ..."
"... In fact, VIPS and independent forensic investigators, have performed what former FBI Director Comey -- at first inexplicably, now not so inexplicably -- failed to do when the so-called "Russian hack" of the DNC was first reported. In July 2017 VIPS published its key findings with supporting data. ..."
"... Why did then FBI Director Comey fail to insist on getting direct access to the DNC computers in order to follow best-practice forensics to discover who intruded into the DNC computers? (Recall, at the time Sen. John McCain and others were calling the "Russian hack" no less than an "act of war.") A 7th grader can now figure that out. ..."
Jun 27, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Did Sen. Warner and Comey 'Collude' on Russia-gate? June 27, 2018 • 68 Comments

The U.S. was in talks for a deal with Julian Assange but then FBI Director James Comey ordered an end to negotiations after Assange offered to prove Russia was not involved in the DNC leak, as Ray McGovern explains.

By Ray McGovern
Special to Consortium News

An explosive report by investigative journalist John Solomon on the opinion page of Monday's edition of The Hill sheds a bright light on how Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and then-FBI Director James Comey collaborated to prevent WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange from discussing "technical evidence ruling out certain parties [read Russia]" in the controversial leak of Democratic Party emails to WikiLeaks during the 2016 election.

A deal that was being discussed last year between Assange and U.S. government officials would have given Assange "limited immunity" to allow him to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been exiled for six years. In exchange, Assange would agree to limit through redactions "some classified CIA information he might release in the future," according to Solomon, who cited "interviews and a trove of internal DOJ documents turned over to Senate investigators." Solomon even provided a copy of the draft immunity deal with Assange.

But Comey's intervention to stop the negotiations with Assange ultimately ruined the deal, Solomon says, quoting "multiple sources." With the prospective agreement thrown into serious doubt, Assange "unleashed a series of leaks that U.S. officials say damaged their cyber warfare capabilities for a long time to come." These were the Vault 7 releases, which led then CIA Director Mike Pompeo to call WikiLeaks "a hostile intelligence service."

Solomon's report provides reasons why Official Washington has now put so much pressure on Ecuador to keep Assange incommunicado in its embassy in London.

Assange: Came close to a deal with the U.S. (Photo credit: New Media Days / Peter Erichsen)

The report does not say what led Comey to intervene to ruin the talks with Assange. But it came after Assange had offered to "provide technical evidence and discussion regarding who did not engage in the DNC releases," Solomon quotes WikiLeaks' intermediary with the government as saying. It would be a safe assumption that Assange was offering to prove that Russia was not WikiLeaks' source of the DNC emails.

If that was the reason Comey and Warner ruined the talks, as is likely, it would reveal a cynical decision to put U.S. intelligence agents and highly sophisticated cybertools at risk, rather than allow Assange to at least attempt to prove that Russia was not behind the DNC leak.

The greater risk to Warner and Comey apparently would have been if Assange provided evidence that Russia played no role in the 2016 leaks of DNC documents.

Missteps and Stand Down

In mid-February 2017, in a remarkable display of naiveté, Adam Waldman, Assange's pro bono attorney who acted as the intermediary in the talks, asked Warner if the Senate Intelligence Committee staff would like any contact with Assange to ask about Russia or other issues. Waldman was apparently oblivious to Sen. Warner's stoking of Russia-gate.

Warner contacted Comey and, invoking his name, instructed Waldman to "stand down and end the discussions with Assange," Waldman told Solomon. The "stand down" instruction "did happen," according to another of Solomon's sources with good access to Warner. However, Waldman's counterpart attorney David Laufman , an accomplished federal prosecutor picked by the Justice Departent to work the government side of the CIA-Assange fledgling deal, told Waldman, "That's B.S. You're not standing down, and neither am I."

But the damage had been done. When word of the original stand-down order reached WikiLeaks, trust evaporated, putting an end to two months of what Waldman called "constructive, principled discussions that included the Department of Justice."

The two sides had come within inches of sealing the deal. Writing to Laufman on March 28, 2017, Waldman gave him Assange's offer to discuss "risk mitigation approaches relating to CIA documents in WikiLeaks' possession or control, such as the redaction of Agency personnel in hostile jurisdictions," in return for "an acceptable immunity and safe passage agreement."

On March 31, 2017, though, WikiLeaks released the most damaging disclosure up to that point from what it called "Vault 7" -- a treasure trove of CIA cybertools leaked from CIA files. This disclosure featured the tool "Marble Framework," which enabled the CIA to hack into computers, disguise who hacked in, and falsely attribute the hack to someone else by leaving so-called tell-tale signs -- like Cyrillic, for example. The CIA documents also showed that the "Marble" tool had been employed in 2016.

Misfeasance or Malfeasance

Comey: Ordered an end to talks with Assange.

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which includes among our members two former Technical Directors of the National Security Agency, has repeatedly called attention to its conclusion that the DNC emails were leaked -- not "hacked" by Russia or anyone else (and, later, our suspicion that someone may have been playing Marbles, so to speak).

In fact, VIPS and independent forensic investigators, have performed what former FBI Director Comey -- at first inexplicably, now not so inexplicably -- failed to do when the so-called "Russian hack" of the DNC was first reported. In July 2017 VIPS published its key findings with supporting data.

Two month later , VIPS published the results of follow-up experiments conducted to test the conclusions reached in July.

Why did then FBI Director Comey fail to insist on getting direct access to the DNC computers in order to follow best-practice forensics to discover who intruded into the DNC computers? (Recall, at the time Sen. John McCain and others were calling the "Russian hack" no less than an "act of war.") A 7th grader can now figure that out.

Asked on January 10, 2017 by Senate Intelligence Committee chair Richard Burr (R-NC) whether direct access to the servers and devices would have helped the FBI in their investigation, Comey replied : "Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server that's involved, so it's the best evidence."

At that point, Burr and Warner let Comey down easy. Hence, it should come as no surprise that, according to one of John Solomon's sources, Sen. Warner (who is co-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee) kept Sen. Burr apprised of his intervention into the negotiation with Assange, leading to its collapse.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst for a total of 30 years and prepared and briefed, one-on-one, the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985.

If you enjoyed this original article please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.

[Jun 26, 2018] Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey and credibility of his story

Jun 26, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

SERIOUSLY?!!! - Did Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey have time to visit his home after he was exposed to the poison but before he exhibited symptoms? Or did someone deliberately pour bucketfuls of Novichok into his home?

'This Must Be a Joke!' Twitter Loses It Over UK's Latest Blunder in Skripal Saga

Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, who also fell ill after being exposed to Novichok, receiving £430,000 in compensation for his family home.

Actually I suspect there is nothing wrong with the house. It is Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey that is too poisonous to be allowed to roam free. He will be given a new identity, transferred to the USA and released into the custody of some FBI witness protection program. He must never be allowed to speak to public.

The secret that Nick Bailey must never reveal is that he was poisoned two days after the Skripals, most likely in the evidence room at the police station by the £100,000 of cash in the red bag .

Posted by: Petri Krohn | Jun 24, 2018 4:33:39 PM | 23

[Jun 25, 2018] Fake News for A Fake Scandal The Definitive Guide to Russian Collusion Hoaxes by Roger Stone

Notable quotes:
"... FBI informant for at least 17 years ..."
"... unless he had some sort of U.S. government dispensation ..."
"... be a 17-year FBI informant ..."
Jun 25, 2018 | stonecoldtruth.com

Now halfway into the 2 nd year of the Trump presidency it is clear that what seemed to be a severe national hissy fit being thrown by bitterly-defeated leftist Democrats after the 2016 election, gradually morphing into a chronic collective temper tantrum, has in fact turned out to be one of the most severe cases of mass psychosis in modern history.

This all-too-real mental derangement is manifested in seething, unhinged, pathological rage that has utterly consumed the entire Democrat party and countless authoritarian leftist malcontents across America, who have literally lost their minds thanks to Donald Trump's stunning victory. Their inability to control or contain it, even as it is becomes their steady undoing on a national scale, only makes it that much more disturbing.

The Democrat party's legion of arrogant simple-minded fake news media propagandists have only made matters worse for their fellow traveler politicians. No matter how badly their clumsy, malignant subversions are backfiring in their faces (the Russian collusion hoax being Exhibit A), no matter how sloppy, desperate and even absurd their ham-handed manipulations have become, apparently they will simply never cease their vicious crusade to inflict malicious harm on and, if possible, destroy the lives of their political opponents.

President Trump's strongest supporters and closest allies have the misfortune of being the central targets of their psychotic obsession and their most vile, degenerate misbehavior. In one sense it is a badge of honor to be a target of the seditious American left. But it is also a serious challenge to live a normal life at the top of their political kill list. Life as a highly-prized, ruthlessly-hunted target of a rage-driven leftist Democrat/corporate media/deep state lynch mob is no picnic.

Just these last 10 days, the usual cast of fake news jackals set to work deceitfully spinning my own voluntary revelation of a long-forgotten, effectively-pointless encounter almost two years ago with a bizarre individual who used the alias "Henry Greenberg", and claimed he had information relevant to the presidential race.

"Greenberg", whose real name turned out to be Gennady Vasilievich Vostretsov, solicited a meeting with me through my longtime colleague and fellow diehard Trump loyalist Michael Caputo.

I took the meeting. It barely lasted 20 minutes before I walked out, having neither given nor received anything whatsoever from Vostretsov, who I never saw or talked to again. My sole comment after the meeting was to text Michael Caputo that it had been waste of time. We never discussed it again.

Until a few weeks ago, I had not even recalled having the meeting, given that it was the only contact I have ever had with Vostretsov and the result was zilch.

Vostretsov's Russian nationality was of no consequence at the time of the meeting and is of no consequence today, EXCEPT in how it has conveniently created yet another fake news cycle opportunity wherein the media lynch mob could screech for awhile about how a "Trump ally met with a Russian!!!!"

(In case you missed the memo, apparently now it is a crime just to meet with anyone even remotely Russian. Same goes for considering any offer of opposition research .it's all ILLEGAL, no??).

My short-lived one-off meeting with Vostretsov is of no relevance to anything or anyone outside of the fake news unreality that is the Russian collusion delusion world.

Just because Democrats and the media cooked up this hoax to sustain their perpetual campaign of public disinformation and personal destruction doesn't mean sane people have to buy into it.

There is no dispute that the meeting with Vostretsov was a non-starter and I summarily walked away from any involvement with him. The substance of the meeting (or more accurately the lack thereof) is 100% exculpatory of me.

Beyond this, no one has the slightest obligation to entertain or otherwise indulge this Russian collusion madness merely because some cabal of Democrat spinmeisters and their media whores are consumed with chasing their own hoax and dragging the world along with them.

Clearly this cabal is willing to twist any and every conceivable circumstance however it suits their mania to persecute any Trump allies they can. Their attempts to frame and defame their political opponents are, frankly, pure rubbish, along with their histrionic chest-beating in favor of their sleazy objectives.

This story, however, does have a real bombshell. It is not that Vostretsov is a Russian national but that he was an FBI informant for at least 17 years prior to the time he solicited a meeting with me.

Even more explosive is Vostrestov's extensive criminal history, including violent crimes that landed him serious prison time in both Russia (10 years) and the United States.

The bombshell becomes nuclear when one considers how Vostretsov's criminal past would have excluded him from ever being in the United States at the time he tried to lure me into purchasing campaign intelligence, unless he had some sort of U.S. government dispensation such as is given only to criminal informants who are doing the bidding of their FBI patrons and handlers.

These extremely-relevant details, however, have quite deceitfully been either omitted or glossed over by the leftist media megaphonies, in a brazenly-deceitful attempt to re-cast a nothing-nowhere one-time meeting I had over two years ago as some sort of puzzle piece in their disintegrating Russian collusion hoax.

Leftstream media manipulators have purposefully disregarded the most relevant and revealing facts in order to dishonestly reduce their reporting to: "Stone met with a Russian!!!"

Incredible detail and documentation about Vostretsov's murky past and his decades of work as an FBI stooge may be found at the website democratdossier.org

Now the FBI is righteously under massive fire for its unprecedented, undeniable politicization and abuse of its extraordinary law enforcement powers in order to protect Hillary Clinton from prosecution, despite her clear cut crimes, while conspiring to frame Donald Trump and those around him with this bogus Russian collusion rap that the kill-Trump media have been gleefully peddling for nearly two years now.

From democratdossier.org:

" In a remarkable 2015 court affidavit (attached), Vostretsov admitted that he is FBI informant who worked for the agency for more than 17 years. He appears to have traded information about criminal activity for temporary visas provided to him by the FBI. We were able to collect 14 different Significant Public Benefit Parole (SPBP) documents allowing him to enter the US. This type of visa waiver is made available to international persons participating in a law enforcement action as an informant. The steady flow of these special waivers, with upgrades like multi-entry status and extensions, indicate his involvement and success in FBI informant projects. While Vostretsov claimed in the 2015 affidavit he sent to an immigration judge that he stopped working for the FBI that year, it would be safe to assume that if a criminal alien with his immigration background is still in the US today, he is only here with the support from the US government and is still working with the FBI."

So, to summarize: in May 2016 a person using the alias Henry Greenberg solicited a meeting with me, claiming they had information of importance to the presidential race. When I met with this person (who incidentally dressed up like a Trump campaign volunteer) he made no mention of Russia or Russian affairs and said he wanted $2M for what he had and, further, that he expected it would be paid for not by me but by Donald Trump himself.

I immediately suspected this was some sort of shakedown and told the person I was not interested, ending the meeting barely 20 minutes after it began. I never had any contact with this person again.

Two years later, this individual's name comes up, again via my colleague Michael Caputo, and I was reminded of this brief, one-off meeting, so wasteful of my time and pointless, from my view, that I never even recalled it. But then this is the case with 100's upon 100's of glancing encounters I've had with strangers over the course of a nearly two-year presidential campaign, not to mention my other professional and personal pursuits, from filming a documentary to writing multiple books to organizing efforts to beat back the establishment GOP machinations against Trump in the lead-up to the convention.

I most certainly had not thought at the time of the meeting that is was anything in the same universe as doing business with a "Russian", as opposed to being solicited by some random grifter whom I knew little about, either before or after the meeting, and from whom nothing came but a total waste of my time.

Once I recalled this meeting and pieced it together as something far more sinister than I had ever thought, with far greater implications than merely a glancing contact with some shakedown artist, I notified the House Intelligence Committee, and the information was simultaneously provided to the Washington Post.

A normal, rational, objective observer would conclude from all this that 2 years ago, in the midst of a whirlwind presidential campaign, I had a single 20-minute meeting with a random con man who used an alias, who may have been Russian, and about whom I knew literally nothing else.

Further, the meeting produced literally nothing, I took no further action, there was no further contact and I had no further thought about or even recall of it until the individual's name came up recently and took onfar greater dimension once we pieced together what was really going on (an attempted FBI set-up), after which I reported the truth about Mr. Vostrestov's (that he was yet another FBI "lure") to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes.

Seems pretty simple, yes?

Well, not according to the Clinton-Obama leftist media juggernaut, which not only spun this meeting as 'another contact with Russia by a Trump loyalist', but even twisted my own pro-active revelation of it into some sort of proof that I had lied previously. Some of the more brazen propagandists went so far as to misportray my voluntary disclosure as a murky scheme to somehow conceal (in plain sight, no less) long-absent proof they so far have had to manufacture as they go, in order to prop up their Russian collusion conspiracy theory.

Predictably, the most nasty, malicious and pathologically-deceitful partisan media manipulators, epitomized by the glib, shifty leftist ambulance chaser and wannabe Watergate hero narrative flamekeeper Ariel Melber, immediately set about spouting their sanitized half-truth version of this story out of the usual Clinton-Obama propaganda defamation outlets, like MSNBC.

A full complement of fake news artists seized on my revelation of this incident as yet another cheap opportunity to mislead their audiences and, yet again, fire up their tired, repetitious false narrative, based solely on the same manipulative insinuations and factual distortions they have used before in an attempt to cast me as having somehow engaged in some sinister conspiracy.

These media hyenas will never miss a chance to peddle their fabricated version of reality, even where it completely flies in the face of demonstrable facts (unless, of course, you have the clairvoyance to read between the lines, aided by a giant pair of leftist lunatic lenses.)

Rather than highlight that I walked away from this meeting after maybe 20 minutes, never looking back, taking no action to avail myself of what was offered or even to pass it along to anyone in the Trump Campaign to pursue, Melber and his fake news wannabes twisted their coverage of it into a 10 minute roundtable spouting off ways in which they think I have somehow lied, not been fully honest or am a Soviet spy.

Naturally they simply ignored, or summarily dismissed as mere speculation and a ploy on my part, the most relevant data point of all -- that "Mr. Greenberg" turned out to be a 17-year FBI informant , who just so happened to be inspired in May 2016, of all times, to approach someone close to Donald Trump to sell information he supposedly had.

Returning to Melber and his stunted panel of forgettable nobodies looking for their 15 minutes of fame, these bullshitters epitomize the dishonesty and unhinged animus I described above. These are cheap partisan propagandists who do not report news or analyze facts or illuminate their audience with insights, but instead manipulate data points and spin the conclusions that suit their partisan orthodoxy.

Were it not for the Russian collusion hoax, what ever would the likes of Melber and his fellow dreck peddlers do to fill their airtime? Perhaps when the witch hunt is finally exhausted and their fake scandal finally falls apart, and I continue to walk the earth a free man, Ari Melber will have the opportunity to go out and get a real job and do some real work, rather than further pollute the world with his phony malicious propaganda.

I know beyond question that it is the absolute, unalterable operating premise of leftist lynch mobsters in anything and everything they either say, write, report or do concerning me that NOTHING that I say, or have ever said, will not be automatically presumed to be a lie, and that NOTHING I do, or have ever done, even in the most mundane and transparent of day-to-day activities, will not automatically be construed as some sort of criminal act or part of some larger criminal conspiracy (i.e. anything and everything I do or say is, per the jackass media manipulators, RUSSIAN COLLUSION!!!!).

No matter what is said, no matter what facts come to light, no matter how many defamatory leftist fabrications about me are serially and conclusively debunked, no matter how consistently my statements all along are subsequently validated as truthful and correct none of it matters because deceitful leftist attackbots and cheap Democrat propagandists will cherry-pick, parse or otherwise manipulate the facts and twist my statements to cast me as a suspicious villain.

No amount of debunking of their defamatory hoax-peddling spin and lies will dissuade them from persisting in their deceitful malpractice and their continued pollution of the airwaves and print outlets with their wildly-false, reckless, baseless allegations and defamatory suspicion-manufacturing. This is just the bottom line with these news fakers.

From the moment they first hatched their cynical, vindictive partisan charade against the American people (and sanity generally), almost 2 years ago, the leftist Democrats' sleazy Russian collusion hoax peddlers, along with their fake news media collaborators, have been nothing if not consistent.

In their spastic mania to prop up and prolong their Trump-Russia collusion fantasy they have proven themselves consistently deceitful, consistently manipulative, and consistently consumed with propagating and perpetuating a pure fiction they know damn well is not simply erroneous or exaggerated, but in fact is a complete and total fabrication, unparalleled in the amount of wanton malevolence that is behind it.

Underhanded and calculating as the leftist Democrats' manufactured torrent of breathless sensationalism, phony outrage and fake news recycling may be, these political bunco artists are not fooling anyone, at least who has an iota of common sense and rational discernment.

In fact, I doubt that the Russian collusion hoax is genuinely believed even by many of the vicious profane malcontents who lap up this sort of leftist sewage and hatefully spew it anywhere and everywhere possible, from social media to the family dinner table.

Of course, leftist Democrats and the Trump-hating national media are far too arrogant and self-serving to limit their deceitful machinations to merely concocting and proliferating a cynical treason hoax as a partisan weapon to take down a duly-elected President of the United States. No, they must also be able to cast their seditious skullduggery as some sort of high holy public service, saving America from itself by torpedoing the hated president it had the gall to elect.

[It is precisely this variety of boundlessly hypocritical self-regard that pretty much sums up the leftist attitude towards everything they do in their ceaseless lust to seize and wield supreme power.]

Back in reality, no one with even half of a functioning brain buys this patently-absurd notion that preening partisan pygmies from the megalomaniacal left actually give a rat's ass about serving the public interest or preserving the sanctity of our Republic.

Only the left's most repulsive partisan parasites (see e.g. Adam Schiff; Eric Swalwell) and deceitful media propagandists (see e.g. Ari Melber; Don Lemon; MSNBC; CNN; NY Times; WaPo .too many to possibly list) actually seem to believe there is some high holy civic purpose behind their endlessly-malicious, pathologically-dishonest scheming to frame, shame and defame President Donald Trump.

It would take a truly-mindless hoaxster to think they are somehow serving their country by conspiring to give constant false cover and perverted quasi-legitimacy to a lawless corrupt bureaucratic hit squad of Trump-hating Hillarybot lawyers and power-crazed federal bullies set loose, like a pack of rabid hyenas, to gleefully wage a ruthless legal jihad against President Trump, his family members, staff, political associates, loyal longtime supporters and anyone even marginally connected to his amazing 2016 victory and his (so far) stunningly- successful presidency.

Even the seditious trash perpetrating this Russia collusion scam know all too well what Trump's presidency and, above all, his singular leadership portend for the continued survival of the undeserved power and illegitimate control that these lowlife self-dealing elites consider to be theirs by divine right. (Suffice to say, it is not a pretty picture for them.)

The bottom line is that Russian collusion hoaxsters serve no higher or more noble purpose than to exact malicious petty revenge on the hated Trump and his allies, and fraudulently undo the epic smackdown that America handed them and their corrupt fellow swamp dwellers in November 2016 -- once and for all smiting the repulsive amoral witch their party has in the greedy self-entitled criminal hag Hillary Clinton.

Whether the Russia collusion hoaxsters like it or not, whatever minuscule shards of credibility, believability and basic dignity they might have once had long ago vaporized into their own toxic smoke-and-mirrors shit cloud of seething partisan malevolence and brazen underhanded deceit. It couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of scoundrels

[Jun 24, 2018] Treason To What I'm With The Russians, They Hate Us Less Than The Media Does!, by James Kirkpatrick - The Unz Review

Notable quotes:
"... Olbermann: Yates An 'American Hero," Trump A 'Traitor,' ..."
"... 'Trump is a traitor!' Protester forcefully removed from president's Harrisburg rally ..."
"... Michael Moore to Trump: 'Vacate you Russian traitor ..."
"... Indecision 5768 ..."
"... , The Daily Show ..."
"... Maher: I want Democrats to say "You're Either With Us Or With The Russians ..."
"... Breitbart, ..."
"... Bill Maher on Israel, uncut and uncensored ..."
"... Jewish Journal, ..."
"... on election day itself. ..."
"... Our ally Turkey is in crisis and needs our support ..."
"... Best-selling author predicted Flynn's departure ..."
"... Wikileaks, Sputnik etc. ..."
"... The Hard Road For Putin ..."
"... Welcome to Weimerica ..."
Jun 24, 2018 | www.unz.com

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List of Bookmarks Technically, this is flag desecration--but Olbermann has hate America for years.

"Traitor!" screamed Keith Olbermann after Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, though Olbermann himself was calling for Comey's resignation months ago . [ Olbermann: Yates An 'American Hero," Trump A 'Traitor,' by Amber Athey, Daily Caller, May 9, 2017] Protesters scream the president is a "traitor" at public rallies [ 'Trump is a traitor!' Protester forcefully removed from president's Harrisburg rally , by Christian Alexanderson, PennLive, April 29, 2017]. Michael Moore has been calling Trump a "Russian traitor" practically since he was inaugurated [ Michael Moore to Trump: 'Vacate you Russian traitor , by Nikita Vladimirov, The Hill, February 14, 2017].

Of course, this begs an obvious question. Traitor to what? In an "America" which no longer has a definable culture, language, ethnos , history, identity or rule of law, what is there left to betray?

The open celebration of what any other generation would have called "treason" reveals how fully self-discrediting is the Russian "interference" narrative. John Harington famously quipped: "Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason." The "Russian interference" narrative is false because the fact it can be loudly denounced without being shut down for being the equivalent of "racist" or "xenophobic" shows Russia isn't very powerful within our government and society.

In contrast, our government and media seem to not only tolerate openly subversive or even hostile actions by foreign governments against the United States, but celebrate them.

Consider:

To criticize any of these countries, or to suggest dual loyalty on the part of their supporters in this country, is political death. Of course, that is because such dual loyalty is sufficiently strong that it is dangerous to broach the topic.

Indeed, for some in our Congress, dual loyalty would be a massive improvement.

The only reason we can't call men like these traitors is because there's no evidence they ever considered themselves Americans in any meaningful way. What could be more ridiculous than considering Chuck Schumer "a fellow American" with some imaginary "common interest" he shares with me?

Or take certain Main Stream Media figures. Bill Maher wants to Democrats to ask if you are with "us or the Russians". [ Maher: I want Democrats to say "You're Either With Us Or With The Russians ," by Ian Hanchett, Breitbart, May 12, 2017] Maher naturally delights in Open Borders for America and the replacement of our own population, but has spoken in the past about how "Israel faces the problem of becoming a minority Jewish state within their own country". [ Bill Maher on Israel, uncut and uncensored , by Danielle Berrin, Jewish Journal, November 29, 2017]

It's not double loyalty; that would be giving Maher too much credit. And it's not treason, because Maher just isn't part of my people, by his own standards. When Bill Maher refers to "us," I know that doesn't include me or my readers, and I know "the Russians" hate me a lot less than he does.

I'm with the Russians.

After all, "treason" requires not just providing "aid and comfort" to a foreign nation, but to an enemy. Why exactly is Russia an enemy of the United States ?

It's not Russia which makes claims on our territory . It's not Russia which funds extremist networks. It's not Russia which is deliberately sending terrorists into the West.

Of course, there is a Trump associate who has disturbing ties with a country doing just that. The main focus of the investigation into "Russian collusion" is focusing on former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn . But Flynn's strongest ties to a foreign power seem to be to be increasingly extreme and anti-European Turkey of the autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Incredibly, Flynn even wrote an editorial demanding more support for Turkey on election day itself. [ Our ally Turkey is in crisis and needs our support , by Michael Flynn, The Hill, November 8, 2016]

As Turkey is quite openly facilitating the migrant invasion of Europe and helping ISIS, there's a far better case to claim our NATO "ally" is a threat than Russia. And yet Flynn's ties to Turkey go all but unmentioned outside evangelical Christian websites [ Best-selling author predicted Flynn's departure , WND, February 14, 2017]. The MSM is utterly indifferent to Flynn's ties to Erdogan, even when they seem to be utterly dedicated to destroying General Flynn personally.

Part of it simply could be the defense industry and the "Deep State" need an enemy with a powerful conventional military to justify their wealth and power. As it can't be China (that would be racist), Russia will do.

The real reason Russia is hated is because it is a media threat. Russia is funding, or at least is tied to, several alternative media sources such as RT, possibly Wikileaks, Sputnik etc. Contrary to MSM claims, RT is hardly friendly to the "Alt-Right," instead promoting progressive hosts such as Thom Hartmann. But there is at least a slightly different point of view than the monolithic Narrative promoted on every late night comedy show, network news broadcast, cable news broadcast, newspaper headline, and Establishment website [ The Hard Road For Putin , by Gregory Hood, Radix, July 22, 2014].

There is also an undeniable, and openly articulated , sense of racial hatred expressed against Russians by Jewish members of the media. Russians are hated both as a specific ethnos and as a white nation which does not seem to be fully committed to "our values," which, as defined by Weimerica's journalist class, consists of various forms of degeneracy. [ Welcome to Weimerica , by Ryan Landry, Daily Caller, May 5, 2017]. John Winthrop's "City Upon A Hill" we are not.

It's not just idiotic but obscene that the same journalists gleefully involved in deconstructing the American identity now demand Middle America rally round the flag out of some misplaced Cold War nostalgia. Needless to say, these same journalists loved Russia back when it was Communist and killing millions of Orthodox Christians.

For immigration patriots, it's especially obnoxious because the eradication of the American identity is a result of mass immigration. And immigration is more important than every other issue for two reasons.

Ignoring immigration ensures no problem can ever be solved; indeed that every problem consistently gets worse.

To take just one example, Americans are sent all over the world to die because "we have to fight them there so they don't come here"; and then our government goes out of its way to bring terrorists here . And of course, as more problems are imported, the managerial class obtains more power to govern social relations and its own power grows . This is why it is hard to believe those who support Open Borders are actually working to defend the national interest in good faith.

But the second reason is even more important:

And even citizenship means nothing, The MSM constantly promotes Jose Antonio Vargas and his illegal friends or the protesters who parade under foreign flags not just as "Americans" but as people somehow more American than us.

It's a strange definition of patriotism where wanting peaceful relations with Russia is "treason" but banning the American flag in public schools because it might offend Mexicans is government policy .

Naturally, Leftist intellectuals and the reporters who parrot their ideas do have some vague idea of "American" identity -- that of a "proposition" or "universal" nation which exists only to fight a global struggle for equality [ Superpowers , by James Kirkpatrick, NPI, June 24, 2013].

But can you betray a "proposition nation?" How exactly does someone turn against a "universal nation?"

Actually, you can. If you are part of the historic American nation, one of those European-Americans who actually think of this country as a real nation with a real culture, you are in a strange way the only people left out of what it means to be a modern "American." To consider America a particular place with a specific culture and history that not everyone in the world can join simply by existing is treason to a "universal nation." Everyone in the world can be an "American," except, you know, actual Americans.

This is why the MSM is insistent that the governing philosophy of " America First ," which should simply be a truism for any rational American government, is instead something subversive and dangerous .

The hard truth is that "our" rulers aren't the guardians of our sovereignty, but the greatest threat to our independence.

And this isn't an unprecedented circumstance in history. During the Napoleonic occupation of Prussia, Carl von Clausewitz violated his king's orders to join the invasion of Russia and instead joined the Tsar's forces in the hope of someday liberating his own country. After all, it wasn't Tsar Alexander that was occupying Prussia; it was Napoleon. And in the end, he won, Prussia was restored, and eventually it was Prussia that would unite all of Germany.

The same situation applies today. Today, those actively pursuing the destruction of my people, culture and civilization aren't in Moscow. I don't even concede those are enemies at all.

Our enemies are in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, in "our" own media companies, government bureaucracies and intelligence agencies.

The real America is under occupation – and resistance to collaborators is patriotism to our country. We elected Donald Trump because we thought he could help disrupt and perhaps even end that occupation so we could have a country once again.

The attempt to destroy the President has ripped the mask off the forces behind this occupation . And we owe no loyalty to the collaborators who are trying to destroy his administration, dispossess our people, and destroy our country.

Because in the end, "treason" to the occupation is loyalty to America.

(Republished from VDare by permission of author or representative)

Mulegino1 , May 16, 2017 at 7:25 am GMT

I concur completely. The Russians are not our enemies. The Russians have never been our enemies. The Soviet behemoth may have harnessed the captive Russian bear, but, to paraphrase St. Paul, "Our battle was not with flesh and blood Russians but with the the powers and principalities of international Jewry and its ugly and deadly spawn, Judeo-Communism." Once it cast off those chains, Russia became a natural ally of the American people, but not, of course, of the Atlanticist Zionist empire which the American deep state serves.

Orthodox Christian Russia and the United States had a true compatibility of interests, until the advent of Roosevelt I and his war party of would be empire builders.

[Jun 22, 2018] Obama cyber chief confirms 'stand down' order against Russian cyberattacks

Looks like Fox and Free Beacon are part of the Deep state as they repeat the Deep State memo that DNC was hacked, not that information was leaked by an insider and then false flag was performed by intelligence agencies to attribute it to Russia.
Jun 22, 2018 | www.foxnews.com

Former Obama administration National Security Council cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel confirmed on Wednesday that a "stand down" order was given to counter Russian cyberattacks during the 2016 election.

During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, asked Daniel about a passage in the book Russian Roluette. The passage was about a staffer from Daniel's team, Daniel Prieto, retelling the time that Obama's national security adviser Susan Rice told Daniel and his team to halt their efforts and to "stand down" in countering Russia's cyberattacks.

Daniel was quoted saying to his team that they had to stop working on options to counter the Russian attack: "We've been told to stand down." Prieto is quoted as being "incredulous and in disbelief" and asking, "Why the hell are we standing down?"

"That is an accurate rendering of the conversation at the staff meeting but the larger context is something that we can discuss in the classified session," Daniel said. "But I can say there were many concerns about how many people were involved in the development of the options so the decision at that point was to neck down the number of people that were involved in our ongoing response options. It's not accurate to say all activities ceased at that point. "

Daniel and his team were tasked in developing options to Russia's cyberattacks on the United States. Russian hacked the Democratic National Committee servers in 2015 and into voter registration systems of several U.S. states in 2016.

[Jun 21, 2018] The Diseased, Lying, Condition of America's 'News'Media by Eric ZUESSE

Notable quotes:
"... the 'news' media don't care about that evil, and that falsehood, and that dangerousness -- they do it anyway, and none of them attacks the others for perpetrating this vicious war-mongering lie, that lying provocation to yet more and worse war than already exists there. ..."
"... accepted the request from Syria's Government, for assistance in protecting Syria's Government, ..."
Jun 21, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

Both President Trump and former President Obama are commonly said in America's 'news' media to be or to have been "ceding Syria to Russia" or "ceding Syria to Russia and Iran," or similar allegations. They imply that 'we' own (or have some right to control) Syria. That's not only a lie; it is a very evil and harmful one, dangerously goading the US President to go even more against Russia (and Iran) (and, of course, against Syria ) than has yet been done -- but the 'news' media don't care about that evil, and that falsehood, and that dangerousness -- they do it anyway, and none of them attacks the others for perpetrating this vicious war-mongering lie, that lying provocation to yet more and worse war than already exists there. And the fact that none is exposing the fraudulence of the others on this important matter, is a yet-bigger additional scandal, beyond and amplifying the media's common lying itself. Because they all function here like a mob, goading to more and worse invasions, and doing it on the the basis of dangerous lies -- that America, and not the Syrians themselves, own Syria.

These lies simply assume that America (probably referring to the US Government, but whatever) somehow "has" or else "had" Syria (so that America can now 'cede' it, to anyone); and this assumption (that the US somehow owns Syria) is not only an imperialistic one (which is bad, and wrong, in itself), but it reduces to nothingness the rights (in the minds of the American public) of the Syrian people, to control their own land . That lie is what America's 'news'media won't expose, but instead they all cooperate with it, when they're not actually participating, themselves, in spreading these lies.

What they are doing is also to slur Russia, and to slur Iran, for having accepted the request from Syria's Government, for assistance in protecting Syria's Government, against the tens of thousands of jihadists who had been recruited throughout the world by the Saudi-American alliance, to overthrow and replace Syria's Government, to replace it with one that would be appointed by the Saud family ('America's ally'), the fundamentalist-Sunni royal family who (as the absolute monarchy there) do actually own Saudi Arabia -- a monarchical dictatorship, which the US Government calls an 'ally'.

The evilness of this imperialistic assumption, which is being constantly spread by the US-and-allied 'news'media, is as bad as is its falseness, because "America" (however one wishes to use that term) never had, never possessed, any right whatsoever to control Syria. Of course, neither does Russia possess such a right, nor does Iran, but neither Russia nor Iran is asserting any such right; both instead are there to protect Syria's national sovereignty, against the invaders (including the US, and the Sauds' regime). But the US-and-allied 'news'media don't present it that way -- the honest way -- not at all. Such truths are instead suppressed.

I was immediately struck by this false and evil assumption that the US owns Syria, when reading the June 15th issue of The Week magazine. It contained, under its "Best Columns" section, a piece by Matthew Continetti ( "Obama Too Good for America" ), which says, among other falsehoods, "Obama was wrong about a lot of other things, too, like ceding Syria to Russia." That phrase, "ceding Syria to Russia" rose straight out from the page to me as being remarkable, stunning, and not only because it suggests that America owns that sovereign nation, Syria. I was especially struck by it because the CIA has several times attempted Syrian coups and once did briefly, in 1949, overthrow and replace Syria's democratically elected President. But is that really something which today's America's 'news'media should encourage the American public to be demanding today's American politicians to be demanding from today's American President? How bizarre, even evil, an idea is that? But it is so normal that it's a fair indication of how evil and untrustworthy today's American 'news'media actually are. I just hadn't noticed it before.

Publishing such a false and evil idea, without any accompanying commentary that truthfully presents its context and that doesn't simply let the false and evil allegation stand unchallenged -- that instead lets it be unchallenged both factually and morally -- is not acceptable either factually or morally, but then I checked and found that it's the almost universal norm, in today's US 'news'media. For examples:

On 17 April 2018, CBS News headlined "Lindsey Graham 'unnerved' after Syria briefing: 'Everything in that briefing made me more worried'" and presented that US Senator saying, "It seems to me we are willing to give Syria to Assad, Russia, and Iran." He was criticizing President Trump as being "all tweet and no action." He wanted more war, and more threat of war. But when President Obama had repeatedly denied in public that only the Syrian people should have any say-so over whom Syria's leaders ought to be, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon repeatedly contradicted the US President's viewpoint on this, and he said, "The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people." If the American people have become so dismissive of international law as this, then is it because the US 'news'media start with the ridiculously false presumption that "America" (whatever that refers to) is the arbiter of international law, and therefore has the right to dictate to the entire world what that law is, and what it means? Is America, as being the dictator over the whole planet, supposed to be something that Americans' tax-dollars ought to be funding -- that objective: global dictatorship? How does that viewpoint differ, then, from perpetual war for perpetual 'peace' -- a dictum that's enormously profitable for America's big 'Defense' contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, but that impoverishes the general public, both in America, and especially in the countries (such as Syria) where 'our' Government drops bombs in order to enforce its own will and demand, that: "Assad must go!"

In fact, as any journalist who writes or speaks about the Syrian situation and who isn't a complete ignoramus knows, Bashar al-Assad would easily win any free and fair Presidential election in Syria, against any contender. His public support, as shown not only in the 2014 Syrian Presidential election , but also in the many Western-sponsored opinion-polls in Syria (since the CIA is always eager to find potential candidates to support against him), show this.

On 17 December 2016, Eric Chenoweth, a typical neocon Democratic Party hack, headlined "Let Hamilton Speak: Recapturing American Democracy" , and he wrote: "Trump's statements and appointments make clear he intends to tilt American policy to serve Russian interests: ceding Syria to Russia by ending support to pro-Western rebels; possibly lifting economic sanctions and recognizing the annexation of Crimea; proposing an alliance with Russia in the war on terror while remaining uncommitted to the defense of NATO allies, in particular the Baltic countries vulnerable to Russian aggression. Restoring American Democracy When they meet on December 19, Republican Electors who reflect on their constitutional duty should not then affirm Trump's election." Those "pro-Western rebels" in Syria were actually led by Al Qaeda's Syrian branch. Without them, the US regime wouldn't have had any "boots on the ground" forces to speak of there. In fact, the US regime has actually been fronting for the Saud family to take over control of Syria if and when Syria's Government falls. The Saud family even selected the people who in the U.N. peace talks on Syria represent 'the rebels' -- the Sauds, who have been Syria's enemy ever since 1950, selected 'Syria's opposition', who were now seeking to take over Syria if and when 'America's moderate rebels' succeed. Both Al Qaeda and ISIS are actually fundamentalist-Sunnis, like the Saud family are, and Assad's Government is resolutely non-sectarian. Assad himself is a non-Islamist Alawite Shiite secularist, which virtually all fundamentalist Sunnis (such as the Sauds are) are taught to despise and to hate -- especially because he's Shiite. The US regime knows that neither it, which is considered Christian, nor Israel, which is theocratically Jewish, could practically succeed at imposing rule in Syria, but that maybe the Sauds could -- so, they are the actual leaders of the 'pro-Western' forces, seeking to replace Syria's secularist Government. Overthrowing Syria's Government would be their victory. It would be the Saud family's victory. But this fact is kept a secret from the American public, by the US 'news'media.

Back on 17 September 2016, shortly before the change in US Administrations, Obama bombed the Syrian Government's garrison in Der Zor, or Deir Ezzor, which is the capital of Syria's oil-producing region. He did it in order to enable ISIS forces, which surrounded the city, to rush in and conquer it. Obama did this only eight days after his Secretary of State, John Kerry, had conceded to the demand by Sergei Lavrov, Russia's Foreign Minister, Russia's demand that in a cease fire, Russia be allowed to continue bombing not only ISIS there, which Kerry agreed should continue to be bombed by both the US and Russia, but also Al Qaeda's forces -- which until 9 September 2016, Obama refused to allow to be bombed during a cease-fire. But, finally, after a year of deadlock between Russia and the United States on that crucial issue, Kerry and Lavrov both signed a cease-fire agreement, and it allowed both ISIS and Al Qaeda-led forces to continue being bombed. (Russia had been bombing both, ever since 30 September 2015, when Russia began its bombing campaign in Syria.) That cease-fire went into effect on September 12th. Then Obama, unannounced -- and a great disappointment to his Secretary of State, who wasn't informed of this in advance -- broke the agreement, by bombing the Syrian outpost in Deir Ezzor -- and that's the moment when Vladimir Putin quit his efforts to get agreements from Obama, because Putin now recognized that Obama was totally untrustworthy.

Already by late September of 2015, even prior to Russia's having been requested by President Assad to enter the war in order to speed up the defeat of what Washington still calls 'the rebels', it was clear that Washington (actually Riyadh) wasn't going to take over Syria; and Americans were -- and are -- being taught by the 'news'media, that this was because Obama was 'weak' and didn't care enough about 'human rights' in Syria, and about 'democracy' in Syria. So, on 28 September 2015, Matt Purple at the libertarian "Rare Politics" site, headlined "Pentagon admits that the Syrian rebels it trained handed over weapons to al Qaeda" , and he wrote "Neoconservatives wail that President Obama is ceding Syria to Russia -- but the reason the Russians are taking the lead is precisely because America has sidelined itself." But the US regime hadn't at all "sidelined itself"; it continued -- and it continues to this day -- its invasion and occupation of that land. Trump's policy on Syria is basically a continuation of Obama's -- and it's not at all "ceding Syria to Russia," or "ceding Syria to Russia and Iran."

Because of America's 'news'media, it still isn't "ceding Syria to the Syrians" -- as Ban ki-Moon and international law would. That wouldn't be profitable for Lockheed Martin etc. (whose biggest customers other than the US Government are the Sauds, and Trump alone sold $400 billion of US weapons to them ); so, it's not done.

Syria's sovereignty is utterly denied by the US regime, but if the US regime were to succeed, the big winners would actually be the Saud family.

Do the American people have sovereignty, over 'their' ( our ) Government? US 'news'media effectively ban that question. Perhaps what controls the US Government is the Saudi-Israeli alliance: the Sauds have the money, and the Israelis have the lobbyists. Of course, the US 'news'media are obsessed whether Russia controls the US Government. That diversionary tactic is extremely profitable to companies such as General Dynamics, and America's other weapons-manufacturers, which thrive on wars -- especially by selling to the Sauds, and to their allies (and, obviously, not at all to Russia).

[Jun 21, 2018] The Media is a complete weapon for propaganda. The "writers" are propagandists. There never is a report on Russia from the Western media that does not vilify or demonize Russia or Russians in some way.

Jun 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Daniel | Jun 20, 2018 11:53:53 PM | 34

When I saw that Shawn Walker Tweet, and the mostly brilliant take-down responses, I hoped b would mention it. I can think of no one better suited to address this particularly putrid propaganda. Bravo! And to the (almost) universally excellent barfly commentariat.

BBC created a whole genre of Russian World Cup scare mongering. One they did was on the deadly threat of "Russian Football Hooligans." RT did an excellent 4 minute job of combining journalism with humor to expose that bit of 100% Fake News.

They also expanded it into a full set-piece. Here's the trailer:

Red Ryder , Jun 20, 2018 11:57:21 PM | 35

The Media is a complete weapon for propaganda. The "writers" are propagandists. There never is a report on Russia from the Western media that does not vilify or demonize Russia or Russians in some way.

The World Cup is experienced by hundreds of thousands of tourists in Russia. They are going to be the truth-tellers.
The event, like Sochi Winter Olympics will stand for itself. It will be splendid.

And the lies will die.

Never expect the truth from the Media.

Always expect the Russian people to be extraordinary. They have demonstrated it for a century.

[Jun 21, 2018] Steele cut his teeth blackmailing FIFA officials

The problem the MSMs have is that the World Cup so far has been a success.
Notable quotes:
"... Also just like the Trump bizzo, when his employers dipped out, Steele's unsubstantiated gossip & slander having done nothing useful, Steele leaked his report to the feds. ..."
"... The claims he makes are utterly fantastic ( WARNING the link is to a graun 'long read' and is brimming with tedious & tendentious bulldust) the most laughable being that 'Putin' - always Putin never any of the many thousands of astute bureaucrats who work in the Russian government, stole a bunch of valuable old paintings from the Hermitage and gave them to the blokes on the World Cup venue committee as a bribe. The feds who went through these poor old buggers' lives with a fine tooth comb found nothing to substantiate that libel. ..."
"... The worst thing about these slanders and the harassment of a few old geezers who prefer sport as a mechanism for nations to interact than war, is that these old fellas were all (well just about all) socialists who yeah probably did allow a coupla mill to fall into their wallets, but who were dedicated to their sport remaining egalitarian. They invested billions into developing their sport all over the world especially in Africa, Latin America and the Mid-East where a shortage of venues, kit and professional coaches used to really hold those nations back. ..."
"... The 'clean sweep' of FIFA has opened the door to neolibs who are talking about corporatising the World Cup like the Olympics, then the billions will all go to corporations and their shareholders ..."
"... It is stuff like this about Skirpal's boss Steele, which really opens up the field of suspects on the 'poisoning'. I have no doubt Skirpal would have been the alleged 'proof' for this farrago of tosh. Russia and Qatar got their world cup final, but england and amerika (who were the finalists against Qatar for hosting in 2022) didn't, surely it is the latter two who are more likely to have a grudge against old Sergei. ..."
"... The Western corporate media is a sorry spectacle to behold. The Baltic and the Scandinavian branches are the most pathetic. Combining native stupidity with pig-headed tenacity to hold on to the past. ..."
Jun 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Debsisdead | Jun 21, 2018 2:42:46 AM | 41

And another thing - the other day I came a cross an interesting tidbit, I would include a link if I can remember where I saw it, it may in fact have even been the graun. It goes like this:

A few years back the FBI raided the FIFA HQ in Switzerland eventually arresting and charging many FIFA commissioners alleging they were taking backhanders and at the time I, along with many other sort of assumed that the amerikans shoving their stickbeaks into an organisation which was none of their damn business was down to an announcement from FIFA president Blatter that if the Israeli army and police didn't cease harassing the Palestinian team preventing players from getting to international games by holding the players up at checkpoints, sometimes for days, FIFA would have no choice but to penalise the Israeli football team who had already been granted special dispensation by FIFA to play in the Euro conference rather than the ME one that their geography should have demanded.

Nuttytahoo did his usual 'antisemite' victim whine so it was a reasonable assumption to think the fed raid the next week was connected.

It may have been the issue which caused the amerikan sheet sniffers to move, but the actual investigation was caused by something completely different.
Two nations competed for the 2018 world cup hosting rights. One was Russia and the second one was . . .drumroll. . . England!
Yep the perfidious poms had put in their bid and one of the tools in their 'kit' was none other than the old fibber Christopher Steele, who just as with the Trump investigation, did his 'inquiry' by remote control as he is persona non grata in Russia.

Also just like the Trump bizzo, when his employers dipped out, Steele's unsubstantiated gossip & slander having done nothing useful, Steele leaked his report to the feds.

The claims he makes are utterly fantastic ( WARNING the link is to a graun 'long read' and is brimming with tedious & tendentious bulldust) the most laughable being that 'Putin' - always Putin never any of the many thousands of astute bureaucrats who work in the Russian government, stole a bunch of valuable old paintings from the Hermitage and gave them to the blokes on the World Cup venue committee as a bribe. The feds who went through these poor old buggers' lives with a fine tooth comb found nothing to substantiate that libel.

The other big lie was that while the Russian president was in Qatar finalising the joint gas pipeline deal he cut another deal of the 'you vote for us we'll vote for you' as world cup host in 2018 and 2022 respectively. Yeah that sounds just like President Putin tossing Russia's economic future to the side while he organised a few soccer games - not.

The worst thing about these slanders and the harassment of a few old geezers who prefer sport as a mechanism for nations to interact than war, is that these old fellas were all (well just about all) socialists who yeah probably did allow a coupla mill to fall into their wallets, but who were dedicated to their sport remaining egalitarian. They invested billions into developing their sport all over the world especially in Africa, Latin America and the Mid-East where a shortage of venues, kit and professional coaches used to really hold those nations back.

The 'clean sweep' of FIFA has opened the door to neolibs who are talking about corporatising the World Cup like the Olympics, then the billions will all go to corporations and their shareholders.

No one should begrudge these guys the few quid they grabbed, I know puritans hate it but in a truly tolerant society we should expect that a few otherwise dedicated types will always 'tickle the peter'. I used to get pissed about it in the union movement but the amounts are usually small compared to turn-over and I'd rather have a dodgy member of the proletariat who grabs a little in a position of power than a slimy neolib forever manouvering to flog the entire kit & kaboodle off to a bunch of anonymous 'financiers'.

It is stuff like this about Skirpal's boss Steele, which really opens up the field of suspects on the 'poisoning'. I have no doubt Skirpal would have been the alleged 'proof' for this farrago of tosh. Russia and Qatar got their world cup final, but england and amerika (who were the finalists against Qatar for hosting in 2022) didn't, surely it is the latter two who are more likely to have a grudge against old Sergei.

Virgile , Jun 21, 2018 4:17:00 AM | 44
The UK hates the idea that the EU that they left would turn to Russia for friendship. Their propaganda goes along with the USA that shares this apprehension. Now that Trump has humiliated the EU, the EU is turning toward Russia despite the UK...
Peter AU 1 , Jun 21, 2018 5:18:08 AM | 45
The pecking order of the mad monks 'anglosphere'.
  1. Britain is the matriarch.
  2. US is the black sheep that returned to rule the family.
  3. Australia, Canada, New Zealand are the loyal offspring that willingly do as they are told.
john , Jun 21, 2018 6:10:15 AM | 46
If two British scribes say they heard something, which each describes differently, then it must be true

oh yeah, absolutely. regarding the metaphysics of propaganda, obeisance trumps perception every time. Perceive the fallen tree .

Steve , Jun 21, 2018 6:15:33 AM | 47
The Western corporate media is a sorry spectacle to behold. The Baltic and the Scandinavian branches are the most pathetic. Combining native stupidity with pig-headed tenacity to hold on to the past.

[Jun 21, 2018] C.J. Hopkins latest on the Russophobia hysteria

Jun 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

loneplateau | Jun 20, 2018 6:30:13 PM | 7

C.J. Hopkins latest on the Russophobia hysteria;

Awaiting the Putin-Nazi Apocalypse

Lochearn | Jun 20, 2018 7:38:52 PM | 14

I'm glad you linked to C J Hopkins. I am impressed with his wit, intelligence and writing style. He got booted off Counterpunch as I understand and is now published by the Unz Review, a rather strange but interesting site that picks up talented writers and thinkers from the left and from the right and appears to pay them.

I say strange because, judging by the comments, the alt-right appear to imagine that like zero hedge it is their forum and attack perfectly good articles because they do not fit in with their ideological mindset.

There is a sort of muddiness in the identity of the site (unlike MOA), but I am pleased that people like C J Hopkins may get something for their brilliant efforts. Diana Johnstone, someone I have huge regard for, is another who appears on Unz.

[Jun 20, 2018] Awaiting the Putin-Nazi Apocalypse by C.J. Hopkins

Notable quotes:
"... C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org . ..."
Jun 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

I don't know about you, but I'm getting a little tired of waiting for the Hitlerian nightmare that the corporate media promised us was coming back in 2016. Frankly, I'm beginning to suspect that all their apocalyptic pronouncements were just parts of some elaborate cocktease. I mean, here we are, a year and half into the reign of the Trumpian Reich, and, well, where are all the concentration camps, the SS units with their death's head insignia, the Riefenstahlian parades and rallies? Trump hasn't even banned the Democratic Party, or annexed Canada, or invaded Mexico, or made anybody wear color-coded armbands. If he doesn't start Hitlering relatively soon, the oracles of the corporate media are going to have some serious explaining to do.

I don't think I'm overreacting. After all, back in 2016, The Guardian promised us an " Age of Darkness ," and the end of "civilized order" as we know it. " Globalization is dead, and white supremacy has triumphed ," one of its more hysterical pundits proclaimed. " Donald Trump is actually a fascist ," Michael Kinsley assured us in The Washington Post . Charles Blow of The New York Times warned that Trump's election was "the beginning of the end," the descent of the republic into " racial Orwellianism ," whatever that's supposed to mean. Thomas Friedman called it " a moral 911 ." Paul Krugman predicted nothing short of " a global recession with no end in sight ." Jonathan Chait, after heroically vowing not to flee the country with his terrified family, but to stay and fight to the bitter end, guaranteed us that the "monster," Trump, would " shake the republic to its foundations ."

Perhaps my seismometer is on the fritz, but I haven't detected much foundation shaking. Yes, Trump repulses me, personally. I do not like the man. I never have. I was based in New York for fifteen years, in the 1990s and early 2000s, before he became a game show host, when he was still just a shady real estate mogul with alleged ties to organized crime who occasionally appeared on Wrestlemania and just generally went about the city making a narcissistic ass of himself and plastering his gold-plated name onto everything. So I have no illusions about his character the man is an inveterate snake oil salesman with the moral compass of a Tijuana pimp. All I'm saying is, we were promised Hitler, or Mussolini at the very least, and it seems like all we're getting so far is just regular old narcissistic Donald Trump.

Of course, he could just be laying low and holding back on the Hitler stuff as part of the evil master plan personally developed by Vladimir Putin to systematically brainwash Americans (with state-of-the-art mind-control Facebook ads) into embracing all-out National Socialism and marching through the streets in full Nazi regalia singing Amerika Über Alles at which point Trump will rip off his mask, reveal his true Hitlerian face, Steve Bannon will suddenly reappear in the turret of an M1 Abrams tank at the head of a division of rebel infantry flying giant Confederate flags as they hideously rumble down Pennsylvania Avenue, and the Putin-Nazi Holocaust will begin.

Or maybe the extremely serious, Pulitzer Prize-winning political pundit David Leonhardt is onto something. In a prominent op-ed in The New York Times , he wonders if Putin's "secret plan" is for Trump to destroy "the Atlantic alliance" by arriving late for the G7 meeting and "picking fights over artificial issues," not to mention insulting the Canadian prime minister, which, it doesn't get much more hair-raising than that. OK, I know you're probably thinking that sounds like the hopelessly paranoid jabber of some conspiracy theorist nut on YouTube, but we're talking The New York Times here, folks, and a bona fide "respectable pundit" who wrote a whole 15,000-word ebook and has been interviewed by Stephen Colbert, among his many other distinguished accomplishments.

Examined in the context of other blatantly loony theories the corporate media are currently attempting to ram down our throats, Leonhardt's theory kind of makes sense. The Guardian , another very serious newspaper, in addition to covering the repercussions of its coverage of Corbyn's Nazi Death Cult , is hot on the trail of the soon-to-be-infamous Putin-Banks-Brexit Connection . According to "documents seen by The Observer ," a Guardian sister publication, Arron Banks, a "Brexit bankroller," allegedly had brunch with the Russian ambassador three times , instead of just once, as he had claimed. He was also allegedly offered a piece of some shady gold deal in exchange for the number of someone on Trump transition team, which for some reason it was otherwise impossible to obtain. Or whatever. It doesn't really matter what happened. The point is, Putin orchestrated the Brexit, presumably as part of his secret plan to destabilize the Atlantic alliance, and then blackmailed Trump into running for president with that "pee-tape" the Democrats paid a former British spook to allege exists .

Paul Krugman of The New York Times concurs. In his latest extremely serious piece of totally respectable grown-up opinionating , he once again calls Trump "a quisling" (he's developed a fondness for this term, which goes over well with New York Times readers) and reiterates that Trump is "a de facto foreign agent" and that "America as we know it is finished." Tragically, according to Krugman, the FBI, CIA, and other Guardians of Western Democracy are utterly powerless to deal with this quisling, and his evil puppet master, Putin, because it turns out the entire Republican Party is "hopelessly, irredeemably corrupt." Yes, it appears the only chance we have to save the world from Trumpzilla, and imminent Putin-Nazi Holocaust, is to elect a buttload of Democrats to office, and eventually an Obama-like Democratic President, so they can launch an all-out thermonuclear war against Russia and North Korea that'll teach these Putin-Nazis to screw around with our trade agreements!

Oh, and also, we need to cancel the Brexit, and do away with all these "populist" movements that Putin has fomented all over Europe. For example, according to billionaire George Soros , the refugee-hating League in Italy is likely another Putin-backed front, part of his scheme to "dominate the West." One can only assume that the AfD, the FPÖ, Rassemblement National, and every other extreme-Right party exploiting people's rage and fear in Europe are parts of Putin's grand conspiracy (except, of course, for the Ukrainian Nazis the Western alliance put into power ). Soros, like billionaire Bruce Wayne before him, tired of waiting for the West to strike back, is taking matters into his own hands. Not only has he been tirelessly laboring to prevent Donald Trump from " destroying the world ," now he's financing "Best for Britain," a campaign to de-brainwash the British people, who, obviously, only voted for Brexit because they'd been brainwashed by the Putin-Nazis.

I could go on and on with this. Have you heard the the one about the Putin-Nazis conspiring with the NRA ? How about the one where Emmanuel Macron, in order to protect the French from "fake news," and division-sowing Putin-Nazi memes, wants the authority to censor the Internet ? Or have you read the column in which David Brooks, without a detectable trace of irony , laments the passing of international relationships "based on friendship, shared values, loyalty, and affection" seriously, he used the word "affection" in reference to the Western alliance, one of the most ruthless, mass-murdering empires in the history of ruthless, mass-murdering empires ? Oh,yeah, and I almost forgot MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is reporting that the North Korea summit was also orchestrated by Putin !

I'm not sure how much more bizarre things can get. This level of bull goose loony paranoia, media-generated mass hysteria, and mindless conformity would be hysterically funny if it weren't so fucking horrifying in terms of what it says about millions of Westerners, who are apparently prepared to believe almost anything the authorities tell them, no matter how nuts. That famous Voltaire quote comes to mind "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities," he wrote. Another, more disturbing way of looking at it is, people willing to believe absurdities, to switch off their critical thinking faculties in order to conform to an official narrative as blatantly ridiculous as the Putin-Nazi narrative, are people who have already surrendered their autonomy, who have traded it for the comfort of the herd. Such people cannot be reasoned with, because there isn't really anyone in there. There is only whatever mindless jabber got injected into their brain that day, the dutiful repetition of which guarantees they remain a "normal" person (who believes what other normal persons believe), and not some sort of "radical" or "extremist."

These people are the people who worry me these "normal" people who, completely calmly, as if what they are saying wasn't batshit crazy, explain how Trump is just like Hitler, and how Putin is trying to take over the world. I sit there and listen and smile at these people, some of whom are friends and colleagues, people who I genuinely like, and who genuinely like me in return, but who, under the right set of circumstances, would stand by and watch me marched into prison, or worse, and not utter a word in protest.

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .


c matt , June 15, 2018 at 8:08 pm GMT

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities

Like "We must destroy Iraq/Libya/Lebanon/Syria/Iran/Yemen so we can save it."

Biff , June 17, 2018 at 3:18 am GMT

These people are the people who worry me these "normal" people who, completely calmly, as if what they are saying wasn't batshit crazy, explain how Trump is just like Hitler, and how Putin is trying to take over the world. I sit there and listen and smile at these people, some of whom are friends and colleagues, people who I genuinely like, and who genuinely like me in return, but who, under the right set of circumstances, would stand by and watch me marched into prison, or worse, and not utter a word in protest.

I've got the same friends. Liberal Putin haters. Dupes, and suckers.

anon [997] Disclaimer , June 17, 2018 at 5:40 am GMT
I refuse to be friends with people stupid enough to believe the media propaganda. Did I mention I don't have any friends?
ick phlegm , June 17, 2018 at 3:13 pm GMT
It's true that some of this is a matter of loony cultish shibboleths imposed to enforce conformity. But there's more to it. This hysterical vilification of Trump is rational and purposive. The system depends on everybody blaming the other party for what CIA does to you. CIA has impunity and an illegal state of emergency based on secret law. They can kill anybody they want and get away with it, including the presidential puppet ruler, ask JFK, oh wait, you can't, he's dead. That absolute sovereignty means CIA's in charge, the buck stops there. So it's crucial to keep the public's attention and emotional energy fixed on the puppet.

Russia does pose a threat, but it's not what we're told. Tying the demonized political enemy to Russia is CIA's way of disguising the real threat Russia poses. Russia is the world's most effective advocate for black-letter rule of law, including human rights law that would destroy the CIA police state. The CIA regime's fulla-shitness is obvious to everyone in the world except the American public.

https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Indicators/Pages/HRIndicatorsIndex.aspx

Russia complies with international law. The USA does not. The largest bloc Russia leads is not the SCO or the BRICS, it's the G-192, the rule-of-law advocates in UNCTAD, UNESCO, and the General Assembly. People are now discussing Uniting for Peace as a means to counter US abuse of veto impunity in the UNSC. Uniting for Peace was originally devised in response to Soviet obstruction, so the tables have turned in a striking way. The free world is ~USA, and they're going from strength to strength under the Russian nuclear umbrella. They're going to break down the Iron Curtain and let us out.

manorchurch , June 18, 2018 at 4:11 am GMT

the man is an inveterate snake oil salesman with the moral compass of a Tijuana pimp

You mean, a typical politician? I see it more as a salesman of golf-club memberships and the moral compass of a network news anchor.

Renoman , June 18, 2018 at 9:08 am GMT
Vlad Putin is the leader of the free World, most popular leader in the World, his people like what he's doing and that would be delivering them a better life while minding his own business internationally. Again I ask "what has Russia ever done to the USA"?
The left is sinking fast these days, most people aren't interested in being over run with immigrants or watching the faggots make fools of themselves or having the State in their business all the time. Time to pave the roads, give us decent schools and Hospitals, put the junkies into leaky boats and send them out to Sea and make sure everyone gets fed. That's what we want, fuck that war shit, nobody wants that. America is nothing but a Thug Nation, at least Trump is something different, anything would be better than the status quo down there.
Never mind, they'll be broke soon and the World will be wrecked for ten years, worth it I say.
annamaria , June 18, 2018 at 10:29 am GMT
@hyperbola

Agree.
In their feverish desire to be correct in the eyes of their paymasters, the ever-opportunistic Paul Krugman of The New York Times, the ever-opportunistic "psychologist" David Brooks, and the "progressively" profiteering Rachel Maddow of MSNBC have crossed all barriers of decent behavior. They are the product of Rovian creation of reality , when facts -- the documented facts -- have no weight anymore.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities," indeed.

Meanwhile, in Syria, "Drivers Behind the War on Syria and the Impoverishment of Us All:" https://www.globalresearch.ca/drivers-behind-the-war-on-syria-and-the-impoverishment-of-us-all/5644381
"We know that the Western narratives about the war on Syria are entirely false, so what are some of the real reasons that are driving this overseas holocaust, and who is benefiting from it?
To be blunt, Western policymakers seek to destroy secular democracy in Syria, along with its socially uplifting political economy, with a view to installing a compliant fascist Wahhabi government. The end result is chaos, the enrichment of the transnational "oligarchs" and the impoverishment of Syria.
In doing this, the policymakers are also impoverishing the vast majority of people in Western countries1, destroying nation-state sovereignties, and endeavouring to create a totalitarian World Order.
International financial institutions see local banking as a threat. Consequently, in Aleppo, Syria, terrorists destroyed local banking institutions."
– Same as in Libya. The banking cabal had led the US/EU coalition of war criminals to murder hundreds of thousands of people in order to destroy Libyan banking system and to satisfy Israel's aspirations for Ertez Israel: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38009.htm

annamaria , June 18, 2018 at 11:41 am GMT
@Wally

"America's Collusion With Neo-Nazis," by Stephen F. Cohen: ttps://www.thenation.com/article/americas-collusion-with-neo-nazis/
"– That the pogrom-like burning to death of ethnic Russians and others in Odessa shortly later in 2014 reawakened memories of Nazi extermination squads in Ukraine during World War II has been all but deleted from the American mainstream narrative even though it remains a painful and revelatory experience for many Ukrainians.
-- That the Azov Battalion of some 3,000 well-armed fighters, which has played a major combat role in the Ukrainian civil war and now is an official component of Kiev's armed forces, is avowedly "partially" pro-Nazi, as evidenced by its regalia, slogans, and programmatic statements, and well-documented as such by several international monitoring organizations. [The Azov Battalion was financed by a Jewish oligarch Kolomojsky]. ( https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Frussia-insider.com%2Fsites%2Finsider%2Ffiles%2F-DaRo81rUvA.jpg&f=1
" -- That stormtroop-like assaults on gays, Jews, elderly ethnic Russians, and other "impure" citizens are widespread throughout Kiev-ruled Ukraine, along with torchlight marches reminiscent of those that eventually inflamed Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s. And that the police and official legal authorities do virtually nothing to prevent these neo-fascist acts or to prosecute them. On the contrary, Kiev has officially encouraged them by systematically rehabilitating and even memorializing Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi German extermination pogroms and their leaders during World War II, renaming streets in their honor, building monuments to them, rewriting history to glorify them, and more."
– None of the 52 main Jewish American organizations raised their voices to condemn the revival of neo-Nazism (banderism) in Ukraine. Is this because of the ethnicity of the State Dept. organizers of the putsch, Nuland-Kagan and Pyatt? Or is it because of the zionists' visceral hatred towards Russia that has been protecting the sovereign state of Syria from the supremacist Israeli thugs?

Chris Bridges , June 18, 2018 at 12:19 pm GMT
I loved this article! Funny as hell! I do not have quite the negative view of Trump – I do think he has matured some from his playboy days and clearly is serious about doing some good things – but the author's depiction of the posturing buffoons of the media is spot on. Hitler indeed! Ha ha!
Wally Streeter , June 18, 2018 at 12:26 pm GMT
When Hillary started ranting about Trump being "Putin's Puppet", I wondered "Where did that come from?". I decided that she probably had a pot of evil warming on the stove and needed a scapegoat to go along with it. Later events haven't proven me wrong.
nickels , June 18, 2018 at 4:07 pm GMT
I just discovered the brilliant Shadia Drury, one of the best resources on the Neocon and Straussian concept of the 'Noble Lie', and the enemy (previously War On Terror, now Russia Threat) to unite the nihilism of liberal society and prevent it from disintegrating.
joe webb , June 18, 2018 at 4:09 pm GMT
trump derangement syndrome here with Hopkins. Trump was a showman, like thousands of others.

He also enjoyed celebrity , again, only this time, like millions of others.

He likes women, especially in a state of undress. Who doesn't? Women as much as men, like to look at pictures of naked ladies, maybe more than men.

Maybe the whole article by Hopkins is a joke.

What I do not fully understand, and Hopkins does not help is how lunatic-hatred on the part of liberals has become so powerful.

I talked some race, as in global North and global South and natural selection, to a liberal gal the other day, and she thought it made sense. But she still hates Trump.

Or take the current moral Outrage over baby Mexicans at the border. None of it makes any sense, especially inasmuch as Mom and Pop can just keep family together by going home, which is not an option for the average burglary suspect, etc. here at home.

Trump has become the default target for every aggrieved world-hating liberal sap. The world must be changed! I demand it!

It may have something to do also with the perception that maybe they picked the wrong team, and that various career choices may have been wrong, in terms of jobs/career and so on. Given the armies of professional liberals wearing badges of Equality but scrambling for Privilege, Trump's laughter at their expense must drive them nuts.

And/or, the SJW types of youngsters (like I was at the time of Vietnam Slaughters) Trump is the Absolute Negation of everything they dream about the Perfect World, and their own badges of Revolutionary Correctness/Rectitude which they desperately seek to pin on their chests/breasts.
( curiously, many young women bare their breasts in protest about something or other. More sexual politics, I guess, especially if they have nice tits.)

I am you and you are me and we are all together. Milan Kundera has a great image in one of his novels about the Revolution in Hungary (?), the communist Revolution that is: A circle dance of young pioneer dancers spiraling up into the sky, like the Ascent of Christians to heaven. He admitted that he was of that delusion at the time. Hope morphed into Belief.

The Delusions of Race Equality are also at hand. And even though Trump declares himself politically correct on that score, the Trump Deranged syndrome SJW children and their parents, deny that Trump is a fellow true-believer. Trump is a Racist! really, and so on.

After a half-century of blatant failure of Blacks to improve the Content of Their Character, never mind getting grades good enough to get into college without privileged access, quotas, etc. older liberals, at least, smell Failure. Disillusion dreams dying hard contributes to the hatreds afoot.

The kids vote for Bernie, but the parents are also disillusioned about socialism, yet the kids luv Bernie and even now blame Billary, etc. for Trump. Who can blame the kids what with the economy punishing their generation like we have not seen for generations

(The ten year cycle of recessions is about to recycle another recession, if history means anything in this regard. Trump is not out of trouble and his standard issue GOP economics is not going to save him if a recession roars in. Wages are still super low, etc, etc and will plummet in another recession, never mind Mexicans.)

So, the desperation of adult liberals is two-fold, or three-fold. Socialism failed. Racial Equality has failed. They know it but cannot admit it to one-another. Trump has won, a repudiation of Everything they Luv.

Hatred simmers in the melting-pot, acrid fumes enter the Body Politic. Liberals stagger while genuine conservatives have adjusted over the last couple decades to the stench of liberalism, all the while buying guns and waiting for the Tipping Point.

Maybe this begins to account for the hatreds swirling out there. I have not even mentioned the hatreds of Blacks who are the most aware of their Failure, and register it for example in their admiration of Elijah Muhammed, Reveredn Wright, and of course, the Obama Zip.

Trump is just the Beginning as the American and European peasantry grab their pitchforks and head for Brussels and D.C.

Joe Webb

nickels , June 18, 2018 at 4:45 pm GMT
On origins of the Russia Threat: just more 'perpetual war' to rescue society from the inherent nihilism of liberalism:

This is made clear in Strauss's exchange with Kojève (reprinted in Strauss's On Tyranny), and in his commentary on Schmitt's The Concept of the Political (reprinted in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue). Kojève lamented the animalisation of man and Schmitt worried about the trivialisation of life. All three of them were convinced that liberal economics would turn life into entertainment and destroy politics; all three understood politics as a conflict between mutually hostile groups willing to fight each other to the death. In short, they all thought that man's humanity depended on his willingness to rush naked into battle and headlong to his death. Only perpetual war can overturn the modern project, with its emphasis on self-preservation and "creature comforts." Life can be politicised once more, and man's humanity can be restored.
This terrifying vision fits perfectly well with the desire for honour and glory that the neo-conservative gentlemen covet. It also fits very well with the religious sensibilities of gentlemen. The combination of religion and nationalism is the elixir that Strauss advocates as the way to turn natural, relaxed, hedonistic men into devout nationalists willing to fight and die for their God and country.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-iraqwarphiloshophy/article_1542.jsp

anon [107] Disclaimer , June 19, 2018 at 5:21 pm GMT
@nickels

You're right, Drury did give good insight into Strauss & his impact. Whoever compiled these clips, from Drury on Strauss to the Wolfowitz interview just after 9/11, made all the right connections.

And the chain of attitudes and actions can be examined in both directions, backward, to Strauss's expectations of Jew-power in Weimar -- he expected Jews to be the elite overseers of the "vulgar masses" who resented being resented by said vulgar masses.

Anon [280] Disclaimer , June 19, 2018 at 11:00 pm GMT
It's projection. They fantasize about doing the same things they falsely imagine Trump will do to them, but to their enemies. They are dangerous. The internet has also allowed the masses to see just how utterly incompetent the Ruling Class is. Neopotism, networking, and geography got them their positions, not talent or erudition.

"These people are the people who worry me these "normal" people who, completely calmly, as if what they are saying wasn't batshit crazy, explain how Trump is just like Hitler, and how Putin is trying to take over the world. I sit there and listen and smile at these people, some of whom are friends and colleagues, people who I genuinely like, and who genuinely like me in return, but who, under the right set of circumstances, would stand by and watch me marched into prison, or worse, and not utter a word in protest."

They can never be allowed to come to power. Ever. Their hysteria over Trump has let the mask slip too much. They have been revealed. It is no different than if Hitler had announced the Holocaust before taking office. At that point, it would have been morally correct to deny him regardless of the vote. We may very well have to consider this in 2020. Do you really want to hand your fate over to these people? They have made their psychotic feelings plain. On top of that, they are incompetent buffoons.

annamaria , June 20, 2018 at 6:04 pm GMT
@redmudhooch

Correct.
Meanwhile, the anonymous "nazi-hunters" at stopantisemitism.org have produced another anti-First Amendment battle cry, this time again a professor at Columbia University, who dared to speak the truth about The Lobby: http://hamiddabashi.com

The "nazi-hunters" at stopantisemitism.org should visit the Nuland-liberated Ukraine, where the activities of the US Zionists (specifically, Nuland-Kagan and Pyatt) have brought about a revival of neo-Nazism (banderism) and the consequent rise in real anti-semitism -- not the one invented by the Jewish vigilantes at stopantisemitism.org

If the "nazi-hunters" from stopantisemitism.org are serious about the memory of the WWII, they should better start investigating the pro-Nazi activities of the Kagans' clan first and foremost (see the "liberated" Ukraine) and then proceed with investigating the Israeli citizen Kolomojsky, who was the main financier of the openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.

https://www.thenation.com/article/americas-collusion-with-neo-nazis/

" the Azov Battalion of some 3,000 well-armed fighters is avowedly pro-Nazi, as evidenced by its regalia, slogans, and programmatic statements, and well-documented as such by several international monitoring organizations."

[Jun 20, 2018] Updating Orwell by Steve Sailer

Notable quotes:
"... Orwell's 1984 is no longer a warning – it's a primer on how to to run your campaign. Use of social media to enforce absolute conformity of opinion, rampant doublethink, teach children to turn in the parents, four fingers equals five fingers – it's all there. ..."
"... Our present cycle of Two-Minutes-Hate seems pretty effective at keeping the Outer Party #Resistance fired up against Donald "Emmanuel Goldstein" Trump. ..."
"... Regular decent folks Democrats really have no idea how far to the Left their party has gone. ..."
"... You can see it in the NY Times. I dropped it recently after reading it for 30 years as I got so sick of their anti-white, gentile, male, heterosexual agenda. I still look at it through a free online subscription from my college, and get disgusted by the pieces in the opinion sections and then log off. ..."
"... I subscribed to the NYT for a number of years. After the recent campaign and the current treatment of our President, Donald Trump, I quit. I am stunned at how these old media properties are being purchased and used for political activism on behalf of their owners and advertisers. They're another example of extreme Left propaganda presented as respectable journalism. ..."
"... The Gray Lady is an old SJW tranny, as far as I can tell.. ..."
"... If a man isn't a committed socialist in 1948, he has no heart. If a man is still a committed socialist in 1984, he has no brain. Orwell was moving to the right, but there are so many "rights" that we can only guess which one he'd have ended up on. Neocon, nationalist, libertarian, who knows. But it's a common arc in one's forties. He didn't make it to 50. ..."
"... Classic satire is often the work of reactionaries: Aristophanes, Juvenal, Swift, Waugh. ..."
"... I have started calling the mass media furies a 'propaganda blitz'. The recent explosion around child separation is a perfect example. It is a combination of major media outlets all going into a froth, the expert use of social media, and the complete shaming of any other viewpoint. They announce a crisis precisely at the time there is movement on an issue, as a means of achieving a purely political objective. Thus, this crisis was timed to coincide with immigration legislation being discussed again. ..."
"... Even small-time progressive players like Russell Moore of the SBC successfully used this recently. They announced a crisis prior to their yearly convention (think voting day for the SBC), used friendly media to spread the word and erupt in hysteria, and used social media to bludgeon their political opponents. It was wicked, but HIGHLY effective. ..."
"... As Steve likes to point out, we need a word for this. I am using 'propaganda blitz', because if you are on the receiving end it is akin to the blitzes over London in WWII, except instead of bombs it is 7-14 days of a brutal, propagandistic news cycle. ..."
Jun 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

From George Orwell's "Inside the Whale," 1940, on the mental atmosphere of English writers in 1937 (slightly updated):

By 2018 the whole of the intelligentsia was mentally at war. Establishment thought had narrowed down to 'anti-Trumpism', i.e. to a negative, and a torrent of hate-literature directed against Russia and the politicians supposedly friendly to Russia was pouring from the Press. The thing that, to me, was truly frightening about the war in America was not such Twitter spats as I witnessed, nor even the party feuds on Instagram, but the immediate reappearance in respectable circles of the mental atmosphere of the McCarthy Era. The very people who for 65 years had sniggered over their own superiority to Kremlin hysteria were the ones who rushed straight back into the mental slum of 1950. All the familiar wartime idiocies, spy-hunting, orthodoxy-sniffing (Sniff, sniff. Are you a good anti-Trumpist?), the retailing of atrocity stories, came back into vogue as though the intervening years had never happened.

Of course, people in 1937 or 1950 at least had some justification for their hysteria.


Anon7 , June 19, 2018 at 3:51 pm GMT

Regular decent folks Democrats really have no idea how far to the Left their party has gone. Orwell's 1984 is no longer a warning – it's a primer on how to to run your campaign. Use of social media to enforce absolute conformity of opinion, rampant doublethink, teach children to turn in the parents, four fingers equals five fingers – it's all there.
Anon7 , June 19, 2018 at 3:52 pm GMT
Regular decent folks Democrats really have no idea how far to the Left their party has gone. Orwell's 1984 is no longer a warning – it's a primer on how to to run your campaign. Use of social media to enforce absolute conformity of opinion, rampant doublethink, teach children to turn in the parents, four fingers equals five fingers – it's all there.
Steve Sailer , Website June 19, 2018 at 3:52 pm GMT
Here's the original:

By 1937 the whole of the intelligentsia was mentally at war. Left-wing thought had narrowed down to 'anti-Fascism', i.e. to a negative, and a torrent of hate-literature directed against Germany and the politicians supposedly friendly to Germany was pouring from the Press. The thing that, to me, was truly frightening about the war in Spain was not such violence as I witnessed, nor even the party feuds behind the lines, but the immediate reappearance in left-wing circles of the mental atmosphere of the Great War. The very people who for twenty years had sniggered over their own superiority to war hysteria were the ones who rushed straight back into the mental slum of 1915. All the familiar wartime idiocies, spy-hunting, orthodoxy-sniffing (Sniff, sniff. Are you a good anti-Fascist?), the retailing of atrocity stories, came back into vogue as though the intervening years had never happened.

Thin-Skinned Masta-Beta , June 19, 2018 at 4:13 pm GMT
Our present cycle of Two-Minutes-Hate seems pretty effective at keeping the Outer Party #Resistance fired up against Donald "Emmanuel Goldstein" Trump.
anony-mouse , June 19, 2018 at 4:14 pm GMT
Don't a lot of people here use war talk like 'invasion' to describe migrants? That's excepting the many WWIII-ers here:

http://www.unz.com/proberts/ten-days-before-the-end-of-the-world/

People of all types seem to like talking about war regardless of how peaceful things are. Human nature?

Luke Lea , June 19, 2018 at 4:17 pm GMT
Nice job. We need a new nickname for this updated form of corporate speech.
bored identity , June 19, 2018 at 4:35 pm GMT
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a cosmopoliethnocentric. Boot with cleats stamping on a host's face – forever:

... ... ...

Neuday , June 19, 2018 at 5:40 pm GMT
@anony-mouse

Invading and colonizing a country is an act of war, regardless of a media-owning fifth column. Things are not peaceful.

Charles Pewitt , June 19, 2018 at 5:52 pm GMT
@Anon7

I like the acting ability of the Welsh guy tormenting the English guy from the Burton/Hurt version of 1984. John Hurt could have done a great O'Brien and Richard Burton could have done a smashing Winston Smith.

Did The Eurythmic's got memory-holed from 1984?

DoublePlusGood:

Charles Pewitt , June 19, 2018 at 6:02 pm GMT
@Steve Sailer

...Orwell and Boxer and Whites Without College Degrees from 2017:

I know what happened to Boxer -- Russian working class -- the work horse in George Orwell's Animal Farm. Boxer busted his arse building the farm back up to snuff after it had undergone the revolution and other problems. The pigs -- Stalinists -- rewarded Boxer by carting him away to the glue factory. Poor Boxer finally realized he was going to the glue factory while in the truck, but he was so exhausted from his labors in working on the farm that he didn't have enough strength to kick the truck to pieces to escape.

Whites Without College Degrees(WWCDs) are the new Boxer of the present day. The Stalinists are now the Globalizers. The Globalizers have decided that all the hard work and all the soldiering over generations by the WWCDs will be rewarded with deliberate attacks and sneaky ways to harm them. From mass immigration to de-industrialization to hooking the WWCDs on drugs, the Globalizer pigs have used every trick in the book to destroy Whites Without Colllege Degrees. Two academics have described this demographic phenomenom as the WHITE DEATH.

Flip , June 19, 2018 at 6:18 pm GMT
@Anon7

Regular decent folks Democrats really have no idea how far to the Left their party has gone.

You can see it in the NY Times. I dropped it recently after reading it for 30 years as I got so sick of their anti-white, gentile, male, heterosexual agenda. I still look at it through a free online subscription from my college, and get disgusted by the pieces in the opinion sections and then log off.

ChrisZ , June 19, 2018 at 6:29 pm GMT
@Anon7

I agree with your observation, Anon7.

Somehow, though, the Left persuaded itself early on that "1984″ was a prophecy of the Trump Era. IIRC the book actually saw a jump in sales, and a stage adaptation was mounted in New York.

I was thinking along your lines (and as yet unaware of the above-mentioned trends) when I saw someone reading it on a commuter train. I cautiously passed a word to him thinking I might be making contact with a fellow Rightist; but was quickly disabused of the notion when he responded with some "resistance" B.S., in the nasally whine typical of the species.

Anon7 , June 19, 2018 at 8:50 pm GMT
@Flip

I subscribed to the NYT for a number of years. After the recent campaign and the current treatment of our President, Donald Trump, I quit. I am stunned at how these old media properties are being purchased and used for political activism on behalf of their owners and advertisers. They're another example of extreme Left propaganda presented as respectable journalism.

The Gray Lady is an old SJW tranny, as far as I can tell..

Reg Cæsar , June 19, 2018 at 9:52 pm GMT
Yes, most Britons would agree that Orwell needs updating: "That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there." He sounds awfully American here.
Reg Cæsar , June 19, 2018 at 10:00 pm GMT
@Tiny Duck

Orwell was a committed socialist

If a man isn't a committed socialist in 1948, he has no heart. If a man is still a committed socialist in 1984, he has no brain. Orwell was moving to the right, but there are so many "rights" that we can only guess which one he'd have ended up on. Neocon, nationalist, libertarian, who knows. But it's a common arc in one's forties. He didn't make it to 50.

Classic satire is often the work of reactionaries: Aristophanes, Juvenal, Swift, Waugh.

Gordo , June 19, 2018 at 10:27 pm GMT

Of course, people in 1937 or 1950 at least had some justification for their hysteria.

Descendants of the same people. Intellectually and often genetically.

Dan Hayes , June 19, 2018 at 11:39 pm GMT
@Reg Cæsar

Reg Caesar: Lord Kenneth Clark summed it all best in Civilisation : Like all great wits he was a violent conservative.

ChrisZ , June 20, 2018 at 12:10 am GMT
@Reg Cæsar

Reg, I thought Norm MacDonald's "gay 'pride'" bit (featured on an earlier thread here) was pretty Aristophanean.

J1234 , June 20, 2018 at 1:33 am GMT

Of course, people in 1937 or 1950 at least had some justification for their hysteria.

This is true, and then some. Just as today, the mainstream media was in on promoting the leftist agenda, though maybe to a lesser degree. Here's the New York Times' obituary (or, more accurately, eulogy) for Joseph Stalin back in 1953. Yes, they acknowledge some of his murderous tendencies, but it seems hard for them to condemn such a great guy for such a minor flaw. The headline reads, Stalin Rose From Czarist Oppression to Transform Russia Into Mighty Socialist State . That's the tone of the the whole article, generally speaking. It's hard for them to conceal their reverence.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1221.html

Anon [381] Disclaimer , June 20, 2018 at 1:54 am GMT
David French, National Review: Israel Has the Right and Obligation to Defend Its Border with Deadly Force

By David French
May 15, 2018 2:41 PM

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/israel-has-right-obligation-defend-border-with-deadly-force/

David French, National Review:

Now Is the Time, Congress -- End Family Separation
By David French

June 18, 2018 5:20 PM

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/family-separation-immigration-congress-end-it/

Anon [381] Disclaimer , June 20, 2018 at 1:58 am GMT
BTW

The EU is attempting to surreptitiously ban criticism of the Ruling Class using some copyright/link tax nonsense that will essentially ban memes and expose anonymous critics. The mask slips ever more.

Charles Erwin Wilson II , June 20, 2018 at 1:59 am GMT
@Anon7

Orwell's 1984 is no longer a warning – it's a primer on how to to run your campaign.

True. But then they do not know that they are Robespierre.

Ozymandias , June 20, 2018 at 2:06 am GMT
OT: Geraldo just invented a new word on Hannity; "THIS IS NOT HYSTERICA! America." He's wrong of course. This is Hysterica.
Charles Erwin Wilson II , June 20, 2018 at 2:10 am GMT
@Reg Cæsar

If a man isn't a committed socialist in 1948, he has no heart.

Wrong.

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. –Winston Churchill

John Pepple , June 20, 2018 at 3:44 am GMT
@Steve Sailer

And just two years later, the anti-fascist rhetoric was completely reversed and became anti-anti-fascist with the Nazi-Soviet pact. And two years after that, it went back to being anti-fascist when Hitler broke the pact.

dr kill , June 20, 2018 at 4:46 am GMT
@ChrisZ

Never underestimate what a man will do to keep a good-paying job.

Anonymous [427] Disclaimer , June 20, 2018 at 5:17 am GMT
@Anon

Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.

sb , June 20, 2018 at 9:55 am GMT
@Reg Cæsar

Quite
Orwell was clearly moving to the right being very anti Communist ( and fellow travellers ) but at all times he was first and foremost an English nationalist . Certainly he was no supporter of Left solidarity

In his time perhaps it was still maybe just possible to consider oneself to be of the left and to be a nationalist. That era has long finished.

Isidore the Farmer , June 20, 2018 at 1:31 pm GMT
I have started calling the mass media furies a 'propaganda blitz'. The recent explosion around child separation is a perfect example. It is a combination of major media outlets all going into a froth, the expert use of social media, and the complete shaming of any other viewpoint. They announce a crisis precisely at the time there is movement on an issue, as a means of achieving a purely political objective. Thus, this crisis was timed to coincide with immigration legislation being discussed again.

The left is getting more skilled at it, too, and is significantly helped by the suppression of right-wing accounts on social media platforms since November 2016. Trayvon was an early example of this, and they have only gotten better at using the tactics. The propaganda is often a mix of true and false components.

Even small-time progressive players like Russell Moore of the SBC successfully used this recently. They announced a crisis prior to their yearly convention (think voting day for the SBC), used friendly media to spread the word and erupt in hysteria, and used social media to bludgeon their political opponents. It was wicked, but HIGHLY effective.

As Steve likes to point out, we need a word for this. I am using 'propaganda blitz', because if you are on the receiving end it is akin to the blitzes over London in WWII, except instead of bombs it is 7-14 days of a brutal, propagandistic news cycle.

[Jun 18, 2018] Real Takeaway The FBI Influenced the Election of a President by Peter Van Buren

In a way we now can talk about Intelligence Industrial complex
Notable quotes:
"... The good news is the Deep State seems less competent than we originally feared. ..."
"... In a damning passage , the 568 page report found it "extraordinary and insubordinate for Comey to conceal his intentions from his superiors for the admitted purpose of preventing them from telling him not to make the statement, and to instruct his subordinates in the FBI to do the same. By departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice." Comey's drafting of a press release announcing no prosecution for Clinton, written before the full investigation was even completed, is given a light touch though in the report, along the lines of roughly preparing for the conclusion based on early indications. ..."
"... Enough: The DOJ Must Show Its Cards to the American Public A Higher Loyalty is Jim Comey's Revenge, Served Lukewarm ..."
"... Attorney General Loretta Lynch is criticized for not being more sensitive to public perceptions when she agreed to meet privately with Bill Clinton aboard an airplane as the FBI investigation into Hillary unfolded. "Lynch's failure to recognize the appearance problem and to take action to cut the visit short was an error in judgment." Her statements later about her decision not to recuse further "created public confusion and didn't adequately address the situation." ..."
"... Page and Strzok also discussed cutting back the number of investigators present for Clinton's in-person interview in light of the fact she might soon be president, and thus their new boss. Someone identified only as Agent One went on to refer to Clinton as "the President" and in a message told a friend "I'm with her." The FBI also allowed Clinton's lawyers to attend her interview, even though they were also witnesses to a possible crimes committed by Clinton. ..."
"... Page and Strzok were among five FBI officials the report found expressed hostility toward Trump and have been referred to the FBI's internal disciple system. The report otherwise makes only wishy-washy recommendations about things every agent should already know, like "adopting a policy addressing the appropriateness of department employees discussing the conduct of uncharged individuals in public statements." ..."
"... In that sense, the IG just poured a can of jet fuel onto the fires of the 2016 election and walked away to watch it burn. ..."
"... One concrete outcome, however, is to weaken a line of prosecution for Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The chief Russiagate investigator has just seen a key witness degraded -- any defense lawyer will characterize Comey's testimony as tainted now -- and a possible example of obstruction weakened. ..."
"... The report thus underscores one of the stated reasons for Comey's dismissal. Firing someone for incompetence isn't obstructing justice; it's the boss' job. ..."
"... the most important conclusion of the report: there is no longer a way to claim America's internal intelligence agency, the FBI, did not play a role in the 2016 election. There is only to argue which side they favored and whether they meddled via clumsiness, as a coordinated action, or as a chaotic cluster of competing pro- and anti- Clinton/Trump factions inside the Bureau. And that's the tally before anyone brings up the FBI's use of a human informant inside the Trump campaign, the FBI's use of both FISA warrants and pseudo-legal warrantless surveillance against key members of the Trump team, the FBI's use of opposition research from the Steele Dossier , and so on. ..."
Jun 18, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com
June 15, 2018 The good news is the Deep State seems less competent than we originally feared.

It will be easy to miss the most important point amid the partisan bleating over what the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General report on the FBI's Clinton email investigation really means.

While each side will find the evidence they want to find proving the FBI, with James Comey as director, helped/hurt Hillary Clinton and/or maybe Donald Trump, the real takeaway is this: the FBI influenced the election of a president.

In January 2017 the Inspector General for the Department of Justice, Michael Horowitz (who previously worked on the 2012 study of "Fast and Furious"), opened his probe into the FBI's Clinton email investigation, including public statements Comey made at critical moments in the presidential campaign. Horowitz's focus was always to be on how the FBI did its work, not to re-litigate the case against Clinton. Nor did the IG plan to look into anything regarding Russiagate.

In a damning passage , the 568 page report found it "extraordinary and insubordinate for Comey to conceal his intentions from his superiors for the admitted purpose of preventing them from telling him not to make the statement, and to instruct his subordinates in the FBI to do the same. By departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice." Comey's drafting of a press release announcing no prosecution for Clinton, written before the full investigation was even completed, is given a light touch though in the report, along the lines of roughly preparing for the conclusion based on early indications.

Enough: The DOJ Must Show Its Cards to the American Public A Higher Loyalty is Jim Comey's Revenge, Served Lukewarm

Attorney General Loretta Lynch is criticized for not being more sensitive to public perceptions when she agreed to meet privately with Bill Clinton aboard an airplane as the FBI investigation into Hillary unfolded. "Lynch's failure to recognize the appearance problem and to take action to cut the visit short was an error in judgment." Her statements later about her decision not to recuse further "created public confusion and didn't adequately address the situation."

The report also criticizes in depth FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who exchanged texts disparaging Trump before moving from the Clinton email to the Russiagate investigation. Those texts "brought discredit" to the FBI and sowed public doubt about the investigation, including one exchange that read, "Page: "[Trump's] not ever going to become president, right? Strzok: "No. No he's not. We'll stop it." Another Strzok document stated "we know foreign actors obtained access to some Clinton emails, including at least one secret message."

Page and Strzok also discussed cutting back the number of investigators present for Clinton's in-person interview in light of the fact she might soon be president, and thus their new boss. Someone identified only as Agent One went on to refer to Clinton as "the President" and in a message told a friend "I'm with her." The FBI also allowed Clinton's lawyers to attend her interview, even though they were also witnesses to a possible crimes committed by Clinton.

Page and Strzok were among five FBI officials the report found expressed hostility toward Trump and have been referred to the FBI's internal disciple system. The report otherwise makes only wishy-washy recommendations about things every agent should already know, like "adopting a policy addressing the appropriateness of department employees discussing the conduct of uncharged individuals in public statements."

But at the end of it all, the details really don't matter, because the report broadly found no political bias, no purposeful efforts or strategy to sway the election. In aviation disaster terms, it was all pilot error. Like an accident of sorts, as opposed to the pilot boarding drunk, but the plane crashed and killed 300 people either way.

The report is already being welcomed by Democrats -- who feel Comey shattered Clinton's chances of winning the election by reopening the email probe just days before the election -- and by Republicans, who feel Comey let Clinton off easy. Many are now celebrating it was only gross incompetence, unethical behavior, serial bad judgment, and insubordination that led the FBI to help determine the election. No Constitutional crisis.

A lot of details in those 568 pages to yet fully parse, but at first glance there is not much worthy of prosecution (though Attorney General Jeff Sessions says he will review the report for possible prosecutions and IG Horowitz will testify in front of Congress on Monday and may reveal more information.) Each side will point to the IG's conclusion of "no bias" to shut down calls for this or that in a tsunami of blaming each other. In that sense, the IG just poured a can of jet fuel onto the fires of the 2016 election and walked away to watch it burn.

One concrete outcome, however, is to weaken a line of prosecution for Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The chief Russiagate investigator has just seen a key witness degraded -- any defense lawyer will characterize Comey's testimony as tainted now -- and a possible example of obstruction weakened. As justification for firing Comey, the White House initially pointed to an earlier Justice Department memo criticizing Comey for many of the same actions now highlighted by the IG (Trump later added concerns about the handling of Russiagate.) The report thus underscores one of the stated reasons for Comey's dismissal. Firing someone for incompetence isn't obstructing justice; it's the boss' job.

It will be too easy, however, to miss the most important conclusion of the report: there is no longer a way to claim America's internal intelligence agency, the FBI, did not play a role in the 2016 election. There is only to argue which side they favored and whether they meddled via clumsiness, as a coordinated action, or as a chaotic cluster of competing pro- and anti- Clinton/Trump factions inside the Bureau. And that's the tally before anyone brings up the FBI's use of a human informant inside the Trump campaign, the FBI's use of both FISA warrants and pseudo-legal warrantless surveillance against key members of the Trump team, the FBI's use of opposition research from the Steele Dossier , and so on.

The good news is the Deep State seems less competent than we originally feared. But even if one fully accepts the IG report's conclusion that all this -- and there's a lot -- was not intentional, at a minimum it makes clear to those watching ahead of 2020 what tools are available and the impact they can have. While we continue to look for the bad guy abroad, we have already met the enemy and he is us.

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well : How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People and Hooper's War : A Novel of WWII Japan. Follow him on Twitter @WeMeantWell .

[Jun 17, 2018] Mattis Putin Is Trying To Undermine America s Moral Authority by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!
The current anti-Russian hysteria is the attempt to unite the society which become hostile to neoliberal elite.
Notable quotes:
"... A casual glance at facts and history makes it instantly clear that the United States has no "moral authority" of any kind whatsoever, and is arguably the hub of the most pernicious and dangerous force ever assembled in human history. But the establishment Russia narrative really is that cartoonishly ridiculous: you really do have to believe that the US government is 100 percent pure good and the Russian government is 100 percent pure evil to prevent the whole narrative from falling to pieces. ..."
"... In reality, Russia is nothing other than a rival power structure that the US-centralized empire wants to either collapse or absorb, but they can't just come right out and tell the public that they're dangerously escalating tensions with a nuclear superpower because westerners live in an invisible empire ruled by insatiably greedy plutocrats, so they make up nonsense about Putin being some kind of omnipotent supervillain who has infiltrated the highest levels of US government and is trying to take over the world. ..."
"... All this new cold war hysteria and nuclear brinkmanship has basically been America acting like a bitchy high school drama queen because Russia is saying mean things about it behind its back? How does a guy named "Mad Dog" get to be such a thin-skinned little snowflake? ..."
"... As we've been discussing a lot recently, control of the narrative is absolutely essential for rulers to maintain their rule. When you hear establishment policy makers babbling about "Russian propaganda" and Putin's attempts to "undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals," all that they are saying is that the plutocrats who rule America need to be able to control the way Americans think and vote, and that the Russian government is making it a bit harder for them to do that. ..."
"... It seems to be that every criticism leveled at Russia, and China even, is a simple reflection of what the USA is doing. Deflection. Classic 'pot calling the kettle black' stuff. ..."
"... You're paying more respect to it than it deserves by giving it a clinical diagnosis, implying "projection" as a psychological defense. Let's call it by its simple name: dirty rotten lying, propaganda, trickery. It's not like the assholes don't know they are lying – of course they do! And they know we know it, too, and don't care. ..."
Jun 17, 2018 | caitlinjohnstone.com

At a graduation ceremony for the US Naval War College (barf), US Secretary of Defense James Mattis asserted that Russian President Vladimir Putin "aims to diminish the appeal of the western democratic model and attempts to undermine America's moral authority," and that "his actions are designed not to challenge our arms at this point but to undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals."

This would be the same James Mattis who's been overseeing the war crime s committed by America's armed forces during their illegal occupation of Syria. This would be the same United States of America that was born of the genocide of indigenous tribes and the labor of African slaves, which slaughtered millions in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Libya and Syria for no legitimate reason, which is partnered with Ukrainian Nazis , jihadist factions in Syria and Iranian terror cultists , which supports 73 percent of the world's dictators , which interferes constantly in the electoral processes of other countries as a matter of policy, which stages coups around the world , which has encircled the globe with military bases , whose FBI still targets black civil rights activists for persecution to this very day , which routinely enters into undeclared wars of aggression against noncompliant governments to advance plutocratic interests , which remains the only country ever to use nuclear weapons on human beings after doing so completely needlessly in Japan, and which is functionally a corporatist oligarchy with no meaningful "democratic model" in place at all .

https://www.youtube.com/embed/8JdurtVYp2E

A casual glance at facts and history makes it instantly clear that the United States has no "moral authority" of any kind whatsoever, and is arguably the hub of the most pernicious and dangerous force ever assembled in human history. But the establishment Russia narrative really is that cartoonishly ridiculous: you really do have to believe that the US government is 100 percent pure good and the Russian government is 100 percent pure evil to prevent the whole narrative from falling to pieces. If you accept the idea that the exchange is anything close to 50/50, with Russia giving back more or less what it's getting and simply protecting its own interests from the interests of geopolitical rivals, it no longer makes any sense to view Putin as a leader who poses a unique threat to the world. If you accept the idea that the west is actually being far more aggressive and antagonistic toward Russia than Russia is being toward the west, it gets even more laughable.

In order to believe that the US has anything resembling "moral authority" you have to shove your head so far into the sand you get lava burns, but that really is what is needed to keep western anti-Russia hysteria going. None of the things the Russian government has been accused of doing (let alone the very legitimate questions about whether or not they even did all of them) merit anything but an indifferent shrug when compared with the unforgivable evils that America's unelected power establishment has been inflicting upon the world, so they need to weave a narrative about "moral authority" in order to give those accusations meaning and relevance. And, since the notion of America having moral authority is contradicted by all facts in evidence, that narrative is necessarily woven of threads of fantasy and denial.

Establishment anti-Russia hysteria is all narrative, no substance. It's sustained by the talking heads of plutocrat-owned western media making the same unanimous assertions over and over again in authoritative, confident-sounding tones of voice without presenting any evidence or engaging with the reality of what Russia or its rivals are actually doing. The only reason American liberals believe that Putin is a dangerous boogieman who has taken over their government, but don't believe for example that America is ruled by a baby-eating pedophile cabal, is because the Jake Tappers and Rachel Maddows have told them to believe one conspiracy theory and not the other. They could have employed the exact same strategy with any other wholly unsubstantiated conspiracy narrative and had just as much success.

In reality, Russia is nothing other than a rival power structure that the US-centralized empire wants to either collapse or absorb, but they can't just come right out and tell the public that they're dangerously escalating tensions with a nuclear superpower because westerners live in an invisible empire ruled by insatiably greedy plutocrats, so they make up nonsense about Putin being some kind of omnipotent supervillain who has infiltrated the highest levels of US government and is trying to take over the world.

Of equal interest to the Defense Secretary's "moral authority" gibberish is his claim that Putin's actions "are designed not to challenge our arms at this point but to undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals."

I mean, like what? So Russia isn't challenging America militarily and isn't taking any actions to attempt to, but it's trying to, what, hurt America's feelings? All this new cold war hysteria and nuclear brinkmanship has basically been America acting like a bitchy high school drama queen because Russia is saying mean things about it behind its back? How does a guy named "Mad Dog" get to be such a thin-skinned little snowflake?

I'm just playing. Actually, when Mattis says that the Russian government is trying to "undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals," he is saying that Moscow is interrupting the lies that Americans are being told about their government by the plutocrat-owned media. As we've been discussing a lot recently, control of the narrative is absolutely essential for rulers to maintain their rule. When you hear establishment policy makers babbling about "Russian propaganda" and Putin's attempts to "undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals," all that they are saying is that the plutocrats who rule America need to be able to control the way Americans think and vote, and that the Russian government is making it a bit harder for them to do that.

More and more, the threads of the establishment narrative are ceasing to be unconsciously absorbed and are being increasingly consciously examined instead. This development has ultimately nothing to do with Russia and everything to do with our species moving out of its old relationship with mental narrative as it approaches evolve-or-die time in our challenging new world. I am greatly encouraged by what I am seeing.

* * *

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Harry S Nydick / June 17, 2018

This is so right on that it is scary. The only problem, while more are questioning, is the fact that the majority of Americans actually believe the bullshit that people like Mattis says. And, with a nickname like Mad Dog, it's a wonder that he hasn't been put down yet.

Even today I had to deal with a typical American – 'swallow-it-hook-line-and-sinker' – idiot.

"The stock market is honest and above board.' 'All immigrants don't belong here.' 'It's fine if the government violates your civil rights' 'Oh and immigrants don't have any.'

I could go on, but I learned long ago to say my piece and move on. For some people, there is no changing their minds, nor even opening them up to considering the truth. There are the descendants of those who were protested against in the 1960s. The 'My country right or wrong' people. Most likely they never had the balls, as children, to speak back to their parents, when those adults were in the wrong. I always wondered whether intellectual blindness is a learned trait. I'm pretty sure that it must be.

William / June 17, 2018
Much or most of what you write about the American narrative is true. However, you weave it into a narrative that ignores central historical facts and themes. Examples; Russia's behavior in Poland after WW2, the Hungarian revolution, the Check invasion and oppression, the take over of Manchuria in the last weeks of WW2.

Stalin killing 20-40 million of his own people, Chechnya, the Korean war, the Berlin wall. Not to mention recent assassinations of its own citizens. Yes, America has done cruel and horrific things in many countries, but it pales to what the Russians have done throughout the ages. It would be akin to comparing what the Nazis did to what the French underground did in response. Both killed, both did things that were horrific, but the French did it in response and not nearly in the same magnitude. Historical contrast is very important when viewing these issues. It is very easy to criticize one's own country but balance is called for. Was Russia justified in taking Crimea, perhaps, but then was Hitler justified in taking the Sudetenland?

JRGJRG / June 17, 2018
What Lee Yates just did there is a beautiful example of Advantageous Comparison defense in Bandera's Moral Disengagement Theory. Yes, the US is morally bankrupt, but so what? The Soviets or Hitler or somebody else was worse. Sorry, that is bullshit.

What did the US overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran have to do with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia? Nothing. And he brings up Russian Crimea, which voted 95% to rejoin Russia, an example of democracy in action.

william / June 17, 2018
The so what is this: when dealing with monsters one has to stoop as low to defend against it. What happened in Iran was Brittain's provocation. They approached Eisenhower once previously and he refused to intervene. It was only after they convinced him that it was a Russian plot to take over the oil fields that he relented. So yes it was wrong and even monstrous but put in the historical perspective at the time, it made sense. At that time, France was in danger of collapsing and with it the rest of Europe. I am of Middle Eastern ethnicity so I too am sensitive to Western colonialization of the region. However, things are not always as simple as we would like them to be.
I really enjoy when people lower themselves to using vulgarities because they disagree with a point of view-most flattering and intelligent.
JRGJRG / June 17, 2018
Just more evasive moral disengagement. So the Dulles boys finally duped Ike into giving the green light to the overthrow of democratically elected Mossadegh installing a bloodthirsty tyrant that ended up destabilizing the Middle East for the next 50years and running, based on the pretext of Russia hysteria.

Was it true the Russians were really going to take over the oilfields? I never heard that story before. I doubt it very much. History teaches a different lesson. Mossadegh had the temerity to want to share oil profits with the Iranian people who owned it. Thats too much democracy for any country.

Just like Truman was tricked into Korea. Or Johnson was duped into Vietnam.

And so how do you explain why the CIA overthrew Arbenz in Guatemala beginning a reign of terror with genocude lasting 50 years against unarmed peasant villages? East Timor? Chile? Brazil and Argentina? Greece? Angola?

This is just more Advantageous Comparison to justify moral bankruptcy. Sorry, sometimes things are as simple as they look.

No I respectfully disagree. If these seem like difficult moral choices to you, I pity you.

JRGJRG / June 17, 2018
Although I must apologize for not recognizing your rank as a cut above the usual G-7 troll with your knowledge of the advanced techniques of argument for moral disengagement, defending your country against the indefensible. Tough job that calls for an expert.

You must be one of those G-12 trolls called to fill in for overtime duty on fathers day. I'm sorry your wife and kids are going to be missing you today. You can make it up to them tomorrow.

William / June 18, 2018
Funny thing, I agree that the overthrow was wrong, and horrible. I also think it was wrong and perhaps criminal when we invaded both Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of my relatives were killed by tyrants in the Middle East and much of what has happened there is ugly. But again, I do not stoop to personal disparagement. It has no place in honest debate. Same tactic used by the deplorable . Trump and McCarthy for that matter, and of course, now you. As for Mossadegh, he was truly a statesman. England owned the oil fields and he went to the UN to mediate the purchase of the oil fields at market value. The English refused and tried to convince Eisenhower that it was a Russian plot. He tried again and finally Eisenhower relented, wrongly I might add. But do remember, that Eisenhower also stopped the English and French when they wanted to invade Egypt to take over the Suez.
Lee Yates / June 17, 2018
Thank You, JRGJRG. I did not know that I knew that much philosophy. What I said was more in light of current events circa the 1990s. Our "bankers" went to Russia and "helped" them get capitalism. Well they got it, and now their gangsters/bankers are just as wealthy and sophisticated as ours, or more so. Politically, I cannot really blame Putin for holding a grudge about our meddling in Russia and general promotion of Boris Yeltsin. Still I doubt that he would make it easy for us to install another Yeltsin or buy all of Russia's resources either, so why would we make it easy for him to meddle in our country, or do what we do overseas?
jrgjrg / June 17, 2018
This is what you're doing, even if you don't recognize it. If you understand this you will begin to understand the errors of your own ways. This is how totalitarianship develops. Read and learn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_disengagement

Harry S Nydick / June 17, 2018
Take off the blinders and fully explain how the U.S. genocide of native Americans – and the ongoing horrific treatment of them – pales in comparison to anything except, possibly, the unnecessary dropping of two nuclear bombs on Japan.

Sorry, but your dissertation of an excuse just doesn't cut the mustard – or maybe your mother never told you that two wrongs don't make a right. Or in the case of the U.S., dozens of never ending wrongs. Unless you really open your eyes and mind and understand the truth, you will never come off as anything more than an apologist for the top 1/10th of the top 1%.

Harry S Nydick / June 17, 2018
This was a reply to William, but comes off looking as an original comment and criticism of Caity, with whom I am in complete agreement on todays article.
jrgjrg / June 18, 2018
Not just the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, but remember that Gen. LeMay firebombed every city in Japan before the bombs were dropped, causing at least another half million deaths. Robert MacNamara said in an interview that if the US had lost the Second World War they both would have been tried as war criminals, and it would be right. See:

https://player.vimeo.com/video/149799416

AriusArmenian / June 17, 2018
Always impressed by Caitlin driving a bulldozer through lying narratives. We need more Caitlin's; we need an antiwar mass movement of Caitlin's. But the antiwar movement is very weak and it is divided against itself.

In the 1990's there was a coming together of the Chronicles paleoconservatives and the CounterPunch progressives against the US/NATO attack on Yugoslavia. But today Thomas Fleming and Chronicles have retreated and those controlling CounterPunch have explicitly rejected an alliance with the 'right' against the US march to war.

I wish I could share the Caitlin enthusiasm for the future but I am depressed and fearful for the future. The US public is asleep. The US is gearing up for war in Europe and Asia. Starting with Clinton each president has murdered about a million souls. They are gearing up for a bigger war in the MENA and even Eastern Europe with Iran as the major target and will likely claim another million+.

From Jungian psychology I learned that unless the opposites come close together change (a birth out of the tyranny of the status quo) will not happen. The elites in control of the US use the fake dialectic of the major two parties to keep us apart. Those in charge of each pole of the fake dialectic derive power from defending it against the 'other' and see alliance with the 'other' as a diminution of their power (a good example is those in control of CounterPunch arguing against antiwar alliance with the 'right'; that they are captured by their power drive is plain to see).

Liberals (neolibs) and many progressives have walked straight into a trap set by the CIA that engineered a Cold War v2. They knew the neocons would come along. The CIA, Wall Street, military, NSA are marching to war. They thirst for their holy war. They are the supremacist 'exceptional and indispensable' while the rest of the world is unexceptional and dispensable.

If the left and right do not come together in an antiwar alliance then how can the warmongering trajectory of the US change?

geoffreyskoll / June 17, 2018
It's just like you, Caitlin, to bring up such quibbles as genocide, slavery, torture, and a few others too minor to even mention. We're talking IDEALS here. You know like complete global domination, slavish catering to the most exploitive class in human history–the stuff that makes America great!
Lee Yates / June 17, 2018
I agree that the U.S. is Imperialist and has been for a long time. However, it is false that Russia opposes the US kleptocracy or represents anything other than the same bankster/gangsters that run the West. They came into the fold after the end of the Soviet Union, and there they remain, probably not too happy about it, but neither are we right. The elites from all over launder money, hide wealth enjoy power and luxury beyond our imagination. A small spat between them is death sentence for the rest of us, but they will make up and enjoy their stolen wealth again.

The moral authority that the West or USA enjoys is a hollow thing, much like Christianity at the height of the Church's power. But the words are still there maybe some day a true believer will come along and do something about them.

ger / June 17, 2018
Forgive me, I could not get beyond the 'undermine America's moral authority'. I take it, Mattis means the 'moral authority' to starve the Yemenis to death and deny them medicine while they are dying . aided by our French Poodle and a mad woman from the Isles! Or maybe the 'moral authority' of Albright when she said killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children 'was worth it'. Or maybe it was 'moral authority' of Clinton, giggling over the sadist murder of Kaddafi. Some how, as an American I don't feel 'moral authority' , all I feel is the pain of inhumanity.
jrgjrg / June 17, 2018
No, no, no, you're still not getting it. Let me explain it to you. It means the authority of the autocrats to determine what's moral for you. They themselves are above morality, like Nietzsche taught, remember? Authoritarianism.

Now do you understand?

elkojohn / June 17, 2018
As was hinted at by the FBI-IG report, neither political party in the criminal U.S. government is complying with law (domestic nor international). The U.S. government system is an organized crime syndicate of liars, thieves and murders. The ruling class and the inside players of the secret government consider the common folk to be deplorable, trailer-park trash.

That's the mind-set of the "holier-than-thou" professionals working inside the U.S. government. Whatever trust, loyalty and respect citizens had for this government has been completely squandered – and voters (not Putin) gave the FU finger to the status quo by electing Trump.

The treasonous, seditious, murdering 2-party dictatorship has absolutely NO ONE to blame but themselves. The time has come to eliminate and defund the secret espionage agencies that run our government, – and which have morphed into crime syndicates. Ditto the two political parties. Until we see all the top level law-breakers in jail (i.e., Clinton, Bush, Obama), until we witness 2/3's of the House and the Senate being purged and replaced, until we witness the complete dismantling of the FED, until we witness ALL military bases around the world being closed and our troops brought home, until we witness the M-I-C's budget cut down to 1/4th and used ONLY for national protection, until we witness a purge of the CIA/FBI cartel, until we witness manufacturing being restored to this country, until we witness the USA cutting all special interest lobbying (in particular, Israel and Saudi Arabia), until we witness the break-up of the death grip that Wall St. and the banking monopoly has on our economy, until we witness the full restoration of the "rule of law" in our government, – until then, it will be the absolute, open, in-your-face, tyrannical, 24/7, lawlessness of the U.S. government that destroys this nation.

So I disagree with James Mattis, that the U.S. holds the moral high ground.

jrgjrg / June 17, 2018
You're paying more respect to it than it deserves by giving it a clinical diagnosis, implying "projection" as a psychological defense. Let's call it by its simple name: dirty rotten lying, propaganda, trickery. They're playing the "I'm rubber and you're glue" game. It's not like the assholes don't know they are lying – of course they do! And they know we know it, too, and don't care.
WillD / June 17, 2018
Mattis didn't realise how well he described Trump. When you look at what Trump's regime has done since taking office last year, it 'trumps' [pun intended] Putin's efforts, such as they are, by a mile. Putin could never hope to achieve so much in such a short time, if that's what he wanted to do.

It seems to be that every criticism leveled at Russia, and China even, is a simple reflection of what the USA is doing. Deflection. Classic 'pot calling the kettle black' stuff.

All one has to do is change a few names in the narrative – replace Putin with Trump, Russia / China with USA. That's it. Easy.

jrgjrg / June 17, 2018
You're paying more respect to it than it deserves by giving it a clinical diagnosis, implying "projection" as a psychological defense. Let's call it by its simple name: dirty rotten lying, propaganda, trickery. It's not like the assholes don't know they are lying – of course they do! And they know we know it, too, and don't care.
WillD / June 17, 2018
No, you misunderstood what I was saying. I'm not saying he/they use it as a defense, but that they don't realize how close it is to what it (the USA) is doing.

Believe me, I have no respect for Mattis & that mob, nor Putin for that matter. None of them deserve respect.

I agree with you on the dirty rotten lying, too. They do know they are lying, but don't know how close to the truth it is when applied to them.

jrgjrg / June 17, 2018
No worries. We are in the "post-truth era." That sounds crazy, I know. The plutocrats are discussing this exact topic this year at the Bilderberg Conference.

[Jun 17, 2018] the dominant political forces in EU are anti-Russia

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There is a strong, EU domestic anti-Russian population based on hundreds of years of history, resentment over losses (Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland), self-brainwashing about perceived abuse (Poland, Baltics, eastern Europeans in general), hatred and contempt towards anything 'eastern', and the traditional anglo anti-Russian policies. Recently new emotional hatreds have been added with endless demonising Russia about xenophobia, hooligans, gays, stray dogs, anything the creative propagandists can push. Most Europeans turn out on reflection to be quite gullible and stupid. ..."
"... There are a few minor exceptions and some Latin nations are more level headed. There is also a minority view in the German world, mostly based on their business realism that is neutral toward Russia, but not pro-Russian. There will be no political rapprochement between EU and Russia. There will be better business relations because water flows downhill and EU-Russia economic ties are such an obvious fit. The cultural hatred and political hostility will go on. ..."
"... After WWII it took most Europeans less than a generation to revert to the traditional anti-Russian attitudes. In some cases, nations that were literally saved from extermination were more resentful than grateful. In Poland it took less than a year, in Czech Republic 20 years, but the old visceral hatreds emerged again. ..."
Jun 17, 2018 | www.unz.com

renfro

Saker is correct that EU countries will not work with Russia. Blaming it all on Washington was always stupid
Bullshit. ...try to keep up with whats actually happening.

U.S. Is Trying to Kill Major Gas Deal Between Russia and Germany
By Tom O'Connor On 5/18/18 at 2:41 PM
http://www.newsweek.com/us-trying-kill-major-gas-deal-between-russia-germany-934603

The U.S. has warned both Russia and Germany against pursuing a planned gas pipeline that would run between the two countries, threatening to impose sanctions and claiming the project would threaten the security of its European allies.

Construction has recently begun for the Nord Stream 2 project, a planned pipeline that would extend from Russia along an existing pipeline through the Baltic Sea into northeastern Germany. Once finished, Nord Stream 2 would reportedly double the amount of gas that Russia could provide Europe. State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary Sandra Oudkirk told reporters in Berlin Thursday that the project could bolster Russia's "malign influence" in the region and that Washington was "exerting as much persuasive power" as it could to stop it, according to the Associated Press.

Europe in diplomatic push to ease Russia sanctions | Financial Times

https://www.ft.com/content/9b9bbd3c-44a5-11e8-93cf-67ac3a6482fdApr 20, 2018 - A Europe-wide diplomatic push is under way to persuade the Trump administration to ease US sanctions targeting Russia, as fears mount that ...

Beckow , June 17, 2018 at 6:01 pm GMT

We are talking apples and oranges. EU wants cheap, reliable energy from Russia and to export to Russia as much as possible without interference from US. That is pure business. But the dominant political forces in EU are anti-Russia, some because they are fed by the security-military-academic spending, some because they 'studied' and were politically formed in US or UK. Some because that's just the way they are.

There is a strong, EU domestic anti-Russian population based on hundreds of years of history, resentment over losses (Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland), self-brainwashing about perceived abuse (Poland, Baltics, eastern Europeans in general), hatred and contempt towards anything 'eastern', and the traditional anglo anti-Russian policies. Recently new emotional hatreds have been added with endless demonising Russia about xenophobia, hooligans, gays, stray dogs, anything the creative propagandists can push. Most Europeans turn out on reflection to be quite gullible and stupid.

There are a few minor exceptions and some Latin nations are more level headed. There is also a minority view in the German world, mostly based on their business realism that is neutral toward Russia, but not pro-Russian. There will be no political rapprochement between EU and Russia. There will be better business relations because water flows downhill and EU-Russia economic ties are such an obvious fit. The cultural hatred and political hostility will go on.

After WWII it took most Europeans less than a generation to revert to the traditional anti-Russian attitudes. In some cases, nations that were literally saved from extermination were more resentful than grateful. In Poland it took less than a year, in Czech Republic 20 years, but the old visceral hatreds emerged again.

My advise to Russia would be to mind its own business and not try to sacrifice for the others or to help them. It has always backfired because the cultural milieu in Europe is naturally resentful of Russia and the east in general. Business doesn't change that.

[Jun 17, 2018] After WWII it took most Europeans less than a generation to revert to the traditional anti-Russian attitudes

Notable quotes:
"... There is a strong, EU domestic anti-Russian population based on hundreds of years of history, resentment over losses (Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland), self-brainwashing about perceived abuse (Poland, Baltics, eastern Europeans in general), hatred and contempt towards anything 'eastern', and the traditional anglo anti-Russian policies. Recently new emotional hatreds have been added with endless demonising Russia about xenophobia, hooligans, gays, stray dogs, anything the creative propagandists can push. Most Europeans turn out on reflection to be quite gullible and stupid. ..."
"... There are a few minor exceptions and some Latin nations are more level headed. There is also a minority view in the German world, mostly based on their business realism that is neutral toward Russia, but not pro-Russian. There will be no political rapprochement between EU and Russia. There will be better business relations because water flows downhill and EU-Russia economic ties are such an obvious fit. The cultural hatred and political hostility will go on. ..."
"... After WWII it took most Europeans less than a generation to revert to the traditional anti-Russian attitudes. In some cases, nations that were literally saved from extermination were more resentful than grateful. In Poland it took less than a year, in Czech Republic 20 years, but the old visceral hatreds emerged again. ..."
"... Failure has never discouraged true fanatics. It is a mistake to see them only in Washington and London, there are plenty of them in positions of power in Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, and even Stockholm. ..."
"... And in Washington the loudest ones are often bitter ethnics from eastern Europe. I honestly think it is about 50-50 whether this gets escalated beyond all reason and we face a catastrophe (so I admit that I don't know :). ..."
"... On the one hand there are the nukes. On the other, it is so hard to climb down for any ideological fanatic. They felt that they were so close, when they bombed Beograd and Russia did nothing, they thought it was all just a question of time. And then Putin happened and the dream has been slowly dying. Imagine the painful void that they have to live with every day. So they hate. Any concession to people who hate you is counter-productive, thus there will be no deal between Russia-EU. Only obvious trade. ..."
Jun 17, 2018 | www.unz.com

Beckow , June 17, 2018 at 6:01 pm GMT

... EU wants cheap, reliable energy from Russia and to export to Russia as much as possible without interference from US. That is pure business. But the dominant political forces in EU are anti-Russia, some because they are fed by the security-military-academic spending, some because they 'studied' and were politically formed in US or UK. Some because that's just the way they are.

There is a strong, EU domestic anti-Russian population based on hundreds of years of history, resentment over losses (Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland), self-brainwashing about perceived abuse (Poland, Baltics, eastern Europeans in general), hatred and contempt towards anything 'eastern', and the traditional anglo anti-Russian policies. Recently new emotional hatreds have been added with endless demonising Russia about xenophobia, hooligans, gays, stray dogs, anything the creative propagandists can push. Most Europeans turn out on reflection to be quite gullible and stupid.

There are a few minor exceptions and some Latin nations are more level headed. There is also a minority view in the German world, mostly based on their business realism that is neutral toward Russia, but not pro-Russian. There will be no political rapprochement between EU and Russia. There will be better business relations because water flows downhill and EU-Russia economic ties are such an obvious fit. The cultural hatred and political hostility will go on.

After WWII it took most Europeans less than a generation to revert to the traditional anti-Russian attitudes. In some cases, nations that were literally saved from extermination were more resentful than grateful. In Poland it took less than a year, in Czech Republic 20 years, but the old visceral hatreds emerged again.

My advise to Russia would be to mind its own business and not try to sacrifice for the others or to help them. It has always backfired because the cultural milieu in Europe is naturally resentful of Russia and the east in general. Business doesn't change that.

Beckow , June 17, 2018 at 11:10 pm GMT

@Kiza

Thanks. Current trends strengthen Euro-asia (and thus China and Russia), so West will have to do something, otherwise they get weaker over time.

There has been a maximalist group in the West who believe that ' anything is possible ', that even with nukes it is possible to defeat and dismember Russia. The key factor would be internal instability inside Russia. Maidan, Saaksavilli's mad dash in 2008, and the support for Caucas separatists were all done with that in mind. It has mostly failed with Russia becoming more united in the process.

Failure has never discouraged true fanatics. It is a mistake to see them only in Washington and London, there are plenty of them in positions of power in Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, and even Stockholm.

And in Washington the loudest ones are often bitter ethnics from eastern Europe. I honestly think it is about 50-50 whether this gets escalated beyond all reason and we face a catastrophe (so I admit that I don't know :).

On the one hand there are the nukes. On the other, it is so hard to climb down for any ideological fanatic. They felt that they were so close, when they bombed Beograd and Russia did nothing, they thought it was all just a question of time. And then Putin happened and the dream has been slowly dying. Imagine the painful void that they have to live with every day. So they hate. Any concession to people who hate you is counter-productive, thus there will be no deal between Russia-EU. Only obvious trade.

[Jun 16, 2018] I noticed the DNC created a tiny plaque above a crappy bike rack for him

Jun 16, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Vote up! 8 Vote down! 1


Ms No -> el buitre Fri, 06/15/2018 - 15:40 Permalink

Found an interesting article about some developments with Seth Rich. Hard to make sense of. I noticed the DNC created a tiny plaque above a crappy bike rack for him. They don't want anybody to remember him. Probably Hillary's idea.

https://www.sott.net/article/388293-Aaron-Rich-refusing-to-authorize-Wi

forexskin -> Ms No Fri, 06/15/2018 - 16:26 Permalink

this article merits wider play - interesting angle that the family won't authorize wikileaks to release their info.

Thought Processor -> Ms No Fri, 06/15/2018 - 16:30 Permalink

Seth uploaded the files into a DropBox (per Sy Hersh) and also may have given others the password to it. He was trying to make sure that the information got out. He very likely also asked that he never be named as the leaker, for obvious reasons.

His family could possibly confirm that he was the leaker if they knew at the time, though I'm sure that they were heavily pressured to do otherwise as soon as Seth Rich was murdered. They would have simply been given a choice along with some thinly veiled threats.

Thought Processor -> Four chan Fri, 06/15/2018 - 15:26 Permalink

Rumor is that Bernie is setting up his crew now for another run at it. Makes me wonder who the next Seth Rich will be.

pparalegal -> Thought Processor Fri, 06/15/2018 - 16:51 Permalink

Bernie sold his mooing cow followers out last time. The DNC will make him an offer he can't refuse. Biden is a tit grabbing corrupt cartoon. I say Crusty the clown has a good chance. Do it for the children!

[Jun 16, 2018] Evil empire 2.0 West conjures up ghost of Soviet past to vilify Russia by Robert Bridge

Notable quotes:
"... "We are going to do the worst thing we can do to you. We are going to take your enemy way from you." ..."
"... "There's no way I would ever agree to give [Russia] that legitimacy," ..."
"... "The Soviet Union may have fallen, but the evil it represents is alive and well in Putin's Russia." ..."
"... "He is no friend of the United States," ..."
"... "He's dismembering democracies everywhere and trying to do so in our own backyard." ..."
"... In order to put to rest this tortured Soviet ghost, it needs to be reminded that the business of "dismembering democracies" ..."
"... "move to re-Sovietize the region." ..."
"... "In respect of Karl Marx, I think he must be turning in his grave to see what the country that was founded on many of his precepts is doing in the name of supporting Syria by condoning the use of chemical weapons on Syrian territory." ..."
"... "recapturing the Soviet position on the world stage." ..."
"... "America's Putin apologist" ..."
"... "The intelligence committees have never produced any evidence," ..."
"... "They never even did a forensic exam of the DNC computers." ..."
"... "genetically driven to co-opt." ..."
"... "The parting with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics will be long and difficult," ..."
"... "We must acknowledge that many will not believe or agree with the death warrant written in Minsk and confirmed in Alma-Ata." ..."
"... Like this story? Share it with a friend! ..."
Jun 16, 2018 | www.rt.com

Listening to Western media and politicians these days, you would never guess that nearly three decades ago the Soviet hammer and sickle lowered for the last time over the Kremlin, replaced by the Russian tricolor. Ironically, the collapse of the Soviet Union - an empire made up of 15 republics encompassing some 12 million square miles - has been far more difficult for­ the West to come to grips with than it has been for the Russian people, who witnessed the decline and fall firsthand. Indeed, many Westerners are ardent believers that the Soviet Union is still alive and kicking.

This apparent paradox was foreseen many years ago by the Soviet political scientist, Georgi Arbatov, when he told a US diplomat shortly after the collapse: "We are going to do the worst thing we can do to you. We are going to take your enemy way from you."

Thirty years later the West still revisits the grave of its former Soviet nemesis, yearning for its rise from the ashes. Just this week, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham conjured up the spirit of America's ex arch-enemy when responding to Donald Trump's suggestion that Russia be readmitted into the G7.

"There's no way I would ever agree to give [Russia] that legitimacy," Graham said . "The Soviet Union may have fallen, but the evil it represents is alive and well in Putin's Russia."

"He is no friend of the United States," he continued. "He's dismembering democracies everywhere and trying to do so in our own backyard."

In order to put to rest this tortured Soviet ghost, it needs to be reminded that the business of "dismembering democracies" has been solely the purview of the US and its NATO allies. At a time when the world lacked a countervailing force to check Western military aggression – which the Soviet Union duly provided – the West eagerly pursued a regime-change agenda that not only destroyed viable governments, like Iraq and Libya, but set in motion a migrant crisis that the European Union is at pains to control today. Read more Adam Scotti/Prime Minister's Office/Handout via Russia should be back in G7 as 'we spend 25% of time' talking about it anyway – Trump

For its part, Russia has resorted to military action against a foreign country on just one occasion. In August 2008, in response to a deadly attack on Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia, Russian forces entered Georgian territory. Even the EU concluded that the government of ex Georgian President, Mikhail Saakashvili, was to blame for sparking the five-day conflict.

So, what is the reason for Graham's gross distortion of the historical record? And why the apparent need to conflate modern, democratic Russia with the vanquished Soviet Union? For the answer, it is always helpful to follow the money trail, and unsurprisingly it leads straight to the door of America's largest defense contractors.

It is no secret that Lindsey Graham – perhaps second only to John McCain - is one of the most notorious war hawks in Washington. During his failed run for the 2016 presidential elections, the Super PAC supporting his bid collected $2.9 million, the bulk of which came from the coffers of defense contractors.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, another darling of the military industrial complex, who raked in just under $500 million from the defense industry for her presidential bid, was portraying Russia as some sort of Soviet-style menace as early as 2012.

Discussing Vladimir Putin's efforts to promote greater economic integration in Eurasia, Clinton depicted the venture as a "move to re-Sovietize the region." Unfortunately, no one challenged the Democrat to explain how one of the largest capitalistic ventures in the world could be confused with communism.

Clearly, Western leaders are intentionally dragging up memories of the bygone Cold War-era in order to incite an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty - the ultimate stimulant for military spending, corporate profit-taking and, last but not least, NATO sprawl up to Russia's border. For defense sector lobbyists, the rhetoric is music to the ears.

The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election. We shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered it because it doesn't align with the main media narrative of Tump and the election. https://t.co/2dL8Kh0hof

-- Rob Goldman (@robjective) February 17, 2018

The threat of peace does not boost the bottom line of the defense contractors, who represent some of the most influential people in Washington, while the politicians who are most hawkish on foreign policy are richly rewarded. In short, it is a marriage made in hell, with a 'honeymoon' somewhere in the Middle East. Russia, due to its stunning resurgence, which was put on full display in Syria as it foiled another Western scheme for regime change, has also appeared on the radar.

Thus, we see Western politicians and pundits on both sides of the Atlantic attempting to make a strained connection between Russia and the Soviet Union, and even more now with 'Russiagate' and the Skripal saga in full hysteria mode. This is clearly being done in an effort to isolate Russia on the global stage.

Britain's Ambassador to the United Nations Karen Pierce, for example, in a heated debate with her Russian counterpart, Vassily Nebenzia, lectured Russia for its 'regrettable behavior' in Syria, saying : "In respect of Karl Marx, I think he must be turning in his grave to see what the country that was founded on many of his precepts is doing in the name of supporting Syria by condoning the use of chemical weapons on Syrian territory."

Read more Britain's Ambassador to the United Nations Karen Pierce. © Brendan McDermid 'Marx would be turning in his grave' – Britain's UN envoy appears to think she's debating Soviets

One wonders how such a high-ranking official could possibly understand what is happening in Syria today when the collapse of the Soviet Union seems to have escaped her attention. Meanwhile, perennial Russophobes, which make up the overwhelming majority of fellowship positions among US think tanks, regularly argue that Russia is somehow 'nostalgic for empire,' and determined to 'restore the glory of the Soviet times.'

Anne Applebaum, a member of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, gave a distorted version of reality on Ukrainian television, arguing that Vladimir Putin is interested in "recapturing the Soviet position on the world stage." There is just one problem with that position: Not a single thing the Russian leader has done or not done to date would reasonably support that thesis. But good luck finding an academic to challenge such misguided notions.

Whenever the tiny cadre of Western academics strays from the reservation and argues from the Russian perspective, they are exiled to academia's version of the Gulag Archipelago seldom to be heard from again. Stephen Cohen, emeritus at Princeton University and NYU, is referred to as "America's Putin apologist" among his peers for daring to suggest there might just be an alternative reality to the mainstream media madness we are being fed about 'Putin's Russia' on a daily basis.

Speaking on the subject of 'Russiagate,' Cohen acknowledged what so few academics have the intellectual courage to say: there is no evidence whatsoever to show that Putin ordered the hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016. "The intelligence committees have never produced any evidence," Cohen said . "They never even did a forensic exam of the DNC computers."

Obviously, this sort of 'crazy talk' is not well received in US policy circles, and if it were not for Cohen's serious credentials as a leading expert on Russia he would be simply 'exiled' from the mainstream discourse. That is because the US has entered a dark, unrecognizable place where top officials, like James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, can actually describe the Russian people in racist overtones, saying they are "genetically driven to co-opt."

The reality is that the West is acquiring a dangerous totalitarian mindset (genetically driven?) in that it has become – similar perhaps to the Soviet times - nearly impossible to question anything that the mainstream media, think tanks and academia disseminates.

"The parting with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics will be long and difficult," Izvestia warned with uncanny foresight. "We must acknowledge that many will not believe or agree with the death warrant written in Minsk and confirmed in Alma-Ata."

Indeed, nostalgia for the Soviet times – complete with a new cold war and lucrative arms race - is so rampant in the West that its roots are beginning to crack through the surface. Such a repressive climate chokes off all any discussion that presents a challenge to the official narrative which proclaims, as absolute fact, that 'Russia is aspiring for Soviet-style empire,' a groundless assertion that is every bit as ridiculous as it is dangerous.

If the current trend towards the homogenization of thought continues - like a chapter torn from Orwell's 1984 - Westerners will awake one sunny morning to a shiny new totalitarian state of their own design and making, complete with jackboots on the streets, under an awning falsely proclaiming 'democracy'.

@Robert_Bridge

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. Former Editor-in-Chief of The Moscow News, he is author of the book, 'Midnight in the American Empire,' released in 2013.

[Jun 15, 2018] The Guardian mounts defence of British government lies over Skripals by Jean Shaoul

Harding is definitely a joke. He is pretty pathetic easily jumping in and trying to milk any Russian scandal be in Litvinenko, Russiagate, Steele dossier, of Skripals. Any version of events that he approved can be instantly discarded a lie probably created with MI6 help. So he can serve as a kind of reliable negative indicator, if you wish.
Applebaum is more dangerous, but still she a typical rabid neocon without any "in depth" understanding of Russia. the net result of Skripal affair was poisoning Russian-British relation for decade or so. If this is the price Theresa May wanted to pay to stay in power she should be prosecuted for abuse of her office.
Notable quotes:
"... The Skripal case: A new Cold War? ..."
"... Applebaum now works at the London School of Economics where she heads, appropriately enough, a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda. She is a virulent anti-communist and a ferocious warmonger, married to the former foreign minister of Poland. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... editing, contextualising, explanation and redaction ..."
"... Answering a question about the government's use of D-Notices (Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice), Morris tried desperately to excuse press censorship. Contradicting reports that the government had issued two D-notices to prevent the media from identifying British intelligence service personnel Skripal was working with, he said there were "very few that we know about, only one." D notices had "changed" and are now "advisory." ..."
"... One audience member pointed out that since the poisoning had been unsuccessful, Russia might not have been responsible and that the government and media had taken the easy way out by blaming Russia. ..."
"... This was dismissed without a serious answer. The newspaper of what passes for the "liberal left" instead proceeded to solidify its alliance with the most right-wing layers of the US and British political and intelligence establishment by churning out anti-Russian propaganda of a distinctly McCarthyite character. ..."
Jun 12, 2018 | www.wsws.org

The Guardian's June 4 event, The Skripal case: A new Cold War? was a blatant attempt to propagandise against Russia in the interests of British imperialism.

The newspaper gave the platform to Anne Applebaum and Luke Harding along with two of its journalists, Caroline Bannock and Steve Morris, who had covered the Skripal story.

All have uncritically regurgitated the British government's unsubstantiated, contradictory and constantly shifting claims that the Russian-British double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Julia were poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent by the Putin regime.

Applebaum now works at the London School of Economics where she heads, appropriately enough, a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda. She is a virulent anti-communist and a ferocious warmonger, married to the former foreign minister of Poland.

After the Russian annexation of Crimea, she called for "total war" against nuclear-armed Russia in a column in the Washington Post . Closely connected to the highest echelons of the US state, she is a member of key foreign policy think tanks and sits on the board of directors of the CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy.

Harding, long time foreign correspondent for the Guardian , appears to have very close links to Britain's security services. He has authored books that can only be described as hatchet jobs on Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, aimed at discrediting them and facilitating their persecution by the US authorities, as well as innumerable propaganda pieces against Russia.

The Guardian itself has a long record of dutifully promoting the anti-Russian warmongering of both the US and British political establishments. It supported the Western-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, using allegations of Russian aggression to press for punitive sanctions against Moscow, British participation in the US intervention in Syria against the Russian-backed regime of Bashar al-Assad, most recently following fake news of a chemical weapons attack on Douma. This is in addition to accepting uncritically the allegations of Russian interference in the US presidential election in 2016.

To underscore the Guardian's political loyalties, another invitee, although not on the platform, was Sir David Omand, from whom the Guardian has commissioned several articles over the years.

Omand is a former senior civil servant and head of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the intelligence and security organisation responsible for spying on people at home and abroad. He is currently a visiting professor at King's College London and vice-president of the Royal United Services Institute, the leading military think-tank.

It was GCHQ that in 2013 oversaw the operation to destroy the Guardian's hard drives and memory cards on two computers containing encrypted files from whistle-blower Edward Snowden, after the British government threatened to jail editor Alan Rusbridger and close the newspaper over its reporting of the Snowden revelations. The Guardian accepted this blatant censorship with only token protest.

The newspaper also has form on news control. It stated in 2010 in an infamous editorial about WikiLeaks, which had provided secret US diplomatic cables to the Guardian and four other news outlets, that it had only agreed to publish "a small number of cables" to control the political fall-out from the details of murder, torture, espionage and corruption they revealed. It added that the newspaper had exercised extreme discretion in the " editing, contextualising, explanation and redaction " of the documents. [emphasis added]

The Guardian is acutely aware of the widespread and entirely healthy scepticism towards anything the government says on Skripal, in the aftermath of lies such as the existence of Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" in furtherance of Britain's warmongering. Indeed, the week before the June 4 event confirmed the need for the Guardian's services in propping up the government's campaign of lies.

The newspaper led on the report of the supposed murder of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko at his apartment in Kiev as the assassination of yet another Putin critic, only for Babchenko to show up alive and well the very next day at a press conference about his "murder." Harding wrote lamenting that the stunt "would allow Russia and other unscrupulous governments to dismiss real events as fake."

At the event itself, focus was placed for the most part on calls to end Russian money laundering in London and avoiding wherever possible any direct examination of the Skripal case in favour of sweeping generalisations.

Applebaum rejected any possibility that the Kremlin was not involved in the Skripals' attempted assassination. She insisted that, having done a lot of research on how Russian propaganda works, "this was like watching a replay of MH17," the Malaysian passenger jet shot down over Eastern Ukraine. In that case, "Russia immediately put out dozens of stories, not just deny it, but using multiple sources, gave out dozens of stories to pollute media with so much nutty stuff in order to make people draw back and say believe it is all unknowable. That is their modus operandi, designed for a Russian audience."

Applebaum never indicated that the same might be said about the British government's line on the Skripal case!

Harding said that assassination was a traditional Russian method of dealing with opponents going back to Lenin and Stalin and was resurrected in the 1990s when Putin and ex-KGB people came to power. Unable to cite any example of Lenin assassinating anyone, he roamed willy-nilly through history citing various assassinations by Stalin, including that of Trotsky, and various more contemporary alleged assassinations as "proof" of his argument.

There were, he said, two theories about why Russia had tried to kill Skripal.

The first, which Harding rejected, was that after Skripal was released in a spy exchange, he broke the rules, remained active and embarked on the old spies' lecture trail. The second, which he "preferred," is that Skripal was "almost irrelevant": not so much the target but an instrument to frighten and intimidate anyone thinking of cooperating with the West, especially talking to the Mueller Inquiry in the US into the alleged Russian attempt to subvert the US 2016 election.

After these baseless ruminations, chairperson Mark Rice Oxley asked former GCHQ chief Omand, sitting in the audience, for his thoughts. Omand was enthused. "It's a great conversation. I agree with Luke's idea of implausible deniability. Hence the baroque method assassination. The point is to intimidate.

"I know the team that did the assessment of the nerve agent, attributing it to a Novichok agent and the Russian state. It was meticulous, like Sherlock Holmes, eliminating everything.

"No scientific theory is 100 percent reliable, but this was as close as it gets," he asserted.

He then admitted that it was entirely unclear how applying Novichok to a door handle would work!

Omand agreed with Harding that the British government "should go after the money," urging investigative journalists "to dig," saying it "would hurt the people in power around Putin."

Omand, responding to a question from the chair as to whether British public opinion would be in favour of increasing hostility to Russia, revealed the extent of the collaboration between the Guardian and Prime Minister Theresa May's Conservative government.

He said, "You are doing a good job in that regard. My fear is that if things worsen, it would be necessary to explain The Kremlin could miscalculate, for example with a cyber-attack. We could be moving into a dangerous period."

Applebaum interrupted, saying, "We know they could do that."

Some questions from the floor revealed public scepticism towards the government and media's coverage of the Skripal case.

Answering a question about the government's use of D-Notices (Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice), Morris tried desperately to excuse press censorship. Contradicting reports that the government had issued two D-notices to prevent the media from identifying British intelligence service personnel Skripal was working with, he said there were "very few that we know about, only one." D notices had "changed" and are now "advisory."

Other members of the audience asked where the Skripals were now, reports about them being given US passports and relocated to the US under fake names, the government's news management, whether it was coincidence that Porton Down, the government's chemical and biological military research institute, was so close to the incident, and that it had recently received additional funding of £48 million.

One audience member pointed out that since the poisoning had been unsuccessful, Russia might not have been responsible and that the government and media had taken the easy way out by blaming Russia.

This was dismissed without a serious answer. The newspaper of what passes for the "liberal left" instead proceeded to solidify its alliance with the most right-wing layers of the US and British political and intelligence establishment by churning out anti-Russian propaganda of a distinctly McCarthyite character.

[Jun 15, 2018] The Russian meddling fraud Weapons of mass destruction revisited by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

Notable quotes:
"... World Socialist Web Site ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... More fundamentally, the quarter-century of invasions and occupations that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union is rapidly developing into a conflict between major nuclear-armed powers. The effort of the American ruling class to offset its economic decline using military force is leading mankind to the brink of another world war. As the National Defense Strategy, published less than a month before the release of the indictments, declared, "Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security." ..."
"... The Mueller indictment is intended to provide an appropriate "narrative" for military aggression motivated by different aims. At the same time, it serves as a ready-made pretext for censorship and domestic repression that goes far beyond the extraordinary measures adopted under the framework of the "war on terror." Russia, the American people are supposed to believe, uses domestic social opposition to weaken the United States, rendering political dissent effectively treasonous. ..."
"... Already, this campaign has led the major US technology firms to implement far-reaching measures to censor political speech on the Internet. Google is manipulating its search results and Facebook is manipulating its news feeds, while seeking to turn the social media platform it has developed into an instrument of corporate-state surveillance. ..."
"... Now, the Democrats, along with their appendages among the organizations of the upper-middle class, are at the forefront of the campaign for war, employing neo-McCarthyite tactics to criminalize opposition while seeking to subordinate all popular opposition to the Trump administration to its right-wing and militarist agenda. ..."
Feb 20, 2018 | www.wsws.org

Fifteen years ago, on February 5, 2003, against the backdrop of worldwide mass demonstrations in opposition to the impending invasion of Iraq, then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell argued before the United Nations that the government of Saddam Hussein was rapidly stockpiling "weapons of mass destruction," which Iraq, together with Al Qaeda, was planning to use against the United States.

In what was the climax of the Bush administration's campaign to justify war, Powell held up a model vial of anthrax, showed aerial photographs and presented detailed slides purporting to show the layout of Iraq's "mobile production facilities."

There was only one problem with Powell's presentation: it was a lie from beginning to end.

The World Socialist Web Site , in an editorial board statement published the next day, declared the brief for war "the latest act in a diplomatic charade laced with cynicism and deceit." War against Iraq, the WSWS wrote, was not about "weapons of mass destruction." Rather, "it is a war of colonial conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global hegemony."

The response of the American media, and particularly its liberal wing, was very different. Powell's litany of lies was presented as the gospel truth, an unanswerable indictment of the Iraqi government.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who rushed off a column before he could have examined Powell's allegations, declared, "The evidence he presented to the United Nations -- some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail -- had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise."

The editorial board of the New York Times -- whose reporter Judith Miller was at the center of the Bush administration's campaign of lies -- declared one week later that there "is ample evidence that Iraq has produced highly toxic VX nerve gas and anthrax and has the capacity to produce a lot more. It has concealed these materials, lied about them, and more recently failed to account for them to the current inspectors."

Subsequent developments would prove who was lying. The Bush administration and its media accomplices conspired to drag the US into a war that led to the deaths of more than one million people -- a colossal crime for which no one has yet been held accountable.

Fifteen years later, the script has been pulled from the closet and dusted off. This time, instead of "weapons of mass destruction," it is "Russian meddling in the US elections." Once again, assertions by US intelligence agencies and operatives are treated as fact. Once again, the media is braying for war. Once again, the cynicism and hypocrisy of the American government -- which intervenes in the domestic politics of every state on the planet and has been relentlessly expanding its operations in Eastern Europe -- are ignored.

The argument presented by the American media is that the alleged existence of a fly-by-night operation, employing a few hundred people, with a budget amounting to a minuscule fraction of total election spending in the US, constitutes a "a virtual war against the United States through 21st-century tools of disinformation and propaganda" ( New York Times ).

In the countless articles and media commentary along this vein, nowhere can one find a serious analysis of the Mueller indictment of the Russians itself, let alone an examination of the real motivations behind the US campaign against Russia. The fact that the indictment does not even involve the Russian government or state officials is treated as a nonissue.

While the present campaign over Russian "meddling" has much in common with the claims about "weapons of mass destruction," the implications are far more ominous. The "war on terror" is exhausted, in part because the US is allied in Syria and elsewhere with the Islamic fundamentalist organizations it was purportedly fighting.

More fundamentally, the quarter-century of invasions and occupations that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union is rapidly developing into a conflict between major nuclear-armed powers. The effort of the American ruling class to offset its economic decline using military force is leading mankind to the brink of another world war. As the National Defense Strategy, published less than a month before the release of the indictments, declared, "Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security."

Russia is seen by dominant sections of the military-intelligence apparatus as a principal obstacle to US efforts to control the Middle East and to take on China -- and it is this that has been at the center of the conflict between the Democratic Party and the Trump administration.

There have already been a series of clashes in recent weeks between the world's two largest nuclear-armed powers. On February 3, a Russian close-air support fighter was shot down by al-Nusra Front fighters, which are indirectly allied with the United States in its proxy war against the government of Bashar Al-Assad. Then, on February 7 and 8, Russian soldiers were killed in US air and artillery barrages in Deir Ezzor, in what survivors called a "massacre." Both the US and Russian governments have sought to downplay the scale of the clash, but some sources have reported the number killed to be in the hundreds.

Even as US and Russian forces clashed in Syria, representatives of the Kremlin and the Pentagon sparred at the Munich security conference this weekend over the deployment and development of nuclear weapons. While accusing Russia of violating the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, Washington this month issued a nuclear posture review envisioning a massive expansion of the deployment of battlefield nuclear weapons.

The Mueller indictment is intended to provide an appropriate "narrative" for military aggression motivated by different aims. At the same time, it serves as a ready-made pretext for censorship and domestic repression that goes far beyond the extraordinary measures adopted under the framework of the "war on terror." Russia, the American people are supposed to believe, uses domestic social opposition to weaken the United States, rendering political dissent effectively treasonous.

Already, this campaign has led the major US technology firms to implement far-reaching measures to censor political speech on the Internet. Google is manipulating its search results and Facebook is manipulating its news feeds, while seeking to turn the social media platform it has developed into an instrument of corporate-state surveillance.

Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it. The target of the repressive measures is not Russia, but the American working class. The ruling elite is well aware that as it plots war abroad, it stands upon a social powder keg at home.

The working class must draw the necessary conclusions from its past experiences. In 2003, the Democratic Party supported the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq and provided it with the necessary political cover. Now, the Democrats, along with their appendages among the organizations of the upper-middle class, are at the forefront of the campaign for war, employing neo-McCarthyite tactics to criminalize opposition while seeking to subordinate all popular opposition to the Trump administration to its right-wing and militarist agenda.

... ... ...

[Jun 15, 2018] Russia, the Neoconservatives, and the Real Issues Involved by Boyd D. Cathey

Pathological Russophobia of neocons is explanation by two factors: (1) they are lobbyists for MIC and this is the way MIC wants the US foreign policy to be execute; (2) this is the way of earning money for people, many of whom are good no nothing else.
Notable quotes:
"... Beyond the ideological foundations for their hatred of nationalist Russia are economic considerations and the issue of who controls and manages the Russian economy: Wall Street and Bruxelles, or ..."
"... From the beginning of his tenure Putin has offered to cooperate with the United States in the fight against international Islamic terror, but each time it was the United States -- us -- who refused, including famously Paul Wolfowitz during the George W. Bush administration who replied to one such offer: "We don't need your assistance or intel." ..."
Jun 15, 2018 | www.unz.com

Almost one year ago the United States Congress (with only a handful of "nay" votes) adopted new and severe sanctions against Russia for its supposed attempt to influence and interfere in the 2016 national elections. Included in that legislation was a provision -- specifically placed there by Russophobe Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) -- that President Trump cannot alter or lift any of the sanctions without future Congressional approbation.

The government of Vladimir Putin, in response to this provocation, announced that the American diplomatic presence in Russia would be reduced by 755 persons, a drastic move by any standards. But we cannot say it was unexpected -- or undeserved.

That sanctions vote was fascinating as it illustrated during the first year of the contentious Trump presidency a rare point of political unity between the socialist Left, the Democrats and the mainstream media -- formerly noted for their "soft" and favorable attitude to the old and unloved Soviet Communist Russian regime -- and the conservative/GOP mainstream, dominated by the Neoconservatives. Of course, perspectives and approaches to the question differ, whether it was the Trump campaign that was colluding with Moscow, or if it was Hillary and the Clinton Foundation that had collaborated in some way, but their target remained the same: that man in the Kremlin and the country he governs.

One thing was clear: the result of the 2016 presidential election had the most unheard of and remarkable result in recent American political history: a de facto alliance of these supposedly antipodal political forces. And what we have witnessed is a phalanx of the pseudo-Right Neocons and the formerly pro-Soviet Left linked together, competing to see who could be more "anti" and who could come up with the more far-fetched Russia conspiracy theories, and -- as with the 2017 sanctions -- the latest unwarranted, over the top legislation.

Consider the recent -- but largely unreported -- formation of an umbrella group, the Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI), with the goal of "uni[ting] the center-left and the center-right." Its leaders include former John McCain foreign policy advisor Max Boot, The Washington Post 's Anne Appelbaum, Never Trumper Bill Kristol, former chess wizard Gary Kasparov, and Richard Hurwitz of Council on Foreign Relations. [See " Neocons & Russiagaters Unite! ," April 27, 2018] RDI's manifesto calls for "fresh thinking" and urges "the best minds from different countries to come together for both broad and discrete projects in the service of liberty and democracy in the West and beyond . Liberal democracy is in crisis around the world, besieged by authoritarianism, nationalism, and other illiberal forces. Far-right parties are gaining traction in Europe, Vladimir Putin tightens his grip on Russia and undermines democracy abroad, and America struggles with poisonous threats from the right and left."

Or, recall those on-camera Fox News Russia experts -- think here of General Jack Keane or the unhinged Colonel Ralph Peters who literally foamed at the mouth when talking about Putin, calling him "the new Hitler," and who asserted that Putin had committed "worse crimes" than the German dictator. (Peters is so anti-Russian that he finally left the Fox News network in March 2018 )

When Tucker Carlson on his prime time program last July 11, 2017, demanded that Peters provide facts and figures for his accusations, Peters immediately exploded and implied that program host Carlson was a "Hitler apologist." It was a classic argument and instance of reductio ad Hitlerum .

Of course, such examples aren't rare in the establishment "conservative movement" media. Pick up any issue of National Review or The Weekly Standard or listen to the Glenn Beck radio program and you can find the same hysteria, largely laced with faked quotes or disinformation (e.g., "Putin wants to re-establish the Soviet Union" or "Putin was head of the KGB" or "Putin has had his enemies assassinated," and so on, ad nauseum ).

Indeed, another ploy by Neocon pundits (and Congress) has been to parade Bill Browder, the grandson of American Communist Party boss Earl Browder, as a star witness to President Putin's nefarious dealings. Of course, it should be noted that Browder fils lost big time financially in his manipulations in Russia, as investigative journalists Philip Giraldi and Robert Parry have documented, and he is engaged in a vicious personal vendetta against Vladimir Putin.

For the Neoconservative leaders of what passes for "conservatism" these days, it is as if nothing has changed since 1991, since the ignominious fall of Communism. It's even arguable that their hostility to Moscow has increased since then.

Let me suggest several reasons for this: First, many of the more prominent Neoconservatives descend from Russian Jews from the Pale of Settlement, whose memories go back to the pre-Communist days of persecution and pogroms under the Tsars. They originally welcomed Lenin and the Communist regime as liberators and formed some of its staunchest supporters and apparatchiks in the regime of terror that followed (especially in the Cheka and KGB) until Josef Stalin unleashed a wave of anti-semitism after World War II. [See the partially translated excerpts from Solzhenitsyn's Two Hundred Years Together at: https://200yearstogether.wordpress.com , and the commentary ]

Putin, despite his strong support from native Russian Jews and from the Moscow Rabbinate, is a Russian nationalist and fervent supporter of the traditionalist Russian Orthodox Church, and those two factors bring up painful memories of the "bad old days" of discrimination and Jewish persecution for the Neocons.

A prime example of this comes in a recent volume authored by prominent Neocon journalist and homosexual activist (yes, the two traits often seem to go together), James Kirchick: The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, 2017). In his jumble of Neocon ideology and prejudice, Kirchick evaluates what for him seems to be happening ominously in Europe. He is deeply fearful of the efforts to "close borders" against Muslim immigrants from the Middle East. He blasts Marine Le Pen as a racist -- and most likely a subtle "holocaust denier!" -- and attacks the attempts in places like Hungary and Poland to reassert national traditions and Christian identity; for him these are nothing less than attempts to bring back "fascism."

Russia comes in for perhaps his harshest criticism, and the reason is unmistakable: Russia seems to be returning to its older national and pre-Communist heritage, to its age-old Orthodox Christian faith. Russians are returning by the millions to the church and the "old-time" religion. For Kirchick this can only mean one thing: the triumph of bigotry, anti-semitism, and "extreme right wing" ideology, and the failure of what he terms "liberal democracy and equality" (including, he would no doubt include, feminism, same sex marriage, across-the-board equality, and all those other "conservative values"!).

Kirchick's critique, shared by many of the leaders of the national Republican Party and dominating the pages of most establishment "conservative" publications and talk radio these days, joins him arm-in-arm with globalist George Soros in efforts to undermine the Russian state and its president all in the name of "democracy" and "equality." [See, " George Soros Aghast as Collapsing EU, while Russia Resurgent, " January 19, 2018]

But, just what kind of "democracy" and what kind of "equality" do Kirchick and Soros defend?

Beyond the ideological foundations for their hatred of nationalist Russia are economic considerations and the issue of who controls and manages the Russian economy: Wall Street and Bruxelles, or Russia, itself. Unlike the weak and pliant Boris Yeltsin, Putin the nationalist ended the strangle-hold of Russian industry, in particular control of Russia's important energy sector, by those few international businessmen, the oligarchs (many of them Jewish), most of whom fled the country. That could not stand! How dare Russia -- and its president -- oppose the economic diktats of Bruxelles and Wall Street!

Lastly, we should add one more reason for hostility, and that is Russia's remaining international presence, in particular, in Syria. It is very simple: you don't go from being one of the world's two "superpowers" to all of a sudden a second-rate, economically-handicapped "has been" without some remorse. As a patriot and nationalist President Putin has, understandably, attempted to reassert Russian prosperity and power -- certainly, not as much or in the same manner as the old Communist leaders. But, from his reasonable point of view, the largest country in the world does have interests, and not just in what goes on in neighboring nations where millions of Russians (formerly within Russia) reside, but also with long-time allies such as Syria.

Is not this same criterion true for the United States and its dealings with its neighbors and allies?

More, for the past twenty-five years Russia has experienced the poisoned tip of Islamic terrorism, domestically, including the brutal war in Tchechnya in the Caucasus region and the horrid bombings in the heart of the country, Moscow. From the beginning of his tenure Putin has offered to cooperate with the United States in the fight against international Islamic terror, but each time it was the United States -- us -- who refused, including famously Paul Wolfowitz during the George W. Bush administration who replied to one such offer: "We don't need your assistance or intel."

And thus, the revealing files on the Tsarnaev brothers (Boston bombing) were not received. But, as Neocon Charles Krauthammer once declared: "We live in a unipolar world today, and there is only ONE superpower, and that is the United States." That attitude was not received with equanimity by post-Communist Russia, a Russia that has discovered its heritage and its traditions and has asked for partnership with the United States, and not the hysteria we have witnessed in the United States sweeping aside all rationality.


Anon [425] Disclaimer , June 14, 2018 at 4:22 am GMT

The BitChute Interview
Carlton Meyer , Website June 14, 2018 at 4:50 am GMT
Ralph Peters is one of the nuttiest neocons around, and Fox was smart to dump him. I recall an article long ago where he suggested that the US Govt. should address the drug addition problem in the USA by assassinating drug dealers on the streets in the USA.

He lives off scraps from neocons by selling his soul for BS talking points and collects a monthly check from Uncle Sam after 20 years of sitting at a desk doing BS intel work, as I once did for a year. It seems he missed his chance at killing commies in Nam by touring Europe, as Fred Reed explained:

https://fredoneverything.org/dulce-et-decorum-est-if-someone-else-has-to-do-it/

Mikhail , Website June 14, 2018 at 6:18 am GMT
Nothing new in the above article. That such people are elevated to the stature of cushy mainstream propping and ridicule by some non-mainstream others is a tell all sign on what's wrong with the coverage.

Regarding this excerpt:

A prime example of this comes in a recent volume authored by prominent Neocon journalist and homosexual activist (yes, the two traits often seem to go together), James Kirchick: The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, 2017). In his jumble of Neocon ideology and prejudice, Kirchick evaluates what for him seems to be happening ominously in Europe. He is deeply fearful of the efforts to "close borders" against Muslim immigrants from the Middle East. He blasts Marine Le Pen as a racist -- and most likely a subtle "holocaust denier!" -- and attacks the attempts in places like Hungary and Poland to reassert national traditions and Christian identity; for him these are nothing less than attempts to bring back "fascism."

Russia comes in for perhaps his harshest criticism, and the reason is unmistakable: Russia seems to be returning to its older national and pre-Communist heritage, to its age-old Orthodox Christian faith. Russians are returning by the millions to the church and the "old-time" religion. For Kirchick this can only mean one thing: the triumph of bigotry, anti-semitism, and "extreme right wing" ideology, and the failure of what he terms "liberal democracy and equality" (including, he would no doubt include, feminism, same sex marriage, across-the-board equality, and all those other "conservative values"!).

Kirchick's critique, shared by many of the leaders of the national Republican Party and dominating the pages of most establishment "conservative" publications and talk radio these days, joins him arm-in-arm with globalist George Soros in efforts to undermine the Russian state and its president all in the name of "democracy" and "equality." [See, "George Soros Aghast as Collapsing EU, while Russia Resurgent," January 19, 2018]

But, just what kind of "democracy" and what kind of "equality" do Kirchick and Soros defend?

JRL promoted a recent Kirchick piece:

http://russialist.org/newswatch-the-soviet-roots-of-invoking-fears-about-world-war-iii-brookings-james-kirchick/

The rant of a coddled establishment chickenhawk, who is quite overrated, relative to the positions accorded to him (Nasty people don't deserve kindness.)

A suggestive dose of McCarthyism that simplistically references the Cold War period with present day realities, which include a subjectively inaccurate overview of what has transpired in Syria and Crimea. Put mildly, James Kirchick is quite ironic in his use of "lazy".

jilles dykstra , June 14, 2018 at 7:22 am GMT
To me it is all quite simple.
FDR's aim was to rule the war with junior aides USSR, China and a smaller Britain.
Stalin had other ideas.
Even in 1946 FDR's main backer, Baruch pleaded for a world government, a USA government, in my view.
Deep State still tries to impose this world government.
Despite Trump 'America first' we see a Bolton in the White House, as many see 'the neocons are back'.
Cannot see much difference between neocons and Deep State.
The big mistake of the British empire was unwillingless to realise that it could no longer maintain the empire.
This already began before 1914, when the two fleet standars became too expensive, the one fleet standard expressed the inability to maintain the empire.
Obama was forcedto reduce the two war standard to one and half.
What a half war accomplishes we see in Syria.
Alas, seldom in history did reason rule.
If it will in the present USA, I doubt it.
Milton , June 14, 2018 at 8:23 am GMT
Sanctions are always a prelude to war. Sanctions are in fact an act of war. Putin's mistake was in thinking he could reason with the Neoconservatives. The Neocons are not guided by pragmatic or rational concerns. Of course, many are starting to think Putin was just "part of the show" all along, as evidenced by his recent capitulation to Netanyahu.
Dante , June 14, 2018 at 9:40 am GMT
That was a very good read and you make some excellent observations, Certainly worth sharing, Thanks very much.
Renoman , June 14, 2018 at 9:51 am GMT
The American Government are a bunch of morons. I ask again "what has Russia ever done to the USA"? A real thin book as far as I can see, time to grow up and be big boys, there's money over there.
Jon Halpenny , June 14, 2018 at 10:48 am GMT
The American diplomat, Bruce P Jackson, who is credited with expanding NATO, made a statement several years ago. He heavily criticized Putin, saying he was responsible for "the largest theft of Jewish property since the Nazis."

So there we can see a motive for hatred of Putin.

War for Blair Mountain , June 14, 2018 at 11:06 am GMT
In 2018, Russia is Conservative Christian .

In 2018, America is homosexual-pedophile-mutilated tranny freak

Anon [436] Disclaimer , June 14, 2018 at 11:14 am GMT
@Milton

Bad start.

S=W-1

S=W

Which is it?

Kirt , June 14, 2018 at 11:15 am GMT
Excellent analysis by Dr. Cathey of the roots of the anti-Russian hysteria. This is also reflected in popular culture – Hollywood movies and the various spy/covert ops novels of people like Ted Bell and Brad Thor, who has hinted that he may run against Trump in the 2020 Republican primaries. Russians have replaced Arabs as the go-to villains.
Wizard of Oz , June 14, 2018 at 11:18 am GMT
@Jon Halpenny

Was Jackson referring to some of the oligarchs who had fallen out with Putin and was he suggesting Putin rather than the state benefitted? Would he have included the Orthodox Khordokovsky as Jewish?

Parbes , June 14, 2018 at 11:20 am GMT
The neocons are a collection of sick, murderous, fanatical supremacist ideologues who have turned the U.S. into the most despicable criminal regime on earth. Because of their control and influence over the U.S. imperial military/political assets, combined with their psychopathic mentality and ideology, these scumbags pose a clear threat to the entire world, but especially to Russia and Europe (and to the U.S. itself, of course). The irony in all of this is that, although these mostly Jewish bottom-feeders like to smear any foreign leader they'd like to demonize as "the new Hitler" etc., they themselves are more nefarious and dangerous to the planet than Hitler and his German Nazis ever were.

Nothing will change until the major members of the neocon collective start getting individually singled out and receiving the harsh punishments they deserve.

War for Blair Mountain , June 14, 2018 at 11:28 am GMT
Who wages war against Christian Russia every night on MSNBC?

Answer:The biological mutant IT .Rachel Maddow .an IT .

jilles dykstra , June 14, 2018 at 11:38 am GMT
@Jon Halpenny

I wonder what jewish property Putin stole.
In the USSR there was hardly any private property.
What was stolen, sold for ridiculously low prices, was state property, to former USSR managers, and/or foreign 'investors'.
As far as I understand it, some crooks have been persecuted.
Any foreigner who, after 1990, went to live in a former USSR state can explain it.
Some did to me.
Possibly Jackson is referring to how Putin threw out Soros, and his Open Society indoctrination organisation.
Hungary just now also threw him out.
Timmermans of the EU again threatened the E European nations, for refusing to let migrants enter.
Soros wants multi ethnic countries

Jake , June 14, 2018 at 11:48 am GMT
@jilles dykstra

"Cannot see much difference between neocons and Deep State."

And that means that the US Deep State can NOT have a Jewish creation, because it existed a long time before 1948, a long time before 1939, a long time before the creation of the Federal Reserve.

There is a reason that Neocons love Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln: the former was an apologist for the nascent American Deep State, and the latter its perfect tool right down to being ready and able to slaughter huge numbers of non-Elite whites so the then virtually 100% WASP-in-blood Elite Deep State could totally control the growing nation.

The source of the American Deep State is the same as England's Deep State: Oliver Cromwell's deal with Jews, a deal granting Jews special rights and privileges and made precisely in order to have the money to wage total war to exterminate non-WASP white Christian cultures and identities.

That is exactly what the Neocons are determined to continue, and they are correct whenever they assert that they are being loyal to the history and heritage of the Puritans and of Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party and of the US in the Spanish-American War, World War 1 and World War 2.

What is different about today's Neocons and, say, the growing number of Jews with major voices among the British Deep State at the height of Victorianism is that now the original junior partner has become the acting partner, the dominant partner.

But the original alliance is the same.

You cannot separate the Neocon problem from the WASP problem. You cannot solve the Neocon problem without also solving the WASP problem.

Anonymous [320] Disclaimer , June 14, 2018 at 12:26 pm GMT
Russia sucks. The only things beautiful about it are the natural landscapes and some of the women.

Russia treats it's poor with utter indifference. It's hospitals are pathetic.

Housing is drab and depressing.

Alcoholism, drug use and prostitution are rampant.

Unless you come from money in Russia, education and opportunity seems non existent. Save for the few poor exemplars.

Yet it has lots of weapons.

Russia is not a great country.

It's basically a bunch of white people acting black.

Quartermaster , June 14, 2018 at 12:30 pm GMT
@War for Blair Mountain

In 2018, Russia is Conservative Christian .

This is true only in the loosest sense. There is a huge difference between holding church membership, or attending church, and being a Christian. Putin may have done the 1st two, but the last is utterly unknown to him.

anonymous [739] Disclaimer , June 14, 2018 at 12:31 pm GMT
Can't believe any sane American thinks Russians – including beautiful Russian tennis players are more of a threat to us in 2018 then say M13 Gang banger invaders, Chicago Black street gangs, Afghan and Pakistani child rapists or just the sub Saharan Black African mobs with their machetes.

We commissioned some Farstar cartoons on this theme – seems pretty basic to me, but the J media mafia simply goes on and on – there is supposedly a Russian spy behind every bush, some Russians posted anti Hillary posts on Facebook – oh the horror!

https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=wYcqmOzk&id=3B43263DD48F82D1FEC205044FBE66DCDA30A42F&thid=OIP.wYcqmOzkZCrNMrWlfuDUigHaJu&mediaurl=http%3a%2f%2fwww.occidentaldissent.com%2fwp-content%2fuploads%2f2017%2f06%2frussians-out.jpg&exph=1280&expw=974&q=occidental+dissent+farstar&simid=607993335092480560&selectedIndex=3&ajaxhist=0

Quartermaster , June 14, 2018 at 12:37 pm GMT
While there is some "hysteria" when it comes to Russia, there is also much truth out there, some of which the author is willing to write off as little more than conspiracy theories.

It is passing strange that those who have strongly criticized Putin have ended up dead. Anytime one appears to be a serious threat to Putin's position they end up dead. It is possible that Putin isn't responsible, but given the numbers and the circumstances, it is likely he knows what is going on.

While Putin was never head of the KGB, much of what he has been up to was learned form iron Felix's organization. To say Putin is a KGB thug is far from being out of line.

What he has done in Ukraine should make the man, and the country he heads, a pariah. Eastern Europe is right to be concerned. The fact that Putin has stated, rather pointedly, that the extent of the USSR is Russia makes the accusation of him being a Soviet revanchist appropriate as well.

Much of what the author seeks to write off as hysteria, isn't. That "hysteria" is a proper concern for what Putin is up to, and what he intends. Fortunately, Russia is too impoverished to all Putin to realize his neo-Tsarist empire. And in pursuing his self-aggrandizing path, he impoverishes his people even more.

DESERT FOX , June 14, 2018 at 12:42 pm GMT
The business of the Zionist controlled U.S. gov is WAR and this has been the agenda since 1913 and the establishment of the Zionist FED and the Zionist IRS and thus began the WAR agenda and the American people were set up to pay for the Zionist created wars and the Zionist agenda of a Zionist NWO.

Thus the Zionists need an enemy and have created enemies where none existed, the case in point being Russia and lesser created enemies the case in point being any given country in the Mideast that Israel and the Zionists wish to destroy. In the case of Russia the Zionists have the added incentive of trying to destroy a Christian country as Russia is now and historically has been Christian with the exception of the Satanist Zionist takeover of Russia in 1917 and the murder of some 60 million Russian people by the Satanist ie Zionist communists.

The U.S. gov is under satanic Zionist control and proof of this is the fact that Israel and the Zionist controlled deep state did 911 and got away with and every thinking person knows this to be the truth, may GOD help we the people of America.

Cleburne , June 14, 2018 at 1:35 pm GMT
@Jake

Jake:

While I defer to no one in my loathing and contempt for the WASPs of the Northeastern U.S., whose career of mischief began with the brutal war of conquest against my native South, I'd would like to point out what I see as some problems in your assigning to Oliver Cromwell to baleful title of WASP the first.

To wit: "Oliver Cromwell's deal with Jews, a deal granting Jews special rights and privileges."

This simply isn't true. Menasseh ben Israel did indeed present a "Humble Address on Behalf of the Jewish Nation" to the Lord Protector and the Counsel of State in 1655. Readmission was opposed by most of the English people and of the Puritan pastorate. However, there was no Act of Parliament, proclamation by Cromwell or notice from the Council of State allowing readmittance. Some historians have "deduced" that Cromwell have Menasseh "verbal assurance that they'd be allowed it, but those are deductions and speculation and no more. As far as sa subsequent petition for Jews to be allowed to practice Judaism in their homes and have a burial place outside the City of London, Cromwell referred that to the Council of State, which took no action.

Who did grant the Jews religious tolerance and naturalized a number of Jews by an Act of Parliament? Why, Charles II – after the Restoration.

You wrote: "made precisely in order to have the money to wage total war to exterminate non-WASP white Christian cultures and identities."

I can only assume you are referring to the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, which began in May 1649. I assume you're aware that Ireland had been engulfed in a bloody and brutal civil war since 1641; indeed, one of the precipitating causes of the English Civil War was the matter of who would control the army raised to suppress the rebellion (Charles I or Parliament). Also as you know, England was swept by fear that Charles meant to bring an Irish army to England to suppress Parliament (and, indeed, there's probably more evidence that this was the actual case than there is that Cromwell cut a deal with the Jews). At any rate, there is no one single shred of evidence or even contemporary speculation that the Cromwellian conquest was at the behest of the Jews. It should be instead regarded in the context of the 17th century wars of religion, rather than 21st century conspiracy theory. Cromwell ended the civil war and pacified Ireland – in a brutal fashion, of course, but probably less vicious than Wallenstein in Germany.

Or are you referring to the Scots, crushed at Preston, Dunbar and Worcester? Again, the quarrel with the scots was over the matter of church governance, and the English unwillingness to impost the Presbyterian system on England. If Cromwell stood for anything, it was religious tolerance for the various sects that exploded after the Civil War; the sort of forced conformity demanded by the Scots displeased him (see the letters to Major Crawford in 1643).

And while both the New Englanders and English are labeled "Puritan," may I point out that the Puritan movement was a large one, with considerable variance. Cromwell favored tolerance and theologically tended toward a sort of univeralism (to judge by his pastors, eg Jeremiah Burroughs); I imagine that if he had gone to New England, he'd have been chased out along with Sarah Hutchinson and Roger Williams by the fanatical shits of Boston.

Boston is the "urgrund" of the WASP plague; not Cromwell. And while there's any number of things to fault him for, creation of the WASP was not one of them. In theological and existential terms, Cromwell and the New Model were probably closer to the Puritan "pioneers" of the Appalachian and Southern frontiers – many of whom were descended of troops planted in Ireland by Cromwell – and who of course made up the rank and file of the Confederate States Army.

You might want to take a look at the history of the Unitarian movement. You'd find everything you need to support your dislike of the WASP plaque there; I certainly have.

anon [228] Disclaimer , June 14, 2018 at 1:51 pm GMT
1 undermines democracy abroad, and America struggles with poisonous threats from the right and left."
Think of Israel. But no don't think of Isreal. That is anti Semitism
2 "Putin wants to re-establish the Soviet Union" or "Putin was head of the KGB" or "Putin has had his enemies assassinated," and so on, ad nauseum)."

Think of US – harking back to the past of Roosevelt and Reagan and Eisenhower or to Monroe

Think of Pap Bush working for CIA
Thinks of thousands of people – leaders, trade unionists, communist, socialists killed by USA

3 Bill Browder, the grandson of -- – have documented, and he is engaged in a vicious personal vendetta against Vladimir Putin."

Think of -
be afraid of the screwing the neocons They will move to China or India and denounce US sue the country, and poison the well of the democracy and the well of the justice ,media, religious organizations to get back at US

4 James Kirchick: -- efforts to "close borders" against Muslim immigrants "

Think of the perversions of the beliefs and attitudes within the psyche of this false man
He is of the same mindset that encourages Islamophobia among the clueless , zealous fervent bible thump er and among the poor indigent uneducated misinformed white populations of France USA Australia and Poland . He does same to the military and leftists secular outfit of Richard Dawkins .
He then encourages to dismember Arabs countries . The half-baked moron Richard Dawkins type, and military, and the white trash fall for it and get ready to pick up the gun for the invisible pervasive psychopathic chants of Kirchick. He also makes sure that each and every members of the opposite conflicting groups never stray way from kowtowing to Zionism who is the enemy of the Islam and the Christianity and the of the respective people.

Jews definitely feel comfortable in all weather and among the separates and in all kind of geography

anon [228] Disclaimer , June 14, 2018 at 1:56 pm GMT
4 Neocon Charles Krauthammer once declared: "We live in a unipolar world today, and there is only ONE superpower, and that is the United States."

And America felt validated , accepted and elevated by the media -mental -act of the bastards who should have met the fate of Saddam long time ago.

jilles dykstra , June 14, 2018 at 2:27 pm GMT
@Quartermaster

"What he has done in Ukraine should make the man, and the country he heads, a pariah. "

What did he do there ?
And what did the CIA do there ?

Anonymous [128] Disclaimer , June 14, 2018 at 2:30 pm GMT
The more Christian that country and its leaders become, the more the atheistic west hates them. Too bad "Uncle Joe" wasn't still the Premier. We would treat that murderous atheist as a beloved relative, maybe even hand him over half of eastern Europe like we did last time. Instead, we send in LGBT protesters to disturb their new found faith.
jilles dykstra , June 14, 2018 at 2:35 pm GMT
@Jake

From the other side of the Atlantic, what is the WASP problem ?
Whatever one thinks of the USA, protestants from NW Europe created the USA.
Their descendants, in my view, defend their culture.
Hardly any culture in the world goes under without a fight.
Some, maybe many, Germans, again the exception.

WHAT , June 14, 2018 at 2:40 pm GMT
@Anonymous

>muh bad housing
> muh alco and drugs
> muh poor
> muh no money fo dem pogroms
> muh weapons everywhere

I love how all this boilerplate wailing can be readily applied to US.

WHAT , June 14, 2018 at 2:44 pm GMT
Also waiting for that other nut who always comes with his tirades about "surrendering ukraine to Putin", no matter what article is about.
Mike something, was it?
Wally , June 14, 2018 at 3:01 pm GMT
@Carlton Meyer

"talking about Putin, calling him "the new Hitler," and who asserted that Putin had committed "worse crimes" than the German dictator."

Classic garbage in, garbage out.

fact: Hitler and the Germans did not, could not have committed the crimes they are alleged to have committed.

"we've often fantasized about drawing up an indictment against Adolf Hitler himself. And to put into that indictment the major charge: the Final Solution of the Jewish question in Europe, the physical annihilation of Jewry. And then it dawned upon us, what would we do? We didn't have the evidence."
- so called "holocaust historian" Raul Hilberg,

Revisionists are just the messengers, the absurd impossibility of the ridiculous 'holocaust' storyline is the message.

The '6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers' are scientifically impossible frauds.
See the 'holocaust' scam debunked here: http://codoh.com
No name calling, level playing field debate here: http://forum.codoh.com

Wally , June 14, 2018 at 3:07 pm GMT
"Neoconservatives descend from Russian Jews from the Pale of Settlement, whose memories go back to the pre-Communist days of persecution and pogroms under the Tsars. They originally welcomed Lenin and the Communist regime as liberators and formed some of its staunchest supporters and apparatchiks in the regime of terror that followed (especially in the Cheka and KGB) until Josef Stalin unleashed a wave of anti-semitism after World War II."

There is no proof of these "pogroms" and the fake "wave of anti-semitism after World War II".
The source of such claims are Jews who benefit / profit from making such claims.

Recall the fake '6M' since 1823.

http://www.codoh.com

Michael Kenny , June 14, 2018 at 3:11 pm GMT
The umpteenth serving of the classic US hegemonist pro-Putin/anti-EU line. The distinction is thus not between those who favour the maintenance of US global hegemony and those who oppose it. It is whether Putin is still useful as a battering ram to destroy the EU precisely so as to maintain US global hegemony into the indefinite future. The most logical explanation of the known facts surrounding the Ukrainian coup is that Victoria Nuland was in cahoots with Putin. Behind Nuland, of course were the US neocons. The split came when Putin waded into the Syrian civil war on Assad's side. By doing so he made himself a threat to Israel and, for the neocons, the whole point of maintaining US global hegemony is to prop up Israel. Logically, therefore, their priority became Putin's defeat and removal. The other side of the US hegemonist camp, which seems to be motivated by something like hubris or a master race delusion, still believes that Putin can be used to break up the EU. That's the position Mr Cathey is arguing.
I don't think Putin is still viable as an anti-EU battering ram. The American groups that have been financing far-right nationalism in Europe have got caught in the web of their own contradictions. On the one hand, they preach national identity and sovereignty to us but then, as Mr Cathey is doing here, they justify Putin's refusal to respect Ukrainian sovereignty and the Ukrainian national identity. Secondly, European nationalism is essentially "anti-other". That means that it is inherently anti-American, which makes newly nationalist Europe the inevitable enemy of US domination. It also means that anti-Semitism is inherent in European nationalism, which is probably what has Soros up in arms. The final contradiction is that, very often, the same people who preach nationalism at us in Europe preach white nationalism in the US. If white Americans are a single ethnic group and entitled to live in a single political entity, then we white Europeans must also be a single ethnic group and should also live in a single political entity (the EU, for example).
I never cease to be amused at the way in which the various American anti-EU scams cut across each other and cancel each other out!
Dan Hayes , June 14, 2018 at 3:13 pm GMT
@anon

anon[228]:

Actually within the last several years Putin also made the statement that there is only one superpower and it is the United States!

Cleburne , June 14, 2018 at 3:39 pm GMT
@jilles dykstra

"WASP" in the "USA" refers fairly specifically to the Protestants of New England and New York who as a result of the War of Northern Aggression attained complete power over the development of the American empire. Their interests were concentrated in banking, railroads, industry and so on. While descended from the Puritans of New England, most of them had lost any traditional religious fervor by, oh, 1700 or so and gradually moved into loopy, nonsensical ideologies like Transcendentalism, Unitarianism, the Social Gospel, and various other creation-fixing endeavors like temperance, abolitionist, progressivism and so on. To them can be attributed the Gnostic notion of the United States as God's appointed righter of wrongs around the world, with quite coincidentally matched up with their commercial interests. On the whole about as nasty and horrible group of people that ever walked the earth; however. WASP does not include the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of Appalachia, the Deep South, Texas and so on. The Bush family are WASPs. Robert E. Lee was not a WASP. Jake is correct to disdain them; he's wrong in saying Cromwell was the archetype.

anon [317] Disclaimer , June 14, 2018 at 3:53 pm GMT
@ Neoconservatives descend from Russian Jews from the Pale of Settlement.. yes but the Lenin crowd were from Salonkia (1908) and Hertzl's Germany @ many above Exactly, the by name, rank and serial number identification including dual nationalities, corporate by name ownership, board membership, and positions, management, advisory positions or whatever.

Deeper yet into the deep state might identify the corporate officers, directors and outside auditors who serve the needs of those identified. Bureaucrat who echo deep state intentions might be a problem?

Who cannot name the few corporations and their owners and directors that strongly support the neocon ideology on the Internet? Which does the intelligence gathering (spying), which processes the data(data mining), which produces and sells OS(limits user security), which makes sleuthing back doors for browsers and application software, which make the devices that negotiate the bits between hardware (CPU) and software (OS), you know one bit for you the user and a duplicate bit of your bit for deep state intelligence units.

At the next level is the global benefactors(Profiteers) . expensive war equipment makers, oil well production gear makers, robot makers, transport organizations, phantom for hire mercenary armies labor agencies, Democrat and Republican candidates managers to be placed on the "vote for 5 election" ballots, inventors of the fake, producers of "the fake" into propaganda, distributors of the propaganda designed fake news to masses in the public, and access managers who gate, for massive fees, lobbyist into see and deal with politicians, media giants, and power wielding bureaucrats.

As I looked through this list I realized that if the public were to deny its elected government authority to support its neocon capitalist, the entire economy would be forced to switch from Global to Domestic.. showering all kinds of benefits on the governed sheep . No wonder the government is so insistent: without globalism there is no neocon-ism, without neocon-ism open competition would flourish, the restrictions on human progress in copyrights and patents would disappear and prices would move from controlled levels to competitive levels.

But I do not think the neocons are "ideologues" ; unless lawless disregard for humanity in search of profit, is an ideology. I am not even sure they are tightly organized, they are not colonist, they are monopolist (meaning any profit potential (tangible or intangible) will soon belong to them or be within their control. They will write laws, or get nations to sanction, start wars, regime change, terrorize, whatever to advance and to protect their exclusive right to competition free profit making); you might call it ownership of all of the factors of production by whatever means is necessary. I look at them as capitalist, who have co-opted many different governments, who have forgone their humanity, who independently profiteer, interactively, and for a multitude of different reasons, to produce a common collective set of extremely effective outcomes.

nickels , June 14, 2018 at 4:34 pm GMT
Interesting, the video asserts that part of Leo Strauss's philosophy was the introduction of Plato's 'Noble Lie', which, in this case, was the bugaboo of an evil Russian Empire as a foil to bring Americans together and avoid the inevitable collapse of liberalism into nihilism. I wonder if anyone can confirm this as part of Strauss's gift the the neopsychoticons?

Also, pretty obvious reason for hatred of Russia is the closeness of the State and the Church. Strauss here talks about how the secular sphere has but one purpose, providing room for the meddlers to thrive:

Cyrano , June 14, 2018 at 4:37 pm GMT
The Neocons are mad at Russia for standing in their way of taking over the world. All in the name of "democracy" of course, nothing sinister there. Russia, and as a matter of fact, the whole world stood by and let the US have their way for almost 25 years. What did they accomplish? Diddly. So now, they want Russia to get out of the way for another (at least) 25 years, so they can spread some more "democracy". Let me tell you something, if they couldn't do it with virtually no opposition between 1991 -2014, and on a trillion dollar "defence" budgets, maybe there is something else that should be blamed other than Russia. Maybe it's their incompetence.
anon [228] Disclaimer , June 14, 2018 at 4:56 pm GMT
@Dan Hayes

Now tell us the difference or differences between the two.

anon [228] Disclaimer , June 14, 2018 at 5:02 pm GMT
@anon

James Kirchick: by encouraging balkanization of ME per the plans advocated by PNAC now FDD and Friends of Syria or SITE -Sharon-Netanahyu Joe Lieberman Kirchick favorite White Helmet or Jishs Fishas Islam Whitewash ludicrous Jihadist and cemented in stone by Yoneen Yidod ( or what ever is the name of that Jew ) sends those same muslims he encourages the "deplorable" to feel suspicious and hate and same time advocating the acceptance by the countries .

fredyetagain aka superhonky , June 14, 2018 at 5:05 pm GMT
@Quartermaster

"Neo-Tsarist empire." Ha, that's rich. Congrats, you've managed to outdo even the most unhinged anti-Putin elements of the l'chaimstream media.
"impoverishes his people even more." You mean be improving their lives as measured by virtually every metric since kicking out the (((Russian))) banksters and their (((American))) advisers who were robbing the place blind? Dude, you're delusional. Go peddle your nonsense elsewhere.

John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan , June 14, 2018 at 5:16 pm GMT
My favorite part of the Renew Democracy Initiative's manifesto:

10. The extremists share a disdain for the globalism on which modern prosperity is based. Whether they are far-left or far-right, they believe in top-down solutions to problems that can best be resolved through greater freedom, competition, openness and mobility . Both seek power without compromise or coalition and defer to the rule of law only when it strengthens their own position. These illiberal forces embrace divisive rhetoric that makes rational debate impossible. Indeed, they frequently reject established facts and scientific reasoning in favor of conspiracy theories and malicious myths. Liberal democracy must address the problems of those disadvantaged by economic change with practical programs grounded in fact and reason.

Amazing! There are two parts to this. The "openness and mobility" is a nod towards their status as rootless kosmopolity who destroy civil society and local communities in favor of a permanent, mobile underclass. But they actually imply that globalism is bottom-up; that globalism is the result of liberty and the free market. Such balls, these people.

John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan , June 14, 2018 at 5:18 pm GMT
@Carlton Meyer

I recall an article long ago where he suggested that the US Govt. should address the drug addition problem in the USA by assassinating drug dealers on the streets in the USA .

Wow. At least Rodrigo Duterte is kinda funny.

Anon [425] Disclaimer , June 14, 2018 at 5:21 pm GMT
"We live in a unipolar world today, and there is only ONE superpower, and that is the United States."

No, the ONE power is the Empire of Judea. US is its Jewel in the Crown.

Rurik , June 14, 2018 at 5:23 pm GMT

Russia seems to be returning to its older national and pre-Communist heritage, to its age-old Orthodox Christian faith. Russians are returning by the millions to the church and the "old-time" religion. For Kirchick this can only mean one thing: the triumph of bigotry, anti-semitism, and "extreme right wing" ideology, and the failure of what he terms "liberal democracy and equality".

more so even than any concern for Jewish supremacy or glorification of sodomy or all the other shibboleths oozing out of the gaping orifices of Jewish fudge packers like Kirchick, is a visceral, unearthly animosity (hatred) for the Western world and its (comparatively) beautiful, well-adjusted, happy and prosperous people.

Indeed, it is the 'happy' part that drives them insane with stinging malice and seething, rancorous rage.

I remember as a kid celebrating Christmas, and how the Jewish children I knew were not allowed. This is all part of the carefully constructed paradigm that the Jewish elite impose on their people to keep them resentful and envious. Eventually metastasizing into a deep-seated hatred.

They want to see all those ruddy-cheeked Christians pay! for their pain during those terrible years.

Like the boy who was picked last for sports or never 'got the girl', they develop a psychological imperium of wrath, which their religion bolsters in spades.

That is why when ever they get the drop on the Gentiles (who tormented them with good-natured hails of 'Merry Christmas!, which stung to their core, because all that love and happiness was not for them. ) – regardless of the obvious sincerity of the Christians. – [which made it even worse]

Eventually it roils and burns in their ids like an acid. And they want revenge. And that's why the Palestinians, and the Syrians and Lebanese are menaced day and night.

That's why the Russians and Ukrainians and Estonians and Poles, and so many others

suffered to monstrously under the cruel Jewish, Bolshevik yoke.

It has nothing to do with fear over a re-ascendant Russia. Hardly. That's laughable.

Rather, the reason they can't abide Russians going to church and thriving and prospering, is because it means the Russians have become happy again, and that drives them absolutely bonkers with murderous, Talmudic rage.

Them Guys , June 14, 2018 at 6:23 pm GMT
@Parbes

Good description of them. Basically I see all their anti Russian crap, as a revenge minded attitude so often seen from jews. They tried to overtake the largest nation, of mainly Whites and Christians, at least once prior to 1917 jewish revolt against Russia. That was I believe in 1905, it ended when the $$$ ended. But with another better funded, by usa and german fellow jew banksters, attempt in 1917.

Those Bolshevik jews took over Russia first, then every eastern nation which also was mainly a White and Christian peoples nation's. They did so basically by mass Murdering aprox 1/2 of orig populations in those nations. And now 100 years later, after Russian soviet commies has crashed, and a huge return to prior Christian ways etc, is going gangbusters Due to Bolsheviks and jews for the most part getting that Big Boot Out jews are so famous for.

So now here in America we have inherited most of those Children and especially Grand Kid jew commies of the Orig 100 years ago Russian Bolshevik butchers, torturers, and mass murderous bastards. And besides infiltrated into All what matters in usa society and govnt and culture, they also have as a "side agenda" of sorts a massive huge Lusting for typical jewish blood thirsty revenge upon Russia and its Christian Whites,and of course its leader Putin. Those jews had Russia in palm of hand, then totally Lost it. They began with around 8.5 to maybe 10-million jews in Russia/Poland soviet and today have around less than 27o,ooo total jews within Russia iirc.

Likely it was Putin more than all other issues or reasons those, mostly jewish swindlers, finally were also Booted Out and their scammed assets from their Raping of Russia resources etc Taken away from them Being such mamon/money worshipers they are also so famous for, no other thing would so piss them scamming jews off eh.

I also believe that after the jewish 1917 revolt in Russia, when top control jews there with plans to use control of Russia as largest nation on earth, to gain their foamed at mouth lust of a JWO control made reality. That it finally dawned on them that in order to Rule as a JWO one world govnt of jewry Vs all gentile others, they could never do so without a huge Navy like usa has.

You must have Navy ships to Carry Jet fighter planes To distant areas you wish to rule over, because most other nations wont simply agree to being jew-ruled with a JWO clan of fanatical jewry. Ergo you need also Ocean Waters, warm waters to Park said ships and navigate those waters to get to those other reluctant nations. Russia failed for such scheme plans for jewry.

So since so many of the tribe were in usa already .Just join fellow tribe in usa, and turn America and its military etc into a huge Tool of international jewry so to complete jwo plans that Russia didn't fulfill.

And both the agenda of jewish revenge, as well as their desired jwo plans probably play an equal part within those evil nasty minds that they are also so famous for having.

Dan Hayes , June 14, 2018 at 6:45 pm GMT
@anon

anon[228]:

In response to your query, the difference between the US and Russia is that in geopolitics the latter has performed well above the cards it has been dealt with.

John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan , June 14, 2018 at 6:48 pm GMT
@Cleburne

And where, dear sir, can we find any "religious fervor" in the likes of that beau ideal of the Southern antebellum statesman, John C. Calhoun? Calhoun began life as a Calvinist (a Presbyterian) and ended it as a kind of Unitarian. This is almost the exact trajectory as the religious life of the Boston Yankee culture. The Old Nullificator was backcountry Scotch-Irish – as opposed to WASP – but Unitarian crap is Unitarian crap no matter where it exists.

Calhoun was, of course, a giant among those of the 1830s and '40s who pushed the South from the 18th century American conception of slavery – as something that should be contained until its eventual death – to a new conception that exclaimed, vigorously, that slavery was a legitimate part of the American way of life. No, no. I cannot abide this poison. If you all want to condemn Hamilton and Sumner and all, go ahead. I'll agree. But when Lincoln – that flawed man – saw the original sin of the American republic as the protection of slavery, he was right. And he was neither fanatical nor alone in his view. To this day, we tend to conflate Lincoln and the anti-slavery bloc with the radical Republican abolitionist bloc. This is unfair.

General Meade, the victor of Gettysburg, was condemned by the radical Republicans in Congress because of their hatred for Lincoln. Some unity there.

The Anti-Federalist Marylander Luther Martin was right to criticize the powerful framers for allowing the slavery problem to go on, for enshrining it in the Constitution. Too many antebellum Southern elites decided that the likes of Martin were wrong.

You will find few "Northerners" more amenable to the South than me. I live only a few miles north of the Mason-Dixon. I count Confederate soldiers among my kin. One was even born in Pennsylvania, and fought in his own hometown during Lee's invasion.

But no one forced the state of South Carolina to fire at Fort Sumter. No one in the North forced the Southern elites to accept a conception of black slavery as a "positive good" (i.e. James Henry Hammond). The idea of a "War of Northern Aggression" is convenient and cute, but I live near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. You may not have heard of its burning, but I have. And it attests to the truth, which is that if the South had the numbers the North had, then it would have done what you all so hate Sherman and Custer for doing in Georgia and the Shenandoah: burn, burn, burn. Perhaps there were just as many hell-fire and brimstone types in the South as there were in Boston.

P.S. Judah Benjamin. Apparently those Southern "Anglo-Saxons" (As General Lee described himself) weren't so uncomfortable with the Jewish folks.

AnonFromTN , June 14, 2018 at 6:51 pm GMT
There is a lot of truth in this piece, but I think that the overall spin is misleading. Putin's orthodox faith (likely pretended; he seems to be too intelligent for a true believer), history of Jewish persecution in Russia, etc., are secondary factors. The US elites (neocons are just one type of servants they hired) are mad that the world refuses to be unipolar. Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and many lesser countries, arouse "righteous indignation" of the robbers because they refuse to let themselves be looted and bossed by the US elites. All sorts of thieves joined the choir: Jewish and gentile, "right" and "left", military and civilian, the only common denominator being that they stole a lot and resent being thwarted from stealing even more. Moreover, the almighty dollar is about to be exposed as a king with no clothes by various countries switching the trade to their own currencies, undermining the Ponzi schemes of the US dollar and US government debt. The hysterical US foreign policy in the last 10-15 years, with its mindless suicidal aggressiveness, is in fact death throes of an Empire that resents going down the drain, like all dominant Empires before it, but cannot do anything about inevitable course of history.
John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan , June 14, 2018 at 6:59 pm GMT
@Cleburne

P.S. Check this out for an opinion you may find controversial – but note the person posting his opinion is relying on primary sources: https://civilwartalk.com/threads/the-non-celtic-confederacy.120973/

Them Guys , June 14, 2018 at 7:07 pm GMT
@Wally

Wally, by keeping Americans always focused on Hitler and Nazis and SS storm troops, they will not have time, nor ever find out what the Real True 20th century crimes against humanity were. When starting in 1917 JEWS that invented communism, and Used it as main means to mass murder almost 1/2 of eastern euro nations and Russia itself Those crimes and mass killings jewry should get blame for makes whatever bads or evils done by Hitler and Nazis Pale in comparison, and makes german Nazis look like small kindergarten kiddies at play in back yard sand box with wooden swords.

Thanks to internet over past 15 years, many usa folks are waking up and getting very jewized up.

Which we know is main reason such massive attempts at internet censorship has been occurring. And is happening at a furious pace like no other agenda we have seen in our lives. Plus the EU and Canada nations non stop Prison terms for truth tellers of any jew issues. Soon to arrive here in usa with 99.9% of us senate and congress full approval votes when pressed by AIPAC and 599 Other jewish usa orgs.

We can toss out our sun glasses as our American future does Not look bright at all. Unless we see soon a massive wake up call and enough armed citizens willing to take back America. That too looks very dim so far.

SunBakedSuburb , June 14, 2018 at 7:47 pm GMT
I think Jake should say WASP elites rather than just WASP. The majority of the US Anglo-Saxon stock are working class and middle class who, along with the Catholic Irish, German, and Italian, have made this country what it is; and in their demographic decline we see the decline of the United States. The problem here and abroad are elites. Elites of any kind.
jack daniels , June 14, 2018 at 7:48 pm GMT
@Anon

In every political question we should remember to look past grandiose abstractions and see the operative gut loyalties, both our own and those of the competing sides. What is going on with Russia is simply Jewish mania to prevent Russia from being Russian and keep it under Jewish or surrogate rule. Similarly, NATO and the EU are now just enforcers of political correctness. The Slavs and other illiberal peoples of central and eastern Europe are to be re-subjugated now that Communism is not there to persecute the priests and re-educate the sexists. The author, in citing ancient persecutions of Jews to excuse the machinations of current Jews, attempts to meet his critic half-way. Some day perhaps we will be able to state the truth without the dance of apology.
Here is an analogy: Suppose in the 90s we thought it critical to weigh in on the Northern Irish Question. Suppose we had a Department of Irish Affairs to formulate US policy, and it was staffed by Clancy, Reilly, Finnegan, O'Toole and O'Meara. Would anyone hesitate to raise the issue of objectivity? Or suppose our middle-eastern team consisted of 5 guys named Muhammad. Do you think there might be questions?

Rurik , June 14, 2018 at 7:51 pm GMT
@AnonFromTN

The US elites (neocons are just one type of servants they hired)

ah, so it was Dubya all along!

what a clever little schemer he was! Pretending all that time to be dumb as a rock, and a tool of organized Zionism, while he was using the neocons to his own advantage!

So while ((Wolfowitz and Feith and Pearl and Kristol)) were being schooled at the feet of ((Leo Strauss)), it was Dubya the college cheerleader all along who was the mastermind behind the Project for a New American Century and 9/11 !

sure, Goldman Sachs and Hollywood get federal subsidies, but it's the (dying) American middle class that has been exploiting the world's poor!

The hysterical US foreign policy in the last 10-15 years, with its mindless suicidal aggressiveness, is in fact death throes of an Empire that resents going down the drain,

what's been going down the drain has been the blood and tears and future of working class Americans, forced to suit up their children to go slaughter innocent Arabs and others in a transparent and treasonous policy intended to bolster Israel – at the direct and catastrophic expense of America and the American people.

I wonder, as the American people are taxed to the tune of billions every year, to send to Israel as tribute, is that also a case of US elites using Israel to their own devices? As Americas roads and bridges crumble, and veterans are denied care?

Or, is it just possible, that the ((owners)) of the Federal Reserve Bank, have used that printing press as a weapon to consolidate absolute power over the institutions of the ZUSA?

Do you suppose that when France bombs Libya or menaces Syria, that they're doing it to benefit the French elite? And that Israel is their dupe, who give them a pretext for doing so? Or that the French (and British and Polish and Ukrainian, etc..) elite are getting their marching orders from Jewish supremacist Zionists who're hell bent on using Gentile Christians to slaughter Gentile Muslims while they laugh and count the shekels? Eh?

EugeneGur , June 14, 2018 at 7:53 pm GMT
@Quartermaster

It is passing strange that those who have strongly criticized Putin have ended up dead.

The logic of this is fascinating in its perversity. Lot's of people who don't criticize Putin at all or downright admire him die including under unclear circumstances – the West just doesn't notice. For example, several Russian diplomat have died suddenly and prematurely in various countries – out UN representative Churkin would be the prime example. Can you imaging how many wonderful conspiracy theories we could have concocted should we be so inclined?

It's the same exact "logic" ridiculed in "conclusions" like this: "Everyone who eats cucumbers dies". And those who don't live forever?

What he has done in Ukraine should make the man, and the country he heads, a pariah.

He, meaning Putin, hasn't done anything in Ukraine – the West did. The West organized and supported a coup bringing to the power a super-corrupt illegitimate "government" that relies on armed neo-Nazi groups for the control of the county. Now Ukraine is a failed state with the dominant neo-Nazi ideology, nonexistent economy, impoverished and fleeing population and repressive political system, not to mention a civil war. All Putin did was to resist this development as much as possible, and I do not believe he should be blamed for that.

redmudhooch , June 14, 2018 at 7:56 pm GMT
War on the poor and defenseless, it what the Neocon and Zionist-puppet traitors do best. Terrorists in Syria (white helmets) getting 7 million in new funding from Trump, just as Russia warns of new chemical attack false flag is in the works. Must kill evil dicktater Assad for protecting those Christians inside Syria

Russia Warns "Credible Information" Of Impending Staged Chemical Attack In Syria

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-14/russia-warns-credible-information-impending-staged-chemical-attack-syria

White House Tied to Terrorists, Trump Authorizes $6.6M in Aid to White Helmets

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2018/06/14/white-house-tied-to-terrorists-trump-authorizes-6-6m-in-aid-to-white-helmets/

Starvation Holocaust in Yemen.

Yemen – The Starvation Siege Has Begun

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/06/the-starvation-siege-on-yemen-has-begun.html#more

By the time the American people realize that the war on terror was designed for them to be the final victim, it will be too late.

Anon [698] Disclaimer , June 14, 2018 at 8:19 pm GMT
@Rurik

Hell of a lot of projection in this comment

Cleburne , June 14, 2018 at 8:44 pm GMT
@John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan

Thanks for your eloquent response. A few thoughts:

1. I wouldn't extend Calhoun's religion, ot the lack thereof, to the "common soldier" of the Confederacy. You might take a look at Fehrenbach's "Lone Star" history of Texas; he understands the "puritanism" of the South.

2.

But when Lincoln – that flawed man – saw the original sin of the American republic as the protection of slavery, he was right.

–> sorry, I don't think "original sin" is attributable to nations. History is a bloodbath, and always will be, and the whole notion that slavery is some sort of "sin" demanding atonement is quite ridiculous. That's the sort of gnosticism practiced by the Bostonians that played sure a huge part in causing the War of Nort.. er. War for Southern Independence. Far as antebellum slavery itself, might I recommend the work of Genovese and Fogelberg on the character of American slavery? A review of how exactly the victorious Yankees and their Republican bosses provided for the liberated slaves after Appomattox is enlightening.

3.

But no one forced the state of South Carolina to fire at Fort Sumter.

Saint Abe himself admitted he connived South Carolina into opening fire.

4.

I live near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. You may not have heard of its burning, but I have.

So we have that in common!

5.

nd it attests to the truth, which is that if the South had the numbers the North had, then it would have done what you all so hate Sherman and Custer for doing in Georgia and the Shenandoah: burn, burn, burn. Perhaps there were just as many hell-fire and brimstone types in the South as there were in Boston.

This is speculation on your part, so hardly the truth. Stonewall Jackson, of course, would have been happy to bring fire and sword to the North. Probably Edward Ruffin, too. But at the same time, the South was primarily acting a defensive capacity during the war, not as a force of invasion.

5.a: "

Perhaps there were just as many hell-fire and brimstone types in the South as there were in Boston."

hellfire and brimstone in what sense?

6,

P.S. Judah Benjamin. Apparently those Southern "Anglo-Saxons" (As General Lee described himself) weren't so uncomfortable with the Jewish folks.

-- yes, AND? What's your point? what's this to do with anything? When the Confederate memorial in Beaumont, Texas was dedicated around the turn of the last century, the local rabbi gave opening remarks. Different creeds tended to get along somewhat better in Dixie. That's a well known fact.

7.

You will find few "Northerners" more amenable to the South than me. I live only a few miles north of the Mason-Dixon. I count Confederate soldiers among my kin.

I appreciate that, sincerely.

Cleburne , June 14, 2018 at 8:49 pm GMT
@John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan

P.S. Check this out for an opinion you may find controversial – but note the person posting his opinion is relying on primary sources: https://civilwartalk.com/threads/the-non-celtic-confederacy.120973/

Why would I find that controversial? Are you suggesting I was arguing for a "celtic south"? I always thought the notion ridiculous. I know Grady McWhiney and others push it, but it's inaccurate to say the least.

Seamus Padraig , June 14, 2018 at 9:02 pm GMT
@Wizard of Oz

Khordokovsky's father was Jewish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky#Early_years_and_entrepreneurship_in_Soviet_Union

AnonFromTN , June 14, 2018 at 9:03 pm GMT
@Rurik

Elites are robbing Americans and foreigners alike. In fact, the US population gets some crumbs off elites' table, and enjoys higher living standards than it would have in fair global competition.
The overall educational level and the level of awareness of what's going on in the world in the US is dismal. Elites arranged that by maintaining pathetic education system and spreading lies via MSM; ignorant sheep are more likely to obey, and to approve of persecution of those "black sheep" who are less ignorant and don't buy the lies of the MSM. Did we see any protests against "Patriot Act" that trampled the very foundations of our Constitution? Sheep don't protest, they just follow the leader.

However, we have to remember that clueless ignoramus in the US gets 5-10 times more than similarly clueless ignoramus in China or India. Bush junior was genuinely dumb, but would he become US President without his family's ill-gotten riches, or without his ex-CIA chief daddy becoming the President first? Of course not, most morons in the US never fly that high. The only reason for his "success" is the fact that he was born into an elite family.

As far as Jews are concerned, this appears to be yet another red herring, like Russia-bashing. Are gentile Koch brothers or Walton family any better than the worst Jews in the US? They are just as selfish, greedy, and repulsive as George Soros or Sheldon Adelson.

See comment 51:

The problem here and abroad are elites. Elites of any kind.

[Jun 13, 2018] How False Flag Operations Are Carried Out Today by Philip M. GIRALDI

Highly recommended!
When the media is controlled by people responsible for false flag operation chances to use investigation to discredit this false flag operation, no matter how many evidence they have is close to zero
In other word false flag operation is perfect weapon for the "sole superpower" and due to this status entail very little risks.
Notable quotes:
"... Today's false flag operations are generally carried out by intelligence agencies and non-government actors including terrorist groups, but they are only considered successful if the true attribution of an action remains secret. ..."
"... False flags can be involved in other sorts of activity as well. The past year's two major alleged chemical attacks carried out against Syrian civilians that resulted in President Donald Trump and associates launching 160 cruise missiles are pretty clearly false flag operations carried out by the rebels and terrorist groups that controlled the affected areas at the time. ..."
"... Because the rebels succeeded in convincing much of the world that the Syrian government had carried out the attacks, one might consider their false flag efforts to have been extremely successful. ..."
"... The remedy against false flag operations such as the recent one in Syria is, of course, to avoid taking the bait and instead waiting until a thorough and objective inspection of the evidence has taken place. The United States, Britain and France did not do that, preferring instead to respond to hysterical press reports by "doing something." If the U.N. investigation of the alleged attack turns up nothing, a distinct possibility, it is unlikely that they will apologize for having committed a war crime. ..."
"... The other major false flag that has recently surfaced is the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury England on March 4 th . Russia had no credible motive to carry out the attack and had, in fact, good reasons not to do so. ..."
"... Unfortunately, May proved wrong and the debate ignited over her actions, which included the expulsion of twenty-three Russian diplomats, has done her severe damage. Few now believe that Russia actually carried out the poisoning and there is a growing body of opinion suggesting that it was actually a false flag executed by the British government or even by the CIA. ..."
"... The lesson that should be learned from Syria and Skripal is that if "an incident" looks like it has no obvious motive behind it, there is a high probability that it is a false flag. ..."
Apr 26, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

False Flag is a concept that goes back centuries. It was considered to be a legitimate ploy by the Greeks and Romans, where a military force would pretend to be friendly to get close to an enemy before dropping the pretense and raising its banners to reveal its own affiliation just before launching an attack. In the sea battles of the eighteenth century among Spain, France and Britain hoisting an enemy flag instead of one's own to confuse the opponent was considered to be a legitimate ruse de guerre , but it was only "honorable" if one reverted to one's own flag before engaging in combat.

Today's false flag operations are generally carried out by intelligence agencies and non-government actors including terrorist groups, but they are only considered successful if the true attribution of an action remains secret. There is nothing honorable about them as their intention is to blame an innocent party for something that it did not do. There has been a lot of such activity lately and it was interesting to learn by way of a leak that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has developed a capability to mimic the internet fingerprints of other foreign intelligence services. That means that when the media is trumpeting news reports that the Russians or Chinese hacked into U.S. government websites or the sites of major corporations, it could actually have been the CIA carrying out the intrusion and making it look like it originated in Moscow or Beijing. Given that capability, there has been considerable speculation in the alternative media that it was actually the CIA that interfered in the 2016 national elections in the United States.

False flags can be involved in other sorts of activity as well. The past year's two major alleged chemical attacks carried out against Syrian civilians that resulted in President Donald Trump and associates launching 160 cruise missiles are pretty clearly false flag operations carried out by the rebels and terrorist groups that controlled the affected areas at the time. The most recent reported attack on April 7th might not have occurred at all according to doctors and other witnesses who were actually in Douma. Because the rebels succeeded in convincing much of the world that the Syrian government had carried out the attacks, one might consider their false flag efforts to have been extremely successful.

The remedy against false flag operations such as the recent one in Syria is, of course, to avoid taking the bait and instead waiting until a thorough and objective inspection of the evidence has taken place. The United States, Britain and France did not do that, preferring instead to respond to hysterical press reports by "doing something." If the U.N. investigation of the alleged attack turns up nothing, a distinct possibility, it is unlikely that they will apologize for having committed a war crime.

The other major false flag that has recently surfaced is the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury England on March 4th. Russia had no credible motive to carry out the attack and had, in fact, good reasons not to do so. The allegations made by British Prime Minister Theresa May about the claimed nerve agent being "very likely" Russian in origin have been debunked, in part through examination by the U.K.'s own chemical weapons lab. May, under attack even within her own party, needed a good story and a powerful enemy to solidify her own hold on power so false flagging something to Russia probably appeared to be just the ticket as Moscow would hardly be able to deny the "facts" being invented in London. Unfortunately, May proved wrong and the debate ignited over her actions, which included the expulsion of twenty-three Russian diplomats, has done her severe damage. Few now believe that Russia actually carried out the poisoning and there is a growing body of opinion suggesting that it was actually a false flag executed by the British government or even by the CIA.

The lesson that should be learned from Syria and Skripal is that if "an incident" looks like it has no obvious motive behind it, there is a high probability that it is a false flag. A bit of caution in assigning blame is appropriate given that the alternative would be a precipitate and likely disproportionate response that could easily escalate into a shooting war.

Tags: CIA

[Jun 12, 2018] The real reason for which 'information apocalypse' terrifies the mainstream media

Highly recommended!
Jun 12, 2018 | failedevolution.blogspot.com

The real reason for which 'information apocalypse' terrifies the mainstream media In short: because they are rapidly losing the propaganda monopoly
by system failure

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't find a source to inform me about the exact origin (who and when) of the term 'fake news'. Generally, the term became mainstream during the last years, and especially after some shocking events for the Western neoliberal establishment, like Trump's presidency and Brexit.

Very briefly, it appears that the term was suspiciously invented by the neoliberal apparatus to discredit people who supported such events, through social media and other Internet platforms completely independent from the mainstream media control. Of course, one can easily discredit this perception as 'conspiracy theory' or even 'fake news', as well.
While it's true that there has been a lot of hyperbole, misinformation and hard propaganda circulated inside the cyberspace, it seems that the 'fake news' term was expanded somehow to include even opinions and positions outside the dominant neoliberal orthodoxy expressed by the political center in the West.

What's perhaps most interesting in the whole story, is that the term 'fake news' eventually backfired against the establishment, as it was immediately adopted by the political 'extremes' outside the neoliberal center, to include the misinformation and the smearing campaigns by the mainstream media against those who didn't comply with the neoliberal narratives. Mainstream media propaganda is what brought us numerous wars and plenty of disaster in previous decades, after all.

numerous wars and plenty of disaster in previous decades, after all.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/7X-YAgYENdA


Now, a relatively new technology with its origins in the beginning of the previous decade, seems that it spreads a sort of panic among the mainstream media, often described as 'information apocalypse'.

As described by Guardian recently:

What is new is the democratisation of advanced IT, the fact that anyone with a computer can now engage in the weaponisation of information. 2016 was the year we woke up to the power of fake news, with internet conspiracy theories and lies used to bolster the case for both Brexit and Donald Trump. We may, however, look back on it as a kind of phoney war, when photoshopping and video manipulation were still easily detectable. That window is closing fast. A program developed at Stanford University allows users to convincingly put words into politicians' mouths. Celebrities can be inserted into porn videos. Quite soon it will be all but impossible for ordinary people to tell what's real and what's not.
What will the effects of this be? When a public figure claims the racist or sexist audio of them is simply fake, will we believe them? How will political campaigns work when millions of voters have the power to engage in dirty tricks? What about health messages on the dangers of diesel or the safety of vaccines? Will vested interests or conspiracy theorists attempt to manipulate them? Unable to trust what they see or hear, will people retreat into lives of non-engagement, ceding the public sphere to the already powerful or the unscrupulous?
The potential for an "information apocalypse" is beginning to be taken seriously. The problem is we have no idea what a world in which all words and images are suspect will look like, so it's hard to come up with solutions. Perhaps not very much will change – perhaps we will develop a sixth sense for bullshit and propaganda, in the same way that it has become easy to distinguish sales calls from genuine inquiries, and scam emails with fake bank logos from the real thing. But there's no guarantee we'll be able to defend ourselves from the onslaught, and society could start to change in unpredictable ways as a result.
The perspective described here is indeed frightening. Yet, what's really impressive in this article and in other similar articles by the big media on the Internet, is that there is a type of information elitism, implying that there is a media priesthood, which has the copyright of Truth. You can tell that by the fact that the article completely ignores the possibility that this technology could be used by the mainstream media too, to manipulate the public.

Inside this increasingly artificial reality, is there really anyone today who holds the keys of the 'ultimate' truth? I don't think so.

So, this bizarre panic around the mainstream media about this new, and indeed frightening technology, is not coming from their concern that you will be heavily misinformed. It's coming from the fact that they want the monopoly to misinform you. Because they know that after decades of lies and propaganda being upgraded to a literally scientific level, their credibility today has reached a record low.

Celebrities can be inserted into porn videos by anyone. I don't like it. I don't think is right.

Personalities should be protected and perhaps we need a new legislation code to achieve that.

But what about the mainstream media pundits who will use this frightening technology to grab the consent of the masses for another devastating war with millions of dead?

[Jun 11, 2018] Atlantic Council Pro-NATO Pressure Group Uses Distortions to FIght 'Disinfor

Notable quotes:
"... raison d'être ..."
Jun 11, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

Fueling hysteria about "Russian disinformation," "Russian meddling," and "Russian propaganda" has quickly become a lucrative pastime. Now NATO's Atlantic Council has gathered the leading proponents under one umbrella.

"Russian's everywhere, everywhere Russians" – that's long been the mantra of NATO's propaganda wing, the Atlantic Council. And, since 1961, the American lobby group's raison d'être has been to convince the world that Moscow presents an existential threat to the rest of Europe.

And as NATO has expanded, the "think tank's" agitprop has evolved from the "reds in the bed" whispers of the Soviet-era to today's new racket: "disinformation."

This week, Atlantic Council announced a new initiative known as the "DisinfoPortal."

Their latest wheeze is pitched as "an interactive online guide to track the Kremlin's disinformation campaigns abroad." Something you can take to mean pretty much everything which contradicts NATO-friendly messaging, whether accurate or not.

[Jun 09, 2018] Spooks Spooking Themselves by Daniel Lazare

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... the Obama administration intelligence agencies worked with Clinton to block " Siberian candidate " Trump. ..."
"... The template was provided by ex-MI6 Director Richard Dearlove , Halper's friend and business partner. Sitting in winged chairs in London's venerable Garrick Club, according to The Washington Post , Dearlove told fellow MI6 veteran Christopher Steele, author of the famous "golden showers" opposition research dossier, that Trump "reminded him of a predicament he had faced years earlier, when he was chief of station for British intelligence in Washington and alerted US authorities to British information that a vice presidential hopeful had once been in communication with the Kremlin." ..."
"... Apparently, one word from the Brits was enough to make the candidate in question step down. When that didn't work with Trump, Dearlove and his colleagues ratcheted up the pressure to make him see the light. A major scandal was thus born – or, rather, a very questionable scandal. Besides Dearlove, Steele, and Halper, a bon-vivant known as "The Walrus" for his impressive girth , other participants include: Robert Hannigan, former director Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, UK equivalent of the NSA. Alexander Downer, top Australian diplomat. Andrew Wood, ex-British ambassador to Moscow. Joseph Mifsud, Maltese academic. James Clapper, ex-US Director of National Intelligence. John Brennan, former CIA Director (and now NBC News analyst). ..."
"... Dearlove and Halper are now partners in a private venture calling itself "The Cambridge Security Initiative." Both are connected to another London-based intelligence firm known as Hakluyt & Co. Halper is also connected via two books he wrote with Hakluyt representative Jonathan Clarke and Dearlove has a close personal friendship with Hakluyt founder Mike Reynolds, yet another MI6 vet. Alexander Downer served a half-dozen years on Hakluyt's international advisory board, while Andrew Wood is linked to Steele via Orbis Business Intelligence, the private research firm that Steele helped found, and which produced the anti-Trump dossier, and where Wood now serves as an unpaid advisor . ..."
"... Everyone, in short, seems to know everyone else. But another thing that stands out about this group is its incompetence. Dearlove and Halper appear to be old-school paranoids for whom every Russian is a Boris Badenov or a Natasha Fatale . In February 2014, Halper notified US intelligence that Mike Flynn, Trump's future national security adviser, had grown overly chummy with an Anglo-Russian scholar named Svetlana Lokhova whom Halper suspected of being a spy – suspicions that Lokhova convincingly argues are absurd. ..."
"... As head of Britain's foreign Secret Intelligence Service, as MI6 is formally known, Dearlove played a major role in drumming up support for the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq even while confessing at a secret Downing Street meeting that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [regime-change] policy." When the search for weapons of mass destruction turned up dry, Clapper, as then head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, argued that the Iraqi military must have smuggled them into neighboring Syria, a charge with absolutely no basis in fact but which helped pave the way for US regime-change efforts in that country too. ..."
"... Brennan was meanwhile a high-level CIA official when the agency was fabricating evidence against Saddam Hussein and covering up Saudi Arabia's role in 9/11. Wood not only continues to defend the Iraqi invasion, but dismisses fears of a rising fascist tide in the Ukraine as nothing more than "a crude political insult" hurled by Vladimir Putin for his own political benefit. Such views now seem distressingly misguided in view of the alt-right torchlight parades and spiraling anti-Semitism that are now a regular feature of life in the Ukraine. ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... describes Mifsud as "an enthusiastic promoter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia" and "a regular at meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual conference held in Sochi, Russia, that Mr. Putin attends," which tried to suggest that he is a Kremlin agent of some sort. ..."
"... But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange later tweeted photos of Mifsud with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and a high-ranking British intelligence official named Claire Smith at a training session for Italian security agents in Rome. Since it's unlikely that British intelligence would rely on a Russian agent in such circumstances, Mifsud's intelligence ties are more likely with the UK. ..."
"... Stefan Halper then infiltrated the Trump campaign on behalf of the FBI as an informant in early July, weeks before the FBI launched its investigation. Halper had 36 years earlier infiltrated the Carter re-election campaign in 1980 using CIA agents to turn information over to the Reagan campaign. Now Halper began to court both Page and Papadopoulous, independently of each other. ..."
"... The rightwing Federalist website speculates that Halper was working with Steele to flesh out a Sept. 14 memo claiming that "Russians do have further 'kompromat' on CLINTON (e-mails) and [are] considering disseminating it." Clovis believes that Halper was trying "to create an audit trail back to those [Clinton] emails from someone in the campaign so they could develop a stronger case for probable cause to continue to issue warrants and to further an investigation." Reports that Halper apparently sought a permanent post in the new administration suggest that the effort was meant to continue after inauguration. ..."
"... Notwithstanding Clovis's nutty rightwing politics , his description of what Halper may have been up to makes sense as does his observation that Halper was trying " to build something that did not exist ." Despite countless hyper-ventilating headlines about mysterious Trump Tower meetings and the like, the sad truth is that Russiagate after all these months is shaping up as even more of a "nothing-burger" than Obama administration veteran Van Jones said it was back in mid-2017. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has indicted Papadopoulos and others on procedural grounds, he has indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for corruption, and he has charged a St. Petersburg company known as the Internet Research Agency with violating US election laws. ..."
"... As The Washington Post noted in an oddly, cool-headed Dec. 2 article , 2, 700 suspected Russian-linked accounts generated just 202,000 tweets in a six-year period ending in August 2017, a drop in a bucket compared to the one billion election-related tweets sent out during the fourteen months leading up to Election Day. ..."
"... Opposition research is intended to mix truths and fiction, to dig up plausible dirt to throw at your opponent, not to produce an intelligence assessment at taxpayer's expense to "protect" the country. And Steele was paid for it by the Democrats, not his government. ..."
"... Although Kramer denies it, The New Yorker ..."
"... But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry observed a few days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's playbook on government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information about you that I'd sure hate to see end up in the press." ..."
"... It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth degree. But that's what the intelligence agencies are for, i.e. to spread fear and propaganda in order to stampede the public into supporting their imperial agenda. In this case, their efforts are so effective that they've gotten lost in a fog of their own making. If the corporate press fails to point this out, it's because reporters are too befogged themselves to notice. ..."
"... "Russiagate" continues to attract mounting blowback at Clinton, Obama and the Dems. Might well be they who end up charged with lawbreaking, though I'd be surprised if anyone in authority is ever really punished. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-02/fbi-spying-trump-started-london-earlier-thought-new-texts-implicate-obama-white ..."
"... I've always thought that the great animus between Obama and Trump stemmed from Trump's persistent birtherist attacks on Obama followed by Obama's public ridicule of Trump at the White House Correspondants' Dinner. Without the latter, Trump probably would not have been motivated to run for the presidency. Without the former, Obama would probably not have gotten into the gutter to defeat and embarrass Trump at all costs. Clinton and Obama probably never recruit British spooks to sabotage and provide a pretense for spying on the campaigns of Jeb, Ted or Little Marco. Since these were all warmongers like Hillary and Obama, the issues would have been different, Russia would not have been a factor, and Putin would have had no alleged "puppet." ..."
"... The irony is that Clinton and Obama wanted Trump as her opponent. They cultivated his candidacy via liberal media bias throughout the primaries. (MSNBC and Rachel Maddow were always cutting away to another full length Trump victory speech and rally, including lots of jibber jabber with the faithful supporters.) Why? Because they thought he was the easiest to beat. The polls actually had Hillary losing against the other GOP candidates. The Dems beat themselves with their own choice of candidate and all the intrigue, false narratives and other questionable practices they employed in both the primaries and the general. That's what really happened. ..."
"... I agree that Hillary wanted Trump as an opponent, thought she could easily win. I've underestimated idiot opponents before, always to my detriment. Why is it that they are always the most formidable? The "insiders" are so used to voters rolling over, taking it on the chin. They gave away their jobs, replaced them with the service industry, killed their sons and daughters in wars abroad, and still the American people cast their ballots in their favor. This time was different. The insiders just did not see the sea change, not like Trump did. ..."
"... Long-time CIA asset named as FBI's spy on Trump campaign By Bill Van Auken https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/05/21/poli-m21.html ..."
"... What the MSM really needed was a bait which they could use to lure more dollars just like a horse race where the track owners needed a fast underdog horse to clean up. I believe the term is to be "hustled". The con men of the media hustlers decided they needed a way to cause all of the candidates to squirm uneasily and to then react to the news that Donald Trump was "in the lead". ..."
"... Those clever media folks. What a gift the Supreme Court handed them. But there was one little (or big) problem. The problem was the result of the scam put Trump in the White House. Something that no conservative republican would ever sign onto. Trump had spent years as a democrat, hobnobbed with the Clinton's and was an avowed agnostic who favored the liberal ideology for the most part. ..."
"... The new guy in the White House with his crazy ideas of making friends with Vladimir Putin horrified a national arms industry funded with hundreds of billions of our tax dollars every year propped up by all the neocons with their paranoid beliefs and plans to make America the hegemon of the World. Our foreign allies who use the USA to fight their perceived enemies and entice our government to sell them weapons and who urge us to orchestrate the overthrow of governments were all alarmed by the "not a real republican" peace-nick occupying the White House. ..."
"... It is probable that the casino and hotel owner in the White House posed an very threatening alternate strategy of forming economic ties with former enemies which scared the hell out of the arms industry which built its economy on scaring all of us and justifying its existence based on foreign enemies. ..."
"... So the MSM and the MIC created a new cold war with their friends at the New York Times and the Washington Post which published endless stories about the new Russian threat we faced. It had nothing to do with the 0.02% Twitter and Facebook "influence" that Russia actually had in the election. It was billed as the crime of the century. The real crime was that they committed the crime of the century that they mightily profited from by putting Trump in the White House in the first place with a plan to grab all the election cash they could grab. ..."
May 31, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

As the role of a well-connected group of British and U.S. intelligence agents begins to emerge, new suspicions are growing about what hand they may have had in weaving the Russia-gate story, as Daniel Lazare explains.

Special to Consortium News

With the news that a Cambridge academic-cum-spy named Stefan Halper infiltrated the Trump campaign, the role of the intelligence agencies in shaping the great Russiagate saga is at last coming into focus.

It's looking more and more massive. The intelligence agencies initiated reports that Donald Trump was colluding with Russia, they nurtured them and helped them grow, and then they spread the word to the press and key government officials. Reportedly, they even tried to use these reports to force Trump to step down prior to his inauguration. Although the corporate press accuses Trump of conspiring with Russia to stop Hillary Clinton, the reverse now seems to be the case: the Obama administration intelligence agencies worked with Clinton to block " Siberian candidate " Trump.

The template was provided by ex-MI6 Director Richard Dearlove , Halper's friend and business partner. Sitting in winged chairs in London's venerable Garrick Club, according to The Washington Post , Dearlove told fellow MI6 veteran Christopher Steele, author of the famous "golden showers" opposition research dossier, that Trump "reminded him of a predicament he had faced years earlier, when he was chief of station for British intelligence in Washington and alerted US authorities to British information that a vice presidential hopeful had once been in communication with the Kremlin."

Apparently, one word from the Brits was enough to make the candidate in question step down. When that didn't work with Trump, Dearlove and his colleagues ratcheted up the pressure to make him see the light. A major scandal was thus born – or, rather, a very questionable scandal. Besides Dearlove, Steele, and Halper, a bon-vivant known as "The Walrus" for his impressive girth , other participants include: Robert Hannigan, former director Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, UK equivalent of the NSA. Alexander Downer, top Australian diplomat. Andrew Wood, ex-British ambassador to Moscow. Joseph Mifsud, Maltese academic. James Clapper, ex-US Director of National Intelligence. John Brennan, former CIA Director (and now NBC News analyst).

In-Bred

A few things stand out about this august group. One is its in-bred quality. After helping to run an annual confab known as the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, Dearlove and Halper are now partners in a private venture calling itself "The Cambridge Security Initiative." Both are connected to another London-based intelligence firm known as Hakluyt & Co. Halper is also connected via two books he wrote with Hakluyt representative Jonathan Clarke and Dearlove has a close personal friendship with Hakluyt founder Mike Reynolds, yet another MI6 vet. Alexander Downer served a half-dozen years on Hakluyt's international advisory board, while Andrew Wood is linked to Steele via Orbis Business Intelligence, the private research firm that Steele helped found, and which produced the anti-Trump dossier, and where Wood now serves as an unpaid advisor .

Everyone, in short, seems to know everyone else. But another thing that stands out about this group is its incompetence. Dearlove and Halper appear to be old-school paranoids for whom every Russian is a Boris Badenov or a Natasha Fatale . In February 2014, Halper notified US intelligence that Mike Flynn, Trump's future national security adviser, had grown overly chummy with an Anglo-Russian scholar named Svetlana Lokhova whom Halper suspected of being a spy – suspicions that Lokhova convincingly argues are absurd.

Halper: Infiltrated Trump campaign

In December 2016, Halper and Dearlove both resigned from the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar because they suspected that a company footing some of the costs was tied up with Russian intelligence – suspicions that Christopher Andrew, former chairman of the Cambridge history department and the seminar's founder, regards as " absurd " as well.

As head of Britain's foreign Secret Intelligence Service, as MI6 is formally known, Dearlove played a major role in drumming up support for the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq even while confessing at a secret Downing Street meeting that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [regime-change] policy." When the search for weapons of mass destruction turned up dry, Clapper, as then head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, argued that the Iraqi military must have smuggled them into neighboring Syria, a charge with absolutely no basis in fact but which helped pave the way for US regime-change efforts in that country too.

Brennan was meanwhile a high-level CIA official when the agency was fabricating evidence against Saddam Hussein and covering up Saudi Arabia's role in 9/11. Wood not only continues to defend the Iraqi invasion, but dismisses fears of a rising fascist tide in the Ukraine as nothing more than "a crude political insult" hurled by Vladimir Putin for his own political benefit. Such views now seem distressingly misguided in view of the alt-right torchlight parades and spiraling anti-Semitism that are now a regular feature of life in the Ukraine.

The result is a diplo-espionage gang that is very bad at the facts but very good at public manipulation – and which therefore decided to use its skill set out to create a public furor over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

It Started Late 2015

The effort began in late 2015 when GCHQ, along with intelligence agencies in Poland, Estonia, and Germany, began monitoring what they said were " suspicious 'interactions' between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents."

Since Trump was surging ahead in the polls and scaring the pants off the foreign-policy establishment by calling for a rapprochement with Moscow, the agencies figured that Russia was somehow behind it. The pace accelerated in March 2016 when a 30-year-old policy consultant named George Papadopoulos joined the Trump campaign as a foreign-policy adviser. Traveling in Italy a week later, he ran into Mifsud, the London-based Maltese academic, who reportedly set about cultivating him after learning of his position with Trump. Mifsud claimed to have "substantial connections with Russian government officials," according to prosecutors. Over breakfast at a London hotel, he told Papadopoulos that he had just returned from Moscow where he had learned that the Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails."

This was the remark that supposedly triggered an FBI investigation. The New York Times describes Mifsud as "an enthusiastic promoter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia" and "a regular at meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual conference held in Sochi, Russia, that Mr. Putin attends," which tried to suggest that he is a Kremlin agent of some sort.

But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange later tweeted photos of Mifsud with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and a high-ranking British intelligence official named Claire Smith at a training session for Italian security agents in Rome. Since it's unlikely that British intelligence would rely on a Russian agent in such circumstances, Mifsud's intelligence ties are more likely with the UK.

After Papadopoulos caused a minor political ruckus by telling a reporter that Prime Minister David Cameron should apologize for criticizing Trump's anti-Muslim pronouncements, a friend in the Israeli embassy put him in touch with a friend in the Australian embassy, who introduced him to Downer, her boss. Over drinks, Downer advised him to be more diplomatic. After Papadopoulos then passed along Misfud's tip about Clinton's emails, Downer informed his government, which, in late July, informed the FBI.

Was Papadopoulos Set Up?

Suspicions are unavoidable but evidence is lacking. Other pieces were meanwhile clicking into place. In late May or early June 2016, Fusion GPS, a private Washington intelligence firm employed by the Democratic National Committee, hired Steele to look into the Russian angle.

On June 20, he turned in the first of eighteen memos that would eventually comprise the Steele dossier , in this instance a three-page document asserting that Putin "has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years" and that Russian intelligence possessed "kompromat" in the form of a video of prostitutes performing a "golden showers" show for his benefit at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton. A week or two later, Steele briefed the FBI on his findings. Around the same time, Robert Hannigan flew to Washington to brief CIA Director John Brennan about additional material that had come GCHQ's way, material so sensitive that it could only be handled at "director level."

One player was filling Papadopoulos's head with tales of Russian dirty tricks, another was telling the FBI, while a third was collecting more information and passing it on to the bureau as well.

Page: Took Russia's side.

On July 7, 2016 Carter Page delivered a lecture on U.S.-Russian relations in Moscow in which he complained that " Washington and other western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change." Washington hawks expressed " unease " that someone representing the presumptive Republican nominee would take Russia's side in a growing neo-Cold War.

Stefan Halper then infiltrated the Trump campaign on behalf of the FBI as an informant in early July, weeks before the FBI launched its investigation. Halper had 36 years earlier infiltrated the Carter re-election campaign in 1980 using CIA agents to turn information over to the Reagan campaign. Now Halper began to court both Page and Papadopoulous, independently of each other.

On July 11, Page showed up at a Cambridge symposium at which Halper and Dearlove both spoke. In early September, Halper sent Papadopoulos an email offering $3,000 and a paid trip to London to write a research paper on a disputed gas field in the eastern Mediterranean, his specialty. "George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?" Halper asked when he got there, but Papadopoulos said he knew nothing. Halper also sought out Sam Clovis, Trump's national campaign co-chairman, with whom he chatted about China for an hour or so over coffee in Washington.

The rightwing Federalist website speculates that Halper was working with Steele to flesh out a Sept. 14 memo claiming that "Russians do have further 'kompromat' on CLINTON (e-mails) and [are] considering disseminating it." Clovis believes that Halper was trying "to create an audit trail back to those [Clinton] emails from someone in the campaign so they could develop a stronger case for probable cause to continue to issue warrants and to further an investigation." Reports that Halper apparently sought a permanent post in the new administration suggest that the effort was meant to continue after inauguration.

Notwithstanding Clovis's nutty rightwing politics , his description of what Halper may have been up to makes sense as does his observation that Halper was trying " to build something that did not exist ." Despite countless hyper-ventilating headlines about mysterious Trump Tower meetings and the like, the sad truth is that Russiagate after all these months is shaping up as even more of a "nothing-burger" than Obama administration veteran Van Jones said it was back in mid-2017. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has indicted Papadopoulos and others on procedural grounds, he has indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for corruption, and he has charged a St. Petersburg company known as the Internet Research Agency with violating US election laws.

But the corruption charges have nothing to do with Russian collusion and nothing in the indictment against IRA indicates that either the Kremlin or the Trump campaign were involved. Indeed, the activities that got IRA in trouble in the first place are so unimpressive – just $46,000 worth of Facebook ads that it purchased prior to election day, some pro-Trump, some anti, and some with no particular slant at all – that Mueller probably wouldn't even have bothered if he hadn't been under intense pressure to come up with anything at all.

The same goes for the army of bots that Russia supposedly deployed on Twitter. As The Washington Post noted in an oddly, cool-headed Dec. 2 article , 2, 700 suspected Russian-linked accounts generated just 202,000 tweets in a six-year period ending in August 2017, a drop in a bucket compared to the one billion election-related tweets sent out during the fourteen months leading up to Election Day.

The Steele dossier is also underwhelming. It declares on one page that the Kremlin sought to cultivate Trump by throwing "various lucrative real estate development business deals" his way but says on another that Trump's efforts to drum up business were unavailing and that he thus "had to settle for the use of extensive sexual services there from local prostitutes rather than business success."

Why would Trump turn down business offers when he couldn't generate any on his own? The idea that Putin would spot a U.S. reality-TV star somewhere around 2011 and conclude that he was destined for the Oval Office five years later is ludicrous. The fact that the Democratic National Committee funded the dossier via its law firm Perkins Coie renders it less credible still, as does the fact that the world has heard nothing more about the alleged video despite the ongoing deterioration in US-Russian relations. What's the point of making a blackmail tape if you don't use it?

Steele: Paid for political research, not intelligence.

Even Steele is backing off. In a legal paper filed in response to a libel suit last May, he said the document "did not represent (and did not purport to represent) verified facts, but were raw intelligence which had identified a range of allegations that warranted investigation given their potential national security implications." The fact is that the "dossier" was opposition research, not an intelligence report. It was neither vetted by Steele nor anyone in an intelligence agency. Opposition research is intended to mix truths and fiction, to dig up plausible dirt to throw at your opponent, not to produce an intelligence assessment at taxpayer's expense to "protect" the country. And Steele was paid for it by the Democrats, not his government.

Using it Anyway

Nonetheless, the spooks have made the most of such pseudo-evidence. Dearlove and Wood both advised Steele to take his "findings" to the FBI, while, after the election, Wood pulled Sen. John McCain aside at a security conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to let him know that the Russians might be blackmailing the president-elect. McCain dispatched long-time aide David J. Kramer to the UK to discuss the dossier with Steele directly.

Although Kramer denies it, The New Yorker found a former national-security official who says he spoke with him at the time and that Kramer's goal was to have McCain confront Trump with the dossier in the hope that he would resign on the spot. When that didn't happen, Clapper and Brennan arranged for FBI Director James Comey to confront Trump instead. Comey later testified that he didn't want Trump to think he was creating "a J. Edgar Hoover-type situation – I didn't want him thinking I was briefing him on this to sort of hang it over him in some way."

But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry observed a few days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's playbook on government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information about you that I'd sure hate to see end up in the press."

Since then, the Democrats have touted the dossier at every opportunity, The New Yorker continues to defend it , while Times columnist Michelle Goldberg cites it as well, saying it's a "rather obvious possibility that Trump is being blackmailed." CNN, for its part, suggested not long ago that the dossier may actually be Russian disinformation designed to throw everyone off base, Republicans and Democrats alike.

It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth degree. But that's what the intelligence agencies are for, i.e. to spread fear and propaganda in order to stampede the public into supporting their imperial agenda. In this case, their efforts are so effective that they've gotten lost in a fog of their own making. If the corporate press fails to point this out, it's because reporters are too befogged themselves to notice.

Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique , and his articles about the Middle East, terrorism, Eastern Europe, and other topics appear regularly on such websites as Jacobin and The American Conservative.


Vivian O'Blivion , June 4, 2018 at 6:36 am

Interesting technical detail.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/04/mueller-russia-troll-case-620653

Mueller is trying to omit the normal burden of legal liability, "wilful intent" in his charges against the St Petersburg, social media operation. In a horrifically complex area such as tax, campaign contributions or lobbying, a foreign entity can be found guilty of breaking a law that they cannot reasonably have been expected to have knowledge of.

But the omission or inclusion of "wilful intent" is applied on a selective basis depending on the advantage to the deep state. From a practical standpoint, omission of "wilful intent" makes it easier for Mueller to get a guilty verdict (in adsentia assuming this is legally valid in America). Once the "guilt" of the St Petersburg staff is established, any communication between an American and them becomes "collusion".

This stinks.

Realist , June 3, 2018 at 4:50 am

"Russiagate" continues to attract mounting blowback at Clinton, Obama and the Dems. Might well be they who end up charged with lawbreaking, though I'd be surprised if anyone in authority is ever really punished. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-02/fbi-spying-trump-started-london-earlier-thought-new-texts-implicate-obama-white

I've always thought that the great animus between Obama and Trump stemmed from Trump's persistent birtherist attacks on Obama followed by Obama's public ridicule of Trump at the White House Correspondants' Dinner. Without the latter, Trump probably would not have been motivated to run for the presidency. Without the former, Obama would probably not have gotten into the gutter to defeat and embarrass Trump at all costs. Clinton and Obama probably never recruit British spooks to sabotage and provide a pretense for spying on the campaigns of Jeb, Ted or Little Marco. Since these were all warmongers like Hillary and Obama, the issues would have been different, Russia would not have been a factor, and Putin would have had no alleged "puppet."

The irony is that Clinton and Obama wanted Trump as her opponent. They cultivated his candidacy via liberal media bias throughout the primaries. (MSNBC and Rachel Maddow were always cutting away to another full length Trump victory speech and rally, including lots of jibber jabber with the faithful supporters.) Why? Because they thought he was the easiest to beat. The polls actually had Hillary losing against the other GOP candidates. The Dems beat themselves with their own choice of candidate and all the intrigue, false narratives and other questionable practices they employed in both the primaries and the general. That's what really happened.

backwardsevolution , June 3, 2018 at 2:50 pm

Realist – good post. I think what you say is true. Trump got too caught up in the birther crap, and Obama retaliated. But I think that Trump had been thinking about the presidency long before Obama came along. He sees the country differently than Obama and Clinton do. Trump would never have built up China to the point where all American technology has been given away for free, with millions of jobs lost and a huge trade deficit, and he would have probably left Russia alone, not ransacked it.

I saw Obama as a somewhat reluctant globalist and Hillary as an eager globalist. They are both insiders. Trump is not. He's interested in what is best for the U.S., whereas the Clinton's and the Bush's were interested in what their corporate masters wanted. The multinationals have been selling the U.S. out, Trump is trying to put a stop to this, and it is going to be a fight to the death. Trump is playing hardball with China (who ARE U.S. multinationals), and it is working. Beginning July 1, 2018, China has agreed to reduce its tariffs:

"Import tariffs for apparel, footwear and headgear, kitchen supplies and fitness products will be more than halved to an average of 7.1 percent from 15.9 percent, with those on washing machines and refrigerators slashed to just 8 percent, from 20.5 percent.

Tariffs will also be cut on processed foods such as aquaculture and fishing products and mineral water, from 15.2 percent to 6.9 percent.

Cosmetics, such as skin and hair products, and some medical and health products, will also benefit from a tariff cut to 2.9 percent from 8.4 percent.

In particular, tariffs on drugs ranging from penicillin, cephalosporin to insulin will be slashed to zero from 6 percent before.

In the meantime, temporary tariff rates on 210 imported products from most favored nations will be scrapped as they are no longer favorable compared with new rates."

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-tariffs/china-to-cut-import-tariffs-for-some-consumer-goods-from-most-favored-nations-idUSKCN1IW1PY

Trade with China has been all one way. At least Trump is leveling the playing field. He at least is trying to bring back jobs, something the "insiders" could care less about.

I agree that Hillary wanted Trump as an opponent, thought she could easily win. I've underestimated idiot opponents before, always to my detriment. Why is it that they are always the most formidable? The "insiders" are so used to voters rolling over, taking it on the chin. They gave away their jobs, replaced them with the service industry, killed their sons and daughters in wars abroad, and still the American people cast their ballots in their favor. This time was different. The insiders just did not see the sea change, not like Trump did.

Abe , June 2, 2018 at 2:20 am

"Pentagon documents indicate that the Department of Defense's shadowy intelligence arm, the Office of Net Assessment, paid Halper $282,000 in 2016 and $129,000 in 2017. According to reports, Halper sought to secure Papadopoulos's collaboration by offering him $3,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to London, ostensibly to produce a research paper on energy issues in the eastern Mediterranean.

"The choice of Halper for this spying operation has ominous implications. His deep ties to the US intelligence apparatus date back decades. His father-in-law was Ray Cline, who headed the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence at the height of the Cold War. Halper served as an aide to Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Alexander Haig in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

"In 1980, as the director of policy coordination for Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign, Halper oversaw an operation in which CIA officials gave the campaign confidential information on the Carter administration and its foreign policy. This intelligence was in turn utilized to further back-channel negotiations between Reagan's campaign manager and subsequent CIA director William Casey and representatives of Iran to delay the release of the American embassy hostages until after the election, in order to prevent Carter from scoring a foreign policy victory on the eve of the November vote.

"Halper subsequently held posts as deputy assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs and senior adviser to the Pentagon and Justice Department. More recently, Halper has collaborated with Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, the British intelligence service, in directing the Cambridge Security Initiative (CSi), a security think tank that lists the US and UK governments as its principal clients.

"Before the 2016 election, Halper had expressed his view – shared by predominant layers within the intelligence agencies – that Clinton's election would prove 'less disruptive' than Trump's.

"The revelations of the role played by Halper point to an intervention in the 2016 elections by the US intelligence agencies that far eclipsed anything one could even imagine the Kremlin attempting."

Long-time CIA asset named as FBI's spy on Trump campaign By Bill Van Auken https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/05/21/poli-m21.html

CitizenOne , June 1, 2018 at 11:19 pm

Sorry for not commenting on other posts as of yet. But I think I have a different perspective. Russia Gate is not about Hillary Clinton or Putin but it is about Donald Trump. Specifically an effort to get rid of him by the intelligence agencies and the MSM. The fact is the MSM created Trump and were chiefly responsible for his election. Trump is their brainchild starlet used to fleece all the republican campaigns like a huckster fleeces an audience. It all ties to key Supreme Court rulings eliminating campaign finance regulations which ushered in the age of dark money.

When billionaires can donate unlimited amounts of money anonymously to the candidate of their choosing what ends up is a field of fourteen wannabes in a primary race each backed by their own investor(s). The only way these candidates can win is to convince us to vote. The only way they can do that is to spend on advertising.

What the MSM dreamed of in a purely capitalistic way was a way to drain the wallets of every single one of the republican Super PACs. The mission was fraught with potential checkmates. Foe example, there could be an early leader who snatched up the needed delegates for the nomination early on which would have stopped the flow of advertising cash flowing to the MSM. Such possibilities worried the MSM and caused great angst since this might just be the biggest haul they ever took in during a primary season. How would they prevent a premature end of the money river. Like financial vampire bats, ticks and leeches they needed a way to keep the money flowing from the veins of the republican Super PACs until they were sucked dry.

What the MSM really needed was a bait which they could use to lure more dollars just like a horse race where the track owners needed a fast underdog horse to clean up. I believe the term is to be "hustled". The con men of the media hustlers decided they needed a way to cause all of the candidates to squirm uneasily and to then react to the news that Donald Trump was "in the lead".

It was a pure stroke of genius and it worked so well that Carl Rove is looking for a job and Donald Trump is sitting in the White House.

Those clever media folks. What a gift the Supreme Court handed them. But there was one little (or big) problem. The problem was the result of the scam put Trump in the White House. Something that no conservative republican would ever sign onto. Trump had spent years as a democrat, hobnobbed with the Clinton's and was an avowed agnostic who favored the liberal ideology for the most part.

What to do? Trump was now the Commander in Chief and was spouting nonsense that the establishment recoiled at such as Trumps plans to form economic ties with Russia rather than continue to wage a cold war spanning 65 years which the MIC used year after year to spook us all and guarantee their billions annual increase in funding. Trump directly attacked defense projects and called for de-funding major initiatives like F35 etc.

The new guy in the White House with his crazy ideas of making friends with Vladimir Putin horrified a national arms industry funded with hundreds of billions of our tax dollars every year propped up by all the neocons with their paranoid beliefs and plans to make America the hegemon of the World. Our foreign allies who use the USA to fight their perceived enemies and entice our government to sell them weapons and who urge us to orchestrate the overthrow of governments were all alarmed by the "not a real republican" peace-nick occupying the White House.

What to do? There was clearly a need to eliminate this bad guy since his avowed policies were in direct opposition to the game plan that had successfully compromised the former administration. They felt powerless to dissuade the Administration to continue the course and form strategies to eliminate Iran, Syria, North Korea, Libya, Ukraine and other vulnerable targets swaying toward China and Russia. They faced a new threat with the Trump Administration which seemed hell bent to discontinue the wars in these regions robbing them of many dollars.

It is probable that the casino and hotel owner in the White House posed an very threatening alternate strategy of forming economic ties with former enemies which scared the hell out of the arms industry which built its economy on scaring all of us and justifying its existence based on foreign enemies.

So the MSM and the MIC created a new cold war with their friends at the New York Times and the Washington Post which published endless stories about the new Russian threat we faced. It had nothing to do with the 0.02% Twitter and Facebook "influence" that Russia actually had in the election. It was billed as the crime of the century. The real crime was that they committed the crime of the century that they mightily profited from by putting Trump in the White House in the first place with a plan to grab all the election cash they could grab.

In the interim, they also forgot on purpose to tell anyone about the election campaign finance fraud that they were the chief beneficiaries of. They also of course forgot to tell anyone what the fight was about for the Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. Twenty seven million dollars in dark money was donated by dark money donors enabled by the Supreme Court's decisions to eliminate campaign finance regulations which enabled these donors to buy out Congress and elect and confirm a Supreme Court Justice who would uphold the laws which eliminate all the election rules and campaign finance regulations dating back to the Tillman Act of 1907 which was an attempt to eliminate corporate contributions in political campaigns with associated meager fines as penalties. The law was weak then and has now been eliminated.

In an era of dark money in politics protected by revisionist judges laying at the top of our federal judicial branch posing as strict constructionists while being funded by the corporatocracy that viciously fights over control of the highest court by a panicked republican party that seeks to tie up their domination in our Congress by any means including the abdication of the Constitutional authority granted to the citizens of the nation we now face a new internal enemy.

That enemy is not some foreign nation but our own government which conspires to represent the wealthy and the powerful and which exalts them and which enacts laws to defend their control of our nation. Here is a quote:

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

Frederic Bastiat – (1801-1850) in Economic Sophisms

Realist , June 1, 2018 at 4:32 am

Different journalist covering much the same ground:

http://www.unz.com/mwhitney/why-is-the-new-york-times-misleading-the-american-people-about-the-paid-informant-who-was-spying-on-the-trump-campaign/

"Russiagate" is strictly a contrivance of the Deep State, American & British Spookery, and the corporate media propagandists. It clearly needs to be genuinely investigated (unlike the mockery being orchestrated by Herr Mueller from the Ministry of Truth), re-christened "Intellgate" (after the real perpetrators of crime), pursued until all the guilty traitors (including Mueller) who really tried to steal our democratic election are tried, convicted and incarcerated (including probably hundreds complicit from the media) and given its own lengthy chapter in all the history books about "The Election They Tried to Steal and Blame on Russia: How America Nearly Lost its Constitution." If not done, America will lose its constitution, or rather the incipient process will become totally irreversible.

Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 6:25 am

Your timing of events is confused.
The deep state didn't try and steal the election because they were overly complacent that their woman would win. Remember, they didn't try to use the dodgy, Steele dossier before the election.
What the deep state has done is reactively try to overcome the election outcome by launching an investigation into Trump. The egregious element of the investigation is giving it the title "investigation into collusion" when they in all probability knew that collusion was unlikely to have taken place. To achieve their aim (removing Trump) they included the line "and matters arising" in the brief to give them an open ended remit which allowed them to investigate Trump's business dealings of a Russian / Ukrainian nature (which may venture uncomfortably close to Semion Mogilevich).
If as you state (and I concur) there was no Russian collusion, then barring fabrication of evidence by Mueller (and there is little evidence of that to date) you have nothing to worry about on the collusion front. Remember, to date, Mueller has stuck (almost exclusively) to meat and potatoes charges like tax evasion and money laundering. If however the investigation leads to credible evidence that Trump broke substantive laws in the past for financial gain, then it is not reasonable to cry foul.

Seer , June 1, 2018 at 7:02 am

The Deep State assisted the DNC in knocking out Sanders. THAT was ground zero. Everything since then has been to cover this up and to discredit Trump (using him as the distraction). Consider that the Deep State never bothered to investigate the DNC servers/data; reason being is that they'd (Deep State) be implicated.

Skip Scott , June 1, 2018 at 7:29 am

Very true Seer. That is the real genesis of RussiaGate. It was a diversion tactic to keep people from looking at the DNC's behavior during the primaries. They are the reason Trump is president, not the evil Ruskies.

Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 8:13 am

We all seem agreed that the Russia collusion is an exercise in distraction. I can't say I know enough to comment with authority on whether the DNC would require assistance from the deep state to trash Bernie. From an outsider perspective it looked more like an application of massively disproportionate spending and standard, back room dirty tricks.
There is a saying; don't attribute to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence. In this case, try replacing incompetence with MONEY.

dikcheney , June 2, 2018 at 5:09 pm

Totally agree with you Skip and the Mueller performance is there to keep up the intimidation and distraction by regularly finding turds to throw at Trump. Mueller doesnt need to find anything, he just needs to create vague intimations of 'guilty Trump' and suspicious associates so that no one will look at the DNC or the Clinton corruption or the smashing of the Sanders campaign.

Their actual agenda is to smother analysis and clear thinking. Thankfully there is the forensicator piecing the jigsaw as well as consortium news.

robjira , June 1, 2018 at 11:55 am

Spot on, Seer.

michael , June 1, 2018 at 4:49 pm

Those servers probably had a lot more pay-to-play secrets from the Clinton Foundation and ring-kissing from foreign big donors than what was released by Wikileaks, which mostly was just screwing over Bernie, which the judge ruled was Hillary's prerogative. Some email chains were probably construed as National Security and were discreetly not leaked.
The 30,000 emails Hillary had bit bleached from her private servers are likely in the hands of Russians and every other major country, all biding their time for leverage. This was the carrot the British (who undoubtedly have copies as well) dangled over idiot Popodopolous.

Uncle Bob , June 1, 2018 at 10:33 pm

Seth Rich

anon , June 1, 2018 at 7:42 am

Realist is likely referring to events before the election which involved people with secret agency connections, such as the opposition research (Steele dossier and Skripal affair).

Realist , June 1, 2018 at 9:32 am

Realist responded but is being "moderated" as per usual.

Realist , June 1, 2018 at 9:31 am

Hillary herself was a prime force in cooking up the smear against Trump for being "Putin's puppet." This even before the Democratic convention. Then she used it big time during the debates. It wasn't something merely reactive after she lost. Certainly she and her collaborators inside the deep state and the intelligence agencies never imagined that she would lose and have to distract from what she and her people did by projecting the blame onto Trump. That part was reactive. The rest of the conspiracy was totally proactive on her part and that of the DNC, even during the primaries.

Don't forget, the intel agencies led by Clapper, Brennan and Comey were all working for Obama at the time and were totally acquiescent in spying on the Trump campaign and "unmasking" the identities and actions of his would-be administration, including individuals like General Flynn. The cooked up Steele dossier was paid for by money from the Clinton campaign and used as a pretext for the intel agencies to spy on the Trump campaign. There is no issue on timing. The establishment was fully behind Clinton by hook or crook from the moment Trump had the delegates to win the GOP nomination. (OBTW, I am not a Trump supporter or even a Republican, so I KNOW that I "have nothing to worry about on the collusion front." I'm a registered Dem, though not a Hillary supporter.)

Moreover, if you think that Mueller (and the other intel chiefs) have been on the impartial up-and-up, why did the FBI never seize and examine the DNC servers? Why simply accept the interpretation of events given by the private cybersecurity firm (Crowdstrike) that the Clinton campaign hired to very likely mastermind a cover-up? That is exceptional (nay, unheard of!) "professional courtesy." Why has Mueller to this day not deposed Julian Assange or former British Ambassador Craig Murray, both of whom admit to knowing precisely who provided the leaked (not hacked) Podesta and DNC emails to Wikileaks? Why has Mueller not pursued the potential role of the late Seth Rich in the leaking of said emails? Why has Mueller not pursued the robust theory, based on actual evidence, proposed by VIPS, and supported by computer experts like Bill Binney and John McAfee, that the emails were not, as the Dems and the intel agencies would have you believe on NO EVIDENCE, hacked (by the "Russians" or anyone else) but were downloaded to a flash drive directly from the DNC servers? Why has Mueller not deposed Binney or Ray McGovern who claim to have evidence to bear on this and have discussed it freely in the media (to the miniscule extent that the corporate media will give them an audience)? Is Mueller after the truth, or is this a kangaroo court he is running? Is the media really independent and impartial or are they part of a cover-up, perpetrating numerous sins of both commission and omission in their highly flawed reportage?

I don't see clarity in what has been thus far been propounded by Mueller or any of Trump's other accusers, but I don't think I am the one who is confused here, Vivian. If you want to meet a thoroughly confused individual on what transpired leading up to this moment in American political history, just go read Hillary's book. Absolutely everyone under the sun shares in the blame but her for the fact that she does not presently reside in the White House.

Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 1:48 pm

You have presented your case with a great deal more detail and clarity than the original post that prompted my reply. You are also a great deal more knowledgeable than I on the details. I think we are 98% in agreement and I wouldn't like to say who's correct on the remaining 2%.
For clarity, I didn't follow the debates and wouldn't do so now if they were repeated. Much heat very little light.
The "pretext" that the intel agencies claim launched their actions against Trump was not the Steele dossier, at least that is what the intel agencies say. Either way your assertion that it was the dossier that set things off is just that, an assertion. I think this is a minor point.
On the DNC servers and the FBI we are 100% singing from the same hymn book and it all sticks. Mueller's apparent disinterest in the question of hack or USB drive does rather taint his investigation and thanks for pointing this out, I hadn't thought of that angle. I still think Mueller will stick to tax and money laundering and stay well clear of "collusion", so yes he may be running a kangaroo court investigation but the charges will be real world.
The MSM as a whole are a sick joke which is why we collectively find ourselves at CN, Craig Murray's blog, etc. I wouldn't like to attribute "collaboration" to any individual in the media. It was the reference to hundreds of journalists being sent to jail in your original post that set me off in the first place. When considering the "culpability" of any individual journalist you can have any position on a spectrum from; fully cognisant collaborator with a deep state conspiracy, to; a bit dim and running with the "sexy" story 'cause it's the biggest thing ever, the bosses can't get enough of it and the overtime is great. If American journalists are anything like their UK counterparts, 99% will fall into the latter category.
Don't have any issue with your final point. Hillary on stage and on camera was phoney as rocking horse s**te and everyone outside her extremely highly remunerated team could see it.
Sorry for any inconvenience, but your second post makes your points a hell of a lot clearer than the original.

Realist , June 1, 2018 at 4:26 pm

My purpose for the first post in this thread was to direct readers to the article in Unz by Mike Whitney, not to compress a full-blown amateur expose' by myself into a three-sentence paragraph. You would have found much more in the way of facts, analysis and opinion in his article to which my terse comments did not even serve as an abstract.

Quoting his last paragraph may give you the flavor of this piece, which is definitely not a one-off by him or other actual journalists who have delved into the issues:

"Let's see if I got this right: Brennan gets his buddies in the UK to feed fake information on Russia to members of the Trump campaign, after which the FBI uses the suspicious communications about Russia as a pretext to unmask, wiretap, issue FISA warrants, and infiltrate the campaign, after which the incriminating evidence that was collected in the process of entrapping Trump campaign assistants is compiled in a legal case that is used to remove Trump from office. Is that how it's supposed to work?

It certainly looks like it. But don't expect to read about it in the Times."

backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 4:49 pm

Vivian – 90% of all major media is owned by six corporations. There most definitely was and IS collusion between some of them to bring down the outsider, Trump.

As far as individual journalists go, yeah, they're trying to pay their mortgage, I get it, and they're going to spin what their boss bloody well tells them to spin. But there is evidence coming out that "some" journalists did accept money from either Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie (sp) or Christopher Steele to leak information, which they did.

Bill Clinton passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that enabled these six media conglomerates to dominate the news. Of course they're political. They need to be split up, like yesterday, into a thousand pieces (ditto for the banks). They have purposely and with intent been feeding lies to the American people. Yes, some SHOULD go to jail.

As Peter Strzok of the FBI said re Trump colluding with Russia, "There was never any there, there." The collusion has come from the intelligence agencies, in cahoots with Hillary Clinton, perhaps even as high as Obama, to prevent Trump being elected. When that failed, they set out to get him impeached on whatever they could find. Of course Mueller is going to stick with tax and money laundering because he already KNOWS there was never any collusion with Russia.

This is the Swamp versus the People.

backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 1:52 pm

Realist – another excellent post. "Is Mueller after the truth, or is this a kangaroo court he is running?" As you rightly point out, Mueller IS being very selective in what he examines and doesn't examine. He's not after the whole truth, just a particular kind of truth, one that gets him a very specific result – to take down or severely cripple the President.

Evidence continues to trickle out. Former and active members of the FBI are now even begging to testify as they are disgusted with what is being purposely omitted from this so-called "impartial" investigation. This whole affair is "kangaroo" all the way.

I'm not so much a fan of Trump as I am a fan of the truth. I don't like to see him – anyone – being railroaded. That bothers me more than anything. But he's right about what he calls "the Swamp". If these people are not uncovered and brought to justice, then the country is truly lost.

Realist , June 1, 2018 at 4:38 pm

Precisely. Destroy the man on false pretenses and you destroy our entire system, whether you like him and his questionable policies or not.

Some people would say it's already gone, but we do what we can to get it back or hold onto to what's left of it. Besides, all the transparent lies and skullduggery in the service of politics rather than principles are just making our entire system look as corrupt as hell.

michael , June 1, 2018 at 5:00 pm

When Mueller arrested slimy Manafort for crimes committed in the Ukraine and gave a pass to the Podesta Brothers who worked closely with Manafort, it was clear that Russiagate was a partisan operation.

backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 6:17 pm

Michael – good point!

KiwiAntz , June 1, 2018 at 1:00 am

Its becoming abundantly clear now, that the whole Russiagate charade was had nothibg to do with Russia & is about a elaborate smokescreen & shellgame coverup designed to divert attention away from, firstly the Democratic Party's woeful defeat & its lousy Candidate choice in the corrupt Hillary Clinton? & also the DNC's sabotaging of Bernie Saunders campaign run! But the most henious & treacherous parts was Obama's, weaponising the intelligence agencies to spy (Halper) on the imaginary Mancharian Candidate Trump & to set him up as a Russia stooge? Obama & Hillary Clinton are complicent in this disgraceful & illegal activity to get dirt on Trump withe goal of ensuring Clinton's election win? This is bigger than Watergate & more scandalous? But despite the cheating & stacking of the card deck, she still lost out to the Donald? And this isn't just illegal its treasonous & willful actions deserving of a lengthy jail incarceration? HRC & her crooked Clinton foundation's funding of the fraudulent & discredited "Steele Dosier" was also used to implement Trump & Russia in a made up, pile of fictitious gargage that was pure offal? Obama & HRC along with their FBI & CIA spys need to be rounded up, convicted & thrown in jail? Perhaps if Trump could just shut his damn mouuth for once & get off twitter long enough to be able too get some Justice Dept officials looking into this, without being distracted by this Russiagate shellgame fakery, then perhaps the real criminal's like Halpert, Obama,HRC & these corrupt spooks & spies can be rounded up & held to account for this treasonous behaviour?

Sean Ahern , May 31, 2018 at 7:25 pm

Attention should be paid also to the role of so called progressive media outlets such as Mother Jones which served as an outlets for the disinformation campaign described in Lazare's article.
Here from David Corn's Mother Jones 2016 article:

"And a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence tells Mother Jones that in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump -- and that the FBI requested more information from him."
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/veteran-spy-gave-fbi-info-alleging-russian-operation-cultivate-donald-trump/

Not only was Corn and Mother Jones selected by the spooks as an outlet, but these so called progressives lauded their 'expose' as a great investigative coup on their part and it paved the way for Corn's elevation on MSNBC for a while as a 'pundit.'

Paul G. , May 31, 2018 at 8:46 pm

In that vein did the spooks influence Rachel Maddow or is her $30,000. a day salary adequate to totally compromise her microscopic journalistic integrity.

dikcheney , June 3, 2018 at 6:57 am

Passing around references to Mother Jones is like passing round used toilet paper for another try. MJ is BS it is entirely controlled fake press.

Abby , May 31, 2018 at 6:23 pm

Stefan Halper was being paid by the Clinton's foundation during the time he was spying on the Trump campaign. This is further evidence that Hillary Clinton's hands are all over getting Russia Gate started. Then there's the role that Obama's justice department played in setting up the spying on people who were working with the Trump campaign. This is worse than Watergate, IMO.

Rumors are that a few ex FBI agents are going to testify to congress in Comey's role in covering up Hillary's crimes when she used her private email server to send classified information to people who did not have clearance to read it. Sydney Bluementhol was working for Hillary's foundation and sending her classified information that he stole from the NSA.

Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills were concerned about Obama knowing that Hillary wasn't using her government email account after he told the press that he only found out about it at the same time they did. He had been sending and receiving emails from her Clintonone email address during her whole tenure as SOS.

Obama was also aware of her using her foundation for pay to play which she was told by both congress and Obama to keep far away from her duties. Why did she use her private email server? So that Chelsea could know where Hillary was doing business so she could send Bill there to give his speeches to the same organizations, foreign governments and people who had just donated to their foundation.

Has any previous Secretary of State in history used their position to enrich their spouses or their foundations? I think not.

The secrets of how the FBI covered for Hillary are coming out. Whether she is charged for her crimes is a different matter.

F. G. Sanford , May 31, 2018 at 7:48 pm

If Hillary paid a political operative using Clinton Foundation funds – those are tax exempt charitable contributions – she would be guilty of tax fraud, charity fraud and campaign finance violations. Hillary may be evil, but she's not stupid. The U.S.Government paid Halper, which might be "waste, fraud and abuse", but it doesn't implicate Hillary at all. Not that she's innocent, mind you

Rob , June 1, 2018 at 2:14 am

I need some references to take any of your multitude of claims seriously. With all due respect, this sound like something taken from info wars and stylized in smartened up a little bit.

chris m , May 31, 2018 at 2:52 pm

the idea that Stefan Halper was some sort a of mastermind spy behind the so called "Russiagate" fiasco
seems very implausible considering what he seems to have spent doing for the past 40 years
going back to the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1980 and his efforts then.

i think he must have had a fairly peripheral role as to whatever or not was going on behind the scenes from 2016 election campaign, and the campaign to first stop Trump getting elected, and secondly, when that failed, to bring down his Presidency.

of course, the moment his name was revealed in recent days, would have shocked or surprised those of in the general
public, but not certainly amongst those in Government aka FBI/CIA/Military-industrial circles.

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 4:36 pm

chris m – Halper is probably one of those people who hide behind their professor (or other legitimate) jobs, but are there at the ready to serve the Deep State. "I understand. You want me to set up some dupes in order to make it look like there was or could be actual Russian meddling. Gotcha." All you've got to do is make it "look like" something nefarious was going on. This facilitates a "reason" to have a phony investigation, and of course they make it as open-ended an investigation as possible, hoping to get the target on something, anything.

Well, they've no doubt looked long and hard for almost two years now, but zip. However, in their zeal to get rid of their opponent, who they did not think would win the election, they left themselves open, left a trail of crimes. Whoops!

This is the Swamp that Trump talked about during the election. He's probably not squeaky clean either, but he pales in comparison to what these guys have done. They have tried to take down a duly-elected President.

F. G. Sanford , May 31, 2018 at 5:09 pm

His role may have been peripheral, but I seem to recall that the Office of Net Assessments paid him roughly a million bucks to play it. That office, run from the Pentagon, is about as deep into the world of "black ops" spookdom as you can get. Hardly "peripheral", I'd say.

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:13 pm

F. G. Sanford – yes, a million bucks implies something more than just a peripheral involvement, more like something essential to the plot, like the actual setting up of the plot. Risk of exposure costs money.

ranney , May 31, 2018 at 6:17 pm

Chris, I think the Halper inclusion in this complex tale is simply an example of how these things work in the ultra paranoid style of spy agencies. As Lazare explains, every one knew every one else – at least at the start of this, and it just kind of built from there, and Halper may have been the spark – but the spark landed on a highly combustible pile of paranoia that caught on fire right away. This is how our and the UK agencies function. There is an interesting companion piece to this story today at Common Dreams by Robert Kohler titled The American Way of War. It describes basically the same sort of mind set and action as this story. I'd link it for you if I knew how, but I'm not very adept at the computer. (Maybe another reader knows how?)

We (that is the American people who are paying the salaries of these brain blocked, stiff necked idiots) need to start getting vocal and visible about the destructive path our politicians, banks and generals have rigidly put us on. Does any average working stiff still believe that all this hate, death and destruction is to "protect" us?

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:07 pm

ranney – when you are on the page that you want to link to, take your cursor (the little arrow on your screen) to the top of the page to the address bar (for instance, the address for this article is:
"https://consortiumnews.com/2018/05/31/spooks-spooking ")

Once your cursor is over the address bar, right click on your mouse. A little menu will come up. Then position your cursor down to the word "copy" and then left click on your mouse. This will copy the link.

Then proceed back to the blog (like Consortium) where you want to provide the link in your post. You might say, "Here is the link for the article I just described above." Then at this point you would right click on your mouse again, position your cursor over the word "paste", and then left click on your mouse. Voila, your link magically appears.

If you don't have a mouse and are using a laptop pad, then someone else will have to help you. That's above my pay grade. Good luck, ranney.

irina , May 31, 2018 at 8:13 pm

If you are using a Mac, either laptop w/touch screen or with a mouse, the copy/paste function
works similarly. Use either the mouse (no need to 'right click, left click') or the touch screen
to highlight the address bar once you have the cursor flashing away on the left side of it.
You may need to scroll right to highlight the whole address. Then go up to Edit (there's also
a keyboard command you can use, but I don't) in your tool bar at the top of your screen.
Click on 'copy'. Now your address is in memory. Then do the same as described above to
get back to where you want to paste it. Put your cursor where you want it to be 'pasted'.
Go back to 'edit' and click 'paste'. Voila !

This is a very handy function and can be used to copy text, web addresses, whatever you want.
Explore it a little bit. (Students definitely overuse the 'paste and match style' option, which allows
a person to 'paste' text into for example an essay and 'match the style' so it looks seamless, although
unless carefully edited it usually doesn't read seamlessly !)

Remember that whatever is in 'copy' will remain there until you 'copy' something else. (Or your
computer crashes . . . )

ranney , June 1, 2018 at 3:39 pm

Irina and Backwards Evolution – Thanks guys for the computer advice! I'll try it, but I think I need someone at my shoulder the first time I try it.

backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 8:53 pm

ranney – you're welcome! Snag one of your kids or a friend, and then do it together. Sometimes I see people posting things like: "Testing. I'm trying to provide a link, bear with me." Throw caution to the wind, ranney. I don't worry about embarrassing myself anymore. I do it every day and the world still goes on.

I heard a good bit of advice once, something I remind my kids: when you're young, you think everybody is watching you and so you're afraid to step out of line. When you're middle-aged, you think everybody is watching you, but you don't care. When you're older, you realize nobody is really watching you because they're more concerned about themselves.

Good luck, ranney.

irina , June 2, 2018 at 10:00 pm

I find it helpful to write down the steps (on an old fashioned piece of paper, with old fashioned ink)
when learning to use a new computer tool, because while I think I'll remember, it doesn't usually
'stick' until after using it for quite a while. And yes, definitely recruit a member of the younger set
or someone familiar with computers. My daughter showed me many years ago how to 'cut & paste'
and to her credit she was very gracious about it. Remember that you need a place to 'paste' what-
ever you copied -- either a comment board like this, or a document you are working on, or (this is
handy) an email where you want to send someone a link to something. Lots of other possibilities too!

mike , June 1, 2018 at 7:43 pm

No one is presenting Halper as a mastermind spy. He was a tool of the deep state nothing more.

Gary Weglarz , May 31, 2018 at 1:57 pm

It seems a mistake to frame the "Russiagate" nonsense as a "Democrat vs Republican" affair, except at the most surface level of understanding in terms of our political realities. If one considers that the Bush family has been effectively the Republican Party's face of the CIA/deep state nexus for decades, as the Clinton/Obama's have been the Democratic Party's face for decades now, what comes into focus is Trump as a sort of unknown, unexpected wild card not appropriately tethered to the control structure. Simply noting that the U.S. and Russia need not be enemies is alone enough to require an operation to get Trump into line.
This hardly means this is some sort of "partisan" issue as the involvement of McCain and others demonstrates.

One of the true "you can't make this stuff up" ironies of the Bush/Clinton CIA/deep state nexus history is worth remembering if one still maintains any illusions about how the CIA vets potential presidents since they killed JFK. During Iran/Contra we had Bush, the former CIA director now vice president, running a drugs for arms operation out the White House through Ollie North, WHILE then unknown Arkansas governor Bill Clinton was busy squashing Arkansas State Police investigations into said narcotics trafficking. Clinton obviously proved his bona fides to the CIA/deep state with such service and was appropriately rewarded as an asset who could function as a reliable president. Here in one operation we had two future presidents in Bush and Clinton both engaged in THE SAME CIA drug running operation. You truly can't make this stuff up.

Russiagate seems to be in the end all about keeping deep state policy moving in the "right direction" and "hating Russia" is the only entree on the menu at this time for the whole cadre of CIA/deep state, MIC, neocons, Zionists, and all their minions in the MSM. The Obama White House would have gladly supported Vlad the Impaler as the Republican candidate that beat Hillary if Vlad were to have the appropriate foaming at the mouth "hate-Russia" vibe going on.

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:18 pm

Gary – great post.

irina , May 31, 2018 at 8:18 pm

Roger that. I would really like to see an inquiry re-opened into the
teenage boys who died 'on the train tracks' in Arkansas during the
early years of the Clinton-Bush trafficking. Many questions are still
unanswered. Speculation is that they saw something they weren't
supposed to see.

Mark Thomason , May 31, 2018 at 1:12 pm

This all grows out of the failure to clean up the mess revealed by the Iraq fiasco. Instead, those who did that remained, got away with it, and are doing more of the same.

Babyl-on , May 31, 2018 at 12:46 pm

So, here is my question – Who, ultimately does the permanent/bureaucratic/deep/Imperial* state finally answer to? Who's interests are they serving? How do they know what those interests are?

It could be, and increasingly it looks as if, the answer is – no one in particular – but the Saud family, the Zionist cabal of billionaires, the German industrialist dynasties, the Japanese oligarchy and never forget the arms dealers, all of them once part of the Empire now fighting for themselves so we end up with the high level apparatchiks not knowing what to do or who to follow so they lie outright to Congress and go on TV and babble more lies for money.

It's a great contradiction that the greatest armed force ever assembled with cutting edge robotics and AI yet at the same time so weak and pathetic it can not exercise hegemony over the Middle East as it seems to desire more than anything. Being defeated by forces with less than 20% of the US spend.

Abby , May 31, 2018 at 6:36 pm

You're right. They answer to no one because they are not just working in this country, but they think that the whole world is theirs.

To these people there are no borders. They meet at places like the G20, Davos and wherever the Bilderberg group decides to meet every year. No leader of any country gets to be one unless they are acceptable to the Deep State. The council of foreign relations is one of the groups that run the world. How we take them down is a good question.

Abe , May 31, 2018 at 12:43 pm

Following the pattern of mainstream media, Daniel Lazare assiduously avoids mentioning Israel and pro-Israel Lobby interference in the 2016 presidential election, and the Israel-gate reality underlying all the Russia-gate fictions.

For example, George Papadopoulos is directly connected to the pro-Israel Lobby, right wing Israeli political interests, and Israeli government efforts to control regional energy resources.

Lazare mentions that Papadapoulos had "a friend in the Israeli embassy".

But Lazare conspicuously neglects to mention numerous Israeli and pro-Israel Lobby players interested in "filling Papadopoulos's head" with "tales of Russian dirty tricks".

Papadopoulos' LinkedIn page lists his association with the right wing Hudson Institute. The Washington, D.C.-based think tank part of pro-Israel Lobby web of militaristic security policy institutes that promote Israel-centric U.S. foreign policy.

https://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/hudson_institute/

The Hudson Institute confirmed that Papadopoulos was an intern who left the pro-Israel neoconservative think tank in 2014.

In 2014, Papadopoulos authored op-ed pieces in Israeli publications.

In an op-ed published in Arutz Sheva, media organ of the right wing Religionist Zionist movement embraced by the Israeli "settler" movement, Papadopoulos argued that the U.S. should focus on its "stalwart allies" Israel, Greece, and Cyprus to "contain the newly emergent Russian fleet".

In another op-ed published in Ha'aretz, Papadopoulos contended that Israel should exploit its natural gas resources in partnership with Cyprus and Greece rather than Turkey.

In November 2015, Papadapalous participated in a conference in Tel Aviv, discussing the export of natural gas from Israel with a panel of current and past Israeli government officials including Ron Adam, a representative of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Eran Lerman, a former Israeli Deputy National Security Adviser.

Among Israel's numerous violations of United Nations Resolution 242 was its annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights in 1981. Recent Israeli threatened military threats against Lebanon and Syria have a lot to do with control of natural gas resources, both offshore from Gaza and on land in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights region.

Israeli plans to develop energy resources and expand territorial holdings in the Syrian Golan are threatened by the Russian military presence in Syria. Russian diplomatic efforts, and the Russian military intervention that began in September 2015 after an official request by the Syrian government, have interfered with the Israeli-Saudi-U.S. Axis "dirty war" in Syria.

Israeli activities and Israel-gate realities are predictably ignored by the mainstream media, which continues to salivate at every moldy scrap of Russia-gate fiction.

Lazare need no be so circumspect, unless he has somehow been spooked.

Herman , May 31, 2018 at 4:13 pm

"Among Israel's numerous violations of United Nations Resolution 242 was its annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights in 1981. Recent Israeli threatened military threats against Lebanon and Syria have a lot to do with control of natural gas resources, both offshore from Gaza and on land in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights region."

And water. Rating energy and water, what's at the top for Israel. Israel would probably say both but Israel shielded by the US will take what it wants. That is already true with the Palestinians.. The last figure I heard is that the Palestinians are allocated one fifth per capita what is allocated to Israel's

mike k , May 31, 2018 at 11:59 am

A large swamp is actually an ancient and highly organized ecosystem. Only humans could create a lawless madness like Washington DC.

irina , May 31, 2018 at 8:24 pm

Yes that is a good description of a swamp. BUT, if it loses what sustains it --
water, in the case of a 'real' swamp and money in the case of this swamp --
it changes character very quickly and becomes first a bog, then a meadow.

I am definitely ready for more meadowland ! But the only way to create it
is to voluntarily redirect federal taxes into escrow accounts which stipulate
that the funds are to be used for (fill in the blank) Public Services at the
Local and Regional levels. Much more efficient than filtering them through
the federal bureaucracy !

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:21 pm

But how would one avoid prosecution for nonpayment of taxes?
That seems a very quiet way to be rendered ineffective as a resister.

irina , June 1, 2018 at 2:30 am

The thing is, you don't 'nonpay' them. The way it used to work, through the
Con$cience and Military Tax Campaign Escrow Account, was that you filed
your taxes as usual. (This does require having less withholding than you owe).
BUT instead of paying what is due to the IRS, you send it to the Escrow Account.
You attach a letter to your tax return, explaining where the money is and why it
is there. That is, you want it to be spent on _________________(fill in the blank)
worthy public social service. Then you send your return to the IRS.

When I used to do this, I stated that I wanted my tax dollars to be spent to develop
public health clinics at neighborhood schools. Said clinics would be staffed by nurse
practitioners, would be open 24-7 and nurses would be equipped with vans to make
House Calls. Security would be provided.

So you're not 'nonpaying' your taxes, you are (attempting) to redirect them. Eventually,
after several rounds of letters back and forth, the IRS would seize the monies from the
escrow account, which would only release them to the IRS upon being told to by the
tax re-director. Unfortunately, not enough people participated to make it a going concern.
But the potential is still there, and the template has been made and used. It's very scale-
able, from local to international. And it would not take that many 're-directors' to shift the
focus of tax liability from the collector to the payor. Because ultimately we are liable for
how our funds are used !

Bill , June 2, 2018 at 3:19 pm

this was done a lot during the Vietnam conflict, especially by Quakers. the first thing, if you are a wage earner, is to re-file a W2 with maximum withholdings-that has two effects: 1) it means you owe all your taxes in April. 2) it means the feds are deprived of the hidden tax in which they use or invest your withholding throughout the year before it's actually due(and un-owed taxes if you over over-withhold). Pretty sure that if a large number of people deprive the government of that hidden tax by under-withholding, they will begin to take notice.

Abe , May 31, 2018 at 11:54 am

Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is an intelligence agency of the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom.

In 2013, GCHQ received considerable media attention when the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the agency was in the process of collecting all online and telephone data in the UK. Snowden's revelations began a spate of ongoing disclosures of global surveillance and manipulation.

For example, NSA files from the Snowden archive published by Glenn Greenwald reveal details about GCHQ's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) unit, which uses "dirty trick" tactics to covertly manipulate and control online communities.

JTRIG document: "The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations"
https://edwardsnowden.com/docs/doc/the-art-of-deception-training-for-a-new.pdf

In 2017, officials from the UK and Israel made an unprecedented confirmation of the close relationship between the GCHQ and Israeli intelligence services.

Robert Hannigan, outgoing Director-General of the GCHQ, revealed for the first time that his organization has a "strong partnership with our Israeli counterparts in signals intelligence." He claimed the relationship "is protecting people from terrorism not only in the UK and Israel but in many other countries."

Mark Regev, Israeli ambassador to the UK, commented on the close relationship between British and Israeli intelligence agencies. During remarks at a Conservative Friends of Israel reception, Regev opined: "I have no doubt the cooperation between our two democracies is saving British lives."

Hannigan added that GCHQ was "building on an excellent cyber relationship with a range of Israeli bodies and the remarkable cyber industry in Be'er Sheva."

The IDF's most important signal intelligence–gathering installation is the Urim SIGINT Base, a part of Unit 8200, located in the Negev desert approximately 30 km from Be'er Sheva.

Snowden revealed how Unit 8200 receives raw, unfiltered data of U.S. citizens, as part of a secret agreement with the U.S. National Security Agency.

After his departure from GCHQ, Hannigan joined BlueteamGlobal, a cybersecurity services firm, later re-named BlueVoyant.

BlueVoyant's board of directors includes Nadav Zafrir, former Commander of the Israel Defense Forces' Unit 8200. The senior leadership team at BlueVoyant includes Ron Feler, formerly Deputy Commander of the IDF's Unit 8200, and Gad Goldstein, who served as a division head in the Israel Security Agency, Shin Bet, in the rank equivalent to Major General.

In addition to their purported cybersecurity activities, Israeli. American, and British private companies have enormous access and potential to promote government and military deception operations.

mike k , May 31, 2018 at 12:23 pm

Thanks Abe. Sounds like a manual for slave owners and con men. What a tangled wed the rich bastards weave. The simple truth is their sworn enemy.

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:19 pm

Interesting that a foreign power would be given all US communications data, which implies that the US has seized it all without a warrant and revealed it all in violation of the Constitution. If extensive, this use of information power amounts to information warfare against the US by its own secret agencies in collusion with a foreign power, an act of treason.

Seer , June 1, 2018 at 7:18 am

This has been going on for a LONG time, it's nothing new. I seem to recall 60 Minutes covering it way back in the 70s(?). UK was allowed to do the snooping in the US (and, likely, vice versa) and then providing info to the US. This way the US govt could claim that it didn't spy/snoop on its citizens. Without a doubt Israel has been extensively intercepting communications in the US..

Secrecy kills.

Sam F , June 1, 2018 at 8:23 am

Yes, but the act of allowing unregulated foreign agencies unwarranted access to US telecoms is federal crime, and it is treason when it goes so far as to allow them full access, and even direct US bulk traffic to their spy agencies. If this is so, these people should be prosecuted for treason.

F. G. Sanford , May 31, 2018 at 11:36 am

To listen to the media coverage of these events, it is tempting to believe that two entirely different planets are being discussed. Fox comes out and says Mueller was "owned" by Trump. Then, CNN comes out and says Trump was "owned" by Clapper. Clapper claims the evidence is "staggering", while video clips of his testimony reveal irrefutable perjury. Some of President Trump's policies are understandably abhorrent to Democrats, while Clinton's email server and charity frauds are indisputably violations of Federal statutes. Democrats are attempting to claim that a "spy" in the Trump campaign was perfectly reasonable to protect "national security", but evidence seems to indicate that the spy was placed BEFORE there was a legitimate national security concern. Some analysts note that, while Mueller's team appears to be Democratic partisan hacks, their native "skill set" is actually expertise in money laundering investigations. They claim that although Mr. Trump may not be compromised by the Russian government, he is involved with nefarious Russian organized crime figures. It follows, according to them, that given time, Mueller will reveal these illicit connections, and prosecution will become inevitable.

Let's assume, for argument, that both sides are right. That means that our entire government is irretrievably corrupt. Republicans claim that it could " go all the way to Obama". Democrats, of course, play the "moral high ground" card, insinuating that the current administration is so base and immoral that somehow, the "ends justify the means". No matter how you slice it, the Clinton campaign has a lot more liability on its hands. The problem is, if prosecutions begin, people will "talk" to save their own skins. The puppet masters can't really afford that.

"All the way to Obama", you say? I think it could go higher than that. Personally, I think it could go all the way to Dick Cheney, and the 'powers that be' are in no mood to let that happen.

Vivian O'Blivion , May 31, 2018 at 12:19 pm

The issue as I see it is that from the start everyone was calling the Mueller probe an investigation into collusion and not really grasping the catch all nature of his brief.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Counsel_investigation_(2017–present)

It's the "any matters arising " that is the real kicker. So any dodgy dealing / possible criminal activity in the past is fair game. And this is exactly what in happening with Manafort.
Morally you can apply the Nucky Johnson defence and state that everyone knew Trump was a crook when they voted for him, but legally this has no value.
There is an unpleasant whiff of deep state interference with the will of the people (electoral college). Perhaps if most bodies hadn't written Trump's chances off in such an off hand manner, proper due diligence of his background would have uncovered any liabilities before the election.
If there is actionable dirt, can't say I am overly sympathetic to Trump. Big prizes sometimes come with big risks.

David G , May 31, 2018 at 5:14 pm

My own feeling from the start has been that Mueller was never going to track down any "collusion" or "meddling" (at least not to any significant degree) because the whole, sprawling Russia-gate narrative – to the extent one can be discerned – is obviously phony.

But at the same time, there's no way the completely lawless, unethical Trump, along with his scummy associates, would be able to escape that kind of scrutiny without criminal conduct being exposed.

So far, on both scores, that still seems to me to be a likely outcome, and for my part I'm fine with it.

Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 5:29 am

My thoughts exactly. Collusion was never a viable proposition because the Russians aren't that stupid. Regardless of any personal opinion regarding the intelligence and mental stability of Donald Snr., the people he surrounds himself with are weapons grade stupid. I don't see the Russians touching the Trump campaign with a proverbial barge pole.

Bill , June 2, 2018 at 3:26 pm

it just happens that Trump appears to have been involved (wittingly or not), with the laundering a whole lot of Russian money and so many of his friends seem to be connected with wealthy Russian oligarchs as well plus they are so stupid, they keep appearing to (and probably are) obstructing justice. The Cohen thing doesn't get much attention here, but it's significant that they have all this stuff on a guy who is clearly Trump's bagman.

Steve Naidamast , May 31, 2018 at 3:15 pm

There is also quite an indication that the entire Mueller investigation is a complete smoke screen to be used as cannon fodder in the mainstream media.

On the one hand, Mueller and his hacks have found nothing of import to link Trump to anything close to collusion with members of the Russian government. And I am by no means a Trump supporter by any stretch of the imagination, except as a foil to Clinton. However, even my minimalist expectations for Trump have not worked out either.

In addition. the Mueller investigation has been spending what appears to be a majority of its time on ancillary matters that were not within the supposed scope and mandate of this investigation. Further, a number of indictments have come down against people involved with such ancillary matters.

The result is that if Mueller is going beyond the scope of his investigatory mandate, this may come in as a technicality that will allow indicted persons to escape prosecution on appeal.

Such a mandate, I would think, is the same thing as a police warrant, which can find only admissible evidence covered by the warrant. Anything else found to be criminally liable must be found to be as a result of a completely different investigation that has nothing to do with the original warrant.

In other words, it appears that the Mueller investigation was allowed to commence under a Republican controlled Congress for the very reason that its intent is simply to go in circles long enough for Republicans to get their agendas through, which does not appear to be working all too well as a result of their high levels of internecine party conflicts.

This entire affair is coming to show just how dysfunctional, corrupt, and incompetent the entirety of the US federal government has become. And to the chagrin of all sincere activists, no amount of organized protesting and political action will ever rid the country of this grotesque political quagmire that now engulfs the entirety of our political infrastructure.

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 8:48 pm

Very true that the US federal government is now "dysfunctional, corrupt, and incompetent."
What are your thoughts on forms of action to rid us this political quagmire?
(other than ineffective "organized protesting and political action")
Have you considered new forms of public debate and public information?

Seer , June 1, 2018 at 7:34 am

All of this is blackmail to hold Trump's feet to the fire of the Israel firsters (such actions pull in all the dark swampy things). By creating the Russia blackmail story they've effectively redirected away from themselves. The moment Trump balks the Deep State will reel in some more, airing innuendos to overwhelm Trump. Better believe that Trump has been fully "briefed" on all of this. John Bolton was able to push out a former OPCW head with threats (knew where his, the OPCW head's children were). And now John Bolton is sitting right next to Trump (whispering in his ear that he knows ways in which to oust Trump).

What actual "ideas" were in Trump's head going in to all of this (POTUS run) is hard to say. But, anything that can be considered a threat to the Deep State has been effectively nullified now.

Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 8:22 am

Possible, but Manafort already tried to get his charges thrown out as being the outcome of investigations beyond the remit He failed.

Brendan , May 31, 2018 at 10:26 am

There's no doubt at all that Joseph Mifsud was closely connected with western intelligence, and with MI6 in particular. His contacts with Russia are insignificant compared with his long career working amongst the elite of western officials.
Lee Smith of RealClearInvestigations lists some of the places where Mifsud worked, including two universities:

"he taught at Link Campus University in Rome, ( ) whose lecturers and professors include senior Western diplomats and intelligence officials from a number of NATO countries, especially Italy and the United Kingdom.

Mifsud also taught at the University of Stirling in Scotland, and the London Academy of Diplomacy, which trained diplomats and government officials, some of them sponsored by the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the British Council, or by their own governments."

Two former colleagues of Mifsud's, Roh and Pastor, recently interviewed him for a book they have written. Those authors could very well be biased, but one of them makes a valid point, similar to one that Daniel Lazare makes above:
"Given the affiliations of Link's faculty and staff, as well as Mifsud's pedigree, Roh thinks it's impossible that the man he hired as a business development consultant is a Russian agent."

Politically, Mifsud identifies with the Clintons more than anyone else, and claims to belong to the Clinton Foundation, which has often been accused of being just a way of funneling money into Hillary Clinton's campaign.

As Lee Smith says, if Mifsud really is a Russian spy, "Western intelligence services are looking at one of the largest and most embarrassing breaches in a generation. But none of the governments or intelligence agencies potentially compromised is acting like there's anything wrong."

From all that we know about Joseph Mifsud, it's safe to say that he was never a Russian spy. If not, then what was he doing when he was allegedly feeding stories to George Papadopoulos about Russians having 'dirt' on Clinton?

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/05/26/the_maltese_phantom_of_russiagate_.html

David G , May 31, 2018 at 4:25 pm

I read somewhere that Mifsud had disappeared. Was that true? If so, is he back, or still missing?

Chet Roman , May 31, 2018 at 6:21 pm

Here are some excerpts that will answer your question from an article by Lee Smith at Realclearinvestigations, "The Maltese Phantom of Russiagate".

A new book by former colleagues of Mifsud's – Stephan Roh, a 50-year-old Swiss-German lawyer, and Thierry Pastor, a 35-year-old French political analyst – reports that he is alive and well. Their account includes a recent interview with him.

Their self-published book, "The Faking of Russia-gate: The Papadopoulos Case, an Investigative Analysis," includes a recent interview with Mifsud in which he denies saying anything about Clinton emails to Papadopoulos. Mifsud, they write, stated "vehemently that he never told anything like this to George Papadopoulos." Mifsud asked rhetorically: "From where should I have this [information]?"

Mifsud's account seems to be supported by Alexander Downer, the Australian diplomat who alerted authorities about Papadopoulos. As reported in the Daily Caller, Downer said Papadopoulos never mentioned emails; he spoke, instead, about the Russians possessing material that could be damaging to Clinton. This new detail raises the possibility that Mifsud, Papadopoulos' alleged source for the information, never said anything about Clinton-related emails either.

In interviews with RealClearInvestigations, Roh and Pastor said Mifsud is anything but a Russian spy. Rather, he is more likely a Western intelligence asset.

According to the two authors, it was a former Italian intelligence official, Vincenzo Scotti, a colleague of Mifsud's and onetime interior minister, who told the professor to go into hiding. "I don't know who was hiding him," said Roh, "but I'm sure it was organized by someone. And I am sure it will be difficult to get to the bottom of it."

Toby McCrossin , June 1, 2018 at 1:54 am

" The Papadopoulos Case, an Investigative Analysis," includes a recent interview with Mifsud in which he denies saying anything about Clinton emails to Papadopoulos. Mifsud, they write, stated "vehemently that he never told anything like this to George Papadopoulos.""

Thank you for providing that explosive piece of information. If true, and I suspect it is, that's one more nail in the Russiagate narrative. Who, then, is making the claim that Misfud mentioned emails? The only source for the statement I can find is "court documents".

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 9:20 am

The election scams serve only to distract from the Israel-gate scandal and the oligarchy destruction of our former democracy. Mr. Lazare neglects to tell us about that. All of Hillary's top ten campaign bribers were zionists, and Trump let Goldman-Sachs take over the economy. KSA and big business also bribed heavily.

We must restrict funding of elections and mass media to limited individual donations, for democracy is lost.

We must eliminate zionist fascism from our political parties, federal government, and foreign policy. Obviously that has nothing to do with any ethnic or religious preference.

Otherwise the United States is lost, and our lives have no historical meaning beyond slavery to oligarchy.

Joe Tedesky , May 31, 2018 at 9:51 am

You are right Sam. Israel does work the fence under the guise of the Breaking News. Joe

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 8:18 pm

My response was that Israel massacres at the fence, ignored by the zionist US mass media.

mike k , May 31, 2018 at 11:48 am

The extreme wealth and privileges of oligarchy depend on the poverty and slavery of others. Inequality of income is the root cause of most of our ills. Try to imagine what a world of economic equals would be like. No striving for more and more wealth at the expense of others. No wars. What would there be to fight over – everyone would be content with what they already had.

If you automatically think such a world would be impossible, try to state why. You might discover that the only obstacle to such a world is the greedy bastards who are sitting on top of everybody, and will do anything to maintain their advantages.

mike k , May 31, 2018 at 11:52 am

How do the oligarchs ensure your slavery? With the little green tickets they have hoarded that the rest of us need just to eat and have a roof over our heads. The people sleeping in the streets tell us the penalty for not being good slaves.

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 12:50 pm

Very true, Mike. Those who say that equality or fairness of income implies breaking the productivity incentive system are wrong. No matter how much or how little wage incentive we offer for making an effort in work, we need not have great disparities of income. Those who can work should have work, and we should all make an effort to do well in our work, but none of us need the fanciest cars or grand monuments to live in, just to do our best.

Getting rid of oligarchy, and getting money out of mass media and elections, would be the greatest achievement of our times.

Joe Tedesky , May 31, 2018 at 5:30 pm

An old socialist friend of my dad's generation who claimed to have read the biography of Andrew Carnegie had told me over a few beers that Carnegie said, "that at a time when he was paying his workers $5 a week he 'could' have been paying them $50 a day, but then he could not figure out what kind of life they would lead with all that money". Think about it mike, if his workers would have had that kind of money it would not be long before Carnegie's workers became his competition and opened up next door to him the worst case scenario would be his former workers would sell their steel at a cheaper price, kind of, well no exactly like what Rockefeller did with oil, or as Carnegie did with steel innovation. How's that saying go, keep them down on the farm . well. Remember Carnegie was a low level stooge for the railroads at one time, and rose to the top .mike. Great point to make mike, because there could be more to go around. Joe

Steve Naidamast , May 31, 2018 at 3:16 pm

"We must restrict funding of elections and mass media to limited individual donations, for democracy is lost.

We must eliminate zionist fascism from our political parties, federal government, and foreign policy. Obviously that has nothing to do with any ethnic or religious preference."

Good luck with that!!!

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 8:19 pm

Well, you are welcome to make suggestions on how to save the republic.

john wilson , May 31, 2018 at 9:10 am

The depths of the deep state has no limits, but as a UK citizen, I fail to see why the American "spooks" need any help from we Brits when it comes state criminal activity. Sure, we are masters at underhand dirty tricks, but the US has a basket full of tricks that 'Trump' (lol) anything we've got. It was the Russians wot done mantra has been going on for many decades and is ever good for another turn around the political mulberry tree of corruption and underhand dealings. Whether the Democrats or the Republicans win its all the same to the deep state as they are in control whoever is in the White House. Trump was an outsider and there for election colour and the "ho ho ho" look what a great democracy we are, anyone can be president. He is in fact the very essence of the 'wild card' and when he actually won there was total confusion, panic, disbelief and probably terror in the caves and dungeons of the deep state.

Realist , May 31, 2018 at 9:33 am

I'm sure the result was so unexpected that the shadowy fixers, the IT mavens who could have "adjusted" the numbers, were totally caught off guard and unable to do "cleanly." Not that they didn't try to re-jigger the results in the four state recounts that were ordered, but it was simply too late to effectively cheat at that point, as there were already massive overvotes detected in key urban precincts. Such a thing will never happen again, I am sure.

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 9:36 am

It appears that UK has long had a supply of anti-Russia fearmongers, presumably backed by its anti-socialist oligarchy as in the US. Perhaps the US oligarchy is the dumbest salesman, who believes that all customers are even dumber, so that UK can sell Russophobia here thirty years after the USSR.

Bob Van Noy , May 31, 2018 at 8:49 am

"But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry observed a few days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's playbook on government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information about you that I'd sure hate to see end up in the press."

Perfect.
Recently, while trying to justify my arguement that a new investigation into the RFK Killing was necessary, I was asked why I thought that, and my response was "Modus operandi," exactly what Robert Parry learned by experience, and that is the fundamental similarity to all of the institutionalized crime that takes place by the IC. Once one realizes the literary approach to disinformation that was fundamental to Alan Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, even Ian Fleming, one can easily see the Themes being applied. I suppose that the very feature of believability offered by propaganda, once recognized, becomes its undoing. That could be our current reality; the old Lines simply are beginning to appear to be ridiculous

Thank you Daniel Lazar.

Sam F , June 1, 2018 at 8:39 am

The recognition of themes of propaganda as literary themes and modus operandi is helping to discredit propaganda. The similarities of the CW false-flag operations (Iraq, Syria, and UK), and the fake assassinations (Skripal and Babchenko) by the anti-Russia crowd help reveal and persuade on the falsehood of the Iraq WMD, Syria CW, and MH-17 propaganda ops. Just as the similarities of the JFK/MLK/RFK assassinations persuade us that commonalities exist long before we see evidence.

Bob Van Noy , June 1, 2018 at 1:11 pm

Many thanks Sam F for recognizing that. As we begin to achieve a resolution of the 60's Kllings, we can begin to see the general and specific themes utilized to direct the programs of Assassination. The other aspect is that real investigation Never followed; and that took Real Power.

In a truly insightful book by author Sally Denton entitled "The Profiteers" she puts together a very cogent theory that it isn't the Mafia, it's the Syndicate, which means (for me at least) real, criminal power with somewhat divergent interests ok with one another, to the extent that they can maintain their Own Turf. I think that's a profound insight

Too, in a similar vain, the Grand Deceptions of American Foreign Policy, "scenarios" are simply and only that, not a Real possible solution. Always resulting in failure

Sam F , June 1, 2018 at 9:23 pm

Yes, it is difficult to determine the structure of a subculture of gangsterism in power, which can have many specialized factions in loose cooperation, agreeing on some general policy points, like benefits for the rich, hatred of socialism, institutionalized bribery of politicians and judges, militarized policing, destruction of welfare and social security, deregulation of everything, essentially the neocon/neolib line of the DemReps. The party line of oligarchy in any form.

Indeed the foreign policy of such gangsters is designed to "fail" because destruction of cultures, waste, and fragmentation most efficiently exploits the bribery structure available, and serves the anti-socialist oligarchy. Failure of the declared foreign policy is success, because that is only propaganda to cover the corruption.

SocraticGadfly , May 31, 2018 at 8:48 am

You know, not only Gay Trowdy but even Dracula Napolitano think people like Lazare , McGovern, etc. are overblown on this issue.

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 1:47 pm

SocraticGadfly – Trey Gowdy hasn't even seen the documents yet, so he's hardly in a position to say anything. The House Intelligence Committee, under Chairman Nunes, are being stymied by the FBI and the Department of Justice who are refusing to hand over documents. Refusing! Refusing to disclose documents to the very people who, by law, have oversight. Nunes is threatening to hit them with Contempt of Congress.

Let's see the documents. Then Trey Gowdy can open his mouth.

Herman , May 31, 2018 at 8:32 am

What I take from this head spinning article is the paragraph about Carter Page.

"On July 7, 2016 Carter Page delivered a lecture on U.S.-Russian relations in Moscow in which he complained that "Washington and other western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change." Washington hawks expressed "unease" that someone representing the presumptive Republican nominee would take Russia's side in a growing neo-Cold War

Mr. Page hit the nail on the head. There is no greater sin to entrenched power than to spell out what is going on with Russia. It helps us understand why terms like dupe and naïve were stuck on Carter Page's back.. Truth to power is not always good for your health.

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:07 am

The tyrant accuses of disloyalty, all who question the reality of his foreign monsters.
And so do his monster-fighting agencies, whose budgets depend upon the fiction.

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:25 am

Daniel Lazare – good report. "It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth degree." This wasn't a case of paranoia. This was a blatant attempt to bring down a rival opponent and, failing that, the President of the United States. This was intentional and required collusion between top officials of the government. They fabricated the phony Steele dossier (paid for by the Clinton campaign), exonerated Hillary Clinton, and then went to town on bringing down Trump.

"Was George Popodopolous set up?" Of course he was. Set up a patsy in order to give you reason to carry out a phony investigation.

"If the corporate press fails to point this out, it's because reporters are too befogged themselves to notice." They're not befogged; they're following orders (the major television and newspaper outfits). Without their 24/7 spin and lies, Russiagate would never have been kept alive.

These guys got the biggest surprise of their life when Hillary Clinton lost the election. None of this would have come out had she won. During the campaign, as Trump gained in the polls, she was heard to say, "If they ever find out what we've done, we'll all hang."

I hope they see jail time for what they've done.

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:38 am

Apparently what has come out so far is just the tip of the iceberg. Some are saying this could lead all the way up to Obama. I hope not, but they have certainly done all they can to ruin the Trump Presidency.

JohnM , May 31, 2018 at 9:58 am

I'm adjusting my tinfoil hat right now. I'm wondering if Skripal had something to do with the Steel dossier. The iceberg may be even bigger than thought.

Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:18 am

It is known that Skripal's close friend living nearby was an employee of Steele's firm Orbis.

Chet Roman , May 31, 2018 at 2:58 pm

Exactly, his name is Pablo Miller and he is the MI6 agent who initially recruited Sergei Skripal. Miller worked for Orbis, Steele's company and listed that in his resume on LinkedIn but later deleted it. But once it's on the internet it can always be found and it was and it was published.

robjira , May 31, 2018 at 2:13 pm

John, both Moon Of Alabama and OffGuardian have had excellent coverage of the Skripal affair. Informed opinions wonder if Sergei Skripal was one of Steele's "Russian sources," and that he may have been poisoned for the purpose of either a) bolstering the whole "Russia = evil" narrative, or b) a warning not to ask for more than what he may have conceivably received for any contribution he may or may not have made to the "dossiere."

mike k , May 31, 2018 at 7:20 am

Interesting details in this article, but we have known this whole Russiagate affair was a scam from the get go. It all started the day after Trump's unexpected electoral win over Hillary. The chagrined dems came together and concocted their sore loser alibi – the Russians did it. They scooped up a lot of pre-election dirt, rolled it into a ball and directed it at Trump. It is a testament to the media's determination to stick with their story, that in spite of not a single scrap of real evidence after over a year of digging by a huge team of democratic hit men and women, this ridiculous story still has supporters.

David G , May 31, 2018 at 10:31 am

"It all started the day after Trump's unexpected electoral win over Hillary."

Not so.

Daniel Lazare's first link in the above piece is to Paul Krugman's July 22, 2016 NY Times op-ed, "Donald Trump, the Siberian Candidate". (Note how that headline doesn't even bother to employ a question mark.)

I appreciate that that Krugman column gets pride of place here since I distinctly remember reading it in my copy of the Times that day, months before the election, and my immediate reaction to it: nonplussed that such a risible thesis was being aired so prominently, along with a deep realization that this was only the first shot in what would be a co-ordinated media disinformation campaign, à la Saddam's WMDs.

Chet Roman , May 31, 2018 at 3:37 pm

Actually, I think the intelligence agencies' (CIA/FBI/DNI) plan started shortly after Trump gave the names of Page and Papadopoulos to the Washington Post (CIA annex) in a meeting on March 21, 2016 outlining his foreign policy team.

Carter Page (Naval Academy distinguished graduate and Naval intelligence officer) in 2013 worked as an "under-cover employee" of the FBI in a case that convicted Evgeny Buryakov and it was reported that he was still an UCE in March of 2016. The FBI never charged or even hinted that Page was anything but innocent and patriotic. However, in October 2016 the FBI told the FISA Court that he was a spy to support spying on him. Remember the FISA Court allows spying on him AND the persons he is in contact, which means almost everyone on the Trump transition team/administration.

Here is an excerpt from an article by WSJ's Kimberley Strassel:

In "late spring" of 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey briefed White House "National Security Council Principals" that the FBI had counterintelligence concerns about the Trump campaign. Carter Page was announced as a campaign adviser on March 21, and Paul Manafort joined the campaign March 29. The briefing likely referenced both men, since both had previously been on the radar of law enforcement. But here's what matters: With this briefing, Mr. Comey officially notified senior political operators on Team Obama that the bureau had eyes on Donald Trump and Russia. Imagine what might be done in these partisan times with such explosive information.

And what do you know? Sometime in April, the law firm Perkins Coie (on behalf the Clinton campaign) hired Fusion GPS, and Fusion turned its attention to Trump-Russia connections.

David G , May 31, 2018 at 4:56 pm

Most interesting, Chet Roman. Thanks.

My understanding is that Trump more or less pulled Page's name out of a hat to show the WashPost that he had a "foreign policy team", and thus that his campaign wasn't just a hollow sham, but that at that point he really had had no significant contact at all with Page – maybe hadn't even met him. It was just a name from his new political world that sprang to "mind" (or the Trumpian equivalent).

Of course, the Trump campaign *was* just a sham, by conventional Beltway standards: a ramshackle road show with no actual "foreign policy team", or any other policy team.

So maybe that random piece of B.S. from Trump has caused him a heap of trouble. This is part of why – no matter how bogus "Russia-gate" is – I just can't bring myself to feel sorry for old Cheeto Dust.

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 6:56 am

Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal had some good advice:

"Mr. Trump has an even quicker way to bring the hostility to an end.

He can – and should – declassify everything possible, letting Congress and the public see the truth.

That would put an end to the daily spin and conspiracy theories. It would puncture Democratic arguments that the administration is seeking to gain this information only for itself, to "undermine" an investigation.

And it would end the Justice Department's campaign of secrecy, which has done such harm to its reputation with the public and with Congress."

What do you bet he does?

RickD , May 31, 2018 at 6:44 am

I have serious doubts about the article's veracity. There seems to be a thread running through it indicating an attempt to whitewash any Russian efforts to get Trump elected. To dismiss all the evidence of such efforts, and , despite this author's words, there is enough such evidence, seems more than a bit partisan.

Paul E. Merrell, J.D. , May 31, 2018 at 6:55 am

What evidence? I've seen none so far. A lot of claims that there is such evidence but no one seems to ever say what it is.

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:06 am

RickD – thanks for the good laugh before bedtime. I'm with Mr. Merrell and I actually want to see some evidence. Maybe it was Professor Halper in the kitchen with the paring knife.

Realist , May 31, 2018 at 9:21 am

Unfortunately, what this guy says is what most Americans still seem to believe. When I ask people what is the actual hard evidence for "Russiagate" (because I don't know of any that has been corroborated), I get a response that there have been massive examples of Russian hacks, Russian posts, tweets and internet adverts–all meant to sabotage Hillary's candidacy, and very effective, mind you. Putin has been an evil genius worthy of a comic book villain (to date myself, a regular Lex Luthor). Sez who, ask I? Sez the trustworthy American media that would never lie to the public, sez they. You know, professional paragons of virtue like Rachel Maddow and her merry band.

Nobody seems aware of the recent findings about Halpern, none seem to have a realistic handle on the miniscule scope of the Russian "offenses" against American democracy. Rachel, the NY Times and WaPo have seen to that with their sins of both commission and omission. Even the Republican party is doing a half-hearted job of defending its own power base with rigorous and openly disseminated fact checking. It's like even many of the committee chairs with long seniority are reluctant to buck the conventional narrative peddled by the media. Many have chosen to retire rather than fight the media and the Deep State. What's a better interpretation of events? Or is one to believe that the silent voices, curious retirements and political heat generated by the Dems, the prosecutors and the media are all independent variables with no connections? These old pols recognise a good demonizing when they see it, especially when directed at them.

Personally, I think that not only the GOPers should be fighting like the devil to expose the truth (which should benefit them in this circumstance) but so should the media and all the watchdog agencies (ngo's) out there because our democracy WAS hijacked, but it was NOT by the Russians. Worse than that, it was done by internal domestic enemies of the people who must be outed and punished to save the constitution and the republic, if it is not too late. All the misinformation by influential insiders and the purported purveyors of truth accompanied by the deliberate silence by those who should be chirping like birds suggests it may well be far too late.

backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:53 pm

Realist – a most excellent post! Some poll result I read about the other day mentioned that well over half of the American public do NOT believe what they are being told by the media. That was good to hear. But you are right, there are still way too many who never question anything. If I ever get in trouble, I wouldn't want those types on my jury. They'd be wide awake during the prosecution's case and fast asleep during my defense.

This is the Swamp at work on both sides of the aisle. Most of the Republicans are hanging Trump out to dry. They've probably got too much dirt they want to keep hidden themselves, so retirement looks like a good idea. Get out of Dodge while the going is good, before the real fighting begins! The Democrats are battling for all they're worth, and I've got to hand it to them – they're dirty little fighters.

Yes, democracy has been hijacked. Hard to say how long this has been going on – maybe forever. If there is anything good about Trump's presidency, it's that the Deep State is being laid out and delivered up on a silver platter for all to see.

There has never been a better chance to take back the country than this. If this opportunity passes, it will never come again. They will make sure of it.

The greatest thing that Trump could do for the country would be to declassify all documents. Jeff Sessions is either part of the Deep State or he's been scared off. He's not going to act. Rosenstein is up to his eyeballs in this mess and he's not going to act. In fact, he's preventing Nunes from getting documents. It is up to Trump to act. I just hope he's not being surrounded by a bunch of bad apple lawyers who are giving him bad advice. He needs to go above the Department of Justice and declassify ALL documents. If he did that, a lot of these people would probably die of a heart attack within a minute.

mike k , May 31, 2018 at 7:11 am

You sure came out of the woodwork quickly to express your "serious doubts" RickD.

Skip Scott , May 31, 2018 at 8:07 am

Please provide "such evidence". I've yet to see any. The entire prosecution of RussiaGate has been one big Gish Gallop.

strgr-tgther , May 31, 2018 at 9:39 pm

RickD – Thank you for pointing that out! You were the only one!!! It is a very strange article leaving Putin and the Russians evidence out and also not a single word about Stromy Daniels witch is also very strange. I know Hillary would never have approved of any of this and they don't say that either.

John , June 1, 2018 at 2:26 am

What does Stormy Daniels have to do with RussiaGate?

You know that someone who committed the ultimate war crime by lying us into war to destroy Libya and re-institute slavery there, and who laughed after watching video of a man that Nelson Mandela called "The Greatest Living Champion of Human Rights on the Planet" be sodomized to death with a knife, is somehow too "moral" to do such a thing? Really?

It amazes me how utterly cultish those who support the Red Queen have shown themselves to be – without apparently realizing that they are obviously on par with the followers of Jim Jones!

strgr-tgther , June 1, 2018 at 12:17 pm

That is like saying what does income tax have to do with Al Capone. Who went to Alctraz because he did not pay income tax not for being a gangster. So we know Trump has sexual relations with Stormy Daniels, then afterward PAID her not to talk about it. So he paid Story Daniels for sex! That is Prostitution! Same thing. And that is inpeachable, using womens bodies as objects. If we don't prosecute Trump here then from now on all a John needs to say to the police is that he was not paying for sex but paying to keep quiet about it. And Cogress can get Trump for prostitution and disgracing the office of President. Without Russia investigations we would never have found out about this important fact, so that is what it has to do with Russia Gate.

Paul E. Merrell, J.D. , May 31, 2018 at 4:53 am

Guccifer 2.0's American Fingerprints Reveal An Operation Made In The USA: https://disobedientmedia.com/2018/05/guccifer-2-0s-american-fingerprints-reveal-an-operation-made-in-the-usa/

[Jun 09, 2018] Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack by Ray McGovern

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... That did not prevent the "handpicked" authors of that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from expressing "high confidence" that Russian intelligence "relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee to WikiLeaks." Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say. ..."
"... The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish and to "show" that it came from a Russian hack. ..."
"... "No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA's Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital Innovation – a growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015. [ (VIPS warned President Obama of some of the dangers of that basic CIA reorganization at the time.] ..."
"... "Scarcely imaginable digital tools – that can take control of your car and make it race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TV – were described and duly reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part 3 release on March 31 that exposed the "Marble Framework" program apparently was judged too delicate to qualify as 'news fit to print' and was kept out of the Times at the time, and has never been mentioned since . ..."
"... "More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post report , Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic attribution double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi." ..."
"... The CIA's reaction to the WikiLeaks disclosure of the Marble Framework tool was neuralgic. Then Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his associates "demons," and insisting; "It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia."Our July 24 Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's Marble Framework, or tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens of CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and with Director Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review. [ President Trump then directed Pompeo to invite Binney, one of the authors of the July 24, 2017 VIPS Memorandum to the President, to discuss all this. Binney and Pompeo spent an hour together at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017, during which Binney briefed Pompeo with his customary straightforwardness. ] ..."
"... Another false flag operation? Suddenly false flag operations have become the weapon of choice. Interestingly enough, they are nefariously (always) committed by the US or US allies. MH17 was a false flag with an SU-25 Ukraine jet responsible for downing the passenger jet (to blame Russia). All of the chemical attacks in Syria were false flag operations with the supply of sarin/chlorine made in Turkey or directly given to the "rebels" by the CIA or US allies. The White Helmets were of course in on all of the details. Assad was just simply not capable of doing that to "his" people. Forget that the sarin had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply. Next it was the snipers who used a false flag operation during the Maidan revolution to shoot protesters and police to oust Yanukovych. Only the neo-Nazis could be capable of shooting the Maidan protesters so they could take power. And then Seth Rich was murdered so he couldn't reveal he was the "real" source of the leak. This was hinted by Assange when he offered a reward to find the killers. ..."
"... The author tosses out that the DNC hack was (potentially) a false flag operation by the CIA obviously to undermine Trump while victimizing Russia. ..."
"... I don't seen any cause to say that any false-flag theory you don't like is merely "tossed out" propaganda. One cannot tell in your comment where you think the accounts are credible and where not. No evidence that the Syria CW attacks "had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply." ..."
"... There can be no doubt that counterintelligence tools would be pursued by our intelligence agencies as a means to create narratives and false evidence based on the production of false flags which support desired geopolitical outcomes. There would be a need to create false flags using technology to support the geopolitical agenda which would be hard or impossible to trace using the forensic tools used by cyber sleuths. ..."
"... Russia-gate is American Exceptionalism writ large which takes on a more sinister aspect as groups like BLM and others are "linked" to alleged "Russian funding"on one and and Soros funding on another ..."
"... (FWIW, this is a new neoliberal phenomenon when the ultra-rich "liberals" can quietly fund marches on Washington and "grassroots" networking making those neophyte movements too easy targets with questionable robust foundation (color revolutions are possible when anyone is able to foot the cost of 1,000 or 2000 "free" signs or t-shirts -- impecccably designed and printed. ..."
"... Excellent post. Thanks also for reminding me I need to revisit the Vault 7 information as source material. These are incredibly important leaks that help connect the dots of criminal State intelligence activities designed to have remained forever hidden. ..."
"... Actually, both Brennan and Hayden testified to Congress that only 3 agencies signed off on their claim. They also said that they'd "hand picked" a special team to run their "investigation," and no other people were involved. So, people known to be perjurers cherry picked "evidence" to make a claim. Let's invade Iraq again. ..."
"... Mueller is not interested in the truth. He can't handle the truth. His purpose is not to divulge the truth. He has no use for truthtellers including the critical possessors of the truth whom you mentioned. This aversion to the truth is the biggest clue that Mueller's activities are a complete sham. ..."
"... Thanks, Ray, for revealing that the CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate is the likely cause of the Russiagate scams. ..."
"... Your disclaimer is hilarious: "We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental." ..."
"... For whatever reason, Ray McGovern chose not to mention the murder of Seth Rich, which pretty clearly points to the real source of the leak being him, as hinted by Assange offering a reward for anyone uncovering his killer. The whole thing stinks of a democratic conspiracy. ..."
"... Ray, from what I have seen in following his writing for years, meticulously only deals in knowns. The Seth Rich issue is not a known, it is speculation still. Yes, it probably is involved, but unless Craig Murray states that Seth Rich was the one who handed him the USB drive, it is not a known. ..."
"... There is a possibility that Seth Rich was not the one who leaked the information, but that the DNC bigwigs THOUGHT he was, in which case, by neither confirming nor denying that Seth Rich was the leaker, it may be that letting the DNC continue to think it was him is being done in protection of the actual leaker. Seth Rich could also have been killed for unrelated reasons, perhaps Imran Awan thought he was on to his doings. ..."
"... Don't forget this Twitter post by Wikileaks on October 30, 2016: Podesta: "I'm definitely for making an example of a suspected leaker whether or not we have any real basis for it." https://www.wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/36082#efmAGSAH- ..."
"... Mueller has nothing and he well knows it. He was willingly roped into this whole pathetic charade and he's left grasping for anything remotely tied to Trump campaign officials and Russians. Even the most tenuous connections and weak relationships are splashed across the mass media in breathless headlines. Meanwhile, NONE of the supposed skulduggery unearthed by Mueller has anything to do with the Kremlin "hacking" the election to favor Trump. Which was the entire raison d'etre behind Rosenstein and Mueller's crusade on behalf of the deplorable DNC and Washington militarist-imperialists. Sure be interesting to see how Mueller and his crew ultimately extricate themselves from this giant fraudulent edifice of deceit. Will they even be able to save the most rudimentary amount of face? ..."
"... If they had had any evidence to inculpate Russia, we would have all seen it by now. They know that by stating that there is an investigation going on: they can blame Russia. The Democratic National Committee is integrated by a pack of liars. ..."
"... My question is simple, when will we concentrate on reading Hillary's many emails? After all wasn't this the reason for the Russian interference mania? Until we do, take apart Hillary's correspondence with her lackeys, nothing will transpire of any worth. I should not be the one saying this, in as much as Bernie Sanders should be the one screaming it for justice from the highest roof tops, but he isn't. So what's up with that? Who all is involved in this scandalous coverup? What do the masters of corruption have on everybody? ..."
Jun 09, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

If you are wondering why so little is heard these days of accusations that Russia hacked into the U.S. election in 2016, it could be because those charges could not withstand close scrutiny . It could also be because special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have never bothered to investigate what was once the central alleged crime in Russia-gate as no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team.

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity -- including two "alumni" who were former National Security Agency technical directors -- have long since concluded that Julian Assange did not acquire what he called the "emails related to Hillary Clinton" via a "hack" by the Russians or anyone else. They found, rather, that he got them from someone with physical access to Democratic National Committee computers who copied the material onto an external storage device -- probably a thumb drive. In December 2016 VIPS explained this in some detail in an open Memorandum to President Barack Obama.

On January 18, 2017 President Obama admitted that the "conclusions" of U.S. intelligence regarding how the alleged Russian hacking got to WikiLeaks were "inconclusive." Even the vapid FBI/CIA/NSA "Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections" of January 6, 2017, which tried to blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for election interference, contained no direct evidence of Russian involvement. That did not prevent the "handpicked" authors of that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from expressing "high confidence" that Russian intelligence "relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee to WikiLeaks." Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say.

Never mind. The FBI/CIA/NSA "assessment" became bible truth for partisans like Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who was among the first off the blocks to blame Russia for interfering to help Trump. It simply could not have been that Hillary Clinton was quite capable of snatching defeat out of victory all by herself. No, it had to have been the Russians.

Five days into the Trump presidency, I had a chance to challenge Schiff personally on the gaping disconnect between the Russians and WikiLeaks. Schiff still "can't share the evidence" with me or with anyone else, because it does not exist.

WikiLeaks

It was on June 12, 2016, just six weeks before the Democratic National Convention, that Assange announced the pending publication of "emails related to Hillary Clinton," throwing the Clinton campaign into panic mode, since the emails would document strong bias in favor of Clinton and successful attempts to sabotage the campaign of Bernie Sanders. When the emails were published on July 22, just three days before the convention began, the campaign decided to create what I call a Magnificent Diversion, drawing attention away from the substance of the emails by blaming Russia for their release.

Clinton's PR chief Jennifer Palmieri later admitted that she golf-carted around to various media outlets at the convention with instructions "to get the press to focus on something even we found difficult to process: the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton." The diversion worked like a charm. Mainstream media kept shouting "The Russians did it," and gave little, if any, play to the DNC skullduggery revealed in the emails themselves. And like Brer' Fox, Bernie didn't say nothin'.

Meanwhile, highly sophisticated technical experts, were hard at work fabricating "forensic facts" to "prove" the Russians did it. Here's how it played out:

June 12, 2016: Assange announces that WikiLeaks is about to publish "emails related to Hillary Clinton."

June 14, 2016: DNC contractor CrowdStrike, (with a dubious professional record and multiple conflicts of interest) announces that malware has been found on the DNC server and claims there is evidence it was injected by Russians.

June 15, 2016: "Guccifer 2.0" affirms the DNC statement; claims responsibility for the "hack;" claims to be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a document that the forensics show was synthetically tainted with "Russian fingerprints."

The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish and to "show" that it came from a Russian hack.

Enter Independent Investigators

A year ago independent cyber-investigators completed the kind of forensic work that, for reasons best known to then-FBI Director James Comey, neither he nor the "handpicked analysts" who wrote the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment bothered to do. The independent investigators found verifiable evidence from metadata found in the record of an alleged Russian hack of July 5, 2016 showing that the "hack" that day of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack, by Russia or anyone else.

Rather it originated with a copy (onto an external storage device – a thumb drive, for example) by an insider -- the same process used by the DNC insider/leaker before June 12, 2016 for an altogether different purpose. (Once the metadata was found and the "fluid dynamics" principle of physics applied, this was not difficult to disprove the validity of the claim that Russia was responsible.)

One of these independent investigators publishing under the name of The Forensicator on May 31 published new evidence that the Guccifer 2.0 persona uploaded a document from the West Coast of the United States, and not from Russia.

In our July 24, 2017 Memorandum to President Donald Trump we stated , "We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI."

Our July 24 Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, the disclosure described below may be related. Even if it is not, it is something we think you should be made aware of in this general connection. On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks began to publish a trove of original CIA documents that WikiLeaks labeled 'Vault 7.' WikiLeaks said it got the trove from a current or former CIA contractor and described it as comparable in scale and significance to the information Edward Snowden gave to reporters in 2013.

"No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA's Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital Innovation – a growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015. [ (VIPS warned President Obama of some of the dangers of that basic CIA reorganization at the time.]

Marbled

"Scarcely imaginable digital tools – that can take control of your car and make it race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TV – were described and duly reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part 3 release on March 31 that exposed the "Marble Framework" program apparently was judged too delicate to qualify as 'news fit to print' and was kept out of the Times at the time, and has never been mentioned since .

"The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima, it seems, 'did not get the memo' in time. Her March 31 article bore the catching (and accurate) headline: 'WikiLeaks' latest release of CIA cyber-tools could blow the cover on agency hacking operations.'

"The WikiLeaks release indicated that Marble was designed for flexible and easy-to-use 'obfuscation,' and that Marble source code includes a "de-obfuscator" to reverse CIA text obfuscation.

"More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post report , Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic attribution double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi."

A few weeks later William Binney, a former NSA technical, and I commented on Vault 7 Marble, and were able to get a shortened op-ed version published in The Baltimore Sun

The CIA's reaction to the WikiLeaks disclosure of the Marble Framework tool was neuralgic. Then Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his associates "demons," and insisting; "It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia."Our July 24 Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's Marble Framework, or tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens of CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and with Director Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review. [ President Trump then directed Pompeo to invite Binney, one of the authors of the July 24, 2017 VIPS Memorandum to the President, to discuss all this. Binney and Pompeo spent an hour together at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017, during which Binney briefed Pompeo with his customary straightforwardness. ]

We also do not know if you have discussed cyber issues in any detail with President Putin. In his interview with NBC's Megyn Kelly he seemed quite willing – perhaps even eager – to address issues related to the kind of cyber tools revealed in the Vault 7 disclosures, if only to indicate he has been briefed on them. Putin pointed out that today's technology enables hacking to be 'masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one can understand the origin' [of the hack] And, vice versa, it is possible to set up any entity or any individual that everyone will think that they are the exact source of that attack.

"'Hackers may be anywhere,' he said. 'There may be hackers, by the way, in the United States who very craftily and professionally passed the buck to Russia. Can't you imagine such a scenario? I can.'

New attention has been drawn to these issues after I discussed them in a widely published 16-minute interview last Friday.

In view of the highly politicized environment surrounding these issues, I believe I must append here the same notice that VIPS felt compelled to add to our key Memorandum of July 24, 2017:

"Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in the public mind to the point that agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we in VIPS say and do: We have no political agenda; our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our former intelligence colleagues.

"We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental." The fact we find it is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly politicized times.

Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Savior in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer before serving as a CIA analyst for 27 years. His duties included preparing, and briefing one-on-one, the President's Daily Brief.


ThomasGilroy , June 9, 2018 at 9:44 am

"More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post report, Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic attribution double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi."

Another false flag operation? Suddenly false flag operations have become the weapon of choice. Interestingly enough, they are nefariously (always) committed by the US or US allies. MH17 was a false flag with an SU-25 Ukraine jet responsible for downing the passenger jet (to blame Russia). All of the chemical attacks in Syria were false flag operations with the supply of sarin/chlorine made in Turkey or directly given to the "rebels" by the CIA or US allies. The White Helmets were of course in on all of the details. Assad was just simply not capable of doing that to "his" people. Forget that the sarin had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply. Next it was the snipers who used a false flag operation during the Maidan revolution to shoot protesters and police to oust Yanukovych. Only the neo-Nazis could be capable of shooting the Maidan protesters so they could take power. And then Seth Rich was murdered so he couldn't reveal he was the "real" source of the leak. This was hinted by Assange when he offered a reward to find the killers.

The author tosses out that the DNC hack was (potentially) a false flag operation by the CIA obviously to undermine Trump while victimizing Russia. It must be the Gulf of Tonkin all over again. While Crowdstrike might have a "dubious professional record and multiple conflicts of interest", their results were also confirmed by several other cyber-security firms (Wikipedia):

cybersecurity experts and firms, including CrowdStrike, Fidelis Cybersecurity, Mandiant, SecureWorks, ThreatConnect, and the editor for Ars Technica, have rejected the claims of "Guccifer 2.0" and have determined, on the basis of substantial evidence, that the cyberattacks were committed by two Russian state-sponsored groups (Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear).

Then there was Papadopoulas who coincidentally was given the information that Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. Obviously, they were illegally obtained (unless this was another CIA false flag operation). This was before the release of the emails by WikiLeaks. This was followed by the Trump Tower meeting with Russians with connections to the Russian government and the release of the emails by WikiLeaks shortly thereafter. Additionally, Russia had the motive to defeat HRC and elect Trump. Yesterday, Trump pushed for the reinstatement of Russia at the G-7 summit. What a shock! All known evidence and motive points the finger directly at Russia.

Calling everything a false flag operation is really the easy way out, but ultimately, it lets the responsible culprits off of the hook.

anon , June 9, 2018 at 11:28 am

I don't seen any cause to say that any false-flag theory you don't like is merely "tossed out" propaganda. One cannot tell in your comment where you think the accounts are credible and where not. No evidence that the Syria CW attacks "had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply."

CitizenOne , June 8, 2018 at 11:40 pm

There can be no doubt that counterintelligence tools would be pursued by our intelligence agencies as a means to create narratives and false evidence based on the production of false flags which support desired geopolitical outcomes. There would be a need to create false flags using technology to support the geopolitical agenda which would be hard or impossible to trace using the forensic tools used by cyber sleuths.

In pre computer technology days there were also many false flags which were set up to create real world scenarios which suited the geopolitical agenda. Even today, there are many examples of tactical false flag operations either organized and orchestrated or utilized by the intelligence agencies to create the narrative which supports geopolitical objectives.

Examples:

The US loaded munitions in broad daylight visible to German spies onto the passenger ship Lusitania despite German warnings that they would torpedo any vessels suspected of carrying munitions. The Lusitania then proceeded to loiter unaccompanied by escorts in an area off the Ireland coast treading over the same waters until it was spotted by a German U-Boat and was torpedoed. This was not exactly a false flag since the German U-Boat pulled the trigger but it was required to gain public support for the entrance of the US into WWI. It worked.

There is evidence that the US was deliberately caught "off guard" in the Pearl Harbor Attack. Numerous coded communication intercepts were made but somehow the advanced warning radar on the island of Hawaii was mysteriously turned off in the hours before and during the Japanese attack which guaranteed that the attack would be successful and also guaranteed that our population would instantly sign on to the war against Japan. It worked.

There is evidence that the US deliberately ignored the intelligence reports that UBL was planning to conduct an attack on the US using planes as bombs. The terrorists who carried out the attacks on the twin towers were "allowed" to conduct them. The result was the war in Iraq which was sold based on a pack of lies about WMDs and which we used to go to war with Iraq.

The Tonkin Gulf incident which historians doubt actually happened or believe if it did was greatly exaggerated by intelligence and military sources was used to justify the war in Vietnam.

The Spanish American War was ginned up by William Randolph Hearst and his yellow journalism empire to justify attacking Cuba, Panama and the Philippines. The facts revealed by forensic analysis of the exploded USS Maine have shown that the cataclysm was caused by a boiler explosion not an enemy mine. At the time this was also widely believed to not be caused by a Spanish mine in the harbor but the news sold the story of Spanish treachery and war was waged.

In each case of physical false flags created on purpose, or allowed to happen or just made up by fictions based on useful information that could be manipulated and distorted the US was led to war. Some of these wars were just wars and others were wars of choice but in every case a false flag was needed to bring the nation into a state where we believed we were under attack and under the circumstances flocked to war. I will not be the judge of history or justice here since each of these events had both negative and positive consequences for our nation. What I will state is that it is obvious that the willingness to allow or create or just capitalize on the events which have led to war are an essential ingredient. Without a publicly perceived and publicly supported cause for war there can be no widespread support for war. I can also say our leaders have always known this.

Enter the age of technology and the computer age with the electronic contraptions which enable global communication and commerce.

Is it such a stretch to imagine that the governments desire to shape world events based on military actions would result in a plan to use these modern technologies to once again create in our minds a cyber scenario in which we are once again as a result of the "cyber" false flag prepared for us to go to war? Would it be too much of a stretch to imagine that the government would use the new electronic frontier just as it used the old physical world events to justify military action?

Again, I will not go on to condemn any action by our military but will focus on how did we get there and how did we arrive at a place where a majority favored war.

Whether created by physical or cyberspace methods we can conclude that such false flags will happen for better or worse in any medium available.

susan sunflower , June 8, 2018 at 7:52 pm

I'd like "evidence" and I'd also like "context" since apparently international electoral "highjinks" and monkey-wrenching and rat-f*cking have a long tradition and history (before anyone draws a weapon, kills a candidate or sicc's death squads on the citizenry.

The DNC e-mail publication "theft" I suspect represents very small small potatoes for so many reasons As Dixon at Black Agenda Report put it . Russia-gate is American Exceptionalism writ large which takes on a more sinister aspect as groups like BLM and others are "linked" to alleged "Russian funding"on one and and Soros funding on another

https://www.blackagendareport.com/russia-gate-and-crisis-american-exceptionalism

(FWIW, this is a new neoliberal phenomenon when the ultra-rich "liberals" can quietly fund marches on Washington and "grassroots" networking making those neophyte movements too easy targets with questionable robust foundation (color revolutions are possible when anyone is able to foot the cost of 1,000 or 2000 "free" signs or t-shirts -- impecccably designed and printed.

Gary Weglarz , June 8, 2018 at 11:08 am

Excellent post. Thanks also for reminding me I need to revisit the Vault 7 information as source material. These are incredibly important leaks that help connect the dots of criminal State intelligence activities designed to have remained forever hidden.

Skip Scott , June 8, 2018 at 1:07 pm

I can't think of any single piece of evidence that our MSM is under the very strict control of our so-called intelligence agencies than how fast and completely the Vault 7 releases got flushed down the memory hole. "Nothing to see here folks, move along."

Realist , June 9, 2018 at 1:36 am

http://www.unz.com/mwhitney/dems-put-finishing-touches-on-one-party-surveillance-superstate/

Skip Scott , June 9, 2018 at 7:05 am

Mbob-

I don't think anyone can predict whether or not Sanders would have won as a 3rd party candidate. He ran a remarkable campaign, but when he caved to the Clinton machine he lost a lot of supporters, including me. If he had stood up at the convention and talked of the DNC skullduggery exposed by Wikileaks, and said "either I run as a democrat, or I run as a Green, but I'm running", he would have at least gotten 15 pct to make the TV debates, and who knows what could have happened after that. 40 pct of registered voters didn't vote. That alone tells you it is possible he might have won.

Instead he expected us to follow him like he was the f'ing Pied Piper to elect another Wall St. loving warmonger. That's why he gets no "pass" from me. He (and the Queen of Chaos) gave us Trump. BTW, Obama doesn't get a "pass" either.

willow , June 8, 2018 at 9:24 pm

It's all about the money. A big motive for the DNC to conjure up Russia-gate was to keep donors from abandoning any future
Good Ship Hillary or other Blue Dog Democrat campaigns: "Our brand/platform wasn't flawed. It was the Rooskies."

Vivian O'Blivion , June 8, 2018 at 8:22 am

An earlier time line.

March 14th. Popadopoulos has first encounter with Mifsud.

April 26th. Mifsud tells Popadopoulos that Russians have "dirt" on Clinton, including "thousands of e-mails".

May 4th. Trump last man standing in Republican primary.

May 10th. Popadopoulos gets drunk with London based Australian diplomat and talks about "dirt" but not specifically e-mails.

June 9th. Don. Jr meets in Trump tower with Russians promising "dirt" but not specifically in form of e-mails.

It all comes down to who Mifsud is, who he is working for and why he has been "off grid" to journalists (but not presumably Intelligence services) for > 6 months.

Specific points.

On March 14th Popadopoulos knew he was transferring from team Carson to team Trump but this was not announced to the (presumably underwhelmed) world 'till March 21st. Whoever put Mifsud onto Popadopoulos was very quick on their feet.
The Australian diplomat broke chain of command by reporting the drunken conversation to the State Department as opposed to his domestic Intelligence service. If Mifsud was a western asset, Australian Intelligence would likely be aware of his status.
If Mifsud was a Russian asset why would demonstrably genuine Russians be trying to dish up the dirt on Clinton in June?

There are missing pieces to this jigsaw puzzle but it's starting to look like a deep state operation to dirty Trump in the unlikely event that he went on to win.

Realist , June 8, 2018 at 4:28 pm

Ms. Clinton was personally trying to tar Trump with allusions to "Russia" and being "Putin's puppet" long before he won the presidency, in fact, quite conspicuously during the two conventions and most pointedly during the debates. She was willing to use that ruse long before her defeat at the ballot box. It was the straw that she clung to and was willing to use as a pretext for overturning the election after the unthinkable happened. But, you are right, smearing Trump through association with Russia was part of her long game going back to the early primaries, especially since her forces (both in politics and in the media) were trying mightily to get him the nomination under the assumption that he would be the easiest (more like the only) Republican candidate that she could defeat come November.

Wcb , June 8, 2018 at 5:25 pm

Steven Halper?

Rob Roy , June 8, 2018 at 1:33 am

I might add to this informative article that the reason why Julian Assange has been ostracized and isolated from any public appearance, denied a cell phone, internet and visitors is that he tells the truth, and TPTB don't want him to say yet again that the emails were leaked from the DNC. I've heard him say it several times. H. Clinton was so shocked and angry that she didn't become president as she so confidently expected that her, almost knee-jerk, reaction was to find a reason that was outside of herself on which to blame her defeat. It's always surprised me that no one talks about what was in those emails which covered her plans for Iran and Russia (disgusting).
Trump is a sociopath, but the Russians had nothing to do with him becoming elected. I was please to read here that he or perhaps just Pompeo? met with Binney. That's a good thing, though Pompeo, too, is unstable and war hungry to follow Israel into bombing yet another innocent sovereign country. Thank, Mr. McGovern for another excellent coverage of this story.

MLS , June 7, 2018 at 9:59 pm

"no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team"

Do tell, Ray: How do you know what the GOP Congress appointed Special Prosecutor's investigation – with its unlimited budget, wide mandate, and notable paucity of leaks – has and has not done?

strgr-tgther , June 8, 2018 at 12:14 am

MLS: Thank you! No one stands up for what is right any more. We have 17 Intelligency agencies that say are election was stolen. And just last week the Republicans Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnel and Trey Gowdy (who I detest) said the FBI and CIA and NSA were just doing there jobs the way ALL AMERICANS woudl want them to. And even Adam Schiff, do you think he will tell any reporter what evidence he does have? #1 It is probably classified and #2 he is probably saving it for the inpeachment. We did not find out about the Nixon missing 18 minutes until the end anyways. All of these articles sound like the writer just copied Sean Hannity and wrote everything down he said, and yesterday he told all suspects in the Mueller investigation to Smash and Bleach there mobile devices, witch is OBSTRUCTION of justice and witness TAMPERING. A great American there!

Rob Roy , June 8, 2018 at 1:48 am

strgr-tgther:

Sean Hannity??? Ha, ha, ha.

As Mr. McGoven wrote .."any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental."

John , June 8, 2018 at 5:48 am

Sorry I had to come back and point out the ultimate irony of ANYONE who supports the Butcher of Libya complaining about having an election stolen from them (after the blatant rigging of the primary that caused her to take the nomination away from the ONE PERSON who was polling ahead of Trump beyond the margin of error of the polls.)

It is people like you who gave us Trump. The Pied Piper Candidate promoted by the DNC machine (as the emails that were LEAKED, not "hacked", as the metadata proves conclusively, show.)

incontinent reader , June 8, 2018 at 7:14 am

What is this baloney? Seventeen Intelligence agencies DID NOT conclude what you are alleging, And in fact, Brennan and his cabal avoided using a National intelligence Estimate, which would have shot down his cherry-picked 'assessment' before it got off the ground – and it would have been published for all to read.

The NSA has everything on everybody, yet has never released anything remotely indicating Russian collusion. Do you think the NSA Director, who, as you may recall, did not give a strong endorsement to the Brennan-Comey assessment, would have held back from the Congress such information, if it had existed, when he was questioned? Furthermore, former technical directors of the NSA, Binney, Wiebe and Loomis- the very best of the best- have proven through forensics that the Wikileaks disclosures were not obtained by hacking the DNC computers, but by a leak, most likely to a thumb drive on the East Coast of the U.S. How many times does it have to be laid out for you before you are willing and able to absorb the facts?

As for Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, (and Trey Gowdy, who was quite skilled on the Benghazi and the Clinton private email server investigations- investigations during which Schiff ran interference for Clinton- but has seemed unwilling to digest the Strozk, Page, McCabe, et al emails and demand a Bureau housecleaning), who cares what they think or say, what matters is the evidence.

I suggest you familiarize yourself with the facts- and start by rereading Ray's articles, and the piece by Joe diGenova posted on Ray's website.

Realist , June 8, 2018 at 4:12 pm

The guy's got Schiff for brains. Everyone who cares about the truth has known since before Mueller started his charade that the "17 intelligence agency" claim was entirely a ruse, bald-faced confected propaganda to anger the public to support the coup attempted by Ms. Clinton and her zombie followers. People are NOT going to support the Democratic party now or in the future when its tactics include subverting our public institutions, including the electoral process under the constitution–whether you like the results or not! If the Democratic party is to be saved, those honest people still in it should endeavor to drain the septic tank that has become their party before we can all drain the swamp that is the federal government and its ex-officio manipulators (otherwise known as the "deep state") in Washington.

Farmer Pete , June 8, 2018 at 7:30 am

"We have 17 Intelligency agencies that say are election was stolen."

You opened up with a talking point that is factually incorrect. The team of hand-picked spooks that slapped the "high confidence" report together came from 3 agencies. I know, 17 sounds like a lot and very convincing to us peasants. Regardless, it's important to practice a few ounces of skepticism when it comes to institutions with a long rap sheet of crime and deception. Taking their word for it as a substitute for actual observable evidence is naive to say the least. The rest of your hollow argument is filled with "probably(s)". If I were you, I'd turn off my TV and stop looking for scapegoats for an epically horrible presidential campaign and candidate.

strgr-tgther , June 8, 2018 at 12:50 pm

/horrible presidential campaign and candidate/ Say you. But we all went to sleep comfortable the night before the election where 97% of all poles said Clinton was going to be are next President. And that did not happen! So Robert Mueller is going to find out EXACTLY why. Stay tuned!!!

irina , June 8, 2018 at 3:40 pm

Not 'all'. I knew she was toast after reading that she had cancelled her election night fireworks
celebration, early on the morning of Election Day. She must have known it also, too.

And she was toast in my mind after seeing the ridiculous scene of her virtual image
'breaking the glass ceiling' during the Democratic Convention. So expensively stupid.

Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:50 pm

Mueller is simply orchestrating a dramatic charade to distract you from the obvious reason why she lost: Trump garnered more electoral votes, even after the popular votes were counted and recounted. Any evidence of ballot box stuffing in the key states pointed to the Democrats, so they gave that up. She and her supporters like you have never stopped trying to hoodwink the public either before or after the election. Too many voters were on to you, that's why she lost.

Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:57 pm

Indeed, stop the nonsense which can't be changed short of a coup d'etat, and start focusing on opposing the bad policy which this administration has been pursuing. I don't see the Dems doing that even in their incipient campaigns leading up to the November elections. Fact is, they are not inclined to change the policies, which are the same ones that got them "shellacked" at the ballot box in 2016. (I think Obama must own lots of stock in the shellack trade.)

Curious , June 8, 2018 at 6:27 pm

Ignorance of th facts keep showing up in your posts for some unknown reason. Sentence two: "we have 17 intelligency (sic) agencies that say ". this statement was debunked a long time ago.

Have you learned nothing yet regarding the hand-picked people out of three agencies after all this time? Given that set of lies it makes your post impossible to read.
I would suggest a review of what really happened before you perpetuate more myths and this will benefit all.

Also, a good reading of the Snowden Docs and vault 7 should scare you out of your shell since our "intelligeny" community can pretend to be Chinese, Russian, Iranian just for starters, and the blame game can start after hours instead of the needed weeks and/or months to determine the veracity of a hack and/or leak.

It's past trying to win you over with the actual 'time lines' and truths. Mr McGovern has re-emphasized in this article the very things you should be reading.
Start with Mr Binney and his technical evaluation of the forensics in the DNC docs and build out from there This is just a suggestion.

What never ceases to amaze me in your posts is the 'issue' that many of the docs were bought and paid for by the Clinton team, and yet amnesia has taken over those aspects as well. Shouldn't you start with the Clintons paying for this dirt before it was ever attributed to Trump?

Daniel , June 8, 2018 at 6:38 pm

Actually, both Brennan and Hayden testified to Congress that only 3 agencies signed off on their claim. They also said that they'd "hand picked" a special team to run their "investigation," and no other people were involved. So, people known to be perjurers cherry picked "evidence" to make a claim. Let's invade Iraq again.

More than 1/2 of their report was about RT, and even though that was all easily viewable public record, they got huge claims wrong. Basically, the best they had was that RT covered Occupy Wall Street and the NO DAPL and BLM protests, and horror of horrors, aired third party debates! In a democracy! How dare they?

Why didn't FBI subpoena DNC's servers so they could run their own forensics on them? Why did they just accept the claims of a private company founded by an Atlantic Council board member? Did you know that CrowdStrike had to backpedal on the exact same claim they made about the DNC server when Ukraine showed they were completely wrong regarding Ukie artillery?

Joe Lauria , June 8, 2018 at 2:12 am

Until he went incommunicado Assange stated on several occasions that he was never questioned by Muellers team. Craig Murray has said the same. And Kim Dotcom has written to Mueller offering evidence about the source and he says they have never replied to him.

Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:40 pm

Mueller is not interested in the truth. He can't handle the truth. His purpose is not to divulge the truth. He has no use for truthtellers including the critical possessors of the truth whom you mentioned. This aversion to the truth is the biggest clue that Mueller's activities are a complete sham.

Miranda Keefe , June 8, 2018 at 3:28 pm

MLS wrote, "How do you know what the GOP Congress appointed Special Prosecutor's investigation – with its unlimited budget, wide mandate, and notable paucity of leaks – has and has not done?"

Robert Mueller is NOT a Special Prosecutor appointed by the Congress. He is a special counsel appointed by the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, and is part of the Department of Justice.

I know no one who dislikes Trumps wants to hear it. But all Mueller's authority and power to act is derived from Donald J. Trump's executive authority because he won the 2016 presidential election. Mueller is down the chain of command in the Executive Department.

That's why this is all nonsense. What we basically have is Trump investigating himself. The framers of the Constitution never intended this. They intended Congress to investigate the Executive and that's why they gave Congress the power to remove him or her via impeachment.

As long as we continue with this folly of expecting the Justice Department to somehow investigate and prosecute a president we end up with two terrible possibilities. Either a corrupt president will exercise his legitimate authority to end the investigation like Nixon did -or- we have a Deep State beyond the reach of the elected president that can effectively investigate and prosecute a corrupt president, but also then has other powers with no democratic control.

The solution to this dilemma? An empowered Congress elected by the People operating as the Constitution intended.

As to the rest of your post? It is an example of the "will to believe." Me? I'll not act as if there is evidence of Russian interference until I'm shown evidence, not act as if it must be true, because I want to believe that, until it's fully proven that it didn't happen.

F. G. Sanford , June 7, 2018 at 8:22 pm

There must be some Trump-Russia ties.
Or so claim those CIA spies-
McCabe wants a deal, or else he won't squeal,
He'll dissemble when he testifies!

No one knows what's on Huma's computer.
There's no jury and no prosecutor.
Poor Adam Schiff hopes McCabe takes the fifth,
Special council might someday recruit her!

Assange is still embassy bound.
Mueller's case hasn't quite come unwound.
Wayne Madsen implies that there might be some ties,
To Israelis they haven't yet found!

Halper and Mifsud are players.
John Brennan used cutouts in layers.
If the scheme falls apart and the bureau is smart,
They'll go after them all as betrayers!

They needed historical fiction.
A dossier with salacious depiction!
Some urinous whores could get down on all fours,
They'd accomplish some bed sheet emiction!

Pablo Miller and Skripal were cited.
Sidney Blumenthal might have been slighted.
Christopher Steele offered Sidney a deal,
But the dossier's not copyrighted!

That story about Novichok,
Smells a lot like a very large crock.
But they can't be deposed or the story disclosed,
The Skripals have toxic brain block!

Papadopolis shot off his yap.
He told Downer, that affable chap-
There was dirt to report on the Clinton cohort,
Mifsud hooked him with that honey trap!

She was blond and a bombshell to boot.
Papadopolis thought she was cute.
She worked for Mifsud, a mysterious dude,
Now poor Paps is in grave disrepute!

But the trick was to tie it to Russians.
The Clinton team had some discussions.
Their big email scandal was easy to handle,
They'd blame Vlad for the bad repercussions!

There must have been Russian collusion.
That explained all the vote count confusion.
Guccifer Two made the Trump team come through,
If he won, it was just an illusion!

Lisa Page and Pete Strzok were disgusted
They schemed and they plotted and lusted.
If bald-headed Clapper appealed to Jake Tapper,
Brennan's Tweets might get Donald Trump busted!

There had to be cyber subversion.
It would serve as the perfect perversion.
They would claim it was missed if it didn't exist,
It's a logically perfect diversion!

Ray McGovern , June 8, 2018 at 1:03 am

BRAVO, F.G. and thanks.
Ray

Rob Roy , June 8, 2018 at 1:41 am

F.G., you've done it again, and I might add, topped even yourself! Thanks.

KiwiAntz , June 7, 2018 at 7:30 pm

What a joke, America, the most dishonest Country on Earth, has meddled, murdered & committed coups to overturn other Govts & interfered & continues to do so in just about every Country on Earth by using Trade sanctions, arming Terrorists & illegal invasions, has the barefaced cheek to puff out its chest & hypocritcally blame Russia for something that it does on a daily basis?? And the point with Mueller's investigation is not to find any Russian collusion evidence, who needs evidence when you can just make it up? The point is provide the US with a list of unfounded lies & excuses, FIRSTLY to slander & demonise RUSSIA for something they clearly didn't do! SECONDLY, was to provide a excuse for the Democrats dismal election loss result to the DONALD & his Trump Party which just happens to contain some Republicans? THIRDLY, to conduct a soft Coup by trying to get Trump impeached on "TRUMPED UP CHARGES OF RUSSIAN COLLUSION"? And FOURTLY to divert attention away from scrutiny & cover up Obama & Hillary Clinton's illegal, money grubbing activities & her treasonous behaviour with her private email server?? After two years of Russiagate nonsense with NOTHING to show for it, I think it's about time America owes Russia a public apology & compensation for its blatant lying & slander of a innocent Country for a crime they never committed?

Sam F , June 7, 2018 at 7:11 pm

Thanks, Ray, for revealing that the CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate is the likely cause of the Russiagate scams.

I am sure that they manipulate the digital voting machines directly and indirectly. True elections are now impossible.

Your disclaimer is hilarious: "We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental."

Antiwar7 , June 7, 2018 at 6:23 pm

Expecting the evil people running the show to respond to reason is futile, of course. All of these reports are really addressed to the peanut gallery, where true power lies, if only they could realize it.

Thanks, Ray and VIPS, for keeping up the good fight.

mike k , June 7, 2018 at 5:55 pm

For whatever reason, Ray McGovern chose not to mention the murder of Seth Rich, which pretty clearly points to the real source of the leak being him, as hinted by Assange offering a reward for anyone uncovering his killer. The whole thing stinks of a democratic conspiracy.

And BTW people have become shy about using the word conspiracy, for fear it will automatically brand one as a hoaxer. On the contrary, conspiracies are extremely common, the higher one climbs in the power hierarchy. Like monopolies, conspiracies are central to the way the oligarchs do business.

John , June 8, 2018 at 5:42 am

Ray, from what I have seen in following his writing for years, meticulously only deals in knowns. The Seth Rich issue is not a known, it is speculation still. Yes, it probably is involved, but unless Craig Murray states that Seth Rich was the one who handed him the USB drive, it is not a known.

There is a possibility that Seth Rich was not the one who leaked the information, but that the DNC bigwigs THOUGHT he was, in which case, by neither confirming nor denying that Seth Rich was the leaker, it may be that letting the DNC continue to think it was him is being done in protection of the actual leaker. Seth Rich could also have been killed for unrelated reasons, perhaps Imran Awan thought he was on to his doings.

Unfettered Fire , June 8, 2018 at 10:44 am

Don't forget this Twitter post by Wikileaks on October 30, 2016: Podesta: "I'm definitely for making an example of a suspected leaker whether or not we have any real basis for it." https://www.wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/36082#efmAGSAH-

Unfettered Fire , June 8, 2018 at 10:47 am

" whether or not"?!! Wow. That's an imperialistic statement.

Drew Hunkins , June 7, 2018 at 5:50 pm

Mueller has nothing and he well knows it. He was willingly roped into this whole pathetic charade and he's left grasping for anything remotely tied to Trump campaign officials and Russians. Even the most tenuous connections and weak relationships are splashed across the mass media in breathless headlines. Meanwhile, NONE of the supposed skulduggery unearthed by Mueller has anything to do with the Kremlin "hacking" the election to favor Trump. Which was the entire raison d'etre behind Rosenstein and Mueller's crusade on behalf of the deplorable DNC and Washington militarist-imperialists. Sure be interesting to see how Mueller and his crew ultimately extricate themselves from this giant fraudulent edifice of deceit. Will they even be able to save the most rudimentary amount of face?

So sickening to see the manner in which many DNC sycophants obsequiously genuflect to their godlike Mueller. A damn prosecutor who was arguably in bed with the Winter Hill Gang!

jose , June 7, 2018 at 5:13 pm

If they had had any evidence to inculpate Russia, we would have all seen it by now. They know that by stating that there is an investigation going on: they can blame Russia. The Democratic National Committee is integrated by a pack of liars.

Jeff , June 7, 2018 at 4:35 pm

Thanx, Ray. The sad news is that everybody now believes that Russia tried to "meddle" in our election and, since it's a belief, neither facts nor reality will dislodge it. Your disclaimer should also probably carry the warning – never believe a word a government official says especially if they are in the CIA, NSA, or FBI unless they provide proof. If they tell you that it's classified, that they can't divulge it, or anything of that sort, you know they are lying.

john wilson , June 7, 2018 at 4:09 pm

I suspect the real reason no evidence has been produced is because there isn't any. I know this is stating the obvious, but if you think about it, as long as the non extent evidence is supposedly being "investigated" the story remains alive. They know they aren't going to find anything even remotely plausible that would stand up to any kind of scrutiny, but as long as they are looking, it has the appearance that there might be something.

Joe Tedesky , June 7, 2018 at 4:08 pm

I first want to thank Ray and the VIPS for their continuing to follow through on this Russia-Gate story. And it is a story.

My question is simple, when will we concentrate on reading Hillary's many emails? After all wasn't this the reason for the Russian interference mania? Until we do, take apart Hillary's correspondence with her lackeys, nothing will transpire of any worth. I should not be the one saying this, in as much as Bernie Sanders should be the one screaming it for justice from the highest roof tops, but he isn't. So what's up with that? Who all is involved in this scandalous coverup? What do the masters of corruption have on everybody?

Now we have Sean Hannity making a strong case against the Clinton's and the FBI's careful handling of their crimes. What seems out of place, since this should be big news, is that CNN nor MSNBC seems to be covering this story in the same way Hannity is. I mean isn't this news, meant to be reported as news? Why avoid reporting on Hillary in such a manner? This must be that 'fake news' they all talk about boy am I smart.

In the end I have decided to be merely an observer, because there are no good guys or gals in our nation's capital worth believing. In the end even Hannity's version of what took place leads back to a guilty Russia. So, the way I see it, the swamp is being drained only to make more room for more, and new swamp creatures to emerge. Talk about spinning our wheels. When will good people arrive to finally once and for all drain this freaking swamp, once and for all?

Realist , June 7, 2018 at 5:25 pm

Ha, ha! Don't you enjoy the magic show being put on by the insiders desperately trying to hang onto their power even after being voted out of office? Their attempt to distract your attention from reality whilst feeding you their false illusions is worthy of Penn & Teller, or David Copperfield (the magician). Who ya gonna believe? Them or your lying eyes?

Joe Tedesky , June 7, 2018 at 10:00 pm

Realist, You can bet they will investigate everything but what needs investigated, as our Politico class devolves into survivalist in fighting, the mechanism of war goes uninterrupted. Joe

F. G. Sanford , June 7, 2018 at 5:34 pm

Joe, speaking of draining the swamp, check out my comment under Ray's June 1 article about Freddy Fleitz!

Sam F , June 7, 2018 at 6:59 pm

That is just what I was reminded of; here is an antiseptic but less emphatic last line:
"Swamp draining progresses apace.
It's being accomplished with grace:
They're taking great pains to clean out the drains,"
New swamp creatures will need all that space!

Unfettered Fire , June 8, 2018 at 11:00 am

We must realize that to them, "the Swamp" refers to those in office who still abide by New Deal policy. Despite the thoroughly discredited neoliberal economic policy, the radical right are driving the world in the libertarian direction of privatization, austerity, private bank control of money creation, dismantling the nation-state, contempt for the Constitution, etc.

[Jun 05, 2018] Amid 'Russiagate' Hysteria, What Are the Facts

Notable quotes:
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Times ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Citizens United ..."
"... Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended ..."
"... Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray -- And How to Return to Reality. ..."
Jun 05, 2018 | www.thenation.com

Amid 'Russiagate' Hysteria, What Are the Facts? | The Nation

"W hom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."

That saying -- often misattributed to Euripides -- comes to mind most mornings when I pick up The New York Times and read the latest "Russiagate" headlines, which are frequently featured across two or three columns on the front page above the fold. This is an almost daily reminder of the hysteria that dominates our Congress and much of our media.

A glaring example, just one of many from recent months, arrived at my door on February 17. My outrage spiked when I opened to the Times ' lead editorial : "Stop Letting the Russians Get Away With It, Mr. Trump." I had to ask myself: "Did the Times ' editors perform even the rudiments of due diligence before they climbed on their high horse in this long editorial, which excoriated 'Russia' (not individual Russians) for 'interference' in the election and demanded increased sanctions against Russia 'to protect American democracy'?"

It had never occurred to me that our admittedly dysfunctional political system is so weak, undeveloped, or diseased that inept Internet trolls could damage it. If that is the case, we better look at a lot of other countries as well, not just Russia!

The New York Times , of course, is not the only offender. Its editorial attitude has been duplicated or exaggerated by most other media outlets in the United States, electronic and print. Unless there is a mass shooting in progress, it can be hard to find a discussion of anything else on CNN. Increasingly, both in Congress and in our media, it has been accepted as a fact that "Russia" interfered in the 2016 election.

So what are the facts?

It is a fact that some Russians paid people to act as online trolls and bought advertisements on Facebook during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. Most of these were taken from elsewhere, and they comprised a tiny fraction of all the advertisements purchased on Facebook during this period. This continued after the election and included organizing a demonstration against President-elect Trump. It is a fact that e-mails in the memory of the Democratic National Committee's computer were furnished to Wikileaks. The US intelligence agencies that issued the January 2017 report were confident that Russians hacked the e-mails and supplied them to Wikileaks, but offered no evidence to substantiate their claim. Even if one accepts that Russians were the perpetrators, however, the e-mails were genuine, as the US intelligence report certified. I have always thought that the truth was supposed to make us free, not degrade our democracy. It is a fact that the Russian government established a sophisticated television service (RT) that purveyed entertainment, news, and -- yes -- propaganda to foreign audiences, including those in the United States. Its audience is several magnitudes smaller than that of Fox News. Basically, its task is to picture Russia in a more favorable light than has been available in Western media. There has been no analysis of its effect, if any, on voting in the United States. The January 2017 US intelligence report states at the outset, "We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election." Nevertheless, that report has been cited repeatedly by politicians and the media as having done so. It is a fact that many senior Russian officials (though not all, by any means) expressed a preference for Trump's candidacy. After all, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had compared President Putin to Hitler and had urged more active US military intervention abroad, while Trump had said it would be better to cooperate with Russia than to treat it as an enemy. It should not require the judgment of professional analysts to understand why many Russians would find Trump's statements more congenial than Clinton's. On a personal level, most of my Russian friends and contacts were dubious of Trump, but all resented Clinton's Russophobic tone, as well as statements made by Obama from 2014 onward. They considered Obama's public comment that "Russia doesn't make anything" a gratuitous insult (which it was), and were alarmed by Clinton's expressed desire to provide additional military support to the "moderates" in Syria. But the average Russian, and certainly the typical Putin administration official, understood Trump's comments as favoring improved relations, which they definitely favored. There is no evidence that Russian leaders thought Trump would win or that they could have a direct influence on the outcome. This is an allegation that has not been substantiated. The January 2017 report from the intelligence community actually states that Russian leaders, like most others, thought Clinton would be elected. There is no evidence that Russian activities had any tangible impact on the outcome of the election. Nobody seems to have done even a superficial study of the effect Russian actions actually had on the vote. The intelligence-community report, however, states explicitly that "the types of systems we observed Russian actors targeting or compromising are not involved in vote tallying." Also both former FBI director James Comey and NSA director Mike Rogers have testified that there is no proof Russian activities had an effect on the vote count. There is also no evidence that there was direct coordination between the Trump campaign (hardly a well-organized effort) and Russian officials. The indictments brought by the special prosecutor so far are either for lying to the FBI or for offenses unrelated to the campaign such as money laundering or not registering as a foreign agent.

So, what is the most important fact regarding the 2016 US presidential election?

The most important fact, obscured in Russiagate hysteria, is that Americans elected Trump under the terms set forth in the Constitution. Americans created the Electoral College, which allows a candidate with a minority of popular votes to become president. Americans were those who gerrymandered electoral districts to rig them in favor of a given political party. The Supreme Court issued the infamous Citizens United decision that allows corporate financing of candidates for political office. (Hey, money talks and exercises freedom of speech; corporations are people!) Americans created a Senate that is anything but democratic, since it gives disproportionate representation to states with relatively small populations. It was American senators who established non-democratic procedures that allow minorities, even sometimes single senators, to block legislation or confirmation of appointments.

Now, that does not mean that Trump's presidency is good for the country, just because Americans elected him. In my opinion, the 2016 presidential and congressional elections pose an imminent danger to the republic. They have created potential disasters that will severely try the checks and balances built into our Constitution. This is especially true since both houses of Congress are controlled by the Republican Party, which itself represents fewer voters than the opposition party.

I did not personally vote for Trump, but I consider the charges that Russian actions interfered in the election, or -- for that matter -- damaged the quality of our democracy ludicrous, pathetic, and shameful.

"Ludicrous" because there is no logical reason to think that anything that the Russians did affected how people voted. In the past, when Soviet leaders tried to influence American elections, it backfired -- as foreign interference usually does everywhere. In 1984, Yuri Andropov, the Soviet leader then, made preventing Ronald Reagan's reelection the second-most-important task of the KGB. (The first was to detect US plans for a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.) Everything the Soviets did -- in painting Reagan out to be a warmonger while Andropov refused to negotiate on nuclear weapons -- helped Reagan win 49 out of 50 states.

"Pathetic" because it is clear that the Democratic Party lost the election. Yes, it won the popular vote, but presidents are not elected by popular vote. To blame someone else for one's own mistakes is a pathetic case of self-deception.

"Shameful" because it is an evasion of responsibility. It prevents the Democrats, and those Republicans who want responsible, fact-based government in Washington, from concentrating on practical ways to reduce the threat the Trump presidency poses to our political values and even to our future existence. After all, Trump would not be president if the Republican Party had not nominated him. He also is most unlikely to have won the Electoral College if the Democrats had nominated someone -- almost anyone -- other than the candidate they chose, or if that candidate had run a more competent campaign. I don't argue that any of this was fair, or rational, but then who is so naive as to assume that American politics are either fair or rational?

Instead of facing the facts and coping with the current reality, the Russiagate promoters, in both the government and the media, are diverting our attention from the real threats.

I should add "dangerous" to those three adjectives. "Dangerous" because making an enemy of Russia, the other nuclear superpower -- yes, there are still two -- comes as close to political insanity as anything I can think of. Denying global warming may rank up there too in the long run, but only nuclear weapons pose, by their very existence in the quantities that are on station in Russia and the United States, an immediate threat to mankind -- not just to the United States and Russia and not just to "civilization." The sad, frequently forgotten fact is that, since the creation of nuclear weapons, mankind has the capacity to destroy itself and join other extinct species.

In their first meeting, President Ronald Reagan and then General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev agreed that "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." Both believed that simple and obvious truth and their conviction enabled them to set both countries on a course that ended the Cold War. We should think hard to determine how and why that simple and obvious truth has been ignored of late by the governments of both countries.

We must desist from our current Russophobic insanity and encourage Presidents Trump and Putin to restore cooperation in issues of nuclear safety, non-proliferation, control of nuclear materials, and nuclear-arms reduction. This is in the vital interest of both the United States and Russia. That is the central issue on which sane governments, and sane publics, would focus their attention.

Jack F. Matlock Jr. Jack F. Matlock Jr., ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, is the author of Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended and Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray -- And How to Return to Reality.

[Jun 03, 2018] Amid Russiagate Hysteria, What Are The Facts

Jun 03, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden Sat, 06/02/2018 - 18:45 Authored by Jack Matlock via The Nation,

We must end this Russophobic insanity...

"Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."

That saying - often misattributed to Euripides - comes to mind most mornings when I pick up The New York Times and read the latest "Russiagate" headlines, which are frequently featured across two or three columns on the front page above the fold. This is an almost daily reminder of the hysteria that dominates our Congress and much of our media.

A glaring example, just one of many from recent months, arrived at my door on February 17. My outrage spiked when I opened to the Times' lead editorial : "Stop Letting the Russians Get Away With It, Mr. Trump." I had to ask myself:

"Did the Times' editors perform even the rudiments of due diligence before they climbed on their high horse in this long editorial, which excoriated 'Russia' (not individual Russians) for 'interference' in the election and demanded increased sanctions against Russia 'to protect American democracy'?"

It had never occurred to me that our admittedly dysfunctional political system is so weak, undeveloped, or diseased that inept internet trolls could damage it. If that is the case, we better look at a lot of other countries as well, not just Russia!

The New York Times, of course, is not the only offender. Their editorial attitude has been duplicated or exaggerated by most other media outlets in the United States, electronic and print. Unless there is a mass shooting in progress, it can be hard to find a discussion of anything else on CNN. Increasingly, both in Congress and in our media, it has been accepted as a fact that "Russia" interfered in the 2016 election.

So what are the facts?

  1. It is a fact that some Russians paid people to act as online trolls and bought advertisements on Facebook during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. Most of these were taken from elsewhere, and they comprised a tiny fraction of all the advertisements purchased on Facebook during this period. This continued after the election and included organizing a demonstration against President-elect Trump.
  2. It is a fact that e-mails in the memory of the Democratic National Committee's computer were furnished to Wikileaks. The US intelligence agencies that issued the January 2017 report were confident that Russians hacked the e-mails and supplied them to Wikileaks, but offered no evidence to substantiate their claim. Even if one accepts that Russians were the perpetrators, however, the e-mails were genuine, as the US intelligence report certified. I have always thought that the truth was supposed to make us free, not degrade our democracy.
  3. It is a fact that the Russian government established a sophisticated television service (RT) that purveyed entertainment, news, and -- yes -- propaganda to foreign audiences, including those in the United States. Its audience is several magnitudes smaller than that of Fox News. Basically, its task is to picture Russia in more favorable light than has been available in Western media. There has been no analysis of its effect, if any, on voting in the United States. The January 2017 US intelligence report states at the outset, "We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election." Nevertheless, that report has been cited repeatedly by politicians and the media as having done so.
  4. It is a fact that many senior Russian officials (though not all, by any means) expressed a preference for Trump's candidacy. After all, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had compared President Putin to Hitler and had urged more active US military intervention abroad, while Trump had said it would be better to cooperate with Russia than to treat it as an enemy. It should not require the judgment of professional analysts to understand why many Russians would find Trump's statements more congenial than Clinton's. On a personal level, most of my Russian friends and contacts were dubious of Trump, but all resented the Clinton's Russophobic tone, as well as those made by Obama from 2014 onward. They considered Obama's public comment that "Russia doesn't make anything" a gratuitous insult (which it was), and were alarmed by Clinton's expressed desire to provide additional military support to the "moderates" in Syria. But the average Russian, and certainly the typical Putin administration official, understood Trump's comments as favoring improved relations, which they definitely favored.
  5. There is no evidence that Russian leaders thought Trump would win or that they could have a direct influence on the outcome. This is an allegation that has not been substantiated. The January 2017 report from the intelligence community actually states that Russian leaders, like most others, thought Clinton would be elected.
  6. There is no evidence that Russian activities had any tangible impact on the outcome of the election. Nobody seems to have done even a superficial study of the effect Russian actions actually had on the vote. The intelligence-community report, however, states explicitly, "the types of systems we observed Russian actors targeting or compromising are not involved in vote tallying." Also both former FBI director James Comey and NSA director Mike Rogers have testified that there is no proof Russian activities had an effect on the vote count.
  7. There is also no evidence that there was direct coordination between the Trump campaign (hardly a well-organized effort) and Russian officials. The indictments brought by the special prosecutor so far are either for lying to the FBI or for offenses unrelated to the campaign such as money laundering or not registering as a foreign agent.

So, what is the most important fact regarding the 2016 US presidential election?

The most important fact, obscured in Russiagate hysteria, is that Americans elected Trump under the terms set forth in the Constitution. Americans created the Electoral College, which allows a candidate with the minority of popular votes to become president. Americans were those who gerrymandered electoral districts to rig them in favor of a given political party. The Supreme Court issued the infamous Citizens United decision that allows corporate financing of candidates for political office. (Hey, money talks and exercises freedom of speech; corporations are people!) Americans created a Senate that is anything but democratic since it gives disproportionate representation to states with relatively small populations. It was American senators who established non-democratic procedures that allow minorities, even sometimes single senators, to block legislation or confirmation of appointments.

Now, that does not mean that Trump's presidency is good for the country just because Americans elected him. In my opinion, the 2016 presidential and congressional elections pose an imminent danger to the republic. They have created potential disasters that will severely try the checks and balances built into our Constitution. This is especially true since both houses of Congress are controlled by the Republican Party, which itself represents fewer voters than the opposition party.

I did not personally vote for Trump, but I consider the charges that Russian actions interfered in the election, or - for that matter - damaged the quality of our democracy ludicrous, pathetic, and shameful.

" Ludicrous " because there is no logical reason to think that anything that the Russians did affected how people voted. In the past, when Soviet leaders tried to influence American elections, it backfired -- as foreign interference usually does everywhere. In 1984, Yuri Andropov, the then Soviet leader made preventing Ronald Reagan's reelection the second-most-important task of the KGB. (The first was to detect US plans for a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.) Everything the Soviets did -- in painting Reagan out to be a warmonger while Andropov refused to negotiate on nuclear weapons -- helped Reagan win 49 out of 50 states.

" Pathetic " because it is clear that the Democratic Party lost the election. Yes, it won the popular vote, but presidents are not elected by popular vote. To blame someone else for one's own mistakes is a pathetic case of self-deception.

" Shameful " because it is an evasion of responsibility. It prevents the Democrats, and those Republicans who want responsible, fact-based government in Washington, from concentrating on practical ways to reduce the threat the Trump presidency poses to our political values and even to our future existence. After all, Trump would not be president if the Republican Party had not nominated him. He also is most unlikely to have won the Electoral College if the Democrats had nominated someone -- almost anyone -- other than the candidate they chose, or if that candidate had run a more competent campaign. I don't argue that any of this was fair, or rational, but then who is so naive as to assume that American politics are either fair or rational?

Instead of facing the facts and coping with the current reality, the Russiagate promoters in both the government and the media, are diverting our attention from the real threats.

I should add "dangerous" to those three adjectives. "Dangerous" because making an enemy of Russia, the other nuclear superpower -- yes, there are still two -- comes as close to political insanity as anything I can think of. Denying global warming may rank up there too in the long run, but only nuclear weapons pose, by their very existence in the quantities that are on station in Russia and the United States, an immediate threat to mankind -- not just to the United States and Russia and not just to "civilization." The sad, frequently forgotten fact is that since the creation of nuclear weapons, mankind has the capacity to destroy itself and join other extinct species.

In their first meeting, President Ronald Reagan and then General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev agreed that "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." Both believed that simple and obvious truth and their conviction enabled them to set both countries on a course that ended the Cold War. We should think hard to determine how and why that simple and obvious truth has been ignored of late by the governments of both countries.

We must desist from our current Russophobic insanity and encourage Presidents Trump and Putin to restore cooperation in issues of nuclear safety, non-proliferation, control of nuclear materials, and nuclear-arms reduction. This is in the vital interest of both the United States and Russia. That is the central issue on which sane governments, and sane publics, would focus their attention. Vote up! 8 Vote down! 2

ebworthen Sat, 06/02/2018 - 18:47 Permalink

Witch hunt.

Stan522 -> ebworthen Sat, 06/02/2018 - 18:56 Permalink

The facts are whatever the media wants to make em....

[May 31, 2018] Journalists and academics expose UK's criminal actions in the Middle East by Julie Hyland

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The reports delivered during the four-hour meeting provided a devastating exposure of the connection between propaganda and censorship by the media and the warmongering of governments in Britain, the United States and across the world. ..."
"... Professor Piers Robinson (Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism) spoke on the rebranding of government propaganda as "public relations." Drawing on his research into the Iraq war, he cited material from the Chilcot Inquiry into the war confirming the systematic manipulation and exaggeration of "intelligence" on Iraq's supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction. This included discussions between the US and British governments over how the 9/11 terror attacks could be used for regime change operations, under the slogan of the "war on terror", which Robinson described as a propaganda slogan for mobilising support for military operations. ..."
"... Stuart gave a presentation on his examination of film recorded by BBC personnel at Atareb Hospital in Aleppo on August 26, 2013 purporting to show the aftermath of a napalm-style bombing by Syrian government forces. The footage was broadcast the same evening that parliament delivered a shock vote against a military attack on Syria. He showed that much of it was staged. Not only did this potentially include the use of military casualty trauma simulations, but BBC personnel were travelling in vehicles displaying ISIS flags and alongside senior members of the western-funded White Helmets. ..."
"... It was impossible to have a functioning democracy without a functioning fourth estate, he said. This had been the gold standard but was no longer the case. Henningsen noted widespread popular opposition to war in the US that successive presidential candidates had sought to manipulate, only to betray once in power -- from George W. Bush to Barack Obama and Donald Trump. ..."
"... The mainstream media have enormous assets and resources but claim democracy is threatened by "fake news", when they are the purveyors of fake news and the real threat to democracy. ..."
May 31, 2018 | www.wsws.org

"Government propaganda and the war on terror from 9/11 to Syria"

Media on Trial held a successful event in Leeds on Sunday, in the face of sustained efforts to prevent the meeting taking place.

The group was formed by Frome Stop War, based in Somerset. Working with academics, investigative journalists and other interested parties and individuals, and drawing on the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, Media on Trial seeks to "cultivate public scepticism when faced with establishment and corporate media's partisan reporting at times of conflict". It held well-attended meetings in Frome and London last year. Its success in exposing the ongoing regime-change operations in Syria, and government/media propaganda to this end, has made its members the subject of an organised media smear campaign, culminating in efforts to silence it altogether.

" Government propaganda and the war on terror from 9/11 to Syria" was booked at Leeds City Museum. But in an assault on free speech, Labour-run Leeds City Council in West Yorkshire cancelled the event .

Sheila Coombes speaking at Media on Trial

Sheila Coombes (Frome Stop War) has reported that the ban, made on May 3 -- World Press Freedom Day -- came after a series of attacks on several of the featured speakers by the Huffington Post , Guardian and Times newspapers as "Assad Apologists".

Among those targeted were Professor Piers Robinson (University of Sheffield), Professor Tim Hayward (University of Edinburgh) -- both of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM) -- and investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley.

Having travelled to Leeds to check out the venue, Coombes was told that Leeds City Council had cancelled the event, suggesting that "security issues" were involved. She was informed that it was a blanket ban and that no other council-run venue would host it.

Less than an hour after she had been informed, the Yorkshire Post ran an online article welcoming the ban, followed by a similar report in the Huffington Post . The speed of publication suggests that these media outlets were aware of the ban before Coombes herself had been informed.

Piers Robinson speaking at the Media on Trial event

Coombes reports that she was in contact with police regarding security arrangements for the event and that she had been informed by the police officer in charge that he had advised Leeds City Council there was "no intelligence to assess a threat". A second alternative private venue was also cancelled.

Media on Trial was forced to keep details of the third venue secret until shortly before it was due to open and restrict entrance to those who had already purchased tickets. The panel was eventually able to go ahead on Sunday at the Baab-ul-llm Islamic education centre, one of the few venues prepared to stand in defiance of this campaign of censorship. Approximately 200 people attended.

The reports delivered during the four-hour meeting provided a devastating exposure of the connection between propaganda and censorship by the media and the warmongering of governments in Britain, the United States and across the world.

Professor Piers Robinson (Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism) spoke on the rebranding of government propaganda as "public relations." Drawing on his research into the Iraq war, he cited material from the Chilcot Inquiry into the war confirming the systematic manipulation and exaggeration of "intelligence" on Iraq's supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction. This included discussions between the US and British governments over how the 9/11 terror attacks could be used for regime change operations, under the slogan of the "war on terror", which Robinson described as a propaganda slogan for mobilising support for military operations.

Robert Stuart is an independent researcher whose presentation on the "irregularities" in the BBC Panorama documentary, "Saving Syria's Children," encouraged film producer and writer Victor Lewis-Smith to tear up his BBC contract in disgust.

Robert Stuart speaking at the Media on Trial event

Stuart gave a presentation on his examination of film recorded by BBC personnel at Atareb Hospital in Aleppo on August 26, 2013 purporting to show the aftermath of a napalm-style bombing by Syrian government forces. The footage was broadcast the same evening that parliament delivered a shock vote against a military attack on Syria. He showed that much of it was staged. Not only did this potentially include the use of military casualty trauma simulations, but BBC personnel were travelling in vehicles displaying ISIS flags and alongside senior members of the western-funded White Helmets.

Professor Tim Hayward (Environmental Political Theory) questioned the morality of the media presenting information that was untrue and its implications for democracy and society. He questioned the media's complicity in glorifying jihadi figures, despite this being in contravention of the British governments' own anti-terror laws. He drew attention to broadcasts on Channel 4 that provided flattering accounts of British women signing up for jihad. The media were guilty of inverting the truth and placing a "lockdown" on information that breached the rudiments of journalistic integrity.

American journalist and broadcaster Patrick Henningsen (21st Century Wire), drew attention to the unprecedented conditions in which the meeting was being held, "in secret, in a tent".

It was impossible to have a functioning democracy without a functioning fourth estate, he said. This had been the gold standard but was no longer the case. Henningsen noted widespread popular opposition to war in the US that successive presidential candidates had sought to manipulate, only to betray once in power -- from George W. Bush to Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

The mainstream media have enormous assets and resources but claim democracy is threatened by "fake news", when they are the purveyors of fake news and the real threat to democracy.

Peter Ford is a former UK ambassador to Syria (2003–2006) and now Director of the British Syrian Society. He noted that the government had been forced to convene the Leveson Inquiry into the media after the phone-hacking scandal involving Murdoch's News of the World . But those actions were trivial in comparison with the real charge sheet that needed to be presented against the media: that of "war mongering and aiding and abetting war mongering".

Vanessa Beeley is an international investigative journalist and photographer who had reported from inside Syria (including East Aleppo), Egypt and Palestine. She played an important role in exposing Syria's White Helmets as an arm of western propaganda and regime change operations.

She delivered a moving account of the situation within Syria and the capital Damascus. In addition to detailing the role of the White Helmets and other institutions financed and backed by western governments, Beeley noted that, especially following the Second World War, pro-war propaganda was deemed a threat to peace. The Nuremberg Trials in 1946 characterised propaganda to facilitate war as a serious crime against humanity; one of the gravest that could be committed. Today, those who advocate peace and the defence of international law are smeared and silenced, while those who promote war are being lauded in the media.

In the short time available for questions, contributions were made, including the possibility of practical action against war-mongering.

Julie Hyland, speaking for the World Socialist Web Site , was greeted warmly by the audience for raising that the high point of the international campaign of smears and censorship is the attack on Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who is in grave danger of eviction from the Ecuadorian Embassy and extradition to the United States.

Henningson replied that the embassy had determined to cut Assange's internet access and personal communications while Syria was being targeted for military strikes. "I don't underestimate the influence of Julian Assange at those critical times. His own website was taken offline as the air strike by the US, Britain and France were happening, along with several other web sites". He added, "Julian Assange is being silenced because they don't want someone like him to have a platform".

Video of the Media on Trial Leeds event can be viewed here

[May 29, 2018] Guccifer 2.0's American Fingerprints Reveal An Operation Made In The USA by Elizabeth Lea Vos

Highly recommended!
May 29, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Elizabeth Lea Vos via Disobedient Media,

In his final report in a three-part series, Guccifer 2's West Coast Fingerprint , the Forensicator discovers evidence that at least one operator behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona worked from the West Coast of the United States.

The Forensicator's earlier findings stated that Guccifer 2.0's NGP-VAN files were accessed locally on the East Coast, and in another analysis they suggested that a file published by Guccifer 2.0 was created in the Central time zone of the United States. Most recently, a former DNC official refuted the DNC's initial allegations that Trump opposition files had been ex-filtrated from the DNC by Russian state-sponsored operatives.

So, if Guccifer 2.0's role was negated by the statements of the DNC's own former "official" in a 2017 report by the Associated Press , why do we now return our attention to the Guccifer 2.0 persona, as we reflect on the last section of new findings from the Forensicator?

The answer: Despite almost two years having passed since the appearance of the Guccifer 2.0 persona, legacy media is still trotting out the shambling corpse of Guccifer 2.0 to revive the legitimacy of the Russian hacking narrative. In other words, it is necessary to hammer the final nail into the coffin of the Guccifer 2.0 persona.

As previously noted, In his final report in a three-part series, the Forensicator discusses concrete evidence that at least one operator behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona worked from the West Coast of the United States. He writes:

"Finally, we look at one particular Word document that Guccifer 2 uploaded, which had "track changes" enabled. From the tracking metadata we deduce the timezone offset in effect when Guccifer 2 made that change -- we reach a surprising conclusion: The document was likely saved by Guccifer 2 on the West Coast, US ."

The Forensicator spends the first part of his report evaluating indications that Guccifer 2.0 may have operated out of Russia. Ultimately, the Forensicator discards those tentative results. He emphatically notes:

"The PDT finding draws into question the premise that Guccifer 2 was operating out of Russia, or any other region that would have had GMT+3 timezone offsets in force. Essentially, the Pacific Timezone finding invalidates the GMT+3 timezone findings previously described."

The Forensicator's new West Coast finding is not the first evidence to indicate that operators behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona were based in the US. Nine months ago, Disobedient Media , reported on the Forensicator's analysis , which showed (among other things) that Guccifer 2.0's "ngpvan" archive was created on the East Coast. While that report received the vast majority of attention from the public and legacy media, Disobedient Media later reported on another analysis done by the Forensicator, which found that a file published by Guccifer 2.0 (on a different occasion) was probably created in the Central Timezone of the US.

Adding to all of this, UK based analyst and independent journalist Adam Carter presented his own analysis which also showed that the Guccifer 2.0 Twitter persona interacted on a schedule which was best explained by having been based within the United States.

The chart above shows a box which spans regular working hours. It indicates that unless Guccifer 2.0 worked the night shift, they were likely working out of the US. Though this last data point is circumstantial, it is corroborated by the previously discussed pieces of independently verifiable hard evidence described by the Forensicator.

When taking all of these separate pieces into account, one observes a convergence of evidence that multiple US-based operators were behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona and its publications. This is incredibly significant because it is based on multiple pieces of concrete data; it does not rely on "anonymous sources within the government," nor contractors hired by the DNC. As a result, much of the prior legacy press coverage of Guccifer 2.0 as a Russia-based agent can be readily debunked.

Such tangible evidence stands in contrast to the claims made in a recently published Daily Beast article, which reads more like a gossip column than serious journalism. In the Daily Beast's recital, the outlet cites an anonymous source who claims that a Moscow-based GRU agent was behind the Guccifer 2.0 operation, writing :

"Guccifer 2.0, the "lone hacker" who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia's military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It's an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.

But on one occasion, The Daily Beast has learned, Guccifer failed to activate the VPN client before logging on. As a result, he left a real, Moscow-based Internet Protocol address in the server logs of an American social media company, according to a source familiar with the government's Guccifer investigation.

Working off the IP address, U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency's headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow."

[The Daily Beast , March 22, 2018]

Clearly, the claim made in the Daily Beast's report is in direct contradiction with the growing mound of evidence suggesting that Guccifer 2.0 operated out of the United States. A detailed technical breakdown of the evidence confirming a West-Coast "last saved" time and how this counters the claims of the Daily Beast can be found in the Forensicator's work.

The Forensicator explained to Disobedient Media that their discovery process was initiated by the following Tweet by Matt Tait ( @pwnallthings ), a security blogger and journalist. Tait noticed a change revision entry in one of the Word documents published in Guccifer 2.0's second batch of documents, (uploaded 3 days after Guccifer 2.0 first appeared on the scene).

The Forensicator corrects Tait, stating that the timestamp is in "wall time," (local time) not UTC. The Forensicator explains that Tait's mistake is understandable because the "Z" suffix usually implies "Zulu" (GMT) time, but that isn't the case for "track changes" timestamps. The Forensicator writes that the document Tait refers to in his Tweet is named Hillary-for-America-fundraising-guidelines-from-agent-letter.docx ; it has Word's "track changes" feature enabled. Guccifer 2.0 made a trivial change to the document, using the pseudonym, "Ernesto Che," portrayed below:

The Forensicator correlated that timestamp ("12:56:00 AM") with the document's "last saved" timestamp expressed in GMT, as shown below courtesy of the Forensicator's study :

Based on the evidence discussed above, the Forensicator concludes that Guccifer 2.0 saved this file on a system that had a timezone offset of -7 hours (the difference between 0:56 AM and 7:56 AM GMT). Thus, the system where this document was last changed used Pacific Timezone settings.

The logical conclusion drawn from the preceding analysis is that Guccifer 2.0 was operating somewhere on the West Coast of the United States when they made their change to that document . This single finding throws into shambles any other conclusions that might indicate that Guccifer 2.0 was operating out of Russia. This latest finding also adds to the previously cited evidence that the persona was probably operated by multiple individuals located in the United States.

Taken all together, the factual basis of the Russian hacking story totally collapses. We are left instead with multiple traces of a US-based operation that created the appearance of evidence that Kremlin-allied hackers had breached the DNC network. Publicly available data suggests that Guccifer 2.0 is a US-based operation. To this, we add:

In the course of the last nine months this outlet has documented the work of the Forensicator, which has indicated that not only were Guccifer 2.0's "ngp-van" files accessed locally on the East Coast of the US, but also that several files published by the Guccifer 2.0 persona were altered and saved within the United States. The "Russian fingerprints" left on Guccifer 2.0's first document have been debunked, as has the claim that the file itself was extracted from the DNC network in the first place. On top of all this, a former DNC official withdrew the DNC's initial allegations that supported the "Russian hack" claim in the first place.

One hopes that with all of this information in mind, the long-suffering Guccifer 2.0 saga can be laid to rest once and for all, at least for unbiased and critically thinking observers.


Chris2 Tue, 05/29/2018 - 22:15 Permalink

Snowden talked about the NSA or is it CIA, had the ability to leave Russian fingerprints.

All of this was the "insurance" to frame Trump who they knew would win when they saw that Hillary rallies had 20 people only showing up few old lesbians and nobody else.

beemasters -> Chris2 Tue, 05/29/2018 - 22:18 Permalink

The hunt for the messenger has certainly proven to be an effective distraction.

LetThemEatRand Tue, 05/29/2018 - 22:16 Permalink

Meanwhile, Snowden risked his life and liberty to show us evidence that the NSA developed technology to make it appear even with expert analysis that NSA hacking originated from a foreign power.

[May 27, 2018] Turning on Russia by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Notable quotes:
"... By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould ..."
"... Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved. This article first appeared on Invisible History. ..."
"... Coming Next, Part 2: The post WWII global strategy of the neocons has been shaped chiefly by Russophobia against the Soviet Union and now Russia ..."
"... * Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story , Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice . Visit their websites at invisiblehistory and grailwerk .com ..."
May 27, 2018 | www.defenddemocracy.press

Turning on Russia 11/05/2018

In this first of a two-part series, Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould trace the origins of the neoconservative targeting of Russia.

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
April 29.2018

The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel last September reported that, "Stanley Fischer, the 73–year-old vice chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, is familiar with the decline of the world's rich. He spent his childhood and youth in the British protectorate of Rhodesia before going to London in the early 1960s for his university studies. There, he experienced first-hand the unravelling of the British Empire Now an American citizen, Fischer is currently witnessing another major power taking its leave of the world stage the United States is losing its status as a global hegemonic power, he said recently. The U.S. political system could take the world in a very dangerous direction "

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the creation of the so called Wolfowitz Doctrine in 1992 during the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush, the United States claimed the mantle of the world's first and only. Unipower with the intention of crushing any nation or system that would oppose it in the future. The New World Order, foreseen just a few short years ago, becomes more disorderly by the day, made worse by varying degrees of incompetence and greed emanating from Berlin, London, Paris and Washington.

As a further sign of the ongoing seismic shocks rocking America's claim to leadership, by the time Fischer's interview appeared in the online version of the Der Spiegel , he had already announced his resignation as vice chair of the Federal Reserve -- eight months ahead of schedule. If anyone knows about the decline and fall of empires it is the "globalist" and former Bank of Israel president, Stanley Fischer. Not only did he experience the unravelling of the British Empire as a young student in London, he directly assisted in the wholesale dismantling of the Soviet Empire during the 1990s.

As an admitted product of the British Empire and point man for its long term imperial aims, that makes Fischer not just empire's Angel of Death, but its rag and bone man.

Alongside a handful of Harvard economists led by Jonathan Hay, Larry Summers, Andrei Shleifer, and Jeffry Sachs, in the "Harvard Project," plus Anatoly Chubais, the chief Russian economic adviser, Fischer helped throw 100 million Russians into poverty overnight – privatizing, or as some would say piratizing – the Russian economy. Yet, Americans never got the real story because a slanted anti-Russia narrative covered the true nature of the robbery from beginning to end.

As described by public policy scholar and anthropologist Janine R. Wedel in her 2009 book Shadow Elite: "Presented in the West as a fight between enlightenment Reformers trying to move the economy forward through privatization, and retrograde Luddites who opposed them, this story misrepresented the facts. The idea or goal of privatization was not controversial, even among communists the Russian Supreme Soviet, a communist body, passed two laws laying the groundwork for privatization. Opposition to privatization was rooted not in the idea itself but in the particular privatization program that was implemented, the opaque way in which it was put into place, and the use of executive authority to bypass the parliament."

Intentionally set up to fail for Russia and the Russian people under the cover of a false narrative, she continues "The outcome rendered privatization 'a de facto fraud,' as one economist put it, and the parliamentary committee that had judged the Chubais scheme to 'offer fertile ground for criminal activity' was proven right."

If Fischer, a man who helped bring about a de facto criminal-privatization-fraud to post-empire Russia says the U.S. is on a dangerous course, the time has arrived for post-empire Americans to ask what role he played in putting the U.S. on that dangerous course. Little known to Americans is the blunt force trauma Fischer and the "prestigious" Harvard Project delivered to Russia under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s. According to The American Conservative's James Carden "As the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted back in 2011 'the IMF's intervention in Russia during Fischer's tenure led to one of the worst losses in output in history, in the absence of war or natural disaster.' Indeed, one Russian observer compared the economic and social consequences of the IMF's intervention to what one would see in the aftermath of a medium-level nuclear attack."

Neither do most Americans know that it was President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski's 1970s grand plan for the conquest of the Eurasian heartland that boomeranged to terrorize Europe and America in the 21 st century. Brzezinski spent much of his life undermining the Communist Soviet Union and then spent the rest of it worrying about its resurgence as a Czarist empire under Vladimir Putin. It might be unfair to say that hating Russia was his only obsession. But a common inside joke during his tenure as the President's top national security officer was that he couldn't find Nicaragua on a map.

If anyone provided the blueprint for the United States to rule in a unipolar world following the Soviet Union's collapse it was Brzezinski. And if anyone could be said to represent the debt driven financial system that fueled America's post-Vietnam Imperialism, it's Fischer. His departure should have sent a chill down every neoconservative's spine. Their dream of a New World Order has once again ground to a halt at the gates of Moscow.

Whenever the epitaph for the abbreviated American century is written it will be sure to feature the iconic role the neoconservatives played in hastening its demise. From the chaos created by Vietnam they set to work restructuring American politics, finance and foreign policy to their own purposes. Dominated at the beginning by Zionists and Trotskyists, but directed by the Anglo/American establishment and their intelligence elites, the neoconservatives' goal, working with their Chicago School neoliberal partners, was to deconstruct the nation-state through cultural co-optation and financial subversion and to project American power abroad. So far they have been overwhelmingly successful to the detriment of much of the world.

From the end of the Second World War through the 1980s the focus of this pursuit was on the Soviet Union, but since the Soviet collapse in 1991, their focus has been on dismantling any and all opposition to their global dominion.

Pentagon Capitalism

Shady finance, imperial misadventures and neoconservatism go hand in hand. The CIA's founders saw themselves as partners in this enterprise and the defense industry welcomed them with open arms. McGill University economist R.T. Naylor, author of 1987's Hot Money and the Politics of Debt , described how "Pentagon Capitalism" had made the Vietnam War possible by selling the Pentagon's debt to the rest of the world.

"In effect, the US Marines had replaced Meyer Lansky's couriers , and the European central banks arranged the 'loan-back,'" Naylor writes. "When the mechanism was explained to the late [neoconservative] Herman Kahn – lifeguard of the era's chief 'think tank' and a man who popularized the notion it was possible to emerge smiling from a global conflagration – he reacted with visible delight. Kahn exclaimed excitedly, 'We've pulled off the biggest ripoff in history! We've run rings around the British Empire.'" In addition to their core of ex-Trotskyist intellectuals early neoconservatives could count among their ranks such establishment figures as James Burnham, father of the Cold War Paul Nitze, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Brzezinski himself.

From the beginning of their entry into the American political mainstream in the 1970s it was known that their emergence could imperil democracy in America and yet Washington's more moderate gatekeepers allowed them in without much of a fight.

Peter Steinfels' 1979 classic The Neoconservatives: The men who are changing America's politics begins with these fateful words. "THE PREMISES OF THIS BOOK are simple. First, that a distinct and powerful political outlook has recently emerged in the United States. Second, that this outlook, preoccupied with certain aspects of American life and blind or complacent towards others, justifies a politics which, should it prevail, threatens to attenuate and diminish the promise of American democracy."

But long before Steinfels' 1979 account, the neoconservative's agenda of inserting their own interests ahead of America's was well underway, attenuating U.S. democracy, undermining détente and angering America's NATO partners that supported it. According to the distinguished State Department Soviet specialist Raymond Garthoff, détente had been under attack by right-wing and military-industrial forces ( led by Senator "Scoop" Jackson ) from its inception. But America's ownership of that policy underwent a shift following U.S. intervention on behalf of Israel during the 1973 October war. Garthoff writes in his detailed volume on American-Soviet relations Détente and Confrontation , "To the allies the threat [to Israel] did not come from the Soviet Union, but from unwise actions by the United States, taken unilaterally and without consultation. The airlift [of arms] had been bad enough. The U.S. military alert of its forces in Europe was too much."

In addition to the crippling Arab oil embargo that followed, the crisis of confidence in U.S. decision-making nearly produced a mutiny within NATO. Garthoff continues, "The United States had used the alert to convert an Arab-Israeli conflict, into which the United States had plunged, into a matter of East-West confrontation. Then it had used that tension as an excuse to demand that Europe subordinate its own policies to a manipulative American diplomatic gamble over which they had no control and to which they had not even been privy, all in the name of alliance unity."

In the end the U.S. found common cause with its Cold War Soviet enemy by imposing a cease-fire accepted by both Egypt and Israel thereby confirming the usefulness of détente. But as related by Garthoff this success triggered an even greater effort by Israel's "politically significant supporters" in the U.S. to begin opposing any cooperation with the Soviet Union, at all.

Garthoff writes, "The United States had pressed Israel into doing precisely what the Soviet Union (as well as the United States) had wanted: to halt its advance short of complete encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army east of Suez Thus they [Israel's politically significant supporters] saw the convergence of American-Soviet interests and effective cooperation in imposing a cease-fire as a harbinger of greater future cooperation by the two superpowers in working toward a resolution of the Israeli-Arab-Palestinian problem."

Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved. This article first appeared on Invisible History.

Coming Next, Part 2: The post WWII global strategy of the neocons has been shaped chiefly by Russophobia against the Soviet Union and now Russia

* Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story , Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice . Visit their websites at invisiblehistory and grailwerk .com

Published at consortiumnews.com

[May 27, 2018] War, propaganda and smears An interview with Professor Piers Robinson by Julie Hyland

Notable quotes:
"... The following is the third part of a three-part interview with Professor Piers Robinson, an academic at the University of Sheffield and a member of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media. Parts one and two appeared on May 24 and May 25. ..."
"... We initially issued two briefing notes on Skripal. That was partly because some of the people in the Working Group who had been looking at chemical/biological events in Syria had relevant knowledge and were aware that what the British government was saying straight off was inaccurate, i.e., the idea that the nerve agent used was Russian and only the Russians could have produced it, etc. ..."
"... I did feel, because at the time the Syrian government was retaking large portions of territory, that the representation of Skripal might be being exploited as part of a broader propaganda drive against Russia (which was providing military support to Syria). ..."
"... If there was going to be an escalation in Syria, beyond the bombing that occurred, that would take us up against the Russians. There was a good possibility that the Skripal event was going to be exploited as part of a broader anti-Russian propaganda drive. ..."
"... when [Foreign Secretary] Boris Johnson pretty much said it was the Russians who must have poisoned the Skripals, that appeared to be a statement of certainty that was not warranted. And, of course, the recent history of Iraq and UK government claims regarding alleged WMD stockpiles was an important reminder that governments can be strongly motivated to distort and manipulate their claims, especially when intelligence is involved. ..."
"... I think the Skripal poisoning might be connected to events in the US. We do know, because Alex Thomson from Channel 4 tweeted on March 12 that the government had put a D-notice restriction on the reporting of [MI6 agent] Pablo Miller. Professor Paul McKeigue (University of Edinburgh) has issued a new briefing talking about this matter. ..."
"... Pablo Miller was Skripal's handler. He was connected to [former MI6 officer] Christopher Steele. He was responsible for the dossier alleging Trump's collusion with Russia. That, as I understand it, was a key part of initiating proceedings and investigations against Trump. It appears that the dossier was linked to the Democratic National Committee in that they apparently commissioned it. ..."
"... If it is the case that Skripal was in any way connected with that, it forms a possibility that there was a motive for someone other than Russia to have carried out the poisoning. ..."
"... More broadly, there is the possibility that the whole Russia-gate narrative is being used for bigger political purposes -- to influence Trump, to try and shore up action in the Middle East, perhaps on some level to distract Western publics from increasing awareness of how we have been involved in wars in the Middle East. ..."
May 26, 2018 | www.wsws.org

The following is the third part of a three-part interview with Professor Piers Robinson, an academic at the University of Sheffield and a member of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media. Parts one and two appeared on May 24 and May 25.

Julie Hyland: What is your estimation of the alleged poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal by Russia, and how do they relate to the war in Syria?

PR: We initially issued two briefing notes on Skripal. That was partly because some of the people in the Working Group who had been looking at chemical/biological events in Syria had relevant knowledge and were aware that what the British government was saying straight off was inaccurate, i.e., the idea that the nerve agent used was Russian and only the Russians could have produced it, etc.

I did feel, because at the time the Syrian government was retaking large portions of territory, that the representation of Skripal might be being exploited as part of a broader propaganda drive against Russia (which was providing military support to Syria).

If there was going to be an escalation in Syria, beyond the bombing that occurred, that would take us up against the Russians. There was a good possibility that the Skripal event was going to be exploited as part of a broader anti-Russian propaganda drive.

It's not something you can pinpoint for sure at this stage because you don't have access to the information. I don't think we will know the full truth of exactly what is happening for some time. But you can make an informed judgement call.

What we do know is that the claims being made at the time were not tenable. So when [Foreign Secretary] Boris Johnson pretty much said it was the Russians who must have poisoned the Skripals, that appeared to be a statement of certainty that was not warranted. And, of course, the recent history of Iraq and UK government claims regarding alleged WMD stockpiles was an important reminder that governments can be strongly motivated to distort and manipulate their claims, especially when intelligence is involved.

I think the Skripal poisoning might be connected to events in the US. We do know, because Alex Thomson from Channel 4 tweeted on March 12 that the government had put a D-notice restriction on the reporting of [MI6 agent] Pablo Miller. Professor Paul McKeigue (University of Edinburgh) has issued a new briefing talking about this matter.

Pablo Miller was Skripal's handler. He was connected to [former MI6 officer] Christopher Steele. He was responsible for the dossier alleging Trump's collusion with Russia. That, as I understand it, was a key part of initiating proceedings and investigations against Trump. It appears that the dossier was linked to the Democratic National Committee in that they apparently commissioned it.

If it is the case that Skripal was in any way connected with that, it forms a possibility that there was a motive for someone other than Russia to have carried out the poisoning.

More broadly, there is the possibility that the whole Russia-gate narrative is being used for bigger political purposes -- to influence Trump, to try and shore up action in the Middle East, perhaps on some level to distract Western publics from increasing awareness of how we have been involved in wars in the Middle East.

... ... ...


Ken Davis15 hours ago

An interview with Eva Bartlett https://ingaza.wordpress.co...
Ken Davis15 hours ago
In a related area that people don't usually connect, the same psychological warfare methods being used in the Middle East are being used in the attack on public education to privatize education globally.
FireintheHeada day ago
I've had a degree of dialogue with Piers on Facebook .

Despite the fact that he has done some important work here regards state propaganda and Syria I have found his political positions very much the typical University sociology professor , where bourgeois ideology and Post modernism runs rampant .

Not immune to running off a line of expletives and ad hominems as if they constitute an argument, Piers came to the defence of Eva Bartlett and Vanessa Bealey when I had the audacity to make a distinction between the defence of Syria against US Imperialism and a defence of Assad per se and Putin

Both engaged in a somewhat lumpen diatribe on the question, despite the fact that I clearly never once promoted an Imperialist line . The situation was in fact reminiscent of what in more recent times the WSWS faced in regards Iran , when it seemingly ''had the audacity'' to support the Iranian working class against its own bourgeois rulers.

Skipa day ago
Very nice interview. As a regular reader of the wsws most of what this man says is already understood. I will share this.

[May 25, 2018] British Hostage Video Of Yulia Skripal Released

Notable quotes:
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
May 25, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

The claims the British government made about the Skripal case are nonsensical. It is entirely possible that the Skipal's were victims of simple food poisoning or suffered from an overdose of Fenatnyl . The British government used the case to increase hostility towards Russia while diverting the public from its failures in the Brexit negotiations. There is historic precedence for such false accusations against the Russian state.

The Skripal case is also related to the "Dirty Dossier" the "former" British spy Christopher Steele created to defame U.S. President Donald Trump. Sergej Skripal may well have written parts of it . A fact which the British government is trying to hide .

The Skripal's were probably hurt. The British accusations against Russia caused huge damage in international relations. But the biggest casualty of the case might be the trustworthiness of the British media.

Where are the deep investigations, the intriguing questions, the door stepping of witnesses in this case? Why are no serious questions asked about the dubious claims made about the case? How did the Skripals survive a nerve agent "ten times as deadly as VX"? Why is there no further digging into the Steele dossier relation?

More questions need to be asked. Who is the media servicing with its obsequious behavior? Why?

---
Previous Moon of Alabama posts on the Skripal case:

March 8 - Poisioned British-Russian Double-Agent Has Links To Clinton Campaign March 12 - Theresa May's "45 Minutes" Moment March 14 - Are 'Novichok' Poisons Real? - May's Claims Fall Apart March 16 - The British Government's 'Novichok' Drama Was Written By Whom? March 18 - NHS Doctor: "No Patients Have Experienced Symptoms Of Nerve Agent Poisoning In Salisbury" March 21 - Russian Scientists Explain 'Novichok' - High Time For Britain To Come Clean (Updated) March 29 - Last Act Of 'Novichok' Drama Revealed - "The Skripals' Resurrection" March 31 - Hillary Clinton Ordered Diplomats To Suppress 'Novichok' Discussions April 3 - Operation Hades Blamed Russia - A Model For The 'Novichok' Claims? April 4 - It's The Cover-Up" - UK Foreign Office Deletes Tweet, Posts False Transcript, Issues New Lies April 5 - Novi-Fog™ In Fleet Street - Truth Cut Off April 6 - The Best Explanation For The Skripal Drama Is Still ... Food Poisoning April 7 - A Very British Farce April 12 - New Developments In The Skripal Drama - Police Statement, OPCW Report Release April 15 - Were the Skripals 'Buzzed', 'Novi-shocked' Or Neither? - May Has Some 'Splaining' To Do April 28 - The Silence Of The Skripals - Government Blocks Press Reports - Media Change The Record May 4 - Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such

Posted by b on May 24, 2018 at 06:35 AM | Permalink


Jen , May 24, 2018 7:21:59 AM | 2

Dear B,

On March 7, the British issued a D-notice (Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice) to the British press formally requesting that they refrain from mentioning the name of Sergei Skripal's former MI6 handler Pablo Miller or making any reference to him in their coverage of the poisoning case and the police investigation. A week later, a second D-notice was issued that reiterated the warning of the first D-notice and putting the press on notice not to publish any information that could lead directly or indirectly to the identification of Pablo Miller as Sergei Skripal's handler.
http://powerbase.info/index.php/DSMA_notice_7_March_2018
http://powerbase.info/index.php/DSMA_notice_14_March_2018

This explains why the British press, usually notorious for harrying people in the spotlight for interviews and gossipy information, have been noticeably reticent in approaching the Skripals - assuming of course, that they have access to them.

This would also explain why Julia Skripal was reading a prepared statement in the video and why her Reuters interview did not seem like a normal interview. She may have had a minder close by prepared to intervene in case the interviewer posed a question she was not allowed to answer.

Is anyone able to find out when the Reuters interview took place? If it took place some time ago, would the time between Julia Skripal's release and the interview have been long enough for Julia to recover to the extent where she looks well and appears not to be suffering traumatic after-effects? And why was it only released on May 23?

Robert Snefjella , May 24, 2018 8:57:43 AM | 14
The most plausible perpetrators of the original poisoning of the Skripals are some element of the dysfunctional and evil British deep state, which connects to the American deep state, which too is diabolical and dysfunctional.

The enormous resources, political and media and choreography and stream of lies, surrounding the Skripal affair make it obvious as a dysfunctional deep state project.

The alternative explanations: 1) that it was Russia, make no sense whatsoever; 2) that it was food poisoning is far fetched but possible, and might have been taken advantage of, and the policeman victim then added, to create the 'right' attempted murder mystery ambience.

That is, those who have been 'protecting' and controlling and hiding away and issuing statements for and 'restoring health to' the Skripals are very likely those who attacked them.

Father Skripal is a practised devious sort, who would know the ropes. Thet he is not just expendable, but an endangered loose end for various reasons now, including the Trump-Russia false flag.

Has Julia Skripal had unimpeded access to her father since their recovery? If so, a wink wink nod nod private whispered exchange between the two could have transformed the two into a potential team effort to stay alive by playing their parts.

If she has not been allowed or had available a moment of private exchange with father Skripal, then she might still know enough to understand that they are both in extreme danger.

Father Skripal can likely be bought off. That's what he does for as living. But can Julia?

P Walker , May 24, 2018 9:39:46 AM | 18
Starting to believe that the Skripals were going to transport Novichok somehow into Syria so that it could be used there In a staged event. The problem was that things may have gone sideways. Makes sense why the Russians issued a warning of a staged attack and how the Brits are keeping the couple incommunicado. The Russians could have known about the plot beforehand.

But it could just be my rampant paranoia.

Kalen , May 24, 2018 10:01:40 AM | 24
As I commented here before there are many plausible explanations much more probable than any of variants U.K. gov or media peddled. And this clear statement under duress sounding to similar British hostages taken by Saddam Hussein in 2003 declaring that they were healthy ate good food and were personal guests of Saddam and that they were free to leave anytime but since they enjoyed themselves immensely they would stay for a while and hence do not worry.

Sounds like Julia Skripal. To support this there is not emphasized fact that they both seem be to held in separate locations so they could not freely communicate much.

What is looks like that in this multiple bottom story something went wrong and some desperate solutions have been implemented. Because it is clear now that by keeping them alive that effectively cut off the family access while if dead family would have claimed bodies and all those lies would have been exposed, or it was all a false flag to redirect Skripal role in Trump dossier into made up Putin revenge on those who contributed to it.

Here is my take on all that, which may have not entirely happened as planed along the scenarios I and others including b proposes.
As far as theory how this happened. I see that Skripal was in it, in fact he prepared and tested appropriate dose for him as his daughter used as pawn to lend credibility and provide required Putin evil killing innocent narrative which would be absent if he just killed or hurt rogue agent.

Skipral himself calibrated that false flag dose of BZ or Fenantyl to make sure no permanent damage would be done to his daughter and then administered it himself to her and himself in controlled manner in public place so help would be coming immediately while in his car they could have possibly lie there for hours before being discovered.

In fact place where he lived Salisbury near Porton Downs was perfect for this since there was no way that doctors would misdiagnose them as military nerve agent victims which wrong treatment would possibly caused irreversible damage to victims as doctors would be more aggressive fearing immediate death of patients and also were immune to propaganda of Novichok crap since they were experts in this medical field as real and present danger, threat of exposure of Porton Downs employees was always there.

After recovery is was Skripal, trusted by her as her father, himself as part of psych op presented the narrative as Putin wanted to kill me and did not care that you happened to be with me at time of attack. I am so sorry, shit lies.

She was brainwashed or threatened some ways offered lucrative financial arrangement in the west decided to stay and followed MI6 instructions, fearing she could be killed upon meeting with Russian diplomats or even recruited family members or upon returning to Russia.

I do not think it would be far fetched to concoct such a thing or similar by MI6 as such stunts were done before like fake deaths or staged attacks but in this case the point was to fool British unwitting participants that nerve agent attack happenced as later they did later in Douma in amateurish way but still it worked as pretext to pre planed aggression on Syria as in case of Skripals pre planed diplomatic retaliation against Russia before any investigation was really commenced , such a thing only perpetrators of false flag themselves would do.

If Skripal was not on it why keep them alive witnesses of conspiracy since I could imagine as a father myself Skripal would,have been furious of MI6 discovering what amounted to attemp to kill his daughter and blame Putin one he learned that there was no Novichok crap or any military nerve agent used.

In fact Fenantyl is deadly if inappropriately handled what just few days after Skripal affair husband and wife overdosed on Fentanty in California and putting in critical condition their mother in law trying to revive them in the bedroom, children that never enter the room by looked through the Door who called 911 were also mildly exposed while a police officer who entered the room end up in hospital himself.

Whole house was immediately quarantined and covered by tent until, special unit arrived days later and only then police investigator entered premises. WImilar scenario unfolded in Salisbury.

What interesting that no emergency or medical personnel in hospital in UK as in California was hurt since they knew well how to deal with Fenantyl epidemic.

We must remember that despite crazy rhetoric we are dealing with risky but rational people who were not smart enough to concoct something that would go down the throuta of gullible public much more smoothly.


BM , May 24, 2018 10:55:51 AM | 29
Starting to believe that the Skripals were going to transport Novichok somehow into Syria so that it could be used there In a staged event.
Posted by: P Walker | May 24, 2018 9:39:46 AM | 18

At one point I saw a reference (on Sputnik I think, certainly a Russian source) that both Skripals Sergei and Yulia were under investigation by Russian intelligence for smuggling arms (I can't remember if there was a reference to chemical weapons but very possibly) into Syria. It was slightly mind-jarring at the time since it conflicted with the official position that Russia had (prior to the incident) no interest in Sergei Skripal. Otherwise I've seen nothing on that, perhaps because of a criminal investigation in progress in Russia.


Regarding the throat scar - I can imagine that was the result of surgery for long-term artificial respiration during the hospital-induced coma. If so, the alleged statement that "the clinical treatment was invasive, painful and depressing" was unequivacally originating from a technical and third-party source and definately not the patient. The doctor could well have used that phrase in discussions with government officials, who got so used to it they repeated it in composing an alleged statement for Yulia, but I am quite certain the patient herself would not describe it in such a way whether in English or Russian, and whether native English speaking or native foreign speaking. A patient's description would be much more focussed on the patient's experience (pain, discomfort, probable dryness of the mucosal membranes and side-effects resulting from that, etc) rather than "invasiveness" which was the first word in the statement and thereby the most emphasised.


It was always suspicious that Yulia was "discharged" from the hospital - and therefore away from her father - when her father was allegedly still under treatment. Yulia was alone in a foreign country, utterly isolated from friends, family and aquaintances, while her father was still in hospital undergoing "invasive, painful and depressing" treatment after an alleged state-sponsored assassination attempt - NO WAY! She would not leave her father voluntarily.


The statement that she does not want to be contacted by her cousin, grandmother, the Russian government or anyone else is the real killer of the fairy tale, and is the exact opposite of the compelling reality of such a traumatic episode. Is she supposed to believe her grandmother and cousin actively conspired in the assassination plot? There is absolutely know scenario that could explain such a wish.

Arioch , May 24, 2018 11:09:40 AM | 31
@S #16

i more like the "и принятия всего происшедшего." part. ('We need time for full revoery and for accepting all that happenned')

i bet it is as unrussian as unrussian can be.

it also is a bit confusing how she sternly repeats "no one should speak for us but ourselves" then she herself speak for her father.

Another giveaway is "grateful to Russian embassy" - "признательна Российскому посольству".
It is plain wrong. You do not write "russian" with capital letter in Russian.
And if you mean "Russian Embassy" as some kind of name - then bot hwords would be capital.
It is yet another case of "thinking English" when authoring this Russian letter from Russian woman to her Russian relatives...

karlof1 , May 24, 2018 11:14:51 AM | 32
Craig Murray again shoots massive holes into the hostage video and PR, further using semantics and discourse analysis to show the UK government at fault in this affair. A jointly written article by b and Craig would be a great read since their own investigations are very advanced, seemingly beyond all others. I for one find Craig's "lion cage" metaphor very convincing.

A conjecture: Teresa had it done to protect Hillary.

S , May 24, 2018 11:17:45 AM | 33
1. Why, out of all places in the UK, Skripal would settle down in Salisbury, the location of UK's CW labs? We're told that is because his handler, Pablo Miller, lived there. Fine, then the question becomes: why, out of all places in the UK, Pablo Miller was living close to UK's CW labs?

2. Why was it necessary to drag Yulia into this mess? A claim could be made that the alleged Russian assassins needed her to track the location where Sergei lived. But this was not her first visit to him, so alleged Russian assassins could have tracked his whereabouts long time ago, then waited for the best moment to kill him. Obviously, it would be better to kill him when he was alone, not with his daughter. Unless alleged Russian assassins, while she was still in Moscow, secretly poisoned some object that she then brought to her father. That is the only explanation why alleged Russian assassins would need Yulia. But British government is not claiming that; instead, they claim that a toxic substance was applied to the doorknob. Therefore, Yulia's presence was of no use to alleged Russian assassins. Then we must conclude that her presence was somehow needed by the British or third-party false-flaggers, or possibly by Sergei in case he was in on the plot. Otherwise, why not wait till she leaves?

3. The choice of CW to assassinate Skripal, the fact that he lived next to the main CW lab in UK (and one of the top CW labs in the world), and the fact that he and Yulia were poisoned at the end of a three-week CW military exercise in Salisbury Plains, taken together, form a combination that cannot be explained by mere coincidence. There must be a connection here. Could British intelligence plan all this 8 years ago when they were selecting the location where Skripal would live? Hell no. Therefore, it must have been the reverse: a decision was made to kill or "kill" Skripal and pin it on the Russians, then someone decided to use the fact that he was living close to the CW lab. However, if that's indeed what has happened, then it was a very flawed plan from the start, since all these coincidences would be readily apparent to outside observers. The poisoning false flag would work much better if Skripal was living in some other region of UK, and there was no CW exercise at the time of his poisoning. Therefore, either the plan was unintentionally dumb (because of incompetence), or it was intentionally dumb (people did not want to do it but could not reject the order, so they decided to sabotage it), or the original plan was entirely different, but it didn't work out, so they quickly improvised something else and failed to make it convincing due to lack of time.

Eric , May 24, 2018 12:01:40 PM | 38
Looking at the obvious tracheostomy scar left on her throat, Yulia must have lost all ability to breathe on her on without ventilatory assistance for some time. A tracheostomy is only performed after all effort to wean a patient off an endotracheal tube placed orally into the trachea at the time of respiratory failure is attempted. It seems to me this was much more than "food poisoning", and Yulia was in a deep coma for a prolonged duration.
This whole thing is very bizarre!
psychohistorian , May 24, 2018 12:19:46 PM | 41
Is Yulia Skripal this generations Patty Hearst with a large case of government induced Stockholm Syndrome?

I swear that Hollywood is behind the scenes of this Wag the Dog perfidy because it reads like sick soap opera that is all they are good at.

Tom Welsh , May 24, 2018 12:22:17 PM | 42
"Its sole argument is that the alleged nerve agent used was from a group of chemical agents which were originally developed in the Soviet Union".

By the same logic, the British government is to blame for poisoning everyone who has ever been harmed by VX or its derivatives.

Mishko , May 24, 2018 1:08:51 PM | 43
Sorry but can't resist: "Do you hear the lambs bleating, Yulia?"
John Gilberts , May 24, 2018 1:55:26 PM | 45
The Russian embassy seems curiously unwilling to file a habeus corpus application to produce the Skripals and enforce their consular rights. I wonder why?
alaff , May 24, 2018 2:04:00 PM | 46
It can be interesting/useful. Translated today's article in Russian newspaper "Komsomolskaya Pravda":

"KP"* exclusive: Victoria Skripal told that what her sister pronounced not her text in the videoclip.

Both specialists and average people right away noticed that [Yulia] Skripal was constrained, and a text which she has been pronounced was obviously written not by herself. Yulia's sister Viktoria [Skripal] appeared with the same suspicions. Here's what the woman told in exclusive interview during the "Komsomolskaya Pravda" radio air.

- Have you seen a written appeal?

- I saw only the appeal where she speaks. I'm glad she's alive and healthy. And i'm very happy she'd like to come back home.

- Maybe you've noticed some strangenesses in this appeal?

- You mean, strangenesses that she's reading a text?

- What makes you think she's reading a text?

- You don't have to be a great specialist [to notice this]. When a person drop his eyes, then lift up, then drop his eyes again. Do you know what is invasive therapy?

- No.

- Me too don't know. She too doesn't have a medical education. She is a geographer. I am an accountant. But i don't know what is invasive therapy. And it can't be a persons speaks so well, without mistakes. She has her favourite word. We all have our own parasite-word, right? She used it when she called me by telephone: "ну да, ну да" (Approximate English translation may be "yeah, yeah", or "well, yeah" - ed.). But here [in this appeal] she suddenly did not use her words. I.e. it's smoothly, in one breath. And a little bit slowly for her. Because [usually] she's chatter faster, when she's talking and nervous.

--

* "KP" - the newspaper "Komsomolskaya Pravda".

Original article - https://www.nnov.kp.ru/daily/26833.4/3873491/

S , May 24, 2018 2:23:22 PM | 48
@John Gilberts: A Russian article I've read today says the 1963 Vienna Convention does not apply since the Skripals are not under investigation by UK authorities. However, their relatives may go to a UK court to establish the status of the Skripals and request a meeting with them.
Ort , May 24, 2018 3:41:40 PM | 50
hoped a thread for Yulia's staged appearance would be forthcoming; because of the vicissitudes of timing, both B.'s observations and the comments have echoed my own reaction: in brief, this was at best another UK government/spook "tease".

Aside from joining the chorus, however, I find that I am even more skeptical than previously of the ostensible cumulative "facts" of the case. Yes, there are some established "knowns", but too much sketchy and dodgy filler material surrounding them.

Yulia's brief presentation was obviously meticulously staged. But nothing that occurred during the period of the Skripals' disappearance from public view should be presumed real, actual, and authentic-- including that tracheotomy scar.

Am I saying that "they" would fake the scar? No; hypotheses non fingo. I'm saying that the appearance of that scar should not prompt the otherwise "reasonable" surmise or assumption that it "proves" that Yulia actually received a tracheotomy, that her medical condition warrants it, etc.

I haven't seen any explanation for the circumstances behind Reuters hosting this tidy little performance. It manifestly is not a case of some intrepid reporter or news organization penetrating UK security and getting a "scoop".

As with the previous episodes, this "interview" raises more questions than it answers. Perhaps its perpetrators hope that it will convince complacent, submissive, incurious dullards that Yulia seems to have recovered nicely, and that there is no real mystery or scandal about the Skripals having been poisoned by some Russian operative.

From the resistance , May 24, 2018 4:35:41 PM | 52
@Posted by: BM | May 24, 2018 10:55:51 AM | 29

Agree, "invasive" is, most definitively, a very technical term used only in medical field by insiders to describe an agressive procedure, mostly consisting in introducing big tubes with/or cameras inside the body to explore or implant drainages or respirator tubes, which could imply secondary harm as a possibility but cnosidered less harmful than the necessity of the exploration or procedure fro the helath of the patient, and which due to that are performed under anesthesics.

No citizen strange to medical profession could anytime use such term, since it is not of public domain.

I agree also in that it is difficult believe that a young girl having passed through such "painful and depressing" experience would not have asked for her close relatives to come in her support, something that, btw, would have been recommended for any doctor or nurse loyal to their professional obligation with respect of the well being and full recovering of patients.
She is obviously quite depressed and most probably psychologically incapable of taking right decissions, or even counterproductive ones for her, as it usually happens under severe depression.....

IMO, she is held hostage and under menace of something..her statements sounded like recited by heart without any hint of personal emotion...She could be under psychiatric drugs, quite possible...

Arioch , May 24, 2018 5:12:00 PM | 56
https://m.facebook.com/alexander.bagaev.9/posts/1628144173974727

Here is yet another comparison of the two letters.
In Russian, by Russian :)

Arioch , May 24, 2018 5:12:00 PM | 56 karlof1 , May 24, 2018 5:12:50 PM | 57
"Wants to return home" is the big point not being raised according to Russian political scientist Igor Shatrov:

"It is unlikely that anyone would want to return to a country accused of poisoning her. Therefore for me, this phrase is the most significant statement that Julia made."

I must concur. But was that part of the script or said independently?

Scotch Bingeington , May 24, 2018 5:21:49 PM | 58
Seems like B is on a roll lately. That's excellent!

However, I can't agree with the hostage claim proposed here and in many other intelligent places any longer. For me, the Skripals being merely victims of greater powers involved in foul play, them being somehow held and silenced against their will - that's completely off the table.

It's hard to come to terms with it, but the Skripals have been in on the whole charade. Sergey has been from the beginning, probably in an instrumental way even, but to some degree Yulia must be complicit in the plot, too.

It's the way she behaves in the Reuters video. Her behavior is actually very straightforward and lighthearted - and coherently so. No gaps there. She sure shows signs of being a little nervous, but what media amateur wouldn't be in an interview situation. It's really only minor nervousness given the fact that the Skripals are at the center of so much international attention and that the Skripal case is a possible casus belli. She is unmistakably flirting with the camera and clearly enjoying the attention brought to her. You can't fake that.

The Russians (and the remaining Skripal family) will have to accomodate the fact that the Skripals are lost to them. They won't be coming back – because they wouldn't want to. That talk of returning to Russia "one day" is just that – talk, strategically placed into the statement and aimed at undermining the Russian ambassador's admirable persistence. Everything else that she says, or most of it, doesn't matter much. You all are perfectly right in your analysis of who actually wrote Yulia's script I think, but sadly it's way beside the point.

The Russian side has likely done so already, but if I were a Russian investigator, I'd have a look at how well in advance of the flight date Yulia's tickets were booked. The date as such might be of great importance, too. The Skripal ploy would have been given the green light by the time Yulia got on that plane. It would have been conceived much earlier and I'd check that against the airing (or finishing of the movie script) of that weird TV series B mentioned in one of his earlier articles. In all likelihood, Yulia booked a return ticket, but just for the sake of completeness, I'd check that, too. Also, what kind of health insurance did she take out for her trip abroad? Was it really the usual, the bare minimum, so as not to waste any money on it, or something more extensive? And how much luggage did she take with her, and what items (not just practical stuff, but some cherished things too, maybe)? Etc. etc.

Mark2 , May 24, 2018 5:31:12 PM | 61
HERE WE GO AGAIN!
BBC reporting a hoax phone call to Boris Johnson lasting 20 mins from Russian. Brit government blaming! Russia Kremlin

So in last 2 days they'v dug up the Scripals again,accused Russia of downing a plain with a missile,reports of new agression against Syria and as a diversion put N.koria back in the news.

The same old same old!

We will know see,, within hours maybe days a massive attack on Syria/Iran !

They just did the ground work- anti Russia properganda,public distraction.

I could weep

Daniel , May 24, 2018 6:14:13 PM | 67
It's great to see much skepticism here. I see no reason to accept that the alleged event happened in the first place. Great Britain, the US and Russia are all perfectly well able to assassinate a couple of civilians if that is their desire.

If these two are alive, I expect they were meant to be alive. If they were meant to be alive, I see no reason to risk their deaths by deliberately poisoning them (regardless of the agent used) and then letting them fall into the hands of an emergency room staff - who could themselves be poisoned or who might accidentally harm (even lethally) the "victims" by treating them for the wrong agent.

Daniel , May 24, 2018 6:18:41 PM | 68
All of the conjecture about Skirpal's ties to the "dodgy dossier" and even that the Clintons could be the culprits in the dirty deed is based on the belief that the US has two "major" political parties in serious opposition to one another. I see no evidence of that.

In this particular instance, we have the Clinton Crime family and The Donald - who have all been good friends for decades. Their daughters both stated during the campaign that they've been "best friends" since childhood. That could not have been possible with one of them living under Secret Service watch, even living in the White House - without close ties between their parents. Further, both Ivanka and Chelsea stated they expect to remain close friends even after the election.

This is just plain impossible to imagine if the "fire and fury" of the campaign and all the nasty stuff said during and since were even just exaggerations of real ideological differences.

I often describe US politics as akin to US football. The Eagles and the Bears both want to win any given game or championship. The teams get some bonuses for winning. But they are both playing the same game, and share the proceeds regardless. It used to be that the two "teams" had different owners (though of the same elite group), but at least since the rise of the Clinton/DLC, they even share owners, let alone ideologies and "long game" goals.

So I see no reason to believe any of the partisan kabuki theater that oozes out of our MSM.

Daniel , May 24, 2018 6:21:35 PM | 69
Arioch. Thanks for all of your erudite dissection of Yulia's words.
m , May 25, 2018 12:26:37 AM | 74
The most interesting aspect of the whole Skripal incident was the imposition of D notices on the media by the UK government. The reasoning was said to be to protect agent Miller but this was a lie as Miller's association with Skripal was previously well known and bound to come to the surface. No, the reasons for the D notices were to protect the government's bizarre narrative of lies and also the likely poisoner which would be our mysterious policeman caught up in the incident.
I strongly suspect the charade was intimately linked to british special forces captured unexpectedly in Gouta, Syria whilst assisting the local jihadis in preparing their next false flag chemical attack which would have brought in a massive western response to try and change the direction of the conflict. In other words an act of desperation which led to the comical situation of the authorities having to make the narrative up as they were going along.

It's a fact that allowing the media to swarm all over the place - even if controlled - would have invariably thrown up scenarios or situations which would have taken control of the narrative out of the government's hands.

[May 24, 2018] The diversion of Russia Gate is a continuation of former diversions such as the Tea Party which was invented by the banksters to turn public anger over the big banking collapse and the resulting recession into a movement to gain more deregulation for tax breaks for the wealthy

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... In the case of the fabricated Russia Gate narrative the results of the Trump election and widespread public distrust of the election process was turned into a new cold war with Russia which benefited major defense contractors and resulted in sanctions against Russia and huge windfalls for the Military Industrial Complex as the US ponied up to fund our national defense industry. ..."
"... We should by now be educated that major failures of our economy and political processes precipitated by government deregulation or corrupted elections will be used by the main stream media to create fictional enemies of our nation to turn public anger into a public movement to blame a target of opportunity which will benefit the wealth and power structures which is based on fiction and contrived plots to benefit the very powerful and wealthy organizations such as big banks and the military. ..."
"... The root cause of this is that they (the MSM) own the microphone. They have the ability to lie without rebuttal because they own that single megaphone to tell lies. They have the ability to create fictions and fantasies which go unchallenged because they own the megaphone. ..."
"... From our history: The creation of the Tea Party was a watershed moment where the big banks turned their bailout by the US government into a political movement which was manufactured by the press as a new and never heard about new political party (The Tea Party) into a political movement aimed to grant the big banks and wealthy Americans tax breaks which resulted in a 3.5 trillion bailout we are now on the hook for. ..."
"... How many news corporations supported the lies about WMDs and Iraq's secret stockpiles of Uranium and chemical weapons? The NY Times and the Washington Post were among the most fervent supporters of those lies and they have never acknowledged their errors. ..."
"... So it is with the Trump administration and the media's aim to turn our attention away from the real reasons our election system is corrupted by dark money by creating fake facts to convince us that Russia is a war monger which stole the election and must be countered by more massive military spending and a renewal of the old Cold War. ..."
"... The NY Times got it wrong in Iraq. They got it wrong in Ukraine. They got it wrong in the last election. They got it wrong on savings and loan deregulation under Reagan. They got it wrong on banking deregulation under Clinton. They got it wrong with Russia Gate. They have gotten it wrong so many times that the statement "they got it wrong" is a testament of their ability to fool us all. ..."
"... Yes, I continually read that the government was "in error", they "didn't understand", or "their models were incorrect". Yeah, sure, whatever you say. ..."
"... It's all just one big "Fleece the Sheep" game, except they can't let the sheep know they're being fleeced. Errors and omissions are all part of the game, and the media act to call the sheep to the starting line. ..."
"... Dan if Robert Blum had had his way the CIA would have been privately funded by secret donations. CIA got caught laundering money in the middle to late 60″s and as always CIA makes investigations go away. A recount of the episode can be found in Jane Mayers book Dark Money. The CIA wrote the book on laundering money. Then the ICIJ and the Paradise Papers expose how large the off shore industry is. ..."
"... I was convinced that Russiagate was a complete fabrication after reading the following penned by Caitling Johnstone:" this administration has already killed Russians in Syria, greatly escalated nuclear tensions with Russia, allowed the sale of arms to Ukraine, established a permanent military presence in Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, forced RT and Sputnik to register as foreign agents, expanded NATO with the addition of Montenegro, assigned Russia hawk Kurt Volker as special representative to Ukraine, shut down a Russian consulate in San Francisco and expelled Russian diplomats " ..."
"... Trump is a thug and a money laundering crook, not a machievelian plotter. His total ignorance of world politics is dangerously leading us to armagedden. ..."
May 24, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

CitizenOne May 20, 2018 at 1:32 am

The diversion of Russia Gate is a continuation of former diversions such as the Tea Party which was invented by the banksters to turn public anger over the big banking collapse and the resulting recession into a movement to gain more deregulation for tax breaks for the wealthy.

In the case of the fabricated Russia Gate narrative the results of the Trump election and widespread public distrust of the election process was turned into a new cold war with Russia which benefited major defense contractors and resulted in sanctions against Russia and huge windfalls for the Military Industrial Complex as the US ponied up to fund our national defense industry.

We should by now be educated that major failures of our economy and political processes precipitated by government deregulation or corrupted elections will be used by the main stream media to create fictional enemies of our nation to turn public anger into a public movement to blame a target of opportunity which will benefit the wealth and power structures which is based on fiction and contrived plots to benefit the very powerful and wealthy organizations such as big banks and the military.

Trump won because the media cleaned up big time by playing the Super PACs for suckers just as deregulation of the big banks enabled them to clean up by merging savings banks with investment banks which moved all the savings banks deposits into risky investments.

There is a clear and present danger born out and evidenced by former economic collapses that the media and the big financial institutions will create public relations campaigns based on the mantra of deregulation to swindle Americans even further. They have a proven ability to use their power to persuade Americans that some other reason is responsible for the latest swindle.

The root cause of this is that they (the MSM) own the microphone. They have the ability to lie without rebuttal because they own that single megaphone to tell lies. They have the ability to create fictions and fantasies which go unchallenged because they own the megaphone.

From our history: The creation of the Tea Party was a watershed moment where the big banks turned their bailout by the US government into a political movement which was manufactured by the press as a new and never heard about new political party (The Tea Party) into a political movement aimed to grant the big banks and wealthy Americans tax breaks which resulted in a 3.5 trillion bailout we are now on the hook for.

How many media/news organizations signed onto the Tea Party after the implosion of the banking industry and beat the drums to grant tax breaks for billionaires? All of them.

How many of the media corporations beat the drums to blame Russia for the election results which resulted in sanctions against Russia and a new Cold War with Russia which resulted in windfall profits for the defense industry? All of them.

How many news corporations supported the lies about WMDs and Iraq's secret stockpiles of Uranium and chemical weapons? The NY Times and the Washington Post were among the most fervent supporters of those lies and they have never acknowledged their errors.

The facts are clear in all of these major failures of our free press to get it right. In every case the media have conspired to fool most of the people into believing the lies of the government and the financial sectors published by main stream press as facts which are giant falsehoods.

The result of this collaboration between the press and the wealth in our nation has been to deceive us and to lead us down paths that twist our understanding to a new understanding that benefits the wealthy in times of prosperity and in times of crisis.

So it is with the Trump administration and the media's aim to turn our attention away from the real reasons our election system is corrupted by dark money by creating fake facts to convince us that Russia is a war monger which stole the election and must be countered by more massive military spending and a renewal of the old Cold War.

The NY Times got it wrong in Iraq. They got it wrong in Ukraine. They got it wrong in the last election. They got it wrong on savings and loan deregulation under Reagan. They got it wrong on banking deregulation under Clinton. They got it wrong with Russia Gate. They have gotten it wrong so many times that the statement "they got it wrong" is a testament of their ability to fool us all.

Reply


backwardsevolution , May 20, 2018 at 5:16 pm

CitizenOne – "'They got it wrong' is a testament of their ability to fool us."

Yes, I continually read that the government was "in error", they "didn't understand", or "their models were incorrect". Yeah, sure, whatever you say. They can't come out and inform us that they lied from the get-go because that would prove intent to deceive, so they cover up their tracks by saying they made an "error" whenever things fall apart, as they knew they would.

It's all just one big "Fleece the Sheep" game, except they can't let the sheep know they're being fleeced. Errors and omissions are all part of the game, and the media act to call the sheep to the starting line.

Dave P. , May 20, 2018 at 11:49 pm

Citizen One – Excellent post. Very informed comments indeed.

Skip Scott , May 21, 2018 at 7:15 am

Citizen One-

Great post. It reminded me of a joke I saw the other day:

"A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the Tea Partier and says, "look out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie."

munchma quchi , May 19, 2018 at 11:51 pm

re: "Without offering a shred of evidence, the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a formal assessment on Jan. 6, 2017, that "Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election [in order] to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency." The "assessment" contains this disclaimer: " [You (the author) did not include a disclaimer. please remedy this.]

F. G. Sanford , May 20, 2018 at 9:39 am

Ms. Quchi,
I think the disclaimer said that intelligence assessments are based on sources, methods and interpretations and rely on raw data. It's raw, so it has to be properly marinated until it's fit for consumption. Addenda to the disclaimer indicate that the Intelligence Community will not accept outrageous conspiracy theories, noting specifically that, "They hate us for our freedom, and those weapons of mass destruction must be here somewhere." It's the standard "release from liability" which accompanies all official narratives. Kinda like eating tuna fish: It's pretty good once you get past the smell.

Chet Roman , May 20, 2018 at 11:35 am

Page 13 of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of Jan. 6, 2017
explains: "High confidence does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong. Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that show something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents."

robert e williamson jr , May 19, 2018 at 7:35 pm

Dan I really can not disagree with much you have to say here. Except there are a few things about this whole affair that bug the hell out of me. For instance the fact that the village idiot from new york spent over $400 million in cash the last 9 years before he ran for president.

Your effort here sounds quite a lot like whining about having nothing to report. Calm down these things take time. If Russia isn't to blame fine but Mueller is not talking and seems to be conducting himself very professionally.

Dan if Robert Blum had had his way the CIA would have been privately funded by secret donations. CIA got caught laundering money in the middle to late 60″s and as always CIA makes investigations go away. A recount of the episode can be found in Jane Mayers book Dark Money. The CIA wrote the book on laundering money. Then the ICIJ and the Paradise Papers expose how large the off shore industry is.

Trump like doing business with Russians during a time when Russian oligarchs were hiding the money they pulled from the Soviet coffers. I think it has gotten him in trouble.

Also interesting is the accounts of what has happen with the Inslaw / PROMIS case and Bill Hamilton. Was this software and early version of what CIA and NSA use to monitor the world now?

One last thing in your last paragraph here you claim the Dimocraps have gone off the deep end with the Russian Connection thing. Dan the dimocraps went off the deep end with their undying allegiance to Israel. And they do little damned else.

When this is finished if CIA allows the release of the Dogdamned files maybe we will learn what happened. Chill my brotha !

kntlt , May 20, 2018 at 6:14 pm

Listen to this man.

drC , May 19, 2018 at 7:27 pm

"The press, the intelligence community, and the Democrats" have committed FAR MORE than a mere "crime against journalism". For kryssakes, this isn't a debating society at Yale! They have provoked international tensions, suspicions and distrust that have pushed the world far closer to the brink of a third world war, damaging national economies across the globe & negatively impacting the lives of millions.

jose , May 19, 2018 at 6:30 pm

I was convinced that Russiagate was a complete fabrication after reading the following penned by Caitling Johnstone:" this administration has already killed Russians in Syria, greatly escalated nuclear tensions with Russia, allowed the sale of arms to Ukraine, established a permanent military presence in Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, forced RT and Sputnik to register as foreign agents, expanded NATO with the addition of Montenegro, assigned Russia hawk Kurt Volker as special representative to Ukraine, shut down a Russian consulate in San Francisco and expelled Russian diplomats "

Since the US national media have been aware of the lack of solid evidence against Russia allege meddling case, they now want to pretend it has not been their fault. Their sheer dishonesty underscores their deviant reporting.

ranney , May 19, 2018 at 5:54 pm

Joe, Abe, Andrew, Sam, Mike,

You are all correct in blaming the MSM for ignoring Israel in all this and whitewashing the main cause of our problems in the middle east. I agree that Russia has not been interfering in our politics any more than virtually all the other countries in the world who have embassys here and things they want to "lobby" for. I believe spying is universal and the US does it more than most, but everyone does it including Russia (and UK, France Germany Israel, Ukraine and on and on for everyone on the map).

What I find increasingly strange is the fact that the MSM and just about everyone else is ignoring the fact that Trump did indeed have business with Russia. He was trying to get permission and financial backing for a Trump tower to be built in Moscow. and he had been trying for a while before he even thought of running for president. THAT is what his now indicted lawyer was doing initially, along with others in Trump's employ. That is why there is indeed evidence of contact with Russians during the pre- campaign and during the campaign as well. Trump didn't want to lose this lucrative deal which, also involves money laundering and other illegal, and/or shady dealings.
I can't figure out why Muller hasn't subpoenaed or somehow got hold of Trump's tax returns. I'm pretty sure he'd find all the crimes we need to impeach him.

Trump is a thug and a money laundering crook, not a machievelian plotter. His total ignorance of world politics is dangerously leading us to armagedden. And I can't help but wonder why Muller is slow walking this whole investigation. I'm pretty sure he can see what I can see. Trump is a crooked, money launderer, ultra con man with his Trump towers and other ploys, and too dumb and ignorant of history and science to understand how dangerous the game he plays is to the world when he has the power of the presidency. But Muller knows that! So what else is really going on that explains why he has moved at snails pace to stop the damage?
Does anyone have a good guess at that? I'd really like to read it.

[May 24, 2018] Looks like Skripals are being detained against their will in order to keep them quiet about something

May 24, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Brendan , May 19, 2018 at 6:39 am

There are a number of reasons to suspect that Sergei Skripal was, and is, being silenced because of fears of what he might reveal about the Steele dossier. Although he is a minor character in this affair, there are many facts -- too many for me to go into here -- that connect him and his alleged MI6 handler Pablo Miller to Christopher Steele and the dossier.

The entire official story of what happened to Skripal in Salisbury on 4 March is unbelievable anyway, but the way that he and his daughter Yulia are now being kept incommunicado looks even more suspicious. The two of them are apparently not even speaking to their friends and family after being discharged from hospital, even though Yulia phoned her cousin Viktoria from the hospital in early April.

Add to this the fact that the British authorities are not doing anything to dispel doubts that the Skripals are acting of their own free will. They have made no effort to allow either the Russian embassy, or even an independent third party, to speak to either Sergei or Yulia.

This all suggests that the Skripals are being detained against their will in order to keep them quiet about something.

J. Decker , May 19, 2018 at 7:25 am

"British authorities have made no effort to allow either the Russian embassy, or even an independent third party, to speak to either Sergei or Yulia"

Isn't this disallowed in international relations? And why is Russia rolling over rather than taking the case to the Hague?

phillip sawicki , May 19, 2018 at 2:11 pm

Russia may have decided that taking it seriously would be a mistake by giving it too much attention with all the distortions that would arrive from the MSM. Putin is a Machiavellian and doesn't rush into things. I predicted weeks ago that we would hear about the miraculous efforts of British medicine to "rescue" the Skripals. That's what happened. The Skripals are being silenced rather than allowed to tell their story. Obvious beyond any doubt.

J. Decker , May 19, 2018 at 7:31 am

Brilliant piece Daniel Lazare. Many thanks! And as well to Consortium News for broadcasting. I am getting more than I give to you each month in support. You are a a light to us moths, most others have been put out.

Sam F , May 19, 2018 at 8:42 am

Yes, the isolation of the Skripals strongly suggests UK complicity in the whole incident.
The lack of transparency requires the presumption of wrongful intent.

robjira , May 18, 2018 at 11:17 pm

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/05/russian-spy-sergei-skripal-discharged-uk-hospital-180518135555333.html
They Live but are incarcerated. The depth to which the Lords of Capital (and we, who as a supine populace made all this possible) have sunk is appalling. I'm really afraid Russia may once again have to defend themselves against fascism.
I'm ashamed to be a taxpayer.

mike k , May 19, 2018 at 10:09 am

You can leave the "suggests" out of your accurate account. Everything you have said is simply a fact.

Jerry Alatalo , May 19, 2018 at 3:58 pm

Yulia and Sergei Skripal: The father and son whose whereabouts and physical condition are currently unknown, and whose important story is little-known, massively and scandalously suppressed and being kept from the awareness of the people of Earth.

Neither U.S. President Donald Trump, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May nor France President Emmanuel Macron have offered anything approaching a public statement, by way of explanation -- over the now "vanished" Yulia and Sergei Skripal.

It is equally important to note and remember that none of these "leaders" have issued public statements with regard to the Douma, Syria confirmed false flag operation. In particular, they have not apologized for dangerously and illegally launching over 100 missiles on Syria based on an obvious lie.

***

Question:
Will Donald Trump, Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron rightfully provide their citizens in America, Britain and France with logical explanations for the massive unresolved controversies surrounding the Skripal and Douma events?

Answer:
Only if men and women around the Earth join, accumulate sufficient power, and demand legitimate, honest answers -- making it impossible for them to further obfuscate, deflect and/or otherwise ignore.

[May 24, 2018] Yulia has returned from the dead

May 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Rowan , May 23, 2018 2:19:32 PM | 1

Yulia has returned from the dead.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-russia-skripal-yulia-exclusiv/yulia-skripal-attempted-assassination-turned-my-world-upside-down-idUKKCN1IO2L5
Daniel , May 23, 2018 10:15:47 PM | 51
Thanks Rowan @1. Considering all the digital ink spilt at MoA over the Skirpal Affair, I expected this news to be highlighted.

This Yulia quote struck me:

"I don't want to describe the details, but the clinical treatment was invasive, painful and depressing... Our recovery has been slow and extremely painful."

Goodness! Considering the US Senate just confirmed a known torturer to run CIA, I must ask what kind of "treatment" Yulia received. I presume the neck scar is the result of endotracheal intubation?

And since visual imprints are so important in perception management, I found it interesting that this young woman, who was last reported in good health sitting on a park bench, is filmed in her "coming out" video sitting on a bench in a park-like setting. And she's writing what we must assume is the handwritten note released to the media - on a pad of paper sitting on the bench next to her! That's a very awkward way to write, especially since that note is is such legible, neat script.

The BBC article goes on to state:

"Meanwhile, work to decontaminate the Wiltshire city is still under way with the highest concentration of the Novichok found at the Skripals' front door."

Still decontaminating the town all this time later?

Jen , May 23, 2018 10:38:48 PM | 53
Rowan @ 1, Daniel @ 51: Julia Skripal appeared to be reading or following a prepared script. For someone who's been in a coma for 20 days, she looked very well indeed and does not appear to be suffering PTSD.

How would a person in a coma know if the treatment she was receiving was invasive, painful and depressing?

Novichok is supposed to be an unstable substance that degrades quickly in humid climatic conditions or in conditions where it comes into contact with water. Is Salisbury being decontaminated one brick tile, one shrub, one pigeon at a time?

Hmm .. this is what endotracheal intubation looks like but I can't see that a shunt has been made beneath the throat and between the collar bones. I too was curious about that neck wound.
http://drkashi.science/endotracheal-intubation/

[May 24, 2018] MSM misled their readers, they made fools of themselves, and they committed a crime against journalism. And now they're trying to dodge the blame

Notable quotes:
"... " . . . Nevertheless, their work is done. The poison seeds of their lies have been planted in millions of unquestioning U.S. brains, from the high and mighty to the average consumer of "news" and will continue to sprout and spread. More lies are needed to cover up the first lies and on and on and on it goes. . ." ..."
"... A lot of accusations that are not backed up by any evidence ..."
"... " personally i blame clinton" Personally I blame AIPAC, BIS, and the Shadow Masters Clinton is just another scapegoat-puppet. ..."
"... It was British Intelligence which first sounded the alarm wrt pre-candidate Trump due to his stated intention to establish a positive relationship with Putin and Russia, thus overturning the basis for the entire post-war paradigm based on the division of the world into East and West. ..."
"... In my view, the purpose of the congress authorized investigation is not to impeach POTUS. That would provide a precedent that neither the democrats, nor the republican would accept. Instead, the investigation is intended to discredit the president and by proxy, the republicans for the upcoming elections. ..."
May 24, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

jsinton , May 19, 2018 at 8:49 am

Since day one, I felt the entire Russia-gate fiasco was horse excrement. It just never passed the smell test. My suspicions were confirmed day by day as Mueller came up with nothing. To my amazement, the MSM pushed the story to the limit with no objectivity, agenda driven, politically motivated, journalistic suicide. They've shown themselves as the propaganda outlets they always were, but we were loath to admit.

Robert Emmett , May 19, 2018 at 8:43 am

"They misled their readers, they made fools of themselves, and they committed a crime against journalism. And now they're trying to dodge the blame."

That may well be. And Robert Parry meticulously documented such a case. Nevertheless, their work is done. The poison seeds of their lies have been planted in millions of unquestioning U.S. brains, from the high and mighty to the average consumer of "news" and will continue to sprout and spread. More lies are needed to cover up the first lies and on and on and on it goes. That's the nature of a infectious culture of lies. The cultured medium explodes, escapes the lab and runs rampant, leaving those who initiated the whole mess to scramble in a mad attempt to "save face". It wouldn't surprise me if the H-ill-re eventually becomes the first, and last, U.S. woman CEO to drop the big one. If you sometimes hear a faint glug-glug-glug pulsing in your ears, that's the sound of U.S. circling the drain.

mike k , May 19, 2018 at 10:03 am

Very well stated Robert. I like the virus metaphor for propaganda. It's like gossip -- spreading, infecting the gullible with lies .

Rob , May 19, 2018 at 1:51 pm

Excellent point. As you say, their work is done. The Russiagate meme is now firmly implanted in the minds of tens of millions of Americans, and nothing short of a public confession by the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton that they fabricated the story and fanned the flames in the media will dislodge it. I cannot envision any other means of killing this particular virus. All contrary facts and logic will be brushed aside as fake news created by Russian agents or stooges.

Dave P. , May 19, 2018 at 2:26 pm

Robert Emmet,

" . . . Nevertheless, their work is done. The poison seeds of their lies have been planted in millions of unquestioning U.S. brains, from the high and mighty to the average consumer of "news" and will continue to sprout and spread. More lies are needed to cover up the first lies and on and on and on it goes. . ."

Yes. You have summarized it very well. That is how it is in our home too. My wife had been listening to this for some time, Russia, Russia, Russia, and Putin , Putin, evil Putin destroying our democracy, and so on on TV and in Newspapers, that it has gone into the subconscious now. And I read that they, the Ruling Power Structures have done the same to people in Western Europe too.

j. D. D. , May 19, 2018 at 7:54 am

While many of the particulars are correct regaring the paucity of evidence against associates of the President, the author misses two key points, upon which the entire Mueller coup operation rests. First, that the campaign against Trump started not in the Clinton campaign or anywhere related, but rather in London with British intelligence, as the Guardian itself has boasted. Not only did MI6's Steele prepare the document that formed the basis of the allegations of "collusion" but it is well known that GCHQ's Hannigan met personally with Brennan in the summer of 2016 to sound the alarm with a "not yet with it" US intel community. Second, the basis of the investigation itself hinges on the alleged "hacking" of the Clinton/DNC emailswhich showed her to be a craven puppet of Wall Street, released just prior to the Democratic Convention. That entire scenario, that the source of the infamous emails were a result of "Russian hacking," was conclusively and repeatedly demolished on this website by fomer top NSA analyst William Binney, and his cohorts at the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

mike k , May 19, 2018 at 10:07 am

The Clinton campaign paid Steele to do his thing. Their operation against Trump began the day after his surprise victory.

backwardsevolution , May 19, 2018 at 9:16 pm

Their operation began long before Trump's victory. It began in earnest just a few days after Hillary Clinton was wrongfully exonerated, way back in July of 2016.

voza0db , May 19, 2018 at 6:29 am

The funniest part of all this nonsense is that the democrats are going to keep this Illusion of RUSSIAGATE alive until the next elections!
So after the next loss in the upcoming elections we all know who to blame for another democratic loss, right?!

RnM , May 19, 2018 at 3:34 am

You paint a nearly hopeless picture, Mike.

Let us all trust that Mr. Trump, who, despite the intentions of the Totalitarians outed in Daniel Lazare's fine summary article, is the DULY ELECTED POTUS (by the common folk -- no one has made a serious demonstration of vote counting fraud, from my recollections), continues in office.

The American Experiment (in enlightened governance of, by, and for the governed) is in grave jeopardy. The enemy of the Enlightenment's fine accomplishment is Monotheism, which is the philosophical parent of Monarchy, which is the civic governing manifestation of said religious thought patterns.

Sam F , May 19, 2018 at 8:52 am

I'll suggest that the "American Experiment" is threatened by money power, more than religion, although many fundamentalists are deluded to support zionism. Religion is a problem where it rationalizes simplistic political views, but the root causes are ignorance and selfishness. Monotheism is not really the problem now that there are few monarchies. The Enlightenment, and enlightenment of individuals, has many enemies.

mike k , May 19, 2018 at 10:12 am

The enemies of good government are the greedy and powerful oligarchs who hate democracy, and do everything to distort and destroy it. No need to drag monotheism into it.

RnM , May 19, 2018 at 4:25 pm

My career was spent working with local rural politics. Good governance is by far imperiled by corrupt locals on the take.

Also, Stalin did his purging by setting up secret local committees of three, who fed him names through a beaurocratic pipeline. The Big Guy gets the blame (or credit), but the little fellas do the dirty work.

Sam F , May 20, 2018 at 4:21 pm

You are very right about local government corruption, which may have factions based upon tribal loyalties, but is caused by poor moral standards throughout our society. Most local officials are elected with little or no public knowledge of who they are, and as a result are mere low-end power-seekers who will abuse whatever power they can get.

David G , May 19, 2018 at 2:50 am

"[The NY Times] article fails to mention that at the time the conversation with the Australian ambassador took place, the Clinton communications in the news were the 30,000 State Department emails that she had improperly stored on her private computer. Instead of spilling the beans about a data breach yet to come, it's more likely that Papadopoulos was referring to emails that were already in the news -- a possibility the Times fails to discuss."

I've been shouting just this at my TV set (oddly, to little effect). And the same goes for other allegedly damning references to "Clinton emails" in connection with the infamous Trump Tower meeting and probably elsewhere.

Thanks to Daniel Lazare for pointing it out.

Adrian E. , May 19, 2018 at 4:29 am

A lot of accusations that are not backed up by any evidence and some of which have officially been rejected by the officials that investigated the case (e.g. as far as France is concerned see https://www.yahoo.com/news/latest-putin-says-attempts-contain-russia-wont-101117186.html ).

But unfortunately, there are many people who don't care about evidence and rational inquiry, and they prefer believing in evidencefree conspiracy theories that match their prejudices. One accusation that is not backed up by any evidence is used to making other accusations that are not based on evidence look more likely.

voza0db , May 19, 2018 at 6:49 am

:lol: " A lot of accusations that are not backed up by any evidence " the good old PROPAGANDA ! It's alive and kicking

voza0db , May 19, 2018 at 6:47 am

Russia is in fact the only REAL EMPIRE in this world!

They hack and manipulate everything and everyone

Anna , May 19, 2018 at 8:26 am

Have you checked the number of US overseas military bases recently?
Do you know why the US Congress is called "Israel-occupied territory?"
Don't you love -- love! -- MSM.

voza0db , May 19, 2018 at 3:35 pm

Hello Anna!

I know that my written sarcasm is very bad sorry about that! And yes I do love MainShitMedia! Their the best.

Sam F , May 19, 2018 at 7:08 am

Try defining "hacking an election." The term pretends that a few techies tampered machines. In the US the election machine makers do that, no doubt, but not likely elsewhere. The US has a very long history of manipulating elections throughout the world and in the US. Even while it pretends to be "promoting democracy" it is installing dictators and faking elections.

The ultimate election hack is allowing big money to control mass media and political campaigns, as in the US.
Only when we restrict funding of mass media and elections to limited contributions will we restore democracy.

Realist , May 20, 2018 at 4:21 am

Washington and its media tools have hacked this guy's brain is what it amounts to.

They could tell the American public anything and have it believed, like, for instance, that the ideal gas law does not apply to inflated footballs in cold weather.

Realist , May 21, 2018 at 3:32 am

Correction: All your unfounded assertions are bogus. Just read this one simple piece that just came out for the accurate course of events.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-05-20/how-fbi-and-cia-restarted-cold-war-protect-themselves

David G , May 19, 2018 at 2:20 am

While I am fully on board with rubbishing Russia-gate as malignant nonsense, I do think it may be a mistake to rely too much on there turning out to be no nefarious nexus between Trump and Russia.

In Trump we have someone devoid of knowledge, sense, or character, an almost altogether wrong guy -- very much including his views on U.S. foreign policy -- who for some reason has a positive and constructive attitude toward Russia and Putin (though, of course, he has mostly gone along with the anti-Russia Beltway consensus in his actions as president when pressured).

It's possibly it's just an isolated, unexplained instance of Trumpian sanity, but to me it's at least as likely to be the result of greed or fear, based on some grubby link to Russia that is as yet undisclosed.

J. Decker , May 19, 2018 at 7:43 am

"who for some reason has a positive and constructive attitude toward Russia and Putin".

Maybe the reason is that Putin is one of history's penultimate statesman who presents the strongest opposition to the global war/banking beast and last bastion of hope? Time magazine's Most Powerful Man of the Year (or something like that as I wouldn't be caught dead reading it.

So does that make Trump a puppet for Russia or a keen observer?

David G , May 19, 2018 at 11:54 am

Do you think Cheeto Dust really capable of appreciating Putin for the reasons you cite?

"Keen" isn't a word that springs to my mind when I think of Trump.

backwardsevolution , May 20, 2018 at 2:32 am

David G -- maybe you need to oil your springs. When you're trying to navigate your way through the swamp, you tend to notice capable players who are doing it and admire them for it.

Anna , May 19, 2018 at 8:28 am

Let's begin with Uranium One and the $500.000 fee for a half-hour speech by Bill.

Mike From Jersey , May 19, 2018 at 1:59 pm

I am also a Green voter. When the choice became Hillary vs Donald that -- for me -- was the last straw. I de-registered as a Democrat and registered as a Green.

Skip Scott , May 21, 2018 at 7:32 am

Good for you Mike. I refuse to be a part of the "lesser of two evils" gambit any longer. Let's hope we can build a movement.

andrew , May 18, 2018 at 10:40 pm

the core accusations are
1. that the russians hacked the dnc, there is no evidence and no basis for this accusation. none.
2. that the russians spread a deadly fake news virus that was incredibly damaging to hillary's campaign. there is no evidence of this and it is a completely ridiculous idea if one just stops for a moment to contemplate the astronomical amount of fake news available at all times on the internet and television. what was the fake news lie that was so supremely effective? nobody knows. there wasn't one. there was for hillary unfortunately a real news truth about the dnc released by wikileaks but that was not from russians or a lie.
3. that the russians hacked the election. again absolutely no proof or evidence of this has been offered.

it is in fact a political witch hunt that has been incredibly destructive. it has distracted energy and attention away from real things that have happened. it has instigated proxy warfare with russia in syria. it has discredited journalism. it has made an honest man out of trump.

personally i blame clinton. this mendacious , self defeating , and bizarre ruse is so in keeping with so many of her and bill's greatest hits. these two people continue to damage the progressive movement . they won't go away it would seem. i hope after russiagate sputters to a stop the clintons will finally be finished.

David G , May 19, 2018 at 1:59 am

well said, andrew

RnM , May 19, 2018 at 4:37 am

A Witch Hunt, alright! Not FOR a witch, but BY a witch.

J. Decker , May 19, 2018 at 7:51 am

" personally i blame clinton" Personally I blame AIPAC, BIS, and the Shadow Masters Clinton is just another scapegoat-puppet.

j. D. D. , May 19, 2018 at 11:41 am

Yes, all true but you fail to identify the cause, which goes well beyond naming Russia as an excuse for Hillary's defeat. It was British Intelligence which first sounded the alarm wrt pre-candidate Trump due to his stated intention to establish a positive relationship with Putin and Russia, thus overturning the basis for the entire post-war paradigm based on the division of the world into East and West.

Jeff , May 19, 2018 at 11:59 am

Thanx, Andrew. You wrote the comment I was going to write. I do, however, have one nit. Russia-gate has not made an honest man out of Trump. Nothing could make an honest man out of Trump. He is nothing but an incompetent con artist whose real skill was getting people to lend him money after he had blown it all on bad deals and lousy management. I personally suspect that the connection between Trump and Russia is not with the Russian government but with the Russian oligarchs who are laundering their ill-gotten gains looting Russian state enterprises through Trump.

mike k , May 18, 2018 at 10:28 pm

The slimy rats always indulge in phony alibis for their criminal tricks. They should be investigated and charged with falsely accusing an elected President, in order to unseat him. Anyone who votes for a "democrat" in the future is just a simple clueless idiot. Trump is a horrible President, but this does not justify the criminal conspiracy to unseat him through slander and innuendo lacking any evidence whatever. The appointment of a "special council" was meant to change the result of the presidential election, and nothing else.

mike k , May 18, 2018 at 10:32 pm

If Trump were to be impeached on the basis of this phony witch hunt, it would be the end of whatever semblance we have of a democracy forever. The whole affair reminds me of the criminal removal of the President of Brazil recently.

Al Pinto , May 19, 2018 at 11:01 am

In my view, the purpose of the congress authorized investigation is not to impeach POTUS. That would provide a precedent that neither the democrats, nor the republican would accept. Instead, the investigation is intended to discredit the president and by proxy, the republicans for the upcoming elections.

The results of the investigations, actual and/or fabricated, will be invaluable campaign material for the democrats. Especially with the help of the main stream media, it's going to very effective headlines to grab the limited attention that most people in the US have for politics

Sam F , May 18, 2018 at 10:10 pm

The Russia-gate hysteria worked fine as a distraction from Israel-gate. All of Hillary's top ten donors were zionists, and Trump appointed Goldman Sachs to run the economy. Not that KSA, the MIC, or WallSt et al lost any bribery chances.

Russia-gate also pressured Trump into the zionist camp. Just what Israel ordered. Of course the US mass media are almost entirely owned by zionists. Mission accomplished; time to backtrack; we never really said that.

[May 24, 2018] There are some [inconclusive] signs that anti-Russian hysteria is weakening in the USA. Still The Empire is falling, and the Empire is blaming all it's idiotic decisions on the Russians

Notable quotes:
"... Back in 1973 there was a feeling of inevitability as the Watergate investigation progressed, every week more incriminating details that we know now came from inside the FBI. The Mueller probe, on the contrary, seems to be stumbling forward and not really getting anywhere as it goes fishing for info and issues like Stormy's accusations take over the news. ..."
"... Joe -- Russiagate was made up, fashioned out of nothing. If we want to talk about collusion, we need to talk about Uranium One. Now there's where some serious money changed hands, and the Clinton's hands are all over it. ..."
"... I think RussiaGate was invented also. I also think it's pretty obvious that Hillary gets a free get out of jail card when it comes to any FBI investigation over her. I also believe that if Trump were in cahoots with Putin, that Mueller by now would have revealed it, as Democrates would be whooping it up better than a homeless person hitting the super multi-million dollar lotto. ..."
"... The Empire is falling, and the Empire is blaming all it's idiotic decisions on the Russians. Our MSM which was always a subject of debate, has gone off the rails with this 24/7 anti-Trump, anti-Russian, news business. I'm suffering from all this hate aimed at Russia, and I'm believing that our MSM is winning on that front. Like I said, both Hillary and Donald's past practices may need investigated, but when will we Americans start discussing the many other issues of our day, is all I'm asking? ..."
"... No backwardsevolution the Empire is in trouble, and we are watching it make an ass out of itself while it goes down the drain. I'm sorry at this point in time I don't see any good guys, or gals. ..."
May 24, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Realist , May 20, 2018 at 3:44 am

It also seems that Yahoo also has the total (if not enthusiastic) support of Putin these days. Pretty tough to buck Israel and achieve peace in the Middle East when it has the full support of both the American Zionist oligarchs and the Russian Zionist oligarchs (who harbor most of their wealth in the West and represent the Atlanticist faction in Russia, in other words play for team USA) who probably comprise the largest and most influential power factions in both countries. No wonder AIPAC is the most powerful lobby whose existence is vehemently denied. If it comes to pass, World War III may essentially be fought because of perceived grievances by thin-skinned megalomaniacs like Adelson and Browder and their ability to wrap politicians around their pinkies using their billions in wealth. I think the Russians especially dislike being played by con-men like Browder, who gets full support from the bought-off American Congress.

voza0db , May 19, 2018 at 12:01 pm

GOOD NEWS EVERYONE!

Here's the solution to your RUSSIA HYSTERIA!

https://youtu.be/M7M4y8jEn_s

Lawrence Magnuson , May 19, 2018 at 11:34 am

Excellent in the facts and your conclusions. It is difficult to imagine what you have done in so few words -- summarize so clearly what became a maze of groundless speculation early on only to end as major byzantine monument to almost nothing but empty accusation, political invective, widespread loose talk and media posturing/gossiping. You described, in the end, a failed circus of second-rate illusions.

Mike From Jersey , May 19, 2018 at 10:07 am

The Times used to be a credible source of information. Now, I won't even read Times article unless it is on an issue in which I am very well versed. I simply don't want to be propagandized. And when I read an article in a matter in which I am well versed, I am often outraged at the slants and selective omissions.

Joe Tedesky , May 19, 2018 at 9:22 am

I have come to the conclusion that they are all bad, and that this constant pounding of Russia interference in our American political establishments is nonsense.

Whether it be Russia-Gate or Uranium One scandals, it always leads back to Russian collusion, or how Putin is hell bent on subverting American democracy. It's like the word come down from a Bilderberg high echelon get together where the supreme elite said, 'now you political puppies go fight amongst yourselves but remember Putin is our target'. After all Putin's handling of the Rothschild oligarchs is enough to get even the most least powerful leaders into hot water, let a lone the world's other nuclear super power. So Putin must go.

So while Palestinians this week died protesting their confinement, N Korea was insulted away from the negotiating table over a Gaddafi inspired threat, as Europeans looked for another currency to replace the U.S. Dollar, our American news media gave little time to those news stories, as it stayed stuck on Russia-Gate, or as FOX is attempting to do with their trying to launch a Hillary investigation into her poor use of computer servers added to her selling off uranium stock, we Americans are isolated by what really should matter. Please keep your eyes on the center ring, for what's around it doesn't matter, is the mantra.

What I'm saying, is that these scandals are in house fights, and that the MSM's circumventing of any real news, is just another way to dumb us Americans down. Not to say that investigating political chicanery isn't a priority, but should these investigations be so overwhelmingly reported over any or all other news? If you answered no to that, then should we next begin to wonder to what we are not being told, is exactly the very news we should be talking about?

phillip sawicki , May 19, 2018 at 2:02 pm

Back in 1973 there was a feeling of inevitability as the Watergate investigation progressed, every week more incriminating details that we know now came from inside the FBI. The Mueller probe, on the contrary, seems to be stumbling forward and not really getting anywhere as it goes fishing for info and issues like Stormy's accusations take over the news.

It's possible, I suppose, that Mueller will come up with something before November, but there's no sense of inevitability. How could there be? Sixty three American citizens voted for Trump. Bad news for the country, bad news for Clinton, bad news for the MSM, bad news for the Deep State. Ironies abound.

Joe Tedesky , May 19, 2018 at 2:58 pm

The one comparison between 1973 and 2018, is that they have the exact same calendar dates. In my mind, the only thing WaterGate has in common with Russia-Gate is that the MSM likes to say that the two scandals are the same. And why not, when you are huckstering the news to sell insurance and pharmaceutical commercials?

WaterGate was of course a break in, and finding Nixon's involvement was key. Russia-Gate wasn't a break in, and as Mueller's Investigation is struggling to find Russian collusion, Mueller gives the impression that he's on to something, when eventually we find out he has nothing. I mean the WaterGate investigation started out with the knowledge that there was a break in, but the Russia-Gate investigation began with lots of allegations with no proof to be found. WaterGate didn't, at least in my opinion, start out as a fishing expedition, but the Russia-Gate Investigation was not only a fishing expedition in as much as it has been a deep sea fishing trip at its best.

You pointed out the voter support of Trump phillip but might I reference you to the many who didn't vote, or at least the bunches of voters who left the presidential pick a blank? America is broken phillip, every institution and every agency which operates inside of it is too. In my estimation to make it right we Americans will need to go back to starting from scratch. Let it begin!

backwardsevolution , May 19, 2018 at 8:05 pm

Joe -- Russiagate was made up, fashioned out of nothing. If we want to talk about collusion, we need to talk about Uranium One. Now there's where some serious money changed hands, and the Clinton's hands are all over it.

What is comparable to Watergate, but a hundred times worse, is what is trickling out now and what the media have gone out of their way to cover up -- the plot by James Comey and other members of the FBI, John Brennan and others in the CIA, Clapper, the Department of Justice (Rod Rosenstein, Sally Yates, Loretta Lynch, Hillary Clinton) to overthrow a duly-elected President.

The Inspector General's report on the FBI and the Department of Justice's role in all of this is apparently damning. Some of these people may end up in jail.

I think Russiagate was invented because, as Hillary said, "If they find out what we've done, we'll all hang." She was trading favors with foreign governments in exchange for cash into the Clinton Foundation. That's why she was using a private server. She didn't want to use the government servers as they would have a back-up of her files, and when you're intent on stealing, the last thing you want is a "back-up" of your dirty dealings.

All of this Russiagate insanity has been one great big deflection away from the true crimes.

It looks like all of them are going to have a date with a Grand Jury.

Joe Tedesky , May 19, 2018 at 9:03 pm

I think RussiaGate was invented also. I also think it's pretty obvious that Hillary gets a free get out of jail card when it comes to any FBI investigation over her. I also believe that if Trump were in cahoots with Putin, that Mueller by now would have revealed it, as Democrates would be whooping it up better than a homeless person hitting the super multi-million dollar lotto.

The Empire is falling, and the Empire is blaming all it's idiotic decisions on the Russians. Our MSM which was always a subject of debate, has gone off the rails with this 24/7 anti-Trump, anti-Russian, news business. I'm suffering from all this hate aimed at Russia, and I'm believing that our MSM is winning on that front. Like I said, both Hillary and Donald's past practices may need investigated, but when will we Americans start discussing the many other issues of our day, is all I'm asking?

I'm tired of the constant insinuating that Trump is a Putin puppet, as I'm also experiencing fatigue over Hillary's being continually left off the hook. Although even more so, I'm sick of all of them, I'm just venting over our sad state of us citizens being well informed.

Good to hear from you backwardsevolution. Joe

backwardsevolution , May 19, 2018 at 9:48 pm

Joe Tedesky -- "Like I said, both Hillary and Donald's past practices may need investigated, but when will we Americans start discussing the many other issues of our day, is all I'm asking?"

Yes, you are so right, Joe, because those other issues are what the average American really cares about: the price of health care and housing, and whether they're going to be able to put food on the table.

Of course, had Donald Trump been colluding with the Russians, that certainly would have been of importance to the country, but they've been looking under every rock for almost two years now and haven't found anything. Well, Stormy Daniels did pop up, but, hey, Trump never professed to be an angel. All they've done is tied him up in knots and prevented him from dealing with the important issues. They have also left far too many Americans with the impression that he's a traitor when he's not, and by holding these charges above his head, they've probably pushed him into doing things that he wouldn't ordinarily have done.

If what I'm hearing about the Inspector General's report is anything close to the truth, then these people (the Deep State people I mentioned above) tried to overthrow a sitting President. These people are running a parallel government. That is very dangerous and will have to be dealt with severely, with criminal charges.

Hey, Joe, on that happy note, you have a good night.

Joe Tedesky , May 19, 2018 at 10:37 pm

I'm suffering from RussiaGate fatigue, like I said. I never bought into the Russian collusion thing. I'm more bothered by the forever nonsense the MSM has us on, where there is no closure. I mean you sit and listen to people like Rachel go through their hysterics and after 20 minutes per monologue she gives you nothing.

The Hillary crimes are frustrating because nothing comes of her getting to meet the hard justice she deserves. Seriously this evil witch starts a civil war withinside of our governments bureaucracy, and yet no one hears that much about it the way it's going down. On the other hand Donald Trump for mostly the bad of it, gets news coverage beyond what any America politician ever gets, and we're suppose to believe we are operating on normal.

No backwardsevolution the Empire is in trouble, and we are watching it make an ass out of itself while it goes down the drain. I'm sorry at this point in time I don't see any good guys, or gals.

I might add Trump's Middle East policies among his other hard nosed geopolitical endeavors leaves me exhausted trying to figure him out. Hillary should no doubt be in jail, but here we are still on the down low and nothing seems to be working as it should.

Thanks, I do value your opinion. Joe

backwardsevolution , May 19, 2018 at 11:38 pm

Joe Tedesky -- "I'm sorry at this point in time I don't see any good guys, or gals."

Yes, I agree. One good thing about Trump's presidency is that it has exposed the Deep State actors. These are the people who run the government, not the President, and it doesn't matter who is elected. If you don't play along, you're Kennedy'd! That's why so few good people ever vie for top positions; you get hammered.

Joe, the World Cup is coming and all is well! I'm going to knock off, watch some old videos, and get myself psyched up. Good talking to you, Joe, as always.

Realist , May 20, 2018 at 4:06 am

Watergate was focussed. Iran-Contra was focussed. Underlings were convicted in both on charges directly related to the main issues. Nixon resigned and Reagan retired, the Congress not having the will to impeach him, which would have been politically unpopular. "Out-of-the-loop" Bushdaddy saved himself from later impeachment by pardoning some key cabinet members under Reagan (most notably Caspar Weinberger). In contrast, Whitewater blossomed into a full-blown fishing expedition, as has so-called Russiagate. Ken Starr didn't just investigate a land deal or management of the White House travel office, but went over the lives of both Clinton's with a fine tooth comb, eventually precipitating impeachment charges over a stained blue dress. Now, I suppose, the Clinton's and their Democratic adherents feel that turnabout is fair play, though it is undoubtedly just as divisive and destructive to the country as their go round. The woman has obviously been traumatized during her years in the public arena and in the aftermath of the election, but she does the country a great disservice by pushing her vendetta.

Joe Tedesky , May 20, 2018 at 9:09 am

The Clinton pass was always going to be a problem, and many people knew that going into the 2016 Presidential Election Campaign. This didn't stop Hillary though. Why, many here on this comment board wrote with good reason why the Clintons should remain in retirement, but oh no Hillary was going to run come hell or high water. Only a sociopath would overlook so many good reasons of why not to run.

Great perspective Realist. One would think you had a scientific mind . oh wait you do. Joe

Herman , May 19, 2018 at 9:09 am

As I'm sure others commenters on this site will note, those guilty of trying to create a lynch mob and encourage hysteria, will as with Iraq WMD's, emerge unscathed, even more honored for their service to America. And with and increasing number of Americans, we will feel more and more that you cant believe anything anymore and that is a disastrous position to be in for a nation.

mike k , May 19, 2018 at 9:59 am

Herman, it has always been a mistake to rely on belief without careful examination. Plato said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Discerning the truth is intellectual work -- something our false educational system does not teach us to do. Those who learn to sort things out and demand the real truth are mostly self-educated. To wake others up who have been taught to conform and accept authorities, is a lengthy and often thankless task. The tenacity with which many hold onto their false beliefs, is a formidable obstacle to creating a new and better society. I wish I knew a way to accomplish this awakening of our fellows, but I do not. We are left with the option of shortcuts, which are no better than new forms of propaganda to compete with those our subjects have already incorporated in their thinking and character. Following a new leader or movement seems the most one can expect from our brainwashed brothers and sisters

[May 23, 2018] If the Trump-Russia set up began in spring 2016 or earlier, presumably it was undertaken on the assumption that HRC would win the election. (I say "presumably" because you never can tell..) If so, then the operation would have been an MI6 / Ukrainian / CIA coordinated op intended to frame Putin, not Trump

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Could it be that Mueller is there for some other reason? we know there are special interests that the democrats represent and since the US federal system doesn't really lend itself to any sort of coalition govt of any form, that the investigation is cover for the those interests being represented in some fashion the form doesn't allow for. ..."
"... Presumably the op would have allowed HRC to undertake just the sort of actions against Russia that, after Trump's election, have been undertaken in any case. The difference being that there is at least some reason to bet that HRC along with Obama knew something of the operation, and that in conjunction with UK/Ukrainian interests was planning her early foreign policy directives. The election of Trump on this reading was accidental to the op as originally designed. Is this right? ..."
May 23, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

heath | May 22, 2018 11:28:05 AM | 8

Could it be that Mueller is there for some other reason? we know there are special interests that the democrats represent and since the US federal system doesn't really lend itself to any sort of coalition govt of any form, that the investigation is cover for the those interests being represented in some fashion the form doesn't allow for.

fastfreddy , May 22, 2018 11:46:23 AM | 11

Heath,

That's what I'm thinking. It is apparent the "The Mueller Investigation" is - firstly - a major distraction. It is also apparent that it doesn't make any headway, lead to any conclusions or indictments of any big fish.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/20/17031772/mueller-indictments-grand-jury

WJ , May 22, 2018 1:00:41 PM | 17
Re: Mueller. If the Trump-Russia set up began in spring 2016 or earlier, presumably it was undertaken on the assumption that HRC would win the election. (I say "presumably" because you never can tell..) If so, then the operation would have been an MI6 / Ukrainian / CIA coordinated op intended to frame Putin, not Trump.

Presumably the op would have allowed HRC to undertake just the sort of actions against Russia that, after Trump's election, have been undertaken in any case. The difference being that there is at least some reason to bet that HRC along with Obama knew something of the operation, and that in conjunction with UK/Ukrainian interests was planning her early foreign policy directives. The election of Trump on this reading was accidental to the op as originally designed. Is this right?

WJ , May 22, 2018 1:08:52 PM | 18
The other possibility being that the operation was demanded by Trump winning the Republican primary, as a kind of insurance policy. He being the only candidate who could not be predictably counted on to follow the anti-Putin hard liners in the Military-intelligence community, something needed to be done to ensure that, on the off chance that he won, the anti-Russian measures already being planned for would not be affected.

So it is perhaps unlikely that this op would have been necessary had, say, Jeb Bush or Rubio won the primary.

What made it necessary was the unknown quantity that Trump represented. This would mean, again, that the op was not so much partisan (Dem v Rep) as it was about ensuring continuity of military-intelligence decisions in face of relatively unknown entity. Had Bush won the R nomination, there would have been no op because the Bush family like the Clintons are down for whatever.

BraveNewWorld , May 22, 2018 1:25:22 PM | 20
If they shutdown Mueller you can expect a sudden gush of leaks like some one took a shot gun to a fire hose.

[May 21, 2018] Sergei Skripal discharged from hospital

May 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Posted by: Ort | May 20, 2018 2:54:33 PM | 13

nofollow" href="https://www.rt.com/uk/427080-skripal-salisbury-nhs-poison/">"Sergei Skripal discharged from hospital after being poisoned by 'deadly' agent"
"Sergei Skripal discharged from hospital after being poisoned by 'deadly' agent"
_____________________________________

The link is to RT, in case anyone missed this report.

It's been a busy "news" week, between significant geopolitical events, the usual US school massacres, and the bread-and-circuses distraction of a UK Royal Wedding. Perhaps this is why the above-cited "news" didn't seem to get much attention.

I'll stop enclosing "news" in ironic quotation marks-- the " key on my laptop is buckling under the strain of overuse. But I used them because every fresh installment of alleged news about the Skripals simply extends, or exacerbates, the riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma that is l'affaire Skripal.

One reason for the lack of reaction to this latest "development" (those quotes needed again) is that it is shown through a glass darkly-- the glass being the government controlled and managed information bubble. Like the earlier "developments", it's eerily self-contained.

Like many barflies, I have my idiosyncratic axes to grind, soapboxes to climb, bees in my bonnet, etc. After the mysterious events of 9/11/2001, I coined the term "pernicious factoids" to describe the bits of manufactured falsehoods and disinformation used to construct and perpetuate bogus Official Narratives.

For example, not long ago a minor New York Times article about Lee Harvey Oswald's gravesite began with something like, "When Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza...". This is a pernicious factoid; they remain embedded like toxic prions in the collective consciousness, and are regarded as reasonably true, correct, and meaningful.

Likewise, the other day the Russian ambassador to the UK, Alexander Yakovenko, gave a routine press conference. As usual, some wretched would-be UK journalist took issue with Yakovenko's reiterating that the Russians are required by law to interview the Skripals personally and directly to confirm their status and wishes.

The questioner hectored the ambassador with the point that Yulia Skripal had released statements through the police indicating that she, at least, did not wish to meet personally with Russian officials because she was afraid to do so.

Ambassador Yakovenko, also as usual, patiently-- and a bit too diffidently-- explained that a third-party statement is not the same as first-hand communication. I get it-- he's a "real" diplomat, not like the whacked-out modern Western berserker-diplomats. So he's not about to tear this bumptious idiot's head off.

But I wanted to scream. This is the way pernicious factoids work. Everybody in that room was at least willing to pretend that yeah, OK, Yulia actually did give the police that statement. Or a statement. Probably. But hmmm, if one really stops and thinks about it, everything the public has been told about the circumstances of the, er, events comes from official sources and/or highly-compromised and untrustworthy mass-media organizations.

So, the ostensibly remarkable development of Sergei Skripal's recovery from a "military-grade nerve agent" just circles around the disinformation/memory hole. And, since these virtual "developments" are largely fact-free, the stories usually pad out the minimal "news" by revisiting and reiterating the same festering gutpile of pernicious factoids we've been sorting through for months: the supposed doorknob-smearing, the peculiar aspects of the "poisoning", etc.

End of rant, but only because my " key is overheating and seizing up. ;)
_____________________________________

Bonus Fun Fact: I was curious about the context of Churchill's "riddle" quote, so I looked it up. According to the "Phrase Finder" website, it was uttered during an October, 1939 radio broadcast: "I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest."

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose! div

Bart Hansen , May 20, 2018 3:21:06 PM | 18
13 - On the Skripals, no reporter I have read on the release of either Skripal has bothered to wonder why there are no photos of them at all, especially of the normal press availability on the hospital steps thanking their doctors, no information on their whereabouts, health or future plans.

[May 18, 2018] The UK s obsession with the Russian bogeyman doesn t stack up by Mary Dejevsky

Notable quotes:
"... Now, it is hard to know what to make of all this, other than to point out that he was speaking to fellow security chiefs. Maybe, among themselves, they find it more morale-boosting to demonise an old enemy than to take on adversaries that have emerged more recently, are more complicated and against which they have so far perhaps had less success. ..."
"... the conclusion has to be that Russia is considered a "safe", useful, and almost eternal enemy by the UK's powers-that-be. Some of us may hope for something better, but it seems a long way away. ..."
May 14, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

The UK's obsession with the Russian bogeyman doesn't stack up Mary Dejevsky The head of MI5 has joined the security establishment's anti-Putin onslaught. But his organization agrees that Moscow is not the greatest threat

Today's speech by the head of MI5 , Andrew Parker, has been presented as a first – the first time the head of the UK's domestic intelligence service has delivered a speech abroad, specifically at a conference of security heads in Berlin. But this is the only respect in which it is a first. It might as accurately be described as the latest in a series of public utterances by UK intelligence chiefs and top brass, which began last autumn and continued with the head of GCHQ addressing a cybersecurity conference in Manchester last month.

"MI5 chief: Kremlin is 'chief protagonist' in campaign to undermine west" Read more

In part, this reflects a deliberate decision by the intelligence services and the government that they should be more open about what they do, with a view to gaining greater public understanding – and expanding recruitment at a time when they face competition for tech-savvy graduates from richer and less restrictive employers. But this season of intelligence and military speeches has also facilitated the communication of an apparently co-ordinated message. As a country, the UK now sees Russia as its prime adversary.

The poisoning of Sergei Skripal , the former Russian spy, and his daughter in Salisbury took the UK's official anti-Russia stance to new heights. And its diplomatic success in persuading so many other countries to expel Russian diplomats in protest – the biggest ever "collective expulsion of security agents", we were told – seems to have emboldened London to view itself as the potential leader of an international anti-Russia front, as the Guardian recently reported .

The invective produced by Parker today – and heavily sold to the media – was, in its way, extraordinary. In tone, it was quite different from the cold war register, which was formal and, well, cold. This attack was populist, direct, and far outside the diplomatic register. Here is just a sample.

The Kremlin was engaging in "deliberate, targeted, malign activity intended to undermine our free, open and democratic societies". The west had to "shine a light through the fog of lies, half-truths and obfuscation that pours out of their propaganda machine". Russia, he said caustically, had as one of its "central and entirely admirable aims to build Russian greatness on the world stage". But it had repeatedly chosen "to pursue that aim through aggressive and pernicious actions by its military and intelligence services". In so doing, it risked becoming "a more isolated pariah".

So long as the UK refuses consular access to Yulia Skripal, Russia can – with some justification – ask just who has a monopoly on a fog of lies.'

Now, it is hard to know what to make of all this, other than to point out that he was speaking to fellow security chiefs. Maybe, among themselves, they find it more morale-boosting to demonise an old enemy than to take on adversaries that have emerged more recently, are more complicated and against which they have so far perhaps had less success. There is a sense too, for the UK at least, that relations with Russia have been so bad for so long that magnifying the supposed Russia threat is a cost-free enterprise in diplomatic terms.

It might also be worth considering whether there are budgetary and Brexit angles. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US and the UK, in particular, scaled back their government-backed research on Russia and lost a great deal of expertise, which they are now trying to rebuild. That means they have to make a case for more taxpayers' money, and scare tactics are one way to do that. For the UK, there may also be the fear that it will find the European Union less inclined to keep London in the intelligence loop, and – at a time when the US is looking a far less reliable ally – it might make sense to play up the Russian bogeyman, not least as Vladimir Putin begins his fourth term in office. Nothing like starting as you intend to go on.

Yet it is still difficult to see the sense in this. Russia has become inured to UK scolding of this kind, and treats it with contempt – as its social media response to Parker's speech shows. What is more, so long as the UK maintains its silence on the Skripals' fate and refuses consular access to Yulia Skripal, Russia can – with some justification, I would argue – ask just who has a monopoly on a "fog of lies".

Nor will the tone necessarily chime well with official views of Russia in Germany and France, which are not necessarily less tough in practice, but certainly more nuanced, and better informed. The UK seems intent – despite recent legislation about dubious money in London – in keeping its diplomatic and business relations with Russia in separate boxes. Germany, for one, does not have that luxury.

The conclusion has to be that Russia is considered a 'safe', useful, and almost eternal enemy by the UK's powers-that-be

The UK's rhetorical onslaught on Russia is even more puzzling when you examine the security services' own priorities. "Is terrorism the biggest threat facing the UK?" visitors to the MI5 website are asked in a pop-up called "fact or fiction". Click no, and this is the response: "The biggest threat we currently face comes from international terrorist groups and individuals inspired by them. Terrorist organisations in Northern Ireland also continue to pose a serious threat."

Now it is true that the threat from terrorism and Islamic State was also broached by Parker in his speech, but this was not the section spun in advance to the media; it was not the aspect MI5 wanted above all to be noticed. So the conclusion has to be that Russia is considered a "safe", useful, and almost eternal enemy by the UK's powers-that-be. Some of us may hope for something better, but it seems a long way away.

• Mary Dejevsky is a former foreign correspondent in Moscow

[May 18, 2018] Guardian fake news. UK media tries to keep Skripal poisoning hoax alive (Video)

May 18, 2018 | theduran.com

Alex Christoforou with Alexander Mercouris discuss a recent Guardian post that claims 100 police have received psychological help after Salisbury attack.

Fake news, trying to create false connections between police psychological issues and a rather dubious UK poisoning false flag. Via The Guardian

Almost 100 Wiltshire police officers and staff have sought psychological support after the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, the Guardian can reveal.

Among those who have asked for help were officers who initially responded to the collapse of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, and those who were at or close to the various investigation sites in subsequent days and weeks.

Some reported feeling disorientated and anxious while others were concerned about the possible long-term health effects on the public.

While the Skripal poisoning story has faded from much of the mainstream media news cycle, as it was increasingly exposed as a complete hoax and embarrassment for the May government, the Guardian appears to be trying to resurrect "the Russians did" Novichok narrative.


Rick Oliver 3 hours ago ,

It is about time your stupid leader and her clown were put on the stage to explain to all the world why they chose to defame the integrity of Russia in such an unbelievable set of circumstances that only children under the age of ten would not understand !! How can any Nation since this demonic happening , ever trust this self - centred Bozo from ever making a sensible judgement for the future of mankind !

louis robert 13 hours ago ,

What a shameful staging! At the very least, try and respect children!... Keep them away from all that nonsense, Ms May!

André De Koning an hour ago ,

UK has lost it completely and the Guardian has fallen prey to the CIA Mockingbird Operation (infiltration and manipulation of media). Used to be a good paper under Alan Rushbridger and protection of Snowden, Assange etc. Now it has lost it altogether with useless editorial board. The woman in charge must have something in common with Nikki Haley: incapable of nuance and irrationally convinced of her being right (without research lots of claims about Assad, Putin etc.).

Wesa F. André De Koning 35 minutes ago ,

When ever I read such nonsense it always brings a smile as I think of what Clint Eastwood said in his summing up of Politicians and not in General.

[May 13, 2018] Trump's Penis Is It Presidential by Douglas Valentine

Notable quotes:
"... According to Giuliani, setting up shell companies is a trick people of wealth learned from either the Israeli Mafia or the CIA. Though it could be the other way around. ..."
"... Rhetorical question: What could somebody do with $250,000? Answer: pay off two prostitutes! ..."
May 11, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org
Donald Trump's sex life is nobody's business but his own. And maybe Melania's, if her Pre-Nuptial Agreement (PNA) stipulates that she can sue his fat ass for divorce and receive a huge percentage of his rumored wealth if he cheats on her, too often.

Like the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) Trump's fixer, Michael Cohen, signed with porn star Stormy Daniels (who had a quickie with Trump in 2006), prenups and private goon squads are standard fare for people of wealth.

But is Trump wealthy? And if so, where did he get his cash?

Some people say he laundered about $400 million in drug money for the Israeli Mafia's Russian franchise back in the early 1990's, in exchange for everything he ever wanted. I don't know if that's a fact. That's what I hear. People say it. Maybe somebody like Robert Mueller should investigate?

Fox News says the president isn't mobbed up, that everyone in New York City has to work with the Mafia if they want a hotel constructed on time. And that could be true.

But what is Truth? It's impossible to tell anymore.

The Truth could be that either the Deep State or the Israeli Mafia is forcing Trump to do many terrible things he doesn't really want to do. Like deep-sixing the Iran deal. Somebody's fingerprints are all over that baby's behind. Maybe Michael Cohen knows? Somebody should ask him.

Trump is obviously a victim of either the Deep State or the Israeli Mafia and its American franchise. You choose. But consider this: On the same day Trump scrapped the Iran deal, someone said that Russian billionaire Victor Vekselberg (who just happens to be Putin's BFF) wired $500,000 into a bank account that hatchet man Cohen (who doubles as Trump's real estate broker) set up for the purpose of issuing the $130,000 hush payment to Stormy Daniels.

I don't know if that's true. Sean Hannity says it isn't true. Rudy Giuliani says it might be true, and that it doesn't matter even if it is True, because people of wealth often set up shell companies to hide their business dealings from the Public Eye, which is their right as people of wealth.

According to Giuliani, setting up shell companies is a trick people of wealth learned from either the Israeli Mafia or the CIA. Though it could be the other way around.

Another one of Trump's prerogatives as a person of wealth is the right to charge people money to play with him. Trump's business consultant, Michael Cohen (who may work for the Israeli Mafia, I don't know), funnels such "pay to play" money into the same bank accounts he, Cohen, uses to pay off the women Trump has casual and unsatisfactory (for them ) sex with.

BTW, I forgot to mention it, but Vekselberg's cousin, American citizen Andrew Intrater, donated $250,000 to Trump's inauguration fund.

Rhetorical question: What could somebody do with $250,000? Answer: pay off two prostitutes!

Somebody in the Deep State (which, according to Hannity, is the code name for the Justice Department) knows about this, but let's it happen, because Trump is, after all, a person of wealth with certain rights to privacy.

... ... ...

Stormy, who whipped Trump's fat ass with a copy of Trump Magazine back in 2006, is an eyewitness to The Thing. When asked by Penthouse to compare his penis size to "his fingers," Daniels said, "I don't want to shame anybody."

... ... ...

[May 13, 2018] The Skripal Affair A Lie Too Far

"They are liars. And they know that they are liars," the late Egyptian writer and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz once wrote: "And we know that they are liars. Even so, they keep lying...."
Notable quotes:
"... of a type developed by Russia ..."
"... The western modus operandi is the same in the Skripal case. The Tories rushed to conclusions and issued a 24-hour ultimatum to the Russian government to prove its innocence, or rather to admit its guilt. How was the so-called novichok delivered to London, did President Vladimir Putin authorise the attack, did Russia lose control of its stockpile? The prime minister and her foreign secretary had in effect declared Russia guilty as charged. No objective police investigation, no due process, no presumption of innocence, no evidence was necessary: it was "sentence first, verdict later", as the Red Queen declared in Alice in Wonderland . ..."
"... The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, stated for the record that "as soon as the rumors, fed by the British leadership, about the poisoning of Skripal appeared, we immediately requested access to this [toxic] substance so that our experts could analyze it in accordance with the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons." After the British ambassador visited the Russian foreign ministry on 13 March to receive the formal Russian reply to the British ultimatum, the foreign ministry in Moscow issued a communiqué: " The [Salisbury] incident appears to be yet another crooked attempt by the UK authorities to discredit Russia. Any threat to take 'punitive' measures against Russia will meet with a response. The British side should be aware of that." The Russian government in fact proposed that the alleged poisoning of the Skripals should be examined by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague, according to procedures to which Britain itself had agreed when the OPCW was established in 1997. ..."
"... In the meantime, President Putin weighed in. "I guess any reasonable person [has] realised," he said, "that this is complete absurd[ity] and nonsense. [How could] anybody in Russia allow themselves such actions on the eve of the [Russian] presidential election and the football World Cup? This is unthinkable." In any police inquiry, investigators look for means, motive and opportunity. On these grounds did the trail of guilt lead to Moscow? ..."
"... The British PowerPoint presentation did not stop with its two main canards. It goes on to refer to "Russian malign activity" including, inter alia ..."
"... bourrage de crâne ..."
"... On 14 April, Minister Lavrov at a meeting in Moscow provided the answer. The substance used to attack the Skripals was laced with a substance know as BZ which incapacitates rather than kills and takes longer to work than an instant acting nerve agent which kills immediately. The United States, Britain and other NATO countries have developed this toxin and put it into service; the Soviet Union never did so. ..."
"... how did the perpetrators obtain the BZ toxin and bring it to Salisbury, did MI5 or MI6 authorise a false flag attack against the Skripals, or was it authorised by the British cabinet or by the prime minister alone? Or did British authorities lose control of their stockpiles? The trail of evidence does not lead to Moscow; it leads to London. ..."
"... A prima facie case can be made that the British government is lying about the Skripal affaire . Suspicion always falls upon those who act deviously, who hide behind clever turns of phrase and procedural and rhetorical smokescreens. British authorities are now saying that they have other top secret evidence, which explains everything, but unfortunately it can't be publicised. Nevertheless, the British government appears to have leaked it to the press. The Times published a story about a covert Russian lab producing nerve agents and it spread like wild fire across the Mainstream Media. The Daily Mirror put out a story about a Russian secret assassins' training manual. These stories are laughable. Is the Tory government that desperate? Is the British "everyman" that gullible? ..."
"... The secret assassin's manual reminds me of the 1924 "Zinoviev Letter", a counterfeit document produced by White Russians in Germany, purporting to demonstrate Soviet interference in British elections and planning for a socialist revolution. It was early days of "fake news". Parliamentary elections were underway in October 1924 and the Tories used the letter to attack the credibility of the Labour party. It was whipping up the red scare, and it worked like a charm. The Tories won a majority government. Soviet authorities claimed that the letter was bogus and they demanded a third party, independent investigation to ascertain the truth, just as the Russian government has done now. In 1924, the Tories refused, and understandably so, since they had a lot to hide. It took seventy-five years to determine that "the letter" was in fact counterfeit. ..."
"... déjà vu. ..."
"... "They are liars. And they know that they are liars," the late Egyptian writer and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz once wrote: "And we know that they are liars. Even so, they keep lying...." ..."
"... The Tories are trying doggedly to maintain control of the narrative. Stakes are high for if it eventuates that the Tories have lied deliberately for political gain, at the risk of destabilising European, indeed world peace and security, the Tory government should be forced to resign and new elections, called. Then, the British electorate can decide whether it wants to be governed by reckless, mendacious Tory politicians who risk to provoke war against the Russian Federation. ..."
Apr 18, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

On 4 March 2018 it was a foggy day in southern England, and the MI6 Russian spy Sergei Viktorovich Skripal and his daughter Yulia stepped out for a stroll, stopped at the local pub in Salisbury, went to lunch at a nearby restaurant, and then took a walk in the park where they collapsed on a park bench. What had happened to them? Did they suffer from food poisoning? Or was Sergei Skripal involved in some dark affaire and the object of a hit by persons unknown, his daughter being an accidental victim?

The police received a call that day at 4:15pm reporting two people in distress. Emergency services were despatched immediately. The Skripals were rushed to hospital, while the local police launched an investigation. It began to look like attempted murder, but the police urged patience, saying it could take months before they might know what had happened and who, if anyone, was responsible.

The Conservative government decided that it did not need to wait for a police investigation. "The Russians" had tried to assassinate a former intelligence officer turned informant for MI6. Skripal went to jail for that, but was released four years later in an exchange of agents with the United States. Now, "the Russians," so the Tory hypothesis goes, wanted to settle old scores. Less than 24 hours after the incident in Salisbury, the British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, suggested that the Russian government was the prime suspect in what looked like an attempt gone wrong to assassinate Sergei Skripal.

On 12 March the foreign secretary summoned the Russian ambassador to inform him that a nerve agent, A-234, had been used against the Skripals. How did you do it, Johnson wanted to know, or did the Russian government lose control of its stocks of chemical weapons? He gave the Russian ambassador 24 hours to respond. In point of fact, the Russian government does not possess any stockpiles of chemical weapons or nerve agents, having destroyed them all as of September 2017.

Later that day, the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in the House of Commons that the Skripals, then said to be in a coma, were poisoned with "a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia " (italics added) called a 'novichok', a Russian word having various possible translations into English (beginner, novice, newcomer, etc.). May claimed that since the Soviet Union was known to have produced this chemical weapon, or nerve agent (also known as A-234), that it was " highly likely " that the Russian government was guilty of the attack on the Skripals.

Here is what the prime minister said in the House of Commons: "Either this was a direct act by the Russian State against our country. Or the Russian government lost control of this potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others." The hurried British accusations were redolent of those in 2014 alleging Russian government complicity or direct involvement in the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines MH 17 over the Ukraine. Within hours of the destruction of MH 17, the United States and its vassals, including Britain, accused Russia of being responsible.

The western modus operandi is the same in the Skripal case. The Tories rushed to conclusions and issued a 24-hour ultimatum to the Russian government to prove its innocence, or rather to admit its guilt. How was the so-called novichok delivered to London, did President Vladimir Putin authorise the attack, did Russia lose control of its stockpile? The prime minister and her foreign secretary had in effect declared Russia guilty as charged. No objective police investigation, no due process, no presumption of innocence, no evidence was necessary: it was "sentence first, verdict later", as the Red Queen declared in Alice in Wonderland .

On 13 March the Russian embassy informed the Foreign Office that the Russian Federation was not involved in any way with the Salisbury incident. We will not respond to an ultimatum, came the reply from Moscow. The eloquent Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, Mariia Zakharova, characterised the British démarche as a "circus show". Actually, Foreign Office clerks must have told Boris Johnson that Russia would not respond to such an ultimatum so that it was a deliberate British attempt to provoke a negative Russian reply.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, stated for the record that "as soon as the rumors, fed by the British leadership, about the poisoning of Skripal appeared, we immediately requested access to this [toxic] substance so that our experts could analyze it in accordance with the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons." After the British ambassador visited the Russian foreign ministry on 13 March to receive the formal Russian reply to the British ultimatum, the foreign ministry in Moscow issued a communiqué: " The [Salisbury] incident appears to be yet another crooked attempt by the UK authorities to discredit Russia. Any threat to take 'punitive' measures against Russia will meet with a response. The British side should be aware of that." The Russian government in fact proposed that the alleged poisoning of the Skripals should be examined by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague, according to procedures to which Britain itself had agreed when the OPCW was established in 1997.

On 14 March the British government expelled 23 Russian diplomats, and a few days later the Russian side expelled 23 British diplomats and shuttered the offices of the British Council in Russia. At the same time, the British appealed to their allies and to the European Union to show solidarity by expelling Russian diplomats. Twenty-eight countries did so, though for most it was one or two expulsions, tokenism to appease the British. Other countries -- for example, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Portugal -- refused to join the stampede. Going over the top, the United States expelled sixty diplomats and closed the Russian consulate in Seattle. The Russians responded in kind with sixty expulsions and the closure of the US consulate in St. Petersburg. Momentum seemed to be building toward a major confrontation. The British prime minister even alluded to the possibility of military action .

In the meantime, President Putin weighed in. "I guess any reasonable person [has] realised," he said, "that this is complete absurd[ity] and nonsense. [How could] anybody in Russia allow themselves such actions on the eve of the [Russian] presidential election and the football World Cup? This is unthinkable." In any police inquiry, investigators look for means, motive and opportunity. On these grounds did the trail of guilt lead to Moscow?

Momentum is sometimes like a balloon, it blows up and then it suddenly bursts. The British case against Russia began to fall apart almost from the time it was made. In late March the Russian newspaper Kommersant leaked a British PowerPoint presentation sent to eighty embassies in Moscow. It asserted, inter alia , that the British chemical weapons facility at Porton Down had positively identified the substance, which allegedly poisoned the Skripals, as a Novichok, "developed only by Russia". Both these statements are false. On 3 April Porton Down stated publicly that it could not determine the origin of the substance that poisoned the Skripals. It also came out that the formula for making a so-called novichok was published in a book by a Russian dissident and chemist, Vil Mirzayanov, who now lives in the United States. You can buy his book (published in 2008), which includes the formula, on Amazon.com . In fact, any number of governments or smart chemists or even bright undergraduate chemistry students with the proper facilities could make this nerve agent. Amongst those governments having access to the original formula are Britain and the United States. The Russian embassy in London noted in a published report that "neither Russia nor the Soviet Union has ever developed an agent named 'Novichok'." The report further stated that "While Soviet scientists did work on new types of chemical poisons, the word 'Novichok' was introduced in the West in mid-1990s to designate a series of new chemical agents developed there on the basis of information made available by Russian expat researchers. The British insistence to use the Russian word 'Novichok' is an attempt to artificially link the substance to Russia."

The British PowerPoint presentation did not stop with its two main canards. It goes on to refer to "Russian malign activity" including, inter alia , the "invasion" of Georgia in 2008, the "destabilisation" of the Ukraine and the shooting down of MH17 in 2014, and interference in the US elections in 2016. All of these claims are audacious lies , easily deconstructed and unpacked. The referenced events are also unrelated to the Salisbury incident and were raised in an attempt to smear the Russian Federation. In fact, the British PowerPoint slides represent vulgar propaganda, bourrage de crâne , as preposterous as any seen during the Cold War.

As Minister Lavrov pointed out, the Skripal case should have gone for resolution to the OPCW in The Hague. Russia would then be directly involved in the investigation and would have access to the alleged toxin, and other evidence to try to determine what had happened and who were the perpetrators. The British government at first refused to go to the OPCW, and then when it did, refused to authorise the Russian government to have access to the alleged substance, which had sickened the Skripals. That idea is "perverse", said British authorities. Actually, not at all, it is the procedure laid out in OPCW statutes, to which Britain itself agreed but has refused to respect. When the Russian representative at the OPCW proposed a resolution to the executive council, that it should respect its own statutes, he could not obtain the required vote of approval. The British were attempting to hijack the OPCW as a potential tool against the Russian Federation. Thus far, that stratagem has not worked. On 12 April the OPCW released a report stating that it had "confirm[ed] the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury ." The report said nothing about the origin of the so-called "toxic chemical". The British accusation against Russia thus remained unsubstantiated.

What I could not understand when I read the OPCW communiqué, is why the Skripals were still alive. The OPCW says that the toxic chemical used against the Skripals was "of high purity". Was it a nerve agent? Oddly, the OPCW published report avoids a straight answer. If it was a nerve agent, being of "high purity," it should have been instant acting and killed the Skripals almost immediately. Yet both have survived at the time of this writing. Something does not make sense. Of course, there could be a simple explanation for this puzzling mystery.

On 14 April, Minister Lavrov at a meeting in Moscow provided the answer. The substance used to attack the Skripals was laced with a substance know as BZ which incapacitates rather than kills and takes longer to work than an instant acting nerve agent which kills immediately. The United States, Britain and other NATO countries have developed this toxin and put it into service; the Soviet Union never did so. Traces of A-234 were also identified, but according to experts, such a concentration of the A-234 agent would cause death to anyone affected by it. "Moreover," according to the Russian embassy in London , "considering its high volatility, the detection of this substance in its initial state (pure form and high concentration) is extremely suspicious as the samples have been taken several weeks since the poisoning," Could Britsh authorities have tampered with the samples? The public OPCW report gives no details, and refers only to a "toxic chemical". Nor did the report say that the OPCW had submitted specimens of the substance to a well-known Swiss lab , which promptly reported back its surprising results. The OPCW authorities thus lied when they said that the tests "confirmed" the British identify of the "toxic chemical". Unless Porton Down knew that the substance used against the Skripals was a BZ type toxin, and so informed the OPCW, or, unless the Tory government lied in claiming publicly that it was a novichok nerve agent. The British attempted hijacking of the OPCW has compromised its independence, for the public report issued on 12 April is misleading. Moreover, since the BZ toxin is made by the US, Britain and other NATO countries, it begs the same questions, which the Tories put to Moscow: how did the perpetrators obtain the BZ toxin and bring it to Salisbury, did MI5 or MI6 authorise a false flag attack against the Skripals, or was it authorised by the British cabinet or by the prime minister alone? Or did British authorities lose control of their stockpiles? The trail of evidence does not lead to Moscow; it leads to London.

A prima facie case can be made that the British government is lying about the Skripal affaire . Suspicion always falls upon those who act deviously, who hide behind clever turns of phrase and procedural and rhetorical smokescreens. British authorities are now saying that they have other top secret evidence, which explains everything, but unfortunately it can't be publicised. Nevertheless, the British government appears to have leaked it to the press. The Times published a story about a covert Russian lab producing nerve agents and it spread like wild fire across the Mainstream Media. The Daily Mirror put out a story about a Russian secret assassins' training manual. These stories are laughable. Is the Tory government that desperate? Is the British "everyman" that gullible?

The secret assassin's manual reminds me of the 1924 "Zinoviev Letter", a counterfeit document produced by White Russians in Germany, purporting to demonstrate Soviet interference in British elections and planning for a socialist revolution. It was early days of "fake news". Parliamentary elections were underway in October 1924 and the Tories used the letter to attack the credibility of the Labour party. It was whipping up the red scare, and it worked like a charm. The Tories won a majority government. Soviet authorities claimed that the letter was bogus and they demanded a third party, independent investigation to ascertain the truth, just as the Russian government has done now. In 1924, the Tories refused, and understandably so, since they had a lot to hide. It took seventy-five years to determine that "the letter" was in fact counterfeit.

The Tories are again acting as if they have something to hide. It is déjà vu. Will it take seventy-five years to get at the truth? Are there any honest British cops, judges, civil servants ready to reveal the truth?

There is other evidence to suggest that the British narrative on the Salisbury incident is bogus. The London Metropolitan Police have sought to prevent any outside contact with the Skripals. They have taken away a recovered Yulia Skripal to an unknown location. They have until now denied Russian consular authorities access to a Russian citizen in violation of British approved consular agreements. Is there any chapter of international law, which the British government now respects? British authorities have denied access to Yulia Skripal's family in Russia; they have denied a visa to Yulia's cousin, Viktoria, to visit with her. Are British spooks grooming Yulia, briefing her to stay on the Tory narrative? Is she being manipulated like some kind of Manchurian Candidate? Have they induced her to betray her country in exchange for emoluments, a new identity in the United States, a house, a BMW and money? Are they playing upon her loyalty to her father? Based on a statement attributed to Yulia by the London Metropolitan Police, it begins to look that way . Or, is the message, sounding very British and official, quite simply a fake? The Russian embassy in London suspects that it is. What is certain is that British authorities are acting as though they have something to hide. Even German politicians, amongst others, have criticised the British rush to indict Russia. Damage control is underway. Given all the evidence, can any person with reasonable abilities to think critically believe anything the Tories are saying about the Salisbury affair?

"They are liars. And they know that they are liars," the late Egyptian writer and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz once wrote: "And we know that they are liars. Even so, they keep lying...." Mahfouz was not writing about the British, but all the same, he could have been. Are not his well-known lines apposite to the present government in London?

The Tories are trying doggedly to maintain control of the narrative. Stakes are high for if it eventuates that the Tories have lied deliberately for political gain, at the risk of destabilising European, indeed world peace and security, the Tory government should be forced to resign and new elections, called. Then, the British electorate can decide whether it wants to be governed by reckless, mendacious Tory politicians who risk to provoke war against the Russian Federation.

Tags: OPCW UK May

[May 13, 2018] The Skripals will most likely never be allowed to talk by The Saker

Where are the Scripals? How are they feeling these days? (68 days and counting), Are they alive ?
Notable quotes:
"... To clarify: Sergei Skripal has been suspected of playing a role in concocting the fake "Steele dossier" that helped launch the Russiagate NARRATIVE. ..."
"... The "dossier" was also used by Comey's FBI to obtain FISA warrants to monitor Trump campaign communications. (The NSA had intercepts all along but Comey's FBI needed a "provenance.") ..."
"... Like the Hound of the Baskervilles, the absence of questions in the British media speaks volumes. "The truth is the first casualty in a war." ..."
May 13, 2018 | www.unz.com

... ... ...

In the meantime, I want to refocus on the Skripal case. There is one outright bizarre thing which I initially dismissed, but which really is becoming disturbing: the fact that the Brits are apparently holding Sergei and Iulia Skripal incommunicado. In other words, they have been kidnapped.

There was this one single telephone call between Iulia Skripal and her sister, Victoria, in which Iulia said that she was okay (she was clearly trying to reassure Victoria) but it was clear that she could not speak freely. Furthermore, when Victoria mentioned that she would want to visit Iulia, the latter reply 'nobody will give you a visa'. After that – full silence. The Russian consulate has been making countless requests to have a visit, but all that the Brits have done since is have Scotland Yard post a letter which was evidently not written by Iulia and which said " I have access to friends and family, and I have been made aware of my specific contacts at the Russian Embassy who have kindly offered me their assistance in any way they can. At the moment I do not wish to avail myself of their services, but, if I change my mind I know how to contact them ". What friends?! What family?! Nonsense!

Her sister tried to contact her many times through various channels, including official ones, and then in total despair, she posted the following message on Facebook:

" My darling sister, Yulia! You are not communicating with us, and we don't know anything about you and Sergey Victorivich. I know that I have no right to interfere in your affairs without asking your permission, but I worry too much. I worry about you and your dad. I also worry about Nuar. [Nuar is Yulia Skrial's dog, whom she left to stay at a kennel center, while she was traveling to the UK.] He is now at the dog hotel, and they want to get paid. We have to decide something what to do with him. I am ready to take him and to take care of him until you come back home. Besides Nuar, I am concerned about your apartment and your car. Nothing has been decided about their safety and maintenance. We can help with all that, but I need your power of attorney in my or my sister Lena's name. If you think that all of these is important, draw up a power of attorney form in a Russian consulate in any country. If you won't do that, we will understand and won't interfere in your affairs.

Vika "

No reply ever came.

I just entered the following query into Google: " Skripal ". April 10 th has an entry saying that she was released from the hospital. That is the most recent one I have found. I looked on Wikipedia , the same thing, there is nothing at all.

I have to admit that when I first heard the Russian complaints I figured that this was no big deal. I thought " the Brits told the Skripals that Putin tried to poison them, they are probably afraid, and possibly still sick from whatever it is which made them sick, but the Brits would never outright kidnap two foreign citizens, and most definitely not in such a public way ".

I am not so sure anymore.

First, let's get the obvious one out of the way: the fear for the security of the Skripals. That is utter nonsense. The Brits can organize a meeting between а Russian diplomat in the UK at a highly protected UK facility, with tanks, SAS Teams on the standby, helicopters in the air, bombers, etc. That Russian diplomat could speak to them through bullet-proof glass and a phone. And, since the Russians are all so dangerous, he can be searched for weapons. All which the Skripals need to do is to tell him/her "thank you, your services are not needed". Conversation over. But the Brits refuse even that.

But let's say that the Skripals are so totally terrified of the evil Russians, that they categorically refuse. Even by video-conference. It would be traumatic for them, right? Okay.

What about a press conference then?

Even more disturbing is that, at least to my knowledge, nobody in the western corporate media is asking for an interview with them. Snowden can safely speak from Russia and address even large conferences, but the Skripals can't speak to anybody at all?

But here is the worst part of this: it has been two months already since the Skripals are held in total secrecy by the UK authorities. Two months, that is 60 days. Ask any specialist on interrogation or any psychologist what kind of effect 60 days of "specialized treatment" can do to a person.

I am not dismissing the Russian statements about "kidnapping" anymore. What I see is this: on substance, the Skripal false flag has crashed and burned, just like MH17 or the Douma chemical attack, but unlike MH17 or Douma, the Skripals are two witnesses whose testimony has the potential to result in a gigantic scandal, not just for the May government, but for all those spineless Europeans who showed "solidarity" with Britain. In other words, the Skripals will probably never be allowed to speak freely: they must either be killed or totally brainwashed or disappeared. Any other option would result in a scandal of planetary magnitude.

I can't pretend like my heart goes out to Sergei Skripal: the man was an officer who gave an oath and who then betrayed his country to the British (he was a British agent, not a Russian one as the press writes). Those holding him today are his former bosses. But Iulia? She is completely innocent and as of April 5 th (when she called her sister Victoria), she was clearly in good health and with a clear mind. Now she has been disappeared and I don't know which is worse, the fact that she might never reappear or that she might one day reappear following months of British "counseling". As for her father, he paid for his betrayal and he too deserves a better fate than being poisoned, used and then disappeared.

In the big scheme of things (the Zionists war against our entire planet), two individuals like Sergei and Iulia Skripal might not matter. But I think that the least we can do is to remember them and their plight.

This also begs the question of what kind of society we live in. I am not shocked by the fact that the British state would resort to such methods (they have always used them). I am shocked that in a so-called western "democracy" with freedom, pluralism and "European values" (whatever that means) the Brits could get away with this.

How about some "solidarity" with the Skripals – you, Europeans?!


Bigly , May 11, 2018 at 4:29 am GMT

Victoria is not Yulia's sister.

Other than that, I share your sentiments regarding Putin.

Eagle Eye , May 11, 2018 at 8:18 am GMT
As noted on this site some three weeks ago, former British ambassador Craig Murray suggested some time ago that Sergei and Yulia Skripal were most likely murdered by Western secret services in order to keep the "Russiagate" fiction (somewhat) alive.

Sergei cannot win – even if he was NOT involved in Russiagate, murdering him creates flexibility to hang the story on him without contradiction. Yulia is icing on the cake – "Surely Her Majesty's Government wouldn't murder a pretty girl like Yulia!"

Rather bizarrely, it appears appears that all premises connected with the Skripals are to be demolished, purely to protect the public, you understand.

Eagle Eye , May 11, 2018 at 1:50 pm GMT
@Eagle Eye

To clarify: Sergei Skripal has been suspected of playing a role in concocting the fake "Steele dossier" that helped launch the Russiagate NARRATIVE.

The "dossier" was also used by Comey's FBI to obtain FISA warrants to monitor Trump campaign communications. (The NSA had intercepts all along but Comey's FBI needed a "provenance.")

Whether Skripal was actually involved in inventing the dossier or not, his absence will be used to milk the narrative afloat a little longer.

Like the Hound of the Baskervilles, the absence of questions in the British media speaks volumes. "The truth is the first casualty in a war."

aleksandar , May 11, 2018 at 5:11 pm GMT
Not a good idea to mix Putin/Satanahyu and the Skripals case. The Skripal deserve one article. Even if they are probably dead.
"Western values "
Antiwar7 , May 11, 2018 at 9:41 pm GMT
@Bigly

You're right. but to explain the error in English: She's her first cousin, and in Russian, cousins are referred to as brother and sister.

El Dato , May 11, 2018 at 9:42 pm GMT
This is going Reservoir Dogs faster than expected.

My popcorn is ready!

Apparently Americans are the usual thre-colored dumbfucks and have no clue what's going on.Grunt noises is all they still understand.

Democrats' lead melting ahead of midterms as Trump turns hawkish

John Brunner was a genius.

JR , May 12, 2018 at 11:28 am GMT
Russia should request a third party for instance a well known British public figure as an intermediary to contact Skripals on behalf of Russia. The UK wil not be able to claim that such figure will put undue pressure on the Skripals and would be forced to either facilitate contact or be exposed as actually kidnapping the Skripals.

Potential intermediaries Corbyn, Galloway, UN representative, Tulsi Gabbard. There are numerous candidates.

Sean , May 12, 2018 at 5:58 pm GMT

In other words, the Skripals will probably never be allowed to speak freely: they must either be killed or totally brainwashed or disappeared. Any other option would result in a scandal of planetary magnitude.

That certainly explains why Britain did not kill them with Novichok.

Cyrano , May 12, 2018 at 6:59 pm GMT
The British are working hard on new super-secret identities for the Scripals. They are so secret that even the Scripals would not be allowed to know them. Technically, the British could tell the Scripals their new identities, but then they would have to kill them, in order to keep them secret.
Eagle Eye , May 13, 2018 at 7:42 am GMT
@Svigor

Not sure what exactly you mean by "pending."

Do you really believe the Skripal's are still alive? Can we expect to see them in public?

The traditional rule is that a person may be declared dead after one year if he hasn't been heard of from people he would normally communicate with.

Saffer , May 13, 2018 at 10:57 am GMT
It is clear that every person including The Saker who write about the Skripals and Russian affairs do not have the in-depth knowledge of John Helmer the longest serving independent western journalist in Moscow. In this post by John Helmer dated 23/03/2018

http://johnhelmer.net/the-skripal-case-goes-to-court-for-the-first-time-new-uncertainties-for-the-british-and-russian-governments/#more-18920

he writes about the British Court of Protection's findings.

Below are two excerpts (in parenthesis his comments) but I implore you to read the whole article as well as other postings on the potential appointments in Putins new government.

"British High Court Justice David Williams has issued the first court adjudication of evidence presented by the British Government of what happened to Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal when they succumbed to poisoning in Salisbury on March 4. Following three days of closed-door hearings this week in London, the judge issued a ruling for publication yesterday."

"Representing the Skripals, Vikram Sachdeva QC told the judge "that in this case at present it did not appear practicable or appropriate to seek the views of others who might be interested in the welfare of Mr Skripal (his mother perhaps) or Ms Skripal (perhaps a fiancé).

Iris , May 13, 2018 at 11:26 am GMT
" the Skripals are two witnesses whose testimony has the potential to result in a gigantic scandal, not just for the May government, but for all those spineless Europeans who showed "solidarity" with Britain . "

Based on recent history, one can safely bet that there will be no scandal.

The bombing of the Lockerbie plane was an evil crime that took 270 innocent lives, and was attributed by the official UK/US intelligence centres to the former Libyan government under late President Gaddafi.

When this government came under NATO attack in 2011, its foreign minister Moussa Koussa defected and sought refuge in London. He had previously been head of Libyan secret services for 15 years (!!!), and as such, would have organised and supervised the Lockerbie "terror" attack.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/31/moussa-koussa-foreign-minister-trial

What did the UK/US governments do with him? Send him to trial at the Hague? Of course not. He was sent to a safe heaven somewhere in the NATO proxy EAU.

Nobody cares about the victims of false flag attacks, quite the contrary: the less investigations, the more efficient the false flag.

[May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... A McClatchy journalist investigated further and came to the same conclusion as I did. The 'leak' to the New York Times was disinformation. ..."
"... Russia has not pinned the Novichok to Sweden or the Czech Republic. It said, correctly, that several countries produced Novichok. Russia did not blame the UK for the 'nerve gas attack' in Syria. Russia says that there was no gas attack in Douma. ..."
"... The claims of Russian disinformation these authors make to not hold up to scrutiny. Meanwhile there pieces themselves are full of lies, distortions and, yes, disinformation. ..."
"... Wait for an outbreak of hostilities on the Ukraine-Donbass front shortly before the beginning of the World Cup competition which is as internationally important as the Olympic Games -- as they did in 2014 with Maidan and 2016 with the Sochi Winter Olympics drug uproar, the CIA will create chaos that will take the emphasis off any Russian success, since as to them, anything negative regarding Russia is a positive for them. ..."
"... No traces of chemical weapons have been found in Douma. This means that not only the US/UK/French airstrikes were illegal under international law but even their political justification was inherently flawed. Similarly, in the Salisbury affair, no evidence of Russian involvement has been presented, while the two myths on which the British case was built (the Russian origin of the chemical substance used and the existence of proof of Russian responsibility) have been shattered. ..."
"... Given the lack of facts, the Tory leadership seems to be adopting a truly Orwellian logic: that the main proof of Russian responsibility are the Russian denials! It is hard to see how they will be able to sell this to their international partners. Self-respecting countries of G20 would not be willing to risk their reputation. ..."
"... The detail of b's analysis that stands out to me as especially significant and brilliant is his demolition of the Guardian's reuse of the Merkel "quote." ..."
"... Related to the above, consider the nature of the recently christened thought-crime, "whataboutism." The crime may be defined as follows: "Whataboutism" is the attempt to understand a truth asserted by propaganda by way of relation to other truths it has asserted contemporaneous with or prior to this one. It is to ask, "What about this *other* truth? Does this *other* truth affect our understanding of *this* truth? And if so, how does it?" ..."
"... Whataboutism seems to deny that each asserted truth stands on its own, and has no essential relation to any other past, present, or future asserted truth. ..."
"... 1984, anyone? ..."
"... The absurd story that the OPCW says there was a 100gm/100mg who knows which on the door and other sites is just so stupid its painful. ..."
"... Presumably the Skripals touch the cutlery, plates and wine glasses in the restaurant, so why weren't the staff there infected as they must have had to pick up the plates etc after the meal. Even the door to the entrance of the restaurant should be affected as they would have to push it open, thus leaving the chemical for other people to touch. Nope, nothing in this stupid story adds up and the OPCW can't even get the amounts of the chemical right. ..."
"... Biggest problem with the world today is lazy insouciant citizens. ..."
"... One very important point Lavrov made was the anti-Russian group consists of a very small number of nations representing a small fraction of humanity; ..."
"... while they have some economic and military clout, it's possible for the rest of the world's nations to sideline them and get on with the important business of forming a genuine Multipolar World Order, which is what the UN and its Charter envisioned. ..."
"... Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy' disinformation. ..."
"... Yes, exactly. The Western hegemony, i.e. the true "Axis of Evil" led by the US, and including the EU and non-Western allies, have invented the Perpetual Big Lie™. ..."
"... Witnesses? They're either confederates, dupes, or terrified by coercion. Evidence and/or technical analysis? All faked! A nominally reliable party, e.g. the president of the Czech Republic, makes statements that undermine the Big Lie Nexus? Again-- he's either been bought off or frightened into making such inconvenient claims. Or he's just a mischievous liar. ..."
"... And, as I seemingly never get tired of pointing out, the Perpetual Big Lie™ strategy arose, and succeeds, because the "natural enemies" of authoritarian government overreach have been coerced or co-opted to a fare-thee-well. So mass-media venues, and even supposedly independent technical and scientific organizations, are part of the Perpetual Big Lie™ apparatus. ..."
"... Putting Kudrin -- an opponent of de-dollarization and an upholder of the Washington Consensus -- in charge of Russia's international outreach would be equal to putting Bill Clinton in charge of a girls' school. ..."
"... In the Guardian I only read the comments, never the article. Here, I read both. That is the difference between propaganda and good reporting. ..."
May 04, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

The Grauniad is slipping deeper into the disinformation business: Revealed: UK's push to strengthen anti-Russia alliance is the headline of a page one piece which reveals exactly nothing. There is no secret lifted and no one was discomforted by a questioning journalist.

Like other such pieces it uses disinformation to accuse Russia of spreading such.

The main 'revelation' is stenographed from a British government official. Some quotes from the usual anti-Russian propagandists were added. Dubious or false 'western' government claims are held up as truth. That Russia does not endorse them is proof for Russian mischievousness and its 'disinformation'.

The opener:

The UK will use a series of international summits this year to call for a comprehensive strategy to combat Russian disinformation and urge a rethink over traditional diplomatic dialogue with Moscow, following the Kremlin's aggressive campaign of denials over the use of chemical weapons in the UK and Syria.
...
"The foreign secretary regards Russia's response to Douma and Salisbury as a turning point and thinks there is international support to do more," a Whitehall official said. "The areas the UK are most likely to pursue are countering Russian disinformation and finding a mechanism to enforce accountability for the use of chemical weapons."

There is a mechanism to enforce accountability for the use of chemical weapons. It is the Chemical Weapon Convention and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). It was the British government which at first rejected the use of these instruments during the Skripal incident:

Early involvement of the OPCW, as demanded by Russia, was resisted by the British government. Only on March 14, ten days after the incident happened and two days after Prime Minister Theresa may had made accusations against Russia, did the British government invite the OPCW. Only on March 19, 15 days after the incident happen did the OPCW technical team arrive and took blood samples.

Now back to the Guardian disinformation:

In making its case to foreign ministries, the UK is arguing that Russian denials over Salisbury and Douma reveal a state uninterested in cooperating to reach a common understanding of the truth , but instead using both episodes to try systematically to divide western electorates and sow doubt.

A 'common understanding of the truth' is an interesting term. What is the truth? Whatever the British government claims? It accused Russia of the Skripal incident a mere eight days after it happened. Now, two month later, it admits that it does not know who poisoned the Skripals:

Police and intelligence agencies have failed so far to identify the individual or individuals who carried out the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, the UK's national security adviser has disclosed.

Do the Brits know where the alleged Novichok poison came from? Unless they produced it themselves they likely have no idea. The Czech Republic just admitted that it made small doses of a Novichok nerve agent for testing purposes. Others did too.

Back to the Guardian :

British politicians are not alone in claiming Russia's record of mendacity is not a personal trait of Putin's, but a government-wide strategy that makes traditional diplomacy ineffective.

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, famously came off one lengthy phone call with Putin – she had more than 40 in a year – to say he lived in a different world.

No, Merkel never said that. An Obama administration flunky planted that in the New York Times :

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told Mr. Obama by telephone on Sunday that after speaking with Mr. Putin she was not sure he was in touch with reality, people briefed on the call said. "In another world," she said.

When that claim was made in March 2014 we were immediately suspicious of it:

This does not sound like typically Merkel but rather strange for her. I doubt that she said that the way the "people briefed on the call" told it to the Times stenographer. It is rather an attempt to discredit Merkel and to make it more difficult for her to find a solution with Russia outside of U.S. control.

A day later the German government denied (ger) that Merkel ever said such (my translation):

The chancellery is unhappy about the report in the New York Times. Merkel by no means meant to express that Putin behaved irrational. In fact she told Obama that Putin has a different perspective about the Crimea [than Obama has].

A McClatchy journalist investigated further and came to the same conclusion as I did. The 'leak' to the New York Times was disinformation.

That disinformation, spread by the Obama administration but immediately exposed as false, is now held up as proof by Patrick Wintour, the Diplomatic editor of the Guardian , that Russia uses disinformation and that Putin is a naughty man.

The British Defense Minister Gavin Williamson wants journalists to enter the UK reserve forces to help with the creation of propaganda:

He said army recruitment should be about "looking to different people who maybe think, as a journalist: 'What are my skills in terms of how are they relevant to the armed forces?'

Patrick Wintour seems to be a qualified candidate.

Or maybe he should join the NATO for Information Warfare the Atlantic Council wants to create to further disinform about those damned Russkies:

What we need now is a cross-border defense alliance against disinformation -- call it Communications NATO. Such an alliance is, in fact, nearly as important as its military counterpart.

Like the Guardian piece above writer of the NATO propaganda lobby Atlantic Council makes claims of Russian disinformation that do not hold up to the slightest test:

By pinning the Novichok nerve agent on Sweden or the Czech Republic, or blaming the UK for the nerve gas attack in Syria, the Kremlin sows confusion among our populations and makes us lose trust in our institutions.

Russia has not pinned the Novichok to Sweden or the Czech Republic. It said, correctly, that several countries produced Novichok. Russia did not blame the UK for the 'nerve gas attack' in Syria. Russia says that there was no gas attack in Douma.

The claims of Russian disinformation these authors make to not hold up to scrutiny. Meanwhile there pieces themselves are full of lies, distortions and, yes, disinformation.

The bigger aim behind all these activities, demanding a myriad of new organizations to propagandize against Russia, is to introduce a strict control over information within 'western' societies.

Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy' disinformation.

That scheme will be used against anyone who deviates from the ordered norm. You dislike that pipeline in your backyard? You must be falling for Russian trolls or maybe you yourself are an agent of a foreign power. Social Security? The Russians like that. It is a disinformation thing. You better forget about it.


c1ue , May 4, 2018 2:27:27 PM | 1

Excellent article, in an ongoing run of great journalism.
I am curious - have you read this? https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/
It purports to be a book by an American military man intimately familiar with the covert ops portion of the US government. The internal Kafka-esque dynamics described certainly feel true.
Mike Maloney , May 4, 2018 2:44:12 PM | 3
One of the reasons newspapers are getting worse is the economics. They aren't really viable anymore. Their future is as some form of government sanctioned oligopoly. Two national papers -- a "left" and a "right" -- and then a handful of regional papers. All spouting the same neoliberal, neoconservative chicanery.
CD Waller , May 4, 2018 2:57:20 PM | 4
Genuine journalist Matt Taibbi warned of this sort of branding of disparate views as enemy a month ago. He was also correct. Evil and insidious. The enemy of a free society.
chet380 , May 4, 2018 2:58:22 PM | 5
Wait for an outbreak of hostilities on the Ukraine-Donbass front shortly before the beginning of the World Cup competition which is as internationally important as the Olympic Games -- as they did in 2014 with Maidan and 2016 with the Sochi Winter Olympics drug uproar, the CIA will create chaos that will take the emphasis off any Russian success, since as to them, anything negative regarding Russia is a positive for them.
WJ , May 4, 2018 3:02:57 PM | 6
The later history of the 20th century will one day be read as the triumph and normalization of the Nazi state through liberal democratic capitalism.
Laguerre , May 4, 2018 3:07:19 PM | 7
I agree that it's difficult to see how the drive to renew the Cold War is going to be stopped. I presume that, with the exception of certain NeoCon circles, there isn't a desire for Hot War. Certainly not in the British sources you quote. Britain wouldn't want Hot War with Russia. It's all a question of going to the limit for internal consumption. Do a 1984, in order to keep the population in-line.
james , May 4, 2018 3:11:05 PM | 8
thanks b... i can't understand how any intelligent thinking person would read the guardian, let alone something like the huff post, and etc. etc... why? the propaganda money that pays for the white helmets, certainly goes to these outlets as well..

the uk have gone completely nuts! i guess it comes with reading the guardian, although, in fairness, all british media seems very skewed - sky news, bbc, and etc. etc.

it does appear as though Patrick Wintour is on Gavin Williamson's propaganda bandwagon/payroll already... in reading the comments and articles at craig murrays site, i have become more familiar with just how crazy things are in the uk.. his latest article freedom no more sums it up well... throw the uk msm in the trash can... it is for all intensive purposes, done..

mk , May 4, 2018 3:31:41 PM | 9
Meanwhile, OPCW chief Uzumcu seems to have been pranked again, this time by his own staff (this is how I interpret it):

He claimed that the amount of Novichok found was about 100 g and therefore more than research laboratories would produce, i.e. this was weaponized Novichok.

http://www.startribune.com/large-dose-of-nerve-agent-was-used-in-spy-s-poisoning-watchdog-says/481687061/

However, the story is being retracted right now because OPCW staff says it was only 100 mg .

Uzumcu looks like a fool.

b , May 4, 2018 3:49:03 PM | 10
The Russian embassy in the UK must be reading MoA. It just now tweeted this press release: Embassy press officer comments on the Guardian article concerning a new British anti-Russian strategy
Q: What is our reaction to the Guardian article on a "comprehensive strategy" to "deepen the alliance against Russia" to be pursued by the UK Government at international forums?

A: Judging by the publication, the main current challenge for Whitehall is to preserve the anti-Russian coalition that the Conservatives tried to build after the Salisbury incident. This task is challenging indeed. The "fusion doctrine" promoted by the national security apparatus has led to the Western bloc taking hasty decisions that, as life has shown, were not based on any facts.

No traces of chemical weapons have been found in Douma. This means that not only the US/UK/French airstrikes were illegal under international law but even their political justification was inherently flawed. Similarly, in the Salisbury affair, no evidence of Russian involvement has been presented, while the two myths on which the British case was built (the Russian origin of the chemical substance used and the existence of proof of Russian responsibility) have been shattered.

Given the lack of facts, the Tory leadership seems to be adopting a truly Orwellian logic: that the main proof of Russian responsibility are the Russian denials! It is hard to see how they will be able to sell this to their international partners. Self-respecting countries of G20 would not be willing to risk their reputation.

karlof1 , May 4, 2018 3:52:31 PM | 11
Hmmm... My reply to c1ue went sideways it seems. Yes, The late Mr. Prouty's book's the real deal and the website hosting his very rare book is a rare gem itself. Click the JFK at page top left to be transported to that sites archive of writings about his murder. The very important essay by Prouty's there too.
WJ , May 4, 2018 3:53:30 PM | 12
The detail of b's analysis that stands out to me as especially significant and brilliant is his demolition of the Guardian's reuse of the Merkel "quote."

This one detail tells us so much about how propaganda works, and about how it can be defeated. Successful propaganda both depends upon and seeks to accelerate the erasure of historical memory. This is because its truths are always changing to suit the immediate needs of the state. None of its truths can be understood historically. b makes the connection between the documented but forgotten past "truth" of Merkel's quote and its present reincarnation in the Guardian, and this is really all he *needs* to do. What b points out is something quite simple; yet the ability to do this very simple thing is becoming increasingly rare and its exercise increasingly difficult to achieve. It is for me the virtue that makes b's analysis uniquely indispensable.

Related to the above, consider the nature of the recently christened thought-crime, "whataboutism." The crime may be defined as follows: "Whataboutism" is the attempt to understand a truth asserted by propaganda by way of relation to other truths it has asserted contemporaneous with or prior to this one. It is to ask, "What about this *other* truth? Does this *other* truth affect our understanding of *this* truth? And if so, how does it?"

Whataboutism seems to deny that each asserted truth stands on its own, and has no essential relation to any other past, present, or future asserted truth.

Jose Garcia , May 4, 2018 3:56:03 PM | 13
1984, anyone?
john wilson , May 4, 2018 4:03:04 PM | 14
The absurd story that the OPCW says there was a 100gm/100mg who knows which on the door and other sites is just so stupid its painful. This implies that the Skripals both closed the door together and then went off on their day spreading the stuff everywhere, yet no one else was contaminated (apart from the fantasy policeman).

Presumably the Skripals touch the cutlery, plates and wine glasses in the restaurant, so why weren't the staff there infected as they must have had to pick up the plates etc after the meal. Even the door to the entrance of the restaurant should be affected as they would have to push it open, thus leaving the chemical for other people to touch. Nope, nothing in this stupid story adds up and the OPCW can't even get the amounts of the chemical right.

ken , May 4, 2018 4:03:13 PM | 15
The problem is,,, most know it's all BS but find it 'easier' to believe or at most ignore, as then there is no responsibility to 'do something'. Biggest problem with the world today is lazy insouciant citizens. (Yes,,, I'm a PCR reader) :))
karlof1 , May 4, 2018 4:05:15 PM | 16
b @10--

Did you catch the Lavrov interview I linked to on previous Yemen thread? As you might imagine, the verbiage used is quite similar. One very important point Lavrov made was the anti-Russian group consists of a very small number of nations representing a small fraction of humanity; and that while they have some economic and military clout, it's possible for the rest of the world's nations to sideline them and get on with the important business of forming a genuine Multipolar World Order, which is what the UN and its Charter envisioned.

I won't omit linking to Craig Murray's conclusion :

"I cannot sufficiently express my outrage that Leeds City Council feels it is right to ban a meeting with very distinguished speakers, because it is questioning the government and establishment line on Syria. Freedom of speech really is dead."

Ort , May 4, 2018 4:22:35 PM | 17
Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy' disinformation.
_______________________________________

Yes, exactly. The Western hegemony, i.e. the true "Axis of Evil" led by the US, and including the EU and non-Western allies, have invented the Perpetual Big Lie™.

This isn't a new insight, but it's worth repeating. It struck me anew while I was listening to a couple of UK "journalists" hectoring OPCW Representative Shulgin, and directing scurrilous and provocative innuendo disguised as "questions" to Mr. Shulgin and the Syrian witnesses testifying during his presentation.

It flashed upon me that there is no longer a reasonable expectation that the Perpetual Big Liars must eventually abandon, much less confess, their heinous mendacity. Just as B points out, there are no countervailing facts, evidence, rebuttals, theories, or explanations that can't be countered with further iterations of Big Lies, however offensively incredible and absurd.

Witnesses? They're either confederates, dupes, or terrified by coercion. Evidence and/or technical analysis? All faked! A nominally reliable party, e.g. the president of the Czech Republic, makes statements that undermine the Big Lie Nexus? Again-- he's either been bought off or frightened into making such inconvenient claims. Or he's just a mischievous liar.

And, as I seemingly never get tired of pointing out, the Perpetual Big Lie™ strategy arose, and succeeds, because the "natural enemies" of authoritarian government overreach have been coerced or co-opted to a fare-thee-well. So mass-media venues, and even supposedly independent technical and scientific organizations, are part of the Perpetual Big Lie™ apparatus.

Even as the Big Liars reach a point of diminishing returns, they respond with more of the same. I wish I were more confident that this reprehensible practice will eventually fail due to the excess of malignant hubris; I'm not holding my breath.

Passer by , May 4, 2018 4:24:44 PM | 18

Is Putin capitulating? Pro US Alexei Kudrin could join new government to negotiate "end of sanctions" with the West.

Former finance minister Alexei Kudrin will be brought back to "mend fences with the West" in order to revive Russia's economy. Kudrin has repeatedly said that unless Russia makes her political system more democratic and ends its confrontation with Europe and the United States, she will not be able to achieve economic growth. Russia's fifth-columnists were exalted: "If Kudrin joined the administration or government, it would indicate that they have agreed on a certain agenda of change, including in foreign policy, because without change in foreign policy, reforms are simply impossible in Russia," said Yevgeny Gontmakher . . . who works with a civil society organization set up by Mr. Kudrin. "It would be a powerful message, because Kudrin is the only one in the top echelons with whom they will talk in the west and towards whom there is a certain trust."

Putting Kudrin -- an opponent of de-dollarization and an upholder of the Washington Consensus -- in charge of Russia's international outreach would be equal to putting Bill Clinton in charge of a girls' school.

It would mark Putin's de facto collapse as a leader. We shall know very soon. Either way, if anyone wondered what the approach to Russia would be from Bolton and Pompeo, we now know: they will play very hard ball with Putin, regardless of what he does (or doesn't do), and with carefree readiness to risk an eventual snap.

https://archive.is/1Ynms#selection-1641.0-1641.66

Formerly T-Bear , May 4, 2018 4:57:25 PM | 21
@ 20 Laguerre

Certainly looks like @ 18 is a fine example of what b is presenting.

A good way to extract one's self from the propaganda is to refuse using whatever meme the disinformation uses, e.g. that Sergei Skripal was a double agent -- that is not a known, only a convenient suggestion.

Military intelligence is far better described as military information needed for some project or mission. Not surreptitious cloak and dagger spying. This is not to say Sergei Scripal was a British spy for which he was convicted, stripped of rank and career and exiled through a spy swap. To continue using Sergei Scripal was a double agent only repeats and verifies the disinformation meme and all the framing that goes with it. Find some alternative to what MSM produces that does not embed truthiness to their efforts.

Peter Schmidt , May 4, 2018 5:08:52 PM | 23
In the Guardian I only read the comments, never the article. Here, I read both. That is the difference between propaganda and good reporting.
Emily Dickinson , May 4, 2018 5:09:00 PM | 24
@Michael Weddington 19

I realize it's from one of the biggest propaganda organs in the world... take this New York Times report of the OPCW's retraction with a 100 grams -- 100mg? -- of salt:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/world/europe/opcw-skripal-attack.html

karlof1 , May 4, 2018 5:12:57 PM | 25
Passer by @18--

This same narrative was put forth in 2016 and is just as false now as then. As I posted on Yemen thread earlier, Putin on 5 May is likely to announce the formation of a Stavka.

Kudrin is a neoliberal and as such is an enemy of humanity and will never again be allowed to hold a position of power within Russia's government. Let him emigrate to the West like his fellow parasites and teach junk economics at some likeminded university.

jalp , May 4, 2018 5:30:35 PM | 26
Anyone seen this reported elsewhere? https://www.rt.com/news/425810-white-helmets-us-funding-freeze/

[May 04, 2018] Attention Hookers: Special Counsel urgently needs your stories. We pay top dollar.

May 04, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

XXX -> IntercoursetheEU Fri, 05/04/2018 - 11:43 Permalink

Attention Hookers : Special Counsel urgently needs your stories. We pay top dollar. Big tits, role-play, and lying required. Television experience preferred. No drug screening. No background check. Transportation included.

Call 1-800-George-Soros or contact the Law Offices of Wray, Mueller, and Rosenstein, LLC.

[May 04, 2018] Sic Semper Tyrannis The Skripals survived, but their cat and rodents ... not so much.

Notable quotes:
"... I am reading Taleb's recent book "Skin in the game" which has interesting material about the disconnection between risky behaviors and their consequences in modern USA. He also has a chapter about the mechanics involved in why minority viewpoints in our culture become dominant. It's an interesting read. ..."
"... Finally, the Police partially acknowledged their mistake and accused the Russians of not having been completely fair play. Indeed, these thuriferous bastards of Vlad the Impaler had put poison on the OUTDOOR handle of the front door of the house. It's infinitely subtle of these savages. The Brit Police did not suspect what strong part it had to make, the unexpected thwarting its learned calculations. Presumption, again and again. Nevertheless, the detectives are formal: the Russians did the trick well. The evidence is obvious. In this dramatic case, we are not going to make a comparison between insular and continental logic. The hour is too serious for these trifles. Lots of laughter. ..."
"... It's very difficult in any case to believe that such a notice could have been issued. Can't see why it would be needed. The scripting of the official story on such matters as this seems to be a joint enterprise between the media and the press officers. That's a time-honoured consensus so why would the media need bullying to stay in line? ..."
"... My personal view on all this is that the No. 10 press officers aren't that good at this new-fangled information stuff. They don't seem to have their hearts in it somehow. Time for them to go back to counting paperclips and for information campaigns to be handled by the experts. The BBC have a proven track record in this field and it's time that was officially recognised. ..."
May 03, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Sir Mark, bless him, has told an MP during a committee meeting, that the armed forces, MI-5, MI-6 and GCHQ do not know who or indeed what sickened the Skripals, pere et fille , in Salisbury. He doesn't seem to have mentioned the police. So, basically, pilgrims, Teresa May, the queen's first minister has insistently and incessantly accused the Russians of a crime of which our British cousins know precious little. In a closely related development, it is now revealed that the Britishers sealed up Skripal's house after the poisoning event leaving the black Persian shown above and two guinea pigs to die of thirst and hunger within. It would seem likely that they knew they were doing this since they would have searched the house first. No? Perhaps they thought that the cat might be a threat as a being of possible Iranian descent. This is impressive stuff. pl https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2018-05-01/uk-has-not-yet-identified-skripal-poisoning-suspects


Eric Newhill , 11 hours ago

These false flag ops are all so shabby in their execution. The lack of thoroughness and imagination on the part of the governments running them is really disappointing. For example, if I was running an investigation into the Skripal incident, I would have captured the cat and rodents and run pathology tests on them to see what bio/chem agents might be in their systems. Also, because they might escape and become a vector of further infection. That seems like it would be SOP. So I'd do it even if I knew the story was BS to create the appearance of reality. Then, I could always state that the pets should signs of Russian engineered bio/chem agents. Could even create a video of the pets dying some horrible death due to the agents. That's more better BS.
Threadzilla , 11 hours ago
And yet, this appears to be a lie as well. An earlier piece in the British news claims the pets were taken to Porton Down for examination and testing soon after the incident. Seems more likely they eliminated evidence and then came up with the cover story about how the animals were "forgotten about" and locked in the house for a month, implying totally unimportant for the investigation. http://metro.co.uk/2018/03/...
JohnA , 12 hours ago
I am truly dis-May-ed!

I hope she and Johnson pay the price for this folly. May it be steep! Very. very steep.

How these two suckered so many nations foolishly into sending diplomats home reflected respect for UK policy toward Russia. These nations will need to think long and hard about following any such UK lead in future.

This week, the US took down the Russian flag flying over Russian real estate in Seattle. Shameful!

Sid Finster -> JohnA , 9 hours ago
Sociopaths care nothing for law and everything for enforcement.
Jack , 4 hours ago
I don't know much about the dynamics of British politics but as a light observer of British news I wonder why Theresa May remains prime minister? She became prime minister after the historic Brexit vote. Promptly takes the country to an election and botches it for the Tories. Then bungles the Brexit negotiations. Runs a floundering government. Now comes up with accusations against the Russians in the Skripal affair with no evidence presented but looking more foolish as her story comes under scrutiny.
DH , 11 hours ago
Thirst, yes, hunger, not so much.
Tony , 11 hours ago
I am reading Taleb's recent book "Skin in the game" which has interesting material about the disconnection between risky behaviors and their consequences in modern USA. He also has a chapter about the mechanics involved in why minority viewpoints in our culture become dominant. It's an interesting read.
Sid Finster , 10 hours ago
http://www.theblogmire.com/...
France74 , 10 hours ago
A french view and laughter.

2 cats and 2 guinea pigs were locked up for 9 days in Skipal's house, in the hope of proving that the Russians are guilty.
When the police reopened the house, they found four bodies. the veterinary faculty is positive, both cats died of starvation. Guinea pigs, some say, began to be worked by hungry cats, accelerating their deaths. Unspeakable bloodshed. In this whole case, it's THE revolting detail, among many others. Poor beasts.

Finally, the Police partially acknowledged their mistake and accused the Russians of not having been completely fair play. Indeed, these thuriferous bastards of Vlad the Impaler had put poison on the OUTDOOR handle of the front door of the house. It's infinitely subtle of these savages. The Brit Police did not suspect what strong part it had to make, the unexpected thwarting its learned calculations. Presumption, again and again. Nevertheless, the detectives are formal: the Russians did the trick well. The evidence is obvious. In this dramatic case, we are not going to make a comparison between insular and continental logic. The hour is too serious for these trifles.
Lots of laughter.

kao_hsien_chih , 11 hours ago
Great. There was once a war for Jenkins' ear. I guess we should now have a nuclear war for Skripals' cat.
English Outsider -> kao_hsien_chih , 9 hours ago
Colonel,

There's talk of a D-Notice covering the Skripal affair. Seems unlikely. All concerned were being sat on quite satisfactorily anyway.

I Looked up D-notices on WIKI -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

Presumably there are bigger guns in the background if information that would really threaten national security or the lives of serving officers is in danger of being released. The D-Notice system itself seems to be a more or less voluntary affair -

https://www.theguardian.com...

It's very difficult in any case to believe that such a notice could have been issued. Can't see why it would be needed. The scripting of the official story on such matters as this seems to be a joint enterprise between the media and the press officers. That's a time-honoured consensus so why would the media need bullying to stay in line?

My personal view on all this is that the No. 10 press officers aren't that good at this new-fangled information stuff. They don't seem to have their hearts in it somehow. Time for them to go back to counting paperclips and for information campaigns to be handled by the experts. The BBC have a proven track record in this field and it's time that was officially recognised.

[May 04, 2018] Attention Hookers: Special Counsel urgently needs your stories. We pay top dollar.

May 04, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

XXX -> IntercoursetheEU Fri, 05/04/2018 - 11:43 Permalink

Attention Hookers : Special Counsel urgently needs your stories. We pay top dollar. Big tits, role-play, and lying required. Television experience preferred. No drug screening. No background check. Transportation included.

Call 1-800-George-Soros or contact the Law Offices of Wray, Mueller, and Rosenstein, LLC.

[May 04, 2018] Theresa May's Lies Must Stop by Matthew JAMISON

May 04, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

It would seem that the so-called British prime minister Theresa May, leader of the Conservative Party [who heads up a minority Tory Government only kept in power through a confidence and supply arrangement with the Democratic Unionist Party] has forgotten that there is such a matter as reality backed up by solid strong evidence and grounded in rational fact . It has been a consistent theme of my writings over the last near two years now that Theresa May is not only a light weight with little leadership talents, but also unhinged and dangerous. Indeed, Mrs. May has become something of a loose cannon on deck deluding herself to the truth of the matter that she badly messed up the General Election of 2017 and just about everything else she inherited as prime Minister and her time is long overdue to Leave 10 Downing Street.

One of the more alarming aspects of the near two-year-old nightmarish May Ministry has been the near total casual evisceration of consistent truth telling and consistency of position regarding fundamental political and philosophical questions of judgement and values which goes to the heart of Leadership. It has not just been the near complete collapse of the UK Government's negotiating position vis-à-vis Brussels and Michel Barnier. It has not been the incompetent and disastrous fashion Mrs. May has governed losing one Cabinet minister after another in rapid succession. It has not just been the lies that Theresa May has poured forth internally.

It has been the growth under Theresa May and her Home Office of almost Nazi style black op false flag operations and exercises - conducted by Mrs. May's personal Gestapo MI5 - as an instrument of government policy in order to control and manipulate the uneducated masses of the UK and turn the mass of the UK population into an even more disgusting Peter Bazgallete Endemol style Big Brother feeding frenzy dump. The distortion of mass public opinion in the UK and the dumbing down across all sections of society has been deeply disturbing and frustrating to watch, but not the least bit surprising. In Theresa May's extreme and increasingly desperate quest to hold on to the title and position of prime Minister, May has become even far more dangerous than I ever could have imagined. Theresa May is such a shallow empty third rate politician she will say anything and do anything to hold on to power just for the sake of it to spite her internal Tory Party enemies such as George Osborne. After less than two years in the job Theresa May has managed to achieve the unthinkable. She has made Gordon Brown's Premiership look like a model for stable Government.

May, after botching badly her gift of an early General Election from the powers that be in Washington DC, has basically conducted the most embarrassing and weak negotiation in modern political history with the European Union 27. Unable to deliver the massive majority that elements in DC and Berlin/Brussels were banking on, May has had to resort to increasingly wild, desperate and highly dangerous tactics to remain in Downing Street, attempting desperately to shore up and re-invigorate her obviously dying leadership and crumbling administration. Which brings us to the subject of Russia, a country and people I have tremendous respect and admiration for and has been treated terribly by the West where I grew up. I am appalled at how the Russian people have been treated and spoken of and harassed and targeted by the right wing English Tory Government of Theresa May. Where to begin with? Hillary Clinton's pathetic whinging and moaning blaming her loss on the Russians? Theresa May's bigoted, xenophobic, dangerous anti-Russian rhetoric? The EU's expansion and NATO encroachments right up to the borders of Russia itself in violation of understandings and promises made at the end of the last Cold War? The 'shock' doctrine capitalism of the West injected without proper thought and planning post-Gorbachev? Theresa May, let us be blunt, is in the pocket of certain deeply anti-Russian forces in Washington DC and Brussels. This group of 'foreign policy' and 'national security' experts and their allies who [seem to be everywhere] hate Russia. For what reason I think I know and it has all the hallmarks of Nazism.... all over it. It stinks to hell of Nazism.

Let us be very clear, Russia is not a threat to the UK and has not interfered or attacked UK vital national interests. Russia is not interested in attacking the UK or UK interests. Russia is not an enemy of all civilised freedom loving peoples. It is in fact a great guardian of them. And it has been treated terribly by the West, misunderstood and disrespected beyond belief. The so-called poisoning of Sergei Skripal was just that, so-called. It never happened. Sergei Skripal was not poisoned with Novichok. The nerve agent, if one was even used which I highly doubt, did not come from Russia. The chemical nerve agent is not Russian and did not come from Russian Labs. The Russian State and Russian Government had nothing to do with it. No Russian agents, assets, personnel were involved in this most disgusting, appalling, freak show pathetic English MI5/6 spectacle of Salisbury. One wonders since the English always boast non-stop about how great their country is and how their intelligence and security services are the best in the world. In fact they are rubbish. How could Britain's so-called domestic security service, the all seeing [supposedly], all hearing [supposedly], all knowing [supposedly] all mighty [supposedly] MI5 allow a chemical nerve agent like Novichok into the UK and then allow it to be transported to Salisbury and then administered first in Yulia Skripal's car, then it became the Mill Pub, then it became Zissi Reastaurant, then MI5/6 finally, finally settled on....the door handle. If this had really occurred like the English State and Establishment want us to believe and would have us believe then all of Salisbury would be dead by now if it had really been Novichok. It never happened. The whole Skripal affair was made up by the wildly anti-Russian CIA/BND controlled Theresa May and her English Nazi style lackeys whether they be in the English Government, media, local authorities, police or population at large - and their pay masters in DC and Brussels.

The whole Salisbury/Skripal affair was made up, plotted, stage managed and produced by British, American and German intelligence services. Everything the UK Government under Theresa May said about the Salisbury affair was pure lies, scripted and made up as talking points sent from Washington DC and Brussels. Everything May said, and Boris Johnson, and Amber Rudd and Philip Hammond with regards to Russia and the Salisbury affair was pure lies. The entire story the English put forward regarding the Salisbury affair kept changing and there were terrible inconsistencies. The whole episode from start to finish was a classic English Monty Python circus act. The Salisbury-Skripal affair was pure English Tory lies. Besides Theresa May who ran the Home Office when all these terrible things [apparently] were going on, knew all about it, did not lift a finger to stop it, did not put up a fight or even resign and lead a rebellion from the backbenches. Theresa May authorised everything she now claims is a terrible threat to UK National Security. The woman must go. .

The world was told by the British prime Minister the nerve agent used was a military grade Novichok chemical only from Russia. The creator of Novichok said if exposed to it you either die a painful slow death or if you do miraculously survive you will be a vegetable the rest of your life. So how come Yulia Skripal is up and singing and dancing and checking herself out of the hospital? And what about Sergei Skripal? I've lost track? Is he still in intensive care in the hospital? Or has he been able to miraculously recover and check himself out? And the police officer also made a very speedy recovery. The police have still not been able to find any suspects even though there is a huge and expensive massive police operation under way. The majority of the English police like MI5 are utterly useless. The Chief Executive of Porton Down stated that Porton Down was unable to verify that the Novichok chemical agent came from Russia. The OPCW review was completely flawed and biased against the Russian Government.

Yet Mrs. May seemed to be rather enjoying her pseudo-role as the new found Amazonian suffragette Wonder Woman FemiNazi, the instrument of the Americans and Germans to take down the 'Evil Empire' of the brilliant and visionary President Vladimir Putin who unlike Theresa May has got his country back strongly and proudly on its strong feet. I suppose Mrs. May was desperate for a 'Falklands' style moment to rescue her dying leadership, and for a brief time it seemed to be working. Mrs. May had successfully wiped off the media agenda any mention of the crucial and critical final stages of the UK-EU divorce negotiations. There had been a flurry of right wing press briefing against Jeremy Corbyn in the lead up to the Salisbury affair just like before the Manchester bombing during the General Election of 2017 which May called. May and her backers had calculated - that in order to bolster her position, take the fight to the Russians [which Mrs. Clinton was supposed to have done], weaken Jeremy Corbyn [which she failed to do fatally last year], change the UK narrative on Brexit and impress May's supporters - a black op false flag trashing Russia and the Russian people and the great Russian President on the eve of President Putin's historic fourth election victory and the glorious World Cup in Moscow - would do the trick nicely for Mrs. May's position. As I have been writing consistently, if Mrs. May is so desperate and crazy and power mad to hold on to her position that she is willing to start a war with a vastly superior and vastly stronger country like Russia, she has completely lost the plot and must go.

After May's appalling power grab at the EU27 Council Summit in March she could not believe her luck. The EU27 were all lined up behind her as the anti-Russian warrior princess egging her on to do their bidding in their unofficial war against Russia. This would be the new security role for Britain in Europe once out of the EU, the anti-Russian Trojan horse leading a robust and united anti-Russian global coalition in Europe and beyond to effect regime in the Kremlin on behalf of the EU and their American allies. Unfortunately for Mrs. May the wheels started to come off this unbelievable, wacky, crazy, ridiculous and extremely dangerous Anti-Russian foreign policy with another false flag black op in Syria this time. From Salisbury and all the lies the English told there we jumped to the sands of the Middle East and all the lies that the Americans have told there along with the British. I could not believe what was going on before my very eyes.

For a split second it looked like the world was on the brink of an all out war between American and Russia in the Middle East. Do Mrs. May and her supporters really want to start a Third World War in the Middle East just so she can pretend to be prime minister for a year or two more? Douma was carried out by German secret service intelligence, the BND, in conjunction with the CIA and MI6. Again, this was not the fault of the Russians or Assad Syrian forces, but rather US backed rebels. However, the consequences of Douma are even more profound geopolitically than what happens in some provincial English town. Theresa May has succeeded in driving a wedge between Trump and President Putin and has successfully destroyed any hope of a rapprochement and detente between Washington DC and Moscow. That is bad for the peace and security of the international order. Thanks Theresa! The world came very close to a possible nuclear confrontation between America and Russia, completely unthinkable during the last Cold War, in the sands of the Middle East only a couple of weeks ago. In this New Cold War, which is merely a preparation and build up phase to a much bigger confrontation, all the rules of the old Cold War have changed. I have never felt more ashamed and more embarrassed about being a British citizen in my life.

The anti-Russian bigotry and racism and xenophobia displayed by the English and their Government against the Russian people and Russian interests is not something I will ever forget and has been deeply disturbing, troubling and deeply concerning. I wonder where all this anti-Russian war mongering is leading? Meanwhile back on the domestic home front after the near clash between the USA and Russia was avoided, May's Government has been crumbling. May lost a senior Remain supporter, the Home Secretary Amber Rudd, and has boxed herself into a corner with her 'good friends' in the DUP who now realise May was just using them for her own ends and was prepared to drop them quickly once she had achieved what she was ordered to achieve by DC and Brussels. It will be fascinating to observe who survives this Theresa May Tory English MI5 car crash of Her Majesty's Government. But what I have seen of heard and experienced in England of the anti-Russian bigotry is something that will remain with me for a lifetime.

Tags: MI6 May

[May 03, 2018] Skripal case British confirm they have no suspect; Yulia Skripal vanishes, no word of Sergey Skripal by Alexander Mercouris

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Testimony by Sir Mark Sedwill, British Prime Minister Theresa May's National Security Adviser, to the House of Commons Defence Committee on 1st May 2018 has now revealed that all the claims about a breakthrough in the Skripal case – not to mention the claims about "Gordon" aka "Mihails Savickis" – were (as I suspected) nonsense. ..."
"... In other words the investigation is going nowhere and has drawn a complete blank. ..."
"... All this comes hot on the heels of suggestions – which are very likely true – that the wall of silence which has recently descended on the British media's reporting of the Skripal case is the product of a British government D-Notice , ie. of a formal request by the British government to the media to limit their coverage of the Skripal story on grounds of national security. ..."
"... It has also been suggested that despite formal denials the most likely reason for the D-Notice is the desire of the British authorities to conceal a possible connection between Sergey Skripal, his former MI6 controller Pablo Miller, and Christopher Steele, the compiler of the Trump Dossier. ..."
May 02, 2018 | theduran.com

Amidst speculation that British government has imposed reporting restrictions, British authorities admit they have no suspect in Skripal case

A week ago the British media were full of reports from the usual anonymous sources of a breakthrough in the Skripal case.

Allegedly the British authorities by comparing CCTV pictures from Salisbury and details of travellers to and from Britain had been to identify the persons who were supposedly responsible for the attack on Sergey and Yulia Skripal. These stories came with further stories of a Russian James Bond style assassin – "Gordon" aka "Mihails Savickis" – who together with his team had supposedly carried out the attack. The stories about "Gordon" aka "Mihails Savickis" came with a bizarre identikit picture supposedly of him, which was too ridiculous to take seriously.

In an article I wrote for The Duran on 24th April 2018 I expressed skepticism about these claims

.it looks to me as if despite all the claims to the contrary the police investigation of the Skripal case has made little actual progress. The British seem to have little more knowledge of who carried out the attack on Sergey and Yulia Skripal and why than they did when the investigation began. Could it possibly be because they are looking in the wrong place?

Testimony by Sir Mark Sedwill, British Prime Minister Theresa May's National Security Adviser, to the House of Commons Defence Committee on 1st May 2018 has now revealed that all the claims about a breakthrough in the Skripal case – not to mention the claims about "Gordon" aka "Mihails Savickis" – were (as I suspected) nonsense.

Here is how Sir Mark Sedwill's testimony is reported by The Guardian

Police and intelligence agencies have failed so far to identify the individual or individuals who carried out the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, the UK's national security adviser has disclosed.

The comments by Sir Mark Sedwill punctured hopes that the police and other security agencies had pinpointed suspects but were withholding the name or names from the public.

Asked by an MP at a Commons defence committee hearing if he knew the individuals responsible, he replied curtly: "Not yet."

Sedwill, who coordinates the work of the MI6, MI5, the surveillance agency GCHQ and others, did not elaborate but among problems that have hampered the agencies is a lack of CCTV coverage in Salisbury compared with London. Known Russian spies based in Britain have also been investigated and ruled out.

In other words the investigation is going nowhere and has drawn a complete blank.

All this comes hot on the heels of suggestions – which are very likely true – that the wall of silence which has recently descended on the British media's reporting of the Skripal case is the product of a British government D-Notice , ie. of a formal request by the British government to the media to limit their coverage of the Skripal story on grounds of national security.

It has also been suggested that despite formal denials the most likely reason for the D-Notice is the desire of the British authorities to conceal a possible connection between Sergey Skripal, his former MI6 controller Pablo Miller, and Christopher Steele, the compiler of the Trump Dossier.

There are even suggestions that Sergey Skripal may have had a hand in producing the Trump Dossier, and that this was the reason for the attack on him.

Whilst all this may be true, I have to say that Sergey Skripal – identified as a British spy by the Russians in 2004 and isolated from Russia in the leafy British town of Salisbury since 2010 – seems an unlikely source for the Trump Dossier, largely fictitious though that strange concoction is.

[May 03, 2018] Despite all the propaganda, all the hysterical headlines, all the blatantly biased coverage, the British haven't bought it

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Inside the Tent gatekeepers have relentlessly attacked those brave individuals who have questioned the official narratives, but its these individuals- smeared as 'crackpots' and 'conspiracy theorists' who the public are turning to for their analysis. ..."
"... After the lies told about Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya people no longer tamely accept what the NeoCon Establishment tells us. ..."
"... We're at an 'Emperor's New Clothes' moment in British politics where more and more people have found the courage to say out loud 'The Emperor has no clothes!'. ..."
"... The elite have been lying to us and they know that we know they've been lying. The question is: what are we going to do about it?" ..."
May 03, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 | May 2, 2018 4:52:58 PM | 174

Neil Clark's become quite the critic of the Neoconism rife within May's UK. His conclusion provides grounds for optimism:

"Despite all the propaganda, all the hysterical headlines, all the blatantly biased coverage, the British haven't bought it. Literally or metaphorically. Inside the Tent gatekeepers have relentlessly attacked those brave individuals who have questioned the official narratives, but its these individuals- smeared as 'crackpots' and 'conspiracy theorists' who the public are turning to for their analysis.

Compare the number of retweets the former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray gets when he publishes on the Skripal case, with those who try and denigrate him. My own Twitter following has increased by several thousands since early March.

Citizen Halo got a big boost in followers after she was smeared by The Times. After the lies told about Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya people no longer tamely accept what the NeoCon Establishment tells us.

We're at an 'Emperor's New Clothes' moment in British politics where more and more people have found the courage to say out loud 'The Emperor has no clothes!'.

The elite have been lying to us and they know that we know they've been lying. The question is: what are we going to do about it?"

[May 03, 2018] Tapper-Clapper Leak Proves Media, Intelligence 'Collaborated' to Make Russiagate

Notable quotes:
"... The leak, and the cover up, shows the "collaboration between the media and the intelligence community in building up Russiagate," ..."
"... The report also states that Clapper "subsequently acknowledged discussing the dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper and admitted that he might have spoken with other journalists about the same topic." ..."
May 03, 2018 | sputniknews.com

Former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, who landed a job at CNN in August 2017 after leaving the government, leaked information to CNN's Jake Tapper regarding the infamous Steele dossier and its salacious allegations against then-candidate Donald Trump - then denied his actions to Congress under oath.

The leak, and the cover up, shows the "collaboration between the media and the intelligence community in building up Russiagate," Max Blumenthal, a journalist and bestselling author, told Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear.

... ... ...

The report also states that Clapper "subsequently acknowledged discussing the dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper and admitted that he might have spoken with other journalists about the same topic."

Blumenthal explained that the dossier was the catalyst for the Russiagate scandal.

"I think this should be a bigger scandal than it is," he told hosts Brian Becker and John Kiriakou.

See Also:

[May 01, 2018] Smut Night at the Press Dinner by Pat Buchanan

May 01, 2018 | www.unz.com

Saturday's White House Correspondents' Association dinner, billed as a celebration of the First Amendment and a tribute to journalists who "speak truth to power," has to be the worst advertisement in memory for our national press corps.

Comedian Michelle Wolf, the guest speaker, recited one filthy joke after another at the expense of President Trump and his people, using words that would have gotten her kicked out of school not so long ago.

Media critic Howard Kurtz said he had "never seen a performance like that," adding that Wolf "was not only nasty but dropping F-bombs on live television." Some of her stuff was grungier than that.

The anti-Trump media at the black-tie dinner laughed and whooped it up, and occasionally "oohed" as Wolf went too far even for them, lending confirmation to Trump's depiction of who and what they are.

While the journalistic elite at the black-tie dinner was reveling in the raw sewage served up by Wolf, Trump had just wrapped up a rally in Michigan.

The contrast between the two assemblies could not have been more stark. We are truly two Americas now.

"Why would I want to be stuck in a room with a bunch of fake-news liberals who hate me?" said Trump in an email to supporters, adding that he would much rather "spend the evening with my favorite deplorables who love our movement and love America."

[Apr 30, 2018] Stormy Daniels Files Defamation Lawsuit Against Trump Zero Hedge

Apr 30, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Stormy Daniels' legal team - led by lawyer Michael Avenatti - must be getting bored since a federal judge in Los Angeles ordered a 90-day delay of her lawsuit against President Trump and his former personal attorney Mike Cohen (who has promised to plead the fifth during the proceedings). Because Stormy has filed another defamation lawsuit, this time exclusively against President Trump, as Reuters reports.

The lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in New York on Monday, seeks damages from Trump for a tweet he sent earlier this month where he criticized a composite sketch that, Daniels said, depicted a man who had threatened her in 2011. He reportedly demanded that she stay quiet about her sexual encounter with Trump. That would've been around the time she gave an interview about her affair with Trump to In Touch magazine which wasn't published until recently.

Her previous lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles, sought to have her released from an NDA she signed shortly before the 2016 vote where she also accepted a $130,000 "hush money" payment from Cohen.

"A sketch years later about a nonexistent man. A total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools (but they know it)!," Trump said.

me title=

According to the filing, cited by the Associate Press and Reuters, the tweet was "false and defamatory" arguing that Trump knew what he was saying out Daniels' claim was false and also disparaging.

The lawsuit also claims Daniels has been exposed to death threats and other threats of "physical violence."

Daniels, whose given name is Stephanie Clifford, is seeking a jury trial and unspecified damages.

"We intend on teaching Mr. Trump that you cannot simply make things up about someone and disseminate them without serious consequences," Avenatti said.

As the Associated Press points out, Daniels, aided by Avenatti, has sought to keep her case in the public eye. She revealed the sketch that Trump mocked during an appearance on the View earlier this month. Trump is facing another defamation lawsuit in New York, this one filed by Summer Zervos, a former "The Apprentice" contestant who says Trump made unwanted sexual contact with her in 2007. She sued him after Trump dismissed her claims. 0


Slippery Slope -> JimmyJones Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:23 Permalink

When does her 15 minutes end?

bobbbny -> Bitchface-KILLAH Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:24 Permalink

Just like herpes she won't go away.

beepbop -> bobbbny Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:25 Permalink

The LAWSUITS will keep on coming

until Trump agrees to Satanyahoo's ULTIMATUM

of destroying SYRIA and IRAN.

TheWholeYearInn -> beepbop Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:29 Permalink

" Now, that your tastes at this time should incline towards the juvenile is understandable; but for you to marry that boy would be a disaster. Because there's two kinds of women. There are two kinds of women and you, as we well know, are not the first kind. You, my dear, are a slut. "

~Komarovsky

Ghost of Porky -> TheWholeYearInn Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:33 Permalink

Stormy's parents are Trump supporters and Stormy hates them.

This is all a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Shitonya Serfs -> Ghost of Porky Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:34 Permalink

"you cannot simply make things up about someone and disseminate them without serious consequences"

#MeToo

Bitchface-KILLAH -> Stan522 Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:27 Permalink

Monica Lewinsky... good family, intern... major credibility problems according to MSM.

Stormy Daniels... washed up porno actress... MSM "sure we'll roll with that"

tmosley Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:22 Permalink

She literally sketched her old boyfriend.

That will happen when you are describing what someone who doesn't exist looks like. You picture someone you know and make them look like that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy9Z-Tg6ufU

ZH FNG Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:26 Permalink

On an earlier Stormy story, someone posted these words of wisdom about intimacy:

A gentleman never talks,

And a whore never shuts up.

jmack Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:26 Permalink

"We intend on teaching Mr. Trump that you cannot simply make things up about someone and disseminate them without serious consequences," Avenatti said.

oh the irony.

sister tika Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:31 Permalink

This cow makes me nauseous. She's a pathetic, has-been punch whose only motivation is (more) money.

Mzhen Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:31 Permalink

Communication purportedly from Stormy to a friend, where she again denied the sex ever happened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbtS8LdTUfI&t=336s

Fox-Scully Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:28 Permalink

"We intend on teaching THE PRESS that you cannot simply make things up about someone and disseminate them without serious consequences," Avenatti said.

Now it is correct.

Stevious Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:34 Permalink

To prove damages under defamation first someone must believe the defamatory content and second, more importantly, damage must have been done.

Damage what, to the reputation of a stripper?

JoeTurner Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:39 Permalink

Who's paying this filthy whore ? Where are the "journalists" to follow the money ?

wally_12 Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:40 Permalink

Sold out performance at the strip club in Detroit. Trying to squeeze out as much as possible before her boobs and butt sag lower.

NYC80 Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:47 Permalink

It has to be really, really hard to defame a porn star.

Hikikomori Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:49 Permalink

Interesting that the Great White Hope of the Democrats in 2018 is a blackmailing prostitute. On the other hand, probably better than Hillary....

SmittyinLA Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:55 Permalink

Damages? What damages? Her income has no doubt spiked.

No case, no damages, nobody givesashit.

Al Huxley Mon, 04/30/2018 - 14:56 Permalink

That's why they're called gold digging whores.

[Apr 30, 2018] NBC tried to eliminate and may be sunk Kelly

Trump is definitely not an idiot: Donald Trump, 1998 - BBC HARDtalk - YouTube
Notable quotes:
"... "He doesn't even understand what DACA is. He's an idiot," Kelly said in one meeting, according to two officials who were present. "We've got to save him from himself." ..."
"... According to NBC's sources, Kelly has been hiding behind his public image as a four-star, while in truth operating in an "undisciplined and indiscreet" manner. "The private manner aides describe may shed new light on why Kelly now finds himself -- just nine months into the job -- grappling with diminished influence and a drumbeat of questions about how long he'll remain at the White House . ..."
Apr 30, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
"Total BS" - Kelly Slams "Pathetic Smear Attempt"; Trump Blasts NBC's "Totally Unhinged" 'Idiot' Report by Tyler Durden Mon, - 16:56 156 SHARES

* * *

White House chief of staff John Kelly has reportedly been undermining morale in the West Wing in recent months - commenting to aides that President Trump is an idiot, while touting himself as the "savior of the country," reports NBC News , citing "eight current and former White House officials."

The officials said Kelly portrays himself to Trump administration aides as the lone bulwark against catastrophe , curbing the erratic urges of a president who has a questionable grasp on policy issues and the functions of government. He has referred to Trump as "an idiot" multiple times to underscore his point , according to four officials who say they've witnessed the comments. - NBC News

NBC notes that three White House spokespeople say the "idiot" thing just isn't true, and he may have spoken in jest about saving the country.

In one heated exchange between the two men before February's Winter Olympics in South Korea, Kelly strongly -- and successfully -- dissuaded Trump from ordering the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the Korean peninsula , according to two officials.

For Kelly, the exchange underscored the reasoning behind one of his common refrains, which multiple officials described as some version of " I'm the one saving the country. "

"The strong implication being ' if I weren't here we would've entered WWIII or the president would have been impeached ,'" one former senior White House official said. - NBC News

"He doesn't even understand what DACA is. He's an idiot," Kelly said in one meeting, according to two officials who were present. "We've got to save him from himself."

According to NBC's sources, Kelly has been hiding behind his public image as a four-star, while in truth operating in an "undisciplined and indiscreet" manner. "The private manner aides describe may shed new light on why Kelly now finds himself -- just nine months into the job -- grappling with diminished influence and a drumbeat of questions about how long he'll remain at the White House ."

"He says stuff you can't believe," one senior White House official tells NBC News . " He'll say it and you think, 'That is not what you should be saying. '"

According to presidential historian Michael Beschloss, Kelly's comments about Trump vs. prior White House chiefs of "suggest a lack of respect for the sitting president of a kind that we haven't seen before," adding that the closest would have to be President Ronald Reagan's chief of staff, Don Regan, who "somewhat looked down on" The Gipper, and eventually lost Reagan's support - having been replaced after two years by Howard Baker.

Meanwhile, insults or not, Trump is said to have soured on Kelly - and is aware of some, "though not all" of Kelly's comments. And as NBC News points out, " The last time it became public that one of Trump's top advisers insulted his intelligence behind his back, it didn't go over well with the president . White House aides have said Trump never got over former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson calling him a "moron" in front of colleagues , which was first reported by NBC News. Trump later challenged Tillerson to an IQ test and fired him several months after the remark became public."

Current and former White House officials said Kelly has at times made remarks that have rattled female staffers . Kelly has told aides multiple times that women are more emotional than men , including at least once in front of the president, four current and former officials said.

And during a firestorm in February over accusations of domestic abuse against then-White House staff secretary Rob Porter, Kelly wondered aloud how much more Porter would have to endure before his honor could be restored , according to three officials who were present for the comments. He also questioned why Porter's ex-wives wouldn't just move on based on the information he said he had about his marriages, the officials said.

So in addition to Kelly allegedly calling Trump an idiot, he's also a misogynist, according to NBC.

Kelly is expected to leave by July - his one-year mark, according to sources, however others say it's anyone's guess. That said, "what's clear is both Trump and Kelly seem to have tired of each other."

" Kelly appears to be less engaged, which may be to the president's detriment ," a second senior White House official said. If NBC is correct, we're about to once again play White House Musical Chairs.

That said, when reached for comment, Kelly that it's all more fake news:

"He and I both know this story is total BS. I am committed to the president, his agenda, and our country. This is another pathetic attempt to smear people close to President Trump... "

One hopes that is the case, then again one also remembers the Rex Tillerson incident...

[Apr 30, 2018] The CIA Democrats vs. Julian Assange - World Socialist Web Site

Apr 23, 2018 | www.wsws.org

The lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), naming WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange as co-conspirators with Russia and the Trump campaign in a criminal effort to steal the 2016 US presidential election, is a frontal assault on democratic rights. It tramples on the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which establishes freedom of the press and freedom of speech as fundamental rights.

Neither the Democratic Party lawsuit nor the media commentaries on it acknowledge that WikiLeaks is engaged in journalism, not espionage; that its work consists of publishing material supplied to it by whistleblowers seeking to expose the crimes of governments, giant corporations and other powerful organizations; and that this courageous campaign of exposure has made both the website and its founder and publisher the targets of state repression all over the world.

Assange himself has been effectively imprisoned in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for the past six years, since he fled there to escape efforts by the British, Swedish and American governments to engineer his extradition to the United States, where a secret grand jury has reportedly indicted him on espionage and treason charges that could bring the death penalty. Since the end of March, the Ecuadorian government, responding to increasing pressure from US and British imperialism, has cut off all outside communication with him.

The reason for the indictment and persecution of Assange is that WikiLeaks published secret military documents, supplied by whistleblower Chelsea Manning, revealing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as diplomatic cables embarrassing to the US State Department because they detailed US attempts to manipulate and subvert governments around the world.

The Democratic National Committee on Friday filed a 66-page complaint that reeks of McCarthyism, with overtones of the Wisconsin senator's demagogy about "a conspiracy so vast" when he was spearheading the anticommunist witch hunts more than 70 years ago. After detailing a long list of supposed conspirators, ranging from the Russian government and its military intelligence agency GRU to the Trump campaign and Julian Assange, the complaint declares: "The conspiracy constituted an act of previously unimaginable treachery: the campaign of the presidential nominee of a major party in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the Presidency."

[Apr 29, 2018] A Fentanyl dealer sent to jail in Salisbury just a month earlier

Apr 29, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Posted by: CE | Apr 29, 2018 2:36:38 PM | 102

@Masshole|100

This one is from the correct Salisbury (UK) newspaper about a Fentanyl dealer sent to jail just a month earlier.

Just glad that our austerity victims still tend to be on Schnaps. ;o)

[Apr 29, 2018] MoA - The Silence Of The Skripals - Government Blocks Press Reports - Media Change The Record

Notable quotes:
"... Clinical Services Journal ..."
"... Salisbury Journal ..."
"... Salisbury Journal ..."
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
"... The media may be banned from reporting, but if my casual interactions with the UK populace are representative, the majority are highly sceptical of .gov - May / BJ 'Putin did it' accusations. ..."
"... One has to wonder why Russia is not calling Britain out on this obvious kidnapping. ..."
"... i had read craig murrays post earlier today...why are they covering up the fentanoyl angle? it's obvious! ..."
"... I think the policeman in this farce is key to everything. If the cause of the Skripal poisoning was fentenyal then why did the policeman become ill? ..."
"... Anyway, if it was a weapons grade chemical agent that the policeman was affected by, why was it he was able to leave hospital a few days later in full uniform looking a picture of health? ..."
"... Originally the story was he was somehow contaminated by the Skripals themselves, but as no one else in the contact chain was affected, and this notwithstanding the fact ambulance and medical had serious hand on contact was affected, it became clear that the policeman had to have another source of contamination. ..."
"... Thus; they invented the magic door knob story. Even this silly story is absurd. The police and the goons didn't investigate the door knob (actually, a door handle lever type) theory until 25 days later when rain and numerous people coming and going at the Skripals's would have worn off any contaminate from the door handle. ..."
"... By the way, they are now telling us the stuff on the door handle was a liquid. How do you get a liquid to stick of a shiny door handle? Apart from the silence of the press, the silence from the medical people is a factor also. They have not signed any official secrets act and they can't be issued with a D notice. ..."
"... the policemen appears like an inside prop for this false flag op... that is what it looks like to me.. forget about it, or him having any relevance or validity, if he is as i am suggesting.. ..."
"... It all seems amazing to me, what a strange world of collapsing empire we live in. Really, why don't the Russians demand at the UNSC the right to visit with Russian citizens? Call for a resolution demanding a visit and force them to veto. ..."
"... The US Drug Enforcement Agency claims that different kinds of Fentanyl, including something known as Carfentanil, can be absorbed through the skin or accidentally inhaled and cause death. ..."
"... Although the Skripal "op" was a success, the planned false flag didn't happen due to SAA's quick advance (with Russian help). Instead, a sloppy false flag was done at the very last minute in Douma just before the Jihadis gave up. This wouldn't save Ghouta so it was possibly motivated by the the desire to solidify anti-Russian sentiment created by the Skripal op. ..."
"... If we assume that the Skripals had been poisoned with fentanyl, we then have to explain how a doctor was able to give the Skripals first aid at the scene where they collapsed without being poisoned by fentanyl herself. ..."
"... @Jen16. Is it not possible the 'potency' of fentanyl is overstated in order to 'sell' the anti-dote? Much like the anthrax 'dote' after 911. I mean most dealers I have met aren't exactly stupid, that being said most aren't lab smart either, it would seem to me there would be a whole lot of dead dealers if 'traces' in the wind can kill. Then there is the anomaly of the Dr. and other's as you brought up in 16. Just a thought. FWIW. ..."
"... This charade has not gone well for May. It has raised serious doubts that the UK can ever be an ally of Trump. The Steele dirt dossier was an attack on Trump's family, presidential campaign and cripples his first term with purile Russia hatred. May and the espionage establishment are the enemy of the USA. After 250 years the British finally won the US war of independence and have enslaved the majority of its media outlets. ..."
"... The state exists to enforce the dominance of elites, all the rest is propaganda, misdirection, Obfuscation or terrorism up to and including total war. ..."
"... The young man Jamie Paine who first found the Skripals on the park bench got some liquid on his skin and apparently didn't suffer from it. ..."
"... The Devon Live report is still in its original form. It links to the first Wiltshire Police statement on the case and quotes from it. Curiously the link is dead. The first official police statement on the Skripal case is "currently unavailable". ..."
"... D-Notices are one of those evils that, once initiated, are never undone. It reminds me a bit of the fraudulent, gauzy "AUMF" used by the United States government as if it were a blank check written by God to wage imperialistic wars kinetic actions of aggression against anyone or anything it deems ripe for pillage or destruction-- at its sole pleasure and discretion, and for eternity. ..."
"... As it is, the D-Notices' ostensible "national security" rationale has proven to be mere camouflage for its true purpose: ensuring that malfeasant officials and operatives are "secure" in their depraved work, and are protected from all inquiries that might expose their heinous wrongdoing. Whoops! ..."
"... I do not know if fentanyl was found in OPCW sample, only British made BZ paralyzingly agent. The question is why? I think doctors in Salisbury who are trained with chemical nerve agents due to proximity to Porton Downs lab instantly knew there was no military nerve agent used there, would they also instantly know that it was Fentanyl since they faced epidemic of opioid overdoses. ..."
"... After recovery is was Skripal, trusted by her as her father, himself as part of psych op presented the narrative as Putin wanted to kill me and did not care that you happened to be with me at time of attack. I am so sorry, shit lies. She was brainwashed offered lucrative financial arrangement in the west decided to stay, thinking she could be killed upon returning to Russia. ..."
"... The fentanyl/BZ/Novichok angle seems eerily like the US/ZATO/MSM fallback position on the BUK missile scam for MH17. By insisting MH17 was brought down by SOME BUK, the story line never gets to the Ukie SU25s seen near MH17 on Russian commercial air-traffic tracking radar. ..."
"... The potential existence of Skripal's dead-man's-switch documentation may have extended well beyond the Steele scam, which would explain the urgency of the deed and why the Skripals are being held incommunicado. The search of the Skripal residence was to find that documentation, easy once the UK cordoned it off due to potential "chemical contamination". ..."
"... Why does this operation seem to have the malodorous stench of Berezovsky's spectre lingering in the background. While Berezovsky himself may be dead, it is safe to assume that remnants of his network are still around. If indeed the Skripals were poisoned, it could very well have been orchestrated by a rogue, non-state actor with embarrassing ties to MI6. In some ways it is reminiscent of the bungled Litvinenko operation (which the British gov't also covered up). ..."
"... Both Pablo Miller and Christopher Steele were known to be associated with Berezovsky. Steele, as his Mi6 handler, would probably have intimate knowledge of Berezovsky's connections and may well have used them as 'Russian sourced' material for his infamous Steele dossier. So Skripal, who consulted on the Steele dossier, is tied to both Miller and Steele who in turn are connected to remnants of Berezovsky's network. The 'suiciding' of Berezovsky (unless sanctioned by Mi6) suggests at least one group of players within this network who have their own agenda. ..."
"... It is possible that the Skripal case and the White Helmets Damascus chemical weapons likely false flag was an attempt of parts of the British (French) and US deep state to force Trump to remain in Syria. ..."
"... Skripal's "dead man switch" is pure fantasy. It assumes that a man who had betrayed his country and was merely an "asset" would be trusted with sensitive info. ..."
Apr 29, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Thretha May proved to be a very dangerous woman -- a real political mafiosy.

There has been no recent reporting on the Skripal case in which a British-Russian double agent and his daughter were poisoned in Salisbury, England. There even seem to be attempts to change the public record of the case.

The British government alleged that the Skripals were poisoned by Novichok, a deadly nerve agent, and blamed Russia for it. There are stiill many open questions to ask but the British media, otherwise not afraid of 'door stepping', are curiously uninterested. We already noted in early April that the British press was throwing Novi-Fog™ onto the public. It was repeating outrageous and illogical claims from "security services" but did no genuine reporting on the Skripal case.

Some photo editor made sense of what the "security services" said and introduced an April 5 London Times piece with a picture of a likely source of the alleged Novichok poison:


via D'Aramitz - bigger

Now the former British ambassador Craig Murray quotes Clive Ponting, another former senior civil servant, who suspects that the British government issued a D-Notice. Such a notice forbids British media to report on an issue. Murray also points to a tweet by Channel 4 correspondent Alex Thomson from March 12 in which Thomsen mentions a D-Notice specifically related to Mr. Skripal's MI6 handler:


bigger

The D-Notice attempt Thomsen mentioned was too late as some media had already reported the name of the Skripal's MI6 handler. We spelled it out on March 8.

One Pablo Miller, a British MI6 agent, had recruited Sergej Skripal. The former MI6 agent in Moscow, Christopher Steele, was also involved in the case. Skripal was caught by the Russian security services and went to jail. Pablo Miller, the MI6 recruiter, was also the handler of Sergej Skripal after he was released by Russia in a spy swap. He reportedly also lives in Salisbury. Both Christopher Steele and Pablo Miller work for Orbis Business Intelligence which created the "Dirty Dossier" about Donald Trump.

We early on suspected a relation between the "Dirty Dossier" and the Skripal affair:

Here are some question:

  • Did Skripal help Steele to make up the "dossier" about Trump?
  • Were Skripal's old connections used to contact other people in Russia to ask about Trump dirt?
  • Did Skripal threaten to talk about this?

If there is a connection between the dossier and Skripal, which seems very likely to me, then there are a number of people and organizations with potential motives to kill him. Lots of shady folks and officials on both sides of the Atlantic were involved in creating and running the anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign. There are several investigations and some very dirty laundry might one day come to light. Removing Skripal while putting the blame on Russia looks like a convenient way to get rid of a potential witness.

Whistleblower Clive Ponting, quoted by Murray , now also suspects that the Skripal case was an 'inside' job that followed from the 'dirty dossier' fakery:

If [Sergej Skripal] was also involved in the 'golden showers' dossier then elements in the US would have a reason to act as well. The whole incident was an inside job not to kill him, hence the use of BZ, but to give him a warning and a punishment. The whole thing is being treated as though the authorities know exactly what went on but have to cover it up.
...
I meant to add that the policeman who 'just happened' to be around was almost certainly the special branch 'minder' who was keeping Yulia under surveillance. The media are not allowed to mention the existence of a D notice.

There is not only a very curious silence in British media about the Skripal case, but there seem to be active attempts to remove certain material about the case from the public.

In 2017 investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhiev reported about massive air transports of weapons to Syrian 'rebels' under diplomatic cover and got fired over it. On April 26 she made another interesting find :

Dilyana Gaytandzhiev @dgaytandzhieva - 21:24 UTC - 26 Apr 2018

The #Skripals were allegedly exposed to the drug #Fentanyl, not the #Novichok nerve agent, according to information obtained from the UK Clinical Services Journal https://www.clinicalservicesjournal.com/story/25262/...

The Clinical Services Journal piece Gaytandzhiev had found is from March 5 2018, the day after the Skripal incident in Salisbury. In its original version it read:

Salisbury District Hospital declared a "major incident" on Monday 5 March, after two patients were exposed to an opioid .
...
It followed an incident hours earlier in which a man and a woman were exposed to the drug Fentanyl in the city centre. The opioid is 10,000 times stronger than heroin.

On April 27, a day after the above tweet:

Dilyana Gaytandzhiev @dgaytandzhieva - 12:12 UTC - 27 Apr 2018

The #Skripals were exposed to #Fentanyl, not #Novichok. After I published this information yesterday (26.04.) the Clinical Services Journal redacted it today https://www.clinicalservicesjournal.com/story/25262/...

I personally read the CSJ story after Gaytandzhiev's first tweeted it on the 26th. I can confirm that it was changed.

The top line in the CSJ quote above now reads:

Salisbury District Hospital declared a "major incident" on Monday 5 March, after two patients were exposed to what is believed to be an opioid .

The second line has been changed to:

It followed an incident hours earlier in which a man and a woman were exposed to a substance in the city centre.

All reference to Fentanyl as cause of the Skripal illness in a March 5 article has been removed between April 26 and April 27.

Archive.org has the original version as collected on April 26:


bigger

The changed version as now available at the Clinical Services Journal site:


bigger

One wonders why such a tiny magazine would bother to change an old story after some journalist tweeted about it.

The CSJ was not the only outlet which mentioned Fentanyl. The local Salisbury Journal reported it on March 5 and the piece is still up:

Police declared a major incident after a man in his 60s and a woman in her 30s were found unconscious on a bench in the shopping centre on Sunday.

Emergency services at the scene suspected the substance may have been a powerful drug called fentanyl , but nothing has yet been confirmed.

They were taken to Salisbury District Hospital where they are in a critical condition in intensive care.

In November 2017 the Salisbury Journal had reported about an unrelated fenatanyl overdose case . In 2016 Salisbury had a spike in Fentanyl OD cases. The local emergency services were surely aware of the symptoms and effects of such a substance.

Another local news site, Devon Live , headlined on March 5: Major chemical incident declared after 10 people vomited fentanyl and two are critically ill

It is understood that police suspect fentanyl, a synthetic opiate many times stronger than heroin, may have been involved . A man and a woman are in a critical condition and up to 10 other people are involved.
Officers and paramedics were called to The Maltings shopping centre in Salisbury after the man and a woman fell ill. The woman, who was unconscious, was airlifted to Salisbury district hospital at about 4.15pm, while the man was taken by ambulance.
...
It was recently reported that fentanyl has claimed the lives of at least 60 people in the UK over the last eight months.

The Devon Live report is still in its original form. It links to the first Wiltshire Police statement on the case and quotes from it. Curiously the link is dead. The first official police statement on the Skripal case is "currently unavailable".

The British press is now totally silent on the Skripal case. Craig Murray and another former senior civil servant suspect that the government gave order to not report on the issue. They also suspect, as we did early on, that the case is related to the fake "Dirty Dossier" which the Clinton campaign ordered up to use it against Donald Trump.

It is not understandable why the British government would give a silencing order if, as the government alleges, Russia caused the incident.

Why is no public investigation by the media allowed? Where is Yulia Skripal and what is the health status of Sergej Skripal? Why have they been silenced?

---
Previous Moon of Alabama posts on the Skripal case:

March 8 - Poisioned British-Russian Double-Agent Has Links To Clinton Campaign March 12 - Theresa May's "45 Minutes" Moment March 14 - Are 'Novichok' Poisons Real? - May's Claims Fall Apart March 16 - The British Government's 'Novichok' Drama Was Written By Whom? March 18 - NHS Doctor: "No Patients Have Experienced Symptoms Of Nerve Agent Poisoning In Salisbury" March 21 - Russian Scientists Explain 'Novichok' - High Time For Britain To Come Clean (Updated) March 29 - Last Act Of 'Novichok' Drama Revealed - "The Skripals' Resurrection" March 31 - Hillary Clinton Ordered Diplomats To Suppress 'Novichok' Discussions April 3 - Operation Hades Blamed Russia - A Model For The 'Novichok' Claims? April 4 - It's The Cover-Up" - UK Foreign Office Deletes Tweet, Posts False Transcript, Issues New Lies April 5 - Novi-Fog™ In Fleet Street - Truth Cut Off April 6 - The Best Explanation For The Skripal Drama Is Still ... Food Poisoning April 7 - A Very British Farce April 12 - New Developments In The Skripal Drama - Police Statement, OPCW Report Release April 15 - Were the Skripals 'Buzzed', 'Novi-shocked' Or Neither? - May Has Some 'Splaining' To Do

Posted by b on April 28, 2018 at 02:18 PM | Permalink

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Reload , Apr 28, 2018 2:55:50 PM | 1

The media may be banned from reporting, but if my casual interactions with the UK populace are representative, the majority are highly sceptical of .gov - May / BJ 'Putin did it' accusations.

Heard yesterday in the dispatch warehouse of a rural agri suply business I was collecting suplies from.
One warehousman to another- "Terry, where the hell is Jeff this morning?" reply from warehousman 2 "Off sick, poisoned by russians his Mrs says, proof is clasified, but he will be in next week"

Blue , Apr 28, 2018 2:58:07 PM | 2
One has to wonder why Russia is not calling Britain out on this obvious kidnapping. Can it be brought to the UN, security council or general assembly?
james , Apr 28, 2018 3:03:44 PM | 3
thanks b... the additional info is fascinating.. i had read craig murrays post earlier today...why are they covering up the fentanoyl angle? it's obvious!

b,

on another and important note - something is wrong with your site, with regard to making posts on the most recent open thread and even on the previous thread to this... some weird html script is showing up on both, but i was able to post earlier today on the previous thread...

john wilson , Apr 28, 2018 3:07:45 PM | 4
I think the policeman in this farce is key to everything. If the cause of the Skripal poisoning was fentenyal then why did the policeman become ill? Surely he wasn't taking this drug?

Anyway, if it was a weapons grade chemical agent that the policeman was affected by, why was it he was able to leave hospital a few days later in full uniform looking a picture of health?

Originally the story was he was somehow contaminated by the Skripals themselves, but as no one else in the contact chain was affected, and this notwithstanding the fact ambulance and medical had serious hand on contact was affected, it became clear that the policeman had to have another source of contamination.

Thus; they invented the magic door knob story. Even this silly story is absurd. The police and the goons didn't investigate the door knob (actually, a door handle lever type) theory until 25 days later when rain and numerous people coming and going at the Skripals's would have worn off any contaminate from the door handle.

By the way, they are now telling us the stuff on the door handle was a liquid. How do you get a liquid to stick of a shiny door handle? Apart from the silence of the press, the silence from the medical people is a factor also. They have not signed any official secrets act and they can't be issued with a D notice.

james , Apr 28, 2018 3:11:47 PM | 5
@4 john.. the policemen appears like an inside prop for this false flag op... that is what it looks like to me.. forget about it, or him having any relevance or validity, if he is as i am suggesting..
john wilson , Apr 28, 2018 3:20:25 PM | 6
Regarding my post above, it has to be said that this assumed 'assassin' must be the most incompetent one in the world. Surely the obvious way to get this fantasy weapons grade chemical to Skripal would be via a letter posted through the door, say, in the early evening. This way Skripal would have most likely died in his bed. By the way, it was a cold day so how did the 'assassin not know that the Skripals wouldn't be wearing gloves? Even the 'assassin' in this affair just doesn't add up. Questions, question, easily answered by lies, lies, and more lies
Babyl-on , Apr 28, 2018 3:27:04 PM | 7
It all seems amazing to me, what a strange world of collapsing empire we live in. Really, why don't the Russians demand at the UNSC the right to visit with Russian citizens? Call for a resolution demanding a visit and force them to veto.
psychohistorian , Apr 28, 2018 3:56:31 PM | 9
Thanks for doing your part to keep this false flag story alive.

It is interesting that Russia has not taken a stronger position in public about their treatment.

The UK folks sure seem to be getting away with killing this story and expect them to be successful if they can create another bigger wag the dog event.....not a good sign except as a good sign that the end is closer.

Don Bacon , Apr 28, 2018 4:21:41 PM | 10
DS Nick Bailey said, via an intermediary, that life will "probably never be the same." What an odd thing for a police sergeant to say (perhaps his last words).

from the Telegraph:

Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey was discharged from hospital two weeks ago and hasn't been heard from since, probably a result of the private session Bailey had with the Prime Minister prior to his release. Bailey wasn't even allowed to make a statement upon his discharge from hospital. In a statement read by Wiltshire Police Chief Constable Kier Pritchard on March 22, DS Nick Bailey said he recognises his life will "probably never be the same" and thanks the public for their "overwhelming" support. . . here .
And what "overwhelming" support from the public?
Peter L. , Apr 28, 2018 4:23:36 PM | 11
The US Drug Enforcement Agency claims that different kinds of Fentanyl, including something known as Carfentanil, can be absorbed through the skin or accidentally inhaled and cause death.

https://www.dea.gov/divisions/hq/2016/hq092216.shtml

In this DEA "Roll Call" video, a "DEA Officer Safety Alert", two law enforcement officers describe accidental Fentanyl poisioning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Xi4A8S23Xo

(The DEA also reminds its officers to protect their canine companions! My respect for the DEA has increased 1000 fold.)

Do ex-spies ever get involved in the drug trade? Would accidental exposure to some kind of Fentanyl explain what happened to the law enforcement officer who was also affected?

Perhaps seafood poisoning is the second most parsimonious explanation.

Jackrabbit , Apr 28, 2018 4:45:59 PM | 12
It doesn't seem unreasonable to initially suspect fentanyl given that fentanyl has killed many people in UK and elsewhere. Food poisoning was also mooted early on due to Zizzi's poor health record. But these possibilities smell like distraction from the BZ finding.

AFAIK The best way to "set the scene" for a public spectacle would be an attack with a fast-acting agent at an opportune time and place. All other "theories" seem to me to be mis-direction/distraction.

A police officer (DS Bailey) makes a logical choice to deliver the incapacitating agent as he/she does not arouse suspicion when loitering and accosting the victims. If the victims fight back, the policeman might be exposed to some of the substance.

Since the British haven't had Yulia appear before even the most loyal media poodles, I suspect that the Skripals are dead.

I'm not convinced that the MI6 had anything to fear from the Steele dossier. To think that any US investigator would be allowed to freely interview Skripal, Steele, or other British "asset" seems a big stretch. And, if tying up loose ends of the Steele dossier was the motive, it would've been much easier and more effective to have Skripal die quietly (in bed of a heat attack) than publicly.

So I'm inclined to think that the "operation" was designed to discredit Russia prior to a planned false flag in Ghouta which was meant to forestall SAA defeat of the takfiri salafist Jihadis that controlled Ghouta. The confusion and apparent hurried nature of the "op" (as noted by Jen early on - one of my favorite commentators here) fits with this theory.

Although the Skripal "op" was a success, the planned false flag didn't happen due to SAA's quick advance (with Russian help). Instead, a sloppy false flag was done at the very last minute in Douma just before the Jihadis gave up. This wouldn't save Ghouta so it was possibly motivated by the the desire to solidify anti-Russian sentiment created by the Skripal op.

Anyway, that's my best guess as to what really happened. Another clusterfuck in a long line of clusterfucks.

Bakerpete , Apr 28, 2018 4:47:47 PM | 13
Related and a good interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4VjL2KdCjo
Don Bacon , Apr 28, 2018 5:02:39 PM | 14
And recall that PM May had that highly unusual private meeting with DS Bailey in hospital prior to his release.
Dmitry , Apr 28, 2018 5:06:09 PM | 15

On April 26th she made an interesting discovery? Really? What about this Russian guy who nobody bothers to read ? He is a pharmacologist and a knock-out coder and wrote about Fentanyl on April the 21st.

https://twitter.com/valeri_sukhov/status/987769057356255232

Jen , Apr 28, 2018 5:07:30 PM | 16
If we assume that the Skripals had been poisoned with fentanyl, we then have to explain how a doctor was able to give the Skripals first aid at the scene where they collapsed without being poisoned by fentanyl herself.

There have been reports from the US about police officers and emergency first response workers coming into contact with even very minute amounts of fentanyl and falling unconscious and needing first aid themselves. In one unusual incident, a police officer had been dealing with several cases, one of which involved coming in contact with someone who overdosed on fentanyl, and after several hours he brushed off what looked like dust particles from his uniform with his bare hand. He collapsed almost straight away and needed hospitalisation. The dust particles turned out to be fentanyl particles.

The doctor who gave first aid to the Skripals reported no ill effects; she turned herself in to Salisbury District Hospital after hearing that the couple had been poisoned by Novichok but she was found to be clear of any poisoning agent.

Tannenhouser , Apr 28, 2018 5:25:11 PM | 17
@Jen16. Is it not possible the 'potency' of fentanyl is overstated in order to 'sell' the anti-dote? Much like the anthrax 'dote' after 911. I mean most dealers I have met aren't exactly stupid, that being said most aren't lab smart either, it would seem to me there would be a whole lot of dead dealers if 'traces' in the wind can kill. Then there is the anomaly of the Dr. and other's as you brought up in 16. Just a thought. FWIW.
flamingo , Apr 28, 2018 5:59:01 PM | 19
This charade has not gone well for May. It has raised serious doubts that the UK can ever be an ally of Trump. The Steele dirt dossier was an attack on Trump's family, presidential campaign and cripples his first term with purile Russia hatred. May and the espionage establishment are the enemy of the USA. After 250 years the British finally won the US war of independence and have enslaved the majority of its media outlets.
et Al , Apr 28, 2018 6:07:39 PM | 20
I would say narrative . Keep it simple. Repeat. Anything that throws doubt or poses questions is submerged .

Curious that they went to the effort of shutting down the British press and the scrubbing from search results on skripal and pablo miller. The results for "pablo miller" in google news UK, US and others throw up almost identical results, even though I recall seeing his name via google news mentioned early on...

I bet it has nothing to do with the Brussels 'Right to be forgotten!' Directive being enforced...

But, when I look for him in Quant (under 'All') ...it throws up some interesting links, but nothing under the 'news'!:

Remember I wrote earlier that I was sure that I had seen Miller's name mentioned on google news earlier on? Well Quant threw this paywalled Daily Telegraph article from 7th March (loose the spaces):

Poisoned Russian spy Sergei Skripal was close to consultant
https://www. telegraph .co.uk/news/ 2018/03/07/ poisoned-russian-spy-sergei-skripal-close-consultant-linked/

By Robert Mendick, Chief Reporter Hayley Dixon Patrick Sawer, Senior Reporter and Luke Heighton

A security consultant who has worked for the company that compiled the controversial dossier on Donald Trump was close to the Russian double agent poisoned last weekend, it has been claimed.

The consultant, who The Telegraph is declining to identify, lived close to Col Skripal and is understood to have known him for some time.

Col Skripal, who is in intensive care and fighting for his life after an assassination attempt on Sunday, was recruited by MI6 when he worked for the British embassy in Estonia, according to the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency....
#####

It must have somehow slipped through, though probably because the you can't see 'pablo miller's name in the visible section.

There are some other juicy links from Qwant, including one from the Guardian in 2000 which names Miller:

( https://www. theguardian. com/ world/ 2000/ mar/ 25/russia. iantraynor1 ),

& this one:

https://www. ukcolumn. org/ article/ skripal-russian-web-or-rusi-web

...which is full of unverifiable claims, including that Putin was almost recruited to the UK! It always makes me laugh when they bring up the 'apartment bombings were an FSB false flag to attack Chechnya', but those same people don't even mention Basayev's invasion of Dagestan on the 7th August 1999 in support of his fellow jihadis who dreamed of a Caucasian Islamic Emirate in Russia's south, i.e. what was attempted in Syria these last few years. Keeping Russia weak, something entirely in keeping with US & UK interests...

I'm pleased to see Antwar.com's stalwart Justin Raimondo's piece come up too.

Observer , Apr 28, 2018 6:11:33 PM | 21
@Jen 16

Its unclear if that happened in all (100%) cases though. Its possible that only in certain percentage of such cases the rescuers were affected, and in some cases they were not.

Thus, a full statistic with such cases will have to be provided in order to be able to make conclusions about this.

GoraDiva , Apr 28, 2018 6:16:20 PM | 22
At this point, the main questions are "Where is Yulia Skripal and what is the health status of Sergej Skripal? Why have they been silenced?" What is Russia doing about the obvious abduction of its citizen? What a strange world we live in... And in case this escaped folks... a good account of mr. Steele - https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/christopher-steele-the-real-foreign-influence-in-the-2016-election/
BRF , Apr 28, 2018 6:34:48 PM | 23
The state exists to enforce the dominance of elites, all the rest is propaganda, misdirection, Obfuscation or terrorism up to and including total war.
Don Bacon , Apr 28, 2018 6:38:00 PM | 24
The young man Jamie Paine who first found the Skripals on the park bench got some liquid on his skin and apparently didn't suffer from it. From a March 8 BBC video -- ". . .man was frothing from the mouth, I got a little bit on my skin, it wasn't too much, I just brushed it off." That has never been mentioned in any recent news accounts that I've seen. We do have other articles mentioning Paine.
WJ , Apr 28, 2018 6:48:39 PM | 25
Jackrabbit @12,

Yes. I think that's right.

Pft , Apr 28, 2018 6:49:11 PM | 26
Lol. 1984 today. Winston working OT
karlof1 , Apr 28, 2018 6:55:14 PM | 27
Wow! Thanks for picking up and expanding on Murray's blog, b! The planet's populated with far too many evil English speaking people that must be culled from the herd--and soon!
Jackrabbit , Apr 28, 2018 6:57:16 PM | 28
Don Bacon @22: frothing at the mouth

I did an online search and I don't see frothing at the mouth or jerking motions as a symptom of fentanyl poisoning. Opiate OD results in dizziness, confusion, sleepiness and loss of consciousness, low blood pressure, slowed heartbeat and slow breathing, etc.

Also, there is a well-known antidote for fentanyl poisoning: naloxone (aka narcan), which could've been applied quickly. And, while I'm not an expert, I am not aware of people being in a coma for weeks due from a fentanyl OD. AFAIK, within days they are dead or recovered.

Tannenhouser , Apr 28, 2018 6:59:32 PM | 29
@DB22. The froth ties in with the Gouta shaving cream victims no?
Don Bacon , Apr 28, 2018 7:03:04 PM | 30
Yes
wagelaborer , Apr 28, 2018 7:09:27 PM | 31
Several people have asked why Russia has not raised the issue at the UNSC. I have heard them raise the issue at the UNSC, (I listened on Ruptly), and so did Lavrov and so did the Russian ambassador to Britain and so did Maria Zakarova.
The reason no one knows this is because the Mighty Wurlitzer of propaganda is controlled by the West, not Russia. If they don't report it, people think it didn't happen. But it did.
Vlad the Impeller , Apr 28, 2018 7:09:34 PM | 32
The Devon Live report is still in its original form. It links to the first Wiltshire Police statement on the case and quotes from it. Curiously the link is dead. The first official police statement on the Skripal case is "currently unavailable".

FYI: A copy of the web page has been preserved at the Wayback Machine

Tannenhouser , Apr 28, 2018 7:10:37 PM | 33
@DB. Froth is a good visual indicator, kinda like having a roach clip on your keychain when u cross a border.
It tells a story......... I doubt the Skirpals got a dose of Gillette.
Lozion , Apr 28, 2018 7:15:52 PM | 34
@21 Curious MoAites would like to know. Same with Assange..
Don Bacon , Apr 28, 2018 7:16:56 PM | 35
So the froth proves the fake attack, again.
Walstib , Apr 28, 2018 7:20:00 PM | 36
I am not sure I have seen this angle in the article or comments, fentanyl use would present the same triage symptoms as BZ. Seems chasing a fentanyl trail gets further from existing evidence.
Ort , Apr 28, 2018 7:29:40 PM | 37
D-Notices are one of those evils that, once initiated, are never undone. It reminds me a bit of the fraudulent, gauzy "AUMF" used by the United States government as if it were a blank check written by God to wage imperialistic wars kinetic actions of aggression against anyone or anything it deems ripe for pillage or destruction-- at its sole pleasure and discretion, and for eternity.

But I digress. Just as a matter of logic, it would seem as if the authorities who created and approved the "D-Notice" procedure presumed that the government would never become so tyrannical, despotic, and unethical that it would issue such mega-censorship diktats in bad faith-- i.e., to provide cover for illicit and illegal government conduct.

As it is, the D-Notices' ostensible "national security" rationale has proven to be mere camouflage for its true purpose: ensuring that malfeasant officials and operatives are "secure" in their depraved work, and are protected from all inquiries that might expose their heinous wrongdoing. Whoops!
______________________________________

That said, I also wonder about Russia's relative official deference, at least publicly, to the UK authorities' sequestering of the Skripals.

Given the absence of any domestic countervailing force to the British government's high-handedness-- the UK media consent-manufactories are complicit enough as it is, even without being gagged by D-Notices-- it would seem that the Russians are the only party able and willing to "raise a stink" beyond polite formal communications.

Perhaps the comparison is inapt, but compare OPCW representative Aleksandr Shulgin's recent presentation at the OPCW, and his comments about the faked chemical attack in Syria. They are directly, forcefully, and appropriately accusatory, and signal that the Russian government is weary of politely submitting to the UK's abusive and bellicose policies and conduct.

But there seems to be no corresponding inclination to press the UK authorities over the reprehensible and unconscionable kidnapping, or worse, of Russian citizens. 'Tis a puzzlement.

Kalen , Apr 28, 2018 7:47:47 PM | 38
I do not know if fentanyl was found in OPCW sample, only British made BZ paralyzingly agent. The question is why? I think doctors in Salisbury who are trained with chemical nerve agents due to proximity to Porton Downs lab instantly knew there was no military nerve agent used there, would they also instantly know that it was Fentanyl since they faced epidemic of opioid overdoses.

As far as theory how this happened. I see that Skripal was in it, in fact he prepared and tested appropriate dose for him as his daughter used as pawn to lend credibility and provide required Putin evil killing innocent narrative which would be absent if he just killed or hurt rogue agent.

Skipral himself calibrated that false flag dose of BZ or Fenantyl to make sure no permanent damage would be done to his daughter and then administered it himself to her and himself in controlled manner in public place so help would be coming immediately while in his car they could have possibly lie there for hours before being discovered.

In fact place where he lived Salisbury near Porton Downs was perfect for this since there was no way that doctors would misdiagnose them as military nerve agent victims which wrong treatment would possibly caused irreversible damage to victims as doctors would be more aggressive fearing immediate death of patients and also were immune to propaganda of Novichok crap since they were experts in this medical field as real and present danger, threat of exposure of Porton Downs employees was always there.

After recovery is was Skripal, trusted by her as her father, himself as part of psych op presented the narrative as Putin wanted to kill me and did not care that you happened to be with me at time of attack. I am so sorry, shit lies. She was brainwashed offered lucrative financial arrangement in the west decided to stay, thinking she could be killed upon returning to Russia.

I do not think it would be far fetched to concoct such a thing or similar by MI6 as such stunts were done before like fake deaths or staged attacks but in this case the point was to fool British unwitting participants that nerve agent attack happenced as later they did later in Douma in amateurish way but still it worked as pretext to pre planed aggression on Syria as in case of Skripals pre planed diplomatic retaliation against Russia before any investigation was really commenced , such thing only perpetrators of false flag themselves would do.

If Skripal was not on it why keep them alive as prime witnesses of conspiracy since I could imagine as a father myself Skripal being furious of MI6 amounted to attemp to kill his daughter and blame Putin one he learned that there was no Novichok crap or any military nerve agent used.

In fact Fenantyl is deadly if inappropriately handled what just few days after Skripal affair husband and wife overdosed on Fentanty in California and putting in critical condition their mother in law trying to revive them in the bedroom, children that never enter the room by looked through the Door who called 911 were also mildly exposed while a police officer who entered the room end up in hospital himself.

Whole house was immediately quarantined and covered by tent until, special unit arrived days later and only then police investigator entered premises.

What interesting that no emergency or medical personnel in hospital was hurt since they knew well how to deal with Fenantyl epidemic.

We must remember that despite crazy rhetoric we are dealing with risky but rational people.

bevin , Apr 28, 2018 7:55:58 PM | 39
Unless I am mistaken D Notices are issued by the Minister of Defence who, in this instance is the exceedingly high flying Tory Gavin Williamson. Williamson's previous job was as Tory Whip -- making sure that there were no rebellions among the MPs at a time when the May government hangs by a thread and is taking the most extraordinary measures to ensure that it does not lose a Paliamentary vote.

Williamson's claim to fame, and May's affection, was that he ran the Whip's office as a blackmail operation-spying on MPs and building dossiers featuring their errors, crimes and indiscretions. He was very good at this, May, though very unpopular, is spared the fate that Thatcher suffered-a vote of non confidence by the Tory MPs (the 1922 Committee)- because Williamson, a thug, has a blackmailer's 'hold' over most of his colleagues.

Using a D Notice in this matter is very unusual- quite how national security would suffer if the truth were to become widely known is difficult to imagine.

But thanks to the Israeli Embassy's million pound campaign against Corbyn, and a hundred Fifth Columnists on the Labour benches who prefer May to their party leader, and Williamson's mafia Parliament isn't working as it ought to.

A P , Apr 28, 2018 8:08:09 PM | 40
The fentanyl/BZ/Novichok angle seems eerily like the US/ZATO/MSM fallback position on the BUK missile scam for MH17. By insisting MH17 was brought down by SOME BUK, the story line never gets to the Ukie SU25s seen near MH17 on Russian commercial air-traffic tracking radar.

The pub seafood dish spiked with shellfish toxin is more likely, as it would need to be ingested with a time-lag after ingestion so mere contact on the bench would not be an issue. Mossad is too clever to leave anything easily traceable, and will keep injecting alternative story lines into the British "intel" system and the MSM.

It is obvious this was NOT a UK or even US/CIA/5-Eyes operation. The UK politicians and intel community had no idea, were caught totally flatfooted, so went to "trusted sources (Mossad) to find out what to say.

The ONLY way for the UK to manage this massive back-stab by the Rothschild-backed Israeli Zionists is to just shut down all access to any real info, so some BS stories will be thrown around to confuse the public and defuse any attempts by real investigators to piece together the real events.

The fact Skripal was probably involved in the Steele dossier scam may indicate the true source of the anti-Trump agenda. Why else would Mossad be moved to desperately silence Skripal, and his daughter on the potential scenario she knew and had come to pick up Skripal's dead-man's-switch documentation and take it back to Russia for safe-keeping. Imagine how upset Trumpty Dumbdy would be if he found out the Steele scam was ultimately set in motion by Nuttyyahoo, or rogue elements in the Israeli gov't/Mossad.

michaelj72 , Apr 28, 2018 9:01:28 PM | 41
"The first official police statement on the Skripal case is "currently unavailable"."

FYI: the first report is still available on the Way Back machine Web Archive here, and there are 5 "captures" but only 3 of those show the actual report (through March 2018), starting in April the text is not available any more....

link ">https://www.wiltshire.police.uk/article/1736/Major-incident-after-two-people-suspected-of-being-exposed-to-unknown-substance-in-Salisbury">link

michaelj72 , Apr 28, 2018 9:02:56 PM | 42
that link didn't come out/work right. sorry. This one appears to work ok

link ">https://www.wiltshire.police.uk/article/1736/Major-incident-after-two-people-suspected-of-being-exposed-to-unknown-substance-in-Salisbury">link

WJ , Apr 28, 2018 9:07:27 PM | 43
@34,

Yes. I think that's right and is consistent with Jackrabbit @12 and my own thoughts on the matter.

Tannenhouser , Apr 28, 2018 9:26:37 PM | 44
@33DB. Yes and no depending on where your personal belief fence may be. For myself not proves...... just seems conspicuously coincidental. Mind you, MSM never played it up to my knowledge... in either case so..... either way froth no froth all we really know is two family members from Russia spent time in a London hospital and the UK skreamed Russia did it way before any reasonable person could be exected to believe it, given the track record, after that who knows really.
V , Apr 28, 2018 11:59:32 PM | 45
Isn't it just amazing how May, doubling down on the false flag story, has been busted as a liar and she doesn't flinch.
A P , Apr 29, 2018 1:13:45 AM | 46
I was curious about the relationship between Trump and the Rothschilds, and why they might go to such lengths to get Mossad to go 100% rogue and pull off the Skripal attack.

A simple Dog Pile meta-search (Google will probably not give the same results for obvious reasons) found a story in wide blog circulation from Oct 2016 which said Trump had recently paid off his debt to the Rothschilds (probably through Goldman Sachs or the like). The interesting part is the article claims Trump had ALL Rothschilds banned from his Mar a Lago resort, the reputed quote from the Tweeter in Chief was "I grabbed Jacob (Rothschild) by the scruff of the neck and kicked him out the back door of Palm Beach of Florida society". Way to make enemies and influence friends there Donny-boy. The same article quotes a Trump tweet, "They do not own the world, and they do not have carte blanch to do whatever they want. If we do not challenge them there will be other issues. We will not be bullied by them!" http://harddawn.com/trump-banned-rothschilds/

Except for the Trump tweets, the rest of the election-run-up article is full of Trumpty Dumbdy hopium which has not panned out.

In an Infowars article: "The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a company under the wing of The Economist, owned by the Rothschild banking family of England, has declared Donald Trump a "global risk"

https://www.infowars.com/rothschild-intel-unit-equates-donald-trump-to-jihadi-terror/

Can't see the Economist getting too far off-narrative with the Rothschild cabal, so this rings true.

So while Infowars and Hard Dawn are not anyone's first choice as sources, they are quoting Trump himself and a Rothschild media/propaganda organ.

Circle closed, Mossad did it. The UK MI6/5 and politicians didn't know what was happening until after Israeli/Mossad "trusted sources" gave May and Johnson the script to feed the MSM .

A P , Apr 29, 2018 1:35:22 AM | 47
The potential existence of Skripal's dead-man's-switch documentation may have extended well beyond the Steele scam, which would explain the urgency of the deed and why the Skripals are being held incommunicado. The search of the Skripal residence was to find that documentation, easy once the UK cordoned it off due to potential "chemical contamination".
Jen , Apr 29, 2018 1:43:29 AM | 48
Just to complicate the matter even more, I have found UK tabloid news reports online dated 7 - 8 March 2018 of a female office worker (who worked in the building next to the Zizzi's Restaurant franchise in Salisbury) who was taken to Salisbury District Hospital by paramedics. Links to the reports below:

The reports may not amount to much. The woman could have had a fainting reaction to something not related to the Skripal poisoning incident.

As of today (29 April 2018) the pizza restaurant remains closed. The uniforms of the staff who worked there on the Sunday when the Skripals ate at the restaurant were seized and burned by the authorities.

http://metro.co.uk/2018/03/11/zizzi-workers-uniforms-burned-poisoning-russian-spy-7379213/

Apparently traces of a nerve gas agent were said to have been found at the restaurant, in particular on and around the table where the Skripals ate their lunch (and which has since been incinerated).

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/11/russian-spy-attack-nerve-agent-traces-found-in-zizzi-restaurant

psychohistorian , Apr 29, 2018 2:58:59 AM | 49
@ Jen with interesting updates...thanks

Any word from the owner of the restaurant or workers laid off? Who pays to shut all them and their families up?

@ A P with the Trump/Rothschild conflict exposure......thanks

If a sane world made the tools of finance public utilities then these social retards would not have the means to plays these games on the backs of the rest of us.

somebody , Apr 29, 2018 3:29:20 AM | 50
Craig Murray is a hero.

It is obvious that Yulia Skripal's and her brother's ability to travel freely between both sides and keep their childhood friends in the secret service community would have cost their father dearly. He is described as a family man, and could easily be blackmailed with his family.

Pharmacist , Apr 29, 2018 3:31:52 AM | 51
Fentanyl OD would have very similar symptoms to BZ exposure. There is no doubt in my mind that the Skripals were exposed to BZ (as confirmed by Swiss lab) and Fentanyl was the obvious suspect for the medical staff who would not have had full toxicology report by the time initial report was made.
Anonymous2 , Apr 29, 2018 3:35:29 AM | 52
Seems like UK just started a propaganda campaing against Corbyn sigh, UK Media Claims 'Russian Bots' Tried to Influence Election to Support Corbyn https://sptnkne.ws/hwDC
somebody , Apr 29, 2018 3:52:28 AM | 53
51 OPCW says the BZ was in the control samples not the original. All you need to cheat would be one person to switch Novichok and original samples in the Dutch lab where the samples were split.
Pharmacist , Apr 29, 2018 4:25:54 AM | 54
A control sample that gives the same exact symptoms as the victims displayed. How convenient! Of all the millions of organic chemicals they could have chosen for a control sample........ I'll leave you with that thought.
somebody , Apr 29, 2018 4:59:19 AM | 55
Posted by: Pharmacist | Apr 29, 2018 4:25:54 AM | 54

Yep. And those were the blood samples not the soil samples.

Tuyzentfloot , Apr 29, 2018 5:29:32 AM | 56
I'm confused about dropping the Novichok hypothesis. The explanation of BZ poisoning has been dropped, fine. But what about the presence of A234? It's not because the initial report mentioned Fentanyl poisoning that this is correct. Fentanyl is a problem the doctors are familiar with as a 'live' social problem and it's easy to explain a new case with Fentanyl while in fact it's something else. So it is possible that afterwards the doctors changed their minds and saw no reason not to comply with pressure to correct the statement. I don't know if the symptoms the doctors were presented with were clear enough to exclude confusion.

Gareth Porter has an article about a batch of A234 which has been around since the nineties, probably in hands of Russian mafia, and which by now has been deteriorated and would have much less predictable effects when used.

There is a mention of the purity of the traces of A234. There are two interpretations of that: one is that it is fresh and contains little contaminations. Another is that it has in fact deteriorated very much but from the proportions of the components it is clear that it was once a pure product.

I would not exclude the possibility that a very old batch of A234 was used and that the British were convinced it was from russian origin and intended to take full advantage of this. It could be that they knew it had russian origin because they had been involved in acquiring the sample , or it was just a good guess, but the opportunistic use of the pretext is the same.

Mikael Kall , Apr 29, 2018 5:55:21 AM | 57
Here is some information from Pablo Miller: "Little was known about Miller's life outside his public clashes with the FSB. He served in the British Army as a member of the Royal Tank Regiment and the Royal Green Jackets before he joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1990. A veterans site for the Royal Tank Regiment shows a 1984 photograph of a Lt. Pablo Miller patrolling the Green Line in Cyprus, where Miller's LinkedIn profile indicates he served.

Diplomatic lists show Miller's first foreign posts after joining the FCO were in Nigeria, first in Abuja and later Lagos beginning in 1992 before he took a job as first secretary at the British embassy in Estonia in September 1997. He also served as a counsellor at the British embassy in Warsaw, Poland from 2010 through 2013." (....) In 2000, the FSB identified Miller as the "head of British intelligence in Tallinn," Estonia and accused him of recruiting an FSB officer later identified as Valery Ojamae." (Source: Daily Beast)
https://www.thedailybeast.com/pablo-miller-the-mystery-man-who-recruited-putins-poisoned-spy?source=facebook&via=mobile

pantaraxia , Apr 29, 2018 5:58:50 AM | 58
Why does this operation seem to have the malodorous stench of Berezovsky's spectre lingering in the background. While Berezovsky himself may be dead, it is safe to assume that remnants of his network are still around. If indeed the Skripals were poisoned, it could very well have been orchestrated by a rogue, non-state actor with embarrassing ties to MI6. In some ways it is reminiscent of the bungled Litvinenko operation (which the British gov't also covered up).

Both Pablo Miller and Christopher Steele were known to be associated with Berezovsky. Steele, as his Mi6 handler, would probably have intimate knowledge of Berezovsky's connections and may well have used them as 'Russian sourced' material for his infamous Steele dossier. So Skripal, who consulted on the Steele dossier, is tied to both Miller and Steele who in turn are connected to remnants of Berezovsky's network. The 'suiciding' of Berezovsky (unless sanctioned by Mi6) suggests at least one group of players within this network who have their own agenda.

pantaraxia , Apr 29, 2018 6:06:49 AM | 59
@8 mauisurfer

Many thanks for the article. Shocking but not surprising. Deserves widespread dissemination.

pantaraxia , Apr 29, 2018 6:25:19 AM | 60
@46 A P
re: Trump and the Rothschilds

Perhaps you would be considerate enough not to degrade the quality of MOA by posting 'information' sourced from obvious nutjobs such as your sourcing for ' Trump and the Rothschilds'. To quote a blog, which includes such gems as "FACT CHECK! 69 Million Illegal Alien Extraterrestrials Voted for Hillary: Mostly True", seems to indicate you are probably more suited to be commenting over there rather than on MOA.

Bakerpete , Apr 29, 2018 7:55:31 AM | 61
@somebody 53,
I've read that as well and every sensible lab worker will be rolling their eyes. Using a contaminant as a control is total bullshit.
Jen , Apr 29, 2018 8:02:29 AM | 62
Psychohistorian @ 49:

As far as I know, the workers at Zizzi's Restaurant in Salisbury were offered shifts in other Zizzi's Restaurant franchises.

Another article at Metro.co.uk dated 8 March 2018 was running with the notion that the nerve gas agent was put into their meal at the restaurant:

http://metro.co.uk/2018/03/08/russian-spy-daughter-pictured-zizzi-restaurant-centre-poison-probe-7371707/

That idea is probably more plausible than the food poisoning idea: the poison need not actually have been a nerve gas agent as long as it mimics the symptoms of shellfish poisoning. The only issue is, who would have put the poison into the food? If the staff had done it, someone would have noticed because there were no walls or other barriers between the kitchen and the dining area. One would also expect other diners to have had food poisoning although it's possible the Skripals were the only diners that day to have eaten seafood risotto. The second possibility is that someone was with the Skripals while they were having lunch and managed to pop something into their lunch while they were not looking.

Of course we would discount other alternatives: that the Skripals were poisoned at The Mill pub or on the park bench.

Jen , Apr 29, 2018 8:09:18 AM | 63
V @ 45: Why would we be surprised if Treason'n'Mayhem doesn't flinch if she's been busted for lying? She's had plenty of practice, another episode of lying is just part of the regular routine!
Noirette , Apr 29, 2018 8:10:11 AM | 64
Fwiw. DS Nick Bailey. I tend to believe that he was 'sickened,' was not a made-up character / a real person playing a hoaxy part / and so on.

1 He existed at the Wiltshire Police, enough on the net about him. At one point (2017) he was stationed very close to the 'park bench' spot. The photo seen everywhere is of an award ceremony for him for work leading to the arrest of a serial rapist. (2016) Imho his wife and children exist (no post about that.)

2 How, from where, etc. he arrived at the Skripal collapse park-bench on 4 March (if he did) is not mentioned in any news article. Expressions used: rushed / speeded / to help -- after coming to the aid of -- first cop on the scene -- after responding to the attack -- as the first response to the attack -- No other info. offered.

Was he on duty? Where was he? How did he arrive? What did he do? How did he get to the hospital? One article mentions TWO policemen as first responders, as one would expect. Who was the other one (if 1 = N. B.)? Almost no info about N.B. was given out. At some later point some articles suggested that he was not poisoned at the scene, or thru contact with the Skripals, but because he was the first plod to enter the Skripal house. (Imho this last story was pure speculation / made up, a sort of offshoot of the poisoned knob narrative. Whatever, if any, poisoning took place, was not at the house, but at the very earliest at the Zizzi restaurant.)

3 Couldn't find any 'witness' descriptions (e.g. doc who first dealt with Yulia) of the arrival of the police. Exceedingly strange. Perhaps some exist but I missed them..? One would expect: When DS Bailey and Plodue rushing to the scene of the deathly murderous attack realised some nerve agent was suspected a high alert priority emergency order was immediately called out for a helicopter .. Nothing like that. It is as if all the 'bystander witnesses' simply vanished at some point. I also looked for cell photos of the park-bench scene and only found ONE possible. Scroll down to pic of Sergei:

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/crime/witnesses-saw-woman-wearing-surgical-12176790

4 I found NO news about N.B. beyond the read-out declaration by police, and the annoucement that he left hosp. on 22 March. The few words available (visit of top plod to N. B. in hosp and declaration) "very anxious" - "completely surreal" - "life never the same again" - "find a new normal" seem to fit with..heh.. a lot of stuff incl. BZ, Fentanyl, and LSD, but not a deadly nerve agent. Heh, not worth much, just a few words. (see Don Bacon as well.)

All this, imho, signals a clumsy cover-up, gag orders, etc. Which points to unexpected results, plots gone wrong, clumsy exploitation of events, etc. No way a planned false flag type conspiracy. (I'm not keen on the links between Skripal and the Steele dossier.)

Blue , Apr 29, 2018 8:23:24 AM | 65
@31. ı think the issue we are wondering most about is the abduction of Yulia Skripal. We know they have addressed the poisoning issue at the UNSC, but wonder about Russia pressing for the illegal prevention of a Russian citizen accessing her government. There is zero evidence provided by the British government which suggests Yulia does not want contact, except the British governments' assertion to that effect. The word of the abductors is worthless.
jason , Apr 29, 2018 9:05:52 AM | 66
your dealing with ............criminals........... who are in charge of top level large organizations/departments called your government. criminals. the same for terrorists, which pre-9/11 was just criminals. your dealing with criminals/terrorist who have a hand in their media to be able to make you think in a hundred directions. which is not necessary.


First. How could UK and US not know about some mossad operation and was caught flat footed? There responses were quick enough to insinuate that russia did it again in syria not long after.


Second. How come skripal and his daughter haven't just come out for answers unless they were in on it? (how they were in, is not really important now, it is obvious, unless i hear a story about a russian immigrant jumping out of a window, I find her flying to UK was her one way trip now unless she proves otherwise)


Last. the fact the sample did contain a bit of everything suggests, their intention was to "hide". remember i said the cctv cameras would have been reviewed by now easily.

the hit on n.korea's brother? there was not really an intention to hide by their governance.

russia is doing good to ignore such banter, because it is really below the level of even petty criminals who do things out of necessity as compared to idiots who have power but still fk it all up. not that putin is not capable of this and probably has so before, but these actions or inactions speak about someone who is experienced.


On a side note. I viewed US campaign commercials and I saw the words two faced being used instead of highlighting what they had done or will do....... it has been a nice ride. i missed the old us but i won't regret her now. =(

AmsterJam , Apr 29, 2018 9:24:15 AM | 67
The original 5 March Wiltshire Police statement is still at WayBack Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180305183334/https://www.wiltshire.police.uk/article/1736/Major-incident-after-two-people-suspected-of-being-exposed-to-unknown-substance-in-Salisbury ">https://www.wiltshire.police.uk/article/1736/Major-incident-after-two-people-suspected-of-being-exposed-to-unknown-substance-in-Salisbury">https://web.archive.org/web/20180305183334/https://www.wiltshire.police.uk/article/1736/Major-incident-after-two-people-suspected-of-being-exposed-to-unknown-substance-in-Salisbury
somebody , Apr 29, 2018 9:29:05 AM | 68
61) actually they do. This here is the OPCW publication on " on-site and off-site analysis"

They use "scheduled chemicals" for spiking controls which means chemicals that are on their chemical weapons list.

bevin , Apr 29, 2018 9:30:16 AM | 69
Craig Murray updates the story:

"UPDATE: Stupidly I had forgotten this vital confirmation from Channel 4 News (serial rebel Alex Thomson) of the D Notice in place on mention of Pablo Miller.
(Alex Thomson tweeted on March 12 that a D notice, to protect Skripal's handler,living nearby, had been imposed in the previous week)
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/

"Back then I did not realise what I now know, that the person being protected was Pablo Miller, colleague in both MI6 then Orbis Intelligence of Christopher Steele, author of the fabrications of the Trump/Russia golden shower dossier. That the government's very first act on the poisoning was to ban all media mention of Pablo Miller makes it extremely probable that this whole incident is related to the Trump dossier and that Skripal had worked on it, as I immediately suspected. The most probable cause is that Skripal – who you should remember had traded the names of Russian agents to Britain for cash – had worked on the dossier with Miller but was threatening to expose its lies for cash."

V , Apr 29, 2018 9:35:10 AM | 70
I think the best description of todays governments is a "Being There" moment. Idiots as savants, running governments...
morongobill , Apr 29, 2018 9:53:00 AM | 71
Starting to think that the "wayback machine" might be the next site to go lights out.
adamski , Apr 29, 2018 10:03:59 AM | 72
Fentanyl

A super strong opioid and therefore OD will involve loss, of consciousness, slowed breathing, pin point pupils and death. Fentanyl is usually administered via a transdermal patch i.e. across the skin but over an extended time period, although the junkies I worked with in Sydney had worked out how to extract the good stuff from the patch in an injectable form. Bang into your arm (or neck if you're hardcore).

Overdose is EASILY reversed by Narcan /naloxone injected IM. Kicks every opioid molecule off associated receptors.

I believe an aerosol form was used by Russian special forces in Moscow theatre siege. It incapacitated terrorists and hostages and unfortunately coused death by positional asphyxiation to a hundred or so hostages.

CE , Apr 29, 2018 10:09:02 AM | 73
I think the idea about Yulia visiting to take Sergei's dead-man-switch back to Russia is interesting. Reminded me of the report that they both had turned off their cell phones for four hours between the visit to the cemetery in the morning and showing up in city center in the early afternoon. Maybe they went for the documents Sergei had stored in a secret location and had them with them when they were taken out in the park.
lysias , Apr 29, 2018 10:10:01 AM | 74
Does the D notice indicate that it was really the UK government that was behind the Steele dossier?
Harry , Apr 29, 2018 10:13:37 AM | 75
@somebody | 68
61) actually they do. This here is the OPCW publication on "on-site and off-site analysis"

They use "scheduled chemicals" for spiking controls which means chemicals that are on their chemical weapons list.

Spiked samples at OPCW lab would show those control chemicals in a virgin state, and that's exactly what happened. Problem is, the evidence was exactly the opposite of what OPCW claimed. Swiss report showed Novichok was in a virgin state and pure form (definitely lethal to victims, if it was in their blood), that's an evidence IT WAS THE SPIKE, not BZ.

somebody , Apr 29, 2018 10:21:49 AM | 76
Posted by: Harry | Apr 29, 2018 10:13:37 AM | 75

We don't really know as the complete report is kept secret.

Peter AU 1 , Apr 29, 2018 10:21:56 AM | 77
According to the OPCW lab report the Russians got hold of, it sounded as though remnant traces of BZ where found plus a A-234 spike (in virgin state). But then medical journal has Fentanyl.

The Skripals knocked out with Fentanyl, OPOCW blood samples first spiked by MI6 with A-234 and then spiked by OPCW with a control substance?

Or Skripals knocked out with fast acting Fentanyl, then dosed with BZ, perhaps a day or two later?

vbo , Apr 29, 2018 10:28:49 AM | 79
@50 "Family man" Scripal...hmmm...they said that his wife and son are dead (for how long?)...Then they said that his daughter has been paid 200.000 in to her account as a money he received from the house sold after his divorce (with second wife that noone even mentioned or ...his dead wife? I assume one can not divorce his dead wife...) just before poisoning...
somebody , Apr 29, 2018 10:28:57 AM | 80
Posted by: lysias | Apr 29, 2018 10:10:01 AM | 74

Theresa May certainly thought Hillary Clinton would win

It is possible that the Skripal case and the White Helmets Damascus chemical weapons likely false flag was an attempt of parts of the British (French) and US deep state to force Trump to remain in Syria.

It looks like there has been a rift between military and intelligence services.

somebody , Apr 29, 2018 10:32:07 AM | 81
79 you are mixing father and son. The father never divorced.
m , Apr 29, 2018 10:36:45 AM | 82
@8,59

The originator of that story is the now deceased Joe Vialls. The text can be found here

https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_zion42.htm

vbo , Apr 29, 2018 10:45:54 AM | 83
I do not know about his daughter but it seems to me that he is definitely dead. Or they may made a deal to play this game for authorities and poisoning never actually happened. Blood samples were manipulated (and badly)... We may know more about this case after 50 years or so...Witnesses wouldn't talk scared for their lives. Time and events are running fast and public easily forgets what happened last week when new "event" plays next week. Hard to follow all these crooked actors on a political scene...But more and more people are dead and wars and "revolutions" are everywhere...I am afraid "chicken will come home" soon...
lysias , Apr 29, 2018 10:49:42 AM | 84
Such power as the UK has retained post-empire has rested on the special relationship with the U.S. The core of that special relationship has been cooperation between the intel agencies of the two countries. Before the election, the U.S. intel agencies very much opposed Trump, and since then they have very much been a part of the so-called resistance to him. It figures that the UK would want to assist them.
vbo , Apr 29, 2018 11:20:18 AM | 85
@ 79 What son? As I understand his son is dead and two of them visited cemetery where his son and wife are...and then again why this money is in his daughter's account?
vbo , Apr 29, 2018 11:23:55 AM | 86
I just found that his wife died in 2012 and his son died in 2017. That was his only son Alexandr.
A P , Apr 29, 2018 11:41:05 AM | 87
@ pantaraxia #60: Thanks for pointing that out. Seems the troll farms were/are working overtime, as I have now found "articles" which use nearly EXACTLY the same two quotes (with suitable substitutions), but attributed to Putin/Russia. Some days you get the bear, some days the bear gets you...

The Economist part? The fact that corporatist rag lies as much as any MSM... but the Economist also definitely toes the Rothschild propaganda line, so that article shows there is no love lost between them and Trump.

Despite this, my premise stands, if Skripal had damning evidence that the Steele scam and the larger "Russian collusion scam" was more than just theory, and linked the Dems/lawyers/spooks back to the Rothschilds, then we have the Zionist connection. Mossad does the Zionists' dirty work.

So what power-base comes out ahead on this episode? Not the UK for sure... they have been shown to be incompetent and not in control of what happens on their turf. The Dems don't gain, as this threw at least temporary focus back onto the nearly-forgotten-by-the-MSM Steele scam. Trump surely doesn't gain much, not enough to have the CIA do the deed. Even assuming the CIA would do as Trump asks. Russia/Putin had exactly zero to gain from this. It may even be a significant loss, because if Yulia was bringing back her father's dead-man-switch documents to Russia for safekeeping, there's a chance the FSB might have been able to get them.

Who's left? Given that the Rothchilds have declared Trump "a danger" via the Economist and elsewhere, one could easily imagine them trying to install, via Trump's impeachment, an even more rabid Zionist puppet in the form of Pence.

So confusion and disarray all 'round.

"By deception shalt you do war." The Mossad motto.

somebody , Apr 29, 2018 11:59:10 AM | 88
Posted by: vbo | Apr 29, 2018 11:20:18 AM | 85

sigh. The money is not in the daughter's account. She got power of attorney for her dead and divorced brother's account in Russia.

Jackrabbit , Apr 29, 2018 12:32:03 PM | 89
Peter AU 1 @77

The effects of BZ are felt about 1/2 hour after exposure and can last for weeks. Fentanyl could have immediate effect but those effects last only days.

Maybe it was an aerosol combination of the two?

Fentanyl is deadly but BZ is not.

Jackrabbit , Apr 29, 2018 12:37:09 PM | 90
Skripal's "dead man switch" is pure fantasy. It assumes that a man who had betrayed his country and was merely an "asset" would be trusted with sensitive info.

Whatever help Skripal may have provided to Steele is likely to have been tangential. Steele almost certainly had other sources that he could call on. But Skripal might make for a good fall guy.

dahoit , Apr 29, 2018 12:37:38 PM | 91
49;the games they on the backs of others. The artist was demonized for such at that.
Jackrabbit , Apr 29, 2018 12:42:25 PM | 92
Those who decry Russia's seeming inaction fail to consider that that keeping the Skripal's incommunicado is a provocation that is meant to illicit threats from Russia that could further the anti-Russian agenda. By keeping a cool head the Russians have avoided this trap.
Jackrabbit , Apr 29, 2018 12:51:25 PM | 93
BZ as control

No evidence was provided to support this. How many substances are on the control list? How many times has BZ been used as a control? Show us evidence of labs that have previously found BZ in samples provided by OPCW. Let independent journalists interview the technicians.

Jackrabbit , Apr 29, 2018 1:12:47 PM | 94
Harry @75

The lab found 'Novocho' in pure and I pure state. If we believe OPCW assertion that they have chain of custody (no reason not to at this point) then it's logical to conclude that the 'Novochok' Is likely to have been administered to Skripal shortly before the sample was taken.

This leads to the interesting question whether samples were taken from BOTH Skripal's or only Mr. Skripal. Prehaps Yulia was not given the 'Novochok' and that's why she "recovered" much sooner?

Jackrabbit , Apr 29, 2018 1:14:11 PM | 95
Typo. Should be "pure and impure"
Ort , Apr 29, 2018 1:30:16 PM | 96
@ Kalen | 38
_____________________________

I've gotten somewhat inured or indifferent to the endless, churning speculation about what happened to the Skripals, most of which relies upon manifestly unverified and untrustworthy reports from various complicit individuals and organizations with strong motivations to deceive the public. But your scenario is indeed novel and quite plausible, so thanks.

I was reminded of a UK journalist infogandist bumptiously questioning some Russian embassy official recently; this would-be reporter parried the Russian's complaint about Yulia's sequestration by sharply positing that Yulia may be averse to meeting with Russian embassy staff because she "is afraid for her life".

At the time, it was obvious enough that this reporter was advancing the narrative that demonizes the sinister Russians in every possible manner. But this tendentious query is certainly consistent with your idea that Yulia is being "played" by both her UK captors and a complicit father.
_____________________________

Regarding another line of speculation: I have no technical qualifications to assess the merits of the speculation about the toxic substances. But on general principles of rational skepticism, I strongly doubt the ambiguous suggestion that an old and/or significantly deteriorated quantity of A-234 or other "nerve agent", possibly possessed by expatriate Russian criminals and ne'er-do-wells, was used to poison the Skripals.

I concede that "anything" is possible . But it simply strikes me as implausibly far-fetched-- and, even worse, it obliquely reinforces the official Big Lie. That is, postulating the use of some deteriorated chemical weapon: 1) supports the preposterous original claim that a powerful nerve agent was indeed deployed, and; 2) supports the speculation that the UK government itself is really a victim, or target, of the "real" perpetrators.

The UK's official response is not that of an innocent party-- a target or victim-- determined to forthrightly and transparently determine the truth of the matter. Introducing the red herring of some malicious independent actor(s) using some mysterious supply of an unpredictable chemical weapon seems inherently disinformational, and further muddies the water.

Peter AU 1 , Apr 29, 2018 1:50:11 PM | 97
Jackrabbit, the policeman recovered quickly, perhaps a dose of Fentanyl only, whereas Skripals hit with Fetanyl, then later hit with BZ? Or all three hit with Fetanyl only Skripals recovering about the same time as policeman but held incommunicado.
From the medical journal it seems Fetanyl was the diagnosis (for all three?) in the first 24 hrs. BZ and A-234 only show up in the OPCW report?

Fetanyl in an aerosol, Skripals hit with it at the park bench, whatever it was delivered in left at the scene? Bailey first copper on the scene picks it up and gives himself a mild dose?

Piotr Berman , Apr 29, 2018 1:57:37 PM | 98
Re: BZ as control, Jackrabbit @93

IMHO, OPCW should release the primary data rather than edited conclusions. Scientifically, edited conclusions have no value without raw data being available and open to alternative analysis. For examples, the spectrum generated by a substance added to a blood sample after it is collected should be different from a substance that the subject had it his/her organism for several weeks before blood sample was collected. "Detecting" a substance covers a variety of possibilities. The phenomenon of bending interpretations according to a pet theory is actually frequent in science setting, but if findings are important, raw data is re-analyzed, additional experiments may be performed (e.g. is this stuff REALLY that toxic? can it have a delayed onset of symptoms? what is the chance of synchronized delayed onset?) Pet theories may misleadingly fit prior experience of the researchers, help getting funding, help financial stakes of a company etc., and in this case, promote a certain type of international crisis. Whatever the mischief potential there may be, releasing primary data became a standard for publications in biomedical research, and it should apply in this case too.

Peter AU 1 , Apr 29, 2018 1:58:28 PM | 99
Jackrabbit
or as you say a mix of Fetanyl and BZ, hospital blood tests picking up the Fetanyl but not checking for BZ? The policeman receiving a much lighter dose due to handling whatever was used to administer the stuff.
Masshole , Apr 29, 2018 2:10:20 PM | 100
In 2016 Salisbury had a spike in Fentanyl OD cases. The local emergency services were surely aware of the symptoms and effects of such a substance.

You might want to reconsider this argument. Your link from the local Newburyport Alefish wrap refers to Salisbury, Massachusetts, not England. By the way, we locals consider Fentanyl a perfectly acceptable response to Austerity.

[Apr 29, 2018] Theresa May is especially good at vitriolic descriptions of entitities she wants the rest of us to hate and revile.

Apr 29, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Yaya April 22, 2018 at 9:22 am Good on Anon for not letting Israel off the hook!

I'm also pleased to see Margolis emphasize the role of Britain, and its talent for brutal name-calling. Theresa May is especially good at vitriolic descriptions of entitities she wants the rest of us to hate and revile. This was so evident in the speech her delegate gave to the OCPW (why that was even allowed is beyond me, since the OCPW is supposed to be impartial) that it was almost laughable. Well, I actually did laugh at one point.
https://www.yayacanada.ca/home/theresa-may-star-of-stage-screen-and-parliament

And kudos big-time to Consortium News for carrying on so beautifully the legacy of your lost leader. I particularly appreciated the sane and cogent articles concerning the so-called Russian Hack Myth, and keep them with others in sidebar of my blog.

[Apr 25, 2018] The DNC might get into deep trouble with their lawsuit

Apr 25, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Several of the parties being sued by the DNC have expressed their excitement over the discovery process , by which they may get their hands on even more evidence which might incriminate or exonerate various actors. President Trump, Roger Stone, and Wikileaks (which is countersuing the DNC) have all noted that they're looking forward to checking out the controversial "DNC Servers" which were allegedly hacked by Russia .

In response to the DNC lawsuit, Trump tweeted that it could be good news that " we will now counter for the DNC Server that they refused to give to the FBI," along with the "Debbie Wasserman Schultz Servers and Documents ."

Just heard the Campaign was sued by the Obstructionist Democrats. This can be good news in that we will now counter for the DNC Server that they refused to give to the FBI, the Debbie Wasserman Schultz Servers and Documents held by the Pakistani mystery man and Clinton Emails.

-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 20, 2018

The Trump campaign also says the lawsuit will provide an opportunity to " explore the DNC's now-secret records ."

And as we reported on Monday, WikiLeaks is counter-suing the DNC - setting up a donation fund and noting "We've never lost a publishing case and discovery is going to be amazing fun."

The Democrats are suing @WikiLeaks and @JulianAssange for revealing how the DNC rigged the Democratic primaries. Help us counter-sue. We've never lost a publishing case and discovery is going to be amazing fun: https://t.co/E1QbYJL4bB

More options: https://t.co/MsNZhrTzTL pic.twitter.com/VbPp7FTNq3

-- WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 20, 2018

DNC chair Tom Perez defended the lawsuit as "necessary," telling Meet the Press that they had to file before the statue of limitations ran out, and that "it's hard to put a price tag on preserving democracy."

David Pepper, chair of the Ohio Democratic Party is totally cool with the DNC lawsuit. "I don't think it hurts," said Pepper. "If you have credible claims, you have a responsibility to pursue legal action. I think you have a day or two where [the suit] is the story, but that's different from your overall message."

" I wouldn't have our candidates spending the fall talking about Russia or the suit or anything like that ," Pepper said.

"They should be focused on health care, education, student debt. We shouldn't divert the message from those topics to talk about Russia. "

And yet, that's exactly what's going to happen as the DNC lawsuit plays out in the six months and change before midterms.

[Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... World Socialist Web Site ..."
"... The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence operatives running in the Democratic primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat experience invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on their websites. And they are welcomed and given preferred positions, with Democratic Party officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies. ..."
"... the Democratic Party has opened its doors to a "friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies. ..."
"... The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an expression of the breakdown of American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose interests the state apparatus and its "bodies of armed men" serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working class, the ruling class is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule. ..."
"... But it is impossible to carry out this fight through the "axis of evil" that connects the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx of military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups, that the Democrats represent a "lesser evil." On the contrary, working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the corporate-controlled two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils. ..."
Mar 13, 2018 | www.wsws.org
by Patrick Martin

In a three-part series published last week, the World Socialist Web Site documented an unprecedented influx of intelligence and military operatives into the Democratic Party. More than 50 such military-intelligence candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination in the 102 districts identified by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as its targets for 2018. These include both vacant seats and those with Republican incumbents considered vulnerable in the event of a significant swing to the Democrats.

... ... ...

The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks .

In centering its opposition to Trump on the bogus allegations of Russian interference, while essentially ignoring Trump's attacks on immigrants and democratic rights, his alignment with ultra-right and white supremacist groups, his attacks on social programs like Medicaid and food stamps, and his militarism and threats of nuclear war, the Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice.

This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and expanded the various operations of the intelligence agencies abroad and within the United States. Obama's endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen candidate of the Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate the confrontation with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine.

The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of resentment over the disruption of its operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that score. A chorus of media backers -- Nicholas Kristof and Roger Cohen of the New York Times , the entire editorial board of the Washington Post , most of the television networks -- are part of the campaign to pollute public opinion and whip up support on alleged "human rights" grounds for an expansion of the US war in Syria.

The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence operatives are moving in large numbers to take over a political party and seize a major role in Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic Party primaries are "former" agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This "retired" status is, however, purely nominal. Joining the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments.

The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence operatives running in the Democratic primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat experience invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on their websites. And they are welcomed and given preferred positions, with Democratic Party officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies.

The working class is confronted with an extraordinary political situation. On the one hand, the Republican Trump administration has more military generals in top posts than any other previous government. On the other hand, the Democratic Party has opened its doors to a "friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies.

The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an expression of the breakdown of American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose interests the state apparatus and its "bodies of armed men" serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working class, the ruling class is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule.

Millions of working people want to fight the Trump administration and its ultra-right policies. But it is impossible to carry out this fight through the "axis of evil" that connects the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx of military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups, that the Democrats represent a "lesser evil." On the contrary, working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the corporate-controlled two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils.

Patrick Martin

[Apr 24, 2018] Democrats Slapped With Demand To Preserve Evidence As Roger Stone Goes After DNC Servers Zero Hedge

Apr 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

The gloves are off in the multimillion-dollar lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) against the Trump campaign, Wikileaks and several other parties including the Russian government, alleging an illegal conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 election in a "brazen attack on American Democracy."

Many have suggested the lawsuit is a tactical error by the DNC, as it may expose or confirm claims against the organization - such as whether they rigged the primary against Bernie Sanders , the level of coordination between the DNC and the Clinton Campaign, and the details surrounding the funding of the "Steele dossier," paid for in part by both the Clinton campaign and the DNC .

The defendants - from President Trump, to Wikileaks - and now Roger Stone - are excited at the prospect of examining the DNC servers which cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike determined were victims of Russian hacking in advance of the 2016 elections. Notably, the DNC would not allow the FBI or anyone else to inspect said servers .

To that end, Stone's attorneys have slapped the DNC with a notification to preserve evidence related to the case with a "standard pre-discovery notice." Discovery is a pre-trial process by which one party can obtain evidence from the opposing party relevant to the case.

My lawyers and I will demand to examine the DNC's servers and expose them to real forensic analysis, not merely accepting the claims of the DNC's paid contractor , to finally extinguish this bogus Russian hacking claim, once and for all . My lawyers have served the DNC with standard pre-discovery notice directing the DNC of their obligation under law to preserve all possible evidence, including their servers, for ultimate inspection and exposure to critical review . As Julian Assange wrote on Twitter, via the WikiLeaks feed, " Discovery is going to be fun ." - Roger Stone

Stone notes that "Former CIA experts like Bill Binney and Ray McGovern examined the basic data available about the copying of DNC data and concluded that there is more forensic evidence that the material was downloaded to a portable drive , meaning it had to be someone with physical access to DNC computers ."

"Having made their computer systems the subject matter of multi-million dollar demands for judicial relief, the DNC has now exposed them to the discovery process ," writes Stone.

In February, New Zealand entrepreneur Kim Dotcom responded to a tweet by President Trump, claiming that "the DNC hack wasn't even a hack. It was an insider with a memory stick." Dotcom says he knows "who did it and why," adding "Special Counsel Mueller is not interested in my evidence. My lawyers wrote to him twice. He never replied."

[Apr 24, 2018] Julian Assange Said to Have "Physical Proof" Russia Didn't Hack DNC

Notable quotes:
"... By now, everybody knows that this idea that Trump was colluding with the Russians in order to get them to do things like steal the DNC emails and then release them through WikiLeaks, the public knows that's just total baloney," ..."
"... "I knew the one man who could prove that it was all baloney was Assange. So I went to see him in London, and he confirmed for me that the Russians did not give him the DNC emails. He had physical proof of that, and he was going to let me see that and have that, but only once, I found an agreement so he wouldn't get arrested when he leaves the Ecuadorian embassy in London." ..."
Apr 24, 2018 | theantimedia.com

In a recent interview with Breitbart Radio, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who reportedly visited the Ecuadorian embassy in London in August 2017 and met with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange, said that Assange has physical evidence to prove that Russia did not provide WikiLeaks with Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails during the 2016 US presidential campaign.

"

By now, everybody knows that this idea that Trump was colluding with the Russians in order to get them to do things like steal the DNC emails and then release them through WikiLeaks, the public knows that's just total baloney," Rohrabacher said. "I knew the one man who could prove that it was all baloney was Assange. So I went to see him in London, and he confirmed for me that the Russians did not give him the DNC emails. He had physical proof of that, and he was going to let me see that and have that, but only once, I found an agreement so he wouldn't get arrested when he leaves the Ecuadorian embassy in London." Rohrabacher added:

"Unfortunately, this was in the middle of having a special prosecutor, [and] any discussion with Trump and myself that mentions Russia will be used as an excuse by that special prosecutor to just quadruple all the areas of investigation into me and into Trump. So it is standing there. I've been waiting because I know that we're not going to give this special prosecutor any more ammunition than he needs to try to destroy this president."

Rohrabacher claimed that Assange had evidence and was willing to provide it in exchange for US/UK authorities agreeing not to arrest him upon leaving the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks co-founder has been "arbitrarily detained" under threat of arrest since 2012.

Assange first sought political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy after the UK sought to arrest him on a Swedish warrant that has since been lifted. British authorities, thought to operating covertly at the behest of the US -- due to a purported secret federal grand jury indictment in the US for Assange -- insist they will arrest him if he attempts to leave the embassy for violating the terms of his bail. It is believed that once arrested for the bail violation in the UK, Assange would likely be extradited to the US under the sealed indictment.

Following his meeting with Assange, Rohrabacher was denied access to President Trump by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly due to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump-Russia collusion during the 2016 US presidential election. In February, Rohrabacher "said he was told by Kelly that meeting with Trump could put the president in unnecessary legal jeopardy," according to a report from The Intercept. Rohrabacher also claimed that Assange "did not want to release the evidence publicly" because he wanted to avoid exposing "his sources and methods."

The DNC and Hillary Clinton have continually accused WikiLeaks as acting as a "Russian cutout" during the 2016 election, after the transparency organization published private emails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta as well as internal DNC emails. Assange says WikiLeaks never releases sources, but has emphatically denied that the organization was supplied the emails by Russia.

Craig Murray -- former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan and "close associate" of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange -- publicly stated in a December 2016 interview with The Daily Mail that the Democratic National Committee's emails were obtained by WikiLeaks from a "disgusted" DNC operative who had legal access to them, not Russia.

"Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians," Murray said. "The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks."

Murray said the leakers were motivated by "disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders."

The Daily Mail reported that Murray said he "retrieved the package from a source during a clandestine meeting in a wooded area near American University, in northwest D.C. He said the individual he met with was not the original person who obtained the information, but an intermediary."

An investigation into the alleged hack performed last year by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) claimed that the "data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to DNC computers." VIPS findings were presented to CIA Director Mike Pompeo last November, reportedly at the direction of President Trump.

Assange has been unable to publicly comment on Rohrabacher's statements, as the Ecuadorian government has barred him from receiving visitor and suspended his internet access for the past month.

By Jay Syrmopoulos / Republished with permission / TruthInMedia.com / Report a typo

This article was chosen for republication based on the interest of our readers. Anti-Media republishes stories from a number of other independent news sources. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect Anti-Media editorial policy.

[Apr 23, 2018] The Tony Blair Rule: The Truth Takes 15 Years to Come Out, Skripal Countdown Starts Now - Simonyan

Highly recommended!
Yes 15 years s about right for false flag operations.
Apr 23, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

I just posted a link to a Vesti clip at the end of the previous thread, because it seems so relevant to b's message about the western crackdown on free speech in this information war. This open thread is coming so close on the heels of that wonderful article, that I want to double-post here as well as there.

Margarita Simonyan of RT says how she's trying to talk, not to power but to common people, because there are those among the common people who do speak up and who really do shape public opinion - not governments. She cited Roger Waters as an example, who was speaking at a concert and telling the truth about the White Helmets.

She said, someone has to read in order to speak. And someone has to write so someone can read:


The Tony Blair Rule: The Truth Takes 15 Years to Come Out, Skripal Countdown Starts Now - Simonyan

Posted by: Grieved | Apr 22, 2018 9:53:58 PM | 54

[Apr 23, 2018] Sentence First, Verdict After

See BBC interview . One really good sarcasm from Lavrov. Sergey Lavrov comperating UK beahviour with the famous Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland episode in order to describe the new western 'weird logic' of 'Sentence First, Verdict After' has to be watched repeatedly by all...what a masterful HardTalk show...exposing the new bench mark in western international discourse.
Sergey Lavrov: No, I said "highly likely" as a new invention of the British diplomacy to describe why they punish people – because these people are highly likely guilty, like in Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - when he described a trial. And when they discovered that the jury could be engaged, then the King said "Let's ask the jury" and the Queen shouted "No jury! Sentence first – verdict afterwards." That's the logic of "highly likely".
Question: Have you got one shred, shred of evidence to suggest British intelligence tried to kill Sergei Skripal?
Sergey Lavrov: There is an old Roman criteria "who is to benefit". The UK is grossly benefiting from the provocations both in Syria and in the United Kingdom itself.
Sergey Lavrov: That's a problem. First, the A-234 agent in highly pure form in high concentration is already raising suspicions.
Question: It came from Russia. In the former Soviet Union, you invented that.
Sergey Lavrov: Stephen, you are not factual. You may be hard talking, but you are not listening. This chemical substance indeed was invented in the Soviet Union, then one the inventors fled to the United States and made the formula public. And if you want to check before raising the issue, please do so, the United States patented this formula; and it was formally taken by United States special services or the army, I don't remember. But A-234 is a very light, I mean, it seriously damages a person, kills him of her, but it evaporates very fast; and the sample taken two weeks after the event cannot, according to our scientists, contain very high concentration.
Notable quotes:
"... 'No, no!' said the Queen. 'Sentence first -- verdict afterwards.' ..."
Apr 23, 2018 | adelaide.edu.au

'No, no!' said the Queen. 'Sentence first -- verdict afterwards.'

'Stuff and nonsense!' said Alice loudly. 'The idea of having the sentence first!'

'Hold your tongue!' said the Queen, turning purple.

'I won't!' said Alice.

'Off with her head!' the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.

'Who cares for you?' said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) 'You're nothing but a pack of cards!'

[Apr 23, 2018] Is this the Salisbury poisonings Timeline from Mirror

Apr 23, 2018 | mirror.co.uk

Timeline

[Apr 23, 2018] Sentence First, Verdict After

See BBC interview . One really good sarcasm from Lavrov. Sergey Lavrov comperating UK beahviour with the famous Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland episode in order to describe the new western 'weird logic' of 'Sentence First, Verdict After' has to be watched repeatedly by all...what a masterful HardTalk show...exposing the new bench mark in western international discourse.
Sergey Lavrov: No, I said "highly likely" as a new invention of the British diplomacy to describe why they punish people – because these people are highly likely guilty, like in Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - when he described a trial. And when they discovered that the jury could be engaged, then the King said "Let's ask the jury" and the Queen shouted "No jury! Sentence first – verdict afterwards." That's the logic of "highly likely".
Question: Have you got one shred, shred of evidence to suggest British intelligence tried to kill Sergei Skripal?
Sergey Lavrov: There is an old Roman criteria "who is to benefit". The UK is grossly benefiting from the provocations both in Syria and in the United Kingdom itself.
Sergey Lavrov: That's a problem. First, the A-234 agent in highly pure form in high concentration is already raising suspicions.
Question: It came from Russia. In the former Soviet Union, you invented that.
Sergey Lavrov: Stephen, you are not factual. You may be hard talking, but you are not listening. This chemical substance indeed was invented in the Soviet Union, then one the inventors fled to the United States and made the formula public. And if you want to check before raising the issue, please do so, the United States patented this formula; and it was formally taken by United States special services or the army, I don't remember. But A-234 is a very light, I mean, it seriously damages a person, kills him of her, but it evaporates very fast; and the sample taken two weeks after the event cannot, according to our scientists, contain very high concentration.
Notable quotes:
"... 'No, no!' said the Queen. 'Sentence first -- verdict afterwards.' ..."
Apr 23, 2018 | adelaide.edu.au

'No, no!' said the Queen. 'Sentence first -- verdict afterwards.'

'Stuff and nonsense!' said Alice loudly. 'The idea of having the sentence first!'

'Hold your tongue!' said the Queen, turning purple.

'I won't!' said Alice.

'Off with her head!' the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.

'Who cares for you?' said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) 'You're nothing but a pack of cards!'

[Apr 22, 2018] The Final Nail in the Russian Collusion Conspiracy Theory Coffin Comes at a Price by by Nathan McDonald

In no way MSM will drop "Russiagate" theme. They are way too invested in it. Douma attack changes nothing at all, contary to the author claims.
Notable quotes:
"... the Russian Conspiracy Theory -- rammed down the throats of everyone around the globe since Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States -- has finally been laid to rest. ..."
"... Russia may or may not act, but it is rather unlikely that they will -- at least in the short term -- as the full combined might of the West is still an overwhelming force that no one nation can contend with. Russia knows this, and they are not stupid. But this is not to say that things cannot, nor will not, change in the future. ..."
"... Meanwhile, the chatter of Russian collusion, via the corrupt and dying MSM has petered out, as even those suffering from an extreme case of brainwashing find it hard to comprehend how a puppet can so easily slap its master across the face and get away with it. ..."
"... If President Trump was truly a puppet of Vladimir Putin -- or at least once was -- then parties in the know would have promptly released the evidence, destroying Trump in the process. The reason why it hasn't happened is simply because the evidence doesn't exist. ..."
"... Hilariously, it is the MSM who cry wolf about fake news and conspiracy theories, while at the same time, pushing their own half-truths, fake news and conspiracy theories. ..."
"... It is sad to see how far the "guardians of the truth" have fallen and how decadent the MSM has become. They are so greedy and corrupt that they have pushed us towards a path that places the West on the precipice of war with a global, nuclear power. ..."
"... The Demorats need impeachment to fire up their base and get their cash. They filed a lawsuit to generate propaganda points for the MSM to wallow in. ..."
"... The Main Stain Media are still pushing the Russia Narrative every chance they get, as a side show now, a little jab here a little jab there not really attached to anything. ..."
Apr 21, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Written by Nathan McDonald, Sprott Money News

Well, it came at a risk. It came at a gamble.

But the Russian Conspiracy Theory -- rammed down the throats of everyone around the globe since Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States -- has finally been laid to rest.

With a resounding boom as the missiles landed in Syria, the hopes and dreams of the MSM proving that President Trump is simply a Russian puppet were shattered in one swift tactical strike.These strikes came at a great risk, as they hit key Syrian assets -- assets that President Putin and his Russian forces vowed to protect. Acting together with its joint allies , Britain and France, the United States struck out against Syria for what the Western Intelligence community claims were chemical attacks against the Syrian civilian population, orchestrated by its own government.

Whether or not these claims are true is debatable (and highly suspect) but regardless, the chips have fallen, and we are now in a precarious position as the West once again plunges itself, ham-fisted, back into the cold war era.

Russian leaders have vowed that there will be consequences for these acts against an ally they have sworn to protect. Yet to this date, no retaliation has seemed to occur.

Russia may or may not act, but it is rather unlikely that they will -- at least in the short term -- as the full combined might of the West is still an overwhelming force that no one nation can contend with. Russia knows this, and they are not stupid. But this is not to say that things cannot, nor will not, change in the future.

Still, this has come at a cost. Russia has once again been forced into further isolation, as its Western peers condemn their actions and threaten them with even more trade sanctions. Pushed to the point of desperation, who knows what actions they will take in the coming years?

Meanwhile, the chatter of Russian collusion, via the corrupt and dying MSM has petered out, as even those suffering from an extreme case of brainwashing find it hard to comprehend how a puppet can so easily slap its master across the face and get away with it.

If President Trump was truly a puppet of Vladimir Putin -- or at least once was -- then parties in the know would have promptly released the evidence, destroying Trump in the process. The reason why it hasn't happened is simply because the evidence doesn't exist.

Hilariously, it is the MSM who cry wolf about fake news and conspiracy theories, while at the same time, pushing their own half-truths, fake news and conspiracy theories.

It is sad to see how far the "guardians of the truth" have fallen and how decadent the MSM has become. They are so greedy and corrupt that they have pushed us towards a path that places the West on the precipice of war with a global, nuclear power.

The final nail in the Russian collusion coffin has been put in place, but at what cost?

Only time will tell.

Itinerant -> New_Meat • Sat, 04/21/2018 - 18:51 Permalink

A dumb article: The Russians have not vowed anything. As Lavrov has stated publicly, "there will be consequences" is a factual observation, not a vow to revenge anything. Revenge does not help. It is not the way Putin thinks -- Putin thinks in terms of interests and the trade off between risks/costs and benefits.

Arctic Frost -> Frilton Miedman • Sun, 04/22/2018 - 11:28 Permalink

"With 4 indictments, 2 guilty pleas, not sure how anyone thinks it's over. AS for the Syria attack. . . "

Four indictments that have NOTHING to do with Trump colluding with Russia and are SOLEY upon the people indicted. Two guilty pleas for "lying" which your side is advocating that lying is no longer an issue we should care about.

AS FOR SYRIA: Interesting you put the Syria strike on Putin when it was obviously led by Britain and France or are we now to believe they along with Trump are Putin puppets too? However, you do seem to be FINALLY admitting your "NGO"'s are nothing but state sponsored shams intent on manipulating the world wide masses to believe their propaganda. After all it was YOUR people who claimed there was a supposed chemical attack and demanded retaliation.

Keep spinning in circles, as the dog who chases his tail is in a world all of his own making.

Reaper • Sat, 04/21/2018 - 09:58 Permalink

BS. The neo-cons know the strike was deliberately ineffective. The Demorats need impeachment to fire up their base and get their cash. They filed a lawsuit to generate propaganda points for the MSM to wallow in.

JailBanksters • Sat, 04/21/2018 - 09:59 Permalink

The Main Stain Media are still pushing the Russia Narrative every chance they get, as a side show now, a little jab here a little jab there not really attached to anything.

We haven't seen anything like this since the Russians were accused of hacking the Federal Election, over to you Bob.

Well that's right Jim, and now for something completely different.

Written by Nathan McDonald, Sprott Money News

[Apr 22, 2018] The Investigative Committee of Russia has published a video covering the information it has collected so far while investigating the Skripal case

Notable quotes:
"... Elena Skripal has granted a power of attorney to Viktoria Skripal allowing her to represent Elena's interests in Russia and the UK (shown in the video at 4:43). That means that the UK government is not allowing a legal representative of Sergei's mother to visit him. ..."
Apr 22, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

S | Apr 22, 2018 2:44:33 PM | 18

The Investigative Committee of Russia has published a video covering the information it has collected so far while investigating the Skripal case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D6Z_yGEFSY (in Russian). Three interesting tidbits stand out:

1:40–2:10 Yulia's movements have been traced from the moment she got into a Moscow taxi to the moment she boarded the plane to London. Taxi driver's identity has been established, as well as the identities of all passengers who traveled on the same flight as Yulia; none of them have experienced any health issues. The video shows CCTV footage of Yulia going through the airport.

4:20–5:10 The British claimed that Skripals had no relatives to represent their interests. This claim allowed the authorities to obtain the court permission to take blood samples from unconscious Skripals. However, it was found that Skripals had two relatives living in Yaroslavl oblast: 89-year old mother of Sergei Skripal, Elena Skripal, and his niece, Viktoria Skripal. We already know that. Here's what's new: on April 5, Elena Skripal has granted a power of attorney to Viktoria Skripal allowing her to represent Elena's interests in Russia and the UK (shown in the video at 4:43). That means that the UK government is not allowing a legal representative of Sergei's mother to visit him.

7:29–8:21 According to Viktor Holstov, the head of the Center for Analytical Research on Conventions for the Prohibition of Chemical and Biological Weapons at the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade, a 2009 US patent evaluating possible antidotes to organophosphorous agents states that the antidotes to nerve agents such as sarin and VX are ineffective against Novichok-class agents. To arrive at such a conclusion, obviously, Novichok-class agents had to be synthesized in the U.S.

[Apr 21, 2018] It s a tough old world and we are certainly capable of a Salisbury set-up and god knows what else in Syria.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... It is perfectly possible that the British government manufactured the whole Salisbury thing. We are capable of just as much despicable behavior and murder as the next. ..."
"... Tucker Carlson of Fox News has it nailed down.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M28aYkLRlm0 ..."
"... This "civil war" has been nothing but a war for Syrian resources waged by western proxies. ..."
"... So now, In desperation borne out of their impending defeat, the imperialists have staged a chemical attack in a last throw of the dice to gain popular support for an escalation in military intervention. Like military interventions of the past, it is being justified in the name of humanitarian intervention. ..."
Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

wheelbarrow1 , 13 Apr 2018 14:37

Why is the prime minister of the United Kinkdom on the phone discussing whether or not to bomb a Sovereign country with the highly unstable, Donald Trump?

Can she not make up her own mind? Either she thinks it's the right thing to do or it isn't. Hopefully, the person on the other end of the phone was not Trump but someone with at least half a brain.

Proof, let's have some proof. Is that too much to ask? Apparently so. Russia is saying it's all a put up job, show us your facts. We are saying, don't be silly, we're British and besides, you may have done this sort of thing before.

It is perfectly possible that the British government manufactured the whole Salisbury thing. We are capable of just as much despicable behavior and murder as the next.

Part of the Great British act's of bravery and heroism in the second world war is the part played by women agents who were parachuted into France and helped organize local resistance groups. Odette Hallowes, Noor Inayat Khan and Violette Szabo are just a few of the many names but they are the best known. What is not generally know is that many agents when undergoing their training in the UK, were given information about the 'D' day landings, the approx time and place. They were then dropped into France into the hands of the waiting German army who captured and tortured and often executed them.

The double agent, who Winston Churchill met and fully approved of the plan was Henri Dericourt, an officer in the German army and our man on the ground in France. Dericourt organized the time and place for the drop off of the incoming agents, then told the Germans. The information about the 'D' day invasion time and place was false. The British fed the agents (only a small number) into German hands knowing they would be captured and the false information tortured out of them.

Source :- 'A Quiet Courage' Liane Jones.

It's a tough old world and we are certainly capable of a Salisbury set-up and god knows what else in Syria.

I_Wear_Socks , 13 Apr 2018 14:37
From The Guardian articles today that I have read on Syria, it makes absolutely clear that if you in any way question the narrative forwarded here, that you are a stupid conspiracy theorist in line with Richard Spencer and other far-right, American nutcases.

A more traditional form of argument to incline people to their way of thinking would be facts. But social pressure to conform and not be a conspiratorial idiot in line with the far-right obviously work better for most of their readers. My only surprise it that position hasn't been linked with Brexit.

ChairmanMayTseTung , 13 Apr 2018 14:37
Did anyone see the massive canister that was shown on TV repeatedly that was supposed to have been air-dropped and smashed through the window of a house, landed on a bed and failed to go off.

The bed was in remarkable condition with just a few ruffled bedclothes considering it had been hit with a metal object weighing god knows what and dropped from a great height.

MartinSilenus -> ChairmanMayTseTung , 13 Apr 2018 14:36
"More than 40 years after the US sprayed millions of litres of chemical agents to defoliate"

The Defoliant Agent Orange was used to kill jungles, resulting in light getting through to the dark jungle floors & a massive amount of low bush regrowing, making the finding of Vietcong fighters even harder!

It was sprayed even on American troops, it is a horrible stuff. Still compared to Chlorine poison gas, let alone nerve gases, it is much less terrible. Though the long term effects are pretty horrible.

"Some 45 million liters of the poisoned spray was Agent Orange, which contains the toxic compound dioxin"
http://theconversation.com/agent-orange-exposed-how-u-s-chemical-warfare-in-vietnam-unleashed-a-slow-moving-disaster-84572

120Daze , 13 Apr 2018 14:36
Who needs facts when you've got opinions? Non more hypocritical than the British. Its what you get when you lie and distort though a willing press, you get found out and then nobody believes anything you say.anymore. The white helmets are a western funded and founded organisation, they are NOT independent they are NOT volunteers, The UK the US and the Dutch fund them to the tune of over $40 million. They are a propaganda dispensing outlet. The press shouldn't report anything they release because it is utterly unable to substantiate ANY of it, there hasn't been a western journalist in these areas for over 4 years so why do the press expect us to believe anything they print? Combine this with the worst and most incompetent Govt this country has seen for decades and all you have is a massive distraction from massive domestic troubles which the same govt has no answers too.
LiviaDrusilla -> Bangorstu , 13 Apr 2018 14:36
LOL are you having a larf?

The same organisation that receives millions of quid in funding from USAID?

Whose 'executive director' used to work for USAID?

Who have campaigned for 'no fly zones' (ie US bombing)?

Who are affiliated to the Iranian terrorist group MEK?

Who only happen to run hospitals in 'rebel' held areas?

You have a strange idea of 'politically neutral'. Your 'NGO' are fighting for an Islamist state. Enjoy them.

Dominique2 , 13 Apr 2018 14:32
https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/sep/01/winston-churchill-shocking-use-chemical-weapons

""I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes," [Winston Churchill] declared in one secret memorandum."

The current condemnation by the international community and international law is good and needs enforcement. But no virtue signalling where there is none.

CaptTroyTempest -> StoneRoses , 13 Apr 2018 14:27
But we're still awaiting evidence that a chemical attack has been carried out in Douma, aren't we? And if an attack was carried out, by whom. But before these essential points are verified, you feel that a targeted military response is justified. Are you equally keen for some targeted military response for the use of chemical weapons, namely white phosphorus, in Palestine by the Israaeli military? Unlike Douma, the use of these chemical weapons in the occupied territories by the IDF's personnel is well documented. But we haven't attacked them yet. Funny that.
CMYKilla , 13 Apr 2018 14:26
Instead of "chemicals" why not just firebomb them - you know like we did to entire cities full of women and children in WW2?

Hamburg 27 July 1943 - 46,000 civilians killed in a firestorm
Kassel 22 October 1943 - 9,000 civilians killed 24,000 houses destroyed in a firestorm
Darmstadt 11 September 1944 - 8,000 civilians killed in a firestorm
Dresden 13/14th February - 25,000 civilians killed in a firestorm

Obviously we were fighting Nazism and hadn't actually been invaded - and he is fighting Wahhabism and has had major cities overrun...

Maybe if Assad burnt people to death rather than gassing them we would make a statue of him outside Westminster like the one of Bomber Harris?

Tom1982 , 13 Apr 2018 14:24
Remember the tearful Kuwaiti nurse with her heartrending story of Iraqi troops tipping premature babies out of their incubators after the invasion in 1990? The story was published in pretty much every major Western newspaper, massively increased public support for military intervention............................and turned out to be total bullshit.

Is it too much too ask that we try a bit of collective critical thinking and wait for hard evidence before blundering into a military conflict with Assad; and potentially Putin?

BlutoTheBruto , 13 Apr 2018 14:21
Didn't General Mattis quietly admit at there was no evidence for the alleged Sarin attacks last year by Assad?

http://www.newsweek.com/now-mattis-admits-there-was-no-evidence-assad-using-poison-gas-his-people-801542

Hmmmm.... call me skeptical for not believing it this time around.

AwkwardSquad , 13 Apr 2018 14:19
Well, this is the sort of stuff that the Israelis would be gagging for. They want Assad neutralised and they are assisting ISIS terrorists on the Golan Heights. They tend to their wounded and send them back across the border to fight Assad. What better than to drag the Americans, Brits and French into the ring to finish him off. Job done eh?

Are you sure you are not promoting an Israeli agenda here Jonathan?

Incidentantally what did we in the west do when the Iraqis were gassing the Iranians with nerve agents in the marshes of southern Iraq during the Iran Iraq War? Did we intervene then? No, we didn't we allowed it to happen.

I say stay out it.

dannymega -> fripouille , 13 Apr 2018 14:18
Come on frip, you have to admit there was absolutely no motive for Assad's forces to carry out this attack. Why do you think the Guardian and other main stream media outlets are not even considering the possibility the Jihadi rebels staged it to trigger western intervention? I know, I know.. it's all evil Assad killing his own people for no other reason than he likes butchering people... blah blah. The regime change agenda against Syria has been derailed, no amount of false flag attacks can change the facts on the ground.
Preshous , 13 Apr 2018 14:18
Tucker Carlson of Fox News has it nailed down.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M28aYkLRlm0
ChairmanMayTseTung , 13 Apr 2018 14:16
More than 40 years after the US sprayed millions of litres of chemical agents to defoliate vast swathes of Vietnam and in the full knowledge it would be have a catastrophic effect on the health of the inhabitants of those area, Vietnam has by far the highest incidence of liver cancer on the planet.

Then more recently we have the deadly depleted uranium from US shells that innocent Iraqis are inhaling as shrill voices denounce Assad.

CodeNameTwiglet , 13 Apr 2018 14:15
The Syrian people are heroically resisting and defeating western imperialism. This "civil war" has been nothing but a war for Syrian resources waged by western proxies.

So now, In desperation borne out of their impending defeat, the imperialists have staged a chemical attack in a last throw of the dice to gain popular support for an escalation in military intervention. Like military interventions of the past, it is being justified in the name of humanitarian intervention.

But if we have a brief browse of history we can see that US & UK governments have brought only death, misery and destruction on the populations it was supposedly helping. Hands off Syria.

[Apr 21, 2018] Eight fundamental British lies over the Skripal attack.

Apr 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 | Apr 19, 2018 1:07:42 PM | 74

Here we have a translated transcript of Shulgin's testimony at OPCW's Hague HQ where he points out the 8 fundamental British lies over the Skripal attack. He prefaces his remarks thusly:

"I would like to start my speech with the words that belong to the great thinker Martin Luther, "A lie is like a snowball: the further you roll it, the bigger it becomes".

"This wise aphorism is fully applicable to politics. He who has chosen the path of deception will have to lie again and again, making up explanations for discrepancies, spreading disinformation and doing forgery, desperately using all means to cover the tracks of the lies and to hide the truth.

"The United Kingdom has entered this slippery path. We can clearly see all of this on the example of the "Skripal case" fabricated by the British authorities, this poorly disguised anti-Russian provocation accompanied by an unprecedented propaganda campaign, taken up by a group of countries, and the finalized unprecedented expulsion of diplomats under a far-fetched pretext. Please, do not try to pass this group for the international community – it is far from that."


Bakerpete , Apr 19, 2018 9:55:05 PM | 138

A good statement.

http://thesaker.is/statement-of-a-shulgin-at-the-opcw-ec/

anti_republocrat , Apr 19, 2018 11:40:19 PM | 145
@ the pessimist | Apr 19, 2018 1:05:37 AM | 1

Not sure when Shulgin gave his statement, but today's briefing by Zacharova is even more impressive and revealing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8cjrgPc4Ew&feature=youtu.be&t=2026

It seems that BZ was detected not only by Spiez, but also by a lab in the Netherlands. The explanation given is that BZ was added to the specimens in order to validate the competence of the contracted labs. Furthermore, they attempted to explain away the existence of pristine Novichok in the specimens in a dosage that would have been fatal, thus confirming that the Spiez lab did indeed find such pristine Novichok. You can't make this sh*t up.

Oh, what a tangled web! The wonder is not so much that MI5/MI6 would perpetrate such a false flag, but that they would be so utterly incompetent about it.

anti_republocrat , Apr 19, 2018 11:47:20 PM | 147
@anti_republocrat | Apr 19, 2018 11:40:19 PM | 144

Clarification: The reference to "pristine" Novichok is that Spiez found the toxic agent in a non-degraded form that could not have survived either within the human body or in a collected specimen. They thought it was a contamination. My opinion is that it was added by the British before delivering the specimens, just to be sure the contracted labs would detect it. Also, the fact they claimed to have deliberately contaminated the specimens with BZ is a clear indication it could just as easily be that the BZ was there from the beginning and the actual contamination was with the agent from the Novichok family. Zakharova called it "weird." I'll say!

WJ , Apr 20, 2018 12:08:28 AM | 148
PavewayIV @143,
Funny you should mention a "preemptive protective attack." The Bush preemption doctrine must not have been found suitably effective for domestic propagandist purposes; as since then, if I am not mistaken, the preferred move has been to engineer an actual "event" that the US is forced to "respond" to. The WMD bombast fit the preemption doctrine. The relatively more modest "chemical attack" has the advantage of being easily produced whenever necessary. I think this development signals an advance in the rhetoric of propaganda between Bush II and Obama. Perhaps the PR folks judged Americans to be finally more stupid than malicious as a group. Optimistically put.

anti_republocrat @146

I believe there were four samples (2 bio, 2 enviro); I think it is likely that the 2 bio samples are the ones with BZ in the control. Why? Pure coincidence, procedure, unrelated to anything, etc. Or because the Skripals, and not their doorknob, were poisoned with BZ.

[Apr 21, 2018] In another development (probably to run with the Syria script) the UK announces it has a dossier that proves Russia was experimenting with delivering nerve agents from door handles.

Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

ChairmanMayTseTung , 13 Apr 2018 13:27

In another development (probably to run with the Syria script) the UK announces it has a dossier that proves Russia was experimenting with delivering nerve agents from door handles.

Not as hilarious as breathlessly closing a children's playground near the Skripal's days after the event for "contamination checks" even though it had been raining in the days in between (the narrative was presumably the dastardly Russian agents planned to kill a few innocent kids for good measure).

[Apr 20, 2018] Skripal and Douma incidents were preceded by extremely intense diplomatic activity between Saudi Arabia, Washington, Paris and London this year, with multiple top level visits between capitals, is presumably supposed to be coincidence.

Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

dumbwaiter -> Kevin Watson, 13 Apr 2018 15:50

I'm going to post a comment by another user posted yesterday as he said it far more eloquently than I could

R Reddington InterestedReader2 1d ago

Your just another armchair warrior.

So you think going to war is a good idea well you first then and dont forget your flack jacket and rifle.

The media onslaught has moved past the attack in Salisbury by a "weapon of mass destruction" (quoting Theresa May) which could only be Russian, except that was untrue, and was extremely deadly, except that was untrue too. It now focuses on an attack by chemical weapons in Douma which "could only be" by the Russian-backed Assad regime, except there is no evidence of that either, and indeed neutral verified evidence from Douma is non-existent. The combination of the two events is supposed to have the British population revved up by jingoism, and indeed does have Tony Blair and assorted Tories revved up, to attack Syria and potentially to enter conflict with Russia in Syria.

The "Russian" attack in Salisbury is supposed to negate the "not our war" argument, particularly as a British policeman was unwell for a while. Precisely what is meant to negate the "why on earth are we entering armed confrontation with a nuclear power" argument, I do not know.

Saudi Arabia has naturally offered facilities to support the UK, US and France in their attempt to turn the military tide in Syria in favour of the Saudi sponsored jihadists whom Assad had come close to defeating. That the Skripal and Douma incidents were preceded by extremely intense diplomatic activity between Saudi Arabia, Washington, Paris and London this year, with multiple top level visits between capitals, is presumably supposed to be coincidence.

I am not a fan of Assad any more than I was a fan of Saddam Hussein. But the public now understand that wars for regime change in Muslim lands have disastrous effects in dead and maimed adults and children and in destroyed infrastructure; our attacks unleash huge refugee waves and directly cause terrorist attacks here at home. There is no purpose in a military attack on Syria other than to attempt to help the jihadists overthrow Assad. There is a reckless disregard for evidence base on the pretexts for all this. Indeed, the more the evidence is scrutinised, the dodgier it seems. Finally there is a massive difference between mainstream media narrative around these events and a deeply sceptical public, as shown in social media and in comments sections of corporate media websites.

The notion that Britain will take part in military action against Syria with neither investigation of the evidence nor a parliamentary vote is worrying indeed. Without Security Council authorisation, any such action is illegal in any event. It is worth noting that the many commentators who attempt to portray Russia's veto of a Syria resolution as invalid, fail to note that last week, in two separate 14 against 1 votes, the USA vetoed security council resolutions condemning Israeli killings of unarmed demonstrators in Gaza.

The lesson the neo-cons learnt from the Iraq war is not that it was disastrous. It was only disastrous for the dead and maimed Iraqis, our own dead and maimed servicemen, and those whose country was returned to medievalism. It was a great success for the neo-cons, they made loads of money on armaments and oil. The lesson the neo-cons learned was not to give the public in the West any time to mount and organise opposition. Hence the destruction of Libya was predicated on an entirely false "we have 48 hours to prevent the massacre of the population of Benghazi" narrative. Similarly this latest orchestrated "crisis" is being followed through into military action at a blistering pace, as the four horsemen sweep by, scything down reason and justice on the way.

[Apr 19, 2018] Imran Awan's Father Transferred USB Drive To Ex-Head Of Pakistani Intel Agency Zero Hedge

Apr 19, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

The father of Imran Awan - a longtime IT aide from Pakistan who made "unauthorized access" to the House computer network - reportedly transferred a USB drive to the former head of a Pakistani intelligence agency , alleges the father's ex-business partner, Rashid Minhas.

Imran Awan and wife Hina Alvi

Minhas told the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) - which traveled to Pakistan to interview those involved - that Haji Ashraf Awan, Imran Awan's father, had been giving information to Rehman Malik - former head of Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) and current senator. Malik was appointed to Interior Minister in early 2008, only to step down in 2013 after he lost a Supreme Court hearing over holding dual UK citizenship.

Minhas told The Daily Caller News Foundation that Imran Awan's father, Haji Ashraf Awan, was giving data to Pakistani official Rehman Malik, and that Imran bragged he had the power to " change the U.S. president. "

Asked for how he knew this, he said that on one occasion in 2008 when a "USB [was] given to Rehman Malik by Imran's father, my brother Abdul Razzaq was with his father ." - DCNF

"After Imran's father deliver (sic) USB to Rehman Malik, four Pakistani [government intelligence] agents were with his father 24-hour on duty to protect him," he said - however Minhas did not say what was on the USB.

[insert: Foreign_Secretary_in_Pakistan_(4727720266).jpg ]

British Foreign Secretary William Hague (left), Rehman Malik

The House watchdog, Inspector General Michael Ptasienski, charged in September 30, 2016 that data was being siphoned off of the House Network by the Awans as recently as two months before the US presidential election.

The Awan family had virtually unlimited access to Democratic House members' computers, including classified information.

Nearly Imran's entire immediate family was on the House payroll working as IT aides to one-fifth of House Democrats , and he began working for the House in 2004. The inspector general, Michael Ptasienski, testified this month that " system administrators hold the 'keys to the kingdom' meaning they can create accounts, grant access, view, download, update, or delete almost any electronic information within an office. Because of this high-level access, a rogue system administrator could inflict considerable damage ." - DCNF

https://www.youtube.com/embed/x6I2ikJIzjU

According to Minhas - "Imran Awan said to me directly these words: ' See how I control White House on my fingertip ' He say he can fire the prime minister or change the U.S. president," Minhas said. " Why the claiming big stuff, I [didn't] understand 'till now ."

" I was Imran father's partner in Pakistan, " Minhas said, in two land deals in Pakistan so big that they are often referred to as "towns." In 2009, both men were accused of fraud , and Haji was arrested but then released after Imran flew to Pakistan , "allegedly exerting pressure on the local police through the ministry as well as the department concerned," according to local news. Minhas and multiple alleged victims in Pakistan also told TheDCNF Imran exerted political influence in Pakistan to extricate his father from the case . - DCNF

Minhas is currently sitting in US federal prison for fraud, and the Daily Caller says they can not confirm whether Minhas' claims about the USB is true. That said, Minhas says that neither the DOJ nor the FBI ever interviewed him about the Awans , which is odd considering that he's available and connected to Imran Awan.

He is also one of many people with past relationships with the Awans who have said they believe they are aggressive opportunists who will do anything for money . And parts of Minhas's story correlate with observations elsewhere. Haji's wife, Samina Gilani -- Imran's stepmother -- said in court documents that Imran used his IT skills to wiretap her as a means of exerting pressure on her.

Haji would frequently boast that Imran's position gave him political leverage, numerous Pakistani residents told TheDCNF. " My son own White House in D.C. ," he would say, according to Minhas. " I am kingmaker ."

Senator Malik has denied any relationship with the parties reportedly involved, saying "I am hearing their names for the first time. I am in public and people always do name-dropping."

Imran Awan's attorney Chris Gowen says Minhas's claims are "completely and totally false."

The Awans were banned from the congressional network on Feb 2, 2017 by House Seargant-At-Arms, Paul Irving - after the IG report concluded that the Awans had been making "unauthorized access" to House servers. The Awans were logging in using Congressional members' personal usernames , as well as breaching servers for members they did not work for. After several members fired them, the Awans continued to access their data , says the IG.

The behavior mirrored a "classic method for insiders to exfiltrate data from an organization," and "steps are being taken [by the Awans] to conceal their activity," reads the report.

Shortly before the 2016 election, the House Democratic Caucus server was breached by Awan - who authorities believe secretly moved all the data of over 12 House members' offices onto the caucus server.

The server may have been " used for nefarious purposes and elevated the risk that individuals could be reading and/or removing information, " an IG presentation said. The Awans logged into it 27 times a day, far more than any other computer they administered .

Imran's most forceful advocate and longtime employer is Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who led the DNC until she resigned following a hack that exposed committee emails. Wikileaks published those emails, and they show that DNC staff summoned Imran when they needed her password . - DCNF

Shortly after the IG report came out, the House Democratic Caucus server - which the Awans were funneling data onto, was physically stolen according to three government officials. During the same period of time, the Awans were shedding assets at a rapid pace.

In January 2017 they took out a loan intended for home improvement, falsely claimed a medical emergency in order to cash out their House retirement account, and wired $300,000 overseas , according to an FBI affidavit. - DCNF

The FBI arrested Imran Awan at Dulles Airport in July 2017 while trying to flee to Pakistan with a wiped cell phone and a resume that listed a Queens, NY address. Imran and his wife, Hina Alvi, were indicted last August on charges of bank fraud - which prosecutors contend was hastened after the Awans had likely learned that authorities were closing in on them for various other activities .

That said, neither Imran nor Hina have been charged over the unauthorized access concluded by the House's own Inspector General, after reviewing server logs. Three other suspects, Jamal and Abid Awan, and Rao Abbas, have faced no charges whatsoever.

[Apr 19, 2018] Theresa May ties with military-industrial complex

Apr 19, 2018 | www.unz.com

anon [107] Disclaimer , April 19, 2018 at 1:47 am GMT

@S. N.

UK PM's husband's Capital Group is largest shareholder in BAE, shares soar since Syrian airstrikes: https://www.rt.com/uk/424392-may-husbands-capital-group/

"Philip May, husband of the UK prime minister, works for a company that is the largest shareholder in arms manufacturer, BAE Systems, whose share price has soared since the recent airstrikes in Syria.
The company, Capital Group, is also the second-largest shareholder in Lockheed Martin -- a US military arms firm that supplies weapons systems, aircraft and logistical support. Its shares have also rocketed since the missile strikes last week. . . ."

h/t http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/04/real-reporting-on-syria-by-publius-tacitus.html

annamaria , April 19, 2018 at 2:14 am GMT
@Philip Owen

We have got it: Philip Owen believes religiously in the words of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Gavin Willaimson. And, of course, Blair is a paragon of honesty for Philip Owen.

What are you doing here, on the Unz Review? -- This is not a ziocon stink-tank source of (dis)information, and this is not the ziocons-controlled MSM's presstitutes' haven.

You make yourself ridiculous by parroting the MSM "wisdom." Your frustration over the impending defeat of "moderate" terrorists in Syria affects your reason and amplifies your rabid hatred of Russia. Don't expect any sympathy for your "victimhood" on this site.

This is the reality: "Salisbury Nerve Agent Attack Reveals $70 Million Pentagon Program at Porton Down," by Dilyana Gaytandzhieva – https://southfront.org/salisbury-nerve-agent-attack-reveals-70-million-pentagon-program-porton/

"Porton Down is just one of the Pentagon-funded military laboratories in 25 countries across the world, where the US Army produces and tests man-made viruses, bacteria and toxins in direct violation of the UN convention . These US bio-laboratories are funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under a $ 2.1 billion military program– Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), and are located in former Soviet Union countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa.
The Pentagon-funded military facilities are not under the direct control of the host state as the US military and civilian personnel is working under diplomatic cover. The local governments are prohibited from public disclosure of sensitive information about the foreign military program running on their own territory."
– All statements in this article are sourced, unlike the pronouncement of the miserable puppets Blair, May, Johnson, and Willaimson.

[Apr 18, 2018] Douma Chemical Attack False Flag Operation EXPOSED!

Looks like people were bombed and the shelter became full of dust and smoke. That led to some suffocations. Later this was played as chemical attack.
The scenario is classic. Put artillery near residential houses and mercilessly shell residential building on government side killing civilians. Wait for return fire which produce its own set of victims. Stage the false flag operation based on return fire victims and the fact that civilians suffered.
Apr 18, 2018 | www.youtube.com

Annie , 15 hours ago (edited)

Thanks for this video. I have had a gut-full of the west and it's lies to take over countries in the Middle East. It's making me sick. What's happening on a daily basis to the people of Palestine and Syria are war crimes, pure and simple.

The country I live in, Australia, is not on the side of the good guys. We were not on the right side in Libya and Iraq either. I'm so sick of this shit. This is all so the US and their creepy allies, including the head-choppin' Saudis, can put a pipeline through Syria to Europe to compete with Russia and so they can use Syria as a jumping off point to invade Iran. Poor Iran.

The CIA threw out their Democratically elected leader and installed a Dictator who they kept in place for 48 years, using the Shah's brutal secret police. The US hates the Iranians for chucking the puppet out. Iran had every right to do so. God knows how they must feel being under constant threat. Israel have been assassinating their citizens for years and launched the Stuxnet virus (with help from the US) to attack their infrastructure, accidentally infecting the world, including Australia at the time. Thanks to them, every group in the world now has the code for that virus. They modified the code and released it again behind Obama's back.

Israel's illegal nukes can't reach Iran but they will definitely use them against Iran if they can get into Syria to use it as a base for attack. Then what happens to the world? Israel have demonstrated clearly, their disinterest in Human Rights. The only people on the planet they care about are Israelis. Damn Israel and damn the US. Macron is a wanna-be Napoleon and Theresa May is Thatcher- Lite. Both of them are sucking on the tail-pipe of that clown, Trump and are keeping the world in a state of perpetual war. Hands off Syria, wankers!

madex4u , 6 hours ago

The western media has covered up so much lies about Syria and Iraq that only few still brainwashed people believe their fake news

M.K. Styllinski , 9 hours ago (edited)

Aside from this video, there is now overwhelming evidence confirming that this was yet another false flag chemical attack designed to demonise Assad. This isn't the first time. Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, the Balkans - all suffered a similar fate designed to hoodwink the public in supporting war and resource grab.

it was only a couple of years ago that Assad and Russia were subjected to the same scenario and proven to be utterly false. How long must we swallow these crimes? History is replete with the same state-sponsored crimes against populations. Governments are not acting in our best interests and never have.

Therefore, there is absolutely no excuse for people to believe the utter bullshit spread around the mainstream media which excels in poor journalism and is determined to push this disgusting propaganda on behalf of their respective governments and intel agencies.

Until the public is prepared to comprehend that such false flag attacks are a long used formula by US-NATO for carving up the Middle East then it will continue with impunity. I hope everyone shares this video on social media in order to counter lazy thinking and the obvious lies that characterize what passes for news.

ameen ayob , 3 hours ago

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-chemical-attack-gas-douma-robert-fisk-ghouta-damascus-a8307726.html

[Apr 18, 2018] More on the Skripal/Douma false flag connection

Apr 18, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Neve | Apr 16, 2018 3:52:13 PM | 2

Two great links at OffG

"The Skripal event and the Douma "gas attack" – two acts in the same drama?"
http://off-guardian.org/2018/04/14/the-skripal-event-and-the-douma-gas-attack-two-acts-in-the-same-drama/


"More on the Skripal/Douma false flag connection"
http://off-guardian.org/2018/04/15/46325/

[Apr 17, 2018] Who are top officials at OPCW and can we expect unparciality?

Notable quotes:
"... Indeed, and if A-234 is as strong as reported, it's likely any traces around the Skripals would have killed the first responders too. ..."
Apr 17, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

anon , Apr 15, 2018 1:36:09 PM | 39

@Peter AU 33

One of the Douma hospital medic interviews can be seen here, starting at about minute 1:36

https://www.rt.com/news/424047-russian-mod-syria-statement/

Ahmet Uzumcu, head of the OPCW, was also Turkish envoy to Israel, and also counsel in aleppo, syria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmet_Üzümcü

Carrie , Apr 16, 2018 6:59:57 AM | 69
Posted by: PavewayIV | Apr 15, 2018 5:21:47 PM | 61

PavewayIV thanks, as always I appreciate your thorough analysis.

...and in quantities that would have absolutely killed the Skripals given what was still there after two weeks...
Indeed, and if A-234 is as strong as reported, it's likely any traces around the Skripals would have killed the first responders too.

No doubt related to Lavrov's disclosure: this morning (and yesterday in the Sunday Times) nearly every national UK paper is running a front page version of this story: "Russia launches cyber war on UK with 'dirty tricks' campaign as PM to face Commons over Syria strikes" (taken from The Daily Telegraph). This meme is so widespread (BBC Radio 4 also) that, in itself, it looks like a co-ordinated attempt at scaremongering and misinformation.

It's designed to make people think that anything they read online that is contrary to the official FUKUS narrative about Russia/Syria can be given the term 'dirty trick' and dismissed. And by conflating the Skripal story with Syria (remember the messages about 'package delivered' picked up by '4-Eyes' in Cypress?) then anything Russia says about the Skripal affair is suspect and "not worthy of your consideration, dear reader".

I see that The Sun newspaper is now running with this news in it's online version:

RUSSIA and Syria have blocked chemical inspectors from investigating the site of a brutal chemical attack in Douma, Syria, reports claim.

Russia may even have compromised the site of the April 7 gas attack, according to Ahmet Uzumcu, Director general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

"It's our concern they may have tampered with it to thwart the fact finding investigation," Mr Uzumcu is quoted as saying by NBC's Bill Neely.

Also see yesterday's important report by Elijah J Magnier. Ties stuff together.

Folks, in seeking out and highlighting the truth we going to have our work cut out for us here! [See "have your work cut out (for you)"

[Apr 17, 2018] Were the Skripals 'Buzzed', 'Novi-shocked' Or Neither - May Has Some 'Splaining' To Do

Notable quotes:
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
"... Did Spiez also do a DNA identification to ensure the TRACE metabolized samples actually came from the Skirpals, with no other DNA/chemical indicators which might indicate purposeful contamination or reformulation? Where did the "virgin" samples come from? The doorknob the Skirpals had not touched for longer than it takes for BZ to show symptoms? The chain of custody for all these samples should be 100% airtight, or all analysis is fatally flawed. ..."
"... This still reeks of a Mossad attack/disinfo operation, there are simply too many "flaws" in this to be unintentional. ..."
"... It is not only the current a Director-General who is a NATO-man, the PR women of OPCW was also on NATO payroll. Almost all international bodies are revolving doors for the Western paid personnel. Nobody does a truly honest job if they want the next appointment and advancement. Does anybody still remember the Brazilian Sergio de Mello? He revolved till he got blown up in Iraq. ..."
"... Ok. Ahmed Üzümcü is a former nato representative. This is interesting. What about the rest of the OPCW people? What about the OPCW teams inspecting Douma? Have they any non poodle nationality members? Does anybody know that? ..."
"... I can confirm that the chain of custody was 100% watertight, no worries there. Custody was 100% under iFUKUS control from the moment of contamination of the victims/environment until the completion of all tests and the publication of final reports. That is why the samples were spiked with fresh A-234. ..."
"... During a brief moment when I was viewing CNN yesterday (Alex Witt was playing bad cop most of the time, making sure Russia was suitably demeaned and excoriated for its evil ways) --but, iirc and I may not have done*, someone asked why the FUKUS would endanger people by blowing up locations the US stated they absolutely KNEW held chemical weapons and precursors. The reply was that the Pentagon was certain that since the locations were not in heavily populated areas that the breezes would disperse the poisons safely. ..."
"... The UN has been fully weoponized by the US and it's sock puppet partners in the west. The western powers completely ignore the UN charter while demanding absolute power through the UNSC. It is time for both Russia and China to leave the UN which will lead to a cascade of other countries leaving. It will also end any lingering belief in the legitimacy of the UN. ..."
"... Re: why hospital workers and others have not said anything about the Skripals' situation in a long time, it's very likely everyone, including patients and witnesses from Salisbury have been made to sign nondisclosure agreements. At least that's what happens in Brit series shown on Masterpiece Theatre. ..."
"... Also, DS Nick Bailey may have been sent to the house to get him exposed to whatever the chem agent was, part of being a way to draw attention away from the main site of exposure? BZ may explain the rather interesting description Bailey's written statement included: this line, and only this one, which described any physical or mental reactions he felt from his ordeal: ..."
"... Indeed, and if A-234 is as strong as reported, it's likely any traces around the Skripals would have killed the first responders too. ..."
"... Also see yesterday's important report by Elijah J Magnier. Ties stuff together. Folks, in seeking out and highlighting the truth we going to have our work cut out for us here! [See "have your work cut out (for you)" ..."
"... This is one of the few if only 'miracle recovery' situations in which the victims did not sit down for interviews. I imagine once they have been groomed enough they will sit down for an interview with a trusted news organization. ..."
"... The Spiez lab is a NATO lab. Even though Switzerland is "neutral", it is an associate member of NATO under the NATO Peace Partnership. Spiez has been involved in serious falsifications of analysis results for the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)'s work on the use of uranium and depleted uranium weapons. ..."
"... In my opinion, the release of the real report to the Russians was the work of a whistle-blower, for the Spiez lab has highly trained people who take great pride in the generally impeccable quality of the lab's work and its repuration for such. Many of them would have been appalled that their lab was party to some sort of deception. ..."
"... Lavrov was right then, and he's right now. The "Joint Investigation Team" is actually "The Fix Is In Team". The official title is just for show, to make infoganda that impresses the ignorant, complacent, and submissive. It's exactly like the Big Lie that "17 intelligence agencies separately concluded that Russians meddled in US elections". ..."
Apr 17, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Were the Skripals 'Buzzed', 'Novi-shocked' Or Neither? - May Has Some 'Splaining' To Do

The Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation, Sergey Lavrov, threw a bombshell at the British assertions that the collapse of the British secret agent Sergej Skripal and his daughter Yulia on March 4 in Salisbury was caused by a 'Novichok' nerve agent 'of a type developed by Russia'. (See our older pieces, linked below, for a detailed documentation of the case.)

During a public speech yesterday Lavrov stated of the OPCW report:

[A] detailed and fairly substantial confidential version was distributed to the OPCW members only. In that report, in accordance with the OPCW way of conduct, the chemical composition of the agent presented by the British was confirmed, and the analysis of samples, as the report states, was taken by the OPCW experts themselves. It contains no names, Novichok or any other. The report only gives the chemical formula, which, according to our experts, points to an agent that had been developed in many countries and does not present any particular secret.

After receiving that report Russia was tipped off by the Spiez Laboratory or someone else that the OPCW report did not include the full results of its analysis.

According to Lavrov this is what the Spiez Laboratory originally sent to the OPCW:

"Following our analysis, the samples indicate traces of the toxic chemical BZ and its precursor which are second category chemical weapons. BZ is a nerve toxic agent, which temporarily disables a person. The psycho toxic effect is achieved within 30 to 60 minutes after its use and lasts for up to four days. This composition was in operational service in the armies of the US, the UK and other NATO countries. The Soviet Union and Russia neither designed nor stored such chemical agents. Also, the samples indicate the presence of type A-234 nerve agent in its virgin state and also products of its degradation. "

The "presence of type A-234 nerve agent", an agent of the so called 'Novichok' series, in its "virgin state", or as the OPCW stated in "high purity", points to later addition to the sample. The 'Novichok' agents are not stable. They tend to fall rapidly apart. Their presence in "virgin state" in a sample which was taken 15 days after the Skripal incident happened is inexplicable. A scientist of the former Russian chemical weapon program who worked with similar agents, Leonid Rink, says that if the Skripals had really been exposed to such high purity A-234 nerve agent, they would be dead.

The whole case, the symptoms shown by the Skripals and their recuperation, makes way more sense if they were 'buzzed', i.e. poisoned with the BZ hallucinogenic agent, than if they were 'novi-shocked' with a highly toxic nerve agent.

The Spiez Laboratory responded by not denying Lavrov's claims:

Spiez Laboratory @SpiezLab - 19:49 UTC - 14 Apr 2018

Only OPCW can comment this assertion. But we can repeat what we stated 10 days ago: We have no doubt that Porton Down has identified Novichock. PD - like Spiez - is a designated lab of the OPCW. The standards in verification are so rigid that one can trust the findings. #Skipal

Science Direct has several excerpts of reports about BZ. The basics:

Agent 15 is also called compound 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, BZ, or "Buzz." It is a powerful chemical warfare agent. As one of the most potent psychoactive chemical agents, only a small amount of BZ is needed to produce complete incapacitation. When used as an aerosol, BZ is absorbed through the respiratory system (it has no odor). It can also be absorbed through the skin or the digestive system. It takes approximately 1 h for BZ to take effect, and the symptoms of exposure include confusion, tremors, stupor, hallucinations, and coma that can last for more than 2 days.

BZ is a psycho agent 25 times stronger than LSD. It was developed by the U.S. military as an incapacitating agent. At least 50 tons were produced and filled into weapon delivery systems. It was allegedly tested on U.S. soldiers in Vietnam:

Working with the CIA the Department of Defense gave hallucinogenic drugs to thousands of "volunteer" soldiers in the 1950's and 1960's. In addition to LSD, the Army also tested quinuclidinyl benzilate, a hallucinogen code-named BZ. Many of these tests were conducted under the so-called MKULTRA program, established to counter perceived Soviet and Chinese advances in brainwashing techniques. Between 1953 and 1964, the program consisted of 149 projects involving drug testing and other studies on unwitting human subjects. Although many human subjects were not informed or protected, Dr. Gottlieb defended those actions by stating "...harsh as it may seem in retrospect, it was felt that in an issue where national survival might be concerned, such a procedure and such a risk was a reasonable one to take."

This is what the military tried to achieve with BZ and other psycho agents.

BZ (and LSD) turned out to be impractical as battlefield weapons.

According to British parliament records BZ was also produced and tested, allegedly on unknowing civilians , by the British chemical weapon laboratory Porton Down.

The Russian Foreign Minister asserts that the OPCW suppressed the details of the Spiez Laboratory report:

Nothing is said whatsoever about a BZ agent in the final report that the OPCW experts presented to its Executive Council. In this connection we address the OPCW a question about why the information, that I have just read out loud and which reflects the findings of the specialists from the city of Spiez, was withheld altogether in the final document. If the OPCW would reject and deny the very fact that the Spiez laboratory was engaged, it will be very interesting to listen to their explanations.

The current Director-General of the OPCW is the Turkish carrier diplomat Ahmed Üzümcü who earlier served as the Turkish Permanent Representative to NATO.

I have no theory how the BZ or the A-234 made it into the OPCW samples or if the Skripals were really influenced by either of these poisons or are victims of simple shellfish poisoning. Your guess is a good as mine.

But the story the British government has so far told is full of holes and discrepancies and makes absolutely no sense at all. The suppression of the Spiez Laboratory report by the OPCW is a serious breach of its procedures.

The British Prime Minister Theresa May, and the OPCW, have some 'splainin' to do.

---
Previous Moon of Alabama posts on the Skripal case:

March 8 - Poisioned British-Russian Double-Agent Has Links To Clinton Campaign March 12 - Theresa May's "45 Minutes" Moment March 14 - Are 'Novichok' Poisons Real? - May's Claims Fall Apart March 16 - The British Government's 'Novichok' Drama Was Written By Whom? March 18 - NHS Doctor: "No Patients Have Experienced Symptoms Of Nerve Agent Poisoning In Salisbury" March 21 - Russian Scientists Explain 'Novichok' - High Time For Britain To Come Clean (Updated) March 29 - Last Act Of 'Novichok' Drama Revealed - "The Skripals' Resurrection" March 31 - Hillary Clinton Ordered Diplomats To Suppress 'Novichok' Discussions April 3 - Operation Hades Blamed Russia - A Model For The 'Novichok' Claims? April 4 - It's The Cover-Up" - UK Foreign Office Deletes Tweet, Posts False Transcript, Issues New Lies April 5 - Novi-Fog™ In Fleet Street - Truth Cut Off April 6 - The Best Explanation For The Skripal Drama Is Still ... Food Poisoning April 7 - A Very British Farce April 12 - New Developments In The Skripal Drama - Police Statement, OPCW Report Release

Posted by b on April 15, 2018 at 09:35 AM | Permalink

Comments


Charles M , Apr 15, 2018 9:39:35 AM | 1

Looks like someone really REALLY wants a hot war with Russia. I dont get why WW3 is so alluring.
Anon , Apr 15, 2018 9:45:47 AM | 2
Is there any reason to call for investigation when you have corrupt organs like OPCW that are as biased as any other western statehood on Russia? Russia working in 110% and get like 5% back if lucky.

Charles M

After years of hatred against Russia, WW3 seems pretty logical for the same brainwashed people that type the propaganda and those who reads it. Daily. This racism sooner or later leads to war, and extermination.

Madeira , Apr 15, 2018 9:45:53 AM | 3
A possible explanation for the apparent divergences between the OPCW report and the Russian claims of what the Swiss lab found:

1. The UK requests Porton Down to confirm the presence of A-234 (motivated no doubt by its "secret intelligence" that the Russians for 10 years had been building up a "small stockpile" for such purposes).

2. Porton Down confirms the presence of A-234. Whether or not it carried out additional tests to determine the presence of other possible toxic agents is uncertain.

3. The UK refuses to provide sample(s) to Russia, arguing that the "exchange of information and consultations" called for by Article IX of the Chemical Weapons Convention does not mean that they need to provide evidence to the "guilty party".

4. After much prodding by the Russians, the UK belatedly agrees to request "technical assistance" from the OPCW to confirm its findings. The precise form this request took is confidential, but one might surmise that it would have been: Please confirm the presence of the toxic substance A-234 which we have identified in the samples (with the understood message "no need to waste time and resources looking for other toxic substances").

5. As per its standard protocol, the OPCW sent out the samples to various "partner" laboratories, of which one was the Spiez laboratory in Switzerland, which is the government "ABC" lab (atomic, biological, chemical). They are asked to confirm (only) the presence of A-234.

6. For an unknown reason, the Spiez Laboratory exceeds its mandate and not only confirms the presence of A-234 but also traces of 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate, better known by its NATO code name BZ. The Spiez Laboratory sends its report to the OPCW.

7. The OPCW issues 2 reports (one private, the other confidential) on 12 April. In response to the specific request made by the UK, the OPCW truthfully confirms that the "toxic chemical identified by the United Kingdom" was indeed A-234. The formula for this "toxic chemical" was (apparently) provided in the confidential report.

8.The OPCW also provides the additional information that "this toxic chemical [i.e. A-234] was of high purity". And for those without the necessary scientific background to digest this statement, it helpfully adds that this technical conclusion was based on " the almost complete absence of impurities".

9. As the OPCW had not been asked to confirm the presence of any toxic chemical other than A-234, it naturally did not take into account the superfluous discovery by the Spiez Laboratory of traces of BZ.

10. The Russians obtain access to the Spiez Laboratory report -- from a "whistleblower" at the lab or the OPCW, or by "hacking".

Entirely implausible?

BX , Apr 15, 2018 9:56:01 AM | 4
"The standards in verification are so rigid that one can trust the findings." !!! I think they are saying "The standards in verification are so rigid that you can trust our findings" (i.e. BZ as well as A-234 in virgin *and* (!) degradation* stage. See also my comments to your previous post (towards the end of the list of comments).
JakeS , Apr 15, 2018 9:57:47 AM | 5
great investigative work - thanks. The Brit state keeping Julia Skirpal incommunicado surely adds to the likely guilt
BX , Apr 15, 2018 10:08:48 AM | 7
I believe you got the "virgin" state wrong. What this refers to is the state of the substance *before* drug metabolism, i.e. before the substance reacts to any great degree chemically within the body and "degrades". Spiez found A-234 prior to metabolism (virgin) and after metabolism (degradation) which might point to two separate points in time when these substances started reacting with chemicals within the body (yes, lastly, it all comes down to chemistry). Drug metabolism is why drug effects last only a limited time. When the substance is metabolized (degraded) its specific effects disappear. Here is the Wikipedia entry which is sufficient to give a general impression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_metabolism
Bill , Apr 15, 2018 10:11:21 AM | 8
US and UK media will unlikely report it now, they are too busy driving the war machine, however the drip drip of evidence coupled with increasing memories of the Iraq dodgy dossier will eventually break through.
BX , Apr 15, 2018 10:13:18 AM | 9
Also, thank you for this vital information: "The current Director-General of the OPCW is the Turkish carrier diplomat Ahmed Üzümcü who earlier served as the Turkish Permanent Representative to NATO." This, to me, this goes a long way understanding recent reports of the OPCW DG regarding the 2 labs that were bombed. My, the puzzle is coming together!
BX , Apr 15, 2018 10:17:04 AM | 10
I am sorry for the many comments but it is not possible to edit comments or reply to them... "virgin state" is not the same as "high purity". The OPCW report does not echo the Spiez results when talking about "high purity" but London, just in more sophisticated way (i.e. not saying "military grade").
A P , Apr 15, 2018 10:23:09 AM | 11
Did Spiez also do a DNA identification to ensure the TRACE metabolized samples actually came from the Skirpals, with no other DNA/chemical indicators which might indicate purposeful contamination or reformulation? Where did the "virgin" samples come from? The doorknob the Skirpals had not touched for longer than it takes for BZ to show symptoms? The chain of custody for all these samples should be 100% airtight, or all analysis is fatally flawed.

This still reeks of a Mossad attack/disinfo operation, there are simply too many "flaws" in this to be unintentional.

"By way of deception, thou shalt do war."

farm ecologist , Apr 15, 2018 10:33:01 AM | 12
We don't know if OPCW found A-234 in the samples they took, or only in the ones that they were given by the British, which could easily have been tampered with.

(Note that there are numerous posts pertaining to this subject on the previous thread.)

Kiza , Apr 15, 2018 10:34:19 AM | 13
It is not only the current a Director-General who is a NATO-man, the PR women of OPCW was also on NATO payroll. Almost all international bodies are revolving doors for the Western paid personnel. Nobody does a truly honest job if they want the next appointment and advancement. Does anybody still remember the Brazilian Sergio de Mello? He revolved till he got blown up in Iraq.

Ultimately, it all comes down to unlimited printing of US$, used as confetti or in pallet loads to pay for corruption of everything. Through US$ petro and reserve currency status the nations are paying to be taken advantage off by global bankers of US, UK and Israel, including Russia and China. But do not tell me that organisations in the West are corrupt. Please show me just one which is not.

Jesrad , Apr 15, 2018 10:34:45 AM | 14
I wondered why the Skripals were said to be suffering from "hallucinations". I assumed that really meant they were just saying things that Airstrip One didn't like during their recovery, but apparently there was a pharmacological reason!

The 30-60 minute time frame for BZ also switches the focus back to the restaurant (Zizzi's?), and whoever they may have met there. Weren't the original reports that Sergei was acting erratically (hallucinations?) by the time he left the restaurant?

Ralf , Apr 15, 2018 10:38:04 AM | 15
If the Swiss laboratory got the facts right as presented by Lavrov, many things come out quite naturally, it seems to me. Here is my guess:

1. the Skripals were poisoned with this BZ stuff, not Novichok. Q1: Who did it?

2. Novichok was added to the blood probes that were analysed by Porton Down and the OPCW labs, after these probes were taken. The Skripals never came into contact with Novichok themselves. Q2: Who did the manipulation?

3. This means that in fact nobody wanted to kill the Skripals. It was a PR stunt from the very start in order to demonize Russia. Whether the Skripals conspire or not, is an open and quite irrelevant question. Q3: Who planned it?

4. The answer to Q3 can only lie in Britain: It was the British intelligence services - presumably under government supervision. Who else would have opportunity, motive and benefit of all this?

5. This also answers the question about the policeman who also showed symptoms: he was the guy who "poisoned" the Skripals with BX. He might just not have been careful enough, which is understanable if he is told that the stuff is not so dangerous. This answers Q1.

6. With respect to Q2, I very much hope that this was done in Porton Down, using their own samples of Novichok, because otherwise this dangerous stuff must have been transported from somewhere, risking, for instance, killing plane passengers etc., if something went wrong. I don't think that secret service people are willing to risk their own and the lifes of innocent people just for such a PR stunt. They surely reduced risks to anybody to a minimum.

From the resistance trench with love , Apr 15, 2018 10:38:12 AM | 16
@Posted by: Madeira | Apr 15, 2018 9:45:53 AM | 3
Entirely implausible?

Totally implausible, since, in sight of the development of events which have derived from the unsubstantiated accusation against Russia, it sounds quite weird that the OPCW, a supposedly independent international organism, would have ommited such a determinant information for, not only discharge the Russians of responsability, but also to apply a reasonable doubt about the responsability of many other states which right now have got dividens from the Skripal hoax by using it as an alibi to strikes Syria with missiles and remain illegaly in the country indefinitely.

I find totally weird as well that the OPCW did not disclose the totality of the analisis result, in spite of what the UK could have requested concretely from them, since they are not there to only hear the demands of the UK, but also from Russia, as part charged and also a memeber and sucriptor of the OPCW charter, the more when this country has been blamed without the opportune investigation of the facts.

As historical facts have already proven, the long hand of Bolton in the OPCW is obvious, and we have that he just landed in the DoS....That every European official is blackmailed by the US as a norm, so that favouring its geopolitial goals, even at the price of harming most the countries of the Euroepan officials blackmailed, is already of public domain as well....

adamski , Apr 15, 2018 10:39:10 AM | 17
Justa n aside but des anyone remember the film Jacobs Ladder? BZ was a key part of the story.
A P , Apr 15, 2018 10:49:36 AM | 20
And the answer to "who did it?" points squarely at Mossad. The UK spies/gov't were obviously caught flat-footed, had no idea it was going to happen, no internal script on which lies they had hard info about, relying on external "trusted sources".

"By deception thou shalt do war" Mossad's motto.

Pnyx , Apr 15, 2018 11:03:33 AM | 21
Ok. Ahmed Üzümcü is a former nato representative. This is interesting. What about the rest of the OPCW people? What about the OPCW teams inspecting Douma? Have they any non poodle nationality members? Does anybody know that?
blah , Apr 15, 2018 11:05:22 AM | 22
"And the answer to "who did it?" points squarely at Mossad."

If they were poisoned with Novichoks from the beginning then I could see Mossad. But if this BZ toxin then it MI6 because they would want to ensure the Skripals, their agents, and any civilians didn't die and only they would be able to uphold the PR narrative that it was Novichoks by controlling the samples and where they are tested.

mk , Apr 15, 2018 11:08:44 AM | 23
One group that could testify on Lavrov's claim is the personnel of Salisbury Hospital. Dr. Blanshard said that they consulted with experts in the whole world to improve the recovery of Julia Skripal. Certainly they can say if it was a BZ treatment or a Novichok treatment.

This looks like a Chessmate für May&co.

Peter AU 1 , Apr 15, 2018 11:12:24 AM | 24
The Novichok narrative was on designed to hold up for a short time. The Ghouta CW attack should have occurred at peak Novichok, drawing attention away, but was waylaid.

A-234 - there are many highly toxic chemical compounds but only few are developed as Chemical weapons. Many of the compounds have properties that make them unsuitable for deployment as CW's. A-234 compound and perhaps all of the compounds in the Russian scientists book may well have properties that make it/them unsuited to either assassination or as a WMD so a substitute was used.

Magnier has a new piece out which helps tie in the larger play that the Novichok narrative was part of. The larger play failed and now the Russians are hunting down the Brits and taking apart their narrative.

mwm , Apr 15, 2018 11:16:14 AM | 25
The picture of the Skripals was taken in the restaurant on that same day? or not, with the reflection in the mirror. With the new time frame for onset of drug reaction doesn't he become a "person of interest"?, this strange guy in the mirror?
Den Lille Abe , Apr 15, 2018 11:17:12 AM | 26
This is wild, I know: Who said anyone was poisoned?

Find anyone that can claim it please. Find any that saw them suffering from poison. Just do this please... Can you ?

dahoit , Apr 15, 2018 11:20:42 AM | 28
The missiles that targeted the chem warfare,they had a germ agent?hohohohoho.
The israelis doing it all.mossad.
Bayleaf , Apr 15, 2018 11:20:42 AM | 29
The official UK government's position was set out when it applied to the court in order to allow the taking of blood samples for the OPCW:

"The samples tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent or closely related agent."

If it had been a "Novichock class nerve agent" they would have left it at that, so we can reasonably conclude that it was a "closely related agent".

But closely related in what sense, nobody is saying. This is a typical lawyer's manipulation of language and the criteria of the comparison are deliberately omitted. People naturally assume that it is closely related in a chemical sense but these are lawyers and the the meaning of the words is whatever they want it to be.

So how could a so-called "Novichok" be "closely related" to BZ? Well, one plausible explanation could be that the lawyers are actually saying they're both chemical agents designed to incapcitate. The phrase "closely related to" doesn't have to be anything to do with the chemical composition. Nobody lied but their "truth" is designed to give a completely misleading impression. That's lawyers for you.

It also allows the OPCW to agree with the UK government's position without actually lying.

Eric Bloodaxe , Apr 15, 2018 11:22:31 AM | 30
Salisbury False Flag

It is said that 11 UK/US officers 'handlers' of the moderate terrorists have been captured in a tunnel in East Ghouta (hmm, mayby). However, the US/UK bellicose rhetoric,two false flags and a Cruise missile show seem to fit the picture.
Russian FM Lavrov says the poison used in Salisbury on the Skripal's was not a Novachoc (VX type - fatal) but the toxin BZ (narcotic, hallucinogenic) and it is definitely US/UK (Hoffman-LaRosch developed in 1951).

A consultant (Davis) at the Salisbury hospital wrote a letter to the Times saying, "there are no patients suffering from nerve agents and only 3 who are poisoned". (fact, I saw the Times letter).

Wikipedia describes the effects of BZ and they exactly fit the delayed, narcotic hallucinogenic effect of BX (30mins to 4 hours post exposure). The physiological effects of BZ and VX differ markedly, which is how doctor Davis knew – he is 8 miles from the Porton Down chemical warfare plant and was therefore 'clued up'. Patients have recovered and VX etc. kills, stops muscle action, not a poison as such).

In the Independent (today, Comments under the Lavrov story, Sunday 15th) a bathroom fitter (Ollie Field) says he saw the Skripal's on the bench and thought they were 'whacked out' on heroin.

Douma False Flag.

The Russians have in their pocket (filmed I believe) a notable at the Douma (only) hospital (can't remember who) that has described the White Helmets filming as; a bomb destroyed the top floor of the hospital and the film crew moved bodies and kids to the basement and doused them with hoses and sprayed them with Ventolin (asthma inhaler – blue). This provided the film used to justify the Cruise missile attack Fri 13th. 2018.

The Russians have rumbled the Douma false flag and the OECD chemical weapons investigators are on their way to the Douma hospital (basement) to find no chemicals, they report in a few weeks.

Lavrov has said that the British ordered the Douma rebels to make a chemical warfare White Helmets type movie fast, in desperation, since the Russians/SAA forces attack was moving fast and they could obtain support bombing. The whole of East Ghouta has been taken by the SAA.

A decent video exposure on TV, or even a simple web search, completely debunks the 'White Helmets' that filmed the fake gas attack in the Douma hospital in East Ghouta. Re. my earlier email.

May didn't wait (in panic) for parliament approval and went ahead with military action (8 of our missiles wasted at £6.3M).
The 11 'handlers' (said to be officers) are not in the hands of the Russians (who have swopped theirs for ours previously) but are held by the SAA and could well have have spilled the beans. If they are paraded (filmed) and spill the beans things will get ugly for May et al.

Peter AU 1 , Apr 15, 2018 11:29:56 AM | 31
mwm 25

It is an old photo. I have seen photos of the inside of Salisbury Zizzi which has a very different interior decoration style. Zizzi's also do not have tableclothes and set tables. Empty table are always bare.

BM , Apr 15, 2018 11:42:42 AM | 32
The chain of custody for all these samples should be 100% airtight, or all analysis is fatally flawed.
Posted by: A P | Apr 15, 2018 10:23:09 AM | 11

I can confirm that the chain of custody was 100% watertight, no worries there. Custody was 100% under iFUKUS control from the moment of contamination of the victims/environment until the completion of all tests and the publication of final reports. That is why the samples were spiked with fresh A-234.

willem friso , Apr 15, 2018 12:58:22 PM | 37
Peter AU 1 33
The video of the two medics at the Douma hospital you can find at Voltaire Network, but they are in French. Hope you can understand French?
BM , Apr 15, 2018 12:59:11 PM | 38
The important part about the presence of unmetabolised A-234 in the samples is that it proves incontrovertably that the analysis was faked implicate the UK's claims. (By 'analysis' here I specifically mean the entire process from the taking of the samples up until the provision of the final report; the existence of the leak from Spiez implies that one or more chemists were doing their job honestly and therefore objected to the fabrications in the final published reports - indeed there could have been many people involved who were acting entirely honestly - but at some critical stage within the chain of custody the process was faked).

There are however two possibilities:

a) The samples taken by OPCW were deliberately spiked with a mixture of high purity virgin A-234 with metabolic derivatives (and/or non-metabolic disintegration products from the virgin A-234 since it is chemically not very stable??) AFTER the blood samples were taken from the Skripals.

b) The Skripals were injected with A-234 shortly (probably very few minutes) before the OPCW experts arrived to take the samples.

Lavrov's statement seems to imply that the blood samples contained both virgin i.e. unreacted A-234, and metabolic by-products of A-234 (i.e. chemicals produced by A-234 as it is broken down by the human body). The implications of that are very important - according to one expert comment I read somewhere (I can't remember where), these metabolic by-products would have to be in plausible proportions, which would be very difficult to mix in the test-tube (that expert cited a sports doping case where the analyst spiked the sample with pure un-metabilised doping drug from a laboratory sample, and was later convicted because he got it wrong). Maybe these certified OPCW labs are capable of mixing virgin A-234 and metabolic products in plausible proportions, but that sounds like "rocket science" to me, i.e. it is a very serious endeavour in itself. That implies that possibility (b) has to be taken seriously.

Even if the A-234 by-products were not metabolic by-products but simply the products of disintegration of A-234 through intrisic chemical instability (i.e. without biological activity) that would also have important implications - such faking would be vastly easier to accomplish but (it seems to me) would imply gross negligence on the part of the analysts unless the lack of METABOLIC by-products was spotted and explicitly drawn attention to as evidence of faking. According to reports, A-234 is metabolised quite rapidly, so the metabolic by-products should be produced very quickly and not much unreacted A-234 should remain.

In a previous comment I have already asserted that the phone call to Viktoria Skripal was faked from the British side by digitally altering the voice characteristics of another person (i.e. not Yulia Skripal) - the British have this capability and I have personally experienced it. To my mind the artificial police-managed statements allegedly made by Yulia Skripal, the denial of visa to Viktoria etc imply that she was by that time already irreversably incabable of making a statement by herself - i.e. either she was dead, or 'preserved' in a coma under life support.

I also think that the BZ was more likely administered by aerosol in the park - quite possibly by the mystery so-called "policeman" (actually from Porton Down or MI6?) - and the restaurant may well have been a decoy, otherwise the response latency for Sergei and Yulia would have been more divergent. That should be visible on cctv, but of course that will never come out. If the BZ was weaponised as an aerosol it would be absorbed very quickly, and the two victims would be affected at the same time.

* Disclaimer * - I am not an expert! Just an "armchair commenter". I hope "Old Microbiologist" will respond, as he obviously has detailed experience in this field.

Christian Chuba , Apr 15, 2018 1:54:57 PM | 40
It's getting clear to me now. There are 1980's hold overs on both sides of the pond in the CIA, MI6, and bureaucracies in both govts who believe that Trump / May are the new Reagan / Thatcher, destined to destroy Russia a second time. Now all they need is another Pope.

BTW I liked Reagan and the Pope (he lived long enough to condemn the Iraq war). Reagan knew how to keep the deep state in line but after we won the Cold War they took over the amateurs starting with Clinton.

So the deep state is unleashing hell on earth because they want to finish off Russia to achieve world domination.

jawbone , Apr 15, 2018 2:13:56 PM | 41
During a brief moment when I was viewing CNN yesterday (Alex Witt was playing bad cop most of the time, making sure Russia was suitably demeaned and excoriated for its evil ways) --but, iirc and I may not have done*, someone asked why the FUKUS would endanger people by blowing up locations the US stated they absolutely KNEW held chemical weapons and precursors. The reply was that the Pentagon was certain that since the locations were not in heavily populated areas that the breezes would disperse the poisons safely.

I somehow cannot believe anyone believes that, but, hey...true believers. Lies to get the West unto yet another illegal war.

*Hhmmm, maybe I heard that in response to questioning at the Pentagon briefing.

On the little broadcast news I caught, mostly there was chest thumping that the West's missiles so completely bested the Russian anti-missile equipment. Not a hair on their chinny-chin-chins (OK, West's missiles don't have hairs, but they are telling fairy tales) were even touched, according to the reporting based on Pentagon pronouncments.

Paul , Apr 15, 2018 2:21:52 PM | 42
OPCW "splainin to do"
It may be that the current OPCW head, like the last one, has children whose locations are known to John Bolton.
BraveNewWorld , Apr 15, 2018 2:23:19 PM | 43
The UN has been fully weoponized by the US and it's sock puppet partners in the west. The western powers completely ignore the UN charter while demanding absolute power through the UNSC. It is time for both Russia and China to leave the UN which will lead to a cascade of other countries leaving. It will also end any lingering belief in the legitimacy of the UN.

Some thing like the UN is needed but like the League of Nations before it, the past due date was long ago. It is time for a new organization to arise that takes into account the fact that the vast majority of the world lives in Asia and acknowledges the complete irrelevance of the General Assemble vs the power of the UNSC was a big mistake for the world as it was intended to be by the US.

If Russia and China proposed an organization that would give India, Pakistan, Latin America & Africa an actual stake in decisions as opposed to just being the victims as they are now, and the rest of the world a say rather than just an arbitrary security council, I think they would jump at it. With the vast majority of the world on board I think most of the Western states would eventually join. The US would never deem to join any thing where they don't have control. But they completely ignore the UN Charter & international law, contribute fewer peace keepers than Canada and don't pay their bills any way.

Party's over boys. Time to move on.

Paul , Apr 15, 2018 2:32:16 PM | 44
@ Bart Hansen:
You're right it's remarkable that the garrulous, ghoulish UK press has turned up no sensationalistic stories (fake or true) at all.

Not clear who anyone would come forward to... in fact perhaps scores have come forward. News blackout seems almost total.

Tuyzentfloot , Apr 15, 2018 2:36:10 PM | 45
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201480/
says the latency can amount to several hours so I wonder if it can be made to match with the 'door handle' theory {or is that more than a claim}.
"it is currently used as a pharmacological tool (a muscarinic antagonist known as QNB)"
So BZ is over 50 years old, commercially available, and it can point to hm, anyone. Not even some bigger player with access to advanced laboratory.
Paul , Apr 15, 2018 2:44:19 PM | 46
@ BraveNewWord comment 45

Point well made. Although Russia and China have gone part way -- SCO, etc -- it may be the moment to go big -- an alternative to the UN, along the lines you've described. This might include the possibility of imposing tariffs on rogue states, as concerns the resolutions of such groups as the alt-UN climate convention, chemical weapons conventions, and an alt-WTO that can impose a financial transfer tax on all foreign exchange transactions so that the organization can be financing, and not have to go begging to Hegemon. Neutral or rotating sites (not NYC). etc. etc.

mali , Apr 15, 2018 2:44:31 PM | 47
: CNN journalist confirmed defintely CW used in Duma by sniffing a child's backpack somewhere in Northern #Syria on April 14

How low can MSM presstitutes go?

Laninya , Apr 15, 2018 3:17:24 PM | 48
Strike_Back:_Retribution ( a ten-part British-American action television series )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_Back:_Retribution

According to the script:
Episode 6: ----> The novichiok is fake however...

Hmmmmm. Someone should check out that lab in Pripyat, Ukraine .

Carrie , Apr 15, 2018 3:19:16 PM | 49
I thought the statement from the Swiss Spietz lab, as read by Lavrov , contained a passage that sounded odd, out of place:
I will now be quoting what they sent to the OPCW in their report. You understand that this is a translation from a foreign language but I will read it in Russian, quote: "Following our analysis, the samples indicate traces of the toxic chemical BZ and its precursor which are second category chemical weapons. BZ is a nerve toxic agent, which temporarily disables a person. The psycho toxic effect is achieved within 30 to 60 minutes after its use and lasts for up to four days. This composition was in operational service in the armies of the US, the UK and other NATO countries. The Soviet Union and Russia neither designed nor stored such chemical agents. Also, the samples indicate the presence of type A-234 nerve agent in its virgin state and also products of its degradation." End of quote.

I was under the impression OPCW Labs (and OPCW itself) were only empowered to discover and reveal "if a chemical substance(s) was used and if so, what?" Isn't that why Porton Down has steadfastly refused to say "Russian/made in Russia" re the Salisbury A-234?

Lavrov states he is reading in Russian something translated from another language. However it seems unlikely that the sentences emboldened would cause any problems in translation? Perhaps it's a little Lavrov 'embroidery' to see who bites and how they bite?

james , Apr 15, 2018 3:31:54 PM | 51
thanks b.. i am particularly interested in what larvov has to say and the info he is in possession of...

@12 farm ecologist.. thanks for that bit of clarity on all this..

@13 kiza... thanks for your post as well.. that is how i see it too..

@24 peter.. i continue to see it the way you are framing it here as well... it was a double pronged game plan that went awry..

jawbone , Apr 15, 2018 3:32:28 PM | 52
Re: why hospital workers and others have not said anything about the Skripals' situation in a long time, it's very likely everyone, including patients and witnesses from Salisbury have been made to sign nondisclosure agreements. At least that's what happens in Brit series shown on Masterpiece Theatre.

Also, DS Nick Bailey may have been sent to the house to get him exposed to whatever the chem agent was, part of being a way to draw attention away from the main site of exposure? BZ may explain the rather interesting description Bailey's written statement included: this line, and only this one, which described any physical or mental reactions he felt from his ordeal:

I "People ask me how I am feeling - but there are really no words to explain how I feel right now. Surreal is the word that keeps cropping up - and it really has been completely surreal."

Surreal hallucinations?

james , Apr 15, 2018 3:34:50 PM | 54
@52 jawbone.. that is how i read all that too.. complete enforced silence of anyone involved with the skripal event... talk about democracy!!
Anon , Apr 15, 2018 3:36:14 PM | 55
Obviously Russia was correct in the BZ claim, the response by OPCW is disgraceful - apparently they are now in panic mode trying to come up with a explanation for BZ findings, apparently you cant trust organs like this today, totally biased.
TJ , Apr 15, 2018 3:43:13 PM | 56
@48 Laninya

Also the series was only 10 episodes and supposed to end last year, it was then split into 2 5 episode chucks so the series could end this year, much closer in time and memory to the Salisbury incident.

Foggy World , Apr 15, 2018 3:46:10 PM | 57
I read this chapter at another place last night and my head just swelled up with a song I learned as a child in Canada and I rearranged and typed it in their comments.

"And Theresa May rolled her wheel barrow, through streets wide and narrow, crying cockles and mussels alive, alive O."

The tune is perfect for the feelings that swept over me and the situation of a street fish monger peddling her wares truthfully or not seems to capture the huge pickle she has put herself into.

CanSpeccy , Apr 15, 2018 4:05:06 PM | 58
"I have no theory how the BZ or the A-234 made it into the OPCW samples or if the Skripals were really influenced by either of these poisons or are victims of simple shellfish poisoning. Your guess is a good as mine."

A-234 (Novichok) is an acetylcholine esterase inhibitor, that causes uncontrolled muscle contraction, and hence vomiting and convulsions. BZ is a paralytic agent, like botulinus toxin, that causes paralysis and, hence, in severe cases death by asphyxiation. Thus, A-234 and BZ are antagonists, meaning that one would be a logical thereapeutic treatment for poisoning by the other. There is no mystery therefore that both would be found in the Skripal blood samples. The question that remains unanswered is which was the poison an which the prescribed therapeutic agent.

dewn , Apr 15, 2018 4:43:28 PM | 59
Using BZ would also explain why they keep Skripals out of any media - a simple question from some journalist like "what did you feel" may lead to them mentioning hallucinations which immediately throws Novichok bull out of the window.
farm ecologist , Apr 15, 2018 4:56:08 PM | 60
CanSpeccy @58

While technically A-234 and BZ would be expected to cancel out each others' toxic effects, at least to some extent, A-234 would never be used therapeutically, and I'm pretty sure BZ also has no recognized medicinal uses (although it's a good experimental tool). I expect that any physician administering them to humans would lose his or her license, at a very minimum. In both cases, safer antidotes exist.

PavewayIV , Apr 15, 2018 5:21:47 PM | 61
Carrie@49 - When the OPCW sends teams to Syria on Fact Finding missions, the teams are given rather bizarre and restrictive mandates. The one you cite was from previous fact-finding mission.

The Porton Down analysis confirmation (collecting samples and distributing to OPCW labs) was in response to a technical assistance request by the UK delegation to the OPCW - something all OPCW members are allowed to do. We only know in general about what UK asked, not the specifics. The details of that request are unrelated to the mandate of the Fact Finding teams you cited.

The exact request made by the UK delegation is confidential. We can only guess what they asked by what they said in public. Likewise, we can only guess the details of those analysis by what the UK, the OPCW and Spiez lab said publicly. The lab can say whatever they want to the OPCW as part of their analysis. The OPCW has been usurped and is no longer impartial (my opinion, not legal fact). They insulate uncomfortable findings from the public with their bureaucracy and rules of confidentiality.

The OPCW members themselves could change that, but that would require a majority of the 192 members to agree on something. It's like expecting the government to un-corrupt itself after it has been usurped. There's simply too much at stake for the smaller nations (foreign aid, military assistance, lives of children in New York, etc.) to fix the OPCW machine.

Lavrov is saying there was a whistleblower who wanted to make known what was in the Spies Lab report. Their motivation was because they knew the OPCW was (or already did) cover up the BZ findings. Of course the OPCW shouldn't have covered that up from it's member states and those member states should object and demand the full report, but they never will. And for the exact same reasons they can't and will never fix the usurped machine itself.

What's most interesting is that, if the whistleblower/Lavrov claim about the Spiez Lab report is true,

1) It's solid proof of sample spiking. That would be the impossibly pure, un-degraded something-like-A-234 from blood, urine or tissue taken two weeks after the fact, and in quantities that would have absolutely killed the Skripals given what was still there after two weeks. Any reasonable lab would interpret that finding as such.

2) The BZ findings explain the Skripals initial condition, and implicate the US/UK/NATO who developed and weaponized it. The USSR never had BZ weapons or worked with BZ - that was the west.

Spiez Lab, to it's credit, knows exactly what kind of deception is going on. They apparently had no intention of weasel-wording their analysis or impugning their lab's credibility. IF they put those words in their analysis for the OPCW, then it was a kind of "In your face, LIARS" jab. The lab's lawyers would have approved - don't drag Spiez into your world domination schemes. The OPCW filtered that out in their public report, and have the same dilemma as any government agency confronted with whistleblower claims.

In the unusual and rare event that the Spiez analysis ever sees the light of day, the OPCW will be made to be the fall guy with much fanfare. Not the US or UK, who will just have to wait to see the results of an independent investigation into the matter. Five years at least - these things take time. For now, just deny something nobody is allowed to prove.

PW , Apr 15, 2018 9:34:37 PM | 62
Going out on a serious limb here.

But things start to make sense when you think of all the things that have occurred in the last few weeks.

The Russians warned of impending chemical weapons event in Syria, then the Skripals are found. This makes me wonder. Like father, like daughter? Were they blackmailed or willing participants? Was Yulia a mule for MI6 with her visit to her father as the cover for the operation? Was she tasked with transporting chemical weapons on behalf a looming Syria operation, of weapons produced at Porton Down? Having a Russian national manage to transit the material via certain points internationally, MI-6/FBI/CIA can then use her own itinerary to show how it originated from Russia. The same way Mueller and the FBI set up fake terrorist plots so they could get public convictions for the plotters the FBI created.

So what went wrong? Maybe the precursors were stored incorrectly. Maybe they mixed in a way that ended up not killing them. That's how they were able to "save" the Skripals in hospital, because they could tell the ER exactly what the agent was. If Novichok is so deadly, and since they didn't die, to me, that seems as plausible as anything else. I'm no expert in chemistry, so I'm not even sure it's possible for the two of them to become ill in this way.

Then, we had the Saudi Clown Prince all over Europe, and finally in Paris. We know MBS is the main benefactor for Jaesh al-Islam. SA could have been the coordinator to make the pieces fall into line. Getting Jaesh and the White Helmets ready to receive a gif from Porton Down. Dump the chemical weapon in a place, get some bodies to film, then wait for international teams to arrive to "discover" samples of A-234. The Jihadis in Syria have done this before in 2013.

One has to admit, if there was a gas attack in Syria, and it turned out to be A-234 Novichok, think of how that would have been such a bonanza for Trump, May, Macron, and the Saudi Clown Prince! But if the Skripals ended up incapacitated, it could explain why the scrambling of the staged international sh*tshow at the UN and the earnestness of the FUKUS reaction in all this. In desperation, they went back to the barrel bomb gambit, a substitute for what they had hoped to do, so then they can go straight into the airstrike.

Why do I think this? Makes sense that Yulia doesn't want to go back to Russia and why the British/Yanks are keeping her incommunicado. Maybe the Kremlin wants here back, for something more than just being a Russian national and why the MI-6/CIA won't let her go.

Speaking of which, it's possible the Russians, behind closed doors suspect this and played their cards well. This might help to explain why the reaction by the Russians was so muted for the strikes in Syria.

All of this is speculation, right up there with the thermite people, of course, but that's what everyone is trading in right now, including Paris, London and Washington.

Yeah, Right , Apr 15, 2018 9:36:05 PM | 63
If we assume - for arguments sake, if nothing else - that Lavrov's information is accurate then the Russians have played their hand in a masterly fashion.

After all, the only way Lavrov can have this information is if the Russians have an intelligence asset in place.

But where, exactly?

Because of the manner in which this information is released nobody knows if that asset is inside the Spiez labs (i.e. where the report originated) or at the OPCW (i.e. where the report was received and then censored).

So this puts everyone in a very difficult position because they don't know how much more information Lavrov has up his sleeve.

After all, if the source is at Spiez Labs then Lavrov is out of ammo, so to speak. The OPCW can claim that the BZ information was not confirmed by the other two labs and, therefore, it is right and proper that it be left out. Lavrov would be in no position to dispute that even if it were a flat-out lie.

But if the source is inside the OPCW then Lavrov may well have all three lab reports, in which case the OPCW would be falling into a trap of its own making if it tries to lie its way out of this. Lavrov would be able to cut them to ribbons by carefully releasing more info.

That, at least in my opinion, is why the Spiez is being so circumspect, and why the OPCW is doing a very good impersonation of a rabbit caught in headlights i.e. until they know where the source of this leak is they can't even begin to rough-up a cover-up.

somebody , Apr 15, 2018 10:13:21 PM | 66
Posted by: PavewayIV | Apr 15, 2018 5:21:47 PM | 61

It is interesting how the "very pure" stuff everybody agrees on is spun in different ways. "Very pure" was interpreted as meaning "can only have been produced by a state". But thinking about it - of course it is unlikely to have been found "pure" in a sample taken from the environment. Russian scientists including Mirzayanov seem to unite on not possible to have been found if Novichok on 19th with rain etc.

2 labs had the samples taken from environment, 2 labs had blood samples. Hardly anything will have been found in the blood samples.

james , Apr 15, 2018 10:16:46 PM | 67
this tells one all they need to know about the usa or the uks role in chemical weapon attacks..
Debsisdead , Apr 15, 2018 10:34:02 PM | 68
Althouth some may have had to sign Non Disclosures, it is difficult to understand why MI5 would even bother since undoubtedly many staff would refuse at from MI5's point of view totally un-necessary since post the consultant's letter to the Times the Home Office announced that any further leaks by staff would result in prosecution under the englander official secrets act .

This a particularly nasty piece of legislation that is an act of parliament dating back to part 1 of the 20th century euro war. Some people are asked to sign it but that is more about intimidation than legality since it applies to all public sector employees, contractors and consultants regardless.

I remember being made to sign it by HR ('personnel' in those days) after getting a telco techie job as a kid in the bad old days when Aoteraoa public servants were bound by the kiwi version (they now have the privacy act which is meant to be about freedom of information but is actually used by every govt agency spokesperson to hide their mistakes regardless giving out details of medical treatment is one of the big no-nos rightly so too, a nurse in Aotearoa only just missed out on getting slotted up for a good spell when she told a student's family at home in India that their daughter had dropped in to the public hospital where she worked for a termination. The girl copped big damages by kiwi standards).

Anyway england, as soon as the Home Secretary mumbled about the OS Act everybody including the media who can also be tossed into the slammer for the rest of their naturals for printing something that is covered by the Act, shut right up. Most especially the original doctor.

Carrie , Apr 16, 2018 6:59:57 AM | 69
Posted by: PavewayIV | Apr 15, 2018 5:21:47 PM | 61

PavewayIV thanks, as always I appreciate your thorough analysis.

...and in quantities that would have absolutely killed the Skripals given what was still there after two weeks...
Indeed, and if A-234 is as strong as reported, it's likely any traces around the Skripals would have killed the first responders too.

No doubt related to Lavrov's disclosure: this morning (and yesterday in the Sunday Times) nearly every national UK paper is running a front page version of this story: "Russia launches cyber war on UK with 'dirty tricks' campaign as PM to face Commons over Syria strikes" (taken from The Daily Telegraph). This meme is so widespread (BBC Radio 4 also) that, in itself, it looks like a co-ordinated attempt at scaremongering and misinformation.

It's designed to make people think that anything they read online that is contrary to the official FUKUS narrative about Russia/Syria can be given the term 'dirty trick' and dismissed. And by conflating the Skripal story with Syria (remember the messages about 'package delivered' picked up by '4-Eyes' in Cypress?) then anything Russia says about the Skripal affair is suspect and "not worthy of your consideration, dear reader".

I see that The Sun newspaper is now running with this news in it's online version:

RUSSIA and Syria have blocked chemical inspectors from investigating the site of a brutal chemical attack in Douma, Syria, reports claim.

Russia may even have compromised the site of the April 7 gas attack, according to Ahmet Uzumcu, Director general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

"It's our concern they may have tampered with it to thwart the fact finding investigation," Mr Uzumcu is quoted as saying by NBC's Bill Neely.

Also see yesterday's important report by Elijah J Magnier. Ties stuff together. Folks, in seeking out and highlighting the truth we going to have our work cut out for us here! [See "have your work cut out (for you)"

qualtrough , Apr 16, 2018 7:12:27 AM | 70
This is one of the few if only 'miracle recovery' situations in which the victims did not sit down for interviews. I imagine once they have been groomed enough they will sit down for an interview with a trusted news organization.
Yonatan , Apr 16, 2018 1:29:48 PM | 72
BZ is not a hallucinogenic compound. It is a nerve agent with an unusual high ratio of lethal dose to symptomatic dose (~400:1). That means the key symptoms of nerve agent poisoning can be induced by exposure to low levels of agent way below the levels needed to kill someone. That would protect the attacker as well as not immediately killing the victims.

There was no audited chain of custody for the first samples so traces on Novichok could have been introduced between the taking of the samples (presumably by a phlebotomist at the hospital) and its arrival at Porton Down.

The only publicly announced CCTV footage (from a private camera) showed the Skripals en route from Zizzis to the park bench where they were found. The footage also showed a blonde haired women leaving the shop(?) hosting the private CCTV camera some minutes after the Skripals and following the same route. There are claims that she appeared to be carrying a face mask. She was listed as a person of interest by the local police, but there was no follow-up once the presence of nerve agent was made public.

This was all before Bailey came down with symptoms. This poisoning was presumably an unexpected complicating event for those running the false flag. From local media sources, it appears that he drove himself to Salisbury hospital early Monday morning (5 March probably before 10:00 am some 18 hours after the attack). The hospital entrance and his car were subsequently sealed off and decontaminated. It would be interesting to know the temporal relationship between his arrival and the knowledge that a nerve agent was used.

The false flaggers were then presented with a problem of explaining Bailey's delayed symptoms. The explanation would have to exclude the possibility of him being poisoned at the same time as the Skripals to avoid anyone regarding him as an eyewitness. An unidentified police officer turned up at the Skripal's house (mentioned in local media) around 5pm on Sunday shortly after the attack. The seems to have provided the false flaggers with a plausible (to them) source of poisoning, namely the door handle.

How did Bailey actually become contaminated? He was described as an early emergency services responder (local media). If he was first on the scene, one plausible explanation is that he was exposed to low amounts of BZ aerosal as one of the Skripals vomitted in his presence. We know from the nature of BZ that even low levels are capable of inducing symptoms, probably slowly progressive at those exposure levels. Local media photos of the hazmat crews show them putting a pile of sawdust/fine sand onto the ground adjacent to the bench, then scooping it up and putting it into an impermeable container which was then sealed for disposal. This supports the vomitting hypothesis, which was also observed by later passers by.

My hypothesis for events: The Skripals were exposed to an aerosol spray of low dose BZ sprayed into their faces by an unknown person (possibly the blonde woman) whilst sitting at the bench. Bailey was unintentionally contaminated by a similar lower level aerosol of BZ as he attended the vomitting Skripal. The desired story of pure Novichok poisoning could not be explained unless Bailey received a higher dose at a later time from a source that the Skripals were plausibly in contact with - hence the door handle hypothesis. The door handle hypothesis would also allow the false flaggers to direct attention away from the possiblity that the Skripals were attacked at the bench. The trail of the attacker (clearly part of the false flag team) could then be closed off and covered up.

Anon , Apr 16, 2018 1:55:48 PM | 73
So now Skripal himself is ok, God what a pathetic circus UK have put on.
irena , Apr 16, 2018 3:18:46 PM | 74
A-234 according to Mirzayanov and A-234 according to Hoenig have different structures. Mirzayanov claims that a number of weaker agents developed as part of the Foliant program were published in the open literature as organophosphate pesticides, in order to disguise the secret nerve agent program as legitimate pesticide research. So, it was made to be pesticides. And it can be produced as a number of different pesticides everywhere in the world.
Kaima , Apr 16, 2018 6:00:37 PM | 75
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-chemical-attack-gas-douma-robert-fisk-ghouta-damascus-a8307726.html

Corroboration for Douma attack - no gas

Robet James Parsons , Apr 16, 2018 6:57:37 PM | 76
Entirely implausible?

Posted by: Madeira | Apr 15, 2018 9:45:53 AM | 3

and From the resistance trench with love | Apr 15, 2018 10:38:12 AM | 16

The Spiez lab is a NATO lab. Even though Switzerland is "neutral", it is an associate member of NATO under the NATO Peace Partnership. Spiez has been involved in serious falsifications of analysis results for the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)'s work on the use of uranium and depleted uranium weapons.

E.g. the water samples that the UNEP took from missile craters in south Lebanon after the Israeli assault in August 2006 revealed low enriched uranium, which is what myself and two other independent researchers, Dai Williams and Dr Chris Busby, had found there. (Our samples were analyzed at Harwell in the United Kingdom.) However, what was announced in the preliminary report by the UNEP was NO radiation found.

We confronted the UNEP (Henrik Slotte, head of the Post-Conflict Intervention Unit, and Mario Buger, the technical officer), and they admitted that the water samples that they had taken from the craters had been carefully filtered before being tested. Under pressure from us, Burger returned, took more samples and had them tested properly, at Spiez. He also found low enriched uranium.

... ... ...

Robet James Parsons , Apr 16, 2018 7:06:42 PM | 77
POST SCRIPTVM

In my opinion, the release of the real report to the Russians was the work of a whistle-blower, for the Spiez lab has highly trained people who take great pride in the generally impeccable quality of the lab's work and its repuration for such. Many of them would have been appalled that their lab was party to some sort of deception.

This would also explain why they went ahead and analyzed the samples for things other than just what might have been requested, although I am inclined to believe that they were requested to analyze for everything. This would only heighten the indination of those who did the work upon discovering that an incomplete -- distorted -- report on thorough (gündlich) work had been sent to one of the states parties to the Convention that had a right to know everything.

Tranquillus , Apr 17, 2018 8:09:57 AM | 78
Lavrov expressed similar doubts about the independence of the international investigation into the shooting down of Malaysian airliner MH17 in 2014, after floating many alternative "theories".

"Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says there are a lot of questions regarding the investigation into the downed MH17 Malaysia Airlines plane in eastern Ukraine, adding that it is not independent, not comprehensive and not truly international."
https://www.rt.com/news/311691-lavrov-mh17-malaysia-asean/

The Joint Investigation Team, consisting of the Netherlands, Malaysia, Ukraine, Belgium and Australia, concluded that MH17 was shot down by a Russian missile under the control of Donbas separatists. The Russian government continues to deny this.

jalp , Apr 17, 2018 9:47:41 AM | 79
My FB feed now has commercial media forwarding UK gov't claim that the Salisbury nerve agent was "delivered in liquid form", FWIW. So -- what (if anything) is that worth?
Ort , Apr 17, 2018 2:44:15 PM | 80
@ Tranquillus | 78
_________________________________

Lavrov was right then, and he's right now. The "Joint Investigation Team" is actually "The Fix Is In Team". The official title is just for show, to make infoganda that impresses the ignorant, complacent, and submissive. It's exactly like the Big Lie that "17 intelligence agencies separately concluded that Russians meddled in US elections".

[Apr 16, 2018] British Propaganda and Disinformation An Imperial and Colonial Tradition by Wayne MADSEN

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... For decades, a little-known section of the British Foreign Office – the Information Research Department (IRD) – carried out propaganda campaigns using the international media as its platform on behalf of MI-6. Years before Syria's Bashar al-Assad, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, and Sudan's Omar al-Bashir became targets for Western destabilization and "regime change." IRD and its associates at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and in the newsrooms and editorial offices of Fleet Street broadsheets, tabloids, wire services, and magazines, particularly "The Daily Telegraph," "The Times," "Financial Times," Reuters, "The Guardian," and "The Economist," ran media smear campaigns against a number of leaders considered to be leftists, communists, or FTs (fellow travelers). ..."
"... After the Cold War, this same propaganda operation took aim at Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Somalia's Mohamad Farrah Aidid, and Haiti's Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Today, it is Assad's, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's, and Catalonian independence leader Carles Puigdemont's turn to be in the Anglo-American state propaganda gunsights. Even Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, long a darling of the Western media and such propaganda moguls as George Soros, is now being targeted for Western visa bans and sanctions over the situation with Muslim Rohingya insurgents in Rakhine State. ..."
"... Through IRD-MI-6-Central Intelligence Agency joint propaganda operations, many British journalists received payments, knowingly or unknowingly, from the CIA via a front in London called Forum World Features (FWF), owned by John Hay Whitney, publisher of the "New York Herald Tribune" and a former US ambassador to London. ..."
Apr 16, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

When it comes to creating bogus news stories and advancing false narratives, the British intelligence services have few peers. In fact, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6) has led the way for its American "cousins" and Britain's Commonwealth partners – from Canada and Australia to India and Malaysia – in the dark art of spreading falsehoods as truths. Recently, the world has witnessed such MI-6 subterfuge in news stories alleging that Russia carried out a novichok nerve agent attack against a Russian émigré and his daughter in Salisbury, England. This propaganda barrage was quickly followed by yet another – the latest in a series of similar fabrications – alleging the Syrian government attacked civilians in Douma, outside of Damascus, with chemical weapons.

It should come as no surprise that American news networks rely on British correspondents stationed in northern Syria and Beirut as their primary sources. MI-6 has historically relied on non-official cover (NOC) agents masquerading primarily as journalists, but also humanitarian aid workers, Church of England clerics, international bankers, and hotel managers, to carry out propaganda tasks. These NOCs are situated in positions where they can promulgate British government disinformation to unsuspecting actual journalists and diplomats.

For decades, a little-known section of the British Foreign Office – the Information Research Department (IRD) – carried out propaganda campaigns using the international media as its platform on behalf of MI-6. Years before Syria's Bashar al-Assad, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, and Sudan's Omar al-Bashir became targets for Western destabilization and "regime change." IRD and its associates at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and in the newsrooms and editorial offices of Fleet Street broadsheets, tabloids, wire services, and magazines, particularly "The Daily Telegraph," "The Times," "Financial Times," Reuters, "The Guardian," and "The Economist," ran media smear campaigns against a number of leaders considered to be leftists, communists, or FTs (fellow travelers).

These leaders included Indonesia's President Sukarno, North Korean leader (and grandfather of Pyongyang's present leader) Kim Il-Sung, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, Cyprus's Archbishop Makarios, Cuba's Fidel Castro, Chile's Salvador Allende, British Guiana's Cheddi Jagan, Grenada's Maurice Bishop, Jamaica's Michael Manley, Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, Guinea's Sekou Toure, Burkina Faso's Thomas Sankara, Australia's Gough Whitlam, New Zealand's David Lange, Cambodia's Norodom Sihanouk, Malta's Dom Mintoff, Vanuatu's Father Walter Lini, and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah.

After the Cold War, this same propaganda operation took aim at Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Somalia's Mohamad Farrah Aidid, and Haiti's Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Today, it is Assad's, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's, and Catalonian independence leader Carles Puigdemont's turn to be in the Anglo-American state propaganda gunsights. Even Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, long a darling of the Western media and such propaganda moguls as George Soros, is now being targeted for Western visa bans and sanctions over the situation with Muslim Rohingya insurgents in Rakhine State.

Through IRD-MI-6-Central Intelligence Agency joint propaganda operations, many British journalists received payments, knowingly or unknowingly, from the CIA via a front in London called Forum World Features (FWF), owned by John Hay Whitney, publisher of the "New York Herald Tribune" and a former US ambassador to London.

It is not a stretch to believe that similar and even more formal relationships exist today between US and British intelligence and so-called British "journalists" reporting from such war zones as Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, and the Gaza Strip, as well as from much-ballyhooed nerve agent attack locations as Salisbury, England.

No sooner had recent news reports started to emerge from Douma about a Syrian chlorine gas and sarin agent attack that killed between 40 to 70 civilians, British reporters in the Middle East and London began echoing verbatim statements from the Syrian "White Helmets" and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

In actuality, the White Helmets – claimed by Western media to be civilian defense first-responders but are Islamist activists connected to jihadist radical groups funded by Saudi Arabia – are believed to have staged the chemical attack in Douma by entering the municipality's hospital and dowsing patients with buckets of water, video cameras at the ready. The White Helmets distributed their videos to the global news media, with the BBC and Rupert Murdoch's Sky News providing a British imprimatur to the propaganda campaign asserting that Assad carried out another "barrel bomb" chemical attack against "his own people." And, as always, the MI-6 financed Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an anti-Assad news front claimed to be operated by a Syrian expatriate and British national named Rami Abdel Rahman from his clothing shop in Coventry, England, began providing second-sourcing for the White Helmet's chemical attack claims.

With President Trump bringing more and more neo-conservatives, discredited from their massive anti-Iraq propaganda operations during the Bush-Cheney era, into his own administration, the world is witnessing the prolongation of the "Trump Doctrine."

The Trump Doctrine can best be explained as follows: A nation will be subject to a US military attack depending on whether Trump is facing a severe political or sex scandal at home.

Such was the case in April 2017, when Trump ordered a cruise missile attack on the joint Syrian-Russian airbase at Shayrat, Syria. Trump was still reeling from the resignation of his National Security Adviser, Lt. General Michael Flynn, in February over the mixing of his private consulting business with his official White House duties. Trump needed a diversion and the false accusation that Assad used sarin gas on the village of Khan Sheikoun on April 4, 2017, provided the necessary pabulum for the war-hungry media.

The most recent cruise missile attack was to divert the public's attention away from Trump's personal attorney being raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a sex scandal involving Trump and a porn actress, and a "tell-all" book by Trump's fired FBI director, James Comey.

Although these two scandals provided opportunities for the neo-cons to test Trump with false flag operations in Syria, they were not the first time such actions had been carried out. In 2013, the Syrian government was blamed for a similar chemical attack on civilians in Ghouta. That year, Syrian rebels, supported by the Central Intelligence Agency, admitted to the Associated Press reporter on the ground in Syria that they had been given banned chemical weapons by Saudi Arabia, but that the weapons canisters exploded after improper handling by the rebels. Immediately, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Syrian rebel organizations operating out of Turkey claimed that Assad had used chemical-laden barrel bombs on "his own people." However, Turkish, American, and Lebanese sources confirmed that it was the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) that had badly bungled a false flag sarin nerve agent attack on Ghouta.

Few Western media outlets were concerned about a March 19, 2013, sarin nerve agent by the Bashair al-Nasr Brigade rebel group linked to the US- and British-backed Free Syrian Army. The rebels used a "Bashair-3" unguided projectile, containing the deadly sarin agent, on civilians in Khan al-Assal, outside Aleppo. At least 27 civilians were killed, and scores of others injured in the attack. The Syrian Kurds also reported the use of chemical weapons on them during the same time frame by Syrian rebel groups backed by the United States, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. The usual propaganda operations – Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Doctors Without Borders, the BBC, CNN, and Sky News – were all silent about these attacks.

In 2013, April 2017, and April 2018, the Western media echo chamber blared out all the same talking points: "Assad killing his own people," "Syrian weapons of mass destruction," and the "mass murder of women and children." Western news networks featured videos of dead women and children, while paid propagandists, known as "contributors" to corporate news networks – all having links to the military-intelligence complex – demanded action be taken against Assad.

Trump, now being advised by the notorious neocon war hawk John Bolton, the new National Security Adviser, began referring to Assad as an "animal" and a "monster." Bolton, along with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff Irving Lewis "Scooter" Libby, helped craft similar language against Saddam Hussein prior to the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq. It was not coincidental that Trump – at the urging of Bolton and other neocons – gave a full pardon to Libby on the very same day he ordered the cruise missile attack on Damascus and other targets in Syria. Libby was convicted in 2005 of perjury and illegally disclosing national security information.

The world is being asked to take, at face value, the word of patented liars like Trump, Bolton, and other neocons who are now busy joining the Trump administration at breakneck speed. The corporate media unabashedly acts as though it never lied about the reasons given by the United States and Britain for going to war in Iraq and Libya. Why should anyone believe them now?

Tags: UK al-Assad Propaganda

Wayne MADSEN Investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club

[Apr 16, 2018] But what neither the British Government nor the OPCW have, to the present, acknowledged is that blood samples from the Skripal's contained two nerve agents, A-234, aka Novichok, plus 3-Quinuclidinyl Benzilate, aka BZ or Buzz.

Apr 16, 2018 | www.unz.com

CanSpeccy , Website April 16, 2018 at 6:15 pm GMT

The technical ability of Porton Down to identify a chemical has never been in doubt, and the only "finding of the United Kingdom " the OPCW has confirmed is the identity of the chemical.

But what neither the British Government nor the OPCW have, to the present, acknowledged is that blood samples from the Skripal's contained two nerve agents, A-234, aka Novichok, plus 3-Quinuclidinyl Benzilate, aka BZ or Buzz.

Novichok is a convulsant (which acts by preventing the breakdown of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine at the neuromuscular junction, with the result that muscles go into full contraction, hence the symptoms of convulsions, vomiting, etc.), whereas BZ is a paralytic agent (which acts by binding to acetylcholine receptors at the neuromuscular junction without activating them, thereby preventing muscle contraction, hence the symptoms of paralysis and ultimately death by asphyxiation).

Thus, BZ will serve as an antidote to Novichok poisoning, wheras Novichok will serve as an antidote to BZ poisoning. So the presence of Novichok in the Skipal blood samples is not conclusive evidence that Novichok was the poison, rather than the antidote, as I have discussed here: 3-Quinuclidinyl Benzilate: The Antidote to Novichok , and here: Novichok: Russia's Antidote to Seafood Poisoning .

[Apr 16, 2018] Tracing the Rush to War by Craig Murray

Notable quotes:
"... And in the later articles posted here, he writes: "That puts Saudi Arabia (and its client jihadists), Saudi Arabia's close ally Israel, the UK and the USA all in the frame in having a powerful motive in inculcating anti-Russian sentiment prior to planned conflict with Russia in Syria. Any of them could have attacked the Skripals." ..."
Apr 16, 2018 | www.unz.com

I have never ruled out the possibility that Russia is responsible for the attack in Salisbury, amongst other possibilities. But I do rule out the possibility that Assad is dropping chemical weapons in Ghouta. In this extraordinary war, where Saudi-funded jihadist head choppers have Israeli air support and US and UK military "advisers", every time the Syrian army is about to take complete control of a major jihadist enclave, at the last moment when victory is in their grasp, the Syrian Army allegedly attacks children with chemical weapons, for no military reason at all. We have been fed this narrative again and again and again.

We then face a propaganda onslaught from neo-con politicians, think tanks and "charities" urging a great rain of Western bombs and missiles, and are accused of callousness towards suffering children if we demur. This despite the certain knowledge that Western military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have had consequences which remain to this day utterly disastrous.

I fear that the massive orchestration of Russophobia over the last two years is intended to prepare public opinion for a wider military conflict centred on the Middle East, but likely to spread, and that we are approaching that endgame. The dislocation of the political and media class from the general population is such, that the levers for people of goodwill to prevent this are, as with Iraq, extremely few as politicians quake in the face of media jingoism. These feel like extremely dangerous times.


Ronald Thomas West , Website April 16, 2018 at 4:58 am GMT

Precisely what is meant to negate the "why on earth are we entering armed confrontation with a nuclear power" argument, I do not know

Well, Craig, you could try bringing some heat here:

https://ronaldthomaswest.com/2018/04/15/what-can-be-known-vs-what-will-be-known/

^ It beats singing to the choir

ValmMond , April 16, 2018 at 5:08 am GMT
I stopped reading at:

"I have never ruled out the possibility that Russia is responsible for the attack in Salisbury"

Time for timid half-truths is over. If by now you haven't identified the Skripal affair as the joint UK/US production it is, Act I of the AngloZionist war on Syria, Russia and humanity, your analysis isn't worth the pixels it's written on. There is zero doubt. Case closed. Especially after this:

https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2018/04/15/swiss-governmental-lab-identifies-the-substance-used-on-the-skripal-case-as-being-linked-to-the-nato/

I wish you realize that appeals to skepticism and lines like "I'm not fan of Putin/Assad" get you nowhere. You are facing a brutal, fact-twisting, intellect-insulting, lying, propaganda machine. Any concession you make to their "arguments" comes with the smell of blood. They'll mock your "moderate" views and will try to make you look weak and foolish as Sky-news did. You can't be only half-brave, half-informed and half-right. And why engage those shameless liars if not to destroy completely their blatant lies?

Wally , April 16, 2018 at 5:44 am GMT
BREAKING: British-US Toxin, Not Novichok used in Salisbury Attack

https://principia-scientific.org/breaking-british-us-toxin-not-novichok-used-in-salisbury-attack/

Swiss lab says 'BZ toxin' used in Salisbury, not produced in Russia, was in US & UK service

jilles dykstra , April 16, 2018 at 7:39 am GMT
Who pulls the strings ?

When Hungary prepared democratically laws to stop Soros meddling in Hungary Soros phoned Brussels, spoke to Juncker and Tusk, the next day Timmermans tried to intimidate the Hungarian government.

Just now there have been Hungarian elections, anti migration and anti Soros Orban was elected.

European parliament member Sargenti now wants to take Hungary's voting right in the EU away.

Sargenti is on the 231 member list that seem to be followers of Soros.

As Jimmy Carter once said 'those that want war do not expect that they themselves are going to be hurt'.

That in the next world war anyone will be more than hurt, killed, the war mongers do not understand, cannot believe.

Randal , April 16, 2018 at 10:03 am GMT
@ZummaZero

Please, why don't you mention the other possibilities, instead of "the Russian one"?

Bit harsh to criticise Craig Murray on that score. I see your point, and it would be a valid point to raise with an establishment journo who has been generally an effective part of the anti-Russia propaganda campaign, but Murray has discussed the other options on many occasions (and been the brunt of some pretty harsh establishment bullying in response).

In this case, it can safely be regarded as just efficient writing.

Vojkan , April 16, 2018 at 11:12 am GMT
Even if Assad did use gas, which he obviously didn't, who the heck are the Americans, the British, and the French to lecture anyone on morality, given that they unlike Assad did practice chemical warfare, and killed uncounted millions around the globe with "conventional" means in order to loot them, and to "punish" Assad as the bankster with an Oedipus complex Macron put it?
Tsar Nicholas , April 16, 2018 at 11:21 am GMT
@ValmMond

I think you are being unfair.

Mr Murray lost his job because he stood up for the right thing in 2004 and he has been abused ever since. His sanity has been called into question ever since he suggested the British government weren't telling the truth. His brief period in an instiuttion after Blair sacked him has been brought up more than once.

I suspect Craig's position of apparent open-mindedness has arisen from a lengthy Sky News TV interview with the appalling Kay Burley. He was careful in an eighteen minute segment not to give cause for Burley to label him as a Putin bot. He was most careful not to take the focus off the weakness in the British government's position and I think that was correct.

As soon as you see the tissue of lies emanating from London the innocence of Moscow follows naturally. Mr Murray was correct not to allow himself to be provoked by Kay Burley and she was visibly annoyed by her failure.

Sky News tried to bury the confrontation but somebody recorded it and you can find the interview at craigmurray.org

TT , April 16, 2018 at 2:49 pm GMT

The ever excellent Campaign Against the Arms Trade is back in the English High Court again today in its continuing attempts to ban arms sales to Saudi Arabia. It is against UK law to sell arms to a country which is likely to use them in breach of international humanitarian law , and that Saudi Arabia consistently and regularly uses British weapons to bomb schools, hospitals and civilians is indisputable.

Why didn't the High Court ban arm sales to UK army, which is using them in breach of international humanitarian law, consistently & regularly since its colonial era, in Vietnam & Korea wars, Blair's Iraq WMD illegal war, Cameron's illegal Libya bombing, and now May's illegal attack to Syria.

Saudi arabia Yemen's war pale in comparison to UK long history of atrocities. What a British hypocrite law enacted in a kangaroo judicial system? A country of government infested with shameless warmonger liars & paedophiles, yet popularly elected by its people. What a great Anglosaxon-West civilization & glorious demoncrapcy system to be spread around the world for easy subversion & regime change.

Proven guilty Iraq war criminal Tony Blair is walking free, repeating his same lies again to push for illegal Syria attack. Yet not a single war protest from UK people. Touch a LBGT issue or Trumps visit, British will gone hysteria protest in London, oh what a great nation. World Capital of paedophiles, war criminals & pathological liars.

How can God save the Queen that connive criminals, with stolen wealth soaking with innocents blood.

EliteCommInc. , April 16, 2018 at 3:53 pm GMT
I appreciated the frame you provided. That's a very serious charge against Great Britain -- sadly, I found it a somewhat compelling and disconcerting.

I suspect that in all of this there are fears that it's a response to enemies without as opposed to enemies from within. I have no idea where this notion comes from -- that states can act as authority for UN missions without the consent of the UN. Great Britain's press here sounds very much like the legal gymnastic of the US to invade Iraq and has much weight -- I agree.

The chaos in Libya, Syria, the Ukraine is the direct result of US and EU manipulation. I just don't know how to support "wrongness" on so many levels and consider myself a person of integrity. The humanitarian crisis in all of the regions is exacerbated by our own violations of law and foreign policy best practices.

Pale hobo , April 16, 2018 at 4:10 pm GMT
Not a bad article, but superficial. Does not address the why question and the huge ideological difference between Russia and the 'West' which leads to war.
Zumbuddi , April 16, 2018 at 4:21 pm GMT
@ValmMond

Agree. Resisting lying provocation to war should be done with what ZUSA terms "moral clarity." Said another way, No Quarter, No Mercy. If the need is felt to characterize Assad, the only things that needs be said are that he is the legitimate leader of a sovereign nation, and that attempts to topple him, by ZUSA & Anglos, are in direct violation of United Nations charter.

Greg Bacon , Website April 16, 2018 at 5:02 pm GMT

I have never ruled out the possibility that Russia is responsible for the attack in Salisbury, amongst other possibilities.

And I have never ruled out the word which can not be spoken, that ISRAEL was behind both attacks, to justify getting their US/UK/French lackeys to do in Syria what they can not without taking losses, attacking Syrian cities with cruise missiles.

Poisoned toothpaste and exploding phones: New book chronicles Israel's '2,700' assassination operations

Poisoned toothpaste that takes a month to end its target's life. Armed drones. Exploding mobile phones. Spare tyres with remote-control bombs. Assassinating enemy scientists and discovering the secret lovers of Muslim clerics.

A new book chronicles these techniques and asserts that Israel has carried out at least 2,700 assassination operations in its 70 years of existence. While many failed, they add up to far more than any other western country, the book says.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mossad-assassinations-israel-foreign-operations-arafat-book-shin-bet-ronan-bergman-interviews-a8181391.ht

The main beneficiary of the recent cruise missile attacks against Syria is Israel, so let's be honest and see what happens.

From an April 2003 Haaretz article:

The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. Two of them, journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it's possible.

This is a war of an elite. [Tom] Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/white-man-s-burden-1.14110

Mike P , April 16, 2018 at 7:37 pm GMT
@James Brown

So, aside from selling weapons to Syria and Iran – and thus, giving up control over those weapons – what exactly should Putin have done to continue receiving your approval? Start WW3?

Another question: if this is just a staged play of good cop, bad cop – why does the puppet master behind the scenes not advance the plot? Why the need for silly diversions into the bucolic English countryside, and for embarrassing cameos by French boy princes?

Mike P , April 16, 2018 at 8:36 pm GMT
@Stonehands

Not sure where you are from, but some countries – particularly those that have experienced it at home – consider war a serious business, not quite the same as a bar brawl in Dodge City.

Anon [425] Disclaimer , Website April 16, 2018 at 8:51 pm GMT
Western Media are turning into a Laughing Gas attack.
paul23 , April 16, 2018 at 8:58 pm GMT
I keep hearing that the Qatar – Europe pipeline is the source of the Syria War, what I cant understand if their so desperate for this why does it need to go through Syria, theres`s other ways like across SA and up the red sea?
Antiwar7 , April 16, 2018 at 9:03 pm GMT
@ZummaZero

In Murray's first post on the Skripal story, he lists other possible suspects as Orbis Intelligence (who produced the Steele dossier) and the state of Israel:

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/03/russian-to-judgement/

And in the later articles posted here, he writes: "That puts Saudi Arabia (and its client jihadists), Saudi Arabia's close ally Israel, the UK and the USA all in the frame in having a powerful motive in inculcating anti-Russian sentiment prior to planned conflict with Russia in Syria. Any of them could have attacked the Skripals."

SolontoCroesus , April 16, 2018 at 9:16 pm GMT
@Sean

The West would simply like him to meet his obligations and stop gassing people as there is an international agreement against killing people that way. Why can't he just stick to the normal use of high explosives to blast them to pieces?

Why can't he just stick to the normal use of high explosives to blast them to pieces?

Because that process is still under Israeli patent protection??

ValmMond , April 16, 2018 at 9:49 pm GMT
@Stonehands

Didn't he and various generals plainly state that retaliation would be swift and immediately delivered to any such platform?

Yes, if Russian military assets in Syria are targeted or hit. The US strike was the warfare equivalent of a plate smashing fit thrown by a hysterical tranny. Just a loud demonstration of impotence and fishing for attention. It's better handled unanswered. Now, if the tranny decides to go in a full abuser mode, Putin may seriously mess up her makeup.

[Apr 16, 2018] Skripal and Yulia were poisoned by non-lethal toxin made in Britain, Russian foreign minister claims

Apr 16, 2018 | dailymail.co.uk

The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, claims former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned by a non-lethal chemical made in Britain and the US.

Mr Lavrov says the pair were not attacked with novichock but instead with BZ - a toxin never developed in Russia - which a laboratory in Spiez, Switzerland, found.

'This formulation was in the inventory of the United States, Britain and other Nato states,' Mr Lavrov said.

[Apr 15, 2018] The Trump Regime Is Insane by Paul Craig Roberts

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... People such as Stephen Cohen and myself, who were actively involved throughout the entirety of the Cold War, are astonished at the reckless and irresponsible behavior of the US government and its European vassals toward Russia. ..."
"... In this brief video, Stephen Cohen describes to Tucker Carlson the extreme danger of the present situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvK1Eu01Lz0 Published on Apr 13, 2018 ..."
Apr 13, 2018 | www.unz.com

Craig Roberts • April 13, 2018

  1. Is it insane to push for war with Russia, a major nuclear power?
  2. Is it insane to threaten Russia and bring false charges against her?
  3. Is it insane to brag about killing "hundreds of Russians"? https://news.antiwar.com/2018/04/12/pompeo-russians-met-their-match-us-killed-hundreds-of-them/
  4. A normal person would answer "yes" to the three questions. So what does this tell us about Trump's government as these insane actions are the principle practice of Trump's government?
  5. Does anyone doubt that Nikki Haley is insane?
  6. Does anyone doubt that John Bolton is insane?
  7. Does anyone doubt that Mike Pompeo is insane?
  8. Does this mean that Trump is insane for appointing to the top positions insane people who foment war with a nuclear power?
  9. Does this mean that Congress is insane for approving these appointments?

These are honest questions. Assuming we avoid the Trump-promised Syrian showdown, how long before the insane Trump regime orchestrates another crisis?

The entire world should understand that because of the existence of the insane Trump regime, the continued existence of life on earth is very much in question.

People such as Stephen Cohen and myself, who were actively involved throughout the entirety of the Cold War, are astonished at the reckless and irresponsible behavior of the US government and its European vassals toward Russia. Nothing as irresponsible as what we have witnessed since the Clinton regime and which has worsened dramatically under the Obama and Trump regimes would have been imaginable during the Cold War. In this brief video, Stephen Cohen describes to Tucker Carlson the extreme danger of the present situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvK1Eu01Lz0 Published on Apr 13, 2018

The failure of political leadership throughout the Western world is total. Such total failure is likely to prove deadly to life on earth.

[Apr 15, 2018] BZ has a history. Lavrov has a strong point

Apr 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

AmsterJam | Apr 14, 2018 6:51:22 PM | 113

BZ has a history. Lavrov has a strong point

1. Psychochemical weapons:

[2009 Wikipedia cached page] https://web.archive.org/web/20120927170325/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychochemical_weapon#cite_note-11 ">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychochemical_weapon#cite_note-11">https://web.archive.org/web/20120927170325/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychochemical_weapon#cite_note-11

"The Iraqi weapon. The existence of a BZ-related compound, called Agent-15, in Iraq's arsenals was revealed in 1998 . Apparently, Iraq possessed large quantities of the agent since the 1980s. A document found by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1995 contained a brief reference to this agent and subsequent assessment of relevant scientific and other background material indicated the size of the stockpile. Soldiers of 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart Georgia found facilities used for the production of these weapons. The facilities had been closed for several years before the invasion as dust almost a half inch thick was noted on everything. Records books of personnel who had entered the buildings and other project related equipment looked as though everything had been stopped suddenly and it did not appear that the research had ever progressed to a state of actual production ".

And from this [2014 Wikipedia cached page]: https://web.archive.org/web/20140618215854/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychochemical_weapon ">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychochemical_weapon">https://web.archive.org/web/20140618215854/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychochemical_weapon " Britain was also investigating the possible weaponization of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) and BZ (3-quinuclidinyl benzilate) as nonlethal battlefield drug-weapons Hungarian researcher Lajos Rosza wrote that records of Hungary's State Defense Council meetings from 1962 to 1978 suggest that the Warsaw Pact forum had considered a psychochemical agent such as Methylamphetamine as a possible weapon .. The United States eventually weaponized the chemical BZ for delivery in the M43 BZ cluster bomb until stocks were destroyed in 1989 ."

2. Zanders JP: CW Agent Factsheet - Agent-15: https://web.archive.org/web/20070613005906/http://www.sipri.org/contents/expcon/agent15.html ">http://www.sipri.org/contents/expcon/agent15.html">https://web.archive.org/web/20070613005906/http://www.sipri.org/contents/expcon/agent15.html ) "Little information is publicly known about Agent-15, except that it is closely related to BZ. The understanding of its physiological effects is based on studies with the latter agent. The existence of Agent-15 in Iraq's arsenals was revealed by the British Secretary of State George Robertson in a statement to the House of Commons on 9 February 1998. According to the statement, Iraq may have possessed large quantities of the agent since the 1980s. A document found by the UN Special Commission on Iraq ( UNSCOM ) in August 1995 contained a brief reference to Agent-15 and subsequent assessment of relevant scientific and other background material indicated the size of the stockpile."

3.. '3-Quinuclidinyl Benzilate': https://web.archive.org/web/20090423142234/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-quinuclidinyl_benzilate ">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-quinuclidinyl_benzilate">https://web.archive.org/web/20090423142234/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-quinuclidinyl_benzilate

"In February 1998, the British Ministry of Defence released an intelligence report that accused Iraq of having stockpiled large amounts of a glycolate anticholinergic incapacitating agent known as Agent 15.[citation needed] Agent 15 is an alleged Iraqi incapacitating agent that is likely to be chemically either identical to BZ or closely related to it. Agent 15 was reportedly stockpiled in large quantities prior to and during the Persian Gulf War. The combination of anticholinergic PNS and CNS effects aids in the diagnosis of patients exposed to these agents. Also in 1998, there were allegations that elements of the Yugoslav People's Army used incapacitating agents against fleeing Bosnian refugees during Srebrenica massacre in 1995 that caused hallucinations and irrational behavior. Physical evidence of BZ use in Bosnia is unsupported, however."

And from the current 2018 Wikipedia page on '3-Quinuclidinyl Benzilate': "The U.S. Army tested BZ as well as other "psycho-chemical" agents on human subjects at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland from 1955 to 1975 , according to declassified documents."

'NUFF SAID !!

cj , Apr 14, 2018 7:00:45 PM | 115
Hi Paul,

the BZ was probably in the food at the restaurant (Zizzi) and they may have gotten a huge dose, it very potent. This would account for the delay -- restaurant to park bench, needs to be absorbed through the GI tract.

I don't believe the doorknob scenario-- I think you would have to have several milligrams of nerve agent in a skin permeable solvent DMSO or DMF plus gelling agent to make it stick and then it would have to be wet to transfer onto the skin and then get absorbed. First, the target might notice the handle is sticky and wash his/her hands in which case you get no effect if its done in a minute or so and the water is alkaline as it is in England. Then, assuming the gel isn't noticed the transfer would be pretty inefficient as the agent has to be absorbed from a small surface area through the keratin of the skin. If you got things just right, applied the novichok in a nice anhydrous solvent and no rain got in it and someone touched it before the solvent evaporated, then you might be able to give a lethal dose. Having said that, if you absorbed say 0.1mg or so the effects would be pretty immediate collapse in 15 mins or so. So in my opinion the doorknob scenario is rubbish-- if you could get it to work the Skripal that touched the handle would have collapsed before getting near the restaurant.

So I think that there are way too many variables that would need to be optimized to get a nice transfer. But if you managed to achieve this feat the target would be very sick in about 10 mins or so.

The way to use a nerve agent is to aerosolize it, then its easy to get 1-2mg into the lungs and onto the mucosa where it is absorbed very fast (Kim's brother), the transfer through the skin is much more difficult. So my bet is BZ in the food--a huge dose, hence the consulatant's letter saying its not an nerve agent. It's an anti-cholinergic (like atropin), not an anti-cholinesterase (nerve gas).

somebody , Apr 14, 2018 7:10:09 PM | 117
Posted by: frankthomas | Apr 14, 2018 6:36:20 PM | 104

It does matter as the politicians doing this need to get reelected.

It does not seem to have worked for Theresa May , I doubt it worked for Trump.

Paul , Apr 14, 2018 7:37:34 PM | 122
@ Paveway IV--the BZ / Novichok rundown was helpful. Thank you. Not sure that it exhausts it, but how could it...
Paul , Apr 14, 2018 8:11:01 PM | 129
@ Paveway IV -- comment 98 Paveway, I'm not sure whether you've seen Sushi's instalments in the "Curious Incident" series at the Saker, but perhaps you'd consider looking at the most recent one, instalment 8, and then examining the hypothetical narrative below.

Sushi, A superb instalment on a stellar "Curious Incident" series.

I am trying to construct a narrative that accounts for what we have plausible reason to infer, but which does not rely on any official interlocutors (except perhaps Boris Johnson, who may not be able to help himself) clearly lying.

First question--and I imagine you might cover this in your next instalment: Am I correct in thinking that BZ and any of the Novichok / Foliant series are simply not similar enough to be covered by Porton Down's public description of the substance "in question" as being: a) a Novichok b) or from that class of nerve agent c) or a closely related compound

BZ isn't a), isn't b) a nerve agent at all and c) is not closely related to any of the family of compounds that could be in any way considered a Novichok.

Inferences: 1) So, if the finding was actually BZ, when the OPCW confirms the UK's findings, the OPCW is not confirming any of the statements made along lines a), b) or c).

The OPCW, then, is not i) confirming that the substance is of a "type developed by Russia" and so it would seem are either, instead ii) confirming something the Salisbury medical personnel have been quoted as saying, or iii) confirming the findings of some other entity that can be plausibly glossed as having official ("UK") findings, or iv) are confirming UK findings not made public.

Which is to say that all along there have been at least two substances in play, and a bit of a bait and switch game, in which "it" is presumed to be specified but the descriptions are referring to another substance.

For example, the bait is Novichoks, etc. But when we think they are referring to a substance whose metabolites are found in the Skripals' biophysical samples, that substance may actually be bench-grade or lab-grade BZ. Some other sample--taken from a park bench, door knob, restaurant, cemetary headstone, or car ventilation system, may have been tested as containing highly pure (Porton Down lab-grade) A-234, for example.

Each time we think they are talking about one, they are talking about another, and we never really pause to re-examine which "it" they are referring to.

Not technically a lie, except perhaps what might initially seem like an "innocent" exaggeration--"weapons-grade" but actually this, as you note, is a big giveaway. The substance for which the OPCW is confirming the UK findings, is not weapons grade, but as they say, virtually without impurities. You are the only source I am aware of who has emphasized that weapons-grade is not, as the lay person might suppose, highly pure but is in fact marked by certain impurities from a full-scale production run and perhaps additionally to introduce changes of viscosity, etc.

Is any of this making sense, and does anything seem factually incorrect here?

Thirdeye , Apr 14, 2018 8:24:31 PM | 133
Russia announced today that the S-300 long-range air defense system would be provided to the Syrian air defenses. That would be a game-changer in terms of both detection and range. Israel is sure to be displeased because it puts Israeli and Lebanese airspace within range. S-300 radar could also be data-linked with the S-120 and S-200 systems. The increased risk to Israeli missions over Syria would be immense. IMO that counts as a "very serious consequence" of the raid. Russia had withheld that system as long as part of a bargaining strategy with FUKUS. After their display of malice and treachery, the lid on defensive aid to SYAAF has been removed.

Report from Southfront states that the cruise missiles had their targeting jammed by Russian EW, i.e. they were mostly wounded ducks by the time they reached Damascus. Syrian air defense was mostly preventing random ground strikes by off-target missiles, in addition to getting valuable training. That would explain something I observed in videos of the shootdowns, that a lot of the targets were on a high arc. That's not my understanding of how cruise missiles are supposed to be flying in the target area.

les7 , Apr 14, 2018 8:30:18 PM | 134
b

What I learned in many years of travel is that politicians in most of they world are profoundly aware of the long game. In NA (sorry Mexico) they seldom think past the next poll and never past the next round of elections. Sadly, it seems many commentators here reflect the same conclusion when they cannot see the long game that must be played to allow the empire to collapse. There will be thrashing about as the beast gets hyped with its' own version of weaponized LSD (MSM fear-mongering) and inevitably there will be casualties. No amount of showdown force will help while the beast is thrashing - it is impossible to constrain a person in the middle of a fit - and the patience to allow the episode to pass is exemplary. and necessary if we are to have a future with hope.

Putin and Xi are playing the long game, with profound grief it is Syria that bears the brunt of the thrashing. May it end quickly

Piotr Berman , Apr 14, 2018 8:45:02 PM | 136
BZ matches some known facts:

a. non-lethal but incapacitating b. hard to make a lethal overdose - safe for incapacitations, Skripals could get high dose to be incapacitated for many days, but suffer no permanent damage that was described for victims of "novichok" accidents -- like malfunction of the lab hood. c. delayed action d. very durable when spread on surfaces, water resistant -- English rain would not be a problem, and it would be detectable weeks after.

It is manifestly not an assassination weapon, but it could be considered to incapacitate terrorists or defenders in bunkers or tunnels, a ship crew etc., together with hostages, civilians etc.

PavewayIV , Apr 15, 2018 12:01:02 AM | 147
Paul@129 - Old Microbiologist and others are really the ones to ask but AFIK, a BZ molecule and FOLIANT nerve agents are entirely unrelated animals in a chemical sense. The only commonality comes when you consider them under the CWC's "certain toxic chemicals and their precursors" schedules. The OPCW considers certain incapacitating agents, including BZ, as potential chemical weapons. BZ is listed as a Schedule 2 Toxic Chemical. 'Novichoks' would be the higher risk/no non-CW use Schedule 1 list.

As far as the UK and OPCW parties playing deception by substitution or deception by omission in their public statements? I think that's exactly what Lavrov is hinting at. The UK is implying that only one chemical toxin - a nerve agent - was found and is being discussed. In hindsight, the odd use of 'military grade' might just mean 'weaponized'. In the case of BZ, the powder has to be micronized (ground up in a jet mill) to some ridiculously tiny size - like a micron - to travel deep into the lungs, but not so tiny that it is immediately exhaled. I imagine the purity can only be figured out by having enough undegraded substance to analyze. That's nearly impossible with a nerve agent with a half-life of hours. BZ has a half-life of weeks.

No idea if the two can be/were used together or separately or why they would even do that. The mere presence of both is what's interesting.

If they found both Novichok-whatever AND BZ, then the whole 'Made in Russia' claim falls apart. It doesn't mean the UK or US absolutely made it either, but sort of levels off the playing field. The fact that they are trying to keep everything about BZ secret means they were clearly being deceptive in order to blame Russia based on just the 'Novichok' part.

Now whether Lavrov's suggestion of BZ is accurate or whether the OPCW or UK will ever reveal the secret details remains to be seen.

Emily Dickinson , Apr 15, 2018 12:18:28 AM | 148
The official statement from the Russian Embassy to the UK:

https://www.rusemb.org.uk/fnapr/6486

The Russians explicitly state that the Swiss specialists found an "A-234 type" nerve agent in the samples, along with the BZ. The "A-234" is suspicious because it is a volatile substance, but was found in its "initial state (pure form and high concentration)" as well as with products of its decomposition. BZ better fits what happened to the Skripals. A-234 would not have remained in a pure state for so long -- and would have quickly killed the Skripals.

This makes the Spiez Labs statement sound even more extraordinarily coy than it did in the first place. It doesn't say that Spiez found a "Novichok"; it says Spiez trusts that Portdon Down did.

This seems to come down -- yet again -- to that word "Novichok." My reading: Spiez found, along with the BZ, an A-234-like compound, but did not want to get into a public argument about whether or not it was the precise compound developed long ago by the Soviet Union and loosely identified by some as one of the "Novichoks" (newcomers).

PavewayIV , Apr 15, 2018 12:19:41 AM | 150
The NYT's Best-Sellers lists undoubtedly includes one of my old favorites: The US Army's Medical Management of Chemical Casualties Handbook. Just the thing to curl up with before nodding off in your medically-induced coma.

Here's the 14 pages on BZ, but none of you are allowed to read it - unless you voted for Trump.

Don Bacon , Apr 15, 2018 12:25:58 AM | 151
There is no novichok. from the files.... In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, 'Novichoks' (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of the 'Foliant' programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published. (Black, 2016)
Don Bacon , Apr 15, 2018 12:27:07 AM | 152
...and we know that Mirzayanov was fed false information.

[Apr 14, 2018] Poison Gas Weapon Of Choice For "False News"

Notable quotes:
"... Authored by Peter Koenig via The Saker, ..."
"... But when such poison gas attacks are mere false flags, or by the new term, "false news", and are used to provoke war, perhaps an all annihilating war, then humanity has turned to what it never should have become – a lowly-lowly herd of brainless zombies. ..."
"... And the saga continues. The saga to drum up war. That's the purpose of it all. Nothing else – Russia, the evil nation, led by an evil leader, must be subdued and conquered. ..."
"... a totally and unprofessionally staged event. As Russian military quickly discovered and reported. ..."
"... The western aggressors, who seek a reason to mass bomb Syria into even more rubble, causing even more death and destitution ..."
"... the US economy is based on war, is based on weapon manufacturing and international banking which finances weapon manufacturing and the exploitation of mineral resources coveted by weapon manufacturing. ..."
"... But, please, do take all your fakeness, from money, to lies, to hypocrisy and more lies and coercion and sanctions and blackmail with you – never to surface again. And give peace a chance – for those who survive your (almost) terminal assault on humanity. ..."
Apr 14, 2018 | thesaker.is

Authored by Peter Koenig via The Saker,

Poison gas is not only deadly, it often provokes a slow suffocating death. That, perpetrated on innocent children, is particularly cruel.

But when such poison gas attacks are mere false flags, or by the new term, "false news", and are used to provoke war, perhaps an all annihilating war, then humanity has turned to what it never should have become – a lowly-lowly herd of brainless zombies.

Is that what we have become – brainless, greedy, selfish beings, no sense of solidarity, no respect for other beings; I am not even talking about humans, but any living being.

Poison gas, the weapon of choice for fear.

Poisoning in Salisbury of the former Russian double-agent, Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, visiting her dad from Moscow. Poisoning with a nerve gas, called Novichok that was allegedly made in Russia. In the meantime, we know that nerve gas made in the former Soviet Union, now non-existent in Russia, was military grade and deadly. The gas used for the alleged attack was not deadly. We also know by now that the UK – all of their highest officials, from PM May down the ladder, lied so miserably that they will have a hard time recovering. It will backfire. Unlike the foreign secretary, Johnson boy pretended their secret bio-gas / bio-weapon laboratory Porton Down, just 13 km down the road from Salisbury, where the pair was allegedly found unconscious on a park bench, assured him the gas was made in Russia. Alas, the laboratories chief chemists testified later to the media that they could not be sure that the substance was made in Russia. No, of course not.

In fact, Porton Down, working in close collaboration with the CIA, is a highly sophisticated chemical warfare facility that can easily make the gas themselves – at the grades they please, deadly or not so deadly, if it should serve a "false news" purpose – which this did.

Were father and daughter indeed poisoned? – This is a legitimate question. Who has seen them since the alleged poisoning occurred on 28 March? – They disappeared from the public eye. Apparently, they are both recovering, Yulia having been released from hospital a few days ago, but has not been seen by anyone in public, nor been able to talk to the media, lest she could say "something" the public is not allowed to know. Her father is also recovering and may be released soon – released from where? – Is this all a farce?

An aunt talked to Yulia from Moscow, where she noticed that Yulia was not free to talk. The aunt wanted to visit her niece in the UK but was obviously denied a visa.

Where are father and daughter? – Washington has "offered" them a new home and new identity in the US, to avoid further poisoning attempts how ridiculous! A blind man or woman must see that this is another farce, or more correctly, an outright abduction. The two won't have a chance to resist. They are just taken away – not to talk anymore to anyone ever. – That's the way the story goes. The lies are protected, and the "Russia did it" syndrome will prevail – prevail in the dumb folded public, in the herd of pigs that we all have become, as Goebbels would say.

And the saga continues. The saga to drum up war. That's the purpose of it all. Nothing else – Russia, the evil nation, led by an evil leader, must be subdued and conquered. But the empire needs the public for their support. And the empire is almost there. It disposes of a vicious media corporate army – that lies flagrantly about anything that money can buy. It's like spitting in the face of the world, and nobody seems to care, or worse, even to notice.

* * *

On the other side of the Mediterranean is Syria. A vast and noble country, Syria, with a leader who truly loves his people and country, a leader who has despite a foreign induced war – not civil war – a proxy war, instigated and funded by Washington and its vassal allies in Europe and the Middle East; Syria, a highly educated socialist country that has shared the benefit of her resources, free education, free medical services, free basic infrastructure, with her people. This Syria must fall. Such strength cannot be tolerated by the all-dominating west. Like Iraq and Libya, also socialist countries once-upon-a-time, and like Syria, secular Muslim nations, sharing their countries wealth with the people, such countries must fall.

According to Pentagon planners and those Zion-neofascist thinktanks that designed the PNAC (Plan for a New American Century), as the chief instrument of US foreign policy, we know since Wesley Clark, the former Supreme Allied commander and Chief of NATO in Europe (1997-2000) talked to Democracy Now in 2007, saying that within 5 years seven countries must fall, one of them is Syria.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/r8FhZnFZ6TY

Since 2011, the Syrian people have been bombarded by US and NATO and Saudi funded terrorists, causing tens of thousands of deaths, and millions of refugees. Now, even more blatantly, US bases are vying to occupying the northern third of Syria, totally illegally, but nobody says beep. Not even the UN.

The recent fake gas attack on Douma outside of Damascus, has allegedly killed 80 to 120 people, mostly women and children.

Of course, that sells best in the propaganda theatre – women and children. Strangely, like last time the infamous White Helmets discovered the gas victims, including a gas canister-like bomb laying on a bed, having been shot through the roof of a house a totally and unprofessionally staged event. As Russian military quickly discovered and reported. They called on an independent investigation, one that could not be bought and corrupted by Washington. President Assad invited a team of investigators to inspect the scene.

Instead of heeding this invitation, Trump, the bully, calls Mr. Assad an "animal" and a "monster", twittering his brainless aggressions throughout the world. Tell you what, Mr. Trump, Bashar al-Assad is a far better human being than you are a monster. You and your dark handlers don't even deserve being called human. Mr. Assad has regard and respect for his people, attempts to protect them and has so far succeeded with the help of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, recovering the last bits of Syrian territory from the terrorist, except of course, the northern part, where the chief terrorist and the world's only rogue state has itself installed, the US of A. – Why in the world would Mr. Assad choose to gas his own people? Especially, when he is winning the war? – People, ask yourself, cui bono (who benefits?) and the answer is simple: The western aggressors, who seek a reason to mass bomb Syria into even more rubble, causing even more death and destitution . That's who.

While you, Donald, and those monsters that direct you from behind the scenes, have no, but absolutely no respect for your people, for any people on this globe, for that matter, not even for your kind, for your greed-no-end kind of elite, as you bring the world to the brink of an all-destructive, all killing annihilating war.

Since the other fake event, 9/11, we are, of course, already in a "soft version" of WWIII, but that's not enough, the United States needs a hard war, so badly it doesn't shy away from destroying itself. That's how blinded your own propaganda has made you Americans, you generals, you corporate "leaders" (sic-sic) – and all you Congress puppets. That is the sheer truth. You better read this and wake up. Otherwise your dead sentence is hastened by your own greed and ignorance.

Both Russia and the US drafted a Security Council Resolution – which of course are both not approved, with Nikki Haley lambasting Russia, accusing them of being responsible for the countless deaths in Syria – pointing again to the children and women, making up the majority. Again, it sells best in the world of psychological propaganda, while evil Nikki Haley knows very well who has caused all these deaths by the millions, destitution and refugees by the millions, tens of millions throughout the Middle East and the world – her own country, directly or through NATO, the European puppets allies and proxy wars, paid and funded by Washington and by elbow-twisting her vassals.

On 9 April – UNSC – while Nikki Haley, repeats and over-repeats her lies and fake accusations, the Russian Ambassador to the UN, Mr. Vassily Nebenzia, listens. And then in a twenty-minute statement of sheer intelligence, he dismantles all the lies, and lays bare the truth, about all the fakeness being played out internationally. The depth with which he addresses the assembly is concise and so brilliant, none of his UK, French and German counterparts could have ever come close to a statement of this magnitude and excellence. Even Ms. Haley can't help glancing over ever-so often to Vassily Nebenzia, as he speaks . Her eyes reveal some kind of hidden admiration for what he says. – After all, she can't be as dumb as she is paid for to look and sound.

By now anybody who dares not just reading and listening to the mainstream presstitute "fake news", but has the courage to dig into the truth news, RT, TeleSur, CGTN, PressTV – and a few others, or websites like Global Research, The Saker Blog, ICH, NEO, Greanville Post CounterCurrent, Dissident Voice and many other trustworthy sources – knows about the lies and the only, but the very only purpose these false flags cum false news serve: Provoking a war with Russia, subjugating and dividing Syria, and the Middle East and becoming the hegemonic masters of the universe.

For the simple reason, and hardly anybody talks or writes about it – the US economy is based on war, is based on weapon manufacturing and international banking which finances weapon manufacturing and the exploitation of mineral resources coveted by weapon manufacturing.

The entire war industry with all its associated civil services and industries, of banking, electronics, aviation, mining . makes up more than half of the US GDP – but of course, it's never broken down that way. The chosen people will control the world. Well, they do already – financially at least the western part of our globe. But it's not enough. They will not stop, before they burry themselves in their own-dug graves, or rather in one massive mass-grave. But, please, do take all your fakeness, from money, to lies, to hypocrisy and more lies and coercion and sanctions and blackmail with you – never to surface again. And give peace a chance – for those who survive your (almost) terminal assault on humanity.

[Apr 14, 2018] It might be that elder Skripal was being surveilled by FSB cause working with MI6 and Ukrainian regime. So Russian might have information both about hism and MI5/MI6 actions

Apr 14, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Apr 13, 2018 5:20:47 PM | 17

Thorvid @9--

Yes, shouting match must end.

Can't recall where I read this info, but elder Skripal was being surveilled by FSB cause working with MI6 and Ukrainian regime. So, he was being watched, but just how closely? Perhaps to the point where Russia knows UK's lying. In other words, Mr. Skripal remains in employ of MI6.

Laguerre , Apr 13, 2018 5:39:27 PM | 24
Will Russia be able to prove its claim of British involvement? If so could it free Yulia Scripal?
No way that Yulia Skripal is going to be released. Too dangerous. Absolutely everyone who was directly involved has been taken off-line, and not allowed to speak. The doctor who wrote the letter to the Times, the personnel of the hospital who treated the victims, the cop, and the Skripals themselves. No public word from any. It's a big effort by the authorities, which shows how sensitive they are.
Thorvid , Apr 13, 2018 5:53:45 PM | 29
karlof1 @17--

That would make scene and tie in with a couple of things i read/saw in the early days, sadly also can't recall where. That Mr Skripal was meeting regularly with MI6/5 handlers and was giving lectures to the military, which of course may explain why he is living in British military heartland.

[Apr 13, 2018] No, the FBI's Michael Cohen Raid Did Not Violate Attorney-Client Privilege by Bruce Fein

Notable quotes:
"... Cohen acknowledged that he paid porn star "Stormy Daniels" $130,000 two weeks before the 2016 election in exchange for her staying silent about her 2006 affair with Trump. No one pays for silence unless there is something to hide. The payment was made 10 years after the alleged dalliance. ..."
"... The obvious purpose was to influence the outcome of the election by concealing damaging information about Mr. Trump's character. That made Mr. Cohen's payment an undisclosed campaign "contribution" to Mr. Trump vastly exceeding the individual statutory limit of $2,700. ..."
"... Maybe you should have picked an example where the defendant wasn't acquitted. It's easy to see how an expansive definition of the term "campaign contribution" could be dangerous. ..."
Apr 13, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

So what of these charges against Cohen and could they really hurt the president?

Federal election laws define a campaign contribution as "anything of value given to influence a Federal election." It is common knowledge that Mr. Cohen acknowledged that he paid porn star "Stormy Daniels" $130,000 two weeks before the 2016 election in exchange for her staying silent about her 2006 affair with Trump. No one pays for silence unless there is something to hide. The payment was made 10 years after the alleged dalliance.

The obvious purpose was to influence the outcome of the election by concealing damaging information about Mr. Trump's character. That made Mr. Cohen's payment an undisclosed campaign "contribution" to Mr. Trump vastly exceeding the individual statutory limit of $2,700.

Similarly, Democrat John Edwards was prosecuted (later acquitted) for soliciting and spending nearly $1 million in his 2008 presidential campaign to conceal his affair with Rielle Hunter, so this is not a crime normally brushed under the rug. The public record also establishes probable cause to believe Cohen was behind the payment of $150,000 to Playboy Bunny Karen McDougall to kill her story about a protracted extramarital relationship with Mr. Trump that could have torpedoed his presidential ambitions. The question remains, of course, how much this will implicate and hurt Trump, who has denied the affair with Daniels and any other "wrongdoing." Cohen said he paid Daniels out of his own pocket and was not reimbursed by Trump or the campaign.

JK April 13, 2018 at 1:52 pm

John Edwards was acquited on one charge and a mistrial on five others w/o retrial. So there was no conviction there, these actions are not business as usual, and the DOJ lesson from that case should have been to cease such abusive prosecutorial misconduct, not to repeat it. These examples show why campaign finance restrictions are an unconstitutional burden on freedom of association. Trump is a rich man, so could afford to pay the hush money if he believed it necessary without it being a crime. As it appears, Cohen believed it important to pay w/o asking Trump, thinking he's helping a friend. Now what of Edwards? Maybe Edwards couldn't afford to pay hush money, so he needed and solicited help from friends. By making it a crime for friends to help him, the law favors rich candidates like Trump that can afford to do things others can't without breaking the law.

There is zero chance of a jury conviction here, so DOJ shouldn't have pursued it given the incendiary effect of conducting raids on someone's attorney. Furthermore, there's zero chance of Muller getting jury convictions on the pile of horse manure prosecutions he's pursuing. The only convictions Muller is getting is from people buckling under the fiduciary extortion inherent in his tactics and copping a plea even though a jury would never convict them.

curri , says: April 13, 2018 at 2:05 pm
So who do we believe, Dershowitz or Fein?

Similarly, Democrat John Edwards was prosecuted for soliciting and spending nearly $1 million in his 2008 presidential campaign to conceal his affair with Rielle Hunter, so this is not a crime normally brushed under the rug.

Maybe you should have picked an example where the defendant wasn't acquitted. It's easy to see how an expansive definition of the term "campaign contribution" could be dangerous.

[Apr 13, 2018] OPCW Confirms Salisbury Poisoning, Can't Say Where Poison Came From by Jason Ditz

Apr 12, 2018 | news.antiwar.com

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has confirmed that the Skirpals were poisoned with a specific "toxic chemical," as alleged by the British government. Both public statement and classified version, however, decline to offer any specific theories on the origin of the poison.

That's a problem for Britain, which has been blaming the Russian government for the poisoning since long before testing began. They identified the poison as Novichuk, and concluded it was Russia's fault, despite there being other nations with access to the chemical.

British officials were quick to claim the OPCW report as vindication, since the classified version reportedly contained the chemical formula for the poison. Yet without any evidence on where it came from, they're really no better off than before.

The Skirpal poisonings were used by the British government to take major diplomatic measures against Russia. Russia has denied anything to do with the incident, and offered to help investigate. Britain has spurned that offer and continued to blame them.

[Apr 11, 2018] History repeats itself. An investigation motivated by some alleged abuse deploys drift nets, finds nothing so it changes the focus to the sexual history of the target.

Apr 11, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Piotr Berman | Apr 11, 2018 10:28:34 AM | 76

Re: the fate of Trump.

History repeats itself. An investigation motivated by some alleged abuse deploys drift nets, finds nothing so it changes the focus to the sexual history of the target. Hush money for consensual sex is legal as far as I know -- I do not know the law, but it became known and studiously ignored by the special prosecutor. So he tries to discover any possible past deal that is somehow illegal, and recorded as illegal? A bit of a fat chance.

[Apr 11, 2018] The Skriptal caper looks like kindergarten stuff compared to that 1965 genocide.

Apr 11, 2018 | www.unz.com

denk , April 11, 2018 at 3:35 am GMT

Regarding fukus shenanigans,
How could we omit the CIA/MI6 'greatest hit ', the 1965 genocide of 3M Indonesians 'leftists suspects' ,
The mother of all regime changes ???

The Skriptal caper looks like kindergarten stuff compared to that 1965 genocide.

fukus orchestrated that bloodbath to remove prez Sukarno cuZ he's pro Beijing.
MI6 planted disinfo in HK media about an imminent China sponsored coup , supported by ethnic Chinese fifth columns.
CIA planted 'evidence' of Chinese supplied arms , to be conveniently 'discovered' by Indon police
. [1]
That devious plot provoked a bloodbath by jihadists death squads against the PKI communists members and ethnic Chinese indons.

CIA whistle blower, John Mcgehee,

The Indonesian covert action of 1965, reported by Ralph McGehee, who was in that area division, and had documents on his desk, in his custody about that operation. He said that one of the documents concluded that this was a model operation that should be copied elsewhere in the world. Not only did it eliminate the effective communist party (Indonesian communist party), it also eliminated the entire segment of the population that tended to support the communist party – the ethnic Chinese, Indonesian Chinese. And the CIA's report put the number of dead at 800,000 killed. And that was one covert action. We're talking about 1 to 3 million people killed in these things.

[2]

[1]
U.S. officials were particularly interested in linking the September 30th plotters to Beijing. They helped to spread stories about China's alleged involvement and reported on caches of weapons purportedly "discovered" by the Indonesian army with the hammer and sickle conveniently stamped on them. "

We have bonanza chance to nail chicoms on disastrous events in Indonesia ," Green wrote the State Department. He urged a "continuation [of] covert propaganda" as one of the "best means of spreading [the] idea of chicom complicity

https://monthlyreview.org/2015/12/01/the-united-states-and-the-19651966-mass-murders-in-indonesia/

[2]

http://www.whale.to/b/stockwell1.html

'Company ' veterans are so proud of that CIA'S greatest hit,
they still reminiscent fondly over it around the water cooler, until this very day.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

[Apr 11, 2018] This unscrupulous false flag op, crying foul and smearing the innocent for the crime they committed relentlessly is a special signature of the British/Anglo culture and trait.

Apr 11, 2018 | www.unz.com

Joe Wong , April 11, 2018 at 12:37 am GMT

@Anonymous

Your decrying confirms that the British has done something wrong and they did poison Skripals in Salisbury England. This unscrupulous false flag op, crying foul and smearing the innocent for the crime they committed relentlessly is a special signature of the British/Anglo culture and trait. The following history provides the evidence the above is not allegation but fact.

Nov 24, 1784, a British gunner on the ship "Lady Hughes" fired cannon against Chinese law and killed two Chinese in Guangzhou. The British refused to hand over the gunner to the Chinese authority for trail and called up few hundred armed sailors to stop the Chinese authority from searching the perpetrator in the British warehouses and living compound.

Anyhow the British was outwitted and the perpetrator was tried by the Chinese, convicted and executed in according to the Chinese law; during that time the British law also gave death penalty for the same crime.

The British had been trampling other people's sovereignty and law like India with impunity for a couple of hundreds of years already by then. Never a British was tried and punished for the crimes, murder or not, they committed since they supplanted the Spanish. British viewed themselves above all human beings and not bound by any other people's law. The execution of the gunner made the British Council of Supercargos feel humiliated and devastated as well as being impotent and incompetent in the eyes of their superiors in London and their peers (other Europeans) in Guangzhou.

In order to cover their crimes and failures, the megalomaniac British decried Chinese legal system was barbaric and sanguinary relentlessly like Anonymous[338] is doing here to Russia. All the Europeans jumped on the British mudslinging bandwagon for the effort to gain extraterritoriality in China, so they could steal, loot, plunder, etc. Chinese wealth with impunity like Elizabeth I's Sea Dogs. Soon after the "Lady Hughes" incident the view that entire Chinese legal system was barbaric and sanguinary or there is no law in China become the dominant representation of China ever since.

The British then engineered Opium Wars for the vengeance of their "Lady Hughes" humiliation, and set to destroy the last nation denying their piracy and other unscrupulous deeds on the moral high ground. If history can be any guidance, the Anglo is not going to stop at smearing Russia; more vicious plot is going to come.

[Apr 11, 2018] The toxin involved in classic shellfish poisoning is a naturally occurring neurotoxin, Saxitoxin, which agent remains toxic even after boiling or steaming, exactly the food preparation techniques likely to be employed in preparing shellfish for consumption. This is, indeed, what makes it so pernicious.

Apr 11, 2018 | www.unz.com

JerseyJeffersonian , April 11, 2018 at 12:00 am GMT

@Simon in London

Bernhard over at his blog, Moon of Alabama, is advocating for the poisoning being real, but being traceable to shellfish poisoning. The Skripals had a shellfish dish at a local restaurant about 40 minutes prior to their discovery on the park bench. While very serious, and potentially fatal, if addressed with respiratory and cardiac support in a timely fashion, this poisoning is survivable.

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/04/the-best-explanation-for-the-skripal-drama-is-food-poisoning.html

The toxin involved in classic shellfish poisoning is a naturally occurring neurotoxin, Saxitoxin, which agent remains toxic even after boiling or steaming, exactly the food preparation techniques likely to be employed in preparing shellfish for consumption. This is, indeed, what makes it so pernicious.

That the Brits, primed for lies in aid of the Hate On The Rooskies campaign, lit on their story is unsurprising. Of course, the denial of the authorities at the hospital that anyone , the Skripals and the supposedly affected policeman, was suffering from exposure to a chemical weapon, along with the refusal of Porton Down officials to lend credence to the hoo haw that this was surely traceable to Novichok series chemical agents identifiably produced by the Russians kind of shot some holes in the big lies.

Anyway, cast an eye at the post at Moon of Alabama. Bernhard is pretty damn good at winnowing facts from the chaff of propaganda, and when he makes a mistake, he openly confesses it instead of doubling down on a falsehood.

[Apr 11, 2018] Liars Lying About Nearly Everything by Philip Giraldi

Notable quotes:
"... Repeated requests by Russia to obtain a sample of the alleged nerve agent for testing have been rejected by the British government in spite of the fact that a military grade nerve agent would have surely killed both the Skripals as well as anyone else within 100 yards. ..."
"... It does look rather like those Syrian chemical weapon attacks that happen whenever the rebels are about to be defeated. ..."
"... Actually, I think that in the end Russia has to thank the British for sending a great message to her traitors and gangsters. ..."
Apr 11, 2018 | www.unz.com

Moving along to the present, we have Prime Minister Theresa May. May has been in serious trouble, politically speaking. After losses suffered in the recent parliamentary elections, she is clinging to power and is increasingly unpopular even within her own Conservative Party. So what do you do when you are in trouble at home? You create a foreign crisis that you have to deal with. If you are someone as venal as former American President and bottom feeder Bill Clinton you accomplish that end by firing off a few cruise missiles at a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan and at some mud huts in Afghanistan. If you are Theresa May, you up the ante considerably, coming up with a powerful enemy who is threatening you, enabling you to appear both resolute and strong in confronting a formidable foe. That is precisely what we have been seeing over the past month relating to the alleged poisoning of former Russian intelligence agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

There is quite a bit that is odd about the Skripal case. Even the increasingly neoconnish Guardian newspaper has conceded that "the British case [against Russia] has so far relied more heavily in public on circumstantial evidence and secret intelligence." And secret intelligence, so called, has all too often been the last refuge of a scoundrel whenever a government is selling snake oil to the public. In this case, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson rushed to judgement on Russia less than forty-eight hours after the Skripals were found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury England, too soon for any chemical analysis of the alleged poisoning to have taken place.

Theresa May addressed Parliament shortly thereafter to blame the Kremlin and demand a Russian official response to the event in 36 hours, even though she had to prevaricate significantly, saying that the apparent poisoning was "very likely" caused by a made-in-Russia nerve agent referred to by its generic name Novichok. She nevertheless rallied the backbenchers in Parliament, who responded with a lot of hearty "Hear! Hear!" endorsements. When Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn attempted to slow the express train down by suggesting that it might be wise to wait in see what the police investigation uncovered, he was hooted down. The British media was soon on board with a vengeance, spreading the government line that such a highly sensitive operation would require the approval of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin himself. The expulsion of Russian diplomats soon followed.

One of the strangest aspects of the Skripal case is what is going on now that daughter Yulia will soon be out of the hospital and Sergei is no longer in critical condition. A cousin Viktoria Skripal has offered to fly in from Moscow to provide support for her family, but it is believed that she will not be able to receive a visa from the British. Russian television aired a recording of a phone call between the two cousins in which Yulia said that she was disoriented but improving and that neither she nor her father had suffered permanent damage from the poisoning. The call ended abruptly and Viktoria Skripal believes that it was scripted by the British government on a controlled phone line.

Repeated requests by Russia to obtain a sample of the alleged nerve agent for testing have been rejected by the British government in spite of the fact that a military grade nerve agent would have surely killed both the Skripals as well as anyone else within 100 yards. As the latest British account of the location of the alleged poison places it on the door handle of the Scripals' residence, the timetable element is also unconvincing. That means that the two would have spent three hours, including a stop at a pub and lunch, before succumbing on a park bench. Military grade nerve agents kill instantly.

A request to have the testing done by the politically neutral Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is in progress, but there is little enthusiasm from the British side, which does not want a Russian observer to participate in the process. The May government has already established its own narrative and certainly would have plenty to hide if the whole affair turns out to be fabricated. And fabricated it might have been as the nerve agent, if it actually exists, could have been manufactured almost anywhere.

The head of Britain's own chemical weapons facility Porton Down has contradicted claims made by May, Foreign Minister Boris Johnson, and British Ambassador in Moscow Laurie Bristow. The lab's Chief Executive Gary Aitkenhead has testified that he does not know if the nerve agent was actually produced in Russia, a not surprising observation as the chemical formula was revealed to the public in a scientific paper in 1992 and there are an estimated twenty countries capable of producing it. There are also possible stocks of Novichok remaining in independent countries that once were part of the Soviet Union, to include Russia's enemy du jour Ukraine, while a false flag operation by the British themselves, the CIA or Mossad, is not unthinkable.

The resort to official Orwellian govspeak by the British is remarkable throughout the process, but is particularly painful reading regarding the treatment of the Skripals' pets, two guinea pigs and a cat. A spokesman for the Department of the Environment reported that "The property in Wiltshire was sealed as part of the police investigation. When a vet was able to access the property, two guinea pigs had sadly died. A cat was also found in a distressed state and a decision was taken by a veterinary surgeon to euthanize the animal to alleviate its suffering. This decision was taken in the best interests of the animal and its welfare."

So the presence of squadrons of technicians and cops in the residence did not permit anyone to take a minute to feed the cat and guinea pigs. And the cat was killed as a purely humanitarian gesture – it's "best interest" was apparently to die. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Finally, the best argument against the British government's evasions about what took place in Salisbury on March 4 th remains the question of motive. So the British would have one believe that Vladimir Putin personally ordered the killing of a former British double agent who had been released from a Kremlin prison in a spy swap and who was no longer capable of doing any damage to Russia. He did that in spite of the fact that he had an election coming up and would be the host of the World Cup in the summer, an event that he would want to go smoothly. So he deliberately shot himself in the foot on both counts, allegedly because he wanted to send a message to traitors and also because just can't help himself since he is a vindictive KGB type whose impulses are pure evil. Does that make sense to the reader? It doesn't to me.
Mulegino1 , April 10, 2018 at 4:49 am GMT

A great man once wrote that the "big lie" had a force of credulity among the broad masses, as the latter were wont to engage in lying about minor quotidian matters of little or no significance while the big lies were engaged in by the mainstream press, dominated by the usual tribal suspects...
Reactionary Utopian , April 10, 2018 at 4:57 am GMT

Does that make sense to the reader?

No, it doesn't.

But here's something else I don't quite understand:

To be sure, President Donald Trump has been exceptional in that he has followed through on some of the promises he made in his campaign, insisting periodically that he has to do what he said he would do. Unfortunately, those choices he has made to demonstrate his accountability to his supporters have been terrible, including moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, threatening to end the Iran nuclear agreement and building a wall along the Mexican border.

Now, Trump is a sense-free random number generator, I will fully agree. But you list three "choices he has made" that you describe as "terrible:" the US embassy move to Jerusalem, the threats against Iran, and "building a wall along the Mexican border." The first two Trump has done, and I agree that "terrible" is the right word to describe them. The third thing -- the border wall -- he hasn't done. And had he done so, it wouldn't have been "terrible" it would have been the obvious and sensible thing to do. I think he clearly isn't serious about building the wall, as far as one can discern the intentions of so random an individual. But your list presents three items in parallel, with one item being quite unlike the others.

Z-man , April 10, 2018 at 5:05 am GMT
Logic escapes the rabid Neocons, anti Christian Russia crowd and their paid henchmen, or henchgirls , the likes of Linda Graham. (Grin) Unfortunatley the now feckless Trump is going to go along with this British yarn and the Neocon wish of destroying Syria.

BTW as of this post your site has still not recovered from the cyber attack it had today.

Corvinus , April 10, 2018 at 5:21 am GMT
"So the British would have one believe that Vladimir Putin personally ordered the killing of a former British double agent who had been released from a Kremlin prison in a spy swap and who was no longer capable of doing any damage to Russia. He did that in spite of the fact that he had an election coming up and would be the host of the World Cup in the summer, an event that he would want to go smoothly. So he deliberately shot himself in the foot on both counts, allegedly because he wanted to send a message to traitors and also because just can't help himself since he is a vindictive KGB type whose impulses are pure evil. Does that make sense to the reader?"

Absolutely. Under the Putin regime, the body count of his enemies has grown. He put the "de Thirty-four Russian journalists in the last decade just somehow "died". Occam's Razor applies here.

Consider also that Putin played a major role in the Russian "Deep State".

windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/04/russia-has-deep-state-too-and-putin-has.html

Jon Baptist , April 10, 2018 at 5:27 am GMT
It makes complete sense if one simply looks at the British Establishment's prior behavior of intentionally starting world wars at the order of the Society of the Elect. It's all in the CFR's archives. Their guilt in starting WW1 is emphatically admitted and documented in roughly the first 200 pages of the following book. http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/Tragedy_and_Hope.pdf
Who is in the Society of the Elect? Read the back pages of http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/The_Anglo-American_Establishment.pdf
Anonymous [280] Disclaimer , April 10, 2018 at 5:33 am GMT
It's surreal to watch such staggering levels of dishonest incompetence among our globalist "elites".

This is worrying. Nobody is that stupid so it's more like they don't care about credibility going forward. Like it won't matter.

Kiza , April 10, 2018 at 5:40 am GMT
We have moved way beyond the Skripals case now. Simply put, if US shoots in Syria, Russia will shoot back this time, yes back at US. USS Donald Duck has been placed as a bait to be sent to the bottom of Mediterrenain sea by the Russians, similar to Arizona et al at Pearl Harbour.

Many dissenter websites are currently under attack by the cyber forces of the Western regimes and Israel, one of them being this one. Another site under attack is my favorite johnhelmer.com. In addition to saying that he is under attack, the current message from John is:
WHEN THE RULE OF LAW WAS DESTROYED IN SALISBURY, LONDON AND THE HAGUE, AND THE RULE OF FRAUD DECLARED IN WASHINGTON, THAT LEAVES ONLY THE RULE OF FORCE IN THE WORLD. THE STAVKA MET IN MOSCOW ON GOOD FRIDAY AND IS READY. THE FOREIGN MINISTRY ANNOUNCED ON SUNDAY "THE GRAVEST CONSEQUENCES". THIS MEANS ONE AMERICAN SHOT AT A RUSSIAN SOLDIER, THEN WE ARE AT WAR. NOT INFOWAR, NOT CYBERWAR, NOT ECONOMIC WAR, NOT PROXY WAR. WORLD WAR.

The West is utterly bankrupt, morally as well as financially and we are experiencing the Western remedial plan and actions – war!

annamaria , April 10, 2018 at 5:52 am GMT
"In 2016 an official British government inquiry determined that Bush and Blair had indeed together rushed to war. The Global Establishment has nevertheless rewarded Tony Blair for his loyalty with Clintonesque generosity. He has enjoyed a number of well-paid sinecures and is now worth in excess of $100 million."
– The character of Blair and the Establishment is well established: Blair is a major war criminal supported by the major war profiteers. His children and grandchildren are a progeny of a horrible criminal.
What is truly amazing is the complacency of the Roman Catholic Church that still has not excommunicated and anathematized the mass murderer. Blair should be haunted and hunted for his crimes against humanity.
With age, Blair's face has become expressively evil. His wife Theresa Cara "Cherie" Blair shows the same acute ugliness coming from her rotten soul of a war profiteer.
Blanco Watts , April 10, 2018 at 6:34 am GMT
The UK is governed by the same Neo-liberal psychotic cabal that runs the US, Israel and France.
quasi_verbatim , April 10, 2018 at 7:01 am GMT
The Skripals are to be disappeared. Their home, the pub and the restaurant are to be demolished. This is a Tarantino cleanup. Move on.
JR , April 10, 2018 at 7:06 am GMT
Keep in mind how long ago all this is: Skripal was recruited around 1990 and arrested in 2004. Guess that the Russian attitude towards Skripal took the chaos of the 90′s as mitigating circumstances into account.

Skripal served his sentence of only 13 years till 2010 when he was pardoned and given the option to leave. Russia did not revoke Skripal's citizenship. The UK issued Skripal a passport too. On arrival in the UK Skripak was extensively debriefed by UK intelligence services. Skripal has lived for 8 years in the UK now.

And now out of the blue this incident nicely dovetailing with May ratcheted up anti Russia language only a few months before this false flag incident and the rapidly failing traction of the Steele/Orbis/MI6 instigated Russia collusion story on the basis of that fake Trump Dossier. By the way Orbis affiliated Steele and Miller have been among Skripal's handlers.

Realist , April 10, 2018 at 7:50 am GMT
Why anybody would believe anything Western governments say is beyond me.
animalogic , April 10, 2018 at 8:28 am GMT
Good article. The Skipnal affair has been an utter disgrace from day one. May & Boris are a shame on the UK fully reminesent of that utter dog, Blair. The fact that the msm still babbles on about Russia & Skipnal is indicative of their monumental contempt for the public & factual balanced reporting .well what's new, I guess ?
Ronald Thomas West , Website April 10, 2018 at 8:43 am GMT
From the Steele dossier lies falling apart to the Skripal lies falling apart to the 'Assad did it' lies falling apart:

https://ronaldthomaswest.com/2018/04/08/open-letter-to-die-linke/

Paul Craig Roberts is correct when quoting The Saker:

"The Russian view is simple: the West is ruled by a gang of thugs supported by an infinitely lying and hypocritical media while the general public in the West has been hopelessly zombified." -- The Saker

I expect that makes the Russians right

OMG , April 10, 2018 at 10:35 am GMT
These ridiculous, suicidal gas attacks by Assad seem to coincide not only with battleground victories against the head-choppers, but co-incidentally with Israel's murderous attacks on unarmed Palestinians "throwing stones".

What nobody seems to have picked up is the emphasis – and red lines – on Gas; gas, gas attacks. Why is gas so much worse than being dismembered, disembowelled, and mutilated by high explosives? Certainly I would favour unconsciousness and death by gas before being smashed to pieces by depleted uranium.

These relentlessly repeated claims are an exercise with the dual purpose of providing a subliminal message about the greatest tragedy in human history, repeated ad nauseam. The massive 'gassing' of European Jews some 65 years ago. Lest we forget.

Greg Bacon , Website April 10, 2018 at 11:14 am GMT
Until some kind of sanity returns to this planet and war mongering gangsters like the Bush and Clinton Mobs, Blair, Obama and a host of Pentagon generals, along with their boot-licking MSM are indicted, tried for crimes against humanity and war crimes, found guilty and sentences carried out, there will be no peace on Earth, just an endless series of False Flags, hysterical reactions by the ones who were behind the False Flags and more wars.
jilles dykstra , April 10, 2018 at 11:19 am GMT
@OMG

Churchill used poison gas in Damascus in 1918. He defended what he did in parliament.

jilles dykstra , April 10, 2018 at 11:23 am GMT
@Jon Baptist

Balfour already in 1907 announced war against Germany: Patrick J. Buchanan, 'Churchill, Hitler and "The unnecessary war", How Britain lost its empire and the west lost the world', New York, 2008, Balfour, to US ambassador Henry White, 1907, page 48/ 49

Anon [436] Disclaimer , April 10, 2018 at 11:23 am GMT
@Anonymous

Because if it is a put up job by the CIA or MI6 part of the plot would have been that they weren't actually killed. And if the perpetrators were other than those what motive would the government have for pretending they were alive?

Simon in London , April 10, 2018 at 11:25 am GMT
It does look rather like those Syrian chemical weapon attacks that happen whenever the rebels are about to be defeated.

I am pretty sure that it was not ordered within the British government and that most of the British government don't know where it came from, but are willing to believe it was Russia.

While the CIA does have plenty of form on assassinations, the risk if they were found to be assassinating in Britain seems quite high due to the close CIA links with the UK intelligence sector. But CIA agents could have paid someone else to do it.

Mossad is the one group that can act freely in the UK, has a record of assassinating scientists, engineers etc here, and unlike CIA, can take the risk of being caught. So it's a possibility – OTOH Israel has shown a lot less anti-Russian hatred than the US Deep State has.

Normally I'd assume it was indeed Russia – I thought there was plenty of evidence the Polonium poisoning was Russia – and it still seems possible, but US or Mossad must be at least equally likely in this case. It's just possible it could have been British initiated but I doubt it.

I do think it's most likely the person who actually poisoned them was not an employee of any agency.

Jake , April 10, 2018 at 11:38 am GMT
Theresa May as more evil than Bill Clinton? That will sound odd to some, but I think it is true. Hillary is the pure evil half of the Clinton marriage. Bill is simply charming and filled with a desire to amass enough power to have a group adore him as he finds new panties to explore.

May is English, and she has the very long line of Brit Empire secret service evil at her disposal. And her move is a bold one. What it means is that she is signaling that at least if she is PM, the UK could replace the US as Fearless Leader of the actual New World Order...

tjm , April 10, 2018 at 11:39 am GMT
@Bill jones

THANK YOU, anyone who give Chump credit for anything, is either a useful idiot, or controlled opposition.

Trump is, like Obama and H. Clinton (and Bush and B. Clinton Reagan though total control of US government had not yet occurred then) a Zionist agent.

The media is very good at giving these traitors cover, Obama was the "peace President/Constitutional scholar, as he made war and shredded the Constitution...

tjm , April 10, 2018 at 12:05 pm GMT
@Simon in London

Agreed, but as an American, I think our CIA is nothing more than a branch of the Israeli government...

Giuseppe , April 10, 2018 at 12:10 pm GMT
I challenge anyone to name a modern war prosecuted by the US government and its allies that did not involve at its root the direct fabrication of blatant lies on enormous levels, both as a casus belli and also to manipulate public opinion in favor of hostilities.

The clandestine activity represented by these *provocations* isn't even good spycraft. The Skripal case and the latest use of chlorine gas in Syria are risible, clumsy, amateur attempts to wangle the empire into war that the callowest rube could see through. And yet, it's working its magic on the media. The politicians, suborned by the war machine, give unanimous bipartisan assent.

What the hell is going on?

JoaoAlfaiate , April 10, 2018 at 12:35 pm GMT
@Giuseppe

Saddam's WMD, Gulf of Tonkin, etc., etc. And now a ridiculous false flag attack in Syria. Did it take place at all? But the narrative is all. The press in the USA is more effectively controlled and conformist than in Germany in the late 1930s and nobody goes around beating up journalists or sending them to a KZ. The Syrian Gov't is winning the civil war, things are going well but what Assad really needs is to have the crap bombed out of his military by Uncle Sam. What transparent bullshit.

Mike Sylwester , Website April 10, 2018 at 12:43 pm GMT
The Moon of Alabama website has been doing great work criticizing the Skripal yarn.

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/04/the-best-explanation-for-the-skripal-drama-is-food-poisoning.html#more

jacques sheete , April 10, 2018 at 12:43 pm GMT
@jilles dykstra

Churchill advocated both the use of gas as well as terror, so I find it interesting that so many suddenly tender hearted "officials" and war criminals now affect squeamishness regarding the use of it, yet fail to condemn Israel for its hideous, terroristic use of white phosphorous among other crimes

Winston S. Churchill: departmental minute (Churchill papers: 16/16) 12 May 1919 War Office
I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas.

I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror

from Companion Volume 4, Part 1 of the official biography, WINSTON S. CHURCHILL, by Martin Gilbert (London: Heinemann, 1976)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article999.htm

jacques sheete , April 10, 2018 at 12:50 pm GMT
@Giuseppe

What the hell is going on?

Nothing new. Same ol same ol.

But how are things going up here? what is Athens about?

Phi. Oh, nothing new; extortion, perjury, forty per cent, face-grinding.

-Lucian of Samosata, MENIPPUS, A NECROMANTIC EXPERIMENT, ~150 AD

http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/luc/wl1/wl176.htm

jacques sheete , April 10, 2018 at 1:05 pm GMT
@JoaoAlfaiate

The press in the USA is more effectively controlled and conformist than in Germany in the late 1930s

Who controlled the press there and then?

What can be said about the control and conformity of the Soviet, British and American press of the time?

and nobody goes around beating up journalists or sending them to a KZ.

That's probably because the usual thugs don't need to do that any longer since they control virtually everything.

A couple of anecdotes to illustrate my point.:

2 of the reasons we don't hear much about mobsters these days are that the press and judiciary are owned by them and if you do get something published, you run the risk of getting snuffed. They probably don't stop at mere blinding anymore.

Victor Riesel was an American newspaper journalist and columnist who specialized in news related to labor unions. In 1956 a mobster threw sulfuric acid in his face on a public street in Chicago causing his permanent blindness.

"Treason is a strong word, but not too strong to characterize the situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, and indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be." This indictment launched a nine-part series of articles entitled "Treason of the Senate."

-David Graham Phillips, Cosmopolitan magazine, February 1906

In 1911 Phillips was shot multiple t imes by Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, a Harvard-educated scion of a prominent Maryland family ,at Gramercy Park in New York City.

Joe Hide , April 10, 2018 at 1:34 pm GMT
Good article.
Still, you authors need to start digging deeper. Trump and his Allies are putting on an amazing show / act to distract their ( and Humanities going back generations) hidden enemies.

The Bad Guys have for millennia weoponized information, convincing the public, reporters, and journalists that the rabbit hole ends here, that they don't need to dig any deeper, to just accept this slightly deeper layer of the onion. That warm and fuzzy feeling from scratching just a little deeper into to information matrix, isn't enough anymore. You guys have the intelligence, experience, and ability just do it please!

Vojkan , April 10, 2018 at 1:48 pm GMT
Actually, I think that in the end Russia has to thank the British for sending a great message to her traitors and gangsters. Apart from the Skripal case, the UK seems up to confiscate the wealth Russian expats in the UK looted back home. On the one hand, it's ~ $10bn worth that will be definitely lost for Russia, on the other if the UK's treatment of Skripal and runaway oligarchs won't heal Russian traitors and gangsters from their blissful enamourment with England's climate, I don't know what will.
anonymous [107] Disclaimer , April 10, 2018 at 1:50 pm GMT
@Mike P

I can't find the comment because the comment archive is down -- I think it was annamaria who reported that the British were holding assets of Russian oligarchs and that Russia wanted the funds back. The speculation was that Teresa May would take possession of the assets.

As these two articles state, most of the Russian billionaire oligarchs are Jewish

US Treasury Putin List Features Jewish Billionaires Times of Israel

https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-treasurys-putin-list-features-jewish-billionaires/

In pictures: Russia's oligarchs Luke Harding (2007) The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jul/02/russia.lukeharding1

So at least (conspiracy theory) part of the Skripal scheme is for Teresa May to be an angel and return their assets to the Jewish billionaires who stole Russian wealth fair and square.

Jake , April 10, 2018 at 2:12 pm GMT
@tjm

The CIA, the Mossad, and the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency are all children of British secret service.

EliteCommInc. , April 10, 2018 at 2:12 pm GMT
I am very fond of the British. They have provided a good deal of what makes the US a healthy and blessed place to live.

But I will admit that I was disappointed in PM Blair on the Iraq invasion and that of Afghanistan. It seemed so blatantly obvious to me, that I thought there was no way the prime minister would buy in. I was wrong. But then who would have believed that the Tory's would abandon natural relations for same sex relations, muchless marriage.

It's unclear how to respond when the leadership is so afraid that they advance anything to avoid grappling with hard reality. PM May has the hurdle of guiding Great Britain out of the EU.

I wonder if all of this is to avoid that.

God save the Queen.

Moi , April 10, 2018 at 2:13 pm GMT
@Reactionary Utopian

I too noticed that and agree with you. Do not understand why the National Guard can only serve in a supportive, non-enforcement role on the border. Heck, every nation uses its military to guard its borders. We need to send our military to guard our border. It's really very simple–no one can enter the US unless they have been admitted legally.

Another thing I don't understand is how these "sanctuary" cities can so blatantly flout federal law by sheltering illegals from ICE or any federal law enforcement agencies. If any city does so, the federal government should put them on notice that ALL federal funds will be cut off.

Rurik , April 10, 2018 at 2:17 pm GMT
@Randal

I watched Tucker Carlson last night as well.

He makes great points, and I'm encouraged that he's allowed to do so on to a big and important audience.

I remember when his predecessor, Bill O'Rielly, claimed to have seen the evidence of Saddam's WMD, and told his audience, on the run up to war, and I was appalled. As indeed, it turned out he too was lying.

When the ZUSA was entrenched in the highly profitable war on Vietnam, there seemed to be no way to end it. Protests in the streets and at the universities, and anger at the war and war pig$ seemed to no avail.

But then a phenomena began. Fragging.

one wonders .

at seven minutes in, Carlson interviews a senator. The senator does his best to lie and deceive, as only a ZUS senator can. But Tucker eviscerates him on screen.

now if this senator, and others like him, were themselves put into peril by these serial, treasonous wars for Israel, would they still be so keen to have Americans die, slaughtering innocent people- to bolster and benefit the main enemy of America; Israel?

I imagine the parent of a young American, who's life was sacrificed to augment the career of Lindsey Graham. Or other Americans who're fed up with the endless wars for Israel, and are willing to do something about the treasonous scum who're demanding and foisting all of these Satanic wars.

Just as Tucker says, any general who advocates for these wars, should be required to actually visit a battlefield, so too I wonder about the politicians, and how they eventually have to go home, and live among their constituents. What if some of the worst of them, like Graham for instance, were to actually suffer some consequence for all the evil he's done, and continues to do?

Of course I'm not advocating anything illegal. Just ruminating on potential solutions to the Eternal Wars for Israel – which are nothing more or less than a continuation of the first two World Wars (for Israel) duh

END the FED!

(or watch your nation bankrupted and looted and made to die for Israel)

Santana , April 10, 2018 at 2:36 pm GMT
@Anonymous

Come on yankee , ( as you say USA is a country of unbridled greed. An insatiable appetite for blood , land , alcohol ,and loot ) . Just return California , Arizona , New Mexico , Florida , Nevada , Utah , Colorado and Louisiana to Mexico , and Alaska to Russia ) , and then, only then , you can talk .

PS , and do not forget to close the 8OO occupation bases the US has around the world , you will save a lot of money

JoaoAlfaiate , April 10, 2018 at 2:40 pm GMT
@jacques sheete

The intent of my post was to show that the MSM here is conformist and doesn't like to stray far from what the USG is claiming and what other journalists are writing. Rather than explore the topics you raise, as worthy of exploration as they might be, I thought I'd offer what newspapers around the USA were saying about Saddam's WMD after Powell's UNSC speech; seems a bit more germane.

The Powell evidence will be persuasive to anyone who is still persuadable.

The Wall Street Journal

Piling fact upon fact, photo upon photo Wednesday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell methodically demonstrated why Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein remains dangerous to his own people, Iraq's neighbors

The Los Angeles Times

On Wednesday, America's most reluctant warrior, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, presented succinct and damning evidence of Saddam's enormous threat to world peace.

Arizona Republic

Saddam Hussein's illicit arsenal of biological and chemical weapons, as well as the equally illicit means that he possesses to deliver them, poses a tangible and urgent danger to U.S. and world security. Millions of innocent lives are at risk.

Dallas Morning News

At some point, the world chooses to believe President George W. Bush and Secretary Powell or the international community chooses to side with Saddam Hussein and those who broadcast his lies to the world. Powell has painstakingly presented a strong case against Iraq.

Greenville News/South Carolina

Iraq is busted. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell laid out the case clearly. No one hearing Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council could doubt Iraq's actions and intentions.

Jacksonville Times-Union/Florida

The threat is real and at our door. Sept. 11, 2001, stripped away the belief that the United States can peacefully coexist with evil. Prove it, they said. Powell has.

Charleston Daily Mail/West Virginia

We are a country always loath to fight unless provoked. The reluctance of Americans to initiate a war needlessly does the nation credit. But this is not a needless war, nor is it unprovoked. Powell laid out the need, and explained the provocation, in step-by-step fashion that cannot be refuted without resorting to fantasy.

Chicago Sun-Times

The Dispatch repeatedly has called on the Bush administration to make a compelling case that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is developing weapons of mass destruction and hiding these efforts from U.N. inspectors. Yesterday, Secretary of State Colin Powell made that case before the Security Council.

Columbus Dispatch

Powell has methodically proved Iraq's failure to comply with U.N. mandates. With each passing day, Iraq's own choices move it closer to a war that full compliance would prevent.

Indianapolis Star

Secretary of State Colin Powell's 90-minute presentation to the U.N. Security Council, buttressed with surveillance photographs and recorded phone conversations, should remove all doubt that Iraq's Saddam Hussein has developed and hides weapons of mass destruction, in violation of U.N. resolutions.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Powell's speech to the U.N. Security Council presented not just one 'smoking gun' but a battery of them, more than sufficient to dispel any lingering doubt about the threat the Iraqi dictator poses.

Denver Post

The United States has made a compelling case that Iraq has failed to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction. This failure violates the U.N. Security Council resolution of late last year which ordered Iraq to disarm. As a consequence and it is a grave one, the Security Council must act now to disarm Iraq by force.

Salt Lake City Tribune

Powell has connected enough dots to tie Iraq to al-Qaeda and show that this alliance is a threat to all of Europe as well as the United States.

Manchester Union Leader

In fact, the speech provided proof that Saddam continues to refuse to obey U.N. resolutions. Any amount of time he has now to comply fully and openly with U.N. demands should be measured in days or a few weeks – and no longer.

Portland Press-Herald/Maine

annamaria , April 10, 2018 at 2:44 pm GMT
On the British Establishment:

The Skripal affair is better understood in the context of "sir" Savile' knighthood -- when the influential pedophile had been raping and molesting kids for 40 years and none stood up to the criminal. The BBC has dutifully refused to publish anything that would upset "sir" Savile. The Scotland Yard looked the other way -- precisely as the Establishment ordered them to do. Savile' specialty were orphans. He was the embodiment of British Establishment.

The British Establishment has done with the concepts of honor. The loudest lying voices against Russia belong either to the whoring "aristocrats," who found that war profiteering (by any means) pays well, or the opportunistic parvenu like Gavin Williamson representing the vulgarity and intellectual inadequacy of the Establishment.

Rurik , April 10, 2018 at 2:46 pm GMT
@jacques sheete

the Senate is the eager, resourceful, and indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be."

-David Graham Phillips, Cosmopolitan magazine, February 1906

and to think that was over a hundred years ago

they've only gotten better at it with time

if you read The Protocols, one thing that I remember was the contemptuous way it referred to the goyim as having the minds and souls of beasts. Lumbering, mindless cattle, chewing their cud in a kind of catatonic stupor.

what else can we conclude about the kind of people who would vote for Lindsey Graham or John McCain? These guys get reelected again and again.

The saddest and most tragic thing about The Protocols is that the goyim seem to be as accommodating to the Elders as any farm animal can be. At least a pig might be apprehensive of the trip to the slaughter house. I remember a video where a pig jumped out of a moving truck, and walked off. But the goyim suit up their children and hand them over as cannon fodder, to be slaughtered on behalf of their enemies.

In the last century, there may have been an excuse for not knowing the nature of the ZUS government, being as ((they)) controlled virtually every source of information.

But today it's all out there. Today everybody knows that all of these wars are for Israel, at the direct expense of America's blood and treasure and (I won't say good) name.

And yet, (especially from the Christian churches) the call to suit up the young people to die in more wars- slaughtering innocents – for our enemies, will resound in the nation.

If I were a British soldier, told to kill some Russian soldier, because Putin is Hitler.. as my daughter languishes in a mental hospital, having been gang raped into a shell of a human being, and my son was brutalized by a British aristocrat, but now I'm called up to kill Russians in a contrived World War, to benefit the pedophile Peerage and their ((patrons)), I don't know how I'd resist pointing that weapon away from the Russian, and towards England's true enemies.

FB , April 10, 2018 at 2:53 pm GMT
@Corvinus

Corv anus dumps a megaload of BS on unsuspecting Unz readers

' Under the Putin regime, the body count of his enemies has grown.

He put the "de Thirty-four Russian journalists in the last decade just somehow "died". Occam's Razor applies here '

anonymous [397] Disclaimer , April 10, 2018 at 3:13 pm GMT
Like a gullible person I at first accepted that there was indeed some event that involved the Skripals. Now I wonder if the entire thing was a scripted hoax, that nothing had hit them, that it's all fake. It wouldn't be surprising. We seem to be in an age of rule by sociopaths whose only compass is that of power and riches. The populations of our countries are being hustled along for the benefit of the few. This can't have a happy ending for the majority of people. The much vaunted democracy of the west looks like just a fixed shell game.
gwynedd1 , April 10, 2018 at 3:22 pm GMT
@Mulegino1

The little lie is more difficult because the veracity thereof may be observed. A large lie or untruth is more difficult to observe. Such as what is visible from outer space is not something anyone can falsify.

FB , April 10, 2018 at 3:29 pm GMT
Justin Raimondo has just done a U turn on 'president' Dump

' doesn't this prove I was wrong about Trump and his movement all along?

I was very wrong to discount the role of character, personality, and intelligence: Trump is simply not fit to be President '

Raimondo's reaction to Dump's incredible imbecility re the Syria 'chemical attacks '

' A child could see through the fake "chemical attack" supposedly launched by Bashar al-Assad just as his troops defeated the jihadists and Trump said he wanted out of Syria '

Yes anyone watching that white helmets footage is immediately cringing for those poor kids being abused as props in a macabre stage play

How stupid is Dump anyway ?

That's the question

annamaria , April 10, 2018 at 3:45 pm GMT
@Anonymous

"More occupation and killing in Crimea "
-- Evidence? It seems that you are very upset that the Kagans' cookies did not deliver.
"One Year Later, Crimeans Prefer Russia:" https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-02-06/one-year-later-crimeans-prefer-russia
"How Crimeans See Ukraine Crisis:" https://consortiumnews.com/2016/02/11/how-crimeans-see-ukraine-crisis/
"A Pew poll from April 2014 revealed that 91 percent of Crimean respondents believed the referendum was free and fair, 93 percent had confidence in Putin, and 85 percent believed Kiev should recognize the results.
Another poll in June 2014, this one from Gallup , showed 94 percent of ethnic Russians in Crimea thought the referendum reflected the views of the people and 68 percent of ethnic Ukrainians in Crimea agreed . The poll found that 74 percent believed that joining Russia would make life better.
A GfK poll from February 2015, sponsored by a pro-Ukrainian group in Canada, revealed 93 percent of Crimeans endorsed the referendum."
-- Still not enough for you?
"Ukraine [post-Maidan] under pressure from West over corruption:" http://www.newindianexpress.com/world/2017/dec/07/ukraine-under-pressure-from-west-over-corruption-1721487.html
"Enough documents have been released -- citing coup-backed snipers killing dozens of protesters, US embassy officials planning false flag attacks, extremists downing a passenger airliner and NATO peddling falsified intelligence -- to make it very clear that the "coup" is more of an invasion than anything else.
The term, roughly translated as Revolution of Dignity, was cooked up at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, well in advance of Victoria Nuland's assumption of the throne as de facto "Queen of the Ukraine," lording over her subjects, playing the role of "donut dollie."
The roots of the conflict in the Ukraine with thousands dead and the threat of, minimally, a wider regional conflict, are attributable to extremist elements in the United States -- those faces and voices seen and heard promoting the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the supporters of ISIS/Al Qaeda in Syria -- and the cheerleaders of the continued genocide against the Palestinian people."

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/03/07/neo-ukraine-fighting-the-spin/

"In 1950, the Nuremberg Tribunal defined Crimes against Peace, in Principle VI, specifically Principle VI(a), submitted to the United Nations General Assembly, as:
(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i)."

Dave Bowman , April 10, 2018 at 3:48 pm GMT
@annamaria

Bravo, indeed, Annamaria. Beautiful, perfect, resounding, harsh, unforgiving words for a pair of worthless human vermin masquerading as civilised, intelligent professionals with a moral compass.

The pair of them – and the entire wide set and grouping of their self-loathing, White-hating racist political henchmen, hangers-on, groupies, freeloaders and Labour party pirates and race traitors who have brought my nation to the brink in every possible way should be publicly hanged and left to rot.

Better still that none of the Moslem-loving filth had ever been born.

[Apr 11, 2018] The Russians are Flabbergasted, by Israel Shamir

This is just neoliberal Inquisition in action
Notable quotes:
"... The details of Skripal case are very entertaining, but not necessary for our understanding. The case was used to install in minds the connection between chemical poisoning and Russia. It is unfair, for Russians destroyed all their chemical poisons under the eyes of Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) inspectors, but life is often unfair. ..."
"... The attack had never occurred at all, but it was duly reported by the pro-Western media. Thus the game came to a close. Skripal Affair established the connection of Russia and chemical weapons, Eastern Ghouta allowed to use this connection in order to attack Russia. ..."
"... We should not overestimate importance of these media events. The leading Western powers and their media refused to consider different explanations, refused an open inquiry, they went for jugular. Russia has been demonised in 2018, like Germany was demonised in 1940. It was a long and cautious labour. Have a look at this site theday.co.uk -- it is a site for school children and their teachers. You'll be amazed to discover its fervent hatred of Russia and Putin being pumped into hearts and heads of young generation. Such a long planning can't be dependent on an event like poisoning of an ex-spy or even on the fall of a Syrian underground fortress. ..."
"... we prefer a more simple explanation: Jews are well integrated into Western elites, and they promote and support the goals of these elites. ..."
"... metum Judaeorum ..."
"... Israel Shamir can be reached at [email protected] ..."
Apr 11, 2018 | www.unz.com

The diplomats' expulsion flabbergasted the Russians. For days they went around scratching their heads and looking for an answer: what do they want from us? What is the bottom line? Too many events that make little sense separately. Why did the US administration expel 60 Russian diplomats? Do they want to cut off diplomatic relations, or is it a first step to an attempt to remove Russia from the Security Council, or to cancel its veto rights? Does it mean the US has given up on diplomacy? (The answer "it's war" didn't come to their minds at that time).

The astonished Russians responded all right. They also expelled 60 diplomats, and they made it painful: all US diplomats engaged in the political department of the Moscow Embassy were on the non-grata list. The Political department consisted of three sections, dealing with foreign policy, internal Russian politics and military analysis; the most important centre of data collection, of liaison with Russian politicians, of military consequences, of Syria and Ukraine, of North Korea and China, experienced first-class intelligence officers and field hands -- all gone, including their Political Officer Christopher Robinson (POL). The Russians expelled Maria Olson, the Embassy's well-known spokesperson, and the Ambassador's interpreter. They closed down St Petersburg Consulate, an important centre for connecting, influencing and interacting with the opposition in this 'second capital' of Russia. The US has lost many of its Moscow hands, people who knew Russia and had developed personal relations with important Russians. It will take a lot of time and effort for the US State Department and intelligence agencies to get back to the positions they had lost. The Brits who initiated the deportations also lost about fifty of their Moscow Embassy staff.

Surprisingly, the mass deportation of so many Russian diplomats had little effect on the Russian people, as this strike had been neutralised by another painful event, by the Kemerovo Mall blaze killing 64 cinema-goers including over 40 children. The blaze, even if it weren't arson (it has not been proven yet) had triggered a massive onslaught of fake news and internet trolls on the people of Russia. A million underfed Ukrainians were deployed by the Western psywar on the web to tell the Russians that hundreds of their children had been incinerated, and that their authorities lie to them. This operation revealed the level of influence and integration the Western spy agencies have in Russia.

Kemerovo was a good choice for the operation: it is the only ethnic-Russian region ruled by an old-style local hero who had outlived his wits, the only region that reported indecently (and unrealistically) high support for Putin in the recent elections, a depressive region of mines and miners with a big potential for trouble.

Putin managed it rather well by coming personally and dealing with the situation hands on. He learned the ropes since 2000, when, at the dawn of his first presidential term, the Kursk submarine went down with all hands. Putin stayed away from the sailors' families, and acted callous, people said. "It had sunk", Putin replied to the question "What happened to Kursk ?" (It is said USS Memphis had fired a torpedo at the submarine, causing the disaster, while the new president had been reluctant to aggravate relations with Clinton Administration). Now, in 2018, he was very good, full of empathy and consideration, conveying strength and decisiveness.

Whatever American agency carried out the psyop around Kemerovo, it was very successful, but its success undermined another operation, that of the Russian diplomats' expulsion. The Russians did not pay it sufficient attention.

The alleged reason for the expulsion, the poisoning of Sergey Skripal and his daughter, made very little sense. Even if the old spy were bumped off by his erstwhile employers, such a reaction would be excessive by all means. He was not a Napoleon (poisoned by the Brits 200 years ago), not a prince of blood, not a great inventor nor a successful spy. He was a retired ex-spy, a wash-out. Anyway he didn't die, he was just sick for a while. Perhaps he ate something in the pub that didn't agree with him. This is the opinion of his niece, Victoria, who is the only person alive who had been in contact with the Skripals since their alleged hospitalisation.

This affair is so obscure that it beats Rashomon anytime. Russian reporters went around Salisbury and noticed many incongruences. It is not certain whether Skripals were poisoned at all, and where they are. Their pets survived the deadly poison, and they had to be destroyed. This piece of black Russian humour had been forwarded a lot around the net:

Skripal had been poisoned by a most powerful poison, 2 grams will kill half a country instantly! The Russians

- poisoned him in the restaurant

- no, on the bench

- no, in the car

- No, the door handle was smeared

- No, the suitcase was poisoned

- No, everything in the house was poisoned.

- Oh, and buckwheat was poisoned,

- but they did not die instantly, but walked around somewhere for four hours,

- but the policeman that discovered them almost died on the spot,

- but the poison was instantly identified,

- an antidote was instantly introduced, and Skripals and the policeman were saved;

- The policeman had been discharged next day!

- But they were in coma, and they will never recover!

- but no, the daughter had recovered fast!

- Oh, and dad is revived a miracle!

- and they both are quickly recovering, your strongest poison is useless.

- the restaurant had been surrounded by police in spacesuits

- the park had been surrounded by police in spacesuits

- the house had surrounded by police in spacesuits

- they are in spacesuits, since the poison is deadly dangerous, but next to them are policemen without protection

- The bench was cut down and removed: it's such a terrible poison that the bench retained its toxic quality for two weeks;

- but the cat had survived in the poisoned house the policeman had touched Skripal and nearly died, and the cat survived and the guinea pigs would survive, but they were all forgotten, and died of hunger in the house;

- and their remains were immediately burned, as they are poisoned by the strongest poison;

- For two weeks they were poisoned by the strongest poison and survived, and now they had to be urgently cremated;

- Only guinea pigs died, the cat survived all this poison. It was stressful and hungry, so they killed it and cremated to make it certain nobody will find the secret etc etc.

The true hero of Skripal saga is the British ex-Ambassador Craig Murray , who followed the developments and unveiled many of its inconsistencies and outright lies. You may read his articles and twits to learn the details.

Julia Skripal took a daring step: she called her cousin Viktoria in Moscow. Their conversation is an amazing document. Julia says that she and her father are in good health; she doubts Viktoria will be allowed to visit her. Indeed, the British government refused to grant her visa. The feeling is that Julia is imprisoned.

I spoke with a retired Russian counter-intelligence officer who is familiar with the subject. He told me Russia never had a Novichok toxic substance: this name was given by counter-intelligence to A-232 in order to trace the leaks. It worked: a man called Vil Mirzayanov, an administrator in the chemical labs, leaked the Novichok story, and thus he was apprehended and arrested. A-232 had been produced in small amounts in 1990s, and some of it could be stolen and sold in these horrible years, when a full colonel of Russian intelligence had to moonlight as a taxi driver to supplement his measly $46 monthly salary. In those years, the poison could be indeed made available, and in one case it was used by criminals. Theoretically it is not impossible that some of this poison could have been saved and stored by some criminals; alternatively, it was available to the Americans who dismantled the labs in 1992. Anyway we have no independent proof that Skripals were poisoned by anything at all. If they survive, if the British and the American intelligence services don't kill them, perhaps we shall know more. We can definitely exclude the possibility that Russian state agents would go to Britain to poison an old spy who had been pardoned by Russian president years ago. Even if he was active in producing Christopher Steele's Trump ("Golden Rain") file, the Russians would have no compelling reason to kill him at all, and in such an odd way in particular. "If we would kill him, he would stay killed", concluded my interlocutor.

The details of Skripal case are very entertaining, but not necessary for our understanding. The case was used to install in minds the connection between chemical poisoning and Russia. It is unfair, for Russians destroyed all their chemical poisons under the eyes of Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) inspectors, but life is often unfair.

The connection between chemical poisoning and Russia had been prepared for the forthcoming event. Eastern Ghouta was an important and well entrenched location of the Syrian rebels. Being within easy reach from Central Damascus, it provided the rebels with a chance to seize power in the Syrian capital. As the Syrian army with Iranian and Russian support advanced into Eastern Ghouta, they learned of the rebel plans to stage a false flag chemical weapon attack, as they already had done a few times in past. President Putin warned of such a possibility at his joint (with President Erdogan and President Rouhani) press conference in Ankara last week, a few days before the alleged attack.

The attack had never occurred at all, but it was duly reported by the pro-Western media. Thus the game came to a close. Skripal Affair established the connection of Russia and chemical weapons, Eastern Ghouta allowed to use this connection in order to attack Russia.

We should not overestimate importance of these media events. The leading Western powers and their media refused to consider different explanations, refused an open inquiry, they went for jugular. Russia has been demonised in 2018, like Germany was demonised in 1940. It was a long and cautious labour. Have a look at this site theday.co.uk -- it is a site for school children and their teachers. You'll be amazed to discover its fervent hatred of Russia and Putin being pumped into hearts and heads of young generation. Such a long planning can't be dependent on an event like poisoning of an ex-spy or even on the fall of a Syrian underground fortress.

The planners of a war on Russia have utilised fear of anti-Semitism for their purposes. I called this method Anti-semitism Weaponised . Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, has been blocked and contained by accusations of anti-Semitism. He was the only leader able to stop Britain's descent into war with Russia. Other Labour MPs and activists have been attacked over alleged anti-Semitism issue, and -- what a coincidence! -- practically all of them were against demonising Russia; while Friends of Israel -- whether Conservative or Labour -- were viciously anti-Russian.

This is a correlation that will be discussed at another time, but it is far from obvious one. Russia has no anti-Semitism; the Russian president is friendly to Israel and to the powerful Jewish Chabad movement. Russia has no white nationalism, and little of the alt-right. However, this correlation exists. Shall we explain it by Jewish hatred of the Orthodox Church, as this Church (active in Russia, Greece, Palestine and Syria) hasn't been Jewified. Or should we prefer a more simple explanation: Jews are well integrated into Western elites, and they promote and support the goals of these elites.

However, people who can withstand accusations of anti-Semitism are the strongest enemies of the ruling power; they stand against the war with Russia and against attack on Syria, as the Haaretz newspaper explained in an article called White Supremacists Defend Assad, Warn Trump: Don't Let Israel Force You Into War With Syria . The article continues: "Alt-right calls Saturday's chemical attack in Damascus suburb a false flag operation, claiming it's an effort by Israel and 'globalists' to keep U.S. troops in Middle East" It quotes David Duke and other untouchables as the only people who reject Israeli narrative.

Not being a white supremacist (probably I do not qualify) I still applaud these brave men when they say and do the right thing. Sensitivity to anti-Semitism accusation is a strong vulnerability of character. Though people like Corbyn have their heart in the right place, they are weak on this point, and the enemy uses this weakness to neutralize them. There are people in the left that are not afraid of any accusation, but there aren't many who are resistant to metum Judaeorum .

Let us hope and pray we shall survive the forthcoming cataclysm.

Israel Shamir can be reached at [email protected]

This article was first published at The Unz Review .

[Apr 11, 2018] Is Theresa May as more evil than Hillary Clinton?

Apr 11, 2018 | www.unz.com

Jake , April 10, 2018 at 11:38 am GMT

Theresa May as more evil than Bill Clinton? That will sound odd to some, but I think it is true. Hillary is the pure evil half of the Clinton marriage. Bill is simply charming and filled with a desire to amass enough power to have a group adore him as he finds new panties to explore.

May is English, and she has the very long line of Brit Empire secret service evil at her disposal. And her move is a bold one. What it means is that she is signaling that at least if she is PM, the UK could replace the US as Fearless Leader of the actual New World Order...

[Apr 10, 2018] The Ghouta Massacre near Damascus on Aug 21, 2013 was not a sarin rocket attack carried out by Assad or his supporters. It was a false-flag stunt carried out by the insurgents using carbon monoxide or cyanide to murder children and use their corpses as bait to lure the Americans into attacking Assad.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "The primary conclusion of this study, based on a pharmacological analysis of the video and photographic evidence, is that the Ghouta Massacre near Damascus on Aug 21.2013 was not a sarin rocket attack carried out by Assad or his supporters. It was a false-flag stunt carried out by the insurgents using carbon monoxide or cyanide to murder children and use their corpses as bait to lure the Americans into attacking Assad." ..."
Apr 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Imagine , a day ago

"Murder in the Sun Morgue" by Dr. Denis O'Brien (neuropharmacology expert):

"The primary conclusion of this study, based on a pharmacological analysis of the video and photographic evidence, is that the Ghouta Massacre near Damascus on Aug 21.2013 was not a sarin rocket attack carried out by Assad or his supporters. It was a false-flag stunt carried out by the insurgents using carbon monoxide or cyanide to murder children and use their corpses as bait to lure the Americans into attacking Assad."

288 pp. analysis. Also, some had slit throats:

https://www.scribd.com/document/230748990/Murder-in-the-SunMorgue

[Apr 10, 2018] Federal probe into Trump's lawyer seeks records about two women who alleged affairs with the president by Devlin Barrett at all

Looks like Rosenstein is after Trump. he authorized this action.
Notable quotes:
"... Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who personally approved the move to seek a search warrant for Cohen's records, which included raids Monday on his home and office, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation. ..."
Apr 10, 2018 | www.washingtonpost.com

Federal prosecutors investigating President Trump's personal attorney, Michael D. Cohen, are seeking records related to two women who received payments in 2016 after alleging affairs with Trump years ago -- adult-film star Stormy Daniels and ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The interest in both Daniels and McDougal indicates that federal investigators are trying to determine whether there was a broader pattern or strategy among Trump associates to buy the silence of women whose accounts could harm the president's electoral chances and whether any crimes were committed in doing so, the person said.

... ... ...

The high stakes of the case were underscored by the involvement of Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who personally approved the move to seek a search warrant for Cohen's records, which included raids Monday on his home and office, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation.

Rosenstein's role has infuriated Trump, who was left "stunned" and "livid" by the aggressive move by prosecutors Monday, according to an outside adviser in frequent touch with the White House.

Cohen, Trump's longtime attorney, is under federal investigation for possible bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations, The Washington Post reported Monday.

[Apr 10, 2018] Britain's Poisoned Spy Case Latest Episode in Western Anti-Russia Inquisition

Theresa May really looks like a Grand Inquisitor. Coupled play such a role in any movie ;-). Johnson hardly...
Notable quotes:
"... Russia is being put on the rack over the mysterious poisoning of a former Kremlin spy exiled to Britain. ..."
Apr 10, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

Like a Medieval inquisition bereft of any due legal process, Russia is being put on the rack over the mysterious poisoning of a former Kremlin spy exiled to Britain.

No evidence is presented, just piles of innuendo and Russophobia heaped up into a bonfire. The prosecution is based solely on pejorative accusations, and the accused – Russia – is not permitted to fairly contest the incriminating information.

This is the same playbook as seen over alleged Russian "meddling" in the US and European elections over the past two years. Western politicians, intelligence services, think-tanks and media are chock-full of allegations and innuendo of "Russian influence campaigns". But no evidence is ever presented. Not a scrap, not a scintilla. It's a case of presumed guilt, and a conviction verdict without any facts.

It's the same inquisitorial echo stemming from the unsolved downing of the Malaysian airliner in July 2014 over Eastern Ukraine, killing nearly 300 people. Recall how British media were within days of that tragedy irresponsibly peddling disgraceful headlines claiming "Putin shot down passenger airliner".

This week, British Prime Minister Theresa May's addressed parliament accusing Moscow of responsibility for the alleged murderous attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the southern England town of Salisbury on March 4.

[Apr 10, 2018] Skripal Poison Case Becoming British Hostage Scenario

Apr 10, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

Far from the Skripal father and daughter being the alleged victims of a Russian assassination plot, it now seems increasingly apparent that they are being held against their will by Britain's authorities. In short, hostages of the British state.

From the outset of the alleged poisoning incident in Salisbury on March 4, the official British narrative has been pocked suspiciously with inconsistencies. The lightning-fast rush to judgment by the British government – within days – to blame the Kremlin for "a brazen murder attempt" was perhaps the main giveaway that the narrative was following a script and foregone conclusion to incriminate Russia.

[Apr 10, 2018] If Putin indeed wanted to deal with Trump, why abort all such prospects with a poison gas murder of a has-been KGB agent in Britain, America's foremost ally?

May be a more correct hypothesis that explains Trump behaviour in Skripal case and Douma supposed gas attack is that Trump was a false flag from the beginning. Being a newcomer to politics he, like Obama before him, was a perfect bait and switch" candidate. Hillary statement that he is "unfit for office" proved to be true, but in a different sense then Hillary implied: in foright policy he proved to be copycat of Hillary, save sex change operation.
Notable quotes:
"... One month after that attack, which Prime Minister Theresa May ascribed to Russia and Foreign Minister Boris Johnson laid at the feet of Putin himself, questions have arisen: If the nerve agent used, Novichok, was of a military variety so deadly it could kill any who came near, why is no one dead from it? Both the target, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia are recovering. ..."
"... If the deadly poison was, as reported, put on the doorknob of Skripal's home, how did he and Yulia manage to go to a restaurant after being contaminated, with neither undergoing a seizure until later on a park bench? ..."
Apr 10, 2018 | original.antiwar.com

[Apr 10, 2018] Liars Lying About Nearly Everything by Giraldi

Apr 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

"So Donald Trump turns out to be a pretty good liar, even if one has to take into account the fact that he frequently has no idea what he is talking about. But the prize for lying at a high level has to go to the British as related to what has been going on both in the Middle East, with Russia, and also in Britain itself. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair was the first master at dissimulation in 2002 when his intelligence chief Sir Richard Dearlove told him that the Bush White House had decided on war and "the intelligence and facts were being around the policy" regarding Iraq, meaning that it was ignoring the information that did not support its desire to create a pretext for invading the country and removing Saddam Hussein. Blair presumably could have derailed the ill-fated invasion by refusing to go along with the venture, which was a war crime, but instead he fully supported George W. Bush in the attack and thereby had a hand in America's worst foreign policy disaster ever. In 2016 an official British government inquiry determined that Bush and Blair had indeed together rushed to war. The Global Establishment has nevertheless rewarded Tony Blair for his loyalty with Clintonesque generosity. He has enjoyed a number of well-paid sinecures and is now worth in excess of $100 million." Giraldi

-------------

The British would lie? Surely not! pl

http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/liars-lying-about-nearly-everything-2/

Sid Finster , 4 hours ago

I honestly don't understand why people refuse to acknowledge that we in the West are ruled either by sociopaths, or by people who are functionally indistinguishable from sociopaths.

This is nothing unique to the United States. Every empire and its rulers were ever thus. What is different is that the American Empire is larger and more universal in scope and has more tools of propaganda, control, surveillance and destruction at its fingertips than a Stalin or a Genghis Khan ever dreamed of.

Hubris and sociopathy explain all of the actions that the American Empire has taken to date, and explain what the Empire will do next.

Ani , 4 hours ago
Has the US brass succumbed to ziocons? https://www.zerohedge.com/n...
The main questions on the social media: "Why the US is in Syria?" and "Is a war in Syria in America's interests?"

[Apr 10, 2018] Yulia is out of hospital and in hiding

Apr 10, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

hopehely | Apr 10, 2018 2:57:40 PM | 13

Yulia is out of hospital and in hiding
That is what they say. I will believe when I see a video footage with her in it. Even then I will not believe 100%. We should never forget that we deal with evil pathological liars, crooks and swindlers.

mk , Apr 10, 2018 3:05:47 PM | 14

This part of the statement of Dr. Blanshard, medical director of Salisbury hospital, is remarkable:

"While I won't go into great detail about the treatment we've been providing, I will say that nerve agents work by attaching themselves to a particular enzyme in the body which then stops the nerves from working properly. This results in symptoms such as sickness, hallucinations and confusion. Our job in treating the patients has been to stabilise them– ensuring that the patients could breathe and that blood could continue to circulate. We then needed to use a variety of different drugs to support the patients until they could create more enzymes to replace those affected by the poisoning. We also used specialised decontamination techniques to remove any residual toxins."

https://www.england.nhs.uk/south/2018/04/10/updates-on-the-salisbury-incident-7/

There was no need for her to go in detail about Julia's recovery, but she did, and what she says fits much more a food poisoning from fish or shellfish than a military nerve agent. The bombshell is at the end. "Toxin" is a poison generated by a plant or animal, i.e. a biological poison. Novichok is no toxin. Doctors are used to formulate careful and precise.

In my eyes this statement is a slap in the face of the British government and its Novichok story and a sign that it's going to collapse soon.

Bakerpete , Apr 10, 2018 3:34:21 PM | 19
Hallucinations is it?
"Nerve agents work by attaching themselves to the particular enzymes in the body, which then stop the nerves from functioning. This results in symptoms such as sickness and hallucinations. Our job in treating the patients is to stabilise them, ensuring that they can breathe and blood can continue to circulate."

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/10/yulia-skripal-discharged-from-hospital-salisbury-attack-nerve-agent

Scotch Bingeington , Apr 10, 2018 3:38:07 PM | 20
mk | 14

Yes, absolutely.

I was very skeptical at first, but I've come to regard something food-related as most likely, like people here at the MoA have proposed. 'b' plus I think 'Jen', is that her name?

It struck me as conspicuous that Blanshard wouldn't just state what substance exactly they were dealing with, if said substance was indeed some manufactured military nerve agent. But since the British government have flung their reputation and credibility down Big Ben by coming up with this Novichok nonsense, Blanshard can't say anything other than what she did say.

Also there's no mention of 'poisoning', 'attack' or some such term, which would indicate a perpetrator actively and intentionally bringing the Skripals into contact with the substance. It's just 'incident'. Adding to that, the phrase "have been exposed to" suggests 'environmental' to me, and that's what food-borne is.

[Apr 10, 2018] Novi-Fog In Fleet Street - Truth Cut Off

Notable quotes:
"... Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, who's skepticism convinced 165 countries to not fall for Boris Johnson's lies, says that Johnson has to answer "serious questions". The spin-masters of the May government throw Novi-Fog™ into Fleet Street to prevent that. ..."
"... Operation 'Save Boris' fills the Fleet Street papers with more lies. It claims that secret intelligence, which can not even be shown to the opposition leader, proves that Russia tested how to smear the nerve agent 'Novichok' on doorknobs ..."
"... Theresa May's government is in serious trouble. It tries to spin its way out of its lies. But the time is working against it. The fog will rise ..."
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
"... Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbor--a mortal sin. ..."
"... The Telegraph today answered critics that are demanding proof , saying that no beyond-a-reasonable-doubt proof is required because governments are not held to that standard. So what standard should a government be held to a) by other governments? And b) by the people that they represent? They didn't bother to say but the impression I got is "trust us". They are tone deaf. Public trust is worn thin. Do they think we have forgotten being lied into Iraq? Their incessant spying and propaganda? Western support for ISIS criminality? Clinton-DNC collusion? And much more! ..."
"... I would guess the Skripals and the policeman would have a full time minder at their sides to ensure they say nothing that busts the narrative. ..."
"... It might have been pesticide poisoning . If doctors guessed correctly they would have been able to treat it. Pesticide poisoning happens a lot by accident in rural households. ..."
"... Novichok shares characteristics with pesticides so laboratory results may very well be something that can be a pesticide - or Novichok. ..."
"... Good reminder that we fight bees with a "military grade weapon". ..."
"... reminded me of the passport that survived the 9/11 twin towers attack in the USA. ..."
"... I think bevin's correct--Brexit, Corbyn and further vilification of Russia are the motives driving this SNAFU. ..."
"... Russia convened an OPCW Special Executive Council meeting in The Hague on April 4, for "addressing the situation around allegations of non-compliance with the Convention made by one State Party against the other State Party with regard to the incident in Salisbury" on March 4. . . here ..."
"... This is a post by a novelist (red flag, I know) with obv. no credibility that claims that Novichok was in fact the name of a KGB operation to locate leakers in their chemical research staff by feeding disinfo about a chemical super-weapon, and that Mirzayanov (an analytical chemist not directly involved in research or production) was ID'd as a leaker as a result, and turned into a disinfo dispenser. ..."
"... The Skripals apparently ordered seafood risotto at Zizzi's Restaurant in Salisbury. If you look up Zizzi's Restaurant menus on Google, you will see the menus mention risotto with mussels. ..."
"... Mussels can carry algae-related toxins that can cause (among other things) nausea, vomiting and (depending on the toxin involved) even brain damage, memory loss and death. Usually the symptoms set in about half an hour after eating so knowing when the Skripals had lunch and when they arrived at the park bench is critical. ..."
"... The grechka is problematic - how did the policeman get ill? ..."
"... The guinea pigs died from thirst? You'd think if there was nerve gas contamination in the house somewhere, thirst would be the last thing they'd die of. ..."
"... If police had visited the house on March 4, immediately or almost immediately after the Skripals were found, surely they would have found the animals in good condition? Sergei Skripal had apparently had the animals brought over from Russia at considerable expense to himself. One assumes he must have been quite attached to them. Yet when the animals are found, they are malnourished and starving or dead from thirst? ..."
"... So what was DS Nick Bailey doing if he didn't go to the house on March 4? When was he stricken with nerve gas poisoning? ..."
"... Its a common Western practice to point finger to enemies military or research facility. They win regardless of circumstances. ..."
"... Only two words: perfidious Albion... always was and always will be. And this is how the west spins off into the dustbin of history... the newbie way. ..."
"... Folks, the reason for all this anti-Putin nonsense is the one fact that the Syrian government now holds over 11 British officers who were liaised with the terrorists in the Ghouta. ..."
"... And they were caught out of uniform, such that they could be executed as spies under international law. Isn't that a howler?" ..."
"... What sort of libretto would Gilbert and Sullivan compose for this fiasco. Could The Onion do better? Reminds me of Cheech & Chong's skits. ..."
"... If all dogs of wars are now unleashed following some absurd false flag as murky and grotesque as the Skippy affair... we, as human species, are absolutely doomed to live in hell for quite sometimes. ..."
"... The only thing that has been officially confirmed is that blood tests showed breakdown products of organophosphates that were believed to come from a "Novichok class nerve agent or closely related agent." I still do not think they have found novichok anywhere in the environment or have collected a sample that could be independently verified to be novichok in some foreign laboratory. At least we have not seen any official confirmation that such a sample exists. Nor have we received information on exactly what compound this "novichok" is claimed to be. ..."
"... I suspect the traces of "novichok" found all over the place, from the Zizzi restaurant to the door handle, are just some ordinary organophosphate pesticide. ..."
"... The Skripals are suffering from "paralytic shellfish poisoning" they received from saxitoxin or tetrodotoxin in the seafood in the Risotto Pesce they ate at the Zizzi restaurant. The Skripals received traces of some organophosphate pesticide from the flowers they left at the graves in the morning. They then left trace on the door handles of the BMW. A video show the BMW driving away from Sergei Skripl's house at 14:55 in the afternoon. This would mean that they visited the house after leaving the pub and entering the Zizzi restaurant, leaving further organophosphate traces on the door knob of the house. ..."
"... Thanks 'B' for keeping the torch lit and shine thru the british lies .. it is so lame and amateurish and i agree for years these propagandist been doing their job the 'easy way' and now they been exposed by the still thinking crowd in the net.. ..."
"... This would suggest that if the breakfast cereal brought to the UK from Russia for Sergei Skripal is tested for "Novichok", it will also test positive for traces of "Novichok". (Unless of course Lord President Vlademort rids the entire Russian Federation of all its agricultural pests with a magnanimous wave of his hand and the utterance of a secret spell.) ..."
Apr 05, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Having been caught lying and covering up his lies about the Salisbury incident, the British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson decided to attack :


bigger

A pity endeavor. It were the lies of Theresa May and Boris Johnson that convinced the other countries , not any factual evidence:

BERLIN (Reuters) - Britain needs to show proof that Russia was behind last month's poisoning of a former Russian double agent and his daughter in England, the German government's coordinator for Russia said on Thursday.

Gernot Erler said pressure was rising on Prime Minister Theresa May's government after Britain's military research centre, at Porton Down, said on Tuesday it could not say yet whether the nerve agent used in the attack had been produced in Russia.

" That contradicts what we had previously heard from British politicians and will certainly raise the pressure on Britain to show further proof that the traces plausibly point to Moscow ," Erler told German broadcaster ARD.

Armin Laschert, head of Germany's most populous state North Rhine-Westphalia and near to Merkel, also questioned the British behavior.

The international loss of trust for the British claims is serious. Unless the UK government comes up with a very plausible story with some real evidence behind it no serious European official will lend it any further support. And no, holding up a tube of white powder will not be enough.

via @Propagandaschau - bigger

Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, who's skepticism convinced 165 countries to not fall for Boris Johnson's lies, says that Johnson has to answer "serious questions". The spin-masters of the May government throw Novi-Fog™ into Fleet Street to prevent that.

Operation 'Save Boris' fills the Fleet Street papers with more lies. It claims that secret intelligence, which can not even be shown to the opposition leader, proves that Russia tested how to smear the nerve agent 'Novichok' on doorknobs:

Police said last week they believed Russian ex-double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned at home in Salisbury via their front door.

Now agents have confirmed that Putin's scientists carried out experiments looking at its effectiveness on door handles before the March 3[sic!] attack.

A security source told the Daily Mail: "We have intelligence that goes beyond Russia made Novichok and stockpiled it.

" We have evidence that they also explored using it as an assassination weapon including on areas such as door handles and everyday objects. "

"Putin's scientists" experimented and found that two persons leaving a home will both touch the exterior doorknob and reliably infect themselves with a rain-resistant, "military grade" nerve agent which several hours later has a similar sudden effect on a 33 year old healthy women and a 66 year old man with serious diabetes. That indeed sounds quite plausible to me (not).

More Novi-Fog™:


bigger

The Times was told that the spies found the source of the nerve agent. But the piece is extremely vague and makes little sense:

There are two different sources: 1. "Security services" which say they know the source but neither name it, nor pin the location to Russia and 2. a Whitehall spin-master who points to Russia.

Some photo editor made sense of what the "security services" said and introduced the Times piece with a picture of the likely source:


via D'Aramitz - bigger

Behind the wall of Novi-Fog™ all the outrageous claims the government made about the case get pushed down the memory hole.

Meanwhile Victoria Skripal, a cousin of Yulia Skripal, claims to have been called by Yulia and told that everything is fine. In response(?) the Metropolitan Police claims to have a statement from Yulia in which she also says that everything is fine. Neither claim is verifiable and both might well be wrong.

Theresa May's government is in serious trouble. It tries to spin its way out of its lies. But the time is working against it. The fog will rise:

What will the British government to get out of this situation?

---
Previous Moon of Alabama reports on the Skripal case:

Posted by b on April 5, 2018 at 03:41 PM | Permalink

Comments


dr sapperstein , Apr 5, 2018 3:58:03 PM | 1

d notice
simple and effective. It has a chilling effect

the gladio diversion crew productions have moved on today it is the knife crime menace in london.all contained on the salisbury front no dissent in the media places that count.

move along please

Red Ryder , Apr 5, 2018 4:06:40 PM | 2
Highly Likely is Extremely Likely a Lie. UK is definitely evil. The Atlantic Alliance is definitely evil.

Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbor--a mortal sin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9cPnL6ep7E

psychohistorian , Apr 5, 2018 4:08:07 PM | 3
Thanks for continuing to hammer on this perfidy by the British puppets and their masters.

At the end of your posting you asked what the British government will do to get out of this situation and I can only expect them to try and top the situation with something to shift focus and so it has to be Huuuuuuge....and not likely in a good way....sigh

When do the aliens come in and save us from our species stupidity?

Formerly T-Bear , Apr 5, 2018 4:08:38 PM | 4
Only a top to bottom regime change will make Britain great again.
Jackrabbit , Apr 5, 2018 4:16:56 PM | 5
The Telegraph today answered critics that are demanding proof , saying that no beyond-a-reasonable-doubt proof is required because governments are not held to that standard. So what standard should a government be held to a) by other governments? And b) by the people that they represent? They didn't bother to say but the impression I got is "trust us". They are tone deaf. Public trust is worn thin. Do they think we have forgotten being lied into Iraq? Their incessant spying and propaganda? Western support for ISIS criminality? Clinton-DNC collusion? And much more!

The link to Sputnik has a link to the video of the Russian TV show but no English subtitles. Is the an English transcription anywhere? According to the transcription of the recorded conversation, it is Yulia initiated the phone call and I would think it was the UK that recorded the call and sent it to Russian TV. I would guess the Skripals and the policeman would have a full time minder at their sides to ensure they say nothing that busts the narrative.

Peter AU 1 | Apr 5, 2018 4:18:24 PM | 6 /

The link to Sputnik has a link to the video of the Russian TV show but no English subtitles. Is the an English transcription anywhere?
According to the transcription of the recorded conversation, it is Yulia initiated the phone call and I would think it was the UK that recorded the call and sent it to Russian TV. I would guess the Skripals and the policeman would have a full time minder at their sides to ensure they say nothing that busts the narrative.

Gerd Müller , Apr 5, 2018 4:20:59 PM | 7
As said before, no #Novichok was used. The Skripals could recover.Now the relative in Moskow asked, what was the order in the restaurant Zizzi. I think it was severe illness after Meal mess. Toad in the Pond? Not on the list of Zizzi.
mischi , Apr 5, 2018 4:25:46 PM | 8
does salmonella cause frothing of the mouth? botulism? I don't think so. Both can be deadly though
Anonymous , Apr 5, 2018 4:26:33 PM | 9
The British police have finally started a proper investigation. It has had immediate results, when absolute proof of Russia's involvement was found under the bench where the Skirpals fell unconscious.

https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/a073irl/78622176/268527/268527_600.jpg

Emmanuel Goldstein , Apr 5, 2018 4:57:09 PM | 10
The cracks are starting to show. No evidence. No serious facts. We continue on regardless pumping out the big lies.....Do they think we don't remember Tony Blair on Iraq, the rush into Afghanistan, the wilful destruction of Libya, which once had the highest human development index in Africa, the near destruction of Syria triggering a huge migrant crisis. The HMG view on all of these has been an inversion of the truth. I stopped beleiving anything any British government says to me after Iraq, and my default setting on this affair was 'false flag'. The Russian ambassador was given over ninety minutes of airtime this afternoon on Sky and acquitted himself very well, posing, to a Brit, very logical and sensible questions. When is he going to move Writ of Habeus Corpus for the Skripals? The guy has quite a sense of humour and the irony would be sublime...
michael d , Apr 5, 2018 4:57:16 PM | 11
So there we were after 1 month waiting for a man with a name and a job title to actually say it was Novichok, and finally one came along presented as the head of Porton Down.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/garyaitkenhead/

Turns out:

Shame Sky didn't bother to ask if he works in Porton Down - I doubt he does.
Even greater shame no one has asked for a chemist from Porton Down to speak up. Maybe Corbyn will ask that, but right now the pro-Israel lobby is flat out to shut him up in case he mentions Palestine.

Reality Check , Apr 5, 2018 4:57:38 PM | 12
So, let me get this straight in my head for once. The Brits 'knew' even before this incident that Russia had been experimenting with doorknobs as delivery agents of this novichok stuff, yet it took them weeks, and dozens of alternate theories, to yell 'eureka, I finally have it. I'll go test the doorknobs now.'

Yep, that makes sense.

Tom Welsh , Apr 5, 2018 5:01:15 PM | 13
"We knew... pretty much... likely". That really says it all.
Somebody , Apr 5, 2018 5:02:03 PM | 14
Link to English language transcript for Yulia's phone conversation-

http://theduran.com/breaking-yulia-skripal-phone-call-leaked-everyones-health-is-fine-will-be-discharged-soon/

Ort , Apr 5, 2018 5:04:57 PM | 15
It were the lies of Theresa May and Boris Johnson that convinced the other countries, not any factual evidence...
______________________________________________

True enough, but I think it's more correct to say that the lies coerced the other countries rather than "convinced" them.

That is, they weren't "convinced" in the sense of "rationally persuaded". They were "convinced" the way fictional Mafia Don "convinced" stubborn or reluctant parties by "making them an offer they can't refuse".

As I say, perhaps this is just a matter of semantics. I suppose that if one tells lies while twisting one's interlocutor's arm sharply, the interlocutor may be "convinced" as much by the pain as the merits of the lies.

I think the feckless response is driven by seeing the handwriting on the wall, not necessarily believing what's being written.

james , Apr 5, 2018 5:05:55 PM | 16
the uk gov't is in trouble.. no amount of msm cover up is going to work.. they are on shaky ground..

as karlof1 shared earlier on the previous thread - craig murray is all over this doorknob bs and more..

james , Apr 5, 2018 5:07:34 PM | 17
btw - the un speech from the uk and usa were ridiculous... someone ought to get a manuscript of there words earlier today at the un special meeting on this and tear them apart... ripe for the taking...
somebody , Apr 5, 2018 5:14:41 PM | 18
7/8

It might have been pesticide poisoning . If doctors guessed correctly they would have been able to treat it. Pesticide poisoning happens a lot by accident in rural households.

Novichok shares characteristics with pesticides so laboratory results may very well be something that can be a pesticide - or Novichok.

The binary versions of the agents reportedly uses acetonitrile and an organic phosphate "that can be disguised as a pesticide precursor."

Mirzayanov gives somewhat different structures for Novichok agents in his autobiography to those which have been identified by Western experts.[53] He makes clear that a large number of compounds were made, and many of the less potent derivatives were reported in the open literature as new organophosphate insecticides,[54] so that the secret chemical weapons program could be disguised as legitimate pesticide research.

Good reminder that we fight bees with a "military grade weapon".

Hoarsewhisperer , Apr 5, 2018 5:20:19 PM | 19
Boris needs to grow a brain. "28 other countries have been so convinced..." is a pretty limp-wristed claim to brag about when one considers that if the evidence was overwhelmingly Q.E.D. then 194 other countries would be convinced. And Boris could just STFU and wouldn't need to say anything.
james , Apr 5, 2018 5:22:46 PM | 20
and what has happened to the pet? how does one spell 'cover up' in the uk??
flamingo , Apr 5, 2018 5:36:13 PM | 22
Thank you anonymous #9. I was expecting a mushroom and that reminded me of the passport that survived the 9/11 twin towers attack in the USA.

These malign fools are klutzes and for that we should be either thankful or terrified. My first thought on reading b's headline was a rough Brexit will follow.

Blessings on your day b.

Daniel , Apr 5, 2018 5:39:30 PM | 23
So, a tad more than 10% of the countries in the world are going along with this provocation. But, as when Ms. Clinton recently stated that she "won" in all the districts that matter (tripling down on driving that wedge between the "Party of the People" and the actual people), the countries that are playing along are the only ones that matter.

Meanwhile: Syria, Ukraine, Israeli slaughtering of unarmed protesters and passing laws to "finish 1948," Turkey, Honduras, Venezuela, Brazil (coup regime set to imprison second former leftist President), mass labor unrest in France, 3 US States school systems shut down by wild cat strikes, etc. etc. etc.

Oops. My dogs see a squirrel. Gotta go.

karlof1 , Apr 5, 2018 5:58:17 PM | 24
The only Truth being ascertained in this SNAFU are the lies being unmasked. The diatribes by UK/US "ambassadors" at UNSC are utterly inane compared to Russian rationality. Germany's essentially said UK's provided zero evidence to back its very serious accusations and the vast majority of the world agrees. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, and both the UK and Outlaw US Empire are guilty of casting Big Lies very often to further their Imperialistic Outlaw behavior since 1945--and that's precisely what's being done now.

I think bevin's correct--Brexit, Corbyn and further vilification of Russia are the motives driving this SNAFU.

CE , Apr 5, 2018 6:04:48 PM | 25
Typo: der Stinker heisst Laschet, nicht Laschert.
Don Bacon , Apr 5, 2018 6:07:39 PM | 26
The OPCW Director has said that "The mandate of the FFM [Fact-Finding Mission] is confined to establishing only the fact of the use of chemical weapons" and not to determine accountability. But the recent meeting on April 4 was to consider the UK charges against Russia, which had EU and US backing.

from a document....

Russia convened an OPCW Special Executive Council meeting in The Hague on April 4, for "addressing the situation around allegations of non-compliance with the Convention made by one State Party against the other State Party with regard to the incident in Salisbury" on March 4. . . here

No doubt Mr. Johnson's remarks were considered and proof demanded. There has been no report on the meeting yet, which should show up here .

Galvanise , Apr 5, 2018 6:15:21 PM | 27
Hi MoA, I wanted to share a funny but tinfoil-y theory that came up on the Russian web very early in the Skripal affair. Briefly, that Novichok was a bogus gas and a KGB psy op to begin with.

https://m.facebook.com/lazarchuk.andrey/posts/2054379401482631

This is a post by a novelist (red flag, I know) with obv. no credibility that claims that Novichok was in fact the name of a KGB operation to locate leakers in their chemical research staff by feeding disinfo about a chemical super-weapon, and that Mirzayanov (an analytical chemist not directly involved in research or production) was ID'd as a leaker as a result, and turned into a disinfo dispenser.

Literally a conspiracy theory (also might be unironic disinfo in itself), but just think how absolutely fucking hilarious it would be if it turned out that (a) novichok really is bogus and (b) without knowing that, the Brits tried a false flag with what they thought was a hype Russian superpoison but was actually rubbish unable of killing a 66 y.o. diabetic.

Also, it does kinda play into OPCW's continued refusal to add Novichok to their CW list, despite years of Mirzayanov's advocacy and even having the formulas.

Posting translation below:

"The tail has wagged the god:

Don't ask for my source, won't give it away anyway. Everything written below is vastly different from what you can find online.

'1. As far back as the early 1980's the Soviet Army stopped considering [chemical weapons] as a worthwhile weapon in a real war. Around 83-84 a decision was made to stop supplying the army with CWs, decreasing operational stocks of it and moving CW from the armed forces to long-term storage and weapon disposal facilies. From that time to 1996 no new CW items were supplied to the army, as well as no instruction materials on usage or defense against them.

2. Mirzoyanov's specialty is analytical chemistry, he was never involved in neither theoretical R&D nor production. He spent the entire 80's in the First Department.

3. In the second half of the 80's KGB launched a wide-scale disinformation operation, which also had a side objective - expose leaks. They developed two dozen bogus but very detailed projects for "new chemical superweapons, which cannot be detected by existing NATO dectors and which is impossible to defend against" (NOVA with its variants, "Novichok" with variants, ASD and others). It was "Novichok" that passed through Mirzoyanov's hands.

4. R&D and production facility in Kantyubek was reoriented from testing and producing CW and BO [military equipment?] to producing herbicides and defoliants - mainly for the cotton industry's needs.

5. Mirzoyanov was immediately identified as a leaker, removed from any materials with a real basis behind them in 1990, and fed a disinformation channel since. In '92 he voluntarily exposed himself by publishing his famous article. Form this moment on "Novichok" reaches the realm of mass media. In '95 NYT writes about the "new Russian superweapon."

6. NATO had spent $10 bln. creating countermeasures for a fake CW.

7. What really happened in Salisbury is absolutely unclear; the victims' behavior, the actions of the police, medics, or special services doesn't all fit into a comprehensible picture. Poisoning by a synthetic neurotoxin, analogous to that of the fugu fish, seems more or less probable.

Summarizing briefly: "Novichok" is not the name of a chemical weapon, but a KGB operation cypher, developed to expose leaks and feed disinformation.'"

Galvanise , Apr 5, 2018 6:17:06 PM | 28
*gah, "The tail has wagged the dog", obviously.
Jen , Apr 5, 2018 6:18:27 PM | 29
Gerd Muller @ 7, Mischi @ 8:

The Skripals apparently ordered seafood risotto at Zizzi's Restaurant in Salisbury. If you look up Zizzi's Restaurant menus on Google, you will see the menus mention risotto with mussels.

Mussels can carry algae-related toxins that can cause (among other things) nausea, vomiting and (depending on the toxin involved) even brain damage, memory loss and death. Usually the symptoms set in about half an hour after eating so knowing when the Skripals had lunch and when they arrived at the park bench is critical.

https://www.emedicinehealth.com/wilderness_shellfish_poisoning_gastrointestinal/article_em.htm#causes_and_symptoms_of_shellfish_poisoning

Unfortunately the table where the Skripals had lunch has now been destroyed. The park bench has been removed from the shopping mall and who knows what state it's in now?

Also what appears to have been ignored in the official account is whether the Skripals had lunch on their own or if there was someone else with them at the cemetery, at the restaurant, at the pub or later in the shopping mall. That someone need not have accompanied them to all four spots where they went on March 4.

Babyl-on , Apr 5, 2018 6:19:42 PM | 30
I agree with just about everyone here one way or another, but propaganda works and they have the media - they are scoring points.

I watched the Security Counsel meeting this afternoon and I must say the Russians did not do themselves any favors, he was rambling, sputtering and all over the map. Did not even mention that this agent can be made in many places and other details. The British argument was polished and thorough, it will convince a great many.

They have lost much but not all of their control of the narrative.

c1ue , Apr 5, 2018 6:26:28 PM | 31
What's really funny and sad is how the story keeps changing.

Do a search for Skripal poisoning and read through the first 2 or 3 pages - you'll see that at various times, it is the Skripal's car door handle, then it is their house door handle, then it is in their buckwheat (grechka).

The car door is problematic - it was raining.

The house door is problematic - since when do both people leaving both grasp the door handle? Unless maybe they're OCD.

The grechka is problematic - how did the policeman get ill?

Seems pretty weak all around, especially now that Porton Down has specifically stated that there is no evidence of manufacture in Russia.

Petri Krohn , Apr 5, 2018 6:33:54 PM | 32
The London Times now claims the novichok was made in Russia in the closed town of Shikhany , formerly known as Volsk-18.

Agent used in Salisbury made at Russia's Shikhany military research base: Times - Reuters

(Reuters) - A Russian military research base was identified as the source of the nerve agent used in Salisbury, England, at a British intelligence briefing for the country's allies, the Times of London reported on Thursday.

The gathering was used to persuade world leaders that Moscow was behind the poisoning and said that the Novichok chemical was produced at the Shikhany facility in southwest Russia, the Times said. The briefing included suggestions that Shikhany had been used during the past decade to test whether the nerve agent could be utilized for assassinations abroad, the newspaper said.

The Guardian made the same claim already on March 14th. I do not know if there is any real information or even guesswork here. Both Britain and Russia may have only one chemical weapons research facility each.

Rob , Apr 5, 2018 6:38:50 PM | 33
So now the standard has been lowered to a "plausible" connection to Russia. That allows for wild conjecture that will leave the public even more confused and, ultimately, disinterested. The term "Novi-fog" well describes the Tories' desperate effort to escape blame for their massive screw-up.
Jen , Apr 5, 2018 6:40:41 PM | 34
James @ 20, 21: The guinea pigs died from thirst? You'd think if there was nerve gas contamination in the house somewhere, thirst would be the last thing they'd die of.

Even the story about the animals' fate looks as if it had been cobbled together at the last minute.

If police had visited the house on March 4, immediately or almost immediately after the Skripals were found, surely they would have found the animals in good condition? Sergei Skripal had apparently had the animals brought over from Russia at considerable expense to himself. One assumes he must have been quite attached to them. Yet when the animals are found, they are malnourished and starving or dead from thirst?

So what was DS Nick Bailey doing if he didn't go to the house on March 4? When was he stricken with nerve gas poisoning?

Harry , Apr 5, 2018 6:54:16 PM | 35
@ Petri Krohn | 32

Its a common Western practice to point finger to enemies military or research facility. They win regardless of circumstances.

a) They have a specific location to point to, which "prove" they have intel.
b) If an enemy refuse access to secure facility, that means "they have something to hide."
c) If an enemy allows access and they find nothing, they simply say enemy "has hidden it somewhere else", plus they can spy on all the other research in that facility.

US does it all the time as well, whether its Iraq, or Iran (Parchin saga is of an epic proportions), etc.

GoraDiva , Apr 5, 2018 6:55:04 PM | 36
Only two words: perfidious Albion... always was and always will be. And this is how the west spins off into the dustbin of history... the newbie way.
karlof1 , Apr 5, 2018 6:59:25 PM | 37
The following is from Ziad at SyrPers :

"Folks, the reason for all this anti-Putin nonsense is the one fact that the Syrian government now holds over 11 British officers who were liaised with the terrorists in the Ghouta. They were captured 2 weeks ago by Syrian Army commandos and are being held in separate jails around the Damascus area inside heavily guarded military bases. The Brits want them badly before they are used to implicate England in the mess it helped to create in Syria. Damascus won't budge on this issue and, evidently, the English are assuming Moscow is not putting pressure on Dr. Assad to release them to Old Blighty. Too bad. And they were caught out of uniform, such that they could be executed as spies under international law. Isn't that a howler?"

I posted about this possible angle several days ago when word of captured ZioNATO operatives were more rumor-like; instead, here Ziad makes a definite statement of fact. IMO, if the Syrians do have these spies--and I really hope they do--given the nature of the war waged against Syria, they will not let them go for any bargain.

It seems English speakers are professional prevaricators -- I certainly had problems with truth-telling until about age 20. Otherwise, why the myth that the young George Washington being unable to tell a lie? Yet another lie to cover for endless prevarication.

francesca , Apr 5, 2018 7:08:22 PM | 38
pretty sure the Russians listed the Shikhany facility for the OPCW when they did their verification and monitoring of Destruction of Russian Chemical warfare stockpiles. Bullshit again , I'm picking, and not even very well researched
Don Bacon , Apr 5, 2018 7:08:51 PM | 39
@29
Food poisoning? Would the police lie? (trick question). Mar 11, 2018 - Traces of the nerve agent used to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia has been discovered at the Zizzi restaurant where they last ate, police have said.

Zizzi food poisoning complaints from Trip Advisor (undercooking):
> Zizzi - The Strand
73-75 Strand, London WC2R 0DE, England (Covent Garden)
November 12, 2016 via mobile
Regrettably our visit last night will be the last! Clearly have food poisoning this morning from undercooked chicken in the Strozzapretti Pesto, we didn't have lunch so this can be the only place it's originated from.
Safe to say I'll be stuck in bed today!
> Zizzi Union Square, Aberdeen AB11 5RG, Scotland
Having been to Zizzis in St Andrews on numerous occasions we decided to go here before the cinema . .pizza/calzone and chicken pasta for me...Half an hour into the film my stomach started churning and I felt nauseous. Got home and have had extreme diahorrea and abdo pain all night. Since all I had yesterday was cereal and toast and jam I think it's safe to conclude I picked this up at zizzis. DON'T GO....

james , Apr 5, 2018 7:17:40 PM | 40
@34 jen... it is a really poorly written script and appears to be changing quite regularly.... none of it adds up and as many of us here have said - we are calling bullshit on most all of it.. the story on the pets is further proof that none of this story holds up with any scrutiny..
karlof1 , Apr 5, 2018 7:34:11 PM | 41
What sort of libretto would Gilbert and Sullivan compose for this fiasco. Could The Onion do better? Reminds me of Cheech & Chong's skits.
Dilara , Apr 5, 2018 7:52:03 PM | 42
@ 27
Chemical weapon named Novichok – a reality check - April 01, 2018 by Eugenia for the Saker Blog is a long article and the following part of it would fit to your story or confirm it:

Mirzayanov claimed that the Soviet Union developed a binary nerve agent 8-10-times more potent that the American VX. A binary agent is a compound produced in a chemical reaction from two benign precursors right before use. Such agents offer obvious advantages: the production is much easier with no extraordinary safety precautions required, storage is also much simplified, no need to stockpile the actual chemical weapons agent (CWA), there is no problem with stability of the CWA, et cetera. The US spent significant resources on the binary CWA program of its own. Interestingly, in the original publications of 1992 the agent in question was simply referred to as binary agent. The name Novichok first surfaced in the 1994 report by Lev Feodorov about the chemical weapons in Russia. According to Vladimir Uglev, a chemist who worked at the same institute as Mirzayanov on the new series of CWA, the official name of the program was Foliant. Mirzayanov later confirmed that.

The believable part of the story is that the Soviet Union and later Russia would have a successful chemical weapons program similar to that in the US. Uglev specifically stated that the Foliant program was meant as the answer to the American VX agent. The quantities of the agents produced ranged from several milligrams to kilograms, and several hundreds compound were supposedly synthesized – all this points to the development stage of the program. There is no indication that any of the agents were ever weaponized, i.e. munitions for delivery of the CWA to the enemy were designed, except for the statements of Mirzayanov. However, by his own admission, he wasn't involved in weaponization, and, thus, he is unlikely to have a firsthand know-ledge about it. Remarkably, Uglev said that although his group developed several deadly substances, attempts to develop binary formulations failed, and no binary agents were ever produced.

Uglev's statements regarding his work are much more specific than Mirzayanov's and, thus, more believable. Besides, Uglev, unlike Mirzayanov, was involved in the actual development of the agents. Mirzayanov's job, as the Head of the Counterintelligence Department, was to control the space around the institute, and he had no part in developing the technology.

Don Bacon , Apr 5, 2018 7:55:53 PM | 43
@42
Also it's been established that novichok doesn't exist.
WorldBLee , Apr 5, 2018 7:57:39 PM | 44
The UK long ago voted in the highest chambers of power to manifest a Trexit, the exit from all forms of the truth. Every day they prove this more and more.
kpax , Apr 5, 2018 8:00:17 PM | 45
@ Galvanise #28
Indeed the tail has wagged the God but first and foremost the tail has done the Devil's work. If all dogs of wars are now unleashed following some absurd false flag as murky and grotesque as the Skippy affair...
we, as human species, are absolutely doomed to live in hell for quite sometimes.

When all it takes is a couple of goofs strained by some remnants from Vicky's cookies virus pleagues, we are issuing a no-parole sentence on all human beings... further to be condemned for centuries, our heads hidden in some 'Novi-fogs' of wars... or another.

Perhaps some sort of British standards of living, permanently under some kind of... 'foog'. We have recently learned from the Pope there is no Hell to go to (cos' we already are in living hell). Then, Foggy Paradise must be empty, deprived from any kind of wisdom.

Petri Krohn , Apr 5, 2018 8:34:42 PM | 47
The only thing that has been officially confirmed is that blood tests showed breakdown products of organophosphates that were believed to come from a "Novichok class nerve agent or closely related agent." I still do not think they have found novichok anywhere in the environment or have collected a sample that could be independently verified to be novichok in some foreign laboratory. At least we have not seen any official confirmation that such a sample exists. Nor have we received information on exactly what compound this "novichok" is claimed to be.

I suspect the traces of "novichok" found all over the place, from the Zizzi restaurant to the door handle, are just some ordinary organophosphate pesticide.

A POSSIBLE SCENARIO

The Skripals are suffering from "paralytic shellfish poisoning" they received from saxitoxin or tetrodotoxin in the seafood in the Risotto Pesce they ate at the Zizzi restaurant. The Skripals received traces of some organophosphate pesticide from the flowers they left at the graves in the morning. They then left trace on the door handles of the BMW. A video show the BMW driving away from Sergei Skripl's house at 14:55 in the afternoon. This would mean that they visited the house after leaving the pub and entering the Zizzi restaurant, leaving further organophosphate traces on the door knob of the house.

Lufasu Mafalu , Apr 5, 2018 9:01:07 PM | 48
Thanks 'B' for keeping the torch lit and shine thru the british lies .. it is so lame and amateurish and i agree for years these propagandist been doing their job the 'easy way' and now they been exposed by the still thinking crowd in the net..

BTW anyone here know why Col Patrick Lang disable comments on SST ? is he afraid of people posting facts and truth in his site ?

Jen , Apr 5, 2018 9:12:09 PM | 49
Petri Krohn @ 47: I'd say your story is the most credible interpretation of all the "evidence".

This would suggest that if the breakfast cereal brought to the UK from Russia for Sergei Skripal is tested for "Novichok", it will also test positive for traces of "Novichok". (Unless of course Lord President Vlademort rids the entire Russian Federation of all its agricultural pests with a magnanimous wave of his hand and the utterance of a secret spell.)

The police officer DS Nick Bailey who was hospitalised may have had an allergic reaction to the pesticide or to something else in the Skripal house.

Mischi , Apr 5, 2018 9:12:49 PM | 50
the Lithuanian PM has asked for concrete proof of Russia's guilt https://sputniknews.com/world/201804061063260917-lithuania-russia-skripal-case/

[Apr 10, 2018] Arguing with Great Britain is like playing chess with a pigeon

Mar 31, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

DillyDilly -> IH8OBAMA Sat, 03/31/2018 - 17:37 Permalink

By now, Russia should have learned that arguing with GB is like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good you are, the bird is just gonna knock all the pieces over, shit on the board, and strut around as if it won anyway.

https://pics.me.me/sull-gazing-com-arguing-with-idiots-is-like-playing-

[Apr 10, 2018] Skripal Poison Case Becoming British Hostage Scenario by Finian CUNNINGHAM

Apr 09, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

The British denial of a visitor visa to a Skripal family relative from Russia is fueling concern that the whole affair is far more sinister than what the British government and media have been claiming.

Far from the Skripal father and daughter being the alleged victims of a Russian assassination plot, it now seems increasingly apparent that they are being held against their will by Britain's authorities. In short, hostages of the British state.

From the outset of the alleged poisoning incident in Salisbury on March 4, the official British narrative has been pocked suspiciously with inconsistencies. The lightning-fast rush to judgment by the British government – within days – to blame the Kremlin for "a brazen murder attempt" was perhaps the main giveaway that the narrative was following a script and foregone conclusion to incriminate Russia.

Last week, the saga took several significant twists raising more doubts about the official British narrative. First, British scientists at the Porton Down warfare laboratory admitted that they hadn't in fact confirmed the alleged nerve agent used against the Skripals originated from Russia. That admission spectacularly exposed earlier British government claims as false, if not barefaced lies.

Secondly, it emerged that potentially key witness-material was destroyed by the British. Three pet animals in the Salisbury home of Sergei Skripal were declared dead and their remains incinerated. Autopsies could have shed light on the nature of the alleged nerve agent used against the Skripals. Why were the animal remains incinerated? And why did the British authorities disclose the fate of the animals only after the matter was raised by the Russian envoy to the UN Security Council on Thursday?

Thirdly, there is the strangely callous way that the British authorities have refused a visitor visa to a Skripal family relative from Russia who was intending to fly to England to be with her relatives while they are reportedly recuperating from the alleged poison attack.

Russian national Victoria Skripal revealed on Friday to Russian news media that she was refused a visa by British authorities to visit her relatives – cousin Yulia and uncle Sergei – who are reportedly confined to a hospital in Salisbury.

The day before her visa application was rejected, Victoria had a brief telephone conversation with Yulia. It appears that Victoria recorded the conversation and made it available to Russian media to broadcast. The transcript shows that Yulia's words were guarded. She was obviously not comfortable with speaking freely. Their phone call ended abruptly. But she did manage to advise her cousin in Russia that the latter would probably not be granted a visitor visa. Why would she say such a thing?

British media quickly tried to smear the Russian cousin, Victoria. A BBC journalist said that the British authorities "suspected that Victoria was being used as a pawn by the Kremlin". Russian's foreign ministry hit back at that suggestion, saying it was a despicable slur.

For her part, Victoria Skripal told Russian media that she thinks the British authorities have "something to hide" by refusing to grant her a permit to Britain in order to visit her cousin and uncle. Was her visa application rejected by the British authorities because she had the "audacity" to record the phone call with her cousin and make it available to Russian media?

Far more plausible is not that Victoria is a "Kremlin pawn" but that the British fear that Victoria would not be a "London pawn". The worst thing for the British authorities would be for an independent-minded Skripal relative coming to the Salisbury hospital and asking critical questions about the nature of why her relatives are being held there.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if several other Skripal relatives in Russia were to make similar applications for visitor visas to Britain. Surely, the British authorities could not turn them all down?

For over a month now since the March 4 incident in Salisbury, the Russian consular representatives in Britain have not been allowed access to the Skripal pair, allegedly being treated in hospital.

Fair enough, Sergei Skripal is a disgraced former Russian spy who had been living in England for nearly eight years. He was exiled there by Moscow as part of a spy-swap with Britain's foreign intelligence MI6 whom Skripal had served as a double agent. It is believed he was given British citizenship by the London authorities.

However, his daughter, 33-year-old Yulia, is a citizen of the Russian Federation. She was visiting her father on holiday when the pair became ill – apparently from exposure to a nerve agent – while sitting in a public park in Salisbury.

Yulia and the Russian authorities are therefore entitled under international law to have consular contact. The Russian embassy in London has been repeatedly denied access by the British authorities to one of its citizens. On the face of it, that is an outrageous breach of international law by the British.

Significantly, Yulia did not express to her cousin during their phone conversation that she did not want to see the Russian consular people. That phone call was obviously initiated by Yulia. Her Russian-based cousin at one point asked her, "Is this your phone?".

How Yulia got use of the phone is a good question. Was it a hospital staff member who felt obliged to allow her a quick call home? Evidently, the call was held in a rushed manner, and Yulia felt constrained to talk in detail about her confinement. And why would she warn her cousin in Russia that the latter would not be given a visa before the application result was known?

It is speculated in British media – most probably at the behest of briefings by shadowy state officials – that Yulia Skripal does not want to see her cousin, or the Russian consular representatives. Even though Yulia did not express that in her phone call. If Yulia didn't want to see her cousin, why would she bother calling her, apparently out of the blue?

The speculation about Yulia's preferences are based on the official British premise that the Russian state attempted to carry out an assassination with a toxic chemical on her father. It is therefore insinuated by the official British narrative that Yulia would not want to see the Russian authorities.

But that logic depends entirely on the plausibility of the British version of events. That is, that a Russian state operation used a Russian nerve agent to try to kill Sergei Skripal, and his daughter as collateral damage.

That British version has relied totally on assertion, innuendo and unverified claims made by politicians briefed by secret services. Claims which we are now seeing to be unfounded, as the Porton Down scientists disclosed last week.

At no point have the British produced any evidence to substantiate their high-flown allegations against Russia. Indeed, Britain refuses to give Russia access to alleged samples in order to carry out an independent chemical analysis.

The entire British case relies on a presumption of guilt and a despicable prejudice towards Russia as a malicious actor. That's it entirely. British prejudice and contempt for due process.

However, what if the Russian government were correct? What if the British state carried out a macabre false flag operation by stealthily injuring the Skripals with some kind of chemical in order to blame it on Russia? For the plausible purpose of adding one more smear campaign in order to demonize and delegitimize Russia as an international power.

No doubt, the situation is disturbing and disorientating especially for Yulia Skripal who apparently was simply visiting her father in England for a happy family reunion.

More sinister, however, is the apparent lack of free will being afforded to Yulia Skripal. The British official position simply conflates their innuendo of a Russian plot, an innuendo which is increasingly untenable.

The denial of a visitor visa to Yulia's family relatives from Russia points to the sinister conclusion that the British authorities are engaging in a macabre propaganda stunt. Moreover, a propaganda stunt involving the criminal assault on a Russian citizen and the ongoing illegal detention of that citizen.

[Apr 10, 2018] A Very British Farce

Apr 10, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Mark J. Doran wrote this very British farce. (Publish here with his permission.)

SERGEI: I'm not dead!

MORTICIAN: What?

CUSTOMER: Nothing - here's your ninepence.

SERGEI: I'm not dead!

MORTICIAN: Here - he says he's not dead!

CUSTOMER: Yes, he is. The 'Times' said so. March 12th. Front page. Trust me: he's dead.

SERGEI: I'm not!

MORTICIAN: He isn't.

CUSTOMER: Well, he will be soon. It was a Novichok nerve agent. There's no treatment, and no recovery is possible.

SERGEI: It was just the prawns, that's all! I'm getting better!

CUSTOMER: No, you are not. It was 'military grade', 8 times stronger than VX. You were dead in seconds.

MORTICIAN: Oh, I can't take him like that - it's against regulations.

SERGEI: How's my daughter? And what about my pets?

CUSTOMER: Oh, don't be such a baby.

MORTICIAN: I can't take him ...

SERGEI: I feel fine! I want to go back to Russia!

CUSTOMER: Oh, do us a favor ...

MORTICIAN: I can't.

CUSTOMER: Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long. We've someone coming over ...

MORTICIAN: I think I'll write a letter to the 'Times'.

CUSTOMER: No you bloody won't. Look at the trouble the last one caused.

b adds:

Yes, the scene is somewhat familiar. https://youtu.be/lDnS4pkmzis

[Apr 10, 2018] Full frontal assault from Russia today on Skripls front

Apr 10, 2018 | thesaker.is

Veritas on April 09, 2018 , · at 6:06 am UTC

Various news sources (RT, TASS) quoting the Russian MOD etc. all confirming it was Israeli F-15's:

https://sputniknews.com/world/201804091063353921-russia-israel-syria-airbase-attack/

No Russian casualties – but some as a couple of missiles hit the Western edge of the base and casualties for SAA.

Full frontal assault from Russia today:

1) Releasing of information on deaths of Russians in UK:

https://www.rt.com/news/423554-litvinenko-polonium-london-berezovsky/

https://sputniknews.com/world/201804091063355141-uk-russia-skripal-litvinenko-berezovky/

2) Russia has called a meeting of UNSC about International peace

https://sputniknews.com/us/201804091063350511-trum-macron-agree-response-syria/

US and France co-ordinating their positions

https://www.rt.com/news/423539-red-crescent-ghouta-no-chemical/

Red Crescent confirms no chemical use in Ghouta

3) In addition to Russian MOD clarification above and MOFA

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201804091063352207-daesh-offensive-missile-attack/

Daesh attacks after air strike and

Lavrov stressing again today that Russia warned of the chemical attack false flag weeks ago ..

Paulv on April 09, 2018 , · at 1:09 pm UTC
Russia should have pulled out of START weeks ago and tested nukes. Maybe they could today

[Apr 09, 2018] Portonblimp Down Episode 2 - A Tale By Boris Johnson - Craig Murray

Apr 09, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

"Comrade Putin, we have successfully stockpiled novichoks in secret for ten years, and kept them hidden from the OPCW inspectors. We have also trained our agents in secret novichok assassination techniques. The programme has cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but now we are ready. Naturally, the first time we use it we will expose our secret and suffer massive international blowback. So who should be our first target? The head of a foreign intelligence agency? A leading jihadist rebel in Syria? A key nuclear scientist? Even a Head of State?"

"No, Tovarich. There is this old retired guy I know living in Salisbury. We released him from jail years ago "

"With respect Comrade Putin, are you sure he is the most important target to reveal a programme we have put so much resource into for ten years?"

"Yes. I sit here every day and I cannot concentrate on the affairs of Russia or the World as all the time am thinking of Sergei Skripal. I should never have let him out of jail to spend his life buying lottery tickets and eating in Zizzis. But you must make absolutely certain to kill him."

"Don't worry Comrade Putin, we have been training in secret novichok assassination techniques for ten years. We even have an detailed manual explaining our methods. We will spread the novichok on his outside door handle (fiendish laugh)."

"Are you sure comrade? Is there not a danger it will wash off or get diluted?"

"No Comrade Putin, it never rains in England."

That is, genuinely, in every detail the official British government version of what happened in Salisbury, including the ten year programme and the secret assassination manual.

Despite this story being one of the most improbably wild conspiracy theories in human history, it is those who express any doubt at all as to its veracity who are smeared as "conspiracy theorists" or even "traitors".

All copyright on this article is waived. Feel free to use, translate and republish as you wish.

[Apr 09, 2018] Skripal might be connected with Ukrainian oligarchs such a Pelepelichniy, killed in London in 2012

Mar 30, 2018 | svpressa.ru

By the way, the Vice President of the Association of veterans of special services Berkut Valery Malevanny spoke about the same, about the Ukrainian trace in an interview with "SP". According to him, Skripal once worked for the Ukrainian mafia. Namely: on the oligarch Alexander Perepelichny who was killed in 2012 in London under unclear circumstances.

Was published reports on the financial status Skripal. It turns out that he has a house in Britain for 270 thousand pounds, a house in Spain for 210 thousand pounds, and a Bank account is 450 thousand pounds. Where does a simple British intelligence officer get that kind of money?

In addition, according to MI-5, Skripal regularly flew to Kiev and Odessa. Most likely, it was about establishing smuggling channels.

So, the Finns have every reason to question the British version of the poisoning of an ex-GRU officer.

[Apr 09, 2018] Skripal Case 'Sounds Like the Story Put Forth About Litvinenko'

Notable quotes:
"... *Mr. Dunkerley is recognized internationally for his research and publications about the 2006 Alexander Litvinenko polonium poisoning. ..."
Apr 09, 2018 | sputniknews.com

Sputnik: But in the case of Litvinenko there's a huge study, it was one of the most thorough investigations that was conducted by the British, Sir Robert Owen was in charge of that, although he came to the conclusion that there was sufficient evidence heard in open court to build a strong circumstantial case against the Russian state. Do you see any parallels between the two cases? Many people criticized Britain for giving an inadequate response to the Litvinenko case, do you think that they're compensating for that now?

William Dunkerley: The Litvinenko case, as far as the public description of what happened, was a hoax in my view. There was no factual basis, the coroner's inquest didn't start until around five years after his death and before the inquest opened, the British prosecutor Ken Macdonald had said that he had grave suspicions there was Russian state involvement, grave suspicions is a long way from having a case, so I don't think that anything that transpired with Robert Owen's inquest or inquiry has any legitimacy. He was definitely on a witch hunt looking for Russian state involvement. I was involved with an effort to get that witch hunt called off and had probably 50 interactions between me and the chancellor's office Chris Grayling and then Home Secretary Theresa May, and ultimately got them to come along with the view that I had taken about the case; that Owen was conducting a witch hunt that he wasn't authorized to do. Theresa May reprimanded Owen for that in the end and subsequently Owen agreed to remove the search for Russian culpability from the scope of his inquest. That happened at the end of 2013.

*Mr. Dunkerley is recognized internationally for his research and publications about the 2006 Alexander Litvinenko polonium poisoning.

[Apr 09, 2018] Russian Prosecutor General Threatens to Release May's Secret Correspondence

Apr 09, 2018 | sputniknews.com

Deputy Russian Prosecutor General Saak Karapetyan has addressed the case, surrounding the alleged poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal, who reportedly is no longer in critical condition. Russian Prosecutor General has accused Britain of violating international law by classifying Sergei Skripal's, as well as Alexander Litvinenko and Boris Berezovsky cases.

The cases of former intelligence officers Sergei Skripal and Alexander Litvinenko, as well as the case of former Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky , have been unfolding under the same scenario, unfounded accusations are followed by the demands for sanctions against Moscow, Karapetyan said Monday.

"The anti-Russian campaign around former officer Skripal and his daughter was unfolded by the UK authorities under a scenario similar to that already used in unfounded accusations against Russia over the alleged attempted murder of Boris Berezovsky in London in 2003 and the circumstances of the death of Alexander Litvinenko in the United Kingdom in November 2006," Karapetyan told a briefing.

The official noted that in all three cases the demands to introduce sanctions against Russia had followed groundless claims of Russia's involvement.

On Berezovsky Case

Berezovsky was granted an asylum even though the UK Interior Ministry didn't find any evidence that there was an assassination attempt on the former Russian businessman, the official noted.

Russia hasn't received any documents, concerning the death of tycoon Berezovsky and its cause, Karapetyan noted, adding that Russia submitted 39 requests to the UK for the period from 2006 to 2011 on Berezovsky.

READ MORE: Skripal Case 'Sounds Like the Story Put Forth About Litvinenko' -- Analyst

Berezovsky was most interested in killing former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko in November 2006, advisor to Russian Prosecutor General Nikolai Atmonyev said Monday.

"I have every reason to assert that Berezovsky was interested in eliminating Litvinenko at that time," Atmonyev told a briefing.

[Apr 09, 2018] Publication by the USA formula of Novichok was probably a fake as in case it is real it put Israel into tremendous danger

Notable quotes:
"... Basically, Mirzayanov claims that it is relatively easy to make the Novichok nerve agents. So, some enterprising Arabs could buy a few chemists to make a few tons of it and then spray it all over the little Satan. Do you really think that the Jews who run the United States would allow the publication of information that could lead to thousands of deaths in Israel? ..."
"... Remember, Mirzayanov was given residence (and a University position) in the United States after he was kicked out of Russia. There are also a number of "people who should know" that have stated that there is zero solid evidence for the existence of the Novichok nerve agents. For example: Robin Black in Development, Historical Use and Properties of Chemical Warfare Agents (2016): ..."
"... "In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, 'Novichoks' (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of the 'Foliant' programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published." ..."
"... "There has never been a 'Novichok' research project conducted in Russia,... But in the West, some countries carried out such research, which they called 'Novichok,' for some reason." ..."
Apr 09, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Slack Jack -> Slack Jack Mon, 04/09/2018 - 09:54 Permalink

Remember, the evil people, Theresa May, Stoltenberg, Trump and the rest, are damning Russia with obvious lies.

The Novichok nerve agents don't even exist.

HERE IS THE PROOF:

The Novichok nerve agents are supposedly much more toxic than the nerve gases VX or Sarin (and yet the Skripals are still alive!?).

Mirzayanov's book, published in 2008, contains the formulas he alleges can be used to create Novichoks. In 1995, he explained that "the chemical components or precursors" of Novichok are "ordinary organophosphates that can be made at commercial chemical companies that manufacture such products as fertilizers and pesticides."

https://www.amazon.com/State-Secrets-Insiders-Chronicle-Chemical/dp/143

Basically, Mirzayanov claims that it is relatively easy to make the Novichok nerve agents. So, some enterprising Arabs could buy a few chemists to make a few tons of it and then spray it all over the little Satan. Do you really think that the Jews who run the United States would allow the publication of information that could lead to thousands of deaths in Israel?

Do you really think they would protect the publisher of such information by giving him residence in the United States?

Remember, Mirzayanov was given residence (and a University position) in the United States after he was kicked out of Russia. There are also a number of "people who should know" that have stated that there is zero solid evidence for the existence of the Novichok nerve agents. For example: Robin Black in Development, Historical Use and Properties of Chemical Warfare Agents (2016):

"In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, 'Novichoks' (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of the 'Foliant' programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published."

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/03/the-novichok-story-is-i

And, Alexander Shulgin, Russia's representative to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (2018):

"There has never been a 'Novichok' research project conducted in Russia,... But in the West, some countries carried out such research, which they called 'Novichok,' for some reason."

CONCLUSION: The Novichok nerve agents don't even exist.

[Apr 09, 2018] The specialist chemical weapons investigators did not gain access to the Skripal residence UNTIL APRIL 4

Apr 09, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

jawbone | Apr 8, 2018 6:01:04 PM | 21

@ 17 -- There seem to be lots of weasely things being said about the fate of the Skripal pets. The big, fluffy black cat with amber eyes should in no way whatsoever have suffered such depletion of calories that he had to be put down. I fear he was sent to Porton Down to be "studied," and then "put down."

If there was a water source --dripping faucet, water closet, most houses have some place a pet can drink from other that his water bowl-- a cat can survive weeks. My Maine Coon disappeared, but showed up about 3-4 weeks later, ragged coat, unkempt, very thin, but, when given saline solution by the vet, immediately began to act more normal. Took a while to get her muscle mass rebuilt, but she survived.

An article from The Sun, dated April 5th, has a photo of Nash Van Drake (what a pretty cat), and states the specialist chemical weapons investigators did not gain access to the Skripal residence UNTIL APRIL 4TH!!! We know from photographs that lots of folks wearing moons suits were around for weeks -- why was nothing done to care for the pets?

I can't find it now through google, but I read a comment or tweet from a vet who had made repeated offers to care for the pets. These pets should never have suffered to the extent they did.

Someone in power did not want anyone outside those with enforced silence agreements to see those pets.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5983643/skripals-beloved-cat-nash-van-drake-had-to-be-secretly-put-down-following-the-poison-attack/

The sickly mog was transported to the Ministry of Defence res­earch laboratory at Porton Down to be tested, where he was found to be severely malnourished.

The lab's top veterinary officer ruled the pet was in so much pain he should be put down.

His body was then immediately incinerated to avoid contamination from the deadly nerve agent Novichok.

Sergei's guinea pigs were also destroyed at the top secret military research facility.

(If there is a hell, may these animal abusers end up there with long and miserable afterlives.)

[Apr 09, 2018] Portonblimp Down Episode 2 - A Tale By Boris Johnson - Craig Murray

Apr 09, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

"Comrade Putin, we have successfully stockpiled novichoks in secret for ten years, and kept them hidden from the OPCW inspectors. We have also trained our agents in secret novichok assassination techniques. The programme has cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but now we are ready. Naturally, the first time we use it we will expose our secret and suffer massive international blowback. So who should be our first target? The head of a foreign intelligence agency? A leading jihadist rebel in Syria? A key nuclear scientist? Even a Head of State?"

"No, Tovarich. There is this old retired guy I know living in Salisbury. We released him from jail years ago "

"With respect Comrade Putin, are you sure he is the most important target to reveal a programme we have put so much resource into for ten years?"

"Yes. I sit here every day and I cannot concentrate on the affairs of Russia or the World as all the time am thinking of Sergei Skripal. I should never have let him out of jail to spend his life buying lottery tickets and eating in Zizzis. But you must make absolutely certain to kill him."

"Don't worry Comrade Putin, we have been training in secret novichok assassination techniques for ten years. We even have an detailed manual explaining our methods. We will spread the novichok on his outside door handle (fiendish laugh)."

"Are you sure comrade? Is there not a danger it will wash off or get diluted?"

"No Comrade Putin, it never rains in England."

That is, genuinely, in every detail the official British government version of what happened in Salisbury, including the ten year programme and the secret assassination manual.

Despite this story being one of the most improbably wild conspiracy theories in human history, it is those who express any doubt at all as to its veracity who are smeared as "conspiracy theorists" or even "traitors".

All copyright on this article is waived. Feel free to use, translate and republish as you wish.

[Apr 08, 2018] Prime Minister May is seen at around beating the cat against a wall.

Apr 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Posted by: librul | Apr 7, 2018 9:05:48 AM | 4

Prime Minister May is seen at around the 0:40 (depending upon clip version) mark beating the cat against a wall.

Also, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g is the "Burn the Witch" scene. With Putin as the witch it is a fair representation of the type of justice and deep thought applied to the Skripal case.

mike k , Apr 7, 2018 9:30:10 AM | 6
First as tragedy, then as farce.......
Saul , Apr 7, 2018 10:00:16 AM | 7
Reminds me of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch...

[Apr 08, 2018] Syria - Timelines Of Gas Attacks Follow A Similar Scheme

From comments: "I was quite surprised the rebels actually went ahead with the so-called gas attack. They didn't, US-France-UK-(Turkey) did. The rebels are the ones with guns and ammo, the alliance are the ones with actors and cameras. "
Notable quotes:
"... If Trump possesses one talent it must surely be the ability to spot a Con Artist pulling a fast one. If he can't connect the same dots that b has just done then Trump has to be an idiot, and I don't for a second believe that he is an idiot. ..."
"... Just one thing that I should point out: the Syrian Observatory is NOT claiming that there has been a chemical weapons attack on Douma. ..."
"... But the claim that those suffocations were the result of chlorine attack is being made by the white helmets, not (at least so far) by the SOHR. ..."
"... The best time for Putin to respond to a Western provocation isn't now, it's when he effectively has hundreds of thousands of Western hostages in his country - June/July. ..."
"... For White Helmets read Britain. They are British created, funded and operated. May's Government has to be deep in this as well. ..."
"... Never forget that May, Cameron and other conservative MPs crossed the floor of parliament and voted for Blair and the illegal attack on Iraq when Labour MPs refused to support him. ..."
"... I hope that this "news" will just fade away. Sad fact is that whatever Russians say or do it doesn't really matter anymore. A narrative and a rhetoric coming from the US is now at the so low level that any diplomatic language or a talk is rendered obsolete. ..."
"... I also think that is is not up to Trump, but more off to a military and the dark powers around Trump, that he doesn't really understand, to decide what is happing next. If anything. ..."
"... The hostage here is the world cup itself, just as the 2014 Olympics were. And in retrospect it was probably a mistake for Russia to host them, but then who could have predicted all this back in 2007 or 8? ..."
"... At any rate, Russia should resist provocations games or not. Retaliation, if any, should be covert and deniable. Unless the west is dumb enough to openly attack Russian forces. Then a hammer blow to the face is appropriate. ..."
"... If there was such a FF 'gas attack' as we have just seen in Syria while the World Cup was on and the US/UK response (as we've heard previously from Russian/Syrian sources) was to initiate strikes against Syrian Government installations, and then Russia has promised to respond if any of their personnel were killed in these strikes the Russians reserve the right (as they have repeatedly started) to strike back against any US/UK targets responsible for the strikes - ie - shooting US/UK planes out of the sky or sinking US/UK warships, destroyers or carriers in the Eastern Mediterranean. ..."
"... If that level of escalation were to occur (and take note I'm not saying it will because I don't believe Putin will take this bait), but if it were, where could the escalation lead on the part of the US/UK?? ..."
"... These areas are intensely scrutinized by the Russians and the SAA, drones, satellite. It would be good to get some footage of the White Helmets staging this, but of course they are embedded with all the rest of the fighting men elsewhere and are never anywhere near where all the children tend to be targeted. ..."
"... I am confident that JAYSH was not going to negotiate, until after they had finished the "job" for their paymasters...once that was completed, they are ready to negotiate again... ..."
"... But The Donald is saying that there are women and children amongst those affected by the supposed attack, but other sites are reporting on the astonishing fact that there are only children in the broadcast footage.. what amount to a staged play like that of Goutha years ago... ..."
"... July 16, 2017. Newswire. CIA Director Admits Fooling Trump Over Syrian Chemical Weapons Story ( ) The false flag attack, which actually originated from CIA rebel groups in the region, resulted in Trump launching Tomahawk missiles into Syria, killing 15 civilians. Posted because of some interest despite misleading title and dubious source. http://yournewswire.com/cia-trump-syria-chemical-weapons/ ..."
"... I am afraid. Have not been this afraid since election night when Hillary was almost elected. The world lucked out and survived to live another day. Has our luck run out? ..."
"... Sigh, here we go again, just like Skripal case, west acts with propaganda and psyops without any evidence. The stupid TRUMP will of course bomb Syria again along with the disgusting Macron cheered by EU and western media. ..."
"... In the US when a murder occurs and a suspect apprehended there is a trial that can take weeks or months, and the prosecution and the defense present their expert Witnesses. Then at the end of all that a jury usually decides where the person is guilty or not. On the other hand, when a crime is alleged in another country far far away from the US, such as an alleged gas attack in Syria, within days we know exactly who is responsible and on that basis are willing to commit arms, troops and spend billions of dollars to kill people in large quantities and destroy a country. One would think that given the stakes involved a little bit more care might be taken. ..."
"... "Gas" scares the bejesus out of rubes. Makes Great Drama. Triggers, then reinforces historical themes. "The fiend! He gassed his own people!" "Gas Chambers" (Cant' go there!). If there's gas, well, by golly there's got to be a ham-handed, asymmetrical "response" (motherfocker of all bombs!) from the "International Community". ..."
"... BTW, kudos to those who pegged the Skripal incident as prelude to some sort of chemical incident in Syria. It couldn't have been scripted better for a TV program. Oh, wait... ..."
"... The point is that the Russians have been preparing for just such an event for months. Was it not two months ago that the Russians put troops into Damascus to prevent a decapitating strike? A US strike would be a sort of Kursk Offensive, attacking into a well-prepared defence. ..."
Apr 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

March 30 2017: U.S. priority on Syria no longer focused on 'getting Assad out': Haley

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The United States' diplomatic policy on Syria for now is no longer focused on making the war-torn country's president, Bashar al-Assad, leave power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said on Thursday, in a departure from the Obama administration's initial and public stance on Assad's fate.

April 4 2017: Suspected gas attack in Syria reportedly kills dozens

World leaders expressed shock and outrage Tuesday at reports of a suspected chemical attack in northwestern Syria that killed scores of civilians, with one UK official suggesting the incident amounted to a war crime.

April 7 2017: Trump launches attack on Syria with 59 Tomahawk missiles

The U.S. military attacked a Syria-government airfield with 59 Tomahawk missiles on Thursday evening.

April 10 2017: US envoy Nikki Haley says Syria regime change is inevitable

The US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, has told CNN that removing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power is a priority, cementing an extraordinary U-turn in the Trump administration's stance on the embattled leader.

The Khan Sheikhun incident had been faked. An international investigation found that half of the alleged casualties arrived in hospitals before the incident was said to have happened. Nothing followed after Haley's last announcement. The administration was apparently not willing to go beyond the one-off strike. The flip-flop was attributed to confusion or infighting within the Trump administration.


Qualtrough , Apr 8, 2018 6:48:54 AM | 1

There apparently is no limit to the number of lies that Americans will believe, as long as they are told to them by their government.
cdvision , Apr 8, 2018 6:53:42 AM | 2
I have the feeling that Russia is loosing patience, and if the US try something it will be big trouble. The speed with which Ghouta was taken caused problems for the West. I hope Russia will clean up Syria quickly; I think we are approaching a decisive moment.
DENNIS RHODES , Apr 8, 2018 7:24:43 AM | 3
All of these world leaders walk in lockstep together following the script handed to them. I would leave Damascus in a hurry if I was living there. The Zionists want to fulfil Isaiah 17.
bolasete , Apr 8, 2018 7:35:07 AM | 4
now we know why the skripals happened. the west is now, today, intent on russia's destruction. putin 'dies' or the west dies. not since the 1950's era of hiding under desks in elementary school have i felt as though i am living in the 'end times.'
Yeah, Right , Apr 8, 2018 7:45:54 AM | 5
If Trump possesses one talent it must surely be the ability to spot a Con Artist pulling a fast one. If he can't connect the same dots that b has just done then Trump has to be an idiot, and I don't for a second believe that he is an idiot.

Surely this is a golden opportunity for Trump to go off-script and shaft those who are trying to con him.

All it would take is one twitter post from him stating that only an dimwit would fall for such an obvious trap, and he will turn the tables on anyone who shouts that The USA Must Do Something About This!!!!!

Trump's retort would be devastating: there ya' go, Dimwit Number One.

Yeah, Right , Apr 8, 2018 8:12:22 AM | 6
Just one thing that I should point out: the Syrian Observatory is NOT claiming that there has been a chemical weapons attack on Douma.

It is claiming that there have been excessive civilian deaths, sure, including a large number who have suffocated in their shelters.

But the claim that those suffocations were the result of chlorine attack is being made by the white helmets, not (at least so far) by the SOHR.

Julian , Apr 8, 2018 8:24:27 AM | 7
World Cup starts on June 14. Do you really think Putin/Russia will do anything to jeopardize the hosting of that event this close to the finish line?

I really doubt it.

Who in Russia would be held responsible if a conflict started and the World Cup in Russia was cancelled??

Which Russian politician would be blamed by the people???

Putin will do nothing and will not be provoked. Do you know the best time to respond? It is actually during the World Cup when hundreds of thousands of EU and foreign nationals will be in Russia - effectively hostages that prevent the West taking over action against Russia - yep, it's that simple.

The best time for Putin to respond to a Western provocation isn't now, it's when he effectively has hundreds of thousands of Western hostages in his country - June/July.

Emily , Apr 8, 2018 8:28:21 AM | 8
Yeah/7: For White Helmets read Britain. They are British created, funded and operated. May's Government has to be deep in this as well.

Never forget that May, Cameron and other conservative MPs crossed the floor of parliament and voted for Blair and the illegal attack on Iraq when Labour MPs refused to support him.

Without Theresa May and David Cameron, Blair wouldn't have had the authority to attack.
The Iraqi blood is on her hands.
And Libyan blood.
And Syrian blood.
And now Salisbury and this.

The woman is a dangerous psychopath.

laserlurk , Apr 8, 2018 8:29:40 AM | 9
I hope that this "news" will just fade away. Sad fact is that whatever Russians say or do it doesn't really matter anymore. A narrative and a rhetoric coming from the US is now at the so low level that any diplomatic language or a talk is rendered obsolete.

UK will trumpet this as there is no tomorrow while Skripal case is, in their eyes, hopefully blurring away. Or so they might think.

I also think that is is not up to Trump, but more off to a military and the dark powers around Trump, that he doesn't really understand, to decide what is happing next. If anything.

lysander , Apr 8, 2018 8:49:04 AM | 10
@8, that is impossible. There is no way Russia will harm any of the soccer fans or stop them from leaving if they choose to leave.

The hostage here is the world cup itself, just as the 2014 Olympics were. And in retrospect it was probably a mistake for Russia to host them, but then who could have predicted all this back in 2007 or 8?

At any rate, Russia should resist provocations games or not. Retaliation, if any, should be covert and deniable. Unless the west is dumb enough to openly attack Russian forces. Then a hammer blow to the face is appropriate.

Julian , Apr 8, 2018 9:00:56 AM | 12
Re: Posted by: lysander | Apr 8, 2018 8:49:04 AM | 11

With due respect I think you misunderstand what I'm saying about 'hostages'.

If there was such a FF 'gas attack' as we have just seen in Syria while the World Cup was on and the US/UK response (as we've heard previously from Russian/Syrian sources) was to initiate strikes against Syrian Government installations, and then Russia has promised to respond if any of their personnel were killed in these strikes the Russians reserve the right (as they have repeatedly started) to strike back against any US/UK targets responsible for the strikes - ie - shooting US/UK planes out of the sky or sinking US/UK warships, destroyers or carriers in the Eastern Mediterranean.

If that level of escalation were to occur (and take note I'm not saying it will because I don't believe Putin will take this bait), but if it were, where could the escalation lead on the part of the US/UK??

Could it lead to Western military strikes of some sort or another?

Could it do that next week? Maybe.

Could it do that while Russia is hosting the World Cup worth hundreds of thousands of Western nationals in Russia? Of course not. The Western route of escalation is therefore blunted while the World Cup is being hosted while there is no such barrier on Russian response to Western provocation while the World Cup is being hosted.

Ie - if Russia did respond to US/UK strikes against Syria whilst the World Cup was being hosted by sinking a couple of US destroyers, what would happen then?

Perimtr , Apr 8, 2018 9:27:18 AM | 13
Given the level of Western insanity and the frequency of the outrages being perpetrated, I don't think we will have to wait several months to see all hell break loose.
b , Apr 8, 2018 9:38:31 AM | 14
Interfax
04/08 15:30 Russian Foreign Ministry warning: Military intervention in Syria under fabricated pretexts can have gravest consequences
Curtis , Apr 8, 2018 9:41:31 AM | 15
WaPo and NYT led the way on this story at news.google. WaPo said that Washington based non-profit Syrian-American Medical Society (SAMS) issued a joint statement with "opposition-linked Civil Defense" (the usual suspects - The White Helmets). There are lots of details on the attacks and damage at Douma but only a tiny mention that Jaish al-Islam launched rockets into densely populated Damascus. Why are there no reports of death and damage in those areas? And where did SAMS come from?
alaff , Apr 8, 2018 9:45:39 AM | 16
Worth to check out - East Ghouta, Syria. Report of Chinese analysts examined by Russian leading Middle East expert (UK/US military advisers in Syria, "Skripal case" hysteria etc.)

https://vimeo.com/263728681

Curtis , Apr 8, 2018 9:47:37 AM | 17
bolasete 4 re: end times
(though I hate to quote from Marvel/DC movie-verse) ...
Batman: We tend to act like the Doomsday Clock has a snooze button.
che , Apr 8, 2018 9:57:26 AM | 18
This is Trump's big chance to redeem himself with the U.S. military ( after "mindlessly" declaring his wish to leave Syria and the entire area ) and get down on his knees and suck Pentagon cock. He will obligingly do this ( as his girlfriends and wife do for him ) and "allow " ( as if he has a choice ) the U.S. war machine, to which he has conceded all civilian control, to respond to the obviously faked and staged false flag chemical attack, in any way they see fit. Russia has already announced that if their troops in Syria are attacked they will respond by Removing the source of that attack, i.e., sinking the ship that launched the missiles. So the U.S. military has lit the fuse and as has worried all of us for a very long time : God only knows where this is headed.
Gravatomic , Apr 8, 2018 9:57:51 AM | 19
These areas are intensely scrutinized by the Russians and the SAA, drones, satellite. It would be good to get some footage of the White Helmets staging this, but of course they are embedded with all the rest of the fighting men elsewhere and are never anywhere near where all the children tend to be targeted.

It's anybody's guess with Trump, remember he said he liked the element of surprise, well, it's hard to spring a surprise when the MSM, in Europe particularly, is literally screaming for a military response with top page headlines.

It was interesting last night watching various outlets over there and how from a seedling article, a little sidebar headline no pics, then came a weed of propaganda, they began every 3-4 hours nudging it to the top and the accusations got wilder and and wilder, ie calling it a 'nerve agent'...

morongobill , Apr 8, 2018 9:58:35 AM | 20
I think the fog is clearing on Trump's thoughts on the matter with his fierce tweet storm mentioning "Animal Assad."

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-08/trump-threatens-assad-putin-over-syrian-chemical-attack-russia-warns-gravest

This is starting to get serious.

Commenting is now turned back on at SST, look forward to b and others commenting there again. I think the whole idea there was to be like the Louis Rukeyser show in the old days, genteel host and guests, just an opinion, didn't work out.

oldenyoung , Apr 8, 2018 10:07:22 AM | 22
I am confident that JAYSH was not going to negotiate, until after they had finished the "job" for their paymasters...once that was completed, they are ready to negotiate again...

I would recommend not negotiating with Jaysh until the hostages have been released...I think their attitude will change quickly now that they are surrounded and no escape/rescue is possible...i wonder how many state agents are stuck inside douma? going to be very embarassing...and it sounds like SAA has a few in custody already...

regards

OY

somebody , Apr 8, 2018 10:09:04 AM | 23
Posted by: b | Apr 8, 2018 9:38:31 AM | 14

Yep, that is how WWIII starts, if they continue like this.

Sasha S , Apr 8, 2018 10:09:06 AM | 24
"I think the fog is clearing on Trump's thoughts on the matter with his fierce tweet storm mentioning "Animal Assad.""

But The Donald is saying that there are women and children amongst those affected by the supposed attack, but other sites are reporting on the astonishing fact that there are only children in the broadcast footage.. what amount to a staged play like that of Goutha years ago...

lysander , Apr 8, 2018 10:23:37 AM | 25
@ Julian, 12.

I think I understand your post better now, thanks for the clarification. I'm not sure that it makes a difference where the tourists are if I understand your 2nd comment correctly. If envision an escalation to full on war, then it really doesn't matter if the soccer fans are at home getting disintegrated by Russian nukes or in Russia getting disintegrated by American nukes.

So might as well wait until the finals.

Noirette , Apr 8, 2018 10:25:31 AM | 26
July 16, 2017. Newswire. CIA Director Admits Fooling Trump Over Syrian Chemical Weapons Story ( ) The false flag attack, which actually originated from CIA rebel groups in the region, resulted in Trump launching Tomahawk missiles into Syria, killing 15 civilians. Posted because of some interest despite misleading title and dubious source. http://yournewswire.com/cia-trump-syria-chemical-weapons/
dh , Apr 8, 2018 10:26:22 AM | 27
@19 Traffic down most likely. Hard to see the colonel retiring gracefully. Let's see how long he lasts this time....he makes a great target.
Don Bacon , Apr 8, 2018 10:31:06 AM | 28
Let's look on the bright side.

SecDef Mattis is a key player in this drama. Mattis didn't buy the fake attack a year ago which no doubt contributed to the flashy but ineffective US response. Putting the blame for this latest fake attack on Russia and Iran (a difference this time) suggests an asymmetric non-military response, one designed to grab headlines and then be forgotten. Trump has sanctioned Russia three times in the past month and bragged about it, so Putin is now his go-to enemy when fake news arises. That Trump strategy (or lack of it) strengthens Russia domestically and internationally, especially with China, so it works for Putin.

Carrie , Apr 8, 2018 10:35:37 AM | 29
Excellent reporting – as always – from Vanessa Beeley on the ground. Several posts from
Vanessa Beeley in Ghouta and Damascus
Breadonwaters , Apr 8, 2018 10:36:44 AM | 30
Perhaps the British false flag poisoning may have a dampening effect on world reaction to this false flag. There are many governments with egg on their face after rushing to throw out the russ diplomats.
psychohistorian , Apr 8, 2018 10:38:16 AM | 31
Thanks for the reporting b. It is looking like positions are hardening on both sides. Lets hope the bully side loses.
fast freddy , Apr 8, 2018 10:42:14 AM | 32
RE: World cup and potential hot war

Affluent Anglo Soccer guests in Russia would be need be detained for their own safety - a kind of twist on R2P. Very embarrassing for elite US, UK, EU jet-setting soccer fans to be detained for an indeterminate period. But for their own safety! Here, enjoy your borscht and caviar.

Don Bacon , Apr 8, 2018 10:42:40 AM | 33
re: SST
"17 million page views for SST and gone -- I am leaving you. Guest authors, commenters and the various troll nations may continue if you wish. I may start another blog under "Pat Lang's Blog" but there will not be comments. pl" -- Jun 8, 2017
Ghost Ship , Apr 8, 2018 10:47:01 AM | 34
The SAA launching a chemical attack on Douma makes no sense. The intention with chemical weapons was to deny areas of land to opposing forces. Now that most modern armies are supplied with effective protection against chemical weapons for individuals and vehicles, area denial no longer works except to the extent that wearing chemical protection suits hinders movement but this applies to both sides so nobody benefits and nobody loses.
librul , Apr 8, 2018 10:49:09 AM | 35
I am afraid. Have not been this afraid since election night when Hillary was almost elected. The world lucked out and survived to live another day. Has our luck run out?
Anon , Apr 8, 2018 10:50:55 AM | 36
Sigh, here we go again, just like Skripal case, west acts with propaganda and psyops without any evidence. The stupid TRUMP will of course bomb Syria again along with the disgusting Macron cheered by EU and western media.
fast freddy , Apr 8, 2018 10:55:05 AM | 37
che 18

That is the most plausible scenario. The "intensity" of the US "response" to the False Flag gas (always gas!) attack. remains to be seen. Pummeling airstrips are generally good stagecraft/showmanship and little else. Airstrips are quickly repaired and back up to speed in short order.

M , Apr 8, 2018 10:55:42 AM | 38
May be coincidental (not) but John Bolton takes his seat as the National Security Advisor tomorrow. I wonder if Ramjet will take his proton pill?
b , Apr 8, 2018 10:56:53 AM | 39
No gas attack says SOHR: Syrian Gov't: Rebels to Give Up Last Ghouta Suburb
Beirut (AP) -- An alleged gas attack killed at least 40 people in the eastern suburbs of Damascus, as Syrian rebels agreed to give up their last foothold in the area, medics and state media reported on Sunday.

...

Meanwhile, state news agency SANA said the Army of Islam group agreed to leave Douma on Sunday, after three days of intensive government shelling and bombardment.

...
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 80 people were killed in Douma on Saturday, including around 40 who died from suffocation. But it said the suffocations were the result of shelters collapsing on people inside them.

"Until this minute, no one has been able to find out the kind of agent that was used," said Mahmoud, the White Helmets' spokesman, in a video statement from Syria.

Anon , Apr 8, 2018 10:59:08 AM | 40
Remember this bullshit is a friggin reprise of what happened on 1 year ago!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Shayrat_missile_strike

"The 2017 Shayrat missile strike took place on the morning of 7 April 2017,[1][4] ..the strike was executed under responsibility of U.S. President Donald Trump, as a direct response to the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack that occurred on 4 Apri"

Give Syria S-400 damnit!

sermon , Apr 8, 2018 10:59:10 AM | 41
miss match in timings damn it. The syria event production should have happened same day as bell pottinger salsbury thus creating another libya quick all in nato depleted uranium party. with movie play and tv show timing and script and emotion are critical for engagement.
emotion is the gelling agent for consent that is why so many tv and radio news pundit are actor not journalist
Qualtrough , Apr 8, 2018 11:00:00 AM | 42
In the US when a murder occurs and a suspect apprehended there is a trial that can take weeks or months, and the prosecution and the defense present their expert Witnesses. Then at the end of all that a jury usually decides where the person is guilty or not. On the other hand, when a crime is alleged in another country far far away from the US, such as an alleged gas attack in Syria, within days we know exactly who is responsible and on that basis are willing to commit arms, troops and spend billions of dollars to kill people in large quantities and destroy a country. One would think that given the stakes involved a little bit more care might be taken.
fast freddy , Apr 8, 2018 11:02:01 AM | 43
"Gas" scares the bejesus out of rubes. Makes Great Drama. Triggers, then reinforces historical themes. "The fiend! He gassed his own people!" "Gas Chambers" (Cant' go there!). If there's gas, well, by golly there's got to be a ham-handed, asymmetrical "response" (motherfocker of all bombs!) from the "International Community".
Red Ryder , Apr 8, 2018 11:06:44 AM | 44
Happy Easter to all our Orthodox Christian friends around the globe. The message is 'never lose hope or live in fear'. Christ leads in this eternal battle against evil and Satan's minions. This war has brought all civilizations of the land together. The dying civilization of the ocean will wreck havoc until it expires. There are many paths to that ruin.

Confronting the Son of God is assuredly one of them. Naturally, the devils have chosen Orthodox Easter to launch this latest perfidy against Russia.

Rob , Apr 8, 2018 11:06:52 AM | 45
@morongobill #19. There is often a stark difference between what Trump says or tweets and what he actually does. Often he is speaking and acting for the benefit of various target audiences, sometimes on opposite sides, simultaneously. However, his bellicose response to the alleged chemical attacks in Syria is cause for worry. Trump is a bully, and he would not wish to appear weak by backing down from explicitly threatening rhetoric. Besides, he doesn't give a damn about killing Syrians or anyone else.

BTW, kudos to those who pegged the Skripal incident as prelude to some sort of chemical incident in Syria. It couldn't have been scripted better for a TV program. Oh, wait...

Anon , Apr 8, 2018 11:10:21 AM | 46
Trump is so stupid its amazing, I have given up on this moron, not only does he threaten Russia and Syria but he threats to bomb again!

President Trump: Will Meet Putin Soon "To Discuss The Arms Race, Which Is Getting Out Of Control"
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/03/20/president_trump_will_meet_putin_soon_to_discuss_the_arms_race_which_is_getting_out_of_control.html

Trump 'ideally' wants US troops out of Syria within 6 months
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/04/05/trump-ideally-wants-us-troops-out-syria-within-6-months.html

fast freddy , Apr 8, 2018 11:10:27 AM | 47
Brilliant Wordsmithery: Covfefe Normal Genius Trump discovers alliteration with "Animal Assad". That's Dr. Animal Assad.
Mina , Apr 8, 2018 11:11:08 AM | 48
Just a couple of days ago, the Syrian observatory was acknowledging the hostages problem: http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/295020.aspx

And 2 days ago bbc arabic was running a headline all day about Russian mercenaries flow to Syria on regular commercial flights. There s a whole world out there in the propaganda addressed to Arab viewers. No time to check if alarabiyya and Aljazeera are now broadcasting the vids from duma 24/7 as they used to do

WorldBLee , Apr 8, 2018 11:24:21 AM | 51
Trump is a like a wind-up doll in that he can be easily led astray due to his complete lack of knowledge of foreign and military affairs. Just tell him children have been "gassed" and he gets angry and wants to strike back. The super hawks can thus wind up him whenever they really need to him to do something stupid. (I mean, other than the normal stupid things he does all the time on his own.)
psychohistorian , Apr 8, 2018 11:30:07 AM | 53
What will empire do now?

I don't see it as an Israel issue but a "who controls the tools of human exchange" issue that may be about to evolve.....or not

Certainly the entitlement of some folks will be affected by making finance a global public utility but I think that is a good thing....

Think of the potential of our species if we can evolve beyond the "social contract" we operate under currently....I am excited about the potential and measured about the chances of it all happening.

n , Apr 8, 2018 11:30:39 AM | 54
we need to come together as a world community forget about yesterdays semite children of palastine slaughter and deal with animal assad and the more important children of ghouta

Israeli officials: U.S. must strike in Syria
"Assad is the angel of death, and the world would be better without him."

The United States must attack the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria in response to the regime chemical gas strike on the Syrian town Douma that killed more than 70 people, Strategic Affairs and Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan said Sunday.

Speaking on Army Radio, Erdan, who is Netanyahu's number two in Likud, said he hoped US military action against the Assad regime would be taken again, as it was when the regime used chemical weapons against its people in the past.

http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Israeli-officals-US-must-strike-in-Syria-549144

Grieved , Apr 8, 2018 11:42:43 AM | 55
@24 Noirette - thanks for that link to the story of how Pompeo gamed Trump into the missile launch (not to call it a "strike") against Syria last year. I must keep that one for reference.

Good that Trump got those tweets off his chest. We can rest easier now. I wonder if he ever will understand how he's being played by the people around him? His sentimentality seems to be a weakness they can easily leverage.

Nothing will happen, of course. As lysander suggests, Russia probably will inflict some covert pain on US interests, while as b reports the FM has already warned of consequences if the US should be stupid enough to do something overt. I really like lysander's image of the hammer blow to the face as Russian retaliation.

Friends, we are seeing the last days of false flags and the last days of the world caring about western propaganda. How many Russian diplomats are left for vassal nations to expel? How many times can the UK government disgrace itself, or Trump have a meltdown on Twitter - and nothing serious ever happens? How many times do we need to see a fleet turn back from Korea - even assuming it could find its way there in the first place - or US missiles fail to strike their targets, whether in Syria or Yemen?

The greater the bluster, the more crystalline the result of no-result appears to the cooler heads of the world. Which shows that even when the dog doesn't bark in the night, still the caravan moves on.

Don Bacon , Apr 8, 2018 11:52:39 AM | 57
@Noirette 24
Help me out here -- how did Pompeo admit fooling Trump?
Hoarsewhisperer , Apr 8, 2018 11:56:27 AM | 58
Posted by: et Al | Apr 8, 2018 8:55:04 AM | 11
(..inundated by a chorus...I yield. pl)

Commendably quick, forthright and unequivocal.
One imagines it wasn't easy.

Don Bacon , Apr 8, 2018 12:08:02 PM | 59
It's the comedy hour in Washington.

from The Hill

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) tore into President Trump after he put blame on former President Obama following reports of a chemical attack in Syria.
"Dear @realDonaldTrump: Remember when you launched cruise missiles at a largely empty field in Syria? That unconstitutional act didn't do very much," Lieu tweeted.

"Remember when you said last week that US is leaving Syria in six months? So what is your plan? You're the President now. Remember?"

Trump took to Twitter Sunday to condemn the attacks and rail against Obama. "If President Obama had crossed his stated Red Line In The Sand, the Syrian disaster would have ended long ago! Animal Assad would have been history!" Trump tweeted, referring to Syrian President Bashar Assad. . . here

dh , Apr 8, 2018 12:15:59 PM | 60
@49 "Just tell him children have been "gassed" and he gets angry and wants to strike back."

He does have a couple of options...neither very appealing. He can ignore the 'gas attack' and be called callous and uncaring. He can hold off and ask for more evidence and get told he's soft on Putin/Assad.

Alain , Apr 8, 2018 12:16:43 PM | 61
Imho i find the us statement pretty "soft". "verification" is better than "russia/assad did it". i don't think the us is going to "strike". the military paradigm has changed. they know, we hope.
Zico , Apr 8, 2018 12:17:39 PM | 62
Convenient timing to take the focus away for the IDF shooting Palestinian kids and journalist or the botched Skripal show. The new memo is Assad, gas, Iran, Russia, Putin - repeat.

Look everybody, over there!!!

You gotta hand it to these guys. They've perfected the art of fooling the masses very well.

imo , Apr 8, 2018 12:18:53 PM | 63
"Is Trump really willing to escalate towards that?"

More than likely willing and able to take it right up to the wire in the lead up to (and during)
the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia between 14 June to 15 July 2018.
Putin will be at his weakest. UK farce was just an appetizer.

Don Bacon , Apr 8, 2018 12:23:57 PM | 64
State : "We continue to closely follow disturbing reports on April 7 " . . .which we write, and we decided this time to pile on Russia. . ."Russia has breached its commitments to the United Nations as a framework guarantor. It has betrayed the Chemical Weapons Convention . . . yadda yadda". . . here
somebody , Apr 8, 2018 12:25:14 PM | 65
It is over. "Rebels" agreed to be deported to Idlib and release hostages.
Anon , Apr 8, 2018 12:25:49 PM | 66
Alain

I think you are badly wrong, US, France have said they would strike weeks before this, and now it happens, they will strike.

Noirette , Apr 8, 2018 12:40:51 PM | 68
Don Bacon, 55, Idk. link I posted seemed interesting enough.

There is no straight admission of course (re. > Pompeo fooling Trump) and the whole story may be made up,
but it has the the ring of truth in the sense that it fits with the US top echeleons are mired in dire,
multiple, crossed, struggles. The various factions of the US PTB are not unified, and fighting secretly under the radar,
there is no unified position from the US, so not from the UK either.

Ok?

Rob , Apr 8, 2018 1:10:36 PM | 69
@psychohistorian (67) Thanks very much for that posting of actual events on the ground in Douma. They are further reason to believe that the alleged chemical gas attack was not the work of the Syrian army. Clearly, the rebels were on the ropes and ready for a knockout blow. We must ask: What might the Syrian government have gained by poisoning civilians and incurring the wrath and condemnation of the "civilized" world? Absolutely nothing! From a military standpoint, it was completely unnecessary, and from a public relations standpoint, a predictable disaster. Hence, being rational actors, they would never have chosen to use chemical weapons under the circumstances. Why is this so hard for Western nations and their media to understand? The only reason that I can give is that it is in their interest not to understand. It does not comport with their agenda, which is to topple Assad and weaken Russia.
james , Apr 8, 2018 1:31:58 PM | 71
thanks b and thanks for the many insightful comments...

of course isis is being coddled by the west as a tool for the same agenda that has never been dropped... same deal the freaks in douma that are unwilling to negotiate... ditto oldenyoungs comments @22... don't worry oy - russia can see thru that..

@27 dh - yes.. we will see how long that lasts.. i made a comment, but it didn't show yet.. the guy is a crank at this point..

@30 Breadonwaters.. good point, but i wouldn't count on it.. the endless propaganda and false flags are relentless and i see no sign of it stopping.. maybe if the white helmets funding dried up, but that is highly unlikely as well..

@33 don bacon.. sst - 'as the stomach turns' a soap opera that periodically does or doesn't run..

@62 zico... i always ask the question 'what would israel want here?'...

meme , Apr 8, 2018 1:33:55 PM | 72
Is Trump about to have an interview with Mueller soon? Is he also trying to set up the US military to get a bloody nose in Syria? .. so that he can fire a few generals and to try and get back on his campaign promises about pulling back foreign wars?
Don Bacon , Apr 8, 2018 1:43:27 PM | 73
@Noirette 68
Ok?
Weeelll, okay. . . I will continue to value your comments.
Probably the main point here is that the CIA can't be trusted, which in its history has resulted in several comeuppances, and should again.
Don Bacon , Apr 8, 2018 2:09:25 PM | 76
Pat Lang: "Animal" Assad? Our beloved president has once again been watching a bit too much TV news. Does it ever occur to him to pick up the secure phone and call the watch officer at CIA, NSA or wherever and ask if they think the news reports are correct?

Sure, Pat. If we can't trust the Intelligence Community, then whom can we trust? Our own lyin' eyes?

Duglarri , Apr 8, 2018 2:11:20 PM | 77
Amazing. Absolutely amazing. There is a chance Assad did this -- but here's also a chance he would walk in front of a moving train, or jump out of an airplane. The question is, why? There's no military advantage to this. None. On the other hand, there is stupendous value to terrorists to conduct a false flag attack.

Americans. Being played by a fiddle, like complete idiots, for... ever.

NemesisCalling , Apr 8, 2018 2:26:02 PM | 80
As I recall, just a few weeks ago, the US was hitting the "Attack No.Ko." circuit hard. Not much came of it, as usual, and to what end DJT thinks these venting moments will lead, I don't have a clue. But it does follow that not much will come of this other than us plebs wondering why we have to live under this looming threat of annihilation. At the very least, maybe a few tomahawks will be unleashed on a few targetted shit-shacks which are being used by sheep herders. Wrong time to take a crap! The MSM needs a rating boost and exploding outhouses with a million-dollar tomahawk might be able to beat "American Idol" tonight. I'd tune in.
bruno , Apr 8, 2018 2:26:11 PM | 81
Duh, here we go again. Syria with help of Russian aerospace forces are winning the war. Why use WMD that would invite US retaliation??????The discredited NeoCons are not happy with the state of Syria instigated war.Again regime is winning.... And lo and behold Trumpster called for withdrawal of US forces that are illegally occupying a sovereign country. What are the NeoCon /Likudniks e to do???.Well..... stage a false flag opps of course. Syria was always the low hanging fruit on way to war with Iran folks.........
spudski , Apr 8, 2018 2:54:17 PM | 83
@ karlof1 75

I think there would be great personal danger to VVP if he went to DC.

Anon , Apr 8, 2018 3:04:54 PM | 84
spudski

Indeed, something Ive also thought about, I would never put my foot in the US if I were the leader of Russia.

I dont see them meeting now when Trump blow it over and over, Trump never seems to learn or he doesnt care, maybe the generals, and state dep. is in charge of the foreign policy. Hes just a puppet?

daffyDuct , Apr 8, 2018 3:13:15 PM | 85

White Helmets and the Mannequin Challenge. Something to remember at times like these.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgl271A6LgQ

Perimetr , Apr 8, 2018 3:15:04 PM | 86
Regardless of who makes the decisions in the US, I seriously doubt that the Russians will back down from their thrice stated threat of direct retaliation against US forces, should the US hit Russian military personnel. The Russian red line has clearly been drawn and if the US crazies choose to cross it, look out.
Babyl-on , Apr 8, 2018 3:26:12 PM | 87
I watched the Security Counsel meeting the other day and I thought Russia really blew it. The Russian ambassador was sputtering and stammering and all over the map and did not provide or mention the ample evidence of the widespread ability to make these chemicals or any other evidence. While the British simply had to stay on script. Russia looked bad in my view.

Now, with the new "chemical attack" in recent hours BoJo is already calling for a prompt investigation and warns - Russia should not be allowed to stall it. Why was not Russia out first calling for an independent investigation and demanding proper procedures and observers?

Russia can't continue to just stand there and get punched.

Bakerpete , Apr 8, 2018 3:26:21 PM | 88
A question I've been mulling over for sometime that may appear unrelated to this thread but does have a general bearing.
In the lead up and during WW2, when did the German population begin to realize they were the bad guys?
Laguerre , Apr 8, 2018 4:04:41 PM | 94
I was quite surprised the rebels actually went ahead with the so-called gas attack. I suppose some sort of combination between a hard-line faction in Douma, desperate about being about to lose their last foothold, and nutters in the US, like Bolton. Far too late.

The point is that the Russians have been preparing for just such an event for months. Was it not two months ago that the Russians put troops into Damascus to prevent a decapitating strike? A US strike would be a sort of Kursk Offensive, attacking into a well-prepared defence.

I remain convinced that Trump is psychologically unwilling to go ahead with a major war, whatever the people around him.

Anon , Apr 8, 2018 4:18:09 PM | 96
Laguerre

Trump have recently added Bolton, Pompeo, I mean come on, its obvious that Trump have no "psychologically unwilling" traits about bombing another nation. He have done it before and will do it again, but beside its not only about Trump but also the ugly little guy in France, Macron that are as warmongering on Syria.

Laguerre , Apr 8, 2018 4:19:25 PM | 97
This gas attack is also, from the US point of view, a sort of "surge". An unwillingness on the part of the US to admit defeat. Something has to be done to put the US, currently losing, back into the game. Just that facing up to Russia is a bit more complicated than beating up poorly armed Arab tribes.
Don Bacon , Apr 8, 2018 4:22:27 PM | 98
@ Laguerre 94
I was quite surprised the rebels actually went ahead with the so-called gas attack. They didn't, US-France-UK-(Turkey) did. The rebels are the ones with guns and ammo, the alliance are the ones with actors and cameras.
frances , Apr 8, 2018 4:40:01 PM | 100
I am a bit confused, did the rebels agree to return to the agreement they defaulted on before or after the supposed "gas" attack? If before, it was a ruse (or the west set the up), if after, they may have been told by Russia to return to the agreement or be slaughtered. We live in interesting times and I am most unhappy about it.

[Apr 08, 2018] Is Theresa "cat killer" may a dangerous female psychopath?

Notable quotes:
"... For White Helmets read Britain. They are British created, funded and operated. May's Government has to be deep in this as well. ..."
"... Never forget that May, Cameron and other conservative MPs crossed the floor of parliament and voted for Blair and the illegal attack on Iraq when Labour MPs refused to support him. ..."
Apr 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Emily , Apr 8, 2018 8:28:21 AM | 8

Yeah/7: For White Helmets read Britain. They are British created, funded and operated. May's Government has to be deep in this as well.

Never forget that May, Cameron and other conservative MPs crossed the floor of parliament and voted for Blair and the illegal attack on Iraq when Labour MPs refused to support him.

Without Theresa May and David Cameron, Blair wouldn't have had the authority to attack.

The woman is a dangerous psychopath.

[Apr 08, 2018] Another false flag ? So while the negotiations with radical Islamist to leave the area were going supposedly Syria was attacking them some sort of chemical bombs?

Apr 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

jawbone | Apr 8, 2018 2:16:44 PM | 8

Yes, and Trump is throwing shit and having a fit.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Trump+tweets&oq=Trump+Tweets&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j0l5.3987j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

CNN on the tweeting:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/08/politics/donald-trump-syria-assad/index.html

FOX News:

http://fox5sandiego.com/2018/04/08/trump-tweets-big-price-after-reports-of-syrian-chemical-attack/

So nice of him to toss off t hreats on Orthodox Easter Sunday. What a guy.

Who's influencing him? Bolton? FOX? Pompeo? Where does Mattis stand?

Wonder who is actually influencing him.

****
Interesting article at RT about Jaysh al-Islam coming to an agreement with the Syrian government to leave Duma/Douma and go to Jarablus.
Published time: 8 Apr, 2018 13:56
Edited time: 8 Apr, 2018 15:05

The Islamist group is to leave Douma for the city of Jarablus within 48 hours, SANA reported, citing an official source. It said a deal to release all the prisoners has been reached. Damascus agreed to negotiate with one of the last major militant groups holding out in Douma in a bid to protect civilians and liberate abductees

The radical Islamist group, which has been accused of using civilians as human shields, earlier agreed to leave the enclave of Eastern Ghouta near the Syrian capital. Jaysh al-Islam will have to clear barricades and provide maps of minefields that they have laid in the area. The militants were set to begin withdrawing from the city of Douma on Sunday, the head of the Russian Defense Ministry's Syrian Reconciliation Center, Major General Yury Yevtushenko has said.

So...were the negotiations going on while supposedly Syrian was attacking with some sort of chem bombs?? Weird.

Also, the number of injured and dead has escalated very unbelievably. From about 15 to thoursands!!

somebody , Apr 8, 2018 3:01:17 PM | 9
8 the "chemical attack" was part of the negotiations. Trump is talking tough but Russia made a believable threat to hit back.

Posted by: Pat Bateman | Apr 8, 2018 1:08:29 PM | 2

Yes, there is a "strategy" to pretend Russia is a criminal worse than other countries. They even mentioned the word "weapons of mass destruction" again. It is a very real campaign in a run up to war.

This here from the opcw meeting

"It is regrettable to say that our Western partners had tried to disrupt today's session. In the beginning they offered to observe a minute of silence in memory of people killed in Khan Sheyhun, Idlib province, Syria. We proposed them to hold a moment of silence to remember all victims of chemical weapons, primarily in Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, Iraq, and our partners somehow felt uncomfortable. [They] don't want to remember all victims of chemical weapons," said Shulgin."

It has become this transparent.

oldenyoung , Apr 8, 2018 4:41:47 PM | 16
There have been some pretty radical reports at VeteransToday. is there anyone that can verify these claims? or even a good German speaker that can read the labels on chemical munitions seized by the SAA...or any other supporting reports of captured US UK ISRAELI chemical experts in East Ghoutta?

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2018/04/08/proof-intel-drop-trump-bolton-behind-syria-chemical-attacks-confirmed/

regards

OY

[Apr 08, 2018] The negotiations with rebels about the surrender were close to completion when the false flag was staged

Apr 08, 2018 | www.google.com

jawbone | Apr 8, 2018 2:16:44 PM | 8

CNN on the tweeting:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/08/politics/donald-trump-syria-assad/index.html

FOX News:

http://fox5sandiego.com/2018/04/08/trump-tweets-big-price-after-reports-of-syrian-chemical-attack/

So nice of him to toss off t hreats on Orthodox Easter Sunday. What a guy. Who's influencing him? Bolton? FOX? Pompeo? Where does Mattis stand? Wonder who is actually influencing him.

****

Interesting article at RT about Jaysh al-Islam coming to an agreement with the Syrian government to leave Duma/Douma and go to Jarablus.

Published time: 8 Apr, 2018 13:56

Edited time: 8 Apr, 2018 15:05

The Islamist group is to leave Douma for the city of Jarablus within 48 hours, SANA reported, citing an official source. It said a deal to release all the prisoners has been reached. Damascus agreed to negotiate with one of the last major militant groups holding out in Douma in a bid to protect civilians and liberate abductees

The radical Islamist group, which has been accused of using civilians as human shields, earlier agreed to leave the enclave of Eastern Ghouta near the Syrian capital. Jaysh al-Islam will have to clear barricades and provide maps of minefields that they have laid in the area. The militants were set to begin withdrawing from the city of Douma on Sunday, the head of the Russian Defense Ministry's Syrian Reconciliation Center, Major General Yury Yevtushenko has said.

So...were the negotiations going on while supposedly Syrian was attacking with some sort of chem bombs?? Weird.

Also, the number of injured and dead has escalated very unbelievably. From about 15 to thousands!!

[Apr 08, 2018] The farce continues. As the Skripals are apparently alive and well the British government has a problem

Notable quotes:
"... I don't think this Skripal incident was staged. They went out for dinner. Caught very bad food poisoning. British intelligence and May's government jumped on this incident to blame it on Russia. May's poll number were down, and her handling of British exit from the EU was horrendous. This gave her all she needed to get back on her feet politically. ..."
"... White helmets and the Coventry MI6 asset not working in unison. I take it the Ghouta gas attack was supposed to have occurred at the peak of the Russia=novichok meme somewhere between 12th-20th March. ..."
"... Whereas it's clear that Bojo and the Tin Lady are playing a weak hand badly -- and have only been spared by the appalling complicity of virtually the entire panoply of Western media as information warfare adjuncts -- which is in itself a stunning and sickening display of power–it's not clear that Russia has played a stronger hand much more ably ..."
"... The UK and France are in deep economic trouble and need an external enemy such as Russia using an incident such as the Skripal affair to deflect the people from focusing on removing their government leaders. If all else fails, the UK Royals will have a couple of weddings and babies to take up the front pages for most of this year. Meanwhile, like the Skripals, several UK/EU agents involved in the HillaryGate Steele dossier trail of evidence such as Christophe Steele, Joseph Mifsid, and Gianni Pittella have disappeared: ..."
"... The EU is also experiencing internal dissent with the Visegrad four (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia) plus Italy and Austria and thus needs an external enemy to distract its members. I suspect that a Ukrainian invasion of DPR/LPR will once again be used as a flash point create "two minutes of hate" against Russia ..."
Apr 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

The farce continues. As the Skripals are apparently alive and well the British government has a problem. When they talk and tell the world that it was actually food poisoning and not a chemical weapon attack that hit them, the government of Theresa May is toast. The Skripals have to be kept isolated and eventually vanished . The CIA might give them a new identity or lock them into one of its black sites. The Skripals house and the Zizzy restaurant are to be destroyed. (Who will kill the hospital doctors?)

The "doorknob" theory the UK spread to explain the alleged injury of one policeman is so outrageously stupid that many doubt it. To counter the mistrust, HMG comes up with an even more implausible explanation :

Russian agents watched Sergei Skripal for a fortnight and chose to strike on a Sunday morning so no postmen or delivery men would be exposed accidentally to the nerve agent. Any third parties touching the door handle before the Skripals would have required the agents to reapply the gel to the door handle, at the risk of being seen doing so.

Sure, that's why so many neighbors spoke of foreigners milling around in the street for two weeks (not). And its why there was such a large manhunt right after the incident happened (not).

Veterinarians in Salisbury post on Facebook that they had contacted the police several times immediately after they learned that the Skripals were admitted into hospital. They offered to take care of their cats and guinea pigs. The police did not react at all. One cat escaped, the Guinea pigs died of thirst and the cat left behind was so starved that it had to be put down.


james , Apr 8, 2018 12:57:31 PM | 1

thanks b.. great work as always...

i don't get it that britian is offering the skripals a new residence in the usa, or that they are destroying their house... is destroying and getting rid of the evidence all that have? i am sure they would like to get rid of the skripals too, not to mention the doctors and whoever else that doesn't go along with the official script...

Pat Bateman , Apr 8, 2018 1:08:29 PM | 2
Has the penny dropped yet b that the Skripal episode was designed to condemn the Syrian Government ahead of another staged chemical attack - this time to be hit hard. Those damn Russians are launching chemical attacks in Britain, and now they are supplying chemicals to the regime to poison Syrian children...

It makes the shit stick.

Jose Garcia , Apr 8, 2018 1:13:47 PM | 3
I don't think this Skripal incident was staged. They went out for dinner. Caught very bad food poisoning. British intelligence and May's government jumped on this incident to blame it on Russia. May's poll number were down, and her handling of British exit from the EU was horrendous. This gave her all she needed to get back on her feet politically.
Pat Bateman , Apr 8, 2018 1:27:57 PM | 4
James Landale, BBC diplomatic correspondent writes
"For Russia, how far is it prepared to defend its allies' apparent use of chemical weapons when its own apparent use of a nerve agent in the UK is subject to so much global condemnation?"

Yes, the shit has stuck.

Peter AU 1 , Apr 8, 2018 1:46:21 PM | 5
Once the Skripals have been vanished, there would no longer be any reason to keep them alive.
The Douma FF - too little too late? White helmets and the Coventry MI6 asset not working in unison. I take it the Ghouta gas attack was supposed to have occurred at the peak of the Russia=novichok meme somewhere between 12th-20th March.
laserlurk , Apr 8, 2018 1:49:23 PM | 6
b.

Very nice writing, wit and "ohrwoerm" in general here.

I doubt that anything dramatic will happen in Syria on behalf of US retaliation or anything sinister in that direction..
US and others have their people in Assad opposing forces and they know exactly what is going on - on the ground.

What will be interesting is to observe how two Russian citizens will vanish and how the truth will be pushed under the carpet while Russia will not let this just go.

I am still trying to find the plausable connection between the two. Could somebody elaborate such option?

Paul , Apr 8, 2018 1:58:16 PM | 7
Whereas it's clear that Bojo and the Tin Lady are playing a weak hand badly -- and have only been spared by the appalling complicity of virtually the entire panoply of Western media as information warfare adjuncts -- which is in itself a stunning and sickening display of power–it's not clear that Russia has played a stronger hand much more ably .

In sum, the questions, criticisms and suggested avenues of response suggested here, as well as at the Off-Guardian, John Helmer's blog, the Saker, MoA, and strategic culture.org (anyone who hasn't seen Rob Slane's 50 questions there really should), has been much richer and potentially more efficacious than Russia's official demarches have so far been.

At the very least, can a writ of habeus corpus be filed? It will be clear to most of the world by now that the UK does not want the Skripals to be heard from directly unless and until their statements will not be those of "tools of the Kremlin." (But it may be that the Russians are not so keen that they be heard from either, until what they will say can be determined.)

I would have to think that this trial balloon to have the Skripals relocated with new identities would be recognized by them as a threat (since at that point they will have been disappeared). If the Russians are hesitating about what they might say, and about having a writ of habeus corpus filed, the implied threat from the USUK might be enough to persuade the Skripals that if they have information embarrassing for the USUK (or for Russia, for that matter), they had better speak out now, before they are disappeared.

james , Apr 8, 2018 3:04:46 PM | 10
craig murrays latest from today..
Maracatu , Apr 8, 2018 3:24:10 PM | 11
Is anybody getting the shivers like I am?
Russian forces deployed in Syria, including S-400 and Pantsir-S1 air defense systems and Sukhoi Su-30SM multirole fighters, have been put on a combat alert , according to reports appearing from local sources in the country's provinces of Tartus and Latakia where Russian military facilities are located.
Grieved , Apr 8, 2018 3:48:47 PM | 12
@11 Maracatu

The US is getting shivers. The knowledge that Russia is on combat alert - which I accept as true - must be scaring the shit out of the US generals. Who wants to make the next call, which ends in death? None of those chickenhawks, for sure.

Grieved , Apr 8, 2018 4:11:35 PM | 13
If you watched Part 1 of the new "Putin" documentary by Andrei Kondrashev a couple of weeks ago, you may not know that Part 2 is now out, at the Vesti YouTube channel:

Putin 2

and if you didn't watch Part 1, here it is too:

Putin

If you're a fan, you'll find these two videos very inspiring. We've seen numerous snippets from the past life of Putin, and anecdotes, but Kondrashev has pulled together more complete narratives and interviews, including with Putin. Kondrashev is the guy who made "Crimea - the Way Home" and was interviewing Putin in that one. They obviously have a good relationship. The scale of Putin's achievement is almost impossible to grasp, and his sheer humanity is amazing. He came from the honest, working poor, and has never lost this connection, never stopped being one of them.

ConfusedPundit , Apr 8, 2018 4:31:50 PM | 14
The Russians now officially want their money back (approx. 8.6b dollars) from Britain. (One of the reasons why the Brits wrote the Skripal script? Preemptive strike?) The Coalition will hit SR sooner or later. Israel will move 40km into SR soil and call the new area a buffer zone (between Golan Heights and the remaining Assad territory).

BTW, Somali authorities seize millions of dollars from UAE plane in Mogadishu.

laserlurk , Apr 8, 2018 4:41:06 PM | 15
@ConfusedPundit

Sources, pretty please.

Krollchem , Apr 8, 2018 5:18:42 PM | 18
The UK and France are in deep economic trouble and need an external enemy such as Russia using an incident such as the Skripal affair to deflect the people from focusing on removing their government leaders. If all else fails, the UK Royals will have a couple of weddings and babies to take up the front pages for most of this year. Meanwhile, like the Skripals, several UK/EU agents involved in the HillaryGate Steele dossier trail of evidence such as Christophe Steele, Joseph Mifsid, and Gianni Pittella have disappeared:

https://disobedientmedia.com/2018/04/all-russiagate-roads-lead-to-london-as-evidence-emerges-of-joseph-mifsuds-links-to-uk-intelligence/

https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertonardelli/the-mysterious-professor-at-the-center-of-the-russia-trump?utm_term=.paVe5QKjLR#.imWM6VNRLp

">https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertonardelli/the-mysterious-professor-at-the-center-of-the-russia-trump?utm_term=.paVe5QKjLR#.imWM6VNRLp">https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertonardelli/the-mysterious-professor-at-the-center-of-the-russia-trump?utm_term=.paVe5QKjLR#.imWM6VNRLp

In the UK case of May and BoJo, any alternative will result in a continuation of the decline of the society. To be honest, much of the decline is baked in structural with the loss of income from former "slave" colonies and the decline of North Sea oil and gas reserves. Staying in the EU against the will of the people will continue to further drain resources to Germany, which has structurally colonialized Western Europe.

France, like the UK, has extracted the wealth from their former colonies and facing a reduction in tribute from these sources. Macron has attempted to maintain control of some colonies such as Mali and really wants to conquer Syria. I suspect the meetings between Macron and MbS will result in an agreement for Saudi Arabia to buy French weapons while France getting financial aid to expand French troop bases in Syria.

Somehow, the current revolution in France is blacked out in the Western Media. Videos of the current revolution are common on Youtube such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g21_myERteQ

Almost all sectors of the French society are protesting against the neo-feudal policies of Macron, FIRE economy participants and his dwarves in the National Assembly. There are strikes among:

For a schedule of the rolling strikes in France see: http://www.cestlagreve.fr/

Macron has already deployed the CRS assassins and the street war will begin when EU police and military invade to crush to protestors. This will be far more violent than May 1968 and may usher in the 6th Republic. Unfortunately, Macron would prefer the cities to burn rather than resign and turnover the government to the President of the Senate.

The EU is also experiencing internal dissent with the Visegrad four (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia) plus Italy and Austria and thus needs an external enemy to distract its members. I suspect that a Ukrainian invasion of DPR/LPR will once again be used as a flash point create "two minutes of hate" against Russia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4zYlOU7Fpk

These EU conflicts will not end peacefully as the system will fight back rather than step aside.

Jackrabbit , Apr 8, 2018 5:34:35 PM | 19
b: . . . The Skripal's are apparently alive and well

I don't think we should assume that that is true.

Wouldn't their pets have been treated better if the authorities expected them to live?
- if they participated in the farce, they would have given some thought to their pets;
- if they were attacked or simply used for propaganda purposes, the authorities would care for their pets so as to not further offend them.

Yulia's phone call was weird. Why would she tell her cousin that she won't get a visa? Now the British are arranging for the Skripal's to disappear into witness protection. Will the Skripal's ever be allowed to make a public appearance and face questions from reporters? It appears that that they won't be allowed to. Either they are already dead or the British fear what they might say if they make a public appearance.

Some mentioned on one of MoA's Skripal threads that we have to be careful about what we believe and what we assume given that the authorities and press have proven to be biased. Sounds like good advice.

It seems clear that escalation in Syria direct public attention away from Skripal's /Salisbury. I don't think it's too much of a stretch (given all that has happened) to think that that was planned for.

The US, Australia, Canada and 16 EU states are among the countries which have expelled Russian envoys. Of the sixteen Commonwealth realms, with Queen Elizabeth II as their head of state, fourteen of them have Russian embassies. But only three of the fourteen (UK, Canada, Australia) have joined the expulsion.
One of the remaining eleven rebel countries, New Zealand, provided a reason. PM Ardern-- "While other countries have announced they are expelling undeclared Russian intelligence agents, officials have advised there are no individuals here in New Zealand who fit this profile. If there were, we would have already taken action."

Posted by: Don Bacon , Apr 8, 2018 5:48:26 PM | 20

The US, Australia, Canada and 16 EU states are among the countries which have expelled Russian envoys. Of the sixteen Commonwealth realms, with Queen Elizabeth II as their head of state, fourteen of them have Russian embassies. But only three of the fourteen (UK, Canada, Australia) have joined the expulsion.
One of the remaining eleven rebel countries, New Zealand, provided a reason. PM Ardern-- "While other countries have announced they are expelling undeclared Russian intelligence agents, officials have advised there are no individuals here in New Zealand who fit this profile. If there were, we would have already taken action."

Posted by: Don Bacon | Apr 8, 2018 5:48:26 PM | 20 /div

jawbone , Apr 8, 2018 6:01:04 PM | 21
@ 17 -- There seem to be lots of weasely things being said about the fate of the Skripal pets. The big, fluffy black cat with amber eyes should in no way whatsoever have suffered such depletion of calories that he had to be put down. I fear he was sent to Porton Down to be "studied," and then "put down." If there was a water source --dripping faucet, water closet, most houses have some place a pet can drink from other that his water bowl-- a cat can survive weeks. My Maine Coon disappeared, but showed up about 3-4 weeks later, ragged coat, unkempt, very thin, but, when given saline solution by the vet, immediately began to act more normal. Took a while to get her muscle mass rebuilt, but she survived.

An article from The Sun, dated April 5th, has a photo of Nash Van Drake (what a pretty cat), and states the specialist chemical weapons investigators did not gain access to the Skripal residence UNTIL APRIL 4TH!!! We know from photographs that lots of folks wearing moons suits were around for weeks -- why was nothing done to care for the pets?

I can't find it now through google, but I read a comment or tweet from a vet who had made repeated offers to care for the pets. These pets should never have suffered to the extent they did.

Someone in power did not want anyone outside those with enforced silence agreements to see those pets.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5983643/skripals-beloved-cat-nash-van-drake-had-to-be-secretly-put-down-following-the-poison-attack/

The sickly mog was transported to the Ministry of Defence res­earch laboratory at Porton Down to be tested, where he was found to be severely malnourished.

The lab's top veterinary officer ruled the pet was in so much pain he should be put down.

His body was then immediately incinerated to avoid contamination from the deadly nerve agent Novichok.

Sergei's guinea pigs were also destroyed at the top secret military research facility.

(If there is a hell, may these animal abusers end up there with long and miserable afterlives.)

jawbone , Apr 8, 2018 6:10:13 PM | 22
I was trying to get through to the Veterans Today link in #16 can't get through, either using the link or the URL for the site. Just got a 524 Error.

Anyone get through?

OY, any really important things you can post?

Norwegian , Apr 8, 2018 6:22:48 PM | 23
@22
The VT site is really slow, but it works. It looks explosive if true.
It links to this video in arabic which shows chemical weapons made in Germany and England (Salisbury!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=0&v=oEhUk73t8BA
oldenyoung , Apr 8, 2018 6:25:08 PM | 24
and now there is this from South Front...

https://southfront.org/russian-forces-in-syria-are-on-combat-alert-as-us-considers-list-of-targets-to-attack-government-forces-reports/

hope this is just exaggerated...otherwise things are getting hardened fast...

PS...will try to paste some from VT...@22

Laguerre , Apr 8, 2018 6:31:57 PM | 25
re krollchem 18
The UK and France are in deep economic trouble
Britain is, France isn't. Britain destroyed its industrial sector under Thatcher, and has nothing to offer faced with Brexit. France has a vast agricultural sector which they can fall back on. The French like revolutions, that's why the present troubles. Here's a video declaring revolution, from my university, if you can cope with the French, note the dog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHaV3Hm5g2A.
oldenyoung , Apr 8, 2018 6:33:22 PM | 26
@22 text only...lots of good photos there...site is there for me. but it is very slow...


Last week, Russia and Syria announced the capture of British chemical weapon stockpiles in East Ghouta along with the capture of a "coalition" command and chemical weapons facility with all personnel. Taken from the combined statement censored from the western press, from March 25, 2018

"The Syrian Arab Army and with the help of Russian captured a shipment of chemical weapons destined for the Eastern Ghouta. These were British weapons produced at Porton Down in Salisbury. Russian suspects that the Skripal incident is related as by their records, Skiripal was working at Porton Down as a chemical weapons trafficker in partnership with a Ukrainian firm. Russia denies attacking Skripal but admits he was under surveillance for his activities involving support of terrorism in Syria and arms trafficking.

Russia also confirms that there are British, American, Israeli and Saudi intelligence officers who were caught by the Syrian army in one of the heavily fortified operations rooms during the invasion of the Syrian army and its allies of the East Ghouta."

VT asked the Syrian government for serial numbers and closeup photographs of chemical weapons used. Syria sent them to us today.

Today, the Syrian Army captured the following German made poison gas shells, shipped into Syria though Ukraine and Turkey and delivered to Jeish al Islam by a US CH53 helicopter, according to statements "allegedly" gotten from POW interrogations.

American, British and Israeli military personnel captured in Syria have confirmed they were ordered to stage chemical attacks in East Ghouta by their governments.

oldenyoung , Apr 8, 2018 6:35:39 PM | 27
@ 22 rest of text

The Americans are still being held along with Israeli's while British prisoners are being negotiated for. Sources in Damascus told us that representatives of Oman in Damascus approached the Russian Office of Reconciliation on behalf of Britain for the return of British chemical warfare personnel.

The shells in the above video are identified as VX gas from British stockpiles.

Russian officials in Syria informed Britain through Oman that they would have to directly deal with Syria for the return of their personnel. We have received no further information since, Damascus has remained silent on how or if negotiations were proceeding.

We do know that US Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a US Army combat veteran of Iraq, met with both President Assad and Donald Trump, in order to arrange for covert exchange, for substantial financial consideration, of captured Americans.

Initial introductions for this meeting were done by VT.

Israel bought back a Brigadier General (they claimed he was a colonel) in 2015 that we know about.

The recent gas attack in Syria, timed as the last terrorists were surrendering for relocation inside the Douma region of the Ghouta pocket, was planned personally by nominated presidential advisor John Bolton and President Donald Trump personally, according to highly placed sources.

Our sources in Russia, highest level, told us the attack was coming based on information they received from US and Israeli prisoners taken in East Ghouta after an evacuation attempt failed.

US casualty announcements in this effort have been released over the past few days as happening in other areas to cover US complicity in terrorism. This dishonors families of the dead, not just in the misuse of service members to support terrorism but in lying to families about combat deaths. This shame goes directly to coward Trump!

"The Marine Corps identified four Marines killed on Tuesday in a CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter crash near El Centro, Calif. The Marines were assigned to Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron (HMH) 465, Marine Aircraft Group 16, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar.

"The loss of our Marines weighs heavy on our hearts," Maj. Gen. Mark Wise, commanding general of 3rd MAW, said in a statement.
"Our priority is to provide support for our families and HMH-465 during this critical time."

The four Marines killed in the crash were Capt. Samuel A. Schultz, First Lt. Samuel D. Phillips, Gunnery Sgt. Derik R. Holley and Lance Cpl. Taylor J. Conrad."

Other US casualties were listed as a US Air Force F16 that allegedly crashed at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada and up to 6 Americans who the US claims were killed by "Kurdish forces" in the north of Syria.

All died in a failed combined US/Israel rescue operation to remove not only communications and command personnel but also chemical weapons operations teams as well.

Last week, VT Damascus received evidence that Americans, US Army Special Forces along with Israeli chemical weapons officers had been captured in East Ghouta. We were told that not only was a command facility captured with modern weapons but a stockpile of British made 81mm poison gas mortar shells, numbering in the hundreds, was seized as well.

Video's were viewed by former MOD weapons specialists who identified the green stripe on the shells seized in East Ghouta as VX gas from British stockpiles.

The Obama administration investigated alleged chemical attacks in 2012 and 2013 and advised Syria to turn over chemical stockpiles as a way of discouraging terrorists from continuing to stage chemical attacks to blame on Damascus.

Most efforts had their roots in Britain's MI6 and its affiliates, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the White Helmets.

The US is currently facing combined military operations against its occupied zone in Syria by Iraq, Syrian and Russian forces. The US has been told to remove forces from Syria or face a wider conflict.

The US and Russia have been at war against one another inside Syria for about a month now.

More coming

ConfusedPundit , Apr 8, 2018 6:40:06 PM | 28
@laserlurk | Apr 8, 2018 4:41:06 PM | 15

Didn't want to clutter my post with links simply because a Copy&Paste from my post into google search bar would provide anyone with the related sources.

Russia's Prosecutor General Yury Chaika demanded Britain to return more than 500 billion rubles to the Russian Federation withdrawn by Russian citizens who are hiding from Russian justice

https://www.vedomosti.ru/politics/news/2018/04/08/756142-genprokuratura-prizvala-britaniyu-vernut-dengi

Somalia: Airport Security Seize Millions of Dollars of Cash sent by UAE

http://hornobserver.com/articles/782/Somalia-Airport-Security-Seize-Millions-of-Dollars-of-Cash-sent-by-UAE-amid-Political-Standoff

[Apr 08, 2018] The Skripal Affair is a Hoax. If Russia is "No Longer to Blame", What Next Global Research - Centre for Research on Globaliz

Notable quotes:
"... By Stephen Lendman , April 05, 2018 ..."
"... "Russia is to blame" said Theresa May, without a shred of evidence. The UK government's baseless accusations have led the expulsion of Russian diplomats by 20 countries (18 countries of the EU, plus Canada and the US). and Moscow has responded by expelling Western diplomats. ..."
Apr 08, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

Skripal could not under any circumstances have been poisoned by a dangerous nerve agent at his home.

Why?

Because the deadly nerve gas agent would have acted immediately and Skripal would not have been able to go from his home (in his BMW or otherwise) to the shopping mall where he was subsequently found (sitting on a bench) and taken to hospital together with his daughter Yulia.

" experts believe that such gases can kill people within a few minutes. Skripal simply did not have time to walk to a restaurant or shopping center, where he was eventually found."

See the incisive article by Bassid al Khalili : U.K. is Lying: If Skripal was Poisoned at His Home, The Agent Used against Him Cannot be Nerve Gas Global Research, April 4, 2018)

If Skripal and his daughter had been poisoned by a nerve agent (at his home), he would have been found at his home rather than on a bench in the shopping mall. This in itself disqualifies the official reports.

It also suggests that The Porton Down statement to the effect that "Russia was not the source of the nerve agent" is a "red herring" (totally irrelevant). Why. Because the evidence amply confirms that Skripal and his daughter were not poisoned by a nerve gas at Skripal's home.

This obvious fact –which has not been the object of media coverage– is that Scotland Yard's counterterrorism report on the "Russian hit squad" is not only fake , it invalidates the UK government's "official" narrative, which is also fake. The lie discredits the lie.

Lest we forget, this latest fake Scotland Yard counterterrorism report was preceded by a string of "authoritative" (UK police, government) statements (analyzed and compiled by Stephen Lendman):

First it was claimed father and daughter Skripal were poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent while eating lunch at a Salisbury restaurant.

The narrative switched to Yulia unwittingly transporting the nerve agent planted in her luggage on her flight from Moscow to London.

The story then shifted to Skripal's BMW, the deadly toxin smeared on its handle ,

Next came the claim about the nerve agent perhaps in aerosolized form affecting them through the vehicle's ventilation system.

The latest official version claims the alleged nerve agent was smeared on the front door of Skripal's home.

If any of the above accounts were valid, the Skripals, Bailey and at least 38 reported others exposed to the same toxin would be dead – surely many others as well.

Yet a month later, no one died. Bailey recovered enough to be discharged from hospitalization. Yulia's doctor said she improved markedly. Days earlier, Sergey was reported in stable condition.

Bombshell Report: Yulia Skripal Says Her Father is "All Right"

By Stephen Lendman , April 05, 2018

Russia was not the Source of the Nerve Agent: The Porton Down Statement. Boris Johnson and the Foreign Office

Her Majesty's Foreign office is in crisis as a result of Porton Down's statement to the effect that Russia was not the source of the nerve gas.

The justification for expelling Russian diplomats from a number of EU countries no longer holds? There is no proof that the nerve gas was from Russia.

Will Boris Johnson be forced to resign?

"Russia is to blame" said Theresa May, without a shred of evidence. The UK government's baseless accusations have led the expulsion of Russian diplomats by 20 countries (18 countries of the EU, plus Canada and the US). and Moscow has responded by expelling Western diplomats. Now that the hoax has been fully revealed. What next? Boris Johnson has been asked to explain. A political upheaval in several European countries? Will diplomatic relations be normalized following these revelations? Unlikely unless there is a backlash from the EU governments which were deliberately misled by the U.K.

Screenshot RT

At the moment both the UK government and the media are in denial. The latest statement from Theresa May's office emphasizes that "[the UK government has] knowledge that within the last decade, Russia has investigated ways of delivering nerve agents probably for assassination " (quoted by the Washington Post, April 4, 2018)

The Media's Double Standards in the Coverage of Important Events. The Skripal Novichock affair versus the Gaza Massacre

A sick Russian double agent and his daughter recovering in hospital, blamed on Vladimir Putin

Versus

14 innocent Palestinians killed and more than 750 wounded

The "Gaza Massacre" is not front page news. It does not make the tabloids. "Israel is not to Blame".

Yet these killings were ordered by the Netanyahu government.

Should these 20 Western countries not contemplate the timely expulsion of Israeli diplomats?

[Apr 08, 2018] Porton Down Lab behind Skripal poison probe has dark history of human testing

Notable quotes:
"... inquisitive inquirer ..."
"... If you like this story, share it with a friend! ..."
Apr 08, 2018 | www.rt.com

The Porton Down lab at the center of the Skripal poisoning case has a dark history of secret government-run human testing. The human trials were conducted as part of the UK's war preparation against the Soviet Union. The military laboratory at Porton Down was the hub of Britain's biological weapons trials between 1939 and 1989. Ministry of Defence scientists conducted chemical experiments on at least 20,000 military personnel and more than 100 secret germ warfare tests on members of the public in preparation for a feared chemical attack from the Soviet Union.

This year, the lab was thrust back into the headlines when it was given the responsibility of determining the substance used to poison Sergei and Yulia Skripal. The lab's chief executive has since confirmed the team are unable to identify the " precise source " of the nerve agent, and the Foreign Office has denied claiming it was from Russia – despite Boris Johnson's assertions on just that point.

The government-run experiments on military personal seriously breached ethical standards, according to an official report released in 2006. It followed years of complaints from veterans claiming to have suffered lasting damage to their health as a result of the trials. During the experiments Porton scientists dripped liquid nerve gas on the bare arms of 440 men and at one point tested nerve gas on eight men without the trial participants knowing what it really was. Six men were exposed to mustard gas for five consecutive days – three of whom suffered burns to their scrotums. Around 450 men had their eyes exposed to sarin nerve gas.

READ MORE: Did Boris Johnson lie that lab told him Russia was source of Salisbury nerve agent? (WATCH VIDEO)

A 60-page government report released in 2002 detailed tests which exposed millions of people to harmful substances. The tests consisted of releasing potentially dangerous chemicals and microorganisms over vast areas of Britain – unbeknownst to the population below.

It also revealed that military personnel were instructed to tell any " inquisitive inquirer " that the trials were part of a research project into weather and air pollution.

Designed to test Britain's vulnerability if deadly clouds were released over the country, in most cases trials used alternatives to biological weapons such as serratia marcescens bacteria or zinc cadmium sulphide, which was dropped on the public in huge amounts to mimic germ warfare.

The government insisted the chemical involved was safe, however cadmium is recognised as a cause of lung cancer and was considered a chemical weapon during World War II. Families living in the tested areas who have children born with birth defects have demanded a public inquiry.

A guard at one of the lab entrances at Porton Down, October 1968. © C. Woods / Getty Images

In another trial a military ship sprayed bacteria including e.coli and bacillus globigii, which mimics anthrax, over a five to 10-mile radius along the south coast of England between 1961 and 1968, exposing more than 1 million people to the micro-organisms. In trials designed to test the vulnerability of government buildings and public transport, bacteria were released on the London Underground, traveling about 10 miles.

READ MORE: Down & out at Porton Down: Embarrassment for the UK's 'Rush to Blame Russia' brigade

The report also confirmed that during World War II Porton Down produced millions of cattle cakes spiked with anthrax which could be dropped into Germany to kill livestock on a mass scale.

Ulf Schmidt, Professor of Modern History at the University of Kent, estimated in his 2015 book 'Secret Science,' that up to 30,000 secret chemical warfare experiments were carried out during that time period at Porton Down. It has also been claimed in most cases the military men were not given enough information to properly give consent.

The 100-year-old lab has a reported annual budget of £500 million and employs 3,000 scientists. In 2008 the Ministry of Defence awarded £3 million in compensation to 360 tested veterans without admitting liability.

If you like this story, share it with a friend!

[Apr 08, 2018] Prime Minister May is seen at around beating the cat against a wall.

Apr 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Posted by: librul | Apr 7, 2018 9:05:48 AM | 4

Prime Minister May is seen at around the 0:40 (depending upon clip version) mark beating the cat against a wall.

Also, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g is the "Burn the Witch" scene. With Putin as the witch it is a fair representation of the type of justice and deep thought applied to the Skripal case.

mike k , Apr 7, 2018 9:30:10 AM | 6
First as tragedy, then as farce.......
Saul , Apr 7, 2018 10:00:16 AM | 7
Reminds me of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch...

[Apr 07, 2018] The Best Explanation For The Skripal Drama Is Still ... Food Poisoning

Notable quotes:
"... A friend of this blog, Tore ..."
"... Noirette , TomGard ..."
"... What is the treatment? ..."
"... xcerpts of CIA inventory 1 , 2 . ..."
"... Associated Press ..."
Apr 07, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Doctors at the Salisbury District Hospital announced today that Sergej Skripal's health is rapidly improving. He and his daughter Yulia will likely be well again.

It is unlikely that any targeted poisoning with a real 'military grade' nerve agent would have allowed for such an outcome. This brings us back to food poisoning as a possible cause of the Skripals' ordeal.

A friend of this blog, Tore , sent us his considerations which we publish below. He suggest that shellfish poisoning, which is caused by a neurotoxin known as Saxitoxin or STX, is the real culprit of the Skripal incident. He explains how this would fit to the observable behavior of the British government and other participants in the drama. In my view his theory has significant merit.

On Wednesday the niece of Sergej Skripal, Viktoria Skripal, received a phone call from Yulia Skripal. She was interviewed by a Russian TV station and suggested that food poisoning might have been the real cause of the calamities her relatives were in:

"Did they eat a dish that one cannot eat, or is it banned in England?

"The first signs when they were found were very similar to fish poisoning."

Victoria intended to visit the UK and to bring Yulia back home to Moscow. The United Kingdom just rejected Victoria Skripal's visa application because she "did not comply with the immigration rules." No further explanation was given.

For those who have not read our previous posts on the issue we offer a short recap of the case. Regular readers may want to scroll down to Tore 's part.

Sergej and Yulia Skripal were found on a public bench in Salisbury at about 4pm on March 4. They had collapsed, were conscienceless and were brought into emergency care at the Salisbury District Hospital. Local media wrote of a potential Fentanyl overdose.

Half an hour before the Skripal's collapsed they had eaten at Zizzi, a seafood and pizza outlet.

Over the next days the British government started to make a fuzz about the case. Sergej Skripal was a British spy who had been caught in Russia, put into jail and, in 2010, exchanged for Russian spies. The British government hinted of Russian involvement in the Salisbury incident.

But that story smelled fishy from its very beginning. To target an exchanged spy would guarantee that no further exchanges would ever happen. Sergej Skripal had links to the "dirty dossier" about Donald Trump that was created for the Hillary Clinton campaign. Russia had no good motive, others potentially had one. If there was something nefarious going on it seemed unlikely that Russia was involved.

I now believe that the British government jumped onto the case because it needed to divert attention from the seriously bad results of the Brexit negotiations in Brussels. There are local elections coming up in May and Theresa May's Tory party was lagging in the polls. (There may have been additional reasons related to a planed 'chemical weapon' surprise in the east-Ghouta campaign in Syria.)

Whatever it was - the spin-masters in Downing Street 10 saw a chance to convert the poisoning of the Skripals into something big that would help their political aims. The general push was to blame Russia. The idea to speak of the fearsome nerve-agent 'Novichok' came from a spy drama that had just run on British TV.

On March 12 the British Prime Minister Theresa May spoke in Parliament and claimed that the Skripals were 'attacked' with 'Novichok', a "military grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia". It was her "45 minutes" moment . Russia was declared guilty without any evidence. Britain and other NATO countries expelled Russian diplomats.

'Novichok' is a name for a group of chemicals that are indeed deadly. But Russia never had a 'Novichok' program. It had worked on a different class of chemicals than the ones described in Vil Mirzayanov's 'Novichok' book . Moreover, if 'Novichok' chemicals were involved than Russia was only one of many suspect. The formulas for 'Novichoks' are known, various military laboratories have made some and any decent organic chemistry laboratory can create them too. The U.S., which had produced some of the 'Novichok' agents for itself, had long told its diplomats to avoid any discussions about them.

The first serious unraveling of the dubious case came on March 18 when a doctor at the Salisbury District Hospital publicly denied that any of its patients had been hurt by a nerve agent. We wrote at that time:

Commentator Noirette had suggested here that the Skripal case was about food poisoning or a food allergy, not nerve agents. The Skripals had visited a fish restaurant one hour before they were found. The letter points into a similar direction. Food poisoning would also explain why a doctor who gave emergency help to the unconscious Yulia Skripal for over 30 minutes was not effected at all.

To my best knowledge none of the main stream media picked up on the doctor's letter.

Then a miracle happened. On March 29, just in time for the Roman Christian Easter, the doctors in Salisbury said that Yulia Skripal was no longer in a critical condition. We headline: Last Act Of 'Novichok' Drama Revealed - "The Skripals' Resurrection" :

It seems that the 'Novichok' fairy-tale the British government plays to us provides for a happy ending - the astonishing and mysterious resurrection of the victims of a "military grade" "five to eight times more deadly than VX gas" "nerve agent" "of a type developed by" Hollywood.

Happy Easter!

The alleged nerve agent should have killed anyone who came even into slight contact with it. Survival did not fit to the earlier claims by the British government.

Now, just in time for the Orthodox Christian Easter, the condition of Sergej Skripal is reported to be rapidly improving. Another Resurrection! Hallelujah!

In my view all the stories we were told about 'Novichok', the 'doorknob' or a 'Russian attack' are fairy tales. They simply do not make sense.

Commentators of this blog, Noirette , TomGard and others, had discussed several theories of food poisoning. Food poisoning makes sense but none of the ones discussed here fitted the picture of the case. Last week Tore , a friend of this blog from Norway, sent me his theory which makes eminent sense to me.

---
Tore writes :

Craig Murray's described the pressure on Porton Down to establish that a nerve agent was used in the alleged Skripal attack. I use 'alleged attack', because there is a fair chance that this was no attack, only a serious food poisoning from the very start.

The Skripals had a seafood risotto pesce with king prawns, mussels and squid rings at Zizzi, as reported here in the Daily Mail on March 6.

This is a dish with a well known reputation as a source of shellfish poisoning.

The Skripals were okay when they arrived, okay when they left, and passed out 40 minutes later on the bench with symptoms similar to a paralytic reaction from shellfish poisoning (PSP) :

Symptoms of PSP could begin within a few minutes and up to 10 hours after consumption.

Symptoms of PSP can include:
...
...
Respiratory difficulty, salivation, temporary blindness, nausea and vomiting may also occur.

In extreme cases, paralysis of respiratory muscles may lead to respiratory arrest and death within two to twelve hours after consumption. Seriously affected people must be hospitalized and placed under respiratory care.

Another official PSP Fact Sheet (pdf) provides:

What is the treatment?

Unfortunately, there is no antidote for PSP toxins; however, supportive medical care can be life saving . For example, persons whose breathing muscles become paralyzed can be put on a mechanical respirator and given oxygen to help them breath, and people who develop a cardiac arrhythmia (abnormal heart rhythm) can be given medications to stabilize their heart rhythm.

The similarity with symptoms and effect derived from a nerve agent are striking, but no surprise:

In fact the substance at work in a case of paralytic seafood poison is a neurotoxin called Saxitoxin (STX) which is among the most potent poisons found in nature. It works the same way as a nerve agent: It acts on the neurons, preventing normal cellular function and leading to paralysis and in worst case death. In fact Saxitoxin is so potent that it was weaponized by the U.S. and used as a chemical weapon - a nerve agent.

The U.S. developed Saxitoxin into a chemical weapon in the 1960s. The U.S. military designation is TZ. It was also used by the CIA for covert operations and liquidations as evidenced by the Church commission - see: E xcerpts of CIA inventory 1 , 2 .

Serotoxin is registered by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) as evidenced in the Wikipedia article Saxitoxin . The agent stays active even after boiling or steaming.

Now back to Porton Down and the pressure to come up with the 'traces of a nerve agent'. The Saxitoxin could obviously pass as a nerve agent, because it is a nerve agent - but without mention of its origin - the food poisoning.

The nerve agent claim was released by police on March 7, three days after the incident.

According to the Daily Mail article mentioned above, the hospital alarmed the police the day after, on March 5, when the staff became aware of Skripal's 'spy credentials', probably through BBC which first brought the news. This means Porton Down at the most had two days from first tests to the conclusion 'nerve agent' announced on the 7th.

This also implies that the hospital probably treated the Skripals for a food poisoning from the start, until they became aware of Skripals credentials the day after. This fits with the letter to the Times from Stephen Davies, the hospital doctor.

(The timeline used above is from the Associated Press ' Key moments in the case of former spy Sergei Skripal .)

The media storm had been going on for a week when Theresa May on March 12 entered parliament and announced the 'Novichok'. The blame had been on Russia from the first moment.

Speculation:

Now suppose the government in the meantime had become aware they had a weak case from the start - because they had rushed Porton Down to a premature conclusion?

There would be no way back for May. The die had been cast. The government had walked out on a limb from the start, now they had to continue the theater by naming the agent.

No nerve agent would suit their narrative better than 'Novichok'. Developed in USSR, a substance with some foggy features and many variants - as opposed to other more well known agents with distinct features. And most important an agent that is not listed in OPCW and which was deliberately chosen to confuse. [b adds: 'Novichok' was also known to the British and U.S. public as a 'fearsome Russian agent' through a current spy drama on TV. It increased the propaganda value.]

The initial reluctance to involve the OPCW also fits into this picture: the decision to involve OPCW came after May had landed the Novichok claim in parliament on March 12.

The day before, on March 11, police found traces of a nerve agent in the Zizzi restaurant.


Note that the police inside is unprotected - bigger

Did they find the mussel in the risotto? Or 'Novichok'?

More than three weeks into the investigation this is, as far as I know, the only confirmed police find of traces of the nerve agent. Zizzi fits in perfectly as the origin of the poisoning considering the 40 minutes it took before the Skripals passed out on the bench. Though I wonder how a "military grade nerve agent", destined to kill instantly on the battlefield, took that long to incapacitate the Skripals.

I am no doctor, nor a specialist in chemistry - only a retired journalist working with open sources. There are so many curiosities with this case, so many speculations, ...

Here in Norway we have an expression called blodtåke - best translated as blood fog - when all the media are rushing blindly in one direction, without asking the most elementary questions.

After I wrote this they found 'Novichok' on the door of the Skripals' home, which makes it even more unlikely, considering the time frame.

Did they have to divert attention from the restaurant as origin of the poisoning?

There are of course some holes in the above - just regard this as an idea to go along the line of food poisoning.

End of Tore's deliberations.
---

b here:

Tore's theory of food poisoning with Saxitoxin makes sense. It is a fitting explanation for what happened in Salisbury and for the murky tale the British government tries to sell.

(update)

Commenters noted that the theory does not immediately explain what happened to Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, who was also treated in the hospital but less severely effected than the Skripals. Off-Guardian noted on March 23:

It was announced today that Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey – allegedly the third victim of the alleged "nerve agent" poisoning in Salisbury, UK – has been released from hospital.

Bailey did not speak to the press, and no photographs or film of him leaving the premises and going home have yet emerged.
...
Where Bailey was poisoned, and how he was poisoned is still not clear – which is puzzling of itself. Was it while attending the Skripals as a first-responder, as claimed by Theresa May (improbable on the face of it, since CID officers in Britain do not act as first-responders). Or did he, on the contrary," have no direct contact with the Skripals ", as put out by the Daily Mail? Was he poisoned while searching the Skripals home ? Or was it somewhere else entirely?

And why did he become poisoned when no one else at the scene, and indeed no one else anywhere in Salisbury fell ill, or even showed signs of contamination in their bloodwork?

If Bailey was on the scene on Sunday afternoon, it was likely not because he was on duty, but because he happened to be in the area. Did he have a private lunch? At Zizzi's? With mussels? We do not know and the government won't say.

(end update)

One of these days the Skripals, Nick Bailey, the doctors at the hospital, or some of the people at Porton Down will talk and let us know the truth.

The Zizzi website says that the restaurant in Salisbury is still - four and a half weeks after the incident - "temporarily closed". If it served healthy food and the Skripals were really poisoned by touching a doorknob at their home why would that still be the case?

But do not take off your tinfoil hat just yet.

If Saxitoxin was the cause of the Skirpals' illness, the story has still potential for a decent spy drama. Was the poison in the mussels Zizzi's served of natural occurrence, or had someone at the CIA rummaged through its old inventory? Who applied the dosage?

In another message Tore notes that there is a foreign member in the British Joint Intelligence Commission which advises Downing Street:

Ever since World War II, the chief of the London station of the United States Central Intelligence Agency has attended the JIC's weekly meetings.

These connections might yet bring us back to Skripal's participation in the 'dirty dossier' about Trump which MI6 agent Chris Steele prepared for the Hillary Clinton campaign. The U.S. and the British intelligence services under Clapper and Brennan waged a war against then candidate Donald Trump. They did not want him to win the election under any circumstance. Were the Skripals late casualties of this fight?

But no. I would not trust that story any more than I trust the British government's current tale.

Another possible explanation, more likely that the election manipulation mentioned above, is a false flag incident solely created to incriminate Russia. It would be a reproduction of the 1994 Operation Hades , a highly propagandized case made up by the German spy service BND to incriminated Russia with a (faked) plutonium smuggling case.

Then again - if it looks like food poisoning, Occam's razor says, it might just be that - food poisoning.

The Skripals' beloved animals though, were admittedly killed by the British government. The Skripal's should sue the responsible persons to hell for committing this murder and for lying about its circumstances.

[Apr 07, 2018] As Skripal-Gate Collapses, Will May's Government Be Next by Tom Luongo,

The level of the USA support suggests that this is a wishful thinking. Who corralled the EU nations to join GB in this mess?
Apr 07, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Tom Luongo,

The United Kingdom is headed for a break-up. Not today or tomorrow, mind you but, sooner than anyone would like to handicap, especially in this age of coalition government at any cost.

By responding to the alleged poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with histrionics normally reserved for The View, Theresa May's government has set the stage for its own collapse.

Government's fall when the people lose confidence in them. May has bungled everything she has touched as Prime Minister, from Brexit talks and her relationship with Donald Trump to her response (or lack thereof) to the escalating level of domestic terrorism and her pathetic campaign during last year's snap election.

When I confront such obvious ineptitude it's not hard to believe that wasn't the plan to begin with.

Since her initial meeting with Donald Trump after his election where it looked like the two would get along, May has become more and more belligerent to both him and his base. While he continues to affirm our special relationship "The Gypsum Lady" as I like to call her makes mistake after mistake.

The latest of which is pushing everyone east of the Dneiper River in Ukraine to denounce the Russians and President Vladimir Putin personally for this alleged poisoning in Salisbury a month ago.

The result of which was the largest round of diplomatic expulsions in a century, if not ever.

And now that the whole "Russia did it" narrative has been skewered by May's own experts at Porton Downs, she stands alone along with her equally inept and embarrassing Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson.

The calls for their jobs will only intensify here.

Tinker, Tailor, Traitor, Spy

The whole thing felt from the beginning like a bad Ian Fleming novel. I said from the beginning this this was a classic false flag to gin up anti-Russian fervor while May's negotiator betrayed Brexit and pushed to remove Russian businesses from doing business in London.

I'm sorry but it's not a stretch to think this whole thing was cooked up by MI-6. In fact, that's been my operating assumption for a month now.

The problem was, until a few days ago, I didn't have a good enough reason why.

Putting diplomatic pressure on Russia on behalf of the U.S.'s crazed neoconservative Deep State just didn't seem like a big enough reward. Neither did cutting Russian businesses out of European banks to stop contractor and creditor payments associated with the Nordstream 2 pipeline.

Those things felt like nice bonus objectives but not main goals.

And it wasn't until the lead scientists at Porton Downs left May, Johnson and Williamson out to hang on Monday that the full operation became clear. By stating that they could not confirm the origin of the Novichok nerve agent used in the attack on the Skripals the Porton Downs officials destroyed the credibility of The Gypsum Lady's government.

Therefore, this operation was always about undermining May's government to the point of a no-confidence vote. This would then be the ultimate betrayal of Brexit in order to preserve the U.K.'s position in the European Union, which is favored by the political and old-monied British elite.

In short, this was a coup attempt.

And don't think for a second that this is not plausible. Remember it was Margaret Thatcher's own most trusted people who betrayed her to get the U.K. into the European Union in the first place. This was why they brought down The Iron Lady.

So, here's the scene:

May and Johnson both get told by trusted advisors that there is incontrovertible proof of Russia's hand in this. They go with this information with confidence to parliament, the U.N., high-level meetings with foreign leaders and the press.

They convince their allies to stand strong against the evil Russians who is everyone's bid 'baddie' at this point.

Trump has to go along with this nonsense even though he is obviously skeptical otherwise there will be an uproar in the U.S. press about him betraying our most trusted ally for his puppet-master Putin.

To be honest, I don't think these bozos, May and Johnson, were in on the plan. I think they were being played all along and now will be the patsies.

Just like May was played last year, calling for snap elections. The minute she called them there were terror attacks all over London, marches against her over public safety. A media campaign which puffed up Jeremy Corbyn, who they are now destroying for his rightful trepidation about this fairy tale MI-6 is spinning.

The goal was to weaken May and get Labour back in charge. Corbyn would then be cast aside and a Tony Blair clone installed as Prime Minister to scuttle Brexit and restore order to the galaxy, Europe. Unfortunately, the DUP got enough of the vote to re-elect a very weakened May and things have limped along for nearly a year.

Crisis on Infinite Empires

The problem with this however, is like all plans of those desperate to cling to vestiges of former glory (and the U.K. is definitely the poster child for that), is the crisis of confidence it will engender.

Make no mistake, Brexit was no mistake.

It's what the people of Britain wanted and they want it more now than in 2016. So, they don't dare call for a new referendum. But, they are also looking at a third parliamentary vote in as many years.

And that doesn't scream confidence no matter how much markets would prefer the legal status quo. Opposition to Brexit comes from the entrenched monied power, not from any adherence to globalist ideology.

But, if Brexit is betrayed through this hackneyed farce of a spy thriller, it won't sit well with the British people. Scotland's call for a second referendum will continue to grow and the Pound will fall alongside the competitiveness of British labor still trapped within a euro-zone that has done nothing but choke the life out of the economy.

The Pound will begin to sink into irrelevancy as this unfolds. It won't happen overnight, but we will look back on these events and see them as the trigger points for the path of history.

Between these things and the toxic levels of political correctness as it pertains to Muslim immigration, the insanity of London liberals and the de facto police state the U.K. has become and you have a recipe for political unrest that will not be pretty.

Brexit was meant to be the peaceful revolution that put the nail in the coffin of the march to one world government. It is about to be nullified.

When it is the sun will finally set on what's left of the British Empire.

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Occident Mortal -> Manthong Sat, 04/07/2018 - 15:30 Permalink

Theresa May and Boris Johnson are just not very competent. At all.

That's all you need to know to understand Brexit and Skripal case.

chunga -> Occident Mortal Sat, 04/07/2018 - 15:35 Permalink

Sergei Skripal's pets die after investigators sealed off home despite vet warning

https://www.rt.com/uk/423359-skripal-salisbury-pets-die/

The revelation that the animals had died caused considerable reaction on social media with many wondering why it had taken officials so long to find the animals despite so much police activity at the home.

solidtare -> chunga Sat, 04/07/2018 - 15:39 Permalink

"Bring down the government" - isn't that the point of all this.

Well, actually, a second Brexit referendum is, "the point".

Boris took the bait "hook, line and sinker."

No Boris, or rather, Boris the disgraced clown, then maybe we rethink Brexit.

Boris was the target.

two hoots -> solidtare Sat, 04/07/2018 - 15:45 Permalink

Shows how easily we can be led, have be led, to war(s). War is hidden agendas from every player.

eforce -> two hoots Sat, 04/07/2018 - 15:46 Permalink

The EUSSR will be destroyed, there were attempts by UKIP and various others to democratize it a decade or two ago and they were unsucessful, the protocols says that all states must be democratic before world government can be implemented, both the EUSSR and PRC stand in their way.

solidtare -> two hoots Sat, 04/07/2018 - 15:57 Permalink

This is political theater.

It all is.

Note the use of the words:

"Actors", "Narrative" "arc", "story", "backstory", "script"

It is all a game with these people and they figure their opponents get the joke.

http://www.unz.com/pcockburn/the-appointments-of-bolton-and-pompeo-brin

"In another major misjudgement by the US in January, the supposedly moderate Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced that the US would be keeping its forces in Syria after the defeat of Isis, and intended to get rid of President Bashar al-Assad and roll back Iranian influence. This ambition was largely fantasy , but the Russian and Turkish reaction was real . Four days after Tillerson's arrogant declaration, the Turkish army poured into northern Syria with Russian permission and within two months had eliminated the enclave of Afrin, inhabited by Kurds who are the only US ally in Syria. "

Buckaroo Banzai -> chunga Sat, 04/07/2018 - 15:55 Permalink

They obviously wanted the poor defenseless pets out of the equation. I guess them surviving was somehow not good for the narrative.

Miserable cunts.

Crazy Or Not -> Buckaroo Banzai Sat, 04/07/2018 - 16:24 Permalink

Can't vivisection them if they're still alive. My guess this is a policy thing - still cunts.

northern vigor -> macholatte Sat, 04/07/2018 - 15:46 Permalink

She may be inept, and pathetic but she doesn't hold a candle to the PM Dumbpuck of Canada.

Ex-Oligarch -> northern vigor Sat, 04/07/2018 - 16:29 Permalink

Yeah, but it's only Canada, eh.

GUS100CORRINA -> Decoherence Sat, 04/07/2018 - 15:36 Permalink

As Skripal-Gate Collapses, Will May's Government Be Next?

My response: ENGLAND is CORRUPT and an UNGODLY place to live. If you have been paying attention, it was these S.O.B.s who were spying on TRUMP under the direction of the "OBOZO" administration.

This kind of thing really angers the SHIT out of me. Since when does ENGLAND have any input into AMERICA's POTUS election process. BASTARDS!!!

I HOPE THE WHOLE DAMN COUNTRY CRASHES and BURNS. JAMES BOND can go pound salt.

[Apr 07, 2018] Food poisoning returns as the main hypothesis in Skripal case

So in this case the chain of events looks like: food poisoning -> discovery that the incident can be used as for the nasty PR campaign against Russia and save May government -> Novichok claims -> Novichok contamination
The deafening silence of neoliberal MSM is an interesting sign that something went wrong with the PR attack on Russia.
Notable quotes:
"... I doubt that the police were responsible, though it is inevitable that they will be saddled with the blame. I have no doubt that there are police procedures that would see the police remove all pets before sealing a premises. But I doubt very much that the police were anything other that props by that stage i.e. they were not doing anything by the book but, rather, they were Doing As They Were Told. ..."
"... IMHO it could have been food poisoning and it fits the timing perfectly but doesn't explain all the other traces of whatever agent they are presenting as evidence. I still feel that these idiots used an old stock of Foliant agents recovered during the cleanup of the Uzbekistan lab. I believe that Porton Down made their own stock from the formulae they recovered. This doesn't explain the presence of the Novichok A234 which was never developed or a part of the Soviet research.It was developed at Edgewood Arsenal back in the late 90's and published back then. However, the weasel wording of the claims by DSTL are that is was highly likely (read that as we are guessing) that there was Novichok or from the novichok family (meaning it could also be anything). I am a scientists and we use very precise language when describing something. I also have a forensic background and you would never put something like this vague report out there. It is actually embarrassing to be this vague and it would be tossed as evidence. ..."
"... There is not one single mention of a poisoned spy Skripal story nowhere near headline or important news columns to be noticed or seen. Like the story never happened. I am saying the BBC, The Guardian and CNN just forgot that there was any news concerning Russia poisoning or even mention of it. Really? ..."
"... The simplest explanation why the British government should have taken food poisoning as an opportunity for a global PsyOp in a manner, that was definitely highly unprofessional and panic-like, is still the repeated Russian warnings of an imminent large-scale chemical False Flag attack in Syria, to which an attack on the government district was to follow, plus ..."
"... On the other hand, Russia would not waste the opportunities of the evidence on Public Relation. The Kremlin would refer it to reasonably selected confidential military and civil contacts within the EU to bolster the rifts within the imperial camp, especially transatlanticists and their opponents in the European Council. Brexit could have become even more detrimental for the UK. ..."
"... How does Yulia Skripal know that "nobody here" will give her cousin a visa? Is she familiar with the intricacies of the Visa process? The whole phone call sounds like the acoustic equivalent of the device ships in StarTrek have installed - a deflector shield. Calm down things, make her cousin not apply for a visa. This phone call came (just like that) after her cousin started to go public in Russia and probably was identified as a potential disruptor. Yulia Skripal tried to make her not apply for a visa - by assuring her everything and everyone is OK (including Sergey) and then, when Victoria insisted, tackling the Visa issue right away - don't apply the message is, no need to come to the UK and see me. It appears this had to be avoided at all costs. ..."
"... Skripal and a 33-year-old woman are believed to have come into contact with a poisonous substance at the city's Zizzi restaurant, which has since been closed by emergency teams. ..."
Apr 07, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

VietnamVet , Apr 7, 2018 12:46:39 AM | 73

Thanks to MoA, the government/media Salisbury England Information Operation doesn't add up. If exposed to military grade nerve agent 5-8 times more toxic than America's VX, the Skripals and first responders would be dead. If food poisoning, there should be more victims at Zizzi's but not the police detective. Clearly the story was made up fast without the facts. Their pets were incinerated for god's sake. The observable goal of the British Hierarchy is to stress Russia with more sanctions and to escalate the Syrian world war plus a cover up PM May's catastrophic handling of Brexit.

As documented here, there are too many coincidences to be happenstance. I am leaning towards an oligarch faction contracted out a mob hit to take out a "contributor" to Steele's Dodgy Dossier to give it credence and scare the crap out of everyone else involved. The Established as an afterthought tasked the incident to promote their greater ambitions.

Peter AU 1 , Apr 7, 2018 12:52:55 AM | 74
From Tore's PSP link

'Health Canada advises Canadians to limit their consumption of lobster tomalley to the equivalent of one lobster tomalley daily for adults, due to the possible presence of PSP. Health Canada has recommended that children not consume lobster tomalley.'


No notice on limiting shellfish - only lobster re PSP at that link. If bivalve shellfish could be more toxic than lobster, would a limit also have been mentioned? By weight, if shellfish acquire similar or less toxicity than lobster then the Skripals must have had a good feed of mussels.

Harry , Apr 7, 2018 12:55:09 AM | 75
@ cdvision | 56

If Skripals werent in it from the start, they will HAVE to say whatever UK tells them to, otherwise they might "relapse" and no Easter miracles this time. At least until they get out of UK. If they will refuse to leave UK because they "fear evil ruskies", then we will know it was all a sham.

@ Yeah, Right | 67

Same thing I was thinking, it doesnt make any sense. Bottom line: police sealed pets to starve to death (due to neglect?), and poor cat which was still alive was killed too. Any normal person by seeing hungry cat would give her food, but no, it was "more merciful" just to kill it. Worse than animals.. And of course, to avoid any investigation later, burned them.

Peter L. , Apr 7, 2018 1:08:02 AM | 76
I searched using Google for "saxitoxin deaths frequency," which turns up lots of papers on the subject. From the abstract of one titled, "Marine algal toxins: origins, health effects, and their increased occurrence" and published in 2000:
"Over the past three decades, the frequency and global distribution of toxic algal incidents appear to have increased, and human intoxications from novel algal sources have occurred. This increase is of particular concern, since it parallels recent evidence of large-scale ecologic disturbances that coincide with trends in global warming."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1637787/

The paper suggests such poisoning is rare, but obviously it is possible. Further browsing for "shellfish poisoning" and so forth indicates that such poisoning is frequent enough for health agencies and governments to warn people about it. Perhaps one could calculate the frequency by which Russia poisons people, and compare the frequency with which people are accidentally poisoned by saxitoxin to form a better judgment of the situation.

(First time leaving a comment on this blog. I found your blog somewhat recently because of Naked Capitalism, and having been reading your posts ever since. )

Hoarsewhisperer , Apr 7, 2018 1:28:40 AM | 77
...
They cannot hide from the truth. The whole world is watching. No one believes Highly Likely.
...
Posted by: Red Ryder | Apr 6, 2018 6:16:45 PM | 11

Especially when one recalls that 'Highly Likely' is the tr-r-raditional excuse used by the Judeo-Christian Barbarians, since 2001, for slaughtering 'suspects' (from a safe distance) without properly identifying them.

All those Afghan Wedding parties, Chelsea Manning's infamous Collateral Murder gun-sight video in Iraq. And the CIA's Drone campaign is ongoing.

wrw , Apr 7, 2018 1:36:28 AM | 78
Sorry, but the odds of these two getting food poisoning is one thing but they just happen to be THE SKRIPALS! getting food poisoning? - no way! Even if there was bad mussels or even if dozens came down with food poisoning, still THE SKRIPALS just happen to eat there - what are the odds? IMPOSSIBLE!

UNLESS... the food poisoning was intentional (to silence him re Steele) and then blame Russia. But if food poisoning was the method, then TPTB would have known better than to go the nerve agent route. UNLESS... they planned it all along to plant nerve agent but not use it on the Skripals due to the danger posed to others.

Jen , Apr 7, 2018 1:55:52 AM | 79
Peter L @ 76:

British celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal's old Fat Duck restaurant was hit by a massive shellfish poisoning incident that made 529 diners ill in 2009.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/sep/11/heston-blumenthal-fat-duck-poisoning

In that case the culprit was norovirus (bane of passenger cruise liners, I believe) transmitted through raw oysters, improperly prepared razorback clams and staff practices (such as staff working while they were still sick) that enabled the spread of the norovirus.

Jen , Apr 7, 2018 2:05:54 AM | 80
WRW @ 78: Isn't it just possible that if the Skripals had had food poisoning, their condition would have been treated the same as any other patient with food poisoning - but once hospital staff noticed that Sergei Skripal had some connection with British security through checking his medical records, they called police and from then on the Skripals were treated differently from other patients, and were kept confined or sedated while the authorities decided that they must have been targeted by Moscow or saw an opportunity to bash the Russians?

Sometimes, sooner or later, incidents can happen in such a way that most observers would believe there must be more to them than coincidence and that such incidents must have been planned. They needn't be planned - all that's needed is someone or a group of people looking for opportunities to exploit situations, use innocent victims and throw blame onto third parties.

Hoarsewhisperer , Apr 7, 2018 2:37:49 AM | 81
...
The truth is that (while China may eclipse the US by 2150) it is very likely that this will be Russia's century. I believe the west know this very well and will do everything they can to capture Russia's resources and that means continuing isolation of, and tension and conflict with, Russia.

Btw: If you add Chinese industry, Russian resources and OBOR together it is obvious that the end of western dominion of the world is coming to an end and that, unfortunately, greatly increases the risk of a major war.

Posted by: Ace | Apr 6, 2018 9:07:04 PM | 48

That makes a certain amount of sense but overlooks a vital component of the current World Order. If the current World Order wasn't dominated and controlled by Greedy Rich Pigs then TRADE would be the friendly and logical way to address any global imbalances in local water, food and resources availability (to which one could add Funds/Finance).
The underlying problem is, imo, the factoid that the Greedy Rich Pigs crowd got rich by monopolising essential industries and resources centuries ago and don't want to surrender their 'right' to OWN everything of value, including politicians, and to continue their Command of the Gravy Train.

Yeah, Right , Apr 7, 2018 2:43:24 AM | 82
@75 "police sealed pets to starve to death"

I doubt that the police were responsible, though it is inevitable that they will be saddled with the blame. I have no doubt that there are police procedures that would see the police remove all pets before sealing a premises. But I doubt very much that the police were anything other that props by that stage i.e. they were not doing anything by the book but, rather, they were Doing As They Were Told.

Hoarsewhisperer , Apr 7, 2018 2:54:33 AM | 83
Greedy Rich Pigs.
It was neither coincidence nor happenstance that inspired Orwell to cast 'un-clean' pigs as the movers & shakers in Animal Farm.
somebody , Apr 7, 2018 2:58:32 AM | 84
80
Being close to Porton Down, the hospital must have all kinds of procedures to deal with chemical accidents.

Anyway, here is the US patent for the treatment of "Novichok"

Oh all those experts..... no antidote, only Russian ....

Old Microbiologist , Apr 7, 2018 3:06:13 AM | 85
IMHO it could have been food poisoning and it fits the timing perfectly but doesn't explain all the other traces of whatever agent they are presenting as evidence. I still feel that these idiots used an old stock of Foliant agents recovered during the cleanup of the Uzbekistan lab. I believe that Porton Down made their own stock from the formulae they recovered. This doesn't explain the presence of the Novichok A234 which was never developed or a part of the Soviet research.It was developed at Edgewood Arsenal back in the late 90's and published back then. However, the weasel wording of the claims by DSTL are that is was highly likely (read that as we are guessing) that there was Novichok or from the novichok family (meaning it could also be anything). I am a scientists and we use very precise language when describing something. I also have a forensic background and you would never put something like this vague report out there. It is actually embarrassing to be this vague and it would be tossed as evidence.

What I think happened was they used old stock (which would have the correct chemical fingerprint from Russia having been made there in the first place) but after 38 years the potency is way off. If the agent was in fact 10 times stronger than VX then perhaps there was just enough potency left to cause what we saw in the Skripals. This, of course, assumes that the UK attacked them in the first place which explains their certainty of what agent it was. However, if it was in fact A234 then you could never attribute this to Russia as it is actually an American product. If it was one of the original Foliant agents that is something different but that is not what was claimed. The finding of agent on the doorknobs is ridiculous and a very bad misstep by the UK. These agents are viscous (like honey) and smell horrible similar to your household bug sprays. Putting it on a doorknob would be patently obvious to anyone touching the door and you would examine the goo on your finger and smell it. Obviously, this didn't happen. So, if agent is present on the doorknob then it was deliberately put there well after the fact. These agents can be soluble in water (2 of the Foliant agents are water soluble and 2 are not). If so, it was raining in Salisbury which would have removed it by rainfall dilution. If it isn't water soluble it was there for 3 weeks.

The persistence of these agents in the environment is not long and it rapidly begins to decompose, especially if in the presence of sunlight (UV), and disappears. When salting a battlefield with nerve agent we expect it to remain lethal for 72 hours. These weapons are designed specifically to keep the enemy forces from travelling through a contaminated area and the purpose of chemical agents is denial of terrain. You use it when you have a front line which is too large to defend with your forces at hand or to funnel the enemy attack into an area where you have amassed your defenses. This is what this stuff is designed to do. You can also use it to mess up rear area support operations but that is a secondary use. Think of it as an aerial delivered (artillery or aircraft) temporary minefield. The key word being temporary. After all, this is the territory you are fighting over and it is useless if it is permanently poisoned. As the FEBA moves you may end up occupying that area in the days following a defensive operation. It is possible; however, to attack through a contaminated area and modern tanks now have air filtration and all combat troops have MOPP gear which will protect a soldier in that environment. However, anyone who has practiced infantry assaults wearing full MOPP gear knows how awful that is and how ineffective you are as a soldier. It is hot, heavy, with poor visibility in a full mask, not to mention inadequate breathing which is rough at best, plus you are also carrying your basic load so it is an awful experience. Also by doctrine attacking forces need to have a 3 to 1 force superiority to be successful and things like chemical agents on the battlefield are force multipliers whereas attacking forces operating a full MOPP are suffering a force detractor. My point is it is an effective way to mount a defense and no one would willingly attack through a contaminated area.

So, I see many problems trying to put this together and all of them add up to me to be a false flag operation which was botched. All the subsequent actions by the UK government including denial of consular privileges to see their citizens, failure to follow fixed procedures as mandated by the CWC, long delay in reporting to the OPCW, failure to provide any physical evidence (GC-MS printouts would be enough), taking the investigation away from the police, not mounting a manhunt for the perpetrators, changing story over time and the miraculous recovery of the victims all indicate to me a completely botched operation. I feel sorry for the British citizens having a government as inept as this is. Of course, mine (the USA) is far worse but I always respected the UK as being somewhat responsible. Now it looks like it has fallen down to American levels of ineptitude.

Blue , Apr 7, 2018 3:09:34 AM | 86
Michael Hudson's take on Skripal poisoning.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49159.htm
Al-Pol , Apr 7, 2018 3:12:14 AM | 87
Binary food-poisoning anyone ? With all this talk about creating these mysterious binary nerve agents, did anyone consider a similar scenario involving two separate strains of bacteria (or even two of the same/similar strain), from two separate foods.

The Russians and Eastern Europeans spend a lot of time preserving foods (for their long cold winters) and they can become a source for the Clostridium botulinum bacteria to grow in. So for breakfast the Skripals have some pickles that Yulia brought with her and a few hours later the botulinum toxin begins to affect them, but only mildly. Their seafood risotto also happens to contain traces of Clostridium botulinum and that combined with the original is enough to knock them out 30 minutes or so later.

Botulism can be hard to track down, but when you have the world's leading experts on it just down the road at Porton Down it should be easy to get a quick positive test and to have all the information necessary to treat any victims.

But can you imagine what would happen if you tell the world that a Russian spy has been poisoned with botulinum toxin, just a few miles away from the world's leading reasearch centre for that toxin. A different explanation is needed and a quick flood of DSMA-Notices needs to be issued to prevent any unwanted details emerging whilst the new explanation is being created.

Bailey the other poisoning victim may have had just a mild dose from the seafood risotto.

somebody , Apr 7, 2018 3:19:12 AM | 89
Deutsche Welle article - in German

claiming that Theresa May got European support by claiming they could prove that the Skripal poison came from Russia (vetoed by Porton Down). The article asks for an independent investigation. Deutsche Welle is the German equivalent of BBC.

m , Apr 7, 2018 3:21:20 AM | 90
@yeah right 55 Yep I think you are on the right track

@wrw 78 Yes you too

I would like to see the cash register bill for the lunchtime meal at zizzi - I would be particularly interested in number of diners

I believe our det sgt hero was a minder and may also have been present at said lunch. Would explain a lot wouldn't it?

notheonly1 , Apr 7, 2018 3:40:03 AM | 91
How about a case of inconceivable coincidence?

The Skripals were on the 'kill list' for the known reasons regarding the Steele dossier. Yulia was just collateral damage. Porton Down had the substance and it was applied to the house door after the Skripals had left to go about what they had planned to do.

Unscripted, the Skripals come down with a food poisoning from eating at the restaurant. They are unable to return home, where they would have been poisoned by whatever services involved. But the cop goes there and comes into contact with whatever was applied there.

Noteworthy is of course, that any assassination will not be perpetrated based on a 10% chance of succeeding. The people with the abilities to take somebody out do just that. Although it must also be mentioned that assassinations by means of causing cancer in the victim are very popular in the valuable West.

Just a thought to connect the dots.

somebody , Apr 7, 2018 3:51:18 AM | 92
Posted by: Old Microbiologist | Apr 7, 2018 3:06:13 AM | 85

I think its military use has shifted since WWI. It is used on civilian populations for ethnic cleansing, on underground makeshift facilities like tunnels and in PR.

laserlurk , Apr 7, 2018 3:55:29 AM | 93
It is Saturday April 7th. Europe 10:00.

There is not one single mention of a poisoned spy Skripal story nowhere near headline or important news columns to be noticed or seen. Like the story never happened. I am saying the BBC, The Guardian and CNN just forgot that there was any news concerning Russia poisoning or even mention of it. Really?

Ghost Ship , Apr 7, 2018 3:58:06 AM | 94
Posted by: MadMax2 | Apr 6, 2018 6:40:36 PM | 17
Brexit has been game over'd.

I'm not so sure. There are increasing demands to have another referendum over the Brexit "package". Also, one thing the Conservative Brexiters have overlooked is what happens when the Labour Party forms a government? Inside the EU there are strict limits and controls to what it could do to return the UK from a neo-liberal economy to either a social democratic or democratic socialist economy. Once the UK leaves the EU all those limits and controls disappear, which is probably why Corbyn is ambivalent about Brexit - he knows we need to remain part of Europe but not part of the neo-liberal EU ruled by a quasi-dictatorship in Brussels.

BTW, the UK has been the United States' enforcer inside the EU since it joined. When the UK voted for Brexit, I suspect that deep-state Washington thought that Poland could take over as enforcer , but the nationalist politicians in Poland are just not up to the job. So what could deep-state Washington do? Discredit Theresa May as she is probably the only Conservative politician capable of getting terms for Brexit that the British electorate will accept? Put in her place a thoroughly damaged Boris Johnson who would screw it up completely?

TomGard , Apr 7, 2018 4:08:55 AM | 95
b,
your "best explanation ... " label is a little deceptive, as you yourself concede in the last paragraphs of your piece. Food poisoning explains the recovery of the Skripals, the conflicting allegations about means and location of the poisoning and the lies and secrecy about DS Baileys alledged affection by the poison, nothing more.

The simplest explanation why the British government should have taken food poisoning as an opportunity for a global PsyOp in a manner, that was definitely highly unprofessional and panic-like, is still the repeated Russian warnings of an imminent large-scale chemical False Flag attack in Syria, to which an attack on the government district was to follow, plus numerous reports of the capture of British Special Forces in Ghouta, which were, with due reservations, relayed by Maxim A. Suchkov. Suchkov is not in a position to indulge in levity in such a case.

On the other hand, Russia would not waste the opportunities of the evidence on Public Relation. The Kremlin would refer it to reasonably selected confidential military and civil contacts within the EU to bolster the rifts within the imperial camp, especially transatlanticists and their opponents in the European Council. Brexit could have become even more detrimental for the UK.

b , Apr 7, 2018 4:09:51 AM | 96
The more I read about it that better is the fit:
Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning

Clinical Presentation:
Ingestion of molluscs contaminated with PSP results in the following clinical picture (Bower et al, 1981, Kao 1993). Five to 30 minutes from consumption, there is slight perioral tingling progressing to numbness which spreads to face and neck to moderate cases. In severe cases, these symptoms spread to the extremities with incoordination and respiratory difficulty. There are medullary disturbances in severe cases evidenced by difficulty swallowing, sense of throat constriction, speech incoherence or complete loss of speech, as well as brain stem dysfunction. Within 2-12 hours, in very severe cases, there is complete paralysis and death from respiratory failure in absence of ventilatory support. After 12 hours, regardless of severity, victims start to recover gradually and are without any residual symptoms within a few days (Bower et al, 1981, ILO 1984, Halstead 1988).

This fits the eyewitness reports of the Skripals on the bank. A women who had watched them said they were behaving erratic before collapsing. She thought they were way out on drugs.
Piotr Berman , Apr 7, 2018 4:12:13 AM | 97
"I suspect that deep-state Washington thought that Poland could take over as enforcer, but the nationalist politicians in Poland are just not up to the job."

It is debatable if the current Polish government is barking mad or batshit insane, but in either case, they lack influence on other countries that an "enforcer" needs. In any case, what would an "enforcer" enforce? On most matters, the French are eager to please and Germans usually follow the suit, even if Merkel utters something feisty in a biergarten on occasion.

BX , Apr 7, 2018 4:25:10 AM | 98
We still do not know for a fact how the Skripals were poisoned (several avenues of "investigation" - buckwheat, door handle, gift, something in a suitcase) and how Detective Sergeant Bailey fits into this picture. If he was in the house (early stories suggested this) how did he get in and was he there on his own? Was he in the house at all? Where was he?

The ER consultant and his letter. There is no follow-up by media. There is apparently no official reaction to the letter. This letter is the only half-way external confirmation there were 3 people with considerable poisoning. Maybe this letter is not a white hat letter?

I think it is best to just take a step back and look at this from some distance. You then realize there is not a single thing here you can be sure about. There are no facts; whatever there is is presented by British government agents (that includes Porton Down). The "defense" cannot get hold of anything to build a meaningful defense on. Embassy is denied access. Close relatives are denied access.

How does Yulia Skripal know that "nobody here" will give her cousin a visa? Is she familiar with the intricacies of the Visa process? The whole phone call sounds like the acoustic equivalent of the device ships in StarTrek have installed - a deflector shield. Calm down things, make her cousin not apply for a visa. This phone call came (just like that) after her cousin started to go public in Russia and probably was identified as a potential disruptor. Yulia Skripal tried to make her not apply for a visa - by assuring her everything and everyone is OK (including Sergey) and then, when Victoria insisted, tackling the Visa issue right away - don't apply the message is, no need to come to the UK and see me. It appears this had to be avoided at all costs.

Followed by an official confirmation Sergey is recovering, too.

Someone decided that they could not keep the Skripals in intensive care forever since somehow the doubt is more widespread than expected? Now it is about calming things down? All is well since the Skripals are fine? Damage control mission?

Someone had a look at Yulia's social media account after March 4.

Sergey Skripal is totally dependent on the UK.

I don't think the animals are dead.

cdvision , Apr 7, 2018 4:42:02 AM | 99
What torpedoes the food-poisoning theory is that the UK response was so quick, coordinated and word perfect - till Boris overstepped the mark (he is just an attention seeking buffoon). So whatever transpired they knew it was coming.

What is odd is that the Skripals are still alive. Maybe its the special Russian DNA. Thankfully, the medics in Salisbury declined to go with the official line, and stated so, publicly, early on. The Skripals could, plausibly, have been taken to Porton Down for sSpecialist treatment", like the Guinea Pigs (it seems the pets have been incinerated - ie destruction of evidence).

There is more to this than food poisoning.

b , Apr 7, 2018 4:48:10 AM | 100
adding to my comment @96

March 6 - 'He looked out of it' Witness says Russian spy Sergei Skripal slumped on Salisbury bench

Freya Church, from Salisbury, said: "On the bench there was a couple, an older guy and a younger girl.

She was sort of leant in on him, it looked like she had passed out maybe.

"He was doing some strange hand movements, looking up to the sky. It looked like they had been taking something quite strong."

Sergei Skripal was found unconscious on a shopping centre bench in Salisbury, Wiltshire, along with a woman he is thought to know.

Skripal and a 33-year-old woman are believed to have come into contact with a poisonous substance at the city's Zizzi restaurant, which has since been closed by emergency teams.

[Apr 06, 2018] As Skripal-Gate Collapses so Will the May Government by Tom Luongo

An interesting hypothesis: May, Johnson and Williamson might be deceived by their own advisors. In tyhis case this is an operation directed at undermining May's government to the point of a no-confidence vote in order to stop Brexit and to preserve the UK's position in the European Union, which is favored by the political and financial elites.
But I doubt the Corbin is the person the British neoliberal want in power.
Notable quotes:
"... And it wasn't until the lead scientists at Porton Downs left May, Johnson and Williamson out to hang on Monday that the full operation became clear. By stating that they could not confirm the origin of the Novichok nerve agent used in the attack on the Skripals the Porton Downs officials destroyed the credibility of The Gypsum Lady's government ..."
"... Therefore, this operation was always about undermining May's government to the point of a no-confidence vote. This would then be the ultimate betrayal of Brexit in order to preserve the U.K.'s position in the European Union, which is favored by the political and old-monied British elite. ..."
"... May and Johnson both get told by trusted advisors that there is incontrovertible proof of Russia's hand in this. They go with this information with confidence to parliament, the U.N., high-level meetings with foreign leaders and the press. They convince their allies to stand strong against the evil Russians who is everyone's bid 'baddie' at this point. ..."
"... Trump has to go along with this nonsense even though he is obviously skeptical otherwise there will be an uproar in the US press about him betraying our most trusted ally for his puppet-master Putin ..."
"... But, if Brexit is betrayed through this hackneyed farce of a spy thriller, it won't sit well with the British people. Scotland's call for a second referendum will continue to grow and the Pound will fall alongside the competitiveness of British labor still trapped within a euro-zone that has done nothing but choke the life out of the economy. ..."
"... Between these things and the toxic levels of political correctness as it pertains to Muslim immigration, the insanity of London liberals and the de facto police state the U.K. has become and you have a recipe for political unrest that will not be pretty. Brexit was meant to be the peaceful revolution that put the nail in the coffin of the march to one world government. It is about to be nullified. When it is the sun will finally set on what's left of the British Empire. ..."
"... That was my gut feeling from the beginning, that it was the MI6 for some internal stuff. I didn't think of Brexit but it makes sense. Either way, Britain has already since decades been geopolitically irrelevant other than as the empire's muscle's sidekick. ..."
"... More like we have privatised so much of our intelligence services, just like the US has got the private sector, working on around 80% of their intelligence. Leaving it to those with minimal knowledge, but, experts in the art of spin, as Elliot Higgins, with his Google Software Certificate, comes to mind. Just one of the experts of the day, with a similar set of skills. ..."
"... Why did British government killed Skirpal's pests? Police search of the Skripal's house was so thorough that in a month they couldn't find his cat and 2 guinea pigs. Now, the police issued the statement full of lies. ..."
"... More then 2/3 of ALL financial transactions are done through the City of London, and the EU has, although there are several contenders, not yet transferred all this to the European Mainland to any major financial center on the Mainland! ...Frankfurt am Main and Paris are the top two contenders. ..."
"... Johnson, as a supervisor for MI6, then is some they want to get rid of? ..."
"... One can look back a few month's before Salisbury and see May out of the blue ratcheting up her Russophobia during speeches on Youtube. Keep in mind that as Home minister from 2010-2016 May must have had direct relations with MI5. ..."
"... Also her carefully scripted language more implying than direct stating offers her a plausible deniability just like Blair exploited. So the fault can be shifted to faulty intelligence or experts. So presenting May as a victim is 'highly likely' too generous. My guess is that she was involved from its inception. ..."
"... May goes to see the EU leaders, next stage signed off, but, we are left in ignorance and low and behold, so many Russian Diplomats are expelled from US and EU nations, just a couple of days after May has been horsetrading? ..."
"... The EU will never be what you Spaniards and we Croats want. We would like something like the US of Europe. All people to be equal. Sweden, Denmark, Germany... want a lot of bantustans in Europe. The name bantustan was used in the RSA during apartheid when they had created a lot of independent states in order to exploit them. My question to you is - if you were a Dane would you like to share "all spoils" with third world countries like Bulgaria, Romania...and tomorrow Bosnia, Macedonia...etc? ..."
"... There is another cover-up taking place in May's government in the midst of the Skripal hysteria, and that is of the decades-old sex rings (organized by Asian Muslims, according to what I have read) that have raped between 1,000-1500 girls in three English towns. It is a sensitive issue, but should rightfully be reported. ..."
"... My only problem with this article is if May's government fails, then there is a serious risk for the globalists that a more ardent Brexiter may end up leading the party! ..."
Apr 06, 2018 | russia-insider.com

Putting diplomatic pressure on Russia on behalf of the U.S.'s crazed neoconservative Deep State just didn't seem like a big enough reward. Neither did cutting Russian businesses out of European banks to stop contractor and creditor payments associated with the Nordstream 2 pipeline.

Those things felt like nice bonus objectives but not main goals.

And it wasn't until the lead scientists at Porton Downs left May, Johnson and Williamson out to hang on Monday that the full operation became clear. By stating that they could not confirm the origin of the Novichok nerve agent used in the attack on the Skripals the Porton Downs officials destroyed the credibility of The Gypsum Lady's government .

Therefore, this operation was always about undermining May's government to the point of a no-confidence vote. This would then be the ultimate betrayal of Brexit in order to preserve the U.K.'s position in the European Union, which is favored by the political and old-monied British elite.

In short, this was a coup attempt.

And don't think for a second that this is not plausible. Remember it was Margaret Thatcher's own most trusted people who betrayed her to get the U.K. into the European Union in the first place. This was why they brought down The Iron Lady.

So, here's the scene:

May and Johnson both get told by trusted advisors that there is incontrovertible proof of Russia's hand in this. They go with this information with confidence to parliament, the U.N., high-level meetings with foreign leaders and the press. They convince their allies to stand strong against the evil Russians who is everyone's bid 'baddie' at this point.

Trump has to go along with this nonsense even though he is obviously skeptical otherwise there will be an uproar in the US press about him betraying our most trusted ally for his puppet-master Putin .

To be honest, I don't think these bozos, May and Johnson, were in on the plan. I think they were being played all along and now will be the patsies.

Just like May was played last year, calling for snap elections. The minute she called them there were terror attacks all over London, marches against her over public safety. A media campaign which puffed up Jeremy Corbyn, who they are now destroying for his rightful trepidation about this fairy tale MI-6 is spinning.

The goal was to weaken May and get Labour back in charge. Corbyn would then be cast aside and a Tony Blair clone installed as Prime Minister to scuttle Brexit and restore order to the galaxy, Europe. Unfortunately, the DUP got enough of the vote to re-elect a very weakened May and things have limped along for nearly a year.

Crisis on Infinite Empires

The problem with this however, is like all plans of those desperate to cling to vestiges of former glory (and the U.K. is definitely the poster child for that), is the crisis of confidence it will engender. Make no mistake, Brexit was no mistake. It's what the people of Britain wanted and they want it more now than in 2016. So, they don't dare call for a new referendum. But, they are also looking at a third parliamentary vote in as many years.

And that doesn't scream confidence no matter how much markets would prefer the legal status quo. Opposition to Brexit comes from the entrenched monied power, not from any adherence to globalist ideology.

But, if Brexit is betrayed through this hackneyed farce of a spy thriller, it won't sit well with the British people. Scotland's call for a second referendum will continue to grow and the Pound will fall alongside the competitiveness of British labor still trapped within a euro-zone that has done nothing but choke the life out of the economy.

The Pound will begin to sink into irrelevancy as this unfolds. It won't happen overnight, but we will look back on these events and see them as the trigger points for the path of history.

Between these things and the toxic levels of political correctness as it pertains to Muslim immigration, the insanity of London liberals and the de facto police state the U.K. has become and you have a recipe for political unrest that will not be pretty. Brexit was meant to be the peaceful revolution that put the nail in the coffin of the march to one world government. It is about to be nullified. When it is the sun will finally set on what's left of the British Empire.


Media Watch • 10 hours ago ,

The problem with this "they made May do it" narrative is that she (and Bojo the blowhard) were clearly no reluctant stooges. They were relishing their chest thumping, Russia hating roles, and it is easier to believe they were in fact the architects not the pawns.

I think Craig Murray understands it best when he said the government had put pressure on Porton Down scientists to say the agent was made in Russia. Even the Aitkenhead interview had the fingerprints of government handlers all over it, when, after "finishing" the interview and taking down the camera, they had to set it up again - it was in a different position - in order to coerce Aitkenhead to make the absurd claim that it could only have been made by a state actor.

So it looks like a government orchestrated provocation for political reasons - to puff up May's "tough" credentials, and get the UK punching above its weight in the international arena. But all it has really done is strain the already fraying relationship between the Nato states.

Ciao Bella Media Watch 9 hours ago ,

.....it could only have been made by a state actor.....About twenty state actors can produce it, including Porton Down / the UK.
So it means nothing for people who can think, on the other hand it means a lot for MSM propaganda and sheepishly population.

Mike 5 hours ago ,

George Galloway said it best. Paraphrasing : "England wants you to believe that a military grade nerve agent that is classified 10 times more potent than VX, did not kill anyone? They want you to believe that the nerve agent was on the door handle so when the Shripal's left the house, the father closed the door and his daughter needed to doubled checked if it was closed? Really? So, it was so deadly that they managed to get to the car, disappear for a few hours, then went to a pub followed by a restaurant where, amazingly enough, they felt well enough to eat a full meal and finally both of them fell at the same time on a park bench over 4 hours later? Not one investigator or police that went to the Shripal house, during the investigation got sick?

If you believe that story, you are not a sheep, you are an idiot!"

Serg Derbst 8 hours ago ,

That was my gut feeling from the beginning, that it was the MI6 for some internal stuff. I didn't think of Brexit but it makes sense. Either way, Britain has already since decades been geopolitically irrelevant other than as the empire's muscle's sidekick.

It never had a vision for Europe (other than to start wars in it since centuries) and never really wanted to be part of it. What is Britain anyhow except for a very beautiful country? Isn't that enough? Why do you always have to be important? Look at Portugal, this often overlooked small country at the edge of Europe where the sun sets in the ocean as otherwise only in California. We used to be the world's number one empire once, then number two, and now? It is certainly going to be the place I want to spend my retirement in. Great weather, rough sea, beautiful beaches, amazing food, and one of the most friendly people in all of Europe. What's an empire good for?

The problem is that these rich people cannot appreciate anything. Here in Hamburg our old Hanseatic money is modeled very much after the British way. Golfing, rowing, tennis, hockey, private boarding schools, the whole shebang. I've been to school with a lot of them and noticed that they all have this aura of lost sadness that can only be filled by greed and artificial importance in artificial clubs and such.

A lot of my classmates ended up managing hedge funds in London, prior to 2008 at least. They still eradiate this cold, empty sadness, but they meet annually in Bangkok for guess what. I prefer to appreciate the simple things and instead of clinging to a distant past the British elites would do well to make room for their common people to do the same, for example by providing for affordable housing in their cities, especially in London.

Tom Luongo Serg Derbst 32 minutes ago ,

Sergei, neither did I and that was the part that was distressing me for the past couple of weeks. Then it finally hit me while I was on YouTube livestreaming about this... and I thought... "Yeah, that's the missing piece."

The rest of your comment is fantastic, thanks!

Howard Douglas 9 hours ago ,

The only part I disagree with is that which the writer states May and Johnson were actually in on this sell out of Britain. Boris is a buffoon, for working with May, so is Gove and so are all (who claimed to be BREXITEERS) but as yo whether Johnson is actually in on it, I will give him the benefit of the doubt. Let's face it though his reputation is ruined and permanently so as a result of enigmatic blaming the Russians for this gross miscarriage of justice (guilty until proven innocent).

As for #ShariaAppeaserMay she is the 'woman' behind keeping the UK in and will be 'the women' who breaks the UK apart. She is bungling, useless and a traitor to this country and all the foolhardy have stood by and watche her complete and utter uselessness be the badge Britain wears in future. The Russians are laughing as #theMaybot destroys her own and UK credibility, she was a liar, remonaner and appeaser from the beginning.

It won't be long, the country can only be saved by Divine Intervention.

Tom Luongo Howard Douglas 34 minutes ago ,

I didn't say they were in on this. Actually I made it a point not to say that. "To be honest, I don't think these bozos, May and Johnson, were in on the plan. I think they were being played all along and now will be the patsies."

Thanks for reading and commenting.

c • 7 hours ago ,

MOSCOW, April 6. /TASS/. The cat and two guinea pigs Sergei Skripal had kept in his home might have proved an important piece of evidence in the case of the former GRU colonel's poisoning, because the animals died under very strange circumstances, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on her Facebook page, adding that did not happen because they were cremated.

"At first sight this may look a reason for another portion of key-witnesses-have-been-eliminated jokes," she said. "In reality, though, they were really 'crucial pieces of evidence,' if it is true a poisonous substance, according to some versions, might have been used inside Skripal's house."

Strange search

Zakharova was surprised that the pets reportedly died because they had remained inside the house all alone without being taken care of.

"How is that? The house was searched but the pets remained unnoticed. The pets of a man who was suspected to have been poisoned with a nerve gas?!" she said.

Also, Zakharova raised doubts why the cat was euthanized at the Porton Down chemical laboratory.

"Is this Britain's usual way of treating house pets? Is it quite common?" she asked.

"That is not all," Zakharova went on to say. "According to media rumors, the guinea pigs and the cat were cremated. In other words, destroyed, although the pets' bodies might have served a crucial piece of evidence in the poisoning case."

Zakharova said that according to Russian sources, the British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC) did know that pets were remaining in Skripal's house, but kept quiet about that. "We would like to hear explanations," she added.

More:
http://tass.com/politics/99...

JPH 8 hours ago ,

Advice to May and Boris: When you're is such a hole, keep digging. LOL! The moral victor is Corbyn and that may translate in dumping the Blairite backstabbers within Labour and perhaps a real victory at elections. The upcoming local elections next month may serve as an indication.

Michael Droy 9 hours ago ,

Ridiculous.

Just for the record - Brexit talks are easy - they went from the win-lose battle of a cash payment a long while ago and have been on win-win negotiations ever since. The only rule in these negotiations is that everyone must claim victory over everything so the publicity is very different from the facts.

AM Hants 9 hours ago ,

Sorry Tom, I do not agree. More like we have privatised so much of our intelligence services, just like the US has got the private sector, working on around 80% of their intelligence. Leaving it to those with minimal knowledge, but, experts in the art of spin, as Elliot Higgins, with his Google Software Certificate, comes to mind. Just one of the experts of the day, with a similar set of skills.

Now why does Elliot Higgins remind me Atlantic Council, NATO and those behind the Great Israel Project, so come to mind? So where do Boris and May fit in and who are they loyal to? If you look at the demonization of Corbyn, together with how they are using the anti-Semitic card, to go with the Zionist led media, hysteria, behind Jeremy.

The Skripals and Salisbury Plain, were meant to complement another false flag that was due to go down. Only Russia and Syria prevented it from happening, before those running the other part of the script, received the message.

How would things have gone, if there was a chemical weapons incident, on the scale of say 9/11, that happened in Syria, with a minor story, set up at the same time, to accuse Russia of a CW incident in the UK?

Tim Bell
Bell Pottinger
PR Media Management Litvinenko and good friend Boris Berezovsky
Sans Frontieres
Doctors Without Borders
Journlists Without Borders
White Helmets
Atlantic Council
NATO
Trump Dossier
Christopher Steele
Sergei Skripal
Ukraine
Salisbury Plain and the list goes on

How does it all fit in, with other stories that are running?

All Russiagate Roads Lead To London: Evidence Emerges Of Mifsud's Links To UK Intelligence... https://www.zerohedge.com/n...

Jeish Al-Islam's Chemical Weapons Production Workshops Discovered in Eastern Ghouta
The Syrian army found a number of workshops and facilities in Eastern Ghouta of Damascus that had been used by Jeish al-Islam terrorist group to produce chemical weapons and toxic gases... https://www.veteranstoday.c...

.............................................................

What happened to Bell Pottinger?

Despots and
Rogues, Met Its
End in South Africa
The British firm Bell Pottinger, hired by
three brothers now caught up in a nationwide
corruption scandal, helped drive racial
tensions to levels not felt since apartheid... https://www.nytimes.com/201...

Michael Droy AM Hants 9 hours ago ,

"The Skripals and Salisbury Plain, were meant to complement another false flag that was due to go down. Only Russia and Syria prevented it from happening, before those running the other part of the script, received the message."
This part at least sounds like a very good explanation.

AM Hants Michael Droy 9 hours ago ,

assumption on my part and I did enjoy Tom's article.

Tom Luongo AM Hants 30 minutes ago ,

AM,
You may be right about the motivations behind this being a bit more murky than I put it in the article. I'm willing to admit I may be wrong here. It's part of what I do, take things and spin out plausible scenarios.

The net effect, however, will be as I laid out, the loss of confidence in the U.K. government, it's further isolation and subservience to both the U.S. and the EU will hasten its demise now that it's alienated both China and Russia over this idiotic incident.

USA vassal • 10 hours ago ,

Why did British government killed Skirpal's pests? Police search of the Skripal's house was so thorough that in a month they couldn't find his cat and 2 guinea pigs. Now, the police issued the statement full of lies.

Boris Jaruselski 10 hours ago ,

I wouldn't worry much about the May government, ...it was doomed to fail much sooner, then later from the day they assumed office, but what the world, and particularly Europe should be VERY afraid of: the collapse of GREAT @#$%& BRITAIN!

Why? ...what's that piddy little island off the European Mainland got, that the rest of Europe don't, ...right?

More then 2/3 of ALL financial transactions are done through the City of London, and the EU has, although there are several contenders, not yet transferred all this to the European Mainland to any major financial center on the Mainland! ...Frankfurt am Main and Paris are the top two contenders.

If Great Britain goes to the dogs, all hell is going to break loose on the Mainland!

outsider 3 minutes ago ,

Thierry Meyssan article, "Theresa May's Foreign Policy" is worth a read : www.voltairenet.org/article...

F*** NATO • 6 minutes ago ,

We learn that this hoax is indeed a hoax: Russian TV Releases Phone Call Of 'Poisoned' Yulia Skripal Saying Her And Her Father Are 'Fine'

"Everything's ok. He's resting now, having a sleep. Everyone's health is fine, there's nothing that can't be put right. I'll be discharged soon. Everything is ok."

TONY LANE • an hour ago ,

it is always Hard to bring the truth to the People when you have the Paedophile Protection Network the BBC, protecting all the Criminal low lifes and sowing the seeds of discontent, because people tend to believe what they hear First before the begin to analyse it, But I beleive that we have a Criminal Government whom have lied and lied and lied, first lie the Grenfell tower the death figures are a lie i would have said it was between 300 and 500 and possibly Higher, she is Lying about Brexit and she does have the Choice to leave it Without Paying a penny for a Union that was created and Controlled by the USA, And now we have the poisoning of Skripal and His Daughter, because the poison clearly came from Porton Down, because the have the Antidote and have always had it as they have Always had the Poison and it was clearly implemented by MI6, as was the Poison's that Porton Down were Spraying on their own people 40 and 50 Years Ago when the had little van's Running About The Countryside spraying out toxic poisons that was the Precurser to chemtrail's, think of all the worst things that Porton Down can do, and all your Gueses could be Right, To Put It In Spades Porton Down Stinks to High Heaven And Should Have Been Shut Down 50 years Ago, they have murdered hundreds of People in the Name Of National Security, the list of lies goes On and On and On.

Eugene TONY LANE 23 minutes ago ,

T.L. Thanks for good post. Since I am quite an old man, please, could you next time make a gap between paragraphs?
Cheers.

Kjell Hasthi 5 hours ago ,

Interesting views from Tom Luongo

- I'm sorry but it's not a stretch to think this whole thing was cooked up by MI-6.

Johnson, as a supervisor for MI6, then is some they want to get rid of?

JPH Bruno 4 hours ago ,

The message contradicts their narrative.

JPH 8 hours ago ,

One can look back a few month's before Salisbury and see May out of the blue ratcheting up her Russophobia during speeches on Youtube. Keep in mind that as Home minister from 2010-2016 May must have had direct relations with MI5.

Also her carefully scripted language more implying than direct stating offers her a plausible deniability just like Blair exploited. So the fault can be shifted to faulty intelligence or experts. So presenting May as a victim is 'highly likely' too generous. My guess is that she was involved from its inception.

AM Hants Enrrique Costas 9 hours ago ,

The Brexit reshuffles world geopolitics by Thierry Meyssan... https://www.voltairenet.org...

The rest of BREXIT does not matter, for those concerned. However, the BREXIT talks were not going that well. Remember, the EU and all their demands, when we just had to sit tight, keep the cheque book closed, retain our fishing rights, post exit, walk away from the legal loopholes, concerned with the EU and the EU gets nought, as we toddle off, in March 2019. In the meantime, May goes to see the EU leaders, next stage signed off, but, we are left in ignorance and low and behold, so many Russian Diplomats are expelled from US and EU nations, just a couple of days after May has been horsetrading?

Enrrique Costas AM Hants 8 hours ago ,

We will see what comes next. I think that the €urozone will not only survive but enlarge to Sweden and Denmark. It is true that the €urozone only can continue as a European Federation, but a European Federation is inevitable if we want Europe to have a say in global affairs, with a GDP similar to China in size and a much higher income per head.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

qop Enrrique Costas 7 hours ago ,

The EU will never be what you Spaniards and we Croats want. We would like something like the US of Europe. All people to be equal.
Sweden, Denmark, Germany... want a lot of bantustans in Europe. The name bantustan was used in the RSA during apartheid when they had created a lot of independent states in order to exploit them. My question to you is - if you were a Dane would you like to share "all spoils" with third world countries like Bulgaria, Romania...and tomorrow Bosnia, Macedonia...etc?

Even today, as it is, by law you as EU citizen are not allowed to stay more than three months - let's say in Italy - if you don't comply some requirements, like a proof that you work, that you seek a job, that you study... Try to open a bank account in Italy without those requirements.

No chance. EU - to my opinion is a big delusion. Artisans cannot benefit because of language barriers, poor organization to find a job...Highly skilled people are not needed...

Enrrique Costas qop 7 hours ago ,

In many areas, there are less differences between EU member states than between US states...

qop Enrrique Costas 7 hours ago ,

Well, why don't you educate me / us?

Just imagine this scenario... The US says to Spain or to Croatia - Whoever wants from now on can go to the US...but will not get the American citizenship. The person is only eligible to seek work...once you get the job you can stay/work forever.

How many people would go? How many skills are marketable? No single layer, social worker, teacher, administrator, policeman, government employee, psycholog, politician...would go. Etc....

JPH Enrrique Costas 8 hours ago ,

Actually Corbyn has no love for our neo-liberal EU.

Valeria Nollan 2 hours ago ,

There is another cover-up taking place in May's government in the midst of the Skripal hysteria, and that is of the decades-old sex rings (organized by Asian Muslims, according to what I have read) that have raped between 1,000-1500 girls in three English towns. It is a sensitive issue, but should rightfully be reported. The U.K. press is not reporting much on it, and the American MSM has been silent. Think about it: the uproar created about the fates of two people (Skripal and his daughter), but the suffering of potentially 1500 girls suppressed. This is a disgrace. But the British people know and are demanding a fuller investigation into these crimes.

Nightcrawler136 8 hours ago ,

My only problem with this article is if May's government fails, then there is a serious risk for the globalists that a more ardent Brexiter may end up leading the party!

[Apr 06, 2018] It is now beyond any reasonable doubt that the claims of the Conservative government of Theresa May charging Russia with responsibility for the poisoning of the Skripals are fabrications

After the Skripal affair, is any more proof required that nothingin neoliberal MSM can be taken at face value? Looks like their motto is "if at first you don't succeed, lie, lie again."
Notable quotes:
"... So politically devastating is the exposure of Britain's lies that yesterday the Foreign Office deleted a text it sent out on March 22 declaring that the "analysis by world-leading experts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down made clear that this was a military-grade novichok nerve agent produced in Russia." ..."
"... The emergency session of the OPCW called at Russia's request received no answers to the serious questions Moscow insisted Britain had to address. Instead, the UK's representative said Russia could not take part in a joint investigation with Britain into the Skripal affair, as it was "a likely perpetrator." This was given unqualified backing by an EU spokesperson, who demanded that Russia respond to the UK's "legitimate questions" about its alleged continued production of novichoks. ..."
"... No less implicated in this criminal affair is the corporate media, especially the New York Times, which has spent the past month disseminating the raw propaganda issued by London and Washington and baying for Moscow's punishment. At no point did the Times raise a single question about the reliability of the claims of the May government. And now its response to the refutation of the lies is to ignore and bury Aitkenhead's statement. The role of the corporate media in the Skripal provocation confirms the political purpose of the hysterical campaign it has been leading against "fake news," and its insistence that social media be regulated, restricted and monitored. ..."
Apr 05, 2018 | www.wsws.org
The lies of the imperialist powers over the Skripal affair unravel by Robert Stevens

... ... ...

On Tuesday, Gary Aitkenhead, chief executive of the UK's chemical weapons facility, the Porton Down Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, told Sky News that scientists had "not verified the precise source" of the material used in the attack in Salisbury on March 4. Aitkenhead's statement came on the eve of the convening at Moscow's request of the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) at The Hague, which would have exposed the UK government's case. But this resort to damage control only underscores the monstrous hoax perpetrated by the British and American governments and their European allies.

May told parliament on March 12 that Porton Down was "absolutely categorical" that the "nerve agent" used on the Skripals had come from Russia. "Based on the positive identification of this chemical agent by world-leading experts at Porton Down," she said, "the government has concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible" for an "attempted murder" on British soil.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle on March 20 that "the people from Porton Down" were "absolutely categorical" that the source of the nerve agent used against the Skripals was Russia. "I asked the guy myself," he said, "and he said 'there's no doubt.'"

So politically devastating is the exposure of Britain's lies that yesterday the Foreign Office deleted a text it sent out on March 22 declaring that the "analysis by world-leading experts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down made clear that this was a military-grade novichok nerve agent produced in Russia."

... ... ...

The emergency session of the OPCW called at Russia's request received no answers to the serious questions Moscow insisted Britain had to address. Instead, the UK's representative said Russia could not take part in a joint investigation with Britain into the Skripal affair, as it was "a likely perpetrator." This was given unqualified backing by an EU spokesperson, who demanded that Russia respond to the UK's "legitimate questions" about its alleged continued production of novichoks.

No less implicated in this criminal affair is the corporate media, especially the New York Times, which has spent the past month disseminating the raw propaganda issued by London and Washington and baying for Moscow's punishment. At no point did the Times raise a single question about the reliability of the claims of the May government. And now its response to the refutation of the lies is to ignore and bury Aitkenhead's statement. The role of the corporate media in the Skripal provocation confirms the political purpose of the hysterical campaign it has been leading against "fake news," and its insistence that social media be regulated, restricted and monitored.

... ... ...

[Apr 05, 2018] The Three Most Important Aspects of the Skripal Case so Far and Where They by Rob Slane

Highly recommended!
The absurd speed at which the British Government reacted to the incident probably means that the event was coordinated with the USA. the fact that The British Government's ignoring of legal frameworks and protocols points to existence of a plan how to fuel this incident to the British equivalent of Russiagate, facts be damned.
That returns us to the classic question Cue bono? When British government supported by the USA demanded that the Western nations join in blaming Russia, with no evidence whatsoever only half the EU nations went along, and, while Trump allowed his Administration to expel Russian diplomats, he himself laid no blame on the Russians, and announced that Moscow could replace their diplomats.
The UK's chemical weapons experts issues a statement which shown that Prime Minister May clearly jumped the gun. The question is Why? She probably understood the flimsiness of the evidence better then nobody. So why "end justifies the means" act on her part?
That suggest that we are witnessing just initial steps of multi-step gambit and there can be more victims is this story. Please remember that Dr. David Kelly was "suicided" after testifying against Blair's "sexed up dossier" that lead to the Iraq War.
Notable quotes:
"... Not only has the British Government acted with lightning speed, it has also ridden roughshod over a number of international legal agreements and protocols. ..."
"... according to the British Government's own timeline , it wasn't until March 14th – the day that Mrs May formally announced the culpability of the Russian State to Parliament – that she actually wrote to the OPCW to involve them in the case. This is, I understand, contrary to the obligations Britain has as a member of the OPCW, and signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). ..."
"... In addition, the British Government has refused to provide evidence to the Russian Government. Again, my understanding is that this is contrary to the protocols set out in the CWC ..."
"... Why, if it was so sure of its claims, did the British Government feel the need to ignore international agreements to which it is a signatory, and instead act in this opaque and frankly suspicious manner? ..."
"... As mentioned above, the Chief Executive of Porton Down, Gary Aitkenhead has confirmed that the laboratory was unable to identify the origin of the substance used to poison the Skripals. ..."
"... In other words, according to the door theory, the two of them were poisoned by a military grade nerve agent, which then took over three hours to have any effect. Odd, wouldn't you say? ..."
"... Therefore, if they were poisoned at the front door, this would mean that not only did the two of them feel little or no effects for the three hours or so that followed, but it would also mean that a large 66-year-old man and an averagely built 33-year-old woman, of different height, weight and metabolism, somehow succumbed to the effects of poisoning at exactly the same time, some three hours or so later. Again, is that not very odd? ..."
"... Perhaps it is possible to survive a miniscule dose of such a nerve agent. The problem with this is that according to many earlier claims, there were significant traces of the substance in various parts of the City of Salisbury, which indicates that it cannot have been a very miniscule amount that they came into contact with at the door. Which means that we are being asked to believe that they were poisoned by "more than a miniscule amount" of this deadly poison, but both somehow survived, despite neither receiving an antidote (a fact now confirmed by Gary Aitkenhead). Does that not seem improbable? ..."
"... Another possibility – that the British Government or intelligence services were behind the incident – has been given great credibility by the British Government itself, in its absurdly quick reaction to the incident and its blatant ignoring of legal protocols. ..."
"... If British intelligence had planned a hit job on Mr Skripal using a military-grade nerve agent "of a type developed by Russia", in order to then pin the blame on the Russian Government, I doubt very much that Mr Skripal and his daughter would still be alive, or that the explanation for where the poison was administered would be changing on a daily basis, or that the British Government's evidence to other countries would have been as risible as it was (unless of course our intelligence agencies are as incompetent as such a scenario would require them to be, that is). ..."
Apr 04, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

I have now asked a total of 50 questions around the Skripal case, which you can find here and here . Having gone back through these questions, as far as I can see only three have been answered by the release of public information or events that have transpired. These are:

On the first two points we are now told that Yulia Skripal's condition has significantly improved to the point where she is said to be recovering well and talking. However, although this provides something of an answer to these questions, it also raises a number of others. Is she finally being allowed consular access? Is she being allowed to speak to her fiancé, her grandmother, or her cousin by telephone? Most importantly, how does her recovery comport with the claim that she was poisoned with a "military-grade nerve agent" with a toxicity around 5-8 times that of VX nerve agent?

On the other point, we do now have a definitive answer from none other than the Chief Executive of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down, Gary Aitkenhead : No, Porton Down was not able to identify the substance as being produced or manufactured in Russia.

It is important that reasonable questions continue to be raised, as they not only help clarify the actual issues, but the answers -- or lack thereof -- are also a good barometer as to how the official narrative stacks up. As a keen observer of the case -- especially since it took place just a few hundred yards from my home in Salisbury -- I have to say that the official narrative of the British Government has not stood up to even the most cursory scrutiny from the outset. In fact, there are three crucial issues that serve to raise suspicions about it, and to my mind these issues are the most important aspects of the case so far:

Let's just look at these in turn.

1. The absurd speed at which the British Government reacted to the incident

I remain astonished at the manner and the speed with which the British Government reacted to this incident. There was the speed with which the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, first pointed the finger of culpability, less than 48 hours after the incident, and before any investigation or analysis of the substance had taken place. There was the speed with which Porton Down was apparently able to analyse and identify the substance, even though it is set to take the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) at least three weeks to carry out a similar identification. There was the speed with which the British Government officially accused the Russian Government of being behind the incident, and the 36-hour ultimatum given to it to prove its innocence without being given any of the evidence that apparently showed its culpability. There was the speed with which the British Government, armed with evidence that looked like it was put together by a rather dull 14-year-old on work experience , managed to convince a number of other countries to expel diplomats, including 60 from the United States.

Why, if it was so sure of its claims, did the British Government feel the need to act so hastily and recklessly, rather than await the results of the investigation?

2. The British Government's ignoring of legal frameworks and protocols

Not only has the British Government acted with lightning speed, it has also ridden roughshod over a number of international legal agreements and protocols.

Firstly, there is the involvement of the OPCW. What ought to have happened is the British Government should have invited the OPCW in as part of the investigation immediately upon suspicion of the use of a nerve agent. However, according to the British Government's own timeline , it wasn't until March 14th – the day that Mrs May formally announced the culpability of the Russian State to Parliament – that she actually wrote to the OPCW to involve them in the case. This is, I understand, contrary to the obligations Britain has as a member of the OPCW, and signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).

In addition, the British Government has refused to provide evidence to the Russian Government. Again, my understanding is that this is contrary to the protocols set out in the CWC.

The British Government has also refused to grant the Russian Embassy in London consular access to two Russian nationals, Sergei and Yulia Skripal, which it is legally obliged to do under Articles 36 and 37 of the 1963 Vienna Convention and Article 35 (1) of the 1965 Consular Convention.

Why, if it was so sure of its claims, did the British Government feel the need to ignore international agreements to which it is a signatory, and instead act in this opaque and frankly suspicious manner?

3. The number of oddities and discrepancies in the official narrative

The speed of apportioning blame and the ignoring of international legal agreements might not have looked nearly as suspicious had the narrative presented by the British Government and the facts on the ground been in harmony with one another. But they have not been. Instead, many of the actual events that have transpired over the weeks since the incident was first reported simply do not fit the overarching explanation given. Below are five of the most important:

1. As mentioned above, the Chief Executive of Porton Down, Gary Aitkenhead has confirmed that the laboratory was unable to identify the origin of the substance used to poison the Skripals. This is in direct contradiction to the claims made by the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, who said the following on the Andrew Marr Show on 18th March :

Obviously to the best of our knowledge this is a Russian-made nerve agent that falls within the category Novichok made only by Russia, and just to get back to the point about the international reaction which is so fascinating
If it's made only by Russia, as Mr Johnson claimed, then it must have originated in Russia. Right? Yet Mr Aitkenhead says they were unable to identify where it was made.

Then in an interview with Deutsche Welle two days after his above comments, Mr Johnson was categorical about the source of the nerve agent as being Russian. Here's the exchange:

Interviewer: You argue that the source of this nerve agent, Novichok, is Russia. How did you manage to find it out so quickly? Does Britain possess samples of it?

Johnson: "Let me be clear with you When I look at the evidence, I mean the people from Porton Down, the laboratory "

Interviewer: "So they have the samples

Johnson: "They do. And they were absolutely categorical and I asked the guy myself, I said, 'Are you sure?' And he said there's no doubt."

Who "the guy" is, perhaps we'll never know. The cleaner perhaps? I suppose a politician of Mr Johnson's calibre will happily try to weasel his way out of the implications of what he said. But to us lesser mortals, it does rather look like he was deliberately misleading, doesn't it

2. Much of the investigation initially concentrated on where the Skripals were poisoned. Amongst the suggestions made were the bench on which they collapsed, the Zizzi restaurant where they had eaten, Ms Skripal's luggage or Mr Skripal's car. Then, some 24 days after the incident, it was announced that a high concentration of the "military-grade nerve agent" had been found on the front door, and that this was the likely place of poisoning. Yet it is known that after leaving the house, Mr Skripal and his daughter drove into the City Centre, went to the Mill pub, and then to the restaurant where they ate a meal together. In other words, according to the door theory, the two of them were poisoned by a military grade nerve agent, which then took over three hours to have any effect. Odd, wouldn't you say?

3. Furthermore, it has been stated that the two of them became ill at the same time on the bench in the Maltings. Therefore, if they were poisoned at the front door, this would mean that not only did the two of them feel little or no effects for the three hours or so that followed, but it would also mean that a large 66-year-old man and an averagely built 33-year-old woman, of different height, weight and metabolism, somehow succumbed to the effects of poisoning at exactly the same time, some three hours or so later. Again, is that not very odd?

4. The claim that they were poisoned by a military grade nerve agent, of a type said to be 5-8 times the toxicity of VX nerve agent, is itself surely open to question. Both Mr Skripal and his daughter not only survived, but Yulia Skripal is now said to be sitting up and talking just weeks later. Perhaps it is possible to survive a miniscule dose of such a nerve agent. The problem with this is that according to many earlier claims, there were significant traces of the substance in various parts of the City of Salisbury, which indicates that it cannot have been a very miniscule amount that they came into contact with at the door. Which means that we are being asked to believe that they were poisoned by "more than a miniscule amount" of this deadly poison, but both somehow survived, despite neither receiving an antidote (a fact now confirmed by Gary Aitkenhead). Does that not seem improbable?

5. The official explanation – that this was planned and authorised at the highest level within the Russian Government – would lead one to believe that the action was carried out by top level agents of the FSB. Yet the mode of attack – nerve agent apparently smeared or sprayed on the door – has to be one of the least effective methods that could be used to assassinate anyone. For a start, it rains a lot in Salisbury, and it did indeed rain on the day of the poisoning. If the substance was left at the front door (assuming it was the outside), the attacker(s) could have had no guarantee that it would not be washed off before Mr Skripal touched it. Nor could they have had any guarantee that he, as opposed to his daughter or perhaps a delivery person etc, would come into contact with it. And of course there is the fact that Mr Skripal is still alive. Does any of this seem consistent with the narrative of a professional, Kremlin-authorised hit-job.

Conclusion

Where does this leave us? The official narrative would have us believe that the Russian Government authorised the killing of a has-been (former?) MI6 spy, who it had freed in 2010 and who presumably posed no threat to it, just a week before the Russian election and weeks before the World Cup, using a nerve agent with an exclusively Russian signature, in a way (on the door) that could not guarantee the intended target would touch it. This would be difficult enough to swallow by itself, but the British Government's rush to judgement, disregard for law, and the many discrepancies in the actual events themselves make this scenario absurdly implausible.

Another possibility – that the British Government or intelligence services were behind the incident – has been given great credibility by the British Government itself, in its absurdly quick reaction to the incident and its blatant ignoring of legal protocols. These actions were bound to fuel suspicions about the possibility of its own involvement, and I have to say that such suspicions are absolutely legitimate precisely because of the way it has behaved. However, it must be said that the oddities and discrepancies in the case don't lend themselves very well to the idea of a carefully planned false flag. If British intelligence had planned a hit job on Mr Skripal using a military-grade nerve agent "of a type developed by Russia", in order to then pin the blame on the Russian Government, I doubt very much that Mr Skripal and his daughter would still be alive, or that the explanation for where the poison was administered would be changing on a daily basis, or that the British Government's evidence to other countries would have been as risible as it was (unless of course our intelligence agencies are as incompetent as such a scenario would require them to be, that is).

My hunch -- and it is just that -- is that Mr Skripal himself was perhaps still working for British intelligence, and may have been in possession of a nerve agent. Somehow, this involvement went wrong, and he ended up accidently poisoning himself and his daughter on the bench in The Maltings. The Government then scrambled to concoct a story in order to cover up the real story of a Russian working for MI6 and handling nerve agents, and so quickly decided to point the finger at that most convenient scapegoat, the Russian Government.

The reason that I'm attracted to this possibility is that it explains all three aspects I have described above, and which I think are the most important aspects of the case. The rush to judgement -- which looked like panic-mode to me -- could have been an attempt to divert attention away from the investigation looking at the possibility of Mr Skripal having military grade nerve agent in his possession. The ignoring of international legal protocols, at least for a time, could have been done to ensure that the case was not probed by any outside body, which may well have exposed discrepancies. And it could also explain many of the oddities mentioned above, such as traces of nerve agent apparently being found in various places in Salisbury, since these could have come about because Mr Skripal was in possession of some sort of nerve agent when he left his house that day.

As I say, this is just a hunch and purely speculative. I am probably wrong. But unless the British Government is able to produce far better evidence than it has so far produced, to back up the claims it has made, I shall consider it a more credible possibility than the one they have sold to the British public.

Reprinted with permission from The BlogMire .


Related

[Apr 05, 2018] An Interview with Retired Russian General Evgeny Buzhinsky The National Interest

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Paul Saunders, associate publisher of the ..."
"... , interviewed retired Russian general Evgeny Buzhinsky. Buzhinsky retired from the Russian Armed Forces in 2009 as a lieutenant general. ..."
Apr 05, 2018 | nationalinterest.org

Paul Saunders, associate publisher of the National Interest , interviewed retired Russian general Evgeny Buzhinsky. Buzhinsky retired from the Russian Armed Forces in 2009 as a lieutenant general.

Paul Saunders: You said recently that the confrontation between the United Kingdom and Russia over the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury could lead to "the last war in the history of mankind." What did you mean by that?

https://lockerdome.com/lad/9521689830966886?pubid=ld-7032-4043&pubo=http%3A%2F%2Fnationalinterest.org&rid=nationalinterest.org&width=617

Evgeny Buzhinsky: I'm sorry, but the BBC correspondent understood me incorrectly. It is not between Russia and the UK: it is between Russia and the so-called collective West, led by the United States by the way. This incident was a crime. In investigating this sort of crime, any investigator must ask some questions: who stands to benefit? What's the motive? For President Putin, believe me, he is the last man on Earth to try to do such a terrible thing on the eve of the Russian presidential elections and the eve of the soccer championship in Moscow. This is a blatant provocation, but what is the aim of this provocation? I don't know if you've heard the "breaking news" that the British military laboratory said that there are no clues that indicate that this poison is of Russian production, which is not surprising to me. So no proof, no evidence, yet the British government said that "we collected information" -- what information? -- "and on the basis of that information we are sure this crime was committed by Russians."

The question always asked these days if this is a new Cold War or a second Cold War. I always state that its worse! In the time of the Cold War, everything was clear: an ideological confrontation, but there were definite truths, definite red lines, no threats, no sanctions. No cases such as recently, with U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham has called to press Russia, to isolate Russia, to economically corner Russia. In my view, it is a very dangerous game to try to corner and isolate Russia.

Paul Saunders: In your statement though, you seem to suggest that you see a possibility of a real military conflict between Russia and the West. How do you think something like that could come about?

Evgeny Buzhinsky: The first place where such a conflict could come about is in Syria. Recently, some days ago, when the Russians spoke to Dunford [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford] after the Americans threatened to strike the center of Damascus, and Russia made a public statement that if the United States strikes the center of Damascus, where Russian servicemen are located, where the headquarters where Russian police and advisors are, then Russia will strike back against the cruise missiles and the carriers of the cruise missiles. In my view, this is very dangerous since U.S. cruise missiles are launched from warships.

Paul Saunders: So you view that statement by Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian General Staff, as a very serious threat?

Evgeny Buzhinsky: Yes, it's serious. And I don't think he was joking or just making a statement to surprise some Americans. No, I am absolutely sure he was serious.

While we're on Syria, there is the subject of chemical weapons. I do appreciate that our gathered intelligence indicates and can warn the world that terrorists, not the Syrian government, are the ones deploying chemical weapons in certain locations in provocative attacks. This results in TV crews being in the right place at the right times, preventing such provocations. But I think that with such confrontational circumstances that the United States could decide to strike Damascus.

Paul Saunders: And in that situation, the Russian military would follow through on General Gerasimov's statement? Many people in the United States would say to themselves that Russia has a really powerful military force, but President Putin is ultimately a very pragmatic person who knows that Russia's economy is less than 5 percent of the combined U.S. and European economies and he would never risk a war like that.

Evgeny Buzhinsky: In the case of war, the economy doesn't matter. 5 percent, 2 percent, 3 percent, it doesn't matter. Because if it ends in war, it will be a very very short war. Do you think that Russia will go to war with United States for months or years? Of course not.

Paul Saunders: Are you suggesting it would become a nuclear war or it would end very quickly because of the nature of modern warfare and the conventional weapons at the disposal of the United States and Russia?

Evgeny Buzhinsky: It is very difficult to predict, but I am sure that any military confrontation will end up with the use of nuclear weapons between the United States and Russia. I don't believe that a nuclear confrontation can be controlled; this is an illusion on the part of the United States.

Paul Saunders: Do you see any dangers elsewhere apart from Syria?

Evgeny Buzhinsky: Possibly Ukraine, if the United States interferes. Ukraine started this, Russia answered. But I don't think that's very likely.

Paul Saunders: Turning back to the dispute surrounding Mr. Skripal, the United Kingdom called for solidarity among its allies. Most of the NATO countries also expelled Russian diplomats. The United States certainly expelled a very considerable number and also closed the consulate in Seattle. What impact do you think that had inside Russia? What message did the Russian government and the Russian people take from that strong, coordinated response? Evgeny Buzhinsky: First of all, I repeat: what happened with Mr. Skripal was a planned provocation. I don't know if the UK was alone in planning this, but it is a clear-cut provocation attempting to demonize and isolate Russia. To find a pretext for expelling Russian diplomats. This is why I am unsure where this confrontational path can lead. What would be next? For example, now the United States is thinking about their response; they will expel another round of Russian diplomats. Russia would expel another fifty. Then the United States would expel another fifty. After that, then what? A freezing of diplomatic relations?

Paul Saunders: Turning back, you mentioned the idea that this all started with a British provocation, and it certainly seems to be a widespread view in Russia that this was some kind of provocation, what do you think would be the motive of the British government to do something like that?

https://lockerdome.com/lad/9521689830966886?pubid=ld-7032-4043&pubo=http%3A%2F%2Fnationalinterest.org&rid=nationalinterest.org&width=617

Evgeny Buzhinsky: Well, no offense meant, but I believe that move by Theresa May was coordinated with Washington. A lot of Russian experts and observers think so. What was the motive? I don't know, maybe it was an attempt to divert attention from the internal problems that Theresa May is facing. For example, what was the first item on the agenda during the last EU summit? Brexit terms, including conditions that aren't favorable for Britain. And after this provocation? Russia, with discussions about European solidarity against it instead of talking about Brexit. Maybe that was the real motive.

Paul Saunders: As you can imagine, very few people in the United States or Britain find it plausible that the British government would do something like that. Do you think there is any evidence that would suggest something like that may have happened, beyond your view that there was not really a motive for Russia to do something like that and there is a motive for the UK?

Evgeny Buzhinsky: I must tell you frankly: I know some people from our intelligence services, and they're very concerned. Because Mr. Skripal was exchanged via the illegal program spy swap, there is a worry that this could endanger or ruin the entire mechanism of exchange. What is the use of this mechanism if people will be killed afterwards? On the Russian side, there is no motive whatsoever. On the British side, we can only guess.

Image: Reuters

[Apr 05, 2018] The British Empire Is Un-Masked, But Desperate

Apr 05, 2018 | larouchepac.com

The British Imperial Lords are in a state of shock. Their frantic effort to save the Empire came crashing down Tuesday when the scientists at Porton Down refused to lie for the Empire -- refused to say that the nerve agent in the Skripal case came from Russia. Recall that it was David Kelly, the head of the Defence Microbiology Division at Porton Down and a member of the inspection team in Iraq, who blew the whistle on Tony Blair's "sexed up" dossier claiming that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. As a scientist he refused to lie. Kelly was "suicided" as a result, and the illegal and genocidal war went on.

This time, neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama are around to provide cover for the Empire's lies. President Trump, to the dismay of the British and American oligarchs and press whores, has refused to say (or tweet) a word about the Russian role in the Skripal case. He spoke to Putin after the incident without mentioning it, and, just yesterday, told the press yet again that "getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing."

[Apr 05, 2018] Nerve agent attack? This ridiculous story is collapsing. MH17 stayed on message throughout (except for a slip-up in the Dutch report: see port engine intake) but this one was incoherence and absurdities from the start. When that story bursts, then what? It seems that sports are the greatest threat to world peace.

Notable quotes:
"... he Chinese side came to let the Americans know about the close ties between the Russian and Chinese armed forces ." Step by step. ..."
"... GERMANY. Expel 4 diplomats to show "solidarity", approve Nord Stream . Does that make sense? ..."
"... © Patrick Armstrong Analysis, Canada Russia Observer ..."
Apr 05, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
... ... ...

SKRIPALMANIA . Years of flaccid acquiescence by MSM stenographers have made the anti-Russia fabulists sloppy: after some wavering on thallium and Scaramella, the Litvinenko story settled down; We are reminded of a similar anti-Russia fabrication in 1994 . What next? Re-writing history, of course . Or pretending it away . Craig Murray is the best single source: not wrong yet.

SPORTING DANGERS. Ever notice the coincidences? Georgia's invasion timing ? Just when the lies about Sochi are revealed it's time to move the narrative to Ukraine? Ban Russia from the Olympics but clear it after. The soccer World Cup will be held in Russia in a couple of months and it will be held in a dozen Russian cities; the world will see that they're not miserable s -- holes full of wretched people suffering under Putin's boot. What to do? This is too big a deal for the governments of soccer-mad countries to dare to boycott. Nerve agent attack? When that story bursts, then what? It seems that sports are the greatest threat to world peace.

WADA YA KNOW? Norwegian asthmatics win ! What a good thing only Russians dope, isn't it?

AMERICA-HYSTERICA. We have an interesting American poll showing that an increasing number of Americans believe that there is a "deep state" . Here's the poll; read it for yourself . How could that be?

WESTERN VALUES ™ . Remember due process? Presumption of innocence? International agreements? Vienna Convention? Rule of law? Beijing remembers: see below.

NEW NWO. China weighs in on Skripalmania reminding us that no matter how subservient NATO allies may be, the rest of the world is less impressed: " Over the past few years the international standard has been falsified and manipulated in ways never seen before ." The petroyuan moves a step closer with the opening of an oil futures market in Shanghai . With the gold-yuan exchange in Hong Kong already functioning , it's only a matter of deciding the right time to connect the two . The Chinese Defence Minister visits Moscow: " T he Chinese side came to let the Americans know about the close ties between the Russian and Chinese armed forces ." Step by step.

GERMANY. Expel 4 diplomats to show "solidarity", approve Nord Stream . Does that make sense?

UKRAINE. An American survey shows that the mood in Ukraine is bad and expecting worse . Well, that's one post-Maidan Ukraine expectation that will be fulfilled. Nadia Savchenko, a former Ukrainian hero, has been arrested in Ukraine on terrorism charges. She dares to suggest that the massacre was a false flag . (Read Ivan Katchanovski's paper : "This academic investigation concludes that the massacre was a false flag operation, which was rationally planned and carried out with a goal of the overthrow of the government and seizure of power. It found various evidence of the involvement of an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland. Concealed shooters and spotters were located in at least 20 Maidan-controlled buildings or areas". Here are confessions by some of the snipers that your local news outlet has been too busy to tell you about.)

© Patrick Armstrong Analysis, Canada Russia Observer

[Apr 05, 2018] It's The Cover-Up - UK Foreign Office Deletes Tweet, Posts False Transcript, Issues New Lies

Notable quotes:
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
Apr 05, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

"It's The Cover-Up" - UK Foreign Office Deletes Tweet, Posts False Transcript, Issues New Lies

It's Not The Crime, It's The Cover-Up :

When a scandal breaks, the discovery of an attempt to cover up is often regarded as even more reprehensible than the original deeds.

The British government is trying to cover-up the lies it made with its false allegations against Russia. The cover-up necessitates new lies some of which we expose below.

Yesterday the head of the British chemical weapon laboratory in Porton Down stated that the laboratory can not establish that the poison used in the alleged 'Novichok' attack in Salisbury was produced by Russia. This was a severe blow to the British government allegations of Russian involvement in the poisoning of Sergej and Yulia Skripal.

Now the British government tries to hide that it said that the poison used in the Salisbury was 'produced in Russia' and that Porton down had proved that to be the case. The government aligned media are helping to stuff the government lies down the memory hole.

We all need to make sure that the new lies get exposed and that the attempts to change the record fail.

Yesterday the British Foreign Office deleted this from its Twitter account:


bigger

The March 22 tweet was part of a now interrupted thread which summarized a briefing on the UK government's response to the Salisbury incident given by the British Ambassador to Russia, Dr Laurie Bristow, to the international diplomatic community in Moscow.

After the silent scrubbing of the record was publicly questioned the Foreign Office admitted that it deleted the tweet:

After it emerged on Wednesday that the tweet had been deleted, the Foreign Office said the post was removed because it "did not accurately report" the words of Laurie Bristow, the UK's ambassador to Russia, which the tweet was supposed to be quoting.

Hmm - fool me once ...

All the tweets in the thread used quotation marks, but none was a literal reproduction of the ambassador's briefing. Only one of the tweets was deleted. A look at the transcript and video of the briefing shows that all the tweets , including the deleted one, "accurately reported" the speech. The cover-up of the false statement the ambassador made thus includes at least one new lie.

The original tweet said "Analysis by world-leading experts at the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down made clear that this was a military-grade Novichok nerve agent produced in Russia . .."

The transcript of the briefing in Moscow - "exactly as it was delivered" - is (still) available at the Foreign Office website.


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The ambassador, reading from a prepared script, recapitulates the event and, according to the posted transcript, then says:

Four days later the analysts at Porton Down, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory in the UK, established and made clear that this was a military-grade chemical weapon. One of the Novichok series; a nerve agent as I said produced in Russia . Porton Down is an Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons accredited and designated laboratory.
..
First, there is no doubt that the weapon used in the attack was the military-grade nerve agent from the Novichok series. This has been confirmed by specialists, our specialists. An Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons mission is in the UK now to independently confirm this analysis.

There is also no doubt that Novichok was produced in Russia by the Russian state.

The last line in the -"exactly as it was delivered" - transcript is false. Here is my transcription from a short Foreign Office video of the briefing ( saved copy ) which includes the uncut passage of the last two paragraphs quoted above:

... there is no doubt that the weapon used in the attack was the military-grade nerve agent from the Novichok series. This has been confirmed by specialists, our specialists. On Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons mission is in the UK now to independently confirm this analysis.

There is also no doubt that the Novichok was produced in Russia by the Russian state.

The written "exactly as it was delivered" transcript of the briefing says "... that Novichok was produced ...". At 0:20 in the video I clearly hear the ambassador saying "... that the Novichok was produced ...". A tiny but very important difference.

The person who put the official captions on the official Foreign Office video agrees with what I hear and transcribed.


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The ambassador referred to " the Novichok", the Novichok he specifically mentioned earlier in the speech. The Novichok that he said had been detected by Porton Down. The transcript on the Foreign Office website leaves out the definite article "the". It makes it look as if the ambassador referred to some unspecified batch of the substance.

The deleted tweet was a faithful rendition of what the ambassador said, it "accurately reported" it. The transcript the Foreign office posted on its website is false. The ambassador clearly accused Russia of having produced the very batch that Porton Down analyzed.

Three days earlier Bristow's boss, Foreign Minister Boris Johnson, made the same false claim (vid at 5:32) in an interview with DW .

Porton Down has now said that it made no such claim. The ambassador's claim was false. The Foreign Office attempt to cover this up by deleting its tweet and by posting a not-so-exact transcript only amplifies the falsehood of the original claims.

The briefing continued to emphasize the "produced in Russia" meme. The phrase occurs four times.

...
Russia's claims that Novichok could have been produced elsewhere have no credibility. We have no information to indicate that this agent could have been produced anywhere else except in Russia. So we have no doubt that the nerve agent was produced in Russia .
...
So the fact that the Novichok was produced in Russia , the fact that Russia has a history of state-sponsored assassinations, and the fact that Russia has responded with the usual playbook of disinformation and denial left us with no choice but to conclude that this amounts to an unlawful use of force by the Russian state against the United Kingdom.

The Foreign Office may want to claim that all the above uses of "produced in Russia" were only references to decades old research and development in the Soviet Union, not to the "Skripal" case. The highlighted details shows that this is not the case. Any listener to the briefing surely got the impression that the UK ambassador was talking about the specific batch analysed by Porton Down.

It highlighted paragraph of Ambassador Bristow's briefing includes several other lies. 'Novichok' agents can and have been produced in other countries than Russia.

In 2016 five nerve agents of the 'Novichok' series were synthesized by Iranian scientists in cooperation with the OPCW. Details of their production process were published . In 1998 the US Army's Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center produced and catalogued 'Novichok' agents. It added the data for the substances to the National Institute of Standards and Technology Mass Spectral Library. The data was later removed and U.S. diplomats were ordered to suppress all international discussion about 'Novichok' agents.

The U.S. military chemical weapon laboratories work in close cooperation with Porton Down. Porton Down continues to receive tens of millions of U.S. military research money for its chemical weapon experiments including tests on animals. The UK government surely knew that 'Novichok' agents can and have been produced by other actors than Russia.

British and U.S. media aligned with the ongoing anti-Russia campaign now downplay the earlier claims of the British government.

BBC Radio 4 news at 6:31am today made this comical effort :

"... Russia requested the meeting to address the UK government's suggestion that it was behind the poisoning ..."

The British government did not make a mere "suggestion". Its ambassador and other officials stated outright that Russia was the culprit:

"... the fact that the Novichok was produced in Russia .. left us with no choice but to conclude... "

The New York Times today also uses the "suggestion" wording (one wonders who 'suggested' that):

The British authorities have blamed Russia for the March 4 poisoning, with Foreign Minister Boris Johnson suggesting it was " overwhelmingly likely " that President Vladimir V. Putin had ordered the attack.

On March 16, when the NYT first wrote about Johnson's claims against Russia, it surely did not convey that they were only 'suggestive':

Mr. Johnson's remarks were a significant escalation in the dispute between London and Moscow, directly linking the Russian leader to the poisoning of Sergei V. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in the English city of Salisbury.

The British Prime Minster herself went way further than just 'suggesting' that Russia was guilty:

[T]he Government have concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

Based on that 'conclusion' the British government threw out 23 Russian diplomats from their embassy in London. There was nothing 'suggestive' with that.

Off-Guardian points out that another tactic to divert from the earlier false claims is to now declare Russia guilty of not cooperating with the investigation:

The UK's flagrant hysteria of the last weeks, the war cries and spittle-flecked abuse is all being airbrushed away and being replaced with the idea the UK simply requested Russian co-operation and Russia refused – preferring to make nasty insinuations instead.

To claim that Russia did not cooperate is another lie told to cover up for the now debunked ones. The Chemical Weapons Convention, which Britain and Russia have signed, dictates the procedures that must be taken when chemical weapon allegations are made. They foresee the involvement of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

It was the British government that rejected the involvement of the OPCW in the investigation. It only agreed to do so after Russia insisted on it :

[Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov] added that a case of alleged use of chemical weapons should be handled through the proper channel, being the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) – of which both Russia and Britain are members.

"As soon as the rumors came up that the poisoning of Skripal involved a Russia-produced agent, which almost the entire English leadership has been fanning up, we sent an official request for access to this compound so that our experts could test it in accordance with the Chemical Weapons Convention [CWC]," Lavrov said. So far the request has been ignored by the British side, he added.

The request from the British government to the OPCW was sent on March 14 , ten days after the incident happened, two days after the Prime Minister made her "highly likely" claims against Russia and one day after Lavrov publicly insisted on OPCW involvement.

It is obviously the British government which at first rejected OPCW involvement and not the Kremlin.

The OPCW is by statute a technical agency, not a court. It will release a technical assessment of the involved agent and not a judgment on responsibility or guilt.

The attempted cover-up by the Foreign Office of the lies the British government spread about the case has already failed. To play down the original strong claims against Russia as mere 'suggestions' is comical. Allegations that Russia was or is holding up a serious international investigation are also false. It was Britain which at first rejected the CWC and OPCW involvement.

The fact that the British government even makes these attempts must be seen as acknowledgement that it has no case and lied in it its official statements to the global public. It now covers its trail with more lies.

What else is the British government lying about?

---
Previous Moon of Alabama reports on the Skripal case:

Posted by b on April 4, 2018 at 04:18 PM | Permalink Daniel , Apr 4, 2018 5:03:11 PM | 8

I posted the following on a earlier b blog, but since this "news" story continues, it seems appropriate to repeat.

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
~ Edward Bernays, "Propaganda," 1928

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out."
~ Karl Rove

And yet, here we are, almost a century after Edward Bernays wrote a book on how the masses are manipulated, and more than a decade after "Bush's Brain" mocked us, here we are "judiciously studying" Empire's past action.

Meanwhile, Empire is acting, and "the masses" are acting and reacting across the globe. And almost no one knows who pulls the strings, let alone are we organizing to overturn their rule.

[Apr 05, 2018] Couldn't May government come up with a better fake story?

Apr 05, 2018 | sputniknews.com

"Boris Johnson continues to convince everyone the British side supposedly sent Russia a list of questions to which it still hasn't received any answers. Everything in fact is completely the opposite. As I said, we never received any list of questions and I turn to the British side, if you have such a list of questions, please tell us, please list those questions," he said.

Regarding the UK's insistence that Moscow coordinated the attack, he asked, "Couldn't you come up with a better fake story?"

The UK is engaged in a propaganda war against Russia, Nebenzya asserted, aiming to discredit the country globally. But even propaganda wars are dangerous.

[Apr 05, 2018] An extreme Russophobia based on the most flimsiest of evidence that threaten a full scale nuclear conflagration, which is an existential threat

Notable quotes:
"... Russian gangsters &/or their capitalist counterparts, who have connections with state actors ..."
"... One should be mindful that the chemical components or precursors of A-232 or its binary version novichok-5 are ordinary organophosphates that can be made at commercial chemical companies that manufacture such products as fertilizers and pesticides. ..."
"... The largest concentration was on their house door. ..."
"... It would be easy to place it there if it were in gel form in the dead of night. ..."
"... the attack was carried out by another state or a non-state entity which had found the technical details of the Russian agent and manufactured its own stocks without being discovered, and had a motive for the attack. ..."
"... What actually happens is it completely distorts the narrative of what people think about things ..."
"... ex falso quodlibet ..."
"... The only thing that makes any sense is the accusation of chemical poisoning by a state power carries with it a level of condemnation that is beyond redemption. It is THE RED LINE. ..."
"... Never knew NC had so many CW/BW experts lurking ..."
"... I'd be mortified that someone carried this over a border ..."
"... But in the meantime, senior leadership has to be terrified (as we all should be too) and given a lot of leeway to figure this out. ..."
Apr 05, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Christopher Dale Rogers , April 4, 2018 at 4:17 am

Yves,

Many thanks for making an objective assessment of recent events within the UK that do have major economic and geopolitical consequences, particularly the growing demand to confront Putin for crimes most are oblivious too, that actual transgressions, rather than an extreme Russophobia based on the most flimsiest of evidence that threaten a full scale nuclear conflagration, which is an existential threat – and still they warmonger.

It is all rather more pernicious than this. essentially we seem to be sleepwalking into a 'Totalitarianism of the Centrists', whereby democratic outcomes must be denied, any dialogue outside what they deem correct suppressed via the imposition of censorship to save us from our own opinions, whilst professing a love for liberty and equality – forget wealth inequality.

We have dived down a rabbit hole where the Overton Window has narrowed to an extent where light itself cannot penetrate, such are the centrists so assured of their righteousness, which is to all intent and purposes a cult – one we are required to obey without question.

Time after time since the British electorate shocked a complacent establishment by voting to exit the EU, we have witnessed a torrent of abuse heaped on those who dare to disagree. We witnessed the gerrymandering and utter corruption of the Democratic Party Primaries, we have witnessed the demonisation and desire to null and void the US November Presidential vote, and we have witnessed within the UK not only a desire to void the EU vote, but the outcome of elections even within political groupings, namely the UK's Labour Party.

Indeed, such is the desire by the Establishment to remove Jeremy Corbyn, that the entire cannon of the MSM has been directed against him, whilst the Establishment forces within the Parliamentary Labour Party have stooped to ever more devious depths to undermine and eradicate the Leftist threat, to the extent of issuing early day motions giving carte blanche to a government to wage war on Putin and Russia.

Should UK political events be of interest to Naked Capitalism and its readers above economic consideration being given to Brexit?

In a nutshell, yes they do, because if the UK's Establishment fail to eradicate Corbyn, and by chance he should enter Number 10, the global elite, Atlanticist and full ecosystem of the Totalitarian Centrists have a real challenge on their hands to maintain an iron consensus that's existed for 40 years if any breach to this comes into existence – Corbyn acting as a Standard for others in the West who are sick and tired of an economic system that does not work, unless of course you belong to that small minority referred too as the 1%.

Greg Gerner , April 4, 2018 at 8:08 am

+ 1,000,000. Many thanks.

templar555510 , April 4, 2018 at 9:32 am

Thank you Christopher for a superb, excellently put comment. This is what Tariq Ali calls the ' Extreme Centre ' and how right you and he are. But neoliberalism is a Berlin Wall and with each day that passes another brick falls out and one day, not so long away I believe, it will crumble because it can no longer stand the strain of the forces marshalled against it. They may be disparate at present , but such is the nature of political ' moments' throughout history that at some point coherence occurs spontaneously and the ' ancien regime' topples.

Christopher Dale Rogers , April 4, 2018 at 11:46 am

Templar,

I must confess I've not read any of Tariq Ali's material for a while, essentially, and since january, I've just witnessed such a full-on Establishment assault on Jeremy Corbyn, with little or no scrutiny whatsoever of the actual Prime Minister, that its become alarming. And with so much evidence now at hand both sides of the Atlantic, conclusions must be drawn, namely, our liberal democracy is presently dead – if it were not for the Internet and independent Blogs, we really would be living a Soviet era dystopia.

David , April 4, 2018 at 6:31 am

This article is not very useful, because it muddles together three separate issues, for some of which there is evidence and for others only conjecture. A better source for trying to understand what's going on is this blog , written by an OPCW specialist.
I have no particular technical insight into this case, or CW in general, and I don't know who carried out the attack, although I do have a little experience of how governments work. But we need to get three things sorted out from each other.
First, according to open sources, and at least one leaked US diplomatic telegram, the Soviet Union did indeed develop new types of chemical agent in the 1970s and 80s for use in a future war, which were both more lethal than existing agents, and also exempt from the likely provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention then being negotiated. This suggestion no longer seems to be controversial. Again, according to open sources, these agents did not need to be declared to the CWC, and seem not to have been. It has been suggested that they were destroyed anyway, but we do not know, and if they were not, there was no violation of the Convention. Thus, the statements by the OPCW and the UK Ambassador last year would be technically true if Russia had destroyed all stocks of agents declared under the CWC, but not stocks of these new agents. There have been allegations that the composition of these agents, and perhaps information on their manufacture and use, may have been passed to other nations, or been stolen by them. But there is no confirmation of this and no specific nations or non-state actors have been mentioned. It remains a possibility, though. Because of this uncertainty, Porton Down has said that the agent used was "of a type developed by Russia." Because it's hard to prove a negative, we don't know, and may never know, if it was also produced elsewhere. Thus the new Porton Down statement about which people are getting so excited, but doesn't actually change anything.
Secondly, it's conceivable that the UK or some other country had completely separate information about Russian assassination plans. If so, it would not be the kind of thing that would ever be made public, so that remains supposition. But if you look at the UK government statements, they don't suggest this. May used the terms "plausible explanations" on 12 March. In the technical sense, her statement was probably correct: either the agent was used by the Russians (not necessarily the government) or it was used by someone who had acquired the formulas and production techniques from them. She was grandstanding, of course, but it's hard to see what a third alternative would have been: a third country independently developing exactly the same chemical agents seems very unlikely and there's no evidence for it.
Finally, politics, and here everything is speculation. It's hard to see what possible motive the Russians would have for this attack, but anything else is just supposition, if not actually wild speculation.
So shorn of the sabre-rattling the UK government position amounts to saying, "We know the Russians developed these agents" (accepted) "we believe they failed to destroy them" (quite possibly true but we have no means of knowing) and "there is no evidence that anyone else has them" (accepted). The leap from this to blaming the Russian government, and dragging in Putin, on the other hand, is pure inference, and pure politics.
I don't know whodunnit. The problem is that, whilst the evidence against the Russians (in the wider sense) is ambiguous, and it seems impossible to find a reasonable motive, there's even less direct reason to suspect any other specific actor.

Bill Smith , April 4, 2018 at 6:58 am

So Novichok "does not figure in the Annex on Chemicals of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC)"? Does "does not figure" mean not included? If it is not included does that mean not banned?

Has there been any roughly similar events in Russia itself? The one that came to mind and I looked up was Ivan Kivelidi. But that was cadmium poisoning I believe, so other than an similarly obscure method, different.

PlutoniumKun , April 4, 2018 at 8:36 am

I'm no expert on the Convention, but my understanding of it is that there are no 'banned' substances as such, but 'controlled' substances, on the understanding that signatories are permitted to have small quantities of nerve agents for research purposes. Hence the Iranians, quite legally, made five variations of Novichuks (in very small quantities) and declared them without anyone making a fuss over it. The Convention has a series of schedules of chemicals which must be declared and facilities storing or manufacturing these compounds must be available for OPCW inspection.

The Treaty also has an 'all other compounds' category that includes any organophosphate which would cover non-scheduled chemicals. So far as I'm aware the obligation is to declare stockpiles and manufacturing facilities of these and allow them to be open for inspection, but there would obviously be a huge number of such facilities, including most pesticide factories worldwide.

So far as I'm aware – and I can stand corrected on this – it is not 'illegal' to have a non-scheduled substance, but there is an obligation to declare the manufacturing facilities. Again, I can stand corrected on this, but I believe some of the Novichuks were added to Schedule I after the Iranians reported that they'd synthesized them.

Paul Whittaker , April 4, 2018 at 9:02 am

I read somewhere recently that this nerve agent was developed in Uzbekistan (or one of the other Stan's) and that the production facilities had been cleaned out by the US military, as the the satellite is now one of their allies? The article also claimed that most agricultural pesticide producers could formulate is as it is related to insecticides used on crops.

Pat , April 4, 2018 at 7:10 am

Unless said actors had either produced false evidence in an attempt to justify military actions before OR was known to make false accusations in order to condemn states they were planning to attack. See US and UK in 2001. Add that this time around the UK Prime Minister has every reason to try to distract her country from her incompetence and her government's dishonest public policy, see Brexit, and there is a great deal of reason to suspect that the real culprits have nothing to do with the state actor they are accusing.

jsn , April 4, 2018 at 12:33 pm

The tangency of the victims to the Steele Dossier suggests multiple levels of political misdirection.

In the photo at the top, is that 12 Grimmauld Place coming into view just to the left of the front door?

PlutoniumKun , April 4, 2018 at 7:12 am

Thanks David, just one clarification:

There have been allegations that the composition of these agents, and perhaps information on their manufacture and use, may have been passed to other nations, or been stolen by them. But there is no confirmation of this and no specific nations or non-state actors have been mentioned.

At least one other nation has synthesised small quantities – Iran . They synthesised at least five of them apparently for the purpose of researching antidotes and they provided the information to the OPCW. Plus we know from reports 10 years ago that US researchers had full access to the Uzbekistan labs where they were apparently manufactured.

I can't find the link now, but I believe it was inferred from some statements that in the past Porton Down had in fact synthesized similar compounds, at the very least so they could develop techniques for identifying them.

David , April 4, 2018 at 8:00 am

Yes, I didn't want to write a long essay and anyway it's not my subject, but it's worth pointing out that nations are allowed a Single Small Scale Facility on their territory for, among other things, making and studying Schedule 1 chemicals (the most dangerous) for protective and other reasons. I've just looked up the reference in the CWC So many countries have technical facilities which could, in theory, produce small volumes of these new agents as well. I hadn't seen the particular report you mention, but I think the basic point stands – that there's nothing in the public domain to suggest that anyone has an offensive programme producing more than a few grams of these agents for protective purposes. And according to the CWC, these sites have to be inspected regularly. If these agents are not in fact illegal under the CWC (which seems to be the case) then various nations might reasonably try to synthesise small quantities for protective purposes, but I imagine it would be very hard to hide the capacity to produce quantities useful for operations. But is there a chemical engineer in the house?

Jesper , April 4, 2018 at 9:21 am

Quantities needed for operations are on the scale of grams (based on the toxicity of the substance). Industrial amounts were not used so looking for industrial capacity to produce might be interesting but I don't see the relevance of doing so.

jsn , April 4, 2018 at 12:36 pm

PK,
This may be what you were looking for .

Bill Smith , April 4, 2018 at 12:50 pm

"US researchers had full access to the Uzbekistan labs"

In the books I mentioned elsewhere the labs had been abandoned years earlier with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Most of the equipment and documentation had been removed with the departing Soviets.. So yeah, the US had full access to the wreckage and learned things but it was considerably different that access to a working lab.

Donald , April 4, 2018 at 7:16 am

I thought the article here was fine. Your summary didn't add anything except your opinion that the evidence slightly favors Russia as the culprit. What, for instance, is the problem with a third country developing exactly the same chemical agent? My impression was that the formula is known. And all suggested motives are wild speculation.

I have no problem saying there is a reasonable chance Russia did it, but there is also a reasonable chance someone else did it.

David , April 4, 2018 at 8:13 am

I think your last paragraph is very reasonable. But I don't think you understood what I was saying, or perhaps I wasn't clear.
The British accusation, once you get past the flag-waving and heavy-breathing, amounts to saying that one of two things happened. Either (1) the Russian government did it or (2) someone else did it making use of either the technology or the actual agents developed by the Russians. In the first case they argue that the Russians are directly guilty, in the second that they are sort of vicariously guilty, like someone who leaves a gun lying around, or the instructions on how to make a bomb. The only other possibility, it seems to me, is that another country, in complete isolation from the Russians, and unknown to anybody, developed precisely similar agents and had a reason to use them last month. The evidence for that is, well, not very great.
The main problem, as I suggested, is mixing these sorts of arguments with political ones as though they were the same. The kind of argument that worries me (though not found on NC, I'm happy to say) amounts to saying "I loath May, she's having a rough time with Brexit, the US lied about WMD in Iraq in 2002 therefore the Russians didn't do it, therefore the British did." These are the sorts of arguments that we should leave to the CT sites to play with.

PlutoniumKun , April 4, 2018 at 8:45 am

I understand what you are saying and I agree with your caution on this, but I don't think I'd agree that the evidence isn't great that other countries have similar agents. I think its clear that within chemical warfare circles, the cat has been out of the bag, so to speak, for many years. The evidence would suggest that certainly the US, UK and Iranians have been studying the compounds and have presumably produced small amounts to do so.

I think the British allegations (1) and (2) as you outline them are only the 'probable' evidence if strong evidence is produced that the chemical used is closely related to Russian (or Uzbek) manufactured stocks – i.e. it has the 'chemical fingerprint' of Russian Novichok. The statement made yesterday by Porton Down came I think very close to stating that this could not be established.

If you are to use Occams Razor, and work on the assumption that the act was carried out by a non-State agent (or a rogue element with State connections), then that would suggest the source was from the research facility an hours walk away from the assassination attempt, not the alleged ones 5,000 km away.

larry , April 4, 2018 at 9:35 am

How would they obtain it? A more plausible hypothesis is that Russian gangsters &/or their capitalist counterparts, who have connections with state actors, some of whom have a long standing grudge against Skripal, could have carried out the act. I am not saying that they did, only that they have a strong motive and possibly the opportunity.

integer , April 4, 2018 at 10:01 am

Russian gangsters &/or their capitalist counterparts, who have connections with state actors

Assuming you're talking about capitalists that had connections to Russian gangsters like Berezovsky, Bill Browder is the man you should be looking at.

Bill Smith , April 4, 2018 at 12:55 pm

Or just plan old Russian gangsters.

"Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?" covers some Putin's old KGB / gangster connections there.

jsn , April 4, 2018 at 1:51 pm

As noted elsewhere in this thread, all it takes is a decent lab to produce this stuff from the information published on it by the people who developed it. As PK suggests, Occam's Razor in this instance takes its edge from the very nearby UK chemical weapons facility that made some effort to down play the information published by the inventors of these agents back when they published.

See: diptherio
April 4, 2018 at 9:25 am

ricken , April 4, 2018 at 10:00 am

My understanding of these agents is that they are a group of agents with a similar basic structure. Their general formula has been published. A chemical engineer should comment on how difficult it is to synthesize them. But keeping in mind that a Japanese fringe group was able to synthesize a nerve agent, my guess is , not very. If the Iranian government is able to synthesize it, then certainly any large university program in the west can. If they are variants of organo phosphorus compounds, as most nerve agents are, then add fertilizer and chemical companies to that list.
The absence of any such evidence,of their synthesis outside of USSR, means nothing. We do not know what the defense and security establishments in most countries are doing. How many knew of a weaponized anthrax program at Fort Derrick?

Many actors have a reason to discredit Russia/ Putin. You think otherwise?

Sid Finster , April 4, 2018 at 10:44 am

So every time someone is murdered with a US made weapon or poisoned with US made chemicals, or even with chemicals originally invented in the US, sanctions against the United States are justified, if not WWIII, right?

Christopher Dale Rogers , April 4, 2018 at 7:56 am

David,

The best analysis in the UK has been on Craig Murray's Blog, including full transcripts appearing from the Sky News press interview and other media sites giving a UK Gov. version – Murray used his own FCO contacts and his website and views have been 100% spot on to date.

David , April 4, 2018 at 8:18 am

Can't agree, I'm afraid. Murray is good on other things, but here I think he's simply misunderstood what the UK government was alleging, as I pointed out in comments last week.

Quentin , April 4, 2018 at 8:04 am

David says: '( ) according to open sources, and at least one leaked US diplomatic telegram, the Soviet Union did indeed develop new types of chemical agent in the 1970s and 80s for use in a future war, which were both more lethal than existing agents, and also exempt from the likely provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention then being negotiated.'

I want to get one thing straight: Were the Soviets in the process of developing or trying to do so or did they actually successfully make such chemical weapons? I can only suppose these chemical weapons were in the pipeline when the Chemical Weapons Convention was finalised and therefore couldn't be listed because they didn't (yet) exist. If so, how do we know that the Soviets/Russians ever had such weapons? Looking around, I get the impression there is some uncertainty about the history of Novichok, even though its Russian name works prejudicially against Russia. However that may be, it is hard to accept that other states hadn't made the same 'type of' weapon. After all, how is an antidote possible if the poison is not known. Or is France involved? Everyone seems to assume that the nerve agent came from outside the UK. Well, how would it every have physically been brought across the UK border. Or was it manufactured there? Maybe for sale on the streets of London–or even somewhere in the vicinity of Salisbury.

David , April 4, 2018 at 8:39 am

My understanding from what's been published is that the agents were developed in the 70s and 80s, and their development was finished by the time of the CWC, which they were anyway planned to circumvent. I think it's right to say that you don't necessarily "make" and stock CW, because the literature suggests that they decay rather quickly. So whether the Russians actually had stocks, or merely the capacity to make them when they needed them, I can't say, and I doubt if there are many people who know. I think the antidote thing is a bit of a red herring. These are not poisons. Nerve agents like VX and Sarin worked by paralysing the muscles, and I remember that during the Cold War (and perhaps since) NATO troops carried atropine injectors to try to counteract the effects. If these agents worked in the same way, then I'm not sure there's an "antidote" – more like generic types of emergency treatment which might save your life.

Quentin , April 4, 2018 at 8:50 am

David: 'My understanding from what's been published is that the agents were developed in the 70s and 80s, and their development was finished by the time of the CWC, which they were anyway planned to circumvent.'

You mean the Soviets then agreed to the CWC without declaring their operational 'Novichok' or their tested procedure to make them. Is this how it went? I really want clarity on this point. The same CWC last year certified that the Soviet Union's successor state, the Russian Federation of course, had destroyed all its chemical weapons. It seems to be that a lot of individuals want to have everything all ways to pin the Skripals' attack on Russia. France hovers in the background here and on Syria.

Quentin , April 4, 2018 at 8:54 am

David: 'My understanding from what's been published is that the agents were developed in the 70s and 80s, and their development was finished by the time of the CWC, which they were anyway planned to circumvent.'

You mean the Soviets then agreed to the CWC without declaring their operational 'Novichok' or their tested procedure to make them? Is this how it went? I really searching for clarity on this point. The same CWC last year certified that the Soviet Union's successor state, the Russian Federation of course, had destroyed all its chemical weapons. It seems to be that a lot of individuals want to have everything all ways to pin the Skripals' attack on Russia. France hovers in the background here and on Syria.

Bill Smith , April 4, 2018 at 9:19 am

Read the second half of the book "The Dead Hand". While not talking about this agent it covers a lot of this ground. Also "Biohazard" by Alibek and Handelman and "State Secrets" by Vil Mirzayanov. All published about a decade ago.

Anyone know of any other books that more or less cover this topic?

"The same CWC last year certified that the Soviet Union's successor state, the Russian Federation of course, had destroyed all its chemical weapons."

The CWC only certifies destruction of declared chemical weapons. Is this stuff on the list of chemical weapons?

brightdark , April 4, 2018 at 8:06 am

Why would Putin take the risk and do it? Simple, he's done similar things before and gotten away with it.

makedoanmend , April 4, 2018 at 8:44 am

I wonder is this the biggest tell that the average punter must keep an open mind?

Cui Bono?

What benefit accrued to the Russians – diplomatic storm, threat of more sanctions, possible war?

Of course, if one thinks that Vlad Putin is evil incarnate and loves killing for the sake of it without thinking about the wider repercussions, and that the rest of the Russian establishment has absolutely no influence or input into their government, the contention is perfectly valid. (And of course it helps if we ignore that other governments in the world have been reported to "eliminate" people they find threatening to their interests or for other reasons.)

Pookah Harvey , April 4, 2018 at 2:46 pm

One scenario that might seem plausible has to do with the Steele Dossier. If Steele's information is correct and Putin does have a sexual and financial blackmailing dossier on Trump then, as Moon over Alabama has pointed out, the Skripals probably were deeply involved in providing the information to Steele..

The fact that this information was available to a fairly low level intelligence probe would indicate that it is widely known in Russian Intelligence.

Why would such a powerful blackmailing dossier be so widely known? Remember when it was produced. You have a buffoon reality TV star with political connections that will jump into any honey-pot intelligence operation you provide. So salacious sexual tapes might easily have been passed around for entertainment value when Trump would have been considered a low value asset. Times have changed. Blackmail only works if the blackmailer controls the flow of the blackmailing information. Putin would want to clamp down on any more leaks about a Trump dossier. Hence both Skripal and his daughter would be blatantly targeted with a Russian audience in mind. This is what will happen if you leak no matter where you go..

If Steele was able to obtain information about a Trump dossier then US intelligence certainly has much more. Releasing the information that Trump is a "Manchurian Candidate" in our current political situation would provoke a civil war. The Intelligence community could try to cut the legs out from under Putin's dossier by pushing the Russian collusion story on Trump's election. Any pro-Russian actions Trump makes will look suspicious to the general public.. This would also explain the unprecedented attacks by former American Intelligence chiefs on Trump. i.e. Ex CIA Chief Brennan's recent twee t "When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history."

This does seem to tie a lot of things together.
1. Why Putin would assassinate the Skripals in such an open manner.
2. The push by Intelligence Services on the story of Russian tampering in the election with little real evidence.
3. The unprecedented personal attacks on Trump from Clapper and Brennan.

Anyway it's something to think about.

jsn , April 4, 2018 at 6:21 pm

I love it! It's wonderfully baroque and it redeems our top spooks!

Do you really think it's possible for Trump to be embarrassed by any of his past behavior?

Pookah Harvey , April 4, 2018 at 7:35 pm

It seems to me that attractive Russian agents who where trying to get their target into the most embarrassing sexual activities would be very successful with Trump. Also remember Don Jr. and Eric have both spent quite a bit of time in Russia. Also it seems almost sure that the Russians would have enough information on money laundering to send the whole family to jail. Who knows how much that could influence Trump's decision making.

gallam , April 4, 2018 at 9:34 pm

The problem with that narrative is that none of the three people apparently poisoned by one of the most dangerous chemicals known to man have actually died. Indeed, two out of three have recovered in less time than some people take to recover from flu.

Pookah Harvey , April 4, 2018 at 10:36 pm

A less than fatal dose is maybe what was planned. From the Guardian :

"Circles appeared before my eyes: red and orange. A ringing in my ears, I caught my breath. And a sense of fear: like something was about to happen," Andrei Zheleznyakov told the now-defunct newspaper Novoye Vremya, describing the 1987 weapons lab incident that exposed him to a nerve agent that would eventually kill him. "I sat down on a chair and told the guys: 'It's got me.'"

By 1992, when the interview was published, the nerve agent had gutted Zheleznyakov's central nervous system. Less than a year later he was dead, after battling cirrhosis, toxic hepatitis, nerve damage and epilepsy.

Only time will tell the final effects of the attack. This seems like a very horrible end, worse then a simple assassination.

Using Novichok points the finger at Russia but also gives them a credible deniability, (other countries can produce the agent). The target audience (Russians who know of the dossier) will very clearly understand the warning.

Again this is only a scenario. But I feel that it is as plausible as any other put forward. My other favorite is Moon of Alabama's guess that Israel might have done it .

Sid Finster , April 4, 2018 at 10:46 am

Rather, Putin has been accused of similar things. Let's not kid ourselves – no evidence has been made public, other than hyperventilation and unsubstantiated claims.

hemeantwell , April 4, 2018 at 5:51 pm

Why would Putin take the risk and do it?

Exactly. Russia Hate proponents have banked heavily on blaming them or their allies for chemical attacks -- this and in Syria –that only appear foolish in terms of any plausible benefit/risk calculation and which are very open to false flagging. As noted above, the conduct of the hate campaigns, in which a rush to judgement and attacks on appeals to caution predominate, is simply alarming to see in societies that are familiar with the value of careful evidentiary procedures and supposedly take them seriously. That this is coupled with an utterly hypocritical anti-"fake news" campaign makes the situation seem all the more desperate.

My impression is that we are witnessing a barrage strategy, in which a succession of disputable accusations is made and each successive "crime" is used to undermine the possibility of reconsidering the previous charge. I don't think of this as hysteria, but as generating an atmosphere in which the threat of a charge of disloyalty and excommunicative punishment, at least, begins to haunt us. As I've probably said before, one of the Frankfurt School takes on fascist ideology was that in a sense it really wasn't one. At its core it was not systematic, but an assertion of a demand to obedience. The fascist would blabber on until someone objected, and then they would laugh and show them their pistol. As determined by the Extreme Center, Russia-focused public discourse is headed in that direction.

integer , April 4, 2018 at 8:12 am

Jiri Matousek accused the US of weaponizing novichoks at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, as detailed in cables released by Wikileaks. Hard to imagine why a Czech scientist would make that claim for no reason. While it's always pragmatic to refrain from rushing to judgement, one of the issues with always insisting on authoritative sources as evidence before reaching any conclusions is that the people who have the most to lose from that sort of information being made available to the public are the same people that have disproportionate control over the so-called authoritative sources.

diptherio , April 4, 2018 at 9:25 am

According to the Russian who developed the chemicals, literally anybody with a modern chemistry lab could produce them. Also, the chemical structures were published over a decade ago.

One should be mindful that the chemical components or precursors of A-232 or its binary version novichok-5 are ordinary organophosphates that can be made at commercial chemical companies that manufacture such products as fertilizers and pesticides. (Mirzayanov, 1995).

Soviet scientists had published many papers in the open literature on the chemistry of such compounds for possible use as insecticides. Mirzayanov claimed that "this research program was premised on the ability to hide the production of precursor chemicals under the guise of legitimate commercial chemical production of agricultural chemicals".

As the structures of these compounds have been described, any organic chemist with a modern lab would be able to synthesize bench scale quantities of such a compound. Indeed, Porton Down must have been able to synthesize these compounds in order to develop tests for them. It is therefore misleading to assert that only Russia could have produced such compounds.
http://syriapropagandamedia.org/working-papers/doubts-about-novichoks

TimmyB , April 4, 2018 at 12:50 pm

The claim that "there is no evidence that anyone else has them" (Novichok) is completely false. The formula for making so-called Novichok nerve agents has been published in a book that was sold to the public. Iran publicly admitted making such agents years ago to test them.

Moreover, the UK would need to manufacture Novichok so it could have samples to test. Simply put, if the UK didn't manufacture Novichok and run tests on it, then it would have no way of knowing what Novichok type nerve agents look like in a blood sample.

Please note that since it is impossible to prove a negative, for example, prove Martians never landed on Earth, Russia will never be able to prove it did NOT poison these people. That is why our courts don't require criminal suspects they didn't commit a crime. Instead, the state must provide evidence that the suspect is guilty. Putting the burden on Russia to provide evidence to disprove its guilt is a propaganda trick.

Bill Smith , April 4, 2018 at 12:58 pm

Or access to gas chromatography data from someone else?

As to Martians, check Weekly World News. They have pictures :)

Ahimsa , April 4, 2018 at 6:45 am

Did Putin really threaten to have traitors killed?
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/40900/did-putin-threaten-to-have-traitors-assassinated

I tried posting this before but it got lost in the intertubes. Suffice it to say, the reported quote is: not a direct quote, a poor translation, out of context, and not refering to Skripal.

At the time of the otiginal interview, the media reported the complete oposite meaning, i.e. Putin says Russian sexret service don't kill traitors!

integer , April 4, 2018 at 7:42 am

Occam's razor suggests, to me at least, that the poisoning of the Skripals occurred at the Salisbury Zizzi restaurant. Interestingly, the Zizzi restaurant chain was recently (Feb, 2015) purchased by Bridgepoint Capital, a private equity firm with headquarters in London. Bridgepoint appears to have some connections to the UK government, for example Sir Stuart Rose (knighted in 2008), who sits on the Conservative Bench at the House of Lords, was appointed to an advisory role in 2010 .

Anyways, just a data point, maybe the Skripals were poisoned somewhere else, but I'd be intersested to hear if any of the UK-based NC commentariat are familiar with Bridgepoint Capital, and if they know of any other connections to the UK government or intelligence agenices that Bridgepoint has.

larry , April 4, 2018 at 8:55 am

The largest concentration was on their house door. Bridgepoint is a bit of a stretch. That hypothesis is not supported by invoking Occam's Razor.

integer , April 4, 2018 at 9:07 am

The largest concentration was on their house door.

Says who? No need to answer, as I know who said it; they are not even close to being reliable sources of information. The house door claim has only recently been made, after the claims that it was the car ventlation system, car door handle, Yulia Skripal's luggage, and Russian porridge(!). My understanding is that these kinds of substances are very volatile, so please enlighten me how it could reliably be established that it was the front door handle of Sergei Skripal's house that contained the highest concentration of novichok four weeks after the poisoning took place? FWIW there are photos of police officers standing by that front door without any protection that were taken shortly after the poisoning occurred.

Adding: In case you missed it, my reference to Occam's razor referred to where the Skripals were poisoned.

larry , April 4, 2018 at 9:46 am

Ah. The police were also standing near the bench where they collapsed. I don't think that shows much. The house door possibility was only recently made because it seems that they had to have comapred all the sites they had been to before they could say that. It would be easy to place it there if it were in gel form in the dead of night. The car door handle could be explained by the agent coming off his hand, so this is consistent, though that does not mean it is true. The others were speculation and clearly so. Russian porridge was ridiculous.

Occam's Razor also can lead to suggesting that they were poisoned where they were because he lived there and therefore an easier target there. Porton Down could be an accidental coincidence. Why he chose to live there is another question.

integer , April 4, 2018 at 10:13 am

It would be easy to place it there if it were in gel form in the dead of night.

Exactly, but not necessarily the night before the Skripals were poisoned. My suggestion is that the poisoning occurred at Salisbury Zizzi restaurant, and that, in light of the establishment's narrative having come apart at the seams since then, evidence has subsequently been planted, perhaps, as you speculate, via the placement of a novichok gel on Sergei Skripal's front door handle.

I mean, seriously, how likely is it that Sergei and Yulia would simultaneously collapse on a park bench hours after one of them touched a nerve agent covered door when they left the house that morning?

larry , April 4, 2018 at 12:14 pm

Not likely, I agree, if the attempted assassination was professionally carried out. But what if it wasn't and the agent was substandard in qualtiy? I haven't seen anything myself about the quality of the agent itself.

integer , April 4, 2018 at 12:56 pm

How many people does it take to close a door? The point I am trying to make is that both Yulia and Sergei ate at Zizzi bar, presumably at the same time, and then they collapsed, simultaneously, half an hour later on a park bench. Occam's razor suggests they were poisoned during that meal. Also, and this is drawing a longer bow, Bridgepoint owns the Zizzi chain and has connections to the UK government, thus, someone at Bridgepoint may have facilitated the poisoning by, say, allowing someone from MI5 or MI6 to be there when it was suspected Sergei and Yulia would be visiting, seeing as it was apparently well known that the Salisbury Zizzi restaurant was Sergei Skripal's favorite place to dine.

pretzelattack , April 4, 2018 at 1:12 pm

or even what the agent is, exactly.

TimmyB , April 4, 2018 at 12:53 pm

The "police" standing near the bench didn't collapse. Instead, one officer, the one who went into the home to search it, collapsed.

Carolinian , April 4, 2018 at 8:03 am

Moon of Alabama on the growing possibility that the whole thing is a false flag.

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/04/operation-hades-a-model-for-the-novichok-case-.html#more

The post includes a John Helmer link.

http://johnhelmer.net/yulia-skripal-is-not-allowed-to-telephone-her-grandmother/

PlutoniumKun , April 4, 2018 at 8:14 am

MoA has been all over the place on this issue, he's been casting out a new theory nearly every day, many of which are as far fetched as the 'Putin did it' ones.

integer , April 4, 2018 at 8:27 am

Fair enough, however each change in direction has been accompanied by a summary of why the change in direction has been made. b at MoA may not be perfect, but it's pretty clear he disseminates information in good faith, which is more than can be said about any MSM outlet.

Carolinian , April 4, 2018 at 9:22 am

On the contrary I'd say he's merely been offering altenative possibilities to the hysteria and to the near impossibility that "Putin did it."

It's the MSM that speaks with certainty at every turn despite facts unknown. As someone pointed out the once ubiquitous word "alleged" seems to have disappeared from our mainstream journals.

Sid Finster , April 4, 2018 at 10:48 am

Alternative theories are perfectly acceptable, even if those theories are themselves mutually exclusive.

If either "Yves pulled the rigger or maybe Lambert did it", it can't be both Yves and Lambert, but in either case it wasn't me.

jabawocky , April 4, 2018 at 8:09 am

'Yesterday, the Guardian drily reported that the absolute confidence with with the UK government had pinned the poisoning on the Russian state was looking ill-founded'

I just think that's misleading, because there was never an assertion from the UK Government that scientists at Porton Down had unambiguously pinned the origin of the nerve agent as from Russia, only that the scientists had identified it as a nerve agent that had previously been developed in Russia. I don't think the article says the conclusion was ill-founded either in so many words, more that it overeggs the significance of the new statement, as David points out above.

Porton Down worked fast to identify the agent, so they pretty much must have had a sample to use as a standard. To pinpoint the origin they would need previous analysis of multiple batches to determine discriminatory trace signatures. As these are binary agents it would be especially challenging and quite time-consuming, if it was even possible.

Analysis is likely to be based on intelligence as to who was known to have samples of the agent, and who had motive to take out Skripal, not the science at Porton Down. It is not unreasonable to want to keep this information out of the public domain. This means it is unlikely that we will ever be shown proof, or be able to assess for ourselves the quality of the evidence. However, we equally cannot conclude from this that the evidence does not exist, and one must presume that the EU and USA were convinced enough by the evidence they were shown to join the UK in direct action.

What s clear is that the UK is a dangerous place for former Russian spies.

PlutoniumKun , April 4, 2018 at 8:17 am

Boris Johnson actually did state explicitly in Parliament that Porton Down had pinned the origin of the nerve agent as being from Russia, but they've quietly stepped back from that, even deleting tweets that repeated the claim.

larry , April 4, 2018 at 8:56 am

PK, no one can believe a word Johnson says.

Yves Smith Post author , April 4, 2018 at 10:57 am

The press treated Johnson's statement as definitive, particularly in the US.

gallam , April 4, 2018 at 9:41 pm

The press in the UK treated the statement as definitive too. They are now trying to pretend that he was referring to something else in the statement he made by carefully editing the question asked by the interviewer.

Chris , April 4, 2018 at 8:30 am

Vodka was 'developed' in Russia and is produced around the world. Same with 'Novichok'?

Colonel Smithers , April 4, 2018 at 9:42 am

Thank you, Chris.

Novichok? That sounds suspiciously and probably tastes like the Creamichoc dispensed by that vending machine down the corridor.

Eustache De Saint Pierre , April 4, 2018 at 9:20 am

Isn't this just another situation like MH-17, & the supposed Syrian Sarin gas attacks in which the actual facts are obscured in a political fog ? Perhaps we will never know in any concrete way the actual truth of the Salisbury affair or the other examples, but there does appear to a lack of the concept of reasonable doubt which doesn't stop the guilty till proven innocent lynch mob from pointing accusatory fingers at their favourite big bad wolves.

One thing I am sure of is that Putin is not a fool & due to that conclusion I would ask " Cui Bono ? ". A question that I was it seems under the mistaken impression was always asked when trying to prove motive & I cannot think of any way that the affair would profit the alleged white cat stroker, although I can certainly see how as part of the constant demonisation of Russia, it profits the mudslingers, which is how I will refer to them until they provide the sort of proof needed in the opposite of a kangaroo court.

I don't think it will result on it's own in a possible demonstration of the actual capability of Russia's new weaponry, but I worry that it is another incremental step up a ladder to nowhere good. Not likely the that the tin pot poodle will send an empty aircraft carrier to the Crimea, but likely more of the same which appears to be resulting in Russia becoming more self sustaining, while increasingly being able to hit back in ways that of course wont hurt those with access to bunkers in any serious way.

It is about faith at the end of the day, as people will believe which version of the truth suits them – after all we appear to be in a war if only a phony one – but the fog where the truth is the first casualty is real enough.

Colonel Smithers , April 4, 2018 at 9:40 am

Thank you, Eustache.

With regard to MH aircraft, how about the one missing in the Indian Ocean?

Debris from an aircraft washes up frequently along the African coast from the Horn to the Cape and the archipelagos to the east, including Mauritius, Rodrigues and Reunion.

Meteo France (Reunion) and France 2 (Envoye Special) are sitting on a report that suggests the debris is coming from the direction of the Maldives and Chagos / Diego Garcia, due to currents, and the state of decomposition and what's growing on the debris suggests its coming from tropical waters mid-Ocean and in a timescale similar to when that MH Boeing 777 disappeared.

The wild goose chase south west of Australia was a way of diverting attention and allowing the black box battery to run out of juice.

integer , April 4, 2018 at 10:32 am

Thank you, Colonel.

Tony Abbott was happy to engage in that wild goose chase; every dollar he spent was one dollar closer to impoverishing Australia and making us peasants see the light of the Catholic church. Just ask Bob Santamaria, or George Pell, for that matter.

Eustache De Saint Pierre , April 4, 2018 at 10:58 am

& thank you Colonel – it does appear to me that one should carry a box of salt for immediate use in times like that of present hysteria, to be used when proven liars make knee jerk accusations, while of course keeping in mind that those who constantly Cry Wolf in such matters could actually be telling the truth.

Schevardnardze once stated after the wall fell to a group of assembled Westerners that they had lost their much needed bogeyman – I guess we now have him back as a replacement for a series of inadequate pretenders.

Synoia , April 4, 2018 at 11:36 am

Nice runway at Diego Garcia.

One should search for Uinterruptable Autopilot (Not a Tesla feature) and contemplate on who has the power to trigger it's use.

I do wonder who or what was on the flight going to China.

Jeff , April 4, 2018 at 9:35 am

I almost stopped reading after the first line:

The UK Government has not presented conclusive evidence that the nerve agent used in the attempted assassinations of Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia originated in Russia, let alone that the Russian state was responsible for these crimes

.
The UK Government has not presented any evidence that a nerve agent was used, no evidence that it was military grade and no evidence that it was from Russia. All we know is a doctor stating some poisoning was detected.
MoA has all the links and details as to why it is such a blatant lie.
As to what did really happen, why the UK government set up such a scam, and why did so many countries fall so quickly in line, many theories abound. I would exclude the 'Russian state' here, as they can only loose and have nothing to gain.

third time lucky , April 4, 2018 at 11:21 am

+1

Stephen Gardner , April 4, 2018 at 9:35 am

Let me see. Who should we give the benefit of the doubt? The nations that attacked Iraq and unleashed jihadi violence based on a lie or the guy who stood up like an adult and prevented the fall of the only truly secular state left in the Middle East?

David , April 4, 2018 at 10:01 am

Ok, let me wield Occam's razor myself.
I don't think anyone seriously (and no I don't mean Johnson) is suggesting that only Russia ever did or ever could manufacture these agents. Their existence has been known for a while, and according to experts the formulas have been published, so at least in theory they could be made by other states/actors assuming they were bloody careful. As PK has noted, the Iranians, at least, seem to have made them in very small quantities. So in the end we have three groups of hypotheses, if we exclude accidents, food poisoning, witchcraft etc. :
– the attack was carried out by part of the Russian state, by some other Russian group (Mafia?) or some other unidentified group (not necessarily Russian) with direct access to the agent itself in some stored form.
– the attack was carried out by another state or a non-state entity which had found the technical details of the Russian agent and manufactured its own stocks without being discovered, and had a motive for the attack.
– the attack was carried out by another state or non-state entity that had quite independently developed an agent amazingly and coincidentally similar to the Russian agent without being discovered and had a motive for the attack.
The third seems to me to be barely conceivable, and the second to rely on a motive which so far no-one has even suggested. The first, to be honest, seems unlikely, but maybe some variant of it is the least unlikely of the three. Somebody must have done it, after all.
Incidentally, Cui Bono is not a logical argument or a principle of proof, just a point of departure for enquiry.

Martin Finnucane , April 4, 2018 at 10:29 am

[T]he second [scenario] [seems to] rely on a motive which so far no-one has even suggested Yes, it has been suggested: false flag. But that would just be crazy talk, right?

"Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it."
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Eustache De Saint Pierre , April 4, 2018 at 10:40 am

Neverthess, Cui Bono is I believe a useful tool in an attempt to define guilt & as for the evidence in terms of the alleged nerve agent itself – is Porton Down what one would describe as being an independent expert ? I did read somewhere that there is an international agreement which comprises of samples in such incidents being sent to an agreed independent laboratory for testing, which if true is a path the UK Gov has decided not to follow. I also wonder about the toxicity of whatever agent was used due to the survival of the daughter, which does not seem to correspond with what I have read about the deadliness of Novichok & other varieties of nerve gas – amateurish at the very least which for me doesn't fit that old KGB dog.

I don't know who carried at the attack but as you are admitting there is reasonable doubt & i would suggest that in a proper court of law the case for the prosecution would be about as watertight as a sieve.

From RT via Zerohedge so perhaps caution needed, but if true – a sign of a backdown ?

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-03/russia-demands-uk-apologize-after-scientists-stunning-admission-about-skripal

begob , April 4, 2018 at 11:20 am

Somebody must have done it, after all.

But what was "it"? Far as I can tell, the only deed that nobody is disputing is that three people were treated in hospital for poisoning by a chemical agent. It's like tossing a deck of cards in the air and trying to read them all before they hit the ground.

gallam , April 4, 2018 at 9:47 pm

Strictly speaking, the three were treated for poisoning, not necessarily by a chemical agent. It could be they ate a bad pork pie.

integer , April 4, 2018 at 11:25 am

> the attack was carried out by another state or a non-state entity which had found the technical details of the Russian agent and manufactured its own stocks without being discovered, and had a motive for the attack.

As I'm sure you are aware, these technical details were published in a book written by Vil Mirzayanov that was published in 2008 (IIRC) and has been available to the public since then. In any case, watching Gavin "go away and shut up" Williamson react like a scorned schoolboy who thought being one of the popular kids would be enough to allow him to dictate the narrative was enlightening to me. I would suggest you spend some time learning how to watch the way people carry themselves, rather than just accepting what they say at face value.

" What actually happens is it completely distorts the narrative of what people think about things "

– Gavin Williamson comparing Russia's POV on the Skripal case to Nazi propaganda

Filiform Radical , April 4, 2018 at 12:33 pm

Cui Bono is not a logical argument or a principle of proof, just a point of departure for enquiry.

Could you clarify what you mean by this? To me, noting that Putin would have less of a motivation to do this than, well, anyone who wanted to damage Russia's standing in the international community and, based on that, reducing one's estimate of the likelihood that he was actually responsible seems like an entirely reasonable thing to do. In what sense is it not a logical argument to make?

larry , April 4, 2018 at 12:39 pm

You are right about the context though the point made is technically correct.

Filiform Radical , April 4, 2018 at 1:00 pm

Again, technically correct in what sense? My issue is I don't really understand the point being made here. Is it that cui bono is not a formal rule of inference in the same sense that, say, ex falso quodlibet is? If so, true, but largely irrelevant in a context such as this one, where a meaningful formal proof of any claim is essentially impossible. If not, what is being said?

David , April 4, 2018 at 1:06 pm

Yes, it's a simple and common logical error. "X benefited from this, so they obviously did it." Whereas the correct statement would be "X benefited from this so we should look to see whether there is any actual evidence that they did it." It's a staple of all conspiracy theories: the classic example is the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. "The Bush administration benefited from this so they must have done it." And there are plenty of others.

pretzelattack , April 4, 2018 at 1:10 pm

so suggesting that the russians did it because he was a double agent, absent other evidence of what it was, exactly, and who had it, is fallacious.

David , April 4, 2018 at 1:19 pm

Absent any hard evidence, yes, if you argue that the Russians benefited from it, which I frankly doubt.

Filiform Radical , April 4, 2018 at 2:11 pm

This seems a rather uncharitable interpretation of the discussions being had here. You're correct that, if someone were to bring up some specific non-Russian actor and assert that they were obviously the perpetrator because they benefited, they would be in the wrong. Correct me if I've missed someone, though, but I don't think any of the commentariat are arguing that we know with certainty that some such actor was behind the attack.

The point, instead, is that we should keep an open mind as to who carried it out, since there's no substantial evidence backing the official narrative or any particular counter-narrative. Asking "Cui bono?" is simply one way of countering the nonsensical, but widely held, idea that no real evidence is needed because the Russians are obviously to blame; in point of fact, if one puts proper thought into the motivations of the various parties involved and the evidence that is available, this explanation seems less likely than many, though not impossible. The bottom line is that, if the UK wants its accusations to be credible, it must provide more evidence than it has thus far.

David , April 4, 2018 at 2:19 pm

Agreed. It's a way of countering lazy thinking, and I would instance subtle and not-so-subtle hints that the UK government might have dunnit, which requires at least a few elements of proof rather than just assertions. I think the argument is actually more powerful if reversed, though, which is that in principle the list of potential perpetrators should be limited to those who stood to benefit in some way. I'm not sure that Russia even makes it to the starting line on that basis.

RenoDino , April 4, 2018 at 10:07 am

Can we all agree there has been a rush to judgment and that very rush to judgment has seriously undermined the credibility of the accusations? We went from chemical poisoning to Putin in a matter of minutes with nothing in between. No perpetrators, no witness statements, and no release of evidence. The conclusions seem to predate the crime, the denunciations and diplomatic expulsions coming even before the source of the poison was discovered on the door. Having unpacked the bag of accusations, the various elements don't seem to neatly fit back into the bag they came out of. And nothing frustrates real criminal investigators more than lack of motivation. There is no reason to murder the victims let alone in the manner ascribed.

The only thing that makes any sense is the accusation of chemical poisoning by a state power carries with it a level of condemnation that is beyond redemption. It is THE RED LINE. History tells us that the mere mention of such use renders immediately a judgment of guilt. There is no going back. Normalization of relations is no longer an option. We must confront absolute evil with all means necessary before we all end up writhing on the floor in a pool of our own vomit, blood, and excrement delivered by an unseen power.

raoul , April 4, 2018 at 10:47 am

good stuff. where ya been? miss your insightful commentary.

'all means necessary' only otherwise includes that third box, the first two being ballot box and soap box (this, and other forums).

jsn , April 4, 2018 at 1:38 pm

All happening at the precise moment May needs a major distraction to avoid being confronted by the Ultras in her capitulation to the EU, coincident with awkward questions about the Steele Dossier being asked across the Atlantic.

Cui bono? Heard much on those stories lately? Just sayin'

Andrew Watts , April 4, 2018 at 1:43 pm

The only thing that makes any sense is the accusation of chemical poisoning by a state power carries with it a level of condemnation that is beyond redemption. It is THE RED LINE.

Isn't that the whole point of this "Russia did it!" narrative though? A few columnists were openly celebrating the fact that Trump wouldn't be able to have a private meeting with Putin after this story broke. They're forgetting that it's Trump and it can still happen regardless.

Matthew G. Saroff , April 4, 2018 at 10:23 am

Also, if this stuff is 5x more powerful than VX, how did they set up a dose level that sickened, but has not killed any of the targets?

We are talking a difference of a few hundreds of micrograms between lethal and dehabilitating.

LD50 for VX is 10 mg, which means that for Novichuk it is on the order of 2mg (2000 μg) (5x more potent according to reports),

It is not unreasonable to assume that a difference of 200 μg or so, about 0.000007054 ounces is the difference, and not one, but two targets threaded this needle.

whine country , April 4, 2018 at 11:23 am

Excellent point! But remember the idea that the public will accept the current narrative is based on the fact that most Americans still believe that Boris and Natashia are prototypical Russian agents in terms of competency.

larry , April 4, 2018 at 10:24 am

Richard North has a fascianting blog post today about the Skripal affair at eureferendum.com. The post is titled, Salisbury: A crumbling ediface of lies.

Jesper , April 4, 2018 at 10:35 am

Seems so many crazy theories abound that I might offer up one myself :-)

The motive was love. One of the Skripals had an affair with an employee at the nearby research facility. The cheated spouse found out and decided to end the affair. This unbalanced individual stole poison from the research facility and then proceeded to try to kill the Skripals.
The research facility would of course not admit that poison could be stolen so the killer gets away with it as the facility provides the perfect cover – it could not happen.

That crazy theory has probably been discarded for the more probable: A foreign government decided to go 'Bond-villain' or rather 'Austin Power -villain' when a simple knifing would have ensured the deaths. What is the point of a deed if it isn't done with flair and high risk of failure?

begob , April 4, 2018 at 11:33 am

The Sun has an even more fevered scenario – the mother of the daughter's FSB lover arranged a hit on her from Moscow. I've noticed some of the more lurid rumours are sourced in that paper, then picked up by the rest of the media.

tc , April 4, 2018 at 10:36 am

Never knew NC had so many CW/BW experts lurking.

The issue with this stuff is how to deliver it, not in the manufacture. If I was in UK's security services, I'd be mortified that someone carried this over a border, carried it around the UK and finally delivered it to a target without any of their sensors anywhere or systems picking it up. That alone should frighten us.

The other major issue is when the public disbelieves senior leadership so quickly on something this serious, that's a major concern especially as the disbelief is fueled by an adversary.

integer , April 4, 2018 at 10:46 am

> Never knew NC had so many CW/BW experts lurking

NC has a lot of political pragmatists that demand facts rather than propaganda lurking. If you feel the need to equate that to NC commenters assuming they are CW/BW experts then that's on you.

> I'd be mortified that someone carried this over a border

Which would be a fair reaction, however there is no evidence that any nerve agent was carried over the UK's border.

Stephen Gardner , April 4, 2018 at 12:51 pm

Not only that but the only evidence we have of what it was that poisoned those people is being held by the British government. The same people who were up to their elbows in lies on the Iraq deal. And to answer TC's point. Yes, everyone should disbelieve our leadership quickly. They have repeatedly proven themselves untrustworthy. They manipulate us with fear and they use modern techniques of advertising to march us all in the same direction. Putin is the good guy in the Middle East and no amount of fear-mongering can make me doubt the facts on the ground in favor of the idiots that brought us al qa'eda by feeding the jihadis in Afghanistan and da'esh by feeding jihadis in Iraq and Syria. Cynical use of dangerous crazies against governments our leaders perceive to be threats to their plans for world domination is both dangerous and stupid.

David , April 4, 2018 at 1:17 pm

Not the same people. The government in 2002 was led by one T Blair, a Labour politician, who was willing to overlook falsehoods perpetrated by the US so as not to lose a position of influence in Washington. Some of the present government were at school then, I think.

pretzelattack , April 4, 2018 at 2:20 pm

the brits still seem to be at washington's beck and call, witness the years long persecution of julian assange, as well as pushing the "white hats" propaganda in syria. nothing has changed there.

Stephen Gardner , April 4, 2018 at 2:28 pm

I guess you are still laboring under the delusion that the identity of the employees of the powerful and moneyed interests that call the shots matters. Blair is an employee of the people whose votes count–the guys who vote with money. You and I vote with ballots. How many ballots does it take to buy a condo in the Virgin Islands?

Sid Finster , April 4, 2018 at 10:52 am

That assumes without evidence that the substance was not in fact manufactured in the UK.

Martin Finnucane , April 4, 2018 at 10:54 am

Is this irony or sarcasm? I get those mixed up. Kierkegaardean levels of the same, whichever it is.

Quentin , April 4, 2018 at 11:04 am

tc rightly asks how the stuff got into the UK if it wasn't produced there. I know nothing about chemistry or chemical weapons. Yet I can ask questions in response to the answers I've heard: this stuff is so absolutely fatal that to me it seems inconceivable that it could be transported by the usual plane, boat, train entering the UK; or being made of two (?) substances that seem readily available as pesticides and/or fertiliser the nerve poison could have been made inside the UK itself. So which is it: in or outside the UK.? In the last instance the explanation for how it entered the UK is the absolute whopper I'm waiting for.

Quentin , April 4, 2018 at 11:14 am

I add: one way or the other there can only be questions of negligence, incompetence, failure on the part of the state to protect its inhabitants from such harm: chemical weapons are not just available for the asking on the streets of London; border guards, police, intelligence agencies, etc. have failed. Who is responsible? This reminds me of those Saudis who somehow learned how to fly aircraft into high buildings and succeeded in doing so. How did they do it? Who failed in their duty to prevent the crime?

fajensen , April 4, 2018 at 3:58 pm

chemical weapons are not just available for the asking on the streets of London

Uh. Yes they are.

Fentanyl (cancer painkiller) and the much more toxic Carfentanil (Elephant tranquilliser) are sold on the street by drug pushers. Carfentanil in particular has a lower LD 50 than VX!

Sid Finster , April 4, 2018 at 12:56 pm

*if* it wasn't produced there.

We don't know that it wasn't.

Mel , April 4, 2018 at 12:12 pm

the disbelief is fueled by an adversary

Which adversary yet to be announced. Time for this again, I guess. Now is the Age of Advertising. There's a major adversarial component ( Caveat emptor ) in ordinary business, and some ad-smarts are necessary for self preservation.

Peter Drucker:

Indeed the danger of total propaganda is not that the propaganda will be believed. The danger is that nothing will be believed and that every communication becomes suspect. In the end, no communication is being received. Everything anyone says is considered a demand and is resisted, resented, and in effect not heard at all. The end results of total propaganda are not fanatics, but cynics–but this, of course, may be even greater and more dangerous corruption.
Management – Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices by Peter Drucker

Hannah Arendt has said something similar, he might have picked up the idea from her.

Patrick Armstrong argues that just trying to argue this story on some kind of merits, as we're doing here, is some kind of mistake.

templar555510 , April 4, 2018 at 2:31 pm

Good comment Mel. Can't disagree with Drucker here. Arendt called her book on Eichmann ' The Banality of Evil ' . As Jordan Peterson said recently she might have more profitably called it ' The Evil of Banality ' which is pretty much where we are now with the ' News ' and so simply attempting to analyse any part of this particular story rather than accepting just the ' known , knowns ' is a waste of energy .

Stephen Gardner , April 4, 2018 at 12:43 pm

The analysis of this case does not revolve around expert opinion on chemical warfare. The only people who have the chemical evidence are the British government. And they have proven quite unreliable in the past. Furthermore, one need no expertise in CW to know that the western allies have lied before, probably will lie again and to know that Putin does nothing in a rash manner. That's why I believe the Russian government and disbelieve the British government. It has nothing to do with CW. Sadly for the west, Putin has been the adult in the room all along. His actions in Syria were measured and made perfect sense. The west, however, decided repeat the mistakes of Afghanistan in the 80s and support the very guys who brought jihad to the west. Our leadership has failed us and the world. Putin is doing the right thing in Syria and that's why the west is trying to blame him for everything with the possible exception of the Lindbergh kidnapping. It is disturbing to me that we are so tribal that people here in the west can't see that.

pretzelattack , April 4, 2018 at 1:11 pm

we don't even know what the stuff is, absent independent testing. as i understand it the british government hasn't made samples available despite being required to do so.

David (1) , April 4, 2018 at 10:57 am

Hats off to the people at Porton Down.
I can imagine how much pressure was applied to influence their decision.
Thankfully, they were braver than people like Colin Powell.

Sid Finster , April 4, 2018 at 12:57 pm

I am sure that they are getting quite a talking to as we speak.

Expect them to magically reverse their position so that WWIII can proceed apace.

The Rev Kev , April 4, 2018 at 11:01 am

"And any developments of such geopolitical importance wind up having economic effects." I'll say! In 51 weeks May and her government are going to be grasping for any ally that they can find while fending off all those wanting to put the boot in. Russia may have been willing to provide a few loans or deliveries of LPG gas on credit but I would say that bridge has been well and truly burned. May and Johnson essentially used flamethrowers on it. Maybe then they can take note of Saudi Arabia and gather up any remaining Russian oligarchs, stick them in the Mayfair, and hang them upside down until they cough a few billion up for Her Majest's Treasury.
Look, the whole fiasco was bogus from start to finish. Boris Johnson is now lying his face off by saying that he never actually said that the Russians did it (he did) and May is backtracking as the Salisbury attack is now coming under international scrutiny. I would like to see if I cannot place the whole thing into some sort of context. May fingered the Russians from the get-go and the usual suspects all signed up for her accusations. Dare I say it, as if there was some sort of coordination behind the scenes. Trump not only ran with it, he jumped into a Humvee and then floored it. Treaties and diplomatic practices have been ignored or trashed on both sides of the Atlantic so I am wondering what was the benefit that hoped to be gained.
There is the disruption of the upcoming FIFA games (as happened with the Olympics) but that would only be a side benefit. It may be that the west wants to occupy eastern Ukraine with a UN force (NATO in disguise) and this effort would have helped neutralize the Russians. It may be to distract the Russians from Syrian but that is coming to a close. What I do wonder is something that has been brought up several items and that a "reform" of the UN Security Council has been suggested. Either Russia would be kicked out or perhaps there would be a majority rule introduced to neutralize both China and Russia here. If Russia was under international suspicion, it may have helped give the impetus for this "reform" to be carried out. Maybe not a compelling theory but you do not organize an international effort on this scale without some major benefit in mind.

Quentin , April 4, 2018 at 11:20 am

You gave me a good laugh: 'neutralise both China and Russia' on the Security Council by introducing a majority rule. Maybe that will end up neutralising the US, the UK and some other bigwigs instead? No we're supposed to buy into the prejudice that things only go wrong at the UN because of Russia and China? I'm doing my best to maintain a semblance of sanity and I'm failing badly.

The Rev Kev , April 4, 2018 at 6:13 pm

No, my idea is that both Russia and China block many votes that would give legal cover to illegal actions in the UN that it is a hindrance to the west. Libya is an example when the west gets what it wants by lying to both countries what a Resolution is all about. Remember the number of times that the west wanted to put Syria on the hit list because they "gassed their own people" and bomb the Syrian Army? Ask Nikki Haley how she feels about Russia in the UN Security Council. Most of those that sit on the UN Security Council are either western countries or vassal countries, hence a desire for a majority vote instead of having to have all members agree to an action.

Tinky , April 4, 2018 at 11:15 am

I'd say that Dmitry Orlov covered the topic well, and soon after the ludicrous charges were being bellowed by the U.S. and U.K. governments.

Here is just one point that he made, a point that should, on its own, raise extremely serious doubt about Russian government involvement:

Then there is the question of timing. Russia's presidential elections will take place in just a few days, on March 18. This is a particularly inopportune time to cause an international scandal. What possible urgency could there have been behind killing a pardoned former spy who no longer possessed any up-to-date intelligence, was living quietly in retirement, and at that moment was busy having lunch with his daughter? If the Russian government were involved in the poisoning, what possible reason could have been given for not waiting until after the election?

You can read the rest here:

http://cluborlov.blogspot.pt/2018/03/false-flags-for-newbies.html

Andrew Watts , April 4, 2018 at 2:17 pm

Unlike Orlov I can believe that Russia is behind this incident. When the Romanovs were Czars and still in charge it wasn't a good idea to talk smack about or cross Mother Russia. But I'm pretty sure that if Putin ordered somebody killed that they'd already be dead. The fact that British spies have been acting like a crazy ex-lover ever since Brexit leads me to think it isn't Putin. It isn't hard to imagine that the Brits would leave a dead animal on somebody's porch, or a park bench, with the way they've acted.

Steele didn't write his dossier and start interfering in the US presidential election until Brexit occurred. For all the media hysteria on this side of the pond about foreign influence during our election they blithely ignore the fact that Steele wasn't alone and another "former" British spook from GCHQ involved himself in our domestic politics. They haven't attempted this kind of operation in the US since WWII when they attempted to smear Adolf Berle and torpedo Henry Wallace's political career / presidential campaign as far as I know.

On the other hand, their "willing handmaidens" in the US intelligence community are receiving a taste of their just deserts. How many of them openly fantasized about murdering Snowden?

tc , April 4, 2018 at 11:20 am

Y'all are kinda running with a narrative thats presented from talking heads. Sad! Its doesnt matter if its X mg, or door handles or someone said this or that or wave an agreement signed before cocktails.

The real issue is that someone has this stuff near a major city, is walking/driving around with it, and knows how to deploy it safely against a target who is security conscious. And no one is sure who it is or how much of it they have. So, quarantining a likely suspect makes a lot of sense – you can always say ooppss, sorry Boris. But in the meantime, senior leadership has to be terrified (as we all should be too) and given a lot of leeway to figure this out.

integer , April 4, 2018 at 11:37 am

But in the meantime, senior leadership has to be terrified (as we all should be too) and given a lot of leeway to figure this out.

Unless senior leadership are responsible for what happened, or they gave their blessings, explicit or otherwise, to those who carried out the deed.

Yves Smith Post author , April 4, 2018 at 2:04 pm

I see you don't follow this site. We are not "running a narrative". Go check our New Cold War section in Links We've been regularly featuring articles from people who were skeptical of the "Putin done it" claims from the get go, when that was a very much a minority view.

Stephen Gardner , April 4, 2018 at 2:37 pm

No one except the British government has the evidence of a) what the substance was b) how it got there and c) how sick the Skripals really are. Note that they have not been allowed visits from their government nor have they been allowed to be interviewed or even pictured in the press. Anyone who believes the British government even one iota is very gullible indeed. Naivete in great abundance here. Assuming that when Blair left the lies left with him. Wow! Just wow!

Graham , April 4, 2018 at 11:26 am

Amongst all the learned posturing about "who done it" there are some much simpler questions that need to be asked, and answered.

The UK lab states that the nerve agent was from the Novichuk "family". Irrespective of which nerve agent it was, how did it end up in a UK city, who brought it there, and how did an ex Russian spy, his daughter and a British Police Officer end up in hospital having come in to contact with said compound???

Novichuk is not available in B&Q or Homebase (DIY stores for non-UK readers) It is a military grade nerve agent and not something than be cooked up in the average terrorist kitchen, and is quite likely to kill whoever is handling it, let alone the target.

In the 70's I spent time in the British Army in W Germany running around in my "noddy suit" (NBC protective clothing which we hoped would work!!) in anticipation of the Warsaw Pact putting in to effect its threat to be at the Channel ports within 5 days of any conflict starting. We knew that Chemical and Biological weapons were likely to be used by Warsaw Pact troops to contaminate our supply depots, and the Soviets knew that NATO would probably use tactical nuclear weapons to stop the enemy tank armies. The chemical weapons would probably arrive by artillery shells, but the downside to using such weapons is that once used, the threat of death is the same for both sides.

There was a previous killing of an ex-Soviet spy in London using Polonium. The availability of polonium is about the same as laying your hands on a nerve agent IE, State Players Only.

The targets were the same, ex Soviet citizens who had been spying for the other side, and caught and expelled from Russia. As the UK had given citizenship and refuge to the ex spies, one has to ask who would be interested in killing them in vengeance?

Given that there are very few sources for Novichuk, and its use as targeted on a former Russian spy living in a very pleasent British Cathedral city, the conclusions are very limited.

pretzelattack , April 4, 2018 at 1:07 pm

we dont even know what was used, so how can we say "there are few sources" for it? that means we don't know who used whatever it was, we certainly can't conclude it was the russians.

Graham , April 4, 2018 at 1:28 pm

Because the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom made a statement to Parliament stating that the agent concerned came from the Novichuk family.

If you don't believe the UK PM then perhaps you might understand why many in the UK and Europe also do not believe the statements made by the President of Russia and the Russian Government.

The attempted murder of a British Citizen and his Russian daughter and a British Police Officer is a very serious matter, but for a Prime Minister to lie to Parliament is a resignation matter, and possibly cause for a General Election. Politicians lie much of the time or are "economical with the truth" but you cannot deliberately lie to Parliament and expect to survive!

pretzelattack , April 4, 2018 at 2:12 pm

yeah the president of the us made statements about saddam wmd's, and so did the prime minister of the uk. and yet, both survived and prospered. i don't believe politicians's statements, i believe evidence. so far, no convincing evidence has been provided.

Sid_finster , April 4, 2018 at 4:12 pm

Lying to Parliament is allowed, admirable even, in pursuit of the "right" objective.

Witness T. Blair.

David , April 4, 2018 at 1:14 pm

There have been suggestions that these were binary agents, similar to those developed by the US in the 1980s, which consist of two agents which are only lethal when mixed together. If they were brought into the UK, then they would have been safe to carry and not aroused suspicion. In any case, in years of travel into and out of the UK I have never seen anything resembling a CW detector. Mixing them together would have been a different issue, of course

Graham , April 4, 2018 at 2:09 pm

I was due to mix up some binary agents in the morning to repair a ding in my bumper. The two part epoxy resin will hopefully not decimate the neighbourhood, and I will try not to get it on my hands (sic!!)

Synoia , April 4, 2018 at 11:42 am

The time line looks suspect. I read the man and his daughter left their hone in the morning and collapsed at 5pm.

VX kills quickly.

The time line suggestes a poison ingested and activated in the gut by digestion.

Susan the other , April 4, 2018 at 11:54 am

I'm skeptical of international rules against nerve agents. Clearly something administered by someone made the Skirpals deathly ill. Little story: When I was 20 the military screwed up a test of nerve agent at Dugway Proving Grounds. It was carried by the wind beyond its test range and killed a large herd of sheep. Dead as rocks. So two years ago when that very hearty band of Central Asian antelope, the Saiga, were all found mysteriously dead – all of them – and the incident was determined to have been caused by some fungus or virus, I was more than a little suspicious. Close to that time there were teams of western researchers looking at the Aral Sea and how to bring it back to life since it is currently a veritable toxic waste dump, now an almost dry sea bed and the toxins are blown around capriciously by the wind. People conducting research there were Americans. No doubt some Brits as well. And now the Skirpals? Sorry to connect such estranged dots. Just thinkin.

Graham , April 4, 2018 at 12:47 pm

In 1942 the British Government tested what the effect of anthrax would be if used in WW2 on a small Scottish island. The island is still uninhabited and anthrax spores can still be found.

Chemical warfare was used in WW1 with devastating effect on the troops concerned, hence the concerns in WW2 and later that an enemy might use them again. So devastating and unpredictable are things like poison gas that neither side used them in WW2, but the threat or possibility of its use had a considerable effect on the UK civilian population who all had to carry gas masks at all times.

It is the possibility of an enemy using Chemical and Biological weapons which causes fear in a population, far beyond the effects of it actually being used.

The UK became used to the threat of IRA bombings on the mainland and the population coped with that and persevered, but as the PM stated to Parliament, the Salisbury incident was the first time that someone had deployed a nerve agent on UK soil, and that is the question that must be answered. Who manufactured and/or released the nerve agent to someone to deploy against a UK target who was a former Russian spy who had worked for the UK. This was not a random attack on the Underground or Parliament, but a targeted attack on a single family, and this is not the first time a former Russian spy has been killed in the UK using a means only available to a State Player.

larry , April 4, 2018 at 12:58 pm

Or someone who had access to a state player or &c.

Graham , April 4, 2018 at 1:41 pm

I would have thought that authority to deploy a nerve agent on foreign soil, especially against a NATO nuclear power, would have to be given at Presidential/Prime Minister level in any government. Given the paranoia of such weapons falling in to the wrong hands, the politicians are not likely to delegate use authority outside their office.

The US doctrine is that Chemical and Biological weapons are no different than Nuclear weapons and the response will be the same. This is because the US destroyed their stockpiles of chemical and bio weapons.

pretzelattack , April 4, 2018 at 2:14 pm

oh like the russians did.

Tinky , April 4, 2018 at 2:17 pm

That is not entirely true (bold emphasis mine):

The United States declared a large chemical arsenal of 27,770 metric tons to the OPCW after the CWC came into force in 1997. Along with Russia, the United States received an extension when it was unable to complete destruction of its chemical stockpiles by 2012. A 2016 OPCW report declared that the United States had destroyed approximately 90 percent of the chemical weapons stockpile it had declared as the CWC entered into force ; nearly 25,000 metric tons of the declared total of 27,770. The United States has destroyed all of Category 2 and Category 3 weapons and is projected to complete destruction of its Category 1 weapons by 2023 ;.

source: https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/cbwprolif

nervos belli , April 4, 2018 at 5:32 pm

Novichok poisons were used by a non-state player in the 90s. It killed a banker and his secretary in Moscow. Either by a business rival or personal matter apparently. The russian police back then questioned all the scientists who were in the Novichok program.
So what you write is patently untrue, historically and of course on its face. Someone in Porton Down, in Iran, in the US, Uzbekistan or of course Russia (probably more but those we at least know of) could get their hands on it for their own ends. Even if it's just something as simple as to sell it for cold hard cash to some "friend".

Please remember the anthrax scare in the US in the early 2000s: those were US made spores but we can assume not even evil mastermind Cheney would have done this. Compared to Cheney, Putin should be sainted or just given a Nobel.

David , April 4, 2018 at 1:11 pm

Actually, CW has generally been pretty ineffective militarily, and counter-measures were quickly developed in WW1. There are no proven examples of it having influenced the outcome of a major engagement in the 20th century, with the possible exception of one point in the Iran/Iraq War in the 1980s. It's subject to all sorts of problems of weather, wind direction etc. In the Cold War, the Soviets planned to use absolutely enormous quantities of it (thousands of tonnes) but essentially as a nuisance, to force NATO troops to fight in NBC suits, rather than in the expectation of causing enormous casualties. As you say, the main effect of CW is fear, and we've certainly had that.

Third Time Lucky , April 4, 2018 at 1:36 pm

It was extremely effective, even in primitive form, in WWI, that's why it was banned* from war (but not on civilians/civil war) afterward. Bad for MIC business.

*still didn't stop Churchill, Mussolini, Truman.

David , April 4, 2018 at 2:08 pm

Sorry, it caused a lot of fear when it was first used, but counter-measures were developed very quickly. Covering your face with a urine-soaked cloth was as effective as anything. CW was considered inhuman, which is why there were measures to ban it, and it's potential effectiveness was massively overestimated in the 1930s. It was fear of the potential effects, rather than actual experience, which was important.

Graham , April 4, 2018 at 2:19 pm

There would have been an ample supply of urine soaked cloth if the "gas, gas, gas" alarm turned out to be for real!!

Third Time Lucky , April 4, 2018 at 6:58 pm

Dude, your willful ignorance is showing.

Covering your face with a urine-soaked cloth was as effective as anything

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-25843294

And pretty much everything else you posted is just as suspect and ill researched.

Sid Finster , April 4, 2018 at 12:52 pm

"Conclusive Evidence is Lacking" makes the UK government's case sound stronger than it is, as if all that were needed were a few more pieces of the puzzle to fit and this thing would be air tight.

Rather, as John Laurits has pointed out, the UK government has not presented ANY evidence other than their say-so.

Sid Finster , April 4, 2018 at 1:44 pm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)

What happened to the last weapons scientist to question the dominant narrative.

Otherwise, presented without comment.

pretzelattack , April 4, 2018 at 2:13 pm

putin must have done it, cause hey why not.

Graham , April 4, 2018 at 2:29 pm

There is a considerable difference between who authorised such an operation, and the people who actually carried out the attack.

You need one man or woman, probably the HOS, to authorise a nerve agent attack on the soil of a NATO nuclear armed power.

You would probably need 5 people to actually carry out the attack on the ground and the actual nerve agent could have come in to the UK in a Diplomatic Bag. The actual on-site team could be from the security service of the country who authorised the attack and who probably supplied the nerve agent, or the actual on-site team could have been from a third party country who have friendly relations with those wanting the attack carried out.

I seem to remember that the Bulgarians have form in doing sub-contract killings with an umbrella!!

nervos belli , April 4, 2018 at 5:36 pm

There is no sub contract killing by bulgarians. The one killed back then was a bulgarian dissident, attacking the bulgarian government or rather their elite persons back then and killed by bulgarians for bulgarian reasons.
Yes, the KGB delivered the weapon, but as people wrote before: whenever someone now kills with a gun, we blame the chinese, not the gunman. After all, they invented gunpowder.

I think this idea has great potential. China needs to be put in its place anyways.

Tobin Paz , April 4, 2018 at 2:12 pm

As an observer on this out of control train called humanity, I stand in awe of the collective gullibility of Western societies. This is same country and media that was complicit in the Iraq war

Tony Blair 'Could Face War Crime Charges' As Result of Iraq Inquiry

Former UK prime minister Tony Blair could face war crimes charges as a result of the long-anticipated Chilcot report into the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a Liberal Democrat peer told the House of Lords on Tuesday.

The BBC And Iraq: Myth and Reality

The second-worst case of denying access to anti-war voices was ABC in the United States, which allowed them a mere 7 per cent of its overall coverage. The worst case was the BBC, which gave just 2 per cent of its coverage to opposition views – views that represented those of the majority of the British people.

Libyan war

U.K. Parliament report details how NATO's 2011 war in Libya was based on lies

"Libya: Examination of intervention and collapse and the UK's future policy options," an investigation by the House of Commons' bipartisan Foreign Affairs Committee, strongly condemns the U.K.'s role in the war, which toppled the government of Libya's leader Muammar Qaddafi and plunged the North African country into chaos.

The Top Ten Myths in the War Against Libya

By June 10, Cherif Bassiouni, who is leading a UN rights inquiry into the situation in Libya, suggested that the Viagra and mass rape claim was part of a "massive hysteria".

The BBC went on to add another layer just a few days after Bassiouni humiliated the ICC and the media: the BBC now claimed that rape victims in Libya faced "honour killings". This is news to the few Libyans I know, who never heard of honour killings in their country.

and the savage assault on Syria:

EXCLUSIVE: Britain drops 3,400 bombs in Syria and Iraq – and says no civilians killed

The vast quantities of ordnance dropped since the start of Operation Shader against IS in 2014 seriously undermines the claim by ministers that the RAF has not caused any civilian casualties in the three-year-long bombing campaign, and has prompted calls for an investigation.

BBC Panorama team embedded with Islamic State partner group

Scenes in the 2013 BBC Panorama special Saving Syria's Children reveal that the award-winning team of reporter Ian Pannell and cameraman Darren Conway OBE were embedded with jihadi group Ahrar al-Sham which, according to Human Rights Watch, had three weeks earlier worked alongside Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra as one of "the key fundraisers, organizers, planners, and executors" of an attack in which at least 190 civilians were killed and over 200 – "the vast majority women and children" – were kidnapped.

All these interventions are violations of international law and war crimes.

IF the British intelligence services were involved in the Skripal case they have quite the wicked sense of humor why on earth would Putin in the midst of an international demonization campaign and on the eve of Russian elections and World Cup attempt to kill a Russian ex-spy with a Russian nerve agent eight years after being released?

jsn , April 4, 2018 at 3:29 pm

Putin was obviously trying to ingratiate himself to Theresa May by drawing attention away from her capitulation on Brexit, and to Robert Mueller by drawing attention away from the fact that his Trump investigation is based on BS possibly about to be outed by the no longer talking Skripal.

There has been no real information provided at all, why should any of this be believed at all? It's all one world threatening, "look at that over there!!!" distraction.

Your links to prior deceptions are an excellent frame through which to view the whole kerfuffle.

David , April 4, 2018 at 3:51 pm

I'm not unsympathetic, but let's not overstate it. The first is just grandstanding which has no legal basis. The second is bad behaviour by the BBC but is by no stretch of the imagination a crime, the third is true but there's no actual crime involved, the rape myth is despicable but it's not a crime to spread it, the fourth is not proof of anything and ignores the fact that the law of war recognises it is not possible to avoid non-combatant deaths altogether, and the last, whilst showing questionable judgement by the BBC wouldn't be a crime committed by their journalists even if it were true.
No matter how unlikely the idea that the Russian government was responsible may appear , "British governments and the BBC have done or said bad things in the past" is not an argument in this case. There are better ones.

nervos belli , April 4, 2018 at 5:40 pm

The attack against Libya by UK and France was a war crime, any way you slice it.
The handling of the UN resolution about a no fly zone for Libya was a further war crime or international crime.
The attack by Britain on Iraq was a clear war crime.

We live thankfully in a post Nuremberg world. Unless it's a "Nuremberg only applies to losers". That one you have to decide for yourself.

Eustache De Saint Pierre , April 4, 2018 at 6:27 pm

Yes the law only applies to losers as opposed to the winners as in Libor rate rigging, sanction busting, money laundering bankers & the like, unless as in the cases of Madoff & the Shrek guy you are foolish enough to rob the wealthy.

As David states in the eyes of the law none of examples above from foreign interventionism are crimes in the legal sense. They are merely examples of moral bankruptcy which it appears to me at least is nowadays one of the qualities required in order to become a winner or to at least hang on to one's rice bowl. It is sad that success is apparently measured by comparison to those who at least in my opinion, appear to consist mainly of dead fish eyed slaves to power & unsatiable appetite.

pretzelattack , April 4, 2018 at 6:36 pm

why wasn't the invasion a war crime? have bush and cheney visiting switzerland recently? nobody is going to prosecute them for it, since the us is still the dominant military power, but doesn't mean they didn't commit a crime.

Eustache De Saint Pierre , April 4, 2018 at 8:42 pm

It was a crime in my view, but in terms of the law in which David was judging the events nobody was prosecuted, as the law is only for the losers like Saddam Hussein, Milosevich etc. I was perhaps rather clumsily attempting to make the point that the law is the winning elites ass, & those who serve their interests, also gain a certain amount of absolution from what I would describe as variations of immorality.

pretzelattack , April 4, 2018 at 6:34 pm

what do you mean it has no legal basis. the invasion of iraq was a war crime, and blair facilitated it. aggressive war is not legal under the un charter.

JustSaying , April 4, 2018 at 5:06 pm

cui bono?

who benefits from stirring up trouble between EU/NATO and Russia?

Don't be surprised if it's a small country actor.

synoia , April 4, 2018 at 8:11 pm

Good question

A: Not Russia.

Follow the money! , April 4, 2018 at 7:43 pm

https://democracyatwrkleftout.libsyn.com/the-hudson-report-the-economics-behind-the-skirpal-poisoning

Hudson has interesting things to say about this

The Rev Kev , April 4, 2018 at 8:45 pm

France seems to be getting a free pass in the news about the Salisbury investigations. Just why exactly did the British need to call in the French in the first place? What knowledge did they have that the British did not have at their chemical warfare establishment just up the road from Salisbury? I know that they were involved in declaring Sarin to be identified going by the sample as supplied by the Jihadists from Syria from a chemical attack. Did that 'expertise' help them to be qualified in identifying the sources of chemical attacks? The Russians were certainly interested to know-
https://eadaily.com/en/news/2018/04/01/russian-embassy-sends-questions-on-skripal-case-to-french-foreign-ministry

[Apr 05, 2018] Accuse the other side of what you are doing

Apr 05, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com


serotonindumptruck -> strannick Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:25 Permalink

One of the scientists at Porton Down, Gary Aitkenhead, should probably take out additional life insurance policies.

https://www.therussophile.org/porton-down-unable-to-link-novichok-to-ru

HowdyDoody -> serotonindumptruck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:40 Permalink

Gary Aitkenhead is not a scientist. He is the head of Porton Down. He used to be an EO in Motorola communications division.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prHoy-BP5W4

Frito -> serotonindumptruck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:42 Permalink

If he fails to keep his mouth shut I wouldn't be surprised to learn in the tabloids in the near future of his (sadly fatal) penchant for auto-erotic asphyxiation.

FBaggins -> Sy Kloine Bee Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:09 Permalink

""Johnson also said that "none of us have forgotten" about the "barbaric" chemical weapons attack in Syria a year ago.""

Translation: "none of us have forgotten" about the "barbaric" chemical weapons attack in Syria a year ago "which was done by our Al Qaeda and ISIS proxies with the help of our special forces stationed in Syria."

Omen IV -> FBaggins Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:51 Permalink

"to obscure the truth and confuse the public," Johnson said"

to add to your comment - this would be standard issue Clinton speak - accuse the other side of what you are doing in real time !

the disease of bullshit spreads world wide as Democracy is gamed to the nine's

Dickweed Wang -> FBaggins Wed, 04/04/2018 - 20:10 Permalink

<--- I'm sick and tired of the west's lying bullshit

<--- My government would never lie about something so serious

Killdo -> FBaggins Wed, 04/04/2018 - 20:32 Permalink

that's all they learn in boarding schools - how to lie and lie and be good psychopaths: charming, fake, easy to bribe and natural traitors, obsessed with money and status.

And above all how to develop that exhagarated catatonic accent so valued by Anglosheeple

I know many of these Public school boys - from Malborough, Harrow etc

Jack Oliver -> Sy Kloine Bee Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:18 Permalink

If Russia has any 'novichok' -well - it should send it straight to BORIS !!

holgerdanske -> Sy Kloine Bee Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:47 Permalink

Boris+May=political poison, unnerving agents, they must go

JRobby Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:02 Permalink

The wallpaper and whitewash won't stick if they are in on it.

johnnycanuck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:02 Permalink

Goebbels wouldn't have allowed anyone to interfere with his propaganda either.

The Big Lie works seamlessly if you control the media barkers.

serotonindumptruck -> johnnycanuck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:08 Permalink

Is it any wonder why TPTB want total control and dominion over the internet?

johnnycanuck -> serotonindumptruck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:17 Permalink

Nope, and if you look closely, TPTB are mostly Corporations or support mechanisms now.

Swamp Monsters.

Kefeer -> johnnycanuck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:46 Permalink

Look no further than you local electric and gas suppliers who are likely publicly traded with a monopoly on the most traded commodities in the world. Why does a human necessity have a monopoly - follow the money.

RagnarRedux -> johnnycanuck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:18 Permalink

The NS's were describing "The Big Lie" technique as the Modus Operandi of Jewry, not advocating using it themselves!

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v02/v02p-35_Brandon.html

https://www.historiography-project.com/misc/biglie.php

manofthenorth Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:02 Permalink

"All your evidence belongs to us"

serotonindumptruck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:06 Permalink

Boris Johnson is a colossal joke.

He declares Russia guilty as charged with absolutely no evidence, no legitimate investigation, and no due process of law.

dirty fingernails -> serotonindumptruck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:17 Permalink

This means there will be a bigger false flag soon. Gotta get eyes off of this mess

Brazen Heist -> dirty fingernails Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:20 Permalink

Lol....that's what I think, from my experience with dealing with retarded psychopaths. They just don't back down until you directly address them and call them out on their bullshit, or just plain fucking slam them against the wall.

So err...is it going to be an "accidental" nuclear launch or dirty bomb, or I don't know.....a Russian ISIS attack? The possibilities are endless with these slimey limey cunts. They're barely out of the European Union, yet are already faltering like a mule loaded with lead.

dirty fingernails -> Brazen Heist Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:34 Permalink

Agreed, and some just go nuts when called out. It's worse than just the Brits. Trump is clearly somewhat on board, and Macron seems to want a distraction, too.

Brazen Heist -> dirty fingernails Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:45 Permalink

Trump is in love with himself, Macron is in love with a granny, and Boris Johnson belongs to the fucking zoo with the gorillas.

What a world we live in, when the voices of reason are coming from Russia, China and Iran, and the irrational tantrum turd throwing is coming from the West.

Delusions of grandeur comes to mind.

Jack Oliver -> dirty fingernails Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:23 Permalink

Yes - Something BIG before the World Cup in June !!

I'm waiting for the FUCKING riots when Britain - Brazil - France - Germany etc - tell their people that they won't be going to the World Cup !

Viva 'La Revolution' !

I doubt they have factored in the 'People Power' response !

These nations live and breath soccer !

johnnycanuck -> serotonindumptruck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:26 Permalink

May I remind you of 59 cruise missiles, and the Chocolate Cake saga.

And of course Ivanka, the latest replacement for the daughter of the Ambassador from Kuwait. Of Hill and Knowlton fame.

" no evidence, no legitimate investigation, and no due process of law . "

serotonindumptruck -> johnnycanuck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:42 Permalink

I concur.

I might also politely remind you and others of Russia's ability to disable the US Aegis missile system, including the Raytheon Tomahawk missile using a highly advanced electronic warfare suite known as Khibiny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s4sKAMgYsU

GreatUncle -> serotonindumptruck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:38 Permalink

You do not need due process to hang him now neither :-) Ain't that cute when the process of law finally breaks down. Happens when you support banksters operating a ponzi scheme to rob people...

man of Wool -> serotonindumptruck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 20:25 Permalink

Stupid cunt is a better description. He is supposed to be the number 1 diplomat but he is a classic attention seeking snowflake who wants to be PM.

He blamed Russia immediately. Then tells everyone not to be Russiaphobic and then the stupid cunt compares attending the WC the same as Hitler's 1936 Olympics.

Guy is out of his depth and making Britain look stupid.

francis scott -> man of Wool Wed, 04/04/2018 - 20:36 Permalink

Boris was just reading his lines in the script.

No one is making Britain look stupid. Britain

does that all by itself.

Obamanism666 Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:06 Permalink

Portland Down say they do not know where the nerve agent was manufactured (Portland down would have the records of OPCW to check). Maybe Russia would have the data relating the nerve agent to a NATO stockpile. Note: If the nerve agent was so deadly how come the person delivering it; is not ill?

Escapedgoat -> Obamanism666 Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:38 Permalink

It is PORTON DOWN not "Portland" Down

crazzziecanuck -> Obamanism666 Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:38 Permalink

Given this talk about "military-grade", it sounds more like something an American MIC manufacturer would make. Overpriced and ineffective when used.

Three people affected. Hours after contact. Yet all three survived, in spite of the lack of antidote, as the BBC has reported. Doesn't sound pretty "military-grade" to me. And if it is "military grade", should we even be shitting our pants at the constant fearmongering over WMDs? If this is what military grade is capable of for terrorism, we're clearly spending way to much money for this particular threat, now aren't we?

HowdyDoody -> crazzziecanuck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:47 Permalink

I don't buy the 'no antidote' business. Nerve agents work by blocking receptors in the nervous system. Atropine breaks this block restoring normal nervous system action. The cop who was affected was talking within days yet the Skirpals were unconscious for weeks, until Julia Skirpal made a 'miraculous' recovery. Did the cop get atropine?

FlKeysFisherman Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:34 Permalink

This propaganda campaign is embarrassing. These goofy bastards can't even pull this off without looking completely incompetent.

It's no wonder the Tribe has complete control of these losers.

[Apr 04, 2018] Standard Clinton speak - accuse the other side of what you are doing in real time

Apr 04, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com


serotonindumptruck -> strannick Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:25 Permalink

One of the scientists at Porton Down, Gary Aitkenhead, should probably take out additional life insurance policies.

https://www.therussophile.org/porton-down-unable-to-link-novichok-to-ru

HowdyDoody -> serotonindumptruck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:40 Permalink

Gary Aitkenhead is not a scientist. He is the head of Porton Down. He used to be an EO in Motorola communications division.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prHoy-BP5W4

Frito -> serotonindumptruck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:42 Permalink

If he fails to keep his mouth shut I wouldn't be surprised to learn in the tabloids in the near future of his (sadly fatal) penchant for auto-erotic asphyxiation.

FBaggins -> Sy Kloine Bee Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:09 Permalink

""Johnson also said that "none of us have forgotten" about the "barbaric" chemical weapons attack in Syria a year ago.""

Translation: "none of us have forgotten" about the "barbaric" chemical weapons attack in Syria a year ago "which was done by our Al Qaeda and ISIS proxies with the help of our special forces stationed in Syria."

Omen IV -> FBaggins Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:51 Permalink

"to obscure the truth and confuse the public," Johnson said"

to add to your comment - this would be standard issue Clinton speak - accuse the other side of what you are doing in real time !

the disease of bullshit spreads world wide as Democracy is gamed to the nine's

Dickweed Wang -> FBaggins Wed, 04/04/2018 - 20:10 Permalink

<--- I'm sick and tired of the west's lying bullshit

<--- My government would never lie about something so serious

Killdo -> FBaggins Wed, 04/04/2018 - 20:32 Permalink

that's all they learn in boarding schools - how to lie and lie and be good psychopaths: charming, fake, easy to bribe and natural traitors, obsessed with money and status.

And above all how to develop that exhagarated catatonic accent so valued by Anglosheeple

I know many of these Public school boys - from Malborough, Harrow etc

Jack Oliver -> Sy Kloine Bee Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:18 Permalink

If Russia has any 'novichok' -well - it should send it straight to BORIS !!

holgerdanske -> Sy Kloine Bee Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:47 Permalink

Boris+May=political poison, unnerving agents, they must go

JRobby Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:02 Permalink

The wallpaper and whitewash won't stick if they are in on it.

johnnycanuck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:02 Permalink

Goebbels wouldn't have allowed anyone to interfere with his propaganda either.

The Big Lie works seamlessly if you control the media barkers.

serotonindumptruck -> johnnycanuck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:08 Permalink

Is it any wonder why TPTB want total control and dominion over the internet?

johnnycanuck -> serotonindumptruck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:17 Permalink

Nope, and if you look closely, TPTB are mostly Corporations or support mechanisms now.

Swamp Monsters.

Kefeer -> johnnycanuck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:46 Permalink

Look no further than you local electric and gas suppliers who are likely publicly traded with a monopoly on the most traded commodities in the world. Why does a human necessity have a monopoly - follow the money.

RagnarRedux -> johnnycanuck Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:18 Permalink

The NS's were describing "The Big Lie" technique as the Modus Operandi of Jewry, not advocating using it themselves!

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v02/v02p-35_Brandon.html

https://www.historiography-project.com/misc/biglie.php

manofthenorth Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:02 Permalink

"All your evidence belongs to us"

[Apr 04, 2018] Russia Denied Request To Join OPCW Investigation Into Skripal Poisoning

Looks like projection but in reality this is a false flag. Projection implies an unawareness of one's own self. They know they did it.
The UK government has effectively repudiated the OPCW treaty by refusing to follow the reporting and investigation procedures set out in the treaty.
Apr 04, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Fifteen countries voted against Russia's bid, while six voted for it and 17 abstained.

"Unfortunately, we haven't been able to have two-thirds of the votes in support of that decision. A qualified majority was needed," Russian ambassador Alexander Shulgin told reporters, adding " Russia as well as other states that are members of the Executive Committee have been pushed aside from this investigation ."

UK's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson brushed aside Russia's request, calling it a "ludicrous proposal" designed to "undermine" the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigation.

"Russia has had one goal in mind since the attempted murders on UK soil through the use of a military-grade chemical weapon - to obscure the truth and confuse the public," Johnson said. " The international community has yet again seen through these tactics and robustly defeated Russia's attempts today to derail the proper international process ." Johnson also said that "none of us have forgotten" about the "barbaric" chemical weapons attack in Syria a year ago.

"After the OPCW-UN investigation found that the Syrian regime was responsible, Russia blocked that body from doing any more work," he said.

Russia wants to discuss a letter sent by UK Prime Minister Theresa May to the UN Security Council which says it's "highly likely" that Moscow was behind last month's nerve agent attack.

Meanwhile , as we reported yesterday , the chief scientist from the UK's Porton Down military laboratory facility, Gary Aitkenhead, told Sky News that they had been unable to prove that the novichok nerve agent used to poison Sergei and Yulia Skripal came from Russia.

"We were able to identify it as novichok, to identify that it was military-grade nerve agent," Aitkenhead said. " We have not identified the precise source, but we have provided the scientific info to government who have then used a number of other sources to piece together the conclusions you have come to. "

**PAGING COLIN POWELL. IS THERE A MR. POWELL IN THE BUILDING?**

The Porton Down chief scientist said that establishing the Novichok's origin required "other inputs," some of which are intelligence based and which only the government has access to.

Aitkenhead added: " It is our job to provide the scientific evidence of what this particular nerve agent is, we identified that it is from this particular family and that it is a military grade, but it is not our job to say where it was manufactured ."

So whose job is it to determine where the Novichok was manufactured?

That said, it was also noted that the nerve agent involved required "extremely sophisticated methods to create, something only in the capabilities of a state actor," and that there is no known antidote to Novichok - nor was any administered to either of the Skripals.

Aitkenhead would not say whether the Porton Down facility had manufactured or maintained stocks of Novichok - long rumored to be the case.

" There is no way anything like that could have come from us or left the four walls of our facility ," said the chief.

Boris Johnson has come under fire since the Porton Down chief's statement, as Johnson lied, saying in an interview two weeks ago that Porton Down officials told him there was "no doubt" that the nerge agent came from Russia .

The Foreign Office told Sky News that Johnson "misspoke," which is apparently UK officialspeak for "he totally lied, but nobody will hold him accountable for it."

Perhaps Johnson "misspoke" in his rush to locate a hairbrush?


Sy Kloine Bee Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:02 Permalink

Nobody believes them anymore, and they know it. They just lie because they have to tell you something.

Got The Wrong No -> Sy Kloine Bee Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:07 Permalink

The British version of the Mueller investigation

Lost in translation -> Got The Wrong No Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:09 Permalink

Russia should wash its hands of OPCW - quit and never return.

Slack Jack -> Pol Pot Wed, 04/04/2018 - 20:31 Permalink

The evil people, Theresa May, Stoltenberg, Trump and the rest, are damming Russia with obvious lies.

The Novichok nerve agents probably don't even exist.

HERE IS THE PROOF:

The Novichok nerve agents are supposedly much more toxic than the nerve gases VX or Sarin.

Mirzayanov's book, published in 2008, contains the formulas he alleges can be used to create Novichoks. In 1995, he explained that "the chemical components or precursors" of Novichok are "ordinary organophosphates that can be made at commercial chemical companies that manufacture such products as fertilizers and pesticides."

https://www.amazon.com/State-Secrets-Insiders-Chronicle-Chemical/dp/143

Basically, Mirzayanov claims that it is relatively easy to make the Novichok nerve agents.

So, some enterprising Arabs could buy a few chemists to make a few tons of it and then spray it all over the little Satan.

Do you really think that the Jews who run the United States would allow the publication of information that could lead to thousands of deaths in Israel?

Do you really think they would protect the publisher of such information by giving him residence in the United States?

Remember, Mirzayanov was given residence in the United States after he was kicked out of Russia.

There are also a number of "people who should know" that have stated that there is zero solid evidence for the existence of the Novichok nerve agents. For example: Robin Black in Development, Historical Use and Properties of Chemical Warfare Agents (2016):

"In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, 'Novichoks' (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of the 'Foliant' programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published."

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/03/the-novichok-story-is-i

And, Alexander Shulgin, Russia's representative to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (2018):

"There has never been a 'Novichok' research project conducted in Russia,... But in the West, some countries carried out such research, which they called 'Novichok,' for some reason."

CONCLUSION: The Novichok nerve agents don't even exist.

philipat -> EuroPox Wed, 04/04/2018 - 19:45 Permalink

The use of the "projection" technique (essentially accusing your opponents of doing the very things you yourself are doing) in official circles has become widespread. It's biggest proponent is, of course, Shitlery who, as an example, recently accused Trump of using his position to enrich himself and his family (Um....?). Now BoJo has the chutzpah to accuse Russia of obfuscation and lies. Same technique. Specifically:

" Russia has had one goal in mind since the attempted murders on UK soil through the use of a military-grade chemical weapon - to obscure the truth and confuse the public," Johnson said. " The international community has yet again seen through these tactics and robustly defeated Russia's attempts today to derail the proper international process ."

And, of course, psychopaths actually believe their projections which allows them to speak with a straight face. And the MSM, naturally, just blindly "reports" what they say. The internet is the only source of real information and the true investigative journalism of any integrity. Which is, of course, why they are trying so hard to censor and close the sources of truth.

Killdo -> philipat Wed, 04/04/2018 - 20:22 Permalink

you can see here their modus operandi - one of the first NSA leaks by Snowden/Greenwald. There is a slide there called the Gambits For Deception - all the tricks are there - how to never admit when caught lying, how to cover the small move by the big one - basically all the BS this fat ugly clown is using are there:

https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

scroll down and look for slides from 5 Eye meetings

JohnFrodo -> philipat Wed, 04/04/2018 - 20:24 Permalink

projection is everything. America banned the Huwawie Chinese cell phone because they thought it was a threat. What are all those Apples in China? Not even to speak about domestic use.

[Apr 04, 2018] How to Debunk the Skripal Poisoning Lie - Advice from an Expert

Notable quotes:
"... I think the Skripal story is where the liars finally meet their Waterloo. They got away with MH17, with Litvinenko, with killing Nemtsov, with Magnitsky, with using gas in Syria ... They got away with the snipers on Maidan Square. There is much more stretching back over the years Iraq, Georgia 2008 etc, but I don't want to belabor the point. ..."
"... contemptuous mockery ..."
"... That's not what the Porton Down chief said 3 April.. He said they could not identify the poison as having been manufactured in Russia. Johnson said a fortnight ago that he was told at Porton Down that there was no doubt about where it had come from. Am I missing something? Is that not an outright lie that he told Nemtsov's daughter in the interview and others? ..."
Apr 04, 2018 | russia-insider.com

Points 2 and 3 really struck me, because, if he is right, than a large part of the effort in the alt-media to rebut this nonsense is in fact only doing more harm.

I think the Skripal story is where the liars finally meet their Waterloo. They got away with MH17, with Litvinenko, with killing Nemtsov, with Magnitsky, with using gas in Syria ... They got away with the snipers on Maidan Square. There is much more stretching back over the years Iraq, Georgia 2008 etc, but I don't want to belabor the point.

Skripal is just another miserable false flag right from their playbook followed up with a timed avalanche of lies in the media, and you can see how, considering what they got away with before, they think they can pull it off again.

Here is Armstrong's advice :

  1. It's obvious nonsense brought to you by proven liars.
  2. The point of propaganda is to leave an impression after the details have been forgotten.
  3. To get involved in discussing the minutiae of the story is to help the propagandists' aims.
  4. Therefore treat it as a badly constructed story that is failing to convince.
  5. Do this by analyzing the comments on the news stories which (at least the ones I've looked at) show that people are skeptical.
  6. Also mock the meanderings of the story: At the restaurant! In the car! On the doorstep! Incredibly lethal but strangely ineffective. Miraculous recovery of daughter. Baby wipes as effective protection. Reminiscent of White Helmets and their flip flops, rubber gloves and paper masks; but, come to think of it, it's the same authors in both stories. Who, after so many lies, are becoming overconfident and sloppy.

It's a startlingly incompetent theatrical production and should be responded to with contemptuous mockery .


This post first appeared on Russia Insider

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Lord Snooty 4 hours ago ,

Liar!

Johnson has now clearly been exposed as a liar in this Nemtsova interview [20 March, 2018] with him on DW:

Nemtsova: You argue that the source of this nerve agent, Novichok, is Russia. How did you manage to find it out so quickly? Does Britain possess samples of it?

Johnson: Let me be clear with you When I look at the evidence, I mean the people from Porton Down, the laboratory

Nemtsova: So they have samples

Johnson: They do. And they were absolutely categorical and I asked the guy myself, I said, "Are you sure?" And he said there's no doubt. We have very little alternative but to take the action that we have taken. But I must say the difference between this time and what happened 12 years ago with Alexander Litvinenko is also that there is much more sympathy in the international community, far more understanding of the kind of behaviour that Russia has been engaged in in the last few years. And round the table in Brussels, talking to all the other European countries, there's hardly anybody who hasn't experienced directly or indirectly some kind of malign or disruptive behaviour.

Again:

Nemtsova's question to Johnson:

You argue that the source of this nerve agent, Novichok, is Russia. How did you manage to find it out so quickly?

Johnson's answer:

When I look at the evidence, I mean the people from Porton Down, the laboratory they were absolutely categorical and I asked the guy myself, I said, "Are you sure?" And he said there's no doubt.

That's not what the Porton Down chief said 3 April.. He said they could not identify the poison as having been manufactured in Russia. Johnson said a fortnight ago that he was told at Porton Down that there was no doubt about where it had come from. Am I missing something? Is that not an outright lie that he told Nemtsov's daughter in the interview and others?

View Hide
Guy Lord Snooty 2 hours ago ,

I would be very careful about pursuing this line of reasoning. From my understanding due to the fact that the substance didn't kill them instantly this means it's impossible that such a nerve agent was used. If we accept what this specialist from Porton Down Say's that means that we are conceding that he actually DID indeed receive such a nerve agent from the crime scene which is in itself a lie.

Formula: Concede to 1 lie whereby the line of reasoning rests on the presumption of a non sequiter.

Basically this scientist is still either lying or more likely he was handed fake evidence due to the chain of custody issue.

mmm if anybody is generally in touch with Mr Armstrong i would urge him to add this line of reasoning to his points.

IMO the use of term false flag is devastating to the case is it implies that the attack took place but the purpose was to blame the pesky Putinites however this is far less plausible (occams razor and whatnot) than THEY JUST SIMPLY MADE IT UP, as they're very well known to do in the past. I.e. colin Powell presenting a vial of white powder VS Colin Powel sneaking the alleged wmd's into the country and screaming "look! They dun have it!!!". This is especially important considering that there has been NO EVIDENCE OF AN ACTUAL ATTACK TAKING PLACE, which is basically what we need to take them to task for.

Scandinavia - Lord Snooty 2 hours ago ,

View Hide

Rick0Shea Scandinavia - 42 minutes ago ,

Boris has his hand on MBS's junk? Hashtag #metoo.

Tommy Jensen 2 hours ago ,

Note that comments in most Western media are CENSURED.
Comments that jeopardize the decided narrative are simply deleted and profiles with repeated "wrong opinions" (its normally people who refer to facts) are simply kicked out without explanation.
It happens in "Daily Beast", m.m. and in about all Scandinavian newspapers.

Magna Farta Tommy Jensen 5 minutes ago ,

Well, it's harder to 'massage' posts than it is the 'news' of the original article.

Tillthetruth Tommy Jensen 29 minutes ago ,

I am 58 and have Never seen the Real Truth the Full Truth only LIES put in such a way that if they get Totally Caught they can disclaim the Lies then the show goes on. bbc - msm all liar's and working for the british "regime's"

Tommy Jensen 2 hours ago ,

You can only use these debunk tools with open minded free people.

To question the government and authorities as written in MSM is impossible.

Any attempt by you or anybody to question the MSM narrative will make people feel unsafe and uncomfortable and make them reject you because you/we have made them feel uncomfortable.

Even with close friends, you can pursuade them to question the narrative and feel doubt about the case, but they will still refuse to make a personal stand because it jeopardize their relationship with the power.
"If the Authorities lie there is probably a good reason for it, in any case its not my business".

Western people are brainwashed to the state of Matrix and its done by semantics where Authority has decided which words are negative and which words are positive.
This leads peoples thoughts through planned pipes with stop and contra valves like in a drainage system where you will feel uncomfortable if you use words the power has decided are negatives.

You can see the absurd result on West television shows.
ISIS members are excused in MSM because "its their culture", "they have had a bad childhood", "we try to resocialise them", saying Authority give them a cover and positive perception.
Muslim women with scarf are smeared in MSM as a "threat to our western values" and "oppressed by men" giving people a negative perception.
When you now speak with Western people they will feel negative and look down on intelligent moslem women and feel positive and admire mass murders because the System has dictated this perception. Pure Matrix.

mis dos centavos • 7 minutes ago ,

BoJo the British Clown and his entourage, in refusing to provide samples and/or their analysis to Russia, has apparently never heard of the concept of 'discovery', where the accused is afforded a review of all 'evidence' against them.

The Brits have now effectively turned the Magna Carta into the Magna Farta. This is no laughing matter.

Opera • an hour ago ,

This is one of a few outlets where can people freely comment.
This is the only place where I comment and I am quite happy to stay here.

quasi_verbatim 2 hours ago ,

Poor old Bodgers.

Munchausens, Bullingdonianism, Megalomania and Brexit Trainwreck Derangement Syndrome in combination is not a pretty sight.

Aged Warrior 3 hours ago ,

This is not an isolated false flag. Allegedly the Baldrick styled cunning plan is just a lead up to Theresa's ff nuke attack on London to be blamed on Russia. The Satanic Tory Party have really sunk to the depths of psychopathic paranoid insanity. Will The Queen save us?

Lord Snooty Aged Warrior an hour ago ,

No, but this is what she probably thinks of her Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs: View Hide

[Apr 04, 2018] Operation Hades - A Model For The 'Novichok' Case

Notable quotes:
"... You argue that the source of this nerve agent, Novichok, is Russia. How did you manage to find it out so quickly? Does Britain possess samples of it? ..."
"... So they have the samples ..."
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
Apr 04, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

(This is a 'working thread' to collect various items related to the alleged 'Novichok' incident in Salisbury and the fate of the British spy Sergej Skripal and his daughter Yulia. For a wider overview of the case please check our longer write-ups linked at the end of this post.)

The Russian government sent fourteen specific questions to the British government and thirteen questions to the OPCW . There seems to be some French involvement in the investigation of the alleged nerve agent and Russia ask why that is the case.

Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador to Britain, further increased the pressure on Theresa May by publicly asserting that the Skripal case was a 'provocation' carried out by British intelligence.

Telepolis points out (in German) that this would not be the first time that a 'western' service would stage such a 'provocation'. The Skripal case is indeed quite comparable to Operation Hades .

On August 10 1994 German officials in Munich 'found' 363 grams of plutonium on a plane coming from Moscow. They immediately asserted, that the plutonium 'must' have come from a Russian reactor. There was a lot of media panic, international political noise and condemnation of Russia.


Time Cover August 29 1994

This put pressure on the Russian government to increase its security at its nuclear sites. The U.S. offered to 'help' with nuclear security and thus got easy access to Russia's nuclear secrets. The case broke in the mid of the federal election campaign in Germany and helped chancellor Kohl to get re-elected.

Months later first leaks appeared, enterprising reporters dug deeper into the story and it started to unravel.

Der Spiegel filled ten pages (in German) with the explosive story.

SPIEGEL Cover May 10 1995
"The BND's Nuke Hustle"
"How German secret agents invented the plutonium hazard"

It turned out that the plutonium was not from Russia but had been planted by the German equivalent of the MI6, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). Later leaks and counter-leaks created a convoluted story to hide the truth behind it. A parliamentarian commission investigated the case but the Kohl government eventually shut it down without any political consequences. Shortly thereafter the deeply involved BND head, Bernd Schmidbauer, was sent into retirement.

The Russian depict the 'Novichok' case as a staged 'provocation'. There is a historic antetype for such a 'provocation' by a 'western' intelligence service. That gives the Russian claim some significant merit.

---

It took only nine month for the 1994 'Operation Hades' story to fall apart. The 'Novichok' fairy-tale may now see an even earlier end.

Sky News Breaking @SkyNewsBreak - 2:59 PM - 3 Apr 2018

Chief executive of Porton Down research laboratory has told Sky News scientists have not been able to prove the Novichok nerve agent used to poison Sergei and Yulia Skripal came from Russia or establish its country of origin

Mind the gap, Mrs. May. Mind the credibility gap.

Video of Mr. Aitkenhead's Sky News interview. (Nice word play included : He only provides scientific evidence. The government may additionally have 'other' (i.e. unscientific) evidence to make a case.)

In light of the Proton Down statement we can now state that Boris Johnson, on March 20 on DW , proved to be an 'absolutely categorical' liar:

You argue that the source of this nerve agent, Novichok, is Russia. How did you manage to find it out so quickly? Does Britain possess samples of it?

BJ: Let me be clear with you When I look at the evidence, I mean the people from Porton Down, the laboratory

So they have the samples

BJ: They do. And they were absolutely categorical and I asked the guy myself, I said, "Are you sure?" And he said there's no doubt.

In the interview Boris Johnson tried to preemptively put any eventual fault in the case on Porton Down. Today he received the response.

Payback is a bitch, Mr Johnson. A biting bitch.

---

The Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media , a number British academics, published an update to their briefing 'Doubts about Novichoks' at Tim Hayward's site.

The update carefully distinguishes and discusses the various chemical substances and research programs relevant to the British 'Novichok' claims. The 'Novichok' nerve agents Vil Mirzayanov describes in his book seem to differ from the substances other Russian scientists talked about in their recent interviews. The U.S. though, as well as other countries, has evidently worked on some of the substances described by Mirzayanov and concealed these efforts from the OPCW. The Working Group concludes:

The UK government has asserted that "No country bar Russia has combined capability, intent and motive" to carry out the Salisbury poisonings. Published studies show that these compounds can be synthesized at bench scale (sufficient for an assassination) in other countries. The UK government's declared case therefore rests only on subjective judgements of "intent and motive", which are open to question.

---

A few days ago Victoriya Skripal, a cousin of Yulia Skripal, was interviewed by the Russian website MKRU (Ru). The Stalkerzone provides an English translation of the full interview . From it we learn that:

Victoriya Skripal apparently also did an interview with the Mail Online (or the Mail plagiarized its piece from MKRU ). There seems to be no additional information in it.

---

British officials spread various theories about where and how the Skripal's were poisoned. According to 'official' leaks to the British press the alleged nerve agent was smeared to the door of Sergej Skripal's car, was in a pizza, in Yulia Skripal's luggage or perfume, or in the car's air vent. I may have been sprayed by a mini drone, or the stuff was smeared onto to the doorknob of Skripal's house or maybe it was, as claimed yesterday, in buckwheat cereals brought from Russia on Sergej Skripal's request.

In my view none of these explanation is plausible. The multitude of the discussed possibilities alone shows that either no one has a clue of what happened and how it happened, or someone is trying to bury the case in a heap of misinformation. We shall call this phenomena 'Novi-fog'. It unmasks headlines like this one as mere propaganda: Poisoned Door Handle Hints at High-Level Plot to Kill Spy, U.K. Officials Say . "It was on the doorknob (maybe)! Thus Putin himself did it!"

---

John Helmer, who reports from Moscow, documents that the British government is breaking several British laws as well as international agreements by keeping the family and the consular service of the Russian embassy in Britain away from the Skripals.

---

Previous Moon of Alabama reports on the Skripal case:

Posted by b on April 3, 2018 at 12:23 PM | Permalink


DomesticExtremist , Apr 3, 2018 12:35:13 PM | 1

Porton Down CEO states "we cannot prove the 'novichok' was made in Russia".
Followed by many weasel words.
May's argument seems to be collapsing.
WorldBLee , Apr 3, 2018 12:50:59 PM | 2
"Spy Poisoning Saves May from Losing Power" - that is an honest headline that you'll never see in the UK press.
Gareth , Apr 3, 2018 12:52:06 PM | 3
From the Guardian, Porton Down experts claim the nerve agent was Novichok but say they can't prove it was produced by Russia. Also, Yulia seems to have recovered spontaneously from the alleged military grade nerve agent as no antidote is available to counteract the effects. That's some military grade weapon!

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/03/porton-down-experts-unable-to-verify-precise-source-of-novichok

b , Apr 3, 2018 12:52:13 PM | 4
@1 thanks! Just added that news to the piece.
Sid2 , Apr 3, 2018 1:03:41 PM | 5
b's comment = a key distinction--

"The UK government's declared case therefore rests only on subjective judgements of "intent and motive", which are open to question."

This is the crux of the matter, with nothing to indicate otherwise as to a definitive case.

Further confirmed by today's report that the source of the poison cannot be id'd.

Christian Chuba , Apr 3, 2018 1:12:35 PM | 6
The OPCW should test it against the known samples held by the British. This is an obvious step for them and is quit telling that they are not doing this. The full OPCW interview is still very hawkish ... https://news.sky.com/story/porton-down-experts-unable-to-identify-precise-source-of-novichok-that-poisoned-spy-11315387

1. They are going with the 'it's military grade and must have been made by a state actor' (test Porton Down)

2. They will meet with the British secret services to see what other evidence they have.

DomesticExtremist , Apr 3, 2018 1:20:55 PM | 7
May has Wil.E.Coyote moment:
No 10 tries to calm Russia row amid cold war rhetoric
Downing Street has issued a plea for "proportionate" action from Russia to the Salisbury poisoning row after its foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, warned that relations with the west are now worse than during the cold war.

That's not "novichok" darling, that's "chutzpah".

Red Ryder , Apr 3, 2018 1:26:34 PM | 8
It is Highly Likely that the British did it.
They had the means, the manpower, the interest, and a purpose (motive).
The proof is they can't prove that anyone else, much less the Russians did it.
They were 8miles away with all the technical means to produce a poison.

They have acted like any criminal does when exposed. They blame others, particularly, their obsessed enemy against whom they have acted vilely and criminally before.

So, elementary police work, fundamental analysis points only to the UK for the Salisbury attempted assassination of their own paid stooge and his hapless daughter.

They did it to blame Russia. Case closed.

Fatima Manoubia , Apr 3, 2018 1:31:25 PM | 9
Just as in the case of the Germans, the US was the most beneffited from the false flag op, since that way gained access to Russian nuclear facilities.
This time around this was plotted to justify a false flag chemical attack on Ghouta who could have justified their illegal and unjustifiable stand in Syria, as well, as spreading a thick fog over the presence and capture of their coalition´s SF in the terrain which would be an scandal in case of becoming of public knowledge after the terrorist attacks that have been place so far in European soil since 9/11 2001, an definitive crushing for the low rates of popularity for both, May and Trump, not to mention Macron who just have suffered some several weeks of general strike against his draconian ( to French standards ) labour reforms, and which where nowhere mentioned in the "alt-media" since there was much more important issues to report about, like the Skripal case....

IMNSHO, the main sin of V.V.Putin was not included in the part of his 1st March speech of adress to the nation about state-of-the-art thachtical weapons, but in the first part related to the necessity of betterment of people´s living conditions, by increasing wages and housing access and conditions of habitability for families and young people, grant access of those gifted to all the varied scoop into the Russian educational system so as nobody with will and capacity gets out without the possibility of developing its strenghts, improvement on health care system and elders care system so as life expectancy spands increasingly, favour maternity conditions for working couples, and so on, and so on...

You have that this was broadcasted to the four winds, so as, everybody with a Smartphone or IT connection could test that while in the US and especialy in Europe, the so called "welfare state" is being dismantled at galloping pace, without nothing left to loot from the working masses except the pensions system, and this only at few corners of Europe, here they come, not only the Chinese, trying to get increasing number of people from amongst their millions of citizens out of poverty every year, but now also, as in the times of the USSR, Russia is offering just the contrary to what the Western powers, in their obscene richness, are offering ot their enslavized working masses.

Now, you tell me that the class strugle has finished and has no sense nowadays....Of course, nobody from the upper middle class who were those which in the higuest numbers voted for Trump, in the hope that that way they would achieve a considerable lowing in taxes, is going to tell you about this. You will onkly learn it from your peers, those who use Twitter, even at the risk of being targetted by the same Intelligence Services who perform the flase flags ops to obnubilate you and act as attack dogs of the elites trying to shut up and demonize every time one of your peers shows its nose at their "blogs".....

Piotr Berman , Apr 3, 2018 1:33:41 PM | 10
"Porton-Down experts unable to verify the source of Novichok". From what I read, this is simple not possible. The chemical was made in a lab more than 20 years ago, so there would have to be a new batch. No samples from the previous lab were ever collected in the West; instead, Western experts either had samples from an industrial facility in Uzbekistan that does not exists anymore or samples they they had made themselves. Thus Porton-Down could check if it was their own product (unless someone made another batch there without telling the colleagues and using different sources of "raw" materials), and provide the history of the substance by citing Mirzayanov.

It is different if we are talking about large stocks military of poison that was either used before or had samples collected by
outsiders like OPCW. But every laboratory batch can be different.

That said, governments that joined UK in expelling Russian diplomats will probably stick to "belief" in the argument about "the only suspect that had all three: motivation, technical ability and characteristic brutality". I expect Boris Johnson 20 years from now claiming that "knowing all the facts, he would do the same thing" and he could even slavishly imitate Tony Blair "I passionately believe that ...".

Peter AU 1 , Apr 3, 2018 1:35:30 PM | 11
Gary Aitkenhead CEO of DSTL bio

https://www.gov.uk/government/people/gary-aitkenhead
"Gary has spent his career in the development and supply of mission-critical wireless communications solutions to public safety, industrial and transportation sectors.

He has previously held senior global positions at Sepura and at Motorola Solutions, where he had commercial responsibility for sales, services, operations and product management.

As Dstl's Chief Executive, Gary will lead an organisation of over 3,800 scientists and engineers providing specialist, and in many cases world-leading expertise, across a wide-range of disciplines...."

psychohistorian , Apr 3, 2018 1:39:50 PM | 12
@ b who wrote:
"
Mind the gap, Mrs. May. Mind the credibility gap.
"

When one relies on a series of lies to move the public instead of truthful need, you can end up twisting slowly in the wind, like May is currently doing.....couldn't happen to a nicer puppet.

What a circus! Too bad it is so meaningful to humanities future. And now the Pope has taken away the revenge of Hell for these folks. It is almost like there is no incentive to do good and avoid evil.

librul , Apr 3, 2018 1:46:44 PM | 13
Often wondered what the planned abort scenario was for 9/11 .

If the CIA etal had indeed wired the towers with explosives how would they go about deinstalling said explosives if there
had been a major muck up and the plans for 9/11 were called off or delayed?

"Training exercises" is a good cover.

When Mossad was caught by an alert bystander planting a bomb under a car in Tel Aviv, it was later announced that it had all been a "training exercise gone awry".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8377746.stm


When bomb parts (not yet assembled) mailed to the US embassy in Tunisia were discovered by Fedex workers at Charles de Gaulle
airport the ready explanation was...you guessed it..."training exercise gone awry".
https://www.yahoo.com/news/tempers-flare-paris-airport-fake-bombs-found-070909988.html

You are probably aware that there were training exercises held in New York just before 9/11.

http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a090801laguardiaexercise&scale=0

"September 8, 2001: Bioterrorism Exercise Is Held at a New York Airport
Edit event

A training exercise is held at New York's La Guardia Airport, based around the scenario of a terrorist attack with a biological weapon"

And, you probably recall that active anthrax was being shipped, although "no one was at fault", for years all over the place.
That is, anthrax created by the Pentagon that was "believed to be inactive" was actually live anthrax and being shipped around the world. But no one was at fault.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pentagon-blames-anthrax-fiasco-on-no-one

Thus, if someone decided to pull the plug on 9/11 and had to remove the explosives from the towers they could have declared
"training exercise has gone awry". The Pentagon could merely declare that they had held an adjunct exercise in the towers and what the biological terror exercise thought was inactive anthrax was actually live and the
towers would need to be evacuated while decontamination took place.

That could have been the abort scenario to 9/11 .

AriusArmenian , Apr 3, 2018 1:52:11 PM | 14
What does this and other reports tell us about the UK?
That it is owned and operated by criminal vermin.
Like the US.
These vermin are psychopaths or at least sociopaths.
They have murdered millions since the end of Cold War v1.
They intend to murder millions more in Cold War v2 (not so cold!) before they are neutralized.
I hope my children survive until those vermin are eradicated.
Arioch , Apr 3, 2018 1:52:17 PM | 15
> The Russian government sent fourteen specific questions to the British government and thirteen questions to the OPCW.

Not quite. There are also few questions EXPLICITLY asked to France itself.
And i already mentioned it in a recent post comments.

http://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/3150139?p_p_id=101_INSTANCE_cKNonkJE02Bw&_101_INSTANCE_cKNonkJE02Bw_languageId=en_GB

I believe this is worth being explicitly mentioned too.


PS. i heard OPCW promised answer their part before end of the day

thanks b for staying on top of this... it bears ongoing scrutiny and you are good at that!@

Posted by: james , Apr 3, 2018 1:55:22 PM | 16

thanks b for staying on top of this... it bears ongoing scrutiny and you are good at that!@

Posted by: james | Apr 3, 2018 1:55:22 PM | 16 /div

james , Apr 3, 2018 1:56:35 PM | 17
@ 15 arioh... thanks for stating that again.. in fact russia has asked britian, france and opcw questions... wonder who says what when?
jayc , Apr 3, 2018 2:17:56 PM | 18
"Porton Down chief executive Gary Aitkenhead said scientists at the lab 'have not verified the precise source, but we provided the scientific information to the government who have then used a number of other sources to piece together the conclusions that they have come to.'"
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/top-russian-diplomat-britain-poisoned-spy-54198504

i.e. The British government's assertions are based exactly on subjective interpretations of supposed motive and method. The repeated "no other plausible explanation" - which the French officials are now parroting - continues to place the onus on Russia to prove the negative. It's a neat trick, as long as the media faithfully sticks to the talking points. Which they will. Soon there will be an attempt to re-focus the topic away from annoying details towards the alleged "pattern of aggression", such as May's statements today that "standing up to Russia" will continue at least through Putin's new term.

Den Lille Abe , Apr 3, 2018 2:22:28 PM | 19
The story just grows more and more embarrassing. I mean. if you want to frame someone, at you get your act together!! no plodders!
And the the eternal Bumbling Boorish turns up, spout liars as never before!
Please FO Britain out to somewhere Titanic sank and do the same. You will not be missed and the air in Europe is cleaner than without Minitrumpistan.
Den Lille Abe , Apr 3, 2018 2:28:16 PM | 20
And the this guy figuring as a foreign minister is an A grade +++ certified liar and cheat.
Moodies says so.
Den Lille Abe , Apr 3, 2018 2:30:44 PM | 21
Saw it was on BBC (Big British Cunts) too, I wonder who will highlight the complicity.
Clueless Joe , Apr 3, 2018 2:41:07 PM | 22
These idiots will lose face in an epic proportion when if one can prove Russia didn't do it, considering how much fuss they made and how they humiliated Russia by expelling scores of diplomats. And Russia will be able to openly ask for some kind of excuse or reparation of a high order.

Meanwhile, the UK government seems to be glad to bury yet another case of mass gang-rapes of British girls in yet another British town, because, fuck a thousand of their young citizens, when a couple of foreigners get food-poisoning or whatever it's obviously of highest importance...

Peter AU 1 , Apr 3, 2018 2:50:10 PM | 23
It seems Novichok are the chemicals described in Mirzanyanov's book and are different to those described by Russian/Soviet scientists who actually researched and developed various compounds.
US/UK ensured no discussion or research into any of these compounds took place at OPCW and elsewhere.
An ace tucked up their sleeve for future use.

With the UK now backing down? - or at least its case starting to fall apart - on its novichok made in Russia claims, the ace has been used and nothing to show for it. It makes me think a CW attack in Ghouta with very large number of victims was to be the pretext for an almost instant attack on Syria and the Russian forces there.
I suspect Russian intel operations are as good as their weapons systems so they most likely took out whatever crew of jihadists were to poison the victims. Then came the direct Russian warning to the US and after that the sacking of Tillerson followed a few days later by the sacking of McMaster.

chet380 , Apr 3, 2018 2:55:47 PM | 24
From the a portion of the Mercouris article, it appears that the High Court Judge was misled by counsel as to the applicability of the Consular Conventions, because they had not been incorporated into British domestic law -- this is false as they had been so incorporated.
Counsel for the Official Solicitor, the agency representing MS. Skripal's interests, is duty bound to inform the Judge about his error immediately after learning of it.
Peter AU 1 , Apr 3, 2018 2:57:15 PM | 25
To add to my post @23 If the UK novichok narrative was a prep for the main play in Syria then the narrative would only need to hold up for a couple of weeks, when attention would shift to a large CW attack in Ghouta quickly followed by a US attack on Syria.
K , Apr 3, 2018 3:01:09 PM | 26
https://tomgard.blog/
Very interesting material, albeit in German. It may be that the GB´s amok run against Russia could have to do with British, Israeli and US soldiers or consultants, who were arrested in Ghouta after the Islamists lost.
SteLe , Apr 3, 2018 3:03:24 PM | 27
As soon as i read the Telepolis article this morning, i just was stunned.
Despite me being of 6 or 7 years old at the time, i remember the media hype... And while i wasnt able to connect the dots myself, because i obviously wasnt old enough the graps the details or even the story at the time, i find it strange, that NO ONE in german MSM could see the parallels, other then the small, non MSM Telepolis outlet (Which is one of the few german media sources i follow daily).

Anyway, good to see, that this article has become known to B... As i think this is a big part of the puzzle.

Let the play unravel.

Formerly T-Bear , Apr 3, 2018 3:07:58 PM | 28
A supposition:

Suppose there were no military grade nerve poison, at least originally and whatever such poison that was 'found' had been planted at a later time as required by the story told the public. The refusal to provide samples to Russia or admit qualified people in to see the victims and take stock of their medical conditions is exactly what would cover such a scenario, and the later application of referenced stock would be likely exposed if Russian scientists were to obtain samples.

How to cover one's posterior? How better than invite a close 'friend' to come in and also do 'certified' testing on the samples you give them that confirm by 'independent' scientific authority exactly your shabby, falling apart story. The world has some cop-on that Macron's integrity has been and still is a marketable product at modest price and would go to any length to accommodate a fine fellow PM as is Theresa May in her hour of need; she after all gave a billion Pounds Sterling to DUP to join her to continue her stewardship of the British Parliament, for Macron's assistance (read French establishment under Macron's direction) several multiples of the DUP's haul could be made available at moment's notice - funny how public treasuries work in such emergency.

What a fine kettle of fish the PM and her Parliament has made of that now 'Scuppered Isle' (or was that sceptre'd isle?). Buckingham Palace might consider dismissing the current Parliament and suggest to the subjects not to return most of the incumbents, or else Charles will be king. That ought to keep the hoi polloi in line.

cdvision , Apr 3, 2018 3:12:41 PM | 29
Peter AU 1 @23 - thats my conclusion as well.

RT quotes Murray on the Porton Down statement:

"If you watch the interview, the sentence where he says it would probably need a state to make it is tacked on to the end. If you look closely, not only has the shot changed, the camera and tripod have actually moved. I strongly suspect government handlers who would have been in that room watching him were unhappy with his interview and wanted something which implicated Russia more, so added a bit onto the end."

et Al , Apr 3, 2018 3:15:54 PM | 30
https://news.sky.com/story/porton-down-experts-unable-to-identify-precise-source-of-novichok-that-poisoned-spy-11315387

" ...It's Novichok or from that family... " he says later but at the beginning he says 'it is Novichok'. Does he mean the known variants of Novichok or 'similar' agents?

Not to mention what does "We have not identified the precise source..." mean? Precise source of where the agent came from or precise type of 'Novichok or novichok family'? It's not like the interviewer made an effort to find out.

Oh, and it appears that the video skips or is edited at 00:46 seconds but there is no skip in audio.

et Al , Apr 3, 2018 3:21:25 PM | 31
And I don't know if it is how they did the video, but the background looks as if it is videoshopped in. Gary has very sharp lines around him. Maybe it is just 'enhanced' but it still looks odd to me.

Vis the 00:46 skip/edit he's saying:

"and that it's, uh" - skip/edit - "military grade agent..". Did he fluff his lines?

karlof1 , Apr 3, 2018 3:28:43 PM | 32
librul @13--

The nanothermite used was applied as paint, so it would be extremely hard to remove. Also, it must be recalled that preparations for 911 occurred during Clinton's presidency, thus begging three questions: Did Clinton know? Did Gore know? Did Bush know? The Saudis were clearly involved as it was a Saudi company that did the "remodeling" work at the Trade Complex.

Killing/Murdering innocents for political goals seems to be a pastime only associated with European nations and their spawn, like the Outlaw US Empire.

Kudos to b for recalling this previous false flag example of a very similar type!!

MoA has outstanding detectives! Too bad we're not actually employed so the Truth can be told.

Posted by: karlof1 , Apr 3, 2018 3:31:45 PM | 33

MoA has outstanding detectives! Too bad we're not actually employed so the Truth can be told.

Posted by: karlof1 | Apr 3, 2018 3:31:45 PM | 33 /div

Ghost Ship , Apr 3, 2018 3:36:55 PM | 34
>>>> Peter AU 1 | Apr 3, 2018 2:57:15 PM | 25
Too late for East Ghouta CW black op as the final transfer of jihadists has already started - why would Syria or Russia use CW against defeated groups?
1st batch of Jaish al-Islam rebels and their families have left Douma Wafideen crossing in preparation for their transfer to Jarablus

A couple of days ago the jihadists tried to stage an 'incident' involving jihadists with suicide belts blowing themselves up on buses transferring families to Idlib but Syrians and Russians were tipped off perhaps by high-ranking double agents within jihadist groups and forty suicide belts and their wearers were captured, so no atrocity.
Peter AU 1 , Apr 3, 2018 3:46:47 PM | 35
Aitkenhead uses the term Novichok. Novichock is supposedly a family or group of chemicals each having a specific name or designation code. UK has specifically accused Russia of using agent A-234, yet it seems Porton Down cannot narrow the substance down to a specific chemical compound withing a group.

The original statement from Porton Down was "Novichok or similar chemical", meaning they cannot even say what chemical group the substance analysed belongs to.

Laguerre , Apr 3, 2018 3:57:08 PM | 36
So May now says they have other evidence that it was the Russians wot did it (intelligence, but not to be revealed). It's ridiculous.

There are no new photos of the sufferers. Neither of the cop, who is supposed to have got out of hospital, nor of Yulia, who is said to have come back to consciousness. Not a single sign. Something is seriously wrong with the public explanation. The cop, being apparently in reasonable health, should have been able to give an interview, but no, it hasn't been done.

Peter AU 1 , Apr 3, 2018 4:07:20 PM | 37
In the questions Russia has put to OPCW, the last four...

10. Has the OPCW's Technical Secretariat approved the disclosure of the investigative material by the UK to the EU countries (according to available information, France has become fully involved in the investigation)?

http://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/3150201
11. Has France notified the OPCW's Technical Secretariat of its involvement in the technical assistance as requested by the UK?

12. Has France provided its material on the investigation, if any, to the OPCW's Technical Secretariat?

13. Can the OPCW's Technical Secretariat provide the French investigative material, if any, to Russia for perusal? If not, why?
..........

Does Russia suspect the OPCW has subcontracted the Skripal investigation to France?

james , Apr 3, 2018 4:20:39 PM | 38
@36 laguerre... lets face it.. they are making shit up! door handle may-boris-my ass..

and - the uk are running rough shod over basic legal procedure on allowing russia access to all of this..

uk - dark age mentality, thanks may and boris the idiot...

somebody , Apr 3, 2018 4:21:06 PM | 39
Who tricked Boris Johnson and May into this? When BND and Kohl did the plutonium stuff they could be sure Russia would play along - and they did though it might have cost Kohl something in negotiations.

What did it cost May to get EU countries and the US along?

And what does it all mean now ?

The development came as a former Russian general warned the response to the Salisbury the attack could trigger "the last war in the history of mankind".

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Evgeny Buzhinsky said the West was "cornering Russia and to corner Russia is a very dangerous thing".

He added: "If the situation develops in the way it is now, it will end up in a very bad outcome."

Write a hundred times: It is not possible to start a war against Russia, it is not possible to start a war against Russia and China, it is not possible to start a war against Russia and China and Iran .....

james , Apr 3, 2018 4:24:25 PM | 40
@37 peter - last question.. it appears there is some concern over the impartiality and objectivity of the opcw.. as we saw in the case of khan shaykhun, "The OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism,[15][16][17][18] the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, France, and Israel, as well as Human Rights Watch have attributed the attack to the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad" in spite of the fact it was the town was held by al nusra!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Shaykhun_chemical_attack

i think russia is right to be skeptical of the opcw's impartiality and objectivity here...

A P , Apr 3, 2018 4:28:19 PM | 41
The integrity of the Porton Down scientists has thrown a wrench into the Mossad plan. Mossad got away with it in the Litvinenko caper, so rinse and repeat with a new "Russia-only poison".

The non-scientist Brits don't have any answers beyond what the Zionist/US/NATO Deep State told them to say because Mossad did it, probably without UK gov't knowledge at even the highest/secret levels. (Easier to ask forgiveness than permission) The various "locations/methods' being floated would have been salted with chemical "indicators" by Mossad to make the confusion of potential scenarios plausible for the presstitutes and politicios to regurgitate on-cue.

Occam's Razor at work.

karlof1 , Apr 3, 2018 4:30:25 PM | 42
As I understand it, Porton Down must have a sample of A-234 in order to be able to identify the agent used in the attack as A-234--a record of the fingerprint to match the recovered fingerprint. However, Porton Down's saying it does not have any samples of A-234; so, if it lacks samples, how can it discover the match?

The there's the further BS about the Skripals not having any close relatives or others able to help.

Lies, Lies, Lies!

Oh, and did you hear what China's Defense Minister, currently visiting Moscow, has said : "The Chinese side came [to Moscow] to let the Americans know about the close ties between the Russian and Chinese armed forces." I really doubt he's lying.

Bart Hansen , Apr 3, 2018 5:04:07 PM | 43
39 - "Russia doesn't start wars - Russia ends wars"
Tom , Apr 3, 2018 5:18:07 PM | 44
Over at John Delacour's twitter site, he asks a simple question, "A simple question for @MetPoliceUK, @WiltshirePolice, @BorisJohnson/#Fakes_R_us et al.
Where was Sergey #Skripal's car going at 2:55pm on Sunday 4th April when you assure us he was eating risotto chez Zizzi?

There is a video clip from the Daily Mirror allegedly showing Skripal's car. John has done lots of good work with the CW attacks in Syria. This dog is not letting go of the bone.

#9 Fatima Manoubia excellent post.
#23 Peter AU Syria and perhaps some local politics, Brexit, EU, discrediting Corbyn.

Don Bacon , Apr 3, 2018 5:21:49 PM | 45
@Laguerre 36
The cop, being apparently in reasonable health, should have been able to give an interview, but no, it hasn't been done.
PM May had a private meeting with DS Bailey on March 15 in hospital, before he was released. Quite unusual. There's no other reason than collusion, as May herself might say.
Daniel , Apr 3, 2018 5:26:12 PM | 46
So, what headline does BBC America post to tell its readers that Porton Down can't determine where the alleged poison came from?

"Russian spy: Source of nerve agent 'not identified'"

For the 1/2 to 3/4 of news consumers who only read the headline, it looks like just another spurious denial by "the Russians."

lysias , Apr 3, 2018 5:29:19 PM | 47
Porton Down, or the Israeli counterpart at Nes Ziyona? Israel has not signed the chemical weapons ban, and is not subject to inspection by the OPCW.
Don Bacon , Apr 3, 2018 5:33:35 PM | 48
Regarding impartiality and honesty, they are rare if not unknown qualities in every government agency everywhere (based on my small sampling). Nearly everybody has a price. One must get an informed opinion from a source that couldn't benefit from a wrong decision, and wouldn't suffer from an honest one. That's difficult, but not impossible. In this case where could one find an impartial lab for the test and evaluation? Perhaps in China or India.
Meanwhile my guess is that Porton was given an order to report (1) novichok and (2) Russia, and they came most of the way with novichok, and probably Russia given #10's deduction powers from the indicators provided.
Daniel , Apr 3, 2018 5:36:08 PM | 49
OT, but since I loves me some irony:

BBC headline :
Florida shooting: Students defy transparent school bags rule


"The rules about the clear rucksacks, which were provided free to students, came into effect on Monday as classes resumed after the spring break. Other security measures announced last month include mandatory new ID badges for students, with plans also in place for airport-style metal detectors.

"But students have argued that the new bags will not prevent future attacks and infringe their privacy."

Permafrost , Apr 3, 2018 6:11:20 PM | 50
Mr. Corbin missed an excellent opportunity to score a goal!
Instead, he preferred to join the warmongers on duty, even after asking for care in the investigations.
Like anyone without a spine, he was swept away by general hysteria.
Curtain, Mr. Corbin...
Sad.
Toxik , Apr 3, 2018 6:13:28 PM | 51
good point that Boris is liar. well for that matter, its now the entire British Government that's lying.
dahoit , Apr 3, 2018 6:28:52 PM | 52
47;In speaking of israel,nehroo is in deep shite,own party is up in arms,at nehroo attempt a fix with un in attempting the African crisis.
likklemore , Apr 3, 2018 6:33:00 PM | 53
Madame May is not walking back on any of this. She has doubled down: Daily Express UK, reporting on Mr. Aitkenhead's interview with SkyNews, has this morsel:

Porton Down experts NOT able to prove Salisbury nerve agent was Russia made
LINK


[.]

Mr Aitkenhead added there was no known antidote to novichok, and that none has been administered to either Sergei or Yulia Skripal. He declined to say whether the lab had developed or keeps stocks of novichok, but rejected suggestions it had come from Porton Down.

[.]The latest developments come after retired Russian Lieutenant-General Evgeny Buzhinsky warned that relations between Russia and the West could become "worse" than the Cold War and "end up in a very, very bad outcome"
Mr Buzhinsky told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "A real war, worse than a cold war is a real war, it will be the last war in the history of mankind."

A Downing Street spokesman responded: "As the Prime Minister has made clear, the UK would much rather have in Russia a constructive partner ready to play by the rules.

"But this attack in Salisbury was part of a pattern of increasingly aggressive Russian behaviour, as well as a new and dangerous phase in Russian activity within the continent and beyond.

"As the Prime Minister has said, we must face the facts, and the challenge of Russia is one that will endure for years to come."

OPCW said its executive council would meet in the morning in The Hague to discuss the UK's Government's claim that Russia was behind the attack.

I have a few questions for Madame May. Recall you stated this nerve agent {Novichok} was 5 to 8x more toxic than VX? Mr. Aitkenhead has stated "there was no known antidote to novichok, and that none has been administered to either Sergei or Yulia Skripal."

The Skripals are alive, Yes!? Daughter Yulia is up, eating, talking. How is that for a miracle?.
I read one report Yulia's social media account was accessed while she was in a coma. Lazarus.

Ali , Apr 3, 2018 6:39:04 PM | 54
@dahoit 52

What Israel is deep in is spelled with two 'i's

Fatima Manoubia , Apr 3, 2018 6:42:13 PM | 55
This is what they are trying to hide:

Apart from general movilizations of elders in Spain claiming for pensions of dignity and for maintaining the public pension system which saw several days of demonstrations which conflued with the women´s day demonstrations...

General strike at AmazonSpain:

https://twitter.com/pechosboys/status/976207765013172230

https://twitter.com/comunistasmijas/status/981254740406390785

But, then, FRA3 AmazonGermany joins the strike in support of AmazonSpain...

https://twitter.com/pechosboys/status/975769208423354368

Several general strikes in France during the last month of March. The strike of the French railway workers, which will last until June, has the support of students, elders, hospital staff and postal workers. That's how the French streets are today.

https://twitter.com/pechosboys/status/976785878080245760

https://twitter.com/pechosboys/status/976786774713421824

https://twitter.com/pechosboys/status/976856517839347712

https://twitter.com/CgtTuifrance/status/981201000907378689

https://twitter.com/pechosboys/status/981167309061439488

https://twitter.com/pechosboys/status/980904992352632832

And at other locations, other events were happening...which left underreported to the people:

Argentina commemorated the Day of Memory, Truth and Justice, where "NUNCA MAS" was a clamor...

https://twitter.com/pechosboys/status/977979771224297472

New demonstrations and protests in Athens against electronic auctions of foreclosed homes and allowing the participation of foreign capital. #Greece

https://twitter.com/pechosboys/status/976890170753593344

Meanwhile in Yemen....

https://twitter.com/pechosboys/status/977954817762123776

Meanwhile in the Russian Federation...

https://twitter.com/pechosboys/status/977580364368699397


james , Apr 3, 2018 6:45:37 PM | 56
@46 daniel.. that bbc headline ""Russian spy: Source of nerve agent 'not identified'" tells one all they need to know of what a lying sack of bs the uk has become on all levels, but especially it's public state run media... the bbc tries to be as pathetic as may and boris and succeeds!!

@47 lysias... your comment is worth repeating.. not enough folks know this.. " Israel has not signed the chemical weapons ban, and is not subject to inspection by the OPCW." immediate suspicion ought be cast on israel as a consequence... what a friggin' team player they are hey? i guess that is why the usa/canada and a bunch of other loser nations love them so much!

@53 likklemore.. quote from the article ""As the Prime Minister has made clear, the UK would much rather have in Russia a constructive partner ready to play by the rules." what bullshite! she means like how israel plays by the rules, by not being a member of the opcw and not being subject to inspection... what a gang of lousy thiefs and liars they all are!

[Apr 03, 2018] This Washington Post Headline Is Fake News

Highly recommended!
Apr 03, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

This Washington Post Headline Is Fake News

On March 30 the Washington Post , the blog site of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, published a report about the expulsion of some 'western' diplomats from Russia. The move was an expected and proportional retaliation for the expulsion of Russian diplomats from some 'western' countries.

The piece was originally published under the headline:

One by one Russia tells European ambassadors of latest diplomatic expulsions

This is visible in the web-address (URL) of the piece which was formed from the original headline when it was first published.

.../washingtonpost.com/world/europe/one-by-one-russia-tells-european-ambassadors-of-latest-diplomatic-expulsions/2018/03/30/...

The editors apparently disliked the original headline. It was factually correct but did not create enough reason to hate Russia. The original headline was therefore replaced with a factually false one:


bigger

One by one, European ambassadors learn they're being expelled from Russia

For the record: "They", i.e. the ambassadors, learned of no such thing. Russia has not expelled any ambassador. The report below the false headline does not claim that Russia did such.

The blatant falsehood of the headline was immediately pointed out in the comments to the piece. The @WashingtonPost Twitter account was notified of the 'mistake'.

Three days later the Post has not taken any corrective action. The fake news headline is still up on its website. Most visitors of the Washington Post site will not read the piece. They skim the headlines of the site and get a daily dosage of Russia-hate from it.

The slogan of the Post , prominently displayed under its name, is " Democracy Dies in Darkness ". When it peddles such sable propaganda it becomes obvious that the paper hates democracy and an informed public. To curry favor with thuggish tyrants, as Post owner Bezos does, is obviously more profitable than factual reporting.


bigger

The next time the Post laments about fake news and asks for censoring blogs like ours, the above shall be thrown into its face.

Posted by b on April 3, 2018 at 12:26 AM | Permalink Doug Colwell , Apr 3, 2018 12:51:37 AM | 1

The phrase "democracy dies in darkness" actually makes sense when you realize they are expressing it as a triumph.
psychohistorian , Apr 3, 2018 1:30:48 AM | 2
But since Bezos and MBS can't go to hell because the Pope says it doesn't exist, it is all good, right?

Can I have more myth, propaganda and BS please.........../snark

[Apr 03, 2018] Exercise TOXIC DAGGER - the sharp end of chemical warfare

Highly recommended!
Apr 03, 2018 | www.gov.uk
Exercise TOXIC DAGGER - the sharp end of chemical warfare

Dstl works with Marines on UK's biggest annual chemical warfare exercise Published 20 February 2018

From:
Defence Science and Technology Laboratory
40 Commando Royal Marines and The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) have staged the UK's biggest annual exercise to prepare troops for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) operations. Exercise TOXIC DAGGER is supported by Dstl, along with Public Health England (PHE) and The Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), and is the largest exercise of its kind in the country.

Specialists in CBRN from Dstl and AWE are able to create realistic exercise scenarios based on the latest threat information. Completing the training and exercising against these scenarios provides a challenging programme for the Royal Marines to demonstrate their proficiency in the methods to detect, assess and mitigate a CBRN threat.

The three-week programme included Company-level attacks and scenarios concerning CBRN vignettes, concluding with a full-scale exercise involving government and industry scientists and more than 300 military personnel.

Major Rob Garside, from 40 Commando Royal Marines, said:

Working with Dstl means we have the most up-to-date information and a realistic exercise. This ensures we are well prepared for a CBRN operating environment. It is vital we can make rapid decisions and are able to protect and support specialists who come in to deal with any incident. On operations these specialists are on hand to advise and we must ensure we already have a strong understanding of their capabilities and what they require of us as a military force.

The Dstl lead for CBRN exercises said:

40 Commando would be first on the ground in the event of a CBRN incident. We ensure they're up to date on the latest threats and make the exercise truly realistic. They not only have to provide a fighting force in an unstable environment, they must also be able to assess the scene and know what they're dealing with.

That's where Dstl, PHE, AWE and the Defence CBRN Centre come in, as we provide the technical information the Marines require.

Find out more about Dstl's CBRN work

[Apr 03, 2018] Russian ministers suggest that British secret services carried out Skripal poisoning to distract from Brexit. No 10 tries to calm Russia row amid cold war rhetoric by Pippa Crerar and Patrick Wintour

Notable quotes:
"... Speaking in Moscow, Lavrov said there was "a lot of talk about a 'cold war', about the situation being worse than it was during the classic cold war, because then there were some rules, and some decency was observed". ..."
"... It came as a former Russian military official Lt-Gen Evgeny Buzhinsky warned that the conflict could even end up as "the last war in the history of mankind". In a thinly veiled threat, he said the diplomatic crisis could result in a "very, very bad outcome" and accused the west of "cornering Russia" which, he argued, was a "very dangerous thing". ..."
"... The deputy foreign minister, Alexander Grushko, called the poisoning of Sergei Skripal a "provocation arranged by Britain" in order to justify high military spending because "they need a major enemy". ..."
"... Russia is also keeping up the pressure on the UK to provide consular access to Skripal's daughter, Yulia, now she is recovering in a Salisbury hospital. ..."
"... Lavrov said it was outrageous that the UK was not letting diplomatic staff see Yulia Skripal . The Russian embassy in London claims the UK is in breach of article 36 of the Vienna convention by refusing consular access to a Russian national. ..."
"... Russia also warned it would not accept any international scientific findings on the nerve agent used to poison the Skripals unless its scientists were involved in testing the nerve agent samples. Moscow spelt out its conditions for cooperation before an emergency meeting it has convened for Wednesday of the executive of the Organisation for Prevention of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. ..."
"... Alexander Shulgin, Russia's permanent representative to the OPCW, complained that Russian scientists have been barred from the tests owing to British objections. ..."
Apr 03, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

Russian ministers suggest that British secret services carried out Skripal poisoning to distract from Brexit

Tue 3 Apr 2018 10.03 EDT Last modified on Tue 3 Apr 2018 12.34 EDT Downing Street has issued a plea for "proportionate" action from Russia to the Salisbury poisoning row after its foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, warned that relations with the west are now worse than during the cold war.

Theresa May is visiting Scandinavia next week with the international security threat from Russia expected to be at the top of the agenda.

Her one-day visit to Denmark and Sweden was announced after Lavrov appeared to suggest that UK secret services may have been involved in the 4 March attack on a former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury. He said the incident could have been "beneficial" to the British government to distract attention from Brexit .

Speaking in Moscow, Lavrov said there was "a lot of talk about a 'cold war', about the situation being worse than it was during the classic cold war, because then there were some rules, and some decency was observed".

He added: "I believe that our western partners, I mean primarily the United Kingdom, the United States and some countries that blindly follow them, have cast away all decency, they are resorting to open lies, blatant misinformation."

It came as a former Russian military official Lt-Gen Evgeny Buzhinsky warned that the conflict could even end up as "the last war in the history of mankind". In a thinly veiled threat, he said the diplomatic crisis could result in a "very, very bad outcome" and accused the west of "cornering Russia" which, he argued, was a "very dangerous thing".

The deputy foreign minister, Alexander Grushko, called the poisoning of Sergei Skripal a "provocation arranged by Britain" in order to justify high military spending because "they need a major enemy".

However, Downing Street in effect called for calm at its weekly briefing for political reporters, simply saying it expected the wider dispute with Russia would not be settled for a long time. A No 10 spokesman said: "We need to respond in a proportionate way to this aggressive behaviour from Russia and that's what we're doing."

He added: "As the prime minister has made clear, the UK would much rather have in Russia a constructive partner ready to play by the rules. But this attack in Salisbury was part of a pattern of increasingly aggressive Russian behaviour, as well as a new and dangerous phase in Russian activity within the continent and beyond. As the prime minister has said, we must face the facts, and the challenge of Russia is one that will endure for years to come."

Russia is also keeping up the pressure on the UK to provide consular access to Skripal's daughter, Yulia, now she is recovering in a Salisbury hospital.

Reports from Russia claim that a cousin has contacted the British and Russian authorities to be given permission to go to the UK to be by her bedside.

Lavrov said it was outrageous that the UK was not letting diplomatic staff see Yulia Skripal . The Russian embassy in London claims the UK is in breach of article 36 of the Vienna convention by refusing consular access to a Russian national.

Downing Street raised the possibility that the 33-year-old may have requested that consular access be denied. It said access was based on a number of considerations "including consent from the individual".

Russia also warned it would not accept any international scientific findings on the nerve agent used to poison the Skripals unless its scientists were involved in testing the nerve agent samples. Moscow spelt out its conditions for cooperation before an emergency meeting it has convened for Wednesday of the executive of the Organisation for Prevention of Chemical Weapons in The Hague.

The OPCW is the internationally recognised body responsible for overseeing the 1997 chemical weapons convention and has been testing samples provided by British scientists from the Skripals.

The first results about the nature of the poison - which the UK believes to be novichok, a nerve agent of Russian origin – are expected in days. Alexander Shulgin, Russia's permanent representative to the OPCW, complained that Russian scientists have been barred from the tests owing to British objections.

[Apr 03, 2018] Russia is accusing Britain of staging and US of exploiting Skripal poisoning

Overview of skeptical press
Notable quotes:
"... by Tyler Durden 04/01/2018 ..."
"... By Chris Marsden ..."
Apr 03, 2018 | www.defenddemocracy.press
Russian Envoy to US: Skripal Case Pretext to Launch Long-Planned Smear Campaign

01.04.2018
The Russian Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, said on Sunday that the Skripal case was a pretext to carry out a provocation against Russia that has been in the planning stages for a long time.
"The developments in the United Kingdom served just as a pretext to carry out a provocation against Russia that was planned a long time ago. We have closely monitored, who attended the US Embassy in Moscow recently, what kind of people [attended it]," Antonov said in an interview with Russia's Channel Five.
Read more at https://sputniknews.com/us/201804011063108307-russia-usa-envoy-pretext-skripal/

Russia Claims Skripal Poisoning Was Staged By UK Intelligence

by Tyler Durden
04/01/2018

Russia's Ambassador to the UK, Alexander Yakovenko, says that London's reluctance to share information on the March 4 poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal has led Moscow to suggest that London authorities actually perpetrated the crime.
"We have very serious suspicion that this provocation was done by British intelligence," Yakovenko told Russia's NTV channel – adding however that Moscow had no direct proof, but that the UK's behavior constitutes strong circumstantial evidence in support of their theory.
Read more at https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-01/russia-claims-skripal-poisoning-was-staged-uk-intelligence

Yulia Skripal "improving rapidly": The unravelling of the Russian Novichok narrative

By Chris Marsden
31 March 2018
When placed in the context of the global anti-Russia propaganda campaign spearheaded by Britain's Conservative government, Thursday saw the greatest Easter miracle since Christ rose from the dead.
For weeks, the world's media has cited uncritically government claims that double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned March 4 with a "weapons grade" nerve agent, known as a Novichok.
The agent was described as so deadly that the comatose Skripals were unlikely to ever recover, and that if they did they would be brain damaged and physically compromised. On Wednesday there were even media headlines that their life support might have to be turned off.
Read more at https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/31/yuli-m31.html Russian MFA Releases 14 Questions Addressed to UK on 'Fabricated Skripal Case'

31.03.2018
The complete list of questions has been published on the Russian Foreign Ministry's website.
On March 31, the Embassy of the Russian Federation in London sent a note to the British Foreign Service with a list of questions regarding the 'fabricated Skripal case '.
Russia is asking the UK to explain why Moscow was denied consular access to the Skripal case, why France was involved in the investigation, what made the Britons believe that the nerve agent was of Russian origin and does the UK have samples of the so-called "Novichok."
Yet another question focuses on the information about the antidotes used to treat the Skripals and the fact that the UK medics had possession of these substances on site.
Read more at https://sputniknews.com/russia/201803311063103452-russia-uk-skripal-case-russian-ministry-questions/

Which countries are expelling Russian diplomats?

31 Mar 2018
Twenty-five European countries, Australia, Canada and the US have announced that they will be expelling 123 Russian diplomats over the coming week.
Days later Russia responded in kind, expelling an equal number of diplomats from those countries, except Belgium, Hungary, Georgia and Montenegro. It also announced that the UK diplomatic mission to Moscow will have to cut staff by another 50 diplomats.
Last week, the UK expelled 23 Russian officials . In addition, Bulgaria and Luxemburg recalled their ambassadors from Moscow for consultations.
Read more at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/03/countries-expelling-russian-diplomats-180326191614898.html

Last Act Of 'Novichok' Drama Revealed – "The Skripals' Resurrection"

March 29, 2018
It seems that the 'Novichok' fairy-tale the British government plays to us provides for a happy ending – the astonishing and mysterious resurrection of the victims of a "military grade" "five to eight times more deadly than VX gas" "nerve agent" "of a type developed by" Hollywood.
Read more at http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/03/she-is-risen-last-act-of-novichok-drama-revealed-the-skripals-resurrection.html#more

[Apr 03, 2018] NATO and Novichok

Notable quotes:
"... Published at http://tass.com/politics/996756 ..."
Mar 29, 2018 | www.defenddemocracy.press

31/03/2018

Diplomat reminds that NATO inherited Czechoslovakia's chemical industry potential

March 29, 2018

Earlier NATO slashed the staff of the Russian mission to 20 from 30

MOSCOW, March 29. /TASS/. NATO countries are using the chemical industry potential of the Czech Republic and its developments in the sphere of protection from chemical warfare agents, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday.

The diplomat thus commented on the statement by the Foreign Ministry of Russia, which mentioned the Czech Republic among the countries that had been developing the nerve agent called Novichyok and used, as the UK claims, to poison former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal.

"The work codenamed Novichyok was conducted in Great Britain, the US, the Czech Republic and Sweden. The results achieved by these countries to create new chemical agents of this type are reflected in more than 200 open sources of NATO countries," the spokeswoman said, noting that Czechia had been carrying out research into chemical protection within the Warsaw Treaty Organization.

"In all media outlets, there are publications on this theme, which say that after the organization's dissolution, the Czech scientific potential in this field was sought by its new western partners and inherited by NATO," Zakharova said.

The Czech army performed special missions in the Middle East, including the work to eliminate the consequences of the use of chemical weapons in Kuwait, the Russian Foreign Ministry's spokeswoman said.

The publications existing in the media on the activity of scientific centers for the study of chemical warfare agents in the Czech Republic make it possible to conclude that "an important place in this research is held by nerve agents called Novichyok according to the western classification, the Russian diplomat noted.

Read also: Why we shouldn't now leave the Euro!

Thus, Czech scientists were numerously awarded grants of the NATO Science Committee. Also, the NATO center for the protection against mass destruction weapons operates in the town of Vyskov on Czech territory, Zakharova said.

"The development of antidotes and the so-called binding substances and ferments to absorb the components of nerve agents is a separate area of the research of [Czech] toxicologists. The Czech side is conducting research in close cooperation with NATO structures," Zakharova said, noting that "the free possession by the Czech chemists of the characteristics of Novichyok-type chemical agents "is evidence that this information is widely accessible."

"No one has accused or is accusing Prague of anything. We never make any accusations as compared to British colleagues. We only say that even in the media space – and this is not propaganda, these are not Russian media outlets but these are Czech publications – there is a large amount of materials confirming the Czech potential in the sphere of chemical research. This simply has to be taken into account," the Russian diplomat concluded.

Diplomats' expulsion and Skripal case

On March 4, former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal, who was earlier sentenced in Russia for spying for the UK, and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a bench near the Maltings shopping center in Salisbury, UK. Police said they had been exposed to the impact of a nerve agent.

UK's top officials claimed later that the nerve agent had allegedly been developed in Russia. Prime Minister Theresa May, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson and others rushed to accuse Russia of being involved, while failing to produce any evidence.

Read also: Regarding the resolution of the Parti de Gauche to submit a motion on the expulsion of SYRIZA from the EL

Moscow refuted the accusations of involvement in the incident and stated that neither the Soviet Union nor Russia have ever done research into that toxic chemical.

Without providing any proof, London expelled 23 Russian diplomats and suspended all planned high-level bilateral contacts. Moscow reciprocated with expelling 23 British diplomats, ordering the closure of Britain's consulate in St. Petersburg and terminating the operations of the British Council in Russia.

On March 26, the United States declared 60 Russian diplomats personae non gratae. Among them were 46 diplomats from the embassy in Washington, two from the consulate general in New York and 12 more from Russia's mission to the United Nations.

Germany, Canada, Poland and France followed suit by expelling four Russian diplomats each. Lithuania, Moldova and the Czech Republic expelled three diplomats, while Australia, Albania, Denmark, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands – two. Belgium, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Macedonia, Norway, Romania, Finland, Croatia, Sweden and Estonia each ordered the expulsion of one Russian envoy. Meanwhile, Ukraine made the decision to expel 13 Russian diplomats.

NATO slashed the staff of the Russian mission to 20 from 30. Bulgaria and Luxembourg recalled their envoys for consultations.

Russia's Foreign Ministry promised that those countries' hostile steps would not be left unanswered.

Published at http://tass.com/politics/996756

[Apr 03, 2018] A very strange coincidence exercise TOXIC DAGGER on the eve of Skripal poisoning

Notable quotes:
"... Dstl works with Marines on UK's biggest annual chemical warfare exercise ..."
Mar 04, 2018 | www.defenddemocracy.press

Dstl works with Marines on UK's biggest annual chemical warfare exercise

20 February 2018
From: Defence Science and Technology Laboratory

40 Commando Royal Marines and The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) have staged the UK's biggest annual exercise to prepare troops for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) operations. Exercise TOXIC DAGGER is supported by Dstl, along with Public Health England (PHE) and The Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), and is the largest exercise of its kind in the country.

Specialists in CBRN from Dstl and AWE are able to create realistic exercise scenarios based on the latest threat information. Completing the training and exercising against these scenarios provides a challenging programme for the Royal Marines to demonstrate their proficiency in the methods to detect, assess and mitigate a CBRN threat.

The three-week programme included Company-level attacks and scenarios concerning CBRN vignettes, concluding with a full-scale exercise involving government and industry scientists and more than 300 military personnel.

Major Rob Garside, from 40 Commando Royal Marines, said:

Working with Dstl means we have the most up-to-date information and a realistic exercise. This ensures we are well prepared for a CBRN operating environment. It is vital we can make rapid decisions and are able to protect and support specialists who come in to deal with any incident. On operations these specialists are on hand to advise and we must ensure we already have a strong understanding of their capabilities and what they require of us as a military force.

The Dstl lead for CBRN exercises said:

40 Commando would be first on the ground in the event of a CBRN incident. We ensure they're up to date on the latest threats and make the exercise truly realistic. They not only have to provide a fighting force in an unstable environment, they must also be able to assess the scene and know what they're dealing with.

Read also: US and European military operations in West Africa set the stage for broader war

That's where Dstl, PHE, AWE and the Defence CBRN Centre come in, as we provide the technical information the Marines require.

Find out more about Dstl's CBRN work

[Apr 03, 2018] Moscow Confronts London With 14 Questions on Skripal False Flag - Fabrication

Notable quotes:
"... fabricated case against Russia." ..."
"... "Have the samples of a chemical warfare agent of this type or its analogues been developed in France and if so, for what purpose?" ..."
"... "provocation," ..."
Apr 03, 2018 | russia-insider.com

Russia's Embassy in London has sent a list of 14 questions to the UK Foreign Ministry, demanding that it reveals details of the investigation into the nerve-agent poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

The questions , provided in full below, include a demand to clarify whether samples of the nerve agent А-234 (also known as "Novichok") have ever been developed in the UK. The embassy's statement calls the incident that started the recent diplomatic row a " fabricated case against Russia."

1. Why has Russia been denied the right of consular access to the two Russian citizens, who came to harm on British territory?

2. What specific antidotes and in what form were the victims injected with? How did such antidotes come into the possession of British doctors at the scene of the incident?

3. On what grounds was France involved in technical cooperation in the investigation of the incident, in which Russian citizens were injured?

4. Did the UK notify the OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) of France's involvement in the investigation of the Salisbury incident?

5. What does France have to do with the incident, involving two Russian citizens in the UK?

6. What rules of UK procedural legislation allow for the involvement of a foreign state in an internal investigation?

7. What evidence was handed over to France to be studied and for the investigation to be conducted?

8. Were the French experts present during the sampling of biomaterial from Sergei and Yulia Skripal?

9. Was the study of biomaterials from Sergei and Yulia Skripal conducted by the French experts and, if so, in which specific laboratories?

10. Does the UK have the materials involved in the investigation carried out by France?

11. Have the results of the French investigation been presented to the OPCW Technical Secretariat?

12. Based on what attributes was the alleged "Russian origin" of the substance used in Salisbury established?

13. Does the UK have control samples of the chemical warfare agent, which British representatives refer to as "Novichok"?

14. Have the samples of a chemical warfare agent of the same type as "Novichok" (in accordance to British terminology) or its analogues been developed in the UK?

A similar list, containing 10 questions , was sent to the French Foreign Ministry by the Russian Embassy in Paris. According to the document, Moscow wanted to know on what grounds France was involved in the British investigation into the Skripal poisoning.

Russia also demanded explanations on what made French experts conclude that the substance used in Salisbury attack was nerve agent А-234 and that it was of Russian origins. The final question on the list read: "Have the samples of a chemical warfare agent of this type or its analogues been developed in France and if so, for what purpose?"

Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were discovered on a bench in Salisbury in early March, with the UK claiming a Soviet-designed nerve agent was used against them. Without a proper investigation being carried out, London said it was "highly likely" that Russia was responsible for the attack and introduced sanctions against the country, including the expulsion of Russian diplomats.

Moscow has denied all accusations, decrying them as a "provocation," and demanded proof from the British side. However, London refused to cooperate with Russia on the case, denying its consular staff access to Russian citizen Yulia Skripal and turning down the request to provide a sample of the toxic substance in question.

Source: RT

[Apr 03, 2018] Strange coinsidence: toxic dagger exersize and the skripals poisoning

Apr 03, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

james | Apr 1, 2018 1:48:18 PM | 8

i can't get it out of my mind the coincidence of toxic dagger and the skripal as excuse to ostracize russia further..

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/exercise-toxic-dagger-the-sharp-end-of-chemical-warfare

i am sorry.. the timing just seems too coincidental... i guess i will be labeled a conspiracy theorists, as opposed to a coincidental theorist..

james , Apr 2, 2018 12:50:14 AM | 48

messed the link.. here it is straight.. sorry

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/exercise-toxic-dagger-the-sharp-end-of-chemical-warfare

[Apr 03, 2018] It turns out that Yulia Skripal logged into her social media account while in a coma

Apr 03, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Mischi | Apr 1, 2018 6:11:45 PM | 28

It turns out that Yulia Skripal logged into her social media account while in a coma.

https://www.fort-russ.com/2018/03/curiouser-and-curiouser-yulia-skripal-logged-into-vk-while-in-coma/

John Gilberts , Apr 2, 2018 3:51:19 AM | 54
Yulia Skripal Is Not Allowed To Telephone Her Grandmother

http://johnhelmer.net/yulia-skripal-is-not-allowed-to-telephone-her-grandmother/

[Apr 03, 2018] Yulia Skripal "improving rapidly" The unravelling of the Russian Novichok narrative by Chris Marsden

Notable quotes:
"... All over the world there is deep skepticism regarding the claims made by the UK government. This is more than justified. The faces may have changed since Blair's Labour Party produced its "dodgy dossiers" to justify war against Iraq in 2003, but not the hypocrisy, scheming and intrigue that the British bourgeoisie have developed to a fine art. ..."
Mar 31, 2018 | www.wsws.org

When placed in the context of the global anti-Russia propaganda campaign spearheaded by Britain's Conservative government, Thursday saw the greatest Easter miracle since Christ rose from the dead.

For weeks, the world's media has cited uncritically government claims that double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned March 4 with a "weapons grade" nerve agent, known as a Novichok.

The agent was described as so deadly that the comatose Skripals were unlikely to ever recover, and that if they did they would be brain damaged and physically compromised. On Wednesday there were even media headlines that their life support might have to be turned off.

Yet Thursday saw reports from Salisbury NHS foundation trust that 33-year-old Yulia is no longer in a critical condition and was "conscious and talking."

Yulia's apparent recovery blows a hole in an official narrative that, by rights, should sink it forever. Instead, as has happened on repeated occasions, the story will no doubt be modified as required. Nothing must be allowed to prevent the UK, in alliance with the United States, from continuing its push for further economic sanctions and the expulsion of diplomats to justify pre-existing plans for military aggression on Russia's borders and in the Middle East.

There are innumerable inconsistencies, contradictions and flat out lies in the case made against Russia. Above all there has been no convincing political explanation advanced as to why Russia would target the Skripals.

Nor is there anything linking the attempted murder of the pair to anyone -- least of all the Russian state and the government of President Vladimir Putin. For the government, everything hangs on the single assertion, based on undisclosed "findings" from Britain's Porton Down chemical weapons facility, that the Novichok nerve agent used was "of a type" developed in Russia and was so sophisticated, and its delivery so complicated, that a "state actor" must have been involved.

Maintaining this lie has involved an accumulation of smaller lies, which depended on their being accepted without question by the media. Even before the news regarding Yulia, this web of deceit was in danger of unravelling.

Initial reports after the March 4 discovery of the Skripals reported as the likely cause of their illness a "white powder" that was identified as the "opioid fentanyl." It was not until March 6 that Russia was officially suggested for possible involvement and March 7 before the Metropolitan Police first stated that a nerve agent was used.

On March 8, it was announced that a police officer, later named as Sgt. Nick Bailey, was seriously ill in hospital because he was one of the first responders to the incident. Police added that 21 people had received (unspecified) treatment.

Four days later, March 12, with hundreds of police and military personnel roaming Salisbury dressed in biohazard suits, sealing off the bench area where the Skripals were found, cordoning off the Zizzi restaurant at which they had dined earlier, etc., Prime Minister Theresa May told Parliament that Porton Down had identified the nerve agent as of Russian origin. It was therefore "highly likely" that Russia was responsible for the poisoning.

Russia has repeatedly denied possession of Novichoks, which were developed in the former Soviet Union. It has pointed out that other states now hostile to Russia, including Ukraine, could have possession and that its formula and the scientists involved are now both available to the UK and the US.

However, the issue raised by recent events is whether there is any proof whatsoever that a military-grade nerve agent was involved in the assassination attempt. Three related issues are of significance -- what a Novichok is, how it is delivered and what it is supposed to do.

After its supposed identification, Novichok was described as being "five to 10 times more lethal" than VX and sarin and, like them, either a liquid or a gas.

One of its creators, Vil Mirzayanov, who defected to the US, was interviewed March 16 by the Guardian , describing it as the "most powerful and unique chemical weapon in the world. "

No non-state actor had the capability of "weaponising" Novichok. "You can kill yourself it is impossible without high technical equipment No one country has these capabilities like Russia, because Russia invented, tested and weaponized Novichok."

"I believe they brought [in a] binary version," Mirzayanov said. "It's two ampules, small containers, like a big bullet, put them together in a spray or something, and after that, some mechanism which is mixing them, a couple seconds and after that you're shooting It could touch any skin and in a couple minutes would take effect."

Upon exposure "the effects are fast and dramatic." The nervous system is hit, victims are unable to breathe, they "cough and foam at the mouth," the "effects on the digestive system trigger vomiting," "muscles convulse Many of those affected will wet themselves and lose control of their bowels."

Given this account, the story of white powder naturally had to be abandoned. And it had to be explained how a Novichok was delivered in a way that allowed for such complexities and still meant that the Skripals left home for seven hours, during which time they went to the local pub, had a meal at a restaurant and only then collapsed.

The first story was that Yulia had unwittingly brought the agent into the country after it was planted in her suitcase. The second story is that it was placed on the Skripal's clothes -- supposedly accounting for the delayed impact. The third was that it was pumped as a gas through the air conditioning of the Skripal's car.

None of this made sense and things worsened after no one else suffered any ill effects. Various figures were given of hospital attendees, but all were released without treatment. On March 22, DS Bailey left Wiltshire Hospital -- making his own recovery several days in advance of Yulia.

Amid this debacle, May spoke in Parliament Tuesday boasting of the expulsions of 100 Russian diplomats by 18 nations, including 60 told to quit the US.

Speaking at the start of a debate on national security and Russia, May declared that Sergei and Yulia Skripal "remain critically ill in hospital. Sadly, late last week, doctors indicated that their condition is unlikely to change in the near future, and they may never recover fully."

If Yulia's recovery two days later were not embarrassing enough, the police also chose that day to announce that the delivery of the Novichok to its intended victims had been carried out by smearing it on the front door of Sergei's house!

No explanation was offered as to how this unsophisticated ruse remained undiscovered for weeks, or why no one other than the Skripals and DS Bailey had been impacted. Instead, the Metropolitan Police terrorist unit announced that it was now cordoning off a children's play area near the Skripal's home, while handing back control of the London Road cemetery, where Sergei's wife and son are buried, the Maltings shopping centre and the Ashley Wood complex to the Wiltshire police.

All over the world there is deep skepticism regarding the claims made by the UK government. This is more than justified. The faces may have changed since Blair's Labour Party produced its "dodgy dossiers" to justify war against Iraq in 2003, but not the hypocrisy, scheming and intrigue that the British bourgeoisie have developed to a fine art.

[Apr 03, 2018] Was the Alleged Skripal Poisoning Incident an Elaborate Hoax by Stephen Lendman

Notable quotes:
"... Was whatever happened on March 4 to father and daughter Skripal something other than what the official narrative reported? ..."
"... On March 31, Fort Russ reported that Yulia Skripal , Sergey's daughter, "visited her 'Vkontakte' (social media) page on the morning of March 7" – three days after the alleged poisoning incident. The official narrative claimed she and her father were in a coma, poisoned by a deadly military-grade nerve agent. It's possible someone else hacked into her site, but for what reason, surely not UK or US operatives, wanting no information conflicting with the official narrative getting out. If hacking occurred, forensic analysis could determine it, nothing suggesting it so far. ..."
"... On March 29, Salisbury District Hospital Dr. Christine Blanshard explained Yulia's condition improved markedly. She's "conscious and talking," no longer in critical condition. Was she ever as ill as officially reported, or if so, what is the hospital's diagnosis? Will Sergey Skripal's condition be reported improved ahead, recovering steadily? ..."
"... Clearly, whatever may have affected them wasn't a military-grade nerve agent. They and other Salisbury residents they had contact with would have been dead in minutes if poisoned by something this deadly. A few obvious lessons can be drawn from the above information. Never accept official narratives at face value on most everything – including major media reports. Most often they're meant to deceive, not accurately explain things. ..."
"... The alleged Skripal incident is the latest US/UK political assault on Russia – public enemy number one in Washington and London. Almost surely more provocative shoes will drop ahead, likely more serious, the trend heading in this direction. If Washington could pull off the elaborate mother of all 9/11 false flags, most Americans still believing the official Big Lie, staging the Skripal affair by the US and Britain would be simple by comparison. Escalating US/UK-led hostility toward Russia heads things perilously toward East/West confrontation – the ominous risk of nuclear war. ..."
Apr 02, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

Was whatever happened on March 4 to father and daughter Skripal something other than what the official narrative reported?

Did anything at all happen? Were the Skripals poisoned or ill for another reason? Did Britain conceal the truth about the whole ugly business – a scheme to frame Russia for what it had nothing to do with?

When inflammatory headlines unquestionably support the official narrative, bet on disinformation and Big Lies substituting for truth-telling.

Russia was framed for perhaps what never happened – at least not as officially claimed.

On March 31, Fort Russ reported that Yulia Skripal , Sergey's daughter, "visited her 'Vkontakte' (social media) page on the morning of March 7" – three days after the alleged poisoning incident. The official narrative claimed she and her father were in a coma, poisoned by a deadly military-grade nerve agent. It's possible someone else hacked into her site, but for what reason, surely not UK or US operatives, wanting no information conflicting with the official narrative getting out. If hacking occurred, forensic analysis could determine it, nothing suggesting it so far.

On March 29, Salisbury District Hospital Dr. Christine Blanshard explained Yulia's condition improved markedly. She's "conscious and talking," no longer in critical condition. Was she ever as ill as officially reported, or if so, what is the hospital's diagnosis? Will Sergey Skripal's condition be reported improved ahead, recovering steadily?

Clearly, whatever may have affected them wasn't a military-grade nerve agent. They and other Salisbury residents they had contact with would have been dead in minutes if poisoned by something this deadly. A few obvious lessons can be drawn from the above information. Never accept official narratives at face value on most everything – including major media reports. Most often they're meant to deceive, not accurately explain things.

The alleged Skripal incident is the latest US/UK political assault on Russia – public enemy number one in Washington and London. Almost surely more provocative shoes will drop ahead, likely more serious, the trend heading in this direction. If Washington could pull off the elaborate mother of all 9/11 false flags, most Americans still believing the official Big Lie, staging the Skripal affair by the US and Britain would be simple by comparison. Escalating US/UK-led hostility toward Russia heads things perilously toward East/West confrontation – the ominous risk of nuclear war.

That's the scary reality ahead if madness defining US policy isn't curbed.

*

Region: Europe , Russia and FSU Theme: Media Disinformation , US NATO War Agenda In-depth Report: FAKE INTELLIGENCE

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org ( Home – Stephen Lendman ). Contact at [email protected] .

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

[Apr 03, 2018] UK investigators set to hide the truth, not find it Litvinenko's father on Skripal case

Notable quotes:
"... "nuclear terrorism." ..."
"... "the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since World War II." ..."
"... "deals with its enemies." ..."
"... "They realized that they have screwed up big time [with the Litvinenko poisoning] and decided to change their tactics a bit. Therefore, they do not show [any evidence] now, but keep it all in secret waiting for Russia to react to it. If there was, as they say, the 'Russian trace' there, everything would have been clear long time ago," ..."
"... "It's the same with Sasha [Aleksandr], if there was the 'Russian trace,' it would emerge over and over again up to this day. But the Scotland Yard was not looking for a criminal. Scotland Yard was covering the tracks," ..."
"... "Now they do not want to show these tracks altogether, since they know they will have to cover them up the same way as with Sasha." ..."
"... "It will be very difficult to hide it all. And they will eventually fail. They will be caught, and Theresa May will be very ashamed. And this clown, their Foreign Minister [Boris Johnson] – he will be very ashamed too." ..."
"... "They are hostages, all of them are hostages of the American authorities, who strive for the world dominance. As long as that's the case – they will kill the Russians, they'll kill anybody who's against it," Litvinenko said. The wealthy Russians in the UK "are all dependent on the authorities... They are being kept only for their money. And when something happens, they will be blatantly robbed, like it happened to Berezovsky." ..."
"... "It's not beneficial for them if Skripal stays alive. And this girl – she knows nothing. Skripal knows. She simply came to visit her father and got into this," Litvinenko said. "They'll let his daughter walk away, probably. But if she knows anything, she won't get out of it either." ..."
Apr 03, 2018 | www.rt.com

Fugitive Russians in the UK are effectively "hostages" of Western spy agencies, the father of Alexander Litvinenko, an intelligence officer who was poisoned in London a decade ago, told RT, sharing his insight on the Skripal case. Walter Litvinenko used to support the theory of Russia's involvement in the 2006 poisoning of his son, Alexander, in London, but he changed his mind after years of analyzing the inconsistencies of the investigation. London said that the fugitive Russian intelligence officer was poisoned with a highly radioactive Polonium-210. Despite an inconclusive investigation, it pinned the blame on Moscow, while the incident was branded as the first ever act of "nuclear terrorism." Russia has vehemently denied the allegations of its involvement in the incident. Read more UK may have staged Skripal poisoning to rally people against Russia, Moscow believes

The poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury on March 4, was, in turn, labeled "the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since World War II." While it bears similarities to the poisoning of Litvinenko, it was handled with different tactics, Walter Litvinenko told RT.

Litvinenko senior says the poisoning of his son was designed as a widely-publicized false-flag operation to show the world that Moscow was extremely "cruel," and the way that it allegedly "deals with its enemies." The ongoing Skripal scandal, in its turn, was launched to provoke a reaction from Russia, he believes.

"They realized that they have screwed up big time [with the Litvinenko poisoning] and decided to change their tactics a bit. Therefore, they do not show [any evidence] now, but keep it all in secret waiting for Russia to react to it. If there was, as they say, the 'Russian trace' there, everything would have been clear long time ago," Litvinenko said.

He believes that, given the different goal, the ongoing investigation is significantly less transparent than it was back in 2006, since it is easier to hide the truth from the beginning than to try and swipe it under the rug afterward.

"It's the same with Sasha [Aleksandr], if there was the 'Russian trace,' it would emerge over and over again up to this day. But the Scotland Yard was not looking for a criminal. Scotland Yard was covering the tracks," Litvinenko stated. "Now they do not want to show these tracks altogether, since they know they will have to cover them up the same way as with Sasha."

READ MORE: Russian embassy in UK warns citizens about possible provocations in Britain

The Skripal scandal would eventually backfire on those who initiated it, Litvinenko said. "It will be very difficult to hide it all. And they will eventually fail. They will be caught, and Theresa May will be very ashamed. And this clown, their Foreign Minister [Boris Johnson] – he will be very ashamed too."

Devil's bargain

Litvinenko, who lost his son after the former officer of the Russian security service FSB fled Russia for London and cooperated with MI6 and Spanish police, says people like Alexander find themselves in a situation where they effectively become hostages of foreign governments and intelligence agencies. He said it applies to both the rich and powerful who have left Russia after having run-ins with the law, such as the late oligarch Boris Berezovsky, as well as less prominent citizens such as Sergei Skripal.

Read more Inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) arrive in Salisbury, UK March 21, 2018. © Peter Nicholls Russia has 13 questions to OPCW over Skripal case

"They are hostages, all of them are hostages of the American authorities, who strive for the world dominance. As long as that's the case – they will kill the Russians, they'll kill anybody who's against it," Litvinenko said. The wealthy Russians in the UK "are all dependent on the authorities... They are being kept only for their money. And when something happens, they will be blatantly robbed, like it happened to Berezovsky."

The fugitive oligarch, once one of the wealthiest Russians, was found dead at his home in the UK in 2014. The investigation did not conclusively determine whether he hanged himself with a scarf, or if he was strangled. Prior to his mysterious death, Berezovsky had lost most of his assets and his wealth waned.

Given the previous suspicious deaths of Russian nationals on British soil, Skripal's fate looks quite grim, Litvinenko believes. The daughter of the former double agent, Yulia, however, might get out of this situation alive, as she was seemingly in the wrong place at the wrong time. Assuming she was of no interest to the intelligence services, the recent reports on Yulia's conditions improving do not look that "miraculous," Litvinenko said.

"It's not beneficial for them if Skripal stays alive. And this girl – she knows nothing. Skripal knows. She simply came to visit her father and got into this," Litvinenko said. "They'll let his daughter walk away, probably. But if she knows anything, she won't get out of it either."

[Apr 02, 2018] Russophobia Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy by A. Tsygankov

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... I wanted to investigate whether the growing volume of criticism toward Russia, sometimes by people who could hardly claim to be knowledgeable about the country, concealed a political agenda. ..."
"... I discovered evidence of Russophobia shared by different circles within the American political class and promoted through programs and conferences at various think tanks, congressional testimonies, activities of NGOs, and the media. Russophobia is not merely a critique of Russia, but a critique beyond any sense of proportion, waged with the purpose of undermining the nation's political reputation. ..."
"... To these individuals, Russophobia is merely a means to pressure the Kremlin into submitting to the United States in the execution of its grand plans to control the world's most precious resources and geostrategic sites. In the meantime, Russia has grown increasingly resentful, and the war in the Caucasus in August 2008 has demonstrated that Russia is prepared to act unilaterally to stop what it views as US unilateralism in the former Soviet region. ..."
"... Anti-American attitudes are strongly present in Russian media and cultural products, as a response to the US policies of nuclear, energy, and military supremacy in the world. Extreme hegemonic policies tend to provoke an extreme response, and Russian nationalist movements and often commentators react harshly to what they view as unilateral encroachment on Russia's political system and foreign policy interests. Russia's reactions to these policies by the United States are highly negative and frequently inadequate, but hardly more extreme than the American hegemonic and imperial discourse. ..."
"... The central objective of the Lobby has been to preserve and strengthen America's power in the post-Cold War world through imperial or hegemonic policies. The Lobby has viewed Russia with its formidable nuclear power, energy reserves, and important geostrategic location as a major obstacle in achieving this objective. Even during the 1990s, when Russia looked more like a failing state3 than one capable of projecting power, some members of the American political class were worried about the future revival of the Eurasian giant as a revisionist power. In their percep- tion, it was essential to keep Russia in a state of military and economic weakness-not so much out of emotional hatred for the Russian people and their culture, but to preserve American security and promote its val- ues across the world. To many within the Lobby, Russophobia became a useful device for exerting pressures on Russia and controlling its policies. Although to some the idea of undermining and, possibly, dismembering Russia was personal, to others it was a necessity of power dictated by the realities of international politics. ..."
"... According to this dominant vision, there was simply no place in this "New American Century" for power competitors, and America was destined eventually to assume control over potentially threatening military capabilities and energy reserves of others. As the two founders of the Project for the New' American Century (PNAC), William Kristol and Robert Kagan, asserted when referring to the large military forces of Russia and China, "American statesmen today ought to recognize that their charge is not to await the arrival of the next great threat, but rather to shape the international environment to prevent such a threat from arising in the first place."4 ..."
"... Russia was either to agree to assist the United States in preserving its world-power status or be forced to agree. It had to either follow the U.S. interpretation of world affairs and develop a political and economic system sufficiently open to American influences or live as a pariah state, smeared by accusations of pernicious behavior, and in constant fear for its survival in the America-centered world. As far as the U.S. hegemonic elites were concerned, no other choice was available. ..."
"... This hegemonic mood was largely consistent with mainstream ideas within the American establishment immediately following the end of the Cold War. For example, 1989 saw the unification of Germany and the further meltdown of the Soviet Union, which some characterized as "the best period of U.S. foreign policy ever."5 President Jimmy Carter's former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski envisioned the upcoming victory of the West by celebrating the Soviet Union's "grand failure."6 ..."
"... Charles Krauthammer, went as far as to proclaim the arrival of the United States' "unipolar moment," a period in which only one super- power, the United States, would stand above the rest of the world in its military, economic, and ideological capacity ..."
"... The mid-1990s saw the emergence of post-Soviet Russophobia. The Lobby's ideology was not principally new, as it still contained the three central myths of Sovietophobia left over from the Cold War era: Russia is inherently imperialist, autocratic, and anti-Western. This ideology now had to be modified to the new conditions and promoted politically, which required a tightening of the Lobby's unity, winning new allies within the establishment, and gaining public support.15 ..."
"... During the period of 2003-2008, Vice President Richard Dick Cheney formed a cohesive and bipartisan group of Russia critics, who pushed for a more confrontational approach with the Kremlin. ..."
"... Cheney could not tolerate opposition to what he saw as a critical step in establishing worldwide US hegemony. He was also harboring the idea of controlling Russia's energy reserves.91 ..."
"... In Russia, however, the Cold War story has been mainly about sovereignty and independence, rather than Western-style liberalism. To many Russians it is a story of freedom from colonization by the West and of preserving important attributes of sovereign statehood. ..."
"... In a world where neocolonialism and cultural imperialism are potent forces, the idea of freedom as independence continues to have strong international appeal and remains a powerful alternative to the notion of liberal democracy. ..."
"... The West's unwillingness to recognize the importance of this legitimizing myth in the role of communist ideology has served as a key reason for the Cold War.5 Like their Western counterparts, the Soviets were debating over methods but not the larger assumptions that defined their struggle. ..."
"... Yet another analyst wrote "at the Cold War's end, the United States was given one of the great opportunities of history: to embrace Russia, the largest nation on earth, as partner, friend, ally. Our mutual interests meshed almost perfectly. There was no ideological, territorial, his- toric or economic quarrel between us, once communist ideology was interred. We blew it. We moved NATO onto Russia's front porch, ignored her valid interests and concerns, and, with our 'indispensable-nation' arrogance, treated her as a defeated power, as France treated Weimar Germany after Versailles."114 ..."
Jun 09, 2017 | www.amazon.com

It was during the spring of 2006 that I began this project. I wanted to investigate whether the growing volume of criticism toward Russia, sometimes by people who could hardly claim to be knowledgeable about the country, concealed a political agenda.

As I researched the subject, I discovered evidence of Russophobia shared by different circles within the American political class and promoted through programs and conferences at various think tanks, congressional testimonies, activities of NGOs, and the media. Russophobia is not merely a critique of Russia, but a critique beyond any sense of proportion, waged with the purpose of undermining the nation's political reputation.

... ... ....

Although a critical analysis of Russia and its political system is entirely legitimate, the issue is the balance of such analysis. Russia's role in the world is growing, yet many U.S. politicians feel that Russia doesn't matter in the global arena. Preoccupied with international issues, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, they find it difficult to accept that they now have to nego- tiate and coordinate their international policies with a nation that only yesterday seemed so weak, introspective, and dependent on the West. To these individuals, Russophobia is merely a means to pressure the Kremlin into submitting to the United States in the execution of its grand plans to control the world's most precious resources and geostrategic sites. In the meantime, Russia has grown increasingly resentful, and the war in the Caucasus in August 2008 has demonstrated that Russia is prepared to act unilaterally to stop what it views as US unilateralism in the former Soviet region.

And some in Moscow are tempted to provoke a much greater confrontation with Western states. The attitude of ignorance and self-righteousness toward Russia tells us volumes about the United States' lack of preparation for the twenty-first century's central challenges that include political instability, weapons proliferation, and energy insecurity. Despite the dislike of Russia by a considerable number of American elites, this attitude is far from universally shared. Many Americans understand that Russia has gone a long way from communism and that the overwhelming support for Putin's policies at home cannot be adequately explained by high oil prices and the Kremlin's manipulation of the public-despite the frequent assertions of Russophobic observers.

Balanced analysts are also aware that many Russian problems are typical difficulties that nations encounter with state-building, and should not be presented as indicative of Russia's "inherent drive" to autocracy or empire. As the United States and Russia move further to the twenty-first century, it will be increasingly important to redefine the relationship between the two nations in a mutually enriching way.

Political and cultural phobias are, of course, not limited to those of an anti-Russian nature. For instance, Russia has its share of America-phobia -- a phenomenon that I have partly researched in my book Whose World Order (Notre Dame, 2004) and in several articles. Anti-American attitudes are strongly present in Russian media and cultural products, as a response to the US policies of nuclear, energy, and military supremacy in the world. Extreme hegemonic policies tend to provoke an extreme response, and Russian nationalist movements and often commentators react harshly to what they view as unilateral encroachment on Russia's political system and foreign policy interests. Russia's reactions to these policies by the United States are highly negative and frequently inadequate, but hardly more extreme than the American hegemonic and imperial discourse.

The Anti-Russian Lobby

When the facile optimism was disappointed, Western euphoria faded, and Russophobia returned ... The new Russophobia was expressed not by the governments, but in the statements of out-of-office politicians, the publications of academic experts, the sensational writings of jour- nalists, and the products of the entertainment industry. (Rodric Braithwaite, Across the Moscow River, 2002)1

....

Russophobia is not a myth, not an invention of the Red-Brovvns, but a real phenomenon of political thought in the main political think tanks in the West . .. [T]he Yeltsin-Kozyrev's pro-U.S. "giveaway game" was approved across the ocean. There is reason to say that the period in ques- tion left the West with the illusion that Russia's role was to serve Washington's interests and that it would remain such in the future. (Sergei Mikoyati, International Affairs /October 2006j)2

This chapter formulates a theory of Russophobia and the anti-Russian lobby's influence on the U.S. Russia policy. 1 discuss the Lobby's objec- tives, its tactics to achieve them, the history of its formation and rise to prominence, and the conditions that preserved its influence in the after- math of 9/11.1 argue that Russophobia has been important to American hegemonic elites in pressuring Russia for economic and political conces- sions in the post-Cold War era.

1. Goals and Means

Objectives

The central objective of the Lobby has been to preserve and strengthen America's power in the post-Cold War world through imperial or hegemonic policies. The Lobby has viewed Russia with its formidable nuclear power, energy reserves, and important geostrategic location as a major obstacle in achieving this objective. Even during the 1990s, when Russia looked more like a failing state3 than one capable of projecting power, some members of the American political class were worried about the future revival of the Eurasian giant as a revisionist power. In their percep- tion, it was essential to keep Russia in a state of military and economic weakness-not so much out of emotional hatred for the Russian people and their culture, but to preserve American security and promote its val- ues across the world. To many within the Lobby, Russophobia became a useful device for exerting pressures on Russia and controlling its policies. Although to some the idea of undermining and, possibly, dismembering Russia was personal, to others it was a necessity of power dictated by the realities of international politics.

According to this dominant vision, there was simply no place in this "New American Century" for power competitors, and America was destined eventually to assume control over potentially threatening military capabilities and energy reserves of others. As the two founders of the Project for the New' American Century (PNAC), William Kristol and Robert Kagan, asserted when referring to the large military forces of Russia and China, "American statesmen today ought to recognize that their charge is not to await the arrival of the next great threat, but rather to shape the international environment to prevent such a threat from arising in the first place."4

Russia was either to agree to assist the United States in preserving its world-power status or be forced to agree. It had to either follow the U.S. interpretation of world affairs and develop a political and economic system sufficiently open to American influences or live as a pariah state, smeared by accusations of pernicious behavior, and in constant fear for its survival in the America-centered world. As far as the U.S. hegemonic elites were concerned, no other choice was available.

This hegemonic mood was largely consistent with mainstream ideas within the American establishment immediately following the end of the Cold War. For example, 1989 saw the unification of Germany and the further meltdown of the Soviet Union, which some characterized as "the best period of U.S. foreign policy ever."5 President Jimmy Carter's former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski envisioned the upcoming victory of the West by celebrating the Soviet Union's "grand failure."6

In his view, the Soviet "totalitarian" state was incapable of reform. Communism's decline was therefore irreversible and inevitable. It would have made the system's "practice and its dogma largely irrelevant to the human conditions," and communism would be remembered as the twentieth century's "political and intellectual aberration."7 Other com- mentators argued the case for a global spread of Western values. In 1990 Francis Fukuyama first formulated his triumphalist "end of history" thesis, arguing a global ascendancy of the Western-style market democracy.®

... ... ...

Marc Plattner declared the emergence of a "world with one dominant principle of legitimacy, democracy."9 When the Soviet system had indeed disintegrated, the leading establishment journal Foreign Affairs pronounced that "the Soviet system collapsed because of what it was, or more exactly, because of what it was not. The West 'won' because of what the democracies were-because they were free, prosperous and successful, because they did justice, or convincingly tried to do so."10 Still others, such as Charles Krauthammer, went as far as to proclaim the arrival of the United States' "unipolar moment," a period in which only one super- power, the United States, would stand above the rest of the world in its military, economic, and ideological capacity.11

In this context of U.S. triumphalism, at least some Russophobes expected Russia to follow the American agenda. Still, they were worried that Russia may still have surprises to offer and would recover as an enemy.12

Soon after the Soviet disintegration, Russia indeed surprised many, although not quite in the sense of presenting a power challenge to the United States. Rather, the surprise was the unexpectedly high degree of corruption, social and economic decay, and the rapid disappointment of pro-Western reforms inside Russia. By late 1992, the domestic economic situation was much worsened, as the failure of Western-style shock ther- apy reform put most of the population on the verge of poverty. Russia was preoccupied not with the projection of power but with survival, as poverty, crime, and corruption degraded it from the status of the indus- trialized country it once was. In the meantime, the economy was largely controlled by and divided among former high-ranking party and state officials and their associates. The so-called oligarchs, or a group of extremely wealthy individuals, played the role of the new post-Soviet nomenklatura; they influenced many key decisions of the state and suc- cessfully blocked the development of small- and medium-sized business in the country.13 Under these conditions, the Russophobes warned that the conditions in Russia may soon be ripe for the rise of an anti-Western nationalist regime and that Russia was not fit for any partnership with the United States.14

The mid-1990s saw the emergence of post-Soviet Russophobia. The Lobby's ideology was not principally new, as it still contained the three central myths of Sovietophobia left over from the Cold War era: Russia is inherently imperialist, autocratic, and anti-Western. This ideology now had to be modified to the new conditions and promoted politically, which required a tightening of the Lobby's unity, winning new allies within the establishment, and gaining public support.15

... ... ...

The impact of structural and institutional factors is further reinforced by policy factors, such as the divide within the policy community and the lack of presidential leadership. Not infrequently, politicians tend to defend their personal and corporate interests, and lobbying makes a difference in the absence of firm policy commitments.

Experts recognize that the community of Russia watchers is split and that the split, which goes all the way to the White House, has been responsible for the absence of a coherent policy toward the country. During the period of 2003-2008, Vice President Richard Dick Cheney formed a cohesive and bipartisan group of Russia critics, who pushed for a more confrontational approach with the Kremlin. The brain behind the invasion of Iraq, Cheney could not tolerate opposition to what he saw as a critical step in establishing worldwide US hegemony. He was also harboring the idea of controlling Russia's energy reserves.91

Since November 2004, when the administration launched a review of its policy on Russia,92 Cheney became a critically important voice in whom the Lobby found its advocate. Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and, until November 2004, Colin Powell opposed the vice president's approach, arguing for a softer and more accommodating style in relations with Moscow.

President Bush generally sided with Rice and Powell, but he proved unable to form a consistent Russia policy. Because of America's involvement in the Middle East, Bush failed to provide the leadership committed to devising mutually acceptable rules in relations with Russia that could have prevented the deterioration in their relationship. Since the end of 2003, he also became doubtful about the direction of Russia's domestic transformation.93 As a result, the promising post-9/11 cooperation never materialized. The new cold war and the American Sense of History

It's time we start thinking of Vladimir Putin's Russia as an enemy of the United States. (Bret Stephens, "Russia: The Enemy," The Wall Street Journal, November 28, 2006)

If today's reality of Russian politics continues ... then there is the real risk that Russia's leadership will be seen, externally and internally, as illegitimate. (John Edwards and Jack Kemp, "We Need to Be Tough with Russia," International Herald Tribune, July 12, 2006)

On Iran, Kosovo, U.S. missile defense, Iraq, the Caucasus and Caspian basin, Ukraine-the list goes on-Russia puts itself in conflict with the U.S. and its allies . . . here are worse models than the united Western stand that won the Cold War the first time around.

("Putin Institutionalized," The Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2007) In order to derail the U.S.-Russia partnership, the Lobby has sought to revive the image of Russias as an enemy of the United States. The Russophobic groups have exploited important differences between the two countries' historical self-perceptions, presenting those differences as incompatible.

1. Contested History

Two versions of history

The story of the Cold War as told from the U.S. perspective is about American ideas of Western-style democracy as rescued from the Soviet threat of totalitarian communism. Although scholars and politicians disagreed over the methods of responding to the Soviet threat, they rarely questioned their underlying assumptions about history and freedom.' It therefore should not come as surprise that many in the United States have interpreted the end of the Cold War as a victory of the Western freedom narrative. Celebrating the Soviet Union's "grand failure"-as Zbigniew Brzezinski put it2-the American discourse assumed that from now on there would be little resistance to freedom's worldwide progression. When Francis Fukuyama offered his bold summary of these optimistic feelings and asserted in a famous passage that "what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War... but the end of history as such,"3 he meant to convey the disappearance of an alternative to the familiar idea of free- dom, or "the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."4

In Russia, however, the Cold War story has been mainly about sovereignty and independence, rather than Western-style liberalism. To many Russians it is a story of freedom from colonization by the West and of preserving important attributes of sovereign statehood.

In a world where neocolonialism and cultural imperialism are potent forces, the idea of freedom as independence continues to have strong international appeal and remains a powerful alternative to the notion of liberal democracy. Russians formulated the narrative of independence centuries ago, as they successfully withstood external invasions from Napoleon to Hitler. The defeat of the Nazi regime was important to the Soviets because it legitimized their claims to continue with the tradition of freedom as independence.

The West's unwillingness to recognize the importance of this legitimizing myth in the role of communist ideology has served as a key reason for the Cold War.5 Like their Western counterparts, the Soviets were debating over methods but not the larger assumptions that defined their struggle.

This helps to understand why Russians could never agree with the Western interpretation of the end of the Cold War. What they find missing from the U.S. narrative is the tribute to Russia's ability to defend its freedom from expansionist ambitions of larger powers. The Cold War too is viewed by many Russians as a necessarily defensive response to the West's policies, and it is important that even while occupying Eastern Europe, the Soviets never celebrated the occupation, emphasizing instead the war vic- tory.6 The Russians officially admitted "moral responsibility" and apolo- gized for the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia.7 They may be prepared to fully recognize the postwar occupation of Eastern Europe, but only in the context of the two sides' responsibility for the Cold War. Russians also find it offensive that Western VE Day celebrations ignore the crucial contribution of Soviet troops, even though none of the Allies, as one historian put it, "paid dearer than the Soviet Union for the victory. Forty Private Ivans fell in battle to every Private Ryan."8 Victory over Nazi Germany constitutes, as another Russian wrote, "the only undisputable foundation of the national myth."9

If the two sides are to build foundations for a future partnership, the two historical narratives must be bridged. First, it is important to recognize the difficulty of negotiating a common meaning of freedom and accept that the idea of freedom may vary greatly across nations. The urge for freedom may be universal, but its social content is a specific product of national his- tories and local circumstances. For instance, the American vision of democracy initially downplayed the role of elections and emphasized selection by merit or meritocracy. Under the influence of the Great Depression, the notion of democracy incorporated a strong egalitarian and poverty-fighting component, and it was not until the Cold War- and not without its influence-that democracy has become associated with elections and pluralistic institutions.10 Second, it is essential to acknowledge the two nations' mutual respon- sibility for the misunderstanding that has resulted in the Cold War. A historically sensitive account will recognize that both sides were thinking in terms of expanding a territorial space to protect their visions of security. While the Soviets wanted to create a buffer zone to prevent a future attack from Germany, the Americans believed in reconstructing the European continent in accordance with their ideas of security and democracy. A mutual mistrust of the two countries' leaders exacerbated the situation, making it ever more difficult to prevent a full-fledged political confronta- tion. Western leaders had reason to be suspicious of Stalin, who, in his turn, was driven by the perception of the West's greed and by betrayals from the dubious Treaty of Versailles to the appeasement of Hitler in Munich. Arrangements for the post-World War II world made by Britain, the USSR, and the United States proved insufficient to address these deep-seated suspicions.

In addition, most Eastern European states created as a result of the Versailles Treaty were neither free nor democratic and collaborated with Nazi Germany in its racist and expansionist policies. The European post-World War 1 security system was not working properly, and it was only a matter of time before it would have to be transformed.

Third, if an agreeable historical account is to emerge, it would have to accept that the end of the Cold War was a product of mutually beneficial a second Cold War, "it also does not want the reversal of the U.S. geopolitical gains that it made in the decade or so after the end of the Cold War."112 Another expert asked, "What possible explanation is there for the fact that today-at a moment when both the U.S. and Russia face the common enemy of Islamist terrorism-hard-liners within the Bush administration, and especially in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, are arguing for a new tough line against Moscow along the lines of a scaled-down Cold War?"113

Yet another analyst wrote "at the Cold War's end, the United States was given one of the great opportunities of history: to embrace Russia, the largest nation on earth, as partner, friend, ally. Our mutual interests meshed almost perfectly. There was no ideological, territorial, his- toric or economic quarrel between us, once communist ideology was interred. We blew it. We moved NATO onto Russia's front porch, ignored her valid interests and concerns, and, with our 'indispensable-nation' arrogance, treated her as a defeated power, as France treated Weimar Germany after Versailles."114

[Apr 02, 2018] Russia 'Novichok' Hysteria Proves Politicians and Media Haven't Learned the Lessons of Iraq by Patrick Henningsen

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Russian conspiracy ..."
"... La Résistance ..."
"... espionage – ..."
"... Reds under the bed. The Russian are coming, etc. ..."
"... shoulder to shoulder. ..."
Mar 31, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

The current state of anti-Russia hysteria is reminiscent of earlier dark chapters of American history, including the rush to war in Iraq of the early 2000s and McCarthyism of the 1950s, Patrick Henningsen observes.

If there's one thing to be gleaned from the current atmosphere of anti-Russian hysteria in the West, it's that the US-led sustained propaganda campaign is starting to pay dividends. It's not only the hopeless political classes and media miscreants who believe that Russia is hacking, meddling and poisoning our progressive democratic utopia – with many pinning their political careers to this by now that's it's too late for them to turn back.

As it was with Iraq in 2003, these dubious public figures require a degree of public support for their policies, and unfortunately many people do believe in the grand Russian conspiracy , having been sufficiently brow-beaten into submission by around-the-clock fear mongering and official fake news disseminated by government and the mainstream media.

What makes this latest carnival of warmongering more frightening is that it proves that the political and media classes never actually learned or internalized the basic lessons of Iraq , namely that the cessation of diplomacy and the declarations of sanctions (a prelude to war) against another sovereign state should not be based on half-baked intelligence and mainstream fake news . But that's exactly what is happening with this latest Russian 'Novichok' plot.

Admittedly, the stakes are much higher this time around. The worst case scenario is unthinkable, whereby the bad graces of men like John Bolton and other military zealots, there may just be a thin enough mandate to short-sell another military conflagration or proxy war – this time against another nuclear power and UN Security Council member.

Enter stage right, where US President Donald Trump announced this week that the US is moving closer to war footing with Russia. It's not the first time Trump has made such a hasty move in the absence any forensic evidence of a crime. Nowadays, hearsay, conjecture and social media postings are enough to declare war. Remember last April with the alleged "Sarin Attack" in Khan Sheikhoun , when the embattled President squeezed off 59 Tomahawk Cruise missiles against Syria – a decision, which as far as anyone can tell, was based solely on a few YouTube videos uploaded by the illustrious White Helmets . Back then Trump learned how an act of war against an existential enemy could take the heat off at home and translate into a bounce in the polls. Even La Résistance at CNN were giddy with excitement and threw their support behind Trump, with some pundits describing his decision to act as "presidential."

As with past high-profile western-led WMD allegations against governments in Syria and Iraq (the US and UK are patently unconcerned with multiple allegations of 'rebel' terrorists in Syria caught using chemical weapons ), an identical progression of events appears to be unfolding following the alleged 'Novichok' chemical weapon poisoning of retired British-Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, Wiltshire on March 4.

Despite a lack of evidence presented to the public other than the surreptitious "highly likely" assessments of British Prime Minister Theresa May and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, President Trump once again has caved into pressure from Official Washington's anti-Russian party line and ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats – whom he accused of being spies. Trump also ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle, citing speculative fears that Russia might be spying on a nearby Boeing submarine development base. It was the second round of US expulsions of Russian officials, with the first one ordered by the outgoing President Obama in December 2016, kicking out 35 Russian diplomats and their families (including their head chef) and closing the Russian Consulate in San Francisco, with some calling it "a den of spies".

Trump's move followed an earlier UK action on March 14th, which expelled 23 Russian diplomats also accused of being spies. This was in retaliation for the alleged poisoning of a retired former Russian-British double agent in Salisbury, England.

The 'Collective' Concern

It's important to understand how this week's brash move by Washington was coordinated in advance. The US and the UK are relying on their other NATO partners, including Germany, Poland, Italy, Canada, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Estonia and Lithuania – to create the image of a united front against perceived 'Russian aggression.' As with multilateral military operations, multilateral diplomatic measures like this are not carried out on a whim.

Aside from this, there are two seriously worrying aspects of this latest US-led multilateral move against Russia. Firstly, this diplomatic offensive against Russia mirrors a NATO collective defense action, and by doing so, it tacitly signals towards an invocation of Article 5. According to AP , one German spokesperson called it a matter of 'solidarity' with the UK. Statements from the White House are no less encouraging:

"The United States takes this action in conjunction with our NATO allies, and partners around the world in response with Russia's use of a military grade chemical weapon on the soil of the United Kingdom -- the latest in its ongoing pattern of destabilizing activities around the world," the White House said . "Today's actions make the United States safer by reducing Russia's ability to spy on Americans, and to conduct covert operations that threaten America's national security."

What this statement indicates is that any Russian foreign official or overseas worker in the West should be regarded as possible agents of espionage. In other words, the Cold War is now officially back on.

Then came this statement: "With these steps, the United States and our allies and partners make clear to Russia that its actions have consequences."

In an era of power politics, this language is anything but harmless. And while US and UK politicians and media pundits seem to be treating it all as a school yard game at times, we should all be reminded that his is how wars start.

The second issue with the Trump's diplomatic move against Russia is that it extends beyond the territorial US – and into what should be regarded at the neutral zone of the United Nations. As part of the group of 60 expulsions, the US has expelled 12 Russian diplomats from the United Nations in New York City. While this may mean nothing to jumped-up political appointees like Nikki Haley who routinely threaten the UN when a UNGA vote doesn't go her way, this is an extremely dangerous precedent because it means that the US has now created a diplomatic trap door where legitimate international relations duties are being carelessly rebranded as espionage – done on a whim and based on no actual evidence.

By using this tactic, the US is casting aside decades of international resolutions, treaties and laws. Such a move directly threatens to undermine a fundamental principle of the United Nations which is its diplomatic mission and the right for every sovereign nation to have diplomatic representation. Without it, there is no UN forum and countries cannot talk through their differences and negotiate peaceful settlements. This is why the UN was founded in the first place. Someone might want to remind Nikki Haley of that.

On top of this, flippant US and UK officials are already crowing that Russia should be kicked off the UN Security Council. In effect, Washington is trying to cut the legs out from a fellow UN Security Council member and a nuclear power. This UNSC exclusion campaign been gradually building up since 2014, where US officials have been repeated blocked by Russia over incidents in Syria and the Ukraine . Hence, Washington and its partners are frustrated with the UN framework, and that's probably why they are so actively undermining it.

Those boisterous calls, as irrational and ill-informed as they might be, should be taken seriously because as history shows, these signs are a prelude to war.

Also, consider the fact that both the US and Russia have military assets deployed in Syria. How much of the Skripal case and the subsequent fall-out has to do with the fact that US Coalition and Gulf state proxy terrorists have lost their hold over key areas in Syria? The truly dangerous part of this equation is that the illegal military occupation by the US and its NATO ally Turkey of northeastern Syria is in open violation of international law, and so Washington and its media arms would like nothing more than to be history's actor and bury its past indiscretions under a new layer of US-Russia tension in the Middle East.

Another WMD Debacle?

Is it really possible to push East-West relations over the edge on the basis of anecdotal evidence?

Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray , highlighted the recent British High Court judgement which states in writing that the government's own chemical weapons experts from the Porton Down research facility could not categorically confirm that a Russian 'Novichok' nerve agent was actually used in the Salisbury incident. Based on this, Murray believes that both British Prime Minster Theresa May and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, and Britain's deputy UN representative Jonathan Allen – have all lied to the public and the world when making their public statements that the Russians had in fact launched a deadly chemical weapons attack on UK soil. Murray states elaborates on this key point:

"This sworn Court evidence direct from Porton Down is utterly incompatible with what Boris Johnson has been saying. The truth is that Porton Down have not even positively identified this as a 'Novichok', as opposed to "a closely related agent". Even if it were a 'Novichok' that would not prove manufacture in Russia , and a 'closely related agent' could be manufactured by literally scores of state and non-state actors.

"This constitutes irrefutable evidence that the government have been straight out lying – to Parliament, to the EU, to NATO, to the United Nations, and above all to the people – about their degree of certainty of the origin of the attack. It might well be an attack originating in Russia, but there are indeed other possibilities and investigation is needed. As the government has sought to whip up jingoistic hysteria in advance of forthcoming local elections, the scale of the lie has daily increased."

Murray has been roundly admonished by the UK establishment for his views, but he is still correct to ask the question: how could UK government leaders have known 'who did it' in advance of any criminal forensic investigation or substantive testing by Porton Down or an independent forensic investigation by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)?

One would hope we could all agree that it's this sort of question which should have been given more prominence in the run-up to the Iraq War. In matters of justice and jurisprudence, that's a fundamental question and yet, once again – it has been completely bypassed.

Murray is not alone. A number of scientists and journalists have openly questioned the UK's hyperbolic claims that Russia had ordered a 'chemical attack' on British soil. In her recent report for the New Scientist , author Debora MacKenzie reiterates the fact that several countries could have manufactured a 'Novichok' class nerve agent and used it in the chemical attack on Russians Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury.

"British Prime Minister Theresa May says that because it was Russia that developed Novichok agents, it is 'highly likely' that Russia either attacked the Skripals itself, or lost control of its Novichok to someone else who did . But other countries legally created Novichok for testing purposes after its existence was revealed in 1992, and a production method has even been published."

The New Scientist also quotes Ralf Trapp, a chemical weapons consultant formerly with the OPCW, who also reiterates a point worth reminding readers of – that inspectors are only able to tell where molecules sampled in Salisbury have come from if they have reference samples for the ingredients used.

"I doubt they have reference chemicals for forensic analysis related to Russian CW agents," says Trapp. "But if Russia has nothing to hide they may let inspectors in."

Even if they can identify it as Novichok, they cannot say that it came from Russia, or was ordered by the Russian government, not least of all because the deadly recipe is available on Amazon for only $28.45 .

It should be noted that a substantial amount of evidence points to only two countries who are the most active in producing and testing biological and chemical weapons WMD – the United States and Great Britain. Their programs also include massive 'live testing' on both humans and animals with most of this work undertaken at the Porton Down research facility located only minutes away from the scene of this alleged 'chemical attack' in Salisbury, England.

Problems with the Official Story

If we put aside for the moment any official UK government theory, which is based on speculation backed-up by a series of hyperbolic statements and proclamations of Russian guilt, there are still many fundamental problems with the official story – maybe too many to list here, but I will address what I believe are a few key items of interest.

The UK police have now released a statement claiming that the alleged 'Novichok' nerve agent was somehow administered at the front door of Sergie Skripal's home in Wiltshire. This latest official claim effectively negates the previous official story because it means that the Skripals would have been exposed a home at the latest around 13:00 GMT on March 4th, and then drove into town, parking their car at Sainsbury's car park, then having a leisurely walk to have drinks at The Mill Pub, before for ordering and eating lunch at Zizzis restaurant, and then finally leaving the Zizzis and walking before finally retiring on a park bench – where emergency services were apparently called at 16:15 GMT to report an incident.

Soon after, local police arrived on the scene to find the Skripals on the bench in an "extremely serious condition." Based on this story, the Skripals would have been going about their business for 3 hours before finally falling prey to the deadly WMD 'Novichok'. From this, one would safely conclude that whatever has poisoned the pair was neither lethal nor could it have been a military grade WMD. Even by subtracting the home doorway exposure leg of this story, the government's claim hardly adds up – as even a minor amount of any real lethal military grade WMD would have effected many more people along this timeline of events. Based on what we know so far, it seems much more plausible that the pair would have been poisoned at Zizzis restaurant, and not with a military grade nerve agent.

When this story initially broke, we were also told that the attending police officer who first arrived on the scene of this incident, Wiltshire Police Detective Sgt. Nick Bailey – was "fighting for his life" after being exposed to the supposed 'deadly Russian nerve agent'. As it turned out, officer Bailey was treated in hospital and then discharged on March 22, 2018. To our knowledge, no information or photos of Bailey's time in care are available to the public so we cannot know the trajectory of his health, or if he was even exposed to the said "Novichok'.

In the immediate aftermath, the public were also told initially that approximately 4o people were taken into medical care because of "poison exposure". This bogus claim was promulgated by some mainstream media outlets, like Rupert Murdoch's Times newspaper . In reality, no one showed signed of "chemical weapons" exposure, meaning that this story was just another example of mainstream corporate media fake news designed to stoke tension and fear in the public. We exposed this at the time on the UK Column News here:

To further complicate matters, this week we were told that Yulia Skripal has now turned the corner and is in recovery, and is speaking to police from her hospital bed. If this is true, then it further proves that whatever the alleged poison agent was which the Skripals were exposed to – it was not a lethal, military grade nerve agent. If it had been, then most likely the Skripals and many others would not be alive right now.

Unfortunately, in this new age of state secrecy, we can expect that most of the key information relating to this case may be sealed indefinitely under a national security letter. In the case of Porton Down scientist David Kelly , the key information is sealed (hidden) for another 60+ years (if we're lucky, we might get to see it in the year 2080). This means that we just have to take their word for it, or to borrow the words of the newly crowed UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson – any one asking questions, "should just go away and shut up." Such is the lack of decorum and transparency in this uncomfortably Orwellian atmosphere.

While Britain insists that it has 'irrefutable proof' that Russia launched a deadly nerve-gas attack to murder the Skripals, the facts simply do not match-up to the rhetoric.

The Litvinenko Conspiracy

It's important to note that as far as public perceptions are concerned, the official Skripal narrative has been built directly on top of the Litvinenko case.

In order to try and reinforce the government's speculative arguments, the UK establishment has resurrected the trial-by-media case of another Russian defector, former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who is said to have died after being poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 in his tea at a restaurant in London's Mayfair district in late 2006.

Despite not having any actual evidence as to who committed the crime, the British authorities and the mainstream media have upheld an almost religious belief that the Russian FSB (formerly KGB), under the command of Vladimir Putin, had ordered the alleged radioactive poisoning of Litvinenko.

The media mythos was reinforced in 2016, when a British Public Inquiry headed by Sir Robert Owen accused senior Russian officials of 'probably having motives to approve the murder' of Litvinenko. Again, this level of guesswork and speculation would never meet the standard of an actual forensic investigation worthy of a real criminal court of law, but so far as apportioning blame to another nation or head of state is concerned – it seems fair enough for British authorities.

Following the completion of the inquiry, Sir Robert had this to say: "Taking full account of all the evidence and analysis available to me, I find that the FSB operation to kill Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr Patrushev and also by President Putin."

Contrary to consensus reality (popular belief), Owen's inquiry was not at all definitive. Quite the opposite in fact, and in many ways it mirrors how the Skripal case has been presented to the public. Despite offering no evidence of any criminal guilt, Owen's star chamber maintained that Vladimir Putin "probably" approved the operation to assassinate Litvinenko. Is "probably" really enough to assign guilt in a major international crime? When it comes to high crimes of state, the answer seems to be yes .

According to Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova , that UK inquiry was "neither transparent nor public" and was "conducted mostly behind doors, with classified documents and unnamed witnesses contributing to the result "

Zakharova highlighted the fact that two key witnesses in the case – Litvinenko's chief patron, a UK-based anti-Putin defector billionaire oligarch named Boris Berezovsky, and the owner of Itsu restaurant in London's Mayfair where the incident is said to have taken place, had both suddenly died under dubious circumstances.

The British authorities went on to accuse two Russian men in the Litvineko murder – businessman Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun. Both have denied the accusations. Despite the lack of any real evidence, the United States Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control blacklisted both Lugovoi and Kovtun, as well as Russian persons Stanislav Gordievsky, Gennady Plaksin and Aleksandr I. Bastrykin – under the Magnitsky Act , which freezes their assets held in American financial institutions, and bans them from conducting any transactions or traveling to the United States.

Notice the familiar pattern: even if the case is inconclusive, or collapses due to a lack of evidence, the policies remain in place.

Despite all the pomp and circumstance however, Owen's official conspiracy theory failed to sway even Litvinenko's own close family members. While Litvinenko's widow Marina maintains that it was definitely the Russian government who killed her husband, Alexsander's younger brother Maksim Litvinenko, based in Rimini, Italy, believes the British report "ridiculous" to blame the Kremlin for the murder of his brother, stating that he believes British security services had more of a motive to carry out the assassination.

"My father and I are sure that the Russian authorities are not involved. It's all a set-up to put pressure on the Russian government," said Litvinenko to the Mirror newspaper, and that such reasoning can explain why the UK waited almost 10 years to launch the inquiry his brother's death.

Maxim also said that Britain had more reason to kill his brother than the Russians, and believes that blaming Putin for the murder was part of a wider effort to smear Russia. Following the police investigation, Alexander's father Walter Litvinenko, also said that he had regretted blaming Putin and the Russian government for his son's death and did so under intense pressure at the time.

For anyone skeptical of the official proclamations of the British state and the mainstream media on the Litvinenko case, it's worth reading the work of British journalist Will Dunkerly here .

With so many questions hanging over the actually validity of the British state's accusations against Russia, it's somewhat puzzling that British police would say they are still 'looking for similarities' between the Skripal and Litvinenko cases in order to pinpoint a modus operandi.

The admission by the British law enforcement that their investigation may take months before any conclusion can be drawn also begs the question: how could May have been so certain so quick? The answer should be clear by now: she could not have known it was a 'Novichok' agent, no more than she could know the 'Russia did it.'

A Plastic Cold War

Historically speaking, in the absence of any real mandate or moral authority, governments suffering from an identity crisis, or a crisis of legitimacy will often try and define themselves not based on what they stand for, but rather what (or who) they are in opposition to. This profile suits both the US and UK perfectly at the moment.

Both governments are limping along with barely a mandate, and have orchestrated two of the worst and most hypocritical debacles in history with their illegal wars in both Syria and Yemen. With their moral high-ground a thing of the past, these two countries require a common existential enemy in order to give their international order legitimacy. The cheapest, easiest option is to reinvigorate a framework which was already there, which is the Cold War framework: Reds under the bed. The Russian are coming, etc.

It's cheap and it's easy because it has already been seeded with 70 years of Cold War propaganda and institutionalized racism in the West directed against Russians. If you don't believe me, just go look at some of the posters, watch the TV propaganda in the US, or read about the horrific McCarthyist blacklists and political witch hunts. I remember growing up in America and being taught "never again" and "we're past all of that now, those days of irrational paranoia are behind us, we're better than that now." But that madness of the past was not a fringe affair – it was a mainstream madness, and one which was actively promoted by government and mainstream media.

You would have to be at the pinnacle of ignorance to deny that this is exactly what we are seeing today, albeit a more plastic version, but just as immoral and dangerous. Neocons love it, and now liberals love it too.

Dutifully fanning the flaming of war, Theresa May has issued her approval of the NATO members diplomatic retaliation this week exclaiming, "We welcome today's actions by our allies, which clearly demonstrate that we all stand shoulder to shoulder in sending the strongest signal to Russia that it cannot continue to flout international law."

But from an international law perspective, can May's 'highly likely' assurances really be enough to position the west on war footing with Russia? When Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn asked these same fundamental questions on March 14th, he was shouted down by the Tory bench, and also by the hawkish Blairites sitting behind him.

Afterwards, the British mainstream press launched yet another defamation campaign against Corbyn, this time with the UK's Daily Mail calling the opposition leader a "Kremlin Stooge", followed by British state broadcaster the BBC who went through the effort of creating a mock-up graphic of Corbyn in front of the Kremlin (pictured above) apparently wearing a Russian hat, as if to say he was a Russian agent . It was a new low point in UK politics and media.

Considering the mainstream media's Corbyn smear alongside the recent insults hurled at Julian Assange by Tory MP Sir Alan Duncan who stood up in front of Parliament and called the Wikileaks founder a "miserable worm", what this really says is that anyone who dares defy the official state narrative will be beaten down and publicly humiliated. In other words, dissent in the political ranks will not be tolerated. It's almost as if we are approaching a one party state.

Would a UN Security Council member and nuclear power really be so brazen as to declare de facto war on another country without presenting any actual evidence or completing a genuine forensic investigation?

So why the apparent rush to war? Haven't we been here before, in 2003? Will the people of the West allow it to happen again?

As with T2ony Blair's WMD's in 2003, the British public are meant to take it on faith and never question the official government line. And just like in 2003, the UK has opened the first door on the garden path, with the US and its 'coalition' following safely behind, shoulder to shoulder. In this latest version of the story, Tony Blair is being played by Theresa May, and Jack Straw is being played by Boris Johnson.

On the other side of the pond, a hapless Bush is hapless Trump. Both Blair and Straw, along with the court propagandist Alastair Campbell – are all proven to have been liars of the highest order, and if there were any real accountability or justice, these men and their collaborators in government should be in prison right now. The fact they aren't is why the door has been left wide open for the exact same scam to be repeated again, and again.

Iraq should have taught us all to be skeptical about official claims of chemical weapons evidence, and to face the ugly truth about how most major wars throughout history have waged by the deception – and by western governments. What does it tell us about today's society if people still cannot see this?

That's why it was wrong to let Blair, Bush and others off the hook for war crimes. By doing so, both the British and Americans are inviting a dark phase of history to repeat itself again, and again.

It's high time that we break the cycle.

Author Patrick Henningsen is a global affairs analyst and founder of independent news and analysis site 21st Century Wire, and host of the SUNDAY WIRE weekly radio show broadcast globally over the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR).


Stephen J. , March 31, 2018 at 3:43 pm

The War Criminals are all in Solidarity with each other.
See more at link below.
http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2018/03/solidarity-among-war-criminals.html

Leo , March 31, 2018 at 8:33 pm

Trump is a businessman, and the biggest and most profitable business is a military spending. PR and advertising campaigns (like Salisbury ) are just a part of the game to keep wheels moving.

Leo , March 31, 2018 at 9:15 pm

One more note. At first I was puzzled by the stupidity of those who produced this cheap B-movie scenario of this Skipal show. Now I must admit that they are much smarter than I previously thought. As Joseph Goebbels said, the more unbelievable lie the easier to make people believe in it. And that is very simple to explain. Those who would try to analyse the unanalysable will not be able to come to a definite conclusion and there will be always a room for a doubt. Good job!

Abby , April 1, 2018 at 1:01 am

Moon of Alabama has been covering this and the latest post shows that this was planned as far back as 2009. Hillary is involved with this and while she was SOS she told her staff not discuss the book that had the information on how to make the poison. This is a little convenient, don't you think?

Good grief, there are so many holes in this story that I'm just frankly dumbfounded that people can't see through them. The timeline of where they got poisoned and then the number of people who had been exposed to it kept going up.

geeyp , April 1, 2018 at 3:03 am

To Stephen J. Gray: I agree with you 200%, and have said the exact same thing for years now. What a let down when the last President declared justice was off limits for these scoundrels! How the world could look now if justice was served then! Patrick J. Henningsen's piece here and his site 21st Century Wire, along with working with Vanessa and Eva, fill us in on what has transpired in Syria more than any other place, and I am pleased to see him represented here. I also love seeing him on "Crosstalk" on RT.

glitch , April 1, 2018 at 5:29 am

Second this!

Stephen J. , April 1, 2018 at 9:40 am

Hi geeyp, I believe we are ruled by total evil. Hopefully, there will be a day of reckoning and these villains will be put on trial.

http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2014/12/will-there-be-day-of-reckoning.html

Anna , April 1, 2018 at 4:18 pm

The current crop of "leaders" in the UK share the same trait -- the complete lack of dignity. It seems that immorality has become a prerequisite for entering the UK politics. Guess, The Friends of Israel have succeeded in educating Brits in accordance with Mossad' ethics, "By way of deception thou shalt do war."

Realist , March 31, 2018 at 4:51 pm

There is always reality and, offered in its place, the risible Washington narrative. Clearly, the world knows the difference just about every time, yet the world hegemon and its NATO vassals insist on the preposterous mythology and most of the rest go along out of fear. It's a frustrating trap that honest and rational people everywhere are forced to accept, unless they want to war in one form or another with the great bully. You go along with the Red Queen's six impossible things imagined before breakfast or it's off with your head!

We know the identities of the figureheads in whose name these outrages are promulgated–moral sell-outs for political grandeur like D.J. Trump, Nikki Haley and now John Bolton. What piques my curiosity would be the names of those powers lurking in the shadows who pull the strings of these figureheads. Who are the psychopaths that have been firmly directing Washington's endless wars with no deviation in their prosecution regardless of campaign promises, elections and warm bodies occupying offices? Who are the monsters that have put us on a certain collision course for nuclear war with Russia ginned up with an un-ending litany of lies, frame-ups, false narratives and aggressive military moves? Would it be people we've heard about? Is Sheldon Adelson essentially the defacto czar of the "Western alliance?" Or is he also only a front for truly Deep Slimeballs pulling the strings at the depths of the Deep State?

If the pope's pronouncements on hell, which presently has some prominent Catholics disconcerted that pain and suffering forever and ever without end is not a reasonable position for an all-knowing and all-loving diety to take, is the likely truth then, for many unfortunates, hell actually ends when their stay on earth is terminated courtesy of the blood-thirsty Washington maniacs who play god.

Sam F , April 1, 2018 at 8:17 am

Yes, the ultimate influencers are the great question. Those who follow the money and follow the motive find the nature of oligarchy and its factions, if not its commanders. Our tyranny is a subculture of bullies using all available forms of power: direct force, economic power, social, and information power, and in all modes of bribery, threat, and deception. We owe everything to our gangsters.

Abe , March 31, 2018 at 5:09 pm

"The fact that the alleged creator of Novichok agents – Vil Mirzayanov – fled to and currently lives in the United States suggests the West has both knowledge of and the means to create Novichok agents themselves.

"The UK's presumption that "only Russia" could have produced the agents when the creator of Novichok lives in the United States – and British labs clearly have access to the poison – is at face value contradictory and dishonest.

"Since the UK has refused to produce any tangible evidence, including producing samples under its obligations to the Chemical Weapons Convention, all that is left for the international community to consider is the source of these accusations. [ ]

"Just as the US and UK did during the lead up to the Iraq War in 2003, an avalanche of propaganda is being produced to stampede the world into backing whatever long-ago elected course of action the West has decided to take against Russia.

"In the hindsight of whatever course of action the UK and its allies decide to take in the coming days, weeks, and months based on the Skripal incident, who will play the role of 'Curveball' who supposedly duped Theresa May in making her Powell-style accusations before declaring her Bush-style retaliation?

"And considering the ramifications for the West regarding its lies in the lead up to Iraq and the fallout the West has faced in the aftermath of Iraq's destruction, what do Western policymakers expect to gain from an incident many times more transparently staged and self-serving against a world increasingly skeptical of their claims and actions?"

WMD Lies Strike Again: The Skripal Incident
By Tony Cartalucci
http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2018/03/wmd-lies-strike-again-skripal-incident.html

Bob H , March 31, 2018 at 6:00 pm

"The fact that the alleged creator of Novichok agents – Vil Mirzayanov – fled to and currently lives in the United States suggests the West has both knowledge of and the means to create Novichok agents themselves." very significant fact .if it was reported before, it flew right by me, although I was aware that Western "scientists" took samples of the Aral Sea stockpile during Yeltsin's chaotic administration.

Fred , March 31, 2018 at 7:08 pm

Here's a link to Moonof Alabama discussing Soviet defector Vil Mirzanyanov who wrote a book about his chemical work for the USSR; he now lives in Princeton, NJ.

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/03/russian-scientists-explain-novichok-high-time-for-britain-to-come-clean.html

Bob H , March 31, 2018 at 8:39 pm

Thanks Fred, the Zakharova interview was particularly revealing considering that the "Russian sounding" name "Novichok" was invented by Western sources, the Tory claim reeks of tampering with the facts. It reminds me of the sloppy "Steele investigation" into alleged Russian hacking where a trail of Russian "clues" seemed to be inserted by Christopher Steel's Fusion GPS. The fact that Steele himself is linked to both MI-6 and the DNC effort to hang Hillary's election loss on Putin should shift all suspicion onto the accusers, but.alas, the msm is not in the business of informing the public.

Abby , April 1, 2018 at 1:02 am

Moon of Alabama has updated the information on this and links it to Hillary. Gee, what a surprise, ehh?

Kathryn , March 31, 2018 at 11:13 pm

Even MORE interesting is that when she was US Sec of State, she along with the UK "ordered Diplomats To Suppress 'Novichok' Discussions! http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/03/clinton-state-department-discouraged-novichok-discussion.html#more

Bob H , April 1, 2018 at 1:14 am

Thanks Kathryn, both the article and the comment thread raise a lot of questions(the thread never ends). Many of the comments seem to be from people with considerable knowledge of the chemical composition and its possible effects,

Curious , March 31, 2018 at 9:01 pm

As the article states above, the book and recipe re: Vil Mirzayanov can be bought on Amazon for $28.45. This information has certainly been known by chemists worldwide.

Zachary Smith , March 31, 2018 at 5:32 pm

The UK police have now released a statement claiming that the alleged 'Novichok' nerve agent was somehow administered at the front door of Sergie Skripal's home in Wiltshire. This latest official claim effectively negates the previous official story because it means that the Skripals would have been exposed a home at the latest around 13:00 GMT on March 4th, and then drove into town, parking their car at Sainsbury's car park, then having a leisurely walk to have drinks at The Mill Pub, before for ordering and eating lunch at Zizzis restaurant, and then finally leaving the Zizzis and walking before finally retiring on a park bench – where emergency services were apparently called at 16:15 GMT to report an incident.

This is the material for a badly written cheap novel, yet the Brits have been pushing it and their Allies have been pretending to believe it. WHY is the big question I'd like to have answered. There were dozens of ways the Skripals could have been quietly murdered, yet somebody decided to use a method designed to gain maximum publicity.

In order to try and reinforce the government's speculative arguments, the UK establishment has resurrected the trial-by-media case of another Russian defector, former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who is said to have died after being poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 in his tea at a restaurant in London's Mayfair district in late 2006.

Given a high probability Israel murdered Arafat with Polonium two years earlier, it was just naturally the turn of the Russians to be the villains. Likely blame was assigned by the Brits using the same method as now – Write the names of all the possible nations who could have done the deed on large pieces of paper. Tape the ones with "Russia" on the south side of a room, and those with all the other suspects on the north side. Make sure your blindfolded dart thrower is pointed south, and you've solved the mysteries of the two deadly poisons.

Bob H , March 31, 2018 at 6:16 pm

Maxim Litvinenko's opinion on his brother's poisoning and his father's regretting being coerced by British authorities into believing his son was targeted by Putin add a particularly relevant wrench into the Tory narrative. Thank you, Patrick Hennigsen, for some very trenchant insights into the web of intrigue.

mrtmbrnmn , March 31, 2018 at 6:52 pm

Vietnam: The Gulf of Tonkin Attack of the Radar Blips (Hanoi Bridge For Sale Cheap!) Gulf War I (Kuwaiti babies pitched out of incubators), Iraq War: Saddam Has WMDs! (Baghdad Bridge For Sale Cheap!), Putin Invades Crimea (Kiev Bridge For Sale Cheap!) Syrian Sarin Gas Attacks (White Helmet videos at 11), Putin Novichoks Ex-Russian Spy (double agent) & daughter in Salisbury UK (Theresa May: "Who ya gonna believe, me or your lying eyes") And, of course, now and forever, Trump = Putin. The hits just keep coming. Shades of the Reichstag Fire and Poland Invades Germany. Rogue Nation USA and its pusillanimous NATO "partners" continuously spew out lies to their ever-gullible Gen Pop, because it works! Again and again and again.

Jeff , March 31, 2018 at 7:24 pm

Where, pray tell, is the UN in all this? The United States has been fomenting coups and "regime changes" for decades. The UN should be standing up and calling the US out instead of supinely agreeing to eject 10 Russian delegates to the UN.

geeyp , April 1, 2018 at 3:18 am

Jeff: Agreed. The UN has lost the plot for some time now. Their mission was peace originally, and the US can't have that. Nicki Hoeky is clueless and is not doing a damn thing to help us.

Dave P. , March 31, 2018 at 8:29 pm

"By using this tactic, the US is casting aside decades of international resolutions, treaties and laws. Such a move directly threatens to undermine a fundamental principle of the United Nations which is its diplomatic mission and the right for every sovereign nation to have diplomatic representation. Without it, there is no UN forum and countries cannot talk through their differences and negotiate peaceful settlements. This is why the UN was founded in the first place. Someone might want to remind Nikki Haley of that."

Reminding Nikki Haley would not make any difference. Nikki Haley does not have the intelligence, knowledge, character or any capacity for deep thinking. Nor does his boss possess much of it. John Bolton has no regard for U.N., and is completely devoid of any humanitarian impulses. He is as close as it could be of being considered as a complete barbarian. There is Mike Pompeo there sitting at the table. You know how he is like. So, there you have it.

And there is nothing to cheer about across the Atlantic. Theresa may, Boris Johnson, Gavin Williamson . . . It is as bad as it gets. Merkel, Macron, Stoltenberg, and the rest of the Flock in those Vassal States follow the orders.

As Henneningsen points out in the article, this latest provocation by The West, in all probability this staged event at Salisbury, is indeed very dangerous. World may be edging towards a nuclear war. There are no sane voices left in the Ruling Establishments in The West.

Joe Tedesky , April 1, 2018 at 1:26 am

Dave I agree. In fact Dave, if you were the international war criminals of all time then wouldn't it be wise to destroy the very fabric of what stands for international justice? It's either the UN, or NATO, and in this case it's destroy the UN in order to drag down more allied nations into this carnival of destruction under the banner of NATO. So I agree Dave, it isn't to how it appears that TPTB want to bring the UN down, as it is that the TPTB are taking the UN down as we speak of this heavy conundrum being laid before us. Believe it not, in Sheldon's eyes Nikki is doing a fantastic job of it.

We are going to war Dave. We are fast moving towards that place where the closer we get to war that the more criticism of war will be deemed traitorous. Starting to paying attention will have a whole new meaning. Joe

Dave P. , April 1, 2018 at 3:02 am

Joe, yes, you are right on that; they are taking the UN down as we speak . Under Bush, when Bolton was at UN, they were talking about dissolving the UN. Immediately after this staged event in Salisbury, the British politicians were talking about kicking Russia out of UN Security Council. It all seems preplanned.

Russia is the biggest country in the World, its population is more than twice that of U.K. and also of France. Its GDP (in PPP) is one and one half times of U.K's. And most of the U.K.'s economy is Finance and Tourism, and London being the World Center of money laundering, and residence of all these oligarchs/financial crooks, and Corrupt Elite from all over the third world countries; you name it all this ill gotten wealth is pouring into London. It is amazing that the Ruling Elite in U.K. are talking as if they are still in the nineteenth or early twentieth century – ruling over a good portion of the World. It seems to me that if the shooting starts, U.K's paper economy is going to crumble.

Unfortunately, there is not much out there to hope for. They – The West – are going not only to take the UN down, but take the World down with it into some type of dark ages again.

mike k , March 31, 2018 at 8:47 pm

Nothing new to readers here, but of course it's all true. The Empire seeks more war.
Has it ever been otherwise?

mike k , March 31, 2018 at 9:20 pm

Politicians and the media are not there to learn anything but how to make money and gain more power through the corrupt, lying games they play. They all made money off the Iraq war, and that is all they care about, period.

Syd , March 31, 2018 at 9:34 pm

Don't the Brits realize that if there's any kind of shooting war with Russia, and any Russian city is attacked,that the Russians can and will bomb British cities to retaliate, not to mention the resulting ecalation,almost certainly up to nuclear? Why aren't a million Brits on the streets demanding peaceful resolution of this and future crises?

jose , March 31, 2018 at 9:52 pm

Dear Sad: your question may sound simple but it is a complex one;It involves numerous factors interwoven that create the right conditions for war. I think that Brits are not on the streets might be due to apathy, ignorance, disinterest, or sheer historical amnesia. According to Richard Sanders, "The historical knowledge of how war planners have tricked people into supporting past wars, is like a vaccine. We can use this understanding of history to inoculate the public with healthy doses of distrust for official war pretext narratives and other deceptive stratagems. Through such immunization programs we may help to counter our society's susceptibility to "war fever."

jose , March 31, 2018 at 9:43 pm

I believe that these war mongers cannot help themselves when it comes to lying and deceiving their own people to promote war. Consequently, it is up to the people to put a stop to their nefarious ambitions; According to Richard Sanders, "Military plotters know that the majority would never support their wars, if it were generally known why they were really being fought
If asked to support a war so a small, wealthy elite could shamelessly profit by ruthlessly exploiting and plundering the natural and human resources in far away lands, people would 'just say no.'" If people chose to be spectators rather than participants into their own affairs, then they deserve what is coming to them. It is simple math.

Skeptigal , March 31, 2018 at 10:14 pm

An excellent analysis, I always enjoy reading your articles, thank you.

The perpetrators do not care whether the allegations can be supported by evidence or if the science makes sense or if there's a logical motive. All that's important is that the damage is done and the endgame achieved. The attack has to be blatant to ensure attention is focused on it and fingers are pointed in the right direction. Government officials can always rely on the MSM and the brain dead public to support them. People are easily propagandized. A video on propaganda by Dr. Jerry Kroth on 21st Century Wire is well worth watching. Whoever is behind the incident get away with it because they feel they are above all laws.

In the Skripal case, once again all the mindless sheeple have the wool pulled over their eyes, while bleating their approval of the excessive measures taken by the UK and allies that are disproportionate to the crime. Not long ago, our local TV station had an online poll asking people if they agree with expelling the Russian diplomats and 81% replied "yes". Many of the comments on the MSM sites are very negative toward Russia over this incident.

History will repeat itself again and again, a long as anyone questioning the official narrative is attacked and discredited, people are fed propaganda, media is censored, and the laws and justice system fail again and again.

Abby , April 1, 2018 at 12:54 am

Will the people of the USA believe another WMDs lie? Of course they will. They have been doing it since Herheinous lost the election. They are believing that because she lost. Can anyone imagine what they would say if it was Trump throwing out these ridiculous lies? They'd say that he is nuts for even thinking it.

The PTB knew that people would never believe another WMDs type story so they came at people with this softer WMDs type propaganda and lo and behold they are buying it. SMDH!

jimbo , April 1, 2018 at 2:36 am

"carnival of warmongering"

A better title IMO.

I chat online and hang out here in Japan with a number Brits and North Americans and they don't seem to care or scoff at my thoughts which wholeheartedly go along with Patrick's, (whom, along with the UK Column team, have podcasts which I never miss.) It seems people have shut off their critical thinking abilities and when I pipe up with my line about how a huge psy-op is being played on us by our own governments (which admittedly to a "normy" does sound whacky), after the scoffing and incredulousness at how evil Russia could possibly be innocent, they will end the discussion with a sure fire discussion ender: they don't give a shit. I am truly privileged to be alive in this amazing present with the greatest toys and gizmos ever invented and yet there's Trump and May and my "friends" pissing in my sandbox. WTF??? How can the words and deeds my heroes like John Lennon and MLK be suddenly wrong? Maybe we should all stop giving a shit about this crap. My mother, a firebrand back in the day, is blissfully unaware of anything due to Alzheimer's and she's fine! But Mom wouldn't have scoffed. I'd have had a loving fellow traveler had she not been stricken. Maybe the most irksome thing is how people are profiting off these lies and dangerous provocations. Conspiracy theory skeptics always say that someone would have talked. That this crap is happening under our noses with only some outlets of the alternative media "saying something" still it goes on and maybe only a war will shake them hard enough to be "woke." Or not. One thing is how much fun the alternative side is. I used to like to read "Consumer Reports" and loved how they got away with ripping apart cars that real companies surely sweated bullets to make. I also liked the way they lauded some products. Nowadays, CR would be a sometimes right but still fake consensus driver like "Snopes" or "Vice News." While I'm rambling, a shout out to James Corbett. You have got to see his dissection of the Sibel Edmunds Twitter melt down.

geeyp , April 1, 2018 at 3:49 am

Yes, I agree with you. I quit paying attention long ago (approximately 12 years ago) to the msm, of whom I used to work with. The most useful thing for me is to not give a shit what they do. It seems to help; I don't have the funding to fight them, though I can counter anyone who might defend them. You mentioned "Consumer Reports" and fake news, refresh my memory, were they also along with either "Popular Science" or "Popular Mechanics" agreeing with the NIST lie that fires destroyed the three towers?

Emmet Sweeney , April 1, 2018 at 3:22 am

The political class in America and UK do what their Zionist paymasters tell them. They're not stupid, they know perfectly well Russia had nothing to do with this.

LookHow , April 1, 2018 at 5:42 am

We have to stop putting the blame on our politicians and take responsibility as a people. It is clear that our elected officials serve somebody else's agenda so we have to change the system. We need to create a democracy where decisions such as diplomatic relations, is voted upon by the people. A more direct democracy is possible today and we need it.

'Herman , April 1, 2018 at 10:02 am

Don't believe in mass insanity? You should. We all should. Even considering the most dastardly murder of someone, what type of reasoning would lead us to risk the murder of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions. We have to acknowledge that it is not about them, it is about us, that we are willingly being led toward the precipice and feeling self righteous in doing so.

Jessika , April 1, 2018 at 2:37 pm

These politicos didn't care to learn any lessons from Iraq! They will lie about anything to retain power. Their 'overlords' who control them pull their marionette strings.

At "The Duran" website Alexander Mercouris has a piece titled "Furious China Ramps Up Support for Russia on Skripal, Calls West's Actions 'Outrageous' ". The Global Times, English language organ of China's ruling Communist Party, published a scorching op-ed and 13 paragraphs are printed in Mercouris' piece. It is well worth reading, as is The Duran a good site to know of. Some very powerful points are made in the piece, please read it.

Not even mentioned in that piece is that China has just launched the petroyuan as exchange for oil purchase, and Russia is their largest supplier of oil. Other countries that are sick of Western bullying are also attempting to get off the dollar and China has leverage to aid them. So does Russia, which has no debt. The US as a debtor nation relies only on its guns to maintain dominance. The West is a 'beast' lashing out to keep control.

[Apr 02, 2018] The Litvinenko Conspiracy

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... In order to try and reinforce the government's speculative arguments, the UK establishment has resurrected the trial-by-media case of another Russian defector, former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who is said to have died after being poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 in his tea at a restaurant in London's Mayfair district in late 2006. ..."
Mar 31, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

The Litvinenko Conspiracy

It's important to note that as far as public perceptions are concerned, the official Skripal narrative has been built directly on top of the Litvinenko case.

In order to try and reinforce the government's speculative arguments, the UK establishment has resurrected the trial-by-media case of another Russian defector, former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who is said to have died after being poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 in his tea at a restaurant in London's Mayfair district in late 2006.

Despite not having any actual evidence as to who committed the crime, the British authorities and the mainstream media have upheld an almost religious belief that the Russian FSB (formerly KGB), under the command of Vladimir Putin, had ordered the alleged radioactive poisoning of Litvinenko.

The media mythos was reinforced in 2016, when a British Public Inquiry headed by Sir Robert Owen accused senior Russian officials of 'probably having motives to approve the murder' of Litvinenko. Again, this level of guesswork and speculation would never meet the standard of an actual forensic investigation worthy of a real criminal court of law, but so far as apportioning blame to another nation or head of state is concerned -- it seems fair enough for British authorities.

Following the completion of the inquiry, Sir Robert had this to say: "Taking full account of all the evidence and analysis available to me, I find that the FSB operation to kill Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr Patrushev and also by President Putin."

Contrary to consensus reality (popular belief), Owen's inquiry was not at all definitive. Quite the opposite in fact, and in many ways it mirrors how the Skripal case has been presented to the public. Despite offering no evidence of any criminal guilt, Owen's star chamber maintained that Vladimir Putin "probably" approved the operation to assassinate Litvinenko. Is "probably" really enough to assign guilt in a major international crime? When it comes to high crimes of state, the answer seems to be yes .

According to Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova , that UK inquiry was "neither transparent nor public" and was "conducted mostly behind doors, with classified documents and unnamed witnesses contributing to the result "

Zakharova highlighted the fact that two key witnesses in the case -- Litvinenko's chief patron, a UK-based anti-Putin defector billionaire oligarch named Boris Berezovsky, and the owner of Itsu restaurant in London's Mayfair where the incident is said to have taken place, had both suddenly died under dubious circumstances.

The British authorities went on to accuse two Russian men in the Litvineko murder -- businessman Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun. Both have denied the accusations. Despite the lack of any real evidence, the United States Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control blacklisted both Lugovoi and Kovtun, as well as Russian persons Stanislav Gordievsky, Gennady Plaksin and Aleksandr I. Bastrykin -- under the Magnitsky Act , which freezes their assets held in American financial institutions, and bans them from conducting any transactions or traveling to the United States.

Notice the familiar pattern: even if the case is inconclusive, or collapses due to a lack of evidence, the policies remain in place.

Despite all the pomp and circumstance however, Owen's official conspiracy theory failed to sway even Litvinenko's own close family members. While Litvinenko's widow Marina maintains that it was definitely the Russian government who killed her husband, Alexsander's younger brother Maksim Litvinenko, based in Rimini, Italy, believes the British report "ridiculous" to blame the Kremlin for the murder of his brother, stating that he believes British security services had more of a motive to carry out the assassination.

"My father and I are sure that the Russian authorities are not involved. It's all a set-up to put pressure on the Russian government," said Litvinenko to the Mirror newspaper, and that such reasoning can explain why the UK waited almost 10 years to launch the inquiry his brother's death.

Maxim also said that Britain had more reason to kill his brother than the Russians, and believes that blaming Putin for the murder was part of a wider effort to smear Russia. Following the police investigation, Alexander's father Walter Litvinenko, also said that he had regretted blaming Putin and the Russian government for his son's death and did so under intense pressure at the time.

For anyone skeptical of the official proclamations of the British state and the mainstream media on the Litvinenko case, it's worth reading the work of British journalist Will Dunkerly here .

With so many questions hanging over the actually validity of the British state's accusations against Russia, it's somewhat puzzling that British police would say they are still 'looking for similarities' between the Skripal and Litvinenko cases in order to pinpoint a modus operandi.

The admission by the British law enforcement that their investigation may take months before any conclusion can be drawn also begs the question: how could May have been so certain so quick? The answer should be clear by now: she could not have known it was a 'Novichok' agent, no more than she could know the 'Russia did it.'

[Apr 02, 2018] 'UK investigators set to hide the truth, not find it' Litvinenko's father on Skripal case -- RT World News

Notable quotes:
"... "nuclear terrorism." ..."
"... "the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since World War II." ..."
"... "deals with its enemies." ..."
"... "They realized that they have screwed up big time [with the Litvinenko poisoning] and decided to change their tactics a bit. Therefore, they do not show [any evidence] now, but keep it all in secret waiting for Russia to react to it. If there was, as they say, the 'Russian trace' there, everything would have been clear long time ago," ..."
"... "It's the same with Sasha [Aleksandr], if there was the 'Russian trace,' it would emerge over and over again up to this day. But the Scotland Yard was not looking for a criminal. Scotland Yard was covering the tracks," ..."
"... "Now they do not want to show these tracks altogether, since they know they will have to cover them up the same way as with Sasha." ..."
"... "It will be very difficult to hide it all. And they will eventually fail. They will be caught, and Theresa May will be very ashamed. And this clown, their Foreign Minister [Boris Johnson] – he will be very ashamed too." ..."
"... "They are hostages, all of them are hostages of the American authorities, who strive for the world dominance. As long as that's the case – they will kill the Russians, they'll kill anybody who's against it," Litvinenko said. The wealthy Russians in the UK "are all dependent on the authorities... They are being kept only for their money. And when something happens, they will be blatantly robbed, like it happened to Berezovsky." ..."
"... "It's not beneficial for them if Skripal stays alive. And this girl – she knows nothing. Skripal knows. She simply came to visit her father and got into this," Litvinenko said. "They'll let his daughter walk away, probably. But if she knows anything, she won't get out of it either." ..."
Apr 02, 2018 | www.rt.com

Fugitive Russians in the UK are effectively "hostages" of Western spy agencies, the father of Alexander Litvinenko, an intelligence officer who was poisoned in London a decade ago, told RT, sharing his insight on the Skripal case. Walter Litvinenko used to support the theory of Russia's involvement in the 2006 poisoning of his son, Alexander, in London, but he changed his mind after years of analyzing the inconsistencies of the investigation. London said that the fugitive Russian intelligence officer was poisoned with a highly radioactive Polonium-210. Despite an inconclusive investigation, it pinned the blame on Moscow, while the incident was branded as the first ever act of "nuclear terrorism." Russia has vehemently denied the allegations of its involvement in the incident. Read more A police notice is attached to screening surrounding a restaurant which was visited by former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. Salisbury, Britain, March 19, 2018. © REUTERS/Peter Nicholls UK may have staged Skripal poisoning to rally people against Russia, Moscow believes

The poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury on March 4, was, in turn, labeled "the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since World War II." While it bears similarities to the poisoning of Litvinenko, it was handled with different tactics, Walter Litvinenko told RT.

Litvinenko senior says the poisoning of his son was designed as a widely-publicized false-flag operation to show the world that Moscow was extremely "cruel," and the way that it allegedly "deals with its enemies." The ongoing Skripal scandal, in its turn, was launched to provoke a reaction from Russia, he believes.

"They realized that they have screwed up big time [with the Litvinenko poisoning] and decided to change their tactics a bit. Therefore, they do not show [any evidence] now, but keep it all in secret waiting for Russia to react to it. If there was, as they say, the 'Russian trace' there, everything would have been clear long time ago," Litvinenko said.

He believes that, given the different goal, the ongoing investigation is significantly less transparent than it was back in 2006, since it is easier to hide the truth from the beginning than to try and swipe it under the rug afterward.

"It's the same with Sasha [Aleksandr], if there was the 'Russian trace,' it would emerge over and over again up to this day. But the Scotland Yard was not looking for a criminal. Scotland Yard was covering the tracks," Litvinenko stated. "Now they do not want to show these tracks altogether, since they know they will have to cover them up the same way as with Sasha."

READ MORE: Russian embassy in UK warns citizens about possible provocations in Britain

The Skripal scandal would eventually backfire on those who initiated it, Litvinenko said. "It will be very difficult to hide it all. And they will eventually fail. They will be caught, and Theresa May will be very ashamed. And this clown, their Foreign Minister [Boris Johnson] – he will be very ashamed too."

Devil's bargain

Litvinenko, who lost his son after the former officer of the Russian security service FSB fled Russia for London and cooperated with MI6 and Spanish police, says people like Alexander find themselves in a situation where they effectively become hostages of foreign governments and intelligence agencies. He said it applies to both the rich and powerful who have left Russia after having run-ins with the law, such as the late oligarch Boris Berezovsky, as well as less prominent citizens such as Sergei Skripal.

Read more Inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) arrive in Salisbury, UK March 21, 2018. © Peter Nicholls Russia has 13 questions to OPCW over Skripal case

"They are hostages, all of them are hostages of the American authorities, who strive for the world dominance. As long as that's the case – they will kill the Russians, they'll kill anybody who's against it," Litvinenko said. The wealthy Russians in the UK "are all dependent on the authorities... They are being kept only for their money. And when something happens, they will be blatantly robbed, like it happened to Berezovsky."

The fugitive oligarch, once one of the wealthiest Russians, was found dead at his home in the UK in 2014. The investigation did not conclusively determine whether he hanged himself with a scarf, or if he was strangled. Prior to his mysterious death, Berezovsky had lost most of his assets and his wealth waned.

Given the previous suspicious deaths of Russian nationals on British soil, Skripal's fate looks quite grim, Litvinenko believes. The daughter of the former double agent, Yulia, however, might get out of this situation alive, as she was seemingly in the wrong place at the wrong time. Assuming she was of no interest to the intelligence services, the recent reports on Yulia's conditions improving do not look that "miraculous," Litvinenko said.

"It's not beneficial for them if Skripal stays alive. And this girl – she knows nothing. Skripal knows. She simply came to visit her father and got into this," Litvinenko said. "They'll let his daughter walk away, probably. But if she knows anything, she won't get out of it either."

[Apr 02, 2018] Exercise TOXIC DAGGER - the sharp end of chemical warfare - GOV.UK

Apr 02, 2018 | www.gov.uk

News story

Exercise TOXIC DAGGER - the sharp end of chemical warfare

Dstl works with Marines on UK's biggest annual chemical warfare exercise Published 20 February 2018

From:
Defence Science and Technology Laboratory
Marines in CBRN kit on Exercise Toxic Dagger
40 Commando Royal Marines and The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) have staged the UK's biggest annual exercise to prepare troops for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) operations. Exercise TOXIC DAGGER is supported by Dstl, along with Public Health England (PHE) and The Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), and is the largest exercise of its kind in the country.

Specialists in CBRN from Dstl and AWE are able to create realistic exercise scenarios based on the latest threat information. Completing the training and exercising against these scenarios provides a challenging programme for the Royal Marines to demonstrate their proficiency in the methods to detect, assess and mitigate a CBRN threat.

The three-week programme included Company-level attacks and scenarios concerning CBRN vignettes, concluding with a full-scale exercise involving government and industry scientists and more than 300 military personnel.

Major Rob Garside, from 40 Commando Royal Marines, said:

Working with Dstl means we have the most up-to-date information and a realistic exercise. This ensures we are well prepared for a CBRN operating environment. It is vital we can make rapid decisions and are able to protect and support specialists who come in to deal with any incident. On operations these specialists are on hand to advise and we must ensure we already have a strong understanding of their capabilities and what they require of us as a military force.

The Dstl lead for CBRN exercises said:

40 Commando would be first on the ground in the event of a CBRN incident. We ensure they're up to date on the latest threats and make the exercise truly realistic. They not only have to provide a fighting force in an unstable environment, they must also be able to assess the scene and know what they're dealing with.

That's where Dstl, PHE, AWE and the Defence CBRN Centre come in, as we provide the technical information the Marines require.

Find out more about Dstl's CBRN work

[Apr 02, 2018] The UK's persecution of Russia arises from two unreported incidents in Syria during operations in Eastern Ghouta

All this "door knob" hypothesis smells with MI5/MI6 falsification. An interesting note about stupid and evil presstitutes in NYT, who bought it.
Notable quotes:
"... The Skripal attack was clearly a total cock-up but that didn't matter. All the UK/US wanted was an/any excuse to vilify Russia – no evidence required, it is all Kabuki. That is why the 5-eyes (excluding NZ) and Nato (excluding Turkey) fell in line with the recent expulsions – no evidence required. The whole point was to show Putin that 'the West' doesn't need evidence – the more ridiculous the better! Everyone knows that Russia didn't do it... but will kick Russia anyway, if it continues on its current path. ..."
"... As for the Skripal "script" and its timing, my speculation is that its purpose was to set the stage for a false flag chemical attack to be blamed on Russia supported Damascus to sell an offensive from the southern flank by US forces in Jordan while missile strikes rained from the Eastern Med ..."
"... Graham: US leaving Syria would be 'single worst decision' Trump could make -- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Sunday cautioned President Trump against pulling American troops out of Syria, saying that doing so would be "a disaster in the making." ..."
"... Again the US has supported anti-government forces and invaded a foreign country, destroyed part of it while killing, injuring and displacing millions of people. The locals want the US out. Wouldn't we? ..."
"... NYT has a bombshell scoop! A material so poisonous that the Skripals have not died, and was spread by allegedly "[going] up to the front door" and smearing it on their outside door handle. This kind of stealth could only come from Russia and Putin... Bonus points attempted by doing a Nexis word search on what the CIA liars said regarding DNC emails.. ..."
"... So the Prime Minister said that Porton Down had positively identified the substance as a Novichok nerve agent. The statement from Porton Down says that their tests indicated that it was a Novichok agent or closely related agent. Are these two statements saying exactly the same thing? . . here ..."
"... If the nerve agent is so potent per NYT description, how came the Skripals went to the pub and restaurant having beers and food with no signs of discomfort after having touched the nerve agent smeared on their house door? ..."
"... This is nerve agent not timebomb. Just how stupid can NYT let itself be? ..."
Apr 02, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

miss lacy | Apr 1, 2018 8:37:03 PM | 34

@Lozion, no. 31 What do you think of the veracity of the following comment recently posted on Zero Hedge? Sorry, I have no links - just the comment:

'The UK's persecution of Russia arises from two unreported incidents in Syria during operations in Eastern Ghouta. In late February, the SAA's special force unit trapped a group of UK Special Forces in a siege, near Kafr Batna settlement. That incident occurred a few days after another unit of UK Special Forces was captured near Nashabiyah!

London didn't want to deal with Assad and sought to negotiate their release with Russia, with Oman as a mediator. Moscow replied that it was the jurisdiction of Syrian military authorities. Mattis's visit to Oman on March 11 was to attempt to secure the release of a US officer and two Israelis also captured in the same operation in Eastern Ghouta.

The UK and US governments (deep state?) see risks rising in Syria and since Russia refuses to back down, pressure on other fronts had to be increased to raise the stakes for Moscow.

The Skripal attack was clearly a total cock-up but that didn't matter. All the UK/US wanted was an/any excuse to vilify Russia – no evidence required, it is all Kabuki. That is why the 5-eyes (excluding NZ) and Nato (excluding Turkey) fell in line with the recent expulsions – no evidence required. The whole point was to show Putin that 'the West' doesn't need evidence – the more ridiculous the better! Everyone knows that Russia didn't do it... but will kick Russia anyway, if it continues on its current path.

Speculation: was the Skripal plan put together by the CIA (deep state) and MI6 (with UK government support) behind Trump's back, which pretty much forced him to go along with the expulsions etc., is that one of the reasons why he has now announced US troops will be leaving Syria altogether?'

Lozion , Apr 1, 2018 9:26:59 PM | 36

@33 miss lacy. Well, yes there have been reports of captured UK and other SF in East Ghouta along with denials so its confusing. There most probably were a few caught but this is such a delicate political matter that their release is I think negotiated in secret by the parties involved. A grey area seems to exist around SF since no one wants to have theirs paraded as war trophies, a tacit agreement of "dont ask, dont tell" is likely enforced.

As for the Skripal "script" and its timing, my speculation is that its purpose was to set the stage for a false flag chemical attack to be blamed on Russia supported Damascus to sell an offensive from the southern flank by US forces in Jordan while missile strikes rained from the Eastern Med but this was scraped in the nick of time due to the SAA's faster advance then expected and capture of militants chemical labs, leaving the UK to deal with the mess created by the failed op.

My opinion is that we went through a real CLOSE CALL around mid-March but thanks to Gerasimov, Shoigu and Rudskoy multiple warnings and rapid pace of the EG operation, we are still here to discuss it..

Don Bacon , Apr 1, 2018 9:52:33 PM | 37
news headline:

Graham: US leaving Syria would be 'single worst decision' Trump could make -- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Sunday cautioned President Trump against pulling American troops out of Syria, saying that doing so would be "a disaster in the making."

Which means it's probably a good idea. The claim in Washington is that Obama made a mistake in pulling troops out of Iraq. In fact, he had no choice because Bush-II had signed a treaty (w/o Senate advice & consent) to pull out in December 2010. So it was done. Obama had no choice.

Syria isn't the same, but it's similar. Again the US has supported anti-government forces and invaded a foreign country, destroyed part of it while killing, injuring and displacing millions of people. The locals want the US out. Wouldn't we?

I'm reminded of what Mike Hastie said. "One day while I was in a bunker in Vietnam, a sniper round went over my head. The person who fired that weapon was not a terrorist, a rebel, an extremist, or a so-called insurgent. The Vietnamese individual who tried to kill me was a citizen of Vietnam, who did not want me in his country. This truth escapes millions." --Mike Hastie, U.S. Army Medic, Vietnam 1970-71

daffyDuct , Apr 1, 2018 10:20:27 PM | 38
NYT has a bombshell scoop! A material so poisonous that the Skripals have not died, and was spread by allegedly "[going] up to the front door" and smearing it on their outside door handle. This kind of stealth could only come from Russia and Putin... Bonus points attempted by doing a Nexis word search on what the CIA liars said regarding DNC emails..

"LONDON -- British officials investigating the poisoning of Sergei V. Skripal, a former Russian double agent, believe it is likely that an assassin smeared a nerve agent on the door handle at his home. This operation is seen as so risky and sensitive that it is unlikely to have been undertaken without approval from the Kremlin, according to officials who have been briefed on the early findings of the inquiry.


Because the nerve agent is so potent, the officials said, the task could have been carried out only by trained professionals familiar with chemical weapons. British and American officials are skeptical that independent actors could have carried out such a risky operation or obtained the agent without approval at the highest levels of the Russian government -- almost exactly the same phrase that American intelligence agencies used in October 2016, when they first attributed the hacking of emails from the Democratic National Committee to a team of Russian hackers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/world/europe/russia-sergei-skripal-uk-spy-poisoning.html

Don Bacon , Apr 1, 2018 10:22:08 PM | 39
Rob Slane has 20 more questions on Skripal:

Here's #4:

In her statement to the House of Commons on 12th March 2018, the British Prime Minister, Theresa May stated the following:

"It is now clear that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia. This is part of a group of nerve agents known as 'Novichok '. Based on the positive identification of this chemical agent by world-leading experts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down" [my emphasis added].
In the judgement at the High Court on 22nd March on whether to allow blood samples to be taken from Sergei and Yulia Skripal for examination by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), evidence submitted by Porton Down to the court (Section 17 i) stated the following:
"Blood samples from Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal were analysed and the findings indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound . The samples tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent or closely related agent " [my emphasis added].
So the Prime Minister said that Porton Down had positively identified the substance as a Novichok nerve agent. The statement from Porton Down says that their tests indicated that it was a Novichok agent or closely related agent. Are these two statements saying exactly the same thing? . . here
Don Bacon , Apr 1, 2018 10:27:51 PM | 40
@37 ...re: door handle, grabbed by both father and daughter exiting the apartment

Novichok nerve agents . . .Within the environment, these agents react with water to degrade, including moisture in the air, and so in the UK they would have a very limited lifetime.

mali , Apr 2, 2018 5:58:01 AM | 58
"Because the nerve agent is so potent, the officials said, the task could have been carried out only by trained professionals familiar with chemical weapons. "

daffyDuct @37
-------------------------------------------------
If the nerve agent is so potent per NYT description, how came the Skripals went to the pub and restaurant having beers and food with no signs of discomfort after having touched the nerve agent smeared on their house door?

This is nerve agent not timebomb. Just how stupid can NYT let itself be?

Happy Easter everyone!

[Apr 02, 2018] Strange coinsidence: toxic dagger exersize and the skripals poisoning

Apr 02, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

i can't get it out of my mind the coincidence of toxic dagger and the skripal as excuse to ostracize russia further..

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/exercise-toxic-dagger-the-sharp-end-of-chemical-warfare

i am sorry.. the timing just seems too coincidental... i guess i will be labeled a conspiracy theorists, as opposed to a coincidental theorist..

Posted by: james | Apr 1, 2018 1:48:18 PM | 8

[Apr 02, 2018] How the East can save the West by The Saker

Notable quotes:
"... Frankly, Saker reads too much into this Chinese article. It is not about Russia. It is not because Skrypal hoax dialed ritual Russophobia over eleven. It just is a coincidence. Yet before loosing the elections Hillary was promising military war with Russia. Yet before winning the elections Trump was promising economic war with China. ..."
"... Russia`s biggest weakness is the incompetent, useless leaders they had from the 80`s to Yeltsin. The mess that the USSR left behind with unstable states on its borders with no treaty to prevent NATO expansion was a huge gift to the US that just keeps giving!! ..."
"... I`ll go as far as saying this gift to the US might lead to Russia`s end as a country in its present form. You can hardly blame the US I mean in 1990 Russia agreed to basically throw the towel in and live in a US dominated world in practice. Whatever they say about promises at the time that lasted for as long as their breath was warm ..."
"... the problem right now is the Imperial US (ruled from Israel). If it succeeds in destroying Russia, then the Chinese are irrelevant, and have nothing to say about anything. ..."
"... The US public are irretrievably useless and are going to have to go the whole way, with WW3 and/or an economic collapse, with the best bet being on WW3 (which they may well lose). ..."
Apr 01, 2018 | www.unz.com

Europe: My honor is solidarity!

"That tells you all you need to know about the difference between modern Britain and the government of Vladimir Putin. They make Novichok, we make light sabers. One a hideous weapon that is specifically intended for assassination. The other an implausible theatrical prop with a mysterious buzz. But which of those two weapons is really more effective in the world of today?".

(Boris Johnson)

Let's begin this discussion with a few, basic questions.

Question one: does anybody sincerely believe that "Putin" (the collective name for the Russian Mordor) really attempted to kill a man which "Putin" himself had released in the past, who presented no interest for Russia whatsoever who, like Berezovsky , wanted to return back to Russia , and that to do the deed "Putin" used a binary nerve agent? Question two: does anybody sincerely believe that the British have presented their "allies" (I will be polite here and use that euphemism) with incontrovertible or, at least, very strong evidence that "Putin" indeed did such a thing? Question three: does anybody sincerely believe that the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats will somehow make Russia more compliant to western demands (for our purposes, it does not matter what demands we are talking about)? Question four: does anybody sincerely believe that after this latest episode, the tensions will somehow abate or even diminish and that things will get better? Question five: does anybody sincerely believe that the current sharp rise in tensions between the AngloZionist Empire (aka the "West") does not place the Empire and Russia on collision course which could result in war, probably/possibly nuclear war, maybe not deliberately, but as the result of an escalation of incidents?

If in the zombified world of the ideological drones who actually remain in the dull trance induced by the corporate media there are most definitely those who answer "yes" to some or even all of the questions above, I submit that not a single major western decision maker sincerely believes any of that nonsense. In reality, everybody who matters knows that the Russians had nothing to do with the Skripal incident, that the Brits have shown no evidence, that the expulsion of Russian diplomats will only harden the Russian resolve, that all this anti-Russian hysteria will only get worse and that this all puts at least Europe and the USA, if not the entire planet, in great danger.

And yet what just happened is absolutely amazing: instead of using fundamental principles of western law (innocent until proven guilty by at least a preponderance of evidence or even beyond reasonable doubt), basic rules of civilized behavior (do not attack somebody you know is innocent), universally accepted ethical norms (the truth of the matter is more important than political expediency) or even primordial self-preservation instincts (I don't want to die for your cause), the vast majority of western leaders chose a new decision-making paradigm which can be summarized in two words:

"highly likely" "solidarity"

This is truly absolutely crucial and marks a fundamental change in the way the AngloZionist Empire will act from now on. Let's look at the assumptions and implications of these two concepts.

First, "highly likely". While "highly likely" does sound like a simplified version of "preponderance of evidence" what it really means is something very different and circular: "Putin" is bad, poisoning is bad, therefore it is "highly likely" that "Putin" did it. How do we know that the premise "Putin is bad" is true? Well -- he does poison people, does he not?

You think I am joking?

Check out this wonderful chart presented to the public by "Her Majesty's government" entitled "A long pattern of Russian malign activity":

In the 12 events listed as evidence of a "pattern of Russian malign activity" one is demonstratively false (2008 invasion of Georgia), one conflates two different accusations (occupation of Crimea and destabilization of the Ukraine), one is circular (assassination of Skripal) and all others are completely unproven accusations. All that is missing here is the mass rape of baby penguins by drunken Russian sailors in the south pole or the use of a secret "weather weapon" to send hurricanes towards the USA. You don't need a law degree to see that, all you need is an IQ above room temperature and a basic understanding of logic. For all my contempt for western leaders, even I wouldn't make the claim that they all lack these. So here is where "solidarity" kicks-in:

"Solidarity" in this context is simply a "conceptual placeholder" for Stephen Decatur 's famous " my country, right or wrong " applied to the entire Empire. The precedent of Meine Ehre heißt Treue just slightly rephrased into Meine Ehre heißt Solidarität also comes to mind.

Solidarity simply means that the comprador ruling elites of the West will say and do whatever the hell the AngloZionists tell them to. If tomorrow the UK or US leaders proclaim that Putin eats babies for breakfast or that the West needs to send a strong message to "Putin" that a Russian invasion of Vanuatu shall not be tolerated, then so be it: the entire AngloZionist nomenklatura will sing the song in full unison and to hell with facts, logic or even decency!

Solemnly proclaiming lies is hardly something new in politics, there is nothing new here. What is new are two far more recent developments: first, now everybody knows that these are lies and, second, nobody challenges or debunks them. Welcome to the AngloZionist New World Order indeed!

The Empire: by way of deception thou shalt do war

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar and the father of it.

(John 8:44)

ORDER IT NOW

Over the past weeks I have observed something which I find quite interesting: both on Russian TV channels and in the English speaking media there is a specific type of anti-Putin individual who actually takes a great deal of pride in the fact that the Empire has embarked on a truly unprecedented campaign of lies against Russia. These people view lies as just another tool in a type of "political toolkit" which can be used like any other political technique. As I have mentioned in the past, the western indifference to the truth is something very ancient coming, as it does, from the Middle-Ages: roughly when the spiritual successors of the Franks in Rome decided that their own, original brand of "Christianity" had no use for 1000 years of Consensus Patrum . Scholasticism and an insatiable thrust for worldly, secular, power produced both moral relativism and colonialism (with the Pope's imprimatur in the form of the Treaty of Tordesillas ). The Reformation (with its very pronounced Judaic influence) produced the bases of modern capitalism which, as Lenin correctly diagnosed, has imperialism as its highest stage. Now that the West is losing its grip on the planet (imagine that, some SOB nations dare resist!), all of the ideological justifications have been tossed away and we are left with the true, honest, bare-bones impulses of the leaders of the Empire: messianic hubris (essentially self-worship), violence and, above all, a massive reliance on deception and lies on every single level of society, from the commercial advertisements targeted at children to Colin Powell shaking some laundry detergent at the UNSC to justify yet another war of aggression.

Self-worship and a total reliance on brute force and falsehoods -- these are the real "Western values" today. Not the rule of law, not the scientific method, not critical thought, not pluralism and most definitely not freedom. We are back, full circle, to the kind of illiterate thuggery the Franks so perfectly embodied and which made them so infamous in the (then) civilized world (the south and eastern Mediterranean). The agenda, by the way, is also the same one as the Franks had 1000 years ago: either submit to us and accept our dominion, or die, and the way to accept our dominion is to let us plunder all your riches. Again, not much difference here between the sack of the First Rome in 410, the sack of the Second Rome in 1204 and the sack of the Third Rome in 1991. As psychologists well know, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

Interestingly, the Chinese saw straight through this strategic psyop and they are now sounding the alarm in their very official Global Times : (emphasis added)

The accusations that Western countries have hurled at Russia are based on ulterior motives, similar to how the Chinese use the expression "perhaps it's true" to seize upon the desired opportunity. From a third-person perspective, the principles and diplomatic logic behind such drastic efforts are flawed, not to mention that expelling Russian diplomats almost simultaneously is a crude form of behavior. Such actions make little impact other than increasing hostility and hatred between Russia and their Western counterparts ( ) The fact that major Western powers can gang up and "sentence" a foreign country without following the same procedures other countries abide by and according to the basic tenets of international law is chilling. During the Cold War, not one Western nation would have dared to make such a provocation and yet today it is carried out with unrestrained ease. Such actions are nothing more than a form of Western bullying that threatens global peace and justice. ( ) It is beyond outrageous how the US and Europe have treated Russia. Their actions represent a frivolity and recklessness that has grown to characterize Western hegemony that only knows how to contaminate international relations. Right now is the perfect time for non-Western nations to strengthen unity and collaborative efforts among one another. These nations need to establish a level of independence outside the reach of Western influence while breaking the chains of monopolization declarations, predetermined adjudications and come to value their own judgment abilities. ( ) The West is only a small fraction of the world and is nowhere near the global representative it once thought it was. The silenced minorities within the international community need to realize this and prove just how deep their understanding is of such a realization by proving it to the world through action.

As the French say " à bon entendeur, salut! ": the Chinese position is crystal clear, as is the warning. I would summarize it as so: if the West is an AngloZionist doormat, then the East is most definitely not.

[Sidebar: I know that there are some countries in Europe who have, so far, shown the courage to resist the AngloZionist Diktat . Good for them. I will wait to see how long they can resist the pressure before giving them a standing ovation]

The modern Ahnenerbe' Generalplan Ost

The decision, therefore, lies here in the East; here must the Russian enemy, this people numbering two hundred million Russians, be destroyed on the battlefield and person by person, and made to bleed to death

(Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler)

Still, none of that explain why the leaders of the Empire have decided to engage in a desperate game of "nuclear chicken" to try to, yet again, force Russia to comply with its demands to "go away and shut up". This is counter-intuitive and I get several emails each week telling me that there is absolutely no way the leaders of the AngloZionist Empire would want a war with Russia, especially not a nuclear-armed one. The truth is that while western leaders are most definitely psychopaths, they are neither stupid nor suicidal, and neither were Napoleon or Hitler! And, yes, they probably don't really want a full-scale war with Russia. The problem is that these rulers are also desperate, and for good cause.

Let's look at the situation just a few months ago. The US was defeated in Syria, ridiculed in the DPRK, Trump was hated in Europe, the Russians and the Germans were working on North Stream, the British leaders forced to at least pretend to work on Brexit, the entire "Ukrainian" project had faceplanted, the sanctions against Russia had failed, Putin was more popular than ever and the hysterical anti-Trump campaign was still in full swing inside the USA. The next move by the AngloZionist elites was nothing short of brilliant: by organizing a really crude false flag in the UK the Empire achieved the following results:

The Europeans have been forced right back into the Anglosphere's fold ("solidarity", remember?) The Brexiting Brits are now something like the (im-)moral leaders of Europe again. The Russians are now demonized to such a degree that any accusation, no matter how stupid, will stick. In the Middle-East, the US and Israel now have free reign to start any war they want because the (purely theoretical) European capability to object to anything the Anglos want has now evaporated, especially now that the Russians have become "known chemical-criminals" from Ghouta to Salisbury At the very least, the World Cup in Russia will be sabotaged by a massive anti-Russian campaign. If that campaign is really successful, there is still the hope that the Germans will finally cave in and, if maybe not outright cancel, then at least very much delay North Stream thereby forcing the Europeans to accept, what else, US gas.

This is an ambitious plan and, barring an unexpected development, it sure looks like it might work. The problem with this strategy is that it falls short of getting Russia to truly "go away and shut up". Neocons are particularly fond of humiliating their enemies (look at how they are still gunning for Trump even though by now the poor man has become their most subservient servant) and there is a lot of prestige at stake here. Russia, therefore, must be humiliated, truly humiliated, not just by sabotaging her participation in Olympic games or by expelling Russian diplomats, but by something far more tangible like, say, an attack on the very small and vulnerable Russian task force in Syria. Herein lies the biggest risk.

The Russian task force in Syria is tiny, at least compared to the immense capabilities of CENTCOM+NATO. The Russians have warned that if they are attacked, they will shoot down not only the attacking missiles but also their launchers. Since the Americans are not dumb enough to expose their aircraft to Russian air defenses, they will use air power only outside the range of Russian air defenses and they will use only cruise missiles to strike targets inside the "protection cone" of the Russians air defenses. The truth is that I doubt that the Russians will have the opportunity to shoot down many US aircraft, at least not with their long-range S-300/S-400 SAMs. Their ubiquitous and formidable combined short to medium range surface-to-air missile and anti-aircraft artillery weapon system, the Pantsir, might have a better chance simply because it's location is impossible to predict. But the real question is this: will the Russians shoot back at the USN ships if they launch cruise missiles at Syria?

My strictly personal guess is that they won't unless Khmeimim, Tartus or another large Russian objective (official Russian compounds in Damascus) are hit. Striking a USN ship would be tantamount to an act of war and that is just not something the Russians will do if they can avoid it. The problem with that is this restraint will, yet again, be interpreted as a sign of weakness, not civilization, by the "modern Franks" (visualize a Neanderthal with a nuclear club in his fist). Should the Russians decide to act à la American and use violence to "send a message", the Empire will immediately perceive that as a loss of face and a reason to immediately escalate further to reestablish the "appropriate" hierarchy between the "indispensable nation" and the "gas station masquerading as a country". So here is the dynamic at work

Russia limits herself to words of protests ==>> the Empire sees that as a sign of weakness and escalates

Russia responds in kind with real actions==>> The Empire feels humiliated and escalates

Now look at this from a Russian point of view for a second and ask yourself what you would do in this situation?

The answer, I think, is obvious: you try to win as much time as possible and you prepare for war. The Russians have been doing exactly that since at least early 2015.

For Russia this is really nothing new: been there, done that, and remember it very, very well, by the way. The "western project" for Russia has always been the same since the Middle-Ages, the only difference today is the consequences of war. With each passing century the human cost of the various western crusades against Russia got worse and worse and now we are not only looking at the very real possibility of another Borodino or Kursk, and not even at another Hiroshima, but at something which we can't even really imagine: hundreds of millions of people die in the course of just a few hours.

How do we stop that?

Is the West even capable of acting in a different way?

I very much doubt it.

The one actor who can stop the upcoming war: China

There is one actor which might, perhaps, stop the current skid towards Armageddon: China. Right now, the Chinese have officially declared that they have what they call a " comprehensive strategic partnership of cooperation " later shortened to " strategic partnership ". This is a very apt expression as it does not speak of an "alliance": two countries of the size of Russia and China cannot have an alliance in the traditional sense -- they are too big and different for that. They are, however, in a symbiotic relationship, that both sides understand perfectly (see this White Paper for details). What this means in very simple terms is this: the Chinese cannot let Russia be defeated by the Empire because once Russia is gone, they will be left one on one with a united, triumphal and infinitely arrogant West (likewise I would argue that Russia cannot afford to have Iran defeated by the Empire for exactly the same reasons, and neither can Iran let the Israelis destroy Hezbollah). Of course, in terms of military power, China is a dwarf compared to Russia, but in terms of economic power Russia is the dwarf when compared to China in this "strategic community of interests". Thus, China cannot assist Russia militarily. But remember that Russia does not need this if only because military assistance is what you need to win a war. Russia does not want to win a war, Russia desperately needs to avoid a war! And here is where China can make a huge difference: psychologically.

Yes, the Empire is currently taking on both Russia and China, but everybody, from its leaders to its zombified population, seems to think that these are two, different and separate foes. [We can use this opportunity to most sincerely thank Donald Trump for so "perfectly" timing his trade war with China.] They are not: not only are Russia and China symbionts who share the same vision of a prosperous and peaceful Eurasia united by a common future centered around the OBOR and, crucially, free from the US dollar or, for that matter, from any type of major US role, but Russia and China also stand for exactly the same notion of a post-hegemonic world order: a multi-polar world of different and truly sovereign nations living together under the rules of international law. If the AngloZionists have their way, this will never happen. Instead, we will have the New World Order promised by Bush, dominated by the Anglosphere countries (basically the ECHELON members, aka the "Five Eyes") and, on top of that pyramid, the global Zionist overlord. This is something China cannot, and will not allow. Neither can China allow a US-Russian war, especially not a nuclear one because China, like Russia, also needs peace.

Conclusion

I don't see what Russia could do to convince the Empire to change its current course: the US leaders are delusional and the Europeans are their silent, submissive servants. As shown above, whatever Russia does it always invites further escalation from the Empire. Of course, Russia can turn the West into a pile of smoldering radioactive ashes. This is hardly a solution since, in the inevitable exchange, Russia herself will also be turned into a similar pile of smoldering radioactive ashes by the Empire. In spite of that, the Russian people have most clearly indicated by their recent vote that they have absolutely no intention of caving in to the latest western crusade against them. As for the Empire, it will never accept the fact that Russia refuses to submit. It therefore seems to me that the only thing which can stop Armageddon would be for the Chinese to ceaselessly continue to repeat to the rulers of the Empire and the people of the West what the wrote in the article quoted above: that " The West is only a small fraction of the world and is nowhere near the global representative it once thought it was" and "the silenced minorities within the international community need to realize this and prove just how deep their understanding is of such a realization by proving it to the world through action."

History teaches us that the West only strikes against those opponents it sees as defenseless or, at least, weaker. The fact that the Popes, Napoleon or Hitler were wrong in their evaluation of the strength of Russia does not change this truism. In fact, the Neocons today are making exactly the same mistake. So telling them about the fact that Russia is much stronger than what the western propaganda says and which, apparently, many western rulers believe (you always end up believing your own propaganda), does not help. Russian "reminders of reality" will do no good simply because the West is out of touch with reality and lacks the ability to understand its own limitations and weaknesses. But if China stepped in and conveyed that crucial message " The West is only a small fraction of the world " and that the rest of the world will prove this " through action " then other countries will step in and a war can be averted because even the current delusion-based "solidarity" will collapse in the face of a united Eurasia.

Russia alone cannot continue to carry the burden of stopping the messianic psychopaths ruling the Empire.

The rest of the world, led by China, now needs to step in to avert the war.


NoseytheDuke , March 30, 2018 at 6:49 am GMT

This plan for global dominance has been over 100 years in the making and has already cost over 100 million lives so far. How likely is it for them to back off now? The Chinese are far from stupid so it will be interesting to see how they view the situation and act.

I've stated previously that the people who really can put a halt to it are Americans themselves but it won't be easy. The ideal situation would be a mass mutiny of US military personnel and the line, The Empire: by way of deception thou shalt do war should probably read, The Israeli Empire: by way of deception thou shalt do war. It would be useful to repeat this ad nauseam until it truly sinks in for US military personnel that the US is a supplicant to Israel and to understand who they will be fighting and dying for. A mass mutiny would be the best way to save their families and future.

Anon [425] Disclaimer , March 30, 2018 at 7:16 am GMT
Again, not much difference here between the sack of the First Rome in 410, the sack of the Second Rome in 1204 and the sack of the Third Rome in 1991. As psychologists well know, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

But all three Romes were empires too filled with lies.

yurivku , March 30, 2018 at 11:00 am GMT
Oh, appears it's China who should do something !

But I think that if stupid westerners won't wake up, -- nobody will help. China is big and possibly can think that in world where no Russia, no Europe nor US/Canada are exist, some place will still be for China.

It's "higly posssible" a mistake, but if silly westerners will continue to munch their MSM grass their shadows will be printed on the walls of history.
Actually they deserve to be.

Seamus Padraig , March 30, 2018 at 11:53 am GMT

"Solidarity" in this context is simply a "conceptual placeholder" for Stephen Decatur's famous "my country, right or wrong" applied to the entire Empire.

Kind of disappointed in the Saker here. Just like liberals, he omits the rest of Decatur's famous toast: "Our country -- in her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right , and always successful, right or wrong. [ Emphasis mine. ]" Decatur was not trying to encourage amoral behavior, such as that which we now see with the AngloZionists running Washington.

By the way, I've heard the Russians are now telling a joke about Boris Johnson: they're saying he was poisoned with durachok (bonehead)!

Issac , March 30, 2018 at 3:53 pm GMT
China has deep ties to the western empire. Russians would be drinking too deeply from their own propaganda to miss this fact. Indeed, the latest crippling of Trumpist reform was lead by heavily Chinese invested men Ryan and McConnell. Israel has a strong grip on US foreign policy for obvious reasons, but Israel has no reason to see Russia bullied into submission. China does.

It should be plain to any objective observer of global politics that the west is internally incoherent and will wane in power by the crush weight of demographic change alone. China observes this and realizes the only long-term competitor to their ascendant position, one generation hence, is an independent Russia. Far better for the Chinese that Russia is mortally wounded or harried into Chinese vassal status before the west breaks down into a third world non-entity.

Fran Macadam , March 30, 2018 at 5:22 pm GMT
The real reasons for the expulsions is the revelation of Russia's next generation war weapons. It was taken up as an invitation to fight, not to make peace, and making it as hard as possible for Russians to either influence opinion or gather information.

Somebody wanted Skripal dead, and while it may be a useful false flag provocation, with his involvement with the Steele Dossier a possible trigger, it could be serving more than one purpose. As usual, we are assigning to the Russkies both more omnipotence and stupidity than is merited. I supoose it is our own elites who believe their omniscience in surveilling all of us means they are also smarter than the rest of us. Maybe

Boris M Garsky , March 30, 2018 at 6:18 pm GMT
Well said and accurate. There is no consensus among the hoipolloi with the neocon push for war. This will never come about. The west is desperate, no doubt, and will continue to beat its chest, much to its own detriment. If the west intended on war, it would have come about. Time is not on their side. The neocons have backed themselves into a corner and, therefore, must create chaos, camouflage, obfuscation, in order to bamboozle the world until they can safely go back into their holes. Most likely, they are looking for concessions. Remember the Wasserman-Schuiltz spy scandal? Remember the many deadly false flags being exposed to the public for what they are?
Arioch , Website March 30, 2018 at 6:25 pm GMT
Frankly, Saker reads too much into this Chinese article. It is not about Russia. It is not because Skrypal hoax dialed ritual Russophobia over eleven. It just is a coincidence. Yet before loosing the elections Hillary was promising military war with Russia. Yet before winning the elections Trump was promising economic war with China.

USA ruling 1% was making a strategic choice year ago.

When Trump got elected he inherited the raging war. He could not stop it, obviously. Then he turned it overboard. He started demanding so many wars at once that US Army got overstretched and paralyzed. Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Itan, Yemen, Korea, new European garrisons . Trump send Army to prepare to war everywhere and now Pentagon can not scratch together enough forces to attack anywhere specifically.
By his "clumsy and incompetent bravado" Trump neutralized the army, made and exposed it as incapable pretend-force.

Now Trump can switch to his programme -- economic war with China.

And that is why Chinese diplomats and media run crazy. Now it is their war, not Russia's. Now their tails are on the line. Now Russia mostly can move to backlines to lick wounds while China would exchange blows and collect bruises.

This turned recent Chinese statements so bald and pushing. This, and not a concern for Russia.

JVC , March 30, 2018 at 6:42 pm GMT
something the Russians might consider -- immediately cutting off all gas to Europe and restoring such service for payment only in gold or the new "petrol yuan" . Europe depends heavily on that Russian Gas, and such a move would re-align some European thinking. Replacing it with US provided LPG would take far too long and be much more expensive having to be shipped by sea

In fact, maybe if Russia, China, the other brics and aligned countries suddenly cut off all ties to the west, it would hasten the coming economic collapse of the EU and US, and that dreamed of multipolar world would arise from the ashes.
Better that than the ashes of a nuclear exchange I would think.

CARLOS231 , March 30, 2018 at 6:57 pm GMT
China is too smart to show its hand yet, they are building their economic & military strength quietly, they don't want to scare the westerners yet with threats.

Russia`s biggest weakness is the incompetent, useless leaders they had from the 80`s to Yeltsin. The mess that the USSR left behind with unstable states on its borders with no treaty to prevent NATO expansion was a huge gift to the US that just keeps giving!!

I`ll go as far as saying this gift to the US might lead to Russia`s end as a country in its present form. You can hardly blame the US I mean in 1990 Russia agreed to basically throw the towel in and live in a US dominated world in practice. Whatever they say about promises at the time that lasted for as long as their breath was warm .

Carlton Meyer , Website March 30, 2018 at 9:16 pm GMT
How the East Can Save the West

A couple centuries ago the phrase "The White Man's Burden" was used to explain why citizens of Western nations must devote resources to civilize the world. Gore Vidal used "The Yellow Man's Burden" to explain why citizens of Asian nations were devoting so much wealth to keep the USA and much of Europe wealthy. If our citizens suddenly lost 30% of their annual income due to tax increases and spending cuts needed to truly balance our national budgets, they would be outraged. They might learn that this was the result of "free trade", which might result in revolution and wars. Those who have profited off "free trade" by selling out their citizens know its best to let the working class learn this truth slowly.

_____________________

Trump's proclamation to pull out of Syria may be good news, but probably not. He hired psychopath Bolton, so we can assume the US military is just consolidating forces in Iraq to hold off attacks whilst they bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. The Iraqis aren't our allies, they just act to get free stuff, and they will know we are not bombing Iran to save Iranians. It might be wise to get our troops out of Iraq too!

____________________________

To answer:

Let's begin this discussion with a few, basic questions.

Question one (thru five): does anybody sincerely believe

Yes, this bimbo does, and she's the State Department spokesman. The State Department is still infected with Clinton-hysteria and uses sexy women to spin lies so the foreign press doesn't laugh and scorn absurd BS too loudly. The American press are just stenographers and eagerly copy her lies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL9UxED4uuI

Sergey Krieger , March 30, 2018 at 9:50 pm GMT
The problem is that Russia/USSR submitted once and the West think it can be achieved again. Hence everything must be made clear. No partners word should be used and the West must be clearly warned that violence of unimaginable level will be used if they dare and what will follow if Russian force anywhere attacked and that any use of nukes against Russia means the end of humanity.

Unfortunately acting adequately and carefully Russia never was able to avoid war. It is in the books. Right now bets are life on earth hence being too careful and being perceived as weak is a bad thing. Russia IMHO must act boldly. Respond to USA and UK harassment by cutting diplomatic relations and giving straight terse warning.

myself , March 30, 2018 at 10:27 pm GMT
@Godfree Roberts

I think what disturbs China about this whole situation regarding the ENTIRE Western world (US, Canada, Western Europe, Australia) is not simply that it is an overreaction to Russia, but the whole idea that one particular people -- the Russian people -- have once again been SINGLED OUT for collective intimidation and eventually for possible dismemberment.

China has very long and very bitter experience of this itself. In the 19th century, the imperial powers, for some reason, ganged up on China.

In other parts of the world, the experience of other backward peoples was with but ONE particular Empire (ex. only the Americans vs the Amerinds, only the Spanish in South America, only Great Britain in India and Australia, only Russians in Central Asia and Siberia, and only Japanese in Korea. The British, French, Germans, Italians and Belgians each had separate RIVAL spheres in Africa, and ditto for South-East Asia.

But when it came to China, ALL these competing powers set aside their differences. It's as if they said to each other "Hey, China is so enormous and juicy, we should not fight among ourselves, there's enough for everyone!" Unbelievably vicious.

And now, we see the same pattern. the whole Western world against Russia. I think in this instance, the Han don't need anyone to tell them what to think -- it is 100% certain they do not approve of what the collective West is doing.

Miro23 , March 30, 2018 at 10:37 pm GMT

But if China stepped in and conveyed that crucial message "The West is only a small fraction of the world"

They can do better than this, and explicitly state that a nuclear war with Russia is a nuclear war with China -- just to make it clear -- and let the US do some more realistic calculations.

Seamus Padraig , March 30, 2018 at 10:45 pm GMT
@Issac

Israel has a strong grip on US foreign policy for obvious reasons, but Israel has no reason to see Russia bullied into submission.

Sure they do: Syria.

Seamus Padraig , March 30, 2018 at 10:47 pm GMT
@Arioch

"war is a path of deceit. When you are strong -- pretend weak ."

Am familiar with Sun-tzu a well. But what are you saying here? That the UK is stronger than Russia. I would definitely have to disagree with that proposition!

Miro23 , March 30, 2018 at 11:06 pm GMT
@Issac

It should be plain to any objective observer of global politics that the west is internally incoherent and will wane in power by the crush weight of demographic change alone. China observes this and realizes the only long-term competitor to their ascendant position, one generation hence, is an independent Russia.

Maybe, but the problem right now is the Imperial US (ruled from Israel). If it succeeds in destroying Russia, then the Chinese are irrelevant, and have nothing to say about anything.

myself , March 30, 2018 at 11:15 pm GMT
Something just occurred to me.

The recent THREATENED tariffs have an INTERESTING TIMING to them. It is being used by Washington to convince China to stay passive as the West takes down Russia. Conversely, if China "bends the knee", then the West promises that the threats won't materialize. (The West loves worthless promises). Washington calculates that the mere threat of tariffs will make China stand by as a neighbor is destroyed. Any turmoil in your neighbor's house, spills over into yours whether you want it to or not. A neighbor is a neighbor, period.

And THAT, IMHO, is why the protectionist threats are happening NOW. Don't get me wrong, the tariffs were going to happen anyway, eventually. China, whatever it does, cannot escape them.

But to threaten a trade war RIGHT NOW with the one power guaranteed to be Russia's economic lifeline (we know that China couldn't care less what Russia does in its backyard, in the Ukraine) while preparing to attack Russia itself? Well, the whole thing is WAY TOO OBVIOUS.

And if someone like me can see, so can a lot of other people in Moscow and Beijing. Washington thinks its being "smart", but they are so ridiculously easy to read.

myself , March 30, 2018 at 11:24 pm GMT
@Seamus Padraig

No, not that UK is really stronger than Russia but appears weaker. It's that the West is actually not capable of defeating Russia but loudly shouts that it CAN defeat them easily, and tries to look powerful and intimidating to Russia. In this situation, the weaker-positioned West pretends to Russia that we are stronger, and we want Russia to believe us. That way, it won't come to actual war, and we think Russia will back down. It's an extremely risky plan.

Miro23 , March 30, 2018 at 11:26 pm GMT
@peterAUS

That could, perhaps, take minds of US citizens from shopping and social media to, perhaps, more serious matters.

Won't hold my breath.

Taking everything into account, I think the you're right. The US public are irretrievably useless and are going to have to go the whole way, with WW3 and/or an economic collapse, with the best bet being on WW3 (which they may well lose).

myself , March 30, 2018 at 11:39 pm GMT
In fact, it's very possible RUSSIA is NOT, at this time, the target of Western aggression. Sure, the West shall SURELY try to destroy Russia, but the urgency is not there YET. Maybe the real target right now is CHINA, shortly to have the world's largest economy in absolute terms. They must be destroyed NOW! The West is trying to cut a deal with Russia: "Stab China in the back, and bow down to us. You can live A LITTLE LONGER, before we come for you. Otherwise we get pissed and kill you TODAY".

An entirely plausible master-plan from Washington, London and Paris. Also a pretty transparent one, if it's the case. The problem with this "Divide and Conquer" plan, aside from being easy to read, is that it counts on both Russia and China to be dumb enough to believe they are not BOTH in the cross-hairs. How stupid does the West think China and Russia are?

myself , March 30, 2018 at 11:47 pm GMT
@Miro23

It would have a psychological effect, at most. Russia has 5,000 warheads, China only admits to having around 500 or 600 strategic city-killers. They may have more, but if you don't admit something it doesn't count for deterrence. Maybe a decade from now, as China builds its arsenal, the statement could be much more effective.

Mikel , March 31, 2018 at 12:09 am GMT
No, the Chinese are surely disgusted with this bullying behavior of the West (even many Europeans are, just read the comments to the news in the different media outlets) but China cannot seriously confront the West. That would make them lose trillions of dollars in exports and investments and put an abrupt end to their miraculous but still ongoing economic development. Not gonna happen anytime soon.

The situation will continue to deteriorate until some sort of modus vivendi is reached (like at the beginning of the first Cold War). Or perhaps it's just been too long since the last World War and the time is ripe for the next one.

As for the Skripal murder attempt, it's hard to imagine Putin ordering it at this time and in that manner but it's not that hard to imagine someone from the Kremlin sewers being behind it.

In the somewhat less likely scenario of a false flag operation, I would consider an Israeli asymmetrical response to the recent downing of their jet by the Syrians with obvious help from the Russians. They have plenty of experience in extraterritorial assassinations and more than enough knowledge to fabricate a Russian-like nerve agent.

Franklin , March 31, 2018 at 12:22 am GMT
@Anon

I respect and value Saker as a commentator on Russian and military affairs. Those are his areas of expertise and professional experience. I do not value him as a historian, because there enters into his writing a clear bias. I respect the fact of his commitment to his Orthodox faith, but I don't appreciate being almost hammerlocked into having to take a side in his prejudices.

He has a way of lumping 1,000 years of exceedingly complex history into what amounts practically to silly formulas that remind one of adolescent pique. West is characterized by "thuggery," whereas the "East," is presumably the source -- and is possibly the monopoly -- of the virtues Saker has in mind, while Western-like manifestations of military violence and conquest are unknown there.

And there is this pearl: "Scholasticism and an insatiable thrust for worldly, secular, power produced both moral relativism and colonialism " This is downright embarrassing in its silliness. Of course, after deep study of Aquinas or Bonaventure the light comes on: moral relativism! Clearly, subtlety and essential distinctions are not the Saker's strong points, to say the least, when it comes to registering his annoyance and bitterness in his 1000 year view of "the West," whereas sweeping and frankly spectacularly inept generalizations are. One is really tempted to accuse him of a lack of intellectual integrity when it comes to these matters.

At root, Saker is a highly emotional and touchy "rooter" for Orthodoxy. Fine, that's his right, but he is no scholar. One looks in vain either for impartiality, for breadth and depth of understanding and sympathy, and hence for generosity of spirit. Thankfully, there are many great scholars of history, East and West.

Johann Ricke , March 31, 2018 at 1:01 am GMT
@myself

In the 19th century, the imperial powers, for some reason, ganged up on China.

That's the opposite of reality. If they had ganged up on China, each would have taken large piece for itself. In reality, they were overawed by China, and tried to preserve it much as they tried to preserve Ottoman rule against both breakup and dismemberment by Russia. The Ottomans were too far gone, so they failed in both respects. But they did manage to prevent China's breakup while failing to keep Russia from annexing a large chunk of Chinese territory.

Heck, they even helped China defeat the millenarian Taiping rebels who racked up a large body count during their rebellion. Note that when the Jurchens detected internal rebellion during the Ming dynasty, they waited until the imperial armies were occupied with rebel suppression before delivering the coup de grace to the Ming dynasty. The Western powers were too tied up competing with each other to really cooperate in anything more than avenging the honor of their envoys and getting trading posts set up on Chinese territory.

myself , March 31, 2018 at 2:06 am GMT
@Johann Ricke

By "ganging up" I refer to the way in which China was COLLECTIVELY FORCED to extend any and all concessions granted any single Imperial Power to ALL Imperial powers. And all the Imperial powers were on-board with this policy , again as a unified group.

For example, if Russia forced a railroad treaty on China, China by unequal, at-gun-point "Treaty" with the Eight Powers (at the time Great Britain, France, Japan, Germany, Russia, The United States, Austria-Hungary and Italy) would also have to grant EVERYONE railroad concessions in their respective zones.

Or say if China was forced to open trade relations by America, China would automatically be forced to open trade to EVERYONE ELSE , and even the instigators in that case, the United States, would force China to do it. All in the name of the relevant Treaties, of course.

Also by mutual agreement among the imperial powers, they would not support China in any efforts to get better terms in any negotiation with any other power . So Russia refused to, say provide support for Chinese efforts to fend off the Japanese, though normally it might have done so. This was because, both being part of the Imperial Powers grouping, Russia and Japan had agreed to co-exist in mutual exploitation of China.

It was all designed so that China would have no ability to shift its favor diplomatically from one power to another, but had to negotiate from a position of deliberately imposed weakness. Diplomacy was the only tool available to China in that execrably weak state, pathetic as that tool was. By collective agreement among the Empires, that tool was taken away.

In effect, exploitation of China became a COOPERATIVE project between such disparate rivals as Britain, France and Germany, or United States, Japan and Russia. Such a thing, of a coordinated desire to apportion one country among many, was not seen anywhere else in the Colonial Age .

That is my meaning when I referred to the Empires "ganging up" on China.

Issac , March 31, 2018 at 2:37 am GMT
@Miro23

How absurd. The foremost producer of virtually all modern goods is irrelevant without Russia? A weakened Russia is a boon to Chinese expansion into their desired role as Eurasian leader state. The only irrelevant nations are in the West as their post-national suicide becomes all the more certain.

Anonymous [392] Disclaimer , March 31, 2018 at 4:03 am GMT
@Issac

Ridiculous, China needs Russia as Russia is a perfect complement to Chinas weaknesses. In fact, neither China nor Russia could have picked a better strategic partner than each other as neither country could confront the West on it's own but together the West cannot topple either nation. No other combination between countries would provide near as much synergies.

China is not looking to expand into Russia. Why would they when they have a shrinking population. They are expanding into the SCS in order to keep their oil lines free.

The real strategic advantage Russia and China have with each other is the OBOR. This is key to everything and is the reason why the West is targeting Russia so aggressively.

myself , March 31, 2018 at 8:13 am GMT
@Anonymous

If Mackinder's Heartland theory is at play, and you want to cut China off from Europe, taking down Russia would seem to be an enormous effort to accomplish that. There are much easier ways. Why not just lobby your European "allies" not to trade at all with China? Mission accomplished, and no war with Russia as a bonus. If the EU won't follow the Empire's orders, you need to take out not only Russia, but probably Pakistan, and all the Central Asian nations, plus Iran and Turkey. If not, and you only destroy one or a few of these, China's One Belt One Road reaches Europe anyway.

Also don't forget the outright blockade of China's maritime trade to be conducted by the U.S. Navy -- kind of an act of war in itself.

Seems far easier, if you want to slow China down, to just ORDER America's NATO allies to stop all trade with China. The rest of the world all together won't be able to fill the gap, not any time soon.

Voila, you lower China's GDP growth by some significant percentage, using just strong-arm diplomacy in Europe.

Buys America another full decade as number one economy, maybe.

myself , March 31, 2018 at 8:29 am GMT
In the fevered dreams of Western strategists, they hope for Russia and China to turn on each other, sparing the Atlantic powers the trouble. Then, they come in and pick up the pieces. They hope to replicate the success of Britain in playing off France against Germany pre-World War One. The problem is they have in fact encouraged the Sino-Russian strategic alignment, not hindered it.

No matter, after all, there can never be such a thing, thought the British, of a long-term common interest between France and Germany -- a "European Union" will never come about. French and Germans naturally hate each other! Right?

And how did Britain make out with that thinking? How will America make out in coming decades? In geopolitics, not that well. Not as long as we are short-sighted.

Anon [384] Disclaimer , March 31, 2018 at 2:11 pm GMT

"solidarity"

Those with the power, and the happily ruled, have always needed synonyms for "obedience." Solidarity is a choice in line with our social-mediatic times and the related communication standards.

Herald , March 31, 2018 at 3:36 pm GMT
@myself

As well as being extremely risky it's also bloody stupid and doomed to failure.

Arioch , March 31, 2018 at 3:40 pm GMT
@Seamus Padraig

I mean, like i said above, Johnson and other western politicians are not "boneheads" (intellectually weak) as you said, no, they are smart (intellectually strong) and pretending, faking their intellectual weakness (appearance of stupidity)

Sean , March 31, 2018 at 5:35 pm GMT
Answers:-
One and two. Proof beyond reasonable doubt does not mean there is no chance of a mistake, and the standard necessary for thinking Putin responsible is less than what would be needed for finding him guilty in a court of law. He cannot hide behind his country and diplomatic immunity while claiming the protection of British Law for evidence necessary to convict someone on trial for a capital offence.

Three. We want nothing from Russia , for indeed they have nothing to offer. To go away and shut up is the most they can do, and that is why are sending the worst of the Russian goons back were they came from, whether they want to go back or not (they would love to stay in London*).

Four. Punishment is essential, otherwise they will see weakness.

Five. No chance of nuclear war or any other kind or war. Russia is destined to become the lonely old man of Europe. It has nothing anyone wants at the price of being treated like an imbecile, and our diplomats dislike living there*).

Arioch , March 31, 2018 at 8:22 pm GMT
@TT

Oh, we have a copypaste contest? Okay then, i'd copy here my reply at saker's blog too.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[MORE]
> China will be blackmailed into submission.

Wooop! Then it is not "existential threat" for China.
Clash for power, clash for sovereignty, clash fo prosperity -- but not for survival.

> Russia & China are working closely

Which does not mean China's role is making harsh diplomatic statements in favor of Russia. At least it was not so before today. So i think it is not today either. Also remember that Chinese social mindset is build upon idea of "indebting with gifts and aids" and then requesting payback when they need it. Which means Russia should be very wary about accepting any help from China unless it wishes to be seen by China as a deeply indebted beggar incapable of sustaining itself. And since diplomatic situation for Russia is not deadly critical I do not think Russia needed that newspaper article. If Russia would request China's support of the kind -- it would be in official diplomatic venues like UN.

> Russia needs to save Syria for its own skin
> Iran needs to save its skin

But is it so for China? Is China in critical need of sovereign and friendly Syria? I doubt it.

> China has been backing up with big cheque book for last few years, signing hundreds of billions deal with upfront payments to prop Russia economy for prolong war.

Which is very important, but is not diplomatic statements nor Chinese newspaper articles.

That is exactly the Chinese role in this fight like i said many times before -- economic and financial warfare is Chinese responsibility, while military and diplomatic warfare is Russian's.

> Global times news mostly reflected the China think tank policy that they wish to propagate to English speaking world.

And here we are getting back to the topic. Why such a harsh, explicitly worded article did appeared today? Was it because of Russia or of China itself? Was that article reaction to some new threat to Syria, to russia, or to China itself?
And i believe in the latter option. This article is not linked to any recent events around Russia, it is caused by Sino-American relations shift.

> China has sensed West is tightened noose around Russia to cut it off from world, seeing from Olympic & now the Skirpal circus

Skripal affair is much less than Olympics was. Even European states many did not jumped Skripal wagon. Additionally, if Russia would be "cut off from Western world" -- what the West did not dared to do even in 2014 on the height of Crimea and MH17 accusations and on the hopes of "gas station" imminent and fast collapse, so would hardly dare now just because some Skripal -- but if Russia would somehow gets politically isolated from the West, what bad is it for China? Russia would become more dependent on China, like many of the trade with West would had to go through Chinese "laundry". China gets more influence over Russia. Russia gets much more limited in its options. Good (for China) development, why hurry to cancel it before Russia even asked for ?

> Trade war will be too bloody for the world

Yes, but the said trade war is not having Russia as primary adversary -- Russian economy i not that significant to the western world, and for USA in particular it has but zero significance. The trade war we see igniting -- is the war against China. China can no more be "wise monkey up the trees", when USA moved their chaingun aim from Russia onto China. Now China is being shot at, and the article is Chinese response to China being attacked. Not to anything around Russia.

> You are silly self center viewer

Frankly, it is exactly the opposite here. It is you who claim Russia being behind that article in Global Time. It is me who claims Russia has no any relation to the timing and wording of that article.

> China special force is operating in Syria.

Maybe it is, but seems no one ever saw those operations.

> Lot of weapons supply to SAA.

Maybe they are, but can you name those Chinese weapons and show me where SAA is employing it?

> Lot of money pump in to sustain Syria war,

If they are, then China does it part of the fight, good. Like USA supplied money and material to fighting European states during WW2. However that has no relation with the Global Times article being discussed.

> always throwing allies under bus whenever possible,

.because Putin is evil and just enjoys every opportunity to do bad thing. Always. I wish i would hear somethign remotely creative from you.

> hence Russia deserve to be raped by West like 1990 is natural.

Oh, i see. Yet another russophobic preaching that "Russians should repent and repay, repay, and repent", then frustrated when Russia shrugs this lecture off.

Vidi , March 31, 2018 at 8:34 pm GMT
@Anonymous

And, as you said, the west has many ways of neutralizing China.

Don't forget that China has an enormous internal market too, which in time should be larger than the U.S. and EU combined. European countries that stay out of this vast and rapidly growing market will be cutting their own throats. Good luck convincing them to do that.

[Apr 02, 2018] Confronting Russophobia by Srdja Trifkovic

Notable quotes:
"... The roots of Russophobia's emotional appeal to the left seem clear: It comes as a huge mental relief to the ultrasensitive liberal mind to be able to hate an outside group with impunity, and even to appear virtuous in the process . Of course, the object of that animus is a Christian and European nation that stubbornly refuses to be postmodernized, or become gripped by self-hate and morbid introspection; a nation not ashamed of its past and unwilling to surrender its future to alien multitudes; a nation where nobody obsesses over transgender bathrooms, microaggressions, and other "issues" indicative of a society's moral and intellectual decrepitude. ..."
"... The liberals' ideological and emotional Russophobia has blended seamlessly with the bread-and-butter hostility to Russia shared by Deep State operatives in the intelligence and national-security apparatus, in the military-industrial complex, and in the congressional duopoly. ..."
"... The late Anna Politkovskaya thus wrote in the Los Angeles Times 12 years ago that "it is common knowledge that the Russian people are irrational by nature." It is impossible to imagine a mainstream publication publishing a similar statement about Jews or Muslims. ..."
"... Cheesepopes be gaslighting ..."
"... Nothing give a NYC Wall Street banker more of a wet dream than the possibility of war between the goy. Oil, white slaves, truly a banker's dream come true. ..."
Apr 23, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
by Srdja Trifkovic via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

There is a paranoid, hysterical quality to the public discourse on Russia and all things Russian in today's America. The corporate media machine and its Deep State handlers have abdicated reason and common decency in favor of raw hate and fear-mongering. We have not seen anything like it before, even in the darkest days of the Cold War.

The roots of Russophobia's emotional appeal to the left seem clear: It comes as a huge mental relief to the ultrasensitive liberal mind to be able to hate an outside group with impunity, and even to appear virtuous in the process . Of course, the object of that animus is a Christian and European nation that stubbornly refuses to be postmodernized, or become gripped by self-hate and morbid introspection; a nation not ashamed of its past and unwilling to surrender its future to alien multitudes; a nation where nobody obsesses over transgender bathrooms, microaggressions, and other "issues" indicative of a society's moral and intellectual decrepitude.

The liberals' ideological and emotional Russophobia has blended seamlessly with the bread-and-butter hostility to Russia shared by Deep State operatives in the intelligence and national-security apparatus, in the military-industrial complex, and in the congressional duopoly. The result is a surreal narrative that mixes supposedly unprovoked "Russian aggression" in Ukraine, hostile intent in the Baltics, serial war crimes in Syria, political destabilization in Western Europe, and gross interference in America's "democratic process". The result is an altogether fictitious "existential threat," which has made President Trump's intended détente with Moscow impossible. He may have been serious about turning over a new leaf, but the Deep State counterpressure proved just too great. A solid rejection front emerged, left and right, conservative and liberal, which extends even into his own team and finally inhibited him from making moves that could have appeared too friendly to Putin.

The Russophobes' narrative is unrelated to Russia's actual policies. It reflects a deep odium of the elite class toward Russia-as-such. That animosity has been developing in its current form since roughly the time of the Crimean War, when in his Letters From Russia the Marquis de Custine said that the country's "veneer of European civilization was too thin to be credible."

"No human beings, black, yellow or white, could be quite as untruthful, as insincere, as arrogant-in short, as untrustworthy in every way-as the Russians," President Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1905. John Maynard Keynes, after a trip to the Soviet Union in 1925, wondered whether the "mood of oppression" might be "the fruit of some beastliness in the Russian nature." J. Robert Oppenheimer opined in 1951 that, in Russia, "We are coping with a barbarous, backward people." More recently, Sen. John McCain declared that "Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country." "Russia is an anti-Western power with a different, darker vision of global politics," Slate wrote in early 2014, even before the Ukrainian crisis reached its climax.

This narrative has two key pillars. In terms of geopolitics, we see the striving of maritime empires-Britain before World War II, and the United States after - to "contain" and if possible control the Eurasian heartland, the core of which is of course Russia. Equally important is the already noted cultural antipathy, the desire not merely to influence Russian policies and behavior but to effect an irreversible transformation of Russia's identity. Some of the most viscerally Russophobic stereotypes come from Russia herself, from those members of Moscow's "intelligentsia" who feel more at home in New York or London than anywhere in their own country. The late Anna Politkovskaya thus wrote in the Los Angeles Times 12 years ago that "it is common knowledge that the Russian people are irrational by nature." It is impossible to imagine a mainstream publication publishing a similar statement about Jews or Muslims.

The Russophobic frenzy comes at a cost. It further devalues the quality of public discourse on world affairs in the United States, which is already dismally low. It has already undermined the prospects for a mutually beneficial new chapter in U.S.-Russian relations, based on a realist assessment that those two powers have no "existential" differences - and share many actual and potential commonalities. It perpetrates the arrogant delusion that there is a superior, "Western" model of social and cultural thought and action that can and should be imposed everywhere, but especially in Russia.

Saddest of all, Russophobic mania prolongs the European civil war that exploded in July 1914, continued in 1939, and has never properly ended - not even with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It would be in the American interest, as well as Russia's and Europe's, for that conflict to end, so that the existential challenge common to all- that of resurgent jihad and Europe's demographic crisis - can be properly addressed.

francis soyer , Apr 23, 2017 7:28 PM

Cheesepopes be gaslighting

Blue Balls -> francis soyer , Apr 23, 2017 7:35 PM

Nothing give a NYC Wall Street banker more of a wet dream than the possibility of war between the goy. Oil, white slaves, truly a banker's dream come true.

Ramesees -> Blue Balls , Apr 23, 2017 7:39 PM

We don't have to go to war with Russia, but let's agree that Russia is, at a minimum, a rival.

Lumberjack -> Ramesees , Apr 23, 2017 7:40 PM

Wrong. China is.

Ramesees -> Lumberjack , Apr 23, 2017 7:43 PM

Russia has its own interests, just like the United States. Sometimes our interests align, more often they do not.

How is that any different than China, other than Russia's demographic death spiral that will eliminate them as a rival in 50-75 years?

knukles -> Ramesees , Apr 23, 2017 7:46 PM

Why can't we all just get along?

Dizzy Malscience -> knukles , Apr 23, 2017 8:16 PM

..it seems like our foreign policy is like an angry poor, innocent "motorist", whacked out on amphetamines, speeding over 100 mph and destined to drown in his liberal negro lottery swimming pool.

Volkodav -> Ramesees , Apr 23, 2017 8:09 PM

missed fact Russian demographic is much improve

sure better than europe

Centerist -> Volkodav , Apr 23, 2017 8:24 PM

Da, comrade. Russian demographic is much improve. Population shrink less fast now.

Lumberjack -> Lumberjack , Apr 23, 2017 8:10 PM

Comment: why US allies Israel, Saudi Arabia are cosying up to China

http://m.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2082673/comment-w...

Furthermore...

Breaking:

The United States is closely watching a recent increase in piracy off the coast of Somalia, a senior U.S. military official said on Sunday as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis visited an important military base in Djibouti.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-mattis-africa-idUSKBN17P0C7?utm_ca ...

-----

Hate to use huffpo but this is relevent...

Why China and Saudi Arabia Are Building Bases in Djibouti http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-braude/why-china-and-saudi-arabi_b_ ...

Then this:

http://thediplomat.com/2017/02/the-chinese-navys-djibouti-base-a-support ...

malek -> Ramesees , Apr 23, 2017 7:49 PM

"Russia is, at a minimum, a rival."

If I ignore your bullshit "but at the maximum..." implication:

So what do you conclude from that. Is it a bad thing to have rivals? Should we strive to turn every remaining rival into a vassal? Is there a limit on methods allowed toward a rival?

Centerist -> Ramesees , Apr 23, 2017 8:20 PM

I'll give you a green arrow to make up for the narrow-mindedness of the simpletons who all gave you red arrows.

We don't need a war with Russia, and the US won't instigate one, either. The juice wouldn't be worth the squeeze.

With all of that being said, Russia is a rival to the US in other parts of the world. The US isn't the only country with a desire for influence around the world.

As much as there is a "Russo-phobia" being perpetuated in the US, you can bet a buck that there is an "Ameri-phobia" being perpetuated out there.

The big difference is that in Russia, they don't have message boards full of people sh*tting on their own country.

Lumberjack -> Centerist , Apr 23, 2017 9:03 PM

They will accomplish the war by proxy.

Centerist -> Lumberjack , Apr 23, 2017 9:17 PM

Well, that is kind of how major powers compete for influence. It takes two to tango. We can't exactly engage in war by proxy if the Russians aren't involved in it, too.

monk27 -> Blue Balls , Apr 23, 2017 7:49 PM

I hate to say it but the so called "elites", in charge of our beloved deep state controlling everything, are quite stupid -- This continuous news hysteria, against whatever subject du jour our intelligentsia decides to float publicly, proves beyond any reasonable doubt that said "elites" suffer from a combination of low IQ, partial education (at best !), and high self-delusion... We might get to witness nuclear war, just because our "elites" are too idiotic to realize what a nuclear war really is...

dsty , Apr 23, 2017 7:29 PM

Yes ZH, tell us once again how wonderful and humane Putin's Russia is.

Don't forget the loving relationship he has with little Kimmy of NK.

Billy the Poet -> dsty , Apr 23, 2017 7:34 PM

I see no such thing in this article. Can you provide quotes to support your criticism?

rccalhoun -> dsty , Apr 23, 2017 7:39 PM

dsty-- ZH does promote putin too much (ZH bias), but ZH is correct in that the MSM has the full court press on to instigate

and insult russia in any way possible.

my question; why the fuck does the USSA stick their fucking nose into everything? if the USSA wants supreme power...then go

conquer these nations and see how that works out.

Justin Case -> rccalhoun , Apr 23, 2017 7:47 PM

They stick their hook nose into everything because they want to own the whole 4th rock from the sun. These people are ill, very ill and as I read these comments it's obvious that some just don't get it yet.

Pure Evil -> Justin Case , Apr 23, 2017 7:59 PM

If we're the fourth rock from the sun, then the other three rocks between us and the sun are.......Venus, Mercury and ?

Implied Violins -> Pure Evil , Apr 23, 2017 9:03 PM

Nibiru. Or Wormwood. Nemesis? Planet X?? Ah fuck it.

knukles -> rccalhoun , Apr 23, 2017 7:48 PM

Which tells us that since we all live rent free in Tyler's pro-Russian basement, that we're now on 2 different sets of lists? That's disturbing.

Brazen Heist -> dsty , Apr 23, 2017 7:40 PM

Do tell us of that more loving butt-buddy relationship the US government has with the Wahhabi terrorist state.

Squid Viscous -> dsty , Apr 23, 2017 8:08 PM

Dsty, dirty stinking tacky yid?

35 Whelen , Apr 23, 2017 7:39 PM

"haven't seen anything like this since the darkest days of the cold war" ... that's because the media was by and large pro-Soviet.

Normalcy Bias , Apr 23, 2017 7:41 PM

All of this B.S. Russophobia evolved from a convenient distraction from the CONTENT of the leaked DNC emails, and has been amplified because of the symbiosis with Neoconservative/Globalist strategies.

dilligaff , Apr 23, 2017 7:42 PM

What amazes me is how well the propaganda seems to be working. There's a bunch of old farts (not that I'm really young!) at the gym every morning talking about how awesome it is that we bombed Syria and it'll show that bastard Putin we're tough and mean business. "America, Fuck yeh!" I wanted to ask them if they were mentally defective or just fucking retards...

Justin Case -> dilligaff , Apr 23, 2017 7:49 PM

Typical merica pie. Fuck tarts

UncleChopChop -> dilligaff , Apr 23, 2017 7:50 PM

sad

monk27 -> dilligaff , Apr 23, 2017 7:51 PM

Propaganda works very well with stupid subjects; the dumber the better...

Reaper -> dilligaff , Apr 23, 2017 7:58 PM

They "think/emote" alike, because each fears the others would otherwise discover their real ignorance.

Reaper , Apr 23, 2017 7:42 PM

Hate = emote. Emote = antithesis of reason. Hate controls the hater. Ergo, the creators of the hate control the haters.

medium giraffe -> Reaper , Apr 23, 2017 8:02 PM

Pretty much. Society has opted to run on emotion rather than fact, emotional manipulation being the key part of the most popular forms of entertainment. Sadly this bleeds into our dealings with each other which are increasingly emotional or insulting. Most of human behaviour and attitudes are due to fear, particularly the egoic fear of inadequacy. As a control mechanism, fear is a formidable tool. But fear is also a choice.

Reaper -> medium giraffe , Apr 23, 2017 8:18 PM

Fear is less effective tool than respect, especially in diplomacy. http://www.businessinsider.com/dale-carnegie-on-habits-of-influential-pe...

aloha_snakbar , Apr 23, 2017 7:44 PM

"Say Russia one more time... I DARE you"...

IranContra , Apr 23, 2017 7:50 PM

The Strategic Culture Foundation who published this piece has an evil agenda, and they are not even friends of Putin. They are very subtle warmongers. You will see when the time comes.

Putin was duped by Iran in Syria, Iran got Syria, not Putin. Trump and Saudi can give Russia what it needs to survive, if Putin stops being duped by deceptive hegemonial Iran.

Billy the Poet -> IranContra , Apr 23, 2017 7:56 PM

The Saudis gave us September 11 -- the gift that keeps on giving. But I doubt that Putin's jealous.

earleflorida -> IranContra , Apr 23, 2017 8:39 PM

"Iran approves six presidential candidates-- blocks Ahmadinejad"

have you any ideal how powerful this nutjob was? ahmadinejab was so powerful at one tyme he challenged the actual ayatollah position as last word! now, this guy was nuts!!! http://news.antiwar.com/2017/04/20/iran-approves-six-presidential-candidates-blocks-ahmadinejad/

sbenard , Apr 23, 2017 8:00 PM

This reminds me of when the ZerroHedge owners mentioned that Bloomberg article several months back that involved an interview of a former Zero Hedge writer blowing the lid off this place. He mentioned how pro-Russia the ZH owners were. This article suggests that he may have been right after all!

number06 -> sbenard , Apr 23, 2017 8:10 PM

Its pretty obvious many around here are in the superbowl ring stealing midgets pocket

stpioc -> sbenard , Apr 23, 2017 8:16 PM

Here is that article showing the Russiophile Zerohedgers:

http://rightwingers.org/forums/thread-156.html

Yea, we shouldn't be afraid of a country with nukes, that invades it's neigbours, has an uber crony economy the size of Italy's, dominated by oligarchs in mining and the obligation to keep friendly with the Kremlin or risk being put in jail and have your assets taken away on trumped up charges. The country that murders it's opponents and critics with nasty stuff like Polonium, even abroad, that interferes in others elections with misinformation campaigns and troll factories, that is on the side of the ayatolla's of Iran and the mass murderer in Syria, helping him by bombing hospitals and refugees, only to be "recognized as a player again on the world stage" A coutry of alcoholics with one of the lowest life expectancy in the developed world. Really, a model state.

As Paul Graig Roberts, the inhouse idiot here noted, Putin for the Nobel peace price!

Neochrome -> stpioc , Apr 23, 2017 8:33 PM

Which of the above does NOT apply to US and even worse?

Volkodav -> sbenard , Apr 23, 2017 8:24 PM

maybe here is one few places balance from the foamy mouth MSM

ZH far more logic, reason informed visitors

momprayn , Apr 23, 2017 8:28 PM

Wikileaks has disclosed the tactic to blame Russia for the election results, Trump's collusion, etc. back to spring of 2016 --- I remember when they started making those "Russia" comments. They wanted to start the thoughts about him/his staff being in collusion with the Russians. That was to hopefully make more decide not to vote for him and in case he won, use it to prove election fraud, treason and somehow impeach him.

Those who know about the Globalists NWO agenda, Deep State, Neocons, etc. realize we've all been lied to about Russia (among all the other lies) since the end of the Cold War. for "their" agenda purposes - need for continuous wars for MIC, etc. also. Putin is not as portrayed at all. Russia is not the "big bad Commie" beast that wants to take over the world as they want us to believe to "justify" another war.

Putin is an Eastern Orthodox Chrsitian who protects Christians, hates and fights terrorists and Globalism. He is not a Globalist. We have those goals in common and Pres. Trump and Putin would be a fantastic duo that when united, terrorism and Globalism would finally be dealt death blows,

Our enemies within know that and therefore they're trying to do everything they can to hurt that relationship and not let it happen because it would mean finally - the end of their evil world order plan.

VW Nerd -> momprayn , Apr 23, 2017 8:45 PM

Excellent assessment. I'll have to share it with my sister. She's a Republican Russia/Iran/Syria hater.

Neochrome , Apr 23, 2017 8:34 PM

Amount of pressure applied commensurate to strength of a country in question. For some of them all it takes is a stern talk from the ambassador, Russia right now is safely beyond the US ability to apply the required pressure, including the threat of Nuclear War. What is happening instead is that world being interconnected the way it is, applying pressure at hardened point that is Russia is also increasing pressure at other weaker points as well, pretty much all over the world. EU and NATO are posturing against Russia in display of lunacy that is symptomatic for the West, it seems that God is taking away humans ability to reason. Day 1, Russia announces indefinite cuts of gas supplies to Europe, stocks crater, world economy craters, Russia and China who were hoarding gold watch the West collapse like a house of cards while passing the popcorn. The End.

earleflorida -> Neochrome , Apr 23, 2017 8:51 PM

"Where Empires go to Die?"?!?

Afghanistan is about to go full retard again, as taliban cuts ussa out of heroin billions--- as our afghan troops turn their weapons on their masters[1]

seems, we bunker-busted the wrong cavity?

http://news.antiwar.com/tag/afghanistan/

Spinkbottle , Apr 23, 2017 8:51 PM

The Jewish media has been obsessed with this business about Russia allegedly influencing the recent 2016 U.S. election. This obsession has concealed the real problem with foreign influence over the American electoral system. It isn't Russian influence that's the problem, it is Israeli influence that's the problem.

Below is a list of stories showing how Israelis or Jews substantively connected to Israel have been subverting the American electoral process.

https://www.dailystormer.com/israel-is-the-main-foreign-power-subverting-the-american-election-system/

globalintelhub , Apr 23, 2017 8:55 PM

Read it and weep www.splittingpennies.com

Son of Captain Nemo , Apr 23, 2017 8:59 PM

You know we will have turned the corner when Donald Trump gives the American people a "Fireside Chat" and tells the public the real reasons the media spearheads a constant barrage of hate filled anti-Russian LYING PROPAGANDA filled rhetoric... BECAUSE

A) THEY ARE THE WORLDS LEADER IN OIL PRODUCTION B) HAVE NO DEBT C) HAVE THERE OWN BALANCE OF PAYMENT CREDIT SYSTEM MIR THAT WILL REPLACE THE WESTERN CENTRAL BANK(S) SYSTEM "SWIFT"

And after he delivers that truthful message he will NEVER BE ALLOWED TO EVER AGAIN... He will probably be shot like HOWARD BEALE in the movie NETWORK... Or WWWIII will be LAUNCHED!!!

[Apr 02, 2018] Russia Has 14 Questions On Fabricated Skripal Case

Mar 31, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Russia's embassy in London has sent a list of questions, 14 to be specific, to the British Foreign Ministry on the poisoning of Sergey and Yulia Skripal – which include a demand to clarify whether samples of the nerve agent "Novichok" have ever been developed in the UK.

The Russian embassy's statement calls the incident that started the recent diplomatic row a " fabricated case against Russia."

The questions published by the Russian Foreign Ministry's official website have been translated below:

  1. Why has Russia been denied the right of consular access to the two Russian citizens, who came to harm on British territory?
  2. What specific antidotes and in what form were the victims injected with? How did such antidotes come into the possession of British doctors at the scene of the incident?
  3. On what grounds was France involved in technical cooperation in the investigation of the incident, in which Russian citizens were injured?
  4. Did the UK notify the OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) of France's involvement in the investigation of the Salisbury incident?
  5. What does France have to do with the incident, involving two Russian citizens in the UK?
  6. What rules of UK procedural legislation allow for the involvement of a foreign state in an internal investigation?
  7. What evidence was handed over to France to be studied and for the investigation to be conducted?
  8. Were the French experts present during the sampling of biomaterial from Sergey and Yulia Skripal?
  9. Was the study of biomaterials from Sergey and Yulia Skripal conducted by the French experts and, if so, in which specific laboratories?
  10. Does the UK have the materials involved in the investigation carried out by France?
  11. Have the results of the French investigation been presented to the OPCW Technical Secretariat?
  12. Based on what attributes was the alleged "Russian origin" of the substance used in Salisbury established?
  13. Does the UK have control samples of the chemical warfare agent, which British representatives refer to as "Novichok"?
  14. Have the samples of a chemical warfare agent of the same type as "Novichok" (in accordance to British terminology) or its analogues been developed in the UK?

The Duran's Alexander Mercouris added some necessary points to the growing mystery and confusion of the Skripal poisoning:

These theories have included claims that Sergey and Yulia Skripal were (1) sprayed with the supposedly deadly chemical by a passer-by; (2) sprayed with the supposedly deadly chemical by an aerial drone; (3) contaminated by the supposedly deadly chemical which was brought from Russia in Yulia Skripal's suitcase where it had been hidden by some third party; and (4) were poisoned by having the supposedly deadly chemical somehow inserted into Sergey Skripal's car.

The British and other critics of Russia have recently taken to citing as 'proof' of Russian guilt the fact that the Russians have supposedly been proposing various theories about who might have poisoned Sergey and Yulia Skripal.

The British – who unlike the Russians have control of the crime scene and samples of the poison – have however been at least as busy proposing various theories about how Sergey and Yulia Skripal were poisoned.

In both cases the fact that the Russian media and the British media – though not it should be stressed the Russian or British governments – have been busy engaging in their respective speculations about who who and how Sergey and Yulia Skripal were poisoned is not proof of guilt.

Rather it suggests ignorance, which if anything (especially in Russia's case) is an indicator of innocence.

As I have said on many occasions, it is the guilty who so far from engaging in a variety of different speculations tend to come up with a single alternative narrative to explain away the facts, which they then pass off as the truth in order to provide themselves with an alibi.

As to the present theory – that Sergey and Yulia Skripal came into contact with the chemical agent on their front door – note the following:

(1) The British police have not said whether the chemical agent was smeared on the outside of the door or on the inside of the door.

If it was smeared on the outside of the door, then it was an extremely reckless act which might have easily poisoned a delivery person to the house such as a postman.

If it was smeared on the inside of the door, then whilst it might have been placed there by a burglar, the greater probability must be that it was placed there by a visitor.

If so then it is likely that either Sergey or Yulia Skripal or possibly both of them have some knowledge of the identity of this person. That might make the fact that Yulia Skripal is said to be recovering and is now conscious a matter of great importance for the solution of this mystery.

(2) If Sergey and Yulia Skripal really were poisoned with the chemical agent by coming into contact with it because it was smeared on their front door, then that would mean that the chemical agent took 7 hours to take effect.

Russian ambassador to Britain Alexander Yakovenko has claimed that the British authorities have told him that Sergey and Yulia Skripal were poisoned by nerve agent A-234, a Novichok type agent which is supposedly "as toxic as VX, as resistant to treatment as soman, and more difficult to detect and easier to manufacture than VX".

I am not a chemist or a chemical weapons expert, but such a slow acting poison seems at variance with the descriptions of A-234 and VX which I have read.

(3) The suggestion that Sergey and Yulia Skripal were poisoned by coming into contact with the chemical agent on their front door must for the moment be treated as no more than a theory. It does however appear to confirm the presence of the chemical agent in the house.

If the latest theory that Sergey and Yulia Skripal were poisoned by coming into contact with a chemical agent smeared on their front door begs many questions, then the news that Yulia Skripal is apparently recovering well from the effect of her poisoning, and is now conscious and speaking and is no longer in intensive care, though extremely welcome, in some ways adds further to the mystery.

EuroPox -> chunga Sat, 03/31/2018 - 16:54 Permalink

The Russians have also sent a list of 10 questions to the French. Just why were they involved at all? I think we should be told.

Question 10 is: "Have the samples of a chemical warfare agent of this type or its analogues been developed in France and if so, for what purpose?"

LOL!

Link to questions to France:

http://www.mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw

Sorry cannot find an English version yet.

Vote up! 6 Vote down! 0

Sudden Debt -> Dickweed Wang Sat, 03/31/2018 - 18:04 Permalink

They control the media...

even if the lies are proven, 90% of the popualation won't see the proof...

And they know it.

Hell, first time they said "Russia" in the investigation, I knew it was a hoax.

And then they started blasting Russia in every TV show, comedy show, news... you name it.

They really really really want a war.

And if we don't have a WOIII in the next 10 years, the world population will be to big to be fed. Yep, there's actually a timer that says there's an endgame.

khnum Sat, 03/31/2018 - 16:41 Permalink

Definately a story the BBC wont cover.

ISEEIT Sat, 03/31/2018 - 16:42 Permalink

This is so much bigger than 95% of the American 'population' realizes.

If you believe in God....Or even just don't know....

Please begin praying that the satanist/globalist retreat.

If they do not...Direct shooting...and soon after nuclear hot war shall commence.

The Russian people will not capitulate. China understands exactly what the reality is, and likely a tandem response is locked and loaded.

The psychopaths must be stopped. They've been outmaneuvered, and by all but psycho standards, have lost.

Now is literally perhaps the most dangerous moment of human history.

Like I said...Pray.

khnum -> ISEEIT Sat, 03/31/2018 - 16:46 Permalink

Yes these morons are playing with 7 billion lives and yes it is time to pray,to pray for their demise ,but dont live in fear if your numbers up its up dont let them manage you through fear.

Dark star Sat, 03/31/2018 - 16:45 Permalink

No one in the UK believes or trusts May and her Government. No one.

It kind of begs the question; On who's behalf is May governing the Country?

It isn't ours; we won't benefit from WWIII.

The government is now the people's enemy; May will be the death of us; not the Russians.

HowdyDoody -> Dark star Sat, 03/31/2018 - 17:12 Permalink

"On who's behalf is May governing the Country?"

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/01/18/24CF8CF200000578-0-image-a-47

iClaudius Sat, 03/31/2018 - 16:52 Permalink

The biggest problem the Russians have, and have had in a number of situations, is that they present well formed arguments and questions that, unfortunately, require a modicum of intelligence and effort to follow. The UK and US governments are simply appealing to the lowest denominator with jingoistic, shallow, junk - as usual; but it works!

Reaper Sat, 03/31/2018 - 17:56 Permalink

How could the emergency doctors so quickly identify this as a particular chemical agent and its source, when no Brit doctors have never seen such poison or its effects? Who identified the agent so quickly?

saldulilem -> Reaper Sat, 03/31/2018 - 18:33 Permalink

It was all in the care package

Joiningupthedots Sat, 03/31/2018 - 20:42 Permalink

You heard from me already ad I'll say it again.

The political careers of May, Johnson and Williamson are going to die on this calamity when the truth is finally outed.

The three not so wise monkeys attempted to take NATO to an Article 5 war footing against Russia.

What are they thinking about?

They have avoided using all of the historically established legal channels and protocols to push through their criminal enterprise.

All three have much to answer for and in the fullness of time history will judge them for the absolute amateur village idiots they truly are.

When the truth comes out there may well be extremely serious criminal charges being levelled at people who thought they were untouchable.

This is most definitely not in the UK National Interest as one would say.

FoggyWorld Sat, 03/31/2018 - 21:12 Permalink

So many of the answers are at website: Moon of Alabama.

It's downright depressing. Start with the Russian who originally developed it moved to the USA in the early 1990's.

We are being sold a bill of goods by Theresa the Incompetent May and there just is no excuse for Trump's not having it all checked out.

DjangoCat Sat, 03/31/2018 - 22:06 Permalink

I confess to an immediate bias in this matter. The entire charade has false flag written all over it and has been obvious since a week after the incident.

What interests me here is the insistence on the French involvement. I confess an immediate bias against Macron, by the way.

Who is pushing here?

[Apr 02, 2018] The UK has been quite brazen about flaunting 500 years of jurisprudence (innocent until...) and multiple international rules/laws and customs. In my view this is Imperial behavior

Apr 02, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Posted by: Babyl-on | Mar 31, 2018 9:23:43 AM | 12

@2-Gravatomic ---

The UK has been quite brazen about flaunting 500 years of jurisprudence (innocent until...) and multiple international rules/laws and customs.

In my view this is Imperial behavior. The AngloZionist/Wahhabi Empire coming out into the open. No need to bother hiding behind "democracy" any more no need to honor "the rule of law" except to disgrace it.

Invasions and belligerence, aggression against all opponents - open demand for "Global full spectrum domination." nothing will stand in the way - starve millions in Yemen so what its nothing to the willingness to slaughter in the tens of millions to achieve regime change in Moscow and Peking.

[Apr 02, 2018] Nerve agents are bioavailable from the gut - that is, they can absorb into the body after being eaten

Apr 02, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Don Bacon | Mar 31, 2018 1:58:46 PM | 44 .

. .Eating in the restaurant might have brought the stuff into their system. 36, 39
from Scientific American
Nerve agents are bioavailable from the gut - that is, they can absorb into the body after being eaten. That route of delivery isn't well studied, but is consistent with the slightly slower onset of symptoms in Sergei and Julia Skripal. In comparison, nerve agents administered via aerosol or spray are effective very quickly -- Kim Jong-Nam died shortly after facial exposure to nerve agent VX in a Malaysian airport. . . here

[Apr 02, 2018] Seems Vil Mirzayanov gave the US the recipe and US forked out 6 million USD to get additional intelligence. Then, radio silence.

Apr 02, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

I wondered why the OPCW did not add "Novichok" because it never had been synthesized. Vil himself said it was tested on dogs in Uzbekistan. This explains it.

So, why would the US and the UK not want the new guy on the block be known?


1998. I believe Vil Mirzayanov had come to the US before 1998.

"The fact is that back in 1998 when we looked through another version of the spectral library, which was published by the National Bureau of Standards of the United States (NBS), we found a substance there that we found interesting since it was an organophosphorus substance. And we realized that it must have a strong lethal effect. Now it turns out that, judging by the name of this substance, it was just the same nerve agent, A-234," Igor Rybalchenko said."

"The most interesting detail in this story is in the following versions of the database, which usually only expand, they are constantly replenished, more and more substances, we did not find this record. And I can't explain where is it now," the Russian military chemist said."

https://sputniknews.com/world/201803251062885016-a-234-skripal-poisoning-us/

1999. The US and Uzbekistan sign bilateral agreement:

"Earlier this year, the Pentagon informed Congress that it intends to spend up to $6 million under its Cooperative Threat Reduction program to demilitarize the so-called Chemical Research Institute, in Nukus, Uzbekistan. Soviet defectors and American officials say the Nukus plant was the major research and testing site for a new class of secret, highly lethal chemical weapons called ''Novichok,'' which in Russian means ''new guy."

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/25/world/us-and-uzbeks-agree-on-chemical-arms-plant-cleanup.html

Seems Vil gave the US the recipe and US forked out 6 million USD to get additional intelligence. Then, radio silence.

+++

From the start, the Salisbury incident and the warnings by Russia over potential false flags involving chemical weapons in East Ghouta seemed to be linked to me, like accusing your enemy of what you yourself are doing; at the minimum, discredit Russia, at the maximum, be able to claim Russia planted evidence.

A bird carried this into my inbox today.

https://cont.ws/@adeptdao/899795

Posted by: BX | Mar 31, 2018 1:49:29 PM | 42

[Apr 02, 2018] So what threat is the US using that caused Macron to turn so quickly, Ecuador to suddenly cut off all communication to Assange, European countries to expel Russian diplomats and a few other things that has happened

Apr 02, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

So what threat is the US using that caused Macron to turn so quickly, Ecuador to suddenly cut off all communication to Assange, European countries to expel Russian diplomats and a few other things that has happened. Makes me wonder if the US neo-cons and the anglo elite are about to go for broke. Perhaps try and pull a blatant coup in the US or start a major war or both.

Posted by: AriusArmenian | Mar 31, 2018 11:56:52 AM | 29

The US and its Anglosphere and EU vassals are doubling down into a much more dangerous stage of confrontation with the coalescing multifarious East.

They thought that using nazis and fascists to take control of Ukraine would break Russia. They thought that breaking apart Syria would open the way to Iran. They thought that threatening to annihilate would break North Korea. They threaten China with trade wars. But with each attack the East coalesces further and gains more strength.

The US led West is probing to find the weak link to break apart the East to thereby pick up the pieces. The West projects its internal disintegration onto the rest of the world.

annie , Mar 31, 2018 12:06:14 PM | 30

Mirzanayov uploaded novichok fomulas are not terrorist weapons on youtube Mar. 1, 2009. this was likely the "Canadian delegate" reference.
Some people in Washington adviced me not include Novichok formulas in my book State Secrets: An Insider's Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program because they could be used by terrorists. I'm explaning that this argument out of touch. Novichok chemical agents cannot be produced by any terrorists because of insurmontable difficulties of their production without highly educated personell, scientists and engineers. This argument is prventing to put Novichok agents under the Control of Chemical Weapons Convention.
karlof1 , Mar 31, 2018 12:17:03 PM | 31
One reason for hushing up Mirzayanov's book is, as Russia has already noted, it provides a blueprint for terrorists to design CW nerve agents--it abets terrorism--which is against the law. And that begs the question, why hasn't Mirzayanov been arrested along with the publisher? Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying USG was responsible for financing the book's publication, but I can't find the link to that currently.

IMO, USG wanted no novichok sample in OPCW database as it wanted to use it without being caught. IMO, Iran did its work as a result of the Zionist's murders of Iranian scientists. The cables present an excellent example of the ways USG is able to frame issues in order to cover up its international transgressions and illegalities--yet further proof as if more were needed proving it most certainly is the Outlaw US Empire.

[Apr 02, 2018] The simplest explanation of Skripal incident may be that there was no nerve gas agent of any kind (Novichok or otherwise)

British did performed nasty experiments on humans involving sarin in the past
Notable quotes:
"... Whatever affected the Skripals initially could have been food poisoning or a reaction to having something put in their drinks. We do not know if the Skripals were acting on their own while visiting the cemetery, eating at Zizzi's Restaurant in Salisbury, having drinks at The Mill (or Mill's) and then walking to the park bench at Maltings shopping pall where they were later found unconscious. The fact that the table at Zizzi's where the two ate has been taken away and apparently is now incinerated should arouse suspicion. Suppose there was a third person at the table with them? ..."
"... As far as is known, skin contact with a nerve gas agent is just as deadly as ingesting it through the lungs. There is the case of a young RAF engineer, Ronald Maddison, who volunteered for a trial back in the 1950s conducted by British authorities at the Porton Down laboratory. He was told the trial was to test a flu vaccine. During the trial two drops of sarin were dropped onto his skin. He died nearly straight away. ..."
www.moonofalabama.org

Jen | Mar 31, 2018 6:30:12 PM | 79

Commenters @ 9, 36 and 39:

Simplest explanation may be that no nerve gas agent of any kind (Novichok or otherwise) was used.

Whatever affected the Skripals initially could have been food poisoning or a reaction to having something put in their drinks. We do not know if the Skripals were acting on their own while visiting the cemetery, eating at Zizzi's Restaurant in Salisbury, having drinks at The Mill (or Mill's) and then walking to the park bench at Maltings shopping pall where they were later found unconscious. The fact that the table at Zizzi's where the two ate has been taken away and apparently is now incinerated should arouse suspicion. Suppose there was a third person at the table with them?

There is that photo (from a source which an Australian-based MoA commenter - BTW not me - posits may be connected to Cambridge Analytica) of the Skripals which MoA put up on a recent post, said photo having been taken on the day the Skripals were found poisoned. The photo shows a reflection of someone in the mirror behind the Skripals with a camera.

After being hospitalised, the Skripals could have been kept under heavy sedation even after the initial poisoning episode passed.

As far as is known, skin contact with a nerve gas agent is just as deadly as ingesting it through the lungs. There is the case of a young RAF engineer, Ronald Maddison, who volunteered for a trial back in the 1950s conducted by British authorities at the Porton Down laboratory. He was told the trial was to test a flu vaccine. During the trial two drops of sarin were dropped onto his skin. He died nearly straight away.

I should think if atropine is applied to the nervous system a week or two after the initial exposure to complete the enzyme chain reactions that enable normal breathing, that's being a bit tardy. The nerve gas works by disrupting the enzyme actions, causing muscles that control breathing to remain contracted and in effect become paralysed. The person dies from asphyxiation caused by this paralysis. That's my understanding anyway - I'm not a physician.

[Apr 02, 2018] Kivelidi case

Apr 02, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

@bjd (6)

Do we know who investigated the murder of said mobster and how it came in the open that it was a 'novichok' class agent? Was it Russian authorities/police?
Yes, Russian state agencies investigated. Three agencies gave chemical analysis evidence to the Kivelidi case: The Forensic Institute of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, The Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and even the State Research Institute for Organic Chemistry & Technology itself (that is, the body who the nerve agents' creators supposedly worked for). All agreed that the substance uncovered in Kivelidi's phone was "a highly toxic organophosphate compound of a kind used in the production of chemical weapons". As far as I can tell, though, only Mirzayanov categorised the compound later as a "Novichok". The term didn't appear in the original case, I don't think. It was, however, determined that the dose consisted of a 5mm droplet that worked immediately and killed Kivelidi within a few days, and his secretary even sooner.

The theories of high-profile lawyer Boris Kuznetsov are interesting in this case. He represented Khutsishvili, the man finally charged with Kivelidi and his secretary's murder (but released early). Kuznetsov's principal idea seems to be that Leonard Rink was offered a deal by the FSB. Rink is known only to have served a one year sentence for producing and selling nerve agents on the black market (supposedly 8-9 ampules). He was used as evidence against Khutsishvili, essentially incriminating himself as supplier of the nerve agent through an intermediary, only for charges against him for other sales and trafficking of poisons to expire years later without prosecution. Rink got off scot free in the end.

Kuznetsov, who has fled Russia (one of his highest profile cases was representing the families of the submariners killed in the Kursk fiasco), reckons the true recipient of Rink's leaked nerve agents were rogue FSB, with Khutsishvili the fall guy. An interesting minor character in the Kivelidi case was Kivelidi's bodyguard - whose first day at work was the day of his client's poisoning, and who quit the very next day. And who, Kuznetsov alleges, turned out to be a former KGB officer in the same division as Lugovoi, the man later at the centre of the Litvinenko poisoning case.

God only knows...

I've taken this information from several Kuznetsov interviews in the Russian press and a review of the Kivelidi case court documents from Novaya Gazeta (which describes at one point the period of onset for that category of poison as 0.5 to 5 hours).

Posted by: Crndbeef | Mar 31, 2018 6:00:26 PM | 77 hojo , Mar 31, 2018 6:02:36 PM | 78

b@7 - The claim about the banker murdered with a novichok-like substance (which is what bjd@6 was asking about) is in the link you provided for the Soviet scientist Vladimir Uglev , not in the link to the machine-translation of the Leonid Rink interview.

Unfortunately all the article had to say about this was in the following paragraph (which doesn't fully answer bjd's questions):
" One of these substances was used to poison the banker, Ivan Kivelidi and his secretary in 1995. A cotton ball, soaked in this agent, was rubbed over the microphone in the handset of Kivelidi's telephone. That specific dose was developed by my group, where we produced all of the chemical agents, and each dose which we developed was given its own complete physical-chemical passport. It was therefore not difficult to determine who had prepared that dose and when it was developed. Naturally, the investigators also suspected me. I was questioned several times about this incident. "

[Apr 02, 2018] I suspect the main event was Ghouta that has been foiled, perhaps by discovering the chemicals or the sacking of Tillerson or both. Skripals poisoning was just a prepartion for that

That explains "solidarity" action on such a non-existent proof of the crime: everything was prepared for larger event in Ghouta
Apr 02, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peter AU 1 | Mar 31, 2018 5:58:52 PM | 75

After keeping the chemicals developed in the soviet union buried for so long, to the extent of ensuring OPCW did not look into or list it, why blow it just on the Skripals just to kick a few diplomats out? The Skripal operation is more like an operation to get it in the public eye and associated with Russia before the main event. I suspect the main event was Ghouta and has been foiled, perhaps by discovering the chemicals or the sacking of Tillerson or both.

karlof1 , Mar 31, 2018 6:55:30 PM | 81
This short Twitter thread focuses on Uk's motive for attack on Skripals. East Ghouta's liberation has seen the capture of several UK/NATO special ops personnel: "#UK's persecution of Russia" has to do w/ serious, underreported development in #Syria that occurred shortly before #Salisbury." A Russian analyst named Satanovsky is being cited; perhaps Yevgeny Satanovsky of Moscow's Middle East Institute. The scenario's certainly plausible.

[Apr 02, 2018] It's 911 all over again...

Mar 30, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Hoarsewhisperer | Mar 30, 2018 8:58:44 PM | 180 ...

The vile Ruskies are capable of nefarious activities that cannot be proven using ordinary legal standards, say, by finding a proof, but now NATO allies got wiser and decided to move forward without falling for "Putin's trap", i.e. delaying any response until some proofs are found. No, no, no! The very fact that nothing concrete can be found attests to the skill of perpetrator, and the combination of (1) ability (2) motivation and (3) brutality leaves only one possible culprit. ... Posted by: Piotr Berman | Mar 30, 2018 5:32:52 PM | 162

Yes! It's 911 all over again... Everyone was quick to forget that, despite the scale of the damage, 911 was simply a criminal act and should have been the subject of a very thorough Police/judicial investigation with unlimited power to subpoena witnesses and suspects - to seek incontrovertible "evidence".

FSFF , Mar 31, 2018 12:57:40 AM | 190

cdvision @174

There is no doubt that this has been in the pipeline for quite a while & that it has gone tits up. Everything else is speculation, guess work and intuition.

It is such a tortured, black comedy, obviously poorly accepted by everyone except the US and UK, it cannot be taken seriously.

Which is also why it cannot be the prelude to a war with Russia and China. If this carnival of liars is deemed the causus belli of WWIII, it is a crude insult to every American sailor who was killed in service at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the last real causus belli.

I, for one, hope it is the absolutely necessary precursor to a military take-over of the US government by patriotic officers in the armed forces who are watching Mueller's investigation unfold who have heard all the lies told by the leaders of the FBI & CIA.

They are already aware of the corruption of the Members of Congress having seen how the procurement of weapon systems is based not on quality but on the location of military factories in their districts.

I believe the Deep State supports this coup d'etat as the only means of getting America back on sound financial footing in an age when the population explosion has just signaled the end of capitalism as we knew it in the last century and the end of enough easy to find and produce oil.

I also believe that the Arab Spring was the code name for the neocon's premeditated destruction of the Middle East, turning nations into piles of rubble for the express purpose of creating a tidal wave of refugees into the low birthrate nations of Eastern Europe, where their presence alone was sure to raise the GDPs of their new homes in OCEANIA.

Yes, I believe that the only alternative to WWIII is the gradual creation of Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR with US, UK & EU the core of Oceania.

OCEANIA -- the worst, most repressive of Orwell's three Super States.

[Apr 02, 2018] The problem of collapsing of two people virtually in sync -- that suggest application of aerosol or pills taken by both Skripals directly on the bench as they have different body mass and different age and should react differently to anything that does not have an immeduate effect

Apr 02, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

nationofbloodthirstysheep | Mar 31, 2018 5:33:53 PM | 71

Maybe I'm technically off-topic in regard to today's MOA post, I tend to regard any MOA Skripal post to be part of a continuing discussion.

It seems to me that what one might call "synchrony of affect" would be such an obvious contradiction to "doorknob" or any other delayed reaction thesis that it would have been covered, and probably has been, by now somewhere in the Skripal thread.

In case it hasn't, here's the obvious:

Apparently both Skripals were stricken almost simultaneously within a few minutes of appearing perfectly fine on CCTV. The latest UK theory has it that they both touched a doorknob a number of hours earlier! a woman in her 30s and a man twice her age both succumbed to a poison on that doorknob within a minute or two of each other - several hundred minutes later!

Engineering a toxin capable of producing that effect must've been incredibly complex; probably the product of a brilliant mind, Boris Johnson's perhaps.

My top three picks are 1: Bad clams in the Risotto 2: Aerosol in the face in front of the bench 3. All fake, staged by the white helmets.

S | Mar 31, 2018 6:48:13 PM | 80

@71 That's a great point. Given their difference in weight, Sergei and Julia could not have possibly collapsed in sync 7 hours after touching the door knob. The only explanation for such a perfectly simultaneous onset of symptoms -- if they were poisoned at all -- is something happening to them shortly before they collapsed.

somebody , Mar 31, 2018 7:21:27 PM | 85
@S | Mar 31, 2018 6:48:13 PM | 80

I doubt the nervous system is influenced by weight.

This here is OPCW

The route for entering the body is of importance for the period required for the nerve agent to start having effect. It also influences the symptoms developed and, to some extent, the sequence of the different symptoms. Generally, the poisoning works faster when the agent is absorbed through the respiratory system than via other routes. This is because the lungs contain numerous blood vessels and the inhaled nerve agent can therefore rapidly diffuse into the blood circulation and thus reach the target organs. Among these organs, the respiratory system is one of the most important. If a person is exposed to a high concentration of nerve agent, e.g., 200 mg sarin/m3 (see table) death may occur within a couple of minutes.

Poisoning takes longer when the nerve agent enters the body through the skin. Nerve agents are more or less fat-soluble and can penetrate the outer layers of the skin. However, it takes some time before the poison reaches the deeper blood vessels. Consequently, the first symptoms do not occur until 20-30 minutes after the initial exposure but subsequently the poisoning process may be rapid if the total dose of nerve agent is high. The toxic effect of nerve agents depends on them becoming bound to an enzyme, acetylcholinesterase, and thereby inhibit this vital enzyme's normal biological activity in the cholinergic nervous system.

[Apr 02, 2018] The photo of "The deadly doorknob" dated March 7

Apr 02, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlofi1. I've read of captures/deaths of US/UK/Israeli Special Ops in Syria multiple times, but never an "official" acknowledgement from any side. I expect at least some of these stories are true, which tells me that no one is being completely honest publicly about what's going on there.

Further down that Twitter feed you posted I saw this photo of The deadly doorknob dated 7 March.

https://twitter.com/MSuchkov_ALM

Posted by: Daniel | Mar 31, 2018 9:02:09 PM | 95

[Apr 02, 2018] Why British elite needs Skripal case by Ann Baker

Slightly edited Google translation
Mar 29, 2018 | annbeaker.livejournal.com

This is a hypotheses about why he will not die and how he can be used after magical resurrection. just a hypotheses.

I think the most close analogy is Stormy Daniels case Trump bullied by the prostitute with whom long ago he had a fling and now she's suing him on the issue of contract what was signed by her to keep her silent.

So she took money from him for silence, then and now she did not return the money and freely slings mud. Since the civil suit it can last years and years this is a defamation by any other name. And one tells the stripper (her current occupation after glorious porno star career) got so much many to her lawyers! And with around 300 dollars per hour, even the cheapest lawyer costs substantial sum for piece of paper he produces and each court meeting he attends.

The idea is that if Trump does not want to resign, let's create him enough stress so that he can enjoy the ride. The former stripper is perfect for this dirty role as she has not decency by definition. She can act scandalous and dirty, as she was trained by her craft.

In this sense West can't get to Putin private life, his whole personal life a secret and he sits in Russia/ Or Skripal is a good substitute to Stormy Daniels in this particular case. They can street him for a long time, like they did previously with Litvinenko and MH17.

After Skripal magically recovers he like Story can hire advocates and sue Putin. And money magically will be available. As well as maybe a support group of activists from the White helmets. Lawsuits will be filed against Putin in courts of London and European curt for human rights, and several other courts, you name it. In short everywhere to provide the maximum coverage in mass media and make that scandal as louder and as dirty as possible. How long many British elite want to play this record is unclear, but want to play it very loud for sure.

The goal is simple. Get on Putin nerves. Isolate him by harassing anyone who tries to cooperate with him. for example if Merkel wants to shake hands with Putin Western MSM will scream and see Merkel shakes hands with the poisoner! Remember there is a case against him in the court of London about Skripal poisoning.

Everybody should stand against the tyrant! Who not with us, is the Putinist! Who would not jump is Moskal! And so 100,000 times. Until total exhaustion. Like a pack of dogs hunt a fox. In the end, creating nervousness and uncertainty make difficult to impossible any constructive dialogue with the West. And meantime British tilt the situation in their favor in EU too.

Moreover, the series of expulsions of ambassadors is not over. The British now need to rebuild the iron curtain, at least a part of it. This way it is easiest to lie and deceive British public. If nobody travels to Russia personally, you can tell a lot of takes with impunity. This is how they play North Korea card, and with repeat this with Russia.

The question arise. What is the counter game against perfidious Albion, if such counter-game exists?

[Apr 01, 2018] UK may have staged Skripal poisoning to rally people against Russia, Moscow believes

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "We have very serious suspicion that this provocation was done by British intelligence," Yakovenko told Russia's NTV channel. He clarified that Russia has no direct proof of this suspicion, but the behavior of the British government constitutes strong circumstantial evidence in support of this theory. ..."
Apr 01, 2018 | www.rt.com

"We have very serious suspicion that this provocation was done by British intelligence," Yakovenko told Russia's NTV channel. He clarified that Russia has no direct proof of this suspicion, but the behavior of the British government constitutes strong circumstantial evidence in support of this theory.

The diplomat added that London had gained both short-term and long-term benefits from the poisoning. The short-term gain is that Theresa May's government managed to spin this story to whip up support both at home and in Europe, while sidelining its failures to negotiate more favorable terms for exiting the European Union, Yakovenko said. The long-term benefit is that it improved London's standing in the ongoing confrontation between the West and Russia.

"The Britons are claiming a leading role in the so-called containment of Russia. To win support from the people and the parliament for this containment of Russia, a serious provocation was required. And the Britons may have done a really savage one to get this support," he said.

The ambassador said that details of British investigations into the deaths of several high-profile people with Russian ties have been kept from the public. These include former Russian intelligence officer Aleksandr Litvinenko, Georgian tycoon Badri Patarkatsishvili, fugitive Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky and Russian whistleblower Aleksandr Perepilichny. He said he hoped there would be a public disclosure of relevant facts in relation to the Skripal case.

"I am sure Russia will not allow the Britons to escape the legal field. They will have to give answers," he said.

After the poisoning in Salisbury, the UK convinced some of its allies to follow its lead by expelling Russian diplomats. The US was the most receptive to the call, kicking 60 Russians out of the country, which dwarfed the UK's expulsion of 23 people. European countries that chose to show solidarity with London expelled between one and four diplomats each. Ukraine expelled 13.

Russia hit back with reciprocal expulsions of foreign diplomats. It also demanded that Britain downsize its diplomatic mission in Russia to that of Russia in Britain, affecting over 50 jobs.

See also:

[Apr 01, 2018] All the President s Women by Andrew Levine

This is probably the most vicious attack on Trump trangressions that i encountered so far...
Notable quotes:
"... The problem for Trump is that what his accusers are saying puts him in legal and political jeopardy. They are claiming, in effect, that he has committed a variety of unlawful and impeachable offenses – from obstruction of justice to violations of campaign finance laws. ..."
"... The Clinton-Lewinsky dalliance led to a series of events that prevented Clinton from doing even more harm to our feeble welfare state institutions than he would otherwise have done. ..."
"... Fire and Fury ..."
Apr 01, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

There is no doubt about it: Stormy Daniels is a formidable woman. Karen McDougal is no slouch either, though she is hard to admire after that riff, in her Anderson Cooper interview, about how religious and Republican she is; she even said that she used to love the Donald. Stormy Daniels is better than that.

How wonderfully appropriate it would be if she were to become the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back.

Even in a world as topsy-turvy as ours has become, there has to be a final straw.

To be sure, evidence of Trump's vileness, incompetence, and mental instability is accumulating at breakneck speed, and there are polls now that show support for him holding fast or even slightly rising. Trump's hardcore "base" seems more determined than ever to stand by their man.

But even people as benighted as they are bound to realize eventually that they have been had. Many of them already do, but don't care; they hate Clinton Democrats that much. This is understandable, but foolish; so foolish, in fact, that they can hardly keep it up indefinitely.

To think otherwise is to despair for the human race.

What, if anything, can bring them to their senses in time for the 2018 election?

Stormy Daniels says she only wants to tell her story, not bring Trump down. But her political instincts seem decent, and she is one shrewd lady. Therefore, I would not be the least surprised if that is not quite true. It hardly matters, though, what her intentions are; I'd put my money on her.

A recession might also do the trick. A recession is long overdue, and Trump's tax cut for the rich and his tariffs are sure to make its consequences worse when it happens.

To turn significant portions of Trump's base against him, a major military conflagration might also do -- not the kind Barack Obama favored, fought far away and out of public view, but a real war, televised on CNN, and waged against an enemy state like North Korea or Iran. It would have to go quickly and disastrously wrong, though, in ways that even willfully blind, terminally obtuse Trump supporters could not fail to see.

Or the gods could smile upon us, causing Trump's exercise regimen (sitting in golf carts) and his fat-ridden, cholesterol rich diet to catch up with him, as it would with most other sedentary septuagenarians. The only downside would be that a heart attack or stroke might elicit sympathy for the poor bastard. No sane person could or should hope for a calamitous economic downturn or for yet another devastating, pointless, and manifestly unjust war, especially one that could become a war to end all wars (along with everything else), on the off-chance that some good might come of it. And if the best we can do is hope that cheeseburgers with fries will save us, we are grasping at straws.

These are compelling reasons to hope that the accusations made by Daniels and McDougal and Summer Zervos – and other consensual and non-consensual Trump victims and "playmates" – gain traction. If the several defamation lawsuits now in the works can get the president deposed, this is not out of the question.

The problem for Trump is not that his accusers' revelations will cause his base to defect; no matter how salacious their stories and no matter how believable they may be. Trump's moral turpitude is taken for granted in their circles; and they do not care about the myriad ways his words and deeds offend the dignity of the office he holds or embarrass the country he purports to put "first." If any of that mattered to them, they would have jumped ship long ago.

Except perhaps for unreconstructed racists and certifiable sociopaths, white evangelicals are Trump's strongest supporters. What a despicable bunch of hypocrites they are! As long as Trump delivers on their agendas, his salacious escapades don't faze them at all. Godly folk have evidently changed a good deal since the Cotton Mather days.

What has not changed is their seemingly limitless ability to believe nonsense.

And in case light somehow does manage to shine through, Trump has shown them how to restore the darkness they crave. When cognitive dissonance threatens, all they need do is scream "fake news."

The problem for Trump is that what his accusers are saying puts him in legal and political jeopardy. They are claiming, in effect, that he has committed a variety of unlawful and impeachable offenses – from obstruction of justice to violations of campaign finance laws.

In this case as in so many others, it is the cover-up, not the underlying "crime," that could lead to his undoing – especially if the stories Daniels and the others are telling shed light upon or otherwise connect with or meld into Robert Mueller's investigation of (alleged) Russian "meddling" in the 2016 election.

Trump could and probably will survive their charges. His base is such a preternaturally obdurate lot that there may ultimately be no last straw for them. We may have no choice, in the end, but to despair for a sizeable chunk of the human race.

Stormy Daniels would not be any less admirable on that account. She took Trump on and came out on top. For all the world (minus the willfully blind) to see, she, the porn star, is a strong woman who has her life together, while he, the president, is a discombobulated sleaze ball who is leading himself and his country to ruin.

***

It was different with Monica Lewinsky, another presidential paramour who, almost two decades ago, also held the world's attention.

There was nothing sleazy or venal about Lewinsky's involvement with Bill Clinton; and, for all I know, unless chastity counts, she is as good and virtuous a person as can be. But personal qualities are not what made her affair with our forty-second president as historically significant as it turned out to be.

It would be fair to say that of all the women who have ever had intimate knowledge of that old horn dog's private parts, there is no one who did more good for her country. If only for that, if there were a heaven, there would be special place in it just for her.

The Clinton-Lewinsky dalliance led to a series of events that prevented Clinton from doing even more harm to our feeble welfare state institutions than he would otherwise have done.

Who knows how much progress he would have turned back had he and Monica never done the deed or at least not been found out. Building on groundwork laid down by Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush, he and his wife had already terminated Aid to Families With Dependent Children, one of the main government programs aimed at relieving poverty. This was to be just the first step in "ending welfare as we know it."

With their "donors" pushing for more austerity, those two neoliberal pioneers were itching to begin privatizing other, more widely supported social programs, including even Social Security, the so-called "third rail" of American politics.

The "Lewinsky matter" put the kybosh on that idea, leaving the American people forever in Monica's debt.

Back in the Kennedy days, Mel Brook's two-thousand year old man got it right when he said: presidents "gotta do it," to which he added – " because if they don't do it to their wives and girlfriends, they do it to the nation."

Stormy Daniels made much the same point ten years ago, while flirting with the idea of running against Louisiana Senator David Vitter. Vitter's political career had been almost ruined when his name turned up in the phone records of the infamous "DC Madam," Deborah Jeane Palfrey. Daniels told voters that, unlike Vitter, she would "screw (them) honestly."

What then are we to make of the fact that Trump screws both the nation and his wife (maybe) and his girlfriends (or whatever they are)?

Blame it on arrested development, on the fact that despite his more than seventy-one years, Trump still has the mind of a teenage boy, one with money and power enough to live out his fantasies.

The contrast with Bill Clinton is stark. Clinton is a philanderer with eclectic tastes, a charming rascal with a broad and mischievous mind. Honkytonk women from Arkansas appeal to him as much as zaftig MOTs from the 90210 area code.

Trump, on the other hand, goes for super-models, Playboy centerfolds, and aspiring beauty queens -- standard teenage fantasy fare.

He seems to have had little trouble living his dreams – not thanks to his magnetic face, form and figure, and certainly not to his refinement, wit or charm, but to his inherited and otherwise ill-gotten wealth.

It is money and the power that follows from it that draws women to his net.

Henry Kissinger understood; recall his musings on the aphrodisiacal properties of power. Even in his prime, that still unindicted war criminal (and later-day Hillary Clinton advisor) was even more repellent than Trump. But that never kept him from having to fight the ladies off.

This fact of life puts a heavy responsibility on the women with whom presidents hook up.

Consider Melania. She made a Faustian bargain when she agreed to become Trump's trophy bride; in return for riches and a soft life in a gilded tower, she sold her soul. She might have thought better of it had she taken the burdens she would incur as First Lady into account, but why would she? The prospect was too improbable.

She has, it seems, a very practical, old world view of marriage, and is therefore tolerant of her husband's womanizing. At the same time, as a mother and daughter, she is, like most immigrants, a strong proponent of old world "family values."

Too much of a proponent perhaps; insofar as her idea was to "chain migrate" her parents out of Slovenia and onto Easy Street, or to raise a kid who would never want for anything, there were less onerous ways of going about it. After all, there are plenty of rich Americans lusting after supermodels out there, and it is a good bet that many of them are less repellent than Trump.

She was irresponsible as well. She ought to have realized that the man she married had already spawned two idiot sons, along with other fruit from the poisonous tree, and that four bad apples in one generation are enough.

And so now she finds herself a single mother – not in theory, of course, but very definitely in practice. Unlike most women in that position, she is not wanting for resources. But it must be a hard slog, even so. To her credit, Melania seems to be handling the burden well. More power to her!

She also deserves credit for her body language when the Donald is around; the contempt she shows for him is wonderful to behold. Best of all is her sense of the absurd. The way she plagiarized from Michelle Obama had obvious comic validity, and making childhood bullying her First Lady cause – all First Ladies have causes -- was a stroke of genius.

On balance, therefore, it is hard not to feel sorry for her. Of all the women in Trump's ambit, she deserves humiliation the least.

The rumor mill has it that with all the publicity about Daniels and the others , she has finally had enough. This may be the case; the old world ethos requires discretion and a concern with appearances. That is not the Donald's way, however, and now she is paying the price.

What a magnificent humiliation it would be if she and Trump were to split up on that account. This could happen soon. I would expect, though, that through a combination of carrots and sticks, Trump and his fixers will find a way to minimize the political effects. More likely still, they will channel Joe Kennedy and Jackie O, and figure out a way to head the problem off.

Then there is poor forgotten Tiffany. Her Wikipedia entry lists her as both a law student and a "socialite." I hope her studious side wins out and that, despite the genes from her father's side, she is at least somewhat decent and smart.

I'd be more confident of that if she would do what Ronald Reagan's daughter, Patti, did: use her mother's, not her father's, name. Unless she is a sleaze ball too, a Trump in the Eric and Don Junior mold, that would be a fine way to make a political point.

It would also pay back over the years. With the Trump administration on its current trajectory, who, in a few years' time, would take a Tiffany Trump seriously? A Tiffany Maples would stand a better chance.

Her half-sister, the peerless Ivanka, the Great Blonde Hope, is, of course, her father's sweetie. Let's not go there, however. Her marriage to Jared Kushner is already enough to process.

What a pair those two make; and what a glorious day it will be when the law finally catches up with Jared, as it did with his Trump-like father, Charles. Perhaps he will take Ivanka down a notch or two with him. Despite an almost complete lack of qualifications, Trump made his son-in-law his minister of almost everything; a pretty good gig for a feckless, airhead rich kid. Among other things, Trump enabled him to become Benjamin Netanyahu's ace in the hole. Netanyahu is a Kushner family friend. Netanyahu has more than his share of legal troubles too. Let them all go down together!

Ivanka and Jared are well matched – they share a "business model." It has them exploiting their daddies' connections and money.

Jared peddles real estate; his efforts have gotten his family into serious debt, while putting him in solid with Russian and Eastern European oligarchs, Gulf state emirs, and Mohammad bin Salman – people in comparison with whom his father-in-law seems almost virtuous.

Ivanka sells trinkets and schmatas to people who think the Trump name is cool. There actually are such people; at two hundred grand a pop, Mar-a-Lago is full of them. Ivanka's demographic is made up mostly of their younger set.

Two other presidential women bare mention: Hope Hicks and Nikki Haley. Surely, they both have tales to tell, but it looks, for now, as if their stories would be of little or no prurient interest. Neither of them appear to have been propositioned or groped.

Even though Hicks is said to be like a daughter to the Donald – we know what that could mean! – it is a safe bet that there was nothing of a romantic nature going on between them. For one thing, Hicks seems too close to Ivanka; for another, she is known to have dallied with two Trump subordinates, Corey Lewandowski and Rob Porter. The don is hardly the type to let his underlings have at his women.

Haley had to quash a spate of rumors that flared up thanks to some suggestive remarks Michael Wolff made while hawking Fire and Fury . The rumor caught on because people who hadn't yet fully realized what a piece of work Trump is, imagined that something had to be awry inasmuch as her main qualification for representing the United States at the United Nations was an undergraduate degree in accounting. Abject servility to the Israel lobby also helped.

But the Trump administration is full of ambitious miscreants whose views on Israel and Palestine are as abject and servile as hers, and compared to many others in Trump's cabinet she is, if anything, over qualified. Think of neurosurgeon Ben Carson heading the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He is qualified because, as a child, he lived in public housing.

With the exception of Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal, Summer Zervos and whoever else comes forward with a juicy and credible tale to tell, the women currently in the president's ambit, though good for gossip and interesting in the ways that characters on reality TV shows can be, are of little or no political consequence.

This could change if any of them decides to "go rogue," to use an expression from the Sarah Palin days. But, while neither Melania nor Tiffany can yet be judged hopeless, it would be foolish to expect much of anything good to come from either of them.

Stormy, Karen, Summer, and whoever else steps forward are a better bet. They are the only ones with any chance of doing as much for their country and the world as Monica Lewinsky did a generation ago.

Among the president's women, they are a breed apart. This is plainly the case with Stormy Daniels; it is already clear that she deserves what all Trump's money can never buy – honor and esteem. To the extent that the others turn out to be similarly courageous, they will too.

[Mar 31, 2018] FBI Director Mueller testified to Congress that Saddam Hussein was responsible for anthrax attack! That was Mueller's role in selling the "intelligence" to invade Iraq.

Highly recommended!
Mar 31, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Steve McIntyre | Mar 31, 2018 9:47:15 AM | 15

It took a long time before the 2001 US anthrax attacks were solved. (The initial attribution was totally wrong.) The ultimate explanation was that an anthrax scientist (Bruce Ivins) was worried that funding for his research would be cut back. A similar motive cannot be excluded out of hand for Skripals, especially given proximity of Porton Downs. Already, there has been a huge infusion of cash into Porton Downs, as there was into anthrax research after Ivins' attack. A quote from https://www.wcpo.com/news/our-community/from-the-vault/from-the-vault-local-scientists-hatred-for-uc-sorority-led-to-national-panic-terror-attack.

FBI Director at the time, Robert Mueller -- yes, that Robert Mueller -- said Ivins' livelihood was in jeopardy when the Department of Defense wanted to end anthrax vaccinations because of side effects later called "Gulf War Syndrome." And when the U.S. was attacked on Sept. 11, Ivins capitalized on the paralyzing fear sweeping the nation.

"The anthrax vaccine program to which he had devoted his entire career was failing," according to the "Amerithrax" report from the Justice Department. "Short of some major breakthrough or intervention, he feared that the vaccine research program was going to be discontinued."

After the anthrax attacks in 2001, however, Ivins' program experienced a rebirth.

ToivoS , Mar 31, 2018 12:55:28 PM | 37

b comments that the case against Ivins (yes, made by Mueller, that Mueller) was all bullshit. At the time I too looked into the case that they had against him. What was completely wrong was that Ivins had prepared the Anthrax spores in his personal lab. I too read the FBI report that described the equipment in that lab. Having experience in this field, I found it was very close to impossible for him to have prepared the samples that were used in the anthrax attacks. However, the facilities at Fort Dietrick do have that capacity. If Ivins used those facilities it would not have been possible for him to use them without accomplices or at the least without witnesses to his use of those facilities.

That is what the Mueller report covered up at the very least. It remains quite possible that Ivins was not involved at all.

Ort , Mar 31, 2018 2:46:44 PM | 46
B. and others have already noted that the official conclusion that Bruce Ivins committed suicide is, in a word, bogus.

But I can't resist adding the piquant detail that the authorities claimed that he killed himself with an overdose of Tylenol with codeine. Despite the presence of some codeine, Tylenol is a truly odd choice for suicide. It is potentially toxic, and overdoses cause liver damage that can be eventually fatal-- but overdoses are reportedly painful to endure, and are by no means sure to be fatal.

We're expected to believe that Ivins was so distraught and irrational that he "chose" this means because he wanted to "sleep", and was either oblivious or indifferent to the above-cited drawbacks.

Yet, Ivins was a microbiologist, vaccinologist, and senior biodefense researcher at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. He presumably had, or could easily acquire, an understanding of the effects of Tylenol-- and he had a laboratory full of ultra-lethal toxins to boot. Yet when the moment of truth came, he reached for a bottle of... Tylenol?

It's déjà vu all over again. How many "other ones" do Western authorities think we have to pull?

Daniel , Mar 31, 2018 5:59:27 PM | 76
b @20. Thanks for setting the record straight on the UNSOLVED Anthrax terrorist attack in the US. FBI Director Mueller testified to Congress that Saddam Hussein was responsible! That was Mueller's role in selling the "intelligence" to invade Iraq. Once it became known that the anthrax came from the US Army, he tried to pin it on an innocent man and then closed and buried the case.

[Mar 31, 2018] France enters the game with Skripal poisoning

Mar 31, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Arioch | Mar 31, 2018 7:01:49 PM | 83

Now Russian Foreign Ministry also asks 10 questions to France directly.

www.translate.ru -> http://www.mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/3150139

I found no ready-made english translation yet

bjd , Mar 31, 2018 7:27:57 PM | 86
@Arioch (83)

Google Translate:

Questions of the Russian Party to France on the fabricated UK against Russia "The Case of the Violins"

618-31-03-2018

On March 31, the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Paris sent a note to the French Foreign Ministry with a list of questions to the French side on the "trick of the Skrypals" trumped up against Russia:

1. On what basis was France involved in technical cooperation in the UK investigation of the Salisbury incident?

2. Did France send an official notification to the OPCW on the connection to technical cooperation in the investigation of the Salisbury incident?

3. What evidence was transferred to France by the UK in the framework of technical cooperation?

4. Did the French specialists attend the sampling of the biomaterial from Sergei and Yulia Skripaly?

5. Was the study of French biomaterials by Sergey and Yulia Skripaly conducted by French specialists? If so, in which laboratory?

6. On the basis of what signs did the French experts conclude that a combatant poisonous substance such as "Newbie" (in British terminology) or its analogues was used?

7. What expertise does France have in the field of studying warfare agents of this type or its analogues?

8. On the basis of what signs (markers) did the French specialists establish the "Russian character" of the origin of the substance used in Salisbury?

9. Does France have control samples of the combatant poison agent "Rookie" (in British terminology) or its analogues?

10. Have any samples of a chemical warfare agent of this type or its analogues been developed in France, if so, for what purposes?

[Mar 31, 2018] One strange thing though. All of this happened within a few miles of the UK's main chemical weapons research station, and there was a simulated chemical weapon attack being conducted at the same time in Salisbury. Oh, and there was a TV program running an episode with a similar theme, in a three part series bracketing the incident.

Mar 31, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

If only we could go back to the original John Thaw/ Kevin Whatley Inspector Morse team of a quarter century ago:

The old Jaguar sways around a corner.

Voice of Morse in the background. Just one thing Lewis, I've been meaning to ask you for a long time. Why do they call it the UK? It's not a kingdom, it's a Queendom and has been for what, at least my life time?

Right you are sir, but what with British accents and all, it might be confusing. Queendom sounds a bit like that rubber thingy that you put on your pee pee for sex.

Speak for yourself Lewis.

Dot dot dot dash dash. The theme music rings out in Morse code. How I miss John Thaw.

Posted by: mireille | Mar 31, 2018 4:10:32 PM | 61

[Mar 31, 2018] Obviously the Russians know something, just wonder what it is.

Mar 31, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

J Swift | Mar 31, 2018 3:56:28 PM | 56

Very interesting twist--that governments would have been denying the existence of Foilant agents precisely because they were having success in developing new weapons along those lines. Also interesting is the new "14 Questions" reported by RT, the Duran, etc.:
1. Why has Russia been denied the right of consular access to the two Russian citizens, who came to harm on British territory?

2. What specific antidotes and in what form were the victims injected with? How did such antidotes come into the possession of British doctors at the scene of the incident?

3. On what grounds was France involved in technical cooperation in the investigation of the incident, in which Russian citizens were injured?

4. Did the UK notify the OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) of France's involvement in the investigation of the Salisbury incident?

5. What does France have to do with the incident, involving two Russian citizens in the UK?

6. What rules of UK procedural legislation allow for the involvement of a foreign state in an internal investigation?

READ MORE: Skripal case becomes even weirder

7. What evidence was handed over to France to be studied and for the investigation to be conducted?

8. Were the French experts present during the sampling of biomaterial from Sergey and Yulia Skripal?

9. Was the study of biomaterials from Sergey and Yulia Skripal conducted by the French experts and, if so, in which specific laboratories?

10. Does the UK have the materials involved in the investigation carried out by France?

11. Have the results of the French investigation been presented to the OPCW Technical Secretariat?

12. Based on what attributes was the alleged "Russian origin" of the substance used in Salisbury established?

13. Does the UK have control samples of the chemical warfare agent, which British representatives refer to as "Novichok"?

14. Have the samples of a chemical warfare agent of the same type as "Novichok" (in accordance to British terminology) or its analogues been developed in the UK?

Not only are many of the questions very good ones, and ones that have been raised in this bar, but what is up with the sudden appearance of so many questions about France. Obviously the Russians know something, just wonder what it is.

[Mar 31, 2018] British elite started to worry about possible toxic fall out from Skripal

Russian elite already views May's government as bandits, who staged this despicable provocation. So stakes for British elite are very high.
And the way May government tried to capitalize on this "poisoning" is really like going "all in". May clearly went what French call "va bank". Reckless statement of Johnson, who is a very weak diplomat, but no fool, if a clear testament that they expect to prevail with pretty weak cards. With ultimate reliance on power of the USA to secure favorable outcome.
Looks more and more that this is a part of Russiagate, or color revolution against Trump, however you want to call the effort: the collusion between the intelligence heads of the Obama administration with British intelligence to oust President Trump.
The Russian Foreign Ministry is now openly pointing the possibility of a UK intelligence involvement. That sheds a very bad light on EU vassals who without any questioning and with any proof immediately fell into line behind Theresa May.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry even said this was a tool used by the Europeans and the United States to try to get unity at a point when they were completely disunified. And this is the old geopolitical game, that in order to create unity you create a war, and then everybody has to fall into line before attacking Iran.
Compare with Ron Paul views on this incident: www.youtube.com
Notable quotes:
"... The UK foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, in a speech late on Wednesday waxed lyrical about how the Skripal episode represented a turning point in the west's approach to Russia, but his officials are aware that this mood can easily dissipate as other considerations, such as commerce, energy security or the Middle East come into play. ..."
"... The UK will try to push for further measures against Russia at the June meeting of the EU heads of state. If it is ambitious, it may may challenge German support for Nord Stream 2, the gas pipeline from Russia that could put European energy demand at the mercy of Moscow. ..."
Mar 31, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

That does not mean the crisis will necessarily end there, or that the crisis is contained.

Russia, whose standing among the international community is badly damaged, is determined to do go further to clear its name, or at least throw up enough chaff so that a chunk of western public opinion doubts the British intelligence service's account of Skripal's poisoning. Moscow has already suggested a meeting on Monday of the executive of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to have "an honest conversation" about the poisoning.

The OPCW is studying samples – provided by the UK – of the novichok nerve agent allegedly used, but does not have the ability to judge the identity of the person that placed the agent by the door of Skripal's house . But the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, is determined to put the UK on the defensive and has already claimed that "if our western partners dodge the meeting then it will be further evidence that every thing that is happened is a provocation".

Russia has also responded to the apparent recovery of Yulia Skripal, who was poisoned alongside her father. She may be able to provide insights into how the poisoning occurred, or even reveal whether she knows of some other motive by some other non-state actor.

The British intelligence services will be debriefing her as soon as her health permits. It would clearly be a huge embarrassment for the UK government if it emerged she believed the Russian state was not involved.

As it is, the UK government is aware that some allied leaders, despite the public show of solidarity, face skeptical voters at home who are either against a confrontation with Vladimir Putin, or expect more convincing proof to be provided.

The UK foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, in a speech late on Wednesday waxed lyrical about how the Skripal episode represented a turning point in the west's approach to Russia, but his officials are aware that this mood can easily dissipate as other considerations, such as commerce, energy security or the Middle East come into play.

The UK will try to push for further measures against Russia at the June meeting of the EU heads of state. If it is ambitious, it may may challenge German support for Nord Stream 2, the gas pipeline from Russia that could put European energy demand at the mercy of Moscow.

... ... ...

[Mar 31, 2018] Russia Has 14 Questions On Fabricated Skripal Case

Mar 31, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Russia's embassy in London has sent a list of questions, 14 to be specific, to the British Foreign Ministry on the poisoning of Sergey and Yulia Skripal – which include a demand to clarify whether samples of the nerve agent "Novichok" have ever been developed in the UK.

The Russian embassy's statement calls the incident that started the recent diplomatic row a " fabricated case against Russia."

The questions published by the Russian Foreign Ministry's official website have been translated below:

  1. Why has Russia been denied the right of consular access to the two Russian citizens, who came to harm on British territory?
  2. What specific antidotes and in what form were the victims injected with? How did such antidotes come into the possession of British doctors at the scene of the incident?
  3. On what grounds was France involved in technical cooperation in the investigation of the incident, in which Russian citizens were injured?
  4. Did the UK notify the OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) of France's involvement in the investigation of the Salisbury incident?
  5. What does France have to do with the incident, involving two Russian citizens in the UK?
  6. What rules of UK procedural legislation allow for the involvement of a foreign state in an internal investigation?
  7. What evidence was handed over to France to be studied and for the investigation to be conducted?
  8. Were the French experts present during the sampling of biomaterial from Sergey and Yulia Skripal?
  9. Was the study of biomaterials from Sergey and Yulia Skripal conducted by the French experts and, if so, in which specific laboratories?
  10. Does the UK have the materials involved in the investigation carried out by France?
  11. Have the results of the French investigation been presented to the OPCW Technical Secretariat?
  12. Based on what attributes was the alleged "Russian origin" of the substance used in Salisbury established?
  13. Does the UK have control samples of the chemical warfare agent, which British representatives refer to as "Novichok"?
  14. Have the samples of a chemical warfare agent of the same type as "Novichok" (in accordance to British terminology) or its analogues been developed in the UK?

The Duran's Alexander Mercouris added some necessary points to the growing mystery and confusion of the Skripal poisoning:

These theories have included claims that Sergey and Yulia Skripal were (1) sprayed with the supposedly deadly chemical by a passer-by; (2) sprayed with the supposedly deadly chemical by an aerial drone; (3) contaminated by the supposedly deadly chemical which was brought from Russia in Yulia Skripal's suitcase where it had been hidden by some third party; and (4) were poisoned by having the supposedly deadly chemical somehow inserted into Sergey Skripal's car.

The British and other critics of Russia have recently taken to citing as 'proof' of Russian guilt the fact that the Russians have supposedly been proposing various theories about who might have poisoned Sergey and Yulia Skripal.

The British – who unlike the Russians have control of the crime scene and samples of the poison – have however been at least as busy proposing various theories about how Sergey and Yulia Skripal were poisoned.

In both cases the fact that the Russian media and the British media – though not it should be stressed the Russian or British governments – have been busy engaging in their respective speculations about who who and how Sergey and Yulia Skripal were poisoned is not proof of guilt.

Rather it suggests ignorance, which if anything (especially in Russia's case) is an indicator of innocence.

As I have said on many occasions, it is the guilty who so far from engaging in a variety of different speculations tend to come up with a single alternative narrative to explain away the facts, which they then pass off as the truth in order to provide themselves with an alibi.

As to the present theory – that Sergey and Yulia Skripal came into contact with the chemical agent on their front door – note the following:

(1) The British police have not said whether the chemical agent was smeared on the outside of the door or on the inside of the door.

If it was smeared on the outside of the door, then it was an extremely reckless act which might have easily poisoned a delivery person to the house such as a postman.

If it was smeared on the inside of the door, then whilst it might have been placed there by a burglar, the greater probability must be that it was placed there by a visitor.

If so then it is likely that either Sergey or Yulia Skripal or possibly both of them have some knowledge of the identity of this person. That might make the fact that Yulia Skripal is said to be recovering and is now conscious a matter of great importance for the solution of this mystery.

(2) If Sergey and Yulia Skripal really were poisoned with the chemical agent by coming into contact with it because it was smeared on their front door, then that would mean that the chemical agent took 7 hours to take effect.

Russian ambassador to Britain Alexander Yakovenko has claimed that the British authorities have told him that Sergey and Yulia Skripal were poisoned by nerve agent A-234, a Novichok type agent which is supposedly "as toxic as VX, as resistant to treatment as soman, and more difficult to detect and easier to manufacture than VX".

I am not a chemist or a chemical weapons expert, but such a slow acting poison seems at variance with the descriptions of A-234 and VX which I have read.

(3) The suggestion that Sergey and Yulia Skripal were poisoned by coming into contact with the chemical agent on their front door must for the moment be treated as no more than a theory. It does however appear to confirm the presence of the chemical agent in the house.

If the latest theory that Sergey and Yulia Skripal were poisoned by coming into contact with a chemical agent smeared on their front door begs many questions, then the news that Yulia Skripal is apparently recovering well from the effect of her poisoning, and is now conscious and speaking and is no longer in intensive care, though extremely welcome, in some ways adds further to the mystery.

EuroPox -> chunga Sat, 03/31/2018 - 16:54 Permalink

The Russians have also sent a list of 10 questions to the French. Just why were they involved at all? I think we should be told.

Question 10 is: "Have the samples of a chemical warfare agent of this type or its analogues been developed in France and if so, for what purpose?"

LOL!

Link to questions to France:

http://www.mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw

Sorry cannot find an English version yet.

[Mar 31, 2018] Possible links of Skripal to Steele dossier

This is not very plausible hypothesis... But the fact that Steele indeed was "curator" of Skripal in Moscow (and later at MI6 Russian desk) is true.
Notable quotes:
"... Important to note, too, this report says, is that absolutely no one in the West is even bothering to ask why Russia would break the first cardinal rule of "spy etiquette" in targeting a spy involved in a spy-swap -- which neither the Soviet Union or Russia has done even once in over 70 years ..."
"... Professor Anthony Glees, the director of the Center for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham, points out by correctly stating that if the Russia did, indeed, poison Skripal, "no one will ever do a swap with them again" -- and who asks the logical question: "If Russia had really wanted to kill Skripal, why didn't they execute him when they had him in custody?" ..."
"... With Michel Chossudovsky, the award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, having just warned that "the entire Western world is insane, and that the Western politicians, and presstitutes who serve them, are driving the world to extinction", this report concludes, among the handful of experts left to explain where this current Russia hysteria in the West is leading to is the former President Ronald Reagan administration official Paul Craig Roberts -- and whose warning issued, just days ago, is both simple and dire: "World War III Is Approaching". ..."
Mar 31, 2018 | yournewswire.com

Not being told the peoples in the West, this report notes, is that Sergei Skripal was a former Russian military intelligence officer who was recruited by MI6 to be a double agent -- and whose recruitment to spy for MI6 was masterminded by MI6 agent Pablo Miller who worked directly under the "Trump Dossier" creator , and MI6 officer, Christopher Steele -- with Sergei Skripal, also, working for Orbis Business Intelligence , Christopher Steele's outfit that put together the infamous dossier on Trump, that both MI6 spies Steele and Miller worked for too .

Though the specifics of the offer made to the FSB by Sergei Skripal in order to secure his returning home to Russia remain more highly classified than this general report allows, it does confirm that Yulia Skripal was discussing this issue with her father, on 4 March, when they were both attacked and left in critical condition -- with the Telegraph news service in London then documenting that all internet links between Sergei Skripaland Christopher Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence were being taken down.

At the same time all the internet links between Sergei Skripal and the creators of the fake "Trump Dossier" were being scrubbed from existence, this report continues, the British government suddenly began blaming Russia for the nerve gas attack on him and his daughter -- but when Russia asked for evidence proving this, the British outright refused to produce it as the Chemical Weapons Convention, that the UK has signed, along with Russia, demands they do -- and when questioned in the British Parliament by Labor Leader Jeremy Corbyn as to why this was so, saw Prime Minister Teresa May's forces jeer and shout him down -- followed by British Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson saying "Russia should go away and shut up".

With President Putin stating in the Security Council meeting that he was " extremely concerned " by the destructive and provocative stance of the UK, this report continues, the British government, nevertheless, has continued to ratchet up it hysteria by blocking a United Nations Security Council draft sponsored by Russia calling for an "urgent and civilized investigation" incident in line with international standards -- and that led Russian Senator Sergey Kalashnikov to warn:

The West has launched a massive operation in order to kick Russia out of the UN Security Council Russia is now a very inconvenient player for the Western nations and this explains all the recent attacks on our country.

Important to note, too, this report says, is that absolutely no one in the West is even bothering to ask why Russia would break the first cardinal rule of "spy etiquette" in targeting a spy involved in a spy-swap -- which neither the Soviet Union or Russia has done even once in over 70 years -- and as Professor Anthony Glees, the director of the Center for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham, points out by correctly stating that if the Russia did, indeed, poison Skripal, "no one will ever do a swap with them again" -- and who asks the logical question: "If Russia had really wanted to kill Skripal, why didn't they execute him when they had him in custody?"

Other logical questions about this supposed nerve gas attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia being suppressed in the West, this report notes, are those such as:

  1. Did Skripal help Steele to make up the "dossier" about Trump?
  2. Were Skripal's old connections used to contact other people in Russia to ask about Trump dirt?
  3. Did Skripal threaten to talk about this?
  4. Was the lonely old man Sergei Skripal preparing to go back to his homeland Russia?
  5. Did he offer some kind of "gift" as apology to the Russian government that his trusted daughter would take to Moscow?
  6. Did someone find out and stop the transfer?

With Michel Chossudovsky, the award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, having just warned that "the entire Western world is insane, and that the Western politicians, and presstitutes who serve them, are driving the world to extinction", this report concludes, among the handful of experts left to explain where this current Russia hysteria in the West is leading to is the former President Ronald Reagan administration official Paul Craig Roberts -- and whose warning issued, just days ago, is both simple and dire: "World War III Is Approaching".

[Mar 31, 2018] It's 911 all over again...

Mar 31, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Hoarsewhisperer | Mar 30, 2018 8:58:44 PM | 180 ...
The vile Ruskies are capable of nefarious activities that cannot be proven using ordinary legal standards, say, by finding a proof, but now NATO allies got wiser and decided to move forward without falling for "Putin's trap", i.e. delaying any response until some proofs are found. No, no, no! The very fact that nothing concrete can be found attests to the skill of perpetrator, and the combination of (1) ability (2) motivation and (3) brutality leaves only one possible culprit.
...
Posted by: Piotr Berman | Mar 30, 2018 5:32:52 PM | 162

Yes! It's 911 all over again...
Everyone was quick to forget that, despite the scale of the damage, 911 was simply a criminal act and should have been the subject of a very thorough Police/judicial investigation with unlimited power to subpoena witnesses and suspects - to seek incontrovertible "evidence".

[Mar 31, 2018] What Russia is experiencing right could serve as a reflection of how other non-Western nations can expect to be treated in the not-to-distant future

Mar 31, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peter AU 1 | Mar 30, 2018 8:24:32 PM | 177

Mercouris has reprinted an article in full from the Global Times. It looks like the Skripal rubbish has been the catalyst for the creation of a defensive block of nations. The relevant section...

http://theduran.com/furious-china-ramps-support-russia-skripal/

"Until a new line of allies emerges, multi-national associations like BRICS, or even the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, need to provide value to those non-Western nations and actively create alliances with them.

What Russia is experiencing right could serve as a reflection of how other non-Western nations can expect to be treated in the not-to-distant future. Expelling Russian diplomats simultaneously is hardly enough to deter Russia. Overall, it's an intimidation tactic that has become emblematic of Western nations, and furthermore, such measures are not supported by international law and therefore unjustified. More importantly, the international community should have the tools and means to counterbalance such actions."

[Mar 31, 2018] Unproven Allegations Against Trump and Putin Are Risking Nuclear War by Stephen F. Cohen

This is a fight to save Us led global neoliberal empire. Nothing more nothing less. Cohen is right about connections between Skripal case and Russiagate. Skripal case is a British attempt to save Russiagate.
Notable quotes:
"... Diplomacy kept the nuclear peace during the preceding Cold War, but the mass expulsions -- even pending the Kremlin's response -- seriously undermines the diplomatic process. They even criminalize it, as illustrated by denunciations of Trump's phone conversation with Putin and by widespread political-media demands after he expelled a large number of Russia's diplomats that he do "more" -- such demands ranging from more sanctions on Russia to more military responses in Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere -- to prove he is not under Putin's control. ..."
"... Identifying all expelled diplomats as "intelligence officers" is also misleading. Posting intelligence officers as diplomats has long been a mutual de facto arrangement tacitly, if not explicitly, agreed upon and known by both sides. Moreover, the designation might apply to embassy officials who study the other country's economic, social, cultural, or political life. They gather and report "information." ..."
"... Recently, US-backed proxies apparently killed a number of Russian citizens also operating there. The Kremlin, through its Ministry of Defense, issued an ominous warning: If this happens again, Moscow will strike militarily not only at the proxies but also at US forces in the region who provided the weapons and launched the missiles. The same razor's edge could easily occur where the United States and Russia are also eyeball-to-eyeball, as in Ukraine or the Baltic region. (Again, as Trump is being crippled to the extent that he probably could not negotiate a crisis the way President Kennedy did the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.) ..."
"... the extreme demonization of Putin and growing Russophobia in the United States are elevating today's small, less formidable Russia into a threat even graver than was the Soviet Union, against which US nuclear weapons were developed and intended. And this, again, in the context of diminished diplomacy and Trump's diminished capacity to negotiate. ..."
Mar 31, 2018 | www.thenation.com

"Russiagate" and the Skirpal affair have escalated dangers inherent in the new Cold War beyond those of the preceding one.

1. "Russiagate" and the attempted killing of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the UK have two aspects in common. Both blame Putin personally. And no actual facts have yet been made public.

§ Having discussed the fallacies of "Russiagate" often and at length, Cohen focuses on the Skripal affair. Putin had no conceivable motive, especially considering the upcoming World Cup Games in Russia, which both the government and the people consider to be very prestigious and thus important for the nation. No forensic or other evidence has yet been presented as to the nature of the purported nerve agent used or whether Russia still possesses it; or, even if so, whether Russia really is the only state whose agents did so; or when, where, and how it was inflicted on Skripal and his daughter; or why they and many others said to have been affected by this "lethal" agent are still alive. Nonetheless, even before the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has issued its obligatory tests, and while refusing to give the Russian government a required sample to test, the British leaders declared that it was "highly likely" Putin's Kremlin had ordered the attack.

§ Nonetheless, on this flimsy basis, Western governments, led by the UK and reluctantly by the Trump administration, rushed to expel 100 or more Russian diplomats -- the greatest number ever in this long history of such episodes.

§ It should be noted, however, that not all European governments did so, and a few others in only a token way, thereby again revealing European divisions over Russia policy.

2. This episode increases the risk of nuclear war between the United States and Russia.

§ Ever since the onset of the Atomic Age, the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction has kept the nuclear peace. This may have changed in 2002. when the Bush administration unilaterally withdrew from, thereby abrogating, the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Since then, the United States and NATO have developed 30 or more anti-missile defense installments on land and sea, several very close to Russia. For Moscow, this was an American attempt to obtain a first-strike capability without mutual destruction. The Kremlin made this concern known to Moscow many times since 2002, proposing instead a mutual US-Russian developed anti-missile system, but was repeatedly rebuffed.

§ On March 1, Putin announced that Russia had developed nuclear weapons capable of eluding any anti-missile system, described it as a restoration of strategic parity, and called for new nuclear-weapons negotiations.

§ American mainstream political and media elites derided Putin's announcement. Following the evaluation of several American nuclear experts, four Democratic senators appealed to (now former) Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to (in effect) respond positively to Putin's appeal. Nothing came of it. Shortly after the Russian presidential election on March 18, President Trump himself, in a congratulatory call to Putin, proposed that they meet soon to discuss the "new nuclear arms race." Trump was widely traduced as having revealed further evidence that he was "colluding" with Putin, perhaps § The result has been, reflected in the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats, even more fraught US-Russian relations and with them, of course, the increased risk of nuclear war.

3. Many Americans, including political and media elites who shape public opinion, have been deluded into thinking, especially since the pseudo–"American-Russian friendship" of the Clinton 1990s, that nuclear war now really is "unthinkable." That the mass expulsion of diplomats was merely "symbolic" and of no real lasting consequence. In reality, it has become more thinkable.

§ Diplomacy kept the nuclear peace during the preceding Cold War, but the mass expulsions -- even pending the Kremlin's response -- seriously undermines the diplomatic process. They even criminalize it, as illustrated by denunciations of Trump's phone conversation with Putin and by widespread political-media demands after he expelled a large number of Russia's diplomats that he do "more" -- such demands ranging from more sanctions on Russia to more military responses in Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere -- to prove he is not under Putin's control.

( Identifying all expelled diplomats as "intelligence officers" is also misleading. Posting intelligence officers as diplomats has long been a mutual de facto arrangement tacitly, if not explicitly, agreed upon and known by both sides. Moreover, the designation might apply to embassy officials who study the other country's economic, social, cultural, or political life. They gather and report "information." )

§ In this connection, historians remind us of how the great powers gradually "slipped" into World War I. The lesson is the crucial role of diplomacy, now being undermined. Consider, for example, Syria. Recently, US-backed proxies apparently killed a number of Russian citizens also operating there. The Kremlin, through its Ministry of Defense, issued an ominous warning: If this happens again, Moscow will strike militarily not only at the proxies but also at US forces in the region who provided the weapons and launched the missiles. The same razor's edge could easily occur where the United States and Russia are also eyeball-to-eyeball, as in Ukraine or the Baltic region. (Again, as Trump is being crippled to the extent that he probably could not negotiate a crisis the way President Kennedy did the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.)

4. The causes of the new risks of nuclear war are not "symbolic" but real and primarily political.

§ As diplomacy is diminished, the militarization of US-Russian relations increases.

§ Every weapon developed as extensively as have been nuclear weapons have eventually been used. Washington dropped two atomic bombs, genetic predecessors of their nuclear offspring, on Japan in 1945. (Before 1914, some people thought gas, the new weapon of mass destruction, would never be widely used in warfare.)

§ On both sides today, but especially in Washington, there is talk of developing "more precise nuclear warheads" that could be usable. Use of even a "small, precise" nuclear weapon would cross the Rubicon of apocalypse.

§ Meanwhile, the extreme demonization of Putin and growing Russophobia in the United States are elevating today's small, less formidable Russia into a threat even graver than was the Soviet Union, against which US nuclear weapons were developed and intended. And this, again, in the context of diminished diplomacy and Trump's diminished capacity to negotiate.

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian Studies and Politics at NYU and Princeton

[Mar 31, 2018] 'Is this poker or intl. relations': Moscow reacts on calls to accept that it is guilty in Skripal case

Notable quotes:
"... "Are we playing cards here or dealing with serious matters? Is this a game of poker or international relations?" Maria Zakharova said when asked by Sky News correspondent John Sparks if Moscow accepted that "Russia has a serious credibility problem," ..."
"... "Is it a sort of international game within the rules set by the UN Charter or, alternatively, is it an unrestricted use of force and pressure?" she said, questioning the behavior of the UK and the US. ..."
"... Zakharova explained that "for decades, it was the West that taught others, including Russia, that force should not be used. Neither should political or ideological pressure." Yet, she noted when Moscow accepted the Western rules and "became an open and transparent international player," and showed that the world can be "multi-polar," then it "felt no longer being accepted." As an example, she mentioned the US interfering in Russia's energy supply deals with Europe. ..."
"... Zakharova then asked the British journalist a question: "Do you think that after the anti-Iraq campaign, Western nations – the nations that were part of the coalition – deserve being trusted?" ..."
"... But Sparks refused to answer, saying that he wasn't a representative of the British government. And when offered to share his personal opinion on the matter, he replied: "That's not my concern. That's not why I am here. I think you are deflecting." ..."
"... She said that countries that refuse to cave into this pressure and spoil relations with Moscow, like Turkey, "show a responsible approach to international law." Zakharova warned that "tomorrow or the day after tomorrow any country could become a victim of a provocation," like the one Russia currently faces. ..."
Mar 31, 2018 | www.rt.com

It is more appropriate to question the credibility of the West, which pressures other countries to express "solidarity" and invade Iraq on a false pretext, than that of Russia, the spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry said. "Are we playing cards here or dealing with serious matters? Is this a game of poker or international relations?" Maria Zakharova said when asked by Sky News correspondent John Sparks if Moscow accepted that "Russia has a serious credibility problem," as a large group of countries simply don't believe its denials in the case of the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal.

"Is it a sort of international game within the rules set by the UN Charter or, alternatively, is it an unrestricted use of force and pressure?" she said, questioning the behavior of the UK and the US.

Read more Moscow calls for meeting of OPCW on April 2 over ex-spy Skripal poisoning

Zakharova explained that "for decades, it was the West that taught others, including Russia, that force should not be used. Neither should political or ideological pressure." Yet, she noted when Moscow accepted the Western rules and "became an open and transparent international player," and showed that the world can be "multi-polar," then it "felt no longer being accepted." As an example, she mentioned the US interfering in Russia's energy supply deals with Europe.

Zakharova then asked the British journalist a question: "Do you think that after the anti-Iraq campaign, Western nations – the nations that were part of the coalition – deserve being trusted?"

But Sparks refused to answer, saying that he wasn't a representative of the British government. And when offered to share his personal opinion on the matter, he replied: "That's not my concern. That's not why I am here. I think you are deflecting."

Speaking about the solidarity of a large group of countries, she said that this is something that should not come out of "pressure," as it happened after former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned with a Soviet-designed nerve agent in Salisbury in early March. Zakharova said the way counties expelled between one to four diplomats at different times and under different pretexts, shows that it was done "under colossal pressure."

READ MORE: '100 suspicions don't make proof': Moscow quotes Dostoyevsky in reply to Boris Johnson over Skripal

She said that countries that refuse to cave into this pressure and spoil relations with Moscow, like Turkey, "show a responsible approach to international law." Zakharova warned that "tomorrow or the day after tomorrow any country could become a victim of a provocation," like the one Russia currently faces.

[Mar 31, 2018] Possibility of ISIS trace in Skripal poisoning, if it ever occurred

Notable quotes:
"... As I pointed out a couple of weeks back, for me the most likely suspect for the Skirpal poisoning was a headchopper who was getting trained in chemical warfare at Porton Downs. The wannabe mass muderer went into town for a spot of luncheon and was angered by the sound of two people talking Russian, his last lab in Gouta had been bombed by Russians, so he sloshed a few drops of nerve juice onto the Skirpals fettucine marinaras while they were distractedly arguing over exchange rates thw rouble to quid rate has been going up and down quicker than whore's drawers since the moronic englanders blindly backed brexit). ..."
"... It is the proximity of Salisbury to Porton Downs that is the biggest unanswered 'coincidence' in this affair, leading one to conclude that the Skipals may merely have been an unfortunate target of convenience. ..."
Mar 31, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Posted by: Debsisdead | Mar 30, 2018 10:41:56 AM | 113

@carrie | Mar 30, 2018 9:40:24 AM | 110

As I pointed out a couple of weeks back, for me the most likely suspect for the Skirpal poisoning was a headchopper who was getting trained in chemical warfare at Porton Downs. The wannabe mass muderer went into town for a spot of luncheon and was angered by the sound of two people talking Russian, his last lab in Gouta had been bombed by Russians, so he sloshed a few drops of nerve juice onto the Skirpals fettucine marinaras while they were distractedly arguing over exchange rates thw rouble to quid rate has been going up and down quicker than whore's drawers since the moronic englanders blindly backed brexit).

Now it is true I may have been jesting when I first posted that hypothesis but it has considerably more logic to it than anything maybot has claimed, and is supported by evidence that America had been supplying CW manufacturing equipment to jihadist chem warfare factories. They have also been subcontracting out their chem and bio jobs to Porton - most likely since the embarrassment caused at their own facility back in the noughties when some of the bio worker/s posted out the homebrand anthrax to assorted media and political figures who they didn't appear like very much, if at all.

It is the proximity of Salisbury to Porton Downs that is the biggest unanswered 'coincidence' in this affair, leading one to conclude that the Skipals may merely have been an unfortunate target of convenience.

A scene somewhat along the lines of the bloke from Syria hypothesis also explains the englander government's hamfisted and deceitful actions. Making a loud noise about the victims while failing to mention Porton Downs proximity to Salisbury for the first couple of weeks has created a big distraction away from something which is at heart just another USuk fuck-up.

[Mar 31, 2018] The term 'nerve agent' entered the Skripal narrative on 7th, and as far as I can find in looking up news articles from that time period, is also the day when the poisoned policeman entered the narrative.

Mar 31, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Mar 30, 2018 12:12:55 PM | 120

March 7 is interesting. The term 'nerve agent' entered the Skripal narrative on 7th, and as far as I can find in looking up news articles from that time period, is also the day when the poisoned policeman entered the narrative.

118
March 7 is interesting. The term 'nerve agent' entered the Skripal narrative on 7th, and as far as I can find in looking up news articles from that time period, is also the day when the poisoned policeman entered the narrative.

[Mar 31, 2018] Nick Bailey's hospitalization

Notable quotes:
"... At the moment, it seems the policeman was poisoned on the 5th or 6th when there where already pics of people in protective suits. The story on the policeman has chopped and changed a lot - he was a first responder, he was poisoned at the house ect ect. ..."
"... I should have highlighted that DS Bailey was initially discharged from hospital after a check up. ..."
"... Chemical weapons attack field drill on the same day. ..."
"... "I think the confusion in the policeman part of the narrative is that he was poisoned perhaps two day later, and had to be fitted into the narrative retrospectively." ..."
"... I think the policeman was thrown into the mix because the female doctor who gave the girl cpr on the spot, the ambulance attendees and driver were all right as rain. They needed another "on the scene" victim to drown out the obvious, that whatever "it" was was not contagious. There is also the young man who first found them who said he got spittle on his sleeve from the male but brushed it off (with his bare hand) and that was that. Whatever it is, it is clearly not the super awesome awful evil Russian elixir. ..."
Mar 31, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

jawbone | Mar 30, 2018 12:52:47 PM | 125

Re: DS Nick Bailey's hospitalization

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/nick-bailey-discharged_uk_5ab3dcede4b0decad047d95d

HuffPo has him entering hospital on March 4, but no mention of his going to the Skripal residence. "He was taken to Salisbury District Hospital after responding to the attack" on the Skripals. So, to emergency some time after initially responding to the couple on March 4 and released on March 22. No mention of his going to the house.

Bailey's statement was read by Chief Constable Kier Pritchard and, to my ear, it sounded like a careful, well written PR release. Basically little information. The experience was "surreal" came the closest to describing how he felt. And that's the part usually run on the broadcast TV news I saw. No mention of how he was treated, whether he had any physical therapy. Has anyone heard he speak? or is that area of lingering effects of the exposure to...whatever it was?

Peter AU 1 , Mar 30, 2018 1:14:20 PM | 128
Jawbone, the article you link to is dated march 22. Articles dated 5th/6th of march are needed.

At the moment, it seems the policeman was poisoned on the 5th or 6th when there where already pics of people in protective suits. The story on the policeman has chopped and changed a lot - he was a first responder, he was poisoned at the house ect ect. I think the confusion in the policeman part of the narrative is that he was poisoned perhaps two day later, and had to be fitted into the narrative retrospectively.

somebody , Mar 30, 2018 1:25:44 PM | 130
@125

I assume it is true that the police officer caught it from the door handle same as the front door being the place of the strongest distribution of the chemical agent as this fact does not support any proof of Russian state involvement. Quite the contrary - it works more like a Mafia warning, whoever might get it the postman, a neighbour, Skripals does not matter.

There is this guy and he is from Uzbekistan .

He spent long years in Europe before he returned to Russia. So I suppose he features in all kinds of secret service files.

Don Bacon , Mar 30, 2018 2:23:37 PM | 137
several snippets on DS (Detective Sgt) Bailey

> It is confirmed that a police officer, later confirmed as DS Nick Bailey, is fighting for his life in hospital.-- Mar 8

> The pair are in a critical condition in a local hospital. A police officer who helped investigate is in serious condition, and a total of 21 people have received medical treatment. Former London police chief Ian Blair said Friday that a police officer who is in serious condition visited Skripal's house -- perhaps a hint that the nerve agent may have been delivered there. Blair told BBC radio that Det. Sgt. Nick Bailey "has actually been to the house, whereas there is a doctor who looked after the patients in the open who hasn't been affected at all. There may be some clues floating around in here." -- Mar 9

> DS Nick Bailey is seriously ill in hospital having visited the home of Skripal after the defector and his daughter were found slumped on a bench in Salisbury, Wiltshire, on Sunday afternoon. Investigators want to know whether Bailey visited the scene where the two Russians were found and was poisoned there or by items there, or whether the officer was contaminated on his visit to Skripal's home. Sources say that, while it is not certain, it is believed more likely that Bailey became contaminated on his visit to the home. -- Mar 9

> But last night it emerged the police officer who also fell ill after responding to the incident, visited Mr Skripal's home before he collapsed. Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey remains in a serious condition in hospital. According to reports, he tended to the victims at the scene and then visited both the Skripal home.A source told The Times: "He was at both places. "First he was where they collapsed, trying to help them, then he went to the house, in that order." -- Mar 10

> DS Bailey, who was among the first to attend to Mr Skripal and his daughter Yulia, before possibly examining their red BMW, where it is thought the nerve agent Novichok may have been placed, was initially discharged from hospital after a check up. He later admitted to Accident and Emergency at Salisbury District Hospital feeling extremely unwell. DS Bailey is now described as in a stable condition -- Mar 15

> Concern for the family of the police officer who went to the aid of the poisoned Russian spy has grown after Army and police sealed off his street and began work to remove his car for examination. Speculation grew that Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey may have carried traces of the nerve agent Novichok home with him after attempting to resuscitate Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. -- Mar 15

> PM Theresa May visits Salisbury and meets privately with DS Nick Bailey . His car is removed from his home as part of the investigation.-- Mar 15

> The police officer who was hospitalized after rushing to help a former Russian spy and his daughter suffering from a poison attack in Salisbury, England, was discharged Thursday [Mar 22]. Bailey was treated at Salisbury District Hospital for several weeks after being exposed to the same deadly and rare nerve agent that the U.K. government says was used to target former intelligence officer Sergie Skirpal, 66, and Yulia, 33. -- Mar 22

Don Bacon , Mar 30, 2018 2:27:01 PM | 138
@137

I should have highlighted that DS Bailey was initially discharged from hospital after a check up.

frances , Mar 30, 2018 2:36:46 PM | 139
Chemical weapons attack field drill on the same day.

Krollchem | Mar 30, 2018 12:23:13 AM | 78

There is always a "drill" taking place in the immediate vicinity addressing the same problem (terrorists, shooters, CW) whenever these events happen isn't there? A drill was happening on 9/11 and has been every time right up to the latest at a Florida school.

cdvision , Mar 30, 2018 3:02:21 PM | 144
I detect that the medics at Salisbury are not reading from the official script. Someone mentioned Yulia has been moved from Salisbury hospital. This is worrying. Hope she doesn't suddenly have a relapse.
frances , Mar 30, 2018 3:13:30 PM | 147
"I think the confusion in the policeman part of the narrative is that he was poisoned perhaps two day later, and had to be fitted into the narrative retrospectively."

Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Mar 30, 2018 1:14:20 PM | 128

I think the policeman was thrown into the mix because the female doctor who gave the girl cpr on the spot, the ambulance attendees and driver were all right as rain. They needed another "on the scene" victim to drown out the obvious, that whatever "it" was was not contagious. There is also the young man who first found them who said he got spittle on his sleeve from the male but brushed it off (with his bare hand) and that was that. Whatever it is, it is clearly not the super awesome awful evil Russian elixir.

Don Bacon , Mar 30, 2018 3:19:50 PM | 148
@jb 145

On Bailey -- Telegraph .

[Mar 31, 2018] SKRIPALMANIA by Patrick Armstrong

Notable quotes:
"... contemptuous mockery ..."
"... From the beginning this story had more holes than a block of swiss cheese. It has only gotten worse with a cast of characters descending into buffoonery. ..."
"... No amount of mockery will make those shameless ashamed. The US, Britain and their fellow travelers have spent so much time and energy in falsehoods they no longer know what truth and reality are. This extends across the spectrum from foreign affairs to economics and finance. Falsity pervades. It is all about PR and marketing now. Baghdad Bob is us. ..."
Mar 31, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

SKRIPALMANIA by Patrick Armstrong

1. It's obvious nonsense brought to you by proven liars.
2. The point of propaganda is to leave an impression after the details have been forgotten.
3. To get involved in discussing the minutiae of the story is to help the propagandists' aims.
4. Therefore treat it as a badly constructed story that is failing to convince.
5. Do this by analysing the comments on the news stories which (at least the ones I've looked at) show that people are sceptical.
6. Also mock the meanderings of the story: At the restaurant! In the car! On the doorstep! Incredibly lethal but strangely ineffective. Miraculous recovery of daughter. Baby wipes as effective protection. Reminiscent of White Helmets and their flip flops, rubber gloves and paper masks; but, come to think of it, it's the same authors in both stories. Who, after so many lies, are becoming overconfident and sloppy.

It's a startlingly incompetent theatrical production and should be responded to with contemptuous mockery .


JohnA , 30 March 2018 at 01:37 PM

Spontaneous mockery:

Skripal Case: How UK 'Explains' Why Russia Is to Blame in 1-Minute Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=47&v=yClMsr6ZfvM

jsn , 30 March 2018 at 02:17 PM

And now back to your regularly scheduled Easter Weekend.
(thanks for weighing in!)

Doug Colwell , 30 March 2018 at 02:50 PM

Thank you Mr. Armstrong. It is reassuring to know that there are some here in Canada who question the prevailing narrative. I find it deeply troubling that we have abandoned the principal of due process. Where will that end?

FB Ali

What Ms Nauert and her bosses are missing is that very few people take the USA seriously any more in the international sphere. No wonder Putin is so amused in that video JohnA linked to (@ #1).

About the only thing left for the US establishment to make people take them seriously is to threaten to blow up the world. The trouble is they don't even realise that this will be the end result if they use the nukes they like to wave around. That's what Putin has been trying to make them understand - so far without much success.

Jony Kanuck , 30 March 2018 at 03:30 PM

Patrick,

From the beginning this story had more holes than a block of swiss cheese. It has only gotten worse with a cast of characters descending into buffoonery. We've been educating the masses for how many years. For sure they haven't read enough poetry:

Died some, pro patria,
non "dulce" non "et decor" . . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,

Ezra Pound from Hugh Selwyn Mauberly

Petrel , 30 March 2018 at 03:34 PM

The overall story given us is that Julia Skripal journeys to her father -- a convicted and released British agent-- from Russia to Salisbury. The following morning they visit her mother's grave north of town, drive to an Italian eatery in downtown Salisbury (all caught on security cameras) and walk past more security cameras through a public passageway to a downtown, riverside park. They sit down on a park bench and 15 - 20 minutes later pass out. A patrolling policeman tries to rouse them, calls Emergency Services and has them transported to hospital. Another policeman, a detective, is sent to the Skripal house and immediately falls ill. (So the mystery poison takes 4 hours to affect the Skripals and 15-30 minutes to affect the detective.)

Before any blood tests are done, the UK Prime Minister denounces Russia for using a Soviet researched, but never manufactured nerve agent, with a name invented by a BBC TV thriller-series 5 month earlier. The following day, the chief medical doctor of the Salisbury hospital denies that the Skripals and the detective were treated for any nerve agent. Meanwhile the Russians demanded that the British abide by a signed anti-chemical weapon convention and turn over whatever blood or other evidence backing the claim to an international agency. The Russians also demand Consular access to Julia Skripal, still a Russian citizen.

A month later, the British grant permission for the relevant International chemical watchdog to search for evidence. By now whatever evidence lay around the Skripals in their house, car, cemetery, restaurant and in their blood is long-gone history. (Since the Skripals have been heavily sedated for the period, we and they don't know what else has been injected into them since they passed out.)

My personal theory is that Skripal, a British double-agent, agreed to ingest poison, something like Valium, after he and his daughter had lunch. They moved to the park bench and waited for the material to render them unconscious, as the Skripal house was somehow poisoned, awaiting the detective's arrival.

What Prime Minister May et al did not know about was the existence of a Chemical Weapons Treaty, an agency in Belgium to enforce the Treaty and a protocol to follow. Russia invoking the Treaty caught them flat-footed, hence the hysterical behavior and statements by the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and a month-long delay before the international agency was allowed access to the still comatose Skripals.

catherine , 30 March 2018 at 04:02 PM

Said May:

"Blood samples from Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal were analyzed and the findings indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound. The samples tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent or closely related agent"

Or a "related compound" or "related agent"? I imagine there are quite a few countries that have related agents. I think if the Kremlin poisoned Skripal they would have made sure he died from it and didn't recover. Sounds like a set up to me.

Jack , 30 March 2018 at 05:34 PM

Patrick

No amount of mockery will make those shameless ashamed. The US, Britain and their fellow travelers have spent so much time and energy in falsehoods they no longer know what truth and reality are. This extends across the spectrum from foreign affairs to economics and finance. Falsity pervades. It is all about PR and marketing now. Baghdad Bob is us.

Big business are managed such that their stock is the product. Management's are incentivized to make that product rise not to insure the business of products that satisfy consumer needs and wants. There is no incentive to build intergenerational franchises. The Wall St mindset of making a quick buck has permeated everywhere.

Old notions of honor and stewardship have gone the wayside. I was born in the Depression and grew up in a different era. The world has changed in many ways yet the fundamental principles remain although temporarily masked by hubris. Thucydides observations of human nature ring true millenia later.

Patrick Armstrong

If you discuss it as if it were serious, you keep the story alive. From a propaganda point the story is simple: Putin=Russia=Enemy. Argue with the details and you become part of a discussion on how much of an enemy? and enemy in other cases but not this and so on.

Much better to robustly assume anyone of sense understands the story is a lie and laugh at how idiotic anyone who believes it is.

[Mar 31, 2018] Russia to Britain - Prove your own spies did not poison Skripal

Mar 28, 2018 | www.legitgov.org

The Russian Foreign Ministry on Wednesday demanded London prove British spies did not poison a former double agent in England, saying in the absence of such proof it would regard the incident as an attempt on the lives of Russian citizens. Ties between London and Moscow are badly strained by the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury. Britain alleges Russia was to blame, but Moscow says it had no involvement. "An analysis of all the circumstances...leads us to think of the possible involvement in it (the poisoning) of the British intelligence services," the foreign ministry said in a statement.

[Mar 31, 2018] Questioning the Conventional Wisdom of Russian Spy's Poisoning -- Interview with Craig Murray

It looks more and more plausible that this is a pretty audacious provocation similar to Steele dossier and "DNC hack" (whcih actually was a leak)
Notable quotes:
"... I'm not saying the Russians didn't do it, I am saying there are other possibilities. We are not supposed to assign responsibility for crime in this way, saying there is a bad guy in the neighborhood and therefore it must be him. So far, there has been no real evidence at all that it was the Russian state that did it. ..."
"... It looks to many people like this may just be a silly amateur mixture of different insecticides. ..."
"... Other questions arise. The British government has been telling us that this is ten times more powerful than a standard nerve agent. Thankfully, so far, nobody has been killed. Why isn't this deadly agent more effective? Why is it that the doctor who administered first aid to Yulia Skripal was completely unaffected, even though he had extensive physical contact with her? ..."
"... if you were Vladimir Putin and you had this secret nerve agent, why would you blow your cover by using it on this retired spy who you released from prison years ago? The whole scenario is utterly implausible. ..."
"... Another false flag like they did with Iraq and literally the same criminals and co conspirators. ..."
Mar 26, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

... ... ...

Craig Murray: I'm not saying the Russians didn't do it, I am saying there are other possibilities. We are not supposed to assign responsibility for crime in this way, saying there is a bad guy in the neighborhood and therefore it must be him. So far, there has been no real evidence at all that it was the Russian state that did it.

I find it remarkable that the very day this happened the British government was announcing that it was the Russian state that was behind this. They couldn't possibly have had time to analyze any of the evidence. It is as though this is being used as a trigger to put prearranged anti-Russian measures into place and to "up" the Cold War rhetoric. You can't help get the feeling that they are rather pleased this has happened and were even expecting it to happen.

DB: This is coming out of the European Union today: "The European Union strongly condemns the attack that took place against Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England on March 4 that also left a police officer seriously ill. The lives of many citizens were threatened by this reckless and illegal action. The European Union takes extremely seriously the UK government's assessment that it is highly likely that the Russian Federation is responsible."

CM: This phrase "highly likely" admits that they don't have the evidence to back this up. It's a speculation.

DB: They say that the poison is consistent with what the Russians have used in the past.

CM: The claim is that this is one of a group of nerve agents known as a Novichok. The Novichok program was being run in the 1980's by the Soviets. The idea was to develop chemical weapons which could be quickly put together from commercial pesticides and fertilizers. They came up with a number of theoretical designs for such weapons.

Until now, the official position of the British government and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons was that there was doubt as to whether they actually produced any of these. As of now, they haven't been put on the banned list, precisely because the scientific community has doubted their existence. So the British government's ability on day-one to identify this was quite remarkable.

Novichok is not a particular weapon but a class of weapon. Russia is by no means the only country capable of producing this kind of weapon. In 2016, the Iranians succeeded in producing several Novichok weapons and they reported their results to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Their motivation was that they were concerned that they themselves might be attacked by chemical weapons, possibly from Israel. There are at least a couple dozen countries who have the technical capability to create this type of nerve agent.

In order to take blood samples from the Skripals, who were both in a coma, doctors had to get court approval. And in giving evidence to the High Court, two scientists stated that the Skripals had been poisoned by a Novichok nerve agent or a "closely related agent." It looks to many people like this may just be a silly amateur mixture of different insecticides.

Other questions arise. The British government has been telling us that this is ten times more powerful than a standard nerve agent. Thankfully, so far, nobody has been killed. Why isn't this deadly agent more effective? Why is it that the doctor who administered first aid to Yulia Skripal was completely unaffected, even though he had extensive physical contact with her?

DB: But some people will say that the only country that would want to silence a former Russian spy would be Russia.

CM: Our foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, has gone on record as saying that the Russians have been secretly stockpiling this chemical weapon for a decade and have had a secret program of assassination techniques. But if you were Vladimir Putin and you had this secret nerve agent, why would you blow your cover by using it on this retired spy who you released from prison years ago? The whole scenario is utterly implausible.

Why would Russia wish to ruin its international reputation with this entirely gratuitous violence against an old spy? Skripal was exchanged as part of a spy swap. If people are going to swap spies and then kill them, there won't be any spy swaps in the future. A KGB person like Putin is the last person who is going to destroy the system of spy swaps.

Randy Credico: Mr. Murray, there has been a concerted effort to defame you and undermine your credibility. What effect has this had on you and your family?

CM: It has been really quite unpleasant. The mainstream media has permitted no doubt at all. All of them are just printing government propaganda. I went on social media to post my doubts about this story being too convenient and too easy. My first piece on this, "Russian to Judgment," had millions of viewers. That brought upon me the wrath of the establishment. I became the recipient of hundreds of pieces of Twitter abuse in which I was called a nut and a conspiracy theorist.

RC: Who stands to benefit from this attack?

CM: It adds fuel to the new Cold War. The armaments industry are the primary people who benefit. This kind of thing is very good for defense budgets. It is very good news for the spies and security services. Here in the UK the industry employs over 100,000 people. In a country of 60 million, this is a strong and very highly paid interest group. All of these people are seeing a major ramping up of their budgets. When the people feeding-in the intelligence are the same people who are benefiting financially from that story, then you have to worry. And particularly for right-wing politicians this is a cheap way of getting support.

DB: Mr. Murray, I don't think that we can separate this from the so-called "Russiagate frenzy." Can you state unequivocally that there were substantial leaks from the DNC, as opposed to hacks?

CM: I can promise you that what came out of the DNC were leaks. They were from somebody who legally had access to the information. It was not an outside hack, not by the Russians, not by anyone.

... ... ...

Dennis J. Bernstein is a host of "Flashpoints" on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom . You can access the audio archives at www.flashpoints.net .


nonsense factory , March 30, 2018 at 4:41 pm

Without a public inquiry and the presentation of the raw analytical data that whoever did the forensics collected, the method they used, the testimony of the technician involved under oath – standard criminal justice procedures – there's really no basis for making any claims at this point.

What that reveals is that the British tabloid press and the British government have some kind of agenda that they're pushing with this story; Cold War 2.0 seems to be the name of the game. There's nothing new about this strategy, it's been going on ever since Putin rejected ExxonMobil's bid for a 51% controlling stake in Yukos in 2003, and soon after, arrested Khodorkovsky and exiled Berezovsky and Gusinsky. Ho hum.

Abe , March 30, 2018 at 4:53 pm

"Considering the lack of actual evidence the UK has provided and the British government's verified history of fabricating claims regarding the use of WMDs to advance it and its allies' geopolitical agendas – the burden of proof never rested upon Russia.

"Just as the US and UK did during the lead up to the Iraq War in 2003, an avalanche of propaganda is being produced to stampede the world into backing whatever long-ago elected course of action the West has decided to take against Russia.

"In the hindsight of whatever course of action the UK and its allies decide to take in the coming days, weeks, and months based on the Skripal incident, who will play the role of 'Curveball' who supposedly duped Theresa May in making her Powell-style accusations before declaring her Bush-style retaliation?

"And considering the ramifications for the West regarding its lies in the lead up to Iraq and the fallout the West has faced in the aftermath of Iraq's destruction, what do Western policymakers expect to gain from an incident many times more transparently staged and self-serving against a world increasingly skeptical of their claims and actions?

"Still, the accusations are serious and the prepared responses from the West will assuredly further endanger global peace and stability. That the alleged attack took place on British soil means that – unlike in Syria – there is no UNSC the West must pass through before taking matters into its own hands.

"This fact alone – following years of frustration in the face of Russia's veto power upon the UNSC in regards to Syria – makes the nature of the Skripal incident even more suspicious. The UK appears to have a pretext and a clear path toward escalation before it – how far it and its allies are prepared to go remains to be seen."

WMD Lies Strike Again: The Skripal Incident
By Tony Cartalucci
http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2018/03/wmd-lies-strike-again-skripal-incident.html

jose , March 30, 2018 at 9:30 pm

Dear Abe: you make very good points that can be easily verified. Personally, I believe that this article goes beyond lying and fake news: It reminds me of the term GASLIGHTING which "is a form of manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, hoping to make them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, it attempts to destabilize the target and delegitimize the target's belief." In a sane world, people should demand from the British government hard evidence so it's accusation of Russia being the culprit could be credible. Instead, we only read innuendo, speculation, and fabrication. The burden of proof should rest on the accuser (England) not Russia (target). Good post Abe.

john wilson , March 30, 2018 at 5:14 pm

My concern is the chain of custody of the Skripal's blood samples. I would hope that the UN chemical weapons inspectors would be present at the taking of the blood samples and take them away themselves. If they are just given the samples taken by the hospital earlier and these samples have been handled by 'government people', then they will most certainly have been spiked with the nerve agent in question. One way or another, May's criminal government operatives won't let there be any possibility of the sample being found not to have nerve agent in them.

Sam F , March 30, 2018 at 7:46 pm

Yes, there should be a UN standard of evidence and provenance thereof, beneath which accusations cannot be made and retaliations are considered aggressions. That would discourage false-flag provocations.

Brendan , March 30, 2018 at 5:56 pm

The official British narrative of what happened in Salisbury is just physically impossible, if you think about the supposed version of events:

Someone, and possibly a second person, makes contact with an extremely powerful nerve agent that has been placed on a door knob. Several hours later, after travelling in a car, drinking in a pub, eating in a restaurant and walking through a park, the two people are critically injured when the nerve agent suddenly kicks into action. This effect probably happens within less than a minute, since neither of them was able to call for help. Nobody else at the scene is affected, not even a doctor who physically handles one of the victims while treating them.

To top it off, more than three weeks later, one of the victims makes a rapid recovery, apparently in a single day, and is able to eat, drink and talk.

This amazing recovery from a lethal nerve agent is the kind of event that would normally be expected to make headlines as The Miracle of Salisbury. However it only gets mentioned as a minor item in media reports, in spite of the huge amount of coverage given to the poisoning and its political consequences.

The media seems afraid to even acknowldge that there's something unusual about this whole story. If they did, they'd have to ask certain questions: Is that how military grade nerve agents really work? Are our governments telling us lies?

Zachary Smith , March 30, 2018 at 7:35 pm

This amazing recovery from a lethal nerve agent is the kind of event that would normally be expected to make headlines as The Miracle of Salisbury .

A drop of nerve gas will kill in seconds, and the Evil Russian Poison was at least ten times as powerful, and one of the Skiprals has started to recover. A blurb and a headline I saw recently:

"She Is Risen!"

Last Act Of 'Novichok' Drama Revealed – "The Skripals' Resurrection"

The people involved now have a problem of gracefully backing away from this nutty story.

Zachary Smith , March 30, 2018 at 7:37 pm

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/03/she-is-risen-last-act-of-novichok-drama-revealed-the-skripals-resurrection.html

Tom Welsh , March 30, 2018 at 5:56 pm

"I find it remarkable that the very day this happened the British government was announcing that it was the Russian state that was behind this".

Exactly like MH17. I am surprised Mr Murray did not mention the parallel himself.

Tom Welsh , March 30, 2018 at 6:02 pm

"What if you were subpoenaed before Congress, would you take the fifth or would you tell that story?"

As Mr Murray is not a US citizen, I don't think Congress has any power to subpoena him. And he certainly couldn't "take the fifth", which is a constitutional protection available only to US citizens.

At a time when the US government is trying to set itself up as some kind of world government, it is extremely important to be perfectly clear about the limits of its power and authority.

Sam F , March 30, 2018 at 9:38 pm

Congress could ask him to cooperate, or request his subpoena via diplomatic channels under bilateral treaties. I don't know whether (under UK law) he could be penalized for claiming a bad memory, but coerced testimony could not be used against him in the US. Constitutional rights explicitly apply to all persons, not just US citizens.

David G , March 30, 2018 at 10:29 pm

"And he certainly couldn't 'take the fifth', which is a constitutional protection available only to US citizens."

Just as a point of information, that is categorically false.

But I hope the ambassador doesn't find himself in front of any U.S. Congressional panel or grand jury if his position is that he will assert that the DNC documents were a leak and not a hack, and then refuse to go into any further detail. A person can get into legal trouble that way.

Benjamin aye , March 30, 2018 at 6:08 pm

The truth concerning this skripal case is that the Russians are not involved in this poisoning.threr are some concept to understanding this situation.first after the incident the British government knew immediately the sort of nerve agent that was used to poison them.if the British on its own have not work on such agent it will be quite difficult to know immediately. This is because you must have a sample of the original so u can make comparison to ascertain your findings. Secondly there is a report that said that the skripal first had contact of the nerve agent at door post of his house,so how is it possible that they went to the cementary without having contact there,went to a cafe without having contact there and visited other places without making contact with the people there. As at these points the agent radiant level is still pretty high yet nobody had contacted the gas but hours later a police person that came to their rescue contact it.there is an irony to this case. Thirdly according to get experts concerning the novirchok nerve agents they are ten time powerful than the VX agents.if a VX agent that was use against the brother of north Korea takes 10minutes to die after been attack with the VX them with novirchok it should take a minute to end their lives.so how come they were Abel to survive,from the deadly reputation accord to the novirchok nerve agents where did the British get the antidote to the nerve agents. fouthly.this skripals case have have another conspiracy theory that is yet to be attained.it wasn't by accident that skripals were targeted.in order to removed the public attentions from the fallout of briext, to increased the defence budgets,to rally around the NATO sportive alliances which will show to the British pollution that after briext the UK can still muscle up allies to it aid.

backwardsevolution , March 30, 2018 at 6:27 pm

George Galloway, British politician and former candidate for the mayor of London, said:

"Why do I not believe you? Let me count the ways. You're not looking for anyone in connection with the attack on the Skripals. There is no manhunt, no all points alert, no description, no identikit drawing, no CCTV. No suspects. That means you already know what happened. #Russia"

Dick , March 30, 2018 at 7:10 pm

Choose for yourself which of the following Seven Rules of Propaganda apply to the current Skripal affair:

Avoid abstract ideas – appeal to the emotions. – When we think emotionally, we are more prone to be irrational and less critical in our thinking; making it easier for the citizenry to believe the absurd!

Constantly repeat just a few ideas. Use stereotyped phrases. – This could be stated more plainly as 'Keep it simple, stupid!' or 'Lie, lie lie, repeat, repeat, repeat'.

Give only one side of the argument and obscure history. – Any historical perspective is ignored keeping the citizenry focused on the here and now.

Demonize the enemy or pick out one special "enemy" for special vilification. – Putin and Russia; enough said.

Appear humanitarian in work and motivations. – Used this technique to validate foreign interventions or ongoing conflicts where the term 'Right to Protect' for justification.

Obscure one's economic interests. – For example, the invasion of Iraq was all about oil and the control over the resources; not WMD.

Monopolize the flow of information. – This mainly entails setting the narrative by which all subsequent events can be based upon or interpreted in such a way as to reinforce the narrative. The narrative does not need to be true; in fact, it can be anything that suits the monopoliser as long as it is based loosely upon some event. It is critical to have at least majority control of media and the ability to control the message so the flow of information is consistent with the narrative.

Sam F , March 30, 2018 at 8:32 pm

The Iraq war motive was the Israeli plan to fragment surrounding states, as they have long done. Oil companies could expect no low price deals from a country in need of reconstruction, and in fact the US oil companies did not get much of the oil even at competitive prices. The "It's the oil, stupid" concept is just zionist propaganda.

Zachary Smith , March 30, 2018 at 7:18 pm

CM: I think that the Russians have the sense not to overreact.

Overreaction is bad, but if I were sitting in Russian ruling councils, I'd be pushing for either a severe restriction of diplomatic relations with the UK, or a complete cut-off. The "mother country" has gone ape****, and is clearly the ringleader for whatever it is that's happening. The latest provocation by the Brits has been to order the crew off a just-landed Russian airliner, and conduct a "search".

Scotland Yard has denied its officers carried out a search of the plane.

A spokeswoman told Daily Star Online: "I've spoken to our control room at London Heathrow and have confirmed that it is not our force."

The Foreign Office told the BBC that Border Force officals boarded the flight and Aeroflot was "willing to cooperate with UK authorities if explanation given".

The pilot refused to leave, so they kept him in the cockpit while the "Border Force" did whatever they were doing. Planting evidence? Wouldn't put it past them.

Again, at a minimum I'd cut the diplomatic staff of the UK in Russia to the Ambassador and maybe one secretary. But I'd favor sending them all home and doing any necessary communications second-hand through the Swiss Embassy.

Zachary Smith , March 30, 2018 at 7:19 pm

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/692750/russian-plane-inspected-british-police-london-airport-refuse-leave-news

Sam F , March 30, 2018 at 8:19 pm

One advantage of diplomatic restraint in such a case is that the provocateur discredits himself, whereas escalation serves as distraction. So Russia may wait until the baselessness of the hysteria becomes clear to the public. The aircraft cockpit search shows hysteria and malice without reason, like the final stages of a witch-hunt craze. If not verified as CW, or nothing but "trust us" emerges, the witch hunters will be discredited.

I like the hypothesis that a US/UK/Israeli agent/employee (at Porton Down lab if it was CW) did this on his own initiative, taking the Skripal house as a convenient target, just to make a splash and a provocation. For example, a zionist UK grad student at Porton Down. Others there or among his associates would likely have spoken about such incidents. Quite possibly a connection with the many false-flag CW incidents in Syria by US/UK/Israeli supported "rebels." This would certainly be a focus of any serious investigation.

Jeff , March 30, 2018 at 9:03 pm

Mr. Murray is a very polite soul. At this point, quite frankly, I'm terrified. Up to this point, the reality is that we have been beating up on little countries who don't have a prayer of fighting back. Russia and China are not those countries. I don't know how many nuclear weapons China has but Russia has enough to destroy the United States. Again, I don't know about China but I know that Russia has non-nuclear weapons that can reach the US. Both separately and together they can seriously hurt the United States. I see no need to get into that kind of pissing contest.

David G , March 30, 2018 at 10:39 pm

Regarding your feeling of terror, Jeff, to quote the comic/movie "Watchmen": "Don't be alarmed. That indicates only that you are still sane."

Stephen J. , March 30, 2018 at 9:20 pm

March 30, 2018
"Solidarity among War Criminals"

"Because of the nerve poison attack, NATO also imposed punitive measures against Russia. Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced that seven employees of the Russian NATO representation would be deprived of accreditation. In addition, the Russian delegation will be limited to 20 of the current 30 employees. The NATO countries had already condemned the attack on Skripal earlier this month and expressed their solidarity with Great Britain ."

It must have been very heartening for the war gangs and war criminals of NATO [1] to see the solidarity of their members all voicing their criticism of Russia despite there being no proof that Russia was behind this attack in Salisbury, England. Oh well, to paraphrase an old saying, "war criminal birds of a feather always stick or fly, bomb, and kill together."
[read more at link below]
http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2018/03/solidarity-among-war-criminals.html

Randal Marlin , March 30, 2018 at 10:36 pm

Craig Murray's makes an important observation concerning the official language about the Skripal poisoning and the language used by media.

Official language, as he notes, talks about "a weapon of a type developed by Russia." But newspapers and some politicians use the expression "Russian weapon," or "a weapon that could only have come from Russia." I find it hard to believe that British and U.S. scientists could not duplicate or come up with an equally toxic equivalent to a Novichok nerve agent.

What I do see is the same kind of repetition of the "Russians did it" meme to reinforce an anti-Russian and anti-Putin mind-set. The same kind of repetition was used to get people to accept the "weapons of mass destruction" deception supporting the U.S. second Iraq war in 2003.

This forms one part of a collage of different Putin-implicating events all of which collectively propagate the image of a power-hungry, dangerous man who must be stopped. Georgia and Ukraine are cited, but without careful attention to circumstances, so that he appears much more evil than a full understanding of events would warrant.

The outrage against Putin's alleged "meddling" in the last U.S. presidential election seems greatly overblown when weighed against the U.S. meddling in the Russian presidential election of 1996, where U.S. advisors reportedly helped Boris Yeltsin get re-elected (Time Magazine, cover story, July 15, 1996). He turned out to be a disaster for Russia, leading to support of Vladimir Putin .

What I like about Consortium News is that it seems to understand the danger of letting contestable factual claims go unchallenged, letting them crystallize into settled beliefs in people's minds. The danger is that a set of beliefs will be widely enough held that only a few more prods, tied to deeply held beliefs about American exceptionalism, will lead the U.S. into war yet again, against more formidable foes than hitherto and with even more disastrous results.

When alleged facts are contestable, and have bearing on important political matters, reasons for doubting them should be kept alive. The mass media prefer simplicity, because most people find complexity off-putting. But policies founded on illusions do not hold out much promise of a peaceful world.

All of this is not to sing praises of Putin, who has a lot of blood on his hands, but to prevent misunderstandings that make another world war more possible. Thanks again to Craig Murray and Consortium News.

Jean , March 30, 2018 at 11:00 pm

Another false flag like they did with Iraq and literally the same criminals and co conspirators. Remember Colon Powell at the U.N. with his vials of talc and artists renditions of mobile labs, nice brush work. The anthrax was made in a US military lab.They even tried to blame a Muslim scientists for stealing it. More lies.

[Mar 31, 2018] Salisbury Incident Report: Hard Evidence For Soft Minds

Notable quotes:
"... This 6-paged PDF is a powerful evidence of another intellectual low of British propaganda machine. Open it and you can tell that substantially it makes only two assertions on the Skripal case, and both are false ..."
"... The fifth version is a rather more elaborate development of the previous point. There is circumstantial evidence, a version outlined by the Daily Telegraph , that Skripal may have had a hand in devising Christopher Steele's 'Trump Dossier'. ..."
"... The authors of this "report" mixed up a very strange cocktail of multitype allegations, none of which have ever been proven or recognized by any responsible entity ..."
Mar 39, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Via Oriental Review,

The UK government's presentation on the Salisbury incident, which was repeatedly cited in recent days as an "ultimate proof" of Russia's involvement into Skripal's assassination attempt, was made public earlier today.

This 6-paged PDF is a powerful evidence of another intellectual low of British propaganda machine. Open it and you can tell that substantially it makes only two assertions on the Skripal case, and both are false:

First.

Novichok is a group of agents developed only by Russia and not declared under the CWC " – a false statement . Novichok was originally developed in the USSR (Nukus Lab, today in Uzbekistan, site completely decommissioned according to the US-Uzbekistan agreement by 2002). One of its key developers, Vil Mirzayanov , defected to the United States in 1990s, its chemical formula and technology were openly published in a number of chemical journals outside Russia. Former top-ranking British foreign service officer Craig Murray specifically noted this point on March 17:

Craig Murray

I have now been sent the vital information that in late 2016, Iranian scientists set out to study whether novichoks really could be produced from commercially available ingredients. Iran succeeded in synthesizing a number of novichoks. Iran did this in full cooperation with the OPCW and immediately reported the results to the OPCW so they could be added to the chemical weapons database.

This makes complete nonsense of the Theresa May's "of a type developed by Russia" line, used to parliament and the UN Security Council. This explains why Porton Down has refused to cave in to governmental pressure to say the nerve agent was Russian. If Iran can make a novichok, so can a significant number of states .

Second.

" We are without doubt that Russia is responsible. No country bar Russia has combined capability, intent and motive. There is no plausible alternative explanation " – an outstanding example of self-hypnosis. None of the previous items could even remotedly lead to this conclusion. The prominent British academician from the University of Kent Prof. Richard Sakwa has elaborated on this on March 23 the following way:

Rather than just the two possibilities outlined by Theresa May, in fact there are at least six, possibly seven. The first is that this was a state-sponsored, and possibly Putin-ordered, killing This version simply does not make sense, and until concrete evidence emerges, it should be discounted

The second version is rather more plausible, that the authorities had lost control of its stocks of chemical weapons. In the early 1990s Russian facilities were notoriously lax, but since the 2000s strict control over stocks were re-imposed, until their final destruction in 2017. It is quite possible that some person or persons unknown secreted material, and then conducted some sort of vigilante operation

Third.

The third version is the exact opposite: some sort of anti-Putin action by those trying to force his policy choices

Forth

The fourth version is similar, but this time the anti-Putinists are not home-grown but outsiders. Here the list of people who would allegedly benefit by discrediting Russia is a long one. If Novichok or its formula has proliferated, then it would not be that hard to organise some sort of false flag operation. The list of countries mentioned in social media in this respect is a long one. Obviously, Ukraine comes top of the list, not only because of motivation, but also because of possible access to the material, as a post-Soviet state with historical links to the Russian chemical weapons programme. Israel has a large chemical weapon inventory and is not a party to the OPCW; but it has no motivation for such an attack (unless some inadvertent leak occurred here). Another version is that the UK itself provoked the incident, as a way of elevating its status as a country 'punching above its weight'. The British chemical weapons establishment, Porton Down, is only 12 kilometres from Salisbury. While superficially plausible, there is absolutely no evidence that this is a credible version, and should be discounted.

Fifth.

The fifth version is a rather more elaborate development of the previous point. There is circumstantial evidence, a version outlined by the Daily Telegraph , that Skripal may have had a hand in devising Christopher Steele's 'Trump Dossier'.

The British agent who originally recruited Skripal, Pablo Miller, lives in Salisbury, and also has connections with Orbis International, Steele's agency in London. In this version, Skripal is still working in one way or another with MI6, and fed stories to Steele, who then intervenes massively in US politics, effectively preventing the much-desired rapprochement between Trump and Putin. Deep anger at the malevolent results of the Steele and British intervention in international politics and US domestic affairs prompts a revenge killing, with the demonstration effect achieved by using such a bizarre assassination weapon.

Sixth.

The sixth version is the involvement of certain criminal elements, who for reasons best known to themselves were smuggling the material, and released it by accident. In this version, the Skripals are the accidental and not intended victims. There are various elaborations of this version, including the activities of anti-Putin mobsters. One may add a seventh version here, in which Islamic State or some other Islamist group seeks to provoke turmoil in Europe.

Do you wish to know our refutations of any other substantial "hard evidence" against Russia in the UK paper? Sorry, but that is all. The primitive information warriors in what used to be the heart of a brilliant empire, today are incapable of designing an even slightly plausible (they love this word, right?) document on a super-politicized case.

What follows is even more depressing. Slide 3 is dedicated to some sort of anatomy lesson:

Slide 4 seemingly represents a real "honey trap". Just look at it:

The authors of this "report" mixed up a very strange cocktail of multitype allegations, none of which have ever been proven or recognized by any responsible entity (like legal court or dedicated official international organization). Of course we are not committed to argue on every cell, but taking e.g. " August 2008 Invasion of Georgia " we actually can't understand why the EU-acknowledged Saakashvili's aggression against South Ossetia is exposed here as an example of "Russian malign activity"

Have you totally lost your minds, ladies & gentlemen from the Downing Street?

Brazen Heist Fri, 03/30/2018 - 10:11 Permalink

The Russians did it....because, the Russians are baddies!

- Sighed, the echo chamber of American butt kissers.

[Mar 30, 2018] Nick Bailey's hospitalization

Mar 30, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Posted by: jawbone | Mar 30, 2018 12:52:47 PM | 125

Re: DS Nick Bailey's hospitalization

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/nick-bailey-discharged_uk_5ab3dcede4b0decad047d95d

HuffPo has him entering hospital on March 4, but no mention of his going to the Skripal residence. "He was taken to Salisbury District Hospital after responding to the attack" on the Skripals. So, to emergency some time after initially responding to the couple on March 4 and released on March 22. No mention of his going to the house.

Bailey's statement was read by Chief Constable Kier Pritchard and, to my ear, it sounded like a careful, well written PR release. Basically little information. The experience was "surreal" came the closest to describing how he felt. And that's the part usually run on the broadcast TV news I saw. No mention of how he was treated, whether he had any physical therapy. Has anyone heard he speak? or is that area of lingering effects of the exposure to...whatever it was?


ninel , Mar 30, 2018 1:13:27 PM | 127

Peter AU 1 , Mar 30, 2018 1:14:20 PM | 128
Jawbone, the article you link to is dated march 22. Articles dated 5th/6th of march are needed.
At the moment, it seems the policeman was poisoned on the 5th or 6th when there where already pics of people in protective suits. The story on the policeman has chopped and changed a lot - he was a first responder, he was poisoned at the house ect ect. I think the confusion in the policeman part of the narrative is that he was poisoned perhaps two day later, and had to be fitted into the narrative retrospectively.
somebody , Mar 30, 2018 1:25:44 PM | 130
125 I assume it is true that the police officer caught it from the door handle same as the front door being the place of the strongest distribution of the chemical agent as this fact does not support any proof of Russian state involvement.

Quite the contrary - it works more like a Mafia warning, whoever might get it the postman, a neighbour, Skripals does not matter.

There is this guy and he is from Uzbekistan .

He spent long years in Europe before he returned to Russia. So I suppose he features in all kinds of secret service files.

Don Bacon , Mar 30, 2018 2:23:37 PM | 137
several snippets on DS (Detective Sgt) Bailey
> It is confirmed that a police officer, later confirmed as DS Nick Bailey, is fighting for his life in hospital.-- Mar 8
> The pair are in a critical condition in a local hospital. A police officer who helped investigate is in serious condition, and a total of 21 people have received medical treatment. Former London police chief Ian Blair said Friday that a police officer who is in serious condition visited Skripal's house -- perhaps a hint that the nerve agent may have been delivered there. Blair told BBC radio that Det. Sgt. Nick Bailey "has actually been to the house, whereas there is a doctor who looked after the patients in the open who hasn't been affected at all. There may be some clues floating around in here." -- Mar 9
> DS Nick Bailey is seriously ill in hospital having visited the home of Skripal after the defector and his daughter were found slumped on a bench in Salisbury, Wiltshire, on Sunday afternoon. Investigators want to know whether Bailey visited the scene where the two Russians were found and was poisoned there or by items there, or whether the officer was contaminated on his visit to Skripal's home. Sources say that, while it is not certain, it is believed more likely that Bailey became contaminated on his visit to the home. -- Mar 9
> But last night it emerged the police officer who also fell ill after responding to the incident, visited Mr Skripal's home before he collapsed. Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey remains in a serious condition in hospital. According to reports, he tended to the victims at the scene and then visited both the Skripal home.A source told The Times: "He was at both places. "First he was where they collapsed, trying to help them, then he went to the house, in that order." -- Mar 10
> DS Bailey, who was among the first to attend to Mr Skripal and his daughter Yulia, before possibly examining their red BMW, where it is thought the nerve agent Novichok may have been placed, was initially discharged from hospital after a check up. He later admitted to Accident and Emergency at Salisbury District Hospital feeling extremely unwell. DS Bailey is now described as in a stable condition -- Mar 15
> Concern for the family of the police officer who went to the aid of the poisoned Russian spy has grown after Army and police sealed off his street and began work to remove his car for examination. Speculation grew that Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey may have carried traces of the nerve agent Novichok home with him after attempting to resuscitate Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. -- Mar 15
> PM Theresa May visits Salisbury and meets privately with DS Nick Bailey . His car is removed from his home as part of the investigation.-- Mar 15
> The police officer who was hospitalized after rushing to help a former Russian spy and his daughter suffering from a poison attack in Salisbury, England, was discharged Thursday [Mar 22]. Bailey was treated at Salisbury District Hospital for several weeks after being exposed to the same deadly and rare nerve agent that the U.K. government says was used to target former intelligence officer Sergie Skirpal, 66, and Yulia, 33. -- Mar 22
Don Bacon , Mar 30, 2018 2:27:01 PM | 138
@137
I should have highlighted that DS Bailey was initially discharged from hospital after a check up.
frances , Mar 30, 2018 2:36:46 PM | 139
Chemical weapons attack field drill on the same day.
Krollchem | Mar 30, 2018 12:23:13 AM | 78
There is always a "drill" taking place in the immediate vicinity addressing the same problem (terrorists, shooters, CW)whenever these events happen isn't there? A drill was happening on 9/11 and has been every time right up to the latest at a Florida school.
Mina , Mar 30, 2018 2:45:05 PM | 140
Yet a new low

Https://www.rt.com/news/422811-britain-plane-russia-provocation/

Maybe its time for Russia to offer scholarships to foreign scientists? I suspect many would like to join Snowden and others

cdvision , Mar 30, 2018 3:02:21 PM | 144
I detect that the medics at Salisbury are not reading from the official script. Someone mentioned Yulia has been moved from Salisbury hospital. This is worrying. Hope she doesn't suddenly have a relapse.
frances , Mar 30, 2018 3:13:30 PM | 147
"I think the confusion in the policeman part of the narrative is that he was poisoned perhaps two day later, and had to be fitted into the narrative retrospectively."
Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Mar 30, 2018 1:14:20 PM | 128
I think the policeman was thrown into the mix because the female doctor who gave the girl cpr on the spot, the ambulance attendees and driver were all right as rain. They needed another "on the scene" victim to drown out the obvious, that whatever "it" was was not contagious. There is also the young man who first found them who said he got spittle on his sleeve from the male but brushed it off (with his bare hand) and that was that. Whatever it is, it is clearly not the super awesome awful evil Russian elixir.
Don Bacon , Mar 30, 2018 3:19:50 PM | 148
@jb 145
On Bailey -- Telegraph .

[Mar 30, 2018] Russia expels diplomats in tit-for-tat action over Salisbury attack by Patrick Wintour and Shaun Walker

Russia now openly accused Britain in the attempt to kill Skripals. Also each new British version of poisoning have larger and larger holes in it. Britain tries to deflect accusations
Many people now view May Skripals gambit (in which Skripals were just pawns -- unclear winning or unwilling) as an attempt to save Russiagate in the USA -- operation conduction jointly with rogue elements of the USA intelligence agencies against Trump.
Notable quotes:
"... Mikhailov said Theresa May should resign for misleading world opinion. ..."
Mar 30, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

Zakharova said nobody had cancelled the agreement, which she said still had force in international law. The UK is likely to argue that an agreement between the UK and the Soviet Union is not enforceable in court and there is no reason to give Russia access to a woman it apparently tried to kill. Russia challenged claims made by Dean Haydon, Britain's counter-terror police chief, that the Skripals first came into contact with the nerve agent from their front door .

... ... ...

"Traces of the nerve agent have been found at some of the other scenes detectives have been working at over the past few weeks, but at lower concentrations to that found at the home address," Haydon said on Wednesday.

Maj-Gen Alexander Mikhailov, from the Russian security agency FSB, claimed that if it was true the poisoning had happened on the doorstep then the Skripals would have died instantly and would not made it as far as the park where they were found slumped on a bench.

Mikhailov said Theresa May should resign for misleading world opinion.

Both sides are waiting for a report from the OPCW, which sent experts to visit the scene in Salisbury and is studying samples of the nerve agent.

Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary of Russian president Vladimir Putin, said it was difficult to guess what other options for anti-Russian measures Britain could take.

"As for the UK, due to the fact that now it is a fairly unpredictable country in relations with the Russian Federation, it is difficult for us to judge what other options can be considered, and what can be the basis for this," Peskov said.

See also:

May considers banning City of London from selling Russian debt

[Mar 30, 2018] Skripal was a traitor who got caught, convicted, jailed and then exchanged, not a defector

Mar 30, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Lyttenburgh 29 March 2018 at 12:16 PM

"a former Russian intelligence defector "

Skripal never defected - he was caught spying for Britain in Russia in 2004, judged and sentenced and then exchanged in 2010. He is a traitor who got caught. Not a defector.

[Mar 30, 2018] Possible Skripal's connection to the Brexit negotiations

Mar 30, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

ninel | Mar 30, 2018 1:13:27 PM | 127

CrossTalk on Anti-Russia Hysteria: Crisis Point?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYSGf-Ia1-8

The first speaker makes some good points in his first and second turn, especially Skripal's connection to the Brexit negotiations.

[Mar 30, 2018] Salisbury nerve agent attack Kremlin says UK must prove it did not poison spy by Alix Culbertson

Notable quotes:
"... The Russian foreign ministry also said in the absence of that evidence it will consider the case a murder attempt on Russian citizens as part of a "massive political provocation". ..."
Mar 28, 2018 | news.sky.com

Russia has said the UK most prove British intelligence services did not poison former spy Sergei Skripal.

The Russian foreign ministry also said in the absence of that evidence it will consider the case a murder attempt on Russian citizens as part of a "massive political provocation".

Russia's accusation is its bluntest yet as it continues to deny involvement in the poisoning of former double agent Mr Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury on 4 March.

[Mar 30, 2018] Definitely UK false flag MI6 operation that must have CIA cooperation. Very dangerous. The US and its Anglosphere and EU vassals must be desperate.

Mar 30, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Posted by: AriusArmenian | Mar 30, 2018 1:35:30 PM | 132 carrie , Mar 30, 2018 1:53:19 PM | 134

jawbone | Mar 30, 2018 12:03:54 PM | 118

Facebook link doesn't work for me; so add to 118

Bulgarian journalist Gaytandzhieva confronts Robert Kadlec over the US secret bio-weapons

carrie , Mar 30, 2018 2:02:40 PM | 136
For completeness, add this resource to 110 and 118, it's the first report by Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, The Pentagon Bio-Weapons

Haven't time to read it myself just now but... for those who have...

[Mar 29, 2018] She Is Risen! - Last Act Of 'Novichok' Drama Revealed The Skripals' Resurrection

From comments: "...the incident is a clear false flag to mark Russia as an aggressor nation. The issue serves as the dead cat on the table. "
Notable quotes:
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
"... Seems to me the behavior of the British government, including the infantile stupidity of Boris Johnson, points directly at its (the government's) culpability versus say Russian gangsters with a grudge against Sergei. I base this on these behaviors of secrecy, inconsistency, incomplete information, leaping to accusations plus heroizing the officer and now the hospital staff. Indeed bless me "she is risen" b! How sweet! (BTW this last is sardonic; I'm very happy Yulia is making it.) ..."
"... The term is attributed to Lynton Crosby, a political strategist who has managed campaigns of right-of-centre parties in several countries. Boris Johnson, who employed Crosby during London mayoral elections explains the term thus: ..."
"... "There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don't mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, 'Jeez, mate, there's a dead cat on the table!' In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief." ..."
"... If Yulia Scribal fully recovers she will be subjected to one of the most intensive debriefing sessions of all time. Imagine her saying she wants to see the Russian ambassador or even Putin because she felt unsafe in the UK. Or causes the UK of attacking her! ..."
"... "To respond to it rationally, as Russia tries to do, makes little sense." Exactly. Tit for tat isn't enough. It's a matter of dignity to stop completely any contact with governments behaving that low. The message delivered must be unmistakably clear. ..."
"... in the last year and a few months, a shift in the balance of power has been happening, global movement toward allying with Russia-China. ..."
"... I predicted early on in this affair that the Skirpals would amazingly "recover" - because there was no poison attack of any kind, just a shoddy attempt at a false flag event. The Skirpals were in on it from the beginning. ..."
"... Novichok is said to be highly toxic and lethal when absorbed through the skin, but it's interesting that the young man Jamie Paine who first found the Skripals on the park bench got some liquid on his skin and apparently didn't suffer from it. From a March 8 BBC video -- ". . .man was frothing from the mouth, I got a little bit on my skin, it wasn't too much, I just brushed it off." That has never been mentioned in any recent news accounts that I've seen. We do have other articles mentioning Paine. ..."
"... UK have stated A-234 was the agent used. According to the Russian scientists book A-234 is volatile, it would evaporate relatively quickly. On the poisoning, food poisoning or deliberate depends on if the narrative was opportunistic or planned. I think the narrative was planned before hand which would make it deliberate poisoning. From what I make of it, their symptoms are similar to organophosphate pesticide poisoning, and that would fit with Porton Down term of "or similar chemical". ..."
"... MH17 was an anglo/US hit job. I start to see now why no Australian rep went with the Malaysians to collect the victims and the planes black boxes. The Dutch at least had the decency to go with the Malaysian's and pick up their own people. ..."
"... As I repeated already many times here it is a moderate overdose, volunteer or not of fentanyl and then they were kept in medically induced coma for weeks not to be able repudiate their lies ..."
"... There is a lot of somewhat pointless discussion about nerve agents, do Novichoks exist, who makes them, feasibility of production etc, etc. To a certain extent, this is all irrelevant as the incident is a clear false flag to mark Russia as an aggressor nation. The issue serves as the dead cat on the table ..."
"... @ francis 11: Excellent point, a poisoned door knob should have afflicted only one of them ..."
"... It seems like every time the Brits try to revise the story, it gets worse! ..."
"... Lastly, there are several reports that the US leaned on virtually everyone in the world very, very hard to attempt to drum up "support" for May. In my experience, you only get so many over-the-top favors to ask/demand, and the US had to burn one to try to save their sanctions. ..."
Mar 29, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

"She Is Risen!" - Last Act Of 'Novichok' Drama Revealed: "The Skripals' Resurrection"

It seems that the 'Novichok' fairy-tale the British government plays to us provides for a happy ending - the astonishing and mysterious resurrection of the victims of a "military grade" "five to eight times more deadly than VX gas" "nerve agent" "of a type developed by" Hollywood.

Happy Easter!

Yulia Skripal no longer in critical condition, say Salisbury doctors

The condition of Yulia Skripal, who was poisoned with a nerve agent in Salisbury along with her father, is improving rapidly , doctors have said.

Salisbury NHS foundation trust said on Thursday the 33-year-old was no longer in a critical condition, describing her medical state as stable.

Christine Blanshard, medical director for Salisbury district hospital, said: "I'm pleased to be able to report an improvement in the condition of Yulia Skripal. She has responded well to treatment but continues to receive expert clinical care 24 hours a day."
...
Her father's condition is still described by the hospital as critical but stable.

Only yesterday the Skripals chances to survive was claimed to be 1 out of 99. Nerve agents are deadly weapons. A dose of ten milligram of the U.S. developed VX nerve agent will kill 50% of those exposed to it. The 'Novichok' agents are said to be several times more deadly than VX.

It seems less and less likely that the British government claim about 'Novichok' poisoning is actually true. Way more likely are other explanations, for example food poisoning or an allergic shock soon after eating out at a fish restaurant.

The claims of a nerve agent and 'Novichok' seem to have been taken from the script of the British-American spy drama Strike Back ( clip ) which recently ran on British and U.S. TV. The sole purpose of the 'Novichok' drama is to implicate and damage Russia.

As the former MI6 spook Alastair Crooke writes :

The evidence is beside the point: here was the opportunity to close-off Trump's 'illusion' of a possible détente with Russia. The narrative is all. We will likely never know the full story.

Yulia and Sergej Skripal were found unconscious on the afternoon of March 4.

The U.S. State Department says that its campaign to use the Skripal incident as a tool against Russia started on March 6, only two days after the incident and six full days before the British government raised accusations against Russia.

In her press briefing on March 27 the U.S. State Department spokeswomen Heather Nauert talked about the coordinated ousting of Russian diplomats by some "western" countries:

Our Deputy Secretary Sullivan, Assistant Secretary Wess Mitchell, and many others in the building across the interagency process have worked tirelessly over the past three weeks to achieve this unprecedented level of cooperation and also coordination. The end result – 151 Russian intelligence personnel sent home to Moscow – is a testimony of how seriously the world takes Russia's ongoing global campaign to undermine international peace and stability, to threaten the sovereignty and security of countries worldwide, and to subvert and discredit Western institutions.

The above quote is from Nauert's prepared remarks, not the more free wheeling Q&A section.

The British prime minister made her allegations against Russia only on March 12 :

"It is now clear that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia.

This is part of a group of nerve agents known as 'Novichok'."

(See our earlier pieces, linked below, for many details on 'Novichok' and its history.)

May's announcement was similar to Tony Blair's "45 minutes" claim. A lie, concocted in a common propaganda operation with the U.S. government. As the Downing Street Memos said of the preparations for the war on Iraq:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam , through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

bigger

There are several details that debunk the 'Novichok' thesis.

The specialists in the British chemical weapon laboratory in Porton Down, which gets millions of U.S. military research dollars, did not agree with the 'Novichok' claim for whatever effected the Skripals. May's phrase "of a type developed by Russia' was politically negotiated. As ambassador Craig Murray provided :

I have now received confirmation from a well placed FCO source that Porton Down scientists are not able to identify the nerve agent as being of Russian manufacture , and have been resentful of the pressure being placed on them to do so. Porton Down would only sign up to the formulation "of a type developed by Russia" after a rather difficult meeting where this was agreed as a compromise formulation.

But was there really a nerve agent involved?

A doctor who administered first aid to Yulia Skripal for 30 minutes was not effected at all. The emergency services suspected the victims had received on overdose of fentanyl.

Doctor Steven Davies, who leads the emergency service of the Salisbury District Hospital, wrote in a letter to the London Times :

Sir, Further to your report "Poison exposure leaves almost 40 needing treatment", (Mar 14), may I clarify that no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury and there have only been ever been three patients with significant poisoning.

A Court of Protection judgment about the Skripals issued on March 22 quotes as witness a Porton Down chemical and biological analyst:

Blood samples from Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal were analysed and the findings indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound . The samples tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent or closely related agent .

"Indicated exposure" is a rather weak formulation. It means that no 'novichok' was found but decomposition products of something that may have been a nerve agent or not. A blood sample may "test positive" for all kinds of stuff but that does not say anything about the amount or about the lethality of any of the "positive tested" elements. The 'Novichok' nerve agents are organophosphates like many of the usual insecticides are. These break down relatively fast. A walk through a field freshly sprayed with some insecticide or the domestic use of such a product might leave similar decomposition products in the bloodstream as a nerve agent attack.

The Court of Protection also said that no relative or friend contacted the authorities about the Skripals. That was evidently false (ru).

Today, 25 days after the incident, the police say they suspect that the Skripals were poisoned from the front door of their home. Today, 25 days after the incident, they removed the front door. I believe that this decision was based on a "most plausible story" guess and not on material evidence. If the door had tested positive for a nerve agent it would have been removed weeks ago. This is, like those people in high protection suits roaming around Salisbury, just theater.

The Skripals were said to have left their home at 9:00am in the morning. They collapsed relatively sudden at 4:00pm in the afternoon. Is this seven hour delay consistent with being severely affected by a "military grade" highly toxic nerve agent? I doubt it.

But even if a nerve agent of the 'novichok' type was involved the jump to allegations against Russia is completely baseless. David B. Collum is Professor for Organic Chemistry at Cornell University. He really, really knows this stuff:

Dave Collum @DavidBCollum - 12:54 AM - 27 Mar 2018
I will say it again: Anybody who tells you this nerve agent must have come from Russia is a liar--a complete and utter liar. They are simple compounds.

The Skripals are getting better. Good for them. But their resurrection from certain death is a further dint in the British government's claim of 'nerve agent' 'of a type developed by Russia'.

The whole anti-Russian campaign constructed out of it is just ridiculous and deeply dishonest. The five page propaganda handout the British provided to other governments is a joke. It provided no solid facts on the case. To respond to it rationally, as Russia tries to do, makes little sense .

An editorial (recommended) in the Chinese Global Times captures the utter disgust such behavior creates elsewhere:

The fact that major Western powers can gang up and "sentence" a foreign country without following the same procedures other countries abide by and according to the basic tenets of international law is chilling.
...
Over the past few years the international standard has been falsified and manipulated in ways never seen before.
...
It is beyond outrageous how the US and Europe have treated Russia. Their actions represent a frivolity and recklessness that has grown to characterize Western hegemony that only knows how to contaminate international relations. Right now is the perfect time for non-Western nations to strengthen unity and collaborative efforts among one another.

Resurrection or not - the result of the 'Novichok' nonsense will not be to our 'western' favor.

---

Previous Moon of Alabama reports on the Skripal case:

Posted by b on March 29, 2018 at 02:59 PM | Permalink

Comments


james , Mar 29, 2018 3:07:44 PM | 1

this story was bullshit from the get go and a frame up of russia, but now the lid comes off to reveal more craziness.. wow..

thanks b.. it is deeply dishonest as you state... none of these state actors are going to take back any of there actions or words on any of this either... that is the really disgusting part... again, it is an issue of no accountability and actions absent facts that the west are operating on f/t... very disturbing.. white helmets is one thing... getting the leaders of western dumbocracy to act according to propaganda 101 is another thing... no one can take any of these western countries seriously again, but until the next episode - and there will be more, no doubt - it is the same as usual....

i note pat lang has nothing to say on it.. he seems too busy holding up his idea of the good ole' days when there were good people and bad people.. too bad the usa has sunk to such a deplorable state..

ex-SA , Mar 29, 2018 3:12:20 PM | 2
Magic of Easter !?
Peter AU 1 , Mar 29, 2018 3:19:25 PM | 3
Her resurrection also comes not long after it was determined OPCW could take blood samples. As it took three weeks with constant Russian pressure to have OPCW involved, her resurrection may not have been part of the original narrative.
lysias , Mar 29, 2018 3:20:06 PM | 4
Remember, Trump, in his telephone call congratulating Putin after March 12, refused the instructions of his aides to bring up the Salisbury event.
Ort , Mar 29, 2018 3:26:52 PM | 5
As the saying goes, the fun never stops! A stalwart minority of "alternative" news and analysis sites like MOA has published compelling critiques of this rotten Western Hegemony-pimped Big Lie from the beginning.

The UK authorities' campaign of simultaneously suppressing factual information and instead bloviating a series of dodgy claims, outright falsehoods, and escalating scurrilous smears kept both critics and the public off balance for a long time.

But it was predictable that events-- facts on the ground-- would eventually emerge that could not be explained away by more facile nonsense and rhetorical Russophobic Sturm und Drang.

So I again pose the question I've been nattering on about for weeks now: since the UK government chose to put itself far out on a greasy limb, what is their anticipated endgame?

Unlike the US, older governments in the UK and EU have a tradition of resigning in the face of scandal-- once attempts to weather the scandal have been exhausted, at any rate.

It would be delicious to see the despicable Gorgon May and UK Village Idiot Laureate Boris Johnson get their well-deserved comeuppance. In fact, it would be too good to be true.

Thus, I assume that the Big Liars will somehow contrive to "tough it out", and double down on the facile nonsense and rhetorical Russophobic Sturm und Drang.

FSFF , Mar 29, 2018 3:31:54 PM | 6
Well, MI6, to move this farce along, must have given Yulia some of the antidote for the nerve agent they gave her and her father almost a month ago. The US and UK have been working on a diabolical 'coma inducing' nerve agent since the CIA sent Otto Warmbier to Pyongyang with an early version of what they poisoned the Skripals with.

Whether Yulia wakes up and starts screaming "Russia did it" or implies it, remembering seeing a Russian diplomatic limousine speed off after she and her father sniffed the gorgeous bouquet of poisoned flowers.

But we're just going to have to wait to see what the latest twist in the plot PM Miss Marple has invented for the whole world to start "oohing" and "ahhing" about.

dh , Mar 29, 2018 3:35:23 PM | 7
A lot depends now on Yulia. Has she been following the news? Will she say anything to implicate Russia? A cynic might even suggest her recovery is conditional.
Neve , Mar 29, 2018 3:40:43 PM | 9
"Why did UK court say "limited evidence" Skripals have relatives while cousin interviewed in UK media?"

https://off-guardian.org/2018/03/28/skripal-relatives/

Sid2 , Mar 29, 2018 3:43:20 PM | 10
from b's last link:

There's no logic in it; it doesn't make sense, and I don't think it needs to make sense, because essentially what the media is doing is propagandizing the population in favor of the madman theory. That's critical to do when you're trying to start aggression against a country. We had it with Gaddafi, we had it with Saddam Hussein, with Assad, with Kim Jong-un. 'These are madmen who are irrational. We cannot do business with them. We cannot make a deal with them. They do crazy things that make no sense.' This is exactly what the propaganda is doing; I'm just surprised that more people aren't questioning it, [since it's been] done over and over and over.

Right on.

frances , Mar 29, 2018 3:44:13 PM | 11
b-thank you for staying on this who-done-it
Just a thought; only one of them would have closed the door, so how can two be poisoned??
les7 , Mar 29, 2018 3:47:16 PM | 12
@1 this story was bullshit from the get go..."

True, but this is bullshit with a purpose.

This is part of a media background buzz against which a false flag (probably in Ukraine) will appear just as the World Cup event gains world wide media traction.

I believe that rather than follow the previous two olympic models, where the false flag of country-sponsored doping was endlessly repeated with decreasing effect, this false flag attack will come during the event, creating a shame-filled spectacle of the semi-final teams withdrawing and flying home in protest against Russian response - no matter what it may be.

Gerd Müller , Mar 29, 2018 3:49:32 PM | 13
The resurrection of Julia is a miracle. All resurrections are. In the night of easter , Mr. Skripal may recover also. I hope, there is a press conference soon. A tweet said, her first words were :" It tastet not as chicken"
Les , Mar 29, 2018 3:53:45 PM | 14
My cynical guess is that the next twist and turn in this story will be that she becomes the Bana Al-Abed of the poisoning saga. The story was dying, and this is just the next phase.
Bart Hansen , Mar 29, 2018 3:54:55 PM | 15
6: Will May's hasty hysteria negate her chances of being made a dame?
Jen , Mar 29, 2018 3:57:18 PM | 16
The thought has occurred to me that perhaps Sergei and Yulia Skripal are being subjected to isolation, sedation and other forms of sensory deprivation that were the hallmark of psychological experiments conducted in the US, Canada and possibly Britain over at least two decades from the 1950s on as part of the MK ULTRA program and related programs. Keeping Yulia Skripal in isolation for three weeks while claiming that she was in critical condition and then announcing a change in her condition might fit the bill.

I should add that I have always suspected that what caused the Skripals to fall unconscious in the first place was food poisoning.

DNJ , Mar 29, 2018 4:00:47 PM | 17
"Stable" and "improving" do not exclude the possibility of severe brain injury and total disability. It is not unusual for such cases to be initially reported as "critical", and later stable or improving after immediate medical risks pass, but then one hears nothing more about them (in ordinary cases) because neural recovery stalls. Fingers are crossed however; there is still hope.

That aside, the reporting here on this case has been invaluable.

che , Mar 29, 2018 4:00:51 PM | 18
Perhaps Mr. Moon has already addressed this somewhere, >?, however I have a question. So they are moving all these criminals and families to Idlib; but that is still inside Syria, so what is the plan there ? Are they going to accede Idlib to these people ? Of course there are other problems like how to get Turkey and the U.S. out of country, and what to do with the traitorous Kurds aligned with the U.S., nothing very resolved there as to an outcome. I just keep reading they are allowing terrorists to vacate out to Idlib, but what could be the end game there ? Carpet bombing ?
Don Bacon , Mar 29, 2018 4:01:52 PM | 19
re: perhaps Sergei and Yulia Skripal are being subjected to isolation 16

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a news conference in Moscow that "we have again demanded to be guaranteed access to Yulia as she is a Russian citizen. I hope the British side can fulfill its obligations under the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations."

FSFF , Mar 29, 2018 4:08:21 PM | 20
#15

Good question. I don't think Orwell tells us whether or not the monarchy survives the transition of Air Strip One to Big Brother's rule.

Fatima Manoubia , Mar 29, 2018 4:08:55 PM | 21
Posted by: dh | Mar 29, 2018 3:35:23 PM | 7
....A cynic might even suggest her recovery is conditional.

Then, call me a cynic...Indeed I have become one since 5 years already in the world of the "alt-media"....The first thing I thought of this "sudden" recovery is its possible relation with the claim by dozens of states on seeing proofs of the assertions of the UK officials, especially after many in the EU have "suffered", according with words whispered into Russian Foreign Ministry officials´ ears, an "unsurmontable pressure" to join the ferenzy in the expelling of diplomats...Take into account that some European countries have only accepted expelling one or two diplomats...

We are not sure that the Skripals were not into the play themselves...

Another possibility, in case they are not into the play, may be that Yulia could be being blackmailed for to corroborate UK claims, under the menace of her father not recovering ever....

To this point, I fear, any dirty trick/foul play by the UK / US must be taken into consideration.. I wonder whether they can fall lower already...

lysias , Mar 29, 2018 4:10:07 PM | 22
The reports are that she is talking, which means that she retains a significant amount of mental capacity.

What excuse can now be given for refusing to allow admission to a Russian consul?

Don Bacon , Mar 29, 2018 4:18:02 PM | 25
Who needs evidence in a nation of outlaws?

NYTimes, Mar 29: The British government has not made its evidence public, but has shared it with major allies, who have said that they agree with London's conclusions. -- here

State Dept Briefing, Mar 27:

QUESTION: Another one on Russia. You talk about certainty about knowing that Russia was responsible. Can you say anything about the process that got you to – the U.S. to certainty?

MS NAUERT: Well, we stand strongly with our ally, with the UK. And when the UK tells us that they have proof that they know Russia was responsible, we have every reason to believe them. -- here

nonsense factory , Mar 29, 2018 4:20:11 PM | 26
The problem with this whole story is the complete lack of public information on the specifics. First, let's consider the general case of poisoning with organophosphates - with range in toxicity from the common organophosphate pesticides, which many people have heard of, like malathion and chlorpyrifos (implicated in many farmworker posionings) through to the highly toxic German 'G-Agents' (invented by German chemists and stockpiled by the Nazis in World War II), i.e. sarin and tabun and soman, and further derivatives like VX and the claimed Novichok agents, synthesized by British and Soviet weapons programs during the Cold War. These vary in terms of the small carbon fragments surrounding the organophosphate core of the molecule

So, given a sample of clothing or something similar contaminated with an organophosphare, how does one analyze it and determine the molecular structure? It's the same for the pesticide as for the nerve agent, you use analytical chemical techniques, which are found in the scientific literature, for example:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0026265X11001111

"A new single-drop microextraction (SDME) followed by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry techniques were used to determine the dimethoate, methyl parathion, ethion (organophosphates) and permethrin (pyrethroid) pesticides in water samples. The parameters linearity, linear range, precision, accuracy, sensitivity and robustness were studied for validation of the SDME/GC–MS method."

GC-MS is just gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, a common analytical method for the analysis of volatile chemicals. You want to use the clothing on the victim or hair or skin swabs, since once in the bloodstream, these compounds may be actively degraded after exerting their effects (i.e. you'd find metabolites). The results of the analysis are compared to known libraries of organophosphate toxins to determine their identity, If Porton Down scientists and technicians are competent, they will have created such libraries of all know OP toxins for the purpose of rapid identification (this is their job description)

So the first thing to do would be to isolate the victim's clothing and conduct forensic analysis, right? So where is that data, where are those results? They exist, but have not been presented; this is understandable since such evidence should be presented at a trial or inquiry. In a public inquiry or lawsuit or criminal case related to pesticide poisoning, all this evidence would be presented to the judge/jury and the analyst who did the work would be called to the stand to present his or her forensic work, they'd be cross-examined in detail, etc. Only then would guilt or innocence be determined, that's the normal course of events.

This has all been completely bypassed in favor of hysterical propaganda speeches, as far as I can see. There's nothing reliable to base any opinion about what happened yet on. So everyone trying to use this event for their own PR agendas, they're just playing some game. The only way to sort it out is to have a public inquiry, and the way things are going, arguments about 'national security' and 'state secrets' will be used to prevent the analytical data from being shown to the public.

Regardless, that's what needs to happen.

Sid2 , Mar 29, 2018 4:20:40 PM | 27
Seems to me the behavior of the British government, including the infantile stupidity of Boris Johnson, points directly at its (the government's) culpability versus say Russian gangsters with a grudge against Sergei. I base this on these behaviors of secrecy, inconsistency, incomplete information, leaping to accusations plus heroizing the officer and now the hospital staff. Indeed bless me "she is risen" b! How sweet! (BTW this last is sardonic; I'm very happy Yulia is making it.)

The context now stretches forward to failure of "diplomacy" coming up in April-May in North Korea as Kim gathers his alliance closer to his vest, and whether EU countries will back out of the Iran deal, with Mattis constrained to withhold much madder dogs in Bolton-Pompeo who will likely be calling for military response. The attitudes I detect in both British and US State Department "thinking" suggest a chortling hubris not ready for a very serious comeuppance. Donald, I think, will wilt further.

Don Bacon , Mar 29, 2018 4:21:14 PM | 28
So now Russia has said they will boot 150 westerners, plus close the St Petersburg consulate, and the US is claiming foul because . . .there's no reason to do so!
nonsense factory , Mar 29, 2018 4:30:51 PM | 29
P.S. An interesting example of a organophosphate poisoning scenario is here, it's very similar to the course the case appears to have taken with the younger Skripal.
https://www.poison.org/articles/2010-jun/pesticide-and-nerve-agent-commonality

One of the child's physicians consulted the medical toxicologist at Poison Control to discuss the child's care and to ask how long the atropine and pralidoxime should be continued. The medical toxicologist explained that malathion can stay in fatty tissue such as the brain for up to 14 days and that there are case reports of needing to use these antidotes for up to 30 days.

Incidentally, claims that only state actors can make nerve agents are unreliable; this chemistry is widely known and is all based on the same general concept of organophosphate synthesis of pesticides. Sarin synthesis was conducted by IG Farben affiliates in the early 1940s on a very large scale; the main issue is making sure the chemists aren't killed while making the stuff. The basic protocol and lists of required equipment can be found by anyone with a library card and an internet connection, and as long as they have the equivalent of a college organic chemistry degree, they'll be able to understand it.

The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo managed it (they had an experienced chemist in the cult). In addition, small sealed glass vials of this stuff could have made it onto the international market after the breakup of the Soviet Union; that's a normal means of storing small amounts of such toxic chemicals for analytical purposes.

Of course, if it turns out to have been sarin instead of some other mystery OP nerve agent. . . Wait and see, I suppose.

michael d , Mar 29, 2018 4:30:56 PM | 30
Obviously a fake story and Novichok doesn't seem to exist.

But we are still debating the extent to which Russia is an aggressive nation - this is superb work by the black PR forces of the West.
We should be debating just how US&Nato are aggressive towards Russia. Very Very in any objective view.

daffyDuct , Mar 29, 2018 4:31:55 PM | 31
Daughter is conscious and talking.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/29/yulia-skripal-conscious-talking-nearly-month-chemical-attack/

Also from the story:

"NHS officials are also understood to be monitoring several people for signs of health problems after coming into potential contact with the Novichok agent. They are thought to include neighbours, postal staff, the first uniformed officers to arrive at the scene."

Weren't they supposed to wash their clothes weeks ago, or burn them? If the poison was still in the environment, then why are people allowed to walk about in town. Why was the town promoting free parking to lure back visitors.

http://www.itv.com/news/meridian/2018-03-24/free-car-parking-as-shoppers-return-to-salisbury/


Darn it, it's so confusing!

daffyDuct , Mar 29, 2018 4:34:43 PM | 32
Sorry - mis-quoted the article. NHS is looking at just a few individuals a month after the incident.
AM , Mar 29, 2018 4:34:55 PM | 33
Boris Jonhson and "a dead cat on the table" strategy
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/9906445/This-cap-on-bankers-bonuses-is-like-a-dead-cat-pure-distraction.html

The term is attributed to Lynton Crosby, a political strategist who has managed campaigns of right-of-centre parties in several countries. Boris Johnson, who employed Crosby during London mayoral elections explains the term thus:

"There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don't mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, 'Jeez, mate, there's a dead cat on the table!' In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief." http://www.dailymirror.lk/article/When-the-dots-are-connected-you-get-a-dead-cat-147293.html

Quentin , Mar 29, 2018 4:37:00 PM | 34
Are we supposed to believe that Russia brought a nerve agent into the UK just to attack the Skripals? Or did a Russian agent buy it on the street in London or even get it from a clandestine Russian chemical weapons factory in the UK? Someone has literally made this up out of whole cloth. I find it especially farcical that the chemical is always labeled 'weapons grade': now you must be looking under your bed every night before you go to sleep. 'Schoolyard grade' would be the most benign category.

If Yulia Scribal fully recovers she will be subjected to one of the most intensive debriefing sessions of all time. Imagine her saying she wants to see the Russian ambassador or even Putin because she felt unsafe in the UK. Or causes the UK of attacking her!

dh , Mar 29, 2018 4:43:19 PM | 35
@34 "Or causes (accuses) the UK of attacking her!"

In that case I think we can expect a dramatic relapse.

ashley albanese , Mar 29, 2018 4:46:55 PM | 36
Side2 27
The Australian foreign minister equivocated on the Skripal case . She pointedly observed that non Russian government state players could have been behind the attack. Australians - some of us - are acutely aware that the 'western ' world may be overextended and moving towards some sort of (catastrophic ? ) military defeat .

Australia , as in 1942 at Singapore may find herself very much alone . Many see the Skripal embroglio as a sign the US / Anglo world is panicking and malfunctioning !

jawbone , Mar 29, 2018 4:49:07 PM | 37
WHen did the DI Nick Baily who fell ill, supposedly from the same poison as the Skripals, actually go to the Skripal residence?

Was there someone adding to the amount of whatever it was which made 3 people ill, ensuring that someone besides the two Skripals got sick to some extent

The Daily Mirror doesn't mention the DI in its timeline.

Business Insider simply skips directly from 4:15PM, March 4 to March 5th's local police declaration of "major incident."

The timing is good -- wouldn't want to claim Yulia has improved on Good Friday.

Pnyx , Mar 29, 2018 4:53:27 PM | 38
"To respond to it rationally, as Russia tries to do, makes little sense." Exactly. Tit for tat isn't enough. It's a matter of dignity to stop completely any contact with governments behaving that low. The message delivered must be unmistakably clear.
imoverit , Mar 29, 2018 5:02:35 PM | 40
It was food poisoning wasn't it ? Fish I believe. That's also Easter-ish eh !
jawbone , Mar 29, 2018 5:09:49 PM | 41
Ew: #39 -- Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey. Not DI

Also, has it been confirmed by any authority that Bailey did indeed go to he residence? Guardian reported they were told he did...so is this just being buried? Or it's an inaccurate report?

Sid2 , Mar 29, 2018 5:14:29 PM | 42
@36 Ashley seems to me neocon-ism has been unraveling fast, a sign of it Trump's victory with follow-up the diminished success of the US military in Syria ("success" that is in terms of State Department Clinton-style regime change policies etc). At the same time, in the last year and a few months, a shift in the balance of power has been happening, global movement toward allying with Russia-China.

The trend for the West and its State Department geniuses is downward, weakening, at which point the cornered beast may turn (or want to turn)even more vicious. So to the propaganda. If the Skripal affair is result of food poisoning, say, not something plotted, it has been (and will be) leaped onto with a very large and flush-faced "Aha!" type behavior to get JQ Public in line. It's particularly disturbing to find the low-level of "intelligence" being exhibited by these "leaders" who are stupid enough to provoke something really serious. The Russians meanwhile are enhancing their popularity by being rational and leader-like.

mike k , Mar 29, 2018 5:35:01 PM | 43
I predicted early on in this affair that the Skirpals would amazingly "recover" - because there was no poison attack of any kind, just a shoddy attempt at a false flag event. The Skirpals were in on it from the beginning.
nonsense factory , Mar 29, 2018 5:35:53 PM | 44
@DaffyDuct

As wikipedia notes, the main difference between sarin-like OP agents and VX-like OP agents is that the former is more gas-like, and the latter more liquid-like:

"The danger of VX, in particular, lies in direct exposure to the chemical agent persisting where it was dispersed, and not through its evaporating and being distributed as a vapor (i.e., it is not a "vapor hazard"). VX is considered an area denial weapon due to these physical and biochemical characteristics."

Since nobody has said anything about the claimed 'Novichok' agents. The (so far completely unsupported) claim is this (link below):

"The nerve agent used in an attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal was part of the Novichok family, the British government has revealed. This group of nerve agents was developed in Russia as part of a secret chemical weapons programme codenamed 'Foliant' in the 1970s and 80s."

Not much of a 'reveal', more like a 'claim.' This is an interesting bit of Cold War history though; US and British bioweapons and chemical weapons programs were most active from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, while the Soviet ones were ramped up from the 1970s to the 1980s (see Foliant, Biopreparat). Crazy bastards,, wasn't getting torched with nuclear weapons enough? Of course, the CIA and KGB were big advocates of the bio/chem approach, for dirty tricks, which extended to using drugs like LSD on unsuspecting politicians, etc. Sociopathic lunatics, the lot of them.

Regardless, nobody knows if the claimed agent was liquid-like, in which case, it could be tracked all over the place by people's shoes, etc. None of it really makes much sense at this point, and without a public inquiry, it probably never will. No plans for one of those anytime soon, is there?

"Scientists at Porton Down would have been able to identify the agent, he adds, because the laboratory has been assembling information on potential threats for decades. 'What they will have done is made these chemicals, suspecting they were part of the Soviet or Russian arsenal,' Hay says. Then chemists at Porton Down would have 'assessed their structure and put them into a library of reference materials', he adds."

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/russian-novichok-nerve-agent-linked-to-attack-on-ex-spy/3008773.article

So yes, some of these materials could have walked out of Porton Down, that's possible. Wonder if they're taking an inventory? Not that they'd ever say.

FSFF , Mar 29, 2018 5:42:29 PM | 45
@21 Fat Man

The Skripals must have been in on it. Blackmail not necessary. Money Will do. Yulia wakes up first. She is more sympathetic than him. Now there can be only one murder charge and if he wakes, only attempted murder. I just read about Otto Warmbier. In a coma for 16 months in North Korea; dead 6 days after being returned home. Did anyone see his body? Open casket or closed? Cremated? Given antidote and new identity?

THERE IS NOTHING CIA & MI6 WILL NOT STOOP TO

mauisurfer , Mar 29, 2018 5:45:15 PM | 46
FSFF @ 45: the Warmbier family refused to allow autopsy
flamingo , Mar 29, 2018 5:45:58 PM | 47
Farce is the primary thought, black farce. Sometimes I see May acting as Mr Steptoe Snr in that ridiculous British comedy, Steptoe and Son (decades ago).

I guess there will be savings for the western fools with less diplomats and then the Russian Federation will have many less meddlers to shadow around. So good economic outcomes all round, sigh.

There is no clown hat that I can imagine that would be silly enough to suit May, Johnson, or Nikki Haley. I can imagine the Australian foreign minister wearing something inspired by a galah and kangaroo tail, with a hint of emu neck and head. It might be a fun competition to sponsor same though.

Don Bacon , Mar 29, 2018 5:53:16 PM | 48
Novichok is said to be highly toxic and lethal when absorbed through the skin, but it's interesting that the young man Jamie Paine who first found the Skripals on the park bench got some liquid on his skin and apparently didn't suffer from it. From a March 8 BBC video -- ". . .man was frothing from the mouth, I got a little bit on my skin, it wasn't too much, I just brushed it off." That has never been mentioned in any recent news accounts that I've seen. We do have other articles mentioning Paine.

Paine is also mentioned in a March 6 euronews article:

Eyewitness Jamie Paine raised the alarm in the southern English city.

"It was like her body was dead," he said, of the woman, who police says was known to Skripal. "Her legs were really stiff... you know when animals die, they have rigor mortis. Both her legs came together when people pulled (her), and when she was on the floor her eyes were just completely white. They were wide open but just white and frothing at the mouth. Then the man went stiff: his arms stopped moving, but he's still looking dead straight." . . here

And also in a March 6 CBS news article:

''When she was on the floor, her eyes were just completely white," said Jaime Paine, who found the couple and alerted police. "They were wide open but just white and (she was) frothing at the mouth. Then the man went stiff. His arms stopped moving, but he's still looking dead straight." . . here . . . and another on March 12.

Peter AU 1 , Mar 29, 2018 5:53:56 PM | 49
UK have stated A-234 was the agent used. According to the Russian scientists book A-234 is volatile, it would evaporate relatively quickly. On the poisoning, food poisoning or deliberate depends on if the narrative was opportunistic or planned. I think the narrative was planned before hand which would make it deliberate poisoning. From what I make of it, their symptoms are similar to organophosphate pesticide poisoning, and that would fit with Porton Down term of "or similar chemical".
Peter AU 1 , Mar 29, 2018 6:04:40 PM | 50
MH17 was an anglo/US hit job. I start to see now why no Australian rep went with the Malaysians to collect the victims and the planes black boxes. The Dutch at least had the decency to go with the Malaysian's and pick up their own people.

With MH17 it took two weeks to push the EU into sanctioning Russia which and only then so called international team and Australian reps went to the site.

With Novichok, it only took a couple of days to get the EU on board so I think plenty of planning by UK and fellow travelers in the US before the Skripal's were poisoned.

somebody , Mar 29, 2018 6:08:51 PM | 51
Posted by: dh | Mar 29, 2018 3:35:23 PM | 7

Last time I checked British private intelligence contractors followed opposite goals. Not to mention the split in British "elites". Theresa May waited before the jumped - or rather was pushed - from March 3 to March 12. If she is lucky she can get rid of Boris Johnson over this.

FSFF , Mar 29, 2018 6:44:25 PM | 52
46 mauisurfer: Then Otto probably had a face lift and is working in the ME now for the CIA.
Kalen , Mar 29, 2018 6:53:30 PM | 53
As I repeated already many times here it is a moderate overdose, volunteer or not of fentanyl and then they were kept in medically induced coma for weeks not to be able repudiate their lies, even thinking of killing them eventually but when their narrative fell apart regardless they are no longer needed as props of this abhorrent false flag ploy and in fact they are suppose to recover somewhat otherwise they would have to send bodies to Russia which would authoritively debunk U.K. lies.
TooMuchTruthiness , Mar 29, 2018 7:21:51 PM | 54
There is a lot of somewhat pointless discussion about nerve agents, do Novichoks exist, who makes them, feasibility of production etc, etc. To a certain extent, this is all irrelevant as the incident is a clear false flag to mark Russia as an aggressor nation. The issue serves as the dead cat on the table.

If setting up Russia as an aggressor nation is the aim of the exercise, how could organizers create the scenario? The story line apparently chosen is that the victims were poisoned with a military grade weapon that could only be produced by Russia.

The OPCW-sanctioned samples will show that the material given to Porton Down did indeed contain Skirpal DNA removing the prime objection of tampering as a possible means by which the supposed nerve agent was found in the sample. Ipso facto - the samples were not tampered with and 'Russia done it'.

The Skirpals are then no longer needed and their statements after recovery can be dismissed as the result of slight brain damage arising from OPCW-verifed posioning by proven Russian nerve agent.

The reality - they could have been poisoned by common organophosphate weedkiller. These products are readily available and are capable of leaving traces in the blood stream similar to a real nerve agent, just waiting to be detected by the likes of Porton Down.

Signs & symptoms of weed killer poisoning

"Initially, this type of poisoning can cause watery eyes and excess salivation . Breathing difficulties often occur. Individuals affected by these poisons sometimes experience nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and stomach cramps. In addition, the fingernails and lips can become blue. The person might develop a headache and feel both dizzy and weak . They might also experience anxiety, convulsions and possibly slip into a coma . Organophosphate is especially dangerous because it can be easily absorbed through the skin and cause paralysis and death in a short period of time. ... Severe poisoning can lead to permanent paralysis or brain damage ."

Most of the publicly described symptoms before and after hospital admission are covered. It would also explain the presence of apparent nerve agent degradation products in the blood. And it would also not endanger the general public. Post-incident hype about passers-by being affected could be created safe in their knowledge that there will be no problems from masses of people dying or overwhelming the medical services with associated high public/media interest and troublesome relatives.

One question - how could the hypothetical 'military grade nerve agent' aka weedkiller be applied to the Skirpals and the Skirpals alone without endangering the person who carried out the attack? If the person was known to the Skirpals, (s)he could get close without arising suspicion. (S)He would then be in a position to dose both with a suitable amount of poison.

How about accidental self-poisoning during the incident? The attacker might wear some kind of hand protection but the poison may be dispersed into his/her face, for example. The person would move away from the crime scene to avoid appearing to be a victim/witness and being questioned. The possible later appearance of symptoms would be planned for. The attacker could attend hospital some time later once the nature of the chemical agent was known publicly, allowing him/her to be treated with the antidote (atropine injection?) in hospital and probably make a safe and quick recovery. Maybe in these circumstances, (s)he would treat themselves at the first sight of symptoms using a disposable atropine autoinjector then call for help if necessary?

All purely hypothetical of course.

Peter AU 1 , Mar 29, 2018 7:36:50 PM | 55
54
Accurate doses in their meals. "How about accidental self-poisoning during the incident?" If it's a pesticide or herbicide organophosphate farmers would, or would have, used the shit.
karlof1 , Mar 29, 2018 8:19:49 PM | 56
And so at least one of the many Big Lies begins to unravel. Time for a No Confidence vote and subsequent change in government. Does anyone know what % of UK believes this May/Johnson Big Lie?
Debsisdead , Mar 29, 2018 9:27:36 PM | 60
The more I consider the Skirpal fantasy, the more convinced I am that the pending world cup final was one of the primary drivers behind the frame up.

... ... ...

J Swift , Mar 29, 2018 9:30:43 PM | 61
At this point there are so many points that are patently ridiculous about this whole Skripal affair it's hard to know how to summarize it...good job, b. A few random thoughts:

@ francis 11: Excellent point, a poisoned door knob should have afflicted only one of them. But more to the point, now that the killer plot du jour is the home door, it leads to more incompatible "facts." In order for May and friends to have even a speck of justification for rushing to judgment rather than investigating, they were stuck with the narrative that they were poisoned, and it had to be a "military grade" (implicitly ruling out all the regular people who wanted Skripal dead) "nerve agent" (really scary like only war criminals use) and "of a kind invented in the USSR" (implying this particular sample must have come from Russia). But by picking an obscure, originally Soviet agent, they are stuck with incredibly deadly, quick acting, volatile, etc.

So if one Skripal was poisoned with something that the lab janitor said would have killed him or her before they could get to their car, and just the residue from this evaporating substance would seriously sicken a strapping young detective within minutes, forcing him to the hospital, how did the Skripal(s) getting the full dose traipse around town half a day, even feeling a bit peckish so as to stop at two different places to eat and drink? You simply can't have it both ways, May. It seems like every time the Brits try to revise the story, it gets worse!

Also, it's so easy to get caught up in the "means" of the mystery, because it is so laughably preposterous, but we should never forget the "motive." On the part of the RF, not only zero (hell, he only had a half dozen years left on his original sentence--not a death sentence), but less than zero to do something at the worst possible time from a Russian point of view (right before election, with EU support for sanctions fading fast, NordStream 2 finally looking to be past all hurdles, etc.). The flip side of that coin shows that this bad timing was indeed what was critical to the Brits and US--why else they just HAD to immediately expel diplomats, etc? After all, if they were indeed quite sure the Russians had done it, wouldn't there be every reason in the world to proceed with a very public investigation, dragging Putin's name through the mud, actually prolonging the affair, and THEN expel diplomats and anything else you want to do once you've proven to the world what shits the Ruskies are?

The hastily thrown together (and now falling apart) "crisis" might be because the other, more carefully planned black eyes for election eve Russia fell apart at the last minute. There was a major nerve gas false flag (serendipitous) and follow-up military strikes set in Syria, but the SAA advanced too quickly and probably along with special ops folks managed to prevent the three planned attacks. Not only did the US/Israel/NATO lose the chance to besmirch Russia and strike Syria hard, it was such a screw up some are saying it cost Tillerson his job.

Then there was the attack on the Donbass, which was fully prepped to spring just before the election -- troops and heavy weapons had massed at the borders, US weapons had arrived, even lanes through mine fields had been cleared, Porky had his orders. But then the DPR (with FSB help, no doubt) discovered the traitors in the LPR government who had planned to sabotage defenses, there are reports of a near mutiny among regular Ukie soldiers who didn't feel like getting chewed up again, and then an actual coup against Porky was barely foiled --all sufficient that the Ukrainian op fizzled.

No doubt the US and NATO were aghast that their two carefully planned March surprises were no-gos. So when something happened to the Skripals, I suspect the powers that be thought "well, it ain't much, but we can make it work!"

Lastly, there are several reports that the US leaned on virtually everyone in the world very, very hard to attempt to drum up "support" for May. In my experience, you only get so many over-the-top favors to ask/demand, and the US had to burn one to try to save their sanctions. They may have got their wish short term, but they may hear a lot more "no"s next time they want something--especially if this ultimately turns out to be a massive embarrassment as is likely.

[Mar 29, 2018] With false flags there always seems to be a drill going on at the same time, a drill that weirdly, and coincidentally of course, mimics the reality that follows (the list is long and easy to Google)

That's an interesting observation. Drill to protect against the exact event that happened. That help to supress internal investigation, if some details of the plot are accidentally leaked and some people inside start asking questions.
Mar 29, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Posted by: Lochearn | Mar 28, 2018 4:33:23 PM | 11

Off topic, but I think this is important. With false flags there always seems to be a drill going on at the same time, a drill that weirdly, and coincidentally of course, mimics the reality that follows (the list is long and easy to Google). So we have the poison incident in Salisbury that stinks to high heaven, but no mention of a drill.

Then I came across a statement by the Royal Navy that a drill had taken place on Salisbury plain at the same time as the poison incident:

https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news-and-latest-activity/news/2018/march/06/180306-toxic-storm-for-royal-marines-in-major-chemical-exercise

Lochearn , Mar 28, 2018 4:49:42 PM | 13
What purpose does the training exercise or "drill" in a false flag perform? From my research I can say, first, it is to protect a participant who is arrested by police showing up: "Hey, I'm on a drill, here's my badge." Secondly it allows control, key people in place, over the whole scenario: "Move on, nothing to see here." Maybe there are other reasons.

[Mar 29, 2018] This whole thing is one HUGE false flag, from start to where ever it finishes. The lies are so thick that they obscure all vision. If any of that family (father or daughter) still possess a Russian passport, then they are still citizens of Russia and the UK government is REQUIRED to release them and information.

Mar 29, 2018 | russia-insider.com

Poindexter 15 hours ago ,

This whole thing is one HUGE false flag, from start to where ever it finishes. The lies are so thick that they obscure all vision. If any of that family (father or daughter) still possess a Russian passport, then they are still citizens of Russia and the UK government is REQUIRED to release them and information. But that will not be forthcoming.
The sooner the Kremlin lowers the boom, the better; the longer this stretches out, the more obscure the facts become and the closer we come to global annihilation.
DOES ANYONE realize that the poison was found in their home??? That is how the policeman made contact with it. THAT alone implies that the victims MAY have been complicit in their own poisoning !?

William Toffan Poindexter 13 hours ago ,

That is very interesting regarding the policeman's exposure. If true, and I'm confident it is, it puts the boots to Canadian media accounts of the Skripal's enjoying the sunshine on a park bench - only to be sprayed in the face from an aerosol device - carried by a Russian agent. I also cannot dismiss the highly coincidental plot of a British TV detective show - aired in November, 2017 - of a "Novichok" attack in Great Britain. I'm not looking for weak conspiratorial links, but I cannot dismiss them either.

Alberto 15 hours ago ,

The Russian government is not involved. The man was retired and all happened a long time ago. The only thing that I don't feel comfortable with is why attack her daughter. She is totally innocent.
Logic indicates that some of those who were affected by the betrayal (he was a traitor) found at last an opportunity to settle old acccounts whithout the Russian government knowing it.
Of course the West is using this attack to lay blame on Putin, they found a golden opportunity to throw dirt at him and continue with the demonization. It is my hunch that he is very angry at those who did it.
Britain can't point the finger without providing Russia with all the evidence.
I don't believe in false flag theories in this case, as the West would be sending a wrong message to those potential recruits (more Russian traitors).

Brampton Bob 8 hours ago ,

Has anyone bothered to ask the Russians whether the have an antidote for this agent they're alleged to have produced?

[Mar 29, 2018] Salisbury Nerve Agent Attack Reveals $70 Million Pentagon Program At Porton Down

Notable quotes:
"... Dilyana Gaytandzhieva is a Bulgarian investigative journalist and Middle East Correspondent. Over the last two years she has published a series of revealing reports on weapons smuggling . Two months ago South Front published her investigation into the Pentagon bio laboratories in 25 countries across the world. Her current report provides an overview of the Pentagon-funded experiments at the secretive UK military laboratory Porton Down near Salisbury, where an ex-Russian spy and his daughter were allegedly poisoned with a nerve agent. ..."
"... By Dilyana Gaytandzhieva exclusively for SouthFront ..."
"... Twitter/@dgaytandzhieva ..."
"... The Porton Down Lab is located just 13 km from the site where Sergei Skripal and his daughter were found and from where they were rushed to hospital. ..."
Mar 29, 2018 | southfront.org

Dilyana Gaytandzhieva is a Bulgarian investigative journalist and Middle East Correspondent. Over the last two years she has published a series of revealing reports on weapons smuggling . Two months ago South Front published her investigation into the Pentagon bio laboratories in 25 countries across the world. Her current report provides an overview of the Pentagon-funded experiments at the secretive UK military laboratory Porton Down near Salisbury, where an ex-Russian spy and his daughter were allegedly poisoned with a nerve agent.

By Dilyana Gaytandzhieva exclusively for SouthFront

Twitter/@dgaytandzhieva

The Pentagon has spent at least $70 million on military experiments involving tests with deadly viruses and chemical agents at Porton Down – the UK military laboratory near the city of Salisbury. The secretive biological and chemical research facility is located just 13 km from where on 4 th March former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found slumped on a bench following an alleged Novichok nerve agent poisoning.

Salisbury Nerve Agent Attack Reveals $70 Million Pentagon Program At Porton Down Salisbury Nerve Agent Attack Reveals $70 Million Pentagon Program At Porton Down

The Porton Down Lab is located just 13 km from the site where Sergei Skripal and his daughter were found and from where they were rushed to hospital.

Information obtained from the US federal contracts registry reveals that the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has funded a number of military projects performed at the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) , or Porton Down, over the last decade. Among them: experimental respiratory infection of non-human primates (marmosets) with Anthrax, Ebola virus, Marburg virus, Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus, Western equine encephalitis virus, and Eastern equine encephalitis virus. The US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has also funded experiments on animals which were exposed to chemical agents such as Sulfur Mustard and Phosgene gas. Phosgene gas was used as a chemical weapon during World War I where it was responsible for about 85 % of the 100,000 deaths caused by chemical weapons.

DTRA has also been granted full access to DSTL scientific and technical capabilities, and test data under a 2011 contract for the collaboration and exchange of scientific and technical capabilities with the UK Ministry of Defence.

At least 122,000 animals used for military chemical and biological experiments at Porton Down

Animal experiments are classified as confidential in the UK. Under section 24 of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, it is a criminal offence to disclose certain information about animal experiments in the UK.

Data obtained via the Freedom of Information Act though gives an idea of the dimensions of military chemical and biological experiments carried out at Porton Down. A total of 122,050 animals have been exposed to deadly pathogens, chemicals and incurable diseases over the last decade (2005-2016).

[Mar 29, 2018] Possibility of completely staged by intelligence services event

Mar 29, 2018 | southfront.org

[Mar 29, 2018] We Don t Even Know Where He Is: Sergei Skripal s Russian Family Speak Out

Mar 29, 2018 | russia-insider.com

On Thursday, High Court Justice David Basil Williams handed down a ruling on the medical condition of the Skripals. It contained evidence from the consultant treating them in Salisbury District Hospital, which stated that the facility had "not been approached by anyone known to the patients to enquire of their welfare."

Ross Cassidy, a haulage contractor, has been Sergei Skripal's neighbor since 2010. He said that he has been prevented from visiting Skripal and his daughter Yulia in hospital, and that he believes they are so critically ill there is no hope they will be revived.

"That is misinformation, because we care," he told Sky News, referring to the consultant's statement. "I asked the police several times if we could go and see them, quietly and away from the media, but I was told quite categorically that we were not allowed. We asked the question and the answer was 'No.'"

"We've already been told they will be severely mentally impaired and I don't think they would want that. I think death would probably be merciful."

Three weeks after the A-234 nerve-agent (also known as Novichok) attack in Salisbury, Sergei and his daughter Yulia remain in a critical condition. According to court documents, Sergei is listed as unable to communicate.

Meanwhile in Russia, the Skripals' extended family say that they have been unable to find out where exactly Sergei and Yulia even are. "I would like to know how [Sergei and Yulia] are – where they are," Sergei's niece, Viktoria Skripal, said.

"We are all grown-ups and we don't believe in miracles, but I can't stop thinking maybe it's not them. Maybe a miracle will happen and it'll turn out not to be them. Maybe they'll get better. But everyone is saying that even if they recover, the long-term prognosis is not good.

Viktoria said that if she could go to the UK to see them, she would – but her number-one priority is to protect Sergei's ailing mother from finding out about her son's attack. The family fears the news could prove fatal for the 90-year-old woman.

"Our priority is to protect our grandmother, so that she does not hear anything. She will not know until the very last moment," Viktoria said. "She will know when this situation is somehow resolved; that is, if there is a logical end. If the story ends badly, we will tell her that they fell ill."

Viktoria Skripal said that, while she was unsure who was responsible for the nerve-agent attack, she did say that her uncle had never expressed fears for his safety and did not consider himself to have any enemies.

"Who did it? I don't really know. Our side say it was the British secret services, the British say it was the Russians. I don't know and I don't want to hazard a guess.

"Even if the special services did it – why is it so clumsy? I believe that it was beneficial to some third party to quarrel between the two countries. Someday we will get answers to all the questions."


wilmers13 Bryce Hopkins 5 hours ago ,

Former Australian diplomat Tony Kevin callled it a false flag operation on ABC TV 24. He also called it a play at which the Brits are so good at.

D. John Bryce Hopkins 14 hours ago ,

Amen!!

tom 15 hours ago ,

The Salisbury doctor says that no one has been admitted suffering from nerve gas poisoning, and only three people have been treated for poisoning (of a different kind, presumably).

But the UK government says that the Skripals were attacked with a novichok agent "of a type developed in Russia" - and apparently knew this with high confidence within a few days, although OPCW will take weeks to identify the poison.

The lawyer for the government said in court that no one has asked to see the Skripals.

But the Russian embassy has asked repeatedly, and now we learn that Mr Skripal's neighbour has asked and been turned away by police.

Who the hell do those people think they are fooling? Their lies are impossible to conceal or reconcile.

Great Expectations tom 10 hours ago ,

The Skripals seem to have become government property and no one is asking why.

Yoast Yoast 16 minutes ago ,

The daughter would be the only direct family with visiting rights, very convenient that she has been attacked too.

courtney harlowe 15 hours ago ,

The Skripals are probably being held in an apartment with military guards on them....unable to even see daylight lest they flag someone on the street, or they are in such a remote area,perhaps being held in a bunker type of place.
Yes its a bit 'Hollywood' but is it that far out of the realm of possibility given the lengths the US &_UK governments seem willing to go to to demonize Russia? They may have even been killed by the UK govt....we know this happens.The family is absolutely in the right to question & they deserve answer, closure....what can we do here?
How are we to help these people get answered,I am American and I have had to watch this evil demonization of Russia ramp up with every day...its gone from haha,Trump has a man crush on Putin to possible murder of these people in an effort to boost some political agenda.Its time for someone to explain...

Poruchik Rzhevskiy courtney harlowe 15 hours ago ,

The problem for the Brits and yanks is that theatre may pass for "evidence" once. And it's been used and the bitches were caught red-handed. They keep at it - only punish themselves by loss of the remainders of credibility.

D. John Poruchik Rzhevskiy 14 hours ago ,

That is assuming they ever had any credibility to start with.

William Toffan courtney harlowe 13 hours ago ,

Congratulations on retaining your critical thinking skills, Courtney. You should run for President, even if overqualified.

bob courtney harlowe 15 hours ago ,

no courtney, they're unfortunately beyond all help, and will be shortly wheeled out in this macabre theatre show in the 3rd act, so the whole world can see how " evil" Putin and Russia are, its all very carefully orchestrated for maximum propaganda effect

Scotch Bingeington courtney harlowe 14 hours ago ,

Or in some place like the Bahamas, sipping cocktails on the beach. A Moscow Mule perhaps?

John C Carleton 15 hours ago ,

Brits have made as big a fools out of themselves as their zionist cousins in Washington DC have.

Great Expectations John C Carleton 11 hours ago ,

When you say Brits, please refer to our cretinous government? Until the anti-Russia troll factories began work on the popular press comments, just a few days ago, it was evident that ordinary Brits were having none of it. Clearly that didn't please our overlords, so they brought in the trolls.

John C Carleton Great Expectations 9 hours ago ,

i consider a person to be English, Irish, Scotch or Welsh, unless they drank the empire kool aid.
i also make the distinction between real Americans and USA loving pedophiles, sheep and never do wells.

Curtis Walker 15 hours ago ,

Haha looks like the UK needs to plug a lot of holes in this farce they've created

Jed Grover Curtis Walker 14 hours ago ,

The hole is far too big to plug. Hopefully UK's Banker entitlement program is about to crash. Shameless Sam and its 20 NATO Mafia style looting collusionors dramatizing another WMD illusion. The west has gone pathetic and rabid. The photo is impressive!

Gano1 15 hours ago ,

1) No pictures of anyone in hospital.
2) No interview with the Policeman released from hospital.

AM Hants Gano1 13 hours ago ,

None of it adds up. Together with the fact that Russia got rid of their chemical weapons. Unlike the US, who have also invested $70 million, in Porton Down,

There is a seriously good article, over on South Front, which raises many more questions. Not forgetting Ukraine, and the American bio-weapons laboratories in Ukraine. No doubt, which is why Urkraine were sending chemical weapons to Syria.

Canister of chemical weapons, with love from Ukraine to Syria.

View Hide
Trauma2000 AM Hants 12 hours ago ,

Gold Hants. You've struck GOLD. Keep up the fantastic posts. I always read your stuff.

AM Hants Trauma2000 11 hours ago ,

Thank you, copy and paste and share the work, others provide.

The article is seriously good and well worth reading. Had the 'WOW' factor.

bob Gano1 15 hours ago ,

the world will get plenty of photos after OPCW "report" , its pure, post normal, post evidence theatre, then all those countries that didn't expel Russian diplomats can also pile in, oh, plus boycott World Cup

Dee Wrench 15 hours ago ,

It's all theater. Never happened... it's that simple.

1691 15 hours ago ,

Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium, a radioactive element and still there were plenty of videos of him in the news although he should have been isolated. Even his wife and son were filmed with him in hospital. Why such secrecy now? I suspect that Skripal and daughter have played their parts in this scenario and are now enjoying the money they were paid for this simple act. Was his daughter single?

SkyPointer 13 hours ago ,

The complete lack of the Skripals' current hospital images is so very telling. Think about it, Alexander Litvinenko's death bed pictures (him still alive and blinking) were posted all over the media as much as they could be to make sure the narrative of "evil Russia" is kept in the memories of all who don't bother to look into the facts (the majority). These images are so vital to keeping the West is good vs. Russia is bad narrative alive and well ahead of the facts. If they could post pictures of the Skripals, they absolutely would, as this is a huge advantage to a retarded narrative. So this in itself (lack of pictures broadcast on a continuous cycle to the entire world to paint Russia as the demon lair before the world cup starts) is extreme proof that something is very wrong with their cooked up and ridiculous narrative.

Koroviev,Behemoth&Woland LLP 9 hours ago ,

Salisbury Nerve Agent Attack Reveals $70 Million Pentagon Program At Porton Down

The Pentagon has spent at least $70 million on military experiments involving tests with deadly viruses and chemical agents at Porton Down – the UK military laboratory near the city of Salisbury. The secretive biological and chemical research facility is located just 13 km from where on 4th March former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found slumped on a bench following an alleged Novichok nerve agent poisoning.
https://www.naturalblaze.co...

[Mar 29, 2018] Can I speak to Theresa?

Mar 29, 2018 | russia-insider.com

Eol Awki10 hours ago ,

The phone rings in Downing Street.
- Can I speak to Theresa?
- She's asleep
- If she wakes up tell her Vladimir called
- What do you mean „if"?

Isabella Jones Eol Awki3 hours ago ,

Eol Awki, I read your comment above from my phone while laying in a dentist chair waiting for needles, drills --- and I laughed so much i nearly fell out. Of course, I was a bit "wired" anyway, but it was quite an achievement for which I would like to thank you - very much.

Eol Awki Isabella Jones2 hours ago ,

Very happy to have brought some relief to you at a critical moment, Isabella.... ;-)

This was a Russian joke going around that my wife passed over to me. I, too, almost fell off my chair!

Isabella Jones Eol Awki2 hours ago ,

Ah, Russian. I might have guessed - I love the Russian sense of humour.

[Mar 29, 2018] 'No slither of evidence' against Russia over Skripal attack, George Galloway tells RT

Now the question is: did "bench incident" existed at all ? Was everything staged?
Mar 29, 2018 | russia-insider.com

RT (VIDEO)... https://www.rt.com/uk/42256...

Peter Paul 1950 AM Hants 8 hours ago ,

Galloway already had a video up a couple of days after the occurrence ... he was always pointing out that the Skripals were poisoned AFTER they had already returned to their home ... no talk about a park bench at all ... now more info is coming out that there was a training exercise that took place the day before the event ... so it's all according to the usual scripting ... and the usual Hollywood set with all the usual crisis actors .... should have been red-flagged before it started ... and send out the safety car ... like follow the leader and do not pass ...

AM Hants Peter Paul 1950 8 hours ago ,

I read about the military exercise, the day before. Always happens. Never thought I would end up having so much respect for George Galloway, but, he is the only UK politician or ex-politician, that I actually respect.

[Mar 28, 2018] Forget policies, the Stormy Daniels affair shows how far US politics has sunk by Ben Jakobs

Mar 28, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

As the porn star's allegations show, discourse in Washington is shifting to something more tawdry and celebrity-oriented

... The idea of a porn star appearing on network television to share details of a sexual encounter with the US commander in chief would have been intellectually confounding at any other moment in time. Instead, the interview, which took place only few days after a former Playboy playmate, Karen McDougal , talked about her affair with Trump, seemed a part of the everyday political landscape in 2018.

... Trump may seem like an aberration but instead he may be an inflection point. It's possible that after over two centuries of presidential campaigns with governors, senators and the occasional general, American politics is shifting to something more tawdry and more celebrity-oriented. The often spoken and rarely met ideal in the United States is that political debates should be about issues. But, after a political campaign where candidates debated penis size on a debate stage, it may be the legacy of Trump that politics has permanently descended to locker-room talk.

[Mar 27, 2018] The Stormy Daniels scandal Political warfare in Washington hits a new low by Patrick Martin

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Celebrity Apprentice ..."
"... National Enquirer ..."
Mar 27, 2018 | www.wsws.org

The "60 Minutes" broadcast on Sunday night, devoted to rehashing allegations of sexual impropriety and bullying against Donald Trump, marked a new level of degradation for the US political system. For nearly half an hour, an audience of 23 million people tuned in to a discussion of a brief sexual encounter between Trump and adult film star Stormy Daniels (Stephanie Clifford) in 2006.

Trump was then a near-bankrupt real estate and casino mogul, best known for reinventing himself as a television personality. By her account, the proffer of a possible guest appearance on Celebrity Apprentice was the only attraction the 60-year-old Trump had for Daniels, then 27. Trump made promises, but as usual did not deliver.

Earlier in the week, the same interviewer, Anderson Cooper, appearing on CNN instead of CBS, held an hour-long discussion with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy magazine centerfold, who described a year-long relationship with Trump, also in 2006, the year after his marriage to Melania Knauss.

White House officials flatly denied both accounts, but Trump himself has been conspicuously and unusually silent, even on Twitter. His lawyers filed papers with a Los Angeles court, in advance of the "60 Minutes" broadcast, claiming that Daniels was in violation of a confidentiality agreement and could be liable for damages of up to $20 million.

Last Tuesday, a New York state judge turned down a motion by lawyers acting for Trump and refused to dismiss the lawsuit for defamation brought against him by Summer Zervos, a former contestant on another Trump "reality" show, The Apprentice . One of nearly a dozen women who made public charges of sexual harassment against Trump during the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, Zervos alone has sued Trump over his repeated public claims that the women were all liars.

There is little doubt that the accounts by Zervos, McDougal and Daniels are substantially true. Trump has already demonstrated this by attempting to suppress their stories, either through legal action or by purchasing their silence, directly or indirectly. A Trump ally, David Pecker, owner of the National Enquirer tabloid, bought the rights to McDougal's account of her relationship with Trump in 2016 for $150,000, in order not to publish it. Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen, admitted last month that he had paid $130,000 to Daniels in October 2016, only weeks before the election, to guarantee her silence.

The bullying tactics of Cohen and other Trump allies add credibility to the claim by Daniels, during her "60 Minutes" interview, that a thug, presumably sent by Cohen, had threatened her with violence in 2011, when she first sought to sell her story about Trump to the media. Daniels offered no evidence to back her claim, but her attorney Michael Avenatti dropped broad hints that Daniels would be able to corroborate much of her account.

Cohen may himself face some legal jeopardy due to his public declaration that he paid Daniels out of his own funds. Given the proximity of the payment to the election, this could well be construed as a cash contribution to the Trump campaign far beyond the $3,500 legal limit for an individual.

The Zervos suit, however, may present the most immediate legal threat, since the next step, after New York Supreme Court Justice Jennifer G. Schecter rejected Trump's claim that he has presidential immunity, is to take discovery. In other words, Trump and his closest aides could be required to give sworn depositions about his actions in relation to Zervos and many of the other women.

Justice Schecter cited the precedent of the Paula Jones case against President Bill Clinton, in which the US Supreme Court held that a US president had no immunity from lawsuits over his private actions. While cloaked in democratic rhetoric at the time ("No one is above the law"), that decision actually gave a green light to an anti-democratic conspiracy by ultra-right forces who used the Jones lawsuit to trap Clinton into lying about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

Unlike the 1998-1999 conflict over impeachment, there is no issue of democratic rights involved in the sexual allegations against Trump. Some of the same legal tactics (using sworn depositions to set a perjury trap), are being employed as weapons in an increasingly bitter conflict within the US ruling elite, in which both factions are equally reactionary.

Trump is a representative of the underworld of real estate, casino gambling and reality television, elevated to the presidency because he had the good fortune to run against a deeply unpopular and reactionary shill for Wall Street and the military-intelligence agencies, Hillary Clinton. Under conditions of mounting discontent among working people with the Democratic Party, after eight years of the Obama administration, Trump was able to eke out a narrow victory in the Electoral College.

The Democratic "opposition" to Trump is focused not on his vicious attacks on immigrants, his promotion of racist and neo-fascist elements, his deregulation of business and passage of the biggest tax cut for the wealthy in decades, or his increasingly violent and unhinged foreign policy pronouncements. The Democrats have sought to attack Trump from the right, particularly on the question of US-Russian relations, making use of the investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 elections, headed by former FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Trump has sought to mollify his critics within the US national security establishment with measures such as a more aggressive US intervention in Syria, the elevation of Gina Haspel, the CIA's chief torturer, to head the agency, and, most recently, the expulsion of dozens of Russian diplomats as part a NATO-wide campaign aimed at whipping up a war fever against Moscow.

As Trump has made concessions on foreign policy, his opponents have shifted their ground, attacking his behavior towards women. They have sought to link these exposures with the broader #MeToo campaign, which is aimed at creating a witch-hunt atmosphere in Hollywood, the US political system, and more generally throughout American society, in which gender issues are brought forward to conceal and suppress more fundamental class questions.

In both the Russia investigation and now the allegations of sexual misconduct, the Democrats have sought to hide their real political agenda, which is just as reactionary and dangerous as that of Trump and the Republicans. While Trump is pushing towards war with North Korea or Iran, and behind them China, the Democrats and their allies in the national security apparatus seek to maintain the focus on Russia that was developed during the second term of the Obama administration, particularly in Syria, Ukraine and Eastern Europe as a whole, posing the danger of a war between the world's two main nuclear powers.

Beyond the immediate foreign policy issues, the whipping up of sexual scandals is invariably a hallmark of reactionary politics. Such methods appeal to social backwardness, Puritanical prejudices or prurient interest. They contribute nothing to the political education of working people and youth, who must come to understand the fundamental class forces underlying all political phenomena. The political basis for a struggle against Trump is not in designating him as a sexual predator, but in understanding his class role as a front man for the American financial oligarchy, which treats the entire working class, including the female half, as objects of exploitation.

[Mar 27, 2018] Brzezinski's Heritage West Wants Total Partition and Defeat of Russia

Notable quotes:
"... The views and opinions expressed by Srdja Trifkovic are those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik. ..."
Mar 03, 2018 | sputniknews.com
1 5 0 On Monday, a number of European countries, as well as the United States and Canada, announced they were expelling Russian diplomats over the Skripal case. Radio Sputnik discussed the significance of the diplomatic response by the Western powers with Srdja Trifkovic, a US journalist and writer on international affairs. Sputnik: What is your overall assessment about what has happened with this diplomatic response by so many countries? How significant is it?

Srdja Trifkovic: The overall impression is that rational discourse has given way to collective hysteria and that it is indeed remarkable. The extent to which the bandwagon has successfully started rolling while we don't even have elementary answers to the questions concerning the case itself.

The second important and discouraging aspect is that continental European countries have followed the Anglo-American lead in Russophobia and this represents a further trial of the Atlanticist domination over Europe. It is indeed remarkable when both Germany and France, the putative leaders of independent European foreign policy, have been reduced to the status of automatic followers of the lead supported by Washington especially when we bear in mind that the initial round of sanctions in 2014 against Russia was dictated by the United States which had nothing to lose in the proceedings and to the detriments of Europeans' interests.

So overall I think that, one we have the hysterical phase of Russophobic discourse in the West which is not amenable to any rational arguments and two, we have a successful degradation of European diplomacy to the status of pliant satellites comparable to East Germany and Bulgaria vis-à-vis Brezhnev.

Sputnik: Do you think there was some classified evidence that was presented that proves beyond a shadow of doubt that Russia was involved or do you think that the fact that there are 11 countries who have not joined in the protest perhaps hints at the fact that this was not the case?

Srdja Trifkovic: Well, first of all, I would say that President Putin, Foreign Minister Lavrov and others would not have made such categorical denials of Russian involvement if there was any possibility of a smoking gun which could effectively show to the world that they were not telling the truth.

And secondly, it is always possible to present some equivocal evidence in the form that even if that indicates the modus operandi of intelligence agencies nevertheless does not disclose outright state secrets. In fact, we've seen that in the past and I don't think that it would be possible for such confidential information to be disclosed to the diplomats and foreign ministers of EU countries as divergent as the 27 are, without risking these very sources.

So I really believe that if you look at the countries which have taken measures against Russia, they almost read like who is who of those who are prepared to follow the US lead and if you look at those reluctant to do so, including Austria, Hungary, Cyprus, Greece, we are looking at those who actually have a more independent foreign policy. So I don't think it's a reflection of the quality of possible intelligence, it is simply a reflection of the determination of decision-makers of those countries to preserve a modicum of independence.

Sputnik: What would you say about the level to which the actions that were actually taken by individual countries? What can you say about the numbers game that's being played? What do you think determined the number of diplomats?

Srdja Trifkovic: Some of these countries are absolutely insignificant countries like the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, which also expelled one Russian and it's just a pathetic non country. On the other hand in the United States obviously it is a matter of regret that President Trump's initially stated intention to have detente with Russia has been subverted by the deep state, it is a long story but now we have really reached the end of the road with the appointment of Pompeo to State Department and Bolton as the national security adviser.

So we can really look at Trump as the would-be drainer of the swamp who has been swallowed by the swamp. And I think that we are in for a long haul. I was in Moscow two weeks ago and coming again next week and sometimes I am surprised that some of my Russian interlocutors are insufficiently aware of the animosity or end of the rule Russophobic sentiment that currently prevails among the Western elites, both political and academic and media. It's almost pathetic when some Russians still use the term "our Western partners," because for partnership you need to have a modicum of mutual respect and trust and these people really seriously want to destroy Russia.

They want to delegitimize the Russian political system and process as we have seen with the public commentary on President Putin's re-election and they want nothing short of regime change, which would then lead to a permanent and irreversible change of Russia's national character and possibly the country's partition along the lines allocated by Zbigniew Brzezinski. With these people partnership is impossible and Russia needs to be prepared for a long and sustained period of confrontation .

The views and opinions expressed by Srdja Trifkovic are those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.

[Mar 27, 2018] West pushing anti-Russia conspiracy theories for achieving political economic advantage

Notable quotes:
"... "should go away and shut up;" ..."
"... "[Sergei Skripal] was handed in to Britain as a result of an exchange. So, why should Russia hand in a man that is of any importance or that is of any value? It's unimaginable. If he's handed in – so Russia quits with him. He's of zero value or zero importance," ..."
"... "America stands ready to help Poland and other European nations diversify their energy supplies so that you can never be held hostage to a single supplier," ..."
"... "If we want to have the United States' LNG supplies in Central Europe, we also want to see the United States getting tough on Nord Stream 2, which means getting tough on Russia," ..."
"... "getting tough on Russia." ..."
"... "The draft law makes clear that they're pursuing economic interests and we think that's not acceptable," ..."
"... "Aggressively combining foreign policy issues with American economic interests and saying: 'We want to drive Russian gas out of the European market so we can sell American gas there is definitely not something we can accept.'" ..."
"... "We are determined to maintain open channels of dialogue with Russia," ..."
Mar 27, 2018 | www.rt.com

Once again, the West has tossed out the democratic baby with the bath water, scapegoating Russia for a mysterious crime on UK territory without a shred of evidence. To understand why, just follow the money. Any hope that Western capitals would come to their democratic senses and demand that PM Theresa May provide some proof that Russia was behind an alleged assassination attempt on Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer turned British spy, were dashed on Monday. Sixteen EU states fell in lockstep behind the US and UK, taking the dramatic measure of banishing Russian diplomats.

Breaking: US to expel 48 Russian embassy workers in Washington, D.C. and 12 at the Russian mission to the U.N. U.S. says they were intel officers using diplo status as cover. pic.twitter.com/mRuwY8Tes6

-- Patrick Tucker (@DefTechPat) March 26, 2018

Meanwhile, back in the land of the free, Trump enthusiastically joined the inquisition, saying he would expel 60 Russian diplomats 'personae non grata,' and shut down the Seattle consulate. Good to see that the American leader practices cool-headed moderation in times of uncertainty.

Short of an actual military conflict with Russia, it would be hard to imagine the situation getting any worse. Most worrisome is the peddling of pulp-fiction conspiracy theories against Russia, which compels Western officials to compensate for their wild imaginations with hysterical, inflammatory outbursts that border on sheer madness.

How else to explain the comment by UK Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson, who spoke like a kid at the playground when he said Russia "should go away and shut up;" or that of Boris Johnson, the British foreign minister, who had the audacity and historical ignorance to compare Russia's hosting of this year's World Cup to the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany.

So, what is motivating self-satisfied Western countries, like the US and Britain, to forward such slanderous claims against Russia without a hint of legal due process? After all, it cannot be denied that Russia would have stood to gain nothing from targeting Skripal.

"[Sergei Skripal] was handed in to Britain as a result of an exchange. So, why should Russia hand in a man that is of any importance or that is of any value? It's unimaginable. If he's handed in – so Russia quits with him. He's of zero value or zero importance," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in an exclusive interview with RT.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/7ATdRpvQKvI

When we ask the question, 'Cui bono' – who stands to benefit the most from an assassination attempt on a man of absolutely no consequence to Moscow – the most credible answer always comes back to 'Russia's accusers.'

Follow the money

Since Washington has taken by far the severest steps against Russia over the Skripal fallout, it would be fair to ask if the US stands to gain anything from the wave of Russophobia now sweeping the West, which got its start, incidentally, as a direct result of 'Russiagate.'

Against the backdrop of the Skripal scandal are extremely lucrative gas contracts with EU countries that Russia has dutifully fulfilled since the Soviet heydays. Today, Russia supplies about 40 percent of Europe's gas. The US, however, with its fracking-backed liquefied natural gas (LNG) program, is anxious to get a piece of the pie.

In July, Donald Trump paid a visit to Poland, where he pledged to boost exports of LNG to Central Europe, as well as challenge Russia's market on energy supplies.

"America stands ready to help Poland and other European nations diversify their energy supplies so that you can never be held hostage to a single supplier," Trump told reporters after talks with Polish President Andrzej Duda.

The comment was odd since, even at the height of the Cold War, Europe never froze due to its gas being turned off in the middle of the night by Moscow.

Read more © Joshua Roberts Entangling alliances or scoring at home? Why US went out of its way with Russian diplomat expulsions

Marek Matraszek, founder of the lobby firm CEC Government Relations, offered a very disturbing comment about Washington's push to supply LNG to Europe.

"If we want to have the United States' LNG supplies in Central Europe, we also want to see the United States getting tough on Nord Stream 2, which means getting tough on Russia," Matraszek said .

I am very curious to know exactly what Matraszek had in mind when he spoke about "getting tough on Russia." Would he approve of the current bilateral breakdown between the nuclear powers? I certainly hope not.

In light of the massive prospects for gross profit on the European continent, would Western capitals not be tempted – tempted, at the very least – to deny Moscow the benefit of the doubt whenever highly suspicious criminal cases arise, like the present one regarding Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia?

In an effort to slander Russia and push it out of lucrative markets, they may be tempted to milk the situation for all its worth – which is exactly what is happening now. To doubt that possibility would require a deep misunderstanding of the geopolitical realities as they have played out over the course of the last decade, complete with a massive propaganda campaign aimed at everything related to Russia – from the Olympic Games to anti-terrorist operations in Syria to criminal cases in foreign lands.

Meanwhile, as the showdown between the US and Russia over EU gas supplies festers, especially in light of Nord Stream 2, the German-Russia venture that would double direct Russia gas supplies, the ongoing US sanction regime against Russia is beginning to look suspect.

Commenting on Trump's passage in August of brand new sanctions against Russia, then German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel was brave enough to mention the elephant in the room.

"The draft law makes clear that they're pursuing economic interests and we think that's not acceptable," he said .

"Aggressively combining foreign policy issues with American economic interests and saying: 'We want to drive Russian gas out of the European market so we can sell American gas there is definitely not something we can accept.'"

Meanwhile, it is not only in the energy sector where the United States - and to a lesser degree the UK - stands to gain from wrecked relations with Russia, but in the defense sector as well.

The UK regularly ranks as Europe's leading weapons exporter, behind the United States globally, which remains the world's leading arms exporter. Much of the expenditure comes from NATO member states, which were just put on notice by Trump to keep their military spending at 2 percent of GDP, at the very same time Washington was going out of its way to portray Russia as a belligerent nation, when it has been the West that has been hell-bent on fomenting regime change around the world. Now that's certainly an interesting sales strategy.

Romanian Prime Minister @VioricaDancila said that the government decisions to purchase #HIMARS missile systems and multirole corvettes were important steps in improving the capability of the Romanian armed forces as a @NATO and EU member #defence pic.twitter.com/EEYk4Sk5MR

-- Radio Romania International (@RRInternational) February 15, 2018

Can this propaganda campaign against Russia work? I believe the answer is no, for many reasons. First, it is not just the Russians who understand that they are being played by major powers in a conspicuous attempt to gain geopolitical and economic advantage.

Thus far, nearly half of the EU's member states have refrained from committing a gesture of "solidarity" with London, deciding not to expel Russian diplomats. Those 'conscientious objectors' are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Slovakia and Slovenia.

"We are determined to maintain open channels of dialogue with Russia," Austrian government spokesperson Peter Launsky-Tieffenthal told RIA Novosti.

In many ways, this represents a victory for Russia – albeit a bittersweet one – that London failed to get so many countries on board its anti-Russia juggernaut.

This needs to be emphasized. The majority of the EU countries did not join in this mass expulsion. As for those that did, expulsions were mostly pro forma, undertaken in order to keep the British happy. Why then the wildly disproportionate response from Trump? https://t.co/4FldvIS80W

-- George Szamuely (@GeorgeSzamuely) March 26, 2018

Second, Russia is actively diversifying its economy away from Western markets in preparation for a worse-case scenario. For example, the "$55bn Power of Siberia pipeline will start carrying gas 3,000km to China next year. The company is also spending $13bn on a pipeline to Turkey," the Financial Times reported.

Finally, as Russia understands that they are up against some very dishonest players, the country has made tremendous inroads to producing many of the things it once depended upon imports to have, and we are not just talking about cheese. The Russian authorities have even prepared a backup plan in the event that Russia is terminated from the SWIFT international payment system. Although, of course, Russia would prefer not to have to take such drastic steps, the unfortunate situation in many Western capitals, where otherwise intelligent people are pointing fingers and hurling unfounded accusations at Russia, without critical evidence or due process – once hallmarks of the Western judicial system – make such steps absolutely vital.

All things considered, Russia will survive this storm, as it has done so many other times in the past against far graver enemies, and stronger than ever.

@Robert_Bridge

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Trends: Facebook West pushing anti-Russia conspiracy theories for achieving political & economic advantage Comparing Russia to Nazi Germany is 'disgusting' – Kremlin on Johnson's 'Hitler' remarks

[Mar 27, 2018] Entangling alliances or scoring at home Why US went out of its way with Russian diplomat expulsions

16 EU states now expelling 33 Russian diplomats
Notable quotes:
"... "intelligence officers" ..."
"... In addition to expelling the diplomats, Trump ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle, Washington. The decision cited the consulate's proximity to a US submarine base and to Boeing production facilities, implying the diplomats were really intelligence operatives. ..."
"... That was echoed by White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah, who told reporters the expulsion is aimed at "significantly degrading their intelligence capabilities around the world, not just in the US." ..."
"... "coordinated with NATO allies," ..."
"... "brazen and reckless" ..."
"... "highly likely" ..."
"... "Thousand-year Reich" ..."
"... "joined at the hip" ..."
"... "entangling alliances," ..."
"... "blindly follow the principle of Euro-Atlantic unity at the expense of common sense, the rules of civilized state-to-state dialogue and the principles of international law," ..."
"... "up to the Russian government and up to Putin," ..."
"... "special relationship" ..."
"... "What we are witnessing now is part of a long-term program of unbridled Russophobia," ..."
"... "what took so long" ..."
"... "Russian oligarchs" ..."
"... "The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States, ..."
Mar 27, 2018 | www.rt.com

The decision to expel 60 Russian diplomats suggests that President Donald Trump is either following the siren call of 'entangling alliances,' or taking the lead in escalating the conflict with Moscow to appease domestic critics. Not only did Trump's order affect more than twice as many diplomats as the March 14 move by London, it accounts for more than half of the total Russian diplomats expelled by various US allies on Monday. Monday's action is the biggest expulsion of alleged "intelligence officers" since the Cold War and the largest in US history, according to US ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman.

Though Trump campaigned on the "America First" foreign policy , openly critical of the nation-building and "humanitarian" interventions his predecessors engaged in, little of that remains after the first year of his presidency. The media and the opposition Democrats appear to have buttonholed the president with never-ending accusations that he is somehow "soft" on Russia.

Read more 2017 could have been year Russia and US made up. Now they stand on brink of new Cold War

In reality, the current administration has taken the hostility toward Moscow, inherited from Barack Obama's second term, and turned it up a notch, from pressuring Russian media to register as foreign agents and approving the sale of anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, to expelling more Russian diplomats and shutting down consulates .

In addition to expelling the diplomats, Trump ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle, Washington. The decision cited the consulate's proximity to a US submarine base and to Boeing production facilities, implying the diplomats were really intelligence operatives.

That was echoed by White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah, who told reporters the expulsion is aimed at "significantly degrading their intelligence capabilities around the world, not just in the US."

Shah said the move was "coordinated with NATO allies," and represented a US response to Russia's "brazen and reckless" actions, namely, the alleged nerve agent attack that reportedly injured former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, UK, three weeks ago.

16 EU states now expelling 33 Russian diplos
🇩🇪 Germany 4
🇵🇱 Poland 4
🇨🇵 France 4
🇨🇿 Czech 3
🇱🇹 Lithuania 3
🇮🇹 Italy 2
🇩🇰 Denmark 2
🇳🇱 Netherlands 2
🇪🇸 Spain 2
🇱🇻 Latvia 1
🇫🇮 Finland 1
🇪🇪 Estonia 1
🇷🇴 Romania 1
🇸🇪 Sweden 1
🇭🇷 Croatia 1
🇭🇺 Hungary 1

-- Danny Kemp (@dannyctkemp) March 26, 2018

British authorities have asserted that Russia was "highly likely" to have been behind the incident, but have refused to provide any evidence to back up Prime Minister Theresa May and Foreign Minister Boris Johnson's words. Johnson even went so far as to compare Russian President Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler - twice! - though it was Russia that carried the disproportionate burden in defeating Hitler's "Thousand-year Reich" in the Second World War.

On March 14, May ordered the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats. Russia retaliated by expelling the same number of British diplomats, as well as shutting down the consulate in St. Petersburg and British Council operations in Russia.

Seasoned observers of international relations might note that it is usually Britain that follows the US lead – whether in the 1999 attack on Yugoslavia, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or the 2011 regime change operation in Libya – and not the other way around. Yet, according to White House's Shah, the US is "joined at the hip" with the UK on this. What gives?

This needs to be emphasized. The majority of the EU countries did not join in this mass expulsion. As for those that did, expulsions were mostly pro forma, undertaken in order to keep the British happy. Why then the wildly disproportionate response from Trump? https://t.co/4FldvIS80W

-- George Szamuely (@GeorgeSzamuely) March 26, 2018

America's first president, George Washington, warned way back in 1796 of the danger of "entangling alliances," which would draw the newly created country into foreign wars on behalf of allied governments. Such alliances would also lead to poor relations with other nations and distort US policies to favor the wishes of its allies over the will of the American people.

Yet today's US policymakers, from the highest officials of the Trump administration to the NeverTrump think-tanks, treat it as an article of faith that the US is strong because it has entangling alliances with countries all over the world, and a military presence all over the planet.

Read more US abusing its rights as host country by expelling Russian diplomats at UN – Russia's UN envoy

Washington and other allies of London "blindly follow the principle of Euro-Atlantic unity at the expense of common sense, the rules of civilized state-to-state dialogue and the principles of international law," the Russian Foreign Ministry said , condemning the expulsions.

Shah's comments, that the US relationship with Russia is entirely "up to the Russian government and up to Putin," as if Washington had no agency in the matter, certainly seems to suggest that Trump is all tangled up in the "special relationship" with London.

However, there is also the possibility that Trump or some of his advisers are pursuing hostility towards Moscow in order to counter the narrative of 'Russian collusion' – which originated from the Hillary Clinton campaign after the humiliating loss in the 2016 election, and continues to be pushed by many in the US media and the Democratic party.

"What we are witnessing now is part of a long-term program of unbridled Russophobia," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Rossiya-1 TV.

Reporters covering the White House presented a good example on Monday. In the rare moments when they digressed from discussing Trump's alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, reporters mostly wanted to know "what took so long" to expel the diplomats and why more is not being done against Russia. CNN's Jim Sciutto finally got a question, only to demand more sanctions against "Russian oligarchs" and Putin personally.

No matter what Trump does against Russia, it fails to mollify his critics, who see evidence of his "collusion" with Moscow in absolutely everything.

Closing Russia's consulate in Seattle hurts Americans in our Northwest who want to visit Russia, not Putin's oligarchs. Typical misdirection by Trump Administration.

-- Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) March 26, 2018

Trump didn't have an option to keep the 60 Russian spies posing as diplomats in the US, but I guarantee he looked for one. He also hasn't criticized Putin or implemented all of the sanctions Congress passed against Russia. Trump's a traitor & shouldn't be president. #ImpeachTrump

-- Scott Dworkin (@funder) March 26, 2018

Whatever the intent behind Monday's decision, its timing and execution were certainly problematic. The expulsion of diplomats came as Russia was collectively mourning the deaths of 64 people, many of them children , in a mall fire in the Siberian city of Kemerovo. Adding insult to injury sounds like really poor diplomacy, no matter who's behind it.

Then again, as the former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali noted in his 1999 memoir, Washington sees no need for diplomacy when power will do.

"The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States, " wrote Boutros-Ghali.

[Mar 27, 2018] Integrity Has Vanished From The West by Paul Craig Roberts,

Mar 27, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored Among Western political leaders there is not an ounce of integrity or morality . The Western print and TV media is dishonest and corrupt beyond repair. Yet the Russian government persists in its fantasy of "working with Russia's Western partners." The only way Russia can work with crooks is to become a crook. Is that what the Russian government wants?

Finian Cunningham notes the absurdity in the political and media uproar over Trump (belatedly) telephoning Putin to congratulate him on his reelection with 77 percent of the vote, a show of public approval that no Western political leader could possibly attain. The crazed US senator from Arizona called the person with the largest majority vote of our time "a dictator." Yet a real blood-soaked dictator from Saudi Arabia is feted at the White House and fawned over by the president of the United States.

The Western politicians and presstitutes are morally outraged over an alleged poisoning, unsupported by any evidence, of a former spy of no consequence on orders by the president of Russia himself. These kind of insane insults thrown at the leader of the world's most powerful military nation -- and Russia is a nation, unlike the mongrel Western countries -- raise the chances of nuclear Armageddon beyond the risks during the 20th century's Cold War. The insane fools making these unsupported accusations show total disregard for all life on earth. Yet they regard themselves as the salt of the earth and as "exceptional, indispensable" people.

Think about the alleged poisoning of Skirpal by Russia. What can this be other than an orchestrated effort to demonize the president of Russia? How can the West be so outraged over the death of a former double-agent, that is, a deceptive person, and completely indifferent to the millions of peoples destroyed by the West in the 21st century alone. Where is the outrage among Western peoples over the massive deaths for which the West, acting through its Saudi agent, is responsible in Yemen? Where is the Western outrage among Western peoples over the deaths in Syria? The deaths in Libya, in Somalia, Pakistan, Ukraine, Afghanistan? Where is the outrage in the West over the constant Western interference in the internal affairs of other countries? How many times has Washington overthrown a democratically-elected government in Honduras and reinstalled a Washington puppet?

The corruption in the West extends beyond politicians, presstitutes, and an insouciant public to experts. When the ridiculous Condi Rice, national security adviser to president George W. Bush, spoke of Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons of mass destruction sending up a nuclear cloud over an American city, experts did not laugh her out of court. The chance of any such event was precisely zero and every expert knew it, but the corrupt experts held their tongues. If they spoke the truth, they knew that they would not get on TV, would not get a government grant, would be out of the running for a government appointment. So they accepted the absurd lie designed to justify an American invasion that destroyed a country.

This is the West. There is nothing but lies and indifference to the deaths of others. The only outrage is orchestrated and directed against a target: the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Iran, Assad, Russia and Putin, and against reformist leaders in Latin America. The targets for Western outrage are always those who act independently of Washington or who are no longer useful to Washington's purposes.

The quality of people in Western governments has collapsed to the very bottom of the barrel. The British actually have a person, Boris Johnson, as Foreign Secretary, who is so low-down that a former British ambassador has no compunction in calling him a categorical liar. The British lab Porton Down, contrary to Johnson's claim, has not identified the agent associated with the attack on Skirpal as a Russian novichok agent. Note also that if the British lab is able to identify a novichok agent, it also has the capability of producing it, a capability that many countries have as the formulas were published years ago in a book.

That the novichok poisoning of Skirpal is an orchestration is obvious. The minute the event occurred the story was ready. With no evidence in hand, the British government and presstitute media were screaming "the Russians did it." Not content with that, Boris Johnson screamed "Putin did it." In order to institutionalize fear and hatred of Russia into British consciousness, British school children are being taught that Putin is like Hitler.

Orchestrations this blatant demonstrate that Western governments have no respect for the intelligence of their peoples. That Western governments get away with these fantastic lies indicates that the governments are immune to accountability. Even if accountability were possible, there is no sign that Western peoples are capable of holding their governments accountable. As Washington drives the world to nuclear war, where are the protests? The only protest is brainwashed school children protesting the National Rifle Association and the Second Amendment.

Western democracy is a hoax. Consider Catalonia. The people voted for independence and were denounced for doing so by European politicians. The Spanish government invaded Catalonia alleging that the popular referendum, in which people expressed their opinion about their own future, was illegal. Catalonian leaders are in prison awaiting trial, except for Carles Puigdemont who escaped to Belgium. Now Germany has captured him on his return to Belgium from Finland where he lectured at the University of Hesinki and is holding him in jail for a Spanish government that bears more resemblance to Francisco Franco than to democracy. The European Union itself is a conspiracy against democracy.

The success of Western propaganda in creating non-existent virtues for itself is the greatest public relations success in history. Tags Politics

[Mar 27, 2018] The Skripal Case: It Looks Like Mrs May Has Some Explaining to do!

Notable quotes:
"... I do not know who poisoned the Skripals, how it was done, or for what reason. I continue to keep an open mind. But I do know one thing. It looks like Mrs May has some explaining to do. ..."
Mar 27, 2018 | www.theblogmire.com

On Monday 12th March , the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Theresa May, stood up in Parliament and made the following claim as part of her 36-hour ultimatum to the Russian Federation:

"Mr Speaker, this morning I chaired a meeting of the National Security Council in which we considered the information so far available. As is normal, the Council was updated on the assessment and intelligence picture, as well as the state of the investigation.

It is now clear that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia. This is part of a group of nerve agents known as 'Novichok' .

Based on the positive identification of this chemical agent by world-leading experts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down ; our knowledge that Russia has previously produced this agent and would still be capable of doing so; Russia's record of conducting state-sponsored assassinations; and our assessment that Russia views some defectors as legitimate targets for assassinations; the Government has concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei and Yulia Skripal [my emphasis]."

In her statement to the House on 14th March , she reiterated the claim, as follows:

"Mr Speaker, on Monday I set out that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a Novichok: a military grade nerve agent developed by Russia [my emphasis]."

Let's break this down. The three key parts of Mrs May's claim are as follows:

  1. That the experts at Porton Down had made a positive identification of the substance used to poison Mr Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.
  2. That this positive identification concluded that it was a military-grade nerve agent .
  3. That this positive identification was that the substance was part of a group of nerve agents known as 'Novichok' .

In a judgement at the High Court on 22nd March on whether to allow blood samples to be taken from Sergei and Yulia Skripal for examination by the OPCW, the evidence submitted by Porton Down (in section 17 i), stated the following:

"Blood samples from Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal were analysed and the findings indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound . The samples tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent or closely related agent [my emphasis]."

Let's break this down. The three key parts of the evidence given by Porton Down to the High Court are as follows:

  1. That the analysis at Porton Down indicated the substance used to poison Mr Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.
  2. That this indication was not able to positively identify whether the substance used was actually a nerve agent (much less a military-grade nerve agent), and left open the possibility that it may have been a related compound .
  3. That this indication could not positively identify whether the substance was part of a group of nerve agents known as 'Novichok', or whether it was a closely related agent .

Mrs May's statement claims positive identification of a military grade nerve agent of the "Novichok" class of chemical weapons. Porton Down's evidence to the High Court shows that no such positive identification took place.

Two statements. Both cannot be true.

I do not know who poisoned the Skripals, how it was done, or for what reason. I continue to keep an open mind. But I do know one thing. It looks like Mrs May has some explaining to do.

[Mar 27, 2018] 30 Questions That Journalists Should be Asking About the Skripal Case

Notable quotes:
"... nerve agent poisoning ..."
"... of a type ..."
"... developed by Russia ..."
"... made only by Russia ..."
Mar 27, 2018 | www.theblogmire.com

There are a lot of issues around the case of Sergei and Yulia Skripal which, at the time of writing, are very unclear and rather odd. There may well be good and innocent explanations for some or even all of them. Then again there may not. This is why it is crucial for questions to be asked where, as yet, there are either no answers or deeply unsatisfactory ones.

Some people will assume that this is conspiracy theory territory. It is not that, for the simple reason that I have no credible theory -- conspiracy or otherwise -- to explain all the details of the incident in Salisbury from start to finish, and I am not attempting to forward one. I have no idea who was behind this incident, and I continue to keep an open mind to a good many possible explanations.

However, there are a number of oddities in the official narrative, which do demand answers and clarifications. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist or a defender of the Russian state to see this. You just need a healthy scepticism, "of a type developed by all inquiring minds!"

Below are 30 of the most important questions regarding the case and the British Government's response, which are currently either wholly unanswered, or which require clarification.


1. Why have there been no updates on the condition of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the public domain since the first week of the investigation?

2. Are they still alive?

3. If so, what is their current condition and what symptoms are they displaying?

4. In a recent letter to The Times , Stephen Davies, Consultant in Emergency Medicine at Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust, wrote the following:

"Sir, Further to your report ("Poison exposure leaves almost 40 needing treatment", Mar 14) may I clarify that no patients have experienced nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury and there have only ever been three patients with significant poisoning."

His claim that " no patients have experienced nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury" is remarkably odd, as it appears to flatly contradict the official narrative. Was this a slip of the pen, or was it his intention to communicate precisely this -- that no patients have been poisoned by a nerve agent in Salisbury?

5. It has been said that the Skripals and Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey were poisoned by "a military grade nerve agent". According to some claims, the type referred to could be anywhere between five and eight times more toxic than VX nerve agent. Given that just 10mg of VX is reckoned to be the median lethal dose , it seems likely that the particular type mentioned in the Skripal case should have killed them instantly. Is there an explanation as to how or why this did not happen?

6. Although reports suggested the involvement of some sort of nerve agent fairly soon after the incident, it was almost a week before Public Health England issued advice to those who had visited The Mill pub or the Zizzi restaurant in Salisbury on the day that the Skripals fell ill. Why the delay and did this pose a danger to the public?

7. In their advice, Public Health England stated that people who had visited those places, where traces of a military grade nerve agent had apparently been found, should wash their clothes and:

"Wipe personal items such as phones, handbags and other electronic items with cleansing or baby wipes and dispose of the wipes in the bin (ordinary domestic waste disposal)."

Are baby wipes acknowledged to be an effective and safe method of dealing with objects that may potentially have been contaminated with "military grade nerve agent", especially of a type 5-8 times more deadly than VX?

8. Initial reports suggested that Detective Sergeant Bailey became ill after coming into contact with the substance after attending the Skripals on the bench they were seated on in The Maltings in Salisbury. Subsequent claims, however, first aired by former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Lord Ian Blair on 9 th March , said that he came into contact with the substance at Sergei Skripal's house in Christie Miller Road. Reports since then have been highly ambiguous about what should be an easily verifiable fact. Which is the correct account?

9. The government have claimed that the poison used was "a military grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia ". The phrase "of a type developed by Russia" says nothing whatsoever about whether the substance used in the Salisbury case was produced or manufactured in Russia. Can the government confirm that its scientists at Porton Down have established that the substance that poisoned the Skripals and DS Bailey was actually produced or manufactured in Russia?

10. The former ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, has claimed that sources within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) have told him that scientists at Porton Down would not agree to a statement about the place of origin of the substance , because they were not able to establish this. According to Mr Murray, only under much pressure from the Government did they end up agreeing to the compromise wording, "of a type developed by Russia", which has subsequently been used in all official statements on the matter. Can the FCO, in plain and unambiguous English, categorically refute Mr Murray's claims that pressure was put on Porton Down scientists to agree to a form of words and that in the end a much-diluted version was agreed?

11. On the occasion that the FCO did attempt to refute Mr Murray's claims , the wording they used included a straightforward repetition of the same phrase – "of a type developed by Russia". Is the FCO willing and able to go beyond this and confirm that the substance was not only "of a type developed by Russia", but that it was "produced" or "manufactured" in Russia?

12. Why did the British Government issue a 36-hour ultimatum to the Russian Government to come up with an explanation, but then refuse their request to share the evidence that allegedly pointed to their culpability (there could have been no danger of their tampering with it, since Porton Down would have retained their own sample)?

13. How is it possible for a state (or indeed any person or entity) that has been accused of something, to defend themselves against an accusation if they are refused access to evidence that apparently points to their guilt?

14. Is this not a clear case of the reversal of the presumption of innocence and of due process?

15. Furthermore, why did the British Government issue an ultimatum to the Russian Government, in contravention of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) rules governing such matters, to which both Britain and Russia are signatories, and which are clearly set out in Article 9, Paragraph ii of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC)?

16. Given that the investigation, which has been described by the man leading it as being "an extremely challenging investigation" and as having "a number of unique and complex issues", and given that many of the facts of the case are not yet known, such as when, where and how the substance was administered, how is it possible for the British Government to point the finger of blame with such certainty?

17. Furthermore, by doing so, haven't they both politicised and prejudiced the investigation?

18. Why did the British Government feel the need to come forward with an accusation little more than a week into the investigation, rather than waiting for its completion?

19. On the Andrew Marr Show on 18 th March, the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, stated the following:

"And I might just say in response to Mr Chizhov's point about Russian stockpiles of chemical weapons. We actually had evidence within the last ten years that Russia has not only been investigating the delivery of nerve agents for the purposes of assassination, but it has also been creating and stockpiling Novichok."

Where has this intelligence come from and has it been properly verified?

20. If this intelligence was known before 27 th September 2017 – the date that the OPCW issued a statement declaring the completion of the destruction of all 39,967 metric tons of chemical weapons possessed by the Russian Federation – why did Britain not inform the OPCW of its own intelligence which apparently contradicts this claim, which they would have had a legal obligation to do?

21. If this intelligence was known after 27 th September 2017, why did Britain not inform the OPCW of this "new" information, which it was legally obliged to do, since it allegedly shows that Russia had been lying to the OPCW and had been carrying out a clandestine chemical weapons programme?

22. Also on the Andrew Marr show, Mr Johnson made the following claim after a question of whether he was "absolutely sure" that the substance used to poison the Skripals was a "Novichok":

"Obviously to the best of our knowledge this is a Russian-made nerve agent that falls within the category Novichok made only by Russia, and just to get back to the point about the international reaction which is so fascinating."

Is the phrase "to the best of our knowledge" an adequate response to Mr Marr's request of him being "absolutely sure"?

23. Is this a good enough legal basis from which to accuse another state and to impose punitive measures on it, or is more certainty needed before such an accusation can be made?

24. After hedging his words with the phrase, "to the best of our knowledge", Mr Johnson then went beyond previous Government claims that the substance was "of a type developed in Russia", saying that it was "Russian-made". Have the scientists at Porton Down been able to establish that it was indeed "Russian-made", or was this a case of Mr Johnson straying off-message?

25. He also went beyond the previous claim that the substance was "of a type developed in Russia" by saying that the substance involved in the Skripal case "falls within the category Novichok made only by Russia "? Firstly, is Mr Johnson able to provide evidence that this category of chemical weapons was ever successfully synthesised in Russia, especially in the light of the OPCW's Scientific Advisory Board stating as recently as 2013, that it has "insufficient information to comment on the existence or properties of 'Novichoks ' "?

26. As Craig Murray has again pointed out , since its 2013 statement, the OPCW has worked (legally) with Iranian scientists who have successfully synthesised these chemical weapons. Was Mr Johnson aware that the category of "Novichok" chemical weapons had been synthesised elsewhere when he stated that this category of chemical weapons is "made only by Russia"?

27. Does the fact that Iranian scientists were able to synthesise this class of chemical weapons suggest that other states have the capabilities to do likewise?

28. Is the British Government aware that the main plant involved in attempts to synthesise Novichoks in the 1970s and 1980s was based not in Russia, but in Nukus in Uzbekistan?

29. Does the fact that the US Department of Defence decontaminated and dismantled the Nukus site, under an agreement with the Government of Uzbekistan , make it at least theoretically possible that substances or secrets held within that plant could have been carried out of the country and even back to the United States?

30. The connection between Sergei Skripal's MI6 recruiter, Pablo Miller , who also happens to live in Salisbury, and Christopher Steele, the author of the so-called "Trump Dossier", has been well established , as has the fact that Mr Skripal and Mr Miller regularly met together in the City . Is this connection of any interest to the investigation into the incident in Salisbury?


If there are any journalists with integrity and inquisitive minds still living in this country, I would be grateful if they could begin doing their job and research the answers to these sorts of questions by asking the appropriate people and authorities.


Here are my previous pieces on the Skripal case:


More from TheBlogMire . Britain , International Relations , Justice , Russia , Uncategorized Boris Johnson , Novichok , OPCW , Salisbury , Sergei Skripal , Stephen Davies , Theresa May , Yulia Skripal 9 thoughts on "30 Questions That Journalists Should be Asking About the Skripal Case"
  1. P.E. Ace says: March 26, 2018 at 12:40 pm The government (incl Porton Down) have no proof novichok was used: a cautious and not even cynical interpretation of the Court of Protection judgment regarding evidence in the Skripal case points to bluffing on the side of May, Johnson and Williamson. It all comes down to the use of the word "related" and the words "closely related".

    According to the judgement, the Porton Down Chemical and Biological Analyst provided following evidence:

    "Blood samples from Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal were analysed and the
    findings indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound."

    "The samples tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent or closely
    related agent."

    The quotes are from paragraph 17 in Mr Justice Williams's judgement issued 22 March 2018.

    https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/sshd-v-skripal-and-another-20180322.pdf

    Macron, Merkel and Trump now weigh extradition of Russian diplomats based on the UK government's hasty conclusion that novichok was used.

    Please also note that the formula for novichok can be found in Mirzayanov's book that you can buy on the US site of Amazon. I was able to see the formula in the Appendix via amazon's browsing facility (chemical A-232). Reply

  2. Stewart Dredge says: March 25, 2018 at 7:05 pm Some more questions:
    Why was there no massive police "national manhunt" after the event?
    A person or persons armed with "the deadliest nerve agent known to man" had just carried out a botched attempted murder on the streets of an English town and was presumably still at large. He/she/they had failed in their task and was/ were presumably desperate and on the run. Did they still carry the lethal substance? Were they perhaps infected themselves? Were they a danger to other Russian dissidents, police or members of the public?
    So why does there appear to have been little or no attempt to identify, find and arrest them? Why no request for anyone witnessing anything suspicious or warnings not to approach anyone behaving strangely?
    Also, why are journalists not behaving the way journalists do in such circumstances? Why are Mr Skripals Salisbury friends not being door-stepped to ask about what he is like, whether he ever talks about his past, his family or his hopes for the future. Why are they not asking his neighbours about the sort of people, if any, come and go at his house. He seems to have been a friendly, gregarious chap who often drank with friends at the local pub. What did the bar staff and the other regulars make of him?
    And what about the "shouting" incident in the restaurant? One member of staff appears to have reported "He started screaming. He just didn't look right.' Where are the media interviews with staff and diners to expand upon this? Why are the UK media and police acting so unlike the UK media and police normally act after such incidents?
    I am no conspiracy theorist and I do not believe that any government could successfully "silence" hundreds of police officers and journalists even if one wanted to. It may be that the UK authorities know exactly what happened and are playing a long, waiting game. But the utterances of May, Johnson and co suggest otherwise. It may be that the OPCW will clarify everything but Johnson's utterances about the substance being proved to be a novichok and that only the Russians can make it are false and demonstrably so the public's confusion can only continue. Reply
    1. Rob Slane says: March 25, 2018 at 7:15 pm Thanks Stewart. These are very good questions. The ones regarding the lack of "manhunt" are especially good and to the point. I am thinking of a follow-up set of questions, and if you don't mind, I might use this one (accredited to you, of course).

      Like you, I am no conspiracy theorist, but there is something extraordinary about the facts (or lack of them) in this case, that really don't add up.

      Best wishes,

      Rob Reply

      1. Stewart Dredge says: March 26, 2018 at 7:59 pm Many thanks. Please use what you require, Paul. Reply
        1. Stewart Dredge says: March 26, 2018 at 8:26 pm .or Rob even! 😀
  3. mikhas says: March 24, 2018 at 11:54 am Another inconsistency is that there are many pictures showing police and others running around in Hazmat suits together with f.ex the fire brigade that clearly do not. Shouldn't they all wear such suits? Even May were strutting around with no protection at all

    If a military grade nerve agent was used everybody in the vicinity of the attack, including the murderer should have died and the entire town evacuated Reply

  4. Gerd Müller says: March 23, 2018 at 9:27 pm what is with eating fish in zizzi resataurant and drinking cold beer and then ending vomitting on a bench in a park? Too much TV on novochock in England Reply
  5. steve Hayes says: March 21, 2018 at 11:24 am The fact that the corporate media are not asking these (and other) question is not because they are stupid; it is because they are paid propagandists.

    We cannot expect them to report accurately. But what we can do is learn from the history of their mendacious journalism.

    http://viewsandstories.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/the-war-on-iraq-has-anyone-learned.html Reply

  6. Ray Joseph Cormier says: March 21, 2018 at 12:41 am Buy the same logic Russia is guilty because they developed the chemical weapon 30 years ago, then England is guilty of the murder of Kin Jong Un's half brother by VX in Malaysia because it was developed in England. Reply
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[Mar 27, 2018] US Media Sings A Happy Song That is Why We Should Be Afraid New Eastern Outlook by Caleb Maupin

"The happy song of the US media accompanies another oddly totalitarian trend, the constant blaming of discontent on foreign powers. In the aftermath of the school shooting in Florida, Russia was blamed for allegedly fomenting what was already probably the biggest political gap among the US public, the question of gun ownership and the 2nd Amendment. Russia was accused of both opposing and promoting gun ownership, in order to sew confusion among the public."
" the US [MSM] ... accuses those who disagree at home of being Russian bots"
Notable quotes:
"... the commercially-owned mainstream American press has always had another role: crafting public opinion. A huge amount of US government funds are devoted to handling and managing the media. The government and the political establishment is deeply worried about making sure that the US public thinks in ways that are conducive to their overall goals and strategies. The CIA's project mockingbird, and the cozy relationship between reporters, newspaper owners, and various Presidential administrations is the most blatant example. US Military intelligence agencies have sponsored over 1,800 hollywood films. School textbooks in California and Texas have their academic standards set in a highly politicized process. ..."
"... it also serves a political purpose as a public relations wing of the American elite, a recent trend in US mainstream mass media should be quite disturbing, when carefully analyzed. ..."
"... A dull "everything is OK, calm down" message is suddenly being put forth in an American media that has nothing to gain from it in terms of ratings or newspaper sales. A lengthy article in the Wall Street Journal Weekend Review by Harvard Psychology Professor Steven Pinker criticized both the political left-wing and right-wing in the USA for their pessimism, and argued in terms of "the big picture" across centuries, that the western liberal democratic capitalist system has proved itself to be very successful. ..."
"... Not only is the US media singing a happy song, but it is now demanding, along with elected officials, that everyone else do the same thing. Russia isn't accused of putting out a particular position, but rather of simply "sewing discord." ..."
"... the US whistles a happy tune, and accuses those who disagree at home of being Russian bots ..."
"... In our high tech world, framing international economic policies as a zero sum game cannot be be expected to have fruitful results. ..."
"... Caleb Maupin is a political analyst and activist based in New York. He studied political science at Baldwin-Wallace College and was inspired and involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, especially for the online magazine "New Eastern Outlook" . ..."
"... https://journal-neo.org/2018/03/05/us-media-sings-a-happy-song-that-is-why-we-should-be-afraid/ ..."
Mar 03, 2018 | journal-neo.org

The understanding that the American press, both TV and print media, thrives on negativity is deeply embedded in the culture, so much so that the theme music to the popular 1990s American TV sit-com "Family Matters" began with the couplet:

Its a rare condition this day and age,
to read any good news on a newspaper page

The US media is a for-profit industry. TV outlets depend on advertising revenue, the value of which depends on ratings. The drive of mainstream American TV news networks is to increase ratings, and make profits. Bad news, scandal, and sensationalism is a way to do that.

However, the commercially-owned mainstream American press has always had another role: crafting public opinion. A huge amount of US government funds are devoted to handling and managing the media. The government and the political establishment is deeply worried about making sure that the US public thinks in ways that are conducive to their overall goals and strategies. The CIA's project mockingbird, and the cozy relationship between reporters, newspaper owners, and various Presidential administrations is the most blatant example. US Military intelligence agencies have sponsored over 1,800 hollywood films. School textbooks in California and Texas have their academic standards set in a highly politicized process.

So, with the understanding that negativity and sensationalism are US media's focus, while it also serves a political purpose as a public relations wing of the American elite, a recent trend in US mainstream mass media should be quite disturbing, when carefully analyzed.

The US media, long known for its negativity intended to grab ratings, is suddenly printing articles, publishing widely circulated books, and featuring commentators all echoing the message: "Don't worry, everything is going to be OK."

This uncharacteristic behavior of American media almost perfectly fits the stereotypical portrayal of government propaganda in supposedly "totalitarian states." Many dystopian science fiction films feature some dark, high tech police state where the controlled press harps on with the message: "Things are going very well, don't worry, just obey."

A dull "everything is OK, calm down" message is suddenly being put forth in an American media that has nothing to gain from it in terms of ratings or newspaper sales. A lengthy article in the Wall Street Journal Weekend Review by Harvard Psychology Professor Steven Pinker criticized both the political left-wing and right-wing in the USA for their pessimism, and argued in terms of "the big picture" across centuries, that the western liberal democratic capitalist system has proved itself to be very successful.

Meanwhile, on February 20th, Public Affairs Books has released a text by Gregg Easterbrook entitled "Its Better Than It Looks." The book has been widely reviewed by the US press. The text assures us that we need to be more positive in our assessment of world events. National Public Radio described the book's message: "Between threats of nuclear war, devastating natural disasters, violence and political division at home, it might feel like things are really bad right now. But not necessarily so, says Gregg Easterbrook. He argues that by a lot of important measures, the United States and the world are on an upward trajectory."

Similar messages have been dancing across American TV screens and radio waves in recent weeks, in a pattern that any careful observer would find peculiar.

A Growing Economic Bubble

Meanwhile, economic news continues to be selectively reported. For example, retail stores across the USA are closing. While US media was previously reporting on the decline of suburban malls and the elimination of retail jobs, suddenly the press is reporting about a rise in retail profits, and hope for the retail sector.

However, all the reports saying that the retail sector is doing well admit that the increase in retail purchases is not taking place at stores, but rather in online sales. The glowing reports about an increase in retail spending all point toward facts that have no bearing on saving the jobs of retail workers, as stores continue to close down. Despite all the talk of a retail boom (on the internet), stores continue to close across the USA, the latest being H&M clothing which closed scores of outlets across the country. Thousands of retail workers have lost their jobs.

Household debt is at record levels, and a lot of purchasing now taking place in the retail market is being done with credit cards. Furthermore, student debt is rising, and with a number of students unable to repay their debt. The student debt markets now face a specter of a potential crash.

Positive numbers on the stock market are certainly a good economic indicator, however, as the stock numbers rise, the population is not seeing an overall rise in its spending power. If Wall Street and Main Street are not rising together, a rise on the stock market simply indicates that the gap between the financialized, fictional Wall Street Casino, and the actual economy is getting larger.

Real economic growth involves the financial sector getting stronger as the population gets richer along with it. The USA hasn't experienced real, sustainable financial growth since the 1950s. "Jobless Recoveries" and other peculiar anomalies show the extent to which Wall Street has insulated itself from the actual conditions of the American people. The result has been the gap between the financial and the real economy expanding for much longer than in the natural boom-bust cycle, making downturns far larger and dramatic.

Artificial growth only lasts so long, and these bubbles tend to burst. As Trump deregulates Wall Street, and rolls back government oversight of the financial sector, all while lowering taxes on corporations, another financial bubble is emerging.

The tone of the press, echoing the mantra of "everything is alright" is oddly reminiscent of 2007 and 2008 as the US economy was moving toward catastrophe. Desperate attempts by the press, politicians, and others to assure us that the economy is fine, while urging us to keep spending money we do not have, should have millions of Americans shouting "We've seen this movie before!"

Blaming Russia for Dissent

The happy song of the US media accompanies another oddly totalitarian trend, the constant blaming of discontent on foreign powers. In the aftermath of the school shooting in Florida, Russia was blamed for allegedly fomenting what was already probably the biggest political gap among the US public, the question of gun ownership and the 2nd Amendment. Russia was accused of both opposing and promoting gun ownership, in order to sew confusion among the public.

Not only is the US media singing a happy song, but it is now demanding, along with elected officials, that everyone else do the same thing. Russia isn't accused of putting out a particular position, but rather of simply "sewing discord." The message behind the endless talk of "bots" and "trolls" is that it is disloyalty and treason to hold dissident or negative assessments of the US political or economic situation. Doing so is allegedly aiding the Russians efforts to harm loyalty and confidence. The insinuation is that all nay-saying and complaint can be traced, somehow, back to Moscow. In order to be a good American, one is expected to simply repeat the media's upbeat and positive message.

Meanwhile, the US media is giving voice to oddly pointed FBI announcements that Americans shouldn't buy Chinese cellphones, and should be suspicious of Chinese University students as potential spies. While China is establishing strong economic ties with France and other countries, the United States is imposing steel tariffs and increasingly cutting itself off from the second largest economy in the world.

At the UN Security Council, the USA and its allies are desperately attempting to prevent the Syrian government from reclaiming the city of Eastern Ghouta. This enclave of Islamic extremists is very near the capital city of Damascus, which is densely populated with pro-government Syrians, many of whom have fled from other parts of the country.

Now that ISIS has been driven from Syria, there is a real fear that the government could win the war, and the longstanding US regime change operation could end in defeat.

As the US whistles a happy tune, and accuses those who disagree at home of being Russian bots , those they deem competitors on the global stage are getting stronger.

The Chinese state controlled machinery of production is marching ahead. Oil prices, a key factor in securing state revenue in Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Angola and Ecuador, are rising.

Political Fallout of a Potential Crash?

If a new financial crisis erupts, as is likely based on indicators, the political implications most likely would mean the demise of the Trump administration. Trump would be voted out of office in 2020, or perhaps even impeached, blamed for the mismanagement that created the fallout.

However, the slim possibility remains that Trump could make such a catastrophic economic situation work in his favor. If Trump were to respond to a financial crash by swiftly pushing his base of supporters into action, pushing forward his proposals for infrastructure, and giving a free hand to his allies in the policing agencies, as he often publicly advocates, the results could be a very swift resolution of the crisis.

In the event of a financial crash, a combination of street authoritarianism and economic arm-twisting, both of which Trump clearly does not oppose, could ultimately let him come out of the rubble looking like a savior. Trump could utilize a crash to become a figure like France's Louis Bonaparte and his "Party of Order" who seized power in 1851.

Regardless of hypotheticals, the "don't be afraid, everything is alright" tone in American media is not a good sign. It indicates that we should all be concerned about what will happen in the coming months.

Meanwhile, the absence of China's concept of "win-win" relations in global trade, and human centered development is deeply disturbing. In our high tech world, framing international economic policies as a zero sum game cannot be be expected to have fruitful results.

Caleb Maupin is a political analyst and activist based in New York. He studied political science at Baldwin-Wallace College and was inspired and involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, especially for the online magazine "New Eastern Outlook" .

https://journal-neo.org/2018/03/05/us-media-sings-a-happy-song-that-is-why-we-should-be-afraid/

[Mar 26, 2018] United front against Kremlin is a coup for Theresa May by Catherine Philp

Looks like this is carefully planned operation, not an incident
Mar 26, 2018 | thetimes.co.uk

United front against Kremlin is a coup for Theresa May

Catherine Philp, Diplomatic Correspondent

The largest mass expulsion of Russian spies from the West is a significant diplomatic achievement for Theresa May at a time when she could badly use one.

Her failure to persuade Donald Trump to back the Paris climate agreement or make him see the wisdom of the Iran nuclear deal has undermined Britain's claim to act as a bridge between Europe and the United States.

Similarly, Brexit means Britain is loosening its bonds with Europe, relinquishing its role in steering the EU's relations with the rest of the world.

[Mar 26, 2018] Trump orders expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats, closure of Seattle consulate -- RT US News

Notable quotes:
"... abused their privilege of residence" ..."
"... "engaged in espionage activities that are adverse to our national security." ..."
Mar 26, 2018 | www.rt.com

President Donald Trump has ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats and the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle. It comes in response to the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, which the UK has blamed on Russia. The move follows major diplomatic pressure by the UK on its allies to follow their lead in expelling Russian diplomats. The Russian embassy in Washington had previously urged Trump not to heed the "fake news " on Skripal's poisoning.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has accused Moscow of being behind the poisoning of the former spy Skripal and his daughter in the town of Salisbury in early March.

Breaking: US to expel 48 Russian embassy workers in Washington, D.C. and 12 at the Russian mission to the U.N. U.S. says they were intel officers using diplo status as cover. pic.twitter.com/mRuwY8Tes6

-- Patrick Tucker (@DefTechPat) March 26, 2018

Of the 60 diplomats expelled, 12 formed part of the Russian mission to the United Nations. In a statement, US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said the 12 Russians in question had " abused their privilege of residence" in the US and had "engaged in espionage activities that are adverse to our national security."

[Mar 26, 2018] Trump orders expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats, closure of Seattle consulate -- RT US News

Notable quotes:
"... abused their privilege of residence" ..."
"... "engaged in espionage activities that are adverse to our national security." ..."
Mar 26, 2018 | www.rt.com

President Donald Trump has ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats and the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle. It comes in response to the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, which the UK has blamed on Russia. The move follows major diplomatic pressure by the UK on its allies to follow their lead in expelling Russian diplomats. The Russian embassy in Washington had previously urged Trump not to heed the "fake news " on Skripal's poisoning.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has accused Moscow of being behind the poisoning of the former spy Skripal and his daughter in the town of Salisbury in early March.

Breaking: US to expel 48 Russian embassy workers in Washington, D.C. and 12 at the Russian mission to the U.N. U.S. says they were intel officers using diplo status as cover. pic.twitter.com/mRuwY8Tes6

-- Patrick Tucker (@DefTechPat) March 26, 2018

Of the 60 diplomats expelled, 12 formed part of the Russian mission to the United Nations. In a statement, US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said the 12 Russians in question had " abused their privilege of residence" in the US and had "engaged in espionage activities that are adverse to our national security."

[Mar 26, 2018] United front against Kremlin is a coup for Theresa May by Catherine Philp

Looks like this is carefully planned operation, not an incident
Mar 26, 2018 | thetimes.co.uk

United front against Kremlin is a coup for Theresa May

Catherine Philp, Diplomatic Correspondent

The largest mass expulsion of Russian spies from the West is a significant diplomatic achievement for Theresa May at a time when she could badly use one.

Her failure to persuade Donald Trump to back the Paris climate agreement or make him see the wisdom of the Iran nuclear deal has undermined Britain's claim to act as a bridge between Europe and the United States.

Similarly, Brexit means Britain is loosening its bonds with Europe, relinquishing its role in steering the EU's relations with the rest of the world.

[Mar 26, 2018] Russia Could Seize UK Business Assets If West Slaps Economic Sanctions, Senator Warns

Mar 26, 2018 | huffingtonpost.co.uk

Russia could seize the assets of European and American companies operating in the country in retaliation for any economic sanctions imposed by the West amid tensions over the Ukraine crisis, a top Russian senator has warned.

Andrey Klishas, chairman of the upper house committee on constitutional law, told RIA Novosti that a team of lawyers are preparing a federal bill that would enable Russian president Vladimir Putin and the government to confiscate foreign-owned property in Russia, including assets owned by private companies.

"All sanctions must be mutual," Klishas said. "We are only suggesting that instead of threatening each other with sanctions we should together with our partners calmly read the Ukrainian Constitution and understand what has happened in this sovereign country".

"The main thing we are trying to achieve, whether our European and American partners want it or not, is to make others listen to our legal arguments and adequately react to them."

Conservative MP Brooks Newmark, a member of parliament's influential Treasury Select Committee, suggested that the UK could hit Russian business assets and bank accounts in turn.

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He told HuffPostUK: "We can economically hurt Putin and his cronies as well, we can put a huge amount of economic pressure on them. They have enormous business interests in the UK and bank accounts here, too."

The White House earlier this week called off trade talks with Russia. President Barack Obama warned earlier this week that if Russia 'continued on its current trajectory" then the US was prepared to impose "a whole series of steps -- economic, diplomatic -- that will isolate Russia and will have a negative impact on Russia's economy and its standing in the world."

In response, foreign minister Sergey Lavrov told the UN Human Rights Council: "Those who try to interpret the situation as a type of aggression and threaten sanctions and boycotts, are the same who consistently have encouraged the sides to refuse dialogue and have ultimately polarised Ukrainian society."

A spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry said: "Moscow has explained to the Americans, repeatedly and demonstrably, why their one-sided punitive measures are not matching the standards of civilized relations between nations. If this fails to take effect, we will have to retaliate, and not necessarily in a mirror way."

[Mar 26, 2018] Theresa May devious plot was to blame Russia for a "chemical attack on Britain" which is an act of war and then invoke NATO Article 5 and impose draconian sanctions on Russia, which allow confiscation of Russian assets in Britain and at the same time protect Britain from the direct retaliation

Notable quotes:
"... What matters is the referenced "aide memoire" which the Russian MFA produced for distribution to the ambassadors for conveyance to their capitals. That document is here: Official Statement of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the "Skripal Case" http://thesaker.is/official-statement-of-the-russian-ministry-of-foreign-affairs-on-the-skripal-case/ ..."
"... The document raises a number of questions about the case which the British appear to be avoiding answering and also points out that there is a procedure under the Convention For The Prohibition of Chemical Weapons" which Russia alleges the British are not following. ..."
"... Mercouris believes the intent of Britain was to get a UNSC Resolution blaming Russia (which Russia would veto) and then getting NATO to impose wide-ranging sanctions against Russia under Article 5 of the NATO Treaty and that this isn't going to happen. ..."
"... It's important to note that the language Theresa May has been using blames Russia for a "chemical attack on Britain" which is an act of war and can be used to invoke NATO Article 5. ..."
"... But it seems most of the parties decided to duck that serious step and left May hanging. Depending on what new details come out about the Skripal attack, I suspect the whole affair may end back-firing against Britain. ..."
"... The role of May & Johnson was so obvious and it defied the human dignity to such extend that others did not dare to participate in the provocation. ..."
Mar 22, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Richardstevenhack , 22 March 2018 at 05:15 PM

Movement on the Skripal case from Russia. They called together ambassadors from numerous nations to the Foreign Ministry and held a two-hour meeting to discuss the British allegations against Russia. The video of that is here:

Russian MFA summons all ambassadors to a meeting on Skripal case (MUST WATCH!!!)

http://thesaker.is/russian-mfa-summons-all-ambassadors-to-a-meeting-on-skripal-case-must-watch/

Although the headline says "Must watch", I wouldn't bother. I watched it and it was mostly a waste of time. There was one statement bringing up the point that all that is known about the alleged "Novichok" agent comes from one Russian defector to the US who is working for the US and what that means for the validity of any statement about those agents.

What matters is the referenced "aide memoire" which the Russian MFA produced for distribution to the ambassadors for conveyance to their capitals. That document is here: Official Statement of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the "Skripal Case" http://thesaker.is/official-statement-of-the-russian-ministry-of-foreign-affairs-on-the-skripal-case/

The document raises a number of questions about the case which the British appear to be avoiding answering and also points out that there is a procedure under the Convention For The Prohibition of Chemical Weapons" which Russia alleges the British are not following.

Alexander Mercouris at The Duran analyzes the EU response to the British allegations in a UNSC meeting which occurred on March 14th.

Britain's ultimatum to Russia BACKFIRES, NATO and EU allies reject demands for action on Skripal http://theduran.com/britain-struggles-win-allied-support-skripal/

Although the EU publicly claims (and repeated these claims in the Russian MFA meeting referenced above) solidarity with Britain, the UNSC meeting was considerably more muted in terms of ascribing the Skripal attack to Russia. Mercouris believes the intent of Britain was to get a UNSC Resolution blaming Russia (which Russia would veto) and then getting NATO to impose wide-ranging sanctions against Russia under Article 5 of the NATO Treaty and that this isn't going to happen.

It's important to note that the language Theresa May has been using blames Russia for a "chemical attack on Britain" which is an act of war and can be used to invoke NATO Article 5.

In other words the British referral to the UN Security Council had the purpose of preparing the ground for an emergency NATO summit at which Britain would invoke Article 5.

But it seems most of the parties decided to duck that serious step and left May hanging. Depending on what new details come out about the Skripal attack, I suspect the whole affair may end back-firing against Britain.

Anna -> Richardstevenhack ... , 22 March 2018 at 09:17 PM
It is hard to wrap one's mind around the stupidity of the Skripal affair, considering that the UK (or perhaps the Friends of Israel in the UK) decided to use the case of poisoning of a Russian citizen Julia Skripal (and her father) during her visit to the UK, as a ground for Article 5 -- before any evidence is collected and before a thorough investigation is conducted.

The role of May & Johnson was so obvious and it defied the human dignity to such extend that others did not dare to participate in the provocation.

[Mar 26, 2018] Melania Trump was 'furious' after Stormy Daniels reports

Jan 29, 2018 | nypost.com

First lady Melania Trump was reportedly "furious" after the news broke about President Trump's alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels.

Sources close to the couple told the New York Times that Melania was "blindsided" by the reports of her husband's supposed cover-up -- which included $130,000 in hush money, paid out to Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election.

She has been trying to stay out of the public eye ever since, the sources said.

Trump's alleged tryst with Daniels, if true, would have taken place just months after Melania gave birth to their son, Barron, in March 2006.

It was first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Jan. 18. In Touch magazine published a follow-up piece a day later, featuring an interview with the porn vixen from 2011, in which she confessed to the hookup.

Since then, Melania has canceled an overseas trip with the president, made an unplanned visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum and even enjoyed some R&R at Mar-a-Lago.

The first lady was reportedly in Florida on Friday while Trump was in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum. The impromptu stop in the Sunshine State wound up costing taxpayers about $64,000, according to the Times.

see also Team Trump paid porn star $130K to keep quiet about extramarital affair Team Trump paid porn star $130K to keep quiet about extramarital affair A lawyer for Donald Trump arranged to fork over $130,000... Melania has said very little in the days following the WSJ article.

Her spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, blasted the affair allegations, saying, "The laundry list of salacious & flat-out false reporting about Mrs. Trump by tabloid publications & TV shows has seeped into 'main stream media' reporting She is focused on her family & role as FLOTUS -- not the unrealistic scenarios being peddled daily by the fake news."

The first lady is expected to reappear alongside her husband Tuesday during his State of the Union address.

"That is the plan," Grisham said.

[Mar 25, 2018] Cambridge Analytica Scandal Rockets to Watergate Proportions and Beyond by Adam Garrie

Highly recommended!
Mar 25, 2018 | www.eurasiafuture.com

Manipulating democracy -- brainwashing the public for a large fee

Cambridge Analytica, the data harvesting firm that worked for the Trump campaign, is in the midst of a scandal that should make everyone who cares about a clean political process demand major investigations of anyone who has procured the services of the company, major prosecutions of those who have violated laws across multiple nations and a wholesale revitalisation of electoral laws to prevent politicians from ever again procuring the services of unethical companies like Cambridge Analytica.

Days ago, whistleblower Christopher Wylie went public about his time working for Cambridge Analytica and specifically about how the firm illegally obtained the public and private data, including the private messages of 50 million Facebook users. He also exposed how Cambridge Analytica used this data to run highly scientific social manipulation campaigns in order to effectively brainwash the public in various countries to support a certain political candidate or faction.

Cambridge Analytica's dubious methods were used to meddle in the US election after the Trump campaign paid Cambridge Analytica substantial sums of money for their services. The firm also meddled in the last two Kenyan Presidential elections, elections in Nigeria, elections in Czech Republic, elections in Argentina, elections in India, the Brexit campaign, UK Premier Theresa May's recently election and now stands accused of working with the disgraced former Pakistani Premier Nawaz Sharif in an attempt to reverse his judicial ban on holding public office, while helping his PML-N party win the forthcoming general election.

Beyond the scandalous use of personal data from Facebook users and the illegal access to people's private messages, Cambridge Analytica has now been exposed as a company that, by the hidden-camera admission of its CEO Alexander Nix, engages in nefarious, illegal and outrageous activities across the globe.

The UK Broadcaster Channel 4 just released a video of Cambridge Analytica's CEO and Managing DIrector Mark Turnbull in a conversation with an undercover reporter posing as a Sri Lankan businessman interested in meddling in domestic elections. During the conversation Nix boasted of Cambridge Analytica's history of using entrapment, bribery and intimidation against the political opponents of its wealthy clients. Furthermore, Nix boasted about his firm's ability to procure Ukrainian prostitutes as a means to entrap adversaries while also procuring the services of "Israeli spies" as part of dirty smear operations.

The activities that Nix boasted of using in the past and then offered to a prospective client are illegal in virtually every country in the world. But for Nix and his world of ultra-rich clients, acting as though one is above the law is the rule rather than the exception. Thus far, Cambridge Analaytica has been able to escape justice throughout the world both for its election meddling, data harvesting, data theft and attempts to slander politicians through calculated bribery and entrapment schemes.

One person who refused to be tempted by Cambridge Analytica was Julian Assange. Alexander Nix personally wrote to Julian Assange asking for direct access to information possessed by Wikileaks and Assange refused. This is a clear example of journalistic ethics and personal integrity on the part of Assange. Justice must be done

Cambridge Analytica stands accused of doing everything and more that the Russian state was accused of doing in respect of meddling in the 2016 US Presidential election. While meetings and conversations that Trump campaign officials, including Steve Bannon had with Cambridge Analyatica big wigs were not recorded, any information as to what was said during these exchanges should be thoroughly investigated by law enforcement and eventually made public for the sake of restoring transparency to politics.

Just as the Hillary Clinton campaign openly conspired to deprive Bernie Sanders of the Democratic Party's nomination, so too did Donald Trump's campaign pay Cambridge Analytica to conspire against the American voters using a calculated psychological manipulation campaign that was made possible through the use of unethically obtained and stolen data.

While Facebook claims it was itself misled and consequently victimised by Cambridge Analytica and has subsequently banned the firm from its platform, many, including Edward Snowden have alleged that Facebook knew full well what Cambridge Analytica was doing with the data retrieved from its Facebook apps. Already, the markets have reacted to the news and the verdict is not favourble in terms of the public perception of Facebook as an ethical company. Facebook's share prices are down over 7% on the S&P 500. This represents the biggest tumble in the price of Facebook share prices since 2014. Moreover, the plunge has knocked Facebook out of the coveted big five companies atop the S&P 500. Furthermore, Alex Stamos, Facebook's security director has announced that he will soon leave the company.

The Trump myth and Russia myth exposed

Donald Trump has frequently boasted of his expert campaigning skills as being the reason he won an election that few thought he could have ever won. While Trump was a far more charismatic and exciting platform speaker than his rival Hillary Clinton, it seems that for the Trump campaign, Trump ultimately needed to rely on the expensive and nefarious services of Cambridge Analytica in order to manipulate the minds of American voters and ultimately trick them into voting for him. It is impossible to say whether Trump would have still won his election without Cambridge Analaytica's services, but the fact they were used, should immediately raise the issue of Trump's suitability for office.

Ultimately, the Trump campaign did conspire to meddle in the election, only it was not with Russia or Russians with whom the campaign conspired, it was with the British firm Cambridge Analytica. Thus one sees that both the narrative about Trump the electoral "genius" and the narrative about Trump the Kremlin puppet are both false. The entire time, the issue of Trump campaign election meddling was one between a group of American millionaires and billionaires and a sleaze infested British firm.

Worse than Watergate

In 1972, US President Richard Nixon conspired to cover-up a beak-in at the offices of his political opponents at the Watergate Complex. The scandal ultimately led to Nixon's resignation in 1974. What the Trump campaign did with Cambridge Analytica is far more scandalous than the Watergate break-in and cover-up. Where Nixon's cronies broke into offices to steal information from the Democratic party, Trump's paid cyber-thugs at Cambridge Analytica broke in to the private data of 50 million people, the vast majority of whom were US citizens.

Richard Nixon, like Donald Trump, was ultimately driven by a love of power throughout his life. Just as Trump considered running for President for decades, so too did Nixon try to run in 1960 and lost to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, while he also failed to become governor of California in 1962 election. By 1968 he finally got into the White House at the height of the Vietnam War. When time came for his re-election, Nixon's team weren't going to take any chances and hence the Watergate break-in was orchestrated to dig up dirt on Nixon's opponent. As it turned out Nixon won the 1972 by a comfortable margin, meaning that the Watergate break-in was probably largely in vain.

Likewise, Trump may well have won in 2016 even without Cambridge Analytica, but in his quest for power, Trump has resorted to dealing with a company whose practices have done far more damage to the American people than the Watergate break-in.

New laws are needed

While existing laws will likely be sufficient to bring the fiends at Cambridge Analytica to justice, while also determining the role that Trump campaign officials, up to and including Trump played in the scandal, new laws must be enshrined across the globe in order to put the likes of Cambridge Analytica out of business for good.

The following proposals must be debated widely and ideally implemented at the soonest possible date:

-- A total ban on all forms of data mining/harvesting for political purposes.

-- A total ban on the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence in any political campaign or for any political purpose.

-- A mandatory seizing of the assets of any company involved in data mining/harvesting for political purposes, after which point such a company would be forcibly shut down permanently.

-- A mandatory seizing of the assets of any company involved in the use of artificial intelligence or algorithms in the course of a public political campaign.

-- A total ban on the use of internet based platforms, including social media by political candidates and their direct associates for anything that could reasonably be classified as a misinformation and/or manipulation scheme.

-- A total ban on politicians using third party data firms or advertising firms during elections. All such advertising and analysis must be devised by advisers employed directly by or volunteering for an individual candidate or his or her party political organisation.

-- A total ban on any individual working for a political campaign, who derives at least half of his or her income from employment, ownership and/or shares in a company whose primary purpose is to deliver news and analysis.

-- A total ban on anyone paid by a political candidate to promote his or her election from an ownership or major share holding role in any company whose primary purpose is to deliver news and analysis until 2 years after the said election.

If all of these laws were implemented along with thorough campaign finance reform initiatives, only then can anything remotely resembling fair elections take place.

The elites eat their own

While many of the media outlets who have helped to publish the revelations of whistleblower Christopher Wylie continue to defame Russia without any evidence about Russian linkage to the 2016 US election (or any other western vote for that matter), these outlets are nevertheless exposing the true meddling scandal surrounding the Trump campaign which has the effect of destroying the Russia narrative.

In this sense, a divided elite are turning against themselves. While the billionaire property tycoon Donald Trump can hardly be described as anything but a privileged figure who moved in elite public circles for most of his life, his personal style, rhetoric and attitude towards fellow elites has served to alienate Trump from many. Thus, there is a desire on the part of the mainstream media to expose a scandal surrounding Trump in a manner that would be unthinkable in respect of exposing a cause less popular among western elites, for example the brutal treatment of Palestine by the Zionist regime.

In this sense, Trump's own unwillingness or lack of desire to endear himself to fellow elites and instead present himself as a 'man of the people', might be his penultimate undoing. His rich former friends are now his rich present day enemies and many ordinary voters will be completely aghast at his involvement with Cambridge Analytica, just as many Republicans who voted for Nixon, became converts to the anti-Nixon movement once the misdeeds and dishonesty of Richard Nixon were made public. Many might well leave the 'Trump train' and get on board the 'political ethics express'.

Conclusion

This scandal ultimately has nothing to do with one's opinion on Trump or his policies, let alone any of the other politicians who have hired Cambridge Analytica. The issue is that a company engaged in the most nefarious, dangerous, sleazy and wicked behaviour in the world, is profiting from their destruction of political institutions that ought to be based on open policy debates rather than public manipulation, brainwashing and artificial intelligence.

The issue is also one of privacy. 50 million people have been exploited by an unethical company and what's more is that the money from the Trump campaign helped to empower this unethical company. This is therefore as unfair to non-voters as it is to voters. Cambridge Analytica must be shut down and all companies like it must restrict the scope of their operations or else face the same consequence.

[Mar 25, 2018] Litvinenko wasn't poisoned by Putin - He was likely smuggling the polonium that killed him by Ryan Dawson

Notable quotes:
"... No experienced mob boss like Berezovsky would be dumb enough to murder an underling in such a manner either. Therefore his death was an accident. It was mostly likely it was a botched smuggling operation . Why was he moving such a dangerous substance? Did he need fast cash? Were they planning to create a dirty bomb? Such a "smoky bomb" would turn the Polonium into powder and kill anyone who ingested it. ..."
"... Traces of Polonium were found on the planes that Litvinenko had been on. So I think we can deduce what happened. He was a mule . The questions remain, why did he have it?, Where did he get it? What was he going to do with it? Why was it in the offices of Berezovsky and Erinsys Ltd (Britain's Blackwater)? ..."
Apr 26, 2015 | www.sott.net

ANC Report, Sun, 26 Apr 2015 22:44 UTC
Berezovsky

Boris Berezovsky Save As we all know Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned by polonium, a rare radioactive substance. The main narrative blamed it all on Vladimir Putin of Russia. The rationale rested on little other than because Litvinenko was a Putin critic . This was the quick line in mass media, and it was on all the typical war propaganda channels.

There are many things wrong with the "Putin did it" story. For one, there is no motive , even with Litvinenko being a critic of Russia, he was no threat whatsoever to Putin. The man worked with Chechen terrorists and the Israeli-Russian oligarchs . But assuming that there was a sufficient motive to kill him, think about this: Why would Russia use a very rare, very expensive, and easily traceable radioactive substance to kill him instead of some cheap poison or just shooting him? Why risk smuggling radioactive material into the UK which is an act of war?

Yet that is exactly what the UK/US media would have you believe. They want to say that Putin had someone sneak into the UK with polonium and poison Litvinenko with it. It just isn't plausible. It's actually absurd.

Alexander Litvinenko who was formerly FSB fled to the UK to avoid court prosecution in Russia, worked for a shady Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky. Boris Berezovsky just so happens to be the Israeli-Russian oligarch who lived in London after fleeing the Russian judicial system for a multitude of crimes too long to list. He was on Interpol's most wanted list. Here is the grand prize. After the US and UK press branded Putin with the poisoning despite there being Zero evidence, (something the US is very well known for now) investigators were tracking down the traces of Polonium in the UK. They detected traces of Polonium at Berezovsky's office and residence! Now I do not know about you, but in my place of work, and certainly in my house, I do not have rare radioactive substances. Polonium is not something you just get at the market or pick up by accident walking through the park.

No experienced mob boss like Berezovsky would be dumb enough to murder an underling in such a manner either. Therefore his death was an accident. It was mostly likely it was a botched smuggling operation . Why was he moving such a dangerous substance? Did he need fast cash? Were they planning to create a dirty bomb? Such a "smoky bomb" would turn the Polonium into powder and kill anyone who ingested it.

Traces of Polonium were found on the planes that Litvinenko had been on. So I think we can deduce what happened. He was a mule . The questions remain, why did he have it?, Where did he get it? What was he going to do with it? Why was it in the offices of Berezovsky and Erinsys Ltd (Britain's Blackwater)?

The "Putin did it" smear case has never made sense. First of all, the amount of polonium 210 in play would have cost millions of dollars. That amount is too expensive to purchase and too large to go unnoticed if it were stolen. The only way to obtain such a quantity would be on a well organized black market that had a connection to a nuclear facility. It would certainly help organized crime if the nuclear powered supplier they received the Polonium from was not subjected to international inspections or part of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Such a country, ( Foreign country A ) which denied they even built nuclear weapons for decades, would certainly also deny selling their Polonium byproduct as well.

Comment: Not necessarily . See:

Is it possible to hide that from the press? Yes. The media would ignore this for the same reason the media ignores them stealing nuclear secrets and building hundreds of nuclear weapons in Dimona, then throwing whistle blowers who took pictures of their warheads, in jail.

Litvinenko was in Israel, where he met Leonid Nevzlin the CEO of Yukos shortly before he died. If you wanted to buy/steal radioactive material that would be the place. What was he negotiating with Nevzlin? We learned Alexander had been an informant in a case that led to the arrest of nine Georgian and Russian Mobsters in Spain, including Alexander Gofstein a lawyer for Yukos who apparently was laundering money.

The downfall began when Georgian Mob Boss Zakhar Kalashov was arrested in May 2006. The scam was similar to what the old Five Families of New York had done, when guys like Meyer Lansky took profits from illegal gambling businesses and funneled them into buying up real estate in Florida. In the European case, the mob was taking illegal funds and buying up real estate in Spain as well as making investments into legitimate businesses .

Litivnenko's associates, Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi, who both had met with him the day of the poisoning, were also both hospitalized. They left traces of Polonium in Hamburg as they had taken the trip to Germany before meeting Litvinenko. It appears all three were involved in a smuggling operation, but for who?

Short answer: Russian Oligarch Boris Berezovsky's employee Alexander Litvinenko died from over exposure to Polonium in a botched smuggling operation. That is why traces of it were at Boris's house and on the planes Litvinenko was riding to and from Israel. The smear on Putin/Russia using a highly traceable 10 million dollar poison to kill a critic is about as plausible and rational as saying we have "British Intelligence" about Niger.... This transparent bogus lie was a quick and shamelessly sloppy explanation to cover up how and why this man in the UK had a radioactive poison in his body. Polonium only has a half life of 138 days.

Litvinenko had been in Israel to visit Yukos's CEO, just shortly before he died. And it's an open secret that Israel has nuclear weapons, the only place without nuclear safeguard or inspections. Traces of polonium were also on the British Airway planes that Litvinenko took to and from Israel. So they would have the means, location, and the timing fits, but let's just blame Putin, "The New Hitler" as Neocons have dubbed him?

Why the fuss about a conspiracy claiming that Putin put Litvinenko on a hitlist and poisoned him? Well as wacky as that story is, it was probably the best they could come up with on short notice. Boris knew once the police found out how Litvinenko died that there would be a lot of explaining to do. He also knew that if the investigation went forward that they could find more of this Polonium on his properties. So they just claimed the KGB was trying to kill them all.

Some History

This is not the first time that Berezovsky tried to pin a murder on someone else and claim that all the damning evidence pointing to him was a frame . There are the notorious cases (in Russia) of Ivan Litskevich and Vlad Listyev.

Ivan Listkevich was the general director of the Omsk oil refinery, easily the best refinery in Russia. Abramovich and Berezovsky planned to take over the refinery and make it part of Berezovsky's Sibnef (which it now is). Listkevich resisted. Ivan had outside investments from LUKoil (10% of the stock) and CS First Boston. So in no way was he threatened to sink. Omsk was in the best location, had the latest equipment, and was well positioned to continue to soar. They serviced the biggest oil producers in Russia. Naturally Ivan did not want to be swallowed by Sibnef. August 19, 1995 Ivan was found drowned in the Irtysh River. I doubt he went there to swim. Five days later Sibnef (Gazprom) took over . August 24th 1995, using his good buddy Yeltsin, Berezovsky got a Presidential Decree №872, to order a transfer of all the state's share in Omsk as well as 4 other companies to Sibnef. Then in 1996 Boris and Roman privatized Sibnef through a series of Loans-for-Shares' auctions which were a complete scam run through front companies and offshore banks. Yeltsin approved of it.

The case may leave doubts in the mind until one learns about the murder of Vlad Listyev. In 1994 Boris attacked one of his rivals over control of a media outlet. Part of the attack was broadcast all over TV and came to be known as "faces in the snow" as Boris's rival's bodyguard were forced at gun point to lie face down in the snow. Shortly after a 90mph high speed chase and attacking rival Gusinsky's MOST guards and pinning Gusinsky in his own building, Berezovsky would take control of ORT (channel 1) through an illegal non-public "auction" and gain a near media monopoly.

For details on that I recommend reading "God Father of the Kremlin" if you can still find it. It was written by the senior editor of Forbes in Russian who holds a Ph.D in Russian history, Paul Klebnikov. For the record Paul Klebnikov was killed after publishing his book on the Oligarchs , particularly on Boris, who is on the cover. He was shot four times in Moscow while leaving work and then died in the hospital after getting stuck on an elevator.

After the Gusinsky event, Boris had another problem. Vladislav Listyev. Listyev was probably the most popular talk show host in Russia and a TV producer. He was a business partner with Boris but the problem was he was not crooked. As general director of ORT he decided to fix a multi-million dollar leak in the company and indirect way of Boris paying people off in the Mob to do dirty work, as well as paying himself by spending money for ads in other companies owned where he also ran the advertising sales. He had an offer from Sergei Lisovsky to buy up the sector. Negotiations never went through and Vlad had a different idea.

On Feb 20th 1995 Vlad announced that he would break the monopoly of Boris and Sergei . He called for a moratorium on ORT advertising until they could work out ethical standards. As you can imagine that did not make Boris or the rest of the mob happy. Eight days later Boris personally met with "Nikolai", a mafia boss, and handed him a hundred thousand dollars in cash. This was witnessed by two police officers who were monitoring the Mob. Prior to that Boris's lacky Badri offered money to a different gangster but that man was arrested before he could do what was asked of him and he confessed this in jail. On March 1st the day after Berezovsky paid a second Mob Boss, Vlad Listyev was shot in the back at the entrance of his home .

Guilty as sin, with a confession against Badri as well as being personally witnessed by two police, offering another mob boss money, Boris was desperate. He was inches away from being arrested. Boris's TV network was cut out of government subsidies after the police raided it and it was subject to bankruptcy. Fellow media giant and friend Ruppert Murdoch promised to invest in the network and bail him out . How nice. And we all know where Murdoch stands. This relationship might also explain why Fox News and Sky News in the UK were so blatantly cheerleading the "Putin killed Litvinenko" conspiracy story.

But here is the real kicker. It is just as outrageous and far fetched as the Litvinenko poisoning. Boris concocted a story for Yeltsin which was recorded on video tape produced by Irina Lesnevskaya a producer at ORT and a friend of Yeltsin's wife. The tape claimed that it was all a big conspiracy against Berezovsky and that the real culprit (who had no motive other than to frame Boris [apparently able to hire a gun to kill Vlad but not Boris?]) was none other than bitter rival Gusinsky of Most Bank, whom Boris had already tried to kill once.

Yeltsin was paranoid of Gusinsky's political ambitions and Boris knew this. Boris also blamed X-KGB and said Vlad was killed by the MOST group, and not the mob he was witnessed meeting with a week after Vlad was going to break his monopoly. (Sounds like "Iraq moved the nonexistent WMDs to Syria just to make the US look bad." give me a break) Boris claimed to be set up because he was loyal to Yeltsin as was his new media outlet.

Yeltsin, ever a partner in cover ups, not to mention a drunk and a thief, got Boris out of trouble once again by firing the lead investigators in the case, which intimidated others to drop it. There was a huge public outcry. A TV personality had been killed. ORT created a new company called ORT advertising with a monopoly to sell ads on commission no less, and the boss-man chosen was none other than Sergei Lisovsky . Wow, how utterly shameless.

If you can speak Russian or if you can find an English copy of the Boris/Lesnevskaya tape transcript sent to Yeltsin, it's going to make you very angry. It is about as plausible as saying Putin risked an act of war with the UK to kill a critic who worked for both a criminal as well as terrorist.

Who Done It?

So we know what didn't happen. But there still remains a "who done it." The quickest way to get to the bottom of this is to see who is lying the most and loudest, because that is usually who has the most to hide .

Remember Anna Politkovskaya? She was killed on Putin's birthday and the alternative press and the 'mindlessly accepting any conspiracy' types who fell for it, tried to use that circumstantial "evidence" to blame the murder on Putin.

These are the same types that claim Russia bombed its own apartment buildings to start a war with Chechnya omitting the fact that the apartment bombing took place five months after the war has already started, and the "sources" trying to blame the FSB were none other than Boris's lacky Litvinenko and well known plagiarist David Satter, who wrote for the PNAC co-founders' Weekly Standard , which gave the world all the bogus lies about Iraq's WMD and connection to the September 11th attacks. Robert Kagan, the paper's cofounder with William Kristol, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Times calling "Speaking of Iraq" which pushes every erroneous prewar scare tactic there was. His wife Victoria Nuland is the same woman who was recorded on the phone saying "F" the EU and openly talking about who would be a good replacement Prime Minister in Ukraine. She chose Arseniy Yatseniuk, who she called "Yatz" and he did become the prime minister of Ukraine a month later after the coup. Everything out of this faction's mouth has been blindly anti-Russian.

There is a huge difference between conspiracy and kookpiracy. Getting away from the outlandish unsubstantiated claims about Anna's death, let's uncover something factual. Anna Politkovskaya was the journalist who had published three different articles on how SOMEONE was testing Polonium on Chechen children . Gee! Where have we seen THAT scenario before? Anna's articles were published in the Novaya Gazeta in 2006 and she was killed October of that same year.

The Washington Post then makes this clever claim. "Leonid Nevzlin, a former Yukos oil company shareholder and Russian exile currently living in Israel, told the Associated Press in late November that Litvinenko had given him a document related to a dossier on criminal charges made by Russian prosecutors against people connected to Yukos. Nevzlin, who is charged by Russian prosecutors with having organized killings, fraud and tax evasion, claimed Litvinenko's inquiries may have provided a motive for his poisoning"

Notice who else is in that Washington Post article (Scaramella) and who was planting the ideas that Putin had killed both Litvinenko and Anna. How crazy is that to use polonium to murder someone...Scaramella is a rotten one. After Anna's lawyer Stanislav Markelov was murdered in 2009 followed by the murder of one of her key informants in Chechnya, Natalia Estemirova the same year, there was a retrial in Anna's case which went to the Supreme Court. Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov stirred up a public disgust when he said about Anna's informant Natalia Estemirova on Radio Liberty "She was a woman...who had never possessed any honor, dignity or conscience."

The prosecution cornered Dmitry Pavliutchenkov a former policeman who in turn confessed Lom-Ali Gaitukayev was who negotiated the contract killing and behind him he suspected Boris Berezovsky . Dmitry was sentenced to 11 years in jail. Five men were found guilty in her murder. Three were the Chechen brothers who had been acquitted in the first trial and they went to prison. Rustam Makhmudov and Lom-Ali Gaitukayev got life sentences in 2014. Berevsovsky had died the year before in March of 2013.

The most troubling thing here is not that mob did something illegal or that the Western press jumped the gun to do a anti-Russian witch hunt. All of that is pretty run of the mill. It's not even that Israel secretly has nukes and is involved with organized crime. Again, image my lack of shock. It's not even the multiple murders that are most troubling. The most troubling part of this story is what the ultimate purpose of that much Polonium was for and why it was in the UK. The potential for a dirty bomb is enormous. With the current climate of ISIS and disgruntled youth in Europe joining the mercenary forces to fight Israel's enemies in Syria and Lebanon, a dirty bomb in the UK is not an unimaginable scenario. Just having such a thing could also hold leverage over politicians there too. The source of the Polonium should have been traced and potential sources should also be subject to inspection.

  1. William Dunkerley on April 30, 2015 12:11 pm The news stream is replete with articles that falsify information in order to vilify Putin. The Arafat polonium poisoning is an example. But according to a March 17, 2015 AP report citing French experts, "Yasser Arafat was NOT poisoned by polonium. Good for AP for exposing that polonium nonsense. It's rare to find these stories debunked in the Western media. The long-running malicious narrative in Litvinenko saga is more the norm. The mainstream story is utterly false and without merit. I documented that in my book "The Phony Litvinenko Murder." Why do people believe all this specious rubbish? Largely it's a result of a phenomenon called "confirmation bias." I explain that process in detail in my book "Ukraine in the Crosshairs." The Ukrainian crisis is just one more example of how Putin's enemies have skillfully taken advantage of confirmation bias to snooker the masses.
    • Ryan Dawson on January 19, 2016 7:49 pm I also debunked the Arafat myth given that there is no way it would survive so long with such a short half life. Would you like your book to go in our library ? I'll read it then maybe we can talk about it.
  2. Mandatum Mandat on February 10, 2016 4:47 am What is your source for the claim that Litvinenko left a radioactive trail after his trip to Israel? Can't find any discusssion of this claim other than your own material.

[Mar 25, 2018] The West Is Going to War With Russia by Brad Cabana

Mar 25, 2018 | russia-insider.com

In a game of one-up-man-ship, UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has been blowing the proverbial bridges between Russia and the western world to pieces in the last several weeks with comments that have really been beyond the pale. He suggested that Russian President Putin was the person that gave the go ahead for the attempted assassination of a former Russian spy in England. He then absolutely blew that out of the water by claiming yesterday that holding the World Soccer Cup in Russia was akin to Hitler's 1936 Olympics. This last point I personally took huge exception to, because the fact is the 25 million or so Soviets that died actually fighting Hitler saved England fro German invasion - an invasion that England would have lost hands down. In truth, Johnson might just as well of accused modern day Israel of being a Nazi state. That's just how bizarre Johnson's attack on Russia was. And perhaps more importantly in the scheme of things, how incendiary the attack was.

What is becoming clear is that the US, and its western allies, are laying the groundwork for a massive war, perhaps a world war, with Eurasia and its allies in the Middle East. With the appointment of Bolton on the same day as Trump signed the first trade action against China (and he emphasized it was the first of many) the signs are very clear. The West is going to war with the East. The likely initial targets are Syria, and Iran. Any attack on Iran is a declaration of war on Russia. Iran after all is not just an important ally to Russia, but it sits right on the border with Russia. In other words, Russia would be pulled into such a war out of self-defence if for no other reason.

Bearing Russia's position in mind, think back to last week when Russia announced a number of new generation weapons it stated were untouchable by Western anti-missile capabilities. It is quite obvious that Russia is attempting to dissuade the West from its intended push against one of Russia's most strategic interests - Iran. It's also quite evident from Trump's gestures today that he is completely unmoved by Russia's message. That can only mean one thing - we are going to war. When I say we, I mean the West. As someone who has served, and the son of a World War II veteran I am disgusted by Western aggression toward Eurasia. Yes, I said Western aggression. Have a look around at all the conflicts going on. They're all going on around Russia's or China's backyard - not so much in the West...

Nobody knows for certain how this will play its deadly hand out. One thing is for certain, scrapping of the Iran Nuclear Agreement appears imminent. Also, a reigniting of the Saudi/Iran conflict is sure to follow. The West will need an easily understandable excuse to attack Iran, and that can only be one of three things really: an attack on Israel; coming to the aid of Saudi; or a North Korea style action against Iran having a nuclear weapon once the aforementioned agreement is unilaterally cancelled.

This won't be a picnic for the West though. Leave a direct conflict with Russia and China out of the equation for the moment. Consider that a Saudi/Iran conflict, or an Israeli/Iran conflict would have the affect of tripling oil prices over night. Then consider a massive sell off on the stock market. Factor in the US Federal Reserves increases in its over night lending rates. All these things, and quite a few economic problems not mentioned here, would plummet the Western economies into a cataclysmic spiral. The markets are very jittery as it is, sensing as they do that things have gone quite far off the tracks. Many people have said to me that such an economic collapse would cause Eurasia to fall as well, but I always answer that statement like this: "Remember in 2008 when the market collapsed? China sent 250 million people home to their villages, without a job, and that was that. There was no revolt, or any social turmoil. If that happened in the US or any Western economy, there would be civil insurrection almost over night. Therein lies the difference. While China would be hurt, it can sustain the blow. The Western world cannot. In other words, a war of economic attrition."

I don't know if there is anything the ordinary citizen can do to forestall this madness - as one American recently said to me: "all I can do is vote". But, I suggest if you like the world in one piece and you are concerned about the end of humanity, get out and say something. Be accountable to yourself, to humanity, and the world. Don't be a sheeple.

Source: Rock Solid Politics


Serg Derbst2 days ago ,

I have the same worries. The mainstream media here in Germany, which is entirely and 100% under CIA control, has been ramping up anti-Russia propaganda since weeks. I didn't think it would be possible after the Ukraine conflict but it is even worse now. The comments of this filthy lunatic Boris Johnson but also of his boss-bitch Theresa May have been way below any line of decency. It's even below the kind of rhetoric Hitler has used when he talked about other statesmen such as (this fat, ugly war-criminal and mass murderer) Winston Churchill.

But it's not "the West" that is going to war, it is the Anglo-American establishment. "West" is an artificial propaganda term that should not be used anyway, because all it denotes is the countries dominated by Anglo-America. Germany and France, the only countries powerful enough to stop Anglo-American madness, are usually dancing to the tune of Warshington and London, but I am not so sure if they will really go all the way here, especially with Iran. Also and despite all the propaganda, while German and French people may not trust Russia and see Putin as a "dictator", they also see the US regime (especially with the Trumpet in charge) as nothing but a dangerous, trigger-happy war machinery. There is no way you could sell a war against Iran to them, also not the rest of Europe including Britain. I even have doubts about whether the American public would swallow such a war.

Either way, it will be a disaster for the "West" - economically, politically, militarily. In fact, it will be the end of the "West" and of the Anglo-American empire including the Zionist colony. So in the end there might be a great result of yet another horror. What Russia really needs to do now is to give both Syria and Iran the full power of Russian air defence.

Scandinavia - Serg Derbst2 days ago ,

Craig Murray is on fire -

Evidence submitted by the British government in court today proves, beyond any doubt, that Boris Johnson has been point blank lying about the degree of certainty Porton Down scientists have about the Skripals being poisoned with a Russian "novichok" agent.

Yesterday in an interview with Deutsche Welle Boris Johnson claimed directly Porton Down had told him they positively identified the nerve agent as Russian:

*You argue that the source of this nerve agent, Novichok, is Russia. How did you manage to find it out so quickly? Does Britain possess samples of it?
Let me be clear with you When I look at the evidence, I mean the people from Porton Down, the laboratory

So they have the samples

They do. And they were absolutely categorical and I asked the guy myself, I said, "Are you sure?" And he said there's no doubt.*

I knew and had published from my own whistle blowers that this is a lie. Until now I could not prove it. But today I can absolutely prove it, due to the judgement at the High Court
case which gave permission for new blood samples to be taken from the Skripals for use by the OPCW. Justice Williams included in his judgement a summary of the evidence which tells us, directly for the first time, what Porton Down have actually said...

Read more here: https://www.craigmurray.org...

hiddeninplainsight Scandinavia -a day ago ,

What a shameful disgrace is the UK government.

CyricRenner Serg Derbsta day ago ,

Having spent some time in Germany, I have to agree with these comments. If you think the Propaganda is bad in the US and the UK, in Germany it is even worse. It is almost as if they are in competition to be the most servile and obedient to their masters. It is if history doesn't even exist. It is 1941 all over again. The difference being Germany has nothing to fight with and if it comes to war they will be absolutely pulverized to nuclear ash.

This is how stupid the media is to hype this Anti-Russian propaganda 24/7, 7 days a week. There is no real "alternative" news that I could find either. If there is a silver lining in all this though, is that many Germans don't take the media seriously at all anymore. When you overcook the pot, this is what can happen. Just like that fool Boris Johnson. He has now compared Putin to Hitler and the 1936 olympics. How stupid can this buffoon be? You think you can just carry on with business as usual once this stupid provocation with the poisoned spy blows over after saying something like that? He hasn't just insulted Putin, he has insulted all of Russia who sacrificed more than any other country to stop Hitler. I can't believe what low IQ clowns the UK is producing as politicians these days. It is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Nationalist Globalist Oligarch CyricRennera day ago ,

Does it really matter if the so called Germans take the media seriously?

They keep voting for Mama Merkel, that really tells me quite a bit about the people living in Germany and their political concerns.

[Mar 25, 2018] Cambridge Analytica was always anti Russia. Involved in operations in most of the ex soviet countries to create a hatred of ethnic Russians and I think will work with non nationalist types who are very anti Russia.

Mar 25, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Peter AU 1 , Mar 25, 2018 1:23:38 PM | 4
James 1

I ran onto something about that when researching SCL/Cambridge Analytica

The Mercer/Cambridge Analytica US wing of SCL put a lot of funding into the leave campaign which was undeclared. Like a political campaign, donations above a threshold have to be declared.

Threshold for declaring donations I think was around 3 to 7000 and CA put in over 300 000.

Peter AU 1 , Mar 25, 2018 2:31:01 PM | 10
james 6

I have been researching SCL the last few days now. It is starting to look as though, rather than being political mercenary's working for whoever pays, they seem to back nationalist leaning groups or individuals. They have a political or geo-political agenda but not sure what at the moment. Always anti Russia. Involved in operations in most of the ex soviet countries to create a hatred of ethnic Russians and I think will work with non nationalist types who are very anti Russia.

[Mar 25, 2018] CNN would use any opportunity to smear Trump. Even publishing revelations of a porno star. That does not apply to Bill Clinton behaviour thouth.

I guess there are many women who would provide more explosive evidence about Bill clinton. CNN is just not interested ;-)
Mar 25, 2018 | www.cnn.com

Washington (CNN)

Stormy Daniels was "truthful about having unprotected vaginal intercourse with Donald Trump in July 2006," according to a polygraph test report from 2011.

The report states that the "probability of deception was measured to be less than 1%." It was given to CNN by Michael Avenatti, Daniels' attorney, and contains three pertinent questions: "Around July 2006, did you have vaginal intercourse with Donald Trump?," "Around July 2006, did you have unprotected sex with Donald Trump?" and "Did Trump say you would get on 'The Apprentice'?"

Another Trump attorney involved in Stormy Daniels case Daniels replied yes to all three questions. The first two were analyzed to be truthful and the third question was "inconclusive," according to the polygraph examiner, Ronald Slay. Polygraphs are generally inadmissible in court.

The polygraph was performed at the request of Bauer Publishing, which owns Life & Style and InTouch magazines, according to the reporter who interviewed Daniels in 2011. Reporter Jordi Lippe-McGraw initially interviewed Daniels for Life & Style magazine. The interview was not published at the time, but Bauer Publishing released it in InTouch magazine earlier this year.

Woman named in Stormy Daniels' document accused Trump of unwanted advances

Avenatti confirmed to CNN that he purchased the video and file of the polygraph test for $25,000. "We did so to ensure that it would be maintained and kept safely during the litigation and not be altered or destroyed," Avenatti said in a statement. "We did so after learning that various parties, including mainstream media organization, were attempting to acquire the video and the file and either destroy it or use it for nefarious means." RELATED: The shaky science of lie detectors Daniels tweeted about the encounter Tuesday afternoon following the release of the polygraph, defending herself and saying she's "not going anywhere."

"Technically I didn't sleep with the POTUS 12 years ago. There was no sleeping (hehe) and he was just a goofy reality TV star. But I digress...People DO care that he lied about it, had me bullied, broke laws to cover it up, etc.

And PS...I am NOT going anywhere. xoxoxo," she wrote.

Technically I didn't sleep with the POTUS 12 years ago. There was no sleeping (hehe) and he was just a goofy reality TV star. But I digress...People DO care that he lied about it, had me bullied, broke laws to cover it up, etc.

And PS...I am NOT going anywhere. xoxoxo https://t.co/Js9sEnanIk

-- Stormy Daniels (@StormyDaniels) March 20, 2018
Lippe-McGraw told CNN on Tuesday that Daniels passed the test in a broader sense. "Based off of the interview, we had her take the polygraph test to confirm the details of what she was telling us. There wasn't much in the way of physical evidence, per se," Lippe-McGraw said, adding that the big-picture question they wanted to confirm was that the affair happened, and that Daniels passed.

Lippe-McGraw said that Daniels told her she had unprotected sex with Trump, because Daniels is allergic to latex and didn't have condoms at the time. Earlier Tuesday, Avenatti tweeted out a photograph of Daniels being administered the test.

The Wall Street Journal first released the details of the polygraph questions and answers. Also on Tuesday, Daniels' friend Alana Evans told CNN's Brooke Baldwin that she and Daniels have received threats over the allegations from people who had previously been in the adult industry. "I have not been made aware that Cohen had physically threatened her. I know in the last few weeks, and the last couple of months, that Stormy and myself have received threats from people in the outside world completely trying to defend Trump and Cohen and calling us liars and threatening us with physical harm, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's stemming from there as well," Evans said. Evans said this included threatening emails, threats to their families and their safety, and threats to release private information.

CNN's Sara Sidner contributed to this report.

[Mar 25, 2018] Russian aide-memoire to clarify the state of affairs as regards the so-called 'Skripal case'

Notable quotes:
"... On 16 March, the Main Directorate for High-Priority Cases of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation initiated a criminal investigation into the attempted willful murder of Russian citizen Yulia Skripal committed by dangerous means in the territory of the United Kingdom. ..."
"... The Western countries' action on the fabricated 'Skripal case' contravenes the norms of international law and the general practice of inter-State relations, as well as the common sense itself. Naturally, we run a detailed record of all that, and when time comes, those guilty will inevitably be brought to justice. ..."
Mar 21, 2018 | www.voltairenet.org

Russian aide-memoire to clarify the state of affairs as regards the so-called 'Skripal case'

  1. On 12 March 2018, Prime Minister of Great Britain Theresa May, addressing the House of Commons, said it was "highly likely" that the Russian Federation was responsible for the poisoning of former GRU colonel, double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia Skripal on 4 March 2018 in Salisbury, with a nerve agent identified according to British classification as A-234.

    The United Kingdom has publicly raised a question about Russia's "concealing" and "using" part of its chemical arsenal, thus alleging that Russia has "violated" its obligations under the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction (CWC) -- one of the most effective multilateral treaties in the disarmament and non-proliferation field, which was initiated, among others, by our country.

    Thus, the United Kingdom has come out against Russia as well as against the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) itself and the tremendous work that has been done within this organization during the last two decades, including with participation of the United Kingdom.

    Pursuant to the requirements of Article III of the CWC, the Russian Federation submitted a full and complete declaration of all its chemical weapons stockpiles. That data was thoroughly checked and verified by the inspection teams of the OPCW Technical Secretariat. The fact of the full elimination of Russia's chemical arsenal has been officially confirmed by the authorized international institution -- the OPCW.

  2. On 12 March 2018, given the gravity of the accusations brought against our country, the Russian Embassy in London sent a note verbale to the Foreign Office of Great Britain requesting access to the investigation materials, including samples of the chemical agent that British investigators were referring to, so that it could be tested by our experts in the framework of joint investigation.

    Thus, we proposed to act in accordance with paragraph 2 of Article IX of the CWC. It stipulates that States Parties to the Convention should first make every effort to clarify and resolve, through exchange of information and consultations among themselves, any matter which may cause doubt about compliance with the CWC. Under the provisions of that Article, Russia would be ready to respond to the United Kingdom's request within 10 days.

    Unfortunately, the British side rejected that option and, instead of following the existing norms of international law, chose to unscrupulously politicize the issue.

  3. British Prime Minister Theresa May suggested that a special Security Council meeting to discuss the matter be held on 14 March 2018. Suspecting that London would play dirty, Russia insisted on making the Security Council's meeting open.

    It is incomprehensible what the British side was trying to achieve by bringing the issue to the UNSC. This matter by no means falls within the mandate of the UNSC. It is quite obvious that all discussions are pointless until the OPCW gives its assessment of the Salisbury incident (it is important to know whether a nerve agent was actually used; if it was, how the likely origin of the chemicals was determined; what, and on what basis, actions were taken with regard to the victims, etc.).

  4. On 14 March 2018, British Prime Minister Theresa May, apparently having come to senses, finally sent a letter to Director-General of the Technical Secretariat of the OPCW Ahmet Üzümcü (circulated to all OPCW Executive Council Member States on 15 March 2018) inviting the OPCW Technical Secretariat "to independently verify the analysis" of the British investigation into the Salisbury incident.

    As indicated in the press release by the British Foreign Office of 18 March 2018, following the letter by Ms Theresa May, the UK's Permanent Representative to the OPCW invited experts of the OPCW Technical Secretariat to visit the United Kingdom to carry out an independent analysis of the findings of the British Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down in connection with the Salisbury incident. On 19 March 2018, OPCW experts arrived in the United Kingdom.

    Russia expects the OPCW to make an official detailed account of developments around the 'Skripal case'. We proceed from the understanding that the OPCW Technical Secretariat shall conduct a full-fledged independent investigation in accordance with all relevant provisions of the CWC.

  5. Russia has more and more questions both in legal and practical terms. And we intend to seek answers through the OPCW.

    Russia states that it has not used chemical weapons against Great Britain. We suppose that the attack on the Skripals with toxic chemicals shall be deemed a terrorist act. As Yulia Skripal, a Russian citizen, is among the victims to the incident, we propose cooperation with the British Side under Article IX of the CWC.

    We would like to ascertain the following issues.

    Where, how, and by whom were the samples collected from Sergei and Yulia Skripal? How was it all documented? Who can certify that the data is credible? Was the chain of custody up to all the OPCW requirements when evidence was collected?

    Which methods (spectral analysis and others) were used by the British side to identify, within such a remarkably short period of time, the type of the substance used ("Novichok" according to the western classification)? As far as we know, to do that, they must have had a standard sample of such agent at their disposal.

    And how do these hasty actions correlate with Scotland Yard's official statements that "the investigation is highly likely to take weeks or even months" to arrive at conclusions?

    What information and medical effects led to a hasty decision to administer antidotes to the aggrieved Skripals and the British policeman? Could that hastiness lead to grave complications and further deterioration of their health status?

    Which antidotes exactly were administered? What tests had been conducted to make the decision to use these drugs?

    How can the delayed action of the nerve agent be explained, given that it is a fast-acting substance by nature? The victims were allegedly poisoned in a pizzeria (in a car, at the airport, at home, according to other accounts). So what really happened? How come they were found in some unidentified time on a bench in the street?

    We need an explanation why it is Russia who was accused on the 'Skripal case' without any grounds whatsoever, while works to develop the agent codenamed "Novichok" in the West had been carried out by the United Kingdom, the USA, Sweden and the Czech Republic. There are more than 200 open sources publications in the NATO countries, highlighting the results that those countries achieved in the development of new toxic agents of this type.

  6. Even from purely humanitarian perspective London's action appears simply barbaric. On 4 March 2018 (as British authorities themselves claim) a nerve agent attack against Russian citizen Yulia Skripal was committed in the territory of the United Kingdom.

    Russian Federation has demanded exhaustive information on the course of investigation into the Salisbury incident involving a Russian citizen (the Russian Embassy in London sent the relevant note verbale on 12 March 2018).

    The United Kingdom is breaching elementary rules of inter-State relations and is still denying, without any explanation, Russian officials' consular access to Yulia Skripal envisaged by the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. For more than two weeks now, we have not been able to credibly ascertain what happened to our citizen and what condition she is actually in.

    On 16 March, the Main Directorate for High-Priority Cases of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation initiated a criminal investigation into the attempted willful murder of Russian citizen Yulia Skripal committed by dangerous means in the territory of the United Kingdom.

    The investigation will be conducted in accordance with the Russian legislation and the norms of international law. Highly qualified experts will contribute to the investigation.

    The investigators stand ready to work together with the competent authorities of the United Kingdom. We expect a cooperative approach of the British side.

  7. In the UN Security Council as well as in the OPCW and at other international fora, the Russian Federation has been a consistent and insistent proponent of thorough, comprehensive and professional investigation of all crimes involving toxic chemicals, and of bringing perpetrators to justice.

    We are ready to engage in full-scale and open cooperation with the United Kingdom in order to address any concerns whether in bilateral format or within the OPCW and other international instruments, working within the purview of international law.

    As a responsible member of the international community and a bona fide State Party to the CWC Russia will never speak the language of ultimatums or answer informal and word-of-mouth questions.

    The Western countries' action on the fabricated 'Skripal case' contravenes the norms of international law and the general practice of inter-State relations, as well as the common sense itself. Naturally, we run a detailed record of all that, and when time comes, those guilty will inevitably be brought to justice.

[Mar 25, 2018] Alexander Yakovenko introductory remarks at a press conference by Alexander Yakovenko

Looks like replay of Litvinenko polonium poisoning affair and MH17 tragedy. There was already a plan before the insident and it was activated immediately. Brits really refined the art of false flag poisoning became classics in the genre...
Subsequence actions of EU suggest existence of a very strong US pressure. So much for Trump administration desire of detente with Russia.
Notable quotes:
"... Therefore, the British Government has violated its obligations under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by denying consular access for the Embassy to the Russian citizens. We continue to insist that the access and full information on the condition of our compatriots, whom nobody has seen since 4 March, should be provided. ..."
"... On 12 March, 8 days after the day of poisoning, I was summoned by Foreign Secretary Johnson, who put forward a 24-hour ultimatum to explain the Russian Government's position by the end of the next day. The question was put like following: either the incident in Salisbury was a direct act of the Russian Government against the UK or the Russian Government had lost control of a nerve agent that the Foreign Secretary identified as A-234, and allowed it to get into the hands of others. ..."
"... Next hour Prime Minister May updated the House of Commons about the incident in Salisbury using the same words as Secretary Johnson did at our meeting, except that she introduced the term "Novichok", a bizarre Russian name to use with regard to a chemical substance, in a clear attempt to additionally and quite artificially link the incident to Russia. ..."
"... On 14 March the Prime Minister gave another statement on the incident in Salisbury in the House of Commons, where she announced an expulsion of Russian diplomats and other hostile and provocative measures against Russia. She provided no proof of Russia's alleged involvement in the incident and made a conclusion that, as she put it, it was "highly likely" that Russia was responsible for it. Thus, the British Government again built its official position on pure assumptions. ..."
Mar 25, 2018 | www.voltairenet.org

Ladies and gentlemen,

The Number 1 rule in Britain is to start any statement with a joke. Unfortunately, it's not a time to joke. The issue I am going to raise is too serious.

On 5 March 2018 we heard media reports announcing that the day before two Russian citizens Sergei and Yulia Skripal were poisoned in Salisbury. Sergei Skripal is one who has dual citizenship. First of all I would like to wish all the victims, including Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, who also suffered from this incident, speedy recovery and well-being.

The Embassy has immediately requested the British authorities to share information about the incident and details of the ongoing investigation.

Unfortunately, 18 days have passed since the day of the incident and we have not received any official information from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office or police on the investigation thereof. The British authorities refused to provide samples of the chemical substance. The legitimate consular access to the Russian citizens under the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relation has not been granted.

The only response we received from the British authorities was a Note Verbale about medical condition of Yulia Skripal. It did not go further than the official public statements, according to which she was reportedly critically ill, but in a stable condition. The Foreign Office refused to share information on Sergei Skripal, citing his British citizenship.

Therefore, the British Government has violated its obligations under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by denying consular access for the Embassy to the Russian citizens. We continue to insist that the access and full information on the condition of our compatriots, whom nobody has seen since 4 March, should be provided.

On 12 March, 8 days after the day of poisoning, I was summoned by Foreign Secretary Johnson, who put forward a 24-hour ultimatum to explain the Russian Government's position by the end of the next day. The question was put like following: either the incident in Salisbury was a direct act of the Russian Government against the UK or the Russian Government had lost control of a nerve agent that the Foreign Secretary identified as A-234, and allowed it to get into the hands of others.

Next hour Prime Minister May updated the House of Commons about the incident in Salisbury using the same words as Secretary Johnson did at our meeting, except that she introduced the term "Novichok", a bizarre Russian name to use with regard to a chemical substance, in a clear attempt to additionally and quite artificially link the incident to Russia.

Next day, on 13 March the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs gave a statement on the incident in Salisbury and strongly protested against evidence-free accusations and provocations by the British authorities. It was emphasized that Russia is not to be talked to in ultimatums, and that in any case we can only properly consider the matter after we receive samples of the chemical substance to which UK is referring to and after the UK complies with the Chemical Weapons Convention that stipulates cooperation between States Parties, for which Moscow is ready. Without that there is no sense in the British statements.

On 14 March the Prime Minister gave another statement on the incident in Salisbury in the House of Commons, where she announced an expulsion of Russian diplomats and other hostile and provocative measures against Russia. She provided no proof of Russia's alleged involvement in the incident and made a conclusion that, as she put it, it was "highly likely" that Russia was responsible for it. Thus, the British Government again built its official position on pure assumptions.

The Embassy again requested the British authorities to cooperate under the Chemical Weapons Convention on bilateral basis or through the OPCW Executive Council and share information and the samples of the toxic substance. Due to the pressure of the Russian side, the Prime Minister at last sent a letter to the Director-General of the OPCW Technical Secretariat on 14 March and requested assistance in verifying British analysis.

As I understand, the OPCW experts arrived to the UK this Monday. We do not know their mandate. But I hope they will follow all the necessary procedures and principles of the CWC, including ensuring a proper chain of custody of the samples, if there are any. They would also need to check how that was possible that the British authorities managed to designate the nerve agent used as so called "Novichok" and its origin so quickly. Could it mean that it is highly likely that the British authorities already had this nerve agent in their chemical laboratory in Porton Down, which is the largest secret military facility in the UK that has been dealing with chemical weapons? Is it a coincidence that this chemical weapons facility is only 8 miles away from the site of the incident? How did doctors decide what antidotes to administer to the victims? Russian experts were puzzled by how quickly the British authorities managed to designate the nerve agent allegedly used in Salisbury and how this correlates with Scotland Yard's official statements that "the investigation is highly likely to take weeks or even months" to arrive at conclusions.

We are sure that the results of the Technical Secretariat assistance mission should be reported to the OPCW Executive Council.

A few words about lack of cooperation from the British side.

Instead of imposing a 24-hour deadline the UK could and should have referred to paragraph 2 of Article IX of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which requires the State Parties to make every effort to clarify and resolve through exchange of information and consultations any matter which may cause doubt about compliance with the Convention. A State Party which receives a request from another State Party shall provide as soon as possible, but in any case not later than 10 days after the request, information sufficient to answer the doubt or concern. If they requested information from Russia on 12 March, they would have received it by 22 March.

The British side did not send a request to Russia and is not willing to talk to Russian representatives in the Hague, where the OPCW Technical Secretariat is located. Instead an anti-Russian campaign has been launched in the UK.

To make the story short, Britain has, without any evidence, blamed Russia of poisoning of three people and continues to refuse to cooperate. We cannot accept that.

There is another case, which worries us very much. From the British media, and again not from the British authorities, we have learned about the death of the Russian citizen Mr Nikolai Glushkov. The Embassy has also learned from the press that the police investigating Mr Glushkov's death assumes that he could have died from "compression on the neck", suggesting he was strangled.

In full accordance with the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, the Embassy immediately requested by a Note Verbale full information on the circumstances of the death of the Russian national and on the investigation, but has not received any meaningful response from the Foreign Office so far. Moreover, it seems that the British side is deliberately ignoring our requests and continues to avoid any contacts with the Embassy on this matter.

To summarize what have been said before a Q/A session, I would like to say that the burden of proof lies with the British authorities. By now no facts have been officially presented either to the OPCW, or to us, or to UK's partners, or to the public.

We can't take British words for granted.

The UK has a bad record of violating international law and misleading the international community, which includes invading Yugoslavia (78 days of bombardment), Iraq and Libya under false pretexts, and supporting the coup d'état in Ukraine. I would like to quote President Ronald Reagan, who frequently referred to the Russian proverb "trust but verify".

History shows that British statements must be verified.

We demand full transparency of the investigation and full cooperation with Russia and with the OPCW. Alexander Yakovenko

Alexander Yakovenko

Alexander Yakovenko Russian Federation ambassador to London (since 2011).  This author's articles

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[Mar 25, 2018] Stormy Daniels, Trump's Unlikely Foe, Is 'Not Someone to Be Underestimated' by MATT FLEGENHEIMER , REBECCA R. RUIZ and KATIE VAN SYCKLE

NYT became a yellow publication. And their hate of Trump is really visceral (Not that Trump is an ideal President). Which is strange because Trump folded and with hiring of Bolton now is really Hillary in foreign policy (the only difference is sex, but that can be fixed with the sex change operation)
They write about this prostitute with such a sympathy that I suspect that they are involved in the industry too.
Mar 25, 2018 | www.nytimes.com

She is the actress in pornographic films who is suing a sitting president , with whom she said she had a consensual affair, in order to be released from a nondisclosure agreement she reached with his lawyer just before the 2016 election. Over the past two months, she has guided the story of her alleged relationship with President Trump -- and the $130,000 she was paid to keep silent -- into a full-fledged scandal. If Ms. Clifford's court case proceeds, Mr. Trump may have to testify in depositions, and her suit could provide evidence of campaign spending violations. She is scheduled to appear on "60 Minutes" on Sunday.

And if her name has seemed ubiquitous -- repeated on cable television and in the White House briefing room, and plastered on signs outside nightclubs, where her appearance fees have multiplied -- there is this to consider: Unlike most perceived presidential adversaries, about whom Mr. Trump is rarely shy, Ms. Clifford has not been the subject of a single tweet.

To many in the capital, Ms. Clifford, 39, has become an unexpected force. It is she, some in Washington now joke, and not the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who could topple Mr. Trump.

... ... ...

The false-start campaign coincided with a turbulent moment in her personal life, exposing her to scrutiny in the mainstream press. In July 2009, Ms. Clifford was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of domestic violence after hitting her husband, a performer in the industry, and throwing a potted plant during a fight about laundry and unpaid bills, according to police records. The husband, Michael Mosny, was not injured, and the charge was later dropped. Ms. Clifford had previously been married to another pornographic actor.

She has since married another colleague in the business, Brendon Miller, the father of her now 7-year-old daughter. He is also a drummer and has composed music for her films.

... ... ...

Ms. Clifford has not shown up at competitions since news broke in January that she accepted a financial settlement in October 2016 -- weeks before the election -- agreeing to keep quiet about her alleged intimate relationship with Mr. Trump. She has said the affair, which representatives of Mr. Trump have denied, began in 2006 and extended into 2007, the year she married Mr. Mosny.

Earlier this month, she escalated public attention by filing suit, calling the 2016 contract meaningless given that Mr. Trump had never signed it and revealing that the president's personal lawyer had taken further secret legal action to keep her silent this year.

[Mar 25, 2018] The masses don't care about Stormy Daniels. Who cares? It preceded him being Prez

Mar 25, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Muppet Sun, 03/25/2018 - 15:40 Permalink

The masses don't care about Stormy Daniels. Of course, Trump used his "art of the deal" to score with likely a hundred of bimbos. Who cares? It preceded him being Prez.

Is like the Facebook article about privacy... most people know the truth and don't need the media view. We know Trump cheated. We know FB is corrupt. By far, Trump is better than the corrupt criminal Clinton's.

[Mar 25, 2018] Melania 'staying in hotel' after Stormy Daniels scandal

Mar 25, 2018 | dailymail.co.uk

Me lania Trump has spent a number of nights at a posh D.C. hotel away from President Trump following allegations of a fling with porn star Stormy Daniels, White House sources told DailyMail.com.

[Mar 25, 2018] Melania Trump Fears More Allegations Of Affairs With Donald Will Emerge After '60 Minutes' Special by Beth Shilliday

Rumors, damaging leaks from anonymous sources. that what neoliberal press is about...
Mar 19, 2018 | hollywoodlife.com

Melania , 47, is terrified that more women could emerge with tales of her husband's infidelity. "Melania is unprepared for more women to come forward with allegations of affairs with Donald. Melania wants to leave, but she is paralyzed with fear. She is bracing the worst and is unsure how to move forward," a Washington D.C. insider tells HollywoodLife.com EXCLUSIVELY. Barron , now 11.

"Melania feels stuck with a sinking presidency and she wants to get out before Trump's house of cards comes crashing down around her. She fears what embarrassing revelations Stormy might reveal in her 60 Minutes interview and Melania's greater worries is what impact the revelations may have on the presidency," our source reveals.

...

Trump himself crudely joked about Melania being the next person to leave the White House during a speech at the Gridiron Club Dinner on March 3. Unfortunately, divorcing a sitting president would be unheard of and history making. Melania's pretty much stuck with him as long as he's in the White House, and she still fears he could be cheating on her to this day! "Melania has wanted to divorce Donald, over fidelity issues, since before they landed in the White House. She has long suspected that he has used, and continues to use, Mar-a-Lago as a rendezvous spot for his secret affairs. The Florida location is completely under Donald's control, he is always there, and it is much easier for him to enjoy private meetings at the resort rather than try to meet his mistresses at the White House or around DC or NYC. Melania has pleaded with Donald to stay away from his many trips to Mar-a-Lago , disguised as golfing holidays, but he refuses to give in to her requests," our insider adds.

[Mar 25, 2018] Melania Trump Reportedly Declines Divorce While Donald Is In Office Because Of Their Son Barron

One more rumor from anonymous source propagated by neoliberal MSM
Notable quotes:
"... Jimmy Kimmel Live ..."
Feb 07, 2018 | www.inquisitr.com

Thanks to Barron Trump his parents are not heading for divorce just yet.

When the news broke that U.S. President Donald Trump had an affair with adult star Stormy Daniels, many people assumed that his wife, first lady Melania Trump was going to divorce him. The FLOTUS has been noticed for allegedly refusing to hold her husband's hand in public. Others also spotted her rolling her eyes while the POTUS was greeting a few cheerleaders during the Super Bowl party on February 4. However, the Slovenia native is far from divorcing her husband of 13 years while he is still in the presidential seat for a good reason.

An insider close to Melania Trump recently told Hollywood Life that she is not thinking about making a move to divorce her husband while he is in office because of their son Barron .

According to the source, the 47-year-old former model wants to focus only on the young boy and his well-being. She doesn't want to get distracted with the alleged affair between the POTUS and Stormy Daniels. She apparently wants her family intact for the sake of her 11-year-old son.

... ... ...

Because of her recent actions that didn't go unnoticed, many people believe that Melania Trump is only trying to save her marriage for her son and not just because of being the first lady of the United States. The alleged extramarital affair of her husband and Daniels in 2006 may have caused their marriage to hit a snag. The adult star, though, has been inconsistent with her statements, which is one reason that some Republicans are not convinced that the president had an affair with the 38-year-old Louisiana native.

An alleged statement from Daniels surfaced on January 30 with her signature, saying that she denies the affair. Howbeit, during her interview during Jimmy Kimmel Live , the adult film star said that she is not aware of the denial statement that surfaced earlier that day.

[Mar 25, 2018] Stormy Daniels, Porn Star And Possible Senate Candidate, Arrested For Domestic Violence

Jul 29, 2009 | talkingpointsmemo.com
Stormy Daniels, an adult entertainer who's considering running for Senate from Louisiana, was arrested Saturday on a domestic violence charge in Tampa, Fla.

Daniels was charged with battery after she allegedly hit her husband, Michael Mosny, over the head with her hands. According to the police report , she was angry about a bill Mosny hadn't paid and about the way his father had done the laundry. She broke a flower pot and a few glass candle holders, threw their wedding album on the floor and allegedly hit her husband while struggling to get the car keys from him. She denied hitting him intentionally.

https://cdn.districtm.io/ids/index.html

Neither Mosny nor Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, were injured. Daniels was held overnight and released on $1,000 bond.

The porn star formed an exploratory committee in May, the first step in a possible Senate run against Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), whose social conservative reputation was tarnished by the D.C. Madam prostitution scandal.

[Mar 25, 2018] Playboy model Karen McDougal I did OK in Trump affair interview

Looks like she is pretty calculating woman...
Amazing neoliberal MSM interest in any dirt that can hurt Trump ;-)
Mar 25, 2018 | www.nydailynews.com
detailing an alleged 2006 romance with Donald Trump , then flew home to celebrate her 47th birthday with friends in Arizona, sources told the Daily News.

On Thursday, the former Playboy Playmate sat down with Anderson Cooper at 6 Columbus Hotel and poured her heart out in a detailed account of what she says was a 10-month fling with the President.

His reps have denied the affair.

McDougal said in the interview that she and Trump had been in love -- and that she now deeply regrets helping him cheat on his wife.

When cameras stopped rolling, she was asked how she felt about the confessional.

"Well, aside from the fact I have a headache and a cold -- I'm my own worst critic -- I think I came across as credible," she said, according to a source. "But I'm not an attorney."

When assured by her handlers that she'd done a great job, a source who was present said McDougal argued she could have been more succinct in explaining why she decided to come forward more than a decade later.

"A friend of mine leaked the story and now that it's out I want to tell my side," she explained.

McDougal also wasn't expecting a marathon grilling.

"I thought this was going to be 20 minutes, I didn't know it would be over an hour," she admitted.

McDougal and her team watched a playback of the interview, which featured an old photo of her that was taken prior to her breast implant removal in January. The model told People magazine in February that the implants were causing her illness.

"That's me on the end," she pointed. "That's when I had breasts."

McDougal cried when watching the part of the interview where Cooper asked what she'd say to Melania, sources told The News. "I'm sorry," she told Cooper. "I wouldn't want it done to me." Tears turned to laughter when a member of the production asked McDougal if she was aware that Hillary Clinton taped an interview in the same hotel suite.

"I didn't know that, but I can tell you I didn't have the questions in advance," she joked.

One member of the production crew asked McDougal if she'd met porn star Stormy Daniels, who also claims she had an affair with the President and is hoping to be released from a confidentiality agreement that could see her punished for speaking up. She said that she has not, nor does she plan to.

[Mar 25, 2018] When Trump goes low, go low by Richard Cohen

They definitely can ruin his marriage, but not much other then that.
Mar 19, 2018 | www.washingtonpost.com

Michelle Obama had it all wrong. " When they go low, we go high " is no way to deal with Donald Trump.

A porn star, a playmate and a contestant who washed out on his reality TV show have become exemplars for doing battle with a president for whom practically nothing is out of bounds. They are showing that the most effective way to deal with him is on his own terms.

The three -- Stormy Daniels , Karen McDougal and Summer Zervos -- are suing for the right to tell their stories about him. The headaches and unforeseeable turns that these legal fights present would be well understood by a man who, according to a USA Today tally, has filed at least 3,500 lawsuits of his own, for grievances real and imagined. When Trump goes low, go low - The Washington Post

Adult entertainer Daniels has outmaneuvered the president and his inept lawyer Michael Cohen at nearly every turn. They apparently believed they had bought her silence about the year-long extramarital affair she claims to have had with the future president a decade ago.

But it turns out they had only rented it. When Trump goes low, go low - The Washington Post

When Daniels signed a nondisclosure agreement in the weeks before the 2016 election, hardly anyone thought Trump had much chance of winning, especially after the furor over comments he had made about women on the now-famous "Access Hollywood" tape . So $130,000 to stay quiet must have looked too good for Daniels to pass up. (Cohen said the money came from his personal home equity line of credit.)

With her alleged paramour in the Oval Office, however, there is surely much more to be gained from her account, so she is trying to slip free from the agreement on the technicality that Trump never signed it.

Backing out of a deal if there's a better one to be had? Trump did it for decades. "I've made a fortune by using debt, and if things don't work out I renegotiate the debt. I mean, that's a smart thing, not a stupid thing," he boasted to CBS during his presidential campaign. As president, he has reversed himself so many times that his befuddled allies on Capitol Hill are never sure where or if he will land on most issues.

Now, instead of Daniels, it is Trump who is remaining silent -- conspicuously so. No tweets, no vicious nicknames, no threats. She, meanwhile, is going on "60 Minutes," where viewership is likely to be some of its highest ever. Count that as another blow to a president who measures the import of every event by its television ratings.

Daniels seems to be having a great time. She has become a ninja master in Trump's own medium, smiting trolls on Twitter with a verve that my colleague Monica Hesse compared to "a very smart cat batting off a series of very dumb mice, who come at her under the delusion that the relationship is reversed." When one man tweeted that she was a "scank," she responded by correcting his spelling.

McDougal, who was Playboy's 1998 Playmate of the Year, claims to have had an affair with Trump around the same time as Daniels. But in her case, the arrangement that she is trying to escape is the one she made with the National Enquirer's parent company, whose chief executive, David Pecker, is close to Trump. In her lawsuit, McDougal claims American Media was working secretly with Cohen to keep her quiet; the company says it contacted Trump's lawyer only to vet her story.

A takedown by a former playmate would be a sour endnote indeed, given how assiduously Trump styled himself as Playboy's ideal of libidinous masculinity. In 1990, the magazine's cover featured the married real-estate developer posing with another playmate, Brandi Brandt. She wore only his tuxedo jacket.

When Trump goes low, go low - The Washington Post

He hung a framed copy of that Playboy in his Trump Tower office. "I was one of the few men in the history of Playboy to be on the cover," Trump once boasted to a Post reporter.

Zervos, a former contestant from "The Apprentice," presents a different kind of threat, and potentially the most serious one. She is one of more than a dozen women who have accused the president of unwanted sexual advances, in her case that he kissed her and groped her breasts when she met with him to discuss a job. During his presidential campaign, Trump called them all liars, and threatened to sue.

But Trump never did, empty threats being another of his favorite tactics. It was Zervos who went to court, charging defamation.

On Tuesday, the same day McDougal filed her lawsuit, a New York judge ruled that Zervos's case can go forward. It was lost on no one that the precedent cited was the one in the sexual harassment lawsuit that ultimately led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton .

The Zervos lawsuit opens the possibility that Trump's other accusers, and maybe even more women, will return to tell their stories under oath. And that the president himself will have to as well.

When Zervos was on the fifth season of "The Apprentice," Trump fired her because she interrupted him. It turns out she may get in a last word after all.

xxx

Scratch #2 is the playmate lawsuit. Scratch #3 is Summer Zervos.

xxx

What's up with powerful men who can't keep it in their pants? Then they lie... What cowards!

xxx

The blame must be shared evenly... if the men cant keep it in their pants, why are women allowing it to happen? Are they being forced against their will? If so, call the police!

xxx

Wow! What a savage piece! And very well written.

xxx

Yawwwwnn..

Why even bother with this. It just makes everyone look bad. Daniels is a low-life. The media lowers its standards by reporting it. Nobody believes Trump didn't have sex with Daniels but nobody cares. It's actually expected of someone like Trump to have an affair now and then.

You might find it unfortunate that a guy named Cohen was involved. I suggest its also unfortunate that a guy named Cohen got stuck reporting this.

xxx

Trump is a dirtbag, but the last time I checked, having an affair was not criminal offense. I don't care who he slept with, but I do care who he is screwing - which in this case is 99% of the American people. The other 1% are doing well thanks to him.

xxx

(Edited) What has stormy Daniels done for America????? Just some porn movies for money for herself and now she is blackmailing the US president. And these readers actually enjoy it????? Trump must be protected. He is our President.

xxx

Now any hooker can come and sue any guy she has slept with for money.......is this what men want???? I dont think so.

xxx

People can't arbitrarily sue people for no reason. His lawyer paid her $130,000. She obviously has something on him. And most sane men want her to win so Trump can be impeached and sent out to spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement... in Antarctica.

xxx

Cant believe men are siding with adult porn actor......... a hooker.... Daniels.........who is out to make money by hook or crook. Men in America are doomed.

xxx 4 days ago

If the U.S. is such that this horrifically warped man and his monstrously greedy and incompetent cabinet are taken down by a stupid sex scandal rather than being judiciously removed by responsible people for being criminals, then the U.S. is in even more serious trouble than even rational thinkers would want to believe.

XXX 3 days ago

"How Trump avoided paying taxes on nearly $1 billion"
http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/01/news/trump-tax-strategy-theory/index.html

"[Trump] deducted somebody else's losses," said John L. Buckley, who served as the chief of staff for Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation in 1993 and 1994. Since the [stiffed] bondholders were likely declaring losses for tax purposes, Trump shouldn't be able to as well. "He is double dipping big time," Buckley told the Times.

Surely, the IRS can't be too happy about multiple taxpayers taking the same ~$1 billion-loss deduction? I therefore look forward to Mueller's audit of Trump's tax returns.

And now the Dumpster finds his yacht "Trumpy!" is caught in "Stormy Weather" off the Seychelles -- LOL

But, never fear Dumpsters, we all know that the usual rules don't and never have applied to the "bouffanted buffoon" -- or so he thinks! -- LOL

Doubtless, the results of Mueller's investigations into Trump's various activities will make this crass, arrogant charlatan (and his family/associates) sorely regret he ever threw his "bouffanted hairpiece" into the political ring. Hopefully, he will ultimately be indicted and convicted for egregious financial/taxation crimes and the courts will penalize him to the extent that all of his and his family's ill-gotten assets will be expropriated, and he'll get to wear one of those ill-fitting orange jump suits too

Still, the thought of the Rev. Pence becoming POTUS fills me with equal dread.

[Mar 25, 2018] Obama sex accuser panned as a liar urges Stormy Daniels scrutiny

Mar 25, 2018 | www.washingtonexaminer.com
A man who claimed without evidence that he had sex with former President Barack Obama says the media is showing a "sickening" double standard with coverage of an alleged affair between President Trump and porn star Stormy Daniels.

Larry Sinclair's allegations involving Obama, cocaine, and a limo -- set in 1999, when Obama was a state senator -- failed to gain broad coverage for a variety of reasons, including lack of corroboration and Sinclair's record of crimes involving deceit.

But Sinclair says the media is giving too much attention and too little skepticism to claims of a 2006 affair between Daniels and Trump.

"Stormy Daniels is being pimped and pimping the media now and it's lining her pockets," Sinclair told the Washington Examine r. "I believe she had sex with him. Do I believe she's trying to twist and add to it to benefit her interests? You're damn right I do."

An interview with Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, is set to air Sunday on the CBS program "60 Minutes." The performer staging a national strip club tour has given other recent interviews, including to "Inside Edition" and "Jimmy Kimmel Live!"

Sinclair said he views Daniels' coyness about details -- as she sues to invalidate a $130,000 nondisclosure agreement -- as well as her attempt to sidestep the deal, as reasons to doubt her truthfulness. He said he watched with suspicion as she declined to say if a signature was hers.

"I do believe that there are enough contradictions by Ms. Daniels to justify questioning her motive and truthfulness," Sinclair said, citing "her statements or nonstatements in subsequent interviews implying that her signature was not her signature [and] her back-and-forth on whether Trump paid her."

"I find this whole double standard sickening, and no I am not a bigger supporter of Trump, but I am a supporter of fair and unbiased media coverage," he said. "I find the whole NDA and accepting money and then later coming back and using a completely legal incident for political and personal gain questionable."

Michael Avenatti, an attorney for Daniels, declined to address Sinclair's suggestion that the media be more skeptical of her claims.

"Is this a joke? Am I being punked?" Avenatti wrote in an email.

Sinclair -- who runs a neighborhood revitalization nonprofit in Cocoa, Fla., where he's considering a run for mayor -- said he believes the media also gives too much credence to affair claims by ex-Playboy bunny Karen McDougal and women alleging misconduct by Trump.

There are many distinctions between the allegations made by Sinclair and those made by Clifford and McDougal. For example, Sinclair lacks a photo of himself with Obama, who was married to future first lady Michelle Obama at the time of the alleged two-day relationship.

Trump has denied cheating on first lady Melania Trump, but he did pose for photos with Daniels and McDougal.

Daniels passed a polygraph in 2011, her team said this week. Sinclair allegedly failed a polygraph in 2008, but he says the tests don't mean much.

Daniels told her story to some journalists, including from Slate and In Touch magazine, before signing the October 2016 NDA, though neither published her account. She and McDougal do have a degree of corroboration from friends who attest to contemporaneous conversations or, in the case of McDougal, provided the media with a letter she allegedly wrote documenting the claims.

Sinclair's allegations, by contrast, lack documentary evidence or corroboration from third parties. And whereas Trump has a decadeslong history of romantic relationships with women, Sinclair's gender does not match Obama's reported preference.

"It seems to me that there is a world of difference between the two stories and that there is no double standard," said Joel Kaplan, associate dean for professional graduate studies at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.

"Sinclair is making a singular allegation without any support," Kaplan said. "Ms. Daniels' allegation is backed up by the fact that there was a settlement and a nondisclosure agreement, which certainly lends credibility to her allegations. If Mr. Sinclair was just one of 14 men making these allegations against President Obama that would be one thing and probably worthy of a story. In President Trump's case, there are multiple women who came forward. So, no I see no double standard."

The high point of Sinclair's press exposure came when he rented a room at the National Press Club in June 2008, prompting an unsuccessful campaign to block the event by journalists fearful that the venue would lend credibility to his claims.

A dueling press conference was planned by Whitehouse.com, then a pornographic website whose owner Dan Parisi had paid Sinclair $20,000 to take the polygraph that Sinclair allegedly failed. Parisi later sued Sinclair unsuccessfully for libel for saying the results were doctored.

"It wasn't until after the fact I was told the Whitehouse.com press conference didn't take place," Sinclair said, recalling that police arrested him at the press club and sent him to Delaware to face theft charges. He also had an open warrant for his arrest in Colorado for allegedly signing someone else's tax return check.

Sinclair said the Delaware and Colorado cases were misunderstandings, but admits he was convicted in Arizona for forgery in 1981, then in Florida for using a friend's credit card before getting a 16-year sentence in Colorado in the late '80s in a similar case. He was released in 1999, the same year he allegedly met Obama through a limo driver in Chicago.

In one similarity between Sinclair's allegations and those made by Daniels and McDougal, significant amounts of money changed hands, resulting in legal action and claims of wrongful gagging of the accuser.

Sinclair negotiated a deal in which he ultimately was paid $20,000 by Parisi to consent to a polygraph. A copy of the check is an exhibit in the libel case Parisi brought against Sinclair. At one point, another $10,000 was supposed to be split between two charities.

Daniels is suing to get out of nondisclosure agreement prepared by Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who like the president says Daniels is lying about an affair, and McDougal is suing to get out of an NDA in which she was paid $150,000 for the rights to her story by the company that publishes the Trump-friendly National Enquirer, which didn't print the claims.

Sinclair said his Whitehouse.com deal required that he give exclusive rights for polygraphing to the company for a period of four weeks during the 2008 campaign, a claim that appears to be consistent with an email cited in court documents, and he suggests Parisi may not have acted independently in the libel lawsuit, which was dismissed by a federal judge in 2012.

Sinclair said he lost money on his 2009 book Barack Obama & Larry Sinclair: Cocaine, Sex, Lies & Murder? in which he associates a Chicago-area killing with his affair claims.

"To journalists I would say take your time, compare statements and call out contradictions in statements and previous interviews," Sinclair said. "When it comes to polygraphs be very sure you vet the examiners conducting them and always ask for the computer scoring results as well as the examiners findings."

Parisi did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Obama's office.

[Mar 25, 2018] Ex-Playboy Model Suing To Break Silence On Affair With Trump

Mar 20, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
A former Playboy model who says she had an affair with President Trump is suing the National Enquirer's parent company, American Media, so that she can be released from a legal agreement barring her from discussing the relationship.

Karen McDougal filed the suit in Los Angeles Superior Court, according to the New York Times , after she claims the Enquirer paid her $150,000 for the story of her nine-month-long affair between 2006 and 2007, but did not publish it when she gave the account in August 2016, several months before the 2016 U.S. election.

McDougal says that Trump's personal attorney, Michael D. Cohen, was secretly involved in her negotiations with A.M.I., and that both the media company and her lawyer at the time misled her about the arrangement. After speaking with The New Yorker last month after it obtained notes she kept on her alleged affair, McDougal said she was warned by A.M.I. that " any further disclosures would breach Karen's contract," and "cause considerable monetary damages ."

Cohen reportedly paid another Trump accuser, adult film actress Stephanie Clifford (aka Stormy Daniels), $130,000 in exchange for signing an NDA barring her from discussing her experiences with Trump.

Trump joined a legal effort last week suing Clifford for $20 million over what they claim is a breach of her NDA. Meanwhile, both women's claims against Trump are being construed by federal watchdog group Common Cause as illegal campaign contributions - arguing that they could constitute in-kind contributions to the Trump campaign.

Ms. Clifford and Ms. McDougal tell strikingly similar stories about their experiences with Mr. Trump, which included alleged trysts at the same Lake Tahoe golf tournament in 2006, dates at the same Beverly Hills hotel and promises of apartments as gifts.

Their stories first surfaced in the The Wall Street Journal four days before the election , but got little traction in the swirl of news that followed Mr. Trump's victory. The women even shared the same Los Angeles lawyer, Keith Davidson, who has long worked for clients who sell their stories to the tabloids . - NYT

"The lawsuit filed today aims to restore her right to her own voice," McDougal's attorney, Peter K Stris told the Times . "We intend to invalidate the so-called contract that American Media Inc. imposed on Karen so she can move forward with the private life she deserves ."

As the Wall Street Journal reported in November, 2016;

The tabloid-newspaper publisher reached an agreement in early August with Karen McDougal, the 1998 Playmate of the Year. American Media Inc., which owns the Enquirer, hasn't published anything about what she has told friends was a consensual romantic relationship she had with Mr. Trump in 2006. At the time, Mr. Trump was married to his current wife, Melania.

Quashing stories that way is known in the tabloid world as "catch and kill." - WSJ

In a written statement, American Media Inc. claims it wasn't buying McDougal's story for $150,000 - rather, they were buying two years' worth of her fitness columns, magazine covers and exclusive life rights to any relationship she has had with a then-married man. "AMI has not paid people to kill damaging stories about Mr. Trump," reads the statement.

American Media Inc. CEO David J. Pecker is a long-standing friend of President Trump.

[Mar 25, 2018] Stormy Daniels -- not Robert Mueller -- might spell Trump's doom by Richard Cohen

Mar 25, 2018 | www.washingtonpost.com

It was just a little thing, a scratch, that he failed to treat and gangrene set in and it was killing him. They were on safari, in Africa, and their truck had broken down and the rescue plane was never going to make it in time. This is the way Harry died in Ernest Hemingway's " The Snows of Kilimanjaro ." I reread it the other day because of President Trump. I think of him as Harry. Stormy Daniels is the scratch.

The saga of the adult-film star and the juvenile president has become a rollicking affair. Each step of the way, Daniels has out-Trumped Trump. She is as shameless as he, a publicity hound who adheres to the secular American religion that, to be famous, even for nothing much, is to be rich. By and large, that's not true, but then there is Kim Kardashian to prove otherwise.

Daniels alleges she and Trump had an affair beginning in 2006. The president's lawyer and his press secretary allege that the allegations are not true. The lawyer, Michael Cohen, does admit to paying Daniels $130,000 , apparently to keep her silent about an affair that, according to Cohen, did not happen. To do this, Cohen set up a private Delaware company and concocted false names for everyone involved -- the allegation-maker and the allegation-denier. Only the name Delaware is legit.

[Mar 25, 2018] Lobbyist Investigating Seth Rich Murder Is Shot Twice and Run Over by Car - Suspect in Custody

Notable quotes:
"... The Gateway Pundit ..."
Mar 25, 2018 | www.thegatewaypundit.com
Mar 21, 2018 attacked outside of his home by a masked man in January.

As reported by The Gateway Pundit 's Jim Hoft, 27 year-old Democratic staffer Seth Conrad Rich was murdered in Washington DC on July 10, 2016, roughly one block from his apartment. The suspects took nothing from Rich, leaving behind his wallet, watch and phone. The murder has gone unsolved to this day.

Burkman sued the Democratic National Committee for the release of the hacked DNC server he claimed will reveal key information in solving the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.

The Washington Examiner reported

Lobbyist Jack Burkman, who began a private investigation into the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich last year, says he was nearly killed after a man who joined the investigation attempted to murder him last week, according to a report.

"It's a horror story," Burkman told the Washington Post Monday.

Kevin Doherty, 46, shot Burkman multiple times and ran him over with an SUV, according to the Post

Tension reportedly developed between the two as Doherty began to think the profiling project was his and began speaking to reporters without Burkman's consent, Burkman told the Post.

Burkman fired Doherty and sent him a cease-and-desist letter in July, according to the news outlet. "I just figured the matter was closed," Burkman told the Post. "But what happened is, I guess, he was simmering and simmering and simmering."

A source who identified as a senior FBI official contacted Burkman and claimed to have internal documents relative to another case he was working on.

The anonymous source planted envelopes of information under a traffic cone in the parking garage at the Key Bridge Marriott in Rosslyn, according to Burkman.

As the lobbyist arrived to retrieve the documents, with his pet Dachshund in hand, he reached under the cone and was shot in the buttocks and thigh and run over by an SUV.

Burkman spent three days in the hospital, and his dog was not harmed.

Doherty was charged with use of a firearm in the commission of a felony and two counts of malicious wounding. He is currently jailed in the Arlington County Detention Facility.

We have reached out to Mr. Burkman and will post any updates as we receive them

[Mar 25, 2018] Litvinenko wasn't poisoned by Putin - He was likely smuggling the polonium that killed him -- Puppet Masters -- Sott.net

Notable quotes:
"... Weekly Standard ..."
"... Washington Times ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
Mar 25, 2018 | www.sott.net

Litvinenko wasn't poisoned by Putin - He was likely smuggling the polonium that killed him Ryan Dawson
ANC Report
Sun, 26 Apr 2015 22:44 UTC Berezovsky
Boris Berezovsky Save As we all know Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned by polonium, a rare radioactive substance. The main narrative blamed it all on Vladimir Putin of Russia. The rationale rested on little other than because Litvinenko was a Putin critic . This was the quick line in mass media, and it was on all the typical war propaganda channels.

There are many things wrong with the "Putin did it" story. For one, there is no motive , even with Litvinenko being a critic of Russia, he was no threat whatsoever to Putin. The man worked with Chechen terrorists and the Israeli-Russian oligarchs . But assuming that there was a sufficient motive to kill him, think about this: Why would Russia use a very rare, very expensive, and easily traceable radioactive substance to kill him instead of some cheap poison or just shooting him? Why risk smuggling radioactive material into the UK which is an act of war?

Yet that is exactly what the UK/US media would have you believe. They want to say that Putin had someone sneak into the UK with polonium and poison Litvinenko with it. It just isn't plausible. It's actually absurd.

Alexander Litvinenko who was formerly FSB fled to the UK to avoid court prosecution in Russia, worked for a shady Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky. Boris Berezovsky just so happens to be the Israeli-Russian oligarch who lived in London after fleeing the Russian judicial system for a multitude of crimes too long to list. He was on Interpol's most wanted list. Here is the grand prize. After the US and UK press branded Putin with the poisoning despite there being Zero evidence, (something the US is very well known for now) investigators were tracking down the traces of Polonium in the UK. They detected traces of Polonium at Berezovsky's office and residence! Now I do not know about you, but in my place of work, and certainly in my house, I do not have rare radioactive substances. Polonium is not something you just get at the market or pick up by accident walking through the park.

No experienced mob boss like Berezovsky would be dumb enough to murder an underling in such a manner either. Therefore his death was an accident. It was mostly likely it was a botched smuggling operation . Why was he moving such a dangerous substance? Did he need fast cash? Were they planning to create a dirty bomb? Such a "smoky bomb" would turn the Polonium into powder and kill anyone who ingested it.

Traces of Polonium were found on the planes that Litvinenko had been on. So I think we can deduce what happened. He was a mule . The questions remain, why did he have it?, Where did he get it? What was he going to do with it? Why was it in the offices of Berezovsky and Erinsys Ltd (Britain's Blackwater)?

The "Putin did it" smear case has never made sense. First of all, the amount of polonium 210 in play would have cost millions of dollars. That amount is too expensive to purchase and too large to go unnoticed if it were stolen. The only way to obtain such a quantity would be on a well organized black market that had a connection to a nuclear facility. It would certainly help organized crime if the nuclear powered supplier they received the Polonium from was not subjected to international inspections or part of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Such a country, ( Foreign country A ) which denied they even built nuclear weapons for decades, would certainly also deny selling their Polonium byproduct as well.

Comment: Not necessarily . See:


Is it possible to hide that from the press? Yes. The media would ignore this for the same reason the media ignores them stealing nuclear secrets and building hundreds of nuclear weapons in Dimona, then throwing whistle blowers who took pictures of their warheads, in jail.

Litvinenko was in Israel, where he met Leonid Nevzlin the CEO of Yukos shortly before he died. If you wanted to buy/steal radioactive material that would be the place. What was he negotiating with Nevzlin? We learned Alexander had been an informant in a case that led to the arrest of nine Georgian and Russian Mobsters in Spain, including Alexander Gofstein a lawyer for Yukos who apparently was laundering money.

The downfall began when Georgian Mob Boss Zakhar Kalashov was arrested in May 2006. The scam was similar to what the old Five Families of New York had done, when guys like Meyer Lansky took profits from illegal gambling businesses and funneled them into buying up real estate in Florida. In the European case, the mob was taking illegal funds and buying up real estate in Spain as well as making investments into legitimate businesses .

Litivnenko's associates, Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi, who both had met with him the day of the poisoning, were also both hospitalized. They left traces of Polonium in Hamburg as they had taken the trip to Germany before meeting Litvinenko. It appears all three were involved in a smuggling operation, but for who?

Short answer: Russian Oligarch Boris Berezovsky's employee Alexander Litvinenko died from over exposure to Polonium in a botched smuggling operation. That is why traces of it were at Boris's house and on the planes Litvinenko was riding to and from Israel. The smear on Putin/Russia using a highly traceable 10 million dollar poison to kill a critic is about as plausible and rational as saying we have "British Intelligence" about Niger.... This transparent bogus lie was a quick and shamelessly sloppy explanation to cover up how and why this man in the UK had a radioactive poison in his body. Polonium only has a half life of 138 days.

Litvinenko had been in Israel to visit Yukos's CEO, just shortly before he died. And it's an open secret that Israel has nuclear weapons, the only place without nuclear safeguard or inspections. Traces of polonium were also on the British Airway planes that Litvinenko took to and from Israel. So they would have the means, location, and the timing fits, but let's just blame Putin, "The New Hitler" as Neocons have dubbed him?

Why the fuss about a conspiracy claiming that Putin put Litvinenko on a hitlist and poisoned him? Well as wacky as that story is, it was probably the best they could come up with on short notice. Boris knew once the police found out how Litvinenko died that there would be a lot of explaining to do. He also knew that if the investigation went forward that they could find more of this Polonium on his properties. So they just claimed the KGB was trying to kill them all.

Some History

This is not the first time that Berezovsky tried to pin a murder on someone else and claim that all the damning evidence pointing to him was a frame . There are the notorious cases (in Russia) of Ivan Litskevich and Vlad Listyev.

Ivan Listkevich was the general director of the Omsk oil refinery, easily the best refinery in Russia. Abramovich and Berezovsky planned to take over the refinery and make it part of Berezovsky's Sibnef (which it now is). Listkevich resisted. Ivan had outside investments from LUKoil (10% of the stock) and CS First Boston. So in no way was he threatened to sink. Omsk was in the best location, had the latest equipment, and was well positioned to continue to soar. They serviced the biggest oil producers in Russia. Naturally Ivan did not want to be swallowed by Sibnef. August 19, 1995 Ivan was found drowned in the Irtysh River. I doubt he went there to swim. Five days later Sibnef (Gazprom) took over . August 24th 1995, using his good buddy Yeltsin, Berezovsky got a Presidential Decree №872, to order a transfer of all the state's share in Omsk as well as 4 other companies to Sibnef. Then in 1996 Boris and Roman privatized Sibnef through a series of Loans-for-Shares' auctions which were a complete scam run through front companies and offshore banks. Yeltsin approved of it.

The case may leave doubts in the mind until one learns about the murder of Vlad Listyev. In 1994 Boris attacked one of his rivals over control of a media outlet. Part of the attack was broadcast all over TV and came to be known as "faces in the snow" as Boris's rival's bodyguard were forced at gun point to lie face down in the snow. Shortly after a 90mph high speed chase and attacking rival Gusinsky's MOST guards and pinning Gusinsky in his own building, Berezovsky would take control of ORT (channel 1) through an illegal non-public "auction" and gain a near media monopoly.

For details on that I recommend reading "God Father of the Kremlin" if you can still find it. It was written by the senior editor of Forbes in Russian who holds a Ph.D in Russian history, Paul Klebnikov. For the record Paul Klebnikov was killed after publishing his book on the Oligarchs , particularly on Boris, who is on the cover. He was shot four times in Moscow while leaving work and then died in the hospital after getting stuck on an elevator.

After the Gusinsky event, Boris had another problem. Vladislav Listyev. Listyev was probably the most popular talk show host in Russia and a TV producer. He was a business partner with Boris but the problem was he was not crooked. As general director of ORT he decided to fix a multi-million dollar leak in the company and indirect way of Boris paying people off in the Mob to do dirty work, as well as paying himself by spending money for ads in other companies owned where he also ran the advertising sales. He had an offer from Sergei Lisovsky to buy up the sector. Negotiations never went through and Vlad had a different idea.

On Feb 20th 1995 Vlad announced that he would break the monopoly of Boris and Sergei . He called for a moratorium on ORT advertising until they could work out ethical standards. As you can imagine that did not make Boris or the rest of the mob happy. Eight days later Boris personally met with "Nikolai", a mafia boss, and handed him a hundred thousand dollars in cash. This was witnessed by two police officers who were monitoring the Mob. Prior to that Boris's lacky Badri offered money to a different gangster but that man was arrested before he could do what was asked of him and he confessed this in jail. On March 1st the day after Berezovsky paid a second Mob Boss, Vlad Listyev was shot in the back at the entrance of his home .

Guilty as sin, with a confession against Badri as well as being personally witnessed by two police, offering another mob boss money, Boris was desperate. He was inches away from being arrested. Boris's TV network was cut out of government subsidies after the police raided it and it was subject to bankruptcy. Fellow media giant and friend Ruppert Murdoch promised to invest in the network and bail him out . How nice. And we all know where Murdoch stands. This relationship might also explain why Fox News and Sky News in the UK were so blatantly cheerleading the "Putin killed Litvinenko" conspiracy story.

But here is the real kicker. It is just as outrageous and far fetched as the Litvinenko poisoning. Boris concocted a story for Yeltsin which was recorded on video tape produced by Irina Lesnevskaya a producer at ORT and a friend of Yeltsin's wife. The tape claimed that it was all a big conspiracy against Berezovsky and that the real culprit (who had no motive other than to frame Boris [apparently able to hire a gun to kill Vlad but not Boris?]) was none other than bitter rival Gusinsky of Most Bank, whom Boris had already tried to kill once.

Yeltsin was paranoid of Gusinsky's political ambitions and Boris knew this. Boris also blamed X-KGB and said Vlad was killed by the MOST group, and not the mob he was witnessed meeting with a week after Vlad was going to break his monopoly. (Sounds like "Iraq moved the nonexistent WMDs to Syria just to make the US look bad." give me a break) Boris claimed to be set up because he was loyal to Yeltsin as was his new media outlet.

Yeltsin, ever a partner in cover ups, not to mention a drunk and a thief, got Boris out of trouble once again by firing the lead investigators in the case, which intimidated others to drop it. There was a huge public outcry. A TV personality had been killed. ORT created a new company called ORT advertising with a monopoly to sell ads on commission no less, and the boss-man chosen was none other than Sergei Lisovsky . Wow, how utterly shameless.

If you can speak Russian or if you can find an English copy of the Boris/Lesnevskaya tape transcript sent to Yeltsin, it's going to make you very angry. It is about as plausible as saying Putin risked an act of war with the UK to kill a critic who worked for both a criminal as well as terrorist.

Who Done It?

So we know what didn't happen. But there still remains a "who done it." The quickest way to get to the bottom of this is to see who is lying the most and loudest, because that is usually who has the most to hide .

Remember Anna Politkovskaya? She was killed on Putin's birthday and the alternative press and the 'mindlessly accepting any conspiracy' types who fell for it, tried to use that circumstantial "evidence" to blame the murder on Putin.

These are the same types that claim Russia bombed its own apartment buildings to start a war with Chechnya omitting the fact that the apartment bombing took place five months after the war has already started, and the "sources" trying to blame the FSB were none other than Boris's lacky Litvinenko and well known plagiarist David Satter, who wrote for the PNAC co-founders' Weekly Standard , which gave the world all the bogus lies about Iraq's WMD and connection to the September 11th attacks. Robert Kagan, the paper's cofounder with William Kristol, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Times calling "Speaking of Iraq" which pushes every erroneous prewar scare tactic there was. His wife Victoria Nuland is the same woman who was recorded on the phone saying "F" the EU and openly talking about who would be a good replacement Prime Minister in Ukraine. She chose Arseniy Yatseniuk, who she called "Yatz" and he did become the prime minister of Ukraine a month later after the coup. Everything out of this faction's mouth has been blindly anti-Russian.

There is a huge difference between conspiracy and kookpiracy. Getting away from the outlandish unsubstantiated claims about Anna's death, let's uncover something factual. Anna Politkovskaya was the journalist who had published three different articles on how SOMEONE was testing Polonium on Chechen children . Gee! Where have we seen THAT scenario before? Anna's articles were published in the Novaya Gazeta in 2006 and she was killed October of that same year.

The Washington Post then makes this clever claim. "Leonid Nevzlin, a former Yukos oil company shareholder and Russian exile currently living in Israel, told the Associated Press in late November that Litvinenko had given him a document related to a dossier on criminal charges made by Russian prosecutors against people connected to Yukos. Nevzlin, who is charged by Russian prosecutors with having organized killings, fraud and tax evasion, claimed Litvinenko's inquiries may have provided a motive for his poisoning"

Notice who else is in that Washington Post article (Scaramella) and who was planting the ideas that Putin had killed both Litvinenko and Anna. How crazy is that to use polonium to murder someone...Scaramella is a rotten one. After Anna's lawyer Stanislav Markelov was murdered in 2009 followed by the murder of one of her key informants in Chechnya, Natalia Estemirova the same year, there was a retrial in Anna's case which went to the Supreme Court. Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov stirred up a public disgust when he said about Anna's informant Natalia Estemirova on Radio Liberty "She was a woman...who had never possessed any honor, dignity or conscience."

The prosecution cornered Dmitry Pavliutchenkov a former policeman who in turn confessed Lom-Ali Gaitukayev was who negotiated the contract killing and behind him he suspected Boris Berezovsky . Dmitry was sentenced to 11 years in jail. Five men were found guilty in her murder. Three were the Chechen brothers who had been acquitted in the first trial and they went to prison. Rustam Makhmudov and Lom-Ali Gaitukayev got life sentences in 2014. Berevsovsky had died the year before in March of 2013.

The most troubling thing here is not that mob did something illegal or that the Western press jumped the gun to do a anti-Russian witch hunt. All of that is pretty run of the mill. It's not even that Israel secretly has nukes and is involved with organized crime. Again, image my lack of shock. It's not even the multiple murders that are most troubling. The most troubling part of this story is what the ultimate purpose of that much Polonium was for and why it was in the UK. The potential for a dirty bomb is enormous. With the current climate of ISIS and disgruntled youth in Europe joining the mercenary forces to fight Israel's enemies in Syria and Lebanon, a dirty bomb in the UK is not an unimaginable scenario. Just having such a thing could also hold leverage over politicians there too. The source of the Polonium should have been traced and potential sources should also be subject to inspection.

  1. William Dunkerley on April 30, 2015 12:11 pm The news stream is replete with articles that falsify information in order to vilify Putin. The Arafat polonium poisoning is an example. But according to a March 17, 2015 AP report citing French experts, "Yasser Arafat was NOT poisoned by polonium. Good for AP for exposing that polonium nonsense. It's rare to find these stories debunked in the Western media. The long-running malicious narrative in Litvinenko saga is more the norm. The mainstream story is utterly false and without merit. I documented that in my book "The Phony Litvinenko Murder." Why do people believe all this specious rubbish? Largely it's a result of a phenomenon called "confirmation bias." I explain that process in detail in my book "Ukraine in the Crosshairs." The Ukrainian crisis is just one more example of how Putin's enemies have skillfully taken advantage of confirmation bias to snooker the masses.
    • Ryan Dawson on January 19, 2016 7:49 pm I also debunked the Arafat myth given that there is no way it would survive so long with such a short half life. Would you like your book to go in our library ? I'll read it then maybe we can talk about it.
  2. Mandatum Mandat on February 10, 2016 4:47 am What is your source for the claim that Litvinenko left a radioactive trail after his trip to Israel? Can't find any discusssion of this claim other than your own material.

[Mar 25, 2018] Trump Plans to Expel Russian Diplomats Over UK Poison Attack

Mar 25, 2018 | www.spartareport.com

President Donald Trump is preparing to expel dozens of Russian diplomats from the U.S. in response to the nerve-agent poisoning of a former Russian spy in the U.K., two people familiar with the matter said Saturday.

Trump agreed with the recommendation of advisers and the expulsions are likely to be announced on Monday, the people said, though they cautioned that Trump's decision may not be final. Trump is prepared to act but first wants to be sure European allies will take similar steps against Russia, aides said.

U.S. officials are working through the weekend to develop a coordinated response with the Europeans, one of the people said, after British Prime Minister Theresa May this week rallied support for a tough rebuke.

As early as Monday, a number of European nations also are expected to expel Russian officials, including Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Czech Republic. France and Germany backed May's call for tougher action, though their exact plans are less clear.

The U.S. considers the diplomats to be spies, carrying out intelligence activities under cover as embassy staff, one of the people said. Trump's action would follow a similar move by May, who ordered 23 Russians that she said were spies to leave Britain over the attack on the former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter.

The advisers reached recommendations for a U.S. response to the U.K. attack at a National Security Council meeting on Wednesday and honed the proposals on Friday. Trump discussed the issue Friday with U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman, Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan, FBI Director Chris Wray, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, outgoing National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and others, two people said.

All of the people familiar with the discussions asked not to be identified.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Raj Shah told Bloomberg on Saturday, "The United States stands firmly with the United Kingdom in condemning Russia's outrageous action. The president is always considering options to hold Russia accountable in response to its malign activities. We have no announcements at this time."

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment.

Russia Divisions More

Michael Moore Colluded With Russia Against Trump!

8:30 AM Feb 21, 2018 1,915

A battle within the White House over how to best address the provocations of Russian President Vladimir Putin has been intensifying. The internal divisions flared this week after Trump congratulated Putin on his recent re-election without first reviewing written guidance that he not do so, a person familiar with the matter said.

Trump has meanwhile reshaped his national security staff. On Thursday, he announced he would replace McMaster, who favored a tougher public posture toward Putin, with John Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations who has promoted military action against Iraq, Iran and North Korea. That move came just a week after the president fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who had also adopted a more confrontational stance toward Russia, and nominated Mike Pompeo, the CIA director, to replace him.

Congress has pressured Trump to get tougher on Putin and passed legislation in August giving lawmakers the power to block the president from lifting punitive U.S. measures imposed after Russia's incursion into Ukraine. Substantively, Washington's policy toward Russia has become tougher in recent months, though Trump's critics say he has dragged his feet in responding to Putin's provocations.

Relationship Priority

Trump has agreed to adopt increasingly tough policy stances on Russia. But the president places a priority on maintaining a personal relationship with the Russian president, won't publicly attack him, and doesn't see any benefit to the U.S. in confronting Putin in one-on-one encounters, one administration official said Thursday.

Trump defended his call with Putin on Twitter Wednesday, dismissing those who "wanted me to excoriate him."

"They are wrong!" Trump wrote. "Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing."

May earlier this month condemned Russia for the nerve-agent attack that critically injured the former Russian spy and his daughter. A British police officer was also hospitalized. May said the 23 Russians she ordered to leave Britain were undeclared spies, and she has sought the cooperation of other countries in her campaign to punish Moscow.

Heather Nauert, a State Department spokeswoman, said on Friday night that "the United States is considering a range of options to respond to Russia's outrageous actions in the U.K., both to demonstrate our solidarity with our ally and to hold Russia accountable for its clear breach of international norms and agreements."

She added that the State Department "doesn't have any actions to announce today."

[Mar 25, 2018] The West's Guilty Until Proven Innocent Mantra Is Wrecking Lives International Relations Zero Hedge

Mar 25, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

... ... ...

In other words, neither men nor women have gained anything from this otherwise-well-intended campaign against sexual improprieties. However, this is not the first time the West has allowed raw emotions to knock the train of progress right off the tracks. History books are replete with examples of Western campaigns rising out of sheer mass hysteria. But at least in those wild times there was still some semblance of justice, complete with trials and investigations. Now compare that with our 'modern' times, when all it took for the United States to win approval for an illicit attack on Iraq was for Colin Powell to shake a vial of faux anthrax in front of the UN General Assembly.

With these historical hiccups in mind, it is possible to argue that the West has truly forgotten the lessons of history because they are certainly repeating them today.

By way of example, consider where the great bulk of US troops are encamped today – in and around the Middle East – and then ask yourself how they got there.

The answer is by hook and by crook, and not a little public manipulation and chicanery. That is because, in our insatiable desire to defend victims – the good guys, we are told – we are allowing ourselves to ignore crucial evidence while placing blind faith in what we are being told is the truth. Clearly that has not been the case to date.

From the accusations that Iraq was harboring weapons of mass destruction to launch against innocent people, to the current claims that the Syrian government of Bashar Assad is using chemical weapons against his own people, the West is gambling that claims based on zero evidence will always work to fulfill ulterior motives. So far, the ploy seems to be working with the gullible public, but sooner or later truth will catch up, indeed, as truth usually does.

Just this month, for example, an assassination attempt was made against Sergei Skripal – a former double agent who had moved to Salisbury, England following a spy-swap in 2010. Any guesses as to who the British authorities have ruled – without a trial, evidence or motivating factor – is the main culprit? Yes, Russia. Yet, even the usually loyal British press has started expressing reservations over the dubious claims.

This should come as no surprise since the UK, a member of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), has staunchly refused to provide samples of the alleged nerve agent to Russia for analysis. Why would it do that? Would anyone be surprised if this investigation goes the same way it did for all those Russian athletes who were, unjustly, banned from the Winter Olympic Games this year?

Or perhaps the same way it went following the 2016 US presidential elections, when Russia was accused of meddling on behalf of Donald Trump – zero evidence to back up the slanderous accusations , which are responsible for putting US-Russia relations into a free fall.

In conclusion, the unsightly spectacle of Western capitals backtracking on legal precedent – from domestic cases to international – makes it all the more clear why it is so anxious to win back the media mountaintops – it has no evidence whatsoever to support the reasons behind its increasingly illicit behavior. It is therefore incumbent upon them to own the narrative, as well as the justice system. How long this democratic charade can last is anybody's guess.

[Mar 24, 2018] Why the UK, the EU and the US Gang-Up on Russia by James Petras

Highly recommended!
For the greater part of a decade the US, the UK and the EU have been carrying out a campaign to undermine and overthrow the Russian government and in particular to oust President Putin. Fundamental issues are at stake including the real possibility of a nuclear war. "
Why do the Western regimes now feel Russia is a greater threat then in the past? Do they believe Russia is more vulnerable to Western threats or attacks? Why do the Western military leaders seek to undermine Russia's defenses? Do the US economic elites believe it is possible to provoke an economic crisis and the demise of President Putin's government? What is the strategic goal of Western policymakers? Why has the UK regime taken the lead in the anti-Russian crusade via the fake toxin accusations at this time?
Notable quotes:
"... For the greater part of a decade the US, the UK and the EU have been carrying out a campaign to undermine and overthrow the Russian government and in particular to oust President Putin. Fundamental issues are at stake including the real possibility of a nuclear war. ..."
"... First and foremost, during the 1990's the US degraded Russia, reducing it to a vassal state, and imposing itself as a unipolar state. ..."
"... Secondly, Western elites pillaged the Russian economy, seizing and laundering hundreds of billions of dollars. ..."
"... Thirdly, the US seized and took control of the Russian electoral process, and secured the fraudulent "election" of Yeltsin. ..."
"... With the collapse of the Yeltsin regime and the election of President Putin, Russia regained its sovereignty, its economy recovered, its armed forces and scientific institutes were rebuilt and strengthened. Poverty was sharply reduced and Western backed gangster capitalists were constrained, jailed or fled mostly to the UK and the US. ..."
"... As the entire US unipolar fantasy dissolved it provoked deep resentment, animosity and a systematic counter-attack. The US's costly and failed war on terror became a dress rehearsal for the economic and ideological war against the Kremlin ..Russia's historical recovery and defeat of Western rollback intensified the ideological and economic war. ..."
"... Russia is not a threat to the West: it is recovering its sovereignty in order to further a multi-polar world. President Putin is not an "aggressor" but he refuses to allow Russia to return to vassalage. ..."
"... The Western regimes recognize that Russia is a threat to their global dominance; they know that Russia is no threat to invade the EU, North America or their vassals. ..."
"... Western regimes believe they can topple Russia via economic warfare including sanctions. In fact Russia has become more self-reliant and has diversified its trading partners, especially China, and even includes Saudi Arabia and other Western allies. ..."
Mar 20, 2018 | unz.com
Originally from: www.globalresearch.ca Prof. James Petras Global Research, March 21, 2018 Region: Europe , Russia and FSU Theme: History , Intelligence , US NATO War Agenda

Introduction

For the greater part of a decade the US, the UK and the EU have been carrying out a campaign to undermine and overthrow the Russian government and in particular to oust President Putin. Fundamental issues are at stake including the real possibility of a nuclear war.

The most recent western propaganda campaign and one of the most virulent is the charge launched by the UK regime of Prime Minister Theresa May . The Brits have claimed that Russian secret agents conspired to poison a former Russian double-agent and his daughter in England , threatening the sovereignty and safety of the British people. No evidence has ever been presented. Instead the UK expelled Russian diplomats and demands harsher sanctions, to increase tensions. The UK and its US and EU patrons are moving toward a break in relations and a military build-up.

A number of fundamental questions arise regarding the origins and growing intensity of this anti-Russian animus.

Why do the Western regimes now feel Russia is a greater threat then in the past? Do they believe Russia is more vulnerable to Western threats or attacks? Why do the Western military leaders seek to undermine Russia's defenses? Do the US economic elites believe it is possible to provoke an economic crisis and the demise of President Putin's government? What is the strategic goal of Western policymakers? Why has the UK regime taken the lead in the anti-Russian crusade via the fake toxin accusations at this time?

This paper is directed at providing key elements to address these questions.

The Historical Context for Western Aggression

Several fundamental historical factors dating back to the 1990's account for the current surge in Western hostility to Russia.

First and foremost, during the 1990's the US degraded Russia, reducing it to a vassal state, and imposing itself as a unipolar state. Secondly, Western elites pillaged the Russian economy, seizing and laundering hundreds of billions of dollars. Wall Street and City of London banks and overseas tax havens were the main beneficiaries Thirdly, the US seized and took control of the Russian electoral process, and secured the fraudulent "election" of Yeltsin. Fourthly, the West degraded Russia's military and scientific institutions and advanced their armed forces to Russia's borders. Fifthly, the West insured that Russia was unable to support its allies and independent governments throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. Russia was unable to aid its allies in the Ukraine, Cuba, North Korea, Libya etc.

With the collapse of the Yeltsin regime and the election of President Putin, Russia regained its sovereignty, its economy recovered, its armed forces and scientific institutes were rebuilt and strengthened. Poverty was sharply reduced and Western backed gangster capitalists were constrained, jailed or fled mostly to the UK and the US.

Russia's historic recovery under President Putin and its gradual international influence shattered US pretense to rule over unipolar world. Russia's recovery and control of its economic resources lessened US dominance, especially of its oil and gas fields.

As Russia consolidated its sovereignty and advanced economically, socially, politically and militarily, the West increased its hostility in an effort to roll-back Russia to the Dark Ages of the 1990's. The US launched numerous coups and military intervention and fraudulent elections to surround and isolate Russia . The Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Russian allies in Central Asia were targeted. NATO military bases proliferated.

Russia's economy was targeted : sanctions were directed at its imports and exports. President Putin was subject to a virulent Western media propaganda campaign. US NGO's funded opposition parties and politicians.

As the entire US unipolar fantasy dissolved it provoked deep resentment, animosity and a systematic counter-attack. The US's costly and failed war on terror became a dress rehearsal for the economic and ideological war against the Kremlin ..Russia's historical recovery and defeat of Western rollback intensified the ideological and economic war.

The UK poison plot was concocted to heighten economic tensions and prepare the western public for heightened military confrontations.

Russia is not a threat to the West: it is recovering its sovereignty in order to further a multi-polar world. President Putin is not an "aggressor" but he refuses to allow Russia to return to vassalage.

President Putin is immensely popular in Russia and hated by the US precisely because he is the opposition of Yeltsin -- he has created a flourishing economy; he resists sanctions and defends Russia's borders and allies.

Conclusion

In a summary response to the opening questions.

The Western regimes recognize that Russia is a threat to their global dominance; they know that Russia is no threat to invade the EU, North America or their vassals. Western regimes believe they can topple Russia via economic warfare including sanctions. In fact Russia has become more self-reliant and has diversified its trading partners, especially China, and even includes Saudi Arabia and other Western allies.

The Western propaganda campaign has failed to turn Russian voters against Putin. In the March 19, 2018 Presidential election voter participation increased to 67% . .Vladimir Putin secured a record 77% majority. President Putin is politically stronger than ever.

Russia's display of advanced nuclear and other advanced weaponry has had a major deterrent effect especially among US military leaders, making it clear that Russia is not vulnerable to attack.

The UK has attempted to unify and gain importance with the EU and the US via the launch of its anti-Russia toxic conspiracy. Prime Minister May has failed. Brexit will force the UK to break with the EU.

President Trump will not replace the EU as a substitute trading partner. While the EU and Washington may back the UK crusade against Russia they will pursue their own trade agenda; which do not include the UK.

In a word, the UK, the EU and the US are ganging-up on Russia, for diverse historic and contemporary reasons. The UK exploitation of the anti-Russian conspiracy is a temporary ploy to join the gang but will not change its inevitable global decline and the break-up of the UK.

Russia will remain a global power. It will continue under the leadership of President Putin. The Western powers will divide and bugger their neighbors -- and decide it is their better judgment to accept and work within a multi-polar world.

*

Prof. James Petras is a Research Associate of the CRG.

[Mar 24, 2018] CNN's Anderson Cooper had an exclusive interview with former Playboy model Karen McDougal

Media promotion of old Trump affairs in full swing. Part of the demonization campaign which is essential for color revolution. What you can expect with Brennan hired as analyst for NBC ?
Mar 24, 2018 | www.dailywire.com

On Thursday, CNN's Anderson Cooper had an exclusive interview with former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who claims that she had a 10-month relationship with Donald Trump a decade before he became President.

CNN, which is always anxious to paint Trump in the worst possible light, most likely did not get quite the response they were looking for from McDougal. While affairs cannot and should not be ever cast in a positive light, it is worth noting that McDougal spoke highly about the way Trump treated her and her friends noticed the same thing.

Speaking of Trump's "Access Hollywood" tape, McDougal said, "I had not seen that in him at all... [that's] not the man that I knew." McDougal said that her friends would tell her how they were impressed with how respectful he was toward her when they were out in public.

WATCH:

Former Playboy model McDougal on Trump's "Access Hollywood" tape: "Not the man that I knew" https://t.co/xjzeDwyHyi https://t.co/Pf6izrZDjg

-- Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) March 23, 2018

On the issue of whether or not she is coming out to hurt Trump, McDougal said, "I voted for Donald. Why would I want to damage him? That's my party, Republican Party. That's my president. I did not want to damage him or hurt him in any way, shape, or form but I also didn't want to put out the story because I didn't want my reputation to be damaged."

McDougal suggested that the reason she came forward is, according to her lawsuit , because she claims she was paid off to keep quiet and was given a "false promise to jumpstart her career as a health and fitness model."

WATCH:

"I voted for Donald. Why would I want to damage him?" Former Playboy model Karen McDougal says her intention in telling her story isn't to damage President Trump https://t.co/fpLyorn15C pic.twitter.com/V6tLUOVDkw

-- CNN (@CNN) March 23, 2018

[Mar 24, 2018] Melania Trump refuses to be bullied by anyone

The main problem for Melania is Trump. Not so much attacks by the media.
Notable quotes:
"... "What can you say except I'm sorry?" [McDougal] told CNN's Anderson Cooper , apologizing for the alleged affair to Melania Trump. "I'm sorry. I wouldn't want it done to me." ..."
"... McDougal admitted that she knew Donald Trump was married during the alleged affair, saying she was reluctant to bring it up because "she felt guilty." ..."
"... She also said that Donald Trump offered to pay her after they had been intimate for the first time in 2006 and that it made her cry. ..."
"... "After we had been intimate, he tried to pay me, and I actually didn't know how to take that," McDougal said. "I've never been offered money like that. I looked at him and said, 'I'm not that type of girl." ..."
"... "And he said, 'Oh,' and he said, 'You're really special,'" McDougal said, adding: "It hurt me that he saw me in that light." ..."
"... According to McDougal, the relationship lasted for about 10 months. She says she broke it off in April 2007 because she felt guilty. She recalled traveling to meet Trump at his properties in New York, New Jersey and California and said she had sex with him "many dozens of times." ..."
"... McDougal had feelings for Trump, but the affair was "just tearing me apart," she said. "There was a real relationship there. There were real feelings," she added. "He would call me baby or he would call me beautiful Karen." ..."
"... quite simply efforts to publicly humiliate and shame of Melania, not to mention attacking the very essence of her marriage to her husband itself. ..."
"... Oh, wait. Isn't that also media bullying? ..."
"... I am well aware that people are skeptical of me discussing this topic. I have been criticized for my commitment to tackling this issue, and I know that will continue. But it will not stop me from doing what I know is right. I am here with one goal: helping children and our next generation." ..."
Mar 24, 2018 | theduran.com

Media sets double standards for itself as it tries to condemn the First Lady for standing up against bullying, all the while bullying her and her husband through infidelity allegations

... ... ...

In seemingly unrelated stories through the rest of the week attack pieces were printed by various women who claimed to have had extramarital affairs with the President during the time of his marriage to Melania. The headlines are anything from accusatory to salacious. Here are some examples:

The attack is the basest sort of hit possible, as these pieces highlight the accusation and "apology" offered by former Playmate model Karen McDougal. In the pieces this lady offers an apology to Melania for the affair with her husband, with the core of the story essentially as shown here (this is from the USA Today version):

"What can you say except I'm sorry?" [McDougal] told CNN's Anderson Cooper , apologizing for the alleged affair to Melania Trump. "I'm sorry. I wouldn't want it done to me."

McDougal admitted that she knew Donald Trump was married during the alleged affair, saying she was reluctant to bring it up because "she felt guilty."

She also said that Donald Trump offered to pay her after they had been intimate for the first time in 2006 and that it made her cry.

"After we had been intimate, he tried to pay me, and I actually didn't know how to take that," McDougal said. "I've never been offered money like that. I looked at him and said, 'I'm not that type of girl."

"And he said, 'Oh,' and he said, 'You're really special,'" McDougal said, adding: "It hurt me that he saw me in that light."

According to McDougal, the relationship lasted for about 10 months. She says she broke it off in April 2007 because she felt guilty. She recalled traveling to meet Trump at his properties in New York, New Jersey and California and said she had sex with him "many dozens of times."

McDougal had feelings for Trump, but the affair was "just tearing me apart," she said. "There was a real relationship there. There were real feelings," she added. "He would call me baby or he would call me beautiful Karen."

Okay, so here we have a great way to humiliate a devout Slovenian Roman Catholic, who is actually quite a traditional woman, even while she was a red-hot model, by making "apologies" that are not apologies at all, but quite simply efforts to publicly humiliate and shame of Melania, not to mention attacking the very essence of her marriage to her husband itself.

Oh, wait. Isn't that also media bullying?

It would seem so. And on Tuesday, Mrs. Trump wasn't having it. She fought back with her own gifts, those being her characteristic elegance, but with her amazing personal strength. But, praise aside, this is what the First Lady had to say:

I am well aware that people are skeptical of me discussing this topic. I have been criticized for my commitment to tackling this issue, and I know that will continue. But it will not stop me from doing what I know is right. I am here with one goal: helping children and our next generation."

[Mar 23, 2018] Megyn Kelly behaves like a rabid dog attacking Putin. Did not work well.

What is interesting that as there are 3.4K dislikes and only 1.2K likes. Looks like people start to decipher the NBC propaganda machine and neoliberal propaganda machine in general (NBC is not an outlier in this respect; this is run of mill neoliberal outlet)
Looks like Putin really has steel nerves. Megyn Kelly was really disgusting pushing her talking points like there is not tomorrow. Such a shill... . She also was organically able to listen. she has her prejudices can't shake them and actually does not want to shake them (may be this is connected with her job security ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... Confronting? The job of a real journalist is to ask questions, not to confront. Want to see the actual interview go watch Russian Insider is there in its totality. ..."
"... the moment i heard "American Democracy Under Attack" i stopped watching the video. ..."
"... Wtf NBC, this is ridiculously badly edited to fit an agenda. This is not journalism. ..."
"... It's not a debate if she keeps interrupting him, very disappointed in the way NBC took this golden opportunity to have a proper conversation with one of the super powers of the world and wasted it in "I tell you, you did this" and childish reaction from Megyn part. ..."
"... I am American and I am fully of aware how evil and deceptive this country is. I understand Putin is trying to do the right thing. But it seems as if almost 90-95% of people in this country still don't get it. ..."
"... How many governments in the world have been overthrown by the American CIA? How often does evil USA interfere in other states' elections? The USA government is pure evil. ..."
"... "American democracy, under attack".... by putting $46,000 worth of ads on Facebook, most of which were posted AFTER the election. Come on people, don't be foolish. ..."
"... "You believe that America meddled in your elections?" No Megyn Kelly, that's a historical fact, look up the "Harvard Boys" sponsored by USAID, look at the cover of the July 15, 1996 issue of Time Magazine entitled "Yanks to the Rescue", celebrating America's role in hijacking the Russian political system. ..."
Mar 16, 2018 | www.youtube.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1pPkAOZI50


rayochapin , 1 week ago

Confronting? The job of a real journalist is to ask questions, not to confront. Want to see the actual interview go watch Russian Insider is there in its totality.

Sa yan , 1 week ago

the moment i heard "American Democracy Under Attack" i stopped watching the video.

Rumata , 1 week ago

Mr. Putin, did you intervene in the US elections? No But did you intervene? No And when you intervened, did you intervene? No Have you intervened with the oligarchs? No Did you help them intervene? No And in the US say you intervened you did it? No But you did not interfere, huh? Yes Interfered? No

spasev , 1 week ago (edited)

Where is the full interview? I had to go to a Russian government TV channel so I can watch the full interview. And you label the Russian media as state propaganda. Shame on you.

Games4us , 1 week ago

FYI, this interview is 1,5 hour long in original. here it is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mhi_AyQAyw&t=977s

Mr. Ben , 1 week ago

"Cut and paste" the interview with an agenda of bashing Russia, using "some people say" or "some American experts say" as the sources without any solid proof and evidence is shameful.

namodicha , 1 week ago

Please, please, please, any US citizen who is watching this, go watch the full interview, just in order to get an idea of what your media is worth. Listen to the words, also pay attention to how it is filmed and presented.You really need to know how much you are bullshitted to.

Linera Y , 1 week ago (edited)

When he talked about principles, why didn't she believe? Please, know that there are many people in the world with principles, who are not necessarily running and dying for capitalist money, brands, silly talentless pointless half-naked pop-stars, yachts or florida-like beaches, etc. There are many people who are fine to live without all these but with principles and other values , which are not that bad even they don't run around money!

John A , 1 week ago

Her first and fatal mistake was underestimating his intelligence, thinking she could trip him up with her aggressive tone. Putin has forgotten more about politics than Kelly has yet to learn. It's easy to see why NBC hacked the interview to pieces - she was pathetic and out of her league, just another brainwashed, deluded American shill.

Johnny Bucknell , 1 week ago

Putin is my hero!! Love Putin from New Zealand, NBC is part of fake news!!

James Medina , 1 week ago

What a fake news BS story... Still desperately trying to find an excuse as to why Crooked Hillary lost.

Mark Hauser , 1 week ago

After listening to the whole interview. This short clip looks like fake news!!!! How the cut the phrase and questions, out of context. Looks pathetic

dimirsen , 1 week ago

why did you decide to create this Frankenstein interview consisting of small snippets? Will the next interview be in a format of a 10 sec coub?

somfplease , 1 week ago

I watched the FULL unedited version of this before hand. Holyshit the editing is dishonest.

Kyle Witcher , 1 week ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2MtKS1O8Ds THIS IS THE TRUE INTERVIEW, UNEDITED AND TRANSLATED Please share the TRUE interview. Megyn Kelly got destroyed.

Toye Adeniran , 1 week ago

Wtf NBC, this is ridiculously badly edited to fit an agenda. This is not journalism. I wasn't a fan of Russia before this, but you might be changing my mind by showing this edited crap. You're making things between the US and Russia worse not better by showing this edited crap.

Вован , 1 week ago

Wow, i am a Russian and i have to say you guys went too far with your propaganda. This is cut and edited beyond reason. Why you do this? Stop making our president look like the ultimate villain. Honestly, it was such a pleasure to listen to Vladimir Putin's reasonable approach. WTF NBC?

Zavier Brewer , 1 week ago

It's not a debate if she keeps interrupting him, very disappointed in the way NBC took this golden opportunity to have a proper conversation with one of the super powers of the world and wasted it in "I tell you, you did this" and childish reaction from Megyn part.

Che , 1 week ago

In America, Our political & Media Elite managed to collude Our foreign policy with Democracy promotion.We use Democracy promotion to achieved our foreign policy agenda.. In Libya we Used democracy promotion to achieve our foreign policy goal of getting ride of Gadhafi, following the fall of Gadhafi we abandon Libya on moved on to OUR NEXT TARGET, SYRIA.... IN SYRIA, we formed an alliance with non Democratic ARAB REGIMES to Overthrow A Circular government of ASSAD. when RUSSIA & IRAN INTERVEIN @ THE REQUEST OF THE SYRIAN GOVERNMENT, we have an issue with that.. OUR FOREIGN POLICY is INCONSISTENT AND UNDERMINES OUR NATIONAL INTEREST/Democracy. & Corporate Media is a SCAM... HAD WE HAD alternative NEWS SOURCE LIKE(social media) WE DO TODAY, WE WOULDN'T HAVE INVADED IRAQ ON FAKE EVIDENCE /INTELLIGENCE God Bless America

somtitious , 1 week ago

National Bias Corporation (NBC) I have watched the full interview and as usual, he flawed the beautiful but empty headed Kelly!

Joey Yared , 1 week ago

NBC is the reason why the US and Russia will never be allies. They seem to want war. Putin is probably laughing at the hysteria of the US media. Make no mistake, the MEDIA is getting in the way of peace with Russia. Putin is no saint, but keep in mind they have more nuclear weapons than us. Wouldn't hurt to mend the relationship...

Shantanu Nair , 1 week ago

This is American propaganda in its purest most undiluted form. The interpreter is putting words into Putin's mouth making him sound arrogant and brash. Its is Megyn Kelly who is the arrogant one just like the rest of the American mainstream media. I admire Putin for his patience, one must have the mental stability of a yogi to tolerate the half literate moronic deluge that radiates from Megyn's mouth. She was going too far, by interrupting Putin at every turn while Putin still has the decency to politely respond. If she is so democratic, I would advise her to pay a visit to her government's Saudi "allies.

Abe Jackson , 4 days ago

Putin is too smart for Megyn. Do you really think he's gonna tell you what you think when an American journalist asks you such questions? I don't like Putin either but he's got balls. I bet he knows English too but he knows that speaking a foreign language will put him at an disadvantage. Smart move by hiring an interpreter. By the way the US government throughout has done things far worse than rigging election.

DJKLY242 , 1 week ago (edited)

This isnt an interview more less the ' pressing' of 'false allegations & speculation'. Every response Putin gives is reasonable. Putin didnt have to agree with doing this. She sounds like a failed lawyer & wanna be politician. America is not Perfect, Russia is not perfect, I wish she would sit down with people in her own country & do the same but she doesnt. She acts as if she is asking these questions on behalf of Americans when really it is based on 'her' own views and for the sake of 'her' interview. This interview is flawed.

Big Money , 1 week ago

a new film about Putin, very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RK2xmLVkDI

Pete Daltry , 1 week ago

Fake news

DazzaWebb , 1 week ago

America = The greatest threat to humanity since Nazi Germany.

Abz , 1 week ago

Don't spread lies NBC news. People should not believe this fake news! Glad to see there's more dislikes than likes, people are starting to know the truth.

Derek Robert , 1 week ago

NBC shilling for war as usual.

London England , 1 week ago (edited)

How disingenuous can NBC get? Actual quote from the interview: "Maybe, although they were Russian, they work for some American company. Maybe one of them worked with one of the candidates. I have no idea about this. These are not my problems" And in the headlines: "Putin on alleged US election interference: I don't care".

Henri Alanko , 1 week ago

It's been over a year and you've managed to find 13 Russian Twitter trolls. What a horrifying conspiracy. Worse than Pearl Harbor!

HeliOs AsclepiUs , 1 week ago

American Democracy is run by plutocrats Itching for war against Russia and China and Iran.. USA is a warmonger doing the bidding for Israel.. As if Russia had Trump elected.. What a joke.. American mainstream media is trying to manufacture consent from its people to go to war.. Watch and see..

VendPrekmurec , 1 week ago

A very russophobic primitive propaganda

zonkus culture , 1 week ago (edited)

United state have been interfering in African election forcing us to there evil democracy, killing Gaddafi for no reason. Look at what you guys did in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries that don't want to do your evil democracy. After lying to the shameless United nations security council about Saddam's building of weapons of mass destruction, Who fight you about that?.

Love Animals-6 , 1 week ago

This is quite possibly the WORST interview ever conducted. This one is NOT a journalist. If you want to be a respectable broadcaster, fire this moron immediately. Horrendously non-factual, terribly edited - this interview is America in a nutshell. The world has awoken in this age and won't stand still.

Tony Stark , 1 week ago

This is the full 90 mins unedited version with English Subs, see the truth for yourselves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mhi_AyQAyw

ImperialLion , 1 week ago

Remember that United States interferes in the affairs of other nations ALL THE TIME. The U.S. attempted to influence the elections of foreign countries as many as 81 times between 1946 and 2000. Since 2000, the U.S. has attempted to sway elections in Ukraine, Kenya, Lebanon, and Afghanistan.

Adam Koester , 1 week ago

I am American and I am fully of aware how evil and deceptive this country is. I understand Putin is trying to do the right thing. But it seems as if almost 90-95% of people in this country still don't get it. They actually are repulsed and angry by the idea that we could be the bad guys. It has turned my family and friends against me. I am all alone...

FahadMHassan , 1 week ago

Megyn Kelly? Pressure Putin? Should I cry or laugh! It's like watching Ahmedinajad destroying King! Even your questions has no concrete clue to any Russian government connection! None!!!!! Are you really a journalist? Guys seriously if you wanna do tv then do it right! You can't pressure Putin by saying they are Russians if you don't have any any any any clues on government connection! You should really consider your questions next time!

Patanjali Kumar.P , 1 week ago

Certain Americans are just pompous arrogant idiots and letting them represent America makes the world look at all Americans as that pompous person.

Korven Griffin , 1 week ago

What an absolute farce. Megan is nothing but a sassy mouthed fool. Funny as f##@

Janihoy Berhan , 1 week ago (edited)

There's no "Russian Connection". This is a lie. This whole "Russian interference in US elections" is a political sham invented by the corrupt American system infiltrated by Zionists and Anti-Christian lobbyists.

Bulat Nurmukhanov , 5 days ago

Poor work by the journalist. She is supposed to have a dialogue, she is supposed to listen to the interviewee. Instead, it was just a bunch of questions and it looked quite awkward.

Richard Mulder , 1 week ago

How many governments in the world have been overthrown by the American CIA? How often does evil USA interfere in other states' elections? The USA government is pure evil.

Richard Rider , 1 week ago

God, is President Putin PATIENT to put up with her...Why does he put up with her?

paul david , 1 week ago

"American democracy, under attack".... by putting $46,000 worth of ads on Facebook, most of which were posted AFTER the election. Come on people, don't be foolish.

Wavanova , 1 week ago

"You believe that America meddled in your elections?" No Megyn Kelly, that's a historical fact, look up the "Harvard Boys" sponsored by USAID, look at the cover of the July 15, 1996 issue of Time Magazine entitled "Yanks to the Rescue", celebrating America's role in hijacking the Russian political system.

[Mar 23, 2018] Fake personality of Guccifer 2.0 which was probably created by Us intelligence now resurfaced again

Hacking is an ideal space for false flag operation where shadow, intelligence connected companies like Crowdstype can plan evidence with impunity and traced can be constructed according to the needs of the day or particular operation. Only British-style poisonings can compete as they provide the same mantle of secrecy in which real evidence can be buried and fake propagated ;-)
Somebody on UNZ forum said that it is stupid to believe anything that comes from national intelligence services, especially when they are engaged in color revolution against the current administration.
Mar 23, 2018 | thehill.com

The Daily Beast reports that U.S. investigators identified the hacker as a Moscow-based Russian intelligence operative after the hacker failed to activate a virtual private networking (VPN) service meant to obscure the operative's location before logging on.

The result was the operative's Moscow IP address being caught in the logs of a U.S. social media company, allowing U.S. investigators to track the individual. Special counsel Robert Mueller , who is leading the investigation into Russian election meddling, has taken over the probe into Guccifer, according to The Daily Beast, which reported that he added FBI agents to his team who previously worked to track the hacker.

U.S. intelligence agencies previously stated in January 2017 that they had "high confidence" that "Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data."

[Mar 23, 2018] Hitler and the Poisoning of the British Public by Brian Cloughley

Notable quotes:
"... The British press and its political puppets are determined to convince the British public that there is a massive threat from Russia and even that the Kremlin influenced the disastrous referendum vote to quit the European Union, the Brexit debacle. The affair of the spy Skripal has provided much ammunition, and the newspapers have been effective in increasing the level of anti-Russian fervor and intensifying international tension. It's poison, Hitler and out-of-control government ministers that sell British newspapers. ..."
Mar 23, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org
... ... ...

The British government and media continue to proclaim that Russia was undeniably responsible for the incident, while ignoring the statement on March 20 by Ahmet Uzumcu, director general of the UN's Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, that "the OPCW has deployed experts to the UK and they will collect some samples." When asked about indications of the origin or type of substance alleged by the highest British authorities to be Russian, Mr Uzumcu said he "cannot project the outcome of such technical work," and that analysis will take "three weeks ahead at least."

Some of the media have attempted to provide objectivity. For example the BBC reported that Skripal "was jailed for 13 years by Russia in 2006. He was convicted of passing the identities of Russian intelligence agents working undercover in Europe to the UK's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. In July 2010, he was one of four prisoners released by Moscow in exchange for 10 Russian spies arrested by the FBI as part of a swap. He was later flown to the UK." The man was a proven spy who had betrayed his own countrymen, and almost the only person to talk any sense about the matter was a former British Ambassador to Russia, Tony Brenton, who said that "the fact that [Skripal] blew a whole range of Russian agents, there may be personal animosities there. In most Russians' minds he would be categorized as a traitor. There are people there who would be delighted to see him dead."

But balance and objectivity do not sell newspapers, and neither do they provide headlines for politicians who are anxious to jump on publicity bandwagons. Enter the colorful British defense minister Gavin Williamson who announced that "Putin has made it quite clear that he has hostile intent towards this country. We've been seeing the build-up of his forces across the Eastern Front and in terms of what they're doing over many years now -- we have to wake up to that threat and we have to respond to it." Then on March 15 Williamson declared that Russia should "go away and shut up," which illustrated the maturity of the British government's approach to international affairs.

The level of official pronouncements was further lowered by yet another Johnson declaration that "By using a specific type of nerve agent known to be developed in Russia, it was a sign that no former Russian agent was immune and no-one could escape the long arm of Russian revenge," and on March 20 he dragged up the old faithful, Hitler, who is always a winner for attention in the UK. One pontificating politician proclaimed that "Putin is going to use it [the World Cup Competition] in the way Hitler used the 1936 Olympics" and Johnson hastened to chime in and say "I think that your characterization of what is going to happen in Moscow, the World Cup, in all the venues -- yes, I think the comparison with 1936 is certainly right. I think it's an emetic prospect, frankly, to think of Putin glorying in this sporting event."

Hitler and football are major players in Britain's propaganda war against Russia. Everyone reads about football, and mere mention of Hitler sends British hearts pounding in patriotic fervor. What these people don't realize is that insulting Russia by bringing in Hitler is a sure and certain way of uniting the Russian people in support of their government and fortifying their present understandable contempt for little Britain. The Russians had some twenty million civilians and over ten million members of the armed services killed in the war begun by Hitler when he invaded Russia in Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941. To in any fashion equate present-day Russia with Hitler's Germany is obscene, malevolent and preposterous to a degree that appears impossible for the British government and most of the media to understand.

The British press and its political puppets are determined to convince the British public that there is a massive threat from Russia and even that the Kremlin influenced the disastrous referendum vote to quit the European Union, the Brexit debacle. The affair of the spy Skripal has provided much ammunition, and the newspapers have been effective in increasing the level of anti-Russian fervor and intensifying international tension. It's poison, Hitler and out-of-control government ministers that sell British newspapers.

Brian Cloughley writes about foreign policy and military affairs. He lives in Voutenay sur Cure, France.

[Mar 23, 2018] A simple question: Where is Julia Skripal, a citizen of Russian Federation, who was taken by the UK secret services and whisked away to some undisclosed location?

Mar 23, 2018 | www.unz.com

annamaria , Next New Comment March 23, 2018 at 1:24 pm GMT

A simple question: Where is Julia Skripal, a citizen of Russain Federation, who was taken by the UK secret services and whisked away to some undisclosed location? There have been no photographs of either her father (British citizen) and Julia since the odd incident in a city of Salisbury that is a few miles away from the UK's main lab of chemical weaponry research.

"Porton Down is situated just northeast of the village of Porton near Salisbury, in Wiltshire, England. a site of the Ministry of Defence's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) – known for over 100 years as one of the UK's most secretive and controversial military research facilities , occupying 7,000 acres." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porton_Down

annamaria , Next New Comment March 23, 2018 at 2:05 pm GMT
Support the [ISIS] troops [in a war for Israel]! http://thesaker.is/syrian-war-report-march-22-2018-syrian-army-gets-control-of-harasta-militants-withdraw/
"Over 40 tonnes of toxic agents have been found in the areas liberated from militants Damascus has officially confirmed its readiness to assist in any investigation into a chemical attack in Syria. However, international organizations have refused to cooperate with the Syrian government, practically conniving with terrorist organizations in their illegal activity. The Syrian Foreign Ministry pointed out that more than 40 tonnes of chemical warfare agents have been discovered on the territories liberated from terrorist s the international community prefers turning a blind eye to the real facts in which chemical weapons are used in Syria against the government troops and civilians. .."

[Mar 23, 2018] A Very Useful Crime: Launching Information War against Putin and Russia by Alex Lantier

Notable quotes:
"... World Socialist Web Site ..."
"... London and NATO have neither produced physical evidence of Kremlin involvement, nor established a motive for a hypothetical Russian attack. Nor has London explained why, if the Kremlin wanted Skripal dead because he spied for Britain in the 1990s and early 2000s, it did not execute him after convicting him of spying in 2006, and instead sent him to Britain four years later in exchange for Russian spies jailed by London. ..."
"... Instead, a simplistic narrative accusing Moscow has emerged: If a crime appears to target countries or individuals hostile to the Russian government, NATO governments and media conclude within hours that it is self-evident that the Kremlin is responsible. ..."
"... And, after the US invaded and occupied Iraq, as it became clear that Iraq had no WMDs and was not responsible for the attacks, it emerged that the particular anthrax strain used in the attacks had in fact been created by Washington's own WMD program at Fort Detrick, Maryland. A US scientist, Steven Hatfill, was rumored to be responsible, investigated, and ultimately cleared. ..."
"... In the Skripal attack, it is unclear how Moscow would benefit. ..."
"... the Skripal attack hands Putin's enemies inside NATO an ideal diplomatic and political weapon to use against him. ..."
"... The benefits flow, rather, to sections of the British and European ruling class who are stoking war hysteria against Russia, and sections of the American ruling elite, particularly around the CIA and the Democratic Party, working with them to discredit Trump as a supposed agent of Russia. The Skripal attack allows these factions to place enormous pressure on rival sections of the European ruling class, notably in the French and German governments, who are calling for a European military policy independent from the United States and closer ties to Russia. ..."
"... Yesterday, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the United States has "full confidence" in the British assessment of the attack -- a statement he implicitly contradicted by then declaring that Russia was only "likely responsible." Despite firing Tillerson shortly after he made those statements, Trump echoed Tillerson's accusation of Russian complicity, declaring, "It sounds to me like it would be Russia, based on all the evidence they have." ..."
"... Porton Down is not a reliable source, however. It has a long record of illegal or covert testing of biological and chemical weapons on British citizens. These include the 1942 contamination with anthrax spores of Gruinard Island, which the British government was compelled to decontaminate in 1986; the unlawful death of Ronald Maddison in 1953 during trials of sarin gas on British servicemen; and the 1963-1975 spraying of biological weapons in Lyme Bay. The British government paid out 3 millions pounds to victims of such tests in 2008, without admitting liability. ..."
Mar 14, 2018 | www.defenddemocracy.press

The World Socialist Web Site holds no brief for the kleptocratic business oligarchy that emerged in Russia from the Stalinist bureaucracy's restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union in 1991. It cannot be ruled out that a faction of Russian intelligence, acting with or without the knowledge of President Vladimir Putin, may have poisoned Skripal.

But London and NATO have neither produced physical evidence of Kremlin involvement, nor established a motive for a hypothetical Russian attack. Nor has London explained why, if the Kremlin wanted Skripal dead because he spied for Britain in the 1990s and early 2000s, it did not execute him after convicting him of spying in 2006, and instead sent him to Britain four years later in exchange for Russian spies jailed by London.

Instead, a simplistic narrative accusing Moscow has emerged: If a crime appears to target countries or individuals hostile to the Russian government, NATO governments and media conclude within hours that it is self-evident that the Kremlin is responsible.

In fact, in international politics, the simple and obvious answer all but inevitably fails to reveal the complex web of political and economic interests that produce a given event or policy. Were the Skripal attack to be a Le Carré spy novel, the accusations so far would likely take up the first 10 pages of the book, after which the real story would unfold over the next 400 pages. The questions that must be posed in such cases are: what is the credibility of the accuser, and, above all, cui bono (who benefits from the crime)?

To those who say it is obvious that Russia poisoned Skripal, it is worth recalling the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, in which a deadly strain of anthrax was mailed to many US officials in Washington, killing 5 people and infecting 17 more, shortly after the September 11 attacks. There again, media immediately blamed the attacks on obvious targets of US-UK war threats -- the Iraqi regime's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program and its alleged ties to Al Qaeda. These all proved to be lies, serving Washington's foreign policy interests as it sought to go to war in Iraq.

And, after the US invaded and occupied Iraq, as it became clear that Iraq had no WMDs and was not responsible for the attacks, it emerged that the particular anthrax strain used in the attacks had in fact been created by Washington's own WMD program at Fort Detrick, Maryland. A US scientist, Steven Hatfill, was rumored to be responsible, investigated, and ultimately cleared.

It still remains unclear to this day which US officials were involved in carrying out the anthrax attacks. The FBI closed the investigation in 2010 after pinning the blame on another scientist, Bruce Edwards Ivins, who had committed suicide in 2008. However, the US National Academy of Sciences found in 2011 that the US government did not have sufficient scientific evidence to definitively assert that the anthrax used in the attacks came from Ivins.

In the Skripal attack, it is unclear how Moscow would benefit. The attack took place shortly before this weekend's elections in Russia, and as the NATO powers ramp up a confrontation with Russia over their failed war for regime change in Syria that has seen US forces attack and kill Russian military contractors in Syria in recent weeks. Rather, the Skripal attack hands Putin's enemies inside NATO an ideal diplomatic and political weapon to use against him.

The benefits flow, rather, to sections of the British and European ruling class who are stoking war hysteria against Russia, and sections of the American ruling elite, particularly around the CIA and the Democratic Party, working with them to discredit Trump as a supposed agent of Russia. The Skripal attack allows these factions to place enormous pressure on rival sections of the European ruling class, notably in the French and German governments, who are calling for a European military policy independent from the United States and closer ties to Russia.

Thus, on Monday, former French President François Hollande issued a sharp if barely veiled attack in Le Monde on his successor, Emmanuel Macron, who is working closely with Berlin. Asserting that current NATO policy allows Moscow and the Syrian government to "liquidate its opposition and massacre its own people," Hollande called for a confrontation with Moscow: "Russia has been rearming for several years, and if Russia is threatening, it must be threatened."

Yesterday, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the United States has "full confidence" in the British assessment of the attack -- a statement he implicitly contradicted by then declaring that Russia was only "likely responsible." Despite firing Tillerson shortly after he made those statements, Trump echoed Tillerson's accusation of Russian complicity, declaring, "It sounds to me like it would be Russia, based on all the evidence they have."

Under these conditions, and after the experience of the anthrax attacks, it must be said that factions of the British and American states themselves are prime suspects in the Skripal attack.

London has based its allegations against Russia entirely on the shifting analyses of its Porton Down biochemical warfare facility, located coincidentally only 10 miles from Salisbury. Initially, London alleged that Skripal had been exposed to fentanyl, a synthetic opioid more powerful than heroin. On March 7, however, British officials alleged that the poison was a nerve gas like sarin or VX, without explaining why Porton Down, a facility that has for decades specialized in producing nerve gases, failed to correctly identify one after it was used.

On Monday, May alleged that the nerve gas in question is in fact "novichok," a special chemical weapon initially produced by the Soviet government. However, London has refused Moscow's requests to actually provide it with samples of the substance used in the Salisbury attack for analysis, as required by the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). As of now, at least, the case against Russia is based on the say-so of the Porton Down facility.

Porton Down is not a reliable source, however. It has a long record of illegal or covert testing of biological and chemical weapons on British citizens. These include the 1942 contamination with anthrax spores of Gruinard Island, which the British government was compelled to decontaminate in 1986; the unlawful death of Ronald Maddison in 1953 during trials of sarin gas on British servicemen; and the 1963-1975 spraying of biological weapons in Lyme Bay. The British government paid out 3 millions pounds to victims of such tests in 2008, without admitting liability.

None of the allegations directed by such sources against Russia on the still-murky Skripal poisoning case have a shred of credibility. Only a full, objective international public inquiry, whose findings are published in real time as the inquiry progresses, can establish the truth of what took place. In the meantime, it is a critical measure of self-preservation for workers in America, Europe and around the world to oppose the ruling elite's stoking of war hysteria against Russia and the danger of an all-out confrontation between the world's main nuclear-armed powers.

Alex Lantier

[Mar 23, 2018] May has declared that there is no pausible alternate explanation for the Skirpal attack other than that Russia has done it. Given the recent elevation of Bolton and the EU acceptance of the May claims it is likely that we are entering a period similar to that of June 1914 when Europe commenced sleepwaling toward war.

Mar 23, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Posted by: Sushi | Mar 22, 2018 10:52:45 PM | 62

Sushi , Mar 22, 2018 10:52:45 PM | 62
May has declared that there is no pausible alternate explanation for the Skirpal attack other than that Russia has done it.

https://thesaker.is/a-curious-incident-part-iii/

Does provide a plausible alternatvie explanation. Given the recent elevation of Bolton and the EU acceptance of the May claims it is likely that we are entering a period similar to that of June 1914 when Europe commenced sleepwaling toward war.

If you find the above to be a credible explanation then please provide it to others so they may realize their government may not be acting in the best interest of the public.

[Mar 23, 2018] Boris Johnson A Categorical Liar by Craig Murray

The article is reposted at Craig Murray request, as his site was at the time under denial of service attack: "This website remains under a massive DOS attack which has persisted for more than 24 hours now, but so far the defences are holding. Some strange form of "ghost banning" is also affecting both my twitter and Facebook feeds. So please (a) Feel free to repost, republish, translate or spread this article anywhere and anyway you can. All copyright is waived.
Notable quotes:
"... The emphasis is mine. This sworn Court evidence direct from Porton Down is utterly incompatible with what Boris Johnson has been saying. The truth is that Porton Down have not even positively identified this as a "Novichok", as opposed to "a closely related agent". ..."
"... This constitutes irrefutable evidence that the government have been straight out lying – to Parliament, to the EU, to NATO, to the United Nations, and above all to the people – about their degree of certainty of the origin of the attack. It might well be an attack originating in Russia, but there are indeed other possibilities and investigation is needed. As the government has sought to whip up jingoistic hysteria in advance of forthcoming local elections, the scale of the lie has daily increased. ..."
"... It does not take a degree in chemistry to understand that something related to a class can be half of all poisons in the world. ..."
"... A closely related agent" has no precise scientific meaning. It could mean "in the same chemical class" as Novichok but of indeterminate chemical structure at this time; or it could mean having the same toxicological effect as novichok, but not necessarily in the same chemical class (although this could refer to mode of synthesis, rather than of structural type). ..."
"... In either case, what it means is that they do not know the precise molecular structure of the agent concerned – and iif they don't know that, they cannot sign it to Russia – or anyone else. ..."
"... The statement to the Court proves beyond any credible argument that the UK Government are simply lying, either to the court, or to the rest of us. ..."
"... 'This has been confirmed by specialists, our specialists. An Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons mission is in the UK now to independently confirm this analysis.' Or, to put it another way, the task of the OPCW is NOT to conduct an independent analysis, but to AGREE WITH 'our specialists'. ..."
"... What's a "related compound"? Could it be something as ordinary as sheep dip or weedkiller? Could they be described as "nerve agents", even if they're not usually thought of in that sense? ..."
"... If the Skripals really are in a Salisbury NHS hospital then It's safe to conclude that no nerve agent was involved at all. This is because of the comments of the consultant and the the fact that they're still alive ..."
"... Could it be argued that all nerve agents are "closely related" and then speculated that the wording of the testimony was arrived at in a way of compromise between the scientist(s) and the government? ..."
"... Also, do we know if the blood sample was taken from the police officer who (it would appear) made sudden recovery? Can him being discharged from hospital be seen as a way to avoid giving the blood sample? ..."
Mar 23, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

Evidence submitted by the British government in court today proves, beyond any doubt, that Boris Johnson has been point blank lying about the degree of certainty Porton Down scientists have about the Skripals being poisoned with a Russian "novichok" agent.

Yesterday in an interview with Deutsche Welle Boris Johnson claimed directly Porton Down had told him they positively identified the nerve agent as Russian:

You argue that the source of this nerve agent, Novichok, is Russia. How did you manage to find it out so quickly? Does Britain possess samples of it?

Let me be clear with you When I look at the evidence, I mean the people from Porton Down, the laboratory

So they have the samples

They do. And they were absolutely categorical and I asked the guy myself, I said, "Are you sure?" And he said there's no doubt.

I knew and had published from my own whistleblowers that this is a lie. Until now I could not prove it. But today I can absolutely prove it, due to the judgement at the High Court case which gave permission for new blood samples to be taken from the Skripals for use by the OPCW. Justice Williams included in his judgement a summary of the evidence which tells us, directly for the first time, what Porton Down have actually said:

The Evidence

16. The evidence in support of the application is contained within the applications themselves (in particular the Forms COP 3) and the witness statements.
17. I consider the following to be the relevant parts of the evidence. I shall identify the witnesses only by their role and shall summarise the essential elements of their evidence.
i) CC: Porton Down Chemical and Biological Analyst
Blood samples from Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal were analysed and the findings indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound. The samples tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent OR CLOSELY RELATED AGENT.

The emphasis is mine. This sworn Court evidence direct from Porton Down is utterly incompatible with what Boris Johnson has been saying. The truth is that Porton Down have not even positively identified this as a "Novichok", as opposed to "a closely related agent". Even if it were a "Novichok" that would not prove manufacture in Russia , and a "closely related agent" could be manufactured by literally scores of state and non-state actors.

This constitutes irrefutable evidence that the government have been straight out lying – to Parliament, to the EU, to NATO, to the United Nations, and above all to the people – about their degree of certainty of the origin of the attack. It might well be an attack originating in Russia, but there are indeed other possibilities and investigation is needed. As the government has sought to whip up jingoistic hysteria in advance of forthcoming local elections, the scale of the lie has daily increased.

On a sombre note, I am very much afraid the High Court evidence seems to indicate there is very little chance the Skripals will ever recover; one of the reasons the judge gave for his decision is that samples taken now will be better for analysis than samples taken post mortem.


Tom Smythe , March 23, 2018 at 00:49

"findings indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound. The samples tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent OR CLOSELY RELATED AGENT."

Yes, they're not even saying it was a nerve agent, much less in the Novichok class of fluorophosphates, much less which among those hundred+ compounds. That fits with the Salisbury Hospital emergency room doctor's letter to The Times in which he states exactly 3 people have been treated there, all for poisoning, with none receiving antidotes for nerve gases. I wondered about that at the time, why not say Novichok-5 like in the fume hood accident at the Russian chemical warfare plant (which was treatable with atropine).

Here is the attending physician saying not only is the 41 bystander bit complete hooey but "no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury" though the 3 were "significantly poisoned". By what, if not a nerve agent, maybe norborene or strychnine? The latter "causes poisoning which results in muscular convulsions and eventually death through asphyxia."

March 16 2018
The Times

Sir, Further to your report ("Poison exposure leaves almost 40 needing treatment", Mar 14), may I clarify that no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury and there have only ever been three patients with significant poisoning. Several people have attended the emergency department concerned that they may have been exposed. None has had symptoms of poisoning and none has needed treatment. Any blood tests performed have shown no abnormality. No member of the public has been contaminated by the agent involved.

Stephen Davies

Consultant in emergency medicine, Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust

In a letter to The Times Dr Davies writes that no patients experienced symptoms other than the three with "significant poisoning". "Several people have attended the emergency department concerned that they may have been exposed," he adds. "None has had symptoms of poisoning and none has needed treatment. Any blood tests performed have shown no abnormality. No member of the public has been contaminated by the agent involved."

The Guardian, flip-flopping daily between uber-patriotic chest-thumping and skepticism, actually ran a well-researched article today

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/22/andrei-zheleznyakov-soviet-scientist-poisoned-novichok

Andrew Roth and Tom McCarthy Thu 22 Mar 2018 05.00 GMT

"Before former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia collapsed on a park bench in Salisbury on 4 March, the only other person confirmed to suffer the effects of novichok was a young Soviet chemical weapons scientist Circles appeared before my eyes: red and orange. A ringing in my ears, I caught my breath. And a sense of fear: like something was about to happen," Andrei Zheleznyakov told the now-defunct newspaper Novoye Vremya, describing the 1987 weapons lab incident that exposed him to a nerve agent that would eventually kill him. "I sat down on a chair and told the guys: 'It's got me.'"

N_ , March 23, 2018 at 02:14

"They got me" were also close to the last words of both Yasser Arafat and Hugo Chavez.

Tony M , March 23, 2018 at 01:06

Well, Nick Bailey is out and about – https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/poisoned-policeman-leaves-hospital-hg0ftjgk2

Harry Law , March 23, 2018 at 01:33

The Court evidence said @17.V ZZ: Treating Consultant.

a)Mr Skripal is heavily sedated following injury by a nerve agent.

b)Ms Skripal is heavily sedated following injury by a nerve agent.

This differs from the Porton Down evidence 17 i) CC: Porton Down Chemical and Biological Analyst
Blood samples from Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal were analysed and the findings indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound. The samples tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent OR CLOSELY RELATED AGENT.
Why isn't the Consultant more precise since he must have been given the exact Porton Down evidence in order to treat them.

james , March 23, 2018 at 01:34

amazing work craig thank you!

no wonder your website is under attack there are those opposed to letting the truth slip out.. they are some of them.. boris needs to be taken out to pasture

Steve , March 23, 2018 at 01:35

Keep up the good work Craig. Solidarity

N_ , March 23, 2018 at 02:02

Has Nick Bailey been asked to give the OPCW a new blood sample? Surely he should be asked. At least there is no consent issue, since he has recovered sufficiently to be discharged from hospital and he is fully able to give his consent or withhold it if he wishes. He probably has been asked, and there is no reason why taking a sample from him should have been mentioned in the judgment about taking samples from the Skripals, but I would still like to know.

N_ , March 23, 2018 at 02:12

I hope people do circulate this post by Craig as widely as they can. But note that it is not only Boris Johnson who has directly lied. Theresa May has also directly lied – and in her case, she has lied to the House of Commons. By parliamentary convention, a minister who has lied to the House should RESIGN, as John Profumo did in 1963.

If Jeremy Corbyn wishes to rise to the moment, he must at the earliest opportunity, which is to say TOMORROW, bring the matter of these lies to the House of Commons. He must directly accuse the prime minister of lying to the House and call on her to resign .

He should also call for Boris Johnson to come to the House and explain why he lied to Deutsche Welt.

N_ , March 23, 2018 at 02:20

And Corbyn should of course be supported by Vince Cable, Ian Blackford, and Liz Saville Roberts.

AAMVN , March 23, 2018 at 03:01

Boris Johnson a liar???? Whoever would have think that?

Pardon my sarcasm. This is important and irrefutable evidence that the UK Government are twisting the facts to suit an agenda that is not in the interests of the general populous, but aimed at retaining their tenuous grip on power. That has always been the Conservative policy – get into power and stay in power at any price. They don't have any answers to the problems the UK or wider world faces. They are not even looking for answers. Any solution would erode the privilege and security of their cronies and masters.

BTW – I don't have much less contempt for the other political parties. But the Conservatives are the most contemptible/despicable at the moment. Maybe we could start referring to the the robotic Ms May as the Contemptible Party Leader? Leader of the Contemptibles? Etc.

Kiza , March 23, 2018 at 00:08

i know that it is pointless, but let me explain something that should not need to be explained. If HMG really identified the nerve agent used in Skripal poisoning then its submission to court would have said: the nerve agent A-2617 was identified .

Instead, HMG submitted: the nerve agent of the class Novichok and then broadened it even beyond class to "or closely related agent".

It does not take a degree in chemistry to understand that something related to a class can be half of all poisons in the world.

Perhaps we will hear from Boris now that the secret intelligence that only he is privy to proves that Lucretia Borgia has been a secret Russian agent with a license to kill.

Harry Law , March 23, 2018 at 00:44

Just like the claims in Syria, it is 'Sarin' or a 'Sarin like substance', what a load of bollocks

A Biochemist writes , March 22, 2018 at 23:44

Fred,

" A closely related agent" has no precise scientific meaning. It could mean "in the same chemical class" as Novichok but of indeterminate chemical structure at this time; or it could mean having the same toxicological effect as novichok, but not necessarily in the same chemical class (although this could refer to mode of synthesis, rather than of structural type).

In either case, what it means is that they do not know the precise molecular structure of the agent concerned – and iif they don't know that, they cannot sign it to Russia – or anyone else.

But indeed, even if they did have a precise chemical structure, given that the synthetic processes have been published, even then they could not in any scientifically meaningful sense, ascribe its synthesis to Russia – or anyone else.

The statement to the Court proves beyond any credible argument that the UK Government are simply lying, either to the court, or to the rest of us.

Herbie , March 22, 2018 at 22:50

"I don't think anyone is disputing that it was 'produced in Russia' originally." That's disputed. By the OPCW. So, there was a program to attempt to develop these theoretical weapons in the Soviet Union (Uzbekistan) No evidence that the program was successful according to OPCW.

Robyn , March 22, 2018 at 23:56

'This has been confirmed by specialists, our specialists. An Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons mission is in the UK now to independently confirm this analysis.' Or, to put it another way, the task of the OPCW is NOT to conduct an independent analysis, but to AGREE WITH 'our specialists'.

Ex Pat , March 22, 2018 at 22:26

BORIS IS YELLOW

You've got them rattled Craig. Already the story is no longer screaming headlines, just faded mentions, even in the Daily Heil.

The nice part is that the British establishment may yet see blood running in the street. Theirs, if they loose control of the narrative!

Who can forget the rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights look of fear on Boris's face the morning after Brexit vote. – Boris booed and jeered as he leaves his house after Brexit, 24 June 2016 – Urban Picture UK – Youtube – – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1EtnpulrIg

"You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off." Michael Caine – The Italian Job – – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_PX1cVuaVA

Just say "Up yours" to USUK Empire Neo-Con Nazi Nonce mass psychosis! – Biggus Dickus – – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGoRRoGQnb8#t=00m36s

– (Boris for it is he) – Youtube – – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx_G2a2hL6U

(ER, Shome mishtake Shurely? Ed.) – Airplane – – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixljWVyPby0#t=01m06s

Paul Hunter , March 23, 2018 at 01:03

It is about right.

In the 90's young Boris used to write Eurosceptic articles for the Sunday Telegraph – really hard hitting pieces of writing, or so it seemed. Then along came Sir James Goldsmith's Referendum Party, a political organisation perfectly suited to Johnson's rhetoric you would have thought, except it wasn't: as soon as the new party appeared BoJo suddenly changed his tune – all of a sudden leaving the EU became a very bad idea with Goldsmith being described as a dangerous demagogue and readers were warned in no uncertain terms not to vote for him. It was as if Boris was taking orders from someone above.

He doesn't mean anything he says.

Harry Law , March 22, 2018 at 23:49

The Skripals are both in a coma in hospital after the nerve agent attack in Salisbury and therefore unable to give their consent to blood samples being taken or tested. A judge has given doctors permission to take blood samples from the former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, so that tests can be carried out by chemical weapons experts.

The judge, David Williams, who is based in the family division of the high court in London, announced his decision on Thursday after analysing the case at a private hearing earlier this week. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/22/salisbury-attack-medical-staff-contacted-police-when-antidotes-failed-to-work

How come Doctors had to wait so long? Doctors have been given the legal right to take blood samples from unconscious or incapacitated drivers without their consent. The change – under the provisions of the 2002 Police Reform Act – comes into effect on Tuesday. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2288574.stm

A spokesperson for the Home Office said the provision, which took effect Oct. 1, gives doctors "a power, but not a duty" to take the samples. The British Medical Association (BMA), which had urged the government to change the law, has issued guidelines for MDs. It says there should be "a clear separation between the 'CLINICAL' care the patient is receiving and any forensic procedures with which patients are asked to cooperate." Dr. Michael Wilks, chair of the BMA's Ethics Committee, says the association rarely supports taking samples without patients' consent, but in this case there is "a clear public interest" in having it done. He also pointed out that the law would help clear the names of some drivers. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC140489/
How much more of a public interest is it to save two peoples lives?

Barden Gridge , March 23, 2018 at 00:02

"Blood samples from Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal were analyzed and the findings indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound. The samples tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent OR CLOSELY RELATED AGENT."

What's a "related compound"? Could it be something as ordinary as sheep dip or weedkiller? Could they be described as "nerve agents", even if they're not usually thought of in that sense?

As for Johnson. I've watched his lies and obfuscation connected with the idiotic Garden Bridge project for the last two years. Some £46 million of public money was wasted on that because of him, never mind the disastrous Heatherwick new bus for London, the Dangleway, the Arcelor Mittal Orbit, the dodgy deal about West Ham getting the Olympic stadium. He has no conscience. He does not give a damn about anything other than Boris Johnson.

In a German TV disscussion programme last night, Anthony Glees was calling for a boycott of the World Cup in Russia and actually said:
"Boris Johnson would not have accused Putin if he didn't have any proof". ( Glees' is quoted in German here: https://twitter.com/maischberger/status/976580438222360576 ) He should try that line on a British audience, especially a London one.

Dave Lawton , March 23, 2018 at 00:23

Sheep dip yes is a nerve agent and people have died. There is even a brand called ASSASSIN Sheep Dip.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11561630/That-sheep-dip-poisoning-disaster-they-tried-to-keep-secret.html

Harry Law , March 23, 2018 at 00:05

The doctors could have taken the blood of the Skripals on 4th of March and helped to save their lives see my comment above. If they die, could this be manslaughter?

PreProle , March 23, 2018 at 00:06

The judgment at the high court also stated –

"c) The main consideration ought to be the beliefs and values that would be likely to influence the decision if Mr Skripal or Ms Skripal had capacity. An individual subjected to such an attack with personally catastrophic consequences would want to see it fully and properly investigated and that all appropriate steps to identify the perpetrators (individual and state) have been taken so that they can be held to account."

A 'full and proper investigation' into the Salisbury incident would HAVE to include the UK government's agreement to supply Russia with blood samples from Mr and Ms Skripal, in accordance with CWC procedures and with Russia's request in keeping with those procedures. As Russia alone hold the formulaic records by which to accurately measure the toxic type in the Skripals blood (should those toxins be Russian in origin), any investigation which excludes Russian participation can in no way be considered as "fully and properly" conducted. Furthermore, any effort to second-guess and thereby disregard whatever results a Russian participation may provide to an investigation can only be considered as an attempt against its 'full and proper' conclusion.

J , March 23, 2018 at 00:44

New cold War 2.0 with optional World War 3.0 extra's, all yours with only vague assurances. Deposit required. Buy now while stocks last.*

*Our products may differ from those described in the packaging, no refunds or returns.

MJ , March 23, 2018 at 00:16

If the Skripals really are in a Salisbury NHS hospital then It's safe to conclude that no nerve agent was involved at all. This is because of the comments of the consultant and the the fact that they're still alive

ohmygowd , March 23, 2018 at 00:27

Could it be argued that all nerve agents are "closely related" and then speculated that the wording of the testimony was arrived at in a way of compromise between the scientist(s) and the government?

https://chemm.nlm.nih.gov/nerveagents.htm

Also, do we know if the blood sample was taken from the police officer who (it would appear) made sudden recovery? Can him being discharged from hospital be seen as a way to avoid giving the blood sample?

[Mar 23, 2018] Interesting detail about illegal British war propaganda in breach of ICCPR Article 20. Of particular note is the report of Pompeo's role in the blame game for the failed Skripal provocation.

Notable quotes:
"... Ultimately, Britain is not a factor in foreign affairs. Having withdrawn from the EU, they've vanished up the USA's asshole. The US controls their Fisher-Price nuclear deterrent and their increasingly atavistic veto. ..."
"... The determining geopolitical factor is Russia's missile announcement. It re-established MAD, but that's not all. It also created a capability for proportional response to the entire range of US force that effectively counters all US use and threat of force. ..."
Mar 23, 2018 | www.unz.com

Red Dawn , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 9:53 pm GMT

Interesting detail about illegal British war propaganda in breach of ICCPR Article 20. Of particular note is the report of Pompeo's role in the blame game for the failed provocation.

Ultimately, Britain is not a factor in foreign affairs. Having withdrawn from the EU, they've vanished up the USA's asshole. The US controls their Fisher-Price nuclear deterrent and their increasingly atavistic veto.

The determining geopolitical factor is Russia's missile announcement. It re-established MAD, but that's not all. It also created a capability for proportional response to the entire range of US force that effectively counters all US use and threat of force. There's no more game of chicken. Russia can discipline the US with localized humiliation and global rout without recourse to mutual destruction.

The Russian program of coercion to peace is already taking effect:

https://www.merkley.senate.gov/news/press-releases/amid-heightened-tension-merkley-feinstein-sanders-and-markey-press-trump-administration-to-jumpstart-new-strategic-talks-with-russia

In these talks, Russia is in a position to impose not just nuclear disarmament but demilitarization. They've turned the clock back to the Eisenhower/Herter peace plan. That is a very good thing.

[Mar 23, 2018] The USA daily propaganda briefings on Skripal case

Mar 23, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Posted by: james | Mar 22, 2018 10:14:16 PM | 58

james , Mar 22, 2018 10:14:16 PM | 58
usa daily propaganda briefings...

https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2018/03/279451.htm


"MS NAUERT: Yeah. Okay. So, as many of you know, Russia – yeah, I think it was yesterday – said that this could have come – the poisoning could have come from yet another country, which is ridiculous. I mean, we put out a statement about that, saying that is a joke that it could have come from another country. We've seen Russian claims like this before, when Russia claimed not to be responsible for its little green men in Ukraine, where Russia claimed to not be responsible for the downing of the Malaysian Air flight in 2014 over Ukraine. We've seen Russia continue to perpetuate the conflict in eastern Ukraine. They make a lot of claims. I think it's pretty clear we stand by the Brits, as do many other countries, that Russia's responsible for this."

[Mar 23, 2018] Unanticipated effect of expulsion of British diplomats from Russia

Mar 23, 2018 | vz.ru

Also on Thursday, the media reported that Moscow can reveal the identity of spies sent as part of 23 employees of the British Embassy in Russia after the announcement of persona non grata Russian diplomats in London.

Elena Vrach , 1 hour ago

Yes, there is a question the despite equal number of expelled diplomats, the level of damage is different and is higher for Britain. Because ironically, EVERYONE assumes that British authorities expelled Russian diplomats as a part of propaganda circus "Oh Oh Oh Novichok".

But on those who were expelled by Russia there is a stamp "MI6" because for Russia it does not make sense to resort to propaganda action -- they expelled those who really were harmful for their security trying to decimate British MI6 capabilities in their country -- and that means that all or most of expelled are iether undercover agents of MI6, or are closely connected with MI6.

Which means effectively the end of their career as MI6 undercover agents. Which is one of the unanticipated effects of this round of Skripal scandal...

It would be funny if WikiLeaks soon publish some list with their positions in MI6.

[Mar 23, 2018] The alleged Salisbury attack succeeded as propaganda but rush to judgement, childish government and diplomatic ranting makes it similar to Iraq WDM hoax

Mar 23, 2018 | www.unz.com

Randal , March 22, 2018 at 4:21 pm GMT

Britain:

My own country is looking particularly shabby at the moment, over a number of topical news stories:

The alleged Salisbury attack, and in particular the disgraceful and shameful British government response to it and the lockstep backing for it by the establishment media. Rush to judgement, childish government and diplomatic ranting, Iraq War-style manipulation of seemingly laughably inadequate evidence to "fit the facts around the policy", massive jingoistic propaganda effort.

Intelligence and security community involvement in the manipulative anti-Trump hysteria in the US.

Now, the related Cambridge Analytica/SCL Elections story and the comical performance in presumably giving time to cover up information on that company's servers with a convenient court delay in issuing a search warrant:

Cambridge Analytica: search of London HQ delayed by wait for warrant

The information commissioner will have to wait until at least Friday to enter the offices of Cambridge Analytica after a high court judge adjourned the hearing into her application for a warrant.

The commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, announced on Monday night that she planned to request an urgent warrant to enter the company's London offices, after it was revealed that it had been given information from 50m Facebook profiles without users' permission.

.

On Tuesday, crates were seen being removed from the central London office that Cambridge Analytica shares with other tenants. No one on the scene would comment on the origin of the crates, and the ICO said it was not involved in their removal.

The effectiveness of US sphere establishment media propaganda can be judged from the widespread belief that Russia was likely responsible for the alleged attack in Salisbury, when in reality the case against Russia is almost literally non-existent . One survey suggested as few as 26% even questioned the state approved and propaganda-imposed version (poll conducted 14th/15th March):

73% of people in the poll think that Russia is responsible for the poisoning, 21% are unsure, 5% don't think it was Russia. There is also broad public support for the government's reaction – 60% support the measures they've announced so far and 14% are opposed.

[Mar 23, 2018] Russiagate Comes to England by Philip Giraldi

Notable quotes:
"... persona non grata ..."
"... May, who referred to a "Russian mafia state," has blamed Moscow for the attack even though she made plain in her first speech that the investigation was still underway. ..."
"... She did not consider that Vladimir Putin's government would have no good reason to carry out an assassination that surely would be attributed to it, particularly as it was on the verge of national elections and also, more important, because it will be hosting the World Cup later this year and will be highly sensitive to threats of boycott. ..."
"... when Theresa May says that the alleged agent used against the Skripals as being "of a type" associated with a reported Russian-developed chemical weapon called Novichok that was produced in the 1970s and 1980s, she is actually conceding that her own chemical weapons laboratories at Porton Down are, to a certain, extent, guessing at the provenance and characteristics of the actual agent that might or might not have been used in Salisbury. ..."
"... Reprinted with permission from Unz.co ..."
Mar 20, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

I don't know what happened in Salisbury England on March 4th, but it appears that the British government doesn't know either. Prime Minister Theresa May's speech before Parliament last Monday was essentially political, reflecting demands that she should "do something" in response to the mounting hysteria over the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. After May's presentation there were demands from Parliamentarians for harsh measures against Russia, reminiscent of the calls for action emanating from the U.S. Congress over the allegations relating to what has been called Russiagate.

This demand to take action led to a second Parliamentary address by May on Wednesday in which she detailed the British response to the incident, which included cutting off all high-level contacts between Moscow and London and the " persona non grata " (PNG) expulsion of 23 "spies" and intelligence officers working out of the Russian Federation Embassy. The expulsions will no doubt produce a tit-for-tat PNG from Moscow, ironically crippling or even eliminating the MI-6 presence and considerably reducing Britain's own ability to understand what it going on in the Kremlin.

May, who referred to a "Russian mafia state," has blamed Moscow for the attack even though she made plain in her first speech that the investigation was still underway. In both her presentations, she addressed the issue of motive by citing her belief that the attempted assassination conforms with an established pattern of Russian behavior. She did not consider that Vladimir Putin's government would have no good reason to carry out an assassination that surely would be attributed to it, particularly as it was on the verge of national elections and also, more important, because it will be hosting the World Cup later this year and will be highly sensitive to threats of boycott. And it must be observed that Skripal posed no active threat to the Russian government. He has been living quietly in Britain for eight years, leading to wild tabloid press speculation that the Kremlin's motive must have been to warn potential traitors that there are always consequences, even years later and in a far-off land.

To provide additional buttressing of what is a questionable thesis, the case of the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 has been repeatedly cited by the media on both sides of the Atlantic as evidence of Russian turpitude, but the backstory is not the same. Litvinenko was an FSB officer who fled to the United Kingdom to avoid prosecution in Russia. In Britain, he became a whistleblower and author, exposing numerous alleged Russian government misdeeds. Would the Kremlin have been motivated to kill him? He was seen as a traitor and a continuing threat through his books and speeches, so it is certainly possible. The story of Skripal was, however, completely different. He was a double agent working for Britain who was arrested and imprisoned in 2006. He was released and traveled to the UK after a 2010 spy swap was arranged by Washington and his daughter has been able to travel freely from Moscow to visit him. If the Russian government had wanted to kill him, they could have easily done so while he was in prison, or they could have punished him by taking steps against his daughter.

There are a number of problems with the accepted narrative as presented by May and the media. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a nerve agent as "usually odorless organophosphate (such as sarin, tabun, or VX) that disrupts the transmission of nerve impulses by inhibiting cholinesterase and especially acetylcholinesterase and is used as a chemical weapon in gaseous or liquid form," while Wikipedia explains that it is "a class of organic chemicals that disrupt the mechanisms by which nerves transfer messages to organs." A little more research online reveals that most so-called nerve agents are chemically related. So when Theresa May says that the alleged agent used against the Skripals as being "of a type" associated with a reported Russian-developed chemical weapon called Novichok that was produced in the 1970s and 1980s, she is actually conceding that her own chemical weapons laboratories at Porton Down are, to a certain, extent, guessing at the provenance and characteristics of the actual agent that might or might not have been used in Salisbury.

Beyond that, a military strength nerve agent is, by definition, a highly concentrated and easily dispersed form of a chemical weapon. It is intended to kill or incapacitate hundreds or even thousands of soldiers. If it truly had been used in Salisbury, even in a small dose, it would have killed Skripal and his daughter as well as others nearby. First responders who showed up without protective clothing, clearly seen in the initial videos and photos taken near the site, would also be dead. After her first speech, May summoned the Russian Ambassador and demanded that he address the allegations, but Moscow reasonably enough demanded a sample of the alleged nerve agent for testing by relevant international bodies like the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons before it could even respond to the British accusations. It was a valid point even supported in Parliament questioning by opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, but May and her government decided to act anyway.

May's language also conveys uncertainty. She used "it appears" and also said it was "highly likely" that Moscow was behind the poisoning of Skripal but provided no actual evidence that that was the case, presumably only assuming that it had to be Russia. And her government has told the public that there is "little risk" remaining over the incident and that those who were possibly exposed merely have to wash themselves and their clothes, hardly likely if it were a military grade toxin, which gains it lethality from being persistent on and around a target. She made clear her lack of corroboration for her claim by offering an "either-or" analysis: either Russia's government did it or it had "lost control" of its nerve agent.

As noted above, May's argument is, to a certain extent, based on character assassination of Russians – she even offered up the alleged "annexation" of Crimea as corroboration of her view that Moscow is not inclined to play by the rules that others observe. It is a narrative that is based on the presumption that "this is the sort of thing the Russian government headed by Vladimir Putin does." The British media has responded enthusiastically, running stories about numerous assassinations and poisonings that ought to be attributed to Russia, while ignoring the fact that the world leaders in political assassinations are actually the United States and Israel.

There are a number of other considerations that the May government has ignored in its rush to expand the crisis. She mentioned that Russia might be somewhat exonerated if it has lost control of its chemical weapons, but did not fully explain what that might mean. It could be plausible to consider that states hostile to Russia like Ukraine and Georgia that were once part of the Soviet Union could have had , and might still retain, stocks of the Novichok nerve agent. That in turn suggests a false flag, with someone having an interest in promoting a crisis between Russia and Britain. If that someone were a country having a sophisticated arms industry possessing its own chemical weapons capability, like the United States or Israel, it would be quite easy to copy the characteristics of the Russian nerve agent, particularly as its formula has been known since it was published in 1992. The agent could then be used to create an incident that would inevitably be blamed on Moscow. Why would Israel and the United States want to do that? To put pressure on Russia to embarrass it and put it on the defensive so I would be forced eventually to abandon its support for President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Removing al-Assad is the often-expressed agenda of the Israeli and American governments, both of which have pledged to take "independent action" in Syria no matter what the United Nations or any other international body says. The redoubtable Nikki Haley is already using the incident to fearmonger over Moscow's intentions at the U.N., warning that a Russian chemical attack on New York City could be coming.

And to throw out a really wild possibility, one might observe that no one in Britain had a stronger motive to generate a major confrontation with a well-defined enemy than Theresa May, who has been under fire by the media and pressured to resign by many in her own Conservative Party. Once upon a time suggesting that a democratically elected government might assassinate someone for political reasons would have been unthinkable, but the 2016 election in the United States has demonstrated that nothing is impossible, particularly if one is considering the possibility that a secret intelligence service might be collaborating with a government to help it stay in power. An incident in which no one was actually killed that can be used to spark an international crisis mandating "strong leadership" would be just the ticket.

Reprinted with permission from Unz.co

[Mar 23, 2018] Manipulative media monopoly Kremlin spokesman says US UK press has ruled world for decades by Simon Belcher

Notable quotes:
"... Media outlets based in the US and Britain have long enjoyed dominance in the global news market and have abused their position to manipulate audiences ..."
"... "People are naked against these media wars. They are victims of these media wars," ..."
"... "They are being driven into a certain way of emotions without even understanding that." ..."
"... "Anglo-Saxon media" ..."
"... "They are the most powerful, the most influential, and they have the widest possible reach globally," ..."
"... And, of course, this feeling of monopoly brings a will to manipulate this monopoly. ..."
"... You can use this monopoly as a tool of delivering your point of view, whether it's right or wrong, it doesn't matter, you can adjust it in accordance with the situation -- to simply manipulate the [minds] of people throughout the world." ..."
Mar 23, 2018 | www.rt.com

Media outlets based in the US and Britain have long enjoyed dominance in the global news market and have abused their position to manipulate audiences , a Kremlin spokesman told RT in an exclusive interview. Russia is currently being targeted by an unprecedented campaign in the West, aimed at undermining its resurgence, Dmitry Peskov told RT's Sophie Shevardnadze. The media are playing a major part in it, as they are selling an anti-Russian narrative to the people of Western nations. But what those outlets do is a disservice to their audiences, he argued.

"People are naked against these media wars. They are victims of these media wars," he said. "They are being driven into a certain way of emotions without even understanding that."

Peskov said that for decades "Anglo-Saxon media" enjoyed a virtual global monopoly on delivering news about economy and politics.

"They are the most powerful, the most influential, and they have the widest possible reach globally," he said. " And, of course, this feeling of monopoly brings a will to manipulate this monopoly.

You can use this monopoly as a tool of delivering your point of view, whether it's right or wrong, it doesn't matter, you can adjust it in accordance with the situation -- to simply manipulate the [minds] of people throughout the world."

He added that outlets like RT challenge this "huge machine" with alternative narratives and facts that don't fit into how the Western media wants the world to see things. A good example of this is coverage of events in Syria and Iraq, Peskov said.

Western media were all too eager to highlight civilian casualties of the operation in Aleppo, which they blame solely on Russian and Syrian forces, but failed to extend this kind of reporting to similar operations in Mosul and Raqqa, where the US-led coalition was in charge.

[Mar 22, 2018] Vladimir Putin: nonsense to think Russia would poison spy in UK

Highly recommended!
Mar 18, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

"As for the tragedy that you mentioned, I found out about it from the media. The first thing that entered my head was that if it had been a military-grade nerve agent, the people would have died on the spot," said Putin.

"Secondly, Russia does not have such [nerve] agents. We destroyed all our chemical weapons under the supervision of international organisations and we did it first, unlike some of our partners who promised to do it, but unfortunately did not keep their promises."

Despite the tensions, Putin said Moscow was ready to cooperate with London: "We are ready to cooperate, we said that straight away. We are ready to take part in the necessary investigations, but for that there needs be a desire from the other side and we don't see that yet. But we are not taking it off the agenda, joint efforts are possible."

"I think any sensible person would understand that it would be rubbish, drivel, nonsense, for Russia to embark on such an escapade on the eve of a presidential election."

[Mar 22, 2018] I think that in much of the world The World Cup is a bigger deal than the Olympics. That's why Brits want to undermine it with Skripal affair

Notable quotes:
"... I think that in much of the world The World Cup is a bigger deal than the Olympics. I knew some athletes here in Canada who had their athletic careers ended by our boycott of the 1980 Olympics (after years and years of hard work). I'm surprised western intelligence agencies have not done more to undermine Russia's world cup. They may yet. ..."
"... Outside of North America the World Cup is definitely a much bigger event than the Olympics. ..."
"... I just thought we would see the same nonsense we saw to undermine the Sochi Olympics, this just seems much more than just derogatory media coverage, or officials boycotting attending the event. I was interested to see Professor Richard Sakwa, his book on the Ukraine crisis is probably the best out there, interviewed on RT regarding this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcKQ-4Qqel0 ..."
Mar 22, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

JamesT , 21 March 2018 at 09:48 PM

LondonBob

I think that in much of the world The World Cup is a bigger deal than the Olympics. I knew some athletes here in Canada who had their athletic careers ended by our boycott of the 1980 Olympics (after years and years of hard work). I'm surprised western intelligence agencies have not done more to undermine Russia's world cup. They may yet.

LondonBob -> JamesT ... , 22 March 2018 at 04:24 AM
Outside of North America the World Cup is definitely a much bigger event than the Olympics. I already have my tickets for England v Panama in Nizhny Novgorod, as well as a second round match in Moscow.

I don't care much for the Olympics, although I do like the Winter Olympics. I just thought we would see the same nonsense we saw to undermine the Sochi Olympics, this just seems much more than just derogatory media coverage, or officials boycotting attending the event. I was interested to see Professor Richard Sakwa, his book on the Ukraine crisis is probably the best out there, interviewed on RT regarding this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcKQ-4Qqel0

[Mar 22, 2018] Either the British authorities are unable to protect from a terrorist attack on their territory or staged the attack themselves

Theresa May was definitly deciving british people about nerve gas attack
"either the British authorities are unable to protect from a terrorist attack on their territory or staged the attack themselves.
Notable quotes:
"... a Russian chem-tech said yesterday if the Russians had done it they would be dead. Even today they were poisoned in their homes is held to, after which they could drive to a pub and a meal (for which they waited 20 minutes) then out to a park bench . . . succumbing almost three hours later. ..."
"... I'm looking forward to an accurate timeline of what happened and when it happened. ..."
"... another gas pipeline inspired madness as NordStream 2 approaches implementation. This is supported by the voltairnet report (especially the sacking of Tillerson). The oil, coal, nuclear lobbies are desperate to profit from gas to EU and that is not going to happen from Russian gas pipelines. ..."
"... the UK is the homeland of Christopher Steele who assembled the Trump smut dossier. That was done with the connivance of MI6 and the UK conservative party in support of Hillary Clinton and against Trump. ie The UK not Russia set out to interfere in the USA elections and have been exposed. ..."
"... IMO, the Brits have made a massive mistake, a grave error, that they are now very much aware of -- their hoax has blown up in their faces, and there's no way out other than sweeping the entire affair down the memory hole or under the rug. And with the advent of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the entire government's shifted to damage control. ..."
"... But there will be some that it doesn't fit easily with and the example of David Kelly will help as a salutary warning to anyone considering reflecting on the morals and ethics of a situation. ..."
"... Just so Mrs May and PHE are clear; A Dissipated, Weaponised Nerve Agent in the air and on surfaces in the Streets of Salisbury (or anywhere else) Is FUCKING DANGEROUS - BIG TIMEY ..."
"... Porton Down employees might get away with lying, Blair did get away with lying but it will be interesting how Mrs May is going to explain this one. ..."
"... Why do you call Wolfowitz, Bremmer and Rumsfeld clueless? Has it occurred to you they knew exactly what they were doing -- the destruction of Iraq -- and got away with it? ..."
"... I cannot understand why so many commenters assume that a toxic agent had anything to do with this obvious false flag charade. I wonder if Skripal or his daughter were actually sick at all, or merely doing a crisis acting job. ..."
"... Actually, there is zero evidence that anything happened at all. ..."
"... It's interesting to see how the Salisbury thing ties in with Brexit negotiations. Clearly the Tories are in disarray and probably pinning their hopes on a strongly worded anti Russian statement from the OPCW. They may be out of luck. ..."
Mar 22, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

ninel , Mar 21, 2018 7:50:18 PM | 78

Couple of recent pieces that point to an imminent attack from several sides Where's b on this?
Sid2 , Mar 21, 2018 7:53:20 PM | 79
@74: plus (sorry don't have link)

a Russian chem-tech said yesterday if the Russians had done it they would be dead. Even today they were poisoned in their homes is held to, after which they could drive to a pub and a meal (for which they waited 20 minutes) then out to a park bench . . . succumbing almost three hours later.

I'm looking forward to an accurate timeline of what happened and when it happened.

flamingo , Mar 21, 2018 8:16:19 PM | 80
Thank you b and all contributors. This is one great community to share ideas with. I am firmly of the belief that this venomous drivel by May and her UK parrots is:

1: another gas pipeline inspired madness as NordStream 2 approaches implementation. This is supported by the voltairnet report (especially the sacking of Tillerson). The oil, coal, nuclear lobbies are desperate to profit from gas to EU and that is not going to happen from Russian gas pipelines.

2: the UK is the homeland of Christopher Steele who assembled the Trump smut dossier. That was done with the connivance of MI6 and the UK conservative party in support of Hillary Clinton and against Trump. ie The UK not Russia set out to interfere in the USA elections and have been exposed.

More dust in the eyes is needed. So kill 2 birds with one stone as they say at Porton Down and voila, a poisoned traitor and daughter are found dying.

As the Afghanistan people discovered more than a century ago, you can't trust any British envoy.

The amusing part of this tale is how the UK suckered Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the UN. The shame and embarassment that Yankees must be feeling after they even had a war of independence from these lying, treacherous Tory fools. Trump needs to reassign Haley to the new embassy in the arctic circle.

karlof1 , Mar 21, 2018 8:20:52 PM | 81
Shamir's Unz Review article cited and linked by Don Bacon @13 which I relink here provides some explosive material at its conclusion that none of the Unz commentators addressed, which I found rather odd given its importance.

IMO, the Brits have made a massive mistake, a grave error, that they are now very much aware of -- their hoax has blown up in their faces, and there's no way out other than sweeping the entire affair down the memory hole or under the rug. And with the advent of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the entire government's shifted to damage control.

Truth is always stranger than fiction!

Peter B , Mar 21, 2018 8:34:58 PM | 83
Got to say it would be a bit of a mind fuck for an honest scientist at Porton Down to be instructed to lie.

Of course the Developed Vetting Process kinda gets the right people in those positions where they actually believe not telling the truth is their duty when circumstances require it.

But there will be some that it doesn't fit easily with and the example of David Kelly will help as a salutary warning to anyone considering reflecting on the morals and ethics of a situation. But their job, when all is said and done, involves extending the science of humans' ability to kill other humans in more novel, ingenious and grotesque ways.

Once they come to terms with that they must accept what they are, and lying is a very minor blemish on what their souls have become.

But Doc Davies unabashed and vibrant (could also read naive and stupid) did speak out.

No retraction, no correction from the Doc himself, the NHS trust, Public Health England (PHE) or any other government authority says to me he told it as it was; nobody in Salisbury was poisoned by nerve agent (weaponised or otherwise)

Which ties in with Putin's observations - that stuff doesn't make you unwell, it kills you - and Mrs May' passing on of PHE advice; "as Public Health England has made clear, the risk to public health is low." whilst reassuring us in the same statement that; "It is now clear that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent"

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2018-03-12/debates/722E1DF5-68E2-41A0-8F3C-23B6480B93BF/SalisburyIncident

Just so Mrs May and PHE are clear; A Dissipated, Weaponised Nerve Agent in the air and on surfaces in the Streets of Salisbury (or anywhere else) Is FUCKING DANGEROUS - BIG TIMEY

Porton Down employees might get away with lying, Blair did get away with lying but it will be interesting how Mrs May is going to explain this one.

Don Bacon , Mar 21, 2018 8:40:28 PM | 84
@Jen.

Porton Down is okay financially. They earned it! news report: Britain will invest 48 million pounds in a new chemical warfare defence centre at its Porton Down military research laboratory, Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson said on Thursday.

Madeira , Mar 21, 2018 8:54:06 PM | 85
@76 JohninMK

Yes, very interesting article on background/history of novichok and the various reasons for keeping it secret. Perhaps most important point to note is the following: "Probably all major laboratories that conduct research on poison gas, such as 'Porton Down' in England, Edgewood in the US and the Dutch TNO, have already synthesized novichoks a long time ago."

Castellio , Mar 21, 2018 9:16:30 PM | 86
sid2@68

Why do you call Wolfowitz, Bremmer and Rumsfeld clueless? Has it occurred to you they knew exactly what they were doing -- the destruction of Iraq -- and got away with it?

mike k , Mar 21, 2018 9:45:34 PM | 88
I cannot understand why so many commenters assume that a toxic agent had anything to do with this obvious false flag charade. I wonder if Skripal or his daughter were actually sick at all, or merely doing a crisis acting job.

Curious that they have been spirited away from anyone who might assess their condition. And the notoriously deadly nerve agent apparently did not do it's job on them. Because there was no nerve agent involved. Now after a long lapse of time some concocted nerve agent may be produced to back up the whole scam.

Meanwhile Scripal and daughter will be held away from prying eyes in "protective custody".

Don Bacon , Mar 21, 2018 10:01:33 PM | 89
Yulia Skripol facebook
PeacefulProsperity , Mar 21, 2018 10:24:08 PM | 90
Yes, Meyssan as always has the best intel about the real stuff behind the scenes. B's reporting has recently been also stellar. Thanks! UK has always been behind every US aggression, not the other way round. Besides read Myron Fagan...
blues , Mar 21, 2018 10:50:09 PM | 94
Actually, there is zero evidence that anything happened at all.
Don Bacon , Mar 21, 2018 11:15:12 PM | 95
The US and EU are wandering away from the UK script on Russia. Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Trump have both undermined Theresa May's attempt at a united front against the Kremlin, as both men congratulated the president on his successful re-election. News report:

A message from European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker congratulating Vladimir Putin on his reelection as Russian president was called "shameful" and "nauseating" by British Conservatives.

Ashley Fox, a Tory MEP, said on Tuesday that it was remiss of Juncker not to have mentioned the poisoning of a Russian former spy and his daughter in Salisbury, southern England.

" To congratulate Vladimir Putin on his election victory without referring to the clear ballot-rigging that took place is bad enough. But his failure to mention Russia's responsibility for a military nerve agent attack on innocent people in my constituency is nauseating ,"

said Fox, according to the Guardian.

Dh , Mar 22, 2018 12:06:20 AM | 98
@97: It's interesting to see how the Salisbury thing ties in with Brexit negotiations. Clearly the Tories are in disarray and probably pinning their hopes on a strongly worded anti Russian statement from the OPCW. They may be out of luck.
jayc , Mar 22, 2018 1:12:16 AM | 100
Reuters describe OPCW inspectors beginning work "at the scene of the nerve agent attack." "The inspectors were seen arriving at the Mill pub in Salisbury." The Mill pub? https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-russia-toxin/chemical-weapons-inspectors-on-scene-of-uk-nerve-agent-attack-idUKKBN1GX1V4

[Mar 22, 2018] On reasons for the made in a hurry Novichok story and the last surprisingly sane admissions by those in charge of CENTCOM

Notable quotes:
"... They mentioned although the Turkish officials have said they are ready to help evacuation of al-Nusra Front (Tahrir al-Sham Hay'at or the Levant Liberation Board) terrorists from Eastern Ghouta to take them to Idlib, this seems to be a cover as they really mean to rescue their special foreign forces that among the ranks of the Al-Qaeda-affiliatetd Al-Nusra in Syria. ..."
"... According to the sources, a sum of 960 foreign agents have so far been transferred to these specific regions after the terrorist groups allowed evacuation of civilians on March 15... ..."
"... It seems that there is a significant effort by the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany to provoke a military confrontation with Moscow. How else are we able to interpret threats from Macron to strike Damascus, together with his ominous advice to foreign journalists not to go to Damascus in the coming days and, for those already there, to leave the capital immediately? There has even been chatter within diplomatic circles that suggest that UN personnel are leaving Damascus.... ..."
"... Russian military representatives have reiterated that in the event of an attack, they will respond by hitting both the missiles launched as well as the ships from which the missiles were launched ..."
Mar 22, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Sarah B 22 March 2018 at 03:52 PM

On reasons for the made in a hurry Novichok story and the last surprisingly sane admissions by those in charge of CENTCOM:

http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13961229000496

"The sources said that after the army's expanding march in Eastern Ghouta and failure of the US-Israeli plot to conduct an effective offensive on Damascus, the US command center has rushed to to evacuate allied militants and agents operating for Israel, Jordan and NATO from the region.

They mentioned although the Turkish officials have said they are ready to help evacuation of al-Nusra Front (Tahrir al-Sham Hay'at or the Levant Liberation Board) terrorists from Eastern Ghouta to take them to Idlib, this seems to be a cover as they really mean to rescue their special foreign forces that among the ranks of the Al-Qaeda-affiliatetd Al-Nusra in Syria.

Therefore, the US has ordered Jeish al-Islam, Faylaq al-Rahman and other terrorist groups to allow evacuation of civilians from Eastern Ghouta to army-held regions in a bid to provide the ground for these foreign agents to also leave Ghouta in disguise and enable the Turkish intelligence service to send them to specified regions in al-Tanf and Northern Syria which are under the control of the US troops," they

.... According to the sources, a sum of 960 foreign agents have so far been transferred to these specific regions after the terrorist groups allowed evacuation of civilians on March 15... ."

Anna , 22 March 2018 at 09:17 AM
Are ziocons trumping the US non-zionized brass?- https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-21/if-us-plans-terrorist-false-flag-chemical-attack-justify-bombing-syria-russia-says

"According to reports, terrorists stationed in Al-Tanf received 20 tons of chlorine gas and detonators, disguised as cigarette packs, in order to attack in an area under the control of the terrorists that is densely inhabited by civilians. ...

It seems that there is a significant effort by the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany to provoke a military confrontation with Moscow. How else are we able to interpret threats from Macron to strike Damascus, together with his ominous advice to foreign journalists not to go to Damascus in the coming days and, for those already there, to leave the capital immediately? There has even been chatter within diplomatic circles that suggest that UN personnel are leaving Damascus....

Russian military representatives have reiterated that in the event of an attack, they will respond by hitting both the missiles launched as well as the ships from which the missiles were launched ."

--- As Zvika Haimovitch [head of the IDF's Aerial Defense Division] infromed us, the US troops will be "on the ground to be part of our deployment team to defend the State of Israel." http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2018/03/20/top-us-general-says-american-troops-should-be-ready-to-die-for-israel/

Casey -> Anna... , 22 March 2018 at 10:47 AM
Am I correct in assuming that the long-term US/UK/Israel plan is to use false-flag events blamed on P (spy poisonings, election tampering, MH17, Syria poison gas, etc.) to force R off the UNSC, then set up a Rus gov in exile (similar to the ploy used recently to steal Libyan cash), transfer the UNSC role to the exile Rus gov, and with all this to give the Rus elite sufficient political cover at home to "take out" an ever-popular P, by any means necessary?

Concurrently, a Syria false-flag gas attack is blamed on P, missiles launched on Syria to make sure Rus sinks a few Anglo warships and a few thousand expendable sailors are sunk, (as Ukraine warring restarts) then the open warfare, limited to the Med, with UK/US/Is certain they can outlast Rus, who will be stunned into surrender by the use of limited yield nukes?

Are the warmongers overplaying their hand? I keep seeing references to hair-on-fire hysteria of the elite doorkeepers being due to them seeing this trap in the Med as the last chance to take Rus out in a bid to try to save the NWO project.

[Mar 22, 2018] Does State Department have its own intel / black operations team in Syria? Thought it was a consumer not producer.

Mar 22, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Imagine -> james... 21 March 2018 at 02:33 PM

Because we all know the State Dept. is expert in hiring and directing jihadis to do dirty work. Thank heaven the CIA saved us!

...The whole thing smells like a dead fish.

The part about Porton Down getting creative with sarin samples' chain of custody has been alleged before, and I suppose State could have asked Britain to use its mercs to pull off an event.

However, since Sy Hersh points out embedded people were explicitly warned about the Apr '17 conventional attack ahead of time for their own safety (and the Syria plane cleared its mission with the Deconflict folks, and knew all along it was being tracked), the likelihood that a different group pulled the current sandbagging job must be considered.

So, fair question: Does State have its own intel / black operations team? Thought it was a consumer not producer.

[Mar 22, 2018] 21 March 2018 at 02:33 PM

Mar 22, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

...The whole thing smells like a dead fish.

The part about Porton Down getting creative with sarin samples' chain of custody has been alleged before, and I suppose State could have asked Britain to use its mercs to pull off an event.

However, since Sy Hersh points out embedded people were explicitly warned about the Apr '17 conventional attack ahead of time for their own safety (and the Syria plane cleared its mission with the Deconflict folks, and knew all along it was being tracked), the likelihood that a different group pulled the current sandbagging job must be considered.

So, fair question: Does State have its own intel / black operations team? Thought it was a consumer not producer.

[Mar 22, 2018] British attempts at gas lighting in Skripal affair

Mar 22, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

ex-PFC Chuck said in reply to james... , 21 March 2018 at 02:24 PM

@ 8
Yesterday Murray put up a post about the attempts at gas lighting thrown his way by the upholders of the Evil Putin Did It narrative, as well as trying to shame him for his past candor about his bipolar disorder.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/03/on-being-a-dissenting-voice-in-2018/comment-page-6/
VietnamVet , 21 March 2018 at 02:50 PM
Shepard
@14


"Russia did it" is a meme designed to scapegoat Russia to cover the Democrat's Asses for losing the 2016 election, and to enable continuation of the Forever Wars since the fall of Raqqa.


Facebook user data was fed into the analytics system that enabled Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign to effectively target voters at a minimal budget. They won Donald Trump the swing states and the election.

It wasn't the Russians, it was our own social media companies who sold user data to the Trump campaign which convinced liberals not to vote in swing states.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-21/it-wasnt-russia-it-was-obama-based-social-media-mining-beat-hillary

Peter Kim said in reply to b ... , 21 March 2018 at 05:33 PM
From what I learned about this Skripal affair and what we're expected to believe -- i.e., the official U.K. government version -- is ludicrous. Farcical. I'm talking Fargo and Burn After Reading kind of farcical. And is anyone a little alarmed that the same Monty Python-esque goofball is behind the attempted subversion of Trump's election in collusion with U.S. Deep State with a ludicrous 'Golden Showers' dossier was also the U.K.'s weapon to subvert FIFA and Russia in the World Cup and was an associate of Skripal.

POISONED RUSSIAN SPY LINKED TO TRUMP-RUSSIA DOSSIER AUTHOR CHRISTOPHER STEELE THROUGH SECURITY CONSULTANT
http://www.newsweek.com/russia-poison-spy-steele-dossier-836768

BBC (1/13/2017): Ex-MI6 man Steele hired for England World Cup bid
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-38607456


[Mar 22, 2018] The only suggestions that the Russians were responsible for the incident come from exactly the same kinds of people who told us about Iraq's WMD and the supposed Libyan humanitarian emergency

Notable quotes:
"... The UK has a long record of misdoings, he said, including the support of coup in Ukraine and the invasion of Iraq. "This is like talking to overweight alcoholics and drug users that have lost any sense of dignity." ..."
"... Their plan was to fabricate an attack against an ex-double agent in Salisbury and at the same time a chemical attack against the " moderate rebels " in the Ghouta. The conspirators' intention was to profit from the efforts of Syria to liberate the suburbs of its capital city and the disorganisation of Russia on the occasion of its Presidential election. Had these manipulations worked, the United Kingdom would have pushed the USA to bomb Damascus, including the Presidential palace, and demand that the United Nations General Assembly exclude Russia from the Security Council. ..."
"... However, the Syrian and Russian Intelligence Services got wind of what was being plotted. They realised that the US agents in the Ghouta who were preparing an attack against the Ghouta were not working for the Pentagon, but for another US agency. ..."
"... And there's the additional evidence that some kind of False Flag attempt fell apart at Eastern Ghouta + Trump's discovery that the Deep State was planning to take him by surprise (the immediate dismissal of Tillerson). ..."
Mar 22, 2018 | www.unz.com

annamaria , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 12:36 pm GMT

@polskijoe

The ongoing story of the lying scoundrels and war profiteers: https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-mysterious-frank-taylor-report-the-911-document-that-launched-us-natos-war-on-terrorism-in-the-middle-east/5632874
"On the morning of 12 September 2001, NATO's North Atlantic Council was summoned in Brussels. This was less than 24 hours after the events in USA.

Lord Robertson, Secretary General of NATO, wrote a draft resolution invoking Article 5 in the Washington treaty -- the famous 'musketeer clause' -- as a consequence of the terror attacks: "The Council agreed that if it is determined that this attack was directed from abroad against the United States, it shall be regarded as an action covered by Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, which states that an armed attack against one or more of the Allies in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all."

There was a reservation. Article 5 would not be formally activated before "it is determined that this attack was directed from abroad". Apparently, NATO had a suspect. But the forensic evidence was still pending, and hence also the formal invocation of Article 5.
Formally, this evidence was provided by Frank Taylor, a diplomat with the title of Ambassador from the US State Department . The first bombs fell in Kabul on 7 October 2001 [the slaughter of civilians by the US/NATO had begun].

Article 5 of the Washington Treaty emphasises the right to self-defense and reads: "Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, ." That is, military action is forbidden in the absence of an armed provocation , and the legality of the attack on Afghanistan depends exclusively on the evidence presented in Frank Taylor's report. But it was classified together with the minutes from the pertinent meetings.

We are still at war seventeen years later. Five countries have been destroyed, hundreds of thousands of people killed and millions displaced. Refugees are swarming the roads of Europe, trillions of dollars have been spent on weapons and mercenaries and our grandchildren have been shackled with endless debt."

-- Oded Yinon plan' fanatics, oilmen, banksters, MIC, "ambassadors," "lords," and "elected leaders of the free world " -- None of the war criminals has been punished. Guess, their children and grandchildren will be paying for the scoundrels' cowardice and lies.

annamaria , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 12:56 pm GMT
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-22/russian-ambassador-questions-uk-involvement-nerve-attack-blasts-johnsons-putin

"The Day, a news website that produces short articles about current affairs meant to be used as teaching aids in British schools , has offered students two alternatives to believe about Vladimir Putin: he is either Europe's "most dangerous leader since Hitler," or a puffed up figure attacking other nations out of weakness."

-- Was it a Friend of Israel that has concocted the definitions?

"Russian ambassador Alexander Yakovenko has held a press conference in London, denying the Kremlin was involved in the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia using military-grade nerve agent.

"Britain has without any evidence blamed Russia for poisoning three people and continues to refuse to cooperate," he said.

The UK authorities are violating Vienna Convention by not giving Russia access to Skripals, because Skripal has dual citizenship (the UK and Russia), Russian Ambassador to the UK Alexander Yakovenko said.

The Russian embassy has immediately requested details and materials of the case, the envoy stated.

While 10 days have passed, Moscow has received no response, while London has refused to pass samples of the poisonous substance allegedly used to attack Skripal.

Then Yakovenko turned a little darker, seemingly indicating concerns that this was nothing but a false-flag operation (via SputnikNews)
The envoy called for checking how could British experts find out the exact type of the nerve gas used to poison Skripal . [Good question!]

Commenting on the death of former top manager of Russian Aeroflot airline Nikolai Glushkov, the ambassador stated that "we cannot take Britain's words on trust."

Alexander Yakovenko said that Britain has provided no proof of Russia's alleged involvement in the nerve agent attack.
He suggested that the samples of the so-called Novichok nerve gas could have already been in possession of a laboratory, which is located just miles away from Salisbury .

"We have been refused consular access to our Russian citizen Yulia Skripal ," Russian Ambassador to the UK Alexander Yakovenko said.

The UK is ignoring requests on case of Russian businessman Glushkov who died in London, ambassador stated.

Russian experts puzzled how UK managed to determine type of nerve gas in Skripal case, in days, but not weeks or months.

The UK has a long record of misdoings, he said, including the support of coup in Ukraine and the invasion of Iraq. "This is like talking to overweight alcoholics and drug users that have lost any sense of dignity."

Boris Johnson [the self-proclaimed "passionate Zionist") compared Russia's hosting of this year's World Cup to the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. Russians respond: "Nobody has the right to insult the Russian people, who defeated the Nazis."

But the Friends of Israel are new Nazis, see ziocons' collaboration with Ukrainian neo-Nazis. Boris Johnson needs to infrom himslef: https://richardedmondson.net/2014/04/27/christian-zionists-neo-nazis-jewish-banderas-a-ukrainian-mazel-tov/ "Christian Zionists, Neo-Nazis, & Jewish Banderas: A Ukrainian Mazel Tov?" "

annamaria , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 1:06 pm GMT
"The US special forces deliver 20 tons of chlorine gas to Al Qaeda terrorists in Syria order to execute a false flag for the purposes of blaming Damascus and Moscow."

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-21/if-us-plans-terrorist-false-flag-chemical-attack-justify-bombing-syria-russia-says

"It seems that there is a significant effort by the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany to provoke a military confrontation with Moscow. How else are we able to interpret threats from Macron to strike Damascus, together with his ominous advice to foreign journalists not to go to Damascus in the coming days and, for those already there, to leave the capital immediately? There has even been chatter within diplomatic circles that suggest that UN personnel are leaving Damascus.

This could be psychological warfare, or it could be a prelude to war. With the stakes so high, we cannot afford to ignore any detail, even if it may be disinformation. The American attack seems imminent, with mounting signs of movements of American and Russian warships in the Mediterranean in attack formation.

Russian military representatives have reiterated that in the event of an attack, they will respond by hitting both the missiles launched as well as the ships from which the missiles were launched. Things are getting pretty dicey, and the risk of a direct confrontation between the United States and the Russian Federation are rising with every passing hour. The transfer of numerous US aircraft from Incirlik, Turkey, to Al-Azrak, Jordan, is another indication of preparations for an attack, since the forces moved to Jordan are close to the Al-Tanf base. The proposed strategy could involve an assault on the city of Daraa, for the purposes of securing the borders between Syria and Jordan and Syria and Israel.

The warnings raised by Lavrov and Gerasimov appear unprecedented, given that they detail a plan already set in course, evidently approved at the highest levels and aimed at provoking and justifying an attack on Syria ; and attack that would encompass the Russian forces in Syria. "

-- Ziocons want their promised land by any means.

DESERT FOX , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 1:22 pm GMT
The Zionists control Britain and the U.S. and are planning to start WWIII using Syria and Iran as the precursor and nothing is going to stop this Zionist drive for a Zionist NWO no matter what the cost in lives or money, these satanic bastards are bound and determined to have a war with Russia and so it shall be done.

These satanic bastards have deep underground military bases that they think they can survive a nuclear war in and so they might, but what will be left, by the way these bases are known as DUMBs, and are connected by a tunnel system through out the U.S. and Britain, if anyone doubts this , do some research , it is true.

A Zionist nuclear war is on the horizon.

ploni almoni , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 1:50 pm GMT
@ANON

If you don't know, why don't you inform yourself?

Abdul Alhazred , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 2:00 pm GMT
@ANON

Mr. Meyssan wrote the first book, in 2002, to assert that 9/11 was a False Flag attack by what we now call the 'Deep State". 9/11 The Big Lie came out in English in 2003. I believe that Meyssan is living in exile from France in Syria. He was one of the first reporters to show that the attacks upon Assad and Syria were being run by foreign intelligence operatives and their terrorist minions like ISIS.

I am glad that Mr. Unz has run this very important article on the present intrigue.

cezanne , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 2:01 pm GMT
This excellent article is why I visit this site. Doing the work that the Jewstream media refuses to do. I knew "something was rotten in Denmark"! It is very, very good that the world has leaders such as our great President Trump and powerful (take no bull) Putin. As far as Merkel and May go the sooner the door hits them on the Ass the better.
Michael Kenny , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 2:36 pm GMT
Hilarious nonsense! Thierry Meyssan is a specialist in conspiracy theories and could be called a "9/11 negationist". One can assume that, in his eyes, the Salisbury attack, regardless of who might have carried it out, has not worked to Putin's advantage.
Beckow , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 2:36 pm GMT
@jilles dykstra

Dutch voters behaved badly, so the toys are taken away. No more 'referanda' for you.

The disintegration will accelerate: more new faces, local parties, rebellion parties. And, of course, more clowns (hello Boris, now climb down from that tree).

Brussels is having urgent off-sites with think-tank geniuses how to stop it. So far they have come up with: more 'media control' (propaganda), more outreach, drastic new restrictions ('you like the old Europe? -- xenophobe!, no travel for you'), and a circular management refresh, Macronism .

One thing I doubt the globo-liberal EU obsessives will ever do is to actually listen to the 'misguided' people. It has been preliminary decided to simply label any resistance as ' Russian subversion '. That buys some time, but they have no long term solutions, or even coherent ideas. This will get more entertaining. Boris J-man might actually climb up that tree before this is over

Ilyana_Rozumova , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 2:55 pm GMT
There is structural Globalist government and all participants as Theresa May are only puppets. All western leaderships are only participants. So far only Trump is the one who is resisting.

The orders are coming from Rothschild. He ordered now that Russia must be destroyed or at least neutralized. I am convinced that Russia's government is fully aware of what is going on.

Just a while ago Russia commissioned three nuclear armed submarines. Not long time ago Putin ordered nuclear drill over all country. I would guess that Russia already a while ago is on war preparation mode. Looks like the west lost its mind.

Concerning economy Britain is in trouble. French were strongly opposing Britain to join EU. That was because England is the main competitor for French food exports. One thing from this will be good. Barb be qui season is coming and beef will be now cheep.

ANON [436] Disclaimer , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 3:41 pm GMT
@ploni almoni

Well I felt so unattracted by what I had read that I thought it would be helpful to see if any of the UR Commenters who can make sense would give an assessment.

ANON [436] Disclaimer , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 3:47 pm GMT
@Abdul Alhazred

Thank you for the information. It doesn't make him sound like a person who is well placed to make the claims to knowledge he has about what went on in England.

jilles dykstra , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 3:50 pm GMT
@Beckow

The main Brussels' battle cry is 'populism'. In my opinion, populism is simply opposing political mainstream. But this mainstream is disintegrating, Hollande abolished the French socialist party, Parti Socialiste.

In Germany Schulz, former EU top man, SPD member, the Socialist Party Germany, even had to step down as chairman in order to make SPD members agree with the SPD coalition with Merkel's CDU. Schulz obviously left his overpaid Brussels job in order to become chancellor.

But also Merkel policies are breaking down. Her minister of the Interior, police, border control, immigration, naturalisation, granting asylum, Seehofer, states that he will reinstate border controls, as the EU does nothing. Polls show that 76% of Germans agree with him.
What most Germans do not know is that oral instructions were given in Merkel's former chancellor period to customs and border police, not to stop any immigrant at the borders.

Merkel and Seehofer now disagree on Islam, Merkel 'the Islam belongs to Germany', Seehofer 'the Islam is in Germany'. But in how far the German people and culture can be saved in the long run one wonders. Demographic calsulations show that with present differences in birth rates in 30 to 40 years time 30 to 40% of the Germans will be Muslims. As Merkel said 'they're here already'. What Merkel's objectives are or were, she if often compared to the sfinx. In any case Mutti, mom, cannot last much longer.

E European countries reject Muslim immigrants. However, after the Muslim immigrants have been naturalised, under present EU rules, they can settle anywhere in the EU, so the eastern countries cannot keep them away. If they want to settle in hostile communities is the question.

annamaria , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 3:54 pm GMT
@Quartermaster

Please, read the informed American analysts before taking a stance of the innocent lady that doth protest too much.

jilles dykstra , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 3:55 pm GMT
@Ilyana_Rozumova

" Looks like the west lost its mind. " Rothschild, Bilderberg, is not the west, nor is AIPAC and AEI. However, former Shell CEO Van der Veer is chairman of a NATO strategic advisory committee.

Anonymous [436] Disclaimer , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 3:55 pm GMT
@annamaria

Does that all depend on the premise that the 9/11 attacks were not an Al Qaeda operation? Yes or No will do thank you.

Johnny Rico , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 6:39 pm GMT
@Wally

Now go back and read the article and then re-assess what A436 said, Wally.

It doesn't make him sound like a person who is well placed to make the claims to knowledge he has about what went on in England.

He's talking about whether Thierry Meyssan would really have access to the people and information that could confirm this story of conspiracy and its uncovering.

The British government and certain of its allies, including US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, have attempted to launch a Cold War against Russia.

Their plan was to fabricate an attack against an ex-double agent in Salisbury and at the same time a chemical attack against the " moderate rebels " in the Ghouta. The conspirators' intention was to profit from the efforts of Syria to liberate the suburbs of its capital city and the disorganisation of Russia on the occasion of its Presidential election. Had these manipulations worked, the United Kingdom would have pushed the USA to bomb Damascus, including the Presidential palace, and demand that the United Nations General Assembly exclude Russia from the Security Council.

However, the Syrian and Russian Intelligence Services got wind of what was being plotted. They realised that the US agents in the Ghouta who were preparing an attack against the Ghouta were not working for the Pentagon, but for another US agency.

In Damascus, the Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, Fayçal Miqdad, set up an emergency Press conference for 10 March, in order to alert his fellow citizens. From its own side, Moscow had first of all tried to contact Washington via the diplomatic channels. But aware that the US ambassador, Jon Huntsman Jr, is the director of Caterpillar, the company which had supplied tunneling materials to the jihadists so that they could build their fortifications, Moscow decided to bypass the usual diplomatic channels.

No, you don't need to be IN England. But you do need to have at least a small record of qualifications and credibility to get readers to move past those first paragraphs which look like the script of a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence as an FSB triple-agent.

Miro23 , Next New Comment March 22, 2018 at 6:47 pm GMT
A comment from Randal on another thread that gets to the point:

The only suggestions that the Russians were responsible for the incident come from exactly the same kinds of people who told us about Iraq's WMD and the supposed Libyan humanitarian emergency. And yes, about supposed suicidal Syrian government uses of chemical weapons that are conveniently just big enough to provide their enemies with yet another big stick to beat them with, but not enough to give them any material advantage.

And there's the additional evidence that some kind of False Flag attempt fell apart at Eastern Ghouta + Trump's discovery that the Deep State was planning to take him by surprise (the immediate dismissal of Tillerson).

[Mar 22, 2018] Russian Ambassador Hints At False Flag The UK Has A Long Record Of Misdoings

Mar 22, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden Thu, 03/22/2018 - 08:41 50 SHARES

It appears the Russians are losing their patience with the proof-less accusations from The UK.

Russian ambassador Alexander Yakovenko has held press conference in London, denying the Kremlin was involved in the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia using military-grade nerve agent.

"Britain has without any evidence blamed Russia for poisoning three people and continues to refuse to cooperate," he said.

The UK authorities are violating Vienna Convention by not giving Russia access to Skripals, because Skripal has dual citizenship (the UK and Russia), Russian Ambassador to the UK Alexander Yakovenko said.

The Russian embassy has immediately requested details and materials of the case, the envoy stated.

While 10 days have passed, Moscow has received no response, while London has refused to pass samples of the poisonous substance allegedly used to attack Skripal.

Then Yakovenko turned a little darker, seemingly indicating concerns that this was nothing but a false-flag operation... (via SputnikNews )

The envoy called for checking how could British experts find out the exact type of the nerve gas used to poison Skripal.

Commenting on the death of former top manager of Russian Aeroflot airline Nikolai Glushkov, the ambassador stated that "we cannot take Britain's words on trust."

Alexander Yakovenko said that Britain has provided no proof of Russia's alleged involvement in the nerve agent attack.

He suggested that the samples of the so-called Novichok nerve gas could have already been in possession of a labaratory , which is located just miles away from Salisbury.

"We have been refused consular access to our Russian citizen Yulia Skripal," Russian Ambassador to the UK Alexander Yakovenko said.

The UK is ignoring requests on case of Russian businessman Glushkov who died in London, ambassador stated.

Russian experts puzzled how UK managed to determine type of nerve gas in Skripal case, in days, but not weeks or months.

The UK has a long record of misdoings, he said, including the support of coup in Ukraine and the invasion of Iraq.

UK Prime Minister May is set to warn at a summit in Brussels that Vladimir Putin's brazen flouting of international law represents a threat democracies across the continent.

And then the ambassador turned his attention to the shocking comments from UK foreign secretary Boris Johnson who compared the Russian World Cup to Hitler's 1939 Olympics...

Johnson recently raised the bar for the UK government's barrage of accusations against Moscow to a new level. The British foreign minister compared Russia's hosting of this year's World Cup to the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany.

"I think the comparison with 1936 is certainly right. It is an emetic prospect to think of Putin glorifying in this sporting event," he told a receptive Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/t1bLlotfGdM

Russia was furious:

"This statement is totally disgusting, it is not appropriate for any foreign minister," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

"Undoubtedly, [this remark] is offensive and unacceptable."

Additionally, Mr Yakovenko condemned the comments today, saying:

"Nobody has the right to insult the Russian people, who defeated the Nazis.'"

But The UK's propaganda is not just for adults, they are indoctrinating the kids too...

In case pupils in the UK don't understand the headlines on Russia and its president, a special publication for kids explains how "toxic Putin" is poisoning the Wes t, without bothering to distinguish between fact and allegation.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/xEhUWxHjzIQ

The Day, a news website that produces short articles about current affairs meant to be used as teaching aids in British schools, has offered students two alternatives to believe about Vladimir Putin: he is either Europe's "most dangerous leader since Hitler," or a puffed up figure attacking other nations out of weakness.

[Mar 22, 2018] Russian MFA summons all ambassadors to a meeting on Skripal case (MUST WATCH!!!) The Vineyard of the Saker

Original at http://www.mid.ru/
Notable quotes:
"... We see that the British authorities are becoming increasingly nervous, which is logical. The clock is ticking. They have driven themselves into a corner. Ultimately, they will have to answer a growing number of questions, but they have no answers. ..."
"... The inference that they have made a mess of things but Russia is responsible anyway and must be held accountable is the wrong kind of logic. This logic may be good for a British or US movie, but it does not work in real life, especially in relations with Russia. ..."
"... It is becoming increasingly obvious that the attack on the Skripals in Salisbury is most likely a clumsy staged provocation. We must expose those who have orchestrated this attack and the reasons behind it. ..."
"... To be continued ..."
"... I have not watched the whole video. Will watch later. It appears, UK is defining the ground and terrain to fight, and Russia is obviously following. In that way, Russia is always on the defensive of what UK is dictating.. even if it is false which it is and that is the fight. ..."
"... Cut it short, Russia must realise that this is the new way to fight now. It cannot rely on facts and international laws and conventions alone as a defense.. Its not enough like the way it is doing now. It must quickly turn the situation around and determine the space to fight and how UK is to fight this of course without going to war. ..."
Mar 22, 2018 | thesaker.is

VIDEO: watch-v=dKyR0KZn2Xc

Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues, friends,

Good afternoon.

We are glad to see you at the Foreign Ministry on this cold wintry day that nevertheless carries a promise of spring.

We are grateful to you for responding so quickly to our invitation, which we issued only yesterday.

The situation is indeed unusual. There is an urgent need for a non-politicised and highly professional discussion of the Skripals' poisoning case. We have distributed a position paper. We ask you to bring it to the notice of your governments.

The language of this position paper, just as any other such paper, is dry legalese with technical details.

It would be wrong to invite you here just to say this. I propose that we hold an open discussion in this closed diplomatic group.

Let us look at hard facts, beginning with the humanitarian aspects of the case at hand.

On March 4, 2018, two people, one of them Russian citizen Yulia Skripal, were attacked in Salisbury, a flourishing city in the south of England.

Various versions of the circumstances of this tragedy have been voiced in the UK. They highlight the use of chemical agents, which the British call Novichok, for some reason. All of these versions do not stand up to any criticism.

In this situation, UK officials have laid the blame on Russia hastily, hysterically and without presenting any evidence, and demanded explanations from us.

I would like to repeat that it was a Russian citizen who has been attacked in the UK. Logic suggests two possible variants. Either the British authorities are unable to ensure protection against such terrorist attacks on their territory, or they were directly or indirectly involved in the preparation of this attack on a Russian citizen. There is no other alternative.

We are surprised, to put it mildly, that the British authorities had denied even consular access to the Russian citizen who has been attacked contrary to the elementary norms of civilised interstate relations. They are prevaricating, but at the same time they distribute video footage from the hospital where the Skripals are allegedly being treated. But this only raises more questions.

The British have refused to share the information obtained by their investigators and have not replied to the Russian requests regarding Yulia Skripal. We have no reliable information about what happened to this Russian citizen over the past two weeks and why this happened to her. This is hard to comprehend: these events are unfolding in the 21st century in a country that is considered civilised.

Naturally, demanding any explanations from Russia in this situation is simply absurd. Russia does not owe anything to anyone in this context, and it cannot be held accountable for the activities or inactivity of the British authorities in their national territory.

We see that the British authorities are becoming increasingly nervous, which is logical. The clock is ticking. They have driven themselves into a corner. Ultimately, they will have to answer a growing number of questions, but they have no answers.

The inference that they have made a mess of things but Russia is responsible anyway and must be held accountable is the wrong kind of logic. This logic may be good for a British or US movie, but it does not work in real life, especially in relations with Russia.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the attack on the Skripals in Salisbury is most likely a clumsy staged provocation. We must expose those who have orchestrated this attack and the reasons behind it.

To be continued


amarynth on March 21, 2018 , · at 9:54 pm UTC

Doubling down by the Empire. Russia is hardening up fast but still displaying manners and offering goodwill! I'm afraid that is going nowhere excepting support is offered by the traditional friends of Russia as usual.

So far, no answer to the question: "And what is next?"

Things on the war front? Well, the Empire wants their war dammit! And how dare Russia deprive them of it!

I'm afraid tensions were only ratcheted up and the word de-escalation has been removed from all Empire Dictionaries. Oh Boy!

cdvision on March 21, 2018 , · at 10:08 pm UTC
I listened to all this. The idiot who represented the UK (actually not an idiot, she was just doing her job and no doubt in private would admit it was stupid) just parroted out May's previous words and never addressed any of the substantive questions raised; the EU and US speakers merely talked about solidarity with the UK.

Telling was the fact that the Russian main man referred to the US rep as someone he had never seen before, and was presumably from the State Dept.

None of the Russian requests for data or access to their citizens were dealt with.

The Russian side were well prepared, and the fact that they are pursuing this in this way indicates they have nothing to hide and are pissed off.

I'm increasingly convinced that Russia is playing for a bit more time. It truly does feel like a game of chess.

Cassandra on March 22, 2018 , · at 4:26 am UTC
"I'm increasingly convinced that Russia is playing for a bit more time."

But why? IMHO the only possible reason could be gaining sufficient time to clear the roaches from East Ghouta in Syria -- why? because it would eliminate one more of the possible false flag locations, and possibly provide more time to beef up the defenses in Syria.

I get the feeling that Russia is adopting a posture, a bit like a boxer puts up his dukes to guard against his opponents blows.

cdvision on March 22, 2018 , · at 5:44 am UTC
Cassandra: I'm thinking the waiting its more strategic than you suggest, bigger than East Ghouta. Maybe all the ducks are not yet in a row?
Lysander on March 22, 2018 , · at 12:07 am UTC
Kudos to the Venezuelan representative, who 1) stood up in Russia's defense against a backdrop of "solidarity" with the UK (I guess meaning whatever story they concoct we will pretend to believe) and 2) seems to be the only foreign diplomat in Moscow who bothered to learn Russian.
vot tak on March 22, 2018 , · at 12:36 am UTC
When FARA is not far enough: US lawmakers invent new ways to brand RT as propaganda

https://www.rt.com/usa/421958-fara-rt-new-legislation/

"Concerned that Americans may be watching "foreign propaganda" (or something different than what is offered on the mainstream media menu) Representatives Seth Moulton (D-MA) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY) introduced the Countering Foreign Propaganda Act.

In practice, it would force RT to do even more reporting to the US government than it currently does under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and will also force it to broadcast every 30 minutes a message saying it is funded by, and is "under editorial control" of, a foreign government. Apparently, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will also be the arbiter of who is under editorial control and who is not, because the BBC and France 24 would not be forced to disclose the origins of their funding, according to Foreign Policy (FP) -- presumably, because their messaging is simply accidentally, sort of, in line with that of the British and French governments respectively.

RT's stance on a potential crackdown in the US was summarized by its editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan: "When the high from FARA is no longer hard enough, the representatives switch to even harder legislation."

The US branch of RT came into the focus of the American mainstream public after the election of Donald Trump as president. The channel starred in a controversial report by the Office of the Director for National Intelligence, which alleged that RT's coverage of American problems like fracking or the killings of black people by police amounted to infringing on US democratic institutions."

adam on March 22, 2018 , · at 1:08 am UTC
Headline story on RT: "Peskov says ex-spy has zero value; no need to poison him." Implication: "We only poison people of value."

If I were the spokesperson of Russia, I wouldn't even entertain the idea that Russia poisons people. If I were a pro Russian television network, I wouldn't treat this story as anything but Milli Vanilli.

Still think Margie "the true liberal" is your friend?

Tristan Dreykus on March 22, 2018 , · at 1:45 am UTC
I would like to make an observation regarding the name given by Briton and others of this lethal nerve agent, "Novichok". It seems to have appeared out of thin air, or the imaginations of some. As has been pointed out, here in the conference, this was a fictional name used in a TV show in Briton.

The point is this, "Novichok" is perhaps as to what the "Khorasan Group" was in the waning days of the Obama regime. Do you remember the "Aboslute Terror!.com"(tm) that was surrounding this fictional group of terrorists as trumpeted by Obama himself? Similarities are not inconsequential in that a nefarious political goal is the point of the obfuscation and lies.

What is that goal? I can't answer that question, but to speculate, I would guess that the oligarchs of the West have decided that the potential for nuclear annihilation is worth risking for unrestricted free market economic world domination in the short term.

Ilya G Poimandres on March 22, 2018 , · at 2:05 am UTC
Cause the translation is not very accurate (tough job!), here is the Russian only link if anyone is interested! :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awQK1WMZrVA

Bone on March 22, 2018 , · at 2:54 am UTC
I have not watched the whole video. Will watch later. It appears, UK is defining the ground and terrain to fight, and Russia is obviously following. In that way, Russia is always on the defensive of what UK is dictating.. even if it is false which it is and that is the fight.

In that way, no matter what facts are presented (which is what Russia is doing) Russia will always start from what they are accused of. Right there, UK is choosing what Russian reaction would be.

Cut it short, Russia must realise that this is the new way to fight now. It cannot rely on facts and international laws and conventions alone as a defense.. Its not enough like the way it is doing now. It must quickly turn the situation around and determine the space to fight and how UK is to fight this of course without going to war.

Cassandra on March 22, 2018 , · at 5:09 am UTC
A very good point, well made. I've learned myself that conforming to Marquis of Queensbury rules when engaged in a conflict with a street fighter can be somewhat counter-productive. You cannot counter lies and medacity with an appeal to truth. I wonder how these mouthpieces reading their government's lines can truly sleep at night.
Ann on March 22, 2018 , · at 3:04 am UTC
its heartbreaking watching this. It reminds me of the poaching of the great animals of Africa -- Russia does everything right and just -- and the shameful poachers use nothing honorable or decent in their wish to destroy. There has been nothing but dishonesty and untruth from Britain (and the west) in this whole affair -- no one even knows where or how the victims of this 'chemical attack' are -- and that there's only be two victims -- a chemical attack kills multiple people
GeorgeG on March 22, 2018 , · at 3:52 am UTC
I shall listen to the whole thing to get a better grasp of the context of certain speeches, remarks. TASS yesterday posted a report ( http://tass.com/politics/995445 ) that represents their own summary: "Russian Foreign Ministry suggests US could have orchestrated Skripal saga." While appreciating Russian humor, I dashed off a message to my German friends, as follows (translated):

Incredible! -- No I believe it. Watch the selected-emphasized sections below. The Russians have the knife in, and they are turning it, very slowly. Delicious!

 "It is likely that this could have been orchestrated from across the pond. [Note that Yermakov -- and he comes from the MoD, not the MFA -- throws May's "highly probable" back into her face, but he provides indirect evidence, which May did not do. Note also that it is indeed "likely". That has been my argument the whole time, except that I told you the Americans -- the Trump-Americans -- set a trap for May and she walked into it. Yermakov is saying the same thing: just watch and listen.]

 „It is no secret to anyone that the UK's closest partner is the only state officially keeping the largest arsenals of chemical weapons in the world." [How true, but ist he USA theUK's "closest partner" really? Actually, since the British launched their anti-Trump cvampaign -- with Christopher Steele / MI6 -- the two have been at war with one another. Yermakov seems to play innocent on that point, even naive, but if the Americans set the trap, then the British set themselves up by believing that what May did was wha their closest partner wanted them to do. And now May is in deep sh**.]

 Yermakov further,"is most likely a new grossly falsified and unlawful provocation." Against Russia, yes, of course, fa false flag, and illegal. But also against the UK? That is left ambiguous.?

 "It only has to be solved who stood behind this and which goals pursued." -- Yes, indeed, who was behind the false flag, and what were the aims? This hast o be solved, clarified. Yermakov poses these questions openly and round about, not limited to Russia. Do the British know who was behind the false flag, and what the aims were? Do they have any interest in finding out? Yermakov does not launch counter-accusations at the British.

 „Only one thing is clear that Russia has absolutely no complicity in this at least for one simple reason: such a scheme is simply inadmissible and it is disadvantageous for us by all parameters." Russia's innocence is clear, and, in fact, the British know that themselves. It would be insulting to claim the British believe their own propaganda. And,

 "At the same time, Great Britain has quite a different track record," the senior diplomat said, adding that former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair had openly admitted his lies about the situation around Iraq." Ah, yes, Blair lying about Irak WMD, but whether he was trapped into that lie or not, at least it is obvious he was doing it to justify actions that were not in the first place British actions, it was Bush's war.

 „"One only has to guess who and for what purpose is now trying to plunge Great Britain into a new dirty and again losing venture for London from the very outset against Russia *this time,*" -- "One" has to guess, and "one" can be Russian, some Russsian who guesses, or it can be a Brit. And "one" is going to "guess" about who is plunging Britain into a dirty and loosing venture against Russia. Wow! -- Let's unravel this. Russia has nothing to do with intelligence war-maneuvers of the Americans against England. If -- that thatg is "highly likely" -- the Americans set the trap, plunging Britain into a losing venture agaisn Russia, implied not to be in British interests, the Russians did not „collude" in setting the trap. Leave Russia out of the game. England is being dragged into something. Yermakov has "empathy" for the British in this dilemma. The British may well think that they were dragged into the Irak-WMD charade and the war, so who is dragging Britain into a losing game „this time"?]

 „"the British authorities are beginning to get ever more nervous" as "they have driven themselves into a deadlock" -- [Really a pity, right? That really hurts, you are invited / or dragged onto the gang-plank, thinking you are doing the right thing, and their your "closest partner" steps off the plank and you plunge into the depths. Sure you get nervous, sure you see you brought onto yourself, you are in a blind-alley. -- You can only do what Yermakov did if you have the upper-hand and you know it. Russia via Yermakov is not out for retaliation, Russia extends the open hand , Russia is merciful. Remember the scene in Schindler's list, where a Nazi camp-commander was about to shoot a little boy because there were still stains in the bathtub the boy was supposed to have cleaned? And Schindler tells the Nazi: real power ist to forgive, and the Nazi, who thinks he is powerful and wans power, lays down his rifle. How merciful the Russias are is ytilll to come. ]

 Moscow considers the Salisbury attack to be an act of terror against Russian citizens carried out on UK soil, he stressed. -- -- So Moscow wants access to the Skripals, Yulia in particular.

 Now comes the icing on the cake, the knife begins to turn. "The senior Russian diplomat called on the British to put their hatred against Russia aside for a moment, as well as their "island way of thinking." "I mean no offence, I think highly of the British diplomacy and this is the reason why I feel ashamed for you when I hear such things," Yermakov added, stressing that in the past, Russian diplomats had learned much from their British colleagues and British experts and now they were calling them for dialogue.. [Of course the British hate the Russians, but don't let that hate get in the way of properly assessing the British situation in this trap. If Russians are anything, they are professional and objective. Of course, Russian diplomats learned from British diplomas: they know double-dealing also, but Russians do it openly -- open double dealing, and that is what Yermakov was doing the whole time. Why would Russia do that? -- It's simple: "to split Europe." That is what the British accuse Russia of doing, but Russia is not doing it the way the British think, they are going to split Europe because the British have handed over the lever to do it, because the British are shaming themselves with their nonsense propaganda, and they know they are losing because it is so shameful. The British were tricked, Russia does not play tricks. The Russians win because they put truth on the table: if the British continue with their shameful behavior, they have no chance to play any leaves in Europe. They know it, that is why they are nervous, that is their own dead-end. Now, when Blair lied, dragging Britain into the Iraq war, it unleashed destruction, which does not bother the British as long as others are destroyed. But now they are on the receiving end, it is their own destruction which is at stake.

Ann on March 22, 2018 , · at 3:55 am UTC
wow -- the British diplomat in the audience has a brutal speech -- well written -- its so hard to defend oneself against untruth -- when its calculated -- at 53:55
Cassandra on March 22, 2018 , · at 4:19 am UTC
It is foolish to believe that explanation will bring to your side those who are implacably oriented against you because they take it as a sign of weakness.
Cassandra on March 22, 2018 , · at 4:28 am UTC
"A military grade, novichok, nerve agent developed by Russia". So they didn't make then ? 'Developing' isn't making, just in case your education didn't cover this rather unsubtle distinction. "Barrage of distortion and disinformation" Have you looked in the mirror of late ?? Pathetic.
Cassandra on March 22, 2018 , · at 5:10 am UTC
I think the UK representative went a bit off-script when she said "Russia produced" -- the official script is "Russian developed". I suspect that she may get a reprimand for that.
GeorgeG on March 22, 2018 , · at 9:21 am UTC
One the one hand I am amazed, on the other hand, not. Has anyone listened to the full session or read the TASS release? ( http://tass.com/politics/995445 ) If not, please do so, and show some of what the Russians call "respect," which means just listen carefully.

I do not wish to offend, as the Russian "senior diplomat" said, but I am ashamed to hear such baseless gossip as "It appears, UK is defining the ground and terrain to fight, and Russia is obviously following" or "You cannot counter lies and medacity with an appeal to truth" (cited examples being by no means exhasutive).

Do you realize, have you registered the *fact* that the Russians said "Russian Foreign Ministry suggests US could have orchestrated Skripal saga"?, which a load of backup to that suggesion.

[Mar 22, 2018] Four days to declare a Cold War by Thierry Meyssan

Notable quotes:
"... By doing do, the British government adopted the theories of Professor Amy Knight. On 22 January 2018, this US Sovietologist published a very strange book -- Orders to Kill -- the Putin régime and political murder . The author, who is " the " specialist on the ex-KGB, attempts to demonstrate that Vladimir Putin is a serial killer responsible for dozens of political assassinations, from the terrorist attacks in Moscow in 1999 to the attack on the Boston Marathon in 2013, by way of the execution of Alexandre Litvinenko in London in 2006 or that of Boris Nemtsov in Moscow in 2015. However, she admits herself that there is absolutely no proof of her accusations. ..."
"... The European Liberals then joined the fray. Ex-Prime Minister of Belgium Guy Verhofstadt, who presides their group in the European Parliament, called on the European Union to adopt sanctions against Russia. His counterpart at the head of their British party, Sir Vince Cable, proposed a European boycott of the World Football Cup. And already, Buckingham Palace announced that the royal family has canceled their trip to Russia. ..."
"... Responding to the Prime Minister, Blairist deputy Chris Leslie qualified Russia as a rogue state and demanded its suspension from the UN Security Council. Theresa May agreed to examine the question, but stressed that the outcome could only be decided by the General Assembly in order to avoid the Russian veto. ..."
"... During the public debate which followed, UK chargé d'affaire Jonathan Allen represented his country. He is an agent of MI6 who created the British War Propaganda Service and gives active support to the jihadists in Syria. He declared -- " Russia has already interfered in the affairs of other countries, Russia has already violated international law in Ukraine, Russia has comtempt for civilian life, as witnessed by the attack on a commercial aircraft over Ukraine by Russian mercenaries, Russia protects the use of chemical weapons by Assad ( ) The Russian state is responsible for this attempted murder ". The permanent representative for France, François Delattre, who, by virtue of a derogation by President Sarkozy, was trained at the US State Department, noted that his country had launched an initiative to end the impunity of those who use chemical weapons. He implied that the initiative, originally directed at Syria, could also be turned against Russia. ..."
"... Russian ambassador Vasily Nebenzya pointed out that the session had been convened at London's request, but that it is public at Moscow's request. He observed that the United Kingdom is violating international law by treating this subject at the Security Council while keeping the OPCW out of its enquiry. He noted that if London had been able to identify the " Novotchik ", it's because it has the formula and can therefore make its own. He noted Russia's desire to collaborate with the OPCW in the respect for international procedures. ..."
"... Throughout its long history, England has never hesitated to lie and betray its oath in order to defend its interests. This is how it earned its French nickname of " perfide Albion " (after the Latin name for England) ..."
"... local parties are the winners, winners also are national anti establishment parties, despite the demonizing of these populists, that represent the opinions of a significant portion of the population. ..."
"... As Belgium and Germany, governing our country becomes more and more difficult. The country seems to be more and more divided between those who trust the government, and those with deep distrust. ..."
Mar 22, 2018 | www.unz.com

The British government and certain of its allies, including US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, have attempted to launch a Cold War against Russia.

Their plan was to fabricate an attack against an ex-double agent in Salisbury and at the same time a chemical attack against the " moderate rebels " in the Ghouta. The conspirators' intention was to profit from the efforts of Syria to liberate the suburbs of its capital city and the disorganisation of Russia on the occasion of its Presidential election. Had these manipulations worked, the United Kingdom would have pushed the USA to bomb Damascus, including the Presidential palace, and demand that the United Nations General Assembly exclude Russia from the Security Council.

However, the Syrian and Russian Intelligence Services got wind of what was being plotted. They realised that the US agents in the Ghouta who were preparing an attack against the Ghouta were not working for the Pentagon, but for another US agency.

In Damascus, the Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, Fayçal Miqdad, set up an emergency Press conference for 10 March, in order to alert his fellow citizens. From its own side, Moscow had first of all tried to contact Washington via the diplomatic channels. But aware that the US ambassador, Jon Huntsman Jr, is the director of Caterpillar, the company which had supplied tunneling materials to the jihadists so that they could build their fortifications, Moscow decided to bypass the usual diplomatic channels.

Here's how things played out:

12 March 2018

The Syrian army seized two chemical weapons laboratories, the first on 12 March in Aftris, and the second on the following day in Chifonya. Meanwhile, Russian diplomats pushed the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to get involved in the criminal investigation in Salisbury.

In the House of Commons, British Prime Minister Theresa May violently accused Russia of having ordered the attack in Salisbury. According to her, the ex-double agent Sergueï Skripal and his daughter were poisoned by a military nerve gas of a type " developed by Russia " under the name of " Novitchok ". Since the Kremlin considers Russian citizens who have defected as legitimate targets, it is therefore highly likely that they ordered the crime.

" Novitchok " is known by what has been revealed by two Soviet personalities, Lev Fyodorov and Vil Mirzayanov. The scientist Fyodorov published an article in the Russian weekly Top Secret (Совершенно секретно) in July 1992, warning about the extremely dangerous nature of this product, and warning against the use of old Soviet weaponry by the Western powers to destroy the environment in Russia and make it unlivable. In October 1992, he published a second article in the News of Moscow (Московские новости) with a counter-espionage executive, Mirzayanov, denouncing the corruption of certain generals and the traffic of " Novitchok " in which they were involved. However, they did not know to whom they may have sold the product. Mirzayanov was first of all arrested for high treason, then released. Fyodorov died in Russia last August, but Mirzayanov is living in exile in the United States, where he collaborates with the Department of Defense.

Russian ex-counter intelligence officer Vil Mirzayanov defected to the United States. Now 83 years old, he comments on the Skripal affair from Boston.

" Novitchok " was fabricated in a Soviet laboratory in Nurus, in what is now Uzbekistan. During the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it was destroyed by a US team of specialists. Uzbekistan and the United States, by necessity, have therefore possessed and studied samples of this substance. They are both capable of producing it.

British Minister for Foreign Affairs Boris Johnson summoned the Russian ambassador in London, Alexandre Iakovenko. He gave him an ultimatum of 36 hours to check if any " Novitchok " was missing from their stocks. The ambassador replied that none was missing, because Russia had destroyed all of the chemical weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union, as witnessed by the OPCW, which had drawn up a certified report.

After a telephone discussion with Boris Johnson, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in turn condemned Russia for the attack in Salisbury.

Meanwhile, a debate was under way at the UN Security Council concerning the situation in the Ghouta. The permanent representative for the US, Nikki Haley, declared -- " About one year ago, after the sarin gas attack perpetrated in Khan Cheïkhoun by the Syrian régime, the United States warned the Council. We said that faced with the systematic inaction of the international community, states are sometimes obliged to act on their own. The Security Council did not react, and the United States bombed the air base from which al Assad had launched his chemical attack. We are reiterating the same warning today ".

The Russian Intelligence Services handed out documents from the US staff. They showed that the Pentagon was ready to bomb the Presidential palace and the Syrian Ministries, on the model of what it had done during the taking of Baghdad (3 to 12 April 2003).

Commenting the declaration by Nikki Haley, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, who had always called the attack in Khan Cheïkhoun a " Western manipulation ", revealed that the false information which had led the White House into error and triggered the bombing of the Al-Chaayrate air base, had in fact come from a British laboratory which had never revealed how it came to possess its samples.

13 March 2018

The Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs published a Press release condemning a possible US military intervention, and announcing that if Russian citizens were harmed in Damascus, Moscow would riposte proportionally, since the Russian President is constitutionally responsible for the security of his fellow citizens.

Bypassing the official diplomatic channels, Russian Chief of Staff General Valeri Guerassimov contacted his US counterpart General Joseph Dunford to inform him of his fear of a false flag chemical attack in Ghouta. Dunford took this information vey seriously, and alerted US Defense Secretary General Jim Mattis, who referred the matter to President Donald Trump. In view of the Russian insistence that this piece of foul play was being prepared without the knowledge of the Pentagon, the White House asked the Director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, to identify those responsible for the conspiracy.

We do not know the result of this internal enquiry, but President Trump acquired the conviction that his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was implicated. The Secretary of State was immediately asked to interrupt his official journey in Africa and return to Washington.

Theresa May wrote to the General Secretary of the United Nations accusing Russia of having ordered the attack in Salisbury, and convened an emergency meeting of the Security Council. Without waiting, she expelled 23 Russian diplomats.

Published one month and a half before the attack in Salisbury, Amy Knight's book presents what was to become MI5's thesis. The author herself maintains that she has not the slightest proof of what she is claiming.

At the request of President of the House of Commons Interior Committee Yvette Cooper, British Secretary for the Interior Amber Rudd announced that MI5 (Military Interior Secret Services ) is going to re-open 14 enquiries into deaths which, according to US sources, were ordered by the Kremlin.

By doing do, the British government adopted the theories of Professor Amy Knight. On 22 January 2018, this US Sovietologist published a very strange book -- Orders to Kill -- the Putin régime and political murder . The author, who is " the " specialist on the ex-KGB, attempts to demonstrate that Vladimir Putin is a serial killer responsible for dozens of political assassinations, from the terrorist attacks in Moscow in 1999 to the attack on the Boston Marathon in 2013, by way of the execution of Alexandre Litvinenko in London in 2006 or that of Boris Nemtsov in Moscow in 2015. However, she admits herself that there is absolutely no proof of her accusations.

The European Liberals then joined the fray. Ex-Prime Minister of Belgium Guy Verhofstadt, who presides their group in the European Parliament, called on the European Union to adopt sanctions against Russia. His counterpart at the head of their British party, Sir Vince Cable, proposed a European boycott of the World Football Cup. And already, Buckingham Palace announced that the royal family has canceled their trip to Russia.

The UK communications regulator, Ofcom, announced that it might ban the channel Russia Today as a retaliatory measure, even though RT has on no occasion violated British law.

The Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs summoned the British ambassador in Moscow to inform him that reciprocal measures would soon be indicated in retaliation for the expulsion of Russian diplomats from London.

President Trump announced on Twitter that he had fired his Secretary of State, with whom he had not yet been in contact. He was replaced by Mike Pompeo, ex-Director of the CIA, who, the night before, had confirmed the authenticity of the Russian information transmitted by General Dunford. On his arrival in Washington, Tillerson obtained confirmation of his dismissal from White House General Secretary General John Kelly.

The ex-CEO of the largest multinational in the world, ExxonMobil, thought he was untouchable. But to his great surprise, Rex Tillerson was brutally dismissed by Donald Trump. The former believed he was serving the Anglo-Saxon world, while the latter considers him to be a traitor to his country.

Ex-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is a product of the Texan middle class. He and his family worked for the US Scouts, of whom he became the National President (2010-12). Culturally close to England, he did not hesitate, when he became President of the mega-multinational Exxon-Mobil (2006-16), not only to wage a politically correct campaign favouring the acceptance of young gays into the Scouts, but also to recruit mercenaries in British Guiana. He is said to be a member of the Pilgrims Society, the most prestigious of Anglo-US clubs, presided by Queen Elizabeth II, a number of whose members were part of the Obama administration.

During his functions as Secretary of State, the quality of his education provided a bond for Donald Trump, considered by US high society to be a buffoon. He was in disagreement with his President on three major subjects which allow us to define the ideology of the conspirators -

Like London and the US deep state, he thought it would be useful to diabolise Russia in order to consolidate the power of the Anglo-Saxons in the Western camp ;

Like London, he thought that in order to maintain Western colonialism in the Middle East, it was necessary to favour Iranian President Cheikh Rohani against the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khamenei. He therefore supported the 5+1 agreement.

Like the US deep state, he considered that the swing of North Korea towards the United States should remain secret, and be used to justify a military deployment which would be directed in reality against the People's Repubic of China. He was therefore in favor of official talks with Pyongyang, but opposed to a meeting between the two heads of state.

14 March 2018

While Washington was still in shock, Theresa May spoke once again before the House of Commons to develop her accusation, while all around the world, British diplomats spoke to numerous inter-governmental organisations in order to broadcast the message. Responding to the Prime Minister, Blairist deputy Chris Leslie qualified Russia as a rogue state and demanded its suspension from the UN Security Council. Theresa May agreed to examine the question, but stressed that the outcome could only be decided by the General Assembly in order to avoid the Russian veto.

The North Atlantic Council (NATO) met in Brussels at the request of the United Kingdom. The 29 member states drew a link between the use of chemical weapons in Syria and the attack in Salisbury. They then decided that Russia was " probably " responsible for these two events.

In New York, the permanent representative of Russia, Vasily Nebenzya, proposed to the members of the Security Council that they adopt a declaration attesting to their common will to shed light on the attack in Salisbury and handing over the enquiry to the OPCW in the respect of international procedures. But the United Kingdom refused any text which did not contain the expression that Russia was " probably responsible " for the attack.

During the public debate which followed, UK chargé d'affaire Jonathan Allen represented his country. He is an agent of MI6 who created the British War Propaganda Service and gives active support to the jihadists in Syria. He declared -- " Russia has already interfered in the affairs of other countries, Russia has already violated international law in Ukraine, Russia has comtempt for civilian life, as witnessed by the attack on a commercial aircraft over Ukraine by Russian mercenaries, Russia protects the use of chemical weapons by Assad ( ) The Russian state is responsible for this attempted murder ". The permanent representative for France, François Delattre, who, by virtue of a derogation by President Sarkozy, was trained at the US State Department, noted that his country had launched an initiative to end the impunity of those who use chemical weapons. He implied that the initiative, originally directed at Syria, could also be turned against Russia.

Russian ambassador Vasily Nebenzya pointed out that the session had been convened at London's request, but that it is public at Moscow's request. He observed that the United Kingdom is violating international law by treating this subject at the Security Council while keeping the OPCW out of its enquiry. He noted that if London had been able to identify the " Novotchik ", it's because it has the formula and can therefore make its own. He noted Russia's desire to collaborate with the OPCW in the respect for international procedures.

15 March 2018

The United Kingdom published a common declaration which had been cosigned the night before by France and Germany, as well as Rex Tillerson, who at that moment was still US Secretary of State. The text reiterated British suspicions. It denounced the use of " a neurotoxic agent of military quality, and of a type developed by Russia ", and affirmed that it was " highly probable that Russia is responsible for the attack ".

The Washington Post published an op-ed piece by Boris Johnson, while the US Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, established new sanctions against Russia. These are not connected to the current affair, but to allegations of interference in US public life. The decree nonetheless mentions the attack in Salisbury as proof of the underhand methods of Russia.

Throughout its long history, England has never hesitated to lie and betray its oath in order to defend its interests. This is how it earned its French nickname of " perfide Albion " (after the Latin name for England)

British Secretary for Defence, the young Gavin Williamson, declared that after the expulsion of its diplomats, Russia should " shut up and go away " (sic). This is the first time since the end of the Second World War that a representative of a permanent member state of the Security Council has employed such a vocabulary in the face of another member of the Council. Sergueï Lavrov commented -- " He's a charming young man. He must want to ensure his place in History, by making shock declarations [...] Perhaps he lacks education ".

Conclusion

In the space of four days, the United Kingdom and its allies have laid the premises of a new division of the world, a Cold War.

However, Syria is not Iraq and the UNO is not the G8 (from which Russia has been excluded because of its adhesion to Crimea and its support of Syria). The United States are not going to destroy Damascus, and Russia will not be excluded from the Security Council. After having resigned from the European Union, then having refused to sign the Chinese declaration about the Silk Road, the United Kingdom thought to improve its stature by eliminating a competitor. By this piece of dirty work, it imagined that it would acquire a new dimension and become the " Global Britain " announced by Madame May. But it is destroying its own credibility.


polskijoe , March 21, 2018 at 2:33 pm GMT

Cold War 2.0 started
during the Bush years.
when NATO expanded and USA pulled out of Ballistic missile treaty.
Ronald Thomas West , Website March 21, 2018 at 3:46 pm GMT
Maybe the USA generals were simply happy to have excuse to make Tillerson go away

https://www.fort-russ.com/2018/03/pompeos-promotion-zio-christian-armageddonist-power-play/

because it's certainly nothing to do with the (non-existent) sanity at the Pentagon

anon [107] Disclaimer , March 21, 2018 at 11:07 pm GMT
Pompeo to correct the treachery of Tillerson?
Pricknick , March 22, 2018 at 4:44 am GMT
False Flag. Get used to it. Governments lie.
utu , March 22, 2018 at 5:00 am GMT
Meyssan is barking at a wrong tree. He should be more concerned with the guy who will replace Tillerson and not with Tillerson.
Carlton Meyer , Website March 22, 2018 at 5:51 am GMT

jilles dykstra , March 22, 2018 at 7:30 am GMT

Yesterday were the Dutch municipal elections. The losers were the governing parties at national level. Winners the local parties. Trust in 'elite' politicians is diminishing further.

We yesterday also had our last referendum, the referendum law no longer exists. As with all previous referenda, we voted against government policy, this time the law that gives secret services the legal right to spy on anyone.

As with all referenda, our vote will not have any effect, as when in 2005 we voted against the EU, and two years ago against the EU Ukraine association treaty.

Nevertheless, democracy functions. As I wrote, local parties are the winners, winners also are national anti establishment parties, despite the demonizing of these populists, that represent the opinions of a significant portion of the population.

As Belgium and Germany, governing our country becomes more and more difficult. The country seems to be more and more divided between those who trust the government, and those with deep distrust.

Realist , March 22, 2018 at 8:57 am GMT
@Pricknick

Two of the worst American false flags are responsible for the killing in North Korea and Vietnam. The killing of it's own people is not a moral dilemma for the Deep State.

Erebus , March 22, 2018 at 10:43 am GMT
Meyssan has often voiced the opinion that Trump & Putin have an understanding. We can't, and will probably never know the truth of this opinion, but when one watches their body language and behaviour together such as was openly displayed at the APEC summit in Vietnam, one sees that they are very comfortable with each other.

One of the things that the Kremlin understands is that the US, and specifically its foreign policy determinations, is rat's nest of various vested and/or rogue interests pulling in their various directions, and that by virtue of Washington's chaotic politics much of what seems to be foreign policy is executed without the knowledge, much less control of the President, or even the State & Defence Departments.

The reality is that both Russia and China want (for different reasons) a healthy USA to sit at a newly constituted round table of Great Powers. There are factions within the US that agree with them, and that the road to Global Hegemony is a dead end. Trump's election has opened a window of opportunity to allow the US to de-throttle, and even back away from that goal should those factions gain the upper hand. From what we see, they are making progress.

There's still a political battle royal ahead for them, but there's also factions within the US' allies whose fortunes will take a turn for the worse should they succeed. They will naturally ally with those in the US who's goal is Empire. As it is, with current developments in DC, and the Syrian gambit backfiring, said factions are panicking and it should surprise no-one to see ill-conceived and executed attempts to reverse their fortunes.

I think the Skripal case is a textbook example of just that kind of thing happening. A farcical caricature of a false flag operation gone awry, and no plausible narrative in sight.

That the once great UK is reduced to 3 blind mice standing in for Ministers of what are normally a nation's 3 most powerful ministries shows just how far from its moorings the West has drifted. One is almost embarrassed for them as they thrash around.

Saker posted a video on his site of a meeting called by the Kremlin of all ambassadors. It's astonishing, frankly.

Macon Richardson , March 22, 2018 at 10:53 am GMT
@utu

He can bark up Pompeo's tree when Pompeo becomes Secretary of State.

tyrone , March 22, 2018 at 11:45 am GMT
MAY-DAY, MAY-DAY don't write checks with insufficient funds on hand, May, America doesn't need the UK pimping a war with Russia, we can't pay for the ones with have now!
Seraphim , March 22, 2018 at 11:57 am GMT
@Erebus

Suggesting image: the ship Britannia cutting its moorings and drifting aimlessly, no longer ruling the waves.

[Mar 22, 2018] D j Vu with British Poison Allegations Against Russia by Wayne MADSEN

Mar 22, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

One thing about the neo-conservatives, who have thoroughly penetrated the Tory government of British Prime Minister Theresa May and, due to the reality television show savant nature of Donald Trump, are rapidly filling as many vacancies in the US administration as possible, is that they are consistent. Neocons, who make no secret of their desire for major military conflagrations, have dusted off an old playbook with regard to the nerve agent poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England. The convoluted charges made by the British government bear all the hallmarks of the Polonium-210 radiation poisoning of ex-Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London in 2006.

In June 2008, the British government conceded that the government of British Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair concocted and exaggerated claims about Russia's involvement in the Litvinenko poisoning in 2006. Apparently, the present government of Mrs. May believes rational people have no memories of what transpired in Britain twelve years ago.

The British intelligence services, which had their own relationship with Litvinenko, could no longer manage to suppress overwhelming evidence that the poisoning of Litvinenko was the result of a plot by anti-Vladimir Putin criminal syndicates based in Britain, Israel, Ukraine, and Poland to embarrass the Russian government.

Suspicions about the role of the exiled Russian-Israeli criminal syndicates in the poisoning of Litvinenko, including that which was headed by Litvinenko's friend, wanted Russo-Israeli oligarch Boris Berezovsky, re-surfaced after former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar became violently ill after eating breakfast at a conference he was attending in Dublin, Ireland. Ireland's banking secrecy laws has made it a favorite location for the Eurasian-Israeli Mafia.

Berezovsky's own suspicious death in March 2013 discovery of Berezovsky's body in his Ascot estate in England suggested that the anti-Russian crime syndicates, which work closely with hedge fund billionaire troublemaker George Soros and the Central Intelligence Agency, eliminated Berezovsky because he was about to reveal the nature of the syndicates to the Russian government. Most media reports coming out of Britain, at the time, claimed that Berezovsky died from natural causes. A few others suggested suicide or murder. Interestingly, Berezovsky had recently received medical treatment in Israel.

Berezovsky's expatriate friends in Britain and Israel included exiled oligarchs who were subjects of Russian arrest warrants. These included Russian-Israeli businessman Leonid Nevzlin, the former chief executive officer of Yukos Oil, who was the subject of a Russian arrest warrant for murder, embezzlement, and tax evasion. Nevzlin, a former head of the Russian Jewish Congress, resided in Tel Aviv under the protection of the Israeli government. Nevzlin's exiled Russian-Israeli comrades included Vladimir Dubov, a major Yukos shareholder, and wanted oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky. The wanted ex-Yukos officials, who are now allied with the expatriate former chief of Yukos and ex-convict, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, have also been linked to wealthy British businessman Jacob Rothschild.

Berezovsky ran from exile a major support network for Chechen terrorists. One of their leaders, Ahmed Zakayev, was a close associate of Berezovsky and Litvinenko.

Just like Litvinenko, Yulia Skripal had her own reported connections to Russian and Western intelligence services, suggesting that she, like Litvinenko, had embarked on a dangerous life as a double or triple agent. Yulia Skripal worked for the "information center" at the US embassy in Moscow and at the Holiday Inn in Southampton in England. Hotel jobs are a preferred "non-official cover" position for the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6). Until his arrest by Russian authorities, Sergei Skripal was a paid agent for MI-6. In 2010, he was given asylum in Britain after a major spy swap between the United States and Russia.

The nerve agent reportedly used on Skripal and his daughter was a "Novichok" ("Newcomer"), one of a series of binary agents allegedly developed in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. These nerve agents were also apparently stockpiled at the British biological and chemical warfare research facility at Porton Down, a mere eight miles from Salisbury, where the Skripals took ill.

But the existence of Novichok is, itself questionable. Claims about Novichok originally came from Vil Mirzayanov, a Soviet chemical weapons scientist who claimed to have invented Novichok at a facility in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1994, Mirzayanov fled to the United States, where he came under the control of the CIA. In 2016, Dr. Robin Black, the chief of the Detection Laboratory in Porton Down, published an academic paper that questioned the veracity of Mirzayanov's Novichok claims.

The poisoning of the Skripals was followed shortly by the death in London of Berezovsky's longtime business colleague and friend Nikolai Glushkov. British police called Glushkov's death "suspicious," citing as the cause "compression to the neck." Berezovsky died as the result of a hanging, believed by police to be a "suicide." Radioactive traces of the Polonium-210 used to poison Litvinenko were traced to Berezovsky's office at 7 Down Street, in London's Mayfair district. In 2008, Badri Patarkatsishvili, Berezovsky's Georgian-Israeli business partner, collapsed and died at his home a mere 15 miles from Berezovsky's English estate. The death of the 52-year old was determined by authorities to be the result of a "heart attack."

Much more than circumstantial evidence suggests that Berezovsky, Glushkov, and Patarkatsishvili were murdered by exiled opponents of the Russian government, who also happen to be kingpins in the Eurasian-Israeli mafia that uses Britain as a major base of operations. Britain is favored by these criminal syndicates because of the close working relationship they have with British and American intelligence agencies, as well as with Soros, who maintains a residence in London.

Just as with the unfounded allegations about Russia made by British government officials in the wake of the Litvinenko death, current British officials found it difficult to keep their stories straight or factual. One such official was Foreign Secretary Boris London, the dim-witted former mayor of London who has been dubbed "the British Trump," a reference to the US president.

Johnson laughingly claimed that Russia directed "the use of a nerve agent on the streets of the UK, on the streets of Europe, for the first time since the Second World War." Just as with the Trump administration's wanton use of "fake news" and "alternate facts," Johnson was engaged in making up a "false history." There is no evidence that any chemical weapons, let alone nerve agents, were used by Germany against Britain during the Second World War. A British mustard gas attack on Adolf Hitler and his army unit near Ypres, France – an attack that landed Hitler in a military hospital with burnt lungs and partial blindness – convinced the German dictator not to use chemical weapons against Britain or the Soviet Union.

Although the Nazis maintained stockpiles of tabun and sarin nerve agents, Hitler forbid his generals from employing them in battle, except for the use of asphyxiating gas agents by SS chemical warfare troops in clearing caverns and catacombs in Sevastopol and Odessa of Soviet military personnel and civilians who had sought refuge from the invading German army. And, although the Nazis used hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide to murder millions of Jews, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and others in concentration camps throughout Europe, Johnson's statement about the use of nerve agents on British and European streets in World War II is ludicrous, as well as patently false. What is not false is that British generals dissuaded British Prime Minister Winston Churchill from using poison gas and anthrax on German population centers in World War II. Of course, Churchill was a great promoter of the use of poison gas, directing the use of debilitating lachrymatory gas ("tear gas") and deadlier mustard gas against rebels in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, in 1920.

In the world of British intelligence "make-believe" it is sometimes more revealing to discover the true nature of MI-6 operations from the movies. The screenwriters of the James Bond film, "Casino Royale," recognized the nature of the real life international mobsters who engage in such matters as assassinations of individuals for propaganda purposes. In the film, not only is a Montenegro-based Eurasian mob ring – Montenegro is one of the centers for the Eurasian-Israeli syndicates – featured as engaging in international terrorism in order to manipulate the stock market, but there is a reference by "M" (Judi Dench) that a similar mob ring engaged in stock "put" options before the 9/11 attacks, in order to make tons of money on the world markets. It appears that fictional spies know more about such intrigue, such as the murders of Litvinenko, Berezovsky, Patarkatsishvili, and Glushkov and the poisonings of the Skripals and Gaidar to bring about international crises, than do their real-life counterparts and intellectual dullards like Boris Johnson and Theresa May.

Tags: UK

[Mar 22, 2018] The voice on MI6 suggests that May should be more aggressive toward Russia by Luke Harding

This supposedly MI6-connected presstitute promoted Steele dossier. Now he promotes the war with Russia.
His idea is confiscate cash from Russian oligarchs. He forgot that British have investments in Russian that can also be gone.
Notable quotes:
"... Expulsion of diplomats is a temporary setback but the PM might have done more ..."
"... There is one area where the Russian elite is vulnerable. It keeps its money in the west, with much of it laundered in London and via UK corporate entities and banks. Unlike in Soviet times when apparatchiks enjoyed superior Moscow apartments, Putin's friends are multibillionaires, with yachts, villas, planes and other international assets. ..."
"... May could have frozen the luxury properties of tycoons such as Alisher Usmanov or Igor Shuvalov, Russia's deputy prime minister, whose handsome London flat overlooks the Ministry of Defence. She didn't. Oligarchs, of course, are not officials. But they are useful intermediaries who enjoy their fortunes at Putin's pleasure. ..."
Mar 22, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

Expulsion of diplomats is a temporary setback but the PM might have done more

... ... ...

There is one area where the Russian elite is vulnerable. It keeps its money in the west, with much of it laundered in London and via UK corporate entities and banks. Unlike in Soviet times when apparatchiks enjoyed superior Moscow apartments, Putin's friends are multibillionaires, with yachts, villas, planes and other international assets.

An entire class of British professionals service Russia's super-rich. They include lawyers, public relations executives, real estate firms, headmasters and accountants. It is this last group which sets up complex offshore-managed structures used for the purposes of money laundering. They went unmentioned by May.

And on the question of what to do about Russian cash, May was vague. The measures she suggested on Wednesday were aspirational. They included bringing to bear the capabilities of law enforcement against "serious criminals and corrupt elites". This happens already. But hard-pressed officers from the National Crime Agency admit prosecuting wealthy perpetrators is difficult and time-consuming.

May could have frozen the luxury properties of tycoons such as Alisher Usmanov or Igor Shuvalov, Russia's deputy prime minister, whose handsome London flat overlooks the Ministry of Defence. She didn't. Oligarchs, of course, are not officials. But they are useful intermediaries who enjoy their fortunes at Putin's pleasure.

[Mar 22, 2018] Well polished schemes: my impression is that I already saw very similar movie

Edited Yandex translation from Russian.
Notable quotes:
"... It looks like Political Hollywood thinks like this: if the scheme works, there is no need to change anything and it can be re-played with the same success, just different actors. That why this new "Russian poisoning scandal" looks to me like copy-cat of Litvinenko case with polonium replaced with equally mysterious and fascinating Novichok nerve gas. Which may or may not exist... ..."
Mar 22, 2018 | valery-pavlov.livejournal.com

"Former MI5 spy Sergei Skripal reported to the police about fears for his life the day before the poisoning". My impression is that I already watched quite similar movie.

I don't really like Hollywood scripts, and for some time I am quite indifferent to Oscar, and in General to the whole factory production.

Because when you buy a t-shirt or sneakers or fast food, quality standards matter to you. It is good to know that for example a t-shirt should be wearable at least for a year or so. When you watch a Hollywood movie with a similarly level of predictability which they try to present as a high quality, you feel like a very old man. In such movies you can guess all the Director's and scenario moves, the whole synopsis approximately 15 minutes into the movies. And it does no matter if this is a Hollywood Thriller, or a Western, or a detective, or a Comedy, or mystery. It iether causes cognitive dissonance or simply boredom.

I usually watch movies late in the evening. In recent years, about a third of these Hollywood moves affected me as a sleeping pill, I really fell asleep on the couch. And I usually watch only most popular, most successful Hollywood movies, often Oscar nominated, not some second rate crap.

But let's return to Skripal, those sacrificial lamps or pawns in some big game. Here we see the same scenario as with Litvinenko. A person used like a preservative long ago who managed to get to London by a lucky chance, and found himself under close watch of Berezovsky and MI5. They extracted from Litvinenko as much useful staff as they could leaving a disgruntled person with limited assets. But in this non-waste technology world they managed to find use even for a worn body of this "thrown like dirty napkins into waste basket" individual.

It looks like Political Hollywood thinks like this: if the scheme works, there is no need to change anything and it can be re-played with the same success, just different actors. That why this new "Russian poisoning scandal" looks to me like copy-cat of Litvinenko case with polonium replaced with equally mysterious and fascinating Novichok nerve gas. Which may or may not exist...

The same is true about our "collective Western partners" attempt to present this poisoning as a "casus belli". Well, this is a standard scheme to initiates the regime change in a certain country and start killing its inhabitants. "Use of chemical weapons". So boring. It was used so many time in Syria, Libya and elsewhere by our Western partners puppets, that it might also make me sleepy watching this nonsense on TV. As if it does not touch the lives of many thousands of people. With whom our "Western partners" play a very nasty "shooter" videogame with real victims. Including woman and children.

By the way, the case of Grigory Rodchenkov, I'd now would not worry about the KGB too much. I would worry a lot about Western intelligence agencies. Which might sooner or later, might decide to use his cadaver to make yet another false flag operation, yet another nasty anti-Russian move. However, this is a completely different story. And the carcass of Rodchenkov no longer belongs to him in any case. He sold his for some number of silver coins, along with his soul.

[Mar 22, 2018] Britain was complicit in creating the world's greatest kleptocracy, Yeltsin regime

Surprisingly this Guardian presstitute has some sound thoughts ;-)
Theresa May was probably pushed by Big Uncle. It is inconceivable that she behaved so arrogantly and foolishly on her own, even taking into account that any confrontation with Russia might prolong the life of her cabinet.
All-in-all this false flag operation looks like the first step is some gambit designed by British intelligence services against Russia. With Scripals as sacrificed pawns. It is amazing how "false flag friendly" poisoning cases are. Uncomfortable evidence can always be hidden under that smoke screen of "state secrecy".
There might be strong desire to confiscate Russian oligarch money as one of the motives for the current May goverment hysteria. That's explains why members of parliament jumped so high on orders, and why the reaction was so bipartisan. Because the attempt to spoil the World Cup looks so petty, that it is smells with the USA, not British intelligence serves. After all British team is a favorite. But such attempts were numerous in the past, so you never know. Sochi was the most recent example.
Notable quotes:
"... Theresa May's language in the wake of events in Salisbury has been unhelpful, given our history of provoking Russia ..."
"... The prospect has certainly taken British minds off Brexit. It has exhilarated the press. It has given Theresa May an immense boost and helped the defence lobby in its campaign for more money. There is nothing democracy seems to enjoy so much as contemplating war, to unite it and raise its spirits. It is never unpopular -- beforehand. ..."
"... Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the west has revelled in the humiliation of Russia. Every act of the EU and Nato after 1989 was to the same destructive end. Russia's neighbours were welcomed into the EU. Nato extended its defensive border to the edge of the Russian Federation, despite then president Boris Yeltsin (and to an extent Germany) pleading with the west "not to play with fire". ..."
"... As Yeltsin plunged into his botched privatisations in the 1990s, London egged them on by opening its banks to handle Russia's stolen billions. Britain was complicit in creating the world's greatest kleptocracy, brazenly and for a quarter of a century. Even this week, the prime minister lacked the guts to face down the City of London and call a halt to Russian money laundering. ..."
Mar 16, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

Originally from: After the Skripal attack, talk of war only plays into Vladimir Putin's hands by Simon Jenkins

Theresa May's language in the wake of events in Salisbury has been unhelpful, given our history of provoking Russia

Do we really want war with Russia? Do we want to risk one, even a tiny one? The prospect has certainly taken British minds off Brexit. It has exhilarated the press. It has given Theresa May an immense boost and helped the defence lobby in its campaign for more money. There is nothing democracy seems to enjoy so much as contemplating war, to unite it and raise its spirits. It is never unpopular -- beforehand.

... ... ...

Parliament parroted the same nonsense. The Tories' Tom Tugendhat said the poisoning "if not an act of war, was certainly a warlike act". Labour's Chris Leslie and John Woodcock worked themselves into a lather over "our country under attack" and "the gravity of the threat Russia poses to this nation". In these bidding wars of exaggeration, words lose all meaning.

... ... ...

Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the west has revelled in the humiliation of Russia. Every act of the EU and Nato after 1989 was to the same destructive end. Russia's neighbours were welcomed into the EU. Nato extended its defensive border to the edge of the Russian Federation, despite then president Boris Yeltsin (and to an extent Germany) pleading with the west "not to play with fire".

As Yeltsin plunged into his botched privatisations in the 1990s, London egged them on by opening its banks to handle Russia's stolen billions. Britain was complicit in creating the world's greatest kleptocracy, brazenly and for a quarter of a century. Even this week, the prime minister lacked the guts to face down the City of London and call a halt to Russian money laundering.

All this is a grim echo of how the allies treated Germany after Versailles in 1919. They rubbed its nose in defeat, occupying its territory, destroying its dignity and stripping it of its flimsy wealth. Germany eventually found refuge in dictatorship.

... ... ...

Camus wrote that "plagues and wars take people equally by surprise". The idea that Skripal may be the Franz Ferdinand of the next European conflict may seem ludicrous. Yet the west's responses to post-Soviet Russia, however reasonable in the short term, have been disastrous in general. A war with Russia would be the west's fault.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

[Mar 22, 2018] Spy poisoning: police say investigation could last until summer by Andrew Roth

Notable quotes:
"... Senior Russian diplomatic and military officials have accused the UK of hiding and possibly planning to destroy evidence in the investigation into the Salisbury nerve agent attack. ..."
Mar 21, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

Senior Russian diplomatic and military officials have accused the UK of hiding and possibly planning to destroy evidence in the investigation into the Salisbury nerve agent attack.

The comments came during a remarkable briefing at Moscow's foreign ministry given for all foreign ambassadors in Russia, to lay out the country's argument for why it is not responsible for the attack on former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, on 4 March.

Britain says they were poisoned with a nerve agent known as novichok and has blamed Russia for the attack, but Moscow has fiercely denied any involvement. The case has prompted the two countries to expel diplomats in a tit-for-tat dispute.

Speaking to a lecture hall of diplomats, Vladimir Yermakov, deputy head of the ministry's department for non-proliferation, suggested that the UK was "hiding facts" about the case that may later "disappear".

Laurie Bristow, the British ambassador to Russia, did not attend and the ambassadors of other major allies, including the US, Germany and France, also boycotted the briefing.

But one British diplomat did go. Emma Nottingham condemned the "disinformation" coming from the Russian government during the briefing, which was closed to the press but streamed live online.

"Russia has offered us so far no explanation of how this agent came to be used in the United Kingdom and no explanation as to why Russia has an undeclared chemical weapons programme in contravention of international law," Nottingham told the five-person panel.

"We are not obliged to give anything to Great Britain," Yermakov replied to Nottingham. "It is an attack on Russian citizens on the territory of Great Britain, so why don't we carry out a joint investigation?"

Yermakov also suggested that Russia may not accept the conclusions of an investigation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons as fact.

"It is not possible to evaluate what happened in Salisbury within the framework of the convention and within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons," he said in remarks translated by Interfax. "Deeper expert evaluations will be needed, and in any case we need to conduct our own investigations for Russia to be able to draw any conclusions."

The briefing lasted just under two hours.

[Mar 22, 2018] Romans saying tha applies to Britain "Iuppiter iratus ergo nefas" (Jupiter, you are angry, therefore you are wrong).

An interesting presentation by Andrey Vadjra (English subtitles)
Mar 22, 2018 | www.youtube.com

Andrey Vadjra. About the coma patients at the service of Her Majesty - YouTube

[Mar 21, 2018] Arafat and Litvinenko: an Interesting Turn to a Mysterious Story

Highly recommended!
Highly recommended !
"... "Arafat and Litvinenko: an Interesting Turn to a Mysterious Story", http://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2013/11/13/arafat-and-litvinenko-an-interesting-turn-to-a-mysterious-story/ ..."
Notable quotes:
"... "Arafat and Litvinenko: an Interesting Turn to a Mysterious Story", http://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2013/11/13/arafat-and-litvinenko-an-interesting-turn-to-a-mysterious-story/ ..."
Mar 16, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Andreas Schlüter | Mar 15, 2018 9:02:38 AM | 84

And a reminder:

"Arafat and Litvinenko: an Interesting Turn to a Mysterious Story", http://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2013/11/13/arafat-and-litvinenko-an-interesting-turn-to-a-mysterious-story/

[Mar 21, 2018] Whataboutism Is A Nonsensical Propaganda Term Used To Defend The Failed Status Quo by Mike Krieger

Highly recommended!
The classic question " Who is judging the judges"
Western journalists, with a very small exception (real outliers), are experts at presenting one-sided arguments, whatever the facts and evidence. Look at Meagan Kelly interviews for the inspiration. They know how to wear down any dissident who does not buy into government talking points
Mar 20, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

If you spend any time on Twitter, you'll probably be familiar with the latest pathetic attempt to defend and insulate the U.S. status quo from criticism. It centers around the usage of an infantile and meaningless term, "whataboutism."

Let's begin with one particularly absurd accusation of "whataboutism" promoted by NPR last year:

When O'Reilly countered that "Putin is a killer," Trump responded, "There are a lot of killers. You got a lot of killers. What, you think our country is so innocent?"

This particular brand of changing the subject is called "whataboutism" -- a simple rhetorical tactic heavily used by the Soviet Union and, later, Russia. And its use in Russia helps illustrate how it could be such a useful tool now, in America. As Russian political experts told NPR, it's an attractive tactic for populists in particular, allowing them to be vague but appear straight-talking at the same time.

The idea behind whataboutism is simple: Party A accuses Party B of doing something bad. Party B responds by changing the subject and pointing out one of Party A's faults -- "Yeah? Well what about that bad thing you did?" (Hence the name.)

It's not exactly a complicated tactic -- any grade-schooler can master the "yeah-well-you-suck-too-so-there" defense. But it came to be associated with the USSR because of the Soviet Union's heavy reliance upon whataboutism throughout the Cold War and afterward, as Russia.

This is a really embarrassing take by NPR .

First, the author tries to associate a tactic that's been around since humans first wandered into caves -- deflecting attention away from yourself by pointing out the flaws in others -- into some uniquely nefarious Russian propaganda tool. Second, that's not even what Trump did in this example.

In his response to O'Reilly, Trump wasn't using "whataboutism" to deflect away from his own sins. Rather, he offered a rare moment of self-reflection about the true role played by the U.S. government around the world. This isn't "whataboutism," it's questioning the hypocrisy and abuse of power of one's own government. It's an attempt to take responsibility for stuff he might actually be able to change as President. It's the most ethical and honest response to that question in light of the amount of violence the U.S. government engages in abroad. If our leaders did this more often, we might stop repeatedly jumping from one insane and destructive war to the next.

Had O'Reilly's question been about the U.S. government's ongoing support of Saudi Arabia's war crimes in Yemen and Trump shifted the conversation to Russian atrocities, he could then be fairly accused of changing the subject to avoid accountability. In that case, you could condemn Trump for "whataboutism" because he intentionally deflected attention away from his own government's sins to the sins of another. This sort of thing is indeed very dangerous, especially when done by someone in a position of power.

But here's the thing. You don't need some catchy, infantile term like "whataboutism" to point out that someone in power's deflecting attention from their own transgressions. I agree wholeheartedly with Adam Johnson when he states:

He's absolutely right. One should never rely on the lazy use of a cutesy, catchy term like "whataboutism" as a retort to someone who points out a glaring contradiction. If you do, you're either a propagandist with no counterargument or a fool who mindlessly adopts the jingoistic cues of others. Responding to someone by saying "that's just whataboutism" isn't an argument, it's an assault on one's logical faculties. It's attempt to provide people with a way to shut down debate and conversation by simply blurting out a clever sounding fake-word. Here's an example of how I've seen it used on Twitter.

One U.S. citizen (likely a card carrying member of "the resistance") will regurgitate some standard intel agency line on Syria or Russia. Another U.S. citizen will then draw attention to the fact that their own government plays an active role in egregious war crimes in Yemen on behalf of the Saudis. This person will proceed to advocate for skepticism with regard to U.S. government and intelligence agency war promotion considering how badly the public was deceived in the run up to the Iraq war. For this offense, they'll be accused of "whataboutism."

The problem with this accusation is that this person isn't switching the subject to bring up another's transgression to deflect from scrutiny of his or her behavior. In contrast, the person is putting the conversation in its rightful place, which is to question the behavior of one's own country. When it comes to issues such as nation-state violence, the primary duty of a citizen is not to obsess all day about the violence perpetrated by foreign governments, but to hold one's own government accountable. This is as true for an American citizen in American as it is for a Russian citizen in Russia.

NPR explained how the Russian government used "whataboutism" to deflect away from it's own crimes, but Trump actually did the opposite in his interview with O'Reilly. He wasn't deflecting away from his own country's crimes, he was pointing out that they exist. That's precisely what you're supposed to do as a citizen.

The problem arises when governments deflect attention away from their own crimes for which they are actually responsible, by pointing out the crimes of a foreign government. This is indeed propaganda and an evasion of responsibility. Calling out your own government's hypocrisy in matters of state sanctioned murder abroad is the exact opposite sort of thing.

Noam Chomsky put it better than I ever could. Here's what he said in a 2003 interview :

QUESTION: When you talk about the role of intellectuals, you say that the first duty is to concentrate on your own country. Could you explain this assertion?

CHOMSKY: One of the most elementary moral truisms is that you are responsible for the anticipated consequences of your own actions. It is fine to talk about the crimes of Genghis Khan, but there isn't much that you can do about them. If Soviet intellectuals chose to devote their energies to crimes of the U.S., which they could do nothing about, that is their business. We honor those who recognized that the first duty is to concentrate on your own country. And it is interesting that no one ever asks for an explanation, because in the case of official enemies, truisms are indeed truisms. It is when truisms are applied to ourselves that they become contentious, or even outrageous. But they remain truisms. In fact, the truisms hold far more for us than they did for Soviet dissidents, for the simple reason that we are in free societies, do not face repression, and can have a substantial influence on government policy. So if we adopt truisms, that is where we will focus most of our energy and commitment. The explanation is even more obvious than in the case of official enemies.

Naturally, truisms are hated when applied to oneself. You can see it dramatically in the case of terrorism. In fact one of the reasons why I am considered "public enemy number one" among a large sector of intellectuals in the U.S. is that I mention that the U.S. is one of the major terrorist states in the world and this assertion, though plainly true, is unacceptable for many intellectuals, including left-liberal intellectuals, because if we faced such truths we could do something about the terrorist acts for which we are responsible, accepting elementary moral responsibilities instead of lauding ourselves for denouncing the crimes official enemies, about which we can often do very little.

Elementary honesty is often uncomfortable, in personal life as well, and there are people who make great efforts to evade it. For intellectuals, throughout history, it has often come close to being their vocation. Intellectuals are commonly integrated into dominant institutions. Their privilege and prestige derives from adapting to the interests of power concentrations, often taking a critical look but in very limited ways. For example, one may criticize the war in Vietnam as a "mistake" that began with "benign intentions". But it goes too far to say that the war is not "a mistake" but was "fundamentally wrong and immoral". the position of about 70 percent of the public by the late 1960s, persisting until today, but of only a margin of intellectuals. The same is true of terrorism. In acceptable discourse, as can easily be demonstrated, the term is used to refer to terrorist acts that THEY carry out against US, not those that WE carry out against THEM. That is probably close to a historical universal. And there are innumerable other examples.

For saying the above, Noam Chomsky would surely be labeled the godfather of "whataboutism" by Twitter's resistance army, but he's actually advocating the most ethical, logical and courageous path of citizenship. U.S. taxpayers aren't paying for Russia's military operations, but they are paying for the U.S. government's. The idea that U.S. citizens emphasizing U.S. violence are committing the thought-crime of "whataboutism" when it comes to foreign policy is absurd. Our primary responsibility as citizens is our own aggressive and violent foreign policy, not that of other countries.

Naturally, this isn't how neocon/neoliberal and intelligence agency imperialists want you to think. Proponents of the American empire need the public to ignore the atrocities of the U.S. government and its allies for obvious reasons, while constantly obsessing over the atrocities of the empire's official enemies. This is the only way to continue to exert force abroad without domestic pushback, and it's critical in order to keep the imperial gravy train going for those it benefits so significantly. How do you shut down vibrant foreign policy debate on social media that exposes imperial hypocrisy? Accuse people of "whataboutism."

That's what I see going on. I see the weaponization of a cutesy, catchy term on social media in order to prevent people from questioning their own government. It's completely logical and ethical for U.S. citizens to push back against those arguing for more regime change wars by pointing out the evils of our own foreign policy.

In fact, the unethical position is the one espoused by those who claim the U.S. can do no wrong, but when an adversary country does what we permit ourselves to do, they must be bombed into oblivion. These people know they have no argument, so they run around condemning those trying to hold their own government accountable of "whataboutism." It's a nonsensical term with no real meaning or purpose other than to defend imperial talking points.

Accusations of "whataboutism" amount to a cynical, sleazy attempt to stifle debate without actually engaging in argument. It's also the sort of desperate and childish propaganda tactic you'd expect during late-stage imperial decline.

* * *

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[Mar 21, 2018] This russiagate soap opera as you called it, is running by the US MSM for almost two years now; and it has completely messed up the majority of the US people.

Notable quotes:
"... An antidote to all my Dem liberal Clinton-supporting "friends" on FB who insanely slaver for Russiagate nonsense because they hate Trump. Nevermind that his impeachment would get us Pence. They pat themselves on the back for being good, liberal Trump-hating, Russia-gate believers. ..."
"... Nary a word from them while Obama cowardly ducked prosecuting torturers or banksters -- or started new illegal wars and drone-murdered so many innocent people. Much less the bogus ACA handout to Big Insurance. So much for American Values. ..."
"... They all believe in all this nonsense about Russia-Gate which is being fed nonstop on major networks; and also this latest incident in U.K. I was the only one who was questioning it and it can become unpleasant. ..."
"... It is sad to see all this happening. It is very dangerous. Newspapers, L.A. Times here, keep the public completely in the dark about the consequences that it may accidentally or knowingly lead to nuclear war with Russia. ..."
Mar 21, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Joe Tedesky , March 19, 2018 at 10:43 am

Here is something worth reading. https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/19/us-empire-on-decline/

Paul E. Merrell, J.D. , March 19, 2018 at 10:19 pm

Thanks for that link, Joe. The article's authors, Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, are long-time political activists, codirectors of PopularResistance.org. https://popularresistance.org/ That organization seems to be taking a very determined approach to social change, supplying not only articles tightly focused on issues but also organizing resources for activists.

I've been watching the group closely because I'm seeing signs that its anti-war work just may become the tip of the spear of a revitalized anti-war movement. (It's been a very long time since the anti-war movement in the U.S. had effective leadership.)

Kevin knows how to play the long game. He was for at least two decades director of NORML and can now watch his earlier work come to fruition as state after state legalizes marijuana.

Typingperson , March 20, 2018 at 12:36 am

Thanks, Paul, for flagging that Kevin Zeese is the former head of NORML. I remember him well from this role -- and how effective he was.

I will check out PopularResistance.org.

An antidote to all my Dem liberal Clinton-supporting "friends" on FB who insanely slaver for Russiagate nonsense because they hate Trump. Nevermind that his impeachment would get us Pence. They pat themselves on the back for being good, liberal Trump-hating, Russia-gate believers.

Nary a word from them while Obama cowardly ducked prosecuting torturers or banksters -- or started new illegal wars and drone-murdered so many innocent people. Much less the bogus ACA handout to Big Insurance. So much for American Values.

Dave P. , March 20, 2018 at 2:29 am

Joe, you are right. I do not have to go too far to see what it has done to the citizens of this country, I just look in my own home. This soap opera as you called it, is going on almost two years now; and it has completely messed up the people. We had a visitor, somebody very close to me, a week before this weekend, and invited some other friends. They all believe in all this nonsense about Russia-Gate which is being fed nonstop on major networks; and also this latest incident in U.K. I was the only one who was questioning it and it can become unpleasant.

It is sad to see all this happening. It is very dangerous. Newspapers, L.A. Times here, keep the public completely in the dark about the consequences that it may accidentally or knowingly lead to nuclear war with Russia.

[Mar 21, 2018] Linking Scripal poisoning with Litvinenko poisoning

Cue bono in both cases points to British government
"... The widow of poisoned former Russian security officer Aleksandr Litvinenko has denied he worked for the British intelligence service MI6, a claim made by Russian businessman Andrey Lugovoy in Moscow last week. ..."
"... The widow of former Russian FSB officer Aleksandr Litvinenko, who was murdered in London in 2006, admitted that her husband cooperated with the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6. ..."
"... The father of late Russian security officer Aleksandr Litvinenko says he pursued a smear campaign against the Russian government out of grief, but changed his mind after Aleksandr's widow revealed his son had been working for British intelligence. ..."
"... It was Berezovsky and Goldfarb. That's it. Goldfarb knows all about atomic energy. How do you think Aleksandr was first infected with Polonium-210? Why do you think this case has been dragging for so long? Why has there been no court case? Because they don't have anything, and if a real court case were to open, it will become apparent who was behind it!" the man said. ..."
"... Aleksandr Goldfarb is the head of Berezovsky's Civil Liberties' Fund. In the weeks prior and after Litvinenko's death he took the role of an unofficial spokesman for the man, putting the blame for the crime on the Kremlin ..."
"... For those keeping score, Boris Berezovsky was later found hanging from the ceiling of his Ascot mansion. ..."
"... There are many things wrong with the "Putin did it" story. For one, there is no motive , even with Litvinenko being a critic of Russia, he was no threat whatsoever to Putin. The man worked with Chechen terrorists and the Israeli-Russian oligarchs . But assuming that there was a sufficient motive to kill him, think about this: Why would Russia use a very rare, very expensive, and easily traceable radioactive substance to kill him instead of some cheap poison or just shooting him? Why risk smuggling radioactive material into the UK which is an act of war? ..."
"... No experienced mob boss like Berezovsky would be dumb enough to murder an underling in such a manner either. Therefore his death was an accident. It was mostly likely it was a botched smuggling operation . Why was he moving such a dangerous substance? Did he need fast cash? Were they planning to create a dirty bomb? Such a "smoky bomb" would turn the Polonium into powder and kill anyone who ingested it. ..."
"... Traces of Polonium were found on the planes that Litvinenko had been on. So I think we can deduce what happened. He was a mule . The questions remain, why did he have it?, Where did he get it? What was he going to do with it? Why was it in the offices of Berezovsky and Erinsys Ltd (Britain's Blackwater)? ..."
"... Litvinenko was in Israel, where he met Leonid Nevzlin the CEO of Yukos shortly before he died. If you wanted to buy/steal radioactive material that would be the place. What was he negotiating with Nevzlin? We learned Alexander had been an informant in a case that led to the arrest of nine Georgian and Russian Mobsters in Spain, including Alexander Gofstein a lawyer for Yukos who apparently was laundering money ..."
"... The British military Radiation and Chemical Warfare Center is just down the road, so they will have had experts on scene pretty rapidly. Latest local rumor is that it's fentanyl, or some derivative thereof. They had to decontaminate A&E and cancel hospital appointments. ..."
"... The local police and medical personnel are on the ball, I used to know a few. Link to local paper - they are quite good too http://www.salisburyjournal.co.uk/ ..."
"... Another false flag. MI5 poisons prominent russian 'baddies' so they can blame it on Russia. Makes Russian look bad, great for propaganda. ..."
"... Litvinenko said, "Mario Scaramella poised me," from his death bed. Enough said. This has gonnne on too long. WW# is enviable with a rapturous lying press living and believing in a James Bond geo political spy moves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Scaramella ..."
"... Polonium, mystery substance, blah, blah, blah! These James Bond spy thriller techniques smell more of MI6 or CIA than Russia. MI6 and CIA have always been drama queens. ..."
"... Why do drama queen things when you can Seth Rich or Michael Hastings this couple? ..."
"... These are the real professionals. What, if anything happened here is rank amateur- they should study how its done. http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/BODIES.php#axzz58vFYg ..."
"... the us and uk intelligence services would not allow you to leave when they are finished with you as you become a liability in tough financial times.the UK killed the bastard like they killed litvinenko. ..."
Mar 05, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Shemp 4 Victory -> newmacroman Mon, 03/05/2018 - 18:47 Permalink

How many times is ZH going to dredge up the discredited fable about Putin ordering Litvinenko's murder?

First, nobody heard Litvinenko's "deathbed confession" except Alexander Goldfarb, who had a grudge against Putin and who worked with other shady Russian exiles in London like Boris Berezovsky.

Litvinenko's wife changed her story. The 2007 version:

The widow of poisoned former Russian security officer Aleksandr Litvinenko has denied he worked for the British intelligence service MI6, a claim made by Russian businessman Andrey Lugovoy in Moscow last week.

The 2011 version:

The widow of former Russian FSB officer Aleksandr Litvinenko, who was murdered in London in 2006, admitted that her husband cooperated with the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6.

From Litvinenko's father in 2012:

The father of late Russian security officer Aleksandr Litvinenko says he pursued a smear campaign against the Russian government out of grief, but changed his mind after Aleksandr's widow revealed his son had been working for British intelligence.

Litvinenko's father later told Scotland Yard who he thought was responsible:

" It was Berezovsky and Goldfarb. That's it. Goldfarb knows all about atomic energy. How do you think Aleksandr was first infected with Polonium-210? Why do you think this case has been dragging for so long? Why has there been no court case? Because they don't have anything, and if a real court case were to open, it will become apparent who was behind it!" the man said.

Boris Berezovsky is an exiled Russian tycoon, who was found guilty of embezzlement in Russia in an absentia trial. He is currently living in Britain, where he enjoys political asylum.

Berezovsky employed Litvinenko, who took part in numerous campaigns the billionaire waged against the Russian government.

Aleksandr Goldfarb is the head of Berezovsky's Civil Liberties' Fund. In the weeks prior and after Litvinenko's death he took the role of an unofficial spokesman for the man, putting the blame for the crime on the Kremlin .

Lots of loose ends and unanswered questions about Litvinenko point to British intelligence and the Russian/Israeli mafia. Which is why Putin must be blamed.

Oh, and by the way, the ricin-tipped umbrella was a Bulgarian way, not a Russian way.

Conscious Reviver -> Shemp 4 Victory Mon, 03/05/2018 - 19:59 Permalink

Thanks for the details, Shemp. For those keeping score, Boris Berezovsky was later found hanging from the ceiling of his Ascot mansion.

sparksmass -> Shemp 4 Victory Mon, 03/05/2018 - 20:32 Permalink

Berezovsky has been dead since 2013

veritas semper -> PrivetHedge Mon, 03/05/2018 - 18:36 Permalink

There are many things wrong with the "Putin did it" story. For one, there is no motive , even with Litvinenko being a critic of Russia, he was no threat whatsoever to Putin. The man worked with Chechen terrorists and the Israeli-Russian oligarchs . But assuming that there was a sufficient motive to kill him, think about this: Why would Russia use a very rare, very expensive, and easily traceable radioactive substance to kill him instead of some cheap poison or just shooting him? Why risk smuggling radioactive material into the UK which is an act of war?

The main thing it is that ANY radioactive substance is traceable to its point of origin.

There is one country which has not signed the nuclear non proliferation treaty and whose radioactive material can nto be traced ,you guessed it:IS>>>RA>>>EL

Alexander Litvinenko who was formerly FSB fled to the UK to avoid court prosecution in Russia, worked for a shady Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky. Boris Berezovsky just so happens to be the Israeli-Russian oligarch who lived in London after fleeing the Russian judicial system for a multitude of crimes too long to list. He was on Interpol's most wanted list. Here is the grand prize. After the US and UK press branded Putin with the poisoning despite there being Zero evidence, (something the US is very well known for now) investigators were tracking down the traces of Polonium in the UK. They detected traces of Polonium at Berezovsky's office and residence! Now I do not know about you, but in my place of work, and certainly in my house, I do not have rare radioactive substances. Polonium is not something you just get at the market or pick up by accident walking through the park.

No experienced mob boss like Berezovsky would be dumb enough to murder an underling in such a manner either. Therefore his death was an accident. It was mostly likely it was a botched smuggling operation . Why was he moving such a dangerous substance? Did he need fast cash? Were they planning to create a dirty bomb? Such a "smoky bomb" would turn the Polonium into powder and kill anyone who ingested it.

Traces of Polonium were found on the planes that Litvinenko had been on. So I think we can deduce what happened. He was a mule . The questions remain, why did he have it?, Where did he get it? What was he going to do with it? Why was it in the offices of Berezovsky and Erinsys Ltd (Britain's Blackwater)?

And here comes the best part:

Litvinenko was in Israel, where he met Leonid Nevzlin the CEO of Yukos shortly before he died. If you wanted to buy/steal radioactive material that would be the place. What was he negotiating with Nevzlin? We learned Alexander had been an informant in a case that led to the arrest of nine Georgian and Russian Mobsters in Spain, including Alexander Gofstein a lawyer for Yukos who apparently was laundering money .

You can read the whole story here . https://www.sott.net/article/310728-Litvinenko-wasnt-poisoned-by-Putin-

A good account here too. http://thesaker.is/the-litvinenko-inquiry-londons-absurd-show-trial/

Litvinenko's father said that Berezovsky killed his son.

newmacroman -> veritas semper Mon, 03/05/2018 - 18:49 Permalink

Wasn't Boris suicided by hanging in his London home?

veritas semper -> newmacroman Mon, 03/05/2018 - 19:10 Permalink

Yes. MI5

WillyGroper Mon, 03/05/2018 - 17:25 Permalink

" 33-year-old woman "

again...wink wink

BurningFuld -> WillyGroper Mon, 03/05/2018 - 17:28 Permalink

F E N T A N Y L

serotonindumptruck -> BurningFuld Mon, 03/05/2018 - 17:32 Permalink

Poison has historically been the preferred method of eliminating political opponents.

CRM114 Mon, 03/05/2018 - 17:28 Permalink

The British military Radiation and Chemical Warfare Center is just down the road, so they will have had experts on scene pretty rapidly. Latest local rumor is that it's fentanyl, or some derivative thereof. They had to decontaminate A&E and cancel hospital appointments.

The local police and medical personnel are on the ball, I used to know a few. Link to local paper - they are quite good too http://www.salisburyjournal.co.uk/

PrivetHedge -> CRM114 Mon, 03/05/2018 - 17:44 Permalink

How convenient. Perhaps they had experts on the scene before there was a problem?

CRM114 -> PrivetHedge Mon, 03/05/2018 - 18:01 Permalink

A No to that one. Not these days, anyway. Back in the Cold War though....

Cloud9.5 Mon, 03/05/2018 - 17:30 Permalink

This is tying up loose ends. Those people who brokered the uranium deal need to be sure their insurance policies are paid up.

PrivetHedge Mon, 03/05/2018 - 17:34 Permalink

Another false flag. MI5 poisons prominent russian 'baddies' so they can blame it on Russia. Makes Russian look bad, great for propaganda.

lurker since 2012 Mon, 03/05/2018 - 18:00 Permalink

Have NOT read. This is the oil, everything you heard and seen pure BS. Litvinenko said, "Mario Scaramella poised me," from his death bed. Enough said. This has gonnne on too long. WW# is enviable with a rapturous lying press living and believing in a James Bond geo political spy moves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Scaramella

ALLRIGHT,

I confess, I poisoned them (with a snickers bar) I am two sheets to the wind with my Make glorious Vodka for my successful job. Please inform Vlad it went well.

SHADEWELL -> lurker since 2012 Mon, 03/05/2018 - 18:13 Permalink

Laughable propaganda comrade ah yes Wikipedia a totally "reliable" source, in which anyone can "update" posts

And further - as if this hit man would ever implicate Putin fucking idiot. You are correct about this having gone on for too long. When will Putin be charged with that crime as well as the numerous other "suspicious deaths" Very similar to cuntlery body count. I wonder why that is? hmm

lurker since 2012 -> SHADEWELL Mon, 03/05/2018 - 18:31 Permalink

As everyone knows Langley write and update all Wiki information. So you use them as the Devils advocate. If they reveal this you can take it as a starting point. ( The 'Company wants to pin it on the Russian/Putin ) as they point out Scaramella wanted to be a CIA spy and had been refused, well o course he helped Whack/poisoned Litvinenko . Might get him his dream job he had been after ALL HIS LIFE. Polonium is easy to source as well as it is used extensive throughout South east Asia as a anti static xxxx on weaving machines involved in Clothing manufacturing.

Don't worry agent Shadewell got it all worked out. Look over their.

SHADEWELL -> lurker since 2012 Mon, 03/05/2018 - 19:31 Permalink

Or his final statement? Cemetery in North London . [32] On 25 November, an article attributed to Litvinenko was published by the Mail on Sunday Online entitled Why I believe Putin wanted me dead... [2] In his last statement he said about Putin:

this may be the time to say one or two things to the person responsible for my present condition. You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed. You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilised value. You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilised men and women. You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people. [33]

Investigation

Koba the Dread Mon, 03/05/2018 - 18:49 Permalink

Polonium, mystery substance, blah, blah, blah! These James Bond spy thriller techniques smell more of MI6 or CIA than Russia. MI6 and CIA have always been drama queens.

Why do drama queen things when you can Seth Rich or Michael Hastings this couple?

thebriang Mon, 03/05/2018 - 18:51 Permalink

Another case of Clintonosis.

RedBaron616 Mon, 03/05/2018 - 18:53 Permalink

When you sell out your country by giving the names of lots of Russian spies, why would you be surprised to get what you probably deserve? After all, you are a turncoat, a traitor. You can rail at Putin all you want. You knew the risks in selling out your country. Hard to fault Putin for making an example of you for others to note.

mog Mon, 03/05/2018 - 19:06 Permalink

These are the real professionals. What, if anything happened here is rank amateur- they should study how its done. http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/BODIES.php#axzz58vFYg

FGopher Mon, 03/05/2018 - 19:35 Permalink

I wonder if the First Responders who initially were dispatched to what would at first appear to be a drug overdose were also injured by whatever substance was used? The GRU used to tell their recruits: Walk through the door and leave by the chimney.

Davidduke2000 Mon, 03/05/2018 - 20:00 Permalink

the us and uk intelligence services would not allow you to leave when they are finished with you as you become a liability in tough financial times.the UK killed the bastard like they killed litvinenko.

the judge who was in charge of the investigations said"it's PROBABLY the Russians who killed him". I cannot believe a judge would say probably? where is the evidence asshole???

Davidduke2000 Mon, 03/05/2018 - 20:15 Permalink

The brits better not say the Russians did it, because they would have snatched Assange if they were looking for a fight.

[Mar 21, 2018] From Litvinenko to Skripal poisoning: the US intelligence agencies as rogue players.

Notable quotes:
"... "Berezovsky's expatriate friends in Britain and Israel included exiled oligarchs who were subjects of Russian arrest warrants. These included Russian-Israeli businessman Leonid Nevzlin, the former chief executive officer of Yukos Oil, who was the subject of a Russian arrest warrant for murder, embezzlement, and tax evasion. Nevzlin, a former head of the Russian Jewish Congress, resided in Tel Aviv under the protection of the Israeli government. Nevzlin's exiled Russian-Israeli comrades included Vladimir Dubov, a major Yukos shareholder, and wanted oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky. The wanted ex-Yukos officials, who are now allied with the expatriate former chief of Yukos and ex-convict, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, have also been linked to wealthy British businessman Jacob Rothschild. ..."
"... "Much more than circumstantial evidence suggests that Berezovsky, Glushkov, and Patarkatsishvili were murdered by exiled opponents of the Russian government, who also happen to be kingpins in the Eurasian-Israeli mafia that uses Britain as a major base of operations. Britain is favored by these criminal syndicates because of the close working relationship they have with British and American intelligence agencies, as well as with Soros, who maintains a residence in London." ..."
Mar 21, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Abe , March 20, 2018 at 3:24 pm

"One thing about the neo-conservatives, who have thoroughly penetrated the Tory government of British Prime Minister Theresa May and, due to the reality television show savant nature of Donald Trump, are rapidly filling as many vacancies in the US administration as possible, is that they are consistent. Neocons, who make no secret of their desire for major military conflagrations, have dusted off an old playbook with regard to the nerve agent poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England. The convoluted charges made by the British government bear all the hallmarks of the Polonium-210 radiation poisoning of ex-Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London in 2006.

"In June 2008, the British government conceded that the government of British Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair concocted and exaggerated claims about Russia's involvement in the Litvinenko poisoning in 2006. Apparently, the present government of Mrs. May believes rational people have no memories of what transpired in Britain twelve years ago.

"The British intelligence services, which had their own relationship with Litvinenko, could no longer manage to suppress overwhelming evidence that the poisoning of Litvinenko was the result of a plot by anti-Vladimir Putin criminal syndicates based in Britain, Israel, Ukraine, and Poland to embarrass the Russian government.

"Suspicions about the role of the exiled Russian-Israeli criminal syndicates in the poisoning of Litvinenko, including that which was headed by Litvinenko's friend, wanted Russo-Israeli oligarch Boris Berezovsky, re-surfaced after former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar became violently ill after eating breakfast at a conference he was attending in Dublin, Ireland. Ireland's banking secrecy laws has made it a favorite location for the Eurasian-Israeli Mafia.

"Berezovsky's own suspicious death in March 2013 discovery of Berezovsky's body in his Ascot estate in England suggested that the anti-Russian crime syndicates, which work closely with hedge fund billionaire troublemaker George Soros and the Central Intelligence Agency, eliminated Berezovsky because he was about to reveal the nature of the syndicates to the Russian government. Most media reports coming out of Britain, at the time, claimed that Berezovsky died from natural causes. A few others suggested suicide or murder. Interestingly, Berezovsky had recently received medical treatment in Israel.

"Berezovsky's expatriate friends in Britain and Israel included exiled oligarchs who were subjects of Russian arrest warrants. These included Russian-Israeli businessman Leonid Nevzlin, the former chief executive officer of Yukos Oil, who was the subject of a Russian arrest warrant for murder, embezzlement, and tax evasion. Nevzlin, a former head of the Russian Jewish Congress, resided in Tel Aviv under the protection of the Israeli government. Nevzlin's exiled Russian-Israeli comrades included Vladimir Dubov, a major Yukos shareholder, and wanted oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky. The wanted ex-Yukos officials, who are now allied with the expatriate former chief of Yukos and ex-convict, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, have also been linked to wealthy British businessman Jacob Rothschild.

"Berezovsky ran from exile a major support network for Chechen terrorists. One of their leaders, Ahmed Zakayev, was a close associate of Berezovsky and Litvinenko.

"Just like Litvinenko, Yulia Skripal had her own reported connections to Russian and Western intelligence services, suggesting that she, like Litvinenko, had embarked on a dangerous life as a double or triple agent. Yulia Skripal worked for the 'information center' at the US embassy in Moscow and at the Holiday Inn in Southampton in England. Hotel jobs are a preferred 'non-official cover' position for the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6). Until his arrest by Russian authorities, Sergei Skripal was a paid agent for MI-6. In 2010, he was given asylum in Britain after a major spy swap between the United States and Russia.

"The nerve agent reportedly used on Skripal and his daughter was a 'Novichok' ('Newcomer'), one of a series of binary agents allegedly developed in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. These nerve agents were also apparently stockpiled at the British biological and chemical warfare research facility at Porton Down, a mere eight miles from Salisbury, where the Skripals took ill.

"But the existence of Novichok is, itself questionable. Claims about Novichok originally came from Vil Mirzayanov, a Soviet chemical weapons scientist who claimed to have invented Novichok at a facility in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1994, Mirzayanov fled to the United States, where he came under the control of the CIA. In 2016, Dr. Robin Black, the chief of the Detection Laboratory in Porton Down, published an academic paper that questioned the veracity of Mirzayanov's Novichok claims.

"The poisoning of the Skripals was followed shortly by the death in London of Berezovsky's longtime business colleague and friend Nikolai Glushkov. British police called Glushkov's death 'suspicious,' citing as the cause 'compression to the neck.' Berezovsky died as the result of a hanging, believed by police to be a 'suicide.' Radioactive traces of the Polonium-210 used to poison Litvinenko were traced to Berezovsky's office at 7 Down Street, in London's Mayfair district. In 2008, Badri Patarkatsishvili, Berezovsky's Georgian-Israeli business partner, collapsed and died at his home a mere 15 miles from Berezovsky's English estate. The death of the 52-year old was determined by authorities to be the result of a 'heart attack.'

"Much more than circumstantial evidence suggests that Berezovsky, Glushkov, and Patarkatsishvili were murdered by exiled opponents of the Russian government, who also happen to be kingpins in the Eurasian-Israeli mafia that uses Britain as a major base of operations. Britain is favored by these criminal syndicates because of the close working relationship they have with British and American intelligence agencies, as well as with Soros, who maintains a residence in London."

Déjà Vu with British Poison Allegations Against Russia By Wayne Madsen: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/03/20/deja-vu-with-british-poison-allegations-against-russia.html

[Mar 21, 2018] An insane anti-Putin propaganda campaign in the West helped Russian people to learn their lesson: another Yeltsin or Gorbachev in Russia are now highly unlikely. In fact, the West will regret the day Putin is gone.

Mar 21, 2018 | www.unz.com

yurivku , Next New Comment March 21, 2018 at 12:53 pm GMT

@jilles dykstra

" As far as we all know now are quite hard times to Russia and to the world as a whole. "

Why do we have these hard times ?
Could it be globalisation, western greed, and western aggression ?

Well, probably it can be more clear for those who are attacking and humiliating Russia in all directions? The West-ZUS-UK

But I think it's just an agony of Empire seeing the world order is about to change. And yes it's "western greed" which have a "western aggression" as a consequence.

The "globalisation" actually IS that world order which the West trying to establish. Russia in all times in all its internal structure was a subject of annexation and submission. But we never agreed and never will do it, until alive. The West is too stupid to get that simple thing to know and leave us to live as we are about to.

[Mar 21, 2018] Considering the DNC machine rigged the Democratic primaries and derailed Bernie Sanders' run, and considering the entire Establishment came out in force to defeat Trump (e.g. Donna Brazile admitting she shared debate questions with Clinton campaign..... leaked audios, false accusations,....which are still ongoing.....), whatever shenanigans Putin campaign was involved in seem like the proverbial nothingburger

Mar 21, 2018 | www.unz.com

CalDre , Next New Comment March 21, 2018 at 4:56 pm GMT

@Avery

Aside from the obvious legalized bribery (Citizens United), the absolute control of the corrupt 2-party system, the oligarchic and utterly undemocratic mass media, etc., we also had the case in 2000 that a bunch of unelected dictators-for-life "decided" the US election, clearly unlawfully. Bush vs. Gore.

Yes, US is in no position to be lecturing anybody about "democracy". But US is not short on chutzpah in any political realm.

Anonymous Disclaimer , Next New Comment March 21, 2018 at 4:17 pm GMT
If elections resulted in real change, Yankees wouldn't have them. All theater for the zombies, aka the voting class. Only zombies would argue over the merits of the candidates. The US needs very little from its citizens. These includes obedience, widespread ignorance and the unquestioned belief they live in a Democracy because voting happens.

The best slaves are the ones that lack the intelligence to recognize their own slavery. The happiest slaves know that voting is a rigged sham but don't care because the right master leads them.

Anon Disclaimer , Next New Comment March 21, 2018 at 3:58 pm GMT
@jilles dykstra

Anon from TN

Now, that I believe. Due to dismal school system (purely parochial, no national standards, local boards full of ignoramuses decide what kids are taught in school) too many Americans sincerely believe that the world consists of three roughly equal parts: Main street, out-of-town, and overseas. I guess the election results in the last few decades show this clearly.

jilles dykstra , Next New Comment March 21, 2018 at 3:36 pm GMT
@Twodees Partain

Alas, I stayed with USA friends, well educated middle class, where CNN was the only 'news' source.
Three other USA acquaintances I visited in their homes, cannot remember having seen a newspaper other than a local one about marriages and funerals.

The USA reminded me of the Peking court, that, when British warships were reported on the coast, responded with 'there had been so many pirates already'.

In the Badlands, in a very small café, I identified myself as Dutch, from Holland, Netherlands. When all this did not ring bell I mentioned Europe, the first time in my life. This was understood.

Anon Disclaimer , Next New Comment March 21, 2018 at 3:24 pm GMT
@RobinG

Anon from TN
Maybe I overestimate American citizens (I work at a top-rate University and communicate mostly with faculty and grad students), but I'd like to come to their defense. CNN (as well as FOX news, NYT, and other MSM) represent the views of the lower half of US citizens by IQ. As far as I can tell, blatant lies of Western propaganda achieved among the people with brains the same result as the Soviet propaganda: even if they state something truthful for a change, people would doubt that.

RobinG , Next New Comment March 21, 2018 at 3:07 pm GMT
@Twodees Partain

You're truly delusional if you think CNN does NOT represent average American thinking, at least a large paart of it. Last week I suffered through a luncheon of 5 mature adults extolling Rachel Maddow. Sickening.

[Mar 21, 2018] The coma patients at the service of Her Majesty

Notable quotes:
"... Well, the party lime is pretty different: "Treat Russia Like the Terrorist It Is. Whether the Skripal poisoning can be conclusively pinned on Moscow is beside the point." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-09/u-k-spy-poisoning-treat-russia-like-the-terrorist-it-is ..."
"... The fact that neither Putin personally nor Russia benefits from the death of Skripal is obvious to any sane person. ..."
"... In addition, statements that gas called "Novichok could be made only in Russia is a known lie. This poison was created forty years ago in the USSR, so to have this gas can, at a minimum, all countries of the former Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. The inventor of the gas has fled to the US, and the chemical composition of the gas is known and now it can be manufactured it any relatively developed country. ..."
"... It would be possible not to poison Skripal by gas, but simply to strike on the head by the bust of Dzerzhinsky. It would be the same level of evidence, of the guilt of the FSB, the KGB successor of the successor of the VChK. ..."
"... Basically, we have a political elite who needs an enemy to distract their own people from what they are doing and oh, do they miss the Soviet Union. ..."
Mar 21, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com


Tiktaalik, , March 20, 2018 at 5:50 am

Well, the party lime is pretty different: "Treat Russia Like the Terrorist It Is. Whether the Skripal poisoning can be conclusively pinned on Moscow is beside the point." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-09/u-k-spy-poisoning-treat-russia-like-the-terrorist-it-is
James from Durham ,, March 20, 2018 at 8:13 am
I'm a socialist. I don't understand how a conservative is getting this so right! There is a mad rush to judgment and anyone who wants to ask questions is getting accused of being unpatriotic.
rus_programmer ,, March 20, 2018 at 10:11 am
Quite a sensible article. The fact that neither Putin personally nor Russia benefits from the death of Skripal is obvious to any sane person.

In addition, statements that gas called "Novichok could be made only in Russia is a known lie. This poison was created forty years ago in the USSR, so to have this gas can, at a minimum, all countries of the former Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. The inventor of the gas has fled to the US, and the chemical composition of the gas is known and now it can be manufactured it any relatively developed country.

It would be possible not to poison Skripal by gas, but simply to strike on the head by the bust of Dzerzhinsky. It would be the same level of evidence, of the guilt of the FSB, the KGB successor of the successor of the VChK.

Serge ,, March 20, 2018 at 11:36 am
At the end of 1980s there was a project started by KGB supposed (1) to detect possible channels of security leakage, and (2) to begin spreading misinformation to potential adversaries. Different names were used to test different security leaks. The name "NOVICHOK" used to identify misinformation given to one of suspects, Vil Mirzayanov who was not chemist but rather a clerk. Very soon this security leakage was detected, and tons of other misinformation supplied to Mirzayanov, who was immediately secretly discharged from access to any real project. Mirzayanov was allowed to publish this fake info in NYT (around 1992-95?), and then to escape from Russia in 1995.

Since that time NATO has spent about $10 billions to develop protection tools against this fake "NOVICHOK"

P.S. The Russian word NOVICHOK stands for "a newbie"; from Russian grammar point of view, there is no chance such word to be assigned to any chemical weapon. It was assigned to Mirzayanov who was "a newbie" to this sort of projects at that time.

mark_be ,, March 20, 2018 at 12:43 pm
Cui bono: every murder of a Russian dissident/defector/oligarch/critical journalist, cannot possibly have happened on Putin's orders or with his tacit approval, because it reflects badly on Russia.

So, we have two possible explanations: some Western intelligence agency is murdering those people, probably without the knowledge of their own government (you'd have think that someone in elected office would have stopped such a programme by now); or the Russian Putin opposition is killing its own people, both in Russia and abroad. If the goal of such an operation is the destabilization of the Putin regime through Western sanctions, it is obviously not working.

You say cui bono, I say Occam's razor. Putin takes out those who might threaten him, raises his popularity, the sanctions are used to cover up his own disastrous economical policies, and in the end nothing changes.

b. ,, March 20, 2018 at 12:58 pm
We *knew* Iraq had no nukes, and we knew that the Bush administration lied, and we knew that "WMD" is the kind of BS we make up when there are no nukes.

Buchanan is not arguing in good faith. What Maine, Tonkin and WMD are about is *lies*, lies in service of criminal acts of aggression, lies to facilitate a premeditated violation of the Constitution as well as international law.

That is frankly a more important issue than the – justified and necessary – doubts regarding the attempted Skripal assassination and the motives behind it.

This is also true of an ongoing campaign employing drones – some controlled by CIA illegal combatants – and kill teams to implement collective punishment and ideological cleansing by means of sustained assassination – based on "signatures" provided by the likes of Google or Booz Allen. The US has no standing to judge the assassination attempts of others, just as our government can no longer meaningfully speak out on aggressive acts of war, collective punishment, and torture. A house divided cannot stand for anything.

Will Harrington ,, March 20, 2018 at 1:19 pm
Emil Bogdan

You say that the burden of proof is on the accused? That works in many parts of the world, but I hope that we here in the US have had a better standard of Justice. The burden of proof falls upon the accuser, in this case Britain. There is no ther standard that America should accept if we are to remain true to American principals. Not that I expect that our current oligarchy will care about principals.

SteveM ,, March 20, 2018 at 1:24 pm
"Cui bono?"

Exactly. Putin's long term strategy is an integrated Pan-Eurasian economic architecture in which Europe would be a major customer segment. That is why the EAEU was stood up by Russia and the BRI stood up by China. With supporting investment platforms like the AIIB to enable the initiatives.

Given that objective, why would Russia/Putin seek to totally wreck its relationship with Europe? More importantly what would be the motive and objectives for Russia to attack Poland and the Baltic Republics – the fear-monger threats du jour? When an overrun of Poland would create 30+ million subversive malcontents that Russia would have to govern, and when there are only minority ethnic Russian populations in the Baltics?

The driving force behind the illogical and incoherent demonization of Russia is the Washington War Party that froths up the political environment with the militarized fear-mongering. Because as Fran Macadam notes, there's Big Money in it. And the Neocon war-monger mouthpieces need some Big Enemies to keep themselves relevant, busy and living very large on the $200K – $600K salaries they collect at the bought off Think Pimp Tanks.

A crazed U.S. foreign policy that has been completely militarized is a train wreck waiting to happen. And us taxpayers will yet again be stuck with the bills to clean up the wreckage.

Will Harrington ,, March 20, 2018 at 1:25 pm
John S

Sovietologists? Now this, more than anything else, explains the reflexive anti-Russia hysteria. Who cares what historians dealing with the twentieth century Soviet Union think about current events? Historians provide useful insight, yes, but that does not mean they are conversant with current events. What you are doing is throwing in a fear laden buzzword. Basically, we have a political elite who needs an enemy to distract their own people from what they are doing and oh, do they miss the Soviet Union.

ScottA ,, March 20, 2018 at 1:53 pm
Our leaders are enthusiastic about being aggressive with the Russians, but the America Empire has a problem attracting enough volunteers to join the military.

For example, the Air Force has a shortage of 2,000 pilots and the Navy has a shortage of mechanics that they need to work on their on their aircraft.

Minnesota Mary ,, March 20, 2018 at 2:39 pm
The U.S. and Britain showed more respect to Joseph Stalin, the Butcher, than it has shown to Putin. The demonization of Putin in all the mainstream media outlets is the tip-off to me that Putin must be a pretty good guy doing some good things for Russia.

"If the world hates you know that it has hated me first. If the world loves you it is because you belong to the world." -- Jesus Christ

Tiktaalik ,, March 20, 2018 at 3:09 pm
>>Given the poison used it means one to two things -- either it was Russian secret services or the Russians have lost control over their poisons. Either one is a nasty thought.

Why? It was presumably created 40 years ago. Pretty much to time for information to spread around.
E.g., Kim's brother was presumably (again) poisoned by VX. Does it mean that it was MI-6? It's a British invention after all.

In any case, this story stinks, pardon for a word pun. A 'military grade agent' and no casualties. How could it be?

>>Why do it? To prove they can. To prove that no matter where you go they can get you -- that there is no safety.

Safety from what? This guy was non-entity, nobody knew him. More importantly, he has been already punished and pardoned, so double no sense.

>>I am sure Gary Kasparov is feeling a bit worried right now and Bill Browder is thinking of moving somewhere new.

Well, I'd suspect that Rodchenko and Khodorkovskiy are more evident sacrificial targets.

>>You ask Cui bono? Who do you think?

Western secret services, non?

EarlyBird ,, March 20, 2018 at 3:52 pm
Pat asks important questions. Unless we ever see the "evidence" to which Boris Johnson refers, or other direct evidence that this hit (and others) in Britain was directed by the Kremlin, it's worth continuing to ask them.

"Who benefits?" Indeed, it could be rogue Russian agents or Western agents attempting to further drive a wedge between the West and Russia.

But it could also be Putin signalling that the Russia which held onto traitorous spies between 2006 and 2010 is over.
It could be him simply trying to show that he can reach people inside the West, a pure flexing of muscle, a warning to future would-be traitors and Western governments. It could be to make America's allies nervous about Putin's relationship with his American puppet, Trumpolini. It could be just Putin sowing chaos and attempting to create discord among Western governments.

Skepticism about the latest pronouncements is valid, but Occam's Razor still applies. If it growls like a Russian bear and kills like a Russian bear

Light Horse Harry ,, March 20, 2018 at 3:58 pm
Who could be so phillistine as to suggest, on the eve of the World Cup, that Premier Andropov's KGB protege', Major Putin, would one day stoop to whacking a traitorous defector from the Party Line ?

The mind is repelled !

Now pass the polonium popcorn.

Tiktaalik ,, March 20, 2018 at 4:47 pm
>>Skepticism about the latest pronouncements is valid, but Occam's Razor still applies. If it growls like a Russian bear and kills like a Russian bear

Occam's Razor, my backside. Some guys from MI-5 tried to kill him like they killed David Kelly and Gareth Williams before. It's as credible as it gets, exactly the same amount of evidence.

Ken Zaretzke ,, March 20, 2018 at 5:00 pm
"But what is missing here is the Kremlin's motive for the crime."

Whereas rogue agents in the CIA or M16 would have a strong motive, by tarnishing the image of Russia and Putin.

sianka ,, March 20, 2018 at 5:28 pm
About the coma patients at the service of Her Majesty http://www.youtube.com/embed/g3CQ_4KEehw
Kuzmich Mar , , March 20, 2018 at 6:15 pm
Russia is guilty always. Russia is guilty in principle. If Russia is innocent, then it is guilty that she is innocent.

[Mar 21, 2018] The British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson now admits that Porton Down (illegally?) had 'Novichok' agents BEFORE the incident happened

Notable quotes:
"... So a non lethal dose of nerve agent, as would be possible with a handling error, a trace from an imperfect seal perhaps of a small sample, happens within a few miles of a facility, the only facility in Britain, that has quantities of that particular nerve agent on hand. If you can believe Boris Johnson. One victim is connected to the false flag 'chemical attacks' occurring in Syria. I wonder how good security really is at Porton Down? ..."
Mar 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

b , Mar 21, 2018 10:29:33 AM | 9

The British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson now admits that Porton Down (illegally?) had 'Novichok' agents BEFORE the incident happened.
Deutsche Welle: You argue that the source of this nerve agent, Novichok, is Russia. How did you manage to find it out so quickly? Does Britain possess samples of it?

BJ: Let me be clear with you When I look at the evidence, I mean the people from Porton Down, the laboratory

DW: So they have the samples

BJ: They do. And they were absolutely categorical and I asked the guy myself, I said, "Are you sure?" And he said there's no doubt.

No doubt = "of a type developed by Russia" NOT= "made by Russia"!

I updated the piece above with the BJ quotes.

TomGard , Mar 21, 2018 10:55:27 AM | 10
@ b | 9

Not illegally, as one Prof Alastair Hay pointed out yesterday http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43431537
He is right, I read it up in the CWC statutes.

Phillip O'Reilly , Mar 21, 2018 10:59:18 AM | 12
So a non lethal dose of nerve agent, as would be possible with a handling error, a trace from an imperfect seal perhaps of a small sample, happens within a few miles of a facility, the only facility in Britain, that has quantities of that particular nerve agent on hand. If you can believe Boris Johnson. One victim is connected to the false flag 'chemical attacks' occurring in Syria. I wonder how good security really is at Porton Down?
Anon , Mar 21, 2018 11:21:20 AM | 15
The moron speaks again: Timing of Salisbury attack is linked to Russian election -- Boris Johnson (WATCH LIVE@RT)
somebody , Mar 21, 2018 11:36:53 AM | 16
If the stuff is from Porton Down and they know it, that would explain the desperate disinformation going on.
the pessimist , Mar 21, 2018 12:51:36 PM | 29
Blocks for Boris has invoked Hitler w/regard to the world cup. The ugliness seems to have no limits. Perhaps this was the intended target.
the pessimist , Mar 21, 2018 12:53:00 PM | 30
Bloviator for Boris
james , Mar 21, 2018 12:54:01 PM | 31
@ the pessimist.. it shows one how low Britain has sunk on the world stage... from former empire to clear has been...

[Mar 21, 2018] It's strange that British police did not find balalaika on the scene. Replay of Iraq WDM hoax on a new level

First of all British did have the poison they detected. Otherwise they would be unable to detect "Novichok" (if there was such substance and this is not just a myth).
Notable quotes:
"... Pat asks, Cui bono? I would say rogue players in the deep state right here in the US along with their brethren in the military/industrial/intelligence complex. ..."
"... Of course, that makes me a conspiracy theorist. But I actually saw war as a young man based upon lies. By the way, in the lead-up to the illegal invasion of Iraq, I told people at work that this war would eventually rival the military blunder in Vietnam. The propaganda reminded me so much of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. They all laughed at me and essentially said I was an old Vietnam veteran living in the past. They aren't laughing now. ..."
Mar 21, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

g e hoeflinger March 20, 2018 at 6:40 pm

"We went to war in Iraq in 2003 to disarm it of weapons of mass destruction we later discovered Saddam Hussein did not really have."

Which was known at the time, but was trumped up to give GWB and excuse foir a fast war at election time.

George Hoffman , , March 21, 2018 at 8:27 am
I served as a medical corpsman in Vietnam and ever since then I have been a card-carrying skeptic of my own country. But I saw the human face of a war based upon lies and propaganda that became the worst foreign policy debacle in our nation's history. If we would get into a shooting war over this affair, we would have to bring back the draft to prosecute this war against Russia. Then the proverbial "merde" would definitely hit the fan.

And when Kim Sung Un assassinated his half-brother in Malaysia, the VX nerve agent was used. The UK invented this agent in the 1950s at its government laboratory. But not one nation blamed Great Britain as the culprit.

Pat asks, Cui bono? I would say rogue players in the deep state right here in the US along with their brethren in the military/industrial/intelligence complex.

Of course, that makes me a conspiracy theorist. But I actually saw war as a young man based upon lies. By the way, in the lead-up to the illegal invasion of Iraq, I told people at work that this war would eventually rival the military blunder in Vietnam. The propaganda reminded me so much of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. They all laughed at me and essentially said I was an old Vietnam veteran living in the past. They aren't laughing now.

[Mar 21, 2018] Russian Scientists Explain 'Novichok' - High Time For Britain To Come Clean on how good security really is at Porton Down?

Notable quotes:
"... Associated Press ..."
"... DW: You argue that the source of this nerve agent, Novichok, is Russia. How did you manage to find it out so quickly? Does Britain possess samples of it? ..."
"... DW: So they have the samples ..."
"... The "White Helmets" propaganda group in Syria was founded and is run by the former(?) British army intelligence officer James Le Mesurier with British and U.S. government money. His former(?) colleague de Bretton-Gordon is running the parallel Syria chemical weapon scam. Both profit from their government financed operations. ..."
"... Other British agents involved in the Skripal case are Pablo Miller who recruited Skripal for the MI6. He was a friend of Skripal, also lived in Salisbury and worked for Christopher Steele, the former(?) MI6 agent who produced the 'dirty dossier' about Donald Trump for the Clinton campaign. Both are involved with Russian mafia emigres in Britain like Boris Berezovski and the deceased Alexander Litvinenko who's father says that he was killed by an MI6 or CIA guy. ..."
"... How could the British government be sure of "Russian" involvement within a week and even expel Russian diplomats when the primary chemical experts on the issue will need three weeks for their first analyses and the British police predicts a several months long investigation? ..."
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
"... I doubt the MSM will let the public know that NoviChok was a term coined by a ex-soviet scientist, perhaps to sell a book, after he moved to the US. In general the western public will continue think the Russians researched and produced this deadly stuff called Novichok and were lying about doing so. Perception management. ..."
"... So a non lethal dose of nerve agent, as would be possible with a handling error, a trace from an imperfect seal perhaps of a small sample, happens within a few miles of a facility, the only facility in Britain, that has quantities of that particular nerve agent on hand. If you can believe Boris Johnson. One victim is connected to the false flag 'chemical attacks' occurring in Syria. I wonder how good security really is at Porton Down? ..."
"... "Novichok" is not the name of the CW, but the code name of a KGB disinformation operation -- per Andrey Lazarchuk here (at end of Shamir post) ..."
"... When Russia were asking for evidence and pushing for an OPCW investigation, this was just stalling according to the Brits. When the Uk gave their evidence to OPCW, they had no blood test results, no documented data of traces of poison or any other tests. ..."
"... Relying purely on propaganda to push it through, perhaps relying on bigger things happening in Syria to pull attention away and prevent any serious investigation taking place. ..."
"... Boris and May seem to be no more than extremely enthusiastic cannon fodder in this game, now having to see the narrative through on their own. ..."
"... A very strongly worded statement ..."
"... The "attack" on the Skripals is described as a "gross folly" by Russia and as a hoax by numerous writers and others like myself. The more the Outlaw US Empire and its vassals try to smear Russia, the more their credibility diminishes. Combined with the Cambridge Analytica revelations, the plan to demonize Russia has grossly failed as the real demons get revealed. ..."
"... "Bypassing the official diplomatic channels, Russian Chief of Staff General Valeri Guerassimov contacted his US counterpart General Joseph Dunford to inform him of his fear of a false flag chemical attack in Ghouta. Dunford took this information vey seriously, and alerted US Defense Secretary General Jim Mattis, who referred the matter to President Donald Trump. In view of the Russian insistence that this piece of foul play was being prepared without the knowledge of the Pentagon, the White House asked the Director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, to identify those responsible for the conspiracy.".. ..."
"... "We do not know the result of this internal enquiry, but President Trump acquired the conviction that his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was implicated. The Secretary of State was immediately asked to interrupt his official journey in Africa and return to Washington.". ..."
"... Don Bacon @13 linked to a piece at UNZ Revue and the note by Andrey Lazarchuk at the bottom of the article which is interesting. According to that, Mirzayanov was Identified as a leak early on, and then used to transmit false information. It is noticeable that Mirzayanov Used a letter plus three digits for the designation code of the chemicals, whereas the scientist that actually worked on developing new compounds uses a letter plus four digits for the designation codes. ..."
"... The compounds Mirzayanov has in his book, A-232 and so forth, were most likely genuine compounds that had been discarded by the soviet scientists, given a new designation code and a name for the group and fed to Mirzayan. ..."
Mar 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Russian Scientists Explain 'Novichok' - High Time For Britain To Come Clean (Updated)

A week ago we asked if 'Novichok' poisons are real. The answer is now in: It is 'yes' and 'no'. Several Russian scientist now say that they once researched and developed lethal poisons but they assert that other countries can and have copied these. 'Novichok', they say, is a just western propaganda invention. They see the British accusations as a cynical plot against Russia. The people who push the 'Novichok' accusations have political and commercial interests.

The British Prime Minister Theresa May insinuated that the British-Russian double agent Sergej Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who collapsed on March 4 on a public bench in Salisbury, were affected by a 'Russian' nerve agent:

It is now clear that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia . It is part of a group of nerve agents known as Novichok .

Theresa May's claims are highly questionable.


Maria Zakharova, spokeswomen of the Russian Foreign Ministry: "'Novichok' has never been used in the USSR or in Russia as something related to the chemical weapon research" - bigger

A highly potent nerve agent would hurt anyone who comes in contact with it. But the BBC reported that a doctor who administered first aid to the collapsed Yulia Skripal for 30 minutes was not affected at all . Another doctor, Steven Davies who heads the emergence room of the Salisbury District Hospital, wrote in a letter the London Times :

"... no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury and there have only been ever been three patients with significant poisoning."

The name 'Novichok' comes from a book written by Vil Mirzanyanov, a 1990s immigrant to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union. It describe his work at Soviet chemical weapon laboratories and lists the chemical formulas of a new group of lethal substances.

AFP interviewed the author of the 'Novichok' book about the Salisbury incident:

Mirzayanov, speaking at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, said he is convinced Russia carried it out as a way of intimidating opponents of President Vladimir Putin.
...
The only other possibility, he said, would be that someone used the formulas in his book to make such a weapon .

"Russia did it", says Mirzanyanov, "OR SOMEONE WHO READ MY BOOK".


1 , 2

A 'Novichok' nerve agent plays a role in the current seasons of the British-American spy drama Strike Back which broadcasts on British TV. Theresa May might have watched this clip (vid) from the series. Is it a source of her allegations?

The Russian government rejects the British allegations and demands evidence which Britain has not provided. Russia joined the Chemical Weapon Convention in 1997. By 2017 it had destroyed all its chemical weapons and chemical weapon production facilities. Under the convention only very limited amounts of chemical weapon agents are allowed to be held in certified laboratories for defense research and testing purposes. The U.S. has such laboratories at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland , the British lab is in Porton Down, a few miles from Salisbury. The Russian lab is in Shikhany in the southern Saratov Oblast. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) audits these laboratories and their declared stocks "down to the milligram level".

The spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry and famous high heels folk dancer (vid) Maria Zakharova explains in a TV interview (vid, English subtitles) that 'Novichok' was not and is not the name of any Soviet or Russian program. The word was introduced in the "west" simply because it sounded Russian.

Western media claimed that Vil Miranzayanov is the developer of the 'Novichok' chemicals. It turns out that this is not the case. Interviews with two retired Russian chemists, both published only yesterday, tell the real story. The Russia news agency RIA Novostni talked with Professor Leonid Rink ( machine translation ):

Did you have anything to do with creating what the British authorities call the "Novice"?

- Yes. This was the basis of my doctoral dissertation.

At that time I worked in Shikhany, in the branch of GosNIIOKhT (State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology, during Soviet times was engaged in the development of chemical weapons), was a leading researcher and head of the laboratory.

Professor Rink says that:

The Associated Press summarizes other parts of the interview with Professor Rink:

Rink told Russia's state RIA Novosti news agency Tuesday that Britain and other western nations easily could have synthesized the nerve agent after chemical expert Vil Mirzayanov emigrated to the United States and revealed the formula.

Echoing Russian government statements, Rink says it wouldn't make sense for Moscow to poison Sergei Skripal, a military intelligence officer who spied for Britain, because he was a used asset "drained" by both Russia and Britain.

He claims Britain's use of the name Novichok for the nerve agent is intended to convince the public that Russia is to blame.

The English-Russian magazine The Bell interviews another Russian scientists involved in the issue:

The Bell was able to find and speak with Vladimir Uglev, one of the scientists who was involved in developing the nerve agent referred to as "Novichok". [...] Vladimir Uglev, formerly a scientist with Volsk branch of GOSNIIOKHT ("State Scientific-Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology"), which developed and tested production of new lethal substances since 1972, spoke for the first time about his work as early as the 1990s. He left the institute in 1994 and is now retired.

– The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs insists that there was no research nor development of any substance called "Novichok", not in Russia, nor in the USSR. Is that true?

– In order to make it easier to understand the subject matter, I will not use the name "Novichok" which has is now commonly used by everyone to describe those four substances which were conditionally assigned to me to develop over a period of several years. Three of these substances are part of the "Foliant" program, which was led by Pyotr Kirpichev, a scientist with GOSNIIOKHT (State Scientific-Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology). The first substance of a new class of organophosphorous chemical agents, I will call it "A-1972", was developed by Kirpichev in 1972. In 1976, I developed two substances: "B-1976" and "C-1976". The fourth substance, "D-1980", was developed by Kirpichev in the early 1980s. All of these substances fall under the group referred to as "Novichkov", but that name wasn't given to the substances by GOSNIIOKHT.

All four chemical agents are "FOS" or organophosphorous compounds which have a nerve paralyzing effect, but they differ in their precursors, how they were discovered and in their usage as agents of chemical warfare.

The four substances were developed by Pyotr Kirpichev and Vladimir Uglev. These substances were not readily usable by the military as they could not be safely transported and used in the field like binary chemical weapons can. Once synthesized they were extremely dangerous. Professor Leonid Rink, working later in a different group, tackled the problem but did not succeed. Uglev confirms that Vil Miranzayanov was not involved in the development at all. His group was responsible chemical analysis and for environmental control around the laboratory.


Vladimir Uglev, via The Bell - bigger

Vladimir Uglev, like Renk and Miranzayanov, notes that these agents "of a type developed by Russia" can now be produced by any sufficiently equipped laboratory, including private ones.

Uglev mentions a criminal use of one of the agents in the 1990s:

One of these substances was used to poison the banker, Ivan Kivelidi and his secretary in 1995. A cotton ball, soaked in this agent, was rubbed over the microphone in the handset of Kivelidi's telephone. That specific dose was developed by my group, where we produced all of the chemical agents, and each dose which we developed was given its own complete physical-chemical passport. It was therefore not difficult to determine who had prepared that dose and when it was developed. Naturally, the investigators also suspected me. I was questioned several times about this incident.

Journalist Mark Ames, who worked in Moscow at that time, remarks :

This muddles the narrative a bit -- "novichok" used in 1995 Moscow mafia poison hit on top mobster Ivan Kivelidi. So:
1) novichok [is] in mob hands too
2) used during reign of #1 Mobfather Boris Yeltsin, Washington's vassal

Uglev further notes that blood samples from the Salisbury victims, which Moscow demands but Britain has not handed over, can show what agent (if any) were involved and "where the specific dose was produced and by whom."

A new article in the New Scientists confirms the claims by the Russian scientists that the 'Novichok' agents which may have affected the Skripals may have been produced elsewhere:

Weapons experts have told New Scientist that a number of countries legally created small amounts of Novichok after it was revealed in 1992 and a production method was later published.

In 2016 Iranian scientists, in cooperation with the OPCW, published production and detection methods for such agents. It is likely that the various government labs secretly re-developed and produced these chemicals for their own purposes even prior to the Iranian publication.

[ UPDATE ] In an interview with Deutsche Welle British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson admits that Proton Down had (illegal?) 'Novichok' agents when the incident in Salisbury happened:

DW: You argue that the source of this nerve agent, Novichok, is Russia. How did you manage to find it out so quickly? Does Britain possess samples of it?

Boris Johnson: Let me be clear with you When I look at the evidence, I mean the people from Porton Down, the laboratory

DW: So they have the samples

Boris Johnson: They do. And they were absolutely categorical and I asked the guy myself, I said, "Are you sure?" And he said there's no doubt.

But Porton Down did not agree with the British government to claim that the supposed nerve agent was "made by Russia." It only agreed to the compromise formulation "of a type developed by Russia" i.e. it could have been made anywhere. [End Update]

The claims by the British government that a. the Skripals were affected by a nerve agent and that b. Russia was involved in the Skripal incident because it has some exclusive access to these agents seem both baseless. Unless there is significant further evidence the British incrimination of Russia looks like a cynical plot invented for political and/or commercial purposes.

As usual in the military-industrial complex the people who push such scares, are the ones who profit from them.

The British Morning Star points to one former British military intelligence officer, Colonel (rtd) Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, as a common protagonist in the Skripal case, in the claims of Syrian chemical weapon use and in commercial interests around chemical weapon defense:

Quoted daily by multiple media outlets on the Skripal case, de Bretton-Gordon has become a very public expert, relied upon for unbiased comment and analysis by the British and foreign media on chemical weapon threats from Salisbury to Syria.

He is a former assistant director of Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Land Forces with the Ministry of Defence. Before that de Bretton-Gordon was commanding officer of Britain's Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) Regiment and Nato's Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion.

While his CBRN background is often mentioned, his military intelligence links are rarely referred to publicly.

Long before the Salisbury event, de Bretton-Gordon was urging greater government expenditure on chemical protection counter-measures and equipment.
...
de Bretton-Gordon is managing director CBRN of Avon Protection Systems, based in Melksham, Wiltshire.
...
In 2017, the company made £50m from its US military contracts and a further £63.3m from other "protection and defence" revenue.

The former(?) army intelligence officer is also deeply involved in the "moderate rebels" chemical weapon scams in Syria:

On April 29 2014, the [Daily Telegraph] reported that it "obtained soil samples collected from sites of chemical attacks inside Syria by Dr Ahmad -- a medic whose real identity cannot be revealed for his own protection -- who had previously received training in sample collection by western chemical weapons experts.

"Mr de Bretton-Gordon, a British chemical weapons expert and director of Secure Bio, a private company, was one of the trainers."

And who carried out the tests? None other than de Bretton-Gordon himself.

The "White Helmets" propaganda group in Syria was founded and is run by the former(?) British army intelligence officer James Le Mesurier with British and U.S. government money. His former(?) colleague de Bretton-Gordon is running the parallel Syria chemical weapon scam. Both profit from their government financed operations.

Other British agents involved in the Skripal case are Pablo Miller who recruited Skripal for the MI6. He was a friend of Skripal, also lived in Salisbury and worked for Christopher Steele, the former(?) MI6 agent who produced the 'dirty dossier' about Donald Trump for the Clinton campaign. Both are involved with Russian mafia emigres in Britain like Boris Berezovski and the deceased Alexander Litvinenko who's father says that he was killed by an MI6 or CIA guy.

While the British government blamed the Russians just a week after the incident in Salisbury happened it now seems interested in delaying any further investigations. It took more than two weeks after the incident for the British government to invite the OPCW to help with the case. The head of the OPCW says it will take another three weeks for the organization to analyze the samples the British laboratory now handed over. The British police requires several months to find out what happened to the Skripals.

How could the British government be sure of "Russian" involvement within a week and even expel Russian diplomats when the primary chemical experts on the issue will need three weeks for their first analyses and the British police predicts a several months long investigation?

The Russian scientist and their government have explained their history and position in relation to 'Novichoks' and the Skripal incident. It is high time now for the British government, its scientists at Porton Down and its greedy mafia of former(?) British intelligence officer and their criminal Russian emigres to come clean about their own roles in it.

---

Previous Moon of Alabama reports on the Skripal case:

Posted by b on March 21, 2018 at 08:37 AM | Permalink

Comments


mischi , Mar 21, 2018 9:00:02 AM | 1

don't confuse them with facts!
ramparts , Mar 21, 2018 9:10:39 AM | 2
How could the British government be sure of "Russian" involvement within a week when the primary chemical experts on the issue will need three weeks for their first analyses and the police predicts a several months long investigation?

Because they're hard out lying -- their political lives depended on it.

Nice work, mate.

John Zelnicker , Mar 21, 2018 9:35:23 AM | 3
Thank you, b, for including the commercial possibilities when writing about the military/intelligence escapades perpetrated by the US and it's minions. Few others in the media ever look at these incidents from an economic point of view, yet we live in a world where Markets are worshiped as the Prime Mover.

Cui Bono? always seems to be a useful approach in determining motives and connections.

Jormaaja , Mar 21, 2018 9:37:55 AM | 4
And oops... here is Hamish de Bretton-Gordon prophesying on BBC in 16 February 2018:

"In the new "Cold War" with Russia, Nato must be prepared for chemical weapon usage. Though Russia and the US have destroyed their chemical stocks, they still maintain the capability to produce new ones, and there is speculation that research has been done on new super chemicals many times more potent than nerve agents like Sarin and VX.

All have seen how effective chemical weapons have been in Syria and Iraq, especially in fighting in built-up areas, and if there is conflict between East and West we must now assume that chemical weapons will be used.

This sadly being the case, quite apart from the very real threat of terrorist use, anywhere any time, Nato needs to re-invest in its chemical defence capabilities and be prepared to fight in this "dirty" environment - or we could quickly be rolled over by a concerted attack from the East.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-43074956

Christian Chuba , Mar 21, 2018 9:45:47 AM | 5
B, you are mean. You are denying Theresa May her Margaret Thatcher moment where she gets to stand up in Parliament and make a momentous speech about the United Kingdom standing tall on behalf of the world.

Why make a reference ... 'since WW2', even Hitler never used chemical weapons, wouldn't a reference to WW1 have been more appropriate? Oh yeah, by invoking WW2 you can make a rather obvious parallel between Putin and Hitler. Go for it Theresa May, hell always has room for more liars, especially self-righteous ones.

Peter AU 1 , Mar 21, 2018 9:56:09 AM | 6
Thanks b. I think UK was relying on full US support to push the Novichok scam through, which was not forthcoming. The brits will most likely end with some egg on their faces, but I doubt the MSM will let the public know that NoviChok was a term coined by a ex-soviet scientist, perhaps to sell a book, after he moved to the US. In general the western public will continue think the Russians researched and produced this deadly stuff called Novichok and were lying about doing so. Perception management.
John Gilberts , Mar 21, 2018 9:59:30 AM | 7
An excellent analysis as seems to be almost always the case here. As always, Canada plays devil's little helper. FM Chrystia Freeland proposed a motion condemning Russia which passed unanimously. As was the case when Canada bombed Libya. No proof necessary...

https://twitter.com/cafreeland/status/976099681838206979

Liberal MPs to Urge Trudeau to Push Magnitsky-Style Laws at G-7 Summit
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-liberal-mps-to-urge-trudeau-to-push-magnitsky-style-laws-at-g7-summit/

TomGard , Mar 21, 2018 10:09:06 AM | 8
Establishing that Porton Down probably lied about having analyzed traces of the fragmentation (!) products of the allegedly used poison raises other questions. Why did they choose such a thorny path? Why didn't they use ricin against the background of the poisoning of Georgi Markov by a secret service of a Warsaw Pact country? Why not botulinum? Both are by no means traceable to an origin and this enhances a suspicion against FSB or GRU based on the identity of the victims.

A manifest thesis, often brought about, those typical assassination weapons were dismissed because they are useless in a bigger follow-up incident. It is often assumed the use of "novichok" was meant either as precursor or threat with a false flag attack in Syria, but that is against logic. DoS annonced to hold Russia responsible for a weapons grade chemical attack in Syria months ago, also hinting at bringing it to the ICC. They could have used, or can use VX to mimic a "Russian" attack in Syria.

But with the EU it's different! Perpetrators in Porton Down and within the British Government had to assume, that they might have to go an "extra mile" in implicating Russia in a chemical attack on the European Continent to deny the EU the loophole of accounting it to "Sarin" and "ISIS".

The preliminary result: A lightning fast postponement of Brexit for 9 month to the end of 2019, to British conditions afaik. Brussels denied them to the UK fiercely even around 8 days before. It's not all about Russia - at least not directly.

b , Mar 21, 2018 10:29:33 AM | 9
The British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson now admits that Porton Down (illegally?) had 'Novichok' agents BEFORE the incident happened.
Deutsche Welle: You argue that the source of this nerve agent, Novichok, is Russia. How did you manage to find it out so quickly? Does Britain possess samples of it?

BJ: Let me be clear with you When I look at the evidence, I mean the people from Porton Down, the laboratory

DW: So they have the samples

BJ: They do. And they were absolutely categorical and I asked the guy myself, I said, "Are you sure?" And he said there's no doubt.

No doubt = "of a type developed by Russia" NOT= "made by Russia"!

I updated the piece above with the BJ quotes.

TomGard , Mar 21, 2018 10:55:27 AM | 10
@ b | 9

Not illegally, as one Prof Alastair Hay pointed out yesterday http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43431537 He is right, I read it up in the CWC statutes.

Phillip O'Reilly , Mar 21, 2018 10:59:18 AM | 12
So a non lethal dose of nerve agent, as would be possible with a handling error, a trace from an imperfect seal perhaps of a small sample, happens within a few miles of a facility, the only facility in Britain, that has quantities of that particular nerve agent on hand. If you can believe Boris Johnson. One victim is connected to the false flag 'chemical attacks' occurring in Syria. I wonder how good security really is at Porton Down?
Don Bacon , Mar 21, 2018 11:02:04 AM | 13
"Novichok" is not the name of the CW, but the code name of a KGB disinformation operation -- per Andrey Lazarchuk here (at end of Shamir post)
somebody , Mar 21, 2018 11:36:53 AM | 16
If the stuff is from Porton Down and they know it, that would explain the desperate disinformation going on.
psychohistorian , Mar 21, 2018 11:37:22 AM | 17
Great ongoing coverage of this trumped up situation.

I believe that this event was suppose to be another war igniting spark that is fizzling out. Maybe the approach is to overwhelm folks with a multitude of "could be" situations with Russian names until ignition and blast off. If they get ignition then they can bury all the fake scaffold leading to the spark.

I keep hoping for a flip by one of he slimeball insiders to tell the world how the puppeteers of our world keep the play of empire in motion. Then maybe some eyes will open.

Peter AU 1 , Mar 21, 2018 11:53:12 AM | 18
From b's link to the Boris the clown interview.

"I think, in the first instance, if I may respectfully say to the Kremlin detectives, we will trust to the technical experts of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Let's see what their assessment is. That's the proper procedure that the UK has to follow under the Chemical Weapons Treaty. And, you know, I just have to say that I find the Russian position about what has happened to this Novichok increasingly bizarre."

When Russia were asking for evidence and pushing for an OPCW investigation, this was just stalling according to the Brits. When the Uk gave their evidence to OPCW, they had no blood test results, no documented data of traces of poison or any other tests.

Relying purely on propaganda to push it through, perhaps relying on bigger things happening in Syria to pull attention away and prevent any serious investigation taking place.

Boris and May seem to be no more than extremely enthusiastic cannon fodder in this game, now having to see the narrative through on their own.

turk 151 , Mar 21, 2018 11:56:33 AM | 20
Great insight on May's duplicity from voltairenet: http://www.voltairenet.org/article200232.html
karlof1 , Mar 21, 2018 11:59:45 AM | 21
"Vil Mirzayanov was head of the chromatographer group, chemists who deals with the separation and analysis of various mixtures of substances. He was responsible for environmental control and not a developer of any new substances."

This seems to impinge on Mirzayanov's credibility as he said he was one of the developers of the agent. Neil Clark muses about how the famous fictional detective Poirot would investigate this alleged crime.

A very strongly worded statement issued jointly by Russia's Foreign and Defense Ministries declares: "either the British authorities are unable to protect from a terrorist attack on their territory or staged the attack themselves... Russia owes nothing and can bear no responsibility for the actions or lack of actions on British soil."

The "attack" on the Skripals is described as a "gross folly" by Russia and as a hoax by numerous writers and others like myself. The more the Outlaw US Empire and its vassals try to smear Russia, the more their credibility diminishes. Combined with the Cambridge Analytica revelations, the plan to demonize Russia has grossly failed as the real demons get revealed.

Fecund Stench , Mar 21, 2018 12:20:35 PM | 23
Posted by: turk 151 | Mar 21, 2018 11:56:33 AM | 20

Thierry Meyssan's article blew me away:

"Bypassing the official diplomatic channels, Russian Chief of Staff General Valeri Guerassimov contacted his US counterpart General Joseph Dunford to inform him of his fear of a false flag chemical attack in Ghouta. Dunford took this information vey seriously, and alerted US Defense Secretary General Jim Mattis, who referred the matter to President Donald Trump. In view of the Russian insistence that this piece of foul play was being prepared without the knowledge of the Pentagon, the White House asked the Director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, to identify those responsible for the conspiracy."..

"We do not know the result of this internal enquiry, but President Trump acquired the conviction that his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was implicated. The Secretary of State was immediately asked to interrupt his official journey in Africa and return to Washington.". .

"[Tillerson was replaced by Mike Pompeo, ex-Director of the CIA, who, the night before, had confirmed the authenticity of the Russian information transmitted by General Dunford."

Peter AU 1 , Mar 21, 2018 12:24:34 PM | 24
Don Bacon @13 linked to a piece at UNZ Revue and the note by Andrey Lazarchuk at the bottom of the article which is interesting.
According to that, Mirzayanov was Identified as a leak early on, and then used to transmit false information. It is noticeable that Mirzayanov Used a letter plus three digits for the designation code of the chemicals, whereas the scientist that actually worked on developing new compounds uses a letter plus four digits for the designation codes.

The compounds Mirzayanov has in his book, A-232 and so forth, were most likely genuine compounds that had been discarded by the soviet scientists, given a new designation code and a name for the group and fed to Mirzayan.

AriusArmenian , Mar 21, 2018 12:27:20 PM | 26
The UK will never come clean on their disinformation campaign. They are petty and stupid to think the UK is and can be kept somehow 'great'. They are actually the evidence of the decline of the UK.
Peter AU 1 , Mar 21, 2018 12:42:14 PM | 27
Further to my post @24. Have UK used some discarded soviet chemical compounds that has been used in a cold war disinformation operation to poison the Skripols and the policeman?

If this is the case, Russia would have the old soviet records of the disinformation operation ready to rock and roll. Maybe the Brits may have walked into a trap?

james , Mar 21, 2018 12:49:47 PM | 28
thanks b... great overview and especially the last half of your post where this kind of info never gets discussed.. pointing out that the messengers are also profiting from what they are saying is necessary and critical to be able to put the comments in perspective...
shills everyone of them - Colonel (rtd) Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, James Le Mesurier, and especially boris the idiot johnson..

my favourite question in the comments today so far..

"I wonder how good security really is at Porton Down?

Piotr Berman , Mar 21, 2018 12:54:26 PM | 32
According to the interview with Prof. Rink, a "military grade formulation" does not follow from the public data disclosed by Vadim Miranzayanov, because beside the main compound it is necessary to have "auxiliary ingredients", and Miranzayanov did not have access to the complete formulations, he had a technical role in the development of "main components". Therefore full chromatography of samples would disclose if the chemist working for the perpetrator(s) had a knowledge of the full formulation or not. There is also an explanation how word "novichok" was used, and indeed, it was used.
james , Mar 21, 2018 1:04:38 PM | 34
@23 Fecund Stench.. the folks over at emptywheel are very slow to figure that out... i guess the russian/trump hatefest must continue in at a number of blogs that used to be intelligent and insightful...
Cassandra , Mar 21, 2018 1:18:56 PM | 36
„In 2016 Iranian scientists, in cooperation with the OPCW, published production and detection methods for such agents. It is likely that the various government labs secretly re-developed and produced these chemicals for their own purposes even prior to the Iranian publication."

THERE IS NO SOLID EVIDENCE for this „Iranian Publication". (The visible source is Craig Murray.)

It appears that MoA, too has fallen for this probable canard, which was filtered thru and spread (unwittingly) by Craig Murray to make it appear „credible".

Ryan De Vooght-Johnson the stated „author" of this article is not a research-scientist but (was) the „commissioning editor" for a magazine called „Bioanalysis", published (among many others) by a company called Future Science Ltd. based in the north of London. (Part of the „Future Science Group")

BIOANALYSIS specialises in „Biomedicine" and „Drug R&D" (including analytical research about Doping) not exactly „nerve agents". (They do know about mass spectrometry, though)

Ryan De Vooght-Johnson apparently no longer works for the FSG, since a search for his name brought only results in the archives from 2013. As a „comissioning editor" he selected the articles which also included „sponsored" articles. So was he paid to publish this?

There is something very fishy about this article (what Iranian source?) and every time I open the website it starts to flash continually (is this just happening to me?) so it is impossible to read the whole thing. I managed to make a screenshot (from the top half) and zoomed in. (To me at least) this looks like a cut and paste job there are some strange dots above the headline)

I asked Press TV to comment (could they deny of verify the claim?) but received no answer so far.

Moreover THERE IS NO MENTION of this alleged „Iranian" breakthrough on the OPCW website and Murray's claim (expressed in the headline „Iranian chemists identify chemical warfare agents" clashes with this statement published by RT on March 16:

There is no record of the Novichok group of nerve agents having been declared by a state party to the Chemical Weapons Convention," the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said in a press release on Friday.

The funny thing is, there is also no record of this „press-release" on the OPCW website. In fact, the search-term „Novichok" yields no result at all. This is all very strange, to say the least.

Seen in a geopolitical context, this „revelation" might have been planted with Craig Murray (who spread it to refute the claim that „Novichoks" must be „Russian") in order to smear Iran – by insinuating they are developing „chemical weapons" in violation of the CWC (now that JPCOA is being discarded by Trump, they need new political amunition ).

I have reached the conclusion that all this „novichok"-saga is a Red Herring. We ought so concentrate more on the WHY, not he HOW (as with „9/11").

A SHOCKING TALE OF THREE CITIES (Washington, Salisbury, Damascus)

In Salisbury, England two people are found „slumped", allegedly „poisoned" with an NA on a park-bench. HMG issues wild accusations against Russia. Days later the US Secretary of State is being fired. Meanwhile the SAA and their Russian allies are gaining more and more control over „rebel-held" Ghouta. Three different stories ? Not really.

Here is the article which connects the dots perfectly: (and it is much more important than the „Cambridge Analytics" stuff )

http://www.voltairenet.org/article200232.html (read also the article about the „rebels" in Ghouta)

Other Sources:
http://www.cfabs.org/7thWRIB-LongBeach2013.php
https://www.future-science.com/pb-assets/pdfs/2017-catalogue.pdf
https://www.rt.com/news/421512-opcw-no-member-states-novichok/

Cassandra , Mar 21, 2018 1:23:58 PM | 37
(I am sorry about the formatting ... I hate this HTML-stuff..) Anyway, the important link is this. Please do read it...

http://www.voltairenet.org/article200232.html

Peter AU 1 , Mar 21, 2018 1:26:51 PM | 38
Cassandra, your post is nearly unreadable the way it is, but I also looked into Ryan De Vooght-Johnson.
I found his bio. Lives in UK and writes for science journals.

TomGard came up with a separate document in one of the earlier novichok threads and it does look like Iran has worked with OPCW on these chemicals and has published its research.

Hmpf , Mar 21, 2018 1:33:02 PM | 40
@Cassandra

The information is correct. Published in 'Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry'. It's not been taken down (yet). Doing so now would be futile, anyways. Here's the link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/rcm.7757

james , Mar 21, 2018 1:33:14 PM | 41
@37 cassandra.. i have read the article, but nowhere in the article do i see any refutation of the article that both b and criag murray linked to on iranian chemists identify russia chemical agents... what am i missing? thanks...

[Mar 21, 2018] RT Chief, Margarita Simonyan: Why We Don't Respect the West Anymore

Notable quotes:
"... We don't want to live like you live, anymore. For fifty years, secretly and openly, we wanted to live like you, but not any longer. We have no more respect for you, and for those amongst us that you support, and for all those people who support you. That's how this 5% came to be. ..."
"... For that you only have yourself to blame. And also your Western politicians and analysts, newsmakers and scouts. Our people are capable to forgive a lot. But we don't forgive arrogance, and no normal nation would. Your only remaining Empire would be wise to learn history of its allies, all of them are former empires. To learn the ways they lost their empires. Only because of their arrogance. ..."
"... (in English in the original text -- trans. ..."
"... Neo-Liberalism is the worst because under this pseudo science they consider all things including the land, the air, the water, the human beings and the same life (all nature) as their rightful commodities. ..."
"... Unfortunately in this case Karl Rove is only making reference to what has been decided in political circles in Washington at that time. This habit of "defining new realities" is what all MSM and most Western politicians work after today. At any time at any case the MSM and the West system can change one reality perception to another without being held responsible for the factual truth. ..."
Mar 20, 2018 | russia-insider.com

And that's your fault, my Western friends. It was you who pushed us into "Russians never surrender" mode.

I've been telling you for a long time to find normal advisers on Russia. Sack all those parasites. With their short-sighted sanctions, heartless humiliation of our athletes (including athletes with disabilities ), with their "skripals" and ostentatious disregard of the most basic liberal values, like a presumption of innocence, that they manage to hypocritically combined with forcible imposition of ultra-liberal ideas in their own countries, their epileptic mass hysteria, causing in a healthy person a sigh of relief that he lives in Russia, and not in Hollywood, with their post-electoral mess in the United States, in Germany, and in the Brexit-zone;

with their attacks on RT, which they cannot forgive for taking advantage of the freedom of speech and showing to the world how to use it, and it turned out that the freedom of speech never was intended to be used for good, but was invented as an object of beauty, like some sort of crystal mop that shines from afar, but is not suitable to clean your stables, with all your injustice and cruelty, inquisitorial hypocrisy and lies you forced us to stop respecting you. You and your so called "values."

We don't want to live like you live, anymore. For fifty years, secretly and openly, we wanted to live like you, but not any longer. We have no more respect for you, and for those amongst us that you support, and for all those people who support you. That's how this 5% came to be.

For that you only have yourself to blame. And also your Western politicians and analysts, newsmakers and scouts. Our people are capable to forgive a lot. But we don't forgive arrogance, and no normal nation would. Your only remaining Empire would be wise to learn history of its allies, all of them are former empires. To learn the ways they lost their empires. Only because of their arrogance.

(in English in the original text -- trans. )

But the only Empire, you have left, ignores history, it doesn't teach it and refuses to learn it, meaning that it all will end the way it always does, in such cases.

In meantime, you've pushed us to rally around your enemy. Immediately, after you declared him an enemy, we united around him.

Before, he was just our President, who could be reelected. Now, he has become our Leader. We won't let you change this. And it was you, who created this situation.

It was you who imposed an opposition between patriotism and liberalism. Although, they shouldn't be mutually exclusive notions. This false dilemma, created by you, made us to chose patriotism.

Even though, many of us are really liberals, myself included.

Get cleaned up, now. You don't have much time left.


Muriel Kuri 13 hours ago ,

I agree with you, Margarita, and I am American! I remember as a child, being taught about that horrid USSR - to be so feared, ready at any moment to bomb us into oblivion! I remember the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. - not knowing the full details, but being told that Kennedy saved us all from WWIII. As time went on, we'd watch humorous shows detailing the large percentage of Russians in USSR wanting to AND defecting to America. We were shown Russians lined up around city blocks to buy toilet paper, shoes (any size, any color would do). Russians naivety was always made fun of, casting the majority of you as either clowns or criminals capable of all heinous crimes. Then came the 90s. I watched Yeltsin tottering around drunk, watched in horror as the USSR collapsed, wondering what had happened to you. Then came Putin - this young man being handed the reins of your collapsed, ruined country. Suddenly it seemed, we saw more and more of him. I remember watching his face when he had to explain to the tearful, waiting parents and friends of the mariners from the Kursk. His remark that if he could go down there himself and rescue them he would! I knew then, that this was a man to be watched, because I admired him at that moment. Over the years, after one successful term after another, I saw Russia rising like a Phoenix from the ashes of the USSR. I saw the pride returning to the Russian faces, saw smiles returning to their faces, watched you regaining your honor, your sovereignty as we started losing ours. Watching and listening, in horror and fear as more and more of our rights were taken away after 9/11. Discovering that it was a false flag (one of many, it seems), that took the lives of ordinary Americans and used their deaths to start killing more people in Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attack. More time going by, more rights taken away here, yet for you, rising ever more to greater economy, more business friendly environments in Russia, more world trade with an increasing number of trading partners.

Then started the demonization again - not of USSR, but of Russia - same story, different name. Putin - guilty of all crimes of mankind, blamed for everything under the sun, capable and willing to kill people around the globe with impunity, using chemicals and all other nefarious things! I watched the crimes committed in Ukraine, which deposed the legally elected president, and that tried to kill him after a coup that put Nazis in his place. I watched Crimea hold it's referendum, saw the fireworks display afterwards with all the happy faces. Russia was demonized even more and sanctioned greatly for that. Now to 2017 - I prayed that Putin would run again - (he waited a long time before stating he would run.) I knew that Russia sorely needed him to remain at the reins, guiding Russia (and the world, it seems) around the icebergs of hate, crimes against humanity, local wars, demise of any empathetic feelings towards others as we are all dragged along to the next, last war. Putin has been the one who has prevented it from happening in several situations, where it could have been started. But the demonization continues - little wonder America has lost it's appeal to most of you!

The deep state has us in thrall - (no Kennedy here now to protect us). I pray daily that all of us will survive to realize our hopes - yours and ours, but feel on a deep level that this time it won't happen. It seems that some people here truly want a war - feel they could survive the strike and retaliate to ruin your country, but that ours would remain mainly untouched. They think their bunkers will protect them - their expansive underground cities built for the richest and 'best' of America, while the rest of us are collateral damage. I am not rich - have no real savings, so am definitely not one of those to be saved - like so others around me. I'm sure many of you are in the same position, have the same fears and dreams as I do. I offer all of you my best wishes for a happy, healthy, free and safe world. Maybe your Putin actually does have a rabbit in his hat, or that silver bullet - the magic needed to save us all! I truly hope so.

wdg Muriel Kuri 5 hours ago ,

As a Canadian, thank you for your excellent summary of what I have concluded for some time. Sadly, the US is no longer a Constitutional Republic as established by the founders; it is not even a representative democracy. What the US has become is an Evil American Empire that is the greatest threat to peace and prosperity in the US and throughout the entire world. The good news is that a growing number of people in the US and the Western World realize this and are working very hard to return America to its founding ideals. The first stage in this process is the exposure of powerful members of the Deep State who have infiltrated and corrupted the essential institutions of government, freedom and justice.

TiredOfBsToo 13 hours ago ,

I used to be liberal before liberalism became a symbol of stupidity, war mongering and affiliated with the Deep State and it's rush to rule the world by destroying every society whose people chose to live life as they saw fit. The translation mechanism for understanding US leadership is projection. If the mouthpieces ramble on about their values, the meaning is that they are stating the values of their opponent or target country. If they're accusing a country of terrorism, they're talking about their own support for terrorism for geopolitical gains. If they're accusing a country of using chemical weapons, they're really talking about their own use of chemical weapons to launch another war and destroy yet another country's society. So one can easily see the true meaning of these psychopaths rantings and rhetoric by merely using the simple mechanism of projection to determine the truth.

Maria Angelica Brunell Solar Gerry Hiles 8 hours ago ,

Many times I am completely confused by the use that Americans make of traditional political or economic terms. "Socialism", for example, applied to Democrats? Calling "Liberals" those who like to defy society's traditional customs? "Marxism" is no longer a theory about the conflict of classes, or a dialectical understanding of society! Many political discussions are due to the different interpretations that people give to the same words. The US political science vocabulary is in chaos- along with many other US things!

tomo stojanovic Maria Angelica Brunell Solar an hour ago ,

Americans are keen on Orwellian renaming

wdg Maria Angelica Brunell Solar 5 hours ago ,

Seventy years ago, George Orwell wrote the prophetic essay, "Politics
and the English Language," in which he noted that politicians,
journalists and academics were increasingly using meaningless words and
euphemisms to make "lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and...
give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Source: https://www.alternet.org/el...

Rafael Gerry Hiles 6 hours ago ,

Totally agree. Fundamental or Philosophical Liberalism has to be with the human being and his liberties and rights.
Economic Liberalism has to be with the commodities trade and physical money, financial money, and their privileges put over the human beings, of course this is a euphemism because whom are really self conceded such privileges are the owners of those goods i.e. International Usurers.
Economic Liberalism morphed into the worst; into Neo-(Economic)-Liberalism (They call it only "liberalism" in order to confuse their enemies, all the people).
Neo-Liberalism is the worst because under this pseudo science they consider all things including the land, the air, the water, the human beings and the same life (all nature) as their rightful commodities.

Tommy Jensen TiredOfBsToo 13 hours ago ,

Double speak, double thinking, defining realities, part of the same s..t.

TiredOfBsToo Tommy Jensen 13 hours ago ,

You're absolutely correct! We've had the worst of the worst running and influencing those that run the country and this man was a psycho, but we have more, too many!

Gerry Hiles Tommy Jensen 12 hours ago ,

And Dubya called him "Turd Blossom". Apt. Perhaps relating to mutual dehumanisation in Skull & Bones?

Peter Jennings Tommy Jensen 5 hours ago ,

The arrogance of the man. I do hope he lives long enough to see the fruits of his labor whilst the economy collapses around him. I guess when that happens he and his other hapless miscreants will keep their heads down and rely on security to protect them from the karma hurtling towards them.

Nothing this man has done has benefited the American people.

Tommy Jensen Peter Jennings 3 hours ago ,

Unfortunately in this case Karl Rove is only making reference to what has been decided in political circles in Washington at that time. This habit of "defining new realities" is what all MSM and most Western politicians work after today. At any time at any case the MSM and the West system can change one reality perception to another without being held responsible for the factual truth.

[Mar 21, 2018] Russia to Theresa May: We ain't scared of you by Jonas E. Alexis

Mar 21, 2018 | www.veteranstoday.com

We've lost something in the political, intellectual, and legal culture. It used to be that if a person posits an extraordinary claim, then he is under the obligation to provide evidence for the claim. That's the way the Western world usually works. Keep that in mind as you read the following headline:

"Theresa May has given Vladimir Putin's administration until midnight on Tuesday to explain how a former spy was poisoned in Salisbury, otherwise she will conclude it was an 'unlawful use of force' by the Russian state against the UK." [1]

This is similar to the age-old tactic, "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" If you say yes, then you have just admitted that you are guilty of committing a crime. If you say no, then you are still guilty of committing a crime.

Theresa May's promiscuous accusation will never work in a sane world where the rules of evidence are respected and applied consistently. You simply cannot accuse someone of a crime and expect the same person to produce evidence that he is not guilty. It just doesn't add up. In fact, one needn't be a politician or even a lawyer to realize that May's position simply is crazy.

That seems to be one reason why Russia isn't taking May seriously at all. What May and New World Order agents need to do is simply this: produce rigorous evidence which shows that Russia is culpable. But there is something else here.

When May was asked in 2016 if she was prepared to authorize a nuclear strike on thousands upon thousands of men, women and children in the Middle East, she responded by saying:

" Yes! The whole point of deterrent is that our enemies need to know that we would be prepared to use it ."

In a rational world, this is inexplicable. Let's just do some thought experiment here. Let's suppose that Russia is guilty. Could it be that Russia was simply following May's prevailing vision? Could it be that Russia was actually universalizing May's ideology?

May is ready to use nuclear weapons on thousands of perceived enemies, but other countries cannot do the same! How in the world did they elect these people as leaders of the so-called free world? This is not even differential equations or mathematical physics. This is common sense which applies to every human being on the planet.

What we are seeing here is that New World Order agents like May are desperate because Russia has humiliated them in Syria. NWO agents are still perpetuating the chorus that Assad has to go. But Assad, Russia and Iran are still exposing war mongers in the region. How long did it take the United States to obliterate Iraq? Just a few months. Libya? Just a few months.

But Syria? Well, both Russia and Iran are saying enough is enough. May and other puppets of the Zionist regime obviously do not like that. Therefore, they are summoning implausible scenarios in order to keep the Zionist expedition in countries in the Middle East alive and well. But Russia isn't taking those people seriously at all. [2]

[Mar 21, 2018] Pat Buchanan Asks Did Putin Order The Salisbury Hit

Mar 21, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Britain has yet to identify the assassin who tried to murder the double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury, England.

But Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson knows who ordered the hit.

"We think it overwhelmingly likely that it was (Russian President Vladimir Putin's) decision to direct the use of a nerve agent on the streets of the U.K."

"Unforgivable," says Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov of the charge, which also defies "common sense." On Sunday, Putin echoed Peskov: "It is just sheer nonsense, complete rubbish, to think that anyone in Russia could do anything like that in the run-up to the presidential election and the World Cup. It's simply unthinkable."

Putin repeated Russia's offer to assist in the investigation.

But Johnson is not backing down; he is doubling down.

"We gave the Russians every opportunity to come up with an alternative hypothesis and they haven't," said Johnson. "We actually have evidence that Russia has not only been investigating the delivery of nerve agents for the purposes of assassination but has also been creating and stockpiling Novichok," the poison used in Salisbury.

Why Russia is the prime suspect is understandable. Novichok was created by Russia's military decades ago, and Skripal, a former Russian intel officer, betrayed Russian spies to MI6.

But what is missing here is the Kremlin's motive for the crime.

Skripal was convicted of betraying Russian spies in 2006. He spent four years in prison and was exchanged in 2010 for Russian spies in the U.S. If Putin wanted Skripal dead as an example to all potential traitors, why didn't he execute him while he was in Kremlin custody?

Why wait until eight years after Skripal had been sent to England? And how would this murder on British soil advance any Russian interest?

Putin is no fool. A veteran intelligence agent, he knows that no rival intel agency such as the CIA or MI6 would trade spies with Russia if the Kremlin were to go about killing them after they have been traded.

"Cui bono?" runs the always relevant Ciceronian question. "Who benefits" from this criminal atrocity?

Certainly, in this case, not Russia, not the Kremlin, not Putin.

All have taken a ceaseless beating in world opinion and Western media since the Skripals were found comatose, near death, on that bench outside a mall in Salisbury.

Predictably, Britain's reaction has been rage, revulsion and retaliation. Twenty-three Russian diplomats, intelligence agents in their London embassy, have been expelled. The Brits have been treating Putin as a pariah and depicting Russia as outside the circle of civilized nations.

Russia is "ripping up the international rulebook," roared Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson. Asked how Moscow might respond to the expulsions, Williamson retorted: Russia should "go away and shut up."

Putin sympathizers, including Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, have been silenced or savaged as appeasers for resisting the rush to judgment.

The Americans naturally came down on the side of their oldest ally, with President Donald Trump imposing new sanctions.

We are daily admonished that Putin tried to tip the 2016 election to Trump. But if so, why would Putin order a public assassination that would almost compel Trump to postpone his efforts at a rapprochement?

Who, then, are the beneficiaries of this atrocity?

Is it not the coalition -- principally in our own capital city -- that bears an endemic hostility to Russia and envisions America's future role as a continuance of its Cold War role of containing and corralling Russia until we can achieve regime change in Moscow?

What should Trump's posture be? Stand by our British ally but insist privately on a full investigation and convincing proof before taking any irreversible action.

Was this act really ordered by Putin and the Kremlin, who have not only denied it but condemned it?

Or was it the work of rogue agents who desired the consequences that they knew the murder of Skripal would produce -- a deeper and more permanent split between Russia and the West?

Only a moron could not have known what the political ramifications of such an atrocity as this would be on U.S.-British-Russian relations.

And before we act on Boris Johnson's verdict -- that Putin ordered it -- let us recall:

The Spanish, we learned, did not actually blow up the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898, which ignited the Spanish-American War.

The story of North Vietnamese gunboats attacking U.S. destroyers, which led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and 58,000 dead Americans in Vietnam, proved not to be entirely accurate.

We went to war in Iraq in 2003 to disarm it of weapons of mass destruction we later discovered Saddam Hussein did not really have.

Some 4,500 U.S. dead and tens of thousands of wounded paid for that rush to judgment. And some of those clamoring for war then are visible in the vanguard of those clamoring for confronting Russia.

Before we set off on Cold War II with Russia -- leading perhaps to the shooting war we avoided in Cold War I -- let's try to get this one right.

[Mar 21, 2018] Russiagate Comes to England by Philip Giraldi

Notable quotes:
"... . Mirzoyanov as a source of leakage was identified immediately. In the 1990, he was removed from all real work, through he remained a conduit of disinformation. In 1992, he revealed himself voluntarily by publishing the well-known article. From that moment, the Novichok attracted media interests. In the 1995, NYT wrote about the "new Russian super-weapon". ..."
"... What actually happened in Salisbury is unclear; nor the behavior of the poisoned, nor the actions of the police, doctors, special services do not add up to the whole picture. More or less plausible is the poisoning with a synthetic neurotoxin, similar to the toxin of fugu fish. ..."
"... Brief summary: "Novichok" is not the name of the CW, but the code of the KGB operation carried out to identify the mole (the information leakage channel), as well as the supply of disinformation. ..."
Mar 21, 2018 | www.unz.com

Israel Shamir , Next New Comment March 20, 2018 at 6:24 am GMT

Another View of Salisbury Accident

This brief note by Andrey Lazarchuk has been published in the social networks. It is interesting, and it agrees with revealed facts. Whether it is true or not – remains to be seen. Here is his text in verbatim translation:

Do not ask for the source of the information, I will not give it up. Everything written below is very different from what you can find on the web.

1. Already in the early 1980s, the Soviet Army ceased to treat CW (Chemical Weapons) as a weapon that could be used in real war conditions: approximately in 1983-84 it was decided to cease CW supplies to the army, reduce operational reserves and take out CW from the troops to long-term storage warehouses and landfills for destruction. At the same time and until 1996, there were no new CW products supplied to the army, neither new instructions for use and protection.

2. Mirzoyanov, majoring in chemistry and analytics, never worked at theoretical developments or practical synthesis. All 1980s he worked in the administration (First Department).

3. In the second half of the 1980s, the KGB carried out a large-scale operation to dis-inform the enemy, which also had the side-line task of identifying information leakage channels. Twenty "fake" but very detailed projects were developed for "a new chemical super-weapon that is not detected by existing NATO detectors and from which there is no protection" (NOVA with indices, "Novichok" with indices, ASD and others). The Novichok passed through the hands of Mirzoyanov.

4. The factory-laboratory in Kantyubek in the late 70′s was re-profiled from the creation and testing of CW and BW for the production and testing of herbicides and defoliants – mainly for the needs of the cotton industry.

5. Mirzoyanov as a source of leakage was identified immediately. In the 1990, he was removed from all real work, through he remained a conduit of disinformation. In 1992, he revealed himself voluntarily by publishing the well-known article. From that moment, the Novichok attracted media interests. In the 1995, NYT wrote about the "new Russian super-weapon".

6. NATO had spent more than $ 10 billion on defence against this fake weapon.

7. What actually happened in Salisbury is unclear; nor the behavior of the poisoned, nor the actions of the police, doctors, special services do not add up to the whole picture. More or less plausible is the poisoning with a synthetic neurotoxin, similar to the toxin of fugu fish.

Brief summary: "Novichok" is not the name of the CW, but the code of the KGB operation carried out to identify the mole (the information leakage channel), as well as the supply of disinformation.

End of Lazarchuk's note.

[Mar 21, 2018] Let us posit some 3rd party, whose name some dare not mention?

Notable quotes:
"... It parallels 9/11, whereby contradictory evidence has been 'pushed.' The targets seem to be two, 1) the proles [as usual] and 2) Putin/Russia [danger, nukes!] ..."
"... But (1) makes no sense; as no Iraqi WMDs showed, a) the CCC [= covert criminal cabal] went ahead anyway, telling the proles: "Bite your bum!" The proles are powerless passengers, and voting is futile anyway since x = y. ..."
"... And (2) should have *no* effect at all; Putin was always going to be and has now been re-elected, and from Crimea, E.Ukr and especially Syria, Russia appears to have the rogue-regimes' measure. A proof = refugees now streaming out of Ghouta into [comparative] freedom, say. ..."
"... Let us posit some 3rd party, whose name some dare not mention? "Do what we say and nobody gets hurt" seems to have lost its oomph and 'smartest crims on the planet' looks definitely jaded. Confounded by inconvenient reality, perhaps? ..."
Mar 21, 2018 | www.unz.com

skrik , March 20, 2018 at 4:21 pm GMT

@Jake

So if the Mossad did it on British soil, you can bet your last penny that both the CIA and MI5/6 not only knew before hand but participated in the details

It's a publicity stunt; recall Bernays' "torches of freedom." It parallels 9/11, whereby contradictory evidence has been 'pushed.' The targets seem to be two, 1) the proles [as usual] and 2) Putin/Russia [danger, nukes!]

But (1) makes no sense; as no Iraqi WMDs showed, a) the CCC [= covert criminal cabal] went ahead anyway, telling the proles: "Bite your bum!" The proles are powerless passengers, and voting is futile anyway since x = y.

And (2) should have *no* effect at all; Putin was always going to be and has now been re-elected, and from Crimea, E.Ukr and especially Syria, Russia appears to have the rogue-regimes' measure. A proof = refugees now streaming out of Ghouta into [comparative] freedom, say.

So, given the apparently threadbare psyop, a) with what purpose, and b) cui bono? Especially (b), UK could end up with a very bad case of 'egg all over its face.'

Let us posit some 3rd party, whose name some dare not mention? "Do what we say and nobody gets hurt" seems to have lost its oomph and 'smartest crims on the planet' looks definitely jaded. Confounded by inconvenient reality, perhaps?

When it comes to choosing between a conspiracy and a stuff-up? Well, here we seem to have both. In spades. *OR* : We haven't seen the 'surprise' ending yet?

[Mar 21, 2018] There is absolutely nothing totally duplicitous, nothing evil, that British secret service (meaning both MI5 and MI6) will not do, and in fact has not done.

Mar 21, 2018 | www.unz.com

Jake , Next New Comment March 20, 2018 at 11:30 am GMT

There is absolutely nothing totally duplicitous, nothing evil, that British secret service (meaning both MI5 and MI6) will not do, and in fact has not done.

The British Empire operated as something at least akin to utterly amoral. It saw itself as beyond good and evil in any historic sense. As it was born of rebellion against Christendom, that not only makes sense but also was all but inevitable.

Anglo-Saxon Puritanism was a Judaizing heresy. Judaizing heresy will produce culture that is pro-Jewish specifically and more generally will reflect ways of doing and being and thinking, ways of defining morality, that are in step with the Talmud. And that may be summed as: amoral will to power based on faith that one's group is the superior race/nation that should rule the world by any means necessary.

The British Empire did not die in any sense. The British Empire's direct rule simply moved to DC and NYC. America is now the chief operating officer of the British Empire. WASP culture and its rather unique form of amoral imperialism still rules the world and intends to crush every opposition into dust – for the uplifting of poor brown and black brothers and sisters, and for freedom for all, and other selfless good works.

Who poisoned the hapless idiot Russian double agent and his daughter? In general, some part of the British secret service, which includes the CIA and the Mossad and the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency.

[Mar 21, 2018] There is certainly a reasonable list of suspects, most more credible than the Russian state. Perhaps one can also separate out the crime in to two parts, those who committed it, and those who have sought to exploit it.

Notable quotes:
"... May accusations implies that the British authorities have both a control sample (to determine if the quantities found would be lethal) and samples from a few different labs to confirm that the fingerprint was from lab A not lab B for example. How did they got those ? ..."
"... Also from scant information available suggests that the most plausible hypothesis is a false flag operation which probably proceeded in two steps (with the first step not necessary accomplished by those who run the second step; it can be two different groups). ..."
"... There is certainly a reasonable list of suspects, most more credible than the Russian state. Perhaps one can also separate out the crime in to two parts, those who committed it, and those who have sought to exploit it. ..."
Mar 21, 2018 | www.unz.com

likbez , Next New Comment March 20, 2018 at 9:57 am GMT

May and Johnson are probably examples of the level of the degeneration of British elite.

May accusations implies that the British authorities have both a control sample (to determine if the quantities found would be lethal) and samples from a few different labs to confirm that the fingerprint was from lab A not lab B for example. How did they got those ?

Also from scant information available suggests that the most plausible hypothesis is a false flag operation which probably proceeded in two steps (with the first step not necessary accomplished by those who run the second step; it can be two different groups).

First some poison like Fentanyl was mixed into food or drinks or taken by Skripals themselves either as masked as some other medication, or as a part of narcoaddict fix. Fentanyl is known for previous use in assassinations. It killed more than 21K people in the USA in 2016

http://www.newser.com/story/249960/fentanyl-claims-top-spot-for-us-overdose-deaths.html

https://www.everydayhealth.com/drugs/fentanyl

On the second stage, which occurred when Skripals were already hospitalized nerve agent was planted in several places, including home and the police investigator became the first victim. Poisoning of "opponent of the regime" provides ideal conditions for a false flag operation as the cloud of secrecy can be used to subvert the investigation and pursue the agenda with the complete impunity. The government can essentially decree the "truth" in such cases. It also provides tremendous propaganda effect.

And British are not shy from experimenting on humans with poison gases either. It took 50 years for Porton Down chemical research centre to come clean on poisoning a British soldier with Sarin telling him it was a flu test. Poor fella.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1476722/Porton-Down-unlawful-killing-verdict-opens-gates-to-claims.html

Only this sequence of events can explain what the doctor who treated the daughter for 30 min and first responders suffered no consequences.

Poisoning of the "opponent of the regime" is a known British tactics first demonstrated in full glory in Litvinenko case ("Arafat and Litvinenko: an Interesting Turn to a Mysterious Story", http://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2013/11/13/arafat-and-litvinenko-an-interesting-turn-to-a-mysterious-story/ .)

The first step can also be plot by some group connected with William Browder of Magnitsky death fame ( http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25190975 ), Berezovsky associates or some other "Russian mafia in London" groups. The fact that Skripal has such an expensive car suggests that he was participating in some business dealings, probably as a part of some London-based exiles group. UK government is not know for extreme generosity toward such people as Skripal.

The question arise why the UK government went this path. It well might be the USA pressure (like in case of Iraq invasion) or internal considerations that such step will be beneficial to the May government survival. Or both.

My impression is that his is just a first (and somewhat clumsy executed) step in multi step gambit in which Scripals were just sacrificial lamps. Pawns is a bigger game.

The next steps might be related to Would Cup and/or confiscation of assets of Russian oligarchs in London to put pressure on Putin and possibly initiate with their hands a "regime change" in Russia.

Available timelines suggest that initial poisoning took around half an hour to incapacitate them, which is not typical for a nerve gas.

Here is timeline adapted from BBC ( http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43315636 )


CCTV footage shows them walking around 3:47 p.m. 16:15 GMT: emergency services received the first report of an incident ??:?? Police found the pair on a bench outside Zizzi in an "extremely serious condition"

If we assume that they were poisoned at Zizzi with fentanyl or something similar they survived for more then an hour, which is not atypical in cases of narcotics overdose. Moreover Scripal lost emotional control at the restaurant which also happens when a narcoaddict wants to take his fix and can't. That does not explain why the daughter was also affected, though.

Here is also another timeline from

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/03/no-patients-have-experienced-symptoms-of-nerve-agent-poisoning-in-salisbury.html#c6a00d8341c640e53ef01b8d2e3cc6c970c

@25 peter.. i found this sequence of events timing from somewhere else -- can't remember.. it
seems they visiting the pub before the restaurant

1255 EST depart residence on 10 min drive to cemetery

1305 EST arrive cemetery

1335 EST depart cemetery

1340 ARR Sainsbury parking lot

1345 EST arrive pub after 5 min walk to pub. EST 30 min in pub

1415 EST depart pub for 5 min walk to Zizzi

1420 ARR Zizzi pizza restaurant. Skirpal angry with loss of emotional control.

1535 DP Zizzi pizza restaurant

1547 CCTV walking on street toward park

1600 Found on park bench Comatose, frothing at mouth, contracted pupils, vacant stare,
convulsions, evidence of vomiting.

1615 Police and ambulance receive information from public. Response followed

CanSpeccy , Website Next New Comment March 20, 2018 at 5:14 pm GMT
@likbez

Only this sequence of events can explain what the doctor who treated the daughter for 30 min and first responders suffered no consequences.

The "Doctor" who, so the BBC reported, "asked not to be named" is surely a prime suspect. Not only was she the only person known to be in the vicinity of the Skripals closest to the time they were poisoned, but she was aksi the person best able to have planted nerve agent contamination where the Skripals were allegedly incapacitated.

As for the Skripals, who have disappeared from view and to whom the daughter has been denied contact by a Russian embassy representative, perhaps they are already settling into new identities, their old selves eventually to be declared dead, despite heroic efforts by, um, well we're not sure who, since no one subjected to a nerve agent was admitted as a patient by the local hospital.

LondonBob , Next New Comment March 20, 2018 at 10:01 am GMT
There is certainly a reasonable list of suspects, most more credible than the Russian state. Perhaps one can also separate out the crime in to two parts, those who committed it, and those who have sought to exploit it.

[Mar 21, 2018] The USA neocons might want to present (apparently by way of a series of reckless provocations) ultimatum to Russia and China: "either cede your sovereignty to the empire and start taking orders, or it's war" or something like that.

Mar 21, 2018 | www.unz.com

Harold Smith , Next New Comment March 21, 2018 at 2:15 am GMT

@tjm

The "hate for Trump" by the establishment, is a total canard.

Trump is OWNED by the same Zionist mafia filth that own May, which is the same Zionists that own the media in America and Britain.

As when Obama (also a Zionist puppet, mainly because Obama was a coward, unlike Trump who has been groomed to be a zionist puppet) was in office, he was provided a FAKE conflict with the "birthers". American politics are all about subterfuge, distraction, divide and conquer.

The so called "attacks on Trump", are simply meant to drive the right to support him, precisely the way the "attacks on Obama", drove the left to ignore Obama's neocon ways, and defend him.

England is run by the Zionists, Washington is run by the Zionists, Wall Street IS Zionist, as it the media and the entire entertainment industry, as well as the "social Media", Trump is from Jew York City, owes his fortune to Jewish Bankers, and yet, so many buy this ridiculous narrative of Trump, the anti establishment warrior, a meme that is ludicrous.

So, instead of discussing Trump's lies about border enforcement, his lies about leaving Syria, his lies about rebuilding infrastructure, he are distracted with lies about "sexual harassment", and "Russia Gate"...and sadly many buy right into it.

" [...] The so called "attacks on Trump", are simply meant to drive the right to support him, precisely the way the "attacks on Obama", drove the left to ignore Obama's neocon ways, and defend him. [...]"

Exactly. Orange Clown's whole campaign was a calculated "bait and switch" scam from the beginning, IMO.

I believe that Orange Clown is a "deep cover" or "sleeper" agent that's been groomed and "waiting in the wings" for his masters' beck and call. And the call came at the end of the Obama administration, with the agenda not only stalled but exposed like never before; with Russia and China rising; and the U.S. falling behind. As I see it, the political ascendancy of Orange Clown is a sign of his masters' increasing desperation.

I believe that Orange Clown's mission – as puppet president of last resort – is to present (apparently by way of a series of reckless provocations) ultimatum to Russia and China: "either cede your sovereignty to the empire and start taking orders, or it's war" or something like that.

And I believe the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem was intended to show the world (in case there's any doubt) just who it is that's calling the shots here and running everything in the U.S. (IOW they're taking off the mask as they demand surrender).

Some people woke up when Orange Clown attacked the Syrian airbase with cruise missiles, but unfortunately it seems there are still many people who absolutely refuse to accept that Orange Clown is a fraud, no matter what he does (or fails to do). Paul Craig Roberts is an example of someone who should know better, but who continues to imply that Orange Clown is just a helpless "babe in the woods"; a nice guy in a bad situation.

[Mar 21, 2018] How much more evidence does the world need that the Western media is nothing but a collection of liars devoid of all integrity who serve as a Propaganda Ministry for undeclared government agendas? The Skripal Affair is the final nail in the coffin of the Western media by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Notable quotes:
"... Washington's gratuitous raising of tensions with Russia that we have been witnessing for many years is so reckless and irresponsible that we need some relief from the depression of it all. Perhaps I am grasping at straws, but here are some hopeful developments. ..."
"... As important as Amb. Murray's factually uncontested findings are, the main point is that no laboratory has reported any finding that such a nerve agent was used on Skirpal and his daughter. We don't even know if any attack occurred on Skirpal. The corrupt British government has provided no evidence of any attack and no evidence of any nerve agent. ..."
"... What is the real reason for the British government's completely obvious blatant lies? What is the real reason for the complete failure of the media to investigate and report an alleged event? ..."
"... How much more evidence does the world need that the Western media is nothing but a collection of liars devoid of all integrity who serve as a Propaganda Ministry for undeclared government agendas? The Skripal Affair is the final nail in the coffin of the Western media. ..."
"... This article was originally published on Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy. ..."
"... Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research. ..."
Mar 20, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca
Originally from: Novichok and Russia-Gate: Finally, Some Good News By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts Global Research, March 20, 2018

Washington's gratuitous raising of tensions with Russia that we have been witnessing for many years is so reckless and irresponsible that we need some relief from the depression of it all. Perhaps I am grasping at straws, but here are some hopeful developments.

"I think we have ample facts revealed to us during this last year and a half that high-ranking people throughout government, not just the FBI, high-ranking people had a plot to not have Hillary Clinton, you know, indicted.

"I think it goes right to the top. And it involves that whole [Russiagate] strategy -- they were gonna win, nobody would have known any of this stuff, and they just unleashed the intelligence community. Look at the unmaskings. We haven't heard anything about that yet. Look at the way they violated the rights of all those American citizens."

Kallstrom goes on to name names .

It is possible that the firing of Deputy FBI Director McCabe has opened for public exposure the plot hatched by the CIA, FBI, Departments of Justice and State, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic National Committee to cover up Hillary's felonies and to falsely accuse Donald Trump of conspiring with Russian President Putin to steal the US presidential election. If Trump doesn't chicken out, it is possible to put Brennan, Comey, McCabe, Hillary, and many others in prison for their egregious and bold assaut on American democracy and the rule of law. These prosecutions would break the power, of much of it, of the secret national security state, and, thereby, make it possible for Trump to return to his campaign promise to normalize relations with Russia. If these relations are not normalized, war will be the result. But at least now there is a chance.

Amb. Murray goes on to establish that there is no evidence that Russia ever developed such a nerve agent and that the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) found no such agent when it oversaw and verified Russia's destruction of Russian chemical weapons. Amb. Murray reports that the only known synthesis of what is being called "Novichok" occurred in 2016 by Iran in cooperation with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in order to test whether formulas published in a book many years ago could actually produce such an agent.

Amb. Murray exposes the utterly corrupt presstitutes that comprise the Western media for never once asking the corrupt UK government about its hedge words, "of a type developed by Russia" and for their efforts to silence him with libel and slander.

As important as Amb. Murray's factually uncontested findings are, the main point is that no laboratory has reported any finding that such a nerve agent was used on Skirpal and his daughter. We don't even know if any attack occurred on Skirpal. The corrupt British government has provided no evidence of any attack and no evidence of any nerve agent.

What is the real reason for the British government's completely obvious blatant lies? What is the real reason for the complete failure of the media to investigate and report an alleged event?

How much more evidence does the world need that the Western media is nothing but a collection of liars devoid of all integrity who serve as a Propaganda Ministry for undeclared government agendas? The Skripal Affair is the final nail in the coffin of the Western media.

*

This article was originally published on Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

[Mar 21, 2018] Blaming Russia for Skripal attack is similar to 'Jews poisoning our wells' in Middle Ages by Jim W. Dean

"The freaky British Government headed by a haggard Prime Minister is accusing President Putin personally of poisoning a former Russian spy and his daughter by nerve gas. This move on the part of British Intelligence is intended to portray President Putin as a criminal before the Presidential elections and to make a hodgepodge of allegations to divide the pro-Russian allies inside the European Union and implant hatred for Putin within the British community."
Notable quotes:
"... I had not known Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan was still on the planet. He was one of the bright lights of the sad War of Terror when he blew the story of the terror regime running Uzbekistan. ..."
"... It used the US war as a smokescreen to round up all of their political opponents as "terrorists", to torture and kill, and then fed phony confessions to US Intel that nobody seemed very interested in knowing they were bogus. Murray at the time said 10,000 were murdered. ..."
"... military grade ..."
"... no alternative conclusion other than that the Russian state was culpable for the attempted murder of Mr Skripal and his daughter. ..."
"... We did not need Murray's revelations, however valuable, to come to this conclusion ourselves. The day before Mrs May made her statement to the House of Commons, Neil Basu, the newly appointed assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police for counter-terrorism, who is in charge of the Skripal enquiry, told the press, in a formal statement, that the investigation was highly complex and that it would take a long time, probably "weeks." ..."
"... This enquiry, which broke the law under which it was conducted because Section 2 of the Enquiries Act of 2005 forbids such enquiries from ruling on criminal or civil liability, was in turn as convincing as the similar 2004 Hutton inquiry into the death of the scientist David Kelly. The Hutton report was widely ridiculed as an establishment stitch-up, which it was. ..."
"... The author of the Litvinenko report, a former judge acting on orders from Theresa May, concluded that President Putin ordered Litvinenko's assassination. Very similar arguments – that only the Russians could have done it because only they have these poisons – have now resurfaced about Skripal. ..."
"... Moreover, the same toxicologist, the late Professor John Henry of Imperial College, London, was the source of both the theory about Litvinenko's poisoning and also of the similar theory about Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian politician who stood for president in 2004 and who developed acne during the campaign. ..."
"... John Laughland for RT. ..."
Mar 15, 2018 | www.veteranstoday.com

from Russia Today , Moscow

Craig Murray is still fighting the bastards

[ Editor's Note : RT is finally hitting its stride on the nerve agent poisoning, albeit it two days late. We were afraid this might be day number three, but its afternoon postings had some meat on their bones.

We are still mystified at VT how the Brits think anyone is going to believe their cock-and-bull story. On the contrary, we think they are pushing a hoax, based on their publicly making claims they admit not having evidence for.

They are not suffering from stupidity, but are over confident in their ability to bluff their way through it.

I had not known Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan was still on the planet. He was one of the bright lights of the sad War of Terror when he blew the story of the terror regime running Uzbekistan.

It used the US war as a smokescreen to round up all of their political opponents as "terrorists", to torture and kill, and then fed phony confessions to US Intel that nobody seemed very interested in knowing they were bogus. Murray at the time said 10,000 were murdered.

When Murray passed this gruesome information on to his diplomatic superiors, they were not interested. This current case is another example, as I had warned after 9-11, that if you don't nail them, they just come back at you later, having no fear of retribution from the public.

Litvinenko killed himself while smuggling a few million dollars of Polonium

VT's Ian Greenhalgh has a great story up, debunking the earlier Polonium poisoning of Russian defector Litvinenko and the usual British coverup done there.

Traces of Polonium on the plane seats Litvinenko had flown on proved he had been transporting it, obviously in a smuggling endeavor. Be sure to read Ian's piece.

As it was worth a few million dollars, VT can assure you the Russians don't have to spend that much to knock somebody off, even for a defector. Forgive me, but I have to say that is overkill.

Our revenge for putting us all through the Russian fear porn hoax is to organize call campaigns to British embassies everywhere, and let them know how ghastly we feel their behavior has been here. The phone number in DC is 202-588-6500.

The police commissioner says it is a complicated case that will take weeks for a preliminary report, and then British politicians are all pretending to have it figured out, but are keeping how they did that a secret. Gosh, might someone be lying to us? Jim W. Dean ]

Whitehall might regret the day for its playing us all for fools

– First published March 15, 2018 –

There is no proof of Russia's guilt in the Skripal poisoning. The case recalls previous allegations of poisoning which turned out to be either unproven or false, writes John Laughland. Congratulations to Craig Murray for getting there first. The colorful former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, turned anti-establishment dissident after he was sacked from the Foreign Office in 2004, has published on his blog some key texts by authoritative scientists which cast serious doubt on the British government's claims about what happened to the former double agent, Sergei Skripal, and why.

Murray – and his sources – have unearthed texts from 2016, 2013 and 1995 by, respectively, a scientist at Porton Down, the secret British military chemical weapons installations which is 20 minutes from Salisbury where Skripal was found last week; a scientist at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the statutory body created by the 1997 Convention on Chemical Weapons but which London has ignored and bypassed in its spat with Moscow; and by the Russian defector scientist, Vil Mirzayanov, who is the sole source for the claim that the Soviet Union started to manufacture so-called novichok ("newbie") nerve agents in the 1980s, allegedly now used to poison Skripal.

Two of these texts, for which Murray does not provide links, are available online here and here . The first two show, long before anyone had heard of Sergei Skripal, that the existence of novichoks has not been confirmed.

Mirzayanov's 1995 paper says that they could be manufactured anywhere, for instance by any laboratory which can make fertilizer or pesticide, and that the factory where they were allegedly developed by the Soviet Union is in Uzbekistan, a country which has not been under Moscow's control since 1991 but where the Americans had a military base until 2005 .

In other words, even if it is true that Skripal was poisoned by this nerve agent, novichoks are not " military grade ". There is therefore no proof that they are manufactured in Russia and no grounds for claiming, as Theresa May did on March 14 in the House of Commons, that there is " no alternative conclusion other than that the Russian state was culpable for the attempted murder of Mr Skripal and his daughter. "

On the contrary, there are plenty of alternative conclusions available at this stage. The fact that these texts date from long before the Skripal affair only increases their credibility.

We did not need Murray's revelations, however valuable, to come to this conclusion ourselves. The day before Mrs May made her statement to the House of Commons, Neil Basu, the newly appointed assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police for counter-terrorism, who is in charge of the Skripal enquiry, told the press, in a formal statement, that the investigation was highly complex and that it would take a long time, probably "weeks."

Mrs. May's statement and that of Commissioner Basu cannot both be true: if the police investigation is still ongoing, there are no grounds even for making allegations, let alone for saying that guilt has been proved.

Mrs. May's proclaimed lack of doubt is hardly convincing, since it was she who, as home secretary, ordered the Litvinenko enquiry to be opened, seven years after Alexander Litvinenko's death, and then later instructed evidence given to it by the British intelligence services to be kept secret .

This enquiry, which broke the law under which it was conducted because Section 2 of the Enquiries Act of 2005 forbids such enquiries from ruling on criminal or civil liability, was in turn as convincing as the similar 2004 Hutton inquiry into the death of the scientist David Kelly. The Hutton report was widely ridiculed as an establishment stitch-up, which it was.

The author of the Litvinenko report, a former judge acting on orders from Theresa May, concluded that President Putin ordered Litvinenko's assassination. Very similar arguments – that only the Russians could have done it because only they have these poisons – have now resurfaced about Skripal.

Moreover, the same toxicologist, the late Professor John Henry of Imperial College, London, was the source of both the theory about Litvinenko's poisoning and also of the similar theory about Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian politician who stood for president in 2004 and who developed acne during the campaign.

The theory that Yuschenko had been poisoned by his " pro-Russian " rival, Viktor Yanukovich, was widely accredited at the time, even though the clinic in Vienna, on whose premises the original claim of poisoning had been announced, formally denied, in a statement on its website, that it had authorized or approved the diagnosis.

In fact, as I learned by telephoning the medical director of the clinic which published the denial, he had received death threats for questioning Yushchenko's story. In five years as president of Ukraine, moreover, with the whole apparatus of the state at his disposal, Yushchenko was never able to find anyone responsible for what happened to him and the affair has now been closed for years.

The whole thing, to put it bluntly, was a load of rubbish. There are no known cases of fatal poisoning by dioxin in the history of medicine, and the Dutch toxicologist who claimed to have found dioxin in Yushchenko's blood – as I also found out when I rang him too – was in reality a food scientist who admitted to me that he had no way of knowing how it had got there.

He added that the dose was so small that it would hardly have killed a rat, let alone a human being. Yet this ridiculous theory was widely believed to be true, including by professors of medicine, and it served its purpose in getting Yushchenko elected.

So there is a history of such poisoning allegations going back a decade and a half. Such accusations tap into some very deep psychology indeed: Russia plays in these allegations the role attributed to Jews in the Middle Ages, who were regularly accused of poisoning wells or of bearing the plague.

Each of our modern witch-hunts feeds off the previous one and the theory snowballs over time. The unproved allegations of yesterday become the elements of proof for today. Those of us who cried foul back in 2004 may well be proved right about Sergei Skripal – but by that time everyone will have forgotten him and moved on to something else.

John Laughland for RT.

John Laughland is a historian and political scientist who has been Director of Studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in Paris since 2008. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is 'A History of Political trials from Charles I to Charles Taylor'.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

[Mar 21, 2018] Why ever would May backtrack? The MSM are in full support, creating all the facts that justify her shrill denunciation of Vlad the Poisoner?

Notable quotes:
"... Why ever would she backtrack? The MSM are in full support, creating all the facts that justify her shrill denunciation of Vlad the Poisoner? ..."
"... Fellow was expendable. Daughter murdered for shock value. Judaized West not ethical not moral. ..."
Mar 21, 2018 | www.unz.com

CanSpeccy , Website March 20, 2018 at 5:27 pm GMT

@El Dato

The fun thing is that Premier May is now so hopelessly committed to this utter bollocks that backtracking will be political suicide.

Why ever would she backtrack? The MSM are in full support, creating all the facts that justify her shrill denunciation of Vlad the Poisoner?

bjondo , March 20, 2018 at 5:43 pm GMT
If they were poisoned?

Probably Brits. Maybe Benyammerin? Certainly US thug state aware. Most likely the 3 Axis of Evil members conspired. Fellow was expendable. Daughter murdered for shock value. Judaized West not ethical not moral.

Any way this event only helped Pres Putin. And 1500 international observers certify legit. US will need 1500 for NYC alone in 2020 to prevent Demos from stealing.

[Mar 21, 2018] Question Less! 'Liberal' witch-finders hunt for heretics in modern Britain by Neil Clark

RT Op-ed
Notable quotes:
"... no specific schooling for his role as witch-finder -- he just came with a passionate belief in the righteousness of his own actions. ..."
"... Keeping our press free is the best way to counter Kremlin propaganda ..."
"... both literally and metaphorically ..."
"... Russian aggression ..."
"... Russian state propaganda is no joke & it shouldn't be on London Underground ..."
"... n simple terms: he doesn't like the idea of a 'state-sponsored ' message which is not coming from his state, so wants to use the power of the state to make absolutely sure no one hears anything his state doesn't like. See? ..."
"... withdrawing licence from Putin's propaganda arm Russia Today ..."
"... f all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind, ..."
"... positive development. ..."
"... entirely justified ..."
Mar 20, 2018 | www.rt.com

Never mind that the presumption of innocence is a hallmark of a fair judicial system and indeed a civilized country. The Sun says it was Putin who did it, and so does John Woodcock MP, so that settles it. Trial by media and neocon propagandists has replaced due process.

Unlike in the 1970s, when Britain was truly a vibrant democracy, political debate is today vigorously policed with dissident voices hounded by obnoxious 'Witch-finder Generals' who clearly model themselves on the late Matthew Hopkins , a man who traveled East Anglia on horseback hunting for heretics. It was said of Hopkins that he had " no specific schooling for his role as witch-finder -- he just came with a passionate belief in the righteousness of his own actions. " With such an attitude he'd surely have a nice job working for the Rupert Murdoch media empire today.

Truly, what a state we're in. People -- believe it or not -- have been banned from membership of political parties on the basis on tweets or Facebook postings they made years ago. Employers are contacted too if the 'wrong' views are expressed on social media. Everyone it seems must conform and only express 'politically correct' opinions which the 21st Century witch-finders deem acceptable. That means no questioning of the official War Party narrative on foreign policy -- and joining in with the current Establishment-induced wave of Russophobia. Or else. Just look at the vile attacks made by 'Inside the Tent' state and corporate media journalists on Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, for his daring to challenge the official narrative on the Salisbury poisonings.

On Being a Dissenting Voice in 2018 - I just thought I might give you a little taste of what it means to your personal life to express dissent from the government line in the UK in 2018. Let me start with this combined effort from the UK's most popular https://t.co/UN886iUjEG

-- Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) March 20, 2018

There have been some chilling statements made in the past week, but arguably none more so than those made in a Sunday newspaper column by Ruth Davidson, the 'progressive' leader of the Scottish Conservatives. In an article entitled in its hard copy version " Keeping our press free is the best way to counter Kremlin propaganda ," Davidson claimed that Britain was being poisoned " both literally and metaphorically " by " Russian aggression ." In order to protect Britain's vigorous free media, we must "pull the plug" on RT.

I live less than 15 miles from where George Orwell is buried and I could swear I heard him turning in his grave on Sunday night. Repeat after me: To keep the press free we must close television stations To keep the press free we must close television stations. War is Peace. Slavery is Freedom!

'The clamour'?! It's only coming from you - The Times- who have run an obsessive & very nasty campaign to try and get @RT_com taken off air and second-rate NeoCon politicians desperate to curry favour with your owner Rupert Murdoch. https://t.co/TXmTla4lRW

-- Neil Clark (@NeilClark66) March 19, 2018

Davidson is one of a small but vociferous group of witch-finders who want RT taken off air. Lord Adonis is another. The unelected peer, whose only elected office was as a Lib Dem/SDP councilor in leafy North Oxford in the 1990s, was incensed when he saw RT's witty adverts on the London Underground last year. " Russian state propaganda is no joke & it shouldn't be on London Underground ," the baron tweeted . He then said he would be taking the matter up with 'the Commissioner.' As Simon Rite noted for RT: "I n simple terms: he doesn't like the idea of a 'state-sponsored ' message which is not coming from his state, so wants to use the power of the state to make absolutely sure no one hears anything his state doesn't like. See? "

On March 15, the pompous, censorious peer tweeted that he had written to UK media regulator Ofcom, requesting that they consider " withdrawing licence from Putin's propaganda arm Russia Today " -- which according to him is "not a news channel."

Perhaps we should move to a system whereby Lord Adonis designates what is or is not a " news channel "? We can't leave it to ordinary viewers in Sunderland or Southampton to decide, can we?

Rights activist Peter Tatchell in hot water over calls for Russian officials' children to be expelled from UK schools -- https://t.co/YCGcIMnwWh

-- Neil Clark (@NeilClark66) March 19, 2018

Then there are the recent comments of Peter Tatchell. The 'rights activist' is another 'liberal' who is currently advocating some pretty illiberal measures. On Sunday, on Twitter, he called for the 'seizure' of the UK assets of Putin-linked officials and their families and for their children to be expelled from British schools. Got that? Children expelled from school not because they are unruly or have been taking drugs, but because of who their mums and dads are. The parallels with Nazi Germany circa 1935 spring readily to mind.

A cursory look at how racial laws in 1930s Germany and Italy began is enough to show you where all this anti-Russian hysteria in the UK is heading: #Nuremberglaws #LeggiRazziali https://t.co/qKz4u3PnTX

-- Robin M Graziadei (@robinmonotti) March 19, 2018

The sad truth is that hatred of Russia and Russians has not only become an acceptable form of racism in the 'politically correct' Britain of 2018, it's almost de rigueur for anyone who wants to progress in politics and the media. What an indictment that is of the present system. The more we talk of 'tolerance,' the less 'tolerant' our public life has become.

The phenomenon of liberal totalitarianism -- and I don't think it's hyperbolic to call it that -- needs to be openly discussed, before it's too late. It's already too late for some. Entire countries such as Libya -- which not so long ago enjoyed the highest standard of living in the whole of Africa -- have been destroyed in order to 'save' their people from a leader the 'liberals' deem is beyond the pale. Whether the people want to be saved is neither here nor there. The Western 'liberal' always knows best. He's superior to everyone else. He has the right to decide who should lead countries thousands of miles away, which elections are 'free and fair' and which ones are fixed. Liberalism used to be an ideology which protected the individual and his rights. Now that it has merged with neo-conservatism, it oppresses the individual and reduces our rights. It seeks to ban, to bomb, to destroy. And all done in the name of 'moderation' and 'fighting extremism.'

Old-style liberalism took its cue from John Stuart Mill, the author of 'On Liberty,' who warned of the dangers of suppressing opinions we don't like. "I f all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind, " Mill famously wrote.

New-style liberalism by contrast takes its cue from neocon ideologues and obsessive Cold War warriors who want to clamp down on dissident voices.

An important turning point in the descent of liberalism into totalitarianism was the 'humanitarian' bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and in particular the targeting by NATO of Serbian TV. Sixteen workers were killed in a missile strike in the early hours of April 23, which also severely damaged a nearby Russian Orthodox Church. It was hailed by the truly demonic US envoy Richard Holbrooke as a " positive development. "

NATO justified the attack on the grounds that RTS was broadcasting anti-NATO 'propaganda.' British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that bombing television stations was " entirely justified ."

It's worth remembering that even the Luftwaffe, at the height of the Blitz, didn't bomb the BBC having demanded that it hand the microphone to Joseph Goebbels.

The way we can strike back against this new liberal totalitarianism is to refuse to be cowed by it. We must not be afraid to express views which we genuinely hold, even if it does mean being targeted by witch-finders or NATO 'democracy bombs.' The more we speak our minds, the more it will encourage others to speak out too. Anti-free speech bullies who are destroying the Enlightenment values they claim to support, can only succeed if they ' gaslight ' us into submission and people decide to bite their tongues. That way -- the cowardly way -- leads to a thousand deaths, as Shakespeare put it; the valiant by contrast, taste death only once.

Question More, as the RT the motto says. And don't let those who want us to question less get away with it.

Read more:

Britain's presumption of guilt towards Russia invites conflict and chaos Anger of Adonis: British Lord joins political onslaught against RT's ads with Twitter rant

Follow Neil Clark on Twitter @NeilClark66

[Mar 21, 2018] "Novichok" is not the name of the CW, but the code of the KGB operation carried out to identify the mole (the information leakage channel), as well as the supply of disinformation by Israel Shamir

Notable quotes:
"... Mirzoyanov, majoring in chemistry and analytics, never worked at theoretical developments or practical synthesis. All 1980s he worked in the administration (First Department). ..."
"... Mirzoyanov as a source of leakage was identified immediately. In the 1990, he was removed from all real work, through he remained a conduit of disinformation. In 1992, he revealed himself voluntarily by publishing the well-known article. From that moment, the Novichok attracted media interests. In the 1995, NYT wrote about the "new Russian super-weapon". ..."
"... What actually happened in Salisbury is unclear; nor the behavior of the poisoned, nor the actions of the police, doctors, special services do not add up to the whole picture. More or less plausible is the poisoning with a synthetic neurotoxin, similar to the toxin of fugu fish ..."
"... Brief summary: "Novichok" is not the name of the CW, but the code of the KGB operation carried out to identify the mole (the information leakage channel), as well as the supply of disinformation. ..."
Mar 21, 2018 | www.unz.com

Postscript: Another View of Novichok

The Salisbury poisoning played an important role in the Russian elections. Practically all Russian publications expressed indignation and didn't propose any explanation. This brief note by Andrey Lazarchuk has been published in the social networks. It is interesting, and it agrees with revealed facts. Whether it is true or not – remains to be seen. Here is his text in verbatim translation:

Do not ask for the source of the information, I will not give it up. Everything written below is very different from what you can find on the web.

1. Already in the early 1980s, the Soviet Army ceased to treat CW (Chemical Weapons) as a weapon that could be used in real war conditions: approximately in 1983-84 it was decided to cease CW supplies to the army, reduce operational reserves and take out CW from the troops to long-term storage warehouses and landfills for destruction. At the same time and until 1996, there were no new CW products supplied to the army, neither new instructions for use and protection.

2. Mirzoyanov, majoring in chemistry and analytics, never worked at theoretical developments or practical synthesis. All 1980s he worked in the administration (First Department).

3. In the second half of the 1980s, the KGB carried out a large-scale operation to dis-inform the enemy, which also had the side-line task of identifying information leakage channels. Twenty "fake" but very detailed projects were developed for "a new chemical super-weapon that is not detected by existing NATO detectors and from which there is no protection" (NOVA with indices, "Novichok" with indices, ASD and others). The Novichok passed through the hands of Mirzoyanov.

4. The factory-laboratory in Kantyubek in the late 70′s was re-profiled from the creation and testing of CW and BW for the production and testing of herbicides and defoliants – mainly for the needs of the cotton industry.

5. Mirzoyanov as a source of leakage was identified immediately. In the 1990, he was removed from all real work, through he remained a conduit of disinformation. In 1992, he revealed himself voluntarily by publishing the well-known article. From that moment, the Novichok attracted media interests. In the 1995, NYT wrote about the "new Russian super-weapon".

6. NATO had spent more than $ 10 billion on defence against this fake weapon.

7. What actually happened in Salisbury is unclear; nor the behavior of the poisoned, nor the actions of the police, doctors, special services do not add up to the whole picture. More or less plausible is the poisoning with a synthetic neurotoxin, similar to the toxin of fugu fish .

Brief summary: "Novichok" is not the name of the CW, but the code of the KGB operation carried out to identify the mole (the information leakage channel), as well as the supply of disinformation.

Raves , March 21, 2018 at 3:31 am GMT

Of course, like most articles about Putin, no evidence is provided.

I'm sick of fake news. I'm sick of the constant barrage of claims with no evidence. I don't care who makes them. If you want people to pay any attention, provide evidence. Otherwise, I might as well waste my time watching CNN.

[Mar 20, 2018] We read that Vladimir Putin's passport was found three days later at the Scripaal's poisoning scene.

Notable quotes:
"... Just like MH17, or the alleged (but fake) poison gas attacks in Syria, the policy has been to launch an initial barrage of accusations completely unsupported by the slightest shred of evidence – and then drop the matter abruptly, leaving the public with a strong impression of "Russian wickedness" although nothing has actually been proved. ..."
"... Skripal and daughter cheap, convenient, collateral damage for the warmongers. A person trained to handle organic nerve material introduces it into Skripal's car, they go for a morning drive and stop to have a pizza. After pizza, they begin to feel a little queasy. Go sit on a park bench. A passing citizen sees them, calls for medical assistance. Doctor says probably poisoned by toxic agent. Doctor knows it was not highly refined military grade. ..."
"... Car is lifted by straps so as not poison others and hauled to Potent Downs or whatever the Nerve Agent Factory is called. Now it can be doctored to fit the crime and I don't mean the Russians. How am I doing? Got a better tale? ..."
"... Now, I do understand that you – and most Brits – think that you are special. That there is one set of rules for you, and another for the ' others '. You have been conditioned by propaganda to assert this without any shame and to demonise Russia based on decades of half-witted stories (most taken out of context and exaggerated). Why would anyone take you seriously? ..."
"... People who walk around saying that they are exceptional, meaning they are 'Gods', or that they talk 'to God', are generally ignored or kept in an institution. Claiming that you are 'exceptional and special' is the same as claiming that you are divine – that's what it has meant historically. ..."
Mar 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

remo , Website Next New Comment March 20, 2018 at 8:36 am GMT

"Sir, Further to your report ("Poison exposure leaves almost 40 needing treatment", TIMES Mar 14)' may I clarify that no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury and there have only ever been three patients with significant poisoning. Several people have attended the emergency department concerned that they may have been exposed. None has had symptoms of poisoning and none has needed treatment. Any blood tests performed have shown no abnormality. No member of the public has been contaminated by the agent involved."
Stephen Davies. Consultant in emergency medicine, Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust.

Meanwhile, a doctor who was one of the first people at the scene has described how she found Ms Skripal..She said she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying "there was no sign of any chemical agent on Ms Skripals face or body."

The woman, who asked not to be named, told the NNC she moved Ms Skripal into the recovery position and opened her airway, as others tended to her father.

she said she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying there was no sign of any chemical agent on Ms Skripal's face or body.

The doctor said she had been worried she would be affected by the nerve agent, hut added that she "feels fine".

Some nerve agent. We read that Vladimir Putin's passport was found three days later at the scene.

Tom Welsh , Next New Comment March 20, 2018 at 8:53 am GMT
One wonders how the Skripals are right now. Have they recovered completely, or partially? Are they still deathly ill? Has one or both of them died?

In any case, why have there been no public announcements of these important facts? It is useless to cite privacy, when the government hastened to trumpet the case – and its own dubious conclusions – as publicly as possible.

Just like MH17, or the alleged (but fake) poison gas attacks in Syria, the policy has been to launch an initial barrage of accusations completely unsupported by the slightest shred of evidence – and then drop the matter abruptly, leaving the public with a strong impression of "Russian wickedness" although nothing has actually been proved.

Incidentally, I wonder where the Skripals are and why. Apparently the Russian government applied for consular access to Yulia (who is a Russian citizen) but this was bluntly refused – against all norms of international law and civilized behaviour.

Ger , Next New Comment March 20, 2018 at 6:17 pm GMT
Skripal and daughter cheap, convenient, collateral damage for the warmongers. A person trained to handle organic nerve material introduces it into Skripal's car, they go for a morning drive and stop to have a pizza. After pizza, they begin to feel a little queasy. Go sit on a park bench. A passing citizen sees them, calls for medical assistance. Doctor says probably poisoned by toxic agent. Doctor knows it was not highly refined military grade.

How does the doctor know this: He is just down the street from the British Nerve Agent Factory and has been trained to recognize and treat real exposures to potent nerve agents. A policeman ends up in same hospital as Skripal because he sees car parked overtime or illegally, opens door to check for ownership gets zapped by toxic agent. Car is lifted by straps so as not poison others and hauled to Potent Downs or whatever the Nerve Agent Factory is called. Now it can be doctored to fit the crime and I don't mean the Russians. How am I doing? Got a better tale?

Beckow , March 20, 2018 at 5:03 pm GMT

We understand we are not being taken seriously

Good, understanding that you are a joke is the first step on the road to possible recovery.

Try for once to imagine a reverse scenario: an Englishman dies under suspicious circumstances in a provincial town in Russia. (Or 3-4 of them over 15-20 years.) He was considered a 'traitor' by UK for whatever reason. Immediately Russia declares that it was an ' unacceptable attack on Russia's sovereignty, that Britain did it, and that it is 'highly likely' that Teresa May ordered it herself' . Russian government also says that they will not disclose any details, show no evidence and will not even allow basis diplomatic protocol for UK embassy. Why? For reasons of ' state security '. Wouldn't any rational outsider consider that a joke?

Now, I do understand that you – and most Brits – think that you are special. That there is one set of rules for you, and another for the ' others '. You have been conditioned by propaganda to assert this without any shame and to demonise Russia based on decades of half-witted stories (most taken out of context and exaggerated). Why would anyone take you seriously?

People who walk around saying that they are exceptional, meaning they are 'Gods', or that they talk 'to God', are generally ignored or kept in an institution. Claiming that you are 'exceptional and special' is the same as claiming that you are divine – that's what it has meant historically.

This 'joke' is not that funny any more. Grow up.

[Mar 20, 2018] Another timeline of Skripals poisoning

Where are those 30 min that a passeby doctor treated Skripla douther fall if they ere found at 16:00 and hospitalized at 16:15
Mar 20, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

james | Mar 19, 2018 5:32:05 PM | 27

@25 peter.. i found this sequence of events timing from somewhere else - can't remember.. it seems they visiting the pub before the restaurant...

[Mar 20, 2018] Only a hopeless moron can stage a provocation without inventing a coherent set of plausible lies beforehand.

Notable quotes:
"... Not to mention that we are currently on version #5 (poisoned in the car, where apparently a British cop and more than 30 other people rode with him, if we are to believe previous statements). Only a hopeless moron can stage a provocation without inventing a coherent set of plausible lies beforehand. He did it, right in the middle of Britain in Salisbury, next to the British chemical weapons facility. Credo quia absurdum. ..."
"... Actually, having no definite story, and constantly updating the narrative with ridiculous red herrings, is probably the best way to go with a fake terror attack. With a different herring to pursue each day, the truth seeking citizen soon becomes exhausted and relapses back into the normal pattern of going to work and feeding a family, but with a reinforced sense of their own lack of power to either control, or even understand the world in which they live. ..."
"... This is the end time of democracy. We are now entering an age of psycho-totalitarianism. People do what the elite require because their brainwashed friends, neighbors, and children otherwise turn against them. They are demonized and humiliated as racists, anti-Semites, dog whistlers and all the rest of the bullshit lexicon of political correctness not for their actions but merely for their thoughts. ..."
Mar 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

CanSpeccy , Website March 20, 2018 at 5:44 pm GMT

@Anon

Anon from TN
Yes, this is the British version of Russiagate, no doubt: no evidence, numerous versions that contradict each other, lots of hot air and finger pointing. At the moment we do not know what Skripal was poisoned with or by whom, we can't even be sure that anyone was poisoned with anything. All we have is hot air, just like with Iraq WMD. From the same very "reliable" sources: British intelligence services and British PM. Neither ever lies, just ask Tony Blair. Not to mention that we are currently on version #5 (poisoned in the car, where apparently a British cop and more than 30 other people rode with him, if we are to believe previous statements). Only a hopeless moron can stage a provocation without inventing a coherent set of plausible lies beforehand. He did it, right in the middle of Britain in Salisbury, next to the British chemical weapons facility. Credo quia absurdum.

Actually, having no definite story, and constantly updating the narrative with ridiculous red herrings, is probably the best way to go with a fake terror attack. With a different herring to pursue each day, the truth seeking citizen soon becomes exhausted and relapses back into the normal pattern of going to work and feeding a family, but with a reinforced sense of their own lack of power to either control, or even understand the world in which they live.

This is the end time of democracy. We are now entering an age of psycho-totalitarianism. People do what the elite require because their brainwashed friends, neighbors, and children otherwise turn against them. They are demonized and humiliated as racists, anti-Semites, dog whistlers and all the rest of the bullshit lexicon of political correctness not for their actions but merely for their thoughts.

[Mar 20, 2018] This looks more and more like false flag operation by British intelligence againces: Queen May has no clothes on, but all the 'adults' in the mainstream press pretend to see a beautiful robe.

Notable quotes:
"... Please do not insult Britain because it does not need any other party (Ukraine, Georgia) to organize a false-flag such as this. Any reasonable person would understand that such mad rush to judgment and frantic lying by the British regime are closely related to the organizers of the poisoning. They could be one and only. ..."
"... I predicted at the start of the Skripal affair that will end up the same as the MH17 case: "truth established" without any good facts or based on secret facts, we move on. ..."
"... If somehow truth does surface, as with Iraqi WMD, then exactly the same strategy will be used by the British regime as by the US regime before: faulty intelligence and misleading (Porton Down) scientists. ..."
"... How many Porton Down scientists will be suicided a few weeks before daughters wedding, if the truth of the Russian WMD comes out, just as David Kelly regarding Iraqi WMD? ..."
"... Britain had a stronger motive to generate a major confrontation with a well-defined enemy than Theresa May, who has been under fire by the media and pressured to resign by many in her own Conservative Party. ..."
"... Really don't understand why Giraldi classifies this as "wild". Has he completely missed the numerous 'false flags' by UK initiated and financed 'White Helmets'? Every time UK/US intend to incite public outrage some 'chemical' incident was faked in Syria. ..."
"... The hate of the UK establishment for Trump is only rivaled by its hate for Russia, so MI5/6 playing May (who only a few weeks before Salisbury out of the blue ratcheted up her anti Russia rhetoric) like a fiddle was provided with what she needed. However looks like given the number of exotic deaths concentrated in the UK some MI5/6 idiot now made the mistake of more than he can fake. ..."
"... Quite astonishingly, given the lack of news coverage – At a London airport in public view, Prince Bandar apparently 'committed suicide' over a week ago, on 12 March 2018, when the UK refused entry to Bandar video said to be of Bandar jumping to his death, on YouTube ..."
"... So we have one of the best-known celebrity Saudi Arabian princes – who had threatened Russia – suddenly dead in a shocking and dramatic public 'suicide' at a London airport – yet this is 'not news' according to our overlords, tho Bandar's death and funeral prayers etc seem leading news across Muslim outlets ..."
"... Obviously we have a Western Permitted News Committee telling all major Western media outlets what is 'news', for our own good ..."
"... British media intel 'sources' have proposed different employ of the poison, from a 'hit squad' followed Yulia from Moscow, to the poison was planted in her luggage at Moscow, to the poison was introduced to Skripal's car via the ventilation system. ..."
"... When the 'backstop' lies differ so widely, it points to likelihood the British haven't a clue as to what actually happened, but the default position is 'the Russians did it' ..."
Mar 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

Kiza , Next New Comment March 20, 2018 at 5:31 am GMT

Dear Mr Giraldi,

Please do not insult Britain because it does not need any other party (Ukraine, Georgia) to organize a false-flag such as this. Any reasonable person would understand that such mad rush to judgment and frantic lying by the British regime are closely related to the organizers of the poisoning. They could be one and only.

I predicted at the start of the Skripal affair that will end up the same as the MH17 case: "truth established" without any good facts or based on secret facts, we move on.

If somehow truth does surface, as with Iraqi WMD, then exactly the same strategy will be used by the British regime as by the US regime before: faulty intelligence and misleading (Porton Down) scientists.

How many Porton Down scientists will be suicided a few weeks before daughters wedding, if the truth of the Russian WMD comes out, just as David Kelly regarding Iraqi WMD?

JR , Next New Comment March 20, 2018 at 7:33 am GMT
"And to throw out a really wild possibility, one might observe that no one in Britain had a stronger motive to generate a major confrontation with a well-defined enemy than Theresa May, who has been under fire by the media and pressured to resign by many in her own Conservative Party."

Really don't understand why Giraldi classifies this as "wild". Has he completely missed the numerous 'false flags' by UK initiated and financed 'White Helmets'? Every time UK/US intend to incite public outrage some 'chemical' incident was faked in Syria.

Look 'Rusiagate' Trump dossier has UK tail waggles US dog all over it. That Russiagate has been faltering increasingly over the last few months with recently the House Intelligence Committee declaring there is none. So some new impetus was required. Steele is too closely connected to MI5/6 to presume innocence on their behalf.

The hate of the UK establishment for Trump is only rivaled by its hate for Russia, so MI5/6 playing May (who only a few weeks before Salisbury out of the blue ratcheted up her anti Russia rhetoric) like a fiddle was provided with what she needed. However looks like given the number of exotic deaths concentrated in the UK some MI5/6 idiot now made the mistake of more than he can fake.

Brabantian , Website Next New Comment March 20, 2018 at 7:52 am GMT
On the topic of Russia-related deaths in Britain - Everyone knows Saudi Prince Bandar – 'Bandar Bush' thanks to his close public ties with the George Bush family – Bandar who reportedly threatened Putin with Saudi-sponsored terrorist attacks inside Russia Bandar has long been the perhaps best-known Saudi prince in the world

Quite astonishingly, given the lack of news coverage – At a London airport in public view, Prince Bandar apparently 'committed suicide' over a week ago, on 12 March 2018, when the UK refused entry to Bandar video said to be of Bandar jumping to his death, on YouTube

So we have one of the best-known celebrity Saudi Arabian princes – who had threatened Russia – suddenly dead in a shocking and dramatic public 'suicide' at a London airport – yet this is 'not news' according to our overlords, tho Bandar's death and funeral prayers etc seem leading news across Muslim outlets

Obviously we have a Western Permitted News Committee telling all major Western media outlets what is 'news', for our own good

Story by the UK's Aangirfan on her site: http://aanirfan.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/prince-bandar-shock.html

Ronald Thomas West , Website Next New Comment March 20, 2018 at 8:28 am GMT
British media intel 'sources' have proposed different employ of the poison, from a 'hit squad' followed Yulia from Moscow, to the poison was planted in her luggage at Moscow, to the poison was introduced to Skripal's car via the ventilation system.

When the 'backstop' lies differ so widely, it points to likelihood the British haven't a clue as to what actually happened, but the default position is 'the Russians did it'

[Mar 20, 2018] Russiagate Comes to England, by Philip Giraldi

Notable quotes:
"... After her first speech, May summoned the Russian Ambassador and demanded that he address the allegations, but Moscow reasonably enough demanded a sample of the alleged nerve agent for testing by relevant international bodies like the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons before it could even respond to the British accusations. It was a valid point even supported in Parliament questioning by opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, but May and her government decided to act anyway. ..."
"... That in turn suggests a false flag, with someone having an interest in promoting a crisis between Russia and Britain. If that someone were a country having a sophisticated arms industry possessing its own chemical weapons capability, like the United States or Israel, it would be quite easy to copy the characteristics of the Russian nerve agent, particularly as its formula has been known since it was published in 1992. The agent could then be used to create an incident that would inevitably be blamed on Moscow. Why would Israel and the United States want to do that? To put pressure on Russia to embarrass it and put it on the defensive so I would be forced eventually to abandon its support for President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Removing al-Assad is the often-expressed agenda of the Israeli and American governments, both of which have pledged to take "independent action" in Syria no matter what the United Nations or any other international body says. The redoubtable Nikki Haley is already using the incident to fearmonger over Moscow's intentions at the U.N., warning that a Russian chemical attack on New York City could be coming. ..."
"... Once upon a time suggesting that a democratically elected government might assassinate someone for political reasons would have been unthinkable, but the 2016 election in the United States has demonstrated that nothing is impossible, particularly if one is considering the possibility that a secret intelligence service might be collaborating with a government to help it stay in power. An incident in which no one was actually killed that can be used to spark an international crisis mandating "strong leadership" would be just the ticket. ..."
Mar 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

There are a number of problems with the accepted narrative as presented by May and the media. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a nerve agent as "usually odorless organophosphate (such as sarin, tabun, or VX) that disrupts the transmission of nerve impulses by inhibiting cholinesterase and especially acetylcholinesterase and is used as a chemical weapon in gaseous or liquid form," while Wikipedia explains that it is "a class of organic chemicals that disrupt the mechanisms by which nerves transfer messages to organs." A little more research online reveals that most so-called nerve agents are chemically related. So when Theresa May says that the alleged agent used against the Skripals as being "of a type" associated with a reported Russian-developed chemical weapon called Novichok that was produced in the 1970s and 1980s, she is actually conceding that her own chemical weapons laboratories at Porton Down are, to a certain, extent, guessing at the provenance and characteristics of the actual agent that might or might not have been used in Salisbury.

Beyond that, a military strength nerve agent is, by definition, a highly concentrated and easily dispersed form of a chemical weapon. It is intended to kill or incapacitate hundreds or even thousands of soldiers. If it truly had been used in Salisbury, even in a small dose, it would have killed Skripal and his daughter as well as others nearby. First responders who showed up without protective clothing, clearly seen in the initial videos and photos taken near the site, would also be dead. After her first speech, May summoned the Russian Ambassador and demanded that he address the allegations, but Moscow reasonably enough demanded a sample of the alleged nerve agent for testing by relevant international bodies like the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons before it could even respond to the British accusations. It was a valid point even supported in Parliament questioning by opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, but May and her government decided to act anyway.

May's language also conveys uncertainty. She used "it appears" and also said it was "highly likely" that Moscow was behind the poisoning of Skripal but provided no actual evidence that that was the case, presumably only assuming that it had to be Russia. And her government has told the public that there is "little risk" remaining over the incident and that those who were possibly exposed merely have to wash themselves and their clothes, hardly likely if it were a military grade toxin, which gains it lethality from being persistent on and around a target. She made clear her lack of corroboration for her claim by offering an "either-or" analysis: either Russia's government did it or it had "lost control" of its nerve agent.

As noted above, May's argument is, to a certain extent, based on character assassination of Russians – she even offered up the alleged "annexation" of Crimea as corroboration of her view that Moscow is not inclined to play by the rules that others observe. It is a narrative that is based on the presumption that "this is the sort of thing the Russian government headed by Vladimir Putin does." The British media has responded enthusiastically, running stories about numerous assassinations and poisonings that ought to be attributed to Russia, while ignoring the fact that the world leaders in political assassinations are actually the United States and Israel.

There are a number of other considerations that the May government has ignored in its rush to expand the crisis. She mentioned that Russia might be somewhat exonerated if it has lost control of its chemical weapons, but did not fully explain what that might mean. It could be plausible to consider that states hostile to Russia like Ukraine and Georgia that were once part of the Soviet Union could have had , and might still retain, stocks of the Novichok nerve agent. That in turn suggests a false flag, with someone having an interest in promoting a crisis between Russia and Britain. If that someone were a country having a sophisticated arms industry possessing its own chemical weapons capability, like the United States or Israel, it would be quite easy to copy the characteristics of the Russian nerve agent, particularly as its formula has been known since it was published in 1992. The agent could then be used to create an incident that would inevitably be blamed on Moscow. Why would Israel and the United States want to do that? To put pressure on Russia to embarrass it and put it on the defensive so I would be forced eventually to abandon its support for President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Removing al-Assad is the often-expressed agenda of the Israeli and American governments, both of which have pledged to take "independent action" in Syria no matter what the United Nations or any other international body says. The redoubtable Nikki Haley is already using the incident to fearmonger over Moscow's intentions at the U.N., warning that a Russian chemical attack on New York City could be coming.

And to throw out a really wild possibility, one might observe that no one in Britain had a stronger motive to generate a major confrontation with a well-defined enemy than Theresa May, who has been under fire by the media and pressured to resign by many in her own Conservative Party. Once upon a time suggesting that a democratically elected government might assassinate someone for political reasons would have been unthinkable, but the 2016 election in the United States has demonstrated that nothing is impossible, particularly if one is considering the possibility that a secret intelligence service might be collaborating with a government to help it stay in power. An incident in which no one was actually killed that can be used to spark an international crisis mandating "strong leadership" would be just the ticket.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected] .

[Mar 20, 2018] Putin was inviting the Russian people to picture traitors dying friendless and alone Men Without a Country in apartments strewn with empty vodka bottles but he never said that traitors should be killed. This was BBC fake.

Mar 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

Randal , March 19, 2018 at 1:11 pm GMT

Here's an interesting related piece that was linked to in Craig Murray's comments page. It deals with the quote by the UK government, in support of their accusation of Russia, of Putin's words in 2010, when he said: "Traitors will kick the bucket, believe me. Those other folks betrayed their friends, their brother in arms, whatever they got in exchange for it, those 30 pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them." The context as stated by the UK government was "when we think about who benefits" [from the attack on the Skripals], and the clear intention was to try to create the impression that Putin had threatened to kill traitors, which is of course exactly how this quote was subsequently misrepresented.

There is of course a familiar "track record", or "pattern of behaviour" here, when one considers how Israel lobbies of various kinds intentionally misrepresented Iranian words about the Zionist regime "vanishing from the pages of history" as a threat to attack Israel.

The piece is long, and I've posted it below for reference because I do not know if the website in question will necessarily be around for long. Hopefully the moderators will put it under a [More] tag so it remains, but does not clog up the thread. There are embedded reference links in the text at the source.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/40900/did-putin-threaten-to-have-traitors-assassinated

No, on the occasion in question Putin did not say that traitors would be killed. The quote in your question comes from a March 5, 2018 broadcast of BBC Newsnight. It is a concatenation of three soundbites from a three-minute statement in which Putin says that Russia no longer kills traitors. The soundbites come from the last paragraph of his statement in which Putin paints a melodramatic picture of traitors as broken men living out their remaining days in abject misery leading to an early death.

The actual fate of enemies of the Russian state is beyond the scope of the question and this answer. Instead we will discuss the beliefs on this subject which Putin was attempting to instill. He was inviting the Russian people to picture traitors dying friendless and alone Men Without a Country in apartments strewn with empty vodka bottles.

The translation in the BBC broadcast alters the tone of Putin's statement and broadens the meaning of his words to the point that, when they are read in the style used by Western comedians portraying Putin, they seem to convey veiled threats of violence.

The Story Spreads

The next day (March 6th) the composite soundbite from the BBC broadcast appeared at the head of article on the website of The Sun, now shorn of all even the context provided in the BBC broadcast. The article describes the statement as a "threat to 'choke traitors'", thereby changing the BBC's poor translation into an unambiguously false one.

The day after that (March 7th) the Independent put up an article with its own version of the BBC video. The article incorrectly identifies it as a video which "re-emerged online" and describes Putin's words as "apparent death threats".

Also on March 7th the Telegraph described Putin's words unambiguously as a "death threat". This despite the fact that in 2010 they had reported on the very same statement and found exactly the opposite meaning in it. What is more, now Putin's words were not simply spoken close to the time of Sergei Skripal's release, they are now actually about him.

On March 7th on Good Morning Britain Piers Morgan asked Alexander Nekrassov (former Kremlin adviser) what Putin had meant by "kick the bucket". They each considered the other's interpretation of the phrase ridiculous. (Not surprising since Mr. Morgan was interpreting the Putin's words in the BBC's poor translation while Mr. Nekrassov was presumably interpreting Mr. Putin's actual words which, at least for this phrase, can be heard in the BBC broadcast.) Neither one of them seemed to know the context of the quote.

On March 12th the video was mentioned in an editorial in the New York Times. The editorial links to the March 7th article in the Independent and quotes the translation from the video. The editors seem to have obtained some information about the TV show during which the statement was made, but this is a bit garbled too. In particular their description of the question is incorrect and they make no mention of the overall import of Putin's answer.

Earlier Western Press Coverage of Putin's Statement

Putin's statement attracted some press coverage in the West at the time he made it. At the time the press had the full text of the statement and did not interpret it as a threat against traitors:

•Vladimir Putin: Russian secret services don't kill traitors (The Telegraph)

•Vladimir Putin says Russian secret service no longer kills traitors (Mirror)

•Putin: Russia's Secret Services Don't Kill Traitors (NBC News)

•Putin: We Don't Kill Traitors Anymore (CBS News)

Background of the Statement

Putin refers to the exposure and arrest of agents of the Illegals Program on June 27, 2010. The Illegals Program (which is the name given it by the US Department of Justice) planted Russian sleeper agents in the United States under cover as private citizens.

In July of 2010 the ten spies arrested in the United States were exchanged for three Russian nationals who had been convicted of high treason for espionage one of whom was Sergei Skripal. (This appears to be his only connection to the affair.) In August the deported Russian spies were "warmly greeted" by Vladimir Putin who "led them in singing patriotic songs".

After the program was exposed, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service began an investigation in an attempt to determine whether the agents had been betrayed. Suspicion fell on one Colonel Aleksander Poteyev who was in charge of undercover spying in the US. He is thought to have fled Russia a few days before the arrest of the undercover agents. Where he is now is unclear, but the opinion in the Russian press is that he went to the US, that his children are also in the US, and that he may or may not have died in 2016.

The Statement

In the quote in question Putin is commenting on this affair. He is speaking during the program Direct Line: A Conversation with Vladimir Putin in December 2010. Direct Line is a marathon ask-me-anything-style show which he does once a year. The broadcast is on Youtube (the question is asked at about 3:12:15 and Putin concludes his answer at about 3:15:15) and there is a written transcript. Here is an English translation. The parts included in some form in the quote from your question are in bold:

M. Sittel: Vladimir Vladimirovich, I'm taking a question from the website, this time it is a personal one. It is clearly written by someone who loves memoirs. "When you spoke of the recent spy scandal, you noted: traitors do not live long. The leaders of many countries, as know from recollections, have signed orders for the the liquidation of the enemies of the homeland oversees. The French have done so, the Israelis. Have you, as the head of state, had occasion to make such a decision in the past?"

V.Putin: I do not think that the leaders of state signed such orders personally even in the past. That is the work of the special services. And during Soviet times, in Stalin's time, it is no secret, there were special subunits which carried out, including (these were military subunits, it was not all they did), which when necessary carried out such assignments: the liquidation of traitors. Such subunits were themselves liquidated long ago.

It is known that actual many, say the Israeli special services used such methods, yes, all things considered, as for today, far from all have given this up even now. The Russian special services do not use such means.

With regard to traitors, they will curl up on their own, I assure you. That's because Here we have this latest instance of betrayal in which they exposed a group of our illegals. And these are officers! Do you get it? Officers. A man betrayed his friends, his comrades in arms. These are people who laid their entire lives on the altar of patriotism. What is it like to learn a language at native level, leave behind one's relatives, not to be able to bury one's loved ones? Think about that for a minute! Someone has given his entire life to serve his homeland and now this brute comes along who betrays people like that. How is he going to live with that for the rest of his life? How will he look his children in the eye, the swine?! Whatever went on there, whatever 30 pieces of silver those people may have gotten, they will stick in their throat, I assure you. To spend your whole life trying to keep out of view, to be unable to talk with your loved ones, it means that someone who chooses such a fate will be regretting it a thousand times over.

So the quotation in the form you cite is garbled and has been interpreted in a manner which is at odds with the original context which is a specific denial that Russia assassinates traitors.

Notes on Translation

The word "загнуться" famously translated "kick the bucket" literally means "to curl up" or "to curl down". What it means here is open to interpretation. The translation "kick the bucket" can be found in Wiktionary as a possible translation of a very informal use of the word. @bashbino's assertion that such use refers to decline and death rather than sudden death is probably correct. I suspect it is an allusion to the way plants whither and die. In 2010 the phrase was translated "they will croak all by themselves" (The Telegraph, NBC News)

In translating "прятаться" as "trying to keep out of view" I am trying to leave the question of whether the traitor is hiding from assassins or simply from people he cannot look in the eye up to the reader's interpretation. This word can refer to social avoidance such as the behavior of a child who hides behind his mother's skirt.

The phrase "колом станут у них в горле" refers to difficulty swallowing due to revulsion, not difficulty breathing. To make this clear I have translated it "will stick in their throat".

Russian Press References

Articles on the Illegals affair:

•https://lenta.ru/articles/2011/06/28/poteev/

•https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1536406

[Mar 20, 2018] The initial poisoning might be accidental but them was used by the UK Government to forge a chemical attack on British soil, probably surfing on the wave of the already mentioned popular spy show that is airing right now in Britain

The other hypothesis is that initial poisoning was done using fentanyl based mixture. Then it was molded into nerve gas attack to create the false flag and blame Russia. In other words nerve gar might be planted on the scene after Skripals were hospitalized.
Notable quotes:
"... The UK Government then, with the MI6, used the episode to forge a chemical attack on British soil, probably surfing on the wave of the already mentioned popular spy show that is airing right now in Britain. ..."
"... It is very likely a chemical attack never happened. It was probably a case of lack of sanitary fiscalization of the British services sector. But the UK has the means to forge the evidence, and give the OPCW (the OPCW is probably in the pockets of the West, but still, some formality may be necessary) "novichok" samples it already had in Porton Down (plausible deniability). ..."
"... Worst case scenario for the UK, however, some lower heads of the MI6 and the government will roll in order to preserve plausible deniability, so it was a low risk, low reward false flag operation by the British. ..."
Mar 20, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
VK , Mar 19, 2018 11:39:32 PM | 78
The doctor's letter is definite proof for me.

It was, most probably, a case of poor sanitary conditions in the restaurant/pub the Skripals visited, which resulted in a mass intoxication by food poisoning of circa 40 people -- the Skripals being two of them. Those people went to the nearest hospital, while the Skripals were intercepted by, probably, the MI6. It is very possible they are under captivity right now (assuming they are alive).

The UK Government then, with the MI6, used the episode to forge a chemical attack on British soil, probably surfing on the wave of the already mentioned popular spy show that is airing right now in Britain. This is a powerful semiotic weapon, because entertainment can, and is, used as a weapon of unconscious mass manipulation (manipulation of the collective imaginary). The British people -- already inclined to be anti-Russian, given the recent geopolitical events and its MSM propaganda warfare -- quickly (because it was mixed with the unconscious) connected the dots the Government wanted them to connect (false wisdom).

It is very likely a chemical attack never happened. It was probably a case of lack of sanitary fiscalization of the British services sector. But the UK has the means to forge the evidence, and give the OPCW (the OPCW is probably in the pockets of the West, but still, some formality may be necessary) "novichok" samples it already had in Porton Down (plausible deniability).

Russia was not affected: Putin was reelected with more votes (both in relative and absolute terms) than in the last election, and Pavel Grudinin (the candidate of the West) received just 12.xx% of the votes -- the worst result by the Communist Party since the fall of the USSR -- the UK will have to transmute this episode into a hot war if it wants to extract more fruits of this episode.

Worst case scenario for the UK, however, some lower heads of the MI6 and the government will roll in order to preserve plausible deniability, so it was a low risk, low reward false flag operation by the British.

[Mar 20, 2018] DID ISRAEL POISON SKRIPAL?

Notable quotes:
"... There are similarities the Skripal poisoning and the 1997 poisoning of Khaled Mashal in Jordan. The poison used may be the same fentanyl based mixture. ..."
"... The thing that really made me suspect Israel was the claim by Boris Johnson that Russia has a secret program that develops novichok type chemical weapons for assassinations ..."
"... I do not think the British found out about the alleged Russian program by themselves. They received the information, along with the disinformation from a foreign intelligence service. Most likely this was Israeli Mossad. Why would Mossad feed the British lies about a Russian assassination program, unless they wanted to pin their own assassinations on Russia. ..."
Mar 20, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Petri Krohn , Mar 20, 2018 12:13:12 AM | 81
In the previous open thread I posted a long analysis of the alleged war preparation of a NATO land invasion of Syria, which I later published on The Duran . The thing that prompted me to write this was Boris Johnson's latest allegations about a Russian assassination program. In the end I left this speculation out of the published version.
U.S. War Plans: Kurdish Land Bridge to Israel?

The United States may be about to start a land invasion of Syria. The offensive would start from the U.S. base at the Al Tanf border crossing and extend through Abu Kemal to the American and Kurdish-held areas on the eastern bank of the Euphrates. The troops would be supplied through Jordan. It is possible that Britain would also take part in this operation.

The 2,400 man strong U.S. 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit arrived in Haifa in Israel on March 14, 2018 aboard the three US Navy ships of the Iwo Jima amphibious ready group. The Marines may be on their way to the Al Tanf base through Jordan. Another 200 U.S. troops are said to have arrived in Al Tanf the previous week. Unconfirmed rumors claim that an additional 2,300 British troops also arrived at the base along with Challenger tanks and Cobra and Black Hawk helicopters.

It now seems evident that to real reason for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal‎ was to drum up British support for a war against Syria and Russia. One must must thus ask who would most gains from such a war. If my analysis below is correct, then the answer would be Israel. Several things make Israel a likely suspect for the poisoning:

  1. Israel has a long history of assassinations abroad.
  2. Israel is not a OPCW member and has an active CW program.
  3. Mossad can perform hostile actions in Britain and still be counted as friendly. If they got caught in the act, they would simply be deported in secrecy.
  4. There are similarities the Skripal poisoning and the 1997 poisoning of Khaled Mashal in Jordan. The poison used may be the same fentanyl based mixture.
  5. Netanyahu is the current prime minister of Israel. He also ordered the 1997 assassination attempt on Mashal.

The thing that really made me suspect Israel was the claim by Boris Johnson that Russia has a secret program that develops novichok type chemical weapons for assassinations. It is most likely true that Russian laboratories have been working in novichoks, like all major weapons laboratories in the West. The part about assassinations is disinformation.

I do not think the British found out about the alleged Russian program by themselves. They received the information, along with the disinformation from a foreign intelligence service. Most likely this was Israeli Mossad. Why would Mossad feed the British lies about a Russian assassination program, unless they wanted to pin their own assassinations on Russia.

[Mar 20, 2018] BBC: A>mong senior ministers and officials, there's quiet satisfaction that the Russia crisis seems to be going according to plan. Maybe even better

So what was the plan then? To cease the assets Russian president's close associates - "the kind of people who have Putin on speed dial"? To raise the level of Russophobia in GB to cosmic level in an attempt to save May's government by splitting Labor Party on this monumental "national security" fake )"
While split of Labor Party (which like Democratic Party in the USA has it is own faction of warmonger of Hillary Clinton style) can help conservatives, the big fish they are trying to fry is probably Russia, not Corbyn/Labor party...
But they got more then they hoped for: probably some improvement of Brexit negotiating position and no doubt the military companies benefit from all this
In other words they managed to kill several birds with one stone ?
Mar 19, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Sid2 | Mar 19, 2018 5:46:27 PM | 29

The headline and intro of the BBC story are telling: Russian spy: UK government response going to plan so far

B's link to the BBC piece on how well it's all going indicates a smugness asking for take-down, in my view.

Among senior ministers and officials, there's quiet satisfaction that the Russia crisis seems to be going according to plan. Maybe even better.

According to one senior government source, "it's gone at least as well as we'd hoped".

I had to look at this phrasing hard to try to decipher the "it's" in how well it's all gone. "According to plan" is also peculiar, but I sense the smugness in the reporter here is oblivious to implications "the plan" was to add to the Russia hysteria and please the Americans.

The "it's" must mean the intent to blame the Russians, flakey and insubstantial as it is, and the sheep-like falling into line reported on (again smugly) in terms of items to tick off. This clumsy language suggests something sinister, not merely stupid, is happening.

I would like to hear more on the speculation Skripal was mixed up with Steele and the dossier. Have they been observed together recently? What suggests this connection in terms of recent activity?

[Mar 20, 2018] Can Ckripal case be a false flag operation by a circle of agents within British intelligence circles?

Notable quotes:
"... There is a tendency on the left to underestimate the fear that Corbyn inspires in The Establishment. They think that because he is a rather moderate Socialist in the old, and generally discredited, Social Democrat tradition he is no threat to the ruling class. In reality he is much more of a threat than someone that they can pin labels like extremist on. He showed as much in the last election when, despite blatant sabotage from the Party Staff, he came very close to victory. ..."
"... Operations like this one in Salisbury were mounted regularly in Northern Ireland and before that in the colonies. And these people don't work for their bosses, they work for themselves. They do as they please. They act withimpunity, the Old Boys network protects them. ..."
"... And they aren't very careful. They don't feel that they need to be-after all who wants to protect Putin or Corbyn? And they know that the neo-cons and Israel are with them. There is a good article in The Morning Star today https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/mask-military-industrial-complex ..."
"... It could very well be that they have unmasked the name, and rank, of the guy behind the plot to smear the two men that the Neocons fear and hate most: Putin and Corbyn. And, while doing so, to earn rewards from the oligarchs in London who are behind most of the killings being blamed on Russia. ..."
Mar 19, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

bevin | Mar 19, 2018 8:04:27 PM | 62

My guess is that this affair is the work of a circle of agents within British intelligence circles. And that it was aimed at embarrassing the Labor Party and stalling what has been looking like Corbyn's inexorable rise to power.

There is a tendency on the left to underestimate the fear that Corbyn inspires in The Establishment. They think that because he is a rather moderate Socialist in the old, and generally discredited, Social Democrat tradition he is no threat to the ruling class. In reality he is much more of a threat than someone that they can pin labels like extremist on. He showed as much in the last election when, despite blatant sabotage from the Party Staff, he came very close to victory.

One thing that everyone understands is that The Establishment and the governing Tories in particular, are in disarray. Nobody is in charge. Anyone who wants to take an initiative can do so without fear of May, Johnson or the alleged leadership.

And the Intelligence services in Britain, including many of the Armed Forces, are arrogant enough and well enough connected to the right wing.

Operations like this one in Salisbury were mounted regularly in Northern Ireland and before that in the colonies. And these people don't work for their bosses, they work for themselves. They do as they please. They act withimpunity, the Old Boys network protects them.

And they aren't very careful. They don't feel that they need to be-after all who wants to protect Putin or Corbyn? And they know that the neo-cons and Israel are with them. There is a good article in The Morning Star today https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/mask-military-industrial-complex

It could very well be that they have unmasked the name, and rank, of the guy behind the plot to smear the two men that the Neocons fear and hate most: Putin and Corbyn. And, while doing so, to earn rewards from the oligarchs in London who are behind most of the killings being blamed on Russia.

[Mar 20, 2018] It took 50 years for Porton Down chemical research centre to come clean on poisoning a British soldier with Sarin telling him it was a flu test. Poor fella.

Mar 20, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Mike , Mar 19, 2018 6:57:20 PM | 51

This story has also been uncovered, took 50 years for Porton Down chemical research centre to come clean on poisoning a British soldier with Sarin telling him it was a flu test. Poor fella.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1476722/Porton-Down-unlawful-killing-verdict-opens-gates-to-claims.html

[Mar 20, 2018] The Ends Don't Justify The Means! by James Howard Kunstler

Mar 20, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

Various readers, fans, blog commenters, Facebook trolls, and auditors twanged on me all last week about my continuing interest in the RussiaRussiaRussia hysteria, though there is no particular consensus of complaint among them -- except for a general "shut up, already" motif. For the record, I'm far more interested in the hysteria itself than the Russia-meddled-in the-election case, which I consider to be hardly any case at all beyond 13 Russian Facebook trolls.

The hysteria, on the other hand, ought to be a matter of grave concern, because it appears more and more to have been engineered by America's own intel community, its handmaidens in the Dept of Justice, and the twilight's last gleamings of the Obama White House, and now it has shoved this country in the direction of war at a time when civilian authority over the US military looks sketchy at best. This country faces manifold other problems that are certain to reduce the national standard of living and disrupt the operations of an excessively complex and dishonest economy, and the last thing America needs is a national war-dance over trumped-up grievances with Russia.

The RussiaRussiaRussia narrative has unspooled since Christmas and is blowing back badly through the FBI, now with the firing (for cause) of Deputy Director Andrew McCabe hours short of his official retirement (and inches from the golden ring of his pension). He was axed on the recommendation of his own colleagues in the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility, and they may have been influenced by the as-yet-unreleased report of the FBI Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, due out shortly.

The record of misbehavior and "collusion" between the highest ranks of the FBI, the Democratic Party, the Clinton campaign, several top political law firms, and a shady cast of international blackmail-peddlars is a six-lane Beltway-scale evidence trail compared to the muddy mule track of Trump "collusion" with Russia.

It will be amazing if a big wad of criminal cases are not dealt out of it, even as The New York Times sticks its fingers in its ears and goes, "La-la-la-la-la ."

It now appears that Mr. McCabe's statements post-firing tend to incriminate his former boss, FBI Director James Comey -- who is about to embark, embarrassingly perhaps, on a tour for his self-exculpating book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership .

A great aura of sanctimony surrounds the FBI these days. Even the news pundits seem to have forgotten the long, twisted reign of J. Edgar Hoover (1924 – 1972), a dangerous rogue who excelled at political blackmail. And why, these days, would any sane American take pronouncements from the CIA and NSA at face value? What seems to have gone on in the RussiaRussiaRussia matter is that various parts of the executive branch in the last months under Mr. Obama gave each other tacit permission, wink-wink, to do anything necessary to stuff HRC into the White House and, failing that, to derail her opponent, the Golden Golem of Greatness.

The obvious lesson in all this huggermugger is that the ends don't justify the means.

I suspect there are basically two routes through this mess .

Personally, I'd rather see the US government clean house than blow up the world over an engineered hallucination. Tags Politics Semiconductors - NEC

Comments Vote up! 17 Vote down! 3

Brazen Heist Mon, 03/19/2018 - 16:43 Permalink

A nation run by donkeys and elephants.

Have donkeys and elephants ever copulated in nature? I'm guessing it wasn't a success story.

"Bi-partisan" in this case means double the anal pain.

[Mar 19, 2018] The vast majority of people have already had drummed into them the fact (sic) that novichok could only be produced in Russia, so this will of course be interpreted as conclusive proof that "Putin did it". The real push for dramatic measures (e.g., World Cup) will begin at that point.

Notable quotes:
"... The vast majority of people have already had drummed into them the fact (sic) that novichok could only be produced in Russia, so this will of course be interpreted as conclusive proof that "Putin did it". The real push for dramatic measures (e.g., World Cup) will begin at that point. ..."
Mar 19, 2018 | www.unz.com

for-the-record , March 19, 2018 at 7:54 pm GMT

It is reported that the OPCW is already carrying out tests on "samples taken from Salisbury". This will presumably take some time, but eventually (2 weeks?) there will be an announcement that it is indeed Novichok.

The vast majority of people have already had drummed into them the fact (sic) that novichok could only be produced in Russia, so this will of course be interpreted as conclusive proof that "Putin did it". The real push for dramatic measures (e.g., World Cup) will begin at that point.

[Mar 19, 2018] The release of toxic agent via the car ventilation system, suggested by some Western MSM, looks unlikely

Mar 19, 2018 | www.unz.com

Beckow , March 19, 2018 at 8:26 pm GMT

@reiner Tor

through Skripal's car's ventilation system

That opens up a few questions:

So I am skeptical, no 'intelligence' agency is this un-intelligent. Someone is releasing more scenarios (luggage, car, drinks, ) to confuse the narrative and let it linger in the media as in 'well, it was possible and if not that, maybe this was possible'. I don't know who that 'someone' is, but it is not Boris Johnson or Teresa May. They clearly know nothing.

[Mar 19, 2018] It might well be that Nordstream 2, the gas pipeline from Russia to Northern Europe is the target

Mar 19, 2018 | www.unz.com

CanSpeccy , Website Next New Comment March 19, 2018 at 8:50 pm GMT

@for-the-record

More likely that Nordstream 2, the gas pipeline from Russia to Northern Europe is the target.

Senators Push to Stop Russia's Nord Stream II Natural Gas Pipeline .

The Senators' argument is that dependence on Russian gas undermines European security.

Whereas to the Russians, it is obvious that the Americans wish to replace cheap Rusian piped gas with expensive liquefied American gas, which is a bi-product of fracking for oil and currently in surplus. Some frackers in Canada are even having to pay someone to take their gas.

Surprisingly, no one has yet pointed out that Russia could deliver Novichok to the whole of Europe via Nordstream 2.

[Mar 19, 2018] What happened to the BBC story of the first responder performing reanimation not getting particularly ill?

Mar 19, 2018 | www.unz.com

CanSpeccy , Website Next New Comment March 19, 2018 at 9:19 pm GMT

@El Dato

What happened to the BBC story of the first responder performing reanimation not getting particularly ill?

Ha! El Dato, you may just have cracked this case wide open. Don't you see?

Here's what the BBC reported :

Meanwhile, a doctor who was one of the first people at the scene has described how she found Ms Skripal slumped unconscious on a bench, vomiting and fitting. She had also lost control of her bodily functions.

The woman, who asked not to be named , told the BBC she moved Ms Skripal into the recovery position and opened her airway, as others tended to her father.

She said she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying there was no sign of any chemical agent on Ms Skripal's face or body.

The doctor said she had been worried she would be affected by the nerve agent, but added that she "feels fine".

So that mystery woman, an alleged doctor, who asked not to be named, who was the first person to see the Skripals stricken, has disappeared. Obviously, she's the prime suspect. But the BBC and the British "intelligence services" are just too dumb to see it.

[Mar 19, 2018] Why the fact that Skripal was really upset by a long wait in the restaurant immediately before losing coinsience, and why the doctor who treated them for 30 minutes with no subsequent ill effects has disappeared down the memory hole

I would like to point out that at the moment we do not know not only what Skripal was poisoned with or by whom, we can't even be sure that anyone was poisoned with anything. All we have is hot air, just like with Iraq WMD. From the same very "reliable" sources: British intelligence services and British PM.
Notable quotes:
"... He said Mr Skripal appeared annoyed that their main course had taken 20 minutes to arrive – and appeared in a hurry to leave. ..."
"... 'They were only there for about 45 minutes. It was a quick lunch. He just wanted to get out of there. She was silent, perhaps embarrassed. ..."
Mar 19, 2018 | www.unz.com

for-the-record , Next New Comment March 19, 2018 at 10:53 pm GMT

@reiner Tor

I think the Skripals won't be able to talk at all. They are in a coma, and either they will stay there, or they will wake up with massive brain damage, unable to think much, let alone tell us what happened to them.

If they even know. For all we know they might have just as little idea why they were almost killed as the rest of us. If it was Russia killing a traitor - then it must have come out of the blue. If it was a false flag - ditto. So even if they woke up in full possession of their mental faculties, they might know nothing more than anyone else.

Apparently the murderer(s) struck them without any personal contacts. So they won't even know how they were poisoned. Just suddenly felt ill, and then lost consciousness. Or something similar.

For all we know they might have just as little idea why they were almost killed as the rest of us.

It would nonetheless be interesting to know why they (or at least he) was so upset in the restaurant immediately before, another story (along with the doctor who treated them for 30 minutes with no subsequent ill effects) that has disappeared down the memory hole.

How the 'poisoned' spy plot unfolded: Sergei Skripal and his daughter left Zizzi after arguing over a risotto before being found collapsed on a bench

The restaurant, in Castle Street, was busy when they arrived, but they declined the seats offered to them at the front, instead selecting ones at the back, close to the kitchen.

They began with a starter of garlic bread to share followed by two glasses of white wine. . .

But within minutes Mr Skripal had become angry, a witness said. 'I think he was swearing in Russian,' said the man, who did not want to be named.

'She was just sitting there quietly, and didn't really say anything. They were both smartly dressed, she was in a black coat.

'They were speaking to each other in Russian.'

He said Mr Skripal appeared annoyed that their main course had taken 20 minutes to arrive – and appeared in a hurry to leave.

He was going absolutely crazy, I didn't understand it and I couldn't understand him.

'They had not been seen for a little while by the front of house staff, but I think it was more than that. He just wanted his food and to go. He was just shouting and losing his temper. I would have asked him to leave. He just said "I want my food and my bill".

'The waiter took him the bill at the same time as the main course, which was unusual.

'I don't think they paid all of the bill. I think they were given a discount because he was so angry and agitated. He had to wait about 20 minutes for his main course.

'I think it was easier for the staff just to give him money to leave as he was so angry.

'They were sitting by themselves at the back of the restaurant but I think people were pleased when they left.

'They were only there for about 45 minutes. It was a quick lunch. He just wanted to get out of there. She was silent, perhaps embarrassed. '

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5470455/How-poisoned-spy-plot-unfolded-Salisbury.html

RobinG says:

March 20, 2018 at 12:21 am GMT
@for-the-record

This story reads like crap. Since when is 45min. is a quick lunch, when you haven't even gotten your entee?

[Mar 19, 2018] The Salisbury Chemist False Flags for Newbies by Dmitry Orlov

The script is really a replica of the one that previously worked out in the Litvinenko case over a decade ago
Notable quotes:
"... Giving the British story the benefit of the doubt, let's see what would compel Russia's secret services to go after Skripal. In Russia, he was convicted and sentenced for treason, then pardoned and released to the British in a prisoner exchange that included ten Russian spies who had worked in the US, including the rather memorable Anna Chapman [image, left]. It is a very important rule of the spy business that those released in a spy swap are never acted against; if this rule were violated, the resulting bad faith would make spy swaps impossible to negotiate. Thus, if the Russian authorities were to order the hit on Skripal, this would not just be immoral and illegal. That would be neither here nor there, since there are instances where raison d'état obviates the need for such scruples. Worse than that, such behavior would have been unprofessional. ..."
"... The attack on Skripal is by no means an isolated incident; there have been multiple suspicious murders of high-profile Russians within the UK for which no adequate explanation has been given. There is a consistent pattern: a strange murder; an instantaneous leap to "blame Russia"; and an attempt to exploit the incident politically. It would be beneficial to put this incident in context, but that would require a much longer article. ..."
"... Under direction from their colleagues in the US, and closely following a script previously worked out in the Litvinenko case over a decade ago, the British secret services, in close coordination with the British government and the press, poisoned Skripal and his daughter using a nerve agent obtained from Britain's military research base at Porton Down in order to obtain an excuse to compromise the World Cup games in Russia this summer and also to create a scandal immediately before the Russian presidential election. ..."
"... As far as Skripal himself well, that's just a really sad story: reputation ruined, life ruined, living in exile, wife dead from cancer, son dead from liver failure, and now this. All for the sake of serving as a warning unto others, which is: Don't trust the Anglos, for they are devious and without shame. ..."
Mar 19, 2018 | 21stcenturywire.com

Britain is in a media frenzy over the recent poisoning of the former Russian intelligence service colonel turned British spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England.

British PM Theresa May demanded that Russia explain itself, claiming that they were poisoned using a nerve agent called "Novichok" (Russian for "Newbie") that was a product of Soviet biological weapons research. It is no longer produced and the destruction of its stockpiles has been verified by international observers. However, its formula is in the public domain and it can be synthesized by any properly equipped chemical lab, such as Britain's own Porton Down, which, incidentally, is just an 18-minute drive from Salisbury.

May provided no evidence to back up her claims of Russian complicity in the attempted murder. Russia's Foreign Ministry has requested that Britain turn over all available evidence to back up its accusation of chemical weapons use (under the terms of the Chemical Weapons Convention Britain must do so within 10 days) but Britain has refused. Therefore, Russia's FM Sergei Lavrov has announced that Russia will not be responding to such baseless allegations.

An important key to spotting a false flag is that the "knowledge" of who is to blame becomes available before any evidence is in. For example, in the case of the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines MH-17 over Eastern Ukraine, everyone in the West was convinced that "pro-Russian separatists" were to blame even before the means could be established. To date, it isn't understood how they could have done it given the equipment they had at their disposal.

In this [Salisbury] case, Russia was accused almost immediately, while British FM Boris Johnson was quick to volunteer that Britain should not send its team to the World Cup in Russia this summer, disclosing the real reason behind the assassination attempt.

Is there anything new and different behind this latest provocation? Not really; it seems like a replay of the Litvinenko assassination back in November 2006. The choice of an exotic poison (Polonium 210), the lack of evidence (the British claimed that compelling circumstantial evidence exists but haven't provided any), and the instantaneous leap to "blame Russia" are all the same. The Russians offered to prosecute whoever is responsible if only the British would provide them with the evidence, but the British have failed to do so.

Giving the British story the benefit of the doubt, let's see what would compel Russia's secret services to go after Skripal. In Russia, he was convicted and sentenced for treason, then pardoned and released to the British in a prisoner exchange that included ten Russian spies who had worked in the US, including the rather memorable Anna Chapman [image, left]. It is a very important rule of the spy business that those released in a spy swap are never acted against; if this rule were violated, the resulting bad faith would make spy swaps impossible to negotiate. Thus, if the Russian authorities were to order the hit on Skripal, this would not just be immoral and illegal. That would be neither here nor there, since there are instances where raison d'état obviates the need for such scruples. Worse than that, such behavior would have been unprofessional.

Then there is the question of timing. Russia's presidential elections will take place in just a few days, on March 18. This is a particularly inopportune time to cause an international scandal. What possible urgency could there have been behind killing a pardoned former spy who no longer possessed any up-to-date intelligence, was living quietly in retirement, and at that moment was busy having lunch with his daughter? If the Russian government were involved in the poisoning, what possible reason could have been given for not waiting until after the election?

The attack on Skripal is by no means an isolated incident; there have been multiple suspicious murders of high-profile Russians within the UK for which no adequate explanation has been given. There is a consistent pattern: a strange murder; an instantaneous leap to "blame Russia"; and an attempt to exploit the incident politically. It would be beneficial to put this incident in context, but that would require a much longer article.

You would be justified in thinking that none of this makes much sense. Given the dearth of evidence, to make sense of this story we are forced to indulge in a bit of conspiracy theory. However, if a conspiracy theory is what it takes to produce the simplest, most elegant and most internally consistent explanation, then that in itself can be considered as circumstantial evidence for the existence of a conspiracy. My simple and consistent explanation, expressed in a single sentence, is as follows:

Under direction from their colleagues in the US, and closely following a script previously worked out in the Litvinenko case over a decade ago, the British secret services, in close coordination with the British government and the press, poisoned Skripal and his daughter using a nerve agent obtained from Britain's military research base at Porton Down in order to obtain an excuse to compromise the World Cup games in Russia this summer and also to create a scandal immediately before the Russian presidential election.

This is deplorable, of course, but there is a silver lining to this cloud as far as Russia is concerned: Britain (and, by association, the US) will now have a much harder time recruiting double agents from inside the Russian government, since their recruitment prospects will now know that they will remain vulnerable even if they escape, or are pardoned and exchanged. Clearly, the British consider them disposable and see it fit to kill them in exotic ways, then to exploit the incident for political purposes.

As far as Skripal himself well, that's just a really sad story: reputation ruined, life ruined, living in exile, wife dead from cancer, son dead from liver failure, and now this. All for the sake of serving as a warning unto others, which is: Don't trust the Anglos, for they are devious and without shame.

Writer Dmitry Orlov is an American author of ten books including, The Five Stages of Collapse . Learn more about his current projects and support his work at Patreon . This article was originally published at Club Orlov .

[Mar 19, 2018] The expensive BTW that Skripal was driving suggest that there he might be involved in some business ventures. Her Majesty s Government (HMG) is not known for generosity especially to Russian double agents (LOL) who actually brought very low value information to MI6, reflected by a relatively short prison sentence in Russia

Mar 19, 2018 | www.unz.com

Kiza , Next New Comment March 19, 2018 at 11:03 pm GMT

@Beckow

The perfect murder (attempted). No evidence at all...
To me it actually looks very imperfect. Something definitely happened, but the reaction and political management suggest chaos. The term 'murky' is very appropriate.

The way it has been set-up requires follow-ups: clarify the fate of Skripals, 'nerve agent' specifics, and the 'Russia-did-it' accusations. If it is not addressed it will be embarrassing. If there was a script, or conflicting scripts, it has gone beyond that. Both Russia and UK are in a bind, a mutually destructive embrace, one will have to let go.

My theory is that it has more to do with Skripals and less with geo-politics. Crimes tend to happen among people who know each other. And Julia just flew in the day before. If Skripals talk, it could get interesting (so they probably will not be allowed to talk).

In most scenarios it leaves a major boo-boo on Boris's face, but given his face we might not notice...

Kiza , Next New Comment March 19, 2018 at 11:16 pm GMT
@reiner Tor

You did not address my main point – there may have been no nerve agent involved at all, then some form of poison. It is true that A&E doctors are not fully qualified to diagnose nerve agent effects, but things become really suspicious when this is followed by the British own nerve agent production lab identifing the "nerve agent" but disallowing OPCW from doing its own checks.

If OPCW was the same as IOC, not following the procedures that the UK Government signed under would be unnecessary. The problem for the British is that they do not control OPCW as much as they control WADA and IOC. OPCW procedures are crystal clear and it is very hard to cheat.

[Mar 19, 2018] The whole story is probably a sham, a fake terror attack, a story concocted to befuddle the plebs and justify some new imperial aggression.

Notable quotes:
"... My impression is that the nerve agent was introduced to the scene after Skripals were hospitalized as a doctor attended the daughter for 30 min before the ambulance came. She did not develop any symptoms. So at this moment they lost conscience at the bench there was no nerve gas on the scene. It might well be something else. ..."
Mar 19, 2018 | www.unz.com

CanSpeccy , Website March 19, 2018 at 11:28 pm GMT

@reiner Tor

I think the Skripals won't be able to talk at all. They are in a coma

How do you know that?

Has there been any public report on the medical condition of the Skripals? I haven't been able to find one. If you know of such a report, will you please provide a link. In the meantime, one should keep in mind the statement of the Salisbury hospital consultant, Steohen Davies, that:

no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury

So either (1) the Skripal's were not exposed to Novichok or any other nerve agent, or (2) though exposed to a nerve agent, they were not treated at the hospital, which would be odd, though not impossible. Perhaps they were taken to the British chemical weapons lab at Porton Down, just seven miles from Salisbury, where, presumably, there are specialists in detoxification of those exposed to nerve agents.

But unless you adhere to (1) or (2), it would seem that you have to conclude that the Skripal's were not exposed to a nerve agent. In other words, that the whole story is probably a sham, a fake terror attack, a story concocted to befuddle the plebs and justify some new imperial aggression.

likbez , March 19, 2018 at 11:47 pm GMT
My impression is that the nerve agent was introduced to the scene after Skripals were hospitalized as a doctor attended the daughter for 30 min before the ambulance came. She did not develop any symptoms. So at this moment they lost conscience at the bench there was no nerve gas on the scene. It might well be something else.

IMHO this looks like an opening salvo in multi-step combination. Clumsy first step. It might well be designed to confiscate a part of Russian money in London banks and thus create the motive for Russian oligarchs to remove Putin. Kind of color revolution launched by disgruntled oligarchs.

That's probably why the UK government does not really care, if that is told to people true or not. Officials produce crazy statements and generally behave quite carelessly, as if they completely despise public and truth dos not matter for them one bit. The support of the USA is all that matter. Look for example at the most recent statement of Boris Johnson. But they needed the pretext for further actions, be it another witch hunt or something more serious and they succeeded.

Their actions look completely logical if the resulting hysteria is needed just for a few weeks to start the next round of sanctions against Russia. It might well be that the real goal is confiscation of "ill gotten" money of Russian oligarchs both to push them to act against Putin and to compensate for Brexit losses

[Mar 19, 2018] Sergei Skripal Casualty of The Psy War by Ian Greenhalgh

Notable quotes:
"... Does the idiot Johnson know what a "doctrine" is? Does he know how long they take to formulate and how long a time period they govern? Does he realise how hopeless the British government is looking, given that it took the view "a few months ago" that a foreign power was carrying out acts of war against Britain, but, don't worry, they're aware that they need to find themselves a new "doctrine", and they're on the job? ..."
"... As for "increasingly think", he's not supposed to be at a fucking debating society or at a high table somewhere. He's supposed to be the foreign minister. He's been asked in parliament whether Britain is at war or not. ..."
"... Boris Johnson is personally probably too off his head on cocaine to understand any of what's going on – he can talk the talk, or at least he can do the facial gestures, but he hasn't got a clue how to walk the walk – but consider what such guff says about the government as a whole. I mean not just the bunch of backhander-taking pricks in the cabinet, but both them and the permanent government of this country. ..."
"... Steering wheel? What's a steering wheel? Chop chop. Snort. ..."
Mar 19, 2018 | www.veteranstoday.com

One anonymous British blogger known only as '_N' wrote a rather prescient retort to the Boris bluster that I felt was worth quoting in full:

Does the idiot Johnson know what a "doctrine" is? Does he know how long they take to formulate and how long a time period they govern? Does he realise how hopeless the British government is looking, given that it took the view "a few months ago" that a foreign power was carrying out acts of war against Britain, but, don't worry, they're aware that they need to find themselves a new "doctrine", and they're on the job?

As for "increasingly think", he's not supposed to be at a fucking debating society or at a high table somewhere. He's supposed to be the foreign minister. He's been asked in parliament whether Britain is at war or not.

Boris Johnson is personally probably too off his head on cocaine to understand any of what's going on – he can talk the talk, or at least he can do the facial gestures, but he hasn't got a clue how to walk the walk – but consider what such guff says about the government as a whole. I mean not just the bunch of backhander-taking pricks in the cabinet, but both them and the permanent government of this country.

Steering wheel? What's a steering wheel? Chop chop. Snort. This does major damage to MI6.

MI6's main work is to collect intelligence from foreign sources. The higher up those sources are, the more they have to present themselves as who they really are: the British secret intelligence service. Above all an agent handler needs to win the trust of his potential asset.

That means that before the aset gets caught and tortured or jailed, the agency has to look after them. Any fears? Tell your handler. If the asset gets jailed, then oh DEAR, Sergei, how terrible – swap him out of jail when the opportunity arises. Oh, and don't ask him to pay for his own ticket from Vienna. That's what happened with Skripal.

They didn't swap him out because he would be able to help them much after his release, they swapped him out because both MI6 and the FSB must look good in the eyes of their potential and actual sources.

If an asset gets rubbed out on the street in Britain, or badly hurt in an attempt to rub them out, that does NOT look good for MI6, however many articles may appear in the British media saying "Putin" and "Russian spy" and "poison". That propaganda works fine for the sheeple, but it damages MI6's image in a market they care about much more – potential and actual foreign sources.

There is more than one market for the media narrative. The sheeple blame it on Putin, yes. But if you're a colonel in Islamabad, a civil servant in Ankara, or a businessman in Donetsk, and you're thinking of selling information to MI6, or you're already doing it, you want to know that they'll protect you if you get into deep shit.

You want to know that, even if they tricked or "coerced" you in the first place into working for them. That swapped out British asset might be you one day. You won't blame this attack on Putin, you'll blame it on Britain. So expect the line to be put out – not necessarily in the mainstream media – that Skripal was a dirty bastard who tried to get one over on his kind hosts.

The Russians Didn't Do It

Make no mistake, the poisoning of Sergei Skripal is part of an on-going and long-running psy war between Russia and the West, whoever carried out this attack had the intent of blackening Russia's image in the minds of the British people. However, do you think Russia's psywar guys give a toss about their image among the British and western sheeple or about "Russophobia" in those markets?

Fear and talk in the said markets about how Russian psywar guys are manipulating politics and media in the west (which they are) is GOOD for the Russian psywar effort, not BAD. Why? Because it implies to western populations that western rulers are WEAK, unable to control what goes on in western countries. That is really awful for morale. This is all in Psychological Warfare 101.

In short, the more bleating there is in Britain and the West about Russian manipulation of politics and media in those countries, the more the Russian psy war guys celebrate.

In psywar it's often very difficult to know the effect of what you've done. It's not like bombing a factory, when you can see the aftermath from your satellite. Often you don't find out what effect you've had, or you find out much later or in unexpected ways. If the other side is complaining to its sheeple about your terrible psywar capabilities and successes all the time, then you ARE finding out, and the news is that you're doing GREAT.

The psywar for WW3 has already begun. That's a normal thing with psywar: it begins before physical conflict and continues after it. I doubt a date has been set for the start of the physical-conflict stage but it won't be too far in the future.

Morale in Russia, unlike in the West, is very high. I mean morale in the sense that concerns war planners. Conversely, morale in Britain and the West, particularly among the military, is, quite frankly, abysmal.

The fact that Putin is not bleating like a crybaby about how foreign psywar agencies are undermining his country is closely related to how his government is perceived among the Russian sheeple, aka "morale". In my opinion, the west is far more likely to collapse than Russia.

Qui Bono

At the end of the day, the people who benefit from this crass and obvious attempt to ratchet up the tension between Russia and the West and to poison the minds of the British people against Russia is all too clear – it is the Zionist criminals who control Israel and the US.

Why is an even more obvious answer, they are pushing the world ever closer to World War 3 and poisoning a former Russian spy on the streets of Britain is their way of sowing in the minds of the British sheeple the notion that the Russians, and particularly Putin, are both belligerent and reckless enough to disregard international law and justice, to ignore British sovereignty and carry out a brutal murder on the streets of a quiet English town.

The message they wish to inculcate is one of fear and loathing of the big, bad Russian bear, a clear psy op to prepare the British sheeple for the upcoming war with Russia.

[Mar 19, 2018] Steele is a charlatan who knocked up a series of allegations that are either wildly improbable, or would need a high level source access he could not possibly get in today's Russia, or both

Notable quotes:
"... Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. ..."
"... The idea that Russia is behind this attack is implausible, but that did not prevent the UK government from launching into an aggressively impertinent confrontation of Russia, and then using the Russian government's understandably annoyed response as supposed further evidence of supposed Russian guilt. ..."
"... After an initial scepticism the usual US sphere suspects (the US, France, Germany) lined up behind the British government's spurious feigned outrage, presumably having been reassured that the UK government would not seek to invoke NATO's Article 5). ..."
"... Am I wrong in thinking that there are thousands of Russians living in Germany, USA, Italy, Cyprus and so on but they are only poisoned in the UK? If I am mistaken on this then I apologies. ..."
"... If this letter is genuine then there has never been any nerve agent in Salisbury. ..."
Mar 19, 2018 | www.unz.com

Originally from: Russian to Judgement, by Craig Murray - The Unz Review

There is no doubt that Skripal was feeding secrets to MI6 at the time that Christopher Steele was an MI6 officer in Moscow, and at the the time that Pablo Miller, another member of Orbis Intelligence, was also an MI6 officer in Russia and directly recruiting agents. It is widely reported on the web and in US media that it was Miller who first recruited Skripal. My own ex-MI6 sources tell me that is not quite true as Skripal was "walk-in", but that Miller certainly was involved in running Skripal for a while. Sadly Pablo Miller's LinkedIn profile has recently been deleted, but it is again widely alleged on the web that it showed him as a consultant for Orbis Intelligence and a consultant to the FCO and – wait for it – with an address in Salisbury. If anyone can recover that Linkedin entry do get in touch, though British Government agencies will have been active in the internet scrubbing.

It was of course Christopher Steele and Orbis Intelligence who produced for the Clinton camp the sensationalist dossier on Trump links with Russia – including the story of Trump paying to be urinated on by Russian prostitutes – that is a key part of the "Russiagate" affair gripping the US political classes. The extraordinary thing about this is that the Orbis dossier is obvious nonsense which anybody with a professional background can completely demolish, as I did here . Steele's motive was, like Skripal's in selling his secrets, cash pure and simple. Steele is a charlatan who knocked up a series of allegations that are either wildly improbable, or would need a high level source access he could not possibly get in today's Russia, or both. He told the Democrats what they wish to hear and his audience – who had and still have no motivation to look at it critically – paid him highly for it.

I do not know for certain that Pablo Miller helped knock together the Steele dossier on Trump, but it seems very probable given he also served for MI6 in Russia and was working for Orbis. And it seems to me even more probable that Sergei Skripal contributed to the Orbis Intelligence dossier on Trump. Steele and Miller cannot go into Russia and run sources any more, and never would have had access as good as their dossier claims, even in their MI6 days. The dossier was knocked up for huge wodges of cash from whatever they could cobble together. Who better to lend a little corroborative verisimilitude in these circumstances than their old source Skripal?

Skripal was at hand in the UK, and allegedly even close to Miller in Salisbury. He could add in the proper acronym for a Russian committee here or the name of a Russian official there, to make it seem like Steele was providing hard intelligence. Indeed, Skripal's outdated knowledge might explain some of the dossier's more glaring errors.

But the problem with double agents like Skripal, who give intelligence for money, is that they can easily become triple agents and you never know when a better offer is going to come along. When Steele produced his dodgy dossier, he had no idea it would ever become so prominent and subject to so much scrutiny. Steele is fortunate in that the US Establishment is strongly motivated not to scrutinise his work closely as their one aim is to "get" Trump. But with the stakes very high, having a very loose cannon as one of the dossier's authors might be most inconvenient both for Orbis and for the Clinton camp.

If I was the police, I would look closely at Orbis Intelligence.

To return to Israel. Israel has the nerve agents. Israel has Mossad which is extremely skilled at foreign assassinations. Theresa May claimed Russian propensity to assassinate abroad as a specific reason to believe Russia did it. Well Mossad has an even greater propensity to assassinate abroad. And while I am struggling to see a Russian motive for damaging its own international reputation so grieviously, Israel has a clear motivation for damaging the Russian reputation so grieviously. Russian action in Syria has undermined the Israeli position in Syria and Lebanon in a fundamental way, and Israel has every motive for damaging Russia's international position by an attack aiming to leave the blame on Russia.

Both the Orbis and Israeli theories are speculations. But they are no more a speculation, and no more a conspiracy theory, than the idea that Vladimir Putin secretly sent agents to Salisbury to attack Skripal with a secret nerve agent. I can see absolutely no reason to believe that is a more valid speculation than the others at this point.

I am alarmed by the security, spying and armaments industries' frenetic efforts to stoke Russophobia and heat up the new cold war. I am especially alarmed at the stream of cold war warrior "experts" dominating the news cycles. I write as someone who believes that agents of the Russian state did assassinate Litvinenko, and that the Russian security services carried out at least some of the apartment bombings that provided the pretext for the brutal assault on Chechnya. I believe the Russian occupation of Crimea and parts of Georgia is illegal. On the other hand, in Syria Russia has saved the Middle East from domination by a new wave of US and Saudi sponsored extreme jihadists.

The naive view of the world as "goodies" and "baddies", with our own ruling class as the good guys, is for the birds. I witnessed personally in Uzbekistan the willingness of the UK and US security services to accept and validate intelligence they knew to be false in order to pursue their policy objectives. We should be extremely sceptical of their current anti-Russian narrative. There are many possible suspects in this attack.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.


Seraphim , March 19, 2018 at 7:06 am GMT
The scam must be so obvious and damaging that even a 'believer' in the other obvious scams (Litvinenko) and the 'illegal' occupation of Crimea and 'parts of Georgia' must disassociate from it. I think that he might know more than simple conjectures about the role of the third party he alludes cautiously to, the party which has not only the motives to do it, but also the means and opportunities to operate freely under the radar which never sees it.
Alan Reid , March 19, 2018 at 7:07 am GMT
Here is one thing i noted about this meme In the American film 'The sum of all fears' the term novochok is used "novochok binary nerve agent" Now if you are going to lie, coat tailing on a BS yank movie is going to have advantages is it not? How many millions saw that movie? How many other movies are used to pre-imbed this type of predictive programming? More than a few is my guess . The instant i heard the 'novochok' claim i immediately recalled that movie and the terror it had gathered into it's celluloid.
jilles dykstra , March 19, 2018 at 8:29 am GMT
In my opinion there is not a shred of evidence that Russia did it, and there is no motive. The motive is the other way round, it fits in the climate of demonising Russia. Maybe the prelude to war, the last one, not a human being will survive.
Renoman , March 19, 2018 at 9:37 am GMT
Just the usual suspects telling the usual lies so they can start another war. It's what they do.
Randal , March 19, 2018 at 9:55 am GMT
Great to see this promoted at Unz. It's a vital story at the moment, which shines a very unflattering light on the UK government and should make anyone foolish enough to think the problems that were exposed over the manipulation of the country into the Iraq war in 2003 were particular to the government of Tony Blair or to that issue, think again. The truth is that the misrepresentation of intelligence, the blustering suppression of dissent by bombastic pseudo-patriotism, and the lockstep mainstream media support for it, are all endemic to the UK (and US, mutatis mutandis).

Murray stands at the opposite end of the political spectrum from me, and we would agree about very little outside of this kind of thing. But I salute his courage and persistence in standing up to the inevitable bullying and pressures that are brought to bear on people raising this kind of thing. Not as perniciously thuggish as the pressures placed upon race realist and English nationalist dissidents, but perhaps more menacing in some ways.

It is interesting to note that Murray – a longstanding UK dissident who has been making trouble for the authorities publicly since at least 2004, states (see Bothered by Midgies, linked above) that: " In 13 years of running my blog I have never been exposed to such a tirade of abuse as I have for refusing to accept without evidence that Russia is the only possible culprit for the Salisbury attack ". That partly reflects the shame he has brought upon the few members of our mainstream media (so called journalists working for the BBC, Sky, Guardian, Telegraph, Times, Independent (sic!), etc) still able to feel it, by doing their job when they had notably failed. It also reflects the importance of the work he is doing.

The idea that Russia is behind this attack is implausible, but that did not prevent the UK government from launching into an aggressively impertinent confrontation of Russia, and then using the Russian government's understandably annoyed response as supposed further evidence of supposed Russian guilt.

After an initial scepticism the usual US sphere suspects (the US, France, Germany) lined up behind the British government's spurious feigned outrage, presumably having been reassured that the UK government would not seek to invoke NATO's Article 5). The confrontation they have initiated will be far more costly to us all in the long run than the crime itself (grim though that has surely been for the individuals affected), and so it is vital for those few who can see through the blizzard of propaganda to continue to rip holes in the UK government's increasingly threadbare case.

Randal , March 19, 2018 at 10:25 am GMT
The UK government's case, such as it was, when it issued its disgraceful "ultimatum" to Russia was basically fourfold, as set out in this BBC piece:

Poisoned ex-spy: Why does UK think it was Russia?

  1. The substance they claim was used is of Russian origin.
  2. There is a motive for Russia to have carried out the attack – killing a traitor.
  3. There is supposedly a "track record" of Russia committing such crimes.
  4. There's no other hypothesis.

These points are all bunk, as set out below, and the information obtained by Murray has helped hugely in establishing that fact. But none of the refutations is remotely complicated or hard to spot, and any honest journalist should have been confronting the government with them from day one.

1 The substance they claim was used is of Russian origin.

As Murray has highlighted, the most the British government can say is that the substance they allege was used was "of a type developed by Russia", and in fact it could have been produced in any other country over the past ten years and was in fact produced in Iran in 2016 under OPCW supervision. So the fact that it was originally developed in Russia decades ago is evidence of nothing.

2 There is a motive for Russia to have carried out the attack – killing a traitor.

In fact Skipal was a spy who was unmasked by the Russians, tried, convicted and imprisoned. His offence was clearly not considered particularly serious, as treasons go, because he was only given 13 years in prison, and he was clearly considered no longer a threat because he was subsequently exchanged for some Russian spies.

3 There is supposedly a "track record" of Russia committing such crimes.

There is no track record of the Russians killing exchanged former spies. Indeed British intelligence effectively admitted that because they were quite happy for Skripal to live openly under his own name, with his address in the public domain and no protection given to him, unlike for instance organised crime witnesses who do actually face enemies with a track record of killing them.

4 There's no other hypothesis.

Of course there are plenty of other hypotheses with at least as much plausibility as the dubious case against Russia. Any of the governments seeking to promote and foment confrontation of Russia, over Ukraine or Syria, or just for internal political benefits, had a motive for committing this crime, and doing it in the method (a "wmd" attack on British soil) guaranteed to create the maximum hysteria and propaganda value. That brings the US, Israel, the Ukraine and the UK into the frame, all of whom would certainly have had the capability to manufacture the substance. Then there are issues around the shadowy criminal and political elements with whom Skripal was potentially involved, from Russian mafia to the US security state figures currently mixed up with British intelligence in the ongoing anti-Russian/anti-Trump nonsense.

In reality there is no shortage of alternative hypotheses. It's just that the BBC like the rest of the mainstream media failed to mention any of them. As usual, acting as stenographers for the powerful, rather than agents of truth.

The Alarmist , March 19, 2018 at 10:42 am GMT
Considering the Brits dragged us into two World Wars and a bunch of lesser but nevertheless costly messes, why the f *** do we listen to, much less believe, anything they say that points even in the general direction of conflict with Russia?

Does anyone in American leadership even fathom that the UK have a big chip on their shoulder for us knocking them off the top of the list of great empires and adding insult to injury by essentially forcing them to dismantle their empire, and then pushing them into a vassal state of the EU so we could better manage them as but one of many vassals?

skrik , March 19, 2018 at 11:11 am GMT
For what it's worth and if I may, a copy of a comment found on craigmurray.org.uk

" Arnie Saccnuson
March 19, 2018 at 09:37

Plot Twist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_Back:_Retribution
Word search Novichok and look at the dates it aired Our Rupert has such wonderful insight.
In case you missed it https://youtu.be/g9MBh1oM2Jo "

CF , March 19, 2018 at 11:55 am GMT
Am I wrong in thinking that there are thousands of Russians living in Germany, USA, Italy, Cyprus and so on but they are only poisoned in the UK? If I am mistaken on this then I apologies.
bliss_porsena , March 19, 2018 at 12:09 pm GMT
This is an Oligarch/Miller/Steele/Orbis carry on. All trails lead to HRC.
jilles dykstra , March 19, 2018 at 12:56 pm GMT
@Randal

There is one 'track record', Litvinov, killed by polonium. What secret service would be so dumb as to use this, pointing immediately to state murder ? Accidents, and suicides are quiet methods for keeping people silent for all times.

The Ukrainian pilot that, according to Russia, by accident shot down MH17, just committed suicide. I wonder if he was suicided.

Sensational murders, or attempted murders, have quite different purposes. Blaming someone.

Who believes that Arafat was not murdered, does anyone believe that the Diana accident was an accident, who believes the Hess and Kelly suicides ? Why was Palme murdered, who indeed thinks that Anna Lyndh was killed accidentally, that Barschel committed suicide, that Mölleman died accidentally ? And so on, and so forth.

Randal , March 19, 2018 at 1:16 pm GMT
@jilles dykstra

There is one 'track record', Litvinov, killed by polonium.

Even if one chooses to believe the pretty dubious story concocted to blame that event on the Russian government, it doesn't represent any "track record" relevant to the Skripal case. Litvinenko was a former KGB/FSB thug who had found himself on the wrong side of a Kremlin power struggle and fled justice. He was not, like Skripal, a previously unmasked, tried, convicted, jailed and exchanged former spy.

Apples and oranges.

Kiza , March 19, 2018 at 1:21 pm GMT
Who says that there is no proof that Putin did it? Boris Johnson personally found a ripped off shirt next to the bench of Scripals and "Vlad WOS HIER" spray painted on the nearest wall.

Seriously, there was apparently an interesting letter from the Salisbury hospital to The Times:

Sir, Further to your report ("Poison exposure leaves almost 40 needing treatment", March 14), ****** may I clarify that no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury and there have only ever been three patients with significant poisoning . ****** Several people have attended the emergency department concerned that they may have been exposed. None has had symptoms of poisoning and none has needed treatment. Any blood tests performed have shown no abnormality. No member of the public has been contaminated by the agent involved.

Stephen Davies, Consultant in emergency medicine, Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust

If this letter is genuine then there has never been any nerve agent in Salisbury.

jilles dykstra , March 19, 2018 at 2:50 pm GMT
https://www.telegraaf.nl/nieuws/1806392/akkoord-eu-en-londen-over-overgangsperiode

And all of a sudden there is a GB EU agreement over a trade transition period. I wondered why May set up the poison gas murder show. I now wonder if this show was the price she was asked to pay, making GB the enemy of Russia, preventing GB trade with Russia. It reminds me of a new mafia member, asked to commit a crime, to show that he's real criminal.

[Mar 19, 2018] 'It's nonsense' to think Russia tried to poison Skripals ahead of elections World Cup - Putin

Mar 19, 2018 | www.rt.com

Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed allegations that Russia was behind the early March poisoning of former double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury. It is "nonsense and absurd to claim that Russia would do anything like that before the elections and the World Cup," Putin said, touching on the subject for the fist time since the incident. He was responding to a reporter's question in his campaign headquarters, as early results of Sunday's presidential election indicated his landslide victory.

"Concerning this tragedy that you've mentioned, I learned about it from the media," Putin told reporters.

He dismissed the theory that it was a military-grade toxic agent that was used in the poisoning, because if that were the case "people, of course, would have died on the spot."

"It's an obvious fact, you should simply understand that," he said.

The Skripals, 66-year-old Sergei and 33-year-old Yulia, were found slumped on a bench in Salisbury on March 4. They remain in hospital, in critical but stable condition.

Moscow is open to working with London to investigate the poisoning, provided the UK is willing, which is not the case at the moment.

"We have not seen this so far, but we keep that on the agenda while planning our bilateral work," Putin said, adding that Russia is ready "to discuss any issues and overcome any difficulties" with London.

Moscow does not possess any chemical weapons stockpiles, Putin said.

"Russia doesn't have such means, and we have destroyed all our chemical weapons under the supervision of international observers," he stated, adding that Russia was the first to get rid of its arsenals while other countries "have promised [to do the same], but have not met their commitments yet, unfortunately."

Earlier, the Russian Foreign Ministry said that, contrary to UK Prime Minister Theresa May's claims that there could be "no alternative conclusion other than the Russian state was responsible," the toxin could have originated from the UK itself, Slovakia, the Czech Republic or Sweden.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova stated on Saturday that the project "is not the creation of Russia or the Soviet Union," pointing to the fact that several countries have been researching the substance since the 1990s, when many former Soviet scientists fled to the West.

On Sunday, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson doubled down on his accusations that Russia was complicit in the incident, claiming that the UK has been collecting evidence "over the past 10 years" of Moscow devising deadly nerve agents for the purpose of assassination.

Moscow has requested samples of the alleged nerve agent to be provided to Russia through Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) channels, but the request has been repeatedly rebuked by the UK.

[Mar 19, 2018] Fancy killings and attempts thereof seem more indicative of the West tendencies towards drama including rogue parts of the CIA, MI6, etc.

Notable quotes:
"... CUI BONO ? Who Benefits? MIC, NeoCons, Zionists, Rothschilds banking cartel. ..."
"... Why the HELL would Russia, or anyone else, bother to use such a messy, traceable and complicated method to kill this guy? Especially when there are SO MANY WAYS it could have been done that wouldn't have garnered all the attention, and that would have left no traces? They could have sent someone to shove him in front of a train or something, or staged a 'botched robbery'. ..."
Mar 19, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Kafir Goyim -> DaiRR Sat, 03/17/2018 - 18:04 Perma link

You're not "just sayin'", you're just babbling. Just as Assad would never be stupid enough to use chemical weapons when he's already winning bigly, Russia would never be stupid enough to use chemical weapons on a has-been spy, when there's a hundred other ways to kill him. Anybody who insists on the chemical weapons narrative in either of these cases is pushing a narrative, not having a discussion. Why are you pushing this narrative, I wonder, my little 5 month old "Warrior for freedom."?

alexcojones -> Kafir Goyim Sat, 03/17/2018 - 19:23 Permalink

CUI BONO ? Who Benefits? MIC, NeoCons, Zionists, Rothschilds banking cartel.

And Russia disgraced and then banned from hosting World Cup.

It really is easy to see the Satanists game plan.

DownWithYogaPants -> pawn Sun, 03/18/2018 - 02:30 Permalink

I maintain that fancy killings and attempts thereof seem more indicative of the wests tendencies towards drama on the part of the CIA et al.

If you want to kill someone it seems a nailgun would be more reasonable.

Bemused Observer -> DownWithYogaPants Sun, 03/18/2018 - 11:56 Permalink

Seriously...I think these 'conspiracy theorists' have been watching too many Hollywood movies.

This is what I want to SCREAM every time I hear this shit...Why the HELL would Russia, or anyone else, bother to use such a messy, traceable and complicated method to kill this guy? Especially when there are SO MANY WAYS it could have been done that wouldn't have garnered all the attention, and that would have left no traces? They could have sent someone to shove him in front of a train or something, or staged a 'botched robbery'.

Reminds me of the stupid assassination methods the CIA wanted to use on Castro...poisoning his beard? Really? Well, aside from the fact that it is just too 'Wile E. Coyote' to be taken seriously, did anyone ask, if such an assassin could get close enough to poison his beard, why he wouldn't go with a more dependable method?

[Mar 19, 2018] There is no doubt that the UK acted as Washington's poodle

The problem with the recommended approach is the Russia is dependent on the West. It just can't break ties with the West.
Mar 19, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Well we know that. But the real point I want to make is that Russia always reacts to such nonsensical and outright false accusations; Russia always responds, rejects of course the accusations but usually with lengthy explanations, and with suggestions on how to come to the truth – as if the UK and the west would give a shit about the truth – why are they doing that? Why are you Russia, even responding?

That is foolish sign of weakness . As if Russia was still believing in the goodness of the west, as if it just needed to be awakened. What Russia is doing, every time, not just in this Skripal case, but in every senseless and ruthless attack, accusations about cyber hacking, invading Ukraine, annexing Crimea, and not to speak about the never-ending saga of Russia-Gate, Russian meddling and hacking into the 2016 US Presidential elections, favoring Trump over Hillary. Everybody with a half brain knows it's a load of crap. Even the FBI and CIA said that there was no evidence. So, why even respond? Why even trying to undo the lies, convince the liars that they, Russia, are not culpable?

Every time the west notices Russia's wanting to be a "good neighbor" – about which the west really couldn't care less, Russia makes herself more vulnerable, more prone to be accused and attacked and more slandered.

Why does Russia not just break away from the west? Instead of trying to 'belong' to the west? Accept that you are not wanted in the west, that the west only wants to plunder your resources, your vast landmass, they want to provoke you into a war where there are no winners, a war that may destroy entire Mother Earth, but they, the ZionAnglo handlers of Washington, dream that their elite will survive to eventually take over beautiful grand Russia. That's what they want. The Bashing is a means towards the end. The more people are with them, the easier it is to launch an atrocious war.

The Skripal case is typical. The intensity with which this UK lie-propaganda has been launched is exemplary. It has brought all of halfwit Europe – and there is a lot of them – under the spell of Russia hating. Nobody can believe that May Merkel, Macron are such blatant liars that is beyond what they have been brought up with. A lifelong of lies pushed down their throats, squeezed into their brains. Even if something tells them – this is not quite correct, the force of comfort, not leaving their comfort zone- not questioning their own lives – is so strong that they rather cry for War, War against Russia, War against the eternal enemy of mankind. – I sadly remember in my youth in neutral Switzerland, the enemy always, but always came from the East. He was hiding behind the "Iron Curtain".

The West is fabricating a new Iron Curtain. But while doing that, they don't realize they are putting a noose around their own neck. Russia doesn't need the west, but the west will soon be unable to survive without the East, the future is in the east – and Russia is an integral part of the East, of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), that encompasses half the world's population and controls a third of the world's economic output.

Mr. Putin, you don't need to respond to insults from the west, because that's what they are, abusive insults. The abject slander that Johnson boy threw at you is nothing but a miserable insult; you don't need to respond to this behavior. You draw your consequences.

Dear President Putin, Dear Mr. Lavrov, Let them! Let them holler. Let them rot in their insanity . – Respond to the UK no longer with words but with deeds, with drastic deeds. Close their embassy. Give all embassy staff a week to vacate your country, then you abolish and eviscerate the embassy the same way the US abolished your consulates in Washington and San Francisco – a bit more than a year ago. Surely you have not forgotten. Then you give all Brits generously a month to pack up and leave your beautiful country (it can be done – that's about what Washington is forcing its vassals around the globe to do with North Korean foreign laborers); block all trade with the UK (or with the entire West for that matter), block all western assets in Russia, because that's the first thing the western plunderers will do, blocking Russian assets abroad. Stealing is in their blood.

Mr. Putin, You don't need to respond to their lowly abusive attacks, slanders, lies. You and Russia are way above the level of this lowly western pack. Shut your relation to the west. You have China, the SCO, the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), Russia is part of the OBI – President Xi's One Belt Initiative – the multi-trillion development thrive, emanating from China, connecting continents – Asia, Africa, Europe, South America – with infrastructure, trade, creating hundreds of millions of decent jobs, developing and promoting science and culture and providing hundreds of millions of people with a decent life.

What would the west do, if suddenly they had no enemy, because the enemy has decided to ignore them and take a nap? China will join you.

Everything else, responding, justifying, explaining, denying the most flagrant lies, trying to make them believe in the truth is not only a frustrating waste of time, it's committing political suicide. You will never win. The west doesn't give a hoot about the truth – they have proven that for the last two thousand years or more. And in all that time, not an iota of conscience has entered the west's collective mind. The west cannot be trusted. Period.


Belrev -> NoDebt Sun, 03/18/2018 - 23:32 Permalink

Putin is all too happy to see West tirelessly attack and insult Russia as this kind of antagonism solidifiers Russian people unity and support for the Czar Vladimir. He does not need to lift a finger, just report the news from abroad. All economic and social problems are now secondary in Russia with this vicious anti-Russia campaign in the West and its weekly russophobic hysteria.

FoggyWorld -> Belrev Sun, 03/18/2018 - 23:39 Permalink

If you would listen to Putin who does give long interviews regularly you see that he understands that all of the money and energy being directed toward war is retarding the growth he and his people want to see in Russia.

That country has paid dues we can't get our minds around between the soviet overthrow of the government and WW2, never mind Stalin's years of the gulag. There is a free Russian movie with English titles on Youtube and it's called The Chekist. Strongly think it's worth your time to watch it.

PhilofOz -> FoggyWorld Mon, 03/19/2018 - 00:55 Permalink

The Checkist.... a great movie. It's time I watched it once more just to remind me of what the leftists around us in this day and age are capable of.

D.T.Barnum -> NoDebt Sun, 03/18/2018 - 23:33 Permalink

The governments of these "big player" countries put on kabuki theater, because behind closed doors and through back channels, they are working together to enslave the peoples. That's why Russia keeps responding.

...

Lore -> NoDebt Sun, 03/18/2018 - 23:51 Permalink

We're witnessing classic psychopathic warfare. Psychopaths play mind games. They make outrageous accusations and force you to spend thousands of hours spinning your wheels in an attempt to Prove A Negative.

I know because I worked for a psychopath who did it frequently, maintaining a culture of fear even among the executive board members. One nice fellow was so affected by the stress that he developed cancer and died. (The manipulative SOB didn't have the balls to attend the funeral. Too bad.)

Again, this is classic psychopathy. I was singled out at one point for something special, being accused in front of the Board of something "Too Horrible To Describe" (those exact words), but if I apologized for "it" then there would be an opportunity to make amends. Obviously, I had no idea, and got so rattled (I was a stupid kid) that I nearly burst into tears. A few minutes after I left, I heard them all laughing about it. People are not human beings to a psychopath, they're instruments to be manipulated.

The average American zombie may still be clueless to this, but Russian officials understand, surely. America and its vassals are a Pathocracy. The directives and messaging coming out of Washington and other corners are going to get a lot more zany, because psycohpaths are nothing if not imaginative when it comes to rationalization and avoidance of responsibility.

I'm convinced of 2 things: 1) Russia's strategy is to document everything like crazy for the purpose of providing a chronicle when SHTF (letting the psychopaths dig their own hole, in other words), and 2) When SHTF, it will not involve Russia directly at all. Things are going to get so loony that rational Americans will rise up. In other words, Revolution is inevitable as long as pscyhopaths are allowed to continued to grind everything that's good about the West into the dirt.

Psychopaths: Expect no sympathy when it all comes down. For all the terror and death that you have rained upon the rest of the world since WW2, you deserve everything coming to you.

Pi Bolar -> Lore Mon, 03/19/2018 - 01:22 Permalink

Psychopaths enjoy the thrill of lying and sowing discord amongst anyone they can bully, i.e. Staff in lower positions, (yes the chief burger flipper can be a psychopath to the junior burger flippers - it's not all about CEO's). They also bully anyone smaller, weaker or less fortunate than themselves. A lot of them do get locked up, but too many roam free.

ldd -> NoDebt Mon, 03/19/2018 - 00:12 Permalink

When you are taught what is right and what is wrong do you question it?

If we started saying this is that and that is this what would be the results?

A reign of steady and constant known vs a steady and constant unknown?

Why do our memories of the past not belong in the present?

Ikiru -> NoDebt Mon, 03/19/2018 - 00:19 Permalink

Agreed. I think the author is missing the point. In my opinion, the Russians are speaking to western people, not the corrupt leaders, when they expose the truth, and they're gaining credibility in the process. With the constant barrage of lies the West receives from the media and the imperialistic misdeeds constantly committed by the U.S. govt, Russia's best propaganda campaign is simply stating the truth.

grizfish Sun, 03/18/2018 - 23:25 Permalink

I'm expecting a false flag by the UK to disrupt delivery of LNG from Russia.

Headlines will read "Putin, with his new power has decided to cause millions to freeze to death in the UK."

FoggyWorld -> grizfish Sun, 03/18/2018 - 23:31 Permalink

Funny though as evil as Putin is painted out to be, he continued supplying Ukraine even when they weren't paying for their oil and gas.

But this endless made up stuff is bound to finally get to one of the more patient leaders on this planet.

[Mar 19, 2018] That it is just too Wile E. Coyote method of poinsoning

"I'm surprised they didn't happen to "find" the assassin's Russian passport lying on the ground next to the victims!"
Mar 19, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Bemused Observer -> DownWithYogaPants Sun, 03/18/2018 - 11:56 Permalink

Seriously...I think these 'conspiracy theorists' have been watching too many Hollywood movies.

This is what I want to SCREAM every time I hear this shit...Why the HELL would Russia, or anyone else, bother to use such a messy, traceable and complicated method to kill this guy? Especially when there are SO MANY WAYS it could have been done that wouldn't have garnered all the attention, and that would have left no traces? They could have sent someone to shove him in front of a train or something, or staged a 'botched robbery'.

Reminds me of the stupid assassination methods the CIA wanted to use on Castro...poisoning his beard? Really? Well, aside from the fact that it is just too 'Wile E. Coyote' to be taken seriously, did anyone ask, if such an assassin could get close enough to poison his beard, why he wouldn't go with a more dependable method?

Snaffew -> Bemused Observer Sun, 03/18/2018 - 16:43 Permalink

exactly why all the fingerprints of this assassination attempt point to the NSA/CIA. Which is more absurd...their methods or the gullible public?

An Shrubbery -> Bemused Observe r Mon, 03/19/2018 - 01:42 Permalink

+1 for "Wile E. Coyote method" lol

Snaffew -> pawn • Sun, 03/18/2018 - 16:41 Permalink

I blame the wildly dumbed down and complicit media here in the US and in our "allies" abroad. They spit out whatever the government feeds to them without a single ounce of effort to validate the stories they frantically preach to the ignorant public. Damn, I can't believe how many times people will be duped into trillion dollar wars and they still are die hard believers in the ethics and truthfulness of the US gov't. Morons---

dussasr -> Kafir Goyim • Sat, 03/17/2018 - 21:13 Permalink

It makes little sense that Russia would assassinate someone using a technique that would immediately implicate them. I'm surprised they didn't happen to "find" the assassin's Russian passport lying on the ground next to the victims! <

0

lakecity55 -> Kafir Goyim Sun, 03/18/2018 - 21:00 Permalink

The only "issue" the Atlanticists can bring up in the "Press" are CWs against the RF and Syria.

It's patently obvious the entire affair is a FF and made up out of a bolt of whole cloth.

The Atlanticists' claims are Pure Bullshit.

((They)) want Russia, and they will kill, lie, cheat and steal to get her back.

WE will pay the price unless they are stopped.

JohannSennefelder -> DaiRR Sun, 03/18/2018 - 07:41 Permalink

I disagree. If a government is going to terminate a spy they don't botch the job by letting him get to a hospital. In Putin's Russia they know how to terminate most efficiently. I may be wrong but this is a pretext for something more aggressive/dangerous.

I got a bad feeling about this situation...

philip88 -> JohannSennefelder Sun, 03/18/2018 - 10:33 Permalink

Me too...

Something big is coming..😱

Griffin -> JohannSennefelder Sun, 03/18/2018 - 13:36 Permalink

It is interesting that the incident took place only 12 km from Porton Down, a government run top secret facility that works on chemicals.

Maybe this was a accident, and the target was supposed to be something that would have had a more powerful impact.

It looks to me that its not entirely impossible that May may end up eating a big slice of humble pi.

lakecity55 -> Griffin Sun, 03/18/2018 - 21:02 Permalink

May is not going to like it when she comes out of her Bunker to find all of the UK a smoking nuclear wasteland.

"Shit! There's nobody left to boss around!!"

bh2 -> JohannSennefelder Sun, 03/18/2018 - 16:08 Permalink

Every war begins with a lie.

PeterLong -> DaiRR Sun, 03/18/2018 - 10:47 Permalink

And the proof that this attack ever happened is?

[Mar 19, 2018] Salisbury Hysteria Exposes the Chauvinism and Hypocrisy of British Elites

Notable quotes:
"... Everything they say is true of brexiters is actually far more true of them ..."
Mar 19, 2018 | russia-insider.com

Salisbury Hysteria Exposes the Chauvinism of British Elites Everything they say is true of brexiters is actually far more true of them

Crypto • 2 days ago ,

Nothing I have ever seen in my life is more ludicrous, more absurd and more unjust than this display in parliament.

1691 Crypto 2 days ago ,

Remember the MH17 tragedy. It was worst. The whole western world was screaming Russia/Putin.

[Mar 18, 2018] It Wasn't Russia! by Michael Shrimpton

Notable quotes:
"... As an agency they would be even less ..."
Mar 17, 2018 | www.veteranstoday.com

... ... ...

The secretiveness of the May government is not helping. However it looks as though the police officer who was also incapacitated, Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, who thankfully is on the road to recovery (as are the Skripals), was not the officer who found them slumped on the bench. It seems that he was incapacitated after he went to the Skripal's home, also in Salisbury. Since he was a detective, not a beat officer, that would make sense.

... ... ...

Although they have been very free with their accusations against President Putin, who faces re-election, the May government have been less than forthcoming in backing up their offensive allegations with evidence. They have not even identified the variant of Novichok used to try and murder the Skripals and DS Bailey. (Under the doctrine of transferred malice the intelligence officers who carried out the attack, almost certainly from GO2, are criminally responsible for the attempt to murder the officer.)

Moreover the May government has not made a sample available to the Russian government, as they are obliged to under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). They haven't even forwarded a sample to the highly competent Technical Secretariat of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, established under CWC Article VIII. The May government clearly has something to hide.

... ... ...

The Cui Bono principle

The 'who gains?' principle is a valuable intelligence analysis tool. President Putin had nothing whatsoever to gain by whacking Col Skripal. Although he was a convicted traitor he had been pardoned and exchanged in a spy swap. Moreover his daughter was living openly in Moscow. Col Skripal himself is reported to have had fairly recent contact with the Russian Embassy in Kensington Gardens.

Not even the old KGB ever went back on a spy swap. They would have regarded it as nekulturny . The SVR, Russia's external intelligence service, are highly professional. They're also very nice people. As an agency they would be even less likely than the KGB to go back on a spy-swap. No one would ever do a swap with them again.

... ... ...

[Mar 18, 2018] UK reluctance to file request to Russia under OPCW indicates their case is weak Lavrov

Mar 18, 2018 | www.rt.com

The UK's failure to send a request to Moscow over the Skripal case via Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) channels points to a lack of legal basis for a proper investigation, Russia's Foreign Minister said. "The fact, that they [UK officials] categorically rejects to file an official request and deliberately and arrogantly fan anti-Russian rhetoric in the public sphere bordering on hysteria, indicates that they clearly understand they have no formal pretext to go down a legal road," Lavrov said on Friday, referring to the British authorities' allegations that Russia, and, notably, President Vladimir Putin, were behind the plot to poison the former double agent and his daughter. Read more

'Highly likely' motto: West goes on offensive against Russia for Skripal poisoning

Instead, UK officials have tried to "move all this to the sphere of political rhetoric, to Russophobia in the hope that, as it was in many other cases, the West will align," Lavrov said.

The Russian top diplomat argued that British PM Theresa May's accusatory tirade in the Parliament, as well as the summoning of the Russian ambassador in the Foreign Office, cannot serve as a substitute for the formal proceedings envisaged in the Convention for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Claims made by British authorities to the contrary are "absolutely illiterate," Lavrov stressed, noting that the UK must file an official request in writing if it genuinely seeks to elicit the truth. For the moment being, Russia is still waiting for British authorities to submit such a request under the framework of the convention, he said.

The fact that the UK government is unwilling to question its own snap judgments should be a cause for concern in a society that prides itself as a democracy, Lavrov said. He was referring to the outrage that was sparked by Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn when he was heckled by the MP after he cautioned them against drawing instant conclusions in the case and asked for concrete evidence of Russia's culpability.

"So I think the right approach is to seek the evidence; to follow international treaties, particularly in relation to prohibited chemical weapons, because this was a chemical weapons attack, carried out on British soil," Corbyn's spokesman said following the debate, which led to him being ostracized by the media.

Read more
MPs retweet claim that Porton Down scientists can't identify nerve agent as Russian

On Thursday, Corbyn doubled down on his dissent, writing an op-ed for the Guardian that said: "To rush way ahead of the evidence being gathered by the police, in a fevered parliamentary atmosphere, serves neither justice nor our national security."

While UK Foreign Minister Boris Johnson said that the UK would allow the international OPCW experts in The Hague to review the British analysis of the sample, the UK refuses to enact the mechanism in the OPCW that calls for a thorough investigation, Lavrov said, adding that "if you appeal to this organization, you must comply with the provisions of the Convention that stipulate filing a request to us, because we are suspected of being a country of origin and even the country which had used this poisoning agent, and, providing us with samples of this agent, so we, together with OPCW experts, can analyze it."

However, "the British don't want to use any of this," he added, noting that when other countries express solidarity with the UK's stance, it looks like a "total sham and an insult to the common sense."

Meanwhile, Johnson claimed that London was "entirely in conformity with OPCW procedures" on Friday, alleging that the evidence of Russia's involvement in the incident is "overwhelming."

Like this story? Share it with a friend!

[Mar 18, 2018] Of A Type Developed By Liars by Craig Murray

Notable quotes:
"... The Russians were allegedly researching, in the "Novichok" program a generation of nerve agents which could be produced from commercially available precursors such as insecticides and fertilizers. ..."
"... My FCO source, like me, remembers the extreme pressure put on FCO staff and other civil servants to sign off the dirty dossier on Iraqi WMD, some of which pressure I recount in my memoir Murder in Samarkand. She volunteered the comparison to what is happening now, particularly at Porton Down, with no prompting from me. ..."
"... Separately I have written to the media office at OPCW to ask them to confirm that there has never been any physical evidence of the existence of Russian Novichoks, and the program of inspection and destruction of Russian chemical weapons was completed last year. ..."
"... OPCW inspectors have had full access to all known Russian chemical weapons facilities for over a decade – including those identified by the "Novichok" alleged whistleblower Mirzayanov – and last year OPCW inspectors completed the destruction of the last of 40,000 tons of Russian chemical weapons ..."
"... Israel has extensive stocks ..."
Mar 17, 2018 | original.antiwar.com
I have now received confirmation from a well placed FCO source that Porton Down scientists are not able to identify the nerve gas as being of Russian manufacture, and have been resentful of the pressure being placed on them to do so. Porton Down would only sign up to the formulation "of a type developed by Russia" after a rather difficult meeting where this was agreed as a compromise formulation. The Russians were allegedly researching, in the "Novichok" program a generation of nerve agents which could be produced from commercially available precursors such as insecticides and fertilizers. This substance is a "novichok" in that sense. It is of that type. Just as I am typing on a laptop of a type developed by the United States, though this one was made in China.

To anybody with a Whitehall background this has been obvious for several days. The government has never said the nerve agent was made in Russia, or that it can only be made in Russia. The exact formulation "of a type developed by Russia" was used by Theresa May in parliament, used by the UK at the UN Security Council, used by Boris Johnson on the BBC yesterday and, most tellingly of all, "of a type developed by Russia" is the precise phrase used in the joint communiqué issued by the UK, USA, France and Germany on Thursday :

This use of a military-grade nerve agent, of a type developed by Russia, constitutes the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War.

When the same extremely careful phrasing is never deviated from, you know it is the result of a very delicate Whitehall compromise. My FCO source, like me, remembers the extreme pressure put on FCO staff and other civil servants to sign off the dirty dossier on Iraqi WMD, some of which pressure I recount in my memoir Murder in Samarkand. She volunteered the comparison to what is happening now, particularly at Porton Down, with no prompting from me.

Separately I have written to the media office at OPCW to ask them to confirm that there has never been any physical evidence of the existence of Russian Novichoks, and the program of inspection and destruction of Russian chemical weapons was completed last year.

Did you know these interesting facts?

OPCW inspectors have had full access to all known Russian chemical weapons facilities for over a decade – including those identified by the "Novichok" alleged whistleblower Mirzayanov – and last year OPCW inspectors completed the destruction of the last of 40,000 tons of Russian chemical weapons

By contrast the program of destruction of US chemical weapons stocks still has five years to run

Israel has extensive stocks of chemical weapons but has always refused to declare any of them to the OPCW. Israel is not a state party to the Chemical Weapons Convention nor a member of the OPCW. Israel signed in 1993 but refused to ratify as this would mean inspection and destruction of its chemical weapons. Israel undoubtedly has as much technical capacity as any state to synthesize "Novichoks".

Until this week, the near universal belief among chemical weapons experts, and the official position of the OPCW, was that "Novichoks" were at most a theoretical research program which the Russians had never succeeded in actually synthesizing and manufacturing. That is why they are not on the OPCW list of banned chemical weapons.

Porton Down is still not certain it is the Russians who have apparently synthesized a "Novichok". Hence "Of a type developed by Russia". Note developed, not made, produced or manufactured.

It is very carefully worded propaganda. Of a type developed by liars.

UPDATE

This post prompted another old colleague to get in touch. On the bright side, the FCO have persuaded Boris he has to let the OPCW investigate a sample. But not just yet. The expectation is the inquiry committee will be chaired by a Chinese delegate. The Boris plan is to get the OPCW also to sign up to the "as developed by Russia" formula, and diplomacy to this end is being undertaken in Beijing right now.

I don't suppose there is any sign of the BBC doing any actual journalism on this?

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster, human rights activist, and former diplomat. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. The article is reprinted with permission from his website .

[Mar 18, 2018] #Novichok Hysteria MI6 fake news agent Sergei Skripal's Salisbury nerve agent provocation

Very impressive YouTube video. They make analogy with US Anthrax case.
Mar 16, 2018 | www.youtube.com

Novichok nonsense? MI6 fake news agent Sergei Skripal & fireplace salesman Gavin Williamson

Former US Army Psychological Warfare officer Scott Bennett, Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, Martin Summers, Tony
Gosling

www.thisweek.org.uk
Fri 16 March 2018

The Russian Ambassador to the UK is giving an interview now to RT's Anastasia Churkina about the chemical-poisoning of a former Russian spy allegations being made by PM Theresa May and the British government against Russia and President Putin.

The Main Points:

It is obvious the charges by the UK against Russia about this "poisoning" incident are false, and expose a deeper strategy of deceit to obtain political objectives. the British government is refusing to answer any questions, provide any material, invite international scientific inspections, and have tried to emotionally hyperventilate this fake story into a nightmare reality. Why? The Globalist UK-EU-US-SOROS types are desperate to ignite a war in order to hide in its flames. The "psychological operation" seems to be attempting to achieve the following objectives:

  1. The political-career stabilization of the establishment Prime Minister Theresa May, who has been slipping into madness and oblivion since BREXIT;
  2. The demonization of Russia as an easy enemy that distracts the public away from the slow destruction of civil liberties and rights and freedoms by the rising police state;
  3. The cultivation and preparation of the public mind to be receptive to increased domination and control by the government;
  4. The expansion of the "chemical weapon" narrative as a potential threat against "New York", as claimed by US UN Rep Nikki Haley, as well as other UK-US-NATO members;
  5. The potential "suspension" of the BREXIT and European Union break-up using this incident as a "call to reverse course and re-integrate the European Union with Britain and France as a matter of "continental security against Russia";
  6. The manipulation of American President Donald Trump to buy in and partner in the lie, and participate in the political war as a pre-text for the military one brewing;
  7. Justify increased military movement of weapons into Ukraine, Syria, and Yemen to try and counter Russia-Iran's success in the Syrian war against Wahhabi-Saudi-Israeli terrorists pushing ISIS/AL NUSRA to try and destabilize Syrian President Bashar Assad;
  8. The blow back will be a separation of the thinking people from the mindless idiots in society, and an increase in social distrust and hostility towards the politicians and media and government institutions fomenting instability and the destruction of personal civil liberty through manufactured national hysteria. Essentially they've cried wolf far too many times to be given any respect by truthful citizens.
YourEyeColours 1 day ago (edited)
les havell 13 hours ago

[Mar 18, 2018] Russia Expels 23 British Diplomats In Retaliation

Mar 18, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Having warned it would retaliate proportionately, this morning Russia did just that when it expelled 23 British diplomats - the same number as the UK kicked out a few days earlier as punishment for Moscow's alleged poisoning of a former double agent. It also ordered the closure of the UK consulate in St Petersburg and the Moscow British Council, a cultural and educational organization.

Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the British ambassador to Moscow and told him that the measures are "in response to the provocative actions of the British side and the unsubstantiated accusations" against Russia, the ministry said. Russia gave the British diplomats one week to leave. "If further actions of an unfriendly nature are taken against Russia, the Russian side reserves the right to take other retaliatory measures," the ministry said.

[Mar 18, 2018] Sean Hannity's time has come ... (irony)

Mar 18, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

turcopolier , 16 March 2018 at 07:44 PM

Laura

You like my comments on the Team of Sycophants? You have not seen what I will write about the Democrats. Pelosi? She is a self centered wretch enriched by her silicon valley admirers through no merit of her own who despises the people her father fought for. HC? I hope she is a drunk. I could like her better if she is. Her contempt for ordinary Americans who do not share her adolescent utopian revolutionary ideals is laughable. Perhaps Wellesley did that to her. My uncle endowed a chair there but I never liked him. pl

wisedupearly Ceo , 16 March 2018 at 08:05 PM
Trump seems unable to manage and keep a team of people of exceptional ability because he fears a cabal forming that will 'capture' him and steal his glory?

Hannity and Bolton are definitely his type of sycophants, distrusted by the establishment and desperate for power.

Matt , 16 March 2018 at 09:34 PM
Off-topic here....

Colonel Lang,

When will someone/something put a halt to this AIPAC/Israel/Neo-con march to war with Iran and possibly Russia?

I consider myself a Progressive who hates the establishment Democratic Party. The Russia hate is off the rails and dangerous. WTF is going on in this country? Have they lost their friggin minds?

Tyler said in reply to wisedupearly Ceo ... , 16 March 2018 at 09:37 PM
Cato,

Hmm yes. Trump has never displayed a habit of quickly shitcanning people if they don't live up to expectations throughout his life.

I'm sure your armchair pop-psychoanalysis through an MSNBC lens is totally on point.

turcopolier , 16 March 2018 at 09:58 PM
tyler

Your comment is obviously directed at me. pl

turcopolier , 16 March 2018 at 09:59 PM
james

Did I ask for your advice? Nevertheless, thanks. But a lot of the people here would not have recognized it as irony. pl

turcopolier , 16 March 2018 at 10:02 PM
ISL

My point. pl

Fred said in reply to Laura... , 16 March 2018 at 10:11 PM
Laura,

Hear! Hear! Even NPR agrees with.... Donald J. Trump:
"The claim Black and Hispanic unemployment are at or near record lows. The short answer Trump's numbers are right," ...... "Trump is right that African-American unemployment hit a record low in December. The unemployment rate for black Americans is currently 6.8 percent, the lowest level recorded since the government started keeping track in January 1972..... And he's also right that the Hispanic unemployment rate is down a point over the last year"

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/08/576552028/fact-check-trump-touts-low-unemployment-rates-for-african-americans-hispanics

outthere , 16 March 2018 at 10:22 PM
Larry Wilkerson writes:
"Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's defense minister, is scheduled to give the keynote address at the Jerusalem Post's conference in New York in April. The title of his address is published as "The Coming War With Iran." Any American citizen who believes this White House team will not involve the U.S. in Israel's war needs to check into a mental ward."
http://lobelog.com/the-most-important-hearings-of-the-young-century/
kooshy , 16 March 2018 at 10:23 PM
Colonel Lang I think our president wants and demands admirers and not advisers. With what I have experienced back here in Lotus Aters town, that self centred mentality fits with Beverly Hills star types, and Goldman Sachs fund managers
which the combination of this two personality brings to mind a CAA agent.
turcopolier , 16 March 2018 at 10:24 PM
outthere

Larry Wilkerson helped Powell sell out the US for favor at the WH. pl

catherine , 16 March 2018 at 10:55 PM

McCabe has been fired today....48 hrs before he was due to retire and be able to collect his 20 year pension....seems a little too vengeful to me.
Was there ever any real investigation into his alleged favoring of Hillary in the FBI investigation? I don't remember the details.
Leaky Ranger , 16 March 2018 at 11:08 PM
Former U.S. Army General Barry McCaffrey says, "Reluctantly I have concluded that President Trump is a serious threat to US national security. He is refusing to protect vital US interests from active Russian attacks. It is apparent that he is for some unknown reason under the sway of Mr Putin."
https://twitter.com/mccaffreyr3/status/974748724176941056
robt willmann , 16 March 2018 at 11:49 PM
And now, apparently on this Friday night, the Deputy Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, who is at this time perhaps not the official deputy director any more but who was on the payroll with accumulated vacation or sick leave or a similar such thing, was officially fired from the Bureau.

This is two days before he could retire with full benefits, as he turns 50 years of age on Sunday. Since he is most likely a civil service employee, even at his job as the number two person at the FBI, he would be covered by federal civil service law. I am not familiar with the federal process, but a civil service employee can usually contest the termination of employment, although it is in an "administrative proceeding", which has different rules than a lawsuit. The result of an administrative hearing can be appealed into a regular trial court in Texas, but with restrictions and limits on the rules of evidence and procedure that govern civil lawsuits. The federal rules regarding the appeal of an administrative ruling may be similar.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/sessions-fires-mccabe-he-can-retire-n856751

The battle lines with the "special counsel" Mueller are being more clearly drawn, as McCabe is quoted in the article as saying--

"This attack on my credibility is one part of a larger effort not just to slander me personally, but to taint the FBI, law enforcement, and intelligence professionals more generally. It is part of this Administration's ongoing war on the FBI and the efforts of the Special Counsel investigation, which continue to this day. Their persistence in this campaign only highlights the importance of the Special Counsel's work."

The situation creates the classic case of McCabe as a "disgruntled former employee". Everybody knows what that means....

turcopolier , 16 March 2018 at 11:50 PM
Leaky Ranger

He is NOT a former general mon petit connard. He is a retired general. pl

turcopolier , 16 March 2018 at 11:53 PM
Catherine

Let the investigation begin! Ecce homo. pl

outthere said in reply to turcopolier ... , 17 March 2018 at 12:21 AM
I remember well Powell's performance at the UN with CIA director literally backing him up. I knew he was lying, it was clear to anyone who bothered to read Knight Ridder.
Wilkerson's role was never clear to me, but I accept your evaluation.
mikee said in reply to robt willmann... , 17 March 2018 at 12:33 AM
The OIG found that McCabe made unauthorized disclosures to the new media then lied about while under oath. Flynn is probably getting drunk tonight.
J , 17 March 2018 at 04:59 AM
Colonel,

Regarding Mattis:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/men-left-die-gen-james-mattis-controversial-wartime/story?id=44018222

Barbara Ann , 17 March 2018 at 07:05 AM
If the Boss surrounds himself with sycophants, were are told what to expect:
Therefore a wise prince ought to hold a third course by choosing the wise men in his state, and giving to them only the liberty of speaking the truth to him, and then only of those things of which he inquires, and of none others; but he ought to question them upon everything, and listen to their opinions, and afterwards form his own conclusions. With these councillors, separately and collectively, he ought to carry himself in such a way that each of them should know that, the more freely he shall speak, the more he shall be preferred; outside of these, he should listen to no one, pursue the thing resolved on, and be steadfast in his resolutions. He who does otherwise is either overthrown by flatterers, or is so often changed by varying opinions that he falls into contempt.

http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/217/the-prince/5603/chapter-23-how-flatterers-should-be-avoided/

r whitman , 17 March 2018 at 07:55 AM
Come on, all you people. This has been the most entertaining soap opera in Washington since Bill Clintons zipper trouble. There has not been any real damage to the country (and maybe a few benefits) and may not be in the future.

Pat, us Democrats are not bad people, we just have shitty leaders and no vision, but in that regard, the Republicans are catching up.

wisedupearly Ceo , 17 March 2018 at 07:57 AM
McCabe is brutally fired a day short of his 20 years, Sessions is humiliated on a daily basis, Tillerson was shafted everytime he went overseas trying to fix Trump's mistakes. Now, how many in the Trump administration and in government are going to 'work for the president' as opposed to 'working for themselves'.
Fear is not the tool of the effective manager.
turcopolier , 17 March 2018 at 08:06 AM
r. Whitman

Yes. Some of you are not bad people. Some Republicans are not bad people. pl

turcopolier , 17 March 2018 at 08:14 AM
j

Marineland is its own country. Army Special Forces have much the same mentality. Bing West is also a USMC fanatic. pl

Lars , 17 March 2018 at 08:33 AM
There may be plenty of irony, but that does not make it implausible. We have witnessed a progression of lamer and lamer ducks in this administration. Why not just use a video substitute and let Fox News take over White House operations?

The firing of McCabe shows how petty Trump is and his lack of a moral code. It is true that not all Republicans are bad. My wife, until recently, was one all her adult life.

I went to my monthly science lecture last evening, conducted by a neighbor, and he will rejoin the federal government this fall as a Senior Science Advisor.( He spent 30 years before retirement in that capacity) I would wish that more people as capable as he is would help run the country, regardless of the dumb people that get elected.

The good news about the dismal current condition is that standards may be raised in the future in an effort to make this just an educational interlude.

turcopolier , 17 March 2018 at 08:48 AM
outthere

Wilkerson told me (through a mutual friend) well be fore the UN debacle that he and Powell had the situation under control and that I should shut up. It was also Wilkerson who persuaded Powell not to take any intel analysts to CIA when they went to be briefed by Tenet and company. why did he do that? Hey! Why would such semi-divine beings as he and Powell need expert help? pl

Nancy K said in reply to turcopolier ... , 17 March 2018 at 09:03 AM
I agree it is time for Pelosi and Schumer to retire. The Democratic party needs new blood.
Barbara Ann -> Lars... , 17 March 2018 at 09:26 AM
Lars

"I would wish that more people as capable as he is would help run the country, regardless of the dumb people that get elected."

Niccolo would argue that wise advisers will not help. I tend to agree.

Babak Makkinejad -> kooshy... , 17 March 2018 at 09:43 AM
Rare indeed are leaders who surround themselves by those better and smarter than themselves; Yelstin was one such, Gorbachev was not.
SRW said in reply to turcopolier ... , 17 March 2018 at 09:50 AM
I am no big fan of Pelosi but she has been a very effective leader as this Atlantic article states. Just one example, she very effectively stopped Bush junior's Social Security privatization plan.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-nancy-pelosi-problem/554048/

A. Pols said in reply to catherine... , 17 March 2018 at 09:51 AM
Ah, but firing him days before his pension vested is beautiful. Too vengeful? I think not; it's exactly what he deserved. Why let a DB like that glean the rewards of double or even triple dipping?
J , 17 March 2018 at 09:52 AM
So Wilkerson had/has no conscience. WH Favors? How shallow can a person be? WH Favors? Blink, blink? Why Powell didn't slap the dog shit out of Wilkerson I'll never understand.

Back to Mattis, what was he waiting for (saying he needed more 'intel' for extraction of the wounded/dying?), a note sent through Fedex or UPS? To leave men to die in the field the way Mattis did. Arghhh.

I also have not seen anywhere where Mattis experienced combat except from a 'comfortable' position. That explains a lot why Mattis seems to be so gung ho on getting U.S. into another unnecessary war.

Leaky Ranger , 17 March 2018 at 10:00 AM
Former/Retired CIA Director John O. Brennan says, "When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you."
https://twitter.com/JohnBrennan/status/974978856997224448
Morongobill , 17 March 2018 at 10:05 AM
"Brutally fired?" More like he got his just deserts!
Jonst said in reply to wisedupearly Ceo ... , 17 March 2018 at 10:58 AM
Spare me the adjectives......he'fired. And if, significant if, he is guilty of what the published reports say is, if that is confirmed by an independent inspector general's report, and the text of that report matters here, then to hell with him he deserves to be fired.
TV said in reply to wisedupearly Ceo ... , 17 March 2018 at 10:58 AM
If Sessions had not (wrongly, it turns out) recused himself and cleaned out the DOJ (as expected) Trump would not have been riding him.
If Tillerson had followed Trump's direction on Iran, he probably would still be in his job.
As for McCabe, that's life in the fast lane.
He was too clever by half and got in over his head.
If anything, this whole McCabe/Strozk/Page and whoever else attempt at "plotting" shows the incompetence of these pinheads.
If Strozk was the FBI's top CI guy (texting like a teenage girl), no wonder the Chinese and Russians are running wild.
But to truly drain the swamp Trump has to get rid of hundreds, maybe thousands, more of the self-enriching parasite class.
TV said in reply to turcopolier ... , 17 March 2018 at 11:01 AM
Col.:
Guess that you and Wilkerson aren't exchanging Christmas cards.
Tosk59 said in reply to outthere... , 17 March 2018 at 11:06 AM
outthere,

For years Wilkerson spent great effort providing Colin Powell 'cover' on the allegations that he was in the loop on all the 'enhanced interrogation tactics' (torture), while Powell himself was quiet on the issue. And when CP was pushed he was vague e.g. stating that he didn't have "sufficient memory recall" about the meetings referenced; that he had participated in " many meetings on how to deal with detainees "; and that he was not "aware of anything that we discussed in any of those meetings that was not considered legal "

Of course it later came out that he was at the meetings, knew exactly what was going on, but said nothing. The bottom line? Wilkerson lied and lied...

http://www.ph2dot1.com/2011/02/great-quotes_21.html

DianaLC said in reply to turcopolier ... , 17 March 2018 at 11:09 AM
Well, if all the reports of her liquor bills for supplying the plane on tax-paid trips back and forth to California when she was speaker of the House are true, she IS a drunk. And on top of that I worry that all the Botox is now really affecting her brain.

She and Hillary really give being a woman something to cringe about. I, as a woman, would like her better if she joined the transgender movement so as to prove they aren't just voting as their husbands tell them to.

Flavius , 17 March 2018 at 11:41 AM
Brennan, Comey, Clapper; McCabe, Strzok, Page and others unknown politicized the Intelligence community through incompetence and malfeasance and left it a smoking wreck. They are delusional if they think that their contemptible bit of work has not been recognized for what it is by both active and retired members of that community.
It has almost nothing to do with Trump. John Brennan is an ass. In fact Trump's flailing around and leadership by tweet has only delayed the day of reckoning for the FBI with the CIA hiding in the tall grass and still unscathed. Lay that on Trump and Pompeo. Wray, a Trump appointment...wait, who is Wray and where is he?
I would call Trump's swamp draining efforts thus far a piss poor job and his FP efforts have been plagued by piss poor appointments and piss poor performance. He himself is more in the swamp than out of it and a Bolton appointment would put him in it over his ears.
Trump right now has one thing going for him: he's not Clinton; and that advantage is rapidly disappearing. He either stops behaving like a NY real estate lout with a pinky ring or he's going to blow himself and who knows what else to kingdom come.
Eric Newhill , 17 March 2018 at 11:53 AM
I despise the leftists that are attempting to take control of the country and, to the extent that the Democrat party has aligned with them (a large extent), I despise them too. Tucker Carlson is doing a fantastic job countering the left and I guess Hannity plays an important role in keeping anti-lefty outrage at the boiling point. We need people like him to keep morale high for the foot soldiers in the culture war. He isn't supposed to be a source of input for the generals.

That said, at a personal level, Hannity is, to me, an ignorant blow hard and he gives me a headache every time I listen to him for more than a minute or two. That is what politics in the USA has come down to; escalating rhetoric and counter rhetoric. If one side became more circumspect then the other side would drown them out with wild rants. So they all rant on with increasing fury. That is Hannity's role in all of this.

People here defending McCabe need to have their heads and moral compasses examined. I see how it goes. No one in DC can ever be punished for breaking the law because one of the parties will declare it to be politically motivated and 50% of the country (+/-) will buy into that narrative. I have seen several comments by former FBI stating that McCabe got what he deserved.

There are other ways to interpret the departure of McMaster (if it's real). The Boss and the section chief have some differences of opinion or style, but they aren't hostile to each other at a fundamental level. The section chief agrees to depart amicably and goes to work in a different area to which he carries and propagates the vision of the Boss. Post departure, the Boss and Chief maintain communications. I've seen this happen in private sector companies. I think this approach is unsettling to those with traditional views of how a bureaucratic career works.

Dr. Puck , 17 March 2018 at 12:05 PM
Thank you Colonel. Your most recent short hand about POTUS being a boss, and being so absolutely, mixes well with the previous and pithy, 'that the deal is everything, and there are no fouls in service to achieving that everything.'

It would be interesting to learn how that classic boss=god top down approach mixes with the military approach of the various 21st century generals who have come into the administration. There are a number of different and basic top down approaches in the private sector.

Isn't retired Army General 'Jerry' Boykins available?

Thomas , 17 March 2018 at 12:16 PM
"When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you."


My. my so Totsky of him.

If Evil Tzar Vladimir IV is selected again on Sunday, the Cruelly Clueless Crew better hope and pray he doesn't drop the Doomsday Dime or when "America" sees what they were a part of on July 17th 2014, well, "...America will triumph over you" will become a prophetic fulfillment.

Keep on talking.

J -> Leaky Ranger... , 17 March 2018 at 12:17 PM
Why are you quoting the words of a Traitor named John Brennan? He committed 'Sedition' against a duly elected/sworn in POTUS called Trump. Sedition is under the 'Treason' Statute which upon conviction is punishable by death, and there is no statute of time limitations. What Brennan did, he can be incarcerated for up until his dying day! Brennan hung himself with his own rope, and he's too narcissistic arrogant to realize it.

On another note it appears that the Trump dossier was created, financed, and orchestrated by MI6, which is (if I'm not mistaken) a U.K. 'Governmental Agency', which by defination the British Government actively conspired to overthrown a sitting U.S. President.

So.....do we now get to squash MI6 for the arrogant gnat they really are?

May owes Trump an formal official apology for MI6's actions of war.

J , 17 March 2018 at 12:31 PM
Colonel,

There are rumors that the double agent GRU Colonel Skripal was offering the Russian Government to turn states evidence against MI6 and provide the Russian Government with all the 'stuff' about the MI6 created Trump Dossier in return for his being able to return to Russia to see his daughter married.

All signs point to Skripal's poisoning was orchestrated and performed by the British Government (spelled MI6/MI5) to hide the fact that the Trump Dossier was created by the British Government (spelled MI6) to overthrow a sitting U.S. President.

The Russian Government had already convicted/incarcerated/realeased Skripal of Treason, they would have had nothing to gain by poisoning British MI6 Asset double agent GRU Colonel Skripal.

J , 17 March 2018 at 12:52 PM
Colonel,

My bad, not only does British PM May owe U.S. President Trump a formal apology for the British Government's (spelled MI6) attempted overthrow of a sitting U.S. President with their Trump Dossier, but also the Queen of England Queen Elizabeth herself and British King Apparent Prince William himself, as May acts as their formal agent. The sitting Queen/King of England rules England, not the PM as the PM are nothing more than their face persona agents.

Portis , 17 March 2018 at 01:18 PM
The fellow at Conservative Treehouse described the Mattis/Trump row (several days before it blew over) as a "Black Hat Hunting" exercise. Trump and Mattis put out the row story in a compartmentalized fashion in order to barium meal the leaker in the NSC. Sounds plausible.
Sid_finster said in reply to turcopolier ... , 17 March 2018 at 01:19 PM
Speaking only for myself, just because I despise mainstream Team D does not mean that I support Team R, and vice versa.
Babak Makkinejad , 17 March 2018 at 01:46 PM
All

In the meantime, weapons get more efficient

http://www.bbc.com/russian/features-43429973

catherine said in reply to A. Pols... , 17 March 2018 at 02:25 PM

''Ah, but firing him days before his pension vested is beautiful''

The timing is the point. If his firing was justifiable it should have been done much earlier.

''Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.''

Trump is racking up a pile of enemies.

VietnamVet , 17 March 2018 at 03:30 PM
Colonel,

I really thought that Andrew McCabe would be allowed to retire and disappear into obscurity. Instead Jeff Session just took a shot at the FBI, Five Eyes intelligence community and the Media Mogul coup plotters. All Clinton, Bush and Obama appointees and supporters must go to the ground. The federal government will seize up. Anyone who thinks their future is at risk has a reason to assist invoking the 25th Amendment. The Trump Family will fight back. This is the start of an oligarch mob war fought by Deplorables against the ruling credentialed Consiglieres.

Meanwhile, even the NewsHour reports on the threat of a new Hezbollah-Israel conflict which will inevitably escalate into a shooting war with Iran and then draw in nuclear armed Russia.

The Gates of Hell are opening.

Charles said in reply to Barbara Ann ... , 17 March 2018 at 03:31 PM
Ah if only the USA were Florence in the 1400's.
While many have read and excoriated the Prince, few have studied the sources from whence that little handbook was drawn.
Enjoy:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Discourses_on_Livy
In my own little library is one of his lesser works:'
https://www.amazon.com/Art-War-Niccolo-Machiavelli/dp/0226500403/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1521313961&sr=8-12&keywords=machiavelli+war
Given the evidence of his career, it is obvious that Pres. Trump is well versed in the art of manipulating sycophants. Rich men attract parasites like magnets attract iron filings. Since Pres. Trump was still rich when he won the presidency after 40+ years being a sycophant magnet, I think he is able to fluster them now as he has for decades. It is also obvious over his career that he picks good people for the job he wants done and when it is done he moves on to the next job and the next batch of appropriate people.
Granted this is not the norm for politicians, but it is for builders. You don't use the foundation or utilities contractor for the stucco work nor the stucco contractor for the interior decoration work. These things should be obvious but the talking heads insist on trying to put Pres. Trump into a politician pigeonhole. He doesn't because he isn't.
It is enjoyable that the talking heads still insist on taking his every word literally while simultaneously refusing to allow that he is a serious man with an excellent control of language and nuance when it serves him.
steve said in reply to Fred... , 17 March 2018 at 03:52 PM
Trump claimed that all those numbers, from the same sources, were fake when he was running for office.

Steve

Sleepybear51902 , 17 March 2018 at 04:07 PM
"Provocation will be used as pretext by #US & allies to launch strikes on military and govt infrastructures in #Syria, we are registering the signs of the preparations. Strike groups of the cruise missile carriers been formed in Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, Red Sea" - @mod_russia

https://twitter.com/Russ_Warrior/status/975013286667325440

Fred -> steve... , 17 March 2018 at 04:30 PM
steve,

You mean Black and Hispanic unemployment were great under Barack? Why oh why did those voters abandon the democratic candidate. I'm sure the Russians make African American's stay home on election day. Hilary 2020!

catherine said in reply to Charles ... , 17 March 2018 at 04:37 PM
''These things should be obvious but the talking heads insist on trying to put Pres. Trump into a politician pigeonhole''

Well he's sort of like a political pigeon playing chess...he struts onto the board, knocks over all the pieces, sh-ts on the board and declares himself the winner.

But the game continues.

Trump says Mueller better not cross his red line and get into his business.

So Mueller crosses Trump's red line:

2 days ago - WASHINGTON -- The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has subpoenaed the Trump Organization business records in recent weeks to turn over documents, including some related to Russia, according to two people briefed on the matter. The order is the first known instance of the special counsel demanding records ....

So yesterday Trump's attorney says :

''"I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe's boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt dossier,"

Next move?

BillWade said in reply to catherine... , 17 March 2018 at 04:42 PM
Catherine, it's possible they were giving McCabe, right up until the last minute, some time to make some statements that might mitigate his dilemna.
Laura said in reply to turcopolier ... , 17 March 2018 at 05:35 PM
I think we are all past the "there is no difference between the parties" rhetoric. There IS a difference...and the consistent damage across the board being done by the GOP. I have no doubt...and, as a historian, NO doubt...that the Democrats can screw up just as badly. They do, however, come from a very different place---and it has the virtue of being much more protective of the people and land of the USA.

I know we come from different life experiences, Pat, but our country is seriously at risk and it will be the differences between the parties that will count from here on out until that day when we can all start pulling in the same direction.

Laura said in reply to Fred... , 17 March 2018 at 05:38 PM
There is a certain amount of demographic inevitability going on here. All to the good for some of the marginalized Americans. I don't think Trump (or anyone) can really claim credit....although I do find Trump being factually correct about something, quite refreshing. Remember---"coincidence is not causation."
turcopolier , 17 March 2018 at 05:46 PM
laura

ah, yes the "end to white America syndrome" (ETWAS) actually, a desire for minorty majority is racist. pl

[Mar 18, 2018] Labour MPs who had decided Moscow was "unequivocally" to blame were "baying for blood"

Notable quotes:
"... Chris Williamson, the Labour MP for Derby North, said Labour MPs who had decided Moscow was "unequivocally" to blame were "baying for blood" and he suggested they face de-selection. ..."
Mar 18, 2018 | telegraph.co.uk

But a key ally of Jeremy Corbyn has suggested moderate Labour MPs who blame Russia for spy poisoning are "enemies" who should be deselected.

Chris Williamson, the Labour MP for Derby North, said Labour MPs who had decided Moscow was "unequivocally" to blame were "baying for blood" and he suggested they face de-selection.

And the Kremlin also ramped up its language, launching a withering response to Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson, who had suggested Russia should "go away and shut up".

Major-General Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman at Russia's defence ministry, accused Mr Williamson of engaging in "market wench talk", adding that it reflected his "intellectual impotency".

[Mar 18, 2018] In 1993 interview one of the Novichok scientists, Vladimir Uglev said that the compounds were successfully synthesised and tested, and would be easy for others to produce as long as they had the technology. He also makes some references to corruption and deceit in the Soviet military research system

Mar 18, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

Jiusito , March 17, 2018 at 22:24

I'm struggling to keep up!

Have you seen this, Craig? See pp18ff. http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a333126.pdf

Jiusito , March 17, 2018 at 22:33

Sorry, I should have said: it's an interview of one of the Novichok scientists, Vladimir Uglev, done in 1993. He says that the compounds were successfully synthesised and tested, and would be easy for others to produce as long as they had the technology. He also makes some references to corruption and deceit in the Soviet military research system.

Je , March 17, 2018 at 22:27

There's a whole load of literature on this. This one:

https://academic.oup.com/jat/article/39/2/96/763160

says "Organophosphate nerve agents (OPNAs) are some of the most widely used and proliferated chemical warfare agents. As evidenced by recent events in Syria, these compounds remain a serious military and terrorist threat to human health because of their toxicity and the ease with which they can be used, produced and stored.

The theoretical possibilities for nerve agents derived from the Schedule 1.A.1 and 1.A.3 core structures exceed 270000"

This article says "Russia's chemical weapons commander was a Mossad target"

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5172264,00.html

Russia's stockpile being destroyed is a red herring. This is tiny amounts of nerve agent that anyone who can purchase the commonly available ingredients can make – provided they have the technical knowhow – and that's a huge proviso. Russia invented these and could do it. The Israelis could do it too.

May is surely being sincere – there's no reason to think otherwise. We come back to who wants to kill this Russian "traitor" and b) the recently strangled person at the top of Russia's most wanted list. Russia having form for these things doesn't help their denials

Anonymous , March 17, 2018 at 22:30

The Iranian paper is very interesting. Thye ran some lab syntheses of Novichok compounds using two separate precursors (presumably the so-called 'safe binary agents') at low levels to minimise exposure. They say nothing about the effectiveness of combining the two compounds in the variable conditions of pressure, humidity and temperature in a non-lab environment.

One of the so-called 'safe' binary components they utilised is methylphosphonic difluoride. This is used in other binary cw weapons (eg M687 artillery shell) to produce sarin or soran. Rather than being safe in the common sense, it is described as reactive and corrosive (not surprising given it contains fluorine). It may cause burns, is rapidly absorbed through the skin and may cause symptoms of mild nerve agent exposure. It strikes me that rather than going through the rigamarole of relying on exposure untested uncontrolled binary agents, exposure to methylphosphonic difluoride may be sufficient. It is also a standard cw component so it could be produced almost anywhere with suitable lab facilities.

Anonymous , March 17, 2018 at 22:41

Further reading reveals more details. It is not simply a malter of combining to two 'safe' precursor copmpounds and bingo! – lots of nasty cw nerve agent. They are mixed together in the presence of a third chemical to produce an intermediate compound which is then converted to the desired nerve agent by the presence of 'alcohols'. This is certainly a long way from the Clown Car comedy description of how these things are supposed to work. This also suggests that whatever was used to poison the people, it was almost certainly not a nerve agent derived from novichok compounds released haphazardly in the house, restaurant, etc.

Dec , March 17, 2018 at 23:30

Craig, you must read the paper the article cites. Relevant quotes are:

"All the chemicals required for the microsynthesis of O-alkylN-[bis(dimethylamino)methylidene]-P-methylphosphonami-dates were purchased from Sigma-Aldrich (St. Louis, MO,USA), Fluka (Neu-Ulm, Germany), and Merck (Darmstadt,Germany), and were used as received. Methylphosphonicdifluoride (Scheme 1, cpd 1) was synthesized by use of amethod described elsewhere.[18]Isopropanol-d6was preparedby reduction of acetone-d6by sodium borohydride."

Interpretation: trivial to obtain ingredients. Next we have the preparation itself. After some simple moves you can make with standard benchtop equipment we have the following line about safety:

"It should be noted that, due to the extreme toxicityof these materials, the separation and purification of CWC-related chemical are very difficult and thereforeshould be carried out only by a trained professional in an efficient fume cupboard equipped with an active charcoal filtration system."

So all you need is a slightly better than standard fume cupboard!

Not just another country, any fucking polytechnic can make this stuff in small quantities.

[Mar 18, 2018] On Not Being Refuted by Craig Murray

Notable quotes:
"... I am aware however of many provocations carried out by NATO close to and even within Russian borders. The U.K. seems to be teeming with Yeltsin-era plutocrats such as Bill Browder who have been sustaining a drumbeat of 'emnity' towards Putin and the Russians for the last five years at least and no doubt have been applying their ill-gotten largesse to U.K. politicians. ..."
"... FSB/GRU or whoever, they do have a track record. It just isn't _this_ track record. The MO has changed radically, from precise, targeted and fairly discreet, to a vast mess of colateral damage without even a fatality to show for it, despite the claim that they used the most lethal poison in the world. ..."
"... Still no apparent motive, no obvious benefit for mother Russia, and no clear identification of the agent, much less its source. ..."
"... Compared to this, evidence for Iraqi WMD was rock solid. But by all means, let's thunder away with outraged self-righteousness on the world stage. ..."
"... The Novichok agent is produced in other country's than in Soviet Union, they have at least acknowledged it. They Novichok agent today at Totalförsvarets forskningsinstituts, in Sweden! ..."
"... "Every time the west notices Russia's wanting to be a "good neighbor" – about which the west really couldn't care less, Russia makes herself more vulnerable, more prone to be accused and attacked and more slandered." ..."
"... Great reporting Craig and a devastating indictment of UK journalism. So why are May, Johnson and Williamson spouting misleading claims? ..."
"... I cannot believe the tories are daft enough to want war with Russia but I do think they want to divert the funds that could be used to mitigate austerity straight into our arms industry and dwindling military. Williamson has been on that track for the last few months. ..."
"... Of course Corbyn has had some success with voters and whipping up anti-Russia hysteria and using it to blacken Corbyn with the electorate is a handy bonus. "Standing up to Putin" is depicted as playing well for May in the media, another bonus. ..."
"... Will it fizzle out now the Russians have done their tit for tat expulsions? Is a chemical weapons false flag about to happen in Syria to justify more coalition bombing? Who knows? ..."
Mar 18, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

Canexpat , March 17, 2018 at 19:37

" a track record of emnity" Care to expand on this? I am unaware of any emnity towards the UK on the part of the Russian Federation in recent years.

I am aware however of many provocations carried out by NATO close to and even within Russian borders. The U.K. seems to be teeming with Yeltsin-era plutocrats such as Bill Browder who have been sustaining a drumbeat of 'emnity' towards Putin and the Russians for the last five years at least and no doubt have been applying their ill-gotten largesse to U.K. politicians.

Educate me. Perhaps I haven't been watching the right television.

BTW Did Israel have a motive to destabilise the U.S. when they attacked the U.S.S. Liberty?

Loftwork , March 17, 2018 at 20:33

FSB/GRU or whoever, they do have a track record. It just isn't _this_ track record. The MO has changed radically, from precise, targeted and fairly discreet, to a vast mess of colateral damage without even a fatality to show for it, despite the claim that they used the most lethal poison in the world.

Still no apparent motive, no obvious benefit for mother Russia, and no clear identification of the agent, much less its source.

Compared to this, evidence for Iraqi WMD was rock solid. But by all means, let's thunder away with outraged self-righteousness on the world stage. Good reviews and trebles all around, eh?

GK , March 17, 2018 at 19:23

The Novichok agent is produced in other country's than in Soviet Union, they have at least acknowledged it. They Novichok agent today at Totalförsvarets forskningsinstituts, in Sweden!

"Det är inte möjligt att Sverige är källan till nervgiftet Novitjok som användes mot den tidigare ryske dubbelagenten Sergej Skripal och hans dotter, säger kemvapenexperten Rikard Norlin till DN.

Anledningen är att nervgift endast finns på Totalförsvarets forskningsinstituts avdelning för CBRN-skydd i Umeå.

– Vi har bra koll på våra substanser och redovisar allt till OPCW, organisationen för förbud mot kemiska vapen, säger Norlin till tidningen."

http://omni.se/expert-nervgiftet-kan-inte-ha-kommit-fran-sverige/a/gPyqqa

Ben , March 17, 2018 at 19:32

"Every time the west notices Russia's wanting to be a "good neighbor" – about which the west really couldn't care less, Russia makes herself more vulnerable, more prone to be accused and attacked and more slandered."

*CHOKE!

http://thesaker.is/russias-reaction-to-the-insults-of-the-west-is-political-suicide/

Phil Espin , March 17, 2018 at 19:35

Great reporting Craig and a devastating indictment of UK journalism. So why are May, Johnson and Williamson spouting misleading claims?

I cannot believe the tories are daft enough to want war with Russia but I do think they want to divert the funds that could be used to mitigate austerity straight into our arms industry and dwindling military. Williamson has been on that track for the last few months.

£48 mill for Porton Down for agreeing to weasel words is just for starters. Cheap compared to £1 bill for the DUP. Of course Corbyn has had some success with voters and whipping up anti-Russia hysteria and using it to blacken Corbyn with the electorate is a handy bonus. "Standing up to Putin" is depicted as playing well for May in the media, another bonus.

Will it fizzle out now the Russians have done their tit for tat expulsions? Is a chemical weapons false flag about to happen in Syria to justify more coalition bombing? Who knows?

Once Putin's 1 March speech sinks in all we'll be left with by the Autumn is a clamour that Britain must spend more on defence. Or give up Brexit and join the EU military?

[Mar 18, 2018] Skripal case is very reminiscent of the MH17 campaign

Mar 18, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Posted by: the pessimist | Mar 16, 2018 2:03:28 PM | 21

Very reminiscent of the MH17 campaign that was used to bully the reluctant Europeans into imposing sanctions on Russia. Accusations were made and a narrative put forward immediately without presenting clear evidence or waiting for an investigation. Through repetition this narrative has become dogma in the West despite the fact that supporting evidence has still not been forthcoming. It seems that after 9-11 it became clear that quickly putting out a narrative, with the support of the press, and demonizing anyone with any public stature who questions the basic story could be successful, even when there were thousands of eye witnesses and many flaws in the official explanation. The facts, or what really happened no longer matter once the narrative has taken root.

My question is what kinds of threats are being used to keep potential dissenters in line now. French banks were punished over the mistrial deal and it was abandoned. Now the stakes seem to be higher and the risk of defections has increased, so what is the stick?

[Mar 18, 2018] UK's claims questioned: doubts voiced about source of Salisbury novichok by Ewen MacAskill

Notable quotes:
"... The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who visited the site at Nukus, said it had been dismantled with US help. He is among those advocating scepticism about the UK placing blame on Russia. ..."
"... In a blog post , he wrote: "The same people who assured you Saddam Hussein had WMDs now assure you Russian 'novichok' nerve agents are being wielded by Vladimir Putin to attack people on British soil." ..."
"... The UK government case rests not just on its argument that novichok was developed in Russia, but what it says is past form, a record of Russian state-sponsored assassination of former spies. ..."
"... Murray, in a phone interview, is undeterred, determined to challenge the government line, in spite of having been subjected to a level of abuse on social media he had not experienced before. ..."
"... "There is no evidence it was Russia. I am not ruling out that it could be Russia, though I don't see the motive. I want to see where the evidence lies," Murray said. "Anyone who expresses scepticism is seen as an enemy of the state." ..."
May 15, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
The question now is whether all of Russia's chemical weapons were destroyed and accounted for. Theresa May – having identified the nerve agent used in the Salisbury attack as novichok, developed in Russia – told the Commons on Wednesday that Russia had offered no explanation as to why it had "an undeclared chemical weapons programme in contravention of international law". Jeremy Corbyn introduced a sceptical note, questioning whether there was any evidence as to the location of its production.

The exchanges provoked a debate echoing the one that preceded the 2003 invasion of Iraq over whether UN weapons inspectors had overseen the destruction of all the weapons of mass destruction in the country or whether Saddam Hussein had retained secret hidden caches.

On social media, there were arguments that the novichok could have come from some part of the former Soviet Union other than Russia, such as Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan or Ukraine, or some non-state group, maybe criminals.

The years following the fall of the Berlin Wall were chaotic, with chemical weapons laboratories and storage sites across the Soviet Union abandoned by staff who were no longer being paid. Security was almost non-existent, leaving the sites at the mercy of criminal gangs or disenchanted staff looking to supplement their income.

"Could somebody have smuggled something out?" Amy Smithson, a US-based biological and chemical weapons expert, said to Reuters. "I certainly wouldn't rule that possibility out, especially a small amount and particularly in view of how lax the security was at Russian chemical facilities in the early 1990s."

It took almost a decade before order was restored, in part through stockpiles being transferred to Russia from other parts of the former Soviet Union and in part through help from US and other western experts.

Novichok was developed at a laboratory complex in Shikhany, in central Russia, according to a British weapons expert, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, and a Russian chemist involved in the chemical weapons programme, Vil Mirzayanov, who later defected to the US. Mirzayanov said the novichok was tested at Nukus, in Uzbekistan.

The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who visited the site at Nukus, said it had been dismantled with US help. He is among those advocating scepticism about the UK placing blame on Russia.

In a blog post , he wrote: "The same people who assured you Saddam Hussein had WMDs now assure you Russian 'novichok' nerve agents are being wielded by Vladimir Putin to attack people on British soil."

A Russian lawyer, Boris Kuznetsov, told Reuters he was offering to pass to the British authorities a file he said might be relevant to the Salisbury case. It details an incident when poison hidden in a phone receiver killed a Russian banker and his secretary in 1995. The poison came from an employee at the state chemical facility who sold it through intermediaries – in an ampule placed in a presentation case – to help reduce his debts.

The UK government case rests not just on its argument that novichok was developed in Russia, but what it says is past form, a record of Russian state-sponsored assassination of former spies.

Murray, in a phone interview, is undeterred, determined to challenge the government line, in spite of having been subjected to a level of abuse on social media he had not experienced before.

"There is no evidence it was Russia. I am not ruling out that it could be Russia, though I don't see the motive. I want to see where the evidence lies," Murray said. "Anyone who expresses scepticism is seen as an enemy of the state."

[Mar 18, 2018] THE LITVINENKO 'RUSSIA DID IT' STORY WAS A LIE

Mar 18, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

Ex Pat , March 17, 2018 at 22:20

THE LITVINENKO 'RUSSIA DID IT' STORY WAS A LIE

In the nature of the internet, someone somewhere knows the truth but usually search engines and governments make sure you don't find it. Ever.

But occasionally the internet gods smile. If you are obsessed with electric bicycles, long time UK Pedelecs poster flecc knows all about Polonium 210 and why the Litvinenko 'Russia did it' story was a pack of lies. – Polonium 210 is _not_ just available in Russia. It is and was commercially available from the U.S.

– Fancy that department! Why the UK government 'Russia did it' Litvinenko story was a pack of lies, by flecc, today (17/3/18) at 1:48 PM post #28622 – Pedelecs UK –

http://www.pedelecs.co.uk/forum/threads/brexit-for-once-some-facts.24369/page-1432#post-428232

How amusing that when someone tries that 'murder a Russian dissident and blame Russia' wheeze one time too often, the truth falls out of the cupboard in spades! Combine that with the lies about the apparent false flag Skripal attack –

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/03/on-not-being-refuted/comment-page-1/#comment-722843

No change there, then!

[Mar 18, 2018] The Dark Secrets of Porton Down: Inside controversial defence lab which developed VX nerve agent and used human 'guinea pigs'

Mar 18, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
likklemore , Mar 16, 2018 1:25:15 PM | 15
Thanks b for your continued heavy lifting. Btw, other serious journalists are now citing your diligence on this plot.

Yes, I 'm in on the dots to the Steele dossier "likely" that Skripal was very helpful and must be silenced; his daughter too since he may have confessed to his part.

Falling apart it is. How was The Mirror, (UK), allowed to publish this article?

Before it is pulled, take a read. Below are just snips.

The Dark Secrets of Porton Down: Inside controversial defence lab which developed VX nerve agent and used human 'guinea pigs'
More than 20,000 people have been tested on at the top secret lab which is concentrating on gas attack defences
LINK

It is one of Britain's most secretive sites, remaining shrouded in mystery for more than 100 years. [.]

The 7,000 acre site, near Salisbury, is one of the UK's most secretive and controversial military research facilities and the oldest chemical warfare research installations in the world.

Scientists from Porton were among the first to create biological weapons as well as one of the world's most lethal chemical weapons, but now its main purpose is to support the military and help combat terrorism.

Porton Down opened in 1916 as the War Department Experimental Station for testing chemical weapons during WW1.

Scientists at the lab researched and developed weapons agents used by the British military during the war such as chlorine, mustard gas and phosgene.[.]

The base was later named the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment.
Chemical weapons were tested on site. Scientists built cannisters full of poison gas that could be released by a timer and they also filled shells with it and released them at targets.

But many of the shells failed to explode meaning the fields are still full of the active chemical agents.

Now Porton concentrates on devising defensive measures against gas attacks after its chemical and biological weapons programme was closed down in the 1950s.

On the government's website it says: "To help develop effective medical countermeasures and to test systems, we produce very small quantities of chemical and biological agents.

"They are stored securely and disposed of safely."[.]

Human experiments

Since 1916 more than 20,000 people have taken part in studies at the base.
Porton Down's experiments on humans have been widely criticised as it is alleged some human 'guinea pigs' were duped into taking part in tests.

Tests were carried out on servicemen to try and determine the effects of nerve agents on humans - with one recorded death due to a nerve gas experiment.
Leading Aircraftman Ronald Maddison died aged 20 in 1953 after taking part in sarin nerve agent toxicity tests.
.[.]

Viruses

Initial samples of the Ebola virus were sent to the Porton Down lab in 1976.
The lab now allegedly contains samples of some of the world's most aggressive diseases including Ebola, anthrax and the plague.[.]

Aerial release trials

Between 1953 and 1976 a number of aerial release trials were carried out to help the government understand how a biological attack might spread across the UK.

The government said: "Given the international situation at the time these trials were conducted in secret."

And added: "The information obtained from these trials has been and still is vital to the defence of the UK."

Two separate and independent reviews concluded the trials did not have any adverse health effects on the UK population.[.]

Aliens

There has been speculation over the years that alien bodies could be hidden at the sight.

But the government has said: "No aliens, either alive or dead have ever been taken to Porton Down or any other Defence Science and Technology Laboratory site."

[Mar 18, 2018] BBC New about Russian reaction

Mar 18, 2018 | www.bbc.com

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia was not worried by international expressions of support for the UK and challenged Britain to "provide some confirmation".

He said: "Sooner or later, the British will have to show some proof to those 'colleagues' who say they are with UK on this; sooner or later will have to stand up its accusations."

The Russian foreign ministry has called Mrs May's allegations "insane" and the Russian Embassy in Britain has described the order for diplomats to leave as "unacceptable, unjustified and short-sighted".

In response to the UK's sanctions, Russia's foreign ministry announced it would:

It said it was responding to "provocative actions" by Britain - and "unproven accusations" that the Russian state was behind the poisoning.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said the UK is "playing politics" and not taking into account an international pact on chemical weapons.

He said if the UK sends Moscow a formal request for an explanation under the Chemical Weapons Convention, Russia will respond within the set 10-day time limit.

Russia has also requested to be given a sample of the nerve agent used.

The Russian Ministry of Defence has called the UK's Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson a "vulgar old harpy" after he said Russia should "go away and shut up".

Major-General Igor Konashenkov said that "the extreme level of the intellectual impotence" of Mr Williamson confirmed London's accusations amounted to nothing.

"Long ago, Great Britain became the cosy nest not just for the world's turncoats, but also of all kinds of headquarters for producing fake scandals," he added.

Meanwhile, a suspect in the 2006 murder of former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko has told Russian news agency Interfax that determining responsibility has to be done by "serious expert analysis".

Andrei Lugovoi, who is now a Russian MP, said: "Any chemist or physicist will tell you that in order to determine the involvement or non-involvement of a country, there must at least be some serious expert analyses carried out at a serious expert level.

"When such statements are made within a few days (of the incident), the only thing this shows is the irresponsibility of the person who makes them. It may also indicate that to find the truth is not the aim."

[Mar 18, 2018] Maria Zakharova blows apart poisoning hoax US should "be put under question"

Mar 18, 2018 | theduran.com

Questions arise: then, they should have samples, which they conceal, or it is a lie from start to finish."

"If the UK prime minister and other British experts give the formula, then it will be clear which countries have been developing these agents."

[Mar 18, 2018] Here's how WW2 startes: with a false flag operation by Nazy Germany against Poland

Mar 18, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk
N_ , March 16, 2018 at 01:50

History lesson time! Here's how WW2 started . I do not mean the background causes or the more proximal Soviet-German and British-Polish pacts. I mean the trigger .

The trigger was a number of false flag attacks carried out by German forces wearing Polish uniforms , collectively given the name "Operation Himmler". The best known incident occurred at Gleiwitz , just inside the German border, where "Polish" (but really German) forces attacked a German radio station on the night of 31 August 1939. The German forces murdered a German farmer, dressed him as a saboteur, and deposited his body at the scene as if he had been killed during the assault. This attack, along with alleged ethnic cleansing of German residents by the Polish authorities and a number of other false-flag attacks carried out by the German SS (in which the bodies of concentration camp prisoners were left behind), was used as "justification" for the German invasion of Poland the next morning.

The murdered German farmer had previously been known, or so it is said, for sympathising with Poles, and he was killed by injection with a chemical.

[Mar 18, 2018] No opportunity to pour more fuel on the fire of anti-Russia sentiments should be passed up. The British government seems up to the task.

Notable quotes:
"... "a robust dialogue with Russia on all the issues" ..."
"... And another question pops up. Why is the UK refusing to give Russia the samples of the deadly substanc e known as Novichok that it says was used to poison the former spy? Isn't it because the real poison was not Novichok but some other agent developed at Porton Down? Could be. You never know. This guess would at least explain the refusal. ..."
"... Nothing can be said for certain but it's only natural to look at what we know and make guesses. That's what analysts are for. Maybe this scenario wasn't what happened, but there is nothing to rule it out. ..."
"... After all, Mr. Skripal and his daughter got immediate emergency medical assistance. It arrived at once. Intelligence services? Who knows, but the victims were injected with an unknown substance almost immediately. Someone had known in advance that they'd need help. This is an undeniable fact. Another coincidence? Aren't there too many of them? ..."
"... Anyway, the work to determine exactly what substance poisoned Mr. Skripal and his daughter was done nowhere else but Porton Down. Wasn't it amazing how quickly they were able to say with absolute certainty that the nerve agent was Russian-produced Novichok? They are unbelievably talented people because normally that takes some time. ..."
"... The Russiagate scandal in the US appears to be dying down . The Skripal case, as well as the furor raised over the events in Eastern Ghouta, Syria, will breathe new life into the ongoing, well-orchestrated attacks on Moscow. ..."
Mar 18, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

Voices were heard calling for a detailed investigation before any final conclusions were reached. Labor Leader Jeremy Corbyn said the UK needed "a robust dialogue with Russia on all the issues" and warned against cutting off ties. He came under harsh criticism in Parliament, although the only thing Mr. Corbyn wanted was some evidence to go on before pointing the finger at Moscow. He just wondered why the government had not made a formal request for information in accordance with Article 9, clause 2 of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC)? He got an emotional response, but nobody explained why the procedures described in the convention had not been invoked.

And what if Mr. Skripal pulls through and offers quite a different story? What if new witnesses appear whose testimony moves the investigation in a different direction?

The UK evidently does not want to go the whole nine yards to uncover the truth. It prefers to make accusations first and launch a halfhearted investigation second.

There is a very important fact that has been almost completely ignored by the British media. Where did the poisoning take place? Yes, we know, the name of that sleepy town is Salisbury. That's where Mr. Skripal lives. On March 16, Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson announced that the UK would spend 48 million pounds ($67 million) on a new chemical-warfare defense center. It will be built at Porton Down , a military research laboratory that has manufactured the nerve agents VX and sarin.

Where do you think that lab is located? Right, less than eight miles from Mr. Skipal's home in Salisbury. Vladimir Pasechnik , a senior Soviet expert on biological warfare, who defected to the UK in 1989, worked there. He died in 2001. Russia again? Not a chance. Where he lived was no secret and he had worked there quietly for so many years. It's the research he did at the Porton Down laboratory that was kept under lock and key. He quit the laboratory in 2000 to set up a business of his own. Since he was no longer working for the government, he was in a position to reveal awkward information. You never know about the people involved in hush-hush activities, and the timing of the events could be a coincidence. But it might not be.

The UK officially ceased all activities associated with nerve gas development in 1989 but scandalous stories about Porton Down have been leaked much more recently. The people who worked in the facility were dying under the most suspicious circumstances. In 2010, the Daily Mail published a very interesting report about these mysterious deaths -- all related to the development of nerve agents -- which was a fact that had been kept under wraps before. Porton Down featured prominently in all those stories. Wouldn't this be a good time to remember those in connection with Mr. Skripal's poisoning?

And another question pops up. Why is the UK refusing to give Russia the samples of the deadly substanc e known as Novichok that it says was used to poison the former spy? Isn't it because the real poison was not Novichok but some other agent developed at Porton Down? Could be. You never know. This guess would at least explain the refusal.

Nothing can be said for certain but it's only natural to look at what we know and make guesses. That's what analysts are for. Maybe this scenario wasn't what happened, but there is nothing to rule it out.

After all, Mr. Skripal and his daughter got immediate emergency medical assistance. It arrived at once. Intelligence services? Who knows, but the victims were injected with an unknown substance almost immediately. Someone had known in advance that they'd need help. This is an undeniable fact. Another coincidence? Aren't there too many of them?

Anyway, the work to determine exactly what substance poisoned Mr. Skripal and his daughter was done nowhere else but Porton Down. Wasn't it amazing how quickly they were able to say with absolute certainty that the nerve agent was Russian-produced Novichok? They are unbelievably talented people because normally that takes some time.

What next? The UK does not want to go it alone. It has raised the issue in the UN. It has approached NATO. The Skripal case will be added to the agenda at the March 22–23 EU summit and even the talks on Brexit.

The Russiagate scandal in the US appears to be dying down . The Skripal case, as well as the furor raised over the events in Eastern Ghouta, Syria, will breathe new life into the ongoing, well-orchestrated attacks on Moscow.

These days the divided West faces many challenges . Just look at the divisions threatening NATO and the EU. There is nothing better than an external enemy, even an imaginary one, to keep the West united and led by the US. That's where Russia comes in. We may never know who is to blame for the attempt on Mr. Skripal's life -- it's not important for those who are leading the anti-Russia campaign. No opportunity to pour more fuel on the fire of anti-Russia sentiments should be passed up. The British government seems up to the task.

[Mar 18, 2018] Theresa May is like the Queen of Hearts in Alice-in-Wonderland: "Verdict first, trial afterwards"

Mar 18, 2018 | dailymail.co.uk

jmNZ, Vienna, Austria, 38 minutes ago

Theresa May is like the Queen of Hearts in Alice-in-Wonderland: "Verdict first, trial afterwards" Indeed, she goes further: "Sentence first and no trial" - not even evidence!

[Mar 18, 2018] First Recorded Successful Novichok Synthesis was in 2016 - By Iran, in Cooperation with the OPCW by Craig Murray

Notable quotes:
"... the most encouraging thing is the reaction of readers of the Daily Mail , i was reading only this morning the hatchet job they did on RT, its not one the readers agreed with incidentally, at the time i read the article over 700 people had responded, the best rated where from those totally against the MSM narrative, the best thing our establishment could do is listen to the people, unfortunately they won't, encased in their bubble environment of Westminster ..."
"... resistance, or a form of inoculation to MSM propaganda is growing, the elite establishment are now on the back foot, question is how will they respond ban RT, or this blog ??? .i suspect the gloves will come off very soon ..."
"... Given the total lack of proper investigation, Craig is one of the few making any sense. I would expect an event like this, if treated normally as a crime, to take months of investigation before anyone could be accused. ..."
"... I see no reason why we have to jump to accusing Russia and I'm glad that Craig, rather than delving into conspiracy theory, is simply confirming that we can't know without a lot more investigation ..."
"... Pants down, she swiftly places a bucket over her head, and expels 23 of her own diplomats from Russia. Then accidentally falls into the embrace of her arch-Brexit enemies Germany and France. Side-splitting comedy. Never had such a good laugh at the expense of the hapless Tories. ..."
"... With Christopher Steele, Pablo Miller, Sergei Skripal in the UK script of the moment – the official deception is at a place of convergence. ..."
Mar 17, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

The line that novichoks can only be produced by Russia is now proven to be a complete lie. As I previously proved by referencing their publications, in 2013 the OPCW scientific advisory committee note the evidence was sparse that novichoks had ever been successfully produced, and in 2016 that was still the line being published by Porton Down in 2016. You can find the hard evidence of all that here .

I have now been sent the vital information that in late 2016, Iranian scientists set out to study whether novichoks really could be produced from commercially available ingredients. Iran succeeded in synthesising a number of novichoks. Iran did this in full cooperation with the OPCW and immediately reported the results to the OPCW so they could be added to the chemical weapons database.


mog, March 17, 2018 at 22:51

This case of unclear wording needs clearing up in a matter when little or no media attention seems to be on the victims, the hospital etc. :
The Times published a letter from Stephen Davies (Consultant in Emergency Medicine, Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust) on the 16th March.
'Sir, further to your report ('Poision Exposure Leaves Nearly 40 needing Treatment'), may I clarify that no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury and there have only ever been three patients with significant poisoning. Several people have attended the emergency department concerned that they may have been exposed. None has had symptoms of poisoning and none has needed treatment. Any blood tests performed have shown no abnormality. No member of the public has been contaminated by the agent involved.'
That first sentence .carefully worded or carelessly worded?

Jean , March 17, 2018 at 23:19

May claimed that the nerve agent was Novichok, developed in the USSR. In order to identify it, the UK experts had to have had a sample of it. Since neither the USSR, nor Russia, have ever been known to export it, we should assume that it was synthesized within the UK. The formula and the list of precursors are in the public domain, published by the scientist who developed Novichok, who has since moved to the US. Thus, British scientists working at Porton Down could have synthesized it themselves. In any case, it is not possible to determine in what country a given sample of the substance was synthesized, and the claim that it came from Russia is not provable.

It was claimed that the victims -- Mr. Skripal and his daugher -- were poisoned with Novichok while at a restaurant. Yet how could this have been done? The agent in question is so powerful that a liter of it released into the atmosphere over London would kill most of its population. Breaking a vial of it open over a plate of food would kill the murderer along with everyone inside the restaurant. Anything it touched would be stained yellow, and many of those in the vicinity would have complained of a very unusual, acrid smell. Those poisoned would be instantaneously paralyzed and dead within minutes, not strolling over to a park bench where they were found. The entire town would have been evacuated, and the restaurant would have to be encased in a concrete sarcophagus by workers in space suits and destroyed with high heat. None of this has happened.

In view of the above, it seems unlikely that any of what has been described in the UK media and by May's government has actually taken place. An alternative assumption, and one we should be ready to fully test, is that all of this is a work of fiction. No pictures of the two victims have been provided.

One of them -- Skripal's daughter -- is a citizen of the Russia

This was posted by RT there's more to the story just I have copied this part obviously to get the truth out there

alwaywrite, March 17, 2018 at 21:56

the most encouraging thing is the reaction of readers of the Daily Mail , i was reading only this morning the hatchet job they did on RT, its not one the readers agreed with incidentally, at the time i read the article over 700 people had responded, the best rated where from those totally against the MSM narrative, the best thing our establishment could do is listen to the people, unfortunately they won't, encased in their bubble environment of Westminster

resistance, or a form of inoculation to MSM propaganda is growing, the elite establishment are now on the back foot, question is how will they respond ban RT, or this blog ??? .i suspect the gloves will come off very soon

Elspeth Parris, March 17, 2018 at 21:11

No conspiracy theories here. Given the total lack of proper investigation, Craig is one of the few making any sense. I would expect an event like this, if treated normally as a crime, to take months of investigation before anyone could be accused.

I see no reason why we have to jump to accusing Russia and I'm glad that Craig, rather than delving into conspiracy theory, is simply confirming that we can't know without a lot more investigation

giyane , March 17, 2018 at 21:46

May must resign. She scripted the farce about Abu Qatada who was eventually deported to Jordan, a country which hosts joint Saudi – Israeli terrorist training camps which were used for training Daesh. The present farce about Salisbury stars the same cast of buffoon MPs from both sides of the House, ra-ra-ing against Russia while USUKIS who started the proxy war against Syria is hiding under the bed.

Pants down, she swiftly places a bucket over her head, and expels 23 of her own diplomats from Russia. Then accidentally falls into the embrace of her arch-Brexit enemies Germany and France. Side-splitting comedy. Never had such a good laugh at the expense of the hapless Tories.

Adrian , March 17, 2018 at 21:49

Here in North America we're witness to a campaign of propaganda that is of a DNA strand with the Salisbury story.

In late 2016 a private outfit named CrowdStrike fabricated word of an "Ukrainian artillery hack" by the GRU – this provided CrowdStrike and the US intell community the needed "high confidence" re Russia being responsible for a DNC "hack" – and this (amplified by recitation of CS agent Dmitri Alperovitch et al's false claims in the Washington Post etc.) preceded Obama's sanctions against Russia.

Cyber-security expert @jeffreycarr, among others, has debunked the GRU attribution by CrowdStrike: https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/the-gru-ukraine-artillery-hack-that-may-never-have-happened-820960bbb02d but, as with the Christopher Steele "dossier", the false reports in the mainstream press created the narrative and, no doubt, helped construct the FBI illusion of things.

It appears now as if neither the Republicans nor the Democrats will really want to reveal all – and are moving to settle on "no collusion" but will avoid the "no hack" evidence as the latter would harm the ongoing military desire to stoke a war, cold or hot, with Russia.

With Christopher Steele, Pablo Miller, Sergei Skripal in the UK script of the moment – the official deception is at a place of convergence.

Thank you for helping dispel the smoke-and-mirrors.

[Mar 17, 2018] How the gas was administred in a place which was under surveillance and why passersby were not affected

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... You have obviously been at the crime scene, have witnessed the comatose bodies of the Skripals and after analyzing the Novitchok samples you meticulously collected, have reached the inescapable conclusion ..."
"... Nice sarcasm. Well deserved for those "Novichok hot heads", who claim that it is plausible that a military grade nerve gas was used. Actually initial reports were about a synthetic opioid, not any nerve gas ( https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ex-russian-agent-sergei-skripal-critical-condition-was-poisoned-by-fentanyl-1665286 ) ..."
"... I am amazed that people do not understand the level of absurdity of using nerve gas in such a case. It's really like ignorance has no boundaries. I understand that some people did not manage to graduate from a university or take a decent organic chemistry course, but still, this is simply amazing and very disturbing to read such posts. Especially here. ..."
Mar 17, 2018 | www.unz.com
likbez, March 17, 2018 at 7:08 am GMT
@ValmMond

You have obviously been at the crime scene, have witnessed the comatose bodies of the Skripals and after analyzing the Novitchok samples you meticulously collected, have reached the inescapable conclusion

Nice sarcasm. Well deserved for those "Novichok hot heads", who claim that it is plausible that a military grade nerve gas was used. Actually initial reports were about a synthetic opioid, not any nerve gas ( https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ex-russian-agent-sergei-skripal-critical-condition-was-poisoned-by-fentanyl-1665286 )

I am amazed that people do not understand the level of absurdity of using nerve gas in such a case. It's really like ignorance has no boundaries. I understand that some people did not manage to graduate from a university or take a decent organic chemistry course, but still, this is simply amazing and very disturbing to read such posts. Especially here.

If it was a nerve gas my question to "Novichok hot heads" here is who the assassin was?

You need either to place a can or some punctured packet under the bench (probably impossible) or spray the liquid on the victim from a short distance. The latter is a very dangerous exercise if you are not wearing a respirator and protection gear.

But still, it makes sense to do this inside (and kill many people) rather than outside. That was how Zarin was administered in Tokyo subway ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack

Remember the place was under surveillance -- bad for any assassination. Also in lethal concentrations, the gas kills the victims in several minutes. But Skripals survived unattended for an hour or more and there was only one other seriously affected person -- a policeman, while doctor who treated Skriplal's daughter on the bench was unaffected.

I do not see any reasonable way to administer the gas in this environment without affecting many other people including any passerby, or the doctor who treated Skripal's daughter

[Mar 17, 2018] This is what a false flag operation is about: you need to carefully plant impurities that point to the desired target. Compare with Vault 7. Can it be a chemical Vault 7 available somewhere?

Notable quotes:
"... The anti Russia propaganda industry I believe was geared up to mobilize on an expected East Ghouta gas attack. OK the "industry" would not be privy to the details of such a false flag. But could it be they have gone off prematurely by assuming this Salisbury "event" was the intended pretext. ..."
"... Certainly there appears a degree of pre planned organization in the response to this false provocation ..."
"... I'm a major fan of Prime Minister May. What arouses my suspicions here is the refusal to this point of Her Majesty's government to submit samples of the poison to independent 3rd-party analysis. ..."
"... I've NEVER been antiwar, but DO oppose no-exit, no-win wars. The British public has a great deal of historical experience with such conflicts. Could this affair be the prelude to yet another? ..."
Mar 17, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

likbez , March 18, 2018 at 00:45

This is what a false flag operation is about: you need to carefully plant impurities that point to the desired target. Compare with Vault 7. Can it be a chemical Vault 7 available somewhere?

Peter Mo , March 17, 2018 at 13:52

The anti Russia propaganda industry I believe was geared up to mobilize on an expected East Ghouta gas attack. OK the "industry" would not be privy to the details of such a false flag. But could it be they have gone off prematurely by assuming this Salisbury "event" was the intended pretext.

Certainly there appears a degree of pre planned organization in the response to this false provocation

Ben Brink , March 17, 2018 at 14:20

My chemistry background is laughable (B in high school, D in college) and the only "legal" course I took was called Sociology of Law.

The Romans had the line "Cui bono?" The rough translation (10th grade Latin) is "Who benefits?"

Russia's President Vladimir Putin is an honor graduate of the KGB's foreign branch. It stands to reason he wouldn't hesitate to have an ex-spy assassinated if he thought it served the Russian interest. But in this case, what is that interest?

I'm a major fan of Prime Minister May. What arouses my suspicions here is the refusal to this point of Her Majesty's government to submit samples of the poison to independent 3rd-party analysis.

Due to nearsightedness, I never served in the U.S. Army; had I the common sense of a goat, I would have served in the Navy Supply Corps. I've NEVER been antiwar, but DO oppose no-exit, no-win wars. The British public has a great deal of historical experience with such conflicts. Could this affair be the prelude to yet another? Thank you all.

[Mar 17, 2018] Was any poisonous gas present in the Skripal bench area. Looks highly unlikely

Yes, it certainly looks like a provocation, the "false flag" operation. The Brits and the Banks needed the US and the EU to join the fight.
Notable quotes:
"... The most plausible goal of the whole "Operation Skripal" was poisoning UK-Russia relations and hopefully bringing the US and EU to impose new round of sanctions on Russia. In this sense it reminds Litvinenko case (which brought huge propaganda benefits to the UK and the hysteria lasted several months, if memory does not fail me). ..."
"... One thing I can't understand in "Operation Skripal" is how such an assassination (if we assume that this is an assassination) was accomplished. ..."
"... The gas (if it really exists, which is yet another question) supposedly is really deadly. If this was not gas but some substance infused with this agent (which would be extremely strange and risky method), you need to get it into the drinks, which means 100% chances of your detection. ..."
"... Moreover in case of the gas the difficulties look insurmountable -- to get it to the victim you need to mix components and shortly after spray it from a short distance, hoping the you mixed them correctly. The place where Skripals were found unconscious is a really bad place for such an exercise as there probably several cameras which record the events on the bench. ..."
"... So IMHO it looks like assassination without an assassin ..."
"... suggested traces of the opiate fentanyl -- a synthetic toxin many times stronger than heroin -- had been detected at the scene. ..."
Mar 15, 2018 | www.unz.com

likbez , March 16, 2018 at 3:48 am GMT

@Kiza

Kiza,

Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or fascist dictorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked (by a Russian sounding chemical weapon Novichok), and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism (https://www.craigmurray.org.uk - Craig Murray has been most viciously attacked for not accepting the official story without any evidence) and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Hermann Göring

That's a perfectly applicable variation of the famous quote.

The most plausible goal of the whole "Operation Skripal" was poisoning UK-Russia relations and hopefully bringing the US and EU to impose new round of sanctions on Russia. In this sense it reminds Litvinenko case (which brought huge propaganda benefits to the UK and the hysteria lasted several months, if memory does not fail me).

BTW exiled Russian oligarchs like Khodorkovski ( https://www.voltairenet.org/article168007.html ) also could easily stage such a false flag operation using their interconnections with both Russia and Israel.

One thing I can't understand in "Operation Skripal" is how such an assassination (if we assume that this is an assassination) was accomplished.

The gas (if it really exists, which is yet another question) supposedly is really deadly. If this was not gas but some substance infused with this agent (which would be extremely strange and risky method), you need to get it into the drinks, which means 100% chances of your detection.

Moreover in case of the gas the difficulties look insurmountable -- to get it to the victim you need to mix components and shortly after spray it from a short distance, hoping the you mixed them correctly. The place where Skripals were found unconscious is a really bad place for such an exercise as there probably several cameras which record the events on the bench.

Unless it was the daughter who did this (in this case authorities have definitely all the necessary evidence of the crime committed) chances of an attacker to survive such an attack are slim, and changes not being recorded on one or more camera are virtually non existent.

If there was a human assassin, he/she risks to be immediately dead or severely injured as even in minimal concentrations such a gas reliably kills a person within two minutes or so. Antidote might help to survive, but how effective it is depends on the dose you can get.

If some robotic disperser was used, then it will be found as unlike in case of an explosive device the activation does no destroy it.

Also unclear why target the daughter, unless we are dealing with some botched amateur false flag operation in best traditions of ISIS Syria false flag operations.

Moreover, Skripals spent around an hour on a bench in a comatose state and were helped by a doctor who was not affected in any way. See timeline at

http://www.businessinsider.com/who-is-sergei-skripal-timeline-2018-3#march-3-240-pm-skripals-33-year-old-daughter-yulia-arrives-in-the-uk-via-london-heathrow-airport-relatives-said-she-was-visiting-from-moscow-17

But later a policeman was affected. Very strange.

So IMHO it looks like assassination without an assassin . There are some absurd statements that the poison was spiked in their drinks either in the pub or at the restaurant:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5742909/sergei-skripal-spy-russian-assassin-poison-hit-pub/

One possible scenario is that Skripal and his daughter were narcoaddicts and did it to themselves The initial reports (see, for example, https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5733372/ex-russian-spy-sergei-skripal-poisoned-salisbury-feared-life-cops/ ) suggested traces of the opiate fentanyl -- a synthetic toxin many times stronger than heroin -- had been detected at the scene.

Later their collapse was used to stage a false flag operation, when in fact there was no any gas involved, and at this point, a grandiose propaganda show with the decontamination of the area started.

[Mar 17, 2018] Governments Decree 'Truth' About Skripal - Dissenters Will Be Punished

Notable quotes:
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... The immense media scare and publicity of the Skripal case is likely centrally directed. Someone is pressing NATO countries as well as thoughtful politicians to get on the side of the aggressive anti-Russian campaign. The French government spokesperson first rejected the accusations Theresa May made against Russia. It demanded proof: ..."
"... " We don't do fantasy politics. Once the elements are proven, then the time will come for decisions to be made," Griveaux told a news conference shortly after May said she was expelling Russian diplomats and suspending bilateral talks. ..."
"... A day later and without further evidence coming into light France folded and joined others in accusing Russia because someone allegedly used a poison "of a type developed by Russia". ..."
"... What we are seeing here with the Skripal incident and the "Novichok" claims is a gigantic propaganda campaign comparable to the 2001 Anthrax scare in the U.S. and the whole "weapons of mass destruction" campaign that heralded the U.S./UK war on Iraq. ..."
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
"... thanks b.. you are covering all the bases here.... it is a clear frame up with serious ramifications...why the politicians of the west are so intent on this begs the question.. who are these politicians working for?? it clearly is not in the interest of its citizens... ..."
"... So what happened in the interim that caused the Russia hysteria? As I pointed out in the previous thread, on March 6 Browder began giving testimony to a UK Commons select committee where he stated it was a "Kremlin hit" and "I believe they want to kill me. They haven't figured out a way yet where they can kill me and get away with it." As The Times put it: "Since he said that, suspicions have deepened that the Russian state was behind the poisoning..." ..."
"... I guess everybody is aware of the potential rhyming of history with this "attempted" assassination. So good to refer to Saker's latest, I find that though he is not a native to the US, his observations concur with many of those I have made on my own in my adult life regarding life and the inhabitants and the cultural starus quo regarding life in America. ..."
"... It's not difficult to comprehend how an entire culture can be whipped up into an irrational unexamined frenzy. ..."
"... Perhaps Peter Lavell is right in his hypothesis that wars begin from a loss of prestige? Well, that and trade wars traditionally escalate? I wonder what will happen next, every day, things are getting worse to quote the Jamaican song. ..."
"... You are correct about the apparent connection between TV shows and what's happening. Same thing with 9/11. Remember when Condsleazy Rice said they never considered Airplanes used to fly into buildings... Then look at the TV show premier Lone Gunman? ..."
"... I read that Yulia, on the bench, was vomiting, had lost control of her bowels, and was conscious. It sounded to me like mushroom poisoning. (Not ricin, anthrax, sarin ) ..."
"... Very reminiscent of the MH17 campaign that was used to bully the reluctant Europeans into imposing sanctions on Russia. Accusations were made and a narrative put forward immediately without presenting clear evidence or waiting for an investigation. ..."
"... Through repetition this narrative has become dogma in the West despite the fact that supporting evidence has still not been forthcoming. It seems that after 9-11 it became clear that quickly putting out a narrative, with the support of the press, and demonizing anyone with any public stature who questions the basic story could be successful, even when there were thousands of eye witnesses and many flaws in the official explanation. The facts, or what really happened no longer matter once the narrative has taken root. ..."
"... Its disgusting to see how all the western media, states use this incident as a warmongering effort. These people are really sick in their heads. Also, note how propaganda works in the west, EVERY JOURNALIST, EVERY POLITICIAN toe with the propaganda line, isn't it amazing? Not only how it works but that there is NO DISSENT? Heinous! ..."
"... "If we want to prevent a unpredictable clash between nuclear armed powers, which could kill millions within just a few moments, we must all publicly voice our doubts and expose the false accusations made against Russia and other countries." Exactly. I strongly hope many more will do so. By now Boris 'the menace' Johnson accuses Putin personally. This man wants to go down history as the one who ignited the world. ..."
"... In December 2017, the BBC was given unprecedented access to Porton Down. They produced a 1 hour documentary on the place including details on animal and human experimentation. The video was available up to a few days ago. It has now been removed. Original BBC page - video not available: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07hx40t Video link at head of this page: [Edit: the page itself is now unavailable] http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/inside-porton-down-britains-controversial-12192830 It is still available here: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x65otqg ..."
"... The empire needs enemies to justify the hundreds of billions given to the MIC corporations. Enemies will continue to be manufactured. Screw the needs of the people. ..."
"... Browder!? Given that guy's history and background, the fact his name comes up in connection with this at all makes him #1 suspect, to my mind. He's a master at getting away with murder by dragging the red herrings of Putin and Russia across the trail. ..."
"... If we assume though that the Skripals poisoned themselves at home (accidentally or deliberately), then between the time they left home, had lunch (during which time they apparently had to wait 40 minutes for their meal), then went to a local pub for drinks and went to the shopping mall park bench, and the time they were found unconscious, with Julia Skripal vomiting, fitting and defecating, at least 90 - 120 minutes (up to 2 hours then) must have passed. They are now in Salisbury District Hospital in a critical condition. ..."
"... Compare and contrast his condition with the Skripals' condition. I think it is very likely that what contaminated the police officer is not the same thing that afflicts the Skripals. Could Bailey have been used to plant something at the Skripals' home and in doing so contaminated himself? ..."
"... Also we must ask why the Skripals have not been moved to a specialist hospital. ..."
"... The cui bono question's answer is those wanting at all/any costs to keep the Unipolar status of the Outlaw US Empire intact--an impossible task given the resources of the Multipolar Alliance. ..."
"... I see many parallels to 911's aftermath and the MH17 shootdown in this Big Lie promotion. Unfortunately, I don't see relations improving for quite a long time. ..."
"... So Glushkov was killed after the Salisbury incident same as Berezovsky (Glushov's partner) got killed after the Litvinenko case. ..."
"... Both the Litvinenko case or the Skripal case either completely incompetent or planned to cause a public crisis. ..."
"... Maybe the Skripals were poisoned for some unrelated reason. Or they simply overdosed on fentanyl. ..."
"... The event was piggybacked a few days later for promoting the War on Russia. Traces of some 'novichok' agent were left around Salisbury to be found by Porton Down experts. ..."
"... What if the "policeman" was actually the one who administered the poison and they just call him a policeman? ..."
"... The 'Skripal affair' is yet another chapter in a very long and inept but mesmerizing for many western geo-political 'soap opera', but without the soap. The constant theme: Russia is the enemy. And Russia really is the enemy, because it alone has effectively stood militarily up to the explicit adopted US geo-political doctrine of global military 'Full Spectrum Dominance'; also, Russia is an effective opposition to the implicit ambition of the insane western dominant-oligarchic-network of achieving global financial, political, and cultural 'full spectrum dominance'. ..."
"... Now there are numerous sub-stories – agendas – involved, but what they amount to are many threads in the playing out of what appears to be turning out to be an unsuccessful attempt at centralized global totalitarianism. Russia is out of western control. ..."
"... The completely unhinged 'Russia did it' outpouring of bs obsession of much of the American establishment and media in response to the Trump election glitch, again, is at core a recognition that Russia really is the enemy: the enemy of GMO food, the enemy of molesting children, the enemy of the western militaristic depravities, of western mass media's and politics' culture of deception. ..."
"... So I interpret the Skripal affair as a truly pathetic and desperate but thematic ploy that will over time rebound on the liars. The incident will underline the insane extent to which brazen stupid lies are relied upon by the western establishment. Notable is how immediately 'on cue' the foaming at the mouth indignation over Russia's 'terrible deed' has been in much British mass media and among British politicians. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Was it Orwell who noted that the great English cultural failing was hypocrisy? ..."
"... This is an outstanding post. The best and most important article that I have read in the years that I've visited here. I don't know how you do it. I believe that the Skripals were attacked with a nerve poison; but not the highly toxic binary "newcomer" agent identified by the Prime Minister. This incident is serving two purposes; to silence a likely source for the Steele Dossier and as a False Flag to further scapegoat Russia. It is inconceivable that the Russian Federation did it. This is too dangerous and not in their national interests. ..."
"... Western democracies have been overthrown by corporate mafia families. The military, intelligence officers, and civil servants, who worked for the public good, have vanished. The hysteria is so great my only conclusion is that the decision has been made to go to war. Withdrawal from Syria is impossible. Last night, NewsHour reported "Syria's war keeps raging, amid threats of a new Hezbollah-Israel conflict". An American war with Iran is inevitable. It will draw in NATO and Russia. This will be five nuclear powers at war. The Apocalypse is inevitable. ..."
"... So what's the end game? Is the Predator Class preparing to start Hot War with Russia sometime real soon? Everyone knows that once the shooting starts things would rapidly escalate into a nuclear confrontation that can easily spin out of control? Are we seriously mobilizing down that path? This is shaping up to be worst disaster since the Cuban Crisis which the Deep State also instigated... JFK vowed to terminate the CIA- Deep State and was taken out by the Dulles- CIA Wet Works Division in retaliation. ..."
"... up to 38 people have reportedly been poisoned but their names have not been released and no photos of them have as yet been released. ..."
"... It's a pretty strange poison that has varying effects on different people. The doctor who gave first aid was unaffected as well. But the narrative has been inconsistent from one day to the next. This suggests that most of what we are reading, seeing or hearing on the news is being improvised on the fly. We need to reserve judgment on who is responsible until more details become available (if they ever do). ..."
"... In Orwells 1984 one cant help but question if the perpetual war between the 3 nations is real or not. The purpose of war is clear, that is to consume the excesses of industrial production, while keeping the populace in relative poverty to keep them controllable. The populace is then further controlled by fear of the enemy rival state and can be coerced into accepting their diminished lifestyle and supporting the ruling regime . The limited amount of human life that is expended in these unending conflicts turns this perpetual war into a twisted peace; "War is Peace." ..."
"... The West is using the Skripal poisoning to strip Russia of credibility when it defends Syria against false flag chemical weapons attacks staged by their Takfiri dupes to facilitate military attacks by the West on Syria. In effect they are saying is that Russia is such an egregious offender regarding the use of chemical weapons that they cannot be believed when they come to the defense of the Syrian government...in fact, they are inferring that Russia is more than likely complicit in these chemical weapon attacks. With obliging media houses and an unthinking general population its foolproof. ..."
"... We know too little to completely rule out the possibility mentioned early on of a possible joint suicide attempt (supported by the references to fentanyl patches, which seems an odd thing for first responders to have made up if there wasn't something going on). ..."
"... The rest is theater, with the beautiful part being to demand Russia prove it did not use "their" nerve agent, one which appears to have been mostly a theoretical exercise by the USSR that did not really pan out and was likely never actually produced, such that anything "found" could be that damned stuff. Prove this is NOT unicorn shit! ..."
"... He had reportedly made recent appearances at the Russian embassy, maybe just renewing passport and registration documents, but what if it was more? ..."
"... As to the hegemonic west, there will be no war. What we're seeing now IS the war. This is all they have to throw at Russia, and China and Iran, etc. This is how they fight, using all the power they can gather, and this is all they have. Putin on March 1 destroyed all possible military options for them, beyond spiteful attacks on the defenseless, and the suicide moves of proxies. ..."
Mar 17, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

The government decreed 'truth' about the Skripal case has many discrepancies. The connection of the case to Russia is much weaker than the propaganda claims. But doubt and dissent about it are not allowed to prevail .

The political response to the incident around the British-Russian double-agent Sergej Skripal and his daughter started slowly. On Sunday, the 4th of March, Skripal and his daughter were found unconscious on a public bench in Salisbury, England. The local police and emergency services took care of them.

Only on March 8 did the case start to make larger waves. The BBC reported :

Addressing the House of Commons, the home secretary [Rudd] said the attack was "attempted murder in the most cruel and public way".
...
She refused to speculate on whether the Russian state might have been involved in the attack, saying the police investigation should be based on "facts, not rumour" .

Besides Skripal and his daughter one police officer was affected:

A police officer, who was in intensive care, is now "stable and conscious", Wiltshire's chief constable said.

It is unclear where the officer is thought to have contacted the alleged poison. Some reports said it was at Skripal's house, others say that it was at the bench where the Skripal's collapsed.

But a doctor and others who administered first aid were not affected at all:

Meanwhile, a doctor who was one of the first people at the scene has described how she found Ms Skripal slumped unconscious on a bench, vomiting and fitting. She had also lost control of her bodily functions.

The woman, who asked not to be named, told the BBC she moved Ms Skripal into the recovery position and opened her airway, as others tended to her father.

She said she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying there was no sign of any chemical agent on Ms Skripal's face or body.

The doctor said she had been worried she would be affected by the nerve agent, but added that she "feels fine".

This seems to exclude a highly toxic poison or a substance that is taken up through the skin. But how then was the police officer affected?

The Skripal's are said to be still alive. No details about the alleged poison were published and no medical bulletin about their current state.

After a slow start the British government is now making an immense show out of the case by involving the army and by sending out lots of people in obviously unnecessary high protection gear.


bigger

It also planted lots of rumors. On March 9 it was said that the poison likely came from inside Mr. Skripal's house. Three days ago claims were made that it was smeared on the door handle of Skripal's car, today it is supposed to have come out of the suitcase of Skripal's daughter. All these claims are based on leaks from anonymous official sources. It is likely that none of them is true.

Today, twelve days after the incident, it is still unknown what chemical substance the alleged poison exactly is and where and how it was administered.

Former British ambassador Craig Murray reports that the British chemical weapon laboratory at Porton Down, just 8 miles from where the incident happened, is unsure about what substance (if any) was actually involved:

I have now received confirmation from a well placed FCO source that Porton Down scientists are not able to identify the nerve gas as being of Russian manufacture , and have been resentful of the pressure being placed on them to do so. Porton Down would only sign up to the formulation "of a type developed by Russia" after a rather difficult meeting where this was agreed as a compromise formulation.

Blaming Russia for the use of a poison "of a type developed by Russia" (i.e. the Soviet Union) is like blaming Germany for all current Heroin addicts because the Deutsche Reich company Bayer developed the mass-production of Heroin as a sedative for coughs.

In her "45 minutes" speech on March 12 Theresa May used this wording:

It is now clear that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia. It is part of a group of nerve agents known as Novichok.

"Of a type developed by Russia" is now the standard formulation that the British government and its allies are using. This is supposed to refer to a zoo of chemical substances, the Novichoks, that back in the 1980s a Soviet laboratory in today's Uzbekistan may have researched as potential chemical weapons. There are serious doubts , including from a leading Porton Down scientist, that these Novichoks actually exist.

Someone in the British government propaganda apparatus probably watched the current seasons of the British-American spy drama Strike Back . Nina Byzantina points to the summaries of recent episodes:

Episode 50 ran in the U.K on November 21 2017 and in the U.S. on February 23 2018:

Meanwhile, General Lázsló shuts down Section 20, forcing Donovan to work in secret. She discovers that Zaryn is in fact Karim Markov, a Russian scientist who allegedly killed his colleagues with Novichok , a nerve agent they invented.

Episodes 51 ran in the U.K on November 28 2017 and in the U.S. on March 2 2018:

Section 20 track Berisovich's meth lab in Turov where Markov is making more Novichok and destroy it, though Berisovich escapes with Markov.

Episodes 52 ran in the U.K on January 31 2018 and in the U.S. on March 9 2018:

Section 20 track down Maya, a local Muslim woman Lowry radicalised, to a local airport. When she attempts to release the Novichok , Reynolds shoots her. The Novichok is fake however, as Berisovich does not want an attack committed in his country. ... By the time Section 20 arrives, Berisovich had already called in the FSB to extract Markov and confiscate the Novichok . Yuri resurfaces to kill McAllister and Wyatt. However they turn the tables and strangle him to death. They then manage to engage the FSB and contain the gas . But in the process Reynolds is exposed. Markov works on an antidote but is killed by the Russians before he can complete. McAllister improvises and saves Reynolds, before Novin blows up the lab. Lowry uses the remainder of the gas to kill Berisovich for trying to betray her.

Isn't it astonishing how life follows the course of last week's TV drama? Or did the TV drama follow a larger pre-written script? (Remember the X-Files pilot episode (vid) in March 2011 which predicted 9/11?) Who really gave the British government the idea to blame Russia and Novichoks for the incident that involved the Skripals? Were it the experts at Porton Down, some spy drama on current TV or a propaganda agency?

The Soviet chemist Vil Mirzanyanov, who now lives in the U.S., is the only person who claims that Novichocks were real chemical weapons. Neither Porton Down nor the OPCW have accepted that claim. In 2007 Mirzanyanov wrote a still available book about his work at the Soviet laboratory in Uzbekistan and published the chemical formulas of some alleged Novichok substances. But, as Mirzanyanov concedes , such Novichok substances, if these were involved at all, are by no means an exclusively Russian issue. Vil Mirzanyanov's much publicized book made sure of that. As today's Wall Street Journal explains :

That publicity led its chemical structure to be leaked, making it readily available for reproduction elsewhere , said Ralf Trapp, a France-based consultant on the control of chemical and biological weapons.

"The chemical formula has been publicized and we know from publications from then-Czechoslovakia that they had worked on similar agents for defense in the 1980s ," he said. " I'm sure other countries with developed programs would have as well. "
...
"The understanding at the time was that even though Russia was working on it and developing it, they didn't actually stockpile Novichok agents or precursors, " said Mr. Trapp.

The formulas are known and several other countries have worked on similar stuff. Anyone with a decent laboratory and some expert knowledge can make such poisons. This explains why the experts in Porton Down would not blame Russia and why the British government, eager to blame Russia, can only talk about "a type developed by Russia".

The WSJ piece also explains why it will be difficult to find out from where, when and how the alleged poisons came to Salisbury:

The components used to make Novichok are readily available, but their short lifespan and the risks involved in using it demand professional expertise, scientific and arms experts said.
...
Finding a trail of Novichok would be more difficult because it is carried in two parts that are combined to create a viscous liquid only shortly before use, said Mr. Trapp.

Mr. Trapp is a serious expert on the issue. He says that the Novichok agents are binary agents made from readily available substances and have a short live span. These characteristics will make it practically impossible to find a real culprit.

Russia, which the British government and now also its allies blame without presenting evidence, had no reason to attack the Skripal's. Mr. Skripal, the British double agent, was released from a Russian jail in a 2010 spy-swap. He has lived openly in Britain for eight years. If this was an act of Russian revenge why wait so long? Killing him would also endanger those Russian spies who came back to Russia in exchange for Skripal's freedom. It would impede any future exchange. There is no plausible reason for Russia to do such, especially not in current atmosphere.

There must be other reasons why Skripal was attacked, if he was, with some more recent motive than the one attributed to Russia.

Elijah Magnier, with decades of experience as war correspondent, tries to fit the incident into the larger picture of the U.S.-Russian proxy war in the Middle East:

The US and the International community tried to stop the battles of al-Ghouta to no avail. This prompted Washington to exercise its favourite hobby of imposing sanctions on Russia, without succeeding in stopping the Syrian army (fighting without its allies – except Russia) from recovering its control over Ghouta. The answer came immediately from Moscow by bombing Daraa and hitting al-Qaeda's area of influence in an indication as to where the future theatre of military operations is expected to be.

Again, events are moving very fast: the US response came quickly through its UK ally when Britain took advantage of the poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergey Skripal in London to accuse Moscow of being behind his assassination . The message here is clear: all means are legitimate for the control of the Middle East, specifically Syria.

I am not sure that this claim fits the timeline. The British already hinted at Russian culpability on March 8. Reuters reported the March 12 Deraa bombing at 1:16 PM . The British prime minister May raised her accusations against Russia only a few hours later. To prepare and negotiate her statement with Porton Down likely took longer than that.

The Skripal incident has its origin in something different, likely in his supposed involvement in the dirty Steele dossier which targeted Donald Trump. ( More interesting background to the Skripal-Steele connection can be found at UKColumn .) May's statement was not prompted by the Syrian-Russian bombing in Deraa governorate but is a part of the general anti-Russian campaign.

Magnier is right though to point out that a further escalation is quite possible:

The Syrian war is far from being a normal one. It is THE war between two superpowers and their allies, where US and Russian soldiers are directly involved on the ground in a war of domination and power. The lack of victory in the US eyes is worse than losing a battle. Even more, the victory of Russia and its allies on Syrian soil in any battle is therefore a direct blow to the heart of Washington and its allies .
...
The superpowers are on the verge of the abyss , so the danger of falling into a war of cosmic proposition is no longer confined to the imagination or merely a sensational part of unrealistic calculations.

The immense media scare and publicity of the Skripal case is likely centrally directed. Someone is pressing NATO countries as well as thoughtful politicians to get on the side of the aggressive anti-Russian campaign. The French government spokesperson first rejected the accusations Theresa May made against Russia. It demanded proof:

" We don't do fantasy politics. Once the elements are proven, then the time will come for decisions to be made," Griveaux told a news conference shortly after May said she was expelling Russian diplomats and suspending bilateral talks.

A day later and without further evidence coming into light France folded and joined others in accusing Russia because someone allegedly used a poison "of a type developed by Russia".

The British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn warned of taking steps against Russia without first presenting evidence. He was immediately assaulted in a vicious propaganda campaign.


Even the hat of British opposition leader Corbyn was photoshopped by BBC Newsnight to make him look "Russian".
(If RT would do similar it would immediately lose its UK license.) - bigger

Corbyn folded and now even makes claims that May has never made:

Theresa May was right on Monday to identify two possibilities for the source of the attack in Salisbury, given that the nerve agent used has been identified as of original Russian manufacture.

Theresa May's careful wording "of a type developed by Russia" does not imply a specific agent nor Russian manufacturing. Corbyn fell into the trap.

What we are seeing here with the Skripal incident and the "Novichok" claims is a gigantic propaganda campaign comparable to the 2001 Anthrax scare in the U.S. and the whole "weapons of mass destruction" campaign that heralded the U.S./UK war on Iraq.

Provoking Russia further will not end well. Rattlesnakes are shy, but at some point they have no other way out than to bite.

If we want to prevent a unpredictable clash between nuclear armed powers, which could kill millions within just a few moments, we must all publicly voice our doubts and expose the false accusations made against Russia and other countries.

---

Previous Moon of Alabama pieces on the Skripal case:

Posted by b on March 16, 2018 at 12:26 PM | Permalink

Comments next page "


Steve , Mar 16, 2018 12:48:41 PM | 1

I doubt the masses of the West is capable of standing up to their government. They have been cowed. It is a pessimistic acknowledgement but I don't think anything short of hot war at home could wake up the average European or American any more. Heaven knows the kind of chemical that has been mixed with their food, but my observation is that most Westerners have become apathetic. And there is no leader to show them the way. Like Barack Obama, if Jeremy Corbyn becomes the Prime Minister of the UK he would be a disappointment. You have seen the sign of it.
Mike Maloney , Mar 16, 2018 1:03:10 PM | 5
The Skripal propaganda offensive is likely designed to soften up European and American voters for the long-sought bombing of Damascus. The French foreign ministry is making threats again today . The good news is that McMaster is rumored to be on his way out the door.
farm ecologist , Mar 16, 2018 1:08:17 PM | 6
"There must be other reasons why Skripal was killed"

If he had died, wouldn't that be announced loudly and repeatedly? Even if he was still seriously ill this long after the incident you'd think we would hear something about it. The silence is deafening, no?

james , Mar 16, 2018 1:09:58 PM | 7
thanks b.. you are covering all the bases here.... it is a clear frame up with serious ramifications...why the politicians of the west are so intent on this begs the question.. who are these politicians working for?? it clearly is not in the interest of its citizens...

that is a shame corbyn has also folded... using these terms ""of a type developed by Russia" is so flimsy as to generally not even require a response, but may as leader of the uk and other world leaders have been quick to cast blame on russia without providing any proof.. we are at the same place we were at with the war on iraq - which has been proven to be based on false premises... the big difference is russia is not iraq... i can't believe the leaders of the west are this stupid and subservient to the interests of moving towards ww3 here...

my own thought is this has been in the works all along.. frame russia... russia stopped the regime change game and for that they must be punished... the shit is going to hit the fan and we will be lucky to avert it... these bimbos for world leaders need to be removed, now as opposed to later - but there appears to be no one to replace them..

pantaraxia , Mar 16, 2018 1:11:48 PM | 8
On Sunday, the 4th of March, Skripal and his daughter were found unconscious on a public bench in Salisbury, England. ...
Only on March 8 did the case start to make larger waves.

So what happened in the interim that caused the Russia hysteria? As I pointed out in the previous thread, on March 6 Browder began giving testimony to a UK Commons select committee where he stated it was a "Kremlin hit" and "I believe they want to kill me. They haven't figured out a way yet where they can kill me and get away with it." As The Times put it: "Since he said that, suspicions have deepened that the Russian state was behind the poisoning..."

hopehely , Mar 16, 2018 1:12:04 PM | 9
They could suffer from botulism. That could explain neurotoxin poisoning symptoms (including paralysis) without doctors and nurses being affected. Still does not explain how that police officer got it. Hm.
Marshalldoc , Mar 16, 2018 1:21:31 PM | 11
Responding to 'Steve'; 'cowed' suggests 'beaten into submission' but my take (as a U.S. citizen & resident for nearly 70 years) is that 'buffaloed' is more apt. American's faith in the leaders & sources we've trusted (wrongly) to provide us the information needed to maintain a functional democracy have now been proven to be unworthy of that faith.

50% of registered voters couldn't even muster the interest in the '16 elections to bother to vote and that outcome was determined by a archaic body formed to insure the continued rule of white supremacist Christian male land owners (and, oh boy! Did they win big on that one!). The 'official media outlets' (NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN, Faux[NOT]News, etc.) have all been shown to be highly partisan propaganda organs on a par with Soviet Russia's 'Pravda' (WaPo is commonly called 'Pravda on the Potomac') so we've also been entirely 'gaslighted' and the vast majority are adrift, not knowing what to believe or how to sort out reasonable 'alternative' news outlets (e.g.; ConsortiumNews, this site, RT, MPN, Telesur, etc. - IMO) from outlets spouting hysterical propaganda (e.g.; InfoWars, Media Matters - IMO). In the absence of trustworthy leaders or news sources I think the majority of my fellow citizens find themselves either too paralyzed with indecision to make decisive choices other than to abandon themselves to their 'Party of choice' and 'go with the flow'.

... Americans might begin seeing U.S. regime-change operations, among other disastrous foreign policy choices, in a different light. Had we ever suffered the direct consequences of war on our territory, we might be more empathetic with those upon whom we unleash our 'democracy promotion'. But, these things haven't happened so the vast majority of Americans are emotionally 'removed' from such empathy, or for some like the NeoCons' "better them than us" & "well, they deserve it". The American political system is entirely broken and dysfunctional. I see nothing hopeful in the future.

Geoff , Mar 16, 2018 1:22:05 PM | 12
I guess everybody is aware of the potential rhyming of history with this "attempted" assassination. So good to refer to Saker's latest, I find that though he is not a native to the US, his observations concur with many of those I have made on my own in my adult life regarding life and the inhabitants and the cultural starus quo regarding life in America.

Arguments that seem to ring true to nature are much more plausible to me than the "propaganda" emanating from the UK and it's allies, but many of my friends and relatives are impossible to speak to at this point, they seem to me so "off centered." It's not difficult to comprehend how an entire culture can be whipped up into an irrational unexamined frenzy.

I'd forgive it completely if I didn't think that it was partly due to the habitual making of poor choices, wherther coerced through societal pressure, or by personal convenience, mainly for short term gain, and over a long period of time. Perhaps Peter Lavell is right in his hypothesis that wars begin from a loss of prestige? Well, that and trade wars traditionally escalate? I wonder what will happen next, every day, things are getting worse to quote the Jamaican song.

mina , Mar 16, 2018 1:23:32 PM | 13
maybe west wants to say that chems are new normal because more evidence of ksa Syrian rebels involved with it everyday

daughter's symptoms are exactly same as nerve gas used on Yemeni demonstrators in sanaa back in 2011, check the vids

pantaraxia , Mar 16, 2018 1:24:18 PM | 14
Now a murder investigation has been launched into the death of Nikolai Glushkov. a close associate of Boris Berezovsky (purported to be his right hand man) who was found dead on Monday.

Police launch murder inquiry over death of Nikolai Glushkov
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/16/police-launch-inquiry-over-death-of-nikolai-glushkov

The Met police's counter-terrorism command, which has led the investigation from the outset, was retaining its lead role in the investigation "because of the associations Mr Glushkov is believed to have had", the force said.

"At this stage there is nothing to suggest any link to the attempted murders in Salisbury, nor any evidence that he was poisoned," the police said in a statement.

Nothing to see here folks.

likklemore , Mar 16, 2018 1:25:15 PM | 15
Thanks b for your continued heavy lifting. Btw, other serious journalists are now citing your diligence on this plot.

Yes, I 'm in on the dots to the Steele dossier "likely" that Skripal was very helpful and must be silenced; his daughter too since he may have confessed to his part.

Falling apart it is. How was The Mirror, (UK), allowed to publish this article?

Before it is pulled, take a read. Below are just snips.

The Dark Secrets of Porton Down: Inside controversial defence lab which developed VX nerve agent and used human 'guinea pigs'
More than 20,000 people have been tested on at the top secret lab which is concentrating on gas attack defences
LINK

It is one of Britain's most secretive sites, remaining shrouded in mystery for more than 100 years. [.]

The 7,000 acre site, near Salisbury, is one of the UK's most secretive and controversial military research facilities and the oldest chemical warfare research installations in the world.

Scientists from Porton were among the first to create biological weapons as well as one of the world's most lethal chemical weapons, but now its main purpose is to support the military and help combat terrorism.

Porton Down opened in 1916 as the War Department Experimental Station for testing chemical weapons during WW1.

Scientists at the lab researched and developed weapons agents used by the British military during the war such as chlorine, mustard gas and phosgene.[.]

The base was later named the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment.

Chemical weapons were tested on site. Scientists built cannisters full of poison gas that could be released by a timer and they also filled shells with it and released them at targets.

But many of the shells failed to explode meaning the fields are still full of the active chemical agents.

Now Porton concentrates on devising defensive measures against gas attacks after its chemical and biological weapons programme was closed down in the 1950s.

On the government's website it says: "To help develop effective medical countermeasures and to test systems, we produce very small quantities of chemical and biological agents.

"They are stored securely and disposed of safely."[.]

Human experiments

Since 1916 more than 20,000 people have taken part in studies at the base. Porton Down's experiments on humans have been widely criticised as it is alleged some human 'guinea pigs' were duped into taking part in tests. Tests were carried out on servicemen to try and determine the effects of nerve agents on humans - with one recorded death due to a nerve gas experiment.
Leading Aircraftman Ronald Maddison died aged 20 in 1953 after taking part in sarin nerve agent toxicity tests. .[.]

Viruses

Initial samples of the Ebola virus were sent to the Porton Down lab in 1976. The lab now allegedly contains samples of some of the world's most aggressive diseases including Ebola, anthrax and the plague.[.]

Aerial release trials

Between 1953 and 1976 a number of aerial release trials were carried out to help the government understand how a biological attack might spread across the UK. The government said: "Given the international situation at the time these trials were conducted in secret." And added: "The information obtained from these trials has been and still is vital to the defence of the UK."

Two separate and independent reviews concluded the trials did not have any adverse health effects on the UK population.[.]

Aliens

There has been speculation over the years that alien bodies could be hidden at the sight. But the government has said: "No aliens, either alive or dead have ever been taken to Porton Down or any other Defence Science and Technology Laboratory site."

... ... ...

ken , Mar 16, 2018 1:27:07 PM | 16
Sorry but IMO no one is FALLING into a trap. These people know what they're doing. One gets tired of hearing how Trump has been trapped into provoking Russia. Paul Craig Roberts seems to believe it but after watching his actions I don't buy it at all. He never had any intentions of settling with Russia nor easing out of the empire wars.

You are correct about the apparent connection between TV shows and what's happening. Same thing with 9/11. Remember when Condsleazy Rice said they never considered Airplanes used to fly into buildings... Then look at the TV show premier Lone Gunman?

Everything in the West is scams and/or lies. Nothing the governments put out, whether economics or geopolitics are even close to accurate. The west is owned lock, stock and barrel by the central banks are fascism economically and very nearly Nazism politically. Their citizens are unskilled, uneducated, and have very little in the way of cognitive skills,,, all necessary for tyrants to exist in the open as they do today.

Very good analysis b. Too bad reading comprehension in the West is at a 3rd grade level.

Noirette , Mar 16, 2018 1:31:04 PM | 17
Without a good description of the toxin / poisonous substance / other agent, it is not possible to speculate. I read that Yulia, on the bench, was vomiting, had lost control of her bowels, and was conscious. It sounded to me like mushroom poisoning. (Not ricin, anthrax, sarin ) The only clue commensurate with 'nerve gas' or some other poison that could act rapidly through skin by touch / contact (touching the ill person, a contaminated surface, etc.) is that a policeman fell ill, but where is he, what are his symptoms, and how is he doing? Maybe that was just hype, etc. (see b, top post.) This is contradictory - as b points out - with the Doc not being affected in the least. (I'm not a toxicologist, this is just common sense.)

Point is, if I stated that some cooking, veggie identification mistake, or some attempted mayhem with mushrooms possibly as an insult miscalculated gone very wrong is what took place here, nobody could disprove or even seriously challenge my theory, for now. (Not saying that took place, only that there are no facts, no way of judging.)

The reaction of GB Gvmt., then the US, France, etc. is another matter altogether, in the present climate it is par for the course. A Russian ex-spy almost dying (if that is the case?) is obviously to be laid at the door of arch-devil Putin. This type of hysteria is actually a sign of weakness, of bewilderment, of not knowing where to turn, what to do, etc., and exploiting situations in the silliest ways. The UK at any rate has gone past a peak propaganda point, imhho.

Norumbega , Mar 16, 2018 1:40:44 PM | 18
I don't see a link for the account of the doctor who administered first aid. Great analysis. This is only something I noticed diving into the article a second time.
james , Mar 16, 2018 1:55:35 PM | 20
@18 norumbega... google is your friend.. here is a link to what you ask about...bbc below... http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43326734
the pessimist , Mar 16, 2018 2:03:28 PM | 21
Very reminiscent of the MH17 campaign that was used to bully the reluctant Europeans into imposing sanctions on Russia. Accusations were made and a narrative put forward immediately without presenting clear evidence or waiting for an investigation.

Through repetition this narrative has become dogma in the West despite the fact that supporting evidence has still not been forthcoming. It seems that after 9-11 it became clear that quickly putting out a narrative, with the support of the press, and demonizing anyone with any public stature who questions the basic story could be successful, even when there were thousands of eye witnesses and many flaws in the official explanation. The facts, or what really happened no longer matter once the narrative has taken root.

My question is what kinds of threats are being used to keep potential dissenters in line now. French banks were punished over the mistrial deal and it was abandoned. Now the stakes seem to be higher and the risk of defections has increased, so what is the stick?

jayc , Mar 16, 2018 2:05:53 PM | 22
Jonathan Freeland at The Guardian writes today that while due process and rules of evidence are a foundation of democracy, they do not apply in this case because Putin is diabolically evil. Freeland claims that since the responsibility for this "chemical weapons attack" is obvious, no delay should be permitted to suss out the silly details - because the evil Russians and their western enablers will use the time to "fog" the minds of the western peoples and seed doubt. He proposes immediate action to isolate the "murderous tyrant", through blacklists, freezing bank accounts, and unspecified action to counteract the intent to exploit "democratic and legal traditions as weaknesses." (i.e. - calls for more clarity play into Putin's hands).

The above is fascist twaddle, aimed at common citizens and also directly at Corbyn. Freeland should be called out as such, I believe The Guardian limited its comment section for a reason (other western media outlets have done the same over the past year). It seems whipping up this non-story was at least 50% directed at Corbyn and reflects domestic UK politics, but has taken a life of its own. The May government likely did not think out possible consequences of going code red, and if Craig Murray's sources are correct that the "findings" of the CW specialists are compromised intelligence produced under pressure, then some seismic backlash may yet await. Certainly Freeland felt the need to bring up the 2003 experiences, if only to argue its not the same. The abject mediocrity of the politicians and many of their supporters in the media is acute, and there's a real good chance they will impale themselves on their own swords.

CF , Mar 16, 2018 2:09:06 PM | 23
When progressive, social programs only have spineless, timid fools like Corbyn and Sanders to front them, it is no wonder why so many socialist states states have been founded by psychopaths like Lenin.
psychohistorian , Mar 16, 2018 2:10:52 PM | 24
Thank you for continuing to raise your voice about the ongoing myth making in our world. Are we ever going to discuss the Western social contract that has an elite cabal owning the global financial system and everything else forever and ever? That is where the power comes from that is fueling our sick world, IMO
Krollchem , Mar 16, 2018 2:13:43 PM | 25
Background on the tangled RUSI web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_United_Services_Institute

Patron: Her Majesty Elizabeth II
President: HRH the Duke of Kent, Lt. Col. Rtd.
Chairman: The Rt Hon the Lord Hague of Richmond
Senior Vice President: General David Petraeus, US Army. Rtd .

More connections to the web can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_think_tanks_in_the_United_Kingdom

Anon , Mar 16, 2018 2:36:54 PM | 27
Its disgusting to see how all the western media, states use this incident as a warmongering effort. These people are really sick in their heads. Also, note how propaganda works in the west, EVERY JOURNALIST, EVERY POLITICIAN toe with the propaganda line, isn't it amazing? Not only how it works but that there is NO DISSENT? Heinous!

'Skripal case helps divert attention from Brexit' – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53XCYOFBQ7Q

james , Mar 16, 2018 2:39:45 PM | 28
@22 jayc.. i wonder if freeland is any relation to our foreign minister here in canada - crystia freeland? she's also a real buffoon whenever the word russia leaves her lips...

i liked this quote from rt..

""Frankly speaking, in international practice we never encountered such behavior at the state level when very serious accusations are being brought up against a country – our country in this case – with such wording as 'apparently,' 'most likely' and so on," the press secretary said. Such an approach "contradicts not only international law, but common sense as a whole," he added. quote from Dmitry Peskov

paul , Mar 16, 2018 2:42:43 PM | 30
What sounds more and more like war fever is becoming quite frightening. But it's interesting to see that people are still sneering at those who point out that we appear to be on the verge of war, as they have been sneering for years. We've been at this precipice for a long time. The difference is that now we seem to be toeing the edge. In the end it is all theater though, bloody theater. The end goal is the same as ever, a global police state, an Orwellian world.
xor , Mar 16, 2018 2:43:34 PM | 31
Jeremy Corbyn: " Theresa May was right on Monday to identify two possibilities for the source of the attack in Salisbury, given that the nerve agent used has been identified as of original Russian manufacture. Either this was a crime authored by the Russian state; or that state has allowed these deadly toxins to slip out of the control it has an obligation to exercise. If the latter, a connection to Russian mafia-like groups that have been allowed to gain a toehold in Britain cannot be excluded.

On Wednesday the prime minister ruled out neither option. Which of these ultimately prove to be the case is a matter for police and security professionals to determine. Hopefully the next step will be the arrest of those responsible. "

I don't see any signs that the statement is manipulated or not of Corbyn's writing. What a disappointment he is! Instead of keeping his back straight, as b correctly pointed out, he completely folded into the anti-Russia frenzy. Without a shred of proof it's the Russian government be it directly or indirectly through Russian mafia. What about MI5/6 creating a desired political situation or as stated earlier by b, suicide or preventing a handover of some sort (remember to what lengths the USA went with Snowden, Miranda and Morales). Corbyn just proved to be a sellout just like any other politician in power.

Pnyx , Mar 16, 2018 2:55:59 PM | 32
"If we want to prevent a unpredictable clash between nuclear armed powers, which could kill millions within just a few moments, we must all publicly voice our doubts and expose the false accusations made against Russia and other countries." Exactly. I strongly hope many more will do so. By now Boris 'the menace' Johnson accuses Putin personally. This man wants to go down history as the one who ignited the world.
Anonymous , Mar 16, 2018 2:56:36 PM | 33
In December 2017, the BBC was given unprecedented access to Porton Down. They produced a 1 hour documentary on the place including details on animal and human experimentation. The video was available up to a few days ago. It has now been removed. Original BBC page - video not available: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07hx40t Video link at head of this page: [Edit: the page itself is now unavailable] http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/inside-porton-down-britains-controversial-12192830 It is still available here: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x65otqg
james , Mar 16, 2018 3:08:46 PM | 34
@31 xor... corbyn could have said a lot of things... what i find amazing is it has to be russia.. no consideration that another state player would consider such a thing - like ukraine which clearly has an axe to grind with russia, under their present us masters, or israel, which are unhappy with the changes that haven't worked out according to plan in syria... they are at the top of the list of possibilities... corbyn is showing himself to be another stooge (- not stoge ghosthip!) for the empire..
Perimetr , Mar 16, 2018 3:18:24 PM | 35
The UK government is manufacturing its nerve agent case for 'action' on Russia
Anon , Mar 16, 2018 3:21:33 PM | 36
paul

Indeed, note also that it is "of course" Russia's fault that we are on the verge of war, rather NOT the hysterical anti-russian stance past years no no move on, sigh.

b , Mar 16, 2018 3:21:46 PM | 37
@Bakerpete - I hear the the English team will boycott the World Cup after the group stage.

@farm ecologist - I have corrected that "killed" in my piece. It was wrong. Thanks for pointing it out.

@pantaraxia - I didn't know of that Browder connection. Sounds plausible.

@likklemore - , other serious journalists are now citing your diligence on this plot.
Who would that be? Also: Please don't quote news-sources at such length

@Noirette - yes, there are several other explanations for the Skripal's falling ill. The first local reports (link in my first piece) said that Fentanyl had been found at the bench. Other (unrelated) reports show that it is quite available in Salisbury.

@Norumbega - I don't see a link for the account of the doctor who administered first aid.
The doctor part is in the BBC piece linked some lines before that passage

ben , Mar 16, 2018 3:38:28 PM | 38
The "Russia did it" meme becomes more and more shrill and desperate every day. Trump's reticence is because he owes Russians mucho money, not because of any thing else. Business uber alles for him. Screw the working scum of the U$A and the globe.

The empire needs enemies to justify the hundreds of billions given to the MIC corporations. Enemies will continue to be manufactured. Screw the needs of the people.

Peter AU 1 , Mar 16, 2018 3:46:36 PM | 39
From Craig Murray's article and from a comment I found at anther site, it seems likely that Portland Down have established that the poison used (or at least detected on the sample tested) was an AChE inhibitor. Apparently other tests can be adapted to check for an AChE inhibitor. Nerve agents designed for CW are AChE inhibitors, but so are all the chemicals in this very long list at wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetylcholinesterase_inhibitor.
Piotr Berman , Mar 16, 2018 3:48:46 PM | 40
Barring such scenarios like announcing a discovery of nerve poison when some mild poison was added to food that Skripals ate just by state fiat, probably some "Novichok" matching published molecular structure was made, and as surmised by experts before, the stuff is not particularly lethal -- you should not add Roundup to your food either, but if you do, there is still some hope; using Novichok instead of soy souse may be similar.

If the molecules were indeed "Novichok" and not particularly lethal, it is very hard to fathom why Russians would resort to it. One can imagine a diabolic plot to discredit western governments by causing the latter to go ape, but really, isn't it enough to watch and comment what they do already?

One argument for Russian involvement is that while many intelligence agencies would be capable of doing it, only Russians would be sufficiently barbaric and brutal to go with something like that. Civilized countries would use different methods. Drones. A team of 48 assassins with poisonous injections, administered to the target in a quiet hotel room without disturbing the public (take that, drones!). And, in the name of Norway, they NEVER do it in bucolic suburbs.

laninya , Mar 16, 2018 3:59:39 PM | 41
@ pantaraxia (8)
@b (37)
"..on March 6 Browder began giving testimony to a UK Commons select committee where he stated it was a "Kremlin hit" and "I believe they want to kill me. They haven't figured out a way yet where they can kill me and get away with it."

Browder!? Given that guy's history and background, the fact his name comes up in connection with this at all makes him #1 suspect, to my mind. He's a master at getting away with murder by dragging the red herrings of Putin and Russia across the trail.

Peter AU 1 , Mar 16, 2018 4:00:11 PM | 42
40
As yet the UK has been unable to give OPCW the molecular structure or chemical makeup of the poison. UK representative gave a statement to OPCW including the UK 'evidence". This included neither designation code of a known substance nor chemical makeup of an unknown substance.
Bakerpete , Mar 16, 2018 4:02:37 PM | 43
Considering that this crap is not very solid for May I was wondering how far she would go to keep this from blowing back on her. Do the father and daughter die? If they are allowed to recover how will they be presented to the media? Then I had a really frightening thought; what if the police officer dies? Then all bets are off and no amount of real evidence will fix this.
Ant. , Mar 16, 2018 4:11:53 PM | 44
@the pessimist (21)

To me, this is more reminiscent of the justification of the Iraq invasion Version 2.

Saddam's Iraq was required to prove they did NOT have chemical weapons to lift crippling sanctions regimes, rather than western governments bearing the onus of proving Iraq DID have chemical weapons. As usual, the west made lots of grandiose accusations but little in the way of credible evidence.

Theresa May is doing the same thing, demanding the Russian Federation show cause why they shouldn't be regarded as being guilty as sin (although I don't understand why anyone would think Russian operatives would be so unprofessional as to use a nerve agent that could be linked to their home country rather than simply shoot him and make it look like a robbery gone wrong... like Seth Rich?).

It's the same trick / tactic. It's very difficult to prove a negative, if not downright impossible.

So much for innocent until proven guilty, a bedrock of jurisprudence pretty much the world over. Western governments don't seem to able to live up to their own self-declared principles.

Skeletor , Mar 16, 2018 4:14:58 PM | 45
The best article you've ever written. My goodness! Thank you Sir
Piotr Berman , Mar 16, 2018 4:15:37 PM | 46
Re Peter AU 1@42

I guess that this is the only strategy Her Majesty Government may have. Whatever the formula, OPCW would have to give the only possible opinion that it had to be produced by a secret lab that could be located in at least 50 different countries. UK and Russia had easier time locating Skripals than most, but they were not living in hiding, so any international reporter could track them (some passing command of Russian and English highly recommended, but not necessary).

Next, OPCW could actually test the substance, and in case of mediocre lethality (poor rats sacrificed in testing!), the case of distinct "Russian" brutality of the incident would be rather weak, and the suspicions could be directed at the civilized countries.

Jen , Mar 16, 2018 4:26:16 PM | 47
Hopehely @ 9:

I've also come to a similar conclusion as you have, that the Skripals were hit by food poisoning. It is known that they went to Zizzi's in Salisbury for a seafood risotto lunch. For those who don't live in the UK or have not visited there (both apply to me), the restaurant is part of the Zizzi restaurant franchise in the UK. I've been told by a UK-based commenter at The New Kremlin Stooge blog that the food (Italian cuisine) is vile.

Botulism might be possible - it doesn't cause unconsciousness but it does cause eyelids to droop so the victim appears to look unconscious - and ciguatera poisoning (symptoms include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and various neurological symptoms that can last for years) from eating fish is also a possibility. Shellfish poisoning is another possibility. Cooking does not remove or destroy the toxins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciguatera
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paralytic_shellfish_poisoning

If we assume though that the Skripals poisoned themselves at home (accidentally or deliberately), then between the time they left home, had lunch (during which time they apparently had to wait 40 minutes for their meal), then went to a local pub for drinks and went to the shopping mall park bench, and the time they were found unconscious, with Julia Skripal vomiting, fitting and defecating, at least 90 - 120 minutes (up to 2 hours then) must have passed. They are now in Salisbury District Hospital in a critical condition.

Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey goes to their home after the Skripals are found, finds something and passes out almost straight away. He is also being treated in Salisbury District Hospital. His condition is serious but not critical. He apparently is able to talk although AFAIK no-one outside the police has been able to interview him.

Compare and contrast his condition with the Skripals' condition. I think it is very likely that what contaminated the police officer is not the same thing that afflicts the Skripals. Could Bailey have been used to plant something at the Skripals' home and in doing so contaminated himself?

Also we must ask why the Skripals have not been moved to a specialist hospital.

james , Mar 16, 2018 4:44:12 PM | 48
@bakerpete.. the sad part, aside from those possibilities - are the many innocent people who have died as a result of war, the war on iraq that blair and bush authored for one.. does Britain want a repeat of that here? looks like they are crazy enough, given their political leaders at this moment..
somebody , Mar 16, 2018 4:52:53 PM | 49
Corbyn is doing ok. Like everybody else he is using this incident for politics. In this case to attack Russian donations to the Conservative Party.
the pair , Mar 16, 2018 4:53:04 PM | 50
i have to say there are more salient and intelligent points made in this comment section than the entirety of US MSM. a low bar, but still noteworthy.

i immediately thought of the reptilian brit wanker who said "russia is at our doorstep fer realz! moar military welfare plz!" a week or so before this incident. in lieu of any actual threat, this litvinenko redux was thrown together. also the steele dossier. and syria.

there are so many moving parts to the anti-russia(/china) machine that it's difficult to pinpoint which cog is turning the hardest.

what stands out to me for the UK specifically (besides another disappointing case of corbyn lacking spine to match his heart) is that the same western media and politicians who over the past months have painted may as a "BrexitTard" (when she's actually just a typical neoliberaltard) and mocked her obvious lack of leadership qualities (or even basic intellect) are suddenly treating her as a pasty version of colin powell holding his little vial. ditto boris johnson who has been derided as "brit trump" but overnight has credibility because "the enemy of russia is my friend". i guess if they can rehab subhuman neocons like kristol and frum then anyone can get a "cold war makeover".

as for WWIII and such, i try to stay positive. there are still a lot of rich twats with money invested in various russian ventures and china would definitely join in on russia's side if nukes became a real possibility. alone, a stalemate in war with the west. together, start watching "the road" and adapting your favorite recipes for human meat since that's all we'll have to eat. plus you can always count on good old fashioned western cowardice should the draft be reinstated and rejected by the coddled masses.

karlof1 , Mar 16, 2018 5:05:41 PM | 51
Jen @47--

Excellent points! The cui bono question's answer is those wanting at all/any costs to keep the Unipolar status of the Outlaw US Empire intact--an impossible task given the resources of the Multipolar Alliance.

I see many parallels to 911's aftermath and the MH17 shootdown in this Big Lie promotion. Unfortunately, I don't see relations improving for quite a long time.

claudeS , Mar 16, 2018 5:07:10 PM | 52
We know that the western " advisers " in Aleppo were exfiltrated through buses with opaque windows when the city went back to the Syrian state. The Russians allowed this. Now they are so angry that they probably have refused the same thing to happen for the advisers still in Ghouta. Wouldn't this explain a lot of things?
Permafrost , Mar 16, 2018 5:09:32 PM | 53
Seeing the first photo, becomes very easy to know the origin of White Helmets: the seed never falls too far from the tree. Bunch of incompetent idiots! They do not even get a picture with a minimum of credibility? Are the English people so stupid as to swallow this shit?
Hoarsewhisperer , Mar 16, 2018 5:16:12 PM | 54
If we want to prevent a unpredictable clash between nuclear armed powers, which could kill millions within just a few moments, we must all publicly voice our doubts and expose the false accusations made against Russia and other countries.

With due respect, I beg to differ. If we must all publicly - do - anything let's choose something measurable with a permanent long-term benefit. Western Democracy has been infected with a cancer called Neoliberalism (= Privatise Everything). It can be treated, and cured, by demanding that our local MPs propose, endorse, and PASS Laws making it illegal for politicians to accept, and for anyone at all to offer, 'political donations'. Refusal to do so may safely be interpreted as a reliable indicator that he/she is representing the interests of an entity other than the people who voted for him/her and should step down so that The People can select a trustworthy replacement.

That's Step 1 towards disinfecting Democracy and until The People have gotten off their asses and tried it, I don't want to hear, and won't listen to, any more feeble-minded whingeing about 'bad' government.

somebody , Mar 16, 2018 5:17:15 PM | 55
The truth on the British Russian scene is coming out slowly. This here is the BBC
When Britain wanted to extradite ex-KGB agent Andrei Lugovoi over the death of Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko, the press noted that Mr Lugovoi had been linked to a supposed escape attempt for Glushkov in 2001.

So Glushkov was killed after the Salisbury incident same as Berezovsky (Glushov's partner) got killed after the Litvinenko case.

Both the Litvinenko case or the Skripal case either completely incompetent or planned to cause a public crisis.

Red Ryder , Mar 16, 2018 5:29:44 PM | 56
Syria is a war of direct conflict between Russia and the US. It also is a war of proxies used by both sides.

Russia seems to have taken revenge/payback for the PMC Wagner deaths dealt out by CENTCOM a month ago.

"All 7 U.S. Troops Aboard Helicopter Killed in Crash in Iraq."

Some reports have it at 9 dead. "The aircraft, a modified version of the Black Hawk helicopter, is also used by Special Operations pararescue specialists." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/us/politics/seven-troops-killed-helicopter-crash-iraq.html

Coverup in full process. Ain't the first time in Syria nor will it be the last.

Syria requires a decisive victory by one side or the other. How much pain can the US take? We already know the Russians feel pain differently. They show it with their heroic acts of immolation rather than capture. For Russia, Syria is not an option. It is as necessary to be there as it is to have Crimea and the port for the Black Sea Fleet. Russia has returned to the ME, to the Mediterranean, to North Africa (Egypt-Libya).

The US refuses to accept Russia as a great power. When it finally takes notice of the body count from payback that is coming, from tactics that cannot win in Syria, from a strategy based on hegemony and Exceptionalist ideology, then the US will retreat. Syria will be decided by missiles (and missile defenses). That is why it is clear, Russia will prevail.

Petri Krohn , Mar 16, 2018 5:44:16 PM | 57
Here is a scenario:
  1. Maybe the Skripals were poisoned for some unrelated reason. Or they simply overdosed on fentanyl.
  2. The event was piggybacked a few days later for promoting the War on Russia. Traces of some 'novichok' agent were left around Salisbury to be found by Porton Down experts.

This may be a bit too complex to pass Occam's razor. But suppose there is an opportunistic infowar operation just waiting for the right trigger event to launch their false-flag spin.

karlof1 , Mar 16, 2018 5:57:23 PM | 58
Andrew Korybko's view of events is rather different:

"Rather, an unemotional reading of the international situation reveals that this conclusion [imminent end of world] is hyperbole, and that all previous indicators suggested that events would expectedly move in this direction. Instead of being "out of control", everything is actually "under control" -- the US and its allies are only doing what Russia had already predicted they would, and it's difficult to imagine that anyone in the Kremlin is surprised by the latest twists and turns in the New Cold War."

I've noted numerous comic strips reflecting on the issue of truth telling, one asking if it's okay to lie since the President and media lie all the time; the answer being no, it's never okay to lie--5 during this past week alone.

Pepe Escobar's been busy thus week with 3 articles published at atimes.com, 2 related to BRI, while this one examines why it's Putin's fault that he continues to win.

Fatima Manoubia , Mar 16, 2018 6:02:37 PM | 59
"We know that the western " advisers " in Aleppo were exfiltrated through buses with opaque windows when the city went back to the Syrian state. The Russians allowed this. Now they are so angry that they probably have refused the same thing to happen for the advisers still in Ghouta. Wouldn't this explain a lot of things?"

Posted by: claudeS | Mar 16, 2018 5:07:10 PM | 52

Most probably. Indeed, I think the Russians should retaliate by disclosing once for all the "real" role of the US and "its allies" in Syria, to the knowledge of all the US and, especially, European citizens who have suffered and have been submitted to martial law on account of the same terrorists they are supporting, trainning, arming and advising in Syria. This issue of falsely accusing Russia has gone too far.

BTW, that not only were "advisors" who fled from Alepo, but when the "Baba Amro caliphate" fell down to the SAA, some UK and French spies disguised as journalist of very renown media were caught and allowed to leave through a corridor straight to Lebanon in a truce...That was at the very beginning of the war....

Ant. , Mar 16, 2018 6:10:12 PM | 60
@Petri (57)

More correctly, William of Ockham's Razor, or even Aristotle's, the first documented exposition of the Law of Parsimony. No such person as Occam, an invention. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

michael d , Mar 16, 2018 6:14:42 PM | 61
I don't think there was a slow response to the event. Rather the press seemed remarkably well prepped in what was just a temporary closure of an A&E for non-urgent customers. Plenty of TV and radio coverage on the same day. Lots more coverage the next day. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-43289194

True there was a drip drip feed of news, and direct references to Senior Sources waited for a few days. But it all seemed pretty well staged managed to me.

As well as Craig Murray's good comments on "of a type developed by Russia", I'd also add that I have yet to see any official with a name and a title actually say it was Novichok or even a nerve agent. May says her intelligence services say so. No one says it in their own name. Very like WMD.

Petri Krohn , Mar 16, 2018 6:36:22 PM | 62
IRAN DID IT! There is a publication online from November 2016 by Iranian scientists that describes the synthesis of Novichok agents. The paper includes precise synthesis instructions, including where to source the raw materials. The synthesized compounds may not be the exact ones most suitable for weaponization, but they resemble A-230 sited A-242 in the literature.
Hosseini, S. E., Saeidian, H., Amozadeh, A., Naseri, M. T., and Babri, M. (2016) Fragmentation pathways and structural characterization of organophosphorus compounds related to the Chemical Weapons Convention by electron ionization and electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry. Rapid Commun. Mass Spectrom., 30: 2585–2593. doi: 10.1002/rcm.7757.

All the chemicals required for the microsynthesis of O-alkyl N-[bis(dimethylamino)methylidene]-P-methylphosphonamidates were purchased from Sigma-Aldrich (St. Louis, MO, USA), Fluka (Neu-Ulm, Germany), and Merck (Darmstadt, Germany), and were used as received. Methylphosphonic difluoride (Scheme 1, cpd 1) was synthesized by use of a method described elsewhere.[18] Isopropanol-d6 was prepared by reduction of acetone-d6 by sodium borohydride.[19]

Unlike the other articles in the Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry journal this article is available for free with all diagrams.

Petri Krohn , Mar 16, 2018 7:02:44 PM | 65
...continued from 62 . Thanks to Charles Wood for finding the Iranian article on Novichok agents. More on the Iranian work here:
Iranian chemists identify Russian chemical warfare agents - Ryan De Vooght-Johnson, Spectroscopy now, Jan. 1, 2017

The Iranian researchers synthesised five 'Novichok' agents, along with four deuterated analogues. They were all O-alkyl N-[bis(dimethylamino)methylidene]-P-methylphosphonamidate compounds (i.e. molecules with the typical nerve agent phosphorus group coupled to N,N,N'N'-tetramethylguanidine). The O-alkyl group was varied, with the methoxy, ethoxy, isopropoxy, phenoxy, and 2,6-dimethylphenoxy derivatives being prepared. The syntheses were carried out on a micro-scale in order to minimize exposure.

Oscar Romero , Mar 16, 2018 7:06:43 PM | 67
What if the "policeman" was actually the one who administered the poison and they just call him a policeman?
Robert Snefjella , Mar 16, 2018 7:12:04 PM | 68
The 'Skripal affair' is yet another chapter in a very long and inept but mesmerizing for many western geo-political 'soap opera', but without the soap. The constant theme: Russia is the enemy. And Russia really is the enemy, because it alone has effectively stood militarily up to the explicit adopted US geo-political doctrine of global military 'Full Spectrum Dominance'; also, Russia is an effective opposition to the implicit ambition of the insane western dominant-oligarchic-network of achieving global financial, political, and cultural 'full spectrum dominance'.

Now there are numerous sub-stories – agendas – involved, but what they amount to are many threads in the playing out of what appears to be turning out to be an unsuccessful attempt at centralized global totalitarianism. Russia is out of western control.

The completely unhinged 'Russia did it' outpouring of bs obsession of much of the American establishment and media in response to the Trump election glitch, again, is at core a recognition that Russia really is the enemy: the enemy of GMO food, the enemy of molesting children, the enemy of the western militaristic depravities, of western mass media's and politics' culture of deception.

And with Russia out of control, China has had a chance to strengthen itself, and straighten its back, and many other countries are trending in that direction. The unipolar ambition is unraveling.

The US dollar as reserve currency, and the US domination of IMF and World Bank are at stake. And sensible populist policies pertaining to finance may begin to infiltrate the debt slavery system that currently dominates and hobbles so many countries.

So I interpret the Skripal affair as a truly pathetic and desperate but thematic ploy that will over time rebound on the liars. The incident will underline the insane extent to which brazen stupid lies are relied upon by the western establishment. Notable is how immediately 'on cue' the foaming at the mouth indignation over Russia's 'terrible deed' has been in much British mass media and among British politicians. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Was it Orwell who noted that the great English cultural failing was hypocrisy?

All the above doesn't make the situation any less dangerous. Insanity and stupidity are not great qualities for influential people with nuclear weapons to have, or when facing those with nuclear weapons.

VietnamVet , Mar 16, 2018 7:18:15 PM | 69
b

This is an outstanding post. The best and most important article that I have read in the years that I've visited here. I don't know how you do it. I believe that the Skripals were attacked with a nerve poison; but not the highly toxic binary "newcomer" agent identified by the Prime Minister. This incident is serving two purposes; to silence a likely source for the Steele Dossier and as a False Flag to further scapegoat Russia. It is inconceivable that the Russian Federation did it. This is too dangerous and not in their national interests.

Western democracies have been overthrown by corporate mafia families. The military, intelligence officers, and civil servants, who worked for the public good, have vanished. The hysteria is so great my only conclusion is that the decision has been made to go to war. Withdrawal from Syria is impossible. Last night, NewsHour reported "Syria's war keeps raging, amid threats of a new Hezbollah-Israel conflict". An American war with Iran is inevitable. It will draw in NATO and Russia. This will be five nuclear powers at war. The Apocalypse is inevitable.

james , Mar 16, 2018 7:53:47 PM | 71
interesting post on this topic here with some interesting info, to which i am going to quote - from the comment section..

Paul Greenwood John Jones • 18 hours ago

Dr David Kelly worked at Porton Down, when he informed Andrew Gilligan about his reservations on WMD following inspections in Iraq he was "suicided"

John Jones Paul Greenwood • 17 hours ago

Yes, David Kelly worked physically at Porton Down as part of his job for DSTL at the time. There is a large wiki entry on the Hutton Enquiry and of the post mortum on Dr Kelly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/... Again, worth a read - I suspect a few people have a different interpretation than you on the scientists tragic death .

Paul Greenwood John Jones • 17 hours ago

I am sure they do as they do on Skripal's situation, whatever that might be. Do you know if he is alive/dead/ventilated or in hospital or inside Porton Down ?

John Jones Paul Greenwood • 16 hours ago

From BBC news I understand that both Skripal anf his daughter and the Police Sargeant. are in hospital in Salisbury, I think the PM.even spoke to the Police Sargeant.

I genuinely doubt that the Dstl site at Porton Down has either the hospital nor isolation facilities /protocols needed for a care situation.

Petri Krohn , Mar 16, 2018 7:55:14 PM | 72
Hopehely @9, Jen @47

Question: Did police sergeant Nick Bailey also eat the seafood risotto at the Zizzi restaurant? In fact, did all the 20 people alleged to have been affected have the same dish for lunch?

bevin , Mar 16, 2018 7:59:11 PM | 73
Those criticising Corbyn-for remarks quoted, without context in the media which hates him- are unconsciously succumbing to the Establishment's game which is to use this false flag to crush dissidents and, in particular (at a time when the internal campaign to clear out the Blairite apparatchiki sabotaging the Labour Party is at a climax, with the selection by the NEC of a new full time General Secretary due within a few days) the Labour Left.

The left has never been closer to power in its long history. The British ruling class live in fear of Corbyn declaring independence from the media, the punditocracy, the deep state and the City of London. They fear him because he promises to reform the tax system, renationalise the utilities, clean up the relationshop between Westminster and the kleptocracy, leave the EU and question the purpose of NATO.
These things may not impress anyone here but they make The Establishment in the UK tremble in fear. And their equivalents around Europe too dread the example of a revitalised welfare state, a reversal of Thatcherism and neo-liberalism and one of the main leaders of the Stop the War movement of 2003 coming to power.

If Corbyn uses the opportunity to point out that the crooked oligarchs who hate Putin are hand in glove with the City and the Tories, good luck to him. If he suggests that they may well be involved in assassinations in the UK, he could be right- what he has not claimed is that there is any evidence at all of Russian governmental involvement.

Let's look at the Big Picture: the only people in the US close to power who want war with Russia are the neo-cons. And most of them (Krystol, Boot, Frum etc) are just web cam whores selling warmongering language because it is easy work.). Nobody seriously believes that the full spectrum domination of the globe is anything more than an old pipedream, the last whiff of the Manifest Destiny gas which was almost empty when Frederic J. Turner was a lad.

There will be wars but only where there are no formidable enemies- the USA will fight anyone who doesn't have an air force or long range missiles.

The main enemy of the US ruling class and its equivalents throughout the west and in most of the world is the people -- it is them that they fear and hate. And for ages they have kept them waiting for justice, for their share of the wealth that they have created by claiming that war is coming, that the pocket money for kids, the pension funds, the budget for new hospitals must be spent on weapons, to keep the Yellow Peril or the Red Menace at bay.

It has been crystal clear since 1990 that there is no longer any justification for postponing the peace dividend, guaranteeing basic social and economic rights (eg the Four Freedoms from WW II), addressing the problems of the environment, evicting the exploiter from his place at every family's dinner table; putting an end to those living off the homeless and the unemployed, blackmailing the sick, enslaving the vulnerable.

And those-too many of whom are elderly baby boomers who have become fearful of change- unable to see what needs to be done- and that it needs doing sooner rather than later- that demographic is shrinking, along with newspaper readership, believers in the MSM and those who, with straight faces, can call a choice between Trump and Clinton (and their clones around the world) a political contest.

The bottom line is that, thanks to b and others like him or ready to share these posts, we all know that the Skrival story is bullshit from soup to nuts. We know who benefits from such lies and hysterical campaigns and it is not us, or the rest of the 99% of the world's population who matter..

What they/we want is a community in which we can live together in peace stop wasting our precious lives on the ideology, practice and organisation of war and murderous competition and the first tiny step in that direction involves replacing our evil rulers with people more in tune with our desires and more receptive to our wishes.

posa , Mar 16, 2018 8:05:33 PM | 74
So what's the end game? Is the Predator Class preparing to start Hot War with Russia sometime real soon? Everyone knows that once the shooting starts things would rapidly escalate into a nuclear confrontation that can easily spin out of control? Are we seriously mobilizing down that path? This is shaping up to be worst disaster since the Cuban Crisis which the Deep State also instigated... JFK vowed to terminate the CIA- Deep State and was taken out by the Dulles- CIA Wet Works Division in retaliation.
John Hawk , Mar 16, 2018 8:06:16 PM | 75
The ? was asked above about 'how do all the EU puppets all of a sudden agree with PM May et al?'. Well, maybe one should make a study of how blackmail works...just sayin'...!
harrylaw , Mar 16, 2018 8:28:18 PM | 77
The loss of the Middle East is in prospect for the US, now the UK, France and Germany are proposing to the other EU members, sanctions against Iran because of their missile defence program and 'meddling in the Middle East' an obvious sop to Donald Trump.Why are the UK population being propagandized so much, could this be the reason.....

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials.

Jen , Mar 16, 2018 8:46:51 PM | 78
Petri Krohn @ 72: Depending on who you read or listen to, up to 38 people have reportedly been poisoned but their names have not been released and no photos of them have as yet been released.

It's a pretty strange poison that has varying effects on different people. The doctor who gave first aid was unaffected as well. But the narrative has been inconsistent from one day to the next. This suggests that most of what we are reading, seeing or hearing on the news is being improvised on the fly. We need to reserve judgment on who is responsible until more details become available (if they ever do).

psychohistorian , Mar 16, 2018 8:54:48 PM | 79
@ harrylaw with the quote from Herman Goering

Thanks for that. It is quite obvious that strategy is being used again. Where are the countervailing forces today? Perhaps only you, I and the rest of the 99%

How to get the 99% to stand up and say NO! And as other have written, we need a replacement/upgrade strategy for our governmental leadership so they all work for us and not the 1%.

I derive some pleasure in seeing events seemingly bringing our cultural dysfunction to a crisis, manufactured or otherwise, because the period of social flux provides opportunity for human growth and evolution......will that potential be realized?

frances , Mar 16, 2018 8:57:26 PM | 80
Posted by: xor | Mar 16, 2018 2:43:34 PM | 31
re Corbyn selling out
Is he selling out or is he leaving options open while avoiding confrontation. He may recall what happened to Kelly.
Pft , Mar 16, 2018 9:05:48 PM | 82
In Orwells 1984 one cant help but question if the perpetual war between the 3 nations is real or not. The purpose of war is clear, that is to consume the excesses of industrial production, while keeping the populace in relative poverty to keep them controllable. The populace is then further controlled by fear of the enemy rival state and can be coerced into accepting their diminished lifestyle and supporting the ruling regime . The limited amount of human life that is expended in these unending conflicts turns this perpetual war into a twisted peace; "War is Peace."

I cant help but think China, Russia and the West are playing the same game with some additional actors in the Middle East taking sides in the pretend conflict. Eric Prince chosen by China to head security for its BRI. Russia leaving business unfinished in Syria. Madness. Putins public declarations of new weapon systems play right into US hands to get larger defense budgets in a time of larger deficits due to tax cuts. He knows as well as anyone the US knows of their capabilities.

On the other side the Trump-Kim silliness. Absurd Russia Gate in US that a 10 yo should be embarrassed to believe in , and this nonsense by May in the UK.

Its all theater IMO. No wonder there are no good movies out there as Hollywood writers are too busy scripting our reality and translating into Russian and Chinese

Don Bacon , Mar 16, 2018 9:07:08 PM | 83
news report
The White House sought to quash suggestions that President Trump is too soft on Moscow Thursday, ordering sanctions against Russians alleged to have participated in election meddling and joining allies to condemn the Kremlin for an attempted murder in Britain. The moves took many skeptical observers by surprise, given that the administration has long been accused of being too sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Othello , Mar 16, 2018 9:12:55 PM | 84
The West is using the Skripal poisoning to strip Russia of credibility when it defends Syria against false flag chemical weapons attacks staged by their Takfiri dupes to facilitate military attacks by the West on Syria. In effect they are saying is that Russia is such an egregious offender regarding the use of chemical weapons that they cannot be believed when they come to the defense of the Syrian government...in fact, they are inferring that Russia is more than likely complicit in these chemical weapon attacks. With obliging media houses and an unthinking general population its foolproof.
J Swift , Mar 16, 2018 9:15:00 PM | 85
Terrific set of articles, b. Really, even the most cursory overview of actual, known facts, viewed in the known political webs and the known modus operandi of the Western intelligence (sic) services, there is truly no way it was a Russian "hit." Not sure what really happened, but sure it wasn't that.

Actually I'm curious about the factor that seemed to have changed--the daughter. Something about her appearance brought this to a head. Did she visit regularly, or was this a portentous meeting? And did she bring good news or bad? We know too little to completely rule out the possibility mentioned early on of a possible joint suicide attempt (supported by the references to fentanyl patches, which seems an odd thing for first responders to have made up if there wasn't something going on). I have seen two pictures of the daughter, and the recent one showed she had lost a lot of weight. That could be healthy, but what if she came to tell Pop that she had terminal cancer, or his request to be allowed to return to Russia was denied. He is friendless and unhappy in a strange country...suicide might not be ridiculous. And only after did it dawn on some MI6 smearmeister how timely it would be to say it was an assassination, performed in the only conceivable way that would immediately implicate Russia. The rest is theater, with the beautiful part being to demand Russia prove it did not use "their" nerve agent, one which appears to have been mostly a theoretical exercise by the USSR that did not really pan out and was likely never actually produced, such that anything "found" could be that damned stuff. Prove this is NOT unicorn shit!

Perhaps more likely, though, would be an alternative. He had reportedly made recent appearances at the Russian embassy, maybe just renewing passport and registration documents, but what if it was more? What if he had been approached with the proposition that since he was the "Russian source" in the Steele dossier, and Russia is tiring of the incessant Russiagate stuff and thought perhaps there was information he could provide which would further discredit Steele? Britain would no longer be safe, so best if he retuned to Russia and be reunited with his daughter. Daughter arrived either to finish sealing the deal, and/or to provide some cover with respect to the return visit to Russia. Western agencies are tipped off (no doubt they have many eyes on Steele an his associates), fear Dad might have talked too much to Daughter, so both are killed, at which point the above theater takes over.

Not enough information to know, of course, but it is curious why the poisoning now, and why him, and why with his daughter? It just seems her appearance on the scene might be tied in with the timing.

Don Bacon , Mar 16, 2018 9:24:15 PM | 88
The West is using the Skripal poisoning to strip Russia of credibility . . . it's foolproof.
Baloney. See my 81.
Peter AU 1 , Mar 16, 2018 10:22:16 PM | 93
Reading up on the AChE inhibitors, the grouping that CW nerve agents belong to, I find that thre is a huge amount of ongoing research into new chemical structures both for pesticides and medicine. The known CW nerve agents were stumbled upon during research for agricultural purposes, but when found too toxic, further developed as chemical weapons. It seems likely, going by Craig Murray's second article, that Portland Down has detected an organophosphorus chemical of some type - as yet, the chemical structure unknown. For a nerve agent or AChE inhibitor to be known as a chemical weapon, it has to have been manufactured for that purpose.

The three people poisoned by some form of organophosphorus AChE inhibitor, chemical structure as yet unknown. Non military as all three victims alive, but as organophosphorus AChE inhibitors are non reversible, will most likely never recover from whatever state they are in now. The facts seem to end with three people being poisoned by an unidentified organophosphorus AChE inhibitor. There would be many thousands of these left over/put aside from other research. The rest, military grade nerve agent, only Russia can produce it, Novichok, ect ect is all narrative.

farm ecologist , Mar 16, 2018 10:39:11 PM | 94
Peter AU #93

clarification Re., "as organophosphorus AChE inhibitors are non reversible, will most likely never recover from whatever state they are in now."

Not necessarily. Like other enzymes, AChE gradually turns over in the body. Thus, assuming the victim survives, the poison should be eliminated via the body's normal metabolic and excretory mechanisms, and the irreversibly inhibited AChE gradually replaced by newly synthesized molecules. To compare, ASA/aspirin is an irreversible inhibitor of an enzyme called cyclooxygenase, whereas ibuprofen inhibits the same enzyme, albeit in a reversible manner.

Kalen , Mar 16, 2018 10:41:42 PM | 95
The only way to deal with pure black propaganda as a series of cases under umbrella of Putin did it MH17 etc all., and Russia gate or rather Russia hate campaign and with all the coming soon more nonsense and vicious attack of wounded and dying political animals in the west trying to prove themselves useful relevant to global oligarchy before they have their asses kicked as ineffective tools for manipulation and confusion of enslaved masses is to ignore it as it is only a theatrical performance aimed to scare people into submission under fake threat of war.

Putin meek or no real response for the series of provocations since at least 2012 is telling the truth of reality of situation namely scared populations. Works for all sides and is beneficial for all trusted politicians who only lie when their lips are moving.

Putin was poling in high fifties to low sixties in 2012 recently polled in eighties and even in nineties when more viciously attacks on Russia was unleashed. What not to like, seen as defended of mother Russia under senseless accusations would rise polls even of hatred Yeltzin as Russian Byzantine politics dictates and what brought support for widely hated Stalin even after mass cleansing of the party and wiping out families deemed his enemies , Russians stood up for him as a symbol of the nation. Putin did not loose on any of that nonsense and in contrast consolidate his power while in the same time build consensus among supporting oligarchy, even Berezovsky change his mind about Putin along that lines.

Also a joke of sanctions against Russia brought no harm to Russia but only benefit as they shed dependence of the west but to Europe and helped to create chaos and let a bunch of puppets of Washington to take over roles of frontmen creating conditions of another bailout this time, since 2008 bailout of banks, multinationals, insurance companies, car companies, and hitech and energy companies now we witness bailout of MIC and war industry on all sides . You want to see nukes flying let May seize all assets of Russian oligarchy in UK but that will never happen, Putin meek attempt of doing so in Russia made him western target so he backed down as releasing Chodakovsky and others like double agents proved.

Do not be fooled, the only war that is coming is vicious war against ordinary people forced into slavery by united global oligarchy who are loosing their propaganda edge as more people wake up from torpor of national politics.

Grieved , Mar 16, 2018 11:32:31 PM | 98
Excellent journalism, b.

@68 Robert Snefjella -

I agree totally with your points. The Skripal affair is more than unraveling, it's rebounding with every wrong action it takes. In its overblown hysteria and vitriol, it is destroying, far more than enforcing, the power of mass lies in the UK - in my view.

@73 bevin -

Agreed that the UK is very alarmed by Corbyn, in the ways you state. I appreciate your summary, I hadn't seen any news about what he said yet. I confess I was falling into disappointment. Silly me.

And of course, it's always been the war of the rich against the poor, on a planet that produces abundance for all, but for the plunderers who become and remain rich by stealing from the poor. This is the only war there ever was, with greed at its root.

~~

As to the hegemonic west, there will be no war. What we're seeing now IS the war. This is all they have to throw at Russia, and China and Iran, etc. This is how they fight, using all the power they can gather, and this is all they have. Putin on March 1 destroyed all possible military options for them, beyond spiteful attacks on the defenseless, and the suicide moves of proxies.

What we are hearing in this latest opportunistic attack on Russia is the howl of insane rage, and the tantrums of willful children who are actually provoking to be slapped, just to return them to their senses.

I think Russia will be judicious with that slap, and execute it perfectly, with as much mercy as the situation allows. The US has been begging for it for a long time, and Russia has had plenty of time to plan multiple scenarios. Syria would be an excellent place for it to happen.

[Mar 17, 2018] Acceptable Bigotry and Scapegoating of Russia by Natylie Baldwin

Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
turcopolier.typepad.com

The first time I realized how low things would likely get was when Ruth Marcus, deputy editor of the Washington Post , sent out the following tweet in March of 2017, squealing with delight at the thought of a new Cold War with the world's other nuclear superpower: "So excited to be watching The Americans, throwback to a simpler time when everyone considered Russia the enemy. Even the president."

Not only did Marcus's comment imply that it was great for the U.S. to have an enemy, but it specifically implied that there was something particularly great about that enemy being Russia.

Since then, the public discourse has only gotten nastier. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper – who notoriously perjured himself before Congress about warrantless spying on Americans – stated on Meet the Press last May that Russians were uniquely and "genetically" predisposed toward manipulative political activities. If Clapper or anyone else in the public eye had made such a statement about Muslims, Arabs, Iranians, Jews, Israelis, Chinese or just about any other group, there would have been some push-back about the prejudice that it reflected and how it didn't correspond with enlightened liberal values. But Clapper's comment passed with hardly a peep of protest.

More recently, John Sipher , a retired CIA station chief who reportedly spent years in Russia – although at what point in time is unclear – was interviewed in Jane Mayer's recent New Yorker piece trying to spin the Steele Dossier as somehow legitimate. On March 6, Sipher took to Twitter with the following comment : "How can one not be a Russophobe? Russia soft power is political warfare. Hard power is invading neighbors, hiding the death of civilians with chemical weapons and threatening with doomsday nuclear weapons. And they kill the opposition at home. Name something positive."

In fairness to Sipher, he did backpedal somewhat after being challenged; however, the fact that his unfiltered blabbering reveals such a deep antipathy toward Russians ("How can one not be a Russophobe?") and an initial assumption that he could get away with saying it publicly is troubling.

Glenn Greenwald re-tweeted with a comment asking if Russians would soon acceptably be referred to as "rats and roaches." Another person replied with: "Because they are rats and roaches. What's the problem?"

This is just a small sampling of the anti-Russian comments and attitudes that pass, largely unremarked upon, in our media landscape.

There are, of course, the larger institutional influencers of culture doing their part to push anti-Russian bigotry in this already contentious atmosphere. Red Sparrow , both the book and the movie , detail the escapades of a female Russian spy. The story propagates the continued fetishization of Russian women based on the stereotype that they're all hot and frisky. Furthermore, all those who work in Russian intelligence are evil and backwards rather than possibly being motivated by some kind of patriotism, while all the American intel agents are paragons of virtue and seem like they just stepped out of an ad for Nick at Nite's How to be Swell .

The recent Academy Awards continued their politically motivated trend of awarding Oscars for best documentary to films on topics that just happen to coalesce nicely with Washington's latest adversarial policy. Last year it was the White Helmets film to support the regime change meme in Syria. This year it's Icarus about the doping scandal in Russia.

[Mar 17, 2018] Could he possibly have been working for the Berezovsky organisation?

Notable quotes:
"... The haste in which the accusations and accompanying propaganda campaign were put in motion indicates a panicked decision made under pressure from the Puppet Masters of Washington. ..."
"... Likely the investigation will be a reprise of the MH17 case, where obstruction and obfuscation were used until the case passed out of the goldfish memory of the people. ..."
Mar 17, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

N_ , March 16, 2018 at 03:32

1) The police have appealed for info on where Sergei Skripal's BMW was between 1pm and 1.40pm on 4 March, the day of the attack. Wasn't his car tracked? What's this about even if it wasn't?

2) According to her cousin , Yulia Skripal is engaged to a "high-ranking security official". Sounds like FSB. Was he her boyfriend when she was living in England for five years after he dad got swapped in 2010?

3) Who has Sergei Skripal worked for? The British and Russian governments both say that when he was in the GRU (Russian military intelligence) he was actually passing secrets to MI6. He pleaded guilty to that crime and was sentenced to jail for it. His family, however, deny that he was a traitor. Could he possibly have been working for the Berezovsky organisation?

james , March 16, 2018 at 03:44

perhaps he was helping pablo miller and christopher steele work on a dossier that became very central to the mueller investigation anything is possible and i wouldn't discount this either

Freddy , March 16, 2018 at 07:05

N_:"Could he possibly have been working for the Berezovsky organisation?"

More likely for the Orbis, together with Pablo Miller and and Christoper Steele.

But this one was a very close Berezovsky friend, and "Nikolai Glushkov, 68, the right-hand man of the deceased oligarch Boris Berezovsky, Mr Putin's one-time fiercest rival, was found dead at his London home on Monday."

Seems to be likely that those two (Skripal and Glushkov) were used by the Orbis to get information for the Steele's "Trump Dossier" through their old connections in Moscow.
Yulia Skripal was a go-between, a courier, because information of that kind was unlikely coming in and out via cell phones, it was delivered by a courier.
Now, as Steele is about to be brought to the US and to be questioned by various US Gov. organization, now is the time to do some cleaning. No information holders, no couriers, no witnesses – no problems whatsoever for the Orbis, for Christopher Steele, for Pablo Miller and others. No doubt there are plenty of cleaners working for the Orbis who can stage any kind of "poisoning".

Salford Lad , March 16, 2018 at 06:07

Teresa May and her Tory Govt have got themselves in a bind. They have made accusations against the Russian Govt, without proof or a credible motive shown. They have failed to go thru' the correct OPCW channels and have blocked a resolution at the UN for an investigation into the Skripal case.

It is inconceivable that the Lawyers around the Govt Civil Service could have allowed these accusations to be made on such spurious grounds.

The haste in which the accusations and accompanying propaganda campaign were put in motion indicates a panicked decision made under pressure from the Puppet Masters of Washington.

Indications are this is connected to Syria and a rapidly closing window of false flag/ chemical attack , to justify an invasion. That horse has now bolted and the cleaning of the Augean stables has arrived.

The OPCW will eventually investigate, but we must remember that many of our International bodies have been contaminated by Washingon infiltration.
OPCW did not cover itself in glory during the last several chemical attacks in Syria and the samples taken passes thru; several dubious channels before presentation to OPCW.

Likely the investigation will be a reprise of the MH17 case, where obstruction and obfuscation were used until the case passed out of the goldfish memory of the people.

No matter, the mud has been thrown at Russia and it will stick proof or no. It is the way of the world and the PTB know it.

Dennis Revell , March 16, 2018 at 07:14

:

Excellent again, Salford Lad.

– Tyldesley lad.

[Mar 17, 2018] Cue bono question and possible players

Mar 17, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

Stonky , March 16, 2018 at 02:53

Clyde Davis: " until I hear a more convincing explanation I'm sticking to my guns."

1. Russian dissident oligarchs: loads of money; baleful influence and financial tentacles extend into the very heart of the UK establishment; all sorts of dodgy connections in the former Soviet Union; zero scruples; hate Putin.
2. Ukraine: fascist regime; involved in a war with Russia already; just as likely to have access to old Soviet Novichok (if it exists) as Russia; just as capable of manufacturing it as Russia if it doesn't; zero scruples; hate Putin.
3. Turkey: angry because they're losing a proxy war with Russia in Syria; already have their own chemical weapons programme; perfectly capable of manufacturing this stuff; previous in targeted assassinations; zero scruples; hate Putin.
4. Saudi Arabia: angry because they're losing a proxy war with Russia in Syria; loads of money; baleful influence and financial tentacles extend into the very heart of the UK establishment; happy to export or facilitate terrorism anywhere in the world including their supposed 'allies'; zero scruples; hate Putin.
5. Anti-Trump forces in the US: Demented in their obsession with 'Trump-Russia' collusion; angry because they're losing a proxy war with Russia in Syria; already have access to Soviet Novichok (if it exists); perfectly capable of manufacturing it if it doesn't; previous in targeted assassinations; zero scruples; hate Putin.
6. Israel: angry because they're losing a proxy war with Russia in Syria; probably the best military/scientific capability in the world; certainly capable of manufacturing this stuff; previous in targeted assassinations; zero scruples when pursuing what they believe to be their own best interests; hate Putin.

Kiza , March 16, 2018 at 02:55

To me this is a repeat of the MH17 case study with its:

  1. Propaganda preparation – media full of shot down Uki military planes vs. media full of CW victims in Syria for which Russia is to blame,
  2. "Rush" to judgement whodunit – former Australian Prime Minister Abbot publicly pointed finger at the Russian rebels in Ukraine 7 hours after the shootdown vs. the UK Prime Minister blames Russia a day after her event,
  3. Soviet Union = Russia when convenient – the Soviet designed and made BUK becomes the exclusively Russian made BUK vs. the Soviet Designed CW becomes the exclusively Russian produced CW (with a touch of the good old British propaganda – maybe Russia lost control over it! => well, maybe US "lost control" over it when it was helping it's client Uzbekistan destroy it)
  4. Logic matters not – let us find a BUK coming all the way from Russia instead of looking at tens of such systems operated by the Uki troops, apparently four near the area where the shoot down happened vs. let us look at poison or a trained chemist coming all the way from Russia (how when one cannot get even a small bottle of drink on a plane?) whilst there is a British own source 12 km away,
  5. When questions arise and contrary items of evidence come out, just ignore and keep drumming "the proven facts" (the science is settled) from the blame package prepared in advance – an alternative, facts-supported explanation will never be accepted no matter what.

The post-modern West operates on evidence-free pure emotion-eliciting narratives ("Putin killed my baby") on the shoulders of MSM and troll farms. Any unauthorised explanation, such as Mr Murray's, is declared a conspiracy theory to be ridiculed.

Sergey , March 17, 2018 at 08:11

https://wikispooks.com/w/images/9/90/Report-mh17-crash-en.pdf Page 232

Above mean that Ukraine, Malaysia and Malaysia Airlines bore certain responsibilities with regards to the operations of flight MH17 based on national an international law.

Russia has very bad lawyers. The investigation is completed.

[Mar 17, 2018] BBC Timeline of the incident

They omitted the time when the doctor treated the daughter for 30 min or so.
Notable quotes:
"... Police said the pair went to The Mill pub before going to Zizzi restaurant at 14:20 GMT, staying until 15:35 GMT ..."
"... 16:15 GMT: emergency services received the first report of an incident ..."
Mar 17, 2018 | www.bbc.com

[Mar 17, 2018] Russian Spy Poisoning Story = Iraq WMD Scam 2.0

Mar 17, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

By Craig Murray, former British intelligence officer, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, and Rector (i.e. Chancellor) of the University of Dundee. Originally published at CraigMurray.org.uk .

As recently as 2016 Dr Robin Black, Head of the Detection Laboratory at the UK's only chemical weapons facility at Porton Down, a former colleague of Dr David Kelly, published in an extremely prestigious scientific journal that the evidence for the existence of Novichoks was scant and their composition unknown.

In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, 'Novichoks' (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of the 'Foliant' programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published. (Black, 2016)

Robin Black. (2016) Development, Historical Use and Properties of Chemical Warfare Agents. Royal Society of Chemistry

Yet now, the British Government is claiming to be able instantly to identify a substance which its only biological weapons research centre has never seen before and was unsure of its existence. Worse, it claims to be able not only to identify it, but to pinpoint its origin. Given Dr Black's publication, it is plain that claim cannot be true.

The world's international chemical weapons experts share Dr Black's opinion. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is a UN body based in the Hague. In 2013 this was the report of its Scientific Advisory Board, which included US, French, German and Russian government representatives and on which Dr Black was the UK representative:

[The SAB] emphasised that the definition of toxic chemicals in the Convention would cover all potential candidate chemicals that might be utilised as chemical weapons. Regarding new toxic chemicals not listed in the Annex on Chemicals but which may nevertheless pose a risk to the Convention, the SAB makes reference to "Novichoks". The name "Novichok" is used in a publication of a former Soviet scientist who reported investigating a new class of nerve agents suitable for use as binary chemical weapons. The SAB states that it has insufficient information to comment on the existence or properties of "Novichoks". (OPCW, 2013)

OPCW: Report of the Scientific Advisory Board on developments in science and technology for the Third Review Conference 27 March 2013

Indeed the OPCW was so sceptical of the viability of "novichoks" that it decided – with US and UK agreement – not to add them nor their alleged precursors to its banned list. In short, the scientific community broadly accepts Mirzayanov was working on "novichoks" but doubts he succeeded.

Given that the OPCW has taken the view the evidence for the existence of "Novichoks" is dubious, if the UK actually has a sample of one it is extremely important the UK presents that sample to the OPCW. Indeed the UK has a binding treaty obligation to present that sample to OPCW. Russa has – unreported by the corporate media – entered a demand at the OPCW that Britain submit a sample of the Salisbury material for international analysis.

Yet Britain refuses to submit it to the OPCW.

Why?

A second part of May's accusation is that "Novichoks" could only be made in certain military installations. But that is also demonstrably untrue. If they exist at all, Novichoks were allegedly designed to be able to be made at bench level in any commercial chemical facility – that was a major point of them. The only real evidence for the existence of Novichoks was the testimony of the ex-Soviet scientist Mizayanov. And this is what Mirzayanov actually wrote.

One should be mindful that the chemical components or precursors of A-232 or its binary version novichok-5 are ordinary organophosphates that can be made at commercial chemical companies that manufacture such products as fertilizers and pesticides.

[Mar 17, 2018] This is what a false flag operation is about: you need to carefully plant impurities that point to the desired target. Compare with Vault 7. Can it be a chemical Vault 7 available somewhere?

Notable quotes:
"... The anti Russia propaganda industry I believe was geared up to mobilize on an expected East Ghouta gas attack. OK the "industry" would not be privy to the details of such a false flag. But could it be they have gone off prematurely by assuming this Salisbury "event" was the intended pretext. ..."
"... Certainly there appears a degree of pre planned organization in the response to this false provocation ..."
"... I'm a major fan of Prime Minister May. What arouses my suspicions here is the refusal to this point of Her Majesty's government to submit samples of the poison to independent 3rd-party analysis. ..."
"... I've NEVER been antiwar, but DO oppose no-exit, no-win wars. The British public has a great deal of historical experience with such conflicts. Could this affair be the prelude to yet another? ..."
Mar 17, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

likbez , March 18, 2018 at 00:45

This is what a false flag operation is about: you need to carefully plant impurities that point to the desired target. Compare with Vault 7. Can it be a chemical Vault 7 available somewhere?

Peter Mo , March 17, 2018 at 13:52

The anti Russia propaganda industry I believe was geared up to mobilize on an expected East Ghouta gas attack. OK the "industry" would not be privy to the details of such a false flag. But could it be they have gone off prematurely by assuming this Salisbury "event" was the intended pretext.

Certainly there appears a degree of pre planned organization in the response to this false provocation

Ben Brink , March 17, 2018 at 14:20

My chemistry background is laughable (B in high school, D in college) and the only "legal" course I took was called Sociology of Law.

The Romans had the line "Cui bono?" The rough translation (10th grade Latin) is "Who benefits?"

Russia's President Vladimir Putin is an honor graduate of the KGB's foreign branch. It stands to reason he wouldn't hesitate to have an ex-spy assassinated if he thought it served the Russian interest. But in this case, what is that interest?

I'm a major fan of Prime Minister May. What arouses my suspicions here is the refusal to this point of Her Majesty's government to submit samples of the poison to independent 3rd-party analysis.

Due to nearsightedness, I never served in the U.S. Army; had I the common sense of a goat, I would have served in the Navy Supply Corps. I've NEVER been antiwar, but DO oppose no-exit, no-win wars. The British public has a great deal of historical experience with such conflicts. Could this affair be the prelude to yet another? Thank you all.

[Mar 17, 2018] The real culprit might be one of the parties who are real beneficiaries of this propaganda surge, including criminal elements connected to the Russian exile "mafia" types, Ukraine, or some of the shadowy US and UK security state players

"At this stage, only gross ignorance or dishonesty can explain anyone seriously claiming there's a rational motive for the Russian government to have done this."
Notable quotes:
"... When Putin's cruising to an easy win and the only concern is whether the turnout is 60% or 70%, the claims he wants it for election purposes are pretty stupid, and become untenable when you consider the very real diplomatic, propaganda and soft power costs Russia will bear for this, and coming at a particularly bad time as well on several counts, with Syria on a knife edge in relation to (even more) open US military aggression, the NordStream II pipeline facing new attempts to block it, and the World Cup coming up. ..."
"... Frankly, if the idea of trying to murder someone in Britain, using a "wmd" in the most hysteria-inducing propaganda-favouring method possible, had been suggested to Putin by one of his security apparatchiks I suspect the man would have been guarding ice floes in the Arctic within a few hours. ..."
"... And that's not even considering that this individual (Skripal) wasn't a thuggish, troublemaking fugitive from Russian justice like Litvinenko, but rather a former spy who had already been unmasked, tried and imprisoned by the Russians (his offence was considered so serious he got a whole 13 years), and then exchanged after a few years inside. He was considered so endangered by British intelligence that they didn't even bother hiding his identity, and his address was in the public domain. ..."
"... At this stage, only gross ignorance or dishonesty can explain anyone seriously claiming there's a rational motive for the Russian government to have done this. ..."
"... And by the same exact token, there's no reason to get breathless about the idea that it could have been one of the parties who are real beneficiaries of this propaganda surge -- any of the countries currently engaged in confrontation of Russia in Syria and elsewhere, or that criminal elements connected to the Russian exile "mafia" types could have obtained it from a lab in, say, Ukraine, or that some of the shadowy US and UK security state contacts involved in the campaign to overturn the election of Trump might have used it as a twofer – to get rid of Skripal if he had information they wanted kept secret and set the pretext for the currently ongoing campaign against Russia. ..."
"... All a lot more plausible than the idea that the Russian government was stupid enough to do this to itself, gratuitously ..."
Mar 17, 2018 | www.unz.com

utu , March 17, 2018 at 2:37 am GMT

@CanSpeccy

Scenarios for operations are written by somebody. Possibly the same people who also write screenplays for TV and Hollywood. We know many writers who worked for intelligence services (Flemming, Greene, LeCarre.) In Six Days of Condor they wanted to keep the scenario secret and have it removed form popular circulation in a thriller books. But here is opposite situation. The operation is basically a psy-op so it is public where you want to convince people that something happened. I can see a point of injecting it as movie drama first so it will become more believable when it eventually happens. But still the simplest explanation of laziness and plagiarism can't be excluded.

Randal , March 17, 2018 at 2:40 am GMT
@Anon

Others have already explained why Purin and cronies might decide now was a good time to kill a traitor and be accused of it.

Nobody has yet credibly done so. When Putin's cruising to an easy win and the only concern is whether the turnout is 60% or 70%, the claims he wants it for election purposes are pretty stupid, and become untenable when you consider the very real diplomatic, propaganda and soft power costs Russia will bear for this, and coming at a particularly bad time as well on several counts, with Syria on a knife edge in relation to (even more) open US military aggression, the NordStream II pipeline facing new attempts to block it, and the World Cup coming up.

Frankly, if the idea of trying to murder someone in Britain, using a "wmd" in the most hysteria-inducing propaganda-favouring method possible, had been suggested to Putin by one of his security apparatchiks I suspect the man would have been guarding ice floes in the Arctic within a few hours.

And that's not even considering that this individual (Skripal) wasn't a thuggish, troublemaking fugitive from Russian justice like Litvinenko, but rather a former spy who had already been unmasked, tried and imprisoned by the Russians (his offence was considered so serious he got a whole 13 years), and then exchanged after a few years inside. He was considered so endangered by British intelligence that they didn't even bother hiding his identity, and his address was in the public domain.

At this stage, only gross ignorance or dishonesty can explain anyone seriously claiming there's a rational motive for the Russian government to have done this.

Randal , March 17, 2018 at 3:03 am GMT
@Mark James

Do I think Russia is involved with the Skripal hit? Of course. .Because of the poison involved, they (Rus/Putin) almost certainly did it.

That's the poison that Porton Down declined to claim they could identify as having come from Russia and were only prepared to say is "of a type developed by Russia"?

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/03/of-a-type-developed-by-liars/

The poison that the main source for (a former Soviet dissident living in the US) put the formulae for in his book published ten years ago, and who was quoted a few days ago as saying that either Russia did it, or someone else who'd read his book?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/russians-says-chemist-uncovered-existence-novichok-075342077.html

Of course, exiled dissidents backing up the latest US propaganda campaign against their former home's government is hardly anything new – that was one of the main methods by which we were lied into the Iraq War. It's rather cutely naïve for one such to openly admit that anybody else with the resources (such as the UK, the US or Israel, for a start, and probably anybody else with access to state resources, such as Ukraine) could have manufactured the supposedly incriminating substance over the past ten years.

So the idea that the particular chemical allegedly used is in the slightest evidence of its origin is completely untenable. Nevertheless, that seems to be the only real piece of "evidence" relied upon for the convenient rush to judgement by the usual suspects.

I just happen to be reading "Rise and Kill First" – the secret history of Israel's targeted assassinations.

Roughly 700 pages of text and notes about one country's targeted killings so I'm really not in a 'how could this be' frame of mind with regard to Russia.

Absolutely. And by the same exact token, there's no reason to get breathless about the idea that it could have been one of the parties who are real beneficiaries of this propaganda surge -- any of the countries currently engaged in confrontation of Russia in Syria and elsewhere, or that criminal elements connected to the Russian exile "mafia" types could have obtained it from a lab in, say, Ukraine, or that some of the shadowy US and UK security state contacts involved in the campaign to overturn the election of Trump might have used it as a twofer – to get rid of Skripal if he had information they wanted kept secret and set the pretext for the currently ongoing campaign against Russia.

All a lot more plausible than the idea that the Russian government was stupid enough to do this to itself, gratuitously.

[Mar 17, 2018] Great Britain has long turned not only into a cozy nest for defectors from all over the world but also into a hub for all sorts of fake news-producing agencies: from the British "Syrian Observatory for Human Rights" to the created by a British intelligence officer pseudo-Syrian "White Helmets".

Notable quotes:
"... As to boorish words of the British Defense Minister regarding Russia, it seems that in the absence of the real results of the professional activity, rudeness is the only weapon remaining in the arsenal of the Her Majesty's Military. ..."
Mar 17, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Perimetr , Mar 16, 2018 11:34:37 PM | 99

Major General Igor Konashenkov of the Russia MoD replies to the British Defense Secretary's comment that "Russia should shut up and go away":

"The rhetoric of an uncouth shrew demonstrated by the Head of the British Ministry of Defense makes his utter intellectual impotence perfectly evident. All this confirms not only the nullity of all accusations towards Russia we have been hearing from London for the last several years but also that the "accusers" themselves are nonentities.

Great Britain has long turned not only into a cozy nest for defectors from all over the world but also into a hub for all sorts of fake news-producing agencies: from the British "Syrian Observatory for Human Rights" to the created by a British intelligence officer pseudo-Syrian "White Helmets".

As to boorish words of the British Defense Minister regarding Russia, it seems that in the absence of the real results of the professional activity, rudeness is the only weapon remaining in the arsenal of the Her Majesty's Military."

[Mar 17, 2018] Russian spy: Conspiracy theories and denial in Russia

Why Russian intelligence services should kill someone of no consequences in UK using some exotic, only in Russia made stuff, is beyond comprehension. Btw, it is not even sure if Novichok was used at all because UK refuses to provide samples and formula is known to many now.
The whole behavior of UK is of the guilty party and BBC coverage demonstrates that quite well. Most probably this is yet another false flag operation by CIA/MI6 job rogue elements hell-bent of Russophobia.
Mar 17, 2018 | www.bbc.com

At an urgent meeting of the United Nations security council on Wednesday, Russian ambassador to the UN Vasily Nebenzya implied the British government and allies including the United States could be responsible.

Mr Nebenzya said Mr Skripal was a "perfect victim which could justify any unthinkable lie," and asked if the attack was "something which benefits Russia on the eve of presidential elections and the world football championships?"

"I can think of a number of countries who would benefit from this incident and [from] blaming Russia," he said.

On state television and social media, Russian citizens and media commentators have espoused similar theories in starker terms. Conspiracy theories implicating the UK and its allies in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal have been widely shared in order - adherents claim without evidence - to attack Russia.

'They love poison in the UK'

A news bulletin on state Rossiya 1 TV accused Britain of masterminding the attack on the Skripals.

In a bizarre and unsubstantiated claim, the Rossiya 1 report referenced the plot of Sky TV series Strike Back in its allegations.

"They started preparing the UK public for the so-called Russian aggression with the use of a nerve paralytic agent at the end of last year," a Rossiya 1 correspondent said.

"It is well known that the Strike Back series is funded and created with the direct involvement of the British special services," he added.

The television series is based on a book authored by former SAS soldier Chris Ryan published in 2007.

An interviewee on Rossiya 1 identified as a "former FSB [Federal Security Service] Major General" said "all this is a well-planned provocation," adding "they love poison in the UK".

'Remarkable coincidence'

On Telegram and VKontakte, a Russian-language social network, similar allegations have circulated among pro-Kremlin channels. Much speculation centred on videos of Mr Skripal's 2004 arrest that had been uploaded to YouTube in the days before the attack.

The timing of the uploads, little more than a week before the Skripals collapsed in Salisbury, led to accusations of British complicity. Posting in Russian, one Twitter user calling themselves 'Uruguayan Intelligence' claimed the YouTube channel Group M was "moderated from Britain", an assertion also made on Russian state TV.

It is unclear if there is any evidence for the claim - Rossiya 1 made it citing "some information" - but despite one news presenter's declaration the upload was "a remarkable coincidence," it is not immediately obvious what it is supposed to prove. In any case, reports on Telegram suggest the decision to post the videos - and other footage of "successful detentions" - was made as long ago as 2017 for a "website for veterans".

Could Ukraine be involved?

Former FSB chief Nikolai Kovalyov, a Russian MP, suggested on Tuesday Ukraine could be involved. Tensions between Russia and Ukraine have been high since Russia's annexation of the Crimea in 2014.

"Given that all this [nerve agent] was stored on the territory of the republics of the former Soviet Union," he said, "a Ukrainian trace cannot be ruled out".

"The beneficiaries are England, America and indirectly Ukraine, because it is interested in showing Russia as an aggressor state."

There is no evidence suggesting Ukraine's involvement.

'Rhetoric from a vulgar woman'

The worsening of tensions between Russia and the UK has also been reflected in the language used by Russian officials.

After the British Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson said Russia should "go away and shut up", Russia's Defence Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov described it as "the rhetoric of a vulgar woman from a bazaar".

"Perhaps he lacks education," suggested Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

"This is trash... can you imagine who we are dealing with?" said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Rossiya 1 TV on 14 March in reference to British government officials.

"These people have no idea about professionalism, diplomacy, international law, any international organisations. Second, they are simply liars. Real, fully-fledged liars."

Russia's ambassador to London, Alexander Yakovenko, told Rossiya 24 TV on Friday that Moscow had not received the answers it needed from Britain concerning the condition of Mr Skripal and his daughter and progress in the investigation.

"Unfortunately, the British often indulge in adopting such a colonial manner," he said.

[Mar 17, 2018] WWII between Russia and the West would be over in 1-2 days (if that), and is basically a suicide.

Mar 17, 2018 | www.unz.com

Beckow , March 15, 2018 at 3:30 pm GMT

@Phillip O'Reilly

bad faith and parochial bellicosity on the part of the all the major powers of the time

Some of it sounds familiar, but not all. I was pointing out that there are major differences between today and 1914, but it is extremely volatile and dangerous like then.

At least some in the West have made a decision to deal with Russia now before it gets stronger. Or to create a much better 'defensive' perimeter for the future. Ukraine, Baltics and probably Georgia, maybe Turkey have been lined up on Russia's border, with Nato bases and soldiers. There was the failed attempt to push Russia out of its key Navy base in Crimea. Syria war will go on to bleed and demoralise Russia, maybe in a few other places. Squeeze the economy by financial isolation. Use media demonisation to create pressure on the Westernised Russian elites.

Will that start a war like in 1914? That's where the differences come in. Russia cannot be today described as ' bellicose ', and neither can large parts of the West. Only some in the West are bellicose. Germany, Italy and to some extent France want to continue or even increase business with Russia.

There is also no such thing as a traditional war between Russia and the West – it would be over in 1-2 days (if that), basically a suicide. It could still happen, but we need more events before we get there.

[Mar 17, 2018] Kremlin Furious After Boris Johnson Accuses Putin Of Murder

Mar 17, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Earlier today we reported that the world got that much closer to a second Cold War after Russia said it would expel UK diplomats in retaliation to Theresa May's decision to kick out 23 Russians, while expanding its "blacklist" of US citizens in response to yesterday's Treasury sanctions. That's when things turned south fast because roughly at that time, the U.K.'s top diploma, Boris Johnson, directly accused Vladimir Putin, saying it was " overwhelmingly likely " that he personally ordered the nerve-agent attack on British soil.

In a dramatic escalation of a diplomatic crisis between the two countries, the Foreign Secretary said the U.K.'s problem was not with the Russian people but with the Russian leader.

"Our quarrel is with Putin's Kremlin and with his decision - and we think it overwhelmingly likely that it was his decision - to direct the use of a nerve agent on the streets of the U.K., on the streets of Europe, for the first time since World War II," Johnson said in London.

Predictably, the Kremlin was furious, said that blaming Putin personally for Skripal's poisoning is "shocking and unforgivable."

Speaking to Interfax, Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that "We have said on different levels and occasions that Russia has nothing to do with this story" and added that "any references to our president is nothing but shocking and unforgivable diplomatic misconduct."

Johnson's statement was a "diplomatic blunder" on the part of the UK foreign secretary, Peskov said, adding that the Kremlin remains "puzzled" by the conduct of the British authorities during the Skripal crisis.

The diplomatic tension increased further Friday afternoon when London's Metropolitan Police said it is treating as murder the death of Nikolai Glushkov, a close associate of Putin opponent Boris Berezovsky -- a one-time billionaire who was himself found hanging dead in 2013 in his house outside London.

The Kremlin's press secretary also expressed belief that "sooner or later the British side would have to present some kind of comprehensive evidence of Russia's involvement, at least, to their partners France, the US, Germany, who declared solidarity with London in this situation." Moscow earlier asked the UK to provide materials in the Skripal case, but received a negative answer.

Johnson's claims of Putin's personal involvement weren't the only example of over-the-top rhetoric by UK officials during the Skripal crisis. UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson said on Thursday that Russia "should go away and shut up" when asked about Moscow's possible response to British sanctions.

In response, Russia's Defence Ministry said Williamson was an "intellectual impotent" and Lavrov said he probably lacked education. "Well he's a nice man, I'm told, maybe he wants to claim a place in history by making some bold statements," Lavrov said. "Theresa May's main argument about Russia's guilt is 'Highly probable', while for him it's 'Russia should go and shut up'. Maybe he lacks education, I don't know."


serotonindumptruck -> kellys_eye Fri, 03/16/2018 - 20:36 Permalink

The False Flag nerve agent attack on Skripal and his daughter merely presents the opportunity to distract the British people from the Brexit imperative.

The British government/Parliament has no desire to separate from the EU, and they have nothing but contempt for the commoners, so they must call upon British intelligence services to fabricate a False Flag terrorist attack against two Russian ex-pats who represent absolutely no value to international espionage and attempt to kill them with poorly engineered chemical weapons.

Then the international community conveniently blames Russia.

What part did I leave out?

Labworks Fri, 03/16/2018 - 19:15 Permalink

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

-Goebbels.

That's Adolf Hitlah's man, Bori boy.

johnnyBoy Fri, 03/16/2018 - 19:22 Permalink

Seems the Deep State is getting desperate. Obama interferes in the Brexit vote..Johnson is interfering in the Russian vote. Bumper stickers back in the 60's.."What if they gave a war and nobody came?" Unfortunately, nukes negate that question. We are all invited and going to participate. Idiots are running the asylum. Duck and cover..ha!

Shemp 4 Victory -> Potato Farmer Fri, 03/16/2018 - 21:16 Permalink

Keep poking that bear geniuses.

During the latest debate between Russian presidential candidates, Zhirinovsky literally erupted about Theresa May's absurd nerve gas psychodrama. Seriously, I've never seen so much fire packed into a two-minute clip.

A couple of choice excerpts (but you really should watch):

"If they give us an ultimatum our Commander-in-Chief should deploy the Baltic Fleet to the shores of Britain. They might respond, but Khrushchev once told the UK: 'A couple of my missiles can eliminate your isles.' It shut them up for twenty years."

"Someone poisoned a filthy turncoat spy, and they blame entire Russia. They threaten to bomb our whole country of 150 million. A cyber-attack, a war - they're nuts. British Prime Minister Mey, May, or whatever, has gone mad. The lady who's never been to war. Like Thatcher, who'd never been to war, but started one over the Falkland Isles in Argentina. And, this one is starting a war in Europe."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsdXW7D50eA (2 min. 22sec. English subtitles)

ted41776 Fri, 03/16/2018 - 18:43 Permalink

definitely not murder though, and they totally hate us for our freedom

skbull44 -> serotonindumptruck Fri, 03/16/2018 - 19:21 Permalink

The Western criminal, er, I mean political class has officially jumped the shark...

Baron von Bud -> FoggyWorld Fri, 03/16/2018 - 19:26 Permalink

The Brits are genuinely good people. My wife much enjoyed herself there on a trip three years ago - except with being threatened with arrest for possessing some Walmart pepper spray. They are much dependent on a warfare economy. Caught between the EU and DC with economic pressure from China, they hooked their wagon to Washington and must play the phony "it was a Russian assassination" game. It's a matter of survival. They are experts at war and torment having run the world or been top dog for well over two centuries. America could help Britain by eliminating all neocons from our government. All this fuss over Hillary's crimes and Comey etc - small potatoes. We have to go after Bush Jr. and make him answer for 9/11. That's the core issue festering in our national soul. Few will talk about it. We need to pull Bush from his hidey-hole and get him on trial. Everything else will then resolve.

GoysRUs18 Fri, 03/16/2018 - 18:56 Permalink

Hey Vald. Time to take the kid gloves off and tell the world who the REAL murders are !!

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/9-11/Israel_did_it

When an event occurs that that fundamentally changes the dynamics of global geopolitics, there is one question above all others whose answer will most assuredly point to its perpetrators. That question is "Cui bono?" If those so indicted are in addition found to have had both motive and means then, as they say in the US, it's pretty much a "slam-dunk" .

And so it is with the events of 9/11 .

Discounting the Official Narrative as the absurdity it so clearly is, there are just two organisations on the entire planet with the expertise, assets, access and political protection necessary to have both executed 9/11 and effected its cover-up to date (ie the means). Both are Intelligence Agencies - the CIA and the Israeli Mossad whose motives were arguably the most compelling. Those motives dovetailed perfectly with the Neocon PNAC agenda, with it's explicitly stated need for "...a catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor" [1] in order to mobilise US public opinion for already planned wars, the effects of which would be to destroy Israel's enemies.

[Mar 17, 2018] How the gas was administred in a place which was under surveillance and why passersby were not affected

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... You have obviously been at the crime scene, have witnessed the comatose bodies of the Skripals and after analyzing the Novitchok samples you meticulously collected, have reached the inescapable conclusion ..."
"... Nice sarcasm. Well deserved for those "Novichok hot heads", who claim that it is plausible that a military grade nerve gas was used. Actually initial reports were about a synthetic opioid, not any nerve gas ( https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ex-russian-agent-sergei-skripal-critical-condition-was-poisoned-by-fentanyl-1665286 ) ..."
"... I am amazed that people do not understand the level of absurdity of using nerve gas in such a case. It's really like ignorance has no boundaries. I understand that some people did not manage to graduate from a university or take a decent organic chemistry course, but still, this is simply amazing and very disturbing to read such posts. Especially here. ..."
Mar 17, 2018 | www.unz.com
likbez, March 17, 2018 at 7:08 am GMT
@ValmMond

You have obviously been at the crime scene, have witnessed the comatose bodies of the Skripals and after analyzing the Novitchok samples you meticulously collected, have reached the inescapable conclusion

Nice sarcasm. Well deserved for those "Novichok hot heads", who claim that it is plausible that a military grade nerve gas was used. Actually initial reports were about a synthetic opioid, not any nerve gas ( https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ex-russian-agent-sergei-skripal-critical-condition-was-poisoned-by-fentanyl-1665286 )

I am amazed that people do not understand the level of absurdity of using nerve gas in such a case. It's really like ignorance has no boundaries. I understand that some people did not manage to graduate from a university or take a decent organic chemistry course, but still, this is simply amazing and very disturbing to read such posts. Especially here.

If it was a nerve gas my question to "Novichok hot heads" here is who the assassin was?

You need either to place a can or some punctured packet under the bench (probably impossible) or spray the liquid on the victim from a short distance. The latter is a very dangerous exercise if you are not wearing a respirator and protection gear.

But still, it makes sense to do this inside (and kill many people) rather than outside. That was how Zarin was administered in Tokyo subway ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack

Remember the place was under surveillance -- bad for any assassination. Also in lethal concentrations, the gas kills the victims in several minutes. But Skripals survived unattended for an hour or more and there was only one other seriously affected person -- a policeman, while doctor who treated Skriplal's daughter on the bench was unaffected.

I do not see any reasonable way to administer the gas in this environment without affecting many other people including any passerby, or the doctor who treated Skripal's daughter

[Mar 17, 2018] Doctor> said she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying there was no sign of any chemical agent on Ms Skripal s face or body.

Mar 17, 2018 | www.bbc.com

Meanwhile, a doctor who was one of the first people at the scene has described how she found Ms Skripal slumped unconscious on a bench, vomiting and fitting. She had also lost control of her bodily functions.

The woman, who asked not to be named, told the BBC she moved Ms Skripal into the recovery position and opened her airway, as others tended to her father.

She said she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying there was no sign of any chemical agent on Ms Skripal's face or body.

The doctor said she had been worried she would be affected by the nerve agent, but added that she "feels fine".

[Mar 17, 2018] Was any poisonous gas present in the Skripal bench area. Looks highly unlikely

Yes, it certainly looks like a provocation, the "false flag" operation. The Brits and the Banks needed the US and the EU to join the fight.
Notable quotes:
"... The most plausible goal of the whole "Operation Skripal" was poisoning UK-Russia relations and hopefully bringing the US and EU to impose new round of sanctions on Russia. In this sense it reminds Litvinenko case (which brought huge propaganda benefits to the UK and the hysteria lasted several months, if memory does not fail me). ..."
"... One thing I can't understand in "Operation Skripal" is how such an assassination (if we assume that this is an assassination) was accomplished. ..."
"... The gas (if it really exists, which is yet another question) supposedly is really deadly. If this was not gas but some substance infused with this agent (which would be extremely strange and risky method), you need to get it into the drinks, which means 100% chances of your detection. ..."
"... Moreover in case of the gas the difficulties look insurmountable -- to get it to the victim you need to mix components and shortly after spray it from a short distance, hoping the you mixed them correctly. The place where Skripals were found unconscious is a really bad place for such an exercise as there probably several cameras which record the events on the bench. ..."
"... So IMHO it looks like assassination without an assassin ..."
"... suggested traces of the opiate fentanyl -- a synthetic toxin many times stronger than heroin -- had been detected at the scene. ..."
Mar 15, 2018 | www.unz.com

likbez , March 16, 2018 at 3:48 am GMT

@Kiza

Kiza,

Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or fascist dictorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked (by a Russian sounding chemical weapon Novichok), and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism (https://www.craigmurray.org.uk - Craig Murray has been most viciously attacked for not accepting the official story without any evidence) and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Hermann Göring

That's a perfectly applicable variation of the famous quote.

The most plausible goal of the whole "Operation Skripal" was poisoning UK-Russia relations and hopefully bringing the US and EU to impose new round of sanctions on Russia. In this sense it reminds Litvinenko case (which brought huge propaganda benefits to the UK and the hysteria lasted several months, if memory does not fail me).

BTW exiled Russian oligarchs like Khodorkovski ( https://www.voltairenet.org/article168007.html ) also could easily stage such a false flag operation using their interconnections with both Russia and Israel.

One thing I can't understand in "Operation Skripal" is how such an assassination (if we assume that this is an assassination) was accomplished.

The gas (if it really exists, which is yet another question) supposedly is really deadly. If this was not gas but some substance infused with this agent (which would be extremely strange and risky method), you need to get it into the drinks, which means 100% chances of your detection.

Moreover in case of the gas the difficulties look insurmountable -- to get it to the victim you need to mix components and shortly after spray it from a short distance, hoping the you mixed them correctly. The place where Skripals were found unconscious is a really bad place for such an exercise as there probably several cameras which record the events on the bench.

Unless it was the daughter who did this (in this case authorities have definitely all the necessary evidence of the crime committed) chances of an attacker to survive such an attack are slim, and changes not being recorded on one or more camera are virtually non existent.

If there was a human assassin, he/she risks to be immediately dead or severely injured as even in minimal concentrations such a gas reliably kills a person within two minutes or so. Antidote might help to survive, but how effective it is depends on the dose you can get.

If some robotic disperser was used, then it will be found as unlike in case of an explosive device the activation does no destroy it.

Also unclear why target the daughter, unless we are dealing with some botched amateur false flag operation in best traditions of ISIS Syria false flag operations.

Moreover, Skripals spent around an hour on a bench in a comatose state and were helped by a doctor who was not affected in any way. See timeline at

http://www.businessinsider.com/who-is-sergei-skripal-timeline-2018-3#march-3-240-pm-skripals-33-year-old-daughter-yulia-arrives-in-the-uk-via-london-heathrow-airport-relatives-said-she-was-visiting-from-moscow-17

But later a policeman was affected. Very strange.

So IMHO it looks like assassination without an assassin . There are some absurd statements that the poison was spiked in their drinks either in the pub or at the restaurant:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5742909/sergei-skripal-spy-russian-assassin-poison-hit-pub/

One possible scenario is that Skripal and his daughter were narcoaddicts and did it to themselves The initial reports (see, for example, https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5733372/ex-russian-spy-sergei-skripal-poisoned-salisbury-feared-life-cops/ ) suggested traces of the opiate fentanyl -- a synthetic toxin many times stronger than heroin -- had been detected at the scene.

Later their collapse was used to stage a false flag operation, when in fact there was no any gas involved, and at this point, a grandiose propaganda show with the decontamination of the area started.

[Mar 17, 2018] This is yet another insult against Russian technical knowhow.

Mar 17, 2018 | www.unz.com

Fidelios Automata , March 16, 2018 at 4:00 am GMT

Even if the Russian government had ordered Skripal's kidding, no way would they be so sloppy as to spew toxins all over the place sickening innocent people. If the backward North Koreans can do a targeted chemical-based assassination, the Russians certainly can. This is yet another Anglo-Zionist insult against Russian technical knowhow.
Carlton Meyer , Website March 16, 2018 at 4:31 am GMT
We all know the KGB is smart and crafty and so is Putin. So for unknown reasons, they want to kill a retired Russian spy living openly in London. Do these brilliant people choose to:

1. Use a dangerous nerve agent that must be smuggled into England, is easily traceable to Russia, is dangerous to the assassin, and difficult to employ and ensure a kill?

Or:

2. Pay a desperate drug addict to club him on the head on the street and steal his wallet?

[Mar 17, 2018] So the chemist takes one of his arguments greatest weaknesses attempting to make it a strength. That the Russians wanted to be the chief suspects!

Notable quotes:
"... This diagrams this chemist put in his tweets are from the Wikipedia article on Novichoks. They are hardly definitive. And he never answers the question Craig poses about how can Porton down say the stuff they have is from Russia when they have no Russian control sample with which to compare it. ..."
"... Saying that all samples of the stuff have the same chemical formula just demolishes his own argument. Even Jeremy Corbyn says it's about the trace impurities, but even then a sample from the same, known source ( indeed, batch) would be needed. ..."
Mar 17, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

Singh March 16, 2018 at 15:52

So the chemist takes one of his arguments greatest weaknesses attempting to make it a strength. That the Russians wanted to be the chief suspects!

Well of course they did, which state wouldn't wish to be vilified on the world stage, to take an inevitable hit to its economy and international standing, who wouldn't enjoy the imposition of yet more sanctions, and finally who could say hand on heart they don't secretly want to have their assets frozen? Not a euphemism.

That a state assassins first priority would be to put as much distance between the state and the evidence should be patently obvious.

The Chemists suggestion that it would help to scare Russians at home is frankly ridiculous, after having inevitably thought about it for some time if this was the best he could offer, it does show the question around motive is the most tricky for the bullshitters. The other suggestion, wishing to scare poor old Blighty cos she's got no mates is equally if not more risible.

Istvan , March 16, 2018 at 16:53

If 'Porton Down' just showed the mass spectra obtained of the samples without any structural formulas that would count as a piece of evidence to many of us.

Philip Ward , March 16, 2018 at 17:12

This diagrams this chemist put in his tweets are from the Wikipedia article on Novichoks. They are hardly definitive. And he never answers the question Craig poses about how can Porton down say the stuff they have is from Russia when they have no Russian control sample with which to compare it.

Saying that all samples of the stuff have the same chemical formula just demolishes his own argument. Even Jeremy Corbyn says it's about the trace impurities, but even then a sample from the same, known source ( indeed, batch) would be needed.

[Mar 17, 2018] Perhaps Russia will instruct a challenge inspection of Porton Down?

Mar 17, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk
N_ , March 17, 2018 at 22:24

Perhaps Russia will instruct a challenge inspection of Porton Down? On my quick reading, an inspection would have to go ahead unless three-quarters of the OPCW council block it within 12 hours. (Possibly a "stop" is different from a "block" and only requires a majority?)

[Mar 17, 2018] Considering UK behavior towards Russia as a slap on face , Russia not only should but must demand immediate release of all information available to UK on this case and samples. It should be done in aggressive manner and backed by international law to which UK is a signer.

Mar 17, 2018 | www.unz.com

Sergey Krieger , March 16, 2018 at 9:04 am GMT

Considering UK behavior towards Russia as a slap on face , Russia not only should but must demand immediate release of all information available to UK on this case and samples. It should be done in aggressive manner and backed by international law to which UK is a signer. Someone must put the money where mouth is or shut up and go away .

[Mar 17, 2018] Operation Beluga The Plot to Demonise Putin by Ian Greenhalgh

Notable quotes:
"... In 2014, a highly credible source – a high ranking French security expert by the name of Paul Barril exposed the existence of a plot to demonise Putin and thus destabilise and weaken Russia; it is called Operation Beluga. ..."
"... Operation Beluga ..."
"... William Dunkerley is author of Ukraine in the Crosshairs. He is a media business analyst, principal of William Dunkerley Publishing Consultants, and a Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. ..."
"... Najadi says the interview drew out the converse revelation that Litvinenko was actually killed by "an Italian who administered the deadly polonium 210." What's more, he astonishingly says, the operation was carried out under the auspices of the US and UK. ..."
"... The Phony Litvinenko Murder ..."
"... Litvinenko Murder Case Solved ..."
"... "According to Paul Barril, Litvinenko was himself working for the late Boris Berezovsky [a Russian fugitive oligarch that made London his home] who, according to Barril, was in turn working for and with the British intelligence service MI6. Barril said, 'Litvinenko has betrayed his employers, Berezovsky and the MI6, and has pocketed large sums of money, millions of US dollars, that were destined for agent provocateurs within the Berezovsky clan. The sole goal was to globally discredit Putin and the Russian Federation. This Western intelligence operation was directed from Washington DC and London. Its code name is Beluga.'" ..."
"... Najadi says, "These new revelations from Captain Paul Barril now open a new window to the truth about the motive for killing Alexander Litvinenko." ..."
"... Now the Litvinenko scandal takes on a new proportion. It's no longer just an incessantly long-running murder mystery. It just might be the telltale sign of an enormous geopolitical provocation that is wreaking havoc with world stability. ..."
Mar 17, 2018 | www.veteranstoday.com

You would have to have been in a coma or otherwise unconscious to not have heard the one about the two poisoned Russians on an English park bench and how those evil Russians did it, the news media has talked of little else in the past week.

Despite giving this story immense amounts of air time, the media have completely failed to apply even the most rudimentary standards of journalism, they have done a shockingly bad job of reporting on this case.

They have utterly failed to do their job and ask the relevant questions such as: Who was this Russian? Why was he poisoned? Who was he associated with? Who might want him dead? Who has he upset? etc; the sort of basic questions that should be asked right at the beginning, the moment the story broke.

Instead, all we have been given, in lieu of actual journalistic reporting, is a bunch of talking heads, many of them members of the UK government, all of them bleating about how reckless and downright murderous the Russians are to have brazenly attacked someone on English soil.

Where is the evidence? Where is the investigative reporting? The media has simply accepted whole and unquestioning the 'Russia did it' claim of Theresa May, obediently following the government's narrative, not once allowing a dissenting voice to be heard lest it asks even the simplest question or expresses even a glimmer of doubt.

What happened to that most proudly held tradition of English law – that one is innocent until proven guilty? Instead of applying that standard of English justice to Vladimir Putin, we have simply accepted he is guilty because Theresa May and Boris Johnson said so.

This is not the first time this has happened, a little over a decade ago, the death of Russian Alexander Litvinenko in London was also blamed on Putin. Litvinenko was not murdered on Putin's orders, there was never even a single shred of evidence to support that claim; furthermore, there was a mass of evidence to point to a completely different group of people.

However, the British government and media steadfastly ignored all the inconvenient facts and simply blamed Putin, exactly the same as they are today over Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

Litvinenko's death was most likely accidental, the result of mishandling of the Polonium-210 he was engaged in smuggling. Litvinenko was an ex-FSB officer who, like many of his former comrades, was now in the employ of the Khazarian mafia. He worked for Boris Berezevsky as a mule, transporting nuclear materials back and forth to Israel.

This is made obvious by the places that traces of Polonium-210 were found: on the British Airways planes that flew Litvinenko back and forth to Israel, in Boris Berezovsky's house, in the offices of businesses owned by Berezovsky

Were Berezovsky and his Khazarian mafia associates investigated, did the media look into the background to this story? Nope, they simply piled the blame on Putin, regardless of the complete lack of evidence, just as they have done this week in the Skripal case.

There have been a great deal of similar cases of 'blame Putin' in recent years, the Litvinenko and Skripal cases are simply the most well known. When so many accusations are aimed at one man and so little evidence is presented to support those accusations, one has to wonder if there is some kind of plot to demonise Putin.

Well, wonder no more for there is clear evidence that such a plot exists in the form of a long-running operation by the intelligence services of the West, primarily the US and Britain, but no doubt aided by the Mossad and others.

In 2014, a highly credible source – a high ranking French security expert by the name of Paul Barril exposed the existence of a plot to demonise Putin and thus destabilise and weaken Russia; it is called Operation Beluga.

This bombshell was reported by one reporter for one online publication and thus went unnoticed, certainly no-one in the mainstream media made any mention of it, lest their 'Putin did it' narrative was holed beneath the waterline and sunk with all hands by this bombshell.

You can read the article that exposed the existence of Operation Beluga below; precious little else is known about this operation, but VT is investigating and will report what we learn in the near future.


Operation Beluga: A US-UK Plot to Discredit Putin and Destabilize the Russian Federation
by William Dunkerley, 13th April 2014

William Dunkerley is author of Ukraine in the Crosshairs. He is a media business analyst, principal of William Dunkerley Publishing Consultants, and a Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow.

Renowned French security expert Paul Barril has let loose a bombshell: the existence of Operation Beluga, a covert Western intelligence scheme intended to undermine Russia and its leaders.

Is that what's behind much of the threatening rhetoric now going back and forth between the US and Russia?

Barril exposed Operation Beluga in a recent interview with Swiss businessman Pascal Najadi on the 2006 Alexander Litvinenko death case. Litvinenko was a reputed former spy who many believe was murdered with radioactive polonium on orders of Vladimir Putin.

Najadi says the interview drew out the converse revelation that Litvinenko was actually killed by "an Italian who administered the deadly polonium 210." What's more, he astonishingly says, the operation was carried out under the auspices of the US and UK.

In my books The Phony Litvinenko Murder and Litvinenko Murder Case Solved I've written about an Italian connection. But I can't confirm that Barril is talking about the same person.

Here's what Najadi told me:

"According to Paul Barril, Litvinenko was himself working for the late Boris Berezovsky [a Russian fugitive oligarch that made London his home] who, according to Barril, was in turn working for and with the British intelligence service MI6. Barril said, 'Litvinenko has betrayed his employers, Berezovsky and the MI6, and has pocketed large sums of money, millions of US dollars, that were destined for agent provocateurs within the Berezovsky clan. The sole goal was to globally discredit Putin and the Russian Federation. This Western intelligence operation was directed from Washington DC and London. Its code name is Beluga.'"

Barril's comments deserve serious consideration. A former officer of the French Gendarmerie Nationale, he's been dubbed "Supercop" in France. Barril is cofounder of the GIGN French antiterror group, and has also served in French presidential security. During his career he has led several private security companies, as well.

Najadi says, "These new revelations from Captain Paul Barril now open a new window to the truth about the motive for killing Alexander Litvinenko."

Litvinenko's death has been a hot topic for officials within British officialdom. A UK coroner's inquest failed to reach a verdict on the manner and cause of Litvinenko's death, even after the passage of almost ten years. Then a politically-motivated official inquiry was authorized by Prime Minister David Cameron. Its final report hypothesized that Putin was behind the death, but it failed to produce any credible evidence. (See "Six Reasons You Can't Take the Litvinenko Report Seriously")

Britain had accused two Russians of poisoning Litvinenko. But the UK prosecutor failed to make his case against them, claiming that he had only "grave suspicions" about who's to blame.

Then there was the aborted coroner's inquest, and finally a report was issued under suspicious circumstances by a discredited judge who lacked the basic qualifications for conducting an official inquiry. (See "Britain Allowed Unqualified Judge to Decide Litvinenko Case. Now Inquiry Report Must Be Recalled" and "Discredited Litvinenko 'Judge' Sends Parliament Untrustworthy Verdict.")

Now the Litvinenko scandal takes on a new proportion. It's no longer just an incessantly long-running murder mystery. It just might be the telltale sign of an enormous geopolitical provocation that is wreaking havoc with world stability.

In the run-up to the American presidential election many of the candidates have talked very tough on dealing with Russia's role in the world. I wonder how many of them have bought into the Beluga scheme.


Appendix:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/U14nGr0y2Z8?feature=oembed

Revisiting Litvinenko, What Really Happened?
by Ryan Dawson April 26, 2015

As we all know Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned by polonium, a rare radioactive substance. The main narrative blamed it all on Vladimir Putin of Russia. The rationale rested on little other than because Litvinenko was a Putin critic. This was the quick line in mass media, and it was on all the typical war propaganda channels.

There are many things wrong with the "Putin did it" story. For one, there is no motive, even with Litvinenko being a critic of Russia, he was no threat whatsoever to Putin. The man worked with Chechen terrorists and the Israeli-Russian oligarchs.

But assuming that there was a sufficient motive to kill him, think about this: Why would Russia use a very rare, very expensive, and easily traceable radioactive substance to kill him instead of some cheap poison or just shooting him? Why risk smuggling radioactive material into the UK which is an act of war?

Yet that is exactly what the UK/US media would have you believe. They want to say that Putin had someone sneak into the UK with polonium and poison Litvinenko with it. It just isn't plausible. It's actually absurd.

Alexander Litvinenko who was formerly FSB fled to the UK to avoid court prosecution in Russia, worked for a shady Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky. Boris Berezovsky just so happens to be the Israeli-Russian oligarch who lived in London after fleeing the Russian judicial system for a multitude of crimes too long to list. He was on Interpol's most wanted list. Here is the grand prize.

After the US and UK press branded Putin with the poisoning despite there being Zero evidence, (something the US is very well known for now) investigators were tracking down the traces of Polonium in the UK. They detected traces of Polonium at Berezovsky's office and residence!

Now I do not know about you, but in my place of work, and certainly in my house, I do not have rare radioactive substances. Polonium is not something you just get at the market or pick up by accident walking through the park.

No experienced mob boss like Berezovsky would be dumb enough to murder an underling in such a manner either. Therefore his death was an accident. It was mostly likely it was a botched smuggling operation. Why was he moving such a dangerous substance? Did he need fast cash? Were they planning to create a dirty bomb? Such a "smoky bomb" would turn the Polonium into powder and kill anyone who ingested it.

Traces of Polonium were found on the planes that Litvinenko had been on. So I think we can deduce what happened. He was a mule. The questions remain, why did he have it?, Where did he get it? What was he going to do with it? Why was it in the offices of Berezovsky and Erinsys Ltd (Britain's Blackwater)?

The "Putin did it" smear case has never made sense. First of all, the amount of polonium 210 in play would have cost millions of dollars. That amount is too expensive to purchase and too large to go unnoticed if it were stolen. The only way to obtain such a quantity would be on a well organized black market that had a connection to a nuclear facility. It would certainly help organized crime if the nuclear powered supplier they received the Polonium from was not subjected to international inspections or part of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Such a country, (Foreign country A) which denied they even built nuclear weapons for decades, would certainly also deny selling their Polonium byproduct as well.

Is it possible to hide that from the press? Yes. The media would ignore this for the same reason the media ignores them stealing nuclear secrets and building hundreds of nuclear weapons in Dimona, then throwing whistle blowers who took pictures of their warheads, in jail.

Litvinenko was in Israel, where he met Leonid Nevzlin the CEO of Yukos shortly before he died. If you wanted to buy/steal radioactive material that would be the place. What was he negotiating with Nevzlin? We learned Alexander had been an informant in a case that led to the arrest of nine Georgina and Russian Mobsters in Spain, including Alexander Gofstein a lawyer for Yukos who apparently was laundering money.

The downfall began when Georgina Mob Boss Zakhar Kalashov was arrested in May 2006. The scam was similar to what the old Five Families of New York had done, when guys like Meyer Lansky took profits from illegal gambling businesses and funneled them into buying up real estate in Florida. In the European case, the mob was taking illegal funds and buying up real estate in Spain as well as making investments into legitimate businesses.

Litivnenko's associates, Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi, who both had met with him the day of the poisoning, were also both hospitalized. They left traces of Polonium in Hamburg as they had taken the trip to Germany before meeting Litvinenko. It appears all three were involved in a smuggling operation, but for who?

Short answer: Russian Oligarch Boris Berezovsky's employee Alexander Litvinenko died from over exposure to Polonium in a botched smuggling operation. That is why traces of it were at Boris's house and on the planes Litvinenko was riding to and from Israel. The smear on Putin/Russia using a highly traceable 10 million dollar poison to kill a critic is about as plausible and rational as saying we have "British Intelligence" about Niger . This transparent bogus lie was a quick and shamelessly sloppy explanation to cover up how and why this man in the UK had a radioactive poison in his body. Polonium only has a half life of 138 days.

Litvinenko had been in Israel to visit Yukos's CEO, just shortly before he died. And it's an open secret that Israel has nuclear weapons, the only place without nuclear safeguard or inspections. Traces of polonium were also on the British Airway planes that Litvinenko took to and from Israel. So if they would have the means, location, and the timing fits, but let's just blame, Putin "The New Hitler" as Neocons have dubbed him?

Why the fuss about a conspiracy claiming that Putin put Litvinenko on a hitlist and poisoned him? Well as wacky as that story is, it was probably the best they could come up with on short notice. Boris knew once the police found out how Litvinenko died that there would be a lot of explaining to do. He also knew that if the investigation went forward that they could find more of this Polonium on his properties. So they just claimed the KGB was trying to kill them all.

Some History

This is not the first time that Berezovsky tried to pin a murder on someone else and claim that all the damning evidence pointing to him was a frame. There are the notorious cases (in Russia) of Ivan Litskevich and Vlad Listyev.

Ivan Listkevich was the general director of the Omsk oil Refinery easily the best refinery in Russia. Abramovich and Berezovsky planned to take over the refinery and make it part of Berezovsky's Sibnef (which it now is). Listkevich resisted. Ivan had outside investments from LUKoil (10% of the stock) and CS First Boston.

So in no way was he threatened to sink. Omsk was in the best location, had the latest equipment, and was well positioned to continue to soar. They serviced the biggest oil producers in Russia. Naturally Ivan did not want to be swallowed by Sibnef.

August 19, 1995 Ivan was found drowned in the Irtysh River. I doubt he went there to swim. Five days later Sibnef (Gazprom) took over. August 24th 1995, using his good buddy Yeltsin, Berezovsky got a Presidential Decree №872, to order a transfer of all the state's share in Omsk as well as 4 other companies to Sibnef. Then in 1996 Boris and Roman privatized Sibnef through a series of Loans-for-Shares' auctions which were a complete scam run through front companies and offshore banks. Yeltsin approved of it.

The case may leave doubts in the mind until one learns about the murder of Vlad Listyev. In 1994 Boris attacked one of his rivals over control of a media outlet. Part of the attack was broadcast all over TV and came to be known as "faces in the snow" as Boris's rival's bodyguard were forced at gun point to lie face down in the snow.

Shortly after a 90mph high speed chase and attacking rival Gusinsky's MOST guards and pinning Gusinsky in his own building, Berezovsky would take control of ORT (channel 1) through an illegal non-public "auction" and gain a near media monopoly.

For details on that I recommend reading "God Father of the Kremlin" if you can still find it. It was written by the senior editor of Forbes in Russian who holds a Ph.D in Russian history Paul Klebnikov. For the record Paul Klebnikov was killed after publishing his book on the Oligarchs, particularly on Boris, who is on the cover. He was shot four times in Moscow while leaving work and then died in the hospital after getting stuck on an elevator.

After the Gusinsky event, Boris had another problem. Vladislav Listyev. Listyev was probably the most popular talk show host in Russia and a TV producer. He was a business partner with Boris but the problem was he was not crooked.

As general director of ORT he decided to fix a multi-million dollar leak in the company and indirect way of Boris paying people off in the Mob to do dirty work, as well as paying himself by spending money for ads in other companies owned where he also ran the advertising sales. He had an offer from Sergei Lisovsky to buy up the sector. Negotiations never went through and Vlad had a different idea.

On Feb 20th 1995 Vlad announced that he would break the monopoly of Boris and Sergei. He called for a moratorium on ORT advertising until they could work out ethical standards. As you can imagine that did not make Boris or the rest of the mob happy.

Eight days later Boris personally met with "Nikolai" a mafia boss, and handed him a hundred thousand dollars in cash. This was witnessed by two police officers who were monitoring the Mob. Prior to that Boris's lacky Badri offered money to a different gangster but that man was arrested before he could do what was asked of him and he confessed this in jail. On March 1st the day after Berezovsky paid a second Mob Boss, Vlad Listyev was shot in the back at the entrance of his home.

Guilty as sin, with a confession against Badri as well as being personally witnessed by two police, offering another mob boss money, Boris was desperate. He was inches away from being arrested. Boris's TV network was cut out of government subsidies after the police raided it and it was subject to bankruptcy.

Fellow Media giant and friend Ruppert Murdoch promised to invest in the network and bail him out. How nice. And we all know where Murdoch stands. This relationship might also explain why Fox News and Sky News in the UK were so blatantly cheerleading the "Putin killed Litvinenko" conspiracy story.

But here is the real kicker. It is just as outrageous and far fetched as the Litvinenko poisoning. Boris concocted a story for Yeltsin which was recorded on video tape produced by Irina Lesnevskaya a producer at ORT and a friend of Yeltsin's wife. The tape claimed that it was all a big conspiracy against Berezovsky and that the real culprit (who had no motive other than to frame Boris [apparently able to hire a gun to kill Vlad but not Boris?]) was none other than bitter rival Gusinsky of Most Bank who Boris had already tried to kill once.

Yeltsin was paranoid of Gusinsky's political ambitions and Boris knew this. Boris also blamed X-KGB and said Vlad was killed by the MOST group, and not the mob he was witnessed meeting with a week after Vlad was going to break his monopoly. (Sounds like "Iraq moved the nonexistent WMDs to Syria just to make the US look bad." give me a break) Boris claimed to be set up because he was loyal to Yeltsin as was his new media outlet.

Yeltsin ever a partner in cover ups, not to mention a drunk and a thief, got Boris out of trouble once again by firing the lead investigators in the case which intimidated others to drop it. There was a huge public outcry. A TV personality had been killed. ORT created a new company called ORT advertising with a monopoly to sell ads on commission no less, and the boss-man chosen was none other than Sergei Lisovsky. Wow how utterly shameless.

If you can speak Russian or if you can find an English copy of the Boris/Lesnevskaya tape transcript sent to Yeltsin, it's going to make you very angry. It is about as plausible as saying Putin risked an act of war with the UK to kill a critic who worked for both a criminal as well as terrorist.

Who Done It?

So we know what didn't happen. But there still remains a "who done it." The quickest way to get to the bottom of this is to see who is lying the most and loudest, because that is usually who has the most to hide.

Remember Anna Politkovskaya? She was killed on Putin's birthday and the alternative press and the 'mindlessly accepting any conspiracy' types who fell for it, tried to use that circumstantial "evidence" to blame the murder on Putin.

These are the same types that claim Russia bombed its own apartment buildings to start a war with Chechnya omitting the fact that the apartment bombing took place five months after the war has already started, and the "sources" trying to blame the FSB were none other than Boris's lacky Litvinenko and well known plagiarist David Satter, who wrote for the PNAC co-founders' Weekly Standard, which gave the world all the bogus lies about Iraq's WMD and connection to the September 11th attacks.

Robert Kagan, the paper's cofounder with William Kristol, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Times calling "Speaking of Iraq" which pushes every erroneous prewar scare tactic there was.

His wife Victoria Nuland is the same woman who was recorded on the phone saying "F" the EU and openly talking about who would be a good replacement Prime Minister in Ukraine. She chose Arseniy Yatseniuk, who she called "Yatz" and he did become the prime minister of Ukraine a month later after the coup. Everything out of this factions mouth has been blindly anti-Russian.

There is a huge difference between conspiracy and kookpiracy. Getting away from the outlandish unsubstantiated claims about Anna's death, let's uncover something factual. Anna Politkovskaya was the journalist who had published three different articles on how SOMEONE was testing Polonium on Chechen children. Gee! Where have we seen THAT scenario before? Anna's articles were published in the Novaya Gazeta in 2006 and she was killed October of that same year.

The Washington Post then makes this clever claim. "Leonid Nevzlin, a former Yukos oil company shareholder and Russian exile currently living in Israel, told the Associated Press in late November that Litvinenko had given him a document related to a dossier on criminal charges made by Russian prosecutors against people connected to Yukos. Nevzlin, who is charged by Russian prosecutors with having organized killings, fraud and tax evasion, claimed Litvinenko's inquiries may have provided a motive for his poisoning"

Notice who else is in that Washington Post article (Scaramella) and who was planting the ideas that Putin had killed both Litvinenko and Anna. How crazy is that to use polonium to murder someone Scaramella is a rotten one.

After Anna's lawyer Stanislav Markelov was murdered in 2009 followed by the murder of one of her key informants in Chechnya Natalia Estemirova the same year, there was a retrial in Anna's case which went to the Supreme Court.

Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov stirred up a public disgust when he said about Anna's informant Natalia Estemirova on Radio Liberty "She was a woman who had never possessed any honor, dignity or conscience."

The prosecution cornered Dmitry Pavliutchenkov a former policeman who in turn confessed Lom-Ali Gaitukayev was who negotiated the contract killing and behind him he suspected Boris Berezovsky. Dmitry was sentenced to 11 years in jail. Five men were found guilty in her murder. Three were the Chechen brothers who had been acquitted in the first trial and they went to prison. Rustam Makhmudov and Lom-Ali Gaitukayev got life sentences in 2014. Berevsovsky had died the year before in March of 2013.

The most troubling thing here is not that mob did something illegal or that the Western press jumped the gun to do a anti-Russian witch hunt. All of that is pretty run of the mill. It's not even that Israel secretly has nukes and is involved with organized crime. Again, imagine my lack of shock.

It's not even the multiple murders that are most troubling. The most troubling part of this story is what the ultimate purpose of that much Polonium was for and why it was in the UK. The potential for a dirty bomb is enormous. With the current climate of ISIS and disgruntled youth in Europe joining the mercenary forces to fight Israel's enemies in Syria and Lebanon, a dirty bomb in the UK is not an unimaginable scenario.

Just having such a thing could also hold leverage over politicians there too. The source of the Polonium should have been traced and potential sources should also be subject to inspection.

[Mar 17, 2018] Aaron Mat on Year 1 of Russiagate and its consequences

Mar 17, 2018 | scotthorton.org

Aaron Maté of The Real News joins Scott to discuss two of his latest pieces for The Nation, " Hyping the Mueller Indictment " and " What We've Learned in Year 1 of Russiagate ." Maté explains why he thinks the Trump-Russia collusion case is much ado about nothing and how Trump's pre-election attempts to de-escalate tensions with Russia have been misconstrued as collusion. Scott and Maté then discuss how the centrist left, with the help of Facebook and corporate media, is using the Russiagate conspiracy to double down on the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic party.

[Mar 16, 2018] Corbyn Calls for Evidence in Escalating Poison Row

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... For requesting evidence of Russian culpability in the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, UK Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has been denounced by PM Theresa May and even members of his own party. ..."
"... he British government demanded that Russia offer an explanation, but then rejected a Russian request to share a sample of the nerve agent that was used in the poisoning. ..."
"... JEREMY CORBYN: Our response must be both decisive and proportionate, and based on clear evidence. If the government believes that it is still a possibility that Russia negligently lost control of a military grade nerve agent, what action is being taken through the OPCW with our allies? I welcome the fact the police are working with the OPCW, and has the prime minister taken the necessary steps under the Chemical Weapons Convention to make a formal request for evidence from the Russian government under Article 9.2? How has she responded to the Russian government's request for a sample of the agent used in the Salisbury attack to run its own tests? Has high resolution trace analysis been run on a sample of the nerve agent? And has that revealed any evidence as to the location of its production or the identity of its perpetrators? ..."
"... My first reaction having listened to the clip you played by Jeremy Corbyn is that's one very courageous man. It's not clear even his own Labour Party supports what he said. ..."
"... So, I kind of quarrel with your opening sentence that relations are as bad as they've been since the end of the Cold War. I say, no they're worse than they were during the Cold War. I jotted down just a few reasons. Let me just rattle them off and then we'll get to this, any other event you want to talk about. The reason this new Cold War is more dangerous is we already have three fronts that are fraught with hot war. That's where the NATO buildup in the North Baltic and the Black Sea, Ukraine, and Syria. Remember in Syria, it appears to be the case that American proxies have already killed Russian citizens. So, we don't know what's going to come next. ..."
"... Secondly, two of these fronts are directly on Russia's borders, not in Berlin as was the case during the preceding Cold War, right on Russia's borders in the Baltic region and in Ukraine. Thirdly, there has been such demonization of the Kremlin leader, Putin, unlike anything that was the case during the old Cold War with Kremlin communist leaders, and along with it a kind of a Russophobic attack on Russia itself the old Cold War was about communism. This one seems to be about Russia just in general. And then you get this lightning speed of news as with this nerve agent, with people weighing in without any authority or any knowledge, very very quickly, and it's spreading before anybody has a time has time to reflect, and think, an actual expert opinion come to the fore. ..."
"... Theresa May is, perhaps, among the weakest prime ministers in modern history. She's holding on for dear life. Jeremy Corbyn is an extraordinary figure. His party, his Labour Party, which is not very good on Russia related issues either, didn't approve of what he said. But he said the right thing. He said, "There's no evidence. While we search for evidence, we need to continue a robust dialogue with Russia." That's exactly right. ..."
"... And whether he'll prevail or not, I don't know, but it is interesting, isn't it, that unlike in the United States, the leader of the opposition, which is what Corbyn is, and potentially a prime minister, is setting himself against this reckless Cold War behavior on the part of the British government. All I can say is I wish we had such a person in American high politics. ..."
"... The latest in a continuing campaign of fear and violence, staged for a hapless public, designed to lend legitimacy to authoritarianism and fascism foisted upon our domestic population; brought to you by the same Fear Inc. that capitalized on the Charlie Hebdo massacre ..."
"... With such careless rush to judgement, circumventing due process, as has been demonstrated time and again by a class of corrupt and covetous warmongers posing as public officials and their equally corrupt mainstream propaganda machine, literally everything uttered by the likes of Teresa May and her cohort of psychopathic political charlatans must be viewed with incredulity. ..."
Mar 16, 2018 | therealnews.com

For requesting evidence of Russian culpability in the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, UK Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has been denounced by PM Theresa May and even members of his own party. We discuss the case with Stephen F. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies at New York University and Princeton

http://www.youtube.com/embed/jY9-c4M7UhA?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0

AARON MATÉ: It's The Real News. I'm Aaron Maté. Ties between Russia and the West are at their lowest point since The Cold War, and a new spat over a poisoning in Britain has sunk them even lower. The British government is blaming Russia for the poisoning of former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the British town of Salisbury.

The two remain in critical condition after ingesting what the British government says is a military-grade nerve agent made by Russia. The British government demanded that Russia offer an explanation, but then rejected a Russian request to share a sample of the nerve agent that was used in the poisoning. Speaking today in parliament, British Prime Minister Theresa May said Russia's response so far proves their culpability.

THERESA MAY: There is no alternative conclusion other than that the Russian state was culpable for the attempted murder of Mr. Skripal and his daughter. And for threatening the lives of other British citizens in Salisbury, including Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey. This represents an unlawful use of force by the Russian state against the United Kingdom. And as I set out on Monday, it has taken place against the backdrop of a well established pattern of Russian state aggression across Europe and beyond. It must therefore, be met with a full and robust response, beyond the actions we have already taken since the murder of Mr. Litvinenko and to counter this pattern of Russian aggression elsewhere.

AARON MATÉ: As part of the measures against Russia, May announced the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats, the single biggest such expulsion in three decades. That drew a response from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who pressed May to hand over evidence.

JEREMY CORBYN: Our response must be both decisive and proportionate, and based on clear evidence. If the government believes that it is still a possibility that Russia negligently lost control of a military grade nerve agent, what action is being taken through the OPCW with our allies? I welcome the fact the police are working with the OPCW, and has the prime minister taken the necessary steps under the Chemical Weapons Convention to make a formal request for evidence from the Russian government under Article 9.2? How has she responded to the Russian government's request for a sample of the agent used in the Salisbury attack to run its own tests? Has high resolution trace analysis been run on a sample of the nerve agent? And has that revealed any evidence as to the location of its production or the identity of its perpetrators?

AARON MATÉ: The dispute over the poisoning has gotten so serious, that there has been speculation of NATO invoking Article 5, which bounds member states to defend others in the event of an attack. So far, Downing Street has tamped down talk of Article 5, but Theresa May has been summoning support from key allies, including the US

Joining me is professor Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York University and Princeton. Welcome, Professor Cohen.

You have been warning for a long time that we are in the midst of a new Cold War. What are your thoughts today as you see now tensions escalating between Britain and Russia, with now Britain ordering the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats following the expulsions that have happened in the US to Russian diplomats as a result of the Russiagate controversy?

STEPHEN COHEN: My first reaction having listened to the clip you played by Jeremy Corbyn is that's one very courageous man. It's not clear even his own Labour Party supports what he said. In the essence of what he said is Theresa May has no evidence, and yet she's prepared to ratchet up already a bad relationship with Russia based on this. They haven't produced any evidence. Let's put it like that. This alarms me because, I've said this before on your broadcast, but it's almost never said in the mainstream and it's hard to get an American discussion of it, is that whether we call our relationship with Russia a new cold war or not, it certainly is. The point is it's so much more dangerous than the preceding Cold War. I could even argue that the situation today is in some ways more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So, I kind of quarrel with your opening sentence that relations are as bad as they've been since the end of the Cold War. I say, no they're worse than they were during the Cold War. I jotted down just a few reasons. Let me just rattle them off and then we'll get to this, any other event you want to talk about. The reason this new Cold War is more dangerous is we already have three fronts that are fraught with hot war. That's where the NATO buildup in the North Baltic and the Black Sea, Ukraine, and Syria. Remember in Syria, it appears to be the case that American proxies have already killed Russian citizens. So, we don't know what's going to come next.

Secondly, two of these fronts are directly on Russia's borders, not in Berlin as was the case during the preceding Cold War, right on Russia's borders in the Baltic region and in Ukraine. Thirdly, there has been such demonization of the Kremlin leader, Putin, unlike anything that was the case during the old Cold War with Kremlin communist leaders, and along with it a kind of a Russophobic attack on Russia itself the old Cold War was about communism. This one seems to be about Russia just in general. And then you get this lightning speed of news as with this nerve agent, with people weighing in without any authority or any knowledge, very very quickly, and it's spreading before anybody has a time has time to reflect, and think, an actual expert opinion come to the fore.

AARON MATÉ: One person who has been pillared in the media today is Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader who we heard from before. And I wanna play more of his speech of his comments today, to the British parliament.

JEREMY CORBYN: And while suspending planned high level contact, does the prime minister agree that it is essential to maintain a robust dialogue with Russia in the interest of our own and wider international security?

AARON MATÉ: That's Jeremy Corbyn speaking today, calling today for. "a robust dialogue with Russia." So, Professor Cohen, for saying that, Corbyn was widely mocked, including by members of his own party. I'm wondering if you can comment on that, the import of that, not just for this specific case, but overall, this attitude towards having dialogue, calling for dialogue with Russia being somehow worthy of scorn and contempt.

... ... ...

STEPHEN COHEN: But I've heard some of these people saying privately that we need this, but I don't hear them saying it publicly. Look, I did live in England and get educated there partly many, many years ago, and I followed British politics. So, I don't have great authority, but two things come to mind. Theresa May is, perhaps, among the weakest prime ministers in modern history. She's holding on for dear life. Jeremy Corbyn is an extraordinary figure. His party, his Labour Party, which is not very good on Russia related issues either, didn't approve of what he said. But he said the right thing. He said, "There's no evidence. While we search for evidence, we need to continue a robust dialogue with Russia." That's exactly right.

And whether he'll prevail or not, I don't know, but it is interesting, isn't it, that unlike in the United States, the leader of the opposition, which is what Corbyn is, and potentially a prime minister, is setting himself against this reckless Cold War behavior on the part of the British government. All I can say is I wish we had such a person in American high politics.

AARON MATÉ: Well, that's a good segue to the next part of our discussion where we're gonna talk more about the role right now of Russiagate in US politics. Professor Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University, thank you.

And thank you for joining us on The Real News.

Stephen F. Cohen is professor emeritus of Russian studies, history, and politics at New York University and Princeton University.


p.munkey 2 hours ago ,

The latest in a continuing campaign of fear and violence, staged for a hapless public, designed to lend legitimacy to authoritarianism and fascism foisted upon our domestic population; brought to you by the same Fear Inc. that capitalized on the Charlie Hebdo massacre (See Youtube | StormCloudsGathering | 02m:43s " Charlie Hebdo Shootings - Censored Video " [ https://youtu.be/yJEvlKKm6og ])

With such careless rush to judgement, circumventing due process, as has been demonstrated time and again by a class of corrupt and covetous warmongers posing as public officials and their equally corrupt mainstream propaganda machine, literally everything uttered by the likes of Teresa May and her cohort of psychopathic political charlatans must be viewed with incredulity.

[Mar 16, 2018] NATO to display common front in Skripal case

Highly recommended!
France previously stated that they do not react to British "Fantasy politics". French president Emmanuel Macron wants more evidence Vladimir Putin was involved and his spokesman accused Britain of "fantasy politics" -- Theresa May accused of punishing Russia too SOON by France who demand more evidence .
Later Macron was forced to change the tune
Notable quotes:
"... Russian Envoy to the UN #Nebenzya: Curious fact. Although Russia stopped all its CW programmes in 1992, the UK & the US received specialists/defectors & documentation on these projects incl. so-called Novichok in mid-1990s, continued researching CW as evidenced by open sources ..."
"... .@RussiaUN: in 1992 Russia closed all Soviet chemical weapons programmes. Some of the scientists were flown to the West (incl UK) where they continued research. To identify a substance, formula and samples are needed – means UK has capacity to produce suspected nerve agent. ..."
"... Craig Murray's excellent essay's been heavily attacked, and he's written a stimulating and educational response that further bolsters the initial essay. Quite interesting the so-called journalists supporting May's propaganda. ..."
"... Oh dear, in sacred Europe!! How about the West using nerve agents on a grand scale against its enemy Iran in the Middle East (since the Second World War)? Twenty thousand Iranians were killed on the spot by nerve gas, according to reports, with thousands of people hospitalized. According to Iraqi documents, assistance in the development of chemical weapons was obtained from firms in many countries, including the United States, West Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and France. A report stated that Dutch, Australian, Italian, French and both West and East German companies were involved in the export of raw materials to Iraqi chemical weapons factories. ..."
"... This is the same sort of "highly likely" language that has worked so well with the false-flag attacks in Syria. It's obviously "highly likely" that there is no actual evidence. ..."
Mar 16, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Don Bacon , Mar 15, 2018 11:17:24 AM | 90

In joint statement, world leaders agree Russia behind nerve agent attack on former spy
This is the joint statement of the whirled leaders:
We, the leaders of France, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom, abhor the attack that took place against Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, UK, on 4 March 2018. A British police officer who was also exposed in the attack remains seriously ill, and the lives of many innocent British citizens have been threatened. We express our sympathies to them all, and our admiration for the UK police and emergency services for their courageous response.

This use of a military-grade nerve agent, of a type developed by Russia, constitutes the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War. It is an assault on UK sovereignty and any such use by a State party is a clear violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention and a breach of international law. It threatens the security of us all.

The United Kingdom briefed thoroughly its allies that it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for the attack. We share the UK assessment that there is no plausible alternative explanation, and note that Russia´s failure to address the legitimate request by the UK government further underlines its responsibility. We call on Russia to address all questions related to the attack in Salisbury. Russia should in particular provide full and complete disclosure of the Novichok programme to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

Our concerns are also heightened against the background of a pattern of earlier irresponsible Russian behaviour. We call on Russia to live up to its responsibilities as a member of the UN Security Council to uphold international peace and security. . . here

b , Mar 15, 2018 11:35:19 AM | 92
Russian Embassy, UK @RussianEmbassy
Russian Envoy to the UN #Nebenzya: Russia destroyed all of its chemical weapons arsenals by 2017, a fact attested by @OPCW. No research, development or manufacturing of projects codenamed Novichok has ever been carried out in Russia, all CW programmes were stopped back in 1991-92

-

Russian Envoy to the UN #Nebenzya: Curious fact. Although Russia stopped all its CW programmes in 1992, the UK & the US received specialists/defectors & documentation on these projects incl. so-called Novichok in mid-1990s, continued researching CW as evidenced by open sources

-

later:

-

.@RussiaUN: in 1992 Russia closed all Soviet chemical weapons programmes. Some of the scientists were flown to the West (incl UK) where they continued research. To identify a substance, formula and samples are needed – means UK has capacity to produce suspected nerve agent.

source:
karlof1 , Mar 15, 2018 11:44:05 AM | 94
Craig Murray's excellent essay's been heavily attacked, and he's written a stimulating and educational response that further bolsters the initial essay. Quite interesting the so-called journalists supporting May's propaganda.
Don Bacon , Mar 15, 2018 11:51:02 AM | 96
from the Joint Statement:
. . . the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War
Oh dear, in sacred Europe!! How about the West using nerve agents on a grand scale against its enemy Iran in the Middle East (since the Second World War)? Twenty thousand Iranians were killed on the spot by nerve gas, according to reports, with thousands of people hospitalized. According to Iraqi documents, assistance in the development of chemical weapons was obtained from firms in many countries, including the United States, West Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and France. A report stated that Dutch, Australian, Italian, French and both West and East German companies were involved in the export of raw materials to Iraqi chemical weapons factories.
Don Bacon , Mar 15, 2018 11:55:15 AM | 97
from the Joint Statement:
. . . it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for the attack
This is the same sort of "highly likely" language that has worked so well with the false-flag attacks in Syria. It's obviously "highly likely" that there is no actual evidence.

[Mar 16, 2018] So what is being implied here, is that the British authorities have both: A control sample (to determine if the quantities found would be lethal) and samples from a few different labs to confirm that the fingerprint was from lab A not lab B for example. How did they have those?

Notable quotes:
"... For conclusive confirmation a coincidence of what is called 'retention times' would also be required against a standard. The retention time is the time it takes for the compound to 'show itself' at the end of the long thin tube inside the Gas Chromatograph. Different chemicals hold on to the tube with varying tenacities. and hence give various rates of elution. ..."
"... So what is being implied here, is that the authorities have both: A control sample (to determine if the quantities found would be lethal) and samples from a few different labs to confirm that the fingerprint was from lab A not lab B for example. ..."
Mar 16, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

OK I'll bite. As a former industrial organic chemist, both synthetic organic, pilot plant, and QC (quality control), post-doc, this smells to me.

Regarding the synthesis, as I understand it, this class are binary agents, i.e. non-lethal till mixing, so the two 'halves' could be made without specialist kit. Even active nerve agents could be prepared using a just fume cupboard, and the right PPE. Nothing too special required other than non shaky hands. Could be made anywhere the precursors are available. We worked with HF, OsO4, Thallium etc in such environments.

Regarding the analysis. Typically small quantities are analysed (I used to install them) using GCMS. Gas Chromatography Mass spectrometry. This can detect down to femtogram levels.

OK.

So there exists databases of substances and their breakdown patterns under fragmentation, which can give possible matches to known compounds. This compound may have been on there. However, for an allegation of such seriousness, these would be 'indicative' rather than 'conclusive'. For conclusive confirmation a coincidence of what is called 'retention times' would also be required against a standard. The retention time is the time it takes for the compound to 'show itself' at the end of the long thin tube inside the Gas Chromatograph. Different chemicals hold on to the tube with varying tenacities. and hence give various rates of elution.

So a professional forensic scientist, I would hope, would do the following.

OK so a good forensic laboratory would have access to the following. A synthetically pure sample of known weight and impurity profile. Finger prints of samples from 'sources of concern'

So what is being implied here, is that the authorities have both: A control sample (to determine if the quantities found would be lethal) and samples from a few different labs to confirm that the fingerprint was from lab A not lab B for example.

(How) did they have those?

[Mar 16, 2018] At best this is circumstantial evidence leading to a wild assumption, and at worst it is conjecture much like that which has been the banner topic in the United States for 16 months concerning Russia and Donald Trump's election

Notable quotes:
"... Many trails point to the fact that Russia is responsible ..."
"... It certainly looks like the Russians were behind it. Something that should never ever happen and we're taking it very seriously as I think are many others. ..."
"... There is no alternative conclusion other than that the Russian state was culpable for the attempted murder of Mr. Skripal and his daughter." ..."
"... our quarrel is with Putin's Kremlin, and with his decision, and we think it overwhelmingly likely that it was his decision to direct the use of a nerve agent on the streets of the UK for the first time since the Second World War ..."
"... (That is assuming it was indeed Novichok, since Britain is being close-handed about sharing the data with Russian authorities.) ..."
"... All words, no facts. ..."
Mar 16, 2018 | theduran.com

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov plainly stated that to refuse this assistance is a direct violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention which states that the country suspected of being the place of origin of a toxic agent is to be contacted first in the event of that agent's use.

One would wonder "why not?" At least one ought to.

But in the meantime, Russia is not taking this matter lying down. More, there is even a bit of humor.

The temperature of relations drops to -2 -3, but we are not afraid of cold weather. pic.twitter.com/mand9YyoaE

-- Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) March 14, 2018

Firstly, Moscow has opened its own investigation into the attempted murders of the Skripals on its own. In addition, they have also opened an investigation into the suspected murder of Nikolay Glushkov, a Russian businessman, which also happened in London.

And of course, when asked by a reporter from Reuters if Moscow would expel British diplomats, Foreign Minister Lavrov smiled and said, "We will, of course."

Even US President Donald Trump is seen by some news agencies to be "joining the dogpile" against Russia, though as it has been noted elsewhere here on The Duran , Mr. Trump's response suggests very tacit agreement, but in such a way as to leave plenty of opening, as the American president seems to have a cooler approach to this matter.

The primary allegation has this sort of structure:

But again these are allegations, and there is no conclusive evidence that verifies any of this aside from the point that Novichok was used. (That is assuming it was indeed Novichok, since Britain is being close-handed about sharing the data with Russian authorities.) At best this is circumstantial evidence leading to a wild assumption, and at worst it is conjecture much like that which has been the banner topic in the United States for 16 months concerning Russia and Donald Trump's election.

All words, no facts. Makes a person feel a bit like this man

[Mar 16, 2018] How do you know Skripal was murdered? Even the British haven't claimed that. In fact we don't even know that Skripal was injured. There have been no photos, no medical statements, we are just expected to believe all the fake news

Notable quotes:
"... How do you know Skripal was murdered? Even the British haven't claimed that. In fact we don't even know that Skripal was injured. There have been no photos, no medical statements, we are just expected to believe all the fake news. ..."
Mar 16, 2018 | www.unz.com

Don Bacon , March 16, 2018 at 2:36 pm GMT

@Daruma

"There are only three scenarios explaining the murder of Skripal "

How do you know Skripal was murdered? Even the British haven't claimed that. In fact we don't even know that Skripal was injured. There have been no photos, no medical statements, we are just expected to believe all the fake news.

But hey, highly likely has become overwhelmingly likely so why should we quibble.

[Mar 16, 2018] Pressure of France to comply with GB position

Mar 16, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

b | Mar 15, 2018 10:27:46 AM | 88

https://twitter.com/Ch_Germann/status/974290574881771521
Christoph Germann @Ch_Germann now

  1. France says it wants firm proof of Russian involvement: "We don't do fantasy politics"
  2. Reuters publishes report
  3. Panic in NATOland
  4. Reuters updates report, no mention of "fantasy politics" or "definitive conclusions"
  5. May calls Macron
  6. France blames Russia

---

[Mar 16, 2018] Since it seems that Russia promise to defend its men and women in Damascus has effectively staved off a US attack and the western alliance decided to frame Russia for something

Notable quotes:
"... Since it seems that Russia's steadfast promise to defend its men and women in Damascus has effectively staved off a US attack, the western alliance did the next best thing to attacking Russia in Syria – it decided to frame Russia for something that happened on English soil. - Let's Talk About Motive in The Skripal Case: Let's Talk About Syria ..."
Mar 16, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Grieved | Mar 15, 2018 3:46:39 PM | 124

Just read a very interesting supposition by Adam Garrie, which strikes a very true note:

Since it seems that Russia's steadfast promise to defend its men and women in Damascus has effectively staved off a US attack, the western alliance did the next best thing to attacking Russia in Syria – it decided to frame Russia for something that happened on English soil. - Let's Talk About Motive in The Skripal Case: Let's Talk About Syria

So, spite. Wounded ego.

And further demonstration of the west's pitiful lack of means to do anything much real in this world except kill people unprepared to fight back. What will it do as more and more prepare to fight back? Ask Kim. Ask Duterte, Maduro, Erdogan.

[Mar 16, 2018] There was a CCTV camera on the traffic light opposite the restaurant with the bench were Skriplas were found

Mar 16, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peter VE | Mar 15, 2018 5:22:28 PM | 138

There's a CCTV camera on the traffic light opposite the restaurant (or was in Google St View June 2017) here . When will they release the video, or was the camera "not working"?

Wait, I found the footage! ;-)

[Mar 16, 2018] What Was the Mysterious WMD an Assassin Used on a Russian Spy The Answer Could Lead to Vladimir Putin by Spencer Ackerman

Notable quotes:
"... A former KGB officer told The Daily Beast that Western assumptions that these deadly concoctions must have been devised and authorized by the state showed a deep misunderstanding of Russia. ..."
"... Vassiliev, who became a KGB historian after retiring from the service, said the deaths of Skripal's wife, son and brother in recent years made this look more like a mafia revenge attack than a Kremlin-sanctioned mission. ..."
Mar 16, 2018 | www.thedailybeast.com

The Porton Down facility has been home to Britain's defense and technology research since reports emerged from First World War battlefields that the Germans had killed 140 British soldiers with chlorine gas in January 1915. Coincidentally, the highly secretive facility is located on the outskirts of Salisbury, just seven miles from where former Russian military intelligence colonel Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found on Sunday.

Samples were being analyzed within hours of the discovery after local police began to feel a physical reaction and officers raced to shut down the areas of contamination. Witnesses reported seeing the victims unconscious, with their eyes rolled back, and foaming at the mouth.

Skripal and his daughter were isolated immediately. About 24 hours after the attack, it was determined that they were suffering from some sort of nerve agent in their system. While Skripal has stabilized, his daughter remains in critical condition; both are being treated in the intensive care unit, along with a police officer who was called to investigate this mysterious illness.

Based on their symptoms and the contamination patterns, scientists who spoke to The Daily Beast are convinced this was a nerve agent attack and not radiation exposure, a cyanide attack, or a biological weapon.

"In these recent cases, the symptoms described like frothing at the mouth, vomiting, convulsions and coma -- that's more likely a nerve agent," said Timothy Erickson , chief of medical toxicology at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital and faculty at Harvard Medical School. Erickson published a paper last year in the journal Toxicology Communications about last the fatal February 2017 attack on Kim Jong Nam , the half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, which used VX -- short for "Venomous agent X."

VX was invented by British biological warfare experts at Porton Down, the very same facility where tests are underway this week.

Sarin and VX -- dangerous neurochemicals that disrupt nerve-organ messaging and shut down basic bodily functions -- are the most popular of the agents, but others with similar properties do exist.

A senior intelligence source told the BBC that it is believed sarin and VX were not the agents used, posing the question: What was used instead and what can that tell us about the source?

Around World War II, Nazi scientists synthesized an entire "G-class" of nerve agents that not only included sarin, but also soman, cyclosarin, and tabun, variants that also debilitate the nervous system.

They were discovered accidentally while manufacturing pesticides , which can have similar effects on humans, but they remain extremely difficult to produce. Mark Bishop , a chemical weapons specialist in nonproliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California, said that producing them requires a technical capacity and scientific know-how that isn't possible in many places. "It's tricky," Bishop said. "It requires a pretty high level of expertise for producing chemicals."

Bishop said it was possible but highly unlikely that the Russians had developed a totally new nerve agent. "They're probably making an attempt [to create other nerve agents], but it's tough. There's no real incentive to create a new nerve agent -- they already work so well. The only motivation to create a new one would be if they wanted them to not be identified as chemicals or to fly under the radar."

One option that is unlikely but potentially alarming is that Russia has finally succeeded in its Soviet era mission to create a new class of nerve agents referred to as novichoks whose molecules were not detectable through modern lab testing methods. "They tried to keep it a secret, and there's pretty skimpy evidence that it was happening," Bishop cautioned. "But it's an interesting possibility that would point directly to the Russians."

No matter what substance was used, conclusively tracing the orders back to the Kremlin will prove difficult.

... ... ...

Judging by the rush to secure Skripal's home, the restaurant where he shared lunch with his daughter, the pub where they retired afterwards, and the hospital where they were treated, it seems there were fears that contaminated footprints were indeed being left along the way.

...The police officer, Nick Bailey, who was affected later at second-hand was so severely afflicted that he had to be treated in intensive care, although he is now conscious and talking.

The weapons experts at Porton Down will be examining every molecule and the patterns of the substance's distribution around Salisbury in the hope that they can find a specific chemical signature that will allow this agent to be traced back to its source.

... ... ...

A former KGB officer told The Daily Beast that Western assumptions that these deadly concoctions must have been devised and authorized by the state showed a deep misunderstanding of Russia.

"People actually underestimate the level of corruption in Russia -- any Russian will tell you that the corruption is so high that you can get anything, anything you want," said Alexander Vassiliev. "You want polonium? You get it -- just pay the money."

Vassiliev, who became a KGB historian after retiring from the service, said the deaths of Skripal's wife, son and brother in recent years made this look more like a mafia revenge attack than a Kremlin-sanctioned mission.

"I was a cadet in the KGB spy school exactly at the time when Putin was -- we had the same training, we had the same instructors, we had the same textbooks, so I always have an idea about how he is thinking," he said. "Intelligence services in civilized countries don't do revenge -- emotions shouldn't have a place in espionage -- it's not like two guys got drunk in Moscow, decided to go to Britain and kill a traitor, it doesn't work like that."

... ... ...

Some British newspaper reports have suggested, however, that he may have still been working either for MI6 -- his handlers when he was spying from Russia -- or freelancing for private intelligence companies including Orbis, which is run by Christopher Steele, who compiled the infamous Trump/Russia dossier.

"Of course, he was a traitor -- he committed high treason. In the Soviet Union he would have been executed, definitely," said Vassiliev. "But you only want to kill someone in espionage if you expect this guy to bring further damage to your country or your intelligence agency."

Where Vassiliev, the scientific community and the British authorities all agree, is on the brazenness of this attack, which could never have gone unnoticed.

Bishop, the weapons expert in California, said the failure to immediately kill the targets -- and incidental poisoning of 21 people -- suggested that this was a sloppy job. "Nerve agents are pretty potent, and you don't need a high concentration to kill someone," he said. "It's really surprising that they're still alive. Either it was not a potent nerve agent or it was not administered efficiently or it was impure and the proper concentration was not transferred."

Vassiliev agreed. "Generally it doesn't look like a special service operation because the whole thing was done in the daylight, as far as I understand. On the other hand you can never be sure about it because many things can go wrong, there could have been a mistake -- no secret agent is perfect."

[Mar 16, 2018] A monumental level of British Imperial Hypocrisy...

Notable quotes:
"... "A briefing paper by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office stated: "We believe it better to maintain a dialogue with others if we want to influence their actions. Punitive measures such as unilateral sanctions would not be effective in changing Iraq's behaviour over chemical weapons, and would damage British interests to no avail." ..."
Mar 16, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

time2wakeupnow | Mar 15, 2018 9:44:30 PM | 155

A Quick Chemical Weapons History of Western Imperial Hypocrisy...

The latest UNSC 'meeting' occurring yesterday - at the behest of the ever yapping US poodles 'across the pond', is available for viewing - (in it's a bit over an hour in it's entirety). I think that you might find find this video documentation of one of the most farcical UNSC sessions to take place probably since the now infamous Colin Powell high kabuki theater piece - when he comically held up for the council members - a vial of a "white power" substance that, I believe, turned out to be nothing more than a packet of "Saccharin" hastily appropriated from the UN's commissary earlier that morning for "demonstration purposes ONLY!". I think, He should have taken it a tad further and pretended to accidentally" drop the vial on the chamber floor - just to see how the other UNSC members listening to his CIA inspired ruse would have responded. I'm sure that everyone attending would've all had a great laugh together and then would have unanimously approved the west's request to bomb all thing Iraqi into oblivion.

What I think that you'll find of interest here, is not only the main parties (UK & the RF) presentations before the council, but also the presentations of the remaining 13 Security Council members - including, of course. Ms. Haley's saccharin & sanctimonious speech of the USA's eternal bond of solidarity with it's favorite, very well manicured pet poodle..eh.. ally: the UK. I especially found the Chinese predictably short, but carefully parsed statement, along with those from African and South American SC ambassadors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=USYfRVqG2lk

Finally, bringing this whole mock-moral unipolar charade full circle, below is the historically damning Wikipedia page on the Halabja (but...he gassed his own people) massacre by Saddam Hussein on the evening of March the 16th, 1988 - nearly 2 months into George the First's term, and near the end of the western supported Iran/Iraq war. One of the very best pretzeled presentational pretenses came from none other that the now theatrically aggrieved sovereign "kingdom":

"A briefing paper by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office stated: "We believe it better to maintain a dialogue with others if we want to influence their actions. Punitive measures such as unilateral sanctions would not be effective in changing Iraq's behaviour over chemical weapons, and would damage British interests to no avail."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_chemical_attack

[Mar 16, 2018] The UK still refuses to provide the required-by-law materials to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapon. The whole "communication" with Russians re Skripal case has exposed a stunning incompetence

Mar 16, 2018 | www.unz.com

annamaria , March 16, 2018 at 2:57 pm GMT

@Stan d Mute

The very first announcement made by Boris Johnson after the alleged terrorist act on the British soil was " British footballers will not attend the championship in Russia" -- before (BEFORE!) any investigation has been conducted.

The UK still refuses to provide the required-by-law materials to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapon.

The whole "communication" with Russian re Skripal case has exposed a stunning incompetence of the UK government across all departments, beginning with the incompetent Mrs. May and Mr. Johnson and down to the US Sec of Def Gavin Williamson (a Diaper-Boy with the expertise in fine china and ceramic countertops).

English subtitles: http://theduran.com/mariya-zakharova-lays-correct-way-deal-assassination/

https://www.fort-russ.com/2018/03/lavrov-uks-defense-chief-just-wants-to-be-remembered-in-history-for-his-bombastic-statements/

[Mar 16, 2018] Shadow of operation Gladio hangs over Skripal case

Notable quotes:
"... "Has high-resolution trace analysis been run on a sample of the nerve agent that revealed any evidence as to the location of its production or identity of its perpetrators? The government should work with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons." ..."
Mar 16, 2018 | www.unz.com

annamaria , March 16, 2018 at 1:33 pm GMT

@peterAUS

Such a strong expression of righteousness from peterAUS -- and careful omission, a la Quartermaster, of a simple fact articulated by Corbin:

"Has high-resolution trace analysis been run on a sample of the nerve agent that revealed any evidence as to the location of its production or identity of its perpetrators? The government should work with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons."

But the UK government refuses to provide samples to the OPCW. Why, peterAUS?

Is it too much to ask for the evidence? Or you want to compete with the soy-boy Gavin Williamson, the former seller of ceramic countertops? Perhaps you should watch the BBC documentary about Gladio before making your allegedly righteous rants re Saker. And please, spare us your ziocon' "defense" of Western society.

https://www.rt.com/uk/421273-russia-british-spy-sanctions/

[Mar 16, 2018] It is unlear if Novichok eve

Mar 16, 2018 | www.unz.com

Tick Tock , March 15, 2018 at 3:09 pm GMT

@Quartermaster

The Saker's most important theme in this article is that the whole Western so called Civilization is built largely on the capacity to LIE, (IE not tell the truth when one knows the truth). Lying is the most fundamentally destructive actions in any culture and in the West it is not only essential for success it is revered. I am so disgusted with the West that it is best for this charade and circus to come to an end, and it seems that the Lying Liars as Al Franken called them years ago have internalized there own Bull $hit and believe it absolutely. Yes, Johnny, you can put your hand on the red hot stove and nothing will happen. Go ahead, put it on there and see!!! Dumber than Dirt and God Damn F-n Proud of it too!! The new Western Motto!!

Arioch , March 15, 2018 at 3:58 pm GMT
The former Soviet scientist, Vil Mirzanyanov, who 'blew the whistle' and wrote about the 'Novichoks', now lives in a $1 million home in the United States. The AFP news agency just interviewed him about the recent incident:
Mirzayanov, speaking at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, said he is convinced Russia carried it out as a way of intimidating opponents of President Vladimir Putin.

"Only the Russians" developed this class of nerve agents, said the chemist. "They kept it and are still keeping it in secrecy."

The only other possibility, he said, would be that someone used the formulas in his book to make such a weapon.

"Russia did it", says Mirzanyanov, "OR SOMEONE WHO READ MY BOOK".

The book was published in 2008 and is available at Amazon as hardcover, paperback or for $8.16 as an electronic file. It includes a number of formulas which, Mirzanyanov says, could be used to produce those chemical agents.

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/03/theresa-mays-novichok-claims-fall-apart.html

..But neither Porton Down nor the OPCW seem convinced that this is possible. They may believe that Mirzanyanov is just full of it.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has not recognized Novichoks as chemical weapons because it found scant evidence that they exist at all. The U.S. and the UK are both part of the organization and both agreed with this evaluation:

The name "Novichok" is used in a publication of a former Soviet scientist who reported investigating a new class of nerve agents suitable for use as binary chemical weapons. The OPCW's Scientific Advisory Board states that it has insufficient information to comment on the existence or properties of "Novichoks". (OPCW, 2013)

As recently as 2016 Dr Robin Black, Head of the Detection Laboratory at the UK's only chemical weapons facility at Porton Down , a former colleague of Dr David Kelly, published in an extremely prestigious scientific journal that the evidence for the existence of Novichoks was scant and their composition unknown.

In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, 'Novichoks' (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of the 'Foliant' programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published. Robin Black. (2016) Development, Historical Use and Properties of Chemical Warfare Agents. Royal Society of Chemistry

[Mar 16, 2018] H.R. McMaster Gives The Kremlin a Double Bird Salute

Notable quotes:
"... "We believe that Russia was responsible for this attack, and we call on the Russian government to answer all questions related to this incident, and to provide full information to the OPCW [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons]. No nation -- Russia, China, or anybody else, any other nation -- should be using chemical weapons and nerve agents," McMaster said, following what critics have called a belated Wednesday statement casting blame on Moscow for the attack on Skripal. ..."
Mar 16, 2018 | www.thedailybeast.com

If H.R. McMaster is on his way out of the White House, he's going out with two middle fingers raised and pointed in the direction of the Kremlin.

"Russia is also complicit in [Syrian dictator Bashar] Assad's atrocities," McMaster, President Trump's national security adviser, said Thursday during an appearance at a discussion of the Syrian civil war held at the U.S. Holocaust memorial museum.

His voice raised, McMaster used harsher and more moralistic language than his boss does in characterizing Russia's geopolitical influence, and unequivocally blamed the Kremlin for "the abhorrent nerve agent attack" on a former double agent, Sergei Skripal , and proposed "serious political and economic consequences" for Russian aggression.

"We believe that Russia was responsible for this attack, and we call on the Russian government to answer all questions related to this incident, and to provide full information to the OPCW [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons]. No nation -- Russia, China, or anybody else, any other nation -- should be using chemical weapons and nerve agents," McMaster said, following what critics have called a belated Wednesday statement casting blame on Moscow for the attack on Skripal.

McMaster's brief remarks, lasting under 20 minutes, came as the Army three-star general is the subject of furious speculation that Trump will soon fire him and install hardliner ex-ambassador John Bolton atop the National Security Council. His capstone achievement thus far has been a Russia-and-China-centric security strategy that has been conspicuously out of step with Trump's rhetoric and actions toward both countries.

"Russia has done nothing to encourage Assad to ensure delivery of humanitarian aid, to respect ceasefires and de-escalation agreements or to comply with U.N. Security Council Resolution 2254's call for a U.N.-monitored political process," McMaster said.

Those remarks suggested that Trump got suckered during his 2017 rounds of personal diplomacy with Vladimir Putin. In November, Trump and Putin issued a joint statement firmly pledging support for what is known as the 2254 Process -- though critics considered it a cover for Moscow to continue ensuring support for its client, Assad -- that "took note" of Assad's "recent commitment to the Geneva process and constitutional reform and elections as called for under UNSCR 2254."

And that followed July's acquiescence from Trump and just-ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signing onto a Russia-driven process centered around achieving ceasefires that McMaster said Russia was not respecting.

[Mar 15, 2018] The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation. Which means that from now on the investigation is highly politicized and tainted in a sense that it will be conducted by people who proved the existence of Iraq WMD in the past: ..."
"... This is one step further from the "self-indictment as a formal proof" used in Show Trials. Now it looks like "suspicion is the formal proof." ..."
"... Both cyberspace and poisoning with exotic chemical agents proved to be a perfect media for false flag operations designed to poison relations between nations and fuel war-style demonization. ..."
Mar 14, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

likbez 14 March 2018 at 11:40 PM

The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation. Which means that from now on the investigation is highly politicized and tainted in a sense that it will be conducted by people who proved the existence of Iraq WMD in the past:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43402506

Moscow refused to meet Mrs May's midnight deadline to co-operate in the case, prompting Mrs May to announce a series of measures intended to send a "clear message" to Russia.

These include:

  • Expelling 23 diplomats
  • Increasing checks on private flights, customs and freight
  • Freezing Russian state assets where there is evidence they may be used to threaten the life or property of UK nationals or residents
  • Ministers and the Royal Family boycotting the Fifa World Cup in Russia later this year
  • Suspending all planned high-level bilateral contacts between the UK and Russia
  • Plans to consider new laws to increase defences against "hostile state activity"

Mrs May told MPs that Russia had provided "no explanation" as to how the nerve agent came to be used in the UK, describing Moscow's response as one of "sarcasm, contempt and defiance".

The use of a Russian-made nerve agent on UK soil amounted to the "unlawful use of force", she said.

So it looks more and more like a well planned multi-step propaganda operation, not an impromptu action on the part of GB. Kind of replica of Russian election influence witch hunt in the USA with the replacement of cyberspace and elections with chemical agents and poisoning.

So inconsistencies that were pointed in this thread (such as the mere fact that three people exposed are still alive) do not matter anymore.

The verdict now is in.

This is one step further from the "self-indictment as a formal proof" used in Show Trials. Now it looks like "suspicion is the formal proof."

Both cyberspace and poisoning with exotic chemical agents proved to be a perfect media for false flag operations designed to poison relations between nations and fuel war-style demonization.

Sad...

[Mar 15, 2018] One strong indication that Skripal case is used for a preplanned propaganda campaign against Russia that specialists in the UK who know their stuff no longer get airtime while people like Luke Harding, who plainly don t, are all over the media

First Steele dossier. Now Skripals.. What's next ?
Notable quotes:
"... But even to an outsider, and even if we take it all at face value, that official account of the Wiltshire poisoning is nowhere near solid enough to justify the steps taken. "If you have a weak argument, shout louder" is sufficient therefore to explain the surprising volume of anti-Russian PR coming out of London just now. ..."
"... I think they're probably shouting loud enough to gain their point. A sufficient number of us in the UK public will accept that Wiltshire incident as further proof of Putin's malevolence. We will therefore accept further anti-Russian measures. ..."
"... For the Westminster bubble all our eggs are in the American neocon basket. One could say that the respective swamps are inextricably connected. What's in it for our politicians is nothing less than the maintenance of a comfortable and familiar status quo. There's therefore no choice but to be more Roman that Rome when it comes to pursuing neocon objectives. ..."
"... As ever therefore it all centres around Trump. Is he getting dragged along by his neocons? Or is he now one of them? ..."
"... Trump is not only up against his own establishment. He's up against the European establishment as well. Hence the hammering he's getting from our European press and politicians. Hence also the dossier scandal, which for my part I now see for certain as a joint attempt by the American/UK status quo supporters to weaken or unseat Trump. ..."
Mar 15, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

English Outsider -> kooshy... 15 March 2018 at 08:52 AM

Kooshy - I should have checked down-thread before submitting my comment. Then I'd have seen that "London Bob" (87) had given a brief account of what is happening in Westminster.

"London Bob" explains something that puzzles some in the UK (and bothered me a lot over Syria). Why isn't Corbyn, the opposition leader in the House of Commons and now stronger than he was, coming out with all guns firing against the present anti-Russian hysteria? He'd have plenty of ammunition, that's for sure.

As that brief account explains, he's in no position to do so. He's leading a divided party. He has some support from within his party rank and file but not from many of his own colleagues in the House. We now see, incidentally, some of his colleagues making public statements that are only a hair's breadth away from disavowing Corbyn or his spokesmen.

In addition Corbyn is already suspected of being anti-patriotic and doesn't want to give his opponents a bigger stick to beat him with on that.

Therefore resistance to the current Russophobia from within the Westminster bubble is likely to be weak.

Also in this thread DH is casting a sceptical eye over the Wiltshire poisoning. It's an indication of how far down public discussion in the UK has gone that specialists in the UK who know their stuff no longer get airtime while people like Luke Harding, who plainly don't, are all over the media. This blanking out of the voice of reasoned criticism in the UK media is, I suspect, already proving counterproductive for the status quo. It merely reinforces that general public feeling, evident to some extent in the Brexit vote, that we do at least know we're being conned even if we don't always know how. I don't know how widespread that feeling is in this case.

But even to an outsider, and even if we take it all at face value, that official account of the Wiltshire poisoning is nowhere near solid enough to justify the steps taken. "If you have a weak argument, shout louder" is sufficient therefore to explain the surprising volume of anti-Russian PR coming out of London just now.

I think they're probably shouting loud enough to gain their point. A sufficient number of us in the UK public will accept that Wiltshire incident as further proof of Putin's malevolence. We will therefore accept further anti-Russian measures.

What's in it for us? As you perhaps indicate, bent money will be running like the devil away from London, which one would think can't be good news for the City or for the London property market. Hence the repeated calls for European and American solidarity; if the Russian expatriates can simply move their fortunes to other Western boltholes that's going to leave Westminster looking ineffectual.

I don't accept the argument I sometimes see put forward that we, and the East Europeans for that matter, are at present dragging the Americans along with us. However weak the American economy is or is said to be, there's no question but that ours is considerably more fragile. For the Westminster bubble all our eggs are in the American neocon basket. One could say that the respective swamps are inextricably connected. What's in it for our politicians is nothing less than the maintenance of a comfortable and familiar status quo. There's therefore no choice but to be more Roman that Rome when it comes to pursuing neocon objectives.

So when it comes to the various neocon establishments, the little dogs can kick up more racket but it's still the big dog running the show.

As ever therefore it all centres around Trump. Is he getting dragged along by his neocons? Or is he now one of them?

If the first, then it's accurate to see this as many of us here have seen it from the start. Trump is not only up against his own establishment. He's up against the European establishment as well. Hence the hammering he's getting from our European press and politicians. Hence also the dossier scandal, which for my part I now see for certain as a joint attempt by the American/UK status quo supporters to weaken or unseat Trump.

If the second then all is still not lost. Better to have the cronies falling out amongst themselves - and it's evident at least that that's happening - than have them as united as they were before Trump.

[Mar 15, 2018] Britain's Toxic Agenda for Russian Media by Finian Cunningham

Notable quotes:
"... This entire Russian hysteria reminds me of the old western movies where a crowd gathers outside the sheriff's office being manipulated into hysteria by rabblerousers shouting "Hang the Bastard". The rabble rousers are the media and government ministers and the crowd is the western public. No need for evidence evidence since everyone knows he is guilty! The west has descended into a pit of their own filth. ..."
Mar 15, 2018 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

Relations between Britain and Russia have become so toxic now that anyone working with Russian news media is liable to be condemned as a stooge or traitor.

Senior Labour party member John McDonnell, the shadow finance minister, has conceded this week that fellow opposition politicians "may be banned from appearing on Russian news media" following the furore over allegations that Moscow carried out an assassination attempt in Britain last week.

Other reports have called on Britain's state media regulator, Ofcom, to cancel the broadcast license for Russian government-owned news outlet RT. That move is being touted as "appropriate retaliation" for Moscow's alleged involvement in the apparent poison attack on Sergei Skripal and his adult daughter.

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The pair have been hospitalized following an incident in their adopted home town of Salisbury on March 4, in which it appears they were exposed to a lethal nerve agent. Disgraced Russian agent Sergei Skripal had been living in the southern England town for the past eight years following his exile to Britain in 2010 as part of a spy exchange.

After much fevered speculation in British media, the Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May followed up this week by telling lawmakers in the House of Commons that "it was highly likely Russia was responsible".

The main incriminating factor cited is that the poisonous substance has been supposedly identified by British authorities as " novichok " -- a Soviet-made nerve agent, similar to VX and other weaponized organophosphate compounds.

Moscow has categorically denied any involvement in the apparent murder bid on the Skripals. Russia's Foreign Ministry has derided May's parliamentary address as "a circus show".

Let's back up a moment. May's claims of "highly likely" are eerily reminiscent of American and British "high confidence" about weapons of mass destruction allegedly in Iraq and Syria; or American and British "high confidence" about alleged Russian meddling in elections. It seems to be always a case of assertion-without-evidence which is either eventually disproven, as with WMDs in Iraq, or reliant on endless repetition by dutiful news media.

As for the British prime minister's supposed "smoking syringe" implicating Moscow because of an alleged Soviet military-grade nerve agent "novichok", that depends on the word of British military intelligence. How do we know novichok was actually used? It could have been any number of highly-toxic related organophosphate chemicals.

Even if novichok was deployed to injure the Skripals that is far from proof of any Russian connection. We can be sure Britain and other Western states have also developed their own stocks of novichok. How easy it would be to use the chemical as an apparent fingerprint framing the Kremlin, in the same way that the CIA and NSA can leave digital fingerprints framing enemies for seeming cyber-attacks.

The official British position implicating Russia over the Salisbury poisoning is tenuous, to say the least. But what is astounding is how the British are toxifying relations with Russia based on no objective evidence.

When Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn stood up in parliament this week to reply to Theresa May's speech, he was roundly vilified by Tory lawmakers and sections of the British media because he did not "condemn" Russia over the Salisbury incident.

This is the toxic war-like climate that has been engendered in Britain owing to relentless Russophobia whipped up by politicians and lynch-mob media mentality.

Russia is found "guilty" without any facts, based upon a ludicrous theory of revenge against a has-been spy who had been living undisturbed in England for eight years. We are expected to believe that Moscow would order his assassination with an identifiable Soviet-era chemical weapon on the eve of its own presidential elections.

What's much more plausible is that the British authorities staged the event as a propaganda stunt to frame and further demonize Russia. Theresa May probably hasn't a clue that she is being manipulated by her own secret services, as are other British politicians media.

May claims that the latest incident comes "against a backdrop of well-established Russian state aggression". One could far more reasonably argue "a backdrop of British and Western Russophobia".

There are many possible reasons for why British state forces would want to polarize international relations even more than they already are with Russia.

Notably, the poisoning incident has led to calls for greater military build-up by NATO forces on Russia's borders. That's an obvious win for the British military-industrial complex.

Another factor is that Britain seems to be using the latest debacle as a way to further damage European relations with Russia, demanding that Germany and France show "solidarity" by condemning Moscow. This could be related to European energy geopolitics in which London and Washington have a shared interest in sabotaging the soon-to-be-completed Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Europe.

But one other tangible outcome is the way that Russian news media are being targeted with even more venom. On the back of sensational claims that Russia "carried out a brazen attempt to murder innocent civilians on our soil", the climate is now conducive to censoring "Kremlin-backed news organizations" like RT and Sputnik.

As mentioned above, senior Labour figures like John McDonnell, who is normally strongly independent-minded, are obligingly calling for fellow members of their party to stop appearing on RT.

This Orwellian-like Russophobia is creating a situation in which anyone working with Russian news media is prone to be labeled traitorous. Former British politicians like George Galloway and Alex Salmond who have gone on to host programs for RT will, we can be sure, be subjected to intense pressure to quit.

A sign of how hysterical the Russophobia has become is a call this week in British media for Manchester United manager José Mourinho to renege on his recent deal with RT as a football pundit during this summer's World Cup tournament.

The same intimidatory atmosphere applies to all public figures and journalists who associate with Russian news media. It's a global witch-hunt orchestrated to silence dissenting views. Working with Russian news media is now tantamount to taking a poison pill.

Russian channels like RT and Sputnik have brought a refreshingly critical perspective to many international events.

When American, British and other European politicians decry "Russian meddling in elections" what they are really vexed about is the Russian news media performing a legitimate and laudable function of properly informing the public. Denigrating Russian media as "Kremlin-sponsored influence campaigns" is a desperate attempt by Western states to shut down critical voices.

The poisoning incident of Sergei Skripal and his daughter is conveniently having a broadside toxic impact on relations with Russia for any number of ulterior objectives for the British authorities.

One objective that seems to be clearly emerging is the way in which the Russophobia is being used to incriminate Russian news media and anyone who might associate with them. That's partly a reflection of how successful Russian news media have become in exposing Western governments' crimes.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Information Clearing House.


Francis · 11 hours ago

Who has called for a public investigation with presentation of evidence? Who is against it and instead supports a witch-hunt hystetia?
B.F. · 11 hours ago
We have presidential elections in Russia on March 18, and this incident happens right before the elections. How convenient. And who gains by this ? Russia ? I think not. This false flag was instigated to vilify both Russia and Putin and give NATO an excuse to exist. The military industrial complexes in the US and Western Europe will, of course, be overjoyed, as now they expect more money. However, as far as I can see, many people are not buying this highly transparent piece of nonsense.
Arvy · 11 hours ago
Assumptions of guilt upon public accusation unless and until the accused undertakes the almost impossible task of proving the negative appears to be the prevalent trend amongst so-called "western democracies" everywhere.

I seem to recall US President Trump recently saying something about "take the gun first, go through due process second" and many others appear to agree with that approach ... although the designated 'villains' deserving that treatment may vary.

Know_the_truth 92p · 8 hours ago
"Theresa May probably hasn't got a clue she is being manipulated by her own intelligence services"

Yes she does, she fully knows what is going on and is on board with it. If these vile creatures succeed in bringing the unthinkable upon their citizens I sincerely hope there will be enough people left who know where the blame lies and who will hunt down these evil scum and deal with them adequately.

MathewNeville · 8 hours ago
Cost of UK Air and Drone Strikes in Iraq and Syria Reach £1.75 billion
http://truepublica.org.uk/united-kingdom/cost-of-...

Britain's secret assassinations programme and extended kill list--------------------------
http://truepublica.org.uk/united-kingdom/britains...
..............................................................................................................................................................

crosswinds · 6 hours ago
"Ratcheting up the Hysteria and Propaganda" for the "Final Battle" against all "evildoers." (i.e. "evildoers of the world unite....the Anglo-American democracies.)
barner davidl · 6 hours ago
As per an advise from Machiavelli : Never admit , deny-deny, lie and lie , till you die .
Dick · 5 hours ago
This entire Russian hysteria reminds me of the old western movies where a crowd gathers outside the sheriff's office being manipulated into hysteria by rabblerousers shouting "Hang the Bastard". The rabble rousers are the media and government ministers and the crowd is the western public. No need for evidence evidence since everyone knows he is guilty! The west has descended into a pit of their own filth.
Dave Welsh · 2 hours ago
Movie and book, I guess: "The Ox-Bow Incident". Did you see the movie?
2LTMorrisseau 97p · 4 hours ago
As to MOTIVE. i have also read that this Russian man and his daughter were caught up in AND HAD INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE that
British M16 actually CREATED THE INFAMOUS "RUSSIAN DOSSIER"....not Christopher Steele alone...........and since this information is a bombshell [UK Intel trying to unseat Trump] that this man and his daughter were knowledgable of AND THEY HAD REQUESTED PERMISSION TO REPATRIATE HOME TO RUSSIA.........."somebody" decided to OFF the two..... I wonder who that "somebody" might be?
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nick · 3 hours ago
poor rupert murdoch, his plans for billions of profit via Genie Energy from the resources of southern syria are being curtailed by russia. you have to feel for the guy, its only right that he uses his media empire to whine about it!
American · 2 hours ago
The Brits are making asses of themselves again, as usual - LOL!

Jose · 1 hour ago

We are witnessing a full court press by the US, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and Canada. The leaders of these nations and their obedient news outlets are going all out to confront Russia militarily, economically, politically and diplomatically. The hysteria stirred up by Western politicians and their subservient media seems to be driven by an agenda to isolate Russia from the rest of the world. The West is cynically using these unsubstantiated allegations to malign, discredit and demonize Russia so as to undermine its international standing. These repeated accusations seem like a page right out of NAZI Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels' "A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth ..If you repeat a lie often enough people will believe it." The assassination of this Russian double agent Sergei Skripal couldn't have come at a more opportune time for Prime Minister Theresa May whose popularity was sagging in the polls. The incident, irrespective of how disingenuous, provided her with a flag waving call to arms against the alien Russian 'aggressor." This all fits in quite neatly with other orchestrated allegations of Russian electoral interference, Russian trolls and hacking of DNC emails disseminating from US politicians and Intelligence Services.

This bellicose fear mongering taking place throughout the West is happening while NATO is literally on Russia's doorstep. How should Russia react to this mass hysteria? Their troops aren't on the borders of Western Europe, the US or Canada. Russia doesn't have 700 military bases in 70 countries throughout the world nor has it invaded other countries or conducted in regime change as has the US and NATO.

It therefore doesn't seem illogical, given the provocative rhetoric coming from the US, UK and Western Europe, that from a Russian perspective Russia is probably facing the greatest challenge from the West since Hitler's 1941 invasion "Operation Barbarossa." Of course the advent of nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles in the last 72 years will hopefully be enough to reign in the crazies in Washington and London's 10 Downing Street.

itchyvet 78p · 41 minutes ago
It was not, an assassination, the guy and his daughter are still alive, therefore it was only an ATTEMPT at assassination.

[Mar 15, 2018] Hysterical panegyric on Observer.com reminds the Hate Week speech delivered by an Inner Party member in the movie version of George Orwell's 1984 !

Notable quotes:
"... It's sad that people even watch things such as BBC,CBC,NBC,ABC, CNN, etc. when every one of them parrots the same talking points, and they have repeatedly been outed as disinfo and pure propaganda outlets. ..."
"... Most interesting to me is that people can now see where their MP's stand WRT war - because this sure smells like the run-up to Libya. We already knew where the US would stand, same position for nearly a century. ..."
"... Only bankers benefit from war, and with the current global debt bomb, they are all in for declaration of "force majeure"- rest assured on that. ..."
Mar 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

ashley albanese , Mar 15, 2018 4:18:50 PM | 129

Lying in bed listening to Australian government media propaganda . Endless parroting about the ' rules based order ' , ' the rising power of ( guess) and now Boris Johnson informing us that the world is insensed at Russian aggression . It is funny and absurd , sad and deadly !
SteveK9 , Mar 15, 2018 4:23:47 PM | 131
It's harder and harder to laugh at this nonsense. Just when you thought it could not get more ridiculous, something like this happens. I keep hearing that our masters are preparing us for war with Russia. All those people who keep saying 'war is coming', 'prepare for World War III', etc., you do realize that your life will be over, along with everyone you know, and ... human civilization?
Mister Roboto , Mar 15, 2018 5:58:41 PM | 143
When I read this hysterical panegyric on Observer.com (or at least as much of it as I could stomach), I couldn't help but think of the Hate Week speech delivered by an Inner Party member in the movie version of George Orwell's 1984 !
Oilman2 , Mar 15, 2018 7:03:54 PM | 150
It's sad that people even watch things such as BBC,CBC,NBC,ABC, CNN, etc. when every one of them parrots the same talking points, and they have repeatedly been outed as disinfo and pure propaganda outlets. The only "waking up" that I see anywhere is among those few that are neither progressive or conservative, and they are waking up to a nightmare. I am glad this is all talking - if fur truly starts flying, there isn't anywhere to hide from all this.

It's straight out of Bernays - just keep doubling down and throwing it up all over the media outlets. I get ashamed that critical thinking exists only in a few places like MOA. Yet even here, people seem to divide themselves right along the lines that all this claptrap designates at times.

All you need to sort this out is a simple exercise in "cui bono", same as ever - and Russia had nothing to gain, even in the intel arena.

Most interesting to me is that people can now see where their MP's stand WRT war - because this sure smells like the run-up to Libya. We already knew where the US would stand, same position for nearly a century.

Only bankers benefit from war, and with the current global debt bomb, they are all in for declaration of "force majeure"- rest assured on that.

[Mar 15, 2018] it is possible that Clinton mafia is a player in the Skripal story: 'BuzzFeed' and Christopher Steele face very serious lawsuits relating to the 'dossier'

This post suggest that one of the motivation fro the attack can be connected with imlications for GB of Steele dossier fiasco.
Notable quotes:
"... Ironically, while I think the notion that the Russian authorities would have organised this kind of attack now is peculiarly preposterous, I think there are a very large number of suspects -- including both state actors and some non-state. So, for example, Ukrainian oligarchs would very likely be in a position to organise such an operation. ..."
"... A possible element in the story is that both 'BuzzFeed' and Christopher Steele face very serious potential problems in lawsuits relating to the 'dossier.' Both have been sued by Aleksej Gubarev and XBT, while the former also has to face actions from the Alfa oligarchs, Michael Cohen, and Carter Page. ..."
"... The best way of avoiding a disaster for both 'BuzzFeed' and Steele -- which could have large knock-on implications -- may be to reinforce the already prevalent climate of hysteria, so that even the most preposterous claims in the dossier can be made to seem reasonable. ..."
Mar 15, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

David Habakkuk -> Barbara Ann ... 15 March 2018 at 11:04 AM

Barbara Ann,

In reply to 139.

Ironically, while I think the notion that the Russian authorities would have organised this kind of attack now is peculiarly preposterous, I think there are a very large number of suspects -- including both state actors and some non-state. So, for example, Ukrainian oligarchs would very likely be in a position to organise such an operation.

Moreover, if they did, the British authorities would have very little option but to cover up for them.

One thing which is striking me forcibly is the way that the claims about a long history of assassinations of 'dissidents' in the UK in the 'investigation' by 'BuzzFeed' last June, of which the centrepiece was a long piece entitled 'From Russia With Blood' are now being recycled all over the place.

(See, for example, this from the 'Chicago Tribune -- http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-russian-dissidents-poisoned-20180306-story.html .)

A possible element in the story is that both 'BuzzFeed' and Christopher Steele face very serious potential problems in lawsuits relating to the 'dossier.' Both have been sued by Aleksej Gubarev and XBT, while the former also has to face actions from the Alfa oligarchs, Michael Cohen, and Carter Page.

The best way of avoiding a disaster for both 'BuzzFeed' and Steele -- which could have large knock-on implications -- may be to reinforce the already prevalent climate of hysteria, so that even the most preposterous claims in the dossier can be made to seem reasonable.

Sid Finster said in reply to turcopolier ... , 15 March 2018 at 11:05 AM
I think the problem goes well beyond the foreign policy establishment and most definitely includes the generals and a variety of other people and institutions in and out of government.

While BHO did restrain some of the aggression that we are now seeing, I suspect that the Deep State was confident that HRC or some Team R muppet (Jeb!) would win the next election, so all they had to do was bide their time.

Sid Finster said in reply to Barbara Ann ... , 15 March 2018 at 11:09 AM
Of course the "Russia poisons peoples we has the proof ZOMG!" coming out of May is pure theater and nothing more.

But why is she putting on this particular production right now?

[Mar 15, 2018] Rephazing Hermann G ring famous quote

Notable quotes:
"... Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? ..."
Mar 15, 2018 | www.unz.com

Kiza , March 16, 2018 at 2:18 am GMT

Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked (by a Russian sounding chemical weapon Novichok), and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism

( https://www.craigmurray.org.uk – Craig Murray has been most viciously attacked for not accepting the official story without any evidence) and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

[Mar 15, 2018] Russia is the Eastern Diamondback desperately trying to do all it can to avoid to have to strike. The West is the drunk idiot full of hubris, arrogance and a very mistaken sense of invulnerability saying " hold my beer and watch this! ".

Notable quotes:
"... Crotalus adamanteus ..."
"... hold my beer and watch this! ..."
"... hold my beer and watch this! ..."
Mar 15, 2018 | thesaker.is

Rattlesnakes have a terrible reputation. Here were I live, in Florida, we have the biggest rattlesnakes on the planet, the Eastern Diamondback ( Crotalus adamanteus ). They are huge and can reach well over 2m (6ft) in length and weigh up to 15kg (30lbs). The Eastern Diamondback's venom is not the most potent out there, but they can deliver *a lot* of it. So, yes, it is a formidable creature. But it is also a gentle creature and truly very shy one.

Eastern Diamonbacks are also a stunningly beautiful creatures. I confess that I absolutely love them.

For all their reputation for nastiness, Eastern Diamonbacks will never ever attack you if they can avoid it . I have seen a lot of these snakes on my hikes, I have manipulated them (with a hook), and I have seen my German Shepherd come nose to nose with one (literally) and that Eastern Diamondback did not strike. Why? Because these snakes will do everything they can to avoid having to bite you.

First and foremost, they hide. Really well. You can stand right next to a large Eastern Diamondback and never notice it. You can walk right by, and it won't move, or rattle its tail, and you will never know that it was there. Camouflage is their first line of defense.

Then, if discovered, they will rattle their tails. If needed, very loudly. You can easily hear the rattle from an Eastern Diamondback from 5m (15ft) away. More than enough distance to easily avoid it.

Furthermore, if given the chance, the Eastern Diamondback will retreat and hide.

Finally, when cornered a lot of them try what is called a "dry bite": they do bite you, but deliver no venom. Why? Because you are not prey, so what would be the point of envenomating you? The Eastern Diamondback does not want you dead, it wants you to let it live!

I was once told by a park ranger in Arizona that the profile of a typical rattlesnake bite victim is: white, male, with tattoos and the famous last words " hold my beer and watch this! ".

Why am I telling you all this?

Because that is exactly what I see happening before my horrified eyes.

Russia is the Eastern Diamondback desperately trying to do all it can to avoid to have to strike. The West is the drunk idiot full of hubris, arrogance and a very mistaken sense of invulnerability saying " hold my beer and watch this! ".

Keep in mind that in a confrontation with a drunken human the Eastern Diamondback is most unlikely to survive. And it knows that, and that is why it does everything it can to avoid such a confrontation in the first place. But if cornered or attacked the Diamondback will strike. Hard. Want to see what such a strike looks like?

[Mar 15, 2018] Having further researched Mike Pompeo s history it seems he is a war hawk

Mar 15, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

CitizenOne Reply

Well I said: "I hope that this is true but I cannot discount the other possibility that Trump has once again been fooled by the intelligence and the media into appointing a tool of the deep state to replace Tillerson. He was fooled in Syria and the World applauded or rather the World media applauded loudly. Hopefully he was not fooled by that contrived story. If that is the case then it is bad news for all of us and might lead to further hostilities against Russia."

Having further researched Mike Pompeo's history it seems he is a war hawk who will align to blame Russia for the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter. Further he has been a strong critic of the nuclear deal with Iran forged under Obama and has also been a strong republican supporter of every republican strategy for national defense including keeping Guantanamo Bay open indefinitely etc. This would support my doubts that the appointment of Secretary of State Pompeo would do much to ratchet down international tensions in the hot spots around the World where the US has chosen to portray our "enemies" as military targets to be conquered rather than other nations with their own sovereign rights to be dealt with through diplomacy.

The most alarming idea is to launch a war with Iran since they have negotiated a nuclear disarmament strategy with the Obama administration leaving them in a precarious situation of being vulnerable to a change in strategy by the US of negotiation towards a threat of armed force intervention coming from the US. Trump calls the Iran deal a terrible deal and so does Pompeo. How it is a terrible deal seems to be the same accusation that the US launched against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. It is only a terrible deal for Iran as it was for Iraq to believe that they could disarm under UN supervision in the hopes it would prevent an attack by the US.

I fear that the lessons of the potential new anti Iranian strategy to cancel out our deals with Iran will only convince the North Koreans that any pursuit of a peace with the USA will ultimately result in our reneging on the deal at the first arrival of our stated goals to get NK to disarm and will turn on them even if they comply with western demands that they must dismantle their nuclear arsenals.

The Iranian Nuclear deal is in peril with the appointment of Pompeo and the result will be that North Korea will see no advantage in cooperating with an adversary which on the one hand forges peace treaties and on the other hand revokes them by the politically shifting winds in Washington headed by a president who cannot see the forest from the trees and is easily influenced by people he "connects with" as though that is reason enough to surround himself with those people and appoint them to high positions.

The politically shifting instability in Washington with the firings of high officials alone would be reason enough for any foreign nation to doubt the credibility of any policy being put forth. Stability is what is essential to create the foundation for trust. Without an honest and consistent foreign policy it will be impossible to gain the trust of foreign leaders. As long as the administration is led by the nose by the media and acts in unpredictable ways there can be no shared basis for trust which is essential for peace.

What we have in Washington is the expansion of domestic political unrest and the contention of our national elections flaring over into blame of foreign influences and the externalization of blame for our current sociopolitical divide.

This is the fertile ground laced with the fertilizer for war or at the least a military buildup to war.

There is no greater threat than a World Superpower nation that shifts almost weekly on its policies and has open disputes with its appointed leaders which results in that nation repeatedly reshuffling the cards and changing its positions on foreign policy. I pray that the current leadership will come to grips with its own internal struggles and find a reasoned path towards maintaining the fragile peace that we all depend on.

[Mar 15, 2018] The central question is cue bono: Who benefits from the gassing of Sergei Skripal and his daughter?

Notable quotes:
"... There is no proof that the Russians were responsible and there is ample circumstantial evidence that there have been similar attempts many former governments to conduct false flag operations to create the appearance of enemy involvement in crimes boosted by the media in a rush to judgement where the home government would benefit from a story blaming the enemy state for deeds they were responsible for. Do you think we are not capable of the same crimes we routinely accuse other nations of? Do you believe every news story you hear and call every dissenting voice fake? ..."
"... The question of who benefits from the accusations that Russia was behind the gassing of Sergei Skripal and his daughter lies at the heart of the question of who really benefits from the news blitzes like the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter? ..."
"... Again, who benefits? Are the Russians benefiting from this assassination attempt? I think not. They are now corralled by the western press as having committed one more grievous crime. Why would they do this? Would their reasons be to empower the west to vilify them? Would they time their attack precisely at a time when the British were questioning their decision to exit the European Union was being called into question? How would their decision to unite against a Russian threat influence their decision? ..."
"... That's how you kill him if you want to frame the Russian state for the death. ..."
"... "Putindiditism" is definitely the new plague sweeping the West, infecting everyone, who was once able to think straight but is now incapable of critical thinking or even common sense. ..."
Mar 15, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

CitizenOne

There is no bigger paid fake news than our commercial news corporations which will soon be able to propagandize us free of the Internet Neutrality rules which allow free discourse and debate thanks to the FCC ruling to end Net Neutrality which will end free speech for the tiny so called "fake news" sites like this. Fake only in the fact they counter the main stream propaganda. Admittedly you have found a hole in the story with some speculation being proposed by the author that connections to the Steele Report and the proximity of some supposed British nerve gas factory plays into the story. It is fake news as far as speculation that the British were involved since there is no proof of that either but how as that different from the fact free accusations that the Russians were responsible?

Personally I agree that the allegations that the British were behind it are unfounded but so are the allegations that Russia was behind it. It is a rush to find guilt on both sides unsupported by evidence and deserving its day in a court of law,

There is no proof that the Russians were responsible and there is ample circumstantial evidence that there have been similar attempts many former governments to conduct false flag operations to create the appearance of enemy involvement in crimes boosted by the media in a rush to judgement where the home government would benefit from a story blaming the enemy state for deeds they were responsible for. Do you think we are not capable of the same crimes we routinely accuse other nations of? Do you believe every news story you hear and call every dissenting voice fake?

The purpose of this site is to examine the all too real possibilities that our own governments are capable of perpetrating the same kinds of lies that our publicly announced "enemies" are accused as responsible for and to call into question their own motives for doing so.

The question of who benefits from the accusations that Russia was behind the gassing of Sergei Skripal and his daughter lies at the heart of the question of who really benefits from the news blitzes like the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter?

The article may be flawed with speculations but the underlying question remains "Who Benefits" Surely it is not the Russians who could have killed Sergei Skripal many years ago if they felt the need to kill him. They surely had ample means to do so being a world superpower and master at spying and controlling their assets.

It is the fault of our judgement and our ability to understand how international relations are controlled to not see how we can easily be fooled by a disinformation campaign aimed at aligning our nations around a guilty verdict based on false evidence.

Again, who benefits? Are the Russians benefiting from this assassination attempt? I think not. They are now corralled by the western press as having committed one more grievous crime. Why would they do this? Would their reasons be to empower the west to vilify them? Would they time their attack precisely at a time when the British were questioning their decision to exit the European Union was being called into question? How would their decision to unite against a Russian threat influence their decision?

Clearly there is more to this story than meets the eye and clearly there is much to be gained by creating a foreign enemy to rally the people.

So what is the risk? The risk is that by marginalizing the Russians and constantly keeping them out in the cold (war) the West will face an renewed existential threat and will only exacerbate tensions with a fully nuclear armed Russia.

This is great news for the arms manufacturers. They will reap giant profits as we descend into Cold War II.

So really you should be asking yourself who benefits and the only answer that is reasonable is the arms manufacturers and the military.

The agitation on the western side for blaming Russia for everything is economically motivated for profit.

That much is not speculation.

Realist , March 14, 2018 at 3:39 am

If the Russians wanted him dead he would have died of a tragic accident, due to mindless street violence, or of an armed robbery gone wrong years ago, not ritually assassinated on the public square using a military grade "weapon of mass destruction" made only at highly secured government facilities (like the shop down the street). That's how you kill him if you want to frame the Russian state for the death.

mrtmbrnmn , March 13, 2018 at 11:43 pm

"Putindiditism" is definitely the new plague sweeping the West, infecting everyone, who was once able to think straight but is now incapable of critical thinking or even common sense. Teresa May sounds as demented and desperate as our own Queen of You Owe Me during her failing campaign. "Highly likely" are Intelligence (duh) Community weasel words for "we're makin' this sh– up".

However, had the Sore Loser won, we might have been spared all these fairy tales and connivings and cut straight to Operation Barbarossa 2018. The true cold hearts' desire of all these berserkers and their fellow travelers barreling helter-skelter down the highway to hell and dragging the rest of us with them. What is to be done??

RUSSELL IACOBUCCI , March 13, 2018 at 11:50 pm

what webs we weave , when we attempt to deceive .

[Mar 15, 2018] It strikes me as odd that not only the Skripals but also Litvinenko who was murdered on British soil with polonium 210, another governmental action only weapon

Notable quotes:
"... The US undoubtedly hopes to get all of NATO to respond to an attack by Russia on the US in a country that the US is illegally occupying. I dunno. All the old colonial powers in Europe are pretty much US lapdogs. so it's hard to say what they'll do. ..."
"... Whether that message be a straightforward one by Russia that traitors always pay in the end, or a double-game, "false flag" one by the U.K. or U.S. to make it look like Russia, or some even more convoluted scenario – it's still more about communication than killing. ..."
Mar 15, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Jeff , March 13, 2018 at 9:01 pm

I think it is much much worse than what you are suggesting. I think the governmental actor in question is either the US or the UK. Most likely the US with the UK as co-conspirator. It strikes me as odd that not only the Skripals but also Litvinenko who was murdered on British soil with polonium 210, another governmental action only weapon.

While on the one hand, these chemical/nuclear agents were known to be possessed by Russia, that doesn't mean that they weren't also possessed by us.

The US military would want samples of the nerve agent to work on possible antidotes and defenses. Polonium 210 is just an element. It can be made by anybody who has a research nuclear reactor.

The US is (unsuccessfully so far) attempting to isolate Russia as they prosecute their pursuit of ousting the elected government of Syria.

My take is that we are working up to attacking the government of Syria to protect "our" "moderate" rebel scum in Syria.

And we won't have any kind of UN resolution to misinterpret. I don't know how we're going to try to spin it but look for an attack in Ghouta sometime soon.

The US is trying to forestall a Russian response but the Russians have come out and said that an attack by the US would result in a Russian response.

The US undoubtedly hopes to get all of NATO to respond to an attack by Russia on the US in a country that the US is illegally occupying. I dunno. All the old colonial powers in Europe are pretty much US lapdogs. so it's hard to say what they'll do.

David G , March 13, 2018 at 2:20 pm

"The obfuscations of the British reinforce in [sic] the view that Skripal was dangerous to the anti-Trump forces and the authorities therefore sought to have them removed."

If it is true (and I don't take it as proved at this point) that an ultra-powerful, military nerve agent that nobody is supposed to even possess in 2018 was employed here, then whoever is responsible was trying to send a message, not just kill somebody unsuccessfully kill, for that matter, at least so far.

Whether that message be a straightforward one by Russia that traitors always pay in the end, or a double-game, "false flag" one by the U.K. or U.S. to make it look like Russia, or some even more convoluted scenario – it's still more about communication than killing. That's because anybody with the resources to get hold of this exotic toxin could easily have killed Skripal in a more mundane (and reliable) manner, if that was their primary goal.

Therefore, I disagree with James O'Neill's hypothesis that this was somebody trying to silence Skripal because of the Steele dossier: if that were the case, we'd have a dead victim and a conventional cause of death, albeit possibly made to look like an accident or suicide.

Linda Wood , March 13, 2018 at 6:54 pm

David G, your point here is really important.

If it is true that an ultra-powerful, military nerve agent that nobody is supposed to even possess in 2018 was employed here, then whoever is responsible was trying to send a message, not just kill somebody it's still more about communication than killing. That's because anybody with the resources to get hold of this exotic toxin could easily have killed Skripal in a more mundane (and reliable) manner, if that was their primary goal.

Not only does the use of such a toxin identify the killer as a government actor, whether Russian or U.S. or UK, it sends the message that whoever it is, they are dangerous, lawless, and willing to take the risk, knowing they have identified themselves as one of very few possible actors.

Just as the note in the anthrax attack stated, "WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX", the question we have to ask in response is a kind of John le Carre quote: Who is speaking here?

alley cat , March 13, 2018 at 2:07 pm

There are infinite ways to eliminate someone without using a chemical that can be traced directly to you. The only operators who would use Novichok would be those trying to fan the flames of hysteria against Russia. The idea that Russians would deliberately incriminate themselves in this manner when they had nothing to gain by it doesn't even pass the straight-face test.

Israel Shamir posted an article on Unz Review that ties Putin's speech on March 1 with the growing threats by U.S. leaders to intervene militarily in Syria if the Syrian government "uses chemical weapons again." As if the Syrian government had any motive to use chemical weapons when it has all but won the war.

The Russians have contemptuously dismissed the absurd allegations against the Syrian government, and will do the same with respect to the allegations of Russian complicity in the assassination of Skripal.

But the military balance of power has shifted since Putin's latest speech. The Russian president has now drawn a line in the sand by giving U.S. leaders a clear warning that Russia has the capability to put a quick end to illegal U.S. meddling in Syria, and the will to do so.

Only complete, deluded, fools would doubt Putin's resolve. Thank God humanity is safe, since the people running the U.S. are all level-headed, intelligent, and reasonable.

[Mar 15, 2018] One of those former Soviet states, where it was stored, was Georgia

Mar 15, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

TWHM March 13, 2018 at 11:08 pm , March 13, 2018 at 11:08 pm

Well, jurgen, you don't have to look too hard to find the formula – all you need is an Amazon a/c and 30 bucks.

https://www.rt.com/news/421200-uk-novichok-agent-allegations/

As noted to the cohort this morn;

"The formula in a book you can buy on Amazon for 30 bucks, the stuff's not listed the OPCW's list of deadly nerve agents, to the stuff being stored in the former Soviet states, but Russia being the only one of those former Soviet states that destroyed their stockpiles of chemical & bio weapons – to the satisfaction of the OPCW, no less, 'Hallelujah' statements, and all.

(One of those former Soviet states, where it was stored, was Georgia. Reckon that all went away? https://journal-neo.org/2016/02/25/lugar-bio-weapons-laboratory-time-bomb-in-georgia-and-region/ . Like that? It's even named after the Yanqui Senator who opened it, FFS).

jurgen , March 13, 2018 at 4:52 pm

New York Times,
By JUDITH MILLER
MAY 25, 1999:

The United States and Uzbekistan have quietly negotiated and are expected to sign a bilateral agreement today to provide American aid in dismantling and decontaminating one of the former Soviet Union's largest chemical weapons testing facilities, according to Defense Department and Uzbek officials.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon informed Congress that it intends to spend up to $6 million under its Cooperative Threat Reduction program to demilitarize the so-called Chemical Research Institute, in Nukus, Uzbekistan. Soviet defectors and American officials say the Nukus plant was the major research and testing site for a new class of secret, highly lethal chemical weapons called "Novichok," which in Russian means "new guy."

Let us guess who got full access to the equipment, technical documentation and all those agents

[Mar 15, 2018] Where is Christopher Steele? Did he not have means and motive and oportunity

Mar 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

simeon | Mar 15, 2018 6:10:07 PM | 144

Where is Christopher Steele? did he not have means and motive and oportunity ?

Why has the russians not highlighted these connections after all the daughter is a russian citizen she has to be somewhere in hospital or kidnapped in a safe house.

Does not the russian embassy have a right to make sure this young lady is safe and happy to stay at her new porton down home.

And look what got announced today problem reaction solution new investments new buildings for the chemical weapons facilities at porton down what a concy dink 50 million for what testing dodgy sim samples .

[Mar 15, 2018] The UK and US had motive in order to keep advancing the Russia did it narrative to continue to manufacture consent for war on Russia It is perhaps telling that the media coverage is clearly designed to obscure rather than reveal

Notable quotes:
"... Clearly the brits were out to get Trump via Steele. That has been a long term objective as Trump is not an 'authorzed' agent for the deep, dependable State. ..."
"... Either the Russophobes are so deluded by their fear and hatred or they are intentional set on a course of action that could result in nuclear war. http://viewsandstories.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/russian-to-judgement.html ..."
Mar 15, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

dikcheney , March 14, 2018 at 12:44 am

Clearly the brits were out to get Trump via Steele. That has been a long term objective as Trump is not an 'authorzed' agent for the deep, dependable State.

Skripal is too well informed and deeply dangerous to be alive now. I guess the unexpected survival issue can be sorted out soon enough. So there you go, fail in afghanistan, iran, iraq, syria, USA, where next for the Brits? fail in the EU. They certainly fail in the believeabilty challenge.

Nop , March 14, 2018 at 10:44 am

Frankly, this false flag is so blatantly gauche that I suspect it's something the Ukraine cooked up.

Steve Hayes , March 14, 2018 at 10:27 am

It is perhaps telling that the media coverage is clearly designed to obscure rather than reveal. The Russian to judgement in this has obvious parallels with the situation immediately prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Either the Russophobes are so deluded by their fear and hatred or they are intentional set on a course of action that could result in nuclear war. http://viewsandstories.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/russian-to-judgement.html

[Mar 15, 2018] The point no Western MSM will even talk about: if this was supposed to be a hit then it was badly botched. The nerve agent didn t kill, the assassins didn t *confirm* the kill, the radius of the effect wasn t contained, and other people were contaminated.

Mar 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Yeah, Right , Mar 15, 2018 7:03:02 PM | 149
Here's a thought: maybe the Soviet Union looked into the manufacture of these "novichoks" but decided that, nah, they don't work all that well in practice e.g. mixing the binary components in the field isn't an exact science, so the end result can range from Instant Death to Oh, Shit, Nobody Has Died And A Lot Of Innocents Are In Hospital.

Utterly unacceptable for any respectable KGB agent.

But some of the dudes who were working on those "novichoks" (dudes now out of work, remember) defected to the West with some diagrams and some tall tales of how stupendously clever they are and how astonishingly lethal their wares.

So places like Porton Down test the chemistry in the laboratory and, sure enough, under lab conditions the chemistry is astonishingly lethal.

They don't test it in the field because, well, why would they?

Fast forward to this week, and Someone has the Bright Idea to use some "novichoks" in a false-flag operation.

Why not? Everyone tells them that they are astonishingly lethal, and the lab tests back that up. What could go wrong?

So they do, and they find out what the Soviets found out decades ago.

Which is that this stuff is utter shit under field conditions: your target's don't die an instant death and innocent people who come to their aid get very, very sick.

Because that is the point that everyone in the MSM won't talk about: if this was supposed to be a hit then it was badly botched. The nerve agent didn't kill, the assassins didn't *confirm* the kill, the radius of the effect wasn't contained, and other people were contaminated.

Hardly the hallmarks of an agency that DEVELOPED this nerve agent, is it. But maybe the hallmark of no-hopers who didn't really understand what they were using.

[Mar 15, 2018] Britain s expulsion of Russian diplomats marks return to Cold War ejections

In the whole comment section there was only one commenter acidbot66 who questioned the windown of this false flag British operation. This particular commenter despite annoing use of ALL CAPS provides interesting line of arguments including the following: " British experts investigating the case are FROM THE VERY SAME AGENCY who advised Blair to go to WAR against Iraq on NON EXISTING Chemical weapons of mass destruction."
Four year of war propaganda took toll on US people if you assume that WaPo attract a special type of commenters ;-)
Mar 14, 2018 | www.washingtonpost.com

Prime Minister Theresa May announced Wednesday that her government will expel 23 Russian diplomats from Britain. It will be the biggest expulsion of Russian diplomats from the country since 1985 -- marking a return to the large-scale diplomatic ejections that took place during the Cold War.

...May's government lists 58 Russian diplomats in Britain, which means that almost 40 percent of them are being expelled.

county kerry 2 hours ago

Why poison , instead of a knife or gun ?

acidbot66

If Russians wanted to be known they would live a Putin's picture on the scene.

acidbot66

The British believes it is more Sensationalist and will catch more audience...

Philip Bond 2 hours ago

Everything old is new again... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhVaSWYcdyQ

acidbot66 2 hours ago

(Edited)
Decisions CANNOT be emotional. Hard evidence is required in ANY COURT of law. ANYONE MUST act according to international LAW not emotion or some sort of RUSSOPHOBIA so often affecting Americans and its European cronies.

NO ONE can be condemned based on CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE and that is in ANY CIVILIZED nation on this planet!

Although Russians may be involved HARD evidence MUST be presented BEFORE the judgment!

acidbot66 3 hours ago (Edited)

Nothing has been VERIFIED you IDIOT.
Nothing has been PROVEN as yet...
Not even VERIFIABLE EVIDENCE have been presented!

Evidences come before judgment, RIGHT?
Is this the way it works in Britain?

acidbot66, 15 minutes ago

No Proof. No Evidence.

That should be the national Motto of Russia.

Russia is as guilty as Sin and y0u know it BORIS. 3 hours ago "freedoms that democracy brings"

You mean like the "FREEDOMS" exposed by Edward Snowden?
Or the "FREEDOMS" for the military to MURDER innocents as disclosed by Julian Assange?

YOU ARE JOKING US ALL!

marph 3 hours ago

Theresa May's wonderful smoke screen would leave behind the toxic Brexit impact off the headlines. In a volatile world that we need alliances and not isolations.

Beside that, a hypocrite Conservative administration should in fact ban receiving donations from Russia.

As it was reported that since 2010, the Conservative party has received more than $5m donation from Russian oligarch and their linked businesses, what a bunch of hypocrite...

[Mar 15, 2018] The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation. Which means that from now on the investigation is highly politicized and tainted in a sense that it will be conducted by people who proved the existence of Iraq WMD in the past: ..."
"... This is one step further from the "self-indictment as a formal proof" used in Show Trials. Now it looks like "suspicion is the formal proof." ..."
"... Both cyberspace and poisoning with exotic chemical agents proved to be a perfect media for false flag operations designed to poison relations between nations and fuel war-style demonization. ..."
Mar 14, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

likbez 14 March 2018 at 11:40 PM

The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation. Which means that from now on the investigation is highly politicized and tainted in a sense that it will be conducted by people who proved the existence of Iraq WMD in the past:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43402506

Moscow refused to meet Mrs May's midnight deadline to co-operate in the case, prompting Mrs May to announce a series of measures intended to send a "clear message" to Russia.

These include:

  • Expelling 23 diplomats
  • Increasing checks on private flights, customs and freight
  • Freezing Russian state assets where there is evidence they may be used to threaten the life or property of UK nationals or residents
  • Ministers and the Royal Family boycotting the Fifa World Cup in Russia later this year
  • Suspending all planned high-level bilateral contacts between the UK and Russia
  • Plans to consider new laws to increase defences against "hostile state activity"

Mrs May told MPs that Russia had provided "no explanation" as to how the nerve agent came to be used in the UK, describing Moscow's response as one of "sarcasm, contempt and defiance".

The use of a Russian-made nerve agent on UK soil amounted to the "unlawful use of force", she said.

So it looks more and more like a well planned multi-step propaganda operation, not an impromptu action on the part of GB. Kind of replica of Russian election influence witch hunt in the USA with the replacement of cyberspace and elections with chemical agents and poisoning.

So inconsistencies that were pointed in this thread (such as the mere fact that three people exposed are still alive) do not matter anymore.

The verdict now is in.

This is one step further from the "self-indictment as a formal proof" used in Show Trials. Now it looks like "suspicion is the formal proof."

Both cyberspace and poisoning with exotic chemical agents proved to be a perfect media for false flag operations designed to poison relations between nations and fuel war-style demonization.

Sad...

[Mar 15, 2018] It is the British who need to maintain a strong diplomatic presence in Moscow to retain relevance

Notable quotes:
"... The Russians are sure to respond to the British expulsion of Russian diplomats from London by expelling a comparable number of British diplomats from Moscow. ..."
"... The reciprocal expulsions of diplomats will of course also make it more difficult for the British to maintain their intelligence operation in Moscow. ..."
"... Since this appears to be rather extensive, and seems to involve far more 'democracy promotion' activity (ie. meddling in Russian domestic politics) than anything the Russians do in Britain, the Russians will probably also be quietly pleased about it. ..."
Mar 15, 2018 | theduran.com

After days of hysteria and of mounting speculation, and after having stoked up by her statement on Monday expectations of stern action against Russia to stratospheric levels, Theresa May produced a package of 'sanctions' today which do no more than expose the weakness of Britain's hand.

This is how the BBC describes them

Note that none of these sanctions include any of the supposedly draconian steps which have been spoken about over the last few days.

Theresa May for example appeared to rule out a blanket visa ban and sweeping asset freezes on wealthy Russians coming to London. It is clear that ideas for a boycott by the England team of the World Cup in Russia and for the complete severing of diplomatic relations with Russia have been abandoned if they were ever considered.

Reports in the media have also confirmed that the idea of launching a cyber attack against Russia has been ruled out, since the British quietly acknowledge that Russia has immeasurably greater cyber resources with which to retaliate than Britain does.

As to whether or not Ofcom will now strip RT of its broadcasting licence, Maria Zakharova's threat to expel all British media outlets from Russia is having a chilling effect, with the British media apparently now quietly lobbying the British government against doing it.

By way of example, The Times of London , the newspaper which has been leading the British media's offensive against RT, now has this to say, tucked away at the bottom of a meandering editorial with the woolly and meaningless headline 'An Unstable World'

The Kremlin has threatened to expel British journalists from Moscow should London shut down the Russian propaganda channel RT. That would be ill advised. Britain stands for nothing if not free speech. Mrs May should stick to the evidence in the Skripal case, identifying the culprits and bringing maximum international force to bear to punish them personally.

It is interesting to see how the British media suddenly discovers free speech also applies to Russian media when its own interests are threatened.

It is still possible that Ofcom may follow up on its threats against RT, but that is now looking rather less likely.

As for the measures Theresa May announced today not only will they not affect Russia in the slightest, but they are actually counterproductive.

The Russians are sure to respond to the British expulsion of Russian diplomats from London by expelling a comparable number of British diplomats from Moscow.

Since Russia is by far the more powerful country, it is the British who need to maintain a strong diplomatic presence in Moscow to retain relevance. By contrast Russia, as a Great Power, has no need to maintain a strong diplomatic presence in Britain, which is nowadays a second or even third rank power.

The reciprocal expulsions which are now going to happen will not therefore affect Russia's position as a Great Power in the slightest. They will however further marginalise the British in international diplomacy.

The same is true of the British decision to sever bilateral contacts with Russia.

Apart from Boris Johnson's recent ill-starred to Moscow, there have in fact been barely any bilateral contacts between the Russian and British governments for years, even though it is again Britain as the weaker country which needs these contacts in order to retain relevance, not Russia.

As it happens I expect the Russians to greet the news that they are going to be spared further meetings with Boris Johnson with a quiet sigh of relief.

As for Boris Johnson himself, how he hopes to cut an important figure in international diplomacy when he is now prevented from visiting Moscow – the capital of one of the world's Great Powers – by his own government, completely escapes me. The reality is that no one takes him seriously anyway.

The reciprocal expulsions of diplomats will of course also make it more difficult for the British to maintain their intelligence operation in Moscow.

Since this appears to be rather extensive, and seems to involve far more 'democracy promotion' activity (ie. meddling in Russian domestic politics) than anything the Russians do in Britain, the Russians will probably also be quietly pleased about it.

[Mar 15, 2018] She and her bunch of Tory war criminals who have used Islamist terror in Libya Syria and Iraq have used highly emotive language today.

Mar 15, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

Reply ↓ giyane March 14, 2018 at 23:29

Adam
Exhilarating to see the establishment cage rattled.
Projection being the psychological flaw of choice for Tories, one could surmise you yourself might be trying to get lecture income, Craig is not touting for business here. In fact he is only surfacing on this blog when establishment lies reach the level of preposterous – dangerous .It was so completely obvious that Mrs May was lying today to parliament that Jeremy Corbyn refused to corroborate her lies. If she had said something reasonable, such as ' we are unable to identify the poison or attribute blame, then the leader of the opposition light have agreed with her suspicions. But she lied, like Blair over Iraqi wmd.

She and her bunch of Tory war criminals who have used Islamist terror in Libya Syria and Iraq have used highly emotive language today. Rather strange for a party that is propped up only by bribing the DUP. Even more strange to find you on the wrong side of history, the Mr Hyde side.

[Mar 15, 2018] The Novichok Story Is Indeed Another Iraqi WMD Scam

Mar 15, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

14 Mar, 2018 in Uncategorized by craig | View Comments

As recently as 2016 Dr Robin Black, Head of the Detection Laboratory at the UK's only chemical weapons facility at Porton Down, a former colleague of Dr David Kelly, published in an extremely prestigious scientific journal that the evidence for the existence of Novichoks was scant and their composition unknown.

In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, 'Novichoks' (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of the 'Foliant' programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published. (Black, 2016)

Robin Black. (2016) Development, Historical Use and Properties of Chemical Warfare Agents. Royal Society of Chemistry

Yet now, the British Government is claiming to be able instantly to identify a substance which its only biological weapons research centre has never seen before and was unsure of its existence. Worse, it claims to be able not only to identify it, but to pinpoint its origin. Given Dr Black's publication, it is plain that claim cannot be true.

The world's international chemical weapons experts share Dr Black's opinion. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is a UN body based in the Hague. In 2013 this was the report of its Scientific Advisory Board, which included US, French, German and Russian government representatives and on which Dr Black was the UK representative:

[The SAB] emphasised that the definition of toxic chemicals in the Convention would cover all potential candidate chemicals that might be utilised as chemical weapons. Regarding new toxic chemicals not listed in the Annex on Chemicals but which may nevertheless pose a risk to the Convention, the SAB makes reference to "Novichoks". The name "Novichok" is used in a publication of a former Soviet scientist who reported investigating a new class of nerve agents suitable for use as binary chemical weapons. The SAB states that it has insufficient information to comment on the existence or properties of "Novichoks". (OPCW, 2013)

OPCW: Report of the Scientific Advisory Board on developments in science and technology for the Third Review Conference 27 March 2013

Indeed the OPCW was so sceptical of the viability of "novichoks" that it decided – with US and UK agreement – not to add them nor their alleged precursors to its banned list. In short, the scientific community broadly accepts Mirzayanov was working on "novichoks" but doubts he succeeded.

[Mar 15, 2018] If your country becomes a haven for dodgy people, like Berezovsky, then dodgy things are likely to happen.

Notable quotes:
"... If your country becomes a haven for dodgy people, like Berezovsky, then dodgy things are likely to happen. ..."
"... In some ways on the political right the neocons are more dominant than they are in the US. The Murdoch empire controls a huge chunk of the right leaning media and pumps out the usual tropes, with the added hysteria of the tabloid press of this country. Sadly we saw the replacement of Emily Blunt's uncle Crispin as Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, a realist replaced by fellow Conservative but Zionist Tughendat. The neocons and the Blairites have the numbers in the Commons. ..."
"... On the left they have been traumatised by the election of Trump and the vote for Brexit. They have dutifully followed the Russia smokescreen of the Democrats in the US. ..."
"... Here, the 1914 analogy can be seen in the rapid insistence that friends and allies of Britain must also stand tall and denounce the Russians - evidence be damned - lest the alliance crumble. ..."
"... This will permit the "unlawfull chemical weapon attack" meme to grow just as Russiagate has done, with unproven allegations presented as settled fact, requiring "action" in response. ..."
"... Further, by this reaction, the British government has assured the investigation into whatever happened will be politicized, and that any information countering the government's charges will be suppressed so to prevent a loss of face. ..."
Mar 14, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

LondonBob -> kooshy ... 14 March 2018 at 05:55 AM

What is going on here in Britain?

There are more unsavoury types who have fallen foul of the law and/or the Kremlin who then base themselves in London. If your country becomes a haven for dodgy people, like Berezovsky, then dodgy things are likely to happen.

In some ways on the political right the neocons are more dominant than they are in the US. The Murdoch empire controls a huge chunk of the right leaning media and pumps out the usual tropes, with the added hysteria of the tabloid press of this country. Sadly we saw the replacement of Emily Blunt's uncle Crispin as Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, a realist replaced by fellow Conservative but Zionist Tughendat. The neocons and the Blairites have the numbers in the Commons.

On the left they have been traumatised by the election of Trump and the vote for Brexit. They have dutifully followed the Russia smokescreen of the Democrats in the US. Crucially though Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour party and continues to poll well. Blairites, the press and the Israelis have launched an unrelenting campaign to unseat him and damage him electorally. This has not worked, Israel looks to have lost the political left. If you thought Trump was pro Russia, anti-interventionist and NATO skeptical then Corbyn is even mores so, with the added bonus of being fiercely critical of Israel.

Finally we have also seen continuing cuts to the defence budget, The military industrial complex has been eagerly jumping on the Russia bandwagon to try to stop this.

Add in the Saudi/Arab lobby and Syria and it is a perfect storm. The hysteria is because they are losing, not winning.

I'll add two articles on the Skripal affair that I like.

jjc , 14 March 2018 at 12:31 PM
May's British government is in a weak position domestically, with the fear and loathing of Corbyn motivating a certain hysteria since last years snap election. What has transpired this week appears direct from the Thatcher playbook. What is stunning is, for all the bluster, they have reached a verdict without a trial, without any evidence at all of an "attempted murder", without even being able to explain what happened. To then wrap their denunciations in the banner of standing tall for "our values" and sticking up for the "rules-based system" while trampling on the logic and procedure of the basic justice system - that's just crazy and rather thoughtless.

Here, the 1914 analogy can be seen in the rapid insistence that friends and allies of Britain must also stand tall and denounce the Russians - evidence be damned - lest the alliance crumble.

This will permit the "unlawfull chemical weapon attack" meme to grow just as Russiagate has done, with unproven allegations presented as settled fact, requiring "action" in response.

Further, by this reaction, the British government has assured the investigation into whatever happened will be politicized, and that any information countering the government's charges will be suppressed so to prevent a loss of face.

David Habakkuk -> LondonBob... , 14 March 2018 at 02:07 PM
LondonBob,

In response to comment 87.

Unfortunately, although the pieces by both Séamus Martin and Craig Murray to which you link are much better than most MSM coverage, among many problems with them is the rather basic one that both accept without question an unproven assumption that is fundamental to the whole British case against Russia over Skripal – that a class of lethal CW called 'Novichoks' actually exists.

A relevant post has just appeared on the site of a 'Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media' recently set up by a group of British academics. It is co-authored by Paul McKeigue, Professor of Statistical Genetics and Genetic Epidemiology at Edinburgh University, and Piers Robinson, Professor of Politics, Society and Political Journalism' at Sheffield University, and is entitled 'Doubts about "Novichoks".'

(See http://syriapropagandamedia.org/working-papers .)

In the Commons on 12 March, Theresa May claimed that 'world-leading experts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down have established that Skripal was poisoned with one of a 'group of nerve agents known as Novichok,' developed by Russia.

Until recently the head of the detection laboratory at Porton Down was Dr Robin Black. As McKeigue and Robinson note, back in 2016 this 'world-leading expert' on chemical weapons – he really is that – published a chapter in a book on 'Chemical Warfare Toxicology' entitled 'Development, Historical Use and Properties of Chemical Warfare Agents.'

The link to this at the site of the Royal Society of Chemistry is at the end of the piece by McKeigue and Robinson – a free download if one registers. I would very strongly recommend the whole chapter to anyone seriously interested in getting to grips with issues to do with chemical weapons, as it provides an authoritative account accessible to those without a scientific background.

Of particular interest in relation to May's accusations against Russia is the fact that Black specifically states that the existence of the Russian programme to which she refers was unconfirmed as of his writing:

'In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, 'Novichoks' (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of the "Foliant" programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published.'

What he is suggesting is that in the course of the – OPCW-monitored – destruction of the Russian chemical weapons programme, no evidence emerged confirming the claims by Mirzayanov. For this to be consistent with the Prime Minister's claims, some pretty radical assumptions have to be introduced.

As McKeigue and Robinson also note, a similar scepticism was expressed in a March 2013 report by the Scientific Advisory Board on the OPCW – again, the link is in the 'Working Group' document:

'[The SAB] emphasised that the definition of toxic chemicals in the Convention would cover all potential candidate chemicals that might be utilised as chemical weapons. Regarding new toxic chemicals not listed in the Annex on Chemicals but which may nevertheless pose a risk to the Convention, the SAB makes reference to "Novichoks". The name "Novichok" is used in a publication of a former Soviet scientist who reported investigating a new class of nerve agents suitable for use as binary chemical weapons. The SAB states that it has insufficient information to comment on the existence or properties of "Novichoks".'

Of course, it is possible that, since Dr Black wrote, both Porton Down and the OPCW have received conclusive evidence vindicating the claims by Mirzayanov. It is even just remotely conceivable – very remotely conceivable – that all these people are part of a conspiracy to cover the devastating information revealed by Mirzayanov. But those who want to argue this owe us at least an attempt to provide a coherent account of how this might be so.

And then, it has to be born in mind that there is a long history of people in the West accepting, without critical examination, claims from 'dissidents' and 'defectors' from the former Soviet Union and now Russia.

In this connection, I would refer people to two reports from Judith Miller. One, from 1999 in the 'New York Times', is entitled 'U.S. and Uzbeks Agree on Chemical Arms Plant Cleanup'. It both accepts Mirzayanov's claim's at face value, and suggests American officials also did this.

(See http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/25/world/us-and-uzbeks-agree-on-chemical-arms-plant-cleanup.html .)

Another, published yesterday in the 'City Journal' is entitled 'Chemical Weapons are Back, Thanks to Russia; The banned agents are increasingly being used for assassination and terror.'

(See https://www.city-journal.org/html/chemical-weapons-are-back-thanks-russia-15766.html .)

The 'City Journal' is an outlet with which I was unfamiliar. At first glance, and particular in the light of their publishing Judith Miller, it seems to me it might usefully be retitled 'Still useful idiots, after all these years, and proud of it', or 'Inside the bubble, and terrified of having it pricked.'

If this seems extreme, have a look at her article.

Compounding the confusion is the fact that various Russians quoted repudiating Theresa May's accusations have not denied that the 'Novichoks' programme existed. In general, these seem to me to be people who could not be expected to have a grasp of the detailed history of the Soviet chemical weapons programme, and this would not be the first time that such figures have opened their big mouths in response to questionable accusations and in so doing given these unmerited credibility.

(See https://www.rt.com/news/421200-uk-novichok-agent-allegations/ ; https://sputniknews.com/russia/201803131062469325-russia-nerve-agent/ .)

However, these are not matters which need to be prejudged. What we clearly need is clarification about the actual state of the evidence about 'Novichoks' from people who are well-informed, both on the Western and Russian sides. Maybe if some people in the Western MSM actually did some journalism, as it used to be understood, we might get it.

It would not be sufficient to establish Russian responsibility to establish that the programme to create 'Novichoks' actually existed, but it would seem rather close to a necessary condition. Until the problems raised by McKeigue and Robinson are cleared up, it really is premature to conduct any discussion of the Skripal poisoning on the basis of the assumption that it did.

Meanwhile, it is difficult to see what possible grounds there can be for the apparent reluctance of the British to supply the Russians with samples for testing.

An intriguing question is raised by the arguments made by McKeigue and Robinson. Clearly something was tested at Porton Down, and some kind of results produced. If in fact 'Novochoks' do not exist, what was it that was tested, and what were the results?

As with the test results from Porton Down and other laboratories on samples from incidents where CW have been used in Syria, one comes back to the urgent need to have the actual test results in the public domain, and the obvious implausibility of claims that 'sources and methods' considerations mean that this cannot be done.

Incidentally, Professor McKeigue is also the author of what I take to be a highly cogent demolition of the report of the UN/OPCW 'Joint Investigative Commission', issued last October, which blamed the Syrian government for the Khan Sheikhoun sarin atrocity, to which I have referred in earlier comments.

(See https://timhayward.wordpress.com/2017/12/22/khan-sheikhoun-chemical-attack-guest-blog-featuring-paul-mckeigues-reassessment/ .)

Among other things, his argument provides very strong reasons to suspect that intense pressure was put on people at the OPCW to collaborate in the cover-up of a 'false flag.' It thus becomes perfectly natural to ask whether similar pressure may have been put on people at Porton Down.

The fact that Theresa May simply assumed away the possibility of a 'false flag' would seem reason at least to a range of possibilities regarding her role – ranging from very great naivety to actual collusion in a cover-up of a 'false flag.'

If she wants to prove such suspicions are groundless, she should order the disclosure of the kind of information I have suggested needs to be made public – just as General Mattis should order the disclosure of the test results relevant to Syrian CW incidents which publicly available evidence indicates must be available to him.

In all these cases, what we most of all simply need are the charts showing the 'spectra' of the various compounds identified by the testing processes. It is difficult to see any cogent 'sources and methods' grounds for not disclosing these. Once they were disclosed, an informed discussion by people with relevant scientific competence would become possible.

Until they are disclosed, suspicion will be unavoidable that those who do not want to see them disclosed are afraid of what such informed discussion would reveal.

[Mar 15, 2018] The USA is on board, Niki Hailey says they will be using nerve agents in New York if we don't deal with the Russians.

Mar 15, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

luke8929 14 March 2018 at 05:28 PM

The USA is on board, Niki Hailey says they will be using nerve agents in New York if we don't deal with the Russians.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/foreign/nikki-haley-warns-russia-could-use-chemical-weapons-in-new-york

And of course a secret North Korean facility underground in Syria helping Assad make chemical weapons.

http://freebeacon.com/national-security/u-s-monitoring-possible-north-korean-military-base-syria/

[Mar 15, 2018] Even if Novichok exists, it seems unlikely that it was used here. It more and more looks like Iraq WDM scam. That strengthes the hypothesis that this was a false flag operation, a replay on Litvinenko murder

Notable quotes:
"... But of course the investigation is a side show in this piece of orchestrated political theater - in much the same way as is Mueller's indictment of Russian trolls, who have no prospect of being brought to trial. God forbid they should actually catch the perpetrator. I'd put money on their being a state actor, just not that state. ..."
Mar 15, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

irf520 said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 14 March 2018 at 04:34 PM

Even if Novichok exists, it seems unlikely that it was used here. Supposedly these things are 10x more toxic than VX, in which case anyone exposed to even the smallest quantity of it would be as dead as a doornail. Yet by some miracle no-one has actually been killed in this incident.
Barbara Ann -> David Habakkuk ... , 14 March 2018 at 05:10 PM
David Habakkuk

Thanks for the link to the 'Doubts about "Novichoks"' article, this is very encouraging. The second point made by the authors is that

"..any organic chemist with a modern lab would be able to synthesize bench scale quantities of such a compound."
Now Theresa May is not a scientist and may believe that a chemical compound can be 'Russian'. But you are right to speculate about pressure having been put on the boffins at Porton Down, as they will know better and seem to be choosing not to say so.

Given that the means in this crime now seems to be open to a far wider range of suspects, I would hope that the investigation would give at least some consideration to motive and opportunity. But of course the investigation is a side show in this piece of orchestrated political theater - in much the same way as is Mueller's indictment of Russian trolls, who have no prospect of being brought to trial. God forbid they should actually catch the perpetrator. I'd put money on their being a state actor, just not that state.

james said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 14 March 2018 at 06:41 PM
david - thanks for commenting on this.. i was hoping you would show up and comment!

craig murray has done another post today worth reading, as has b over at moa.. here are the links to them as it sounds like you haven't read them.

i will just say this.. as for dr. robin black - perhaps he is not at liberty to say that porton down followed the instructions in Mirzanjaov's book 'state secrets' - as b so aptly puts it ""Russia did it", says Mirzanjaov, "OR SOMEONE WHO READ MY BOOK"... either that, or he knows and is unwilling to state this openly.. i don't know, but what i really want to know is how does porton down verify it is this novichuk, without ever having been familiar with it? that part is hard to fathom... and, if it can be reproduced, how can the uk ascertain with such certainty that it was produced in russia? too many questions remain and the rush to a conclusion seems really shoddy on the part of the uk leadership...

thanks for the links and additional thoughts..

VietnamVet , 14 March 2018 at 07:20 PM
David Habakkuk and LondonBob

Thanks.

The hysteria that Russia did it is so total I completely missed that the victims are still alive. Like CP, I remember Basic Training, with nerve gas, if you didn't get the protective gear on; you died. This is very very strange. "Newcomer" nerve agents are binaries that are relative non-toxic but when mixed highly toxic; five times greater than VX. The policeman was exposed at the house. Yet the victims left home, drove into town, dined and collapsed on the park bench. I don't see how one mixes Russian military grade nerve agents without chemical protective gear and respirator and not die instantly. Perhaps someone mixed together an organophosphate compound in a clandestine laboratory that the victims were exposed to; but, that completely destroys the PM's narrative.

[Mar 15, 2018] Russian to Judgment Who Poisoned Sergei Skripal

Mar 15, 2018 | original.antiwar.com

by Justin Raimondo Posted on March 15, 2018 March 14, 2018 The latest example of alleged Russian perfidy – the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia – is yet another case of faith-based attribution. In accusing Russia of some heinous crime – in this instance, the murder of a former double agent working for MI6 – one needn't present any real evidence: it's only necessary to point the finger at the Kremlin. And of course we haven't had any real evidence proffered by the British government: Prime Minister Theresa May simply declared that Russia is the culprit and gave a midnight deadline for the Kremlin to explain how " its nerve weapon " – as NBC reported it – was used to attacked Skripal on British soil. She has since announced the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats.

... ... ...

This is a replay of the Litvinenko affair , which was based on similarly dubious "evidence.": even the official British government report was ambiguous about Russia's alleged responsibility for poisoning the exiled anti-Putin propagandist. It says that Putin " probably approved" the murder.

Probably. No need for exactitude in these matters: after all, we're only talking about a country with enough nuclear weapons aimed at us – and the Brits – to wipe out the entire population of the planet. So "probably" is good enough.

Alexander Litvinenko was involved with all sorts of dubious characters , many of them linked to the Russian Mafia: any one of a number of these fine fellows could've killed him. As more of Skripal's story comes out, one suspects that the same will prove true in his case.

That won't stop the War Party from concocting yet another conspiracy theory pointing to the all-powerful Vladimir Putin as the source of all that's bad in the world.

Don't fall for it: instead, ask the question that's pinned to the top of my Twitter feed: Where's the evidence ?

[Mar 15, 2018] Visualizing How The World Views Vladimir Putin

Mar 15, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Earlier this week, British Prime Minister Theresa May announced in the House of Commons that Russia was "highly likely" to have been involved in the attempted murder of a former Russian spy and his daughter. The incident left Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, critically ill in hospital. As Statista's Niall McCarthy notes , The UK has now announced that it will expel 23 Russian diplomats after Russia failed to explain how a military-grade nerve agent was used in the attack in Salisbury.

Even though the Kremlin has vehemently denied any involvement, insiders have said that all signs point to Moscow and if that's true, it raises some troubling questions ahead of the country's presidential election on Sunday.

Some observers have suggested that rogue elements of the Russian government could be responsible for the attack while others are pointing their fingers firmly towards Vladimir Putin.

Even though there is no evidence that Putin gave the order to carry out a high-profile killing in public, the decision to use nerve agents that could be linked to Russia carries considerable risk. Some have claimed that Putin might have arranged the attack to engineer a confrontation with the west in order to improve turnout at the polls.

If the UK goes a step beyond expelling diplomats and imposes sanctions, Russia could find itself more isolated and that has proven deeply unpopular with the country's electorate .

Putin is expected to win Sunday's election easily and even if Russian media portrays the events in Salisbury as some kind of western conspiracy to rally voters, the president's image is still likely to worsen internationally .

The most recent polling into how Putin is viewed abroad was conducted in August 2017 by the Pew Research Center. Even before the events in Salisbury, Putin was very unpopular across the world.

You will find more infographics at Statista

In Poland where the relationship with Russia has never been easy, 89 percent of Pew's respondents said they have no confidence in Putin doing the right thing regarding world affairs.

In France, the share was also high at 80 percent.

In the United Kingdom and the United Stated, 76 and 74 percent of people have no faith in the Russian president doing the right thing on the world stage.

At the other end of the scale, Nigeria and India are more confident than not confident in Putin doing the right thing.

It seems the global propaganda machine has not been able to reach there quite yet.


DownWithYogaPants -> pier Wed, 03/14/2018 - 21:33 Permalink

If you don't have some appreciation of Putin's intellect and skill as a leader you're not paying attention. Additionally he's shown real composure and self control given the provocations he has been subject to.

If he has indeed tossed out the Rothschild bankers he is a hero of the ages. That is no light work.

eforce -> DownWithYogaPants Wed, 03/14/2018 - 21:36 Permalink

MSM propaganda still holds some power it seems.

Drater -> gatorengineer Wed, 03/14/2018 - 21:40 Permalink

Highly recommend reading Putin's NYT editorial from 2013...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-caution-from-r

rejected Wed, 03/14/2018 - 21:33 Permalink

When you say it like it is,,, when you don't BS everyone,,, and if you don't start a dozen wars in a dozen years no one has confidence in you?

The charts show the indoctrination levels, not confidence levels.

Russia and Mr. Putin have taken a lot of abuse that kept us and the world out of a major war,,, so far,,, and I sincerely thank them for that.

rwe2late Wed, 03/14/2018 - 21:36 Permalink

Even if the poll were accurate and unbiased,

it says next to nothing by way of relevant comparisons.

"Confident" about what?

How many had even heard of Putin or knew anything about him?

How confident are they in Trump or T. May or their own government?

How about confidence within the respective country?

Are Russians confident?

What about the most populous nation, China?

Iran? Syria?

Even if the poll were unbiased,

the selection of countries for the presentation is not.

Smi1ey Wed, 03/14/2018 - 21:36 Permalink

This is complete horseshit straight from the same people who give us WaPo and the New York Times. How does he not have Putin's popularity in Russia. Where is that?

Also, The author's view of the world is extremely skewed.

just the tip Wed, 03/14/2018 - 21:37 Permalink

this is nothing new. the propaganda is strong with this one.

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2015/04/21/countries-that-hate-ame

No country disapproves of America more than Russia, where 82% of survey respondents said they disapproved of U.S. leadership. This was also the worst rating from Russia in the history of the survey. While many Russians do not like America, residents of many other countries do not approve of Russia. The median disapproval rating of Russian leadership was greater than the median approval rating, the only country to claim this distinction. And while a majority of residents in 15 countries disapprove of the U.S., a majority of residents in 42 countries disapprove of Russia's leadership. Russia's disapproval rating of U.S. leadership worsened considerably from 2013, increasing 12 percentage points. Recently implemented U.S.-led Western sanctions on Russia have likely intensified Russians' disapproval. According to historical data from the Levada Center, Russia's independent public opinion tracker, negative attitudes towards the United States spiked during the invasion of Iraq and worsened again in 2008 after the Russia-Georgia conflict. More recently, the U.S. sided with Ukraine after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

Brazen Heist Wed, 03/14/2018 - 21:44 Permalink

Putin is the best Statesman of the 21st century.

The West doesn't make Statesmen anymore. It produces whores and pedophiles who sell to the highest bidders and don't have the capacity to think beyond their tenures.

Because Western governments are dominated by cucks and sellouts, they feel threatened by Putin's unwavering determination, backbone and geopolitical mastery, hence the concerted propaganda campaign to discredit him, which by the way is pretty fucking pathetic.

ISEEIT Wed, 03/14/2018 - 21:46 Permalink

Were YOU Russian... Likely that you would be one of the 70%+ who will vote for him.

Despite the massive (laughable) western efforts to interfere..collude...

Attempting to "undermine FAITH in their institutions"....lol

Pathetic..

[Mar 15, 2018] The end of Pax Americana, the period of controlling USA global influence, might be more close that previously thought

Notable quotes:
"... That Washington's principal focus currently is on attacking another country (Russia) which due to USA incompetence is punching far above its weight in world affairs. The latest anti-Russia attacks center on a sick Russian spook and some Facebook ads (new weak USA sanctions just announced) are two examples of USA weakness (together with its Europe puppets, also losers). ..."
"... It is the obvious finale of Pax Americana, the period of controlling USA global influence now coming slowly to an inglorious end due to USA incompetence. Coincidentally, the USA is faced with overwhelming problems domestically in many fields, including citizen disparity, health care, transportation, crime and unemployment. So let's celebrate the potential shift against a forced USA withdrawal on the world scene and a possible improvement in domestic policy. ..."
Mar 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Don Bacon | Mar 15, 2018 12:40:31 PM | 105

That Washington's principal focus currently is on attacking another country (Russia) which due to USA incompetence is punching far above its weight in world affairs. The latest anti-Russia attacks center on a sick Russian spook and some Facebook ads (new weak USA sanctions just announced) are two examples of USA weakness (together with its Europe puppets, also losers).

It is the obvious finale of Pax Americana, the period of controlling USA global influence now coming slowly to an inglorious end due to USA incompetence. Coincidentally, the USA is faced with overwhelming problems domestically in many fields, including citizen disparity, health care, transportation, crime and unemployment. So let's celebrate the potential shift against a forced USA withdrawal on the world scene and a possible improvement in domestic policy.

It won't happen soon though, as the current incompetent president is advocating huge increases in wasteful military spending including the expansion of an army which has no productive purpose to exist at all.

[Mar 14, 2018] Russian UN anvoy> alleged the Salisbury attack was a false-flag attack, possibly by the UK itself, intended to harm Russia s reputation by Julian Borger

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... He alleged the Salisbury attack was a false-flag attack, possibly by the UK itself, intended to harm Russia's reputation. "Most probable source of this agent are the countries who have carried out research on these weapons, including Britain," Nebenzia said. ..."
"... The Russian ambassador sought to turn the tables on the UK, claiming that Theresa May's letter to the UN, outlining UK grounds for accusing Russia, was itself a "threat to a sovereign state". ..."
"... "The letter contains completely irresponsible statements which are even difficult for me to comment on using diplomatic vocabulary," the Russian envoy said. ..."
"... In her statement on behalf of the US, Haley said: "Let me make one thing clear from the very beginning: the United States stands in absolute solidarity with Great Britain. The United States believes that Russia is responsible for the attack on two people in the United Kingdom using a military-grade nerve agent," Haley said. ..."
Mar 14, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

UK spy poisoning: Russia tells UN it did not make nerve agent used in attack

Russian envoy suggests Britain itself may have been behind the attack as UK allies support London's assertion

... ... ...

In his response, the Russian envoy to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, told the council: "No scientific research or development under the title novichok were carried out." He alleged the Salisbury attack was a false-flag attack, possibly by the UK itself, intended to harm Russia's reputation. "Most probable source of this agent are the countries who have carried out research on these weapons, including Britain," Nebenzia said.

The Russian ambassador sought to turn the tables on the UK, claiming that Theresa May's letter to the UN, outlining UK grounds for accusing Russia, was itself a "threat to a sovereign state".

"The letter contains completely irresponsible statements which are even difficult for me to comment on using diplomatic vocabulary," the Russian envoy said.

He later told reporters that the case belonged at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague.

"We are ready to cooperate," he said.

Allen pointed out that the UK had already called in the OPCW to take part in the investigation. He described extensive evidence that novichok nerve agents had been developed by the Soviet Union and bequeathed to Russia.

In her statement on behalf of the US, Haley said: "Let me make one thing clear from the very beginning: the United States stands in absolute solidarity with Great Britain. The United States believes that Russia is responsible for the attack on two people in the United Kingdom using a military-grade nerve agent," Haley said.

... ... ...

The French ambassador, François Delattre, made a similar declaration backing the UK position, offering "the full support and complete solidarity of France for the UK".

... ... ..

[Mar 14, 2018] UNSC holds urgent meeting over Salisbury attack

Highly recommended!
Mar 14, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

ninel , Mar 14, 2018 6:56:58 PM | 40

UNSC holds urgent meeting over Salisbury attack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USYfRVqG2lk

At the 39 minutes and 25 seconds mark Russian UNSC member begins his speech

[Mar 14, 2018] On this occasion the Russians are being accused without being presented with any evidence or ability to test the nerve agent [Lavrov has said this is required under the Chemical weapons convention]

Possibility that Skripal flipped again and was killed in such a way as to put all the blame on Russians should not be discarded. That actually explains why his daughter was hurt.
Mar 14, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

John Gilberts , Mar 13, 2018 7:29:08 AM | 96

14 1/2 Certainties About the Case of Sergei Skripal - by John Helmer

http://johnhelmer.net/fourteen-and-a-half-certainties-about-the-case-of-sergei-skripal/

"In cases like the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, the only way to proceed is by identifying the evidence which proves with certainty, what happened; or failing that, proves with certainty what did not happen.

Perpetrators, co-conspirators, method, motive, intention - all come later, if they come at all..."

harrylaw | Mar 13, 2018 7:58:42 AM | 100

John Gilberts @96. One of the first and fundamental rules of natural justice is to hear both sides.

Audi alteram partem (or audiatur et altera pars) is a Latin phrase meaning "listen to the other side", or "let the other side be heard as well". It is the principle that no person should be judged without a fair hearing in which each party is given the opportunity to respond to the evidence against them.

On this occasion the Russians are being accused without being presented with any evidence or ability to test the nerve agent [Lavrov has said this is required under the Chemical weapons convention].

The same thing happened over the claim by the US/UK of the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Missiles were sent killing men, women and children before any investigation was initiated, all contrary to International law. The US/UK are rogue states, Putin must hit back hard to any further illegal actions against them or their allies in Syria.

Charles Michael , Mar 12, 2018 11:55:22 PM | 71
Very little attention has so far been directed to Skypal dautgher; her presence has surely added an emotional element but no part in the plot.
And then it just happen when she came to visit ?
- One first consideration: if it was a vendetta from Vlad why then to wait so many years and acting just when the daugther is meeting the father ?
- Second point any agent on Russian official (or not) disposal team would have been stricly prohibited to use anything more chemical than a lead pipe.
- remember this turn coat did it for money, supposedely collaborated on the Steele garbage can for money, so did the daughter bring somme message from Russia of the bribe and return home specy against informations on the Steele dossier ?

That would make a much more logical script, IMO.

simon , Mar 13, 2018 12:06:35 AM | 72

The possibility that British intelligence sent scores of its own agents to almost certain death in occupied Holland during the Second World War has been raised by the release of Foreign Office files kept secret for 60 years.

The disclosure that more than 50 Dutch agents working for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) may have been sacrificed as part of a complicated "double double agent" game played against the Germans is likely to provoke heated debate in the Netherlands.

The agents, trained in Britain to carry out sabotage, were parachuted straight into the arms of the waiting enemy, which had penetrated the entire SOE network in Holland. Almost all were subsequently executed in concentration camps.

in another case


All The King's Men" (Collins, 1988) homosexual Freemason, Deputy Head of MI-6, Sir Claude Dansey (1876-1947.)

Dansey deliberately placed a known german agent, Henri Dericourt, at the heart of the french ressistance Prosper organization. Dericourt, a French pilot, was responsible for organizing the nighttime shuttling of agents and materiel in and out of France.
in the wake of D-Day June 6, 1944, hundreds of acts of sabotage were committed by the French Resistance -- with one exception.

There were none in the north and north west where they mattered most.

There, the "Prosper" and related "Scientist" networks had been mopped by the Gestapo in 1943. Prosper's courageous young leader, Francis Anthony Suttill, 34, was languishing in a concentration camp.

He and scores of British agents were later executed, along with over 10,000 members of the French Resistance. One hundred and sixty plane loads of armaments –2600 containers -- including tons of sten guns and explosives, were seized by the Nazis. (193)

MI-6 placed their own man Nicolas Bodington in SOE to vouch for Dericourt and block all efforts by SOE (Special Operations Executive) to uncover the traitor. Bodington actually met with Baumelburg on a visit to Paris in 1943. They all had known each other before the war. It was Bodington who introduced Baumelburg to Dericourt.
nothing new
a gay mi6 mason gave up the top teams from other depts within the british government because of rivalry in this case the soe.
more tea vicar benign normalcy

somebody , Mar 13, 2018 12:53:24 AM | 73
Theresa May is in a bind.

The city of London (and the conservative party) is full of pro Putin Russian money same as Russian money hostile to Putin.

It is highly likely that the - very unprofessional, messy - attack was done by people trying to embarrass Putin before the election. That would be the Russian opposition - Chechen, Russian - whose center is in London plus the part of MI6 that would become obsolete with an end to the cold war.

So Russians are fighting it out in a city dependent on their (largely illegal) money especially under the conditions of Brexit - which may have been funded by both Russian factions to escape EU controls. It is not a good position to be in as the head of a party sponsored by Russians.

May sanctioning Russian "pro Putin" money in the city of London would endanger the city's business model - that money is safe there. It would also cut funds sponsoring the Conservative Party.

Yeah, Right , Mar 13, 2018 3:08:04 AM | 80
The moment that I read about this I assumed that the daughter had been sent to deliver a message (or, more likely, an offer) to Skripal to flip one more time, and unfortunately for both of them "Western" spooks got wind of it and decided that This Can Not Be Allowed To Happen.

Hence the hit, and also the need to stage the hit so that the very people who sent her could be blamed for the resulting mayhem.

Am I the only person who thinks this?

Peter AU 1 , Mar 13, 2018 3:23:24 AM | 81
80
The other angle is, he may already have flipped. Six years in jail and then pardoned. The Ukraine Joan of Ark, much touted in MSM, pardoned, no longer the Joan of Ark one back in Ukraine and talking of peace. Dropped off the MSM radar very quickly.
V. Arnold , Mar 13, 2018 5:03:37 AM | 83
All of these distractions must work as planned; there is a never ending drama; ramped up and down; played out ad infinitum.
The play behind the curtain is of course what is deemed important; but hard to focus with all the chatter.
War is coming to Syria; the U.S. is going to make a move (East Ghouta?) soon. They're boxed in and must find out just what Russia can/will do.
Damn stupid move if it's made.

Skripal is just a pawn; but damned effective, so far, it would seem. TM is far more stupid than she looks.

Yeah, Right , Mar 13, 2018 6:21:20 AM | 89
@84 Ah, yep, so you did. So it's not just me who is paranoid....

A general question for the readership here: in the history of Soviet/Russian "hits" on exiled dissidents (and let's not kid ourselves, there have been some) how many times have innocent bystanders become collateral damage?

I don't know the answer, which is why I'm asking: do the Russians have an MO of taking great care that no citizen of the host country is put in danger when an assassination attempt is made on an expat Russian?

Because that police officer first-responder is now fighting for his life, which does suggest that whoever did this was either so sloppy or so callous that they didn't seem to give any consideration to the possibility that innocent Brits would be put in danger.

Which strikes me as very in-Russian like but, then again, what do I know?

harrylaw , Mar 13, 2018 7:20:31 AM | 95
Lavrov as usual gives a logical response to the warmongering UK clowns. "Russia is not responsible," Sergei Lavrov said during a televised press conference with the Indonesian foreign minister in which he suggested that Moscow would not comply with a Tuesday deadline set by Theresa May to deliver an explanation or face retaliation.

Lavrov said Moscow's requests to see samples of the nerve agent have been turned down, which he called a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention outlawing the production of chemical weapons.

"We have already made our statement on this case," he said. "Russia is ready to cooperate in accordance with the convention to ban chemical weapons if the United Kingdom will deign to fulfil its obligations according to the same convention."

In his remarks Lavrov said that under the convention, Russia would have ten days to reply to an official accusation by the United Kingdom for the use of a banned substance inside its borders. [The Guardian]

[Mar 14, 2018] Russia Slams Unprecedented, Hostile UK Action, Vows Retaliation

Notable quotes:
"... The Russian diplomats also claimed that "it's obvious that by opting for unilateral and non-transparent methods of investigating this incident, the British authorities have once again tried to unleash an indiscriminate anti-Russian campaign." ..."
"... Moscow said that it was "unacceptable and unworthy" for the UK leadership to further escalate tensions in relations with Russia "in pursuit of its own deplorable political aims." ..."
"... Russia had previously said that it's open to cooperation with the UK on the Skripal case if it's carried out in accordance with international law and Moscow is treated as an equal partner in the probe. Russia has also officially requested that the UK provide all the case files regarding the incident, but was turned down. ..."
"... If the Skripals had been shot with a Smith & Wesson found at the scene, that's all the evidence May needs to prove the United States are responsible? ..."
"... Firstly , he had done all the damage he could possible have done to Russian intelligence interests: there is no way he would have been 'traded' in a prisoner-swap otherwise ..."
"... Secondly : using a chemical agent that is so strongly associated with Russia? That would be such monumentally poor tradecraft that it beggars belief. It would be as stupid as the Mossad scrawling passages from the Talmud in the hotel room in which they killed al-Mabouh ..."
"... Thirdly , and most importantly: prisoner-swap individuals are the nearest thing there is to sacrosanct in the intelligence game. If Russia offed one of the people that it had swapped out , it would undermine the implied 'protected' status of people it had managed to swap back . ..."
"... As all y'all know, I am the last person to ascribe consistency or competence to state security and intelligence appratuses and their apparatchiki - but I would consider it massively unlikely that the Russians dunnit in such a hamfisted and stupidly detectable way. ..."
"... That would pretty much require the Pommie government to hurl accusations at someone, otherwise the whole " The UK produces significant quantities of biological weapons at Porton Down " narrative would clamber to the top of the problem sheet, and would have a new adjunct: " baddies can acquire deadly toxins - for a price - from corrupt individuals within the program ". ..."
Mar 14, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Shortly after the Russian embassy in the UK reacted angrily to Britain's expulsion of 23 diplomats after Theresa May accused Russia of using a chemical weapon on UK soil, saying that it considers "this hostile action as totally unacceptable, unjustified and shortsighted" and adding that "all the responsibility for the deterioration of the Russia-UK relationship lies with the current political leadership of Britain", the Russian foreign ministry double down and warned that the UK's "hostile actions" against Russia under the pretext of the poisoning of ex-double agent Sergei Skripal are an "unprecedented provocation" which won't be left without a response.

The British move is "an unprecedentedly rude provocation, which undermines the foundations of a normal dialogue between our countries," the ministry said in a statement.

The ministry said that "the British government chose confrontation with Russia" instead of completing the investigation and using international formats "including those in the framework of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons."

The Russian diplomats also claimed that "it's obvious that by opting for unilateral and non-transparent methods of investigating this incident, the British authorities have once again tried to unleash an indiscriminate anti-Russian campaign."

Moscow said that it was "unacceptable and unworthy" for the UK leadership to further escalate tensions in relations with Russia "in pursuit of its own deplorable political aims."

"Needless to say, our response measures will not be long in coming," the Foreign Ministry concluded.

Russia had previously said that it's open to cooperation with the UK on the Skripal case if it's carried out in accordance with international law and Moscow is treated as an equal partner in the probe. Russia has also officially requested that the UK provide all the case files regarding the incident, but was turned down.

Below is the response from the Russia Foreign Ministry so far:

The March 14 statement made by British Prime Minister Theresa May in Parliament on measures to "punish" Russia, under the false pretext of its alleged involvement in the poisoning of Sergey Skripal and his daughter, constitutes an unprecedented, flagrant provocation that undermines the foundations of normal dialogue between our countries.

We believe it is absolutely unacceptable and unworthy of the British Government to seek to further seriously aggravate relations in pursuit of its unseemly political ends, having announced a whole series of hostile measures, including the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats from the country.

Instead of completing its own investigation and using established international formats and instruments, including within the framework of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons – in which we were prepared to cooperate – the British Government opted for confrontation with Russia. Obviously, by investigating this incident in a unilateral, non-transparent way, the British Government is again seeking to launch a groundless anti-Russian campaign.

Needless to say, our response measures will not be long in coming

Separately, when the Russian embassy was asked about the unexpected death of Nikolay Glushkov who as we reported yesterday was an associated of billionaire anit-Putin oligarch Boris Berezovsky, it said: "Regretfully, the Embassy has received no information whatsoever regarding the circumstances of the death of Mr Glushkov. The investigation is not transparent, the British side appears not inclined to cooperate. This can only cause regret. Today the Embassy made an official request to provide all the information in possession of the British side regarding this Russian citizen whose death, as you said, appears mysterious."

"Overall, we are surprised with UK authorities' reluctance and unwillingness to provide us with full details of both the poisoning of Russians Sergei and Yulia Skripal and the death of Nikolay Glushkov."

We expect it is only a matter of time before Putin is personally blamed for Glushkov's death next.


BullyBearish -> skbull44 Wed, 03/14/2018 - 14:11 Permalink

GREAT BRITAIN...jeez, the same guys who tried to keep the entire chinese population addicted to opium...

Occident Mortal -> BullyBearish Wed, 03/14/2018 - 14:15 Permalink

Dear Russia,

Retaliate as hard as you like, we have all of your money.

Figured it out yet?

Dutti -> Smufty Wed, 03/14/2018 - 14:26 Permalink

A malevolent government full of cucks in the UK.

On the one hand they try to distract from their multiple failures and create or follow obvious false flag attacks against Russia, on the other hand they detain patriots like Lauren Southern, Martin Sellner etc. and also try to silence Tommy Robinson who are just voicing their opinion about the disastrous Multi-Kulti policies of western Europe:

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/right-wing-canadian-activist-lauren-

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5490911/Martin-Sellner-Brittany

FoggyWorld -> TheRedScourge Wed, 03/14/2018 - 15:07 Permalink

Usually a Russian who stole his way into serious wealth and then quickly bolted and left the country to live high on the hog. Many reside in London and NYC and can't remember one getting poisoned in the US.

yomutti2 -> Dutti Wed, 03/14/2018 - 14:29 Permalink

Putin is such a fuck-up. Wasn't it obvious that this was going to happen? And no, Russian denials of responsibility carry no weight. Remember how they denied that the invading troops in Ukraine were really Russian? Yeah, that pretty much destroyed their credibility forever.

Brazen Heist -> yomutti2 Wed, 03/14/2018 - 14:35 Permalink

Yeah and WMDs in Iraq certainly "made" US credibility LOL. Do you think Putin would want to take out this double agent in the most extravagant way possible shortly before March 18th when he could have done it quietly while he was in Russia? Take your head out of your ass and think about cui bono? You're lapping up their stinking bullshit again.

This is MI5 handiwork, local chemical facility couple of miles from Salisbury. Its pretty pathetic.

The game is up. The fuckers were exposed for the head-chopper scum that they are in Syria for the whole world to see while they pretended to be white knight virtuosos of peace, and now the best they can do is blame Russia Russia Russia because Russia is the reason they failed to install Wahhabis in Syria!

Buckaroo Banzai -> solidtare Wed, 03/14/2018 - 15:06 Permalink

Indeed. It's hard to believe that Skripal wouldn't have a very good idea of who just tried to kill him. The fact that the British have put a muzzle on him tells you everything you need to know. The longer Skripal goes without saying anything while in British custody, the more certain you can be that when he does open his mouth, it'll be because they are forcing him to say something he doesn't want to say.

One thing you can say about Clown World®, at least it's entertaining to watch.

Nukerella -> Buckaroo Banzai Wed, 03/14/2018 - 15:23 Permalink

Ummm...let's see if they die in hospital, if they aren't already dead. The Russians have been denied a consular visit. And where is Christopher Steele?

Scar Bro -> Nukerella Wed, 03/14/2018 - 15:35 Permalink

Note that Jeremy Corbyn is the only one in Parliament who asked for proof to be provided before such action was taken.
Note also that Assange is a bit of a cunt saying that the Russian moves are already "gamed out". Jumping the gun aren't we Julian? WHERE IS THE FUCKING PROOF RUSSIA WAS EVEN INVOLVED??

CatInTheHat -> Nukerella Wed, 03/14/2018 - 16:18 Permalink

Skripal was an associate of Christopher Steele and Pablo Martin. Skripal is the one who fed the Russian side of the Trump dossier and was likely paid to do so. Israel Mossad also had the means with the chemicals and assassin's to pull it off. Zionist pissed because Russia helping Syria.

US/UK also have motive. Skripal could tell the truth about dossier. Was he on Mueller or Congressional list of inquiries?

fleur de lis -> CatInTheHat Wed, 03/14/2018 - 17:54 Permalink

So that means that Skirpal was nothing more than a loose end.

The DC Swamp does not like loose ends.

The dossier must have seemed like a fabulous idea at the time, but it is now a liability and anyone associated with it is a person of interest.

Christopher Steele is probably a loose end at this point too, but he thinks he's so important that nothing will happen to him.

And maybe nothing will, but who knows.

He's a loose end.

are we there yet -> solidtare Wed, 03/14/2018 - 17:36 Permalink

A public park bench is a difficult covert assassination spot. They had to loose consciousness so fast that they did not try to flee or draw attention, yet they are still barely alive. How was the nerve agent delivered? Plus, the assassin had to be sure there was no public surveillance or phone cams to incriminate him/her.

RedBaron616 -> yomutti2 Wed, 03/14/2018 - 15:18 Permalink

Notice that the Brits aren't handing over any information to Russia. Just an ultimatum. Is that diplomacy? They aren't handing anything over because it is all made up out of whole cloth. Russia isn't so stupid to kill a well-known Russian in such an exotic way when bullets work just as well. Do you think Russians would go to such an exotic murder method which would point to them? This is a false flag, which is why NOTHING has been submitted to Russia. Just a lot of hot air from May the Witch.

RedBaron616 -> yomutti2 Wed, 03/14/2018 - 15:21 Permalink

I remind you that the US SUPPORTED the VIOLENT OVERTHROW of a PROPERLY ELECTED GOVERNMENT in order to INSTALL their PRO-NATO, PRO-EURO, PUPPET GOVERNMENT. Russia saw where this was going and ensured access to the Naval Base they have had for over 200 YEARS. Seeing yet ANOTHER NATO move next to Russia and being thrown out of their only warm-water port, they acted to keep what is rightfully theirs. You, sir, are a complete dupe of the MSM.

Amun -> yomutti2 Wed, 03/14/2018 - 17:08 Permalink

"The Massacre

'I found [Sharon] at home sleeping. He woke up and I told him "Listen, there are stories about killings and massacres in the camps. A lot of our officers know about it and tell me about it, and if they know it, the whole world will know about it. You can still stop it." I didn't know that the massacre actually started 24 hours earlier. I thought it started only then and I said to him "Look, we still have time to stop it. Do something about it." He didn't react."'

Brazen Heist -> Smufty Wed, 03/14/2018 - 14:26 Permalink

Bullshit.....Western elites have become laughingstock of the world.

The constant drama and pandering to non-evidence-based emotional appeals is getting tiring.

It looks like Western governments are in dire need of the low-IQ crowd for their legitimacy with each new passing contrived scandal and conflict, meant to direct attention towards every single foreign bogeyman other than themselves.

rwe2late -> Smufty Wed, 03/14/2018 - 15:05 Permalink

Smufty

you need to educate yourself in order to conduct an intelligent discussion at ZH.

start here:

" The financial sector exploits an astonishing political privilege: the City of London is the only jurisdiction in the UK not fully subject to the authority of parliament. ...

The City is a semi off-shore state, a bit like the UK's crown dependencies and overseas territories, ...
Even the more orthodox financial institutions deploy a succession of scandalous practices: pension scams, endowment mortgage fraud, the payment protection insurance con, Libor rigging."

London is now the global money-laundering centre for the drug trade, says crime expert

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/london-is-now-the-global-mon

London: A giant washing machine for the filthy cash of a corrupt elite

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/london-giant-washing-machine-filthy-cash-corr

Guardian Op-Ed – The City of London Has Turned Britain Into a "Civilized Mafia State"

https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2015/09/09/guardian-op-ed-the-city-of-lon

Mr Twitch -> Smufty Wed, 03/14/2018 - 16:56 Permalink

You sound like Nikki Haley who now is saying this today; "Russia could use chemical weapons in New York"

Never go full retard like Nikki Haley.

Boubou -> Smufty Wed, 03/14/2018 - 17:11 Permalink

Putin's only crime is to be an obstacle to US full spectrum domination of the world. Only US is truly to be feared.

FBaggins -> Smufty Wed, 03/14/2018 - 18:27 Permalink

You think the on-going history of the wrongs of a society of international bankers, aristocrats and other powerful men and women running things in England is irrelevant?

May is a puppet of the oligarchic monsters which run her nation, the US and Israel. Putin is the only leader of a major power on the world stage with enough courage and integrity to oppose them. It is Russia under Putin which is defeating ISIS in Syria and not the false-flag nations of Britain, the US or Israel. If this evil cabal would simply stop supplying and paying the terrorists the war in Syria would abruptly end.

The bankster cabal first spread their control from England to the American colonies and after the 1776 American Revolution, which was essentially against them, they manipulated to regain complete financial control over US finances and assets until through their bankster agents in the US they succeeded by the end of the 19th century, administering the final coup de grâce in 1913 with the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act.

This same cabal is directly responsible for all the major wars of the 20 th century. In Britain, the US, and most Western nations, they control finances, the media, most politicians, the entertainment industry, and most research, historical education and publications. They control both the left and right political wings in British and American politics. They rule by causing endless division in the moderate majority of the citizenry and they constantly remain hidden from any real scrutiny or accountability. They purse monopolistic control of everything they touch. Like the monopolistic control of the diamond industry, they are now seeking complete control of the energy sector mainly through extreme sanctions and military conquest. The wars in the Middle East and aggression against Russia and other nations attempting to control their own oil and gas resources is the major link to complete global hegemony.

The purpose of their long regime-change operation and war against the Syrian government is to divide that nation both for additional territory for Israel, and for complete control of the vast Mid East oil and gas reserves together with a British-American controlled pipeline through Syria. There is no regard for the devastation they have caused to that nation or to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and the displacement of millions. They organized, trained, armed, supplied, deployed and payed both the so-called "moderate terrorists" and the radical Deash (ISIS, ISIL, & IS) terrorists.

They are the most evil, greedy, plundering counterfeit human beings on the face of the earth, and they do not have and cannot have the support of any truly God-fearing people anywhere even if they call themselves Christians, Jews, or Muslims.

History of the Rothschilds

http://majestic12research.blogspot.ca/2009/06/history-of-rothschilds.htm

Royalty & Bankers Collusion Against Scotland Since 1694

https://www.whatthepoliticiansdontsay.com/single-post/2017/05/30/Royalty-Bankers-Collusion-Against-Scotland-Since-1694

Rothschild and Freshfields founders linked to slavery

https://aaronrusso.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/rothschild-and-freshfields-founders-linked-to-slavery/

The History of Banking Control in the United States

https://www.michaeljournal.org/articles/social-credit/item/the-history-

Lincoln Financed the War by Taking On the British-Backed
New York Banks

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2014/4125lincoln_greenbks.html

The Origins of the WWI

https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/secret-origins-first-world-war

rwe2late -> Looney Wed, 03/14/2018 - 15:09 Permalink

T. May reminds me of the lying war criminal T. Blair.

(In Britain, it appears, poodles and chihuahuas are political favorites)

FoggyWorld -> Singelguy Wed, 03/14/2018 - 15:16 Permalink

And P.S. We in Russia own Rosneft and BP has a 20% share. Guess what we may impound first.

nardami -> Occident Mortal Wed, 03/14/2018 - 15:05 Permalink

Notice how much England loves to take in dodgy Russian types...especially with suitcases full of dodgy cash?

kellys_eye -> flapdoodle Wed, 03/14/2018 - 16:26 Permalink

As much as I'd love for Putin to reveal details of all the false flag operations it will go unreported and classically refuted (without supporting evidence other than "it's the Russians, what did you expect them to say?").

The power of the establishment lies with the lies - and the MSM that propagate them.

Singelguy -> flapdoodle Wed, 03/14/2018 - 19:02 Permalink

Does anyone besides me get the impression that the deep state in the US is in cahoots with the deep state in the UK and that it was likely the CIA that poisoned that double agent just to stir up more shit with Russia?

land_of_the_few -> BullyBearish Wed, 03/14/2018 - 14:26 Permalink

And the Oscar for the least credible Russia-demonization attempt of the year goes to ....

Boubou -> land_of_the_few Wed, 03/14/2018 - 17:30 Permalink

Quite so. Like they would use a unique nerve agent with Russia written all over it.

Donnez moi a break.

Brazen Heist -> peopledontwanttruth Wed, 03/14/2018 - 14:17 Permalink

The UK-US elites are getting desperate. They know the game is up. Many people are no longer buying the stupid shit they're selling. These clowns don't have the ability to back down, they will go full retard. It's what empires do when ruled by degenerates and pedophiles coked up on hubris and lawlessness.

CatInTheHat -> Brazen Heist Wed, 03/14/2018 - 16:35 Permalink

Brazen, should have read National Security council Twitter. More folks know, than don't, that this is FF to manufacture consent for war on Russia cuz Russia and Syria moping up the terrorists enclaves in E.Ghouta. Only a few are deceived. But Corporate media want folks thinking that most believe.

They dont. House of cards falls when JUSA screams chemical attack in Syria (planned) and attacks Damascus with JUSA military hardware. And Russia retaliates....

Boubou -> Brazen Heist Wed, 03/14/2018 - 17:35 Permalink

From the viewpoint of the world and the future, UK does not exist.

Sine 1970 UK has not been independent. Its words and deeds follow the US like a shadow, a small shadow. It is for all intents occupied.

OutaTime43 -> asheylarry Wed, 03/14/2018 - 14:22 Permalink

Read..
Novichok is FIVE TIMES MORE POTENT than VX and yet nobody died. Rather curious eh? VX was used on Kim's half brother and he died within minutes. They are obviously lying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novichok_agent 

Do you REALLY think this was actually used in this attack? Five times more potent than VX? Think

OutaTime43 Wed, 03/14/2018 - 14:19 Permalink

Novichok is FIVE TIMES MORE POTENT than VX and yet nobody died. Rather curious eh? VX was used on Kim's half brother and he died within minutes. They are obviously lying.

If Novichok was actually used, then dozens would have been killed in that area. Even the TARGET survived! Wake up rationalists!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novichok_agent

OutaTime43 Wed, 03/14/2018 - 14:20 Permalink

Just like Hitler invaded Ukraine after the winter was over, the EU and UK attack Russia over this bs after winter is over otherwise the gas lines would be shut off. The earlier in the spring, the better. This timing is not an accident.

It also takes the focus off of the current FBI FISA abuses in the US. FBI deputy who was bribed by Clinton and the DNC to obstruct justice was fired today.

Albertarocks Wed, 03/14/2018 - 14:29 Permalink

The UK is so incredibly out of line here. Of course it's not really "the UK", it's the global banking class who is trying to instigate a war as a major distraction from what really ails planet earth. And that problem is a totally unpayable global debt, a situation that is going to end in world-wide economic catastrophe, a catastrophe cause by... you guessed it, the same global banking class who is screaming for an excuse for what's coming, and which they themselves caused. But of course I'll bet 97% of ZH readers already understand this fully. It's the rest of the world who are going to get absolutely blindsided that I worry most about.

Savvy -> Dorothea Binz Wed, 03/14/2018 - 15:53 Permalink

"Using a nerve agent known for it's connection to Russia"

Umm... It would only take an IQ of 60 to NOT sign your name on the body.
Or believe they would be so stupid.

quantum_wiggler -> Savvy Wed, 03/14/2018 - 16:23 Permalink

'But its the only "evidence" we've got'. Classic frame up. Pull someone over, drop some coke on them...they become a "Drug Dealer"...drop some Russian coke on them...and they become a Russian drug dealer. Simple confabulation which skews the objective nature of any investigation. There is also alot of word association at play here. Not in any order, but when we hear, "Nerve Agent", "Assassination", "Putin"...it imprints a certain degree of relativity...between these commonly used words so that they define their own, new meaning of those words...making them synonymous and therefore the sheeple will come to their "OWN" informed conclusions that Putin, in fact, did assassinate with a Russian nerve agent. Making it that much easier to steer public opinion as needed.

Joiningupthedots Wed, 03/14/2018 - 17:21 Permalink

NOVICHOKS?

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/03/theresa-mays-novichok-claims-fall-

MedTechEntrepreneur Wed, 03/14/2018 - 18:35 Permalink

If Deep State UK-US starts war with Russia....can we all agree that we dont accept that and they will need to be taken down? NO MORE WAR! NO WAR WITH RUSSIA!

Greed is King Wed, 03/14/2018 - 19:35 Permalink

The British Secret Service, once lauded as the best in the World is a pale imitation of comic outfits like the Keystone Cops, their false flags are pure theatre, one could be forgiven thinking that some thespian luvvie was directing operations; maybe the usual Secret Service recruitment grounds of Oxford and Cambridge are only teaching drama studies courses these days. A few of their LESS pathetic attempts of cloak and daggery of recent years;

At the inquest it was the official story that he had locked himself in the bag in some sort of bizarre sex game, to add credence to this it was stated that numerous womens dresses in his wardrobe. Under cross examination the Police admitted that the dresses were still in their original wrappers and had not been worn, and had been bought from Oxford street stores whose prices were way above what Gareth Williams could afford, it was also revealed by forensic experts that it was impossible for him to have locked himself into the hold all.

The Coroner recorded a verdict of death in suspicious circumstances and ordered the Police to reopen the case, they have not. What information had Gareth stumbled upon which proved fatal to his health.

galant Wed, 03/14/2018 - 19:46 Permalink

If the Skripals had been shot with a Smith & Wesson found at the scene, that's all the evidence May needs to prove the United States are responsible?

GeoffreyT Wed, 03/14/2018 - 19:50 Permalink

The UK government's claims are simply preposterous - the Russians are the last people who would off Skripal.

Firstly , he had done all the damage he could possible have done to Russian intelligence interests: there is no way he would have been 'traded' in a prisoner-swap otherwise;

Secondly : using a chemical agent that is so strongly associated with Russia? That would be such monumentally poor tradecraft that it beggars belief. It would be as stupid as the Mossad scrawling passages from the Talmud in the hotel room in which they killed al-Mabouh (who, truth be told, was probably offed by rivals - Mossad will work for anyone at a price, so long as the target is not a political ally of the Zionist Occupiers of Palestine).

Thirdly , and most importantly: prisoner-swap individuals are the nearest thing there is to sacrosanct in the intelligence game. If Russia offed one of the people that it had swapped out , it would undermine the implied 'protected' status of people it had managed to swap back . It would risk setting off a wave of reprisal killings of people who had been out of the game for decades - which would severely dry up the ability to recruit clandestine assets (part of the whole offer is promising the traitor that they would, if discovered, be included in a swap - these swaps happen all the time ... occasionally folks like Aldrich Ames discover that immediate swap is not always possible, but at least Ames is not dead).

As all y'all know, I am the last person to ascribe consistency or competence to state security and intelligence appratuses and their apparatchiki - but I would consider it massively unlikely that the Russians dunnit in such a hamfisted and stupidly detectable way.

It's far more likely that Skripal was a buyer's conduit, acquiring the chemical agent from a source inside Porton Down... and fucked up its handling.

That would pretty much require the Pommie government to hurl accusations at someone, otherwise the whole " The UK produces significant quantities of biological weapons at Porton Down " narrative would clamber to the top of the problem sheet, and would have a new adjunct: " baddies can acquire deadly toxins - for a price - from corrupt individuals within the program ".

That would add another headache to the beleaguered premiership of Theresa May.

[Mar 14, 2018] No British outlet will work in Russia if London shuts down RT

Notable quotes:
"... As colonel predicts a pre-war condition is forming on the two far ends of our outdated two ocean protection. ..."
Mar 14, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Reply 13 March 2018 at 09:02 PM

I can't figure out what the hell is going on these days in UK, are they looking are they looking to exit the Europe only or the rather exit out of the world. What do they really want? Do they really think they can isolate Russia out of Europe?

Would that bring more security for UK? IMO, they must be crazy if they think American population will allow or come to protect them again, while the two-ocean security no longer is viable in era of ICBMs.

As colonel predicts a pre-war condition is forming on the two far ends of our outdated two ocean protection.

"No British outlet will work in Russia if London shuts down RT - Foreign Ministry"

https://www.rt.com/news/421190-british-outlet-rt-shut-zakharova/

[Mar 14, 2018] I m now even more convinced that the nerve agent attack in Sailsbury was staged

Notable quotes:
"... This is a time chosen to do most harm to Russia, with both the elections and the World Cup imminent. ..."
"... I really do not think that Putin gives a toss about the Skripals, and with the daughter living in Russia, Skripal was probably careful not to put her in danger. Which means it is even more unlikely to be Russia. We never do our own dirty work of course, that is what 'special relationships' are for. ..."
"... Listening to ex-CIA agent Philip Giraldi speak about the particular nerve agent used against Skirpal, it seem clear that not only would Skripal now be dead but quite a few other people in the nearby area would also be dead, such is the potency of the named agent. ..."
"... If we take into account the accusations against Russia of using chemical weapons in Syria, which again were suspect. Then we can plainly see that this latest event in England, can at the very least be seen in a similar light. ..."
"... This is what confuses me about the incident, how was it administered and how come they are not dead? Novichok agents are not widely known but I did find some information from https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/novichok-agent ..."
"... If Novichok was found in Zizzi then either the attempted murderers followed Skripal there or Skripal himself was carrying it. Unless the agent placed it in the targets food (very carefully), every other method I can think of had a large chance of killing members of the public and the agents themselves. ..."
"... As Skripal was outside when he become unconscious the most likely method is that someone walking past sprayed the powder in his face. Assuming of course it was Novichok. A slower acting agent would make things a lot easier and safer. ..."
"... Assuming of course that the whole thing wasn't faked. ..."
"... Excellent article. The UK media and Westminster are suffering from mass hysteria again just like, as you correctly state, they did with Saddam Hussain. It seems to be a case of guilty until proved innocent. ..."
"... The UK authorities actions in Salisbury seem either inept or suspicious. Shortly after finding Skripal and his daughter, and realising this was a nerve gas attack, I'd have expected an evacuation of the surrounding area, if not the whole town. Once they determined it was from the Novichok (spelling, Craig?) family, at least one of which is extremely powerful, it seems perhaps more likely the whole town should have been evacuated – rather than a recommendation to those in the bar and restaurant to wash their clothes etc. ..."
"... There would also be a manhunt underway to try and find the perpetrator(s). ..."
"... what is saddest about this incident is that the UK public have been infected by JamesBondism for generations, and spooks are very "sexed up" ..."
"... Major Alert ! Britain is undefended against Chemical Attack. Whether from False Flag, Terrorists, Russian or Israeli. The Threat Response demonstrated a complete shambolic readiness and zero contingency planning. ..."
"... Russia has humiliated the US, UK, Israel and Saudi Arabia in the middle east with its successful support of Syria. This could well be an attempt at retaliation. Qui buno ? Putin? Lest we forget, they do this kind of stuff, but are rarely caught. ..."
"... Here was a documented and utterly undeniable false flag, inside job, with Israel/US fingerprints all over it, does anybody remember how the media howled at the time, blaming Iraq, compounding the prevalent fear so soon after 9/11. Remember how silent they were when it turned out to be yet another one of their gigantic lies. ..."
"... Anthrax: The Forgotten False Flag and the Illegal Invasion of Iraq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP2G-cejYhI ..."
"... Another false flag lie that helped launch a war. The Incubator Babies Conspiracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v94WsjWKQ3U ..."
"... I expect May knows full well it wasn't the Russians behind this poisoning attack. The whole pantomime is necessary so they can turn a blind eye to the real perpetrators, for which our government probably gets some favour in return. ..."
"... YES! It was [like] the White Helmets. Now it all makes sense. The discrepancies form a pattern called British state bullshite. ..."
Mar 14, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk
Michael Dean March 13, 2018 at 12:24

The assassination of a Hamas commander in Dubai is confirmed as a Mossad operation, it will not be the first time that Israeli agents have used or tried to obtain foreign passports.

Forty-nine-year-old Mahmoud ¬al-Mabhouh was found dead in his room at the Al-Bustan Rotana hotel last month, and within days Hamas officials claimed he had been murdered as part of a secret operation by the Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service.
Dubai police said yesterday they were looking for 11 suspects with regard to the killing, all carrying European passports – six from Britain, three from Ireland and one each from France and Germany. Dubai's police chief said the assassination was a foreign intelligence operation by Israel.

Michael Dean March 13, 2018 at 12:34

Two suspected agents were jailed for six months in 2004 in New Zealand for trying to falsely obtain a New Zealand passport. They were caught when an immigration official noticed a passport applicant was speaking with an American or Canadian accent.

Helen Clark, then prime minister of New Zealand, criticised Israel for behaving in a way "unacceptable internationally by any country". She said at the time: "The breach of New Zealand laws and sovereignty by agents of the Israeli government has seriously strained our relationship with Israel.

Michael Dean March 13, 2018 at 12:23

Agents from Mossad were caught with foreign passports, triggering diplomatic rows. In 1997, two using forged Canadian passports were arrested in Amman after trying to assassinate Khalid Meshal, a Hamas official by spraying poison into his ear!

The agents were quickly captured & their mission backfired spectacularly. Israel was forced to hand over an antidote that saved Meshal's life & had to release Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas spiritual leader, from prison, while also incurring the anger of key Arab ally Jordan. That operation was carried out while Binyamin Netanyahu was prime minister.

AndyM March 13, 2018 at 10:21

I was already assuming that Putin would have nothing to do with this. He has too much to lose, while others have too much to gain. Simply looking at Syria, where the intentions of the West, together with it's Gulf allies, have been thwarted, would be enough of a reason. This is a time chosen to do most harm to Russia, with both the elections and the World Cup imminent.

I thought that May would have shown more common sense, but seems to have been easily bullied into following the ideas of the American Press, or even the Russian haters in UK. That said, there was probably also a trigger; a reason to bump him off anyway, where that was combined with the intention to cause most harm to Russian interests, (If they have to do it, then they might as well achieve the most from it.) The question is 'Why did they have to do it and to whom was he a threat or nuisance? I really do not think that Putin gives a toss about the Skripals, and with the daughter living in Russia, Skripal was probably careful not to put her in danger. Which means it is even more unlikely to be Russia. We never do our own dirty work of course, that is what 'special relationships' are for.

Republicofscotland March 13, 2018 at 10:25

Stepping back for a moment, I'm now even more convinced that the nerve agent attack in Sailsbury was staged.

Listening to ex-CIA agent Philip Giraldi speak about the particular nerve agent used against Skirpal, it seem clear that not only would Skripal now be dead but quite a few other people in the nearby area would also be dead, such is the potency of the named agent.

So why has this whole event come about, is it an attempt to damage Putin's election chances? In my opinion Putin will still win comfortably though definitely not fairly.

Is it some sort of payback for the somewhat not proven fully attempts of Russian hacking in the US and Germany.

If we take into account the accusations against Russia of using chemical weapons in Syria, which again were suspect. Then we can plainly see that this latest event in England, can at the very least be seen in a similar light.

MightyDrunken March 13, 2018 at 14:12

This is what confuses me about the incident, how was it administered and how come they are not dead? Novichok agents are not widely known but I did find some information from https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/novichok-agent

Apparently these agents only require a few mg to kill, being more deadly than other nerve agents. Novichok is believed to be in powder form and starts to act in seconds, with death in minutes.

If Novichok was found in Zizzi then either the attempted murderers followed Skripal there or Skripal himself was carrying it. Unless the agent placed it in the targets food (very carefully), every other method I can think of had a large chance of killing members of the public and the agents themselves.

As Skripal was outside when he become unconscious the most likely method is that someone walking past sprayed the powder in his face. Assuming of course it was Novichok. A slower acting agent would make things a lot easier and safer.

LondonBob March 13, 2018 at 14:25

Link for the Giraldi interview?

Republicofscotland March 13, 2018 at 16:38

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVx5yjPY8NE

Ian Fantom March 13, 2018 at 10:46

Assuming of course that the whole thing wasn't faked.

Colliedogs March 13, 2018 at 10:49

Excellent article. The UK media and Westminster are suffering from mass hysteria again just like, as you correctly state, they did with Saddam Hussain. It seems to be a case of guilty until proved innocent.

GeorgeS March 13, 2018 at 10:54

The UK authorities actions in Salisbury seem either inept or suspicious. Shortly after finding Skripal and his daughter, and realising this was a nerve gas attack, I'd have expected an evacuation of the surrounding area, if not the whole town. Once they determined it was from the Novichok (spelling, Craig?) family, at least one of which is extremely powerful, it seems perhaps more likely the whole town should have been evacuated – rather than a recommendation to those in the bar and restaurant to wash their clothes etc.

As I understand it (from Googling), the Novichuk agents are binary and the formula for one of them may be in the public domain, namely a book by this insider – http://vilmirzayanov.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/novichok-chemical-formulas-are-not.html
The book, which I have not bought or read, is at https://www.amazon.com/State-Secrets-Insiders-Chronicle-Chemical/dp/1432725661

MJ March 13, 2018 at 11:36

There would also be a manhunt underway to try and find the perpetrator(s).

David Marchesi March 13, 2018 at 10:55

what is saddest about this incident is that the UK public have been infected by JamesBondism for generations, and spooks are very "sexed up" . The John Hale book "The Whistleblower" points out that "secret agents"(at least the management -grade) are similar the world over, rather as "special forces" men are surely interchangeable merely of different nationalities.

So the public is receptive to a Hollywood-style scenario where truth is the first casualty. We start from the position that we are the good guys, together with our good friends, like the Yanks and the Israelis. And end at the same point. It's a win-win situation for the media moguls and sleazy politicians, whose combined honour is about the same as the amount of whatever required to kill "x" number of double/triple/quadruple agents. A wonderful weapon of mass distraction, stage management of the highest order. Grotesque.

PeteB March 13, 2018 at 11:38

Something that seems strange to me is that the OPCW verified on 27/9/17 that Russia had destroyed all of its chemical weapons https://www.opcw.org/news/article/opcw-director-general-commends-major-milestone-as-russia-completes-destruction-of-chemical-weapons-stockpile-under-opcw-verification/ A major propaganda boost for Russia, since the USA have still not destroyed all of theirs.

So to hold Putin responsible we have to believe that a) he successfully concealed CW stock from OPCW inspectors in order to achieve certification and then b) within 6 months of doing so, reveals that he has such material by ordering it to be used to assassinate a low-value target in a way and location that guarantees the material being identified, being impossible to conceal and causing much outraged publicity. Thus losing, or at least losing credibility for, Russian compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Tony_0pmoc March 13, 2018 at 11:55

Craig,

Brilliant article. I agree with all of that, except the bit about Crimea. The Russians were already legally there, hosting their Black Sea Fleet, where they had been since 1783. They didn't shoot anyone, and the population of Crimea voted overwhelmingly, to again become a part of Russia. If that hadn't have happened, Crimea's fate would be even worse than that of the Donbass, with very heavy casualties in Sevestapol, and quite probably a hot shooting war between Russians already stationed there, and American mercenaries if not their full army. The Americans obviously wanted to take Sevastpol from the Russians, and were defeated without a shot being fired. WWIII has so fare been avoided (I hope).

Otherwise, one of the best things you have ever written.

The Crimea referendum vote must have been because of the economy. Remove the Russian fleet from Sebastopol, and the Crimean economy would have been up the creek, with nothing to replace it from Kiev.

John A March 13, 2018 at 14:20

The US were fully determined to take over Sevastopol and the naval base. So much so they had drawn up plans and for putting contracts out to tender. They would certainly have kept the Crimean economy afloat.

Crimea was the main target for the US coup in Kiev. To deprive Russia of its Black Sea naval base.

graham wilson March 13, 2018 at 11:59

The first one to rule out is Russia. So blaming Russia is the game here. Could be Mossad, they would be favourites. The cold war goes on, Russia are an impediment to the West in the M/E, the key area for control of energy, the crucial big weapon as they see it. The US deep state do not trust Trump and try to smear his victory crying Russian involvement. Now they strike back and interfere in Russian elections! They won't like his art of the deal sit down with NK, he's off message to them. These things are all distractions for the mass of people. The BBC was primed ready to launch the Russia story on QT last Thursday, straight out the blocks no evidence required.

MJ March 13, 2018 at 12:12

"Could be Mossad, they would be favourites"

If it were Mossad I think the job would have been done properly. To me it's got a distinctively British, naff quality, from the botched assassination attempt right up to the bumbling police response.

"If it were Mossad I think the job would have been done properly."

Not at all. Mossad have botched lots of assassinations and false-flags, going back to the Lavon Affair in Cairo in 1954. In any case, the point here was not to kill the guy, but to put the blame on Putin.

Michael Dean March 13, 2018 at 12:19

The Crimean authorities have relied on the well-known Kosovo precedent, a precedent our Western partners created themselves, with their own hands, so to speak. In a situation absolutely similar to the Crimean one, they deemed Kosovo's secession from Serbia to be legitimate, arguing everywhere that no permission from the country's central authorities was required for the unilateral declaration of independence.

The UN's international court, based on Paragraph 2 of Article 1 of the UN Charter, agreed with that, and in its decision of 22 July 2010 noted the following, and I quote verbatim: No general prohibition may be inferred from the practice of the Security Council with regard to unilateral declarations of independence.

UN's Int. Court No prohibition may be inferred from the practice of the Security Council regarding unilateral declarations of independence

Colin Brown March 13, 2018 at 12:27

So today the BBC website is linking to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/415742.stm – where Uzbekistan's inheritance of chemical weapons facilities was dismantled with US experts.
Many possibilities arise for continuation of that work by Russia's enemies .. any comment from Our Man in Uzbekistan, Craig?

P March 13, 2018 at 12:33

Major Alert ! Britain is undefended against Chemical Attack. Whether from False Flag, Terrorists, Russian or Israeli. The Threat Response demonstrated a complete shambolic readiness and zero contingency planning.

Forget about the threat from Russia, they can turn Britain (in totality) into a smouldering radioactive waste ground. The UK cannot countermeasure this threat, it cannot defend against it and it seems the only reprisal it can take is not to send our brave footballers to the World Cup.

Who are doing the most killings in the world? It's not the jihadies.

But thanks to HMG's response to the Salisbury incident the jihadies now know how to paralyse Britain.

Even a low grade co-ordinated Chemical Attack across multiple sites, pubs, restaurants, transport hubs, shopping centres, sports venues etc will crate chaos (terror)

They still don't know what the toxin was, they don't know where it came from, who delivered it, how it was administered or why. (the why is the most important of these, fat old blokes are easy to kill – this needed to be global news).

We do however know about the route the pair took, where they ate, drank. What flowers were put on a grave, a car recovered, a helicopter (don't mention the helicopter spreading a chemical weapon over Salisbury). The house, the red bag the brave Detective sgt first on the scene, before uniformed constables or ambulance and his visit to the victims home.

We know lots now but we still don't know what, who and why but we do know how to cripple Britain

Thank you HMG for making that known and making us less safe.

Sharp Ears March 13, 2018 at 12:34

Craig is correct about Mossad. There are many instances of assassination.

In 1992, an El Al Boeing 747 cargo plane crashed near Schipol airport and Avner Cohen reports that it had a shipment of DMMP, used in the manufacture of sarin nerve gas. From the Israeli government's public reaction to this tragedy, it seems that the policy of ambiguity and opacity that surround Israel's use and deployment of nuclear weapons, developed by Israel as a strategy to contain and threaten the Arab states without the danger of alienating US support, is also being followed in dealing with the problem of Israel's refusal to ratify the Chemical Weapons treaty and join the Biological Weapons Treaty.

fredi March 13, 2018 at 12:39

Russia has humiliated the US, UK, Israel and Saudi Arabia in the middle east with its successful support of Syria. This could well be an attempt at retaliation. Qui buno ? Putin? Lest we forget, they do this kind of stuff, but are rarely caught.

Here was a documented and utterly undeniable false flag, inside job, with Israel/US fingerprints all over it, does anybody remember how the media howled at the time, blaming Iraq, compounding the prevalent fear so soon after 9/11. Remember how silent they were when it turned out to be yet another one of their gigantic lies.

Anthrax: The Forgotten False Flag and the Illegal Invasion of Iraq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP2G-cejYhI

Another false flag lie that helped launch a war. The Incubator Babies Conspiracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v94WsjWKQ3U

Tom March 13, 2018 at 12:46

An excellent piece. The Russian scare is almost certainly nothing more than a smokescreen so the real perpetrators can get away. We have seen this tactic in all the recent terrorist attacks, complete with the huge police search that inevitably turns up nothing except red herrings, and certainly not any ringleaders.

And leaving aside which state was behind this, why aren't there any clues about the would-be assassins?

I expect May knows full well it wasn't the Russians behind this poisoning attack. The whole pantomime is necessary so they can turn a blind eye to the real perpetrators, for which our government probably gets some favour in return.

Republicofscotland March 13, 2018 at 12:58

Well according to FT's correspondent in Moscow.

"Russia will not respond to Britain's request to explain its alleged role in the attempted murder of a former Russian spy in the UK until Moscow is allowed access to the case materials, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said."

https://amp.ft.com/content/42417f04-26ac-11e8-b27e-cc62a39d57a0?__twitter_impression=true

Looks like Russia's Foreign Minister, has called May's bluff. But I'm pretty sure that the Tory government, see's the production of hard evidence and supplying said evidence to Russia as a non starter.

Its far more important to achieve a consensus from their allies, which it looks like they have, and move forward with implementing some sort of retribution, which ever form it takes.

Red Robbo March 13, 2018 at 13:07

Another interesting post by Craig. So basically lots of states could have used Novichok, including the UK at Porton Down, just a few miles from where the young woman was treated for vomiting by a doctor who wasn't wearing any protection.

Squeeth March 13, 2018 at 13:42

YES! It was [like] the White Helmets. Now it all makes sense. The discrepancies form a pattern called British state bullshite.

Philmo March 13, 2018 at 13:09

The Israeli hardliners certainly have more to gain in muddying waters, causing distractions from their Palestinian atrocities and in addition tweak the Russian noses for discouraging their participation, opposing Shia elements. The Israelis could, of course, depend on support from Tories and May/Patel in particular!

Republicofscotland March 13, 2018 at 13:14

Meanwhile the BBC are playing down Donald Trump's shock removal of Rex Tillerson, whose been replaced by Mike Pompeo, as Secretary of State.

Tillerson who was the US Secretary of State has been very vocal on the alleged nerve agent attack in Salisbury – Tillerson had no qualms about blaming Russia.

[Mar 14, 2018] Iraq is a country, in which, even the most pro-American Iraqis (outside of the Kurdish dominated region), will, at this very moment deciding that they have been screwed!

Notable quotes:
"... Iraq is a country, in which, even the most pro-American Iraqis (outside of the Kurdish dominated region), will, at this very moment (2017.09.28.17h03 NA EDT) be 100% deciding that they have been screwed! And not very nicely, at that. ..."
Mar 14, 2018 | www.unz.com

One Tribe , September 28, 2017 at 9:13 pm GMT

@Ron Unz

First of all, thank you Andrei Martyanov for the very informative analysis/article. Also, thank you Ron Unz for this supporting addendum.

I am very much interested in further information concerning the U.S. military establishments seeming (increasingly alluded to) weak assessment/intelligence of Russian military capability, especially armaments.

Iraq is going to be a topic of (likely dramatically) increasing heat and attention (in the uncensored press which reports on the issues that are the most important to everyone alive, like this web site). The 'referendum' in the Kurdish dominated area of Iraq will make the 24 month long reverse polarization of Turkey (from NATO/US partner to Russian partner) look like an indecisive epic.

If anyone thought the 'war' in Iraq was going poorly for the Americans before, 'they ain't seen nothing yet'! Also, the passing the point of no return for Turkey; they've had enough lies and disingenuous promises from the Euroangangstas; their future association to the U.S. and (western) Europe will be exclusively from the Eurasian-centric multi-polar world perspective, under which they will prosper as well or better than they ever have before.

Iraq is a country, in which, even the most pro-American Iraqis (outside of the Kurdish dominated region), will, at this very moment (2017.09.28.17h03 NA EDT) be 100% deciding that they have been screwed! And not very nicely, at that.

With all of this Russiaphobia (let us not forget that this emanating as a deflection from the revelations a corrupt candidate who was cheating to win a party's nomination for the U.S. presidential candidate), it is highly politically incorrect to reference how far ahead V. Putin's geopolitical movement is compared to the west, especially the civil war crippled U.S.A..

One can see so much thoughtfulness and 'communication' in the completely unnecessary flight path, through Iraq of the bombers delivering their payloads.
In fact, it could be the most telling aspect of the entire operation!

Iraq is lost to the western empire.

Unfortunately, the response to on-ground western-empire supported aggression in the Kurdish-dominated region of Iraq, and likely in other Kurdish dominated middle eastern regions (outside of Iran), will like be decisive and therefore brutal (but, alas, understandable).

[Mar 14, 2018] I think the underlying assumption of your post - that a Novichok programme existed - is open to serious doubt

Notable quotes:
"... The British government is now demanding that Russia make a full disclosure of its Novichok programme by Tuesday evening. A Russian denial that such a programme existed will be taken as proof of guilt. ..."
Mar 14, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

yoffa | Mar 12, 2018 9:04:40 PM | 59

b

I think the underlying assumption of your post - that a Novichok programme existed - is open to serious doubt.

The only source for the story of a Soviet/Russian programme to develop a new class of military nerve agents codenamed Novichoks is a defector in the 1990s named Vil Mirzayanov. He claimed that one of these compounds was 5 to 8 times more toxic than VX and that production of these compounds had continued after the Chemical Weapons Convention came into effect. He explained the many publications in the open literature by Soviet chemists on compounds with similar structures as a deception to provide cover for secret research on other more toxic compounds, and gave structures for these compounds.

A review of chemical warfare agents in 2016 ( http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/chapter/bk9781849739696-00001/978-1-84973-969-6) by Robin Black, who had just retired as head of the detection lab at Porton Down, states that there is no independent confirmation of Mirzayanov's claims about the chemical properties of Novichok compounds.

The report of the OPCW's Scientific Advisory Board's meeting in April 2013 made a similar statement, and did not recommend adding these compounds or their precursors to the list of scheduled chemicals banned or restricted under the CWC. The members of the scientific advisory board included people who, like Black, were heads of western chemical defence labs. These labs would almost surely have undertaken experimental tests of Mirzayanov's claims about the toxicity of these compounds. So if members of the scientific advisory board who were in a position to know the results of these experiments did not recommend adding these compounds to the list of scheduled chemicals, we can reasonably infer that they were not found to be military grade nerve agents.

The British government is now demanding that Russia make a full disclosure of its Novichok programme by Tuesday evening. A Russian denial that such a programme existed will be taken as proof of guilt.

[Mar 14, 2018] FOURTEEN AND A HALF CERTAINTIES ABOUT THE CASE OF SERGEI SKRIPAL by John Helmer

If this really was a nerve gas there are multiple unexplainable details. For example, the doctor who fist treated both on the bench did not develop any symptoms. Another strange thing is that handing of the case violated standard protocols of dealing with military agents (which includes evacuation of the neighborhood). Another strange thing is why anybody on the scene is still alive? Why Skripals developed symptoms on the bench if nerve against was in this home. Who would be both instantly killed at home, if their home was contaminated with this substance.
So it might well be that Skripals suffered from something else. And nerve can well be introduced later as a part of false flag operation against Russia, which used (can well be accidental) collapse of both the Skripals (collapse, which can among other things be caused by narcotics).
Note that No.2 and No.3 suggest that two agents were used.
Notable quotes:
"... whereas there was a doctor who looked after the patients in the open, who hasn't been affected at all ..."
"... the poison cannot have been fast-acting for them at home ..."
"... the poison was faster-acting for Sgt Bailey because he developed symptoms almost immediately at the Skripal house ..."
Mar 14, 2018 | johnhelmer.net

At the moment, according to police and government releases and the British state media, the crime scene in Salisbury is being combed by at least 250 police officers; with another 180 military personnel specializing in chemical warfare. Dozens more electronic surveillance and cyber-warfare agents are also engaged. The crime scene locations include the Skripal house; the cemetery graves of Skripal's wife and son; the Mill public house where Skripal and his daughter had a drink; the Zizzi restaurant where they ate before collapsing; and the public areas where they walked between house, pub, restaurant, the Maltings shopping precinct, and park bench.

At least 240 pieces of evidence have reportedly been identified as such, not counting the Skripal house, and 200 witnesses interviewed, including Wiltshire Police Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey. He developed symptoms after being despatched to the Skripal house. That is, after the Skripals had been found and hospitalized.

According to Lord Ian Blair, a former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, "there are some indications that the police officer who was injured had been to the house, whereas there was a doctor who looked after the patients in the open, who hasn't been affected at all . So there maybe some clues floating around in here." Blair said this on the BBC.

His disclosure, also confirmed in several newspapers, provides the first certainty in the case: the Skripals came into contact with the poison for the first time inside their own home. They then went out to the pub and the restaurant.

Certainty No. 2 – the poison cannot have been fast-acting for them at home .

Certainty No. 3 – the poison was faster-acting for Sgt Bailey because he developed symptoms almost immediately at the Skripal house .

Follow the next eleven certainties.

Certainty No. 4. Prime Minister Theresa May has identified the poison as a "military grade nerve agent part of a group of nerve agents known as Novichok." Listen to May making her announcement in the House of Commons yesterday.

... .... ...

After they had left their home on Sunday afternoon, the Skripals spent more than an hour before developing symptoms. It is certain, therefore, that there were two sites of active poisoning. The Skripals must have carried the poison from their home through the streets to the mall, the pub, and the restaurant, before they were exposed. The large numbers of police, special service agents and soldiers have been deployed in order to trace the route the Skripals took, and all points at which they stopped, in order to identify, measure and map all concentrations, then dilute or destroy them for public safety.

Certainty no. 7. The British forces have inventoried all contents of the Skripal home, and verified all deliveries to the house, including mail and packages before last Sunday. They are certain to know if there are traces of the chemical components required for the Novichok combination, and whether these traces are in separate locations of the house. It is certain they have asked themselves how the nerve agent was active in the house to strike Sgt Bailey, but inactive for the Skripals until hours later.

Certainty No. 8. The British secret services and the Porton Down Defence Science and Technology Laboratory near Salisbury know what contact, if any, there has been recently between Skripal, his British secret service contacts and the Porton Down lab.

Certainty No. 9. The British Government agencies have informed Prime Minister May if samples of Novichok components, and of the active nerve agent itself, are in stock at Porton Down.

Certainty No. 10 The Prime Minister has not informed the House of Commons if Novichok is -- or was until Sunday evening -- in stock at Porton Down.

Certainty No. 11 . Although the British, American, and Russian secret services have the electronic capability to have been monitoring the Skripal house, Yulia Skripal on her travel from Moscow to Salisbury, and Sergei Skripal at home, in advance of the poisoning, they are unlikely to have been doing so on Sunday afternoon. British sources add that the security perimeter for the Porton Down establishment doesn't extend the nine kilometres (twelve by road) to Salisbury town.

However, it is certain, the sources acknowledge, that in retrospect the British and American services will have identified all unusual mobile telephone, other electronic signals and encrypted messaging around the Skripals on Sunday, including computer, internet and mobile telephone signals the Skripals sent and received before the Sunday events. Just as certainly, the Russian services will have the retrospective capacity to follow the communications of all their agents in the vicinity, if any there were. It is sure that if there had been a Russian operation targeting Skripal, an unusual volume of electronic evidence would now be visible to the British and Americans -- and the Russians would know it.

... ... ...

[Mar 14, 2018] The link between Christopher Steele and Sergei Skirpal is made in the UK Telegraph

Mar 14, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Julian | Mar 13, 2018 6:37:57 AM | 91

By the way - the link between Christopher Steele and Sergei Skirpal is made in the UK Telegraph.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/07/poisoned-russian-spy-sergei-skripal-close-consultant-linked/#comments

Read the comments - 90% bring up Hillary!

Anyone working for Hillary in anything dodgy has a history of ending up dead!

HA.

Anonymous , Mar 13, 2018 4:11:56 AM | 82
If Skripal was actually murdered, that would be an indication of the MAGNITUDE of the problem he posed to someone.

HENCE: almost certainly a clean-up operation by the Russiagate organizers in DC who are beginning to feel the heat.

It may be that there is now another DC faction who has decided that Brennan's Russiagate costume play has gone far enough and it's time for the adults to take over.

Ike , Mar 13, 2018 3:06:05 AM | 79
This was probably carried out by Mi6 for the Steel dossier reasons but also to bolster their shattered ego's after Putin's announcement re his nuclear weapons. More sanctions will just backfire as the last ones did and surely anything more than a symbolic response from NATO would only happen if they are complete idiots......oh wait a minute!

[Mar 14, 2018] Not only is Russia groundlessly and provocatively accused of the Salisbury incident, but apparently, plans are being developed in the UK to strike Russia with cyber weapons

Mar 14, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

"Today the Embassy sent a note to the Foreign Office reiterating that Russia is not involved in the Salisbury incident and outlining the above mentioned demands for joint investigation."

The embassy added: "UK Ambassador Laurence Bristow was summoned to Russia's ministry of foreign affairs, where first deputy FM Vladimir Titov strongly protested the evidence-free accusations by the UK authorities of Russia's alleged involvement in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

"It was stated that the actions of the UK authorities are a clear provocation and that the Russian Federation was not involved in the incident that took place in Salisbury on March 4, 2018." * * *

Meanwhile, the Press Association reports that Russia has warned Britain to "consider the consequences" of mounting a retaliatory cyber strike after the Salisbury spy poisoning.

In a fresh sign of the escalating diplomatic tension sparked by the case, the Russian Embassy cautioned against "such a reckless move".

...

The Government has not publicly disclosed the options under consideration but reports on Tuesday suggested one possibility was a cyber counter-attack.

Responding to the speculation, the Russian Embassy in the UK said: "Statements by a number of MPs, 'Whitehall sources' and 'experts' regarding a possible 'deployment' of 'offensive cyber-capabilities' cause serious concern.

"Not only is Russia groundlessly and provocatively accused of the Salisbury incident, but apparently, plans are being developed in the UK to strike Russia with cyber weapons.

"Judging by the statements of the Prime Minister, such a decision can be taken at tomorrow's meeting of the National Security Council.

"We invite the British side to once again consider the consequences of such a reckless move."

Additionally, Zakharova stated that British Prime Minister Theresa May apparently has no actual facts concerning the poisoning of former Russian military intelligence Colonel Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

"No one knows anything, including Theresa May, who has no actual fact in her hands," Zakharova told the 60 Minutes program on the Rossiya-1 television channel.

Finally, following reports that Britain's media regulator Ofcom said Russian broadcaster RT could lose its UK licence if Theresa May's government determines that Moscow was behind the poisoning of a former Russian double agent in England this month, Russia's foreign ministry threatened retaliation:

"...not a single British media outlet with work in Russia if London shuts RT."


philipat -> The_Juggernaut Tue, 03/13/2018 - 13:35 Permalink

Agreed. Who the fuck does May think she is? Other than confirming that this is a false flag backed by a "rich uncle" with Russian sanctions and Nord Stream 2 front and centre?

skbull44 -> ???ö? Tue, 03/13/2018 - 13:37 Permalink

Iraqi WMDs all over again ... https://Olduvai.ca

pazmaker -> skbull44 Tue, 03/13/2018 - 13:43 Permalink

If this was Russia they would not still be alive.

EuroPox -> BaBaBouy Tue, 03/13/2018 - 13:47 Permalink

So, with no evidence at all, the utterly incompetent PM, Theresa May, demands action from Russia within 24 hours – which is completely different to the protocol set out in the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which has 165 signatories including the UK and Russia . WTF!!!!

How can anyone have allowed her to make such an embarrassing error? Whoever is advising her does not even know the terms of international agreements the UK has signed?

What on earth is going on? The PM is making a total laughing stock of the UK!

Freddie -> Beam Me Up Scotty Tue, 03/13/2018 - 16:32 Permalink

Mi6 aka 007 and James Bond. Mi6 = the Roth$schilds/Bank of England murder gang. Just like the CIA and all the Spec Ops.

Murdering innocent people for the bankers plus also the Clintons, Bushes and Obama who are ALL CIA lackeys.

east of eden -> Freddie Tue, 03/13/2018 - 18:04 Permalink

Yes, and the elites in Britain have had their own people under their thumb since forever. Maybe, just maybe, we are going to start to the see the beginning of some grass root movements to slice and dice some of the old guard. Just enough so the rest of them take notice, or rather, are put on notice.

Shillinlikeavillan -> BennyBoy Tue, 03/13/2018 - 18:38 Permalink

This is why women in power is BAD fuckin news...

Dipshit may claimed that this "Novichok" nerve agent was used to kill thousands of people during her rant, when it is clear that it NEVER made it past the laboratory and was used in a small empty field test. And on top of that, Novichok hasn't been even seen by anyone since the late 80's, it's actual existence is highly questionable... hell, knowing how drugs are, the shit probably expired and broke down to something harmless after sitting around for 30+ years...

beemasters -> Shillinlikeavillan Tue, 03/13/2018 - 19:11 Permalink

Why would Russia poison Mr Skripal and his daughter in the UK with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia???

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_Skripal

Are there no common lethal poisons in England anymore???

MK ULTRA Alpha -> mkkby Tue, 03/13/2018 - 19:01 Permalink

The UK won't release a sample of the nerve gas to Russia?

Because there maybe an impurity in the nerve gas? And the nerve agent sample could tell Russia what production batch and the Russians would be able to track it. The UK is unwilling to allow this.

It was reported, the nerve gas target was still working for Russia, sending data to the Russian military. Proof of this would dispel the theory one of Russians defectors was killed by the Russians. It doesn't make sense, and the Russians wouldn't kill an asset.

One should look at who has the most to gain from stirring it up against Russia.

Would Russia kill a defector who was working for the Russians? No. Would Russia kill someone after Putin made the comment in the Megyn Kelly Putin interview, Putin saying if someone gives us poison, the poison would be given back, or another translation, If they give Russia poison, they will be consumed by their own poison.

The operative word is "poison". In the same interview Putin cites different nationalities could be responsible for the alleged Russian meddling in the US presidential election. The speculative Putin statement has been taking out of context by US media wanting to disrupt Russia, Putin statement it could have been Jews doing the manipulation of the US presidential election.

The nerve gas attack is the work of the Mossad. It is a warning to Putin.

A nerve gas attack in broad day light, at this time, wouldn't be a Russian tactic. The Russians are smarter and more capable than using a Russian nerve agent.

It was TOO DRAMATIC made for TV propaganda. Netanyahu was making the Iran war speech in NYC and then the Netahyahu and Trump stating the Iran war is on. Israel war hawk CIA director Pompeo wouldn't risk it during the Russia election manipulation probe. Too dangerous with limited reward. So no US gain.

Who gains? Israel and the plan to use the Americans as the beast of burden for a new round of wars for Israel. Putin must be warned, and be made a permanent enemy with no possible chance of a Russia US reset.

  1. Kelly Putin interview "poison" and "Jew" both taken out of context.
  2. double agent reporting to Russia is an asset for Russia
  3. the new US Israel relation with promises from Trump to attack Iran.

My analysis points at Israel Mossad.

[Mar 14, 2018] Hysterical hyperventilation of British authorities about Skripal incident suggests that it was pre-plnanned provocation, a false flag operation for fueling Russiphonia and Neo-McCarthyism

The event develop under scenario, which is very close to Litvinenko poisoning and MH17 investigation. Both now are suspected to be false flag operation to demonize Russia.
Mar 14, 2018 | www.unz.com

Randal , March 14, 2018 at 4:08 pm GMT

@Inquiring Mind

How about conducting a chemical WMD strike in the heart of U.K? How about Mr. Putin, O.J. Simpson style, saying "I didn't do it" while at the same time saying "the man deserves to die." How about poisoning a British police officer who did his duty to render aid along with about 20 other people? How about that even if the victims, your traitor along with innocent U.K. citizens survive the immediate effects, they can become permanently disabled and end up in a nursing home with people having to feed you and clean you up?

How about you admitting that you have not a shred of credible evidence for all your hysterical hyperventilation about this trivial incident?

How about you admitting that you cannot produce any remotely credible motivation for Russia doing this, when the costs to Russia of increased confrontation will massively outweigh any possible gains?

The only suggestions that the Russians were responsible for the incident come from exactly the same kinds of people who told us about Iraq's WMD and the supposed Libyan humanitarian emergency. And yes, about supposed suicidal Syrian government uses of chemical weapons that are conveniently just big enough to provide their enemies with yet another big stick to beat them with, but not enough to give them any material advantage.

Basically your idea is that the Syrians and Russians do these things just because they can, because in your opinion they are evil and stupid. And simultaneously, of course, so fiendishly cunning that they are threats to the world if not suppressed.

[Mar 14, 2018] President Donald Trump has assured Prime Minister Theresa May that the U.S. is "with the U.K. all the way" and said Russia must provide clear answers about the nerve-agent poisoning of a former spy

Notable quotes:
"... Lavrov told reporters on Tuesday Moscow's requests to see samples of the nerve agent have been turned down, which he called a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which outlaws the production of chemical weapons. He insisted that Russia is "not to blame" for the poisoning. ..."
"... Lavrov said on Tuesday Moscow is willing to cooperate with the probe but suggested that London would be "better off" complying with its international obligations "before putting forward ultimatums." ..."
Mar 14, 2018 | www.truthdig.com

Britain says U.S. President Donald Trump has assured Prime Minister Theresa May that the U.S. is "with the U.K. all the way" and said Russia must provide clear answers about the nerve-agent poisoning of a former spy.

May's office says Trump and the British leader spoke by phone on Tuesday afternoon.

... ... ...

It says Trump "said the U.S. was with the U.K. all the way, agreeing that the Russian government must provide unambiguous answers as to how this nerve agent came to be used."

Russia says it will not meet a British deadline of midnight Tuesday to provide answers unless the U.K. shares samples of the nerve agent

___

6:00 p.m.

Russia's Foreign Ministry has sternly warned Britain against shutting the office of Russian state-funded RT television, saying it will lead to the closure of British media's bureaus in Moscow.

The ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said in televised remarks Tuesday that "not a single British media outlet will be able to work in our country if they close RT."

Zakharova's statement came in response to a warning by British media regulator Ofcom that RT could be stripped of its broadcasting license in the U.K. in the wake of the nerve agent attack on former spy Sergei Skripal.

Britain has given Russia until midnight Tuesday to explain how a Russian-made nerve agent came to be used in an English city, or face retaliatory measures.

___

5:15 p.m.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says Russia must provide "quick answers to the legitimate questions posed by the British government" about the poisoning of an ex-spy and his daughter.

Merkel's office said the German leader spoke by phone on Tuesday with British Prime Minister Theresa May and condemned the nerve agent attack "in the sharpest manner."

The chancellor assured May that she took Britain's assessment about Russia's likely responsibility for the attack "extraordinarily seriously."

Merkel urged Russia to "comprehensively and immediately" reveal its chemical weapons program to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

___

4:30 p.m.

A lawyer says a Russian businessman who had associated with a prominent critic of the Kremlin who died in London in 2013 also has been found dead in the British capital.

Andrei Borovkov told Russian media outlets on Tuesday that his client, Nikolai Glushkov, has died, but said he was unaware of the time and circumstances.

Reports in British and Russian media say Glushkov, who was in his late 60s, was found dead at his home in southwest London.

London's Metropolitan Police force says officers are investigating the "unexplained" death of a man found at a house in the New Malden area late Monday. It did not identify him by name.

Glushkov was a friend of Boris Berezovsky, a Russian oligarch who died in London in 2013. An inquest failed to determine whether he had killed himself or died from foul play.

London police say counterterrorism detectives are leading the investigation "as a precaution because of associations that the man is believed to have had."

Police say there is no evidence to suggest a link to the March 4 poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

___

3:50 p.m.

Britain's representative to the global chemical weapons watchdog says Russia has "failed for many years to declare chemical weapons development programs which date from the 1970s" and London has demanded that Moscow now "come clean."

Ambassador Peter Wilson told reporters Tuesday that London wants "Russia to declare these programs now."

British Prime Minister Theresa May said Monday that a military-grade nerve agent was used in the attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia, and that Russia was "highly likely" to blame.

Wilson also refuted a claim by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that Britain would be breaching the treaty that outlaws chemical weapons if it refuses to share with Moscow samples of the nerve agent.

___

3:35 p.m.

Britain's media regulator says Kremlin-backed news channel RT could lose its license to broadcast in the U.K. in the wake of the nerve agent attack on former spy Sergei Skripal.

The channel has repeatedly been criticized by regulator Ofcom for breaching impartiality standards, and some British lawmakers have called for it to be shut down.

The regulator said Tuesday that it has a duty "to be satisfied that broadcast licensees remain fit and proper to hold their licenses."

Ofcom said it had written to ANO TV Novosti, which holds RT's U.K. broadcast licenses, saying that if Russia is found to be behind the attack, "we would consider this relevant to our ongoing duty to be satisfied that RT is fit and proper."

Britain has given Russia until midnight Tuesday to explain how a Russian-made nerve agent came to be used in an English city, or face retaliatory measures.

___

3:10 p.m.

Denmark's prime minister has said "the use of chemical weapons in a peaceful English town brings back memories of the Cold War."

Lars Loekke Rasmussen was commenting Tuesday on the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in southern England.

Loekke Rasmussen told Denmark's TV2 that his country would consult "with our allies what countermeasures it can lead to."

The Danish government leader also expressed "sympathy with the people affected and solidarity with Britain."

May told Britain's Parliament it is "highly likely" Russia was to blame for the March 4 attack. British police and intelligence reports say that Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia Skripals were poisoned by a military grade nerve agent produced in Russia.

___

2:50 p.m.

The Russian Foreign Ministry says it has handed the British ambassador a note of protest regarding the accusations leveled against Moscow over last week's poisoning of an ex-Russian spy.

Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia remain hospitalized in critical condition after being exposed to a military-grade nerve agent.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has vowed retaliatory measures if Russia offers no explanation for how the nerve agent developed in the Soviet Union came to poison the former spy and his daughter in a British city.

The Russian Foreign Ministry says it has summoned British Ambassador Laurie Bristow and handed him a protest note over the "baseless accusations" leveled against Russia. The ministry dismissed the reaction of British authorities to the attack as "provocative" and said it suspects the poisoning is "another unscrupulous attempt of the British authorities to discredit Russia."

___

2:30 p.m.

British police say the investigation into the chemical agent attack on a former Russian spy will last many weeks, and that they are not declaring a person of interest yet in the probe.

In a brief statement outside police headquarters, new counter-terror chief Neil Basu offered more details on the movements of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia before they were attacked in the English town of Salisbury on March 4. He appealed to the public to come forward if they saw the pair that day.

Basu says the public will see much police activity in and around the city over the coming days and that they should not be alarmed.

Basu also revealed for the first time that Skripal was a British citizen -- a fact that might color the government's response to the incident.

___

2:15 p.m.

Germany's foreign minister says Berlin is "very concerned" about the poisoning of the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in England and is voicing solidarity with Britain.

Sigmar Gabriel said in a statement that he spoke by phone Tuesday with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. He said that "we condemn this attack with a banned chemical weapon in the strongest terms."

Gabriel said that the perpetrators must be brought to justice and added: "If it is confirmed that Russia is behind this, that would be a very serious matter."

Gabriel is to be replaced as foreign minister by Heiko Maas, who is a member of the same party, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel's new government takes office on Wednesday.

___

1:45 p.m.

U.S. President Donald Trump has said "it sounds" like Russia was responsible for the poisoning of an ex-spy and his daughter in England.

Trump told reporters he will discuss the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in southern England with British Prime Minister Theresa May on Tuesday.

"It sounds to me that they believe it was Russia and I would certainly take that finding as fact," Trump said. He added the U.S. will condemn Russia if it agrees with Britain's findings.

His comments came after May told Parliament it is "highly likely" Russia was to blame for the attack.

British police and intelligence reports say that the Skripals were poisoned by a military grade nerve agent produced in Russia.

___

12:40 p.m.

British police have cordoned off a parking lot ticketing machine in the southwestern city of Salisbury as authorities retraced the steps of a former Russian spy and his daughter targeted in a chemical weapons attack.

The ticketing machine near a shopping center in Salisbury, 90 miles (145 kilometers) southwest of London, was covered by a tent similar to those at other sites where Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were seen during a March 4 excursion into the city.

A bench where the pair were found and markers for Skripal's son and wife in a nearby graveyard are also beneath tents.

Authorities say the pair were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent and that Russia is "highly likely" to be behind it. Prime Minister Theresa May is demanding an explanation.

___

12:25 p.m.

The French Foreign Ministry says the nerve agent attack on former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain is "a totally unacceptable attack."

Without mentioning Russia, the ministry said in a statement that France repeatedly expressed "its refusal of impunity for those who use or develop toxic agents."

According to the statement, Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian spoke with his British counterpart, Boris Johnson, to express France's solidarity to "a top and strategic ally."

___

12:20 p.m.

A senior European Union official is calling for an EU-wide response to the poisoning of a former spy amid questions over whether Russia is to blame.

European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans said Tuesday that "we cannot have nerve gas being used in our societies. This should be addressed by all of us."

He told EU lawmakers in Strasbourg, France, that "it is of the utmost importance that those who are responsible for what has happened see very clearly that there is European solidarity, unequivocal, unwavering and very strong."

Timmerman's appeal is a show of solidarity amid tense negotiations on Britain's departure from the EU next year.

Ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in England last week and remain in critical condition.

___

Noon

British Home Secretary Amber Rudd says police and the domestic security service will look into a number of deaths in Britain that may be linked to Russia.

In a letter made public Tuesday, Rudd says the government takes seriously allegations that some 14 deaths may have some links to Russia.

"In the weeks to come, I will want to satisfy myself that the allegations are nothing more than that," Rudd said. "The police and MI5 agree and will assist in that endeavor."

BuzzFeed News reported in 2017 that some 14 deaths in Britain and the United States dating back to 2006 may have been linked to Russia. The cases include some prominent critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin including oligarch Boris Berezovsky and whistle-blower Alexander Perepilichny.

The list also includes former spy Alexander Litvinenko, killed by radioactive tea in 2006, a killing that British officials have linked to the Russian government.

___

11:50 a.m.

The British representative to the world's chemical weapons watchdog says it is highly likely that Russia is implicated in the nerve agent attack on a former spy and his daughter "by failure to control its own materials or by design."

Ambassador Peter Wilson told the Executive Council of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons on Tuesday that "I did not expect to have to brief this council on the first offensive use of a nerve agent of any sort on European territory since World War II."

British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Monday Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter had been poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed in the Soviet Union.

Wilson has called the attack "not just a crime against the Skripals. It was an indiscriminate and reckless act against the U.K., which put the lives of innocent civilians at risk." His comments to the closed-door meeting were tweeted by his delegation.

___

11:30 a.m.

The chairwoman of the upper chamber of the Russian parliament says Britain is trying to influence this weekend's Russian presidential election by accusing Moscow of poisoning an ex-spy.

Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in an English city last week and are in the hospital in critical condition.

Valentina Matviyenko, who is the third most senior official in Russia, said on Tuesday the British prime minister's statement aims to "exert influence and pressure" on the March 18 vote.

British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Monday Russia is "highly likely" to be responsible for the attack.

___

11:20 a.m.

A former chief of Russia's main domestic intelligence agency says another post-Soviet nation could be the source of a rare nerve agent that Britain said was responsible for poisoning a Russian ex-spy in an English city last week.

British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Monday that Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter had been poisoned with Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed in the Soviet Union near the end of the Cold War.

Nikolai Kovalyov, former chief of the FSB, told the Russian news agency on Tuesday that Novichok used to be stored in different parts of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, which have since become independent nations, and that Ukraine or another post-Soviet nation could be the source of it.

Britain has asked the Russian ambassador in London to explain how the nerve agent turned up in the English city of Salisbury, leaving Skripal and his adult daughter in critical condition.

___

11:15 a.m.

Russian news agencies say the Foreign Ministry has summoned the British ambassador in Moscow over the poisoning of a Russian ex-spy.

The foreign ministry was quoted by Russian wires as saying that the ambassador must visit the ministry later on Tuesday.

Britain says a military-grade nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union was used in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. It has demanded a response from Moscow.

___

10:40 a.m.

The chief of the world's chemical weapons watchdog says that those responsible for the nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy and his daughter "must be held accountable."

In a speech Tuesday to the Executive Council of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Director-General Ahmet Uzumcu said British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson called him Monday evening to inform him of the results of investigations into the attack on 66-year-old Sergei Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia.

British Prime Minister Theresa May told Parliament that Russia is "highly likely" to blame for poisoning Skripal and his daughter with a military-grade nerve agent.

Uzumcu says that, "It is extremely worrying that chemical agents are still being used to harm people. Those found responsible for this use must be held accountable for their actions."

Uzumcu's comments to the closed-door meeting were released by the OPCW.

___

10:30 a.m.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says Russia will only cooperate with Britain on the investigation into last week's poisoning of an ex-Russian spy if it receives samples of the nerve agent that is believed to have sickened the ex-spy and his daughter.

Lavrov told reporters on Tuesday Moscow's requests to see samples of the nerve agent have been turned down, which he called a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which outlaws the production of chemical weapons. He insisted that Russia is "not to blame" for the poisoning.

British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Monday Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter had been poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed in the Soviet Union. May said Russia has until the end of Tuesday to explain how the substance ended up in Britain.

Lavrov said on Tuesday Moscow is willing to cooperate with the probe but suggested that London would be "better off" complying with its international obligations "before putting forward ultimatums."

___

9:35 a.m.

Britain's government is considering how to deal with the poisoning of an ex-spy as it awaits a Russian government response to its claim that Russian was involved.

Officials said Tuesday Prime Minister Theresa May is reviewing a range of economic and diplomatic measures.

May has said it is "highly likely" Russia was involved in the nerve agent poisoning of 66-year-old Sergei Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia. Both remain in critical condition.

The prime minister says Russia has until the end of Tuesday to explain its actions in the case, which focuses on a former Russian military intelligence officer who was convicted of spying for Britain and then released in a spy swap.

Former foreign minister David Miliband has urged May to seek support from Europe and the United States.

[Mar 14, 2018] Over in GB, Theresa May lays down a 24 hr ultimatum: does this idiot know what an ultimatum is and what it means and where it leads? August 1914?

Mar 14, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Flavius Reply , 13 March 2018 at 08:10 PM

Trump is President today because in the Republican primaries he faced a fractured slate, many of whom, like Trump, had no business thinking they should be President; and in the election, he faced a corrupt government grifter without political talent whose only salient asset was that she was the wife of a former President, the one who destroyed the bully pulpet. Without the Clintons, there is no Trump.

Trump assumed office with no political friends, with some good ideas that resonated with old line Democrats and people who were tired of 16 years of a disastrous over militarized foreign policy and aimless failing or failed interventions; but unfortunately he had neither tactics, strategy, or personnel to carry those ideas forward; and as if these deficits weren't enough, through some combination of misfeasance and malfeasance, the outgoing Administration, the Intelligence swamp, and the Democratic Party extremists combined to cripple him with a hastily concocted crisis in our relations with Russia. Finally, Trump did not help himself by surrounding himself with Generals and family members, something he had not signaled he would be doing during the campaign.

Trump tapped Tillerson for State precisely because it was reasonable at the time to believe that Tillerson could be instrumental in restoring correct relations with Russia. Alas, it was not to be: neither Trump nor Tillerson were up to steering out of the maelstrom. Still, Trump did not serve himself well by the chickenshit way he got rid of Tillerson.

So how are things now lining up: Trump; Mattis; Pompeo; a career bureaucrat from an undistinguished time frame (to say the least) at CIA: and the perfectly awful, hopelessly unqualified, ranting fool, Nikki Haley.

Over in GB, Theresa May lays down a 24 hr ultimatum: does this idiot know what an ultimatum is and what it means and where it leads? Is there a .300 hitter in the bunch?

JohnsonR said in reply to Pacifica_Advocate... , 13 March 2018 at 08:08 PM
The UK and Israeli elites undoubtedly count among the second order "influencers" that I mentioned, but in the end the US can't use them as excuses. They are only allowed to "influence" the US so strongly because it suits so many powerful people in the US for them to do so, and the "influence" certainly goes both ways, in Britain's case at any rate.

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me". Israel has been manipulating US policy and culture for decades, and Britain has been doing so for a century and more. However, it's a bit absurd to pretend that the scope and scale of British "influence" has even approached that of Israel and its lobbies, certainly in recent decades. British "influence" is nowadays mostly just being useful for particular factions within US politics and government.

[Mar 14, 2018] MoA - Theresa May's 'Novichok' Claims Fall Further Apart

Notable quotes:
"... In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, 'Novichoks' (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of the 'Foliant' programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published. (Black, 2016) ..."
"... Additionally the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has not recognized Novichoks as chemical weapons because it found scant evidence that they exist at all. ..."
"... [The SAB] emphasised that the definition of toxic chemicals in the Convention would cover all potential candidate chemicals that might be utilised as chemical weapons. Regarding new toxic chemicals not listed in the Annex on Chemicals but which may nevertheless pose a risk to the Convention, the SAB makes reference to "Novichoks". The name "Novichok" is used in a publication of a former Soviet scientist who reported investigating a new class of nerve agents suitable for use as binary chemical weapons. The SAB states that it has insufficient information to comment on the existence or properties of "Novichoks". (OPCW, 2013) ..."
"... Theresa's May claims that the Skripals were poisoned with 'Novichok' agents is highly questionable. Her claim that only Russia could be responsible for this is obviously bollocks. ..."
"... But most disturbing about the case are not the false claims Theresa May makes. She is in deep political trouble over the Brexit negotiations and other issues and needs any political diversion that she can get. Blaming Russia for something is en vogue and might help her for a while. ..."
"... No, the most troubling issue is the behavior of the media who fail to point out that May's claims are bluster and that there is no evidence at all that supports her claims. The only paper that is somewhat skeptical is the Irish Times ..."
"... The British opposition leader Corbyn was right today when he demanded that she produces evidence for her claims. A few more pushes and her house of cards will surely come down. ..."
"... it seems to me Russia bashing is really en vogue and nobody important comes out to call May - and Boris - miserable liars. We are lingering at the border of a mayor war. ..."
"... remembering what was written by Arthur Conan Doyle: "There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact". ..."
"... I have little faith that the truth will change matters since it will be suppressed by the anti-Russian media and the political class. It's very depressing--although not surprising--that we find ourselves in this state. ..."
"... Its amazing how easily propaganda works in the west, this is nothing but a psy-operation. ..."
"... Surely the British must have CCTV footage of the perpetrator. Why is does not one seem to be interested in who the person is? Why are there no descriptions from staff and patrons? ..."
"... If they have not been able to identify the perpetrator, why have they not published photos and tried to identify this person. If the perpetrator is still at large in the UK, are they not a threat to other people? Why are the British not trying to find this person? ..."
"... Corbyn is being savaged in the corporate press for questioning May's proof. There's even a hint of yet another leadership challenge within in Labour. If the Blairites are able to claim Corbyn's scalp based on this, one has to truly marvel at the miracle powers of propaganda. ..."
"... Information-, propaganda- and proxy war against Russia had begun in 2012 at least ..."
"... WWIII has already started and we are just witnessing the latest battle/scrimmage. ..."
"... Worthwhile to add the rush to judgement into the "claims fall apart" mix? As the Russians pointed out at OPCW meeting, there's a longstanding agreed procedure to investigating claims of chemical weapons use. ..."
"... Since I read about the "sanctions" I am quite sure, this isn't about Russia at all. It is about blackmailing the EU. Additional stopping North Stream 2. ..."
"... After 6 years of attacks on Putin the only shocking is that we see weak and meek response of Russians for another provocation. Did they not know for sure that a series of provocations were and are coming? ..."
"... This Global McCarthysm is nothing but the expression of panic among political puppets of oligarchic ruling elite that their embellishments are no longer effective in fooling and dividing of population into self destructive herds and that they themselves will be disposed of when their no longer effective lies will be replaced by war and violence within societies all over the world. ..."
Mar 14, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Theresa May's 'Novichok' Claims Fall Further Apart

The British government claims that 'Novichok' poisons, developed 30 years ago in the Soviet Union, affected a British double agent. Such substances may not exits at all.

The 'whistleblower' for the 'Novichok' program and poisons published some chemical formulas that should enable any decent laboratory to reproduce them. But neither the existence of the claimed program nor the existence of the alleged substances were ever accepted by the scientific community.

The highly constructed drama around the alleged poisoning of a British double agent Skripal and his daughter has thus turned into a surreal play. The British government has so far given no evidence that the Skripal's were poisoned at all, or were poisoned by someone else. No detailed medical bulletin was published. The British accusations against Russia lets one assume that a suicide attempt has been excluded. Why?

There is no independent evaluation of the alleged poison. The British government claims that its own chemical weapon laboratory at Porton Down, only a few miles from where the incident happened, has identified the poison as one of the 'Novichok' chemicals.

But in 2016 a leading chemist at Porton Down published a piece in a scientific journal that denied that such chemicals exist. (Tim Hayword and Craig Murray both point this out ):

As recently as 2016 Dr Robin Black, Head of the Detection Laboratory at the UK's only chemical weapons facility at Porton Down, a former colleague of Dr David Kelly, published in an extremely prestigious scientific journal that the evidence for the existence of Novichoks was scant and their composition unknown.

In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, 'Novichoks' (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of the 'Foliant' programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published. (Black, 2016)

Robin Black. (2016) Development, Historical Use and Properties of Chemical Warfare Agents. Royal Society of Chemistry

Additionally the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has not recognized Novichoks as chemical weapons because it found scant evidence that they exist at all. The U.S. and the UK are both part of the organization and both agreed with this evaluation:

The OPCW's Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) appeared to doubt the existence of "Novichoks", and did not advise that the compounds described by Mirzayanov, or their precursors, should be designated as Scheduled Chemicals that should be controlled under the Chemical Weapons Convention:

[The SAB] emphasised that the definition of toxic chemicals in the Convention would cover all potential candidate chemicals that might be utilised as chemical weapons. Regarding new toxic chemicals not listed in the Annex on Chemicals but which may nevertheless pose a risk to the Convention, the SAB makes reference to "Novichoks". The name "Novichok" is used in a publication of a former Soviet scientist who reported investigating a new class of nerve agents suitable for use as binary chemical weapons. The SAB states that it has insufficient information to comment on the existence or properties of "Novichoks". (OPCW, 2013)

The former Soviet scientist, Vil Mirzanjaov, who 'blew the whistle' and wrote about the 'Novichoks', now lives in a $1 million home in the United States. The AFP news agency just interviewed him:

Mirzayanov, speaking at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, said he is convinced Russia carried it out as a way of intimidating opponents of President Vladimir Putin.

"Only the Russians" developed this class of nerve agents, said the chemist. "They kept it and are still keeping it in secrecy."

The only other possibility, he said, would be that someone used the formulas in his book to make such a weapon.

"Russia did it", says Mirzanjaov, "OR SOMEONE WHO READ MY BOOK".


1 , 2

The book was published in 2008 and is available as hardcover, paperback or for $8.16 as an electronic file. It includes a number of formulas which, Mirzanjaov says, could be used to produce those chemical agents. But neither Porton Down nor the OPCW seem convinced that this is possible. They may believe that Mirzanjaov is just full of it.

One customer reviewing Mirzanjaov's book remarked :

[Needs] an editor to throttle back his epic "i'm an epic awesome martyr" stuff and stick to the science.

Another reviewer wrote :

State secrets is by far the most long winded and painfully slow novel on chemical weapons written by a disgruntled defected scientist from Russia I have ever read! If you want to hear an employ with delusions of grandeur moan about every person he ever worked with then this is the book for you, otherwise don't waste your sweet time. Seriously! Nothing happens except Vil somethingkov helps make things that kill people for 30 years, gets a (sort of) conscience, defects, and constantly whinges about.....everything.

Vil Mirzanjaov promoted his book in a 2009 video . Shortly after he published his book he blogged an explanation why he included formulas in it:

While I was writing my book "State Secrets: An Insider's Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program", some people from Washington persistently advised me not to include the formulas of the chemical agents of the Novichok series in my book.
...
I asked why it would be a bad idea to publish this information, since it would be for the safety of all people. Then the governments would work to have those chemical agents and their precursors included into the Control List. They responded, "Terrorists could use them for their criminal actions." This kind of reasoning is used all the time now to scare people and prevent any discussion. We are already used to ignoring a lot of real problems thanks to that.

Mirzanjaov further points out that only experienced personal in well equipped laboratories would be able to use his formulas. State actors have such laboratories, like the British Porton Down, but terrorists do not have such capabilities.

Mirzanjaov urged to included the substances he described into the OPCW list of controlled material. But the OPCW, as seen above, rejected that. Neither its scientific board nor the head of a Porton Down laboratory were convinced that these substances or the Soviet program Mirzanjaov described existed at all.

The Soviet chemical weapon laboratory in which Mirzanjaov had worked was in Uzbekistan, not in Russia as Theresa May falsely claims. The laboratory was dismantled with the active help of the United States .

Theresa's May claims that the Skripals were poisoned with 'Novichok' agents is highly questionable. Her claim that only Russia could be responsible for this is obviously bollocks.

The existence of the substances as described by Vil Mirzanjaov is in serious doubt. But if he is right then any state or company with a decent laboratory and competent personal can produce these substances from the formulas and descriptions he provides in his book. That is at least what Mirzanjaov himself says.

But most disturbing about the case are not the false claims Theresa May makes. She is in deep political trouble over the Brexit negotiations and other issues and needs any political diversion that she can get. Blaming Russia for something is en vogue and might help her for a while.

No, the most troubling issue is the behavior of the media who fail to point out that May's claims are bluster and that there is no evidence at all that supports her claims. The only paper that is somewhat skeptical is the Irish Times which finds it highly unlikely that the Russian government is behind the poisoning.

May demanded and got a NATO meeting on the case. But the statement NATO issued afterwards was extremely weak. It only offered support in conducting the British investigation and it asked Russia to respond to the British questions. Neither did it support the claims May made, nor did it take any measures against Russia. A French spokesperson said "We don't do fantasy politics" and demanded ' definite conclusions ' on the case before deciding anything. No support was given to May by the Trump administration.

The story May wants to tell has way too much holes to be sustainable. The involvement of the British double agent Skripal in the fake Steele dossier about Trump is likely the real story behind the incident. No international support is coming for May. The British opposition leader Corbyn was right today when he demanded that she produces evidence for her claims. A few more pushes and her house of cards will surely come down.

Posted by b on March 14, 2018 at 03:17 PM | Permalink


Fatima Manoubia , Mar 14, 2018 3:31:12 PM | 1

Interesting that a Senate Democrat of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Robert Menendez, brings in the case of the murder of Kim Jong Un´s brother, Kim Jong-Nama, since, for the same token, on the arbitrarious asignation of guilt against Russia for having fabricated Novichok in the past decades, the poisonous substance which finished Kim Jong-Un´s brother was the nerve agent VX, as well fabricated by the UK in the past, and probably also today, as was stated by Annie Machon in the last Crosstalk by Peter Lavelle about this case.
Thus, the same requests made to the Russian governement, we assume, could well be directed to Theresa May´s government.

What this pantomime is about, is that those West countries implicated in the Syrian nightmare, seeing their terrorists proxies being definitely defeated and so their goals sent to waste, at the hands of the SAA and their allies, amongst whom they are the RF, do not know already what to invent next to try to paint Russia as the agressor when it is getting increasingly clear, even in the public light, out of the so called "alt-media", that that label fits better with them.
They, simply, are in panicking that Mr. Putin gets elected once more time and the paradigm shift is definitely completed....

For desperation, they even do not bother to appoint people who carry a warrant for abuse of human rights in Europe...Although this increasingly resembles a western titled "The City Without Law"....

Another question would be, why none of the affected by the alleged poisoning have been yet accesed by any relative or official of its country ( as could be the case of Yulia Skripal ) since they did not died after all..... You go to see whether this is real or is simply a new "Manequin Challenge" like those performed by the "White Helmets", a renowned, even at Oscars level, broadcasting enterprise created by another MI6 "ex-spy", James LeMesurier....This increasingly seem to be the next profit niche of London...Theater!...But of the worst kind...

Not to mention that there are some declaration by a female doctor, who arrived at the event location at the first moments, and who was not affected in any way by any poison, on the contrary to the alleged poisoned policeman placed some meters away...

Also, it is said that the Skripals went out of the restaurant where they were eating quite airated, arguing...

Enough data to take months of inquiries even for the very sharp Sherlock Holmes...Even "Murder in the Orient Express" took, well, a whole travel in the orient Express of the lasting of those of past decades, to be solved by Agatha Christie....That Theresa May and the Democrats/Republicans in the USA, have already the case solved speaks volumes of cui bono ....and who could be interested in solving the case asap without any evidence and a proper investigation to their benefit...

SmoothieX12 , Mar 14, 2018 3:40:07 PM | 2
Note to spies: if ever becoming a Russian spy and then deciding to switch sides--DO NOT go to London. No UK, period. Mexico or Argentina increasingly look attractive. LOL.
ben , Mar 14, 2018 3:43:33 PM | 3
Be interesting to see if any of this info b is reporting, makes it's way into the corporate media. Thanks b...

If it does, I'll be shocked...

Pnyx , Mar 14, 2018 3:43:47 PM | 4
Interesting. I hope you're right with your confidence. Although it seems to me Russia bashing is really en vogue and nobody important comes out to call May - and Boris - miserable liars. We are lingering at the border of a mayor war.
jfc , Mar 14, 2018 3:43:59 PM | 5
It will give her enough leverage to survive this term.
karlof1 , Mar 14, 2018 3:56:37 PM | 6
Great work b!

Where's Jim Jones when you need him to serve up some of his koolaid to the numerous politicos and propagandists pushing the Russiagate Big Lie, for they surely deserve several pitchers full each.

Given the degree of effort Pompeo's used in pushing Russiagate, I can't wait for his first meeting with Lavrov or Putin.

The sooner Corbyn is able to become British PM, the better for all excepting the corrupt.

Il Discobolo , Mar 14, 2018 3:59:14 PM | 7
In the MEF Territorial Office in Salisbury, England, the Inspector Watson summarizes to Commissioner Golphar the known facts:

"- a man was found unconscious in a park;
- he turns out to be a former Russian spy who worked for Britain in the '90s, arrested but freed by the Russians themselves 8 years ago. from the analysis it turns out to have been contaminated with a substance created in the former Soviet Union decades ago ... that has hit also other people nearby"

The Inspector halts to speak for a while, then asks loudly: "Who could have been to do all that?"

"Elementary, my dear Watson", the Commissioner immediately responds with a flash of cunning in his eyes: "It was Russia, of course!"

But immediately afterwards he becomes pensive and among himself says in a low voice: "... or not?", remembering what was written by Arthur Conan Doyle: "There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact".

In the homeland of Sherlock Holmes, does anyone remember that sentence?

WorldBLee , Mar 14, 2018 4:01:00 PM | 8
In the House of Commons and the UK press, May's ploy sure is working. Now she is a "War Prime Minister" who may be able to hang onto power -- and even gain more powers through legislation. Let's not forget that in the US, Bush 2 was failing miserably until 9/11 -- then his rating zoomed up and America happily went to war behind him, or at least its hapless soldiers did. Even if the UK's far -- fetched narrative is shown to be completely inaccurate, I have little faith that the truth will change matters since it will be suppressed by the anti-Russian media and the political class. It's very depressing--although not surprising--that we find ourselves in this state.

I imagine the Tories are chortling right now with little thought that they are bringing a world war closer through their reckless actions.

Anonymous , Mar 14, 2018 4:10:06 PM | 9
Just how deadly is this nunchuck agent?

i) Absolutely deadly - you need total body protection with positive pressure suit and self-contained rebreather.
ii) Just your average toxic industrial chemical - tyvek suit, boots, gloves and gasmask.
iii) Meh - come across worse on a Friday night outside a curry house.
iv) All of the above at the same time.

Anonymous , Mar 14, 2018 4:12:12 PM | 10
Its amazing how easily propaganda works in the west, this is nothing but a psy-operation. Anyway, there seems to be a one effort to kick Russia out of UNSC by the brittish as a "response".
Blessed Economist , Mar 14, 2018 4:12:15 PM | 11
May trying to be Maggie. Haha. I have never read spy novels, so there are a few things about this incident that I don't understand.

• If the Skripals were hit with a military grade toxin, why are they not dead?

• If they were being taken out by the FSB, MI6, CIA, or even Mossad, surely they would have done the job properly?

• Even if Skripal contributed dodgy info to Steel dossier, why would that justify silencing him?

• Why would anyone do a hit in a pizza care in mid-afternoon, when the perpetrator would be obvious to staff and patrons? Would not an ex-spy be on the alert for an attack in such a place.

Surely the British must have CCTV footage of the perpetrator. Why is does not one seem to be interested in who the person is? Why are there no descriptions from staff and patrons?

• If the British have identified the person from CCTV footage, why are they not slamming the Russians with their identity, rather than making vague claims about the source of the toxin.

If they have not been able to identify the perpetrator, why have they not published photos and tried to identify this person. If the perpetrator is still at large in the UK, are they not a threat to other people? Why are the British not trying to find this person?

There is a different possibility that no one seems to have raised: Skripal is old and ill. His son died recently. He is stuck in dreary England, separated from his friends and family. He has become depressed. His daughter came to visit because she was concerned about his mental health. He decided to commit suicide and put his daughter's shame to an end. As an ex-spy, he had a suicide pill. He used it to kill himself and his daughter. He failed to complete the task.

Shakesvshav , Mar 14, 2018 4:13:53 PM | 12
A canter through the various deaths on British soil: https://off-guardian.org/2018/03/13/fatal-quad-who-is-assassinating-former-mi6-assets-on-british-soil/
Mike Maloney , Mar 14, 2018 4:17:32 PM | 13
Corbyn is being savaged in the corporate press for questioning May's proof. There's even a hint of yet another leadership challenge within in Labour. If the Blairites are able to claim Corbyn's scalp based on this, one has to truly marvel at the miracle powers of propaganda.
TomGard , Mar 14, 2018 4:23:18 PM | 14
The statement of OPCW 2013 means nothing at all. The Scientific Advisory Board "included US, French, German and Russian government representatives and on which Dr Black was the UK representative" (Murray). Information-, propaganda- and proxy war against Russia had begun in 2012 at least. So in the SAB they had a stalemate. Russia couldn't say anything without incriminating itself, the Germans normally know nothing and the representatives of US, French and UK could well have had motives to be quiet about things they knew or had.
Tobin Paz , Mar 14, 2018 4:23:59 PM | 15
Intersting article from Nafeez Ahmed. Aside from touching on Skripal:

The UK government is manufacturing its nerve agent case for 'action' on Russia

Two years ago, the Independent reported on new historical research which found that during the Cold War, the British government "used the general public as unwitting biological and chemical warfare guinea pigs on a much greater scale than previously thought."

...

Less well-known, though, is the fact that members of the British armed forces "were experimented on with Sarin, the deadly nerve gas, as late as 1983 at the Government's defence research centre at Porton Down," according to Ministry of Defence documents obtained by The Telegraph. Operation Antler, as the police investigation into the experiments was called, found that the nerve agent trials had gone on as late as 1989.

james , Mar 14, 2018 4:24:02 PM | 16
thanks b.. this story is a load of bs with nothing substantive to back it up.. and of course the scribes for the empire are only too willing to not ask questions! i look forward to the time when sanity returns to international affairs.. at this point, russia seems like the only stand up player on the scene...

i love the info you found in mirzanjaov.. "Russia did it", says Mirzanjaov, "OR SOMEONE WHO READ MY BOOK". - brilliant!! i guess that pays for the house and all else... you are a good stooge mirzanjaov!

james , Mar 14, 2018 4:51:46 PM | 20
we haven't gotten to that point yet ghost ship, lol... here is cluborlov's comment on this..
John Gilberts , Mar 14, 2018 4:52:43 PM | 21
Canada's Banderite FM Chrystia Freeland. Russia is guilty as charged of course. This came out before TMay even rose to deliver her version: Statement By Foreign Affairs on Chemical Attack in UK
https://www.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/news/2018/03/statement-by-minister-of-foreign-affairs-on-chemical-weapon-attack-in-united-kingdom.html

and Response by the Russian Embassy: https://twitter.com/RussianEmbassyC/status/973981938649190400

psychohistorian , Mar 14, 2018 4:54:11 PM | 22
# b who wrote:
"
No, the most troubling issue is the behavior of the media who fail to point out that May's claims are bluster and that there is no evidence at all that supports her claims.
"

We read your blog because those media organizations are controlled by the same elite that have their fist up May's ass.

The City of London was around before the US Fed, as was the British empire. I read recently that London has the most millionaires of any city in the world.

The God of Mammon religion is my name for the global private financial system (BIS, SWIFT, IMF, World Bank, etc) and all the national private Central Banks and the money systems within all Western nations. That "sacred" construct of our social contract is under attack and what you see is their response so far.

WWIII has already started and we are just witnessing the latest battle/scrimmage. When/if there is another Bretton Woods meeting of the geopolitical elite to decide where the financial control will/should be going forward, then we will see if the centuries old cabal of families that have ruled our world will give up that power or reset the human experiment with nukes.

Jackrabbit , Mar 14, 2018 5:00:25 PM | 23
b

Worthwhile to add the rush to judgement into the "claims fall apart" mix? As the Russians pointed out at OPCW meeting, there's a longstanding agreed procedure to investigating claims of chemical weapons use.

TomGard , Mar 14, 2018 5:02:13 PM | 24
@James - 16

(Following up the other thread) Since I read about the "sanctions" I am quite sure, this isn't about Russia at all. It is about blackmailing the EU. Additional stopping North Stream 2.

Stopping North Stream might well be a zero-sum game for Russia. It can't fail sustaining the world price of gas and this might compensate Russia for disadvantages of Asian markets

Taffyboy , Mar 14, 2018 5:08:59 PM | 26
Here you go B. nice support article.

http://johnhelmer.org/?p=17619

Fatima Manoubia , Mar 14, 2018 5:14:27 PM | 28
@Posted by: Blessed Economist | Mar 14, 2018 4:12:15 PM | 11

Some good questions there, but better than the CCTV footage would be hearing the MI6 person in charge of supervising every movement by Skripal, since, as claimed by Annie Machon at the same Crosstalk program I pointed out at my previous comment, every double agent has its own agent behind it, as a protection protocol ( and also for securing he is not a triple...I guess )...

telescope , Mar 14, 2018 5:15:51 PM | 29
EU is basically telling Theresa May to go and screw herself. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-russia-eu/eu-to-back-may-on-russia-with-words-but-limited-action-idUSKCN1GQ1FB
Anonymous , Mar 14, 2018 5:41:34 PM | 32
Telecope

Nah, EU is of course as hysterical against Russia as UK is, but what can they do? Why should they do anything is another question. Its like these people are looking for war all because a Russian spy is hurt. Are they insane?

Daniel , Mar 14, 2018 6:05:04 PM | 33
Floating around the Twittersphere:

The Official Enemy always does *exactly* the wrong thing:

- Saddam Hussein hid WMD even as war loomed
- Gaddafi ordered a massacre certain to bring 'intervention'
- Assad launched a gas attack exactly as inspectors entered Damascus
- And now Putin...

I haven't yet seen the Russian Ambassador yet, but the UN Security Council's special meeting over this had been universally condemning Russia/Putin. Naturally, this was especially full-throated from Trump's UN Embarrasor, Nimrata "Nikki" Randhawa "Haley."

What would be required to have Russia removed from the UNSC?

Anonymous , Mar 14, 2018 6:10:48 PM | 34
AT the UN, the US provides evidence supporting the UK's claim that 'Putin done it' in the Skirpal case.

By one of those amazing coincidences, the western media has rediscovered the MH17 incident, and the infamous Spanish air traffic controller Carlos. He has been interviewed by Radio Liberty and a group of Romanian investigative journalists. He claims he received $48,000 USD from 'Russian sources' for his part in the incident.

https://z5h64q92x9.net/proxy_u/ru-en.en/https/diana-mihailova.livejournal.com/1744880.html

What an amazing story! /sarc

james , Mar 14, 2018 6:21:33 PM | 35
221 john gilberts.. thanks.. nice to know the loser freeland is being given a large platform to her anti russia rhetoric under the canuck flag too.. geez, but sometimes i wish canada wasn't so stupid and dishonest catering to the usa and etc, but alas.. as a canuck i am very disappointed that she is anywhere near a position of power.. working with soros has it's merits..

@24 tomgard.. i think blackmailing the eu is a smaller part of it..i could be wrong.. isolating russia seems like the main meal.. russia is viewed as a threat by the usa/uk and probably a few other players that will go unnamed..

@33 daniel question.. i am sure china would go along with it, lol - NOT... in fact - they would be next... too bad the un security council actually represents a few level headed players - the uk/usa not being one of them!

karlof1 , Mar 14, 2018 6:22:11 PM | 36
Garrie comments and provides video of UNSC session.
Mina , Mar 14, 2018 6:36:14 PM | 37
Uae got rex's head and mbs got 23 russian diplomats?
Mina , Mar 14, 2018 6:39:00 PM | 38
Seamus Martin conclusion on Russian billionaires apply just as well to Gulfies in London
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/unlikely-that-vladimir-putin-behind-skripal-poisoning-1.3425736
Clueless Joe , Mar 14, 2018 6:42:58 PM | 39
Fucking Theresa May should stick to do her job, as in protecting British citizens and ensuring their safety. Like, for instance, in Telford, where more than thousand kids have been gang-raped for decades, and authorities kept shut about it - a case that the usually very loud Me-Too crowd is being suspiciously quiet about as well. But no, it's so much easier just to make shit up and bash Russia like the Brits have been doing since Crimean War.
ninel , Mar 14, 2018 6:56:58 PM | 40
UNSC holds urgent meeting over Salisbury attack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USYfRVqG2lk

At the 39 minutes and 25 seconds mark Russian UNSC member begins his speech

karlof1 , Mar 14, 2018 7:07:12 PM | 41
In case some haven't, Craig Murray's essay b linked to and I relink here is quite the blockbuster, or rather Maybuster. Russia's UNSC rep only needed to announce Craig's conclusion to destroy the credibility of UK, US, France, and any other nation stupid enough to back May's crazy assertions. As Garrie proposes , May certainly rivals Blair for worst UK PM ever.
LXV , Mar 14, 2018 7:12:04 PM | 42
Posted by: Anonymous | Mar 14, 2018 4:10:06 PM | 9

LOL, nice catch! Facts...? Who needs stinkin facts in a post-truth world ?

Ian , Mar 14, 2018 7:33:57 PM | 43
Daniel @33:

After looking at this for the second time, it appears there is a possible way. It appears a precedent was set via UN General Assembly Resolution, UN Res. 1668 & 2758, where support from 2/3 of the membership is needed. Although the resolutions addressed specifically to the China/Taiwan question, it could be used against Russia. However, it requires an alternate capital with support from a significant population.

Another obstacle I see is from pro-UN supporters, who wouldn't tolerate Russia, or any other nation, being excluded from the UN. By allowing any member to leave the UN would be repeating the mistakes from it's predecessor, League of Nations. Yes, there's been cases where nations stopped it's participation, but the UN didn't consider them gone; just absent. The UN concept was never meant to be some governing body. Unfortunately, there's considerable efforts to make it one.

In the end, the possibility of excluding Russia from either the UNSC and or UN is ZERO.

Kalen , Mar 14, 2018 7:38:21 PM | 44
After 6 years of attacks on Putin the only shocking is that we see weak and meek response of Russians for another provocation. Did they not know for sure that a series of provocations were and are coming?

Will the wait another 6 months to expel British MI6 spies masquerading as diplomats this time because of coming Easter and children of those agents of war and death may suffer spoiled holidays.

It is clear now that this timid response is due to Russian oligarchs, Putin supporters, vital interests in the west are being challenged or even threatened.

Did they not know that in medical schools of psychiatry they warn new doctors not to succumb to mental patient's delusions by trying to reason with him or her, trying to explain reality since it only aggravates psychosis and leads to violence.

This Global McCarthysm is nothing but the expression of panic among political puppets of oligarchic ruling elite that their embellishments are no longer effective in fooling and dividing of population into self destructive herds and that they themselves will be disposed of when their no longer effective lies will be replaced by war and violence within societies all over the world.

bevin , Mar 14, 2018 8:09:49 PM | 45
The Soviet Union boycotted UNSC meetings some time around the Korean War -- that is how the imperialist forces got to call themselves UN forces, because USSR didn't veto the resolutions in question.

Where the idea came from that Russia could be removed from the SC I have no idea, it is a nonsense reflecting the propaganda overhang that the US and its satellites can do anything that they want. They can't. And their power is declining daily.

This idiocy from the UK is a direct measurement of the actual impotence of the UK government which has nothing left to do but to scare up the elderly (most people under 50 either don't follow the MSM or know them to be lying) the only demographic that will support them in an election. The story is aimed at embarrassing Corbyn, who they hate and fear, by calling up the Blairites to disassociate themselves from Labour.

It has worked: the usual treacherous MPs, the remains of those who pushed for war in Iraq and called for war in Libya and Syria, have come out in support of May and the MI6. This makes it much more likely that they will not be running for Labour again. Which is good news.

The bad news is that so long as b and the handful of bloggers like him continue to shoot down these propaganda balloons when they are still only a few dozen feet in the air, the Political caste and the Ruling Class will attempt to silence them.

[Mar 14, 2018] If Putin is so diabolical and his information operations so elegant and effective he should execute one that breaks the chain of zionist influence on the US polity. That would prevent Armageddon and the world would be thankful.

Mar 14, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

14 March 2018 at 04:12 AM

What is US interest in the Middle East? I don't see any. We've got plenty of oil. And the Canadians will happily sell us more.

The millenia old conflicts there are really no business of ours. The possibility that we'll go to war with Russia and risk our own population to further Israeli perceptions shows how far down the rabbit hole we've gone. The zionists "own" our political, media, governmental establishments lock stock and barrel for this possibility to exist.

If Putin is so diabolical and his information operations so elegant and effective he should execute one that breaks the chain of zionist influence on the US polity. That would prevent Armageddon and the world would be thankful.

Honestly I have no idea what the firing of Tillerson and his replacement by Pompeo means. Maybe it's because Tillerson called Trump a moron and Pompeo is an ass licker. Hillary, Rubio, etc al wanted a no-fly-zone over Syria. That would have brought instant conflict with Russia. If Nikki Haley's threats come to pass we'll get there.

Trump is attempting to change many past arrangements. One being trade where the US has bled for decades running massive trade deficits. How the GOP does in the mid-terms will influence his position on many issues.

[Mar 13, 2018] The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party by Patrick Martin

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... If on November 6 the Democratic Party makes the net gain of 24 seats needed to win control of the House of Representatives, former CIA agents, military commanders, and State Department officials will provide the margin of victory and hold the balance of power in Congress. ..."
"... Since its establishment in 1947 -- under the administration of Democratic President Harry Truman -- the CIA has been legally barred from carrying out within the United States the activities which were its mission overseas: spying, infiltration, political provocation, assassination. These prohibitions were given official lip service but ignored in practice. ..."
"... The Church Committee in particular featured the exposure of CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, General Rene Schneider in Chile, and many others. More horrors were uncovered: MK-Ultra, in which the CIA secretly subjected unwitting victims to experimentation with drugs like LSD; ..."
"... Operation Mockingbird, in which the CIA recruited journalists to plant stories and smear opponents; Operation Chaos, an effort to spy on the antiwar movement and sow disruption; Operation Shamrock, under which the telecommunications companies shared traffic with the NSA for more than a quarter century. ..."
"... The Church and Pike committee exposures, despite their limitations, had a devastating political effect. The CIA and its allied intelligence organizations in the Pentagon and NSA became political lepers, reviled as the enemies of democratic rights. The CIA in particular was widely viewed as "Murder Incorporated." ..."
"... The last 15 years have seen a massive expansion of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, backed by an avalanche of media propaganda, with endless television programs and movies glorifying American spies and assassins ..."
"... The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks . ..."
"... This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and expanded the various operations of the intelligence agencies abroad and within the United States. Obama's endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen candidate of the Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate the confrontation with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine. ..."
"... The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of resentment over the disruption of its operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that score. ..."
"... The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence operatives are moving in large numbers to take over a political party and seize a major role in Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic Party primaries are "former" agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This "retired" status is, however, purely nominal. Joining the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments. ..."
Mar 13, 2018 | www.wsws.org

In a three-part series published last week, the World Socialist Web Site documented an unprecedented influx of intelligence and military operatives into the Democratic Party. More than 50 such military-intelligence candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination in the 102 districts identified by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as its targets for 2018. These include both vacant seats and those with Republican incumbents considered vulnerable in the event of a significant swing to the Democrats.

If on November 6 the Democratic Party makes the net gain of 24 seats needed to win control of the House of Representatives, former CIA agents, military commanders, and State Department officials will provide the margin of victory and hold the balance of power in Congress. The presence of so many representatives of the military-intelligence apparatus in the legislature is a situation without precedent in the history of the United States.

Since its establishment in 1947 -- under the administration of Democratic President Harry Truman -- the CIA has been legally barred from carrying out within the United States the activities which were its mission overseas: spying, infiltration, political provocation, assassination. These prohibitions were given official lip service but ignored in practice.

In the wake of the Watergate crisis and the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon, reporter Seymour Hersh published the first devastating exposure of the CIA domestic spying, in an investigative report for the New York Times on December 22, 1974. This report triggered the establishment of the Rockefeller Commission, a White House effort at damage control, and Senate and House select committees, named after their chairmen, Senator Frank Church and Representative Otis Pike, which conducted hearings and made serious attempts to investigate and expose the crimes of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.

The Church Committee in particular featured the exposure of CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, General Rene Schneider in Chile, and many others. More horrors were uncovered: MK-Ultra, in which the CIA secretly subjected unwitting victims to experimentation with drugs like LSD;

Operation Mockingbird, in which the CIA recruited journalists to plant stories and smear opponents; Operation Chaos, an effort to spy on the antiwar movement and sow disruption; Operation Shamrock, under which the telecommunications companies shared traffic with the NSA for more than a quarter century.

The Church and Pike committee exposures, despite their limitations, had a devastating political effect. The CIA and its allied intelligence organizations in the Pentagon and NSA became political lepers, reviled as the enemies of democratic rights. The CIA in particular was widely viewed as "Murder Incorporated."

In that period, it would have been unthinkable either for dozens of "former" military-intelligence operatives to participate openly in electoral politics, or for them to be welcomed and even recruited by the two corporate-controlled parties. The Democrats and Republicans sought to distance themselves, at least for public relations purposes, from the spy apparatus, while the CIA publicly declared that it would no longer recruit or pay American journalists to publish material originating in Langley, Virginia. Even in the 1980s, the Iran-Contra scandal involved the exposure of the illegal operations of the Reagan administration's CIA director, William Casey.

How times have changed. One of the main functions of the "war on terror," launched in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has been to rehabilitate the US spy apparatus and give it a public relations makeover as the supposed protector of the American people against terrorism.

This meant disregarding the well-known connections between Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders and the CIA, which recruited them for the anti-Soviet guerrilla war in Afghanistan, waged from 1979 to 1989, as well as the still unexplained role of the US intelligence agencies in facilitating the 9/11 attacks themselves.

The last 15 years have seen a massive expansion of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, backed by an avalanche of media propaganda, with endless television programs and movies glorifying American spies and assassins ( 24 , Homeland , Zero Dark Thirty , etc.)

The American media has been directly recruited to this effort. Judith Miller of the New York Times , with her reports on "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, is only the most notorious of the stable of "plugged-in" intelligence-connected journalists at the Times , the Washington Post , and the major television networks. More recently, the Times has installed as its editorial page editor James Bennet, brother of a Democratic senator and son of the former administrator of the Agency for International Development, which has been accused of working as a front for the operations of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks .

In centering its opposition to Trump on the bogus allegations of Russian interference, while essentially ignoring Trump's attacks on immigrants and democratic rights, his alignment with ultra-right and white supremacist groups, his attacks on social programs like Medicaid and food stamps, and his militarism and threats of nuclear war, the Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice.

This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and expanded the various operations of the intelligence agencies abroad and within the United States. Obama's endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen candidate of the Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate the confrontation with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine.

The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of resentment over the disruption of its operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that score. A chorus of media backers -- Nicholas Kristof and Roger Cohen of the New York Times , the entire editorial board of the Washington Post , most of the television networks -- are part of the campaign to pollute public opinion and whip up support on alleged "human rights" grounds for an expansion of the US war in Syria.

The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence operatives are moving in large numbers to take over a political party and seize a major role in Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic Party primaries are "former" agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This "retired" status is, however, purely nominal. Joining the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments.

The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence operatives running in the Democratic primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat experience invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on their websites. And they are welcomed and given preferred positions, with Democratic Party officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies.

The working class is confronted with an extraordinary political situation. On the one hand, the Republican Trump administration has more military generals in top posts than any other previous government. On the other hand, the Democratic Party has opened its doors to a "friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies.

The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an expression of the breakdown of American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose interests the state apparatus and its "bodies of armed men" serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working class, the ruling class is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule.

Millions of working people want to fight the Trump administration and its ultra-right policies. But it is impossible to carry out this fight through the "axis of evil" that connects the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx of military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups, that the Democrats represent a "lesser evil." On the contrary, working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the corporate-controlled two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils.

Patrick Martin

The author also recommends:

Palace coup or class struggle: The political crisis in Washington and the strategy of the working class

[Mar 13, 2018] Russians have also been accusing the British of ignoring the Chemical Weapons Convention, which they say stipulates joint investigations of incidents like the Skripal attack.

Mar 13, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 | Mar 13, 2018 4:00:26 PM | 34

Mercouris at The Duran provides more info related to additional threats and their counters. Just one example:

"Meanwhile the Russians have also been accusing the British of ignoring the Chemical Weapons Convention, which they say stipulates joint investigations of incidents like the Skripal attack."

Certainly not least, it's suggested that May didn't listen to what Putin had to say on 1 March.

March Madness, and I don't mean basketball. Western nations lack diplomats and sane leaders not led by Big Lies. I read the Doomsday Clock to declare 11:59:45!

[Mar 13, 2018] I worked on Pathogen security and storage in UZ (as well as GE, KZ others) and they ain't secure take my word for it.

Mar 13, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

Durak March 13, 2018 at 19:14

Craig

I worked on Pathogen security and storage in UZ (as well as GE, KZ others) and they ain't secure take my word for it.

Wanna steal something nasty? Just bribe the staff at the Georgia NCDC in Tbilisi (for example) . Would love to have stayed in UZ but they closed Juliano's . No reason to extend contract there!

A few thou will do it.

Job done.

[Mar 13, 2018] Russian to Judgement - Craig Murray

The speed with which British authorities blades Putin strongly suggests false flag operation: "I am alarmed by the security, spying and armaments industries' frenetic efforts to stoke Russophobia and heat up the new cold war. I am especially alarmed at the stream of cold war warrior "experts" dominating the news cycles."
Notable quotes:
"... From Putin's point of view, to assassinate Skripal now seems to have very little motivation. If the Russians have waited eight years to do this, they could have waited until after their World Cup. The Russians have never killed a swapped spy before. ..."
"... Just as diplomats, British and otherwise, are the most ardent upholders of the principle of diplomatic immunity, so security service personnel everywhere are the least likely to wish to destroy a system which can be a key aspect of their own personal security; quite literally spy swaps are their "Get Out of Jail Free" card. You don't undermine that system – probably terminally – without very good reason. ..."
"... It is worth noting that the "wicked" Russians gave Skripal a far lighter jail sentence than an American equivalent would have received. If a member of US Military Intelligence had sold, for cash to the Russians, the names of hundreds of US agents and officers operating abroad, the Americans would at the very least jail the person for life, and I strongly suspect would execute them. Skripal just received a jail sentence of 18 years, which is hard to square with the narrative of implacable vindictiveness against him. If the Russians had wanted to make an example, that was the time. ..."
"... Sadly Pablo Miller's LinkedIn profile has recently been deleted, but it is again widely alleged on the web that it showed him as a consultant for Orbis Intelligence and a consultant to the FCO and – wait for it – with an address in Salisbury. If anyone can recover than Linkedin entry do get in touch, though British Government agencies will have been active in the internet scrubbing. ..."
"... It was of course Christopher Steele and Orbis Intelligence who produced for the Clinton camp the sensationalist dossier on Trump links with Russia – including the story of Trump paying to be urinated on by Russian prostitutes – that is a key part of the "Russiagate" affair gripping the US political classes. The extraordinary thing about this is that the Orbis dossier is obvious nonsense which anybody with a professional background can completely demolish, as I did here . ..."
"... If I was the police, I would look closely at Orbis Intelligence. ..."
"... To return to Israel. Israel has the nerve agents. Israel has Mossad which is extremely skilled at foreign assassinations. Theresa May claimed Russian propensity to assassinate abroad as a specific reason to believe Russia did it. Well Mossad has an even greater propensity to assassinate abroad. And while I am struggling to see a Russian motive for damaging its own international reputation so grieviously, Israel has a clear motivation for damaging the Russian reputation so grieviously. Russian action in Syria has undermined the Israeli position in Syria and Lebanon in a fundamental way, and Israel has every motive for damaging Russia's international position by an attack aiming to leave the blame on Russia. ..."
"... Both the Orbis and Israeli theories are speculations. But they are no more a speculation, and no more a conspiracy theory, than the idea that Vladimir Putin secretly sent agents to Salisbury to attack Skriapin with a secret nerve agent. I can see absolutely no reason to believe that is a more valid speculation than the others at this point. ..."
"... I am alarmed by the security, spying and armaments industries' frenetic efforts to stoke Russophobia and heat up the new cold war. I am especially alarmed at the stream of cold war warrior "experts" dominating the news cycles. ..."
Mar 13, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

The "novochok" group of nerve agents – a very loose term simply for a collection of new nerve agents the Soviet Union were developing fifty years ago – will almost certainly have been analysed and reproduced by Porton Down. That is entirely what Porton Down is there for. It used to make chemical and biological weapons as weapons, and today it still does make them in small quantities in order to research defences and antidotes. After the fall of the Soviet Union Russian chemists made a lot of information available on these nerve agents. And one country which has always manufactured very similar persistent nerve agents is Israel. This Foreign Policy magazine (a very establishment US publication) article on Israel 's chemical and biological weapon capability is very interesting indeed. I will return to Israel later in this article.

Incidentally, novachok is not a specific substance but a class of new nerve agents. Sources agree they were designed to be persistent, and of an order of magnitude stronger than sarin or VX. That is rather hard to square with the fact that thankfully nobody has died and those possibly in contact just have to wash their clothes.

From Putin's point of view, to assassinate Skripal now seems to have very little motivation. If the Russians have waited eight years to do this, they could have waited until after their World Cup. The Russians have never killed a swapped spy before.

Just as diplomats, British and otherwise, are the most ardent upholders of the principle of diplomatic immunity, so security service personnel everywhere are the least likely to wish to destroy a system which can be a key aspect of their own personal security; quite literally spy swaps are their "Get Out of Jail Free" card. You don't undermine that system – probably terminally – without very good reason.

It is worth noting that the "wicked" Russians gave Skripal a far lighter jail sentence than an American equivalent would have received. If a member of US Military Intelligence had sold, for cash to the Russians, the names of hundreds of US agents and officers operating abroad, the Americans would at the very least jail the person for life, and I strongly suspect would execute them. Skripal just received a jail sentence of 18 years, which is hard to square with the narrative of implacable vindictiveness against him. If the Russians had wanted to make an example, that was the time.

It is much more probable that the reason for this assassination attempt refers to something recent or current, than to spying twenty years ago. Were I the British police, I would inquire very closely into Orbis Intelligence.

There is no doubt that Skripal was feeding secrets to MI6 at the time that Christopher Steele was an MI6 officer in Moscow, and at the the time that Pablo Miller, another member of Orbis Intelligence, was also an MI6 officer in Russia and directly recruiting agents. It is widely reported on the web and in US media that it was Miller who first recruited Skripal. My own ex-MI6 sources tell me that is not quite true as Skripal was "walk-in", but that Miller certainly was involved in running Skripal for a while. Sadly Pablo Miller's LinkedIn profile has recently been deleted, but it is again widely alleged on the web that it showed him as a consultant for Orbis Intelligence and a consultant to the FCO and – wait for it – with an address in Salisbury. If anyone can recover than Linkedin entry do get in touch, though British Government agencies will have been active in the internet scrubbing.

It was of course Christopher Steele and Orbis Intelligence who produced for the Clinton camp the sensationalist dossier on Trump links with Russia – including the story of Trump paying to be urinated on by Russian prostitutes – that is a key part of the "Russiagate" affair gripping the US political classes. The extraordinary thing about this is that the Orbis dossier is obvious nonsense which anybody with a professional background can completely demolish, as I did here . Steele's motive was, like Skriapin's in selling his secrets, cash pure and simple. Steele is a charlatan who knocked up a series of allegations that are either wildly improbable, or would need a high level source access he could not possibly get in today's Russia, or both. He told the Democrats what they wish to hear and his audience – who had and still have no motivation to look at it critically – paid him highly for it.

I do not know for certain that Pablo Miller helped knock together the Steele dossier on Trump, but it seems very probable given he also served for MI6 in Russia and was working for Orbis. And it seems to me even more probable that Sergei Skripal contributed to the Orbis Intelligence dossier on Trump. Steele and Miller cannot go into Russia and run sources any more, and never would have had access as good as their dossier claims, even in their MI6 days. The dossier was knocked up for huge wodges of cash from whatever they could cobble together. Who better to lend a little corroborative verisimilitude in these circumstances than their old source Skripal?

Skripal was at hand in the UK, and allegedly even close to Miller in Salisbury. He could add in the proper acronym for a Russian committee here or the name of a Russian official there, to make it seem like Steele was providing hard intelligence. Indeed, Skripal's outdated knowledge might explain some of the dossier's more glaring errors.

But the problem with double agents like Skripal, who give intelligence for money, is that they can easily become triple agents and you never know when a better offer is going to come along. When Steele produced his dodgy dossier, he had no idea it would ever become so prominent and subject to so much scrutiny. Steele is fortunate in that the US Establishment is strongly motivated not to scrutinise his work closely as their one aim is to "get" Trump. But with the stakes very high, having a very loose cannon as one of the dossier's authors might be most inconvenient both for Orbis and for the Clinton camp.

If I was the police, I would look closely at Orbis Intelligence.

To return to Israel. Israel has the nerve agents. Israel has Mossad which is extremely skilled at foreign assassinations. Theresa May claimed Russian propensity to assassinate abroad as a specific reason to believe Russia did it. Well Mossad has an even greater propensity to assassinate abroad. And while I am struggling to see a Russian motive for damaging its own international reputation so grieviously, Israel has a clear motivation for damaging the Russian reputation so grieviously. Russian action in Syria has undermined the Israeli position in Syria and Lebanon in a fundamental way, and Israel has every motive for damaging Russia's international position by an attack aiming to leave the blame on Russia.

Both the Orbis and Israeli theories are speculations. But they are no more a speculation, and no more a conspiracy theory, than the idea that Vladimir Putin secretly sent agents to Salisbury to attack Skriapin with a secret nerve agent. I can see absolutely no reason to believe that is a more valid speculation than the others at this point.

I am alarmed by the security, spying and armaments industries' frenetic efforts to stoke Russophobia and heat up the new cold war. I am especially alarmed at the stream of cold war warrior "experts" dominating the news cycles. I write as someone who believes that agents of the Russian state did assassinate Litvinenko, and that the Russian security services carried out at least some of the apartment bombings that provided the pretext for the brutal assault on Chechnya. I believe the Russian occupation of Crimea and parts of Georgia is illegal. On the other hand, in Syria Russia has saved the Middle East from domination by a new wave of US and Saudi sponsored extreme jihadists.

The naive view of the world as "goodies" and "baddies", with our own ruling class as the good guys, is for the birds. I witnessed personally in Uzbekistan the willingness of the UK and US security services to accept and validate intelligence they knew to be false in order to pursue their policy objectives. We should be extremely sceptical of their current anti-Russian narrative. There are many possible suspects in this attack.

[Mar 13, 2018] 'Say something' May 'under incredible pressure' from colleagues to blame Russia in ex-spy poisoning -- RT UK News

Notable quotes:
"... "seem to have forgotten about that very quickly and, rather than being cautious, there's a drive to blame Russia immediately." ..."
"... "outright accusatory statements" made mid-way though the investigation are "part of the anti-Russia hype that continues in the West." ..."
"... "We need to see the evidence. And the people of both Russia and the United States, and the world, are savvy enough to see the evidence and be able to make their own judgement. We haven't seen that evidence," ..."
"... "Why would Russia leave a signature like that, it's similar to some of the hacking that has been going on leaving Cyrillic [script] in the hacking codes. If this all was orchestrated by the Russian government, why would they be leaving such a trail?" ..."
"... "defies logic and common sense." ..."
"... "what will happen will be sanctions, some diplomatic expulsions." ..."
"... One possible response floated by MPs was a boycott of the World Cup in Russia by the England national football team. While the topic was not raised personally by May, if it turns out to be the case, such a decision will go down in history as, arguably, the most unpopular one ever taken by an incumbent PM, "apart from Brexit delay," ..."
Mar 13, 2018 | www.rt.com

... ... ... 'A history of politicized intel'

It's hard to believe that the investigation that is being conducted by the UK authorities is impartial, what with the surrounding media frenzy and the vast record of highly politicized intelligence coming from the authorities, Dr Tara McCormack, lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester, told RT.

Read more 'Russia as close to a rogue state as any': Wildest MP claims from Skripal session in UK parliament

McCormack noted that the media and the lawmakers are reluctant to reflect on these mistakes. They "seem to have forgotten about that very quickly and, rather than being cautious, there's a drive to blame Russia immediately."

Former Pentagon official Michael Maloof echoed the point, saying that the "outright accusatory statements" made mid-way though the investigation are "part of the anti-Russia hype that continues in the West." Bringing up how the UK government sided with the US in the false claim that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he said it's hard to take any such assertions at face value.

"We need to see the evidence. And the people of both Russia and the United States, and the world, are savvy enough to see the evidence and be able to make their own judgement. We haven't seen that evidence," Maloof said.

Timed to Russia's election

The timing of the attack, on the verge of Russia's presidential election and its circumstances, notably the use of a Soviet nerve agent, begs the question: "Why would Russia leave a signature like that, it's similar to some of the hacking that has been going on leaving Cyrillic [script] in the hacking codes. If this all was orchestrated by the Russian government, why would they be leaving such a trail?" Maloof asked, pointing out that it "defies logic and common sense."

With MPs calling Russia names and touting a host of potential sanctions, NATO retaliation and a ban on RT broadcasting, it's still up to the UK government to decide what measures to take, Dr McCormack noted. Asserting that she doesn't believe May will back down from her initial allegations against Russia, she theorized that "what will happen will be sanctions, some diplomatic expulsions."

One possible response floated by MPs was a boycott of the World Cup in Russia by the England national football team. While the topic was not raised personally by May, if it turns out to be the case, such a decision will go down in history as, arguably, the most unpopular one ever taken by an incumbent PM, "apart from Brexit delay," Jon Gaunt said.

[Mar 13, 2018] Theresa May Makes A 45 Minutes Claim

Why would Putin be interested in a has-been spy he could have killed long ago? On the other hand, might certain people connected with the Trump dossier be keen to silence sources, now that Sessions is investigating the FISA warrants and at the same time, implicate Russia?
Notable quotes:
"... as usual - the west under the leadership of the usa /uk - need no proof... assertions and innuendo is all that is needed! ..."
"... Interesting they allowed the possibility that the gas, if made in Russia, could have been stolen. Is that because they thought the sheeple might actually wonder about the anthrax released after 9/11, which came from a US facility, and which nobody ever accused the government of unleashing? ..."
"... In testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee (on 3 November, 2017), it was stated that Daniel Jones (a member of Fusion GPS), had described Fusion as a "shadow media organization helping the government," and was funded by a "group of Silicon Valley billionaires and George Soros." ..."
"... Steele has refused to comment about which projects he involved Miller but given Miller's Russian contacts, it is not credible that the Trump dossier was not one of them – in which case it is also not credible that Skripal was also not involved. ..."
"... Why would Putin be interested in a has-been spy he could have killed long ago? On the other hand, might certain people connected with the Trump dossier be keen to silence sources, now that Sessions is investigating the FISA warrants and at the same time, implicate Russia? ..."
"... Edit: The PM has said that the nerve agent was 'Novichok' which is 5 to 8 times more potent than VX... and the authorities waited 5 days to send the army in and over a week to tell people to wash their clothes and other items? ..."
Mar 13, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Theresa May claimed ( saved tweet ) in Parliament that:

May went on to claim that:

Cont. reading: Theresa May Makes A "45 Minutes" Claim


james , Mar 12, 2018 3:48:25 PM | 1

thanks b...

as usual - the west under the leadership of the usa /uk - need no proof... assertions and innuendo is all that is needed!

i swear they are gearing up for something with russia, whether it be war in syria, thanks that freak haleys words from earlier today, or this, or something... it is non stop..

simon , Mar 12, 2018 4:30:09 PM | 7
What is this "known" Russian never agent? Who else manufactures it? Does UK (or could it as a "special project")? Particularly, in the lab right down the street?

Interesting they allowed the possibility that the gas, if made in Russia, could have been stolen. Is that because they thought the sheeple might actually wonder about the anthrax released after 9/11, which came from a US facility, and which nobody ever accused the government of unleashing?

EDIT: Apparently May is alleging the chemical involved is a novichok, which was supposedly produced by the USSR from the 1970s to the 1990s. Assuming all this is true, I found the following interesting excerpt from Wikipedia in terms of who may have access to the chemical (aside from the Russian state and/or ((Russian)) mafia):

One of the key manufacturing sites was the Soviet State Scientific Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology (GosNIIOKhT) in Nukus, Uzbekistan. ... Since its independence in 1991, Uzbekistan has been working with the government of the United States to dismantle and decontaminate the sites where the Novichok agents and other chemical weapons were tested and developed.

Funny, didn't see anything in May's speech about that.

In reply to Fucking fascist UK with by Perimetr
Vote up!

paul , Mar 12, 2018 4:33:31 PM | 8
In 1995, Sergey Skripal was recruited by an MI6 undercover agent, Pablo Miller, who at the time was posing as Antonio Alvarez de Hidalgo and working at the British Embassy in Tallinn, Estonia.

Pablo Miller was exposed in the early 2000s, after multiple Russians were arrested for spying and fingered Miller as their recruiter. One of Miller's other recruits was Alexander Litvinenko. [Note: Polonium was also used to murder Arafat – the source is said to have been Israel's Dimona reactor.]

Miller and Skripal met frequently: Skripal (whose codename was "Forthwith") passed the entire Russian military intelligence telephone handbook to Miller, containing details of more than 300 of his colleagues in Russian intelligence. In 2006 Skripal was jailed.

After the spy swap in 2010, Skripal decided to resettle in Salisbury, where Pablo Miller also lived. In 2015 Miller retired and received an OBE for services to Her Majesty's Government. No doubt Miller was Skripal's minder and was probably the reason Skripal had gone to Salisbury.

According to his LinkedIn entry (deleted a few days ago), Miller worked as a consultant for Christopher Steele – Miller is the consultant whose name was withheld by the Telegraph. Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence was hired by Fusion GPS in 2016 to research Trump.

In testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee (on 3 November, 2017), it was stated that Daniel Jones (a member of Fusion GPS), had described Fusion as a "shadow media organization helping the government," and was funded by a "group of Silicon Valley billionaires and George Soros."

Between 26 November, 2017 and 10 January, 2018 George Soros (who is a prolific tweeter) was silent. Not a single tweet. Why, where was he?

Steele has refused to comment about which projects he involved Miller but given Miller's Russian contacts, it is not credible that the Trump dossier was not one of them – in which case it is also not credible that Skripal was also not involved.

Join the dots.... cui bono? Why would Putin be interested in a has-been spy he could have killed long ago? On the other hand, might certain people connected with the Trump dossier be keen to silence sources, now that Sessions is investigating the FISA warrants and at the same time, implicate Russia?

Edit: The PM has said that the nerve agent was 'Novichok' which is 5 to 8 times more potent than VX... and the authorities waited 5 days to send the army in and over a week to tell people to wash their clothes and other items?

In reply to May: Umm, our investigations by Shitonya Serfs

[Mar 13, 2018] May Charges Russia in Ex-Spy's Poisoning, Warns of U.K. Reprisal

Mar 13, 2018 | www.bloomberg.com

"Either this was a direct act by the Russian State against our country, or the Russian government lost control of this potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others," May told lawmakers in London on Monday.

Russia wasted little time in dismissing May's assessment. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called her statement a " circus act ." The onus is on the U.K. to act decisively this time given criticism it responded weakly to the 2006 murder of Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko.

[Mar 13, 2018] Poisoning of Russian Ex-Spy "Is Almost Beyond Comprehension," Tillerson Says by GARDINER HARRIS

Friends in need...
Notable quotes:
"... Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson on Monday called the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain "an egregious act" and added, "It appears that it clearly came from Russia." ..."
"... The statement, made in an interview with reporters at the end of a five-nation tour of Africa, was the clearest statement yet from the Trump administration, after several days of equivocation in which American officials declined to explicitly blame Russia for the March 4 attack. ..."
Mar 12, 2018 | www.nytimes.com

Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson on Monday called the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain "an egregious act" and added, "It appears that it clearly came from Russia."

The statement, made in an interview with reporters at the end of a five-nation tour of Africa, was the clearest statement yet from the Trump administration, after several days of equivocation in which American officials declined to explicitly blame Russia for the March 4 attack.

"I've become extremely concerned about Russia," Mr. Tillerson said in the interview. "We spent most of last year investing a lot into attempts to work together, to solve problems, to address differences. And quite frankly, after a year, we didn't get very far. Instead what we've seen is a pivot on their part to be more aggressive."

He added: "And this is very, very concerning to me and others, that there seems to be a certain unleashing of activity that we don't fully understand what the objective behind that is. And if in fact this attack in the U.K. is the work of the Russian government, this is a pretty serious action."

[Mar 12, 2018] New Huge Anti-Russian Provocation ahead of Russian election by Robert Stevens

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The pair were found unconscious and slumped on a bench near the Maltings shopping centre. Police stated that two became ill at around 13.30 p.m. Police arrived on the scene at around 16.15 p.m., after being alerted by a concerned member of the public. ..."
"... Financial Times, ..."
"... Daily Mirror's ..."
"... If the Putin regime were indeed set on killing Skripal and his daughter, some explanation needs to be made as to motive. Skripal's daughter lived and worked in Russia and made regular trips back and forth. ..."
"... At least one other person released from jail in Russia would appear to have been a much more likely target of the Putin regime than Skripal, if indeed its intention was to prevent anti-Russian activities. Igor Sutyagin developed into a prominent anti-Putin figure in the UK, becoming a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) defence and intelligence think-tank. ..."
"... RUSI is central to the formulation of British imperialism's anti-Russian policy. Even the Guardian's ..."
"... Under conditions in which the NATO powers, including Britain, are seeking to utilise any pretext to justify their ongoing encirclement of Russia's border, Putin authorizing the murder of two people on the streets of the UK would be a propaganda gift to his opponents. ..."
"... The response of the government and media to these events must be placed in the context of the concerted drive by London to demonize Russia. Only last week the Times ..."
"... This followed a January speech given at RUSI by General Sir Nick Carter, the Chief of the General Staff of the British Armed Forces, in which he declared that the UK had to actively prepare for war with Russia and other geo-political rivals. ..."
"... Moon of Alabama has cited a London Daily Telegraph article stating that Sergei Skripal was close to a security consultant (fingered in MoA comments as Pablo Miller) who has worked for Christopher Steele. This security consultant apparently recruited Skripal in Estonia in 1995 and also lives in Salisbury (which as some have noted is some 13 km from Porton Down, site of a UK Ministry of Defence military research lab). ..."
"... If MoA's speculations have any substance, I should think Boris Berezovsky's suicide in 2013 merits closer attention. ..."
"... The UK and M16 is probably behind this murder as a step in helping the USA pile up fake evidence about alleged Russian crimes to justify the USA in its plan to go to war against Russia. ..."
"... These characters and entities (CIA or MI-6), are capable of unthinkable evil, such us disposing of those people just to be able to blame Russia-Putin once more. No holds barred. ..."
"... Cui Bono indeed. There is absolutely no reason the "Putin regime" as you insist on calling the Russian government, or Putin personally would gratuitously kill some completely irrelevant long-retired and already pardoned double agent who had long ago given British Intelligence every scrap of information he knew while knowing the only possible outcome would be a huge propaganda campaign against Russia and Putin personally just two weeks before the Presidential election. ..."
"... On the other hand, for MI6, the CIA, and the creatures behind them, it makes perfect sense to have their now useless former spy perform one last unwitting "service" for the Western Oligarchy by providing yet another pretext for ramping up their campaign of anti-Russian hysteria. As a fringe benefit, they don't have to pay his pension anymore. ..."
www.moonofalabama.org

Nobody of us can really know what happened in London with the Russian ex-double agent they tried to kill.
But Russians would be foolish to let the agent leave from Russia to try to assassinate him many years afterwards, at the eve of their Presidential Election.

DK Anti-Russia campaign follows alleged poisoning of former UK/Russian double agent and daughter

The British government and mass media have mounted a hysterical anti-Russian campaign centered on the still unexplained circumstances surrounding the hospitalisation of former British double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, after they were found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury on Sunday.

Initial reports Monday stated that Skripal, aged 66, may have ingested fentanyl, a synthetic opioid many times stronger than heroin, which can be fatal in small doses.

On Tuesday, the other person hospitalized was identified as Skripal's 33-year-old daughter, Yulia, who was also said to be in a critical condition.

Skripal is a former colonel in Russia's GRU, the military intelligence service. He spent four years in jail in Russia after being found guilty in 2006 of passing secrets to MI6, the UK's foreign intelligence service. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison.

Skripal served four years before being released in 2010, when he was pardoned by Russia as part of a well-publicized 10-person spy swap between the US, the UK and Russia. He moved to the UK where he has lived for the past seven years.

The pair were found unconscious and slumped on a bench near the Maltings shopping centre. Police stated that two became ill at around 13.30 p.m. Police arrived on the scene at around 16.15 p.m., after being alerted by a concerned member of the public. It was announced Wednesday that a police officer is also in critical condition after attending the incident. The Skripals visited a nearby restaurant, Zizzi's, which was cordoned off, as well as a local pub, The Bishop's Mill.

By Tuesday, despite nothing of substance being reported by the police, the government and media had effectively declared the incident an act of terrorism, with the finger pointing at Russia's Putin government. References to an opioid being involved were dropped, with media reports saying the government's secret chemical lab at Porton Down was as yet unable to identify the substance. Wiltshire police announced that London's Metropolitan Police counter-terrorist unit would be taking over the investigation.

In parliament, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson spoke about the "disturbing incident in Salisbury" and stated, "Although I am not now pointing fingers, because we cannot point fingers, I say to governments around the world that no attempt to take innocent life on UK soil will go either unsanctioned or unpunished," He then referred to Russia as a "malign and destructive force" and warned that if Moscow were found to be involved, the government would "take whatever measures we deem necessary to protect the lives of the people in this country, our values and our freedoms."

In another pointed reference to Russia, he stated that the case had "echoes of the death of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006" -- the former officer in Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB, the successor to the KGB), who died on November 23, 2006 after having been granted asylum in Britain in 2000. The UK, backed by the US have long claimed that the Putin regime ordered the killing despite no evidence being presented in an official British inquiry in 2016 -- other than the presence of the radioactive substance polonium.

Johnson threatened that England could consider boycotting the soccer World Cup in Russia this summer.

Every newspaper, apart from the Financial Times, led with hysterical anti-Russian headlines . The Sun blared, "Red Spy in UK Poison Terror," with an accompanying story referring to "fear over a Kremlin backed hit " The Daily Mirror's headline was " 'Assassins' on British street".

In an article in the Spectator , columnist Ed West posed the question, "Will Britain stand up to Russia?"

By the evening, despite Newsnight anchor Kirsty Wark introducing the story by saying, "so far we know nothing about what happened to them, if they were poisoned and if they were, by whom," the BBC's flagship news programme was dedicated to a narrative that Russia was responsible and that Skripal and his daughter were likely victims of an attack by Russia intelligence operatives.

The media have reported the deaths of Skripal's wife, his son and his older brother as mysterious events requiring investigation. His wife died of cancer in 2012 in Britain.

The following day the Daily Telegraph asserted that "Putin swore death on poisoned Russian spy." The Times went with "MI5 believes Russians tried to kill former spy."

On Wednesday morning, the government convened its COBRA committee, which meets during periods of national emergencies. On Wednesday evening, Met Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley announced that Skripal and his daughter were subjected to an attack by a "nerve agent," with it being classified as a case of "attempted murder."

No information released by the authorities can be taken at face value. All reports attest that Skripal was supposedly politically inactive. He evidently did nothing to hide his identity, buying a house for £260,000 in his real name and applying to join a railway social club. He regularly bought lottery scratch cards and purchased food from a local Polish food store.

If the Putin regime were indeed set on killing Skripal and his daughter, some explanation needs to be made as to motive. Skripal's daughter lived and worked in Russia and made regular trips back and forth.

At least one other person released from jail in Russia would appear to have been a much more likely target of the Putin regime than Skripal, if indeed its intention was to prevent anti-Russian activities. Igor Sutyagin developed into a prominent anti-Putin figure in the UK, becoming a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) defence and intelligence think-tank.

RUSI is central to the formulation of British imperialism's anti-Russian policy. Even the Guardian's main advocate against the Putin regime, columnist Luke Harding, was forced to acknowledge that Sutyagin "gave lectures on Vladimir Putin's darkening state, and kept a high public profile. Skripal, by contrast, eschewed London. He settled with Liudmilla [his wife] in the comparative quiet of Wiltshire. "

Asking the question who would benefit from the deaths of Skripal and his daughter, there would appear to be no obvious reason why the Putin government would authorize such an act. Putin is currently campaigning in the last stretch of the 2018 presidential election, which takes place on March 18. He is expected to be re-elected.

Under conditions in which the NATO powers, including Britain, are seeking to utilise any pretext to justify their ongoing encirclement of Russia's border, Putin authorizing the murder of two people on the streets of the UK would be a propaganda gift to his opponents.

The response of the government and media to these events must be placed in the context of the concerted drive by London to demonize Russia. Only last week the Times devoted its front page, an op-ed piece and an editorial to bellicose calls by senior military figures, including second in command of the armed forces, Sir Gordon Messenger, for an increase in military spending, naming Russia as the power that must be confronted.

This followed a January speech given at RUSI by General Sir Nick Carter, the Chief of the General Staff of the British Armed Forces, in which he declared that the UK had to actively prepare for war with Russia and other geo-political rivals.


Jennifer Hor4 days ago

Moon of Alabama has cited a London Daily Telegraph article stating that Sergei Skripal was close to a security consultant (fingered in MoA comments as Pablo Miller) who has worked for Christopher Steele. This security consultant apparently recruited Skripal in Estonia in 1995 and also lives in Salisbury (which as some have noted is some 13 km from Porton Down, site of a UK Ministry of Defence military research lab).

http://www.moonofalabama.or...

If MoA's speculations have any substance, I should think Boris Berezovsky's suicide in 2013 merits closer attention.

Kelli Hernandez4 days ago
When will people realize, here in America, that everything Russia is meant to manufacture consent for a world war against Russia? Why are our people so stupid?
Terry Lawrence Kelli Hernandez4 days ago
Not stupid, but victims of the best miseducation system in the world, sowing endless disinformation while pretending to educate.
Raycomeau4 days ago
The UK and M16 is probably behind this murder as a step in helping the USA pile up fake evidence about alleged Russian crimes to justify the USA in its plan to go to war against Russia.
Carolyn Zaremba Raycomeau4 days ago
Wouldn't surprise me at all.
Balázs Jávorszky4 days ago
A good article at last, apart from constant references to the "Putin regime".
Terry Lawrence -> Balázs Jávorszky4 days ago
Exactly.
Dave Tate4 days ago
Is it possible that instead of Putin or the Russian government being responsible for Skripal death more shadowy figures from his past decided to seek revenge from some past action? After all these people move in murky unpleasant circles and the past can catch up with one eventually.
Deplorable -> Dave Tate4 days ago
These characters and entities (CIA or MI-6), are capable of unthinkable evil, such us disposing of those people just to be able to blame Russia-Putin once more. No holds barred.
Terry Lawrence -> Dave Tate4 days ago
MI-6
jo5 days ago
Makes me laugh (kind of bitterly though) how the media's labelled the recent bout of cold weather insistently and repeatedly as "the beast from the East" blaming Russia for it! All of a piece with planting anti Russian seeds in the pleb's mind.
Terry Lawrence5 days ago
Cui Bono indeed. There is absolutely no reason the "Putin regime" as you insist on calling the Russian government, or Putin personally would gratuitously kill some completely irrelevant long-retired and already pardoned double agent who had long ago given British Intelligence every scrap of information he knew while knowing the only possible outcome would be a huge propaganda campaign against Russia and Putin personally just two weeks before the Presidential election.

On the other hand, for MI6, the CIA, and the creatures behind them, it makes perfect sense to have their now useless former spy perform one last unwitting "service" for the Western Oligarchy by providing yet another pretext for ramping up their campaign of anti-Russian hysteria. As a fringe benefit, they don't have to pay his pension anymore.

Incidentally, according to Canadian TV "news", his daughter lives in Moscow and was just visiting him in Britain. So apparently the FSB had no particular interest in killing her as they could easily have arranged a low profile "car accident" or something similar in Moscow at any convenient time. Whenever some high profile murder is promptly attributed to "Putin", "the Putin Regime" or "the Russians" and a huge obviously pre-arranged propaganda campaign swings into full throated shrieking, usually shortly before some important international event being held in Russia like the World Cup Soccer matches or the Presidential Election, always ask: Cui Bono.

Carolyn Zaremba -> Terry Lawrence4 days ago
Always.
Deplorable -> Terry Lawrence4 days ago
Putin has levels of approval ratings, unknown to the leaders of any country in the world. The only ones worrying about his reelection, are the despicable enemies of Russia, parroting US media anti Putin campaign.

By the way, how come that the indispensable country, home to 327 million people, can not even field a team in the Football World Cup in Russia this summer.

Even little Uruguay with a population of 3 million, is going to be there. Everybody who is somebody in the civilized world, is going to be in Russia for the cup, but the US.

Terry Lawrence -> Deplorable4 days ago
In the US, where everything is named for the opposite of what it actually is, the name "Football" is reserved for a game where you carry an object which is not shaped like a ball with your hands instead of kicking a round, ball shaped object with your foot.

Kind of like the "Forest Protection Act" removes logging protecting from National Forests and the "Clean Air Act" removes anti-pollution regulations from big polluters like coal fired power stations.

Here in Canada the "Seal Protection Act" makes it illegal to protect seals, among other "named the opposite of what they actually do" laws.

George Orwell nailed it in "1984". "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength".

jo Terry Lawrence5 days ago
Yeah why not the Trump regime? Obama regime? When I'm reading these articles I always mentally replace "administration" with "regime".

[Mar 12, 2018] State Department's War on Political Dissent

Highly recommended!
Mar 12, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

The US State Department is spending millions of dollars spreading its own disinformation and propping up NGOs to destroy any individual or organization that does not toe the official US government line on the US global military empire. Through its "Global Engagement Center" the State Department establishes in fact -- in the open -- what it accuses the Russian government of doing without any evidence. Social media companies are colluding with the US government to make organizations who oppose the US global military empire disappear.

RPI's Daniel McAdams joins the Corbett Report to discuss the neocon/Washington war on dissent in America:

Inside the State Department's Troll Farm - Daniel McAdams on The Corbett Report - YouTube

[Mar 12, 2018] Remember when that building fire killed scores of people, they called for calm and patience until the full investigation is done, not to jump to any conclusions and all that jazz, song dance. Where is now the famous British attitude "Keep calm and carry on"?

Notable quotes:
"... As far as one can tell from what the British have revealed about this attempted killing is that the agent is an organophosphate triester acety choline (ach) inhibitor. ..."
"... This is a class of chemicals that include hundreds if not thousands of different compounds. As a matter of fact most of these compounds can be synthesized in very simple labs if there is an individual that has the knowledge. It would be possible to put together such a lab in a single family house with a natural gas, electric hook ups and a good kitchen sink along with a few thousand dollars to purchase the right flasks, pumps and temperature controllers. ..."
"... The suggestion by May that Russia is one of the only countries in the world capable of making this stuff is totally laughable. In the last 80 years the organophosphate neurotoxins have been used by and produced by dozens of countries as insecticides. ..."
"... At this point there close to zero evidence that the agent used to intoxicate the Skripils was something uniquely available to Russia. ..."
"... When in trouble at home, create trouble abroad. ..."
Mar 12, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

ToivoS , Mar 12, 2018 4:36:57 PM | 9

What is totally insane about all of these allegations against Russia is that so far they have not identified the nerve agent that was used against Skrpil and his daughter. As far as one can tell from what the British have revealed about this attempted killing is that the agent is an organophosphate triester acety choline (ach) inhibitor.

This is a class of chemicals that include hundreds if not thousands of different compounds. As a matter of fact most of these compounds can be synthesized in very simple labs if there is an individual that has the knowledge. It would be possible to put together such a lab in a single family house with a natural gas, electric hook ups and a good kitchen sink along with a few thousand dollars to purchase the right flasks, pumps and temperature controllers.

The suggestion by May that Russia is one of the only countries in the world capable of making this stuff is totally laughable. In the last 80 years the organophosphate neurotoxins have been used by and produced by dozens of countries as insecticides. These chemicals were discovered by German chemists in the 1920s.

The difference between an insecticide and a chemical warfare agent is no more than a simple side chain about the phosphate core.

At this point there close to zero evidence that the agent used to intoxicate the Skripils was something uniquely available to Russia.

et Al , Mar 12, 2018 5:28:14 PM | 21

Well, I place my completely subjective assessment on Mossad wot dun it.

Motive?

Russia is in 'its backyard' and screwing up its plans (destroying IS/ISIL/ISIS/DAESH/Whatever), or at least limiting its options.

Means?

Lots of Israeli Russians to pick from for the job, probably previously unactivated ones for this special one off. As 'b' has pointed out already, this agent is not 'magic' or unknown to the West.

Opportunity?

Upcoming 2018 Football World Cup in Russia, Presidential elections. Timed for maximum impact to give allies (CIA probably and by extension MI6/whatever) a sliver of opportunity to try and push for collective action to limit or control Russia in the ME and elsewhere.

It all rather smacks of desperation though, which is why I think of Nut&Yahoo who was yet again 'interviewed' last week by the cops. When in trouble at home, create trouble abroad. It's also a pretty dumb move (considering the close relations between Russia & Israel) which I hope will back fire and probably won't work out as planned (as everything else planned by the West hasn't). If Russia fingers Nut&Yahoo for this, then they will call the shots, i.e. he'll have to fall on his sword and Russian troops will retake the Golan. Actually I expect the latter to happen regardless. No one else can do it without being bombed.

Anyways, that's my massive speculation for what it is worth. Not a lot!

WorldBLee , Mar 12, 2018 5:35:59 PM | 23
If the UK has any doubt, I'm sure there are '17 intelligence agencies' in the US who will back them up all the way! And they're so good, they don't even need to see any evidence to know for sure!
karlof1 , Mar 12, 2018 5:42:50 PM | 24
May's using the trusted-old projection propaganda ploy for her constituents. I await the CCTV footage showing the pair being gassed on that public park bench only 8 miles away from a very sensitive military installation. Seems the only people sniffing the bait are from 5-Eyes, English-speaking nations, as proven by how the media's playing along. The UK's drowning as it continues its slide into irrelevancy after its brief affair as #1 planetary hegemon.

Meanwhile, Mercouris and Escobar provide the underlying reasons why UK/US are so frantic.

hopehely , Mar 12, 2018 5:49:15 PM | 26
Remember when that building fire killed scores of people, they called for calm and patience until the full investigation is done, not to jump to any conclusions and all that jazz, song & dance. Where is now the famous British attitude "Keep calm and carry on"?
Peter AU 1 , Mar 12, 2018 5:49:22 PM | 27
The UK poisoned spy is just part of an intensive US/UK/France propaganda effort. US and France on Syria and UK on Russia. Haley in the UN saying US will act on its own unless UNSC demand imediate no conditions 30 day ceasefire in Ghouta, Macron fiddling with his CW red line and now May/UK ramping up the propaganda on Russia.
Ghouta must have been very important to these pricks.
JohninMK , Mar 12, 2018 6:15:01 PM | 35
Wonderful thing the Internet. I have just found this 1993 document that contains a long interview with one of the 'inventors' of Novochuk. It is amazing stuff, as is the rest of the document.

It is part of the 'what can we do to turn Soviet tanks into plowshares' plan back then with interviews with key players. Found in a JPRS report available through DTIC.

I can't cut and past as its a huge pdf that also takes a bit of time to load. Check out pages 18/19/20.

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a333126.pdf

Huge thanks to Twitter users Private Joker and Veli-Pekka Kivimäki

Mina , Mar 12, 2018 6:15:49 PM | 36
Since the ghouta scheduled false Flag was debunked in advance thy had to come with another chemical big one?

[Mar 12, 2018] It appears Mr Skripal for some reason has a nerve gas stored in his house with enough concentration to take out a policeman who inspected the premises

Mar 12, 2018 | off-guardian.org

Thomas Peterson says March 9, 2018

From what's emerging now, it seems there simply were no assassins wandering round Salisbury.

Instead, it appears Mr Skripal for some reason has a house full of nerve gas, or enough of it at least to take out himself, his daughter and a policeman who inspected the premises.

[Mar 12, 2018] MILITARY grade? Well then, Mrs. Prime Minister... that's pretty God damn serious then. Because everyone knows the Russian CONSUMER-grade nerve agents are crap

The PM has said that the nerve agent was 'Novichok' which is 5 to 8 times more potent than VX... and the authorities waited 5 days to send the army in and over a week to tell people to wash their clothes and other items?
Mar 12, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

PavewayIV | Mar 12, 2018 4:41:58 PM | 10

"Sergej Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia.

MILITARY grade? Well then, Mrs. Prime Minister... that's pretty God damn serious then. Because everyone knows the Russian CONSUMER -grade nerve agents are crap. I think they sell them on Amazon (Free shipping with Amazon Prime).

TJ , Mar 12, 2018 4:55:27 PM | 11
Like I said in a previous thread Novichok was part of the plot of the recent "Strike Back: Retribution" TV series on Sky TV, Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox owns a 39.14% controlling stake in Sky PLC. So a TV series by a billionaire supporter of Teresa May just happens to make a fictional TV series around a nerve agent and Bad Russians(TM) and is put on TV just before Teresa May accuses Bad Russians(TM) of using said nerve agent. This is not a coincidence.

[Mar 11, 2018] Reality Check: The Guardian Restarts Push for Regime Change in Russia by Kit

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... This,,,"Russia appears lost, a global menace, a moral vacuum, a far greater threat than it ever was during the cold war." Should be changed to "The Guardian appears lost, a global menace, a moral vacuum, a far greater threat than it ever was during the cold war." ..."
"... The Guardian has consistently propagandised for regime changes inspired by Washington NeoCons, those of Libya, Syria, Ukraine and is ramping up their propaganda machine toward North Korea, Venezuela and now Russia itself having promoted destabilisation on its borders in Ukraine. ..."
"... On top of what I said yesterday, if Russian oligarchs do pull all their money out of Britain, the British economy would crash, it being highly dependent on the services sector (constituting 80% of Britain's GDP in 2016 according to Wikipedia) and the financial services industry in particular. So if all those Russian billions swirling through Britain's financial system are "dodgy", that's because the system itself encouraged those inflows. ..."
"... "Poor little Britain" which actually spends on par with Russia in terms of its military budget, despite the fact that a) it's a much smaller country to defend and is surrounded by water, and b) it's part of NATO with the US as its staunch defender so it really doesn't need a standalone military anyway. ..."
"... From what's emerging now, it seems there simply were no assassins wandering round Salisbury. Instead, it appears Mr Skripal for some reason has a house full of nerve gas, or enough of it at least to take out himself, his daughter and a policeman who inspected the premises. ..."
"... There is one key element that proves that the Russians didn't do it: The Russians aren't so clumsy as to poison over a dozen other people at the same time. ..."
"... The whole piece is an emotionally charged rant, bordering on hysteria, based on a transparent tissue of lies, distortions and absolutely stunning hypocrisy; and this coming from the 'liberal' 'left of centre' Guardian! ..."
Mar 11, 2018 | off-guardian.org

Mark Rice-Oxley, Guardian columnist and the first in line to fight in WWIII.

The alleged poisoning of ex-MI6 agent Sergei Skripal has caused the Russophobic MSM to go into overdrive. Nowhere is the desperation with which the Skripal case has been seized more obvious than the Guardian. Luke Harding is spluttering incoherently about a weapons lab that might not even exist anymore . Simon Jenkins gamely takes up his position as the only rational person left at the Guardian, before being heckled in the comments and dismissed as a contrarian by Michael White on twitter. More and more the media are becoming a home for dangerous, aggressive, confrontational rhetoric that has no place in sensible, adult newspapers.

For example, Mark Rice-Oxley's column in today's Guardian:

Oh, Russia! Even before we point fingers over poison and speculate about secret agents and spy swaps and pub food in Salisbury, one thing has become clear: Russia appears lost, a global menace, a moral vacuum, a far greater threat than it ever was during the cold war.

Read this. It's from a respected "unbiased", liberal news outlet. It is the worst, most partisan political language I have ever heard, more heated and emotionally charged than even the most fraught moments of the Cold War. It is dangerous to the whole planet, and has no place in our media.

If everything he said in the following article were true, if he had nothing but noble intentions and right on his side, this would still be needlessly polarizing and war-like language.

To make it worse, everything he proceeds to say is a complete lie.

Usually we would entitle these pieces "fact checks", but this goes beyond that. This? This is a reality check.

Its agents pop over for murder and shopping

FALSE: There's no proof any of this ever happened. There has been no trial in the Litvinenko case. The "public inquiry" was a farce, with no cross-examination of witnesses, evidence given in secret and anonymous witnesses. All of which contravene British law regarding a fair trial.

even while its crooks use Britain as a 24/7 laundromat for their ill-gotten billions, stolen from compatriots.

TRUE sort of: Russian billionaires do come to London, Paris, and Switzerland to launder their (stolen) money. Rice-Oxley is too busy with his 2 minutes of hate to interrogate this issue. The reason oligarchs launder their money here is that WE let them. Oligarchs have been fleeing Russia for over a decade. Why? Because, in Russia, Putin's government has jailed billionaires for tax evasion and embezzling, stripped them of illegally acquired assets and demanded they pay their taxes. That's why you have wanted criminals like Sergei Pugachev doing interviews with Luke Harding, complaining he's down to his "last 270 million" .

When was the last time a British billionaire was prosecuted for financial crimes? Mega-Corporations owe literally billions in tax , and our government lets them get away with it.

Its digital natives use their skills not for solving Russia's own considerable internal problems but to subvert the prosperous adversaries that it secretly envies.

FALSE: Russiagate is a farce, anyone with an open-mind can see that . The reference to Russians envying the west is childish and insulting. The 13, just thirteen, Russians who were indicted by Mueller have no connection to the Russian government, a nd allegedly campaigned for many candidates , and both for and against Trump. They are a PR firm, nothing more.

It bought a World Cup,

FALSE: The World Cup bids are voted on, and after years and years of investigation the US/UK teams have found so little evidence of corruption in the Russia bid that they simply stopped talking about it. If the FBI had found even the slightest hint of financial malpractice, would we ever have stopped hearing about it?

invaded two neighbours

False: A European Union investigation found that Georgia was to blame for the start of the (very brief, very humiliating) Russo-Georgian war . It lasted a week. That a week-long conflict started by the other side is evidence of "global threat" in a world where Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have happened is beyond hypocritical it is delusional.

Regarding the second "neighbour": Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia are not at war. Ukraine has claimed to have been "invaded" by Russia many times but has never declared war. Why? Because they rely on Russian gas to live, and because they know that if Russia were to ever REALLY invade, the war would last only just a big longer than the Georgian one. The "anti-terrorist operation" in Ukraine was started by the coup government in 2014. Since that time over 10,000 people have died. The vast majority killed by the governments mercenaries and far-right militias many of whom espouse outright fascism .

bombed children to save a butcher in the Middle East.

MISLEADING: The statement is trying to paint Russia/Assad as deliberately targeting children, which is clearly untrue. Russia is operating in Syria in full compliance with international law. Unlike literally everybody else bar Iran. When Russia entered the conflict, at the invitation of the legitimate Syrian government, Jihadists were winning the war. ISIS had huge swathes of territory, al-Qaeda affiliates had strongholds in all of Syria's major cities. Syria was on the brink of collapse. Rice-Oxley is unclear whether or not he thinks this is a good thing.

Today, ISIS is obliterated, Aleppo is free and the war is almost over. Apparently Syria becoming another Libya is preferable to a secular government winning a war against terrorists and US-backed mercenaries.

And now it wants to start a new nuclear arms race.

FALSE: America started the arms race when they pulled out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty. Putin warned at the time it was a dangerous move . America then moved their AEGIS "defense shield" into Eastern Europe . Giving them the possibility of first-strike without retaliation. This is an untennable position for any country. Putin warned, at the time, that Russia would have to respond. They have responded. Mr Rice-Oxley should take this up with Bush and Cheney if he has a problem with it.

And before the whataboutists say, "America does some of that stuff too", that may be true, but just because the US is occasionally awful it doesn't mean that Russia isn't.

MISLEADING: America doesn't do "some of that stuff". No, America aren't "occasionally awful". They do ALL of that stuff, and have been the biggest destructive force on the planet for over 70 years. Since Putin came to power America has carried out aggressive military operations against Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria. They have sanctioned and threatened and carried out coups against North Korea, Ukraine, Iran, Honduras, Venezuela and Cuba. All that time, the US has also claimed the right to extradite and torture foreign nationals with impunity. The war crimes of American forces and agencies are beyond measure and count.

We are so used to American crimes we just don't see them anymore. Imagine Putin, at one his epic four-hour Q&A sessions, off-handedly admitting to torturing people in illegal prison camps . Would we ever hear the end of it?

Even if you cede the utterly false claim that Russia has "invaded two neighbours", the scale of destruction just does not compare.

Invert the scale of destruction and casualties of Georgia and Iraq. Imagine Putin's government had killed 500,000 people in Georgia alone, whilst routinely condemning the US for a week-long war in Iraq that killed less than 600 people. Imagine Russia kidnapped foreign nationals and tortured them, whilst lambasting America's human rights record.

The double-think employed here is literally insane.

Note to Rice-Oxley and his peers, pointing out your near-delusional hypocrisy is not "whataboutism". It's a standard rhetorical appeal to fairness. If you believe the world shouldn't be fair, fine, but don't expect other people not to point out your double standards.

As for poor little Britain, it seems to take this brazen bullying like a whipping boy in the playground who has wet himself. Boycott the World Cup? That'll teach them!

FALSE: Rice-Oxley is trying to paint a picture of false weakness in order to promote calls for action. Britain has been anything but cooperative with Russia. British forces operate illegally in Syria , they arm and train rebels. They refused to let Russian authorities see the evidence in the Litvinenko case, and refused to let Russian lawyers cross-examine witnesses. Britain's attitude to Russia has been needlessly, provocatively antagonistic for years.

Russians have complained that the portrayal of their nation in dramas such as McMafia is cartoonish and unhelpful, a lazy smear casting an entire nation as a ludicrous two-dimensional pantomime villain with a pocketful of poisonous potions .Of course, the vast majority of Russians are indeed misrepresented by such portrayals, because they are largely innocent in these antics.

TRUE: Russians do complain about this, which is entirely justifiable. The western representation of Russians is ignorant and racist almost without exception. It is an effort, just like Rice-Oxley's column, to demonize an entire people and whip up hatred of Russia so that people will support US-UK warmongering.

Most ordinary Russians are in fact also victims of the power system in their country, which requires ideas such as individual comfort, aspiration, dignity, prosperity and hope to be subjugated to the wanton reflexes of the state

FALSE: Putin's government has decreased poverty by over 66% in 17 years . They have increased life-expectancy, decreased crime, and increased public health. Pensions, social security and infrastructure have all been rebuilt. These are not controversial or debated claims. The Guardian published them itself just a few years ago. That is hardly a state where hope and aspiration are put aside.

Why is Russian power like this: cynical, destructive, zero-sum, determined to bring everything down to a base level where everyone thinks the worst of each other and behaves accordingly?

MISLEADING FALLACY: This is simply projection. There is no logical basis for this statement. He is simply employing the old rhetorical trick of asking WHY something exists, as a way of establishing its existence. This allows the (dishonest) author to sell his own agenda as if it solves a riddle. Before you can explain something, you need to establish an explanandum something which requires explaining. This is the basic logical process that our dear author is attempting to circumvent. We don't NEED to explain why Russian power is like this, because he hasn't yet established that it is .

I think there are two reasons. The most powerful political idea in Russia is restoration. A decade of humiliation – economic, social and geopolitical – that followed its rebirth in 1991 became the defining narrative of the new nation.

MISLEADING LANGUAGE: Describing the absolute destruction caused by the fall of the USSR as "rebirth" is an absurd joke. People sold their medals, furniture and keepsakes for food, people froze to death in the streets.

At times, even the continued existence of the Russian Federation appeared under threat.

TRUE: This is true. Russia was in danger of Balkanisation. The possibility of dozens of anarchic microstates, many with access to nuclear weapons, was very real. Most rational people would consider this a bad thing. The achievement of Putin's government in pulling Russia back from the brink should be applauded. Especially when compared with our Western governments who can barely even maintain the functional social security states created by their predecessors. Compare the NHS now with the NHS in 2000, compare Russia's health service now to 17 years ago. Who do you think is really in trouble?

The second reason is that the parlous internal state of Russia – absurdist justice, a threadbare social safety net, a pyramid society in which a very few get very rich and the rest languish – creates moral ambivalence.

PROJECTION: he actually makes this statement without even a hint of irony. The Tory government has killed people by slashing their benefits, and homeless people froze to death during the recent blizzards. The overall trend of British social structure has been down, for decades. Poverty is increasing all the time , food banks are opening and people are increasingly desperate. We are trending down. 20%, one in five British people, now live in poverty .

In that same time, as stated above, Russia's poverty has gone down and down. 13% of Russians live in poverty, almost half the UK rate. In 2014, before we sanctioned Russia, it was only 10%. Even the briefest research would show this. Columnists like Rice-Oxley go out of their way to avoid inconvenient facts.

What is to be done? I wouldn't respond with empty threats, Boris Johnson. No one cares.

Here we come to the centre of the shrubbery maze, up until now the column was just build up. Establishing a "problem" so he can pitch us a "solution".

There are only two weaknesses in this bully's defences. The first is his money. Britain needs to do something about the dodgy Russian billions swilling through its financial system. Make it really hard for Kremlin-connected money to buy football clubs or businesses or establish dodgy limited partnerships; stop oligarchs from raising capital on the London stock exchange. Don't bother with sanctions. Just say: "No thanks, we don't want your business."

FALSE: This shows not even the most basic understanding of the way money works. Money being made in Russia and spent in London is bad fo Russia. Sending billionaires back to Russia would inject money INTO the Russian economy. Either Rice-Oxley is actually a moron, or he is being deliberately dishonest.

What he REALLY means is that we should put pressure on the oligarchs, not to the hurt the Russian economy, but in the hopes the oligarchs will turn on Putin and remove him by undemocratic means.

He is pushing for backdoor regime change. And if you think I'm reading too much into this, then here

The second is public opinion. The imminent presidential election is a foregone conclusion, but the mood in Russia can turn suddenly, as we saw in 1991, 1993 and 2011-2012.

Notice how quickly he dismisses the democratic will of the Russian people. Poor, stupid, "envious" Russians aren't equipped to make their own decisions. We need to step in. "Public opinion" turning means a colour revolution. It means US backed regime change in a nuclear armed super-power. Backed by the cyberwarriors paid to spread Western propaganda online.

Maybe it's time to try some new digital hearts-and-minds operation. In the internet age, Russians have already shown how public opinion can be manipulated. Perhaps our own secret digital marvels can embark on the kind of information counter-offensive to win over the many millions of Russians who share our values. Perhaps they already are.

The hypocrisy is mind-blowing, when I read this paragraph I was dumb-founded. Speechless. For months we've been hearing about how terrible Russia is for allegedly interfering in the American election. Damaging democracy with reporting true news out of context and some well placed memes.

Our response? Our defense of our "values"? Use the armies of online propagandists our governments employ – their existence was reported in the Guardian – in order to undermine, or undo the democratic will of the Russian people. Rice-Oxley is positing this with a straight face.

Russia is such a destabilising threat to "our democratic values", such a moral vacuum, that we must use subterfuge to undermine their elections and remove their popular head of state.

Rice-Oxley wants to push and prod and provoke and antagonise a nuclear armed power that, at worst, is guilty of nothing but playing our game by our rules and winning. He wants to build a case for war with Russia, and he's doing it on bedrock of cynical lies.

It's all incredibly dangerous. Hopefully they'll realise that before it's too late. For all our sakes.


vexarb says March 11, 2018

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Putin's 10 year plan for the future of Russia. Putin is a builder, like Peter the Great. He is a seeker after excellence, like Catherine the Great. If his 10 year plan can achieve the half of what he set out in his recent speech, the name Putin will go down in history with the same sobriquet.

The most important part of Putin's March 1st speech:

https://thesaker.is/the-most-important-part-of-putins-march-1st-speech/

And on the village level, because that's where most of the real work of the world is done, a snippet BTL from Auslander who lives in the Crimea: "the first implications of anti corruption efforts are obvious in our little village. We'll see how it pans out but everyone can, and should, assist in this task. The proof will be in the pudding when The West starts screaming about certain kind, gentle and innocent 'businessmen' who end up counting trees [in Siberia?] for a decade or three."

Jay Q says March 10, 2018
Take a look at this wretched piece in the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/10/sergei-skripal-case-proved-charge-putin-attempted-murder

I wonder how much longer the general readership over there will cotton on to the pro-war and propaganda agenda of the Guardian and leave it en masse? It's as dishonest as The Sun.

M. says March 10, 2018
"Poor little Britain", with half the population, a much smaller territory ,and being part of the largest military alliance in the world, spends only 10 billions less than Russia in "defense". One of those "defense" strategies included in the budget, one that all those commentators vilifying Russia conveniently ignore, is to blow up weddings, funerals and entire villages with missiles fired from drones. No trial, no public kill list, no record of people killed, no accountability. That is sanctioned, extra-judicial murder of suspects and everyone around them. And these progressive commentators, eager to spread prosperity by any mean, seem to be ok with it.

Update: as I was writing this I noticed that The Guardian has a piece by (of all people!), Simon Jenkins, which, yes, takes for granted that the assassination attempt was carried out by the Russians, but asks if there is a moral difference between that and killing suspects with drone strikes. For that, he has been labeled an useful idiot and "an apologist for attempted mass murder on British soil". Highly amusing if you ask me, but also a terrifying example of how straying if only a little bit from the official line ("yes, the Russians tried to kill this guy, they are the worst, but maybe we should have a look at ourselves and our (kind of) inappropriate tendency to murder everyone we want") has to be punished. There are no ifs or buts while at the two minutes of hate. Now even the pieces that are there to give a semblance of balance have to be torn apart by those liberal, prosperity loving persons that can´t seem to be able to condemn the murder of children at will. Now it is time to express hatred towards Goldstein, I mean, of course, Putin and everything Russia.

Greg Bacon says March 10, 2018
This,,,"Russia appears lost, a global menace, a moral vacuum, a far greater threat than it ever was during the cold war." Should be changed to "The Guardian appears lost, a global menace, a moral vacuum, a far greater threat than it ever was during the cold war."

All suffering from PTDS AKA Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome.

stevehayes13 says March 10, 2018
The Russophobes over at the Guardian (and the rest of the corporate media) would be well advised to review the trial of Julius Streicher at the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Sheila Coombes says March 10, 2018
The Guardian has consistently propagandised for regime changes inspired by Washington NeoCons, those of Libya, Syria, Ukraine and is ramping up their propaganda machine toward North Korea, Venezuela and now Russia itself having promoted destabilisation on its borders in Ukraine.

I find it the ultimate paradox that a publication purporting to be 'liberal' acts so enthusiastically for deadly regime changes from this once Trotskyist but now extreme Right Wing group. There is nothing 'liberal', 'humanitarian', or moral about promotion of deadly regime changes that have destroyed previously peaceful nations and murdered hundreds of thousands in the process. Guardian for the geopolitical goals of the self-declared 'exceptional' Empire, the new 'master race' that of the US.

Big B says March 10, 2018
One final observation on the Skripal case (for now): this stuff is so toxic. We don't know what the stuff is: nevertheless, we know it is so toxic, can only be made by a state, and needs careful expert handling. We know this because every paper and TV channel has by now emphasised that this stuff is so toxic, etc. If we missed the "nerve agents and what they do to you" coverage: we can ascertain for ourselves from the men in the hazmat suits, the this stuff must be so toxic. The Army have now been deployed: on hand after completing the largest CW exercise ever held, 'Toxic Dagger'; they are now employing their specialist skills to carry out "Sensitive Site Operations" because this stuff is you get it by now. In another piece of pure theater: police in hazmat suits were examining the grave of Alexander and Liudmila Skripal because even after a year or more buried underground, you can't be too careful, because this stuff is A woman from the office next to Zizzi was taken ill (maybe she had the risotto con pesce) because even after a week, and next door, traces of this stuff can still be

11 (or 16) people were hospitalised from the effects of 'this stuff': the first attending officer, Nick Bailey, is only just out of ICU and lucky to be alive. The Skripal's are not so lucky: and on "palliative care" according to H de Bretton-Gordon. Yet the eye-witness calling himself 'Jamie Paine' was close enough to get coughed on; and the unnamed passing doctor and nurse that attended the Skripals at the scene, clearing their airways, are all fine (despite being hospitalised). Yet PC Bailey nearly died? Funny that?

When first you practice to deceive: someone in the propaganda department must have noticed this glaring inconsistency. Enter, stage right, former Met Chief Ian (now Lord) Blair (guess who was leading the Met when Litvinenko was poisoned?): to clarify that PC Bailey was contaminated when he was the first officer to enter the Skripal's home – not attend them in Salisbury. This allowed the Torygraph and Fox to speculate that Yulia brought a contaminated present for her father (which she kept in a drawer for a week, because this stuff is so toxic?). The Torygraph's previous spin: that Skripal was poisoned for his contributions to the Pissgate dossier were torpedoed by Orbis (Steele's company). Speaking on Radio 4: after pushing the Buzzfeed "14 other deaths" dodgy dossier; Blair said "So there maybe some clues floating around in here." Yes, clues that you are lying? This is pure theater: only it is more Morecambe and Wise than Shakespeare.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/09/russian-spy-may-have-poisoned-home-police-believe/

DomesticExtremist says March 10, 2018
Theatre indeed.

Check out the report from C4News (mute the sound).

Two guys plodding around in fluorescent breather suits, another couple with gas masks, but behind them firemen in normal uniform and no gas masks and the reporter 20 feet in front, in civvies wih no protective gear at all.

Virulent nerve agent threat? Theatre, and not very convincing at that.

BigB says March 10, 2018
Another day, another story: now the BBC, Torygraph (contradicting its own article above), Wiltshire Police, and Nick Bailey himself all confirmed that he became ill after attending the Skripals. So now we know they are lying: the house story concocted by Blair was a complete fabrication. The "nerve agent" appears to be only selectively toxic!
http://www.salisburyjournal.co.uk/news/journalnewsindex/16078868.Police_officer_in_hospital_over_nerve_agent_attack_releases_first_statement/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/08/russian-spy-poisoning-police-officer-struck-rare-nerve-agent/
flaxgirl says March 10, 2018
It just seems like the so very patronizing nonsense you'd see in a right-wing publication.
Edwige says March 10, 2018
Or the tune you'd hear played on the "mighty wurlitzer".
BigB says March 10, 2018
Flaxgirl: a bit OT, but not too much as this event does not seem to have too much basis in reality: on the question of fabrication the UK Home Office held an event this week – Security and Policing 2018 – where the "Live Demo Area" was sponsored by Crisis Cast. I though you might interested? Are they providing critical incident training: or the critical incidents themselves is a legitimate question after the events in Salisbury?

https://www.securityandpolicing.co.uk/security-policing-live/demo/

As featured on UK Column News (from 22:52.)
https://www.ukcolumn.org/ukcolumn-news/uk-column-news-6th-march-2018

Francis Lee says March 10, 2018
I suppose by now we should be used to the nauseating, self-righteous bluster dished out on a daily basis by the Anglo-Zionist media. The two minutes hate by the flabby 'left' liberals who now have apparently joined forces with the demented US neo-cons in openly baying for a war against Russia. How, exactly did these people expect Russia to react to the abrogation of the ABM agreement, marching NATO right up to Russia's doorstep, staging coups in the Ukraine and Georgia, having the US sixth fleet swanning around in the Black Sea? Of course, Russia reacted as any other self-respecting state would react to such blatant provocations. And this includes the US during the Cuba crisis and its self-proclaimed right to intervene in its sphere of influence – Latin America – and for that matter anywhere else on the planet. And it does so A L'outrance.

But I was foregetting, the Anglo-Zionist axis has a divine mission mandated by the deity to reconfigure the world and bring democracy and freedom to those "Lesser breeds without the Law" (Kipling). Of course, this updated version of 'taking up the white man's burden' by the 'exceptional people' may involve mass murder, mayhem, destruction and chaos, unfortunately necessary in the short(ish) run. But these benighted peoples should realise it is for their own good, and if this means starving to death 500,000 Iraqi children through sanctions, well, it was 'worth it' according to the lovely Madeline Albright. This is the language and methodology of a totalitarian imperialism. As someone has remarked the Anglo-zionist empire is not on the wrong side of history, it is the wrong side of history.

The arrogance, ignorance and crass venality of these people is manifest to the point of parody.

Jen says March 10, 2018
I agree with Mark Rice-Oxley that Russian oligarchs should pull their money out of Britain and return it to Russia to invest in businesses there. That would be the ethical thing for them to do, to fulfill their proper tax obligations and stop using Britain as a tax haven.

I hear that Russia has had another bumper wheat harvest and is now poised to take over from Australia as the major wheat exporter to Egypt and Indonesia, the world's biggest buyers of wheat. So if Russian oligarchs are wondering where to put their money in, wheat production, research into improving wheat yields and the conditions wheat is grown in are just a few areas they can invest in.

Be careful what you wish for, Mr Rice-Oxley – your wish might come true bigger than you realise!

Jen says March 11, 2018
On top of what I said yesterday, if Russian oligarchs do pull all their money out of Britain, the British economy would crash, it being highly dependent on the services sector (constituting 80% of Britain's GDP in 2016 according to Wikipedia) and the financial services industry in particular. So if all those Russian billions swirling through Britain's financial system are "dodgy", that's because the system itself encouraged those inflows.

Who's really "dodgy", Mr Rice-Oxley?

David C. Lee (@worldblee) says March 10, 2018
"Poor little Britain" which actually spends on par with Russia in terms of its military budget, despite the fact that a) it's a much smaller country to defend and is surrounded by water, and b) it's part of NATO with the US as its staunch defender so it really doesn't need a standalone military anyway.
Emily Durron says March 9, 2018
The Guardian are scum. Lying, deceiving, warmongering, hating scum. I would love to parachute them all into East Ghouta.
Fair dinkum says March 9, 2018
"It's them, over there, they are evil. We must stop them. They are coming for us, they will take our children and steal our i phones !!! Arrgh!!!" "I'll have another strong short black thanks"
bevin says March 9, 2018
Their world is falling apart- in Korea and the Middle East the Empire is on the verge of eviction. All the certitudes of yesteryear are dissolving. Even the Turks, who, famously, held the line in Korea when the PLA attacked and the US Eighth Army fled south, are now on the other side. The same Turks who hosted US nuclear armed strategic missiles so openly that the USSR sent missiles of its own to Cuba.
As to the UK, the economy is contracting and the economic infrastructure is cracking up- living standards are plummeting and the only recourse of those responsible for the mess-the officers on the bridge- is propaganda. Like the Empire the British Establishment has been living on the fruits of its own propaganda for so long that, when it is exposed as merely empty bullying, there is nothing left but to resort to more lies in the hope that they will obscure raw and looming reality.

In The Guardian newsroom the water is three feet deep and rising inexorably, the ship is sinking and all hands are required to bail or the screens will go black. There is no time to wait for developments, for investigations to be completed, for evidence- every ounce of strength must be thrown into the defiance of nature, the shocking nakedness of reality.

There is something very significant about the way that simultaneous attacks of impotent russophobic dementia are eating away the brains of the rulers on both sides of the Atlantic.

The game, which has been going the same way for about 500 years, is up. The maritime empire is becoming marginal and the force that it has used, throughout these centuries, no longer overwhelms. The cruisers and carriers no longer work except to intimidate those not worth frightening.

There is only one thing left for the Empire and its hundreds of thousands of apparatchiki-from cops to pundits, from Professors to jailers- either they adjust to a new dispensation because the Times are Changing or they blow themselves and the whole planet up.

Thomas Peterson says March 9, 2018
From what's emerging now, it seems there simply were no assassins wandering round Salisbury. Instead, it appears Mr Skripal for some reason has a house full of nerve gas, or enough of it at least to take out himself, his daughter and a policeman who inspected the premises.
Thomas Prentice says March 9, 2018
Cleary the Guardian was swallowed up by England's fascist regime controlled by the City of London when it surrendered its hard drives to the regime for examination and/or destruction in the wake of the Snowden revelations.

The Guardian ownerships also sold their souls -- although the Guardian had already been in decline before they nabbed Glenn Greenwald. When he left, the Guardian lost ALL presumptive credibility.

Now The Guardian is just an organ of regime propaganda like the BBC (thank GOd for OffGuardian) and here is the island nation AGAIN asserting its dominance over the whole world, but this time on behalf of his brawnier brother, the EUSE, aka Exceptional US Empire.

One wonders how much longer the Russians will put up with this now that it is CLEAR that -- for the first time ever -- the Russians have complete military and nuclear superiority over "The West."

I'll bet Putin won't invade Ukraine, Germany, France, Brussels and England from the North and from the sea in the wintertime.

The Big Problem Is YThat Americans are afraid -- frightened -- but they are NOT afraid or frightened of a particular tbhing -- it is a generic fright. So they are no longer afraid of nuclear war. Trotsky said A'meria was the strongest nation but also the most terrified' and nothing has changed except military and nuclear superiority along with economic clout has shifted to Russia and China. Were Americans afraid of nuclear war -- or say, of an invasion from Saskatchewan or Tamaulipas -- there might be hope.

But somewhere along the time beginning with Clinton, Americans didn't worry their pretty little heads about nuclear war or American wars on everybody anywhere any longer so long as it didn't disturb their creature comforts and shopping and lattes by coming to the homeland. The Nuclear Freeze movement was, after all, a direct response to Reagan's "evil empire" military buildup in the 1980s and then voila he and Gorbachev negotiated away a whole class of nuclear weapoms and Old Bush promised NAto wouldn;t expand. Hope. Then that sneaky little bastard Clinton started expanding Nato on behalf of the Pentagon / CKIA / NSA / miklitary /congressional industyrial complex.

None of this suggests tht it will end pretty.

vierotchka says March 9, 2018

Maybe it's time to try some new digital hearts-and-minds operation. In the internet age, Russians have already shown how public opinion can be manipulated. Perhaps our own secret digital marvels can embark on the kind of information counter-offensive to win over the many millions of Russians who share our values. Perhaps they already are.

He really is taking Russians for idiots and fools!

vierotchka says March 9, 2018
There is one key element that proves that the Russians didn't do it: The Russians aren't so clumsy as to poison over a dozen other people at the same time.
MichaelK says March 9, 2018
The whole piece is an emotionally charged rant, bordering on hysteria, based on a transparent tissue of lies, distortions and absolutely stunning hypocrisy; and this coming from the 'liberal' 'left of centre' Guardian!

It's rather scary. The Guardian screaming for a crusade aimed at toppling the Russian system and replacing it with something else, something closer to 'our values.' The moralizing is shocking and grotesque. I really wish the ground would just open up and swallow the Guardian whole. We'd be far better off with out it.

[Mar 11, 2018] The Elephant In The Room by Craig Murray

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... while totally failing to mention the fact that incident took place only eight miles from the largest stock of nerve agent in western Europe. ..."
"... The adviser said the use of nerve agent suggested a state operation ..."
"... It certainly does. But the elephant in the room is – which state? ..."
Mar 11, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

Nerve agents including Sarin and VX are manufactured by the British Government in Porton Down, just 8 miles from where Sergei Skripal was attacked. The official British government story is that these nerve agents are only manufactured "To help develop effective medical countermeasures and to test systems".

The UK media universally accepted that the production of polonium by Russia was conclusive evidence that Vladimir Putin was personally responsible for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. In the case of Skripal, po-faced articles like this hilarious one in the Guardian speculate about where the nerve agent could possibly have come from – while totally failing to mention the fact that incident took place only eight miles from the largest stock of nerve agent in western Europe.

The investigation comprises multiple strands. Among them is whether there is any more of the nerve agent in the UK, and where it came from.

Chemical weapons experts said it was almost impossible to make nerve agents without training. "This needs expertise and a special place to make it or you will kill yourself. It's only a small amount, but you don't make this in your kitchen," one said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commanding officer at the UK's chemical, biological and nuclear regiment, said: "This is pretty significant. Nerve agents such as sarin and VX need to be made in a laboratory. It is not an insufficient task. Not even the so-called Islamic State could do it."

Falling over themselves in the rush to ramp up the Russophobia, the Guardian quotes

"One former senior Foreign Office adviser suggested the Kremlin was taking advantage of the UK's lack of allies in the US and EU. He said the British government was in a "weaker position" than in 2006 when two Kremlin assassins poisoned the former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko with a radioactive cup of tea.

The adviser said the use of nerve agent suggested a state operation "

It certainly does. But the elephant in the room is – which state?

[Mar 11, 2018] It is highly probably that Steele and Skripal knew each other

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Russophobia is extremely profitable to the armaments, security and spying industries and Russophobia reinforces intellectually challenged voters in their Tory loyalty. Ramping Russophobia is the most convincing motive for the Skripal attack. ..."
"... Steele was an MI6 undercover agent in Moscow around the time when Skripal was recruited and handed over Russian secrets to the MI6. He also ran the MI6 Russia desk so anything about Skripal will have passed through him. It is very likely that they personally knew each other. Pablo Miller, who worked for Steele's private company, lived in the same town as Skripal and they seems to have been friends since Miller had recruited him. Miller or someone else attempted to cover up the connection to Steele by editing his LinkedIn entry. ..."
"... Unfortunately it is likely that the British government, and its U.S. cousin, will come up with some "blame Russia" story for the gullible people and leave it at that. That story will involve some "brazen and reckless" Russian plot and an "outrageous" attempt by Putin himself to publicly kill a friend of Britain with some with highly dangerous weapon of mass destruction. This will then be used to throw up new tensions, to put more sanctions on Russia and to sell more weapons. ..."
"... Ms Rudd told MPs it was an "outrageous crime", adding that the government would "act without hesitation as the facts become clearer". ..."
"... One day the pendulum will swing back hard and merciless at these criminal warmongers and war profiteers. Disgusting how low what goes for 'homo sapiens' can sink. ..."
Mar 10, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

... ... ...

It was not Russian vengeance for Skripal's earlier spying. He had been in Russian jails for four years and lived openly in Salisbury for eight. There was plenty of time to off him. Russia certainly does not need any more anti-Russian propaganda in "western" media. If a Russian service would want to kill someone it would do so without making such noise.

The former British ambassador Craig Murray suspects a different motive and culprit:

Craig Murray @CraigMurrayOrg - 10:21 AM - 8 Mar 2018
Russophobia is extremely profitable to the armaments, security and spying industries and Russophobia reinforces intellectually challenged voters in their Tory loyalty. Ramping Russophobia is the most convincing motive for the Skripal attack.

Ambassador Murray also points out that Salisbury, where the incident took place, is just 8 miles away from Porton Down, a chemical weapon test site run by the British government. As the BBC noted in a report about the place:

... chemical agents such as VX and mustard gas are still manufactured on site ...

I believe that Craig Murray is wrong. Russophobia can be stoked without attempting to publicly kill a retired spy and his daughter.

More likely motives can be found in the tight connection to another important affair. The British Telegraph reports today :

A security consultant who has worked for the company that compiled the controversial dossier on Donald Trump was close to the Russian double agent poisoned last weekend, it has been claimed.

The consultant, who The Telegraph is declining to identify, lived close to Col Skripal and is understood to have known him for some time.
...
The Telegraph understands that Col Skripal moved to Salisbury in 2010 in a spy swap and became close to a security consultant employed by Christopher Steele , who compiled the Trump dossier.

The British security consultant, according to a LinkedIn social network account that was removed from the internet in the past few days , is also based in Salisbury.

On the same LinkedIn account, the man listed consultancy work with Orbis Business Intelligence, according to reports.

Meduza named the man the Telegraph declines to identify as:

Pablo Miller, who at the time was posing as Antonio Alvarez de Hidalgo and working in Britain's embassy in Tallinn. Russia's Federal Security Service says Miller was actually an undercover MI6 agent tasked with recruiting Russians.

Orbis is Christopher Steele's company which was paid by the Clinton campaign to make up or find 'dirt' about Trump. Sergei Skripal was an agent Steele himself was likely involved with :

Steele had spent more than twenty years in M.I.6, most of it focussing on Russia. For three years, in the nineties , he spied in Moscow under diplomatic cover. Between 2006 and 2009, he ran the service's Russia desk, at its headquarters, in London. He was fluent in Russian, and widely considered to be an expert on the country.

Steele was an MI6 undercover agent in Moscow around the time when Skripal was recruited and handed over Russian secrets to the MI6. He also ran the MI6 Russia desk so anything about Skripal will have passed through him. It is very likely that they personally knew each other. Pablo Miller, who worked for Steele's private company, lived in the same town as Skripal and they seems to have been friends since Miller had recruited him. Miller or someone else attempted to cover up the connection to Steele by editing his LinkedIn entry.

Here are some question:

If there is a connection between the dossier and Skripal, which seems very likely to me, then there are a number of people and organizations with potential motives to kill him. Lots of shady folks and officials on both sides of the Atlantic were involved in creating and running the anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign. There are several investigations and some very dirty laundry might one day come to light. Removing Skripal while putting the blame on Russia looks like a convenient way to get rid of a potential witness.

Update: Steele's company issued a weak denial of Skripal's involvement in the dossier:

Sources close to Orbis, the business intelligence firm run by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, who was behind a dossier of compromising allegations against Donald Trump, said Mr Skripal did not contribute to the file. But they could not say whether Mr Skripal was involved in different investigations into the US President for other interested parties.

The most curious point in the affair though is the visit of the daughter. She had just come from Moscow to visit her lonely father when both were poisoned in a rather sensational way. There must be some reason why she was involved in this.

or

The above questions are all highly speculative. But the connection between Steele and Skripal is way too deep to be irrelevant here. It certainly deserves more digging.

Unfortunately it is likely that the British government, and its U.S. cousin, will come up with some "blame Russia" story for the gullible people and leave it at that. That story will involve some "brazen and reckless" Russian plot and an "outrageous" attempt by Putin himself to publicly kill a friend of Britain with some with highly dangerous weapon of mass destruction. This will then be used to throw up new tensions, to put more sanctions on Russia and to sell more weapons.

That official story though is unlikely to be the true one.

---
h/t to commenter yoffa for providing the Meduza link.

Posted by b on March 8, 2018 at 04:04 PM | Permalink

yoffa , Mar 8, 2018 4:35:34 PM | 2

The Orbis consultant / analyst living in Salisbury is identified as Pablo Miller.
He had recruited Skripal in 1995 ( https://meduza.io/en/feature/2018/03/06/a-hundred-grand-and-hundreds-of-betrayed-agents).
notheonly1 , Mar 8, 2018 4:40:39 PM | 3
Ms Rudd told MPs it was an "outrageous crime", adding that the government would "act without hesitation as the facts become clearer".

Yeah, right. Like the illegal invasion of a sovereign foreign country based on the lies by the same 'government', with a million+ casualties among the middle eastern population. That kind of outrageous crime , correct?

One day the pendulum will swing back hard and merciless at these criminal warmongers and war profiteers. Disgusting how low what goes for 'homo sapiens' can sink.

[Mar 11, 2018] Ramping Russophobia is the most convincing motive for the Skripal attack

Highly recommended!
The key question is "Why now", after so many years ? This guy was exchanged by Russians. It he was such a threat to Russia they would keep him in jail. this is an interesting question. And it looks like in current circumstances cuo bono test firmly points to British as it can poison World cup in Russia. Intelligence services recently extended the activities of sabotage of sport events and teams of adversaries so there is nothing new to it. In a way this somewhat similar line of attack to previous attempts to undermine international sporting events in Russia. British Foreign Office quick reaction suggests exactly that.
Notable quotes:
"... Russia spent millions it really couldn't afford on the World Cup the worlds eyes are on Russia. Putin needs this kind of attention on him his leadership, election and his money like a hole in the head. Gov will up defence spending who wins..Putin or IMC. ..."
"... You clearly identify Russian motive and willingness to kill an ex-spy along with others who are, or may prove too troublesome. Fair enough. Just be sure that western intel agencies would have no qualms doing the same ..."
Mar 11, 2018 | twitter.com

Craig Murray ‏ Verified account @ CraigMurrayOrg Mar 8

Russophobia is extremely profitable to the armamaments, security and spying industries and Russophobia reinforces intellectually challenged voters in their Tory loyalty. Ramping Russophobia is the most convincing motive for the Skripal attack.

37 replies 285 retweets 378 likes

ᎠᎩլꂅᏒ ϮuᏒᎠᕱՈ ‏ @ dylerturdan Mar 9 Replying to @ CraigMurrayOrg

Russia spent millions it really couldn't afford on the World Cup the worlds eyes are on Russia. Putin needs this kind of attention on him his leadership, election and his money like a hole in the head. Gov will up defence spending who wins..Putin or IMC.

Broty Burgermeister ‏ @ anseachdamhtonn Mar 8 Replying to @ CraigMurrayOrg

When I run this poisoning event though the cui bono test, it makes more sense if western intel elements did it

Paul Mansfield ‏ @ azardsphere Mar 8 Replying to @ muschifuss998 @ Jb83080064 @ CraigMurrayOrg

You clearly identify Russian motive and willingness to kill an ex-spy along with others who are, or may prove too troublesome. Fair enough. Just be sure that western intel agencies would have no qualms doing the same

1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes

[Mar 11, 2018] Washington s Century-long War on Russia by Mike Whitney

Highly recommended!
The crisis of neoliberalism is at the core of current anti-Russian campaign.
Notable quotes:
"... So, as long as Russia remained open to the West's political maneuvering and wholesale thievery, every thing was hunky-dory. But as soon as Vladimir Putin got his bearings (during his second term as President) and started reassembling the broken state, then western elites became very concerned and denounced Putin as an "autocrat" and a "KGB thug." ..."
"... As the Western countries' elites were implementing a policy of political and economic containment of Russia, old threats were growing and new ones were emerging in the world, and the efforts to do away with them have failed. I think that the main reason for that is that the model of "West-centric" globalization, which developed following the dismantling of the bipolar architecture and was aimed at ensuring the prosperity of one-seventh of the world's population at the expense of the rest, proved ineffective. It is becoming more and more obvious that a narrow group of "chosen ones" is unable to ensure the sustainable growth of the global economy on their own and solve such major challenges as poverty, climate change, shortage of food and other vital resources . ..."
"... The American people need to look beyond the propaganda and try to grasp what's really going on. Russia is not Washington's enemy, it's a friend that's trying to nudge the US in adirection that will increase its opportunities for peace and prosperity in the future. Lavrov is simply pointing out that a multipolar world is inevitable as economic power becomes more widespread. This emerging reality means the US will have to modify its behavior, cooperate with other sovereign nations, comply with international law, and seek a peaceful settlement to disputes. It means greater parity between the states, fairer representation in global decision-making, and a narrower gap between the world's winners and losers. ..."
"... Admit it: The imperial model has failed. It's time to move on. ..."
www.nakedcapitalism.com

The United States has launched a three-pronged offensive on Russia. First, it's attacking Russia's economy via sanctions and oil-price manipulation. Second, it's increasing the threats to Russia's national security by arming and training militant proxies in Syria and Ukraine, and by encircling Russia with NATO forces and missile systems. And, third, it's conducting a massive disinformation campaign aimed at convincing the public that Russia is a 'meddling aggressor' that wants to destroy the foundation of American democracy. (Elections)

In response to Washington's hostility, Moscow has made every effort to extend the olive branch. Russia does not want to fight the world's biggest superpower any more than it wants to get bogged down in a bloody and protracted conflict in Syria. What Russia wants is normal, peaceful relations based on respect for each others interests and for international law. What Russia will not tolerate, however, is another Iraq-type scenario where the sovereign rights of a strategically-located state are shunted off so the US can arbitrarily topple the government, decimate the society and plunge the region deeper into chaos. Russia won't allow that, which is why it has put its Airforce at risk in Syria, to defend the foundational principle of state sovereignty upon which the entire edifice of global security rests.

The majority of Americans believe that Russia is the perpetrator of hostilities against the United States, mainly because the media and the political class have faithfully disseminated the spurious claims that Russia meddled in the 2016 elections. But the allegations are ridiculous and without merit. Russia-gate is merely the propaganda component of Washington's Full Spectrum Dominance theory, that is, disinformation is being used to make it appear as though the US is the victim when, in fact, it is the perpetrator of hostilities against Russia. Simply put, the media has turned reality on its head. Washington wants to inflict as much pain as possible on Russia because Russia has frustrated its plan to control critical resources and pipeline corridors in Central Asia and the Middle East. The Trump administration's new National Defense Strategy is quite clear on this point. Russia's opposition to Washington's destabilizing interventions has earned it the top spot on the Pentagon's "emerging rivals" list. Moscow is now Public Enemy#1.

Washington's war on Russia has a long history dating back at least 100 years to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Despite the fact that the US was engaged in a war with Germany at the time (WW1), Washington and its allies sent 150,000 men from 15 nations to intervene on behalf of the "Whites" hoping to staunch the spread of communism into Europe. In the words of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the goal was "to strangle the Bolshevik baby in its crib."

According to Vasilis Vourkoutiotis from the University of Ottawa:

" the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War.. was a failed attempt to eradicate Bolshevism while it was still weak .As early as February 1918 Britain supported intervention in the civil war on behalf of the Whites, and in March it landed troops in Murmansk. They were soon joined by forces from France, Italy, Japan, the United States, and ten other nations. Eventually, more than 150,000 Allied soldiers served in Russia

The scale of the war between the Russian Reds and Whites, however, was such that the Allies soon realized they would have little, if any, direct impact on the course of the Civil War unless they were prepared to intervene on a far grander scale. By the end of April 1919 the French had withdrawn their soldiers .British and American troops saw some action in November 1918 on the Northern Front but this campaign was of limited significance in the outcome of the Civil War. The last British and American soldiers were withdrawn in 1920. The main Allied contributions to the White cause thereafter were supplies and money, mostly from Britain .

The chief purpose of Allied intervention in Soviet Russia was to help the Whites defeat the Reds and destroy Bolshevism." (Allied Intervention in the Russian Revolution", portalus.ru)

The reason we bring up this relatively unknown bit of history is because it helps to put current events into perspective. First, it helps readers to see that Washington has been sticking its nose in Russia's business more than a century. Second, it shows that– while Washington's war on Russia has ebbed and flowed depending on the political situation in Moscow– it has never completely ended. The US has always treated Russia with suspicion, contempt and brutality. During the Cold War, when Russia's global activities put a damper on Washington's depredations around the world, relations remained stretched to the breaking point. But after the Soviet Union collapsed in December, 1991, relations gradually thawed, mainly because the buffoonish Boris Yeltsin opened the country up to a democratization program that allowed the state's most valuable strategic assets to be transferred to voracious oligarchs for pennies on the dollar. The plundering of Russia pleased Washington which is why it sent a number of prominent US economists to Moscow to assist in the transition from communism to a free-market system. These neoliberal miscreants subjected the Russian economy to "shock therapy" which required the auctioning off of state-owned resources and industries even while hyperinflation continued to rage and the minuscule life savings of ordinary working people were wiped out almost over night. The upshot of this Washington-approved looting-spree was a dramatic uptick in extreme poverty which intensified the immiseration of tens of millions of people. Economist Joseph Stiglitz followed events closely in Russia at the time and summed it up like this:

"In Russia, the people were told that capitalism was going to bring new, unprecedented prosperity. In fact, it brought unprecedented poverty, indicated not only by a fall in living standards, not only by falling GDP, but by decreasing life spans and enormous other social indicators showing a deterioration in the quality of life ..

(Due to) the tight monetary policies that were pursued firms didn't have the money to even pay their employees . they didn't have enough money to pay their pensioners, to pay their workers .Then, with the government not having enough revenue, other aspects of life started to deteriorate. They didn't have enough money for hospitals, schools. Russia used to have one of the good school systems in the world; the technical level of education was very high. (But they no longer had) enough money for that. So it just began to affect people in every dimension of their lives .

The number of people in poverty in Russia, for instance, increased from 2 percent to somewhere between 40 and 50 percent, with more than one out of two children living in families below poverty. The market economy was a worse enemy for most of these people than the Communists had said it would be. It brought Gucci bags, Mercedes, the fruits of capitalism to a few .But you had a shrinking (economy). The GDP in Russia fell by 40 percent. In some (parts) of the former Soviet Union, the GDP, the national income, fell by over 70 percent. And with that smaller pie it was more and more unequally divided, so a few people got bigger and bigger slices, and the majority of people wound up with less and less and less . (PBS interview with Joseph Stiglitz, Commanding Heights)

So, as long as Russia remained open to the West's political maneuvering and wholesale thievery, every thing was hunky-dory. But as soon as Vladimir Putin got his bearings (during his second term as President) and started reassembling the broken state, then western elites became very concerned and denounced Putin as an "autocrat" and a "KGB thug." At the same time, Washington continued its maniacal push eastward using its military catspaw, NATO, to achieve its geopolitical ambitions to control vital resources and industries in the most populous and prosperous region of the coming century, Eurasia. After promising Russian President Gorbachev that NATO would never "expand one inch to the east", the US-led military alliance added 13 new countries to its membership, all of them straddling Russia's western flank, all of them located, like Hitler, on Russia's doorstep, all of them posing an existential threat to Russia's survival. NATO forces now routinely conduct provocative military drills just miles from the Russian border while state-of-the-art missile systems surround Russia on all sides. (Imagine Russia conducting similar drills in the Gulf of Mexico or on the Canadian border. How would Washington respond?)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gave an excellent summary of post Cold War history at a gathering of the Korber Foundation in Berlin in 2017. Brainwashed Americans who foolishly blame Russia for meddling in the 2016 elections, should pay attention to what he said.

LAVROV– "Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall we have shown our cards, trying to do our best to assert the values of equal partnership in international affairs .Back in the early 1990s, we withdrew our troops from Eastern and Central Europe and the Baltic states and dramatically downsized our military capacity near our western borders

When the cold war era came to an end, Russia was hoping that this would become our common victory – the victory of both the former Communist bloc countries and the West. The dreams of ushering in shared peace and cooperation seemed near to fruition. However, the United States and its allies decided to declare themselves the sole winners, refusing to work together to create the architecture of equal and indivisible security. They made their choice in favor of shifting the dividing lines to our borders – through expanding NATO and then through the implementation of the EU's Eastern Partnership program

As the Western countries' elites were implementing a policy of political and economic containment of Russia, old threats were growing and new ones were emerging in the world, and the efforts to do away with them have failed. I think that the main reason for that is that the model of "West-centric" globalization, which developed following the dismantling of the bipolar architecture and was aimed at ensuring the prosperity of one-seventh of the world's population at the expense of the rest, proved ineffective. It is becoming more and more obvious that a narrow group of "chosen ones" is unable to ensure the sustainable growth of the global economy on their own and solve such major challenges as poverty, climate change, shortage of food and other vital resources .

The latest events are clear evidence that the persistent attempts to form a unipolar world order have failed .The new centers of economic growth and concomitant political influence are assuming responsibility for the state of affairs in their regions. Let me reiterate that the emergence of multipolar world order is a fact and a reality. Seeking to hold back this process and keep the unfairly gained privileged positions is going to lead nowhere. We see increasing examples of nations raising their voice in defense of their right to decide their own destiny ." (Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister)

The American people need to look beyond the propaganda and try to grasp what's really going on. Russia is not Washington's enemy, it's a friend that's trying to nudge the US in adirection that will increase its opportunities for peace and prosperity in the future. Lavrov is simply pointing out that a multipolar world is inevitable as economic power becomes more widespread. This emerging reality means the US will have to modify its behavior, cooperate with other sovereign nations, comply with international law, and seek a peaceful settlement to disputes. It means greater parity between the states, fairer representation in global decision-making, and a narrower gap between the world's winners and losers.

Who doesn't want this? Who doesn't want to see an end of the bloody US-led invasions, the countless drone assassinations, the vast destruction of ancient civilizations, and the senseless slaughter of innocent men, women and children? Who doesn't want to see Washington's wings clipped so the bloodletting stops and the millions of refugees and internally displaced can return to their homes?

Lavrov offers a vision of the future that all peace-loving people should welcome with open arms.

Admit it: The imperial model has failed. It's time to move on.

[Mar 11, 2018] One final observation on the Skripal case (for now): this stuff is toxic anti-Russian propaganda .

Mar 11, 2018 | off-guardian.org

Big B says March 10, 2018

One final observation on the Skripal case (for now): this stuff is so toxic. We don't know what the stuff is: nevertheless, we know it is so toxic, can only be made by a state, and needs careful expert handling. We know this because every paper and TV channel has by now emphasised that this stuff is so toxic, etc. If we missed the "nerve agents and what they do to you" coverage: we can ascertain for ourselves from the men in the hazmat suits, the this stuff must be so toxic. The Army have now been deployed: on hand after completing the largest CW exercise ever held, 'Toxic Dagger'; they are now employing their specialist skills to carry out "Sensitive Site Operations" because this stuff is you get it by now. In another piece of pure theater: police in hazmat suits were examining the grave of Alexander and Liudmila Skripal because even after a year or more buried underground, you can't be too careful, because this stuff is A woman from the office next to Zizzi was taken ill (maybe she had the risotto con pesce) because even after a week, and next door, traces of this stuff can still be

11 (or 16) people were hospitalised from the effects of 'this stuff': the first attending officer, Nick Bailey, is only just out of ICU and lucky to be alive. The Skripal's are not so lucky: and on "palliative care" according to H de Bretton-Gordon. Yet the eye-witness calling himself 'Jamie Paine' was close enough to get coughed on; and the unnamed passing doctor and nurse that attended the Skripals at the scene, clearing their airways, are all fine (despite being hospitalised). Yet PC Bailey nearly died? Funny that?

When first you practice to deceive: someone in the propaganda department must have noticed this glaring inconsistency. Enter, stage right, former Met Chief Ian (now Lord) Blair (guess who was leading the Met when Litvinenko was poisoned?): to clarify that PC Bailey was contaminated when he was the first officer to enter the Skripal's home -- not attend them in Salisbury. This allowed the Torygraph and Fox to speculate that Yulia brought a contaminated present for her father (which she kept in a drawer for a week, because this stuff is so toxic?). The Torygraph's previous spin: that Skripal was poisoned for his contributions to the Pissgate dossier were torpedoed by Orbis (Steele's company). Speaking on Radio 4: after pushing the Buzzfeed "14 other deaths" dodgy dossier; Blair said "So there maybe some clues floating around in here." Yes, clues that you are lying? This is pure theater: only it is more Morecambe and Wise than Shakespeare.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/09/russian-spy-may-have-poisoned-home-police-believe/

DomesticExtremist says March 10, 2018
Theatre indeed.

Check out the report from C4News (mute the sound).

Two guys plodding around in fluorescent breather suits, another couple with gas masks, but behind them firemen in normal uniform and no gas masks and the reporter 20 feet in front, in civvies with no protective gear at all .

Virulent nerve agent threat? Theatre, and not very convincing at that.

BigB says March 10, 2018
Another day, another story: now the BBC, Torygraph (contradicting its own article above), Wiltshire Police, and Nick Bailey himself all confirmed that he became ill after attending the Skripals. So now we know they are lying: the house story concocted by Blair was a complete fabrication. The "nerve agent" appears to be only selectively toxic!
http://www.salisburyjournal.co.uk/news/journalnewsindex/16078868.Police_officer_in_hospital_over_nerve_agent_attack_releases_first_statement/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/08/russian-spy-poisoning-police-officer-struck-rare-nerve-agent/

[Mar 11, 2018] Craig Murray smelt a rat and made his suspicions clear, publicly. like Litvinenko case this case will probably remains unresolved and milked mesilessly for anti-russian propaganda purposes, if history is any guide

Notable quotes:
"... As for murray's theory, i think you're both right. while i doubt the primary reason was to gin up more russophobia (they usually just make stuff up out of thin air and it usually works) it is a pleasant side effect for the brit officials who have recently been groveling for more war profiteering under the pretense of "russia on our doorstep". ..."
"... They seem to have the same mentality rahm emanuel had when he said (regarding the 2008 collapse that decimated giant swathes of the US economy) "never let a good crisis go to waste". ..."
"... The whole affair gets curiouser and curiouser. Now there's a report that the Skripals were poisoned at HOME. And then succumbed later, elsewhere? And what about the other 21 people reportedly affected and treated? Huh?? ..."
"... I believe Craig Murray. Anyone who remembers the 9/11 Anthrax scare that threatened US decision makers? ..."
"... The BBC has reported that a "source familiar with the investigation" said the nerve agent was "likely to be rarer than sarin or VX". This suggests that the ground is being prepared for announcing a result that will implicate Russia. ..."
"... Kaszeta's comments are relevant because he works closely with Bellingcat and it appears from his output that since 2013 he has been used to channel information originating from western intelligence services about alleged chemical attacks, based on his status as an independent expert with his company Strongpoint Security. The accounts filed for this company show that its turnover was not enough to provide Kaszeta with a living, raising obvious questions about who or what was paying him. ..."
"... There we go Britain to raise Sergei Skripal poisoning case with Nato allies ..."
"... Similar case in California, Were they addicts? http://abc7.com/2-dead-in-possible-fentanyl-exposure-in-fontana-home/3197127/ ..."
Mar 11, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Christopher Black , Mar 9, 2018 12:22:35 PM | 55

My take on this incident.

https://journal-neo.org/2018/03/09/the-skripal-incident-another-anti-russian-provocation/

the pair , Mar 9, 2018 2:14:50 PM | 56
as mentioned above, the UK is saturated with CCTV cameras. in all the MSM screeching i have yet to hear about any footage being examined.

As for murray's theory, i think you're both right. while i doubt the primary reason was to gin up more russophobia (they usually just make stuff up out of thin air and it usually works) it is a pleasant side effect for the brit officials who have recently been groveling for more war profiteering under the pretense of "russia on our doorstep".

They seem to have the same mentality rahm emanuel had when he said (regarding the 2008 collapse that decimated giant swathes of the US economy) "never let a good crisis go to waste". maybe an even better analogy would be churchill praying for a german attack to justify his bloodlust as seen in dresden and other firebombing targets.

jason , Mar 9, 2018 3:40:04 PM | 57
the fact that putin has elections and the media came out with the story that this move would ensure after the elections that other spies won't have any doubts.....are prepared statements. if your spies were in syria from rus and from us. i think most people know who would have the heavier conscience. and in fact it is reminding their own what they are worth to them .... genius. actually.

before cctv were widespread among civil infrastructure, the opponents against the idea realized that people can just erase the time stamp and put on different ones and have actors act it out and placed onto television as proof. but we see they usually go for the afp reported from cnn report from 50 agencies unnamed unsourced deparment heads, circular fun.

i am not so much interested in the videos from nearby stores and streets, as if one really were to investigate, looking through weeks of tapes is not difficult. i am more interested in Britain next move.

i think it would be easier to britain to just mute this guy permanently if he were to wake up with ideas that it wasn't putin its a big problem for all the milking they are doing on it.

a. he makes it out of the hospital and comes out and becomes anti putin fanatic and makes it believable.
b. he makes it out of the hospital and goes back to normal life.
c. he makes it out of the hospital and is immediately gunned/poisoned by "russians".
d. he doesn't make it out of the hospital and goes back to normal life anyways.
e. he doesn't make it out of the hospital......but his daughter does.
f. he doesn't make it out of the hospital and is in coma indefinitely.
g. he is dropped from the news altogether due to security censorship.

Emily Dickinson , Mar 9, 2018 5:56:52 PM | 58
The whole affair gets curiouser and curiouser. Now there's a report that the Skripals were poisoned at HOME. And then succumbed later, elsewhere? And what about the other 21 people reportedly affected and treated? Huh??

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/09/russian-spy-may-have-poisoned-home-police-believe/

luke8929 , Mar 9, 2018 11:54:55 PM | 61
The police sgt. that became ill wasn't at the initial scene, he later searched the home of the two victims. So someone is making the assumption that they may have been poisoned at their home since that is where the police officer who later became ill was assigned.
francesca , Mar 10, 2018 12:49:40 AM | 62
There is a possible scenario that he was in possession of a nerve agent, and accidentally poisoned himself and his daughter
Porton Down is only 8 miles down the road
somebody , Mar 10, 2018 5:45:04 AM | 63
I believe Craig Murray. Anyone who remembers the 9/11 Anthrax scare that threatened US decision makers?
somebody , Mar 10, 2018 5:58:51 AM | 64
And yes, a MI6 agent is connected to Litvinenko, Skripal and Christopher Steele .
Hoarsewhisperer , Mar 10, 2018 9:58:06 AM | 65
I believe Craig Murray.
...
Posted by: somebody | Mar 10, 2018 5:45:04 AM | 63

Craig Murray smelt a rat and made his suspicions clear, publicly. Whether Murray's speculation is better or worse than anyone else's is unresolved and could remain that way, if History is any guide.

We seem no closer to discovering the ID of the instigators of the sordid and spectacularly public murder of Kim Jong-nam.

yoffa , Mar 10, 2018 10:29:38 AM | 66
The BBC has reported that a "source familiar with the investigation" said the nerve agent was "likely to be rarer than sarin or VX". This suggests that the ground is being prepared for announcing a result that will implicate Russia.

Kaszeta on bellingcat.com brings up the story of "novichoks" a class of organophosphate compounds allegedly developed as military nerve agents in the USSR. Russian chemists published papers in the open literature on these compounds from the 1960s to the 1980s. The story that they were developed for military use and given the name "novichok" comes from a defector in the 1990s, Vil Mirzayanov. An authoritative review by Robin Black notes that there is no independent evidence supporting Mirzayanov's claims about the properties of these compounds.

Kaszeta's comments are relevant because he works closely with Bellingcat and it appears from his output that since 2013 he has been used to channel information originating from western intelligence services about alleged chemical attacks, based on his status as an independent expert with his company Strongpoint Security. The accounts filed for this company show that its turnover was not enough to provide Kaszeta with a living, raising obvious questions about who or what was paying him.

Petra , Mar 10, 2018 10:45:44 AM | 67
65, Hw... Murray has a lot more insider information than he lets on, often couching it as speculation, probably partly to protect sources. He can be admirably or foolishly blunt at times ("z' is b'sh!")but with delicate issues, he often alludes at things insteda of saying outright. He has retained deep connections with many (at least partially like-minded) people at the FCO, the diplomatic corps and (indeed) MS5 and 6.
Fatima Manoubia , Mar 10, 2018 11:10:53 AM | 69
Attention to the thread of comments starting with commenter "Abben" in this article by RI:

https://russia-insider.com/en/putin-recites-love-poem-all-women-internatl-womens-day-march-8-video/ri22732#comment-3793737255

TJ , Mar 10, 2018 11:32:45 AM | 70
@66 yoffa

"Novichok" was just used in the plot of the latest Strike Back TV series, from the Wikipedia article-"She discovers that Zaryn is in fact Karim Markov, a Russian scientist who allegedly killed his colleagues with Novichok, a nerve agent they invented"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_Back:_Retribution

Hoarsewhisperer , Mar 10, 2018 12:53:16 PM | 73
65, Hw... Murray has a lot more insider information than he lets on.
...
Posted by: Petra | Mar 10, 2018 10:45:44 AM | 67

His Former British Ambassador status bolsters his street cred. OTOH one imagines that he is acutely aware of the line dividing whistle-blowing from treason.

On the other, other hand, b is a quite diligent and competent sleuth too, and has more than a passing interest in military/defense intrigue and intel.

somebody , Mar 10, 2018 3:37:56 PM | 74
#65

There we go Britain to raise Sergei Skripal poisoning case with Nato allies

Kalen , Mar 10, 2018 3:40:12 PM | 75
Similar case in California, Were they addicts? http://abc7.com/2-dead-in-possible-fentanyl-exposure-in-fontana-home/3197127/

[Mar 11, 2018] The Skripal Incident -- Another Anti-Russian Provocation

Mar 11, 2018 | journal-neo.org

The British government is talking war with Russia over a mysterious incident that is claimed to have taken place on Sunday March 4, just a few kilometres from the secrecy shrouded British biological and chemical warfare research and development facility at Porton Down in Wiltshire. I say claimed since we have very little information confirming what exactly took place outside of government statements and we have seen no photographs of the alleged victims in their hospital beds to convince us that the alleged victims did fall ill and are being treated. However, let us assume that the incident as described did take place.

The mystery consists in the fact that the victims, former Russian colonel of military intelligence, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter, were not under any known threat from Russia. Skripal was charged and convicted in Russia in 2006 of being an asset of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and handing over secret information to the British. He was jailed, but in a spy swap in 2010 was pardoned and allowed to leave Russia for Vienna, then Britain, where he has been living ever since. Why he was pardoned is difficult to determine, unless it was necessary legally to effect the swap with the British. In any even the Russians had washed their hands of him but it seems the British had other uses for him, as their expendable man for a provocation against Russia.

The facts as the British government states them are that Skripal and his daughter, visiting from Russia, met for lunch in Salisbury, the town outside of which Porton Down is located. The purpose of the daughter's visit is not known. According to ever changing media accounts witnesses in a restaurant reported that Skripal appeared to be agitated and angry and left in that state with his daughter following. Agitated and angry about what we do not know.

Half an hour later it is said that the two of them were found slumped over on a public bench. Some early media accounts state that it was thought they had taken too much fentanyl and were vomiting and that their illness may have been self-induced. But very quickly the British government claimed that they had been poisoned by some chemical or nerve agent and immediately cast the blame on Russia though the investigation had just begun. The incident was immediately taken out of the hands of the local police and handed over to the Counter-Terrorism Police, formerly known as Special Branch, though the government refused to call it a terrorist incident. A meeting of the British government high-level emergency committee, Cobra, was called. Why this was done for what appears to be an assault or attempted murder or a self-induced accident is a good question. But the answer lies in the immediate propaganda campaign mounted in the British press against Russia.

On Thursday the 8th of March the British government claimed that they had identified a "nerve agent" as the substance used. Yet the BBC quotes on the same day a woman physician who attended at the scene saying that she found Mrs. Skripal slumped unconscious on a bench vomiting and fitting. She had lost control of her bodily functions. The physician, who asked not to be named, told the BBC she moved the daughter into the recovery position and opened her airways as others tended to her father. The doctor stated that the she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying there was no sign of any chemical agent on her face or body and that though she had been worried she would be affected by a nerve agent so far she "feels fine."

Yet, the British media published on Thursday a photograph of a police officer who they say attended the scene and who they claim was made ill and placed in intensive care but is now stable and recovering. The two stories do not add up, as it would seem the doctor was in closer physical contact with the two victims than the police officer yet the doctor has suffered no symptoms at all.

The Guardian quoted Andrei Lugovoi, another former Russian agent, accused of Litvinenko's murder by the British as stating that Skripal had been pardoned in Russia so no one from there is after him. " "I don't rule out that this is another provocation by British. Whatever happens on British territory, they start yelling: 'He was killed, he was hung, he was poisoned!' and that Russia is to blame for everything. This is to their advantage." Igor Sutyagin, yet another Russian traitor flown to Russia in 2010 in an exchange of spies-also said, "I don't think that Mr. Skripal would be targeted, because he was pardoned."

To add to the mystery the British government refuses to name the alleged nerve agent. To create more drama the British Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, stated that it was not Sarin or VX but something "very rare." I think we can expect that they will choose the right dramatic moment to name something and state that only Russian labs can make it. That is their modus operandi. They certainly do not want to state that VX was involved since VX was developed in 1952 at Porton Down near the sight of the incident; for that would lead to necessary investigations into security at that facility and whether personnel there were involved. However, despite the fact that Porton Down is in the business of manufacturing chemical warfare agents including nerve agents and that logic would dictate that the Porton Down authorities would be barred from being investigators into a case in which they could be involved the British government immediately assigned Porton Down to identify the substance that might have been used.

That the Russians may be correct that this incident is another NATO arranged provocation must be seriously considered. Despite the fact there is no evidence whatsoever that Russia had anything to do with this incident, the British government was quick to label Russia as the villain of the piece and the mass media dutifully acted in lock step and put out the word. Boris Johnson called Russia a "malign and disruptive force' and made threats about pulling the UK out of the World Cup to be held in Russia this year. The attempts by the NATO alliance to throw Russia out of the Olympics on trumped up doping charges were largely successful and now we see another attempt to disrupt a sports event that is important to world football fans and to Russia. Johnson added that Britain would act "robustly' of Moscow is found to be involved.

The Russian embassy in London stated the allegations of Russian involvement are untrue and that the "script of yet another anti-Russian campaign has already been written." It seems so and the script has some pages to run yet. One has to wonder what the role of the British intelligence services is in this for the BBC also reports that Skripal still kept the company of British intelligence agents. So one has to ask, for what reason? What was his continuing role as an asset of MI6? What was their role on that day?

But that line of inquiry will not be followed. All the British media are linking this incident to the case of Alexander Litvinenko, another Russian who was supposedly poisoned with radioactive tea. Evidence that cronies of his were involved were ignored in favour the line that Russia was behind it though no evidence has ever been put forward to support that claim. They are also making the claim that this "very rare" substance must be from a state military stockpile, so the statements to come from the British government can be predicted.

This incident has echoes of the case of Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident killed in London in 1978 by a ricin pellet injected into his leg by means of an umbrella it was said, though it was no doubt done with an air pistol. That murder was quickly blamed on the KGB and Bulgarian government agents but there is evidence that in fact the murder was arranged by MI6 as was the murder of media magnate Robert Maxwell in 1991, who had documents relating to the Markov murder in his possession, according sources such as Richard Cottrell in his book Gladio and accounts by former British intelligence agent Gordon Logan.

The Skripal incident also brings to mind the death of Dr. David Kelly in 2003 whose mysterious death in woods near his home, was officially attributed to "suicide." He is thought by many to have been assassinated by the British secret services and CIA to keep him from revealing secrets about the war in Iraq. He worked at Porton Down as head of microbiology.

He in turn is connected to other scientists at Porton Down who have died under questionable circumstances, for instance, Dr. Richard Holmes, whose body was found in the same woods as Dr. Kelly, in 2012, two days after going for a walk, and one month after resigning from Porton Down, and to Vladimir Pasechnik's death in November 2001, another Russian defector, who allegedly died of a stroke. His death was not announced until a month later and by British intelligence. Dr. Kelly had been involved in his debriefing when he left Russia.

Sir Edward Leigh, a member of the Parliamentary Defence Committee, in the British Parliament stated, "the circumstantial evidence against Russia is very strong. Who else would have the motive and the means?" The answer to that of course is that the British government has the motive and the means. What would Russia benefit from harming a has-been like Skripal and causing all this fuss? None. What benefit does Britain have and NATO? The answer again is provided by Sir Richard who went on to state "The only way to preserve peace is through strength," carefully echoing Trump's foreign policy. He continued, "and if Russia is behind this, this is a brazen act of war, of humiliating our country and defence is the first duty and spending 2% of the budget on defence is not enough." There is the motive right there. To justify an increase on defence spending and to hit Russia yet again with propaganda warfare to justify NATO's continuing aggression against Russia.

Russia has volunteered to cooperate in the "investigation" but to what end? The script is already written, the drama will unfold, the consequences will flow and they will lead not to peace and cooperation but to more hostility and war.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel " Beneath the Clouds . He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine "New Eastern Outlook."

[Mar 11, 2018] Theresa May To Blame Russia For Nerve Gas Attack; Full Spectrum Of Sanctions To Follow

Introduction of new sanctions and confiscating some Russian property were probably the idea behind this, most probably, false flag operation.
Notable quotes:
"... In a late-breaking report, the Sun confirmed that May is preparing to name Russia as the perpetrator of the attack on Sergei Skripal, a spy who was turned over to the UK in 2010 as part of a swap with Russia, after receiving confirmation from her intelligence chiefs. ..."
"... Of course, by blaming Russia for the attack, May be inadvertently doing Putin a favor. With Russian elections set for next weekend, blaming Russia after such a short investigation could bolster Putin's claims that Western powers are actively conspiring against him. Some have speculated that Russia could've planned the attack for exactly this purpose, while others have pointed out that it bears some hallmarks of a false flag attack intended to frame Russia. ..."
"... Former British Ambassador to Russia Sir Tony Brenton said yesterday: "The more Putin can point to Western hostility and aggression, the more he rallies the Russian people around him". ..."
"... So, once again, a Western power is blaming Russia for an attack, citing an obscure piece of Russian law which declares that foreign assassinations must be approved by the Russian president. ..."
"... MI6 false flag attack? How much do you want to bet? ..."
"... Note that the UK military has been trying to hype the Russian threat for the last several weeks to get more money to expand the UK war machine. ..."
Mar 11, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Barely a week after UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd warned the country not to "jump to conclusions" about who was behind a nerve gas attack on a former Russian double-agent, it appears Prime Minister Theresa May is about to do just that...

In a late-breaking report, the Sun confirmed that May is preparing to name Russia as the perpetrator of the attack on Sergei Skripal, a spy who was turned over to the UK in 2010 as part of a swap with Russia, after receiving confirmation from her intelligence chiefs.

An intelligence assessment explaining the findings is reportedly being delivered overnight, and will be on May's desk in the morning. The attack, which occurred at a shopping center in a quiet suburban area, led to the hospitalization of 21 people, and left Skripal, his daughter Yulia and a local officer who responded to the scene in critical - but stable - condition.

The "tell" - as it were - was the presence of certain chemicals which are believed to have been developed in a Russian laboratory. The announcement is expected to take place at 11 am during a meeting of May's National Security Council. A formal charge against Moscow could be unveiled before the House of Commons could as early as this afternoon. May might even go as far as blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin personally for ordering the hit.

In their report to Mrs May, The Sun has learned that MI5 and MI6 chiefs will cite the very rare substance used on ex-spy Sergei Skripal and daughter Yulia as key evidence of the Kremlin's involvement.

It is believed to have been developed in the SVR Russian foreign spy service's notorious Yasenevo laboratory.

Mrs May will then summon an emergency meeting of her National Security Council at 11 am to decide on the scale of Britain's retaliation.

The result of the finding could be more economic sanctions against Russia (which is still facing sanctions tied to the annexation of Crimea).

However, UK ministers are still undecided on exactly how and when to retaliate.

A "full spectrum" package of expulsions and economic sanctions has been drawn up, along with a plea for international support for them.

Of course, by blaming Russia for the attack, May be inadvertently doing Putin a favor. With Russian elections set for next weekend, blaming Russia after such a short investigation could bolster Putin's claims that Western powers are actively conspiring against him. Some have speculated that Russia could've planned the attack for exactly this purpose, while others have pointed out that it bears some hallmarks of a false flag attack intended to frame Russia.

Given the recent criticism that May is being "soft" on Russia, the timing of the announcement also bears some hallmarks of a purely political decision meant to strengthen May's hand.

But it is feared that a strong reaction ahead of Russia's presidential elections next Sunday may play into Putin's hands.

It is suspected that the Russian ruler sanctioned the brazen nerve agent attack simply to goad Britain into a reaction that he can strike back against and look like a strongman standing up to the West to voters.

Former British Ambassador to Russia Sir Tony Brenton said yesterday: "The more Putin can point to Western hostility and aggression, the more he rallies the Russian people around him".

Sir Tony added: "Russia is number one on a list of suspects that doesn't include a number two".

In a hint of action to come, the Chancellor said: "If there were to be an involvement of a foreign state, then obviously that would be very serious indeed and the government would respond appropriately.

Philip Hammond also told BBC1's Andrew Marr Show that Britain will not be humiliated by the attack, that breaks every rule in the international book.

He added: "The vast resources that have been deployed and the high level assets that we have been able to use show that nobody is laughing at us.

"This is a very serious investigation. Let's see where it leads us."

Mrs May came under mounting pressure last night from campaigners and her own MPs to hit back at Russia.

So, once again, a Western power is blaming Russia for an attack, citing an obscure piece of Russian law which declares that foreign assassinations must be approved by the Russian president. That, and some chemical markers that purport to trace back to a Russian lab. Whether or not May decides to pursue sanctions, one thing is clear: Putin's words from an address he made to Parliament earlier this month - where he unveiled a new nuclear weapon capable of bypassing NATO missile defenses - are resonating more and more.


Looney -> ???ö? Sun, 03/11/2018 - 19:47 Permalink

Theresa May is a frozen cunt, but Boris Johnson is, well Before running his mouth and threatening to boycott the World Cup 2018 in Russia, he should've checked the FIFA's rules.

According to the Telegraph , A boycott would risk breaching FIFA's tournament regulations, which dictate that "all participating member associations undertake to play all of their matches until eliminated from the FIFA World Cup".

Article 6 of those regulations states that any association that withdraws could face sanctions, "including the expulsion of the association concerned from subsequent FIFA competitions" [that would be the World Cup 2022 in Qatar].

The Brits don't seem to mind being spied on by the GCHQ, they don't care about the CCTV cameras everywhere, but if you take away their soccer/football, they WILL pick up pitchforks and torches and they WILL fuck you up.

That's why Boris is backpedaling, "We will not send the UK government's representatives".

Hey, Boris, I have a deal for you – let Julian Assange go and you can keep your BritBob ! ;-)

Looney

Shemp 4 Victory -> Looney Sun, 03/11/2018 - 19:55 Permalink

In their report to Mrs May, The Sun has learned that MI5 and MI6 chiefs will cite the very rare substance used on ex-spy Sergei Skripal and daughter Yulia as key evidence of the Kremlin's involvement.

Everyone knows that MI5/MI6 were responsible for this, which is why they have no choice other than blaming the Russians.

Theresa May knows who did it. She also knows what will happen to her if she deviates from the official script given to her by MI5/MI6.

Slippery Slope -> Shemp 4 Victory Sun, 03/11/2018 - 19:56 Permalink

It makes no sense for Russia to kill a has-been spy 5 years after they exchanged him for their own spies.

Especially right before the elections and World Cup.

philipat -> Slippery Slope Sun, 03/11/2018 - 20:07 Permalink

This makes absolutely no sense and has all the hallmarks of a CIA/MI6 false flag to keep the pressure on Russia in a Europe (particularly Germany) leaning back towards opening trade with Russia.

It is also interesting that NONE of the UK media have disclosed the fact that Christopher Steele was a close associate. Might it be assumed that much of Steele's "information" came from here? If so, and if disclosed, it might be "inconvenient" for this person to be questioned? But inconvenient for whom? Therein lies the answer.

EuroPox -> doctor10 Sun, 03/11/2018 - 21:16 Permalink

In 1995, Sergey Skripal was recruited by an MI6 undercover agent, Pablo Miller, who at the time was posing as Antonio Alvarez de Hidalgo and working at the British embassy in Tallinn, Estonia.

Pablo Miller was exposed in the early 2000s, after multiple Russians were arrested for spying and fingered Miller as their recruiter. One of his recruits was Alexander Litvinenko.

Miller and Skripal met frequently: Skripal (whose codename was "Forthwith") passed the entire Russian military intelligence telephone handbook to Miller, containing details of more than 300 of his colleagues in Russian intelligence. In 2006 Skripal was jailed.

After the spy swap in 2010, Skripal decided to resettle in Salisbury, where Pablo Miller also lived. In 2015 Miller retired and received an OBE for services to Her Majesty's Government. No doubt Miller was Skripal's minder and was probably the reason Skripal had gone to Salisbury.

According to his LinkedIn entry (deleted a few days ago), Miller worked as a consultant for Christopher Steele – Miller is the consultant whose name was withheld by the Telegraph. Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence was hired by Fusion GPS in 2016 to research Trump.

In testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee (on 3 November, 2017), it was stated that Daniel Jones (a member of Fusion GPS), had described Fusion as a "shadow media organization helping the government," and was funded by a "group of Silicon Valley billionaires and George Soros."

Between 26 November, 2017 and 10 January, 2018 George Soros (who is a prolific tweeter) was silent. Not a single tweet. Why, where was he?

Steele has refused to comment about which projects involved Miller but given Miller's Russian contacts, it is not credible that the Trump dossier was not one of them – in which case it is also not credible that Skripal was also not involved.

Join the dots....

Baron von Bud -> Looney Sun, 03/11/2018 - 19:59 Permalink

They sure do have a Russia bug up their butts. What's the real story? We'll never know. But this sounds like the bogus Syrian gas attacks. Oh, well. Russia will be incentivized to build up it's own industries and not be reliant in any way on the West. Probably best for everybody in the long run.

veritas semper -> Baron von Bud Sun, 03/11/2018 - 21:08 Permalink

The Perfidious Albion had always suffered from an acute case of Russophobia.

And this has become lethal for Britain since Pueeh-tin is in power.

LOL.

TeethVillage88s -> ???ö? Sun, 03/11/2018 - 21:14 Permalink

UK Must plead for War on Russia, it has too many problems at home which threaten the Regime.
A) Planned Inflation, Big City Living, Rents, Cost of Living, Debts, Pounds Expanded in new Finance/FIREs, just like dying empire
B) Dis-Unity, Polarization, Social Media, Alternative News, Fake News, People know of Lies from Govt not Monarchy
C) Type Three Crisis, No Deflation, No Growth, Output Gap continues after 10 years... GINI Income Inequality is well known

Lea -> Ignatius Sun, 03/11/2018 - 20:05 Permalink

They have teams working 24/7 on making shit up, namely the MI6 and the US alphabet soup agencies, plus a whole array of PR firms. That being said, money sure buys you serious propaganda firepower, but not brains.

Why would Putin kill a spook who had been in jail in Russia, that he had swapped years ago and who lived in Britain with no further connection to Russian intelligence? If he had wanted the dude dead, why wait so long? Why not kill quietly when he was in jail in Russia?

On the other hand, Litvinenko had been an MI6 agent, and so is Skripal. It would seem that being an MI6 agent is not very good for your health, especially when you are more use to them dead than alive.

Son of Captain Nemo Sun, 03/11/2018 - 19:50 Permalink

Theresa.

I hate to ask you honey... But did the U.K. have anything to do with the 22 foreign service officers of the Russian Federation that included Vitaly Churkin ( https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-un-churkin/russias-u-n-envoy- ) mysteriously dying or murdered like the Russian media magnet in a Washington D.C. hotel room ( https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-28/fbi-releases-docs-claiming-rt ) over the last 6 years???...

Let alone the bombing of flight 9268 ( http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-34687990 ) after you knew all of your assets inside Ukraine during the siege by the "DPR" in the Donbass airport incident left you "gutted" in May 2014... And Russian special forces kicking the ever loving shit out of your SAS in Syria which has meant total defeat for the Anglo-Zionist operation(s)?...

Take your time answering sweetie!... And above all else... PLEASE be "THOUGHTFUL"!!!

Shemp 4 Victory -> Son of Captain Nemo Sun, 03/11/2018 - 20:07 Permalink

Theresa May also knows who was responsible for the killing of Litvinenko. She's certainly taking her time answering that one.

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2014/07/31/theresa-may-raises-an-

Shemp 4 Victory -> CRM114 Sun, 03/11/2018 - 19:57 Permalink

It's also a war crime, under the Chemical Weapons Convention

Conveniently, MI6 are above such laws.

Conscious Reviver -> Shemp 4 Victory Sun, 03/11/2018 - 20:48 Permalink

After the over and over again false flag chemical attacks in Syria, which have so far failed to spark a wider war, MI6 decides to try their luck with the domestic variety.

Shemp 4 Victory -> lolmao500 Sun, 03/11/2018 - 20:02 Permalink

lolmao500 shilling for MI6 using chemicals weapons on UK soil against UK citizens, which is an act of treason.

CARONTE-RAPTOR Sun, 03/11/2018 - 20:37 Permalink

The little, stinking English house of horror, ...... is horrified? Smells like a false flag?

Promethus Sun, 03/11/2018 - 20:45 Permalink

And the Russians probably killed Seth Rich too.

Promethus Sun, 03/11/2018 - 20:47 Permalink

Blame the Russians. Never saw that coming.

45North1 Sun, 03/11/2018 - 20:49 Permalink

May wanted to ensure that the heating season was close enough to being over before taking an economic swing at Russia....

smacker Sun, 03/11/2018 - 20:51 Permalink

By blaming the Russians so aggressively for this attack, Theresa May is really admitting that it was a job carried out by MI6 and probably the CIA.

Pure deflection of blame.

PhiPhi Sun, 03/11/2018 - 21:05 Permalink

I hope she has more evidence than ' the chemicals are know to be used by the Russians '. The Islamic terrorist attacks and policy of importing immigrants hailing from the very nations that spawn the terrorists is becoming deeply unpopular, enter the Russian bogeyman. TPTB need to mobilize a new external threat to keep the peasants compliant to outrageous revocation of rights, freedoms and true equalities. For example a perceived imminent threat from Russia would provide extenuating circumstances to sell a non-Brexit Brexit deal that essentially in all but name thwarts the referendum.

I just don't see how offing some historic traitor on foreign soil in such a public and exotic way is of any benefit to Russia.

Herdee Sun, 03/11/2018 - 21:05 Permalink

MI6 false flag attack? How much do you want to bet?

WTFUD Sun, 03/11/2018 - 21:12 Permalink

As the Russia dun it meme/narrative Special Neocon Investigation dies a slow death across the Atlantic, its vassal tag-team/ugly twin, in the City of London, pick up the mantle/batton in order to prolong the mind-fuck.

The sinister publishing group, News Corp ( Permanent Member of 5 Eyes Security Council ) via its sister WSJ rag, The Sun, are once again CHOSEN as the Official Conduit Flag-Bearers by the Ministry of Truthy Leaks.

AriusArmenian Sun, 03/11/2018 - 21:26 Permalink

This is not a false flag when the supposed gas attack occurred about eight miles from where there is a UK government facility that experiments with such agents?

Note that the UK military has been trying to hype the Russian threat for the last several weeks to get more money to expand the UK war machine.

UK, go suck on a string.

[Mar 11, 2018] THE HYSTERICAL LEFT LIES ABOUT WIKILEAKS AND ME Roger Stone Stone Cold Truth by Roger Stone

Notable quotes:
"... The drooling left-wing talking heads insist endlessly that Julian Assange, the publisher of WikiLeaks, is a Russian agent and WikiLeaks is a Russian front. Therefore, they reason that obtaining and passing such documents to Trump would be a treasonous crime. ..."
Mar 09, 2018 | stonecoldtruth.com
I AM UNDER ATTACK In the 40 years that I have spent in American Politics, I have never seen a more hysterical lynch mob than the one at MSNBC , and other "Trump Hating" fake news sites. If you read the Washington Post, Salon or Vice , they would have you believe that I am on the verge of being indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for obtaining copies of the allegedly hacked DNC emails acquired and published by Julian Assange, and passing them to Donald Trump and his campaign.

The drooling left-wing talking heads insist endlessly that Julian Assange, the publisher of WikiLeaks, is a Russian agent and WikiLeaks is a Russian front. Therefore, they reason that obtaining and passing such documents to Trump would be a treasonous crime.

There is only one little problem with this conspiracy theory. I never received anything from Wikileaks, or the Russians, or anyone else. I never sent Donald Trump anything. In fact, I never discussed the Wikileaks disclosures or allegedly hacked DNC emails with Donald Trump before during or after the election.

I testified for four hours before the House Intelligence Committee months ago, debunking this left-wing conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, although members of the Committee disparaged me in public session, I was only allowed to respond behind closed doors. Suggestions by the grumbling Democratic minority and amplified by Politico that my testimony was less than honest are completely and categorically false.

Last week someone on the staff of the House of Intelligence Committee leaked a carefully doctored and truncated screenshot of the direct message exchange I had with WikiLeaks. This material was long ago supplied to the House Intelligence Committee and even in its heavily edited form, proves yet again that I had no coordination or collaboration with WikiLeaks.

[Mar 11, 2018] Russia Narrative Is Cynical Manipulation by Oleg Deripaska

Notable quotes:
"... In the comedy movie " Wag the Dog ," a fictitious U.S. president is on the cusp of losing an election over a real scandal. So a political spin doctor and Hollywood producer hired by his campaign instead distract the public by manufacturing "the appearance of a war" with Albania. The spin doctor explains: "It's not a war, it's a pageant. We need a theme, a song -- some visuals." The producer ascribes Albania a false motive against the United States: "They want to destroy our way of life!" The story line keeps changing to explain away emerging, inconvenient realities. ..."
"... The ever-changing "Russia narrative" in American politics is today's "Wag the Dog" scenario. Technology and the disintegration of evidence-based journalism permit a surprisingly small number of individuals to destroy bilateral or multilateral relations. Their motivation in shifting from an inconvenient reality into their desired reality is power and military-industrial commercial interests. ..."
"... Ignore Donald Trump and increase your defense budget to 2 percent, because the generals who are 'operationalizing policy' remain in charge ..."
"... When you owe the world $18 trillion, the only way to get them to "pay 2 percent for defense" is to manufacture a boogeyman. Russian novelist and pacifist Leo Tolstoy observed: "There is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people." ..."
"... they simply follow the "Wag the Dog" playbook: We don't need it to prove to be true. We need it to distract them. ..."
"... President Theodore Roosevelt once cautioned ..."
"... The distractions no longer can mask these "unholy alliances." The wife of a central architect of the Department of Justice's "Russia narrative" secretly worked for the dossier-peddling Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson attempted -- according to his own congressional admissions -- to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election ..."
"... Yet on March 16, 2017, Daniel Jones -- himself a team member of Fusion GPS, self-described former FBI agent and, as we now know from the media, an ex-Feinstein staffer -- met with my lawyer, Adam Waldman, and described Fusion as a "shadow media organization helping the government," funded by a "group of Silicon Valley billionaires and George Soros." My lawyer testified these facts to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Nov. 3. Mr. Soros is, not coincidentally, also the funder of two "ethics watchdog" NGOs (Democracy 21 and CREW) attacking Rep. Nunes' committee memo. ..."
"... A former Obama State Department official, Nuland, has been recently outed as another shadow player, reviewing and disseminating Fusion's dossier, and reportedly, hundreds of other dossiers over a period of years. "Deep State-proud loyalists" apparently was a Freudian slip, not a joke. ..."
Mar 11, 2018 | dailycaller.com

In the comedy movie " Wag the Dog ," a fictitious U.S. president is on the cusp of losing an election over a real scandal. So a political spin doctor and Hollywood producer hired by his campaign instead distract the public by manufacturing "the appearance of a war" with Albania. The spin doctor explains: "It's not a war, it's a pageant. We need a theme, a song -- some visuals." The producer ascribes Albania a false motive against the United States: "They want to destroy our way of life!" The story line keeps changing to explain away emerging, inconvenient realities.

The ever-changing "Russia narrative" in American politics is today's "Wag the Dog" scenario. Technology and the disintegration of evidence-based journalism permit a surprisingly small number of individuals to destroy bilateral or multilateral relations. Their motivation in shifting from an inconvenient reality into their desired reality is power and military-industrial commercial interests.

When I attended the Munich Security Conference in February, the extraordinary, coordinated message of a panel of U.S. senators was summarized by moderator Victoria Nuland, former assistant secretary of state under President Barack Obama, as: "Deep State-proud loyalists giv[ing] broad reassurance about continuity." One of the panelists, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), said: "What the Breitbart crowd would call the 'Deep State' is what many of us would call 'knowledgeable professionals.'" The panel's uniform message was essentially: Ignore Donald Trump and increase your defense budget to 2 percent, because the generals who are 'operationalizing policy' remain in charge .

When you owe the world $18 trillion, the only way to get them to "pay 2 percent for defense" is to manufacture a boogeyman. Russian novelist and pacifist Leo Tolstoy observed: "There is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people."

What has been inelegantly termed the "Deep State" is really this: shadow power exercised by a small number of individuals from media, business, government and the intelligence community, foisting provocative and cynically false manipulations on the public. Out of these manipulations, an agenda of these architects' own design is born.

Unfortunately, I am personally familiar with this group. Before they moved to their current, bigger ambitions of reversing the U.S. presidential election results, they scurrilously attacked me and others from the shadows for two decades. The various story lines and roles they have created for me don't survive close scrutiny and are internally inconsistent, yet they simply follow the "Wag the Dog" playbook: We don't need it to prove to be true. We need it to distract them.

President Theodore Roosevelt once cautioned : "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task."

The distractions no longer can mask these "unholy alliances." The wife of a central architect of the Department of Justice's "Russia narrative" secretly worked for the dossier-peddling Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson attempted -- according to his own congressional admissions -- to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election and its aftermath, to attack Russia and to "embarrass" me and cause trouble for the company I founded.

This inconvenient disclosure necessitated a new story line. Former Democratic National Committee chairwoman and CNN commentator Donna Brazile attacked the memo prepared by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) on television as "the weaponization of classified information." It is ironic that someone who once ran the organization that allegedly rigged the primary nomination process and who was fired from CNN for allegedly rigging a presidential debate is now producing "Russian-rigging" stories.

World War II hero and former U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) once observed , in a different context: "There exists a shadowy government with its own fundraising mechanism." Wagging the dog costs money. So, who is the "funding mechanism" of this "shadowy government?"

Fusion GPS's Simpson, in a New York Times op-ed describing his own Judiciary Committee testimony, claimed a neoconservative website "and the Clinton campaign" were "the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research." The Judiciary Committee's Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) then unilaterally released, over the objection of committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Simpson's testimony to "set the record straight." Fusion GPS "commended Senator Feinstein for her courage."

Yet on March 16, 2017, Daniel Jones -- himself a team member of Fusion GPS, self-described former FBI agent and, as we now know from the media, an ex-Feinstein staffer -- met with my lawyer, Adam Waldman, and described Fusion as a "shadow media organization helping the government," funded by a "group of Silicon Valley billionaires and George Soros." My lawyer testified these facts to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Nov. 3. Mr. Soros is, not coincidentally, also the funder of two "ethics watchdog" NGOs (Democracy 21 and CREW) attacking Rep. Nunes' committee memo.

A former Obama State Department official, Nuland, has been recently outed as another shadow player, reviewing and disseminating Fusion's dossier, and reportedly, hundreds of other dossiers over a period of years. "Deep State-proud loyalists" apparently was a Freudian slip, not a joke.

Invented narratives -- not "of the people, by the people, for the people," but rather just from a couple of people, cloaked in the very same hypocritical rhetoric of "freedom" and "democracy" that those are actively undermining -- impede internationally shared efforts on the world's most pressing, real issues, like global health, climate change and the future of energy. My own "Mother Russia" has many problems and challenges, and my country is still in transition from the Soviet regime -- a transition some clearly wish us to remain in indefinitely.

But we need to stop this old movie.

Oleg Deripaska is the founder of UC Rusal, the world's leading producer of aluminum using clean, renewable hydropower.

[Mar 11, 2018] Russiagate is being used for a host of multipurpose items. Including the suppression of any disagreement with the Mainstream Media, and any dissent with the official line.

Mar 11, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

J, 10 March 2018 at 03:32 PM

Colonel,

Russiagate is being used for a host of multipurpose items. Including the suppression of any disagreement with the Mainstream Media, and any dissent with the official line.

http://therealnews.com/t2/story:21276:Will-Rqussiagate-Help-the-Israel-Lobby-Censor-Al-Jazeera%3F

[Mar 11, 2018] America's Troll Farm Media

Notable quotes:
"... A recent Gallup poll found that while 84% of Americans see media as "critical" or "very important" to democracy, only 28% see the corporatist mainstream news media (MSM) as actually supporting democracy. They're right on both counts of course. The quality of a democracy is only as good as the information people have to make informed judgments about public policy and politicians. ..."
"... Even as the mainstream news media continue to lose street cred, they persist in a rumor-saturated full court press against the "Trump-Putin presidency," which only further exposes their lack of professionalism and increasing vulgarity. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... But it's not a new game, because despite their "free press" claims, American major news media have long been instruments of state propaganda. In the 1970s, Carl Bernstein exposed the fact that the overseas branches of US MSM had long served as eyes and ears of the CIA's "Operation Mockingbird," and it's very likely than many amongst their ranks remain agency assets. ..."
"... During the GW Bush presidency, the Pentagon recruited over 75 military generals to spread propaganda in the mass media, fed in camera ..."
"... In February 2018, former CIA director John Brennan, the man who fed the Russian "hacking" story to the House Intelligence Committee, became a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC in what has become standard revolving door practice between government and the corporate world. ..."
"... And he certainly knows something about hacking, as he was forced to admit, after first lying about it, that his CIA hacked the computers of Senate staffers who were investigating the agency's role in torturing prisoners. A man the MSM apparently regard as having impeccable credentials for truth telling. ..."
"... Facebook's vice president for advertising Rob Goldman said that in fact most of the total Russian ad buys occurred after ..."
"... The Peacemaker, The Saint, Rambo III, Red Dawn, Red Heat, the James Bond flicks, and the 2018 Oscar for documentaries, Icarus. ..."
"... There are a few signs of life in mainstream journalism. New York Times ..."
"... pledge to be truthful ..."
"... Consortium News ..."
"... The intelligence agencies "have been playing games with us. There is no factual evidence to back up any charge of hacking here." It was likely no more than a USB transfer, he said. ..."
"... Leslie Moonves, CEO of CBS, spoke for the media establishment: "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS . The money's rolling in . It's a terrible thing to say. But bring it on, Donald." ..."
"... Gerald Sussman is professor of urban studies and international and global studies at Portland State University. He is the author and editor of several books, including The Propaganda Society: Promotional Culture and Politics in Global Context (2011). ..."
Mar 11, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

Despite all the smoke and mirrors, most Americans seem to see where the stenographers of corporate capitalism are taking us. A recent Gallup poll found that while 84% of Americans see media as "critical" or "very important" to democracy, only 28% see the corporatist mainstream news media (MSM) as actually supporting democracy. They're right on both counts of course. The quality of a democracy is only as good as the information people have to make informed judgments about public policy and politicians.

Even as the mainstream news media continue to lose street cred, they persist in a rumor-saturated full court press against the "Trump-Putin presidency," which only further exposes their lack of professionalism and increasing vulgarity. MSM management and their boardroom bosses have long understood that as long as they spice up their "nothing burger" news, ratings and advertising rates will keep them in business and please their commercial and government clients. Tabloid journalism, which can describe most American mainstream media these days, even when wrapped up as "all the news that's fit to print," is in constant search of sensation, scandal, gossip, and profit – and only occasionally in public-oriented investigative integrity.

What else does the citizenry have to say? A mere 18% have "a lot" of trust in the MSM, while 74% see them as "biased" (Pew Research, July 2016). A study by the Harvard-Harris polling organization in May 2017 confirmed this, finding that 65 percent of Americans consider the so-called "free press" biased, obsessed with scandal, and full of "fake news" and therefore cannot be trusted. Among the concurring are a majority of both Democrats (53%) and Independents (60%) as well as 80% of Republicans. Amongst the "informed public," trust in American institutions in general, that is, the government, business, NGOs, and the MSM, is going through the worst crisis in recorded history, according to the marketing firm Edelman in 2018. The US is the lowest rated of the 28 countries surveyed by the firm on this measure. This is not consistent with the image of a serious "democracy."

On the MSM coverage of national politics, Americans are equally skeptical. A June 2017 Rasmussen survey of likely American voters indicated that 50% think most reporters are prejudiced against the president, and only 4% believe most reporters are biased in Trump's favor. Although this is weighted by the 76% of Republicans who support this view, the study also found that 51% of independent voters and even 24% of Democrats also agree. Aided by the billions of dollars of free, almost all negative, publicity the MSM provided, with apparent reverse effect during the presidential campaign, Trump's standing is also supported by the 47 million American shock troops that faithfully follow him on Twitter.

On January 27, 2018, the Washington Post editorial board issued this statement: "A foreign power interfered in the 2016 presidential election. U.S. law enforcement is trying to get to the bottom of that story. Congress should be doing everything possible to make sure the investigation can take place." Obviously referring to Russia, the Post's declaration, as the late investigative journalist Robert Parry and many other independent and respected writers have pointed out, was and remains without a shred of evidence. It's WMD time all over again, only this time the propaganda is being trumpeted mainly by the Democrats. It would better serve the cause of democracy to investigate the Post for its covert coalition and collusion with the deep state and the Clinton (right) wing of the Democratic Party. The Post and the rest of their pack have constructed a wicked Russia foil in order to undermine Moscow's presumed ally Trump and boost bigger Pentagon budgets. It's an extremely dangerous game that is headed toward military confrontation and massive annihilation by the yahoos in government and the liberal media.

But it's not a new game, because despite their "free press" claims, American major news media have long been instruments of state propaganda. In the 1970s, Carl Bernstein exposed the fact that the overseas branches of US MSM had long served as eyes and ears of the CIA's "Operation Mockingbird," and it's very likely than many amongst their ranks remain agency assets. Back then, Philip Graham, publisher of the Post , ran the agency's media industry operations, a fact not mentioned in the currently showing eponymous film. During the GW Bush presidency, the Pentagon recruited over 75 military generals to spread propaganda in the mass media, fed in camera by leaders at the Defense Department, the State Department, the Justice Department, and the White House. Their responsibilities included their employment as "objective" foreign policy and war analysts for major network and cable news channels, many of them concurrently receiving pay by military contracting firms. The Pentagon referred to the on-air military propagandists as "surrogates" and "message force multipliers."

The Russians are Coming

In February 2018, former CIA director John Brennan, the man who fed the Russian "hacking" story to the House Intelligence Committee, became a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC in what has become standard revolving door practice between government and the corporate world. Brennan was a well-known advocate for the CIA's rendition and torture program, spying on its critics, and its use of drone bombings and assassinations in the Middle East. And he certainly knows something about hacking, as he was forced to admit, after first lying about it, that his CIA hacked the computers of Senate staffers who were investigating the agency's role in torturing prisoners. A man the MSM apparently regard as having impeccable credentials for truth telling.

If the Russia "hacking" story has no legs, the more interesting piece of news is the organized efforts of the Democrats and some Republicans to bring down Trump and turn over the White House to theocrat Mike Pence. Mainstream pundits and reporters are churning out unsubstantiated speculations about Russia and Trump by the hour. A number of Democrats, military brass, and mercenary journalist (and former country club caddy) Thomas Friedman have characterized alleged Russian intervention as a new "Pearl Harbor" or "9/11," thereby building a case for war and for treason against the president. There's no downside to making even the most absurd claims about Russia and Trump, no penalty for fabrications, misrepresentations, or getting facts wrong. If they were honest, their ledes might read: "This fictional news report is loosely based on a true story." Or: "Any resemblance in this story to real people and events is merely coincidental."

There's room in the inferno for the Democrats' deep state allies. Starting in mid-2015, Peter Strzok, the FBI's H. Clinton personal email scandal investigator before taking the lead in the probe of Russian election interference, sent emails to his lover, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, which clearly revealed that both of them were actively working for the Clinton campaign to undermine Trump in any way possible. The pair also exchanged references to a "secret society" that was operating within the Department of Justice and the FBI to block a Trump victory. Until their exposure, Strzok had been Robert Mueller's right hand man on the Trump-Russia investigation.

Meanwhile, two years later, the hunt for the smoking Kalashnikov continues. The best the MSM have come up with is that a St. Petersburg outfit called Internet Research Agency (IRA) placed $100,000 in ads on Facebook (compared to the $81 million Facebook ad spending by the Trump and Clinton campaigns), some of the Russian ads actually directed against Trump. As Jeffrey St. Clair pointed out in the pages of CounterPunch, in the key states where Clinton lost the election, the traditional Democrat strongholds of Michigan ($832 spent on token IRA buy ads), Pennsylvania ($300), and Wisconsin ($1,979), all but $54 of this amount was spent before the party primaries even started.

Facebook's vice president for advertising Rob Goldman said that in fact most of the total Russian ad buys occurred after the presidential election. "We shared that fact," he tweeted, "but very few [news] outlets have covered it because it doesn't align with the main media narrative" about Trump's election victory. Winning the election for Trump was simply not the Russian objective, Goldman says. Alex Stamos, Facebook chief security officer, concurred. The ads, he said, were more about sowing discord, with messages about guns, immigrants, and racial strife, than on pushing a particular candidate. Think about all the blockbuster American (and British) movies that portray Russians as sinister, violent, and criminal. For starters, remember über-teutonic Ivan Drago, Sgt. Yushin, the many sadistic "Russian" mafia nogoodniks, along with the Cold War-for-children cartoon characters, Boris Badanov and Natasha Fatale? Among the many Russophobic films and TV shows over the decades: The Americans , Air Force One , The Peacemaker, The Saint, Rambo III, Red Dawn, Red Heat, the James Bond flicks, and the 2018 Oscar for documentaries, Icarus. Soviet and Russia-era films, not well tutored in ethnic caricatures, have no comparable stereotypical American counterparts.

There are a few signs of life in mainstream journalism. New York Times correspondent Scott Shane was one of the few journalists who happened to notice that the US intelligence agency (the CIA, NSA, and FBI) report of January 6, 2017 on Russian "hacking" actually offered no evidence. "Instead," he said, "the message from the agencies essentially amounts to 'trust us.'" It took the mainstream media 6 months before they acknowledged that the Obama administration claim that 17 intelligence agencies backed the hacking claim was false, the real number was only 3, and even the NSA had only "moderate confidence" in the finding. Last January, the NSA made a significant alteration in its mission statement: it removed the words "honesty" and the pledge to be truthful from its list of priorities.

Even if there were genuine evidence that Russian officials had hacked the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta emails, as originally claimed by the intelligence agencies, one should put this in context of the long history of the CIA's efforts to overthrow many democratically elected leaders who had the temerity to stand up to the superpower. These would include Allende, Arbenz, Mossadeq, Lumumba, Chavez, Goulart, Ortega, and others. The list of US interventions in foreign elections just since 1948 (Italy) is voluminous. Do the mainstream media suffer amnesia about Victoria Nuland and John McCain's presence in the Maidan, egging on the coup against Yanukovych or her infamous leaked phone call to the US ambassador in Kiev in which she dictated the ousted president's successors? And is it reasonable to expect Russia to be passive about a hostile NATO putting troops along its borders and reacting to efforts to install an anti-Russian regime next door in the Ukraine? In this recent historical context, US accusations of Russian political interference smack of complete hypocrisy.

A study by Carnegie Mellon professor Dov Levin found that between 1946 and 2000 alone, the US intervened in foreign elections 81 times, which does not include its invasions, blockades, sanctions, assassination attempts, and other regime change initiatives. "The U.S. is no stranger to interfering in the elections of other countries," he wrote. In 1996, the US intervened in the Russian election to prevent the Communist Party from returning to power. Have the MSM also forgotten the lies the government and the CIA told about Saddam Hussein's WMD and connections to terrorist movements? Or that, thanks to Edward Snowden's exposés, we know that Obama's NSA bugged the phones of 35 foreign political leaders?

If the MSM are still confused, perhaps they should listen to former CIA director James Woolsey. Interviewed by Fox News' Laura Ingraham, Woolsey was asked directly whether the US ever interfered with other countries' elections. He initially said, "probably, but it was for the good of the system in order to avoid the communists from taking over." Ingraham followed up with the question, "We don't do that now?" To this Woolsey responded, "nyum, nyum, nyum, nyum, nyum, only for a very good cause," a rather frank admission that merely amused Ingraham, who failed to follow up with this obvious statement of US double standards. After leaving the CIA, Woolsey became chairman of Freedom House, a right-wing government-supported private NGO that putatively supports human rights causes and has been active in regime change operations around the world – far more actively than merely doing Facebook postings.

William Binney, formerly with NSA as a high-level intelligence operative, subsequently becoming a whistleblower on the agency's illegal surveillance operations, called the alleged Russian attacks on the DNC "a charade." Speaking to Daniel Bernstein at Consortium News , Binney said that had any bulk transmissions come from across the Atlantic, the NSA would have known about it, as they tap every communication from abroad. The data from "Guccifer 2.0," was a download "not a transfer across the Web," which "won't manage such high speed." The intelligence agencies "have been playing games with us. There is no factual evidence to back up any charge of hacking here." It was likely no more than a USB transfer, he said.

Is there any hope for the mainstream media to change? It would take a revolution to get the MSM to become more democratic. A Harvard Shorenstein Center report found that media coverage of the 2016 US party conventions contained almost no discussion of policy issues and instead concentrated on polling data, scandals, campaign tactics, and Trump and Russia bashing. Leslie Moonves, CEO of CBS, spoke for the media establishment: "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS . The money's rolling in . It's a terrible thing to say. But bring it on, Donald."

As Walter Cronkite would say, "And that's the way it is." Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: Gerald Sussman

Gerald Sussman is professor of urban studies and international and global studies at Portland State University. He is the author and editor of several books, including The Propaganda Society: Promotional Culture and Politics in Global Context (2011).

[Mar 10, 2018] Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko s death.

Highly recommended!
There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time.
It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this
Notable quotes:
"... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
"... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
"... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
"... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
"... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
"... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
"... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
"... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
"... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
"... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
"... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
"... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
"... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
"... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
"... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
"... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
"... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
"... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
"... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'

In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background, which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.'

There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.

This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.

And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area.

Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.

The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.

In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry – the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.

Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier, which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.

(See http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/what-really-happened-robert-levinson-cia-iran-454803.html .)

Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio 4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets, backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.

The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The – publicly available – evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.

Still less was it mentioned that claims that the – very dangerous – late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.

What Shvets had done had been to take – genuine – audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest a sale had been completed.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.

All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder. For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.

(On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews both with Mogilevich and Levinson at

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcript_06_12_99.txt )

In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.

Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions north of the Litani.

These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.

What followed from the disaster unleashed by the – Anglo-American – 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian side that going around smashing up 'régimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.

Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking 'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.

Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.

So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.

All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' – aka 'suitcase nuke' – to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate Russia in supplying materials.

There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation – which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'régime change' is the goal.)

It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional, Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.

It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here, a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.

Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.

In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.

Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain, but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)

That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:

'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear limited life components and you can read for weeks).'

(For this and other articles by Kaszeta, as also his bio, see http://strongpointsecurity.co.uk ')

What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility, in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of ones which lasted longer.

For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.

What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.

In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would – rather naturally – try to make 'boomerang.'

According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong – but, even if it were true, would you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?

As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his – accurate but irrelevant – point about polonium into an article which was concerned with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.

In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties, and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another day.

A corollary of all this is that we cannot – yet at least – be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious of violations' – the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation – is necessarily wholly accurate.

Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.

Posted at 03:42 PM in As The Borg Turns , Habakkuk , Russia , Russiagate | Permalink


james , 03 February 2018 at 04:33 PM

thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..

it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..

JohnB , 03 February 2018 at 05:17 PM
David,

Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.

turcopolier , 03 February 2018 at 06:02 PM
james

It is the closest of all international intelligence relationships. It started in WW2. Before that the Brits were though of as a potential enemy. pl

Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 03 February 2018 at 06:10 PM
I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
catherine , 03 February 2018 at 06:22 PM
That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.

Re: Levinson

# Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.

# Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson went to Jablonski with it.

# And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson? The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing came of it.

I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.

Ishmael Zechariah , 03 February 2018 at 06:54 PM
DH,

As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.

I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".

Be safe.

Ishmael Zechariah

Rd , 03 February 2018 at 07:31 PM
Babak Makkinejad said in reply to turcopolier...

The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
..and US is the one who has been paying for it since 1979!!!

kooshy said in reply to Ishmael Zechariah... , 03 February 2018 at 08:21 PM
IZ
My guess is, that he is unpredictable, instantaneous and therefore can't be consistent and reliable, useful idiot needs to be predictable.
kooshy , 03 February 2018 at 08:43 PM
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. "

David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making. Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

different clue , 03 February 2018 at 08:49 PM
Ishmael Zechariah,

( reply to comment 6),

I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.

It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate.

And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.

So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.

Jack , 03 February 2018 at 08:54 PM
David,

Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.

In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.

Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century endorsed her.

Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in. Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling the Borg pundits.

SmoothieX12 -> kooshy... , 03 February 2018 at 09:51 PM
So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.

Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:10 PM
They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.
kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:24 PM
You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier on atlantic side.
catherine said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:21 AM
''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''

The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.

'1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'

In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241, 251 - 256]

'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'

State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union

aleksandar , 04 February 2018 at 04:41 AM
David,

About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS.

Fred said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 08:40 AM
Babak,

"they got US to bail them out during WWII" And how would things have worked out had we not done so?

Fred , 04 February 2018 at 08:46 AM
David,

"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time."

Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.

Anna said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 08:48 AM
"They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
-- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
turcopolier , 04 February 2018 at 08:54 AM
Anna

The powerful are often remarkably ignorant. pl

Babak Makkinejad -> Fred... , 04 February 2018 at 10:08 AM
England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion, did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 11:53 AM
"unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental people. Just general impressions, mind you.
Kooshy said in reply to catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting, even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such an escalation.
Phodges said in reply to turcopolier ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:23 PM
Sir

It seems we are being defeated by Cicero's enemy within. Zion is achieving what no one could hope to achieve by force of arms.

David Habakkuk -> catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 01:17 PM
catherine,

In response to comment 5.

I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain more pointers.

It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.

An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were – apparently at least – cooperating with Russian attempts to get hold of him. An extract:

'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'

(See http://defiancethebook.com/legal/habeas/petition.htm .)

Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.

Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:

'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'

(See http://konanykhin.com/news/the-konanykhine-case.html .)

So – 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist – look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has changed.

For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty – if not always judgement – I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:

'"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [Ł1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign passports for its "very, very special clients".

'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".

(For a 'Guardian report, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/sep/23/julianborger ; for the actual testimony, see http://archives-financialservices.house.gov/banking/92299ger.pdf .)

Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC – which some of us think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – in which the introduction by the presenter, Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:

'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'

(For the transcript presented in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, see http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ )

When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' – when I came across this later, it was immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.

(For the first part of the exchanges of comments, the second apparently having become unavailable, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/markurban/2008/07/litvinenko_killing_had_state_i.html )

She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator, David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.

Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.

What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary claim about Shvets:

'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a cease and desist on allegations of a politically motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.

'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.

'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'

Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling her as to the side for which he was working.

It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion – of which I, like others, was both beneficiary and victim – could be useful.

An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria' was actually credible.

This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking, and for similar action against Syria.

Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson – clearly in collusion with Steele – was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.

There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.

A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing. This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High') might be a start.

Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')

The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one feel as though one wanted to throw up.

Thomas , 04 February 2018 at 01:24 PM
"They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.}

No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.

SmoothieX12 -> Anna... , 04 February 2018 at 01:39 PM
- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.

My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.

Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.

Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.

james said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 04 February 2018 at 03:01 PM
there seems to be no shortage of money for these blatant propaganda exercises..
Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 04:14 PM
I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914. Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
begob , 04 February 2018 at 05:20 PM
I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 06:20 PM
IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.

The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.

spy killer , 04 February 2018 at 06:55 PM
Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
English Outsider -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 07:23 AM
Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google also allows searches with more than one term. This link -

https://twitter.com/pat_lang

- gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories" on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.

If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.

"Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.

The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations" (hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many of the contributors know it from inside.

In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible, but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.

jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 08:11 AM
Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for the most part, Labor was Left.
Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.

So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.

Babak Makkinejad -> jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 08:29 AM
All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
Sid Finster said in reply to Jack... , 05 February 2018 at 10:26 AM
Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.

The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.

Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.

Sid Finster said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 05 February 2018 at 10:31 AM
Explain Marshall Miller's role in this, please. He is someone I know quite well. I also know one of the Chalupas.
begob said in reply to jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 10:56 AM
jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat of the BEF.
turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 11:18 AM
FM
What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break - David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 11:19 AM
Yes, I am Iranian. All "Babak"s are Iranians - except some obscure ones that are Rus - Babakov.
Anna , 05 February 2018 at 02:07 PM
The hard, blinding truth: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Thomas said in reply to turcopolier ... , 05 February 2018 at 02:08 PM
Colonel,

This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.

Richardstevenhack , 05 February 2018 at 02:36 PM
Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.

And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.

Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."

Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.

Seriously, read this! The whole thing!

Rampant abuse and possible contempt of Court: what you need to know about the GOP memo
http://theduran.com/rampant-abuse-contempt-court-analysis-gop-memorandum/

blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 03:25 PM
Sen Grassley releases memo heavily redacted by DOJ/FBI.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-05/grassley-graham-blast-fbi-censoring-memo-calling-criminal-probe-trump-dossier

"Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "

I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI is lying.

What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that are based on classified documents.

turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 04:38 PM
FM

We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status. You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are, in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you. You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl

Kooshy said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 04:46 PM
Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from Northeestern
blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 04:55 PM
...would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

Aye. Aye. Sir!

+1

That is why some of us believe the Patriot Act and FISA are both unpatriotic and unconstitutional. SCOTUS disagrees with the few of us.

Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 05:03 PM
I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist. I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians - they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
English Outsider , 05 February 2018 at 06:31 PM
Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.

David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because of that.

The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as "salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling around unsupervised?

The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but for the general public, that bit more untenable.

So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.

I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?

kooshy , 05 February 2018 at 07:49 PM
Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type, they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 07:59 PM
EO

Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to pay him until he left UK service. pl

English Outsider , 06 February 2018 at 05:10 AM
Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.

Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK side.

English Outsider -> Cortes... , 06 February 2018 at 05:53 AM
Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about the "golden showers"? "

I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.

So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.

Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.

But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK get mixed up in it?

David Habakkuk -> Sid Finster... , 06 February 2018 at 06:19 AM
Sid Finster,

In response to comment 53.

When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.

A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella.

When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.

His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques, and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium forgeries – an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.

So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'

The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.

(This initial post by me, and later posts by me on that site, are at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/uid:1857/diary. Three posts David Loepp and I produced jointly in December 2012, which have a lot on Scaramella and Shvets, are on his page there, at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/de%20Gondi/diary .)

The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December 2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:

'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic- Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'

Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:

'12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them [presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'

The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':

'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI. Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini. Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'

In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography – which Steele may also have had a hand in organising – I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella which had been described in the wiretap request.

As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.

In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from Karon von Gerhke – but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.

Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.

'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with him.'

From a fax dated 7 November 2005:

'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re: Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'

From a fax dated 5 December 2005:

'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO – DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA disseminated on Berezovsky – a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is alleged is totting off to London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'

In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was unfortunate that her filing was a shambles – a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be in a chaotic state.

However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus justifications.

Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made – see for example the two posts I put up on the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.

(I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)

And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence in the Inquiry.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.

Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' – whatever that is – to Iran.

The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')

Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 09:40 AM
Thank you David Habakkuk. Truly sordid and deplorable. WWIII to be initiated on basis of lies.
Jack , 06 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
David

You may already know this but Steele was a no show in a UK court for a deposition on the libel suit.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/02/05/christopher-steele-is-no-show-in-london-court-in-civil-case-over-dossier.amp.html

Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 01:18 PM
I know something of spectroscopy.

The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis itself or its instrumentation.

The paragraph that you have quoted:

"To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."

And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics - which did not and could not exist in this situation.

LeaNder , 07 February 2018 at 09:16 AM
David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there is to know?

I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.

Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.

By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.

According to Google search there are no other links then your articles here:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf

**********

JAN RICHARD BĆRUG
The Collapsing Wall. Hybrid Journalism.
A Comparative Study of Newspapers and
Magazines in Eight Countries in Europe

Available online. Haven't read it yet, but journalism as hidden public relations transfer belt would be one of my minor obsessions. ...

Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 07 February 2018 at 11:23 AM
I wonder too; their command of the English idiom is very au currant - noticed "opt in/opt out" reference? Too American.

They clearly are not native speakers of German.

LeaNder said in reply to kooshy... , 07 February 2018 at 12:30 PM
why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_Island#Economy

Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.

Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those?

The German link is different. How about the Iranian?

or isn't this the Kish we are talking about?

LeaNder said in reply to LeaNder... , 07 February 2018 at 01:14 PM
correcting myself #94:

another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s

I see Sergei seems to share my interest in the literary genre:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Ivanov#Personal

[Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
"... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
"... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
"... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
"... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
"... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
"... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
"... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
"... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
"... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
"... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
"... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
"... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
"... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
"... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
"... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
"... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
"... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
"... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'

In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background, which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.'

There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.

This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.

And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area.

Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.

The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.

In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry – the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.

Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier, which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.

(See http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/what-really-happened-robert-levinson-cia-iran-454803.html .)

Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio 4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets, backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.

The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The – publicly available – evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.

Still less was it mentioned that claims that the – very dangerous – late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.

What Shvets had done had been to take – genuine – audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest a sale had been completed.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.

All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder. For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.

(On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews both with Mogilevich and Levinson at

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcript_06_12_99.txt )

In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.

Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions north of the Litani.

These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.

What followed from the disaster unleashed by the – Anglo-American – 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian side that going around smashing up 'régimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.

Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking 'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.

Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.

So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.

All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' – aka 'suitcase nuke' – to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate Russia in supplying materials.

There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation – which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'régime change' is the goal.)

It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional, Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.

It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here, a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.

Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.

In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.

Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain, but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)

That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:

'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear limited life components and you can read for weeks).'

(For this and other articles by Kaszeta, as also his bio, see http://strongpointsecurity.co.uk ')

What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility, in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of ones which lasted longer.

For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.

What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.

In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would – rather naturally – try to make 'boomerang.'

According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong – but, even if it were true, would you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?

As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his – accurate but irrelevant – point about polonium into an article which was concerned with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.

In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties, and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another day.

A corollary of all this is that we cannot – yet at least – be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious of violations' – the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation – is necessarily wholly accurate.

Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.

Posted at 03:42 PM in As The Borg Turns , Habakkuk , Russia , Russiagate | Permalink


james , 03 February 2018 at 04:33 PM

thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..

it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..

JohnB , 03 February 2018 at 05:17 PM
David,

Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.

turcopolier , 03 February 2018 at 06:02 PM
james

It is the closest of all international intelligence relationships. It started in WW2. Before that the Brits were though of as a potential enemy. pl

Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 03 February 2018 at 06:10 PM
I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
catherine , 03 February 2018 at 06:22 PM
That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.

Re: Levinson

# Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.

# Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson went to Jablonski with it.

# And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson? The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing came of it.

I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.

Ishmael Zechariah , 03 February 2018 at 06:54 PM
DH,

As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.

I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".

Be safe.

Ishmael Zechariah

Rd , 03 February 2018 at 07:31 PM
Babak Makkinejad said in reply to turcopolier...

The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
..and US is the one who has been paying for it since 1979!!!

kooshy said in reply to Ishmael Zechariah... , 03 February 2018 at 08:21 PM
IZ
My guess is, that he is unpredictable, instantaneous and therefore can't be consistent and reliable, useful idiot needs to be predictable.
kooshy , 03 February 2018 at 08:43 PM
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. "

David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making. Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

different clue , 03 February 2018 at 08:49 PM
Ishmael Zechariah,

( reply to comment 6),

I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.

It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate.

And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.

So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.

Jack , 03 February 2018 at 08:54 PM
David,

Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.

In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.

Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century endorsed her.

Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in. Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling the Borg pundits.

SmoothieX12 -> kooshy... , 03 February 2018 at 09:51 PM
So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.

Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:10 PM
They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.
kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:24 PM
You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier on atlantic side.
catherine said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:21 AM
''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''

The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.

'1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'

In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241, 251 - 256]

'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'

State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union

aleksandar , 04 February 2018 at 04:41 AM
David,

About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS.

Fred said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 08:40 AM
Babak,

"they got US to bail them out during WWII" And how would things have worked out had we not done so?

Fred , 04 February 2018 at 08:46 AM
David,

"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time."

Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.

Anna said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 08:48 AM
"They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
-- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
turcopolier , 04 February 2018 at 08:54 AM
Anna

The powerful are often remarkably ignorant. pl

Babak Makkinejad -> Fred... , 04 February 2018 at 10:08 AM
England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion, did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 11:53 AM
"unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental people. Just general impressions, mind you.
Kooshy said in reply to catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting, even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such an escalation.
Phodges said in reply to turcopolier ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:23 PM
Sir

It seems we are being defeated by Cicero's enemy within. Zion is achieving what no one could hope to achieve by force of arms.

David Habakkuk -> catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 01:17 PM
catherine,

In response to comment 5.

I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain more pointers.

It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.

An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were – apparently at least – cooperating with Russian attempts to get hold of him. An extract:

'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'

(See http://defiancethebook.com/legal/habeas/petition.htm .)

Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.

Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:

'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'

(See http://konanykhin.com/news/the-konanykhine-case.html .)

So – 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist – look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has changed.

For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty – if not always judgement – I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:

'"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [Ł1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign passports for its "very, very special clients".

'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".

(For a 'Guardian report, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/sep/23/julianborger ; for the actual testimony, see http://archives-financialservices.house.gov/banking/92299ger.pdf .)

Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC – which some of us think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – in which the introduction by the presenter, Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:

'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'

(For the transcript presented in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, see http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ )

When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' – when I came across this later, it was immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.

(For the first part of the exchanges of comments, the second apparently having become unavailable, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/markurban/2008/07/litvinenko_killing_had_state_i.html )

She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator, David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.

Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.

What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary claim about Shvets:

'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a cease and desist on allegations of a politically motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.

'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.

'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'

Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling her as to the side for which he was working.

It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion – of which I, like others, was both beneficiary and victim – could be useful.

An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria' was actually credible.

This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking, and for similar action against Syria.

Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson – clearly in collusion with Steele – was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.

There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.

A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing. This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High') might be a start.

Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')

The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one feel as though one wanted to throw up.

Thomas , 04 February 2018 at 01:24 PM
"They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.}

No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.

SmoothieX12 -> Anna... , 04 February 2018 at 01:39 PM
- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.

My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.

Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.

Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.

james said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 04 February 2018 at 03:01 PM
there seems to be no shortage of money for these blatant propaganda exercises..
Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 04:14 PM
I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914. Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
begob , 04 February 2018 at 05:20 PM
I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 06:20 PM
IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.

The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.

spy killer , 04 February 2018 at 06:55 PM
Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
English Outsider -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 07:23 AM
Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google also allows searches with more than one term. This link -

https://twitter.com/pat_lang

- gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories" on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.

If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.

"Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.

The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations" (hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many of the contributors know it from inside.

In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible, but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.

jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 08:11 AM
Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for the most part, Labor was Left.
Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.

So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.

Babak Makkinejad -> jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 08:29 AM
All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
Sid Finster said in reply to Jack... , 05 February 2018 at 10:26 AM
Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.

The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.

Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.

Sid Finster said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 05 February 2018 at 10:31 AM
Explain Marshall Miller's role in this, please. He is someone I know quite well. I also know one of the Chalupas.
begob said in reply to jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 10:56 AM
jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat of the BEF.
turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 11:18 AM
FM
What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break - David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 11:19 AM
Yes, I am Iranian. All "Babak"s are Iranians - except some obscure ones that are Rus - Babakov.
Anna , 05 February 2018 at 02:07 PM
The hard, blinding truth: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Thomas said in reply to turcopolier ... , 05 February 2018 at 02:08 PM
Colonel,

This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.

Richardstevenhack , 05 February 2018 at 02:36 PM
Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.

And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.

Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."

Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.

Seriously, read this! The whole thing!

Rampant abuse and possible contempt of Court: what you need to know about the GOP memo
http://theduran.com/rampant-abuse-contempt-court-analysis-gop-memorandum/

blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 03:25 PM
Sen Grassley releases memo heavily redacted by DOJ/FBI.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-05/grassley-graham-blast-fbi-censoring-memo-calling-criminal-probe-trump-dossier

"Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "

I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI is lying.

What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that are based on classified documents.

turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 04:38 PM
FM

We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status. You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are, in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you. You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl

Kooshy said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 04:46 PM
Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from Northeestern
blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 04:55 PM
...would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

Aye. Aye. Sir!

+1

That is why some of us believe the Patriot Act and FISA are both unpatriotic and unconstitutional. SCOTUS disagrees with the few of us.

Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 05:03 PM
I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist. I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians - they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
English Outsider , 05 February 2018 at 06:31 PM
Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.

David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because of that.

The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as "salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling around unsupervised?

The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but for the general public, that bit more untenable.

So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.

I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?

kooshy , 05 February 2018 at 07:49 PM
Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type, they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 07:59 PM
EO

Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to pay him until he left UK service. pl

English Outsider , 06 February 2018 at 05:10 AM
Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.

Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK side.

English Outsider -> Cortes... , 06 February 2018 at 05:53 AM
Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about the "golden showers"? "

I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.

So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.

Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.

But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK get mixed up in it?

David Habakkuk -> Sid Finster... , 06 February 2018 at 06:19 AM
Sid Finster,

In response to comment 53.

When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.

A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella.

When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.

His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques, and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium forgeries – an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.

So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'

The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.

(This initial post by me, and later posts by me on that site, are at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/uid:1857/diary. Three posts David Loepp and I produced jointly in December 2012, which have a lot on Scaramella and Shvets, are on his page there, at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/de%20Gondi/diary .)

The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December 2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:

'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic- Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'

Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:

'12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them [presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'

The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':

'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI. Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini. Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'

In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography – which Steele may also have had a hand in organising – I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella which had been described in the wiretap request.

As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.

In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from Karon von Gerhke – but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.

Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.

'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with him.'

From a fax dated 7 November 2005:

'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re: Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'

From a fax dated 5 December 2005:

'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO – DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA disseminated on Berezovsky – a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is alleged is totting off to London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'

In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was unfortunate that her filing was a shambles – a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be in a chaotic state.

However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus justifications.

Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made – see for example the two posts I put up on the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.

(I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)

And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence in the Inquiry.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.

Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' – whatever that is – to Iran.

The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')

Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 09:40 AM
Thank you David Habakkuk. Truly sordid and deplorable. WWIII to be initiated on basis of lies.
Jack , 06 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
David

You may already know this but Steele was a no show in a UK court for a deposition on the libel suit.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/02/05/christopher-steele-is-no-show-in-london-court-in-civil-case-over-dossier.amp.html

Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 01:18 PM
I know something of spectroscopy.

The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis itself or its instrumentation.

The paragraph that you have quoted:

"To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."

And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics - which did not and could not exist in this situation.

LeaNder , 07 February 2018 at 09:16 AM
David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there is to know?

I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.

Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.

By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.

According to Google search there are no other links then your articles here:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf

**********

JAN RICHARD BĆRUG
The Collapsing Wall. Hybrid Journalism.
A Comparative Study of Newspapers and
Magazines in Eight Countries in Europe

Available online. Haven't read it yet, but journalism as hidden public relations transfer belt would be one of my minor obsessions. ...

Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 07 February 2018 at 11:23 AM
I wonder too; their command of the English idiom is very au currant - noticed "opt in/opt out" reference? Too American.

They clearly are not native speakers of German.

LeaNder said in reply to kooshy... , 07 February 2018 at 12:30 PM
why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_Island#Economy

Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.

Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those?

The German link is different. How about the Iranian?

or isn't this the Kish we are talking about?

LeaNder said in reply to LeaNder... , 07 February 2018 at 01:14 PM
correcting myself #94:

another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s

I see Sergei seems to share my interest in the literary genre:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Ivanov#Personal

[Mar 10, 2018] Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in Obama policy and HRC campaign long before any Steele s Dossier. This was a program ofunleashing cold War II

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
"... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
"... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

As chickenhawks related those who experienced war in the USA elite that slide to neocon dominance became inevitable.

SmoothieX12 -> Anna... , 04 February 2018 at 01:39 PM

- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.

My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.

Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.

Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.

kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 04:10 PM
John McCain is a war veteran and a policy maker, who has seen war closer than Marshal or Ike still he will shy away from any war even with nuclear Russia.
Joe100 said in reply to kooshy... , 04 February 2018 at 04:40 PM
While McCain is a war veteran, his career was not in any way distinguished - rather he pretty clearly was given "hall pass" after "hall pass" given his father and grandfather. It also seems pretty clear his time as a POW has probably significantly influenced his view of the world.

"The Nightingale's Song" has an excellent treatment of his Naval Academy and service time, along with and in contrast to Ollie North, Jim Webb, admiral Poindexter and Bud MacFarlane. Not a pretty picture..

SmoothieX12 -> kooshy... , 04 February 2018 at 05:00 PM
John McCain is a war veteran and a policy maker, who has seen war closer than Marshal or Ike still he will shy away from any war even with nuclear Russia.

Seeing generations of your close and remote relatives killed and your property destroyed as a result of war is usually a very sobering collective experience. McCain, apart from being a rather exceptional warmonger, doesn't know what it is, despite experiencing some serious trials while being a POW. Ike saw, for starters, concentration camps and, unlike, McCain was mostly on the ground. This is a crucial distinction.

kooshy , 04 February 2018 at 05:15 PM
"It also seems pretty clear his time as a POW has probably significantly influenced his view of the world."
I agree, and, that was the point I tried to make, not all veterans are necessary qualified MINDS for deciding future of the coming generations. I have the same suspicion for General Kelly, having lost a son in Afghanistan and having power to influence the war in Afghanistan, I think is this situation, like judges, one has to recuse him/herself to be part of planers.

[Mar 10, 2018] The Russia witch hunt is caused by the economic failures of neoliberalism and growing distruct toward neoliberal elite in the UK and US. No noticeable advance in living standards since 1985 make middle class disillusioned and angry. The neilineral elite badly needs a spcapegoat and Russia fits the bill

Notable quotes:
"... Obvious failure everywhere the supposed electorate look. Of course they want an alternative. ..."
"... You have a good point, but I often think that, a the machinery of surveillance and repression becomes so well oiled and refined, the ruling oligarchs will soon stop even paying lip service to 'American workers', or the "American middle class" and go full authoritarian. ..."
"... The Clintonoid project seems set on taking it to the late 16th century. Probably with a return of chattel slavery. I recall during the George II administration someone in congress advocating for he return of debtor's prisons during the 'debat' over ending access to bankruptcy ..."
Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Harry, 09 March 2018 at 08:02 PM

I'm increasingly coming tip the conclusion that the Russia stuff is caused by the economic failures of the ruling classes in the UK and US. No noticeable advance in living standards since 1985.

An American oligarch is now a trillionaire and doesn't pay tax.

Obvious failure everywhere the supposed electorate look. Of course they want an alternative. Its lucky the Russians chose now to become aggressive cos otherwise the Dem party leaders would be fired for incompetence.

Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg -> Harry... 10 March 2018 at 06:25 PM

You have a good point, but I often think that, a the machinery of surveillance and repression becomes so well oiled and refined, the ruling oligarchs will soon stop even paying lip service to 'American workers', or the "American middle class" and go full authoritarian.

Karl Rove's dream to return the economy to the late 19th Century standard.

The Clintonoid project seems set on taking it to the late 16th century. Probably with a return of chattel slavery. I recall during the George II administration someone in congress advocating for he return of debtor's prisons during the 'debat' over ending access to bankruptcy

likbez -< Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg...
Late Sheldon Wolin (who died Oct. 21, 2015) claimed that the current US political system should be called "inverted totalitarism". He stressed that the democracy and the republican form of government are incompatible with
  1. Powerful national intelligence agencies, which inevitably tend to escape civilian control and convert the state into national security state
  2. MIC which enforces the imperial foreign policy which is associated with such terms as "super power" and global neoliberal Empire. This was noted much earlier by President Eisenhower in his farewell address to the nation.
  3. High level of concentration of media ownership. In the USA six corporations control the lion share of MSM.
  4. Neoliberalism as a social system, with its inescapable tendency to replace representative democracy with "one dollar, one vote" regime and institualized corruption of politicians (via "revolving door" mechanism, mechanism of financing the election campaign, and the power of lobbyists on Capital Hill )

As he wrote ( http://www.activatingdemocracy.com/resources/get-inspired/sheldon-wolin/inverted-totalitarianism-by-sheldon-wolin/ ):

"Empire" and "superpower" accurately symbolize the projection of American power abroad, but for that reason they obscure the internal consequences. Consider how odd it would sound if we were to refer to "the Constitution of the American Empire" or "superpower democracy." The reason they ring false is that "constitution" signifies limitations on power, while "democracy" commonly refers to the active involvement of citizens with their government and the responsiveness of government to its citizens.

For their part, "empire" and "superpower" stand for the surpassing of limits and the dwarfing of the citizenry. The increasing power of the state and the declining power of institutions intended to control it has been in the making for some time. The [two] party system is a notorious example.

...Representative institutions no longer represent voters. Instead, they have been short-circuited, steadily corrupted by an institutionalized system of bribery that renders them responsive to powerful interest groups whose constituencies are the major corporations and wealthiest Americans. The courts, in turn, when they are not increasingly handmaidens of corporate power, are consistently deferential to the claims of national security.

Elections have become heavily subsidized non-events that typically attract at best merely half of an electorate whose information about foreign and domestic politics is filtered through corporate-dominated media.

Citizens are manipulated into a nervous state by the media's reports of rampant crime and terrorist networks, by thinly veiled threats... and by their own fears about unemployment.

What is crucially important here is not only the expansion of governmental power but the inevitable discrediting of constitutional limitations and institutional processes that discourages the citizenry and leaves them politically apathetic.

...At the same time, it is corporate power, as the representative of the dynamic of capitalism and of the ever-expanding power made available by the integration of science and technology with the structure of capitalism, that produces the totalizing drive
.. a pervasive atmosphere of fear abetted by a corporate economy of ruthless downsizing, withdrawal or reduction of pension and health benefits; a corporate political system that relentlessly threatens to privatize Social Security and the modest health benefits available, especially to the poor.

With such instrumentalities for promoting uncertainty and dependence, it is almost overkill for inverted totalitarianism to employ a system of criminal justice [to suppress dissent, like in classic totalitarism. ]

[Mar 10, 2018] 'It's propaganda,' Lavrov BLASTS Britain's claims of Russian involvement in Skripal poisoning

Notable quotes:
"... We haven't heard a single fact, we only watch TV coverage, where your colleagues speak fervently with serious faces that if it is Russia, the response will be that Russia will remember forever. It's not serious, it's propaganda at its finest and pressing hysteria " ..."
"... "I want to remind people that Litvinenko's death was also attributed to Russia, but hasn't been investigated, because court proceedings, which were called 'public,' were in fact closed. They were carried out in a very strange way, and numerous facts, which emerged throughout investigation, haven't come into the public domain. ..."
"... "We offered our assistance and cooperation; however, British justice decided that they are above this, and it was enough just to come out with a verdict which is not inclusive," ..."
"... "swept under the carpet." ..."
"... "propaganda channels," ..."
Mar 10, 2018 | theduran.com

Russophobia called to account as Russian Foreign Minister offers Moscow's help, confronting the British for uncooperative attitude towards Moscow

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that his government is willing to cooperate with an ongoing British investigation into the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergey Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. However, Lavrov blasted the allegations that this was an act committed by the will of the Russian government, calling these 'hysteria' and 'propaganda.'

We haven't heard a single fact, we only watch TV coverage, where your colleagues speak fervently with serious faces that if it is Russia, the response will be that Russia will remember forever. It's not serious, it's propaganda at its finest and pressing hysteria "

Click here for the best news on Russia >>

RT.com notes in their newspiece that Skripal died, but this appears to be a mistake . What is true is that Sergey's wife and son died in 2012 and 2017. At the time of this report, both Sergei and Yulia are in the hospital in critical condition. In fact, there have been 21 people in total who have received medical treatment as the result of the poisoning, which made many of them also seriously ill.

The nature of the agent used in this poisoning is not specifically known publicly, but the British police did state that this was a 'nerve gas' that was used. They have also stated that this was a targeted assassination attempt.

The present climate of Russophobia and hysteria concerning 'all things Russia' has increased the ease at which hysterical accusations abound in this situation. Lavrov called all this to account in addressing the parallels attempted between this attack on the Skripals and the death of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, which was determined to have been caused by radiation poisoning from polonium-210. The foreign minister had this to say:

"I want to remind people that Litvinenko's death was also attributed to Russia, but hasn't been investigated, because court proceedings, which were called 'public,' were in fact closed. They were carried out in a very strange way, and numerous facts, which emerged throughout investigation, haven't come into the public domain.

"We offered our assistance and cooperation; however, British justice decided that they are above this, and it was enough just to come out with a verdict which is not inclusive," Lavrov added, saying that many facts linked to the tragedy have been "swept under the carpet."

Those interested in the matter should turn to countries they wish to find answers from, not to "propaganda channels," Lavrov added.

[Mar 10, 2018] Another possibility for the identity of the DNC hacker/leaker.

Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Fred , 09 March 2018 at 05:23 PM

Intereseting that a former staffer from Senator Feinstein is implicated in the mess. How many others are there who have been doing the same thing? I wonder if Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultt's IT staffer Mr. Arwan was accessing any relavent iformation while he was on her payroll and for whom?
Seamus Padraig said in reply to Fred ... , 09 March 2018 at 06:36 PM
You wanna hear another hot tip? Debbie's brother, Steven Wasserman, is the Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia -- the very jurisdiction where Seth Rich was murdered. Not much progress being made in that investigation ... can't imagine why!
rg -> Fred ... , 09 March 2018 at 10:27 PM
Interesting comment. Maybe he was the DNC hacker/leaker.

[Mar 10, 2018] The military industrial complex needs an enemy to keep Western Europe in line. The Russians serve this role as Boogeyman

Notable quotes:
"... For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one. ..."
"... Ultimately the US government's anti-Russian animus does not matter. US government propaganda intensifies in lockstep with Washington's impotence and discredit. These beltway tantrums are a good sign. ..."
"... But in fact, comprehensive and exhaustive evidence shows that the US is more repressive than Russia. ..."
"... Russia is no longer a communist totalitarian state. In the intervening 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet empire, the yankee imperium itself has completed its morph into a quasi-fascist empire begun over the cold war decades. It is, therefore, imperative that Mr. Buchanan's wise counsel be followed if we are to survive. ..."
"... Few Americans understand the extent of the anti-Russian propaganda and the massive profiteering by military contractors that results. Watch this recent Jimmy Dore clip to learn more. Most are shocked to learn the USA spends twelve times more. Our increase this year alone is much greater than Russian entire military budget! ..."
"... The antipathy to Russia comes from the US Deep State, not Trump or the American people. Anti-Russian hysteria is derived entirely from America's Jewish press and Deep State with their "Russian hacking" and "influencing elections" stories – as if the Israel lobby doesn't influence US elections?? ..."
"... Neocons, Izzy firsters, and globalist banksters, mostly. Then there are the stooges like the McCainiacs and the Hillaryhyenas Then we have stupid, gullible people who believe their rot, essentially the rot believed by preceding generations including the brain dead, unquestioning, "greatest" generation of pseudo tough guy servile suck ups. ..."
Mar 10, 2018 | www.unz.com

33 Comments to "Time to Get Over the Russophobia"


RobinG , March 9, 2018 at 5:59 am GMT

"And Russians today enjoy freedoms of speech, assembly, religion, travel, politics, and the press that the generations before 1989 never knew."

And these are freedoms that Americans, since 2001, are enjoying less and less. To add insult to injury, it's not only our gov't., but our neighbors who seek to curtail Freedom of Speech. One is likely to be ostracized for not succumbing to the Russiagate hysteria.

This excellent interview discusses motives for this propaganda.

Will Russiagate Help the Israel Lobby Censor Al Jazeera?

Anon Disclaimer , March 9, 2018 at 6:40 am GMT
'Russophobia' is not OUR problem.

Most Americans would have no 'Russophobia' if not for the crazy media. After all, most Americans, Demmy or Repuby, are wholly oblivious to world affairs. They only care about pop culture.

So, why did Russia become a big deal?

Not because of the people. It was because of the media and deep state. Who runs them? Jewish globalists. Why do Jews hate Russia? It's historic.

So, the real problem is Jewish Supremacism. 'Russophobia' is just a symptom of it.

Jewish globalists HATE anything that stands in the way of their total domination.

Russia clearly isn't anti-Jewish. Jews are 0.2% of the population but make up 20% of the richest people there. So, why do Jews hate Russia? They haven't been allowed to gain total power as in the US. And Jews fear that the Russian example might inspire other white nations. And only total mastery and domination will please Jewish globalists who are in supremacist mode.

That's what this is about. All this hysteria about Russia hacking blah blah is just Jewish globalists trying to discredit Russia in the eyes of goyim.

Now, given the Jewish globalist mindset, why would they abandon anti-Russian hysteria? It's not about Russia. It's about them. They will do ANYTHING to serve their own interests.

Anon Disclaimer , March 9, 2018 at 8:46 am GMT
Unfortunately, we will not get over it for the following reasons:

1. The military industrial complex needs an enemy to keep Western Europe in line. The Russians serve this role as Boogeyman.

2. The LA-NYC-DC media axis has a strong hatred of Russians because they are White and opposed to gays; never mind the fact that the public at large could care less. The axis controls the megaphone, so Russiophobia it is.

3. Russiophobia is the means by which these Deep State traitors and axis allies are attempting to overthrow our elected president. Not a single day has gone by that I haven't seen some BS Russia gate crap from these late night propaganda shows or the controlled media. Russiophobia is literally the only thing they have going because their immigration and trade policies are unpopular.

4. Money. Lots of cash to be made in weapon sales from a new Cold War. Since the Chinese are Chinese, a Cold War with them would be 'racist' but since Russia is white

5. The Israel lobby has their sights set on Iran and Russia stands in the way. Thus, the lobby fiercely opposes Putin.

PiltdownMan , March 9, 2018 at 9:53 am GMT

For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.

Putin should come to realize that, whatever his grievances, a policy of military impositions would produce another Cold War. For its part, the United States needs to avoid treating Russia as an aberrant to be patiently taught rules of conduct established by Washington. Putin is a serious strategist -- on the premises of Russian history. Understanding U.S. values and psychology are not his strong suits. Nor has understanding Russian history and psychology been a strong point of U.S. policymakers.

Leaders of all sides should return to examining outcomes, not compete in posturing.

-- Henry Kissinger, in 2014

reiner Tor , March 9, 2018 at 11:45 am GMT

But what Russian leader, save Yeltsin, has not been an autocrat?

How was Yeltsin not an autocrat? He illegally dissolved the parliament by military force killing hundreds, illegally ousted his own vice president who was elected on the same ticket as himself, had a new constitution accepted by a plebiscite with massive fraud, then had himself re-elected with massive fraud, while some 100% of the media and 90+% of the press were under his or his allies' control. He then handpicked a successor who was elected in 2000 with near total control of the media (and massive fraud, though probably it was only needed to avoid a second round).

If that's not an autocrat, then what is? How could Yeltsin be any less of an autocrat than Putin?

Renoman , March 9, 2018 at 12:16 pm GMT
Where is the threat? What have they done? Yes they have good weapons and thank God they do or the crazy Israeli led US Generals would surely have nuked someone by now.
The economy? About the same as Italy, big whoop.
Resource rich, peaceful, mind their own business sort of folks not being led around by Gays goofs and assholes like the USA, why not do business with em? They are not the BOOGIE MAN!
I'm sure trump would have been over there cutting deals a year ago if it weren't for the Hillary crazies. What a bunch of looser's they are, they make me sick.
restless94110 , March 9, 2018 at 2:42 pm GMT
@Anon

Very good collection of Buchanan's erros and omissions, but you missed one:

Neither Putin nor Franklin Roosevelt were autocrats. They were (or are about to be) elected by their people 4 times. They were and are very popular leaders.

The Constitutional Amendment limiting a President to 2 terms should have never been passed and should be repealed (or if not, then add all of Congress to that 2 term limit nonsense).

The only reason for a 2-term limit was hatred of Roosevelt by idiots like Buchanan, and the so-called "tradition" of Presidents only staying or lasting for 2 terms.

Both reasons are obvious poppycock. Buchanan and his ilk never complain about the 10 terms of many Senators and House members. Yet a beloved and popular President is somehow an autocrat?

What a moronic smear. Mirriam-Webster's definition of autocrat is: a person (such as a monarch) ruling with unlimited authority; one who has undisputed influence or power.

FDR like Putin did not have unlimited power, neither did(do) either have undispouted power or influence.

You are dead wrong about both Presidents, Pat. Shame on you, you know that you know better.

Charta 17 , March 9, 2018 at 2:56 pm GMT
Ultimately the US government's anti-Russian animus does not matter. US government propaganda intensifies in lockstep with Washington's impotence and discredit. These beltway tantrums are a good sign.

When this article says 'us,' I don't think it conflates the US police state and the American people. Many Americans suffer from induced Russophobia. They feel they have to qualify any opinion with a general complaint about Russian oppression.

But in fact, comprehensive and exhaustive evidence shows that the US is more repressive than Russia.

You can compare them for yourself, point-by-point, in terms of all the legal duties of the state.

The Russian government has put itself on a self-improvement treadmill of ongoing independent review by all the nations that commit themselves to human rights. The US government evades independent review and undermines your rights with bureaucratic red tape and bad faith.

Russians get a better deal than you do. What happens when we all realize it? We'll do to the USA what we did to the USSR. We'll knock it over, rip it apart, replace it with a country based on rights and rule of law. That's the underlying panic of the bureaucrats at Langley. Their real enemy is rights and rule of law.

David , March 9, 2018 at 2:57 pm GMT
@reiner Tor

I don't know what Buchanan meant, but maybe it was that Yeltsin was a western stooge.

Achmed E. Newman , Website March 9, 2018 at 4:26 pm GMT
@anonymous

I agree, and Mr. Buchanan comes off sounding naive in quite a few of his columns. He knows what's going on in the world. He also knows American politics, but only in terms of who is on this committee, who will vote yea on that bill there, whether there is a precedent for this, etc. and lots of history on all this. What he does not seem to understand is that it is not 1965 or even 1990, as far as the way things get actually run in this country.

There are no civil agreements "across the aisle" that will be held to, no precedent from a court decision from 1995 that will, of course, be upheld by rule-of-law judges, and that sort of thing. It is anarcho-tyranny at this point, from top to bottom .

Achmed E. Newman , Website March 9, 2018 at 4:38 pm GMT
@restless94110

Neither Putin nor Franklin Roosevelt were autocrats. They were (or are about to be) elected by their people 4 times. They were and are very popular leaders.

I don't know Russian politics that well, but I imagine Putin would be very popular. As far as relations with American is concerned he's a great guy to have there, and things would be lots better between our countries without the American Deep State .

... ... ...

TomSchmidt , March 9, 2018 at 4:56 pm GMT
True, Vladimir Putin is an autocrat seeking a fourth term, like FDR.

That, my friends, is how one does propaganda.

Anon Disclaimer , March 9, 2018 at 6:41 pm GMT
@Anon

Buchanan needs to address the Jewish Power directly. WE are not behind anti-Russianism. If Jews were call a halt to anti-Russianism, everyone else would follow suit since most of the goys inside the Beltway are shabbos cucks.

Inque Yutani , March 9, 2018 at 6:46 pm GMT
Does he not understand the concept if the Narrative? They KNOW it's bullshît. It's just a tool to use on the marching morons.
exiled off mainstreet , March 9, 2018 at 6:56 pm GMT
Russia is no longer a communist totalitarian state. In the intervening 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet empire, the yankee imperium itself has completed its morph into a quasi-fascist empire begun over the cold war decades. It is, therefore, imperative that Mr. Buchanan's wise counsel be followed if we are to survive.
Jonathan Tokeley , March 9, 2018 at 8:31 pm GMT
@anonymous

There WAS a referendum in the Crimea -- I have a copy of it before me, as I write, provided by my wife, a Ukrainian -- and it asks whether you (the voter), wish to retain the Constitution of '56, by which the Crimea was ceded by Khruschev to Ukraine, as a gift, or whether you (the voter) wish to return to Russian hegemony?

The vote for the latter was 97%.

All the talk of "annexation" was nonsense. There were no troops involved, no movement of military, and the Russian Federation Base, which contractually was allowed to host 10,000 troops, was not involved.

It was a perfectly peaceful SECESSION from Ukraine

Please don't talk nonsense

Carlton Meyer , Website March 9, 2018 at 8:35 pm GMT
Few Americans understand the extent of the anti-Russian propaganda and the massive profiteering by military contractors that results. Watch this recent Jimmy Dore clip to learn more. Most are shocked to learn the USA spends twelve times more. Our increase this year alone is much greater than Russian entire military budget!
Anon Disclaimer , March 10, 2018 at 12:11 am GMT
"Pat, you need to get over the Putinist propaganda. There was no coup in Ukraine."

Literally the next sentence: "The people rose up because they refused to be betrayed into Russian hands by Yanukovich." These State Department paid trolls really need to get some better training. State Dept Gets $40 Million to Fund Troll Farm:

https://news.antiwar.com/2018/02/26/state-dept-gets-40-million-to-fund-troll-farm/

U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans

https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-ban-spreads-government-made-news-to-americans/

Noah Way , March 10, 2018 at 12:36 am GMT
Syria was never about "Assad putting down peaceful protests". It is about pipelines – both existing Russian and potential new ones from Qatar that need a route (a la Trans Afghanistan Pipeline), geopolitical dominance, regional destabilization (for Israel and the MIC), and revenge for Putin derailing the imminent US invasion of Syria by brokering a deal for Assad to eliminate chemical weapons.
Twodees Partain , March 10, 2018 at 2:18 am GMT
"What is the matter with us?"

It isn't us, Pat, at least not ordinary people like you and me who have no input into policy decisions. It's the neocons, zionists, and the lunatics in government who are pushing this Russophobia. They have a goal in mind and it looks as though they are afraid to reveal what it is.

Whatever that goal is, it's not likely to be good for either the US or Russia.

Twodees Partain , March 10, 2018 at 2:25 am GMT
@Jonathan Tokeley

Jonathon, he was quoting Pat Buchanan, not talking nonsense himself. I'm sure he agrees with what you said about the referendum.

Now if you'd ask Pat to stop talking nonsense, that would be like asking a fish not to shit in the water.

MarkinLA , March 10, 2018 at 3:04 am GMT
@Quartermaster

Russia wasn't going to lose the Sevastopol base, but when Crimea is returned to its rightful owners, they will lose it, as they deserve.

Are you planning to take it back for them?

polskijoe , March 10, 2018 at 5:25 am GMT
Good article.

But if the US goes after China, Russia will probably side with China. The US did backstab Russia a couple times.

Miro23 , March 10, 2018 at 8:57 am GMT

Yet, what is also clear is that Putin hoped and believed that, with the election of Trump, Russia might be able to restore respectful if not friendly relations with the United States.

Clearly, Putin wanted that, as did Trump.

That's what it looked like, and Trump clearly said that he wanted better relations with Russia.

The antipathy to Russia comes from the US Deep State, not Trump or the American people. Anti-Russian hysteria is derived entirely from America's Jewish press and Deep State with their "Russian hacking" and "influencing elections" stories – as if the Israel lobby doesn't influence US elections??

USA as a country, has been hopelessly captured by Zionist Jews who have their own agenda directed against Russia (and the US public).

jacques sheete , March 10, 2018 at 1:27 pm GMT

Again, what is the matter with this generation?

Neocons, Izzy firsters, and globalist banksters, mostly. Then there are the stooges like the McCainiacs and the Hillaryhyenas Then we have stupid, gullible people who believe their rot, essentially the rot believed by preceding generations including the brain dead, unquestioning, "greatest" generation of pseudo tough guy servile suck ups.

Boycott 'em, mock 'em, and play the victim card just like the imaginary heroes and bureaucrat messiahs typically do.

for-the-record , March 10, 2018 at 2:03 pm GMT
@Jonathan Tokeley

whi ch contractually was allowed to host 10,000 troops, was not involved.

Actually, it was 25,000, I believe.

KenH , March 10, 2018 at 3:29 pm GMT

Bibi Netanyahu has met many times with Putin,

That's because Bibi is playing good cop while he outsources the role of bad cop to the Jewish diaspora in the West and specifically AIPAC. This is in keeping with the age old Jewish strategy of betting on both horses so only a certain segment of Jewry gets blamed and reaps the consequences.

Putin has to know this and the power American Jews and their goy auxiliaries have over U.S. foreign policy.

[Mar 10, 2018] Soros role in Fusion GPS? "Follow the money."

Soros might well be a front company for an intelligence agency.
Notable quotes:
"... a former FBI investigator, Feinstein staffer and now a Fusion GPS operative ..."
"... This is quite plausible. Silicon Valley billionaires are definitely "investing" in their PC propaganda agenda. The Seattle billionaire and now the world's wealthiest man owns the neocon rag published from our nation's capital. He's also got lucrative contracts from our IC. Alexa is quite happy to listen into all your private conversations at home. ..."
"... "This funding is critical to ensuring that we continue an aggressive response to malign influence and disinformation and that we can leverage deeper partnerships with our allies, Silicon Valley, and other partners in this fight," said Steve Goldstein, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs." ..."
"... I have often wondered if Soros is not a front company for an intelligence agency. ..."
"... i think it was the open Russia foundation that was funded by Soros, but i see former owner of yukos - Mikhail Khodorkovsky has his name attached to it... ..."
"... It seems the Magnitsky Act is a critical juncture in all the developments towards singling out russia for everything.. ..."
"... i don't know soros or khodorkovskys connection to bill browder in all of this, but would be curious to know. it seems they are all operating to bring down russia, in some way, shape or form.. ..."
"... My understanding is that Mr. Soros has funded, participated and closely associated himself with US' IC community, for various regime change and copes mostly Eastern Europe in past decades. We know that US IC community has the agenda ( a hard on) for discrediting and removing legally elected president of US from his office. We know US Democratic Party has paid and hired members of foreign intelligence for connecting presidential campaign of DT to Russians, for a possible killing of 2 birds with one shot. We know the cheassy silicon billionaires, are no other than the same old Move on Organization which to the bone are clintonian DLC, or the latter day Obamachies. We know Mr. Soros an Easter European migrant like Zbig is totally and fiercely anti anti Russian. ..."
"... When all facts put to gather, sounds like all these elements, entities, and personalities share a common motif and goal, which centers on anti Trump and anti Puttin Russia. When put together, makes a villain's marriage in haven. ..."
Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

"In a Daily Caller op-ed calling the Russian meddling narrative a " false public manipulation ," Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska claims that Daniel Jones - a former FBI investigator, Feinstein staffer and now a Fusion GPS operative - told the Russian Oligarch's lawyer in March, 2017 that Fusion GPS was funded by " a group of Silicon Valley billionaires and George Soros. "" Zerohedge

------------

Now, this is something different. I have no idea what the relative truthiness of this may be, but... pl

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-09/russian-billionaire-claims-fusion-gps-funded-soros

Posted at 12:33 PM in Russiagate | Permalink


Jack , 09 March 2018 at 01:58 PM

Sir

This is quite plausible. Silicon Valley billionaires are definitely "investing" in their PC propaganda agenda. The Seattle billionaire and now the world's wealthiest man owns the neocon rag published from our nation's capital. He's also got lucrative contracts from our IC. Alexa is quite happy to listen into all your private conversations at home.

JW , 09 March 2018 at 02:39 PM
I appreciate your use of the phrase ' relative truthiness', and I suggest this latest truthiness is just part of the movie, and a great movie it is.

Still, it's about time Soros showed up and he's in good company too, along with this week's poisoned Russian spy and a paid prostitute with a Trump story to tell. Next ?

We're probably due for a Clinton/Russia-related Julian Assange document dump, some Russian intel officer arrests in DC and....a new Steele-equivalent originator offering a more respectable document since after all any evidence is good evidence. Anything to keep the show going and the audience enthralled !

As for Soros himself, I suggest that there are plenty of Soros's with plenty of attached money trails, but George has the watch. All he is missing is the white cat on his lap.

Peter AU , 09 March 2018 at 03:04 PM
Silicon Valley. A mention of them in this Politico article
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/26/state-defense-russia-propaganda-426626

"This funding is critical to ensuring that we continue an aggressive response to malign influence and disinformation and that we can leverage deeper partnerships with our allies, Silicon Valley, and other partners in this fight," said Steve Goldstein, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs."

The entry at wikipedia on Fredric Terman, Stanford university and silicon valley is interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Terman

Soros? All NGO's that apear in MSM articles, I look up their funding. Most funding traces back to State Dep NED and Soros, along with other older money 'philanthropist' type foundations.

I have often wondered if Soros is not a front company for an intelligence agency.

james , 09 March 2018 at 04:02 PM
oleg deripaska is a colorful Russian oligarch...

i think it was the open Russia foundation that was funded by Soros, but i see former owner of yukos - Mikhail Khodorkovsky has his name attached to it...

It seems the Magnitsky Act is a critical juncture in all the developments towards singling out russia for everything..

i don't know soros or khodorkovskys connection to bill browder in all of this, but would be curious to know. it seems they are all operating to bring down russia, in some way, shape or form..

Kooshy , 09 March 2018 at 05:04 PM
My understanding is that Mr. Soros has funded, participated and closely associated himself with US' IC community, for various regime change and copes mostly Eastern Europe in past decades. We know that US IC community has the agenda ( a hard on) for discrediting and removing legally elected president of US from his office. We know US Democratic Party has paid and hired members of foreign intelligence for connecting presidential campaign of DT to Russians, for a possible killing of 2 birds with one shot. We know the cheassy silicon billionaires, are no other than the same old Move on Organization which to the bone are clintonian DLC, or the latter day Obamachies. We know Mr. Soros an Easter European migrant like Zbig is totally and fiercely anti anti Russian.

When all facts put to gather, sounds like all these elements, entities, and personalities share a common motif and goal, which centers on anti Trump and anti Puttin Russia. When put together, makes a villain's marriage in haven.

Fred , 09 March 2018 at 05:23 PM
Interesting that a former staffer from Senator Feinstein is implicated in the mess. How many others are there who have been doing the same thing? I wonder if Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultt's IT staffer Mr. Arwan was accessing any relevant information while he was on her payroll and for whom?

[Mar 10, 2018] It's Time to Get Over Our Russophobia

Notable quotes:
"... Russia is acting again as a great power. And she sees us as having slapped away her hand, extended in friendship in the 1990s, only to humiliate her by planting NATO on her front porch. ..."
"... Yet what is also clear is that Putin hoped and believed that, with the election of Trump, Russia might be able to restore respectful if not friendly relations with the United States. Clearly, Putin wanted that, as did Trump. Yet with the Beltway in hysteria over hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, and the Russophobia raging in Washington, we appear to be paralyzed when it comes to engaging with Russia. ..."
"... The U.S. political system, said Putin this week, "has been eating itself up." Is his depiction that wide of the mark? What is the matter with us? ..."
"... Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, ..."
"... . To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com. ..."
"... " If Russia wanted friendly relations with the US why meddle in our elections?" ..."
"... "However, Europeans are not irrational, but perfectly logical in being wary of Russia." ..."
Mar 10, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

That's pretty naive article. The Russophobia is used to cement fracturing neoliberal society and create the commonenemy, more important the neoliberal elite which looted the country for the last 40 years or so.

Russia is just a very convenient target which allow to reuse Cold War stereotypes and play to the crowd instincts.

Another problem that Russa refuses to the be a Washington vassal (the status it enjoyed under drunk Yeltsin) and neoliberal empire accept only vassal not eaul partners in thier ranks.

Unless there is a late surge for Communist Party candidate Pavel Grudinin, who is running in second place with 7 percent, Vladimir Putin will be re-elected president of Russia for another six years on March 18.

Once he is, we must decide whether to continue on course into a second Cold War, or to engage Russia, as every president sought to do in Cold War I.

For our present conflict, Vladimir Putin is not alone at fault. His actions have often been reactions to America's unilateral moves.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, we brought all of the Warsaw Pact members and three former republics of the USSR into our military alliance, NATO, to corral Russia. How friendly was that?

Putin responded with his military buildup in the Baltic.

George W. Bush abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that Richard Nixon had negotiated. Putin responded with a buildup of the offensive missiles he put on display last week. The U.S. helped to instigate the Maidan Square coup that dumped over the elected pro-Russian government in Ukraine. To prevent the loss of his Sevastopol naval base on the Black Sea, Putin countered by annexing the Crimean Peninsula.

After peaceful protests in Syria were put down by Bashar al-Assad, we sent arms to Syrian rebels to overthrow the Damascus regime. Seeing his last naval base in the Med, Tartus, imperiled, Putin came to Assad's aid and helped him win the civil war.

The Boris Yeltsin years are over.

Russia is acting again as a great power. And she sees us as having slapped away her hand, extended in friendship in the 1990s, only to humiliate her by planting NATO on her front porch.

Yet what is also clear is that Putin hoped and believed that, with the election of Trump, Russia might be able to restore respectful if not friendly relations with the United States. Clearly, Putin wanted that, as did Trump. Yet with the Beltway in hysteria over hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, and the Russophobia raging in Washington, we appear to be paralyzed when it comes to engaging with Russia.

The U.S. political system, said Putin this week, "has been eating itself up." Is his depiction that wide of the mark? What is the matter with us?

... ... ...

Japan negotiates with Putin's Russia over the southern Kuril Islands lost at the end of World War II. Bibi Netanyahu has met many times with Putin, though he is an ally of Assad, whom Bibi would like to see ousted, and has a naval and air base not far from Israel's border.

We Americans have far bigger fish to fry with Russia than Bibi. Strategic arms control. De-escalation in the Baltic, Ukraine, and the Black Sea. Ending the war in Syria. North Korea. Space. Afghanistan. The Arctic. The war on terror. Yet all we seem to hear from our elites is endless whining that Putin has not been sanctioned enough for desecrating "our democracy."

Get over it.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever . To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.


Chris in Appalachia March 8, 2018 at 10:33 pm

Good article, Pat, although it will probably send commenter Michael Kenny into apoplexy. Yes, we have all heard the official lines about why we should beware of Putin. Like so many official spins (Saddam's WMDs, etc.) it is probably an intentional distraction from the actual truth.
The Other Eric , says: March 8, 2018 at 11:13 pm
This was actually a sane article. What have you done with the real Buchanan?
spite , says: March 9, 2018 at 12:46 am
It's the same nonsense in other places of the world, North Korea agitates against America, Israel against Iran, Iran against Israel, China against Japan, etc. What all of these have in common is that it is easier to point out the distant foreigner as the cause of so many problems instead of looking inward and asking what REALLY is causing problems.

And with absolute certainty all the liberal comments here will say that this is false and that Russia is to blame for all the problems.

Ken T , says: March 9, 2018 at 1:00 am
Russia is neither America's "best friend" nor our "implacable enemy". What it is is a very powerful competitor, with its own agenda and its own interests. Sometimes those interests will align with ours, sometimes they will clash. Certainly it is a good thing for our relationship with them to be on as amicable terms as possible, in order to facilitate our mutual benefit wherever possible.

But for you to insist that their direct meddling in our electoral process is a non-issue that should be ignored, is to declare that the United States is not a sovereign state, that we have no right to determine our own form of government. That we in fact exist as a puppet of Russia. You may think that is an acceptable position to take. I do not.

Mai La Dreapta , says: March 9, 2018 at 2:15 am
So this article is a basically a softball way of pitching the reactionary motto "America Is A Communist Country". Why did the elites favor engagement with the Soviet premiers? Because they liked communism. Why are they enraged by Putin, who is in every significant way less oppressive than his predecessors? Because he's not a communist.
William Dalton , says: March 9, 2018 at 4:07 am
What on Earth is Trump doing meeting with Kim before he meets with Putin?
Adam , says: March 9, 2018 at 5:31 am
While I agree with you that the expansion of NATO did a lot of damage to the relationship with Russia I have to say that you seem remarkably sanguine about a foreign power influencing the American election so much that the clear favorite ended up losing.

I wonder how easily you would have been able to 'get over it' if Russia had leaked letters from the Republicans which lead to Carter beating Reagan in 1980 or Gore beating Bush in 2000? I'm no fan of Clinton and am glad she lost but I am a fan of Democracy and a foreign power undermining it is tantamount to an act of war. Are you really so partisan that you would rather your side win than the country have a reliable democracy?

Thaomas , says: March 9, 2018 at 7:56 am
If Russia had no military designs on the new NATO members, why was their membership considered an affront? If Russia had no economic designs on Ukraine, why was it's joining the EU considered a treat? If Russia wanted friendly relations with the US why meddle in our elections?
Mal Profit , says: March 9, 2018 at 7:58 am
All true.
HenionJD , says: March 9, 2018 at 8:53 am
Is Russia the great bogey-man of yesteryear? Perhaps not. Do they have legitimate issues and grievances? Possibly. Can we perhaps reach an accommodation with them? Maybe. Is Trump doing anything to curtail their mucking about in our political process? Nope. There's the rub.
MikeCLT , says: March 9, 2018 at 8:57 am
As usual Mr. Buchanan is correct.
pfed , says: March 9, 2018 at 9:16 am
Patrick Buchanan is an apologist for Kremlin kleptocrats who not only foment trouble abroad, but oppress their own people to stay in power.

The U.S. did not instigate the Maidan protest, unless you think that upwards of a million ordinary people in Kyiv and millions more across Ukraine protested for dignity and the rule of law in the dead of winter for nearly four months, then perhaps Mr. Buchanan has a point. He does not.

Again, I quote verbatim from comments I made last month to pieces by Robert Merry and Mr. Buchanan: "The Ukrainian president wasn't toppled; he fled,doubting the loyalty of his own security forces and despite an agreement with the opposition to stay in power pending a new election within 10 months."

Wezz , says: March 9, 2018 at 10:12 am
I lean liberal and it's not that much much about what Russia is up to but If Meuller actually came out with solid evidence that Trump himself and his people, did collude with Russia to influence the 2016 election will his followers even care at this point?

I really wonder how Americas next generation is going to behave now that Trump and his cronies have done so much to damage to any ideas of truth, integrity, honesty, decency, the common good I could go on.

And something like 70% of Republicans think Trump is a good role model for children according to a January Quinnipiac poll.

collin , says: March 9, 2018 at 10:19 am
These are all reasonable points but:

If you want to stop Russiaphobia, then Putin and Trump need to come clean about the 2016 activity. Period. Trump will not be impeached. End the Russian trolling for alt-right causes or otherwise Democrats will attack hard.

Otherwise, the Manafort trial starting in July is going to be the biggest trial since OJ and every night cable news will analyze every detail of Manafort working with Russian government and money laundering for the Russians. (And there will be plenty of details of expensive area rugs!)

And if there are any connections of Manafort or witness Gates to the Russian trolls it will not be pretty. (Or Roger Stone to the hacked DNC e-mails.)

Michael Kenny , says: March 9, 2018 at 10:42 am
The usual double-talk: "Vladimir Putin will be re-elected president of Russia", i.e. the Russian Federation, a sovereign state which has existed only since 1991, but then, "we must decide whether to continue on course into a second Cold War, or to engage Russia, as every president sought to do in Cold War I, "Russia" here meaning the now defunct "Soviet Union". Mr Buchanan is locked in his cold war mindset and is simply unable to get his mind around the idea that the Russian Federation isn't the Soviet Union, nor is it even the sole successor state to the Soviet Union. It is merely one of 15 former Soviet republics and if Mr Buchanan believes the US should "engage" with the former Soviet Union, shouldn't it also engage with, Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic Republics etc.? Engaging only with the Russian Federation implies taking sides with Putin against the other 14 former Soviet republics, which, of course, contradicts Mr Buchanan's much proclaimed belief in "non-intervention"! It's perfectly true to say that US wrongdoing created Putin, not least the US neocon attempt to use him as a useful idiot to destroy the EU, but how does US wrongdoing give Putin the right to violate Ukrainians' rights? This is in fact the standard pro-Putin nonsense argument: A violates B's rights. C is to be allowed to punish A by also violating B's rights! If the US is at fault, it must put right its wrongdoing by getting Putin out of Ukraine. One way or the other. Any other course of action is just one more step towards the collapse of the US.
Annab , says: March 9, 2018 at 11:55 am
All that I know to be the truth is that Russia seems to support the truth more than we Americans! We have lost our soul. If we cannot recuperate our "soul", we need to die the death of all failed empires!
ukm1 , says: March 9, 2018 at 12:10 pm
During an event in October, 2017, the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir V. Putin blamed the collapse of the U.S.S.R. on Soviet Union trusting the West "too much," describing the move as "our biggest mistake!"

"You interpreted our trust as weakness, and you exploited that," said the Russian president, adding:

"Unfortunately, our Western partners, having divided the U.S.S.R.'s geopolitical legacy, were certain of their own incontestable righteousness having declared themselves the victors of the 'Cold War'."

"They started to openly interfere in the sovereign affairs of countries and to export democracy in the same way as in their time the Soviet leadership tried to export the Socialist revolution to the whole world."

SteveM , says: March 9, 2018 at 12:38 pm
Re: Thaomas, " If Russia wanted friendly relations with the US why meddle in our elections?"

The jilted Left has mutated a huge bogus "Russian meddling" junk narrative into a self-licking ice cream cone of political insanity.

The late, great journalist Robert Parry (RIP) had been tracking the Russia meddling story assiduously before he died unexpectedly in January. Parry's Consortium News is one of the few remaining sites of genuine journalistic integrity. It has no affection for Donald Trump, only the Truth. It swings a 2X4 in every direction. Read the final assessment of the Russia Meddling ruse by Parry published last December:

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/12/11/russia-gates-litany-of-corrections/

And then tell us how Parry had it wrong. Americans, including Thaomas are being played for chumps by the corrupted MSM and crony Political Hacks. Reject the Big Lie and the Crony Tools that sustain it.

P.S. Save consortiumnews to your browser favorites and visit it occasionally to wash off the slime of MSM Fake News propaganda.

Aleks , says: March 9, 2018 at 12:49 pm
The truth is this. Russia is the irreplaceable adversary of the United States because they are the one significant nation on this planet whose peoples do not fit neatly into our post modern western concepts of race and ethnicity. Slavic people have and never will be understood in the United States. They will always be the backwards, unelightened, barbaric, undemocratic people. The one whom both Churchill and Hitler stated were inferior to both the Anglo and Germanic peoples.

That is the truth.

EarlyBird , says: March 9, 2018 at 12:49 pm
Pat, are you kidding?

While your critique of America's unnecessary post-Cold War antagonism is correct, it is hardly relevant to 2018.

"Putin hoped and believed that, with the election of Trump, Russia might be able to restore respectful if not friendly relations with the United States." >? What?!

Putin has and continues to attempt to meddle in and create chaos in our elections. He clearly "has something" on Trump personally. He's using Trump as an agent of disruption within the United States to get vengeance on the US for its post-Cold War activities.

It may very well make sense to attempt to reach out to the Russians, but this is hardly the president or the time to do that.

Delia Ruhe , says: March 9, 2018 at 12:49 pm
Pat Buchanan is far from my favourite American (ex)politician, but this article is a model of pure reason. Indeed, it ranks up there with the best ones on the current topic of Washington's childish and dangerous Russophobia.

It really is high time that the Democrats and their fellow travellers, the neocons, gave up on their poorly designed anti-Russia, anti-Putin propaganda narrative. Ever more Americans are not buying it, Washington's vassal states have never bought it (although, as obedient vassals the leaders of those states don't dare say so), and the rest of the world is simply enjoying the clownish performance of American victimization and injured innocence.

Thanks, Pat Buchanan

Cynthia McLean , says: March 9, 2018 at 1:00 pm
Good article.
What snowflakes we are -- has our house of Democracy always been built on the sands of hypocrisy and hubris? The recent demonization of Russia, it seems to me, is a gift to the War Machine which always needs an enemy to justify $billions in weaponry. I am much more concerned about John Bolton calling shots from the White House, than I am about Putin, or even Kim Jungun.
b. , says: March 9, 2018 at 1:19 pm
"Putin hoped and believed that, with the election of Trump, Russia might be able to restore respectful if not friendly relations with the United States. Clearly, Putin wanted that, as did Trump. [..] What is the matter with us?"

Let us not pretend to be naive, and let us give credit where credit is due. Whereas the Republican Party's principled stance against the political opponents focused on "stained dress" and "birth certificate", the Clinton/Obama leadership of the *other* war mongering party managed to strike a strategic alliance with the neocons and the "national insecurity" apparat, and, together with the "Real GOP", has prevented Trump from changing US foreign policy for the better as effectively as the business wings of the "Biparty" have co-opted Trump into Reagonomics 2.0 – now as farce.

There is a reason why the GOP refused to focus on the Benghazi CIA pipeline channeling Libyan arsenals to Syrian islamists.

The authors recap makes rather clear that the US elites, since before the end of WW2, committed themselves to the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the subordination of its parts. US policy towards Russia is not driven by negligence or incompetence, and we should not ever forget that US talk of "winneable" nuclear war, decapitation strikes and "regime change" goes far back – to Eisenhower, in fact, who denied that nuclear weapons were different from other means of "mass destruction" in war. The continuity of US aggressive posture – and posturing – is exemplified by the career of Keith Payne, with GWB and now Trump, and his sponsors – like Rumsfeld – with Reagan, Bush and Bush – posturing that culminated in Able Archer, which led Thatcher to concern herself with containing and rolling back US nuclear blackmail.

The Biparty and other camp followers of the war profiteering classes and the global oligarchy are not concerned with "defending" The People, much less our "allies", as South Korea is learning at cost – the Endsieg over Russia and, eventually, China, is their multi-generational project. If you wonder whether the 2016 election was rigged or fixed in any way, you have to go back to the primaries that were supposed to only offer us a choice between two warmongers intent to outdo each other.

In Clinton, the establishment succeeded in promoting another Judas goat in the mold of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, for the Democratic Party. The Republican leadership failed in this task, but it turns out that Trump is not merely a flawed champion of the discontent, a hollow man, but the perfect Judas goat of our time – he even believed himself.

Anybody voting for "pocket change" in 2018 will lead us to another goat rodeo in 2020. Meanwhile, we are heading for a repeat of Able Archer and another change to "win" ourselves a profitable nuclear war at "a level compatible with national survival and recovery."

Donald , says: March 9, 2018 at 1:33 pm
It is a sad state of affairs when Pat Buchanan writes a column that makes more sense than most of what appears in the mainstream liberal press.
DanJ , says: March 9, 2018 at 1:45 pm
A phobia is an irrational fear, not based on reason. The term "Russophobia" is used to proactively belittle and discredit arguments critical of Russia.

However, Europeans are not irrational, but perfectly logical in being wary of Russia. The Soviet Union occupied and violently oppressed Eastern Europe for 50 years, while building the capability to wage massive nuclear war on Western Europe on short notice.

It is now perfectly sensible for former Warsaw Pact allies or Soviet republics to seek maximum integration with any and all institutions of the West, such as NATO and the EU. It is also their right to do so as sovereign nations. Russia has no legitimate "sphere of interest" beyond her own borders.

And NATO in its current form is but a shadow of the Cold War alliance in Europe. US troop levels there are at 1/5 of Cold War numbers. NATO does not have an offensive posture in Europe, hardly even a good defensive one. It does not threaten Russia in any way, even if you might think otherwise from the incessant complaining by Putin and some of his American fellow travellers.

SteveM , says: March 9, 2018 at 2:47 pm
Re: DanJ, "However, Europeans are not irrational, but perfectly logical in being wary of Russia."

Talk is cheap. The actual level of European fear of Russia is implied by the level of military spending by the Europeans to defend themselves against that supposed threat. Those military spending levels are almost universally below the relatively modest GDP targets, especially compared to the out of control U.S. "defense" spending.

The perverse irony is that the low levels of military spending by Europe would indicate masochistic irrationality if the Russian threat were genuine.

Agree NATO does not militarily threaten Russia. The Russian objection is to the Global Cop Gorilla that consciously throws wrenches in the normalization of Russian/European relationships by militarizing every element of foreign policy. Simply because the U.S. Security State apparatus needs an existential enemy to justify its TRILLION dollar War Machine.

The Europeans currently accept U.S. hegemony because it doesn't cost them anything.

The U.S. war-monger led foreign policy model is completely bankrupt. The Crony Elite Hacks in Washington just haven't realized it yet. Because as parasites, they make too much money from it. They will feed on the carcass until it collapses.

Josep , says: March 9, 2018 at 3:23 pm
@ Aleks
"They will always be the backwards, unelightened, barbaric, undemocratic people. The one whom both Churchill and Hitler stated were inferior to both the Anglo and Germanic peoples."

If what you wrote isn't racist, then I dunno what to say.

Lenny , says: March 9, 2018 at 3:24 pm
Pat writes:
Yet all we seem to hear from our elites is endless whining that Putin has not been sanctioned enough for desecrating "our democracy."

Get over it.

Nyet comrade Buchananovich. If Democracy means so little to you, move to Russia

Ken Zaretzke , says: March 9, 2018 at 3:30 pm
Something else to keep in mind is this: In the 1960s, Russia detonated an H-bomb that was–I forget the exact ratio–about 10,000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. And now we're worried about a country–North Korea–that a half century later detonated a bomb five times as powerful as the one that obliterated Hiroshima.

How crazy is it to demonize Putin when, if push came to shove, they could annihilate the U.S.? Yes, we could annihilate them, even if they launched a first strike with strategic (as opposed to tactical) nuclear weapons. But it's no offense to the country that produced the incomparable Tolstoy to say that against the ruin of Moscow and St. Petersburg would be measured the ruin of New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., San Diego, and Denver. Russia can destroy far more human capital in America than we can destroy in Russia. Advantage, Russia.

The moral of this story: It's unwise to poke the bear–much less to poke the bear in the eye, as we have been doing since the presidency of Bill Clinton, who started NATO's misguided project of encircling Russia.

Tiktaalik , says: March 9, 2018 at 3:30 pm
Guys, if you trully believe that 13 superheroes with 100 K$ can overcome +1Bn$ plethora of PACs|SuperPACS|and all other whatnots you should quit watching all these fine Marvel movies about superheroes.

And, btw, leaving aside total lack of proofs, how did this DNC hack played out? Was it some dirty invented lies about Whight Knigtess? Or was it blatant truth? ) I'm really amused how lemmings started to sing 'DNC hacks!DNC hacks!' being completely oblivious to the content of this leaked emails. You don't care that you're being, hmm, 'abused' by your ruling class all the time, don't you?
Finally, do you care that US meddled (and this fact is 1000% proven) in internal politics in quite a number of different countries, Russia included?

Aleks , says: March 9, 2018 at 3:42 pm
@Josep

"If what you wrote isn't racist, then I dunno what to say."

I fail to see the racism in what I wrote since they were both well-known beliefs (and quotes) held by both Churchill and Hitler. But I'm sure you knew that.

cdugga , says: March 9, 2018 at 3:42 pm
I will follow Buchanan's reasoning to its logical conclusion and say that, well, the guy, and maybe his daughter to, were spies and deserved the classic kgb response. What putin does, we deserve. It is getting hard to swallow so much putin and kgb love here at TAC. Like, most americans are not suffering from russophobia nearly as much as so many are enamored by authoritarianism and the murderous kgb agent putin. The don himself admires putin for the head oligarch the don wishes he himself could be. Putin is head of an organized crime syndicate masquerading as a great state. Social conservatives have even crowned putin an advocate for western christian civilization. Russians gladly kiss his hand. It may not pay them anything, but the consequences of not kissing his hand have been demonstrated. You know, something right wingers admire. The don is doing the same thing here. Like, if we could see his tax returns, we could readily anticipate his policy actions. Hey, and get rich too.
I will be surprised though, if US steel does much more than become the middle man in marking up steel they import and stamp USA on to. I do not know, but expect a large part of the imported steel the US buys, is bought from middlemen companies that buy chinese steel and stamp it canadian. Canada does produce allot of aluminum. Most of china sits on a 15k foot plateau of minerals. The rest of the world will buy from their glut. We might really not want to depend on chinese steel if we are planning to war. Europe is beholding to putin to stay warm in the winter, so it will be interesting to see how they respond to the collateral damage from assassinations carried out in their own countries. Like, I wonder if their punditry will claim they probably deserve it. Churchill has been gone for quite a while after all. Russophobia? Is that where people show illegitimate concern when putin proclaims to have shiny new nukes that we have no defense against. Yepper, we deserve that too. Once you put the victims mantle on, it is hard to be anything but a victim, and much easier to excuse yourself anything while projecting your fear onto, well, defenseless snowflakes are an easy target. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russian-ex-spy-sergei-skripal-his-daughter-poisoned-nerve-agent-n854516
vato_loco_frisco , says: March 9, 2018 at 4:09 pm
The Democratics are obsessed with Putin and the Russians, blaming them for the most ignominious shellacking in modern electoral history, and yet refuse to do the necessary groundwork to win the presidency in 2020. They've placed all their cards on the collusion narrative, hoping for the best. BTW, good article, Pat.
Someone in the crowd , says: March 9, 2018 at 4:38 pm
I think cdugga expresses best the mentality that defines the present moment: 'If Russia is accused of something, it means that they are guilty.' Can't imagine how that assumption could ever be abused, can you?

One of your better articles, Pat, was glad to see it. Let's hope a few more of our leaders start thinking along these same lines and decide it might be just as well not to nuke the planet out of pique over some bleeping facebook ads.

Tiktaalik , says: March 9, 2018 at 4:41 pm
2 cdugga
>> I will follow Buchanan's reasoning to its logical conclusion and say that, well, the guy, and maybe his daughter to, were spies and deserved the classic kgb response.

Could you please provide some proofs that they were poisoned by some Russian secret service? Why on Earth would these aforementioned services like to kill the guy? He's 100% non-entity.
On the other hand, it's a very convenient target if someone wants to frame FSB or GRU, so I'll bet on British MI-###. Tough luck for this guy, you're fired in this way in this business.

Josep , says: March 9, 2018 at 4:42 pm
@ Aleks
I'm aware that Hitler and Churchill believed those. I apologize for taking your comment out of context and calling out racism where none was intended. I feel kinda silly now.
ScottA , says: March 9, 2018 at 5:29 pm
Great article Pat!
Kurt Gayle , says: March 9, 2018 at 8:32 pm
Thanks for another important essay, Pat.

But what I most want to thank you for is your role in President Trump's announcement of tariffs on steel and aluminum.

That announcement had your name written all over it, Pat.

[Mar 10, 2018] Dr. Strangelove already back, McCarthy coming! by Ali Watkins

Notable quotes:
"... It would also require the FBI to investigate all requests by U.S.-based Russian diplomats to travel 50 miles outside his or her official post to ensure those diplomats have properly notified the U.S. Government of their travel plans. No Russian diplomats could travel outside of that 50 mile perimeter unless all of their colleagues have followed travel rules in the three months prior. The FBI would also be required to notify Congress that the Russians have followed the rules before the travel is cleared by the State Department. The purpose is to ensure the Russians are following proper protocol in their travel. ..."
Mar 10, 2018 | www.defenddemocracy.press

Dr. Strangelove already back, McCarthy coming! 02/07/2016 Senate Committee Looks To Revive Cold-War Era Body To Catch Russian Spies

By Ali Watkins

A new intelligence bill also proposes tightening how Russian diplomats can travel.

Congress is pushing the White House to revive a Cold War-era committee to crack down on Russian spies, underscoring just how uneasy Washington is about its adversaries in Moscow.

In its 2017 Intelligence Authorization Bill, the Senate Intelligence Committee is asking the White House to reinstate a presidentially-appointed group to unmask Russian spies and uncover Russian-sponsored assassinations. The group, which would include personnel from the State Department, intelligence community and several other executive offices, would meet monthly. Along with spies and covert killings, the committee would also investigate the funding of front groups -- or cover organizations for Russian operations -- "covert broadcasting, media manipulation" and secret funding.

A similar interagency body called the "Active Measures Working Group" existed during the Cold War, but it hasn't been active in decades. This new group would be modeled after its Cold War predecessor, one U.S. intelligence official said on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive bill.

The intelligence bill passed through the Senate committee in May, and now must be passed by the full Senate.

It would also require the FBI to investigate all requests by U.S.-based Russian diplomats to travel 50 miles outside his or her official post to ensure those diplomats have properly notified the U.S. Government of their travel plans. No Russian diplomats could travel outside of that 50 mile perimeter unless all of their colleagues have followed travel rules in the three months prior. The FBI would also be required to notify Congress that the Russians have followed the rules before the travel is cleared by the State Department. The purpose is to ensure the Russians are following proper protocol in their travel.

[Mar 09, 2018] When we look at how the MSM are spinning Skripal story, Craig Murray's theory about using the incident to ramp up Russophobia is the most plausible hypothesis

Notable quotes:
"... Russophobia is extremely profitable to the armaments, security and spying industries and Russophobia reinforces intellectually challenged voters in their Tory loyalty. Ramping Russophobia is the most convincing motive for the Skripal attack. ..."
Mar 09, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

The former British ambassador Craig Murray suspects a different motive and culprit:

Craig Murray @CraigMurrayOrg - 10:21 AM - 8 Mar 2018
Russophobia is extremely profitable to the armaments, security and spying industries and Russophobia reinforces intellectually challenged voters in their Tory loyalty. Ramping Russophobia is the most convincing motive for the Skripal attack.

Dee Drake | Mar 9, 2018 4:58:36 AM | 44

When we look at how the corporate media is spinning this story, it seems to me that Craig Murray's theory about using the incident to ramp up Russophobia has its merits.

[Mar 09, 2018] Gladio still running

Mar 09, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Mark | Mar 8, 2018 10:36:17 PM | 39

Remember Operation Gladio.

[Mar 09, 2018] The Clinton Body Count increases again

Mar 09, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

PeacefulProsperity | Mar 8, 2018 10:35:35 PM | 38

BTW The Clinton Body Count increases again:

" FBI Special Agent David Raynor was suicided yesterday while he was investigating why former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met this past June (2017) with Baltimore Police Department Detective Sean Suiter -- who was a member of the wildly corrupt Baltimore police unit called the Gun Trace Task Force linked to the "Operation Fast and Furious" gun scandal covered up the Obama regime -- but with Detective Suiter being murdered with his own gun on 15 November (2017) the day before he was due to testify before a US Federal Grand Jury..."

[Mar 09, 2018] New Huge Anti-Russian Provocation ahead of Russian election by Robert Stevens

Notable quotes:
"... Nobody of us can really know what happened in London with the Russian ex-double agent they tried to kill. But Russians would be foolish to let the agent leave from Russia to try to assassinate him many years afterwards, at the eve of their Presidential Election. DK ..."
"... By Robert Stevens ..."
"... Financial Times, ..."
"... Under conditions in which the NATO powers, including Britain, are seeking to utilise any pretext to justify their ongoing encirclement of Russia's border, Putin authorising the murder of two people on the streets of the UK would be a propaganda gift to his opponents. ..."
Sep 03, 2018 | Defend Democracy Press
Originally from: www.wsws.org

Nobody of us can really know what happened in London with the Russian ex-double agent they tried to kill. But Russians would be foolish to let the agent leave from Russia to try to assassinate him many years afterwards, at the eve of their Presidential Election.
DK
Anti-Russia campaign follows alleged poisoning of former UK/Russian double agent and daughter

By Robert Stevens
8 March 2018

The British government and mass media have mounted a hysterical anti-Russian campaign centred on the still unexplained circumstances surrounding the hospitalisation of former British double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, after they were found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury on Sunday.

Initial reports Monday stated that Skripal, aged 66, may have ingested fentanyl, a synthetic opioid many times stronger than heroin, which can be fatal in small doses.

On Tuesday, the other person hospitalised was identified as Skripal's 33-year-old daughter, Yulia, who was also said to be in a critical condition.

Skripal is a former colonel in Russia's GRU, the military intelligence service. He spent four years in jail in Russia after being found guilty in 2006 of passing secrets to MI6, the UK's foreign intelligence service. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison.

Skripal served four years before being released in 2010, when he was pardoned by Russia as part of a well-publicized 10-person spy swap between the US, the UK and Russia. He moved to the UK where he has lived for the past seven years.

The pair were found unconscious and slumped on a bench near the Maltings shopping centre. Police stated that two became ill at around 13.30 p.m. Police arrived on the scene at around 16.15 p.m., after being alerted by a concerned member of the public. It was announced Wednesday that a police officer is also in critical condition after attending the incident. The Skripals visited a nearby restaurant, Zizzi's, which was cordoned off, as well as a local pub, The Bishop's Mill.

By Tuesday, despite nothing of substance being reported by the police, the government and media had effectively declared the incident an act of terrorism, with the finger pointing at Russia's Putin government. References to an opioid being involved were dropped, with media reports saying the government's secret chemical lab at Porton Down was as yet unable to identify the substance. Wiltshire police announced that London's Metropolitan Police counter-terrorist unit would be taking over the investigation. In parliament, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson spoke about the "disturbing incident in Salisbury" and stated, "Although I am not now pointing fingers, because we cannot point fingers, I say to governments around the world that no attempt to take innocent life on UK soil will go either unsanctioned or unpunished," He then referred to Russia as a "malign and destructive force" and warned that if Moscow were found to be involved, the government would "take whatever measures we deem necessary to protect the lives of the people in this country, our values and our freedoms."

In another pointed reference to Russia, he stated that the case had "echoes of the death of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006" -- the former officer in Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB, the successor to the KGB), who died on November 23, 2006 after having been granted asylum in Britain in 2000. The UK, backed by the US have long claimed that the Putin regime ordered the killing despite no evidence being presented in an official British inquiry in 2016 -- other than the presence of the radioactive substance polonium.

Johnson threatened that England could consider boycotting the soccer World Cup in Russia this summer.

Every newspaper, apart from the Financial Times, led with hysterical anti-Russian headlines . The Sun blared, "Red Spy in UK Poison Terror," with an accompanying story referring to "fear over a Kremlin backed hit " The Daily Mirror's headline was " 'Assassins' on British street".

In an article in the Spectator , columnist Ed West posed the question, "Will Britain stand up to Russia?" By the evening, despite Newsnight anchor Kirsty Wark introducing the story by saying, "so far we know nothing about what happened to them, if they were poisoned and if they were, by whom," the BBC's flagship news programme was dedicated to a narrative that Russia was responsible and that Skripal and his daughter were likely victims of an attack by Russia intelligence operatives.

The media have reported the deaths of Skripal's wife, his son and his older brother as mysterious events requiring investigation. His wife died of cancer in 2012 in Britain.

The following day the Daily Telegraph asserted that "Putin swore death on poisoned Russian spy." The Times went with "MI5 believes Russians tried to kill former spy."

On Wednesday morning, the government convened its COBRA committee, which meets during periods of national emergencies. On Wednesday evening, Met Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley announced that Skripal and his daughter were subjected to an attack by a "nerve agent," with it being classified as a case of "attempted murder."

No information released by the authorities can be taken at face value. All reports attest that Skripal was supposedly politically inactive. He evidently did nothing to hide his identity, buying a house for £260,000 in his real name and applying to join a railway social club. He regularly bought lottery scratch cards and purchased food from a local Polish food store.

If the Putin regime were indeed set on killing Skripal and his daughter, some explanation needs to be made as to motive. Skripal's daughter lived and worked in Russia and made regular trips back and forth.

At least one other person released from jail in Russia would appear to have been a much more likely target of the Putin regime than Skripal, if indeed its intention was to prevent anti-Russian activities. Igor Sutyagin developed into a prominent anti-Putin figure in the UK, becoming a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) defence and intelligence think-tank.

RUSI is central to the formulation of British imperialism's anti-Russian policy. Even the Guardian's main advocate against the Putin regime, columnist Luke Harding, was forced to acknowledge that Sutyagin "gave lectures on Vladimir Putin's darkening state, and kept a high public profile. Skripal, by contrast, eschewed London. He settled with Liudmilla [his wife] in the comparative quiet of Wiltshire." Asking the question who would benefit from the deaths of Skripal and his daughter, there would appear to be no obvious reason why the Putin government would authorize such an act. Putin is currently campaigning in the last stretch of the 2018 presidential election, which takes place on March 18. He is expected to be re-elected.

Under conditions in which the NATO powers, including Britain, are seeking to utilise any pretext to justify their ongoing encirclement of Russia's border, Putin authorising the murder of two people on the streets of the UK would be a propaganda gift to his opponents.

The response of the government and media to these events must be placed in the context of the concerted drive by London to demonize Russia. Only last week the Times devoted its front page, an op-ed piece and an editorial to bellicose calls by senior military figures, including second in command of the armed forces, Sir Gordon Messenger, for an increase in military spending, naming Russia as the power that must be confronted.

This followed a January speech given at RUSI by General Sir Nick Carter, the Chief of the General Staff of the British Armed Forces, in which he declared that the UK had to actively prepare for war with Russia and other geo-political rivals:

... ... ...

[Mar 09, 2018] A Stalinist Purge In America by Paul Craig Roberts

There is huge difference: Stalinist were convinced that communism is a bright future of mankind and were determine (with the religious zeal_ to eliminate allthe resistance to tits coming.
Neoliberalism is clearly experience both ideological (since 2008) and now social crisis in the USA. So here the purges are designed to prolong the like of decaying regime which lost its legitimacy in the eyes of population. As such is is not similar to the Stalin Doctors' plot - Wikipedia -- the purge of Jewish doctors at the end of this reign.
Notable quotes:
"... Militarily, since World War II Washington has relied on its armed predominance to dictate to the world. But now the President of Russia has announced possession of what are from the US perspective super weapons that do not, as some claim, give Russia parity with the US, but give Russia immense military superiority over the US, indeed over the entire Western alliance. ..."
Mar 07, 2018 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

This year could turn out to be a defining year for the United States. It is clear that the US military/security complex and the Democratic Party aided by their media vassals intend to purge Donald Trump from the presidency. One of the open conspirators declared the other day that we have to get rid of Trump now before he wins re-election in a landslide.

It is now a known fact that Russiagate is a conspiracy of the military/security complex, Obama regime, Democratic National Committee, and presstitute media to destroy President Trump. However, the presstitutes never present this fact to the American public. Nevertheless, a majority of Americans do not believe the Democrats and the presstitutes that Trump conspired with Putin to steal the election.

One question before us is: Will Mueller and the Democrats succeed in purging Donald Trump, as Joseph Stalin succeed in purging Lenin's Bolsheviks, including Nikolai Bukharin, who Lenin called "the golden boy of the revolution," or will the Democratic Party and the presstitutes discredit themselves such that the country moves far to the right.

Stalin didn't need facts and could frame-up people at will as he had absolute power. In the US the presstitute media, like Stalin, does not concern itself with facts, but the presstitutes do not have absolute power. Indeed, few people trust the presstitutes, and even fewer trust Mueller.

Many are puzzled that President Trump has not moved against his enemies as they have no evidence for their charges. Indeed, Mueller's indictments have nothing whatsoever to do with the Russiagate accusations. Why are not Mueller, Comey, Rosenstein, and all the rest indicted for their clear and obvious crimes?

America's future turns on the answer to this question. Is it because the Trump regime is letting the presstitutes and the Democrats destroy their credibility, or is it because Trump is weak, confused, and doesn't know how to use the powers of his office to slay those who intend to slay him?

If it is the former, then America will move far to the right. If it is the latter, America will have had its own Stalinist purge, and the purge is likely to follow the Stalin model and to extend down to those who voted for Trump.

The failure of the integrity of the liberal/progressive/left has left the US facing two unpalatable outcomes. One is a right-wing government empowered by the left's self-defeat. The other is the rise of the Identity Politics state in which oppression will be based on gender, race, and beliefs.

This is not the only issue that could be resolved in 2018. There are others, and the other two major ones are the economic situation and the military situation.

For a decade the central banks of the West and Japan have printed money far in excess of the increase in real goods and services. This money printing has not caused massive inflation of consumer prices. Instead it has caused inflation in financial instruments and real estate.

The high Dow Jones average is the product of this money printing. Can the central banks stop printing money and allow interest rates to rise, thus collapsing equity prices and pension funds? What would be the consequences?

Militarily, since World War II Washington has relied on its armed predominance to dictate to the world. But now the President of Russia has announced possession of what are from the US perspective super weapons that do not, as some claim, give Russia parity with the US, but give Russia immense military superiority over the US, indeed over the entire Western alliance.

[Mar 08, 2018] Mueller determines the US foreign policy toward Russia; The Intel Community Lies About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus

Highly recommended!
The sad but reasonable conclusion from all those Russiagate events is that an influential part of the US elite wants to balance on the edge of war with Russia to ensure profits and flow of taxpayer money. that part of the elite include top honchos on the US intelligence community and Pentagon (surprise, surprise)
The other logical conclusion is that intelligence agencies now determine the US foreign policy and control all major political players (there were widespread suspicions that Clinton, Bush II and Obama were actually closely connected to CIA). Which neatly fits into hypotheses about the "deep state".
This "can of worms" that the US political scene now represents is very dangerous for the future on mankind indeed.
Notable quotes:
"... Most objective observers would concede that the DNI has been a miserable failure and nothing more than a bureaucratic boondoggle. ..."
"... "The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow -- the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities." ..."
"... More telling was the absence of any written document issued from the Office of the DNI that detailed the supposed intel backing up this judgment. Notice the weasel language in this release ..."
"... If there was actual evidence/intelligence, such as an intercepted conversation between Vladimir Putin and a subordinate ordering them to hack the DNC or even a human source report claiming such an activity, then it would have and should have been referenced in the Clapper/Johnson document. It was not because such intel did not exist. ..."
"... "We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election," Clinton said. "I find that deeply disturbing." ..."
"... The basic job of an analyst is to collect as much relevant information as possible on the subject or topic that is their responsibility. There are analysts at the CIA, the NSA, the DIA and State INR that have the job of knowing about Russian cyber activity and capabilities. That is certain. But we are not talking about hundreds of people. ..."
"... Let us move from the hypothetical to the actual. In January of 2017, DNI Jim Clapper release a report entitled, " Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections " (please see here ). In subsequent testimony before the Congress, Clapper claimed that he handpicked two dozen analysts to draft the document . That is not likely. There may have been as many as two dozen analysts who read the final document and commented on it, but there would never be that many involved in in drafting such a document. In any event, only analysts from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI were involved ..."
"... This report includes an analytic assessment drafted and coordinated among The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and The National Security Agency (NSA), which draws on intelligence information collected and disseminated by those three agencies. ..."
"... That is how the process is supposed to work. But the document produced in January 2017 was not a genuine work reflecting the views of the "Intelligence Community." It only represented the supposed thinking (and I use that term generously) of CIA, NSA and FBI analysts. In other words, only three of 16 agencies cleared on the document that presented four conclusions ..."
"... Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow's longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations. ..."
"... We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. ..."
"... We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. ..."
"... We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against US allies and their election processes. ..."
"... It is genuinely shocking that DNI Jim Clapper, with the acquiescence of the CIA, the FBI and NSA, would produce a document devoid of any solid intelligence. There is a way to publicly release sensitive intelligence without comprising a the original source. But such sourcing is absent in this document. ..."
"... The Intelligence Community was used as a tool to misinform the public and persuade them that Russia was guilty of something they did not do. That lie remains unchallenged. ..."
"... "The Intelligence Community was used as a tool to misinform the public and persuade them that Russia was guilty of something they did not do. That lie remains unchallenged.'" Yes it was and so remains the lie unchallenged. ..."
"... Conjectural garbage appears first to have been washed through the FBI, headquarters no less, then probably it picked up a Triple A rating at the CIA, and then when the garbage got to Clapper, it was bombs away - we experts all agree. There were leaks, but they weren't sufficient to satisfy Steele so he just delivered the garbage whole to the Media in order to make it a sure thing. The garbage was placed securely out there in the public domain with a Triple A rating because the FBI wouldn't concern itself with garbage, would it? ..."
"... Contrast this trajectory with what the Russian policy establishment did when it concluded that the US had done something in the Ukraine that Russia found significantly actionable: it released the taped evidence of Nuland and our Ambassador finishing off the coup. ..."
"... To be precise, CrowdStrike did provide the FBI with allegedly "certified true images" of the DNC servers allegedly involved in the alleged "hack." They also allegedly provided these images to FireEye and Mandiant, IIRC ..."
"... Of course, given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence. ..."
"... In addition, regardless of whether the images were true or not, the evidence allegedly contained therein is painfully inadequate to confirm that APT28 or APT29 were involved, nor that the Russian government was involved, or even that there was a real hack involved, and even less evidence that any emails that might have been exfiltrated were given to Wikileaks as opposed to another leak such as that alleged by Sy Hersh to have been done by Seth Rich. ..."
"... My interpretation is: In 1990 +- Bush 41 sold us the 1st Iraq war using fudged intelligence, then Bush 43 sold us the second Iraq war using fabricated intelligence. And now the Obama Administration tried to sell us fake intelligence in regard to Russia in order to get Clinton elected ..."
"... Mueller has had 18 months and has proceeded to reveal exactly nothing related to either Trump "collusion" with Russia nor Russia as a state actually doing anything remotely described as "meddling." ..."
"... His expected indictment of some Russians for the DNC hack is going to be more of the same in all likelihood. I predict there will be next to zero evidence produced either that the Russians named are in fact members of APT28 or APT29 or that they had any direct connection with either the alleged DNC hack or Wikileaks or the Russian government. ..."
"... It's a witch hunt, nothing more. People holding their breath for the "slam dunk" are going to pass out soon if they haven't already. ..."
"... Mueller is investigating some aspects. But there is another aspect - the conspiracy inside law enforcement and the IC. That is also being investigated. There are Congressional committees in particular Nunes, Goodlatte and Grassley. Then there is the DOJ IG. And today AG Sessions confirms there is a DOJ prosecutor outside Washington investigating. ..."
"... But such evidence (corroborating the Steele dossier) was not forthcoming. If it had existed than Jim Comey could have claimed in his June 2017 testimony before Congress that the parts of the "Dossier" had been verified. He did not do so. Testifying under oath Comey described the "Dossier" as "salacious and unverified." ..."
"... ... was UK Intelligence, or an ex-UK intelligence officer, used to get material through the US evaluation process, material that would not have got through that US evaluation process had it originated within the US itself?" I would say yes and especially yes if the contact for this piece of data was conducted at the highest level within the context of the already tight liaison between the US IC and Mi-6/GCHQ ..."
"... Was it Hitler or Stalin who said "show me the man and I will find his crime?" As I have said before, Trumps greatest vulnerability lies in his previous business life as an entrepreneurial hustler. ..."
"... Re 'baby adoption' meeting between Trump, Jr. and Veselnitskaya, I recall a comment here linking to an article speculating the email initiating the meeting originated in Europe, was set up by the playboy son of a European diplomat, and contained words to trip data-gathering monitors which would have enabled a FISA request to have Trump, Jr. come under surveillance. ..."
"... "We don't have the evidence yet because Mueller hasn't found it yet!" is a classic argument from ignorance, in that is assumes without evidence (there's that pesky word again!) that there is something to be found. ..."
"... The fact is Flynn has pled guilty to perjury. Nothing else like collusion with the Russians. ..."
"... Manafort has been indicted for money laundering, wire fraud, etc for activities well before the election campaign. Sure, it is good that these corrupt individuals should be investigated and prosecuted. However, this corruption is widespread in DC. How come none of these cheering Mueller on to destroy Trump care about all the foreign money flowing to K Street? Why aren't they calling for investigations of the Clinton Foundation or the Podesta brothers where probable cause exist of foreign money and influence? What about Ben Cardin and all those recipients of foreign zionist money and influence? It would be nice if there were wide ranging investigations on all those engaged in foreign influence peddling. But it seems many just want a witch hunt to hobble Trump. It's going to be very difficult to get the Senate to convict him for obstruction of justice or tax evasion or some charge like that. ..."
"... What does "hacking our elections" mean? Does it means breaking into voting systems and changing the outcome by altering votes? Or does it mean information operations to change US voters' minds about for whom they would vote? ..."
"... As for McMasters, I am unimpressed with him. He displays all the symptoms of Russophobia. He has special information? Information can be interpreted many ways depending on one's purpose. pl ..."
"... IMO the perpetrators in the Steel Memo case are and were merely hiding behind claims of sources and methods protection in order to protect themselve. ..."
"... So now we are supposed to believe unquestioningly the word of torturers, perjurers and entrapment artists, all talking about alleged evidence that we are not allowed to see? Did you learn nothing from the "Iraqi WMD" fiasco or the "ZOMG! Assad gassed his own peoples ZOMG!" debacle? Funny how in each of these instances, the intelligence community's lies just happened to coincide with the agenda of empire. ..."
Mar 07, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

The Intel Community Lie About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus

Americans tend to be a trusting lot. When they hear a high level government official, like former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, state that Russia's Vladimir ordered and monitored a Russian cyber attack on the 2016 Presidential election, those trusting souls believe him. For experienced intelligence professionals, who know how the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence works, they detect a troubling omission in Clapper's presentation and, upon examining the so-called "Intelligence Community Assessment," discover that document is a deceptive fraud. It lacks actual evidence that Putin and the Russians did what they are accused of doing. More troubling -- and this is inside baseball -- is the fact that two critical members of the Intelligence Community -- the DIA and State INR -- were not asked to coordinate/clear on the assessment.

You should not feel stupid if you do not understand or appreciate the last point. That is something only people who actually have produced a Community Assessment would understand. I need to take you behind the scenes and ensure you understand what is intelligence and how analysts assess and process that intelligence. Once you understand that then you will be able to see the flaws and inadequacies in the report released by Jim Clapper in January 2017.

The first thing you need to understand is the meaning of the term, the "Intelligence Community" aka IC. Comedians are not far off the mark in touting this phrase as the original oxymoron. On paper the IC currently is comprised of 17 agencies/departments:
  1. Air Force Intelligence,
  2. Army Intelligence,
  3. Central Intelligence Agency aka CIA,
  4. Coast Guard Intelligence,
  5. Defense Intelligence Agency aka DIA,
  6. Energy Department aka DOE,
  7. Homeland Security Department,
  8. State Department aka INR,
  9. Treasury Department,
  10. Drug Enforcement Administration aka DEA,
  11. Federal Bureau of Investigation aka FBI,
  12. Marine Corps Intelligence,
  13. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency aka NGIA or NGA,
  14. National Reconnaissance Office aka NRO,
  15. National Security Agency aka NSA,
  16. Navy Intelligence
  17. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

But not all of these are "national security" agencies -- i.e., those that collect raw intelligence, which subsequently is packaged and distributed to other agencies on a need to know basis. Only six of these agencies take an active role in collecting raw foreign intelligence. The remainder are consumers of that intelligence product. In other words, the information does not originate with them. They are like a subscriber to the New York Times. They get the paper everyday and, based upon what they read, decide what is going on in their particular world. The gatherers of intelligence are:

Nine of the other agencies/departments are consumers. They do not collect and package original info. They are the passive recipients. The analysts in those agencies will base their conclusions on information generated by other agencies, principally the CIA and the NSA.

The astute among you, I am sure, will insist my list is deficient and will ask, "What about the FBI and DEA?" It is true that those two organizations produce a type of human intelligence -- i.e., they recruit informants and those informants provide those agencies with information that the average person understandably would categorize as "intelligence." But there is an important difference between human intelligence collected by the CIA and the human source intelligence gathered by the FBI or the DEA. The latter two are law enforcement agencies. No one from the CIA or the NSA has the power to arrest someone. The FBI and the DEA do.

Their authority as law enforcement agents, however, comes with limitations, especially in collecting so-called intelligence. The FBI and the DEA face egal constraints on what information they can collect and store. The FBI cannot decide on its own that skinheads represent a threat and then start gathering information identifying skinhead leaders. There has to be an allegation of criminal activity. When such "human" information is being gathered under the umbrella of law enforcement authorities, it is being handled as potential evidence that may be used to prosecute someone. This means that such information cannot be shared with anyone else, especially intelligence agencies like the CIA and the NSA.

The "17th" member of the IC is the Director of National Intelligence aka DNI. This agency was created in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks for the ostensible purpose of coordinating the activities and products of the IC. In theory it is the organization that is supposed to coordinate what the IC collects and the products the IC produces. Most objective observers would concede that the DNI has been a miserable failure and nothing more than a bureaucratic boondoggle.

An important, but little understood point, is that these agencies each have a different focus. They are not looking at the same things. In fact, most are highly specialized and narrowly focused. Take the Coast Guard, for instance. Their intelligence operations primarily hone in on maritime threats and activities in U.S. territorial waters, such as narcotic interdictions. They are not responsible for monitoring what the Russians are doing in the Black Sea and they have no significant expertise in the cyber activities of the Russian Army military intelligence organization aka the GRU.

In looking back at the events of 2016 surrounding the U.S. Presidential campaign, most people will recall that Hillary Clinton, along with several high level Obama national security officials, pushed the lie that the U.S. Intelligence agreed that Russia had unleashed a cyber war on the United States. The initial lie came from DNI Jim Clapper and Homeland Security Chief, Jeb Johnson, who released the following memo to the press on 7 October 2016 :

"The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow -- the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities."

This was a deliberate deceptive message. It implied that the all 16 intelligence agencies agreed with the premise and "evidence of Russian meddling. Yet not a single bit of proof was offered. More telling was the absence of any written document issued from the Office of the DNI that detailed the supposed intel backing up this judgment. Notice the weasel language in this release:

If there was actual evidence/intelligence, such as an intercepted conversation between Vladimir Putin and a subordinate ordering them to hack the DNC or even a human source report claiming such an activity, then it would have and should have been referenced in the Clapper/Johnson document. It was not because such intel did not exist.

Hillary Clinton helped perpetuate this myth during the late October debate with Donald Trump, when she declared as fact that:

"We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election," Clinton said. "I find that deeply disturbing."

What is shocking is that there was so little pushback to this nonsense. Hardly anyone asked why would the DEA, Coast Guard, the Marines or DOE have any technical expertise to make a judgment about Russian hacking of U.S. election systems. And no one of any importance asked the obvious -- where was the written memo or National Intelligence Estimate laying out what the IC supposedly knew and believed? There was nothing.

It is natural for the average American citizen to believe that something given the imprimatur of the Intelligence Community must reflect solid intelligence and real expertise. Expertise is supposed to be the cornerstone of intelligence analysis and the coordination that occurs within the IC. That means that only those analysts (and the agencies they represent) will be asked to contribute or comment on a particular intelligence issue. When it comes to the question of whether Russia had launched a full out cyber attack on the Democrats and the U.S. electoral system, only analysts from agencies with access to the intelligence and the expertise to analyze that intelligence would be asked to write or contribute to an intelligence memorandum.

Who would that be? The answer is simple -- the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, State INR and the FBI. (One could make the case that there are some analysts within Homeland Security that might have expertise, but they would not necessarily have access to the classified information produced by the CIA or the NSA.) The task of figuring out what the Russians were doing and planned to do fell to five agencies and only three of the five (the CIA, the DIA and NSA) would have had the ability to collect intelligence that could inform the work of analysts.

Before I can explain to you how an analyst work this issue it is essential for you to understand the type of intelligence that would be required to "prove" Russian meddling. There are four possible sources -- 1) a human source who had direct access to the Russians who directed the operation or carried it out; 2) a signal intercept of a conversation or cyber activity that was traced to Russian operatives; 3) a document that discloses the plan or activity observed; or 4) forensic evidence from the computer network that allegedly was attacked.

Getting human source intel is primarily the job of CIA. It also is possible that the DIA or the FBI had human sources that could have contributed relevant intelligence.

Signal intercepts are collected and analyzed by the NSA.

Documentary evidence, which normally is obtained from a human source but can also be picked up by NSA intercepts or even an old-fashioned theft.

Finally there is the forensic evidence . In the case of Russian meddling there is no forensic evidence available to the IC because the Democratic National Committee did not permit the FBI to investigate and examine the computers and the network that was allegedly attacked.

What Do Analysts Do?

Whenever there is a "judgment" or "consensus" claimed on behalf to the IC, it means that one or more analysts have written a document that details the evidence and presents conclusions based on that evidence. On a daily basis the average analyst confronts a flood of classified information (normally referred to as "cables" or "messages"). When I was on the job in the 1980s I had to wade through more than 1200 messages -- i.e., human source reports from the CIA, State Department messages with embassies around the world, NSA intercepts, DIA reports from their officers based overseas (most in US embassies) and open source press reports. Today, thanks to the internet, the average analyst must scan through upwards of 3000 messages. It is humanly impossible.

The basic job of an analyst is to collect as much relevant information as possible on the subject or topic that is their responsibility. There are analysts at the CIA, the NSA, the DIA and State INR that have the job of knowing about Russian cyber activity and capabilities. That is certain. But we are not talking about hundreds of people.

Let us move from the hypothetical to the actual. In January of 2017, DNI Jim Clapper release a report entitled, " Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections " (please see here ). In subsequent testimony before the Congress, Clapper claimed that he handpicked two dozen analysts to draft the document . That is not likely. There may have been as many as two dozen analysts who read the final document and commented on it, but there would never be that many involved in in drafting such a document. In any event, only analysts from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI were involved :

This report includes an analytic assessment drafted and coordinated among The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and The National Security Agency (NSA), which draws on intelligence information collected and disseminated by those three agencies.

Limiting the drafting and clearance on this document to only the CIA, the NSA and the FBI is highly unusual because one of the key analytical conclusions in the document identifies the Russian military intelligence organization, the GRU, as one of the perpetrators of the cyber attack. DIA's analysts are experts on the GRU and there also are analysts in State Department's Bureau of INR who should have been consulted. Instead, they were excluded.

Here is how the process should have worked in producing this document:

  1. One or more analysts are asked to do a preliminary draft. It is customary in such a document for the analyst to cite specific intelligence, using phrases such as: "According to a reliable source of proven access," when citing a CIA document or "According to an intercept of a conversation between knowledgeable sources with access," when referencing something collected by the NSA. The analyst does more than repeat what is claimed in the intel reports, he or she also has the job of explaining what these facts mean or do not mean.
  2. There always is an analyst leading the effort who has the job of integrating the contributions of the other analysts into a coherent document. Once the document is completed in draft it is handed over to Branch Chief and then Division Chief for editing. We do not know who had the lead, but it was either the FBI, the CIA or the NSA.
  3. At the same time the document is being edited at originating agency, it is supposed to be sent to the other clearing agencies, i.e. those agencies that either provided the intelligence cited in the draft (i.e., CIA, NSA, DIA, or State) or that have expertise on the subject. As noted previously, it is highly unusual to exclude the DIA and INR.
  4. Once all the relevant agencies clear on the content of the document, it is sent into the bowels of the DNI where it is put into final form.

That is how the process is supposed to work. But the document produced in January 2017 was not a genuine work reflecting the views of the "Intelligence Community." It only represented the supposed thinking (and I use that term generously) of CIA, NSA and FBI analysts. In other words, only three of 16 agencies cleared on the document that presented four conclusions:

Sounds pretty ominous, but the language used tells a different story. The conclusions are based on assumptions and judgments. There was nor is any actual evidence from intelligence sources showing that Vladimir Putin ordered up anything or that his government preferred Trump over Clinton.

How do I know this? If such evidence existed -- either documentary or human source or signal intercept -- it would have been cited in this document. Not only that. Such evidence would have corroborated the claims presented in the Steele dossier. But such evidence was not forthcoming. If it had existed than Jim Comey could have claimed in his June 2017 testimony before Congress that the parts of the "Dossier" had been verified. He did not do so. Testifying under oath Comey described the "Dossier" as "salacious and unverified."

It is genuinely shocking that DNI Jim Clapper, with the acquiescence of the CIA, the FBI and NSA, would produce a document devoid of any solid intelligence. There is a way to publicly release sensitive intelligence without comprising a the original source. But such sourcing is absent in this document.

That simple fact should tell you all you need to know. The Intelligence Community was used as a tool to misinform the public and persuade them that Russia was guilty of something they did not do. That lie remains unchallenged.


LeaNder , 07 March 2018 at 05:59 PM

Good summary argument, PT. Thanks. Helpful reminder.

But, makes me feel uncomfortable. Cynical scenario. I'd prefer them to be both drivers and driven, somehow stumbling into the chronology of events. They didn't hack the DNC, after all. Crowdstrike? Steele? ...

********
But yes, all the 17 agencies Clinton alluded to in her 3rd encounter with Trump was a startling experience:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/19/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-blames-russia-putin-wikileaks-rele/

turcopolier , 07 March 2018 at 06:10 PM
LeaNder

One other point on which Tacitus and I differ is the quality of the analysts in the "minors." The "bigs" often recruit analysts from the "minors" so they can't be all that bad. And the analysts in all these agencies receive much the same data feed electronically every day. There are exceptions to this but it is generally true. I, too, read hundreds of documents every day to keep up with the knowledge base of the analysts whom I interrogated continuously. "How do you know that?" would have been typical. pl

Flavius , 07 March 2018 at 06:19 PM
Well done.

"The Intelligence Community was used as a tool to misinform the public and persuade them that Russia was guilty of something they did not do. That lie remains unchallenged.'" Yes it was and so remains the lie unchallenged.

Conjectural garbage appears first to have been washed through the FBI, headquarters no less, then probably it picked up a Triple A rating at the CIA, and then when the garbage got to Clapper, it was bombs away - we experts all agree. There were leaks, but they weren't sufficient to satisfy Steele so he just delivered the garbage whole to the Media in order to make it a sure thing. The garbage was placed securely out there in the public domain with a Triple A rating because the FBI wouldn't concern itself with garbage, would it?

Contrast this trajectory with what the Russian policy establishment did when it concluded that the US had done something in the Ukraine that Russia found significantly actionable: it released the taped evidence of Nuland and our Ambassador finishing off the coup.

The whole sequence reminds me in some ways of the sub prime mortgage bond fiasco: garbage risk progressively bundled, repackaged, rebranded and resold by big name institutions that should have known better.

I have only two questions: was it misfeasance, malfeasance, or some ugly combination of the two? And are they going to get away with it?

Richardstevenhack , 07 March 2018 at 06:23 PM
Re this: " In the case of Russian meddling there is no forensic evidence available to the IC because the Democratic National Committee did not permit the FBI to investigate and examine the computers and the network that was allegedly attacked."

To be precise, CrowdStrike did provide the FBI with allegedly "certified true images" of the DNC servers allegedly involved in the alleged "hack." They also allegedly provided these images to FireEye and Mandiant, IIRC.

All three allegedly examined those images and concurred with CrowdStrike's analysis.

Of course, given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence.

In addition, regardless of whether the images were true or not, the evidence allegedly contained therein is painfully inadequate to confirm that APT28 or APT29 were involved, nor that the Russian government was involved, or even that there was a real hack involved, and even less evidence that any emails that might have been exfiltrated were given to Wikileaks as opposed to another leak such as that alleged by Sy Hersh to have been done by Seth Rich.

The "assessment" that Putin ordered any of this is pure mind-reading and can be utterly dismissed absent any of the other evidence Publius points out as necessary.

The same applies to any "estimate" that the Russian government preferred Trump or wished to denigrate Clinton. Based on what I read in pro-Russian news outlets, Russian officials took great pains to not pick sides and Putin's comments were similarly very restrained. The main quote from Putin about Trump that emerged was mistranslated as approval whereas it was more an observation of Trump's personality. At no time did Putin ever say he favored Trump over Clinton, even though that was a likely probability given Clinton's "Hitler" comparison.

As an aside, I also recommend Scott Ritter's trashing of the ICA. Ritter is familiar with intelligence estimates and their reliability based on his previous service as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq and in Russia implementing arms control treaties.

ann , 07 March 2018 at 11:22 PM
This is a wonderful explanation of the intelligence community. And I thank you for the explanation. My interpretation is: In 1990 +- Bush 41 sold us the 1st Iraq war using fudged intelligence, then Bush 43 sold us the second Iraq war using fabricated intelligence. And now the Obama Administration tried to sell us fake intelligence in regard to Russia in order to get Clinton elected. However inadequate my summary is it looks like the Democrats are less skilled in propaganda than the Repubs. And what else is the difference?
Richardstevenhack , 08 March 2018 at 03:02 AM
Mueller has had 18 months and has proceeded to reveal exactly nothing related to either Trump "collusion" with Russia nor Russia as a state actually doing anything remotely described as "meddling."

His expected indictment of some Russians for the DNC hack is going to be more of the same in all likelihood. I predict there will be next to zero evidence produced either that the Russians named are in fact members of APT28 or APT29 or that they had any direct connection with either the alleged DNC hack or Wikileaks or the Russian government.

It's a witch hunt, nothing more. People holding their breath for the "slam dunk" are going to pass out soon if they haven't already.

blue peacock , 08 March 2018 at 04:12 AM
GZC #12

Mueller is investigating some aspects. But there is another aspect - the conspiracy inside law enforcement and the IC. That is also being investigated. There are Congressional committees in particular Nunes, Goodlatte and Grassley. Then there is the DOJ IG. And today AG Sessions confirms there is a DOJ prosecutor outside Washington investigating.

IMO, the conspiracy is significantly larger in scale and scope than anything the Russians did.

Yes, indeed we'll have to wait and see what facts Mueller reveals. But also what facts these other investigations reveal.

English Outsider , 08 March 2018 at 05:57 AM
Thank you for setting out the geography and workings of this complex world.

Might I ask how liaison with other Intelligence Communities fits in? Is intelligence information from non-US sources such as UK intelligence sources subject to the same process of verification and evaluation?

I ask because of the passage in your article -

"But such evidence (corroborating the Steele dossier) was not forthcoming. If it had existed than Jim Comey could have claimed in his June 2017 testimony before Congress that the parts of the "Dossier" had been verified. He did not do so. Testifying under oath Comey described the "Dossier" as "salacious and unverified." "

Does this leave room for the assertion that although the "Dossier" was unverified in the US it was accepted as good information because it had been verified by UK Intelligence or by persons warranted by the UK? In other words, was UK Intelligence, or an ex-UK intelligence officer, used to get material through the US evaluation process, material that would not have got through that US evaluation process had it originated within the US itself?

turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 07:53 AM
EO,

" ... was UK Intelligence, or an ex-UK intelligence officer, used to get material through the US evaluation process, material that would not have got through that US evaluation process had it originated within the US itself?" I would say yes and especially yes if the contact for this piece of data was conducted at the highest level within the context of the already tight liaison between the US IC and Mi-6/GCHQ. PT may think differently. pl

turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 07:54 AM
GZC

A lot of smoke? Only if you wish to place a negative value on everything the Trump people did or were. pl

jsn -> The Twisted Genius ... , 08 March 2018 at 08:20 AM
The CIA appears to be trying to right the wrongs done them with the creation of the DNI:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/08/dems-m08.html
turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 08:54 AM
jsn

The wrongs done them? I hope that was irony. pl

turcopolier -> Green Zone Café ... , 08 March 2018 at 09:01 AM
GZC

Was it Hitler or Stalin who said "show me the man and I will find his crime?" As I have said before, Trumps greatest vulnerability lies in his previous business life as an entrepreneurial hustler. If he is anything like the many like him whom I observed in my ten business years, then he has cut corners legally somewhere in international business. they pretty much all do that. Kooshy, a successful businessman confirmed that here a while back. These other guys were all business hustlers including Flynn and their activities have made them vulnerable to Mueller. IMO you have to ask yourself how much you want to be governed by political hacks and how much by hustlers. pl

turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 09:24 AM
jsn

hy this socialist pub would fing it surprising that former public servants seek elected office is a mystery to me. BTW, in re all the discussion here of the IC, there are many levels in these essentially hierarchical structures and one's knowledge of them is conditioned by the perspective from which you viewed them. pl

DH , 08 March 2018 at 09:50 AM
Re 'baby adoption' meeting between Trump, Jr. and Veselnitskaya, I recall a comment here linking to an article speculating the email initiating the meeting originated in Europe, was set up by the playboy son of a European diplomat, and contained words to trip data-gathering monitors which would have enabled a FISA request to have Trump, Jr. come under surveillance.

Also, the Seymour Hersh tape certainly seems authentic as far as Seth Rich being implicated in the DNC dump.

Publius Tacitus -> Green Zone Café ... , 08 March 2018 at 09:53 AM
GZC,

Are you really this obtuse?

You insist (I guess you rely on MSNBC as your fact source) that Manafort, Page, etc. all "have connections to Russia or Assange." You are using smear and guilt by association. Flynn's so-called connection to Russia was that he accepted an invite to deliver a speech at an RT sponsored event and was paid. So what? Nothing wrong with that. Just ask Bill Clinton. Or perhaps you are referring to the fact that Flynn also spoke to the Russian Ambassador to the US after the election in his capacity as designated National Security Advisor. Zero justification for investigation.

Stone? He left the campaign before there had even been a primary and only had text exchanges with Assange.

Your blind hatred of Trump makes you incapable of thinking logically.

jsn , 08 March 2018 at 10:15 AM
Sir,

The most sarcastic irony was intended. This is what the real left looks like, its very different from Clintonite Liberals, not that I agree with their ideological program, though I believe parts have their place.

Liberals have, I believe, jumped the shark: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/03/07/progressive-journalists-jump-the-shark-on-russiagate/

If the get their way with the new McCarthyism, the implications for dissent, left or right, seem to me to be about the same:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/federalist-68-the-electoral-college-and-faithless-electors.html#intelligence

jsn , 08 March 2018 at 10:25 AM
Sir,

And to your second comment, yes I agree about the complexity of institutions and how situationally constrained individual experiences are, if that was the point.

I'll also concede my brief comments generalize very broadly, but it's hard to frame things more specific comments without direct knowledge, such as the invaluable correspondents here. I try to avoid confirmation bias by reading broadly and try to provide outside perspectives. My apologies if they're too far outside.

I suppose it would be interesting to see a side by side comparison of how many former IC self affiliated with which party in choosing to run. I'm just guessing but I'll bet there's more CIA in the D column and more DIA among the Rs.

LeaNder said in reply to Flavius... , 08 March 2018 at 10:40 AM
love this coinage Flavius: Yes it was and so remains the lie unchallenged

a lie "circumstantial"? http://recycledknowledge.blogspot.de/2005/05/seven-degrees-of-lie.html

Sid Finster , 08 March 2018 at 11:06 AM
"We don't have the evidence yet because Mueller hasn't found it yet!" is a classic argument from ignorance, in that is assumes without evidence (there's that pesky word again!) that there is something to be found.

That said, I have no doubt that Mueller will find *something*, simply because an aggressive and determined prosecutor can always find *something*, especially if the target is engaged in higher level business or politics. A form unfiled, an irregularity in an official document, and overly optimistic tax position.

If nothing else works, there's always the good old standby of asking question after question until the target makes a statement that can be construed as perjury or lying to investigators.

Sarah B said in reply to turcopolier ... , 08 March 2018 at 11:27 AM
My perspective, after reading that linked article by the WSWS, is that both, the IC and the DoD, are trying to take over the whole US political spectrum, in fact, militarizing de facto the US political life....

Now, tell me that this is not an intend by the MIC ( where all the former IC or DoD people finally end when they leave official positions )to take over the government ( if more was needed after what has happened with Trump´s ) to guarantee their profit rate in a moment where everything is crimbling....

Btw, have you read the recently released paper, "WorldWide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community" by Daniel R. Coats ( DNI )? You smell fear from the four corners....do not you?

Barbara Ann -> turcopolier ... , 08 March 2018 at 11:35 AM
Those immortal words are attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, Colonel and you are not the first to draw the comparison re Mueller's investigation. For those who do not know Beria was head of the NKVD under Stalin.
Sarah B , 08 March 2018 at 11:38 AM
Here is the paper in question I am mentioning above: https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Testimonies/2018-ATA---Unclassified-SSCI.pdf Some neutral analyst is saying that from 28 pages, 24 are dedicated to Russia and China, then Iran and NK, in this order...and that it is an official recognition of the new multipolar order....
Peter VE said in reply to johnf... , 08 March 2018 at 11:55 AM
The BBC reported this morning that a police officer who was amongst the earliest responders to the "nerve gas" poisoning of Col. Skripal is also being treated for symptoms. How was it that many "White Helmets" who were filmed where the sarin gas was dropped on Khan Sheikhoun last April suffered no symptoms?
Jack -> turcopolier ... , 08 March 2018 at 11:59 AM
Sir

That's a good way to present it political hacks vs hustlers. The fact is Flynn has pled guilty to perjury. Nothing else like collusion with the Russians. And his sentencing is on hold now as the judge has ordered Mueller to hand over any exculpatory evidence. Clearly something is going on his case for the judge to do that.

Manafort has been indicted for money laundering, wire fraud, etc for activities well before the election campaign. Sure, it is good that these corrupt individuals should be investigated and prosecuted. However, this corruption is widespread in DC. How come none of these cheering Mueller on to destroy Trump care about all the foreign money flowing to K Street? Why aren't they calling for investigations of the Clinton Foundation or the Podesta brothers where probable cause exist of foreign money and influence? What about Ben Cardin and all those recipients of foreign zionist money and influence? It would be nice if there were wide ranging investigations on all those engaged in foreign influence peddling. But it seems many just want a witch hunt to hobble Trump. It's going to be very difficult to get the Senate to convict him for obstruction of justice or tax evasion or some charge like that.

The Twisted Genius , 08 March 2018 at 12:59 PM
The select group of several dozen analysts from CIA, NSA and FBI who produced the January 2017 ICA are very likely the same group of analysts assembled by Brenner in August 2016 to form a task force examining "L'Affaire Russe" at the same time Brennan brought that closely held report to Obama of Putin's specific instructions on an operation to damage Clinton and help Trump. I've seen these interagency task forces set up several times to address particular info ops or cyberattack issues. Access to the work of these task forces was usually heavily restricted. I don't know if this kind of thing has become more prevalent throughout the IC.

I am also puzzled by the absence of DIA in the mix. When I was still working, there were a few DIA analysts who were acknowledged throughout the IC as subject matter experts and analytical leaders in this field. On the operational side, there was never great enthusiasm for things cyber or info ops. There were only a few lonely voices in the darkness. Meanwhile, CIA, FBI and NSA embraced the field wholeheartedly. Perhaps those DIA analytical experts retired or moved on to CYBERCOM, NSA or CIA's Information Operations Center.

LeaNder said in reply to Richardstevenhack ... , 08 March 2018 at 01:01 PM
I predict there will be next to zero evidence produced either that the Russians named are in fact members of APT28 or APT29 ...

Richard, over here the type of software is categorized under Advanced Persistent Threat, and beyond that specifically labeled the "Sofacy Group". ... I seem to prefer the more neutral description 'Advanced Persistent Threat' by Kaspersky. Yes, they seem to be suspicious lately in the US. But I am a rather constant consumer, never mind the occasional troubles over the years.

APT: Helps to not get confused by all the respective naming patterns in the economic field over national borders. APT 1 to 29 ...? Strictly, What's the precise history of the 'Bear' label and or the specific, I assume, group of APT? ...

Kasperky pdf-file - whodunnit?
https://tinyurl.com/APT-Avanced-Persitent-Treat

Ever used a datebase checking a file online? Would have made you aware of the multitude of naming patterns.

******
More ad-hoc concerning one item in your argument above. To what extend does a standard back-up system leave relevant forensic traces? Beyond the respective image in the present? Do you know?

Admittedly, I have no knowledge about matters beyond purely private struggles. But yes, they seemed enough to get a vague glimpse of categories in the field of attribution. Regarding suspected state actors vs the larger cybercrime scene that is.

LeaNder said in reply to Fred... , 08 March 2018 at 02:29 PM
Even mentioning those is just further evidence that something really did happen.

I appreciate you are riding our partially shared hobby horse, Fred. ;)

But admittedly this reminds me of something that felt like a debate-shift, I may be no doubt misguided here. Nitwit! In other words I may well have some type of ideological-knot in the relevant section dealing with memory in my brain as long-term undisciplined observer of SST.

But back on topic: the argument seemed to be that "important facts" were omitted. In other words vs earlier times were are now centrally dealing with omission as evidence. No?

Dave -> Publius Tacitus ... , 08 March 2018 at 03:18 PM
Ask National Security Advisor General McMaster.
Even Trump now says Putin meddled.
What more evidence do you need
Dave -> Publius Tacitus ... , 08 March 2018 at 03:20 PM
General McMaster has seen the evidence and says the fact of Russian meddling can no longer be credibly denied.
That doesn't stop the right-wing extremists from spinning fairy tales.
turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 03:34 PM
Dave

It is politically necessary for Trump to say that. Tell me, what is meant by "Russian meddling"in this statement by McMaster? pl

Dave -> turcopolier ... , 08 March 2018 at 03:50 PM
Russian meddling is hacking our election systems.

The right wing (re: Hannity and Limbaugh) have been trying mightily to discredit this investigation by smearing Mueller's reputation, even though he is a conservative republican.

They are doing this so that if Mueller's report is damning, they can call it a "witch hunt."

I would think that if Trump is innocent, he would cooperate with this investigation fully.

You are insinuating that McMaster is a liar even though he has access to information that you don't.

Publius Tacitus -> Dave... , 08 March 2018 at 04:02 PM
Just because trump is stupid is not an excuse for you. You accept a lie without one shred of actual evidence. You are a lemming
Fred -> LeaNder... , 08 March 2018 at 04:04 PM
LeaNder,

"omission as evidence. " Incorrect. Among the omissions was the fact that the dossier was paid for by a political campaign and that the wife of a senior DOJ lawyer's wife was working for Fusion GPS. Then there's the rest of the political motivations left out.

Fred -> Dave... , 08 March 2018 at 04:07 PM
Dave,

Putin hired Facebook. That company seems to do well helping out foreign governments.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-censorship-tool-china.html

Linda , 08 March 2018 at 04:16 PM
If you have seen the classified information that would be necessary to back up your conclusions, it should not be discussed in this forum. As you are well aware sources and methods cannot be made public so I fail to see how you believe this should have been publically done. Having said that, I pretty much agree with your conclusion except for the indication that the analysts lied.
turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 04:26 PM
Dave

What does "hacking our elections" mean? Does it means breaking into voting systems and changing the outcome by altering votes? Or does it mean information operations to change US voters' minds about for whom they would vote?

If the latter you must know that we (the US) have done this many times in foreign elections, including Russian elections, Israeli elections, Italian elections, German elections, etc., or perhaps you think that a different criterion should be applied to people who are not American.

As for McMasters, I am unimpressed with him. He displays all the symptoms of Russophobia. He has special information? Information can be interpreted many ways depending on one's purpose. pl

turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 04:36 PM
Linda

PT does not have access to the classified information underlying but your argument that "As you are well aware sources and methods cannot be made public so I fail to see how you believe this should have been publicly done." doesn't hold water for me since I have seen sources and methods disclosed by the government of the US many times when it felt that necessary. One example that I have mentioned before was that of the trial of Jeffrey Sterling (merlin) for which I was an expert witness and adviser to the federal court for four years.

In that one the CIA and DoJ forced the court to allow them to de-classify the CIA DO's operational files on the case and read them into the record in open court. I had read all these files when they were classified at the SCI level. IMO the perpetrators in the Steel Memo case are and were merely hiding behind claims of sources and methods protection in order to protect themselve. pl

JamesT -> turcopolier ... , 08 March 2018 at 04:37 PM
I continue to learn things around here that I could never learn anywhere else. It is a privilege to read the Colonel, TTG, and Publius Tacitus.
turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 04:47 PM
Dave

If you use denigrating language like "wild eyed" to attack your interlocutors you will not be welcome here. pl

LeaNder said in reply to Flavius... , 08 March 2018 at 04:49 PM
Mueller cleared his ridiculous indictment relating to the Russian troll farm, a requirement that at one time would have been SOP for any FBI Office or USAtty Office bringing an indictment of this kind.

Not aware of this. Can you help me out?

No doubt vaguely familiar with public lore, in limited ways. As always.

Sid Finster said in reply to Dave... , 08 March 2018 at 05:09 PM
So now we are supposed to believe unquestioningly the word of torturers, perjurers and entrapment artists, all talking about alleged evidence that we are not allowed to see? Did you learn nothing from the "Iraqi WMD" fiasco or the "ZOMG! Assad gassed his own peoples ZOMG!" debacle? Funny how in each of these instances, the intelligence community's lies just happened to coincide with the agenda of empire.
LeaNder said in reply to Fred ... , 08 March 2018 at 05:10 PM
Ok, true. I forgot 'Steele'* was used as 'evidence'. Strictly, Pat may have helped me out considering my 'felt' "debate-shift". Indirectly. I do recall, I hesitated to try to clarify matters for myself.

* ...

m -> turcopolier ... , 08 March 2018 at 06:29 PM
Depends on what crime the "hack" committed. Fudging on taxes or cutting corners? Big whoop. Laundering $500 mil for a buddy of Vlad's? Now you got my attention and should have the voters' attention.

This is a political process in the end game. Clinton lied about sex in the oval Office and was tried for it. Why don't we exercise patience in the process and see if this President should be tried?

m -> Publius Tacitus ... , 08 March 2018 at 06:33 PM
I ain't a lawyer but don't prosecutors hold their cards (evidence) close to their chests until the court has a criminal charge and sets a date for discovery?
Publius Tacitus -> Linda ... , 08 March 2018 at 06:45 PM
Linda,
You betray your ignorance on this subject. You clearly have not understood nor comprehended what I have written. So i will put it in CAPS for you. Please read slowly.

THIS TYPE OF DOCUMENT, IF IT HAD A SOURCE OR SOURCES BEHIND IT, WOULD REFERENCE THOSE SOURCES. AN ANALYST WOULD NOT WRITE "WE ASSESS." IF YOU HAVE A RELIABLE HUMAN SOURCE OR A RELIABLE PIECE OF SIGINT THE YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ASSESS. YOU SIMPLY STATE, ACCORDING TO A KNOWLEDGEABLE AND RELIABLE SOURCE.

GOT IT. And don't come back with nonsense that the sources are so sensitive that they cannot be disclose. News flash genius--the very fact that Clapper put out this piece of dreck would have exposed the sources if they existed (but they do not). In any event, there would be reference to sources that provided the evidence that such activity took place at the direction of Putin.

IT DOES NOT EXIST.

J , 08 March 2018 at 07:08 PM
Colonel,

The granddaddy of them all is #16, and what have they contributed?

Steve McIntyre -> David Habakkuk ... , 08 March 2018 at 07:41 PM
I'm eagerly awaiting your thoughts on the Skripal poisoning. I'm sure I'm not alone in the hope that you will write on it.
The Twisted Genius -> Publius Tacitus ... , 08 March 2018 at 07:59 PM
Publius Tacitus,

I notice other Intelligence Community Assessments also use the term "we assess" liberally. For example, the 2018 Worldwide Threat Assessment and the 2012 ICA on Global Water Security use the "we assess" phrase throughout the documents. I hazard to guess that is why they call these things assessments.

The 2017 ICA on Russian Interference released to the public clearly states: "This report is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment. This document's conclusions are identical to the highly classified assessment, but this document does not include the full supporting information, including specific intelligence on key elements of the influence campaign. Given the redactions, we made minor edits purely for readability and flow."

I would hazard another guess that those minor edits for readability and flow are the reason that specific intelligence reports and sources, which were left out of the unclassified ICA, are not cited in that ICA.

The Twisted Genius -> Dave... , 08 March 2018 at 08:26 PM
Dave,

As far as I know, no one has reliably claimed that election systems, as in vote tallies, were ever breached. No votes were changed after they were cast. The integrity of our election system and the 2016 election itself was maintained. Having said that, there is plenty of evidence of Russian meddling as an influence op. I suggest you and others take a gander at the research of someone going by the handle of @UsHadrons and several others. They are compiling a collection of FaceBook, twitter and other media postings that emanated from the IRA and other Russian sources. The breadth of these postings is quite wide and supports the assessment that enhancing the divides that already existed in US society was a primary Russian goal.

https://medium.com/@ushadrons

I pointed this stuff out to Eric Newhill a while back in one of our conversations. He jokingly noted that he may have assisted in spreading a few of these memes. I bet a lot of people will recognize some of the stuff in this collection. That's nothing. Recently we all learned that Michael Moore did a lot more than unwittingly repost a Russian meme. He took part in a NYC protest march organized and pushed by Russians. This stuff is open source proof of Russian meddling.

Publius Tacitus -> The Twisted Genius ... , 08 March 2018 at 08:55 PM
TTG
Nice try, but that is bullshit just because recent assessments come out with sloppy language is no excuse. Go back and look at the assessment was done for iraq to justify the war in 2003. Many sources cited because it was considered something Required to justify going to war. As we have been told by many in the media that the Russians meddling was worse or as bad as the attack on Pearl Harbor and 9-11. With something so serious do you want to argue that they would downplay the sourcing?

[Mar 08, 2018] Cue bono question in Scripal case?

Highly recommended!
This case looks more and more like Litvinenko II -- another false flag designed to implicate Russia a fuel anti-russian hysteria. British MI6 are masters in such provocations.
Along with sabotaging Moscow soccer tournament this also can also be an attempt to distract from MI6 role is creation of Steele dossier too.
Notable quotes:
"... Having worked for Russia's Military Intelligence Directorate (GRU) since the Soviet era, Sergey Skripal was recruited in 1995 by the British agent Pablo Miller, who at the time was posing as Antonio Alvarez de Hidalgo and working in Britain's embassy in Tallinn. Russia's Federal Security Service says Miller was actually an undercover MI6 agent tasked with recruiting Russians. ..."
"... The first reports about Miller's work in Russia emerged in the early 2000s, after multiple Russians arrested for spying fingered Miller as their recruiter. For example, former tax police Major Vyacheslav Zharko says it was Miller who recruited him. He says it was Boris Berezovsky and former Federal Security Service (FSB) agent Alexander Litvinenko who introduced him to British intelligence agents. Zharko surrendered himself to Russian officials when he learned about the British authorities' suspicions that another former FSB officer, Andrey Lugovoi, had poisoned Litvinenko with polonium. ..."
"... Litvinenko also worked for MI6 ..."
"... Skripal, however, never turned himself in. For nine years, according to the FSB, he collaborated actively with British intelligence, transmitting information about Russian agents. ..."
"... Who/what paid Skripal a $472,000 house and a pension? That is way more than the reported $100,000 he earlier got. What did he do to earn the higher pay? ..."
"... Seems Skripal was a British spy at the end. If he required killing, it would have happened long ago as b asserts. Clearly, he knew something dangerously compromising to make himself a target. ..."
"... If b is too moral to consider killing injuring unrelated, innocent people for propaganda as it was 9/11 whoever did it, he must wake up. These days, days of phony YT,FB Twitter reality, the only value is propaganda value nothing else, anybody will be thrown under the bus if this fits aims of ruling elite even some oligarchs who are rich only because their submit to rape of ruling elite as high paid prostitute while the rest are raped for free ..."
"... If fact they will supress details of that crime just to obfuscate obvious perpetrators in a cloud of conspiracy theories in fact mining people's brains busy them up like little ants like Bitcoin miners waste electricity and computer power for delusional quest of riches ..."
"... Sources close to Orbis, the business intelligence firm run by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, who was behind a dossier of compromising allegations against Donald Trump, said Mr Skripal did not contribute to the file. But they could not say whether Mr Skripal was involved in different investigations into the US President for other interested parties. ..."
"... It's interesting how quickly the denial from steele comes out... Is skripal dead yet, or still alive? i wonder if he comes back, what he says? i guess we will never know either way... ..."
"... Media management and playing the old "backs to the wall boys & girls, its the blitz all over again" is what the 'counter-terror' mob do. ..."
"... The initial cops played the whole thing really low key, it seemed as though they wanted to get to the bottom of whatever happened, but their replacements 'counter-terror' appear to devote more time and energy to seducing credulous journos than they do trying to find out what actually did occur. ..."
"... Over in the states there have been reports about carfentanil poisoning responders to overdoses because of trace amounts. It is reported as 100 x as powerful as fentanyl. So maybe a chemical cousin is a possible consideration. ..."
"... B's suggestion that Skripal might be longing to return to and die in Russia, and that he was offering a "gift" to Moscow via his daughter (or maybe even a letter apologising for his treachery and begging for forgiveness, Berezovsky-style) is a stroke of genius. Makes me think that Boris Berezovsky's death merits more attention and cannot be brushed off as a suicide. ..."
"... On a park bench, they were discovered. I'll bet my best fishing lure that location's covered by a CCTV whose footage will provide all the answers--unless we aren't to be shown, due to national security or some such. ..."
"... Meanwhile The Guardian is spewing its usual bilge : Russian spy attack inquiry widens after medics treat 21 people ..."
"... The longer Skripal and his daughter stay alive, the more propaganda can be rung out of his death. Be worth watching to see how many sanctions and laws the UK can push through before he finally snuffs it. ..."
Mar 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Spy Poisons Spy And The Anti-Trump Campaign

On Sunday a former British-Russian double agent and his daughter were seriously injured in a mysterious incident in Salisbury, England. The British government says that both were hurt due to "exposure to a nerve agent". Speculative media reports talk of Sarin and VX, two deadly nerve-agents used in military chemical weapons. Anonymous officials strongly hint that 'Russia did it'.

New reports though point to a deep connection between the case and the anti-Trump/anti-Russia propaganda drive run by the Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton election campaign.

Sergei Skripal once was a colonel in a Russian military intelligence service. In the early 1990s he was recruited by the MI6 agent Pablo Miller. He continued to spy for the Brits after his 1999 retirement. The Russian FSB claims that the British MI6 paid him $100,000 for his service. At that time a Russian officer would only make a few hundred bucks per month. Skripal was finally uncovered in 2004 and two years later convicted for spying for Britain. He was sentenced to 18 years and in 2010 he and other agents ware exchanged in a large spy swap between the United States and Russia. Skripal was granted refuge in Britain and has since lived openly under his own name in Salisbury. His wife and his son died over the last years of natural causes. The only near relative he has left is his daughter who continued to live in Russia.

Last week his daughter flew to Britain and met him in Salisbury. On Sunday they went to a pub and a restaurant. At some point they were poisoned or poisoned themselves. They collapsed on a public bench. They are now in intensive care. A policeman one the scene was also seriously effected.

Authorities have declined to name the substance to which the pair is suspected to have been exposed, but :

Local media had on Monday reported the substance found at the scene to be similar to fentanyl: a lethally strong opioid available even on Salisbury's soporific streets.

The British government is hinting at Russian involvement :


Whorin Piece , Mar 8, 2018 4:30:36 PM | 1

Seth Rich.

Awesome, thank you b,

I think this event is a ramp to offing Knesia Sobchak prior to or just after the national poll. She is a pawn of the West. She has been directed to consolidate the disparate liberal opposition campaigns by the use of primaries...which would just happen to result in her primacy. The idea is to have her win enough vote it can be alleged that she has embarrassed Putin...and then they six her using VX. Her father was close go Putin during Putin's early years in St Pete. The BBC has been running chaff out the foot saying Putin killed his mentor Anatoly Sobchak. Knesia has been moved into position. She will be offed to harm Putin's reputation but also to place e a complex wound in him. The West are monsters

yoffa , Mar 8, 2018 4:35:34 PM | 2
The Orbis consultant / analyst living in Salisbury is identified as Pablo Miller. He had recruited Skripal in 1995 ( https://meduza.io/en/feature/2018/03/06/a-hundred-grand-and-hundreds-of-betrayed-agents).
notheonly1 , Mar 8, 2018 4:40:39 PM | 3
Ms Rudd told MPs it was an "outrageous crime", adding that the government would "act without hesitation as the facts become clearer".

Yeah, right.

Like the illegal invasion of a sovereign foreign country based on the lies by the same 'government', with a million+ casualties among the middle eastern population.

That kind of outrageous crime , correct?

One day the pendulum will swing back hard and merciless at these criminal warmongers and war profiteers. Disgusting how low what goes for 'homo sapiens' can sink.

Christian Chuba , Mar 8, 2018 4:43:02 PM | 4
I was wondering if Grigory Rodchenkov was in danger of meeting the same fate by some of the more unsavory elements of U.S. Intelligence Agencies. He would become a poster boy for Russian assassinations on U.S. soil.

One thing about Rodchenkov, if the doping was not state sponsored, what motive would have have for doing it on his own, is there enough money in the Olympics that individual athletes would bribe him or would it make him look better if his athletes did better? I don't buy that it was state sponsored, or at least there is no evidence to that affect.

Oyyo , Mar 8, 2018 4:51:46 PM | 6
21 people were affected.

https://news.sky.com/story/live-poisoned-salisbury-cop-talking-and-engaging-11280674

xLemming , Mar 8, 2018 5:05:53 PM | 7
Sadly @3 we may have to wait for Judgement Day for that to happen. But if it comes about sooner, and in our lifetime, it will be a day of rejoicing!
b , Mar 8, 2018 5:07:11 PM | 8
@yoffa @2 - thank you. Your link does not work, here is a good one: A hundred grand and hundreds of betrayed agents What was former GRU Colonel Sergey Skripal's treason against Russia?
Having worked for Russia's Military Intelligence Directorate (GRU) since the Soviet era, Sergey Skripal was recruited in 1995 by the British agent Pablo Miller, who at the time was posing as Antonio Alvarez de Hidalgo and working in Britain's embassy in Tallinn. Russia's Federal Security Service says Miller was actually an undercover MI6 agent tasked with recruiting Russians.

The first reports about Miller's work in Russia emerged in the early 2000s, after multiple Russians arrested for spying fingered Miller as their recruiter. For example, former tax police Major Vyacheslav Zharko says it was Miller who recruited him. He says it was Boris Berezovsky and former Federal Security Service (FSB) agent Alexander Litvinenko who introduced him to British intelligence agents. Zharko surrendered himself to Russian officials when he learned about the British authorities' suspicions that another former FSB officer, Andrey Lugovoi, had poisoned Litvinenko with polonium.

Litvinenko also worked for MI6 ..
Skripal, however, never turned himself in. For nine years, according to the FSB, he collaborated actively with British intelligence, transmitting information about Russian agents.

Nikolai Luzan, who calls himself a colonel and a veteran of Russia's security agencies, wrote a detailed book about how the British recruited Sergey Skripal. Luzan says his book, "A Devil's Counterintelligence Dozen," is an "artistic-documentary production."

If we assume that Luzan's account is generally accurate, then Skripal was recruited during a long-term assignment in Malta and Spain, where he "got greedy."
...

Further on:
Skripal led a quiet life in Salisbury, where he reportedly bought an average house for 340,000 British pounds (about $472,000). His neighbors describe him as an ordinary, reasonably friendly pensioner. When he moved to the area, he even invited the whole street over for a housewarming party.

It's unclear why Skripal decided to resettle specifically in Salisbury, but LinkedIn indicates that Pablo Miller -- the MI6 agent who recruited him -- lives in the same town. In 2015, the year he retired, Miller received the Order of the British Empire for services to Her Majesty's Government.

Skripal's wife, Lyudmila, lived with him in Salisbury until her death a few years ago. His son died from liver failure in 2017 in St. Petersburg.

It must be Pablo Miller who worked with Steele ...

Who/what paid Skripal a $472,000 house and a pension? That is way more than the reported $100,000 he earlier got. What did he do to earn the higher pay?

karlof1 , Mar 8, 2018 5:12:03 PM | 9
Seems Skripal was a British spy at the end. If he required killing, it would have happened long ago as b asserts. Clearly, he knew something dangerously compromising to make himself a target. The UK's fairly well covered by CCTV; I'd be very interested in what those in Salisbury observed. The incident has La Carre written all over it.
Kalen , Mar 8, 2018 5:21:30 PM | 10
If someone like MI6 for FSB wanted him dead they would be instantly in a car accident of robbery attempt, they whoever they are, wanted this to thing to prolong in time to feed the press Russia gate and wanted people like b to follow the trap since most of the info here can be found just after few clicks, will be picked up by rational people.

If b is too moral to consider killing injuring unrelated, innocent people for propaganda as it was 9/11 whoever did it, he must wake up. These days, days of phony YT,FB Twitter reality, the only value is propaganda value nothing else, anybody will be thrown under the bus if this fits aims of ruling elite even some oligarchs who are rich only because their submit to rape of ruling elite as high paid prostitute while the rest are raped for free .

If fact they will supress details of that crime just to obfuscate obvious perpetrators in a cloud of conspiracy theories in fact mining people's brains busy them up like little ants like Bitcoin miners waste electricity and computer power for delusional quest of riches .

In the society of control ruling elite controls everything it needs to control and hence is responsible for this. Case closed.

b , Mar 8, 2018 5:39:21 PM | 12
The Independent: Sergei Skripal: Former double agent may have been poisoned with nerve agent over 'freelance' spying, sources say
The Russian double agent poisoned in Salisbury may have become a target after using his contacts in the intelligence community to work for private security firms, investigators believe.

Sergei Skripal could have come to the attention of certain people in Russia by attempting to "freelance" for companies run by former MI5, MI6 and GCHQ spies, security sources say.
...
Sources close to Orbis, the business intelligence firm run by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, who was behind a dossier of compromising allegations against Donald Trump, said Mr Skripal did not contribute to the file. But they could not say whether Mr Skripal was involved in different investigations into the US President for other interested parties.

A very believable denial by Steele. Not.
james , Mar 8, 2018 5:56:08 PM | 13
It's interesting how quickly the denial from steele comes out... Is skripal dead yet, or still alive? i wonder if he comes back, what he says? i guess we will never know either way...
Debsisdead , Mar 8, 2018 6:02:23 PM | 14
For me it was particularly suss when the Leceister Police who are the coppers on the ground in Salisbury were heavied by Scotland Yuk ( or 'the met' as englander papers call that gang of proven torturers & murderers) to turn the Skripsky investigation over to the 'counter-terror squad' - the mob of thugs whose skillful manipulation of england's media combined with evidence falsification made their indicted murder of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes seem like an heroic act by playing the old honest whitefella card - "all those brownfellas look the same, who can tell the difference?" . No copper, not the killers or the idiot in charge suffered any disciplinary actiion, much less a criminal one. IIRC the policeperson in charge who claimed to be 'in the bathroom' at the time of de Menzeses murder, one Cressida Dick, is now chief commissioner, the boss of Scotland Yuk.

The local coppers know the area and will have a rapport with witnesses that a mob of arseholes in sharp suits backed by balaclava wearing armed heavies is unlikely to enjoy, so why grab the gig especially since it is certain to remain unsolved?

Well partly that, to make sure it remains unsolved, but also because counter-terror plays the press release regurgitators who are englander 'journos' like a fine old violin. Questions about fentanyl being a nerve agent get tricky? Spin the chooks a yarn about evil a-rabs you have met.

Uncoy , Mar 8, 2018 6:21:20 PM | 15
Kalen is right. Such a flamboyant killing is not how modern intelligence agencies dispose of problems. Unless they want to draw attention to their work.

Maybe there's a bunch of people around the Christopher Steele dossier thinking of talking. What better way to shut them up than to knock off a Steele source.

Peter , Mar 8, 2018 6:33:27 PM | 16
Very good work, B. Thanks for your website, best on the web.
sadness , Mar 8, 2018 6:41:55 PM | 17
It could always be a simple & rather human explanation - The daughter was struggling for cash at home, dad was old but refused to die & had a stash of cash from his past, she knocked him off to get an earlier inheritance but being an amateur at this she did herself in too, which would be poetic justice...?
sadness , Mar 8, 2018 6:49:11 PM | 18
....oh i forgot to add....or it was a sad suicide pact between them when all else was lost & over
ToivoS , Mar 8, 2018 7:08:41 PM | 19
It is highly unlikely that fentanyl was the toxin that poisoned Skribal and his daughter. That hypothesis should be excluded at this point.

The main reason for this is that the patrol man who discovered them also came down with similar symptoms. Fentanyl is extremely toxic when injected intravenously. But not to any one coming into contact with them, touching them or even performing mouth to mouth resusication.

There are numerous acetyl choline inhibitors (e.g. sarin, vx, and many other similar compounds that have never been approved for chemical warfare) that can cause symptoms if someone comes into contact with an intoxicated patient especially one has be exposed externally.

Also the Portland Down lab has identified an ACE inhibitor (of course, that is part of the British military and they could very easily be lying.)

In any case, this looks like a nerve toxin poison, fentanyl is not in that class.

Fatima Manoubia , Mar 8, 2018 7:08:44 PM | 20
Fentanyl patchs are used to control intense chronic pain...If he resigned from GRU because of health issues, as the "Meduzas" affirm, it might be related to this chronic pain and so he could well be a patient using this drug for pain control.....

Thus, fentanyl is not a nerve agent, but an anesthesic in any case....All could well be a performance...to blame the Russians and contribute to scare the population about them previous to some machination to be mounted at......Do not forget that that factory of mannequin challenges broadcasts, the White Helmets, is also a British "enterprise", creation of "former" MI6 LeMesurier....

Debsisdead , Mar 8, 2018 7:40:41 PM | 21
Yesterday when questions about fentanyl were raised, the sick policeman was identified, up until that point all that had been said was that the bill first on the scene were admitted to be checked out by medics. Today the close to death's door copper is in fine fettle once again. I leave it up to others to decide whether he was crook (sick - an Oz term) or the imported police were crooks (lying).

Media management and playing the old "backs to the wall boys & girls, its the blitz all over again" is what the 'counter-terror' mob do. If they were really opposed to scaring the bejeezuz outta englanders which is what their name implies they would A) be better at preventing actions which they hadn't cranked up themselves for entrapment and B) not imagine it was on the up and up to terrify the burghers of Salisbury with yarns about possible 'nerve agent' on the loose that were placing the town's population at risk.

The initial cops played the whole thing really low key, it seemed as though they wanted to get to the bottom of whatever happened, but their replacements 'counter-terror' appear to devote more time and energy to seducing credulous journos than they do trying to find out what actually did occur. The form of this gang of sleek deceitful killers means that just because they claim this local woodentop was poisoned, it doesn't mean that is what actually befell him.

Duck1 , Mar 8, 2018 7:49:18 PM | 22
Over in the states there have been reports about carfentanil poisoning responders to overdoses because of trace amounts. It is reported as 100 x as powerful as fentanyl. So maybe a chemical cousin is a possible consideration.
Jen , Mar 8, 2018 7:54:30 PM | 23
It seems that MI6 was keeping Sergei Skripal on a tight leash by having him live in Salisbury close to Pablo Miller who must be the old fellow's minder as well as recruiter. One way of keeping Skripal on this leash must be to supply him with an addictive painkiller, for whatever pain he is suffering (physical, perhaps psychological?), and fentanyl fits the bill.

Fentanyl also fits the bill for a poisoning agent that also affected the police officer who attended the Skripals. The fentanyl epidemic is apparently forcing emergency and first-response personnel to re-evaluate procedures in handling patients so that they themselves are not affected by sniffing fentanyl accidentally.

B's suggestion that Skripal might be longing to return to and die in Russia, and that he was offering a "gift" to Moscow via his daughter (or maybe even a letter apologising for his treachery and begging for forgiveness, Berezovsky-style) is a stroke of genius. Makes me think that Boris Berezovsky's death merits more attention and cannot be brushed off as a suicide.

karlof1 , Mar 8, 2018 7:59:42 PM | 24
sadness @17 & 18--

Nobody died. Only 3 remain in hospital and are not endangered.

On a park bench, they were discovered. I'll bet my best fishing lure that location's covered by a CCTV whose footage will provide all the answers--unless we aren't to be shown, due to national security or some such.

Briar Patch , Mar 8, 2018 8:05:32 PM | 25
The question raised by the link offered by Oyyo at 6 (at least 21 affected by the "neurotoxin"), the comments offered by Debisdead at 21, and the note from Craig Murry about the nearby chemical site: Was this an attack targeting Skripal at all, or some other kind of "misadventure"? There are so many opportunities to use this kind of incident, by entities capable of spinning it this way and that, that it doesn't give to us individuals reading the news much hope of ever learning the truth.
Ghost Ship , Mar 8, 2018 8:16:50 PM | 26
>>>>> ToivoS | Mar 8, 2018 7:08:41 PM | 19

Fentanyl can enter the body through the skin :

A police officer in East Liverpool, Ohio, collapsed and was rushed to the hospital after he brushed fentanyl residue off his uniform, allowing the drug to enter his system through his hands. The officer had apparently encountered the opioid earlier in the day while making a drug bust.
Fenatanyl acts on the nervous system so could be described as a "nerve agent", particularly by a British politician or civil servant.
WorldBLee , Mar 8, 2018 8:49:38 PM | 30
I love it when the UK media call it a "professional hit job." No, it's not. In a professional hit job the person ends up dead.
Ghost Ship , Mar 8, 2018 9:02:37 PM | 31
Meanwhile The Guardian is spewing its usual bilge: Russian spy attack inquiry widens after medics treat 21 people

Statement from Wiltshire Police :

In addition to the three inpatients**** who are currently receiving treatment in relation to the incident, in line with Public Health England guidance, which asked anyone who was in the area and is concerned because they feel unwell to come forward, the Trust has seen and assessed a number of people who did not need treatment.

**** - These are Sgt Nick Bailey & the two original victims.

Peter AU 1 , Mar 8, 2018 9:04:33 PM | 32
The longer Skripal and his daughter stay alive, the more propaganda can be rung out of his death. Be worth watching to see how many sanctions and laws the UK can push through before he finally snuffs it.

[Mar 08, 2018] In recent years, there has been ample evidence that US policy-makers and, equally important, mainstream media commentators do not bother to read what Putin says, or at least not more than snatches from click-bait wire-service reports.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Still worse, Putin and "Putin's Russia" have been so demonized that it is hard to imagine any leading American political figures or editorial commentators responding positively to what is plainly his hope for a new beginning in US-Russian relations. If nothing else, strategic parity always also meant political parity -- recognizing that Soviet Russia, like the United States, had legitimate national interests abroad. The years of American vilifying Putin and Russia are essentially an assertion that neither has any such legitimacy. ..."
Mar 08, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

outthere , 08 March 2018 at 11:01 AM

Stephen F. Cohen:

Does Putin really believe Washington will "listen now"? He may still have some "illusions," but we should have none. In recent years, there has been ample evidence that US policy-makers and, equally important, mainstream media commentators do not bother to read what Putin says, or at least not more than snatches from click-bait wire-service reports.

Still worse, Putin and "Putin's Russia" have been so demonized that it is hard to imagine any leading American political figures or editorial commentators responding positively to what is plainly his hope for a new beginning in US-Russian relations. If nothing else, strategic parity always also meant political parity -- recognizing that Soviet Russia, like the United States, had legitimate national interests abroad. The years of American vilifying Putin and Russia are essentially an assertion that neither has any such legitimacy.

And making matters worse, there are the still unproven allegations of "Russiagate" collusion. Even if President Trump understands, or is made to understand, the new -- possibly historic -- overture represented by Putin's speech, would the "Kremlin puppet" allegations made daily against him permit him to seize this opportunity? Indeed, do the promoters of "Russiagate" care?

more here:

https://www.thenation.com/article/how-washington-provoked-and-perhaps-lost-a-new-nuclear-arms-race/

[Mar 08, 2018] Kleptocracy the most typical form of corruption under neoliberalism, where the government exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the financial oligarchy at the expense of the wider population, now even without pretense of honest service

Notable quotes:
"... he Dems disgust me with their neo-McCarthyism and the Repubs disgust me because of the way they are playing out their hand right now as well. Games within corrupt games, and yet normal behavior especially in waning empires (or other types of polities, including powerful int'l corporations). ..."
"... Chapter 14 of Guns, Germs and Steel is titled "From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy" and it used to be available online but my old link is dead and I couldn't find a new one. But a basic definition should suffice: "Kleptocracy, alternatively cleptocracy or kleptarchy, is a form of political and government corruption where the government exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often without pretense of honest service." I have no idea how one turns this around and I doubt it's even possible. ..."
"... The Real Reason Establishment Frauds Hate Trump and Obsess About Russia https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2018/02/20/the-real-reason-establishment-frauds-hate-trump-and-obsess-about-russia/ ..."
"... Blaming Russia for all the nation's problems serves several key purposes for various defenders of the status quo. For discredited neocons and neoliberals who never met a failed war based on lies they didn't support, it provides an opportunity to rehabilitate their torched reputations by masquerading as fierce patriots against the latest existential enemy. Similarly, for those who lived in denial about who Obama really was for eight years, latching on to the Russia narrative allows them to reassure themselves that everything really was fine before Trump and Russia came along and ruined the party. ..."
Mar 01, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Valissa -> jsn... , 01 March 2018 at 07:44 PM

jsn @16 & 40, in complete agreement with you. Great comments! T he Dems disgust me with their neo-McCarthyism and the Repubs disgust me because of the way they are playing out their hand right now as well. Games within corrupt games, and yet normal behavior especially in waning empires (or other types of polities, including powerful int'l corporations).

Chapter 14 of Guns, Germs and Steel is titled "From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy" and it used to be available online but my old link is dead and I couldn't find a new one. But a basic definition should suffice: "Kleptocracy, alternatively cleptocracy or kleptarchy, is a form of political and government corruption where the government exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often without pretense of honest service." I have no idea how one turns this around and I doubt it's even possible.

Back when I used to subscribe to STRATFOR, founder George Friedman always made a point of evaluating the elites of whatever country he was analyzing and how they operated amongst themselves and relative to the people and how effective they were or were not in governing a country. But he never did that for the US. I would have paid extra for that report! But of course he could not stay in business if he did such a thing as those people are his clients.

I think Mike Krieger over at Liberty Blitzkrieg nails it from another perspective with this post:

The Real Reason Establishment Frauds Hate Trump and Obsess About Russia https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2018/02/20/the-real-reason-establishment-frauds-hate-trump-and-obsess-about-russia/

Blaming Russia for all the nation's problems serves several key purposes for various defenders of the status quo. For discredited neocons and neoliberals who never met a failed war based on lies they didn't support, it provides an opportunity to rehabilitate their torched reputations by masquerading as fierce patriots against the latest existential enemy. Similarly, for those who lived in denial about who Obama really was for eight years, latching on to the Russia narrative allows them to reassure themselves that everything really was fine before Trump and Russia came along and ruined the party.

By throwing every problem in Putin's lap, the entrenched bipartisan status quo can tell themselves (and everybody else) that it wasn't really them and their policies that voters rejected in 2016, rather, the American public was tricked by cunning, nefarious Russians. Ridiculous for sure, but never underestimate the instinctive human desire to deny accountability for one's own failures. It's always easier to blame than to accept responsibility.

That said, there's a much bigger game afoot beyond the motivations of individuals looking to save face. The main reason much of the highest echelons of American power are united against Trump has nothing to do with his actual policies. Instead, they're terrified that -- unlike Obama -- he's a really bad salesman for empire. This sort of Presidential instability threatens the continuance of their well oiled and exceedingly corrupt gravy train. Hillary Clinton was a sure thing, Donald Trump remains an unpredictable wildcard.

... Obama said all the right things while methodically doing the bidding of oligarchy. He captured the imagination of millions, if not billions, around the world with his soaring rhetoric, yet rarely skipped a beat when it came to the advancement of imperial policies. He made bailing out Wall Street, droning civilians and cracking down on journalists seem progressive. He said one thing, did another, and people ate it up. This is an extraordinarily valuable quality when it comes to a vicious and unelected deep state that wants to keep a corrupt empire together.

Trump has the exact opposite effect. Sure, he also frequently says one thing and then does another, but he doesn't provide the same feel good quality to empire that Obama did. He's simply not the warm and fuzzy salesman for oligarchy and empire Obama was, thus his inability to sugarcoat state-sanctioned murder forces a lot of people to confront the uncomfortable hypocrisies in our society that many would prefer not to admit.

------------

I can't stand Kushner's smirky face and got a good chuckle from this prince's fall as I am not a fan of his passion for Israel. But I don't think he's a stupid idiot either. He's probably very smart in business, but he seems to have no feel for politics. Trump is much better at it than Kushner. Of course they are going after Kushner as a way to attack and disadvantage Trump. Politics is a form of warfare after all.

My take is that Trump survives but mostly contained by the Borg

[Mar 08, 2018] No. Russians Did Not Hack The FCC Comments.

Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... [email protected] ..."
"... Pew Research Center ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... #Russiagate, from the start, was framed as an indictment not just of one potentially traitorous Trump, but all alternative politics in general. The story has evolved to seem less like a single focused investigation and more like the broad institutional response to a spate of shocking election results, targeting the beliefs of discontented Americans across the political spectrum. ..."
"... it might be more scary then insane actually given how many are being suckered into this stupidity.. ..."
"... The US is under a psychotic mind massage that requires daily doses of Russophobic "medicine". ..."
"... All they have is their own crippled view of reality. But it is very dangerous. Projecting their own fears and hatreds often self-triggers into violence when schizoidal patients act out. ..."
"... The silver lining here though is that it is not working. Take the case of Matteo Renzi in Sunday's general election in Italy. He had tried to copy his neoliberal colleagues in other countries and allege victimization at the hands of Russian hackers and bots, but he eventually threw in the towel because the absurdity of his claims were roundly dismissed by the public. His Democratic Party polled under 20% and he announced his resignation the other day. The neoliberals can keep peddling their Russophobia but it doesn't work at the polls. ..."
"... "This Russiagate nonsense has do be debunked at each and every corner to prevent its further abuse against dissent on everything else." To me it looks like a Sisyphos work. Where I look I am confronted with cheating Russians, faking Russians, murdering Russians, they are just evil, evil, evil. I honestly doubt you can do anything against this avalanche of genuine demonizing. It's disgusting but apparently the ruling circles want to go to war. And even you won't stop them. ..."
"... The morons who peddle this "Russia did it" nonsense fully realize it isn't true, but it distracts the masses, so the bought and paid for idiots who now own the U$A, can dismantle any Govt. interference to their plan for global market share capture. ..."
"... Taibbi is right and that makes 'progressive' embrace of the Russiagate hoaxes that much more sinister. It is fundamentally pro-war, pro-establishment and pro-censorship ..."
"... "...but I rather doubt "the ruling circles" want a hot war with Russia/China and their allies as that will destroy their Casino-economy faster than most anything else..." ..."
"... Let's hope you're right. Brit General Sir Gordon Messenger views the "next big fight," most likely against nuclear-armed Russia, as winnable. (Times 18.03.01) And he isn't the only confident warmonger. ..."
"... Really folks, what the hell do people expect the rest of the globe to do, as the U$A's corporate empire continues to surround and attempt to strangle other nations? If other nations of the globe didn't push back, I for one, wouldn't respect them. Other nations of the world have the legitimate right to push back, and should. ..."
Mar 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

A member of the Federal Communications Commission, Jessica Rosenworcel, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post .


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It is unlikely that the headline was chosen by the author of the op-ed. The editors of the Washington Post opinion page wrote it. I also doubt that she would have chosen a picture of the FCC head to decorate her piece.

For the record: The headline is false.

The op-ed is about a request for comments the Federal Communications Commission issued last year in preparation of its net-neutrality decision. Anyone, and anything, could comment multiple times. Various lobbying firms, political action groups and hacks abused the public comment system to send copy-paste comments via single-use email accounts or even without giving any email address.

But this had and has nothing to with Russia or Russians.

Here are the top graphs of the the WaPo op-ed with the "Russia-did-it" headline:

What do Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), deceased actress Patty Duke, a 13-year-old from upstate New York and a 96-year-old veteran from Southern California have in common?

They appear to have filed comments in the net neutrality record at the Federal Communications Commission. That ought to mean they went online, submitted their names and addresses, and typed out their thoughts about Internet regulatory policy. But appearances can be deceiving. In fact, each of these individuals -- along with 2 million others -- had their identities stolen and used to file fake comments.

These fake comments were not the only unnerving thing in the FCC net neutrality record. In the course of its deliberations on the future of Internet openness, the agency logged about half a million comments sent from Russian email addresses . It received nearly 8 million comments from email domains associated with FakeMailGenerator.com with almost identical wording.

I have emphasized the only words in the whole op-ed that are related to Russia. They are wrong. The author of that op-ed does not understand the FCC public comment system. Public comments are made by filling out a form on the FCC website leaving ones comment, some address data and an email address. Public comments are not "send" by email. Thus the FCC did not log any comments "sent from Russian email". It logged comments made in a web form where the human (or program) making the comment provided a Russian email address as a means of contact. (It is obviously not expertise on communication issues that qualifies Mrs. Rosenworcel for her position as FCC commissioner.)

At least 12-13 million of the 21.7 million comments to the FCC were fake. 8 million email addresses entered in the form the FCC had set up were generated with www.fakemailgenerator.com , half a million were entered with *.ru Internet domains.

FakeMailGenerator can use foreign domains for generating throw-away email addresses. In the screenshot below it generated an Hungarian one for me.


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If I would comment at the FCC and enter [email protected] into the FCC form I would be counted as Hungarian. I would not have "sent" that comment from an Hungarian email address. Nor did the entering of the comment make me Hungarian. Neither do *.ru email domains mean that the people (ab-)using them have anything to do with Russia.

The Pew Research Center analyzed the 21.7 million comments the FCC received:

Fully 57% of comments used temporary or duplicate email addresses, and seven popular comments accounted for 38% of all submissions

The FCC and other agencies are required by law to accept public comments. But, as the op-ed says, it is utterly useless to request such public comments on the Internet without having some authentication system in place. The FCC did have some email address verification system in place. But it did not use it. As the Pew Center writes:

[T]he Center's analysis shows that the FCC site does not appear to have utilized this email verification process on a consistent basis. According to this analysis of the data from the FCC, only 3% of the comments definitively went through this validation process . In the vast majority of cases, it is unclear whether any attempt was made to validate the email address provided.

As a result, in many cases commenters were able to use generic or bogus email addresses and still have their comments accepted by the FCC and posted online.

It is obvious that the FCC had no interest at all in receiving legitimate public comments. But the FCC at least did not blame Russia. The Washington Post editors do that when they chose a headline that has no factual basis in the piece below it. They abuse the op-ed which has the presumed authority of an FCC commissioner to reinforce their anti-Russian campaign.

C. J. Hopkins notes that such a cult of authority is systematically used to make the lunatic claims of Russiagate believable.

Matt Taibbi writes that the aim of the Russiagate campaign was and is to target all dissent :

If you don't think that the endgame to all of this lunacy is a world where every America-critical movement from Black Lives Matter to Our Revolution to the Green Party is ultimately swept up in the collusion narrative along with Donald Trump and his alt-right minions, you haven't been paying attention.

That's because #Russiagate, from the start, was framed as an indictment not just of one potentially traitorous Trump, but all alternative politics in general. The story has evolved to seem less like a single focused investigation and more like the broad institutional response to a spate of shocking election results, targeting the beliefs of discontented Americans across the political spectrum.

Some commenters here lament about my posts about the Steele and or Russiagate issues. "It's enough already." But the issue is, as Taibbi points out, much bigger. This Russiagate nonsense has do be debunked at each and every corner to prevent its further abuse against dissent on everything else.

Posted by b on March 7, 2018 at 04:17 PM | Permalink

Comments


Castellio , Mar 7, 2018 4:40:37 PM | 1

"This Russiagate nonsense has do be debunked at each and every corner to prevent its further abuse against dissent on everything else."

Exactly right, b, exactly right.

james , Mar 7, 2018 4:58:26 PM | 4
thanks b.. this Russiagate thing is insane... i like the counter punch article you linked to and appreciate your breaking these fcc thing apart... it might be more scary then insane actually given how many are being suckered into this stupidity..
james , Mar 7, 2018 4:59:47 PM | 5
Craig Murray has a good article up today on the poisoning in the uk of the ex russian dude...
karlof1 , Mar 7, 2018 5:04:28 PM | 6
b: "This Russiagate nonsense has do be debunked at each and every corner to prevent its further abuse against dissent on everything else."

Concur 100% Truth must be used in the constant battle against Big Lie Nation and its perverse billionaire Deep State. Bezos should be wary he now wears a bullseye on his back none of his billions can remove. I see Taibbi has finally gotten part of his head out of his ass and is finally beginning to recognize Russiagate to be the Big Lie that it is, although he hasn't yet extracted his mouth so he can tell the world it's all a Big Lie--bet Deep State affiliated Rolling Stone would fire him if he did so. That's why we're treated to his poorly written article that's almost two years too late.

Red Ryder , Mar 7, 2018 5:51:55 PM | 9
b, glad to have your expert mind cutting through the maze of crapola. The US is under a psychotic mind massage that requires daily doses of Russophobic "medicine".

All they have is their own crippled view of reality. But it is very dangerous. Projecting their own fears and hatreds often self-triggers into violence when schizoidal patients act out. We see this in America with school and concert shootings. With Russia as its enemy, the Exceptional Nation is taunting a great power with more nukes than the US has. Every stupid American statement, thus, must be challenged. We can't be silent or laugh. It's too serious.

Jackrabbit , Mar 7, 2018 5:58:13 PM | 10
Yes, criminalizing dissent. Those who view this as partisan politics misunderstand the nature of politics today.
Mike Maloney , Mar 7, 2018 6:24:14 PM | 12
The silver lining here though is that it is not working. Take the case of Matteo Renzi in Sunday's general election in Italy. He had tried to copy his neoliberal colleagues in other countries and allege victimization at the hands of Russian hackers and bots, but he eventually threw in the towel because the absurdity of his claims were roundly dismissed by the public. His Democratic Party polled under 20% and he announced his resignation the other day. The neoliberals can keep peddling their Russophobia but it doesn't work at the polls.
Debsisdead , Mar 7, 2018 6:27:49 PM | 14
Sorry to go off topic but the Syrian Arab Army has just marched thru East Gouta town of Al-Hammouriyah to the joy of locals who are demanding that the arseholes of Faylaq al-Rahman and Jaysh al-Islam take the next stage outta Beit Sawa.
There is a vid from Al Masdar News here and another here if you want to use facebook links as the vids are mounted on FB. Both vids show support for the SAA by the population of East Gouta.
Pnyx , Mar 7, 2018 7:04:56 PM | 15
"This Russiagate nonsense has do be debunked at each and every corner to prevent its further abuse against dissent on everything else." To me it looks like a Sisyphos work. Where I look I am confronted with cheating Russians, faking Russians, murdering Russians, they are just evil, evil, evil. I honestly doubt you can do anything against this avalanche of genuine demonizing. It's disgusting but apparently the ruling circles want to go to war. And even you won't stop them.
michaelj72 , Mar 7, 2018 7:56:03 PM | 17
"It is obvious that the FCC had no interest at all in receiving legitimate public comments. ..." hahaha. too true, B!! quite simply, democracy and capitalism can no longer co-habitate under the same roof
ben , Mar 7, 2018 8:36:00 PM | 19
The morons who peddle this "Russia did it" nonsense fully realize it isn't true, but it distracts the masses, so the bought and paid for idiots who now own the U$A, can dismantle any Govt. interference to their plan for global market share capture.
ben , Mar 7, 2018 8:55:20 PM | 20
A reminder as to who the evil MF's are: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/450078556481803620/?autologin=true
paul , Mar 7, 2018 9:48:04 PM | 21
Taibbi is right and that makes 'progressive' embrace of the Russiagate hoaxes that much more sinister. It is fundamentally pro-war, pro-establishment and pro-censorship and thus not progressive -- depending on how we define progress of course...
Pnyx , Mar 7, 2018 10:01:37 PM | 22
karlof1 16

"...but I rather doubt "the ruling circles" want a hot war with Russia/China and their allies as that will destroy their Casino-economy faster than most anything else..."

Let's hope you're right. Brit General Sir Gordon Messenger views the "next big fight," most likely against nuclear-armed Russia, as winnable. (Times 18.03.01) And he isn't the only confident warmonger.

Don Bacon , Mar 7, 2018 10:37:47 PM | 23
Yes, we (patriotic) dissenters are "swept up in the collusion narrative" when we are labeled "Russians." This has happened to me. When I comment a lot on military sites about the ridiculous waste of money they are, I occasionally get the Russian treatment. "You're a Russian." Once it was hilarious when the "Russian" label on me was deemed authentic by one genius blogger. He said I must be Russian because I had used the word "kilometers." That proved my Russian-ness to him. . . .Currently Trump is denigrated for being a Russia-lover, but calling him a Russian is not likely (but possible).
ben , Mar 7, 2018 11:53:38 PM | 24
Really folks, what the hell do people expect the rest of the globe to do, as the U$A's corporate empire continues to surround and attempt to strangle other nations? If other nations of the globe didn't push back, I for one, wouldn't respect them. Other nations of the world have the legitimate right to push back, and should.

[Mar 07, 2018] How Russiagate helps the Israel lobby

Notable quotes:
"... The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs ..."
"... The Washington Report's ..."
Mar 07, 2018 | electronicintifada.net

Ever since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 US presidential election , the Democratic Party establishment has held tightly to the belief that her shock defeat was not the result of her and their shortcomings, but rather due to a nefarious Russian plot to "hack" the election in "collusion" with the winner.

Instead of examining why Donald Trump was able to connect with voters in economically distressed parts of the country in a way that Democrats failed to do, adherents of the Russiagate narrative hoped that investigations would quickly find a smoking gun, leading to Trump's impeachment and undoing an election result they consider aberrant and unjust.

On Friday, I spoke at a conference in Washington, DC, titled The Israel Lobby and American Policy , sponsored by The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and IRmep , a group that researches the lobby's influence.

As I note in my talk, a handful of journalists – especially Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté of The Real News – have consistently debunked the wild, exaggerated and sometimes fabricated claims of Russian interference made by members of the self-styled but woefully ineffectual "Resistance" to Trump.

Watch the video above.

True, over the course of the last year, special counsel Robert Mueller has made a number of indictments, but none of those cases – including the recent indictment of 13 Russians linked to a St. Petersburg troll farm – substantiates the heavily hyped claim that Russia helped Trump win the White House.

Perhaps the most high-profile indictment of someone in Trump's inner circle, the president's first national security adviser Michael Flynn , actually shows that rather than colluding with Russia, senior members of Trump's team were really working with Israel to advance its agenda.

And while no one has pinpointed evidence of Trump auctioning off his foreign policy to any Russian oligarchs, he has definitely tailored his policy toward Israel to the demands of casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson , his biggest campaign donor .

Adelson's immediate priority was securing US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moving the American embassy there – and Trump duly obliged .

New censorship helps Israel

In my talk I consider how the Russiagate narrative is actually helping Israel and its lobby in particular ways.

I point out that the Russiagate hysteria being adopted by many liberals is legitimizing censorship that helps Israel clamp down on free speech and a free press.

Last year, the Russian-funded network RT was forced to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

As Maté has noted, free speech advocates and journalists were largely silent about it , perhaps thinking this tool of government control over the media would never be used against them.

But now, Israel's supporters in Congress – including Senator Ted Cruz – are demanding that Al Jazeera be investigated by the Department of Justice and forced to register as an agent of Qatar. They are explicitly citing the US government crackdown on RT as their precedent.

Al Jazeera's transgression is that it produced an undercover documentary on the workings of the Israel lobby in the US.

Qatar has come under intense pressure from that lobby to make sure the documentary is never aired. Five months after the network's head of investigations Clayton Swisher announced it would be released "very soon," the film has yet to be broadcast.

On Monday, The Electronic Intifada exclusively published details of what is in the film.

According to a source who has seen it, the film identifies a number of lobby groups as working with Israel to spy on American citizens using sophisticated data gathering techniques. It is also said to cast light on covert efforts to smear and intimidate Americans seen as too critical of Israel.

True, FARA is being used only against foreign networks, but the point is that these outlets – whatever their flaws – are providing space for discussion and dissent that docile US mainstream media keep closed.

It's simply impossible to imagine CNN, ABC – or for that matter the BBC – showing true independence and taking on the power of the Israel lobby.

While organizers diligently informed media about the Washington conference, the only outlets that invited me on to talk about the Israel lobby were the The Real News and RT. I know that other speakers were shut out of mainstream media as well.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/v7EvTIplv5I?feature=oembed

And besides, there are other forms of high-tech censorship that are being used to stifle or stigmatize dissent in domestic media: Partly as an outgrowth of Russiagate, Silicon Valley giants Google and Facebook have succumbed to political pressure to effectively throttle the exposure of independent outlets in the name of fighting extremism, "fake news" and alleged foreign interference.

The perverse effect has been to reassert state and elite control over media and erode the freedom that those of us shut out of mainstream outlets rely on. Nothing could suit Israel and its lobby better.

Stark warning

The conference in Washington featured many interesting presentations that can be seen at The Washington Report's YouTube channel .

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state in the run-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, issued a stark warning that the US ramping up its military presence in Syria may be a prelude to launching a war on Iran on behalf of Israel.

Wilkerson said that Israel and its ally Saudi Arabia are encouraging the US to fight a regime-change war against Tehran that they would be incapable of mounting on their own.

"We've already done Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan," Wilkerson said, "so we'd just be seen as continuing the trend."

He warned that an Israeli confrontation and war with Lebanon – perhaps on the pretext of disputed gas fields in the Mediterranean – could provide the pretext.

In an ominous parallel, he likened the current situation to 1914, the eve of World War I – any spark could generate a broad regional or even global conflagration.

Wilkerson singled out the role of the neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies as leading the campaign for war on behalf of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister Avigdor Lieberman.

Notably, the source who spoke to The Electronic Intifada about Al Jazeera's suppressed Israel lobby film said that the documentary reveals that the same think tank may be acting as an agent for Israel in its covert efforts to undermine support for Palestinian rights in the US.

In spite of Wilkerson's worrying thesis, it must be said that, however powerful, the Israel lobby cannot alone force the US to undertake foreign military conquests. For one thing, US elites have never needed encouragement from anyone to wage devastating wars around the world.

When the US establishment sees a critical interest at stake, it pursues it regardless of what the lobby may want. That is why the US signed the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement despite all of Israel's efforts to sabotage it. Of course whether that deal survives the Trump administration remains to be seen .

In his keynote address , Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy stated that Israel's military rule over Palestinians "is today one of the most brutal, cruel tyrannies on Earth."

He asserted that the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights is a "legitimate tool" and the "only game in town" to force Israel to end this injustice.

[Mar 07, 2018] 'Progressive' Journalists Jump the Shark on Russiagate Consortiumnews

Notable quotes:
"... According to Mayer, Trump defenders argue that Steele is "a dishonest Clinton apparatchik who had collaborated with American intelligence and law enforcement officials to fabricate false charges against Trump and his associates, in a dastardly (sic) attempt to nullify the 2016 election. According to this story line, it was not the President who needed to be investigated, but the investigators themselves." ..."
"... I could not help but think that Mayer wrote her piece some months ago and that she and her editors might have missed more recent documentary evidence that gives considerable support to that "dastardly" story line. But seriously, it should be possible to suspect Steele of misfeasance or malfeasance – or simply telling his contractors what he knows they want to hear – without being labeled a "Trump supporter." I, for example, am no Trump supporter. I am, however, a former intelligence officer and I have long since concluded that what Steele served up is garbage. ..."
"... Mayer reports that Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 from 1999 to 2004, described Steele as "superb." Personally, I would shun any "recommendation" from that charlatan. Are memories so short? Dearlove was the intelligence chief who briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on July 23, 2002 after a quick trip to Washington. The official minutes of that meeting were leaked to the London Times and published on May 1, 2005. ..."
"... Worse still, he displays a distinct inclination toward the remarkable view of former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who has said that Russians are "typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever." If Mayer wanted to find some ostensibly authoritative figure to endorse the kind of material in Steele's dossier, she surely picked a good one in Sipher. ..."
"... Mayer notes, "It's too early to make a final judgment about how much of Steele's dossier will be proved wrong, but a number of Steele's major claims have been backed up by subsequent disclosures. She includes, as flat fact, his claim that the Kremlin and WikiLeaks were working together to release the DNC's emails, but provides no evidence. ..."
"... It was, of course, WikiLeaks that published the very damaging Democratic information, for example, on the DNC's dirty tricks that marginalized Sen. Bernie Sanders and ensured that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would win the Democratic nomination. What remained to be demonstrated was that it was "the Russians" who gave those emails to WikiLeaks. And that is what the U.S. intelligence community could not honestly say. ..."
Mar 07, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

'Progressive' Journalists Jump the Shark on Russiagate March 7, 2018

A lack of skepticism has characterized much of the reporting on Russiagate, with undue credibility being given to questionable sources like the Steele dossier, and now progressives like Jane Mayer and Cenk Uygur are joining the bandwagon, Ray McGovern observes.

By Ray McGovern

Russiagate reporting has increasingly taken on a tabloidish and sensationalist character.

Jane Mayer of The New Yorker and Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks are the latest progressives to jump on the anti-Trump, pro-Russiagate bandwagon. They have made it crystal clear that, in Mayer's words, they are not going to let Republicans, or anyone else, "take down the whole intelligence community," by God.

Odd? Nothing is too odd when it comes to spinning and dyeing the yarn of Russiagate; especially now that some strands are unraveling from the thin material of the "Steele dossier."

Before the 2016 election, British ex-spy Christopher Steele was contracted (through a couple of cutouts) by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee to dig up dirt on candidate Donald Trump. They paid him $168,000. They should ask for their money back.

Mayer and Uygur have now joined with other Trump-despisers and new "progressive" fans of the FBI and CIA – among them Amy Goodman and her go-to, lost-in-the-trees journalist, Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel.net. All of them (well, maybe not Cenk) are staying up nights with needle and thread trying to sew a silk purse out of the sow's-ear dossier of Steele allegations and then dye it red for danger.

Monday brought a new low, with a truly extraordinary one-two punch by Mayer and Uygur .

A Damning Picture?

Mayer does her part in a New Yorker article, in which she – intentionally or not – cannot seem to see the forest for the trees.

In her article, Mayer explains up front that the Steele dossier "painted a damning picture of collusion between Trump and Russia," and then goes on to portray him as a paragon of virtue with praise that is fulsome, in the full meaning of that word. For example, a friend of Steele told Mayer that regarding Steele, "Fairness, integrity, and truth, for him, trump any ideology."

Now, if one refuses to accept this portrait on faith, then you are what Mayer describes as a "Trump defender." According to Mayer, Trump defenders argue that Steele is "a dishonest Clinton apparatchik who had collaborated with American intelligence and law enforcement officials to fabricate false charges against Trump and his associates, in a dastardly (sic) attempt to nullify the 2016 election. According to this story line, it was not the President who needed to be investigated, but the investigators themselves."

Can you imagine!

I could not help but think that Mayer wrote her piece some months ago and that she and her editors might have missed more recent documentary evidence that gives considerable support to that "dastardly" story line. But seriously, it should be possible to suspect Steele of misfeasance or malfeasance – or simply telling his contractors what he knows they want to hear – without being labeled a "Trump supporter." I, for example, am no Trump supporter. I am, however, a former intelligence officer and I have long since concluded that what Steele served up is garbage.

Character References

Mayer reports that Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 from 1999 to 2004, described Steele as "superb." Personally, I would shun any "recommendation" from that charlatan. Are memories so short? Dearlove was the intelligence chief who briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on July 23, 2002 after a quick trip to Washington. The official minutes of that meeting were leaked to the London Times and published on May 1, 2005.

Dearlove explained to Blair that President George W. Bush had decided to attack Iraq for regime change and that the war was to be "justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction." Dearlove added matter-of-factly, "The intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy."

Another character reference Mayer gives for Steele is former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin (from 2000 to 2004) who, with his boss George Tenet, did the fixing of intelligence to "justify" the war on Iraq. State Department intelligence director at the time, Carl Ford, told the authors of "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War" that both McLaughlin and Tenet "should have been shot" for what they did.

And then there is CIA veteran spy John Sipher who, Mayer says, "ran the Agency's Russia program before retiring, in 2014." Sipher tells her he thinks the Steele dossier is "generally credible" in "saying what Russia might be up to." Sipher may be a good case officer but he has shown himself to be something of a cipher on substance.

Worse still, he displays a distinct inclination toward the remarkable view of former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who has said that Russians are "typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever." If Mayer wanted to find some ostensibly authoritative figure to endorse the kind of material in Steele's dossier, she surely picked a good one in Sipher.

Mayer notes, "It's too early to make a final judgment about how much of Steele's dossier will be proved wrong, but a number of Steele's major claims have been backed up by subsequent disclosures. She includes, as flat fact, his claim that the Kremlin and WikiLeaks were working together to release the DNC's emails, but provides no evidence.

Major Holes

Mayer, however, should know better. There have been lots of holes in the accusation that the Russians hacked the DNC and gave the material to WikiLeaks to publish. Here's one major gap we reported on Jan. 20, 2017: President Barack Obama told his last press conference on Jan. 18, that the U.S. intelligence community had no idea how the Democratic emails reached WikiLeaks.

Using lawyerly language, Obama admitted that "the conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC e-mails that were leaked."

It is necessary to carefully parse Obama's words since he prides himself in his oratorical constructs. He offered a similarly designed comment at a Dec. 16, 2016 press conference when he said: "based on uniform intelligence assessments, the Russians were responsible for hacking the DNC. the information was in the hands of WikiLeaks."

Note the disconnect between the confidence about hacking and the stark declarative sentence about the information ending up at WikiLeaks. Obama does not bridge the gap because to do so would be a bald-faced lie, which some honest intelligence officer might call him on. So, he simply presented the two sides of the chasm – implies a connection – but leaves it to the listener to make the leap.

It was, of course, WikiLeaks that published the very damaging Democratic information, for example, on the DNC's dirty tricks that marginalized Sen. Bernie Sanders and ensured that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would win the Democratic nomination. What remained to be demonstrated was that it was "the Russians" who gave those emails to WikiLeaks. And that is what the U.S. intelligence community could not honestly say.

Saying it now, without evidence, does not make it true.

Cenk Also in Sync

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks at once picked up , big time, on the part of Mayer's article that homes in on an "astonishing" report from Steele in late November 2016 quoting one "senior Russian official." According to that official, "The Kremlin had intervened to block Trump's initial choice for secretary of state, Mitt Romney." Steele's late November memo alleged that the Kremlin had asked Trump to appoint someone who would be prepared to lift Ukraine-related sanctions and cooperate on security issues like Syria.

Mayer commented, "As fantastical as the memo sounds, subsequent events could be said to support it." Fantastical or not, Uygur decided to run with it. His amazing 12-minute video is titled: "New Steele Dossier: Putin PICKED Trump's Secretary of State." Uygur asks: "Who does Tillerson work for; and that also goes for the President."

Return to Sanity

As an antidote to all the above, let me offer this cogent piece on the views of Joseph E. diGenova, who speaks out of his unique experience, including as Counsel to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Church Committee). The article is entitled: "The Politicization of the FBI."

"Over the past year," diGenova wrote, "facts have emerged that suggest there was a plot by high-ranking FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) officials in the Obama administration, acting under color of law, to exonerate Hillary Clinton of federal crimes and then, if she lost the election, to frame Donald Trump and his campaign for colluding with Russia to steal the presidency."

He pointed out that nearly half of Americans, according to a CBS poll, believe that Mueller's Trump-Russia collusion probe is "politically motivated." And, he noted, 63 percent of polled voters in a Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll believe that the FBI withheld vital information from Congress about the Clinton and Russia collusion investigations.

This skepticism is entirely warranted, as diGenova explains, with the Russiagate probe being characterized by overreach from the beginning.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served in Army and CIA intelligence analysis for 30 years and, after retiring, co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

[Mar 07, 2018] The disproportionate ongoing emphasis on the fake story that Russia meddled in the US election serves to stir up suspicions and fears regarding Russia in the generally brain-numbed population

Notable quotes:
"... The deep state (the oligarchs, MIC, and intelligence community, which controls the media and most politicians) whether or not it actually helped Trump by harming Hillary is immaterial. The election is over and there was never any real resolve in the deep state to impeach Trump or to jail Hillary and their never will be. The reason should be obvious. ..."
"... The only thing consistent in the Russian collusion and election rigging nonsense is the groundless and unrelenting vilification of Russia, blaming Putin for everything. Just as we see grandiose deep state theatrics for the US to obtain access to strategic rare-earth resources in North Korea, we see the similar deep state orchestrated theatrics falsely alleging that Russians rigged or interfered in the US Presidential election. Russia's Putin is the main obstacle to the Western bankster-corporate cabal obtaining resource and geopolitical hegemony over the entire planet. That is the main fact. It is the main reason to subject that nation to constant vilification, sanctions, and military aggression and provocation. ..."
"... The deep state cabal will likely spend tens, if not hundreds, of billions of US dollars interfering in the Russian election. Presently they are most likely bribing, blackmailing, and intimidating thousands of people to swing and rig the election to ensure Putin does not win. "You did it to us." Will be their justification when Putin complains. ..."
Mar 07, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

teolawki -> Joe Davola Wed, 03/07/2018 - 11:19 Permalink

Well of course there are. We've been told repeatedly that the Obama administration was on the job and focused like a laser on Russia collusion and meddling.

Unfortunately, the hard drive all that was stored on crashed and it was all lost.

FBaggins -> Joe Davola Wed, 03/07/2018 - 11:45 Permalink

If we really want the truth then we have to stop relying on what people say just because we like them, or we think they are on our side, and instead we have to examine the interests of the various sources. Only then we can make better decisions. At this stage of the game the deep state can no longer blame with any credibility Russian hacking as the source of the alleged leak. The know it came directly from the DNC. However, the deep state has a priority (a very strong interest) to keep the heat on Russia.

The deep state (the oligarchs, MIC, and intelligence community, which controls the media and most politicians) whether or not it actually helped Trump by harming Hillary is immaterial. The election is over and there was never any real resolve in the deep state to impeach Trump or to jail Hillary and their never will be. The reason should be obvious.

The only thing consistent in the Russian collusion and election rigging nonsense is the groundless and unrelenting vilification of Russia, blaming Putin for everything. Just as we see grandiose deep state theatrics for the US to obtain access to strategic rare-earth resources in North Korea, we see the similar deep state orchestrated theatrics falsely alleging that Russians rigged or interfered in the US Presidential election. Russia's Putin is the main obstacle to the Western bankster-corporate cabal obtaining resource and geopolitical hegemony over the entire planet. That is the main fact. It is the main reason to subject that nation to constant vilification, sanctions, and military aggression and provocation.

The disproportionate ongoing emphasis on the fake story that Russia meddled in the US election, not only serves to stir up suspicions and fears regarding Russia in the generally brain-numbed population, but mainly at this stage, and by the sheer fact that the deep state has carried this rouse so far down the field, the only rational conclusion one can make is that the deep state is going to interfere in the Russian elections in a very major way to ensure that Putin and his cronies - those wicked oil and gas nationalizers, those heinous enemies of the Rothschild banksters and their plans for an expanded US Fed to the auspices of their proposed One World Bank; those upstart renegades who support nations which choose to trade oil without US petrodollars; those evil monsters who oppose globalism and defend their own nation's sovereignty and other nations like Syria which call for help.

The deep state cabal will likely spend tens, if not hundreds, of billions of US dollars interfering in the Russian election. Presently they are most likely bribing, blackmailing, and intimidating thousands of people to swing and rig the election to ensure Putin does not win. "You did it to us." Will be their justification when Putin complains.

Good luck Vlad and F the deep state.

[Mar 07, 2018] We might well ask why DNC was funding "opposition research" that they could not use.

Notable quotes:
"... For someone who is such an outsider, Trump has a knack for stroking the establishment. Droning and occupying Syria, sword dancing, moving US embassy to Jerusalem, more tax cuts, upping military spending, drill baby drill, etc. ..."
"... Also consider these made-for-tv moments: ..."
"... Bloomberg's hysterical reaction in Jan 2016 at the prospect of a Sanders or Trump win; ..."
"... Schumer's snide remark about the intel agencies: "they have a way of getting back at you"; ..."
Mar 07, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Mar 7, 2018 2:12:40 AM | 69

We might well ask why DNC was funding "opposition research" that they could not use.

Hillary's own embarrassing connections to Russia via Uranium One made it difficult, if not impossible, for her campaign to question Trump's connection to Russia (if any such connection was found).

it is reasonable to conclude that the "opposition research" was actually an 'insurance policy' to ensure that Trump did as he was told after he was elected President.

Jackrabbit , Mar 7, 2018 12:47:57 AM | 65
ben

Problem with "opposition research" thing is that Russian influence was not made an issue in the election.

Why?

Some might say that Hillary didn't need to raise the issue because she was in the lead. Yeah, what politician pulls punches like that? The race had already turned ugly with both Democrats bringing forth women that claimed to have been sexually abused by Trump and Trump accusing Bill Clinton of sexual malfeasance.

Some might say that making such accusations would be irresponsible because they weren't proven. Since when does a US politician shy away from innuendo?

Interestingly, Obama also faced questions about his loyalty to the country. In fact, Trump was one of leaders of the "birthers" that questioned Obama's qualification to be President and, by extension, his loyalty to America. Criticism of Obama as a "socialist Muslim" by parts of the right nearly reached "meme" status.

As Trump pointed out during the campaign, it was Hillary that first questioned (obliquely) if Obama was qualified to be President. And it was her loyal friend Trump that ran with that ball on her behalf.

Jackrabbit , Mar 7, 2018 12:02:30 AM | 62
Don,

For someone who is such an outsider, Trump has a knack for stroking the establishment. Droning and occupying Syria, sword dancing, moving US embassy to Jerusalem, more tax cuts, upping military spending, drill baby drill, etc.

Trump once boasted that he could kill some one in Times Square and get away with it. Why would he say such a thing? It's the kind of think that a "made man" might say.

Also consider these made-for-tv moments:

>> Bloomberg's hysterical reaction in Jan 2016 at the prospect of a Sanders or Trump win;

>> Schumer's snide remark about the intel agencies: "they have a way of getting back at you";

>> Hillary wins 6 out of 6 coin tosses in Iowa primaries;

>> Bill Clinton's meeting on the tarmac just happen to be caught by a journalist?

>> Hillary's being dragged into a van among rumors of ill health just happen to be caught by an amateur photographer;

>> the father of a the guy that shot up a Florida night club shows up at one of her campaign events - sitting in a highly visible spot behind the podium;

>> and who could forget: "Wiped? like with a cloth?"

Innocent mistakes? Or best government (entertainment) money can buy?

[Mar 07, 2018] DNC Hack Involved Russian Agents Within The Democratic Party : Unreleased Steele Memo

Notable quotes:
"... It wasn't a "Hack." It was a LEAK. And, his name was #SethRich. Control the Language, Control the Narratives. ..."
"... Seth Rich was a Russian agent? Does that mean we can investigate his murder now? Somebody call that British Boris to throw a hissyfit, and maybe JUST MAYBE we can take a second look... ..."
"... DID they find SETH's Russian Passport Yet ? ? ? ..."
"... Hmm.....Friend of Panda....Fancy Bear....it's all starting to MAKE SENSE .....not..... The Obama and Clinton (and McCain) dorks botched a coup attempt, have the world's sloppiest coverup underway, and they will pay. ..."
"... Mueller would indict a bowl of borscht soup. Nevermind that British MI6 spy, Christopher Steele, hacked the US Election. Nevermind that DNC email leaker Seth Rich was asassinated by British MI6 spies. Nevermind that Assange is held captive by British MI6 spies. ..."
"... And why is ANYONE listening to this lying SOB Steele? Man the media disgusts me in this country. I wish I could find a way to consume less of their product, but I already have no TV, turn off the radio news in a heartbeat when I hear it come on, and visit none of their websites. ..."
Mar 07, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden Wed, 03/07/2018 - 14:55 434 SHARES

Shortly after WikiLeaks released emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on July 26, 2016, former UK spy Christopher Steele filed a memo with his employer, Fusion GPS, claiming that the DNC "hack" during the 2016 election involved Russian agents "within the Democratic Party structure itself ," The New Yorker reports.

On July 26, 2016, after WikiLeaks disseminated the D.N.C. e-mails, Steele filed yet another memo, this time claiming that the Kremlin was "behind" the hacking, which was part of a Russian cyber war against Hillary Clinton's campaign. Many of the details seemed far-fetched: Steele's sources claimed that the digital attack involved agents "within the Democratic Party structure itself," as well as Russian émigrés in the U.S. and "associated offensive cyber operators."

The unverified claim was contained within a multitude of memos compiled by Steele on behalf of Fusion GPS, which was conducting opposition research on then-candidate Donald Trump for Hillary Clinton and the DNC.

Of note, the 35-page "Trump-Russia" dossier used in part by the FBI to obtain a FISA warrant on one-time Trump campaign advisor Carter Page was comprised of seventeen of Steele's memos - including one which alleged that Trump had paid "a number of prostitutes to perform a 'golden showers' (urination) show in front of him," which would defile a bed that Barack and Michelle Obama had slept in during a state visit - an allegation attributed to four individuals' second-hand reporting.

The shocking claim comes amid recent reports that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is preparing criminal charges against Russian hackers allegedly behind the breaches of both the DNC and John Podesta's email.

NBC News reports:

Much like the indictment Mueller filed last month charging a different group of Russians in a social media trolling and illegal-ad-buying scheme, the possible new charges are expected to rely heavily on secret intelligence gathered by the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), several of the officials say. [ ] Mueller's consideration of charges accusing Russians in the hacking case has not been reported previously . Sources say he has long had sufficient evidence to make a case, but strategic issues could dictate the timing. Potential charges include violations of statutes on conspiracy, election law as well as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

The sources say the possible new indictment -- or more than one, if that's how Mueller's office decides to proceed -- would delve into the details of, and the people behind, the Russian intelligence operation that used hackers to penetrate computer networks and steal emails of both the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

Meanwhile, as we have been reporting, Mueller has yet to even reach out to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, or New Zealand entrepreneur Kim Dotcom - who clearly knew of the upcoming email leaks before they were dropped. While Assange has heavily insinuated it was DNC staffer Seth Rich, Dotcom has gone "all in" over the last few months - tweeting that he knows Seth Rich was Wikileaks' source, Rich used a memory stick, and that Dotcom himself was involved.

me title=

me title=

As Josh Caplan of TGP notes, In Donna Brazile's book, "Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House," the Democrat operative admits the DNC allowed alleged Russian hackers to steal data from the party's servers. From the Daily Caller :

Donna Brazile says in her new book the Democratic National Committee (DNC) went against professional advice and sat idly for a month while Russians stole data because primaries were still underway in a number of states.

In May, when CrowdStrike recommended that we take down our system and rebuild it, the DNC told them to wait a month, because the state primaries for the presidential election were still underway , and the party and the staff needed to be at their computers to manage these efforts," Brazile wrote in her new book , " Hacks ."

"For a whole month, CrowdStrike watched Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear operating. Cozy Bear was the hacking force that had been in the DNC system for nearly a year."

Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear are cybersecurity firms that have reported ties with Russian hackers. Both groups are blamed for the hacks on the DNC in 2016. CrowdStrike is a private U.S. cybersecurity firm that oversaw the protection of the DNC's servers.

Nothing to see here folks - just Trump's enemies using Steele's unverified memos with info from high level Kremlin officials when it benefits them, while ignoring the ones which suggest "insiders" was involved in the DNC hack. Tags Politics Entertainment Production - NEC Application Software


Chupacabra-322 Wed, 03/07/2018 - 09:28 Permalink

It wasn't a "Hack." It was a LEAK. And, his name was #SethRich. Control the Language, Control the Narratives.

Killtruck -> Chupacabra-322 Wed, 03/07/2018 - 09:28 Permalink

Seth Rich was a Russian agent? Does that mean we can investigate his murder now? Somebody call that British Boris to throw a hissyfit, and maybe JUST MAYBE we can take a second look...

BaBaBouy -> AlaricBalth Wed, 03/07/2018 - 09:33 Permalink

DID they find SETH's Russian Passport Yet ? ? ?

Jim in MN -> BaBaBouy Wed, 03/07/2018 - 10:01 Permalink

Hmm.....Friend of Panda....Fancy Bear....it's all starting to MAKE SENSE .....not..... The Obama and Clinton (and McCain) dorks botched a coup attempt, have the world's sloppiest coverup underway, and they will pay.

HenryKissinger -> Jim in MN Wed, 03/07/2018 - 10:04 Permalink

Seth Rich was RUSSIAN? because Kim Dotcom was German until he had to hide from the USA.

???ö? -> HenryKissinger Wed, 03/07/2018 - 10:27 Permalink

Mueller would indict a bowl of borscht soup. Nevermind that British MI6 spy, Christopher Steele, hacked the US Election. Nevermind that DNC email leaker Seth Rich was asassinated by British MI6 spies. Nevermind that Assange is held captive by British MI6 spies.

pods -> ???ö? Wed, 03/07/2018 - 10:35 Permalink

I am sooooo tired of this Russian hacking, collusion, meddling bullshit. They are just not going to stop until we are trading missiles with Russia. Then they will say that they were right all along, when in fact they started the damn thing.

And why is ANYONE listening to this lying SOB Steele? Man the media disgusts me in this country. I wish I could find a way to consume less of their product, but I already have no TV, turn off the radio news in a heartbeat when I hear it come on, and visit none of their websites.

pods

[Mar 07, 2018] Neo-McCarthyism in the USA leads to growing distrust toward neoliberals and compradors in Russia

Mar 07, 2018 | www.unz.com

likbez , March 7, 2018 at 5:03 am GMT

@peterAUS

Peter,

that's not exactly what I've been saying and what concerns me. That's the easy, nice option. There is only one, very little snag there. TRUST.

That's an astute observation, but it cuts both ways. You also need to take into account the level of Neo-McCarthyism in the USA and resulting growing distrust toward neoliberals and compradors in Russia. Despite efforts of Putin personally and Putin administration (Lavrov, Medvedev) to suppression growing anti-Americanism, soon Russian people might start throwing eggs at neoliberals/comparadors rallies. Look at the travails of the elite prostitute who is the most neoliberal and pro-Western candidate for Presidents in the current race:

https://sputniknews.com/russia-elections-2018-news/201803041062213741-sobchak-zhirinovsky-water/

Add to that a distinct desire by the "Collective West" to expropriate Russian oligarchs holdings during the next six years of Putin rule (which they now probably understand, or at least start to understand after the most recent "blacklist"). That creates some links with the motherland even for the most cosmopolitan Russian bankers

pogohere , Website March 7, 2018 at 5:07 am GMT
@NoseytheDuke

$21 trillion of unauthorized spending by US govt discovered by economics professor
Published time: 16 Dec, 2017
[MORE]

The US government may have misspent $21 trillion, a professor at Michigan State University has found. Papers supporting the study briefly went missing just as an audit was announced.

Two departments of the US federal government may have spent as much as $21 trillion on things they can't account for between 1998 and 2015. At least that's what Mark Skidmore, a Professor of Economics at MSU specializing in public finance, and his team have found.

They came up with the figure after digging the websites of departments of Defense (DoD) and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as well as repots of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) over summer.

The research was triggered by Skidmore hearing Catherine Austin Fitts, a former Assistant Secretary in the HUD in the first Bush administration, saying the Inspector General found $6.5 trillion worth of military spending that the DoD couldn't account for. She was referring to a July 2016 report by the OIG, but Skidmore thought she must be mistaking billion for trillion. Based on his previous experience with public finances, he thought the figure was too big even for an organization as large as the US military.

"Sometimes you have an adjustment just because you don't have adequate transactions so an auditor would just recede. Usually it's just a small portion of authorized spending, maybe one percent at most. So for the Army one percent would be $1.2 billion of transactions that you just can't account for," he explained in an interview with USAWatchdog.com earlier this month.

After discovering that the figure was accurate, he and Fitts collaborated with a pair of graduate students to comb through thousands of reports of the OIG dating back to 1998, when new rules of public accountability for the federal government were set and all the way to 2015, the time of the latest reports available at the time. The research was only for the DoD and the HUD.

"This is incomplete, but we have found $21 trillion in adjustments over that period. The biggest chunk is for the Army. We were able to find 13 of the 17 years and we found about $11.5 trillion just for the Army," Skidmore said.

https://www.rt.com/usa/413411-trillions-dollars-missing-research/

josealamia , March 7, 2018 at 5:43 am GMT
@Regnum Nostrum

I think Americans might be able to get along just fine without the USA?
If the USA wants to threaten or mute those who offer an opinion?

As stupid as Americans are said to be,
they do feel the pains of fake news, loss of freedom of speech,
spying, corporate dominance, and corrupt in purpose leadership?

Erebus , March 7, 2018 at 6:06 am GMT
@peterAUS

Another possibility is that even the best technology can't compensate for human factor.
From the crew being overworked, untrained to being on drugs. Or vodka. Pick the one more likely.

Perhaps you've seen the article linked below.
Some excerpts from the summation follow:

"Russia appears to have won at least a partial victory in Syria, and done so with impressive efficiency, flexibility, and coordination between military and political action."

" Russia's "lean" strategy, adaptable tactics, and coordination of military and diplomatic initiatives offer important lessons for the conduct of any military intervention in as complex and volatile an environment as the Middle East."

" Washington should pay close attention to the Russian intervention and how Moscow achieved its objectives in Syria."

Leaving the requisite downplaying of what happened in Syria ("partial victory"?, really?) aside, the authors seem a little envious, frankly.

Your points are of course valid, but the Russians seem to have answered those calls and a few others besides, at least in the Syrian theatre. One can expect a similar or better performance in any conflict involving Russian soil, especially as only the creme de la creme of missile crews would be assigned to game changing weaponry.

Putin's announcement represents a massive FAIL on the part of a $1T's worth of intelligence agencies, military think tanks, political analysts and military planners who collectively didn't see it coming . They're all now in either panic, the foundation of America's geo-political goals utterly undermined, or in denial.
Denial is winning, so their next big FAIL is already underway. Heads aren't rolling. The Pentagon thinks it can save the day by doubling down and demanding more of the useless crap they've got now. We can expect the CIA et al will roll out even more failing propaganda and politically destabilizing activity to continue trying their hand at regime change. Even the Afghans are on to them, so good luck with that.

The US simply must internalize the strategic significance of these developments, and change everything about their postures and behaviours in the world. There's little sign of that happening, Mad Dogs can't learn new tricks, so we're sailing into very treacherous waters indeed.

http://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/March-April-2018/Rojansky-Victory-for-Russia/

David Archibald , March 7, 2018 at 7:46 am GMT
The Deep State, also known as the Swamp, holds Trump in contempt because he put Deep State people into so many positions. The Secretary of the Air Force is a Lockheed agent – she took in $600k from Lockheed while she was a politician. Mattis is in favour of trannies in the military – 50% suicide rate and $100k a pop. Tillerson was in favour of the Paris climate treaty, so was Mattis. There are signs that reality is sinking in though – putting Trophy systems on M1 tanks for example. The increase in the bomb production rate is a sign that it is not business as usual. A much larger warstock is necessary for the coming conflict with China. Nobody in the system has the guts to end the F-35. Mattis, for all his bravado, is just a political creature.

One thing that struck me about Putin's speech on the new missile systems is that he understood the technical detail of how the things worked to the extent of having a genuine personal interest in knowing such stuff. Corruption and the Russian mafia are still Russia's biggest problem but I see that Russian wheat production is finally increasing near 20 years after the fall of communism.

SteveRogers42 , March 7, 2018 at 9:54 am GMT
Mr. Martyanov -- Does the ECM/EMP capability that the USS Donald Cook allegedly ran into in the Black Sea enter into these deliberations at all?
TT , March 7, 2018 at 10:54 am GMT
@pogohere

These was reported some time ago. Pentagon needs another 911 to remove all evidents that they did after 5+Trillions unknown usage was discovered.

Tip of iceberg how many trillions US is printing from air for its lavish unproductive lives & endless wars over last many decades unreported. The world having their foreign reserves tied by IMF to 5 currencies, is picking up the tabs of US, EU, Japan & UK free currency printing QE to artificially prop up their collapsing economy based on stupid theory of growth by borrowing.

These countries run on deficit(except jp with high export & artificial low ex-ch rate), high debts, high salary, high property price, overspending with budget deficit, and financial banking scams to prop up high Nominal GDP.

When music stop, someone will miss the seat.

China & Russia know, they stored up time proven gold reserve, & Petrol Yuan started. When China replaced Petrol $ with yuan, slash its 3T US treasury reserve, the music stop.

TT , March 7, 2018 at 11:05 am GMT
@David Archibald

I see that Russian wheat production is finally increasing near 20 years after the fall of communism.

Food commodity price is controlled by big oligarchs. West has big subsidy to artificially lowered their cost/ export price in name of food security, to the tune that all subsidies are enough to feed all hungries on earth. But its aim to destroy developing countries agri sector. Latin America was hit badly in past that agri no longer sustainable, when land bcom barren, capitalist swoop in to buy land dirt cheap.

China & Russia aren't stupid to let West control their food chain, but they imported these subsidized food without ruin own agri ability, esp for animal feeds. When sanction started, Putin simply activated its standby agri program. When trade war start, China will do the same, already its probing US sorghum subsidy.

TT , March 7, 2018 at 12:02 pm GMT
@likbez

Looks like in order to make such a statement Putin should have intelligence information about a real threat of attack from the USA, or some large scale provocation in Syria or Ukraine. Only in this case his statement makes some sense. As a open warning: do not do it.

Look at the keyword, allies. Putin emphasized, if Russia or its allies are attacked .. so its Syria potential hyper escalation, Ukraine brewing collision with new lethal weapons, to some lesser extent, Iran & Venezuela with Russia high investment.

12. China has less than 300 nuclear weapons and still is regarded as a formidable nuclear power, probably spending 20 times less money in this area.

China might have to do something similar to Putin later just to ensure US won't took the wrong calculated risk to do something stupid. However China style is always keep secretive of its killer weapon that worry US most. Its said in every Wargaming, whenever Red team losing to Blue, they launch China Murderer Mace(Trump card), then everything end in Red favour.

In another topic, some said China has est 400 nukes, with only 20~40 that can reach US which might tempted US to believe it could survive an exchange. So a large upgrade is necessary. Anyone got better idea?

In last year during South China Seas confrontation, China actually sent out all its navy to conduct live exercise till eve of fake Hague court judgement, with nuclear subs in high profile despatched to US Guam & Indian ocean bases(where their nuclear bombers station). Two strike groups that with its Adm Harry threaten war start tonight, were reportedly hiding in East Philippine Seas to get out of H6k bomber missiles(aircraft carrier killer) range.

WH panick of real war escalation, Obama sent its top general to China, with NSA advisor Rice also visited Xi to resolve. This shows US isn't ready for a military clash with nuke China, with much lesser warheads than Russia.

TT , March 7, 2018 at 12:32 pm GMT
@Carlton Meyer

The new $14 billion USS Ford aircraft carrier has a launch system that cannot be fixed because it never worked. It remains an experimental system that after 20 years of development is not ready for use, and may never be. Replacing it with a proven steam system will cost over $5 billion.

EMALS works! Carrier Ford completes first flight operations
By: Mark D. Faram   July 29, 2017

https://www.defensenews.com/news/2017/07/29/emals-works-carrier-ford-completes-first-flight-operations/

China took a short time to develop, and a much better medium power EMALS running on non nuclear powered a/c.

China claims breakthrough in electromagnetic launch system for aircraft carrier
By: Mike Yeo   November 9, 2017

https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2017/11/09/tech-breakthrough-chinas-next-carrier-could-feature-electromagnetic-launch-system/

Construction of the third carrier is expected to start next year and will use electromagnetic launch rather than steam-powered catapults. The carrier is expected to have 80,000 ton displacement which would put it in the super carrier class.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/11/china-starting-construction-of-superaircarrier-with-electromagnetic-launch-but-using-older-heavier-fighter-jets.html/amp

China was confident about its EMALS technology now that it was able to produce its own insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) chips, a key component of the high-efficiency electric energy conversion systems used in variable-speed drives, trains, electric and hybrid electric vehicles, power grids and renewable energy plants.

Andrei Martyanov , Website March 7, 2018 at 1:51 pm GMT
@pogohere

Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism

All things described like "realism", "order" and references to Napoleon is all contrived pseudo-academic bunk. In the end another "great" strategic minds such as neocons wrote (Kagan's cabal) what is touted as the "best" history pf Peloponnese Wars. And look where this "academic brilliance" based on those ideas brought the United States and the world to. American elites of the 20th and 21st Century, with some minor exceptions, have no grasp of the nature of the military force (power) and how it applies. None and this can not be fixed. It is also a tragedy for many, including the US itself.

Andrei Martyanov , Website March 7, 2018 at 2:00 pm GMT
@SteveRogers42

Mr. Martyanov -- Does the ECM/EMP capability that the USS Donald Cook allegedly ran into in the Black Sea enter into these deliberations at all?

No. Russia does have the best EW capabilities in the world–the fact admitted even by US military's top brass, but USS Donald Cook's alleged "shutting down" of her radar by SU-24 never happened. It is all, hm, as strange as it sounds, Russian amateurs' and fanboys' propaganda. SU-24 is not capable to "shut down" anything on a ship with energy capacity of Arleigh Burke-class DDG. Two different weight categories. Most likely SU-24 simply put out what is known as pomehi (interference) which may have created multiple targets picture–this is possible. It is still very unpleasant and unnerving situation but nothing as dramatic as what became now a consistent and false meme.

Dragon , March 7, 2018 at 3:53 pm GMT
@yurivku

and I'm just guessing, but for the same reasons successful anti-laser techniques could be devised once that becomes a reality (even in clear day conditions)

Y.L. , March 7, 2018 at 4:53 pm GMT
@Andrei Martyanov

Andrei, I don't know if you're still reading comments on this thread, but ZeroHedge posted confirming what you wrote, yet somehow analysts are still dismissive. Still to quote you "butt hurt."

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-06/putins-hypersonic-rocket-revealed-be-modified-iskander-ballistic-missile

Quote: "From a national security perspective, Putin's claims of hypersonic weapons should not be underestimated but should be analyzed in an attempt to parse fact from fiction.

"The team of analysts at The Drive precisely did that, and made several conclusions: In particular, one of the weapons Putin mentioned in his speech was an air-launched hypersonic anti-ship missile launched from a Mikoyan MiG-31 Foxhound. Upon closer examination, the Drive team found the hypersonic weapon closely resembles the Iskander short-range ballistic missile."

End quotation.

I wonder if Putin will deploy the laser system to Syria, now that America is making threats.

"A potential decision by Washington to take new military actions against Damascus would mark the second US strike on Syria in less than a year."

https://sputniknews.com/us/201803071062309965-us-considering-attack-syria/

5371 , March 7, 2018 at 4:59 pm GMT
@Andrei Martyanov

The elder Kagan's Peloponnesian war history is actually instructive from a neocon point of view. He identifies with the Athenian side, and with the most belligerent Athenian politicians, so completely that he shows not the least understanding of why the other side, or neutrals, or less aggressive Athenian politicians acted as they did. So although he uses a respectable scholarly apparatus, he has no conception of how history should be written.

Y.L. , March 7, 2018 at 5:19 pm GMT
@Andrei Martyanov

Thanks for the reply but my point primarily is that the A.Z. (to quote The Saker) Empire is doubling down. Its attitude is still "what're you gonna do about it" and the recent news indicates they're pushing in Syria.

A nuclear strike from Russia that kills 99% of the population doesn't bother them in the slightest. Or they think Putin is bluffing.

My concern is about the plane crash in Syria: why were so many pilots (allegedly) on board and thus so vulnerable. Not that it's necessarily true that the "Deep State" caused this.

https://sputniknews.com/world/201803071062295024-russia-syria-an-26-crash/

The self-confessed military analysts "Q" with millions of followers states, incidentally, that CIA caused the recent jetliner crash to kill Rosatom executives and scientists. I don't trust him. He says Snowden now is in China; was CIA all along and was deliberately sent to Russia for mischief making.

https://qanonposts.com/

Finally, if you have any idea about my hypothesis discussed with F.B. above whether the glider manipulates plasma using electric fields and a small on-board nuclear reactor or just uses an undiscovered and unknown to America composite. But from what F.B. wrote we have no how idea how it would work, hence the skepticism by the fake experts.

I hope you can comment since you're the expert and can separate truth from the bullshit.

Putin's character makes me think he doesn't bluff. Western politicians are such liars they don't believe Putin tells the truth.

Quaint , March 7, 2018 at 5:31 pm GMT
@Russia is the best

I don't think they are "shell shocked", that implies they understand what happened.

peterAUS , March 7, 2018 at 5:36 pm GMT
@Erebus

Your points are of course valid, but the Russians seem to have answered those calls and a few others besides, at least in the Syrian theatre. One can expect a similar or better performance in any conflict involving Russian soil,

Agree.
Keywords "Syria" and "similar".

How about:
A new flareup in Novorossya->in, say, 3 months of "engagement" that part of Ukraine starts looking as parts of Syria now.
An ethnic unrest in one of remote regions->reaction by the Kremlin->that part of RF starts looking as parts of Syria now.

So, based on that, this

.the foundation of America's geo-political goals utterly undermined, or in denial.

and

They're all now in either panic, the foundation of America's geo-political goals utterly undermined, or in denial

sounds .wrong?

Perhaps those advising Kremlin are in denial?

So, related to

We can expect the CIA et al will roll out even more failing propaganda and politically destabilizing activity to continue trying their hand at regime change.

how about:
We can expect the Kremlin et al will roll out even more failing propaganda and internal politically destabilizing activity to continue trying their hand against The Empire.

Just a thought.

peterAUS , March 7, 2018 at 5:41 pm GMT
@Y.L.

Or they think Putin is bluffing.

They do.

My concern is about the plane crash in Syria: why were so many pilots (allegedly) on board and thus so vulnerable.

Systemic failure. Somewhere between acquiring spare parts, through maintenance and general processes and procedures to, last, but not least .vodka.
More to come in coming months.

Andrei Martyanov , Website March 7, 2018 at 5:49 pm GMT
@5371

So although he uses a respectable scholarly apparatus, he has no conception of how history should be written.

True, but to add insult to injury neocons generally do not know actual military history–one is bound to fail to know it when they are in the business of erasing causalities, rather than finding them. That is why they suck as strategists, have a very vague understanding of operational and tactical issues and, of course, none of them understands serious military-technological problems. Just to reiterate my point–they have no idea what warfare is.

Andrei Martyanov , Website March 7, 2018 at 5:52 pm GMT
@Y.L.

The team of analysts at The Drive precisely did that

Each time I hear (read) about some "team of analysts" and Russia in the same sentence I am getting a sour taste in my mouth.

I wonder if Putin will deploy the laser system to Syria, now that America is making threats.

No. Why?

Avery , March 7, 2018 at 6:09 pm GMT
@5371

{ ., he has no conception of how history should be written.}

I think he does, so do his ilk.

They mind-bend history to fit their narrative, to confuse the multitudes into seeing the world through their Neocon lens. Part and parcel of the full spectrum disinformation/propaganda/brainwashing campaign. History (books & movies), "news", analysis, commercials, nothing is off the table.

pogohere , Website March 7, 2018 at 6:20 pm GMT
@Andrei Martyanov

"All things described like "realism", "order" and references to Napoleon is all contrived pseudo-academic bunk. "

Russia intends to relate to its adversaries from a position of strength. That is consistent with what Kissinger believes. Putin still meets with him on occasion. See http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/world/europe/henry-kissinger-to-meet-with-vladimir-putin-in-russia.html , https://www.rt.com/news/331194-putin-meets-friend-kissinger/ and https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/trump-kissinger-russia-putin-232925 . That was why I posted that excerpt from Kaplan's review.

No need to discuss Kaplan et al nor his work. I am aware of who he is.

Y.L. , March 7, 2018 at 6:23 pm GMT
@Andrei Martyanov

I am assuming the laser is state-of-the-art anti-missile defense: better chance of shooting down Patriot missiles and making a point if another attack comes and prove the system exists and he's not a liar. A real field test.

I am saddened, incidentally, by the death of so many brave Russian personnel in the plane crash, which I notice you didn't remark upon. If it was an accident, I am sure the callous Americans are saying, "See, they kill themselves, we don't have to bother trying" unless there was duplicity involved and not just a gross failure due to negligence, etc.

I assume also that there is no evidence CIA (or Mossad) did target Rosatom executives in the jet liner crash or Russia would not want that to get out, clear act of war.

Of course, sadly, American Deep State is at war with Russia. They just use duplicity and proxies and it's too bad since we could have been friends and not enemies. So many voted for Trump hoping for the best.

American Deep State won't change (neocons) until they get a bloody nose. Not sure when or if that will ever happen.

Harold Smith , March 7, 2018 at 6:25 pm GMT
The thing with "neocons" is that they're pathological liars and narcissists. And the first victims of their dishonesty are themselves. In fact even describing them as "liars" who've deceived themselves is being generous. To put it another way, they've created a false reality for themselves. Actual facts and reasoned arguments, especially any kind of moral reasoning, bounce off such creatures like bullets bounce off Superman.
kemerd , March 7, 2018 at 6:25 pm GMT
@peterAUS

My contention is that the factions are not so clear cut and most people that matters can switch sides. That is why I think, the compradors will eventually win if a sweeping cleaning is not done as such a setup is open to external manipulation for tipping the balance on one side.

Currently, the wind is blowing from the side of patriots so many people that are influential position themselves on this side. But as said before, a patriot billionaire is an oxymoron and they would switch sides when they feel themselves or their wealth are threatened. That is why the military-security bureaucracy that spearheads the Russian nationalist faction will eventually have to make a choice if they want to sustain their power: either clean them up or try to juggle a a difficult balancing act while also not completely alienating western elites. In my view, this cannot be done. But, since the difference among them is not day and night for many an reverse transition of power in a similar manner like the smooth transition from Yeltsin to Putin is most likely.

[Mar 07, 2018] Russia this and Russia that. It's a circus. It's a spectacle. Nothing more. US has one party: the war party. US has one establishment that wants MOAR.

Notable quotes:
"... How is Trump different from Hillary? Here's how: Trump is MUCH better at playing the crowd. He is a MUCH better faux populist and distractor. Please take note: The left hates Trump for being a playboy and colluding with Russia!! Real issues like inequality and militarism are back page material. ..."
"... It's all political games now. One side promises too much, the other side corrects that, then goes overboard themselves. This back and forth APPEARS to rock the boat but no one of any importance ever falls out. Only the occasional wildcard - like Assange and Putin - give the establishment pause. ..."
Mar 07, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Russia this and Russia that. It's a circus. It's a spectacle. Nothing more. US has one party: the war party. US has one establishment that wants MOAR.

Why did Al Gore choose not to fight for the Presidency? Why did "liberal lion" Ted Kennedy throw his support to Obama, the sneaky warmongering neoliberal? Why did Sanders not walk away from the Democratic Party when it became clear that they conspired with the Hillary campaign?

How is Trump different from Hillary? Here's how: Trump is MUCH better at playing the crowd. He is a MUCH better faux populist and distractor. Please take note: The left hates Trump for being a playboy and colluding with Russia!! Real issues like inequality and militarism are back page material.

It's all political games now. One side promises too much, the other side corrects that, then goes overboard themselves. This back and forth APPEARS to rock the boat but no one of any importance ever falls out. Only the occasional wildcard - like Assange and Putin - give the establishment pause.

Posted by: Jackrabbit | Mar 6, 2018 9:50:13 PM | 57

[Mar 07, 2018] Russiagate also serves as a massive distraction from many vile things being done such as a war against Yemen, illegal US occupation of Syria; ongoing war in Ukraine

Notable quotes:
"... Frankly; I'm so bloody fed up with this whole narrative; I don't care if it's true or not! What difference does it make? Russia, Russia, Russia; bloody hell; get over it! It's a massive distraction from many other vile things being done; war against Yemen; illegal US occupation of Syria; ongoing war in Ukraine; massive violations of the US constitution within the borders of the continental US; militarized police violence against US citizens; the list goes on ad infinitum... ..."
"... I'm shocked! Mayer has a stellar reputation, but this piece is riddled with errors and misinformation. Are they all sellouts in the MSM???? ..."
"... The term "presstitute" which is used for attacking pro-establishment media shills comes to mind. Formerly respectable outlets such as the New Yorker and their writer, Jane Mayer, have gone over into war crimes by in effect fomenting a new cold war based on falsehoods, similar to what the postwar less corrupt yankee imperium considered war crimes in the four power Nuremberg trial which convicted the editor of Der Stuermer, a Nazi sheet, on that basis. ..."
"... The reason why this whole Russiagate seems to go beyond the usual partisan tit-for-tat when it comes to the executive branch (Kenneth Star v. Clinton, Birthers v. Hussein-Obama, liberal-educated dems v. A fundamentalist-protestant dumbass W. Bush), is the absolute certainty which the MSM, the dems, and neocons spew their Russophobic spittle onto anyone that happens to be listening; meanwhile dragging Trump through the mud. The usual partisan coverage of prior executive branches were more evenhanded by news outlets (it resembled news). The current atmosphere resembles pure propaganda and smacks of utter desperation and globalist panic. ..."
"... The New Yorker refused to allow Sy Hersh to publish "The Red Line and the Rat Line", about the covert US effort to transfer weapons from Libya to Syrian jihadist groups, so he had to go to the London Review of Books. At that point it became clear the New Yorker had gone over into partisan pro-government propaganda publishing. ..."
"... These days the corporate media will often start a story with a lie. They think it's funny or something ..."
"... Mayer is no Judith Miller, but if it's not "selling out", she may be suffering from a case of incipient Judith Miller Syndrome. ..."
"... This New Yorker disinfomation piece is most likely not exclusively Ms Mayer's doing alone. David Remnick (NYer Publisher & Ms. Mayers boss) is a full fledged participant in the MSM'S ongoing 'Russian Collusion' narrative. ..."
"... Remnick is a full fledged supporter of our oligarchical, neocon establishment that's hell bent on establishing a US/Israel centered global hegemony since the break-up of the Soviet Union. ..."
"... So, we have yet another fraud promoting the initial fraud as Big Lie Nation manufactures and exports its #1 commodity. Those of us knowing Russiagate's yet another Big Lie ought to be shocked by the further digging of this massive excavation that can no longer be called a deep hole but aren't because the desperation's become all too predictable. The exceptional witch is melting live in living color! ..."
"... The Slate is another publication that wants to go to war with Russia, 'Why are we letting the Russians get away with it' ... https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/03/why-is-america-letting-russia-get-away-with-meddling-in-our-democracy.html What does Fred Kaplan want to do? Oh nothing crazy, just cyber espionage on the order of Stuxnet, or at least outing Putin's secret foreign bank accounts (or pilfering them). ..."
Mar 07, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

V. Arnold , Mar 6, 2018 7:46:39 AM | 7

Frankly; I'm so bloody fed up with this whole narrative; I don't care if it's true or not! What difference does it make? Russia, Russia, Russia; bloody hell; get over it! It's a massive distraction from many other vile things being done; war against Yemen; illegal US occupation of Syria; ongoing war in Ukraine; massive violations of the US constitution within the borders of the continental US; militarized police violence against US citizens; the list goes on ad infinitum...

Ya'all just seem immune and apathetic...

Hoarsewhisperer , Mar 6, 2018 8:37:39 AM | 10
Will The Swamp's vassals ever stop behaving like spiteful 10-year-olds?
Don Bacon , Mar 6, 2018 9:02:32 AM | 12
CNN had another lengthy special report on alleged Trump-Russia collusion over the weekend. Remember CNN was the lead-dog on the dossier with its release of the dossier fake news on Jan 10, 2017, just ten days before the Trump inauguration. But also remember what a CNN producer said last summer about Trump-Russia collusion: " Could be bullshit. I mean, it's mostly bullshit right now. Like, we don't have any big giant proof ."
Jay Connor , Mar 6, 2018 9:17:24 AM | 15
And twice Ms Mayer repeats the lie about "all US intelligence agencies concluding that Russia interfered in the US election". Her phrasing: "that major U.S. intelligence agencies had unanimously endorsed this view'" then: "It [the report] contained the agencies' unanimous conclusion that, during the Presidential campaign, Putin had directed a cyber campaign aimed at getting Trump elected."

These are obvious references to the January 6th 2017 "report" that was full of unsupported assertions and distraction. Ms Mayer doesn't appear to be familiar with reasons to avoid citing that report.

The New York Times has had to retract the "17 agencies lie"--did so at the end of June 2017. Ms Mayer doesn't appear to have noticed, or worse thought she could get away with changing the phrasing of the lie slightly to "major intelligence agencies".

I too seemed to remember that Yahoo news had published on the Steele report in advance of others in the press. Obviously the New Yorker staff didn't.

All very embarrassing for the New Yorker and Ms Mayer, will now of course be used to question the validity of other Jane Mayer reporting.

lg , Mar 6, 2018 10:00:07 AM | 16
@Luther - LOL too mild, howling more like it, creating my very own river deltas...
plantman , Mar 6, 2018 10:24:34 AM | 17
I'm shocked! Mayer has a stellar reputation, but this piece is riddled with errors and misinformation. Are they all sellouts in the MSM????
exiled off mainstreet , Mar 6, 2018 11:04:37 AM | 18
The term "presstitute" which is used for attacking pro-establishment media shills comes to mind. Formerly respectable outlets such as the New Yorker and their writer, Jane Mayer, have gone over into war crimes by in effect fomenting a new cold war based on falsehoods, similar to what the postwar less corrupt yankee imperium considered war crimes in the four power Nuremberg trial which convicted the editor of Der Stuermer, a Nazi sheet, on that basis.
LXV , Mar 6, 2018 11:19:24 AM | 19
Ah, so the elitist award-winning (((culprit))) of global warming propaganda and niece of "dark money" oligarch henchmen such as Emanuel Lehman and Allan Nevins has written a eulogy for the creatures of the Imperial Swamp?

Color me not-so-surprised!

WorldBLee , Mar 6, 2018 11:37:36 AM | 20
As a former, longtime New Yorker reader I can attest that the New Yorker's supposed fact checking is basically non-existent. They do check rigorously for spelling and grammar to fit the writing style of the magazine, but incorrect facts have riddled articles for decades. They do publish a few letters each issue and occasionally allow criticisms through but for the most part as long as the narrative fits what "the right sort of people believe" there seems to be no standard for actually, you know, basing statements on reality.
Mike Maloney , Mar 6, 2018 12:21:30 PM | 23
My guess is that the Democratic Party, so addled at the top, splits by 2020. All it has for the voters, which it repetitiously blares from its many organs -- CNN, MSNBC, NYT, New Yorker -- is Russophobia. For instance, I ran into a guy last night who regularly watches MSNBC and he said the network has not once mentioned the statewide teachers strike underway in West Virginia. How's that for "leaning forward"?
NemesisCalling , Mar 6, 2018 12:24:24 PM | 24
The reason why this whole Russiagate seems to go beyond the usual partisan tit-for-tat when it comes to the executive branch (Kenneth Star v. Clinton, Birthers v. Hussein-Obama, liberal-educated dems v. A fundamentalist-protestant dumbass W. Bush), is the absolute certainty which the MSM, the dems, and neocons spew their Russophobic spittle onto anyone that happens to be listening; meanwhile dragging Trump through the mud. The usual partisan coverage of prior executive branches were more evenhanded by news outlets (it resembled news). The current atmosphere resembles pure propaganda and smacks of utter desperation and globalist panic.

It makes the whole situation seem like Trump really is anti-establishment. That is where the hope came from which won him the election and it continues on in his fanbase.

@24 nemesiscalling.. ditto your comment as well.. thanks..

nonsense factory , Mar 6, 2018 1:38:23 PM | 27
The New Yorker refused to allow Sy Hersh to publish "The Red Line and the Rat Line", about the covert US effort to transfer weapons from Libya to Syrian jihadist groups, so he had to go to the London Review of Books. At that point it became clear the New Yorker had gone over into partisan pro-government propaganda publishing.

It's also curious how the article doesn't really touch on Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry in the United States; that sector also donates heavily to Democrats, which is likely why. There could be some issues there related to sanctions-dodging by ExxonMobil but digging into that doesn't serve the political agenda, so. . . . Still nothing credible on the evidence side as far as iI can tell.

Anon , Mar 6, 2018 2:13:11 PM | 28
These days the corporate media will often start a story with a lie. They think it's funny or something .
Ort , Mar 6, 2018 2:27:55 PM | 30
@ plantman | 17

Mayer has a stellar reputation, but this piece is riddled with errors and misinformation. Are they all sellouts in the MSM????
____________________________________

Some well-regarded Amerikan investigative journalists seem deeply ambivalent when reporting on US government, military, and intelligence (spook agencies) affairs.

They can be appropriately skeptical and critical some of the time-- admirable "watchdogs" or "gadflies" in the best muckraking tradition. Their critical stories are even a form of "speaking truth to power", and their reputation and popularity is deserved.

OTOH, at other times they seem to display a core uncritical regard, respect, and even admiration for these institutions and their personnel. I've seen interviews with Mayer following some exposé in which she comes across as being either deliberately naïve, or reluctant to follow her own findings to an unacceptably radical logical conclusion.

As in this article, Mayer is far more trusting and credulous of official sources than her experience of their habitual mendacity dictates.

Sorry that I can't provide precise examples off the top of my head, but I think this is an occupational hazard of journalists who spend their careers working (too) closely with government insiders. Seymour Hersh and Jeremy Scahill come to mind.

In a nutshell, I think they're trying to be disinterested, dispassionate journalists who report without fear or favor though the heavens fall, etc. But my pop-psychology guess is that they also develop an affinity with their sources that occasionally trips them up, and/or renders them vulnerable to manipulation by their vaunted insider connections.

Or maybe it's comparable to the undercover drug enforcement agent who ends up getting addicted and engaging in criminal activity after becoming too immersed in the life they're supposed to be policing.

Mayer is no Judith Miller, but if it's not "selling out", she may be suffering from a case of incipient Judith Miller Syndrome.

Anonymous , Mar 6, 2018 2:50:57 PM | 32
An autotranslated article about a pending(?) cw false flag in Syria with the usual cast of cute children, fake wounds and the White "False Flags 'R US" Helmets. If they do pull something off it may be worth keeping an eye open for these actors.

Fakebook and LiveJournal have already pulled the original articles this item was based on.

https://z5h64q92x9.net/proxy_u/ru-en.en/https/colonelcassad.livejournal.com/4032567.html

Anon , Mar 6, 2018 2:52:44 PM | 33
Maybe he could bomb Syria to get the focus elsewhere? Sigh, this man is a moron that is led by neocons. Trump considered new military action against Syrian govt.: Report http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2018/03/06/554582/Trump-considered-new-military-action-against-Syrian-govt
time2wakeupnow , Mar 6, 2018 3:16:03 PM | 34
This New Yorker disinfomation piece is most likely not exclusively Ms Mayer's doing alone. David Remnick (NYer Publisher & Ms. Mayers boss) is a full fledged participant in the MSM'S ongoing 'Russian Collusion' narrative.

Remember, even the great Sy Hersh had to go to the independent European press to publish his 'controversial' article that methodically debunked the deep states fairy tale narrative of events on what exactly went down in the infamous OBL Abottabad compound raid in 2011.

Hersh, up until then, exclusively published most of his investigative "bombshell" articles in the New Yorker. Remnick is a full fledged supporter of our oligarchical, neocon establishment that's hell bent on establishing a US/Israel centered global hegemony since the break-up of the Soviet Union.

karlof1 , Mar 6, 2018 3:28:29 PM | 38
So, we have yet another fraud promoting the initial fraud as Big Lie Nation manufactures and exports its #1 commodity. Those of us knowing Russiagate's yet another Big Lie ought to be shocked by the further digging of this massive excavation that can no longer be called a deep hole but aren't because the desperation's become all too predictable. The exceptional witch is melting live in living color!
sejmon , Mar 6, 2018 3:29:20 PM | 39
V.ARNOLD #7 ..You forget very important stuff....since 11/9/16 Dems they still wage war against legally elected president PDJT...those whores did try everything..and nothing is working......
Christian Chuba , Mar 6, 2018 3:42:26 PM | 42
The Slate is another publication that wants to go to war with Russia, 'Why are we letting the Russians get away with it' ... https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/03/why-is-america-letting-russia-get-away-with-meddling-in-our-democracy.html What does Fred Kaplan want to do? Oh nothing crazy, just cyber espionage on the order of Stuxnet, or at least outing Putin's secret foreign bank accounts (or pilfering them).

BTW I do not believe that Putin has billions socked away offshore. If he did then Obama would have revealed it on his way out the door and even if Obama didn't the CIA / FBI / Treasury would have leaked it. Instead what they did was claim he had billions without providing any proof.

Pft , Mar 6, 2018 4:19:25 PM | 44
Some Faraday bags allow you to reveive calls if placed in the front pouch and block all signals at back pouch, while still offering complete EMP protection front or back
time2wakeupnow , Mar 6, 2018 4:42:45 PM | 45
If you are able to receive a call on your cellphone - in a Faraday bag, or not, you are still completely vulnerable to hacking and/or tracking. No "back of the bag EMP protection" claim is gonna be able to block invasive signals - unless the pouch, or bag, or whatever it's stored in is COMPLETELY impenetrable - period!
Daniel Bruno , Mar 6, 2018 5:12:29 PM | 46
You can make your own Faraday bag with rolls of aluminum or tin foil spun around a crayon box.

Anyway, cell phones are unavoidable tracking devices and can not be immunized from surveillance and hacking http://hpub.org/article-64217/ so anybody with secrets would avoid using one unless your name is Her Haughtiness Hillary Clinton and you keep an unencrypted email server in your personal bathroom or, your name is Podesta and your google account password is "password."

End to end encryption is available but requires cooperation on both ends.

bevin , Mar 6, 2018 5:25:38 PM | 47
I seem to recall that Steele was involved in the Magnitsky and Litvinenko cases and that he has long made a living out of defending oligarchs against the Russian government's attempts to collect taxes from them.
It is sad that Steele is polluting the air of Farnham an ancient town with a long history which includes being the birthplace of some of the greatest English writers.
Tobin Paz , Mar 6, 2018 5:31:45 PM | 48
You gotta be kidding:

Australian Diplomat Whose Tip Launched Russia Probe Has $25 Million Tie To Clintons

The Australian diplomat whose 2016 tip resulted in the FBI's Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation had previously arranged one of the largest donations to Clinton charities, documents reveal.
...
Downer tipped off Australian authorities after a conversation with Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos at a London bar, in which Papadopoulos reportedly said the Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. After Australian authorities alerted the FBI, a counterintelligence probe was launched according to reports
alcemartello , Mar 6, 2018 6:47:47 PM | 53
Greta work
It only proves that western journalist have become stenographers and propagandist for pax-americana/anglo-zionist.
15000 word readers digest entry on the so called fourth estate. It only shows how desperate they are in trying to keep the perception of the Russians ate my lunch. Seeing that the Russian Federation just recently revealed that their invincibility as a Military force is questionable Nato must be rethinking their first strike capacity.
Post Scriptum: It is sad to see not one nation in the west speaking of peace and detente but of aggression and conquest. It smells like 1913 all over again especially since the Trump regime has now opened up the can of worms TRADE WARS. If any individual with a semblance of grey matter can critically analyse these moves one could see WAR on the horizon .
Firts currency wars then trade wars and docius in fundem Firing wars. How sad the weste has become.
Debsisdead , Mar 6, 2018 7:08:51 PM | 54
Posted by: Tobin Paz | Mar 6, 2018 5:31:45 PM | 48

Alexander Downer has never been a diplomat, he was always a particularly sleazy politician - may even have been leader of the opposition as head of Oz's conservative & misnamed Liberal Party. The guy is the worst of the worst, a small time suburban solicitor (lawyer who doesn't go to court), whose play was posing as a mock englander gentleman but never quite pulling it off.
Anything Downer gets his sticky fingers into has two common features 1) It benefits A.Downer and 2) It is a lie.

Jen , Mar 6, 2018 7:16:54 PM | 55
Tobin Paz @ 48, Debsisdead @ 54: I thought Alexander Downer had been sent overseas to play at being ambassador or diplomat so as to limit the amount the damage he could cause just by his very existence. Instead he hoovers up money faster than a pig can sniff out truffles.
Debsisdead , Mar 6, 2018 6:43:42 PM | 52
I'm sorta enjoying it all it's so over the top I doubt anyone apart from the usual dingbats & drongos, takes it seriously.

Just as the Steele dossier with its outrageous fictions led the way, the englanders are outdoing themselves sledging Russia and Russians.

Even the seemingly innocuous 'weatherman' has been getting in on the act, England has been even colder than usual and before the freeze over actually began the incessant weather reports which dominate englander 'news' was warning of a cold wind from Siberia that was in evil Russian fashion about to "freeze the balls off Her Majesty's brass monkey".

The cooler air a direct result of western europe's (including england) two century long penchant for burning shit up which had raised the temperature of the Arctic seas to the point where even in the middle of winter the North Pole waters no longer freeze. Warm seas=warmer air which rises and cooler air comes in to fill the gap blah, blah but that didn't stop the weather reports, which by the time england was frozen the cause had been casually abbreviated into "the beast from the east". Cold are you englanders? Don't forget to blame Russia and Russians while you salute Stephenson's Rocket (the instigator) and you wait for a train which will never come thanks to Thatcherism/neoliberalism/can't pick Johnnie Foreigner's pocket any more, better pick Johnnie Neighbours.

But blaming the weather on Russia is so last week, this week it is all about some treasonous former KGB colonel and his daughter who prolly offed themselves in the most public way possible since their lives turned to shit . Natch the englander media being what it is, the traitor was executed at the behest of the man himself Vladimir Putin. Except of course the timing is inexplicable as Prez Putin is about to have an election - sorry 'election' (elections in Russia have to have single quotes around em because the winner is not supported by any englander newspaper and must therefore be a put up job cos englander fishwraps never get it wrong). The old cui bene is relevant since this death happened at a bad time for Russia one is left asking if the traitor didn't top himself who else would want it right now, certainly not Russia's leadership.

I can still remember 50 years later exactly how gobsmacked I was the first time I read a serious englander newspaper and discovered that these otherwise seemingly intelligent journos actually believed all this Cold War horseshit that we used to laugh at in the South. Yeah amerika sure they believe anything they are told to, but the englanders subscribe to this nonsense - how can that be? I was young and naive and didn't realise that the most truthful parts of englander media are in the boxes around the edges of the articles. The real commercials are the news stories. In england in the 1970's all the foreign correspondents had two jobs, there was the newspaper gig which paid well but felt sleazy and the other gig with the SIS aka MI6 which was a good way to rub shoulders with the elite plus it covered the kids' public school fees.

Nothing about englander media can be believed, for a long time the audience was entirely captive so the earn was guaranteed with more money if you could tell a really big lie. Big enough to generate headlines and start a fleet street feeding frenzy. Those days are gone the journos know no other way to work so the stories are getting more tawdry and less believable by the day.

This is the poisonous atmosphere the Steele dossier came out of. There is certain to be a few doubles in the generation of this yarn That is the double giggers englander journo by day wannabe 'secret' agent by night. Steele wasn't allowed into Russia so who else is he gonna call?

Don Bacon , Mar 6, 2018 8:07:26 PM | 56
It's becoming more amusing. From Stars and Stripes--
WASHINGTON, Mar 6 -- Senators grilled the top intel chief Tuesday, pushing for details of a U.S. plan to stave off attempts of Russian meddling and cyberattacks .

In a tense congressional hearing examining worldwide threats, the lawmakers expressed frustration that the U.S., hampered by President Donald Trump, hasn't done enough to address past and future Russian cyberattacks.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that while counterintelligence work is underway, the details of those operations are classified.

"The American people deserve to know whether or not the president directed his top intelligence officials to effectively counter this continuing act of war on our country ," Sen. Richard Blumethal, D-Conn., said in a sharp exchange with Coats.

The comments come a week after a hearing before the same committee when U.S. Cyber Command Chief Adm. Mike Rogers said that Russia has paid little for its interference in the 2016 elections , and that he hasn't been authorized by Trump to combat future attempts.

There are growing concerns that Russia will target this year's elections and that the U.S. hasn't done enough to counter that effort.
"We're taking steps, but we're probably not doing enough ," Rogers told the committee last week. . . here

President Putin must be enjoying this. I know I am.

[Mar 06, 2018] Is MSNBC Now the Most Dangerous Warmonger Network by Norman Solomon

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The evidence is damning. And the silence underscores the arrogance. ..."
"... More than seven weeks after a devastating report from the media watch group FAIR, top executives and prime-time anchors at MSNBC still refuse to discuss how the network's obsession with Russia has thrown minimal journalistic standards out the window. ..."
Mar 03, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

Originally from Truthdig 1 March 2018 Region: USA Theme: Media Disinformation

The evidence is damning. And the silence underscores the arrogance.

More than seven weeks after a devastating report from the media watch group FAIR, top executives and prime-time anchors at MSNBC still refuse to discuss how the network's obsession with Russia has thrown minimal journalistic standards out the window.

FAIR's study, " MSNBC Ignores Catastrophic U.S.-Backed War in Yemen ," documented a picture of extreme journalistic malfeasance at MSNBC:

Meanwhile, MSNBC's incessant "Russiagate" coverage has put the network at the media forefront of overheated hyperbole about the Kremlin. And continually piling up the dry tinder of hostility toward Russia boosts the odds of a cataclysmic blowup between the world's two nuclear superpowers.

In effect, the programming on MSNBC follows a thin blue party line, breathlessly conforming to Democratic leaders' refrains about Russia as a mortal threat to American democracy and freedom across the globe. But hey -- MSNBC's ratings have climbed upward during its monochrome reporting, so why worry about whether coverage is neglecting dozens of other crucial stories? Or why worry if the anti-Russia drumbeat is worsening the risks of a global conflagration?

FAIR's report, written by journalist Ben Norton and published on Jan. 8, certainly merited a serious response from MSNBC and the anchors most identified by the study, Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes . Yet no response has come from them or network executives. (Full disclosure: I'm a longtime associate of FAIR.)

In the aftermath of the FAIR study, a petition gathered 22,784 signers and 4,474 individual comments -- asking MSNBC to remedy its extreme imbalance of news coverage. But the network and its prime-time luminaries Maddow and Hayes refused to respond despite repeated requests for a reply.

The petition was submitted in late January to Maddow and Hayes via their producers, as well as to MSNBC senior vice president Errol Cockfield and to the network's senior manager in charge of media relations for "The Rachel Maddow Show" and "All In with Chris Hayes."

Signers responded to outreach from three organizations -- Just Foreign Policy, RootsAction.org (which I coordinate), and World Beyond War -- calling for concerned individuals to "urge Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, and MSNBC to correct their failure to report on the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen and the direct U.S. military role in causing the catastrophe by signing our petition." (The petition is still gathering signers.)

As the cable news network most trusted by Democrats as a liberal beacon, MSNBC plays a special role in fueling rage among progressive-minded viewers toward Russia's "attack on our democracy" that is somehow deemed more sinister and newsworthy than corporate dominance of American politicians (including Democrats), racist voter suppression, gerrymandering and many other U.S. electoral defects all put together.

At the same time, the anti-Russia mania also services the engines of the current militaristic machinery.

It's what happens when nationalism and partisan zeal overcome something that could be called journalism.

"The U.S. media's approach to Russia is now virtually 100 percent propaganda," the independent journalist Robert Parry wrote at the end of 2017 , in the last article published before his death. "Does any sentient human being read the New York Times' or the Washington Post's coverage of Russia and think that he or she is getting a neutral or unbiased treatment of the facts?"

Parry added that

"to even suggest that there is another side to the story makes you a 'Putin apologist' or 'Kremlin stooge.' Western journalists now apparently see it as their patriotic duty to hide key facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia. Ironically, many 'liberals' who cut their teeth on skepticism about the Cold War and the bogus justifications for the Vietnam War now insist that we must all accept whatever the U.S. intelligence community feeds us, even if we're told to accept the assertions on faith."

Across a U.S. media landscape where depicting Russia as a fully villainous enemy is now routine, MSNBC is a standout. The most profound dangers from what Rachel Maddow and company are doing is what they least want to talk about -- how the cumulative effects and momentum of their work are increasing the likelihood that tensions between Washington and Moscow will escalate into a horrendous military conflict.

Even at the height of the Cold War during the 1960s, when Soviet Communists ruled Russians with zero freedom of speech or press, most U.S. political and media elites recognized the vital need for détente. They applauded the " Spirit of Glassboro " when the top leadership of the United States and Russia met at length. Now, across most of the U.S. media spectrum, no such overtures to the Kremlin are to be tolerated.

The U.S. government's recently released " Nuclear Posture Review " underscores just how unhinged the situation has become.

Consider the assessment from the head of a first-rate research organization in the nuclear weapons field, the Los Alamos Study Group. Its executive director, Greg Mello, said :

"What is most 'missing in action' in this document is civilian leadership. Trump is not supplying that. In part the fault for this comes from Democrats -- who, allied with the intelligence community and other military-industrial interests, insist that the U.S. must have an adversarial relationship with Russia. There is no organized senior-level opposition to the new Cold War, which is intensifying week by week. This document reflects, and is just one of many policies embodying, the new and very dangerous Cold War."

But -- with everyone's survival at stake -- none of that seems to matter much to those who call the shots at MSNBC.

*

Norman Solomon is the coordinator of the online activist group RootsAction.org.

[Mar 06, 2018] The U.S. Returns to 'Great Power Competition,' With a Dangerous New Edge

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... It was President Bill Clinton who moved NATO eastwards, abrogating a 1991 agreement with the Russians not to recruit former members of the Warsaw Pact that is at the root of current tensions with Moscow. And, while the U.S. and NATO point to Russia's annexation of the Crimea as a sign of a "revanchist" Moscow, it was NATO that set the precedent of altering borders when it dismembered Serbia to create Kosovo after the 1999 Yugoslav war. ..."
"... And it was President Barack Obama who further chilled relations with the Russians by tacitly backing the 2014 coup in the Ukraine, and whose "Asia pivot" has led to tensions between Washington and Beijing. ..."
"... In speaking at Johns Hopkins, Defense Secretary James Mattis warned , "If you challenge us, it will be your longest and worst day" -- a remark aimed directly at Russia. ..."
"... NATO ally Britain went even further. Chief of the United Kingdom General Staff, Nick Carter, told the Defense and Security Forum that "our generation has become used to wars of choice since the end of the Cold War," but "we may not have a choice about conflict with Russia." He added , "The parallels with 1914 are stark." ..."
"... Certainly the verbiage about Russia and China is alarming. Russia is routinely described as "aggressive," "revisionist," and "expansionist." In a recent attack on China, U.S. Defense Secretary Rex Tillerson described China's trade with Latin America as " imperial ," an ironic choice of words given Washington's more overtly imperial history in the region. ..."
"... While Moscow is certainly capable of destroying the world with its nuclear weapons, Russia today bears little resemblance to 1914 Russia -- or, for that matter, the Soviet Union. ..."
"... The U.S. and its NATO allies currently spend more than 12 times what Russia does on its armaments, and even that vastly underestimates Washington's actual military outlay. A great deal of U.S. spending is not counted as "military," including nuclear weapons, currently being modernized to the tune of $1.5 trillion. ..."
"... The balance between China and the U.S. is more even, but the U.S. still outspends China almost three to one. Fact in Washington's major regional allies -- Japan, Australia, and South Korea -- and that figure is almost four to one. In nuclear weapons, the ratio is vastly greater: 26 to 1 in favor of the U.S. Add NATO and the ratios are 28 to 1. ..."
"... Meanwhile, China has two military goals: to secure its sea-borne energy supplies by building up its navy, and to establish a buffer zone in the East and South China seas to keep potential enemies at arm's length. To that end it has constructed smaller, more agile ships, and missiles capable of keeping U.S. aircraft carriers out of range, a strategy called "area denial." It has also modernized its military, cutting back on land-based forces and investing in air and sea assets. However, it spends less of its GDP on its military than does the U.S.: 1.9 percent as opposed to 3.3 percent as of 2016. ..."
"... But China has been invaded several times, starting with the Opium Wars of 1839 and 1856, when Britain forced the Chinese to lift their ban on importing the drug. Japan invaded in 1895 and 1937. If the Chinese are touchy about their coastline, one can hardly blame them. ..."
"... Is this a new Cold War, when the U.S. attempted to surround and isolate the Soviet Union? There are parallels, but the Cold War was an ideological battle between two systems, socialism and capitalism. The fight today is over market access and economic domination. When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned Latin America about China and Russia, it wasn't about "Communist subversion," but trade. ..."
"... For one, the big arms manufacturers -- Lockheed Martian, Boeing, Raytheon, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics -- have lots of cash to hand out come election time. "Great power competition" will be expensive, with lots of big-ticket items: aircraft carriers, submarines, surface ships, and an expanded air force. ..."
"... And many of the Democrats are ahead of the curve when it comes to demonizing the Russians. The Russian bug-a-boo has allowed the party to shift the blame for Hillary Clinton's loss to Moscow's manipulation of the election, thus avoiding having to examine its own lackluster campaign and unimaginative political program. ..."
"... Piling onto Moscow may have consequences as well. Andrei Kostin, head of one of Russia's largest banks, VTB, told the Financial Times that adding more sanctions against Russia " would be like declaring war ." ..."
Mar 06, 2018 | fpif.org

The U.S. has never taken its eyes off its big competitors.

It was President Bill Clinton who moved NATO eastwards, abrogating a 1991 agreement with the Russians not to recruit former members of the Warsaw Pact that is at the root of current tensions with Moscow. And, while the U.S. and NATO point to Russia's annexation of the Crimea as a sign of a "revanchist" Moscow, it was NATO that set the precedent of altering borders when it dismembered Serbia to create Kosovo after the 1999 Yugoslav war.

It was President George W. Bush who designated China a "strategic competitor," and who tried to lure India into an anti-Chinese alliance by allowing New Delhi to violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Letting India purchase uranium on the international market -- it was barred from doing so by refusing to sign the NPT -- helped ignite the dangerous nuclear arms race with Pakistan in South Asia.

And it was President Barack Obama who further chilled relations with the Russians by tacitly backing the 2014 coup in the Ukraine, and whose "Asia pivot" has led to tensions between Washington and Beijing.

So is jettisoning "terrorism" as the enemy in favor of "great powers" just old wine, new bottle? Not quite. For one thing the new emphasis has a decidedly more dangerous edge to it.

1914 vs. Today

In speaking at Johns Hopkins, Defense Secretary James Mattis warned , "If you challenge us, it will be your longest and worst day" -- a remark aimed directly at Russia.

NATO ally Britain went even further. Chief of the United Kingdom General Staff, Nick Carter, told the Defense and Security Forum that "our generation has become used to wars of choice since the end of the Cold War," but "we may not have a choice about conflict with Russia." He added , "The parallels with 1914 are stark."

Certainly the verbiage about Russia and China is alarming. Russia is routinely described as "aggressive," "revisionist," and "expansionist." In a recent attack on China, U.S. Defense Secretary Rex Tillerson described China's trade with Latin America as " imperial ," an ironic choice of words given Washington's more overtly imperial history in the region.

But there are differences between now and the run up to the First World War. In 1914, there were several powerful and evenly matched empires at odds. That is not the case today.

While Moscow is certainly capable of destroying the world with its nuclear weapons, Russia today bears little resemblance to 1914 Russia -- or, for that matter, the Soviet Union.

The U.S. and its NATO allies currently spend more than 12 times what Russia does on its armaments, and even that vastly underestimates Washington's actual military outlay. A great deal of U.S. spending is not counted as "military," including nuclear weapons, currently being modernized to the tune of $1.5 trillion.

The balance between China and the U.S. is more even, but the U.S. still outspends China almost three to one. Fact in Washington's major regional allies -- Japan, Australia, and South Korea -- and that figure is almost four to one. In nuclear weapons, the ratio is vastly greater: 26 to 1 in favor of the U.S. Add NATO and the ratios are 28 to 1.

This isn't to say that the military forces of Russia and China are irrelevant. Russia's intervention in the Syrian civil war helped turn the tide against the anti-Assad coalition put together by the United States. But its economy is smaller than Italy's, and its "aggression" is arguably a response to NATO establishing a presence on Moscow's doorstep.

Meanwhile, China has two military goals: to secure its sea-borne energy supplies by building up its navy, and to establish a buffer zone in the East and South China seas to keep potential enemies at arm's length. To that end it has constructed smaller, more agile ships, and missiles capable of keeping U.S. aircraft carriers out of range, a strategy called "area denial." It has also modernized its military, cutting back on land-based forces and investing in air and sea assets. However, it spends less of its GDP on its military than does the U.S.: 1.9 percent as opposed to 3.3 percent as of 2016.

Beijing has been heavy-handed in establishing "area denial," alienating many of its neighbors -- Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Taiwan -- by claiming most of the South China Sea and building bases in the Paracel and Spratly islands.

But China has been invaded several times, starting with the Opium Wars of 1839 and 1856, when Britain forced the Chinese to lift their ban on importing the drug. Japan invaded in 1895 and 1937. If the Chinese are touchy about their coastline, one can hardly blame them.

China is, however, the United States' major competitor and the second largest economy in the world. It has replaced the U.S. as Latin America's largest trading partner and successfully outflanked Washington's attempts to throttle its economic influence. When the U.S. asked its key allies to boycott China's new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, with the exception of Japan , they ignored Washington.

However, commercial success is hardly "imperial."

Is this a new Cold War, when the U.S. attempted to surround and isolate the Soviet Union? There are parallels, but the Cold War was an ideological battle between two systems, socialism and capitalism. The fight today is over market access and economic domination. When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned Latin America about China and Russia, it wasn't about "Communist subversion," but trade.

Behind the Shift

There are other players behind this shift.

For one, the big arms manufacturers -- Lockheed Martian, Boeing, Raytheon, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics -- have lots of cash to hand out come election time. "Great power competition" will be expensive, with lots of big-ticket items: aircraft carriers, submarines, surface ships, and an expanded air force.

This is not to say that the U.S. has altered its foreign policy focus because of arms company lobbies, but they do have a seat at the table. And given that those companies have spread their operations to all 50 states, local political representatives and governors have a stake in keeping -- and expanding -- those often high paying jobs.

Nor are the Republicans going to get much opposition on increased defense spending from the Democrats, many of whom are as hawkish as their colleagues across the aisle. That's true even though higher defense spending -- coupled with the recent tax cut bill -- will rule out funding many of the programs the Democrats hold dear. Of course, for the Republicans that dilemma is a major side benefit: cut taxes, increase defense spending, then dismantle social services, Social Security, and Medicare in order to service the deficit.

And many of the Democrats are ahead of the curve when it comes to demonizing the Russians. The Russian bug-a-boo has allowed the party to shift the blame for Hillary Clinton's loss to Moscow's manipulation of the election, thus avoiding having to examine its own lackluster campaign and unimaginative political program.

There are other actors pushing this new emphasis as well, including the Bush administration's neoconservatives who launched the Iraq War. Their new target is Iran, even though inflating Iran to the level of a "great power" is laughable. Iran's military budget is $12.3 billion. Saudi Arabia alone spends $63.7 billion on defense, slightly less than Russia, which has five times the population and eight times the land area. In a clash between Iran and the U.S. and its local allies, the disparity in military strength would be closer to 60 to 1 .

However, in terms of disasters, even Iraq would pale before a war with Iran.

The most dangerous place in the world right now is the Korean Peninsula, where the Trump administration appears to be casting around for some kind of military demonstration that will not ignite a nuclear war. But how would China react to an attack that might put hostile troops on its southern border?

Piling onto Moscow may have consequences as well. Andrei Kostin, head of one of Russia's largest banks, VTB, told the Financial Times that adding more sanctions against Russia " would be like declaring war ."

The problem with designating "great powers" as your adversaries is that they might just take your word for it and respond accordingly. Foreign Policy In Focus columnist Conn Hallinan can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com and middleempireseries.wordpress.com .

[Mar 06, 2018] The current anti-Russian sentiment in the West as hysterical. But this hysteria is concentrated at the top level of media elite and neocons. Behind it is no deep sense of unity or national resolve. In fact we see the reverse - most Western countries are deeply divided within themselves due to the crisis of neolineralism.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Therefore, if we must see this in terms of conflict, we see a dramatically less powerful and dramatically poorer but essentially unified Russia facing up to a threat from a West that is far superior militarily and economically but that is divided in itself and slipping further into decline. ..."
"... This does of course lead to the unstable world you say we are faced with. Dangerously unstable. But I do not believe you are admitting to yourself that it is an instability we in the West are causing. ..."
Mar 06, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

English Outsider -> Lars, 04 March 2018 at 07:43 AM

Lars,

I don't understand the last three paragraphs of your comment so I may be missing your central point. However, I believe this sentence taken in isolation could do with qualifying:-

"No doubt there is a lot of noise, but the reality is that economically Russia is a basket case and the US is rapidly joining them."

The picture one gets of Russia is of a country slowly digging itself out of the disintegrative corruption of the 90's. Putin's recent remarks indicate how slowly.

President Carter's characterisation of the US as now being an oligarchy shows the US slowly going the other way. Even including Germany that is the general picture in the West.

Some recent remarks and examples from DH show the Russian people, or rather a substantial number of them, soberly and consciously preparing to address the threat from the West. Unless it's all Russian PR there is a sense of national unity there, at least for many, and that is reflected by the Russian leadership.

I'm afraid our host is correct when he characterises the current anti-Russian sentiment in the West as hysterical. That, however, is I believe largely top down. It is a product of PR from the media and from the Western politicians. Behind it is no deep sense of unity or national resolve. In fact we see the reverse - most Western countries are deeply divided within themselves.

The Russians seem also to have escaped the demoralising effects of the more far out social trends in the US and other Western countries.

Therefore, if we must see this in terms of conflict, we see a dramatically less powerful and dramatically poorer but essentially unified Russia facing up to a threat from a West that is far superior militarily and economically but that is divided in itself and slipping further into decline.

This does of course lead to the unstable world you say we are faced with. Dangerously unstable. But I do not believe you are admitting to yourself that it is an instability we in the West are causing.

[Mar 06, 2018] A Parody on New Yorker reporting of Steele dossier saga

Mar 06, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Luther , Mar 6, 2018 8:52:41 AM | 11

"...looked much like the other businessmen heading home, except for the fact that he kept his phones in a Faraday bag -- a pouch, of military-tested double-grade fabric, designed to block signal detection..."

A practical man, Steele also kept a giant roll of telephone line attached to his belt. Unrolling it as he proceeded down the high street, he glanced upwards.

A Pteranodon, perched upon the slate roof was watching him closely. A bead of sweat appeared on his temple, just showing underneath the rim of his bowler hat, trickling down the side of his face, the leaving a streak that resembled a long forgotten river delta.

A chimmney sweet was approaching him on his right, whistling a jaunty tune, his bag of extendable brushes jingling and clanking, just like Steele's nerves. Obviously a Russian operative, the sweep was whistling an excerpt from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, an ominous warning...

[Mar 06, 2018] A former CIA officer called John Sipher, calling a rival organisation 'the best intelligence professionals in the world'

Mar 06, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jen , Mar 6, 2018 4:15:56 PM | 43

This part of the New Yorker article could be sheer comedy gold:

'... Regardless of what others might think, it's clear that Steele believed that his dossier was filled with important intelligence. Otherwise, he would never have subjected it, his firm, and his reputation to the harsh scrutiny of the F.B.I. "I'm impressed that he was willing to share it with the F.B.I.," [former CIA spook John Sipher] said. "That gives him real credibility to me, the notion that he'd give it to the best intelligence professionals in the world."...'

FBI, best intelligence professionals in the world? Didn't the FBI along with the CIA miss most indications of a looming terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in the months leading up to September 11, 2001?

A former CIA officer called John Sipher, calling a rival organisation 'the best intelligence professionals in the world'?

[Mar 06, 2018] A former CIA officer called John Sipher, calling a rival organisation 'the best intelligence professionals in the world'

Mar 06, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jen , Mar 6, 2018 4:15:56 PM | 43

This part of the New Yorker article could be sheer comedy gold:

'... Regardless of what others might think, it's clear that Steele believed that his dossier was filled with important intelligence. Otherwise, he would never have subjected it, his firm, and his reputation to the harsh scrutiny of the F.B.I. "I'm impressed that he was willing to share it with the F.B.I.," [former CIA spook John Sipher] said. "That gives him real credibility to me, the notion that he'd give it to the best intelligence professionals in the world."...'

FBI, best intelligence professionals in the world? Didn't the FBI along with the CIA miss most indications of a looming terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in the months leading up to September 11, 2001?

A former CIA officer called John Sipher, calling a rival organisation 'the best intelligence professionals in the world'?

[Mar 06, 2018] A Parody on New Yorker reporting of Steele dossier saga

Mar 06, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Luther , Mar 6, 2018 8:52:41 AM | 11

"...looked much like the other businessmen heading home, except for the fact that he kept his phones in a Faraday bag -- a pouch, of military-tested double-grade fabric, designed to block signal detection..."

A practical man, Steele also kept a giant roll of telephone line attached to his belt. Unrolling it as he proceeded down the high street, he glanced upwards.

A Pteranodon, perched upon the slate roof was watching him closely. A bead of sweat appeared on his temple, just showing underneath the rim of his bowler hat, trickling down the side of his face, the leaving a streak that resembled a long forgotten river delta.

A chimmney sweet was approaching him on his right, whistling a jaunty tune, his bag of extendable brushes jingling and clanking, just like Steele's nerves. Obviously a Russian operative, the sweep was whistling an excerpt from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, an ominous warning...

[Mar 04, 2018] Promising Jewish Democratic National Committee Staffer Shot Dead on Own Washington D.C. Block by Ari Feldman

Notable quotes:
"... Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman . ..."
Jul 11, 2016 | forward.com

Ari Feldman , Jul 11, 2016

As Hofkin mourned the loss of 27-year-old Rich, he saw a powerful meaning in the illicit cookouts: Even though Rich was not particularly observant, he wanted to make sure that his more observant friends could enjoy the salami, steak and kebabs with him.

That respect for others' beliefs combined with the can-do spirit made Rich a natural leader -- and a serious politics geek.

"He was a totally unassuming intellectual who knew very early on that he wanted go into politics," said Jacob Cytryn, the director of Camp Ramah. "He wanted to get stuff done."

Rich's life was cut short early that Sunday morning, when an unknown assailant shot him four times, including at least once in the back.

The idealistic young man from Omaha, Nebraska, was on his way home in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, a small community near Howard University that has seen a rise in crime this year . Police heard the gunshots and arrived on the scene to find Rich conscious and breathing, but he died of his injuries after being taken to a local hospital.

The motive for the shooting is still unclear. Rich's father, Joel Rich, thought that it might have been a botched robbery attempt. The shooter remains at large, and the investigation into the shooting is ongoing. The police are offering a $25,000 reward for information on the case.

Growing memorial on the corner where #SethConradRich was murdered. Neighbors paying their respects. pic.twitter.com/yHTeKopxv7 -- Van Applegate (@VBagate) July 11, 2016

For friends and family it was a shocking end to a short life of extraordinary promise.

Rich grew up in a tight-knit and relatively modest Jewish community in Omaha. Rabbi Paul Drazen, who knew Rich when he was a young boy still preparing for his bar mitzvah, said he always knew Rich would go far.

"He was a young man who had dreams, and, frankly, he pursued them," Drazen said "He really, really pushed hard to be all he could be."

Drazen credited Rich's parents with teaching him the importance of caring for others -- in words and deeds. When they would visit their son at summer camp, Drazen said, they wouldn't just bring treats for Rich's cabin -- they would bring food enough for his whole eidah , or age group.

"That was the kind of lesson they taught through the way they lived," Drazen said. "And they still live that way."

Rabbi Steven Abraham, the current spiritual leader of Rich's hometown synagogue, Beth El Synagogue, said that Rich was always actively engaged in a wide range of Jewish organizations.

"Seth was involved in USY [United Synagogue Youth], he was involved in Ramah, he went to the community Jewish day school," he said. "The kid was a mensch."

Joel Rich is the immediate past president of their synagogue. His grandparents were founding members.

"This is a family that is entrenched in our Jewish community," Abraham said.

Rich brought creativity and initiative to his experience at camp, especially during his summer as the director of boating education in 2011, a year after graduating from Creighton University in Omaha.

"He was exceptionally thoughtful, very engaged, in his own way, in his Jewish identity," Cytryn said. "And he loved roofball."

He had always been drawn to the world of politics: In high school he was a member of the student democrats club, and at Creighton, where he majored in political science, he served two terms as a representative on the student government.

After his summer as the director of boating at Camp Ramah, Rich moved to Washington, where he held jobs in the office of the Nebraska senator Ben Nelson and at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a major polling and consulting firm, before going to work for the Democratic National Committee.

Seth Rich was only two years into his job as the voter expansion data director working for the DNC, where he helped boost turnout by connecting voters with resources like polling place locations.

But it was clear that he had even bigger goals.

"In this business, people cycle in and out, but not him," said James Green , a campaign director who gave Rich one of his first jobs in politics. "He was going to be a rising star."

Since the news of Rich's killing broke, many of his friends and co-workers have taken to social media to mourn his loss.

Seth Rich was one of the good guys. https://t.co/Ltt5qzQEUA -- Jon Adam Ross (@jonadamross) July 11, 2016

Seth Rich was a great guy. Warm, funny, happy, extremely talented and creative. May his memory be a blessing. https://t.co/z8EdxOhZu6 -- Henry J. Bernstein (@gonzo3249) July 11, 2016

Heartbreaking to hear about the loss of friend and former coworker Seth Rich. https://t.co/0aQutTIjKA https://t.co/ramhV9mYTG -- Ruth Igielnik (@RuthIgielnik) July 11, 2016

"Add him to the roll of justice," wrote Democratic stalwart Donna Brazile.

Remember his name and add him to the rolls of justice. #SethConradRich . He lived to make a difference. He believed in voting rights. -- Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) July 11, 2016

At a speech on gun reform on Tuesday in Portsmouth, N.H., Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, spoke of Rich's death . Tragedies like these, she said, "tear at our soul."

"Seth Rich was a dedicated, selfless public servant who worked tirelessly to protect the most sacred right we share as Americans -- the right to vote," said Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, chair of the DNC, in a statement released after Rich's death.

"He was a joy to have as a member of our team, and his talents, intelligence and enthusiasm will be deeply missed by many friends, colleagues and coworkers who worked by his side in service to the highest ideals of our democracy."

Around the office Rich was known for combining a strong work ethic with ample lightheartedness. He often pulled out his famous panda sweatshirt and wore it around the office, just to make his coworkers smile, his mother, Mary Ann Rich, told WOWT News .

"Will I forever miss him, yes. But I have to remember the happy times too to get through the tears," she said.

"He worked hard and he wanted to make a difference and unfortunately now there is someone who could have made a difference who isn't going to be there," his father, Joel, said.

Seth Rich's last Facebook post is a final symbol of his dedication to the ideals his parents instilled in him.

As accounts of the shootings of Dallas police officers spread, Rich made an emotional plea on Facebook for people to end the violence.

"I have family and friends on both sides of the law," he wrote. "Please, stop killing each other."

twitter

Seth Rich's last Facebook post, in response to the series of shootings last week.

SHARE

Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman .

Read more: https://forward.com/news/national/344781/for-seth-rich-passion-for-service-started-with-kosher-cookouts-at-camp-rama/

[Mar 04, 2018] Zuesse America's News Media Foment Hate by Eric Zuesse

Mar 04, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Mimicking the movie 1984, in its two-minute section " Two Minutes of Hate ,"...

https://www.youtube.com/embed/WupvCZhKMnM

...the US-installed Ukrainian regime on Russia's doorstep, will soon be debating a bill to make hate of Russia obligatory to be inculcated into all Ukrainian children.

The Hill , on 9 November 2017, had the extraordinary courage to publish an opinion-piece that condemned the mainstream news-media's charges that reports of widespread "neo-Nazi formations in Ukraine" are nothing but "Russian propaganda." An editor who would accept a submission like that at such media as the Washington Post, New York Times, New Yorker, The Atlantic , or just about any other in America, would probably be fired or else re-assigned, so as to prevent a repeat.

It's the way to achieve mass-indoctrination, which the Ministry of Truth specializes in. Thus, among the reader-comments to that bold article, the top-listed one under "sort by best" (in other words, the most popular) was the anti -Russian "Have you counted how many neo-Nazis are in the Russian army as well?"

[Mar 04, 2018] Russian Foreign Ministry slams US State Department spokesperson

Mar 04, 2018 | www.fort-russ.com

Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova blasted the United States on Friday saying that the Russian Foreign Ministry will allocate special seats for American journalists at press briefings if the US continues to infringe on the rights of Russian reporters.

The aggressive response came as US State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert rudely and condescendingly rejected questions from a Russian reporter at a press briefing on Thursday.

"You're from Russian TV too? OK! Enough said then, I'll move on," Nauert interrupted.

Nauert's outburst even received condemnation from some American journalists who also wanted the spokesperson to clarify her remarks about Putin's speech.

"This behavior is unacceptable! If the State Department once again dares to label our journalists who are present at press briefings 'journalists from Russia' and stop communicating with them because of that, we will carry out what we promised," Zakharova said.

"We will arrange special seats for the so-called journalists from the US at the Foreign Ministry's press center so that your journalists could feel this time what it is all about," she said.

"Earlier, literally several decades ago, people with different skin color were not allowed to ride on the same bus in the United States. It is necessary to overcome that instead of returning to the flawed practice of the early 19th century, dividing journalists into countries and nationalities. You have no right to deny them access to information due to their nationality," Zakharova stressed.

She then also went onto thank "those American reporters who defended their Russian counterparts' right to access information and be treated equally."

[Mar 04, 2018] Bill Maher The US Media Manufactures More Fake News Than Russia Ever Could

Notable quotes:
"... Maher released a helpful summary of "rules for identifying fake news" - which everybody who posts on social media about the campaign-era predations of shadowy Russian trolls ..."
"... In his monologue "explainer" on how to spot fake news, Maher admits that Trump voters have good reasons to be suspicious of the mainstream media and its tendency toward hyperbole and exaggeration that often leads CNN, the Huffington Post, Slate and their peers to manufacture controversies out of thing air. ..."
"... "I used to think something was news if a journalist reported it. But really I live in a world where its news if Mariah Carey's tit flops out because Twitter will respond and then a journalist reports on the controversy. If a boob flops in the forest and nothing is heard about it doesn't make a sound. But if three jackasses tweet about it, it's news." ..."
"... This is not an outlier, this is a constant and prominent part of today's journalism. Creating some bullshit non-issue that a few trolls will go apeshit over, then reporting on those tweets like all of America's talking about nothing else ..."
"... No wonder fake news resonates so much with Trump fans - because so much of it is fake! Just nonsense made to keep you perpetually offended with an endless stream of controversy that aren't controversial. And outrages that aren't outrageous. ..."
"... Because places like the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed and Salon - they make their money based on how many clicks they get. Yes, the people who see themselves as morally superior are actually ignoring their sacred job of informing citizens of what's important and instead creating divisions to pursue their own selfish ends. Wait isn't that what Russia was doing to us? Yes it is . ..."
"... And no, it's not easy: in fact, as the media's current business model shows, clickbait works, which is why it is easier to just blame someone else for creating it and "sowing discord", when the real culprit is America's endless superficial, scandal-seeking obsession, always eager to to click on the next catchy, if idiotic news story, and then cover up its guilt by blaming, why who else, Russia. ..."
Mar 04, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Every once in a while, Bill Maher reminds us that he's the only liberal pundit on TV who will call "the tolerant" left on its BS. In his latest weekly show, Maher released a helpful summary of "rules for identifying fake news" - which everybody who posts on social media about the campaign-era predations of shadowy Russian trolls and the mechanics of "internalized misogyny" would do well to watch: "Fake News" isn't some made-up phenomenon concocted by pro-Trump bloggers. It's a very real and disturbing trend that goes much further in tearing at the social fabric of American society than $100,000 of spending on Facebook ads ever could.

In his monologue "explainer" on how to spot fake news, Maher admits that Trump voters have good reasons to be suspicious of the mainstream media and its tendency toward hyperbole and exaggeration that often leads CNN, the Huffington Post, Slate and their peers to manufacture controversies out of thing air. Or, as he puts it, just because a few people on Twitter with no followers and no real-life influence are angry, doesn't mean the rest of America feels that way...

"Since so much of what passes for today's journalism is anything but...how about some rules for identifying actual news.

"If anybody is demanding an apology... unless they have hostages, that's not news.

"And when the offended group are identified as the internet, twitter or people - it's nobody. I guarantee when you click on the story the internet is three losers with a combined twitter following of their mom."

"I used to think something was news if a journalist reported it. But really I live in a world where its news if Mariah Carey's tit flops out because Twitter will respond and then a journalist reports on the controversy. If a boob flops in the forest and nothing is heard about it doesn't make a sound. But if three jackasses tweet about it, it's news."

Maher gives several examples of what passes as news, including the "controversy surrounding Jennifer Lawrence's performance in the movie "Red Sparrow". The mainstream press reported that a shot of Lawrence with a group of men was unforgivably sexist...because Lawrence wasn't wearing a coat (while the men in the shot were).

Maher threw up all over the "story" which just happened to be reported in dozens of "serious" media outlets, despite having zero social import or even any grounding in reality.

Here's the headline from Elle online and a hundred other sites: 'Jennifer Lawrence's latest red sparrow protocol has twitter calling out gender inequality. See because the men are wearing coats but she's not. And even though that was her choice, somebody with 11 followers didn't like it so the the story was reported in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Post, Fox News..."

" Now all these esteemed news organizations aren't saying they think it's a big deal because they're serious journalists. They'd rather be writing about Syria or the oceans dying but oh the humanity, Jennifer Lawrence didn't have a coat. Wrap her up, wrap her up!"

Such "clickbait" stories like this aren't rare, in fact as Maher admits they have become the norm, to an extent that most consumers of news hardly recognize how ridiculous they sound.

"This is not an outlier, this is a constant and prominent part of today's journalism. Creating some bullshit non-issue that a few trolls will go apeshit over, then reporting on those tweets like all of America's talking about nothing else."

Justin Timberlake used a protection of Prince for his Superbowl halftime show and people are furious...nope nobody cared.

People are really mad that Sean White dragged the American flag after he won the gold...nope not even a little you fucking liars.""Weight Watchers is targeting teens and twitter is outraged. No it isn't, it's the same three people. And it's not hard to find three people who are mad at anything. I could say good morning and three people on twitter would object: 'Good in your privileged world, Bill Maher'."

Yet considering the mainstream media's obsession with these types of stories, it is no surprise that a sizable chunk of the US population has lost its faith in the validity and and motivations of news organizations like CNN. What is surprising is that people like Maher are finally admitting what is really going on...

"No wonder fake news resonates so much with Trump fans - because so much of it is fake! Just nonsense made to keep you perpetually offended with an endless stream of controversy that aren't controversial. And outrages that aren't outrageous.

And what is really going on is that as Maher admits, what the US media is doing is no different than the alleged "discord-sowing" misinformation campaign that Mueller recently accused 13 Russians and 3 Russian companies of perpetrating on the US population?

"Because places like the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed and Salon - they make their money based on how many clicks they get. Yes, the people who see themselves as morally superior are actually ignoring their sacred job of informing citizens of what's important and instead creating divisions to pursue their own selfish ends. Wait isn't that what Russia was doing to us? Yes it is .

And we need to stop both of them from using us as the cocks in their cock fights. And so I saw to the people who were unable to go on after seeing Kendal Jenner tweet the wrong colored emoji A bit of advice: If you didn't like what Kendal did with a brown fist...then don't watch her sister's sex tape."

So, next time you're reading about the epidemic of teenagers eating Tide Pods, or rushing to be the first to know all about the latest Kardashian clickbait du jour, don't: not only will it stop rewarding hollow headlines designed for clicks, it will force the US media to once again focus on news that truly matters. The real news.

And no, it's not easy: in fact, as the media's current business model shows, clickbait works, which is why it is easier to just blame someone else for creating it and "sowing discord", when the real culprit is America's endless superficial, scandal-seeking obsession, always eager to to click on the next catchy, if idiotic news story, and then cover up its guilt by blaming, why who else, Russia.

[Mar 04, 2018] Will the War Clouds Pass Us By, Or Will the Storm Break by Alastair Crooke

Notable quotes:
"... Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act ..."
"... "This has happened as the Russia-gate claims have fallen to pieces All across the media spectrum, from the big name corporate stenographers like The New York Times, CNN, National Public Radio, The Washington Post to The Atlantic and Nation magazines and other "leftist" publications such as Mother Jones and Who What Why, the Russia and Putin bashing has become hysterical in tone, joined as it is with an anti-Trump obsession "Russia Sees Midterm Elections as a Chance to Sow Fresh Discord ( NY Times , 2/13), "Russia Strongman [Putin] haspulled off one of the greatest acts of political sabotage in modern history" ( The Atlantic , Jan. /Feb. 2018), "Mueller's Latest Indictment Shows Trump Has Helped Putin Cover Up a Crime" ( Mother Jones , 2/16/18), "A Russian Sightseeing Tour For Realists" ( whowhatwhy.com , 2/7/18), etc." ..."
"... a war of choice ..."
"... generational enemy. ..."
"... the primordial threat ..."
"... status quo ante ..."
"... or its allies ..."
Mar 04, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

The compulsive hatred of President Putin in élite western circles has surpassed anything witnessed during the Cold War. Western states have been hyping political hostility in almost every sphere: In Syria, in Ukraine, across the Middle East, in Eurasia, and now, this hatred has leached into the Security Council, leaving it irretrievably polarised -- and paralysed. This hostility has percolated too, across to all Russia's allies, contaminating them. It potends – almost inevitably – further sanctions on Russia (and its friends) under the catch-all Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act . But the real question is: Does this collective hysteria portend war ?

Ed Curtis reminds us of the almost parabolic escalation of antagonism in recent weeks:

"This has happened as the Russia-gate claims have fallen to pieces All across the media spectrum, from the big name corporate stenographers like The New York Times, CNN, National Public Radio, The Washington Post to The Atlantic and Nation magazines and other "leftist" publications such as Mother Jones and Who What Why, the Russia and Putin bashing has become hysterical in tone, joined as it is with an anti-Trump obsession "Russia Sees Midterm Elections as a Chance to Sow Fresh Discord ( NY Times , 2/13), "Russia Strongman [Putin] haspulled off one of the greatest acts of political sabotage in modern history" ( The Atlantic , Jan. /Feb. 2018), "Mueller's Latest Indictment Shows Trump Has Helped Putin Cover Up a Crime" ( Mother Jones , 2/16/18), "A Russian Sightseeing Tour For Realists" ( whowhatwhy.com , 2/7/18), etc."

By casting Russia's interference in the US presidential election as "an attack on American democracy" and thus "an act of war", the 'Covert American State' is saying – implicitly - that just as the act of war at Pearl Harbour brought a retaliatory war upon Japan, so, pari passu , Russia's effort to subvert America require similar retribution.

Across the Middle East – but especially in Syria – there is ample dry tinder for a conflagration, with incipient or existing conflicts between Turkey and the Kurds; between the Turkish Army and the Syrian Army; between Turkish forces and American forces in Manbij; between Syrian forces and American forces; between American forces and the USAF, and Russian servicemen and Russia's aerospace forces; between American forces and Iranian forces, and last but not least, between Israel and Syria.

This is one heck of a pile of combustible material. Plainly any incident amidst such compressed volatility may escalate dangerously. But this is not the point. The point is: Does all this Russia hysteria imply that the US is contemplating a war of choice against Russia, or in support of a re-set of the Middle East landscape to Israel's and Saudi Arabia's benefit ? Will the US deliberately provoke Russia – by killing Russian servicemen, for example – in order to find pretext for a 'bloody nose' military action launched against Russia itself – for responding to the American provocation?

Inadvertent war is a distinct possibility, of course: Both Israel and Saudi Arabia are experiencing domestic leadership crises. Israel may overreach, and America may overreach, too, in its desire to support Israel. Indeed the constant portrayal of the US President as Putin's puppet is pursued, of course, to taunt Trump into proving the opposite - by authorizing some or other action against Russia – albeit against his better instincts.

At the Munich Security Conference, PM Netanyahu said :

"For some time I've been warning about this development [Iran's alleged plan to complete a Shi'i crescent] I've made clear in word and deed that Israel has red lines it will enforce. Israel will continue to prevent Iran from establishing a permanent military presence in Syria We will act without hesitation to defend ourselves. And we will act, if necessary, not just against Iran's proxies that are attacking us, but against Iran itself."

And, at the same conference, US National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster warned Saturday against increased Iranian efforts to support its proxies in the Middle East, saying the "time is now" to act against Tehran.

But what did McMaster mean by "time is now to act" ? Is he encouraging Israel to attack Hizbullah or Iranian-linked forces in Syria? This, almost certainly, would lead to a three or four front war for Israel; yet there are good grounds for believing that the Israeli security establishment does not want to risk a three front war. Possibly, McMaster was thinking more of full-spectrum hybrid, or COIN war, but not conventional war, especially since Israel cannot, any longer (after the shoot down of its F16), be sure of its air dominance , without which, it cannot expect, or hope, to prevail.

As senior Israeli officials complain about the gap between US rhetoric and action, General Josef Votel, the commander of Centcom , stated explicitly, by way of confirmation of the differing view, at a hearing in Congress on 28 February that, "countering Iran is not one of the coalition missions in Syria".

So – back to the Russia hysteria. I do not believe that Syria is a practical locus for a war of choice either for the United States or Russia. Both are circumscribed by the realities of Syria. American forces there are not numerous: they are isolated, and dependent on allies – the Kurds – who are a minority in that part of Syria, who are divided, and who are disliked by the Arab population. And Russian forces mostly consist of no more than 37 aircraft, and small numbers of Russian advisers and Russian supply lines are extended and vulnerable (in the Bosphorous).

No, the US aim in Syria is limited to denying any political success to either Presidents Putin or Assad. It is pure schadenfreude. The American occupation of north-east Syria is primarily about spitting in the face of Iran – i.e. the pursuit of a COIN war against an American, generational enemy.

And at the same time, at the macro, geo-strategic level, America has precisely been trying to 'disarm' Russia's nuclear defences, and seize the advantage, by withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, and by deliberately surrounding Russia on its borders with anti-ballistic missiles (the ABM treaty provided for only one site on its territory - for each party - that would be protected from missile attack). The US strategy effectively left Russia naked, in the nuclear sense. And that clearly was the intent. "With the build-up of the global US ABM missile system, the New START Treaty (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) is devaluated, and the strategic balance [was] broken", Russian President Vladimir Putin said in his State of the Nation Address yesterday.

But then, as 'the quartet of generals' (effectively, General Petraeus is a part of the WH trinity of generals), having usurped America's foreign policy out from the prerogative of the President and into their control, so US defence policy has metamorphosed beyond 'Cold War', to something far more aggressive - and dangerous: a precursor to 'hot war'.

From the original Strategic Statement, casting Russia and China as 'rivals and competitors', the subsequent Defense Posture Statement elevated the latter from mere rivals, to 'revisionist powers', which is to say, dubbed them as seditionists committed to overturning the global order by military force (the definition of revisionist power). The Statement placed great power competition above terrorism, as the primordial threat facing America, and implied that this 'revisionist' threat to the American-led global order needed to be met. American generals complained that their erstwhile, unchallenged global dominance of the skies, and of terrain, was being eroded by Russia acting as 'arsonist' [of stability] whilst presenting itself as the "fire-fighter" [in Syria]. America's air dominance must be reasserted, General Votel implied .

But in a startling upending of the strategic balance and missile encirclement, that America has been seeking to impose on Russia, President Putin announced yesterday that:

"Those who for the past 15 years have been fueling the arms race, seeking advantages over Russia, imposing restrictions and sanctions, which are illegal from the standpoint of international law, in order to hinder our country's development, particularly in the defence field, must hear this: all that you have been trying to prevent by this policy has happened. Attempts to restrain Russia have failed."

The Russian President announced a series of new weapons (including new nuclear-powered missiles invulnerable to any missile defence, hypersonic weapons, and underwater drones, inter alia ), that remarkably return the situation to the status quo ante – one of mutually assured destruction (MAD), were NATO to contemplate attacking Russia.

President Putin said that he had repeatedly warned Washington not to deploy ABM missiles around Russia – "Nobody listened to us: [But] Listen now!", he said:

"Our nuclear doctrine says Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons only in response to a nuclear attack or an attack with other weapons of mass destruction against her or her allies, or a conventional attack against us that threatens the very existence of the state."

"It is my duty to state this: Any use of nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies , be it small-scale, medium-scale or any other scale, will be treated as a nuclear attack on our country. The response will be instant - and with all the relevant consequences" (emphasis added).

President Putin underlined that he was not threatening America, nor did Russia have revanchist ambitions. It was rather Russia simply using the only language that Washington understands.

Putin's speech, accompanied by visuals of the new Russian weaponry, explains at least something of what has been going on in DC: America's recent seizure by a madness for spending. The Pentagon must have got (some) wind of Russia's advances – hence the huge increase in the budget for Defence planned for this year, and another 9% next year, and an unbudgeted commitment to fund a new nuclear submarine fleet, a replacement for the Minuteman missile system, and the development of new nuclear (tactical) weapons (costs unspecified).

The expense will be prodigious for the US government. But Russia already has stolen the lead, and did this with government debt, as a percentage of nominal GDP, standing at only 12.6%, whereas America debt's already is at 105% of GDP (before the weapons upgrade has begun). President Reagan is credited with busting the USSR economically by forcing it into an arms race, but now it is the US that is vulnerable to its mountain of debt – should the US try to reverse Putin's Spring 'surprise', and (if it can), restore its global conventional and nuclear primacy.

So, America has a choice: either to re-set the relationship with Russia (i.e. pursue détente), or, risk running a US borrowing requirement that busts the credibility of the dollar. The US, culturally, is accustomed to acting militarily 'where, when and how' it decides so to do. It will probably be culturally unable to abstain from this well-practiced habit. Therefore, a weak dollar and rising debt servicing costs seems inevitable: thus, the rôles seem set for a reversal from the Reagan era. Then it was Russia that overreached, trying to catch up with the US. Now, it may be the vice versa .

The hysteric anti-Russian rhetoric will continue – so deeply embedded is it as an 'article of faith' - but it seems likely that America will need to reconsider before further provoking Russia in Syria. If America is now unwilling to 'bloody Russia's nose' over some escalation in Syria, then its isolated and vulnerable military outposts in eastern Syria will loose much of their point, or begin to take casualties, or both.

The question now must be how Russia's exercise in speaking 'truth to power' will play on America's policy towards North Korea. The US 'generals' will not like President Putin's message, but there is probably little that they can do about it. But North Korea is different. Just as Britain, at its moment of weakness, in the wake of WW2, wanted the world to know that it remained strong (though the signs of its weakened state were evident to all), it sought to demonstrate its continued power through the disastrous Suez Campaign. Let us hope North Korea does not become America's 'Suez moment'.


Peter AU , 03 March 2018 at 05:40 PM

It seems Russia was able to develop all these weapons, right up to the testing phase, in total secrecy. Testing, impossible to conceal, would have been undertaken over the last two years or so, which fits the time frame for US looking at upgrading their weapons. US ABM defense, a big part of US military future, what twenty years in the making for US? is now null and void.
Christian Chuba , 03 March 2018 at 06:12 PM
If I know my country our reaction will be, 'we beat them in space race, we beat them in the 80's arms race, and dog gone it, we will beat them again'.

We have no interest in examining how we got here or who triggered it. All we see is that a gauntlet has been thrown down. We will go into even more massive deficit spending to whip them again and won't think about it again until we are eating out of garbage cans.

I'm angry at the professional Cold Warriors but even more angry at the MSM. Just today, I heard a Russian expert (aka hater) on FOX intone that Russia never had anything to worry about with our ABM systems because it can't a massive first strike. I naively expected the lady host to ask, 'but maybe they are worried that it would be able to stop a retaliatory strike after we send them to hades'. Needless to say, I was disappointed. Instead, Eboni Williams (mentioning her name to show that I'm not hallucinating, any of them would have reacted the same way), her eyes opened wide, 'we must improve our defenses to stop them'.

There you go, the FOX host, not only didn't see through the guests straw man argument but took it as a given that the U.S. should be able to nuke Russia out of existence with no consequences for us. The entire premise of the START treaty was to preserve MAD with a smaller nuke force to reduce accidents. Mr. Naive again, why should I expect the host to know that or the expert to inform her that MAD is the expected norm.

catherine , 03 March 2018 at 06:16 PM

''The point is, ladies and gentleman, that war, for lack of a better word, is good. War is right, war works. War clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. War, in all of its forms; war for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.''

So say the fellows who qualify to sit it out in well stocked gov bunkers and watch it on TV.

Lars , 03 March 2018 at 06:16 PM
When you qualify any anti-Russian sentiment as "hysteric", you lose a lot of credibility. No doubt there is a lot of noise, but the reality is that economically Russia is a basket case and the US is rapidly joining them.

For the next decade, we are faced with an unstable world and that will cause a lot of damage. However, it is unlikely that it will result in the massive land wars of the past. The biggest potential adversary to both the US and Russia is China. The battle field will be the communications platforms. The good new is that they will remain fragmented and technology will more than likely make it even more so, which will thankfully and eventually localize information, as global solutions are increasingly rejected.

As with these pages, there are a lot of conspiracies published right now, but as they are increasingly dispatched, a standard will be developed. Some will agree with it and others will not and will thus migrate elsewhere. This will be repeated all over the Internet.

I was an early user of the Internet and it quickly became a rather awful place where people were exchanging views. It soon became evident that was not sustainable and things changed. Like in a pond, the scum will rise, until encountering sunlight, when it is transformed and sinks to the bottom, never to be seen again, unless you dig very deep. But the cream will assemble at the top.

likbez , 04 March 2018 at 12:54 AM
The compulsive hatred of President Putin in élite western circles has surpassed anything witnessed during the Cold War. Western states have been hyping political hostility in almost every sphere: In Syria, in Ukraine, across the Middle East, in Eurasia, and now, this hatred has leached into the Security Council, leaving it irretrievably polarised -- and paralysed. This hostility has percolated too, across to all Russia's allies, contaminating them. It potends – almost inevitably – further sanctions on Russia (and its friends) under the catch-all Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. But the real question is: Does this collective hysteria portend war?
Not necessary. With MAD temporary restored on a new level the benefits of the first strike against Russia (if such plans existed) are null and void. Moreover spending on the current generation of missile defense systems should be partially written off, as their efficiency is now highly questionable (but they can be repurposed into offensive weapons carrying cruise missiles and such)

But the new neo-McCarthyism campaign, which is now in full force in the USA, serves a different purpose than the preparation to the WWIII, and reached such scale and intensity for a quite different reason.

Neoliberalism, which was the social system that the USA adopted in 1970th and spread around the globe entered a deep crisis. And Russia is a very convenient scapegoat, which allows to avoid the most difficult question: what to do next as neoliberalism entered the phase of decline (also Russia as a scapegoat allows just to reuse Cold War stereotypes firmly engraved in minds of the considerable part of the US population.)

The collapse of neoliberal ideology in 2008. and the collapse of support by the US population of neoliberal elite in 2016, threatens the USA role in the world and thus the existence of global neoliberal empire. And, in a more distant perspective (a decade, or two), the status of dollar as a global reserve currency.

And nobody knows what to do with this situation, how to approach it.

First it looked to me that the election of Trump was a sign that a more forward looking part of the US elite was trying to organize a soft landing: declare victory for neoliberalism and slowly retreat from the large part of the expenses for maintaining the global neoliberal empire. Partially off-loading those costs on EU, Japan, Australia, etc.

In this case enormous resources spent on MIC and empire per se can be redirected internally to placate restive population, and the deepening of the internal crisis in governance and the loss of confidence of population in the ruling elite, which demonstrated itself is such a dramatic manner in Hillary loss in 2016, can be probably be averted.

I was wrong. Multinationals fully and tightly control the US neoliberal elite (and are an important part of it) and they will never allow this. Also a large part of neoliberal elite is hell bent on world domination, and, like French aristocracy, "forgot nothing, and learned nothing" after 2016 elections.

With the alarming level of degeneration of the elite clearly visible in both Trump Administration and Congress. But the process itself started long ago (people say that Nixon was the last "real" president ;-). To say nothing about top intelligence agencies honchos.

In any case, it is clear that the US neoliberal elite still is hell-bent on world domination and is resistant to any change of the status quo . And I also noticed that, like in Rome, there is now an influential caste of "imperial servants", also hell-bent on maintaining the status quo.

Which includes not only Pentagon, and State Department which have a lot of staff living abroad for years. But also major intelligence agencies, closely connected with their counterparts (note role of UK-USA connections in Steele dossier) and as such fully "globalized/neoliberalized", at least ideologically. As well as the majority of the US Senate and House

That blocks any possibility of change in the US foreign policy and budget priorities. It looks like MIC needs to be fed at all costs. And the power of the "deep state" is such that it took them just three months to emasculate Trump, and put him in line with previous policies.

I would like to remind that Trumpism (or "economic nationalism" as it sometimes it is called) initially was pretty attractive proposition which included the following elements (most of which are anathema to classic neoliberalism):

  1. Rejection of neoliberal globalization;
  2. Rejection of unrestricted immigration;
  3. Fight against suppression of wages by multinationals via cheap imported labor;
  4. Fight against the elimination of meaningful, well-paying jobs via outsourcing and offshoring of manufacturing;
  5. Rejection of wars for enlargement and sustaining of neoliberal empire, especially NATO role as global policemen and wars for Washington client Israel in the Middle East;
  6. Détente with Russia;
  7. More pragmatic relations with Israel and suppression of Israeli agents of influence;
  8. Revision of offshoring of manufacturing and relations with China and India, as well as addressing the problem of trade deficit;
  9. Rejection of total surveillance on all citizens;
  10. The cut of military expenses to one third or less of the current level and concentrating on revival on national infrastructure, education, and science.
  11. Abandonment of maintenance of the "sole superpower" status and global neoliberal empire for more practical and less costly "semi-isolationist" foreign policy;
  12. Closing of unnecessary foreign military bases and cutting aid to the current clients.

The truth is that the moment, when the USA could change direction to the regime of "splendid isolation", or whatever such move can be called, was lost.

Moreover, despite Trump capitulation, the color revolution against him continued because he is not accepted as a legitimate POTUS by neoliberal elite, and, especially, by neocons. Which further weakens the state. That's another reason why neo-McCarthyism hysteria is still in full swing: it helps to compensate for the damage caused by slash-and-burn political infighting (which is a kind of soft civil war, if you wish)

The problem with witch hunt against Russia is that can speed up the alliance of China and Russia, on most beneficial for China terms. If and when China-Russia alliance materialize, the containment of China would be even more difficult and costly, the threat to dollar more pronounced and all bets are off for the US led global neoliberal empire as "Silk road" project will eat it in Europe and Asia chunk by chunk.

Neo-McCarthyism in this respect might be not such an absurd policy (and it does provide internal benefits in the form of consolidation of society against the fake external enemy -- a classic trick described by Hermann Göring in his famous quote https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/33505-why-of-course-the-people-don-t-want-war-why-should ) as Putin is not eternal and this will be his last term in office. With clear signs of possible political crisis in Russia due to the weakness of the mechanisms for smooth transition of the power to a new leader, or even the selection of the new one.

The danger is that instead of desirable new pro-European president (or at least a person who is inclined to cooperate with the West, but only on equal terms, like Putin) the next Russian president can be a fierce nationalist.

[Mar 04, 2018] Highlights From Putin's Megyn Kelly Interview Hacked Elections, Nukes And A New Cold War

Mar 04, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

NBC's Megyn Kelly has tried to establish herself as the US media's preeminent "Putin whisperer" since confronting the Russian president last year over allegations he sanctioned interference by hacking groups in the 2016 US presidential election. In a formal interview with the Russian president, Kelly asked the Russian leader about the latest development in the ongoing controversy, Mueller's indictment of 13 Russians and 3 Russian entities for election meddling.

Ignoring that the indictment stated that the alleged activities of the trolls at the Internet Research Agency had no impact on the outcome of the election, Kelly insisted on pressing the Russian president about why Russia hadn't acted to prosecute the men - including Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a wealthy Russian businessman.

Putin pointed out that no formal requests had been made by the US government, and no effort to share the incriminating information had been made.

"I have to see first what they've done. Give us a document, give us an official request" Putin said in the NBC interview adding that "We can not respond to that if they do not violate Russian laws."

Kelly responded by listing some of the allegations, before Putin insisted that they shouldn't be presented to him personally - but to Russia's general prosecutor.

"This has to go through official channels, not through the press, or yelling and hollering in the United States Congress," Putin said.

The broadcast aired a day after Putin grabbed headlines in Western media by revealing that Russia had recently finished testing a range of nuclear weapons that were capable of evading US anti-ballistic missile batteries, showing animated footage and digital representations of the missiles' capabilities striking Florida which prompted an uproar at the US State Department .

Meanwhile, even though Russia has repeatedly criticized the US and NATO for installing anti-ballistic missile shields in Eastern Europe that Russia says more closely resemble offensive missile batteries, Putin pushed back against questions about whether the US and Russia were entering a new Cold War. The Russian leader said anybody spreading these accusations are more concerned with propaganda than accurate representations of the relationships between the two countries.

"My point of view is that the individuals that have said that a new Cold War has started are not analysts. They do propaganda."

Repeating a claim that has been made by many Russian officials, Putin said the arms race between the US and Russia began when George W Bush withdrew from the anti-ballistic missile treaty in 2002.

"If you were to speak about an arms race, then an arms race began exactly at the time and moment the U.S. opted out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty," he said.

When asked, Putin refused to answer direct questions about the missile tests, saying only that "every single weapons system that I have discussed today easily surpasses and avoids a missile defense system."

Watch the full interview below:

https://www.nbcnews.com/widget/video-embed/960120387521

Politics War Conflict

Brazen Heist -> NiggaPleeze Sat, 03/03/2018 - 11:07 Permalink

Whatever interview is shown of Putin on any lamestream outlet, you can bet your bottom dollar that they will twist it to fit their narratives that Putin is bad, and the Swamp is good. In fact, it don't matter that the US pulls out of treaties and acts unilaterally.......laws and treaties are optional to the evil empire. Non-agreement capable comes to mind.

TahoeBilly2012 -> Brazen Heist Sat, 03/03/2018 - 12:10 Permalink

Better a few Ruski internet geeks "hack" ur election, than Hillary and Merkel hack your regime out of power, like Gaddafi learned.

virgule -> TahoeBilly2012 Sat, 03/03/2018 - 12:13 Permalink

The Pentagon in uproar? You mean despite all the spying, eavesdropping, electronic surveillance, satellites, etc...they had no idea?

LOL. Might as well cut those defense budgets by 90% then!

[Mar 03, 2018] Glenn Greenwald to Tucker Carlson Journalists Eagerly Being Manipulated By Intelligence Community On Russia

Notable quotes:
"... So, you and I don't agree on a lot of issues but I think we share the same concern about this story, and that is that American journalists are being manipulated for whatever reason by the intelligence community in the United States, and I'm wondering why after years of having this happen to American journalists, they are allowing this to happen again. ..."
"... Well, that's the thing I would refrain that a little bit. I don't actually think so much that journalists are the victims in the sense of that formulation that they're being manipulated. I think at best what you can say for them is they are willingly and eagerly being manipulated. ..."
"... Because what you see is over and over they publish really inflammatory stories that turn out to be totally false and what happens in those cases? Nothing. They get enormous benefits when they publish recklessly. They get applause on social media from their peers, they get zillions of re-tweets, huge amounts of traffic, they end up on TV. They get applauded across the spectrum because people are so giddy and eager to hear more about this Russia and Trump story. ..."
Mar 03, 2018 | www.realclearpolitics.com
Greenwald Journalists 'eagerly manipulated' on Russia story - YouTube

Tucker Carlson interviews Green Greenwald of The Intercept about journalists "willingly" being taken advantage of by the intelligence community on stories about Russia to reap the benefits, even when they know what they are publishing is "totally false."

From Tuesday's broadcast of Tucker Carlson Tonight on the FOX News Channel:

TUCKER CARLSON: So, Glenn, just to get to the facts of this story, it is conclusively shown that the story about the 21 voting systems being hacked is untrue, correct?
GLENN GREENWALD, JOURNALIST: It's false in two ways, one is that several of the states included in the list, such as Wisconsin, California, and Texas, said that the websites that the Homeland Security Department cited had nothing to do with voting systems, they are entirely unrelated.

And it's false in a second way, which is a lot of the stories, in fact, most of them said that Russia tried to hack into the voting systems when in fact even Homeland Security, it can only show that what they did was scan those computer systems, which is basically casing something to say for vulnerabilities and made no attempts to actually hack into them. So, it was false on various levels.

CARLSON: So, you and I don't agree on a lot of issues but I think we share the same concern about this story, and that is that American journalists are being manipulated for whatever reason by the intelligence community in the United States, and I'm wondering why after years of having this happen to American journalists, they are allowing this to happen again.

GREENWALD: Well, that's the thing I would refrain that a little bit. I don't actually think so much that journalists are the victims in the sense of that formulation that they're being manipulated. I think at best what you can say for them is they are willingly and eagerly being manipulated.

(LAUGHTER)

Because what you see is over and over they publish really inflammatory stories that turn out to be totally false and what happens in those cases? Nothing. They get enormous benefits when they publish recklessly. They get applause on social media from their peers, they get zillions of re-tweets, huge amounts of traffic, they end up on TV. They get applauded across the spectrum because people are so giddy and eager to hear more about this Russia and Trump story.

And when their stories get completely debunked, it just kind of, everybody agrees to ignore it and everyone moves on and they pay no price. At the same time, they are feeling and pleasing their sources by publishing these sources that their sources want them to publish. And so, there is huge amounts of career benefits and reputational benefits and very little cost when they publish stories that end up being debunked because the narrative they are serving is a popular one, at least within their peer circles.

CARLSON: Gosh! That is so dishonest. I mean, I think all of us and journalism have gotten things wrong, I certainly have. If you feel bad about it, I mean, you really do and there's a consequence. Do you really think there's that level of dishonesty in the American press?

GREENWALD: I think what it is more than dishonesty is a really warped incentive scheme bolstered by this very severe groupthink that social media is fostering in ways that we don't yet fully understand.

CARLSON: Yes.

GREENWALD: Most journalists these days are in Congressional Committees or at zoning board meetings or using -- they're sitting on Twitter talking to one another and this produces this extreme groupthink where these orthodoxies arise in deviating from them or questioning them or challenging, believe me, results in all kinds of recrimination and scorn. And embracing them produces this sort of in group mentality where you are rewarded, and I think a lot of it is about that kind of behavior.

CARLSON: That is really deep. I mean, you live in a foreign country, I'm not on social media, so maybe we have a little bit of distance from this, where do you think the story is going? What's the next incarnation of it?

GREENWALD: Well, the odd part about it, and about the inpatients that journalists have in trying to just jump to the finish line is that there are numerous investigations underway in the city, including by credible investigators, including Senator Burr and Warner and the Senate Intelligence Committee, which most people seem to trust and certainly Robert Mueller who is armed with subpoena power, and everyone is really eager to lavish with praise.

So, we are going to find out presumably one way or the other soon enough. I guess that one thing that is so odd to me Tucker, is that, this has been going on now for a year, this accusation that the Trump administration or the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to hack the DNC and John Podesta's email and we know that there are huge numbers of people inside the government who are willing to leak, even at the expense of committing crimes in order to undermine Trump and yet, there has been no leaks so far showing any evidence of that kind of collusion leading one to wonder why that is.

So, I hope that everybody is willing to wait until the actual investigation reveals finally the real answers. But it doesn't seem that will be the case.

CARLSON: Bravery is when you disagree in public with your peers. And by that definition, you are a very brave man. Glenn Greenwald, thanks for joining us tonight. I appreciate it.

[Mar 03, 2018] Wheeler also claimed in recently leaked audio that Seth Rich's brother, Aaron a Northrup Grumman employee, blocked him from looking at Seth's computer and stonewalled his investigation.

Mar 03, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

just the tip Fri, 03/02/2018 - 21:35 Permalink

wow.

if anyone has any doubts about how deep and wide the swamp is, they only need to read about seth's brother aaron.

a northrup grumman employee?

Wheeler also claimed in recently leaked audio that Seth Rich's brother, Aaron – a Northrup Grumman employee, blocked him from looking at Seth's computer and stonewalled his investigation.

Wheeler said that brother Aaron Rich tried to block Wheeler from looking at Seth's computer, even though there could be evidence on it. "He said no, he said I have his computer, meaning him," Wheeler said. "I said, well can I look at it? He said, what are you looking for? I said anything that could indicate if Seth was having problems with someone. He said no, I already checked it. Don't worry about it."

Aaron also blocked Wheeler from finding out about who was at a party Seth attended the night of the murder.

"All I want you to do is work on the botched robbery theory and that's it," Aaron told Wheeler - Big League Politics

Anunnaki -> just the tip Fri, 03/02/2018 - 21:45 Permalink

One of the Awan brothers was at the same party, stalked Seth on his walk home and botched the hit. Seth was alive in Howard Univ. Hospital and was murdered in his bed after being moved to the private hospital

Richard Whitney Fri, 03/02/2018 - 22:19 Permalink

Loretta Lynch - some of you know her as Elizabeth Carlisle - told WJC on the tarmac that it was Seth Rich. A procedure known as Arkancide then ensued.

Wikileaks offered a reward for information leading to the killers of Seth Rich. Did the DNC do anything? No.

Rich was killed by two members of MS-13, who were subsequently liquidated for their efforts.

Remember when President Trump referred to MS-13 in the SOTU? And then some undereducated water buffalo on CNN complained to the effect that "No one outside of Fox News knows about this obscure gang?" Well, Trump wasn't making some random verbal gesture. That was a signal that he knows, and serious investigators know, about Rich's murder and the DNC.

[Mar 03, 2018] The poisonous Guardian about Hope Hicks by Tom McCarthy

So this pro-Hillary bastion of Neoliberal innuentndo -- Guardian -- does not not like Hicks. As onecommneter noted " The poisonous Guardian which is so toxic I would advise folks not to use it even as an ass wipe, did not allow comments as is their custom now." Source
Mar 03, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

What is despicable pressitute is this guy: "The Washington Post has found that "members of the Trump campaign interacted with Russians at least 31 times throughout the campaign" in "at least 19 known meetings"."

Hicks, 29, had the high-pressure job last summer of crafting , with the president, an explanation for his son Donald Trump Jr's secret meeting with Russians at Trump Tower in New York in 2016 – an explanation later revealed as false. More recently, Hicks was said to have run the botched White House response to domestic abuse allegations against former aide Rob Porter, with whom she has been linked romantically.

... ... ...

Hicks aggressively defended the president-elect and his team against charges of inappropriate ties to Russian figures.

"The campaign had no contact with Russian officials," she said. Two days after the election, she said: "We are not aware of any campaign representatives that were in touch with any foreign entities before yesterday, when Mr Trump spoke with many world leaders."

The Washington Post has found that "members of the Trump campaign interacted with Russians at least 31 times throughout the campaign" in "at least 19 known meetings".

Discrepancies such as those have perhaps accelerated Hicks' political education. On Tuesday, the House intelligence committee questioned her for close to nine hours about the campaign's Russia ties.

Hicks refused to answer some of the most sensitive questions, including about the explanation for Trump Jr's meeting with Russians, according to House Democrat Adam Schiff.

But Hicks was said to have made one concession, admitting to having told, on an unspecified number of occasions, certain "white lies" on the president's behalf.

[Mar 03, 2018] From Russia with Trepidation The Rocky Ride of Edward G. Robinson

Notable quotes:
"... Moscow Strikes Back ..."
"... I am an American ..."
"... Miss V from Moscow ..."
Mar 03, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

In the darkest days of World War II, Hollywood went to bat for Russia -- our ally then -- by adapting Soviet propaganda films for the American audience and making some of its own on their behalf. This amazing documentary, a paean to the heroism of the Russian people and the Red Army, was shot before, during, and after Hitler's siege of Moscow. Filmed between October 1941 and January 1942 during a time of invasion, privation, agony and death in the depths of the Russian winter, Moscow Strikes Back (Russian version here ) may be a little hard to take in spots, but is well worth an hour of your time. Should the following video start in the middle, rewind by dragging the red button all the way to the left. Makes me think: wouldn't it be nice to be able to rewind America away from the right?

... ... ...

Hollywood's famous tough guy (also fine art collector and philanthropist) Edward G. Robinson narrates over a sound track featuring spirited scores by Russian composers. Directed by Leonid Varlamov and Ilya Kopalin, it won the 1942 Academy Award for Best Documentary. Then, as soon as the war ended, along with thousands of government and private employees, Hollywood directors and screenwriters were purged for suspect loyalties. Robinson was among those who paid a steep price's for their idealism and activism.

Now fascism is back in fashion. Who has the temerity advocate for Russian-American solidarity, given that Russia is once again on our rulers' shit list and World War III wish list? We aren't allowed to say good things about it or even that our countries once worked together, however mistrustfully. Thanks to several generations of hawkish propagandists, few of our countrymen remember or appreciate what the Russian people suffered in that war and how thankful they were for the goods the US shipped to them that helped them struggle through it, but it was their own fortitude that won the day. That and a regime that took civil defense seriously and directed the public's efforts.

As Nazi forces encircled Moscow, Marshal Zhukov mobilized Moscow's women to fortify the city. According to the WWII Multimedia Database , the women had to slog and dig through freezing muck to excavate their redoubts. With little more than shovels and wheelbarrows, they "emplaced or dug 201 miles (323.4 kilometers) of anti-tank obstacles and ditches, 158 miles (254.2 kilometers) of anti-infantry obstacles, and laid minefields. 3,800 prepared bunkers and fire bases were built. 37,500 metal 'hedgehogs' were set up to stop vehicles." I hope they at least got medals.

Could today's Americans match Russia's Greatest Generation or even our own? Take it on the chin and go on to collectively mobilize ourselves to prevail? We have sufficient tools and wealth, but have we enough will and leadership? Anesthetized by the H-Bomb, our government let preparedness and civil defense institutions wither. Lacking action plans for what to do in an extreme emergency, we're apparently expected to tough it out (use firearms responsibly and no looting, please). Of course, the government stocks bunkers for top officials and members of Congress, and our moneyed elites will repair to their hideaways and lock the gates at the first sign of mortal danger. Those of us who aren't armed preppers will go first. As civil society collapses, militias will battle over whatever resources are left. And then, depopulated, America will be great again.

But I digress. Back to Eddy Robinson's politics . In 1952, HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee) plunged into ignominy Edward Goldenberg Robinson for being duped by fifth-columnists into assailing fascism and advocating peace and cooperation among the great powers. The anti-fascist Jewish Romanian immigrant film star had served in two world wars. Fluent in six languages, he narrated Allied propaganda broadcasts for which the American Legion honored him. His anti-fascist bona fides, left-wing Hollywood connections, and support and advocacy for several hundred civic, cultural, philanthropic, and political organizations only served to target him as postwar red-baiting and housecleaning proceeded apace.

On April 30, 1952, Robinson sat before HUAC for the third time. He hadn't been subpoenaed; just harassed until he decided the time had come to clear his name. Through 20 pages of testimony (plaintext here ), he states his opposition to communism over and over:

My conscience is clear. My loyalty to this Nation I know to be absolute. No one has ever been willing to confront me under oath free from immunity and unequivocally charge me with membership in the Communist Party or any other subversive organization. No one can honestly do so. I now realize that some organizations which I permitted to use my name were, in fact, Communist fronts. But their ostensible purposes were good, and it was for such purposes that I allowed use of my name and even made numerous financial contributions. The hidden purposes of the Communists, in such groups, was not known to me. Had I known the truth, I would not have associated with such persons, although I would have and intend to continue to help to the extent of my ability in worth-while causes, honestly calculated to help underprivileged or oppressed people, including those oppressed by Communist tyranny.

Robinson closed his prepared testimony by saying:

Anyone who understands the history of the political activity in Hollywood will appreciate the fact that innocent, sincere persons were used by the Communists to whom honesty and sincerity are as foreign as the Soviet Union is to America. I was duped and used. I was lied to. But, I repeat, I acted from good motives, and I have never knowingly aided Communists or any Communist cause.

I wish to thank the committee for this opportunity to appear and clarify my position. I have been slow to realize that persons I thought sincere were Communists. I am glad, for the sake of myself and the Nation, that they have been exposed by your committee.

While you have been, exposing Communists, I have been fighting them and their ideology in my own way. I just finished appearing in close to 250 performances of "Darkness at Noon" all over the country. It is, perhaps, the strongest indictment of communism ever presented. I am sure it had a profound and lasting effect on all who saw it.

During questioning, he doubled down on his anti-communism:

To me, communism is abhorrent. Certainly I supported Russia during the war but, as an ally, and no more than as an ally. What I did for Russia was relatively negligible, compared to what I did for our other allies.

Upon being pressed, he named film industry colleagues he had come to believe were communists: Albert Maltz; Dalton Trumbo; John Howard Lawson; Donald Ogden Stewart. This of course was not news to anyone, but as he had "named names," the witch-hunters refrained from branding him with the Red Star label. But when Robinson asked members of the committee why they shouldn't certify him as a loyal American, the best he could get was Rep. Morgan Molder (R-MO) telling him:

Mr. [Donald L.] Jackson [R-CA16] has made the statement that this committee is not in a position to exonerate or to vindicate any person who has been wrongfully accused of being a Communist or who has been smeared as a result of such false accusations. I will agree with him to a certain extent. However, I believe that when, as a result of any proceedings or functions of this committee, someone has been unjustly smeared or injured it is our duty to aid that person and give that person an opportunity to appear before the committee to explain and defend himself as you have done.

In other words, he was potentially guilty until proven innocent, which the committee refused to do. Instead, they treated him like a student in a dunce cap scratching out "I will not be a commie dupe" over and over. His penitence extended to publishing "How the Reds Made a Sucker Out of Me," in American Legion Magazine (October 1952), paraphrased in 2011 by USC historian Steven J. Ross:

Robinson told readers that while he had "never paid much attention to communism in the past," he now knew how they went about duping loyal Americans. "They do not reveal themselves as communists," but pose "as fine American citizens who are for 'peace,' or 'decent working conditions,' or 'against intolerance.' " These were lies; their real aim was "world domination, oppression, and slavery for the working people and the minorities they profess to love." The contrite actor ended by swearing, "I am not a communist, I have never been, I never will be – I am an American ."

It must have been soul-crushing for someone so allergic to fascism to prostrate himself before that jingoist tribunal. Thank Mother of Mercy, that wasn't the end of Rico . Robinson returned to the stage for several years and then went on to act in more than 40 films. Somehow befittingly, his last role came in the cult classic b-movie Soylent Green ( 1973 ). He died soon after in Mount Sinai Hospital and was buried in Brooklyn. He was 79.

In that article, Little Caesar and the McCarthyist Mob , Ross observes, "The internationalist pronouncements of Robinson and other Hollywood activists soon came to haunt them as HUAC began portraying anti-fascists as the allies of Communists bent on destroying America." And so it is today as anti-Russia hysteria paves the way to a fascist-style America-first militarism, cheered on by compliant corporate media and political opportunists from both sides of the aisle. Whoever objects to the gathering storm is apt to be fingered as soft on Putin and entered into watch lists.

Meanwhile, the corporate takeover of the Federal Government and more than several states is nearly a fait accompli . Our elections are rigged, not by Russian trolls but minions of the GOP. The First Family mixes governing with business and pleasure and the Bozo-in-Chief can't get his wealth-addled mind around anything for more than a New York minute. Generals and billionaires have been placed in charge of arming and corrupting the republic, respectively. Democrats won't take on the Electoral College or Republican stratagems to rig elections, even though reforms would be win-win for them.

We're going down folks, and if Edward G. were around and still in the game he would understand where we're heading. The old anti-fascist would be plunging right in to keep America safe for democracy. Since he can't, I reckon we've got to.

Bonus Feature

Another pro-Soviet propaganda production from 1942, this one all-American, is Miss V from Moscow . Directed by Albert Herman and starring Lola Lane and Noel Madison, it is regarded as one of the cheesiest spy films ever to grace the silver screen. Lane plays Vera Marova, an untrained Soviet spy apparently fluent in German, French, and English. She slips into occupied France pretending to be a dead German spy whom she closely resembles. In an absurd sequence of implausible events, she and Steve Worth, a downed American airman, hook up and collaborate with Free French partisans in Paris. After she romances a Gestapo Captain and worms war plans from him, they send secret radio messages to Moscow from the back room of a bistro that enable American convoys bound for Russia to elude German submarines. As the film ends, instead of having Vera and her plucky American comrade Steve romantically embrace (that would be a bit too much bilateral solidarity) we get to cheer on American supply ships steaming through the Baltic to deliver the goods.

Geoff Dutton is an ex-geek turned writer and editor. He hails from Boston and writes about whatever distortions of reality strike his fancy. Currently, he's pedaling a novel chronicling the lives and times of members of a cell of terrorists in Europe, completing a collection of essays on high technology delusions, and can be found barking at progressivepilgrim.review.

[Mar 03, 2018] The Grammar of Russiagate

Notable quotes:
"... thief, rapist ..."
"... Sheldon Richman , author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited , keeps the blog Free Association and is a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society , and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com . He is also the Executive Editor of The Libertarian Institute. ..."
Mar 03, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

Closely observing the grammar of the Official Russiagate Narrative is revealing and instructive. It provides clues to the (language-)game being played.

Consider what I call the insidious article, the . In the public prints and official pronouncements, it's not enough to say Russians tried to muck around in the American election. It's almost always the Russians . This is a subtle way to convey the idea that Vladimir Putin and his intel agencies were responsible. If a second-tier Russian oligarch who wishes to help Putin hires, on his own initiative, "a bunch of subliterate-in-English trolls," in Masha Gessen's words, and pays them the minimum wage to (again Gessen) "post[] mostly static and sort of absurd advertising," that is treated as the equivalent of Putin's executing a plan to destroy the American political system.

There's a big difference between Russians and the Russians , even if the grammar seems inconsequential.

Then there's the similar case of synecdoche , "a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa." This is one of the few things I learned in college that I actually remember. (Thank you Mark Isaacs, professor of journalism at Temple University, who also introduced me to the work of H. L. Mencken.)

When you read in the newspaper or hear it said on CNN that Russia or Moscow or the Kremlin did such and such, you should call out, "Who exactly?" Countries, cities, and citadels cannot act. Only individuals do. Moreover, there's a big difference between the GRU (Glavnoje Razvedyvatel'noje Upravlenije) and the IRA (Internet Research Institute), between Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin. But their acts are equally attributed to Russia . St. Petersburg (where the IRA is located) even becomes subsumed by Moscow . The Kremlin could refer to someone directly ordered by Putin or a rogue actor. But those distinctions are of little interest to those formulating or promulgating the Official Narrative.

Finally, let's turn to the word alleged . I can't stress how important this word figured in my journalism training in the 1960s and 70s, both in school and on the job. It was drilled into me by teachers and editors that an allegation is just an allegation until it is confirmed. And to drive this home, my teachers' favorite line was, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."

Alleged was the obligatory qualifier before murderer , thief, rapist , kidnapper , etc. -- until the suspect was convicted or his guilty plea was accepted by a judge. We'd never dream of not using it before that point. News organization were of course protecting themselves from libel actions, but it was more than that, namely, fairness and acknowledgment of the presumption of innocent/burden of proof. Even an initial confession was not proof of guilt: people sometimes confess to offenses they did not commit, and sometimes people think their actions are illegal when they are not.

At least one young newsman either learned the lesson about alleged too well or thought it would be fun to mock the obsession with the word. Don Folsom, a rookie Buffalo, NY, radio newscaster in the 1960s began his Easter morning report thus: "Today millions of Christians around the world are celebrating the alleged resurrection of Jesus Christ." He was fired.

The word alleged seems almost completely lacking in the Russiagate conversation. The New York Times and other major news outlets have many times referred merely to "Russian interference in the 2016 election." No alleged ? Have those reporters actually seen the evidence the general public has been denied? If so, they haven't said informed us of that fact. Remember, the infamous January 2017 National Intelligence Assessment contained no evidence, as the same Times explicitly acknowledged at the time. In his Jan. 6, 2017, article, "Russian Intervention in American Election Was No One-Off," Times reporter Scott Shane wrote :

What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies' claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. This is a significant omission .

Instead, the message from the agencies amounts to "trust us."

I thought reporters weren't supposed to trust even their own mothers! Why are they trusting the lying James Clapper's "handpicked" intel personnel who made this assessment? Do they not remember the Big Lie about Iraqi WMDs, not to mention the entire lying history of the U.S. intel complex?

The Times and the other major news companies have forgotten what Shane reported more than a year ago: that the government has not disclosed the evidence again Putin and the Russians . If you think the indictment of 13 Russians patched up this hole, reread this column. Note also that the IRA is not charged with hacking the DNC and Podesta email accounts and giving the authentic contents to Wikileaks, which is how the big fuss got started.

So there you go. I can only conclude that the mainstream media were so traumatized by Trump's win (a traumatizing event, to be sure) and by Hillary Clinton's loss (not so much) that they have dropped the grammar of detached reporting and embraced the grammar of those who seek confrontation with Russia.

It's a very dangerous (language-)game indeed.

Sheldon Richman , author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited , keeps the blog Free Association and is a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society , and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com . He is also the Executive Editor of The Libertarian Institute.

[Mar 02, 2018] Contradictions In Seth Rich Murder Continue To Challenge Hacking Narrative

Highly recommended!
Muller was the guy who buried 911 investigation. That's probably why he was hired for Russiagate investigation too.
Notable quotes:
"... retired U.S. Navy admiral James A. Lyons, Jr. asks a simple, yet monumentally significant question: Why haven't Congressional Investigators or Special Counsel Robert Mueller addressed the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich - who multiple people have claimed was Wikileaks' source of emails leaked during the 2016 U.S. presidential election? ..."
"... Mueller has been incredibly thorough in his ongoing investigations -- however he won't even respond to Kim Dotcom, the New Zealand entrepreneur who clearly knew about the hacked emails long before they were released, claims that Seth Rich obtained them with a memory stick , and has offered to provide proof to the Special Counsel investigation. ..."
"... In addition to several odd facts surrounding Rich's still unsolved murder - which officials have deemed a "botched robbery," forensic technical evidence has emerged which contradicts the Crowdstrike report. The Irvine, CA company partially funded by Google , was the only entity allowed to analyze the DNC servers in relation to claims of election hacking: ..."
"... Notably, Crowdstrike has been considered by many to be discredited over their revision and retraction of a report over Russian hacking of Ukrainian military equipment - a report which the government of Ukraine said was fake news. ..."
"... Also notable is that Crowdstrike founder and anti-Putin Russian expat Dimitri Alperovitch sits on the Atlantic Council - which is funded by the US State Department, NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukranian Oligarch Victor Pinchuk. Who else is on the Atlantic Council? Evelyn Farkas - who slipped up during an MSNBC interview with Mika Brzezinski and disclosed that the Obama administration had been spying on the Trump campaign: ..."
"... "The facts that we know of in the murder of the DNC staffer, Seth Rich, was that he was gunned down blocks from his home on July 10, 2016. Washington Metro police detectives claim that Mr. Rich was a robbery victim, which is strange since after being shot twice in the back, he was still wearing a $2,000 gold necklace and watch. He still had his wallet, key and phone. Clearly, he was not a victim of robbery, " writes Lyons. ..."
"... Another unexplained fact muddying the Rich case is that of a stolen 40 caliber Glock 22 handguns stolen from an FBI agent's car the same day Rich was murdered. D.C. Metro police said that the theft occurred between 5 and 7 a.m., while the FBI said two weeks later that the theft had occurred between Midnight and 2 a.m. - fueling speculation that the FBI gun was used in Rich's murder ..."
"... Perhaps the most stunning audio evidence, however, comes from leaked audio of a recorded conversation between Ed Butowsky and Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who told him of a " purported FBI report establishing that Seth Rich sent emails to WikiLeaks ." ..."
"... Hersh also told Butowsky that the DNC made up the Russian hacking story as a disinformation campaign – directly pointing a finger at former CIA director (and now MSNBC/NBC contributor ) John Brennan as the architect. ..."
"... and said 'I want money.' ..."
Mar 02, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

As rumors swirl that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is preparing a case against Russians who are alleged to have hacked Democrats during the 2016 election -- a conclusion based solely on the analysis of cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, a Friday op-ed in the Washington Times by retired U.S. Navy admiral James A. Lyons, Jr. asks a simple, yet monumentally significant question: Why haven't Congressional Investigators or Special Counsel Robert Mueller addressed the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich - who multiple people have claimed was Wikileaks' source of emails leaked during the 2016 U.S. presidential election?

Mueller has been incredibly thorough in his ongoing investigations -- however he won't even respond to Kim Dotcom, the New Zealand entrepreneur who clearly knew about the hacked emails long before they were released, claims that Seth Rich obtained them with a memory stick , and has offered to provide proof to the Special Counsel investigation.

On May 18, 2017, Dotcom proposed that if Congress includes the Seth Rich investigation in their Russia probe, he would provide written testimony with evidence that Seth Rich was WikiLeaks' source.

In addition to several odd facts surrounding Rich's still unsolved murder - which officials have deemed a "botched robbery," forensic technical evidence has emerged which contradicts the Crowdstrike report. The Irvine, CA company partially funded by Google , was the only entity allowed to analyze the DNC servers in relation to claims of election hacking:

Notably, Crowdstrike has been considered by many to be discredited over their revision and retraction of a report over Russian hacking of Ukrainian military equipment - a report which the government of Ukraine said was fake news.

In connection with the emergence in some media reports which stated that the alleged "80% howitzer D-30 Armed Forces of Ukraine removed through scrapping Russian Ukrainian hackers software gunners," Land Forces Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine informs that the said information is incorrect .

Ministry of Defence of Ukraine asks journalists to publish only verified information received from the competent official sources. Spreading false information leads to increased social tension in society and undermines public confidence in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. –mil.gov.ua (translated) (1.6.2017)

In fact, several respected journalists have cast serious doubt on CrowdStrike's report on the DNC servers:

Pay attention, because Mueller is likely to use the Crowdstrike report to support the rumored upcoming charges against Russian hackers.

Also notable is that Crowdstrike founder and anti-Putin Russian expat Dimitri Alperovitch sits on the Atlantic Council - which is funded by the US State Department, NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukranian Oligarch Victor Pinchuk. Who else is on the Atlantic Council? Evelyn Farkas - who slipped up during an MSNBC interview with Mika Brzezinski and disclosed that the Obama administration had been spying on the Trump campaign:

The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods , meaning we would not longer have access to that intelligence. - Evelyn Farkas

Odd facts surrounding the murder of Seth Rich

"The facts that we know of in the murder of the DNC staffer, Seth Rich, was that he was gunned down blocks from his home on July 10, 2016. Washington Metro police detectives claim that Mr. Rich was a robbery victim, which is strange since after being shot twice in the back, he was still wearing a $2,000 gold necklace and watch. He still had his wallet, key and phone. Clearly, he was not a victim of robbery, " writes Lyons.

Another unexplained fact muddying the Rich case is that of a stolen 40 caliber Glock 22 handguns stolen from an FBI agent's car the same day Rich was murdered. D.C. Metro police said that the theft occurred between 5 and 7 a.m., while the FBI said two weeks later that the theft had occurred between Midnight and 2 a.m. - fueling speculation that the FBI gun was used in Rich's murder.

Furthermore, two men working with the Rich family - private investigator and former D.C. Police detective Rod Wheeler and family acquaintance Ed Butowsky, have previously stated that Rich had contacts with WikiLeaks before his death.

"According to Ed Butowsky, an acquaintance of the family, in his discussions with Joel and Mary Rich, they confirmed that their son transmitted the DNC emails to Wikileaks ," writes Lyons.

While Wheeler initially told TV station Fox5 that proof of Rich's contact with WikiLeaks lies on the murdered IT staffer's laptop, he later walked the claim back - though he maintained that there was "some communication between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks."

Wheeler also claimed in recently leaked audio that Seth Rich's brother, Aaron – a Northrup Grumman employee, blocked him from looking at Seth's computer and stonewalled his investigation.

Wheeler said that brother Aaron Rich tried to block Wheeler from looking at Seth's computer, even though there could be evidence on it. "He said no, he said I have his computer, meaning him," Wheeler said. "I said, well can I look at it? He said, what are you looking for? I said anything that could indicate if Seth was having problems with someone. He said no, I already checked it. Don't worry about it."

Aaron also blocked Wheeler from finding out about who was at a party Seth attended the night of the murder.

"All I want you to do is work on the botched robbery theory and that's it," Aaron told Wheeler - Big League Politics

Perhaps the most stunning audio evidence, however, comes from leaked audio of a recorded conversation between Ed Butowsky and Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who told him of a " purported FBI report establishing that Seth Rich sent emails to WikiLeaks ."

As transcribed and exclusively reported on by journalist Cassandra Fairbanks last year:

What the report says is that some time in late Spring he makes contact with WikiLeaks, that's in his computer," he says. " Anyway, they found what he had done is that he had submitted a series of documents -- of emails, of juicy emails, from the DNC."

Hersh explains that it was unclear how the negotiations went, but that WikiLeaks did obtain access to a password protected DropBox where Rich had put the files.

" All I know is that he offered a sample, an extensive sample, I'm sure dozens of emails, and said 'I want money.' Later, WikiLeaks did get the password, he had a DropBox, a protected DropBox," he said. They got access to the DropBox."

Hersh also states that Rich had concerns about something happening to him, and had

"The word was passed, according to the NSA report, he also shared this DropBox with a couple of friends, so that 'if anything happens to me it's not going to solve your problems,'" he added. "WikiLeaks got access before he was killed."

Brennan and Russian disinformation

Hersh also told Butowsky that the DNC made up the Russian hacking story as a disinformation campaign – directly pointing a finger at former CIA director (and now MSNBC/NBC contributor ) John Brennan as the architect.

I have a narrative of how that whole f*cking thing began. It's a Brennan operation, it was an American disinformation , and the fu*kin' President, at one point, they even started telling the press – they were backfeeding the Press, the head of the NSA was going and telling the press, fu*king c*cksucker Rogers, was telling the press that we even know who in the Russian military intelligence service leaked it.

Listen to Seymour Hersh leaked audio:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/giuZdBAXVh0

(full transcription here and extended audio of the Hersh conversation here )

Hersh denied that he told Butowsky anything before the leaked audio emerged , telling NPR " I hear gossip [Butowsky] took two and two and made 45 out of it. "

Technical Evidence

As we mentioned last week, Dotcom's assertion is backed up by an analysis done last year by a researcher who goes by the name Forensicator , who determined that the DNC files were copied at 22.6 MB/s - a speed virtually impossible to achieve from halfway around the world, much less over a local network - yet a speed typical of file transfers to a memory stick.

The big hint

Last but not least, let's not forget that Julian Assange heavily implied Seth Rich was a source:

Given that a) the Russian hacking narrative hinges on Crowdstrikes's questionable reporting , and b) a mountain of evidence pointing to Seth Rich as the source of the leaked emails - it stands to reason that Congressional investigators and Special Counsel Robert Mueller should at minimum explore these leads.

As retired U.S. Navy admiral James A. Lyons, Jr. asks: why aren't they?

macholatte Permalink

Something all of us here already know, if Mueller gets away from the delusion of Trump-Russia collusion then it will be his ass in the frying pan. So he won't go after the Clintons, Obama, Comey or anyone else. Hitlery could show up with a gun in her hand and tell Mueller she shot Seth and he would ignore it.

And, sadly, there ain't nobody gonna do anything about it unless and until a Special Prosecutor from outside DC is hired. Right now a snowball in hell has a better chance.

Corruption!
It's what's for breakfast!

– Rod Sessions

NumberNone -> hedgeless_horseman Permalink

Why don't the Democrats scream about the exploitation of his murder against them like they do with every minor accusation? It's as if they want his death to disappear from the public view...wonder why?

Theosebes Goodfellow -> WTFRLY Permalink

I think it is mostly because they know so much of their world hangs in the secrecy. If they let the Seth Rich story get out, the Uranium One story gets out. If the Uranium One story gets out, the Awans' stolen cars with diplomatic cover for guns to Syria in return for heroin to America comes out. If that story comes out, then the ISI Pakistani doctors with fake medical degrees pushing pharma opiods in America comes out. And finally, Pizzagate, Pedogate, call it what you want, it comes out too. And then all of these dirty sons of bitches go to jail.

And that's why you aren't hearing any of it. Especially from Mueller. I think he got hoodwinked too. They sold him this job as a slam dunk to get Trump out of the White House. It really is the shits when the best laid plans of mice go south.

Bes Yars Revenge Permalink

One of Trumps big problems is that as an outsider he did not have people both qualified and loyal to appoint to critical offices in the deep state. That is why he wound up with a cipher like Sessions, a guy naive and gullible enough to believe the justice department was filled with honorable and trustworthy people or at least men who played by some set of rules. Having found out the hard way that he screwed up Trump is groping for a way out, trying to use a knife in a gun fight. The other side is too ruthless and i suspect they will take him down in the end.

SlothB77 Yars Revenge Permalink

"All I know is that he offered a sample, an extensive sample, I'm sure dozens of emails, and said 'I want money.' Later, WikiLeaks did get the password, he had a DropBox, a protected DropBox," he said. They got access to the DropBox."

Why has no one followed the money on this yet? This introduces an interesting angle - did Seth Rich get paid by WikiLeaks? And if so, can we find evidence of the payoff? How did he afford his expensive watch and necklace?

Freddie Bastiat Permalink

Dems voters and liberals are silent on all this or really just pushing the Russian and Putin narrative.

Blankenstein RopeADope Permalink

Report a crime, yet don't allow law enforcement access to evidence to help them solve the case.

Sounds like a case in Illinois. A 1 1/2 year old went missing, yet the parent wouldn't let the authorities search the house. I don't remember if there was a warrant or what finally happened that the police were allowed to search the home, but they did, and found the baby, dead, under the sofa.

hedgeless_horseman z530 Permalink

The case is being tried on CNN and in the NYT. It was never intended to go to court.

Withdrawn Sanction z530 Permalink

The other key is Rod Rosenstein's post-indictment presser. At the very end, he gave away the game by admitting there was no collusion, no Americans were involved, and nothing allegedly done by the Russians affected the election's outcome. BOOM. Stick a fork in Mueller's ham sandwich indictment.

truthalwayswinsout Permalink

Without that bit of truth, Mueller can go after people for other crimes but not for what he was mandated to do.

EddieLomax Permalink

The one bit of evidence that pushes me over from the possible to probably is the gun, what are the odds of this gun being stolen from the FBI, not just some random joe, but the FBI themselves. If that was the same gun used in the murder than the odds of it happening to turn up immediately in a robbery where nothing was stolen in an area where no one commits crimes is so small as to be near zero. It is vague above, what do ballistics say?

If Trump really wants to drain his swamp then this would be the way in, however if they did murder Seth then they'll murder Trump's family too so he is neutralized unless they can go in and get everyone involved in one go. Otherwise I'd expect the job to be handed over to someone ready to die, thinking here a retired general/admiral with no family might be the one to do it.

[Mar 02, 2018] The best time to attack Russia

Mar 02, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

V. Arnold | Mar 2, 2018 12:01:34 AM | 57

The best time to attack Russia, enjoy:

This past September, in one of his regular interviews with the newspaper Parlamentní Listy, retired Czech Major General Hynek Blaško commented on the possibility of a conflict between Russia and NATO with a following anecdote:

"I have seen a popular joke on the Internet about Obama and his generals in the Pentagon debating on the best timing to attack Russia. They couldn't come to any agreement, so they decided to ask their allies.

The French said: " We do not know, but certainly not in the winter. This will end badly. "

The Germans responded: "We do not know, either, but definitely not in a summer. We have already tried."

Someone in Obama's war room had a brilliant idea to ask China, on the basis that China is developing and always has new ideas.

The Chinese answered: "The best time for this is right now. Russia is building the Power of Siberia pipeline, the North Stream Pipeline, Vostochny Cosmodrome Spaceport, the MegaProject bridge to Crimea; also Russian is upgrading the Trans-Siberian railroad with a new railway bridge across Lena River and the Amur-Yakutsk Mainline. Russia is also building new sports facilities for the World Cup and athletics, and has in development over 150 production projects in the Arctic Well, now they really need as many POWs as possible!"

[Mar 02, 2018] The best time to attack Russia

Mar 02, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

V. Arnold | Mar 2, 2018 12:01:34 AM | 57

The best time to attack Russia, enjoy:

This past September, in one of his regular interviews with the newspaper Parlamentní Listy, retired Czech Major General Hynek Blaško commented on the possibility of a conflict between Russia and NATO with a following anecdote:

"I have seen a popular joke on the Internet about Obama and his generals in the Pentagon debating on the best timing to attack Russia. They couldn't come to any agreement, so they decided to ask their allies.

The French said: " We do not know, but certainly not in the winter. This will end badly. "

The Germans responded: "We do not know, either, but definitely not in a summer. We have already tried."

Someone in Obama's war room had a brilliant idea to ask China, on the basis that China is developing and always has new ideas.

The Chinese answered: "The best time for this is right now. Russia is building the Power of Siberia pipeline, the North Stream Pipeline, Vostochny Cosmodrome Spaceport, the MegaProject bridge to Crimea; also Russian is upgrading the Trans-Siberian railroad with a new railway bridge across Lena River and the Amur-Yakutsk Mainline. Russia is also building new sports facilities for the World Cup and athletics, and has in development over 150 production projects in the Arctic Well, now they really need as many POWs as possible!"

[Mar 02, 2018] Look deeper at "election rigger" and will find a neoconservative

Mar 02, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Paul Craig Roberts' invective against the "riggers:" https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/03/01/washington-sufficiently-intelligent-trusted-independent-foreign-policy/
"The stupid Samantha Vinograd [who served as a staffer on Obama's National Security Council] repeats the lie that Russiagate was Putin's plot "to destabilize the United States." So, how is the US a superpower when Russia controls US elections? Doesn't this mean that Americans are of no relevance whatsoever in the world? ... With intelligence levels this low on Obama's National Security Council, no wonder the neoonservatives were able to run over the Obama regime and resurrect the Cold War, thus returning the world to a high chance of nuclear Armageddon."
The "riggers" have exposed their incompetence again and again and again...

[Mar 02, 2018] The War Against Alternative Information by Rick Sterling

Notable quotes:
"... The U.S. establishment is not content simply to have domination over the media narratives on critical foreign policy issues, such as Syria, Ukraine and Russia. It wants total domination. Thus we now have the " Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act " that President Obama signed into law on Dec. 23 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2017 , setting aside $160 million to combat any "propaganda" that challenges Official Washington's version of reality. ..."
"... The new law is remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least because it merges a new McCarthyism about purported dissemination of Russian "propaganda" on the Internet with a new Orwellianism by creating a kind of Ministry of Truth – or Global Engagement Center – to protect the American people from "foreign propaganda and disinformation." ..."
"... Justifying this new bureaucracy, the bill's sponsors argued that the existing agencies for " strategic communications " and " public diplomacy " were not enough, that the information threat required "a whole-of-government approach leveraging all elements of national power." ..."
"... The law also is rife with irony since the U.S. government and related agencies are among the world's biggest purveyors of propaganda and disinformation – or what you might call evidence-free claims, such as the recent accusations of Russia hacking into Democratic emails to "influence" the U.S. election. ..."
"... Of course, there is a long history of U.S. disinformation and propaganda. Former CIA agents Philip Agee and John Stockwell documented how it was done decades ago, secretly planting "black propaganda" and covertly funding media outlets to influence events around the world, with much of the fake news blowing back into the American media. ..."
"... In more recent decades, the U.S. government has adopted an Internet-era version of that formula with an emphasis on having the State Department or the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy supply, train and pay "activists" and "citizen journalists" to create and distribute propaganda and false stories via "social media" and via contacts with the mainstream media. The U.S. government's strategy also seeks to undermine and discredit journalists who challenge this orthodoxy. The new legislation escalates this information war by tossing another $160 million into the pot. ..."
Mar 02, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

By Rick Sterling ( first published Jan. 1, 2017 )

The U.S. establishment is not content simply to have domination over the media narratives on critical foreign policy issues, such as Syria, Ukraine and Russia. It wants total domination. Thus we now have the " Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act " that President Obama signed into law on Dec. 23 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2017 , setting aside $160 million to combat any "propaganda" that challenges Official Washington's version of reality.

The new law mandates the U.S. Secretary of State to collaborate with the Secretary of Defense, Director of National Intelligence and other federal agencies to create a Global Engagement Center "to lead, synchronize, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests." The law directs the Center to be formed in 180 days and to share expertise among agencies and to "coordinate with allied nations."

The legislation was initiated in March 2016, as the demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia was already underway and was enacted amid the allegations of "Russian hacking" around the U.S. presidential election and the mainstream media's furor over supposedly "fake news." Defeated Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton voiced strong support for the bill: "It's imperative that leaders in both the private sector and the public sector step up to protect our democracy, and innocent lives."

The new law is remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least because it merges a new McCarthyism about purported dissemination of Russian "propaganda" on the Internet with a new Orwellianism by creating a kind of Ministry of Truth – or Global Engagement Center – to protect the American people from "foreign propaganda and disinformation."

As part of the effort to detect and defeat these unwanted narratives, the law authorizes the Center to: "Facilitate the use of a wide range of technologies and techniques by sharing expertise among Federal departments and agencies, seeking expertise from external sources, and implementing best practices." (This section is an apparent reference to proposals that Google, Facebook and other technology companies find ways to block or brand certain Internet sites as purveyors of "Russian propaganda" or "fake news." )

Justifying this new bureaucracy, the bill's sponsors argued that the existing agencies for " strategic communications " and " public diplomacy " were not enough, that the information threat required "a whole-of-government approach leveraging all elements of national power."

The law also is rife with irony since the U.S. government and related agencies are among the world's biggest purveyors of propaganda and disinformation – or what you might call evidence-free claims, such as the recent accusations of Russia hacking into Democratic emails to "influence" the U.S. election.

Despite these accusations -- leaked by the Obama administration and embraced as true by the mainstream U.S. news media -- there is little or no public evidence to support the charges. There is also a contradictory analysis by veteran U.S. intelligence professionals as well as statements by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and an associate, former British Ambassador Craig Murray , that the Russians were not the source of the leaks. Yet, the mainstream U.S. media has virtually ignored this counter-evidence, appearing eager to collaborate with the new "Global Engagement Center" even before it is officially formed.

Of course, there is a long history of U.S. disinformation and propaganda. Former CIA agents Philip Agee and John Stockwell documented how it was done decades ago, secretly planting "black propaganda" and covertly funding media outlets to influence events around the world, with much of the fake news blowing back into the American media.

In more recent decades, the U.S. government has adopted an Internet-era version of that formula with an emphasis on having the State Department or the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy supply, train and pay "activists" and "citizen journalists" to create and distribute propaganda and false stories via "social media" and via contacts with the mainstream media. The U.S. government's strategy also seeks to undermine and discredit journalists who challenge this orthodoxy. The new legislation escalates this information war by tossing another $160 million into the pot.

Propaganda and Disinformation on Syria

Syria is a good case study in the modern application of information warfare. In her memoir Hard Choices , former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote that the U.S. provided "support for (Syrian) civilian opposition groups, including satellite-linked computers, telephones, cameras, and training for more than a thousand activists, students and independent journalists."

Indeed, a huge amount of money has gone to "activists" and "civil society" groups in Syria and other countries that have been targeted for "regime change." A lot of the money also goes to parent organizations that are based in the United States and Europe, so these efforts do not only support on-the-ground efforts to undermine the targeted countries, but perhaps even more importantly, the money influences and manipulates public opinion in the West.

In North America, representatives from the Syrian "Local Coordination Committees" (LCC) were frequent guests on popular media programs such as "DemocracyNow." The message was clear: there is a "revolution" in Syria against a "brutal regime" personified in Bashar al-Assad. It was not mentioned that the "Local Coordination Committees" have been primarily funded by the West, specifically the Office for Syrian Opposition Support, which was founded by the U.S. State Department and the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

More recently, news and analysis about Syria has been conveyed through the filter of the White Helmets, also known as Syrian Civil Defense. In the Western news media, the White Helmets are described as neutral, non-partisan, civilian volunteers courageously carrying out rescue work in the war zone. In fact, the group is none of the above. It was initiated by the U.S. and U.K. using a British military contractor and Brooklyn-based marketing company.

While they may have performed some genuine rescue operations, the White Helmets are primarily a media organization with a political goal: to promote NATO intervention in Syria. (The manipulation of public opinion using the White Helmets and promoted by the New York Times and Avaaz petition for a "No Fly Zone" in Syria is documented here. )

The White Helmets hoax continues to be widely believed and receives uncritical promotion though it has increasingly been exposed at alternative media outlets as the creation of a "shady PR firm ." During critical times in the conflict in Aleppo, White Helmet individuals have been used as the source for important news stories despite a track record of deception.

Recent Propaganda: Blatant Lies?

As the armed groups in east Aleppo recently lost ground and then collapsed, Western governments and allied media went into a frenzy of accusations against Syria and Russia based on reports from sources connected with the armed opposition. CNN host Wolf Blitzer described Aleppo as "falling" in a "slaughter of these women and children" while CNN host Jake Tapper referred to "genocide by another name."

The Daily Beast published the claims of the Aleppo Siege Media Center under the title "Doomsday is held in Aleppo" and amid accusations that the Syrian army was executing civilians, burning them alive and "20 women committed suicide in order not to be raped." These sensational claims were widely broadcast without verification. However, this "news" on CNN and throughout Western media came from highly biased sources and many of the claims – lacking anything approaching independent corroboration – could be accurately described as propaganda and disinformation.

Ironically, some of the supposedly "Russian propaganda" sites, such as RT, have provided first-hand on-the-ground reporting from the war zones with verifiable information that contradicts the Western narrative and thus has received almost no attention in the U.S. news media. For instance, some of these non-Western outlets have shown videos of popular celebrations over the "liberation of Aleppo."

There has been further corroboration of these realities from peace activists, such as Jan Oberg of Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research who published a photo essay of his eyewitness observations in Aleppo including the happiness of civilians from east Aleppo reaching the government-controlled areas of west Aleppo, finally freed from areas that had been controlled by Al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate and its jihadist allies in Ahrar al-Sham.

Dr. Nabil Antaki, a medical doctor from Aleppo, described the liberation of Aleppo in an interview titled "Aleppo is Celebrating, Free from Terrorists, the Western Media Misinformed." The first Christmas celebrations in Aleppo in four years are shown here, replete with marching band members in Santa Claus outfits. Journalist Vanessa Beeley has published testimonies of civilians from east Aleppo. The happiness of civilians at their liberation is clear.

Whether or not you wish to accept these depictions of the reality in Aleppo, at a minimum, they reflect another side of the story that you have been denied while being persistently force-fed the version favored by the U.S. State Department. The goal of the new Global Engagement Center to counter "foreign propaganda" is to ensure that you never get to hear this alternative narrative to the Western propaganda line.

Even much earlier, contrary to the Western mythology of rebel "liberated zones," there was strong evidence that the armed groups were never popular in Aleppo. American journalist James Foley described the situation in 2012 like this :

"Aleppo, a city of about 3 million people, was once the financial heart of Syria. As it continues to deteriorate, many civilians here are losing patience with the increasingly violent and unrecognizable opposition -- one that is hampered by infighting and a lack of structure, and deeply infiltrated by both foreign fighters and terrorist groups. The rebels in Aleppo are predominantly from the countryside, further alienating them from the urban crowd that once lived here peacefully, in relative economic comfort and with little interference from the authoritarian government of President Bashar al-Assad."

On Nov. 22, 2012, Foley was kidnapped in northwestern Syria and held by Islamic State terrorists before his beheading in August 2014.

The Overall Narrative on Syria

Analysis of the Syrian conflict boils down to two competing narratives. One narrative is that the conflict is a fight for freedom and democracy against a brutal regime, a storyline promoted in the West and the Gulf states, which have been fueling the conflict from the start . This narrative is also favored by some self-styled "anti-imperialists" who want a "Syrian revolution."

The other narrative is that the conflict is essentially a war of aggression against a sovereign state, with the aggressors including NATO countries, Gulf monarchies, Israel and Jordan. Domination of the Western media by these powerful interests is so thorough that one almost never gets access to this second narrative, which is essentially banned from not only the mainstream but also much of the liberal and progressive media.

For example, listeners and viewers of the generally progressive TV and radio program "DemocracyNow" have rarely if ever heard the second narrative described in any detail. Instead, the program frequently broadcasts the statements of Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power and others associated with the U.S. position. Rarely do you hear the viewpoint of the Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations, the Syrian Foreign Minister or analysts inside Syria and around the world who have written about and follow events there closely.

"DemocracyNow" also has done repeated interviews with proponents of the "Syrian revolution" while ignoring analysts who call the conflict a war of aggression sponsored by the West and the Gulf monarchies. This blackout of the second narrative continues despite the fact that many prominent international figures see it as such. For example, the former Foreign Minister of Nicaragua and former President of the UN General Assembly, Father Miguel D'Escoto, has said, "What the U.S. government is doing in Syria is tantamount to a war of aggression, which, according to the Nuremberg Tribunal, is the worst possible crime a State can commit against another State."

In many areas of politics, "DemocracyNow" is excellent and challenges mainstream media. However in this area, coverage of the Syrian conflict, the broadcast is biased, one-sided and echoes the news and analysis of mainstream Western corporate media, showing the extent of control over foreign policy news that already exists in the United States and Europe.

Suppressing and Censoring Challenges

Despite the widespread censorship of alternative analyses on Syria and other foreign hotspots that already exists in the West, the U.S. government's new "Global Engagement Center" will seek to ensure that the censorship is even more complete with its goal to "counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation." We can expect even more aggressive and better-financed assaults on the few voices daring to challenge the West's "group thinks" – smear campaigns that are already quite extensive.

In an article titled "Controlling the Narrative on Syria" , Louis Allday describes the criticisms and attacks on journalists Rania Khalek and Max Blumenthal for straying from the "approved" Western narrative on Syria. Some of the bullying and abuse has come from precisely those people, such as Robin Yassin-Kassab, who have been frequent guests in liberal Western media.

Reporters who have returned from Syria with accounts that challenge the propaganda themes that have permeated the Western media also have come under attack. For instance, Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett recently returned to North America after being in Syria and Aleppo, conveying a very different image and critical of the West's biased media coverage. Bartlett appeared at a United Nations press conference and then did numerous interviews across the country during a speaking tour. During the course of her talks and presentation, Bartlett criticized the White Helmets and questioned whether it was true that Al Quds Hospital in opposition-held East Aleppo was attacked and destroyed as claimed.

Bartlett's recounting of this information made her a target of Snopes, which has been a mostly useful website exposing urban legends and false rumors but has come under criticism itself for some internal challenges and has been inconsistent in its investigations. In one report entitled " White Helmet Hearsay," Snopes' writer Bethania Palmer says claims the White Helmets are "linked to terrorists" is "unproven," but she overlooks numerous videos , photos, and other reports showing White Helmet members celebrating a Nusra/Al Qaeda battle victory, picking up the bodies of civilians executed by a Nusra executioner, and having a member who alternatively appears as a rebel/terrorist fighter with a weapon and later wearing a White Helmet uniform. The "fact check" barely scrapes the surface of public evidence.

The same writer did another shallow "investigation" titled "victim blaming" regarding Bartlett's critique of White Helmet videos and what happened at the Al Quds Hospital in Aleppo. Bartlett suggests that some White Helmet videos may be fabricated and may feature the same child at different times, i.e., photographs that appear to show the same girl being rescued by White Helmet workers at different places and times. While it is uncertain whether this is the same girl, the similarity is clear.

The Snopes writer goes on to criticize Bartlett for her comments about the reported bombing of Al Quds Hospital in east Aleppo in April 2016. A statement at the website of Doctors Without Borders says the building was "destroyed and reduced to rubble," but this was clearly false since photos show the building with unclear damage. Five months later, the September 2016 report by Doctors Without Borders says the top two floors of the building were destroyed and the ground floor Emergency Room damaged yet they re-opened in two weeks.

The many inconsistencies and contradictions in the statements of Doctors Without Borders resulted in an open letter to them. In their last report, Doctors Without Borders (known by its French initials, MSF) acknowledges that "MSF staff did not directly witness the attack and has not visited Al Quds Hospital since 2014."

Bartlett referenced satellite images taken before and after the reported attack on the hospital. The images do not show severe damage and it is unclear whether or not there is any damage to the roof, the basis for Bartlett's statement. In the past week, independent journalists have visited the scene of Al Quds Hospital and report that that the top floors of the building are still there and damage is unclear.

The Snopes' investigation criticizing Bartlett was superficial and ignored the broader issues of accuracy and integrity in the Western media's depiction of the Syrian conflict. Instead the article appeared to be an effort to discredit the eyewitness observations and analysis of a journalist who dared challenge the mainstream narrative.

U.S. propaganda and disinformation on Syria has been extremely effective in misleading much of the American population. Thus, most Americans are unaware how many billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on yet another "regime change" project. The propaganda campaign – having learned from the successful demonizations of Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and other targeted leaders – has been so masterful regarding Syria that many liberal and progressive news outlets were pulled in. It has been left to RT and some Internet outlets to challenge the U.S. government and the mainstream media.

But the U.S. government's near total control of the message doesn't appear to be enough. Apparently even a few voices of dissent are a few voices too many.

The enactment of HR5181, "Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation," suggests that the ruling powers seek to escalate suppression of news and analyses that run counter to the official narrative. Backed by a new infusion of $160 million, the plan is to further squelch skeptical voices with operation for "countering" and "refuting" what the U.S. government deems to be propaganda and disinformation.

As part of the $160 million package, funds can be used to hire or reward "civil society groups, media content providers, nongovernmental organizations, federally funded research and development centers, private companies, or academic institutions."

Among the tasks that these private entities can be hired to perform is to identify and investigate both print and online sources of news that are deemed to be distributing "disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda directed at the United States and its allies and partners."

In other words, we are about to see an escalation of the information war.

Rick Sterling is an independent investigative journalist. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and can be reached at [email protected]


Joe Tedesky , February 28, 2018 at 4:08 pm

If Russia-Gate hadn't been about providing a distraction from Hillary's blasted emails, it would have been something else to create this need to combat 'fake news', because for my whole life of 68 years most of everything our government and media has told us is a lie, so now truthful reporting will be censored. Now all alternative news is being attacked by the very establishment of people who have been lying to us for so long, as their constant lies have made necessary a market for honest news. Rather the corporate owned media tell the truth, they instead rally behind a patriotically draped 'news ban', as this is the MSM's fix for all that's fake, or to tell the truth their fake news hammer to squash all that's honest. We are in the bottom of the ninth whereas our police state nation is about to lose it's free press god help us, god help the world.

BobH , February 28, 2018 at 4:19 pm

" their constant lies have made necessary a market for honest news." yes, Joe, perhaps that's the only good thing that has come out of their monopoly of MSM.

Joe Tedesky , February 28, 2018 at 5:02 pm

Yes being able to find truthful journalism is a commodity these days, but how long before we lose that, is the question?

Joe Tedesky , February 28, 2018 at 4:54 pm

Lt. Col. Daniel L Davis says it's time to quit going to war with the AUMF. After you read this let's see how much media attention the good Lt. Col. gets.

http://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/376067-abuse-of-the-2001-aumf-weakens-our-national-security

Joe Tedesky , February 28, 2018 at 5:10 pm

More on journalism going down the drain.

https://www.sott.net/article/378500-The-Hired-Jumping-Jacks-of-the-Press-and-Their-Corporate-and-Deep-State-Overlords

Joe Tedesky , February 28, 2018 at 5:33 pm

Here's another link, this one took 100 years in the making.

https://www.sott.net/article/378594-Prolonging-The-Agony-Macgregor-and-Docherty-Publish-Volume-Two-of-Hidden-History-of-WW1

godenich , February 28, 2018 at 7:58 pm

Here's an interesting view[1] and a classic on patriotic peer pressure for war[2]. There must have been ample profit for stakeholders in the Vickers maxim gun production during the Boer Wars and WW1[3,4].

[1] The Truth About World War I: The Hidden History | Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ8Sj9FFmRc
[2] The Four Feathers | AEW Mason
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18883
https://librivox.org/the-four-feathers-by-a-e-w-mason-2/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG1kHdnMSRU
[3] Merchants of Death | H. C. Engelbrecht | Internet Archives | 1934
https://archive.org/details/MerchantsOfDeath-AStudyOfTheInternationalArmamentIndustry
[4] Zaharoff High Priest Of War | Guiles Davenport | Internet Archives | 1934
https://archive.org/details/zaharoffhighprie011222mbp

Joe Tedesky , February 28, 2018 at 10:06 pm

Thank you very much. I watched the first video and got the book, I also am going to enjoy 'the Four Feathers' movie since it is one of my favorites.

Here something where moonofalabama is suggesting of how the NYT is back to their old tricks like before the Iraq WMD invasion, where now the NYT is claiming N Korea is selling nuclear weapons parts to Syria.

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/02/new-york-times-time-warps-back-to-2002-makes-new-bogus-wmd-claims.html#more

John W , March 1, 2018 at 12:04 pm

Checked out all of your links. I have downloaded, and saved as favorites. I have some reading to do. I'll watch the youtube links that you have provided first. Thanks godenrich.

John W , March 1, 2018 at 11:19 am

Keep those links coming Joe Tedesky. People need actual reality, not reality derived by the criminally insane.

Bruce , March 1, 2018 at 5:57 am

Excellent comment. To paraphrase Orwell .telling the truth has become a revolutionary act.

Joe Tedesky , March 1, 2018 at 5:51 pm

Orwell was so right, that sometimes I swear we in this century should be looking to see if he is amongst us .a true time traveler. Joe

John W , March 1, 2018 at 11:13 am

I concur Joe Tedesky. The shit is indeed hitting the fan. Destroying the very thing that gives them live(Earth) is complete insanity. But, psychopaths want control, and I believe that these humanoids in control do not want anything to grow, live, prosper, or be, unless they say so. Unless they have ultimate control over it(trees, grass, flowers, birds, animals, humans, bacteria, planets, suns, etc). This geoengineering and other agendas that they are doing, is killing off everything. This I believe is where their GMO's comes in. Kill all off, then replace it with that they have created to live in the environment they have created. Nothing or no one has a child or offspring unless they deem it ok, give their acceptance for it to be. Entirely psychopathic, or an extremely primitive beastial mind. But, no one says that what we call psychopathic is anywhere near sane. A bit off the tracks, but it does coincide with controlling narratives or 'truths' for their agendas.

Nancy , March 1, 2018 at 1:07 pm

In a crazy way, it makes sense!

Joe Tedesky , March 1, 2018 at 5:50 pm

John W if more people were to investigate the harmful effects of GMO food products, and they were to take what they found seriously, why this alone would be a good reason to stand up and say to our corporate masters, 'enough is enough'.

Glad you enjoyed the links, because I was fearful that I had over done it with all those posted links get this I had even more, but thought I was going overboard with what I had already posted. So thanks for the approval John W. Joe

BobH , February 28, 2018 at 4:15 pm

"the State Department or the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy supply, train and pay "activists" and "citizen journalists" to create and distribute propaganda and false stories via "social media" and via contacts with the mainstream media." and yet they hyperventilate about "Russian trolls". How many of these pseudo patriotic agencies have been financed with our taxes?

mark , March 1, 2018 at 5:22 pm

They paid just one British PR company, Bell Pottinger, $540 million to produce fake material about Iraq and Syria and get it on to the Internet. This firm is run by a British Lord, Lord Bell. He and his firm have a very shady record. They were hired by corrupt South African politicians to divert attention from corruption scandals by fomenting hatred towards the white minority there.

mike k , February 28, 2018 at 4:17 pm

Mind control is an essential feature of the project to enslave the world. If you think there is no such project, you may already be a victim of it. Realizing that this is happening is essential for defending against it. Those who are waging this war against your freedom will do everything in their power to make you unaware of being brainwashed.

For a person to awaken to being brainwashed requires humility, openness, honesty, courage, and the right kind of help from those already awakening.

mike k , February 28, 2018 at 5:43 pm

And if you lack the qualities mentioned, welcome to zombiehood!

ranney , February 28, 2018 at 4:20 pm

Last Sunday 60 minutes had a segment on the White Helmets so full of lies I wanted to barf. I hope everyone who reads this comments section will write 60 minutes and tell them that lying to the public is a big no-no and that White Helmets is an ISIS organization that gasses their own people and leaves "evidence" to prove Assad did it.

Lois Gagnon , February 28, 2018 at 6:46 pm

Once in a while I go on the networks' Facebook pages and link an article that contradicts what they just reported. Sometimes the next night they will add what the critics of US policy are saying. They go out of their way to minimize that content, but it's good to let them know there are people paying attention to the reality on the ground. It also exposes those commenting on the FB page to alternative information.

It may not make a big difference, but even putting a dent in the official propaganda is better then nothing.

Realist , March 1, 2018 at 3:48 am

I make it a point not to watch 60 Minutes any more, because I have a low tolerance for deceit. However, I am aware of the false narratives they have been propagating on this country's foreign policy for a long time. Other media outlets that have taken on that role with zest these days include the History Channel, with a scathing systematic slander of "Public Enemy Number One," President Vladimir Putin, and the National Geographic Channel. Like PBS and NPR, both try to pass themselves off as dispensers of a refined intellectual approach to news. Frankly, there is more thoughtful analysis given to the purchases of backyard junk made by Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz on the History Channel's "American Pickers."

john wilson , March 1, 2018 at 5:23 am

60 minutes is part of the MSM deep state mouth piece. You don't seriously think they will take the slightest bit of notice of letters complaining about their shyty programme do you? We need to support and donate to genuine alternative media, news and comment like the late Mr Parry's great site. Further, good, informative articles and alternative news clips should be printed out and left on public transport for others to read. If each of us only printed out 10 copies of informative alternative news and left them on public transport for others to read, then we might get at least a bit of the alternative (no, not alternative but truth news) out there.

Nancy , March 1, 2018 at 1:10 pm

That's a great idea.

Virginia , March 1, 2018 at 2:51 pm

I second that idea.

Dan Good , February 28, 2018 at 7:04 pm

It is quite amazing to see that America is creating a class of American dissidents. Growing up in the 50's and 60's it was hard to understand how the USSR could treat its writers as outcasts. But it is about to happen now in the US of A.

Virginia , February 28, 2018 at 7:34 pm

Thank you, Mr. Stirling.

Jessika , February 28, 2018 at 11:56 pm

Sobering recap in reprint of this Rick Sterling article, to realize that things continue as bad or worse since this was published. There is a very well written opinion piece on Sputnik by Finian Cunningham, "American Collapse -- The Spectacle of Our Time". The US power structure, rather than address US internal societal rot, he says, doubles down on its rogue nation behavior and militarism. The US is now as bad as Nazi Germany was and ought to receive a "Judgement at Nuremberg" condemnation, is my opinion, but read Finian's piece at Sputnik, very good.

geeyp , March 1, 2018 at 12:24 am

Particularly good choice to reprint as many have awoken since then to the last president's sedition and cutting of the last thin thread of what was left of US democracy. And, he didn't even have to pay for it. He allotted for it, and you paid for it.

robjira , March 1, 2018 at 1:12 am

It was the one sided reporting on Syria that was the last straw for me regarding DN, of which I had been a financial supporter. Cracks in the veneer appeared (for me, at any rate) as far back as the release of the Collateral Murder video (I distinctly recall Amy Goodman relentlessly badgering Julian Assange to confirm it was [Bradley] Chelsea Manning who provided the material to Wikileaks, while Assange with obvious discomfort repeatedly told Goodman Wikileaks did not reveal the identities of sources), and continued with her ignorant and insulting treatment of a member of Iraq Veterans Against The War who acknowledged during a segment on the CM video, that he had friends among the squad of ground troops who arrived after the massacre (he didn't want to reveal their names, and Goodman tore into him questioning his enthusiasm for transparency, displaying stunning ignorance of the bonds formed by soldiers serving together in combat). My misgivings deepened with the enthusiastic support for the vilification of Putin as a monolithic representation of all that is brutally and nefariously, "Russian." This coincided with DN's somewhat murky reporting on the Ukrainian crisis, but it was Syria and the coverage of the 2016 election that did it for me as far as DN is concerned.
Thank the stars for Consortium News. RIP Robert Parry.

Gary , March 1, 2018 at 3:45 am

robjira – thanks for the observations on Democracy Now. It has really been quite amazing to watch Amy and company continue to shill for amoral neocon war mongering while continuing to promote themselves as some sort of challenge to power. I'm really not sure how that crew sleeps at night given the amount of civilian blood on their hands from their reporting both Libya and Syria. Glad to see Aaron Mate left and now is able to do important ethical journalism over at RealNews. Meanwhile a senior reporter Shane Bauer at "Mother Jones" openly calls for censorship by the web platform "Medium" of those posting views that challenge the official government narrative on Syria. And "Counterpunch" seems to have stopped publishing the work of Andre Vitchek, as its editorial selection of articles becomes more and more milk-toast "McResistance" by the week. As the ranks of "alternative media" willing to actually stand up and oppose U.S. imperialism continues to shrink, those (like Consortiumnews) that have maintained their integrity become that much more important.

Nancy , March 1, 2018 at 1:21 pm

The times we are living in are separating the real truth-seekers from the phonies. This is a good thing, as Democracy Now, Counterpunch, etc. are exposing themselves as part of the problem, not the solution. The truth is hard to face but as the saying goes–will set us free –someday.

BobH , March 1, 2018 at 2:35 pm

The good news is that there are other independent sources that keep popping up. They may have occasional links to MSM(when relevant) but the bias is toward uncovering corruption and international hypocrisy. One such website I recently discovered was Defend Democracy Press with an emphasis on European news.

http://www.defenddemocracy.press/a-fourth-nato-reich-over-europe-preparing-to-fight-iran-and-russia/

Virginia , March 1, 2018 at 2:47 pm

Robjira, Gary, Nancy -- I observed the same thing with DN and Amy Goodman. I recall a piece here at CN that show DN not to be the independent news source it used to be, some huge contribution was mentioned. DN is compromised now.

Maybe you saw Amy interview Glenn Greenwald who early on debunked Russia hacking the DNC. He made a good case but she, as did MSM's reporters, stopped using the word "alleged" hacking almost right away.

Two good articles not to miss on RT today: one on White Helmets, the other on Putin's speech.

mark , March 1, 2018 at 5:15 pm

Not really all that amazing.
DemocracyNow is funded by Soros.
Just follow the money.
It's the same story with a lot of these "radical", "alternative" sites.

Realist , March 1, 2018 at 3:37 am

Wonderful, this gives me another chance to say it: Thanks, Obama! NOT!!!

KiwiAntz , March 1, 2018 at 4:39 am

What a godsend Consortiumnews & other alternative news outlets like RT & Sputnik are which provide real news rather than the Fakestream American & Western Media? I can't even watch or read Western Media now, I just cringe in disgust at the endless, baseless & 24 hr propagandist lies & bull crap, it makes me sick to my stomach! Consortiumnews has really opened my eyes to the real situation behind World events? As a thinking person, I reached a sort of "Road to Damascus moment" & that's when one comes to the realisation that everything our Leaders & Countries have told us are blatant lies & brainwashing lies at that? Some Americans, especially those who read alternative news & refuse to be brainwashed by their Govt, are slowly coming to this realisation, that their Country has become a evil, murderous, Fascist, Oligarchy state & when that happens the scales really come off the eyes (just like the Apostle Paul) & you really start to understand the serious threat to every human being on Earth, that this evil, scumbag, American deepstate elite class are, with their demented agenda, seeking to manipulate, deceive & enslave the World with their murderous, money making schemes. Using Nazi style, fake media propaganda as demonstrated in this article, that Joseph Goebels would have rejoiced in, they fail to recognise that just as Hitler's fascist Empire fell, it is the fate of this current false US Empire as well, to collapse under its own imperialistic weight? Americans need a "storming the Bastille" revolution like the French Revolution, where they round up this elite class & dispense justice by gullotine? It worked out fine for the French & it could work for American citizens, fed up with this bunch of crooks? That's the only way to get rid of these satanic nutcases? The Writings on the Wall, the rot has set in, & hopefully we will be around to see the American empire collapse, it's going to happen & the sooner the better before it's drags us into WW3?

john wilson , March 1, 2018 at 5:31 am

Hey there KiwAntz, there is another great site out there called 'information clearing house info' and it has great articles by people like John Pilger and others. Just type in the usual www, etc and you will find it.

Crimean , March 1, 2018 at 6:21 am

Well of course the USG has to quiet the Alternative News army – how else can one have successful False Flags or assisted ones , when you have someone – spilling the beans. And there is a big one coming folks – you can bet on it – but they have to silence the Truth News – first. The Deep State , MIC, Corporations, Bankers, Wall Street, and many many USG employees along with State and Muni Govs. are going to throw all their chips into the pot on this Global poker game – they're all in – Look out World !

backwardsevolution , March 1, 2018 at 6:32 am

The Southern Poverty Law Center has been hired by Google to police the content of YouTube for hate speech. IOW, one hate group gets to stifle their opposition.

anastasia , March 1, 2018 at 8:10 am

Is this why I have noticed that google and youtube are taking down comments, youtube channels, etc of alternative media; why I also noticed that new bogus websites are going up purporting to be "alternative" websites (but who clearly are not) that are putting up false information and are very threatening, etc. Is google, Amazon, etc. doing this in accordance with this new law? What is our President doing about it? What about Congress? Eventually will they close down Trump's Twitter account and claim that they are only complying with the National Defense Authorization Act for 2017? This is very disturbing.

backwardsevolution , March 1, 2018 at 8:45 am

anastasia – yes, it is disturbing. I think Congress is putting pressure on Google (who owns YouTube), Facebook and Twitter to censor. Of course, some say that these outfits are merely an arm of the U.S. government. Who knows what's really happening.

The upshot is that freedom of speech is being strangled right in front of our eyes. I hope everyone will stop using Google, Facebook and Twitter. Boycott them.

backwardsevolution , March 1, 2018 at 8:47 am

As Paul Craig Roberts said:

"Who asked Google to transform itself from search engine to gatekeeper? Is there a conspiracy here against the First Amendment? What are Google's qualifications for determining what is fake news and extremist views? Is what are we witnessing here the elite's use of a private company to control explanations in behalf of the One Percent?

How does a private company get to overrule the First Amendment of the US Constitution? [ ]

Why do people use Google, Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter when the companies are in a conspiracy against freedom of the press? Is the answer that Americans would rather be entertained than to be free?"

E. Leete , March 1, 2018 at 11:03 am

I remember Paul Craig Roberts saying that the neoliberal economic agenda is getting enough pushback that it will have to use nuclear weapons to succeed, and make no mistake the neoliberal economic agenda means. to. succeed.

I can't fathom why the 99% underpaid are not campaigning united for an end to allowing overpay. When will humans snap awake and stop shoveling world wealth to a fraction few in exchange for tyranny? Tyranny is where overfortunes are – money is power – power to influence power to control power to make human history be what they say it will be – !! – the government is bought by people with overfortunes who are writing the laws and putting themselves above the laws they write – because they can – the gigarich are behind all the disinformation, the waste of wealth, the chaos, violence, corruption, the psychopathological militarism we cannot afford – divide and conquer – distractions instead of focus on the root cause – people endlessly discuss myriad CONsequences of allowing overpayoverpower but won't go near the one idea that would reverse the colossal destruction of everyone's everything. Getting good government and an unbiased press requires turning to justice and obeying her. Peace, safety, prosperity, a bright future? Spread world wealth as evenly as world work is spread and outlaw once and for all time any human being's being able to keep an overfortune. The madness is not going to stop until we resolve ourselves to end the stealing – legal thefts are too numerous to count right now and the gigarich obviously have the power to keep inventing new ones even if you can manage to shut one legal theft down now and then – see the biggest picture, humanity – or perish by your own lack of seeing. Endlessly attacking the consquences of allowing overpayoverpower is getting you nowhere but deeper in the hole.

BobH , March 1, 2018 at 11:33 am

"Who asked Google to transform itself from search engine to gatekeeper?" exactly, it's the loose end of a long rope that tends to choke dissent on the internet at best, it induces paranoia one never knows whether that "glitche" is intended to censor or is merely a technical aberration

jools , March 1, 2018 at 12:22 pm

Just wait until Net Neutrality "officially" kicks in, when the Stasi will go full throttle in interrupting many of the progressive channels esp. on UTube. On a side note, I was wondering, does Consortiumnews have a podcast? Again, thanks for enlightening us all w/your hard hitting journalism for I fear that much darker days awaits this nation.

Liam , March 1, 2018 at 12:27 pm

Excellent article Rick Sterling and Consortium News. For those wanting to learn more about the White Helmets (FSA terrorists) this link includes hundreds of pics from their own Facebook accounts proving that they are indeed terrorists posing as rescuers of little kids.

Huge Cache of White Helmets Exposed Links All In One Massive Volume For Sharing and Red Pilling – Over 400 Images in 22 Files

https://steemit.com/news/@clarityofsignal/huge-cache-of-white-helmets-exposed-links-all-in-one-massive-volume-for-sharing-and-red-pilling-over-400-images-in-22-files

Liam , March 1, 2018 at 12:32 pm

Also worth noting: A huge purge of You Tube alternative information channels took place in the wake of the Parkland shooting event. Looks like the school shooting has been used not just as a gun grab, but also to assert control via purging of a large number of popular You Tube channels that were critical of the children's acting skills. It would be great to see Consortium News cover this attack on free speech, and also the Google/You Tube connections to the Deep State and why they should be looked at as a government entity and not simply as a corporate entity that has the right to ban and censor people. They have almost complete control of information.

Massive list of channels removed from YouTube #The1984IsREAL

https://steemit.com/politics/@theouterlight/massive-list-of-channels-removed-from-youtube-the1984isreal

backwardsevolution , March 1, 2018 at 7:08 pm

Liam – great post! People need to open their eyes. I too hope that more and more articles are written on this very topic. I know Tucker Carlson at Fox tries to bring this to people's attention on a weekly basis. You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. We had better smarten up quickly.

backwardsevolution , March 1, 2018 at 7:13 pm

Good article here:

https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=233057

me under the circumstances , March 1, 2018 at 3:10 pm

Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett are targeted by the "pure white never mistaken good guys" ie the Fawning Corporate Media, as Ray McGovern calls them, as fake news providers, indicating to fair observers that they are actually the reporters on the scene in many parts of the globe who record what is really happening and how it affects the people involved.

Even when evidence is staring people in the face, many refuse to change their stereotyped images of who is to blame.

Lucifer Christ , March 1, 2018 at 3:49 pm

The problem with this propaganda is that the US government is calling its own ticked off citizens trolls.

The American people should not be paying for propaganda against their own interests.

This money is being spent by the Deep State to destroy the American people.

The American people are aware of the evil that lives in Washington, DC and how people in Washington, DC within the Deep State care nothing about them or their families. No matter of money will change that fact!

People's actions say much. Over time the American people have learned that the Deep State and the majority of politicians in DC are all about their own agenda and padding their own pockets – not serving Americans.

Washington DC is evil. Everybody knows!

mark , March 1, 2018 at 5:02 pm

DemocracyNow is just controlled opposition.
It is constantly shilling for regime change and "humanitarian bombing".
It gets its funding from Soros.
It is just another faux Left outfit like the Guardian.

backwardsevolution , March 1, 2018 at 10:22 pm

From Paul Craig Roberts again:

"The Trump presidency is the perfect timing for the oligarchs to take over control of all information. The liberal/progressive/left hate Trump so much that they are willing to ignore the proven fact that Russiagate was a FBI/Obama/Hillary conspiracy against Trump in order to use the false accusation as a weapon against Trump.

Gun control advocates and Identity Politics are willing to turn a blind eye to the unanswered questions about school shootings and terrorist bombings in order to get more gun control and police power to suppress "white supremacists." Partisan in their approach, they do not consider that the same power will be used against them.

As far as I can tell, the vast majority of young Americans have no idea what is at stake. Most will never realize that their reality consists of controlled explanations. They will never know the truth about anything."

The Lefties are playing right into their trap. Like I said, useful idiots.

Drew Hunkins , March 2, 2018 at 12:55 am

There were two points in very recent history when the Putin vilification operations really began to ramp up in the West:

1.) The anti Putin propaganda campaign escalated in 2006 when Kemp & Edwards published their CFR paper in which they made the absurd charge that Putin was "rolling back democracy" in Russia. What a sick joke. They made no such breathless accusations during the rape and pillage of Russia during the 1990s when j. Sachs and his Harvard boyz provided the intellectual muscle for the massive exploitation and plunder. No, it was only when Putin put a halt to a lot of the looting and capital flight that the Western liberal intellectual class became alarmed and proceeded to assail and decry the Putin "regime" ( it is almost always deemed a regime, rarely is it referred to as the Putin "administration.")

2.) Then the anti Putin propaganda campaign began to escalate even more so in 2013 when Putin pulled off one of the finest diplomatic moves of the last 30 years: he talked Obama down from bombing Damascus to remove Assad. This made Putin enemy number one in the eyes of the Zio-Saudi-Washington militarist Terror Network. They wanted ever so desperately to topple Assad and turn Syria into a wasteland and miserable failed state. They were apoplectic.

From here on out the Rachelle Maddows & Masha Gessens were off and running, fomenting Russophobia and putting the world on the brink of thermo nuclear Armageddon.

Gerry , March 2, 2018 at 2:45 am

I wrote a small comment thanking Rick (whom I know) and even that comment was not published.
I cannot find a moderation policy, but perhaps non-US citizens are not allowed on this site? I cannot find any way of contacting anybody either.Probably because I said a few more things that were upsetting the status quo here.
Well, so much for the most censored site I have ever seen: nice website but operated by controlling journalists, so better stick to non-US sites as this is really ridiculous. You publish whatever somebody says (Abe) who exposes anybody who dares to disagree with his idea about those of us who do not agree with Zionism, but no rebuttal allowed. Nobody will see this comment probably, so censor that as well and you are right up there with all the other Americans who pretend they have a broader view and yet censor anybody who says something slightly critical. Goodbye and good luck with the effect of this site on the media while your part of the same policies in the end if it does not suit you.

Loretta , March 2, 2018 at 5:11 am

What about Israel's foreign propaganda and meddling in elections?

[Mar 02, 2018] Why Russia: one day, we woke up and realised the Chicoms held enough of our debt to destroy us, while the Russians don't, so we keep kicking at the old bogeyman.

Mar 02, 2018 | www.unz.com

p

The Alarmist , Next New Comment March 2, 2018 at 11:56 am GMT

Biggest blunder in our lifetimes was not inviting Russia to join NATO, but I guess after years of anti-Russian propaganda the Neocons figured China would never be quite the bogeyman that we had built the Sovs into, big enough to keep the defense-dollars gravy-train flowing while we re-jiggered the mission to find another bogey man. Then, one day, we woke up and realised the Chicoms held enough of our debt to destroy us, while the Russians don't, so we keep kicking at the old bogeyman.

[Mar 01, 2018] Putin The Man Who Stopped Washington s Regime Change Rampage by Mike Whitney

What Washington really haptes about Putin is that he has refused to comply with their diktats and has openly rejected their model of a "unipolar" world order.
Notable quotes:
"... The attacks on Putin began sometime in 2006 during Putin's second term when it became apparent that Russia was going to resist the looting and exploitation the US requires of its vassal states. ..."
"... That's right, Russia was thrown under the bus because they wanted to control their own oil and their own destiny. ..."
"... John Edwards and Jack Kemp were appointed to lead a CFR task force which concocted the absurd pretext that that Putin was "rolling back democracy" in Russia. ..."
"... What Washington really despises about Putin is that he has refused to comply with their diktats and has openly rejected their model of a "unipolar" world order. ..."
"... Despite Russia's efforts to assist the US in its War On Terror, Washington has continued to regard Putin as an emerging rival that would eventually have to be confronted. The conflict in Ukraine added more gas to the fire by pitting the two superpowers against each other in a hot war that remains unresolved to this day. ..."
"... But Syria was the straw that broke the camel's back. Russia's intervention in the Syrian War in September 2015 proved to be the turning point in the 7 year-long conflagration. By rolling back the CIA-trained militants, Putin bloodied Washington's nose and forced the Pentagon to adopt a backup plan that relied heavily on Kurdish proxies east of the Euphrates. ..."
"... The Syria humiliation precipitated the Russia-gate Information Operation (IO) which is the propaganda component of the current war on Russia. The scandal has been an effective way to poison public perceptions and to make it look like the perpetrator of aggression is really the victim. ..."
"... Putin clearly blames the United States for the rise of ISIS and the surge in global terrorism. He also condemns Washington's strategy to use terrorist organizations to achieve its own narrow strategic objectives. (regime change) More important, he uses his platform at the United Nations to explain why he has deployed the Russian Air-force to bases in Syria where it will it will be used to conduct a war against Washington's jihadist proxies on the ground. ..."
"... The only place where people have a negative view of Putin is in the United States (14 percent) and EU (28 percent), the two locations where he is relentlessly savaged by the media and excoriated by the political class. ..."
"... The problem is that the propaganda power structure behind the yankee imperium is probably too powerful for rationality to triumph, so we are in for serious trouble. ..."
"... After having spent 36 years in the West and having seen Westerners vote for the likes of Blair, Sarkozy or Macron, I have a very low opinion of Western intelligence, and Western moral relativism and indifference with regards to the crimes their elected leaders committed abroad. ..."
"... China is a rival but an odd kind of rival. Let's not forget that the US, over the last 30 whatever years has enthusiastically facilitated China's rise. China has become the world's factory because the US and other countries Co's want CHEAP labour. ..."
"... American liberals support lifting living standards and ending poverty? You mean, the same American liberals who support 'free' trade and importing unlimited amounts of scab labor? You must have us confused with some other country, Mike. ..."
"... not like he had a choice. dc was about to have it's hands on his throat and he finally reacted. That was ukraine. syria was him trying to protect another one of his naval bases. the bear simply reacted to attempts at cutting off it's legs. ..."
"... Putin inherited a broken Russia in 2000. A Russia on the verge of collapse due to misrule of drunkard Yeltsin and body blows administered by US/NATO. A broken down military; economy in shambles; demographic collapse. During his presidency US/EU/NATO engineered a collapse of oil prices and assaults on ruble: what exactly was Putin supposed to non-passively do to counter the collapse of world oil prices, for example? ..."
"... Putin was wise enough and cautious enough not to go head-to-head with US/NATO until his military and economy were in good enough shape to do and make a difference, as in Syria for example. It would have been very bad for Russia to act prematurely and get bled dry, which warmongering US Neocons were hoping for. ..."
"... Obviously Putin knows the strengths and weaknesses of Russia better than any of us here. He is butting heads with the combined military industrial might of US+EU: that block has a lot of human resources, wealth, worldwide financial and political influence. Also Putin has to – has to – improve the living standards of citizens of RF, so he cannot afford to get into an expensive arms race with the West. Putin is doing very well with what he has, as far as human and military-industrial resources Russia has. ..."
"... When asked by a Germany-based academic where Russia had most seriously gone wrong in the past decade and a half, Putin said he had too readily laid his trust in the West, which he then accused of having abused its relationship with Moscow to further its own interests." ..."
"... America is in a very ugly spot and getting worse everyday. Living here I can sense it. Americans are going crazy. Pathetic how they are trying and build hate for Russia/Putin mainly because America got triple fucked across the ME and especially in Syria. Very sad. ..."
"... America's greatest historical truth: in foreign policy the USA just cannot learn from experience. We keep making the same mistakes. Stupid, idiotic, nation building b/s. ..."
"... In my opinion, the USA, until now, could afford to conduct foreign policy for internal reasons ..."
"... The reason why the US empire will follow the British empire into the graveyard is because they are based on the same model – trying to prevent others from becoming equal to them instead of trying to get better than the competitors. ..."
"... GB was preoccupied with preventing Germany from surpassing them – and guess what? They succeeded. And where is the British empire now? ..."
"... US is on a similar path of self-destruction. First they made China an economic superpower and now they want to contain them militarily. Good luck with that. ..."
"... The money that the US spent on military misadventures – they could have bribed with far lesser amount of money the various "dictatorships" that they were so democratically inclined to topple – and would have achieved better results. Instead of using those money to make US better – for their citizens, they are trying to prevent the world from catching up with them – British style. ..."
Feb 28, 2018 | www.unz.com

"It is essential to provide conditions for creative labor and economic growth at a pace that would put an end to the division of the world into permanent winners and permanent losers. The rules of the game should give the developing economies at least a chance to catch up with those we know as developed economies. We should work to level out the pace of economic development, and brace up backward countries and regions so as to make the fruit of economic growth and technological progress accessible to all. Particularly, this would help to put an end to poverty, one of the worst contemporary problems." Vladimir Putin, President Russian Federation, Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club

Putin wants to end poverty? Putin wants to stimulate economic growth in developing countries? Putin wants to change the system that divides the world into "permanent winners and losers"? But, how can that be, after all, Putin is bad, Putin is a "KGB thug", Putin is the "new Hitler"?

American liberals would be surprised to know that Putin actually supports many of the same social issues that they support. For example, the Russian President is not only committed to lifting living standards and ending poverty, he's also a big believer in universal healthcare which is free under the current Russian Constitution. Naturally, the Russian system has its shortcomings, but there has been significant progress under Putin who has dramatically increased the budget, improved treatment and widened accessibility. Putin believes that healthcare should be a universal human right. Here's what he said at the annual meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club:

"Another priority is global healthcare . All people in the world, not only the elite, should have the right to healthy, long and full lives. This is a noble goal. In short, we should build the foundation for the future world today by investing in all priority areas of human development." (Vladimir Putin, President Russian Federation, Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club)

How many "liberal" politicians in the US would support a recommendation like Putin's? Not very many. The Democrats are much more partial to market-based reforms like Obamacare that guarantee an ever-increasing slice of the pie goes to the giant HMOs and the voracious pharmaceutical companies. The Dems no longer make any attempt to promote universal healthcare as a basic human right. They've simply thrown in the towel and moved on to other issues.

Many Americans would find Putin's views on climate change equally surprising. Here's another clip from the Valdai speech:

"Ladies and gentlemen, one more issue that shall affect the future of the entire humankind is climate change. I suggest that we take a broader look at the issue .What we need is an essentially different approach, one that would involve introducing new, groundbreaking, nature-like technologies that would not damage the environment, but rather work in harmony with it, enabling us to restore the balance between the biosphere and technology upset by human activities.

It is indeed a challenge of global proportions. And I am confident that humanity does have the necessary intellectual capacity to respond to it. We need to join our efforts, primarily engaging countries that possess strong research and development capabilities, and have made significant advances in fundamental research. We propose convening a special forum under the auspices of the UN to comprehensively address issues related to the depletion of natural resources, habitat destruction, and climate change. Russia is willing to co-sponsor such a forum .." Valdai)

Most people would never suspect that Putin supports a global effort to address climate change. And, how would they know, after all, bits of information like that– that help to soften Putin's image and make him seem like a rational human being– are scrubbed from the media's coverage in order to cast him in the worst possible light. The media doesn't want people to know that Putin is a reflective and modest man who has worked tirelessly to make Russia and the world a better place. No, they want them to believe that he's is a scheming tyrannical despot who's obsessive hatred for America poses a very real threat to US national security. But it's not true.

Putin is not the ghoulish caricature the media makes him out to be nor does he hate America, that's just more propaganda from the corporate echo-chamber. The truth is Putin has been good for Russia, good for regional stability, and good for global security. He pulled the Russian Federation back from the brink of annihilation in 2000, and has had the country moving in a positive direction ever since. His impact on the Russian economy has been particularly impressive. According to Wikipedia:

"Between 2000 and 2012 Russia's energy exports fueled a rapid growth in living standards, with real disposable income rising by 160%. In dollar-denominated terms this amounted to a more than sevenfold increase in disposable incomes since 2000. In the same period, unemployment and poverty more than halved and Russians' self-assessed life satisfaction also rose significantly."

Inequality is a problem in Russia just like it is in the US, but the vast majority of working people have benefited greatly from Putin's reforms and a system of distribution that –judging by steady uptick in disposable incomes – is significantly superior to that in the United States where wages have flatlined for over 2 decades and where virtually all of the nation's wealth trickles upward to the parasitic 1 percent.

Since Putin took office in 2000, workers have seen across-the-board increase in wages, benefits, healthcare and pensions. Poverty and unemployment have been reduced by more than half while foreign investment has experienced steady growth. Onerous IMF loans have been repaid in full, capital flight has all-but ceased, hundreds in billions in reserves have been accumulated, personal and corporate taxes have been slashed, and technology has experienced an unprecedented renaissance. The notorious Russian oligarchs still have a stranglehold on many privately-owned industries, but their grip has begun to loosen and the "kleptocracy has begun to fade."

Things are far from perfect, but the Russian economy has flourished under Putin and, generally speaking, the people are appreciative. This helps to explain why Putin's public approval ratings are typically in the stratosphere. (70 to 80 percent) Simply put: Putin the most popular Russian president of all time. And his popularity is not limited to Russia either, in fact, he typically ranks at the top of most global leadership polls such as the recent Gallup International End of Year Survey (EoY) where Putin came in third (43 percent positive rating) behind Germany's Angela Merkel (49 percent) and French President Emmanuel Macron. (45 percent) According to Gallup: "Putin has gone from one in three (33 percent) viewing him favourably to 43 percent, a significant increase over two years."

The only place where people have a negative view of Putin is in the United States (14 percent) and EU (28 percent), the two locations where he is relentlessly savaged by the media and excoriated by the political class. This should come as no surprise to Americans who know that the chances of stumbling across an article that treats Putin with even minimal objectivity is about as likely as finding a copper coin at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The consensus view of the western media is that Putin is a maniacal autocrat who kills journalists and political opponents (no proof), who meddles in US elections to "sow discord" and destroy our precious democracy (no proof), and who is conducting a secret and sinister cyberwar against the United States. (no proof). It's a pathetic litany of libels and fabrications, but its impact on the brainwashed American people has been quite impressive as Gallup's results indicate. Bottom line: Propaganda works.

The attacks on Putin began sometime in 2006 during Putin's second term when it became apparent that Russia was going to resist the looting and exploitation the US requires of its vassal states. This is when the powerful Council on Foreign Relations funded a report titled "Russia's Wrong Direction" that suggested that Russia's increasingly independent foreign policy and insistence that it control its own vast oil and natural gas resources meant that "the very idea of a 'strategic partnership' no longer seems realistic." That's right, Russia was thrown under the bus because they wanted to control their own oil and their own destiny.

John Edwards and Jack Kemp were appointed to lead a CFR task force which concocted the absurd pretext that that Putin was "rolling back democracy" in Russia. They claimed that the government had become increasingly authoritarian and that the society was growing less "open and pluralistic". Kemp and Edwards provided the ideological foundation upon which the entire public relations campaign against Putin has been built. Twelve years later, the same charges are still being leveled at Putin along with the additional allegations that he meddled in the 2016 presidential elections.

Needless to say, none of the nation's newspapers, magazines or broadcast media ever publish anything that deviates even slightly from the prevailing, propagandistic narrative about Putin. One can only assume that the MSM's views on Putin are either universally accepted by all 325 million Americans or that the so-called "free press" is a wretched farce that conceals an authoritarian corporate machine that censors all opinions that don't promote their own malign political agenda.

What Washington really despises about Putin is that he has refused to comply with their diktats and has openly rejected their model of a "unipolar" world order. As he said at the annual Security Conference at Munich in 2007:

"The unipolar world refers to a world in which there is one master, one sovereign; one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making. At the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within."

Despite Russia's efforts to assist the US in its War On Terror, Washington has continued to regard Putin as an emerging rival that would eventually have to be confronted. The conflict in Ukraine added more gas to the fire by pitting the two superpowers against each other in a hot war that remains unresolved to this day.

But Syria was the straw that broke the camel's back. Russia's intervention in the Syrian War in September 2015 proved to be the turning point in the 7 year-long conflagration. By rolling back the CIA-trained militants, Putin bloodied Washington's nose and forced the Pentagon to adopt a backup plan that relied heavily on Kurdish proxies east of the Euphrates. At present, US Special Forces and their allies are clinging to a strip of arid wasteland in the Syrian outback hoping that the Pentagon brass can settle on a forward-operating strategy that reverses their fortunes or brings the war to a swift end.

The Syria humiliation precipitated the Russia-gate Information Operation (IO) which is the propaganda component of the current war on Russia. The scandal has been an effective way to poison public perceptions and to make it look like the perpetrator of aggression is really the victim. More important, failure in Syria has led to a reevaluation of how Washington conducts its wars abroad. The War on Terror pretext has been jettisoned for a more direct approach laid out in the Trump administration's National Defense Strategy. The focus going forward will be on "Great Power Competition", that is, the US is subordinating its covert proxy operations to more flagrant displays of military force particularly in regards to the "growing threat from revisionist powers", Russia and China. In short, the gloves are coming off and Washington is ramping up for a land war.

Putin has become an obstacle to Washington's imperial ambitions which is why he's has been elevated to Public Enemy Number 1. It has nothing to do with the fictitious meddling in the 2016 elections or the nonsensical "rolling back democracy" in Russia. It's all about power. In the United States the group with the tightest grip on power is the foreign policy establishment. These are the towering mandarins who dictate the policy, tailor the politics to fit their strategic vision, and dispatch their lackeys in the media to shape the narrative. These are the people who decided that Putin must be demonized to pave the way for more foreign interventions, more regime change wars, more bloody aggression against sovereign states.

Putin has repeatedly warned Washington that Russia would not stand by while the US destroyed one country after the other in its lust for global domination. He reiterated his claim that Washington's "uncontained hyper-use of force" was creating "new centers of tension", exacerbating regional conflicts, undermining international relations, and "plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts." He has pointed out how the US routinely displayed its contempt for international law and "overstepped its national borders in every way." As a result of Washington's aggressive behavior, public confidence in international law and global security has steadily eroded and "No one feels safe. I want to emphasize this," Putin thundered in Munich. "No one feels safe."

On September 28, 2015 Putin finally threw down the gauntlet in a speech he delivered at the 70th session of the UN General Assembly in New York. After reiterating his commitment to international law, the UN, and state sovereignty, he provided a brief but disturbing account of recent events in the Middle East, all of which have gotten significantly worse due to Washington's use of force. Here's Putin:

"Just look at the situation in the Middle East and Northern Africa Instead of bringing about reforms, aggressive intervention destroyed government institutions and the local way of life. Instead of democracy and progress, there is now violence, poverty, social disasters and total disregard for human rights, including even the right to life

The power vacuum in some countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa obviously resulted in the emergence of areas of anarchy, which were quickly filled with extremists and terrorists. The so-called Islamic State has tens of thousands of militants fighting for it, including former Iraqi soldiers who were left on the street after the 2003 invasion. Many recruits come from Libya whose statehood was destroyed as a result of a gross violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 ."

US interventions have decimated Iraq, Libya, Syria and beyond. Over a million people have been killed while tens of millions have been forced to flee their homes and their countries. The refugee spillover has added to social tensions across the EU where anti-immigrant sentiment has precipitated the explosive growth in right wing groups and political organizations. From Northern Africa, across the Middle East, and into Central Asia, global security has steadily deteriorated under Washington's ruthless stewardship. Here's more from Putin:

"The Islamic State itself did not come out of nowhere. It was initially developed as a weapon against undesirable secular regimes. Having established control over parts of Syria and Iraq, Islamic State now aggressively expands into other regions .It is irresponsible to manipulate extremist groups and use them to achieve your political goals, hoping that later you'll find a way to get rid of them or somehow eliminate them ."

Putin clearly blames the United States for the rise of ISIS and the surge in global terrorism. He also condemns Washington's strategy to use terrorist organizations to achieve its own narrow strategic objectives. (regime change) More important, he uses his platform at the United Nations to explain why he has deployed the Russian Air-force to bases in Syria where it will it will be used to conduct a war against Washington's jihadist proxies on the ground.

Putin: "We can no longer tolerate the current state of affairs in the world."

Less than 48 hours after these words were uttered, Russian warplanes began pounding militant targets in Syria.

Putin again: "Dear colleagues, relying on international law, we must join efforts to address the problems that all of us are facing, and create a genuinely broad international coalition against terrorism .Russia is confident of the United Nations' enormous potential, which should help us avoid a new confrontation and embrace a strategy of cooperation. Hand in hand with other nations, we will consistently work to strengthen the UN's central, coordinating role. I am convinced that by working together, we will make the world stable and safe, and provide an enabling environment for the development of all nations and peoples."

So, here's the question: Is Putin "evil" for opposing Washington's regime change wars, for stopping the spread of terrorism, and for rejecting the idea that one unipolar world power should rule the world? Is that why he's evil, because he won't click his heels and do as he's told by the global hegemon?

We should all be so evil.


Renoman , February 28, 2018 at 10:32 am GMT

Leader of the free World.
Robert Magill , February 28, 2018 at 11:00 am GMT
The dumbest thing about the US focus on Russia and Putin is that it leaves China, our actual rival, free to continue its march to overwhelming mastery of the entire Eastern Hemisphere. Without firing a shot or wasting a bullet China has moved into a position of influence the US has dreamed of for a century.

The next war, if it comes, will be over something like Cobalt. The future lies in big and plentiful electric batteries and China and Russia between them control almost 50% of the known supply of Cobalt, while the US has none. Stand by and wait, folks.

https://robertmagill.wordpress.com/2015/01/11/mr-bernays-to-dr-goebbels-to-s-h-i-t-3/

macilrae , February 28, 2018 at 2:11 pm GMT

The only place where people have a negative view of Putin is in the United States (14 percent) and EU (28 percent), the two locations where he is relentlessly savaged by the media and excoriated by the political class.

I would be staggered is only 14 percent of Americans had a negative view of Putin – almost everybody I have spoken to has completely swallowed the media line. In Europe UK in particular has been brainwashed against him – southern Europe far less so. The 28 percent is more realistic.

Harold Smith , February 28, 2018 at 2:41 pm GMT
@Robert Magill

Is China trying to trash our constitution? Is China invading other countries, killing people with missiles and bombs all over the world, staging "color revolutions" and subverting legitimate governments in the "West"? Is China patrolling the Gulf of Mexico and putting missiles in Mexico and Canada? China hasn't done anything bad to me or to anyone I know, so please explain how China is "our" "rival"?

exiled off mainstreet , February 28, 2018 at 3:37 pm GMT
This is a great article. The problem is that the propaganda power structure behind the yankee imperium is probably too powerful for rationality to triumph, so we are in for serious trouble.
Tailgunner Joes talking liver , February 28, 2018 at 3:50 pm GMT
Magisterial article.

There's a simple reason why Putin is talking sense. He's doing nothing more than stating customary international law. Those economic quotes have been set out in a series of UN resolutions including A/RES/41/128 on the right to development. This is the acquis of the civilized world. No country in the world opposes it – except the USA. The US votes alone against it every time it comes up, even though customary international law is US federal and state common law under the Supreme Court decision, The Paquete Habana.

Mr. Whitney has accepted the official framing that it's all about Putin. That clever decision makes his article more provocative. Calm appraisal of the current official foreign devil is inherently inflammatory. However, this has nothing to do with Putin. Rigid legalist that he is, his hands are tied. Russia has ratified the ICESCR.

Russia has ratified the ICESCR. The USA has not. Here are some of the rights Russians have that you do not:

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CESCR.aspx

OHCHR has a convenient compilation showing how each government meets its legal obligations and commitments. The synoptic heatmap below shows the US deep down in the shithole with Wahhabi headchoppers and neocolonial African presidents-for-life.

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Indicators/Pages/HRIndicatorsIndex.aspx

The exhaustively documented fact here is, the Russian state meets world standards. The US government does not. The Russian government respects, protects, and fulfils human rights. The US government fights tooth and nail to keep them out of your reach, and negates your incomplete half-assed constitutional rights with statist red tape. Russians get a better deal than you do. Merely by reciting the law as he does, Putin would win a fair election here with Roosevelt-scale majorities, again and again. That's why he drives the US government up the wall.

Beckow , February 28, 2018 at 4:23 pm GMT
Where is it the propaganda campaign going? We have seen this before as preparation for a war or a regime change. In Russia both are unlikely to succeed. That leaves an ever increasing propaganda bombast in the West, people brainwashed to the point where outright racism against anything 'Russian' will become widespread. Then what? Move movies with white Russian villains, as if that is what threatens West the most?

Russia can neither be isolated, nor 'collapsed' economically, nor ignored. It is too resource rich and powerful. Russia could possibly be checked in a second tier conflict (Syria?), but that would be of minimal consequence. Ukraine could be escalated, but there Russia has an enormous local logistics advantage, it would be a disaster for Kiev. And Russia is on friendly terms with China, its only potential military threat on land.

Propaganda by itself does nothing, it is only means to an end. West is in no position to go beyond propaganda, so we might experience a bizarre example of a mindless propaganda that goes on and on. As with all propaganda the main target is the domestic population – in other words it is the common people in the West who are being propagandised and in effect made more stupid, less capable of making rational decisions.

Even a slight u-turn is at this point unthinkable, almost all elites have too visibly engaged in the evil-Russia talk, how could they let go of it? We are stuck, we might get saved by an unrelated 'big event' somewhere else. If not, this could just be fatal, after all this belligerent talk we could perish because somebody dared to call Clinton a satan on Facebook. And they didn't use their real name – the horror .

dearieme , February 28, 2018 at 5:08 pm GMT
My own view is that Putin is probably as trustworthy and honest as any other ex-KGB man. On the other hand he does come across as intelligent, cautious, and calm. Especially when compared to the crook Hillary or the oaf Trump.
Si1ver1ock , February 28, 2018 at 5:34 pm GMT
@Tailgunner Joes talking liver

Great comment. I tried to follow the links but got an error:

The connection has timed out

The server at http://www.ohchr.org is taking too long to respond.

The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection.
If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

This is starting to bother me. Stuff is disappearing from the web. Look at the link below to an Al Jazeera documentary which has disappeared from YouTube and the web.

Attempting to play the video gives a message:

This video is unavailable.

https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2010/03/201031761541794128.html

Si1ver1ock , February 28, 2018 at 5:38 pm GMT
Nowadays being Pro Truth now makes you Anti American.

Sad.

and

Edie P , February 28, 2018 at 8:36 pm GMT
Si1ver1ock, interesting problems you're having. I had no problem with the links, but then the magic of Tor means I'm reaching them from the Netherlands. State censorship is harder when you can access suppressed URLs from a couple dozen different countries.

( https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en )

anonymous Disclaimer , February 28, 2018 at 11:50 pm GMT
@Robert Magill

Please do respond, and in good faith, to the reply of commenter Harold Smith. I share his apparent concern that you may be conflating the interests of the American people with the imperial ambitions of their Uncle Sam.

Robert Magill , March 1, 2018 at 1:19 am GMT
@Harold Smith

Harold Smith,

I feel we have a problem with the term 'rival' here. All the negatives you describe represent a rivalry that I in no way imply in my statements. Rivalry can be strictly limited to trade and business and not in the war-making processes you are citing. I tried to point out that we as a nation miss the mark in constantly demonizing Russia, who is certainly no rival in trade and business, while China certainly is.
Our zealous attacking of rivals has a long history and is not easily abandoned. However, I am afraid our national focus in this unproductive way will cause us as a people to not be aware of where our serious competition is actually coming from and be able to deal with it in a timely fashion.

Robert Magill , March 1, 2018 at 1:20 am GMT
@anonymous

See my reply to Harold Smith.

Harold Smith , March 1, 2018 at 2:52 am GMT
@Robert Magill

"I feel we have a problem with the term 'rival' here. All the negatives you describe represent a rivalry that I in no way imply in my statements. Rivalry can be strictly limited to trade and business and not in the war-making processes you are citing."

In your original comment you said:

"The dumbest thing about the US focus on Russia and Putin is that it leaves China, our actual rival, free to continue its march to overwhelming mastery of the entire Eastern Hemisphere. Without firing a shot or wasting a bullet China has moved into a position of influence the US has dreamed of for a century."

Since a big part of the U.S. "focus" on Russia is military encirclement, confrontation by proxy, the threat of direct conflict even nuclear war, etc., this statement clearly suggests a "military solution" to "contain" an economically "rising" China, IMO. (After all, when the only tool the U.S. "government" has is a hammer, everything looks like a nail).

But so what if China has some kind of "mastery" of the Eastern hemisphere? To the extent that's true, at least they didn't do it by way of lawless imperial treachery.

The U.S. is losing influence all over the world because it's making itself hated; it's imposing itself everywhere and squandering everything of value on the hopeless pursuit of world domination and control.

"I tried to point out that we as a nation miss the mark in constantly demonizing Russia, who is certainly no rival in trade and business, while China certainly is."

The thing is "we" don't demonize Russia "as a nation"; rather, it's done by the Satanic ruling class that hates Russia – not for any rational reason, but for the same reason that Cain hated Abel: because "evil" hates a "good" example.

"Our zealous attacking of rivals has a long history and is not easily abandoned."

Unless you're going change the definition of "rival" again, I should point out that the U.S. "government" doesn't generally attack "rivals" but deems any country that asserts its sovereign independence and refuses to take orders an "enemy", subject to economic, political and military attack.

"However, I am afraid our national focus in this unproductive way will cause us as a people to not be aware of where our serious competition is actually coming from and be able to deal with it in a timely fashion."

You seem to be conflating "us as a people" with the U.S. "government" which has by now lost even the pretense of moral and constitutional legitimacy, and thus has nothing remotely to do with what's in the best interests of "us as a people".

Ilyana_Rozumova , March 1, 2018 at 5:34 am GMT
@Harold Smith

Here is the explanation. China is economic rival to US. That is not only inconvenient, rival, it is the most efficient and most dangerous rival, because who is wining the economic competition is pushing out the opponent from world markets.

LarryS , March 1, 2018 at 5:51 am GMT
@Harold Smith

Somebody wants white Christians to kill each other. Again.

Vojkan , March 1, 2018 at 6:52 am GMT
That people in the West believe the lies that TPTB concoct for their consumption, I can conceive, though only after a convoluted intellectual effort, for given all the now exposed deceit, one is left in wonder as to why the masses still believe proven liars.

After having spent 36 years in the West and having seen Westerners vote for the likes of Blair, Sarkozy or Macron, I have a very low opinion of Western intelligence, and Western moral relativism and indifference with regards to the crimes their elected leaders committed abroad.

Still, I can't figure out if TPTB believe their own narrative. It takes a very peculiar mindset to be able to live in permanent lies. Contrary to truth which can exist per se and is therefore essentially cost-free, lies demand permanent maintenance and have high maintenance cost.
So, TPTB of the West are either delusional in thinking they can maintain their lies ad vitam aeternam, or they are mythomaniacs. Either way, just think what happens when lies cannot be maintained any more and the liars don't want to relinquish power.

Bear in mind that lying being effectively irrational, they cannot be considered as rational actors. Prepare your shelters folks.

Ludwig Watzal , Website March 1, 2018 at 8:02 am GMT
Very seldom, I've read such a realistic article on President Putin and his policy. I've been following not only his administration but also that of the US Empire, and I'm always flabbergasted about the US elites demonization of this leader. He belongs to the few leaders who got their act together compared to the political exorcists in Washington. The real thugs and psychopaths are the members of the American political elite and their cheerleaders in the fawning US mainstream media. Following their analysis, I often think they stem from lunatics who are coming from outer space.
animalogic , March 1, 2018 at 9:05 am GMT
@Robert Magill

Yes, China is a rival but an odd kind of rival. Let's not forget that the US, over the last 30 whatever years has enthusiastically facilitated China's rise. China has become the world's factory because the US and other countries Co's want CHEAP labour.
So -- Dr Frankenstein is now scared of his own monster. Oh the irony !

Truthmatters , March 1, 2018 at 9:41 am GMT
In the last two weeks a virtual book burning has begun on YouTube. Scores of independent truth seeking channels have been deleted. Some were pretty amateur and sensationalist, many were good, top notch investigative fact checking in nature. Many had large numbers of subscribers, a few had 100,000s subscribers.

Common denominator seemed to question official mainstream media narrative on mass shootings, 9/11, war on terror, human sex trafficking, Clinton Foundation corruption, and even UFO coverups. One channel was a woman skilled at body language commenting on videos of people like John Podesta being interviewed as to whether he was lying.

None of these channels advocated violence, quite the contrary. Most couched opinion alongside probable facts by asking deductive and inductive questions. The YouTube virtual book burning appears to have gathered pace in last week.

So much for free speech in the fake but very slickly fake Western democracies. Where the geopolitical narrative is uniformly uniform.

Seamus Padraig , March 1, 2018 at 9:43 am GMT

American liberals would be surprised to know that Putin actually supports many of the same social issues that they support. For example, the Russian President is not only committed to lifting living standards and ending poverty, he's also a big believer in universal healthcare which is free under the current Russian Constitution.

American liberals support lifting living standards and ending poverty? You mean, the same American liberals who support 'free' trade and importing unlimited amounts of scab labor? You must have us confused with some other country, Mike.

"I suggest that we take a broader look at the issue .What we need is an essentially different approach, one that would involve introducing new, groundbreaking, nature-like technologies that would not damage the environment, but rather work in harmony with it "

I note that he says nothing about 'cap and trade,' or any other Western bankster-scam. I have nothing against renewable energy–whether or not global warming is real.

PiltdownMan , March 1, 2018 at 11:01 am GMT
For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one. -- Henry Kissinger in 2014.
Swan Knight , Website March 1, 2018 at 11:18 am GMT
Vladimir Putin is the World's greatest leader since Robert E Lee
Astuteobservor II , March 1, 2018 at 12:50 pm GMT
not like he had a choice. dc was about to have it's hands on his throat and he finally reacted. That was ukraine. syria was him trying to protect another one of his naval bases. the bear simply reacted to attempts at cutting off it's legs.

that is actually very, very passive.

Robert Magill , March 1, 2018 at 1:49 pm GMT
@ animalogic

"China has become the world's factory because the US and other countries Co's want CHEAP labour. "

We all know the drill here. China makes stuff cheap so that WalMart can undercut competitors and grow rich. Therefore, alas, what can be done? Except that WalMart has over four hundred stores IN CHINA and plans to build forty more! So what's our excuse now for not being able to compete?

Avery , March 1, 2018 at 2:18 pm GMT
@Harold Smith

{Russia had not been so passive over the years,}

Putin inherited a broken Russia in 2000. A Russia on the verge of collapse due to misrule of drunkard Yeltsin and body blows administered by US/NATO. A broken down military; economy in shambles; demographic collapse. During his presidency US/EU/NATO engineered a collapse of oil prices and assaults on ruble: what exactly was Putin supposed to non-passively do to counter the collapse of world oil prices, for example?

Putin was wise enough and cautious enough not to go head-to-head with US/NATO until his military and economy were in good enough shape to do and make a difference, as in Syria for example. It would have been very bad for Russia to act prematurely and get bled dry, which warmongering US Neocons were hoping for.

Obviously Putin knows the strengths and weaknesses of Russia better than any of us here. He is butting heads with the combined military industrial might of US+EU: that block has a lot of human resources, wealth, worldwide financial and political influence. Also Putin has to – has to – improve the living standards of citizens of RF, so he cannot afford to get into an expensive arms race with the West. Putin is doing very well with what he has, as far as human and military-industrial resources Russia has.

TailgunnerJoes Talking Liver , March 1, 2018 at 2:33 pm GMT
Alden, sounds like you stopped with the maps and didn't read any of the underlying documents because of the preconceptions you wear on your sleeve: "idealistic pie in the sky by and by UN treaties impossible to effect." Those preconceptions happen to coincide with the residual message of one persistent strand of US statist propaganda.

Have you ever read, in any US institution or medium, criticism as comprehensive and incisive as this?

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Countries/LACRegion/Pages/USIndex.aspx

IGs can't do this. Courts can't begin to do this. Congress wouldn't dare do this. Media would never do it if they could. The recommendations are legally binding and the US government knows it. Each review is videoed. You haven't lived until you've seen State and Justice bureaucrats crawling and sniveling and tying themselves in logical knots, making fools of themselves in the most public forum in the world. You get to watch the US regime bleeding influence and standing and 'soft power.' It's public disgrace in front of the 96% of the world outside the US iron curtain. You may not want to watch impartial legal experts make a laughingstock of the USG, but everybody else in the world watches with amusement, so you might as well know.

Treaty body review has driven more reforms than Congress ever did. You know perfectly well how bad your government sucks, what a useless parasite it is. The treaty bodies and charter bodies give you more say than either state-controlled political party. Face it, human rights review is all you got. When your government sucks, you go over its head to the world.

Harold Smith , March 1, 2018 at 4:11 pm GMT
@Avery

"During a policy talk at the Valdai Discussion Club, the Russian leader spoke on a number of issues, especially criticizing U.S. foreign policy moves across the globe and lauding Russia's increasingly relevant role as a world power. When asked by a Germany-based academic where Russia had most seriously gone wrong in the past decade and a half, Putin said he had too readily laid his trust in the West, which he then accused of having abused its relationship with Moscow to further its own interests."

http://www.newsweek.com/russia-putin-reveal-biggiest-mistake-trusting-west-688998

Well maybe you can make Vladimir Putin feel better about this. You can tell him that blindly trusting the corrupt "West" (in the face of shamelessly obvious provocations) was actually not a mistake at all, since Russia couldn't have done a single thing about it anyway, right?

EugeneGur , March 1, 2018 at 4:40 pm GMT
@Quartermaster

Putin has drubbed Russia's economy.

This is a ridiculous statement. When Putin came aboard, there was no Russian economy to speak of. Now it's grown strong enough to withstand the events in Ukraine, sanctions and what not and even derive benefits from these challenges. I am not saying everything's coming up roses but it could hardly be expected considering the deep hole Russia dug itself into in the 1990s.

the entire region is upset with Putin's behavior as they have seen Putin's behavior in Crimea and the Donbas.

The entire region, it you mean our Eastern European neighbors, can like it or lump it. They, Poland in particular, participated very willingly and actively in the coup in Ukraine. Crimea and Donbass are direct, and perfectly predictable, consequences of that coup. If they forgot the law of physics that every action has a reaction, this is just as good a reminder as any.

the thing is, because of the recent study by J. Leroy Hulsey, Putin could still do it, but I predict that he unfortunately will do nothing of the kind.

EugeneGur , March 1, 2018 at 4:57 pm GMT
@Harold Smith

blindly trusting the corrupt "West" (in the face of shamelessly obvious provocations) was actually not a mistake at all, since Russia couldn't have done a single thing about it anyway, right?

Actually, it could've done a lot. Right at the beginning, Russia could've refused to trust in the word of the West's leaders about the NATO expansion and demand guarantees. A formal treaty plus a couple of remaining military bases, say, in Poland and East Germany, would've sufficed. This likely would've saved Yugoslavia as well.

Russia could've refrained from stopping the development of many weapon system and from destroying others. It could've also kept its own industry (civil aviation comes to mind) instead of relying on cooperation with the West. It could've refrained from allowing the US troops to use the Russia territory to move supplies to Afghanistan. Even recently it did occur to someone exceedingly smart to order aircraft carriers in France – speaking about trust! I do hope they learned their lesson, finally.

jilles dykstra , March 1, 2018 at 5:43 pm GMT
@Avery

In my opinion Putin is the man who saves us from a worldwide USA yoke

windwaves , March 1, 2018 at 6:07 pm GMT
Great Article.

America is in a very ugly spot and getting worse everyday. Living here I can sense it. Americans are going crazy. Pathetic how they are trying and build hate for Russia/Putin mainly because America got triple fucked across the ME and especially in Syria. Very sad.

America's greatest historical truth: in foreign policy the USA just cannot learn from experience. We keep making the same mistakes. Stupid, idiotic, nation building b/s. Come on dudes !

This is just a phase, we will turn it around and make America great again ( as opposed to israel which was never great anyway). It is just a question of how long it will take.

It will start the day when we'll tell that terrorist, shit-hole country called israel to go the hell, fight your own wars, pay for your own wars.

When Ukies attack , March 1, 2018 at 6:25 pm GMT
@EugeneGur

GDP per capita tripled on Putin's watch. That's one reason why he has public approval numbers that US politicians couldn't dream of.

jilles dykstra , March 1, 2018 at 6:58 pm GMT
@windwaves

In my opinion, the USA, until now, could afford to conduct foreign policy for internal reasons. Because of this the Sept 11 shock, while in reality it meant very little, as USA citizens working in the Netherlands soon afterwards said 'we have 30.000 traffic deaths each year'.

edNels , March 1, 2018 at 7:46 pm GMT
@Harold Smith

Good comeback there that was one of the best ones in a while!

I'm sorry, but no we're not. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we here in the "West" are living under a Satanic judeo-communist dictatorship, bent on world domination and control at any cost.

The difference between corporate state, and totalitarian state like old Soviet system is getting blurier all the time. Like planned economies of command systems, now they just create money for the cronies, who might as well be commies, and they don't give a care about what's true or honest, they lie and that's, like you mentioned, (Satanic), the truth isn't in 'em.

FB , March 1, 2018 at 8:01 pm GMT
@Seamus Padraig

' I note that he says nothing about 'cap and trade,' or any other Western bankster-scam. I have nothing against renewable energy–whether or not global warming is real '

Good comment however the environment is about more than just 'global warming' which may or may not be man-caused there is no scientific certainty but certainly what looks like a concerted push by certain quarters

But there is also habitat loss the toxins introduced through pollution industrial farming and the problems it causes with erosion, bad food etc

Putin's comments and Mike's citation of them reflect a thoughtful and realistic approach to at least start looking at these problems

Anon Disclaimer , March 1, 2018 at 8:15 pm GMT
Anon from TN
The author is painting Putin as larger-than-life figure, which he isn't. Just like the Soviet Union was not defeated by the US, but actually collapsed due to internal problems, regime change rampage is over largely because the United States pushed their luck and overextended themselves, and not just thanks to Putin. Throughout history, all dominant empires lose their grip and eventually crumble (remember Roman or British), and now it's the turn of the US Empire. Fortunately or unfortunately, the next will be the Chinese Empire, not Russian. (PS. Muslims missed the train. Again)
The Alarmist , March 1, 2018 at 10:57 pm GMT
@Harold Smith

It's not like he used the term 'enemy,' which too many unfortunately resort to in these discussions. During Cold War 1.0, a lot of us referred to the Sovs as the 'Adversary' because it was a less loaded term than enemy, though many equate the two. Are the Chinese rivals? Sure. Are they adversaries? You bet, especially when we keep stepping into their back yard. Are they enemies? The will be if we keep stepping into their back yard and telling them how to behave with their next door neighbours. All of this applies to Russia as well.

Cyrano , March 1, 2018 at 11:15 pm GMT
The reason why the US empire will follow the British empire into the graveyard is because they are based on the same model – trying to prevent others from becoming equal to them instead of trying to get better than the competitors.

GB was preoccupied with preventing Germany from surpassing them – and guess what? They succeeded. And where is the British empire now?

From an empire on which the sun never sets, pretty soon they'll be a country where the sun never rises – thanks to their stupid immigration policies and preoccupations with Russia (still!), like they (the British) are still even a factor in the global power games.

US is on a similar path of self-destruction. First they made China an economic superpower and now they want to contain them militarily. Good luck with that.

The money that the US spent on military misadventures – they could have bribed with far lesser amount of money the various "dictatorships" that they were so democratically inclined to topple – and would have achieved better results. Instead of using those money to make US better – for their citizens, they are trying to prevent the world from catching up with them – British style.

If anything the British military record was at least better than US's, at least they used to win wars – they pretty much went down undefeated – but they did went down and US military doesn't have the same success rate and even if they did, they will not accomplish holding the world back – same as Britain didn't.

renfro , March 1, 2018 at 11:26 pm GMT

American liberals would be surprised to know that Putin actually supports many of the same social issues that they support. For example, the Russian President is not only committed to lifting living standards and ending poverty, he's also a big believer in universal healthcare which is free under the current Russian Constitution

I do not see anything 'liberal' in Putin's ideas, certainly not as in the liberal agendas in the US.

I see him advocating Balance . creating a better order for the needs of populations and interactions between nations . therefore preserving nations, people and earth. Balance is not rocket science .nature is the ultimate example of balance, when it is tampered with all species eventually suffer.

Florin , March 2, 2018 at 12:06 am GMT
The neocons were/are Zionist in essence and mainly Jewish in thought leadership – this is inarguable. Also inarguable, though I am not aware of very many well-written essays on the topic, is that under Yeltsin, brought to power in no small part by US meddling, there was a fire sale of Russian assets – something arranged very largely by Jewish economists and Jewish bureaucrats. And the new 'oligarchs?' Why 6 of 7 of the most enriches were Jews in a nation <3% Jewish.

Ukraine was largely a coup by Nuland, Pyatt, Feltman ato help Jewish oligarchs in Ukraine who suddenly found themselves in the very top of the new govt. Jewish names pop up inordinately as to authors and editors of unhinged Russophobic articles. At what point do we say that the mideast wars are driven by Jews, so, disproportionately (maybe even mainly as to the media) is the aggression and disinfo on Russia.

The Jewish Problem is to be taken seriously. We need to find a way to discuss it, rescued from Zionists and bona fide Judeophobes. Our lives may well depend on it.

[Mar 01, 2018] MoA - New York Times Time Warps Back To 2002 - New Bogus WMD Claims Made

Notable quotes:
"... Did they bring Judith Miller back to write this latest Langley Gazette war-mongering op? ..."
Mar 01, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

New York Times, September 8 2002
U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest For A-Bomb Parts

Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.

In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium. American officials said several efforts to arrange the shipment of the aluminum tubes were blocked or intercepted but declined to say, citing the sensitivity of the intelligence, where they came from or how they were stopped.

The infamous aluminum tubes Iraq sought to buy from Italy were for short range rockets, not for uranium enrichment centrifuges as the Bush administration claimed. That was a fact well known to several U.S. agencies like the Energy and State Departments. But the claim, first propagandized by the NY Times, was repeated by then President Bush in a speech to the UN and became a main basis for the war on Iraq. The Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) Washington Bureau, but not the NY Times, reported about the many doubts experts had about such Weapon of Mass Destruction claims.

New York Times, February 27 2018
U.N. Links North Korea to Syria's Chemical Weapons Program

North Korea has been shipping supplies to the Syrian government that could be used in the production of chemical weapons, United Nations experts contend.
...
The supplies from North Korea include acid-resistant tiles, valves and thermometers, according to a report by United Nations investigators .
...
The possible chemical weapons components were part of at least 40 previously unreported shipments by North Korea to Syria between 2012 and 2017 of prohibited ballistic missile parts and materials that could be used for both military and civilian purposes , according to the report, which has not been publicly released but which was reviewed by The New York Times.

The valves, thermometers and acid resistance tiles Syria may have sought to acquire could be used for medical facilities, the production of candy or for dozens of other civilian purposes. They could be used to produce something for the military with chemical weapons probably being the most unlikely.

But like the discredited aluminum tube story, the current NYT piece, written by its UN reporter Michael Schwirtz, obfuscates the doubts about WMD connections of the issue. It makes false claims and is full of war-mongering assertions by hawkish figures. It is a scare story constructed to vilify various opponents to U.S. hegemony on meager factual grounds.

The reporter does not understand the issue he writes about. The "possible chemical weapons components" are not such. Chemical weapons obviously do not contain valves, thermometers or acid resistance tiles. To increase the "be afraid" effect of his piece the author mentions an alleged 2007 accident "in which several Syrian technicians, along with North Korean and Iranian advisers, were killed in the explosion of a warhead filled with sarin gas and the extremely toxic nerve agent VX." No weapon designer ever thought of "a warhead" that was filled with both - Sarin and VX. That would be lunacy and reports thereof are obviously bogus.

The "United Nations investigators" are a bunch of spooks selected by individual Security Council members who collect claims of North Korean breaches of sanctions. The group was set up in 2006 under the UN Security Council resolution 1718 as a "Committee of the Security Council consisting of all the members of the Council". The Committee is not part of the UN bureaucracy and they are not "UN experts" or "UN investigators". The reports of the committee list various claims made by single UN member countries without judging their veracity.

The Associated Press report on the issue makes this clear :

[The report] said, a visit by a technical delegation from North Korea in August 2016 "involved the transfer to Syria of special resistance valves and thermometers known for use in chemical weapons programmes".

That information came from another member state , which also reported that North Korean technicians "continue to operate at chemical weapons and missile facilities at Barzeh, Adra and Hama", the report said.

The valve and thermometer point in the Committee report are based on the claims of one country alone. But the NY Times lists those claims as "the [UN] report says" giving them a false aura of neutrality. That one country also claims that Syria still has chemical weapons facility. In 2013 the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) verified (pdf) that all Syrian production facilities for chemical weapons and under control of the government were rendered unusable or destroyed. The OPCW can request to inspect additional facilities it deems suspicious. It has not done so. The AP, but not the New York Times, notes that the Syrian government officially denied that any North Korean technicians are working there.

The New York Times discredited itself over its support for the false Bush administration claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It later issued a lame mea culpa and fired one reporter while the responsible editors and managers stayed on.

The paper has obviously not changed. It is again creating false pretexts for wars by publishing unobjective, one sided and intended-to-scare pieces about alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Posted by b on February 28, 2018 at 08:36 AM | Permalink

Comments


librul , Feb 28, 2018 9:16:44 AM | 1

Great b,

One small issue. You conclude with, "It is again creating false pretexts for wars..."

Obviously the word "again" should be "still".
"It is still creating false pretexts for wars..."

The NYT did not take a decade long hiatus in it's relationship with the CIA, etal.

JC , Feb 28, 2018 9:17:04 AM | 2
Did they bring Judith Miller back to write this latest Langley Gazette war-mongering op?
Don Bacon , Feb 28, 2018 9:26:02 AM | 3
It's amazing that these diplomats could get copies of key documents.
NYTimes -- The report, which is more than 200 pages long, includes copies of contracts between North Korean and Syrian companies as well as bills of lading indicating the types of materials shipped. Much information was provided by unidentified United Nations member states.
But hey, why release the details when the US propaganda public diplomacy mill is working.
The UN declined to comment on the report, which was written by a panel of eight experts tasked with checking North Korea's compliance with sanctions. It may never be publicly released, but a spokesperson stressed that the "overarching message is that all member states have a duty and responsibility to abide by the sanctions that are in place."
Tannenhouser , Feb 28, 2018 9:27:46 AM | 4
"The valves, thermometers and acid resistance tiles Syria may have sought to acquire could be used for medical facilities, the production of candy or for dozens of other civilian purposes. They could be used to produce something for the military with chemical weapons probably being the most unlikely"

Funny how their is no mention of the simple fact that most 'western' homes have numerous devices which could be identified as 'suspect' if TPTB needed an excuse. Where I'm from there is a big push for households to obtain pressure cookers, as 'a roast from frozen in two hours' fit's a hyper active stressful cancer causing lifestyle and eating out is becoming prohibitively expensive even for those of us on the west side of town.

How many households have old cell phones? Got a pool/hot tub? Bromine/chlorine anyone? Like to garden, oops might be some NPK fertilizers around. Like to hunt? Gunpowder, I wont even go into the over the counter kinetic explosives that are the target shooter rage ATM. Got kids' then you probably have electronic kits and RC vehicles, likely in doubles.

Western society bows to authority regardless how illegitimate it shows itself to be. How else can you explain a belief that fires at the top of three buildings caused them to free fall into their own footprints against the laws of gravity taught in grade school and still practiced and verified daily in universities and regular life.

librul , Feb 28, 2018 9:32:16 AM | 5
@3

You quoted: "Much information was provided by unidentified United Nations member states" The NYT has given everyone on this planet permission to identify themselves as from a UN member state. This post came to you courtesy of a UN Member state.

Yul , Feb 28, 2018 9:45:50 AM | 6
All these lies based and hidden under the auspices of a UN Panel of Experts which consists of 8 members: P5 + Japan , South Korea and South Africa , sitting on their a---s @ Turtle Bay. Did they visit Syria or North Korea or any port to check on those shipments ?

http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/2017/377

Nikki Haley orgasmic (sorry for unladylike language) thirst for Muslim/Arab blood is growing.

LXV , Feb 28, 2018 9:46:51 AM | 7
Thanks b!

For obvious reasons, I stopped reading at "...the current NYT piece, written by its UN reporter (((Michael Schwirtz))) ..."

Don Bacon , Feb 28, 2018 9:55:32 AM | 8
This "report" coincides with US charges on chemical use in Ghouta.
Diplomatic sources have said the chemical weapons watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, opened an investigation into attacks in eastern Ghouta to determine whether banned munitions were used. U.S. disarmament ambassador Robert Wood said on Wednesday that Russia has violated its duty to guarantee the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons stockpile and prevent the Assad government from using poison gas. . . here
"Russia has..." -- In a larger sense this is part of an updated US diplomatic offensive against Russia. From recent testimony of General Votel, CENTCOM Commander:
>On the diplomatic front, Moscow is playing the role of arsonist and firefighter–fueling the conflict in Syria between the Syrian Regime, YPG, and Turkey, then claiming to serve as an arbiter to resolve the dispute. Moscow continues to advocate for alternate diplomatic initiatives to Western-led political negotiations in Syria and Afghan-led peace processes in Afghanistan, attempting to thwart the UN's role and limit the advance of American influence.

> Russia is also trying to cultivate multi-dimensional ties to Iran. Though historic rivals, Moscow and Tehran share interests across the region, including an overarching desire to sideline, if not expel, the U.S. from the region.

> Russia also maintains significant influence in Central Asia,where the countries of the former-Soviet Union rely on Russia to varying degrees for their economic and security needs. This is problematic as Russia's efforts could limit U.S. engagement options and provide Moscow additional levers of influence, particularly as NATO forces deployed in Afghanistan are dependent on Central Asian partners for logistical support. . . here

Don Bacon , Feb 28, 2018 10:21:13 AM | 9
Meanwhile, the sanctions on North Korea shipping are a joke. More than 50 ships and shipping companies were cited by the Treasury Department for evading existing U.S. and international sanctions. While most of those named were based in North Korea, companies and ships from China, Singapore, Taiwan, Panama, Tanzania, the Marshall Islands and the Comoros were also included.
Bloomberg reports on the "name game":
The Jin Teng, sanctioned by the U.S. in March 2016, became the Shen Da 8 and then the Hang Yu 1 last November, according to Kharon, a Los Angeles-based firm that identifies sanctions risks for banks and companies. The Jin Tai 7, also sanctioned by the U.S. in March 2016, changed its name to Sheng Da 6 two months later and then to Bothwin 7 last November, Kharon said. That was before a new round of UN sanctions was agreed on in December. Both ships remain on the U.S.'s sanctions list despite the name changes.The Bothwin 7 visited the port of Lianyungang, China, in January, the same month that the Hang Yu 1 stopped at the Port of Ningbo-Zhoushan, also in China. Both ships, once part of a fleet owned by Ocean Maritime Management Co., based in Pyongyang and sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department and the UN, changed their names to evade detection, according to Kharon, whose researchers drill down into company releases as well as court and corporate filings to establish links between front companies and sanctioned entities.

"Sanctions against North Korea are largely symbolic gestures of disapproval that do not demonstrate any capability to change the political behavior of the Kims," said Robert Huish, an associate professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, who has been monitoring the country's shipping traffic. . . here

Don Bacon , Feb 28, 2018 10:58:29 AM | 10
And we have the recent striking news that the Pentagon doesn't believe Syria used Sarin last year.
Secretary of Defense James Mattis made it very clear recently that "aid groups and others" had provided the U.S. with evidence that was insufficient to conclude that President Bashar Assad had recently used the chemical weapon Sarin against Syrian civilians . In other words, the Pentagon does not believe what has been presented to it as evidence, chiefly because of the dubious provenance of the providers. . . here

Remember that almost a year ago a UN commission concluded that the Syrian government was responsible for a widely discussed incident in Khan Sheikhoun. An alleged gas attack by air happened in April in an al-Qaeda controlled area in Syria. It was used by the White House to justify its bombing of a Syrian airbase.
Christian Chuba , Feb 28, 2018 11:24:04 AM | 11
The Guardian link has one of the most comical requests that the U.N. tends to make on the accused in the vein of 'prove you are not a witch' ...
"The UN experts added that they had not yet received a reply with documents supporting this claim and a list of all North Koreans who had travelled to Syria."

Syria, 'there were no Korean technicians, military, or official visits'.
U.N. - 'Prove it, give us a list of the Koreans'
The Syrians should give the U.N. an empty list.

They did this to Syria before when they were accused of a WMD bombing of civilians. The Syrians said that they didn't have any military flights that day, 'give us a list of flights, what, no list? GUILTY!'

AriusArmenian , Feb 28, 2018 11:58:57 AM | 12
Same old, same old.
Warmongering US morons marching to war.
They always lie us into their wars.
WorldBLee , Feb 28, 2018 12:04:33 PM | 13
Never underestimate the ability of the NYT or WaPo to fabricate incredible lies in conjunction with the US security state.
james , Feb 28, 2018 12:40:54 PM | 14
thanks b... i think what you are doing here, if i could be so bold, is that you are tearing apart of merits of this reporter michael schwirtz's talking points... this is very important to do, as no one is doing it! in looking at what the dolt has written for the nyt the past few months, it becomes very clear the agenda is to carry water for the neo con crowd, facts be dammed... this is his job... he does need to be taken to the woodshed and given a beating! and why is it these ambiguous types are always given clearance in such papers as the nyt, wapo or wsj? it would be hard not to conclude the folks who own these papers are very intent on doing the same - carrying water for the military and financial industry in a move towards war, or a desire for war..

your story is not going to get the coverage the nyt story gets... how do we change that?

@don bacon - reading the usa daily press propaganda briefings is always informative... why it was just yesterday that the quote you gave from today, was served up yesterday thanks heather nauert.. this from yesterday "MS NAUERT: Russia signed on to this. That's first of all. Russia signed on to this as an entity that agreed to this UN Security Council resolution. Let me remind you also that Russia had agreed to help, years ago, Syria with getting rid of its chemical weapons. Russia has failed to do that. I want to point that out as well." who needs facts, when you can lie, make shit up and etc. etc.?? https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2018/02/278913.htm

@1 librel.. i agree with you - change the word, again to still... the nyt is 'still' shilling for the war machine...

ritzl , Feb 28, 2018 12:47:21 PM | 15
Is it some surprise that US sanctioned countries trade with other US sanctioned countries (for benign, commercial reasons)? It apparently is to some.

(Warning: sweeping statement alert...) This GLOBAL US sanctions regime only hastens the formation of a non-US/alternative commercial trade collective, the end of the dollar as "world trade currency," and the subsequent end of the US ability to fund global war (as US T-Bill interest rates jack up - currently at ZERO - correspondingly, US sovereign debt becomes unsupportable by the economy, and the end of economic life as we in the US know it). Perpetual war, as a function of the end of empire, do have that effect.

psychohistorian , Feb 28, 2018 12:59:03 PM | 16
I just stumbled across a Feb 26, Vanity Fair article written by Joe Pompeo about disagreements at the NYT

"THE NEWSROOM FEELS EMBARRASSED": BACKFIRES AND EXPLOSIONS AT THE NEW YORK TIMES AS A POSSIBLE FUTURE CHIEF RE-INVENTS THE PAPER'S OPINION PAGES

alaric , Feb 28, 2018 1:02:08 PM | 17
The Syrian attempt to end militants in Ghouta has elicited an incredibly strong, and for me, unexpected response. Why are the NATO/zionist/neocon crowd going crazy over a small plot of land that was obviously going to be recaptured? Are they concerned that the inability of the jihadists to shell Damascus will be too beneficial to Assad? Is this just an attempt by Bibi to save his skin? Maybe the jihadist backers have finally come to realize that this little game is coming to a close?
james , Feb 28, 2018 1:20:12 PM | 18
@17 alaric - "Reading media reports of the fighting in east Ghouta over the last few days has triggered an eery sense of déjà vu.

It is like taking a time machine back to the autumn of 2016 and listening to all the arguments over the fighting in Aleppo all over again." the article is here

Scotch Bingeington , Feb 28, 2018 1:21:36 PM | 19
Thanks b and also Yul | 6 for shedding light on that matter.

Those "UN experts" are being cited on German state media again and again, with some new report on this or that, establishing Syria as guilty party. But whenever that happens and I go on the UN's website to find s.th. on said report, like a press statement, just anything official, there's nothing to be found. So clearly they're misusing the official 'UN' tag, and no-one's stopping them.

As for the latest expert ruse, it's eye-opening to have a look at the people from the document which Yul posted. On the face of it, it might look like a pretty diverse crew, ppl from all regions of the world with names no-one has ever heard of, so why not trust them?

It gets bad when you take a closer look. The French boy (born '84) is from law and has dealt with nothing but law so far, yet poses as an expert on "missile issues and other technologies". Would you believe it?

This just goes on, the Britisher ("air transport") has a background in political science (or "science" rather).

Rounding things off, there's this American lady with her no doubt common English name Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt. If you're confused as to her actual nationality you can at least be sure that she's a deep-state outgrowth. Council on Foreign Relations, Council of Europe, council here, council there. Political science by training too, probably's never done a day's work in her life. But quite the expert on "finance and economics", I hear.

PS: Those tiles, I remember we had tables clad with those in the chemistry labs, back in high school. So maybe they were justmeant for one of the schools they're rebuilding in Aleppo, another thought.

Have a nice day, everybody!

Ninel , Feb 28, 2018 1:24:48 PM | 20
These reports (allegations) are part of a psychological war waged by the US and its allies on Syria et al. There may be a military attack in the works, maybe not, but one thibg's for sure -- serious allegations like these serve to keep the Syrians and their allies on their tippy toes, and intended to make them think twice before they make moves contrary to US interests. So yes the reports are for domestic consumption but also part of a warning to foreign foes.
Yul , Feb 28, 2018 1:34:18 PM | 21
@ 19 Scotch
Don't forget who has got the permanent post for the USG of Political Affairs at the UN . A US citizen- currently Jeffrey Feltman who is leaving soon to be replaced by another ilk - a woman this time around. Ban Ki-Moon couldn't sneeze w/o the approval of Jeffrey. Looks like Antonio is in the same boat - guess that's how and why he got elected - another US puppet as UNSG.
jayc , Feb 28, 2018 2:11:38 PM | 22
The NYT piece so obviously contradicts itself internally to boil down to a leaked document without official imprimatur, containing unverified information from unnamed UN member states, information which may or may not appear sinister, should it ever be confirmed, depending on one's point of view. That's very thin gruel, and yet the story has been amplified by other outlets and presented to the public as representing some sort of established fact. Yes, that is exactly the Iraqi WMD propaganda playbook.

Jonathan Cook on the "authoritarian courtiers" who write, amplify, and excuse such nonsense:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/28/the-authoritarians-who-silence-syria-questions/

OJS , Feb 28, 2018 2:19:43 PM | 23

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/syrias-ghouta-rescuers-keep-finding-bodies-164128495.html


How about fake news from AFP?

In Syria's Ghouta, rescuers keep finding bodies

.... Abdulmonam Eassa AFP News February 28, 2018
Syrian civil defence volunteers pray over the body of a victim who died in a building collapse following reported regime bombardment in Haza, in the besieged Eastern Ghouta region on February 26, 2018 More In Syria's rebel-held Eastern Ghouta enclave, the bombs have stopped falling from the sky but the dead are still being raised from the rubble.

In the town of Hazeh, volunteers from the Syrian Civil Defence known as the "White Helmets" pull one body from the basement of a collapsed home. And minutes later, a second one.

"It's carnage down there," says Ali Bakr, a young man looking on with other residents. "People hide underground to shelter from the strikes but even that doesn't guarantee you're safe."

Syrian regime forces, backed by Russia's military, intensified their bombardment of Eastern Ghouta on February 18, carrying out one of the bloodiest assaults of the country's seven-year war.

More than 600 civilians have been killed in 10 days of air strikes, barrel bombs dropped from helicopters and rocket fire on the area, which is controlled by Islamist and jihadist groups....

Cassandra , Feb 28, 2018 2:57:31 PM | 24
The „churnalists" live up to their real name. They did the same stunt in 2017 – even more brazenly rehashing what the press agency „said" (in turn relying on what anonymous „officials" and reports „said"):

The „sources":

1 a „confidential" (read: secret) report by ANONYMOUS authors (called: „independent experts" in manipulative press jargon):

„The report by a panel of independent U.N. experts, which was submitted to the U.N. Security Council earlier this month and seen by Reuters on Monday, gave no details on WHEN or WHERE the interdictions occurred or WHAT the shipments contained".
(Give me a break )

2 the allegations of 3 UNIDENTIFIED „(UN) member states": 2 „interdicted shipments " and 1 „HAD REASONS TO BELIEVE" :

(REUTERS) " Two MEMBER STATES interdicted shipments destined for Syria. Another Member state informed the panel that it HAD REASONS TO BELIEVE that the goods were part of a KOMID contract with Syria," according to the report.
„KOMID is the Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation. It was blacklisted by the Security Council in 2009 and DESCRIBED AS Pyongyang's key arms dealer and exporter of equipment related to ballistic missiles and conventional weapons. In March 2016 the council also blacklisted two KOMID representatives in Syria."
The consignees were Syrian entities DESIGNATED by the European Union and the United States as front companies for Syria's Scientific Studies and Research Centre (SSRC), a Syrian entity identified by the Panel as cooperating with KOMID in previous prohibited item transfers," the U.N. experts wrote. SSRC has overseen the country's chemical weapons program since the 1970s."

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-syria-un/north-korea-shipments-to-syria-chemical-arms-agency-intercepted-u-n-report-idUSKCN1B12G2 (this piece was dutifully distributed by the „mass producers of ignorance"

An excellent commentary / critique of this „journalism for imbeciles" can be found here:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/un-asserts-link-north-korea-syria-chemical-weapons-program/231262/

The latest „reporting" is using the same methods: secret sources, innuendo, conjecture, confirmation bias, framing, etc.
The report is UNPUBLISHED, the authors („experts on what?) are NOT KNOWN but the insinuation is that it contains „new evidence" for criminal activities between the DPRK and Syria (criminal only because of the unwarranted sanctions)

So the „multiplicators" write about what Reuters says is in the report (as if it were true) although no journalist has tried to verify the claims but when the Syrian government refutes the allegations they dutifully point out that

„The UN panel said Syrian officials had not responded to a request for documents that would support this assertion "

http://www.dw.com/en/north-korea-is-supplying-chemical-weapons-to-syria-un-experts/a-42764642

Cassandra , Feb 28, 2018 3:07:26 PM | 25
Meanwhile .. the real axis of evil has been doing its dirty work unhindered

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/war-gains-bulgarian-arms-add-fuel-to-middle-east-conflicts-12-16-2015
http://21stcenturywire.com/2018/01/21/wmd-america-inside-pentagons-global-bioweapons-industry/ .

Some information on the UN„experts" (DPRK-sanctions panel)

https://www.un.org/sc/suborg/en/sanctions/1718/panel_experts/appointment-experts

BENOIT CAMGUILHEM (F) – missile issues
a French university lecturer in public / administrative law - an expert on missiles?

HUGH GRIFFITHS (UK) - air transport
leads the panel this guy is a dangerous fraud ... infiltrating SIPRI and earlier involved in the black "human rights" propaganda about Serbia and Kosovo (director of field mission, medecins du monde (1999-2001)- as "authentic" as the White Helmets...)

https://www.sipri.org/about/bios/hugh-griffiths

(„he worked for governments" (!) and the „Institute for War & Peace":

„Institute for War & Peace Reporting (or IWPR for short) is an international media development charity, established in 1991. It runs major programmes in Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Iran, Iraq, the Philippines, Southeastern Europe, Syria, Uganda and Southern Africa. (nice choice of countries !)

"IWPR builds democracy at the frontlines of conflict and change through the power of professional journalism. IWPR programs provide intensive hands-on training, extensive reporting and publishing, and ambitious initiatives to build the capacity of local media ." (haven't we heard this crap before ?)

„Also we are managing a special reporting project on war crimes tribunals" . „managing" indeed:

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Institute_for_War_and_Peace_Reporting

Edward Herman's great analysis about the Milosevic trial (Marlise Simons: A Study in Total Propaganda Service) contains this reference:

Marlise Simons, "Prosecutors SAY Documents Link Milosevic to Genocide," New York Times, June 20, 2003

„Simons swallowed the Office of the Prosecutor's bait, its revelation of a document that "MAY PROVE TO BE crucial evidence in support of their case that the former Yugoslav president is guilty of genocide." (First published on the webpage of the highly-compromised Institute for War & Peace Reporting..)" Sound familiar?

The Simonses of this world have multiplied like cancer cells and as Herman remarked:

„Framing and sourcing are closely linked, as the use of a particular source allows that source to define the issues and to fix the frames of reference, presumably those acceptable to or preferred by the journalist"

By the way, the IWPR (their "democracy-loving" directors) seem to be very unpopular in Iraq .. I wonder why:

http://www.iraq-businessnews.com/2015/05/05/iwpr-iraq-director-killed-in-baghdad/
http://www.iraq-businessnews.com/2015/10/20/iwpr-director-found-dead/

The newly-appointed Iraq Director for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) has been found dead in suspicious circumstances at an Istanbul airport. („hanged herself with shoelaces") The ex-BBC journalist had been returning from a memorial service in London for the former IWPR Iraq director, Ammar Al Shahbander, who was killed in a car bomb attack in Baghdad in May.

Daniel , Feb 28, 2018 3:18:00 PM | 26
I hate to admit it, but clearly the AZ Empire is not "finished" with Syria yet. The division of this ancient society with the storied Euphrates River serving as one border (as "Promised" in Genesis 15:18) is enforced by thousands of US troops, artillery pieces, warplanes and at least a dozen US military bases. That gives about 1/3 of Syria's land and 1/2 of its oil to the proposed Kurdistan (with Kurdish people making up 6% of Syria's population).

I sincerely hope that Syria's allies, Russia and Iran, are themselves sincere in their commitment to preserve Syria's sovereignty and the integrity of its borders.

Another story came out of this devastated land and people.

Syria conflict: Women 'sexually exploited in return for aid'

It's been going on since "revolution" began. The first UN report on it was 3 years ago, but nothing has been done. And of course, it is the Sharia Councils we pay for that set the terms for trading food for women and girls (and no doubt boys).

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-43206297

Tobin Paz , Feb 28, 2018 3:29:10 PM | 27
Things are not looking good:

Lindsey Graham Warns Iran Is Testing Trump and Israel Is Preparing for War

Senator Lindsey Graham said Iran is testing President Donald Trump and warned Israel was preparing to start a war in southern Lebanon over an Iranian-backed Hezbollah rocket factory.
Castellio , Feb 28, 2018 3:31:16 PM | 28
James @14

You write: "the folks who own these papers are very intent on doing the same - carrying water for the military and financial industry in a move towards war, or a desire for war.. "

Have you considered that the owners of the media also own large parts of the military industrial complex, as well as controlling interest in the financial institutions?

The media is not a separate fourth estate seeking objectivity, it is a useful tool to create popular support for policies that go against the interest of the majority. They are not separate.

Perhaps that was your point.

karlof1 , Feb 28, 2018 4:07:00 PM | 29
Castellio @28--

Excellent points! I shun most "traditional" media of all types as most are corrupted in some manner, with some more than others. I'm reminded of the closed door meeting FDR had with the major media CEOs just prior to 7 Dec and the resulting lock-step they all displayed afterwards--a lock-step continuing as we breathe.

james , Feb 28, 2018 4:07:13 PM | 30
@28 castellio.. thanks for articulating that.. i didn't say that, but it does beg the question who owns the media and i do believe it is as you say..
test , Feb 28, 2018 4:21:58 PM | 31
Max Blumenthal slams Democracy Now & guest for supporting 'neocon project of regime change in Syria'
https://www.sott.net/article/378447-Max-Blumenthal-slams-Democracy-Now-guest-slammed-for-supporting-neocon-project-of-regime-change-in-Syria
Jeffrey Kaye , Feb 28, 2018 4:47:54 PM | 32
This is a black propaganda two-fer, casting aspersions upon both Syria and North Korea. Let us now forget it was the U.S. that enabled sales of chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein. It was the U.S. that most likely used Sarin gas during the Vietnam War. And it was the U.S. that amnestied the worst biological warfare criminals from Japan's Unit 731 complex and then used their expertise to conduct a large-scale experimental campaign of germ warfare against both China and North Korea during the Korean War. Regarding the latter, readers are referred to https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-long-suppressed-korean-war-report-on-u-s-use-of-biological-weapons-released-at-last-20d83f5cee54
karlof1 , Feb 28, 2018 5:08:09 PM | 33
NY Times now spreading All Propaganda report that Russia hacked German database extensively & for very long period of time.
Quentin , Feb 28, 2018 5:20:06 PM | 34
Jeffrey Kaye @ 32 - the link doesn't work - no information at Medium Search nor in Google search - could you help?
Kalen , Feb 28, 2018 5:25:45 PM | 35
Here are white helmeted angels in Syria.
It is true. They live.
https://pp.userapi.com/c834404/v834404425/cda58/8COyhYqrb8I.jpg
Jen , Feb 28, 2018 5:36:07 PM | 36
Castellio @ 28, James and Karlof1: In the case of Rupert Murdoch, who through News Corporation owns newspapers, journals, magazines, TV and online news channels, at least one major film studio (20th Century Fox), publishing company HarperCollins Publishers and other media outlets, the link between the media and the military industrial complex is between the two hemispheres of his brain. Murdoch is on the Board of Directors of Genie Energy (along with ex-US President of Vice Dick Cheney) which owns a company that has a licence (granted by an Israeli court) to explore and drill for oil and natural gas in Syria's Golan Heights.

How much more incestuous can the media be with the military industrial complex?

Wait while I hunt out the connection between The Guardian newspaper's management and investment bank NM Rothschild & Sons Ltd ...

https://www.theguardian.com/the-scott-trust/2015/jul/26/the-scott-trust-board

wendy davis , Feb 28, 2018 5:36:33 PM | 37
@ quentin 34

see if this works at his medium site (though they look the same):

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-long-suppressed-korean-war-report-on-u-s-use-of-biological-weapons-released-at-last-20d83f5cee54

on his twitter thing: https://twitter.com/Anony_Mia/status/968892377065754625

ted01 , Feb 28, 2018 5:59:10 PM | 38
Quentin @ 34

delete the formatting characters that appear at the end of the url in your web browser. If you hover over the link you can see them.

Debsisdead , Feb 28, 2018 6:39:35 PM | 39
What is up here? Apart from the horror of the NYT story, why are so many commenters in this thread too damn lazy to use the html tags provided. It is 2018 and I find it impossible to accept that so many are still incapable of posting to a blog.
The only reason I can deduce is that far too many still sit at ancient desktops and don't comprehend the disaster their laziness causes for those who use tablets & phones.
Daniel , Feb 28, 2018 6:42:15 PM | 40
A new movie "Revolution Man" directed by Syrian director Najdat Aznour. Deals with rebel propaganda ie. #WhiteHelmets fakery, child soldiers & the role of western media in demonizing the government.

Check out the trailer at their F**kBook site:

https://www.facebook.com/Revolution-Man-Movie-فيلم-رجل-الثورة-993146510832449

Daniel , Feb 28, 2018 6:46:04 PM | 41
For Debs and b:

A new movie "Revolution Man" directed by Syrian director Najdat Aznour. Deals with rebel propaganda ,#WhiteHelmets fakery, child soldiers & the role of western media in demonizing the government

Check out the trailer at their F**kBook site:

karlof1 , Feb 28, 2018 6:50:33 PM | 42
Jen @36--

Such incestuousness was uncovered during the Merchants of Death Congressional hearings during the 1930s and helped enact the Neutrality Acts. Prominent US Historians Charles and Mary Beard were decrying the evils of media consolidation soon after WW1, a message that only increased in volume as time moved forward. Imagine what we might have if anti-trust legislation were enforced as rigorously as Taft(!) did 100+ years ago.

[Mar 01, 2018] Russiagate and the Neo McCarthyite War on Alternative Media and Political Dissent Global Research by Jonathan Sigrist

Notable quotes:
"... It has been a long year ever since January 20 th of last year. Not only because of the ever-ensuing embarrassments of the Commander in Chief with such frequency it can be difficult to follow, but also – and I would say especially – because of the incessant daily media focus on the so called "Russiagate" scandal, a conspiracy which seeks to prove a collusion between the Putin and the Trump administration in order to successfully steal the 2016 presidential election win away from Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton. ..."
Feb 28, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

It has been a long year ever since January 20 th of last year. Not only because of the ever-ensuing embarrassments of the Commander in Chief with such frequency it can be difficult to follow, but also – and I would say especially – because of the incessant daily media focus on the so called "Russiagate" scandal, a conspiracy which seeks to prove a collusion between the Putin and the Trump administration in order to successfully steal the 2016 presidential election win away from Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.

The United States and the Russian Federation have a long history of mutual hostility – famously dividing the East and West into a bipolar world during the Cold War – and the vision of Russia is among many Americans still that of the Soviet bad guys . The Cold War was not a pleasant time for many obvious reasons, but in the minds of the American left, the McCarthy era is one that still sticks, and its apparent return is something that seems to concern only a minority on the left – including myself. Now for the unacquainted, McCarthyism can be described as " the vociferous campaign against alleged communists in the US government and other institutions carried out under Senator Joseph McCarthy in the period 1950–4. Many of the accused were blacklisted or lost their jobs, though most did not in fact belong to the Communist Party " ( source ). It was a clever way used by the US government to frame and condemn all the big left leaning civil rights and social justice movements that were happening during the Cold War era. Professors, academics, independent media platforms, politicians or activists with left leaning messages were being labelled as Soviet agents by the US government, discrediting them completely of any legitimacy in the eyes of the American people through the widespread Red Scare . What has been happening in the last year can be seen as a mirror of the same mentality, except that " Soviet spy " has today been replaced by labels such as " Kremlin agent " or " Russian bot ".

It isn't news that what is often referred to as the " American Left" of the Democratic party is in reality nothing more than a neo-liberal party slightly more to the center/left than the GOP. So in this article, when I am referring to the terminology "American Left" , and the one subject to the revamped McCarthyism, I am in fact talking about the often anti-establishment, anti-imperialistic and even sometimes anti-capitalistic left – the one that threatens the current neo-liberal status quo. So as I elaborate my case, I just want to make it clear that I am referring to the latter.

One of the greater, larger left-wing media presence on US ground is undoubtedly RT America (RT short for Russia Today). Hosting many US critical segments such as Redacted Tonight by Lee Camp, On Contact with Chis Hedges and Breaking The Set with Abby Martin, RT America comes out as a prominent side-narrative to the mainstream medias such as MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CNN, NPR and so forth. Yet last year, RT America has had to register itself as a "foreign agent" , on the basis of a very weak report by the Director of National Intelligence . Reasons for this decision as stated in the report claims to be that RT regularly covers surveillance, civil liberties, protest movements, the environmental impacts of fracking and Wall Street greed. Other more establishment friendly foreign news media on US soil such as BBC America have not had to register as a foreign agent. So far, only RT. Facebook (known for working closely with the US government) has even gone as far as marking RT articles shared on its platform as spam The Intercept

did find out recently as well that Facebook does censor certain of its pages on behalf of governments , so more of the same behaviour is expected to be seen more in the future.

Where the delegitimization of leftist media really strikes is in the realm of "fake news"-stamping and propaganda-flagging. The Washington Post backed the website project PropOrNot.com which frames in a sort of 'blacklist' news medias that they believe are Russian Propaganda, with usually no evidence to back up their claims. Many independent news outlets are to be found on their list, and none of the major media conglomerates (unless they're Russian, of course). In the same vein, Facebook has decided to team up with established media outlets such as AP and ABC News to find out and decide what is or is not "Fake News" .

Apparently, Americans are believed to be too unwise to figure it out for themselves, and if alternate narratives and opinions are being held, it must be because they have fallen victim of fake news. BBC has even gone as far as taking the teaching role in spotting "fake news" . The concept seems to be that social media platforms and mainstream media outlets are to tell the population what is real and what is a lie. The same outlets that pushed the war in Iraq, Syria, Libya, as well as the current Russiagate narrative. Media outlets that are ramping up on US intelligence spokesmen for their news segments, despite the fact that they are historically known to lie and deceive the American people . These same people are to tell us what is the truth. It is my belief that one of the only way such a development has become possible lies in the fact that the Democratic party and its voters have a newfound love for the FBI, NSA and CIA, thanks to the Russiagate conspiracy.

During the last year, James Comey and Robert Mueller have incessantly been praised by the media as American heroes and patriots saving the American people from the Kremlin puppets that Trump and his administration are accused to be (with very little evidence so far). It would seem that in this day and age, the Democrats would rather side with the deep state than with reason. Through programs such as COINTELPRO

and Operation Mockingbird , the FBI and CIA have spent decades and millions of dollars deceiving and crushing any movement that dared to challenge the two-party system. For " the resistance " movement to embrace US intelligence agencies and the lies they propagate is an extremely reckless and dangerous move, and by doing so they are not only consciously trying their best to harm the current administration, but unconsciously harming the many media outlets, journalists, activists and politicians who hold a different view on the world than the Washington narrative, and who are now all being flagged as Kremlin agents pushing Russian propaganda.

During the last year we have been told not only that Trump's campaign colluded with the Kremlin, but also that Bernie Sanders, Green Party leader Jill Stein and even that UK's Jeremy Corbyn did. So have we been told about whistleblowers Julian Assange , Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning , and many of RT America's journalists who have their shows and articles published on RT America for the sole reason that RT is one of the only outlets allowing their differing viewpoints on American politics. Many Russiagate sceptics on Twitter have r eceived messages directly from Twitter informing them that they might have fallen victim to Russian propaganda because they had retweeted or were following certain accounts they deemed to be associated with the Kremlin. From my own personal experience, I cannot count how many times I have seen Russiagate sceptics being called-out by liberals for being Kremlin agents or Russian bot accounts – all because of the many, many Russia-Kremlin-Trump stories that have been promulgated over the last year. It has paralyzed a large portion of the centre-left to not even move an inch more towards the left, and has condemned those who have.

There is a paranoia happening in the US political establishment, remarkably similar to the one experienced during the Cold War era. It doesn't matter whether the Russia-Collusion story is true or not (let's not forget the United States has itself meddled in countless foreign elections ever since the end of WWII , even in Russia in 1996 ), it matters more what this ongoing investigation and grotesque media-hype is doing to the American public – and by extension to the rest of the world. The US-Russia relation is worse today than at the high point of the Cold War , all thanks to this constant Putin bashing and the fact that NATO is slowly encircling the Russia in Eastern Europe, Northern Europe, the Arctic, the Middle-East and Asia. Despite the West promising not to expand NATO an inch Eastwards as part of the German reunification deal, such promises have not been kept. But of course, most of the general population is fine this politically unwise expansion of NATO, " because you know, Russians are bad " (satire).

If there is a threat to national and global security today, and a threat to free speech and independent media, it is not coming from Putin or the Kremlin – but rather from the United States. And until the American left gathers itself and stops listening to the warmongering pundits and establishment journalists parroting the Washington narrative, we have nothing but a bleak future in front of us with regards to the relation between thte two old nemesis nuclear superpowers.

*

Jonathan Sigrist is a student at the University of Tromsř in Northern Norway, currently studying the geopolitical, environmental, cultural and economic relations between the Arctic nations (The US, Canada, Russia, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark/Greenland and Iceland), as well as the future of the Arctic's role in global politics. He has lived in Denmark, Sweden, Finland and France, and is a fervent observer and critic of US foreign policy.

[Feb 27, 2018] China will force the US to change its mind about Bashing Russia by Andranik Migranyan

Notable quotes:
"... This is why Washington has adopted a strategy of bashing Russia. The US wants to break our country and withdraw it from the game, deprive it of sovereignty and subjectivity in world politics, as was the case in the 1990s, so that at the hour of the decisive clash, Russia was not an independent player capable of making decisions based on its interests. ..."
"... Thus, the minimum and maximum goals of the US are pursued: the first is to neutralize Russia, and since today it reliably covers China's rear, create threats for China from the Russian direction. ..."
"... The second is to establish a power in Moscow that would act together with Washington against China in a decisive battle. In recent years, we have seen elements of the implementation of this strategy. These are sanctions in Ukraine, attempts at financial and economic strangulation, involvement in mediated wars and a new arms race in order to provoke a split in elite Russian circles, and between the masses and the leader -- in order to ruin Putin's power and establish a puppet regime in Russia. ..."
Feb 19, 2018 | www.newsilkstrategies.com

Andranik Migranyan for RIA Novosti

The US is no longer a superpower: Washington's nuclear strategy tells us this.

By now, the United States has already adopted a deterrence strategy with respect to Beijing and methodically pursues a policy of encircling the PRC with the help of its partners and allies. China has with almost all its neighbours conflicts and problems that the US traditionally skilfully uses to create an anti-China coalition. Countries that can form its core include Japan, India, Vietnam, the Philippines and Australia. Over time, other states may join them.

... And now - the most important thing. Against the backdrop of a possible battle between the two giants in the foreseeable future, Russia's role and significance are incredibly increasing. Obviously, having huge nuclear-missile potential, vast spaces and immense resources, Russia can, with its participation on the side of one of the giants in the battle, decide the fate of the confrontation.

I personally get the impression that Washington strategists understand this perfectly. However, they do not believe that by improving relations with Moscow, they can make it a reliable ally in the case of a head-on confrontation with China. And because the future destiny of the United States is at stake, facing an impending existential challenge, any miscalculation can prove fatal.

This is why Washington has adopted a strategy of bashing Russia. The US wants to break our country and withdraw it from the game, deprive it of sovereignty and subjectivity in world politics, as was the case in the 1990s, so that at the hour of the decisive clash, Russia was not an independent player capable of making decisions based on its interests.

Thus, the minimum and maximum goals of the US are pursued: the first is to neutralize Russia, and since today it reliably covers China's rear, create threats for China from the Russian direction.

The second is to establish a power in Moscow that would act together with Washington against China in a decisive battle. In recent years, we have seen elements of the implementation of this strategy. These are sanctions in Ukraine, attempts at financial and economic strangulation, involvement in mediated wars and a new arms race in order to provoke a split in elite Russian circles, and between the masses and the leader -- in order to ruin Putin's power and establish a puppet regime in Russia.

Will the Americans succeed in implementing their strategy? This is highly doubtful, despite the enormous resources that the collective West, led by the United States, can mobilize. First, the Western world and the States are not experiencing the best of times. America has overextended itself over almost the past two decades in a series of endless wars and external adventures. Secondly, Russia cannot be broken by applying crude, direct pressure on it. If it breaks down, as we know from our history, it is only because of internal conflicts and confrontations. So, in the medium term, external pressure can only consolidate Russian society and power.

Third. The history of the White House's pressure on North Korea suggests that this huge country cannot cope even with this small state, which has taken a firm stand.

Fourth. The solidarity of Western countries with the United States also has its limits. They are unlikely to become willing hostages to the confrontation of the US vs Russia, and then the US vs China.

And lastly, I like to hope that in Beijing they understand (or very soon will realize) that the main target of the States is not Russia. Thus, the Kremlin is now resisting the White House both for itself and, as we used to say in the USSR, for the other guy.

And it seems to me that if in this confrontation China more vigorously defends Russia, then it is likely that the US will understand the hopelessness of the strategy of bashing Russia and change the paradigm of its policy. Otherwise, they themselves are at risk of being broken because of the exorbitant imperial overstrain.

No wonder Patrick Buchanan, one of the most astute patriarchs of American politics and analysts of US foreign and domestic policy, published a few years ago a book with the very characteristic title "Suicide of a superpower: will the US survive until 2025?"

RIA Novosti https://ria.ru/analytics/20180219/1514877102.html

[Feb 27, 2018] Neoliberalism goes into counter-offence and Russians under each bed is just tip of the iceberg

Interesting observation: "This is what happens when you have 'Five Eyes' but no brains!"
Notable quotes:
"... The entire U.S. MSM is a F'ing troll farm, disinformation, Orwellian world on steroids. The U.S. public is fed a constant never ending stream of complete Bull sh**, self serving crap. ..."
"... It's surprising to see the NYT admit the US does it, too. The alt media has been all over this including Corbett's recent video with the Woolsey interview with Fox News where he laughs it off and then says it was for a good cause. ..."
"... I've been writing to my favorite websites telling them that the Russians could not possibly compete with the U.S. when it came to manipulation of twitter/facebook etc. Where is the comparative analysis? How could the Russians possibly compete with US Internet-manipulation, US-election-funding? Look at the most basic numbers, US population compared to Russian population... ..."
"... The whole Russiagate thing has been proven to be nothing but a cover for the Democratic Party's real manipulation of the last election to cut out the only progressive in the race (Sanders) and get the worst possible opponent (Trump) for the elite's favorite candidate (Clinton). The stupid little people of middle America just didn't follow orders like their ever so sophisticated compatriots on the east and west coasts and now the 0.01% have to cover their tracks. Mueller's indictment of 13 interns in some sadsack little St Petersburg troll farm would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic (well actually it is pretty funny). ..."
"... It's McCarthyism on steroids, and as usual, the real targets are progressives and the "real left" fighting for workers. We are allowed to have all the social justice we want, but don't you dare discuss economic justice that threatens the bank accounts of the 0.01%, or watch any of that evil alternative news that provides a different perspective from our govt/corporate approved sources. ..."
Feb 27, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

pantaraxia | Feb 26, 2018 6:42:36 PM | 21

It went much further than that . Google actually tweaked its algorithms to alter search recommendations in favor of the Clinton campaign. A comparative analysis of search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo showed that Google differed significantly from the other two in producing search recommendations relevant to Clinton.

Google Manipulates Search Results To Favor Hillary Clinton - Jimmy Dore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MICXf6viakc

But , but, but...Russia!!!

Nothing to see her folks. Carry on.


che , Feb 26, 2018 6:47:53 PM | 22

The entire U.S. MSM is a F'ing troll farm, disinformation, Orwellian world on steroids. The U.S. public is fed a constant never ending stream of complete Bull sh**, self serving crap.

How to stop it is the only question, to stop the impunity with which these criminals like Bush and Trump and Obama and Mattis et.al. lie with their pants on fire and .....they all suck .01% dick.

Fec , Feb 26, 2018 8:19:04 PM | 23
@8 Nonsense Factory

Ahmed Nafeez exposed The Rendon Group and the Pentagon's Highlands Forum a few years ago.

And then there's today's nonsense.

Are You a Russian Troll?

John Gilberts , Feb 27, 2018 8:21:44 PM | 86
It's surprising to see the NYT admit the US does it, too. The alt media has been all over this including Corbett's recent video with the Woolsey interview with Fox News where he laughs it off and then says it was for a good cause.

Posted by: Curtis | Feb 26, 2018 8:44:21 PM | 24

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Finally, I do not believe my eyes. I've been writing to my favorite websites telling them that the Russians could not possibly compete with the U.S. when it came to manipulation of twitter/facebook etc. Where is the comparative analysis? How could the Russians possibly compete with US Internet-manipulation, US-election-funding? Look at the most basic numbers, US population compared to Russian population...

... ... ...

John Gilberts | Feb 27, 2018 1:00:46 PM | 59

CBC: NATO Researcher Warns of Russian Interference inn 2019 Canadian Elections
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/nato-researcher-russia-interference-election-1.4553572

"Russia is attracted to Canada because destabilizing it will 'undermine the cohesion' of the broader NATO alliance. Moreover it could serve to undermine Canadian policy in Europe..."

More money for CSIS, CSE, 'Five Eyes' etc. Maybe we'll build a Trudeau troll-farm too.

Sad Canuck | Feb 27, 2018 3:31:01 PM | 67

@59 John Gilberts,

Gee gosh golly a NATO researcher thinks Russia is threatening Canada and the CBC acts as a megaphone for this BS.

The whole Russiagate thing has been proven to be nothing but a cover for the Democratic Party's real manipulation of the last election to cut out the only progressive in the race (Sanders) and get the worst possible opponent (Trump) for the elite's favorite candidate (Clinton). The stupid little people of middle America just didn't follow orders like their ever so sophisticated compatriots on the east and west coasts and now the 0.01% have to cover their tracks. Mueller's indictment of 13 interns in some sadsack little St Petersburg troll farm would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic (well actually it is pretty funny).

Who exactly is Putin going to support in a Canadian election? The liberals and conservatives are both reliable lapdogs of Washington and even the NDP (No Difference Party) is infected with Russophobia and Whitehelmetphilia. Between supporting an overtly fascist regime in Kiev, contributing to every "bombing brown people to save them" campaign concocted by Washington, and leading a NATO battle group in Latvia some 250 miles from Moscow, it's pretty hard to make a case that Canada is a passive little angel looking for world peace anymore.

Very sad what the neo-liberal imposter Trudeau is doing to Canada. The guy is Harper with ridiculous socks and a bit of identity politics thrown in to fool whatever passes as center-left in Canada these days. What a change and almost nobody makes a fuss or cares. Of course the Canadian media attacks anyone suggesting better relations with Russia and Canada might be worth trying. It's McCarthyism on steroids, and as usual, the real targets are progressives and the "real left" fighting for workers. We are allowed to have all the social justice we want, but don't you dare discuss economic justice that threatens the bank accounts of the 0.01%, or watch any of that evil alternative news that provides a different perspective from our govt/corporate approved sources.

Very sad for my home and native land .......

9308305K | Feb 27, 2018 1:32:40 PM | 62

Pertinent quote regarding propaganda:

"When people ask about what is most threatening to humanity and all of life on Earth today, they usually mention nuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons, but forget about one more truly terrible weapons of mass destruction, aimed primarily at the human brain. This is information, propaganda and agitation."

Valentin Falin, who recently died aged 92.

More on what he thought (some of it quite extreme) here:

http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news–analysis/the-us-goal-is-to-destroy-russia-ten-quotes-by-valentin-falin

Anon | Feb 27, 2018 3:46:29 PM | 69

John Gilberts | Sad Canuck

ITs the classical propaganda campaign, Nato+western media, another standard psyop stunt earlier by the same "troll":

Russia is trying to cause unrest in Germany to topple Merkel, senior NATO expert says

https://www.dailysabah.com/europe/2016/03/06/russia-trying-to-create-unrest-in-germany-to-topple-merkel-senior-nato-expert-says

John Gilberts | Feb 27, 2018 8:21:44 PM | 86

"Huge Cash Infusion"? Hardly...

Liberals Pitch $500 Million Cyber Security Plan

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2018/02/27/liberals-pitch-500-million-cyber-security-plan.html

"Canada's electronic spy agency takes a central role in new cyber security strategy, will see budget boosts."

This is what happens when you have 'Five Eyes' but no brains!

[Feb 26, 2018] Democrat Memo Lays Egg by Publius Tacitus

Highly recommended!
Carter Page FISA warrant does much, much more than surveille Page himself -- it permits surveillance of most of the Trump campaign.
Notable quotes:
"... The whole Memo discussion above concerns the FBI's data manipulations to cast Carter Page as a spy worthy of an Article 1 warrant by the FISC. As I explained above, once Admiral Rogers closed the FBI's access to the NSA mega-file, the Bureau developed several work-arounds to explain how the FBI had data from the mega-file that they were mining through our Ambassador to the UN. ..."
"... Fusion GPS immediately hired the wife of FBI manager Bruce Ohr, Nellie, and Christopher Steele. Bruce handed material to Nellie, Nellie to Christopher. He repackaged the material claiming it was provided by very personal "Russian contacts" and the FBI then handed that laundered Steele material to the FISC. ..."
"... This laundering operation was exposed with a mistake concerning Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen. Michael Cohen was actually attending a family celebration and a ball game here in the US when he supposedly met Steele's "Russian contacts" in Prague. Steele's contacts, who exist only in his mind, dutifully confirmed that the meeting took place in Prague. ..."
"... Bill Binney, on Jimmy Dore show, said that FISA warrant enabled "two hop" surveillance. If so, then Carter Page FISA warrant does much, much more than surveille Page himself -- it permits surveillance of most of the Trump campaign. ..."
"... My "dog that didn't bark" question about Carter Page - if Carter Page was such a known danger, why didn't the FBI warn the Trump Campaign against letting him become involved in the campaign? ..."
"... The dog that didn't bark - if the Schiff Memo were so powerful, such a slam dunk, every MSM outlet in the western world would be trumpeting it to the skies and talking about nothing but. They seem to be barely able to acknowledge the existence of the Memo. ..."
"... As it happens, I think the suggestion that Steele's role may have been, in very substantial measure, to give the impression that material from other source was the product of a high-quality 'humint' investigation merits being taken extremely seriously. ..."
"... Schiff's defence sounded so, pardon the pun, shifty and did nothing to really counter the main point Nunes made when he released his memo. ..."
"... Schiff's memo was basically a vendetta against persons. Page and Papadopolis (sp?) are obviously the unpopular kids in the minds of the "mean girl" Democrats because they had links to Trump, the real threat to the popular girl Democrats. ..."
"... Funnily enough the question raised in your excerpt is exactly what I've been thinking since reading a post by TTG about Carter Page being an important FBI informant and state witness to the prosecution of Russian espionage. ..."
"... If the FBI believed Page had become a Russian spy it would have been easy due to their prior relationship with him to interview him and if he lied, to prosecute him for the process crime of perjury. That is such a slam dunk that the fact they didn't do that makes it seem there's something fishy there. ..."
"... And they never verified Steele's allegation that Page met with Sechin and Divyekin which would have been easy to do and now it seems was pure fabrication. Instead the FBI and DOJ lied and misrepresented to FISC to get a surveillance warrant on Page. This seems rather fishy. I speculate they did that to gain incidental collection on members of the Trump campaign. ..."
"... I note that Page hasn't been charged by the DOJ for any crime. ..."
"... Instead of working hard to protect national security, the FBI/CIA/DOJ' senior-idiots (accustomed to comfort and hefty checks) have been politicking and meddling in the electoral process. Meanwhile, the foreign nationals were left free to surf congressional computers – for years! (See Awan affair) and the "natives" like Clinton et al have been making a lot of money by getting huge bribes from Russians and Saudis (see Uranium One, involving Mueller for all other people). ..."
"... Carter Page during his period of cooperation with the FBI, almost certainly was handled by Agents assigned to a field office. I wonder what they had to say, assuming they even knew, about HQ opening a CI case targeting their former cooperating witness for FISA coverage. It will be very interesting to see who handled Steele. Strzok? ..."
"... What was the compelling evidence and who furnished it to turn a US Naval Academy graduate, and presumably a Naval Officer with a readily accessible track record in service, into the targeted subject of an espionage investigation. Did he even have any current access to classified information? This is not looking good. ..."
"... Carter Page is indeed a puzzlement. I don't see any account of him being an FBI informant, but he was a witness in the investigation and trial of the three SVR officers who tried to recruit him in 2013. ..."
"... Obama claimed something to the effect that, it turns out I am pretty good at killing people. This was in reference to the drone program and assume I don't need to footnote. Perhaps he got the notion that his administration was pretty good at intelligence. ..."
Feb 26, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

After reading the memo championed by Democrat Adam Schiff , which was promised to rebut the memo produced by the Republican majority on the House Intel Committee, I was reminded of a Peggy Lee song-- Is That All There Is?

Devin Nunes and his team have saved me the effort of pointing out the problems with the Schiff rebuttal. I am presenting that in full. Here is the bottomline--we now know that Christopher Steele was not a "one-time Charlie." He had a longstanding covert relationship as an FBI intelligence asset. The Democrat memo does nothing to dispute that fact.

It also is clear that DOJ and FBI personnel engaged in unprofessional (and possibly illegal) conduct with respect to making representations to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Three key points on this front--1: The so-called Steele dossier was proffered as evidence to the FISC without fully disclosing that Steele was a covert asset being paid for his work and that Democrat political operatives were also paying him; 2: Senior DOJ officials, particularly Bruce Our, were totally comprised yet continued to be involved in the process; and 3: The Democrats insist that Carter Page is a bad guy and deserves to be investigated. Yet, no charges have been filed against him and the allegations leveled in the Steele dossier were dismissed by former FBI Director Comey as "salacious and unverified."

Anyway, here are the main points from the Democrat memo and the Republican response.


Publius Tacitus -> steve... , 25 February 2018 at 03:12 PM

Steve,

Page was a campaign nobody. Never had a meeting with Trump. Never briefed Trump. That's what is one of the bizarre aspects of this.

james , 25 February 2018 at 08:53 PM
from page 2 of the pdf - https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hpsci_redacted_minority_memo.pdf

"George Papadopoulos revealed [redacted] that individuals linked to Russia, who took interest in Papadopoulos as a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, informed him in late April 2016 that Russia [two lines redacted]. Papadopoulos's disclosure, moreover, occurred against the backdrop of Russia's aggressive covert campaign to influence our elections, which the FBI was already monitoring. We would later learn in Papadopoulos's plea that the information the Russians could assist by anonymously releasing were thousands of Hillary Clinton emails."

my problem with this is wikileaks released the e mails via a search-able archive on march 16th 2016...

i still don't see how anything papadopolous said is relevant time wise.. what am i missing here, other then the obvious fact papadopolous looks like a lousy liar.. apparently he got this from Joseph Mifsud who as it turns out was 'director of the London Academy of Diplomacy' and etc - according to the nyt here - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/world/europe/russia-us-election-joseph-mifsud.html

and from the nyt article "Mr. Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with the "professor." Mr. Mifsud is referred to in the papers only as "the professor," based in London, but a Senate aide familiar with emails involving Mr. Mifsud -- lawmakers in both the Senate and the House are investigating Russia's role in the election -- confirmed that he was the person cited."

the whole thing of russia influencing the usa election seems built on via a number of sketchy characters at best..

at any rate - this is what emptywheel thinks is relevant in an otherwise irrelevant memo from schiff... i don't get how it is!

RC said in reply to Fred ... , 25 February 2018 at 09:50 PM
Fred,

The whole Memo discussion above concerns the FBI's data manipulations to cast Carter Page as a spy worthy of an Article 1 warrant by the FISC. As I explained above, once Admiral Rogers closed the FBI's access to the NSA mega-file, the Bureau developed several work-arounds to explain how the FBI had data from the mega-file that they were mining through our Ambassador to the UN.

Fusion GPS immediately hired the wife of FBI manager Bruce Ohr, Nellie, and Christopher Steele. Bruce handed material to Nellie, Nellie to Christopher. He repackaged the material claiming it was provided by very personal "Russian contacts" and the FBI then handed that laundered Steele material to the FISC.

This laundering operation was exposed with a mistake concerning Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen. Michael Cohen was actually attending a family celebration and a ball game here in the US when he supposedly met Steele's "Russian contacts" in Prague. Steele's contacts, who exist only in his mind, dutifully confirmed that the meeting took place in Prague.

I wish I might be a sock-puppet, but too many of my condo neighbors know otherwise. My favorite hobby in retirement is writing films for children, in which white hats succeed and black hats don't.

Steve McIntyre , 25 February 2018 at 10:25 PM
Bill Binney, on Jimmy Dore show, said that FISA warrant enabled "two hop" surveillance. If so, then Carter Page FISA warrant does much, much more than surveille Page himself -- it permits surveillance of most of the Trump campaign.
Tel said in reply to Boronx... , 25 February 2018 at 10:40 PM
"The entire case against the FBI rests on the idea that they cannot seek a warrant using biased evidence."
The FBI can use any evidence that is convincing to a judge.

Ahhhh, but they cannot legally tell lies to the judge during that process.

RC , 25 February 2018 at 11:19 PM
Hi Fred,

In some ways, being a sock-puppet and napping, in a bureau drawer (?), between soliloquies would be rather peaceful. Alas, too many of my condo neighbors know me to be otherwise !

Do check out sites such as The Conservative Treehouse and you will discover that Admiral Rogers' closing the NSA mega-file to the FBI led to Nellie Ohr's & Christopher Steele's information laundering operation. Other sites yet will introduce you to FISC Chief Judge Rosemary Collyer's 99-page rebuke of the FBI for their defalcations.

At a minimum, you won't be surprised when a plethora of FBI / DOJ / State Department employees are found guilty and sent to prison.

Enrico Malatesta , 26 February 2018 at 12:06 AM
My "dog that didn't bark" question about Carter Page - if Carter Page was such a known danger, why didn't the FBI warn the Trump Campaign against letting him become involved in the campaign?
blue peacock , 26 February 2018 at 03:53 AM
A cogent critique of the Schiff memo and how it doesn't aid the Democrats.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/schiff-memo-russia-investigation-harms-democrats-more-than-helps-them/

The memo does note that "the FBI also interviewed Page multiple times about his Russian intelligence contacts." Apparently, these interviews stretch back to 2013. The memo also lets slip that there was at least one more interview with Page in March 2016, before the counterintelligence investigation began. We must assume that Page was a truthful informant since his information was used in a prosecution against Russian spies and Page himself has never been accused of lying to the FBI .

So . . . here's the question: When Steele brought the FBI his unverified allegations that Page had met with Sechin and Divyekin, why didn't the FBI call Page in for an interview rather than subject him to FISA surveillance? Lest you wonder, this is not an instance of me second-guessing the Bureau with an investigative plan I think would have been better. It is a requirement of FISA law.

When the FBI and DOJ apply for a FISA warrant, they must convince the court that surveillance -- a highly intrusive tactic by which the government monitors all of an American citizen's electronic communications -- is necessary because the foreign-intelligence information the government seeks "cannot reasonably be obtained by normal investigative techniques." (See FISA, Section 1804(a)(6)(C) of Title 50, U.S. Code.) Normal investigative techniques include interviewing the subject. There are, of course, situations in which such alternative investigative techniques will inevitably fail -- a mafia don or a jihadist is not likely to sit down with FBI agents and tell them everything he knows. But Carter Page was not only likely to do so, he had a documented history of providing information to the FBI .

There's a reason why Nunes, Goodlatte and Grassley are focused on the Clinton commissioned Fusion GPS dossier, Christopher Steele and the FISA Title 1 warrant on Carter Page. It is the simplest path to the conspiracy at the Obama administration.

jonst said in reply to Boronx... , 26 February 2018 at 09:35 AM
My, street sense, and experience as a lawyer tells me that -- "tips, confessions.." from informants is true Steve. But the bar for going after a drug dealer, or fence, or kiddie porn type, is supposed -- one assumes -- to be a hell of a lot lower than going after the nominee for President of a major political party.
Green Zone Café , 26 February 2018 at 11:11 AM
Welcome to the criminal defense world. Everyday, hundreds of warrants based on the statements of criminals, paid informers, bitter ex-girlfriends, lying cops, and even non-existent "confidential informants" are issued. With all but the most blatant provably false affidavits, questionable searches are upheld by judges.

At this point I'm just waiting for Mueller's final indictments and the report. The facts will be there, or they won't.

If they are, try arguing a Motion to Suppress Evidence in the impeachment trial. That'll get you far . . .

Sid Finster , 26 February 2018 at 11:14 AM
The dog that didn't bark - if the Schiff Memo were so powerful, such a slam dunk, every MSM outlet in the western world would be trumpeting it to the skies and talking about nothing but. They seem to be barely able to acknowledge the existence of the Memo.
David Habakkuk -> RC... , 26 February 2018 at 11:28 AM
RC,

It really does help if, when you make claims, you link to the source so that others can evaluate them. In the case of the claims you are making, the source is clearly a post two days ago by 'sundance' on the 'Conservative Treehouse' site entitled 'Tying All The Loose Threads Together – DOJ, FBI, DoS, White House: "Operation Latitude" '

(See https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/02/24/tying-all-the-loose-threads-together-doj-fbi-dos-white-house-operation-latitude/ .)

As it happens, I think the suggestion that Steele's role may have been, in very substantial measure, to give the impression that material from other source was the product of a high-quality 'humint' investigation merits being taken extremely seriously.

However, to repeat claims by 'sundance', while not taking the – rather minimal – amount of trouble required to provide the link which allows others to evaluate them, simply puts people's backs up and makes them less likely to take what you are suggesting seriously.

DianaLC , 26 February 2018 at 01:55 PM
PT,

In the words of Emily Dickinson, I'm nobody. So., I come here to test my reaction when I read what the Democrats wrote -- though it was hard to get any continuity while reading because of all the big black lines--I was completely underwhelmed. I hate it when someone claims that what he/she is going to say will be something that will change my entire Weltanschauung and it turns out to be a nothing burger, in today's parance.

So thank you for confirming my opinion of the memo and thanks to others who have commented and who have way more experience and knowledge about how our Swam works (or doesn't work?).

My first reaction before I even tried to read the memo was correct. My first instinct was to judge on the basis of personality, which I know is not often logical. I felt that nothing put out under Schiff's authority could change my mind about the point Nunes made when he put out his mamo. Schiff's defence sounded so, pardon the pun, shifty and did nothing to really counter the main point Nunes made when he released his memo.

Schiff's memo was basically a vendetta against persons. Page and Papadopolis (sp?) are obviously the unpopular kids in the minds of the "mean girl" Democrats because they had links to Trump, the real threat to the popular girl Democrats. All we have to do is hear their names and we should automatically decide that if we want to be popular, we should malign them also so as to malign Trump and gain our entrance into the popular group in the cafeteria.

Jack said in reply to blue peacock... , 26 February 2018 at 02:00 PM
blue peacock,

Thanks for that link.

Funnily enough the question raised in your excerpt is exactly what I've been thinking since reading a post by TTG about Carter Page being an important FBI informant and state witness to the prosecution of Russian espionage.

If the FBI believed Page had become a Russian spy it would have been easy due to their prior relationship with him to interview him and if he lied, to prosecute him for the process crime of perjury. That is such a slam dunk that the fact they didn't do that makes it seem there's something fishy there.

And they never verified Steele's allegation that Page met with Sechin and Divyekin which would have been easy to do and now it seems was pure fabrication. Instead the FBI and DOJ lied and misrepresented to FISC to get a surveillance warrant on Page. This seems rather fishy. I speculate they did that to gain incidental collection on members of the Trump campaign.

I note that Page hasn't been charged by the DOJ for any crime. I agree with you that the investigation of the "conspiracy" is moving along well despite the roadblocks by the DOJ. Goodlatte who has seen the FISA application has now requested all the DOJ testimony from FISC. In a recent interview Rep. Ratcliffe who has also seen the FISA application made an interesting point that since in a FISC proceeding the accused has no ability to challenge the prosecution's claims, the prosecution has an affirmative obligation under FISA to present all the evidence, which the DOJ did not do but instead knowingly mislead the court.

It looks like we're heading towards another special counsel to investigate law enforcement and the IC regarding both the Trump and Clinton counter-intelligence investigations as well as the IC and media propaganda efforts to build hysteria around the meme of collusion of the Trump campaign with the Russian government. That investigation could lead all the way into the Obama White House.

Anna said in reply to Leaky Ranger... , 26 February 2018 at 02:56 PM
Your answer deserves F.

See post No 14: "...the FBI also interviewed Page multiple times about his Russian intelligence contacts." Apparently, these interviews stretch back to 2013. The memo also lets slip that there was at least one more interview with Page in March 2016, before the counterintelligence investigation began. We must assume that Page was a truthful informant since his information was used in a prosecution against Russian spies and Page himself has never been accused of lying to the FBI."

The case is not closed – it is closing on the high-placed violators of the US Constitution --as well as on their lack of professionalism, sheer incompetence and promiscuous opportunism

Instead of working hard to protect national security, the FBI/CIA/DOJ' senior-idiots (accustomed to comfort and hefty checks) have been politicking and meddling in the electoral process. Meanwhile, the foreign nationals were left free to surf congressional computers – for years! (See Awan affair) and the "natives" like Clinton et al have been making a lot of money by getting huge bribes from Russians and Saudis (see Uranium One, involving Mueller for all other people).

There is another big Q: To what extend both the FBI and the CIA have been infiltrated by Israel-firsters that are loyal to Zion, and how extensive is the damage inflicted by the "duals" on the US.

RC said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 26 February 2018 at 03:30 PM
Thank you David -- will do so in the future.
outthere , 26 February 2018 at 04:30 PM
Some commentators here seem not to know this simple fact: prosecutors in USA have enormous power. They can make mountains of molehills. And their most powerful weapon is the law of conspiracy. Here is an explanation by an experienced attorney:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/26/thirteen-russians-a-defense-lawyer-decodes-the-mueller-indictments/
Flavius , 26 February 2018 at 05:32 PM
Most unusual, I would say, for an Agent in an upper management position in FBI HQ to open a counter intelligence case and then for all intents and purposes assign it to himself. Cases are normally worked and directly supervised in field offices.

Carter Page during his period of cooperation with the FBI, almost certainly was handled by Agents assigned to a field office. I wonder what they had to say, assuming they even knew, about HQ opening a CI case targeting their former cooperating witness for FISA coverage. It will be very interesting to see who handled Steele. Strzok?

What was the compelling evidence and who furnished it to turn a US Naval Academy graduate, and presumably a Naval Officer with a readily accessible track record in service, into the targeted subject of an espionage investigation. Did he even have any current access to classified information? This is not looking good.

The Twisted Genius -> Jack... , 26 February 2018 at 07:29 PM
Jack,

Carter Page is indeed a puzzlement. I don't see any account of him being an FBI informant, but he was a witness in the investigation and trial of the three SVR officers who tried to recruit him in 2013.

If he was an informant, the FBI would not have had to obtain a FISA warrant to surveil him in 2014. That also raises doubts about how cooperative he was during that investigation and the 2015 Russian spy trial.

Obviously he didn't obstruct the investigation or prosecution or he would have been charged for that long ago. I get the impression he is a lot more wily than most people give him credit for.

Duck1 , 26 February 2018 at 08:37 PM
Obama claimed something to the effect that, it turns out I am pretty good at killing people. This was in reference to the drone program and assume I don't need to footnote. Perhaps he got the notion that his administration was pretty good at intelligence.

[Feb 26, 2018] State Department Troll Farm Receives Huge Cash Infusion

Notable quotes:
"... "This funding is critical to ensuring that we continue an aggressive response to malign influence and disinformation and that we can leverage deeper partnerships with our allies, Silicon Valley, and other partners in this fight," said Under Secretary Goldstein. "It is not merely a defensive posture that we should take, we also need to be on the offensive. ..."
"... Israel is long known for such information operations in which its paid trolls not only comment on issues on social media but actively manipulate Wikipedia entries. Such astroturfing has since become a common tool in commercial marketing campaigns. ..."
"... With regard to the larger issue, it seems that the US is getting more and more like its allies Ukraine (drives out any press concerned with printing the truth, relies on a bombastic and entirely false narrative to try and convince its hapless citizens that all is great and everything is Russia's fault) and Israel (an early leader in manipulating online info as b states). ..."
"... If it sounds like a PR monkey banging away on a regurgitated theme, it probably is. For example, the endless repetition in US media about "Syrian chemical weapons attacks" with no on-the-ground supporting evidence is typical of a Rendon Group disinformation campaign; so then they hire a hundred trolls to post outraged comments about 'Syrian chemical weapons use' in comment sections and on twitter; then they hire some State Department intern to write a book about the horrors of the Assad regime, and at the end they collect their $10 million paycheck. ..."
"... The hypocrisy of the U$A continues to be staggering.. If the collective IQ's of the general public approached double digits, the disinformation and propaganda afoot, couldn't gain much traction. As comedian Richard Pryor once said, " Who you gonna' believe, the propagandists, or your lying eyes." ..."
"... money for propaganda... that was back in 1984 - we have progressed from Orwell's version of reality to a new one where reality is what you make of it... meanwhile there will be more dead people that the sponsors of these troll farms, could care less about... although they will frame it - 180% of that... ..."
Feb 26, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

The U.S. State Department will increase its online trolling capabilities and up its support for meddling in other countries. The Hill reports :

The State Department is launching a $40 million initiative to crack down on foreign propaganda and disinformation amid widespread concerns about future Russian efforts to interfere in elections.

The department announced Monday that it signed a deal with the Pentagon to transfer $40 million from the Defense Department's coffers to bolster the Global Engagement Center, an office set up at State during the Obama years to expose and counter foreign propaganda and disinformation.

The professed reason for the new funding is the alleged but unproven "Russian meddling" in the U.S. election campaign. U.S. Special Counsel Mueller indicted 13 Russians for what is claimed to be interference but which is likely mere commercial activity.

The announcement by the State Department explains that this new money will not only be used for measures against foreign trolling but to actively meddle in countries abroad:

Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Steve Goldstein said the transfer of funds announced today reiterates the United States' commitment to the fight.

"This funding is critical to ensuring that we continue an aggressive response to malign influence and disinformation and that we can leverage deeper partnerships with our allies, Silicon Valley, and other partners in this fight," said Under Secretary Goldstein. "It is not merely a defensive posture that we should take, we also need to be on the offensive. "

The mentioning of Silicon Valley is of interest. The big Silicon Valley companies Google, Facebook and Twitter were heavily involved in the U.S. election campaign. The companies embedded people within the campaigns to advise them how to reach a maximum trolling effect:

While the companies call it standard practice to work hand-in-hand with high-spending advertisers like political campaigns, the new research details how the staffers assigned to the 2016 candidates frequently acted more like political operatives, doing things like suggesting methods to target difficult-to-reach voters online, helping to tee up responses to likely lines of attack during debates, and scanning candidate calendars to recommend ad pushes around upcoming speeches.

In May 2016 the Hillary Clinton campaign even set up her own troll farm :

Hillary Clinton's well-heeled backers have opened a new frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired by some of the Internet's worst instincts. Correct the Record, a super PAC coordinating with Clinton's campaign, is spending some $1 million to find and confront social media users who post unflattering messages about the Democratic front-runner.

In effect, the effort aims to spend a large sum of money to increase the amount of trolling that already exists online.

Clinton is quite experienced in such issues. In 2009, during protests in Iran, then Secretary of State Clinton pushed Twitter to defer maintenance of its system to "help" the protesters. In 2010 USAid, under the State Department set up a Twitter-like service to meddle in Cuba.

The foreign policy advisor of Hillery Clinton's campaign, Laura Rosenberger, initiated and runs the Hamilton68 project which falsely explains any mentioning of issues disliked by its neo-conservative backers as the result of nefarious "Russian meddling".

The State Department can build on that and other experience.

Since at least 2011 the U.S. military is manipulating social media via sock puppets and trolls:

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.
...
The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations "without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries".

It was then wisely predicted that other countries would follow up:

The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as "sock puppets" – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.

Israel is long known for such information operations in which its paid trolls not only comment on issues on social media but actively manipulate Wikipedia entries. Such astroturfing has since become a common tool in commercial marketing campaigns.

With the new money the State Department will expand its Global Engagement Center (GEC) which is running "public diplomacy", aka propaganda, abroad:

The Fund will be a key part of the GEC's partnerships with local civil society organizations, NGOs, media providers, and content creators to counter propaganda and disinformation. The Fund will also drive the use of innovative messaging and data science techniques.

Separately, the GEC will initiate a series of pilot projects developed with the Department of Defense that are designed to counter propaganda and disinformation. Those projects will be supported by Department of Defense funding.

This money will be in addition to the large funds the CIA traditionally spends on manipulating foreign media:

"We've been doing this kind of thing since the C.I.A. was created in 1947," said Mr. Johnson, now at the University of Georgia. "We've used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners -- you name it. We've planted false information in foreign newspapers. We've used what the British call 'King George's cavalry': suitcases of cash."
...
C.I.A. officials told Mr. Johnson in the late 1980s that "insertions" of information into foreign news media, mostly accurate but sometimes false, were running at 70 to 80 a day.

Part of the new State Department money will be used to provide grants. If online trolling or sock puppetry is your thing, you may want to apply now.

Posted by b on February 26, 2018 at 02:02 PM | Permalink

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nhs , Feb 26, 2018 2:34:39 PM | 1

The US propaganda machine has just confirmed what establishment's worst nightmare would be
Peter AU 1 , Feb 26, 2018 2:40:29 PM | 2
"to find and confront social media users who post unflattering messages about the Democratic front-runner"

I call these social media watchers rather than trolls. Rather than simply trying to disrupt any and all social media threads they don't like, social media watchers look for comments or comment threads that are disparaging or damaging to their employer.

WorldBLee , Feb 26, 2018 2:49:32 PM | 3
#2 @Peter AU 1 - I would say the language "to find and CONFRONT" sounds pretty much like troll behavior.

With regard to the larger issue, it seems that the US is getting more and more like its allies Ukraine (drives out any press concerned with printing the truth, relies on a bombastic and entirely false narrative to try and convince its hapless citizens that all is great and everything is Russia's fault) and Israel (an early leader in manipulating online info as b states).

Don Bacon , Feb 26, 2018 2:51:50 PM | 4
That $40 million will probably be pissed away on a couple sweetheart contracts to Tillerson friends and nobody will see a difference. US State Department propaganda programs, labeled as "public diplomacy" and other monikers, have been around for a long time but haven't been executed very well.

From the State Dept. historian office, 2013: . .(excerpt):

Public Diplomacy Is Still in Its Adolescent Stage in the State Department , etc.

. . . The process of convergence has been evolutionary. Secretary Powell grasped the power of the information revolution, reallocated positions and resources from traditional diplomatic posting to new areas and recognized the power of satellite television to move publics and constrain governments even in authoritarian regimes. Secretary Rice forwarded this reconceptualization under the rubric of "Transformational Diplomacy," which sought to help people transform their own lives and the relationship between state and society. Secretary Clinton continued the theme under the concept of "Smart Power." "Person-to-person diplomacy in today's work is as important as what we do in official meetings in national capitals across the globe," Clinton said in 2010.The work done by PD officials in Arab Spring countries beginning in 2011 was as much about capacity-building as advocating U.S. policies or directly trying to explain American culture. . . here

notlurking , Feb 26, 2018 2:55:14 PM | 5
I am retired and can use some extra change....just kidding!!!....
nonsense factory , Feb 26, 2018 3:18:15 PM | 6
Prior efforts were targeted more at traditional news outlets, this is just an expansion into social media along the lines of previous work, example A being the Rendon Group in Iraq, etc. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Rendon_Group

If it sounds like a PR monkey banging away on a regurgitated theme, it probably is. For example, the endless repetition in US media about "Syrian chemical weapons attacks" with no on-the-ground supporting evidence is typical of a Rendon Group disinformation campaign; so then they hire a hundred trolls to post outraged comments about 'Syrian chemical weapons use' in comment sections and on twitter; then they hire some State Department intern to write a book about the horrors of the Assad regime, and at the end they collect their $10 million paycheck.

Tediousness, defined.

Peter AU 1 , Feb 26, 2018 3:19:30 PM | 7
WorldBLee 2

Media watchers target specific comments or comment threads, in the case stated by b, those disparaging or damaging to Clinton.

What I term trolls target blogs or social media accounts that are considered targets, no matter the content of a particular article or comment thread. Social media media watchers are a little more specialized than trolls and look for specific content.

nonsense factory , Feb 26, 2018 3:23:52 PM | 8
P.S. it's funny that you can find out what these clowns are up to by looking for job listings and salary reports:

The Rendon Group Social Media Specialist Salary | Glassdoor

Average [monthly] salaries for The Rendon Group Social Media Specialist: $2,520. The Rendon Group salary trends based on salaries posted anonymously by The Rendon Group employees.

Talk about a soul-destroying job. Right up there with Wikipedia page editor.

Peter AU 1 , Feb 26, 2018 3:27:48 PM | 9
nonsense factory 8. Money looks good. Plenty of people that dont give a shit about their soul will take it up.
la Cariatide , Feb 26, 2018 3:40:19 PM | 11
http://www.voltairenet.org/article194715.html
NemesisCalling , Feb 26, 2018 4:08:38 PM | 12
@7 peter

I see what you are alluding to, but the only problem with it is that, irrespective of the differing definitions, at heart, these infiltrators are a disrupting force on the message boards, whether paid to be or not. Their medium is disruption and obfuscation. I tried to wade into the neoliberal viper's den at slate.com un the past to post "alt-right" stuff and was quickly attacked by multiple avatars.

In essence, one troll disrupts because he has a need for recognition, and the latter disrupts for money. Both are netgain for the troll and loss for the rest of us.

ben , Feb 26, 2018 4:09:30 PM | 13
The hypocrisy of the U$A continues to be staggering.. If the collective IQ's of the general public approached double digits, the disinformation and propaganda afoot, couldn't gain much traction. As comedian Richard Pryor once said, " Who you gonna' believe, the propagandists, or your lying eyes."

Turn off your I phones, and think a little.

james , Feb 26, 2018 4:19:32 PM | 14
thanks b... troll farms looks like a good name for it... farming for the empire.. they could call it that too.. russia as trend setter, lol.. i don't think so!

speaking of troll farms, i see max Blumenthal came out with some 'about time' comments on the sad kettle of fish called 'democracy now'... here is his tweet - "If @democracynow is going to push the neocon project of regime change in Syria so relentlessly and without debate, it should drop the high minded literary NPR aesthetic and just host Nikki Haley for a friendly one-on-one #EstablishmentNow https://twitter.com/democracynow/status/967123918237655041
7:07 AM - Feb 25, 2018 "

money for propaganda... that was back in 1984 - we have progressed from Orwell's version of reality to a new one where reality is what you make of it... meanwhile there will be more dead people that the sponsors of these troll farms, could care less about... although they will frame it - 180% of that...

NemesisCalling , Feb 26, 2018 4:19:33 PM | 15
The silver lining here is that the state dept. is in a sense admitting that there is nothing "in the pipe" relating to outright censorship whether through nefarious agreements between ISP providers and the IC via the repeal of net neutrality.

$40 mil is a lot for liberal college graduates however.

Jen , Feb 26, 2018 4:20:59 PM | 16
Nonsense Factory @ 8, Peter AU 1 @ 9: There are plenty of communities in rural Australia who'd be glad to have troll farms paying that sort of money (even as Australian dollars - 1 Australian dollar being worth about US$0.76 at this time of posting) a month. Real farmers could do trolling on the side during slow seasons of the year and make some money.
karlof1 , Feb 26, 2018 4:26:45 PM | 17
What we need are some Mole Trolls, or maybe that's Troll Moles--double agents if you will that work for 6-12 months recording 100% of all they do then reveal it all in an expose.
Ian , Feb 26, 2018 5:21:58 PM | 18
Getting ready for mid-terms. It's going to be interesting to see if the Democrats get wiped off the map. They should be able to hire quite a few people for $40 million. Don't be surprised if they deploy AI in the first wave, then follow up with a real person.

ben @13:

Turn off your I phones, and think a little.

ROFL After wandering aimlessly in the mall with Her Majesty over the weekend, I'm not sure if that's even possible now.

Piotr Berman , Feb 26, 2018 5:23:20 PM | 19
Hillary Clinton sat on a wall,
Hillary Clinton had a great fall;
All the DNC stooges and all her trolls
Couldn't put her campaign again on the roll.

[department of lame rhymes]

Piotr Berman , Feb 26, 2018 5:29:18 PM | 20
I am retired and can use some extra change....just kidding!!!....

Posted by: notlurking | Feb 26, 2018 2:55:14 PM | 5

Foolish human, who needs the likes of you! Regards, Chief Bot

pantaraxia , Feb 26, 2018 6:42:36 PM | 21
"The big Silicon Valley companies Google, Facebook and Twitter were heavily involved in the U.S. election campaign. The companies embedded people within the campaigns to advise them how to reach a maximum trolling effect:"

It went much further than that . Google actually tweaked its algorithms to alter search recommendations in favor of the Clinton campaign. A comparative analysis of search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo showed that Google differed significantly from the other two in producing search recommendations relevant to Clinton.

Google Manipulates Search Results To Favor Hillary Clinton - Jimmy Dore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MICXf6viakc

But , but, but...Russia!!!

Nothing to see her folks. Carry on.

che , Feb 26, 2018 6:47:53 PM | 22
The entire U.S. MSM is a F'ing troll farm, disinformation, Orwellian world on steroids. The U.S. public is fed a constant never ending stream of complete Bull sh**, self serving crap. How to stop it is the only question, to stop the impunity with which these criminals like Bush and Trump and Obama and Mattis et.al. lie with their pants on fire and .....they all suck .01% dick.
Fec , Feb 26, 2018 8:19:04 PM | 23
@8 Nonsense Factory

Ahmed Nafeez exposed The Rendon Group and the Pentagon's Highlands Forum a few years ago.

And then there's today's nonsense.

Are You a Russian Troll?

Curtis , Feb 26, 2018 8:44:21 PM | 24
It's surprising to see the NYT admit the US does it, too. The alt media has been all over this including Corbett's recent video with the Woolsey interview with Fox News where he laughs it off and then says it was for a good cause.
Curtis , Feb 26, 2018 8:47:09 PM | 25
Hillary's Troll Farm = Lipstick on a pig.
Fec , Feb 26, 2018 8:51:55 PM | 26
From Nafeez Ahmed :
Two days before 9/11, Condoleeza Rice received the draft of a formal National Security Presidential Directive that Bush was expected to sign immediately. The directive contained a comprehensive plan to launch a global war on al-Qaeda , including an "imminent" invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taliban. The directive was approved by the highest levels of the White House and officials of the National Security Council, including of course Rice and Rumsfeld. The same NSC officials were simultaneously running the Dhabol Working Group to secure the Indian power plant deal for Enron's Trans-Afghan pipeline project. The next day, one day before 9/11, the Bush administration formally agreed on the plan to attack the Taliban.
Fec , Feb 26, 2018 9:01:10 PM | 27
From Nafeez Ahmed :

The Highlands Forum has thus played a leading role in defining the Pentagon's entire conceptualization of the 'war on terror.' Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a retired IMB vice president who co-chaired the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee from 1997 to 2001, described his experience of one 2007 Forum meeting in telling terms:

"Then there is the War on Terror, which DoD has started to refer to as the Long War, a term that I first heard at the Forum. It seems very appropriate to describe the overall conflict in which we now find ourselves. This is a truly global conflict the conflicts we are now in have much more of the feel of a battle of civilizations or cultures trying to destroy our very way of life and impose their own."
Debsisdead , Feb 26, 2018 9:01:42 PM | 28
Posted by: Fec | Feb 26, 2018 8:19:04 PM | 23

Yeah well since the writer of the 'quiz' exposes themself as bein a troll of the worst sort there is nothing to be said. I'm currently attempting to ingest only those newstories where the publisher provides space for feedback from readers since if a story is truthful it should be able to withstand challenge. yeah riight cos that means there's bugger all out there anymore. The biggest 'win' populism has had this far is in driving all feedback off all sites with a readership of more than a few hundred. Many of those that do allow feedback only permit humans with credentialed facebook or google accounts to indulge and the comments are only visible to similarly logged in types. That tells us a lot about the lack of faith the corporate media actually have in the nonsense they publish.

Of course 'trolls' are the ones held to be the guilty for causing this but if you actually watch what happens in a feedback column such as the rare occasions when the graun still permits CIF comments it isn't the deliberately offensive arseholes spouting the usual cliches who get deleted, it is those who put forward a considered argument which details why the original writer has reached a faulty conclusion.

We all know this yet it seems as though none of us are prepared to confront it properly as the censorship it is.
IMO media outlets which continually lie or at least distort the truth to advance a particular agenda need to be called to account.
Massed pickets outside newsrooms would be a good way cos as much as media hate us loudmouths who won't swallow their bromides, they like their competition even less. A decently organised picket of NYT, WaPo or the Graun would be news in every other spineless, propagandising & slug-featured media entity.

Lozion , Feb 26, 2018 9:09:10 PM | 29
Cant wait to see the big new shiny gold GEC logo, AMC & GMC anyone? ;)
Fec , Feb 26, 2018 9:17:57 PM | 30
@ 28 Debsisdead

Said troll was published in Richmond and God only knows who else picked it up. I refuted it in the comments as best I could, also excerpting MOA. Regardless:

From Ahmed Nafeez :

Among Rendon's activities was the creation of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) on behalf of the CIA, a group of Iraqi exiles tasked with disseminating propaganda, including much of the false intelligence about WMD . That process had begun concertedly under the administration of George H W. Bush, then rumbled along under Clinton with little fanfare, before escalating after 9/11 under George W. Bush. Rendon thus played a large role in the manufacture of inaccurate and false news stories relating to Iraq under lucrative CIA and Pentagon contracts  --  and he did so in the period running up to the 2003 invasion as an advisor to Bush's National Security Council: the same NSC, of course, that planned the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, achieved with input from Enron executives who were simultaneously engaging the Pentagon Highlands Forum.

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/why-google-made-the-nsa-2a80584c9c1
Fec , Feb 26, 2018 9:26:22 PM | 31
From Ahmed Nafeez :
Mass surveillance and data-mining also now has a distinctive operational purpose in assisting with the lethal execution of special operations, selecting targets for the CIA's drone strike kill lists via dubious algorithms, for instance, along with providing geospatial and other information for combatant commanders on land, air and sea, among many other functions. A single social media post on Twitter or Facebook is enough to trigger being placed on secret terrorism watch-lists solely due to a vaguely defined hunch or suspicion; and can potentially even land a suspect on a kill list.
Fec , Feb 26, 2018 9:40:37 PM | 32
From Ahmed Nafeez :
In 2011, the Forum hosted two DARPA-funded scientists, Antonio and Hanna Damasio, who are principal investigators in the 'Neurobiology of Narrative Framing' project at the University of Southern California. Evoking Zalman's emphasis on the need for Pentagon psychological operations to deploy "empathetic influence," the new DARPA-backed project aims to investigate how narratives often appeal "to strong, sacred values in order to evoke an emotional response," but in different ways across different cultures

This goes a long way toward explaining what is occurring in Hollywood and Nashville.

[Feb 26, 2018] Et Tu, Bernie by Justin Raimondo

Looks like neoliberals decided to equate widespread anti-neoliberalism and anti-globalization sentiment with pro-Russian propaganda. A very clever and very dirty trick.
What is funny is that Steele dossier and FBI Mayberry Machiavellians machinations actually deprived Sanders a chance to represent Democratic Party. nt that he wanted this badly, he folded eve without major pressure (many be under behind the scenes intimidation due to business dealing of his wife)
Notable quotes:
"... Instead of standing up to the crazies – by which I mean the Democratic party Establishment – and saying that the whole Russia-phobic campaign is based on nothing but hot air and fantasy, he's kowtowing to the very people who are trying to smear him as a Russian agent. Here he is signing on to the Clintonite canon of faith that poor Hillary " had to run against the Russian government " as well as Trump. ..."
"... This is laughable: there's no evidence for this other than Mueller's comical "indictment," which shows that something called the "Internet Research Agency," run by an out-of-work chef, spent a grand total of $100,000 – mostly after the election – on Facebook ads that were both anti-Clinton and anti-Trump. Michael Moore attended one "Russian-sponsored" event – a rally of thousands targeting Trump Tower, and, by the way, the only successful "Russian" event (the pro-Trump events were flops). ..."
"... Not only is Bernie buying into Russia-gate, now that the case for it is collapsing – nearly two years later and there's still no evidence of "collusion" – but he's calling for a full-fledged witch-hunt: ..."
"... Sanders' followers have taken up the hate-on-Russia battle cry with alacrity, with material by the fraudulent fanatic Luke Harding all over the web site of the Democratic Socialists of America. And being the left edge of the Democratic party, DSA will be supporting the very Democratic officeholders and officials who are shouting the loudest about Russia. ..."
"... Oh, he's got money-laundering charges on Paul Manafort and associates, but that has nothing to do with the Trump campaign: it all happened years before Trump ran. He's got Carter Page pleading guilty to lying to the FBI – but it's not clear what this means, exactly, since he's not been charged with a crime after all this time. ..."
"... So no matter what you may think of Trump and his policies, the real question is: will the Deep State and their allies in the media succeed in their bid for power? Will they oust a sitting President and institute a new era in our politics, one in which the political class can exercise its veto over the democratic will of the people? ..."
"... A SPECIAL NOTE : Yes, our matching funds have arrived: a group of donors has gotten together and pledged $30,000 – but there's a catch. We have to match that amount in smaller donations. So now it's up to you. We need your support so we can get back to doing our job – exposing the lies of the War Party. But we can't do it without your tax-deductible donations. ..."
Feb 26, 2018 | original.antiwar.com

Sanders signs on to Russia-gate conspiracy theory

One by one, the plaster gods fall, cracked and crumbled on the ground: the latest is Bernie Sanders, the Great Pinko Hope of the (very few) remaining Democrats with a modicum of sense who reject the "Russia! Russia! Russia!" paranoia of Rep. Adam Schiff and what I call the party's California Crazies. The official Democratic leadership seems to have no real commitment to anything other than fealty to a few well-known oligarchs, who provide the party with needed cash, a burning hatred of Russia – an issue no ordinary voter outside of the Sunshine State loony bin and Washington, D.C. cares about – and exotic issues of interest only to the upper class virtue-signalers who are now their main constituency (e.g., where will trans people go to the bathroom?). Overlaying this potpourri of nothingness, the glue holding it all together, is pure unadulterated hatred: of President Trump, of Trump voters, of Middle America in general, and, of course, fear and loathing of Russia and all things Russian.

And now the one supposedly bright spot in this pit of abysmal darkness has flickered out, with Bernie Sanders, the Ron Paul of the Reds, jumping on the Russia-did-it bandwagon and cowering in the wake of Robert Mueller's laughable "indictment," in which the special prosecutor avers that $100,000 in Facebook ads were designed to throw the election to Trump – and to help Bernie!

Oh no, says Bernie, from his place of exile in the wilds of Vermont, where the Russians did not take over the electrical grid: It wasn't me!

Instead of standing up to the crazies – by which I mean the Democratic party Establishment – and saying that the whole Russia-phobic campaign is based on nothing but hot air and fantasy, he's kowtowing to the very people who are trying to smear him as a Russian agent. Here he is signing on to the Clintonite canon of faith that poor Hillary " had to run against the Russian government " as well as Trump.

This is laughable: there's no evidence for this other than Mueller's comical "indictment," which shows that something called the "Internet Research Agency," run by an out-of-work chef, spent a grand total of $100,000 – mostly after the election – on Facebook ads that were both anti-Clinton and anti-Trump. Michael Moore attended one "Russian-sponsored" event – a rally of thousands targeting Trump Tower, and, by the way, the only successful "Russian" event (the pro-Trump events were flops).

Not only is Bernie buying into Russia-gate, now that the case for it is collapsing – nearly two years later and there's still no evidence of "collusion" – but he's calling for a full-fledged witch-hunt:

"The key issues now are: 1) How we prevent the unwitting manipulation of our electoral and political system by foreign governments. 2) Exposing who was actively consorting with the Russian government's attack on our democracy."

This is the real goal of anti-Trump groups like the " Alliance for Securing Democracy " and their "Hamilton dashboard," which purports to track "pro-Russian" sentiment online: it's the explicit intention of #TheResistance to censor the media with the cooperation of the tech oligarchs like Google, Twitter, and Facebook. It's back to the 1950s, folks, only this time the Thought Police are "liberals," and "socialists" like Bernie and the Bernie Bros.

Sanders' followers have taken up the hate-on-Russia battle cry with alacrity, with material by the fraudulent fanatic Luke Harding all over the web site of the Democratic Socialists of America. And being the left edge of the Democratic party, DSA will be supporting the very Democratic officeholders and officials who are shouting the loudest about Russia.

Coming soon: a congressional "investigation" into "pro-Russian" Americans using the "Hamilton dashboard" and the Southern Poverty Law Center as templates. Remember the House UnAmerican Activities Committee? Well, it's coming back. That's always been in the cards, and now those cards are about to be dealt.

I'll tell you one thing: I would have colluded with the Klingon Empire to prevent Hillary and her band of authoritarian statists and warmongering nutcases from taking the White House. If only the Russians had intervened, they'd have been doing this country – and the world – a great service. Alas, there's not one lick of solid evidence – forensic, documentary, witness testimony – that shows this. Which is what the Mueller investigation is all about: the Democrats are claiming there was interference, and Mueller is out to find corroboration. Except it's been over a year and he's come up with nothing.

Oh, he's got money-laundering charges on Paul Manafort and associates, but that has nothing to do with the Trump campaign: it all happened years before Trump ran. He's got Carter Page pleading guilty to lying to the FBI – but it's not clear what this means, exactly, since he's not been charged with a crime after all this time.

The Deep State's bid for power has hit several roadblocks recently, but it could yet succeed. First, Mueller could indict the President for "obstruction of justice" – a charge derived not from any real criminal activity, but from the investigation itself. I think this is the most probable outcome of all this.

Barring that, however, there is one road they could and probably would go down, given the intensity of their hatred for this President and their overweening power lust. Having gone this far in an attempt to overthrow a sitting President, they can't just stop halfway to their goal. They have to go all the way, or else suffer the consequences – public exposure, and possible criminal charges. In short, if they fail to get Trump on some semi-legal basis, I think they'd welcome his assassination.

The Deep State cannot allow the Trump administration to stand for a number of reasons, the chief one being that the coup is already in progress and there's no stopping it now. The President's enemies are legion, they are powerful, and they are abroad as well as here on American shores. They cannot allow his brand of "America First" nationalism to succeed, or seem to succeed: it conflicts too violently with their globalist vision of a borderless America-centric empire ruled by a coalition of oligarchs, technocrats, and Deep State operatives who've been shaping world events from the shadows for generations.

So no matter what you may think of Trump and his policies, the real question is: will the Deep State and their allies in the media succeed in their bid for power? Will they oust a sitting President and institute a new era in our politics, one in which the political class can exercise its veto over the democratic will of the people?

That's the issue at hand and that's why I spend so much time writing about Trump and his enemies' efforts to destroy him. Because if the Deep State succeeds, the America we knew and loved will be no more. Something else will take its place – and believe me, it won't be pretty.

A SPECIAL NOTE : Yes, our matching funds have arrived: a group of donors has gotten together and pledged $30,000 – but there's a catch. We have to match that amount in smaller donations. So now it's up to you. We need your support so we can get back to doing our job – exposing the lies of the War Party. But we can't do it without your tax-deductible donations.

If we all get together and make that final push we can make our goal. Every donation counts, no matter the amount. This is how we'll finally win the battle for peace: by uniting, despite superficial differences, to support the institutions that are in the front lines of the struggle for a rational foreign policy. And leading the charge is Antiwar.com.

Please make your tax-deductible contribution today.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed by going here . But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.

I've written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement , with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey , a Foreword by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon ( ISI Books , 2008).

You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here .

[Feb 25, 2018] Lawyers For The DNC Argue That Primary Rigging Is Protected By The First Amendment

Neoliberalism in all its glory ;-). One dollar one vote.
How Debbie Wasserman Schultz managed to survive Imran Awan scandal is a mystery. Imran Awan case: Lawmaker calls 'massive' data transfers from Wasserman Schultz aide a 'substantial security threat' Fox News
Perry, a member of the Homeland Security subcommittee on cyber security, said Tuesday that the House Office of Inspector General tracked the network usage of Awan and his associates on House servers and found that a "massive" amount of data was flowing from the networks.
Notable quotes:
"... Attorneys for the Plaintiffs in the case, Jared and Elizabeth Beck, and appears to argue that if the Democratic Party did cheat Sanders in the 2016 Presidential primary race, then that action was protected under the first amendment. Twitter users were quick to respond to the brief, expressing outrage and disgust at the claims made by representatives of the DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schultz. ..."
"... This author was shocked to find that despite the characterization of the Becks as peddlers of conspiracy theory, the defense counsel failed to mention the motion for protection filed by the Becks earlier in the litigation process. They also failed to note the voice-modulated phone calls received by the law offices of the Becks which contained a caller-ID corresponding to the law offices of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a defendant in the case. In light of this context, the Becks hardly appear to be peddlers of conspiracy theory. ..."
"... It appears that the defendants in the DNC Fraud Lawsuit are attempting to argue that cheating a candidate in the primary process is protected under the first amendment. ..."
"... If all that weren't enough, DNC representatives argued that the Democratic National Committee had no established fiduciary duty "to the Plaintiffs or the classes of donors and registered voters they seek to represent." ..."
"... It seems here that the DNC is arguing for its right to appoint candidates at its own discretion while simultaneously denying any "fiduciary duty" to represent the voters who donated to the Democratic Party under the belief that the DNC would act impartially towards the candidates involved. ..."
"... If Wikileaks' publication of DNC emails are found to be similarly admissible in a United States court of law, then the contents of the leaked emails could be used to argue that, contrary to the defendant's latest brief, the DNC did favor the campaign of Hillary Clinton over Senator Sanders and that they acted to sabotage Sanders' campaign. ..."
"... Seth Rich murder and DHS investigation into 2016 election tampering soon to expose this party's contempt for the law, and all other forms of ethical conduct. ..."
"... Bernie is more than happy to yammer on about Russian bots swarming Facebook and other social media platforms in some insidious plot to rig the election -- and yet he fails to say a word about the actual attempts to rig the election by the DNA and Hillary. ..."
"... Don't forget in their twisted minds that the lies they tell to support their corrupt agenda are "protected free speech". There are no further examples one needs to show that these fuckers are nothing but malignant sociopaths. The death of the Rule of Law is why sociopaths flourish. ..."
"... They are without shame, without remorse, without ethics or morals, feeling or caring. Yet they still try to defend their indefensible actions where contrition and humbleness would be much better long term..."politically". The rank & file snowflakes would eat up a simple apology because they have been brought up to think thats all it takes to right wrongs. ..."
Feb 25, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Via Disobedient Media ,

The ongoing litigation of the DNC Fraud Lawsuit and the appeal regarding its dismissal took a stunning turn yesterday. The defendants in the case, including the DNC and former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, filed a response brief that left many observers of the case at a loss for words. The document , provided by the law offices of the Attorneys for the Plaintiffs in the case, Jared and Elizabeth Beck, and appears to argue that if the Democratic Party did cheat Sanders in the 2016 Presidential primary race, then that action was protected under the first amendment. Twitter users were quick to respond to the brief, expressing outrage and disgust at the claims made by representatives of the DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The Defense counsel also argued that because of Jared Beck's outspoken twitter posts, the plaintiffs were using the litigation process for political purposes: "For example, Plaintiffs' counsel Jared Beck repeatedly refers to the DNC as "shi*bags" on Twitter and uses other degrading language in reference to Defendants." Fascinatingly, no mention is made regarding the importance of First Amendment at this point in the document.

The defense counsel also took issue with Jared Beck for what they termed as: " Repeatedly promoted patently false and deeply offensive conspiracy theories about the deaths of a former DNC staffer and Plaintiffs' process server in an attempt to bolster attention for this lawsuit."

This author was shocked to find that despite the characterization of the Becks as peddlers of conspiracy theory, the defense counsel failed to mention the motion for protection filed by the Becks earlier in the litigation process. They also failed to note the voice-modulated phone calls received by the law offices of the Becks which contained a caller-ID corresponding to the law offices of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a defendant in the case. In light of this context, the Becks hardly appear to be peddlers of conspiracy theory.

The DNC defense lawyers then argued that: " There is no legitimate basis for this litigation, which is, at its most basic, an improper attempt to forge the federal courts into a political weapon to be used by individuals who are unhappy with how a political party selected its candidate in a presidential campaign ."

The brief continued: " To recognize any of the causes of action that Plaintiffs allege based on their animating theory would run directly contrary to long-standing Supreme Court precedent recognizing the central and critical First Amendment rights enjoyed by political parties, especially when it comes to selecting the party's nominee for public office. "

It appears that the defendants in the DNC Fraud Lawsuit are attempting to argue that cheating a candidate in the primary process is protected under the first amendment.

If all that weren't enough, DNC representatives argued that the Democratic National Committee had no established fiduciary duty "to the Plaintiffs or the classes of donors and registered voters they seek to represent."

It seems here that the DNC is arguing for its right to appoint candidates at its own discretion while simultaneously denying any "fiduciary duty" to represent the voters who donated to the Democratic Party under the belief that the DNC would act impartially towards the candidates involved.

Adding to the latest news regarding the DNC Fraud Lawsuit was the recent finding by the UK Supreme Court, which stated that Wikileaks Cables were admissible as evidence in legal proceedings.

If Wikileaks' publication of DNC emails are found to be similarly admissible in a United States court of law, then the contents of the leaked emails could be used to argue that, contrary to the defendant's latest brief, the DNC did favor the campaign of Hillary Clinton over Senator Sanders and that they acted to sabotage Sanders' campaign.

The outcome of the appeal of the DNC Fraud Lawsuit remains to be seen. Disobedient Media will continue to report on this important story as it unfolds.


css1971 Sun, 02/25/2018 - 16:24 Permalink

WTF?

Even on a practical level, beyond the "fraud is free speech" argument, they don't seem to have considered that this argument is a lose/lose proposition. Even if they (DNC) win legally, they are going to lose as people turn away from the finger they're giving them.

vulcanraven -> css1971 Sun, 02/25/2018 - 16:27 Permalink

In other words, "we can piss in the faces of all you plebes, and you will like it"

macholatte -> just the tip Sun, 02/25/2018 - 17:24 Permalink

Notice this is a civil suit brought by a citizen. The Bern is silent and not suing anybody although he was the target of the scam, or maybe a party to it. The DOJ is silent and not looking to put anybody in jail for what appears to be an obvious violation of criminal law.

Nothing to see here. Move along.
- - Jeff Sessions

IntercoursetheEU -> macholatte Sun, 02/25/2018 - 17:31 Permalink

Not so for murder, and rigging the general election. Seth Rich murder and DHS investigation into 2016 election tampering soon to expose this party's contempt for the law, and all other forms of ethical conduct.

putaipan -> IntercoursetheEU Sun, 02/25/2018 - 17:43 Permalink

don't forget the dead attorney involved in this case (too lazy to google the poor dead guys name)

caconhma -> IntercoursetheEU Sun, 02/25/2018 - 17:57 Permalink

What is the difference? There is no any justice in America. It is all gone.

The US people are polarized and, thanks to Hollywood and mainstream media, with the culture of lawless, violence, and hatred of everybody. America is a very sick country with a fake President and the utterly corrupt US Congress. It will not end good or bloodless.

The US military reliance on super-technology is poorly thought of since these high-tech military systems require very highly-educated and intelligent people to operate these systems while the US educational system being a total failure cannot produce.

Lemmy Caution -> macholatte Sun, 02/25/2018 - 17:41 Permalink

Bernie is more than happy to yammer on about Russian bots swarming Facebook and other social media platforms in some insidious plot to rig the election -- and yet he fails to say a word about the actual attempts to rig the election by the DNA and Hillary. But, hey, if he can shave a few hundred dollars off of my monthly health insurance premiums he can call for a first-strike nuclear attack on Russia!

AtATrESICI -> JRobby Sun, 02/25/2018 - 16:53 Permalink

Clearly we have laws for little people while the owners do whatever the fuck they want.

... the State Department completed its review and determined that 2,115 of the 30,490 emails contain information that is presently
classified Out of these 2,115 emails, the State Department determined that 2,028 emails contain information classified at the Confidential level; 65 contain information classified at the Secret level; and 22 contain information classified at the Top Secret level....

https://vault.fbi.gov/october-2016-application-affidavit-and-search-warrant-related-to-email-server-investigation/October%202016%20Application%20Affidavit%20and%20Search%20Warrant%20Related%20to%20Email%20Server%20Investigation%20Part%2001%20of%2001/view

just the tip -> AtATrESICI Sun, 02/25/2018 - 16:59 Permalink

i may be repeating someones posting of: it's a big club, and you ain't in it.

JRobby -> just the tip Sun, 02/25/2018 - 17:18 Permalink

Carlin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7yzi1I_Zsk

Still the best 3:00 summary of all time

JRobby -> AtATrESICI Sun, 02/25/2018 - 17:12 Permalink

Let me reiterate (if I may) Do we really need to see anymore pictures of Delusional Slut Horror Show Wasserman-Schultz?

She has a face that can stop time

Herp and Derp -> AtATrESICI Sun, 02/25/2018 - 16:47 Permalink

I think this is the exact reason election boards exists. They should be suing the DNC over this as well, but are full of party officials. If there was any sane form of democracy, the DNC would be bared from campaigning in most states.

Al Huxley -> chunga Sun, 02/25/2018 - 16:41 Permalink

It's a sewer, the whole fucking system is just a cesspool filled with the most reprehensible, self-serving people in the country outside of Wall Street. But everybody just keeps playing along.

Quinvarius -> Al Huxley Sun, 02/25/2018 - 16:52 Permalink

Sounds like a swamp.

nmewn -> WorkingPawn Sun, 02/25/2018 - 16:30 Permalink

At the basic level, the DNC conned it's rank & file members with words like "democracy" and "one man, one vote" and "equality".

The DNC is a political party that relied on useful idiots not reading the fine print of it's charter ;-)

nmewn Sun, 02/25/2018 - 16:27 Permalink

"The DNC defense lawyers then argued that: " There is no legitimate basis for this litigation, which is, at its most basic,...

...an improper attempt to forge the federal courts into a political weapon to be used by individuals who are unhappy...

...with how a political party selected its candidate in a presidential campaign ."

So basically the same reasoning behind the Mueller witch hunt and using the FBI & FISA courts to destroy political opponents then...lol.

Egggcellent ;-)

SDShack -> nmewn Sun, 02/25/2018 - 16:39 Permalink

Don't forget in their twisted minds that the lies they tell to support their corrupt agenda are "protected free speech". There are no further examples one needs to show that these fuckers are nothing but malignant sociopaths. The death of the Rule of Law is why sociopaths flourish.

nmewn -> SDShack Sun, 02/25/2018 - 16:57 Permalink

They don't live in the same reality as us and never have.

They are without shame, without remorse, without ethics or morals, feeling or caring. Yet they still try to defend their indefensible actions where contrition and humbleness would be much better long term..."politically". The rank & file snowflakes would eat up a simple apology because they have been brought up to think thats all it takes to right wrongs.

They are all sociopaths.

Pure Evil -> gatorengineer Sun, 02/25/2018 - 17:54 Permalink

My take was Bernie was supposed to cat herd the millennials to the Hillary camp but that blew up in their face when the millennials decided to put down their cell phones and proceeded to give Hillary the bird.

Wouldn't doubt a large majority still ended up voting for but they probably won't admit it.

Hubbs Sun, 02/25/2018 - 16:30 Permalink

Doesn't this make the whole candidate selection process, and all the rules and regulations governing a party's whole nomination process meaningless? If what DEMS did within their own party to Bernie is moot, then what Trump may have done via his "Russian collusion" is mooted also. Can't have it both ways.

SRV Sun, 02/25/2018 - 16:41 Permalink

They used the same argument before the appeal... and the corrupt judge agreed with "The Crooks" and closed the case. NOT ONE media outlet covered the fact they actually said in open court that the DNC had no legal obligation to be fair.

But... Russia... Rusia... Russia

Only in America... r.i.p.

[Feb 25, 2018] Looks like FBI or CIA has an insider in Internet Research Agency Agata Burdonova, who has recently moved with her husband to the United States. She run translator project and is missing from Mueller indictment

Notable quotes:
"... The Russian independent TV Rain, also known as Dozhd, found (Russian, machine translation ) that one management person of the IRA was missing in the Mueller indictment. That women, Agata Burdonova, has recently moved with her husband to the United States. She had run the "translator" department of the IRA that created English language social marketing campaigns. She has now applied for a U.S. Social Security number. ..."
"... On June 15, 2017, Dmitry Fyodorov says he received an employment offer from Facebook. On August 8, 2017 Fyodorov marries Burdonova. Employer (presumably, Facebook) sponsors both of their visas -- prob. H1B. ..."
"... On December 7 2017 both moved to Bellevue, Washington. Two month later Mueller indicts the alleged IRA owner and management, but not Burdonova. This smells of a deal made by some US agency to get insight into the IRA. In return, an opportunity to move to the US was offered. ..."
Feb 25, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Feb 19 - Internet Marketing - Why Is This Smelly Fish Priceless?

Automated Twitter accounts, or trolls, repeated a tweet about a MoA piece on Muller's indictment of "Russian trolls" . Funny but not really important. There is interesting news though related to the original Muller indictment. Mueller accused with little evidence 13 persons involved in the private Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) of meddling with the U.S. election campaign.

The Russian independent TV Rain, also known as Dozhd, found (Russian, machine translation ) that one management person of the IRA was missing in the Mueller indictment. That women, Agata Burdonova, has recently moved with her husband to the United States. She had run the "translator" department of the IRA that created English language social marketing campaigns. She has now applied for a U.S. Social Security number.

According to a follow up :

On June 15, 2017, Dmitry Fyodorov says he received an employment offer from Facebook. On August 8, 2017 Fyodorov marries Burdonova. Employer (presumably, Facebook) sponsors both of their visas -- prob. H1B.

On December 7 2017 both moved to Bellevue, Washington. Two month later Mueller indicts the alleged IRA owner and management, but not Burdonova. This smells of a deal made by some US agency to get insight into the IRA. In return, an opportunity to move to the US was offered.

Feb 20 - "Russian bots" - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News

On the farce of the "Hamilton 68" dashboard and how the media fall for it.

[Feb 24, 2018] Russiagate or Deep State What Some Progressives Get Wrong on Russia by John Feffer

This migration to truthful analysis of the situation to FOx is paradoxically true phenomenon.
Greenwald definition of Rachel Maddow transformation is really brilliant: " "I used to be really good friends with Rachel Maddow," Greenwald told New York magazine. "And I've seen her devolution from this really interesting, really smart, independent thinker into this utterly scripted, intellectually dishonest, partisan hack."
Notable quotes:
"... The Nation, Counterpunch, Consortium News ..."
"... Over at The Nation ..."
Feb 14, 2018 | fpif.org
Greenwald has emerged as one of the prominent skeptics of the investigation into collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Once a fixture in the progressive media for his dissection of the national security state, he is now more frequently cited by the far right in its efforts to discredit the investigation run by Robert Mueller. The journalist used to chat regularly with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, but now he's more likely to appear with Tucker Carlson on Fox News.

"I used to be really good friends with Rachel Maddow," Greenwald told New York magazine. "And I've seen her devolution from this really interesting, really smart, independent thinker into this utterly scripted, intellectually dishonest, partisan hack."

Wow, that's harsh.

Greenwald is not alone. You can find skeptical articles about Russiagate at The Nation, Counterpunch, Consortium News , and many other progressive outlets. And these articles can be equally scathing about the journalists, mainstream or otherwise, that take the investigation seriously.

Over at The Nation , Russia specialist Stephen Cohen regularly challenges the emerging narrative, most recently suggesting that the intelligence community essentially fabricated Russiagate, which has generated in turn a different scandal -- he calls it "Intelgate" -- even larger than Watergate.

[Feb 24, 2018] The Mueller Indictments The Day the Music Died by Daniel Lazare

The size of funds that Democrats and Republicans operated were in billions. And , IRA staffers purchased just $100,000 worth of Facebook ads, 56% of which ran after Election Day. So only $44K was spent during election campaign.
There author is wrong about color revolution against Trump. It is progressing.
One interesting side effect will be ruthless suppression of the US influence in Russian elections. Bismark famously remarked that "the Russians are slow to saddle up, but ride fast." Here media dogs also are off leash and there will be innocent victims, blamed in treason and other nefarious activities just to voicing dissent. Russiagate discredited neoliberal fifth column in Russia, making them all "enemies of the people".
Notable quotes:
"... After nine months of labor, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller thus brought forth a mouse. Even if all the charges are true – something we'll probably never know since it's unlikely that any of the accused will be brought to trial -- the indictment tells us virtually nothing that's new. ..."
"... Yes, they persuaded someone in Florida to dress up as Hillary Clinton in a prison uniform and stand inside a cage mounted on a flatbed truck. And, yes, they also got another "real U.S. person," as the indictment terms it, to stand in front of the White House with a sign saying, "Happy 55th Birthday Dear Boss," a tribute, apparently, to IRA founder Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the convicted robber turned caterer whose birthday was three days away. Instead of a super-sophisticated spying operation, the indictment depicts a bumbling freelance operation that is still giving Putin heartburn months after the fact. ..."
"... Not that this has stopped the media from whipping itself into a frenzy. "Russia is at war with our democracy," screamed a headline in the Washington Post. "Trump is ignoring the worst attack on America since 9/11," blared another. " Russia is engaged in a virtual war against the United States through 21st-century tools of disinformation and propaganda," declared the New York Times, while Daily Beast columnist Jonathan Alter tweeted that the IRA's activities amounted to nothing less than a "tech Pearl Harbor." ..."
"... This makes the Dems seem crass, unscrupulous, and none too democratic. But then Mudde gave the knife a twist. The real trouble with the strategy, he said, is that it isn't working: ..."
"... No collusion means no impeachment and hence no anti-Trump "color revolution" of the sort that was so effective in Georgia or the Ukraine. Moreover, while 53 percent of Americans believe that investigating Russiagate should be a top or at least an important priority according to a recent poll , figures for a half-dozen other issues ranging from Medicare and Social Security reform to tax policy, healthcare, infrastructure, and immigration are actually a good deal higher – 67 percent, 72 percent, or even more. ..."
"... " the Russia-Trump collusion story might be the talk of the town in Washington, but this is not the case in much of the rest of the country." Out in flyover country, rather, Americans can't figure out why the political elite is more concerned with a nonexistent scandal than with things that really count, i.e. de-industrialization, infrastructure decay, the opioid epidemic, and school shootings. As society disintegrates, the only thing Democrats have accomplished with all their blathering about Russkis under the bed is to demonstrate just how cut off from the real world they are. ..."
"... But Russiagate is not just about regime change, but other things as well. One is repression. Where once Democrats would have laughed off Russian trolls and the like, they're now obsessed with making a mountain out of a molehill in order to enforce mainstream opinion and marginalize ideas and opinions suspected of being un-American and hence pro-Russian. If the RT (Russia Today) news network is now suspect -- the Times described it not long ago as "the slickly produced heart of a broad, often covert disinformation campaign designed to sow doubt about democratic institutions and destabilize the West" – then why not the BBC or Agence France-Presse? How long until foreign books are banned or foreign musicians? ..."
"... "I'm actually surprised I haven't been indicted," tweets Bloomberg columnist Leonid Bershidsky. "I'm Russian, I was in the U.S. in 2016 and I published columns critical of both Clinton and Trump w/o registering as a foreign agent." When the Times complains that Facebook "still sees itself as the bank that got robbed, rather than the architect who designed a bank with no safes, and no alarms or locks on the doors, and then acted surprised when burglars struck," then it's clear that the goal is to force Facebook to rein in its activities or stand by and watch as others do so instead. ..."
"... But Russiagate is about something else as well: war. As National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster warns that the "time is now" to act against Iran, the New York Times slams Trump for not imposing sanctions on Moscow, and a spooky "Nuclear Posture Review" suggests that the US might someday respond to a cyber attack with atomic weapons, it's plain that Washington is itching for a showdown that will somehow undo the mistakes of the previous administration. The more Trump drags his feet, the more Democrats conclude that a war drive is the best way to bring him to his knees. ..."
"... Thus, low-grade political interference is elevated into a casus belli while Vladimir Putin is portrayed as a supernatural villain straight out of Harry Potter. But where does it stop? Libya has been set back decades, Syria, the subject of yet another US regime-change effort, has been all but destroyed, while Yemen – which America helps Saudi Arabia bomb virtually around the clock – is now a disaster area with some 9,000 people killed, 50,000 injured, a million-plus cholera cases, and more than half of all hospitals and clinics destroyed. ..."
"... The more Democrats pound the war drums, the more death and destruction will ensue. The process is well underway in Syria, the victim of Israeli bombings and a US-Turkish invasion, and it will undoubtedly spread as Dems turn up the heat. If the pathetic pseudo-scandal known as Russiagate really is collapsing under its own weight, then it's not a moment too soon. ..."
"... The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy ..."
"... A minor quibble was how at the end the author kept referring to how the "U.S" or "Washington" were the forces for the regime changes or flat-out destruction of nations Israel wants destroyed. The crappy little pesthole has been the barely-concealed mastermind of all the "Wars For Israel" which have turned the US of A into a bankrupt laughingstock. ..."
"... As ludicrous as Russiagate became, it was no joke, and became a real amplifier of the threat of nuclear war, and the relentlessly increasing militarization of America. Without the enthusiastic help of the corporate media, the whole phony narrative would never have got off the ground. Of course the criminals we call the intelligence community did all they could to give it legs, as well. We can only pray that it fades away now, and is not replaced with something else like a shooting war. But that hope is fading now on several fronts ..."
"... That was NOT to remove Trump, which was always a long shot and would only produce Pence and angry motivated Trump voters in the next election. ..."
"... The Trump derangement syndrome had a calculated purpose to keep donors giving after they were outraged by the waste of their donations. They'd been acting like a donor-strike was in progress. This cured that. ..."
"... This fed off the Stages of Grief reactions of those who'd so confidently expected a Hillary win. That helped do it, but was not the real motive. Those who initiated and shaped it were more directed, and aimed at the money. That is why the more likely things to blame, like Comey, were set aside in favor of the easy target of a foreign enemy which was familiar from recent Cold War. ..."
"... Having only as reference my own personal take on our news media the infamous MSM, is that these journalistic bandits are only in the game of twisting the news for the ratings, and to promote their own opportunistic careers. The corporate owned media has replaced responsible reporting with salaisuus promotions of often tragic events in a way that tends to in my eyes be a mere exploitation of these tragedies, as we viewers become glued to our TV screens. ..."
Feb 24, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Fads and scandals often follow a set trajectory. They grow big, bigger, and then, finally, too big, at which point they topple over and collapse under the weight of their own internal contradictions. This was the fate of the "Me too" campaign, which started out as an exposé of serial abuser Harvey Weinstein but then went too far when Babe.net published a story about one woman's bad date with comedian Aziz Ansari. Suddenly, it became clear that different types of behavior were being lumped together in a dangerous way, and a once-explosive movement began to fizzle.

So, too, with Russiagate. After dominating the news for more than a year, the scandal may have at last reached a tipping point with last week's indictment of thirteen Russian individuals and three Russian corporations on charges of illegal interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. But the indictment landed with a decided thud for three reasons:

It failed to connect the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the alleged St. Petersburg troll factory accused of political meddling, with Vladimir Putin, the all-purpose evil-doer who the corporate media say is out to destroy American democracy. It similarly failed to establish a connection with the Trump campaign and indeed went out of its way to describe contacts with the Russians as "unwitting." It described the meddling itself as even more inept and amateurish than many had suspected.

After nine months of labor, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller thus brought forth a mouse. Even if all the charges are true – something we'll probably never know since it's unlikely that any of the accused will be brought to trial -- the indictment tells us virtually nothing that's new.

Yes, IRA staffers purchased $100,000 worth of Facebook ads, 56 percent of which ran after Election Day. Yes, they persuaded someone in Florida to dress up as Hillary Clinton in a prison uniform and stand inside a cage mounted on a flatbed truck. And, yes, they also got another "real U.S. person," as the indictment terms it, to stand in front of the White House with a sign saying, "Happy 55th Birthday Dear Boss," a tribute, apparently, to IRA founder Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the convicted robber turned caterer whose birthday was three days away. Instead of a super-sophisticated spying operation, the indictment depicts a bumbling freelance operation that is still giving Putin heartburn months after the fact.

Not that this has stopped the media from whipping itself into a frenzy. "Russia is at war with our democracy," screamed a headline in the Washington Post. "Trump is ignoring the worst attack on America since 9/11," blared another. " Russia is engaged in a virtual war against the United States through 21st-century tools of disinformation and propaganda," declared the New York Times, while Daily Beast columnist Jonathan Alter tweeted that the IRA's activities amounted to nothing less than a "tech Pearl Harbor."

All of which merely demonstrates, in proper backhanded fashion, how grievously Mueller has fallen short. Proof that the scandal had at last overstayed its welcome came five days later when the Guardian, a website that had previously flogged Russiagate even more vigorously than the Post, the Times, or CNN, published a news analysis by Cas Mudde, an associate professor at the University of Georgia, admitting that it was all a farce – and a particularly self-defeating one at that.

Mudde's article made short work of hollow pieties about a neutral and objective investigation. Rather than an effort to get at the truth, Russiagate was a thinly-veiled effort at regime change. "[I]n the end," he wrote, "the only question everyone really seems to care about is whether Donald Trump was involved – and can therefore be impeached for treason.

With last week's indictment, the article went on, "Democratic party leaders once again reassured their followers that this was the next logical step in the inevitable downfall of Trump." The more Democrats play the Russiagate card, in other words, the nearer they will come to their goal of riding the Orange-Haired One out of town on a rail.

This makes the Dems seem crass, unscrupulous, and none too democratic. But then Mudde gave the knife a twist. The real trouble with the strategy, he said, is that it isn't working:

"While there is no doubt that the Trump camp was, and still is, filled with amoral and fraudulent people, and was very happy to take the Russians help during the elections, even encouraging it on the campaign, I do not think Mueller will be able to find conclusive evidence that Donald Trump himself colluded with Putin's Russia to win the elections. And that is the only thing that will lead to his impeachment as the Republican party is not risking political suicide for anything less."

Other Objectives of "Russiagate"

No collusion means no impeachment and hence no anti-Trump "color revolution" of the sort that was so effective in Georgia or the Ukraine. Moreover, while 53 percent of Americans believe that investigating Russiagate should be a top or at least an important priority according to a recent poll , figures for a half-dozen other issues ranging from Medicare and Social Security reform to tax policy, healthcare, infrastructure, and immigration are actually a good deal higher – 67 percent, 72 percent, or even more.

Summed up Mudde: " the Russia-Trump collusion story might be the talk of the town in Washington, but this is not the case in much of the rest of the country." Out in flyover country, rather, Americans can't figure out why the political elite is more concerned with a nonexistent scandal than with things that really count, i.e. de-industrialization, infrastructure decay, the opioid epidemic, and school shootings. As society disintegrates, the only thing Democrats have accomplished with all their blathering about Russkis under the bed is to demonstrate just how cut off from the real world they are.

But Russiagate is not just about regime change, but other things as well. One is repression. Where once Democrats would have laughed off Russian trolls and the like, they're now obsessed with making a mountain out of a molehill in order to enforce mainstream opinion and marginalize ideas and opinions suspected of being un-American and hence pro-Russian. If the RT (Russia Today) news network is now suspect -- the Times described it not long ago as "the slickly produced heart of a broad, often covert disinformation campaign designed to sow doubt about democratic institutions and destabilize the West" – then why not the BBC or Agence France-Presse? How long until foreign books are banned or foreign musicians?

"I'm actually surprised I haven't been indicted," tweets Bloomberg columnist Leonid Bershidsky. "I'm Russian, I was in the U.S. in 2016 and I published columns critical of both Clinton and Trump w/o registering as a foreign agent." When the Times complains that Facebook "still sees itself as the bank that got robbed, rather than the architect who designed a bank with no safes, and no alarms or locks on the doors, and then acted surprised when burglars struck," then it's clear that the goal is to force Facebook to rein in its activities or stand by and watch as others do so instead.

Add to this the classic moral panic promoted by #MeToo – to believe charges of sexual harassment and assault without first demanding evidence "is to disbelieve, and deny due process to, the accused," notes Judith Levine in the Boston Review – and it's clear that a powerful wave of cultural conservatism is crashing down on the United States, much of it originating in a classic neoliberal-Hillaryite milieu. Formerly the liberal alternative, the Democratic Party is now passing the Republicans on the right.

But Russiagate is about something else as well: war. As National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster warns that the "time is now" to act against Iran, the New York Times slams Trump for not imposing sanctions on Moscow, and a spooky "Nuclear Posture Review" suggests that the US might someday respond to a cyber attack with atomic weapons, it's plain that Washington is itching for a showdown that will somehow undo the mistakes of the previous administration. The more Trump drags his feet, the more Democrats conclude that a war drive is the best way to bring him to his knees.

Thus, low-grade political interference is elevated into a casus belli while Vladimir Putin is portrayed as a supernatural villain straight out of Harry Potter. But where does it stop? Libya has been set back decades, Syria, the subject of yet another US regime-change effort, has been all but destroyed, while Yemen – which America helps Saudi Arabia bomb virtually around the clock – is now a disaster area with some 9,000 people killed, 50,000 injured, a million-plus cholera cases, and more than half of all hospitals and clinics destroyed.

The more Democrats pound the war drums, the more death and destruction will ensue. The process is well underway in Syria, the victim of Israeli bombings and a US-Turkish invasion, and it will undoubtedly spread as Dems turn up the heat. If the pathetic pseudo-scandal known as Russiagate really is collapsing under its own weight, then it's not a moment too soon.

Daniel Lazare is the author of several books including The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace).


Zachary Smith , February 24, 2018 at 1:25 pm

First thing I checked before reading this was to check for instances of misuse of the term "liberal". When I found none at all, the piece suddenly looked very promising. And it was a fine essay!

A minor quibble was how at the end the author kept referring to how the "U.S" or "Washington" were the forces for the regime changes or flat-out destruction of nations Israel wants destroyed. The crappy little pesthole has been the barely-concealed mastermind of all the "Wars For Israel" which have turned the US of A into a bankrupt laughingstock.

With that small objection on record, I will declare this was great.

BobH , February 24, 2018 at 2:05 pm

Zachary, I wouldn't get too hung up on words like "liberal" which have been used and abused to become almost meaningless but yes, "the Democratic Party is now passing the Republicans on the right." Somehow I think they believe they can pick up enough "moderate" Republicans in the midterms to make up for the "angry white males"(& intellectuals) they lost in the last election the same losing strategy.

mike k , February 24, 2018 at 1:41 pm

As ludicrous as Russiagate became, it was no joke, and became a real amplifier of the threat of nuclear war, and the relentlessly increasing militarization of America. Without the enthusiastic help of the corporate media, the whole phony narrative would never have got off the ground. Of course the criminals we call the intelligence community did all they could to give it legs, as well. We can only pray that it fades away now, and is not replaced with something else like a shooting war. But that hope is fading now on several fronts

Mark Thomason , February 24, 2018 at 1:41 pm

From its first moment, this was a Team Hillary exercise, decided on by her in the days right after the election and promoted through her media contracts that had been an extension of her campaign.

Why? At first they seemed to imagine it possible to reverse the election outcome.

Then it shifted to Trump hate. Why?

That was NOT to remove Trump, which was always a long shot and would only produce Pence and angry motivated Trump voters in the next election.

The Trump derangement syndrome had a calculated purpose to keep donors giving after they were outraged by the waste of their donations. They'd been acting like a donor-strike was in progress. This cured that.

This fed off the Stages of Grief reactions of those who'd so confidently expected a Hillary win. That helped do it, but was not the real motive. Those who initiated and shaped it were more directed, and aimed at the money. That is why the more likely things to blame, like Comey, were set aside in favor of the easy target of a foreign enemy which was familiar from recent Cold War.

It was completely cynical, guided by the same greed that had produced the candidacy of Hillary and run it the whole time, doing fund raising in friendly places instead of campaigning in swing states.

JDQ , February 24, 2018 at 2:00 pm

..please do read this. It gives Liberals more a bashing than Conservatives

Joe Tedesky , February 24, 2018 at 2:40 pm

Having only as reference my own personal take on our news media the infamous MSM, is that these journalistic bandits are only in the game of twisting the news for the ratings, and to promote their own opportunistic careers. The corporate owned media has replaced responsible reporting with salaisuus promotions of often tragic events in a way that tends to in my eyes be a mere exploitation of these tragedies, as we viewers become glued to our TV screens.

This is the way the MSM sell too many needless pharmaceutical products, and their drugs are products, to insurance ad's and somehow make commercial space for the MIC defense contractors. This is how the MSM makes real money, as they forfeited our learning of anything worthwhile, as to pave the way for more exploitation of our country's struggles with everything and anything, but all forfeited simply to make the MSM more money.

It goes without saying that we the American public aren't necessarily as fooled, and tricked, as our masters would like to believe we are. So to explain away the Empire's failings certain forces from within our nation's Beltway are hard at work trying to blame all of their misgivings on another, and that another is Vladimir Putin and his American engineered misunderstood Russians. For this reason our MSM hardly ever put the real Putin on our television screens. No never, these American media producers always when describing Putin, use a prop, or a slimy squinty eyed shirtless Russian stereotype instead. For our MSM ever to air a speech of Putin, or do as Oliver Stone did, is beyond question, so don't wait up kids to see ever steady Vladimir on our American TV sets because it just isn't going to happen.

So now our MSM is exploiting the Florida mass shooting, and it is with their slants and predisposed opinions where I lose faith in anything our media does. Even as terrible as this Florida school shooting was, our MSM must politicize and adhere left right slants to this story as in their daff journalistic heads this is what they must do. Like I said this is my opinion taken from my own experiences, so take my comment for what it is, and not from any references I happened upon.

[Feb 23, 2018] NSA Genius Debunks Russiagate Once For All

Highly recommended!
Interesting information Guccifer II. He falsified the evidence.
Follow the money. Along with a smoke screen for Hillary political fiasco, Russiagate is a swindle to get more money for intelligence agencies and MIC. For about 15 companies who run the US foreign policy.
Notable quotes:
"... The CIA and NSA, and other intelligence agencies all work on behalf of these corporate entities. There main objective is to keep us all uninformed and dumber than a bag of hammers, so they can extort all the wealth from our great nation ..."
"... If this video won't stop the brainless McCarthyist regressives from knowing the truth about Russiagate, nothing will. And I mean absolutely nothing. Except maybe if they come here to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, NYC. We got lots of Russian immigrants here and they are just normal people ..."
"... Russiagate is an excuse to spend more on the military. Wow- surprising, yet somehow not surprising. American Empire is the biggest destabilizing force in the world ..."
"... Guccifer 2.0 is the United States government. Either the CIA, FBI, NSA or DHS. I'd say it was the CIA with the NSA being a close second ..."
Feb 23, 2018 | www.youtube.com

Art Dehls , 2 months ago

Also, when did Russian hackers become so stupid? Since when has the GRU being unable to get even the basics like the up to date email list for the Clinton campaign, started using two-year-old obsolete malware instead of 0-day exploits, completely forgetting that VPN's exist and how to spoof an IP address, and on and on and on. These aren't the guys who cloned Nasdaq!

SeaRose , 2 months ago

Wish I could give this 1000.

Thank you jimmy so much for doing this interview and thank you Bill Binney for so clearly explaining the technical and structural reasons why Russiagate is both false and ceaselessly pushed. Amazing interview!

David Schnell , 2 months ago

My experience working on the Mississippi democratic party executive committee, the Hinds county Executive committee, and working for the state employees union here in Mississippi has educated me on the fact that democratic reps and republican reps work together to pass legislation to benefit the corporate class i.e. business. All you who have replied to my comment make sense, but we must remember that there is no difference between the Democratic and Republician parties, they all work for their corporate masters.

The CIA and NSA, and other intelligence agencies all work on behalf of these corporate entities. There main objective is to keep us all uninformed and dumber than a bag of hammers, so they can extort all the wealth from our great nation. In other words they our commiting treason upon the American people and our constitution and all should be through in prison for the rest of their lives and all ill-gotten wealth given back to the people of these great nation by rebuilding the infrastructure of America, investing in the education of our people to secure a prosperous future, and provide healthcare for all Americans. We can ensure this happens in two ways, pass the 28th amendment and pass FDR's 2nd bill of rights(worker's bill of rights). This will ensure that corporations will never take control of our country again.

hamdoggius , 2 months ago

Can we please now move onto whom the person was that stole the data from the DNC? Can I take a stab in the dark (or maybe two shots to the back of the head?) and guess his name was Seth Rich?

James Williamson , 2 months ago

The fraudulent "war on terror" is a big money-making scam. I've been saying this for the past three years.

P , 2 months ago

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." Goethe (requote for google... best line)

Atze Peng Bar , 2 months ago

I know I commented this already in the last segment, but this guy is absolutely awesome. Everything he says is substantial, non-speculative and supported by facts. You're becoming a proper journalist Jimmy. More of people like this please. I got my credit card again. I will donate shortly. Keep up.

Laura Cortez , 2 months ago (edited)

Russia didn't hack USA democracy .. AIPAC did long time ago and you didn't even know it.

Tommy O Donovan , 2 months ago

This is earth shaking news. World class Jimmy....I never thought you had it in you.

tesscot , 2 months ago

As long as they keep lying about Russia they can continue the sanctions against Russia. Russia is holding it's own even with the sanctions but originally under Putin Russia had paid off all it's debt to the IMF (World Bank). Now their debt is increasing, partly because of the sanctions and partly because of helping Syria and preparing for the US to cause a great war. Russia is a threat to the IMF (World Bank). Russia and China want trade outside of the Petrol Dollar. When Russia was debt free from the IMF (World Bank) it was completely independent of them. Russia did not have to take orders from the international bankers. That is why they lie about Russia.

Amateur Professional , 2 months ago

If this video won't stop the brainless McCarthyist regressives from knowing the truth about Russiagate, nothing will. And I mean absolutely nothing. Except maybe if they come here to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, NYC. We got lots of Russian immigrants here and they are just normal people.

stephen0793 , 2 months ago (edited)

Russiagate is an excuse to spend more on the military. Wow- surprising, yet somehow not surprising. American Empire is the biggest destabilizing force in the world

branden burks , 2 months ago

Guccifer 2.0 is the United States government. Either the CIA, FBI, NSA or DHS. I'd say it was the CIA with the NSA being a close second.

branden burks , 2 months ago

A war on terror is a war on ourselves since the United States are the largest terrorists in the world and fund and arm terrorists around the world.

jennings mills , 2 months ago

So you would need a Internet speed of 392 mbps from Russia to Washington. yeah there was no hack. R.I.P Seth Rich,

Matt Erbst , 2 months ago

As I tried to tell you the previous time you had referenced the "conclusions" of the CIA groups, this data nonsense he is handwaving about is all quite feasible, by using a nearby national server, and much skepticism is deserved! Also he doesn't seem to know what he is talking about, from all of the paraphrasing.

I am also quite reminded of the psychological incorporation into personal behaviors by habit of the standards and policies of the industry or professional standards, which for the US Intelligence community includes an explicit policy of disinformation and dishonesty.

How the hell would the NSA's "man in the middle" logging servers see that the transfer occurs to a local USB2 drive (he assumes this is the case because 40 megabytes per second is approximately the rate of the USB2 protocol of 400 megabits per second... Very few USB flash drives were manufactured with solid state storage chips fast enough to reach that full transfer rate before the widespread adoption of USB3, or the modern USB3.1. Essentially, your chosen headline title is a false clickbait, because as of today there is insufficient evidence to draw ANY conclusion

earthie48 Johnson , 2 months ago

Just as they smeared Joe Wilson & his wife, and other great Courageous Americans that came out AGAINST the invasion of Iraq! Until we start DEMANDING those LIARS leave their seats in Washington, put on the Military Gear, and GO to the Countries they want to invade! I am past FED UP with them sacrificing our Troops, they return home to be MISTREATED, and kicked to the curb! Americans, wake up and DEMAND that they GO!

[Feb 22, 2018] Bill Binney explodes the rile of 17 agances security assessment memo in launching the Russia witch-hunt

Highly recommended!
A very interesting interview. It is almost one year old.
When intelligence agencies use the phase "with high confidence" means that they do not have evidence. This is one of the biggest lie intelligence agencies resort to. They are all professional liars and should be treated as such.
If DNC email offloading was done over Internet (which means it was a hack not an internal leak) NSA should have the direct evidence. They do not. So this is a progpaganda move by Brennan and Clapper to unleash MSM witch hunt, which is a key part of the color revolution against Trump.
Another question is who downloaded this information to Wikileaks. Here NSA also should have evidence. And again they do not.
They have already to direct attention from the main issues. Oversight of intelligence agencies is joke. They can lie with impunity.
BTW NSA has all Hillary emails, including deleted.
Mar 4, 2017 | www.youtube.com

He also exposes the NSA penchant for "swindles", such as preventing the plugging of holes in software around the world, to preserve their spying access.

John, 10 months ago

It's almost comical to hear that they lie to each other. No wonder why these retards in the mid-east and every other third world country gets the better of us.

Nancy M, 10 months ago

The Clinton campaign to divert attention to Russia instead of her myriad of crimes that were revealed during the election must be stopped and the alt media needs to start talking about her and Obama's crimes again and demand justice...control the dialogue

[Feb 22, 2018] Ray McGovern's First Day as CIA Director

Notable quotes:
"... The low-calorie Jan. 6 ICA was clumsily cobbled together: "We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks." ..."
"... Binney and other highly experienced NSA alumni, as well as other members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), drawing on their intimate familiarity with how the technical systems and hacking work, have been saying for a year and a half that this CIA/FBI/NSA conclusion is a red herring , so to speak. Last summer, the results of forensic investigation enabled VIPs to apply the principles of physics and the known capacity of the internet to confirm that conclusion. ..."
"... Oddly, the FBI chose not to do forensics on the so-called "Russian hack" of the Democratic National Committee computers and, by all appearances, neither did the drafters of the ICA. ..."
"... What troubles me greatly is that the NYT and other mainstream print and TV media seem to be bloated with the thin gruel-cum-Kool Aid they have been slurping at our CIA trough for a year and a half; and then treating the meager fare consumed as some sort of holy sacrament. That goes in spades for media handling of the celebrated ICA of Jan. 6, 2017 cobbled together by those "handpicked" analysts from CIA, FBI, and NSA. It is, in all candor, an embarrassment to the profession of intelligence analysis and yet, for political reasons, it has attained the status of Holy Writ. ..."
"... And Democrats like Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, were kicking the ball hard down the streets of Washington. On Jan. 25, 2017, I had a chance to confront Schiff personally about the lack of evidence -- something that even Obama had acknowledged just before slipping out the door. I think our two-minute conversation speaks volumes. ..."
"... Now I absolutely look forward to dealing with Adam Schiff from my new position as CIA director. I will ask him to show me the evidence of "Russian hacking" that he said he could not show me on Jan. 25, 2017 – on the chance his evidence includes more than reports from the New York Times ..."
"... Intelligence analysts put great weight, of course, on sources. The authors of the lede, banner-headlined NYT article of Jan. 7, 2017 were Michael D. Shear and David E. Sanger; Sanger has had a particularly checkered career, while always landing on his feet. Despite his record of parroting CIA handouts (or perhaps partly because of it), Sanger is now the NYT's chief Washington correspondent. ..."
"... More instructive still, in May 2005, when firsthand documentary evidence from the now-famous "Downing Street Memorandum" showed that President George W. Bush had decided by early summer 2002 to attack Iraq, the NYT ignored it for six weeks until David Sanger rose to the occasion with a tortured report claiming just the opposite. The title given his article of June 13 2005 was "Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn't Made." ..."
"... Against this peculiar reporting record, I was not inclined to take at face value the Jan. 7, 2017 report he co-authored with Michael D. Shear – "Putin Led a Complex Cyberattack Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Finds." ..."
"... Nor am I inclined to take seriously former National Intelligence Director James Clapper's stated views on the proclivity of Russians to be, well, just really bad people – like it's in their genes. I plan to avail myself of the opportunity to discover whether intelligence analysts who labored under his "aegis" were infected by his quaint view of the Russians. ..."
"... I shall ask any of the "handpicked" analysts who specialize in analysis of Russia (and, hopefully, there are at least a few): Do you share Clapper's view, as he explained it to NBC's Meet the Press on May 30, 2017, that Russians are "typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever"? I truly do not know what to expect by way of reply. ..."
"... In sum, my priority for Day One is to hear both sides of the story regarding "Russian hacking" with all cards on the table. All cards. That means no questions are out of order, including what, if any, role the "Steele dossier" may have played in the preparation of the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment. ..."
Feb 22, 2018 | www.antiwar.com

Now that I have been nominated again – this time by author Paul Craig Roberts – to be CIA director, I am preparing to hit the ground running.

Last time my name was offered in nomination for the position – by The Nation publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel – I did not hold my breath waiting for a call from the White House. Her nomination came in the afterglow of my fortuitous, four-minute debate with then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, when I confronted him on his lies about the attack on Iraq , on May 4, 2006 on national TV. Since it was abundantly clear that Rumsfeld and I would not get along, I felt confident I had royally disqualified myself.

This time around, on the off-chance I do get the nod, I have taken the time to prepare the agenda for my first few days as CIA director. Here's how Day One looks so far:

Get former National Security Agency Technical Director William Binney back to CIA to join me and the "handpicked" CIA analysts who, with other "handpicked" analysts (as described by former National Intelligence Director James Clapper on May 8, 2017) from the FBI and NSA, prepared the so-called Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of Jan. 6, 2017. That evidence-impoverished assessment argued the case that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his minions "to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton."

When my predecessor, CIA Director Mike Pompeo invited Binney to his office on Oct. 24, 2017 to discuss cyber-attacks, he told Pompeo that he had been fed a pack of lies on "Russian hacking" and that he could prove it. Why Pompeo left that hanging is puzzling, but I believe this is the kind of low-hanging fruit we should pick pronto.

The low-calorie Jan. 6 ICA was clumsily cobbled together: "We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks."

Binney and other highly experienced NSA alumni, as well as other members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), drawing on their intimate familiarity with how the technical systems and hacking work, have been saying for a year and a half that this CIA/FBI/NSA conclusion is a red herring , so to speak. Last summer, the results of forensic investigation enabled VIPs to apply the principles of physics and the known capacity of the internet to confirm that conclusion.

Oddly, the FBI chose not to do forensics on the so-called "Russian hack" of the Democratic National Committee computers and, by all appearances, neither did the drafters of the ICA.

Again, Binney says that the main conclusions he and his VIPs colleagues reached are based largely on principles of physics – simple ones like fluid dynamics. I want to hear what that's all about, how that applies to the "Russian hack," and hear what my own CIA analysts have to say about that.

I will have Binney's clearances updated to remove any unnecessary barriers to a no-holds-barred discussion at a highly classified level. After which I shall have a transcript prepared, sanitized to protect sources and methods, and promptly released to the media.

Like Sisyphus Up the Media Mountain

At that point things are bound to get very interesting. Far too few people realize that they get a very warped view on such issues from the New York Times . And, no doubt, it would take some time, for the Times and other outlets to get used to some candor from the CIA, instead of the far more common tendentious leaks. In any event, we will try to speak truth to the media – as well as to power.

I happen to share the view of the handful of my predecessor directors who believed we have an important secondary obligation to do what we possibly can to inform/educate the public as well as the rest of the government – especially on such volatile and contentious issues like "Russian hacking."

What troubles me greatly is that the NYT and other mainstream print and TV media seem to be bloated with the thin gruel-cum-Kool Aid they have been slurping at our CIA trough for a year and a half; and then treating the meager fare consumed as some sort of holy sacrament. That goes in spades for media handling of the celebrated ICA of Jan. 6, 2017 cobbled together by those "handpicked" analysts from CIA, FBI, and NSA. It is, in all candor, an embarrassment to the profession of intelligence analysis and yet, for political reasons, it has attained the status of Holy Writ.

The Paper of (Dubious) Record

I recall the banner headline spanning the top of the entire front page of the NYT on Jan. 7, 2017: "Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says;" and the electronic version headed "Putin Led a Complex Cyberattack Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Finds." I said to myself sarcastically, "Well there you go! That's exactly what Mrs. Clinton – not to mention the NY Times, the Washington Post and The Establishment – have been saying for many months."

Buried in that same edition of the Times was a short paragraph by Scott Shane: "What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies' claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. That is a significant omission."

Omission? No hard evidence? No problem. The publication of the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment got the ball rolling. And Democrats like Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, were kicking the ball hard down the streets of Washington. On Jan. 25, 2017, I had a chance to confront Schiff personally about the lack of evidence -- something that even Obama had acknowledged just before slipping out the door. I think our two-minute conversation speaks volumes.

Now I absolutely look forward to dealing with Adam Schiff from my new position as CIA director. I will ask him to show me the evidence of "Russian hacking" that he said he could not show me on Jan. 25, 2017 – on the chance his evidence includes more than reports from the New York Times .

Sources

Intelligence analysts put great weight, of course, on sources. The authors of the lede, banner-headlined NYT article of Jan. 7, 2017 were Michael D. Shear and David E. Sanger; Sanger has had a particularly checkered career, while always landing on his feet. Despite his record of parroting CIA handouts (or perhaps partly because of it), Sanger is now the NYT's chief Washington correspondent.

Those whose memories go back more than 15 years may recall his promoting weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as flat fact. In a July 29, 2002 article co-written with Them Shanker, for example, Iraq's (nonexistent) "weapons of mass destruction" appear no fewer than seven times as flat fact.

More instructive still, in May 2005, when firsthand documentary evidence from the now-famous "Downing Street Memorandum" showed that President George W. Bush had decided by early summer 2002 to attack Iraq, the NYT ignored it for six weeks until David Sanger rose to the occasion with a tortured report claiming just the opposite. The title given his article of June 13 2005 was "Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn't Made."

Against this peculiar reporting record, I was not inclined to take at face value the Jan. 7, 2017 report he co-authored with Michael D. Shear – "Putin Led a Complex Cyberattack Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Finds."

Nor am I inclined to take seriously former National Intelligence Director James Clapper's stated views on the proclivity of Russians to be, well, just really bad people – like it's in their genes. I plan to avail myself of the opportunity to discover whether intelligence analysts who labored under his "aegis" were infected by his quaint view of the Russians.

I shall ask any of the "handpicked" analysts who specialize in analysis of Russia (and, hopefully, there are at least a few): Do you share Clapper's view, as he explained it to NBC's Meet the Press on May 30, 2017, that Russians are "typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever"? I truly do not know what to expect by way of reply.

End of Day One

In sum, my priority for Day One is to hear both sides of the story regarding "Russian hacking" with all cards on the table. All cards. That means no questions are out of order, including what, if any, role the "Steele dossier" may have played in the preparation of the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment.

I may decide to seek some independent, disinterested technical input, as well. But it should not take me very long to figure out which of the two interpretations of alleged "Russian hacking" is more straight-up fact-based and unbiased. That done, in the following days I shall brief both the Chair, Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and ranking member Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee, as well as the Chair and ranking member of its counterpart in the Senate. I will then personally brief the NYT's David Sanger and follow closely what he and his masters decide to do with the facts I present.

On the chance that the Times and other media might decide to play it straight, and that the "straight" diverges from the prevailing, Clapperesque narrative of Russian perfidy, the various mainstream outlets will face a formidable problem of their own making. Mark Twain put it this way: "It is easier to fool people than it is to convince them they have been fooled."

And that will probably be enough for Day One.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and CIA analyst for a total of 30 years and now servers on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Reprinted with permission from Consortium News .

[Feb 21, 2018] Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News

Notable quotes:
"... Atlantic Council ..."
"... Alliance for Securing Democracy. ..."
"... Alliance for Securing Democracy ..."
"... "to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe." That's pretty rich, coming from a country and from people who actually genuinely, and in proven ways, have subverted democracy in Europe since the late 1940s - Italy being one of the clearest cases. ..."
"... For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia. I can't believe it has to do with the economy. There's got to be a far better nefarious reason. Even during the real cold war we tried to avoid conflict. Absolute insanity. ..."
"... The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing. ..."
"... Clearly, this entire psyop was premeditated and its design was hastily done contemporaneously with Russia's Syria intervention. NSA/CIA/FBI knew of HRC's security breeches and rightly assumed their contents would find their way into the election, so the general plan was ready to go prior to WikiLeaks publications. b has uncovered much, and I hope he's planning to publish a book about the entire affair. ..."
"... Ken @ 4: There doesn't necessarily need to be One Major Reason for going to war. There may be several reasons all feeding and reinforcing one another and creating a psychological climate in which Going To War is seen as the only solution and is inevitable. The reasons are not just economic and political but cultural and historical. ..."
"... In some countries allied with the US, the politicians in power are the ideological descendants of those who collaborated with Nazi Germany - so in a sense they are committed to "correcting" what they see as wrong. In the case of current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, he is the grandson of a former prime minister who once served in General Tojo's World War II cabinet. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/12/26/national/formed-in-childhood-roots-of-abes-conservatism-go-deep/#.WoyZCG9uaUk ..."
"... The idea is to keep piling the pressure on to countries like Iran and Russia in the hope that their populations will rise up and demand the freedoms that we enjoy in the West....things like uncensored wardrobe malfunctions and transgender washrooms. ..."
"... Media have long agitated for War in US History. Nothing sells newspapers like a good ole war! Demonizing is a way to achieve it. What is sure is that this is a one way street. Once over the cliff, there is no turning back. ..."
"... In that The Narrative is tightly controlled in the corporate media, not matter how strong the proofs or arguments about the falsity of these propaganda campaigns are, little or no circulation of those proofs or arguments wlll reach the general public. ..."
"... Thanks Jen. It still makes no sense. As a veteran of the Vietnam fiasco, I was pretty much government oriented until McNamara outed the whole thing whining about haw sorry he was. 59,000 dead and he's sorry. They were able to hide the Gulf of Tonkin BS until then. After that I researched the reasons for each war/conflict the USA started and could find no logical reasons except hunger for power. But the little sandbox wars won't destroy the world like a major war/conflict with Russia and it goes nuclear. ..."
"... The warmongering is not intended to make any sense - not many people are trained in critical thinking and logic, and even when they are, they can be swamped by their own emotions or other people's emotions. Propaganda is intended to appeal to people's emotions and fears. You can try reading works by Edward Bernays - "Crystallizing Public Opinion" (1923) and "Propaganda" (1928) - to see how he uses his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories of the mind to create strategies for manipulating public opinion. https://archive.org/details/EdwardL.BernaysPropaganda ..."
Feb 20, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

"Russian bots" - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News

The U.S. mainstream media are going nuts. They now make up and report stories based on the uncritical acceptance of the outcome of an algorithm they do not understand and which is know to produce fake results.

See for example these three stories:

From the last link:

SAN FRANCISCO -- One hour after news broke about the school shooting in Florida last week, Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up the gun control debate.

The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network. Some adopted the hashtag #guncontrolnow. Others used #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. Earlier on Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., many of those accounts had been focused on the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

In other words - the "Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia" were following the current news just as cable news networks do. When a new sensational event happened they immediately jumped onto it. But the NYT authors go to length to claim that there is some nefarious Russian scheme behind this that uses automated accounts to spread divisive issues.

Those claims are based on this propaganda project:

Last year, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, in conjunction with the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, created a website that tracks hundreds of Twitter accounts of human users and suspected bots that they have linked to a Russian influence campaign.

The "Alliance for Securing Democracy" is run by military lobbyists, CIA minions and neocons. Its claimed task is:

... to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.

There is no evidence that Vladimir Putin made or makes such efforts.

The ASD "Hamilton 68" website shows graphics with rankings of "top items" and "trending items" allegedly used by Russian bots or influence agents. There is nothing complicate behind it. It simply tracks the tweets of 600 Twitter users and aggregates the hashtags they use. It does not say which Twitter accounts its algorithms follows. It claims that the 600 were selected by one of three criteria: 1. People who often tweet news that also appears on RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik News , two general news sites sponsored by the Russian government; 2. People who "openly profess to be pro-Russian"; 3. accounts that "appear to use automation" to boost the same themes that people in group 1 and 2 tweet about.

Nowhere does the group say how many of the 600 accounts it claims to track belong to which group. Are their 10 assumed bots or 590 in the surveyed 600 accounts? And how please does one "openly profess" to be pro-Russian? We don't know and the ASD won't say.

On December 25 2017 the "Russian influence" agents or bots who, according to NYT, want to sow divisiveness, wished everyone a Merry Christmas.


bigger

The real method the Hamilton 68 group used to select the 600 accounts it tracks is unknown. The group does not say or show how it made it up. Despite that the NYT reporters, Sheera Frenkel and Daisuke Wakabayashi, continue with the false assumptions that most or all the accounts are automated, have something to do with Russia and are presumably nefarious:

Russian-linked bots have rallied around other divisive issues, often ones that President Trump has tweeted about. They promoted Twitter hashtags like #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee after some National Football League players started kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice.

The automated Twitter accounts helped popularize the #releasethememo hashtag , ...

The Daily Beast reported earlier that the emphasized claim is definitely false :

Twitter's internal analysis has thus far found that authentic American accounts, and not Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo. There are no preliminary indications that the Twitter activity either driving the hashtag or engaging with it is either predominantly Russian.

The same is presumably true for the other hashtags.

The Dutch IT specialist and blogger Marcel van den Berg was wondering how Dutch keywords and hashtags showed up in on the Hamilton 68 "Russian bots" dashboard. He found ( Dutch , English auto translation) that the dashboard is a total fraud:

In recent weeks, I have been keeping a close eye on Hamilton 68. Every time a Dutch hashtag was shown on the website, I made a screenshot. Then I noted what was playing at that moment and I watched the Tweets with this hashtag. Again I could not find any Tweet that seemed to be from a Russian troll.

In all cases, the hash tags that Hamilton 68 reported were trending topics in the Netherlands. In all cases there was much to do around the subject of the hashtag in the Netherlands. Many people were angry or shared their opinion on the subject on Twitter. And even if there were a few tweets with Russian connections between them, the effect is zero. Because they do not stand out among the many other, authentic Tweets.

Van den Berg lists a dozen examples he analyzed in depth.

The anti-Russian Bellingcat group around couch blogger Eliot Higgins is sponsored by the NATO propaganda shop Atlantic Council . It sniffs through open source stuff to blame Russia or Syria wherever possible. Bellingcat were recently a victim of the "Russian bots" - or rather of the ASD website. On February 10 the hashtag #bellingcat trended to rank 2 of the dashboard.


bigger

Bellingcat was thus, according to the Hamilton 68 claims, under assault of hordes of nefarious Russian government sponsored bots.

The Bellingcat folks looked into the issue and found that only six people on Twitter, none of them an automated account, had used the #bellingcat hashtag in the last 48 hours. Some of the six may have opinions that may be "pro Russian", but as Higgins himself says :

[I]n my opinion, it's extremely unlikely the people listed are Russian agents

The pro-NATO propaganda shop Bellingcat thus debunked the pro NATO propaganda shop Alliance for Securing Democracy.

The fraudsters who created the Hamilton 68 crap seem to have filled their database with rather normal people who's opinions they personally dislike. Those then are the "Russian bots" who spread "Russian influence" and divisiveness.

Moreover - what is the value of its information when six normal people out of millions of active Twitter users can push a hashtag with a handful of tweets to the top of the dashboard?

But the U.S. media writes long gushing stories about the dashboard and how it somehow shows automated Russian propaganda. They go to length to explain that this shows "Russian influence" and a "Russian" attempt to sow "divisiveness" into people's minds.

This is nuts.

Last August, when the Hamilton 68 project was first released, the Nation was the only site critical of it. It predicted :

The import of GMF's project is clear: Reporting on anything that might put the US in a bad light is now tantamount to spreading Russian propaganda.

It is now even worse than that. The top ranking of the #merrychristmas hashtag shows that the algorithm does not even care about good or bad news. The tracked twitter accounts are normal people.

The whole project is just a means to push fake stories about alleged "Russian influence" into U.S. medias. Whenever some issue creeps up on its dashboard that somehow fits its false "Russian bots" and "divisiveness" narrative the Alliance for Securing Democracy contacts the media to spread its poison. The U.S. media, - CNN, Wired, the New York Times - are by now obviously devoid of thinking journalists and fact checkers. They simple re-package the venom and spread it to the public.

How long will it take until people die from it?

Posted by b on February 20, 2018 at 03:15 PM | Permalink

Comments


nhs , Feb 20, 2018 3:24:03 PM | 1

The truth about 'Russiagate'
Lohmann , Feb 20, 2018 3:32:49 PM | 2
It's all too reminiscent of Duck Soup:

Rufus T. Firefly: I'd be unworthy of the high trust that's been placed in me if I didn't do everything in my power to keep our beloved Freedonia in peace with the world. I'd be only too happy to meet with Ambassador Trentino, and offer him on behalf of my country the right hand of good fellowship. And I feel sure he will accept this gesture in the spirit of which it is offered. But suppose he doesn't. A fine thing that'll be. I hold out my hand and he refuses to accept. That'll add a lot to my prestige, won't it? Me, the head of a country, snubbed by a foreign ambassador. Who does he think he is, that he can come here, and make a sap of me in front of all my people? Think of it - I hold out my hand and that hyena refuses to accept. Why, the cheap four-flushing swine, he'll never get away with it I tell you, he'll never get away with it.

[Trentino enters]

Rufus T. Firefly: So, you refuse to shake hands with me, eh?

[slaps Trentino with his glove]

Ambassador Trentino: Mrs. Teasdale, this is the last straw. There's no turning back now! This means war!

Rufus T. Firefly: Then it's war! Then it's war! Gather the forces. Harness the horses. Then it's war!

Clueless Joe , Feb 20, 2018 3:45:14 PM | 3
"to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe." That's pretty rich, coming from a country and from people who actually genuinely, and in proven ways, have subverted democracy in Europe since the late 1940s - Italy being one of the clearest cases.
ken , Feb 20, 2018 3:46:05 PM | 4
For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia. I can't believe it has to do with the economy. There's got to be a far better nefarious reason. Even during the real cold war we tried to avoid conflict. Absolute insanity.
xor , Feb 20, 2018 4:11:10 PM | 6
The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing.
karlof1 , Feb 20, 2018 4:30:11 PM | 8
Gee, what could go wrong formulating policy founded upon a series of Big Lies? Kim Dotcom says he has important info the FBI refuses to hear. At the Munich Security Conference , neocon Nicholas Burns, former US Ambassador to NATO, details my assertion's factual basis that current policy is being formed on a series of Big Lies: "Will NATO strengthen itself to contain Russian power in Eastern Europe giving what Russian [sic] has done illegally in Crimea, in the Donbass, and in Georgia ?" [Bolded text are the Big Lies.]

Clearly, this entire psyop was premeditated and its design was hastily done contemporaneously with Russia's Syria intervention. NSA/CIA/FBI knew of HRC's security breeches and rightly assumed their contents would find their way into the election, so the general plan was ready to go prior to WikiLeaks publications. b has uncovered much, and I hope he's planning to publish a book about the entire affair.

Jen , Feb 20, 2018 4:54:59 PM | 10
Ken @ 4: There doesn't necessarily need to be One Major Reason for going to war. There may be several reasons all feeding and reinforcing one another and creating a psychological climate in which Going To War is seen as the only solution and is inevitable. The reasons are not just economic and political but cultural and historical.

In some countries allied with the US, the politicians in power are the ideological descendants of those who collaborated with Nazi Germany - so in a sense they are committed to "correcting" what they see as wrong. In the case of current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, he is the grandson of a former prime minister who once served in General Tojo's World War II cabinet.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/12/26/national/formed-in-childhood-roots-of-abes-conservatism-go-deep/#.WoyZCG9uaUk

That's why pinning down the reason for wanting a war against Russia is so difficult.

Partisan , Feb 20, 2018 5:06:58 PM | 11

The whole piece is just hilarious and I laughed out loud all time while reading it.

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/16/nyts-really-weird-russiagate-story/

Since the FBI never inspected the DNC's computers first-hand, the only evidence comes from an Irvine, California, cyber-security firm known as CrowdStrike whose chief technical officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, a well-known Putin-phobe, is a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank that is also vehemently anti-Russian as well as a close Hillary Clinton ally.

Thus, Putin-basher Clinton hired Putin-basher Alperovitch to investigate an alleged electronic heist, and to absolutely no one's surprise, his company concluded that guilty party was Vladimir Putin. Amazing! Since then, a small army of internet critics has chipped away at CrowdStrike for praising the hackers as among the best in the business yet declaring in the same breath that they gave themselves away by uploading a document in the name of "Felix Edmundovich," i.e. Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police.

As noted cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr observed with regard to Russia's two main intelligence agencies: "Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add Iron Felix's name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released it to the world while pretending to be a Romanian hacker. Someone clearly had a wicked sense of humor."

james , Feb 20, 2018 5:17:19 PM | 12
thanks b!

muddy waters.. paid for propaganda.... look at all the russian bots, lol... cold war 2 / mccarthyism 2 is in effect... the historic parallels are marked. thank you neo cons! it's working... the ordinary person in the usa can't be this stupid can they? when does ww3 kick in? is that really what these idiots want? or is it just to prolong the huge defense budget?

Mike Maloney , Feb 20, 2018 5:24:03 PM | 13
This is about conditioning voters in Europe and the United States for a long war with Russia and China. In other words, a return to the 1950s. It is not working and becoming increasingly hysterical because societies are not nearly as cohesive as they once were, and the mainstream political parties, while better funded and more top-down organized, are basically hollow. The collapse is coming. Four years or ten, take your pick.
dh , Feb 20, 2018 5:32:10 PM | 14
@4 "For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia."

Most Americans probably don't. Just the chosen few with the deepest fall-out shelters. The idea is to keep piling the pressure on to countries like Iran and Russia in the hope that their populations will rise up and demand the freedoms that we enjoy in the West....things like uncensored wardrobe malfunctions and transgender washrooms.

Partisan , Feb 20, 2018 6:02:58 PM | 15
"Most Americans probably don't."

not true.

let's imagine that we have the pyramid of evilness, by which we measure bestiality of one regime and its constituency. my firm belief is that us would be on the top of that pyramid. Only dilemma would be between Zionist entity and the US.

"How could the masses be made to desire their own repression?" was the question Wilhelm Reich famously asked in the wake of the Reichstagsbrandverordnung (Reichstag Fire Decree, February 28, 1933), which suspended the civil rights protections afforded by the Weimar Republic's democratic constitution.Hitler had been appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933 and Reich was trying to grapple with the fact that the German people had apparently chosen the authoritarian politics promoted by National Socialism against their own political interests. Ever since, the question of fascism, or rather the question of why might people vote for their own oppression, has never ceased to haunt political philosophy.2 With Trump openly campaigning for less democracy in America -- and with the continued electoral success of far-right antiliberal movements across Europe -- this question has again become a pressing one.

An American people is in perfect harmony with its regime.

CarlD , Feb 20, 2018 6:06:06 PM | 16
Remember the "USS MAINE"!

Media have long agitated for War in US History. Nothing sells newspapers like a good ole war! Demonizing is a way to achieve it. What is sure is that this is a one way street. Once over the cliff, there is no turning back.

How do you tell people that, at the flick of your magic switch, Putin is in fact a swell guy and wonderful human being? Once love is gone who goes back to the filthy, abhorrent and estranged spouse?

Surely the US establishment is playing with fire thinking they will successfully ride out any conflict and come out on top secure in their newly reestablished hegemony on the smoldering ruins of Humanity.

Make no mistake, we are all on the road to hell. Better enjoy todays peace as tomorrow word will be filled with the sweet music of cemeteries.

"Freedom of speech"...

CarlD , Feb 20, 2018 6:12:52 PM | 17
re 16
correction:

Make no mistake, we are all on the road to hell. Better enjoy todays peace as tomorrow's world will be filled with the sweet music of cemeteries.

dh , Feb 20, 2018 6:14:14 PM | 18
@15 "An American people is in perfect harmony with its regime."

I'm not so sure. I think there are many Americans who deeply distrust their government. But of course they don't want to appear unpatriotic. There are also many who are apathetic and many simply don't know how to change things.

SteveK9 , Feb 20, 2018 6:35:58 PM | 19
It's horrible I know to quote a Nazi, but Goring had this right:

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

WorldBLee , Feb 20, 2018 6:36:51 PM | 20
American media has graduated from simply repeating the lies of "unnamed government sources" to repeating the lies of any organization unofficially blessed by the powers that be. The skills required to repeat the text verbatim serve them well in both cases. Skepticism is only reserved to anyone who tries to introduce logic or facts into the equation--such as when Jill Stein was interviewed on MSNBC recently. How dare Ms. Stein try to bring FACTS into the discussion!
chet380 , Feb 20, 2018 6:41:04 PM | 21
In that The Narrative is tightly controlled in the corporate media, not matter how strong the proofs or arguments about the falsity of these propaganda campaigns are, little or no circulation of those proofs or arguments wlll reach the general public.
Sinc , Feb 20, 2018 6:41:57 PM | 22
See info on US 'Twitter' manipulation campaign
Sinc , Feb 20, 2018 6:44:16 PM | 23
Sorry, link here
ken , Feb 20, 2018 6:59:01 PM | 24
Thanks Jen. It still makes no sense. As a veteran of the Vietnam fiasco, I was pretty much government oriented until McNamara outed the whole thing whining about haw sorry he was. 59,000 dead and he's sorry. They were able to hide the Gulf of Tonkin BS until then. After that I researched the reasons for each war/conflict the USA started and could find no logical reasons except hunger for power. But the little sandbox wars won't destroy the world like a major war/conflict with Russia and it goes nuclear. Almost every politician, and major news organizations are pushing for a war/conflict with Russia. This is insanity as no one will win a war like this and I am sure they know that,,, but they keep the war drums beating anyhow. It simply doesn't make sense. But Thanks again.

Same for dh, #14. Things are soooo stupid, your joking may be closer to the truth than you know. :-)

Skip , Feb 20, 2018 6:59:35 PM | 25
@SteveK9 #19

Thank you for the post. I will save it and use it liberally, with proper attributions. When one challenges the tribe on places like Twitter, it is hard to tell who is a real idiot and who is a bot. How do you know? Maybe that the bots go away fairly quickly and the idiots hang around to argue ad infinitum.

oldenyoung , Feb 20, 2018 7:06:23 PM | 26
The thing that bothers me, is the fact that the MICGlobalists dont care what we think or how poor their deceptions are. The public perception that "russia did it!!" continues to rise. I wonder what the public acceptance level needs to be for them to execute a MAJOR false flag event. They seem to think they are still on target, and its just a short matter or time...

They are going to do this when the perception management is complete...

We really do not need another one of their disasters

regards

OY

Grieved , Feb 20, 2018 7:37:47 PM | 27
The bully pushes and pushes until stopped by the first serious push back. The dynamic of the west and the neocon/Zionists at the core is essentially that of the bully. Nations like Venezuela and the Philippines have started to push back, and I hope and feel fairly confident that they will both survive the rage of the US. In some part, they have begun to show the actual powerlessness of the bully.

But the really killer nations - Russia and China - are holding their water as they strengthen their force. I believe that one very serious push back from either of them in the right circumstances will stop the bully. And yet, as they bide their time, we see a curious phenomenon wherein the US is destroying itself from the inside.

It's as if all of the forces that exist to control the country - the lockstep media, the fully rigged markets, the hysterical military, the bought legislature and the crooked courts - are all acting far more strongly than should be necessary. The entire system is over-reacting, over-reaching, over-boiling. And in the course of this, the US is actually shedding power, and at an amazing rate. But not from the action of Russia but from its non-action, the empty space that that allows the bully's dynamic to over-reach, all the way to complete failure.

Is it possible that deep in the security states of Russia and China there's even a study and a model for this? Is the collapse of the US actually being gamed by Russia and China - and through the totally counter-intuitive action of non-action?

Just a thought.

Ghost Ship , Feb 20, 2018 7:51:03 PM | 28
>>>> xor | Feb 20, 2018 4:11:10 PM | 6
The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing.

I've always put it down to the Washington Establishment having a severe case of psychological projection.

WG , Feb 20, 2018 7:52:38 PM | 29
Hey b,
Just wanted to let you know that Joe Lauria mentioned your blog and the article you wrote on the indictment of the 13 Russians. He was on Loud and Clear (Sputnik Radio, Washington DC) today and brought you up at the start of the program.
Glad to see you get some recognition for all the great work you've been doing :)
Mike , Feb 20, 2018 7:53:24 PM | 30
Meanwhile, back in 2010:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/11/when-campaigns-manipulate-social-media/66351/
Jen , Feb 20, 2018 7:53:43 PM | 31
Ken @ 24: The warmongering is not intended to make any sense - not many people are trained in critical thinking and logic, and even when they are, they can be swamped by their own emotions or other people's emotions. Propaganda is intended to appeal to people's emotions and fears. You can try reading works by Edward Bernays - "Crystallizing Public Opinion" (1923) and "Propaganda" (1928) - to see how he uses his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories of the mind to create strategies for manipulating public opinion.
https://archive.org/details/EdwardL.BernaysPropaganda

Bernays' books influenced Nazi and Soviet propaganda and Bernays himself was hired by the US government to justify in the public mind the 1954 US invasion of Guatemala.

You may be aware that Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation which owns the Wall Street Journal, FOX News and 20th Century Fox studios, is also on the Board of Directors of Genie Energy which owns a subsidiary firm that was granted a licence by an Israeli court to explore and drill for oil and natural gas in Syria's (and Israeli-occupied) Golan Heights.

simjam , Feb 20, 2018 7:59:21 PM | 32
The national media speaks as one -with one consistent melody day after day. Who is the conductor?

When will one representative of the mainstream media sing solo? There must be a Ray McGovern somewhere among the flock.

V. Arnold , Feb 20, 2018 8:05:33 PM | 33
Grieved | Feb 20, 2018 7:37:47 PM | 27

Many of my thoughts as well.The U.S.'s greatest fault is its tacit misunderstanding of just what russia is in fact. They utterly fail to understand the Russian character; forged over 800 years culminating with the defeat of Nazi Germany, absorbing horrific losses; the U.S. fails to understand the effect upon the then Soviets, become todays Russians. Even the god's have abandoned the west...

Palloy , Feb 20, 2018 8:52:02 PM | 34
@4 "For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia."

Ever since US Crude Oil peaked its production in 1970, the US has known that at some point the oil majors would have their profitability damaged, "assets" downgraded, and borrowing capacity destroyed. At this point their shares would become worthless and they would become bankrupt. The contagion from this would spread to transport businesses, plastics manufacture, herbicides and pesticide production and a total collapse of Industrial Civilisation.

In anticipation of increasing Crude Oil imports, Nixon stopped the convertibility of Dollars into Gold, thus making the Dollar entirely fiat, allowing them to print as much of the currency as they needed.

They also began a system of obscuring oil production data, involving the DoE's EIA and the OECD's IEA, by inventing an ever-increasing category of Undiscovered Oilfields in their predictions, and combining Crude Oil and Condensate (from gas fields) into one category (C+C) as if they were the same thing. As well the support of the ethanol-from-corn industry began, even though it was uneconomic. The Global Warming problem had to be debunked, despite its sound scientific basis. Energy-intensive manufacturing work was off-shored to cheap labour+energy countries, and Just-in-Time delivery systems were honed.

In 2004 the price of Crude Oil rose from $28 /barrel up to $143 /b in mid-2008. This demonstrated that there is a limit to how much business can pay for oil (around $100 /b). Fracking became marginally economic at these prices, but the frackers never made a profit as over-production meant prices fell to about $60 /b. The Government encourages this destructive industry despite the fact it doesn't make any money, because the alternative is the end of Industrial Civilisation.

Eventually though, there must come a time when there is not enough oil to power all the cars and trucks, bulldozers, farm tractors, airplanes and ships, as well as manufacture all the wind turbines and solar panels and electric vehicles, as well as the upgraded transmission grid. At that point, the game will be up, and it will be time for WW3. So we need to line up some really big enemies, and develop lots of reasons to hate them.

Thus you see the demonisation of Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela for reasons that don't make sense from a normal perspective.

Debsisdead , Feb 20, 2018 8:53:42 PM | 35
I watched bbc news this am in the hope that I would get to see the most awful creature at the 2018 olympics cry her croc tears (long story - a speed skater who cuts off the opposition but has been found out so now when she swoops in front of the others they either skate over her leading to tearful whines from perp about having been 'pushed', or gets disqualified for barging. Last night she got disqualified so as part of my study on whether types like this believe their own bullshit I thought I'd tune in but didn't get that far into the beebs lies)
The bulk of the bulletin was devoted to a 'lets hate Russia' session which featured a quisling who works for the russian arm of BBC (prolly just like cold war days staffed exclusively by MI6/SIS types). This chap, using almost unintelligible english, claimed he had proof at least 50 Russian Mercenaries (question - why are amerikan guns for hire called contractors [remember the Fallujah massacre of 100,000 civilians because amerikan contractors were stupid] yet Russian contractors are called mercenaries by the media?) had been killed in Syria last week. The bloke had evidence of one contractor's death not 50 - the proof was a letter from the Russian government to the guy's mother telling her he didn't qualify for any honours because he wasn't in the Russian military.
The quisling (likely a Ukranian I would say) went on to rabbit about the bloke having also fought in Donbass under contract - to which the 'interviewer (don't ya love it when media 'interview' their own journos - a sure sign that a snippet of toxic nonsense is being delivered) led about how the deceitful Russians had claimed the only Russians fighting in Donbass were contractors - yeah well this bloke was a contractor surely that proves the Russians were telling the truth.
It's not what these propagandists say; they adopt a tone and the audience is meant to hate based on that even when the facts as stated conflict with the media outlet's point of view. Remember the childhood trick of saying "bad dog" ter yer mutt in loving tones - the dog comes to ya tail wagging & licks yer hand. This is that.

The next item was more Syria lies - white helmets footage (altho the beeb is now mostly giving them an alternative name to dodge the facts about white helmets) of bandaged children with flour tipped on their heads.
The evil Syrians and Russians are bombarding Gouta - nary a word about the continuous artillery barrage Gouta has subjected the citizens of Damascus to for the past 4 years, or that the Syrians have repeatedly offered truces and safe passage for civilians. Any injured children need to ask their parents why they weren't allowed to take advantage of the frequent offers of transport out. Maybe the parents are worried 'the resistance' will do its usual and blow up the busloads of children after luring them over with candy.

Anyway I switched off after that so never did learn if little miss cheat had a cry.

[Feb 20, 2018] For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia

Highly recommended!
This post summaries several "alternative" views that many suspect, but can't express as clearly as here.
Feb 20, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Palloy | Feb 20, 2018 8:52:02 PM | 34

@4 "For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia."

Ever since US Crude Oil peaked its production in 1970, the US has known that at some point the oil majors would have their profitability damaged, "assets" downgraded, and borrowing capacity destroyed. At this point their shares would become worthless and they would become bankrupt. The contagion from this would spread to transport businesses, plastics manufacture, herbicides and pesticide production and a total collapse of Industrial Civilisation.

In anticipation of increasing Crude Oil imports, Nixon stopped the convertibility of Dollars into Gold, thus making the Dollar entirely fiat, allowing them to print as much of the currency as they needed.

They also began a system of obscuring oil production data, involving the DoE's EIA and the OECD's IEA, by inventing an ever-increasing category of Undiscovered Oilfields in their predictions, and combining Crude Oil and Condensate (from gas fields) into one category (C+C) as if they were the same thing. As well the support of the ethanol-from-corn industry began, even though it was uneconomic. The Global Warming problem had to be debunked, despite its sound scientific basis. Energy-intensive manufacturing work was off-shored to cheap labour+energy countries, and Just-in-Time delivery systems were honed.

In 2004 the price of Crude Oil rose from $28 /barrel up to $143 /b in mid-2008. This demonstrated that there is a limit to how much business can pay for oil (around $100 /b). Fracking became marginally economic at these prices, but the frackers never made a profit as over-production meant prices fell to about $60 /b. The Government encourages this destructive industry despite the fact it doesn't make any money, because the alternative is the end of Industrial Civilisation.

Eventually though, there must come a time when there is not enough oil to power all the cars and trucks, bulldozers, farm tractors, airplanes and ships, as well as manufacture all the wind turbines and solar panels and electric vehicles, as well as the upgraded transmission grid. At that point, the game will be up, and it will be time for WW3. So we need to line up some really big enemies, and develop lots of reasons to hate them.

Thus you see the demonisation of Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela for reasons that don't make sense from a normal perspective.

[Feb 20, 2018] Russophobia is a futile bid to conceal US, European demise by Finian Cunningham

Highly recommended!
This is an old method to unite the nation against external enemy. Carnage (with so much oil and gas) needs to be destroyed. And it's working only partially with the major divisions between Trump and Hillary supporters remaining open and unaffected by Russiagate witch hunt.
Notable quotes:
"... It is an age-old statecraft technique to seek unity within a state by depicting an external enemy or threat. Russia is the bête noire again, as it was during the Cold War years as part of the Soviet Union. ..."
"... Russophobia -- "blame it all on Russia" -- is a short-term, futile ploy to stave off the day of reckoning when furious and informed Western citizens will demand democratic restitution for their legitimate grievances. ..."
"... The dominant "official" narrative, from the US to Europe, is that "malicious" Russia is "sowing division;""eroding democratic institutions;" and "undermining public trust" in systems of governance, credibility of established political parties, and the news media. ..."
"... A particularly instructive presentation of this trope was given in a recent commentary by Texan Republican Representative Will Hurd. In his piece headlined, "Russia is our adversary" , he claims: "Russia is eroding our democracy by exploiting the nation's divisions. To save it, Americans need to begin working together." ..."
"... He contends: "When the public loses trust in the media, the Russians are winning. When the press is hyper-critical of Congress the Russians are winning. When Congress and the general public disagree the Russians are winning. When there is friction between Congress and the executive branch [the president] resulting in further erosion of trust in our democratic institutions, the Russians are winning." ..."
"... The endless, criminal wars that the US and its European NATO allies have been waging across the planet over the past two decades is one cogent reason why the public has lost faith in grandiose official claims about respecting democracy and international law. ..."
"... The US and European media have shown reprehensible dereliction of duty to inform the public accurately about their governments' warmongering intrigues. Take the example of Syria. When does the average Western citizen ever read in the corporate Western media about how the US and its NATO allies have covertly ransacked that country through weaponizing terrorist proxies? ..."
"... The destabilizing impact on societies from oppressive economic conditions is a far more plausible cause for grievance than outlandish claims made by the political class about alleged "Russian interference". ..."
"... Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV. ..."
Feb 20, 2018 | www.rt.com

Russophobia - "blame it all on Russia" - is a short-term, futile ploy to stave off the day of reckoning when furious and informed Western citizens will demand democratic restitution for their legitimate grievances

It is an age-old statecraft technique to seek unity within a state by depicting an external enemy or threat. Russia is the bête noire again, as it was during the Cold War years as part of the Soviet Union.

But the truth is Western states are challenged by internal problems. Ironically, by denying their own internal democratic challenges, Western authorities are only hastening their institutional demise.

Russophobia -- "blame it all on Russia" -- is a short-term, futile ploy to stave off the day of reckoning when furious and informed Western citizens will demand democratic restitution for their legitimate grievances.

The dominant "official" narrative, from the US to Europe, is that "malicious" Russia is "sowing division;""eroding democratic institutions;" and "undermining public trust" in systems of governance, credibility of established political parties, and the news media.

This narrative has shifted up a gear since the election of Donald Trump to the White House in 2016, with accusations that the Kremlin somehow ran "influence operations" to help get him into office. This outlandish yarn defies common sense. It is also running out of thread to keep spinning.

Paradoxically, even though President Trump has rightly rebuffed such dubious claims of "Russiagate" interference as "fake news", he has at other times undermined himself by subscribing to the notion that Moscow is projecting a campaign of "subversion against the US and its European allies." See for example the National Security Strategy he signed off in December.

Pathetically, it's become indoctrinated belief among the Western political class that "devious Russians" are out to "collapse" Western democracies by "weaponizing disinformation" and spreading "fake news" through Russia-based news outlets like RT and Sputnik.

Totalitarian-like, there seems no room for intelligent dissent among political or media figures.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has chimed in to accuse Moscow of "sowing division;" Dutch state intelligence claim Russia destabilized the US presidential election; the European Union commissioner for security, Sir Julian King, casually lampoons Russian news media as "Kremlin-orchestrated disinformation" to destabilize the 28-nation bloc; CIA chief Mike Pompeo recently warned that Russia is stepping up its efforts to tarnish the Congressional mid-term elections later this year.

On and on goes the narrative that Western states are essentially victims of a nefarious Russian assault to bring about collapse.

A particularly instructive presentation of this trope was given in a recent commentary by Texan Republican Representative Will Hurd. In his piece headlined, "Russia is our adversary" , he claims: "Russia is eroding our democracy by exploiting the nation's divisions. To save it, Americans need to begin working together."

Congressman Hurd asserts: "Russia has one simple goal: to erode trust in our democratic institutions It has weaponized disinformation to achieve this goal for decades in Eastern and Central Europe; in 2016, Western Europe and America were aggressively targeted as well."

Lamentably, all these claims above are made with scant, or no, verifiable evidence. It is simply a Big Lie technique of relentless repetition transforming itself into "fact" .

It's instructive to follow Congressman Hurd's thought-process a bit further.

He contends: "When the public loses trust in the media, the Russians are winning. When the press is hyper-critical of Congress the Russians are winning. When Congress and the general public disagree the Russians are winning. When there is friction between Congress and the executive branch [the president] resulting in further erosion of trust in our democratic institutions, the Russians are winning."

As a putative solution, Representative Hurd calls for "a national counter-disinformation strategy" against Russian "influence operations" , adding, "Americans must stop contributing to a corrosive political environment".

The latter is a chilling advocacy of uniformity tantamount to a police state whereby any dissent or criticism is a "thought-crime."

It is, however, such anti-democratic and paranoid thinking by Western politicians -- aided and abetted by dutiful media -- that is killing democracy from within, not some supposed foreign enemy.

There is evidently a foreboding sense of demise in authority and legitimacy among Western states, even if the real cause for the demise is ignored or denied. Systems of governance, politicians of all stripes, and institutions like the established media and intelligence services are increasingly held in contempt and distrust by the public.

Whose fault is that loss of political and moral authority? Western governments and institutions need to take a look in the mirror.

The endless, criminal wars that the US and its European NATO allies have been waging across the planet over the past two decades is one cogent reason why the public has lost faith in grandiose official claims about respecting democracy and international law.

The US and European media have shown reprehensible dereliction of duty to inform the public accurately about their governments' warmongering intrigues. Take the example of Syria. When does the average Western citizen ever read in the corporate Western media about how the US and its NATO allies have covertly ransacked that country through weaponizing terrorist proxies?

How then can properly informed citizens be expected to have respect for such criminal government policies and the complicit news media covering up for their crimes?

Western public disaffection with governments, politicians and media surely stems also from the grotesque gulf in social inequality and poverty among citizens from slavish adherence to economic policies that enrich the wealthy while consigning the vast majority to unrelenting austerity.

The destabilizing impact on societies from oppressive economic conditions is a far more plausible cause for grievance than outlandish claims made by the political class about alleged "Russian interference".

Yet the Western media indulge this fantastical "Russiagate" escapism instead of campaigning on real social problems facing ordinary citizens. No wonder such media are then viewed with disdain and distrust. Adding insult to injury, these media want the public to believe Russia is the enemy?

Instead of acknowledging and addressing real threats to citizens: economic insecurity, eroding education and health services, lost career opportunities for future generations, the looming dangers of ecological adversity, wars prompted by Western governments trashing international and diplomacy, and so on -- the Western public is insultingly plied with corny tales of Russia's "malign influence" and "assault on democracy."

Just think of the disproportionate amount of media attention and public resources wasted on the Russiagate scandal over the past year. And now gradually emerging is the real scandal that the American FBI probably colluded with the Obama administration to corrupt the democratic process against Trump.

Again, is there any wonder the public has sheer contempt and distrust for "authorities" that have been lying through their teeth and playing them for fools?

The collapsing state of Western democracies has got nothing to do with Russia. The Russophobia of blaming Russia for the demise of Western institutions is an attempt at scapegoating for the very real problems facing governments and institutions like the news media. Those problems are inherent and wholly owned by these governments owing to chronic anti-democratic functioning, as well as systematic violation of international law in their pursuit of criminal wars and other subterfuges for regime-change objectives.

Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.

[Feb 20, 2018] MoA - Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News

Notable quotes:
"... Atlantic Council ..."
"... Alliance for Securing Democracy. ..."
"... Alliance for Securing Democracy ..."
Feb 20, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

"Russian bots" - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News

The U.S. mainstream media are going nuts. They now make up and report stories based on the uncritical acceptance of the outcome of an algorithm they do not understand and which is know to produce fake results.

See for example these three stories:


Russian bot with ancient regalia

From the last link:

SAN FRANCISCO -- One hour after news broke about the school shooting in Florida last week, Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up the gun control debate.

The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network. Some adopted the hashtag #guncontrolnow. Others used #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. Earlier on Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., many of those accounts had been focused on the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

In other words - the "Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia" were following the current news just as cable news networks do. When a new sensational event happened they immediately jumped onto it. But the NYT authors go to length to claim that there is some nefarious Russian scheme behind this that uses automated accounts to spread divisive issues.

Those claims are based on this propaganda project:

Last year, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, in conjunction with the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, created a website that tracks hundreds of Twitter accounts of human users and suspected bots that they have linked to a Russian influence campaign.

The "Alliance for Securing Democracy" is run by military lobbyists, CIA minions and neocons. Its claimed task is:

... to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.

There is no evidence that Vladimir Putin made or makes such efforts.

The ASD "Hamilton 68" website shows graphics with rankings of "top items" and "trending items" allegedly used by Russian bots or influence agents. There is nothing complicate behind it. It simply tracks the tweets of 600 Twitter users and aggregates the hashtags they use. It does not say which Twitter accounts its algorithms follows. It claims that the 600 were selected by one of three criteria: 1. People who often tweet news that also appears on RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik News , two general news sites sponsored by the Russian government; 2. People who "openly profess to be pro-Russian"; 3. accounts that "appear to use automation" to boost the same themes that people in group 1 and 2 tweet about.

Nowhere does the group say how many of the 600 accounts it claims to track belong to which group. Are their 10 assumed bots or 590 in the surveyed 600 accounts? And how please does one "openly profess" to be pro-Russian? We don't know and the ASD won't say.

On December 25 2017 the "Russian influence" agents or bots who, according to NYT, want to sow divisiveness, wished everyone a Merry Christmas.


bigger

The real method the Hamilton 68 group used to select the 600 accounts it tracks is unknown. The group does not say or show how it made it up. Despite that the NYT reporters, Sheera Frenkel and Daisuke Wakabayashi, continue with the false assumptions that most or all the accounts are automated, have something to do with Russia and are presumably nefarious:

Russian-linked bots have rallied around other divisive issues, often ones that President Trump has tweeted about. They promoted Twitter hashtags like #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee after some National Football League players started kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice.

The automated Twitter accounts helped popularize the #releasethememo hashtag , ...

The Daily Beast reported earlier that the emphasized claim is definitely false :

Twitter's internal analysis has thus far found that authentic American accounts, and not Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo. There are no preliminary indications that the Twitter activity either driving the hashtag or engaging with it is either predominantly Russian.

The same is presumably true for the other hashtags.

The Dutch IT specialist and blogger Marcel van den Berg was wondering how Dutch keywords and hashtags showed up in on the Hamilton 68 "Russian bots" dashboard. He found ( Dutch , English auto translation) that the dashboard is a total fraud:

In recent weeks, I have been keeping a close eye on Hamilton 68. Every time a Dutch hashtag was shown on the website, I made a screenshot. Then I noted what was playing at that moment and I watched the Tweets with this hashtag. Again I could not find any Tweet that seemed to be from a Russian troll.

In all cases, the hash tags that Hamilton 68 reported were trending topics in the Netherlands. In all cases there was much to do around the subject of the hashtag in the Netherlands. Many people were angry or shared their opinion on the subject on Twitter. And even if there were a few tweets with Russian connections between them, the effect is zero. Because they do not stand out among the many other, authentic Tweets.

Van den Berg lists a dozen examples he analyzed in depth.

The anti-Russian Bellingcat group around couch blogger Eliot Higgins is sponsored by the NATO propaganda shop Atlantic Council . It sniffs through open source stuff to blame Russia or Syria wherever possible. Bellingcat were recently a victim of the "Russian bots" - or rather of the ASD website. On February 10 the hashtag #bellingcat trended to rank 2 of the dashboard.


bigger

Bellingcat was thus, according to the Hamilton 68 claims, under assault of hordes of nefarious Russian government sponsored bots.

The Bellingcat folks looked into the issue and found that only six people on Twitter, none of them an automated account, had used the #bellingcat hashtag in the last 48 hours. Some of the six may have opinions that may be "pro Russian", but as Higgins himself says :

[I]n my opinion, it's extremely unlikely the people listed are Russian agents

The pro-NATO propaganda shop Bellingcat thus debunked the pro NATO propaganda shop Alliance for Securing Democracy.

The fraudsters who created the Hamilton 68 crap seem to have filled their database with rather normal people who's opinions they personally dislike. Those then are the "Russian bots" who spread "Russian influence" and divisiveness.

Moreover - what is the value of its information when six normal people out of millions of active Twitter users can push a hashtag with a handful of tweets to the top of the dashboard?

But the U.S. media writes long gushing stories about the dashboard and how it somehow shows automated Russian propaganda. They go to length to explain that this shows "Russian influence" and a "Russian" attempt to sow "divisiveness" into people's minds.

This is nuts.

Last August, when the Hamilton 68 project was first released, the Nation was the only site critical of it. It predicted :

The import of GMF's project is clear: Reporting on anything that might put the US in a bad light is now tantamount to spreading Russian propaganda.

It is now even worse than that. The top ranking of the #merrychristmas hashtag shows that the algorithm does not even care about good or bad news. The tracked twitter accounts are normal people.

The whole project is just a means to push fake stories about alleged "Russian influence" into U.S. medias. Whenever some issue creeps up on its dashboard that somehow fits its false "Russian bots" and "divisiveness" narrative the Alliance for Securing Democracy contacts the media to spread its poison. The U.S. media, - CNN, Wired, the New York Times - are by now obviously devoid of thinking journalists and fact checkers. They simple re-package the venom and spread it to the public.

How long will it take until people die from it?

Posted by b on February 20, 2018 at 03:15 PM | Permalink

Comments


nhs , Feb 20, 2018 3:24:03 PM | 1

The truth about 'Russiagate'
Lohmann , Feb 20, 2018 3:32:49 PM | 2
It's all too reminiscent of Duck Soup:

Rufus T. Firefly: I'd be unworthy of the high trust that's been placed in me if I didn't do everything in my power to keep our beloved Freedonia in peace with the world. I'd be only too happy to meet with Ambassador Trentino, and offer him on behalf of my country the right hand of good fellowship. And I feel sure he will accept this gesture in the spirit of which it is offered. But suppose he doesn't. A fine thing that'll be. I hold out my hand and he refuses to accept. That'll add a lot to my prestige, won't it? Me, the head of a country, snubbed by a foreign ambassador. Who does he think he is, that he can come here, and make a sap of me in front of all my people? Think of it - I hold out my hand and that hyena refuses to accept. Why, the cheap four-flushing swine, he'll never get away with it I tell you, he'll never get away with it.

[Trentino enters]

Rufus T. Firefly: So, you refuse to shake hands with me, eh?

[slaps Trentino with his glove]

Ambassador Trentino: Mrs. Teasdale, this is the last straw. There's no turning back now! This means war!

Rufus T. Firefly: Then it's war! Then it's war! Gather the forces. Harness the horses. Then it's war!

Clueless Joe , Feb 20, 2018 3:45:14 PM | 3
"to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe."
That's pretty rich, coming from a country and from people who actually genuinely, and in proven ways, have subverted democracy in Europe since the late 1940s - Italy being one of the clearest cases.
ken , Feb 20, 2018 3:46:05 PM | 4
For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia. I can't believe it has to do with the economy. There's got to be a far better nefarious reason. Even during the real cold war we tried to avoid conflict. Absolute insanity.
foo , Feb 20, 2018 3:59:22 PM | 5
Zomg! Pricey robot!

Keep up the excellent work b.

xor , Feb 20, 2018 4:11:10 PM | 6
The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing.
Bart Hansen , Feb 20, 2018 4:14:00 PM | 7

How much time might the "Alliance for Securing Democracy" spend on uncovering voter suppression and purges, dis-enfrancisement of felons, the closing of polling places, restrictions of early voting, the influence of billionaires, gerrymandering and so on?
karlof1 , Feb 20, 2018 4:30:11 PM | 8
Gee, what could go wrong formulating policy founded upon a series of Big Lies? Kim Dotcom says he has important info the FBI refuses to hear. At the Munich Security Conference , neocon Nicholas Burns, former US Ambassador to NATO, details my assertion's factual basis that current policy is being formed on a series of Big Lies: "Will NATO strengthen itself to contain Russian power in Eastern Europe giving what Russian [sic] has done illegally in Crimea, in the Donbass, and in Georgia ?" [Bolded text are the Big Lies.]

Clearly, this entire psyop was premeditated and its design was hastily done contemporaneously with Russia's Syria intervention. NSA/CIA/FBI knew of HRC's security breeches and rightly assumed their contents would find their way into the election, so the general plan was ready to go prior to WikiLeaks publications. b has uncovered much, and I hope he's planning to publish a book about the entire affair.

john , Feb 20, 2018 4:34:32 PM | 9
How long will it take until people die from it

as long as it takes to flog a dead horse

Jen , Feb 20, 2018 4:54:59 PM | 10
Ken @ 4: There doesn't necessarily need to be One Major Reason for going to war. There may be several reasons all feeding and reinforcing one another and creating a psychological climate in which Going To War is seen as the only solution and is inevitable. The reasons are not just economic and political but cultural and historical.

In some countries allied with the US, the politicians in power are the ideological descendants of those who collaborated with Nazi Germany - so in a sense they are committed to "correcting" what they see as wrong. In the case of current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, he is the grandson of a former prime minister who once served in General Tojo's World War II cabinet.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/12/26/national/formed-in-childhood-roots-of-abes-conservatism-go-deep/#.WoyZCG9uaUk

That's why pinning down the reason for wanting a war against Russia is so difficult.

Partisan , Feb 20, 2018 5:06:58 PM | 11

The whole piece is just hilarious and I laughed out loud all time while reading it.

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/16/nyts-really-weird-russiagate-story/

Since the FBI never inspected the DNC's computers first-hand, the only evidence comes from an Irvine, California, cyber-security firm known as CrowdStrike whose chief technical officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, a well-known Putin-phobe, is a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank that is also vehemently anti-Russian as well as a close Hillary Clinton ally.

Thus, Putin-basher Clinton hired Putin-basher Alperovitch to investigate an alleged electronic heist, and to absolutely no one's surprise, his company concluded that guilty party was Vladimir Putin. Amazing! Since then, a small army of internet critics has chipped away at CrowdStrike for praising the hackers as among the best in the business yet declaring in the same breath that they gave themselves away by uploading a document in the name of "Felix Edmundovich," i.e. Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police.

As noted cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr observed with regard to Russia's two main intelligence agencies: "Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add Iron Felix's name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released it to the world while pretending to be a Romanian hacker. Someone clearly had a wicked sense of humor."

james , Feb 20, 2018 5:17:19 PM | 12
thanks b!

muddy waters.. paid for propaganda.... look at all the russian bots, lol...

cold war 2 / mccarthyism 2 is in effect... the historic parallels are marked. thank you neo cons!

it's working... the ordinary person in the usa can't be this stupid can they?

when does ww3 kick in? is that really what these idiots want? or is it just to prolong the huge defense budget?

Mike Maloney , Feb 20, 2018 5:24:03 PM | 13
This is about conditioning voters in Europe and the United States for a long war with Russia and China. In other words, a return to the 1950s. It is not working and becoming increasingly hysterical because societies are not nearly as cohesive as they once were, and the mainstream political parties, while better funded and more top-down organized, are basically hollow. The collapse is coming. Four years or ten, take your pick.
dh , Feb 20, 2018 5:32:10 PM | 14
@4 "For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia."

Most Americans probably don't. Just the chosen few with the deepest fall-out shelters. The idea is to keep piling the pressure on to countries like Iran and Russia in the hope that their populations will rise up and demand the freedoms that we enjoy in the West....things like uncensored wardrobe malfunctions and transgender washrooms.

Partisan , Feb 20, 2018 6:02:58 PM | 15
"Most Americans probably don't."

not true.

let's imagine that we have the pyramid of evilness, by which we measure bestiality of one regime and its constituency. my firm belief is that us would be on the top of that pyramid. Only dilemma would be between Zionist entity and the US.

"How could the masses be made to desire their own repression?" was the question Wilhelm Reich famously asked in the wake of the Reichstagsbrandverordnung (Reichstag Fire Decree, February 28, 1933), which suspended the civil rights protections afforded by the Weimar Republic's democratic constitution.Hitler had been appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933 and Reich was trying to grapple with the fact that the German people had apparently chosen the authoritarian politics promoted by National Socialism against their own political interests. Ever since, the question of fascism, or rather the question of why might people vote for their own oppression, has never ceased to haunt political philosophy.2 With Trump openly campaigning for less democracy in America -- and with the continued electoral success of far-right antiliberal movements across Europe -- this question has again become a pressing one.

An American people is in perfect harmony with its regime.


CarlD , Feb 20, 2018 6:06:06 PM | 16
Remember the "USS MAINE"!

Media have long agitated for War in US History. Nothing sells newspapers
like a good ole war!

Demonizing is a way to achieve it. What is sure is that this is a one way street.
Once over the cliff, there is no turning back.

How do you tell people that, at the flick of your magic switch, Putin is in fact
a swell guy and wonderful human being? Once love is gone who goes back
to the filthy, abhorrent and estranged spouse?

Surely the US establishment is playing with fire thinking they will successfully
ride out any conflict and come out on top secure in their newly reestablished
hegemony on the smoldering ruins of Humanity.

Make no mistake, we are all on the road to hell. Better enjoy todays peace as
tomorrow word will be filled with the sweet music of cemeteries.

"Freedom of speech"...

CarlD , Feb 20, 2018 6:12:52 PM | 17
re 16
correction:

Make no mistake, we are all on the road to hell. Better enjoy todays peace as
tomorrow's world will be filled with the sweet music of cemeteries.

dh , Feb 20, 2018 6:14:14 PM | 18
@15 "An American people is in perfect harmony with its regime."

I'm not so sure. I think there are many Americans who deeply distrust their government. But of course they don't want to appear unpatriotic. There are also many who are apathetic and many simply don't know how to change things.

SteveK9 , Feb 20, 2018 6:35:58 PM | 19
It's horrible I know to quote a Nazi, but Goring had this right:

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

WorldBLee , Feb 20, 2018 6:36:51 PM | 20
American media has graduated from simply repeating the lies of "unnamed government sources" to repeating the lies of any organization unofficially blessed by the powers that be. The skills required to repeat the text verbatim serve them well in both cases. Skepticism is only reserved to anyone who tries to introduce logic or facts into the equation--such as when Jill Stein was interviewed on MSNBC recently. How dare Ms. Stein try to bring FACTS into the discussion!
chet380 , Feb 20, 2018 6:41:04 PM | 21
In that The Narrative is tightly controlled in the corporate media, not matter how strong the proofs or arguments about the falsity of these propaganda campaigns are, little or no circulation of those proofs or arguments wlll reach the general public.
Sinc , Feb 20, 2018 6:41:57 PM | 22
See info on US 'Twitter' manipulation campaign
Sinc , Feb 20, 2018 6:44:16 PM | 23
Sorry, link here
ken , Feb 20, 2018 6:59:01 PM | 24
Thanks Jen. It still makes no sense. As a veteran of the Vietnam fiasco, I was pretty much government oriented until McNamara outed the whole thing whining about haw sorry he was. 59,000 dead and he's sorry. They were able to hide the Gulf of Tonkin BS until then. After that I researched the reasons for each war/conflict the USA started and could find no logical reasons except hunger for power. But the little sandbox wars won't destroy the world like a major war/conflict with Russia and it goes nuclear. Almost every politician, and major news organizations are pushing for a war/conflict with Russia. This is insanity as no one will win a war like this and I am sure they know that,,, but they keep the war drums beating anyhow. It simply doesn't make sense. But Thanks again.

Same for dh, #14. Things are soooo stupid, your joking may be closer to the truth than you know. :-)

Skip , Feb 20, 2018 6:59:35 PM | 25
@SteveK9 #19

Thank you for the post. I will save it and use it liberally, with proper attributions. When one challenges the tribe on places like Twitter, it is hard to tell who is a real idiot and who is a bot. How do you know? Maybe that the bots go away fairly quickly and the idiots hang around to argue ad infinitum.

oldenyoung , Feb 20, 2018 7:06:23 PM | 26
The thing that bothers me, is the fact that the MICGlobalists dont care what we think or how poor their deceptions are. The public perception that "russia did it!!" continues to rise. I wonder what the public acceptance level needs to be for them to execute a MAJOR false flag event. They seem to think they are still on target, and its just a short matter or time...

They are going to do this when the perception management is complete...

We really do not need another one of their disasters

regards

OY

Grieved , Feb 20, 2018 7:37:47 PM | 27
The bully pushes and pushes until stopped by the first serious push back. The dynamic of the west and the neocon/Zionists at the core is essentially that of the bully. Nations like Venezuela and the Philippines have started to push back, and I hope and feel fairly confident that they will both survive the rage of the US. In some part, they have begun to show the actual powerlessness of the bully.

But the really killer nations - Russia and China - are holding their water as they strengthen their force. I believe that one very serious push back from either of them in the right circumstances will stop the bully. And yet, as they bide their time, we see a curious phenomenon wherein the US is destroying itself from the inside.

It's as if all of the forces that exist to control the country - the lockstep media, the fully rigged markets, the hysterical military, the bought legislature and the crooked courts - are all acting far more strongly than should be necessary. The entire system is over-reacting, over-reaching, over-boiling. And in the course of this, the US is actually shedding power, and at an amazing rate. But not from the action of Russia but from its non-action, the empty space that that allows the bully's dynamic to over-reach, all the way to complete failure.

Is it possible that deep in the security states of Russia and China there's even a study and a model for this? Is the collapse of the US actually being gamed by Russia and China - and through the totally counter-intuitive action of non-action?

Just a thought.

Ghost Ship , Feb 20, 2018 7:51:03 PM | 28
>>>> xor | Feb 20, 2018 4:11:10 PM | 6
The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing.

I've always put it down to the Washington Establishment having a severe case of psychological projection.

WG , Feb 20, 2018 7:52:38 PM | 29
Hey b,
Just wanted to let you know that Joe Lauria mentioned your blog and the article you wrote on the indictment of the 13 Russians. He was on Loud and Clear (Sputnik Radio, Washington DC) today and brought you up at the start of the program.
Glad to see you get some recognition for all the great work you've been doing :)
Mike , Feb 20, 2018 7:53:24 PM | 30
Meanwhile, back in 2010:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/11/when-campaigns-manipulate-social-media/66351/
Jen , Feb 20, 2018 7:53:43 PM | 31
Ken @ 24: The warmongering is not intended to make any sense - not many people are trained in critical thinking and logic, and even when they are, they can be swamped by their own emotions or other people's emotions. Propaganda is intended to appeal to people's emotions and fears. You can try reading works by Edward Bernays - "Crystallizing Public Opinion" (1923) and "Propaganda" (1928) - to see how he uses his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories of the mind to create strategies for manipulating public opinion.
https://archive.org/details/EdwardL.BernaysPropaganda

Bernays' books influenced Nazi and Soviet propaganda and Bernays himself was hired by the US government to justify in the public mind the 1954 US invasion of Guatemala.

You may be aware that Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation which owns the Wall Street Journal, FOX News and 20th Century Fox studios, is also on the Board of Directors of Genie Energy which owns a subsidiary firm that was granted a licence by an Israeli court to explore and drill for oil and natural gas in Syria's (and Israeli-occupied) Golan Heights.

simjam , Feb 20, 2018 7:59:21 PM | 32
The national media speaks as one -with one consistent melody day after day. Who is the conductor?

When will one representative of the mainstream media sing solo? There must be a Ray McGovern somewhere among the flock.

V. Arnold , Feb 20, 2018 8:05:33 PM | 33
Grieved | Feb 20, 2018 7:37:47 PM | 27

Many of my thoughts as well.
The U.S.'s greatest fault is its tacit misunderstanding of just what russia is in fact.
They utterly fail to understand the Russian character; forged over 800 years culminating with the defeat of Nazi Germany, absorbing horrific losses; the U.S. fails to understand the effect upon the then Soviets, become todays Russians.
Even the god's have abandoned the west...

Palloy , Feb 20, 2018 8:52:02 PM | 34
@4 "For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia."

Ever since US Crude Oil peaked its production in 1970, the US has known that at some point the oil majors would have their profitability damaged, "assets" downgraded, and borrowing capacity destroyed. At this point their shares would become worthless and they would become bankrupt. The contagion from this would spread to transport businesses, plastics manufacture, herbicides and pesticide production and a total collapse of Industrial Civilisation.

In anticipation of increasing Crude Oil imports, Nixon stopped the convertibility of Dollars into Gold, thus making the Dollar entirely fiat, allowing them to print as much of the currency as they needed.

They also began a system of obscuring oil production data, involving the DoE's EIA and the OECD's IEA, by inventing an ever-increasing category of Undiscovered Oilfields in their predictions, and combining Crude Oil and Condensate (from gas fields) into one category (C+C) as if they were the same thing. As well the support of the ethanol-from-corn industry began, even though it was uneconomic. The Global Warming problem had to be debunked, despite its sound scientific basis. Energy-intensive manufacturing work was off-shored to cheap labour+energy countries, and Just-in-Time delivery systems were honed.

In 2004 the price of Crude Oil rose from $28 /barrel up to $143 /b in mid-2008. This demonstrated that there is a limit to how much business can pay for oil (around $100 /b). Fracking became marginally economic at these prices, but the frackers never made a profit as over-production meant prices fell to about $60 /b. The Government encourages this destructive industry despite the fact it doesn't make any money, because the alternative is the end of Industrial Civilisation.

Eventually though, there must come a time when there is not enough oil to power all the cars and trucks, bulldozers, farm tractors, airplanes and ships, as well as manufacture all the wind turbines and solar panels and electric vehicles, as well as the upgraded transmission grid. At that point, the game will be up, and it will be time for WW3. So we need to line up some really big enemies, and develop lots of reasons to hate them.

Thus you see the demonisation of Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela for reasons that don't make sense from a normal perspective.

Debsisdead , Feb 20, 2018 8:53:42 PM | 35
I watched bbc news this am in the hope that I would get to see the most awful creature at the 2018 olympics cry her croc tears (long story - a speed skater who cuts off the opposition but has been found out so now when she swoops in front of the others they either skate over her leading to tearful whines from perp about having been 'pushed', or gets disqualified for barging. Last night she got disqualified so as part of my study on whether types like this believe their own bullshit I thought I'd tune in but didn't get that far into the beebs lies)
The bulk of the bulletin was devoted to a 'lets hate Russia' session which featured a quisling who works for the russian arm of BBC (prolly just like cold war days staffed exclusively by MI6/SIS types). This chap, using almost unintelligible english, claimed he had proof at least 50 Russian Mercenaries (question - why are amerikan guns for hire called contractors [remember the Fallujah massacre of 100,000 civilians because amerikan contractors were stupid] yet Russian contractors are called mercenaries by the media?) had been killed in Syria last week. The bloke had evidence of one contractor's death not 50 - the proof was a letter from the Russian government to the guy's mother telling her he didn't qualify for any honours because he wasn't in the Russian military.
The quisling (likely a Ukranian I would say) went on to rabbit about the bloke having also fought in Donbass under contract - to which the 'interviewer (don't ya love it when media 'interview' their own journos - a sure sign that a snippet of toxic nonsense is being delivered) led about how the deceitful Russians had claimed the only Russians fighting in Donbass were contractors - yeah well this bloke was a contractor surely that proves the Russians were telling the truth.
It's not what these propagandists say; they adopt a tone and the audience is meant to hate based on that even when the facts as stated conflict with the media outlet's point of view. Remember the childhood trick of saying "bad dog" ter yer mutt in loving tones - the dog comes to ya tail wagging & licks yer hand. This is that.

The next item was more Syria lies - white helmets footage (altho the beeb is now mostly giving them an alternative name to dodge the facts about white helmets) of bandaged children with flour tipped on their heads.
The evil Syrians and Russians are bombarding Gouta - nary a word about the continuous artillery barrage Gouta has subjected the citizens of Damascus to for the past 4 years, or that the Syrians have repeatedly offered truces and safe passage for civilians. Any injured children need to ask their parents why they weren't allowed to take advantage of the frequent offers of transport out. Maybe the parents are worried 'the resistance' will do its usual and blow up the busloads of children after luring them over with candy.

Anyway I switched off after that so never did learn if little miss cheat had a cry.

[Feb 20, 2018] Nunes FBI and DOJ Perps Could Be Put on Trial

Feb 20, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Paul E. Merrell, J.D. , February 19, 2018 at 5:59 pm

Related news: Kim Dotcom: "Let Me Assure You, The DNC Hack Wasn't Even A Hack", https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-18/kim-dotcom-let-me-assure-you-dnc-hack-wasnt-even-hack (Kim Dot Com claims personal knowledge on who took the DNC emails (Seth Rich) and his lawyers wrote to Mueller twice, offering his testimony, but never heard back from Mueller).

Bob Van Noy , February 19, 2018 at 7:18 pm

Thank you Paul E. Merrell, J.D. I have been convinced from the beginning of all of this that this was the line to Wikileaks. Now if we could only get a real investigation into Seth's murder.

Stop Bush and Clinton , February 19, 2018 at 7:34 pm

"We found that they broke a vast number of laws, did surveillance of a competitor with a warrant based on fake evidence, all adding up to treason worse than Watergate. But we think that no reasonable prosecutor would file charges .." -- The FBI

[Feb 19, 2018] Nunes FBI and DOJ Perps Could Be Put on Trial by Ray McGovern

Highly recommended!
Nunes chances to bring perpetrators to justice are close to zero. The Deep State controls the Washington, DC and can withstand sporadic attacks.
It is an extremly courageous of Devin Nunes to give this interview.
Notable quotes:
"... Throwing down the gauntlet on alleged abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by the Department of Justice and the FBI, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) stated that there could be legal consequences for officials who may have misled the FISA court. "If they need to be put on trial, we will put them on trial," he said. "The reason Congress exists is to oversee these agencies that we created." ..."
"... Nunes took this highly unusual, no-holds-barred stance during an interview with Emmy-award winning investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson , which aired on Sunday. ..."
"... He unapologetically averred that, yes, a criminal trial might well be the outcome. "DOJ and FBI are not above the law," he stated emphatically. "If they are committing abuse before a secret court getting warrants on American citizens, you're darn right that we're going to put them on trial." ..."
"... The stakes are very high. Current and former senior officials -- and not only from DOJ and FBI, but from other agencies like the CIA and NSA, whom documents and testimony show were involved in providing faulty information to justify a FISA warrant to monitor former Trump campaign official Carter Page -- may suddenly find themselves in considerable legal jeopardy. Like, felony territory. ..."
"... On the other hand, the presumptive perps have not run into a chairman like Nunes in four decades, since Congressmen Lucien Nedzi (D-Mich.), Otis Pike (D-NY), and Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) ran tough, explosive hearings on the abuses of a previous generation deep state, including massive domestic spying revealed by quintessential investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in December 1974. (Actually, this is largely why the congressional intelligence oversight committees were later established, and why the FISA law was passed in 1978.) ..."
"... At this point, one is tempted to say plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose ..."
"... One glaring sign of the media's unwillingness to displease corporate masters and Official Washington is the harsh reality that Hersh's most recent explosive investigations, using his large array of government sources to explore front-burner issues, have not been able to find a home in any English-speaking newspaper or journal. ..."
"... On this point, Nunes said, "In the last administration they were unmasking hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of Americans' names. They were unmasking for what I would say, for lack of a better definition, were for political purposes." ..."
"... It is real courageous of Devin Nunes to give this interview. It is not only the accountability to law that is at stake in U.S., but the Whole World is imperiled with what happens in Washington. But as many have written before in comments about this complete moral collapse of the Entire West, I am afraid, it is all going to be swept under the rug. We have to just keep the fingers crossed. ..."
"... I have never seen such media bias against a sitting president in my lifetime, not even against Richard Nixon when they at least practiced decorum and feigned objectivity even if they were secretly cheering on his demise. I will reiterate here that I do not champion the man but rather due process under our constitution, which has been made a travesty from the moment of Clinton's loss at the polls. ..."
"... I completely agree with you Realist. I am not Trump's fan or supporter of his agenda, in fact, in many things quite the opposite of it. However, he raised some very valid points about the the domestic economy and other issues, and about the need to stop interventions in foreign countries, and getting along Russia, and the need to rebuild country's manufacturing system again. He was duly elected by the people, and he should have been given the support to pursue what he promised. But it did not happen. ..."
"... Although it's being done for the wrong reasons, I am nevertheless looking forward to seeing our out-of-control intelligence agencies being put in their place. If I were president and my party controlled both houses of Congress, you'd better believe I'd be looking to dismantle the national surveillance state and reduce the military budget to a "mere" $250 billion annually. ..."
"... The post 9-11 wars of aggression, massive surveillance, torture and other war crimes were sold to the American public as only to be inflicted on foreigners, i.e. "we fight them over there so we don't fight them here." But the blowback has now turned America's schools, malls, workplaces, concerts and churches into war zones and little by little, the disinformation ops, "regime change" know-how and other accoutrements of perpetual war (the fool's errand of gaining full spectrum dominance over the rest of the world) have been turned inward on the American people, including powerful American officials themselves. So it would seem to be a good thing that some politicians like Nunes have finally seen the light exactly as Frank Church did -- only when they themselves began to reap the negative consequences of what they thought would only negatively impact other, lesser people. ..."
"... But there is more to it, as some have pointed out in comments above, there are some intra-party quarrels going on in Washington to take the upper hand. Regarding foreign policy, National Security State and surveillance, and other such issues, both parties are joined at the hip. ..."
"... It is instructive to read the comments on any NYT article on this subject. The comments are clearly written by intelligent, well-educated individuals – who parrot the Deep State's anti-Russian propaganda as if they were the dumbest of the "Better dead than Red!" 50s McCarthyites. ..."
"... The new McCarthyites are actually stupider and more authoritarian than their sad fore-bearers, because they could pierce the Deep States lies with 30 minutes of online research, but they prefer tribalism and ignorance, instead. ..."
"... Trump started going head to head with the intel folks, but has backed down a lot now. Let's hope Nunes et al hang in there and keep the pressure on these despicable criminals who hide behind governmental powers. ..."
"... Somehow I don't think Nunes or his committee is capable of reigning in Frankenstein. His "constitutuents"" are not likely to allow it and although the monster was pieced together from many body parts its instincts for self-preservation are formidable. Nevertheless, I would applaud anyone who makes the effort. ..."
"... Note that after saying the Russians are indicted for interfering in the election, and spending 5 minutes on this, at the 5 minute 20 second mark Rosenstein says there is no evidence that the Russians had any affect [sic] on the election! So what we have is the Deputy Attorney General of the United States announcing an indictment for which he says there is no evidence! ..."
"... In the world of cypher espionage I have no knowledge, but if Russia does hang out in it well then I'm sure the U.S. is already there to do what it must to defend it's cypher security. So that's a wash, but this insane Russia-Gate distraction was originally a way to deflect attention from Hillary & Debbie's putting the screws to Socialist Sanders . then Russia-Gate became a MSM driven coup to oust Trump from his Electoral won presidential office. ..."
"... Impossible to get the whole Gorgon's head, anyway, in such a corrupt system as we have ..."
"... Ray, do you think Trump has made a deal: he'll allow escalations against Russia, and in return the Deep State will leave him alone? If so, does that portend that this will fizzle out? ..."
"... While the shiny ball, smoke and mirrors psychological operation known as "Russiagate" has begun running on fumes before the gas tank finally runs dry, the major revelation of the Clinton WikiLeaks emails describing Saudi/Qatari financing of ISIS drops further down the memory hole. There's nothing like success ..."
Feb 19, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes has stated that "DOJ and FBI are not above the law," and could face legal consequences for alleged abuses of the FISA court, reports Ray McGovern.

Throwing down the gauntlet on alleged abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by the Department of Justice and the FBI, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) stated that there could be legal consequences for officials who may have misled the FISA court. "If they need to be put on trial, we will put them on trial," he said. "The reason Congress exists is to oversee these agencies that we created."

Nunes took this highly unusual, no-holds-barred stance during an interview with Emmy-award winning investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson , which aired on Sunday.

Attkisson said she had invited both Nunes and House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) but that only Nunes agreed. She asked him about Schiff's charge that Nunes' goal was "to put the FBI and DOJ on trial." What followed was very atypical bluntness -- candor normally considered quite unacceptable in polite circles of the Washington Establishment.

Rather than play the diplomat and disavow what Schiff contended was Nunes' goal, Nunes said, in effect, let the chips fall where they may. He unapologetically averred that, yes, a criminal trial might well be the outcome. "DOJ and FBI are not above the law," he stated emphatically. "If they are committing abuse before a secret court getting warrants on American citizens, you're darn right that we're going to put them on trial."

Die Is Cast

The stakes are very high. Current and former senior officials -- and not only from DOJ and FBI, but from other agencies like the CIA and NSA, whom documents and testimony show were involved in providing faulty information to justify a FISA warrant to monitor former Trump campaign official Carter Page -- may suddenly find themselves in considerable legal jeopardy. Like, felony territory.

This was not supposed to happen. Mrs. Clinton was a shoo-in, remember? Back when the FISA surveillance warrant of Page was obtained, just weeks before the November 2016 election, there seemed to be no need to hide tracks, because, even if these extracurricular activities were discovered, the perps would have looked forward to award certificates rather than legal problems under a Trump presidency.

Thus, the knives will be coming out. Mostly because the mainstream media will make a major effort -- together with Schiff-mates in the Democratic Party -- to marginalize Nunes, those who find themselves in jeopardy can be expected to push back strongly.

If past is precedent, they will be confident that, with their powerful allies within the FBI/DOJ/CIA "Deep State" they will be able to counter Nunes and show him and the other congressional investigation committee chairs, where the power lies. The conventional wisdom is that Nunes and the others have bit off far more than they can chew. And the odds do not favor folks, including oversight committee chairs, who buck the system.

Staying Power

On the other hand, the presumptive perps have not run into a chairman like Nunes in four decades, since Congressmen Lucien Nedzi (D-Mich.), Otis Pike (D-NY), and Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) ran tough, explosive hearings on the abuses of a previous generation deep state, including massive domestic spying revealed by quintessential investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in December 1974. (Actually, this is largely why the congressional intelligence oversight committees were later established, and why the FISA law was passed in 1978.)

At this point, one is tempted to say plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose -- or the more things change, the more they stay the same -- but that would be only half correct in this context. Yes, scoundrels will always take liberties with the law to spy on others. But the huge difference today is that mainstream media have no room for those who uncover government crimes and abuse. And this will be a major impediment to efforts by Nunes and other committee chairs to inform the public.

One glaring sign of the media's unwillingness to displease corporate masters and Official Washington is the harsh reality that Hersh's most recent explosive investigations, using his large array of government sources to explore front-burner issues, have not been able to find a home in any English-speaking newspaper or journal. In a sense, this provides what might be called a "confidence-building" factor, giving some assurance to deep-state perps that they will be able to ride this out, and that congressional committee chairs will once again learn to know their (subservient) place.

Much will depend on whether top DOJ and FBI officials can bring themselves to reverse course and give priority to the oath they took to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. This should not be too much to hope for, but it will require uncommon courage in facing up honestly to the major misdeeds appear to have occurred -- and letting the chips fall where they may. Besides, it would be the right thing to do.

Nunes is projecting calm confidence that once he and Trey Gowdey (R-Tenn.), chair of the House Oversight Committee, release documentary evidence showing what their investigations have turned up, it will be hard for DOJ and FBI officials to dissimulate.

In Other News

In the interview with Attkisson, Nunes covered a number of other significant issues:

The committee is closing down its investigation into possible collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign; no evidence of collusion was found. The apparently widespread practice of "unmasking" the identities of Americans under surveillance. On this point, Nunes said, "In the last administration they were unmasking hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of Americans' names. They were unmasking for what I would say, for lack of a better definition, were for political purposes." Asked about Schiff's criticism that Nunes behaved improperly on what he called the "midnight run to the White House," Nunes responded that the stories were untrue. "Well, most of the time I ignore political nonsense in this town," he said. "What I will say is that all of those stories were totally fake from the beginning."

Not since Watergate has there been so high a degree of political tension here in Washington but the stakes for our Republic are even higher this time. Assuming abuse of FISA court procedures is documented and those responsible for playing fast and loose with the required justification for legal warrants are not held to account, the division of powers enshrined in the Constitution will be in peril.

A denouement of some kind can be expected in the coming months. Stay tuned.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Savior in inner-city Washington. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).


Skip Scott , February 19, 2018 at 9:38 am

Thanks Ray for another great article. One can only hope that Nunes is successful. However, like you say, the MSM is now complicit with the "Deep State", so the fight for justice becomes much harder. One also has to remember Schumer's "six ways from Sunday" applies equally to the congress as it does to the president. I hardly ever watch TV news, but recently I've been subjected to it, and I've seen a deluge of fluff pieces on our so-called Intelligence Agencies. I would love to see Trump give a speech (instead of a tweet) directly to the American people letting them know what rascals like Brennan, Clapper, et al have been up to.

Bob Van Noy , February 19, 2018 at 12:51 pm

This may be the best broadcast tv journalism in many years, read Sharyl Attkisson's story, "Stonewalled" (I will link the commentary page to that book for thorough readers). And thank you Nat, Ray McGovern & CN

https://www.amazon.com/Stonewalled-Obstruction-Intimidation-Harassment-Washington/dp/0062322850/ref=sr_1_1/140-4375232-2286101?ie=UTF8&qid=1519058613&sr=8-1&keywords=stonewalled#customerReviews

Dave P. , February 19, 2018 at 2:29 pm

An excellent and very timely article by Ray McGovern. Lawlessness, greed, complete subservience to Wall Street Finance and other Powers, insanity, and utter inhumanity prevails in present day Ruling Establishment in Washington. Obama, "the hope and change" Con Artist for whose election, being democrats we worked so hard in 2008 turned to be the biggest perpetrator of this lawlessness and responsible for fanning the flames still further in starting a new Cold War.

It is real courageous of Devin Nunes to give this interview. It is not only the accountability to law that is at stake in U.S., but the Whole World is imperiled with what happens in Washington. But as many have written before in comments about this complete moral collapse of the Entire West, I am afraid, it is all going to be swept under the rug. We have to just keep the fingers crossed.

Howard Dean just said yesterday that Nunes and people like him belong in jail. Now can you believe it, how low these so called liberal democrats have come to? Looking at the pictures of Adam Schiff, Howard Dean, and others in their company, I literally feel sick in the stomach. And one asks the essential question: "did not their parents teach them any honesty or moral principles in young age?".

Abbybwood , February 19, 2018 at 3:54 pm

But what he said is very confusing. First he says that Congress has no way to prosecute the DOJ/FBI for wrong doing then at the end he says Congress will need to prosecute the DOJ/FBI if necessary. Either Congress has the ability to prosecute the DOJ/FBI and issue indictments and set up Grand Juries or they don't.

Somebody needs to find out, Constitutionally, what the solution is when the DOJ/FBI at the highest levels become the criminals. WHO has the power to indict/convict these individuals??

Sam F , February 19, 2018 at 10:36 pm

A special prosecutor (Mueller's position) is appointed by the Pres or AG.

Annie , February 19, 2018 at 3:20 pm

From what I've heard expressed by a few FBI people, you don't come before a court, but a judge, one person, and they are known to rubber stamp almost everything. So they should be investigated too.

Realist , February 19, 2018 at 5:02 pm

I have never seen such media bias against a sitting president in my lifetime, not even against Richard Nixon when they at least practiced decorum and feigned objectivity even if they were secretly cheering on his demise. I will reiterate here that I do not champion the man but rather due process under our constitution, which has been made a travesty from the moment of Clinton's loss at the polls.

Dave P. , February 19, 2018 at 7:56 pm

I completely agree with you Realist. I am not Trump's fan or supporter of his agenda, in fact, in many things quite the opposite of it. However, he raised some very valid points about the the domestic economy and other issues, and about the need to stop interventions in foreign countries, and getting along Russia, and the need to rebuild country's manufacturing system again. He was duly elected by the people, and he should have been given the support to pursue what he promised. But it did not happen. We would not know now what he actually wanted to accomplish.

Sam F , February 19, 2018 at 10:41 pm

Yes, neither party nor the mass media shows concern for the Constitution or for the people. As the propaganda agency, the mass media are primarily responsible. The zionist/WallSt/MIC oligarchy have consolidated control over mass media, secret agencies, and elections, but not without factions.

Michael , February 19, 2018 at 10:00 am

Although it's being done for the wrong reasons, I am nevertheless looking forward to seeing our out-of-control intelligence agencies being put in their place. If I were president and my party controlled both houses of Congress, you'd better believe I'd be looking to dismantle the national surveillance state and reduce the military budget to a "mere" $250 billion annually.

Joe Tedesky , February 19, 2018 at 11:09 am

Michael I hear ya. Yes, there is a civil war of sorts going on in DC, and yes it would be a wonderful thing to rid our bureaucracy of all the slim that is in it, but taking Jiminy Cricket's good advice to heart would be so much more fruitful to if you and I would only sing;

'When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires will come to you"

Now that song will be stuck in my head all day .got any Journey? Joe

Coleen Rowley , February 19, 2018 at 3:27 pm

It's true that people generally do not care when bad practices, policies or violence is inflicted on others and not on themselves. Of course that's stupid because it's just a matter of time before "blowback" occurs (as the CIA euphemistically labeled how doing unto others eventually boomerangs back on perpetrators). Going back to the Church Committee and how that bit of accountability finally happened, it only got off the ground when Frank Church and other Senators found THEMSELVES in the crosshairs of FBI Cointelpro; CIA's "CHAOS" and NSA's "Minaret" surveillance. http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/09/25/secret-cold-war-documents-reveal-nsa-spied-on-senators/ (To this day, only 7 of the 1000 or so Americans targeted by the NSA during the Vietnam War have been discovered but their identities are telling.)

The post 9-11 wars of aggression, massive surveillance, torture and other war crimes were sold to the American public as only to be inflicted on foreigners, i.e. "we fight them over there so we don't fight them here." But the blowback has now turned America's schools, malls, workplaces, concerts and churches into war zones and little by little, the disinformation ops, "regime change" know-how and other accoutrements of perpetual war (the fool's errand of gaining full spectrum dominance over the rest of the world) have been turned inward on the American people, including powerful American officials themselves. So it would seem to be a good thing that some politicians like Nunes have finally seen the light exactly as Frank Church did -- only when they themselves began to reap the negative consequences of what they thought would only negatively impact other, lesser people.

BobS , February 19, 2018 at 4:50 pm

" the blowback has now turned America's schools, malls, workplaces, concerts and churches into war zones"

"blowback" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, if you're referring specifically to "post 9-11 wars of aggression, massive surveillance, torture and other war crimes". Whenever the incidents have had a political agenda attached, it's more often than not been of the domestic right-wing variety. And of course, all of them have been facilitated by easy civilian access to hardware that was originally developed by the military (ours and the Soviets) to efficiently kill/incapacitate large numbers of enemy fighters.

Gregory Herr , February 19, 2018 at 7:30 pm

BobS fails to understand that blowback encapsulates more than "revenge". "Forever war" and all Colleen mentions that goes with it has had societal impact because violence is glorified as a "solution" and feelings of suspicion and antagonism become part of the dark undertow.

Sam F , February 19, 2018 at 10:54 pm

Well said, Colleen. Let us hope that Nunes is not merely acting the part. I wonder whether the greatest secrets of domestic spying are now so compartmentalized and controlled that only those most dependent upon their agency could blow the whistle.

Annie , February 19, 2018 at 4:23 pm

This is not to be compared to spying on citizens, which is unacceptable, but they tried to undermine a presidency, whether you like Trump or not, and at the same time it allowed them to push their cold war agenda. I remember Clinton's campaign manager coming out right after the e-mail dump that said the Russians did it. And didn't Obama send a lot of those Russian ambassadors packing? They should be investigated, as should the FISA court itself. Perhaps if Trump didn't have this charge of colluding with Russia he might have been able to be more diplomatic on that score. Now, they made sure he would never be getting along with Russia. What they have now is a bunch of Russians acting on their own that allegedly interfered in our elections and created political discord, which is absurd, since the democrats are mainly responsible for this nonsense, as is the FBI and DOJ. I was a democrat, but no more.

Dave P. , February 19, 2018 at 4:52 pm

Annie, you are right on that. However, Coleen Rowely has also made some very good observations in her comments. But there is more to it, as some have pointed out in comments above, there are some intra-party quarrels going on in Washington to take the upper hand. Regarding foreign policy, National Security State and surveillance, and other such issues, both parties are joined at the hip.

Gregory Herr , February 19, 2018 at 7:42 pm

I wouldn't completely discount the idea that Nunes' sense of responsibility has been activated by being a close witness to what is blatant wrongdoing. But then my cynicism is still tempered by the belief that sometimes people are compelled to do what's right just because it's what's right. Silly me.

Virginia , February 19, 2018 at 10:34 am

Me, too, Michael, to " dismantle the national surveillance state and reduce the military budget to a 'mere' $250 billion annually."

Thanks to Ray McGovern for another good article with link to interview. Good to hear they will finally be closing the Mueller investigation (Nunes was straightforward about that, no there there) and will likely be investigating the FBI and DOJ.

Applause goes to David Nunes. Keep up the good work.

Abbybwood , February 19, 2018 at 4:03 pm

But I see where Trump asked for nearly one TRILLION dollars for the military and got it.

Pandas4peace , February 19, 2018 at 10:24 am

Where can we get access to Seymour Hersh's "recent explosive investigations" even if they are written in German?

Cherrycoke , February 19, 2018 at 11:57 am

https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article165905578/Trump-s-Red-Line.html

There is more at the bottom of the page.

Ray McGovern , February 19, 2018 at 12:11 pm

Try this link: http://raymcgovern.com/?s=hersh+welt or simply search on consortiumnews.com webpage.

ray

mike k , February 19, 2018 at 2:54 pm

"On June 25th 2017 the German newspaper, Welt, published the latest piece by Seymour Hersh, countering the "mainstream" narrative around the April 4th 2017 Khan Sheikhoun chemical attack in Syria."

Ray McGovern , February 19, 2018 at 9:35 pm

Ranney,

Please have a look at this: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/06/25/intel-behind-trumps-syria-attack-questioned/

Consortiumnews.com publishes and comments on everything Pulitzer Prize winning Sy Hersh does. The problem is that he is BANNED from English-language pubs -- simply banned and even kept off erstwhile "liberal" TV and radio programs. Amy Goodman, for example, has ALWAYS had Sy on when he had a new story until this one. She would not touch it; these days prefers to go with the "White Helmets" of this world. O Tempora, O Mores. Sad.

So, in sum, the problem is a very basic one. Sy does not publish until he has nailed down every significant detail and, since he is so well plugged in with many longtime, trusted sources to sift through, that takes a while for a bit story -- as all of them are. And when he is ready to publish, he hears folks whisper "Leper" as he gets close to an editorial office. It really IS that bad. We owe the op-ed editor at die Welt our thanks.

Btw: The Consortiumnews.com main page has a SEARCH button that I find very handy. Try to search on Seymour Hersh. Same goes for easily searchable raymcgovern.com, my website.

Ray

David Otness , February 19, 2018 at 5:37 pm

The London Review of Books has been publishing Hersh's work. That's one source.

Ray McGovern , February 19, 2018 at 9:51 pm

David,

Not for his latest of last June. See explanation of LRB cave in at: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/06/25/intel-behind-trumps-syria-attack-questioned/

The ostracizing of Sy Hersh is a major -- if highly depressing -- story in and of itself. But he is irrepressible. I do not think he is going to silently steal away any time soon.

Ray McGovern

Kim Dixon , February 19, 2018 at 10:32 am

Can anyone imagine the Neocon WashPo, or the NYT (or CBS, or CNN, or ) committing actual journalism, as this story progresses?

That, and the DNC's commitment to the DNC to the Russia Did It!™ canard, will ensure that real revelations go nowhere.

It is instructive to read the comments on any NYT article on this subject. The comments are clearly written by intelligent, well-educated individuals – who parrot the Deep State's anti-Russian propaganda as if they were the dumbest of the "Better dead than Red!" 50s McCarthyites.

The new McCarthyites are actually stupider and more authoritarian than their sad fore-bearers, because they could pierce the Deep States lies with 30 minutes of online research, but they prefer tribalism and ignorance, instead.

Lois Gagnon , February 19, 2018 at 1:01 pm

You got that right! I live in the 5 college area in Massachusetts. Plenty of those types around here playing activists. They fit your description. I can't stand to be in the same room with any of them. They may as well be from Mars.

Nancy , February 19, 2018 at 2:47 pm

I agree. The average working person has more common sense than the so-called intelligent, educated class. I suspect their views reflect the fact that they are very comfortable, financially, with the status quo, and don't want any real change.

mike k , February 19, 2018 at 10:35 am

Trump started going head to head with the intel folks, but has backed down a lot now. Let's hope Nunes et al hang in there and keep the pressure on these despicable criminals who hide behind governmental powers. When you allow people to do whatever they want in secret with no oversight, you can expect them to abuse their power. The basic question all this leads to is "who is running this country and making crucial decisions about war and peace, or fascism and democracy"?

BobH , February 19, 2018 at 10:52 am

Somehow I don't think Nunes or his committee is capable of reigning in Frankenstein. His "constitutuents"" are not likely to allow it and although the monster was pieced together from many body parts its instincts for self-preservation are formidable. Nevertheless, I would applaud anyone who makes the effort.

BobH , February 19, 2018 at 6:43 pm

Here's where Mueller's investigation didn't go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-2_Bc_7Pos

Bob Van Noy , February 19, 2018 at 7:11 pm

Thanks BobH, that's an excellent rant, thanks for passing it along.

Joe Tedesky , February 19, 2018 at 10:58 am

The only way any trail that Nunes could even begin to make magically appear to happen before our weary eyes will happen only, and I say only, will appear because it will be good for tv ratings. Enforcing Constitutional law, I mean who does that anymore? Why today in our nation's capital we have congressional people asking the opposite of what Ben Franklin warned us good citizens about as the swamp critters are saying, 'Constitution how can we lose it'. You know this Ray that these crooks and crookettes in DC think that the U.S. Constitution is so passé and so anciently colonial that they hear Jefferson saying, 'ignore this stupid document, I was drunk with Adams and Franklin when I wrote it. It was all a big mistake.' Or something like that, but Constitutional law we don't need no stink'n Constitutional law, now get back to your part time work. (Whip cracking sound)

Hey Ray this whole fiasco does what is most important in this new American century, this fiasco is entertaining and the ratings are going through the roof so with that what more could a red blooded good American ask for now pass the tv remote.

Joe Tedesky , February 19, 2018 at 11:29 am

Paul Craig Roberts may have nailed this thing: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/18/cbs-contradicts-muellers-report/

blimbax , February 19, 2018 at 9:21 pm

Paul Craig Roberts wrote,

Note that after saying the Russians are indicted for interfering in the election, and spending 5 minutes on this, at the 5 minute 20 second mark Rosenstein says there is no evidence that the Russians had any affect [sic] on the election! So what we have is the Deputy Attorney General of the United States announcing an indictment for which he says there is no evidence!

If we take Roberts' statement at face value, he may have inadvertenly mischaracterized Rosenstein's statement. According to Roberts, Rosenstein said there is no evidence of an effect on the election, but it does not follow from that that Rosenstein is saying that there is no evidence of interference. There may have been "interference" that had no impact. And, of course, there is the question, just what is meant by "interference" in this context?

I share the frustration many commenters have about the entire "Russiagate" narrative, but I think it is important to be careful in how we evaluate these statements. It may all be a "nothinburger," but it is important to describe things carefully and correctly. Otherwise, one ends up inadvertently setting up a straw man for someone else to knock down.

Joe Tedesky , February 19, 2018 at 10:25 pm

I share the stress you do blimblax that you and all who stay on this Russia-Gate pay-ops suffer, but the way this crooked nail investigation has been going, mostly distorted by the press coverage, your argument about the interpretation of Rosenstein's words to the general public will be like splitting hairs with bald people . they just won't get it, and why, because I'm not sure the vast amount of Americans get it now. They got turned off along time ago back when the FBI didn't produce Trump performing his much heard about Steele Dossier acclaimed Water Sports in his Moscow Obama's Presidential Suite sick, yes, but it's the truth. No pictures, no believe you.

Personally I have never doubted any Russian influence in the way of statements, or essays, but this contribution of opinion is to be expected from any well thinking country, or nation if you'd rather of the world. Plus the Russians spending wasn't even close to any real fraction of what both U.S. Presidential candidate spend on their campaigns, get real.

In the world of cypher espionage I have no knowledge, but if Russia does hang out in it well then I'm sure the U.S. is already there to do what it must to defend it's cypher security. So that's a wash, but this insane Russia-Gate distraction was originally a way to deflect attention from Hillary & Debbie's putting the screws to Socialist Sanders . then Russia-Gate became a MSM driven coup to oust Trump from his Electoral won presidential office.

We could argue to how Trump,should be questioned, or even brought up on impeachment charges, but not for this particular Russia interference into our so well guarded American democracy. In fact we Americans don't need any Russian help at bringing our American democracy down, because we Americans already did that with the Patriot Act as among a few many other things. Joe

Joe Tedesky , February 19, 2018 at 11:59 am

Here is a rant by Charles Hugh Smith: http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2018/02/russian-meddling-gagging-on-irony.html

SocraticGadfly , February 19, 2018 at 1:35 pm

Neither Dems nor GOP truly care about the First Amendment. Ray won't write about that. I have, re the Mueller indictments: http://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2018/02/internet-research-agency-butt-hurt.html

Joe Tedesky , February 19, 2018 at 2:14 pm

That was a terrific read, and so is this: http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/02/mueller-indictement-the-russian-influence-is-a-commercial-marketing-scheme.html#more

Enjoy. Joe

Bill , February 19, 2018 at 11:48 am

Somehow many Democrats are convinced that the FBI/DOJ did nothing wrong with regards to the FISA warrants. And they're still convinced that Trump colluded with Putin. Nothing will change their minds, it's hopeless.

Lois Gagnon , February 19, 2018 at 4:17 pm

It is indeed surreal to watch people who classify themselves as the left undermining the left by supporting the very agencies whose sole purpose from their inception is to destroy the left.

As David William Pear put it at OpEd News, "I don't think even Orwell has a scene like this: anti-authoritarian dissidents endorse more authoritarian means to weed out authoritarians resulting in authoritarians having more control to weed out dissidents."

I have a headache.

Jessika , February 19, 2018 at 11:55 am

The Deep State is very, very deep, and we're "Knee Deep in the Big Muddy" (Pete Seeger). Anybody knows the US Deep State was thoroughly entrenched by Reagan's time. It's overdue not to let this deep state corruption harden to concrete. I support neither party until there is a course correction, and Nunes makes valid points in support of a correction. Thanks, Ray.

BobS , February 19, 2018 at 11:58 am

Thin skinned too, eh Ray?
You're right, of course- Russia analysts at the CIA did stellar work in the 1980s.

Joe Tedesky , February 19, 2018 at 12:01 pm

No BobS it's you with your thickhead that doesn't get it. Keep it up BobS, because eventually you are going to say something funny. Take care. Joe

SocraticGadfly , February 19, 2018 at 1:34 pm

Ray continues to engage in two-siderism. He ignores digging into legit critiques of Mueller, as I have. http://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2018/02/internet-research-agency-butt-hurt.html

Charles Misfeldt , February 19, 2018 at 11:58 am

Will Nunes or any conservative go after the thousands of illegal acts perpetrated by conservatives??? NO! Nunes, along with every conservative traitor in America (republican or democrat) needs to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The conservative agenda is not moral or constitutional.

BobS , February 19, 2018 at 1:09 pm

Considering their disregard for law as well as their worship of authoritarianism (exercised against the proper targets, of course), I'd say it's more than "self-enrichment" that drives conservatives, both ancient and modern.

Deniz , February 19, 2018 at 1:58 pm

Perhaps that is an issue, but I am unclear precisely what is wrong in Nunes position that he is relying on Gowdy, an undeniably sharp, precise, prosecutor, to review the examined material. Watching both Nunes and Gowdy in sessions, I would have probably, and gladly, made the same decision. It also make sense politically that they cover for each other, one person is expendable and takes the heat – Nunes, while the other – Gowdy, an upward star of the party, who probably ran the whole investigation anyway, keeps his hands clean.

BobS , February 19, 2018 at 2:09 pm

The always partisan "upward star" Trey 'BENGHAZI!!!' Gowdy announced his retirement from congress last month due to his being "sick of hyper-partisanship". And let me show you this bridge I'm selling

Deniz , February 19, 2018 at 2:32 pm

In fact, I would greatly enjoy a discussion on weapons transfers from Libya to Erdogan to Al – Qaeda via Clinton. This is actually one of my favorite topics. So have it.

Deniz , February 19, 2018 at 5:34 pm

So what is your argument, that we should be loyal to our crime family and not theirs?

Or do you think Hillary, "We came, we saw, he died" or Mueller, of nothing to see here on 9/11 notoriety are the sort of people we should be defending.

Jessika , February 19, 2018 at 12:07 pm

Impossible to get the whole Gorgon's head, anyway, in such a corrupt system as we have. Why else are we in such a mess? Both GOP and Democrats have not served the people, so we should therefore give up trying to address any abuse?

Antiwar7 , February 19, 2018 at 12:35 pm

Ray, do you think Trump has made a deal: he'll allow escalations against Russia, and in return the Deep State will leave him alone? If so, does that portend that this will fizzle out?

Gregory Herr , February 19, 2018 at 8:14 pm

So you are privy to the briefings in question. Just because Reagan bloated the military budget doesn't mean he was being fed false intelligence by McGovern.

On the other hand, it is well publicized that Cheney twisted arms at Langley and Tenet obliged and Rummy worked the Iraq angle as well. We also had the Downing Street Memo and the Powell fiasco and Valerie Plame. Ray was right to be indignant.

Jerry Alatalo , February 19, 2018 at 3:50 pm

While the shiny ball, smoke and mirrors psychological operation known as "Russiagate" has begun running on fumes before the gas tank finally runs dry, the major revelation of the Clinton WikiLeaks emails describing Saudi/Qatari financing of ISIS drops further down the memory hole. There's nothing like success

Drew Hunkins , February 19, 2018 at 3:59 pm

Good point Mr. Alatalo. The Saudi-Zio Terror Network gets away with murder, literally and figuratively and of course the Saudi-Zio Terror Network NEVER, EVER interferes in ANY elections in the United States, no never.

(sarcasm)

Paul E. Merrell, J.D. , February 19, 2018 at 5:59 pm

Related news: Kim Dotcom: "Let Me Assure You, The DNC Hack Wasn't Even A Hack", https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-18/kim-dotcom-let-me-assure-you-dnc-hack-wasnt-even-hack (Kim Dot Com claims personal knowledge on who took the DNC emails (Seth Rich) and his lawyers wrote to Mueller twice, offering his testimony, but never heard back from Mueller).

Bob Van Noy , February 19, 2018 at 7:18 pm

Thank you Paul E. Merrell, J.D. I have been convinced from the beginning of all of this that this was the line to Wikileaks. Now if we could only get a real investigation into Seth's murder.

Stop Bush and Clinton , February 19, 2018 at 7:34 pm

"We found that they broke a vast number of laws, did surveillance of a competitor with a warrant based on fake evidence, all adding up to treason worse than Watergate. But we think that no reasonable prosecutor would file charges .." -- The FBI

[Feb 19, 2018] The Russiagate Intelligence Wars What We Do and Don't Know

Highly recommended!
Mueller was the person responsible for investigation of 911. That fact alone tells you all as for what we can expect.
Notable quotes:
"... NO actual physical proof has been presented to the public to substantiate claims that Russia hacked the DNC ..."
"... There is NO proof (only allegations) of collusion between Trump's campaign and the Kremlin ..."
"... Social media efforts by Russian trolls to influence the election were minimal in the extreme, laughably amateurish and completely ineffective ..."
"... Glenn Greenwald has spent the past year documenting in detail the large volume of fake anti-Russian "news" generated by the MSM (see GG at The Intercept) ..."
"... There is NO connection between the Russian government and the 13 private citizens recently indicted for their pathetic and ineffectual activity as part of a troll farm ..."
"... Thanks to the paranoid, xenophobic, Russia-bashing nationalistic propaganda that is being promoted by our military-industrial-intelligence-media complex, the U.S. now believes it is acceptable to launch a first strike nuclear attack in retaliation for breeches of cyber security ..."
"... Trump won't be impeached over Russiagate for the simple reason that Russiagate is nothing but a psyops perpetrated against the American people by the national-security bureaucracy (and their corporate media propagandists) for the purposes of reigniting a second Cold War and maintaining U.S. global hegemony. ..."
"... Thanks to the hysterical McCarthyism now rampant among Democrats - and that is being used to great effect by Washington's bipartisan neocon warmongers - we may just end up in a nuclear war. The good news: it will be a short war and the Democrats will never have to accept responsibility for Clinton's loss. ..."
"... How about that Clinton got the CIA to partner with neo-Nazis in Ukraine to stage a coup, kick out Putin's friend, and install a billionaire capitalist as President? - something the media never mentions. ..."
"... Ultimately, I see the Russia story as getting its legs from the efforts of the dominant Hillary wing of the Democratic party, backed by big media, to continue to assert that Hillary really won the presidency in 2016, and that their wing should continue to have control of the party. ..."
"... That an immensely dangerous war fever is being whipped up in the process is of no importance to them. And, by no means incidentally, they are ignoring all of the real atrocities being committed by the Trump administration against the American people and the earth's environment. ..."
"... It has been thus since the creep moved into the White House. Dreyfuss, perky Rachel Maddow, Colbert, Maher, and many others have been the true "useful idiots". ..."
"... This same media never gave Sanders any media exposure during the primary. ..."
"... I would add that the election manipulations which the Clinton forces engaged in to defeat Sanders during the Democratic primaries dwarfs, by orders of magnitude, anything alleged against the Russians by even the most hawkish backers of the Russia probe. ..."
"... tweet by Peter Van Buren, former US foreign intelligence officer "Just did a quick read of the '13 Russian' indictment. Missing are a) any connections between the 13 and the Russian government and/or Trump campaign; b) any discussion of the impact (if any) their social media efforts had. It describes them buying Facebook ads, but nothing about if it affected votes; c) no connection shown between any of this and DNC, Wikileaks, hacking of emails; d) no discussion of motive; e) assumption that anything anti-Clinton was defacto pro-Bernie and/or pro-Trump. And all indicted persons are Russians, and outside the U.S., so highly unlikely this is going anywhere further legally. ..."
"... BTW, today the media put up that scumbag Podesta as a spokesperson for the Democrats. ..."
"... Seems that the end justifies the means. No matter what is the truth. In the mean-time, they're actually harming the opposition to Trump. I suppose nobody asked Podesta why the DNC never offered their computers for FBI forensics. ..."
"... The MSM never asks the hard questions anymore. It seems all pre-scripted and sanitized for corporate media. ..."
"... It's been a year since Mueller went to work and what's he got? A couple of Republican political operatives being political operatives. Their crime was not reporting to the USG that they were working for Ukraine. Now we're down to social media posts. You're probably one of those people who say, I saw it on the internet so it must be true. If the government is going to be upset about crap they see on social media from foreign parties, they need to start by telling said social media that they can't solicit advertising from foreign entities with political overtones as facebook did of RT. ..."
"... So we are going to limit global free speech by spending $Trillions more on building a nuclear arsenal - total madness - driven by [un] Democratic whining. ..."
"... Apparently, it comes down to trolls who planted various "fake news" stories. Stipulate to all of that; the worst of it. How does THAT begin to stack–up against the murderous coup that the USA OPENLY fomented in the Ukraine a couple of years earlier by bankrolling dozens of Non-governmental organizations whose sole purpose was "regime change"? ..."
"... Maybe come back to me about all of this when the FBI can convincingly prove that the Russian government armed and funded a Neo–nazi para–military group that assaulted and burned–down the North Carolina State House. ..."
"... You mean like Clinton and the CIA did in Ukraine, for economic domination over Russia, don't you? ..."
"... Tell me, as soon as you can, when having skepticism on the Russia/Election Meddling story is finally permitted. I heard tell, we've lately dropped the "Treason" narration. Now the spin du jour is that Trump & Co were all duped by them clever Ruskies. Whatever floats your boat. ..."
"... Stephen Cohen's take on Russiagate makes a lot of sense, to me. I've followed Russia/soviet/US relations very closely since Gorbachev. Open your eyes, Mattis has labeled Russia our mortal enemy, we just upped defense spending to an obscene level that shall keep our schools, hospitals, social services, and infrastructure in their bad state. ..."
Feb 19, 2018 | www.thenation.com

Cara Marianna says: February 19, 2018 at 4:36 pm

Here's what we know:

  1. NO actual physical proof has been presented to the public to substantiate claims that Russia hacked the DNC
  2. There is NO proof (only allegations) of collusion between Trump's campaign and the Kremlin
  3. Social media efforts by Russian trolls to influence the election were minimal in the extreme, laughably amateurish and completely ineffective
  4. Glenn Greenwald has spent the past year documenting in detail the large volume of fake anti-Russian "news" generated by the MSM (see GG at The Intercept)
  5. There is NO connection between the Russian government and the 13 private citizens recently indicted for their pathetic and ineffectual activity as part of a troll farm
  6. Thanks to the paranoid, xenophobic, Russia-bashing nationalistic propaganda that is being promoted by our military-industrial-intelligence-media complex, the U.S. now believes it is acceptable to launch a first strike nuclear attack in retaliation for breeches of cyber security

Read number six again and think about it. The U.S. is ready and willing to launch a preemptive nuclear attack against any nation it accuses of undermining our cyber security - no proof necessary. The Democratic establishment, which has spent the past year engaging in baseless Kremlin-baiting (and very little else), is directly responsible for this insanity.

Trump won't be impeached over Russiagate for the simple reason that Russiagate is nothing but a psyops perpetrated against the American people by the national-security bureaucracy (and their corporate media propagandists) for the purposes of reigniting a second Cold War and maintaining U.S. global hegemony.

Thanks to the hysterical McCarthyism now rampant among Democrats - and that is being used to great effect by Washington's bipartisan neocon warmongers - we may just end up in a nuclear war. The good news: it will be a short war and the Democrats will never have to accept responsibility for Clinton's loss.

Fred Caruso says: February 18, 2018 at 9:30 pm

Who gives a shit really?

How about that Clinton got the CIA to partner with neo-Nazis in Ukraine to stage a coup, kick out Putin's friend, and install a billionaire capitalist as President? - something the media never mentions.

Caleb Melamed says: February 18, 2018 at 9:12 am

As I open the online edition of The Nation this morning, there are two lead stories. One of them tells how Trump is planning to evict 5 million poor people from public housing. A very important story.

The second story by Bob Dreyfuss is probably the 10,000th one I've seen about the Russia probe. The public housing story is obviously much more important and substantial, yet the Democrats have been focusing almost exclusively on the flimsy Russia probe. Not even the pressing need to regulate assault rifles has really grabbed their full attention, even in the wake of the latest dreadful Florida high school massacre. In perusing the news stories this Sunday morning, the Russia probe continues to hold first place in coverage by a big margin.

Ultimately, I see the Russia story as getting its legs from the efforts of the dominant Hillary wing of the Democratic party, backed by big media, to continue to assert that Hillary really won the presidency in 2016, and that their wing should continue to have control of the party.

That an immensely dangerous war fever is being whipped up in the process is of no importance to them. And, by no means incidentally, they are ignoring all of the real atrocities being committed by the Trump administration against the American people and the earth's environment.

Clark M Shanahan says: February 18, 2018 at 9:52 am

Amen, Caleb
It has been thus since the creep moved into the White House. Dreyfuss, perky Rachel Maddow, Colbert, Maher, and many others have been the true "useful idiots".

Fred Caruso says: February 18, 2018 at 9:33 pm

This same media never gave Sanders any media exposure during the primary.

Caleb Melamed says: February 18, 2018 at 9:42 am

I would add that the election manipulations which the Clinton forces engaged in to defeat Sanders during the Democratic primaries dwarfs, by orders of magnitude, anything alleged against the Russians by even the most hawkish backers of the Russia probe.

Clark M Shanahan says: February 18, 2018 at 8:24 am

FYI
tweet by Peter Van Buren, former US foreign intelligence officer "Just did a quick read of the '13 Russian' indictment. Missing are a) any connections between the 13 and the Russian government and/or Trump campaign; b) any discussion of the impact (if any) their social media efforts had. It describes them buying Facebook ads, but nothing about if it affected votes; c) no connection shown between any of this and DNC, Wikileaks, hacking of emails; d) no discussion of motive; e) assumption that anything anti-Clinton was defacto pro-Bernie and/or pro-Trump. And all indicted persons are Russians, and outside the U.S., so highly unlikely this is going anywhere further legally.

Fred Caruso says: February 18, 2018 at 9:37 pm

There is nothing illegal or unethical about any individual of government supporting one candidate over another. BTW, today the media put up that scumbag Podesta as a spokesperson for the Democrats.

Clark M Shanahan says: February 19, 2018 at 9:02 am

Seems that the end justifies the means. No matter what is the truth. In the mean-time, they're actually harming the opposition to Trump. I suppose nobody asked Podesta why the DNC never offered their computers for FBI forensics.

Fred Caruso says: February 19, 2018 at 12:31 pm

The MSM never asks the hard questions anymore. It seems all pre-scripted and sanitized for corporate media.

Richard Phelps says: February 18, 2018 at 2:52 am

There is one issue that no media is talking about regarding the "memos". Trump is clearly a "person of interest", if not a suspect in some parts of the investigation. Given Trump's entanglement how is it not an absolute conflict of interest for Trump being the person who decides what memos get to be public and what redactions must be made.

Imagine a judge being a suspect in a crime or a major stockholder in a corporate civil suit. S/he would never be allowed to make any rulings on what evidence the jury gets to see or anything about the case. Some non-interested 3rd party needs to make those decisions.

Fred Caruso says: February 18, 2018 at 9:38 pm

Quit feeding this beast.

Jeffrey Harrison says: February 16, 2018 at 8:15 pm

The other interesting and fun fact not mentioned anywhere. Three Names won by 3 million votes. Crafty Ruskis.

Carla Skidmore says: February 16, 2018 at 7:33 pm

This investigation by Mueller is just beginning. In other words, and to use the vernacular, "We "ain't seen nothing," yet."

Fred Caruso says: February 18, 2018 at 9:40 pm

You are right. This is nothing but bullshit and it may be just the beginning. The Democrats have an endless supply of donkey-shit.

Jeffrey Harrison says: February 16, 2018 at 6:08 pm

It's interesting that the Russians set this all up to boost Trump and disparage Three Names before Trump even announced he was running. The basic set up for this was going on in 2014 whereas Trump announced in 2015.

Carla Skidmore says: February 16, 2018 at 7:29 pm

No, not really. Trump was making gestures of interest in the presidency in 2012

Clark M Shanahan says: February 18, 2018 at 10:28 am

Since when have you been so trusting of our FBI & CIA, Carla? From what we've experienced together from the Gulf of Tonkin onward, I'm a wee-tad taken aback. Please read the ex-foreign intelligence officer's twitter posting that I posted above.

Jeffrey Harrison says: February 16, 2018 at 8:30 pm

Pfui. He also made noises about running in the 2012 election. People don't set up organizations to do stuff just on the off chance that some politician or wannabe is going to run. These guys ain't got nothin'. It's been a year since Mueller went to work and what's he got? A couple of Republican political operatives being political operatives. Their crime was not reporting to the USG that they were working for Ukraine. Now we're down to social media posts. You're probably one of those people who say, I saw it on the internet so it must be true. If the government is going to be upset about crap they see on social media from foreign parties, they need to start by telling said social media that they can't solicit advertising from foreign entities with political overtones as facebook did of RT.

Fred Caruso says: February 19, 2018 at 3:35 pm

So we are going to limit global free speech by spending $Trillions more on building a nuclear arsenal - total madness - driven by [un] Democratic whining.

Francis Louis Szot says: February 16, 2018 at 6:05 pm

Apparently, it comes down to trolls who planted various "fake news" stories. Stipulate to all of that; the worst of it. How does THAT begin to stack–up against the murderous coup that the USA OPENLY fomented in the Ukraine a couple of years earlier by bankrolling dozens of Non-governmental organizations whose sole purpose was "regime change"?

Maybe come back to me about all of this when the FBI can convincingly prove that the Russian government armed and funded a Neo–nazi para–military group that assaulted and burned–down the North Carolina State House.

Fred Caruso says: February 19, 2018 at 3:37 pm

You mean like Clinton and the CIA did in Ukraine, for economic domination over Russia, don't you?

Clark M Shanahan says: February 16, 2018 at 3:44 pm

I'm hoping the hush-money passed on to two of Trump's romantic caprices, during the election, gets traction.

Tell me, as soon as you can, when having skepticism on the Russia/Election Meddling story is finally permitted. I heard tell, we've lately dropped the "Treason" narration. Now the spin du jour is that Trump & Co were all duped by them clever Ruskies. Whatever floats your boat.

Clark M Shanahan says: February 17, 2018 at 10:13 am

Yes David, I'm still a skeptic. In fact, I think this move to indict 13 suspects, that have a snowball in Hell's chance of ever being tried, is simply a dog and pony show to placate the public. Debrief yourself, read Binney's report and listen to Stephen F Cohen's latest, here on the Nation.

Clark M Shanahan says: February 17, 2018 at 5:25 pm

Stephen Cohen's take on Russiagate makes a lot of sense, to me. I've followed Russia/soviet/US relations very closely since Gorbachev. Open your eyes, Mattis has labeled Russia our mortal enemy, we just upped defense spending to an obscene level that shall keep our schools, hospitals, social services, and infrastructure in their bad state.

As if Hill, who stole the primaries actually ran a competent campaign.

[Feb 19, 2018] Kim Dotcom Let Me Assure You, The DNC Hack Wasn t Even A Hack Zero Hedge

Notable quotes:
"... All fucking Kabuki. All of it. ..."
"... The Deep State (Oligarchs and the MIC) is totally fucking loving this: they have Trump and the GOP giving them everything they ever wanted and they have the optics and distraction of an "embattled" president that claims to be against or a victim of the "deep state" and a base that rally's, circles the wagons around him, and falls for the narrative. ..."
"... They know exactly who it was with the memory stick, there is always video of one form or another either in the data center or near the premises that can indicate who it was. They either have a video of Seth Rich putting the stick into the server directly, or they at least have a video of his car entering and leaving the vicinity of the ex-filtration. ..."
"... This would have been an open and shut case if shillary was not involved. Since it was involved, you can all chalk it up to the Clinton body count. I pray that it gets justice. It and the country, the world - needs justice. ..."
Feb 19, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Kim Dotcom: "Let Me Assure You, The DNC Hack Wasn't Even A Hack"

by Tyler Durden Mon, 02/19/2018 - 07:51 3.4K SHARES

Kim Dotcom has once again chimed in on the DNC hack, following a Sunday morning tweet from President Trump clarifying his previous comments on Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

In response, Dotcom tweeted " Let me assure you, the DNC hack wasn't even a hack. It was an insider with a memory stick. I know this because I know who did it and why," adding "Special Counsel Mueller is not interested in my evidence. My lawyers wrote to him twice. He never replied. 360 pounds! " alluding of course to Trump's "400 pound genius" comment.

Dotcom's assertion is backed up by an analysis done last year by a researcher who goes by the name Forensicator , who determined that the DNC files were copied at 22.6 MB/s - a speed virtually impossible to achieve from halfway around the world, much less over a local network - yet a speed typical of file transfers to a memory stick.

The local transfer theory of course blows the Russian hacking narrative out of the water, lending credibility to the theory that the DNC "hack" was in fact an inside job, potentially implicating late DNC IT staffer, Seth Rich.

John Podesta's email was allegely successfully "hacked" (he fell victim to a phishing scam ) in March 2016, while the DNC reported suspicious activity (the suspected Seth Rich file transfer) in late April, 2016 according to the Washington Post.

On May 18, 2017, Dotcom proposed that if Congress includes the Seth Rich investigation in their Russia probe, he would provide written testimony with evidence that Seth Rich was WikiLeaks' source.

On May 19 2017 Dotcom tweeted "I knew Seth Rich. I was involved"

Three days later, Dotcom again released a guarded statement saying "I KNOW THAT SETH RICH WAS INVOLVED IN THE DNC LEAK," adding:

"I have consulted with my lawyers. I accept that my full statement should be provided to the authorities and I am prepared to do that so that there can be a full investigation. My lawyers will speak with the authorities regarding the proper process.

If my evidence is required to be given in the United States I would be prepared to do so if appropriate arrangements are made. I would need a guarantee from Special Counsel Mueller, on behalf of the United States, of safe passage from New Zealand to the United States and back. In the coming days we will be communicating with the appropriate authorities to make the necessary arrangements. In the meantime, I will make no further comment."

Dotcom knew.

While one could simply write off Dotcom's claims as an attention seeking stunt, he made several comments and a series of tweets hinting at the upcoming email releases prior to both the WikiLeaks dumps as well as the publication of the hacked DNC emails to a website known as "DCLeaks."

In a May 14, 2015 Bloomberg article entitled "Kim Dotcom: Julian Assange Will Be Hillary Clinton's Worst Nightmare In 2016 ": "I have to say it's probably more Julian," who threatens Hillary, Dotcom said. " But I'm aware of some of the things that are going to be roadblocks for her ."

Two days later, Dotcom tweeted this:

Around two months later, Kim asks a provocative question

Two weeks after that, Dotcom then tweeted "Mishandling classified info is a crime. When Hillary's emails eventually pop up on the internet who's going to jail?"

It should thus be fairly obvious to anyone that Dotcom was somehow involved, and therefore any evidence he claims to have, should be taken seriously as part of Mueller's investigation. Instead, as Dotcom tweeted, "Special Counsel Mueller is not interested in my evidence. My lawyers wrote to him twice. He never replied. "

chunga Sun, 02/18/2018 - 21:59 Permalink

Pffft...this guy sounds like the reds with their "blockbuster" memo. Honest Hill'rey is laughing!

SethPoor -> chunga Sun, 02/18/2018 - 22:00 Permalink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_8VaMbPjUU

Bes -> J S Bach Sun, 02/18/2018 - 22:17 Permalink

All fucking Kabuki. All of it.

The Deep State (Oligarchs and the MIC) is totally fucking loving this: they have Trump and the GOP giving them everything they ever wanted and they have the optics and distraction of an "embattled" president that claims to be against or a victim of the "deep state" and a base that rally's, circles the wagons around him, and falls for the narrative.

Meanwhile they keep enacting the most Pro Deep State/MIC/Police State/Zionist/Wall Street agenda possible. And they call it #winning

----

pathetic.

bigkahuna -> CheapBastard Mon, 02/19/2018 - 09:58 Permalink

"Had to be a Russian mole with a computer stick. MSM, DNC and Muller say so."

They know exactly who it was with the memory stick, there is always video of one form or another either in the data center or near the premises that can indicate who it was. They either have a video of Seth Rich putting the stick into the server directly, or they at least have a video of his car entering and leaving the vicinity of the ex-filtration.

This would have been an open and shut case if shillary was not involved. Since it was involved, you can all chalk it up to the Clinton body count. I pray that it gets justice. It and the country, the world - needs justice.

StarGate -> CheapBastard Mon, 02/19/2018 - 11:23 Permalink

Don't forget the "hack" analysis of Russian owned "Crowdstrike" since the FBI did and continues to, refuse to analyze the DNC computers.

KuriousKat -> CheapBastard Mon, 02/19/2018 - 13:26 Permalink

Isn't Alperovitch the Only Russian in there?.. When you rule out the impossible...whatever remains probable.. probably is..

wildbad -> IntercoursetheEU Mon, 02/19/2018 - 03:05 Permalink

Kim is great, Assange is great. Kim is playing a double game. He wants immunity from the US GUmmint overreach that destroyed his company and made him a prisoner in NZ.

Good on ya Kim.

His name was Seth Rich...and he will reach out from the grave and bury Killary who murdered him.

NumberNone -> wildbad Mon, 02/19/2018 - 10:04 Permalink

There are so many nuances to this and all are getting mentioned but the one that also stands out is that in an age of demands for gun control by the Dems, Seth Rich is never, ever mentioned. He should be the poster child for gun control. Young man, draped in a American flag, helping democracy, gunned down...it writes itself.

They either are afraid of the possible racial issues should it turn out to be a black man killing a white man (but why should that matter in a gun control debate?) or they just don't want people looking at this case. I go for #2.

Socratic Dog -> Buckaroo Banzai Mon, 02/19/2018 - 12:09 Permalink

Funny that George Webb can figure it out, but Trump, Leader of the Free World, is sitting there with his dick in his hand waiting for someone to save him.

Whatever he might turn out to be, this much is clear: Trump is a spineless weakling. He might be able to fuck starlets, but he hasn't got the balls to defend either himself or the Republic.

verumcuibono -> Buckaroo Banzai Mon, 02/19/2018 - 14:26 Permalink

Webb's research is also...managed. But a lot of it was/is really good (don't follow it anymore) and I agree re: SR piece of it.

I think SR is such an interesting case. It's not really an anomaly because SO many Bush-CFR-related hits end the same way and his had typical signatures. But his also squeels of a job done w/out much prior planning because I think SR surprised everyone. If, in fact, that was when he was killed. Everything regarding the family's demeanor suggests no.

verumcuibono -> NumberNone Mon, 02/19/2018 - 12:41 Permalink

MANY patterns in shootings: failure in law enforcement/intelligence who were notified of problem individuals ahead of time, ARs, mental health and SSRIs, and ongoing resistance to gun control in DC ----these are NOT coincidences. Nor are distractions in MSM's version of events w/ controlled propaganda.

Children will stop being killed when America wakes the fuck up and starts asking the right questions, making the right demands. It's time.

KJWqonfo7 -> wildbad Mon, 02/19/2018 - 11:15 Permalink

Kim is awesome to watch, I remember his old website of pics of him on yachts with hot girls and racing the Gumball Rally.

verumcuibono -> wildbad Mon, 02/19/2018 - 14:28 Permalink

I don't think you know how these hackers have nearly ALL been intercepted by CIA--for decades now. DS has had backdoor access to just about all of them. I agree that Kim is great, brilliant and was sabotaged but he's also cooperating. Otherwise he'd be dead.

StarGate -> Billy the Poet Mon, 02/19/2018 - 11:48 Permalink

Bes is either "disinfo plant" or energy draining pessimist. Result is the same - to deflate your power to create a new future.

Trump saw the goal of the Fed Reserve banksters decades ago and spoke often about it. Like Prez Kennedy he wants to return USA economy to silver or gold backed dollar then transition to new system away from the Black Magic fed reserve/ tax natl debt machine.

The Globalist Cabal has been working to destroy the US economy ever since they income tax April 15th Lincoln at the Ford theater. 125 years. But Bes claims because Trump cannot reverse 125 years of history in one year that it is kabuki.

Pessimism is its own reward.

[Feb 19, 2018] With the almost non stop Russian bashing in the US one has to wonder if something else is at play here. Like priming the US psych to cheer on an inevitable war with Russia.

More like attempt to unite the nation which crumbles die to crisis of neoliberalism and decimation of neoliberal ideology. And resore even on false pretext trust for neoliberal ruling elite that is sitting in Congress and major government institutions.
As well as swipe Hillary political fiasco under the rug and prevent loss of power by Clinton wing of Democratic Party.
Feb 19, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

not dead vet Fri, 02/16/2018 - 23:43 Permalink

With the almost non stop Russian bashing in the US one has to wonder if something else is at play here. Like priming the US psych to cheer on an inevitable war with Russia. If one digs into the revelations it's obvious they are bunk, unless your reading Wapo, New York Times, Time, and other neocon mouthpieces which are full of fiction not facts, but America is a soundbite nation. We stop reading after the headline and the way stories are structured that do have some truth in them never get read.

No matter what the US has done to crash the Russian economy Putin has strengthened it and is working hard to make it impervious to outside forces.

Unlike the US where the government and the CEO's can't destroy it fast enough while filling their wallets. The more successful Putin is, especially on foreign policy, the more desperate and dangerous the neocons will become. Remember they have nice luxurious bunkers to wait out the inevitable while you die a slow death.

[Feb 19, 2018] America Is Descending Into a Dangerous Psychosis by James Howard Kunstler

Notable quotes:
"... The author is a prominent American social critic, blogger, and podcaster , and we carry his articles regularly on RI . His writing on Russia-gate has been highly entertaining. ..."
"... He is one of the better-known thinkers The New Yorker has dubbed 'The Dystopians' in an excellent 2009 profile , along with the brilliant Dmitry Orlov, another regular contributor to RI (archive) . These theorists believe that modern society is headed for a jarring and painful crack-up. ..."
"... You can find his popular fiction and novels on this subject, here . To get a sense of how entertaining he is, watch this 2004 TED talk about the cruel misery of American urban design - it is one of the most-viewed on TED. ..."
"... If you like his work, please consider supporting him on Patreon . ..."
"... Why Does Trump Ignore Top Officials' Warnings on Russia? , ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Sport's Illustrated ..."
"... Actually the Times's editorial seems to have CIA / NSA fingerprints all over it, or at least Deep State paw prints. By stating that the Russians are already "meddling" in 2018 elections that haven't happened yet, aren't our own security agencies setting up the public to lose faith in the electoral process and fight over election results? Oh, by the way, the Times ..."
"... The longer this fantasy about Russia continues from the Left side of the political transect, the deeper the nation sinks into a dangerous collective psychosis. After all this time, the only known instances of American political figures "colluding" with Russians involve the shenanigans between the DNC, the Hillary Clinton campaign, and US intel services including the FBI and CIA, in paying for the "Steele Dossier" and the activities of the Fusion GPS company that claimed Russia hacked Hillary's and John Podesta's email. ..."
"... There is now a ton of evidence about all this monkey business, and no sign (yet) that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller may be taking a good hard look at it, not to mention the professional misconduct of a half dozen senior FBI, NSA, and CIA officials, especially former CIA chief John Brennan, who has now morphed into a CNN "analyst," taking an active role in what amounts to a psy-ops campaign to shove the public toward war. ..."
"... We are already choking this polity to death by endlessly litigating the past, insuring that the country doesn't have the time or the fortitude to deal with much more important quandaries of the present -- especially a financial system that is speeding into the most colossal train wreck in history. That will de-rail Mr. Trump soon enough, and then all the rest of us will have enough to do to keep our lives together or to refashion them in some that will work in a very different economy. ..."
Feb 19, 2018 | russia-insider.com
The author is a prominent American social critic, blogger, and podcaster , and we carry his articles regularly on RI . His writing on Russia-gate has been highly entertaining.

He is one of the better-known thinkers The New Yorker has dubbed 'The Dystopians' in an excellent 2009 profile , along with the brilliant Dmitry Orlov, another regular contributor to RI (archive) . These theorists believe that modern society is headed for a jarring and painful crack-up.

You can find his popular fiction and novels on this subject, here . To get a sense of how entertaining he is, watch this 2004 TED talk about the cruel misery of American urban design - it is one of the most-viewed on TED.

If you like his work, please consider supporting him on Patreon .

Forget about sharks. In their Valentine's Day editorial: Why Does Trump Ignore Top Officials' Warnings on Russia? , The New York Times jumped several blue whales (all the ones left on earth), a cruise ship, a subtropical archipelago, a giant vortex of plastic bottles, and the Sport's Illustrated swimsuit shoot. The lede said:

The phalanx of intelligence chiefs who testified on Capitol Hill delivered a chilling message: Not only did Russia interfere in the 2016 election, it is already meddling in the 2018 election by using a digital strategy to exacerbate the country's political and social divisions.

Hmmm . After almost two years of relentless public paranoia about Russia and US elections, don't you suppose these Ruskie gremlins would find some other way to make mischief in our world -- maybe meddle in the NHL playoffs, or hack WalMart's bookkeeping department, or covertly switch out the real Dwayne Johnson with a robot? I kind of completely and absolutely doubt that they'll bother with our elections.

Actually the Times's editorial seems to have CIA / NSA fingerprints all over it, or at least Deep State paw prints. By stating that the Russians are already "meddling" in 2018 elections that haven't happened yet, aren't our own security agencies setting up the public to lose faith in the electoral process and fight over election results? Oh, by the way, the Times presented no evidence whatsoever that this alleged "meddling" is taking place. They just assert it, as if it were already adjudicated.

But then they take it another step, making the case that because Mr. Trump does not go along with the Russian Meddling story, he is obstructing efforts to prevent Russian interference in the elections that haven't happened yet, and is therefore by implication guilty of treason. A fine piece of casuistry.

The longer this fantasy about Russia continues from the Left side of the political transect, the deeper the nation sinks into a dangerous collective psychosis. After all this time, the only known instances of American political figures "colluding" with Russians involve the shenanigans between the DNC, the Hillary Clinton campaign, and US intel services including the FBI and CIA, in paying for the "Steele Dossier" and the activities of the Fusion GPS company that claimed Russia hacked Hillary's and John Podesta's email.

There is now a ton of evidence about all this monkey business, and no sign (yet) that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller may be taking a good hard look at it, not to mention the professional misconduct of a half dozen senior FBI, NSA, and CIA officials, especially former CIA chief John Brennan, who has now morphed into a CNN "analyst," taking an active role in what amounts to a psy-ops campaign to shove the public toward war.

The "resistance" may think it is getting some mileage out of this interminable narrative, but its arrant inconsistencies only undermine faith in all our political institutions, and that is really playing with fire.

We are already choking this polity to death by endlessly litigating the past, insuring that the country doesn't have the time or the fortitude to deal with much more important quandaries of the present -- especially a financial system that is speeding into the most colossal train wreck in history. That will de-rail Mr. Trump soon enough, and then all the rest of us will have enough to do to keep our lives together or to refashion them in some that will work in a very different economy.

... ... ...

[Feb 18, 2018] This dangerous escalation of tensions with Russia is extremely lucrative for the war profiteers, the retired generals intelligence members who prostitute themselves as media pundits, the members of Congress who get $$$ from the war profiteers, and the corporate media which thrives on links to the war profiteers as well as on war reporting

Highly recommended!
Feb 18, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

REDPILLED

This dangerous escalation of tensions with Russia is extremely lucrative for the war profiteers, the retired generals & intelligence members who prostitute themselves as media pundits, the members of Congress who get $$$ from the war profiteers, and the corporate media which thrives on links to the war profiteers as well as on war reporting.

That's why we must all be kept fearful, so we don't demand that annual trillion dollar military "defense" budgets be slashed and that money instead be spent on social safety net programs and infrastructure.

That's also why tensions with not only Russia, but Iran, Syria, North Korea, and China must be maintained, and our endless wars and global empire of military bases continued.

As long as war and militarism are such profitable rackets, it doesn't matter that all life on earth is threatened. That is the essence of capitalism in a nutshell: profits are more important than life itself.

Joe Tedesky , February 17, 2018 at 12:55 pm

You got that right, and the sooner the American public wise up to all these lies the better. If you want this maddening insanity to stop, well then my fellow Americans quit buying into their lies. Just go ahead and board the damn plane, oh BTW one of the reasons NFL attendance is down is well think of the new security rules put in place plus who knows the rules of football anymore (our football is even tainted with screwiness). Sorry for the rant, but we Americans got to start calling our officials out on this stuff. It's that plain and simple. Nice post REDPILLED. Joe

Virginia , February 17, 2018 at 1:06 pm

REDPILLED,

I'm just imagining how it must feel, if you're Putin, to be able to rein in your emotions, to not react no matter how much baited, and to stay above the fray while warmongers, like dogs, are barking at your feet. That degree of self-composure, resting on a strong necessity to try to prevent WWIII and nuclear annihilation, well, I'm afraid not many of us will ever know or feel that exactly, but we can imagine! To do this with grace and dignity, insult after insult! There are lessons to be learned here.

Joe Tedesky , February 17, 2018 at 1:10 pm

Virginia we Americans better hope patient Putin stays in power. Joe

irina , February 17, 2018 at 3:19 pm

Exactly. I can't imagine who the Creatures of the Deep think would be a
good successor to Putin, but I do think they should be very careful of
what they wish for. Case in point, the Ukraine. What exactly happened
to "Our Man Yats" anyway ? He seems to have (been ?) disappeared. . .

Joe Tedesky , February 17, 2018 at 3:30 pm

There is a bit of a warring nature still left in this old fighter cat, and during these imaginary moments of destruction I struggle with I see Russian T72 tanks driving down Maiden Square looking for old Yats and his friends. Not to worry though, I seriously don't want anyone, anywhere, to have to suffer even one minute of war, but on a bad day, well need I say more? Joe

ranney , February 17, 2018 at 5:45 pm

I agree Virginia. I am so depressed by Mueller's actions my head swims. I had hoped that Mueller was actually an honest investigator who believed in the rule of law as everyone said. Now I can't imagine what game he is playing. Now it seems like all hope has vanished that anything even vaguely resembling the truth will come out.. Mueller"s indictments of these poor people seals the deal: Russia is the evil bugbear that must be destroyed and all right thinking patriots will agree to that when we launch nuclear war.
I keep feeling like we're all in a Kafka exercise or a Harold Pinter play where motives and truths are hidden behind an impenatrable wall. Even the new Consortium article by McGovern and Binney seems to hint at much more than they are telling, leaving me to wish they'd just come out and say what they are worried about given their knowledge and expertise. Instead I'm left with the sense that there is a coded message in there that I have missed.

So yes, I too worry about how patient Putin can be when we have already in so many ways performed a dozen or more acts of war on Russia in the past year and he has not reacted violently.

p.s. Once again Caitlin has provided great links. Click on one of the first about the government telling us lies. It'll get you a great 4 minute cartoon based on Chomskys book Manufacturing Consent. It's about propaganda. You'll like it.

Virginia , February 17, 2018 at 8:50 pm

Ranney -- One thing that has lifted my spirit somewhat, I heard a real thinker say that the Deep State (DS) is losing ground now because its anointed candidate HRC was defeated in 2016. So 2016 marks a positive time of turning and healing. Putin and Xi seem to both be working for the good of the world. Wonderful if Donald Trump could drain the swamp and get on board. Either way, those two Leaders together can lead us out of this morass.

There's a state of thought that remains composed no matter what the valley of the shadow of death. The more I learn -- and sometimes what I learn is vastly darker than I could ever conceive -- the deeper grows my joy. It's been a puzzle to me that I could read something truly devastating here on CN and walk away with more joy than I had before reading it (and believe me, it's not because of the evil news). It's partly because I'm grateful that my eyes have been opened. There is absolutely nothing I can do without being well informed about it. I feel I'm learning all this for a reason; a very real big good reason. Don't you? There's a state of thought that refuses to be fearful no matter what. Adopt that one, Ranney.

Just look at those Olympiads doing the impossible! They start with, "I can."

Dave P. , February 18, 2018 at 4:07 am

Virginia,

Yes. Regarding the barking dogs, I read some where this Putin's answer to a question a few days ago on that list of 200 sanctioned Russians put out by U.S. Treasury Department. Putin said: Let the barking dogs bark, but the caravan goes on.

[Feb 18, 2018] Here s how Mueller s latest indictment further discredits the Trump Dossier by Alexander Mercouris

Notable quotes:
"... As the days since Mueller's latest indictment have passed, the failure of his investigation to make any claim of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia has begun to sink in, even amongst some of Donald Trump's most bitter enemies. ..."
"... Even the Guardian – arguably the most fervid of Donald Trump's British media critics, and the most vocal supporter of the Russiagate conspiracy theory – has grudgingly admitted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has "once again failed to nail Donald Trump" ..."
"... In fact the latest indictment when considered properly is a further huge nail in the coffin of the Russiagate conspiracy theory and in the already disintegrating credibility of the Trump Dossier, which is the foundation document for that theory ..."
"... Notwithstanding claims to the contrary, the Russiagate conspiracy theory is laid out in its most classic form in the Trump Dossier, and it is the Trump Dossier which remains the primary and indeed so far the only 'evidence' for it ..."
"... This theory holds that Donald Trump was compromised by the Russians in 2013 when he was filmed by Russian intelligence performing an orgy in a hotel room in Moscow, and he and his associates Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Michael Cohen subsequently engaged in a massive criminal conspiracy with Russian intelligence to steal the election from Hillary Clinton by having John Podesta's and the DNC's emails stolen by Russian intelligence and passed on by them for publication by Wikileaks. ..."
"... The Trump Dossier never mentions Jared Kushner's four conversations with Russian ambassador Kislyak, including the famous meeting between Kislyak and Kushner in Trump Tower on 1st December 2016 (which Michael Flynn also attended) over the course of which the setting up of a backchannel to discuss the crisis in Syria is supposed to have been discussed (Kushner denies that it was). ..."
"... The last entry of the Trump Dossier is dated 13th December 2016 ie. twelve days after this meeting took place, and given its high level a genuinely well-informed Russian source familiar with the private ongoing discussions in the Kremlin might have been expected to know about it. ..."
"... Nor does the Trump Dossier mention the now famous meeting in Trump Tower between the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Donald Trump Junior – which Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner also attended – which took place on 9th June 2016. ..."
"... Now Special Counsel Mueller has provided further details in his latest indictment of actual albeit unknowing contacts between members of the Trump campaign and various Russian employees of Yevgeny Prigozhin's Internet Research Agency, LLC, apparently both in person and online. ..."
"... The Trump Dossier has however nothing to say about these contacts either, just as it has nothing to say about the Internet Research Agency, LLC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, or the entire social media campaign set out in such painstaking detail by Special Counsel Mueller in his indictment. ..."
"... I only remembered Helmer's 18th January 2017 article about the Trump Dossier after I wrote my article about Senator Grassley's and Senator Lindsey Graham's memorandum to the Justice Department on 6th February 2018. ..."
"... This is most unfortunate, not only because Grassley's and Lindsey Graham's memorandum resoundingly vindicates Helmer's reporting, but because it shows that a genuine expert about Russia like Helmer was able to spot immediately the holes in the Trump Dossier, which only now – a whole year and months of exhaustive investigations later – are starting to be officially admitted. ..."
"... Heroic efforts to elevate Papadopoulos's case and the meeting between Donald Trump Junior and the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya into 'evidence' of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia which exists supposedly independently of the Trump Dossier fail because as I have discussed extensively elsewhere (see here and here ) they in fact do no such thing. ..."
"... With the Trump Dossier – the lynchpin of the whole collusion case – not just unverified and discredited but proved repeatedly to have been completely uninformed about events which were actually going on, why do some people persist in pretending that there is still a collusion case to investigate? ..."
Feb 19, 2018 | theduran.com

As the days since Mueller's latest indictment have passed, the failure of his investigation to make any claim of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia has begun to sink in, even amongst some of Donald Trump's most bitter enemies.

Even the Guardian – arguably the most fervid of Donald Trump's British media critics, and the most vocal supporter of the Russiagate conspiracy theory – has grudgingly admitted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has "once again failed to nail Donald Trump"

There will be understandable disappointment in many quarters that the latest indictments delivered by Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, once again failed to nail Donald Trump. Although the charges levelled against 13 Russians and three Russian entities are extraordinarily serious, they do not directly support the central claim that Trump and senior campaign aides colluded with Moscow to rig the vote.

The Times of London meanwhile has admitted that the latest indictment contains "no smoking gun"

The Department of Justice, however, offered no confirmation to those still smarting from the election in Nov­em­ber 2016, who believe that, in the absence of Russian interference, Hillary Clinton would be in the White House today. Friday's allegations offered no evidence that the outcome had been affected. Sir John Sawers, former head of MI6, said yesterday that Donald Trump's victories in the key swing states were his own.

There was further comfort for Mr Trump, which he was quick to celebrate with a tweet. The investigation uncovered no evidence "that any American was a knowing participant in the alleged unlawful activity". That includes, so far, anybody involved in the Trump campaign. If there is a smoking gun it has yet to emerge, though Robert Mueller's investigation will grind on. Presi­dent Vladimir Putin is a malign and dangerous mischief maker. It has not been proved that he is an evil genius with the ability to swing a US election.

In fact the latest indictment when considered properly is a further huge nail in the coffin of the Russiagate conspiracy theory and in the already disintegrating credibility of the Trump Dossier, which is the foundation document for that theory.

Notwithstanding claims to the contrary, the Russiagate conspiracy theory is laid out in its most classic form in the Trump Dossier, and it is the Trump Dossier which remains the primary and indeed so far the only 'evidence' for it

This theory holds that Donald Trump was compromised by the Russians in 2013 when he was filmed by Russian intelligence performing an orgy in a hotel room in Moscow, and he and his associates Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Michael Cohen subsequently engaged in a massive criminal conspiracy with Russian intelligence to steal the election from Hillary Clinton by having John Podesta's and the DNC's emails stolen by Russian intelligence and passed on by them for publication by Wikileaks.

Belief in this conspiracy dies hard, and an interesting article in the Financial Times by Edward Luce provides a fascinating example of the dogged determination of some people to believe in it. Writing about Mueller's latest indictment Luce has this to say

Mr Mueller's report hints at more dramatic possibilities by corroborating contents of the "Steele dossier", which was compiled in mid-2016 by the former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele -- long before the US intelligence agencies warned of Russian interference. Mr Steele, who is in hiding, alleged that the Russians were using "active measures" to support the campaigns of Mr Trump, Bernie Sanders, the Democratic runner-up to Hillary Clinton, and Jill Stein, the Green party nominee. Mr Mueller's indictment confirms that account.

Likewise, Mr Mueller's indictment confirms the Steele dossier's claim that Russia wished to "sow discord" in the US election by backing leftwing as well as rightwing groups. Among the entities run by the IRA were groups with names such as "Secured Borders", "Blacktivists", "United Muslims of America" and "Army of Jesus".

What is fascinating about these words is that none of them are true.

Christopher Steele is not in hiding.

The actua l Trump Dossier does not allege "that the Russians were using "active measures" to support the campaigns of Mr Trump, Bernie Sanders, the Democratic runner-up to Hillary Clinton, and Jill Stein, the Green party nominee".

Bernie Sanders is mentioned by the Trump Dossier only in passing. By the time the Trump Dossier's first entries were written Bernie Sanders's campaign was all but over and it was already clear that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic Party's candidate for the Presidency.

Jill Stein is mentioned – again in passing – only once, in a brief mention which refers to her now infamous visit to Russia where she attended the same dinner with President Putin as Michael Flynn.

Nor does the Trump Dossier anywhere claim that "Russia wished to "sow discord" in the US election by backing leftwing as well as rightwing groups".

On the contrary the Trump Dossier is focused – exclusively and obsessively – on documenting at fantastic length the alleged conspiracy between the Russian government and the campaign of the supposedly compromised Donald Trump to get him elected US President.

Supporters of the Russiagate conspiracy theory need to start facing up to the hard truth about the Trump Dossier.

At the time the Trump Dossier was published in January 2017 little was known publicly about the contacts which actually took place between members of Donald Trump's campaign and tranisiton teams and the Russians during and after the election.

Today – a full year later and after months of exhaustive investigation – we know far more about those contacts.

What Is striking about those contacts is how ignorant the supposedly high level Russian sources of the Trump Dossier were about them.

Thus the Trump Dossier never mentions Jeff Sessions's two meetings with Russian ambassador Kislyak, or the various conversations Michael Flynn is known to have had with Russian ambassador Kislyak, some of which apparently took place before Donald Trump won the election.

The Trump Dossier never mentions Jared Kushner's four conversations with Russian ambassador Kislyak, including the famous meeting between Kislyak and Kushner in Trump Tower on 1st December 2016 (which Michael Flynn also attended) over the course of which the setting up of a backchannel to discuss the crisis in Syria is supposed to have been discussed (Kushner denies that it was).

The last entry of the Trump Dossier is dated 13th December 2016 ie. twelve days after this meeting took place, and given its high level a genuinely well-informed Russian source familiar with the private ongoing discussions in the Kremlin might have been expected to know about it.

Nor does the Trump Dossier mention the now famous meeting in Trump Tower between the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Donald Trump Junior – which Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner also attended – which took place on 9th June 2016.

This despite the fact that the Trump Dossier's first entry is dated 20th June 2016 i.e. eleven days later, so that if this meeting really was intended to set the stage for collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia – as believers in the Russiagate conspiracy theory insist – a well informed Russian source with access to information from the Kremlin would be expected to know about it.

Nor does the Trump Dossier have anything to say about George Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign aide who had the most extensive contacts with the Russians, and whose drunken bragging in a London bar is now claimed by the FBI to have been its reason for starting the Russiagate inquiry.

In fact George Papadopoulos is not mentioned in the Trump Dossier at all.

This despite the fact that members of Russia's high powered Valdai Discussion Club were Papadopoulos's main interlocutors in his discussions with the Russians, and Igor Ivanov – Russia's former foreign minister, and a senior albeit retired official genuinely known to Putin – was informed about the discussions also, making it at least possible that high level people in the Russian Foreign Ministry and conceivably in the Russian government and in the Kremlin were kept informed about the discussions with Papadopoulos, so that a genuinely well-informed Russian source might be expected to know about them.

By contrast none of the secret meetings between Carter Page and Michael Cohen and the Russians discussed at such extraordinary length in the Trump Dossier have ever been proved to have taken place.

Now Special Counsel Mueller has provided further details in his latest indictment of actual albeit unknowing contacts between members of the Trump campaign and various Russian employees of Yevgeny Prigozhin's Internet Research Agency, LLC, apparently both in person and online.

The Trump Dossier has however nothing to say about these contacts either, just as it has nothing to say about the Internet Research Agency, LLC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, or the entire social media campaign set out in such painstaking detail by Special Counsel Mueller in his indictment.

The only conclusion possible is that if the Trump Dossier's Russian sources actually exist (about which I am starting to have doubts) then they were extraordinarily ignorant of what was actually going on.

That of course is consistent with the fact – recently revealed in the heavily redacted memorandum sent to the Justice Department by Senators Grassley and Lindsey Graham – that many of the sources of the Trump Dossier were not actually Russian but were American.

John Helmer – the most experienced journalist covering Russia, and a person who has a genuine and profound knowledge of the country – made that very point – that many of the Trump Dossier's sources were American rather than Russian – in an article he published on 18th January 2017, ie. just days after the Trump Dossier was published.

In that same article Helmer also made this very valid point about the Trump Dossier's compiler Christopher Steele

Steele's career in Russian intelligence at MI6 had hit the rocks in 2006, and never recovered. That was the year in which the Russian Security Service (FSB) publicly exposed an MI6 operation in Moscow. Russian informants recruited by the British were passed messages and money, and dropped their information in containers fabricated to look like fake rocks in a public park. Steele was on the MI6 desk in London when the operation was blown. Although the FSB announcement was denied in London at the time, the British prime ministry confirmed its veracity in 2012.Read more on Steele's fake rock operation here , and the attempt by the Financial Times to cover it up by blaming Putin for fabricating the story.

Given that Steele was outed by Russian intelligence in 2006, with his intelligence operation in Russia dismantled by the FSB that year, it beggars belief that ten years later in 2016 he still had access to high level secrets in the Kremlin.

What we now know in fact proves that he did not.

I only remembered Helmer's 18th January 2017 article about the Trump Dossier after I wrote my article about Senator Grassley's and Senator Lindsey Graham's memorandum to the Justice Department on 6th February 2018.

This is most unfortunate, not only because Grassley's and Lindsey Graham's memorandum resoundingly vindicates Helmer's reporting, but because it shows that a genuine expert about Russia like Helmer was able to spot immediately the holes in the Trump Dossier, which only now – a whole year and months of exhaustive investigations later – are starting to be officially admitted.

For my part I owe Helmer an apology for not referencing his 18th January 2017 article in my article of 6th February 2018. I should have done so and I am very sorry that I didn't.

I have spent some time discussing the Trump Dossier because despite denials it remains the lynchpin of the whole Russiagate scandal and of the claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Heroic efforts to elevate Papadopoulos's case and the meeting between Donald Trump Junior and the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya into 'evidence' of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia which exists supposedly independently of the Trump Dossier fail because as I have discussed extensively elsewhere (see here and here ) they in fact do no such thing.

Despite Edward Luce's desperate efforts to argue otherwise, Mueller's latest indictment far from corroborating the Trump Dossier, has done the opposite.

With the Trump Dossier – the lynchpin of the whole collusion case – not just unverified and discredited but proved repeatedly to have been completely uninformed about events which were actually going on, why do some people persist in pretending that there is still a collusion case to investigate?

[Feb 18, 2018] America Is Descending Into a Dangerous Psychosis by James Howard Kunstler

Notable quotes:
"... The author is a prominent American social critic, blogger, and podcaster , and we carry his articles regularly on RI . His writing on Russia-gate has been highly entertaining. ..."
"... He is one of the better-known thinkers The New Yorker has dubbed 'The Dystopians' in an excellent 2009 profile , along with the brilliant Dmitry Orlov, another regular contributor to RI (archive) . These theorists believe that modern society is headed for a jarring and painful crack-up. ..."
"... You can find his popular fiction and novels on this subject, here . To get a sense of how entertaining he is, watch this 2004 TED talk about the cruel misery of American urban design - it is one of the most-viewed on TED. ..."
"... If you like his work, please consider supporting him on Patreon . ..."
"... Why Does Trump Ignore Top Officials' Warnings on Russia? , ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Sport's Illustrated ..."
Feb 18, 2018 | russia-insider.com
The author is a prominent American social critic, blogger, and podcaster , and we carry his articles regularly on RI . His writing on Russia-gate has been highly entertaining.

He is one of the better-known thinkers The New Yorker has dubbed 'The Dystopians' in an excellent 2009 profile , along with the brilliant Dmitry Orlov, another regular contributor to RI (archive) . These theorists believe that modern society is headed for a jarring and painful crack-up.

You can find his popular fiction and novels on this subject, here . To get a sense of how entertaining he is, watch this 2004 TED talk about the cruel misery of American urban design - it is one of the most-viewed on TED.

If you like his work, please consider supporting him on Patreon .

Forget about sharks. In their Valentine's Day editorial: Why Does Trump Ignore Top Officials' Warnings on Russia? , The New York Times jumped several blue whales (all the ones left on earth), a cruise ship, a subtropical archipelago, a giant vortex of plastic bottles, and the Sport's Illustrated swimsuit shoot. The lede said:

The phalanx of intelligence chiefs who testified on Capitol Hill delivered a chilling message: Not only did Russia interfere in the 2016 election, it is already meddling in the 2018 election by using a digital strategy to exacerbate the country's political and social divisions.

Hmmm . After almost two years of relentless public paranoia about Russia and US elections, don't you suppose these Ruskie gremlins would find some other way to make mischief in our world -- maybe meddle in the NHL playoffs, or hack WalMart's bookkeeping department, or covertly switch out the real Dwayne Johnson with a robot? I kind of completely and absolutely doubt that they'll bother with our elections.

Actually the Times's editorial seems to have CIA / NSA fingerprints all over it, or at least Deep State paw prints. By stating that the Russians are already "meddling" in 2018 elections that haven't happened yet, aren't our own security agencies setting up the public to lose faith in the electoral process and fight over election results? Oh, by the way, the Times presented no evidence whatsoever that this alleged "meddling" is taking place. They just assert it, as if it were already adjudicated.

But then they take it another step, making the case that because Mr. Trump does not go along with the Russian Meddling story, he is obstructing efforts to prevent Russian interference in the elections that haven't happened yet, and is therefore by implication guilty of treason. A fine piece of casuistry.

The longer this fantasy about Russia continues from the Left side of the political transect, the deeper the nation sinks into a dangerous collective psychosis. After all this time, the only known instances of American political figures "colluding" with Russians involve the shenanigans between the DNC, the Hillary Clinton campaign, and US intel services including the FBI and CIA, in paying for the "Steele Dossier" and the activities of the Fusion GPS company that claimed Russia hacked Hillary's and John Podesta's email.

There is now a ton of evidence about all this monkey business, and no sign (yet) that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller may be taking a good hard look at it, not to mention the professional misconduct of a half dozen senior FBI, NSA, and CIA officials, especially former CIA chief John Brennan, who has now morphed into a CNN "analyst," taking an active role in what amounts to a psy-ops campaign to shove the public toward war.

The "resistance" may think it is getting some mileage out of this interminable narrative, but its arrant inconsistencies only undermine faith in all our political institutions, and that is really playing with fire.

We are already choking this polity to death by endlessly litigating the past, insuring that the country doesn't have the time or the fortitude to deal with much more important quandaries of the present -- especially a financial system that is speeding into the most colossal train wreck in history. That will de-rail Mr. Trump soon enough, and then all the rest of us will have enough to do to keep our lives together or to refashion them in some that will work in a very different economy.

PS: Readers may wonder why I did not devote this space to the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. It is exactly what you get in a society that wants to erase behavioral boundaries. It is especially dangerous where adolescent boys are concerned. The country has a gigantic boundary problem.

We have also created perfect conditions -- between the anomie of suburbia and the dreariness of our school systems -- to induce explosions of violent despair. That's why these things happen.

Until we change these conditions, expect ever more of it.

[Feb 17, 2018] Russia condemned and defined as the enemy of America with laughably little evidence (effing Facebook posts being about the extent of it) .... not a word about JEWISH MONEY controlling the entire political system in the USA. When Netanyahu gets 29 standing ovations from Congress should that not have triggered an FBI Investigation

Taking oil price to 30th or 40th is a strategic goal of the USA in relation to Russia. Listen at 3:30.
Notable quotes:
"... Appeasing interview with a shockingly cheap incompetent former CIA head Woolsey. If this man seriously represents the intellectual level of the CIA, then the USA will implode even faster than in ten years. ..."
"... You are exactly right. U$ politicians are uninformed, stupid, detached from reality, selfish and they think like schoolyard kids do. ..."
"... They are the product of the US society as a whole. ..."
"... Craig Murray nailed this issue stone dead for all time a few years ago, when he wrote:"[neo]liberal interventionism, the theory that bombing brown people is good for them". ..."
"... In the former The Ukraine, the Jewish Quisling oligarch dictator, Poroshenko, has been appointing foreigners to positions of power (SackOfShvilli is but one). He supported this by stating: "Ukrainians are too corrupt to rule themselves." When will we in America hear such a statement from our leaders to justify the appointment of Jews and paid Judaeophiles to all positions of power? ..."
"... I'm just waiting for Yevgeny Prigozhin to hold a press conference in Russia to claim that Hillary Clinton paid him to run the Internet Research Agency to besmirch her opponent- watch the fireworks :) It's all a hall of mirrors. ..."
"... The Internet Research Agency couldn't have possibly been more ineffective, which points to it's main purpose being to besmirch Trump (more more likely it was just an unimportant hobby of Prigozhin). ..."
"... Sure the United States has, they have been doing it since 1953 with the overthrow of Iran, to as recently as 2012 Russian Election, 2014 Ukraine Election, the UK referendum on 23 June 2016 on Brexit and currently trying to overthrow it this year. These are just a few and there is a very long list of other countries also. The United States in now in Russia and Hungry today meddling it their elections. Got to get the right people in office so they will cow-tow to the United States. ..."
"... What an admission! trump doesn't want more drilling for oil to Americans to use. It is for export and for foreign interference ..."
"... and if the price of oil would go down to 30/40$ that would make a unhappy input and so would be the saudis and you fracking industry would go down the toilet and thy will drag the banks with them. What a moron. And US oil companies would like that alot too ..."
Feb 17, 2018 | theduran.com

Gano1 , February 17, 2018 10:31 AM

The USA has lost all morality, they are so hypocritical it is risible.

Patricia Dolan , February 17, 2018 10:25 AM

What Russian expansionism??? Look at the US expansionism..........get a grip!

Ann Johns Patricia Dolan , February 17, 2018 2:51 PM

Another tiresome, butthurt yank/wank? Between the new One Belt, One Road Chinese initiative, the Russians taking control of ME oil production and the fact that america has NO answers to help it's declining empire, it would seem to the non-partisan observer that america is well and truly f***ed. You must be talking about their debt expansionism, $20 TRILLION and rising by the second.

Vera Gottlieb Patricia Dolan , February 17, 2018 2:29 PM

US expansionism...really? Where? 😜

Mario8282 Vera Gottlieb , February 17, 2018 2:58 PM

Syria? Libya? Yemen? Africa, Afgh...

Vera Gottlieb Mario8282 , February 17, 2018 3:00 PM

And you left out Latin America...

Mario8282 Vera Gottlieb , February 17, 2018 3:05 PM

This is why I left with the dots... The list would end up with America itself (an endless spree of false flags and deception schemes).

Patricia Dolan Mario8282 , February 17, 2018 6:11 PM

Thank you Mario......let's not forget Ukraine, Kosovo, Bosnia, the entirety of eastern Europe, the entirety of northern Africa, Rwanda, the Congo, Venezuela, Chili, Guatemala, Panama, Jeeeeeeeze etc......

Patricia Dolan Vera Gottlieb , February 17, 2018 6:07 PM

get a grip......and turn your TV off!

Terry Ross Patricia Dolan , February 17, 2018 6:08 PM

'twas sarcasm Patricia.

Patricia Dolan Terry Ross , February 17, 2018 6:18 PM

I guess the WINKS need to be LARGER!!!! LOL

ThereisaGod , February 17, 2018 10:05 AM

Russia condemned and defined as the enemy of America with laughably little evidence (effing Facebook posts being about the extent of it) .... not a word about JEWISH MONEY controlling the entire political system in the USA. When Netanyahu gets 29 standing ovations from Congress should that not have triggered an FBI "Investigation"? Nah ... nothing happening there. It is breathtaking that THIS is the Alice-In-Wonderland world we inhabit.

Ton Jacobs, Human Guardians , February 17, 2018 10:02 AM

Appeasing interview with a shockingly cheap incompetent former CIA head Woolsey. If this man seriously represents the intellectual level of the CIA, then the USA will implode even faster than in ten years.

christianblood Ton Jacobs, Human Guardians , February 17, 2018 12:32 PM

(...If this man seriously represents the intellectual level of the CIA, then the USA will implode even faster than in ten years...)

You are exactly right. U$ politicians are uninformed, stupid, detached from reality, selfish and they think like schoolyard kids do.

Jesse Marioneaux christianblood , February 17, 2018 12:43 PM

They are the product of the US society as a whole.

christianblood Jesse Marioneaux , February 17, 2018 12:57 PM

They indeed are! U$A! U$A! U$A!

tom , February 17, 2018 11:14 AM

Craig Murray nailed this issue stone dead for all time a few years ago, when he wrote:"[neo]liberal interventionism, the theory that bombing brown people is good for them".

journey80 , February 17, 2018 12:37 PM

Yeah, that's hilarious. Join the murdering creep in a giggle, Laura, that's cute. Here's a global criminal who should have been hung years ago for crimes against humanity. No one in their right mind would treat this creep with anything but contempt and horror, let alone find him funny.

Franz Kafka , February 17, 2018 12:17 PM

In the former The Ukraine, the Jewish Quisling oligarch dictator, Poroshenko, has been appointing foreigners to positions of power (SackOfShvilli is but one). He supported this by stating: "Ukrainians are too corrupt to rule themselves." When will we in America hear such a statement from our leaders to justify the appointment of Jews and paid Judaeophiles to all positions of power?

journey80 Franz Kafka , February 17, 2018 12:34 PM

We don't need to hear it, we're living it.

Franz Kafka journey80 , February 17, 2018 3:33 PM

My profound and sincere condolences. You are getting the 'Democracy Treatment' by the West. I hope some of you survive to tell the tale and take revenge.

Franz Kafka , February 17, 2018 12:09 PM

Are those ears or bat-wings? WOW! Yet another Jewe, pretending not be be. I guess he would say that the USA murdered all the Indians and enslaved Africans 'for their own good' as well.
Talmudo-Satanism is the pernicious underlying ideology of the people who have taken over, not just the USA, but, lets face it, the entire West.

Vera Gottlieb , February 17, 2018 2:28 PM

What a bunch of ingrates we are...not appreciating all that the CIA is doing for us. We must thank them instead of complaining.

Trauma2000 , February 17, 2018 5:30 PM

Lets not forget that the U.$.A. meddled in Australia's election of the Whitlam Government. (And several governments there after as soon as they realised they could get away with it an nothing would happen to them). The United States are a bunch of sick puppies; really sick puppies the way they have treated Australia.

So much for being allies. With allies like the United States you don't need enemies (Unless the U.$. doctors them up for you to force you to pay them more money for weapons and protection).

And it makes me sick that so many 'naive' people around the world keep falling for the SH*T that comes out of their mouths.

When dealing with the United States there are a few rules to follow. (Apologies to the innocent Americans out there but 'they' allow their government to do some unspeakable horrors to the world.)

And that goes for the entire planet no matter who the United States is speaking to.

End of story.

Shue Trauma2000 , February 17, 2018 5:51 PM

Worst part is the our Gov can't think ahead, if they keep antagonising China on behalf of the Seppo's China will eventually pull their mineral imports and our economy will crash overnight.

HappyCynic , February 17, 2018 4:31 PM

Yes, nobody doubts that the US interferes with elections in other countries - we're the good guys, so this is ok :)

I'm just waiting for Yevgeny Prigozhin to hold a press conference in Russia to claim that Hillary Clinton paid him to run the Internet Research Agency to besmirch her opponent- watch the fireworks :) It's all a hall of mirrors.

The Internet Research Agency couldn't have possibly been more ineffective, which points to it's main purpose being to besmirch Trump (more more likely it was just an unimportant hobby of Prigozhin).

John R Balch Jr , February 17, 2018 6:31 PM

Sure the United States has, they have been doing it since 1953 with the overthrow of Iran, to as recently as 2012 Russian Election, 2014 Ukraine Election, the UK referendum on 23 June 2016 on Brexit and currently trying to overthrow it this year. These are just a few and there is a very long list of other countries also. The United States in now in Russia and Hungry today meddling it their elections. Got to get the right people in office so they will cow-tow to the United States.

Graeme Pedersen , February 17, 2018 6:11 PM

I believe john Key was sent from the U$A (Merrill Lynch) to ruin our economy in New Zealand as well.

janbn , February 17, 2018 5:37 PM

What an admission! trump doesn't want more drilling for oil to Americans to use. It is for export and for foreign interference.

Aidi Deduction , February 17, 2018 4:51 PM

Frederick the Great concluded that to allow governments to be dominated by the majority would be disastrous: "A democracy, to survive, must be, like other governments a minority persuading a majority to let itself be led by a minority."

General Kreeg , February 17, 2018 4:13 PM

Russian Trolls are all of a sudden the Russian Gov't.

fredd , February 17, 2018 3:18 PM

and if the price of oil would go down to 30/40$ that would make a unhappy input and so would be the saudis and you fracking industry would go down the toilet and thy will drag the banks with them. What a moron. And US oil companies would like that alot too

Mario8282 , February 17, 2018 2:56 PM

...and the US bombed half of the world's countries for their own good too. US made Libya a slave market for humanity's good as well. Oboomer even got the Nobel Peace Prize for it.

K Walker , February 17, 2018 2:55 PM

I would be greatly relieved if the USA government merely tweeted instead of invading and indulging in regime change.

Kevin S , February 17, 2018 12:55 PM

Talk about the pinnacle of hypocrisy!

[Feb 17, 2018] Former CIA Chief Admits US Meddling In Foreign Elections For Their Own Good

Notable quotes:
"... How about Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa? Fuck Allen Dulles, Mike Pompeo, and everybody in-between! ..."
"... BTW, Victoria Noodles will be very disappointed Ukraine didn't make the list after all of her hard work. ..."
"... Victoria "F*ck the EU" Nuland and the CIA were all over the Ukrainian "coup", but of course no mention of that on "Fair and Balanced". Laura Ingram is a typical Fox News Zio-Nazi bitch, hiding behind a cross, who apparently believes her own BS, and along others like Hannity have blood on their hands. ..."
"... You can always spot a psychopathic liar by their predisposition to smile or laugh at questions that are not humorous. Laura Ingraham is a neocon mouth-peice for the establishment. ..."
Feb 17, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Former CIA chief James Woolsey appeared on Fox News to push the narrative of how dastardly 'dem Russkies' are in their meddling with the sacred soul of America's democracy.

Woolsey did his patriotic deep-state-duty and proclaimed the evils of "expansionist Russia" and dropped 'facts' like "Russia has a larger cyber-army than its standing army," before he moved on to China and its existential threats.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/SpWai3kZ-gM

But then, beginning at around 4:30 , the real debacle of the conversation begins as Ingraham asks Woolsey,

"Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries' elections?"

Hes responds, surprisingly frankly...

"Oh probably... but it was for the good of the system..."

To which Ingraham follows up...

"We don't do that now though? We don't mess around in other people's elections?"

Prompting this extraordinary sentence from a former CIA chief...

"Well...hhhmmm, numm numm numm numm... only for a very good cause...in the interests of democracy"

So just to clarify - yes, the CIA chief admitted that Democracy-spreading 'Murica meddled in the Democratic elections of other nations "in the interests of democracy."

In case you wondered which ones he was referring to, here's a brief selection since 1948...

2016: UK (verbal intervention against Brexit)
2014: Afghanistan (effectively re-writing Afghan constitution)
2014: UK (verbal intervention against Scottish independence)
2011: Libya (providing support to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi)
2009: Honduras (ousting President Zelaya)
2006: Palestine (providing support to oust Prime Minister Haniyeh)
2005: Syria (providing support against President al-Assad)
2003: Iran (providing support against President Khatami)-
2003: Iraq (ousting of President Hussein)
2002: Venezuela (providing support to attempt an overthrow of President Chavez)
1999: Yugoslavia (removing Yugoslav forces from Kosovo)
1994: Iraq (attempted overthrow of President Hussein)
1991: Haiti (ousting President Aristide)
1991: Kuwait (removing Iraqi forces from Kuwait)
1989: Panama (ousting General Noriega)
1983: Grenada (ousting General Austin's Marxist forces)
1982: Nicaragua (providing support
1971: Chile (ousting President Allende)
1967: Indonesia (ousting President Sukarno)
1964: Brazil (ousting President Goulart)
1964: Chile (providing support against Salvador Allende)
1961: Congo (assassination of leader Lumumba)
1958: Lebanon (providing support to Christian political parties)
1954: Guatemala (ousting President Arbenz)
1953: Iran (ousting Prime Minister Mossadegh)
1953: Philippines (providing support to the President Magsaysay campaign)
1948: Italy (providing support to the Christian Democrats campaign)

(h/t @Yogi_Chan)


gellero Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:18 Permalink

What?? No Ukrania ???

Stan522 -> gellero Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:23 Permalink

obama sent in operatives into Israel to mess with Bibi....... They missed that one too....

skbull44 -> Stan522 Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:25 Permalink

It's always for the children...

https://olduvai.ca

TBT or not TBT -> skbull44 Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:29 Permalink

Yeah, a little bit for the children, but primarily it's for the stockholders and upper management, with some serious trickle down to their children.

Looney -> TBT or not TBT Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:32 Permalink

How about Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa? Fuck Allen Dulles, Mike Pompeo, and everybody in-between!

Looney

Mango327 -> manofthenorth Sat, 02/17/2018 - 17:01 Permalink

This Russia bullshit has gotta stop. For the love of God, it's been like two and a a half years now. If Vladimir Putin was as twice as evil as we're told, he still wouldn't be half as evil as the Clintons are on any given Thursday.

MUELLER IS A JOKE, ABOLISH the F.B.I.

https://youtu.be/wC_Ro80LlhE

SoilMyselfRotten -> skbull44 Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:47 Permalink

Democracy? Annnnnnnd it's gone! No wonder the rest of the world thinks we've collectively lost our minds. BTW, Victoria Noodles will be very disappointed Ukraine didn't make the list after all of her hard work.

marysimmons -> SoilMyselfRotten Sat, 02/17/2018 - 17:16 Permalink

Victoria "F*ck the EU" Nuland and the CIA were all over the Ukrainian "coup", but of course no mention of that on "Fair and Balanced". Laura Ingram is a typical Fox News Zio-Nazi bitch, hiding behind a cross, who apparently believes her own BS, and along others like Hannity have blood on their hands.

The whole purpose of the Mueller indictment was to give the mainstream outlets something to report so idiot Americans will believe the crap put out about Russia since the Winter Olympics in Sochi and set the tone to justify a military conflict with Russia that won't end well for anyone, IMO

veritas semper -> marysimmons Sat, 02/17/2018 - 17:40 Permalink

And Victoria Nuland Kagan is now Senior Adviser in the Donald's Department of Defense. See, kids, how the swamp is drained?

New_Meat -> marysimmons Sat, 02/17/2018 - 17:46 Permalink

mary, just a touch catty tonight, don't cha' think?

Zio-Nazi? How dat work?

Whole purpose of the Mueller indictments is to give the folks a show to prove that their money hasn't been wasted on a Trump collusion charge for collusion that started in 2014 when Trump was prolly out schlongin' some playmate or other..

TheSilentMajority -> Looney Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:47 Permalink

They didu sumtin.

Deep Snorkeler -> skbull44 Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:38 Permalink

America plays political-economic pranks on the rest of the world for the good of the system. It's worked out well.

Dumpster Elite -> Stan522 Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:28 Permalink

I kinda wondered why they missed that one, too. I've seen that list on here before. I guess messing with Israel's elections doesn't fit the ZH narrative?

Justin Case -> Stan522 Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:36 Permalink

That anchor sounds like she would be a good candidate for a gender change, meat stick and tea bag.

Vilfredo Pareto -> Stan522 Sat, 02/17/2018 - 17:00 Permalink

They missed post war Greece too, Albania, and a ton of others.

Bastiat -> Vilfredo Pareto Sat, 02/17/2018 - 17:18 Permalink

. . . and Australia: watch The Falcon and the Snowman, if you haven't.

TheSilentMajority -> gellero Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:51 Permalink

Rothschilds at it again?

keep the basta -> gellero Sat, 02/17/2018 - 17:53 Permalink

No Australia? Whitlam dismissal 11/11/1975 even wiki lists it

dirty fingernails Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:20 Permalink

The US is working hard to make banana republics look respectable

TBT or not TBT -> dirty fingernails Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:31 Permalink

We're The Most Interesting Banana Republic In The World.

Justin Case -> dirty fingernails Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:45 Permalink

to make banana republics look respectable

Not like a shit hole?

Bay Area Guy Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:20 Permalink

I generally can't stand Laura, but that was a spot on question. America is the quintessential "do as I say and not as I do" government.

chunga -> Bay Area Guy Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:33 Permalink

Among the many things sorely lacking in uncle sam is simple humility.

rwe2late Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:29 Permalink

Woolsey is an evil man. I doubt if he really believes. that the murders and tortures he presided over were for "their own good".

Ms No -> rwe2late Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:55 Permalink

No way he believes it. One thing about people who lack human empathy is that they would NEVER fall for the same tricks that the empathy having population does. They will always see the angle. It's what their brain is devoted to. All the capacity that we use to be reflective, emotional or caring all goes to angling for advantage with them. He knows exactly why people are tortured and couldn't give a shit less. You are either shark or mutilated gold fish as far as he is concerned.

New_Meat -> rwe2late Sat, 02/17/2018 - 17:51 Permalink

Woolsey is an evil man, for a certainty. But, au contraire, I bet he does believe it is for their own good. Whoever "they" are that he's doin' shit to. Like the Jesuits in Andalusia, purging the non-believers.

- Ned

dizzyfingers Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:29 Permalink

This repeats our own terrible history: Tom Landess on "The Dark Side of Abraham Lincoln," and the week in review at the Abbeville Institute.

serotonindumptruck Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:31 Permalink

You can always spot a psychopathic liar by their predisposition to smile or laugh at questions that are not humorous. Laura Ingraham is a neocon mouth-peice for the establishment.

Dumpster Elite Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:32 Permalink

It really would be a new dawn for this country if the entire Deep State were outed, and publicly executed. I know that sounds like tinfoil hat talk, but hey, I'm sure the NSA is all over me right about now. Too bad they can't seem to find serial killers that say they're going to shoot up a school online. Too busy trying to shut up those that don't like the Deep State.

Ms No Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:50 Permalink

They have always done this and every single other accusation that they have levied against other "tyrants". The crazy train continues to pick up speed.

OT: Wales may have had a fracking quake. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fM4Wcqe6s_s

This is pretty funny. "Footage" of quake. Fracking quakes usually are not that big but it did drop masonry off of buildings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEI4cSd4B38

Paracelsus Sat, 02/17/2018 - 16:52 Permalink

Ummm, Fidel Castro, Cuba, 1962 ? Leading up to Dallas? Which led to LBJ and ramp up of Indochina. If you look closely you will see that there was a huge little war going on in Laos, lots of bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail from fighter bombers based in Thailand.

Also, Australia. The 1972 Whitlam dismissal was a bloodless coup d'état. Whitlam recognized North Vietnam which pissed off a bunch of people in Langley. The pilots were on strike and they couldn't fly parts and crew into Alice Springs (Pine Gap Satellite facility). The Aussies have long memories and it will be a cold day in hell before they trust the Yanks like before. This is a country with a strong sense of injustice. The Aussies still talk about the "bodyline" cricket scandal with the Brits, and that happened in the 1930's....

[Feb 17, 2018] DNC "hack" hoax should be investigated as that involves screwing with the investigation of a Federal crime and has counterintelligence implications and could lead to lots of indictments

Notable quotes:
"... We need a separate, really non-partisan investigation for the rest of the list. I think it would be possible to find competent investigators outside of the more politicized agencies who could be vetted for any political bias before being assigned. Investigation is investigation - you just need a place to start and a list of people to talk to. Facts then shake out. ..."
"... If Mueller does not look sufficiently into the "rolling Soft-Coup" aspects of all this, let us hope that the Congress and the Administration together can force into existence a Special Counsel with all of the powers and staff and funding that Mueller currently has/ will have. . . . to look into the "rolling Soft-Coup" aspects of all this. ..."
"... If such a counsel would look into the "letting Clinton off the e-mail hook" aspects of all this and esPECially into the "who shot Seth Rich" and "e-mails . . . hacked or leaked?" aspects of all this, so much the better. ..."
Feb 17, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Richardstevenhack , 17 February 2018 at 03:07 PM

I agree that the list should be investigated - especially the DNC "hack" hoax as that involves screwing with the investigation of a Federal crime and has counterintelligence implications and could lead to lots of indictments.

However, as someone else pointed out in the last thread, Mueller's only remit was to find evidence of Russian government "meddling" in the election and/or "collusion" with Trump and the Trump campaign - which he has not found yet and is highly unlikely to find. The 13 indictments are a joke in that regard.

We need a separate, really non-partisan investigation for the rest of the list. I think it would be possible to find competent investigators outside of the more politicized agencies who could be vetted for any political bias before being assigned. Investigation is investigation - you just need a place to start and a list of people to talk to. Facts then shake out.

different clue , 17 February 2018 at 03:07 PM
If Mueller does not look sufficiently into the "rolling Soft-Coup" aspects of all this, let us hope that the Congress and the Administration together can force into existence a Special Counsel with all of the powers and staff and funding that Mueller currently has/ will have. . . . to look into the "rolling Soft-Coup" aspects of all this.

If such a counsel would look into the "letting Clinton off the e-mail hook" aspects of all this and esPECially into the "who shot Seth Rich" and "e-mails . . . hacked or leaked?" aspects of all this, so much the better.

[Feb 17, 2018] Neo-McCarthyite Hysteria at US Senate Intelligence Committee Hearing Global Research - Centre for Research on Globalization

Notable quotes:
"... The concern of the American ruling class is not Russian or Chinese "subversion," but the growth of social opposition within the United States. The narrative of "Russian meddling" has been used to justify a systematic campaign to censor the Internet and suppress free speech. ..."
"... World Socialist Web Site ..."
Feb 17, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

The concern of the American ruling class is not Russian or Chinese "subversion," but the growth of social opposition within the United States. The narrative of "Russian meddling" has been used to justify a systematic campaign to censor the Internet and suppress free speech.

Senator Mark Warner

The performance of Senator Mark Warner , the ranking Democrat on the committee, was particularly obscene. Warner, whose net worth is estimated at $257 million, appeared to be doing his best impersonation of Senator Joe McCarthy . He declared that foreign subversion works together with, and is largely indistinguishable from, "threats to our institutions from right here at home."

Alluding to the publication of the so-called Nunes memo, which documented the fraudulent character of the Democratic-led investigation of White House "collusion" with Russia, Warner noted,

"There have been some, aided and abetted by Russian Internet bots and trolls, who have attacked the basic integrity of the FBI and the Justice Department."

Responding to questioning from Warner, FBI Director Christopher Wray praised the US intelligence agencies' greater "engagement" and "partnership" with the private sector, concluding,

"We can't fully police social media, so we have to work with them so that they can police themselves."

Wray was referring to the sweeping measures taken by social media companies, working directly with the US intelligence agencies, to implement a regime of censorship, including through the hiring of tens of thousands of "content reviewers," many with intelligence backgrounds, to flag, report and delete content.

The assault on democratic rights is increasingly connected to preparations for a major war, which will further exacerbate social tensions within the United States. Coats prefaced his remarks by declaring that "the risk of inter-state conflict, including among great powers, is higher than at any time since the end of the Cold War."

As the hearing was taking place, multiple news outlets were reporting that potentially hundreds of Russian military contractors had been killed in a recent US air strike in Syria. This came just weeks after the publication of the Pentagon's National Defense Strategy, which declared,

"Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security."

However, the implications of this great-power conflict are not simply external to the US "homeland." The document argues that "the homeland is no longer a sanctuary," and that "America is a target," for "political and information subversion" on the part of "revisionist powers" such as Russia and China.

Since "America's military has no preordained right to victory on the battlefield," the only way the US can prevail in this conflict is through the "seamless integration of multiple elements of national power," including "information, economics, finance, intelligence, law enforcement and military."

In other words, America's supremacy in the new world of great-power conflict requires the subordination of every aspect of life to the requirements of war. In this totalitarian nightmare, already far advanced, the police, the military and the intelligence agencies unite with media and technology companies to form a single seamless unit, whose combined power is marshaled to manipulate public opinion and suppress political dissent.

The dictatorial character of the measures being prepared was underscored by an exchange between Wray and Republican Senator Marco Rubio , who asked whether Chinese students were serving as spies for Beijing.

"What is the counterintelligence risk posed to US national security from Chinese students, particularly those in advanced programs in the sciences and mathematics?" asked Rubio.

Wray responded that

"the use of nontraditional collectors, especially in the academic setting, whether it's professors, scientists, students, we see in almost every field office that the FBI has around the country, not just in major cities, small ones as well, basically every discipline."

This campaign, with racist overtones, recalls the official rationale -- defense of "national security" -- used to justify the internment of some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during the Second World War.

In its open letter calling for a coalition of socialist, antiwar and progressive websites against Internet censorship, the World Socialist Web Site noted that

"the ruling class has identified the Internet as a mortal threat to its monopolization of information and its ability to promote propaganda to wage war and legitimize the obscene concentration of wealth and extreme social inequality."

It is this mortal threat -- and fear of the growth of class conflict -- that motivate the lies and hypocrisy on display at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.

The original source of this article is World Socialist Web Site Copyright © Andre Damon , World Socialist Web Site , 2018

[Feb 17, 2018] News Watch A Reading on Collective Angst naked capitalism

Notable quotes:
"... or like viewing old photos of the Robber Barons. The msm has stopped trying to convince middle class readers it's 'on their side', imo. A few have gone full plutocrat friendly. Anything that rocks the plutocrats boats must be caused by 'russians, russians, russians', or outside agitators, or foreigners of one kind or another – not 'real' Americans. ..."
"... Exactly the kind of things the robber barons and their press said 100+ years ago about working class workers striking for better wages and working conditions. ..."
"... I agree in the regard to the seeming reduction in analytical quantity and quality. I think you're right with it being caused by reductions in newsroom staff, but I think the type of journalists we have has also changed drastically. ..."
"... In this real world context, this guy wants to promote an unnecessary new cold war to get Democrats elected. Truly disgusting and insane. ..."
"... Not only disgusting and insane, but politically stupid. Any Democrat politician who thinks that promoting Unhinged Russia Hysteria is a winning political strategy is guilty of political malpractice. ..."
"... seems to be what she and they are pushing(unhinged Russia hysteria ) as a winning political strategy. ..."
"... That's what people are going to remember when they go to the voting booth in 2018 (if they even bother) – while the Democrats where whining about Putin and Russia and doing nothing productive whatsoever to improve people's lives, Trump gave everybody more $$$. ..."
"... The "official" narratives from much of the MSM are increasingly removed from any reality experienced by the majority. For example, the latest is a report from Hamilton that much of the social media activity concerning the Florida school shooting is now infested and promoted by Russian bots "to sow division". How more absurd could it be? ..."
"... I have it on good authority that the whole rebranding of the KKK first as the CCC than as the NRA was a long-term Soviet Russian plot to cause an epidemic of mass shootings that would undermine not only US 'Democracy', but the entire capitalist juggernaut! ..."
"... Following up on something Lambert wrote once, it seems that pundits who are incapable of using the term "working class" without somehow attaching the word "white" to it are -- besides not really being on the left -- also more likely than others to push the "Russia ate my Election" nonsense. ..."
"... I think what the horrid warmongering article in Useless News misses is that the flyover states, which supply the troops for the wars, are getting war weary (and why not). Trump capitalized on this in the election, and there was a positive correlation at IIRC the county level between war casualities and troop support. ..."
"... An anti-war candidate who could make the case in the flyover states might really make an impact. ..."
"... I wholeheartedly agree about how a significant factor is that the mainstream media insists on viewing everything through ridiculously contrived "lenses" (Trump, "Russia-gate", Brexit, harassment) and, intentionally I would claim, deliberately obscuring the real problems (wealth distribution, neoliberalism, collapse of the social contract). ..."
"... whatever other news there is seems weirdly predictable and is based around personalities, rather than communities and systems. ..."
"... Animals become agitated in advance of earthquakes. It may be that the reason for angst does not lie in the past, but in the future. In general, so many of the stories are predictable self-parodies, from the Democrats relentless pursuit of the mythical 'moderate insurgents' in republican suburbs, and their comical screeching about Putin, to the drumbeat stories attacking Trump for Obama policies, to the contortions of the neocon policy apparatus trying to justify occupation and regime change in Syria, without mentioning those goals ..."
"... For me, this is key. When I cast my eye upon the news I'm greeted with unrelenting bleakness. Trump's cruel and terrible health plan was big news for months, then his terrible tax cut plan, now his terrible budget. Foreign affairs are equally bleak: the Democrats are busy stirring up a second Cold War. There's no end in sight to the trillions of dollars our nation spends every year on waste and destructive mayhem. Sociopathic corporations and octogenarian billionaires own this country. It's difficult to see anything positive on the horizon. ..."
"... There are two Americas. The news is mostly for and from the one that protects the rentier or elite class. They send their children to private schools. The second one has children who go to public schools who get shot and killed by gunmen that the school and law authorities have been warned about and then decide it's not worth their attention. ..."
"... I think we have reached America's breaking point. Shitty jobs, shitty pay, shitty hours, no hope of affordable housing anywhere, no advancement, massive amounts debt, no easy access to medical care, uneven safety nets, denigration, lack of mutual respect, a lifetime of working with little hope of a safe retirement it's just not pretty out here. ..."
"... I think we are still in a Wile E. Coyote moment where he has gone off the cliff but gravity has not taken hold yet (cartoons don't understand parabolic arcs, similar to central banks and politicians). One of the purposes of financial crises like 2008 is to reset the playing field. The inequality and inefficiency of the Roaring 20s got reset in the 1930s where many people who had paper wealth, but large debt, collapsed and regulation followed that survived for 60 years in preventing similar scenarios. The 2009-2016 period missed that window of opportunity as the focus became preserving the people who had destabilized the system. That meant the damage was one-sided to the bottom 90%. The top 10% are largely disconnected, deliberately, from what is going on with the bottom 90% and as a result are baffled about the swelling unrest in the country. That unrest is still largely unfocused and just burps out random things right now like the Tea Party, Trump, Sanders etc. ..."
"... The only good news to come out of the Florida shooting is that the young people are beginning to realize that they are cannon fodder (literally) in the cynical political battles waged by their elders. ..."
"... I've done my stint in living through the chaotic end to the 1970's and endured the major social upheavals in Thatcher's show-no-mercy early 1980's. Those were bad times. But this is worse in a lot of ways, if only for the crushing atmosphere of a powerless proletariat. ..."
"... The Dem commitment to Russiagate has become their WMD story, it has to be stuck with lest its proponents admit their lying ..."
"... The Russo-Resistance strategy has had the effect of exacerbating divisions in the potential opposition to neoliberalism. Not a bug. ..."
"... Compare and contrast with Putin and Xi, who are personally untouched by corruption taint, and whom their population actually believes has their nations' long-term interests at heart ..."
"... The general consensus was that we simply cannot go on as we are. ..."
"... I think you've hit the nail on the head. Whether it's skyrocketing measures of income inequality, health insurance premiums rising faster than wages, college tuition rates and student loan balances rising faster than wages, mindlessly skyrocketing stock markets and asset bubbles fueled by stupid central bank policies, or whatever other unsustainable woe you choose to pick, these things cannot go on forever ..."
"... And we're incredibly divided. Most of the MSM has been sucked into personality conflicts and the us-vs-them mindset. They actively feed it now. You're expected to pick a team and learn to hate the other guys. ..."
"... I too suspect that "tweaking round the edges" will prove totally inadequate, but I have no desire for revolution. I've seen too many of them start off well but then go off the rails in horrible, terrifying directions. Revolutions can be terribly sloppy affairs, with real people getting hurt in the process. And they usually don't end where we really want them to. ..."
"... Just yesterday I was asked, "Aren't you a liberal Democrat?" I answered, "No, I hate both parties equally." That set them back on their laurels. They expected me to say "Yes." ..."
"... The general consensus was that we simply cannot go on as we are ..."
"... Waiting for Godot ..."
"... A seemingly endless loop of outrage that yields nothing, except the feeling of powerlessness -- that all that is important in life is out of our hands, and in the hands of those who look at us and see nothing but another source of revenue. ..."
"... I rather think that our "feeling of powerlessness" is the goal aimed for by the msm. And identity politics serves a divide and conquer function. (But you can buy T-shirts! so it's all good. /s) ..."
"... I hope to draw some response to the second part of my complaint, which is that in the dog-eat-dog world of a society ordered solely by markets, we are reduced: First, from being to citizens to consumers, then from being consumers to being marks, rubes, suckers. The "news" (such as it is) isn't reported to us, it's sold to us. ..."
"... Corporate media has been pumping out Trump Derangement Syndrome stories for 18+ months. [if you're cynical] not only because the media genuinely dislike trump, but to drive clickbait and subscription sign-ups ..."
"... From my reading of history, when countries have been in the grip of anxiety it is often a relief when a feared thing happens – such as when Japan bombed Pearl Harbour it was widely reported that the response of the public, including anti-war activists, was great relief. ..."
"... I've read that much the same feeling descended over much of Europe at the start of WWI. While the same situation doesn't quite apply in the US, I do fear that there is a craving for some sort of decision, a decisive act. ..."
"... I think Trump understands more than he reveals. I think we are looking at the tempered effects of MSM froth by all the good, sensible internet bloggers and commenters which serve to neutralize the nonsense. What I see is angst failure – nobody bought this farcical onslaught of propaganda. Everyone questioned it. Something happens to the "news" when opposite views and facts collide – it gets emulsified like vinegar and oil into much less drastic possibilities. ..."
"... Interesting reminds me of how some torturers have learned that the fear of the pain can be worse than the pain itself in terms of emotional distress and breaking down ego-barriers to cooperation/submission. When the fear is worse than the feared experience, the feared experience itself is a relief. ..."
"... ur–Angst? ..."
"... Our Jerri-Lynn, who mainly lives overseas, was briefly in the US last month and dropped by our NYC meetup. She commented to me that she was very eager to leave because she could sense how high the general tension level was. ..."
"... Few people I know feel secure; a lot of it is about the basic stuff, health care and jobs. ..."
"... True, but can they address those concerns? The Occupy movement was such an effort, but the police seem to have stifled it. Then Sen. Sanders appeared on the scene with his Presidential campaign and that too was suppressed. If people are in fact not engaged it probably indicates an absence of what is important and meaningful for them in the larger society ..."
"... The LAT had truly turned into a piece of garbage the past years, they'd get scooped on stories in their own backyard, the writing was what you'd expect from a newspaper emanating from a city of 48,424, and it would be a given that new reporter hires should go at least a page into google when investigating. ..."
"... We've been watching a German TV series called Babylon Berlin, which is set in Wiemar Germany, 1929, just before the crash. It's fascinating to compare those times to our own, there are many parallels. The show is extremely well done. https://newrepublic.com/article/147053/babylon-berlin-sees-weimar-republic ..."
"... ah, yes. this has been on my mind lately. More the best lacking all conviction and the worst full of passionate intensity than the rough beast part He's already ensconced in Washington and doesn't seem to be able to do much of anything [brain glancing off the specter of all those judges]. ..."
"... post the nation state ..."
"... When war comes it will not be fought by "post-nation states." ..."
"... These are middle aged and middle class professionals about to be thrown on the scrap heap. ..."
"... Colonel Smithers, I observed something similar during the Sanders campaign's peak here in Tucson. That would be during late 2015 and early 2016. Let's just say that people weren't flocking to Bernie because their lives were going well. ..."
"... If the subtext to the MSM's Trump coverage is, "He's a racist authoritarian so he must be stopped at all costs," then you'd think they'd cover police brutality every day. If they're so concerned about racism and authoritarianism. Instead, we're seeing the FBI, CIA, etc., cast in the role of 'oppressed minorities standing up to The System, Maaan!' ..."
"... Plus, as a fan of paranoia, I can say. . . I've never seen a more unsatisfying, overly-abstract conspiracy in my life. It's not that they are rehabilitating CIA goons, but they're doing so specifically in order to obsess over memos, and reports about memos, and memos about reports about leaks about other memos. ..."
"... It's like an episode of The Office if everyone in the office had nukes. ..."
"... that attitude is nearly universal, across all layers of society ..."
"... I am in my late 50s, and for most of my life there was an air of seriousness and competence about national leaders. Even when they were doing something you didn't like, you could generally assume they were adequate to the situation, or at least had access to people who were. E.g., the moronic Reagan at least supposedly had a coterie of serious people in his administration who could keep the train on the tracks. ..."
"... Now we seem to be at a point where the people in charge are unapologetic about their greed, their lack of ability or even interest in their jobs and consitiuents, their lack of intellect and integrity, and the absence of any pretense of doing anything useful for the population or the society ..."
"... I guess what I'm saying is, as one surveys the landscape, there is a marked loss of hope coupled with a tearing urgency that something needs to be done. It's a terrible, very volatile and dangerous condition. ..."
Feb 17, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Jim Haygood , February 16, 2018 at 7:42 am

' orthodox MSM outlets like the New York Times and the WaPo seem to be presenting us with stale fare right now '

Such as this [paywalled] bombshell from the WaPo: 'With McCain's retreat, some turn to Romney to carry his torch.'

Riveting. Like reviewing old photos of the Soviet Politburo to see who got airbrushed out. To paraphrase the WaPo's slogan, 'Democracy dies in decadence. '

flora , February 16, 2018 at 10:31 am

or like viewing old photos of the Robber Barons. The msm has stopped trying to convince middle class readers it's 'on their side', imo. A few have gone full plutocrat friendly. Anything that rocks the plutocrats boats must be caused by 'russians, russians, russians', or outside agitators, or foreigners of one kind or another – not 'real' Americans.

Exactly the kind of things the robber barons and their press said 100+ years ago about working class workers striking for better wages and working conditions.

Alex V , February 16, 2018 at 10:25 am

I agree in the regard to the seeming reduction in analytical quantity and quality. I think you're right with it being caused by reductions in newsroom staff, but I think the type of journalists we have has also changed drastically.

Most of the younger generation that is being brought in has gone directly to journalism school, but has no other experience in the real world. I think many of the older guard had other careers, expertise or experience before they started writing.

So much of what passes for "analysis" nowadays reveals very shallow knowledge of the subject being covered by the writer. This is often most apparent in tech or science articles. I would say some overlap to "management" culture – managers are interchangeable, no matter the industry, since they are experts on managing. Same thing with journalism – if you can write something, you can write about anything .

XXYY , February 16, 2018 at 2:59 pm

For one thing, the, MSM has become heavily dependent on election coverage in the last decade or so, both (I assume) in revenue from political advertising, and in fountains of easy-to-write daily horse race articles about the state of the election.

I think 2017, a post-election year, kind of got a free pass because of the election of Trump, who was either going to make everything great (again!) or blow everything up, and the media was able to sustain an electoral-style energy and reader involvement well beyond the 2016 elections.

Now that (a) Trump has turned out to be an incompetent and ineffectual idiot who does nothing but watch TV, (b) we are seeing the tired old GOP program of screwing the population instead of anything new, and ( c) the Dems have done absolutely nothing for 13 months beyond foam at the mouth about Trump, perhaps the energy of the 2016 election is finally wearing off.

In other words, this is a pre-2018 election lull.

Emorej a Hong Kong , February 16, 2018 at 6:44 am

How much does this weigh?

The article ( https://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-jefferson-street/articles/2018-02-13/democrats-should-use-patriotism-to-appeal-to-white-working-class-voters ) linked in yesterday's Water Cooler, seemed to be a major step forward in articulating and advocating a strategy of the Democratic establishment making anti-Russia hysteria (and resulting surveillance and military spending and probably adventures), as a core campaigning plank, the new normal, completely independent of any impeachment or even re-election defeat of Trump.

This strategy was already starting to become implicit, as the Mueller-related "wolf"-crying drags on (and counter-investigations of Clintons are brandished as a M.A.D. deterrent), and as we read that Trump's tax cuts are playing well among likely swing voters both in Congress and in the low-middle income electorate, while it gets ever-closer to "too late" (to be credible before the 2018 midterms) for the Democratic establishment to show any new seriousness about the issues raised and pursued by Bernie Sanders, and by the many local candidates being sabotaged (of necessity more openly than in the past) by the donor-addicted Democratic establishment.

Dwight , February 16, 2018 at 7:48 am

In the real world, we have growing social needs with an aging population that will require Social Security and Medicare. This guy is basically saying to ignore that, which will likely result in a mass die-off of the middle-aged and elderly like that which occurred in 1990s Russia when social programs were gutted under neoliberal shock-therapy "advisors" to the puppet Yeltsin.

Meanwhile, climate change advances requiring massive investment in adaptation, and mitigation if Democrat concerns about climate change are to be taken at face value. (I believe we are 30 years too late, but should do what we can. Democrats claim to be concerned about climate change with their posturing around the Paris Agreement – how does this new cold war lower emissions?)

Nuclear waste from nuclear power and weapons needs to be secured before climate change kicks in, but instead we are spending trillions on new weapons that will create new radioactive waste. The new arms race with Russia and China will be incredibly expensive and dangerous, taking money from real societal and economic needs. Arms spending by the US will result in arms spending in Russia and China, multiplying the problem on a global scale. Unsecured nuclear waste in Russia and China, like unsecured nuclear waste in the US, affects the entire globe.

In this real world context, this guy wants to promote an unnecessary new cold war to get Democrats elected. Truly disgusting and insane.

Big River Bandido , February 16, 2018 at 11:18 am

In this real world context, this guy wants to promote an unnecessary new cold war to get Democrats elected. Truly disgusting and insane.

Not only disgusting and insane, but politically stupid. Any Democrat politician who thinks that promoting Unhinged Russia Hysteria is a winning political strategy is guilty of political malpractice.

petal , February 16, 2018 at 12:22 pm

On that note, I'll try harder to go to that Sen. Jeanne Shaheen talk on Tuesday, as that seems to be what she and they are pushing(unhinged Russia hysteria ) as a winning political strategy.

lyman alpha blob , February 16, 2018 at 1:54 pm

It really is politically stupid.

I got paid today and since the Republican tax cut, my take home pay is larger. Not a dollar or two larger, but enough that it's very easy to notice.

That's what people are going to remember when they go to the voting booth in 2018 (if they even bother) – while the Democrats where whining about Putin and Russia and doing nothing productive whatsoever to improve people's lives, Trump gave everybody more $$$.

DHG , February 16, 2018 at 7:42 pm

Not everything is about money and its not going to affect the majority of people who will be going to the polls, we are already set in our objections of the POTUS and unless he becomes Presidential quickly none of us are changing our minds. This brought to you by a swing voting independent. I will not vote for a republican in 2018 sans what I said.

sleepy , February 16, 2018 at 8:05 am

. . . articulating and advocating a strategy of the Democratic establishment making anti-Russia hysteria (and resulting surveillance and military spending and probably adventures), as a core campaigning plank, the new normal, completely independent of any impeachment or even re-election defeat of Trump.

The "official" narratives from much of the MSM are increasingly removed from any reality experienced by the majority. For example, the latest is a report from Hamilton that much of the social media activity concerning the Florida school shooting is now infested and promoted by Russian bots "to sow division". How more absurd could it be?

I think that sort of disconnect produces both a numbness and an anxiety and a belief that we are governed and led by institutions completely clueless and out of control. Therefore, people just hunker down in disbelief.

taunger , February 16, 2018 at 8:41 am

this. this seems important. coupled with the fact that enough of the news consumers today are wholly cynical regarding any ability of the hoi poloi to make change.

Skip Intro , February 16, 2018 at 10:03 am

I have it on good authority that the whole rebranding of the KKK first as the CCC than as the NRA was a long-term Soviet Russian plot to cause an epidemic of mass shootings that would undermine not only US 'Democracy', but the entire capitalist juggernaut!

Fiery Hunt , February 16, 2018 at 11:05 am

Key phrase here "out of control".

I've definitely been noticing a fairly obvious breakdown in people's ability to be on top of even basic things. We're all fried. I've got really reliable clients suddenly bouncing payments, unable to track projects I've also had first hand encounters with both the law/court system and the medical industry/health care system and the IT processes are byzantine and hugely ineffective.

I think Lambert used the phrase "boom exhaustion ". I think it's apt. We're spinning so hard and nothings getting better or easier.

" the center can't hold.
Things fall apart."

I suggest we expect serious gyrations.

Andrew Watts , February 16, 2018 at 10:42 am

That story is a classic example of a dominant minority resorting to archaism to address the present crisis they face. It won't work either. The US government had an extraordinarily high amount of social trust and support heading into the external crisis that was the Cold War. They eventually frittered it away into the present and the expectation that events will turn out the same is why the creative minority of our past is now a dominant minority in the present. I've said it before, but I'll say it again, for the sake of clarity. We live in a target rich environment for people who've studied Toynbee.

will_f , February 16, 2018 at 12:53 pm

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-jefferson-street/articles/2018-02-13/democrats-should-use-patriotism-to-appeal-to-white-working-class-voters

Following up on something Lambert wrote once, it seems that pundits who are incapable of using the term "working class" without somehow attaching the word "white" to it are -- besides not really being on the left -- also more likely than others to push the "Russia ate my Election" nonsense.

Lambert Strether , February 16, 2018 at 4:50 pm

I think what the horrid warmongering article in Useless News misses is that the flyover states, which supply the troops for the wars, are getting war weary (and why not). Trump capitalized on this in the election, and there was a positive correlation at IIRC the county level between war casualities and troop support.

An anti-war candidate who could make the case in the flyover states might really make an impact. And the only candidate I can see doing that is Sanders, and I'm not sure Sanders has the inclination, or even the stones, to do it. That F-35 base in Vermont rankles. Is that really the kind of bacon to bring home?

windsock , February 16, 2018 at 7:14 am

A couple of thoughts:

1) Do you think this might be an age-related experience? The elders among us may have a feeling of deja-vu, been here, seen that there's not much new in the world, just the same scenes endlessly repeated with new actors, or an incremental worsening of situations that have already been in decline for years. How long can endless war be news? Or endless corruption? Or endless neo-liberalism etc?

2) Here in the UK, I personally am sick to death with everything being seen through the prism of Brexit. Yes it is an existential crisis for our politics and our way of life but no-one is addressing the ways in which it will improve/demolish our daily lives – food being an obvious one. Yes it is referred to but not in such terms as ordinary people can identify with. It's all about abstracts – treaties/reciprocal arrangements/customs and tariffs/values and volumes of exports/imports etc. And in the meantime, we get stories about how Europeans leaving us will damage our NHS and crop picking without addressing the underlying causes of WHY we need imported labour and why the NHS is still deteriorating despite having those immigrants.

3) Following on from 2, whatever other news there is seems weirdly predictable and is based around personalities, rather than communities and systems. Whatever source one chooses to read, this predictability leads one to end up agreeing with Mandy Rice-Davies "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?", no matter who the subject is.

4) Now we are leaping on the Russiabus but it is largely met with a huge yawn, unless you like to foam at the mouth at ConservativeHome.

Clive , February 16, 2018 at 7:44 am

I wholeheartedly agree about how a significant factor is that the mainstream media insists on viewing everything through ridiculously contrived "lenses" (Trump, "Russia-gate", Brexit, harassment) and, intentionally I would claim, deliberately obscuring the real problems (wealth distribution, neoliberalism, collapse of the social contract).

Fiery Hunt , February 16, 2018 at 11:09 am

Yep.
And that discord is showing signs of sowing collapse.

sleepy , February 16, 2018 at 9:45 am

Here in the UK, I personally am sick to death with everything being seen through the prism of Brexit.

I read the following article from today's Links fully expecting it to be about Brexit and the political fallout from a possible hard border. Instead, the pivotal issue in the split between Sinn Fein and the DUP apparently revolves around efforts to secure offical status for the Irish language in the North. While that issue too may well be a distraction, it had nothing to do with Brexit, and I was surprised.

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/02/could-direct-rule-solve-northern-irelands-political-crisis/

MoBee , February 16, 2018 at 10:30 am

whatever other news there is seems weirdly predictable and is based around personalities, rather than communities and systems.

This really hit home for me. Thank you!

Skip Intro , February 16, 2018 at 7:17 am

Animals become agitated in advance of earthquakes. It may be that the reason for angst does not lie in the past, but in the future. In general, so many of the stories are predictable self-parodies, from the Democrats relentless pursuit of the mythical 'moderate insurgents' in republican suburbs, and their comical screeching about Putin, to the drumbeat stories attacking Trump for Obama policies, to the contortions of the neocon policy apparatus trying to justify occupation and regime change in Syria, without mentioning those goals

" The centre does not hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ".

Lee Robertson , February 16, 2018 at 7:22 am

It's the mind numbing parade of horrors.

Brooklin Bridge , February 16, 2018 at 10:55 am

Yes! I've never seen anything like this by any measure. It's the scope and magnitude and number and inter-relatedness and intractability of all the issues at once. Population, climate change, economic disaster systems as in Capitalism going nuts, exploding Military Industrial Complex and perpetual wars , 2 Bat -- - Crazy and utterly corrupt political parties playing nuclear Russian Roulette, Baghdad Bob like main stream media, transformation from a democracy into a police state, open and protected killing of blacks for being black (the fact that isn't exaggerated is mind-numbing), technological tsunamis being co-opted and twisted into iron fisted dystopias by all of the above.

The mind simply can't keep up with it – particularly the reality of it (as in the Democrats going stark raving mad with Russia-Gate – never mind just being corrupt and hypocritical to the core) and the body or something inside sends out a sort of anesthetic to help the mind deal with the increasing perception of the trauma.

I do "get" the analogy of calm before the storm and perhaps that is indeed what we are going through right now but to me it feels like we are simultaneously in the middle of the disaster and constantly waking up to just how horrific it really is.

John , February 16, 2018 at 10:57 am

"Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and movements, he suffered from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a nosebleed behind his forehead the moment he tried to make up his mind to do something." -- Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

False Solace , February 16, 2018 at 4:39 pm

For me, this is key. When I cast my eye upon the news I'm greeted with unrelenting bleakness. Trump's cruel and terrible health plan was big news for months, then his terrible tax cut plan, now his terrible budget. Foreign affairs are equally bleak: the Democrats are busy stirring up a second Cold War. There's no end in sight to the trillions of dollars our nation spends every year on waste and destructive mayhem. Sociopathic corporations and octogenarian billionaires own this country. It's difficult to see anything positive on the horizon.

It could also come down to low Vitamin D and an unusually cold (thanks to climate change) winter.

Lambert Strether , February 16, 2018 at 4:52 pm

> the Democrats are busy stirring up a second Cold War

That's hardly fair; they're stirring up a second Civil War at home, because that's what an impeachment would amount to.

sd , February 16, 2018 at 7:24 am

There are two Americas. The news is mostly for and from the one that protects the rentier or elite class. They send their children to private schools. The second one has children who go to public schools who get shot and killed by gunmen that the school and law authorities have been warned about and then decide it's not worth their attention.

I think we have reached America's breaking point. Shitty jobs, shitty pay, shitty hours, no hope of affordable housing anywhere, no advancement, massive amounts debt, no easy access to medical care, uneven safety nets, denigration, lack of mutual respect, a lifetime of working with little hope of a safe retirement it's just not pretty out here.

rd , February 16, 2018 at 11:38 am

I agree with this. For example this article yesterday caught my attention: http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-housing-crisis-home-sale-2018-2?r=UK&IR=T

Where I live, they post the real estate sales in the newspaper and there are many weeks where not a single house sold for over $500k. But in SF, it is news that something sold for $500k because nothing is ever that cheap.

So you have many areas of the country (not accidental they voted for Trump) where $500k is a fabulously high price for a house because the economies are in a rut but the places where all the people carrying huge student debt loads are supposed to go to work to be part of the future are completely unaffordable for all but a few.

I think we are still in a Wile E. Coyote moment where he has gone off the cliff but gravity has not taken hold yet (cartoons don't understand parabolic arcs, similar to central banks and politicians). One of the purposes of financial crises like 2008 is to reset the playing field. The inequality and inefficiency of the Roaring 20s got reset in the 1930s where many people who had paper wealth, but large debt, collapsed and regulation followed that survived for 60 years in preventing similar scenarios. The 2009-2016 period missed that window of opportunity as the focus became preserving the people who had destabilized the system. That meant the damage was one-sided to the bottom 90%. The top 10% are largely disconnected, deliberately, from what is going on with the bottom 90% and as a result are baffled about the swelling unrest in the country. That unrest is still largely unfocused and just burps out random things right now like the Tea Party, Trump, Sanders etc.

The only good news to come out of the Florida shooting is that the young people are beginning to realize that they are cannon fodder (literally) in the cynical political battles waged by their elders. We may start to see more passion for change occurring. https://www.thecut.com/2018/02/florida-school-shooting-survivors-share-powerful-messages.html Hopefully the 70 years old politicians will move out of the way and allow a new generation with new ideas to start to emerge. However, it will take a lot to displace the current political inertia from funding allowed for the wealthy 70 year olds by Citizens United.

Clive , February 16, 2018 at 7:25 am

Strangely enough, I've been thinking the exact same things, obviously from a U.K. framed perspective. I've not commented on this on posts nor have I discussed this with either Jerri-Lynn, Lambert, Yves, Richard Smith or any of the regular crowd here. I just passed it off to myself as my usual neurotic preoccupations.

I can't really put it into words properly. Which can be one of the reasons why I've not put my thoughts down in writing. Musing on this earlier this week, the best way I could come up with capturing the vibe was to quote from E M Forster who (describing an English country house, the people in it and as a metaphor for the country as a whole at the time) as "being not yet actually in decline, but in the torpor which precedes it". That fit both the mood that I sense and the cause of the pervasive anxiety.

It also, he says, opening a can of worms which he'll probably regret, but here goes, covers and explains several conversations I've had with fellow Brexit voters. The U.K. government is screwing things up royally with regards to the implementation of Brexit. The national division is just as bad as ever. And we're alienating the neighbors who we really need to keep in with for the sake of the long term. We may yet end up as being something akin to Mordor-on-Sea. But, among the friends and relatives I've had these discussions with, none of us could, if we were being honest, really say we cared that much. The nihilism was slightly shocking. What was the reason for that?

The general consensus was that we simply cannot go on as we are. Something -- anything -- is better than years and years, decades and decades of more of the same. A shake up is long overdue and we're way past the point that tweaking round the edges is going to be good enough.

I'm still slightly stunned to have stumbled across this unsettling zeitgeist.

I've done my stint in living through the chaotic end to the 1970's and endured the major social upheavals in Thatcher's show-no-mercy early 1980's. Those were bad times. But this is worse in a lot of ways, if only for the crushing atmosphere of a powerless proletariat.

I do think there are some safety valves. And at least in the past decade we've come to recognise in our shared culture the harms done by things like inequality and how corrupt our governments and corporations really are. And we've channels of common communication (like Naked Capitalism, amongst a few others) which didn't exist a decade or so ago. I'm just not sure they're enough.

windsock , February 16, 2018 at 7:55 am

Mordor-Sea ha! Mordor has better weather.

Completely agree with "none of us could, if we were being honest, really say we cared that much". My friends and I are in the same boat. I'm not sure it's nihilism sometimes I think this is the point of our news coverage – to grind us down with boring mediocrity until we accept whatever settlement suddenly becomes acceptable to TPTB. But then maybe THAT is nihilistic too.

hemeantwell , February 16, 2018 at 8:55 am

Important question! Let me serve up a goulash of inertial fear and loathing:

1. Attacks on Trump have failed to wing him legally. Passage of the corporatophilic tax bill is going to produce a short term stimulus that many of us suspect will undermine the reversal of fortune the policy-thin Dems hoped to pull off. So in part we're stuck with watching a dreary theme in political economy play out in as margin estimates drift downward.

2. The Dem commitment to Russiagate has become their WMD story, it has to be stuck with lest its proponents admit their lying. Down on the ground, I was flummoxed to get a forwarded MoveOn email from a friend encouraging me to participate in flash demonstration at the capitol if Mueller is fired. I was moved to explain that this worried me since it likely hinged on Russophobia. A coolness ensued. This is happening broadly. The Russo-Resistance strategy has had the effect of exacerbating divisions in the potential opposition to neoliberalism. Not a bug.

3. The Syrian conflict has entered yet another crucial phase. I expect the Israelis to kick over the table, and the Trump administration doesn't have the necessary resolution to stop them with guaranteed threats. Militaristic cretins might be given a chance to run with the ball. And then there's North Korea. Breath holding here.

4. Personally, I have very little gut-level understanding of the cadences of crisis politics. Given the seriousness of the issues and the obviousness of the targets, I'd expect Sanders or someone else to be sounding the trumpets. Instead, it seems to be more a matter of setting out rebuttals, worrying about exhausting or boring the audience. I realize that we're not in an "in the streets" phase, but are supposed to be building organizations, finding candidates, etc. But the methodical, deliberate pace of that effort starts to seem inadequate to the moment.

5. And then there's climate warming, which so easily gives rise to that deck chairs feeling. Hard to suppress it at times.

I hate to concede much to the importance of national leadership, but in the absence, as yet, of a broad, thoroughly anti-neoliberal social democratic organization that provides a "culture of solidarity," (as Rick Fantasia described it in his fine book) we need it. And so we're left with moods and presentiments, while trying to deflate fake leader trial balloons -- another Kennedy? Cory Booker?

chwee , February 16, 2018 at 9:42 am

I would argue that there's a basic need for most human beings to feel like part of something greater, that they're working towards something more meaningful than ever more crass consumerism, ala Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you .."

So when push comes to shove, a credible national leader who is able to cajole everyone to start pulling together in the same direction can make a serious go at solving or at least addressing / amerliorating some of our pressing issues. I don't think there's anyone in the US political circles right now that fits the bill ..

Compare and contrast with Putin and Xi, who are personally untouched by corruption taint, and whom their population actually believes has their nations' long-term interests at heart

I'd say national leadership will make all the difference when push comes to shove. Been telling that to US friends for a couple of years, fwiw.

Grumpy Engineer , February 16, 2018 at 8:56 am

" The general consensus was that we simply cannot go on as we are. "

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Whether it's skyrocketing measures of income inequality, health insurance premiums rising faster than wages, college tuition rates and student loan balances rising faster than wages, mindlessly skyrocketing stock markets and asset bubbles fueled by stupid central bank policies, or whatever other unsustainable woe you choose to pick, these things cannot go on forever . Indeed, you can almost feel the "major social upheaval" lurking around the corner.

And we're incredibly divided. Most of the MSM has been sucked into personality conflicts and the us-vs-them mindset. They actively feed it now. You're expected to pick a team and learn to hate the other guys.

I too suspect that "tweaking round the edges" will prove totally inadequate, but I have no desire for revolution. I've seen too many of them start off well but then go off the rails in horrible, terrifying directions. Revolutions can be terribly sloppy affairs, with real people getting hurt in the process. And they usually don't end where we really want them to.

So where does this leave us? Unsettled and full of angst, to say the least, with no good solutions in sight.

perpetualWAR , February 16, 2018 at 9:38 am

Just yesterday I was asked, "Aren't you a liberal Democrat?" I answered, "No, I hate both parties equally." That set them back on their laurels. They expected me to say "Yes."

Lambert Strether , February 16, 2018 at 5:00 pm

> The general consensus was that we simply cannot go on as we are

Waiting for Godot :

ESTRAGON: I can't go on like this.

VLADIMIR: That's what you think.

(Bleakness mitigated by my view that Waiting for Godot is best read, and performed, in the tradition of slapstick comedy.)

bassmule , February 16, 2018 at 7:26 am

A seemingly endless loop of outrage that yields nothing, except the feeling of powerlessness -- that all that is important in life is out of our hands, and in the hands of those who look at us and see nothing but another source of revenue.

timotheus , February 16, 2018 at 7:48 am

Yes, I agree with the "endless loop of outrage" weariness that has set in, the best example being the (ho-hum) shooting of a dozen high school students that in a normal society would prompt mobilization for change and quick marginalization of any leader who said, Let's do nothing! When murder becomes routine, an overall numbness is unavoidable. I had a visitor from Mexico with me recently who asked why I was watching a documentary about serial killer John Wayne Gacey (as someone who hitchhiked nearby around that time, I take a personal interest) and remarked, "In Mexico serial killers are not news."

flora , February 16, 2018 at 10:51 am

"A seemingly endless loop of outrage that yields nothing, except the feeling of powerlessness–"

I rather think that our "feeling of powerlessness" is the goal aimed for by the msm. And identity politics serves a divide and conquer function. (But you can buy T-shirts! so it's all good. /s)

bassmule , February 16, 2018 at 11:39 am

I hope to draw some response to the second part of my complaint, which is that in the dog-eat-dog world of a society ordered solely by markets, we are reduced: First, from being to citizens to consumers, then from being consumers to being marks, rubes, suckers. The "news" (such as it is) isn't reported to us, it's sold to us.

flora , February 16, 2018 at 7:18 pm

Facebook's emotional contagion experiment comes to mind.

Louis Fyne , February 16, 2018 at 7:30 am

Corporate media has been pumping out Trump Derangement Syndrome stories for 18+ months. [if you're cynical] not only because the media genuinely dislike trump, but to drive clickbait and subscription sign-ups

but just as 'likes' juice the happy-chemical parts of your brain, Trump-related outrage stories juice the angry-chemical parts of your brain.

After 18 months of being triggered by the news media [sometimes by Trump, sometimes by DNC pundits, sometimes by real life], your brain basically says -- 'so what? i'm not angry any more.'

qed the overton Window has been moved.

PlutoniumKun , February 16, 2018 at 7:40 am

I was idly wondering yesterday where the current hysteria surrounding Trump will lead everyone. There have been hysterical political situations before, but they have tended to be 'single issue' ones – I can't recall any time when so many people on the main political parties have been so singlemindedly determined to whip up anger. When its a 'single issue' or generated by one side it can run out of steam or diffuse but when its multiple issues I think its liable to either result in an explosion, or, conversely, lead to a sort of nervous exhaustion. Looking at it from the outside, I would really fear what could happen in the US if there was a major economic reversal. A sense of a rising tide can ease over a lot of worries, but if things go into reverse, it can curdle into real anger. In historical situations it can help if the anger has a particular focus, but a huge problem in the US seems to me to be that there is no focus – its all so diffuse – anger at Trump, at inequality, at feminists, at equality, at Russia, at Iran, at pretty much everyone.

From my reading of history, when countries have been in the grip of anxiety it is often a relief when a feared thing happens – such as when Japan bombed Pearl Harbour it was widely reported that the response of the public, including anti-war activists, was great relief. A feeling that at least a course had been set, a key decision made, even if it was a potentially disastrous one.

I've read that much the same feeling descended over much of Europe at the start of WWI. While the same situation doesn't quite apply in the US, I do fear that there is a craving for some sort of decision, a decisive act. While I think Trump is by nature someone who prefers to stir the pot rather than take decisive action, he is also very sensitive to the darker drives of the public feeling. I do fear that he might feel inclined to do something really stupid, and there is nobody sensible around him to stop it happening.

susan the other , February 16, 2018 at 12:25 pm

I think Trump understands more than he reveals. I think we are looking at the tempered effects of MSM froth by all the good, sensible internet bloggers and commenters which serve to neutralize the nonsense. What I see is angst failure – nobody bought this farcical onslaught of propaganda. Everyone questioned it. Something happens to the "news" when opposite views and facts collide – it gets emulsified like vinegar and oil into much less drastic possibilities.

On the one hand – on the other hand. The internet was able to neutralize the MSM because the MSM does only superficial "reporting". There seems to be a state of angst withdrawal, lots of confusion, and no direction. As if "time goes on like nothing is important." And lately a very interesting thing has happened – there is almost no hysteria about "the debt. I have the vague feeling that there are some few people who are actually in control of their senses and the sea change is approaching critical mass. Things will change for the better not only because everyone is fed up but probably more because our dear leaders, including the banksters, are clueless and they don't know how to make capitalism work using the old rules. It's gonna be interesting. Thank you NC.

W , February 16, 2018 at 3:38 pm

Interesting reminds me of how some torturers have learned that the fear of the pain can be worse than the pain itself in terms of emotional distress and breaking down ego-barriers to cooperation/submission. When the fear is worse than the feared experience, the feared experience itself is a relief.

johnf , February 16, 2018 at 7:42 am

I am definitely sensing more Angst in Germany (the ur–Angst? ), but at the moment, that is probably going off topic.

Kevin , February 16, 2018 at 7:44 am

Our Jerri-Lynn, who mainly lives overseas, was briefly in the US last month and dropped by our NYC meetup. She commented to me that she was very eager to leave because she could sense how high the general tension level was.

I can assure you, what she feels is very, very real. My wife and I travel at least once a year back to Canada , where my wife is from – the difference in tension is palpable. I feel so loose and calm when I am there.

windsock , February 16, 2018 at 7:50 am

I feel the same when I leave UK and head to Italy or Portugal.

Lambert Strether , February 16, 2018 at 5:04 pm

> I feel so loose and calm when I am [in Canada]

I felt the very same thing when I lived there for a couple years in the late 90s. I think it's the lack of the imperial burden.

Norello , February 16, 2018 at 7:46 am

"Do you sense, as Lambert and I do, that the news tide has receded?"

My primary news source is the print edition of the Wall Street Journal and I've noted to myself a similar observation recently. The first time I saw the gymnist doctor sex abuse story featured prominetly on the first page I thought it odd. When the story was featured promintely on the front page multiple times after that it felt bizzare. My reaction was wondering how can this possibly be that important compared to everything else happening in the world.

"If so, to resort to Warren Buffett's image, who do you think it has exposed as swimming naked?"

My interpetation has been the news media has been exposed as swimming naked. They are unable or unwilling to spend the money required to deliver professional reporting. Since election season they have depended on reporting on Trump's controversies to fill their pages. That is cheap and easy to do. Without that they have to spend time, money and talent to report on other complex matters.

The quaility and quantity of the print edition of the WSJ has been a noticeable decline the last few years. Little things like a front page lead in to what was supposed to be on page B1 was instead on B4. I've been reading the WSJ for probably twenty years now and never seen that happen before.

Twice during the presidential election they had what looked like at first a normal section of the newspaper but was actually a "paid advertisement" from China and Japan. It was blatant propaganda from their governments. It was shocking that the WSJ would take money to print foreign government's propaganda on election matters. There have been many other observations like that which have lead me to the conclusion news reporting capabilities have been gutted more than most people realize.

Anonymous2 , February 16, 2018 at 4:18 pm

Taken over not so long ago by one R Murdoch? He has damaged every paper he has touched IMO.

Edward , February 16, 2018 at 7:52 am

Maybe this painting depicting ennui captures the current mood: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sickert-ennui-n03846

Perhaps this is what happens when you are surrounded by nonsensical rubbish by press and government. But I have felt this way for years.

ChiGal in Carolina , February 16, 2018 at 9:17 am

They might be without purpose but they appear secure. Few people I know feel secure; a lot of it is about the basic stuff, health care and jobs.

Edward , February 16, 2018 at 10:02 am

True, but can they address those concerns? The Occupy movement was such an effort, but the police seem to have stifled it. Then Sen. Sanders appeared on the scene with his Presidential campaign and that too was suppressed. If people are in fact not engaged it probably indicates an absence of what is important and meaningful for them in the larger society.

Eustache De Saint Pierre , February 16, 2018 at 7:57 am

I have had the same or at a least similar feeling of late, but for the most part considered it as me reflecting my own circumstances on the world, as well as worrying items of news particularly from Syria. A bit like an increasing tightness of breath, within the increasingly stale & pressurized air of an expanding balloon.

Wukchumni , February 16, 2018 at 7:58 am

It has been a rather dull time for news, and i'm not really feeling any angst, other than when I went to a neighbor's dinner party surrounded by reign of error supporters that seemed to be doubling down on their choice in an assertive manner, with absolutely no prompting from me.

I found that disturbing, the group-sink mentality, a blackjack equivalent of doubling down on a 16, with the dealer showing a face card, why?

The LA Times got sold this week, which came with the SD Union Tribune as 2 for 1 deal for $500 million.

The LAT had truly turned into a piece of garbage the past years, they'd get scooped on stories in their own backyard, the writing was what you'd expect from a newspaper emanating from a city of 48,424, and it would be a given that new reporter hires should go at least a page into google when investigating.

Why would somebody pay half a billion for something that's broken down and even if you fixed it, where is the upside?

Sam Adams , February 16, 2018 at 7:59 am

My take is we are in the period just before WW1 and the last garden parties. Everything seems warm, slightly off. The skirts are hobbling, the hats large and the military medals shiny on gold braid. The politicians are making noise, but we all know that for all the strum and bother, they will come to a resolution.

Did you hear the Austrian heir and his wife were shot? Try the sandwiches .

JacobiteInTraining , February 16, 2018 at 10:36 am

Ummm, those sandwiches are simply MARVELOUS I *must* get your recipe.

My neighbors sons both joined the Uhlan Regiment, and we are organizing a party for them before they go to the academy. They look sooooo precious in their uniforms, I want to be sure we have the best in food and drink for their send off party!

And yes, those dang Serbians. Such troublemakers. Rest assured they will be dealt with swiftly and severely.

Lord Koos , February 16, 2018 at 2:19 pm

We've been watching a German TV series called Babylon Berlin, which is set in Wiemar Germany, 1929, just before the crash. It's fascinating to compare those times to our own, there are many parallels. The show is extremely well done. https://newrepublic.com/article/147053/babylon-berlin-sees-weimar-republic

Carolinian , February 16, 2018 at 7:59 am

There's an Ingmar Bergman film from the 1960s called Winter Light where one of the characters finds out the Red Chinese have acquired the bomb and kills himself. Surely it's the news media who are creating the current wave of high anxiety and even tragedies like school shootings seem to be egged on by the media since most shooters are copycats.

Which is why some of us have taken to getting our news from sites like this one. A sanity filter is needed. A sense of perspective may also be useful as in world historical terms there have been much worse periods than this. Time does heal wounds, perhaps even elites who have lost their marbles.

ChiGal in Carolina , February 16, 2018 at 9:29 am

ah, yes. this has been on my mind lately. More the best lacking all conviction and the worst full of passionate intensity than the rough beast part He's already ensconced in Washington and doesn't seem to be able to do much of anything [brain glancing off the specter of all those judges].

GERMO , February 16, 2018 at 9:46 am

This is an astute post by NC and lots of great comments -- little to add but I'll see your Yeats and raise you one Gramsci:

"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

Bittercup , February 16, 2018 at 11:24 am

Well as long as we're talking poetry, I think Auden's September 1, 1939 might be even more relevant today than it was back when it was written. So much so that I can't decide which part of it to excerpt (and it's a bit too long to just quote the whole thing!).

Actually, no, I do know -- here is the last stanza of the poem, which just happens to describe exactly the kind of thing that NC -- at its best -- can provide in opposition to the "waves of anger and fear [ ] obsessing our private lives."

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Katherine Calkin , February 16, 2018 at 10:15 pm

How about Sartre: Hell is other people.

Jay Jay , February 16, 2018 at 8:16 am

The DOJ Inspector General report will be out in March. After one look at a draft of the report, Randall Wray fired McCabe. And remember, the DOJIG has all of the Strzok e-mails, including the ones the FBI "inadvertently destroyed." Hopes–and fears–are high that this report will expose all of the Russiagate corruption in complete detail. If so, even mainstream media stars won't have a place to hide. They went all in too long ago and pushed the story way too hard.

So to answer Yves's questions: yes, there is deep fear that a receding tide is about to reveal a lot of naked swimmers and that yes, it will be a tsunami.

nv , February 16, 2018 at 8:16 am

Professor Kendall Thomas, director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia Law School, spoke at Goethe House New York recently. He designated Trump a 'post-president,' saying that the mythological status of the US presidency has been exploded (my word). An audience member asked if we were also post the nation state; Kendall replied that the questioner had answered his own question.

Perhaps here we have the source, or one major source, of the generalized angst? (No video, or no video yet, however, see https://www.goethe.de/ins/us/en/sta/ney/ver.cfm ? fuseaction=events.detail&event_id=21154521)

paul , February 16, 2018 at 12:48 pm

Now that is news I can use!

I suppose it might have been private eye, a very changed publication from my first introduction, suggested that the offspring of the firm were far more interested in discotheques and tax free beaches than than the fealty of the field mice in their property.

A little disinterested resignation might go a long way.

However

paul , February 16, 2018 at 1:21 pm

NCO smithers, sorry to hijack your thread; But if I'm going to do it within the headline post: Iraq war protests: The one in edinburgh was glorious, people flowing in from the mound, the west est end and leith street, blocking the roads, g galloway and t sheridan doing what they do best.

I retired and watched the news on the bbc and that is why I have hardly looked at since then.

What your have gifted me is contributions is that nothing is rational as family business, and extra-family is hopeless romance.

I'll jog along (to use the contemporary parlance),

The only weak point is the family.

Loneprotester , February 16, 2018 at 12:04 pm

When war comes it will not be fought by "post-nation states."

Great thread. Keep it going.

Weltschmerz , February 16, 2018 at 8:26 am

1) gaslighting with news that doesn't matter
2) feeeling of an echo chamber and the same ol same ol
3) unclear ways of taking action and identifying those persons who can fix the mess that those persons impmementing neoliberalism and warmongering have created

Colonel Smithers , February 16, 2018 at 8:58 am

Thank you.

I don't have much contact with the 1% now, having changed jobs in mid-2016, but agree with you and get that sense from friends / former colleagues who do.

I work in the City of London. To use the euphemism en vogue at my employer, many people will be "rolling off the platform", ours, over the spring. It's the same at my former employer and another firm I know well. These are middle aged and middle class professionals about to be thrown on the scrap heap.

One can observe Thatcherites becoming Corbynites.

Arizona Slim , February 16, 2018 at 11:40 am

Colonel Smithers, I observed something similar during the Sanders campaign's peak here in Tucson. That would be during late 2015 and early 2016. Let's just say that people weren't flocking to Bernie because their lives were going well.

Lambert Strether , February 16, 2018 at 5:10 pm

> "rolling off the platform"

What's the metaphor here?

ChiGal in Carolina , February 16, 2018 at 6:23 pm

Just to clarify, these are Bernie folks I'm talking about, with no love of corporate Dems/Hillary, but I fear they don't realize how very real the threat is that the energy of the base will be coopted by the leadership.

Norb , February 16, 2018 at 9:20 am

The news tide has receded because by blurring the line between news/information and entertainment, for most people, it looses all relevance in conducting daily life. People are tuned out and apathetic. Those watching the MSM closely are either entirely satisfied with society as is, brainwashed, social voyeurs titilated by the access to human suffering in ever expanding forms, or for professional interest. The weird atmosphere is that people realize how precarious their social positions have become, but are offered no outlet to relieve the growing anxiety. There is no leadership attempting to address these grievances, and when movements do surface, the same set of characters jump to the forefront and successfully diffuse the energy building for something different.
There is no accountability.

The MSM is ubiquitous in its constant drone of irrelevance. Just as the constant flashing of advertising becomes harder and harder to see, it just stops carrying any useful information regardless of what is being said or shown.

My sense for years has been the thought, "what will it take to break the malaise". Society has gone from the Deep Water Horizon disaster, Fukushima meltdown, endless small wars, and growing ecological disasters. Not to mention growing economic inequality with no end in sight. The response is indifference and obfuscation.

Democracy requires civic action, but without proper leadership, Democracy is impossible. Democracy requires institutions that citizens can participate in, and the current crop of leaders undermines that participation at every turn.

So what is left is that everyone conducts their lives on autopilot- until forced to act otherwise. It is a weird atmosphere where the general consensus is one of quiet despair, but easier to pretend that all is well.

Pat , February 16, 2018 at 9:25 am

I will note that years after I stopped biting my nails I have started again. And this time it is worse. I never endangered the quick, but am now so anxious And I have eliminated most traditional sources of news from my life.

I am powerless. A seismic event that should have caused at least a small path change has not. Instead the road is even more closed to alteration, the real news is the same or worse. And the bread and circuses is not considered necessary because nothing really changed. The shootings, the growing early deaths of the populace, and so on are normal. I do not know if the slow boil of the frogs/populace will only end with their total collapse and that we have merely turned up the heat to speed things up. Or if another seismic event that is more violent and revolutionary is going to happen as the restricted road is overrun by those supposed to die quickly and quietly. A Russian and French Revolution level up rising where our current system is bludgeoned to death.

I try to ignore that sense, that prediction. But as my admission makes clear I cannot. We are cursed to live in interesting times.

Dean , February 16, 2018 at 10:02 am

The firehose of information (shit?) being sprayed at me during my waking hours by the industrial-information complex was chipping away at my soul one clickbait headline at a time, one junk email at a time, one advertisement at a time. So I made a choice and l 'opted out' as best I could. I have only 3 news bookmarks (NC on of them). I dropped all social media in the summer of '16. I've been cable free for nearly two years.

My overall mood has improved greatly over this time. I am not feeling the angst but I see the effect the 24×7 bombardment is having on people close to me.

I am beginning to wonder if this constant bombardment is someone's grand design to wear us down, divide us, and keep us in a permanent state of fear and paralysis.

Loneprotester , February 16, 2018 at 12:37 pm

Brilliant! I felt a similar Lightness of Being after giving up Facebook a few months ago. But this has been undermined by recently taking up Twitter. Twitter is like having a stranger run up to you every few minutes shouting the same piece of nonsense in your face. Then someone else shouts the exact opposite. And so on and so on.

Lambert Strether , February 16, 2018 at 5:24 pm

Twitter demands extremely careful curation, and then it's incredibly valuable. Rather like life.

Kokuanani , February 16, 2018 at 1:06 pm

I share your sense of "bombardment," and for me it's an on-going fight with my husband who wants to watch MSNBC, CNN, etc. We have a very small house, so it's almost impossible for me to get away from the audio, and it's winter, so going outside to escape is more challenging.

I find the yelling of Rachel Maddow et al. actually like a physical assault on my senses. I say to my husband, "you know things in the world are crap. Do you need to have that fact repeated to you again and again? And don't you feel that this assault wears you down and makes you less able to take positive action? That's its effect on me."

[I wear my noise-cancelling earphones a lot.]

Eclair , February 16, 2018 at 1:37 pm

Gosh, Kokuanani, I am in much the same situation. My recently-retired husband turns the TV on first thing in the morning and almost never shuts it down until bedtime. We have downsized to a small condo, which fortunately has a small second bedroom/sitting room, so I can escape for a time.

He watches CNN and the local news stations a lot and, as I stroll through the living room or work in the adjacent kitchen, I am assaulted with the tension-laden voices of the news anchors, pushing the latest disaster. I was almost grateful for the school shooting, since it did make a change from the incessant prattling about l'affaire Porter.

What I find most horrifying are the daytime TV shows that feature white male authority figures telling hapless people who have supposedly screwed up their lives and relationships, exactly where they have gone wrong and what they need to do to straighten themselves out. The audience, or should it be the 'mob,' acts as a chorus, egging on the participants.

I now realize how insulated from the 'real world' I have been for decades.

It is interesting that you feel the verbal yelling as as an almost physical assault. I feel the same about constant background noise; it hurts. My spouse, on the other hand, seems to need the stimulation of the verbal stream. (Might have something to do with his dyslexia).

RMO , February 16, 2018 at 3:36 pm

I frequently like to have the television on – often as background while I do other things. I do have cable (as part of an integrated telephone/internet/television package) and when I have broadcast television playing, as opposed to DVD's etc., I find I gravitate to old comedy reruns. I've rewatched the entirety of the Mary Tyler Moore show multiple times this winter along with many other 50's through early 80's television. The only breakthrough from the hurricane of angst whirling through the U.S. media has been the commercials. The ads are often made up of 50% promotion of a new pharmaceutical or medical product and 50% an invitation to join a class action suit against the makers of a slightly older pharmaceutical or medical product. It's an odd juxtaposition.

Lambert Strether , February 16, 2018 at 5:26 pm

I visit friends who watch CNN all the time fairly regularly (and as readers know, I don't have a TV at all, so it's quite an experience for me).

Whatever's going on at CNN, it's clearly not news in any sense that I understand. It's demented, crazy-making.

John , February 16, 2018 at 10:07 am

The wheels keep turning in place with no movement forward, backward, or in a circle. Case in point: Yet one more mass shooting in a school. Yet one more disturbed, angry, and/or obsessed personal with a semi-automatic weapon. Shock, horror, thoughts, prayers; we need 'sensible' gun controls; it's not the time to talk about guns, etc., etc. Same script every time and it fades away until the next time. Does no one notice?

What can I add to what has already been said? I am sick to death of slippery empty words and sly tactics and thievery. I want to say to hell with it all, but I cannot not care.

Craig H. , February 16, 2018 at 10:11 am

The reason most news is dull is that most of it is fake. I was watching an old interview that Kerry Cassidy did with Jim Marrs the other day and he was riveting. A lot of people classify Marrs as a conspiracy nut but he described himself as a journalist. One of the most memorable things he said (this is not an exact quote) is that he still tried to do journalism, but we really don't have journals any more. They are more like advertising circulars and the stories are almost all government or corporate public relations pieces. There are plenty of stories to write. The pieces you guys run on Uber and Calpers are rare and not dull. It is obvious when a competent journalist has taken the time to do research and investigate and double-check things and think about what they are doing.

The manipulated dope the government releases on the latest shooting is not news. It is propaganda. It isn't worth reading.

schultzzz , February 16, 2018 at 2:08 pm

my 2 cents: the FOX NEWS-ification of the MSM is now complete, and that's why it's weird.

If the subtext to the MSM's Trump coverage is, "He's a racist authoritarian so he must be stopped at all costs," then you'd think they'd cover police brutality every day. If they're so concerned about racism and authoritarianism. Instead, we're seeing the FBI, CIA, etc., cast in the role of 'oppressed minorities standing up to The System, Maaan!'

Plus, as a fan of paranoia, I can say. . . I've never seen a more unsatisfying, overly-abstract conspiracy in my life. It's not that they are rehabilitating CIA goons, but they're doing so specifically in order to obsess over memos, and reports about memos, and memos about reports about leaks about other memos.

It's like an episode of The Office if everyone in the office had nukes. Sheesh, give me P2 and the Vatican Bank any day.

TLDR: It's weird because of the sudden growth of the disconnect between [the very real anxieties we news consumers feel in our daily lives] . . . . and the news reports which attempt to leverage those anxieties into outrage at [whatever media elites are mad at that day].

EGrise , February 16, 2018 at 2:13 pm

A question I'm pondering lately that may be related: suppose a general pulled a Julius Caesar, crossed the Rubicon/Potomac and seized control of the US government. What would the response be?

Sixty years ago, there would have been staunch support for the civilian government, politicians of both parties would have rallied their supporters to defend our democratic heritage, and I believe ordinary citizens would have actively opposed the military government in a number of ways up to and including taking up arms.

Today? I just can't see it. I don't know if anyone would really give a [family_blog] beyond some outrage on Facebook or Twitter. The nihilism and ennui are palpable.

Mark Blyth tells the story of speaking to a room full of fund managers and other monied types, and he asked them if they would have trusted the politicians they supported twenty or thirty years prior to manage one of their accounts, to general assent. But when he asked if they would trust any of the politicians they currently support to do the same, they all laughed out loud. In the US, that attitude is nearly universal, across all layers of society .

Could you see yourself risking your life to go fight for our democracy under the banner of Chuck Schumer? The DNC? Any of the ghouls in the GOP? I can't. And I think that's meaningful.

schultzzz , February 16, 2018 at 2:22 pm

If I didn't know any better, I'd say the MSM is getting revenge on us. They got the 2016 election wrong, were exposed as out-of-touch, and rightly ridiculed. Lacking credibility and unwilling to do stories that would upset their owners (i.e. stories ABOUT average American problems), the only tool left in their 'keep people reading us' toolkit is. . .'aaaaah read this or the country dies!!!!'

And what do you know, the 'anxiety' tool just also happens to inflict a lot of psychic punishment on the same news consumers that ridiculed them. So that's a two-fer!

Rosario , February 16, 2018 at 2:44 pm

I'm having trouble articulating the pile of words in my head to describe my thinking on current news media. I'll just say that I've suspected an "establishment agenda" in most news for years and Trump has mostly confirmed that suspicion. I'm sure it has, to some extent, always been that way with the press (we can't escape our culture), but the stakes of milquetoast (or outright nefarious) new media seem bigger now than ever (US empire collapse, climate change, ballooning global inequality). I'm only 31 so let me know if I'm off base thinking the sky is falling.

I think the hosts are right that the news seems to be drying up as of late, but I think that is more a feature than a bug. There is plenty to discuss and dissect. They are just not the kinds of things that capitalist media wants to even acknowledge much less cover.

I don't know if there are any Aussies in this thread, but I'll include a link to a comedian from Australia who has excellent and usually funny commentary on Australian politics. He posts a great deal on Youtube and has a pretty excellent take down of Vice News. BTW the ever edgy Vice has a 5% stake owned by Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox and his boy James is/was a board member, figure that one out. The comedian says more pointedly what I was trying to say above to a particular example of the problem, and I think the critique of Vice News is within the topic of the thread. As a heads up, you may need to see his initial video to get any context. I recommend both.

XXYY , February 16, 2018 at 3:36 pm

I think one thing that is new recently is that the people supposedly driving the bus are *obviously* incompetent and in over their heads.

I am in my late 50s, and for most of my life there was an air of seriousness and competence about national leaders. Even when they were doing something you didn't like, you could generally assume they were adequate to the situation, or at least had access to people who were. E.g., the moronic Reagan at least supposedly had a coterie of serious people in his administration who could keep the train on the tracks. Various government departments were staffed by people who had a lifetime of experience in their affairs, and there was thus a deep bench of skill and experience the national leaders could rely on when needed. Government seemed serious and purposeful for the most part, and the nation seemed in reasonably good hands.

It's impossible to say how much of this sensibility was real and how much carefully maintained illusion; my guess is a lot of what was going on was the latter, but at least leaders and the media realized seriousness was an important front to maintain.

Now we seem to be at a point where the people in charge are unapologetic about their greed, their lack of ability or even interest in their jobs and consitiuents, their lack of intellect and integrity, and the absence of any pretense of doing anything useful for the population or the society. Important national institutions (e.g. the State Department! The CDC!) are being left to languish or being actively dismantled. Who will fill the void? No one cares. The media, meanwhile, not only fails to lament these things but actually seems to have some glee about the situation and delights in spotlighting incompetence and even criminality in the leadership

(I write from the US, obviously; however, the same seems to be true, perhaps even more so, in the UK, from what I read.)

As a result, a deadly sense of futility sets in. At best, we can head off the bigger disasters. Nothing is likely to actually improve. The will and leadership to face our many impending disasters (climate change, nuclear war, inequality, racism, financial collapse, infrastructure collapse) seems utterly absent.

I guess what I'm saying is, as one surveys the landscape, there is a marked loss of hope coupled with a tearing urgency that something needs to be done. It's a terrible, very volatile and dangerous condition.

jrs , February 16, 2018 at 7:40 pm

a sensible emotional response to Trump perhaps. Obama was bad in many ways, but Trump is something harder to make sense of than mere bad: he's absurd.

Jim , February 16, 2018 at 6:55 pm

The Crack-Up F.Scott Fitzgerald (1936)

"Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation -- the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."

Do we still have that will and can we find a way?

[Feb 16, 2018] New evidence shows DNC server files were downloaded directly to USB drive, not hacked by Russians by Alex Christoforou

Jul 12, 2017 | theduran.com

New evidence shows DNC server files were downloaded directly to USB drive, not hacked by Russians

Now that the liberal left mainstream media is fixated on their latest Trump-Russia collusion smoking gun, with the revelation that Donald Trump Jr., **GASP**, spoke with a lawyer from Russia about adoption stuff, it is important to take a step back and realize that this entire Hillary Clinton concocted Russia collusion narrative started with a DNC server hack that the FBI never investigated, and now (according to an independent researcher known as The Forensicator) was not even a hack, but a document download onto a USB drive.

The evidence points to a DNC inside job. Via Disobedient Media .

New meta-analysis has emerged from a document published today by an independent researcher known as The Forensicator, which suggests that files eventually published by the Guccifer 2.0 persona were likely initially downloaded by a person with physical access to a computer possibly connected to the internal DNC network. The individual most likely used a USB drive to copy the information. The groundbreaking new analysis irrevocably destroys the Russian hacking narrative, and calls the actions of Crowdstrike and the DNC into question.

The document supplied to Disobedient Media via Adam Carter was authored by an individual known as The Forensicator. The full document referenced here has been published on their blog . Their analysis indicates the data was almost certainly not accessed initially by a remote hacker, much less one in Russia. If true, this analysis obliterates the Russian hacking narrative completely.

Click here for the best news on Russia >>

The Forensicator specifically discusses the data that was eventually published by Guccifer 2.0 under the title "NGP-VAN." This should not be confused with the separate publication of the DNC emails by Wikileaks. This article focuses solely on evidence stemming from the files published by Guccifer 2.0, which were previously discussed in depth by Adam Carter .

Disobedient Media previously reported that Crowdstrike is the only group that has directly analyzed the DNC servers. Other groups including Threat Connect have used the information provided by Crowdstrike to claim that Russians hacked the DNC. However, their evaluation was based solely on information ultimately provided by Crowdstrike; this places the company in the unique position of being the only direct source of evidence that a hack occurred.

The group's President Shawn Henry is a retired executive assistant director of the FBI while their co-founder and CTO, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, which as we have reported , is linked to George Soros. Carter has stated on his website that "At present, it looks a LOT like Shawn Henry & Dmitri Alperovitch (CrowdStrike executives), working for either the HRC campaign or DNC leadership were very likely to have been behind the Guccifer 2.0 operation." Carter's website was described by Wikileaks as a useful source of primary information specifically regarding Guccifer 2.0.

Carter recently spoke to Disobedient Media, explaining that he had been contacted by The Forensicator, who had published a document which contained a detailed analysis of the data published by Guccifer 2.0 as "NGP-VAN."

The document states that the files that eventually published as "NGP-VAN" by Guccifer 2.0 were first copied to a system located in the Eastern Time Zone, with this conclusion supported by the observation that "the .7z file times, after adjustment to East Coast time fall into the range of the file times in the .rar files." This constitutes the first of a number of points of analysis which suggests that the information eventually published by the Guccifer 2.0 persona was not obtained by a Russian hacker.

Disobedient Media , The Forensicator stated in their analysis that a USB drive was most likely used to boot Linux OS onto a computer that either contained the alleged DNC files or had direct access to them.

They also explained to Disobedient Media that in this situation one would simply plug a USB drive with the LinuxOS into a computer and reboot it; after restarting, the computer would boot from the USB drive and load Linux instead of its normal OS. A large amount of data would then be copied to this same USB drive.

In this case, additional files would have been copied en masse, to be "pruned" heavily at a later time when the 7zip archive now known as NGP-VAN was built. The Forensicator wrote that if 1.98 GB of data had been copied at a rate of 22.6 MB/s and time gaps t were noticed at the top level of the NGP-VAN 7zip file were attributed to additional file copying, then approximately 19.3 GB in total would have been copied. In this scenario, the 7zip archive (NGP-VAN) would represent only about 10% of the total amount of data that was collected.

The very small proportion of files eventually selected for use in the creation of the "NGP-VAN" files were later published by the creators of the Guccifer 2.0 persona. This point is especially significant, as it suggests the possibility that up to 90% of the information initially copied was never published.

The use of a USB drive would suggest that the person first accessing the data could not have been a Russian hacker. In this case, the person who copied the files must have physically interacted with a computer that had access to what Guccifer 2.0 called the DNC files. A less likely explanation for this data pattern where large time gaps were observed between top level files and directories in the 7zip file, can be explained by the use of 'think time' to select and copy 1.9 GB of individual files, copied in small batches with think time interspersed. In either scenario, Linux would have been booted from a USB drive, which fundamentally necessitates physical access to a computer with the alleged DNC files.

The Forensicator believed that using the possible 'think-time' explanation to explain the time-gaps was a less likely explanation for the data pattern available, with a large amount of data most likely copied instantaneously, later "pruned" in the production of the Guccifer 2.0's publication of the NGP-VAN files.

Both the most likely explanation and the less likely scenario provided by The Forensicator's analysis virtually exclude the possibility of a Russian or remote hacker gaining external access to the files later published as "NGP-VAN." In both cases, the physical presence of a person accessing a containing DNC information would be required.

Importantly, The Forensicator concluded that the chance that the files had been accessed and downloaded remotely over the internet were too small to give this idea any serious consideration. He explained that the calculated transfer speeds for the initial copy were much faster than can be supported by an internet connection. This is extremely significant and completely discredits allegations of Russian hacking made by both Guccifer 2.0 and Crowdstrike.

This conclusion is further supported by analysis of the overall transfer rate of 23 MB/s. The Forensicator described this as "possible when copying over a LAN, but too fast to support the hypothetical scenario that the alleged DNC data was initially copied over the Internet (esp. to Romania)." Guccifer 2.0 had claimed to originate in Romania. So in other words, this rate indicates that the data was downloaded locally, possibly using the local DNC network. The importance of this finding in regards to destroying the Russian hacking narrative cannot be overstated.

If the data is correct, then the files could not have been copied over a remote connection and so therefore cannot have been "hacked by Russia."

The use of a USB drive would also strongly suggest that the person copying the files had physical access to a computer most likely connected to the local DNC network. Indications that the individual used a USB drive to access the information over an internal connection, with time stamps placing the creation of the copies in the East Coast Time Zone, suggest that the individual responsible for initially copying what was eventually published by the Guccifer 2.0 persona under the title "NGP-VAN" was located in the Eastern United States, not Russia.

The implications of The Forensicator 's analysis in combination with Adam Carter 's work, suggest that at the very least, the Russian hacking narrative is patently false. Adam Carter has a strong grasp on the NGP-VAN files and Guccifer 2.0, with his website on the subject called a "good source" by Wikileaks via twitter. Carter told Disobedient Media that in his opinion the analysis provided by The Forensicator was accurate, but added that if changes are made to the work in future, any new conclusions would require further vetting.

On the heels of recent retractions by legacy media outlets like CNN and The New York Times, this could have serious consequences, if months of investigation into the matter by authorities are proven to have been based on gross misinformation based solely on the false word of Crowdstrike.

Assange recently lamented widespread ignorance about the DNC Leak via Twitter, specifically naming Hillary Clinton, the DNC, the Whitehouse and mainstream media as having "reason" to suppress the truth of the matter. As one of the only individuals who would have been aware of the source of the DNC Leaks, Assange's statement corroborates a scenario where the DNC and parties described in Adam Carter's work likely to have included Crowdstrike, may have participated in "suppressing knowledge" of the true origins and evidence surrounding the leak of the DNC emails by confusing them with the publication of the Guccifer 2.0 persona.

Despite Guccifer 2.0's conflicting reports of having both been a Russian hacker and having contact with Seth Rich, the work of The Forensicator indicates that neither of these scenarios is likely true. What is suggested is that the files now known as "NGP-VAN" were copied by someone with access to a system connected to the DNC internal network, and that this action had no bearing on the files submitted to Wikileaks and were most likely unassociated with Seth Rich, and definitively not remotely "hacked" from Russia.

[Feb 16, 2018] This whole thing hangs on the murder of Seth Rich. The Dossier and the Intelligence Assessment are fundamentally rooted to Trump and Russians hacking the DNC and using WikiLeaks to ruin Hillary Clinton. Without the DNC hack there is nothing to Russia's interference in the election or any Trump collusion. Seth Rich is the Redline.

Feb 16, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Vanmac Fri, 02/16/2018 - 14:43 Permalink

This whole thing hangs on the murder of Seth Rich. The Dossier and the Intelligence Assessment are fundamentally rooted to Trump and Russians hacking the DNC and using WikiLeaks to ruin Hillary Clinton. Without the DNC "hack" there is nothing to Russia's interference in the election or any Trump collusion. Seth Rich is the Redline.

Hannity and CTH can go on and on about all of this but, not Seth Rich.

Mention Seth Rich and get your chain yanked. Everything now reflects a Limited Hangout. They've been caught, and they're cutting their losses. What will "they" do to keep Seth Rich's real killers hidden forever from public view?

whosyerdaddy Fri, 02/16/2018 - 14:44 Permalink

You folks are missing the point. Mueller has been at this for 9 months. He has come up with basically nothing, nada, zip, zilch. To make himself and Rosie look better they indict the evil Rooskies and say "aha I told you there was something there". It is a punt and a fairly transparent one.

The cases against Manafort and Flynn will be dropped for prosecutorial malfeasance, withholding of evidence, flawed FISA warrants etc.

It tells me there is no case against not only Trump but also no case against any higher ups in either the campaign or the administration. It is a way of saving face for Mueller and Rosenstein but they may have their own worries soon enough or perhaps a deal has already been made.

[Feb 16, 2018] Joe Rogan and Jimmy Dore deliver red pill truth on Seth Rich, Hillary and Obama (Video)

Notable quotes:
"... Article first appeared on RPT ..."
Feb 15, 2018 | theduran.com

Article first appeared on RPT


Joe Rogan and Jimmy Dore talk about the shady history of Hilary Clinton, and how Set Rich's murder may very well be attributed to Hillary and the DNC.

From the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast

http://www.youtube.com/embed/9bnoOounHAc?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Click here for the best news on Russia >>

Rogan and Dore discuss Obama's corruption and how Hillary Clinton was not the lesser of two evils, just pure evil.

[Feb 16, 2018] The indictment includes charges not yet proven in a court of law, yet prominent Americans are treating the indictment as fact

Notable quotes:
"... People read these accusational headlines, probably just the headlines, and it acts as a virus and penetrates the membrane of the collective subconscious, without even a moments thought to question the assertion. In time, the virus breaks down the will of the rational consumer to weigh evidence fairly, though it is also aided by further bombardment of fake news, which increases the rate of infection. ..."
Feb 16, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
stonebird , Feb 16, 2018 3:49:41 PM | 39
francis @37

One of the best bits about the indictment is the mention ;"arranging for a Real US person to stand in front of the White House in the district of Colombia with a sign that read; "Happy 55th birthday dear boss" (May 29, in 2016)" America must have trembled. (or maybe they were shaking with laughter?).

NemesisCalling , Feb 16, 2018 4:14:31 PM | 40
People read these accusational headlines, probably just the headlines, and it acts as a virus and penetrates the membrane of the collective subconscious, without even a moments thought to question the assertion. In time, the virus breaks down the will of the rational consumer to weigh evidence fairly, though it is also aided by further bombardment of fake news, which increases the rate of infection.

The virus then blossoms into a fairly beautiful and uniform flower with clean, geometric edges and universal appeal which catches the gaze of others and so is able to double the rate of infection from this secondary source.

This flower, the Ruskiesdidittous, is the result of haphazard propogation, though its ability to survive and thrive is notable due to a carrier population already enfeebled by a diet of Dr. Pepper and a lack of discernible vegetables.

I tremble for my countrymen.

Don Bacon | Feb 16, 2018 4:25:01 PM | 41

...adding to the remarks in #40...

The indictment includes charges not yet proven in a court of law, yet prominent Americans are treating the indictment as fact. from CNN:

>House Speaker Paul Ryan called the Russians' alleged actions "a conspiracy to subvert the process, and take aim at democracy itself." "We have known that Russians meddled in the election, but these indictments detail the extent of the subterfuge," Ryan said in a statement.

>Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement that given the indictments, Trump should "immediately" implement the Russia sanctions that Congress passed last summer to punish Moscow for its election meddling. "The administration needs to be far more vigilant in protecting the 2018 elections, and alert the American public any time the Russians attempt to interfere," Schumer said.

>House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement that the indictments "make absolutely clear" that Russians tried to influence the presidential election to support Trump's campaign and continue to try to interfere with our elections. "We are on the eve of the 2018 midterm elections," the statement added. "There is no time to waste to defend the integrity of our elections and our democracy."

>Robby Mook, Clinton's former campaign manager, tweeted: "The intelligence community has repeatedly told us Russia meddled. Now criminal indictments from DOJ. We were attacked by a foreign adversary. Will our Congress and President stand strong and take action? Or let it happen again?"

karlof1 | Feb 16, 2018 5:04:57 PM | 42

My rebuttal of Pelosi's statement @41--

There has never been any "integrity" in US elections, nor is there such a thing as "democracy" within the USA.

IMO, Congresscritters have never before looked and acted so damn stupid -- clearly they are merely mutts being led by a leash and told to bray at a moon called Russia.

The Outlaw US Empire totally lacks integrity and clearly isn't a democracy; it is merely another of history's failed empires destroyed by its own hubris; it really needs to gouge its eyes out and wander in the forest until it dies.

[Feb 15, 2018] Tucker You have to be a moron to believe Steele dossier

Impressive dissection of Steele dossier
Notable quotes:
"... What kind of a moron would believe the Steele dossier on Trump and Russia? Lots of Democrat and hollywood elite morons and lots of morons at MSNBC and CNN. It's so transparently partisan, outrageous and full of fictitious claims, the dossier reads like a parody of a badly written spy novel. ..."
"... It is funny to watch how they are divided (republicans and democrats) on domestic issues but they are as one on aggressive and militaristic foreign policies. Bomb, invade, bomb... rinse and repeat. No objection from either side. ..."
"... Watch Jerome Corsi and James Kalstrom great video's about all the felony crimes Barry's DNC/DOJ/FBI were involved in including the dossier. ..."
"... to deflect the Seth Rich /WikiLeaks affair...and the Keystone Kops have been tripping all over as well as tripping up themselves ever since trying to "make it happen"...and if it was not for almost the "entire" mainstream media 'covering' for them many more people would actually realize that they are the biggest 'comedy' in town... ..."
Feb 15, 2018 | theduran.com

What kind of a moron would believe the Steele dossier on Trump and Russia? Lots of Democrat and hollywood elite morons and lots of morons at MSNBC and CNN. It's so transparently partisan, outrageous and full of fictitious claims, the dossier reads like a parody of a badly written spy novel.

Amazingly, the dossier is what the FBI used to justify spying on American citizens.

Tucker Carlson easily debunks the many claims that Democrats in Congress repeatedly cited as reason to stop the normal functioning of government, so that millions of tax payer dollars can be spent trying to figure out if Trump has been a Russian spy for the last 10 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29vHVcXVN_M


Melotte 22 , February 14, 2018 5:48 PM

It is funny to watch how they are divided (republicans and democrats) on domestic issues but they are as one on aggressive and militaristic foreign policies. Bomb, invade, bomb... rinse and repeat. No objection from either side.

Joseph Sobecki , February 14, 2018 1:29 PM

Watch Jerome Corsi and James Kalstrom great video's about all the felony crimes Barry's DNC/DOJ/FBI were involved in including the dossier.

john vieira , February 15, 2018 1:06 AM

No need to convince me Tucker...have been calling them morons with regards to "Putin did it" since the ex "moron in chief"...who by the way is now a certified fifth columnist with the blessing of the treasonous mainstream media...insinuated as much after the "loser" lost....to deflect the Seth Rich /WikiLeaks affair...and the Keystone Kops have been tripping all over as well as tripping up themselves ever since trying to "make it happen"...and if it was not for almost the "entire" mainstream media 'covering' for them many more people would actually realize that they are the biggest 'comedy' in town...

Vierotchka , February 14, 2018 1:28 PM

I can only concur.

[Feb 15, 2018] Russophobia a Futile Bid to Conceal US, European Decline by Finian Cunningham

Feb 14, 2018 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

It is an age-old statecraft technique to seek unity within a state by depicting an external enemy or threat. Russia is the bête noire again, as it was during the Cold War years as part of the Soviet Union. But the truth is Western states are challenged by internal problems.

Ironically, by denying their own internal democratic challenges, Western authorities are only hastening their institutional demise.

Russophobia -- "blame it all on Russia" -- is a short-term, futile ploy to stave off the day of reckoning when furious and informed Western citizens will demand democratic restitution for their legitimate grievances.

The dominant "official" narrative, from the US to Europe, is that "malicious" Russia is "sowing division;""eroding democratic institutions;" and "undermining public trust" in systems of governance, credibility of established political parties, and the news media.

This narrative has shifted up a gear since the election of Donald Trump to the White House in 2016, with accusations that the Kremlin somehow ran "influence operations" to help get him into office. This outlandish yarn defies common sense. It is also running out of thread to keep spinning.

Paradoxically, even though President Trump has rightly rebuffed such dubious claims of "Russiagate" interference as "fake news" , he has at other times undermined himself by subscribing to the notion that Moscow is projecting a campaign of "subversion against the US and its European allies." See for example the National Security Strategy he signed off in December.

Pathetically, it's become indoctrinated belief among the Western political class that "devious Russians" are out to "collapse" Western democracies by "weaponizing disinformation" and spreading "fake news" through Russia-based news outlets like RT and Sputnik.

Totalitarian-like, there seems no room for intelligent dissent among political or media figures.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has chimed in to accuse Moscow of "sowing division;" Dutch state intelligence claim Russia destabilized the US presidential election; the European Union commissioner for security, Sir Julian King, casually lampoons Russian news media as "Kremlin-orchestrated disinformation" to destabilize the 28-nation bloc; CIA chief Mike Pompeo recently warned that Russia is stepping up its efforts to tarnish the Congressional mid-term elections later this year.

On and on goes the narrative that Western states are essentially victims of a nefarious Russian assault to bring about collapse.

A particularly instructive presentation of this trope was given in a recent commentary by Texan Republican Representative Will Hurd. In his piece headlined, "Russia is our adversary" , he claims: "Russia is eroding our democracy by exploiting the nation's divisions. To save it, Americans need to begin working together."

Congressman Hurd asserts: "Russia has one simple goal: to erode trust in our democratic institutions. It has weaponized disinformation to achieve this goal for decades in Eastern and Central Europe; in 2016, Western Europe and America were aggressively targeted as well."

Lamentably, all these claims above are made with scant, or no, verifiable evidence. It is simply a Big Lie technique of relentless repetition transforming itself into "fact" .

It's instructive to follow Congressman Hurd's thought-process a bit further.

He contends: "When the public loses trust in the media, the Russians are winning. When the press is hyper-critical of Congress the Russians are winning. When Congress and the general public disagree the Russians are winning. When there is friction between Congress and the executive branch [the president] resulting in further erosion of trust in our democratic institutions, the Russians are winning."

As a putative solution, Representative Hurd calls for "a national counter-disinformation strategy" against Russian "influence operations" , adding, "Americans must stop contributing to a corrosive political environment".

The latter is a chilling advocacy of uniformity tantamount to a police state whereby any dissent or criticism is a "thought-crime."

It is, however, such anti-democratic and paranoid thinking by Western politicians -- aided and abetted by dutiful media -- that is killing democracy from within, not some supposed foreign enemy.

There is evidently a foreboding sense of demise in authority and legitimacy among Western states, even if the real cause for the demise is ignored or denied. Systems of governance, politicians of all stripes, and institutions like the established media and intelligence services are increasingly held in contempt and distrust by the public.

Whose fault is that loss of political and moral authority? Western governments and institutions need to take a look in the mirror.

The endless, criminal wars that the US and its European NATO allies have been waging across the planet over the past two decades is one cogent reason why the public has lost faith in grandiose official claims about respecting democracy and international law.

The US and European media have shown reprehensible dereliction of duty to inform the public accurately about their governments' warmongering intrigues. Take the example of Syria. When does the average Western citizen ever read in the corporate Western media about how the US and its NATO allies have covertly ransacked that country through weaponizing terrorist proxies?

How then can properly informed citizens be expected to have respect for such criminal government policies and the complicit news media covering up for their crimes?

Western public disaffection with governments, politicians and media surely stems also from the grotesque gulf in social inequality and poverty among citizens from slavish adherence to economic policies that enrich the wealthy while consigning the vast majority to unrelenting austerity.

The destabilizing impact on societies from oppressive economic conditions is a far more plausible cause for grievance than outlandish claims made by the political class about alleged "Russian interference".

Yet the Western media indulge this fantastical "Russiagate" escapism instead of campaigning on real social problems facing ordinary citizens. No wonder such media are then viewed with disdain and distrust. Adding insult to injury, these media want the public to believe Russia is the enemy?

Instead of acknowledging and addressing real threats to citizens: economic insecurity, eroding education and health services, lost career opportunities for future generations, the looming dangers of ecological adversity, wars prompted by Western governments trashing international and diplomacy, and so on -- the Western public is insultingly plied with corny tales of Russia's "malign influence" and "assault on democracy."

Just think of the disproportionate amount of media attention and public resources wasted on the Russiagate scandal over the past year. And now gradually emerging is the real scandal that the American FBI probably colluded with the Obama administration to corrupt the democratic process against Trump.

Again, is there any wonder the public has sheer contempt and distrust for "authorities" that have been lying through their teeth and playing them for fools?

The collapsing state of Western democracies has got nothing to do with Russia. The Russophobia of blaming Russia for the demise of Western institutions is an attempt at scapegoating for the very real problems facing governments and institutions like the news media. Those problems are inherent and wholly owned by these governments owing to chronic anti-democratic functioning, as well as systematic violation of international law in their pursuit of criminal wars and other subterfuges for regime-change objectives.

Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent.

This article was originally published by " RT "


Cathi · 4 hours ago

Anyone who believes MSM is totally indoctrinated since it has been proven over and over that they won't tell the truth of the matter. The only REAL thing this country supplies or produces is war. Most other industries have been outsourced and given subsidies to so, thus taking American jobs from our lives. And now they want to take Social Security and Medicare to PAY for our military buildup????
Jim P · 3 hours ago
This nation needs a complete chage. All Congress and Dual citizens must be removed!
vicenr · 4 hours ago
It is without a doubt true that the political class and their oligharchic owners are falling and falling fast. They need a war to sustain their enrichment and attempted control of the world. They have run out of potential victims , while on the home front the naive Amrikan is starting to reject their nonsense. They can't really afford to take on China as they could easily dump their US treasuries and sink the financing arrangements for a war. They would like to stop the OBOR ; but how? Ah Russia. Smaller population but lethal in central Europe and perhaps beyond. Good geographic position for cutting OBOR. After all why would anyone be allowed to put in such a mega project and not let the US oligharchic class control it?
Woopy · 3 hours ago
A big part of the problem with Washington DC is that they are ruled by the Rothschild oligarchs and function first and foremost for Rothschild interests such as Israel and other Rothschild programs. Washington is not focused on the states it was designed to serve. Rothschild's and other oligarchs, fascists and the like control Washington crippling them. Countries like China, Russia are making their own destinies while Washington languishes and dissolves under a Rothschild fascist flag.
the_chump · 3 hours ago
"Intel chief: Federal debt poses 'dire threat' to national security"

The above was the title to an article in The Hill, yesterday. The comment was attributed to Dan Coates, DNI in testimony to Congress. To me, since elected officials CREATE the federal debt, what the DNI is REALLY saying is that the elected officials are a dire threat to national security. Their spending and fake borrowing from the Federal Reserve is the threat-not Syria, Yemen, or other countries that have not attacked the US. The elected officials, both Democrat and Republicans are on the way to destroying the US. Not Russia, China, ISIS, or international terrorism.

Eric · 2 hours ago
I recently read a horrifying commentary by John Whitehead on the burgeoning sex trade in this country where young girls are abducted and sold for sexual favors to deviants in every major city in the US. Many of these girls are as young a three and four years old, and the average age of these victims is 13! Thousands of missing children end up as sex slaves and are forced to be with as many as 40 men a night.

This great evil has become extremely lucrative, and numerous monsters, both men, and women are reaping billions of dollars from the unspeakable crime of destroying children's lives, not only physically, but mentally and spiritually as well.

The West has reached a new level of rottenness. Moral decay is actively gnawing at the very fabric of our society. The Cabal and its rampant criminality in Washington is a reflection of this terrible decline we are witnessing around us.

The hypocritical cry and hue from our government officials about the terrible human rights abuses in other countries as they seek to deflect the attention away from their own criminality and murderous abuses at home and abroad is indeed sickening.

Ray Joseph Cormier 84p · 1 hour ago
UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold was killed in a suspicious plane crash in 1961. He dared speak Truth to the Power. His quote from over 60 years ago is so relevant to what is going on Today. It has spread like never before to affect the judgments of the Politicians, the news media, and the Public.

-The Assembly has witnessed over the last weeks how historical truth is established; once an allegation has been repeated a few times, it is no longer an allegation, it is an established fact, even if no evidence has been brought out in order to support it.

American propaganda is scapegoating Russia to absolve Americans of responsibility for creating their own political divisions.

Observing from CanaDa, this anti-Russia/Putin Propaganda is confirming this Vision of the Future published 41 years ago.

On September 13, 1976, the major daily THE KANSAS CITY TIMES published this Vision of the FUTURE: "He came to town for the Republican National Convention and will stay until the election in November TO DO GOD'S BIDDING: To tell the world, from Kansas City, this country has been found wanting and its days are numbered [...] He gestured toward a gleaming church dome. "The gold dome is the symbol of Babylon," he said." [...] He wanted to bring to the Public's attention an "idea being put out subtly and deceptively" by the government that we have to get prepared for a war with Russia.

It's taken over 40 years, but that 1976 FUTURE is NOW with the Revelation of the details GENERALLY unfolding in the spirit of the letter. The World is finally waking up to see Trump just may hasten "its days are numbered" part of the 1976 Public record.

Ray Joseph Cormier 84p · 1 hour ago
The KANSAS CITY TIMES did a follow up report on ALL SOULS DAY, November 2, 1976. When the TV movie 'THE DAY AFTER' Kansas City was incinerated in a Nuclear Holocaust appeared in 1983, most likely, I was the only Human on Earth, including the newspaper reporters, to note at the END, the movie pauses at the very same picture frame THE KANSAS CITY TIMES chose for the ALL SOULS DAY record 7 years earlier.

Any way you look at it, that HISTORICAL FACT is a confirming SIGN for our Generations, the World has arrived at this point of Decision, of an "idea being put out subtly and deceptively" by the government that we have to get prepared for a war with Russia."
Multitudes! Multitudes in the Valley of Decision. The Day of the LORD IS NEAR in the Valley of Decision.

Not many will recognize, "this country has been found wanting and its days are numbered" as the 1st two parts, of the 3 part 'Writing on the Wall" from Daniel 5 and the Captivity of Babylon some 2600 years ago. The whole world saw The Writing on the Wall for the 1st TIME at the same TIME, with the Global Financial Meltdown-Economic Pearl Harbour in September of 2008, even if the world does not recognize it as such.

The 3rd part of the Writing on the Wall tells of the decline of Babylon, the 1st Biblical model of the Nation that reaches Imperial Military-Economic Superpower Status, and the rise of Persia

Ancient Babylon is now Iraq, and ancient Persia is now Iran.

The US is the latest, greatest of all the Nations reaching Imperial Military-Economic Superpower Status in the 2600 year old Biblical Babylonian superstructure.

The TAIL struck the HEAD, causing the unravelling of the Earthly Babylonian superstructure and infrastructure, ushering in the Law of the Jungle to the Middle East and this World.

The Iranian Revolution happened in 1979, 2-1/2 years after the record in the 1976 KANSAS CITY TIMES Timeline.

All the chaos in the Middle East since then, including the carnage in Syria, is the consequence of the vain attempt to reverse that God ordained, repeat of History, as a SIGN for our Generations.
http://ray032.com/2013/09/01/signs-of-the-times/

refirex · 55 minutes ago
https://warsclerotic.com/2017/01/07/cartoons-and-...
Take Placid · 43 minutes ago
Bulldoze them Georgia Guidestones.
Erase that Denver Airport Artwork.
Send Lady Liberty back to France.
Neandertals, behaving badly.
Stars and Stripes gilded cheap pennant should be changed to Skull n Bones.
Guest99 · 5 minutes ago
What the U.S. political and Deep State accused of Russia today is exactly what they themselves have done to much of the world. Entire Wikipedia is not big enough to write about the dirty tricks of the CIA and NSA.

Russia of course has no need to do what was accused. But they are surely laughing at being accused. Indeed, keep the accusation coming. The more the accusations, the longer they last, the more sure Russia know the corrupt terror empires of the west are going down.

Without firing a single shot. Now isn't that funny? Just ask the Chinese!

[Feb 14, 2018] Recused Judge in Flynn Prosecution Served on FISA Court

Highly recommended!
Feb 14, 2018 | www.unz.com

Clyde, February 14, 2018 at 11:20 am GMT

@Ozymandias

"It's worth noting that intentionally deceiving a federal judge is a felony."
It's also worth noting that sometimes the judge is in on it.

For the Trump Admin surveillance warrants the FISA judge was probably Contreras. So goes the rumor. He was probably in on it or halfway in on it. All the major players in DC know each other and trade favors.

And Gen Mike Flynn is in the process of getting his case dismissed. The only thing left to determine is how much the Federales will have to reimburse him for his lawyers fees, which are a million plus.

FISA Judge Rudolph Contreras EXPOSED – twitter.com

Rudolph Contreras was the FISA Judge who issued a warrant to spy on Carter Page because of a Yahoo News article and a Phony Probably have already. He needs to go

Recused Judge in Flynn Prosecution Served on FISA Court

https://www.infowars.com/recused-judge-in-flynn-prosecution-served&#8230 ;

Did Judge Contreras OK electronic surveillance of Recused Judge in Flynn Prosecution Served on FISA Court Did Judge Contreras OK electronic surveillance of

Federal FISA Judge Recuses Himself From Michael Flynn Case

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2017/12/07/federal-fisa-judge&#8230 ;

Blows the whole FISA Court to hell in a hand basket and Judge Contreras is getting the hell out of dodge. This a helluva mess for the FISA Court and it's victims. Rule 5. Authority of the Judges. (b) Referring Matters to Other Judges.

[Feb 14, 2018] The Anti-Trump Coup by Michael S. Rozeff

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... One objective is to keep in place an anti-Russian policy. The coup's instigators want to prevent Trump from letting up on the pressure (sanctions) on Russia and from cooperating with Russia. The coup forces are all anti-Russia, and that serves to unite them. A second objective is to maintain the positions, power, and influence of the coup's seekers. ..."
"... This is a "seed crystal" coup. The model for the seed crystal coup is the Watergate scandal. The operational goal is to crystallize and solidify the disunited Trump opposition into a movement that has irresistible momentum. In much the same way that seed crystals can accelerate a phase change from liquid to solid, the coup perpetrators introduce reports, accusations, and leaks over time in order to create the impression that a widening scandal is occurring. Each component has no merit but the media accept them at face value and provide publicity that creates new adherents and coherence among the anti-Trump forces. The anti-Trump forces are anxious to replicate the success in getting Nixon to resign. ..."
"... The anti-Trump media are critical in this effort. The anti-Trump media keep up a drumbeat of anti-Trump reporting. They slant the news, manufacture stories, repeat them and create fake news. ..."
"... The media must paint Russia and Putin as enemies for this propaganda effort to succeed. The media provide a focal point that coordinates the coup's backers even if they never sit down and conspire with one another. Everyone can observe the media stories and through that the effects of their anti-Trump leaks, reports, and innuendos. This allows them to plan their next moves. ..."
"... Social media have played a role in uprisings during the Arab Spring. The same thing can happen in America. There is a host of groups who are anti-Trump on grounds other than Russia. They can coordinate through social media. These groups seek to de-legitimize Trump so as to maintain items on their agenda. Aides to Hillary Clinton's failed campaign are now piling on to the effort. ..."
"... Positing a coup attempt is the simplest and most comprehensive hypothesis that ties together and explains a host of known facts that we know have occurred. Being a model of events, it is imperfect; but it's better than no model because it still helps us to understand what's going on. We are not seeing a train of unconnected events that just happen to be anti-Trump. It is easier to understand it as a concerted effort going on to emasculate the Trump presidency and possibly see him replaced; and that effort is centered in the CIA. ..."
"... The second victim of the coup is Michael T. Flynn, who resigned as Trump's National Security Advisor after only three weeks in that post. Leaks of tapped phone calls showed that intelligence operatives were behind this shark attack ..."
"... Mainly, unnamed intelligence officials and operatives who are in the CIA or recently retired from such. A number of media outfits are exceptionally active in propagating negative headlines and stories about Trump and his administration. Elements of other intelligence agencies and departments of government are possibly involved. We do not know the names of those operating against Trump, and this is a weakness of the coup hypothesis. ..."
Feb 21, 2017 | www.lewrockwell.com

Q. Will the coup succeed in removing Trump from office?

A. Not in its present form. It is currently destined to fail because the investigating agencies and enemies of Trump haven't found a smoking gun against him on the basis of Russian ties or influence. No one can prove that Trump is being controlled by Putin, and so he won't resign for that reason. The coup will peter out unless it comes up with new and more explosive anti-Trump material that's not obviously specious or doubtful as much of the current material is. Furthermore, Trump hasn't yet counterattacked and he has plenty of ammunition.

Q. What are the objectives of the coup?

A. One objective is to keep in place an anti-Russian policy. The coup's instigators want to prevent Trump from letting up on the pressure (sanctions) on Russia and from cooperating with Russia. The coup forces are all anti-Russia, and that serves to unite them. A second objective is to maintain the positions, power, and influence of the coup's seekers.

Q. How is the coup being conducted?

A. This is a "seed crystal" coup. The model for the seed crystal coup is the Watergate scandal. The operational goal is to crystallize and solidify the disunited Trump opposition into a movement that has irresistible momentum. In much the same way that seed crystals can accelerate a phase change from liquid to solid, the coup perpetrators introduce reports, accusations, and leaks over time in order to create the impression that a widening scandal is occurring. Each component has no merit but the media accept them at face value and provide publicity that creates new adherents and coherence among the anti-Trump forces. The anti-Trump forces are anxious to replicate the success in getting Nixon to resign.

Q. What is the role of the establishment media in the coup?

A. The anti-Trump media are critical in this effort. The anti-Trump media keep up a drumbeat of anti-Trump reporting. They slant the news, manufacture stories, repeat them and create fake news. They try to convince the public that the coup's promoters are on the side of the angels (as in protecting national security and the election system's purity) and Trump is on the side of the devils (as in making concessions to a dangerous foe and being too respectful to Putin). The media must paint Russia and Putin as enemies for this propaganda effort to succeed. The media provide a focal point that coordinates the coup's backers even if they never sit down and conspire with one another. Everyone can observe the media stories and through that the effects of their anti-Trump leaks, reports, and innuendos. This allows them to plan their next moves.

Q. What is the role of social media in the coup attempt?

A. Social media have played a role in uprisings during the Arab Spring. The same thing can happen in America. There is a host of groups who are anti-Trump on grounds other than Russia. They can coordinate through social media. These groups seek to de-legitimize Trump so as to maintain items on their agenda. Aides to Hillary Clinton's failed campaign are now piling on to the effort.

These groups are distinct from the coup's perpetrators. They might launch a coup attempt of their own or they may become a front line of the existing coup, that is, merge with it as a force to reckon with that Trump has to address.

Q. How do you answer those who deny that there is an ongoing coup attempt?

A. Positing a coup attempt is the simplest and most comprehensive hypothesis that ties together and explains a host of known facts that we know have occurred. Being a model of events, it is imperfect; but it's better than no model because it still helps us to understand what's going on. We are not seeing a train of unconnected events that just happen to be anti-Trump. It is easier to understand it as a concerted effort going on to emasculate the Trump presidency and possibly see him replaced; and that effort is centered in the CIA.

The people behind the coup are operating partly openly and partly covertly. They are not so far using military means or physically threatening means so that the coup is not clearly recognizable as such. They are more like sharks circling their intended victims, with each one being hungry and attacking its own, as opposed to making pre-arranged attacks. Their coordination is achieved through publicity and a common goal.

We can see these attacks, and they show a pattern, a common goal and a recognizable origin, primarily among U.S. intelligence agencies, especially the CIA.

Q. What attacks are you referring to?

A. The first victim was Paul Manafort who resigned in mid-August 2016 as Trump's campaign chairman. His lobbying efforts on behalf of the ousted head of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych, resulted in a dirt campaign against him. That attack stemmed from anti-Russian sources in Ukraine whom the U.S. government supports. Attacks from foreign origins conceal their true U.S. origins. They are a sign of a CIA operation behind the scenes.

The second victim of the coup is Michael T. Flynn, who resigned as Trump's National Security Advisor after only three weeks in that post. Leaks of tapped phone calls showed that intelligence operatives were behind this shark attack .

Q. Who is behind the coup attempt ?

A. Mainly, unnamed intelligence officials and operatives who are in the CIA or recently retired from such. A number of media outfits are exceptionally active in propagating negative headlines and stories about Trump and his administration. Elements of other intelligence agencies and departments of government are possibly involved. We do not know the names of those operating against Trump, and this is a weakness of the coup hypothesis.

... ... ...

Michael S. Rozeff [ send him mail ] is a retired Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New York. He is the author of the free e-book Essays on American Empire: Liberty vs. Domination and the free e-book The U.S. Constitution and Money: Corruption and Decline .

[Feb 14, 2018] BuzzFeed Suing DNC For Proof They Were Hacked Zero Hedge

Notable quotes:
"... As part of their defense, BuzzFeed issued a subpoena to the DNC for information which might help them defend against Gubarev's lawsuit by verifying claims in the dossier - including "digital remnants left by the Russian state operatives," as well as a full version of the hacking report prepared by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. ..."
"... Since the DNC wouldn't let the FBI look at the server and instead relied on the report prepared by CrowdStrike (founded by Russian expat Dimitri Alperovitch - who sits on the very Anti-Russian Atlantic Council along with Evelyn " oops! " Farkas. The AC is funded by the US State Department, NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukranian Oligarch Victor Pinchuk, who apparently owns the Ukrainian gas company Joe Biden's son is on the board of). ..."
"... If the DNC is compelled to turn over the full CrowdStrike report and "digital remnants," perhaps Gubarev would then present a counter-analysis by researcher Forensicator which CrowdStrike apparently "missed" - revealing that the DNC files were copied at 22.6 MB/s - all but confirming that the files had to have been copied locally by an inside source. Many have speculated that DNC IT staffer Seth Rich, whose murder is still unsolved, was the source of the emails provided to WikiLeaks. ..."
"... Word of BuzzFeed's suit against the DNC comes on the heels of a Monday revelation that the news outlet hired a former top FBI and White House cybersecurity official to fly around the globe on a secret mission to corroborate various claims in the dossier. ..."
"... The probe is being conducted by Anthony Ferrante - formerly the FBI's top official in charge of "cyber incident response" at the U.S. National Security Council under the Obama administration. Ferrante is leading the investigation from his new employer, D.C.-based business advisory firm, Forensic Technologies International (FTI) consulting reports Foreign Policy ..."
"... Wouldn't it be funny if BuzzFeed proves the DNC wasn't hacked? ..."
Feb 14, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

BuzzFeed is suing the cash-strapped Democratic National Committee (DNC) to force them to hand over information related to the "Steele Dossier" that might help the news outlet defend itself against a lawsuit lodged by a Russian businessman who was named in the document. Three separate lawsuits have been launched against BuzzFeed in connection to the January 11, 2017 publication of the dossier, which states that Russian tech executive Aleksej Gubarev used his web hosting companies to hack into the DNC's computer systems.

The dossier, without substantiation, said Gubarev's U.S.-based global web-hosting companies, XBT and Webzilla, planted digital bugs, transmitted viruses and conducted altering operations against the Democratic Party leadership.

While one key name in the dossier was blackened out by BuzzFeed, Gubarev's was not. He alleges that he was never contacted for comment, suffering reputational harm in the process. - Foreign Policy

As part of their defense, BuzzFeed issued a subpoena to the DNC for information which might help them defend against Gubarev's lawsuit by verifying claims in the dossier - including "digital remnants left by the Russian state operatives," as well as a full version of the hacking report prepared by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

Since the DNC wouldn't let the FBI look at the server and instead relied on the report prepared by CrowdStrike (founded by Russian expat Dimitri Alperovitch - who sits on the very Anti-Russian Atlantic Council along with Evelyn " oops! " Farkas. The AC is funded by the US State Department, NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukranian Oligarch Victor Pinchuk, who apparently owns the Ukrainian gas company Joe Biden's son is on the board of).

"As part of the discovery process, BuzzFeed is attempting to verify claims in the dossier that relate to the hacking of the DNC," said BuzzFeed spokesman Matt Mittenhal in a statement. "We're asking a federal court to force the DNC to follow the law and allow BuzzFeed to fully defend its First Amendment rights."

Last month, the DNC claimed that providing the requested information would expose the DNC's internal operations and harm the party politically (it's always someone else's fault, no?).

"If these documents were disclosed, the DNC's internal operations, as well as its ability to effectively achieve its political goals, would be harmed ," said DNC lawyers.

If the DNC is compelled to turn over the full CrowdStrike report and "digital remnants," perhaps Gubarev would then present a counter-analysis by researcher Forensicator which CrowdStrike apparently "missed" - revealing that the DNC files were copied at 22.6 MB/s - all but confirming that the files had to have been copied locally by an inside source. Many have speculated that DNC IT staffer Seth Rich, whose murder is still unsolved, was the source of the emails provided to WikiLeaks.

Word of BuzzFeed's suit against the DNC comes on the heels of a Monday revelation that the news outlet hired a former top FBI and White House cybersecurity official to fly around the globe on a secret mission to corroborate various claims in the dossier.

The probe is being conducted by Anthony Ferrante - formerly the FBI's top official in charge of "cyber incident response" at the U.S. National Security Council under the Obama administration. Ferrante is leading the investigation from his new employer, D.C.-based business advisory firm, Forensic Technologies International (FTI) consulting reports Foreign Policy .

At FTI, Ferrante launched what's now been a months-long stealth effort chasing down documents and conducting interviews on the ground in various countries around the world. His team directed BuzzFeed lawyers to subpoena specific data and testimony from dozens of agencies or companies across the country and assembled a cyber ops war room to analyze that dat a, according to sources familiar with the work.

Considering that much of the Steele dossier came from a collaboration with high level Kremlin officials (a collusion if you will), one has to wonder exactly what channels Ferrante and FTI have tapped in order to access such information.

Wouldn't it be funny if BuzzFeed proves the DNC wasn't hacked?

[Feb 11, 2018] DemoRats and neoliberal MSM are using Russiagate to empower the military-security complex

Notable quotes:
"... The Apprentice ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... The Atlantic ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... The Daily Beast ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... Rachel Maddow, the top-rated cable-news host who covers Russiagate more than all other issues combined , has speculated that Putin was responsible for the hiring of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson; is inducing Trump to "weaken" the State Department and " bleed out " the FBI; and, via the infamous "pee tape" alleged by Steele, may blackmail Trump into withdrawing US forces near Russia's border . ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ..."
"... The Wall Street Journal ..."
"... Far beyond Israelgate, Russiagate allows them to oppose Trump while obscuring key areas where they either share his priorities or have no viable alternative. Democrats can claim to be Trump's opposition without having to confront many of the failings that handed them one of the most stunning defeats in US political history. ..."
"... The DP is a neoliberal party which has been able to distinguish itself from Republicans by campaigning like progressives, but governing as neoliberals. ..."
"... Trump ran his campaign as a populist who would "drain the swamp." He opposed trade deals, and corporations relocating their factories outside the US. The Clinton campaign ran mostly negative personal attacks at Trump's failed marriages, his university, business bankruptcies, abuse of women, and his Russian connection. ..."
"... The DP has a real problem, how can they continue to be a neoliberal party, and cooperate with the RP, while pretending to support progressive causes when more and more people realize the charade and are demanding real progressive change? ..."
"... This whole "we lost the election because of Russian interference" argument appears to be roughly on the same level as "the dog ate my homework" dodge. ..."
"... The bottom line of any Trump association is financial - whether or not an association will protect and increase his wealth. Trump most likely believed that Russians were hacking the DNC (and the RNC) and favored him over Clinton, but that is a far cry from proof that he was colluding with a foreign government that committed crimes. The Democrats knee-jerk obsession with Russia serves to inoculate Trump from any real crimes that the Mueller investigation uncovers. Mostly those crimes will be financial, money laundering being the foremost. Democrats, in a 'the sky is falling' tone, breathlessly proclaim the latest revelation that Trump wanted a reset of Russia relations, or that some Trump official actually talked to a Russian official, as proof positive that Trump is a traitor. That Russia is the enemy is a fait accompli. ..."
"... To go on any liberal forum and point out that we really do need a better foreign policy with Russia than demonizing Putin is to bring forth a cascade of vituperation. Russia is the enemy and Trump colluded with the enemy, end of story they say. It's really way more complicated than that. It goes to the heart of the financialization of governments, including ours, to the point where finance can no longer be separated from government, and everything in government becomes a business transaction. Trump views the presidency as just another tool for self-enrichment, on a continuum from his global wheeling-dealing working on the boundaries of the law. The Russian state works in much the same way, a government that is run by a confederation of oligarchs and mob figures. ..."
"... In indulging themselves in Russiagate, Democrats have solidified the current provocative foreign policy that benefits the arms industry while putting civilization in danger. They are closing out all the sane options, and engaging in the same asinine fearmongering that Republicans do. On foreign policy, both parties deserve contempt. ..."
Feb 11, 2018 | www.thenation.com

Originally from: What We've Learned in Year 1 of Russiagate by Aaron Maté ( The Nation)

... ... ...

Neither "Proven nor Disproven"

Both scenarios also call into question another foundation of Russiagate, the series of Clinton-campaign-funded intelligence reports written by former British spy Christopher Steele. The premise of the Steele dossier is of a "well-developed conspiracy of cooperation" in which Russia has been "cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least five years," beginning back when Trump was hosting The Apprentice . Russia gives Trump "and his inner circle a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals." As an insurance policy, Steele contends, at least two years after their conspiracy began, the Russians collected a videotape of Trump hiring and watching prostitutes "perform a 'golden showers' (urination) show," in a Moscow Ritz-Carlton hotel room.

This questionable narrative is perhaps why, according to the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, after one year and multiple investigations, the dossier's allegations remain neither "proven nor, conversely, disproven" -- in other words, not proven. According to Fox News, "when pressed [in recent congressional testimony] to identify what in the salacious document the bureau had actually corroborated [then–FBI Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe cited only the fact that Trump campaign adviser Carter Page had traveled to Moscow." It would not have been difficult for the FBI -- or Steele -- to figure that out, given that it was reported in The Washington Post and Russian media in early July. (Steele reports it only on July 19.)

"Missing Hard Evidence"

The shaky evidentiary basis for collusion extends to Russiagate's other central pillars. It has been over a year since the release, shortly before Trump's inauguration, of a US intelligence report alleging a Russian-government campaign to elect Trump through e-mail hacking and covert propaganda. Amid the ensuing uproar, some quietly noted at the time that the public version of the report "does not or cannot provide evidence for its assertions" ( The Atlantic ); contained "essentially no new information" ( Susan Hennessy , Lawfare ); and was "missing what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies' claims" ( The New York Times ).

If "hard evidence" is what "many Americans most eagerly anticipated" in January 2017, they have continued to wait in vain. The Russian government may well have hacked Democratic Party e-mails, but evidence of it beyond unsubstantiated claims has yet to arrive.

In its place is a bipartisan fearmongering campaign that recalls the height of the Cold War. The nation is said to face "an ongoing attack by the Russian government through Kremlin-linked social media actors directly acting to intervene and influence our democratic process" ( Democrats Representative Adam Schiff and Senator Dianne Feinstein ); in which "Russia continues to disseminate propaganda designed to weaken our nation" ( former acting CIA director Michael Morell and former Republican Representative Mike Rogers ); which means that we cannot "simply sit back and hope that we do not face another attack by a hostile foreign power" (Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen).

A credulous national media has helped disseminate the panic. When news of Russian-linked Facebook ads (in reality, Russian troll farms ) broke open, The Daily Beast calculated that the "Russian-funded covert propaganda posts were likely seen by a minimum of 23 million people and might have reached as many as 70 million," meaning that "up to 28 percent of American adults were swept in by the campaign." National audiences were soberly informed of covert Russian attempts to dupe them via Pokemon Go . CNN reported -- and multiple outlets repeated -- that "highly sophisticated" Russian Facebook ads targeted "the states that turned out to be pivotal," including "Michigan and Wisconsin, two states crucial to Donald Trump's victory last November." The New York Times consulted with "analysts" to ponder over the mysterious significance of a Russian-linked "Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies":

The goal of the dog lovers' page was more obscure. But some analysts suggested a possible motive: to build a large following before gradually introducing political content. Without viewing the entire feed from the page, now closed by Facebook, it is impossible to say whether the Russian operators tried such tactics.

We may never know if vulnerable American dog-lovers were compromised by the Russian puppy-gandists. But "analysis" and "exclusives" like these have drowned out the actual evidence. In brief, more than half of the relatively paltry $100,000 in Facebook ads bought by "Russian-linked" accounts ran after the election. They were mostly related not to the election but to social issues and were often juvenile and written in broken English. Those that were "geographically located" came mostly during the primaries. The ads that ran in battleground states were, as one study noted , "microscopic": Fewer than a dozen ran in Michigan and Wisconsin combined, and the majority were seen fewer than 1,000 times. Purported Russian ad spending amounted to $1,979 in Wisconsin -- all but $54 of that during the primary -- $823 in Michigan, and $300 in Pennsylvania.

Summarizing available data, The Washington Post 's Philip Bump concludes : "what we actually know about the Russian activity on Facebook and Twitter: It was often modest, heavily dissociated from the campaign itself and minute in the context of election social media efforts."

"Theories With Virtually No Fact"

The impact of Russiagate panic has been magnified by a preponderance of influential exponents wading into imaginative territory. And their audience happens to be millions of people aggrieved by Trump's presidency and seeking hope that it can be reversed.

Rachel Maddow, the top-rated cable-news host who covers Russiagate more than all other issues combined , has speculated that Putin was responsible for the hiring of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson; is inducing Trump to "weaken" the State Department and " bleed out " the FBI; and, via the infamous "pee tape" alleged by Steele, may blackmail Trump into withdrawing US forces near Russia's border .

The Russian influence theory is so ingrained that Democrats see no irony in invoking it to dismiss the conspiracy theories of Republicans. Denouncing the current right-wing uproar over alleged anti-Trump bias at the FBI, Senator Chuck Schumer cautioned that in pushing "conspiracy theories with virtually no fact," the Republicans "wittingly or unwittingly are acting as allies of Russia's disinformation campaigns," ultimately "playing right into Putin's hands."

Such is our Trump-era political spectrum: a Republican Party that has graduated from birtherism to now pushing fears of an anti-Trump FBI "secret society," versus a Democratic Party whose counterattack is to accuse its foes of doing Putin's bidding.

... ... ...

As it ramps up its armed presence near Russia, the Pentagon's new National Defense Strategy declares that the US military advantage over Russia and China is "eroding," and that reversing it is now more of a priority than stopping ISIS or Al Qaeda. "Great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national security," Defense Secretary James Mattis declared. Russia is the top threat invoked in Trump's Nuclear Posture Review. The plan's centerpiece is the development of smaller, so-called "low-yield" nuclear weapons, small enough to ensure that Russia fears their actual use. The review attributes this to the "deterioration of the strategic environment" -- "a nod toward existing tensions with Russia in particular," The Washington Post observes .

Tensions between the world's two major nuclear powers have helped lead the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move its Doomsday Clock to its highest point since 1953. "Nuclear risks have been compounded by US-Russia relations that now feature more conflict than cooperation," the Bulletin warns . "Coordination on nuclear risk reduction is all but dead. For the first time in many years, in fact, no US-Russian nuclear arms control negotiations are under way."

The nuclear risks may also be compounded by a US opposition party that has made "more conflict than cooperation" a defining trait. "Never before has a U.S. president so clearly ignored such a grave threat, and a growing threat, to U.S. national security," declares Senator Ben Cardin . In not imposing new sanctions, Trump has "let Russia off the hook yet again," says Representative Eliot Engel . In releasing the House Republican memo, Trump has "Vladimir Putin there smiling like he gave Donald Trump the script" ( Representative Jackie Speier ) and has "just sent his friend Putin a bouquet" ( Representative Nancy Pelosi ). It is difficult to imagine Democrats leading the charge to reduce nuclear tensions with Russia when they expend more energy urging Trump to be confrontational.

With Trump's actual Russia policies receiving less attention than Russiagate, it also makes sense that his administration has begun to take advantage of the opportunities that the distraction provides. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has warned that there are "initial signs" of Russian "subversion and disinformation and propaganda" in Mexico's upcoming presidential election . McMaster did not cite any evidence, but perhaps he had in mind the multiple polls that show leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador as the front-runner so far .

Top Priorities

The focus on still-absent evidence of Trump-Russia collusion while ignoring increasing US-Russia tensions coincides with the indifference that has greeted the most concrete case of Trump collusion with a foreign government so far: the Trump transition's effort to undermine President Obama's abstention on a United Nations Security Council vote condemning Israeli settlements in December 2016. Undertaken at the request of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, "derailing the vote was Mr. Trump's top priority at that time," The Wall Street Journal reports .

But for Democrats and thought leaders to oppose the Trump transition's "top priority" would mean challenging one that they uphold. "While [the UN effort] might have otherwise given the Democrats a welcome political opportunity to underscore the perfidy of the Trump team," Stephen Zunes observes , "they are hindered by the fact that the majority of Congressional Democrats opposed Obama and supported Trump's position on the vote."

It is here that Russiagate performs a critical function for Trump's political foes. Far beyond Israelgate, Russiagate allows them to oppose Trump while obscuring key areas where they either share his priorities or have no viable alternative. Democrats can claim to be Trump's opposition without having to confront many of the failings that handed them one of the most stunning defeats in US political history.

In focusing on a foreign villain, there is also little need for Democrats to challenge the powerful sectors of US society that many Trump voters were duped into thinking that they were voting against -- and whose interests many Democrats have deftly served. In fact, the outside enemy offers Democrats new opportunities to cater to powerful donors: increased militarism towards a nuclear power is a boon for the military-security establishment, and lawmakers who promote it have been duly rewarded .

Less understandable is how Democrats and partisan media outlets can continue to prioritize Russiagate over factors that likely cost their party far more votes than any stolen e-mails or Facebook ads: gerrymandering , voter suppression , declining unionization , exhaustive Trump media coverage , and the unregulated, worsening " dark-money " takeover of political campaigns. Or any number of domestic outrages around which large segments of the population, not just liberals , could be mobilized.

After more than one year of its engulfing our politics, perhaps that could be Russiagate's most helpful contribution: guiding us to the challenges that it helps us avoid.

  1. Victor Sciamarelli says: February 10, 2018 at 2:35 pm

    An interesting article especially the conclusion under "Top Priorities" where it states, "It is here that Russiagate performs a critical function for Trump's political foes. Far beyond Israelgate, Russiagate allows them [democrats] to oppose Trump while obscuring key areas where they either share his priorities or have no viable alternative."

    This is important and I largely agree, but the observation could have gone further. The DP is a neoliberal party which has been able to distinguish itself from Republicans by campaigning like progressives, but governing as neoliberals.

    Trump ran his campaign as a populist who would "drain the swamp." He opposed trade deals, and corporations relocating their factories outside the US. The Clinton campaign ran mostly negative personal attacks at Trump's failed marriages, his university, business bankruptcies, abuse of women, and his Russian connection. Jill Stein was attacked and brought before the Senate Intelligence Committee because the dossier claimed, falsely, that she accepted payment from Russia to attend a RT event in Moscow. And we all know what happened to the Sanders' campaign.

    None of this would matter because Clinton was expected to win. Trump is a hypocrite and a fake populist but the populist message resonated with voters. Bernie Sanders, the real deal populist, remains the most popular politician in America and he is the most popular democratic politician among Republican voters.

    The recent FISA reauthorization bill passed with 65 House Democrats who joined Trump and the Republicans. In 2002 the DP controlled the Senate, but 29 Dems joined Republicans to pass the Iraq War Resolution along with 82 House Dems. And was the Republican regime change in Iraq better than the Democratic regime change in Libya? And recall that Hugo Chavez, who was democratically elected, governed constitutionally, and complied with international law, and if he ever crossed a line it was trivial compared to the lines Bush crossed, was labeled a dictator and attacked much like Putin is today.

    The DP has a real problem, how can they continue to be a neoliberal party, and cooperate with the RP, while pretending to support progressive causes when more and more people realize the charade and are demanding real progressive change?

    Maintaining a neoliberal course on behalf of elite interests is more important than winning elections. Thus, while Trump is investigated, the DP and supportive media are preparing to demonize progressives and any alternative voices as nothing more than Russian puppets.

  2. Jeffrey Harrison says: February 10, 2018 at 12:12 pm

    Articles like this one on The Nation surprise me. The Nation seems to be in the pockets of the DNC and their Hillary-bots. While this is a great article, I'm left with a sense of dissatisfaction based on what was missing from it. Nobody seems to see the forest for the trees.

    The first thing missing is the reality that Three Names won the election by about 3 million votes. Mr Maté does a good job of pointing out the weaknesses of the whole facebook/twitter meme but leaves out that Three Names' problem was not a lack of votes but a lack of breadth of votes. She won the major population centers but not the countryside and thus lost the state. Folks in the countryside are much less likely to be on facebook and twitter than their city cousins and thus will be relatively immune from the influence of ads on those platforms. If you want to see real meddling, take a look at what AIPAC is doing.

    The other thing that's missing is the danger behind sanctions. There's another name for sanctions - economic warfare. These are actually forbidden by the UN charter unless authorized by the UN but the US has never let its promises keep the US from doing exactly what it wanted to. In the past, sanctions have, in fact, led to shooting wars. What we are doing is perpetrating economic warfare on the only country capable of destroying the United States.

    In what way could this be considered wise?

  3. Matthew Walsh says: February 10, 2018 at 11:30 am

    I appreciate this article--and I agree with many of its arguments--but it contains some layered irony that is important to address. The author is correct in asserting that there is irony in the Democrats' claim that Republicans' opposition to the investigation is not based in fact.

    But I find it ironic that the author is accusing the Democrats of using Russiagate to empower the military-security complex. It's a highly plausible prospect, but it's certainly no more plausible than Russian collusion accusations.

  4. Dan Swanson says: February 10, 2018 at 8:36 am

    Superb article. My only quibble is that Trump probably did collude with Russians -- not over the election, but over his business interests, and that exposing this will damage his overall popularity, even among some of his supporters. But the article's major point still stands -- putting all the opposition eggs into the Russiagate basket is a big risk, especially now that the Republicans will take aim at Social Security and Medicare. Among major politicians, only Bernie Sanders has recognized that Russiagate distracts from Trump's true evils.

  5. Robert Borneman says: February 10, 2018 at 2:29 am

    Kudos to Mr. Maté for keeping a clear eye out on the facts and evidence of the case against Russia having thrown the election to Hillary (which is paltry at best, and falsely exculpatory of HRC's own disaster on the simple surface). Kudos to The Nation for not swallowing the same establishment DNC pill which seeks to provide cover for the neo-liberal wing of the Democratic Party by blaming Russia instead of their own (DNC's own) anti-democratic machinations and poor decisions.

  6. Philip Gerard says: February 9, 2018 at 5:16 pm

    This whole "we lost the election because of Russian interference" argument appears to be roughly on the same level as "the dog ate my homework" dodge. The democrats just can't admit that they blew the 2016 election . If they did they would have to look for answers and this is something they really do not want to do. Why? I suspect that they all ready know what they need to do to win but that would mean cutting ties with their corporate "constituents" and that is something they simply can not bring themselves to do.

  7. Michael Robertson says: February 9, 2018 at 3:39 pm

    The bottom line of any Trump association is financial - whether or not an association will protect and increase his wealth. Trump most likely believed that Russians were hacking the DNC (and the RNC) and favored him over Clinton, but that is a far cry from proof that he was colluding with a foreign government that committed crimes. The Democrats knee-jerk obsession with Russia serves to inoculate Trump from any real crimes that the Mueller investigation uncovers. Mostly those crimes will be financial, money laundering being the foremost. Democrats, in a 'the sky is falling' tone, breathlessly proclaim the latest revelation that Trump wanted a reset of Russia relations, or that some Trump official actually talked to a Russian official, as proof positive that Trump is a traitor. That Russia is the enemy is a fait accompli.

    To go on any liberal forum and point out that we really do need a better foreign policy with Russia than demonizing Putin is to bring forth a cascade of vituperation. Russia is the enemy and Trump colluded with the enemy, end of story they say. It's really way more complicated than that. It goes to the heart of the financialization of governments, including ours, to the point where finance can no longer be separated from government, and everything in government becomes a business transaction. Trump views the presidency as just another tool for self-enrichment, on a continuum from his global wheeling-dealing working on the boundaries of the law. The Russian state works in much the same way, a government that is run by a confederation of oligarchs and mob figures.

    To say that the Russians hacked the election is to say nothing. There is nothing that they have putatively done that we haven't done to them. The Facebook posts that are evidence of high-level psychological manipulation are indistinguishable from Republican spin. In indulging themselves in Russiagate, Democrats have solidified the current provocative foreign policy that benefits the arms industry while putting civilization in danger. They are closing out all the sane options, and engaging in the same asinine fearmongering that Republicans do. On foreign policy, both parties deserve contempt.

  8. Brian Cairns says: February 9, 2018 at 1:43 pm

    Excellent job, Aaron! And thanks to The Nation for not getting swept up in the Russiagate hysteria like so many other progressive outlets have.

[Feb 11, 2018] Republican investigations put Blumenthal in spotlight

Notable quotes:
"... Steele also gave the dossier to Winer, who flagged to his superiors at the State Department, according to the source. Kerry was eventually briefed on its existence, and that it wasn't known how much was true. ..."
Feb 11, 2018 | www.cnn.com

How Shearer's notes got to Steele

Shearer, an independent journalist, decided to investigate potential Trump-Russia connections after seeing stories about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, the source said.

Shearer's so-called dossier is actually a set of notes based on conversations with reporters and other sources, according to the person who spoke to CNN, and he circulated those notes to assorted journalists, as well as to Blumenthal.

Blumenthal then passed the notes to Jonathan Winer, who was a State Department special envoy for Libya under former Secretary of State John Kerry, the source said. Winer had a previous relationship with Steele, and he passed it along to Steele in order to get his assessment.

Carter Page struggles to explain how he could advise both Kremlin and Trump team

Related Article: Carter Page struggles to explain how he could advise both Kremlin and Trump team

Blumenthal, according to the source, did not know that Winer would consult Steele on the Shearer document, and said Winer made that decision on his own.

After Winer gave Steele the notes from Shearer, Steele wrote that he found it interesting and it tended to corroborate some of what he found, but he also noted that it was uncorroborated, the source said.

Shearer's notes, a copy of which were obtained by CNN, make uncorroborated allegations involving Trump and Russia, and they cite unnamed Russian intelligence and Turkish sources.

Steele provided Shearer's notes to the FBI in October 2016.

What are the GOP allegations? Steele was being paid for his research by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was hired by a law firm on behalf of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. A key allegation in last week's Nunes memo was that Steele's political connections to Democrats were not told to the FISA court, and Republicans are charging that Shearer's involvement could show Steele was receiving information from Clinton associates that went into the dossier he gave to the FBI. The criminal referral from Grassley and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham -- which was unclassified with some redactions this week -- states that Shearer's notes went to Steele through an official at the State Department and another person who was a "friend of the Clinton's." "It is troubling enough that the Clinton Campaign funded Mr. Steele's work, but that these Clinton associates were contemporaneously feeding Mr. Steele's allegations raises additional concerns about his credibility," the senators wrote in the criminal referral, which does not accuse Steele of wrongdoing but urges the Justice Department to investigate the matter. Winer worked with Steele from 2014 through 2016, according to another source familiar with their interactions. Steele provided Winer with reports related to the conflict in Ukraine and Russia as a courtesy, which was not unusual and considered one source among many used for assessing the situation on the ground in Ukraine, the source said.

Former CIA Director Brennan says Nunes 'abused his office' Steele also gave the dossier to Winer, who flagged to his superiors at the State Department, according to the source. Kerry was eventually briefed on its existence, and that it wasn't known how much was true.

Senior State Department officials showed the dossier to Kerry once it was clear the document was in wide circulation around Washington, according to the source. Kerry was not briefed on the Shearer document, the source said. Lee Wolosky, an attorney for Winer, said in a statement that Winer was "concerned in 2016 about information that a candidate for the presidency may have been compromised by a hostile foreign power." "Any actions he took were grounded in those concerns," Wolosky said.

"Today's attacks are nothing more than a further attempt to undermine the independence and credibility of special (counsel Robert) Mueller's ongoing investigation into those and related issues." What are Republicans saying? Republicans haven't come out and accused Blumenthal of any wrongdoing, but they've hinted in public appearances that raw intelligence may have been distributed for partisan purposes. Rep. Trey Gowdy, who chairs the House Oversight Committee and is a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, discussed Nunes' State Department investigation a Fox News interview Tuesday, saying he was "troubled" by the role the State Department played. Gowdy read the classified FISA documents that the Justice Department gave congressional committees access to on the condition that only one member of the majority and minority would view them. "When you hear who the source, or one of the sources of that information is, you're going to think, 'Oh, my gosh, I've heard that name somewhere before. Where could he possibly have been?'" the South Carolina Republican said.

Gowdy: Memo has no impact on Russia probe "A domestic source. I'm trying to think of Secretary Clinton defined him. I think she said he was an old friend who emailed her from time to time," Gowdy continued. "Sidney Blumenthal?" Fox News' Martha MacCallum asked. "That would be really warm," Gowdy concluded. Nunes made headlines over the weekend when he predicted more memos would be coming from his committee, but he says that the investigation into the State Department has already been in the works. "We have an active investigation into the State Department. That has been ongoing for a while now," Nunes told Fox News' Sean Hannity.

Nunes has repeatedly declined to discuss his investigations with CNN, saying he doesn't discuss committee business "in the halls." Graham declined to discuss Blumenthal's role in the committee's investigation into Steele, but said the State Department is one element of it. "There's some connections outside the Department of Justice and the dossier that we're looking at. One of them goes to the State Department," Graham told CNN. "It's clear to me he was using the dossier for political purposes and that should have been more alarming than it was."

Who are the players?

Blumenthal is no stranger to congressional investigations, playing a role in the House Benghazi Select Committee investigation that was led by Gowdy. Blumenthal testified behind closed doors as part of the Benghazi investigation, and he provided the committee with emails he exchanged with Clinton , who was secretary of state when the 2012 Benghazi attack occurred. Blumenthal sent Clinton dozens of emails while she was secretary of state on various foreign policy topics, some of which were unsolicited and others that were requested by Clinton.

A former journalist, Blumenthal has known the Clintons for more than 30 years, and he worked in the Clinton White House as senior adviser from 1997 to 2001. He's been by the family's side during difficult moments, including President Bill Clinton's impeachment trial.

[Feb 11, 2018] None Dare Call It Treason by James Kirkpatrick

Notable quotes:
"... Trump: Democrats 'Un-American,' 'Treasonous,' During State of the Union ..."
"... National Review ..."
"... Is Trump Serious about 'Treasonous' Democrats? ..."
"... But Trump's "joke" really should be taken seriously. The likes of Nancy Pelosi are traitors in the most literal sense -- in that they openly and explicitly oppose the interests of American citizens ..."
"... Pelosi is entranced by 3 million 'Dreamer' illegals, insults Americans' children ..."
"... This year kicks off the new 3.8 billion yearly to Israel up from 3.1 billion and another 775 million for Israel missile defense and undoubtly more incremental aid bills as the year goes on. ..."
Feb 11, 2018 | www.unz.com

President Trump, allegedly humorously, later described the [neoliberal] Democrats' behavior during his State of the Union speech as "treasonous" and "un-American," prompting the usual hysteria [ Trump: Democrats 'Un-American,' 'Treasonous,' During State of the Union , by Jessica Taylor, NPR, February 5, 2018].

The chutzpah is breathtaking considering how journalists and their pet elected officials in the Democrat party have waged a nonstop insurgency against the President of the United States since his inauguration , accusing him of being a puppet of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Indeed, as even Never Trump cuckservatives at National Review wearily pointed out, Democrats have habitually and quite seriously called Republicans not only traitors but " terrorists " for opposing their various policies. [ Is Trump Serious about 'Treasonous' Democrats? , by Dan McLaughlin, February 5, 2018]

But Trump's "joke" really should be taken seriously. The likes of Nancy Pelosi are traitors in the most literal sense -- in that they openly and explicitly oppose the interests of American citizens and advocate their replacement with foreigners. Pelosi's ludicrous claim that the Founding Fathers (who created the Naturalization Act of 1790 ) would support the mass influx of "Dreamers" and that illegals are "more American than Americans" is as definitive a statement of hatred for American citizens as can be imagined [ Pelosi is entranced by 3 million 'Dreamer' illegals, insults Americans' children , by Neil Munro, Breitbart, February 7, 2018].

renfro , February 9, 2018 at 8:46 am GMT

Hell, they are ALL traitors here is how they spend their time in congress

That's 376 bills, more than one a day and I haven't even gotten into the trade and appropriation categories where they bury other bills for Israel that would take several days of reading. This year kicks off the new 3.8 billion yearly to Israel up from 3.1 billion and another 775 million for Israel missile defense and undoubtly more incremental aid bills as the year goes on.

Hang them all and let God sort them out.

[Feb 11, 2018] Hope Hicks: Trump s confidante finds herself center stage in scandal

Feb 11, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

Throughout Donald Trump's campaign and relentlessly chaotic presidency, the single constant presence at his side, outside of his family, has been the 29-year-old former Ralph Lauren model and White House communications director Hope Hicks.

While aides and advisers fall in and out of favor, Hicks has remained Trump's Oval Office gatekeeper, companion and sounding board, offering consistent loyalty.

But now Hicks has herself been cast into two plotlines currently playing out in the presidential daytime reality-soap.

In one, Hicks features as a likely target in the special counsel Robert Mueller's effort to acquire cooperating witnesses in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Hicks has reportedly been interviewed by Mueller's investigators.

In the other, her prized judgment is being called into question over Rob Porter, the senior White House aide accused of physically abusing two ex-wives and whom Hicks has reportedly been dating.

Publicly, Trump has offered his support for Hicks, saying: "Hope is absolutely fantastic. She was with the campaign from the beginning, and I could not ask for anything more. Hope is smart, very talented and respected by all."

But in private, the president is believed to have issued rare criticism of a woman who by some estimates is the most influential figure in the administration after Trump himself.

At issue is whether Hicks, who also served as communications director during the campaign, relaxed her judgment owing to her relationship with Porter.

White House officials have said Hicks knew that an ex-girlfriend of Porter's had informed aides that both of Porter's ex-wives had said he was violent. Hicks continued to see him and did not tell the president. Porter denies the allegations against him.

If the unfolding episode calls into question the maturity of Hicks' judgement, she clearly is invaluable as a personal assistant. In his campaign memoir, Let Trump Be Trump, Corey Lewandowski, the early campaign strategist – with whom, coincidentally, Hicks also had an affair – described her steaming Trump's suit while he is wearing it.

"She's really quite talented and able," Christopher Ruddy, a close friend of the president and chief executive of the conservative website Newsmax, told the Washington Post .

But her professional experience, especially where is comes to matters that carry potentially legal consequences, is limited. Hicks came to the Trumps through a PR firm that represented the Trump Organization. The family later hired her away to work exclusively for them, furnishing her with responsibilities that included working on Ivanka Trump's fashion line.

A GQ magazine profile in June 2016 described her: "She is a hugger and a people pleaser, with long brown hair and green eyes, a young woman of distinctly all-American flavor – the sort that inspires Tom Petty songs, not riots."

But her looks and fashion background can cause people to underestimate her. She has a background in PR and is a graduate of Dallas' Southern Methodist University.

[Feb 10, 2018] More on neoliberal newspeak of US propaganda machine

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The "Newspeak" we experience is straight out of Orwell's 1984. From Wikipedia: Newspeak is the fictional language in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, written by George Orwell. It is a controlled language created by the totalitarian state Oceania as a tool to limit freedom of thought, and concepts that pose a threat to the regime such as freedom, self-expression, individuality, and peace. Any form of thought alternative to the party's construct is classified as "thoughtcrime". ..."
"... It is truly scary how Orwellian our current situation has become reminding me that there are always two two takeaways from any story or historical record. Those that view it as a cautionary tale and those who use it as an instruction manual. ..."
"... We are also controlled through Doublespeak another Orwellian concept. From Wikipedia: Doublespeak is a language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Some common examples are the branding of liberals by pundits in the media as Fascists in order to eliminate the historical understanding of exactly what that word refers to. Another example is the appearance of the term Alt Right which is used to confuse and obscure the true nature of these groups. A great example of the doublespeak the media exercises in service to the state is the instantaneous adoption of the term Alt Right and nary ever a mention of its former names such as White Supremacist, Neo Nazi, Racist, Hate Group etc. They just rename these movements and hide all the other terms from sight. Another example is scapegoating the same group of people but under a different term. Today the term is Liberal but in the past, the Nazi movement called them Jews, Communists, Intellectuals etc. Whatever the term, the target of these attacks are always the ones that threaten the Power Structure. ..."
"... Joseph Goebbels was in charge of the war propaganda for the Nazis during WWII. He said: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." ..."
Feb 10, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

CitizenOne , February 10, 2018 at 11:58 am

The reason we are in the pickle barrel is exactly the reasons stated in the article and by Annie. We are exposed to exactly what they want to show us and are blinded by other narratives which do not support the group think. It is as if the politicians, the intelligence community and the media are all involved in a conspiracy. Remember that word means a plan by two or more people. No tin foil hat required. But anyone suggesting conspiracy is instantly branded a nut hence the universal use of the term conspiracy nut as a derogatory term to label anyone with a different message that somehow captures the attention of a wider audience. It is not so much that all Holly Wood stars are liberal socialists. They are a diverse group. However they all have one thing in common which is they have the public's ear. They are also not on point with the approved messaging and so must be continuously branded as conspiracy nuts and socialist subversives. We all have seen the 24/7 bashing of these folks. Control is the reason.

The "Newspeak" we experience is straight out of Orwell's 1984. From Wikipedia: Newspeak is the fictional language in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, written by George Orwell. It is a controlled language created by the totalitarian state Oceania as a tool to limit freedom of thought, and concepts that pose a threat to the regime such as freedom, self-expression, individuality, and peace. Any form of thought alternative to the party's construct is classified as "thoughtcrime".

It is truly scary how Orwellian our current situation has become reminding me that there are always two two takeaways from any story or historical record. Those that view it as a cautionary tale and those who use it as an instruction manual.

I am appalled by how the media at first put Trump in the game in the first place for economic gain (see Les Moonvies article) and then created another fictional fantasy which serves the goal of permawar and control of the citizenry through fear, confusion and ignorance. We are all exposed to the Daily Two Minutes of Hate another Orwellian concept. From Wikipedia: The Two Minutes Hate, from George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a daily period in which Party members of the society of Oceania must watch a film depicting the Party's enemies (notably Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers) and express their hatred for them for exactly two minutes. The difference is we can find it 24/7 on our technological wonder machines.

Another Orwellian concept is The Ministry of Truth: The Ministry of Truth (in Newspeak, Minitrue) is the ministry of propaganda. As with the other ministries in the novel, the name Ministry of Truth is a misnomer because in reality it serves the opposite: it is responsible for any necessary falsification of historical events. From Wikipedia: As well as administering truth, the ministry spreads a new language amongst the populace called Newspeak, in which, for example, "truth" is understood to mean statements like 2 + 2 = 5 when the situation warrants. In keeping with the concept of doublethink, the ministry is thus aptly named in that it creates/manufactures "truth" in the Newspeak sense of the word. The book describes the doctoring of historical records to show a government-approved version of events.

We are also controlled through Doublespeak another Orwellian concept. From Wikipedia: Doublespeak is a language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Some common examples are the branding of liberals by pundits in the media as Fascists in order to eliminate the historical understanding of exactly what that word refers to. Another example is the appearance of the term Alt Right which is used to confuse and obscure the true nature of these groups. A great example of the doublespeak the media exercises in service to the state is the instantaneous adoption of the term Alt Right and nary ever a mention of its former names such as White Supremacist, Neo Nazi, Racist, Hate Group etc. They just rename these movements and hide all the other terms from sight. Another example is scapegoating the same group of people but under a different term. Today the term is Liberal but in the past, the Nazi movement called them Jews, Communists, Intellectuals etc. Whatever the term, the target of these attacks are always the ones that threaten the Power Structure.

Joseph Goebbels was in charge of the war propaganda for the Nazis during WWII. He said: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

If these things seem eerily similar to what is going on today then we probably have a power structure which is a grave threat for peace. Okay, we do have a power structure that is a grave threat to peace but oddly not democracy. Noam Chomsky wrote about propaganda stating, "it's the essence of democracy" This notion is contrary to the popular belief that indoctrination is inconsistent with democracy. The point is that in a totalitarian state, it doesn't much matter what people think because you can control what they do. But when the state loses the bludgeon, when you can't control people by force and when the voice of the people can be heard, you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what in more honest days used to be called propaganda. Manufacture of consent. Creation of necessary illusions.

The folks who contribute here on this website are few indeed and what lies beyond the haven of the oasis is a vast barren dessert filled with scorpions, snakes and a whole bunch of lies.

Well said for Annie and the authors.

Democracy may be the ultimate tool of control of the masses.

More wisdom from Goebbels:

I like that last one a lot but unfortunately it will not come to pass until things get bad.

CitizenOne , February 10, 2018 at 11:59 am

Link to article: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-trump-moonves-snap-htmlstory.html

Elaine Sandchaz , February 10, 2018 at 5:34 pm

Citizen One – You have beautifully & precicely nailed the means ( "how" ) the USA has gotten in such a mess : Newspeak, Daily Two Minutes of Hate, The Ministry of Truth, DoubleSpeak and the way and why of how Propaganda actually works. George Orwell was a seer.

AND now it would be helpful to understand "why" the USA has gotten in such a mess. The polarity of American politics tells a very long story but in short, polarity means there are only two ways and when the going gets tough, each way is in the extreme – the right way or the wrong way, it flips depending on each individual's political persuasion. When the going gets tough the extremes become the tail that wags the dog.

So my question is : WHY after the seemingly happy years under Obama did the going get so tough so fast?
My pet theory is that Trump threatened to "drain the swamp" which was understood – seemingly now quite rightly – that he was going to expose some very significant wrong doing in very high places. I believe that he was on "NYC/DC" friendly terms with the Clintons and both parties knew each other for the true devil they were. Thus the big red flag he waved in her face brought about what is turning in to a multi billion dollar ongoing attempt to discredit him in the eyes of the people, in the eyes of the World and in the eyes of the highest courts " America be damned".

And politically this is quite necessary because she is not only an icon of all that is American,"apple pie and motherhood"; she is to the under 45 age group the great white mother of democracy via Democrat rule. And the bad part of that iconography is that if she goes down so does the party. It was also critical for her to win because of all the swamp people who had chosen to compromise their life's work, thus had to continue in that compromise in the hope that they would come out clean since they believed that both Trump and the ordinary American were so naive, thus would be easily played for fools.

So all this crap to destroy Trump is about saving her hide to save the party. Things are so desperate now because there is nothing yet in place to replace her in the mind's eye of the Democratic half the voting public. All who might have been in 2nd place were kept diminished to raise her higher. It now is quite obvious that she has been told to shut up and lie low, to come out only when she is in safe company – as at the Golden Globes. So the big picture today as is being painted and hyped to intensify mass hysteria is that Mueller needs to be protected from Trump where really what is needed are the names and numbers to be called on for more $$$, more social media propaganda pages and to vote in November 2018.

Why only that? Because Trump is not going to fire Mueller; remember Mueller was a Bush man and so was Comey. They have a long history of going both ways. Survival is tricky business – especially in DC. The scapegoats are already cornered; possibly the new "lie" is already in draft form. Remember – "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

It is going to be an interesting next few months!! But we can hope that, from this one of many previous American political exercises in democracy, the ordinary defenders of those democratic values (the voters) will learn some significant truths about governance, transparency and the rule of law. The guys at the top are not gods and are not above the law; they must not only do right but be seen to do right.

CitizenOne , February 10, 2018 at 7:57 pm

The only thing I can tell you is that the conspirators who concocted Russia Gate have figured out all the pieces to the puzzle of how to control events via the means I mentioned and many other means. We are as manipulated as a light switch. One way we are all fired up about some BS and flip the switch and we are all calm and mellow. Hopefully if you follow the threads here you will find out a lot of alternative information much of it thoroughly researched by highly respected and qualified individuals who are in a position to know the truth.

Mariam , February 10, 2018 at 7:11 pm

I agree with you wholeheartedly. They call themselves "liberals" in fact they are "new liberals."
Alas, these false ("new) liberals" are very well represented by the Obamas, the Clintons, the Trudeaus, the Macrons and so on.
If you truly believe in the "left" and call yourself "progressive" you couldn't stand for useless and pointless wars, period.

[Feb 10, 2018] American Think Tanks Are Hired Purveyors of Fake News by Paul Craig Roberts

Notable quotes:
"... think tanks are essentially lobby groups for their donors. The policy analyses and reform schemes that they produce are tailored to support the material interests of donors. None of the studies are reliable as objective evidence. They are special pleading. ..."
"... Think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, and the Atlantic Council, speak for those who fund them. Increasingly, they speak for the military/security complex, American hegemony, corporate interests, and Israel ..."
"... Bryan MacDonald lists those who support the anti-Russian think tanks such as the Atlantic Council, the Center for European Policy Analysis, German Marshall Fund of the US, and Institute for Study of War. The "experts" are mouthpieces funded by the US military security complex. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48755.htm US government agencies use taxpayer dollars to deceive taxpayers. ..."
Feb 10, 2018 | www.unz.com

A couple of decades or more ago when I was still in Washington, otherwise known as the snake pit, I was contacted by a well-financed group that offered me, a Business Week and Scripps Howard News Service columnist with access as a former editor also to the Wall Street Journal, substantial payments to promote agendas that the lobbyists paying the bills wanted promoted.

To the detriment of my net worth, but to the preservation of my reputation, I declined. Shortly thereafter a conservative columnist, a black man if memory serves, was outed for writing newspaper columns for pay for a lobby group.

I often wondered if he was set up in order to get rid of him and whether the enticement I received was intended to shut me down, or whether journalists had become "have pen will travel"? (Have Gun -- Will Travel was a highly successful TV Series 1957-1963).

Having read Bryan MacDonald's article on Information Clearing House, "Anti-Russia Think Tanks in US: Who Funds them?," I see that think tanks are essentially lobby groups for their donors. The policy analyses and reform schemes that they produce are tailored to support the material interests of donors. None of the studies are reliable as objective evidence. They are special pleading.

Think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, and the Atlantic Council, speak for those who fund them. Increasingly, they speak for the military/security complex, American hegemony, corporate interests, and Israel.

Bryan MacDonald lists those who support the anti-Russian think tanks such as the Atlantic Council, the Center for European Policy Analysis, German Marshall Fund of the US, and Institute for Study of War. The "experts" are mouthpieces funded by the US military security complex. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48755.htm US government agencies use taxpayer dollars to deceive taxpayers.

In other words insouciant Americans pay taxes in order to be brainwashed. And they tolerate this.

[Feb 10, 2018] Martin Armstrong Asks Is George Soros One Of The Greatest Threats Against Society

Feb 10, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

BobEore -> Captain Chlamydia Feb 10, 2018 12:04 PM Permalink

Soros is mid level management

The firm employs him in a variety of roles, the better to smoke screen the real agendas in play

George deals in politicians as much or more as 'currencies'

Red/blue... what's it to you. Like the man always sez|

joomanji gonna git you!

Ckierst1 -> BobEore Feb 10, 2018 2:34 PM Permalink

My guess is that he is a very highly paid lackey for the Rothschilds, much as was J. P. Morgan. The world would be better off without him, obviously, but the "darkside" globalist remain, and ultimately they are the real eminence gris control freaks working for instability, corruption, financial manipulation, fiat money, violence, strife, illegal immigration, drug epidemics, human trafficking and bad economics, such as mercantilistic, false capitalism cronyism, among other anti-middle class and anti-liberty movements/phenomena occurring around the world. G. Edward Griffin might be right! Wikipedia has one of the most negative bios of him that I've ever read, to his credit, I suppose!

Expendable Container -> OverTheHedge Feb 10, 2018 2:24 PM Permalink

Being a genuine psychopath (they are not quite human due to brain differences) Soros certainly enjoys his sense of power. They cannot experience conscience nor empathy and that emotional vacuum can only be filled by a sense of P O W E R over others. Psychopathy used for political purposes for evil is called Political Ponerology. We watch the movies and think psychos are out killing prostitutes - we never consider Snakes In Suits! Despite all this Soros is working for the Zionist World Domination plan (check out the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion).

Expendable Container -> Trader Maximus Feb 10, 2018 2:31 PM Permalink

No, Soros is not just a threat to the 'American way of life'. He organizes color revolutions around the world including Asia so he is a threat to all nations' sovereignty but then national sovereignty is to be 'removed' for the Neoliberal World totalitarian goal.

Gadfly Feb 10, 2018 1:55 PM Permalink

Soros is a front man for the Rothschilds. Plain and simple. That's where he gets the billions he needs to engage in global activities that destroy religion, morals, values, gender, nationalism and society. This is the agenda of the Rothschilds, the private central bankers, and the New World Order.

Do you really think Soros is some kind of investing genius who's made billions on his own, who is then willing to give it all away for so called "philanthropic" reasons? Bullshit. He's a hired gun. A front man. A cover for the Rothschilds who have spent two hundred years hiding in the shadows while others go about doing their dirty work to reshape society for their own selfish ends – a private, worldwide financial system they own and control.

Just like he pimped for the Nazis, Soros is now pimping for the Rothschilds. He has no moral center or compass, and has admitted as much in a televised interview. (He said if he hadn't turned in Jews to the Nazis for money, someone else would have done it.) Wake up people. Soros is the Sammy the Bull Gravano for the Rothschilds. The Luca Brasi to the Godfather. He needs to be brought to justice. And so do the Rothschilds.

[Feb 08, 2018] Control of narrative means that creation of the simplistic picture in which the complexities of the world are elided in favor of 'good guys' vs. 'bad guys' dichotomy

Highly recommended!
StratCom is a new synonym of propaganda.
Notable quotes:
"... What 'StratCom' means in practical terms is propaganda, usually involving the creation of a 'narrative' -- in which the complexities of the world are elided in favour of a simplistic picture of 'good guys' versus 'bad guys.' Commonly it is difficult to know how far the people doing this are deliberately dishonest, how far they have simply succumbed to 'double think' and 'crimestop.' ..."
"... It has become amply apparent that with MI6, and other intelligence and indeed law enforcement agencies, the activity of attempting to understand the world has become inextricably involved with that of trying to shape it by covert action and 'perception management', or 'StratCom.' ..."
"... The structures involved, moreover, are inextricably linked with ostensibly non-governmental institutions, like King's College and the Atlantic Council, and related organisations in a range of countries, as Rid's career strongly suggests. ..."
"... It has also however become amply apparent that these structures create ample opportunities for 'information operations' groups such as those which were associated with the late Boris Berezovsky and the Menatep oligarchs. ..."
Feb 08, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

David Habakkuk -> turcopolier ... , 08 February 2018 at 12:32 PM

In response to #63.

Colonel Lang,

My apologies -- it was sloppy of me to use the term.

I was using it interchangeably with 'propaganda.' One reason for this is that I have been looking at the website of the 'Department of War Studies' at King's College London. This has a 'Centre for Strategic Communications', which 'aims to be the leading global centre of expertise on strategic communications.'

(See https://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/warstudies/kcsc/experts.aspx .)

An 'Associate Fellow' is my sometime BBC Radio colleague Mark Laity, who, according to his bio on the site, 'is the Chief Strategic Communications at SHAPE, the first post holder, and as such he has been a leading figure in developing StratCom within NATO.' In this capacity, he produces presentations with titles like ' "Bocca della veritas" or "Perception becomes Reality."

(See http://www.natoschool.nato.int/Media/News/2015/20150910_StratCom .)

The same ethos penetrates other parts of the War Studies Department -- Eliot Higgins is involved, as also Thomas Rid, who backed up the claims made by Dmitri Alperovitch of 'CrowdStrike', along with the former GCHQ person Matt Tait. (It appears that Rid, who has now moved to SAIS at Johns Hopkins, is a German who has earlier worked at IFRI in Paris, RAND, and in Israel.)

What 'StratCom' means in practical terms is propaganda, usually involving the creation of a 'narrative' -- in which the complexities of the world are elided in favour of a simplistic picture of 'good guys' versus 'bad guys.' Commonly it is difficult to know how far the people doing this are deliberately dishonest, how far they have simply succumbed to 'double think' and 'crimestop.'

It has become amply apparent that with MI6, and other intelligence and indeed law enforcement agencies, the activity of attempting to understand the world has become inextricably involved with that of trying to shape it by covert action and 'perception management', or 'StratCom.'

The structures involved, moreover, are inextricably linked with ostensibly non-governmental institutions, like King's College and the Atlantic Council, and related organisations in a range of countries, as Rid's career strongly suggests.

It has also however become amply apparent that these structures create ample opportunities for 'information operations' groups such as those which were associated with the late Boris Berezovsky and the Menatep oligarchs.

So in describing what these people got up to I sloppily used 'StratCom', when I should have said propaganda.

[Feb 08, 2018] Charge of neoliberal MSM brigade against Trump

Notable quotes:
"... Only two ways in which Trump candidacy could be destroyed once he was nominated. Official: Trump is charged with conspiring with a foreign government to materially damage America. Public: Trump is maligned as being an tool of the Russians. ..."
"... Official is unlikely as no evidence to date has any chance of being used for an indictment. Not saying that the charges are false just that what was released prior to election was insufficient. ..."
"... Public: most likely avenue. But the details released were not impressive or determinative to the majority of Trump supporters who I see as being more anti-establishment than anti-Russian. True, you could expect the GOP elite to be disturbed but they were anti-Trump before his nomination and wedded to him after. ..."
Feb 08, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

wisedupearly Ceo , 07 February 2018 at 06:42 PM

Addendum: can we all agree that if the STEELE intel was a genuine attempt to ensure Trump's failure in the election then the effort was the most inept operation in a long time?

Only two ways in which Trump candidacy could be destroyed once he was nominated. Official: Trump is charged with conspiring with a foreign government to materially damage America. Public: Trump is maligned as being an tool of the Russians.

Official is unlikely as no evidence to date has any chance of being used for an indictment. Not saying that the charges are false just that what was released prior to election was insufficient.

Public: most likely avenue. But the details released were not impressive or determinative to the majority of Trump supporters who I see as being more anti-establishment than anti-Russian. True, you could expect the GOP elite to be disturbed but they were anti-Trump before his nomination and wedded to him after.

[Feb 08, 2018] The FBI Hand Behind Russia-gate by Ray McGOVERN

Feb 08, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

But the "assessment" served a useful purpose for the never-Trumpers: it applied an official imprimatur on the case for delegitimizing Trump's election and even raised the long-shot hope that the Electoral College might reverse the outcome and possibly install a compromise candidate, such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, in the White House. Though the Powell ploy fizzled, the hope of somehow removing Trump from office continued to bubble, fueled by the growing hysteria around Russia-gate.

Virtually all skepticism about the evidence-free "assessment" was banned. For months, the Times and other newspapers of record repeated the lie that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies had concurred in the conclusion about the Russian "hack." Even when that falsehood was belatedly acknowledged , the major news outlets just shifted the phrasing slightly to say that U.S. intelligence agencies had reached the Russian "hack" conclusion. Shane's blunt initial recognition about the lack of proof disappeared from the mainstream media's approved narrative of Russia-gate.

Doubts about the Russian "hack" or dissident suggestions that what we were witnessing was a "soft coup" were scoffed at by leading media commentators. Other warnings from veteran U.S. intelligence professionals about the weaknesses of the Russia-gate narrative and the danger of letting politicized intelligence overturn a constitutional election were also brushed aside in pursuit of the goal of removing Trump from the White House.

It didn't even seem to matter when new Russia-gate disclosures conflicted with the original narrative that Putin had somehow set Trump up as a Manchurian candidate. All normal journalistic skepticism was jettisoned. It was as if the Russia-gate advocates started with the conclusion that Trump must go and then made the facts fit into that mold, but anyone who noted the violations of normal investigative procedures was dismissed as a "Trump enabler" or a "Moscow stooge."

The Text Evidence

But then came the FBI text messages, providing documentary evivdence that key FBI officials involved in the Russia-gate investigation were indeed deeply biased and out to get Trump, adding hard proof to Trump's longstanding lament that he was the subject of a "witch hunt."

[Feb 08, 2018] The Nunes Memo and the Death of American Journalism

Notable quotes:
"... Here's the real deal: FISA, the notion of what is essentially a Federal secret police force, most of our post-9-11 infrastructure and our pathetic lack of regulation of information technology has been a problem built by both parties for decades. ..."
Feb 08, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

BCZ February 6, 2018 at 3:40 am

We know that FISA knew the dossier was politically motivated and unconfirmed. Even Nunes acknowledges this . now.

And this is the issue, and the irony of this article. 'Wasn't it nice before journalists stopped reporting and pushing narratives?' Yes, it was narrative pusher.

Here's the real deal: FISA, the notion of what is essentially a Federal secret police force, most of our post-9-11 infrastructure and our pathetic lack of regulation of information technology has been a problem built by both parties for decades. I find it literally impossible that the most scandal free 'weak kneed' administration was doing anything other than business as usual in this increasingly dystopian context .

. but now here comes the GOP to try to turn this in to a partisan weapon, and journalists like you to help them do it increasing division over an issue that should be the people versus the elites into democrats versus republicans.

And, frankly that was so blatantly the intent given the manner this whole thing has been handled that only a true hack wouldn't note it in the context of an article like this.

But here's the thing I think deep down you are just too blind to acknowledge that all this security apparatus, tough on terror, 'freedom-isn't-free-but-I'll-sell-it-for-a-security-from-attacks-less-likely-than-lightning-strikes' cowardice is the problem.

OF COURSE FISA'S BEING ABUSED (along with the whole intelligence apparatus) it was custom designed by decades of elites to be so!

What fits the facts more? That the FBI simultaneously conspired to help, and then hurt the Clinton campaign, all the while saying that they are all just doing their jobs .

Or

That they were just doing their jobs, and this kind of stuff happens all the time.

I'm going door number two.

https://www.washingtonpost.com

[Feb 07, 2018] Capitalism Collapsing from Inequality... Blame Russia! by Finian CUNNINGHAM

Nov 11, 2017 | www.strategic-culture.org

New figures published this week on obscene inequality show how the capitalist economic system has become more than ever deeply dysfunctional. Surely, the depraved workings of the system pose the greatest threat to societies and international security. Yet, Western leaders are preoccupied instead with other non-existent threats – like Russia.

Take British prime minister Theresa May who this week was speaking at a posh banquet in London. She told the assembled hobnobs, as they were sipping expensive wines, that "Russia is threatening the international order upon which we depend". Without providing one scrap of evidence, the British leader went to assert that Russia was interfering in Western democracies to "sow discord".

May's grandstanding is a classic case study of what behavioral scientists call "displacement activity" – that is, when animals find themselves in a state of danger they often react by displaying unusual behavior or making strange noises.

For indeed May and other Western political leaders are facing danger to their world order, even if they don't openly admit it as such. That danger is from the exploding levels of social inequality and poverty within Western societies, leading to anger, resentment, discontent and disillusionment among increasing masses of citizens. In the face of the inherent, imminent collapse of their systems of governance, Western leaders like May seek some relief by prattling on about Russia as a threat.

This week European bank Credit Suisse published figures showing that the wealth gap between rich and poor has reached even more grotesque and absurdist levels. According to the bank, the world's richest 1% now own as much wealth as half the population of the entire planet. The United States and Britain are among the top countries for residing multi-millionaires, while these two nations have also emerged as among the most unequal in the world.

The data calling out how dysfunctional the capitalist system has become keeps on coming. It is impossible to ignore the reality of a system in deep disrepair, yet British and American politicians in particular – apart from notable exceptions like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders – have the audacity to block out this reality and to chase after risible phantoms. (The exercise makes perfect sense in a way.)

Last week, a report from the US-based Institute of Policy Studies found that just three of America's wealthiest men – Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett – own the same level of wealth as the poorest half of the entire US population. That is, the combined monetary worth of these three individuals – reckoned to be $250 billion – is equivalent to that possessed by 160 million citizens.

What's more, the study also estimates that if the Trump administration pushes through its proposed tax plans, the gap between rich elite and the vast majority will widen even further. This and other studies have found that over 80% of the tax benefits from Trump's budget will go to enrich the top 1% in society.

All Western governments, not just May's or Trump's, have over the past decades overseen an historic trend of siphoning wealth from the majority of society to a tiny elite few. The tax burden has relentlessly shifted from the wealthy to the ordinary workers, who in addition have had to contend with decreasing wages, as well as deteriorating public serves and social welfare.

To refer to the United States or Britain as "democracies" is a preposterous misnomer. They are for all practical purposes plutocracies; societies run by and for a top strata of obscenely wealthy.

Intelligent economists, like the authors at the IPS cited above, realize that the state of affairs is unsustainable. Morally, and even from an empirical economics point of view, the distortion of wealth within Western societies and internationally is leading to social and political disaster.

On this observation, we must acknowledge the pioneering work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who more than 150 years ago identified the chief failing of capitalism as being the polarization of wealth between a tiny few and the vast majority. The lack of consumption power among the masses owing to chronic poverty induced by capitalism would result in the system's eventual collapse. Surely, we have reached that point in history now, when a handful of individuals own as much wealth as half the planet.

Inequality, poverty and the denial of decent existence to the majority of people stands out as the clarion condemnation of capitalism and its organization of society under private profit. The human suffering, hardships, austerity and crippled potential that flow from this condition represent the crisis of our time. Yet instead of an earnest public debate and struggle to overcome this crisis, we are forced by our elites to focus on false, even surreal problems.

American politics has become paralyzed by an endless elite squabble over whether Russia meddled in the presidential elections and claims that Russian news media continue to interfere in American democracy. Of course, the US corporate-controlled news media, who are an integral part of the plutocracy, lend credibility to this circus. Ditto European corporate-controlled media.

Then we have President Donald Trump on a world tour berating and bullying other nations to spend more money on buying American goods and to stop cheating supposed American generosity over trade. Trump also is prepared to start a nuclear war with North Korea because the latter is accused of being a threat to global peace – on the basis that the country is building military defenses. The same for Iran. Trump castigates Iran as a threat to Middle East peace and warns of a confrontation.

This is the same quality of ludicrous distraction as Britain's premier Theresa May this week lambasting Russia for "threatening the world order upon which we all depend". By "we" she is really referring to the elites, not the mass of suffering workers and their families.

May and Trump are indulging in "perception management" taken to absurdity. Or more crudely, brainwashing.

How can North Korea or Iran be credibly presented as global threats when the American and British are supporting a genocidal blockade and aerial slaughter in Yemen? The complete disconnect in reality is testimony to the pernicious system of thought-control that the vast majority of citizens are enforced to live under.

The biggest disconnect is the obscene inequality of wealth and resources that capitalism has engendered in the 21 st century. That monstrous dysfunction is also causally related to why the US and its Western allies like Britain are pushing belligerence and wars around the planet. It is all part of their elitist denial of reality. The reality that capitalism is the biggest threat to humanity's future.

Do we let these mentally deficient, deceptive political elites and their media dictate the nonsense? Or will the mass of people do the right thing and sweep them aside?

[Feb 07, 2018] Why do you, dummy, not believe this junk? ...because Don Lemon and Rachel Maddow said so?

Feb 07, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

vofreason Feb 7, 2018 9:56 AM Permalink

Why do you dummies believe this junk? ...because Hannity said so? The "memo" is an altogether ridiculous idea, it's just a piece of paper of what all these liars thought about something,....it has no weight on anything anymore than if someone came on tv and gave their opinion..........and in this case it's just the opinion, like all the rest, of an incompetent group of people that have no business being in their positions.

This isn't the usual Dems' vs Repuplican stuff where they fight about issues ........ this is our government taken over by reality tv personalities, rich housewives and greedy leeches of the worst kind.

They're the dummy at the McDonalds counter that can't understand your order and should all be working some harmless minimum wage job where they aren't responsible for anything important or that requires any sort of intellect.

Stan522 -> vofreason Feb 7, 2018 10:15 AM Permalink

Why do you, dummy, not believe this junk? ...because Don Lemon and Rachel Maddow said so?

The "memo" is an altogether review of the evidence at hand that uses what has been derived from evidence found much through the Inspector General's report and the testimony from witnesses (that means documented in writing), both in the House and Senate, plus what has been released by the DOJ and FBI through both lawsuits and Congressional requests... Again, it's all documented and irrefutable.

The dem memo is just a piece of paper of what all these dem liars thought about something,....it has no weight on anything anymore than if someone came on tv and gave their opinion..........and in this case it's just the opinion, like all the rest, of an incompetent group of people that have no business being in their positions in the dem party and the left leaning dem carrier pigeons in the MSM.

This isn't the usual Dems' vs Repuplican stuff where they fight about issues ........ this is the democrat party desparately trying to block EVERYTHING because they fully realize what the outcome will be if all id disclosed.

It will be the end of their party for decades (similar to republicans during Watergate - I was in DC then and I know). The dem sycophants like you are the dummy at the McDonalds counter that can't understand your order and should all be working some harmless minimum wage job where they aren't responsible for anything important or that requires any sort of intellect.

[Feb 07, 2018] 'Deep State' Veterans find New Homes in Mainstream Media by Caitlin Johnstone

Notable quotes:
"... purchase of the Washington Post ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers ..."
"... Trump doesn't wear the pretty face mask that most recent Presidents had. In that, he is showing that the Emperor has no clothes (and the Empire no morals). This could be a good thing as people realize the one truth he campaigned on – "the system is rigged" is still true. But this Administration's faux "war" with the Establishment is serving to blind many from the reality that it is continuing and even expanding the horrible NeoCon foreign policies and Neoliberal economic policies that the Establishment desires. ..."
"... This Reality TV Show Presidency is sweeping up most USAmericans. Like all Reality TV Shows, we in the audience cheer our favorites and jeer their opponents as if it was real, and not a fully-scripted performance. ..."
"... I feel your pain cmp thank you for your post. For you and others interested in this combination of Student Anti-War activism and Government Surveillance, I'd like to recommend a truly insightful book entitled, "Subversives": The FBI's War On Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise To Power by Seth Rosenfeld. Matt Taibbi remarked in a review of this book which now seems understated, that "Domestic intelligence forces will tend to use all the powers they're given (and even some that they're not) to spy on people who are politically defenseless, irreverent from a security standpoint and targeted for all the wrong reasons". ..."
"... "Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley's push to force the DOJ to open a criminal investigation into ex-British spy and 'Trump dossier' author Christopher Steele is being met with resistance from the bureau, the latest sign that it doesn't want information about its relationship with Steele to be shared with the public." ..."
Feb 07, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

'Deep State' Veterans find New Homes in Mainstream Media February 5, 2018

NBC News' hiring of former CIA Director John Brennan is the latest in a wave of intelligence community stalwarts being given jobs in the media, raising concerns over conflicts of interests, reports Caitlin Johnstone.

"Former CIA director John Brennan has become the latest member of the NBC News and MSNBC family, officially signing with the network as a contributor," chirps a recent article by The Wrap, as though that's a perfectly normal thing to have to write and not a ghastly symptom of an Orwellian dystopia. NBC reports that the former head of the depraved , lying, torturing , propagandizing , drug trafficking , coup-staging , warmongering Central Intelligence Agency "is now a senior national security and intelligence analyst."

Brennan, who played a key role in the construction of the establishment's Russia narrative that has been used to manufacture public consent for world-threatening new cold war escalations , is just the latest addition in an ongoing trend of trusted mainstream media outlets being packed to the gills with stalwarts from the U.S. intelligence community. Brennan joins CIA and DoD Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash on the NBC/MSNBC lineup, who is serving there as a national security analyst, as well as NBC intelligence/national security reporter and known CIA collaborator Ken Dilanian.

Former Director of National Intelligence, Russiagate architect, and known Russophobic racist James Clapper was welcomed to the CNN "family" last year by Chris " It's Illegal to Read WikiLeaks " Cuomo and now routinely appears as an expert analyst for the network. Last year CNN also hired a new national security analyst in Michael Hayden , who has served as CIA Director, NSA Director, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and an Air Force general.

Former CIA analyst and now paid CNN analyst Phil Mudd, who last year caused Cuomo's show to have to issue a retraction and apology for a completely baseless claim he made on national television asserting that WikiLeaks' Julian Assange is "a pedophile", is once again making headlines for suggesting that the FBI is entering into a showdown with the current administration over Trump's decision to declassify the controversial Nunes memo.

More and more of the outlets from which Americans get their information are being filled not just with garden variety establishment loyalists, but with longstanding members of the U.S. intelligence community. These men got to their positions of power within these deeply sociopathic institutions based on their willingness to facilitate any depravity in order to advance the secret agendas of the U.S. power establishment, and now they're being paraded in front of mainstream Americans on cable news on a daily basis. The words of these "experts" are consistently taken and reported on by smaller news outlets in print and online media in a way that seeds their authoritative assertions throughout public consciousness.

The term "deep state" does not refer to a conspiracy theory but to a simple concept in political analysis which points to the undeniable reality that (A) plutocrats, (B) intelligence agencies, (C) defense agencies, and (D) the mainstream media hold large amounts of power in America despite their not being part of its elected government. You don't need to look far to see how these separate groups overlap and collaborate to advance their own agendas in various ways. Amazon's Jeff Bezos, for example, is deeply involved in all of the aforementioned groups : (A) as arguably the wealthiest person ever he is clearly a plutocrat, with a company that is trying to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy ; (B) he is a CIA contractor ; (C) he is part of a Pentagon advisory board ; and (D) his purchase of the Washington Post in 2013 gave him total control over a major mainstream media outlet.

Bezos did not purchase the Washington Post because his avaricious brain predicted that newspapers were about to make a profitable resurgence; he purchased it for the same reason he has inserted himself so very deeply into America's unelected power infrastructure – he wants to ensure a solid foundation for the empire he is building. He needs a potent propaganda outlet to manufacture support for the power establishment that he is weaving his plutocratic tentacles through. This is precisely the same reason other mass media-controlling plutocrats are stocking their propaganda machines with intelligence community insiders.

Time and again you see connections between the plutocratic class which effectively owns America's elected government , the intelligence and defense agencies which operate behind thick veils of secrecy in the name of "national security" to advance agendas which have nothing to do with the wishes of the electorate, and the mass media machine which is used to manufacture the consent of the people to be governed by this exploitative power structure.

America is ruled by an elite class which has slowly created a system where money increasingly translates directly into political power , and which is therefore motivated to maintain economic injustice in order to rule over the masses more completely. The greater the economic inequality, the greater their power. Nobody would willingly consent to such an oppressive system where wealth inequality keeps growing as expensive bombs from expensive drones are showered upon strangers on the other side of the planet, so a robust propaganda machine is needed.

And that's where John Brennan's new job comes in. Expect a consistent fountain of lies to pour from his mouth on NBC, and expect them to all prop up this exploitative power establishment and advance its geopolitical agendas . And expect clear-eyed rebels everywhere to keep calling it all what it is.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium . Follow her work on Facebook , Twitter , or her website. She has a podcast and a new book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .


Cold N. Holefield , February 5, 2018 at 10:29 am

Yeah, I noticed this too and it disgusts me. It doesn't surprise me, though. Ever since Oliver North got his own show and has been a regular contributor at Fox News, this has been the trend. CNN also gives plenty of Air Time to the disgraced John Dean of Watergate Infamy.

It underscores how vital it is We The People take back The Media from the Corporate Thieves who now own it. We need to reverse consolidation in the Media Industry and in fact, reverse the trend of Media as an Industry.

Ol' Hippy , February 5, 2018 at 1:58 pm

There appears to be two types of media these days. The first type plays by the "rules" of the corporate/banking/military state and gets prestigious jobs with all the perks, i.e. Nice house, good salary, steady work, etc. The second type works independent from the power structures. They have integrity; Robert Parry being a prime example. They also become media pariahs. They work hard for less pay, get denigrated, marginalized, called liars, etc. Without them we would all be as clueless as those that only read and watch MSM. Thank goodness for these brave people.

Cold N. Holefield , February 5, 2018 at 2:52 pm

They work hard for less pay, get denigrated, marginalized, called liars, etc. Without them we would all be as clueless as those that only read and watch MSM. Thank goodness for these brave people.

Yes, I agree. Thank goodness for the few of us who still remain and persist against all odds with no support.

Joe Tedesky , February 5, 2018 at 10:48 am

The culture in DC being described recently as 'critters in the swamp', does not nearly come close to describing the choking filth that has taken our government over. To be clear, this coup toke place a very longtime ago, but don't announce that to any good red blooded American Patriot, that is unless you want to be titled 'un-American'.

My hesitation to get excited over the 'Nunes Memo', is my frustration over what all is missing from this Congressional members flaming Memo. Like where is Brennan, Clapper, or any DNC Operatives, as if we should have expected the MSM to be mentioned? Why, just go after a couple of cheating lovers?

Seeing Brennan join the NBC staff, is like watching him walk across the hall at Langley only to start his mischief in another CIA department. I'd love to wish the old spook good luck on his first day at his new job, but then that would be like condoning that pain be inflicted upon more unsuspecting poor souls, so I won't.

Joe Tedesky , February 5, 2018 at 11:49 am

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/

Realist , February 5, 2018 at 3:17 pm

Inserting guys like that into the center of the storm within the corporate media whose job it *should* be to expose the truth to the public is clearly a conflict of interest (because they themselves are prime suspects in the purported criminal activities) and obvious obstruction of justice because we know they are actually snow-jobbing the public and hiding the truth to protect themselves and their puppetmasters.

In all fairness, when does General Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page or Jared Kushner get to have a regular segment on the Rachel Maddow show? Why doesn't the media interview Barack Obama himself to find out what he knows and when he first knew it, or to force him into self-incriminating or at least highly-suspicious obfuscations? It was his justice department that targeted the Trump campaign on highly problematic grounds. Or, put a microphone in front of Hillary's face and ask her how the administration (of which she was an organic outgrowth) interfaced with the FISA court, allegedly on her behalf to spy on the competition.

This caper is not only worse than Watergate (Watergate was conducted in the shadows), this crime and subsequent cover-up are being carried out in broad daylight with the full complicity of the media. They don't care who knows because those people, regardless of their substantiated facts, will never get a hearing in the media which now creates our moment-to-moment reality, as far as 99% of Americans know or care about.

Joe Tedesky , February 5, 2018 at 3:48 pm

Our MSM is lacking the honor and truthfulness of Robert Parry.

Realist, I always like reading your comments, and with this comment of yours you don't disappoint. I too would like to know when the truth will be broadcast over our airways, and printed in our national news outlets. Although, I could watch the grass grow, or the snow melt, and have better results to jump up and down about, before the MSM will shoot straight with us viewers. I have come to the conclusion that what hurts our nation most, is we have to much corporate control, like our infamous corporate owned MSM. These pundits, and news anchors only do what they do best, and that is they promote themselves. I mean, the omissions of facts, and the over the top characterizations of world leaders and national political opponents goes to the degree of slander, and yet life goes on. I know it would be an impossible task, but wouldn't it be great to if we news junkies could sue the MSM for fraud?

Realist , February 5, 2018 at 8:44 pm

I could have been more strident than I was, Joe. I might have called the FISA court outright illegal and unconstitutional like Jimmy Dore did yesterday. I mean, what the hell is its role in America today? It serves as a SECRET COURT which gives permissions to intelligence agencies to SPY without limits on any American citizen they choose to target, including, apparently, their supposed boss, the president of the United States. As if the carte blanch, full spectrum eavesdropping done by DARPA on every American weren't enough of a violation of our constitutional rights, they have to dress up some of their spying with special judicial privilege. Useful tools like Brennan, Clapper, Mueller and Comey have been justifying or fallaciously LYING about this imposition on our citizens for years now. Remember when the KGB was disbanded and folks were publicly rooting through the files in a carnival atmosphere after the Soviet Union collapsed? This country needs a dose of the same thing. We need more of our freedoms back and less of the so-called "order" imposed by the Deep State and its string pullers. I don't believe for a moment that the Russians, the Chinese, ISIS, Al Queda, Kim Yung-Un, the Ayatollahs or a squadron of Klingon battle cruisers are waiting just outside our borders preparing to attack the United States and we all must be defended by the "Intelligence Community" by living like Winston Smith.

Joe Tedesky , February 5, 2018 at 9:57 pm

The U.S. is so shallow at even their attempting to address its citizens with the appropriate truth, that after 50 years to prepare for the public more information on the JFK Assassination that when the time come the government wasn't even ready for the release. What an insult to the nation.

The purge you spoke of Realist is a dream in this purist eye. I really do welcome a much broader investigation of panoramic proportions of our nation's massive bureaucracy, and the discovery of the elements who only conspire to enact their agendas could then be exposed.

You are right about our freedoms. We Americans are in the end going to need to put our foot down to our governments police state rules, and all of us will need to brave it out when going into public places. (Oh boy what false flag bate) At some point it will be necessary to say, enough is enough, and hopefully catch them while at their game. Joe

Ps that last part I doubt will ever happen.

Gregory Herr , February 6, 2018 at 12:52 am

I think you touched upon something really important referring to the "moment-to-moment reality" that media "creates". A big problem with television "news" and the funny papers is the failure to.contextualize what's going on today with related events or issues–even from the relatively recent past. It's almost always about a myopic and usually distorted focus on just one particularly vexing item that generates competing opinions that must be paired and parsed to death–until there's something else to "talk" about. Yeah, yeah! Pick a team–partisanship is entertaining don't ya know! Rachel's got ratings and Hannity's one of us!

Just one for instance:
Obama relaxed constraints on sharing of NSA raw data as a parting blow to privacy that also makes it easier to "leak" and cover up the leaking. He signed a Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act which essentially is a way for government to make it harder to "counter" their disinformation and propaganda. Google and Facebook are are all in on the filter and censor project. Yet with all this and much more there isn't a peep of a national discussion about the First Amendment and the value of protecting free and diverse expression. Oh, I know why. The Court says money is speech so all the "important" people can buy their freedom of expression. Guess that will leave me out.

Bob Van Noy , February 5, 2018 at 11:16 am

Thank you Caitlin Johnstone!

I'm going to refer readers to an off-guardian article running now and specifically to the comment pages where one can see Noam Chomsky's (as a young researcher) explain cointelpro. This is an exceptional explination

I will attempt a link below

Bob Van Noy , February 5, 2018 at 11:17 am

Here is the link mentioned above:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/02/05/bought-journalists-postscript-to-udo-olfkottes-suppressed-book/#comments

Bob Van Noy , February 5, 2018 at 11:49 am

Here is the link to Wikipedia on COINTELPRO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

Virginia , February 5, 2018 at 11:51 am

Thanks, Caitlin. People need to learn more about Deep State and and also the One World Order. There are lots of videos on the Internet, including some featuring former CIA (whistleblower-type) agents who feel impelled to divulge the hidden government. Thanks for your links, Bob. I'll take a look.

Erin , February 5, 2018 at 11:51 am

Don't watch, don't watch, don't watch!

Skip Scott , February 5, 2018 at 12:42 pm

Erin-

I agree. I think people need to turn off their TV sets. They are mind numbing. People like Brennan belong in jail, not on television.

Nancy , February 5, 2018 at 2:24 pm

I don't think the majority of people are watching this crap anymore. It's mainly a bunch of circle jerks mouthing off in an echo chamber. Problem is, the rest of the population is either preoccupied with making a living or playing with their gadgets to find out what's really going on. People seem to have given up on the idea of democracy, justice and fairness and in a way I don't blame them.
It's kind of a curse to still have this notion that a better world is possible.

Cold N. Holefield , February 5, 2018 at 2:49 pm

Good points. I agree. It's as though "The News" is intended for the Oligarchs and the Political Class. The ads are a dead giveaway that's the target market. The products they are selling are not for the Average Joe who can't afford such luxuries.

Bob Van Noy , February 5, 2018 at 12:00 pm

Now finally for the most adventurous of you I'll introduce you to a man I discovered in an agonizingly slow way over the course of years. His name is Carl Oglesby and as a young worker at a defense industry job he started doing research on the Vietnam War. He ultimately wrote a book called "The Yankee and Cowboy Wars" that surprisingly accurately describes our current condition. It is one of those books long out of print worth thousands of dollars in resale.
I will post a link to Spartacus
Educational below but you can find it on your own..
I promise to now shut-up and listen

Bob Van Noy , February 5, 2018 at 12:02 pm

Here is the link:
http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKoglesby.htm

geeyp , February 5, 2018 at 12:25 pm

I saw that recent Mudd comment regarding President Trump = 13 months vs. Hoover Org. = since 1908. The President needs to eliminate this agency. Then we can watch this asshole cough up his spleen LIVE on t.v.! I guess these creatures have license to claim anything they want and get away with it. His Assange accusation falls out of his mouth and gets repeated endlessly. Then when the weak retraction occurs, it never gets the same press/traction and the damage is already done.

Babyl-on , February 5, 2018 at 12:25 pm

Nothing particularly new here, this has been established practice for decades. What is new about this issue and so many others now is that it is done openly, without any pretense that there is a constitution. The Imperial institutions housed in the US now act openly for the interests of an overarching transnational oligarchy.

Trump has destroyed the dominate narrative this is by far the deepest wound I have seen the Empire receive. No one really believes Clapper any more – whether it is a plurality or a majority is not the point, enough people don't believe them that the Empire has lost control of the message. That is the source of their panic. Trotting out their apparatchiks once worked and worked for decades but – "It's all over now baby blue."

Trump has exposed much of the ways things have been done behind the seines for many years and unwittingly forced them into the open – this has been his biggest contribution to the weakening of the Imperial structures. Leaving them naked in their policies of slaughter. The Empire has nothing now but a huge military which it can't use without destroying civilization so it goes around the world destroying countries and cities in its helpless thrashing around slaughtering innocent people as it looses on every front. The last gasp of Empire – kill them all if they will not submit. In its death throws the Empire will do untold damage and create vast human suffering, it might very well destroy civilization with its nuclear weapons rather that accept a place as one part of the human community not the ruler of humanity.

Daniel , February 5, 2018 at 6:13 pm

Trump doesn't wear the pretty face mask that most recent Presidents had. In that, he is showing that the Emperor has no clothes (and the Empire no morals). This could be a good thing as people realize the one truth he campaigned on – "the system is rigged" is still true. But this Administration's faux "war" with the Establishment is serving to blind many from the reality that it is continuing and even expanding the horrible NeoCon foreign policies and Neoliberal economic policies that the Establishment desires.

This Reality TV Show Presidency is sweeping up most USAmericans. Like all Reality TV Shows, we in the audience cheer our favorites and jeer their opponents as if it was real, and not a fully-scripted performance.

exiled off mainstreet , February 5, 2018 at 12:29 pm

Yankee media has degenerated into an echo chamber for the deep state structure. This is just further proof of that salient fact.

No More Neos , February 5, 2018 at 1:35 pm

Maybe we should view this as a good sign that they need to "call in the National Guard" for corporate media back-up reinforcements. The propaganda machine is sputtering and sparking, overheated from working OT to push flimsy narrative, which only accentuates the cartoonish spectacle of it all.

Neoliberalism rests on a fragile foundation of financial myths that are beginning to come crashing down, aside from shooting itself in the foot in the 2008 crash. They had to admit that:

Global banks are global in health and national in death. ~ Mervyn King

A growing number of economics students are demanding to be taught economic history and not just neoclassical economics. Hayek, Friedman, Greenspan and the Apostles of Doublespeak in the academic and corporate media realm have lost all credibility. Heterodox economists like Steve Keen, Michael Hudson, Bill Mitchell and Stephanie Kelton are gaining popularity in their blinders-off clarity of how the economy actually works, sans the political spin.

Even Russia and China have decided to not allow Monsanto to control the world's food supply, have no desire to continue working with the IMF and World Bank and are wise enough to see the futility in acquiescing to a unipolar world view. Ultimately, the US will be the bigger loser by going it alone and not accepting the vast multipolar opportunities that await, based on faulty principle. But that won't deter them from continuing provocations in Ukraine, Venezuela (and other Latin American countries), etc., even though Western agenda's neoliberal offerings are now considered to be an appalling joke internationally.

But this has been known for some time. It was just a matter of time before the "market society" experiment crashed and burned:

"To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment would result in the demolition of society." ~ Karl Polanyi, 1944

"In 1945 or 1950 if you had seriously proposed any of the ideas and policies in today's standard neo-liberal toolkit, you would have been laughed off the stage or sent off to the insane asylum." ~ Susan George

Do not confuse the economic -- oikos nomia -- the norms of running home and community with chrematistics -- krema atos -- the accumulation of money. ~ Aristotle

Bob Van Noy , February 6, 2018 at 8:50 am

Many thanks No More Neos. I was unaware of most of what you wrote. I have noted the names that you mentioned and I will pay more attention to them. I do know of Michael Hudson and admire his work.

It has occurred to me that there will be Rich academic histories written about the organized management of subject matter by TPTB. See my Response To cmp below.

Stephen J. , February 5, 2018 at 1:55 pm

Re, The Deep State and the "media."Do: "Birds of a feather produce propaganda together?
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
December 25, 2015
Are the Corporate Media and Others Covering Up The Treachery of The War Criminals?

There is plenty of evidence that people in positions of power planned and plotted a number of "illegal" wars [1] in "defiance of international law." Unfortunately, this information is suppressed and censored in most of the corporate monopoly media. Instead we are fed propaganda that attempts to disguise the truth, and covers up the massive human suffering caused by the warmongering criminals of these 21st century war crimes. This has resulted in the creation of millions of refugees, [1a] many soldiers dead and maimed, countries destroyed, millions dead, children dead and contaminated, and the war criminals are FREE. [2]
[read more at link below]
http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2015/12/are-corporate-media-and-others-covering.html

Bob Van Noy , February 5, 2018 at 2:52 pm

Thank you Stephan J. Here is a link that you provided from a Robert Parry piece.

If one goes through the commentary, you will see that comments have always been decent, informative and educational on this truly wonderful site.

Man oh man I miss Robert Parry and F. G. Sanford where are you?
(Caitlin Johnstone you're our new leader, and apparently another fine journalist. Thank You)

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/12/19/neocons-object-to-syrian-democracy/

Ol' Hippy , February 5, 2018 at 2:09 pm

This article by Caitlin just helps me to be glad that I never bought cable TV. I didn't realize how many former government criminals/ex-officials populated their polluted networks. Former head spook Mike Morell on CBS doesn't seem like an anomaly any more. The hens are fattening the foxes guarding the air and cable waves. No wonder those with little time, due to work and family matters, know so little about what's actually going on.

j. D. D. , February 5, 2018 at 2:25 pm

Looks like the Obama/British connected warmongering intel agents have decided to eliminate the "middle-men" (and women) and go directly on record. Rachel, Chris, Jim and Wolfe, your jobs are in jeopardy, Not to be left out, I expect that Comey, McCabe, Strzok, and perhaps Mueller, are filling out their own applications right now.

, , February 5, 2018 at 2:45 pm

Johnstone tells it like it is. It's a pure pleasure to read her ripping out the guts of the oligarchic monster creating our present deepening dystopia. Wouldn't it be nice if every American could read her little piece, and think about what it says? Maybe I can get a few of my friends to read it. You have to start somewhere to wake people up. If enough of us gently encourage our friends to take a brief dip into reality, who knows what might come from it?

Realist , February 5, 2018 at 2:48 pm

Mainstream liberal pundits used to talk like this, blasting the privileged insiders "feeding at the trough" and such. Now they have become just a bunch of crybaby spoilers and haters because their push for power via the Hildebeast movement came crashing down. If they can't have it, they'd rather break it. They couldn't beat the warmongering neocons or the rapacious neoliberals, so they joined 'em. They became what they always professed to hate.

Their followers, being just mindless tribalists rather than the perspicacious philosophers they are told they are, leap in lockstep over the precipice. They can never give you a coherent or logical reason why, just vapid slogans usually diametrically at odds with any real truth. All that matters to them is receiving daily affirmation from their fellow ranks of sloganeering nincompoops. In their newfound McCarthyism they've morphed into the lost boys from "Lord of the Flies" who went so far as to kill Piggy, Piggy's counterpart being Al Franken and his career as a champion of liberal causes in the U.S. senate.

But, in a world where one can purportedly choose any identity one pleases with no basis in reality, these self-immolations merely win accolades from the right-thinking media clerics as society in general goes into a death spiral. Living the "theatre of the absurd" has become the new "American way of life." Now, if we could just quickly get out of the way of the rest of the world, things might turn out all right for the rest of humanity. Unfortunately, they've designed an "app" to prevent that, it's called the MIC, and it's not user friendly.

Tom K. , February 5, 2018 at 3:05 pm

As exposed by Julian Assange: https://swprs.org/the-american-empire-and-its-media/

Daniel , February 5, 2018 at 6:57 pm

We are all victims of the pernicious 24/7 scientifically-designed propaganda apparatus. It has little to do with the victim's intelligence since almost all human opinions are formed by emotional reactions that occur even before the conscious mind registers the input.

Through critical thinking, we can overcome these emotional impulses, but only with effort, and a pre-existing skepticism of all information sources. And even still, I have no doubt that all of us who are aware of the propaganda still accept some falsehoods as true.

It could be that having former Intelligence Agency Directors as "news" presenters, and Goldman Sachs alum and Military/Industrial complex CEOs running important government agencies makes clear to some the reality that we live in an oligarchy with near-tyrannical powers. But most people seem too busy surviving and/or being diverted by the circus to notice the depths of the propaganda.

Chris , February 5, 2018 at 3:43 pm

"America is ruled by an elite class which has slowly created a system where money increasingly translates directly into political power, and which is therefore motivated to maintain economic injustice in order to rule over the masses more completely. The greater the economic inequality, the greater their power. " This is backwards. The elite does not create economic injustice to maintain and solidify their power for then there would have been no French, Russian, Cuban, Chinese revolutions. The capitalist system leads to economic injustice because it steals unpaid labour power from the working class and puts into the hands of the capitalists. The reason they keep wages lower is to increase the rate of profit not to keep power thought they try to hold on to the power to maintain that system. And the more that inequality is produced the weaker they become because the working class then realises it has nothing to lose and revolts. This is basic marxism which the writer seems to be unaware of. The greater the economic inequality, the greater the distress of the working class is and greater the motivation to change their condition.

backwardsevolution , February 5, 2018 at 4:01 pm

Chris – you are right, conditions must be favorable for any action to take place. It is when the crowd gets a taste of fear that they move.

Daniel , February 5, 2018 at 7:02 pm

Cold, you may know that the original use of the term "American Exceptionalism" was Stalin's description of how the USAmerican working classes seem incapable of revolting against capitalist exploitation, no matter how egregious it becomes. We are "the exception" to Marx's theories about the tipping points for revolutions.

cmp , February 5, 2018 at 4:20 pm

Just what does democracy look like to these cowards who sell prejudice, discrimination, hate and violence?

Here is an example of how much they think of their (our) own kids, if they even dare to speak to the teachers & preachers:

On May 2nd 1970, Governor James A. Rhodes (R-OH), says of student protesters at Kent State University:
"They're worse than the brown shirts and the communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes. They're the worst kind of people we harbor in America. I think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained, militant revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America. We're going to eradicate the problem, we're not going to treat the symptoms." Two days later, on May 4th, National Guardsmen kill four unarmed students on the Kent State campus and wounded nine others.
~ Jim Hunt; 'They Said What?'; 9/1/ 2009

On May 5th 1970, Governor Ronald Reagan (R-CA) says of the efforts to stop student protests on university campuses:
"If it takes a bloodbath, then let's get it over with.."
~ Jim Hunt; 'They Said What?'; 9/1/ 2009

.. And, 10 years later, in 1980, America elected who??

Who will the sellers offer up in 2024? Are we closing in on the end of the era of the puppet?

Perhaps it will be a pro. (with media experience on the resume, to boot) .. A John Brennan-ite?

If there is a hell, then certainly there must be a special spot reserved for those who are the worst of the guru's in greed. But, in the meantime, for America's own good, maybe someday soon, the International Community will close Guantanamo.. .. And, do all of the citizens of the planet a great justice by reopening it in the middle of the Mohave Desert. These cowards that corporatize & commercialize prejudice, discrimination, hate and violence, they can be the honorary members. And since it is they who have long killed their conscience, then maybe that desert heat will serve as a small reminder for what a little heat really feels like.

Bob Van Noy , February 6, 2018 at 8:31 am

I feel your pain cmp thank you for your post. For you and others interested in this combination of Student Anti-War activism and Government Surveillance, I'd like to recommend a truly insightful book entitled, "Subversives": The FBI's War On Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise To Power by Seth Rosenfeld. Matt Taibbi remarked in a review of this book which now seems understated, that "Domestic intelligence forces will tend to use all the powers they're given (and even some that they're not) to spy on people who are politically defenseless, irreverent from a security standpoint and targeted for all the wrong reasons".

cmp , February 6, 2018 at 4:43 pm

Bob, "Thank You!" I have made a note to look for Lansdale, Carl Oglesby, and now Seth Rosenfeld. All of this I know, will be such great reading for me!

I also sent you some follow up on the 28th. Did you receive those two? Would you like for me to send them again?

I look forward to all of your posts – Keep up all of your great work Bob!

backwardsevolution , February 5, 2018 at 4:31 pm

Sean Hannity on Fox is doing a stellar job of exposing the Department of Justice, FBI, and all of the other characters re the Steele dossier and Russiagate. Every night more information is revealed; it's like a spy novel. None of the other outlets are even talking about this stuff. Crickets. If you want the latest on criminality, go there. Meanwhile, Zero Hedge says:

"Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley's push to force the DOJ to open a criminal investigation into ex-British spy and 'Trump dossier' author Christopher Steele is being met with resistance from the bureau, the latest sign that it doesn't want information about its relationship with Steele to be shared with the public."

The Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC had paid Steele for his dossier. But the FBI also hired Steele, and just before they paid out $50,000.00 to Steele for his work, they discovered he lied, didn't pay him, but still continued to spy on Trump and his team. With Steele's dossier now discredited in the eyes of the FBI, they should have stopped their spying, but they didn't. Russiagate has been based on this Steele dossier, and yet there was "no there there", and the DOJ and the FBI knew it.

Zero Hedge goes on:

"Furthermore, a section on a second memo by Steele says he received information from the State Department, which in turn got it from a foreign source who was in touch with 'a friend of the Clintons.'

'It is troubling enough that the Clinton Campaign funded Mr. Steele's work, but that these Clinton associates were contemporaneously feeding Mr. Steele allegations raises additional concerns about his credibility,' Grassley and Graham wrote in their criminal referral."

So Steele was receiving information from the State Department and a friend of the Clinton's? How impartial is that?

backwardsevolution , February 5, 2018 at 4:33 pm

Link for the above Zero Hedge piece:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-05/grassley-graham-blast-fbi-censoring-memo-calling-criminal-probe-trump-dossier

Daniel , February 5, 2018 at 7:16 pm

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,

~ The Bard

The Reality TV Show Presidency has great ratings.

Do you think Nikki Haley got the red rose? Apparently Michael Wolf, the author of "Fire and Fury," is backing down on that bit of salacious gossip "news."

backwardsevolution , February 6, 2018 at 4:39 pm

Daniel – and a line I like to quote from Shakespeare applies so well to the Clinton's:

"Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."

backwardsevolution , February 5, 2018 at 4:36 pm

John Brennan – "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes." That guy is evil, and nothing good will come of this.

Mark Thompson , February 5, 2018 at 8:13 pm

Really happy to see Caitlin writing on this forum. Keep up the good work Caitlin. You'll never be short on material to write about. If what we're witnessing in this point in time is any barometer, we're in for a world of hurt. Orwell is in his grave wishing he had two more hands. He has to choose whether to cover his eyes or ears. What a sad state of affairs

Lois Gagnon , February 5, 2018 at 11:18 pm

It becomes more evident by the day that we live in a military dictatorship. One of the incidents that brought this realization home to me was when John Kerry had negotiated a deal with the Russians regarding military operations in Syria. The military took it upon themselves to nullify that deal when it purposely attacked and killed 60 Syrian soldiers. That was a clear case of insubordination that should have led to firings of the military brass who ordered that strike. Instead, Obama just carried on as if nothing happened except that the negotiated deal was null and void.

And of course the press said nothing about the blatant criminality of the military action.

What president is willing to stand up to the military and the Department of Skullduggery AKA the CIA anymore? Who is really calling the shots?

Diana Lee , February 6, 2018 at 2:52 pm

Thank you Caitlin! Good job! I especially like: "Nobody would willingly consent to such an oppressive system where wealth inequality keeps growing as expensive bombs from expensive drones are showered upon strangers on the other side of the planet, so a robust propaganda machine is needed." I agree! NO ONE is "willfully ignorant". NO ONE chooses to be under the influence of government mass mind control/propaganda. Mind control is something that is "done to" people -- – whether the perpetrator is a psychopathic spouse or cult leader; religious indoctrinator, military boot camp sargeant, and/or the voice of government control of the media. Blaming victims of mind control for being mind controlled and therefore being "willfully ignorant" is just another form of mind control used to discount the reality of mind control.

[Feb 07, 2018] I don't talk to parasites and pressitutes

Notable quotes:
"... You even had Eleanor Clift and Clarence Page on The McLaughlin Group emphatically stating that the Steele Dossier was 90% factual which is just repeating what Steele said just after the release of the dossier. The veracity has since tumbled as questions arose about the allegations and their sources. But, there is a Cabal that still hang their hopes on the "90%". ..."
"... Seriously, explain to me the difference between the two things. Trump may have sought out dirt on Hillary from Russia and Hillary may have sought out dirt on Trump from an former British spy. ..."
"... We will see what the other memo says but simply as speculation I think the chances are that Democrats probably would be better off cutting ties with Steele, GPS Fusion, Comey, Page, Ohr, Strzok, Lynch even and maybe more, than to parse out why this FISA warrant was not a bad idea. It really is never, ever too late to turn back, but the animus against Donald Trump is clouding a lot of otherwise clear thinking Democrats. "Yeah, that whole mess sure was a screw-up and now let's talk about how terrible Trump's immigration policies would be for the country." ..."
"... the Wall Street Journal calls "disturbing facts about how the FBI and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court appear to have been used to influence the 2016 election and its aftermath." ..."
"... When is somebody going to read United states vs Leon that stands for the rule of law that if a cop (fbi) knowingly or recklessly includes facts in an application for a warrant that the cop knows are false or recklessly includes, then the warrant is quashed and and all evidence is suppressed ..."
"... This whole thing stinks to high heaven. The left is deliberately trying to steer discussion away from the elephant in the room -- the FBI under Obama was no longer neutral but was being used as a political tool to undermine the opposition. This is a serious threat to our democratic process and cannot be taken lightly. Jeff Sessions needs to appoint a special counsel to investigate the Nunes Memo allegations. Rod Rosenstein, Robert Mueller and Christopher Wray all need to be suspended while the investigation is ongoing. ..."
"... The NYT and the [neo]liberal media in general have lost all their journalistic integrity in the way they've been covering up for all of Democrats' corruption and abuse of power the last two decades. The way they fawned over Obama was downright sickening. Watergate was billed as the greatest scandal ever because it was done by a Republican president. What Obama did not just with the 2016 election meddling but with covering for Clinton's Uranium One pay to play scheme was far, far worse. ..."
"... The people aren't as stupid as the liberal elites think we are. That's why the fake news media is losing their stranglehold on news as people turn to alternative news sources thanks to the internet. The Times can print whatever they want, they are only further discrediting themselves as a legitimate news source with each passing day. The delirious, foam at the mouth reader comments that they deemed fit to print just show how hysterical and out of touch the left have become. ..."
Feb 07, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Jay Dee February 6, 2018 at 12:22 pm

Some years ago, my father-in-law was pursued by the press after witnessing an armed robbery. His response? "I don't talk to parasites."
ArtR , says: February 6, 2018 at 12:24 pm
You even had Eleanor Clift and Clarence Page on The McLaughlin Group emphatically stating that the Steele Dossier was 90% factual which is just repeating what Steele said just after the release of the dossier. The veracity has since tumbled as questions arose about the allegations and their sources. But, there is a Cabal that still hang their hopes on the "90%".
Terence Kivlan , says: February 6, 2018 at 1:02 pm
NYT reporters have always been part of the [neo]liberal Democratic flea circus. They are just more open about it now.
MM , says: February 6, 2018 at 1:21 pm
ArtR: "You even had Eleanor Clift and Clarence Page on The McLaughlin Group emphatically stating that the Steele Dossier was 90% factual which is just repeating what Steele said."

Yeah, I caught that doozy over the weekend. Clift, a so-called journalist, also claimed that Steele and the dossier had been funded by the GOP, which is a false statement that's still widely circulated, for no good reason.

Katy Tur, another so-called journalist, was calling Nunes "treasonous" on par with Snowden before the memo release, and is now laughing about it after the fact. When the press acts like that, not in the public interest but in defense of government secrecy, you can bet something rotten is going on in the bureaucracy.

Add to that Senators Blumenthal and Booker claiming the release of this memo, and by extension the public's right to know, would constitute "obstruction of justice" and "treason", essentially repackaging claims by the intelligence agencies that the release would jeopardize national security. And again, this was all before the memo release.

Why so much fear-mongering and lying? It suggests there's something to hide. But that could describe Trump's behavior, too.

Donald (the left leaning one) , says: February 6, 2018 at 1:35 pm
"That you CAN'T combine the two speaks of a deeper rot. The opposition researcher was working with agents of the exact same country and they knew it."

This makes sense to me. I am and continue to be somewhat agnostic and bemused by this whole russiagate thing. Without defending Trump, who I just assume is corrupt and surrounded by corrupt people, it is more than a little hard to believe that Steele and the Clinton side was entirely innocent. On the one hand we are supposed to be scared to death of the mighty Russian propaganda machine and yet on the other hand people on the left don't stop and ask whether someone sent to Russia to gather dirt on Trump might have had contact, witting or not, with Russian intelligence. If they wanted to sow confusion, wouldn't they try to do it on both sides? Wouldn't they know what Steele was up to? It wasn't like anyone thought Trump had a good shot of winning, so why wouldn't they play both sides if they wanted to sow confusion?

Personally, I don't give a crap about any of this. Much of the outrage, I think, is being fueled by people who want a new Cold War with Russia. Russiagate, true or false, helps keep the all important fear and loathing of Russia on the front page.

Roman Reigns , says: February 6, 2018 at 1:36 pm
"The brilliant conservative mind at work.

One side collaborating with an adversary nation (Russia) that harms our national interests is a threat to national security.

The other side is hiring an opposition researcher.

The fact that you can combine the two and compare them speaks of deep the rot is."

Well, I'm not a conservative, so there's that. Second, Russia wasn't an adversary nation up until about two seconds ago when Democrats suddenly needed a scapegoat for Hillary's flame-out. Russia wasn't an adversary nation for nearly the entirety of 20th century while they were being run by a series of despots, but now they're an adversary nation. I think it was Obama who said, "The 80's called and they want their foreign policy back."

Seriously, explain to me the difference between the two things. Trump may have sought out dirt on Hillary from Russia and Hillary may have sought out dirt on Trump from an former British spy.

Eric377 , says: February 6, 2018 at 1:41 pm
We will see what the other memo says but simply as speculation I think the chances are that Democrats probably would be better off cutting ties with Steele, GPS Fusion, Comey, Page, Ohr, Strzok, Lynch even and maybe more, than to parse out why this FISA warrant was not a bad idea. It really is never, ever too late to turn back, but the animus against Donald Trump is clouding a lot of otherwise clear thinking Democrats. "Yeah, that whole mess sure was a screw-up and now let's talk about how terrible Trump's immigration policies would be for the country."
MikeJC , says: February 6, 2018 at 2:10 pm
The entire episode brings three possibilities.

1. All reporters, FBI agents, intel agents and congressional investigators -- Dem and GOP are so incompetent that they can't find "collusion" after nearly 20 months.

2. Trump is a master genius who has engineered the most successful cover-up in US history -- keeping all direct evidence of collusion hidden. or

3. Hillary hated Trump so much she paid for phony Russian dirt and then spread it to law enforcement and media to ensure that there would not a repeat of Obama snatching the Presidency away from her.

Since no evidence of collusion has shown up, #3 is most obvious. Of course, Democrats think "evidence" is "Joe lied about the perfectly legal act of drinking milk, so that means he must have stolen some milk." Actually, they don't care; any old lie will do.

balconesfault , says: February 6, 2018 at 3:02 pm
what the Wall Street Journal calls "disturbing facts about how the FBI and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court appear to have been used to influence the 2016 election and its aftermath."

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

ADBrooks , says: February 6, 2018 at 3:25 pm
When is somebody going to read United states vs Leon that stands for the rule of law that if a cop (fbi) knowingly or recklessly includes facts in an application for a warrant that the cop knows are false or recklessly includes, then the warrant is quashed and and all evidence is suppressed
KD , says: February 6, 2018 at 3:40 pm
It really does seem like an alternate reality.

The FBI should not be conducting political surveillance on opposition candidates in national elections. If you want to talk about the real Putinization of America, that would be it.

Further, the fact that the FBI was conducting political surveillance based on unvetted opposition research which was so badly concocted even the media wouldn't run it for libel fears, combined with a drunk quip, that is really pathetic.

On the other hand, Machiavelli noted something to the effect that the ends sometimes justify the means, and its not clear that democracy dies in darkness, it dies in the kind of anti-constitutional partisanship we are witnessing today, with the media in the Amen corner.

b. , says: February 6, 2018 at 4:29 pm
"If the FBI obtained permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Trump aide Carter Page based on information from the Christopher Steele dossier, that in itself is a monumental scandal." If the FBI knew that the allegations of Steele's now-famous dossier remained unverified and used them anyway, that would constitute an abuse of power and an effort to manipulate the FISA court [..] what the Wall Street Journal calls "disturbing facts about how the FBI and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court appear to have been used to influence the 2016 election and its aftermath."

Dodgy "intel" stovepiped through "dodgy intelligence?
FBI discredited for unconstitutional searches?
FISA secret court revealed as abuse of government power?

This whole affair must be a cunning liberal plot to turn Republicans against themselves

I will never understand what satisfaction any citizen could draw from the joys of being a "partisan" of either collection of half-wits that make for our schizoid duopoly of political "parties". Those "parties", thrown – always – at our expense, are a lot more educational and even entertaining if you have no dog in this fight, given the inbreeding on the two lousy, rapid dogs involved.

Tempest in a sh*thole.

The media fails , says: February 6, 2018 at 5:16 pm
This whole thing stinks to high heaven. The left is deliberately trying to steer discussion away from the elephant in the room -- the FBI under Obama was no longer neutral but was being used as a political tool to undermine the opposition. This is a serious threat to our democratic process and cannot be taken lightly. Jeff Sessions needs to appoint a special counsel to investigate the Nunes Memo allegations. Rod Rosenstein, Robert Mueller and Christopher Wray all need to be suspended while the investigation is ongoing.

The NYT and the [neo]liberal media in general have lost all their journalistic integrity in the way they've been covering up for all of Democrats' corruption and abuse of power the last two decades. The way they fawned over Obama was downright sickening. Watergate was billed as the greatest scandal ever because it was done by a Republican president. What Obama did not just with the 2016 election meddling but with covering for Clinton's Uranium One pay to play scheme was far, far worse.

The people aren't as stupid as the liberal elites think we are. That's why the fake news media is losing their stranglehold on news as people turn to alternative news sources thanks to the internet. The Times can print whatever they want, they are only further discrediting themselves as a legitimate news source with each passing day. The delirious, foam at the mouth reader comments that they deemed fit to print just show how hysterical and out of touch the left have become.

[Feb 05, 2018] Schiff's Latest Bizarre Claim: Russian Ads Promote 2nd Amendment 'So We All Kill Each Other'

www.trendli.net

The Second Amendment (Amendment II) to the United States Constitution protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms... and, as The Duran's Alex Christoforou writes, according to California Congressman Adam Schiff, those pesky Russians are using bots to promote the second amendment with an ultimate goal of having Americans"'kill each other."

Once again, another brilliant plan hatched by Putin... good thing Schiff caught on to it and can now begin seizing American's guns so as to thwart Russia's evil plan.

On Thursday Democrat Schiff spoke to a crowd at the University of Pennsylvania, where the TDS – "Russia hysteria virus" infected Schiff told the crowd Russian ads promoted the Second Amendment during the 2016 election "so we will kill each other."

NTK Network reports...

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said Thursday that Russia promoted content that supported the Second Amendment on social media during the 2016 election because they wanted Americans to kill one another.

[Feb 04, 2018] There are heroes out there, Dobson of F F, Binney, Drake, Snowden and others. But the ration of truth tellers to neoliberal feral dogs in MSM is abysmally small. And that s why the majority of the US population is thoroughly brainwashed and kept in the dark

"Robust regime of oversight" is a joke. Powerful intelligence agencies which are immanent feature of the national security state tend to acquire control off MSM and never relinquish it.
Notable quotes:
"... There are heroes out there, Dobson of F&F, Binney, Drake, Snowden and others. But the majority of the ppl are kept in the dark via the enemedia. Those who make waves are sent to job Siberia ..."
"... So guilty or not, Carter Page is in the clear. And if the FBI's knowledge of Mike Flynns payment for "lobbying" for Turkey were discovered while the FBI was monitoring Page and his known associates, then the charges against Flynn will be dropped and he will be free and clear as well. ..."
Feb 04, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

It wasn't the bombshell everyone hoped for. But the release of the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) memo did corroborate what we already knew: the government is corrupt.

In fact, the contents of the memo should be disturbing to everyone. But Bill Binney, Thomas Drake, and Edward Snowden revealed much worse. Americans are desensitized to immense abuses of their rights.

The FISA Memo Overview: The Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton Campaign paid Christopher Steele $160,000 to dig up information on Trump team members including Carter Page. Steele also provided this information to the FBI.

The FBI and DOJ asked the FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) for permission to surveil Page, using the Steele Dossier as evidence. They did not disclose that Steele was paid by political opponents of their target to compile the information presented to the court. Based on probable cause from the information amassed by a democrat operative, the court granted their surveillance request.

So the Republicans are upset a government agency targeted a GOP ally based on information provided by political opponents. That seems like a valid complaint.

[Flashback: Trump Administration settles IRS Tea Party targetting lawsuits for peanuts.]

... ... ...

We should note that the FISA memo specifically states that "DOJ and FBI sought and received a probable cause order (not under title VII) authorizing electronic surveillance on Carter Page from FISC."

That just means that are other parts of FISA that also use secretive proceedings to ignore due process.

So the GOP likes some mass surveillance that violates rights, just not when it targets one of their own.

They seem to think if we just had the right people in power then the government could work for good!


VWAndy Feb 3, 2018 6:22 PM Permalink

Basic logic says you could not have this level of corruption if they have this much access to everyones data. Unless it was all being used by the corrupt only.

nmewn -> VWAndy Feb 3, 2018 7:15 PM Permalink

Its a fair point. It took years to find out "most of the truth" about Fast & Furious and the weaponizing the IRS (again) against political opponents, surely if there were any "boy scouts believing in truth, justice and the American way", they would have came forward. But they didn't.

Gardentoolnumber5 -> nmewn Feb 3, 2018 7:30 PM Permalink

There are heroes out there, Dobson of F&F, Binney, Drake, Snowden and others. But the majority of the ppl are kept in the dark via the enemedia. Those who make waves are sent to job Siberia or have their homes raided as an example to future whistle blowers. Just like the populace, too many followers willing to accept their 30 pieces of silver for quiet instead of standing for principle.

nmewn -> Gardentoolnumber5 Feb 3, 2018 8:56 PM Permalink

Agreed. But are there enough is the question. People being what they are, they come with all sorts of personalities and belief systems. There are those who blindly follow orders without any moral or ethical compass, just doing what they are paid for. Then, there are those with that compass who follow orders anyways knowing its wrong in the hope someone else will straighten it out.

Then you have the Snowdens, Binneys etc of the world who are willing to face ostracization, the character assassination (or real assassination), loss of family, liberty and possessions for what is a right for all of us.

I would hazard a guess that its less than 10% but on the optimistic side...I think that number is growing ;-)

VWAndy -> nmewn Feb 3, 2018 9:33 PM Permalink

Id like to see where they stand if there is no chance of a payday for them. A put up or shut up moment is needed. The boy scouts to feral ratio looks pretty bad.

Richard Chesler -> VWAndy Feb 4, 2018 10:25 AM Permalink

So the US gov is nothing more than the covert ops unit of the DNC.

VWAndy -> Richard Chesler Feb 4, 2018 10:36 AM Permalink

Bankers run the joint. Both parties do their bidding.

Anonymous_Bene -> VWAndy Feb 4, 2018 12:12 PM Permalink

Funny. You would think it would be more obvious to everyone that Trump is repaying a debt.

Gerrilea -> nmewn Feb 3, 2018 10:54 PM Permalink

Ummm...wait...didn't we have Manning, Snowden and Drake? They came forward and told us the truth. All of them were branded traitors and 2 out of the 3 were prosecuted for telling us.

Gardentoolnumber5 Feb 3, 2018 7:20 PM Permalink

Black Pigeon Speaks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM_guk9LC8g

grunk Feb 3, 2018 7:48 PM Permalink

The intelligence agencies are going to pull down this country just to save themselves. Those in leadership positions are psychotics.

Reaper Feb 3, 2018 8:48 PM Permalink

Now, more future jurors will know the government hacks (FBI, prosecutors forensic examiners) cannot be trusted. The FBI forms 302 were a tool for absolute corruption. https://boingboing.net/2013/05/07/dont-ever-speak-to-the-fbi-w.html

Mustafa Kemal Feb 3, 2018 10:17 PM Permalink

Excellent article. One of the take aways is: if you think that this is going to manifest itself in any improvement in these practices, you are sorely mistaken. Did Trump undo Obama's 11th hour executive order distributing the NSA US-surveillance information to all other intelligence agencies? Not.

AurorusBorealus Feb 3, 2018 11:28 PM Permalink

Secret police, secret courts, secret investigations, using secret police against political opponents, news media performing as instruments of propaganda, widespread surveillance of all public communications, and conspiring with foreign agents to overthrow a government. The U.S. has arrived at the Finland Station. To any clear thinking person in the U.S. government, these secret police agencies, their endless abuses of the ability to "classify" information, their secret courts, and their secret investigations must come to an end and be constrained by the rule of law and subject to some form of public of scrutiny. Therefore, why have Trump and his junta and the Republicans in congress not begun legislation to end the totalitarian regime that Washington has become?

There can be only one reason. They have not ended these totalitarian measures because they seek to use them. Against who? Against all the "enemies of the state." Who is an "enemies of the state?" Whoever the military decides is an enemy of the state. That could be you. Get out of that country, right now.

hootowl -> AurorusBorealus Feb 4, 2018 9:56 AM Permalink

Get out of the U.S.........and go where??? The U.S. is the last, best, hope of mankind in this fallen world. When we fall, darkness will descend upon all of mankind.

Our constitution was designed to govern a moral and religious people. The U. S. was founded by geniuses. We are now being governed and led by self-serving idiots.

......And we are no longer a moral and religious people.

Trifecta Man Feb 3, 2018 11:47 PM Permalink

Too many crooks in high positions. FISA is not Constitutional. Many years ago, pro wrestling champ Verne Gagne started out a match with Mad Dog Vashon by viciously attacking him. He broke the rules. But Mad Dog Vashon readily broke the rules repeatedly in all his matches. Sometimes the good guys break the rules to get rid of the bad guys who pay no attention to them. Same here.

bshirley1968 -> Trifecta Man Feb 4, 2018 9:35 AM Permalink

It is NEVER right to do wrong...to do right! The ends NEVER justify the means. Once you go down that slippery slope as a man, society, government, etc., you are DONE. It is only a matter of time, Mr. Lincoln.

libertyanyday Feb 4, 2018 12:42 AM Permalink

trying to blame the GOP for the indiscriminate abuses of the Democrats is reprehensible. Appointing a chief of police does NOT authorize the rampant lawlessness he may produce......... when the inofrmants lie to the cops, bad results occur....

7thGenMO -> libertyanyday Feb 4, 2018 8:10 AM Permalink

+1, but having been involved with Repugnican politics, the memo shouldn't be used to reinforce the illusion that Repugnicans are in true opposition to the DemonRats. In reality, we have a Uniparty system. The memo does expose .gov's total lack of credibility because its own law enforcement agencies are corrupt.

NuYawkFrankie Feb 4, 2018 2:34 AM Permalink

In its deeper context, what the FISA Memo CONFIRMED is that.. the America you thought existed, if it ever did, is now just a fantasy, a fond 'Norman Rockwell' memory... superceded by ZOG USSA, a Rogue Entity - beholden to a 5th Column Cabal of Mega Criminals controlling over 5000 nuclear weapons - masquerading as a "Legitimate Government". JFK had his brains blown out for even suggesting such an eventuality - that has now transpired - in his last public speech.

Son of Loki Feb 4, 2018 6:57 AM Permalink

Fewer then 40% of Americans now trust the fbi. Unless Wray or Congress does something, their cred will drop further and crime will increase since 90% of obeying the law is psychological respect for the law enforcement agencies. If they don't get that back, people will just spit in their faces when they come to the door.

bshirley1968 -> Son of Loki Feb 4, 2018 9:48 AM Permalink

What planet are you on? "Spit in their faces"? Lol, that's funny right there. All over the western world, governments are breaking laws, stomping on rights, invading their own countries with 3rd world, radical foreigners, taking out debt so they can live off the backs of several generations that haven't even been born yet.......and what are the people doing about it? Not one damn meaningful thing. All they know to do is trust in another goobermint agency to fix another goobermint agency.

What do you think happens when you find out your cook and butler have slowly been poisoning you for weeks? You think they say, "Oh, gee, we're sorry and won't ever do it again."? No, the jig is up, and they pull out a revolver and shoot you in the head, or wrestle you down and smother your weak ass. Either way, "finding out the truth" only hastens your demise, unless you or a brother who just happened to show up can kill them before they kill you.

All we have done here is acquire the truth we are being killed by those who are supposed to serve us. You wait until they come to your door, and you are dead already. "Spitting" or any action on that level is a joke.

JailBanksters Feb 4, 2018 7:36 AM Permalink

It's not the Agencies that are corrupt, it's is the people in these Agencies that are Corrupt.

And it's these People the Public can not vote for or get rid of them. Even the President can't Fire anybody in these Agencies. Just removing one or two bad Apples is not going to save the Bunch, and that's the real problem. Does the USA really need all these, NOT so secret Spy Agencies ? But in true US Fashion, they will probably add another Spy Agency to Spy on the other US Agencies.

7thGenMO -> JailBanksters Feb 4, 2018 8:12 AM Permalink

"Who watches the watchmen?" - Satires of the Roman Poet Juvenal

nekten Feb 4, 2018 7:45 AM Permalink

"They are just fighting for the upper hand over their political opponents. This is not freedom versus tyranny. It is a war of factions ."

Exactly right. It was hypocritical to withhold the FISA memo until after the vote on extending and expanding 702. It's not just the FBI and DOJ who are corrupt. That said, Nunes provided a weapon to begin ferreting out these weasels. It needs to be used with maximum effectiveness. Long live the Republic!

SirBarksAlot Feb 4, 2018 8:33 AM Permalink

Agreed.

However, they need to keep it the way it is until they rout out the components of the government that are controlled by the elite international power-brokers.

Just like J. Edgar Hoover had everyone in Congress blackmailed, the elite have evidence of everyone in the government they need to control in compromised status. The elite lost control of the USA Corporation in 2016, when Puerto Rico filed bankruptcy. Now there is a fight by the heads of that corporation to try to wrestle back control of our nation. Let them use whatever tools they need to use until the wicked witch is dead!

Joshua2415 Feb 4, 2018 8:58 AM Permalink

A tid-bit that should not be lost on us when we consider the origins of the Clinton-Steele dossier is that Steele admitted to PAYING his russian "informants" for the information that he included in his report. So not only is the information he used "salacious and unverified", it is also inadmissible as evidence in US court...ANY US court. So even IF, the FBI did not know that the DNC paid for the dossier, and even IF, the FBI believed the allegations to be true, the FISA warrant they obtained is invalid and any evidence gathered as a result is inadmissible.

So guilty or not, Carter Page is in the clear. And if the FBI's knowledge of Mike Flynns payment for "lobbying" for Turkey were discovered while the FBI was monitoring Page and his known associates, then the charges against Flynn will be dropped and he will be free and clear as well.

jin187 -> Joshua2415 Feb 4, 2018 10:26 AM Permalink

I still haven't figured out why Trump hasn't blanket pardoned everyone in his administration. He can pardon a cocksucking illegal immigrant slavelord, but can't pardon Manafort and Flynn for procedural crimes? WTF...

SirBarksAlot Feb 4, 2018 9:00 AM Permalink

https://nypost.com/2017/07/05/vatican-cops-bust-drug-fueled-gay-orgy-at

Start at 1:50:

Leo Zagami interview on elite pedophile rings: https://youtu.be/S_kj2TN-3ZI

Neil Keenan on elite pedophile rings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcqTA8NY75Y

jin187 Feb 4, 2018 10:22 AM Permalink

I don't think people are desensitized to the corruption. We just know that when the smoke clears, none of the big players are going to jail, and it'll be business as usual. Trump needs an epic win against the swamp, with someone bigger than a deputy assistant whatever going to prison.

Fred box Feb 4, 2018 10:42 AM Permalink

This $tory has much more to play out. > But Bill Binney, Thomas Drake, and Edward Snowden revealed much worse . Americans are desensitized to immense abuses of their rights <The daily brain washing of the Boogy Man coming, as well as the implementing of The Patriot Act is the biggest thief of rights. But as George says: Your either with us, or your against us!

Consuelo Feb 4, 2018 11:49 AM Permalink

'What the FISA Memo Reveals about the FBI, DNC, GOP–and the sketchy timeline' That the rule of law is effectively, Dead. Here, try this on for a headline, TDB: 'What the failure to prosecute Hillary Rodham Clinton reveals about the rule of law in America'

[Feb 04, 2018] Imran Awan, the former DNC staffer who was arrested this week while trying to flee the United States, was with Seth Rich the night of his murder, according to new photographic evidence

Feb 04, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Vote up! 0 Vote down! 0 dot_bust Feb 3, 2018 12:33 PM Permalink

I'm wondering where Seth Rich fits into the whole scenario.

Did he discover the Hillary/DNC plot? Was he going to leak that information? I'm not sure if the timeline surrounding his death fits, but I'm curious about it.

Can someone here add some clarification on this hypothesis?

hooligan2009 -> dot_bust Feb 3, 2018 1:57 PM Permalink

long winded, but you could start here for some lite bg reading on the events of the summer of 2016:

July 10, 2016 : DNC staffer Seth Rich, whose title is reported as "voter expansion data director," is murdered in the street near his home in Washington, DC. The police will attribute his murder to robbery, although nothing was stolen from Rich. His murder remains unsolved.

Here, thanks to William Craddick of Disobedient Media , is the crime report, which tells us that three of the officers at the scene were wearing body cams.

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3559/A-Seth-Rich-Chronology-

one of the awan brothers (of "all congress software and hardware belong to us" fame) has been implicated also.

http://yournewswire.com/imran-awan-seth-rich/

" I mran Awan, the former DNC staffer who was arrested this week while trying to flee the United States, was with Seth Rich the night of his murder, according to new photographic evidence.

Police who originally investigated the murder suggested that Seth Rich might have been killed by someone he knew, due to the lack of struggle. The killer also took nothing from the victim, leaving behind his wallet containing $2000, watch and phone.

The photo, which directly links Imran Awan to Seth Rich, also links Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Awan's former employer, to the former Seth Rich's death.

there's bunches more available via your favorite search engine, but that might pique your curiosity.

[Feb 03, 2018] Can The Impending Collapse Of Russiagate Halt The Slide Toward A Nuclear 1914 Zero Hedge

Feb 03, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by James George Jatras via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

In the period preceding the World War I how many Europeans suspected that their lives would soon be forever changed – and, for millions of them, ended?

Who in the years, say, 1910 to 1913, could have imagined that the decades of peace, progress, and civilization in which they had grown up, and which seemingly would continue indefinitely, instead would soon descend into a horror of industrial-scale slaughter, revolution, and brutal ideologies?

The answer is, probably very few, just as few people today care much about the details of international and security affairs. Normal folk have better things to do with their lives.

To be sure, in that bygone era of smug jingosim , there was always the entertainment aspect that "our" side had forced "theirs" to back down in some exotic locale, as in the Fashoda incident (1898) or the Moroccan crises (1906, 1911). Even the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 seemed less a harbinger of the cataclysm to come than local dustups on the edge of the continent where the general peace had not been disturbed even by the much more disruptive Crimean or Franco-Prussian wars.

Besides, no doubt level-headed statesmen were in charge in the various capitals, ensuring that things wouldn't get out of hand.

Until they did.

A notable exception to the prevailing mood of business-as-usual, nothing-to-see-here-folks was Pyotr Durnovo, whose remarkable February 1914 memorandum to Tsar Nicholas II laid out not only what the great powers would do in the approaching general war but the behavior of the minor countries as well. Moreover, he anticipated that in the event of defeat, Russia, destabilized by unchecked socialist "agitation" amid wartime hardships, would "be flung into hopeless anarchy, the issue of which cannot be foreseen." Germany, likewise, was "destined to suffer, in case of defeat, no lesser social upheavals" and "take a purely revolutionary path" of a nationalist hue.

When the great powers blundered into war in August 1914, each confident of its ability speedily to dispatch its rivals, the price (adding in the toll from the 1939-1945 rematch) was upwards of 70 million lives. But the cost of a comparable mistake today might be literally incalculable – if there's anyone left to do the tally.

During the first Cold War between the US and the USSR, there was a general sense that a World War III was, in a word, unthinkable. As summed up by Ronald Reagan: " A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought ." Then, it was understood that all-out war, however it started, meant massed ICBMs over the North Pole and the " end of civilization as we know it ."

Not anymore. What was unthinkable in the old Cold War has become all-too-thinkable in the new one between the US and Russia . As described by veteran arms control inspector Scott Ritter , in analyzing a draft of the 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR ), the US threshold for the use of nuclear weapons has become dangerously low:

'The 2018 NPR has a vision of nuclear conflict that goes far beyond the traditional imagery of mass missile launches. While ICBMs and manned bombers will be maintained on a day-to-day alert, the tip of the nuclear spear is now what the NPR calls "supplemental" nuclear forces – dual-use aircraft such as the F-35 fighter armed with B-61 gravity bombs capable of delivering a low-yield nuclear payload, a new generation of nuclear-tipped submarine-launched cruise missiles, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles tipped with a new generation of low-yield nuclear warheads. The danger inherent with the integration of these kinds of tactical nuclear weapons into an overall strategy of deterrence is that it fundamentally lowers the threshold for their use. [ ]

'Noting that the United States has never adopted a "no first use" policy, the 2018 NPR states that "it remains the policy of the United States to retain some ambiguity regarding the precise circumstances that might lead to a US nuclear response." In this regard, the NPR states that America could employ nuclear weapons under "extreme circumstances that could include significant non-nuclear strategic attacks." The issue of "non-nuclear strategic attack technologies" as a potential precursor for nuclear war is a new factor that previously did not exist in American policy. The United States has long held that chemical and biological weapons represent a strategic threat for which America's nuclear deterrence capability serves as a viable counter. But the threat from cyber attacks is different. If for no other reason than the potential for miscalculation and error in terms of attribution and intent, the nexus of cyber and nuclear weapons should be disconcerting for everyone. [ ]

'Even more disturbing is the notion that a cyber intrusion such as the one perpetrated against the Democratic National Committee and attributed to Russia could serve as a trigger for nuclear war. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. The DNC event has been characterized by influential American politicians, such as the Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, as " an act of war ." Moreover, former vice president Joe Biden hinted that, in the aftermath of the DNC breach, the United States was launching a retaliatory cyberattack of its own, targeting Russia. The possibility of a tit-for-tat exchange of cyberattacks that escalates into a nuclear conflict would previously have been dismissed out of hand; today, thanks to the 2018 NPR, it has entered the realm of the possible.'

The idea that a first-strike Schlieffen Plan could knock out the Russians (and no doubt similar contingencies are in place for China) at the outset of hostilities reflects a dangerous illusion of predictability. Truth may be the first casualty of war, but "the plan" is inevitably the second. That's because war planners generally don't consult the enemy, who – annoyingly for the planners – also gets a vote.

Recently US Secretary of State James Mattis declared that "great power competition – not terrorism – is now the primary focus of US national security," specifying Russia and China as nations seeking to "create a world consistent with their authoritarian models, pursuing veto authority over other nations' economic, diplomatic and security decisions." At least we can drop the pretense that US policy has been to fight jihad terrorism, not to use it as a policy tool in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere. And of course Washington never, ever meddles in "other nations' economic, diplomatic and security decisions" . . .

There is much anticipation that release of a House Intelligence Committee memo "naming names" of those in the FBI and elsewhere inside and outside of government to thwart the election of Donald Trump and cripple his administration with a phony Russian "collusion" probe will be a silver bullet that upturns the Mueller probe and cleans the Augean stables of the Deep State. Even in that unlikely case, the damage is already done. The primary purpose of Russiagate was always to ensure Trump could not reach out to Moscow , as seems to be his sincere desire. Even as the narrative began to boomerang against those who launched it , Trump's defenders (such as fanatical Russophobe Nikki Haley ) are as adamant as his detractors that Russia is and will remain the main enemy: Russia was behind the Steele Dossier, Russia tried to " corner the market" on "the foundational material for nuclear weapons " with the Uranium One deal, etc. Hostility toward Russia is not a means to an end – it is the end .

At this point Trump is fastened to the neocons' and generals' axle, and all he can do is spin. Echoing Mattis, in his State of the Union speech Trump lumped "rivals like China and Russia" together with "rogue regimes" and "terrorist groups" as "horrible dangers" to the United States. (Note: The word "horrible" does not appear in the posted text . That evidently was Trump's adlib.) The recently issued "name and shame" list of prominent Russians is a veritable Who's Who of government and business, ensuring that there's no American engagement with anyone within screaming distance of the Kremlin .

To be fair, the Russians and Chinese are making their own war preparations. Russia's "Kanyon," a doomsday nuclear torpedo carrying a massive warhead, is designed to obliterate the U.S east and west coasts , rendering them inhabitable for generations. (Wait a minute. Is it any coincidence, Comrade, that the coastal cities are just where the Democrats' electoral strength is? Talk about "collusion!" Somebody call Bob Mueller!) For its part, China is developing means to eliminate our white elephant carrier groups – handy for pummeling Third World backwaters but useless in a war with a major power – with drone swarms and hypersonic missiles .

Just as in 1914, when Durnovo referred to "presence of abundant combustible material in Europe," there is any number of global flashpoints that could turn Mattis's "great power competition" into a major conflagration that probably was not desired by anyone. However, if the worst happens, and the lamps go out again – maybe this time forever – Americans will not again be immune from the consequences as we were in the wars of the 20th century. The remainder of our lives, however brief, might turn out very differently from what we had anticipated

[Feb 03, 2018] This Putin paranoia is insane and ridiculous. Our homegrown problems regarding every aspect of government far exceed, by orders of magnitudes, Putin tinkering.

Notable quotes:
"... This Putin paranoia is insane and ridiculous. Our homegrown problems regarding every aspect of government far exceed, by orders of magnitudes, Putin tinkering. All of you making hysterical claims about Putin and impugning Americans as Russian stooges are diverting attention from our real homegrown problems. ..."
"... The root of the situation is FISA, as amended after September 11. ..."
"... History tells us that if a government gets a law enforcement tool, somebody in the government will try to abuse it in ways the legislators who provided the tool did not think of. History also teaches us to keep a sharp eye on the law enforcement organizations – trust but verify! ..."
"... Law enforcement is made of normal people, who bring with them all the qualities and defects of human nature. Abusing power is one of the defects, and since September 11, we gave law enforcement much power ..."
"... We need to find out if any of the candidates broke the law. We need to find out if the FBI and the DOJ abused their power. This is not about political preferences, this is about keeping the country a democracy. For those who might have forgotten it, I will remind what Martin Niemöller said: "First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out -- Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to speak for me." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_ ..."
"... The land of the surreal; I see the usual in denial left-wing commenters hanging around Buchanan columns are now defending a corrupt, politicized FBI. ..."
"... After Mr. Trump secured the nomination, Fusion GPS was hired on behalf of Mrs. Clinton's campaign and the D.N.C. by their law firm, Perkins Coie, to compile research about Mr. Trump, his businesses and associates -- including possible connections with Russia. It was at that point that Fusion GPS hired Mr. Steele, who has deep sourcing in Russia, to gather information. ..."
"... Is is surprising that all the hoopla for both Republicans, Democrats, the media is about "Trump did it", "Clinton did it, "Putin did it". Only one reader – #Max Charles – made the very intelligent observation that the real beneficiaries of the situation are the Chinese. ..."
"... Democrats and liberals had nothing but disdain for the FBI and other spook organizations until they were 'militarized' by King 'Bama and became the Democrat secret police. Now they love the FBI. This scandal must be dragged into the light of day and cleaned up, folks fired and/or charged and put in prison. OR it will be settled in the streets. When half of the country is 'down with a one party state and secret police,' we're on the same glide path that Venezuela was on. ..."
Feb 03, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Jack February 2, 2018 at 12:27 pm

This Putin paranoia is insane and ridiculous. Our homegrown problems regarding every aspect of government far exceed, by orders of magnitudes, Putin tinkering. All of you making hysterical claims about Putin and impugning Americans as Russian stooges are diverting attention from our real homegrown problems. Look in the mirror everyone. It is in the reflection that you will find what really ails us.
peter , says: February 2, 2018 at 12:45 pm
The root of the situation is FISA, as amended after September 11.

History tells us that if a government gets a law enforcement tool, somebody in the government will try to abuse it in ways the legislators who provided the tool did not think of. History also teaches us to keep a sharp eye on the law enforcement organizations – trust but verify!

Law enforcement is made of normal people, who bring with them all the qualities and defects of human nature. Abusing power is one of the defects, and since September 11, we gave law enforcement much power

We need to find out if any of the candidates broke the law. We need to find out if the FBI and the DOJ abused their power. This is not about political preferences, this is about keeping the country a democracy. For those who might have forgotten it, I will remind what Martin Niemöller said: "First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out -- Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to speak for me."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_

Andrew , says: February 2, 2018 at 12:51 pm
The land of the surreal; I see the usual in denial left-wing commenters hanging around Buchanan columns are now defending a corrupt, politicized FBI.
russ , says: February 2, 2018 at 1:29 pm
@Craig: And, BTW, the Steele dossier was originally paid for/hired by the REPUBLICANS running against Trump!

From the NY Times, you'll learn you're wrong :

After Mr. Trump secured the nomination, Fusion GPS was hired on behalf of Mrs. Clinton's campaign and the D.N.C. by their law firm, Perkins Coie, to compile research about Mr. Trump, his businesses and associates -- including possible connections with Russia. It was at that point that Fusion GPS hired Mr. Steele, who has deep sourcing in Russia, to gather information.

collin , says: February 2, 2018 at 1:51 pm
Update:

Memo released and 90% of the country yawns!

peter , says: February 2, 2018 at 2:02 pm
Is is surprising that all the hoopla for both Republicans, Democrats, the media is about "Trump did it", "Clinton did it, "Putin did it". Only one reader – #Max Charles – made the very intelligent observation that the real beneficiaries of the situation are the Chinese.

Since the departure of the Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao, China has followed a highly focused and highly effective path towards becoming #1 in the world.
There is a combination of economic policy, internal policy and foreign policy which brought this country to move quietly into such a position. Could they be behind the circus?

It is very possible, since the Chinese are now using what Fukuyama presented as "the good emperor" model. An intelligent, non-democratic system can be so efficient!

Dan Green , says: February 2, 2018 at 2:25 pm
How does this play into the impeachment strategy ? That is all that counts.
Paul Clayton , says: February 2, 2018 at 2:30 pm
Democrats and liberals had nothing but disdain for the FBI and other spook organizations until they were 'militarized' by King 'Bama and became the Democrat secret police. Now they love the FBI. This scandal must be dragged into the light of day and cleaned up, folks fired and/or charged and put in prison. OR it will be settled in the streets. When half of the country is 'down with a one party state and secret police,' we're on the same glide path that Venezuela was on.
Mike , says: February 2, 2018 at 2:34 pm
Pat,

The so called facts should not be released unless all of the facts are released – not simply an interpretation of the facts, least of all Nunes' (or maybe the Whitehouse's?)

You are being disingenuous in simply stating that all memos should be released when you know that the Schiff memo will never be placed in the public sphere.
There is also an impact on the public which is being overlooked. No person in their right mind will ever come forward with information for the FBI ever again. Everyone now knows that if some political opportunist wants to "out you" and embarrass you, you do not stand a chance. This release made no pretense that it was a political hit, not some kind of sunlight on a nefarious practice.

That is not to say that a political hit piece is not legitimate or has its proper place – because it does. Its just that this memo masquerades as something that it is not, and as a man of intellectual integrity, you should say so.

KD , says: February 2, 2018 at 3:23 pm
Pat:

Can you remind us of what the lib's said about Nixon's operation engaging in political surveillance of his opponent?

Also, what was the date that Putin and the Trump campaign met and agreed to hack the DNC servers? They were hacked from the outside, right? We have proof?

Does this mean it is now fair game if the Trump campaign hires some hack to meet with foreign operatives who make up nasty stories about his Democratic opponent, Trump's DOJ can go to the FISA court and get permission to spy on his opponents during the campaign, and then get a Special Prosecutor to "investigate" fabricated allegations and try to snare the new leadership in process crimes? Or is this a special right that only Democrats get to exercise because they wear white hats?

[Feb 03, 2018] Memo: Democrats Made Up Evidence Enabled Eavesdropping On Trump Campaign

It was not only that Steele memo enabled eavesdropping. More troubling fact that FBI considered both Trump and Sanders as insurgents and was adamant to squash them and ensure Hillary victory. In other word it tried to play the role of kingmaker.
Notable quotes:
"... The former British spy Steele had been hired by the Democratic Party via Fusion GPS to dig up dirt about Donald Trump. He came back with a package of "reports" which alleged that Trump was "colluding" with Russia or even a puppet of Putin. The content of the reports is hilarious and so obviously made up that one wonders how anyone could have treated it seriously. ..."
"... Getting a FISA warrant on Carter Page meant that all his communication with the Trump campaign was effectively under surveillance of the Obama administration. While Page was no longer an official member of the campaign at the time of the warrant it is likely that he had kept contact. All internal communication that Page had access to was thereby also accessible for at least some people who tried to prevent a Trump election victory. ..."
"... One may (like me) dislike Trump and the Republican party and all they stand for. But this looks like an extremely dirty play by the Democrats and by the Obama administration far outside of any decency and fairness. The Steele dossier is obviously made up partisan nonsense. To the use it for such a FISA warrant was against the most basic rules of a democratic system. It probably broke several laws. ..."
Feb 03, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Over the last month political enemies of U.S. President Trump and the FBI and Justice Department have desperately tried to prevent the publishing of a memo written by the Republican controlled House Intelligence Committee.

The memo (pdf) describes parts of the process that let to court sanctioned spying on the Trump campaign. The key points of the memo that was just published:

* The Steele dossier formed an essential part of the initial and all three renewal FISA applications against Carter Page.

* Andrew McCabe confirmed that no FISA warrant would have been sought from the FISA Court without the Steele dossier information.

* The political origins of the Steele dossier were known to senior DOJ and FBI officials, but excluded from the FISA applications.

* DOJ official Bruce Ohr met with Steele beginning in the summer of 2016 and relayed to DOJ information about Steele's bias. Steele told Ohr that he, Steele, was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected president and was passionate about him not becoming president.

If the above memo proves to be correct one can conclude that a Democratic front organization created "evidence" that was then used by the FBI and the Obama Justice Department to get FISA warrants to spy on someone with intimate contacts into the Trump campaign.

The Democrats as well as the FBI have done their utmost to keep this secret.

Carter Page was a relative low ranking volunteer advisor of the Trump campaign with some business contacts to Russia. He had officially left the campaign shortly before the above FISA warrant was requested.

Andrew McCabe was an FBI assistant director. A few month earlier his wife ran for a Virginia State Senate seat with the help of $700,000 she had received from Clinton allies.

The wife of DOJ official Bruce Ohr worked for Fusion GPS, the outlet hired by the Democrats to find Trump dirt. Fusion GPS hired the former British agent Steele.

The former British spy Steele had been hired by the Democratic Party via Fusion GPS to dig up dirt about Donald Trump. He came back with a package of "reports" which alleged that Trump was "colluding" with Russia or even a puppet of Putin. The content of the reports is hilarious and so obviously made up that one wonders how anyone could have treated it seriously.

Getting a FISA warrant on Carter Page meant that all his communication with the Trump campaign was effectively under surveillance of the Obama administration. While Page was no longer an official member of the campaign at the time of the warrant it is likely that he had kept contact. All internal communication that Page had access to was thereby also accessible for at least some people who tried to prevent a Trump election victory.

One must wonder if the FISA warrant and eavesdropping on Page was the only one related to the Trump campaign.

One may (like me) dislike Trump and the Republican party and all they stand for. But this looks like an extremely dirty play by the Democrats and by the Obama administration far outside of any decency and fairness. The Steele dossier is obviously made up partisan nonsense. To the use it for such a FISA warrant was against the most basic rules of a democratic system. It probably broke several laws.

There are still many questions: What was, exactly, the result of the surveillance of Carter Page and the Trump campaign? Who was getting these results - officially and unofficially? How were they used?

I am pretty sure now that more heads of those involved will role. Some of the people who arranged the scheme, and some of those who tried to cover it up, may go to jail.

If Trump and the Republicans play this right they have practically won the next elections.

[Jan 31, 2018] The neoliberal MSM spin on Nunes memo is astounding

" I do think Russia-gate is an over-hyped political campaign. The threat from Russia to our electoral process is like a cult, in which belief is paramount to rational thinking. Evidence. Let's see the evidence for all these things."
" The weight of evidence is on the side of the debunkers of Russiagate. This "debate" is far from a wash, or a draw. The propaganda and spin are from the Russia blamers, not their refuters."
Notable quotes:
"... Talking about the spin the New York Times is putting on the memo contents (The Nunes Conspiracy), please take a look at last night's PBS News Hour. Instead of what Judy Woodruff and Lisa Desjardins should have reported, they spun Andrew McCabe's "stepping aside" as yet another loss of an important high ranking FBI official causing still more vacancies in the many still unfilled offices due to Trump's failure to appoint people, etc. It was unbelievable! ..."
"... It's painful to say, but the PBS Newshour is a pathetically blatant propaganda outlet. I suspect Judy Woodruff, Mark Shields, etc have nights of troubled sleep. ..."
Jan 31, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Virginia , January 30, 2018 at 12:14 pm

Talking about the spin the New York Times is putting on the memo contents (The Nunes Conspiracy), please take a look at last night's PBS News Hour. Instead of what Judy Woodruff and Lisa Desjardins should have reported, they spun Andrew McCabe's "stepping aside" as yet another loss of an important high ranking FBI official causing still more vacancies in the many still unfilled offices due to Trump's failure to appoint people, etc. It was unbelievable!

Then Judy interviewed Mark Warner, and his spin was even more astounding -- that most Democrats hadn't read it, implying it was unavailable; also implying that this "memo creation" hadn't gone through proper channels. Nothing on the up and up with Warner! But, I don't think they are going to be able to get by with it. Will the American people agree to be duped by propaganda when the facts are on the table? I'm not seeing that friends of mine are coming around, but do they really believe in Santa Claus? Is there integrity in the land, or will truth continue to be trampled in the streets and sold in the shambles? The house of cards is about to crumble, or will it?

JWalters , January 31, 2018 at 12:54 am

It's painful to say, but the PBS Newshour is a pathetically blatant propaganda outlet. I suspect Judy Woodruff, Mark Shields, etc have nights of troubled sleep.

Regarding Congressman Nunes,

"The current chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, R- California, is one of the few politicians who knows and cares about the attack on the Liberty."

from "Still Waiting for USS Liberty's Truth" by Ray McGovern https://consortiumnews.com/2015/07/04/still-waiting-for-uss-libertys-truth/

[Jan 30, 2018] The narrative on the Ghouta alleged "chemical attacks" is coming from the Al Qaeda affiliated, UK FCO/US multi-million-financed White Helmets and has not basis in fact

Notable quotes:
"... It has got to the point where I cannot read/listen/view to ANY news stories in the mainstream media without doubting their accuracy. And that, I began to think, was a tragedy. But no, it's actually liberating: be a skeptic. Ask why. Ask who benefits from the story. And what their sources are – If unnamed, simply disregard. And remember that the MSM is beholden to very powerful media groups with their own agendas along with deep and opaque ties to various governments/agencies. ..."
"... In the USSR, before the collapse of communism, party members used to lament that Russians didn't believe any of their media output but were also amazed and full of awe that people in the West tended to believe their own media ..."
"... Another nail in the coffin of the legacy news media. The more the years go bye the more the alternative media becomes mainstream. ..."
Jan 30, 2018 | off-guardian.org

vanessa beeley: January 24, 2018

I have just returned from Syria. The narrative on the Ghouta alleged "chemical attacks" is coming from the Al Qaeda affiliated, UK FCO/US multi-million-financed White Helmets and has not basis in fact.

Meanwhile the terrorist groups supported by the White Helmets and the UK/US coalition of terror, have launched a series of murderous mortar attacks on the civilian areas of Damascus, Old City (Christian areas). I was leaving Damascus on Monday this week, when they targeted hundreds of school children pouring out of the schools for the school buses parked in the streets of the Old City and just outside its walls. 9 people were killed including one 3 year old child, Elias Khoury. Christine Hourani is a beautiful Syrian teenager, her leg has been amputated below the knee as a result of this indiscriminate and deliberate attack on children by the same "moderate" extremists who are feeding the corporate media with the Fake News that the Guardian relies upon to maintain its anti Syria and New Cold War narrative.

The Guardian is one of the chief fire-stokers for the UK FCO and acts as its main attack dog when the UK FCO is under threat of exposure for its funding of terrorism in Syria with taxpayer funds – hence the ridiculous Solon article trying to discredit myself and Eva Bartlett, among others – while never addressing the facts and hard evidence against the UK FCO and the various entities it is financing, such as the White Helmets, the Local Councils in Syria & the Free Syrian Police (to name only a few). The latest CW attack story is to distract from the crimes against humanity being comitted by the terrorist factions in the eastern suburbs of Damascus and to further foment the escalation of military conflict between Russian and the US on Syrian soil. The role of the Guardian is a criminal one – and it must not be underestimated, they will take us to war, if allowed to continue.

What the Guardian and others don't mention is. 1. the terrorist attacks on civilians and the massacre of children & civilians on a daily basis. 2. Russia delivered a humanitarian aid convoy to eastern Ghouta on 19th January, why are these aid deliveries not mentioned and who benefits from them (see East Aleppo and Madaya to know exactly who does receive and stockpile these supplies). 3. How are the terrorist receiving weapon supplies to facilitate the murder of Syrian civilians in the residential areas of the city? The Guardian is at the vanguard of the UK FCO dirty intelligence operation in Syria, you only have to create a timescale of their reports on the alleged Khan Sheikhoun attacks to see who led that narrative for the British public based upon spurious claims and unverified testimony from known terrorist operators. Of course the Guardian does not allow comment, it knows perfectly well that it has been rumbled.

Johnny Hacket: January 24, 2018
Not expecting anything from the Graun really but this SIS memo is a new low . The mystery for me is why do they bother even . Who are their target readership ?
Neil Youngson: January 24, 2018
They now rely heavily on US corporate advertising, so they must be seen to be promoting the US agenda.
Quizzical: January 24, 2018
This chemical attack has been "in preparation" for a while – several comments on blogs with sources more credible than either the White Helmets or SOHR. In particular, on Moon of Alabama – here's a quote:

http://www.moonofalabama.org/

"Asaad Hanna @AsaadHannaa 4:26pm · 22 Jan 2018
Assad army dropped chlorine bombed barrels on Abo Aldhoor military base #Idlib countryside in a big attempt to take control of it.

The above is from an anti-Syrian "Media Adviser, researcher and freelance journalist" previously published or quoted by Al Jazeerah, The Guardian, Business Insider and several other outlets. His twitter account has a "Verified" mark.

"There is only a tiny problem with the tweet about the Abu Duhur air base. Since Saturday the base is in government hands. Yesterday the Syrian Ministry of Defense officially announced the full capture of the air base."

It's wonderful to see Eva Bartlett posting here.

Marcus: January 24, 2018

"Whoever conducted the attacks, Russia ultimately bears responsibility for the victims in East Ghouta and countless other Syrians targeted with chemical weapons, since Russia became involved in Syria," Tillerson told reporters.

Tillerson told reporters, and reporters just wrote it down! I was following the Twitter exchange just now between OffG and the BBC reporter – Dan something – about the recent new round of Russia fear porn , and it's just the same ; "I just write what the general said": this alleged journalist.

Glad OffG reminded him what journalism actually is. You are supposed to check your facts!

"There is simply no denying that Russia, by shielding its Syrian ally, has breached its commitments to the US as a framework guarantor. At a bare minimum, Russia must stop vetoing, or at the very least abstain, from future security council votes on this issue," he added.

But what if the "rebels" did the attack? or – even more likely – what if the "attack" never happened like the one featured in "Saving Syria's Children"?

A good reporter could have had this fellow on the ropes, having to explain the nonsense he's talking – but no, they just obediently type it all up and publish it.

Eva Bartlett: January 24, 2018
Well, if I may, I'll comment with a link to my rebuttal of their (employing CIA-tactics and non sequitur arguments) recent smear article whitewashing of al-Qaeda's rescuers:
https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2018/01/06/how-the-mainstream-media-whitewashed-al-qaeda-and-the-white-helmets-in-syria/
(including many good links to analyses of the article)
Captain Kemlo: January 24, 2018
Hi Eva

When I first read the Solon article in the Guardian my hackles rose alarmingly. At the time of publication, there was already widespread information as to the true nature of the White Helmets, including about origin and funding.

As well as subsequently reading many articles in independent media about the Solon piece, I have belatedly read your linked article above. The emails you received from Solon inviting comment were, as you rightly imply, damning 'evidence' as to the nature of her proposed story. It simply beggars belief.

It has got to the point where I cannot read/listen/view to ANY news stories in the mainstream media without doubting their accuracy. And that, I began to think, was a tragedy. But no, it's actually liberating: be a skeptic. Ask why. Ask who benefits from the story. And what their sources are – If unnamed, simply disregard. And remember that the MSM is beholden to very powerful media groups with their own agendas along with deep and opaque ties to various governments/agencies.

In the USSR, before the collapse of communism, party members used to lament that Russians didn't believe any of their media output but were also amazed and full of awe that people in the West tended to believe their own media. Not any more. We've finally come full circle

A Petherbridge: January 24, 2018
Thanks – comments are a great initiative on some of these Guardian propaganda stories. Amazing the way US officials can in one breath condemn a nation (Syria Govt in this case) and at the same time announce they are establishing an illegal and permanent garrison in the country (Syria in this case). These US officials must have skin made of rawhide – or snake leather. Surprised our Foreign Minister Bishop hasn't been applauding this new development.
falcemartello: January 24, 2018
Another nail in the coffin of the legacy news media. The more the years go bye the more the alternative media becomes mainstream. Once the reset happens good bye to the lame street media and hello to good old fashion news where journos question more.

The Guardian like all legacy news sights are on life support.

Russia ate my homework to western economic recovery to Takfiri rebranding as freedom fighters have all be revealed as simple good old fashion propaganda how Orwellian and fascistic the times we r living

vanessa beeley: January 24, 2018
It is censorship. When the Guardian promoted the White Helmet bid for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016, it shamelessly lobbied for their success. The hundreds, if not thousands of comments reflected public outrage at their blatant PR for an organisation that has clear affiliations to Al Qaeda in Syria and which is financed by the UK FCO with taxpayer funds. To dismiss this outrage as "trolling" merely echoes the lexicon employed by the Guardian to dismiss those who are exposing the UK regime's nefarious role in Syria and its project to destabilize a sovereign nation and to bring about regime change yet again, in favour of a puppet regime more in tune with UK imperialist designs in the region.

When Solon wrote her appalling lynch-mob-hack piece attacking myself, Eva Bartlett, Tim Anderson etc she used the same terminology – and the Guardian exercised the same censorship – even, illegally, denying myself and others named in the article, the right to reply.

Rather than attack the "standard of debate", I would be asking, why has the rage against the criminal misdirecting, omission & misrepresenting of facts in Syria, reached such a fever pitch? You may consider those "trolling" remarks to be beneath you but I say, that is an insult to the public that the Guardian is asking to fund their efforts .that makes the Guardian answerable to its audience, however they may express their disgust.

[Jan 30, 2018] Anti-Trump propaganda in MSM continues unabated

Gaslighting of American public by neolibs from Hollywood...
Jan 30, 2018 | www.breitbart.com

The 60th annual Grammy Awards went full anti-President Donald Trump on Sunday as the awards show host James Corden enlisted singers Cher and John Legend, rappers Snoop Dogg and Cardi B, music producer DJ Khaled, and failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to read excepts from Michael Wolff's White House tell-all Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

"Trump won't read anything. He gets up halfway through meetings with World leaders because he is bored," Legend read during the surprise comedy bit meant to introduce the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.

"His comb-over: A product called 'Just for Men,'" Cher said.

"Trump did not enjoy his own inauguration, he started to get angry and hurt that stars were there to hurt him and embarrass him," Snoop Dogg said.

[Jan 30, 2018] John Heilemann suggests Devin Nunes is a Russian agent - Washington Times

Notable quotes:
"... Free speech is one thing but this stuff shouldn't be allowed. Making up false allegations against someone should Not be protected speech! This guy should be fired immediately! ..."
"... The legal issue is libel and slander, but the laws are very specific and need to be read and understood carefully before launching into a lawsuit against Progressive demagogues. ..."
"... Mr Heileman is behaving in a very McCarthyism manner( I mean the cartoonish liberal version of McCarthyism not the real McCarthy) ..."
Jan 30, 2018 | www.washingtontimes.com

Greg Beaty , January 30, 2018 1:58 PM

MSNBC Is all fake news!

FirstLadyIvana Greg Beaty , January 30, 2018 2:02 PM

I thought CNN was all fake news and MSNBC was only 90% fake. Are you sure you have your facts right?

VermontAmerican FirstLadyIvana , January 30, 2018 2:05 PM

You know who's fake? Adam Schiff. He's really a puppet. Chuck Schumer has his hand up his back making his mouth work.

Rotorblade VermontAmerican , January 30, 2018 4:31 PM

Adam Schiff... When I see that guy he gives me the impression that he has young boys buried under his house.

FirstLadyIvana VermontAmerican , January 30, 2018 2:12 PM

You know what isn't fake? Liberals in Vermont. Possession and cultivation rights must have you feeling pretty good.

VermontAmerican FirstLadyIvana , January 30, 2018 2:14 PM

His head is just a network of wires and cotton, with latex stretched over to approximate skin. It's actually pretty lifelike.

sandraleesmith46 FirstLadyIvana , January 30, 2018 3:55 PM

Both are 100% fake and not worth anyone's time!

Thucydides_of_Athens FirstLadyIvana , January 30, 2018 2:27 PM

But CNN says MSNBC is 100% accurate.....

Ernest Nizza , January 30, 2018 1:41 PM

Free speech is one thing but this stuff shouldn't be allowed. Making up false allegations against someone should Not be protected speech! This guy should be fired immediately!

Thucydides_of_Athens Ernest Nizza , January 30, 2018 2:26 PM

The legal issue is libel and slander, but the laws are very specific and need to be read and understood carefully before launching into a lawsuit against Progressive demagogues.

sandraleesmith46 Ernest Nizza , January 30, 2018 3:56 PM

It's not; that's called "slander" under the law, and listed in the US code of CRIMES!

Rotorblade Ernest Nizza , January 30, 2018 4:35 PM

Yes, many top Democrats have publicly said there is no evidence of Trump/Russia collusion... even the melting-face woman Maxine Waters said so. But the fact the search continues IS evidence of Democrat desperation and childishness.

Kbuzz Rotorblade , January 30, 2018 4:44 PM

It is about the spin - deflection - intimidation, or perhaps a hope that the democrats can get a rise out of Trump or his Family via a tweet. The Administration really needs to slap this stuff down - hard, and bury these false accusers. Incarcerate, confiscate assets, freeze the accounts, and when the MSM starts spreading what is false crap, throw them in too...it might improve the Journalistic standards while where at it. In essence, make these people accountable for their accusations.

Brad Gillespie , January 30, 2018 1:33 PM

Maybe mr. Heilemann is having nancy Pelosi write up his talking points? Mr. Nunes looks like a paragon of reason compared to any of the msnbc socialist parrots, and the comparison is even more extreme when compared to adam shiff. Unfortunately, when your main goal is to obfuscate and throw incredibly rude comments at your opposition, you lose.

Thucydides_of_Athens Brad Gillespie , January 30, 2018 2:28 PM

The Legacy media is always between 24 and 72hr behind what is really going on because they have to clear their talking points through the DNC and Valarie Jarrett before going on air.

Susie Q Thucydides_of_Athens , January 30, 2018 2:49 PM

very true!!

Tnt , January 30, 2018 1:26 PM

Journalism has been compromised

Harry Tnt , January 30, 2018 4:04 PM

.At MSNBC Journalism is extinct.

VermontAmerican , January 30, 2018 2:09 PM

The memo won't be released until after Trump has had a chance to bask in the glow of his SOTU. And there's a lot to boast about: the economy is soaring, ISIS is destroyed, record number of fed judges appointed, tax reform, companies repatriating billions of off shore dollars. This is one SOTU the Democrats could only DREAM they could have. Unfortunately, their policies won't allow them.

Larry VermontAmerican , January 30, 2018 4:05 PM

make that "repatriating TRILLIONS of off shore dollars".

ricocat1 , January 30, 2018 2:10 PM

All the delusional Democrats have is the rejected race card and RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA. No wonder Democrats lose most honest elections.

VermontAmerican ricocat1 , January 30, 2018 2:12 PM

Can anyone now believe that 'Romney 2012' lost fairly and squarely? Likely Obama had his campaign wiretapped, too.

tofubamboo VermontAmerican , January 30, 2018 2:51 PM

Bingo!!!

Ed Workman jonzebut , January 30, 2018 3:47 PM

Well, dunno about any wires, but I did see Harry "the littlest mouse turd" Reid admit that he got up in front of the senate and told the world the Romney was a tax evader to the tune of many $millions. You understand that anything can be said on that floor without legal consequence. Harry LMT told the interviewer it was ok to lie and malign a person if that's what it took to win the election.

lumark630 Ed Workman , January 30, 2018 4:37 PM

Thankfully, that scum bag is gone. Unfortunately, the Democrats have a limitless supply of people to replace him. Whatever happened to honest debate and statesmanship? There was a time when both sides could express opposition, without name calling and outrageous accusations.

Leprekhan jonzebut , January 30, 2018 4:26 PM

How about the 2005 photo just surfacing this week with Osucko smiling and shaking hands with the biggest black racist on the planet, Farrakhan? A photo that has been hidden for the last 13 years because the Congressional Black Caucus didn't want it released so as not to damage his chances of being elected. If that had surfaced, he wouldn't have won. Didn't hear about that? Oh, that's right, you only listen to the ClintonNewsNetwork. Keep shoveling that s*#t down your gullet.

zeno2654 , January 30, 2018 2:06 PM

Veteran MSNBC political analyst John Heilemann should put up or shut up. Probably wrote this to cover some breaking news that excoriates the Dems and Party

GeoWashington1787 , January 30, 2018 2:28 PM

The deranged media were colluding to overturn the election--they are more guilty than anything the Russians could have done.

CountMontyC , January 30, 2018 1:27 PM

Mr Heileman is behaving in a very McCarthyism manner( I mean the cartoonish liberal version of McCarthyism not the real McCarthy)

Jack Magan , January 30, 2018 2:19 PM

The Liberal media's uncontrollable disdain for Donald J. Trump has reached manic proportions ...and it's going to devour them over the remaining 3-7 years of the Trump presidency, as it already has THE LOS ANGELES TIMES and THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS.

Lee , January 30, 2018 3:50 PM

Adam Schiff is a Russian agent! Along with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton! Prove that is wrong.

Average Joe Lee , January 30, 2018 4:02 PM

It's wrong...

Guy Smith , January 30, 2018 4:58 PM

Boy the DEMs are really sweating! That Memo must be really good!.

[Jan 29, 2018] You need to dispense with appeals to the Pavlovian training of your readers to accept the narrative of the villainous Russians and Chinese and North Koreans

Notable quotes:
"... The FBI of course has no place in the US Constitution. It could be argued that its very existence violates that document. Freedom of speech and assembly, etc, combined with the Stasi? ..."
Jan 29, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

FREDBUDTZ , 27 Jan 2018 11:32

Oh, I am very sorry, but I think you have that quite wrong.

I don't want to defend Trump. He's a nasty piece of work, but even a nasty piece of work can be correct sometimes.

The FBI of course has no place in the US Constitution. It could be argued that its very existence violates that document. Freedom of speech and assembly, etc, combined with the Stasi?

But if its very existence doesn't violate the Constitution, its hideous lifetime record of behavior does.

And, again, ignoring what we think of Trump, we do have strong suggestions of highly inappropriate behavior by the FBI around the election of Trump.

Does anyone really think secret police should be able to work against a proper election?

Keeping secret files on Congressmen. Helping Presidents do political spying. Hounding innocent citizens. setting up agent provocateur operations.

If you want a clear brief history of this abysmal organization, see:

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/the-dreadful-record-of-the-fbi /

Stringfellow1983 , 27 Jan 2018 11:31
The evidence against the FBI is mounting, to list a few:
Texts between FBI lovers (one involved then fired from the Russian probe) regarding Trump " we cant take the risk" and " an insurance policy" .
High level FBI employee involved with the Russian probe whos wife works for Fusion GPS.
Texts from the lovers mentioned above regarding Clintons FBI interview " don't go loaded for bear, she could be our president".
Comey writing his exoneration of Clinton months before all people involved were interviewed.
More texts from the lovers go missing, as claimed by the FBI, but are found and are now being released by the Inspector General.

These are all know facts that have been used by both the Oversight and Intelligence committees, you can watch the actual meetings on YouTube.

HaveYouSeenThisMan , 27 Jan 2018 11:28
Strange days when progressives are defend the FBI. Let's hope the DOJ inquiry into both Hillary and the Clinton Foundation doesn't find anything.
Paul Wiiddeyed , 27 Jan 2018 11:16
The FBI has a trash history of locking up and framing leftists , black activists, native americans or anyone else who has threatened the establishment. trump is filth but there is a lot lot lower.
tc2011 -> erikus , 27 Jan 2018 11:15
If you want to shock yourself with the similarities between Nixon and Trump, try some Hunter S Thompson.

It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes too close

"Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls " (October 1973)

baudelaire , 27 Jan 2018 11:14
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average (Trump) voter. --Churchill (were he alive today...)
Edward Frederick Ezell , 27 Jan 2018 11:14
Too much rhetoric and too little sourced information. Right off the bat, you need to dispense with appeals to the Pavlovian training of your readers to accept the narrative of the villainous Russians and Chinese and North Koreans and Vietnamese and all things related to Communism or even socialism - and start accepting that the political actors of all social entities - especially nations which are the entities that decide what can be owned and who can be privileged to own it - meddle as much as they can in the selection processes of all other social entities as much as they can. Certainly , even aside from Western Military interventions, the US, UK, and the other partners in the Western Hegemony have been using all means possible to influence the political outcomes of other nations - including the launching of viral autonomous and guided propaganda bots into the media and internet networks of foreign nations. What would be surprising, and worth investigating, is any significant evidence that a foreign country was not meddling in the internal affairs of other countries. Please - stop promoting fantasies yourself - and gain credibility by moving your platform into the real world. I remember when all the Germans in comic books had green faces. It brought back memories when I saw pictures of contemporary villains depicted on news sites with green faces. This vilification stuff is old. Very old. How about some new tricks for a change.
aldebaranredstar , 27 Jan 2018 11:11
This is ridiculous. There is ample evidence, before and after Trump, of FBI incompetence and disarray. Look at the inept handling of the Boston bombing, the failure to vet the Tsarnov family despite a head's up from Russia that they had been in contact with extremists. Then there was the failure regarding the Orlando nightclub killings, even though, again, there were ample warnings ignored. The FBI and Comey are, in addition, extremely suspect for their bizarre handling of the Clinton 'investigation,' so-called: a hand-picked group of investigators, side-stepping protocols for setting up a team; the fact that an exoneration was written before the investigators interviewed key witnesses or Clinton herself; granting immunity to the witnesses; failure to impanel a grand jury; failure to get a subpoena to examine the DNC computers that were breached; changing the wording of the exoneration to 'extremely careless,' instead of 'reckless,' and of course, the fact that biased, pro-Clinton agent Strozak was the team leader. If this is not sufficient for Jill, or anyone, to be alarmed about FBI impartiality, I despair. The fact she has made her bias against Trump known, saying he is unsuitable for the presidency, merely adds to the known biases that permeate this piece and its defense of the corrupted FBI.
DeltaFoxWhiskyMike -> erikus , 27 Jan 2018 11:06
The fogies these days think it is more appropriate to have the actual government intelligence agencies (all seventeen of them) listen in on the rival party's Presidential campaign conversations, especially when the fogies' personal politics exactly match those of the administration in power.
Why hire Watergate burglars when you have an alphabet soup of spooks with a trillion dollars in hardware at your disposal?
DogsLivesMatter , 27 Jan 2018 11:01
Con't....even Masha Gessen says you CAN'T keep blaming Russia for Trump, and she is not a fan of Putin as most of us know.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/masha-gessen-wendy-mesley-interview-the-national-1.4071222
DogsLivesMatter , 27 Jan 2018 10:58
You'd have to be a complete fool, or a "democrat can do no wrong ever" to not think that Trump has some reason to be suspicious of the FBI and DOJ. BTW, who the hell keeps on leaking, it's like hour by hour leaks? If I were Trump I'd get rid of Sessions cuz he sure isn't doing his job. Soooo, why did Rod Rosenstein go to Speaker Ryan and plead with him not to release the "memo" if there's nothing to hide?
***Even
J.K. Stevens , 27 Jan 2018 10:54
This is a strange century where liberals and moderates are defending J. Edgar's old haunts. But must agree with the author that the POTUS is a clear and present danger.
mp66 , 27 Jan 2018 10:49
Preview of some upcoming Graun drivels: "Attack on NSA is attack on privacy", "Attack on CIA is attack on international law". I am sure somebody will correct me, but none of these three letter agencies have anything in common with either the letter or the spirit of US constitution.
erikus , 27 Jan 2018 10:49

As the Republicans continue their campaign to discredit the FBI, it's important to remember a piece of history. Without Deep Throat, the Washington Post's secret source, the Watergate scandal might never have been exposed. Deep Throat, we learned in 2012, was Mark Felt, the No2 official at the FBI.

Another Watergate reference. We hear a great many of them emanating from the US. It does seem as though the American media is top heavy with old fogies who see every independent council investigation as an opportunity to LARP the glory days of the Watergate Era.

[Jan 29, 2018] CNN has gone bananas and doesn't seem to care; and other horrible examples of media bias

Jan 29, 2018 | www.foxnews.com

Yes, CNN staffers have lost their minds. One year of Donald Trump's America and he's defeated them as thoroughly the New England Patriots beat, well, just about anybody.

We're a year into the most-biased U.S. media in history – tracking at 90 percent biased against President Trump . But there appears to be lasting damage to journalists, their professionalism and even their ability to pretend they are rational.

In just one week, CNN staffers blamed President Trump for a man who tried to harm people at their headquarters, ran a piece celebrating cuckolding (not kidding!) and questioned whether the president deserved "credit" for all of the good corporate news of raises and bonuses – resulting from his tax cut.

Celebrity clown and CNN Chief White House Correspondent Jim Acosta had repeated run-ins with whoever the Trump administration put at the podium. In each case, they smacked him down and showed the lack of depth of his reporting.

... ... ...

2. What FBI Memo? What Missing Messages? Journalists love to highlight the 18-minute gap in one of President Richard Nixon's tapes. Give them 30,000 missing emails or 50,000 missing texts and they are less thrilled. Perhaps because both of those involved are liberal.

It was all hands on deck in a desperate quest to control the narrative about the memo and texts. MSNBC's "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough claimed criticism of the FBI amounted to "conspiracy theories" that were "making America less safe." CNN talked repeatedly about the effort to "discredit" the Mueller investigation.

CBS and NBC tried to spin the story away from the missing texts . But when ABC finally decided to chime in, it went full bore against the GOP. Anchor David Muir echoed Democratic talking points about the FBI text messages: "This is a political battle, and ultimately, the American people will decide whether those personal text messages were appropriate or not."

... ... ...

4. You Actually Thought Journalists Were Neutral? Part II: The New York Times actually devoted some opinion space to Trump supporters. Naturally, it caused a firestorm with its lefty readers and journalists who think those readers aren't left-wing enough.

Journalistic operations like the Columbia Journalism Review and the Poynter Institute were joined by HuffPost and others blasting the decision. How dare the Times run content from actual Trump supporters and turn the page into a "welcome wagon" for his supporters, wrote Poynter ?

CJR's attack: "The Times's pro-Trump editorial page is patronizing and circular" at least admitted that the paper has no pro-Trump voices. "In fact, the Times employs many conservative commentators. It just seems to be a requirement that those commentators are never-Trumpers."

In fact, it has three "conservatives." David Brooks is only conservative compared to his coworkers. Relatively new hire Bret Stephens hates the Second Amendment and Ross Douthat wrote, "Why I Can't Learn to Love Donald Trump" soon after the president took office.

... ... ...

Dan Gainor is the Media Research Center's Vice President for Business and Culture . He writes frequently about media for Fox News Opinion. He can also be contacted on Facebook and Twitter as dangainor.

[Jan 29, 2018] Trump's attack on the FBI is an attack on the US constitution itself by Jill Abramson

Is she a MI6 asset? Strong intelligence agencies (and FBI for all practical purposes is a branch of CIA, when if comes to politics) are grave threat to republican form of government (then make elections meaningless, as the winner need their support) and remnants of democracy. In view of FISA memo bomb I like her statement "Comey's independence and ethics cost him his job when Trump fired him" Such an ethical Comey, using falsified dossier to spy on one of contenders in the Presidential race ;-)
As one commenter aptly noted: "Wasn't MI-6 (British spies) working on behalf of the Democrats and their candidate?"
Notable quotes:
"... President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedein, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton [remember his surreptitious visit to Lynch's plane during the final days of the investigation?] conspired to compromise the independence of The Justice Department itself. ..."
Jan 29, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

tc2011 -> Wolframite , 27 Jan 2018 14:03

Says who?

The only person who can fire Mueller is Rod Rosenstein. From last June:

Amid reports that President Trump is considering firing the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigations, a senior Justice Department official said Tuesday that he - and not the president - is the only official empowered to dismiss the prosecutor and that he sees no reason to do so.

link

Hence Trump's meltdown and McGahn's freakout, one presumes.
Cali_Quercus -> theredmenace , 27 Jan 2018 14:03
No indictments alleging collusion have been issued.

http://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/362813-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-of-the-flynn-indictment "However, there is nothing in this indictment that offers serious support for the allegation of collusion with the Russians. "

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-to-know-about-the-paul-manafort-indictment / "This is Mueller's first indictment resulting from his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election and any collusion between Trump campaign associates and Russia. But this indictment does not get to the heart of that matter."

Grae Sun -> Durangotang , 27 Jan 2018 13:46
This comment...if it was written by a journalist, would be the perfect example of what we are discussing. The bias is obvious and it claims to offer facts under the veil of industry standard sub part evidence (sources within the white house)....sadly, our journalists, including the Guardian CNN FOX...all of them...now allow their journalists to cross these ethical lines. The damage is that their audiences swallow it up rather than questioning the bias and questioning the evidence....in a nut shell, society's critical thinking skills have deminished and polarization (conquer and divide) has increased.....because dumb or lazy people don't read and dumb/lazy people don't demand sources or evidence. If everyone took the 10 seconds to simply request that journalist follow their OWN STANDARD OF ETHICS across the board, the political chaos and polarization we see in the world would be reduced.
ConBrio -> Ritula Fränkel , 27 Jan 2018 13:34
Ritula Fränkel ConBrio 10m ago

Ha ha! Show me a fact, please! I'd love to see what a fact in the National Review looks like.

Try CBS and other media:

"The FBI recently released records last month that detailed an interview with Clinton adviser Huma Abedin, in which she was shown an email exchange between Clinton and Mr. Obama. At first, she didn't recognize that it was the president because he was using a pseudonym.

"Once informed that the sender's name is believed to be a pseudonym used by the president, Abedin exclaimed: 'How is this not classified?'" the report said. "Abedin then expressed her amazement at the president's use of a pseudonym and asked if she could have a copy of the email."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/did-hillary-clintons-email-servers-jeopardize-obama /

Don't like the facts? Revise them as you wish.

Subversives in leftist cloth.

zolotoy , 27 Jan 2018 13:33
Trump and the FBI are **both** attacks on the Constitution.
Jeshan -> Durangotang , 27 Jan 2018 13:31
We recovered from the Civil War. i think America is stronger and better than the Republican Party

The Civil War hasn't finished yet.

tjt77 -> Ritula Fränkel , 27 Jan 2018 13:31
America exists to serve the powerful and wealthy interests that have always called the shots.. read the written record expressed by its founders, if you seek proof. The difference at this current time, is that with trump being the "distractor in chief", there is little effort to cover up the reality of who exists to serve whom. for those who don't like it, be patient. Trump will be out on his ear once his usefulness has played out.
DaveBloomfield , 27 Jan 2018 13:19
This isn't Watergate. I remember it well. Actual crimes were committed. A group of operatives broke into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate hotel in the middle of the night going through files. Then you had an unsolved crime seeking the criminals. This is the opposite. You've decided Trump is a criminal, and now you're desperately seeking a crime to pin on him.

It won't work. Any obstruction charge will either fail at the Supreme Court or during impeachment proceedings in the Senate. Democrats will claim a moral victory, in that they actually got Trump charged, if not convicted. This is a farce. Just like the BS charges against Bill Clinton. Back then we were treated to the ridiculous spectacle of grown men raising a semen encrusted dress skyward in victory. It's just sad that this is what government has been reduced to. It's pathetic.

Under Freedom of Speech President Trump has a democratic right to criticize the FBI, judges, or any other subject he chooses. Just like the Guardian, and numerous other media publications have a right to criticize the President. No one disputes that judges have the legal right to render a decision, but you do have every right to criticize that decision. Same goes for the FBI. They have the legal obligation to investigate and bring charges, but you can criticize those charges and the impartiality of investigators. Unquestioned obedience to authority is still fortunately not part of our democratic tradition. If that's what you're looking for, move to China.

ninoinoz , 27 Jan 2018 12:59
"As the Republicans continue their campaign to discredit the FBI, it's important to remember a piece of history. Without Deep Throat, the Washington Post's secret source, the Watergate scandal might never have been exposed. Deep Throat, we learned in 2012, was Mark Felt, the No2 official at the FBI."

It also important to remember that Nixon was President at the time of the Watergate break-in, seeking re-election.
It is Obama, Clinton and the serving FBI officers who are under scrutiny for abuse of power before an election, not Trump.

ConBrio , 27 Jan 2018 12:48
The Author's selectivity is fascinating as well as ironic. While Trump's harangues are potentially criminal the notion that they could do much more damage than already done by her cadre is laughable.

President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedein, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton [remember his surreptitious visit to Lynch's plane during the final days of the investigation?] conspired to compromise the independence of The Justice Department itself.

In fact against regulations not to speak of good investigative practice, an FBI agent disclosed the name of Barack Obama as a knowing recipient of State Department Emails from her home grown server, to Huma Abedein, herself a potential material witness and in all likelihood a target of the investigation.

Who authorized that disclosure isn't documented, but it had to be a higher up.

"How is this not classified?" So exclaimed Hillary Clinton's close aide and confidante, Huma Abedin. The FBI had just shown her an old e-mail exchange, over Clinton's private account, between the then-secretary of state and a second person, whose name Abedin did not recognize. The FBI then did what the FBI is never supposed to do: The agents informed their interviewee (Abedin) of the identity of the second person. It was the president of the United States, Barack Obama, using a pseudonym to conduct communications over a non-secure e-mail system -- something anyone with a high-level security clearance, such as Huma Abedin, would instantly realize was a major breach.

She recovered quickly enough, though. The FBI records that the next thing Abedin did, after "express[ing] her amazement at the president's use of a pseudonym," was to "ask if she could have a copy of the email." Abedin knew an insurance policy when she saw one. If Obama himself had been e-mailing over a non-government, non-secure system, then everyone else who had been doing it had a get-out-of-jail-free card.

The fix was in.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440380/obama-email-alias-clinton-why-fbi-didnt-prosecute-hillary

lyonedes , 27 Jan 2018 12:28
Bile.

The FBI is corrupt as is the Department of Justice. Why was Comey signing off investigations into Hillary's wrongdoings before he's see the evidence?
The whole lot of them are totally anti-Trump and collude together to withhold information from Congressional Hearings with Trey Gowdy exposing lie after lie..
Be assured, the Clinton's eil influence will be exposed for what it is.

Karma Chameleon -> tc2011 , 27 Jan 2018 12:25
Excellent. Now they've been recovered, which virtually anyone should have been able to do with forensic software, maybe their contents will become publicly available through their use in the courts/legal proceedings.

It was Page and Strzok who were the ones using the term 'secret society', from your link:

Some GOP lawmakers in recent days have homed in on an exchange in recently recovered texts in which Strzok and Page make reference to a "secret society." Johnson, one of the senators who has voiced concerns about this exchange, acknowledged Thursday morning the possibility that the "secret society" reference was made in jest. [note, this is his speculation]

"Are you even going to give out your calendars?" Page asked Strzok in one of the messages. "Seems kind of depressing. Maybe it should just be the first meeting of the secret society."

DeltaFoxWhiskyMike -> Matthew McKinnon , 27 Jan 2018 12:24
That's about how long it would take an effective Intel analyst to access, sort, select, prioritize, arrange, print, cover, staple, and deliver everything in the electronic inventory of NSA intercepts. That they haven't done so is an indication that the concept of an ongoing investigation is more important than the outcome.
Travis , 27 Jan 2018 12:23
The true attack on the US Constitution was Hillary Clinton's email management practices. Thank God we dodged that bullet, thanks to the wholly proportionate coverage from media like Jill's former employer.

[Jan 29, 2018] "Russiagate" or "Netanyahugate" Defend Democracy Press

Notable quotes:
"... By Eric Zuesse 1 ..."
"... The Special Counsel Robert Mueller 's main evidence thus far in his "Russiagate" probe is not actually about possible Russian collusion with Trump to win the Presidency, but instead about definite Israeli collusion with Trump after Trump had already won the Presidency but before he became inaugurated. As a lawyer explained on the day when Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was indicted in a plea-deal: "Mr. Flynn has just become the prosecution's star witness." What Flynn had pled to was his trying to obtain Russia's support for Israel's Government, against the Palestinians. Russia said no; Putin said no to Flynn's request, which had been made on behalf of Israel. ..."
"... * Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 , and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity . ..."
"... The original source of this article is Global Research Copyright © Eric Zuesse , Global Research, 2017 ..."
Jan 29, 2018 | www.defenddemocracy.press

"Russiagate" or "Netanyahugate"? 24/12/2017

If what Mr. Zuesse is writing, in the following, seemingly very well substantiated article, is true, then extremely serious questions arise as to which forces have helped Mr. Trump become the President in a country where anybody who challenged the establishment got assasinated (for ex. the Kennedies) and which forces are controlling him.

Another extraordinary aspect of all that is also the way such forces have succeeded, up to now, to be hidden behind Russia!

If things like those already revealed are true, then the same forces controlling Mr. Trump can use the situation they helped engineer, to push him to implement their war agenda against both Iran and North Korea, in exchange for help to the President to get out of all this mess. If Mr. Trump will not agree to the war scenarios, then more disturbing revelations may follow.

We hope that all these are simple suppositions and hypotheses, theories of conspiracies and not description of real conspiracies.

But, unfortunately, nightmares tend now to happen more often when we wake up, than when we slip. Maybe this is a reason we slip too much.

K.D.

"Russiagate" Is Actually "Israelgate": Trump as "Agent of Israel", Not of Russia?

By Eric Zuesse 1

The Special Counsel Robert Mueller 's main evidence thus far in his "Russiagate" probe is not actually about possible Russian collusion with Trump to win the Presidency, but instead about definite Israeli collusion with Trump after Trump had already won the Presidency but before he became inaugurated. As a lawyer explained on the day when Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was indicted in a plea-deal: "Mr. Flynn has just become the prosecution's star witness." What Flynn had pled to was his trying to obtain Russia's support for Israel's Government, against the Palestinians. Russia said no; Putin said no to Flynn's request, which had been made on behalf of Israel.

The way that Mueller's investigation, to find reasons for Trump's impeachment, achieved on December 1st the indictment and plea-deal with Flynn, was to get Flynn to admit (after his first having lied to deny) that he had been asked by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner , who had been asked by Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu , to communicate to Russia's head-of-state Vladimir Putin through Russia's U.S. Ambassador, a request on behalf of the incoming U.S. Administration of Donald Trump , for Russia to get Israel out of a jam at the U.N. Security Council. Netanyahu didn't want to be alone in trying to pressure Putin to turn against the Palestinians; he wanted the incoming Trump Administration also to be pressuring Putin to do that -- for Russia to veto, this time, a resolution ( #2334 in 2016 ), which, every year in the past, had been supported by Russia; or, failing to achieve that, to get Russia's support for Israel's effort to delay the Security Council's vote, until after Trump would become installed as the U.S. President on January 20th. That's what Putin was saying no to.

The initiative in this matter -- the matter that has oddly become the centerpiece of Mueller's case for impeaching Trump -- came from Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, not at all from Russia's head-of-state, Vladimir Putin, such as is almost universally reported to have been the Trump Administration's foreign master (if any). Trump's agent, Kushner, was the supplicant, on behalf of Israel, for Putin's assistance to Israel. Kushner had been asked by Netanyahu to do this, and Kushner assigned Flynn to do it, on behalf of Trump. According to ABC News ,

"Trump phoned Flynn shortly after the election to explicitly ask him to 'serve as point person on Russia,' and to reach out personally to Russian officials to develop strategies to jointly combat ISIS."

But, apparently, Flynn accepted Kushner's instructions also (not only Trump's), and he assumed that what Kushner wanted here (which was not against ISIS, but instead against the Palestinians) was also what Trump wanted on this matter. In fact, Eli Lake reported about Flynn, on the day of Flynn's indictment, December 1st,

"that during the last days of the Obama administration, the retired general was instructed to contact foreign ambassadors and foreign ministers of countries on the U.N. Security Council, ahead of a vote condemning Israeli settlements. Flynn was told to try to get them to delay that vote until after Barack Obama had left office, or oppose the resolution altogether."

This was being done for Netanyahu, not for Putin. As the New York Times reported this ,

"Mr. Flynn asked Russia to intervene at the United Nations on behalf of Israel."

Furthermore, Putin's answer to Kushner's request for Russia to veto or at least delay the "United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel for its settlement policy" was the exact opposite of what Netanyahu-Kushner were requesting: Russia voted in favor of the resolution , not weakened it -- much less vetoed it, as Netanyahu-Kushner were urging.

In other words: Russia refused to comply with the incoming U.S. President's son-in-law's request that had been passed to Putin through Russia's U.S. Ambassador Sergey Kislyak , through Flynn, through Kushner, who had received the request directly from Netanyahu (and the indictment makes no allegation that President-Elect Trump even so much as knew about any of this; there is no impeachable allegation made there against Trump). Possibly, but not yet certainly, Kushner had received, from his father-in-law, instructions to comply with Israel's 'requests', so that Kushner didn't need to communicate with Mr. Trump specifically for permission to pass along to Putin through Russia's U.S. Ambassador, Netanyahu's desire, as being also America's desire. Not only was Trump not Putin's agent in this matter, but his son-in-law was instead serving there as Netanyahu's agent, under some as-yet-undetermined authorization from Trump, but the indictment doesn't even allege there to have been any such authorization, by Trump, at all .

We can be certain that Kushner did have Trump's authorization, however, in some form, because even now, Trump hasn't yet fired Kushner. Kushner's incompetence might bring down Trump, but Trump still stands with Kushner, against Mueller, even though that seems politically suicidal for Trump to be doing. No doubt, if Trump were to break from Kushner, then Kushner might testify against Trump -- and so that path (Trump's turning against Kushner) would also be politically suicidal for Trump. Perhaps Kushner will go to prison if he becomes prosecuted and doesn't reach any plea-deal. Maybe that's the reason why Trump doesn't fire Kushner.

The plea-deal with Flynn has him admitting that his contacts with Kislyak were authorized only by Kushner (referred to in Flynn's indictment not by name but only by the vague phrase "a very senior member of the Presidential Transition Team"). However, Flynn had earlier lied to the FBI and said that he "never asked Russia's ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak, to delay the vote for the U.N. Security Council resolution." So: if, subsequently, it somehow does turn out to be Flynn's word against Trump's word, then the ultimate decision will be made by Senate Republicans when they either do or don't vote for Mike Pence to take over the remainder of Trump's term. In order for that switch to be made, two-thirds of the entire U.S. Senate -- that's 67 of the 100 -- would need to vote for Pence to take over. Whereas Democrats seem eager for Pence to complete Trump's term, that's only 46 Senators, or 48 if both Independents vote with the Democrats , and at least 9 or 11 of the Senate's 52 Republicans would then also need to vote for Pence. The Vice President would not be the presiding officer; instead, the Constitution makes the Chief Justice of the U.S. that, and only the Senators are allowed to be counted in a Senate trial that would follow after the House's majority-vote for a Senate trial to be held. The V.P. couldn't serve as any 'tie-breaker' in this trial. And removal-from-office would be the only direct harm to Trump; the U.S. provides no way to try the President on any charge via the courts -- the only way a U.S. President can be punished for any crime is by being tried, and then convicted and removed from office, by a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Other than that, a U.S. President is above the law.

The Flynn indictment does make one other allegation which specifically concerns Russia:

"FLYNN falsely stated that he did not ask Russia's Ambassador to the United States to refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions that the United States had imposed against Russia."

Flynn admitted now that that was a lie -- that he had made this request of Kislyak.

On December 5th, Max Blumenthal aptly headlined, "Michael Flynn's Indictment Exposes Trump Team's Collusion With Israel, Not Russia -- But you wouldn't know it from reading most mainstream coverage of the revealing affair," and he commented:

"While the Israel lobby ran interference for Kushner, the favorite pundits of the liberal anti-Trump 'Resistance' minimized the role of Israel in the Flynn saga. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow , who has devoted more content this year to Russia than to any other topic, appeared to entirely avoid the issue of Kushner's collusion with Israel."

Apparently, exposing Israeli control over the U.S. Government is, in effect, prohibited; only Russian 'control' over us may be 'exposed'. The very possibility, that when America's taxpayers pay (via U.S. taxes) annual donations of $3.8 billion per year to the Government of Israel, which is a 'friend', instead of a master -- an enemy -- of the American people, seems to be prohibited to disprove, or even to question publicly. But there it is, and Russia gets the blame, which Israel ( and the Sauds ) do not.

Such misdirection of the blame could cause WW III, especially if U.S. media continue calling this 'evidence' 'against Trump', by such terms as 'Russiagate.' It's not that, at all; and portraying it as if it were, could do the whole world a whole lot of harm. (I don't say this in support of Trump, a President I loathe as much as I do his far slicker predecessor, but instead to expose the current lynch-mob as being what they actually are: psychopathic inciters of the most horrific -- and unwarranted -- war ever.)

* Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 , and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity .

The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Eric Zuesse , Global Research, 2017

[Jan 29, 2018] The Trump administration is the wake-up call: the constitutional powers of the president are not as well defined

Notable quotes:
"... It has long been known that the constitutional powers of the president are not as well defined as the powers of the other branches of government. And for many years now, Republicans and Democrats have been content to see the powers of the office increased, so long as it was to the benefit of their particular agenda. ..."
"... The Trump administration is the wake-up call both parties need. But whether they are willing to learn and change remains to be seen. ..."
"... "Wasn't MI-6 (British spies) working on behalf of the Democrats and their candidate? " ..."
"... Read The American War Machine by Peter Dale Scott for some idea of the FBI's role in undermining the US Constitution for decades. https://heavywatergate.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/american-war-machine-peter-dale-scott.pdf ..."
"... Are you going on record here saying that Hillary Clinton did not destroy 30,000 emails from her private server? There is a strange one-sided nature to all this - I support Clinton, therefore I will rewrite history to preserve her reputation. I hate Trump and I will write anything regardless of reality in order to attack him. ..."
"... Where was the author for in the last 50 years that she can write the FBI is the torch bearer of freedom and democracy. ..."
"... Attacking the FBI, CIA, Stazi, MI5, SIS and all other secret services and making them accountable to the people should definitely be something we all do. But for a President to attack the FBI, for a personal advantage is insupportable. ..."
"... Under McCarthyism which, let's face it, attacking the FBI should have happened and was about to happen under JFK, until his untimely death, it was deeply suspected that the FBI had a hand in silencing a President ..."
"... I remember acting CIA Director Mike Morell telling Charlie Rose "we need to start killing Iranians and Russians in Syria". Maybe they decided to use another tactic and started killing Russian's ambassadors: https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/24/europe/dead-russians/index.html ..."
"... Wasn't MI-6 (British spies) working on behalf of the Democrats and their candidate? Which foreign influence on US campaigns is acceptable? Is there a list? Or are we supposed to just buy into the concept that only Hillary's favorite bogeymen, the Russians, are worthy of interest? ..."
"... Let's not forget the J Edgar Hoover was a facist tool of presidents who ruined or tried to ruin many a career in Hollywood and academia during decades of secret unlawful espionage against MLK. ..."
"... For better or worse Trump was ELECTED and has a mandate. Separation of powers and checks and balances in America apply to the three branches: executive, legislative and judicial. The FBI is strictly under control of the president. ..."
"... We have seen in Switzerland and in Italy in recent decades plots exposed where various people in security positions organized actual cabals and plots to subvert the elected governments. We now know that military officers and government employees in the time of JFK deliberately refused to follow presidential directives ..."
"... It is this kind of thing which is treason. And that is what the FBI was clearly doing, against Trump and illegally to further Hillary ..."
"... Bye, Bye, FBI? The Case for Disbanding the Federal Frankenstein's Monster https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/25/bye-bye-fbi-the-case-for-disbanding-the-federal-frankensteins-monster/ ..."
Jan 29, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

ID6030211, 27 Jan 2018 12:23

"Where is my Congress? This is the urgent question posed by these outrageous attempts by the president to subvert the constitution. The legislative branch of government must hold an out-of-control president with authoritarian tendencies accountable."

Provided that Republicans and Democrats can think and act maturely (a very big 'if'), this may well be the principal benefit of a Trump administration.

It has long been known that the constitutional powers of the president are not as well defined as the powers of the other branches of government. And for many years now, Republicans and Democrats have been content to see the powers of the office increased, so long as it was to the benefit of their particular agenda.

The Trump administration is the wake-up call both parties need. But whether they are willing to learn and change remains to be seen.

Durangotang , 27 Jan 2018 12:17
Hello people.

Robert Mueller is NOT the FBI. He is a Special Prosecutor for the Justice Department, which is a far bigger entity than the FBI. His position is similar, if not identical to any other US Prosecutor.

Mueller is using the FBI as his investigation team because . . . that is what Federal Attorneys do. The FBI is one investigative branch of the Justice Department. I would be very surprised if Mueller is not using other investigating officers from other Departments, such as the SEC, IRS for his investigation.

For those reasons attacking the FBI in an attempt to discredit Mueller is just plain stupid.

But then just look at the track record of Republican Congressmen and Senators who are attempting to discredit Mueller. Stupid may very well be their middle names.

Densher , 27 Jan 2018 12:16
So far Trump has said a lot about 'draining the swamp' but has done nothing to re-structure US institutions, or reform Congress which he probably cannot do anyway. The genuine problem the US has is that in addition to the FBI and Military Intelligence and the CIA, George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security, so there are these overlapping agencies that cost a lot of money but at times are doing the same thing without communicating with each other.

Yes, the FBI has often had a dubious view that Martin Luther King and John Lennon were security threats, but it has also played an important role in taking on organized crime and murder cases that cross state lines. It remains to be seen if Trump is a real radical or just a loud-mouth, but maybe the US needs to re-think is security apparatus, if only to save money; but as long as an independent body exists to investigate everything inside the State.

backstop -> DeltaFoxWhiskyMike , 27 Jan 2018 12:11
DeltaFoxWhiskyMike John Schwartz
26m ago
0 1

"Wasn't MI-6 (British spies) working on behalf of the Democrats and their candidate? "

I don't think so, perhaps you could find out and get back to us...

Aldous0rwell , 27 Jan 2018 12:08
Frankly, it's disturbing to see the rush of "liberals" to defend the FBI, simply because of Trump's opposition to the institution. Let's not forget this is the same FBI that attempted to drive MLKJr. to suicide through harassing letters. The same FBI that has initiated mass domestic surveillance on the Citizens of this country (USA), the same FBI that has generated tons of sting operations goading people into committing "acts of terror", infiltrated environmental organizations in an attempt to turn them violent, and been used by big corporate interests to spy on anti-fracking activists in Pennsylvania. And now they are Democratic heroes? That tells you plenty about the heart of the Democratic Party!
Karma Chameleon , 27 Jan 2018 12:06
Read The American War Machine by Peter Dale Scott for some idea of the FBI's role in undermining the US Constitution for decades. https://heavywatergate.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/american-war-machine-peter-dale-scott.pdf
MasonInNY -> jpl72948 , 27 Jan 2018 11:59
Let's not forget that you're describing the FBI at least 50 years ago. MLK was assassinated in 1968. Hoover (1895-1972) tracked MLK's friendships and love affairs in 1963-65. At this time, the British, West German, Canadian, and French domestic security services did exactly the same thing, with more discretion than the FBI. That includes Canadian in the discretion dept. Parallel East German, Czech, Hungarian, and Soviet domestic agencies were a different order of magnitude. They did far more than blackmailing actresses or trailing human rights activists.
Karma Chameleon , 27 Jan 2018 11:57
You don't think the FBI losing 5 months of texts between Strzok and Page due to 'software upgrades' is a little bit too coincidental?

just as Clinton's so-called missing emails were in 2016.

Pardon? So-called? Are you going on record here saying that Hillary Clinton did not destroy 30,000 emails from her private server? There is a strange one-sided nature to all this - I support Clinton, therefore I will rewrite history to preserve her reputation. I hate Trump and I will write anything regardless of reality in order to attack him.

I think what the author is missing here is the fact that the FBI have no constitutional role in politics yet throughout US history of the last 60-70 years they have been heavily involved. This is the constitutional crisis - nobody elects the FBI to tamper with elections, candidates, etc, and they aren't mandated to even play a role. How the author fails to see this is beyond me.

jpl72948 -> ID4524057 , 27 Jan 2018 11:53
Did the Guardian order the author to write this story or did you choose it yourself? Where was the author for in the last 50 years that she can write the FBI is the torch bearer of freedom and democracy. It turns my stomach having lived through the '60s in college to read anything about the FBI that whitewashes it's history.
Helen Pat -> mikedow , 27 Jan 2018 11:53
Attacking the FBI, CIA, Stazi, MI5, SIS and all other secret services and making them accountable to the people should definitely be something we all do. But for a President to attack the FBI, for a personal advantage is insupportable.

Under McCarthyism which, let's face it, attacking the FBI should have happened and was about to happen under JFK, until his untimely death, it was deeply suspected that the FBI had a hand in silencing a President

But Trump is merely trying to muzzle the FBI to ensure his political survival despite some very murky dealings in his camp.

jak1234 , 27 Jan 2018 11:51
I always become indignant when people, Abramson (who should know better) or anyone else tries to put the FBI up on a pedestal. No one familiar with the history of this political police agency could do such a thing. Look at the agency's disgraceful efforts to discredit Dr. King and its role in the assassination of Fred Hampton. In the current context the agency's essentially political orientation is evident in the anti-Trump text messages by the two FBI officials in formerly key positions.
Durangotang -> Lafcadio1944 , 27 Jan 2018 11:50
Many of the posters here write like J Edgar Hoover is still alive. And that makes unfounded all their underlying assumptions.
DeltaFoxWhiskyMike -> violagirl , 27 Jan 2018 11:48
Anybody with half a brain would figure out that insulting millions of voters might go badly. You are still bad mouthing the voters a year after the election. Slow learner?
DogsLivesMatter -> Paul Wiiddeyed , 27 Jan 2018 11:46
I remember acting CIA Director Mike Morell telling Charlie Rose "we need to start killing Iranians and Russians in Syria". Maybe they decided to use another tactic and started killing Russian's ambassadors: https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/24/europe/dead-russians/index.html
DeltaFoxWhiskyMike -> John Schwartz , 27 Jan 2018 11:43
Wasn't MI-6 (British spies) working on behalf of the Democrats and their candidate? Which foreign influence on US campaigns is acceptable? Is there a list? Or are we supposed to just buy into the concept that only Hillary's favorite bogeymen, the Russians, are worthy of interest?
jpl72948 , 27 Jan 2018 11:42
Let's not forget the J Edgar Hoover was a facist tool of presidents who ruined or tried to ruin many a career in Hollywood and academia during decades of secret unlawful espionage against MLK. He blackmailed the Kennedys. They weren't thinking about the constitution then. Now they're the whites in shining armor because it's a requirement to write anything against Trump. Please.
marknickless , 27 Jan 2018 11:41
This is a worrying example of how hate for Trump results in damage to logical thought and utter misrepresentation of American institutions. NB I am NOT a Trump voter.

For better or worse Trump was ELECTED and has a mandate. Separation of powers and checks and balances in America apply to the three branches: executive, legislative and judicial. The FBI is strictly under control of the president.

We have seen in Switzerland and in Italy in recent decades plots exposed where various people in security positions organized actual cabals and plots to subvert the elected governments. We now know that military officers and government employees in the time of JFK deliberately refused to follow presidential directives.

It is this kind of thing which is treason. And that is what the FBI was clearly doing, against Trump and illegally to further Hillary.

William Anthony -> Joe Dert , 27 Jan 2018 11:37
Trump is the absolute lowest common denominator. Extremely embarrassing. The US (except New York and California) has become an Unstable Shithole.
DeltaFoxWhiskyMike -> Morat , 27 Jan 2018 11:36
The answer is to pick better opponents and run better campaigns.
Lafcadio1944 , 27 Jan 2018 11:36
Yes, of course Jill, we know how pristine and "constitutional" the FBI has always been...that is if we ignore the historical record of shameful disgrace left behind by J. Edgar Hoover.

The press writes as if history started last week, and makes unfounded underlying assumptions.

rd232 -> J.K. Stevens , 27 Jan 2018 11:34
Quite. Here's another view:

Bye, Bye, FBI? The Case for Disbanding the Federal Frankenstein's Monster https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/25/bye-bye-fbi-the-case-for-disbanding-the-federal-frankensteins-monster/

[Jan 29, 2018] In the Western World Lies Have Displaced Truth by Paul Craig Roberts

Notable quotes:
"... A conspiracy of US government agencies, tax-exempt think tanks funded by the ruling interests, and media acting in behalf of a war and police state agenda work to shape perceived reality as it is described in George Orwell's book, 1984 ..."
"... Nothing stated in the Western presstitute media and no statement by any Western government or subservient vassal state can be trusted to comply with the facts. Truth is the enemy of the state, and the state is eliminating the truth. ..."
Jan 29, 2018 | www.unz.com

A conspiracy of US government agencies, tax-exempt think tanks funded by the ruling interests, and media acting in behalf of a war and police state agenda work to shape perceived reality as it is described in George Orwell's book, 1984 , and in the film, The Matrix . Controlled perception-based reality is only a Facebook "like" away from killing one person or one million or elevating a liar or the warmonger responsible for the killing to hero status or to the conrol of the CIA or FBI or the US presidency.

... ... ...

...Nothing stated in the Western presstitute media and no statement by any Western government or subservient vassal state can be trusted to comply with the facts. Truth is the enemy of the state, and the state is eliminating the truth.

Peoples in the United States, Europe, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the various vassal states, such as Japan, all live day in, day out, an orchestrated lie that serves interests directly opposed to the interests of the peoples.

Governments that do not rest on truth rest on tyranny.

[Jan 29, 2018] The War on Dissent by C.J. Hopkins

Notable quotes:
"... This propaganda campaign is part and parcel of the roll-out of a new "official narrative." If it wasn't so completely depressing, I would say it is awe-inspiring to watch. This full-spectrum type of mass indoctrination, or "reality adjustment," doesn't happen that often. It used to only happen on the national level, typically during times of war, when the ruling classes of nation states needed to temporarily unite their populaces and demonize their enemy. It is happening now on a global level, for the second time in the 21st Century. ..."
"... The global capitalist ruling classes (which now reigned unopposed over the entire planet) needed a new official narrative to unite, not just a nation, or region, but everyone within the new global market. This narrative needed a convincing enemy that would function on a global level. "Terrorism" is that enemy. ..."
"... The key to understanding both the original War on Terror official narrative and the expanded variation we are being sold currently is the fact that terrorism is an insurgent tactic employed by weaker militant forces against a ruling government or occupation force. This makes it the perfect bogeyman (in essence, the only bogeyman) for our brave new global capitalist world, where global capitalism takes the place of that "ruling government or occupation force." ..."
"... we we no longer live in a world where nation-against-nation conflict is driving the course of political events. We live in a world where global capitalism is driving the course of political events. The economies of virtually every nation on the planet are hopelessly interdependent. Capitalist ideology pervades all cultures, despite their superficial differences. It is a globally hegemonic system, so it has no external enemies. None. The only threats it faces are internal. Its "enemies" are, by definition, insurgent in other words, "extremist" or "terrorist." ..."
"... This even holds true for the Russia paranoia the ruling classes are pumping out currently it's all just part of the "reality adjustment," and the launch of a new official narrative, not a prelude to war with Russia. The USA is not going to war with Russia. The notion is beyond ridiculous. Have you noticed, despite all their warlike verbiage, that no one has put forth a single scenario in which war between Russia and the West makes sense? That's because it doesn't make sense. Not for Russia, the USA, or anyone else. This is why "the Russian threat" is being marketed as an "attack on democratic values" and "an attempt to sow division," and so on. Because the war the corporatocracy is waging is not a war against Russia, the nation. The war they are fighting is a counter-insurgency, an ideological counter-insurgency. "Russia" has just been added to the list of "terrorists" and "extremists" who "hate us for our freedom." ..."
"... The message is, "you're either with us or against us." The message is, "we will tolerate no dissent, except for officially sanctioned dissent." The message is, "try to fuck with us, and we will marginalize you, and demonize you, and demonetize you, and disappear you." ..."
"... The message is, "we control reality, so reality is whatever the fuck we say it is, regardless of whether it is based in fact or just some totally made-up story we got The Washington Post to publish and then had the corporate media repeat, over and over, for fourteen months. " If that doesn't qualify as full-blown Orwellian, I'm not sure what, exactly, would. ..."
"... C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org . ..."
Jan 29, 2018 | www.unz.com

Just when you thought the corporatocracy couldn't possibly get more creepily Orwellian, the Twitter Corporation starts sending out emails advising that they "have reason to believe" we have "followed, retweeted," or "liked the content of" an account "connected to a propaganda effort by a Russia government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency." While it's not as dramatic as the Thought Police watching you on your telescreen, or posters reminding you "Big Brother Is Watching," the effect is more or less the same.

And if that's not creepily Orwellian enough for you, Facebook has established a Ministry of Counterspeech , manned by "a dedicated counterterrorism team" of "former intelligence and law-enforcement officials," to "disrupt ideologies underlying extremism" ( see Chris Hedges' recent essay for details ). The Google Corporation is systematically disappearing , deranking , and maliciously misrepresenting non-corporate news and opinion sources, and the "thought criminals" who contribute to them. Meanwhile, the corporate media continues to pump out Russia paranoia propaganda like this Maddow segment on MSNBC about "the remarkable number of Russian financiers who'll be rubbing elbows with the Trump team in Davos."

These are just the latest salvos in the corporate establishment's War on Dissent, an expanded version of the War on Terror, which they've been relentlessly waging for over a year now. As you may have noticed, the ruling classes have been using virtually every propaganda organ at their disposal to whip up mass hysteria over a host of extremely dubious threats to "the future of democracy" and "democratic values," Russia being foremost among them, followed closely by white supremacy, then a laundry list of other "threats," from Julian Assange to Bernie Bros to other, lesser "sowers of division."

This propaganda campaign is part and parcel of the roll-out of a new "official narrative." If it wasn't so completely depressing, I would say it is awe-inspiring to watch. This full-spectrum type of mass indoctrination, or "reality adjustment," doesn't happen that often. It used to only happen on the national level, typically during times of war, when the ruling classes of nation states needed to temporarily unite their populaces and demonize their enemy. It is happening now on a global level, for the second time in the 21st Century.

The first time it happened on a global level was 2001-2002, when the War on Terror narrative was launched to supplant the defunct Cold War narrative that had functioned since the end of World War II. The End of History/New World Order narrative, which had served as a kind of ideological stop-gap from 1990 to 2001, never really sold that well. It was far too vague, and there was no clear enemy. The global capitalist ruling classes (which now reigned unopposed over the entire planet) needed a new official narrative to unite, not just a nation, or region, but everyone within the new global market. This narrative needed a convincing enemy that would function on a global level. "Terrorism" is that enemy.

In the official War on Terror narrative, the term "terrorism" does not refer to any type of actual terrorism (although of course such terrorism does occur) as much as to "terrorism" as a general concept, an essentially meaningless pejorative concept, one which can be expanded to include almost anything and anyone the ruling classes need it to which is what is taking place at the moment. It is being expanded, rather dramatically, to include virtually any type of dissent from global capitalist ideology. In order to understand what's happening, we need to understand how terms like "terrorism" and "extremism" function ideologically, not just as terms to dehumanize "bad guys" but to designate a type of ur-antagonist , one that conforms to the official narrative. So let's take a few minutes and try to do that.

The key to understanding both the original War on Terror official narrative and the expanded variation we are being sold currently is the fact that terrorism is an insurgent tactic employed by weaker militant forces against a ruling government or occupation force. This makes it the perfect bogeyman (in essence, the only bogeyman) for our brave new global capitalist world, where global capitalism takes the place of that "ruling government or occupation force."

I've written a number of essays about this , so I won't reiterate all that here. The short version is, we we no longer live in a world where nation-against-nation conflict is driving the course of political events. We live in a world where global capitalism is driving the course of political events. The economies of virtually every nation on the planet are hopelessly interdependent. Capitalist ideology pervades all cultures, despite their superficial differences. It is a globally hegemonic system, so it has no external enemies. None. The only threats it faces are internal. Its "enemies" are, by definition, insurgent in other words, "extremist" or "terrorist."

This even holds true for the Russia paranoia the ruling classes are pumping out currently it's all just part of the "reality adjustment," and the launch of a new official narrative, not a prelude to war with Russia. The USA is not going to war with Russia. The notion is beyond ridiculous. Have you noticed, despite all their warlike verbiage, that no one has put forth a single scenario in which war between Russia and the West makes sense? That's because it doesn't make sense. Not for Russia, the USA, or anyone else. This is why "the Russian threat" is being marketed as an "attack on democratic values" and "an attempt to sow division," and so on. Because the war the corporatocracy is waging is not a war against Russia, the nation. The war they are fighting is a counter-insurgency, an ideological counter-insurgency. "Russia" has just been added to the list of "terrorists" and "extremists" who "hate us for our freedom."

Thus, our new official narrative is actually just a minor variation on the original War on Terror narrative we've been indoctrinated with since 2001. A minor yet essential variation. From 2001 to 2016, the constant "terrorist threat" we were facing was strictly limited to Islamic terrorism, which made sense as long as the corporatocracy was focused on restructuring the Middle East. White supremacist terrorism was not part of the narrative, nor was any other form of terrorism, as that would have just confused the audience.

That changed, dramatically, in 2016.

The Brexit referendum and the election of Trump alerted the global capitalist ruling classes to the existence of another dangerous insurgency that had nothing to do with the Greater Middle East. While they were off merrily destabilizing, restructuring, privatizing, and debt-enslaving, resentment of global capitalism had grown into a widespread neo-nationalist backlash against globalization, the loss of sovereignty, fiscal austerity, and the soulless, smiley-face, corporate culture being implemented throughout the West and beyond. That this backlash is reactionary in nature does not change the fact that it is an insurgency just as Islamic fundamentalism is. Both insurgencies are doomed attempts to revert to despotic social systems (nationalist in one case, religious in the other) and so reverse the forward march of global capitalism. The global capitalist ruling classes are not about to let that happen.

The corporatocracy wasted no time in dealing with this new insurgency. They demonized and hamstrung Trump, as they'll continue to do until he's well out of office. But Trump was never the significant threat. The significant threat is the people who elected him, and who voted for Brexit, and the AfD, and Sanders, and Mélenchon, and Corbyn, and who just stayed home on election day and refused to vote for Hillary Clinton. The threat is the attitude of these people. The insubordinate attitude of these people. The childish attitude of these people (who naively thought they could challenge the most powerful empire in the annals of human history one that controls, not just the most fearsome military force that has ever existed, but the means to control "reality" itself).

The corporatocracy is going to change that attitude, or it is going to make it disappear. It is in the process of doing this now, using every ideological weapon in its arsenal. The news media. Publishing. Hollywood. The Internet. Intelligence agencies. Congressional inquiries. Protests. Marches. Twitter's "advisory emails." Google's manipulation of its search results. Facebook's "counterspeech" initiative. Russiagate. Shitholegate. Pornstargate. The ruling class is sending us a message. The message is, "you're either with us or against us." The message is, "we will tolerate no dissent, except for officially sanctioned dissent." The message is, "try to fuck with us, and we will marginalize you, and demonize you, and demonetize you, and disappear you."

The message is, "we control reality, so reality is whatever the fuck we say it is, regardless of whether it is based in fact or just some totally made-up story we got The Washington Post to publish and then had the corporate media repeat, over and over, for fourteen months. " If that doesn't qualify as full-blown Orwellian, I'm not sure what, exactly, would.

I wish I had some rallying cry to end this depressing assessment with, but I have no interest in being one of these Twitter-based guerrilla leaders who tell you we can beat the corporatocracy by tweeting and donating to them on Patreon, and then going about our lives as "normal." It's probably going to take a little more than that, and the obvious truth is, the odds are against us. That said, I plan to make as much noise about The War on Dissent as humanly possible, until they marginalize me out of existence or the corporate-mediated simulation that so many of us take for existence these days. What do you say, want to join me?

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .


Grandpa Charlie , January 28, 2018 at 6:35 am GMT

Until now, I have considered C. J. Hopkins to be only a playwright or whatever and not a serious political scientist or political critic. But now, I see that he has grown out to be a serious political voice.

I consider Hopkins' manifesto to be not unlike the old Communist Manifesto of 1848. Just as more than 170 years ago the Communist Manifesto could note that "a specter is haunting Europe," so today we could say that "a specter is haunting the world." But whereas back then the hunted people had a name -- "communists" -- today those who are wanted for 'terrorism' have no name or flag under which to come together. Perhaps the most appropriate name for these people is "Dissidents."

Several individuals come to mind as perhaps having leadership potential for the Dissidents. First, there is Ai Weiwei, who is known as a dissident artist and also as an enemy of the state -- so the word for these dissident artists may be "anarchists." But since anarchists would seem to have to eschew all political organization, they can't be anything like the old Communist Party. Nonetheless, they can certainly be a specter to haunt the globalized world, the world that pretends to be based on humanist globalism.

Two other examples, along with Ai Weiwei, are: Jello Biafra in the USA and Varg Vikernes in Europe (at least in Northern and Central Europe). Both have arisen from the world of music but have not been particularly shy about getting involveed in politics. So far Jello has managed to avoid prosecution/persecution, while Varg is actually a convicted murderer and also convicted of "hate crime" under the infamous "hate crime" statutes of France. Jello is a Green, however, and it's note-worthy that the current leader (POTUS candidate) of the Green Party USA (Dr. Jill Stein) has recently been singled out by congressional "intel" committees as a person of interest in the so-called "Russiagate" affair.

As Hopkins says,

The ruling class is sending us a message. The message is, "you're either with us or against us."

Maybe that's what has happened with the USA Greens: the global PTB have sent the message, and it appears that the Greens' leader has responded by chosing to cooperate with the witch hunt -- "discretion is the better part of valor" (as the old expression goes).

It seems to me a lot like the real California 'hippies' back in the the mid-60s -- not the war protesters but the real hippies who were too stoned to know that there was a war going on. They just knew that they did not want any part of the world as we know it. Oh, they wanted the natural world all right, they just didn't want the so-called "civilized" world. Rightists tended to place them somewhere on the Left side of the spectrum of the Right-Left-Right-ya-Left-ya Right-ya-left-right-left (as drill sergeants might express it). I was there in the 60s, although I was already too old to be trusted according to the political pseudo-hippies (I was already over 30 years of age) but what I would call the real hippies, they trusted me just fine. Anyway, Rightists and all the journalists and commentators never came close to realizing what it was all about. You almost had to have some experience first-hand of LSD, you know.

Maybe that's where this is all heading -- right back to LSD, psilocybin and good old Cannabis. I note in this respect that the Trump administration has recently come down strong to suppress the "Movement" in Colorado and elsewhere. One of Trump's numerous sell-outs or cop-outs (to use the old 60s terminology). Contrary to his campaign statements, of course.

Yes, I think that Hopkins way off there in the capital of rationalism, Berlin, probably has no idea of how this is likely to play out back in the US of A it's going to be all about illicit drugs and I don't mean factory-produced opioids or amphetamine. This battle will definitely divide the goats from the sheep -- the real "libertarian" anarchists from the pretend libertarians. I could be wrong but I think it's going to be a BFD. Yeah, I admit to it: I hope it's going to be a BFD. Anything else and it's too boring for tears.

Back to the Future.

Steve Hayes , Website January 28, 2018 at 1:27 pm GMT
No one wanted the First World War, but given the build up of propaganda, tensions, mistrust, and the alliances, a mere act of terrorism by Gavrilo Princip was enough to ignite a conflagration that no one could stop.
Barryroe , January 28, 2018 at 10:04 pm GMT
This is an excellent and exceptional piece. Correct on all points, as we have come to expect of C. J. Hopkins, one of the most clear-sighted contributors to this site. Fewer comic flourishes than in his earlier essays, probably reflecting how desperate things are becoming for independent and fair-minded people trying to make their voices heard. Surprising to see so few comments, though perhaps that's not a bad thing, given how intemperate some commenters can be.
Grandpa Charlie , January 28, 2018 at 10:07 pm GMT

"No one wanted the First World War, but given the build up of propaganda, tensions, mistrust, and the alliances, a mere act of terrorism by Gavrilo Princip was enough to ignite a conflagration that no one could stop." -- Steve Hayes

I guess that Hayes' comment here at C.J. Hopkins' article is all about demonstrating the effectiveness of terrorism so then the War on Terror makes sense? but whatever to respond to Hayes' contention that no one wanted the First World War, I would ask Hayes: "No one? Not even greedy internationalist central bankers with international connections?"

[Jan 28, 2018] Russiagate Isn t About Trump, And It Isn t Even Ultimately About Russia by Caitlyn Johnstone

Highly recommended!
Truth is the first victim of war. This is also true about the Cold War II with Russia.
Notable quotes:
"... MSNBC's Chris Hayes recently asked a question of his Twitter following that was so heavily loaded it wouldn't be permitted on most interstate highways: "Aside from genuine cranks, is there anyone left denying it was the Russians that committed criminal sabotage in the American election?" ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... You can begin finding your way toward the answer to that question by envisioning the following hypothetical scenario. Imagine what would happen if, instead of promoting the Russiagate narrative, the faces of the consent-manufacturing machine known as the mass media began telling mainstream America that in order to ensure that the US will remain capable of dominating the other countries on this planet, there's going to have to be an aggressive campaign to re-inflame the Cold War with the goal of disrupting and undermining China and its allies ..."
"... This is what Russiagate is ultimately about. Democrats think it's about impeaching Trump and protecting the world from a nigh-omnipotent supervillain in Vladimir Putin, Trump's supporters think it's a "deep state coup" to try and oust their president, but in reality this has nothing to do with Trump, and ultimately not a whole lot to do with Russia either. When all is said and done, Russiagate is about China. ..."
"... In an essay titled "Russia-China Tandem Changes the World", US-Russia relations analyst Gilbert Doctorow explains how the surging economic power China depends upon Russia's willingness to go head-to-head with America and its extensive experience with US attempts to undermine the USSR during the Cold War. Alone both nations are very vulnerable, but together their strengths are complimentary in a way that poses a direct threat to America's self-appointed role as world leader ..."
"... So the strategic value of taking Russia out of the equation is clear, and that's exactly what the US power establishment is attempting to do. California Representative Eric Swalwell, one of the lead congressional promoters of both anti-Russia sentiment and the Trump-Russia "collusion" narrative, admitted last year that he'd like to see tougher sanctions stacked up until they "isolate Russia from the rest of the world" ..."
"... The US oligarchs, the oligarch-owned media outlets, and the oligarch-aligned intelligence/defense agencies can't just come right out and say "Hey America, we need to ensure our power structures remain unrivalled for the foreseeable future, so we're going to have to try and shut down Russia's influence using ever-tightening economic sanctions, NATO expansionism, proxy wars and troops along Russia's border to squeeze them until they lose the capacity to interfere with our ability to crush China. We'll also need a vastly inflated military budget to help facilitate our geopolitical agendas and prepare for a possible world war, please." A few Americans might consent to it, but by and large the US public would rather see those resources spent on making their lives better. ..."
"... So they lie. They use America's deliberately constructed partisan enmity and culture wars to fan the flames of mass hysteria about a new president so that enough Americans will permit continuous escalations with Russia under the mistaken impression that they are helping to resist Trump. ..."
Jan 28, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

Russiagate Isn't About Trump, And It Isn't Even Ultimately About Russia Written by Caitlin Johnstone Sunday January 28, 2018

MSNBC's Chris Hayes recently asked a question of his Twitter following that was so heavily loaded it wouldn't be permitted on most interstate highways: "Aside from genuine cranks, is there anyone left denying it was the Russians that committed criminal sabotage in the American election?"

Hayes asked this fake question because he works for MSNBC and it is therefore his job, and he asked it in response to a report first made viral by deranged espionage LARPer Eric Garland that a Dutch intelligence agency had been observing Russian hackers attacking US political parties in advance of the 2016 election. Like all "bombshell" Russiagate reports, this one roared through social media like wildfire carried on the wings of liberal hysteria about the current administration, only to be exposed as being riddled with gaping plot holes as documented here by independent journalist Suzie Dawson. The report revolves around an allegedly Russian cyber threat now known in the west as "Cozy Bear," which as Real News ' Max Blumenthal notes is not a network of hackers but "a Russian-sounding name the for-profit firm Crowdstrike assigned to an APT to market its findings to gullible reporters desperate for Russiagate scoops."

This "bombshell" overlapped with another as it was reported by the New York Times that at one point many months ago Trump had wanted to fire Robert Mueller, but then didn't.

*Cough.*

Why does this keep happening? Why does the public keep getting sold a mountain of suspicion with zero substance? Over and over and over again these "bombshell" stories come out about Trump and Russia, Russia and Trump, only to be debunked , retracted , or erased from the spotlight after people start actually reading the allegations and thinking critically about them and see they're not the shocking bombshells they purport to be? These allegations are all premised upon claims made the US intelligence community, which has an extensive and well-documented history of lying to advance its agendas, as well as porous claims made by an extremely shady and insanely profitable private cyber security company, and yet all we're ever shown is smoke and mirrors with no actual fire.

Why is that?

You can begin finding your way toward the answer to that question by envisioning the following hypothetical scenario. Imagine what would happen if, instead of promoting the Russiagate narrative, the faces of the consent-manufacturing machine known as the mass media began telling mainstream America that in order to ensure that the US will remain capable of dominating the other countries on this planet, there's going to have to be an aggressive campaign to re-inflame the Cold War with the goal of disrupting and undermining China and its allies.

That would be a very different narrative with a very different effect, wouldn't it? But that's exactly what's going on here, and if the US power establishment and its propaganda machine were in the business of telling people the truth, that's precisely what they'd say.

It's not a secret that China has been working to surpass the United States as the world's leading superpower as quickly as possible. Hell, Xi Jinping flat-out said so during a three and a half hour address last October, and many experts think it might happen a lot sooner than Xi's 30-year deadline. An editorial from China's state press agency about the Davos World Economic Forum asserts that the time has come for the world to choose between the "Xi-style collaborative approach" and Trump's "self-centred America First policy (which) has led his country away from multiple multilateral pacts and infused anxiety into both allies and the broader world." China has been collaborating with Russia to end the hegemony of the US dollar , to shore up control of the Arctic as new resources become available, and just generally build up its own power and influence instead of working to remain in Washington's good graces as most western nations have chosen to do.

Preventing this is the single most important goal of the US power establishment, not just its elected government but the unelected plutocrats, defense and intelligence agencies which control the nation's affairs behind the scenes. This agenda is so important that in a letter to his successor the outgoing President Barack Obama made the "indispensable" nature of American planetary leadership his sole concrete piece of advice, and pro-establishment influence firms like Project for a New American Century have made preventing the rise of a rival superpower their stated primary goal .

This is what Russiagate is ultimately about. Democrats think it's about impeaching Trump and protecting the world from a nigh-omnipotent supervillain in Vladimir Putin, Trump's supporters think it's a "deep state coup" to try and oust their president, but in reality this has nothing to do with Trump, and ultimately not a whole lot to do with Russia either. When all is said and done, Russiagate is about China.

In an essay titled "Russia-China Tandem Changes the World", US-Russia relations analyst Gilbert Doctorow explains how the surging economic power China depends upon Russia's willingness to go head-to-head with America and its extensive experience with US attempts to undermine the USSR during the Cold War. Alone both nations are very vulnerable, but together their strengths are complimentary in a way that poses a direct threat to America's self-appointed role as world leader .

"Russia is essential to China because of Moscow's long experience managing global relations going back to the period of the Cold War and because of its willingness and ability today to stand up directly to the American hegemon," writes Doctorow, "whereas China, with its heavy dependence on its vast exports to the U.S., cannot do so without endangering vital interests. Moreover, since the Western establishment sees China as the long-term challenge to its supremacy, it is best for Beijing to exercise its influence through another power, which today is Russia."

So the strategic value of taking Russia out of the equation is clear, and that's exactly what the US power establishment is attempting to do. California Representative Eric Swalwell, one of the lead congressional promoters of both anti-Russia sentiment and the Trump-Russia "collusion" narrative, admitted last year that he'd like to see tougher sanctions stacked up until they "isolate Russia from the rest of the world" after much badgering from Fox's Tucker Carlson about his incendiary claims that the alleged cyberattacks constituted an "act of war." It is worth noting here that despite Swalwell's repeated hysterical claims about Trump and Russia, he recently voted to renew the treasonous Kremlin-colluding president's godlike surveillance powers anyway.

Establishment muppets like Swalwell and the unelected elites who own them don't care about Trump, they care about crippling China's right arm Russia so that they can set about sabotaging the agendas of a potential rival superpower unimpeded by the skilful opposition of a nuclear superpower. But, getting back to the hypothetical situation I asked you to envision earlier, they can't just come right out and say that.

They can't. The US oligarchs, the oligarch-owned media outlets, and the oligarch-aligned intelligence/defense agencies can't just come right out and say "Hey America, we need to ensure our power structures remain unrivalled for the foreseeable future, so we're going to have to try and shut down Russia's influence using ever-tightening economic sanctions, NATO expansionism, proxy wars and troops along Russia's border to squeeze them until they lose the capacity to interfere with our ability to crush China. We'll also need a vastly inflated military budget to help facilitate our geopolitical agendas and prepare for a possible world war, please." A few Americans might consent to it, but by and large the US public would rather see those resources spent on making their lives better.

Just as importantly, the rest of the world would recoil in revulsion.

So they lie. They use America's deliberately constructed partisan enmity and culture wars to fan the flames of mass hysteria about a new president so that enough Americans will permit continuous escalations with Russia under the mistaken impression that they are helping to resist Trump. They think they're lying to you for your own good, because you can't understand how important it is that they do what they're trying to do. That's why there are so many gaping plot holes and none of this ever quite adds up; they're lying to you like a parent telling a child he needs to eat his broccoli if he doesn't want a lump of coal for Christmas. Except instead of eating broccoli it's consenting to dangerous escalations and military expansionism, and instead of a parent it's a class of elitist sociopaths, and you're always going to get coal.

And sure, an argument can be made that the world is better off under the watchful domination of the US power establishment than it would be with multipolar power arrangements, and I encounter many establishment loyalists who make precisely that argument. Personally I would argue that the death, destruction and mayhem caused by the intrinsically evil things the US establishment must do in order to maintain dominance completely invalidate that argument, but it's a debate that people deserve to have, and they can't have it when they're being lied to about what's really going on.

Insist on the truth. Keep pushing back against this pernicious psyop. Spread the word.

Support Caitlyn Johnstone's work on Patreon or Paypal . Reprinted with author's permission from her website .

[Jan 28, 2018] The old MH17 crew back in action. Now to help to depose Trump

The financialization of the American economy and continued slide of the lower 80% of population standard of living might provide the impetus to scale back the MIC. And scaling back MIC is long overdue
Notable quotes:
"... A thread here not long back with a bit about the Aussie diplomat giving some 'intel' to US IC for the Russia/Trump collusion meme. Now the Dutch are in on it too, hacking into a university beside red square in 2014 and watching Russia hack DNC/Hillary emails or whatever. (apparently no university beside red square) ..."
Jan 28, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
3

A thread here not long back with a bit about the Aussie diplomat giving some 'intel' to US IC for the Russia/Trump collusion meme. Now the Dutch are in on it too, hacking into a university beside red square in 2014 and watching Russia hack DNC/Hillary emails or whatever. (apparently no university beside red square)

Ukraine for the Dossier, Australia and Netherlands chipping in with their bits of 'evidence'. The old MH17 crew back in action.

Tillerson/US holding Russia responsible for Syrian chemical weapons attacks, lots of new sanctions on Russia etc etc.

Saker has an interesting article written for UNZ Review. Ukraine have official changed the status of Donbass from being terrorist occupied to Russian occupied to dump the Minsk agreement. US supplying javelin missiles etc.

US about to kick off the war in Ukraine again as revenge for Russia stuffing up their plans for Syria?

[Jan 28, 2018] How Trump Trauma Is Crippling the News Media (Guest Column)

Neoliberal MSM are hired presstitutes on a mission. Ideological soldiers of the neoliberal Party, if you want to use the Bolsheviks term. To expect from them objectivity is like to expect snow in hell.
But what is interesting is how Trump managed to undermine this neoliberal fake news industry, especially WaPo, NYT, and CNN. Now even some neoliberal view those presstitutes with disdain: they went way too far ion the war trial. Russiagate debacle is one such story.
Notable quotes:
"... This is, at bottom, a battle over the truth. Who owns it, who controls it, who can sell their version to a polarized public that increasingly cannot agree on basic facts. ..."
"... As paradoxical as it sounds, negative coverage helps Trump because it bonds him to people who also feel disrespected by the denizens of the mainstream press. The media take everything literally, and Trump pitches his arguments at a gut level. It is asymmetrical warfare. ..."
"... Every president gets pounded by the press. But no president has ever been subjected to the kind of relentless ridicule, caustic commentary and insulting invective that has been heaped on Trump. I have a name for this half-crazed compulsion to furiously attack one man. It's called Trump Trauma. ..."
"... by Howard Kurtz (Regnery Publishing, Jan. 29), copyright Regnery Publishing. ..."
"... This story appears in the Jan. 25 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe . ..."
Jan 28, 2018 | www.hollywoodreporter.com

This is, at bottom, a battle over the truth. Who owns it, who controls it, who can sell their version to a polarized public that increasingly cannot agree on basic facts. Everything you read, hear and see about Trump's veracity is filtered through a mainstream media prism that reflects a lying president -- and virtually never considers the press' own baggage and biases. Everything you read, hear and see from the Trump team is premised on the view that media news is fake news, that journalists are too prejudiced, angry and ideological to fairly report on the president. Trump and his acolytes use these attacks on the Fourth Estate to neutralize their own untruths, evasions and exaggerations.

What many journalists fail to grasp is that Trump's supporters love his street talk and view the media critiques as nonsense driven by negativity. They don't care if he makes mistakes. As paradoxical as it sounds, negative coverage helps Trump because it bonds him to people who also feel disrespected by the denizens of the mainstream press. The media take everything literally, and Trump pitches his arguments at a gut level. It is asymmetrical warfare.

Every president gets pounded by the press. But no president has ever been subjected to the kind of relentless ridicule, caustic commentary and insulting invective that has been heaped on Trump. I have a name for this half-crazed compulsion to furiously attack one man. It's called Trump Trauma.

Excerpted from Media Madness: Donald Trump, the Press, and the War Over the Truth by Howard Kurtz (Regnery Publishing, Jan. 29), copyright Regnery Publishing.

This story appears in the Jan. 25 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe .

[Jan 28, 2018] MSM know how to spin a good story and spread propaganda/disinformation

Notable quotes:
"... Maybe they get their training from the CIA. ..."
"... Maybe they ARE CIA. ..."
"... Always keep in mind, when a source leaks an "exclusive" to one reporter, there is ALWAYS an ulterior motive, even if the leaked information is true. ..."
Jan 28, 2018 | theconservativetreehouse.com

blind no longer , January 26, 2018 at 8:36 pm

We've had people here arguing with each other on another thread about it. They( MSM ) know how to spin a good story and spread propaganda/disinformation. Maybe they get their training from the CIA.
WSB , January 26, 2018 at 9:41 pm
Maybe they ARE CIA.
filia.aurea , January 27, 2018 at 1:27 am
It's not like Sundance hasn't been warning us Sara Carter and Sean Hannity Are Being Played By James Comey Posted on June 13, 2017 by sundance
Angel Martin , January 26, 2018 at 7:50 pm
Always keep in mind, when a source leaks an "exclusive" to one reporter, there is ALWAYS an ulterior motive, even if the leaked information is true.

Every leak has multiple consequences, and it is not clear what the primary motive was. For example: TheHill leak to Soloman and Carter has:

-S&P leaking various things to various reporters. The one that caught my eye was the reference to "throwing him under the bus" regarding the CF article (Clinton Foundation?). ie. they are leaking to get back at superiors who do things re clinton that S&P don't like. But there are many others, including the actual or likely identities of the reporters being leaked to.

[Jan 28, 2018] Deep State Private Chat Intercepted, Exposes A Coup Attempt Against America By Intelligence Community Members by Susan Duclos

Notable quotes:
"... That time range is incredibly important ..."
"... The first was that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would be naming former FBI Director Robert Mueller as Special Counsel and that the White House would be "blind-sided." The second would be a MSM news report on "MF" (Michael Flynn) to which they planned to "put MF back in the news" by drawing up "a memo on Turkey," stating that "with Erdogan thugs beating protesters on the streets, it fits the news cycle." ..."
"... During the beginning of the conversation it was stated that "I'm hearing Mueller, maybe by the end of the week." By the end of the conversation, someone with a little more knowledge said "RM is happening tonight," to which the original person that mentioned Mueller by name, says "Tonight. F*ck. Quicker than I thought." ..."
Jan 28, 2018 | allnewspipeline.com

On May 17, 2017, a person that calls himself "FreshCamel," posted messages on multiple forums across the Dark Web (part of the Internet not included in search engines and requires special encrypted programs to access it), asking for help to decipher a discussion he had witnessed between five people communicating using the secure messaging platform called Gliph .

The same day, the user also uploaded four screen shot links to a pastebin account which allegedly showed the conversation "FreshCamel" witnessed on Wednesday, May 17, 2017, during a 45 minute period, from 2:31 pm to 3:15 pm.

That time range is incredibly important because the conversation detailed knowledge and planning of events that had not occurred nor been reported at the time the conversation took place, meaning those participating in the conversation had first hand knowledge of events that wouldn't occur until hours later.

The first was that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would be naming former FBI Director Robert Mueller as Special Counsel and that the White House would be "blind-sided." The second would be a MSM news report on "MF" (Michael Flynn) to which they planned to "put MF back in the news" by drawing up "a memo on Turkey," stating that "with Erdogan thugs beating protesters on the streets, it fits the news cycle."

During the beginning of the conversation it was stated that "I'm hearing Mueller, maybe by the end of the week." By the end of the conversation, someone with a little more knowledge said "RM is happening tonight," to which the original person that mentioned Mueller by name, says "Tonight. F*ck. Quicker than I thought."

Screen shots below, but first a couple points as to the timeline. The news of Mueller did not hit the news until 6 pm ET on May 17, 2017 ( CBS News ) and 7:32 pm ( ABC News ), both of which time stamp their articles, which was 3 1/2 hours after the first mention in the chat log, and 3 hours after the second person said "RM is happening tonight."

The second point is that the New York Times article on Michael Flynn and Turkey, and follow ups by other organizations like McClatchy , weren't published until 7:27 pm on Wednesday.

Parciat test recovered fromt he image (see the original article for the fuill text)

Dooku joined the group.

Dooku: RR isn't taking shit., and he knows our friends have stuff on him
Dooku: I'm hearing Mueller, maybe by the end of the week

SevernS: May 17 at 2: 37 pm

Hearing that too.. WH will be blind-sided. Let's put MF back in the news? Can have S draw up
memo on Turkey With Erdogan thugs beating protesters in streets, it fits news cycle, and I'm
sure we'll need a few more 'memos'' down the road. Good practice :-)

Huck

I'm in. S. you in here? Our friends in NY still have secure connection set up waiting

Roger

MF was mentioned in company group too... Evidently their work on the limey is paying off.

Roger

MF was mentioned in company group too... Evidently their work on the limey is paying off.

Dooku

Paying off how?

Dooku

Getting to him?

Timelines aside, there are a number of other references that line up with the constant leaks by the Deep State to the MSM.

For example, the reference in the log above, to how their work on "MF" was paying off, saying he is "scared sh*tless," then the one that calls himself "Roger" stating "didn't AEWP mention it when we gave him that tape."

Coincidentally, the original report on Michael Flynn, in February 2017, detailing his conversation with the Russian ambassador to the United States, before Trump took office, was published by the Washington Post, with one of the writers listed as "Adam Entous." Is that the "AE" that is one of the Deep States "carrier pigeons?"

Another highly interesting reference is to the "Limey," where the person listed as "Huck, states "our carrier pigeon said in debrief that they said something along the lines of "No wonder no one in our business has called the Limey out, what's the point when you all keep bringing us great stuff? It actually helps our pageviews when she gets all of her minions first up with dumb sh*t first'."

According to The Third Estate New Group, who broke this story, the Limey reference could be to "Louise Mensch," who just happens to be the one of the two people that put out the bogus report that there had been a sealed indictment issued against President Trump, just last week, and who also has been given space at the New York Times for op-eds.

Another thing that caught my eye was the reference to a "Camp Eagle," to which the user Roger called an "asset." In the intelligence community an "asset" someone "within organizations or countries being spied upon who provide information for an outside spy. They are sometimes referred to as agents, and in law enforcement parlance, as confidential informants, or "CIs" for short." (Source)

Third Estate also claims they have contacted the person that released these screen shots, who said that while five people participated int he conversations, there were 13 present in the message group.

ANP has also reached out to the dark web .onion email address "FreshCamel" posted on the pastebin account, but have not heard back from him by the time of publishing, but we will update if we do receive a response.

BOTTOM LINE

While anybody in the intelligence community could be leaking to the press, the specific knowledge of Rod Rosenstein tapping Robert Mueller as Special Counsel, would have been known to only a short list of people within the DOJ, and Mueller himself of course.

Since the information aligned so well with actual events that happened after the conversation took place, this lends considerable credence to the veracity of the Third Estate claim that they "independently reviewed and verified these screenshots and other information provided by "FreshCamel."

This is a well planned coup attempt against not just president Trump, but against every single voter and supporter that fought to get him elected.

Last, but not least, at the top of the first screen shot, it says "Palpatine's Revenge" as the name of the chat..... which appears to be a reference to a Star Wars character, which has "has become a widely recognized popular culture symbol of evil, sinister deception, dictatorship, tyranny, and the subversion of democracy," according to Wikipedia.

[Jan 27, 2018] Ukraine, Syria, Russiagate, the Media, and the Risk of Nuclear War by Robert Roth

Notable quotes:
"... London Review of Books, ..."
"... at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack ..."
"... Return to Moscow ..."
"... The demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia is where the neocons and the liberal interventionists most significantly come together. The U.S. media's approach to Russia is now virtually 100 percent propaganda. For instance, the full story of the infamous Magnitsky case cannot be told in the West, nor can the objective reality of the Ukrane coup in 2014 . The American people and the West in general are carefully shielded from hearing the "other side of the story." Indeed to even suggest that there is another side to the story makes you a "Putin apologist" or "Kremlin stooge." ..."
Jan 27, 2018 | www.unz.com

The claim of Russian meddling in the US election has brought US-Russia relations to what may be an all-time low, substantially contributing to the near-universal demonization of Russian president Vladimir Putin and of Russia itself in virtually all major media, with little or no discussion of the supposed evidence for the claim. A stellar exception is the London Review of Books, which published a critically important essay by Rutgers University professor Jackson Lears in the January 4, 2018 issue. Titled "What We Don't Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking," the article is an excellent overview and analysis of many of the issues the title suggests.

The claim of Russian meddling in the election remains to this day evidence-free, although you would never know that from the treatment of the topic in the mainstream media. As Professor Lears observes:

Like any orthodoxy worth its salt, the religion of the Russian hack depends not on evidence but on ex cathedra pronouncements on the part of authoritative institutions and their overlords. Its scriptural foundation is a confused and largely fact-free 'assessment' produced last January by a small number of 'hand-picked' analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. The claims of the last were made with only 'moderate' confidence. The label Intelligence Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of unanimity, given that only three of the 16 US intelligence agencies contributed to the report. And indeed the assessment itself contained this crucial admission: 'Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation and precedents.' Yet the assessment has passed into the media imagination as if it were unassailable fact, allowing journalists to assume what has yet to be proved. In doing so they serve as mouthpieces for the intelligence agencies, or at least for those 'hand-picked' analysts.

But although Professor Lears refers to the reports of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity in his discussion of "Russian hacking," it seems clear there must have been a leak, not a hack, because "the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack ." ("Was the 'Russian Hack' An Inside Job?", July 25, 2017, https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/07/25/was-the-russian-hack-an-inside-job/ .)

In any case, definitive claims about who was responsible (assuming, purely arguendo , it was a hack) face the fact that, according to Ray McGovern and William S. Binney, two members of VIPS,

On March 31, 2017, WikiLeaks released original CIA documents [the "Vault 7" trove of CIA documents ] -- ignored by mainstream media -- showing that the agency had created a program allowing it to break into computers and servers and make it look like others did it by leaving telltale signs like Cyrillic markings, for example. ("Trumped-up Claims Against Trump," May 17, 2017, http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-trump-russia-phony-20170517-story.html ).

McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years; Binney worked for NSA for 36 years, was the agency's technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and reporting, and created many of the collection systems still used by NSA.

In other words, as Russian president Vladimir Putin has explained,

today's technology is such that the final address can be masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one will be able to understand the origin of that address. And, vice versa, it is possible to set up any entity or any individual [so] that everyone will think that they are the exact source of that attack. (Valdimir Putin's televised interview on NBC (June 4, 2017), by NBC News' Megyn Kelly, text published on the website of the President of Russia, June 5, 2017.) [9]

Demonization of Putin and Russia

The demonization of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Russia itself is just part, albeit the most dangerous part, of a disinformation campaign flowing from the mainstream media. I don't propose to present a full treatment of the subject here. But in broad outline, it's my understanding that when the Cold War ended in 1991, Russian president Boris Yeltsin accepted the advice of Western neoliberal planners and dismantled much of the Russian "safety net," with the result that the Russian economy tanked and millions of people faced terrific hardship.

Vladimir Putin has been attempting to repair that situation, and his initial success is part of the reason for his popularity in Russia. That understanding comes from a number of articles I've read over the years, but primarily from Tony Kevin's book Return to Moscow , mentioned above. I'm hardly an expert on internal Russian politics. But I've read many of the extensive public statements Mr. Putin has made since 2007, and with my primary concern being his role in international relations and with respect to the control of Russia's nuclear arsenal, he strikes me as a statesman. [10] . Yet as investigative journalist Robert Parry observes,

The demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia is where the neocons and the liberal interventionists most significantly come together. The U.S. media's approach to Russia is now virtually 100 percent propaganda. For instance, the full story of the infamous Magnitsky case cannot be told in the West, nor can the objective reality of the Ukrane coup in 2014 . The American people and the West in general are carefully shielded from hearing the "other side of the story." Indeed to even suggest that there is another side to the story makes you a "Putin apologist" or "Kremlin stooge."

Western journalists now apparently see it as their patriotic duty to hide key facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia. Ironically, many "liberals" who cut their teeth on skepticism about the Cold War and the bogus justifications for the Vietnam War now insist that we must all accept whatever the U.S. intelligence community feeds us, even if we're told to accept the assertions on faith. [11] .

One result is a needless heightening of the dangers and risks outlined in this article.

[Jan 27, 2018] "Fancy Bear" and "Cozy Bear" are names created by Crowdstrike.

Notable quotes:
"... "Inevitably there were questions about the strange names his company had given the Russian hackers. As it happened, "Fancy Bear" and "Cozy Bear" were part of a coding system Alperovitch had created. Animals signified the hackers' country of origin: Russians were bears, Chinese were pandas, Iranians were kittens, and North Koreans were named for the chollima, a mythical winged horse. By company tradition, the analyst who discovers a new hacker gets to choose the first part of the nickname. Cozy Bear got its nickname because the letters coz appeared in its malware code. Fancy Bear, meanwhile, used malware that included the word Sofacy, which reminded the analyst who found it of the Iggy Azalea song "Fancy." " ..."
Jan 27, 2018 | theconservativetreehouse.com

V , January 27, 2018 at 8:49 pm

My goodness, what a farce this muh Russia hoax is! I'm sure you're all familiar with Adam Carter's Guccifer 2.0: Game Over exposing Crowdstrike.

Besides the wonderful research linked above, here's a very quick retort one can use to knock out the Dutch intel story (see bold):

In this 10-24-16 puff piece by Esquire on Crowdstrike, we find a nugget – "Fancy Bear" and "Cozy Bear" are names created by Crowdstrike . The purported Russian hackers do not call themselves that. It's Crowdstrike's name for them!!! It's become so used by know-nothing "experts" in the media that people believe that's what the hackers call themselves.

So, how did Dutch intel know anything about those names – the Russians aren't as stupid as CNN* to put those names in their coding!

Excerpt from Esquire article:

"Inevitably there were questions about the strange names his company had given the Russian hackers. As it happened, "Fancy Bear" and "Cozy Bear" were part of a coding system Alperovitch had created. Animals signified the hackers' country of origin: Russians were bears, Chinese were pandas, Iranians were kittens, and North Koreans were named for the chollima, a mythical winged horse. By company tradition, the analyst who discovers a new hacker gets to choose the first part of the nickname. Cozy Bear got its nickname because the letters coz appeared in its malware code. Fancy Bear, meanwhile, used malware that included the word Sofacy, which reminded the analyst who found it of the Iggy Azalea song "Fancy." "
__________

* CNN The Russian Connection June 2017 video – at 19:00 – 19:11 shows fake computer screen with the words "Fancy Bear" and "Cozy Bear" and commentary by Hultquist, former senior US Intel Analyst. CNN didn't have Crowdstrike people presenting that screen; they'd know better.

The whole video is one piece of amateur propaganda laughable puerile piece of .

[Jan 27, 2018] Speaking of questionable narratives: The Dutch are throwing a pathetic lifeline of slippery dental floss to Obama and Hillary. Won't work.

"Fancy Bear" and "Cozy Bear" are names created by Crowdstrike.
Notable quotes:
"... I'm formerly a VP level IT security expert. The mickey mouse audit Crowdstrike did on the DNC server reads like a port-scan-log for any old box on the internet. So, this "Dutch surprise" is garbage, as is the report from Crowdstrike. That server was a victim of a LEAK, not a hack. ..."
"... IP's from all over the world scan for open and vulnerable ports 24/7/365. The best hackers don't use an IP you'll ever see unless they WANT you to see it – or it is a quick hit-and-run. They allege the activity was going for "years". ..."
"... The Dutch are throwing a pathetic lifeline of slippery dental floss to Obama and Hillary. Won't work. ..."
Jan 27, 2018 | theconservativetreehouse.com

IpsoPhakto (@Mcschweety) ,

January 26, 2018 at 8:15 pm
Speaking of questionable narratives: http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/370857-dutch-spy-agencies-passed-fbi-crucial-intel-on-russian-election-hacking

This is the next desperate grasp at straws. They put a pic of Trump next to Putin – with no reference regarding Trump at all. Also, funny how this alleged activity is going on while Obama is in charge of the FBI and Debbie Wasserman Shultz has a gang of Pakistani "IT Admins" savaging congressional computers / servers.

I'm formerly a VP level IT security expert. The mickey mouse audit Crowdstrike did on the DNC server reads like a port-scan-log for any old box on the internet. So, this "Dutch surprise" is garbage, as is the report from Crowdstrike. That server was a victim of a LEAK, not a hack.

IP's from all over the world scan for open and vulnerable ports 24/7/365. The best hackers don't use an IP you'll ever see unless they WANT you to see it – or it is a quick hit-and-run. They allege the activity was going for "years".

The Dutch are throwing a pathetic lifeline of slippery dental floss to Obama and Hillary. Won't work.

Ziiggii , January 26, 2018 at 8:36 pm
interesting that you should bring up that Hill article because Devlin retweeted this today:

[Jan 27, 2018] Dutch agencies provide crucial intel about Russia s interference in US-elections

Dutch media is trying to help the Russiagate plotters. nice...
Notable quotes:
"... Spying is like a recursive algorithm. Next Russia will announce that they ' spied on the Dutch spies who were spying on them '. Maybe we can skip the ' motivations ': they are all spying on each other, all the time, it is their job description. ..."
Jan 26, 2018 | www.volkskrant.nl

It's the summer of 2014. A hacker from the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD has penetrated the computer network of a university building next to the Red Square in Moscow, oblivious to the implications. One year later, from the AIVD headquarters in Zoetermeer, he and his colleagues witness Russian hackers launching an attack on the Democratic Party in the United States. The AIVD hackers had not infiltrated just any building; they were in the computer network of the infamous Russian hacker group Cozy Bear. And unbeknownst to the Russians, they could see everything.

That's how the AIVD becomes witness to the Russian hackers harassing and penetrating the leaders of the Democratic Party, transferring thousands of emails and documents. It won't be the last time they alert their American counterparts. And yet, it will be months before the United States realize what this warning means: that with these hacks the Russians have interfered with the American elections. And the AIVD hackers have seen it happening before their very eyes.

The Dutch access provides crucial evidence of the Russian involvement in the hacking of the Democratic Party, according to six American and Dutch sources who are familiar with the material, but wish to remain anonymous. It's also grounds for the FBI to start an investigation into the influence of the Russian interference on the election race between the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and the Republican candidate Donald Trump. 'High confidence'

After Trump's election in May 2017, this investigation was taken over by special prosecutor Robert Mueller. While it also aims to uncover contacts between Trump's presidential campaign and the Russian government, the prime objective is bringing to light the Russian interference with the elections. An attempt to undermine the democratic process, and an act that caused tensions between the two superpowers to rise to new heights, bringing about a string of diplomatic acts of revenge.

Three American intelligence services state with 'high confidence' that the Kremlin was behind the attack on the Democratic Party. That certainty, sources say, is derived from the AIVD hackers having had access to the office-like space in the center of Moscow for years. This is so exceptional that the directors of the foremost American intelligence services are all too happy to receive the Dutchmen. They provide technical evidence for the attack on the Democratic Party, and it becomes apparent that they know a lot more.

Anonymous Disclaimer says: January 26, 2018 at 8:16 am GMT • 200 Words
Russian Meddling in Muh Elections (more like hacking the Obama's e-mail) bizzaredly confirmed by the Dutch!

Dutch agencies provide crucial intel about Russia's interference in US-elections

(This is not a joke)
(Why is this being announced now)
(This is going to run and run)
(Is this even real, sounds quite fishy)
(Navy CSI levels of Drama!!)

via

Matryoshki of news: Tech giants flash code to Russia, Dutch hack Kremlin spies, and more

According to de Volkskrant, AIVD in 2014 had established surveillance on Cozy Bear, the Russian state hacking group, and observed its efforts to attack the US Democratic Party's email systems and American government servers.

AIVD was, we're told, able to compromise security cameras surrounding the building used by the Cozy Bear crew, to look out for known Russian spies entering the joint. The Euro snoops duly tipped off the FBI that something was afoot.

"Hackers from the Dutch intelligence service AIVD have provided the FBI with crucial information about Russian interference with the American elections," reports the Dutch daily newspaper.

"For years, AIVD had access to the infamous Russian hacker group Cozy Bear AIVD [became] witness to the Russian hackers harassing and penetrating the leaders of the Democratic Party, transferring thousands of emails and documents.

"It won't be the last time they alert their American counterparts. And yet, it will be months before the United States realize what this warning means: that with these hacks the Russians have interfered with the American elections. And the AIVD hackers have seen it happening before their very eyes."

yurivku , January 26, 2018 at 2:00 pm GMT
@jilles dykstra

But, in my opinion, trying to prevent the election of war loving Hillary, who can blame the Russians ?

Nobody, but it' still a bullshit.

Beckow , January 26, 2018 at 7:55 pm GMT

@jilles dykstra

today our secret service made public that they spied on Russian interference in the USA elections

Spying is like a recursive algorithm. Next Russia will announce that they ' spied on the Dutch spies who were spying on them '. Maybe we can skip the ' motivations ': they are all spying on each other, all the time, it is their job description.

I am still waiting for someone to explain to us how is ' interference ' or ' meddling ' different from having an opinion about an election. And we all know that Americans (or Dutch) have never, ever, expressed any opinions about other countries' elections. Right. My democracy promotion is your meddling.

It is bad when you kill my cow. It is very good when I kill your cow. Monkey reasoning level?

[Jan 27, 2018] Is Trump Truly 'Insane'

Jan 27, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Susan Dawkins January 26, 2018 at 4:44 pm

The author has made several errors. He assumes that discussing the possibility of a psychiatric disorder making Trump unfit means proving insanity. In reality, the most likely disorder does not meet the legal definition of insanity, but does make a person incapable of competently or faithfully performing the duties of office.

The suggestion that this is some type of superficial soviet style political maneuver ignores the fact that good diagnosis is done nowadays based to a large extent on observed behavior, history, and the reports of third parties. This is especially important when the individual shows signs of being a pathological liar. In these cases, information gained in a face-to-face interview may be virtually useless.

The condition that Mr. Trump should be assessed for is Antisocial Personality Disorder with Psychopathic Features. (Alternative PDOs in DSM-5, pg. 761-765 Some of the signs and symptoms which make such a person unfit for office include-
 Dishonesty and fraudulence
 Embellishment or fabrication when relating events
 Anger or irritability in response to minor slights and insults
 Mean, nasty, or vengeful behavior
 Boredom proneness and thoughtless initiation of activities to counter boredom
 Lack of concern for one's limitations
 Acting on the spur of the moment in response to immediate stimuli
 Acting on a momentary basis without a plan or consideration of outcomes
 Disregard for -- and failure to honor­–financial and other obligations or commitments

No one imagined that someone with this possible disorder would ever make it to the White House, however, the 25th Amendment provides an avenue for him to temporarily be removed from power while he can undergo proper evaluation by military psychiatrists and neurologists. This is all mental health professionals are requesting. These individuals can do tremendous damage when give power over others.

karsten , says: January 26, 2018 at 8:56 pm
"The condition that Mr. Trump should be assessed for is Antisocial Personality Disorder with Psychopathic Features. (Alternative PDOs in DSM-5, pg. 761-765 Some of the signs and symptoms which make such a person unfit for office include-
 Dishonesty and fraudulence
 Embellishment or fabrication when relating events
 Anger or irritability in response to minor slights and insults
 Mean, nasty, or vengeful behavior
 Boredom proneness and thoughtless initiation of activities to counter boredom
 Lack of concern for one's limitations
 Acting on the spur of the moment in response to immediate stimuli
 Acting on a momentary basis without a plan or consideration of outcomes
 Disregard for -- and failure to honor­–financial and other obligations or commitments "

An Orwellian comment like the above just proves the point of the article, and then some. As if there isn't anyone in the world who couldn't be shoehorned to fit such a diagnoses, with a crafty narrative reconfiguring of their actions.

If there are indeed any witch doctors (excuse me, "psychiatrists") pathologizing people on the basis of a laughable list like the above, then I consider them to be far more undeserving of the power they have, and far more toxic to society, than Trump in any of the actions or utterances that he has made.

Peter Van Buren , says: January 26, 2018 at 9:04 pm
Susan Dawkins, who claims my article has mistakes, didn't read it. Her amateur diagnosis that Trump has "Antisocial Personality Disorder with Psychopathic Features" does not make him UNABLE to be president, which is what the 25th Amendment is for.

She claims he is UNFIT. Fitness is judged primarily by the people, who elected him. If a president somehow becomes unfit while in office it must be because of "high crimes and misdemeanors." That's the only reason the Constitution provides for. And impeachment is the only answer.

Sorry kiddies, the 25th is a not-over for an election Rachael Maddow doesn't like.

karsten , says: January 26, 2018 at 9:07 pm
This is all mental health professionals are requesting."

"All"? That's rich.

Indeed, is that all that they're requesting? My goodness -- what a modest request! -- a request merely to have complete veto power over America's entire citizenry, in terms of who is allowed to be President; a request merely to be able to remove any President who is not to their liking.

In short, a mere request to be able to legally perform a coup d'etat at will, to overturn any election that does not yield their desired result.

How gratified we all should be that their request for power is such a small one. Imagine if they asked for something just a bit more ambitious. "Omnipotence" comes to mind.

Dale , says: January 26, 2018 at 9:38 pm
Trump is the one who messes with the very fundamentals of our democracy. Remember his voting commission and the crap they wanted? Force states to provide all the 2016 voter information to his CosaNostra buddies. And remember when they wanted all Americans to fill out a registration form similar to the one used when purchasing a gun? They said they wanted to make sure only those qualified were on the voter registration lists.

[Jan 27, 2018] Today press in US is a huge tabloid rug

Jan 27, 2018 | www.unz.com

Ilyana_Rozumova , January 26, 2018 at 7:25 pm GMT

These terms must be immediately banned from US political discourse:

These are totally irresponsible statements. There must be absolute responsibility of press. There must be also absolute transparency of press. Today press in US is a tabloid rug. New York times and Washington post should be fired and replaced with people from this website.

[Jan 27, 2018] Tech Companies See No Evidence of Russian Influence in US Elections by Jason Ditz

Jan 27, 2018 | news.antiwar.com

Facebook Accuses Russia of Creating Events, But Unsure if They Took Place

A written statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee from Google, Twitter, and Facebook revealed that they have found absolutely no evidence of any attempt by Russia to influence any US votes within the past year (2017) and were unaware of any state-sponsored attempts to interfere at all.

With Congress increasingly desperate to turn up something that they can pin on Russia interference-wise, there is growing pressure on major technology companies to dig through their logs and try to find something conceivably Russia-related.

Facebook has appeared to be the most eager to come up with something, having claimed that 129 "events" were created by people they suspect of being in league with the Russians, though later conceding that they had no information if any of those events ever actually took place.

Facebook did, however, claim an "insignificant" overlap between the putative Russian and the Trump campaign. That's somewhat surprising, as oftentimes attempts to label someone a secret Russian hinge heavily on them being perceived as pro-Trump in such after the fact investigations.
Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz

[Jan 26, 2018] Warns The Russiagate Stakes Are Extreme by Paul Craig Roberts

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Many Americans do not seem to understand what is at stake. What America is confronted with is a coup conspiracy organized by top officials of the Obama Justice Department, FBI, CIA, the Hillary DNC, and the presstitute media to overturn the result of a democratic election and remove the president from office. The basis of the coup is a fake dossier purchased for money that consists of unsupported allegations against Trump and that was used to obtain warrants from the FISA count to spy on Trump and various associates hoping to find something that can be used against Trump. Regardless, the false allegations could be fed to the CIA's media assets and used to create a scandal requiring a special prosecutor to investigate Russiagate. ..."
"... If the highest reaches of the police state agencies can get away with an attempted or successful coup against the president of the United States, then that is the complete end of democracy and all accountability in government. The House, Senate, and judiciary will become as powerless as the Roman senate under the caesars. We will live under a dictatorship ruled by police state agencies. ..."
"... This is not minor stuff. This goes to the heart of whether any form of liberty will exist. We all know that the ability of the people to hold government accountable is not assured by democracy. However, there is no prospect of holding government accountable if it is a police state, a road that the US has been going down for some time. The audacious coup attempt against President Trump is our opportunity to stop the momentum to a police state. ..."
"... When Admiral Rodgers, director of the National Security Agency, discovered that the FBI and DOJ were misusing the spy system for partisan political reasons, he let it be known that he was going to inform the FISA court. This caused the FBI and DOJ to rush to the court in advance and confess to "mistakes" and to promise to tighten up procedures so as not to make mistakes in the future. It is these "mistakes" and corrections that the FISA court document reveals. ..."
"... In other words, the information already exists in the pubic domain that proves that Russiagate was a conspiracy organized for the purpose of bringing down the elected president of the United States ..."
"... A case can be made that it would be just as well if the coup succeeds as it would bring an end to Washington's cover as the government of a great democracy with liberty and justice for all. Most other governments, and one would hope certainly the Russian and Chinese governments, would see the coup as America's final transition into a police state and give up their utopian ideas of reaching accommodation with Washington. The constraints on Washington's ability to bully the world would be greatly strengthened by the universal perception that the government of the United States had devolved into a police state. ..."
Jan 26, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

The Republicans' delay in releasing the summary of the House Intelligence Committee's Russiagate investigation is giving weight to the presstitutes' claim that the report is not being released, because it is a hack attempt at a Trump cover-up that is not believable. Only Republicans are stupid enough to put themselves in such a situation.

Readers ask me why the summary memo is not released if it is real. There must be some reasons besides the stupidity of Republicans. Yes, that is so. Among the many reasons that might be blocking release are:

1) Republicans are very national security conscious. They don't want to provide precedents for the release of classified information.

2) Many Republican congressional districts host installations of the military/security complex. Upsetting a large employer and directing campaign financing to a challenger is a big consideration.

3) The George W. Bush/Dick Cheney regime was a neoconservative regime. One consequence is that Republicans are influenced by neoconservatives who stress the alleged "Russian threat."

4) The Israel Lobby can unseat any member of the House and Senate. The Israel Lobby is allied with the neoconservatives and this alliance intends to keep the US militarily active against perceived threats to Israel's hegemony in the Middle East and against Russia, which supports Syria and Iran, countries perceived as threats by Israel.

5) Many Republicans are themselves invested in false Russiagate allegations against Trump and would like to replace him with Pence. Other Republicans believe that Trump is undermining Washington's expensively-purchased foreign alliances and, thereby, undermining US power.

Many Americans do not seem to understand what is at stake. What America is confronted with is a coup conspiracy organized by top officials of the Obama Justice Department, FBI, CIA, the Hillary DNC, and the presstitute media to overturn the result of a democratic election and remove the president from office. The basis of the coup is a fake dossier purchased for money that consists of unsupported allegations against Trump and that was used to obtain warrants from the FISA count to spy on Trump and various associates hoping to find something that can be used against Trump. Regardless, the false allegations could be fed to the CIA's media assets and used to create a scandal requiring a special prosecutor to investigate Russiagate.

Once the investigation was under way, the presstitutes kept the scandal alive hoping to convince enough Americans that Trump must have done something -- "where there is smoke, there is fire" -- that justifies his removal. It worked against Richard Nixon, but not against Ronald Reagan, and Trump is no Reagan. If the highest reaches of the police state agencies can get away with an attempted or successful coup against the president of the United States, then that is the complete end of democracy and all accountability in government. The House, Senate, and judiciary will become as powerless as the Roman senate under the caesars. We will live under a dictatorship ruled by police state agencies.

Many Americans say they don't need the House Intelligence Report, because they don't believe the Russiagate BS in the first place. They miss the point. They need the report, because those responsible for this attempt at a coup must be identified, charged, and prosecuted for their act of high treason.

This is not minor stuff. This goes to the heart of whether any form of liberty will exist. We all know that the ability of the people to hold government accountable is not assured by democracy. However, there is no prospect of holding government accountable if it is a police state, a road that the US has been going down for some time. The audacious coup attempt against President Trump is our opportunity to stop the momentum to a police state.

Despite my recent postings, many people do not understand that the somewhat redacted FISA court document that has been declassified and released and explained by myself, William Binney, and former US Attorney Joe di Genova contains admissions by the FBI and DOJ that they improperly spied and obtained warrants from the court under false pretenses. In other words, we have it on the authority of the FISA court itself that the FBI and DOJ have admitted to the court their transgressions. When Department of Justice (sic) congressional liaison Stephen Boyd says the DOJ is "unaware of any wrongdoing," he is lying through his teeth. The DOJ has already confessed its wrongdoing to the FISA court.

(See Lendman on Boyd's claim that releasing the memo would harm national security and ongoing investigations. This is always the claim made when government has to cover up its crimes. )

When Admiral Rodgers, director of the National Security Agency, discovered that the FBI and DOJ were misusing the spy system for partisan political reasons, he let it be known that he was going to inform the FISA court. This caused the FBI and DOJ to rush to the court in advance and confess to "mistakes" and to promise to tighten up procedures so as not to make mistakes in the future. It is these "mistakes" and corrections that the FISA court document reveals.

In other words, the information already exists in the pubic domain that proves that Russiagate was a conspiracy organized for the purpose of bringing down the elected president of the United States.

A case can be made that it would be just as well if the coup succeeds as it would bring an end to Washington's cover as the government of a great democracy with liberty and justice for all. Most other governments, and one would hope certainly the Russian and Chinese governments, would see the coup as America's final transition into a police state and give up their utopian ideas of reaching accommodation with Washington. The constraints on Washington's ability to bully the world would be greatly strengthened by the universal perception that the government of the United States had devolved into a police state.


holdbuysell Jan 26, 2018 12:18 AM Permalink

Why Russia is the enemy is found in the historical record that Collins lays out in a series of articles.

https://philosophyofmetrics.com/category/crown-beast-series/

[Jan 25, 2018] Russiagate as Kafka 2.0

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Someone must have been telling tales about Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested ..."
Jan 25, 2018 | www.unz.com

"Someone must have been telling tales about Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested."

Thus begins The Trial , Franz Kafka's 1925 work, in which Joseph K., ordinary bank employee, is arrested at his home by mysterious agents and notified of legal proceedings against him.

He is not informed of the offense or crime of which he would allegedly be guilty – he is only given to understand that he must have broken some unknown law – and is notified of a summons to court a certain day, without knowing the exact time or place.

The protagonist is dragged into a completely absurd circle, wavering between inspectors, bailiffs, lawyers and judges, and not knowing at any time for what or against whom he must defend himself.

He is finally executed by three distinguished executioners who, with "odious politeness", plant a butcher's knife in his heart.

[Jan 24, 2018] Brazen Plot To Exonerate Hillary Clinton And Frame Trump Unraveling, Says Former Fed Prosecutor

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The FBI used to spy on Russians. This time they spied on us. what this story is about - a brazen plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton from a clear violation of the law with regard to the way she handled classified information with her classified server. Absolutely a crime, absolutely a felony . It's about finding out why - as the Inspector General is doing at the department of justice - why Comey and the senior DOJ officials conducted a fake criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton . Followed none of the regular rules, gave her every break in the book, immunized all kinds of people, allowed the destruction of evidence, no grand jury, no subpoenas, no search warrant. That's not an investigation, that's a Potemkin village. It's a farce. ..."
"... DiGenova condemned the FBI for working so closely with the controversial Fusion GPS, a political hit squad paid by the DNC and Clinton campaign to create and spread the discredited Steele dossier about President Donald Trump . Without a justifiable law enforcement or national security reason, he says, the FBI "created false facts so that they could get surveillance warrants. Those are all crimes. " He adds, using official FISA-702 "queries" and surveillance was done "to create a false case against a candidate, and then a president. " - Daily Caller ..."
"... This feels like the most significant American political scandal that has taken place in my lifetime, and I was born in the 60's. ..."
"... The entire collection program needs to be shut down, the data deleted and the program replaced by the one William Binney originally created that collected and analyzed only metadata unless a warrant is obtained first. The current program is clearly a violation of our 4th Amendment rights even without NDAA section 702. ..."
"... He forgot to mention Weissman: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-15/fbi-probe-russian-uranium-bri ..."
"... " unauthorized disclosures of raw intelligence on Americans]. This is stunning stuff. " "Stunning" only for the willfully deluded among us. ..."
"... Pretty soon, the MSM is gonna have to do a false flag ..."
"... Is he gonna sit there and let these bastards have another shot at him? ..."
Jan 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

In this highly recommended 30 minute interview with Joe diGenova, the former Special Counsel who went after both the Teamsters and former NY Governor Elliot Spitzer, paints a very clear picture of collusion is painted between the Obama administration, the FBI, the Clinton campaign and opposition research firm Fusion GPS.

From the Daily Caller :

The FBI used to spy on Russians. This time they spied on us. what this story is about - a brazen plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton from a clear violation of the law with regard to the way she handled classified information with her classified server. Absolutely a crime, absolutely a felony . It's about finding out why - as the Inspector General is doing at the department of justice - why Comey and the senior DOJ officials conducted a fake criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton . Followed none of the regular rules, gave her every break in the book, immunized all kinds of people, allowed the destruction of evidence, no grand jury, no subpoenas, no search warrant. That's not an investigation, that's a Potemkin village. It's a farce.

And everybody knew it was a farce. The problem was, she didn't win. And because she didn't wain, the farce became a very serious opera. It wasn't a comic opera anymore, it was a tragic opera. And she was going to be the focus.

What this is about, this is about a lavabo, a cleansing of FBI and the upper echelons of the Department of Justice.

We're going to discover that the Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, her deputy Sally Yates, the head of the national security division John Carlin, Bruce Ohr and other senior DOJ officials, and regrettably, lying attorneys . People who were senior career civil servants violated the law, perhaps committed crimes, and covered up crimes by a presidential candidate - but more than that, they tried to frame an incoming president with a false Russian conspiracy that never existed, and they knew it, and they plotted to ruin him as a candidate and then destroy him as a president. That's why this is important. That's why connecting the dots is important.

DiGenova condemned the FBI for working so closely with the controversial Fusion GPS, a political hit squad paid by the DNC and Clinton campaign to create and spread the discredited Steele dossier about President Donald Trump . Without a justifiable law enforcement or national security reason, he says, the FBI "created false facts so that they could get surveillance warrants. Those are all crimes. " He adds, using official FISA-702 "queries" and surveillance was done "to create a false case against a candidate, and then a president. " - Daily Caller

During the interview, DiGenova holds up and references a previously unreported and heavily redacted 99-page FISA court opinion from April, 2017, which " describes systematic and on-going violations of the law [by the FBI and their contractors using unauthorized disclosures of raw intelligence on Americans]. This is stunning stuff."

NSA Admiral Mike Rodgers: An American Hero

diGenova also discusses the immense risks taken by retiring NSA director, Mike Rogers - who briefed Trump on Nov. 7, 2016 about the Obama administration's surveillance of the Trump team. The next day, the Presidental transition team was moved out of Trump tower and into the president-elect's Bedminster, NJ golf course until they could sweep for bugs.


headcase Jan 23, 2018 7:18 PM Permalink

This feels like the most significant American political scandal that has taken place in my lifetime, and I was born in the 60's.

anti-republocrat Jan 22, 2018 10:25 PM Permalink

Paul Craig Roberts says he's been too hard on the NSA. I don't think so. The FISA warrant only allowed the FBI to unmask people in surveillance the NSA is already doing on everybody. If the dirt is being collected and stored, eventually somebody will find a way to use it.

The entire collection program needs to be shut down, the data deleted and the program replaced by the one William Binney originally created that collected and analyzed only metadata unless a warrant is obtained first. The current program is clearly a violation of our 4th Amendment rights even without NDAA section 702.

Boris Badenov Jan 22, 2018 8:39 AM Permalink

He forgot to mention Weissman: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-15/fbi-probe-russian-uranium-bri

HoPewGassed Jan 22, 2018 8:34 AM Permalink

" unauthorized disclosures of raw intelligence on Americans]. This is stunning stuff. " "Stunning" only for the willfully deluded among us.

RKae Jan 22, 2018 12:12 AM Permalink

Pretty soon, the MSM is gonna have to do a false flag where they fucking blow up the sun in order to deflect from all this!

farmerbraun -> RKae Jan 22, 2018 12:37 AM Permalink

Trump has known all of this all along. The only pre-emptive move that he could make would be to declare martial law , and have the military move on the traitors. For Chrissake, look what's at stake here. Is he gonna sit there and let these bastards have another shot at him?
(Shakes head in puzzlement).

Francewhoa Jan 22, 2018 12:02 AM Permalink

Interesting article

Related to this, a former FBI agent leaked a top secret document related to the FISA Abuse Memo. Read more at:
https://www.minds.com/blog/view/801991857799499776
or
https://www.facebook.com/groups/Hillary.Clinton.Critics/permalink/16978

VideoEng_NC -> CatInTheHat Jan 22, 2018 12:02 AM Permalink

The action is happening behind the scenes, we in the John Q Public seats have to wait.

[Jan 24, 2018] Russian Bots Not Behind #ReleaseTheMemo Hasht

Jan 24, 2018 | dailycaller.com

The Daily Caller

A spokesman for the House Intelligence Committee took a shot at Democrats for pushing the false narrative.

"When Democrats demand investigations of a hashtag but find no cause for concern after the FBI loses five months' of critical evidence concerning the Strzok text messages, then someone's priorities are out of whack," Jack Langer told The Daily Caller.

[Jan 22, 2018] Ivanka Trump Told by Steve Bannon: 'You're Just Another Staffer Who Doesn't Know What You're Doing,' New Book Claims by Melina Delkic

Jan 22, 2018 | www.yahoo.com

January 22, 2018

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon once told Ivanka Trump: "You're just another staffer who doesn't know what you're doing," according to a new book.

Related: Ivanka Trump's "special place in hell" for child predators comment trolls Roy Moore rally

Bannon, who has long critiqued and clashed with Ivanka's and her husband Jared Kushner's roles in the White House, tried to put the president's daughter in her place in one instance detailed in the book.

"My daughter loves me as a dad...You love your dad. I get that. But you're just another staffer who doesn't know what you're doing," Bannon said, The Washington Post reported when it published excerpts on Monday.


The revelation is part of the latest book about life inside the White House. Howard Kurtz, host of the Fox News show Media Buzz, wrote the book Media Madness: Donald Trump, The Press, And The War Over The Truth, set to be released on January 29.

The new book, though perhaps not as sensational as the explosive tell-all Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, contains several new alleged revelations about the administration. Along with reports of the turbulent relationship between Ivanka Trump and Bannon, are claims that the president himself leaked information to journalists, that his aides referred to his behavior as "defiance disorder" and that his staff was "blindsided" when he accused former President Barack Obama of wiretapping his phones.

[Jan 22, 2018] Defiance Disorder Another new book describes chaos in Trump s White House by Ashley Parker

Beware of a strategist who watch how tigers fight in the valley from a safe top of the mountain ~ Shota Rustaveli (c. 1160-after c. 1220
"Early in the administration, Kurtz describes White House aides waking up one Saturday morning in March, confused and "blindsided," to find that Trump had -- without any evidence -- accused former president Barack Obama on Twitter of wiretapping him during the campaign." -- What a blatant lie, there are tons of evidence that this was the fact. the author desrctied himslef as an establishment stooge.
Notable quotes:
"... Early in the administration, Kurtz describes White House aides waking up one Saturday morning in March, confused and "blindsided," to find that Trump had -- without any evidence -- accused former president Barack Obama on Twitter of wiretapping him during the campaign. ..."
"... "Nobody in the White House quite knew what to do," Kurtz writes. ..."
"... Priebus watched as his phone exploded with email and text messages, according to the excerpts. "Priebus knew the staff would have to fall into line to prove the tweet correct, the opposite of the usual process of vetting proposed pronouncements," Kurtz writes. "Once the president had committed to 140 characters, he was not going to back off." ..."
Jan 21, 2018 | www.washingtonpost.com

In late July, the White House had just finished an official policy review on transgender individuals serving in the military and President Trump and his then-chief of staff, Reince Priebus, had agreed to meet in the Oval Office to discuss the four options awaiting the president in a decision memo.

But then Trump unexpectedly preempted the conversation and sent his entire administration scrambling, by tweeting out his own decision -- that the government would not allow transgender individuals to serve -- just moments later.

" 'Oh my God, he just tweeted this,' " Priebus said, according to a new book by Howard Kurtz, who hosts Fox News's "Media Buzz." There was, Kurtz writes, "no longer a need for the meeting."

The White House -- and the politerati diaspora -- has just barely stopped reeling from author Michael Wolff's account of life in Trump's West Wing, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," and now another life-in-the-White-House book is about to drop, this one from Kurtz.

Like the books that came before it, and almost certainly like the ones still to come, Kurtz's book, "Media Madness: Donald Trump, The Press, And The War Over The Truth," offers a portrait of a White House riven by chaos, with aides scrambling to respond to the president's impulses and writing policy to fit his tweets, according to excerpts obtained by The Washington Post.

Kurtz, who worked at The Post from 1981 to 2010, writes that Trump's aides even privately coined a term for Trump's behavior -- "Defiance Disorder." The phrase refers to Trump's seeming compulsion to do whatever it is his advisers are most strongly urging against, leaving his team to handle the fallout.

The book officially hits stores Jan. 29.

Early in the administration, Kurtz describes White House aides waking up one Saturday morning in March, confused and "blindsided," to find that Trump had -- without any evidence -- accused former president Barack Obama on Twitter of wiretapping him during the campaign.

"Nobody in the White House quite knew what to do," Kurtz writes.

Priebus watched as his phone exploded with email and text messages, according to the excerpts. "Priebus knew the staff would have to fall into line to prove the tweet correct, the opposite of the usual process of vetting proposed pronouncements," Kurtz writes. "Once the president had committed to 140 characters, he was not going to back off."

... ... ...

[Jan 22, 2018] NYT settles upon brilliant strategy for manipulating Trump Insult his intelligence by Steve Sailer

NYT is borrowing the ideas from Wolff's book...
Notable quotes:
"... The New York Times is trying to convince Trump that he is being betrayed by his staffers John Kelly and Stephen Miller ..."
"... But, his favorite NYT reporter also can't help herself from insulting Trump. ..."
Jan 22, 2018 | www.unz.com

The New York Times is trying to convince Trump that he is being betrayed by his staffers John Kelly and Stephen Miller:

A President Not Sure of What He Wants Complicates the Shutdown Impasse
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS and MAGGIE HABERMAN JAN. 21, 2018

WASHINGTON -- When President Trump mused last year about protecting immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children, calling them "these incredible kids," aides implored him privately to stop talking about them so sympathetically.

When he batted around the idea of granting them citizenship over a Chinese dinner at the White House last year with Democratic leaders, Mr. Trump's advisers quickly drew up a list of hard-line demands to send to Capitol Hill that they said must be included in any such plan.

And twice over the past two weeks, Mr. Trump has privately told lawmakers he is eager to strike a deal to extend legal status to the so-called Dreamers, only to have his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, make clear afterward that such a compromise was not really in the offing -- unless it also included a host of stiffer immigration restrictions.

But, his favorite NYT reporter also can't help herself from insulting Trump.

... ... ...

Great strategy, NYT. The surest way to get Donald Trump to side with what you demand for the good of the Democratic Party electing a new electorate is to insult his intelligence.

Your strategy is foolproof! There's nothing Trump like more than being played for a fool. What could possibly go wrong?


YetAnotherAnon , January 22, 2018 at 12:31 pm GMT
There's a lot of media focus on Miller atm, the thrust being that Miller is Bannon* 2.0, riding on the coat tails of The Great Deal-Maker (formerly the New Hitler, but that didn't work) to push his own agenda.

They're hoping that Trump won't like a staffer getting more attention than he does and will say "you're fired". The same thing will happen to any Trump appointment who looks like they want to implement the platform Trump ran on.

* AFAIK Bannon wasn't actually doing that, but it's the Narrative.

PS – BBC only ever quote Flake or Ryan when they want a "Republican" view.

dearieme , January 22, 2018 at 12:54 pm GMT
OT: while y'all rightly shake with apprehension at what the next skullduggery from the FBI, CIA, or NSA might be, cheer yourselves up by contemplating the incompetence of the people involved. They're such mugs that a 15-year old can dance rings around their security procedures.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5290787/Boy-15-posed-head-CIA-secret-files.html

Still, it doesn't seem to inhibit the FBI from murdering US citizens, staging a slow-motion coup against a President, or manfully saving the USA from a terrorist attack on 9/11. Hang on; the latter would have called for competence

[Jan 22, 2018] Twitter looks stupid accusing account started in 2017 of Russian Propaganda during 2016 election

Jan 22, 2018 | theduran.com

Last week, Twitter sent out a creepy email to over 677,775 users letting them know that the platform was actively working to understand "Russian-linked activities" that took place during the 2016 presidential election.

Twitter claimed that they had identified and suspended a "number of accounts that were potentially connected to propaganda efforts by a Russian government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency [IRA]".

One of the 677,775 users to receive the message was "Liquid IQ", the only problem is that the Liquid IQ twitter account was created in July 2017. That is a full eight months after the US elections.

The 2017 Liquid IQ account was definitely not spreading Russian propaganda during the 2016 US presidential election on twitter, unless Liquid IQ magically found a way to follow "Russian trolls" on twitter without having an actual twitter profile.

[Jan 20, 2018] Struggle for the Presidency

Notable quotes:
"... the recent influx of attack dog journalism has resulted in less investigative reporting and a misguided definition of news, both of which have serious, negative implications. ..."
"... All the President's Men ..."
"... The non-news news norm also includes what Larry Sabato referred to as attack dog journalism. That is, "the press coverage attending any political event or circumstance where a critical mass of journalists leap to cover the same embarrassing or scandalous subject and pursue it intensely, often excessively, and sometimes uncontrollably" (Sabato, 1991, p. 6). For instance, Obama's "you didn't build that" remark was immediately removed from context and spread by the mass media (so much so that the GOP then referenced it in their "We Built It" slogan at the Republican National Convention). His minor gaffe matters much less than his policy regarding taxes and social services. Even so, the media coverage did not focus on what his point was in the speech in which his misspoke. Rather, the attention was placed on the comment itself. The news should be what the President said he plans to do if he remains in office, not the poor wording choice. ..."
"... All the President's Men ..."
Jan 20, 2018 | struggleforthepresidency.wordpress.com

Journalists' role in the political process should be to serve as intermediaries between politicians and the public. The average American does not have the means by which to get the news directly from the White House and other bureaucrats. Therefore, there are reporters, who exist to provide such information to the people. However, the recent influx of attack dog journalism has resulted in less investigative reporting and a misguided definition of news, both of which have serious, negative implications.

Woodward and Bernstein, as portrayed in All the President's Men , should be the heroes of every news reporter in the country. By tirelessly digging up the dirt on the Watergate, they discovered a government scandal. The pair adhered to their journalistic duty of reporting the details to the public, despite hesitation from others and a warning from Deep Throat that their lives may be in danger. They did not cease their searching once they had enough to publish a story; rather, they kept probing until they got to the bottom of things. According to lecture, their investigative journalism is indicative of a shift from lap dog journalism to watch dog journalism.

Around the 1990s, American journalism lost its watch dog affiliation. Today's reporters are rarely incited by the whispers of a government cover-up. For example, it took at least eight years for the public to learn that Iraqi detector Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi lied about weapons of mass destruction in an effort to influence Western war efforts ( http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41609536/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/curveball-i-lied-about-wmd-hasten-iraq-war/#.UFzwiVGQTE0 ). Reporters should not be expected to question every government decision. Nevertheless, when the issue at hand is a war, they should be counted upon to look into why exactly one country proposes going to war with another – reporting not only why the government is saying it is time for war, but providing what evidence they are using to authorize their decision. This is an enormous responsibility that is vital to our very democracy.

That is not to say that investigative journalism or watch dog reporting has died out (e.g., http://watchdog.org/about/ ). Rather, their admirable tactics have been subsumed by the new news norm of non-news. In an effort to attract an audience, countless news outlets have transitioned to offering non-news items as news. For instance, the top story's headline on one of Tucson's local news station's websites reads, "Donate hair this weekend to win tickets to "Disney on Ice." Another is, "Man jumps off Bronx Zoo train, mauled by tiger." While a contest and a novel story might be interesting enough for people to tune in, they are undoubtedly not the top stories of the day. One might find the protesters' overtake of an Islamist group's headquarters in Benghazi more pressing, especially considering the potential link to the recent attack at the U.S. Consulate in Libya (or perhaps Mitt Romney's tax release).

The non-news news norm also includes what Larry Sabato referred to as attack dog journalism. That is, "the press coverage attending any political event or circumstance where a critical mass of journalists leap to cover the same embarrassing or scandalous subject and pursue it intensely, often excessively, and sometimes uncontrollably" (Sabato, 1991, p. 6). For instance, Obama's "you didn't build that" remark was immediately removed from context and spread by the mass media (so much so that the GOP then referenced it in their "We Built It" slogan at the Republican National Convention). His minor gaffe matters much less than his policy regarding taxes and social services. Even so, the media coverage did not focus on what his point was in the speech in which his misspoke. Rather, the attention was placed on the comment itself. The news should be what the President said he plans to do if he remains in office, not the poor wording choice.

The trend away from watch dog journalism toward attack dog journalism, as well as the warped definition of what is considered news, have serious implications for the country as a whole. The current nature of political news coverage can serve to place importance on non-issues, inspire and perpetuate misinformation, and leaves out what is not easily accessible. By giving so much attention to minor gaffes, rumors, and unimportant issues, the media make such items salient to the public and communicate that they are important. This can lead to skewed priorities, as people might find insignificant items to be much more relevant than they actually should be. Additionally, attack dog journalists' mongering about Obama's birth certificate led approximately 25% of the country to believe Obama was not born in the United States – according to 2011 polls, administered two to three years after the rumor's origin. Finally, acting like attack dogs rather than watch dogs prevents journalists from investigating stories. Reporters might not act as politicians' lap dogs but by attacking rather than digging, they fail as watch dogs.

Such a sociological shift in news norms and journalistic tendencies is difficult to reverse, but not impossible. In All the President's Men , Woodward and Bernstein did not act alone. While met with hesitation from most, a few people offered invaluable support, such as their executive editor and Deep Throat. The four of them (Woodward, Bernstein, Ben Bradlee, and Deep Throat) prove that it does not take an army to reveal a scandal. Both the moral of the film and the return to watch dog journalism is the belief that all it takes are a few people impassioned by a desire to get the story and to get it right.

(Sabato's book is titled "Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics")

[Jan 17, 2018] Out " -- Trump Expels CNN's Jim Acosta From Oval Office Over Shiteholegate Questions

Jan 17, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

"Mr. President," Acosta shouted three times, finally getting Trump's attention, "Did you say that you want more people to come in from Norway? Did you say that you wanted more people from Norway? Is that true Mr. President?" Acosta barked at Trump.

" I want them to come in from everywhere everywhere. Thank you very much everybody ," Trump replied while Acosta continued to interject.

" Just Caucasian or white countries, sir? Or do you want people to come in from other parts of the world people of color ," Acosta asked - effectively calling Trump racist, to which Trump looked Acosta directly in the eye and simply said:

"Out!"

Watch here:

me title=

Different angle:

me title=

Acosta spoke about the incident with Wolf Blitzer afterwards and said it was clear the president was ordering him out of the room. Acosta said he tried to ask his questions again when Trump and Nazarbayev gave a joint statement later on, but Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley "got right up in my face" and started shouting at him to block out any questions.

"It was that kind of a display," Acosta recalled. "It reminded me of something you might see in less democratic countries when people at the White House or officials of a foreign government attempt to get in the way of the press in doing their jobs."

Acosta and CNN were infamously humiliated after Trump called them "fake news" during a January, 2017 press conference in which Acosta attempted to shoehorn a question in front of another reporter:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Xy2U55fIBx0

Meanwhile, Acosta was shut down in December by White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders after he tried to grandstand during a press briefing over being called "Fake News," telling her that sometimes reporters make "honest mistakes."

Sanders shot back; "When journalists make honest mistakes, they should own up to them. Sometimes, and a lot of times, you don't," only to be temporarily cut off by Acosta.

"I'm sorry, I'm not finished," Sanders fired back, adding "There is a very big difference between making honest mistakes and purposefully misleading the American people... you cannot say it's an honest mistake when you're purposely putting out information you know is false."

[Jan 16, 2018] The Russia Explainer

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Historians will come to view Aug. 8, 2008, as a turning point no less significant than Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Russia's attack on sovereign Georgian territory marked the official return of history, indeed to an almost 19th-century style of great-power competition , complete with virulent nationalisms, battles for resources, struggles over spheres of influence and territory, and even -- though it shocks our 21st-century sensibilities -- the use of military power to obtain geopolitical objectives. ..."
"... Administration officials said Mr. Putin had miscalculated and would pay a cost regardless of what the United States did, pointing to the impact on Russia's currency and markets. "What we see here are distinctly 19th- and 20th-century decisions made by President Putin to address problems," one of the officials said. "What he needs to understand is that in terms of his economy, he lives in the 21st-century world, an interdependent world." ..."
"... The dossier's claim that Putin talked about the "ideals-based international order" also rings false. Putin only ever refers to Western ideals when saying that Western countries' leaders are hypocrites for not adhering to them. ..."
"... The more straightforward explanation is that, knowing that this is opposition research, Steele and his sources provided information that rang true with what the client already believed and would want to hear. This is the first report in the series–in effect, a teaser trailer–and no consultant working on a monthly retainer is going to tell you in the first memo that his services aren't needed. If Steele had indicated that there was no dirt to investigate, the $15,000/mo. (as estimated by Vanity Fair ) contract wouldn't have lasted longer than a month or two. ..."
"... The dossier's use of the phraseology "Trump and his team" and "Trump team" and the like is confusing in reference to the pre-2016 campaign period. Other than his lawyer Michael Cohen, there's nothing I've seen to indicate that the other Trump campaign people mentioned by name in the dossier (Paul Manafort and Carter Page) knew Trump before 2016. By all appearances, the key members of Trump's team before 2016 were his children, and maybe his talent agent. ..."
"... It also seems out of character for Trump to have the foresight and planning that it would take to seek out intelligence on Hillary Clinton several years back. Several years ago, Trump and the Clintons were friends , and the Clintons attended Trump's wedding and Bill and Donald played golf together. ..."
"... Russians are very cautious about what they talk about, even amongst each other. Therefore, with the story about [sexual acts] in the Moscow Ritz Carlton, the idea you have managed to triple source it via an employee at the hotel, a serving FSB [Russian security service] officer, and the security officer at the hotel, who inevitably will be at least a former FSB or GRU [Russian intelligence agency] officer It just doesn't make sense. If such a thing had taken place, it would be a Russian state secret. ..."
"... Seems more likely that it's just a piece of "scuttlebutt" that Steele's sources, pressed to find anything juicy on Trump, saw in the newspaper or in a news search on Google or on Russian search engine Yandex . ..."
"... Whatever the truth of the matter, Page is clearly someone who was very keen to network with powerful Russians in 2016 and was not shy about leveraging his affiliation with the Trump campaign to do it. ..."
"... But at the same time, this would also mean Page was a loose cannon and a huge potential liability to the Trump campaign. Igor Sechin is, and was in July 2016, on the Specially Designated Nationals list of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. This means that it's a crime for any US citizen to do any business with Sechin personally (though not with Rosneft as a corporate entity). ..."
"... Page, by all appearances, is reckless and kind of an idiot . He had to have known that his activities (even if they were limited to just non-treasonous networking with Russians) carried a huge risk of blowback for Trump. He didn't care. Carter Page's willingness to toe the Russian line on foreign policy, publicly and on the record, goes beyond even what the most Russophile Western expats in Moscow say in private conversations. I think it's a perfectly valid question to ask why and how Carter Page came to be affiliated with the Trump campaign, why he visited Russia alone at least twice in 2016, and what contacts he's had with Russian officials (he definitely met with some of them, at least at the New Economic School graduation reception on Jul. 8, at which there were several senior Russian officials present and Carter Page was commencement speaker and an honored foreign guest). ..."
"... And why send him to give a public university commencement speech in which he rails against US foreign policy, ensuring wide media coverage? ..."
"... A meeting with a Trump adviser on the sidelines of such a noisy, high-profile trip–with both the Russian and foreign press speculating in real-time what the hell Page was doing in Moscow–seems like an extremely incautious setting for a meeting to discuss the most scandalous quid pro quo since the secret protocols to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. ..."
"... To sum up, I have serious doubts that a meeting took place as described. But I also think that Carter Page was–at the very least–trying to leverage his connection to Trump in Russia for personal gain at the very earliest opportunity he got. ..."
"... *This report doesn't have a date. However, the July 19 report is numbered "2016/94" and the July 26 report is numbered "2016/097" so it seems like this is where the report should go. ..."
"... This is the central allegation against the Trump campaign – that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to take actions aimed at defeating Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. The one thing that I'd add (or, rather, remind) is that by late July, the story of allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election was in full swing . Manafort's history in the former Soviet Union was being widely reported . Carter Page, as mentioned above, had traveled to Moscow for unknown purposes a few weeks before, a trip that was covered in the Russian and US media. ..."
"... What I'd like to point out here -- in terms of the timing of the information in this report -- is that the DNC hacked e-mail dumps on WikiLeaks that led to Debbie Wassermann Schultz resigning as head of the DNC happened on July 22, 2016 , and even before the WikiLeaks dumps the DNC had been attributing the hack to Russia. ..."
"... Since this report refers to the WikiLeaks dump of DNC e-mails that happened on July 22, even though it's undated we know that the report must have been made after that, as well as after the Republican National Convention that happened on July 18, as well as after reports had emerged that the Trump team had been behind a change in the Republican Party platform to remove a reference to providing lethal arms to Ukraine. The allegation made here closely tracks what was being reported in the media at the time. ..."
"... FBI director James Comey made a point of saying that US intelligence services were struck by how unusually noisy the Russians had been in their election interference, as if they wanted to be discovered. ..."
"... *The actual date on the report is "26 July 201 5 " (in the British style), but since it refers to events that happened as recently as June 2016, and based on the news reports that said that Steele was hired in June 2016, I assume this is just a typo. ..."
"... This strains credulity. So there's a single Russian emigre who not only knows the internal mood of the Trump team, but also knows what the Russian leadership is thinking (about a matter that, remember, according to the dossier is top-top secret)? And I know what you're thinking – well, if they were in collusion, of course there's such a person. But who is it? You'd think that there couldn't be too many people who fit this description – being a Russian emigre, close to the Trump campaign, and also with top-level Kremlin access. ..."
"... This is described as someone's opinion so it's hard to argue against or fact-check. I will note that the e-mails from John Podesta's Gmail account started being published by WikiLeaks in October 2016, and since the e-mails run only through March 2016, and given that WikiLeaks usually takes time to prepare for a dump, whoever broke into Podesta's Gmail account was likely very active at the time when this report was dated. If you believe that it was the Russians who broke into Podesta's Gmail account, then this intelligence report is precisely wrong. Eleven days after this report, on August 10, Guccifer 2.0 published the personal contact info of 200 prominent Democrats, so if you believe that Guccifer 2.0 was the alter ego of the Russian government, this intelligence report was precisely wrong. ..."
"... This report is dated precisely one week before Sergei Ivanov was dismissed from his post and moved to a less political role as Putin's special envoy for the environment. If you want to be charitable to the dossier, you could say that this report foreshadows Ivanov's dismissal (later reports say that the dismissal was unexpected). But on the other hand, clearly Ivanov's move to his new position was already in the works on Aug. 5 – it was reported that rumors of the move had been circulating since spring. Why hadn't Steele's "well-placed and established" sources heard those rumors? ..."
"... Peskov is widely considered not to be an independent political player in the Kremlin. He is seen as being a sort of assistant to Putin in addition to his role as spokesman, but someone who likes the spotlight, celebrity and glamour a bit too much. ..."
"... About Turkey: Peskov started his career in the Russian diplomatic corps as a Turkey specialist and worked as the third secretary of the Russian embassy in Ankara in the early '90s. He speaks Turkish. So hearing him mentioned in connection with Turkey makes some sense. ..."
"... Russia was reported to have given advance warning to Erdogan, based on intelligence intercepts, that a coup was being planned. Peskov denied these reports. Just a few weeks earlier, Turkish president Erdogan had apologized to Putin for shooting down a Russian fighter jet on the Turkey-Syria border and Medvedev had announced that Russia would begin lifting the sanctions it had imposed on Turkey in connection with the incident. ..."
"... So in early August 2016 it seemed like Russia-Turkey relations had turned a corner and were being handled quite well – as a matter of fact, over the course of 2016, Turkey went from being the US's partner on Syria to being in a de facto alliance with Russia . The turnaround is stunning – in January 2016 , the US and Turkey were conducting joint operations in Syria, and in January 2017 , Turkey and Russia were conducting joint operations in Syria. Whoever was handling Russia's relationship with Turkey, they did a good job by any objective measure – hard to see how this can be considered "botched." ..."
"... Around this time , there was a lot of speculation in the media about whether Trump would drop out of the race. It's remarkable how the "intelligence" in the dossier follows what was being reported in the news at the time. ..."
"... Ivanov was leading the operation to "hack the US election" literally days before he was fired? That doesn't make sense. ..."
"... This ethnic Russian associate of Trump – who is it? Is it Sergei Millian ? He's supposed to be Source D , a "close associate" of Trump, but he might also be the ethnic Russian (even though Millian is technically from Belarus) associate referred to here and elsewhere. ..."
"... Here we have Carter Page telling the maybe-Millian about his collusion with Russian intelligence on the DNC leaks. Do people really go around confessing crimes willy-nilly? According to this dossier, they do. ..."
"... The big Trump campaign news of August 2016, of course, was that on Aug. 17, Steve Bannon replaced Paul Manafort as head of Trump's campaign. This news was absolutely huge. If Steele's source would have said on Aug. 9 that Bannon would be replacing Manafort, or even that a change of campaign management was being discussed, then in retrospect, you would have to admit that this source was well-informed. But if on Aug. 9, this source was talking about "a rethink and a likely change of tactics," s/he either was not very close to the campaign or was holding back on Steele. ..."
"... So this associate was so close to the campaign that he was privy to all of the team's discussions about collusion with the Russians, but he didn't know that Steve Bannon was about to be named as the new campaign head? ..."
"... But my main beef with this paragraph involves the phrase "kick-back payments to MANAFORT as alleged." Manafort wasn't accused of receiving kickbacks (as I'll explain in a moment, that doesn't make any sense) – he was accused of being paid cash by Yanukovich's political party in an off-the-books scheme, and this was widely covered in the press after the story broke in The New York Times on Aug. 14. ..."
"... That's not a kickback. A kickback is when a government or other organization is offering a contract to an outside contractor, typically in a competitive bid situation, and then when the winner is selected the winner kicks back some of the contract proceeds to the person who manipulated the contract selection process. ..."
"... So if there were kickbacks involved in Manafort's work for Yanukovich, it would've been Manafort kicking back money to Yanukovich, not the other way around. ..."
"... However, what Manafort was actually accused of in the press -- receiving money not properly accounted for under Ukrainian law -- is a crime under American law only if he received income that he didn't report to the IRS, or engaged in money laundering, even if an indisputable "documentary trail" emerges. ..."
"... It is difficult to imagine Putin and his inner circle being fearful of political vulnerability and embarrassment in connection with Manafort. As even Julia Ioffe–a journalist opposed to both Trump and Putin–conceded i n a recent article i n The Atlantic , the political consulting work that Manafort did for Yanukovich and others in the former Soviet Union was hardly unusual. ..."
"... Just to point out – there's a certain implication in the dossier's description of Manafort's work for Yanukovich that this work was "exposed" during the 2016 US election campaign. That's not the case. Manafort just wasn't a household name before 2016, so no one cared. He was just another American political consultant who was more than happy to offer his services to unsavory foreign politicians, like Sandra Bullock's character in "Our Brand is Crisis." ..."
"... Manafort's work for Yanukovich was public knowledge in Ukraine as early as 2005, and was reported actively in the Ukrainian press. By 2016 it was part of Manafort's resume. ..."
"... The report on the Alfa Group (yes, Steele spelled it wrong) is actually the only place in the whole dossier where the dossier was ahead of the mainstream news cycle. The report doesn't give any context for why a special report on the relationship between Putin and Alfa was requested. But on Halloween 2016, the story broke that in Spring and Summer 2016, white-hat hackers had been tracking electronic communications between Trump's e-mail server and an Alfa-Bank (part of Alfa Group) computer in Russia, posting their findings on Reddit – so it was in the public domain but you really had to be paying attention (as apparently a few New York Times journalists and probably the FBI were). I doubt that Steele or his sources were following hacker forums on Reddit. ..."
"... So here's what I think happened: by September, Steele's ultimate client was the Democrats. Someone tipped off the Hillary Clinton campaign (and/or the Clinton-aligned group that was paying Fusion GPS / Orbis) about the electronic link to Alfa, and then Orbis (Steele) got a call asking for an intelligence report on Alfa Group's connections to Putin, without saying why. However, since it was on the phone, the Orbis person heard it as "Alpha Group," and their Russian sources didn't correct the error. ..."
"... Vladimir Putin was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg from 1992 to 1996 . In August 1996 Putin moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow to be Deputy Chief of the Presidential Property Management Directorate (Yeltsin was president at the time, of course). He needed a new job because his boss, St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak , lost his re-election bid. ..."
"... Alfa-Bank was a direct competitor to Khodorkovsky's Bank Menatep (a subsidiary of Rosprom) at the time. So there's no way Fridman and Aven used Govorun to deliver cash to Putin when Putin was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. The dates don't line up. There was an 8-month gap after Putin left St. Petersburg and before Govorun started working at Alfa. ..."
"... How could Steele's sources have made this mistake? Because Govorun's Wikipedia page omits his time at Rosprom, and makes it look like Govorun worked at Alfa-Bank from 1993 to 2000. This is why you don't prepare your report based on Wikipedia, kids! ..."
"... Or if Steele was feeling particularly lazy, he could've gone to Trump's Twitter feed, where Trump proudly told his millions of followers that he'd just spent the weekend with Aras Agalarov and that he wanted to do more business with him. Maybe in Steele's world, being "well-placed" to hear intel about Trump's connections with Russian businesspeople means reading Donald Trump's tweets? ..."
"... There's no other word but "fraud" to describe an "intelligence report" that tries to make it look like the connection between Trump and the Agalarov family is some kind of inside information that you'd need "well-placed sources" to obtain. It took some serious balls for Steele to present it that way, since all anyone would have to do is Google the names mentioned in the report and it would be instantly clear that the intelligence was worthless. ..."
"... Hmm. This is the intelligence that Hillary's people were getting less than one month from Election Day. Intelligence that they paid for. Makes you feel sorry for her; I strongly suspect she was being conned with these reports. ..."
"... In December 2016, Rosneft did indeed sell 19.5% of its shares to two investors using a complicated financing structure. Some have pointed to this as an example where the dossier correctly predicted something would happen. However, the sale of 19.5% of Rosneft to an investor was part of Russia's privatization plan for 2016, which the Russian government announced in December 2015 , and the timeline for the privatization (referring to the 19.5% figure) was updated throughout the year . Anyone who was following Russian business news in 2016 knew that Rosneft was planning to sell 19.5% to an investor that year. ..."
"... Sucks to be Michael Cohen! Unless the dossier is true, he should sue for libel. ..."
"... Sechin is a very big deal in Russia, and a total badass that you don't want to mess with. He is an intimidating guy who is as serious as a heart attack. Carter Page is a dumbass. But the account of this conversation makes it sound like Page was running the meeting like a seasoned pro, leaving Sechin hanging, keeping things vague and noncommittal. I, on the other hand, think that Sechin would never bother meeting with a nobody like Carter Page to discuss something as consequential as billion-dollar oil deals and international relations unless Page had made his bona fides abundantly clear. ..."
"... "Unexpectedly." This looks suspiciously like ass-covering as to why Steele's earlier reports dated mere days before Ivanov's dismissal, containing statements attributed directly to Ivanov, made no mention that these were his last days on the job. ..."
"... Most political observers believed at the time that it was Bernie Sanders, not Russia, who pushed Hillary Clinton away from supporting TPP. This is because Bernie Sanders said openly that he was pressuring Hillary to drop support for TPP. Strangely, the only place where the "veterans' pensions ruse" was ever reported was in the Steele dossier, and the media haven't been tipped off to it to this day. Dodged a bullet! Remember, this is after Putin had supposedly directly ordered all Kremlin insiders, all of whom are tried-and-true Putin loyalists, not to talk about these matters even in private. ..."
"... Steele's team has made the bold decision to misspell Paul Manafort's name as MANNAFORT (Mannafort from heaven?) throughout this report. ..."
"... Gubarev sued BuzzFeed and its editor-in-chief for libel and slander and, lacking any basis other than the dossier itself for these allegations, BuzzFeed blacked out the identifying information. ..."
"... This is quite a cinematic portrayal of hacking. The implication seems to be that there were teams of hackers in a room somewhere and they were ordered to "stand down." Is that how hacking works? Especially in this case, where the hacking that resulted in the 2016 DNC and Podesta leaks had taken place several months before this alleged meeting? This also seems to contradict the declassified US intelligence community findings that said that the hacks were done by Russian government hacker teams called "Cozy Bear" and "Fancy Bear" that were working for the GRU, a Russian intelligence agency that isn't mentioned once in the dossier. The Romanian angle apparently refers t o Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be Romanian but was also believed to be a Russian intelligence agency alter ego only pretending to be Romanian. If these were Russian government hackers, why would they be ordered to cross international borders and "lay low" in Bulgaria, a member of NATO? ..."
"... Also, given that Russia allegedly had huge wins in their 2016 election meddling, why would they be so stingy as to demand that Trump pay his share for the hacking? Especially if they were so concerned about covering their tracks? This only would implicate the Trump campaign and create a paper trail leading directly to Trump transition team members in the United States, plus they would be involving themselves in a criminal conspiracy to violate US money laundering laws, RICO and the like. ..."
Apr 04, 2017 | russiaexplainer.com

THE DOSSIER

... ... ...

[Jan 16, 2018] The One Fact Which Disproves Russiagate, But Nobody Wants To Talk About

While Trump was emasculated after just three months of his presidency, the reality is that Trump does not matter. It is the deep state that controls the Us foreign policy...
Jan 16, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Caitlyn Johnstone via Medium.com,

Over the weekend, the people of Hawaii were temporarily terrorized by a notification sent to their mobile phones that a ballistic missile was headed straight for them and they needed to seek shelter immediately. They were not notified that it was a false alarm for 38 minutes , despite its reportedly being a simple human error triggered by an employee who "pushed the wrong button".

Many who are less trusting of official CNN narratives when it comes to the US power establishment have been voicing skepticism of this explanation, finding the timing highly suspect given that the Trump administration just caused international controversy by giving the okay for a $133 million sale of an anti-ballistic missile system to Japan . A sale which, according to Russia, violates international ballistic missile treaties and will put a strain on Moscow's relationship with Tokyo.

The general idea is that this deal has a lot less to do with the threat posed by North Korea, its ostensible object, and a lot more to do with the Russia-China tandem that the US power establishment is continually working to undermine. Placing an anti-ballistic missile system in the hands of a US ally right on the east edge of Asia weakens the effectiveness of mutually assured destruction (MAD) , the understanding that if any nation launches a nuclear attack on another nuclear-armed country there will be full-scale retaliation and both countries will be destroyed. If some American officials get it into their heads that their country's rivals can be taken out via nuclear strikes and any retaliatory strikes nullified via missile defense systems, MAD is no longer a deterrent to this and we're looking at potentially billions of deaths and possible planetary extinction.

Regardless of whether the false alarm was a psyop designed to manufacture support for the anti-ballistic missile sale or a genuine human error, the fact remains that the deal itself is undeniably a move taken by the Trump administration against the will and interests of the Kremlin.

This is just the latest in a string of maneuvers against Russia that have been made by this administration, despite Trump's continued outward assurances that he wants to improve relations with Moscow. As is so often the case, a US president is saying one thing and doing something very different.

And it completely kills the Russiagate narrative. Just a few days ago Russiagaters were having yet another "BOOM! We got him!" social media parade about an article from the Clinton-directed Daily Beast, claiming that a senior national security aide within the Trump administration had suggested scaling down the US troop presence along Russia's border, a dangerous escalation which all peace advocates support eliminating. In the first sentence of the article's second paragraph, the author Spencer Ackerman acknowledges that "the proposal was ultimately not adopted."

Huh?

So President Trump, alleged to have been groomed early and at great expense by the Kremlin in anticipation of a presidential victory nobody else imagined possible at that time, was pitched a recommendation to scale down new cold war escalations with Russia... and he refused? That's how you're starting your article about the "return on Russia's election-time investment in President Trump"?

Russiagate is so weird. You need to plug yourself into Louise Mensch and Rachel Maddow ramblings so extensively that you can contort your sense of reason to the point where it looks perfectly rational to believe that Putin was omniscient enough to know that Trump could defeat all primary opponents and take the fight to the heir apparent Hillary Clinton back when virtually no one else imagined such a thing was possible, recruited his team reportedly at the cost of billions of dollars , poured all kinds of intel and resources into ensuring Trump's election using hackers and bots to influence American opinion, only to get a US president who is, when it comes to facts in evidence, already just a year into his administration demonstrably more hawkish towards Russia than his predecessor was.

Again: huh?

Nobody wants to think about this because it doesn't fit in with America's stale partisan models; Democrats would have to admit that their best shot at getting a rival president impeached is pure gibberish, and Trump supporters would have to acknowledge that their swamp-draining populist hero is actually just one more corrupt globalist neocon like his predecessors. But when it comes to actual facts in evidence, that's exactly what we're looking at.

Over and over and over again this alleged Russian asset has been choosing to undermine Moscow instead of advancing its interests. He approved the sale of arms to Ukraine, a move loudly encouraged by DC neocons which Obama refused to do because of the dangerous tensions it would inflame with Russia. His administration forced first RT and now Sputnik to register as foreign agents, expanded NATO with the addition of Montenegro, assigning established Russia hawk Kurt Volker as special representative to Ukraine, shutting down a Russian consulate in San Francisco and throwing out Russian diplomats as part of continued back-and-forth hostile diplomatic exchanges, and signing the Russian sanctions bill despite loud protests from Moscow. If he is indeed an expensive Russian asset, then Russia got ripped off.

The one area Russiagaters can claim Trump hasn't gone against Russian interests is in Syria, where the administration has cooperated with Putin in fighting terrorist forces. Or at least, they would have been able to make that argument had Obama not been in favor of it as well . If Syria proves Trump is a Putin puppet, then the White House must have been offering a two-for-one deal, because they bought Obama as well.

Russiagaters can claim "Well, Trump colluded with Russia, but because we're putting political pressure on him not to align with Putin he isn't able to do anything to advance Moscow's interests." Okay, but what's the charge, then? That Russia bought Trump, and accomplished absolutely nothing other than bringing new sanctions and cold war escalations down upon itself? Again, the Steele dossier upon which the collusion narrative is based alleges that Trump was recruited at great expense long before anyone in the US thought of him as a serious presidential contender. We're expected to believe that Putin was psychic enough to know Trump could win with enough confidence to invest accordingly, but not psychic enough to know that collusion and election meddling could be detected by America's sprawling surveillance networks and cause backlash, sanctions and escalations?

No part of any of this makes any sense at all. If you can see past the stupid corporate media-fed filters of Trump_vs_deep_state and anti-Trump_vs_deep_state enough to look at what's actually happening, the collusion narrative is nonsense on its face.

Maybe the false missile alarm wasn't a psyop, but Russiagate definitely is. America's unelected power establishment had a plan to manufacture support for new escalations to hobble the Russia-China tandem regardless of who won the 2016 presidential election, and since their prefered candidate didn't win they've been employing what is surely the most extensive single psychological operation ever performed in human history.

And it's working so far. Sure will cause a lot of problems for them if people start waking up to it, though.

Buckaroo Banzai -> JimJones Jan 16, 2018 6:53 PM Permalink

"No part of this makes any sense"...author is a fucking retard. It makes perfect sense when you realize that the Democrats are traitorous greedy deranged lunatics who have disconnected from reality.

stizazz -> Buckaroo Banzai Jan 16, 2018 7:08 PM Permalink

Russiagate is an elite trick to get Trump to keep fanning the conflict with Russia.
https://goo.gl/nKJndT

WTFUD Jan 16, 2018 7:19 PM Permalink

Sanctions must be placed on the US immediately. Put all US Nationals on Foreign Soil under House/Base-Arrest, in particular, the Real Psychotic Banker/MIC/Neocon Types. Then Close their Internment/Training Camps, cutting off their WMD Supply Routes and hence, their ability to form Militias for Regime Change purposes.

hardmedicine Jan 16, 2018 6:57 PM Permalink

article is bullshit.... If Trump even thinks about cooperating with RUSSIA he is "completely a russian agent" if he tries to sabotage Russia then he is "totally being played and is a deep state play-along"

he can't win. like in 90% of all the press............. Trump is hated because he is against the Deep STate.

I always go with the exact opposite of what the mainstream says. That is , more often than not, the closest thing to the truth.

WTFUD -> hardmedicine Jan 16, 2018 7:23 PM Permalink

Only certain Factions of the Deep State, mind you. There's Terrorist & Moderate US Deep State. LoL.

[Jan 14, 2018] Sic Semper Tyrannis The Trump Dossier Timeline, A Democrat Disaster Looming by Publius Tacitus

Highly recommended!
It was a coup d'état.
Notable quotes:
"... When the entire episode about the creation of the Trump dossier (by former Brit spy, Christopher Steele) and its dissemination (by Steele and the Democrat hired contractor, FUSION GPS,) to the FBI and the press, is fully exposed, the American people will be confronted with the stark dilemma of how to deal with the fact that there was a failed domestic coup attempted by members of the U.S. intel and law enforcement community. The facts will show that the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the CIA and the FBI conspired and meddled in the 2016 Presidential election. They lied to a Federal judge about the origins of the dossier and used those lies to get permission to spy on Trump and members of his campaign staff. ..."
"... But U.S. officials have since received intelligence reports that during that same three-day trip, Page met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy prime minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft, Russian's leading oil company, a well-placed Western intelligence source tells Yahoo News. ..."
"... The response to the information from the FBI, he recalled, was "shock and horror." After a few weeks, the bureau asked him for information on his sources and their reliability and on how he had obtained his reports. He was also asked to continue to send copies of his subsequent reports to the bureau. These reports were not written, he noted, as finished work products; they were updates on what he was learning from his various sources. ..."
"... "I have recently become concerned that the threat of the Russian government tampering in our presidential election is more extensive than widely known and may include the intent to falsify official election results. The evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump's presidential campaign continues to mount. . ." ..."
"... Michael Isikoff referenced those briefings : "The activities of Trump adviser Carter Page, who has extensive business interests in Russia, have been discussed with senior members of Congress during recent briefings about suspected efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential election, the sources said. After one of those briefings, Senate minority leader Harry Reid wrote FBI Director James Comey, citing reports of meetings between a Trump adviser (a reference to Page) and "high ranking sanctioned individuals" in Moscow over the summer as evidence of "significant and disturbing ties" between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin that needed to be investigated by the bureau." ..."
"... September 2016. FBI used the Steele memos as part of the basis for requesting a FISA warrant according to reports by the NY Times and the Washington Post : ..."
"... We do not know exactly when the FISA warrant was granted, but the New York Times and the Washington Post have reported, citing U.S. government sources, that this occurred in September 2016 (see here , here , and here ). ..."
"... After Mr. Page, 45 -- a Navy veteran and businessman who had lived in Moscow for three years -- stepped down (26 September 2016) from the Trump campaign in September, the F.B.I. obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing the authorities to monitor his communications on the suspicion that he was a Russian agent. ..."
"... The Justice Department obtained a secret court-approved wiretap last summer on Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Donald J. Trump 's presidential campaign, based on evidence that he was operating as a Russian agent, a government official said Wednesday. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued the warrant, the official said, after investigators determined that Mr. Page was no longer part of the Trump campaign, which began distancing itself from him in early August. ..."
"... The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant targeting Carter Page's communications after convincing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia, according to the officials. ..."
"... Loretta Lynch, Attorney General under President Obama, approved the FISA application. (Note--federal law requires that the attorney general approve every application to the FISA court.) ..."
"... End of September--Steele revealed in a London court filing earlier this year that he was directed by Fusion GPS to brief reporters at outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Yahoo! News and Mother Jones about his Trump findings. ..."
"... End of September--Steele informs Simpson (i.e. Fusion GPS) that the FBI wants to meet him in Rome. ( Senate Judiciary Committee 0n 22 August 2017, p. 171 ) ..."
"... 6 January 2017--FBI Director Comey briefs Trump on the Steele dossier, which Comey describes as "salacious and UNVERIFIED." : ..."
"... The IC leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming President to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified. Among those reasons were: (1) we knew the media was about to publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from the President-Elect; and (2) to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt any such effort with a defensive briefing. (Comey's statement before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 8 June 2017) ..."
"... Describing his reports in the Mother Jones interview, Steele asserted, "This was something of huge significance, way above party politics." Things changed, though, when Steele was sued for libel after the dossier was published in early 2017. Suddenly, when he was in a forum where it was clear to him that making exaggerated or false claims could cost him dearly, he decided his allegations were not of such "huge significance" after all . . . .According to Steele's courtroom version, the dossier is merely a compilation of bits of "raw intelligence" that were "unverified" and that he passed along because they "warranted further investigation" -- i.e., not because he could vouch for their truthfulness. (kudos to Rowan Scarborough who initially broke the story). ..."
"... I think one has to start with the assumption that everyone at the highest levels of the federal government, especially the national security apparatus, is a swamp creature. They just don't get there unless they are one. Weasels like Clapper, Brennan, Hayden. Of course that does not mean a person with honor & integrity doesn't get up there. Just far and few between. ..."
"... It is extremely difficult to uncover malfeasance in government in the best of circumstances and it is practically impossible within the national security apparatus as they have the ever present shield of "state secrets". In this context we have to be thankful for small gifts of transparency coming from inside like these disclosures by IG Horowitz as well as by whistleblowers like Snowden. ..."
"... Are you sure the"insurance policy" referred to a way to destroy Trump if he were to be elected? What if FBI counterintelligence agents were involved in illegal surveillance activities that could possibly come to light if Trump were president? The dossier in fact was the insurance policy that they retroactively used to launder previous illegal searches that would have been covered up if Hillary had won. ..."
"... The primary purpose of the "insurance policy" was to protect FBI agents against accusations of malfeasance, which at present, appears to be an accurate description of their behavior. ..."
"... The ENTIRE SYSTEM of FISA-702 surveillance and data collection was weaponized against a political campaign. The DOJ and FBI used the FISA Court to gain access to Trump data, and simultaneously justify earlier FISA "queries" by their contractor, Fusion GPS. FISA-702 queries were used to gather information on the Trump campaign which later became FBI counterintelligence surveillance on the officials therein. ..."
"... So, the snooping began much before Steele was hired by Fusion GPS. Sundance for example believes that the FBI provided this "unauthorized" access to its subcontractor Fusion GPS. This is how Fusion GPS was paid by the FBI. ..."
"... When the time line and interactions are put together it seems that it all begins at the FBI during March 2016, pretty early in the primary season, possibly with Fusion GPS as the subcontractor. Steele only comes on the scene, after the meeting of Mary Jacoby, Glen Simpson's wife at the White House and Fusion is hired by the Clinton campaign. ..."
"... This post and PT's previous ones on the same topic, concern what many here suspect to be an orchestrated attempt to remove the Constitutionally-elected head of state via extra Constitutional means. In other words a soft coup. Rather than "Trump_vs_deep_state", I think the motivations for exploring this possibility here, by and large, come from feelings of patriotism. Particularly from those who swore to defend the Constitution (not the President) from enemies, both foreign and domestic. ..."
"... The question of whether the Rule of Law, or the observance of contitutional propriety, is being upheld is what is being examined here. That second issue is independent of the first. That is as it should be. If it were so that the FBI had played politics against Mrs Clinton that would be as disturbing as if they had played politics against Mr Trump. ..."
"... It will be most interesting to see Trump's most devoted congressional supporters and 'swamp beast fighters' utilize the timeline and verified facts and (unknown-to-indy investigators) details in the 'private' source, to bring justice to bear on this extremely serious matter. Why hasn't the DOJ appointed a special prosecutor; considering what PT and many others here and elsewhere are "piecing together?" ..."
"... I didn't vote Trump but I was shocked by the obvious coup d'etat to overthrow Trump after the election. You see some of us support the rule of law, our constitution, and established process for political change. Just because someone is elected that is unpopular with the losing side doesn't mean you throw away everything and become a willing banana Republic. While this was going on I predicted that if they had succeeded they would have over a million angry people in Washington and I would have been one of them ..."
"... To amplify your point, Terry: once you give the unelected and unaccountable "intelligence community" (or any other part of the Deep State) a de facto veto over election results, you will never get that power back. ..."
"... You as a country have crossed the Rubicon, and when you get to the other side, you are no longer in a constitutional republic, but in something else. ..."
"... In my view, the deep state......... CIA, FBI, NSA....... had the opportunity to prove their commitment to the welfare of the nation...... given they had the means and opportunity to sway the election. ..."
"... Given that the FBI made no serious effort to analyze the DNC servers after the alleged "hack" and, according to Seymour Hersh, are sitting on an FBI report that fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the supplier of the DNC emails to Wikileaks, these two facts also support the conclusion that the FBI at the highest levels are in a criminal conspiracy to overthrow Trump ..."
"... The FBI IS a criminal enterprise ..."
"... The FBI never investigated the DNC servers because they decided to accept CrowdStrike's analysis despite CrowdStrike being run by a Russian ex-pat who hates Russia and sees Russians under every bed. Now they want to try to accuse Trump associates of "hacking"? Seriously? ..."
"... Second, according to Seymour Hersh, the FBI is sitting on a report that explicitly fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the source for the DNC emails received by Wikileaks. ..."
Jan 12, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

The Trump Dossier Timeline, A Democrat Disaster Looming by Publius Tacitus

When the entire episode about the creation of the Trump dossier (by former Brit spy, Christopher Steele) and its dissemination (by Steele and the Democrat hired contractor, FUSION GPS,) to the FBI and the press, is fully exposed, the American people will be confronted with the stark dilemma of how to deal with the fact that there was a failed domestic coup attempted by members of the U.S. intel and law enforcement community. The facts will show that the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the CIA and the FBI conspired and meddled in the 2016 Presidential election. They lied to a Federal judge about the origins of the dossier and used those lies to get permission to spy on Trump and members of his campaign staff.

Here are the facts as we know them now. (Please note, these facts are sourced and are not my opinion).

  1. Perkins Come was retained by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC in April 2016.
  2. Fusion GPS approached Perkins Coie (a Seattle based law firm) and sought an engagement to continue research it had started on Donald Trump. (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4116755-PerkinsCoie-Fusion-PrivelegeLetter-102417.html)
  3. The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee funded the research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump's connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin. (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4116755-PerkinsCoie-Fusion-PrivelegeLetter-102417.html, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clinton-campaign-dnc-paid-for-research-that-led-to-russia-dossier/2017/10/24/226fabf0-b8e4-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html?utm_term=.14d16b270afd).
  4. Christopher Steele (Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd) was hired by Fusion GPS in May or June of 2016 (Glen Simpson testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee 0n 22 August 2017, p. 77 )
  5. The first report of the Dossier was dated 20 June 2017 and made the following allegations:
    1. Russian regime had been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years.
    2. TRUMP declined various business deals offered him in Russia but accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.
    3. Russian intelligence officer claims FSB has material to blackmail TRUMP.
    4. The Russians had a dossier on Clinton but "nothing embarrassing."
  6. Christopher Steele tells Glen Simpson that he wants to take the info in the 20 June report to the FBI (this conversation occurred late June/early July according to Glen Simpson testimony before Senate Judiciary Committee, p. 161, 165
  7. July 2016, Christopher Steele meets with FBI (name of contact unknown) and passes on content from the 20 June memo.
  8. Third report, dated 19 July 2016 , claims that TRUMP advisor Carter PAGE held secret meetings in Moscow with SECHIN and senior Kremlin Internal Affairs official, DIVYEKIN. ( See dossier ).
    1. But U.S. officials have since received intelligence reports that during that same three-day trip, Page met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy prime minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft, Russian's leading oil company, a well-placed Western intelligence source tells Yahoo News.
  9. 15 August 2016 FBI Agent Strzok's text about the meeting in McCabe's office is dated August 15, 2016. . . According to Agent Strzok, with Election Day less than three months away, Page, the bureau lawyer, weighed in on Trump's bid: "There's no way he gets elected."
  10. According to David Corn, Christopher Steele was sending all of his subsequent reports to the FBI :
    1. The response to the information from the FBI, he recalled, was "shock and horror." After a few weeks, the bureau asked him for information on his sources and their reliability and on how he had obtained his reports. He was also asked to continue to send copies of his subsequent reports to the bureau. These reports were not written, he noted, as finished work products; they were updates on what he was learning from his various sources.
  11. 27 August 2016. Senate and House leaders briefed by "intelligence community" on the contents of the Steele memos-- A letter from Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, dated 27 August 2017 states :
    1. "I have recently become concerned that the threat of the Russian government tampering in our presidential election is more extensive than widely known and may include the intent to falsify official election results. The evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump's presidential campaign continues to mount. . ."
    2. Michael Isikoff referenced those briefings : "The activities of Trump adviser Carter Page, who has extensive business interests in Russia, have been discussed with senior members of Congress during recent briefings about suspected efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential election, the sources said. After one of those briefings, Senate minority leader Harry Reid wrote FBI Director James Comey, citing reports of meetings between a Trump adviser (a reference to Page) and "high ranking sanctioned individuals" in Moscow over the summer as evidence of "significant and disturbing ties" between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin that needed to be investigated by the bureau."
  12. September 2016. FBI used the Steele memos as part of the basis for requesting a FISA warrant according to reports by the NY Times and the Washington Post :
    1. We do not know exactly when the FISA warrant was granted, but the New York Times and the Washington Post have reported, citing U.S. government sources, that this occurred in September 2016 (see here , here , and here ).
      1. After Mr. Page, 45 -- a Navy veteran and businessman who had lived in Moscow for three years -- stepped down (26 September 2016) from the Trump campaign in September, the F.B.I. obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing the authorities to monitor his communications on the suspicion that he was a Russian agent.
      2. The Justice Department obtained a secret court-approved wiretap last summer on Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Donald J. Trump 's presidential campaign, based on evidence that he was operating as a Russian agent, a government official said Wednesday. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued the warrant, the official said, after investigators determined that Mr. Page was no longer part of the Trump campaign, which began distancing itself from him in early August.

      3. The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant targeting Carter Page's communications after convincing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia, according to the officials.
      4. Loretta Lynch, Attorney General under President Obama, approved the FISA application. (Note--federal law requires that the attorney general approve every application to the FISA court.)
  13. End of September--Steele revealed in a London court filing earlier this year that he was directed by Fusion GPS to brief reporters at outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Yahoo! News and Mother Jones about his Trump findings.
  14. End of September--Steele informs Simpson (i.e. Fusion GPS) that the FBI wants to meet him in Rome. ( Senate Judiciary Committee 0n 22 August 2017, p. 171 )
  15. 8 November 2016 , Senator John McCain, accompanied by David Kramer (a Senior Director at Senator McCain's Institute for International Leadership), met in London with an Associate of Orbis, former British Ambassador Sir Andrew Wood, to arrange a subsequent meeting with Christopher Steele in order to read the now infamous Steele Dossier.
  16. David Kramer and Christopher Steele met in Surrey on 28 November 2016 , where Kramer was briefed on the contents of the memos.
  17. Once Senator McCain and David Kramer returned to the United States, arrangements were made for Fusion GPS to provide Senator McCain hard copies of the memoranda.
  18. 13 December 2016 , Christopher Steele prepares, on his own, the 17th report in the dossier and sends it to Senator McCain via David Kramer.
  19. 6 January 2017--FBI Director Comey briefs Trump on the Steele dossier, which Comey describes as "salacious and UNVERIFIED." :
    1. The IC leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming President to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified. Among those reasons were: (1) we knew the media was about to publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from the President-Elect; and (2) to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt any such effort with a defensive briefing. (Comey's statement before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 8 June 2017)

One of the more interesting developments in the dossier case came as a result of depositions and testimony in the defamation case that Aleksej Gubarev filed against Christoper Steele in the United Kingdom last year. When pressed to defend the authenticity and accuracy of the dossier and the allegations against President Trump, Christopher Steele became a British version of Michael Jackson and moon-walked backwards. Andy McCarthy describes the situation beautifully :

Describing his reports in the Mother Jones interview, Steele asserted, "This was something of huge significance, way above party politics." Things changed, though, when Steele was sued for libel after the dossier was published in early 2017. Suddenly, when he was in a forum where it was clear to him that making exaggerated or false claims could cost him dearly, he decided his allegations were not of such "huge significance" after all . . . .According to Steele's courtroom version, the dossier is merely a compilation of bits of "raw intelligence" that were "unverified" and that he passed along because they "warranted further investigation" -- i.e., not because he could vouch for their truthfulness. (kudos to Rowan Scarborough who initially broke the story).

There are some very interesting unanswered questions. Here are some that I believe are most relevant:

  1. Why does a former MI-6 officer reach out on his own to the FBI when the normal point of contact would be the CIA?
  2. Who did Steele contact at the FBI?
  3. Who at the FBI asked Steele to travel to Rome in October 2016? [Note--this request is quite odd given the fact that the FBI has a very large presence in London and, if the purpose was simply to inform the FBI about possible nefarious Russian activity, could have easily walked over to the US Embassy at Grosvenor Square rather than travel to Rome.]

The failure of the FBI and the CIA to disclose to members of Congress and the President that the information they briefed from the dossier had been paid for by the Clinton campaign is much more than gross negligence and incompetence. It is prima facie evidence of collusion and meddling in a U.S. domestic election. Only the culprits weren't the Russians. As Pogo once said , "we have met the enemy and he is us."

blue peacock , 11 January 2018 at 06:37 PM

PT

Thanks for spurring my interest on this monumental deceit with your many posts.

I knew nothing about FISA & mass surveillance other than our government was collecting all communications of every American, before you began posting on this topic. I've learned more since and it is revolting if one is a staunch believer in the Bill of Rights as what makes America different.

IG Mike Horowitz was barred from investigating the DOJ National Security Division by the Obama administration. It required an act of Congress and Obama signed it after the election, to allow the IG the ability to investigate all of DOJ. The DOJ NSD and FBI CounterIntelligence had a big role to play in all this as all the FISA applications originated there. What we know about Peter Strzok & Lisa Page, Bruce & Nellie Ohr and the Clinton exoneration all came from the IG. In testimony to Congress, Rosenstein used the IG investigation to stall the production of documents and witness interviews. It seems the IG report will become available in a few weeks. That will hopefully shed more light.

Considering that in our country the rule of law does not apply to high officials in government, I am not holding my breath that any of these miscreants will be held accountable or there will be any changes to the surveillance laws.

M. Smyth , 11 January 2018 at 07:45 PM
So, is IG Michael Horowitz one of the honorable guys in this whole thing? You'd never guess judging by his bio. And his ties to the Democrats and Comey. I've lost all respect for the FBI. And the IC.

https://heavy.com/news/2017/01/michael-e-horowitz-inspector-general-department-of-justice-fb-investigation-james-comey-hillary-clinton-email-review/

Pilot44236 , 11 January 2018 at 07:45 PM
Sundance's view reporting on the whole affair.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/01/11/the-doj-and-fbi-worked-with-fusion-gps-on-operation-trump/#more-144446

blue peacock said in reply to M. Smyth... , 11 January 2018 at 10:06 PM
M. Smyth

I think one has to start with the assumption that everyone at the highest levels of the federal government, especially the national security apparatus, is a swamp creature. They just don't get there unless they are one. Weasels like Clapper, Brennan, Hayden. Of course that does not mean a person with honor & integrity doesn't get up there. Just far and few between.

I don't have any basis to judge Michael Horowitz since I didn't even know about him until a few weeks ago. What we know in this case is he has allowed us to learn about some of the activities of Peter Strozk & Lisa Page as well as Bruce & Nellie Ohr which has helped further understand Russiagate.

It is extremely difficult to uncover malfeasance in government in the best of circumstances and it is practically impossible within the national security apparatus as they have the ever present shield of "state secrets". In this context we have to be thankful for small gifts of transparency coming from inside like these disclosures by IG Horowitz as well as by whistleblowers like Snowden.

blue peacock said in reply to Publius Tacitus ... , 11 January 2018 at 10:12 PM
PT

Both Christopher Wray and Rosenstein in separate testimony were unable to confirm that any of the contents in the Steele dossier was verified, with the exception of Carter Page's visit to Russia.

doug , 11 January 2018 at 11:19 PM
It's becoming quite clear that Trump, as President, appeared to be such an appalling concept amongst some highly placed functionaries that "insurance" was needed to deal with the possibility. And these people had contacts with the media, which, by and large, were as appalled. Thus the current situation.

Quite unfortunately, Trump's unbounded hubris has played into this mess. Trump is very fortunate that his party is in control of the legislative branches. One thinks of Hercules and the Aegean stables.

Newmarket , 11 January 2018 at 11:19 PM
PT,r

Great compilation and analysis of the available facts. No need to publish the following, but I would suggest that your work is important enough to correct a couple of typos and provide a clarification which I will identify by paragraph number.
1. Perkins Coie (a Seattle Law Firm)--you get the name right in #2.
9. Put "Lisa" in front of "Page" in order to let the reader know you are referring to Lisa Page.
19. Rowan Farrow, I think, not Rowan Scarborough.
Keep posting and keep up the good work. Bob Randolph

Cvillereader said in reply to doug... , 11 January 2018 at 11:19 PM
Are you sure the"insurance policy" referred to a way to destroy Trump if he were to be elected? What if FBI counterintelligence agents were involved in illegal surveillance activities that could possibly come to light if Trump were president? The dossier in fact was the insurance policy that they retroactively used to launder previous illegal searches that would have been covered up if Hillary had won.

The primary purpose of the "insurance policy" was to protect FBI agents against accusations of malfeasance, which at present, appears to be an accurate description of their behavior.

Reggie said in reply to DC... , 11 January 2018 at 11:50 PM
DC, It is quite simple:

The ENTIRE SYSTEM of FISA-702 surveillance and data collection was weaponized against a political campaign. The DOJ and FBI used the FISA Court to gain access to Trump data, and simultaneously justify earlier FISA "queries" by their contractor, Fusion GPS. FISA-702 queries were used to gather information on the Trump campaign which later became FBI counterintelligence surveillance on the officials therein.

blue peacock , 12 January 2018 at 12:26 AM
PT

Here's something that's puzzling. The FBI directly or indirectly through Fusion GPS or another a subcontractor, began querying the NSA database around March 2016 as per the FISC ruling. That's pretty early in the primary. I don't think anyone at that point was thinking Trump was going to clinch the GOP nomination.

Do you think they were doing this on other candidates too? Bernie? Were they already an arm of the Clinton campaign? Or just snooping on all or some of the candidates communications?

The Twisted Genius , 12 January 2018 at 12:44 AM
Publius Tacitus,

Here's a stab at your relevant unanswered questions.

"Why does a former MI-6 officer reach out on his own to the FBI when the normal point of contact would be the CIA?"
"Who did Steele contact at the FBI?"
"Who at the FBI asked Steele to travel to Rome in October 2016?"

Steele's CIA contacts were probably more of the bureaucratic liaison variety. Hardly memorable. However, he worked closely with the FBI Eurasian Joint Organized Crime Squad on several operations. He formed strong friendships doing these "heady things" as Steele describes . When he decided to bring his concerns to the FBI, he found one of these old FBI friends stationed in Rome. This FBI friend is who he reached out to. This FBI Special Agent seems to be identified in Steele's Judicial Committee testimony, but the name and position is redacted. Someone in Comey's Russian investigation team probably decided to continue this established relationship and venue for the October 2016 meeting. Perhaps it was Comey himself.

Walrus said in reply to DC... , 12 January 2018 at 12:44 AM
DC you are entitled to your own opinion but you are not entitled to your own facts. Both the FBI and Steele in his court case have stated that there is no confirmation of anything in the reports. They are purely hearsay at absolute best and more likely a deliberate fabrication for political purposes in the opinion of far more knowledgeable people than you.

To put that another way, the chances of your opinion being valid are judged as zero.

Publius Tacitus -> The Twisted Genius ... , 12 January 2018 at 01:22 AM
Keep your eyes tightly closed. Your hatred of Trump blinds you to what is really going on. Deal with these two indisputable facts: 1) Comey, under oath, almost one year after the info became available, still said it was UNVERIFIABLE; 2) Steele, himself, also under oath, now disavows the importance of what he originally claimed was so essential. You should write a novel. You're very good at spinning a tale without having a shred of evidence to go on.
blue peacock said in reply to The Twisted Genius ... , 12 January 2018 at 02:05 AM
TTG

If you look at the FISC ruling that has been declassified but heavily redacted, you will notice the FBI provided a sub-contractor "unauthorized" access to the NSA database in March 2016. This access to the raw FISA data was discontinued on April 18, 2016.

So, the snooping began much before Steele was hired by Fusion GPS. Sundance for example believes that the FBI provided this "unauthorized" access to its subcontractor Fusion GPS. This is how Fusion GPS was paid by the FBI.

When the time line and interactions are put together it seems that it all begins at the FBI during March 2016, pretty early in the primary season, possibly with Fusion GPS as the subcontractor. Steele only comes on the scene, after the meeting of Mary Jacoby, Glen Simpson's wife at the White House and Fusion is hired by the Clinton campaign.

Peter AU , 12 January 2018 at 03:11 AM
Not being an academic, mathematician, nor pollster, I simply run an image search on both Clinton and Trump election rallies. These showed that Trump would win. Early in the campaign, there were several pics of large crowds at Clinton rallies, but from about six months out, the images all showed her speaking to fifty to hundred people, whereas Trump images always showed packed stadiums.

The Dossier. A person as portrayed in the Steele would be corrupt/dishonest in most everyday business dealings. With the attacks against Trump, by intelligence and investigative agencies, any dishonesty, breaking the law in business dealings, would have been brought up. This tells me he has always operated within the letter of the law. Perhaps sharp and ruthless, but within the letter of the law.

Trump's ideology/culture is USA through and through. Russia has no ideology, and its own culture.

There is no ideology nor religion involved, so why would a man like Trump that has always operated within the letter of the law be nefariously colluding with a foreign state?

Needs to be a lot more digging like you are doing PT, as the saying goes "Without fear or favor".

blue peacock , 12 January 2018 at 03:56 AM
Here's a timeline based on Sundance's work to supplement PT's timeline. I did this for my benefit so likely contain errors. Others here at SST can correct.
Lee A. Arnold -> Publius Tacitus ... , 12 January 2018 at 07:08 AM
Publius Tacitus: "When James Comey testified in June of 2017 that the dossier was "SALACIOUS AND UNVERIFIED," he made it very clear that Steele's so-called "raw intelligence" had no value nor corroboration. If Comey had said, "WE HAVE VERIFIED KEY ELEMENTS OF THE DOSSIER BUT WILL HAVE TO DISCUSS THAT IN CLOSED SESSION," then Trump would have been a dead man walking."

Then Trump is in big trouble. In the June 2017 transcript, Senator Burr questions first. After about a dozen questions:

"BURR: In the public domain is this question of the "Steele dossier," a document that has been around out in for over a year. I'm not sure when the FBI first took possession of it, but the media had it before you had it and we had it. At the time of your departure from the FBI, was the FBI able to confirm any criminal allegations contained in the Steele document?

COMEY: Mr. Chairman, I don't think that's a question I can answer in an open setting because it goes into the details of the investigation."

Barbara Ann -> Stonevendor ... , 12 January 2018 at 08:40 AM
Stonevendor

This post and PT's previous ones on the same topic, concern what many here suspect to be an orchestrated attempt to remove the Constitutionally-elected head of state via extra Constitutional means. In other words a soft coup. Rather than "Trump_vs_deep_state", I think the motivations for exploring this possibility here, by and large, come from feelings of patriotism. Particularly from those who swore to defend the Constitution (not the President) from enemies, both foreign and domestic.

This said, if Trump actually does go to war with Iran (rather than just threaten it) I will agree with your comparison re Bush and the neocons of his era.

Barbara Ann -> blue peacock... , 12 January 2018 at 08:54 AM
Minor correction: Nellie Ohr is the Ham radio enthusiast:

http://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsApp/LicArchive/license.jsp?archive=Y&licKey=12382876

Publius Tacitus -> Lee A. Arnold ... , 12 January 2018 at 09:05 AM
Nice try Lee, but he still does not contradict his sworn testimony, i.e. UNVERIFIED. Not being able to discuss "details of the investigation" could have opened up questions about when the FBI first learned of the reports in the dossier. That would have raised even more uncomfortable questions about the FBIs conduct.
English Outsider -> Stonevendor ... , 12 January 2018 at 09:14 AM
"I check in with this site from time to time because I find coverage of the Middle East that I will not find elsewhere. It has always been informative. But it is curious to find this remarkable devotion to Trump_vs_deep_state."

Right on the first point. Wrong on the second. To my occasional regret the dream of 2016 had and has few all-in adherents here.

The merits of what you term "Trump_vs_deep_state" are examined from time to time on the Colonel's site. The question of whether the Rule of Law, or the observance of contitutional propriety, is being upheld is what is being examined here. That second issue is independent of the first. That is as it should be. If it were so that the FBI had played politics against Mrs Clinton that would be as disturbing as if they had played politics against Mr Trump.

From my point of view - I'm English, as you might notice - the question of whether the UK Security Services helped play politics in a US presidential election is relevant whoever the target was. I like to think that our Security Services work as part of our defence forces, not as political hit men.

Fred said in reply to bks ... , 12 January 2018 at 09:24 AM
bks,

The Kremlin targeted "educated youth"? Which ones, the Bernie supporters who were going to be screwed by the rigged democratic primary? How did they do the targeting, by that $100K ad spend with Zuckerberg? Isn't he then also guilty by association or is he still the good billionaire? Which other US citizens maintain ties to rich businessmen from Axerbaijan? Which law does that violate?

Annem , 12 January 2018 at 09:43 AM
Two small points:

When the MSM was all a-flutter with coverage of Simpson's testimony in the Capitol, I heard none of the TV hosts mention that it was the Clinton folks who hired Fusion. If that is not the case, please let me know.

In his testimony, Simpson supposedly said that Russia was just one country that research into Trump's business contacts were conducted, the others being the likes of South East Asia and Latin America. We have heard nothing about the outcome of that research.

Dr. Puck , 12 January 2018 at 09:59 AM
It will be most interesting to see Trump's most devoted congressional supporters and 'swamp beast fighters' utilize the timeline and verified facts and (unknown-to-indy investigators) details in the 'private' source, to bring justice to bear on this extremely serious matter. Why hasn't the DOJ appointed a special prosecutor; considering what PT and many others here and elsewhere are "piecing together?"

If Trump wanted to do so, he could have all this factual stuff published on the WH web site; yes? If he did so the counter-narrative would be instantly annihilated, right?

Terry said in reply to Stonevendor ... , 12 January 2018 at 10:09 AM
I didn't vote Trump but I was shocked by the obvious coup d'etat to overthrow Trump after the election. You see some of us support the rule of law, our constitution, and established process for political change. Just because someone is elected that is unpopular with the losing side doesn't mean you throw away everything and become a willing banana Republic. While this was going on I predicted that if they had succeeded they would have over a million angry people in Washington and I would have been one of them

What I find remarkable isn't Trump_vs_deep_state - but rather the blind emotional partisanship that drives far too many people and how willing so many people are to commit treason and tear apart constitutional law just to "win".

Greco said in reply to blue peacock... , 12 January 2018 at 10:28 AM
Further to your points:

- November 2016: Clapper recommended that Rogers be fired. This was soon after Rogers' meeting with Trump.

- March 2017: Trump tweeted that Trump Tower had it's "wires tapped."

Sundance's theory is very interesting. Given the circumstances and the timeline of events, it seems plausible to say the least that Rogers tipped off Trump.

Sid Finster said in reply to blue peacock... , 12 January 2018 at 10:42 AM
I have believed that the FISA courts and procedures are a flat violation of the Sixth Amendment (which guarantees public trials, the right to confront witnesses and the right of the accused to be made aware of the charges against them) ever since the day I became aware of them.
Sid Finster said in reply to Terry... , 12 January 2018 at 10:50 AM
To amplify your point, Terry: once you give the unelected and unaccountable "intelligence community" (or any other part of the Deep State) a de facto veto over election results, you will never get that power back.

You as a country have crossed the Rubicon, and when you get to the other side, you are no longer in a constitutional republic, but in something else.

TimmyB , 12 January 2018 at 10:54 AM
Americans should be able to put their personal beliefs about Trump aside and realize that our country has a serious problem when one-sided opposition research containing little more than rumors is used as the basis for starting a FBI investigation on a presidential candidate during an election. This is especially true when, as we all know, the "news" of such an investigation would soon be leaked to the press.

Personally, I have a very low opinion of Trump and his policies. However, this whole "Russiagate" thing, from what evidence I've seen, is complete bullshit. To see that such obvious bullshit was used to start an FBI spying operation and witch hunts by both the press and a special prosecutor against Trump is outrageous. It is also a crime under our laws. If it can happen to Trump, it can happen to anyone.

One would think the great harm caused by allowing our government intelligence agencies to spy on political candidates and then leak both true and false information about those candidates to the press would be obvious. I hope the people who caused this outrage are prosecuted for the many crimes they committed.

Laura , 12 January 2018 at 11:07 AM
And then...there is this: http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/368671-russia-linked-hackers-targeting-us-senate
Flavius , 12 January 2018 at 11:11 AM
Very, very well done. Andy McCarthy's and Publius Tacitus's combined work in clearing the political and MSM smoke from around this Beltway debacle alone is more than is needed to predicate a full criminal investigation.

In my opinion, another Special Counsel is neither needed nor desirable: a competent apolitical United States Attorney with a special Grand Jury and a couple of squads of FBI Agents brought in from some place like Chicago should be adequate to the job; or the American taxpayer has not been getting its money's worth. A not inconsiderable side benefit would be that our system of justice and the FBI might start to reclaim some of their reputation that is lying in tatters.

The only thing I would add is that I would integrate into the design of the case the multiple unmaskings and unfettered leaks. This case points directly towards the Obama White House and it is reasonable to suspect that it may include Obama himself.

Dr. George W. Oprisko , 12 January 2018 at 11:52 AM

In my view, the deep state......... CIA, FBI, NSA....... had the opportunity to prove their commitment to the welfare of the nation...... given they had the means and opportunity to sway the election.

I'm speaking of Sanders... There was enough dirt on HRC to blackmail her into giving the nomination to Sanders. There was enough dirt on DT to show him as the plaything of the Zionists/ Russians. They had both the Post and Times in their pockets, not to mention Fox and CNN. Only Sanders had a domestic program which could put money into households and thus grow demand and the economy, and Sanders was/is a hawk. They didn't. Their loyalty to HRC trumped the nation.... The question left un asked......... WHY??? What did they have to gain from HRC that no one else offered?

INDY

Richardstevenhack , 12 January 2018 at 12:29 PM
Given that the FBI made no serious effort to analyze the DNC servers after the alleged "hack" and, according to Seymour Hersh, are sitting on an FBI report that fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the supplier of the DNC emails to Wikileaks, these two facts also support the conclusion that the FBI at the highest levels are in a criminal conspiracy to overthrow Trump.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the FBI's history of conducting illegal, criminal activities against various dissident groups in the US and covering up evidence of criminal activity by their own informants - including murder - and also covering up evidence of criminal activity by other law enforcement agencies such as the Bureau of Prisons.

The FBI IS a criminal enterprise.

Richardstevenhack , 12 January 2018 at 12:51 PM
And now we have this...

Mueller adds DOJ cybercrime prosecutor to his team https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/10/russia-special-counsel-mueller-adds-cybercrime-prosecutor-276499

If any of Trump's associates knew about and encouraged the hacking of Democrats' emails and computer servers, they could be charged under the statute.

In November, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mueller's team was letting the original DOJ prosecutors retain the investigation of the actual cyber intrusions into the DNC and other targets.

This is beyond ridiculous.

The FBI never investigated the DNC servers because they decided to accept CrowdStrike's analysis despite CrowdStrike being run by a Russian ex-pat who hates Russia and sees Russians under every bed. Now they want to try to accuse Trump associates of "hacking"? Seriously?

Second, according to Seymour Hersh, the FBI is sitting on a report that explicitly fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the source for the DNC emails received by Wikileaks.

These two facts - along with the compromised FBI personnel involved in the Fusion GPS scandal - demonstrate that the FBI at the highest levels were involved in a criminal conspiracy to prevent Trump from winning the election.

This establishes that the entire "Russiagate" investigation is nothing but more of the same. The real scandal is that the FBI, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies are involved in a "soft coup" against an elected President.

Publius Tacitus -> Lee A. Arnold ... , 12 January 2018 at 02:01 PM
I can keep smacking you around all day. Here's what Corn reported in January 2017 about his first conversations with Steele: The former spy said he soon decided the information he was receiving was "sufficiently serious" for him to forward it to contacts he had at the FBI. He did this, he said, without permission from the American firm that had hired him. "This was an extraordinary situation," he remarked.

The response to the information from the FBI, he recalled, was "shock and horror." After a few weeks, the bureau asked him for information on his sources and their reliability and on how he had obtained his reports. He was also asked to continue to send copies of his subsequent reports to the bureau. These reports were not written, he noted, as finished work products; they were updates on what he was learning from his various sources. But he said, "My track record as a professional is second to no one."

When I spoke with the former spy, he appeared confident about his material -- acknowledging these memos were works in progress -- and genuinely concerned about the implications of the allegations. He came across as a serious and somber professional who was not eager to talk to a journalist or cause a public splash. He realized he was taking a risk, but he seemed duty bound to share information he deemed crucial. He noted that these allegations deserved a "substantial inquiry" within the FBI.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/spy-who-wrote-trump-russia-memos-it-was-hair-raising-stuff/
Of course, if you had actually read carefully what I wrote you would have known this.

[Jan 13, 2018] CNN's Jake Tapper uses Stephen Miller incident to create buzz by Charles Hurt

Notable quotes:
"... It is true that Mr. Miller can come off as serious. After all he is a very serious guy. He does not play mental footsie with fools. The guy has studied U.S. immigration more deeply than just about the entire Washington press corps combined. He knows more about immigration than any of them. Mr. Miller is not going to get into intellectual soft-pillow fights with reporters and lawmakers wearing their silly, soft and fuzzy pajamas. ..."
Jan 11, 2018 | www.washingtontimes.com

CNN's Stephen Miller incident proves how fake news ignorantly smears conservatives

White House adviser does not play mental footsie with fools

White House adviser Stephen Miller appears on CNN anchor Jake Tapper Sunday show. After an exchange, Mr. Tapper cut off Mr. Miller's mic, saying, "I think I've wasted enough of my viewers' time." (CNN.com)

Behold, the anatomy of a "fake news" smear.

The latest drive-by character assassination of White House adviser Stephen Miller began, as it so often does, in a fact-free live TV orgy of public posturing by a journalist eager to display his virgin-snow virtue when it comes to unalloyed hatred of President Donald Trump .

This time it was CNN anchor Jake ( Mr. Trump calls him "Fake") Tapper, who invited Mr. Miller on his Sunday show to respond to Mr. Tapper's complex conspiracy theory about how the president is somehow unfit or too mentally unstable to occupy the White House .

Obviously, Fake Tapper missed the report on Twitter that actually Mr. Trump is a "very stable genius."

Anyhoo, Mr. Miller had no intention of playing any of Fake Tapper's reindeer games. Instead, he wanted to talk about the unrelenting unfairness of CNN and its coverage of Mr. Trump .

When Mr. Miller refused to engage in Mr. Tapper's conspiracy fantasy, the anchor changed his mind and decided he no longer wanted Mr. Miller on his show.

"I think I've wasted enough of my viewer's time," he petulantly whined before cutting off Mr. Miller 's mic.

It was a small, sad, silly moment in the death gurgles of American journalism. But enough to whip up a little buzz on Twitter or some Internet echo chamber. Which is all Fake Tapper was going for in the first place.

In all the frenzy, doddering old House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi clamored over to the bright lights to declare through her unglued dentures that Mr. Miller -- a Jew -- is somehow a "white supremacist."

And then she declared that the Jew be fired from the White House . How that does not make Nancy Pelosi -- a Christian, despite her infatuation with abortion -- an anti-Semite?

Details. Minor details. Then, along comes a Washington reporter who announces that Mr. Miller is "standing in the way of an immigration deal." Not clear if this "deal" is a good one or a bad one. Mr. Miller is just standing in the way of it, which further proves he is a white supremacist. Her entire story was entirely based on unnamed "sources," according to the reporter. Another death gurgle of American journalism. The story includes a link to a "very tense and loud exchange" Mr. Miller had last year with another CNN reporter in which Mr. Miller utterly eviscerated the reporter over his near total ignorance of immigration policy in America.

All that matters to doltish reporters around here, though, is that the exchange was "very tense and loud." Mr. Miller is not only a (Jewish) white supremacist, he is an angry (Jewish) white supremacist. So, like Hitler, basically. Only Jewish.

It is true that Mr. Miller can come off as serious. After all he is a very serious guy. He does not play mental footsie with fools. The guy has studied U.S. immigration more deeply than just about the entire Washington press corps combined. He knows more about immigration than any of them. Mr. Miller is not going to get into intellectual soft-pillow fights with reporters and lawmakers wearing their silly, soft and fuzzy pajamas.

Rather, Mr. Miller -- and his boss -- wants desperately to fix a horribly broken immigration system that created this whole unfortunate class of illegal Dreamers in the first place and prevent a future generation of "Dreamers."

If you have any doubt about the challenge Mr. Miller and Mr. Trump face in honestly addressing illegal immigration in this country, consider this: During this week's bipartisan meeting in the White House to begin negotiations, the word "DACA" was uttered 61 times. The universal sentiment among lawmakers from both parties was to pass some kind of "DACA" legislation that would legalize the illegal-immigrant Dreamers.

Sixty-one times.

The word "American" was used just 20 times. "Worker" only twice. "Citizen" not once. "Citizenship" was used three times -- as in the DACA bill should give Dreamers "citizenship." The words "miner," "unemployed," and "lawful" were never uttered during the 55-minute confab. Perhaps Mr. Miller is "standing in the way of an immigration deal" with these people. But is that a bad thing?

[Jan 12, 2018] According to Seymour Hersh, the FBI is sitting on a report that explicitly fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the source for the DNC emails received by Wikileaks.

Notable quotes:
"... The FBI never investigated the DNC servers because they decided to accept CrowdStrike's analysis despite CrowdStrike being run by a Russian ex-pat who hates Russia and sees Russians under every bed. Now they want to try to accuse Trump associates of "hacking"? Seriously? ..."
"... Second, according to Seymour Hersh, the FBI is sitting on a report that explicitly fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the source for the DNC emails received by Wikileaks. ..."
Jan 12, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Richardstevenhack 12 January 2018 at 12:51 PM

And now we have this...

Mueller adds DOJ cybercrime prosecutor to his team
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/10/russia-special-counsel-mueller-adds-cybercrime-prosecutor-276499

Quote:

If any of Trump's associates knew about and encouraged the hacking of Democrats' emails and computer servers, they could be charged under the statute.

In November, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mueller's team was letting the original DOJ prosecutors retain the investigation of the actual cyber intrusions into the DNC and other targets.

End Quote

This is beyond ridiculous.

The FBI never investigated the DNC servers because they decided to accept CrowdStrike's analysis despite CrowdStrike being run by a Russian ex-pat who hates Russia and sees Russians under every bed. Now they want to try to accuse Trump associates of "hacking"? Seriously?

Second, according to Seymour Hersh, the FBI is sitting on a report that explicitly fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the source for the DNC emails received by Wikileaks.

These two facts - along with the compromised FBI personnel involved in the Fusion GPS scandal - demonstrate that the FBI at the highest levels were involved in a criminal conspiracy to prevent Trump from winning the election.

This establishes that the entire "Russiagate" investigation is nothing but more of the same. The real scandal is that the FBI, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies are involved in a "soft coup" against an elected President.

[Jan 12, 2018] Court Order Confirms DNC Fraud Lawsuit Appeal Will Proceed by Elizabeth Lea Vos

Jan 10, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Source: Disobedient Media

Attorneys for the plaintiffs in the DNC Fraud Lawsuit received good news from the 11th Circuit Court of Federal Appeals earlier today. The Becks stated via social media that "After posing two separate jurisdictional questions, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has found jurisdiction sufficient for the case to proceed on appeal.

The DNC Fraud lawsuit was initially filed on behalf of donors to the Democratic party in the wake of the revelations stemming from the publication of DNC emails that clearly demonstrated the party's partisan efforts to support Hillary Clinton and to undermine Bernie Sander's campaign. After the suit was dismissed late last year, Disobedient Media reported that the Becks filed an appeal to that ruling.

The suit has proven extremely significant in terms of calling the Democratic Party establishment to account, with DNC defense counsel forced to argue in open court that the Party should legally be able to support one candidate over another, in an apparently overt contradiction of the DNC's charter.

Disobedient Media reported on the numerous issues stemming from the suit, including safety concerns of the plaintiff's Attorneys and their co-counsel. Among other disturbing events surrounding the case, including the death of Shawn Lucas , Disobedient Media reported that the Becks had received unusual phone calls from a caller-ID which matched the Aventura office of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a defendant in the case.

The latest order, which can be read in full at the Beck's JAMPAC site, reads in part:

Chupacabra-322 -> Bastiat Jan 11, 2018 5:26 PM Permalink

@ Bastiat,

This email?

"I'm definitely for making an example of a suspected leaker whether or not we have any real basis for it," John Podesta said not long before the young DNC staffer, Seth Rich, was mysteriously killed. Some unsubstantiated claims indicate Rich may have been Julian Assange's source for the leaked DNC emails

http://www.angrypatriotmovement.com/email-links-hillary-to-murder-plot/

indygo55 -> ATM Jan 11, 2018 4:10 PM Permalink

But talk he did. He was alive and talking when the police arrived. And what do the police ask gunshot victims when that are talking? They ask "Who shot you?". And where is that testimony? Where are the police reports about when the police found him alive and talking? And why did the emergency room personnel leave the room and allow .GOV officials enter the room where Rich was? And then he was dead. His wounds were NOT life threatening.

Chupacabra-322 -> indygo55 Jan 11, 2018 5:32 PM Permalink

@ Indy,

I wonder who ordered the murder of Seth Rich. Was it John Podesta?

Was it Hillary Clinton?

Was it Debra Wasserman-Scholtz?

As I side note, I wonder who double crossed and informed on Seth Rich?

Was it Julian Assange or was Seth Rich careless and confided his intentions to someone that he thought he could trust?

I'd bet my balls to a barn dance the whoever those two gunmen were that were on the surveillance tape were also in the bar that night.

Bet that bar has video too.

You know the kid said something to paramedics and the ER Docs, too.

Seth Rich was talkative when police arrived. Was not even aware he'd been shot. In fact, the cops were surprised to learn that he didn't make it. So what did Rich have to say before he passed? And why did Rich wander so long that early morning, far longer than the walk home should have taken - was he trying to shake someone?

What did he tell his GF?

The frat bro he also spoke with that morning?

The machinations surrounding the Election 2016 and its aftermath could hardy have been scripted more intriguingly. So many vile characters.

FIAT CON -> Chupacabra-322 Jan 11, 2018 6:37 PM Permalink

Yes the entire Seth Rich murder is fucked up...no death certificate, no body cam footage the list goes on and on.

MoreFreedom -> ATM Jan 11, 2018 5:06 PM Permalink

" He couldn't be allowed to talk."

Well, actually he did by passing the emails to Wikileaks one would assume.

His murder wasn't to keep him from talking, it was to keep anyone else from talking in the future

FIAT CON -> ATM Jan 11, 2018 6:11 PM Permalink

It would seem that if the facts don't get reported by all news agencies then I guess the truth is not the truth after all.

Bill Binney proved that this was a leak not a hack, because metadata proves that the transfer rate was much too fast to have been a hacker and was a drive that was plugged directly into the computer.

MK ULTRA Alpha -> d edwards Jan 11, 2018 3:29 PM Permalink

The Lucas murder right after serving DNC papers on the law suit, then Seth Rich murder, nothing stolen but according to police it was a robbery. Then the Haitian minister is suicided the day before he was to testify on the Clinton Foundation.

Too many dead bodies showing up around democrats, considering Wasserman Shultz looks inbred, sounds and acts inbred, is extremely racist against those who are not Jews, then maybe Wasserman Shultz must be investigated, we can't because she is a Jew, just like Harvey Wienstein can't be indicted and convicted, because he is a Jew.

Then we have Wasserman Shultz running a Pakistani espionage ring connected to Hezbollah and we don't know if this is the same Hezbollah cocaine ring Obama covered for.

Chupacabra-322 -> MK ULTRA Alpha Jan 11, 2018 5:34 PM Permalink

I've been saying for over 2 years now, the collective "we" probably deserves what's coming for sticking their fingers in the ears, closing their eyes and adamantly refusing to to consider any evidence except that which supported their previously held beliefs.

It does remove all doubt about the FBIs true role in our society, hopefully opening a few eyes and minds.

The secret police guarding the one party, the Pure Evil Criminal Psychopath and its minions.

Its policing work is merely practice and cover for that true purpose.

Don't nominate a new head, send it to the trash can of history NOW..

A federal investigator who reviewed an FBI forensic report detailing the contents of DNC staffer Seth Rich's computer generated within 96 hours after his murder, said Rich made contact with WikiLeaks through Gavin MacFadyen, a now-deceased American investigative reporter, documentary filmmaker, and director of WikiLeaks who was living in London at the time.

This explosive information was being suppressed by James Comey...FUCK the FBI!

FIAT CON -> MK ULTRA Alpha Jan 12, 2018 12:37 AM Permalink

And Andrew the Weiner and Huma have called off the divorce......Hmmmm cannot testifies against your husband!!! or wife.....

You just know they are all dirty of what we suspect, and I'm sure much more. They would not do these things if they were not guilty...

Private meetings on air port runways, smashing hard drives and blackberry's, bleach bit...erasing emails after subpoena... and the list goes on and on.....

MoreFreedom -> nmewn Jan 11, 2018 5:08 PM Permalink

Actually there will be a lot of super delegates. At least it's no more than 15% of the total delegates. It's partly how the Democrats choose their candidate, and ensures the "establishment" has a say. In 1968, Hubert Humphrey obtained the Democrat nomination for president, without entering a single primary by sewing up the super delegate vote, which led to some reform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate

BidnessMan Jan 10, 2018 7:14 PM Permalink

Glad they appealed so the Judge in the DNC pocket got overruled. Let's see all the details.

Bastiat Jan 11, 2018 1:24 PM Permalink

Washer-woman making thinly disguised "anonymous" calls (and forgetting about caller-ID) is a sign of serious desperation. Discovery on this one could be life changing for many people. "OK, I'll talk: I did X, Y and Z so I wouldn't end up blackmailed to disgrace or dead."

GunnyG Jan 11, 2018 4:10 PM Permalink

The best part of this whole shitstorm is that if nothing happens to the guilty parties here, then it is very clear that the Rule of Law is dead in America and revolution a necessity.

[Jan 07, 2018] Neoliberal MSM want to control the narrative

"Controlling the narrative" is politically correct term for censorship.
Notable quotes:
"... I suspect most of the people who write all that furious invective on the Internet, professional polemicists and semiliterate commenters alike, are lashing out because they've been hurt -- their sense of fairness or decency has been outraged, or they feel personally wounded or threatened. ..."
"... "controlling the narrative" by neoliberal MSM is the key of facilitating the neoliberal "groupthink". Much like was in the USSR with "communist" groupthink. This is a step in the direction of the theocratic society (which the USSR definitely was). ..."
"... In other words "controlling the narrative" is the major form of neoliberal MSM "war on reality" as the neoliberal ideology is now completely discredited and can be sustained only by cult-style methods. ..."
Jan 30, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
libezkova -> Fred C. Dobbs... January 29, 2017 at 08:31 AM , 2017 at 08:31 AM
Neoliberal MSM want to control the narrative.

That's why "alternative facts" should be called an "alternative narrative".

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/controlling-the-narrative/?_r=0

== quote ==

Maybe this is the same kind of clinical detachment doctors have to cultivate, a way of distancing oneself from the subject, protecting yourself against a crippling empathy. I won't say that writers or artists are more sensitive than other people, but it may be that they're less able to handle their own emotions.

It may be that art, like drugs, is a way of dulling or controlling pain. Eloquently articulating a feeling is one way to avoid actually experiencing it.

Words are only symbols, noises or marks on paper, and turning the messy, ugly stuff of life into language renders it inert and manageable for the author, even as it intensifies it for the reader.

It's a nerdy, sensitive kid's way of turning suffering into something safely abstract, an object of contemplation.

I suspect most of the people who write all that furious invective on the Internet, professional polemicists and semiliterate commenters alike, are lashing out because they've been hurt -- their sense of fairness or decency has been outraged, or they feel personally wounded or threatened.

libezkova -> libezkova... , January 29, 2017 at 09:24 AM
"controlling the narrative" by neoliberal MSM is the key of facilitating the neoliberal "groupthink". Much like was in the USSR with "communist" groupthink. This is a step in the direction of the theocratic society (which the USSR definitely was).

In other words "controlling the narrative" is the major form of neoliberal MSM "war on reality" as the neoliberal ideology is now completely discredited and can be sustained only by cult-style methods.

They want to invoke your emotions in the necessary direction and those emotions serve as a powerful filter, a firewall which will prevents you from seeing any alternative facts which taken as whole form an "alternative narrative".

It also creates certain taboo, such as "don't publish anything from RT", or you automatically become "Putin's stooge." But some incoherent blabbing of a crazy neocon in Boston Globe is OK.

This is an old and a very dirty game, a variation of method used for centuries by high demand cults:

"Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece.

Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood.

But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

– Hermann Goering (as told to Gustav Gilbert during the Nuremberg trials)

You need to be able to decipher this "suggested" set of emotions and detach it from the set of facts provided by neoliberal MSM. It might help to view things "Sine ira et studio" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine_ira_et_studio )

That helps to destroy the official neoliberal narrative.

Here skepticism (whether natural or acquired) can be of great help in fighting groupthink pushed by neoliberal MSM.

We are all guilty of this one sidedness, but I think that we need to put some efforts to move in direction of higher level of skepticism toward our own views and probably provide at least links to alternative views.

[Jan 06, 2018] Russia-gate Breeds Establishment McCarthyism by Robert Parry

Highly recommended!
I wish Robert Parry quick and full recovery after his minor stoke. He is a magnificent journalist !
Notable quotes:
"... In the past, America has witnessed "McCarthyism" from the Right and even complaints from the Right about "McCarthyism of the Left." But what we are witnessing now amid the Russia-gate frenzy is what might be called "Establishment McCarthyism, " traditional media/political powers demonizing and silencing dissent that questions mainstream narratives. ..."
"... This extraordinary assault on civil liberties is cloaked in fright-filled stories about "Russian propaganda" and wildly exaggerated tales of the Kremlin's "hordes of Twitter bots," but its underlying goal is to enforce Washington's "groupthinks" by creating a permanent system that shuts down or marginalizes dissident opinions and labels contrary information – no matter how reasonable and well-researched – as "disputed" or "rated false" by mainstream "fact-checking" organizations like PolitiFact. ..."
"... For instance, PolitiFact still rates as "true" Hillary Clinton's false claim that "all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies" agreed that Russia was behind the release of Democratic emails last year. Even the Times and The Associated Press belatedly ran corrections after President Obama's intelligence chiefs admitted that the assessment came from what Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called "hand-picked" analysts from only three agencies: CIA, FBI and NSA. ..."
"... And, the larger truth was that these "hand-picked" analysts were sequestered away from other analysts even from their own agencies and produced "stove-piped intelligence," i.e., analysis that escapes the back-and-forth that should occur inside the intelligence community. ..."
"... And this was not a stand-alone story. Previously, the Times has run favorable articles about plans to deploy aggressive algorithms to hunt down and then remove or marginalize information that the Times and other mainstream outlets deem false. ..."
"... Congress has authorized $160 million to combat alleged Russian "propaganda and disinformation," a gilded invitation for "scholars" and "experts" to gear up "studies" that will continue to prove what is supposed to be proved – "Russia bad" – with credulous mainstream reporters eagerly gobbling up the latest "evidence" of Russian perfidy. ..."
"... And, given the risk of thermo-nuclear war with Russia, why aren't liberals and progressives demanding at least a critical examination of what's coming from the U.S. intelligence agencies and the mainstream press? ..."
"... So, as we have moved into this dangerous New Cold War, we are living in what could be called "Establishment McCarthyism," a hysterical but methodical strategy for silencing dissent and making sure that future mainstream groupthinks don't get challenged. ..."
Oct 27, 2017 | ronpaulinstitute.org
In the past, America has witnessed "McCarthyism" from the Right and even complaints from the Right about "McCarthyism of the Left." But what we are witnessing now amid the Russia-gate frenzy is what might be called "Establishment McCarthyism, " traditional media/political powers demonizing and silencing dissent that questions mainstream narratives.

This extraordinary assault on civil liberties is cloaked in fright-filled stories about "Russian propaganda" and wildly exaggerated tales of the Kremlin's "hordes of Twitter bots," but its underlying goal is to enforce Washington's "groupthinks" by creating a permanent system that shuts down or marginalizes dissident opinions and labels contrary information – no matter how reasonable and well-researched – as "disputed" or "rated false" by mainstream "fact-checking" organizations like PolitiFact.

It doesn't seem to matter that the paragons of this new structure – such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and, indeed, PolitiFact – have a checkered record of getting facts straight.

For instance, PolitiFact still rates as "true" Hillary Clinton's false claim that "all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies" agreed that Russia was behind the release of Democratic emails last year. Even the Times and The Associated Press belatedly ran corrections after President Obama's intelligence chiefs admitted that the assessment came from what Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called "hand-picked" analysts from only three agencies: CIA, FBI and NSA.

And, the larger truth was that these "hand-picked" analysts were sequestered away from other analysts even from their own agencies and produced "stove-piped intelligence," i.e., analysis that escapes the back-and-forth that should occur inside the intelligence community.

Even then, what these analysts published last Jan. 6 was an "assessment," which they specifically warned was "not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact." In other words, they didn't have any conclusive proof of Russian "hacking."

Yet, the Times and other leading newspaper routinely treat these findings as flat fact or the unassailable "consensus" of the "intelligence community." Contrary information, including WikiLeaks' denials of a Russian role in supplying the emails, and contrary judgments from former senior U.S. intelligence officials are ignored.

The Jan. 6 report also tacked on a seven-page addendum smearing the Russian television network, RT, for such offenses as sponsoring a 2012 debate among U.S. third-party presidential candidates who had been excluded from the Republican-Democratic debates. RT also was slammed for reporting on the Occupy Wall Street protests and the environmental dangers from "fracking."

How the idea of giving Americans access to divergent political opinions and information about valid issues such as income inequality and environmental dangers constitutes threats to American "democracy" is hard to comprehend.

However, rather than address the Jan. 6 report's admitted uncertainties about Russian "hacking" and the troubling implications of its attacks on RT, the Times and other U.S. mainstream publications treat the report as some kind of holy scripture that can't be questioned or challenged.

Silencing RT

For instance, on Tuesday, the Times published a front-page story entitled " YouTube Gave Russians Outlet Portal Into U.S ." that essentially cried out for the purging of RT from YouTube. The article began by holding YouTube's vice president Robert Kynci up to ridicule and opprobrium for his praising "RT for bonding with viewers by providing 'authentic' content instead of 'agendas or propaganda.'"

The article by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Nicholas Confessore swallowed whole the Jan. 6 report's conclusion that RT is "the Kremlin's 'principal international propaganda outlet' and a key player in Russia's information warfare operations around the world." In other words, the Times portrayed Kynci as essentially a "useful idiot."

Yet, the article doesn't actually dissect any RT article that could be labeled false or propagandistic. It simply alludes generally to news items that contained information critical of Hillary Clinton as if any negative reporting on the Democratic presidential contender – no matter how accurate or how similar to stories appearing in the U.S. press – was somehow proof of "information warfare."

As Daniel Lazare wrote at Consortiumnews.com on Wednesday, "The web version [of the Times article] links to an RT interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that ran shortly before the 2016 election. The topic is a September 2014 email obtained by Wikileaks in which Clinton acknowledges that 'the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.'"

In other words, the Times cited a documented and newsworthy RT story as its evidence that RT was a propaganda shop threatening American democracy and deserving ostracism if not removal from YouTube.

A Dangerous Pattern

Not to say that I share every news judgment of RT – or for that matter The New York Times – but there is a grave issue of press freedom when the Times essentially calls for the shutting down of access to a news organization that may highlight or report on stories that the Times and other mainstream outlets downplay or ignore.

And this was not a stand-alone story. Previously, the Times has run favorable articles about plans to deploy aggressive algorithms to hunt down and then remove or marginalize information that the Times and other mainstream outlets deem false.

Nor is it just the Times. Last Thanksgiving, The Washington Post ran a fawning front-page article about an anonymous group PropOrNot that had created a blacklist of 200 Internet sites, including Consortiumnews.com and other independent news sources, that were deemed guilty of dispensing "Russian propaganda," which basically amounted to our showing any skepticism toward the State Department's narratives on the crises in Syria or Ukraine.

So, if any media outlet dares to question the U.S. government's version of events – once that storyline has been embraced by the big media – the dissidents risk being awarded the media equivalent of a yellow star and having their readership dramatically reduced by getting downgraded on search engines and punished on social media.

Meanwhile, Congress has authorized $160 million to combat alleged Russian "propaganda and disinformation," a gilded invitation for "scholars" and "experts" to gear up "studies" that will continue to prove what is supposed to be proved – "Russia bad" – with credulous mainstream reporters eagerly gobbling up the latest "evidence" of Russian perfidy.

There is also a more coercive element to what's going on. RT is facing demands from the Justice Department that it register as a "foreign agent" or face prosecution. Clearly, the point is to chill the journalism done by RT's American reporters, hosts and staff who now fear being stigmatized as something akin to traitors.

You might wonder: where are the defenders of press freedom and civil liberties? Doesn't anyone in the mainstream media or national politics recognize the danger to a democracy coming from enforced groupthinks? Is American democracy so fragile that letting Americans hear "another side of the story" must be prevented?

A Dangerous 'Cure'

I agree that there is a limited problem with jerks who knowingly make up fake stories or who disseminate crazy conspiracy theories – and no one finds such behavior more offensive than I do. But does no one recall the lies about Iraq's WMD and other U.S. government falsehoods and deceptions over the years?

Often, it is the few dissenters who alert the American people to the truth, even as the Times, Post, CNN and other big outlets are serving as the real propaganda agents, accepting what the "important people" say and showing little or no professional skepticism.

And, given the risk of thermo-nuclear war with Russia, why aren't liberals and progressives demanding at least a critical examination of what's coming from the U.S. intelligence agencies and the mainstream press?

The answer seems to be that many liberals and progressives are so blinded by their fury over Donald Trump's election that they don't care what lines are crossed to destroy or neutralize him. Plus, for some liberal entities, there's lots of money to be made.

For instance, the American Civil Liberties Union has made its "resistance" to the Trump administration an important part of its fundraising. So, the ACLU is doing nothing to defend the rights of news organizations and journalists under attack. When I asked ACLU about the Justice Department's move against RT and other encroachments on press freedom, I was told by ACLU spokesman Thomas Dresslar: "Thanks for reaching out to us. Unfortunately, I've been informed that we do not have anyone able to speak to you about this."

Meanwhile, the Times and other traditional "defenders of a free press" are now part of the attack machine against a free press. While much of this attitude comes from the big media's high-profile leadership of the anti-Trump Resistance and anger at any resistors to the Resistance, mainstream news outlets have chafed for years over the Internet undermining their privileged role as the gatekeepers of what Americans get to see and hear.

For a long time, the big media has wanted an excuse to rein in the Internet and break the small news outlets that have challenged the power – and the profitability – of the Times, Post, CNN, etc. Russia-gate and Trump have become the cover for that restoration of mainstream authority.

So, as we have moved into this dangerous New Cold War, we are living in what could be called "Establishment McCarthyism," a hysterical but methodical strategy for silencing dissent and making sure that future mainstream groupthinks don't get challenged.

Reprinted with permission from ConsortiumNews.com .


Related

[Jan 05, 2018] The Washington Post rather surprised me when I came across this recent article: There's still little evidence that Russia's 2016 social media efforts did much of anything

Jan 05, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

blowback, 04 January 2018 at 05:10 PM

The Washington Post rather surprised me when I came across this recent article:

There's still little evidence that Russia's 2016 social media efforts did much of anything

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/12/28/theres-still-little-evidence-that-russias-2016-social-media-efforts-did-much-of-anything/?utm_term=.7760dfd315bd

Some in the comments section have difficulty believing the story.

[Jan 02, 2018] The Still-Missing Evidence of Russia-gate by Dennis J. Bernstein

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The central groupthink around Russia-gate is the still unproven claim that Russia hacked Democratic emails in 2016 and publicized them via WikiLeaks, a crucial issue that NSA experts say should be easy to prove if true, reports Dennis J. Bernstein. ..."
"... Binney: We at Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) published an article on this in July. First of all, if any of the data went anywhere across the fiber optic world, the NSA would know. Just inside the United States, the NSA has over a hundred tap points on the fiber lines, taking in everything. ..."
"... The other data that came out from Guccifer 2.0, a download from the DNC, has been a charade. It was a download and not a transfer across the Web. The Web won't manage such a high speed. It could not have gotten across the Atlantic at that high speed. You would have to have high capacity lines dedicated to that in order to do it. They have been playing games with us. There is no factual evidence to back up any charge of hacking here. ..."
"... Bernstein: Let me come at this from the other side. Has the United States ever tried to hack into and undermine Russian operations in this way? ..."
"... Binney: Oh, sure. We do it as much as anybody else. In the Ukraine, for example, we sponsored regime change. When someone who was pro-Soviet was elected president, we orchestrated a coup to put our man in power. ..."
"... Did the US meddle in the Russian elections that brought Yeltsin to power? ..."
"... I believe they did. We try to leverage our power and influence elections around the world. ..."
"... Binney: Yes, to defend privacy but also to defend the Constitution. Right now, our government is violating the first, fourth and fifth amendments in various ways. Mueller did it, Comey did it, they were all involved in violating the Constitution. ..."
"... Bernstein: There seems to be a new McCarthyite operation around the Russia-gate investigation. It appears that it is an attempt to justify the idea that Clinton lost because the Russians undermined the election. ..."
"... Bernstein: It was initially put out that seventeen intelligence agencies found compelling evidence that the Russians hacked into our election. You're saying it was actually selected individuals from just three agencies. Is there anything to the revelations that FBI agents talked about taking action to prevent Trump from becoming president? ..."
"... Binney: It certainly does seem that it is leaning that way, that is was all a frame-up. It is a sad time in our history, to see the government working against itself internally ..."
"... Bernstein: What concerns do you have regarding the Russia-gate investigation and the McCarthyite tactics that are being employed? ..."
"... Binney: Ultimately, my main concern is that it could lead to actual war with Russia. We should definitely not be going down that path. We need to get out of all these wars. I am also concerned about what we are doing to our own democracy. We are trampling the fundamental principles contained in the Constitution. The only way to reverse all this is to start indicting people who are participating in and managing these activities that are clearly unconstitutional. ..."
Jan 02, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

The central groupthink around Russia-gate is the still unproven claim that Russia hacked Democratic emails in 2016 and publicized them via WikiLeaks, a crucial issue that NSA experts say should be easy to prove if true, reports Dennis J. Bernstein.

A changing-places moment brought about by Russia-gate is that liberals who are usually more skeptical of U.S. intelligence agencies, especially their evidence-free claims, now question the patriotism of Americans who insist that the intelligence community supply proof to support the dangerous claims about Russian 'hacking" of Democratic emails especially when some veteran U.S. government experts say the data would be easily available if the Russians indeed were guilty.

One of those experts is William Binney, a former high-level National Security Agency intelligence official who, after his 2001 retirement, blew the whistle on the extraordinary breadth of NSA surveillance programs. His outspoken criticism of the NSA during the George W. Bush administration made him the subject of FBI investigations that included a raid on his home in 2007.

Even before Edward Snowden's NSA whistleblowing, Binney publicly revealed that NSA had access to telecommunications companies' domestic and international billing records, and that since 9/11 the agency has intercepted some 15 trillion to 20 trillion communications. Snowden has said: "I have tremendous respect for Binney, who did everything he could according to the rules."

I spoke to Binney on Dec. 28 about Russia-gate and a host of topics having to do with spying and America's expanding national security state.

Dennis Bernstein: I would like you to begin by telling us a little about your background at the NSA and how you got there.

William Binney: I was in the United States Army from 1965 to 1969. They put me in the Army Security Agency, an affiliate of the NSA. They liked the work I was doing and they put me on a priority hire in 1970. I was in the NSA for 32 years, mostly working against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. I was solving what were called "wizard puzzles," and the NSA was sometimes referred to as the "Puzzle Palace." I had to solve code systems and work on cyber systems and data systems to be able to predict in advance the "intentions and capabilities of adversaries or potential adversaries."

Bernstein: At a certain point you ran amiss of your supervisors. What did you come to understand and try to tell people that got you in dutch with your higher-ups?

Binney: By 1998-1999, the "digital issue" was basically solved. This created a problem for the upper ranks because at the time they were lobbying Congress for $3.8 billion to continue working on what we had already accomplished. That lobby was started in 1989 for a separate program called Trailblazer, which failed miserably in 2005-2006. We had to brief Congress on how we were progressing and my information ran contrary to the efforts downtown to secure more funding. And so this caused a problem internally.

We learned from some of our staff members in Congress that several of the corporations that were getting contracts from the NSA were downtown lobbying against our program in Congress. This is the military industrial complex in action. That lobby was supported by the NSA management because they just wanted more money to build a bigger empire.

But Dick Cheney, who was behind all of this, wanted it because he grew up under Nixon, who always wanted to know what his political enemies were thinking and doing. This kind of approach of bulk acquisition of everything was possible after you removed certain segments of our software and they used it against the entire digital world. Cheney wanted to know who his political enemies were and get updates about them at any time.

Bernstein: Your expertise was in the Soviet Union and so you must know a lot about bugging. Do you believe that Russia hacked and undermined our last election? Can Trump thank Russia for the result?

Binney: We at Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) published an article on this in July. First of all, if any of the data went anywhere across the fiber optic world, the NSA would know. Just inside the United States, the NSA has over a hundred tap points on the fiber lines, taking in everything. Mark Klein exposed some of this at the AT&T facility in San Francisco.

This is not for foreigners, by the way, this is for targeting US citizens. If they wanted only foreigners, all they would have to do was look at the transatlantic cables where they surface on the coast of the United States. But they are not there, they are distributed among the US population.

Bernstein: So if, in fact, the Russians were tapping into DNC headquarters, the NSA would absolutely know about it.

Binney: Yes, and they would also have trace routes on where they went specifically, in Russia or anywhere else. If you remember, about three or four years ago, the Chinese hacked into somewhere in the United States and our government came out and confirmed that it was the Chinese who did it, and it came from a specific military facility in Shanghai. The NSA had these trace route programs embedded by the hundreds across the US and all around the world.

The other data that came out from Guccifer 2.0, a download from the DNC, has been a charade. It was a download and not a transfer across the Web. The Web won't manage such a high speed. It could not have gotten across the Atlantic at that high speed. You would have to have high capacity lines dedicated to that in order to do it. They have been playing games with us. There is no factual evidence to back up any charge of hacking here.

Bernstein: So was this a leak by somebody at Democratic headquarters?

Binney: We don't know that for sure, either. All we know was that it was a local download. We can likely attribute it to a USB device that was physically passed along.

Bernstein: Let me come at this from the other side. Has the United States ever tried to hack into and undermine Russian operations in this way?

Binney: Oh, sure. We do it as much as anybody else. In the Ukraine, for example, we sponsored regime change. When someone who was pro-Soviet was elected president, we orchestrated a coup to put our man in power.

Then we invited the Ukraine into NATO. One of the agreements we made with the Russians when the Soviet Union fell apart was that the Ukraine would give them their nuclear weapons to manage and that we would not move NATO further east toward Russia. I think they made a big mistake when they asked Ukraine to join NATO. They should have asked Russia to join as well, making it all-inclusive. If you treat people as adversaries, they are going to act that way.

Bernstein: Did the US meddle in the Russian elections that brought Yeltsin to power?

Binney: I believe they did. We try to leverage our power and influence elections around the world.

Bernstein: What has your group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, been up to, and what has been the US government's response?

Binney: We have been discussing privacy and security with the European Union and with a number of European parliaments. Recently the Austrian supreme court ruled that the entire bulk acquisition system was unconstitutional. Everyone but the conservatives in the Austrian parliament voted that bill down, making Austria the first country there to do the right thing.

A slide from material leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden to the Washington Post, showing what happens when an NSA analyst "tasks" the PRISM system for information about a new surveillance target.

Bernstein: Is it your goal to defend people's privacy and their right to communicate privately?

Binney: Yes, to defend privacy but also to defend the Constitution. Right now, our government is violating the first, fourth and fifth amendments in various ways. Mueller did it, Comey did it, they were all involved in violating the Constitution.

Back in the 1990's, the idea was to make our analysts effective so that they could see threats coming before they happened and alert people to take action so that lives would be saved. What happens now is that people go out and kill someone and then the NSA and the FBI go on a forensics mission. Intelligence is supposed to tell you in advance when a crime is coming so that you can do something to avert it. They have lost that perspective.

Bernstein: They now have access to every single one of our electronic conversations, is that right? The human mind has a hard time imagining how you could contain, move and study all that information.

Binney: Basically, it is achievable because most of the processing is done by machine so it doesn't cost human energy.

Bernstein: There seems to be a new McCarthyite operation around the Russia-gate investigation. It appears that it is an attempt to justify the idea that Clinton lost because the Russians undermined the election.

Binney: I have seen no evidence at all from anybody, including the intelligence community. If you look at the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) report, they state on the first page that "We have high confidence that the Russians did this." But when you get toward the end of the report, they basically confess that "our judgment does not imply that we have evidence to back it up."

Bernstein: It was initially put out that seventeen intelligence agencies found compelling evidence that the Russians hacked into our election. You're saying it was actually selected individuals from just three agencies. Is there anything to the revelations that FBI agents talked about taking action to prevent Trump from becoming president?

Binney: It certainly does seem that it is leaning that way, that is was all a frame-up. It is a sad time in our history, to see the government working against itself internally.

Bernstein: I take it you are not a big supporter of Trump.

Binney: Well, I voted for him. I couldn't vote for a warmonger like Clinton. She wanted to see our planes shooting down Russian planes in Syria. She advocated for destabilizing Libya, for getting rid of Assad in Syria, she was a strong backer of the war in Iraq.

Bernstein: What concerns do you have regarding the Russia-gate investigation and the McCarthyite tactics that are being employed?

Binney: Ultimately, my main concern is that it could lead to actual war with Russia. We should definitely not be going down that path. We need to get out of all these wars. I am also concerned about what we are doing to our own democracy. We are trampling the fundamental principles contained in the Constitution. The only way to reverse all this is to start indicting people who are participating in and managing these activities that are clearly unconstitutional.

Dennis J Bernstein is a host of "Flashpoints" on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom . You can access the audio archives at www.flashpoints.net .

[Jan 02, 2018] Some investigators ask a sensible question: "It is likely that all the Russians involved in the attempt to influence the 2016 election were lying, scheming, Kremlin-linked, Putin-backed enemies of America except the Russians who talked to Christopher Steele?"

Highly recommended!
"If one argues the document is unverified and never will be, it is critical to learn the identity of the sources to support that conclusion. If one argues the document is the whole truth, or largely true, knowing sources is equally critical."
Notable quotes:
"... there is another reason to know Steele's sources, and that is to learn not just the origin of the dossier but its place in the larger Trump-Russia affai ..."
"... Really incredible that it is assumed that everyone will believe any loopy paid-by-Soros "sources" the CIA trots out. ..."
"... I'll not bother with the CIA's repugnant history of overthrowing governments all over the planet. But I do have to ask: when are the Russia-did-it enthusiasts going to stop making fools of themselves? ..."
"... Steele's contacts might just be a bunch of washed-up spies like himself, feeding him garbage ... because he was paying for it. ..."
Dec 30, 2017 | theduran.com

According to Zerohedge, there is another reason to know Steele's sources, and that is to learn not just the origin of the dossier but its place in the larger Trump-Russia affair.

As the WashEx adds, there is a belief among some congressional investigators that the Russians who provided information to Steele were using Steele to disrupt the American election as much as the Russians who distributed hacked Democratic Party emails. In some investigators' views, they are the two sides of the Trump-Russia project, both aimed at sowing chaos and discord in the American political system.

Still, investigators who favor this theory ask a sensible question: " It is likely that all the Russians involved in the attempt to influence the 2016 election were lying, scheming, Kremlin-linked, Putin-backed enemies of America – except the Russians who talked to Christopher Steele? "

On the other hand, the theory is still just a theory, for now and as the Examiner's Byron York correctly points out, to validate -or refute – it House investigators will seek Steele's sources – and is why they will try to compel Kramer to talk.

journey80 , December 28, 2017 12:32 PM

Are we supposed to believe that the CIA doesn't have any Russian spooks on its payroll? Any Russian "sources" are going to be taken as gold? Really incredible that it is assumed that everyone will believe any loopy paid-by-Soros "sources" the CIA trots out.

https://www.thenation.com/a...

I'll not bother with the CIA's repugnant history of overthrowing governments all over the planet. But I do have to ask: when are the Russia-did-it enthusiasts going to stop making fools of themselves?

Franz Kafka journey80 , December 28, 2017 9:59 PM

They have an audience which chooses to believe that the fools are wise-men.

stevek9 , December 29, 2017 8:56 AM

There is another theory: the 'Kremlin' did not direct any of this. Steele's contacts might just be a bunch of washed-up spies like himself, feeding him garbage ... because he was paying for it.

[Jan 02, 2018] What We Don t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking by Jackson Lears

Highly recommended!
It you need to read a singe article analyzing current anti-Russian hysteria in the USA this in the one you should read. This is an excellent article Simply great !!! And as of December 2017 it represents the perfect summary of Russiagate, Hillary defeat and, Neo-McCarthyism campaign launched as a method of hiding the crisis of neoliberalism revealed by Presidential elections. It also suggest that growing jingoism of both Parties (return to Madeleine Albright's 'indispensable nation' bulling. Both Trump and Albright assume that the United States should be able to do as it pleases in the international arena) and loss of the confidence and paranoia of the US neoliberal elite.
It contain many important observation which in my view perfectly catch the complexity of the current Us political landscape.
Bravo to Jackson Lears !!!
Notable quotes:
"... Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil in order to secure global progress ..."
"... Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton's defeat. Then everything changed. ..."
"... A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton's chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s. ..."
"... The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by ordering his minions to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. The story became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and completeness. Doubters are perceived as heretics and as apologists for Trump and Putin, the evil twins and co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy. ..."
"... Like any orthodoxy worth its salt, the religion of the Russian hack depends not on evidence but on ex cathedra pronouncements on the part of authoritative institutions and their overlords. Its scriptural foundation is a confused and largely fact-free 'assessment' produced last January by a small number of 'hand-picked' analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. ..."
"... It is not the first time the intelligence agencies have played this role. When I hear the Intelligence Community Assessment cited as a reliable source, I always recall the part played by the New York Times in legitimating CIA reports of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's putative weapons of mass destruction, not to mention the long history of disinformation (a.k.a. 'fake news') as a tactic for advancing one administration or another's political agenda. Once again, the established press is legitimating pronouncements made by the Church Fathers of the national security state. Clapper is among the most vigorous of these. He perjured himself before Congress in 2013, when he denied that the NSA had 'wittingly' spied on Americans – a lie for which he has never been held to account. ..."
"... In May 2017, he told NBC's Chuck Todd that the Russians were highly likely to have colluded with Trump's campaign because they are 'almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique'. The current orthodoxy exempts the Church Fathers from standards imposed on ordinary people, and condemns Russians – above all Putin – as uniquely, 'almost genetically' diabolical. ..."
"... It's hard for me to understand how the Democratic Party, which once felt scepticism towards the intelligence agencies, can now embrace the CIA and the FBI as sources of incontrovertible truth. One possible explanation is that Trump's election has created a permanent emergency in the liberal imagination, based on the belief that the threat he poses is unique and unprecedented. It's true that Trump's menace is viscerally real. But the menace posed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was equally real. ..."
"... Trump is committed to continuing his predecessors' lavish funding of the already bloated Defence Department, and his Fortress America is a blustering, undisciplined version of Madeleine Albright's 'indispensable nation'. Both Trump and Albright assume that the United States should be able to do as it pleases in the international arena: Trump because it's the greatest country in the world, Albright because it's an exceptional force for global good. ..."
"... Besides Trump's supposed uniqueness, there are two other assumptions behind the furore in Washington: the first is that the Russian hack unquestionably occurred, and the second is that the Russians are our implacable enemies. ..."
"... So far, after months of 'bombshells' that turn out to be duds, there is still no actual evidence for the claim that the Kremlin ordered interference in the American election. Meanwhile serious doubts have surfaced about the technical basis for the hacking claims. Independent observers have argued it is more likely that the emails were leaked from inside, not hacked from outside. On this front, the most persuasive case was made by a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, former employees of the US intelligence agencies who distinguished themselves in 2003 by debunking Colin Powell's claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, hours after Powell had presented his pseudo-evidence at the UN. ..."
"... The crucial issue here and elsewhere is the exclusion from public discussion of any critical perspectives on the orthodox narrative, even the perspectives of people with professional credentials and a solid track record. ..."
"... Sceptical voices, such as those of the VIPS, have been drowned out by a din of disinformation. Flagrantly false stories, like the Washington Post report that the Russians had hacked into the Vermont electrical grid, are published, then retracted 24 hours later. Sometimes – like the stories about Russian interference in the French and German elections – they are not retracted even after they have been discredited. These stories have been thoroughly debunked by French and German intelligence services but continue to hover, poisoning the atmosphere, confusing debate. ..."
"... The consequence is a spreading confusion that envelops everything. Epistemological nihilism looms, but some people and institutions have more power than others to define what constitutes an agreed-on reality. ..."
"... More genuine insurgencies are in the making, which confront corporate power and connect domestic with foreign policy, but they face an uphill battle against the entrenched money and power of the Democratic leadership – the likes of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons and the DNC. Russiagate offers Democratic elites a way to promote party unity against Trump-Putin, while the DNC purges Sanders's supporters. ..."
"... Fusion GPS eventually produced the trash, a lurid account written by the former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele, based on hearsay purchased from anonymous Russian sources. Amid prostitutes and golden showers, a story emerged: the Russian government had been blackmailing and bribing Donald Trump for years, on the assumption that he would become president some day and serve the Kremlin's interests. In this fantastic tale, Putin becomes a preternaturally prescient schemer. Like other accusations of collusion, this one has become vaguer over time, adding to the murky atmosphere without ever providing any evidence. ..."
"... Yet the FBI apparently took the Steele dossier seriously enough to include a summary of it in a secret appendix to the Intelligence Community Assessment. Two weeks before the inauguration, James Comey, the director of the FBI, described the dossier to Trump. After Comey's briefing was leaked to the press, the website Buzzfeed published the dossier in full, producing hilarity and hysteria in the Washington establishment. ..."
"... The Steele dossier inhabits a shadowy realm where ideology and intelligence, disinformation and revelation overlap. It is the antechamber to the wider system of epistemological nihilism created by various rival factions in the intelligence community: the 'tree of smoke' that, for the novelist Denis Johnson, symbolised CIA operations in Vietnam. ..."
"... Yet the Democratic Party has now embarked on a full-scale rehabilitation of the intelligence community – or at least the part of it that supports the notion of Russian hacking. (We can be sure there is disagreement behind the scenes.) And it is not only the Democratic establishment that is embracing the deep state. Some of the party's base, believing Trump and Putin to be joined at the hip, has taken to ranting about 'treason' like a reconstituted John Birch Society. ..."
"... The Democratic Party has now developed a new outlook on the world, a more ambitious partnership between liberal humanitarian interventionists and neoconservative militarists than existed under the cautious Obama. This may be the most disastrous consequence for the Democratic Party of the new anti-Russian orthodoxy: the loss of the opportunity to formulate a more humane and coherent foreign policy. The obsession with Putin has erased any possibility of complexity from the Democratic world picture, creating a void quickly filled by the monochrome fantasies of Hillary Clinton and her exceptionalist allies. ..."
"... For people like Max Boot and Robert Kagan, war is a desirable state of affairs, especially when viewed from the comfort of their keyboards, and the rest of the world – apart from a few bad guys – is filled with populations who want to build societies just like ours: pluralistic, democratic and open for business. This view is difficult to challenge when it cloaks itself in humanitarian sentiment. There is horrific suffering in the world; the US has abundant resources to help relieve it; the moral imperative is clear. There are endless forms of international engagement that do not involve military intervention. But it is the path taken by US policy often enough that one may suspect humanitarian rhetoric is nothing more than window-dressing for a more mundane geopolitics – one that defines the national interest as global and virtually limitless. ..."
"... The prospect of impeaching Trump and removing him from office by convicting him of collusion with Russia has created an atmosphere of almost giddy anticipation among leading Democrats, allowing them to forget that the rest of the Republican Party is composed of many politicians far more skilful in Washington's ways than their president will ever be. ..."
"... They are posing an overdue challenge to the long con of neoliberalism, and the technocratic arrogance that led to Clinton's defeat in Rust Belt states. Recognising that the current leadership will not bring about significant change, they are seeking funding from outside the DNC. ..."
"... Democrat leaders have persuaded themselves (and much of their base) that all the republic needs is a restoration of the status quo ante Trump. They remain oblivious to popular impatience with familiar formulas. ..."
"... Democratic insurgents are also developing a populist critique of the imperial hubris that has sponsored multiple failed crusades, extorted disproportionate sacrifice from the working class and provoked support for Trump, who presented himself (however misleadingly) as an opponent of open-ended interventionism. On foreign policy, the insurgents face an even more entrenched opposition than on domestic policy: a bipartisan consensus aflame with outrage at the threat to democracy supposedly posed by Russian hacking. Still, they may have found a tactical way forward, by focusing on the unequal burden borne by the poor and working class in the promotion and maintenance of American empire. ..."
"... This approach animates Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis, a 33-page document whose authors include Norman Solomon, founder of the web-based insurgent lobby RootsAction.org. 'The Democratic Party's claims of fighting for "working families" have been undermined by its refusal to directly challenge corporate power, enabling Trump to masquerade as a champion of the people,' Autopsy announces. ..."
"... Clinton's record of uncritical commitment to military intervention allowed Trump to have it both ways, playing to jingoist resentment while posing as an opponent of protracted and pointless war. ..."
"... If the insurgent movements within the Democratic Party begin to formulate an intelligent foreign policy critique, a re-examination may finally occur. And the world may come into sharper focus as a place where American power, like American virtue, is limited. For this Democrat, that is an outcome devoutly to be wished. It's a long shot, but there is something happening out there. ..."
Jan 04, 2018 | lrb.co.uk

American politics have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership's failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign. Bernie Sanders's challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump's triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as usual – the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington. Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil in order to secure global progress . Both agendas have proved calamitous for most Americans. Many registered their disaffection in 2016. Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton's defeat. Then everything changed.

... ... ...

[Jan 02, 2018] Jill Stein in the Cross-hairs by Mike Whitney

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Russia Investigation shifts to Clinton's Political Rivals ..."
"... Let me get this straight: The Democrats think Stein siphoned votes away from Hillary, so Stein must be a "Russian agent". Is that it? ..."
"... The persecution of Jill Stein strips away the facade once and for all exposing Russia-gate as a complete fraud that is being used to exact revenge on the adversaries of Hillary Clinton and her reprobate friends. The New York Times even admits as much. ..."
"... That's what's really really going on, the fatcat honchos behind the scenes are just settling scores for Hillary's lost election. It's payback time for the Clinton Mafia. Here's more baloney from the Times: ..."
"... Give me a break. Does anyone on the Senate Intelligence Committee honestly believe that Jill Stein is a Russian agent? ..."
"... Of course not. They're just harassing her to send a message to anyone who might be thinking about running for president in the future. They're saying, "You'd better watch your step or we'll trump-up charges against you and make your life a living hell. Isn't that the message?You're damn right it is! ..."
"... "This is a witch hunt. It is neo-McCarthyism, plain and simple. The people who are outright calling Stein a Russian agent are making a complete mockery of themselves and of the American political process ..."
"... Dragging Stein into this mess shows Clinton Democrats up for what they really are. It proves that the 'Resist' crowd's crusade is not just about Trump and "collusion" -- it's also about discrediting all dissenting American voices and establishing their own definition of what political opposition is supposed to look like -- and for the Clinton cult, it's not supposed to look like Jill Stein . ..."
"... Anyone who disagrees with the Democrats is a Putin puppet -- and if you've ever been to Moscow, forget it -- don't even bother trying to defend yourself. Off with your head." ("McCarthy-style targeting of Jill Stein proves Democrats have truly lost the plot", RT) ..."
"... "The Socialist Equality Party condemns the targeting of Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate in the 2016 election, by the neo-McCarthyite witch-hunters on the Senate Intelligence Committee . The attack on Stein, spearheaded by the Democratic Party, is an unconstitutional attempt to delegitimize and suppress political opposition to the monopoly of the capitalist two-party system . ..."
"... This is the Orwellian reality of America in 2017, ruled by two right-wing, oligarchic parties that can and will tolerate no political opposition . ..."
"... If you're a liberal and you hate Donald Trump, then you probably see the Russia-gate investigation as your best chance to achieve the Golden Grail of "impeachment". But are you willing to compromise your principles, join forces with the sinister and unscrupulous Clinton cabal, and throw allies like Jill Stein under the bus to achieve your goal? ..."
"... How high a price are you willing to pay to get rid of Trump? That's the question that every liberal in America should be asking themselves. And they'd better answer it fast before it's too late. ..."
"... Mueller is clearly not the upstanding 'protector of American values' he is painted he is a servile political degenerate. A lifetime of betrayal has rendered him ethically autistic. He is blind to the way his own actions condemn him before reasonable minds. Hopefully he will wake up when condemned hiself in an American Court of Law at some future date. ..."
"... According to Edward Aguilar of Project for Nuclear Awareness, cancelling construction of the new submarines, reducing the current number of such subs, and retiring rather than replacing nuclear warheads and a couple hundred ICBMs would save $270 billion. ..."
"... The weapons oligarchy appears to be a racketeering-influenced and corrupt organization. Luckily, the RICO Act provides for heavy criminal penalties for such death-dealing corruption. ..."
Dec 26, 2017 | www.unz.com
The Russia Investigation shifts to Clinton's Political Rivals Mike Whitney

"Jill Stein had dinner with Putin, so GET THE GUILLOTINE! That's how we roll in this country now. Didn't she know it's illegal to eat with Russians?"

... ... ...

[Jan 02, 2018] The NYT's latest Russiagate story on George Papadopoulos is not believable. Here's why

"We have a triumvirate of the Democratic Party, New York Times, and FBI, that perfectly parallels their predecessors: the Communist Party, Pravda, and KGB." January 4, 2018 at 8:44 pm GMT
"Why was it felt necessary for a DNC-linked "journalist", in a politically-biased "newspaper", to obfuscate the rather obvious fact that the Fusion GPS "dossier"was the pretext for the FBI investigation? "
Notable quotes:
"... This information has clearly been published in order to counter the increasingly widely circulating claim that it was the Trump Dossier which triggered the Russiagate investigation. ..."
Jan 02, 2018 | theduran.com

Of much more interest is the new information which has been published about George Papadopoulos. The information appears in an article in the New York Times which reads in part as follows

During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia's top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.

Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online , Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians' role.

This information has clearly been published in order to counter the increasingly widely circulating claim that it was the Trump Dossier which triggered the Russiagate investigation.

[Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater

Highly recommended!
What a pitiful pressitute this Like Harding is...
The fact that he is employed by Guardia tells a lot how low Guardian fall. It's a yellow press (owned by intelligence agencies if we talk about their coverage of Russia).
Notable quotes:
"... In theory, it would be hard to find two journalists more qualified to debate each side of this important issue. In practice, it was a one-sided thrashing that The Intercept 's Jeremy Scahill accurately described as "brutal". ..."
"... Russiagate only works if you allow it to remain zoomed out, where the individually weak arguments of this giant Gish gallop fallacy form the appearance of a legitimate argument. ..."
"... That's not how you're going to get the truth about Russia. He's all appeals to authority - Steele's most of all, even name dropping Kerry. To finally land on "oh well if you would read my whole book" is just getting to the silly season. Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. Also, the ubiquitous throwing around of accusations of the murder of journalists in Russia is a straw man argument, especially when it is just thrown in as some sort of moral shielding for a shabby argument. ..."
Dec 28, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com

Have you ever wondered why mainstream media outlets, despite being so fond of dramatic panel debates on other hot-button issues, never have critics of the Russiagate narrative on to debate those who advance it? Well, in a recent Real News interview we received an extremely clear answer to that question, and it was so epic it deserves its own article.

Real News host and producer Aaron Maté has recently emerged as one of the most articulate critics of the establishment Russia narrative and the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, and has published in The Nation some of the clearest arguments against both that I've yet seen. Luke Harding is a journalist for The Guardian where he has been writing prolifically in promotion of the Russiagate narrative, and is the author of New York Times bestseller Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.

In theory, it would be hard to find two journalists more qualified to debate each side of this important issue. In practice, it was a one-sided thrashing that The Intercept 's Jeremy Scahill accurately described as "brutal".

The term Gish gallop , named after a Young Earth creationist who was notoriously fond of employing it, refers to a fallacious debate tactic in which a bunch of individually weak arguments are strung together in rapid-fire succession in order to create the illusion of a solid argument and overwhelm the opposition's ability to refute them all in the time allotted. Throughout the discussion the Gish gallop appeared to be the only tool that Luke Harding brought to the table, firing out a deluge of feeble and unsubstantiated arguments only to be stopped over and over again by Maté who kept pointing out when Harding was making a false or fallacious claim.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/9Ikf1uZli4g

In this part here , for example, the following exchange takes place while Harding is already against the ropes on the back of a previous failed argument. I'm going to type this up so you can clearly see what's happening here:

Harding: Look, I'm a journalist. I'm a storyteller. I'm not a kind of head of the CIA or the NSA. But what I can tell you is that there have been similar operations in France, most recently when President Macron was elected ? -

Maté: Well actually Luke that's not true. That's straight up not true. After that election the French cyber-intelligence agency came out and said it could have been virtually anybody.

Harding: Yeah. But, if you'll let me finish, there've been attacks on the German parliament ? -

Maté: Okay, but wait Luke, do you concede that the France hack that you just claimed didn't happen?

Harding: [pause] What? -- ?that it didn't happen? Sorry?

Maté: Do you concede that the Russian hacking of the French election that you just claimed actually is not true?

Harding: [pause] Well, I mean that it's not true? I mean, the French report was inconclusive, but you have to look at this kind of contextually. We've seen attacks on other European states as well from Russia, they have very kind of advanced cyber capabilities.

Maté: Where else?

Harding: Well, Estonia. Have you heard of Estonia? It's a state in the Baltics which was crippled by a massive cyber attack in 2008, which certainly all kind of western European and former eastern European states think was carried out by Moscow. I mean I was in Moscow at the time, when relations between the two countries were extremely bad. This is a kind of ongoing thing. Now you might say, quite legitimately, well the US does the same thing, the UK does the same thing, and I think to a certain extent that is certainly right. I think what was different last year was the attempt to kind of dump this stuff out into kind of US public space and try and influence public opinion there. That's unusual. And of course that's a matter of congressional inquiry and something Mueller is looking at too.

Maté: Right. But again, my problem here is that the examples that are frequently presented to substantiate claims of this massive Russian hacking operation around the world prove out to be false. So France as I mentioned; you also mentioned Germany. There was a lot of worry about Russian hacking of the German elections, but it turned out? -- ?and there's plenty of articles since then that have acknowledged this? - ? that actually there was no Russian hack in Germany.

In the above exchange, Maté derailed Harding's Gish gallop, and Harding actually admonished him for doing so, telling him "let me finish" and attempting to go on listing more flimsy examples to bolster his case as though he hadn't just begun his Gish gallop with a completely false example .

That's really all Harding brought to the debate. A bunch of individually weak arguments, the fact that he speaks Russian and has lived in Moscow, and the occasional straw man where he tries to imply that Maté is claiming that Vladimir Putin is an innocent girl scout. Meanwhile Maté just kept patiently dragging the debate back on track over and over again in the most polite obliteration of a man that I have ever witnessed.

The entire interview followed this basic script. Harding makes an unfounded claim, Maté holds him to the fact that it's unfounded, Harding sputters a bit and tries to zoom things out and point to a bigger-picture analysis of broader trends to distract from the fact that he'd just made an individual claim that was baseless, then winds up implying that Maté is only skeptical of the claims because he hasn't lived in Russia as Harding has.

jeremy scahill 0
@jeremyscahill
This @aaronjmate interview is brutal. He makes mincemeat of Luke Harding, who can't seem to defend the thesis, much less the title, of his own book: Where's the 'Collusion' - YouTube
11:03 AM-Dec 25, 2017
Q 131 11597 C? 1,148

The interview ended when Harding once again implied that Maté was only skeptical of the collusion narrative because he'd never been to Russia and seen what a right-wing oppressive government it is, after which the following exchange took place:

Maté: I don't think I've countered anything you've said about the state of Vladimir Putin's Russia. The issue under discussion today has been whether there was collusion, the topic of your book.
Harding: Yeah, but you're clearly a kind of collusion rejectionist, so I'm not sure what sort of evidence short of Trump and Putin in a sauna together would convince you. Clearly nothing would convince you. But anyway it's been a pleasure.

At which point Harding abruptly logged off the video chat, leaving Maté to wrap up the show and promote Harding's book on his own.

You should definitely watch this debate for yourself , and enjoy it, because I will be shocked if we ever see another like it. Harding's fate will serve as a cautionary tale for the establishment hacks who've built their careers advancing the Russiagate conspiracy theory , and it's highly unlikely that any of them will ever make the mistake of trying to debate anyone of Maté's caliber again.

The reason Russiagaters speak so often in broad, sweeping terms? - saying there are too many suspicious things happening for there not to be a there there, that there's too much smoke for there not to be fire? - ? is because when you zoom in and focus on any individual part of their conspiracy theory, it falls apart under the slightest amount of critical thinking (or as Harding calls it, "collusion rejectionism"). Russiagate only works if you allow it to remain zoomed out, where the individually weak arguments of this giant Gish gallop fallacy form the appearance of a legitimate argument.

Well, Harding did say he's a storyteller.

* * *

Thanks for reading! My work here is entirely reader-funded so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following me on Twitter , bookmarking my website , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , or buying my new book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers . Our Hidden History 4 days ago (edited) That Harding tells Mate to meet Alexi Navalny, who is a far right nationalist and most certainly a tool of US intelligence (something like Russia's Richard Spencer) was all I needed to hear to understand where Luke is coming from.

He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies.

That's not how you're going to get the truth about Russia. He's all appeals to authority - Steele's most of all, even name dropping Kerry. To finally land on "oh well if you would read my whole book" is just getting to the silly season. Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. Also, the ubiquitous throwing around of accusations of the murder of journalists in Russia is a straw man argument, especially when it is just thrown in as some sort of moral shielding for a shabby argument.

Few in the US know about these cases or what occurred, or of the many forces inside of Russia that might be involved in murdering journalists just as in Mexico or Turkey. But these cases are not explained - blame is merely assigned to Putin himself. Of course if someone here discusses he death of Michael Hastings, they're a "conspiracy theorist", but if the crime involves a Russian were to assign the blame to Vladimir Putin and, no further explanation is required.

[Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou

Highly recommended!
If this is true, then this is definitely a sophisticated false flag operation. Was malware Alperovich people injected specifically designed to implicate Russians? In other words Crowdstrike=Fancy Bear
Images removed. For full content please thee the original source
One interesting corollary of this analysis is that installing Crowdstrike software is like inviting a wolf to guard your chicken. If they are so dishonest you take enormous risks. That might be true for some other heavily advertized "intrusion prevention" toolkits. So those criminals who use mistyped popular addresses or buy Google searches to drive lemmings to their site and then flash the screen that they detected a virus on your computer a, please call provided number and for a small amount of money your virus will be removed get a new more sinister life.
I suspected many of such firms (for example ISS which was bought by IBM in 2006) to be scams long ago.
Notable quotes:
"... Disobedient Media outlines the DNC server cover-up evidenced in CrowdStrike malware infusion ..."
"... In the article, they claim to have just been working on eliminating the last of the hackers from the DNC's network during the past weekend (conveniently coinciding with Assange's statement and being an indirect admission that their Falcon software had failed to achieve it's stated capabilities at that time , assuming their statements were accurate) . ..."
"... To date, CrowdStrike has not been able to show how the malware had relayed any emails or accessed any mailboxes. They have also not responded to inquiries specifically asking for details about this. In fact, things have now been discovered that bring some of their malware discoveries into question. ..."
"... there is a reason to think Fancy Bear didn't start some of its activity until CrowdStrike had arrived at the DNC. CrowdStrike, in the indiciators of compromise they reported, identified three pieces of malware relating to Fancy Bear: ..."
"... They found that generally, in a lot of cases, malware developers didn't care to hide the compile times and that while implausible timestamps are used, it's rare that these use dates in the future. It's possible, but unlikely that one sample would have a postdated timestamp to coincide with their visit by mere chance but seems extremely unlikely to happen with two or more samples. Considering the dates of CrowdStrike's activities at the DNC coincide with the compile dates of two out of the three pieces of malware discovered and attributed to APT-28 (the other compiled approximately 2 weeks prior to their visit), the big question is: Did CrowdStrike plant some (or all) of the APT-28 malware? ..."
"... The IP address, according to those articles, was disabled in June 2015, eleven months before the DNC emails were acquired – meaning those IP addresses, in reality, had no involvement in the alleged hacking of the DNC. ..."
"... The fact that two out of three of the Fancy Bear malware samples identified were compiled on dates within the apparent five day period CrowdStrike were apparently at the DNC seems incredibly unlikely to have occurred by mere chance. ..."
"... That all three malware samples were compiled within ten days either side of their visit – makes it clear just how questionable the Fancy Bear malware discoveries were. ..."
Dec 28, 2017 | theduran.com

Of course the DNC did not want to the FBI to investigate its "hacked servers". The plan was well underway to excuse Hillary's pathetic election defeat to Trump, and CrowdStrike would help out by planting evidence to pin on those evil "Russian hackers." Some would call this entire DNC server hack an "insurance policy."

... ... ...

[Dec 28, 2017] On your surmise that Putin prefers Trump to Hillary and would thus have incentive to influence the election, I beg to differ. Putin is one smart statesman; he knows very well it makes no difference which candidates gets elected in US elections.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... I accept your point that the Democrats and the Republicans are two sides of the same coin, but it's important to understand that Putin is deeply conservative and very risk averse. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton may be a threat to Russia but she knows the "rules" and is very predictable, while Trump doesn't know the rules and appears to act on a whim ..."
"... However, given the problems that Hillary Clinton had to overcome to get elected, backing her against Trump would be risky. So the highly risk averse Putin would logically stay out of the election entirely and all the claims of Russia hacking the election are fake news. ..."
"... As for the alleged media campaign, my response is "so what!". Western media, including state-owned media, interferes around the world all the time so complaining about Russian state-owned media doing the same is pure hypocrisy and should be ignored. ..."
Dec 28, 2017 | www.moonofalabama.org

Ghost Ship , Dec 27, 2017 10:17:37 AM | 92

Posted by: Oriental Voice | Dec 26, 2017 3:56:16 PM | 35
On your surmise that Putin prefers Trump to Hillary and would thus have incentive to influence the election, I beg to differ. Putin is one smart statesman; he knows very well it makes no difference which candidates gets elected in US elections.

I accept your point that the Democrats and the Republicans are two sides of the same coin, but it's important to understand that Putin is deeply conservative and very risk averse.

Hillary Clinton may be a threat to Russia but she knows the "rules" and is very predictable, while Trump doesn't know the rules and appears to act on a whim , so if Putin were to have interfered in the 2016 presidential election, logic would suggest that he would do so on Hillary Clinton's side. However, given the problems that Hillary Clinton had to overcome to get elected, backing her against Trump would be risky. So the highly risk averse Putin would logically stay out of the election entirely and all the claims of Russia hacking the election are fake news.

As for the alleged media campaign, my response is "so what!". Western media, including state-owned media, interferes around the world all the time so complaining about Russian state-owned media doing the same is pure hypocrisy and should be ignored.

[Dec 27, 2017] Putin is one smart statesman; he knows very well it makes no difference which candidates gets elected in US elections. Any candidate that WOULD make a difference would NEVER see the daylight of nomination, especially at the presidential level. I myself believe all the talk of Russia interfering the 2016 Election is no more than a witch hunt

Highly recommended!
Neocons dominate the US foreign policy establishment.
In other words Russiagate might be a pre-emptive move by neocons after Trump elections.
Notable quotes:
"... The dogma does not come from questioning this conclusion. Because Putin, during the campaign, complimented Trump, does not support the conclusion with its insinuation that those who voted for Trump needed to be influenced by anything other than being fed up with the usual in American politics. Same with Brexit. That dissatisfaction continues, and it doesn't need Russian influence to feed it. This is infantile oversimplification to say so. ..."
"... "The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by ordering his minions to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. The story became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and completeness. Doubters are perceived as heretics and as apologists for Trump and Putin, the evil twins and co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy. Responsibility for the absence of debate lies in large part with the major media outlets. Their uncritical embrace and endless repetition of the Russian hack story have made it seem a fait accompli in the public mind. It is hard to estimate popular belief in this new orthodoxy, but it does not seem to be merely a creed of Washington insiders. If you question the received narrative in casual conversations, you run the risk of provoking blank stares or overt hostility – even from old friends. This has all been baffling and troubling to me; there have been moments when pop-culture fantasies (body snatchers, Kool-Aid) have come to mind." ..."
"... But I do believe Putin, and for that matter Xi Jinping of China too, should make efforts to infiltrate the USA election processes. It's an eye for an eye. USA has been exercising its free hands in manipulating elections and stirring up color revolutions all around the world, including the 2012 presidential election in Russia. They should be given a taste of their own medicine. In fact, I believe it is for this reason that the US MSM is playing up this hocus pocus Russian-gate matter, as a preemptive measure to justify imposing electioneering controls in the future. ..."
"... USA may not be vulnerable as yet to this kind of external nuisances, as the masses have not yet reached the stage of being easily stirred. But that time will come. ..."
Dec 27, 2017 | www.moonofalabama.org

Rhett , Dec 26, 2017 2:18:30 PM | 20

I have great respect for the reporting on this site regarding Syria and the Middle East. I regret that for some reason there is this dogmatic approach to the issue of Russian attempts to influence the US election. Why wouldn't the Russians try to sway the election? Allowing Hillary to win would have put a dangerous adversary in the White House, one with even more aggressive neocon tendencies than Obama. Trump has been owned by Russian mobsters since the the 1990s, and his ties to Russian criminals like Felix Sater are well known.

Putin thought that getting Trump in office would allow the US to go down a more restrained foreign policy path and lift sanctions against Russia, completely understandable goals. Using Facebook/Twitter bots and groups like Cambridge Analytica, an effort was made to sway public opinion toward Trump. That is just politics. And does anyone really doubt there are incriminating sexual videos of Trump out there? Trump (like Bill Clinton) was buddies with billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Of course there are videos of Trump that can be used for blackmail purposes, and of course they would be used to get him on board with the Russian plan.

The problem is that everything Trump touches dies. He's a fraud and an incompetent idiot. Always has been. To make matters worse, Trump is controlled by the Zionists through his Orthodox Jewish daughter and Israeli spy son-in-law. This gave power to the most openly extreme Zionist elements who will keep pushing for more war in the Middle East. And Trump is so vile that he's hated by the majority of Americans and doesn't have the political power to end sanctions against Russia.

Personally, I think this is all for the best. Despite his Zionist handlers, Trump will unintentionally unwind the American Empire through incompetence and lack of strategy, which allows Syria and the rest of the world to breathe and rebuild. So Russia may have made a bad bet on this guy being a useful ally, but his own stupidity will end up working out to the world's favor in the long run.

Sid2 , Dec 26, 2017 3:17:40 PM | 27
@20

there is considerable irony in use of "dogmatic" here: the dogma actually occurs in the rigid authoritarian propaganda that the Russians Putin specifically interfered with the election itself, which now smugly blankets any discussion. "The Russians interfered" is now dogma, when that statement is not factually shown, and should read, "allegedly interfered."

The dogma does not come from questioning this conclusion. Because Putin, during the campaign, complimented Trump, does not support the conclusion with its insinuation that those who voted for Trump needed to be influenced by anything other than being fed up with the usual in American politics. Same with Brexit. That dissatisfaction continues, and it doesn't need Russian influence to feed it. This is infantile oversimplification to say so.

To suggest "possibly" in any argument does not provide evidence. There is no evidence. Take a look at b's link to the following for a clear, sane assessment of what's going on. As with:

"The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by ordering his minions to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. The story became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and completeness. Doubters are perceived as heretics and as apologists for Trump and Putin, the evil twins and co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy. Responsibility for the absence of debate lies in large part with the major media outlets. Their uncritical embrace and endless repetition of the Russian hack story have made it seem a fait accompli in the public mind. It is hard to estimate popular belief in this new orthodoxy, but it does not seem to be merely a creed of Washington insiders. If you question the received narrative in casual conversations, you run the risk of provoking blank stares or overt hostility – even from old friends. This has all been baffling and troubling to me; there have been moments when pop-culture fantasies (body snatchers, Kool-Aid) have come to mind."

this is b's link in URL form here:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n01/jackson-lears/what-we-dont-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-russian-hacking

Oriental Voice , Dec 26, 2017 3:56:16 PM | 35
@20:

I echo you opinion that this site gives great reports on issues pertaining to Syria and the ME. Credit to b.

On your surmise that Putin prefers Trump to Hillary and would thus have incentive to influence the election, I beg to differ. Putin is one smart statesman; he knows very well it makes no difference which candidates gets elected in US elections. Any candidate that WOULD make a difference would NEVER see the daylight of nomination, especially at the presidential level. I myself believe all the talk of Russia interfering the 2016 Election is no more than a witch hunt.

But I do believe Putin, and for that matter Xi Jinping of China too, should make efforts to infiltrate the USA election processes. It's an eye for an eye. USA has been exercising its free hands in manipulating elections and stirring up color revolutions all around the world, including the 2012 presidential election in Russia. They should be given a taste of their own medicine. In fact, I believe it is for this reason that the US MSM is playing up this hocus pocus Russian-gate matter, as a preemptive measure to justify imposing electioneering controls in the future.

USA may not be vulnerable as yet to this kind of external nuisances, as the masses have not yet reached the stage of being easily stirred. But that time will come.

[Dec 18, 2017] The Scary Void Inside Russia-gate by Stephen F. Cohen

Highly recommended!
"A looming, aggressive enemy (so portrayed) is needed to sustain the US's parasitic surveillance, "security", and "defense" ecosystems." Well said. National security parasites are so entrenched (and well fed by MIC) that any change of the US foreign policy is next to impossible. The only legitimate course is more wars and bombing.
Notable quotes:
"... This is unprecedented, preposterous, and dangerous, potentially more so than even Joe McCarthy's search for "Communist" connections. It would suggest, for example, that scores of American corporations doing business in Russia today are engaged in criminal enterprise. ..."
"... To suggest that such contacts are in any way criminal is to slur hundreds of reputations and to leave U.S. policy-makers with advisers laden with ideology and no actual expertise. It is also to suggest that any quest for better relations with Russia, or détente, is somehow suspicious, illegitimate, or impossible, as expressed recently by Andrew Weiss in The Wall Street Journal and by The Washington Post , in an editorial . This is one reason why I have, in a previous commentary , argued that Russia-gate and its promoters have become the gravest threat to American national security. ..."
"... Russia-gate began sometime prior to June 2016, not after the presidential election in November, as is often said, as an anti-Trump political project. (Exactly why, how, and by whom remain unclear, and herein lies the real significance of the largely bogus "dossier" and the still murky role of top U.S. intel officials in the creation of that document.) ..."
"... As Greenwald points out, all of the now retracted stories, whether by print media or cable television, were zealous promotions of Russia-gate and virulently anti-Trump. They, too, are examples of Russia-gate without Russia. ..."
"... Tillerson may be the last man standing who represents the possibility of some kind of détente. ..."
"... Unfortunately, and I can't believe I'm going to concede this, but FOX News, regarding this one particular issue: the baloney of Russiagate, is probably the most accurate mainstream source out there right now. Despite everything else they get wrong, FOX News, pertaining to Russiagate, is generally (generally) accurate from the bits and pieces I've seen. ..."
"... I agree. It seems sort of like the Nazi regime with more advanced technology and more complete ability for the gestapo to exercise control or more aptly like the Soviet Union where people actually believe the regime's propaganda. ..."
"... The neocon perpetrators of the Russia-gate hoax will continue putting their own greed (for money and power) ahead of American national security. That's who they are and what they do. They conflate global domination with American national security because it benefits them to do so. Sure, they don't want a hot war with Russia because they are neither psychotic nor suicidal. But they are power-crazed: delusional to the extent they think they can prevent the Russian-American hostility provoked by their own machinations from spinning out of control. ..."
"... Reason #3: A looming, aggressive enemy (so portrayed) is needed to sustain the U.S.'s parasitic surveillance, "security", and "defense" ecosystems. ..."
"... Thanks, Professor Cohen, and I happen to think that this phony Russia hacking fabrication is breaking down, along with many other false narratives of the West. So many things are exposing the lies and there are truly good investigators who are weighing in, so I am hopeful that the neocons will be finally outed as hopelessly behind the times. ..."
Dec 15, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

Despite a lack of evidence at its core – and the risk of nuclear conflagration as its by-product – Russia-gate remains the go-to accusation for "getting" the Trump administration, explains Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen.

The foundational accusation of Russia-gate was, and remains, charges that Russian President Putin ordered the hacking of Democratic National Committee e-mails and their public dissemination through WikiLeaks in order to benefit Donald Trump and undermine Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, and that Trump and/or his associates colluded with the Kremlin in this "attack on American democracy."

As no actual evidence for these allegations has been produced after nearly a year and a half of media and government investigations, we are left with Russia-gate without Russia. (An apt formulation perhaps first coined in an e-mail exchange by Nation writer James Carden.) Special counsel Mueller has produced four indictments: against retired Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump's short-lived national-security adviser, and George Papadopolous, a lowly and inconsequential Trump "adviser," for lying to the FBI; and against Paul Manafort and his partner Rick Gates for financial improprieties. None of these charges has anything to do with improper collusion with Russia, except for the wrongful insinuations against Flynn.

Instead, the several investigations, desperate to find actual evidence of collusion, have spread to "contacts with Russia" -- political, financial, social, etc. -- on the part of a growing number of people, often going back many years before anyone imagined Trump as a presidential candidate. The resulting implication is that these "contacts" were criminal or potentially so.

This is unprecedented, preposterous, and dangerous, potentially more so than even Joe McCarthy's search for "Communist" connections. It would suggest, for example, that scores of American corporations doing business in Russia today are engaged in criminal enterprise.

More to the point, advisers to U.S. policy-makers and even media commentators on Russia must have many and various contacts with Russia if they are to understand anything about the dynamics of Kremlin policy-making. I myself, to take an individual example, was an adviser to two (unsuccessful) presidential campaigns, which considered my wide-ranging and longstanding "contacts" with Russia to be an important credential, as did the one sitting president whom I advised.

To suggest that such contacts are in any way criminal is to slur hundreds of reputations and to leave U.S. policy-makers with advisers laden with ideology and no actual expertise. It is also to suggest that any quest for better relations with Russia, or détente, is somehow suspicious, illegitimate, or impossible, as expressed recently by Andrew Weiss in The Wall Street Journal and by The Washington Post , in an editorial . This is one reason why I have, in a previous commentary , argued that Russia-gate and its promoters have become the gravest threat to American national security.

Russia-gate began sometime prior to June 2016, not after the presidential election in November, as is often said, as an anti-Trump political project. (Exactly why, how, and by whom remain unclear, and herein lies the real significance of the largely bogus "dossier" and the still murky role of top U.S. intel officials in the creation of that document.)

That said, the mainstream American media have been largely responsible for inflating, perpetuating, and sustaining the sham Russia-gate as the real political crisis it has become, arguably the greatest in modern American presidential and thus institutional political history. The media have done this by increasingly betraying their own professed standards of verified news reporting and balanced coverage, even resorting to tacit forms of censorship by systematically excluding dissenting reporting and opinions.

(For inventories of recent examples, see Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept and Joe Lauria at Consortiumnews . Anyone interested in exposures of such truly "fake news" should visit these two sites regularly, the latter the product of the inestimable veteran journalist Robert Parry.)

Still worse, this mainstream malpractice has spread to some alternative-media publications once prized for their journalistic standards, where expressed disdain for "evidence" and "proof" in favor of allegations without any actual facts can sometimes be found. Nor are these practices merely the ordinary occasional mishaps of professional journalism.

As Greenwald points out, all of the now retracted stories, whether by print media or cable television, were zealous promotions of Russia-gate and virulently anti-Trump. They, too, are examples of Russia-gate without Russia.

Flynn and the FBI

Leaving aside possible financial improprieties on the part of General Flynn, his persecution and subsequent prosecution is highly indicative. Flynn pled guilty to having lied to the FBI about his communications with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, on behalf of the incoming Trump administration, discussions that unavoidably included some references, however vague, to sanctions imposed on Russia by President Obama in December 2016, just before leaving office.

Those sanctions were highly unusual -- last-minute, unprecedented in their seizure of Russian property in the United States, and including a reckless veiled threat of unspecified cyber-attacks on Russia. They gave the impression that Obama wanted to make even more difficult Trump's professed goal of improving relations with Moscow.

Still more, Obama's specified reason was not Russian behavior in Ukraine or Syria, as is commonly thought, but Russia-gate -- that is, Putin's "attack on American democracy," which Obama's intel chiefs had evidently persuaded him was an entirely authentic allegation. (Or which Obama, who regarded Trump's victory over his designated successor, Hillary Clinton, as a personal rebuff, was eager to believe.)

But Flynn's discussions with the Russian ambassador -- as well as other Trump representatives' efforts to open "back-channel" communications with Moscow – were anything but a crime. As I pointed out in another commentary , there were so many precedents of such overtures on behalf of presidents-elect, it was considered a normal, even necessary practice, if only to ask Moscow not to make relations worse before the new president had a chance to review the relationship.

When Henry Kissinger did this on behalf of President-elect Nixon, his boss instructed him to keep the communication entirely confidential, not to inform any other members of the incoming administration. Presumably Flynn was similarly secretive, thereby misinforming Vice President Pence and finding himself trapped -- or possibly entrapped -- between loyalty to his president and an FBI agent. Flynn no doubt would have been especially guarded with a representative of the FBI, knowing as he did the role of Obama's Intel bosses in Russia-gate prior to the election and which had escalated after Trump's surprise victory.

In any event, to the extent that Flynn encouraged Moscow not to reply in kind immediately to Obama's highly provocative sanctions, he performed a service to U.S. national security, not a crime. And, assuming that Flynn was acting on the instructions of his president-elect, so did Trump. Still more, if Flynn "colluded" in any way, it was with Israel, not Russia , having been asked by that government to dissuade countries from voting for an impending anti-Israel U.N. resolution.

Removing Tillerson

Finally, and similarly, there is the ongoing effort by the political-media establishment to drive Secretary of State Rex Tillerson from office and replace him with a fully neocon, anti-Russian, anti-détente head of the State Department. Tillerson was an admirable appointee by Trump -- widely experienced in world affairs, a tested negotiator, a mature and practical-minded man.

Originally, his role as the CEO of Exxon Mobil who had negotiated and enacted an immensely profitable and strategically important energy-extraction deal with the Kremlin earned him the slur of being "Putin's pal." This preposterous allegation has since given way to charges that he is slowly restructuring, and trimming, the long bloated and mostly inept State Department, as indeed he should do. Numerous former diplomats closely associated with Hillary Clinton have raced to influential op-ed pages to denounce Tillerson's undermining of this purportedly glorious frontline institution of American national security. Many news reports, commentaries, and editorials have been in the same vein. But who can recall a major diplomatic triumph by the State Department or a Secretary of State in recent years?

The answer might be the Obama administration's multinational agreement with Iran to curb its nuclear-weapons potential, but that was due no less to Russia's president and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which provided essential guarantees to the sides involved. Forgotten, meanwhile, are the more than 50 career State Department officials who publicly protested Obama's rare attempt to cooperate with Moscow in Syria. Call it by what it was: the sabotaging of a president by his own State Department.

In this spirit, there are a flurry of leaked stories that Tillerson will soon resign or be ousted. Meanwhile, however, he carries on. The ever-looming menace of Russia-gate compels him to issue wildly exaggerated indictments of Russian behavior while, at the same time, calling for a "productive new relationship" with Moscow, in which he clearly believes. (And which, if left unencumbered, he might achieve.)

Evidently, Tillerson has established a "productive" working relationship with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, the two of them having just announced North Korea's readiness to engage in negotiations with the United States and other governments involved in the current crisis.

Tillerson's fate will tell us much about the number-one foreign-policy question confronting America: cooperation or escalating conflict with the other nuclear superpower, a détente-like diminishing of the new Cold War or the growing risks that it will become hot war. Politics and policy should never be over-personalized; larger factors are always involved. But in these unprecedented times, Tillerson may be the last man standing who represents the possibility of some kind of détente. Apart, that is, from President Trump himself, loathe him or not. Or to put the issue differently: Will Russia-gate continue to gravely endanger American national security?

Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University and a contributing editor of The Nation , where a version of this article first appeared.

Abe , December 15, 2017 at 1:49 pm

"Thanks to Flynn's indictment, we now know that the Israeli prime minister was able to transform the Trump administration into his own personal vehicle for undermining Obama's lone effort to hold Israel accountable at the UN. A clearer example of a foreign power colluding with an American political operation against a sitting president has seldom, if ever, been exposed in such glaring fashion.

"Kushner's deep ties to the Israeli right-wing and ethical breaches

"The day after Kushner was revealed as Flynn's taskmaster, a team of researchers from the Democratic Super PAC American Bridge found that the presidential son-in-law had failed to disclose his role as a co-director of his family's Charles and Seryl Kushner Foundation during the years when his family's charity funded the Israeli enterprise of illegal settlements. The embarrassing omission barely scratched the surface of Kushner's decades long relationship with Israel's Likud-led government. [ ]

"A Clinton mega-donor defends Kushner's collusion

"So why isn't this angle of the Flynn indictment getting more attention? An easy explanation could be deduced from the stunning spectacle that unfolded this December 2 at the Brookings Institution, where the fresh-faced Kushner engaged in a 'keynote conversation' with Israeli-American oligarch Haim Saban. [ ]

""The spectacle of a top Democratic Party money man defending one of the Trump administration's most influential figures was clearly intended to establish a patina of bipartisan normalcy around Kushner's collusion with the Netanyahu government. Saban's effort to protect the presidential son-in-law was supplemented by an op-ed in the Jewish Daily Forward headlined, 'Jared Kushner Was Right To 'Collude' With Russia -- Because He Did It For Israel.'

"While the Israel lobby ran interference for Kushner, the favorite pundits of the liberal anti-Trump "Resistance" minimized the role of Israel in the Flynn saga. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, who has devoted more content this year to Russia than to any other topic, appeared to entirely avoid the issue of Kushner's collusion with Israel.

"There is simply too much at stake for too many to allow any disruption in the preset narrative. From the journalist pack that followed the trail of Russiagate down a conspiracy infested rabbit hole to the Clintonites seeking excuses for their mind-boggling campaign failures to the Cold Warriors exploiting the panic over Russian meddling to drive an unprecedented arms build-up, the narrative must go on, regardless of the facts."

Michael Flynn's Indictment Exposes Trump Team's Collusion With Israel, Not Russia
By Max Blumenthal
https://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/flynn-indictment-exposes-collusion-israel

Drew Hunkins , December 15, 2017 at 2:19 pm

Unfortunately, and I can't believe I'm going to concede this, but FOX News, regarding this one particular issue: the baloney of Russiagate, is probably the most accurate mainstream source out there right now. Despite everything else they get wrong, FOX News, pertaining to Russiagate, is generally (generally) accurate from the bits and pieces I've seen.

One quick example -- a few months ago the otherwise execrable Hannity actually had on his show the great Dennis Kucinich who railed against the deep state for attacking Trump b/c of his overtures toward peace with Moscow and how the deep state was using Russiagate to do it, etc. Kucinich was sensational. I doubt Maddow would ever have given him such a platform to voice the truth like Hannity did on this particular occasion.

Patrick Lucius , December 15, 2017 at 2:27 pm

I may have to take a look at Fox again–I bet you are right. Hannity as an arbiter of truth–oh my god

Drew Hunkins , December 15, 2017 at 3:35 pm

On this one particular issue, Hannity gets things right.

Rob , December 16, 2017 at 2:00 pm

If Hannity ever reports a story correctly, it's only because it coincides with his deeply partisan interests. Being truthful is something about which he cares little, if at all.

Skip Scott , December 15, 2017 at 3:05 pm

Yeah Drew-

For years I railed against Fox, but nowadays they seem to be the relatively sensible ones. Tucker Carlson is exceptionally bright, and I have no idea what got into Hannity. I used to loathe him to no end. Him giving Dennis Kucinich a chance to speak his mind is something I never would have imagined.

Drew Hunkins , December 15, 2017 at 3:36 pm

Isn't it something Mr. Scott?

Dave P. , December 15, 2017 at 11:34 pm

Drew and Skip Scott – Yes, I agree with you. I watched Dennis Kucinich too. Hannity and Carlson have been doing some very good reporting on these issues. It is amazing how the things have changed. Fox News was "No" for progressives to go to.

Annie , December 15, 2017 at 4:25 pm

Prior to Trump's presidency I would never watch Fox News, but on this issue,, they are a more accurate source of information then any other broadcasting media. Rachel Maddow does nothing but rave, as if she had her own personal agenda, and maybe she does, ousting Trump, and that a woman didn't win the White House. I too saw the interview with Kucinich, and indeed it was a very good one.

RamboDave , December 15, 2017 at 5:27 pm

Tucker Carlson, on Fox (right before Hannity), has had Glenn Greenwald on several times.

David G , December 16, 2017 at 9:08 am

That basically maps directly onto the fact that Russia is the one issue Trump is right on.

Patrick Lucius , December 15, 2017 at 2:20 pm

Great article. Has America gone off the deep end? I just watched the first ten minutes of an anti-Putin and anti-Russian Frontline on television two nights ago. I have never seen more blatant or shameless propaganda. Because my mom watches tv all day and I am taking care of her, I see the same slop, drivel, and gibberish parroted all day long on the major news outlets. Perhaps I should state that more professionally: I see the same shameless propaganda parroted daily by the mainstream news media And it occurs to me–these young news commentators are not part of a conspiracy, willfully lying–they actually believe the propaganda. We are in trouble. I think as a group we act much more like bees in a hive or monkeys in a troop than we do as rational beings, and I mean no disrespect to bees or monkeys.

exiled off mainstreet , December 15, 2017 at 2:56 pm

I agree. It seems sort of like the Nazi regime with more advanced technology and more complete ability for the gestapo to exercise control or more aptly like the Soviet Union where people actually believe the regime's propaganda.

Annie , December 15, 2017 at 4:35 pm

Personally I believe that many do know that there is nothing to the Russia-gate story, but go along to get along, and they are no different then politicians, who bow before the Israeli Lobby, or NRA, or corporate groups to get reelected, and maintain their standing in their party. Another way of putting it, is to say they are willing to prostitute themselves. I can't see myself doing that.

occupy on , December 16, 2017 at 12:36 am

I, too, saw this scurrilous 'documentary' – "Putin's Revenge" – and made a point of writing down the names of a good number of those commentators moving the narrative along. All of them are well-known active Zionists or children of American Zionists who've helped create and ardently protect the State of Israel. I wish I could remember now at least some of the commentors' names. I didn't see Frontline' "Putin's Revenge" on PBS. It was on a National Geographic channel that traditionally shows those anthropological 'documentaries' about "Ancient Alien Visitors," "Gods from Outer Space, etc .pleasant programs to fall to sleep by. 'Putin's Revenge', however, was grotesque in its downright lies – making me furiously wide awake until I could google info on those names.

alley cat , December 15, 2017 at 2:36 pm

"Or to put the issue differently: Will Russia-gate continue to gravely endanger American national security?"

The neocon perpetrators of the Russia-gate hoax will continue putting their own greed (for money and power) ahead of American national security. That's who they are and what they do. They conflate global domination with American national security because it benefits them to do so. Sure, they don't want a hot war with Russia because they are neither psychotic nor suicidal. But they are power-crazed: delusional to the extent they think they can prevent the Russian-American hostility provoked by their own machinations from spinning out of control.

exiled off mainstreet , December 15, 2017 at 2:54 pm

This is a great article by one of the most intelligent and knowledgeable commentators on Russia remaining active despite the ongoing dangerous propaganda storm. Those responsible for this storm are threatening our continued existence. Because of this depressing salient fact, the democratic party, which has been fully on board with this, has totally sacrificed its legitimacy and degenerated to a clear and present existential danger. Clear thinking people have to view it as such and take necessary action based upon that fact, which is serious in its implications, since it is difficult in the extreme to supplant an existing party in a two party system (which has degenerated into a two faction one party state some time ago) in light of the media propaganda, intelligence and police control exercised by this odious system.

Bill , December 15, 2017 at 3:11 pm

Really glad, Mr, Cohen, to see your article in Consortium. Your voice is always a wise one. Weekly listener.

Very important and accurate information, for the most part, in my view, though I have a few caveats.

Unfortunately for our perception of the 'goodness' of those in power, I tend to think the level of knowledge and intention of those who spread Russiagate are more cynical than you imagine.

When we read certain articles from hardline think-tanks and serious political commentary from those publications and outlets which sustain the current 'scandal' we see a surprising awareness of Russia's true intentions and nature. Sober, and reasonable. The problem is that this commentary is not what is used to persuade any element of the public toward a certain view on Russia. You instead see it within the establishment essentially talking amongst themselves.

The problem, as I see it, is that these people are fully aware of the truth, as well as Russia's intentions. They are just quite simply spinning vast lies to the contrary whenever they speak to, or in front of, the public. For two main reasons:

  • Hobbling Trump, for a number of reasons, not least of which amounts to his unwillingness to pretend he cares about 'spreading Democracy' around the world. More immediate goal.
  • Trying to put a lid on a rapidly boiling over domestic discontent with the status quo. Meaning corporate control over the government, pro-corporate, anti-democratic policy, and endless senseless war.

The remainder of this piece refers to #2.

Russia is an 'enemy' now, more than anything else, because, for whatever it's self-interested motivations, it is a loud, prominent, powerful voice actively and methodically criticizing and opposing US imperial hypocrisy, double-standards, and deception.

  • We are told they 'sow chaos'. Code for platforming anti-establishment truth-tellers.
  • We are told they cause us to 'lose trust in our system of government'. Code for them platforming people who help expose, like Bernie Sanders does, how 'our system of government' has been taken from us by corporations, and making us want it back, for the people.
  • We are told that Russia is, in however many words, whatever we, ourselves are. Imperialistic, disregarding of truth and reality, arrogant, entitled, expansionist etc. The American people are waking up to what the Empire does, and why. The rather desperate idea is to redirect that knowledge and stick it to Russia. Externalizing an internal threat.
  • Finally, we are told that Russia is criticizing and grand-standing against the West in order to tamp down domestic discontent. Which, given the previous entry here, is showing to be exactly what the US government is doing. To the letter.

Russia is a fake enemy, talked about in a fake way, by fake people in an increasingly fake democracy. Respectfully, Mr. Cohen, I don't think ideology is the problem. I don't think those at the helm of US foreign policy have had an ideology in a long, long time. I think they have, with few exceptions, a 'prime directive': The retention and expansion of Oligarchic corporate power.

Nowadays, fearmongering over immigrant crime, terrorists, non-state cyber-criminals, or whatever else conjured to make the extremely safe-from-foreign-threats (To this day no war on our soil since the Civil War. Itself a domestic threat) American people feel afraid, and thus controllable and ignorant, is no longer working. Only a big fish like Russia can even hope to do the job. Plus that big fish is one of the factors 'sowing chaos' by giving a voice to anti-imperialists in the West to spread the truth of the government we actually live under.

In short, Russiagate, and it's accompanying digital censorship efforts, are a desperate attempt to rest control back over the American people and away from honest, rational truth.

Even shorter, our rulers underestimated the power of the internet.

Kind regards,
Bill

Lois Gagnon , December 15, 2017 at 8:57 pm

Thank you. That is a really truthful post. It really is all about maintaining imperial hegemony at all costs. Unfortunately, the cost could be the end of life on Earth. These weasels controlling the machinery of state from the darkness must be exposed as the treacherous criminals they are.

David G , December 16, 2017 at 9:22 am

Reason #3: A looming, aggressive enemy (so portrayed) is needed to sustain the U.S.'s parasitic surveillance, "security", and "defense" ecosystems.

Jessica K , December 15, 2017 at 3:27 pm

Thanks, Professor Cohen, and I happen to think that this phony Russia hacking fabrication is breaking down, along with many other false narratives of the West. So many things are exposing the lies and there are truly good investigators who are weighing in, so I am hopeful that the neocons will be finally outed as hopelessly behind the times.

And Twitter is helping because western media sources will not tell the truth and people are taking to it to push back. I agree that at this time Fox is more interested in the facts than MSNBC, and particularly Tucker Carlson. (The sex scandals, now another witch hunt, are showing what a fouled-up society America has become. It is feminist McCarthyism, sadly, and I am glad Tavis Smiley is fighting back.)

Yesterday I had a conversation with a loud mouth believer of the "Putin did it" fable and told him some details, that outright it was a fabrication, and someone nearby in the coffee shop actually joined to support the pushback with other facts. So, I am hopeful that people are waking up. And Nikki Haley has just been called by people on Twitter for her lies about Iran provocation in Yemen. Plus documents on NATO expansion after Gorbachev was assured would not happen, have just been revealed. I do think people are waking up.

Bill , December 15, 2017 at 3:30 pm

Jessica,

That's what it takes. The political battle of our times. Good on you. I think you're right. The beginnings of which seem to have motivated Russiagate in the first place. I did a longer post on this above. Please keep spreading sense. I'll do the same.

Best wishes,
Bill

RnM , December 15, 2017 at 9:25 pm

It's good to be optimistc, but let us not forget the long history (short by Old World standards) of the oligarchy of doing anything and everything to get what they want.

The present cock-up of Russia-gate (Geez, I hate using that MSM concocted jingo term) points, not to the oligarchs losing their groove, but to an incompetent but persistent bunch of Clinton/Obama synchophants. Their days in any kind of power are, thankfully, numbered. But the snakes are lurking in the bushes, as are the deeper parts of the deep state. It's the long game that they are in for.

Martin - Swedish citizen , December 15, 2017 at 6:37 pm

Thanks, Jessica,
A hopeful comment! Here, too, I sense at least some more dissent among us citizens with the prevailing lies.
When the bubble bursts, the boy has cried and everyone "realises" the emperor is naked, I wonder, will our governments, politicians and media survive? Everyone, practically, is complicit.

Jessica K , December 15, 2017 at 3:35 pm

Thanks, Bill, and I think we're at a profound crossroads in world history. I saw an interview on YouTube with young Americans who did not even know who won the Civil War nor why it was fought! We all must speak out with conviction and without anger.

Realist , December 15, 2017 at 3:44 pm

My parents always used to use the old argument to keep my thinking on track and avoid conforming to dangerous groupthink: "if everyone else decided to jump off the cliff, in the river or out the 10th floor window, would you just follow the crowd?" Professor Cohen is one of the rare little boys who either learned that lesson well or has always had strong innate instincts to avoid following the crowd or jumping on self-destructive bandwagons. Most of the readers of this site seem to have similar predilections and are among the very few Americans not being led by the Pied Pipers of all-encompassing self-destructive Russophobia. (Is there some common childhood experience or shared gene in our personal biographies that compel our rigorous adherence to the principles we all uphold?) As other posters have noted here, those few media personalities with a seeming immunity to the pathological groupthink now infecting most of America are indeed a very curious lot, with little else in the way of ideological conformity, but thank heavens for them for any restoration of mass sanity will surely have to originate from within their ranks, examples and leadership. I, for one, am pulling for Professor Cohen to be among those leading this country out of the wilderness of lock-step madness.

Bob Van Noy , December 15, 2017 at 3:47 pm

We remember an era before 11/22/1963

Joe Tedesky , December 15, 2017 at 4:30 pm

Realist I'm glad you brought up the readers on consortiumnews, and their not falling for this Russia-Gate nonsense. People posting comments here in support of 'no Russian interference' have been accused of being Trump supporters, but that was never the case. No, instead many here just saw through the fog of propaganda, and certainly saw this Russia-Gate idiocy as it being nothing more than an instigated coup. This defense of Trump could have been for any newly elected president, but the division between Hillary supporters, and Trump backers, has been the biggest obstacle to overcome, while attempting to explain your thought. I truly think that if the shoe had been on the other foot, that the many posters of comments here on consortiumnews would have been on Hillary's side, if it had been the same kind of coup that had been put in place. It's time to tell John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Robert Mueller, to call Hillary and say, 'well at least we tried Madam Secretary', and then be done with it.

Dave P. , December 16, 2017 at 2:43 pm

Realist and Joe – I always enjoy reading your thoughtful comments. Those of us who have been reading professor Stephen Cohen's articles for more than four decades now , know that he is the foremost authority on Russia. Instead of being courted to give his valuable input into the relations with Russia, he and others like him are being vilified as Putin apologists. It is the sign of the times we live in now.

As many comments posters here on this site had noted, the Russia-Gate has been deliberately created to confront Russia at this time rather than later on. Russia is in the way for final push for World domination – the Neoliberal Globalization.

Nobody, in Washington or elsewhere in the Country seems to ask why and for whom they, The ruling Powers want to establish this World Empire at any cost – even at the risk of a nuclear war. This process of building an Empire has changed the country as I had seen it more than half a century ago.

NeoLiberal Globalization, building this World wide Empire during the last three or four decades had its real winners and losers. Lot of wealth has been created all over the World under neoliberal global economy.

The big time winners are top .01% and another about 10% are also in the winners category, and have accumulated lot of wealth. From all over the World; China, India . . . this top 10% class send their kids to the best universities in the West for professional education; Finance, High tech, Sciences, and other professions and they get the jobs all over in Silicon Valley, and big financial Institutions and other professional fields in U.S. , U.K., Australia Canada . . .

The losers are middle class in U.S. – whom Hillary called deplorables – especially in those once mighty Industrial States in the Midwest, and East. With my marriage here , I inherited lots of relatives more than forty five years ago, most of them in the Midwest. As somebody commented a few weeks ago on this site about these middle class people that their " Way of Life " has been destroyed. It is true. All these people voted for Trump. With the exception of two, all our relatives in the Midwest and elsewhere on my wife's side voted for Trump. They are good, hard working people. It is painful to look at those ruined and abandoned factories in those States and ruined lives of many of those Middle Class people. Globalization has been disastrous for the middle class people in U.S. It is a race to the bottom for those people.

Ask those relatives if they have ever read anything about Russia during 2016. Not one of them have ever read or listened to anything related to Russian media or other Russian source. They did not even know if anything like RT or Sputnik News ever existed. Most of them don't even know now. And it is true of the people we associate with here where we live. None of them have time to read anything let alone Russian Media. I came to know about RT during events in Ukraine in 2014, and about Sputnik News over a year ago when this Russia- Gate commotion began. And I had read lot of Russian literature in my young age.

As several articles on this website have pointed out those email leaks were an inside job. Russia-Gate is just a concocted scheme to bring down Trump. And to destabilize Russia – a hurdle to Globalization and West's domination.

Skip Scott , December 17, 2017 at 8:39 am

Dave P-

Yours is a very accurate portrayal of the heartland of America. I live in a very rural area of the southwest, and you describe reality there to a "T". They are much too busy trying to survive to dig too deeply into world affairs. Thank goodness at least they've got Tucker Carlson at Fox to contrast the propaganda spewers on the other networks. They know the latte sippers and their government has abandoned them, but they don't fully understand the PNAC empire's moves in pursuit of global domination, and many wind up in the military jousting at windmills.

Realist , December 17, 2017 at 4:46 pm

I totally concur, Dave. I'm 70 and well remember, as a little kid, as a teenager and as a young man, folks talking about a far-off ideal of world unity, wherein all people on earth would share in earth's bounty and have the same democratic rights. The UN was supposed to be one of the first steps in that general direction. However, nobody thought that the eventual outcome would be what the movement has transmogrified into today: neoliberal globalism in which a tiny fraction of the top 1% own and control everything, with the rest of us actually suffering a drastic drop in our standard of living and a blatant diminution of our political rights.

It's been fifty years since I lived in Chicago, and about 45 since I last lived in the Midwest, but I was born and raised there and well recognise everything you have said about the place and the people in your remark to be entirely correct. It's also true for most of the other regions of this country in which I have lived, but the "Rust Belt" has paid the price in spades to satiate the neoliberal globalist "free traders." (Remember when THAT catchphrase was first sold to the working classes by Slick Willie's DLC wing of the Democratic party? He and Al Gore basically ended up doubling the ranks of "Reagan Democrats" whether they intended to do so or not. And, Hillary was so delusional as to assume those people would be on her side!)

Dave P. , December 17, 2017 at 11:36 pm

Yes, Realist. That Slick Willie and Gore did the most damage to the working class than any other administration in the recent American history. And being progressive democrats, we worked hard for their election as volunteers registering voters. At that time Rolling Stone Magazine called them as Saviors after Reagan and Bush era of greed – as they called it. Clintons sold the Democratic Party to the Wall Street and to Neoliberal Globalization. Tony Blair did the same in U.K. to the Labor Party.

Then we put faith in Hopey changey Obama and worked for his election. And he turned out to be big fraud too. After his Libya intervention and then on to Syria, I finally got turned off from Democratic Party politics. My wife, and I had started with McGovern Campaign in 1972.

Talking about Chicago, I landed at O'Haire fifty two years ago during snowy Winter, with just a few hundred dollars in my pocket enough for one semester on my way to Graduate School. You can not do it these days. America was at it's best. Ann Arbor was a Republican town those days with very friendly people. Compared to Europe, and other cultures, I found Americans the least prejudiced people, very open to other cultures. The factories In Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana . . . were humming. Never on Earth, such a prosperous middle class on such a scale has ever been created; made of good, hard working people in those small and big towns. The workers were back bone of the Democratic Party. And every thing looked optimistic. I, and couple of my friends thought it can not get better than this on Earth.

And all this seems like a past history now. Life is still good but that stability and that optimism of 1960's is gone. I visited Wisconsin and Michigan last Spring and in Fall again this year. It is painful to look at those gigantic factories shut down and in ruins. I lived for a decade in Michigan. As I said in my comments above, the biggest loser in this NeoLiberal Globalization is American Middle Class.

Piotr Berman , December 15, 2017 at 4:13 pm

Jessica K: The sex scandals, now another witch hunt, are showing what a fouled-up society America has become.

One could say that there is nothing bad about a witch hunt, provided that it genuinely goes after evil witches. Perhaps the worst hitch hunt in my memory was directed at preschool teachers accused of sexual molestation and sometimes satanism. Probably we are not in this Animal Kingdom story (yet):

Denizens of AK see a hare running very fast and they ask "what happen?" Mr. hare answers "They are castrating camels!" "But you are a hare, not a camel!" "Try to prove that you are not a camel!".

Abe , December 15, 2017 at 5:02 pm

"In a dramatic development in the trial in Kiev of several Berkut police officers accused of shooting civilians in the Maidan demonstrations in February 2014, the defence has produced two Georgians who confirm that the murders were committed by foreign snipers, at least 50 of them, operating in teams. The two Georgians, Alexander Revazishvili and Koba Nergadze have agreed to testify [ ]

"This dramatic and explosive evidence was first brought to light by the Italian journalist Gian Micalessin on November 16 in an article in the Italian journal Il Giornale and is again brought to the world's attention by a lawyer with some courage picking up on that report and speaking with the witnesses himself. These witnesses stated to Gian Micalessin, even more explosively, that the American Army was directly involved in the murders.

"The clear objective of the Maidan massacre in Kiev on February 20, 2014 was to sow chaos and reap the fall of the democratically elected, pro-Russian Yanukovych government. People were slaughtered for no other reason than to destroy a government the NATO powers, especially the United States and Germany, wanted removed because of its opposition to NATO, the EU, and their hegemonic drive to open Ukraine and Russia to American and German economic expansion. In other words, it was about money and the making of money.

"The western media and leaders quickly blamed the Yanukovych government for the killings during the Maidan demonstrations, but more evidence has become available indicating that the massacre in Kiev of police and civilians – which led to the escalation of protests, leading to the overthrow of the Yanukovych government – was the work of snipers working on orders of government opponents and their NATO controllers using the protests as a cover for a coup.

"One of the snipers already admitted to this in February 2015, thereby confirming what had become common knowledge just a few days after the massacre in Kiev and in a secretly recorded telephone call, the Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet reported to the EU head of Foreign Policy, Catherine Ashton, in early March 2014, that there was widespread suspicion that "someone from the new coalition" in the Kiev government may have ordered the sniper murders. In February 2016, Maidan activist Ivan Bubenchik confessed that in the course of the massacre, he had shot Ukrainian police officers. Bubenchik confirmed this in a film that gained wide attention.

'Dr. Ivan Katchanovski, at the University of Ottawa, published a devastating paper on the Maidan killings setting out in extensive detail the conclusive evidence that it was a false flag operation and that members of the present Kiev regime, including Poroshenko himself were involved in the murders, not the government forces. [ ]

"In the November 16 article in the Italian journal Il Giornale, and repeated on Italian TV Canale 5, journalist Gian Micalessin revealed that 3 Georgians, all trained army snipers, and with links to Mikheil Saakashvili and Georgian security forces were ordered to travel to Kiev from Tbilisi during the Maidan events. It is two of these men that are now being called to testify in Kiev."

The Maidan Massacre: US Army Orders: Sow Chaos
By Christopher Black
https://journal-neo.org/2017/12/15/the-maidan-massacre-us-army-orders-sow-chaos/

Abe , December 15, 2017 at 5:12 pm

The pretext for the western-supported overthrow of Ukrainian President Yanukovych was the massacre of more than a hundred protestors in Kiev in February 2014, which Yanukovych allegedly ordered his forces to carry out. Doubts have been expressed about the evidence for this allegation, but they have been almost entirely ignored by the western media and politicians.

Ukrainian-Canadian professor Ivan Katchanovski has carried out a detailed study of the evidence of those events, including videos and radio intercepts made publicly available by pro-Maidan sources, and eye witness accounts. His findings point to the involvement of far-right militias in the massacre and a cover-up afterwards:

– The trajectories of many of the shots indicate that they were fired from buildings that were then occupied by Maidan forces.
– Many warnings were given by announcers on the Maidan stage about snipers firing from those buildings.
– Several leaders of the then opposition felt secure enough to give speeches on the Maidan around the time that gunmen in nearby buildings were shooting protestors dead, and those leaders were not targeted by the gunmen .
– Many of the protesters were shot with an outdated type of firearm that was not used by professional snipers but was available in Ukraine as a hunting weapon.
– Recordings of all live TV and Internet broadcasts of the massacre by five different TV channels were either removed from their websites immediately after the massacre or not made publicly available.
– Official results of ballistic, weapons, and medical examinations and other evidence collected during the investigations have not been made public, while crucial evidence, including bullets and weapons, has disappeared.
– No evidence has been given that links the then security forces' weapons to the killings of the protesters.
– No evidence has been given of orders to shoot unarmed protestors even though the new government claimed that Yanukovych issued those orders personally.
– So far the only three people have been charged with the massacre, one of whom has disappeared from house arrest.

http://www.academia.edu/8776021/The_Snipers_Massacre_on_the_Maidan_in_Ukraine

Bob Van Noy , December 15, 2017 at 6:16 pm

Thank you Abe that article could change everything

Martin - Swedish citizen , December 15, 2017 at 6:54 pm

Abe,
Thanks for advocating Dr Katchanovski! I have been reading some of his papers since a year or two and his work seems very thorough! He uses physical facts like trajectories of bullets to determine where shots originated.

Another expert in the field who knows Mr Katchanovski fully endorsed his academic work without any hesitation when I asked him recently. He is being published by publishers with the highest demands. His work can be found in academia.com or is it .org, login is free of charge.
His work deserves the attention of real journalists.

Martin - Swedish citizen , December 15, 2017 at 6:57 pm

Oh, sorry, I see u already mentioned academia.edu!
No harm repeating though.
And it is .edu. :)

Litchfield , December 15, 2017 at 9:51 pm

Ditto with the airliner shootdown.
Russia is accused and evidence is destroyed/suppressed.
The pattern is quite clear. Russiagate is merely an extension of the same pattern.
Remember those intelligence tests that consist of presenting a series of numbers, and the test taker has to figure out what the next number in the pattern is . . .
So, the Russiagate thing is merely the next item that continues the pattern of Maidan, plane shootdown and cover-up, shootdown of plane in Sinai, etc. etc. etc.
I think the deep state REALLY went apoplectic when Snowden escaped to Russia.

They will have their revenged, at any price, to the USA, to Russia, to the world. These are madmen.

Joe Tedesky , December 16, 2017 at 12:32 am

It's prove Abe that 'only if you live long enough' applies to learning these newly uncovered facts regarding the Maiden Square riots. Let's hold out hope that the truth to MH17 comes out soon. Another thing, how can these sanctions against Russia stay in place while everything known as a narrative to that event comes unraveled.

Marko , December 15, 2017 at 5:31 pm

That's a good article , worth reading in its entirety. Thanks.

occupy on , December 16, 2017 at 1:23 am

Abe, thank you so much for this information. US fingerprints are all over Ukraine's sickening economic 'reforms', too! Have you read the House Ukraine Freedom Support Act – passed by both houses in the middle of the night Dec. 2014? I have. Wade through until nearly the end where it gives President Obama #1. the power to work toward US corporations exploring and developing Ukraine's natural resources (including fracking) once 'reforms' have been put in place (privatization); #2. the power to ask the World Bank to extend special loans for US corporations to develop those natural resources; #3. the power to install 'defensive' missile sites all along Russia's western borders; #4. the power to free US NGO's in Russia from their previously non-partisan restraints and allow them to work with anti-Putin political groups.

I urge you to google Dennis Kucinich/Ron Paul/Ukraine Freedom Support Act -2014. You won't believe how that bill got through the House of Representatives and Senate. And you'll have to laugh when you hear the word "democracy" in any context with "the USA".

Annie , December 15, 2017 at 6:48 pm

I also see the sexual allegations made against Trump, as another opportunity to oust him from his presidency. I in no way condone such behavior, but it's disturbing to think the main motivation driving this is another means of trying to oust him from his presidency. I don't believe, as these women claim, that they felt "left out", in the recent outings of men who have misused their positions of power to exploit women sexually.

Litchfield , December 15, 2017 at 9:58 pm

Yep, the Weinstein thing is being trumpeted and amplified to the extent that it synergizes wtih attempts to oust Trump. It is handy to the deep state. Trump qua political figure is being tarred with the Weinstein brush. That is the main reason we are seeing such a heavy dose of stories on male bad behavior. We would not be seeing this if Hillary were in power. Just a few stories but not full-court press. Because too many of these bad actors are actually in the Hillary camp. Like, most of Hollywood. The story wouldn't help her, politically, if she were in power. It only helps politically to drag down Trump. Before the Weinstein thing came along, we arleady had teh golden showers fairy tale. In fact it would not surprise me at all if Rose McGowan had some kind of political support and encouragement to "go public."
this is no way means that I think this kind of thing is OK. But, things are not straightforward in our world. It is a political as well as a "moral" or lifestyle story. One of the political targets is Trump. Notice that the heads of studios who knew all about this behavior and did nothing are not being forced to step down. Let's check out their political donations . . .

Joe Tedesky , December 16, 2017 at 12:44 am

What if the 'Sexual Predator Purge' stories along with the 'Get Trump Out of Office' campaign were but two stories colliding into each other? I mean a reporter in our TMZ world we live in would need paid a handsome sum to continually stay quiet over a Harvey Weinstein kind of scoop, so eventually these scandals had to come out. And then there's hateable loud mouth the Donald, who must be stopped by any means. Put the two together, and hey with how all these big shot perv's are going down, why not corral Trump and force him to resign. It's even cheaper than impeachment.

So the conniving once again craft together a piece of fiction, mixed in with some reality, and take the American conscience off into another realm of fantasy. Hate can get anybody carted off to the guillotine, if the timings right.

Joe Tedesky , December 16, 2017 at 12:55 am

Andrew Bacevich mentions the Weinstein scandal, and then goes on to suggest what the conversation should be.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48429.htm

Litchfield , December 16, 2017 at 9:12 am

Bacevich is fine as far as he goes
But he never quite "turns the corner" himself in taking the story as far as it needs to be taken and laying out the conclusions that the public needs to grasp.

David G , December 16, 2017 at 9:32 am

Yes! That! Thank you, Litchfield.

Bacevich is knowledgeable and worth reading. But he never, afaik, ventures to look deeply enough into the imperial heart of darkness – "turn the corner", as you say.

Leslie F. , December 15, 2017 at 7:11 pm

So the investigation isn't really about Russia. It is about corruption, money laundering, tax evasion, etc. All worthy of investigation. Not to mention the conspiracy to kidnap the Turkish cleric and collusion with Israel This investigation should not be shut down because the deep state and the press are in a conspiracy to blame it all on Russia. It is up to you guys in the press to convince your colleagues to call it what it really is, and expose those members who continue to misrepresent reality. The press, as a whole, has dropped the ball in a big way on this, but that is not Mueller's responsibility. The 4th estate is a mess and you should be trying to figure out how to clean it up without violating the constitution.

Annie , December 15, 2017 at 7:58 pm

This is one of the reasons I no longer support Democracy Now. As Mr. Cohen said, " worse, this mainstream malpractice has spread to some alternative-media publications once prized for their journalistic standards, "

God, help us, everyone including mental health professionals have no sense of professionalism, but they sure know how to make a buck, and try to undo a presidency.

"There are Thousands of Us": Mental Health Professionals Warn of Trump's Increasing Instability

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/12/8/there_are_thousands_of_us_mental

Litchfield , December 15, 2017 at 10:00 pm

Ditto, The Nation. See my post.

Annie , December 15, 2017 at 11:22 pm

I read your post, and of course I agree. Some of the allegations are so minor, as he hugged me and gave me a kiss on my mouth. He touched my breast. I was in the dressing room when he came in unannounced, and my hair was in curlers, and I was only wearing a robe, but I was nude underneath. Of course some were more disconcerting then those I mentioned, but all claim to be traumatized. I have no doubt their agenda is to bring him down and the whole thing has been orchestrated to do just that. Where is all the concern, and coverage of rape in this country where the estimates go from 300,000 to over a million women raped each year? Where are the stories about sexual trafficking of children, or the children who are sexually abused in their own homes? I've never seen coverage on these issues like what is happening now. That is another reason I find this whole thing appalling. Not to mention using sexual harassment as a political tool to bring down a president.

David G , December 16, 2017 at 9:41 am

So many examples of this. There's an alternative newspaper comic I used to like, "Tom the Dancing Bug" – smart, subversive, and "progressive". But the writer has completely bought into Scary Putin/Puppet Trump. It's depressing.

BobH , December 15, 2017 at 8:33 pm

"unprecedented, preposterous, and dangerous" sums it up nicely. It was also good to have Professor Cohen's endorsement of this website's courageous initiatives in combatting the Russia-gate farce.

Bob Van Noy , December 16, 2017 at 11:15 am

I'll happily second that thought BobH. And thanks

Litchfield , December 15, 2017 at 9:29 pm

Thank god Consortium News keeps up the pressure on the Russia-gate scam.
And glad to see Stephen Cohen published here.
Readers of this site need to keep reminding themselve of the basic background on this -- at least, I do -- in case opportunities comes along to deflate others' credulousness.

One question for Stephen Cohen:
Your wife is the editor of The Nation.
What has The Nation done to stop the madness?
Not enough. What's the story?
In fact, during the campaign and post-election, The Nation shamefully lent itself to the craziness on the left that sought to devalidate not only the results of the election but Trump himself qua human being. Nothing has been too far below the belt for Nation editors and writers to strike. I have had the ongoing impression that The Nation's editorial board really cannot see below the surface on any of this and have driven a very superficial anti-Trump, "resist" narrative dangerous in its implications. I think I have seen just one story, by a Patrick someone, that seriously questioned the russia-gate narrative. The Nation has fallen right in to the trap of "I hate Trump so much and am so freaked out by his election that I will make common cause with any one and any forces in our polity that will get rid of him somehow." The nation seems too scared of facing head on the reality of deep state actors in the USA. Or is too wedded to its version of reality to see what has become incraseingly clear to growing numbers of Americans.
As many an intelligent and more knowledgeable than I person has said: There is plenty to decry about Trump. But worse is the actions taken in the name of ridding the country of him and his presidency.
Because of this consistent cluelessness I have canceled all gift subscriptions to The Nation. I'll pay for my own sub, to see where this magazine goes, but others will have to pay their own way with The Nation if they so choose.
So, please clean up at home and get the act together on what is left of the left.
First.

Herman , December 15, 2017 at 9:32 pm

Thought the acronym PEPs was clever, Progressives Except for Palestine. Now it has morphed into PEPIRs pronounced Peppers, Progressives Except for Palestine, Iran and Russia. Actually could be PEPIRS adding Syria. If we added Iraq it could be PIEPIRS or Peepers. Actually, I have little regard for such people whose aims include killing and maiming for land and money.

Professor Cohen's credentials are very impressive and his voice and pen are badly needed. People like him are precious resources for America and the world.

Herman , December 16, 2017 at 11:08 am

PIEPIRS is incorrect with the I before the E making Pipers. So we have PEPs, Peppers and Pipers. Please excuse the frivolous comments but it feels good to try to expose their hypocrisy in any way you can, that is of the Peps, Peppers and Pipers.

Gregory Herr , December 15, 2017 at 9:43 pm

What has really been astonishing to me -- beyond a lack of evidence for all the "Russia-gate" allegations–is the utterly preposterous nature of the narrative in the first place. Robert Parry has addressed this, but the voice of Stephen Cohen–with the perspective of specialized scholarship and experience vis-a-vis Russia–is a welcome voice indeed.

David G , December 16, 2017 at 9:55 am

The NY Times printed an allegedly explanatory graphic a couple of days ago showing the Trump/Russia "scandal" as a basically a proliferating root system descending from the central "collusion" premise, with the roots and rootlets branching down to encompass all the disjointed facts (and "facts") and allegations that have appeared in the media.

The graphic was unintentionally revealing of the phoniness of the whole business: instead of showing numerous observations leading to a deeper truth, it accurately depicted "Russia-gate" as a pre-existing (fact-free) conceit that has chaotically complexified to accommodate random developments. That's the definition of a weak and useless theory!

Gregory Herr , December 16, 2017 at 4:37 pm

It seems to that as a representative of the incoming Administration's foreign policy team Flynn was just doing his job speaking with the Russian ambassador about the sudden and striking maneuvers of Obama during the transition. And in trying to defuse potential fallout and escalation due to those sanctions he was doing his job well. Was it not perfectly legal and well within the parameters of his duties to establish some baselines of discussion with counterparts?
Flynn's expression of thoughts on policy to counterparts were, to my mind, subject to the approval of the head of the incoming Administration -- namely Trump, and Trump only.

By the time the FBI questioned Flynn, he surely must have had an idea his conversation with the Ambassador had been under surveillance. What was the "lie"? Was he forgetful of a detail and just caught in a nitpicking technicality? Or did he deliberately manufacture a falsehood? When he gets past his legal entanglement, I sure hope he sits down to a candid interview. I'd like him to demystify me about all this.

I like your phraseology David this nonsense has been chaotically complexified to accommodate random developments!

David G , December 16, 2017 at 6:46 pm

Thanks, Gregory Herr. In your earlier comment that I replied to, you reference "the utterly preposterous nature of the narrative". That's not bad phraseology either.

And it also gets to something I've been thinking all along: I'd like to hear a "Russia-gate" proponent, such as an MSNBC host, actually supply what they consider a plausible narrative that fits all these breathless Trump/Russia "scoops".

I'm not demanding they prove anything, but just want to hear a story that makes sense. Because it seems to me that all the little developments they rush toward with their hummingbird attention spans don't fit together, *even if you concede all the dubious and debatable "facts"*.

dhinds , December 16, 2017 at 7:28 am

An important interview, for anyone that wants to understand Russia, today.

https://youtu.be/E_WPk6Rxx00

Megyn Kelly Interview Vladimir Putin

June, 2017

Damn good Interview (on the part of Putin – He said what was needed to be said. including "well, this is just more nonsense Have you lost your mind over there, or something)? He then continued to wrap it up, in a reasonable and and diplomatic manner.

Effectively, the USA continues locked into denial, refusing to accept responsibility for it's own current state of affairs. (The mass delusion is so thick you could eat it with a spoon, if it wasn't so putrid).

Warmongering, terrorist and refugee creating Regime Change and mass assassinations (with neither congressional oversight nor due process), arms and influence peddling profiteering, the creation of a mass surveillance society and militarized police state that kills minorities, the homeless and poor with impunity, mass incarceration in private for profit prisons, increasingly gross inequality and the excessive cost of health care and education; show the USA to be a society adrift and devoid of fundamental values. (And that's me talking, not Vladimir Putin)

The Clintons, Bush's and their supporters are to blame and should be held accountable, but mainly a new course for society must be charted and neither of the two corrupt major political parties is capable of that at this time.

A new coalition is called for.

James , December 16, 2017 at 10:13 am

Thank you Mr. Cohen for your ever insightful and reasoned commentary on this disturbing trend.

Clif , December 16, 2017 at 5:04 pm

Yes, thank you Dr. Cohen.

The lack of scrutiny is alarming. I'd like to offer Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan as possible figures who are working the lines and should be drawn into the light.

rosemerry , December 16, 2017 at 5:53 pm

Professor Cohen is one of the few who really knows about Russia, so of course so any of the Fawning Corporate Media (to quote Ray McGovern) denigrate his work. Even in GWBush's time he often explained "the Cold War is over", and Obama's intemperate rush to expel diplomats and push ahead the Russophobia after Trump's election had no basis in fact and just encouraged the Hillary-Dems and neocons to continue the unjustified destruction of the one aspect of Trump's "plan" that would have benefited the USA and peace.

Bill , December 17, 2017 at 12:03 pm

Do you really think that Obama was misled by others? I don't believe it. Obama and Hillary are the origin of the fabrications. Will anyone hold their feet to the fire?

Jerry Alatalo , December 17, 2017 at 1:56 pm

"It's the state-sponsorship of terrorism, stupid." The largest-scale, ongoing, organized war criminal operation in the history of the world has murdered millions.

Jessica K , December 17, 2017 at 9:10 pm

Vox has an article "The Left Shouldn't Make Peace With Neocons -- Even to Defeat Trump", by Robert Wright. Bill Kristol of American Conservative and many other neocons including Robert Kagan have dual US-Israel citizenship, and they push the MICC toward war. They'll be pushing for war with Iran and maybe Russia.

Tim , December 18, 2017 at 10:13 am

Sadly, quite a concise, clear picture of the muddy waters called Russia-gate, Intel's baby, and the faint possibilities of Tillerson and Lavrov holding fast against sabotage. Let's hope against all hope.

[Dec 13, 2017] All the signs in the Russia probe point to Jared Kushner. Who next?

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... More like he's denying the story peddled by the Democrats in some vain attempt at reducing his legitimacy over smashing Hillary in the elections. ..."
"... What is he going to prison for, again? Colluding with Israel? ..."
"... The most anger in the media against the POTUS seems to be directed against Russia gate. Time and energy is wasted on conjecture, most 'probables will not stand in a court of law. This media hysteria deflects from the destruction of the affordable healthcare act and the tax changes good for the rich against the many. I think the people are being played. ..."
"... In the 1990s and 2000s a large section of the American establishment was effectively bought off by people like Prince Bandar. These are the ones that are determined that the anti-Russian policy then instigated be continued, even at the cost of slandering the current President's son-in-law. The irony is that in the meantime an effective regime change has taken place in Saudi and Bandar's bandits are mostly locked up behind bars. ..."
"... True, and not just hypocrisy either. This has to be seen in the context of a war, cold for now, on Russia - with China, via Iran and NK, next in line. Dangerous times, as a militarily formidable empire in economic decline looks set to take us all out. For the few who think and resist the dominant narrative - and are thereby routinely called out as 'kremlin trolls' - it is dismaying how easily folk are manipulated. ..."
"... Your points are valid but, alas, factual truths are routinely trumped (!) by powerful mythology. Fact is, despite an appalling record since WW2, Washington and its pet institutions - IMF/World Bank/WTO - are still seen as good guys. How? Because (a) all western states have traded foreign policy independence for favoured status in Washington, (b) English as global lingua franca means American soft propaganda is lapped up across the world via its entertainment industry, and (c) all 'our' media are owned by billionaire corps or as with BBC/Graun, subject to government intimidation/market forces. ..."
"... Truth is, DRT is not some horrifically new entity. (Let's not forget how HRC's 'no fly zone' for Syria promised to take us into WW3, nor her demented "we came, we saw, he died - ha ha" response to Gaddafi's sodomisation by knife blade, and more importantly to Libya's descent into hell.) As John Pilger noted, "the obsession with Trump the man – not Trump as symptom and caricature of an enduring system – beckons great danger for all of us". ..."
"... If all Meuller has is Flynn and the Russians during the transition period, he's got nothing. ..."
"... It's alleged that Turkey wanted Flynn to extradite Gullen for his alleged involvement in Turkey's failed coup. Just this weekend, Turkey have issued an arrest warrant for a former CIA officer in relation to the failed coup. So, IF the CIA were behind the failed coup and Flynn knows this - well, a good way to silence him would be to charge him with some serious crimes and then offer to drop them in return for his silence. But, like your theory, it's just speculation. ..."
"... The secret deep state security forces haven't been this diminished since Carter cleared the stables in the 70's - they fought back and stopped his second term ... ..."
"... Seeing how the case against Trump and Flynn is based on 'probable' and not hard proof its 'probable that the anti Trump campaign is directed from within the murky enclaves of the US intelligence community. ..."
"... Hatred against Trump deflects the anger, see the system works the US is still a democracy. Well it isn't, its a sick oligarchy run by the mega rich who own the media, 90% is owned by 5 corporations. Americans are fed the lie that their vast military empire with its 800 overseas bases are to defend US interests. ..."
"... Wow this is like becoming McCarthy Era 2.0. I'm just waiting for the show trials of all these so-called colluders. ..."
"... the interest of (Russian Ambassador) Kislyak in determining the position of the new administration on sanctions is not unheard of in Washington, or necessarily untoward to raise with one of the incoming national security advisers. Ambassadors are supposed to seek changes in policies and often seek to influence officials in the early stages of administrations before policies are established. Flynn's suggestion that the Russians wait as the Trump administration unfolded its new policies is a fairly standard response of an incoming official ..."
"... "The problem is charging Flynn for lying. A technicality. But not charging Hillary for email server. Another technicality. That's all the public will see if no collusion proved, and will ruin credibility of the FBI and the Dems" ..."
"... It's not just collusion is it, what about the rampant, naked nepotism, last seen on this unashamed scale in ancient Rome? ..."
"... So he lobbied for Israel not Russia then? Whoops. How does the author even know where Mueller's probe is heading, and which way Flynn flipped? Flynn worked much longer for the Obama administration than for Trump's. ..."
"... You can easily impeach Trump for bombing Syria's military airfield, which is by UN definition war crime of war aggression, starting war without the Congress approval; and doing so by supporting false flag of AQ, is support of terrorists and so on ..."
"... Oh you can't do it, of course, it was so - so presidential to bomb another country and it is just old habit and no war declaration, if country is too weak to bomb you back. And you love this exiting crazy balance of global nuclear annihilation too much, so you prefer screaming Russia, Russia to keep it hot, for wonderful military contracts. ..."
"... If the US wanted to do itself a massive favour it should shine the spotlight on Robert Mueller, the man now in charge of investigating the President of these United States for "collusion" with Russia and possible "obstruction of justice" himself obstructed a congressional investigation into the 9/11 terrorist attacks. ..."
"... Dealing with western backed coups on its own doorstep and being the only country actually to be legally fighting in Syria - a war that directly threatens its security - does not amount to global belligerence. ..."
"... Clinton lied under oath ..."
"... The logan act is a dead law no one will be prosecuted for a act that has never been used... plus the president elect can talk to any foreign leader he or she wishes to use and even talk deals even if a current president for 2 months is still in office... ..."
"... Should all countries which try to influence elections be treated as enemies? Where do you set the threshold? If we go by the actual evidence, Russia seems to have bought some Facebook ads and was allegedly involved in exposing HRC's meddling with the Democratic primaries. Compare that to the influence that countries like Israel and the Gulf Arabs exert on American politics and elections. Are you seriously claiming that Russia's influence is bigger or more decisive? ..."
"... The goal of weakening the US is also highly debatable. Accepting for a moment that Russia tried to tip the balance in favor of Trump, would America be stronger if it were engaged more actively in Syria and Ukraine? Is there a specific example where Trump's administration weakened the American position to the advantage of Russia? And how is the sustained anti-Russian information warfare helping anyone but the Chinese? ..."
"... The clues that Kushner has been pulling the strings on Russia are everywhere... He then pushed Flynn hard to try to turn Russia around on an anti-Israel vote by the UN security council. ..."
"... And Russia didn't turn, so hardly a clue that Kushner was pulling strings with any effect. What this clue does suggest however, is that Israel pressured/colluded with the Trump Team to undermine the Obama administrations policy towards a UN resolution on illegal settlements. The elephant in the room is Israels influence on US politics. ..."
"... In relation to the "lying" charge - In December, Flynn (in his role as incoming National Security Advisor) was told to talk to the Russians by Kushner (in his role as incoming special advisor). In these conversations, Flynn told the Russians to be patient regarding sanctions as things may change when Trump becomes President. All of this is totally legal and is what EVERY new adminstration does. Flynn had his phoned tapped by the FBI so they knew he had talked to the Russian about sanctions - they also knew the conversation was totally legal - but when they asked him about it, he said he didn't discuss sanctions. So Flynn is being charged about lying about something that was totally legal for him to do. That's it. ..."
"... All those thinking this is the beginning of the end of Trump are going to be disappointed. Just look at the charges so far. Manafort has been charged with money laundering and not registering as a foreign agent - however, both of those charges pre-date him working for Trump. Flynn has been charged with lying to the FBI about speaking to the Russians - even though him speaking to the Russians in his role as National Security Advisor to the President-elect was not only totally legal, it was the norm. And this took place in December, after the election. ..."
"... So the 2 main players have been charged with things that have nothing to do with the Trump campaign, and lets not forget the point of the investigation is to find out if Trump's campaign colluded with the Russians to win the election. Manafort's charges related to before working for the Trump campaign whilst Flynn's came after Trump won the Presidency, neither of which have anything to do with the election. As much as I wish Trump wasn't President, don't get your hopes up that this is going anywhere ..."
"... Gross hypocrisy on the US governments side. They have, since WW2 interfered with other countries elections, invaded, and killed millions worldwide, and are still doing so. Where were the FBI investigations then? Non existent. US politicians and the military hierarchy are completely immune from any prosecutions when it comes down to overseas illegal interference. ..."
"... America like all governments are narcissistic, they will cheat, steal, kill, if it benefits them. It's called national interest, and it's number one on any leader's job list. Watch fog of war with Robert McNamara, fantastic and terrifying to see how it works. ..."
"... The US has also been meddling in other countries elections for years, and doubtless most Americans neither know or care about that! So it's perhaps it's best to simply term them a 'rival', most people should be able to agree on that ..."
"... Gallup have been polling Americans for the past couple of decades on this. The last time I read about it a couple of years ago 70% of Americans had unfavourable views of Russia, ranging from those who saw them as an enemy (a smaller amount) through to those who saw them as a threat. ..."
Dec 13, 2017 | www.theguardian.com

polpont , 4 Dec 2017 08:32

Mueller will have to thread very carefully because he is maneuvering on a very politically charged terrain. And one cannot refrain from comparing the current situation with the many free passes the democrats were handed over by the FBI, the Department of Justice and the media which make the US look like a banana republic.

The mind blowing fact that Clinton sat with the Attorney General on the tarmac of the Phoenix airport "to chit-chat" and not to discuss the investigation on Clinton's very wife that was being overseen by the same AG, leaves one flabbergasted.

And the fact that Comey essentially said that Clinton's behaviour, tantamount in his own words to extreme recklessness, did not warrant prosecution was just inconceivable.

Don't forget that Trump has nearly 50 M gun-toting followers on Tweeter and that he would not hesitate to appeal to them were he to feel threatened by what he could conceive as a judicial Coup d'Etat. The respect for the institutions in the USA has never been so low.

ID1456161 -> Canadiman , 4 Dec 2017 08:30

...a judge would decide if the evidence was sufficient to warrant a trial.

Actually, in the U.S. a grand jury would decide if the evidence was sufficient to warrant formal charges leading to a trial. There is also the possibility that Mueller has uncovered both Federal and NY State offenses, so charges could be brought against Kushner at either level. Mueller has been sharing information from his investigation with the NY Attorney General's Office. Trump could pardon a federal offense, but has no jurisdiction to pardon charges brought against Kushner by the State of NY.

Anna Bramwell -> etrang , 4 Dec 2017 08:28
I watched RT for 24 months before the US election. They favoured Bernie Saunders strongly before he lost to Hilary. Then they ran hustings for the smaller US parties, eg Greens, and the Libertarians , which could definitely be seen as an interference in the US election, but which as far as I know, was never mentioned in the US. They were anti Hilary but not pro Trump. And indeed, their strong anti capitalist bias would have made such support unlikely.
EduardStreltsovGhost -> JonShone , 4 Dec 2017 08:28
What's he lying about? More like he's denying the story peddled by the Democrats in some vain attempt at reducing his legitimacy over smashing Hillary in the elections.

Obama and Hillary met hundreds of foreign officials. Were they colluding as well?

pretzelattack -> Atticus_Finch , 4 Dec 2017 08:28
What is he going to prison for, again? Colluding with Israel?
oddballs -> Taf1980uk , 4 Dec 2017 08:26
The most anger in the media against the POTUS seems to be directed against Russia gate. Time and energy is wasted on conjecture, most 'probables will not stand in a court of law. This media hysteria deflects from the destruction of the affordable healthcare act and the tax changes good for the rich against the many. I think the people are being played.
Krautolivier , 4 Dec 2017 08:21
In the 1990s and 2000s a large section of the American establishment was effectively bought off by people like Prince Bandar. These are the ones that are determined that the anti-Russian policy then instigated be continued, even at the cost of slandering the current President's son-in-law. The irony is that in the meantime an effective regime change has taken place in Saudi and Bandar's bandits are mostly locked up behind bars.
It's all too funny.
zerohoursuni -> damientrollope , 4 Dec 2017 08:19
True, and not just hypocrisy either. This has to be seen in the context of a war, cold for now, on Russia - with China, via Iran and NK, next in line. Dangerous times, as a militarily formidable empire in economic decline looks set to take us all out. For the few who think and resist the dominant narrative - and are thereby routinely called out as 'kremlin trolls' - it is dismaying how easily folk are manipulated.

Your points are valid but, alas, factual truths are routinely trumped (!) by powerful mythology. Fact is, despite an appalling record since WW2, Washington and its pet institutions - IMF/World Bank/WTO - are still seen as good guys. How? Because (a) all western states have traded foreign policy independence for favoured status in Washington, (b) English as global lingua franca means American soft propaganda is lapped up across the world via its entertainment industry, and (c) all 'our' media are owned by billionaire corps or as with BBC/Graun, subject to government intimidation/market forces.

Truth is, DRT is not some horrifically new entity. (Let's not forget how HRC's 'no fly zone' for Syria promised to take us into WW3, nor her demented "we came, we saw, he died - ha ha" response to Gaddafi's sodomisation by knife blade, and more importantly to Libya's descent into hell.) As John Pilger noted, "the obsession with Trump the man – not Trump as symptom and caricature of an enduring system – beckons great danger for all of us".

cookcounty , 4 Dec 2017 08:15
I missed Jill Abramson's column about all the meetings the Obama administration held -- quite openly -- with foreign governments during the transition period between his election and his first inauguration.

But since she's been demonstrably and laughably wrong about predicting future political events in the USA (see her entire body of work during the 2016 election campaign), why should she start making sense now?

It's completely possible, of course, that some as-yet-to-be-revealed piece of evidence will prove collusion -- before the election and by candidate Trump -- with the Russians. But the Flynn testimony certainly isn't it. All the heavy breathing and hysteria is simply a sign of how the media, yet again, always gravitates toward the news it wishes were true, rather than what really is true. If all Meuller has is Flynn and the Russians during the transition period, he's got nothing.

themandibleclaw -> SteveMilesworthy , 4 Dec 2017 08:12
Flynn was charged with far more serious crimes which were all dropped and he was left with a charge that if he spends any time in prison, it will be about 6 months. Now, you could say for him to agree to that, he must have some juicy info - and he probably does - but what that juicy info is is just speculation. And if we are speculating, then maybe what he traded it for was nothing to do with Trump? After all, one of the charges against him was failing to register as a foreign agent on behalf of Turkey.

It's alleged that Turkey wanted Flynn to extradite Gullen for his alleged involvement in Turkey's failed coup. Just this weekend, Turkey have issued an arrest warrant for a former CIA officer in relation to the failed coup. So, IF the CIA were behind the failed coup and Flynn knows this - well, a good way to silence him would be to charge him with some serious crimes and then offer to drop them in return for his silence. But, like your theory, it's just speculation.

WallyWillage , 4 Dec 2017 08:05
Still no evidence of Russian collusion in Trump campaign BEFORE the election...... whatever happened after being president elect is not impeachable unless it would be after taking office.

The secret deep state security forces haven't been this diminished since Carter cleared the stables in the 70's - they fought back and stopped his second term ...

EduardStreltsovGhost -> CitizenOfTinyBlue , 4 Dec 2017 08:03

You can easily impeach Trump for bombing Syria's military airfield, which is by UN definition war crime of war aggression

if that were the case, Clinton, Bush and Obama would be sitting in jail right now.
oddballs -> Taf1980uk , 4 Dec 2017 07:58
Seeing how the case against Trump and Flynn is based on 'probable' and not hard proof its 'probable that the anti Trump campaign is directed from within the murky enclaves of the US intelligence community.

Trumps presidency could have the capability of galvanising a powerful resistance against the 2 party state for 'real change, like affordable healthcare and affordable education for ALL its people. But no its not happening, Trump is attacked on probables and undisclosed sources. A year has passed and nothing has been revealed.

Hatred against Trump deflects the anger, see the system works the US is still a democracy. Well it isn't, its a sick oligarchy run by the mega rich who own the media, 90% is owned by 5 corporations. Americans are fed the lie that their vast military empire with its 800 overseas bases are to defend US interests.

Well their not, their only function is, is to spend tax dollars that otherwise would be spent on education, health, infrastructure, things that would 'really' benefit America. Disagree, well go ahead and accuse me of being a conspiracy nut-job, in the meantime China is by peaceful means getting the mining rights in Africa, Australia, deals that matter.

The tax legislation for the few against the many is deflected by the anti-Trump hysteria based on conjecture and not proof.

EduardStreltsovGhost , 4 Dec 2017 07:52
Wow this is like becoming McCarthy Era 2.0. I'm just waiting for the show trials of all these so-called colluders.
RelaxAndChill -> Silgen , 4 Dec 2017 07:46
Crimea was and is Russian. Your mask is slipping, Vlad .

Your ignorance is showing. I have no connection to Russia what so ever. Crimea was legally ceded to Russia over 200 years ago, by the Ottomans to Catherine the Great. Russia has never relinquished control. What the criminal organization the USSR did under Ukrainian expat Khrushchev, is irrelevant. And as Putin said , any agreement about respecting Ukraine's territorial integrity was negated when the USA and the EU fomented and financed a rebellion and revolution.

StillAbstractImp , 4 Dec 2017 07:40
Decelerating Fascism - Is Kushner a Putin operative, too?
mikedow -> Karantino , 4 Dec 2017 07:35
Australia, Canada, and S. Africa supply the lion's share of gold bullion that London survives on. And the best uranium in the world. All sorts of other precious commodities as well. If you're not toeing the line on US foreign policies religiously, the Yanks will drop you.
themandibleclaw -> Toastface_Killah , 4 Dec 2017 07:34

You are selectively choosing to refer to this one instance, but even here Obama administration were still in charge - so not very legal, was it.

I am "selectively choosing to refer to this one instance" because that's all Flynn has been charged with. Oh, and it is totally legal for a member of the incoming administration to start talks with their foreign counterparts. Here's a quote from an op-ed piece in The Hill from a law professor at Washington University.

the interest of (Russian Ambassador) Kislyak in determining the position of the new administration on sanctions is not unheard of in Washington, or necessarily untoward to raise with one of the incoming national security advisers. Ambassadors are supposed to seek changes in policies and often seek to influence officials in the early stages of administrations before policies are established. Flynn's suggestion that the Russians wait as the Trump administration unfolded its new policies is a fairly standard response of an incoming official .

http://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/362813-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-of-the-flynn-indictment

backstop -> EdwardFatherby , 4 Dec 2017 07:31
"The problem is charging Flynn for lying. A technicality. But not charging Hillary for email server. Another technicality. That's all the public will see if no collusion proved, and will ruin credibility of the FBI and the Dems"

It's not just collusion is it, what about the rampant, naked nepotism, last seen on this unashamed scale in ancient Rome?

BustedBoom , 4 Dec 2017 07:31

He then pushed Flynn hard to try to turn Russia around on an anti-Israel vote by the UN security council.

So he lobbied for Israel not Russia then? Whoops. How does the author even know where Mueller's probe is heading, and which way Flynn flipped? Flynn worked much longer for the Obama administration than for Trump's.
CitizenOfTinyBlue , 4 Dec 2017 07:26
You can easily impeach Trump for bombing Syria's military airfield, which is by UN definition war crime of war aggression, starting war without the Congress approval; and doing so by supporting false flag of AQ, is support of terrorists and so on

Oh you can't do it, of course, it was so - so presidential to bomb another country and it is just old habit and no war declaration, if country is too weak to bomb you back. And you love this exiting crazy balance of global nuclear annihilation too much, so you prefer screaming Russia, Russia to keep it hot, for wonderful military contracts.

Oh, and I have to be supporter of Putin's oligarchy with dreams of great tsars of Russia, if I care about humans survival on this planet and have very bad opinion about suicidal fools playing this stupid games.

ConCaruthers , 4 Dec 2017 07:25
If the US wanted to do itself a massive favour it should shine the spotlight on Robert Mueller, the man now in charge of investigating the President of these United States for "collusion" with Russia and possible "obstruction of justice" himself obstructed a congressional investigation into the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
moonsphere -> Hydro , 4 Dec 2017 07:24
Dealing with western backed coups on its own doorstep and being the only country actually to be legally fighting in Syria - a war that directly threatens its security - does not amount to global belligerence.
etrang -> CraftyRabbi , 4 Dec 2017 07:14

Mueller could charge/indict Kushner or Trump Jr under New York state criminal statutes

But not for crimes relating to federal elections or conspiring with Russia.

John Edwin -> OlivesNightie , 4 Dec 2017 07:13
Clinton lied under oath
John Edwin -> SoAmerican , 4 Dec 2017 07:11
The logan act is a dead law no one will be prosecuted for a act that has never been used... plus the president elect can talk to any foreign leader he or she wishes to use and even talk deals even if a current president for 2 months is still in office...
emiliofloris -> Sowester , 4 Dec 2017 07:08

I am not sure any level of scandal will make much difference to Trump or his supporters. They simply see this as an elitist conspiracy and not amount of evidence of wrongdoing will have an impact.

So far the level of scandal is below that of Whitewater/Lewinsky, and that was a very low level indeed. What "evidence of wrongdoing" is there? Nothing, that's why they charged Flynn with lying to investigators. It's important to keep in mind that the he did nor lie about actual crimes. Perhaps that's going to change as the investigation proceeds, but so far this is nothing more than a partisan lawfare fishing expedition.

Billsykesdoggy -> reinhardpolley , 4 Dec 2017 06:55
<blockquoteSpecifically, it prohibits citizens from negotiating with other nations on behalf of the United States without authorization.>

So Trump authorized Obama's talks with Macron last week?

Don't think so.

braciole -> Karantino , 4 Dec 2017 06:55

Because they attempted to covertly influence a general election in order to weaken the US.

And your evidence for this is what exactly? As for countries trying to influence elections in other countries, I'm all for it particularly when one of the candidates is murderous, arrogant and stupid.

BTW, in Honduras after supporting a coup against the democratically-elected president because he sought a referendum on allowing presidents to serve two terms, you'd think the United States would interfere when his non-democratically-elected replacement used a "packed" supreme court to change the constitution to allow presidents to serve more than one term to at least stop him stealing an election as he is now doing/has done. But they didn't and that hasn't stopped the United States whining that Evo Morales is being undemocratic by trying to extend the number of terms he can serve.

emiliofloris -> Karantino , 4 Dec 2017 06:53

Because they attempted to covertly influence a general election in order to weaken the US.

Should all countries which try to influence elections be treated as enemies? Where do you set the threshold? If we go by the actual evidence, Russia seems to have bought some Facebook ads and was allegedly involved in exposing HRC's meddling with the Democratic primaries. Compare that to the influence that countries like Israel and the Gulf Arabs exert on American politics and elections. Are you seriously claiming that Russia's influence is bigger or more decisive?

The goal of weakening the US is also highly debatable. Accepting for a moment that Russia tried to tip the balance in favor of Trump, would America be stronger if it were engaged more actively in Syria and Ukraine? Is there a specific example where Trump's administration weakened the American position to the advantage of Russia? And how is the sustained anti-Russian information warfare helping anyone but the Chinese?

technotherapy , 4 Dec 2017 06:46
The clues that Kushner has been pulling the strings on Russia are everywhere... He then pushed Flynn hard to try to turn Russia around on an anti-Israel vote by the UN security council.

And Russia didn't turn, so hardly a clue that Kushner was pulling strings with any effect. What this clue does suggest however, is that Israel pressured/colluded with the Trump Team to undermine the Obama administrations policy towards a UN resolution on illegal settlements. The elephant in the room is Israels influence on US politics.

themandibleclaw -> Simon Denham , 4 Dec 2017 06:44

Can someone please actually tell us what Flynn/Jared/Trump is supposed to have done.

In relation to the "lying" charge - In December, Flynn (in his role as incoming National Security Advisor) was told to talk to the Russians by Kushner (in his role as incoming special advisor). In these conversations, Flynn told the Russians to be patient regarding sanctions as things may change when Trump becomes President. All of this is totally legal and is what EVERY new adminstration does. Flynn had his phoned tapped by the FBI so they knew he had talked to the Russian about sanctions - they also knew the conversation was totally legal - but when they asked him about it, he said he didn't discuss sanctions. So Flynn is being charged about lying about something that was totally legal for him to do. That's it.

moonsphere -> SoAmerican , 4 Dec 2017 06:44
These days "US influence" seems to consist of bombing Middle Eastern countries back to the bronze age for reasons that defy easy logic. Anything that reduces that kind of influence would be welcome.
reinhardpolley -> Simon Denham , 4 Dec 2017 06:33
The Logan Act (18 U.S.C.A. § 953 [1948]) is a single federal statute making it a crime for a citizen to confer with foreign governments against the interests of the United States. Specifically, it prohibits citizens from negotiating with other nations on behalf of the United States without authorization.
https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Logan+Act
themandibleclaw , 4 Dec 2017 06:22
All those thinking this is the beginning of the end of Trump are going to be disappointed. Just look at the charges so far. Manafort has been charged with money laundering and not registering as a foreign agent - however, both of those charges pre-date him working for Trump. Flynn has been charged with lying to the FBI about speaking to the Russians - even though him speaking to the Russians in his role as National Security Advisor to the President-elect was not only totally legal, it was the norm. And this took place in December, after the election.

So the 2 main players have been charged with things that have nothing to do with the Trump campaign, and lets not forget the point of the investigation is to find out if Trump's campaign colluded with the Russians to win the election. Manafort's charges related to before working for the Trump campaign whilst Flynn's came after Trump won the Presidency, neither of which have anything to do with the election. As much as I wish Trump wasn't President, don't get your hopes up that this is going anywhere.

damientrollope , 4 Dec 2017 06:15
Gross hypocrisy on the US governments side. They have, since WW2 interfered with other countries elections, invaded, and killed millions worldwide, and are still doing so. Where were the FBI investigations then? Non existent. US politicians and the military hierarchy are completely immune from any prosecutions when it comes down to overseas illegal interference.

But now this Russian debacle, and at last they've woken up, because another country had the temerity to turn the tables on them. And I think if this was Bush or Obama we would never have heard a thing about it. Everybody hates the Dotard, because he's an obese dick with an IQ to match.

Boojay , 4 Dec 2017 06:15
Nothing will happen to Trump, It's all bollocks. You've all watched too many Spielberg films, bad guys win, and they win most of the time.
Trump is the real face of America, America like all governments are narcissistic, they will cheat, steal, kill, if it benefits them. It's called national interest, and it's number one on any leader's job list. Watch fog of war with Robert McNamara, fantastic and terrifying to see how it works.
formerathlete -> vacantspace , 4 Dec 2017 06:15

when American presidents were rational, well balanced with progressive views we had.... decent American healthcare? Equality of opportunity? Gun laws that made it safe to walk the streets?

Say who, what an a where now????????? Since when has the US EVER had any of the three things that you mentioned???

If ever, then it was a loooooong time before the pilgrim fathers ever landed.

Hugh Mad -> JonShone , 4 Dec 2017 06:10

The US has also been meddling in other countries elections for years, and doubtless most Americans neither know or care about that! So it's perhaps it's best to simply term them a 'rival', most people should be able to agree on that.

That is the bottom line, yes. People view the world through west = good and Russia = bad, while both make economic and political decisions that serve the interests of their people respectively. Ultimately, I think people are scared that the West's monopoly on global influence is slipping, to as you said, a rival.

JonShone -> Hugh Mad , 4 Dec 2017 06:06
You are right that calling Russia the US enemy needs justification, but these threads often deteriorate into arguments of the yes it is/no it isn't variety.

Gallup have been polling Americans for the past couple of decades on this. The last time I read about it a couple of years ago 70% of Americans had unfavourable views of Russia, ranging from those who saw them as an enemy (a smaller amount) through to those who saw them as a threat.

It's certain that their ideals and goals run counter to those generally held in the US in many ways. But let's not forget that the US' ideals are often, if not generally, divergent from their interests and US foreign policy since 1945 has been responsible for countless deaths, perhaps more than Russia's.

The US has also been meddling in other countries elections for years, and doubtless most Americans neither know or care about that! So it's perhaps it's best to simply term them a 'rival', most people should be able to agree on that.

RelaxAndChill , 4 Dec 2017 05:59
All the signs in the Russia probe point to ..

How the liberals and the Democrats don't give a damm about the USA or the world's political scene, just some endless 'sore loser' witch hunt. So much could be achieved by the improving of relations with Russia. Crimea was and is Russian. Let Trump have a go as POTUS and then judge him. He wants to befriend Putin and if done it would help solve Syrian, Nth Korean and other global problems.

variation31 -> Sowester , 4 Dec 2017 05:50

They simply see this as an elitist conspiracy and not amount of evidence of wrongdoing will have an impact

Whereas if it's a Democrat in the spotlight, these same dipshits see it as an élitist cover-up and no lack of evidence of wrongdoing will have an impact. If anything, lack of evidence is evidence of cover-up which is therefore proof of evidence.

These cynical games they play with veracity and human honesty are a very pure form of evil.

[Dec 11, 2017] How Russia-gate Met the Magnitsky Myth by Robert Parry

Highly recommended!
Looks like Browder was connected to MI6. That means that intellignece agances participated in economic rape of Russia That's explains a lot, including his change of citizenship from US to UK. He wanted better protection.
Notable quotes:
"... The Russian lawyer, Natalie Veselnitskaya, who met with Trump Jr. and other advisers to Donald Trump Sr.'s campaign, represented a company that had run afoul of a U.S. investigation into money-laundering allegedly connected to the Magnitsky case and his death in a Russian prison in 2009. His death sparked a campaign spearheaded by Browder, who used his wealth and clout to lobby the U.S. Congress in 2012 to enact the Magnitsky Act to punish alleged human rights abusers in Russia. The law became what might be called the first shot in the New Cold War. ..."
"... Despite Russian denials – and the "dog ate my homework" quality of Browder's self-serving narrative – the dramatic tale became a cause celebre in the West. The story eventually attracted the attention of Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, a known critic of President Vladimir Putin. Nekrasov decided to produce a docu-drama that would present Browder's narrative to a wider public. Nekrasov even said he hoped that he might recruit Browder as the narrator of the tale. ..."
"... Nekrasov discovered that a woman working in Browder's company was the actual whistleblower and that Magnitsky – rather than a crusading lawyer – was an accountant who was implicated in the scheme. ..."
"... Ultimately, Nekrasov completes his extraordinary film – entitled "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes" – and it was set for a premiere at the European Parliament in Brussels in April 2016. However, at the last moment – faced with Browder's legal threats – the parliamentarians pulled the plug. Nekrasov encountered similar resistance in the United States, a situation that, in part, brought Natalie Veselnitskaya into this controversy. ..."
"... That was when she turned to promoter Rob Goldstone to set up a meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. To secure the sit-down on June 9, 2016, Goldstone dangled the prospect that Veselnitskaya had some derogatory financial information from the Russian government about Russians supporting the Democratic National Committee. Trump Jr. jumped at the possibility and brought senior Trump campaign advisers, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, along. ..."
"... By all accounts, Veselnitskaya had little or nothing to offer about the DNC and turned the conversation instead to the Magnitsky Act and Putin's retaliatory measure to the sanctions, canceling a program in which American parents adopted Russian children. One source told me that Veselnitskaya also wanted to enhance her stature in Russia with the boast that she had taken a meeting at Trump Tower with Trump's son. ..."
"... But another goal of Veselnitskaya's U.S. trip was to participate in an effort to give Americans a chance to see Nekrasov's blacklisted documentary. She traveled to Washington in the days after her Trump Tower meeting and attended a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, according to The Washington Post. ..."
"... There were hopes to show the documentary to members of Congress but the offer was rebuffed. Instead a room was rented at the Newseum near Capitol Hill. Browder's lawyers. who had successfully intimidated the European Parliament, also tried to strong arm the Newseum, but its officials responded that they were only renting out a room and that they had allowed other controversial presentations in the past. ..."
"... Their stand wasn't exactly a profile in courage. "We're not going to allow them not to show the film," said Scott Williams, the chief operating officer of the Newseum. "We often have people renting for events that other people would love not to have happen." ..."
"... So, Nekrasov's documentary got a one-time showing with Veselnitskaya reportedly in attendance and with a follow-up discussion moderated by journalist Seymour Hersh. However, except for that audience, the public of the United States and Europe has been essentially shielded from the documentary's discoveries, all the better for the Magnitsky myth to retain its power as a seminal propaganda moment of the New Cold War. ..."
"... Over the past year, we have seen a growing hysteria about "Russian propaganda" and "fake news" with The New York Times and other major news outlets eagerly awaiting algorithms that can be unleashed on the Internet to eradicate information that groups like Google's First Draft Coalition deem "false." ..."
"... First Draft consists of the Times, the Post, other mainstream outlets, and establishment-approved online news sites, such as Bellingcat with links to the pro-NATO think tank, Atlantic Council. First Draft's job will be to serve as a kind of Ministry of Truth and thus shield the public from information that is deemed propaganda or untrue. ..."
"... From searches that I did on Wednesday, Nekrasov's film was not available on Amazon although a pro-Magnitsky documentary was. I did find a streaming service that appeared to have the film available. ..."
"... Why are so many people–corporate executives, governments, journalists, politicians–afraid of William Browder? Why isn't Andrei Nekrasov's film available via digital versatile disk, for sale on line? Mr. Parry, why can't you find it? Oh, wait: You did! Heaven forbid we, your readers, should screen it. Since you, too, are helping keep that film a big fat secret at least give us a few clues as to where we can find it. Throw us a bone! Thank you. ..."
"... Hysterical agit-prop troll insists that world trembles in fear of "genuine American hero" William Browder. John McCain in 2012 was too busy trembling to notice that Browder had given up his US citizenship in 1998 in order to better profit from the Russian financial crisis. ..."
"... Abe – and to escape U.S. taxes. ..."
"... Excellent report and analysis. Thanks for timely reminder regarding the Magitsky story and the fascinating background regarding Andrei Nekrasov's film, in particular its metamorphosis and subsequent aggressive suppression. Both of those factors render the film a particular credibility and wish on my part to view it. ..."
"... I am beginning to feel more and more like the citizens of the old USSR, who, were to my recollection and understanding back in the 50's and 60's:. Longing to read and hear facts suppressed by the communist state, dependent upon the Voice of America and underground news sources within the Soviet Union for the truth. RU, Consortium news, et. al. seem somewhat a parallel, and 1984 not so distant. ..."
"... Last night, After watching Max Boot self destruct on Tucker Carlson, i was inspired to watch episode 2 of The Putin Interviews. I felt enlightened. If only the Establishment Media could turn from promoting its agenda of shaping and suppressing the news into accurately reporting it. ..."
"... Media corruption is not so new. Yellow journalism around the turn of the 19th century, took us into a progression of wars. The War to End All Wars didn't. Blame the munitions makers and the Military Industrial Complex if you will, but a corrupt medial, at the very least enabled a progression of wars over the last 120 or so years. ..."
"... Nekrasov, though he's a Putin critic, is a genuine hero in this instance. He ulitimately put his preconceptions aside and took the story where it truly led him. Nekrasov deserves boatloads of praise for his handling of Browder and his final documentary film product. ..."
"... "[Veselnitskaya] traveled to Washington in the days after her Trump Tower meeting and attended a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, according to The Washington Post." The other day I saw photos of her sitting right behind Amb. McFaul in some past hearing. How did she get a seat on the front row? ..."
"... "The approach taken by Brennan's task force in assessing Russia and its president seems eerily reminiscent of the analytical blinders that hampered the U.S. intelligence community when it came to assessing the objectives and intent of Saddam Hussein and his inner leadership regarding weapons of mass destruction. The Russia NIA notes, 'Many of the key judgments rely on a body of reporting from multiple sources that are consistent with our understanding of Russian behavior.' There is no better indication of a tendency toward 'group think' than that statement. ..."
"... "The acknowledged deficit on the part of the U.S. intelligence community of fact-driven insight into the specifics of Russian presidential decision-making, and the nature of Vladimir Putin as an individual in general, likewise seems problematic. The U.S. intelligence community was hard wired into pre-conceived notions about how and what Saddam Hussein would think and decide, and as such remained blind to the fact that he would order the totality of his weapons of mass destruction to be destroyed in the summer of 1991, or that he could be telling the truth when later declaring that Iraq was free of WMD. ..."
"... Magnitsky Act in Canada has been based on made-up `facts` as Globe & Mail reporting proves. Not news, but deepens my concern about Canada following the Cold War without examination. ..."
"... Bill Browder's grandfather was Earl Browder, leader of the CPUSA from the the late 30s to late 40s. His father was also a communist. Bill jr parlayed those connections with the Soviet apparatchiks to gain a foothold in looting Russia of its state assets during the 1990s. No he was not a communist but neither were the leaders of the Soviet Union at the time of its dissolution (in name yes, but in fact not). ..."
"... I've also heard that it was the Jewish commissars who, when the USSR fell apart, rushed off to grab everything they could (with the help of outside Jewish money) and became the Russian oligarchs we hear about today. This is probably what Britton is getting at: "His father has a communist past." You go from running the government to owning it. Anti-Putin because Putin put a stop to them. ..."
"... backwardsevolution: I worked with a Soviet emigre engineer – Jewish – on the same project in an Engineering design and construction company during early 1990's. He immigrated with his family around 1991. In Soviet Union, there being no private financial institutions or lawyers so to speak , many Jews went into science and engineering. A very interesting person, we were close work place friends. His elder brother had stayed behind back in Russia. His brother was in Moscow and involved in this plunder going on there. He used to tell me all these hair raising first hand stories about what was going on in Russia during that time. All the plunder flowed into the Western Countries. ..."
"... I have read all the comments up to yours you have told it like it was in Russia in those years. Browder was the king of the crooks looting Russia. ..."
"... I remember reading Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine," but I just could not get through the chapter on the USSR falling apart. I started reading it, but I didn't want to finish it (and I didn't) because it just made me angry. The West was too unfair! Russia was asking for help, but instead the West just looted. I'd say that Russia was very lucky to have someone like Putin clean it up. ..."
"... The Canadian Minister Chrysta Freeland met with William Brawder in Davos a few months ago " -- Birds of a feather flock together. Mrs. Chrystal Freeland has a very interesting background for which she is very proud of: her granddad was a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator denounced by Jewish investigators: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/02/27/a-nazi-skeleton-in-the-family-closet/ ..."
Jul 13, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

Exclusive: A documentary debunking the Magnitsky myth, which was an opening salvo in the New Cold War, was largely blocked from viewing in the West but has now become a factor in Russia-gate, reports Robert Parry.

Near the center of the current furor over Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016 is a documentary that almost no one in the West has been allowed to see, a film that flips the script on the story of the late Sergei Magnitsky and his employer, hedge-fund operator William Browder.

The Russian lawyer, Natalie Veselnitskaya, who met with Trump Jr. and other advisers to Donald Trump Sr.'s campaign, represented a company that had run afoul of a U.S. investigation into money-laundering allegedly connected to the Magnitsky case and his death in a Russian prison in 2009. His death sparked a campaign spearheaded by Browder, who used his wealth and clout to lobby the U.S. Congress in 2012 to enact the Magnitsky Act to punish alleged human rights abusers in Russia. The law became what might be called the first shot in the New Cold War.

According to Browder's narrative, companies ostensibly under his control had been hijacked by corrupt Russian officials in furtherance of a $230 million tax-fraud scheme; he then dispatched his "lawyer" Magnitsky to investigate and – after supposedly uncovering evidence of the fraud – Magnitsky blew the whistle only to be arrested by the same corrupt officials who then had him locked up in prison where he died of heart failure from physical abuse.

Despite Russian denials – and the "dog ate my homework" quality of Browder's self-serving narrative – the dramatic tale became a cause celebre in the West. The story eventually attracted the attention of Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, a known critic of President Vladimir Putin. Nekrasov decided to produce a docu-drama that would present Browder's narrative to a wider public. Nekrasov even said he hoped that he might recruit Browder as the narrator of the tale.

However, the project took an unexpected turn when Nekrasov's research kept turning up contradictions to Browder's storyline, which began to look more and more like a corporate cover story. Nekrasov discovered that a woman working in Browder's company was the actual whistleblower and that Magnitsky – rather than a crusading lawyer – was an accountant who was implicated in the scheme.

So, the planned docudrama suddenly was transformed into a documentary with a dramatic reversal as Nekrasov struggles with what he knows will be a dangerous decision to confront Browder with what appear to be deceptions. In the film, you see Browder go from a friendly collaborator into an angry adversary who tries to bully Nekrasov into backing down.

Blocked Premiere

Ultimately, Nekrasov completes his extraordinary film – entitled "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes" – and it was set for a premiere at the European Parliament in Brussels in April 2016. However, at the last moment – faced with Browder's legal threats – the parliamentarians pulled the plug. Nekrasov encountered similar resistance in the United States, a situation that, in part, brought Natalie Veselnitskaya into this controversy.

Film director Andrei Nekrasov, who produced "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes."

As a lawyer defending Prevezon, a real-estate company registered in Cyprus, on a money-laundering charge, she was dealing with U.S. prosecutors in New York City and, in that role, became an advocate for lifting the U.S. sanctions, The Washington Post reported.

That was when she turned to promoter Rob Goldstone to set up a meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. To secure the sit-down on June 9, 2016, Goldstone dangled the prospect that Veselnitskaya had some derogatory financial information from the Russian government about Russians supporting the Democratic National Committee. Trump Jr. jumped at the possibility and brought senior Trump campaign advisers, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, along.

By all accounts, Veselnitskaya had little or nothing to offer about the DNC and turned the conversation instead to the Magnitsky Act and Putin's retaliatory measure to the sanctions, canceling a program in which American parents adopted Russian children. One source told me that Veselnitskaya also wanted to enhance her stature in Russia with the boast that she had taken a meeting at Trump Tower with Trump's son.

But another goal of Veselnitskaya's U.S. trip was to participate in an effort to give Americans a chance to see Nekrasov's blacklisted documentary. She traveled to Washington in the days after her Trump Tower meeting and attended a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, according to The Washington Post.

There were hopes to show the documentary to members of Congress but the offer was rebuffed. Instead a room was rented at the Newseum near Capitol Hill. Browder's lawyers. who had successfully intimidated the European Parliament, also tried to strong arm the Newseum, but its officials responded that they were only renting out a room and that they had allowed other controversial presentations in the past.

Their stand wasn't exactly a profile in courage. "We're not going to allow them not to show the film," said Scott Williams, the chief operating officer of the Newseum. "We often have people renting for events that other people would love not to have happen."

In an article about the controversy in June 2016, The New York Times added that "A screening at the Newseum is especially controversial because it could attract lawmakers or their aides." Heaven forbid!

One-Time Showing

So, Nekrasov's documentary got a one-time showing with Veselnitskaya reportedly in attendance and with a follow-up discussion moderated by journalist Seymour Hersh. However, except for that audience, the public of the United States and Europe has been essentially shielded from the documentary's discoveries, all the better for the Magnitsky myth to retain its power as a seminal propaganda moment of the New Cold War.

Financier William Browder (right) with Magnitsky's widow and son, along with European parliamentarians.

After the Newseum presentation, a Washington Post editorial branded Nekrasov's documentary Russian "agit-prop" and sought to discredit Nekrasov without addressing his many documented examples of Browder's misrepresenting both big and small facts in the case. Instead, the Post accused Nekrasov of using "facts highly selectively" and insinuated that he was merely a pawn in the Kremlin's "campaign to discredit Mr. Browder and the Magnitsky Act."

The Post also misrepresented the structure of the film by noting that it mixed fictional scenes with real-life interviews and action, a point that was technically true but willfully misleading because the fictional scenes were from Nekrasov's original idea for a docu-drama that he shows as part of explaining his evolution from a believer in Browder's self-exculpatory story to a skeptic. But the Post's deception is something that almost no American would realize because almost no one got to see the film.

The Post concluded smugly: "The film won't grab a wide audience, but it offers yet another example of the Kremlin's increasingly sophisticated efforts to spread its illiberal values and mind-set abroad. In the European Parliament and on French and German television networks, showings were put off recently after questions were raised about the accuracy of the film, including by Magnitsky's family.

"We don't worry that Mr. Nekrasov's film was screened here, in an open society. But it is important that such slick spin be fully exposed for its twisted story and sly deceptions."

The Post's gleeful editorial had the feel of something you might read in a totalitarian society where the public only hears about dissent when the Official Organs of the State denounce some almost unknown person for saying something that almost no one heard.

New Paradigm

The Post's satisfaction that Nekrasov's documentary would not draw a large audience represents what is becoming a new paradigm in U.S. mainstream journalism, the idea that it is the media's duty to protect the American people from seeing divergent narratives on sensitive geopolitical issues.

Over the past year, we have seen a growing hysteria about "Russian propaganda" and "fake news" with The New York Times and other major news outlets eagerly awaiting algorithms that can be unleashed on the Internet to eradicate information that groups like Google's First Draft Coalition deem "false."

First Draft consists of the Times, the Post, other mainstream outlets, and establishment-approved online news sites, such as Bellingcat with links to the pro-NATO think tank, Atlantic Council. First Draft's job will be to serve as a kind of Ministry of Truth and thus shield the public from information that is deemed propaganda or untrue.

In the meantime, there is the ad hoc approach that was applied to Nekrasov's documentary. Having missed the Newseum showing, I was only able to view the film because I was given a special password to an online version.

From searches that I did on Wednesday, Nekrasov's film was not available on Amazon although a pro-Magnitsky documentary was. I did find a streaming service that appeared to have the film available.

But the Post's editors were right in their expectation that "The film won't grab a wide audience." Instead, it has become a good example of how political and legal pressure can effectively black out what we used to call "the other side of the story." The film now, however, has unexpectedly become a factor in the larger drama of Russia-gate and the drive to remove Donald Trump Sr. from the White House.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ).

Joseph A. Haran, Jr. , July 13, 2017 at 2:13 pm

Why are so many people–corporate executives, governments, journalists, politicians–afraid of William Browder? Why isn't Andrei Nekrasov's film available via digital versatile disk, for sale on line? Mr. Parry, why can't you find it? Oh, wait: You did! Heaven forbid we, your readers, should screen it. Since you, too, are helping keep that film a big fat secret at least give us a few clues as to where we can find it. Throw us a bone! Thank you.

Rob Roy , July 13, 2017 at 2:45 pm

Parry isn't keeping the film viewing a secret. He was given a private password and perhaps can get permission to let the readers here have it. It isn't up to Parry himself but rather to the person(s) who have the rights to the password. I've come across this problem before.

ToivoS , July 13, 2017 at 4:01 pm

Parry wrote: I did find a streaming service that appeared to have the film available.

Any link?? I am willing to buy it.

Lisa , July 13, 2017 at 6:28 pm

This may not be of much help, as the film is dubbed in Russian. If you want to look for the Russian versions on the internet, search for: "????? ?????? ????????? "????? ???????????. ?? ????????"

https://my.mail.ru/bk/n-osetrova/video/71/18682.html?time=155&from=videoplayer

I'll keep looking for the film with translation into some other language.

Lisa , July 13, 2017 at 6:31 pm

Sorry, the Russian text did not appear. Try with latin alphabet: Film Andreia Nekrasova "Zakon Magnitskogo. Za kulisami"

Lisa , July 13, 2017 at 6:45 pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d1ylakLMNU

This is the same dubbed version, on youtube.

Abe , July 13, 2017 at 5:21 pm

Hysterical agit-prop troll insists that world trembles in fear of "genuine American hero" William Browder. John McCain in 2012 was too busy trembling to notice that Browder had given up his US citizenship in 1998 in order to better profit from the Russian financial crisis.

backwardsevolution , July 13, 2017 at 5:51 pm

Abe – and to escape U.S. taxes.

incontinent reader , July 13, 2017 at 6:24 pm

Well stated.

Vincent Castigliola , July 13, 2017 at 2:38 pm

Mr. Parry,

Excellent report and analysis. Thanks for timely reminder regarding the Magitsky story and the fascinating background regarding Andrei Nekrasov's film, in particular its metamorphosis and subsequent aggressive suppression. Both of those factors render the film a particular credibility and wish on my part to view it.

Is there any chance you can share information regarding a means of accessing the forbidden film?

I am beginning to feel more and more like the citizens of the old USSR, who, were to my recollection and understanding back in the 50's and 60's:. Longing to read and hear facts suppressed by the communist state, dependent upon the Voice of America and underground news sources within the Soviet Union for the truth. RU, Consortium news, et. al. seem somewhat a parallel, and 1984 not so distant.

Last night, After watching Max Boot self destruct on Tucker Carlson, i was inspired to watch episode 2 of The Putin Interviews. I felt enlightened. If only the Establishment Media could turn from promoting its agenda of shaping and suppressing the news into accurately reporting it.

Media corruption is not so new. Yellow journalism around the turn of the 19th century, took us into a progression of wars. The War to End All Wars didn't. Blame the munitions makers and the Military Industrial Complex if you will, but a corrupt medial, at the very least enabled a progression of wars over the last 120 or so years.

Demonizing other countries is bad enough, but wilfully ignoring the potential for a nuclear war to end not only war, but life as we know it, is appalling.

Anna , July 13, 2017 at 5:54 pm

"After watching Max Boot self destruct on Tucker Carlson "
Am I the only one who thinks that Max Boot should have been institutionalized for some time already? He is not well.

Vincent Castigliola , July 13, 2017 at 9:41 pm

Anna,
Perhaps Max can share a suite with John McCain. Sadly, the illness is widespread and sometimes seems to be in the majority. Neo con/lib both are adamant in finding enemies and imposing punishment.

Finding splinters, ignoring beams. Changing regimes everywhere. Making the world safe for Democracy. Unless a man they don't like get elected

Anna , July 14, 2017 at 9:31 am

Max Boot parents are Russain Jews who seemingly instilled in him a rabid hatred for everything Russian. The same is with Aperovitch, the CrowdStrike fraudster. The first Soviet (Bolshevik) government was 85% Jewish. Considering what happened to Russia under Bolsheviks, it seems that Russians are supremely tolerant people.

orwell , July 14, 2017 at 3:44 pm

Anna, Anti-Semitism will get you NOWHERE, and you should be ashamed of yourself for injecting such HATRED into the rational discussion here.

Cal , July 14, 2017 at 8:03 pm

Dear orwell

re Anna

Its not anti Semitic if its true .and its true he is a Russian Jew and its very obvious he hates Russia–as does the whole Jewish Zionist crowd in the US.

Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 1:02 am

orwell, I wonder why the truth always turns out to be so anti-semitic!?

Taras77 , July 13, 2017 at 11:17 pm

I hope you caught the preceding tucker interview with Ralph Peters, who says he is a retired us army LTC. He came off as completely deranged and hysterical. The two interviews back to back struck me as neo con desperation and panic. My respect for Tucker just went up for taking on these two wackos.

Zachary Smith , July 13, 2017 at 2:51 pm

The fact that the film is being suppressed by everybody is significant to me. I don't know a thing about the "facts" of the Magnitsky case, and a quick look at the results of a Google search suggests this film isn't going to be available to me unless I shell out some unknown amount of money.

If the producers want the film to be seen, perhaps they ought to release it for download to any interested parties for a nominal sum. This will mean they won't make any profit, but on the other hand they will be able to spit in the eyes of the censors.

Dan Mason , July 13, 2017 at 6:42 pm

I went searching the net for access to this film and found that I was blocked at every turn. I did find a few links which all seemed to go to the same destination which claimed to provide access once I registered with their site. I decided to avoid that route. I don't really have that much interest in the Magnitsky affair, but I do wonder why we are being denied access to information. Who has this kind of influence, and why are they so fearful. I'm really afraid that we already live in a largely hidden Orwellian world. Now where did I put that tin foil hat?

orwell , July 14, 2017 at 3:48 pm

The Orwellian World is NOT HIDDEN, it is clearly visible.

Drew Hunkins , July 13, 2017 at 2:53 pm

Nekrasov, though he's a Putin critic, is a genuine hero in this instance. He ulitimately put his preconceptions aside and took the story where it truly led him. Nekrasov deserves boatloads of praise for his handling of Browder and his final documentary film product.

backwardsevolution , July 13, 2017 at 3:30 pm

Drew – good comment. It's very hard to "turn", isn't it? I wonder if many people appreciate what it takes to do this. Easier to justify, turn a blind eye, but to actually stop, question, think, and then follow where the story leads you takes courage and strength.

BannanaBoat , July 13, 2017 at 6:12 pm

Especially when your bucking an aggressive billionaire.

backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 1:49 am

BannanaBoat – that too!

Zim , July 13, 2017 at 3:11 pm

This is interesting:

"In December 2015, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hillary Clinton opposed the Magnitsky Act while serving as secretary of state. Her opposition coincided with Bill Clinton giving a speech in Moscow for Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank! for which he was paid $500,000.

"Mr. Clinton also received a substantial payout in 2010 from Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank whose executives were at risk of being hurt by possible U.S. sanctions tied to a complex and controversial case of alleged corruption in Russia.

Members of Congress wrote to Mrs. Clinton in 2010 seeking to deny visas to people who had been implicated by Russian accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who was jailed and died in prison after he uncovered evidence of a large tax-refund fraud. William Browder, a foreign investor in Russia who had hired Mr. Magnitsky, alleged that the accountant had turned up evidence that Renaissance officials, among others, participated in the fraud."

The State Department opposed the sanctions bill at the time, as did the Russian government. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pushed Hillary Clinton to oppose the legislation during a meeting in St. Petersburg in June 2012, citing that U.S.-Russia relations would suffer as a result."

More: http://observer.com/2017/07/natalia-veselnitskaya-hillary-clinton-magnitsky-act/

Virginia , July 13, 2017 at 6:13 pm

Very interesting, Zim.

Bart in Virginia , July 13, 2017 at 3:15 pm

"[Veselnitskaya] traveled to Washington in the days after her Trump Tower meeting and attended a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, according to The Washington Post." The other day I saw photos of her sitting right behind Amb. McFaul in some past hearing. How did she get a seat on the front row?

Now I remember that Post editorial. I was one of only 20 commenters before they shut down comments. It was some heavy pearl clutching.

Cal , July 13, 2017 at 3:31 pm

WOW..excellent reporting.

BobH , July 13, 2017 at 3:35 pm

nice backgrounder for an ever evolving story censorship is censorship by any other name!

BobH , July 13, 2017 at 3:38 pm

afterthought couldn't the film be shown on RT America?

Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 1:11 am

Would that not enable Bowder's employees online to claim that this documentary is Russian state propaganda, which it obviously is not because it would have been made available for free everywhere already just like RT. I believe that Nekrasov does not like RT and RT probably still does not like Nekrasov. The point of RT has never been the truth then the alternative point of view, as they advertised: Audi alteram partem.

Abe , July 13, 2017 at 3:41 pm

"The approach taken by Brennan's task force in assessing Russia and its president seems eerily reminiscent of the analytical blinders that hampered the U.S. intelligence community when it came to assessing the objectives and intent of Saddam Hussein and his inner leadership regarding weapons of mass destruction. The Russia NIA notes, 'Many of the key judgments rely on a body of reporting from multiple sources that are consistent with our understanding of Russian behavior.' There is no better indication of a tendency toward 'group think' than that statement.

Moreover, when one reflects on the fact much of this 'body of reporting' was shoehorned after the fact into an analytical premise predicated on a single source of foreign-provided intelligence, that statement suddenly loses much of its impact.

"The acknowledged deficit on the part of the U.S. intelligence community of fact-driven insight into the specifics of Russian presidential decision-making, and the nature of Vladimir Putin as an individual in general, likewise seems problematic. The U.S. intelligence community was hard wired into pre-conceived notions about how and what Saddam Hussein would think and decide, and as such remained blind to the fact that he would order the totality of his weapons of mass destruction to be destroyed in the summer of 1991, or that he could be telling the truth when later declaring that Iraq was free of WMD.

'President Putin has repeatedly and vociferously denied any Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Those who cite the findings of the Russia NIA as indisputable proof to the contrary, however, dismiss this denial out of hand. And yet nowhere in the Russia NIA is there any evidence that those who prepared it conducted anything remotely resembling the kind of 'analysis of alternatives' mandated by the ODNI when it comes to analytic standards used to prepare intelligence community assessments and estimates. Nor is there any evidence that the CIA's vaunted 'Red Cell' was approached to provide counterintuitive assessments of premises such as 'What if President Putin is telling the truth?'

'Throughout its history, the NIC has dealt with sources of information that far exceeded any sensitivity that might attach to Brennan's foreign intelligence source. The NIC had two experts that it could have turned to oversee a project like the Russia NIA!the NIO for Cyber Issues, and the Mission Manager of the Russian and Eurasia Mission Center; logic dictates that both should have been called upon, given the subject matter overlap between cyber intrusion and Russian intent.

'The excuse that Brennan's source was simply too sensitive to be shared with these individuals, and the analysts assigned to them, is ludicrous!both the NIO for cyber issues and the CIA's mission manager for Russia and Eurasia are cleared to receive the most highly classified intelligence and, moreover, are specifically mandated to oversee projects such as an investigation into Russian meddling in the American electoral process.

'President Trump has come under repeated criticism for his perceived slighting of the U.S. intelligence community in repeatedly citing the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction intelligence failure when downplaying intelligence reports, including the Russia NIA, about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Adding insult to injury, the president's most recent comments were made on foreign soil (Poland), on the eve of his first meeting with President Putin, at the G-20 Conference in Hamburg, Germany, where the issue of Russian meddling was the first topic on the agenda.

"The politics of the wisdom of the timing and location of such observations aside, the specific content of the president's statements appear factually sound."

Throwing a Curveball at 'Intelligence Community Consensus' on Russia By Scott Ritter http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/did-17-intelligence-agencies-really-come-to-consensus-on-russia/

Joe Tedesky , July 13, 2017 at 4:13 pm

Thanks Abe once again, for providing us with news which will never be printed or aired in our MSM. Brennan may ignore the NIC, as Congress and the Executive Branch constantly avoid paying attention to the GAO. Why even have these agencies, if our leaders aren't going to listen them?

Virginia , July 13, 2017 at 6:16 pm

Abe, I'm always amazed at how much you know. Thank you for sharing. If you have your comments in article form or on a site where they can be shared, I'd really like to know about it. I've tried, but I garble the many points you make when trying to explain historical events you've told us about.

Skip Scott , July 14, 2017 at 9:08 am

Thanks Abe. You are a real asset to us here at CN.

John V. Walsh , July 13, 2017 at 3:54 pm

Very good article! The entire Magnitsky saga has become so convoluted and mired in controversy and propaganda that it is very hard to understand. I remember vaguely the controversy surrounding the showing of the film at the Newseum. it is especially impressive that Nekrasov changed his opinion as fcts unfolded.

I will now try to get the docudrama and watch it.
If anyone has suggestions on how to do this, please let me know via a response. here.
Thanks.

Roger Annis , July 13, 2017 at 4:02 pm

A 'Magnitsky Act' in Canada was approved by the (appointed) Senate several months ago and is now undergoing fine tuning in the House of Commons prior to a third and final vote of approval. The proposed law has the unanimous support of the parties in Parliament.

A column in today's Globe and Mail daily by the newspaper's 'chief political writer' tiptoes around the Magnitsky story, never once daring to admit that a contrary narrative exists to that of Bill Browder.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/when-it-comes-to-magnitsky-laws-its-clear-what-russia-is-looking-for/article35678618/

John-Albert Eadie , July 13, 2017 at 5:01 pm

Magnitsky Act in Canada has been based on made-up `facts` as Globe & Mail reporting proves. Not news, but deepens my concern about Canada following the Cold War without examination.

backwardsevolution , July 13, 2017 at 5:56 pm

Roger Annis – just little lemmings following the leader. Disgusting. I hope you posted a comment at the Globe and Mail, Roger, with a link to this article.

Britton , July 13, 2017 at 4:05 pm

Browder is a Communist Jew, his father has a Communist past according to his background so I know I can't trust anything he says. Hes just one of many shady interests undermining Putin I've seen over the years. His book Red Notice is just as shady. Good reporting Consortium News. Fox News promotes Browder like crazy every chance they get especially Fox Business channel.

Joe Average , July 13, 2017 at 5:06 pm

"Browder is a Communist " Hedge Fund managers are hardly Communist – that's an oxymoron.

ToivoS , July 13, 2017 at 6:02 pm

Bill Browder's grandfather was Earl Browder, leader of the CPUSA from the the late 30s to late 40s. His father was also a communist. Bill jr parlayed those connections with the Soviet apparatchiks to gain a foothold in looting Russia of its state assets during the 1990s. No he was not a communist but neither were the leaders of the Soviet Union at the time of its dissolution (in name yes, but in fact not).

Joe Average , July 13, 2017 at 6:34 pm

ToivoS,

thank you for this background information.

My main intention had been to straighten out the blurring of calling a hedge fund manager communist. Nowadays everything gets blurred by people misrepresenting political concepts. Either the people have been dumbed-down by misinformation or misrepresenting is done in order to keep neo-liberalism the dominant economical model. On many occasions I had read comments of people seemingly believing that Nationalsocialism had been some variant of socialism. Even the ideas of Bernie Sanders had been misrepresented as socialist instead of social democratic ones.

backwardsevolution , July 13, 2017 at 6:21 pm

Joe Average – Dave P. mentioned Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book entitled "Two Hundred Years Together" the other day. I've been reading a long synopsis of this book. What Britton says appears to be quite true. I don't know about Browder, but from what I've read the Jews were instrumental in the communist party, in the deaths of so many Russians. It wasn't just the Jews, but they played a big part. It's no wonder Solzhenitsyn's book has been "lost in translation", at least into English, for so many years.

I've also heard that it was the Jewish commissars who, when the USSR fell apart, rushed off to grab everything they could (with the help of outside Jewish money) and became the Russian oligarchs we hear about today. This is probably what Britton is getting at: "His father has a communist past." You go from running the government to owning it. Anti-Putin because Putin put a stop to them.

Dave P. , July 13, 2017 at 7:37 pm

backwardsevolution: I worked with a Soviet emigre engineer – Jewish – on the same project in an Engineering design and construction company during early 1990's. He immigrated with his family around 1991. In Soviet Union, there being no private financial institutions or lawyers so to speak , many Jews went into science and engineering. A very interesting person, we were close work place friends. His elder brother had stayed behind back in Russia. His brother was in Moscow and involved in this plunder going on there. He used to tell me all these hair raising first hand stories about what was going on in Russia during that time. All the plunder flowed into the Western Countries.

In recent history, no country went through this kind of plunder on a scale Russia went through during ten or fifteen years starting in 1992. Russia was a very badly ravaged country when Putin took over. Means of production, finance, all came to halt, and society itself had completely broken down. It appears that the West has all the intentions to do it again.

Bruce Walker , July 13, 2017 at 9:29 pm

I have read all the comments up to yours you have told it like it was in Russia in those years. Browder was the king of the crooks looting Russia. Then he got to John McCain with all his lies and bullshit and was responsible for the sanctions on Russia. All the comments aboutBrowders grandfather andCommunist party are all true but hardly important. Except that it probably was how Browder was able to get his fingers on the pie in Russia. And he sure did get his fingers in the pie BIG TIME.

I am a Canadian and am aware of Maginsky Act in Canada. Our Minister Chrystal Freeland met with William Brawder in Davos a few months ago both of these two you could say are not fans of Putin, I certainly don't know what they spoke about but other than lies from Browder there is no reason she should have been talking with him. I have made comments on other forums regarding these two meeting. Read Browders book and hopefully see the documentary that this article is about. When I read his book I knew instantly that he was a crook a charloten and a liar. Just the kind of folk John McCain and a lot of other folks in US politics love. You all have a nice Peacefull day

backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 12:38 am

Joe Average – "I guess that this book puts blame for Communism entirely on the Jewish people and that this gave even further rise to antisemitism in the Germany of the 1930's."

No, it doesn't put the blame entirely on the Jews; it just spells out that they did play a large part. As one Jewish scholar said, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was too much of an academic, too intelligent to ever put the blame entirely on one group. But something like 40 – 60 million died – shot, taken out on boats with rocks around their necks and thrown overboard, starved, gassed in rail cars, poisoned, worked to death, froze, you name it. Every other human slaughter pales in comparison. Good old man, so civilized (sarc)!

But someone(s) has been instrumental in keeping this book from being translated into English (or so I've read many places online). Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" and his other books have been translated, but not this one. (Although I just found one site that has almost all of the chapters translated, but not all). Several people ordered the book off Amazon, only to find out that it was in the Russian language. LOL

Solzhenitsyn does say at one point in the book: "Communist rebellions in Germany post-WWI was a big reason for the revival of anti-Semitism (as there was no serious anti-Semitism in the imperial [Kaiser] Germany of 1870 – 1918)."

Lots of Jewish people made it into the upper levels of the Soviet government, academia, etc. (and lots of them were murdered too). I might skip reading these types of books until I get older. Too bleak. Hard enough reading about the day-to-day stuff here without going back in time for more fun!

I remember reading Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine," but I just could not get through the chapter on the USSR falling apart. I started reading it, but I didn't want to finish it (and I didn't) because it just made me angry. The West was too unfair! Russia was asking for help, but instead the West just looted. I'd say that Russia was very lucky to have someone like Putin clean it up.

Keep smiling, Joe.

backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 12:58 am

Dave P. – I told you, you are a wealth of information, a walking encyclopedia. Interesting about your co-worker. Sounds like it was a free-for-all in Russia. Yes, I totally agree that Putin has done and is doing all he can to bring his country back up. Very difficult job he is doing, and I hope he is successful at keeping the West out as much as he can, at least until Russia is strong and sure enough to invite them in on their own terms.

Now go and tell your wife what I said about you being a "walking encyclopedia". She'll probably have a good laugh. (Not that you're not, but you know what she'll say: "Okay, smartie, now go and do the dishes.")

Chucky LeRoi , July 14, 2017 at 9:56 am

Just some small scale, local color kind of stuff, but living in the USA, west coast specifically, it was quite noticeable in the mid to late '90's how many Russians with money were suddenly appearing. No apparent skills or 'jobs', but seemingly able to pay for stuff. Expensive stuff.

A neighbor invited us to her 'place in the mountains', which turned out to be where a lumber company had almost terra-formed an area and was selling off the results. Her advice: When you go to the lake (i.e., the low area now gathering runoff, paddle boats rentals, concession stand) you will see a lot of men with huge stomachs and tiny Speedos. They will be very rude, pushy, confrontational. Ignore them, DO NOT comment on their rudeness or try to deal with their manners. They are Russians, and the amount of trouble it will stir up – and probable repercussions – are simply not worth it.

Back in town, the anecdotes start piling up quickly. I am talking crowbars through windows (for a perceived insult). A beating where the victim – who was probably trying something shady – was so pulped the emergency room staff couldn't tell if the implement used was a 2X4 or a baseball bat. When found he had with $3k in his pocket: robbery was not the motive. More traffic accidents involving guys with very nice cars and serious attitude problems. I could go on. More and more often somewhere in the relating of these incidents the phrase " this Russian guy " would come up. It was the increased use of this phrase that was so noticeable.

And now the disclaimer.

Before anybody goes off, I am not anti-Russian, Russo-phobic, what have you. I studied the Russian language in high school and college (admittedly decades ago). My tax guy is Russian. I love him. My day to day interactions have led me to this pop psychology observation: the extreme conditions that produced that people and culture produced extremes. When they are of the good, loving , caring, cultured, helpful sort, you could ask for no better friends. The generosity can be embarrassing. When they are of the materialistic, evil, self-centered don't f**k with me I am THE BADDEST ASS ON THE PLANET sort, the level of mania and self-importance is impossible to deal with, just get as far away as possible. It's worked for me.

Joe Average , July 13, 2017 at 8:10 pm

backwardsevolution,

thanks for the info. I'll add the book to the list of books onto my to-read list. As far as I know a Kibbutz could be described as a Communist microcosm. The whole idea of Communism itself is based on Marx (a Jew by birth). A while ago I had started reading "Mein Kampf". I've got to finish the book, in order to see if my assumption is correct. I guess that this book puts blame for Communism entirely on the Jewish people and that this gave even further rise to antisemitism in the Germany of the 1930's.

The most known Russian Oligarchs that I've heard of are mainly of Jewish origin, but as far as I know they had been too young to be commissars at the time of the demise of the USSR. At least one aspect I've read of many times is that a lot of them built their fortunes with the help of quite shady business dealings.

With regard to President Putin I've read that he made a deal with the oligarchs: they should pay their taxes, keep/invest their money in Russia and keep out of politics. In return he wouldn't dig too deep into their past. Right at the moment everybody in the West is against President Putin, because he stopped the looting of his country and its citizens and that's something our Western oligarchs and financial institutions don't like.

On a side note: Several years ago I had started to read several volumes about German history. Back then I didn't notice an important aspect that should attract my attention a few years later when reading about the rise of John D. Rockefeller. Charlemagne (Charles the Great) took over power from the Merovingians. Prior to becoming King of the Franks he had been Hausmeier (Mayor of the Palace) for the Merovingians. Mayor of the Palace was the title of the manager of the household, which seems to be similar to a procurator and/or accountant (bookkeeper). The similarity of the beginnings of both careers struck me. John D. Rockefeller started as a bookkeeper. If you look at Bill Gates you'll realize that he was smart enough to buy an operating system for a few dollars, improved it and sold it to IBM on a large scale. The widely celebrated Steve Jobs was basically the marketing guy, whilst the real brain behind (the product) Apple had been Steve Wozniak.

Another side note: If we're going down the path of neo-liberalism it will lead us straight back to feudalism – at least if the economy doesn't blow up (PCR, Michael Hudson, Mike Whitney, Mike Maloney, Jim Rogers, Richard D. Wolff, and many more economists make excellent points that our present Western economy can't go on forever and is kept alive artificially).

backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 12:50 am

Joe Average – somehow my reply to you ended up above your post. What? How did that happen? You can find it there. Thanks for the interesting info about John D. Rockefeller, Gates, Jobs and Wozniak. Some are good managers, others good at sales, while others are the creative inventors.

Yes, Joe, I totally agree that we are headed back to feudalism. I don't think we'll have much choice as the oil is running out. We'll probably be okay, but our children? I worry about them. They'll notice a big change in their lifetimes. The discovery and capture of oil pulled forward a large population. As we scale back, we could be in trouble, food-wise. Or at least it looks that way.

Thanks, Joe.

Miranda Keefe , July 14, 2017 at 5:48 am

Charlemagne did not take over from the Merovingians. The Mayor of the Palace was not an accountant.

During the 7th Century the Mayor of the Place more and more became the actual ruler of the Franks. The office had existed for over a century and was basically the "prime minister" to the king. By the time Pepin of Herstal, a scion of a powerful Frankish family, took the position in 680, the king was ceremonial leader doing ritual and the Mayor ruled- like the relationship of the Emperor and the Shogun in Japan. In 687 Pepin's Austrasia conquered Neustria and Burgundy and he added "Duke of the Franks" to his titles. The office became hereditary.

When Pepin died in 714 there was some unrest as nobles from various parts of the joint kingdoms attempted to get different ones of his heirs in the office until his son Charles Martel took the reins in 718. This is the famous Charles Martel who defeated the Moors at Tours in 732. But that was not his only accomplishment as he basically extended the Frankish kingdom to include Saxony. Charles not only ruled but when the king died he picked which possible heir would become king. Finally near the end of his reign he didn't even bother replacing the king and the throne was empty.

When Charles Martel died in 741 he followed Frankish custom and divided his kingdom among his sons. By 747 his younger son, Pepin the Short, had consolidated his rule and with the support of the Pope, deposed the last Merovingian King and became the first Carolingian King in 751- the dynasty taking its name from Charles Martel. Thus Pepin reunited the two aspects of the Frankish ruler, combining the rule of the Mayor with the ceremonial reign of the King into the new Kingship.

Pepin expanded the kingdom beyond the Frankish lands even more and his son, Charlemagne, continued that. Charlemagne was 8 when his father took the title of King. Charlemagne never was the Mayor of the Palace, but grew up as the prince. He became King of the Franks in 768 ruling with his brother, sole King in 781, and then started becoming King of other countries until he united it all in 800 as the restored Western Roman Emperor.

When he died in 814 the Empire was divided into three Kingdoms and they never reunited again. The western one evolved into France. The eastern one evolved in the Holy Roman Empire and eventually Germany. The middle one never solidified but became the Low Countries, Switzerland, and the Italian states.

Anna , July 14, 2017 at 9:45 am

The Canadian Minister Chrysta Freeland met with William Brawder in Davos a few months ago " -- Birds of a feather flock together. Mrs. Chrystal Freeland has a very interesting background for which she is very proud of: her granddad was a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator denounced by Jewish investigators: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/02/27/a-nazi-skeleton-in-the-family-closet/

Since the inti-Russian tenor of the Canadian Minister Chrysta Freeland is in accord with the US ziocons anti-Russian policies (never mind all this fuss about WWII Jewish mass graves in Ukraine), "Chrysta" is totally approved by the US government.

Joe Average , July 14, 2017 at 11:32 pm

I'll reply to myself in order to send a response to backwardsevolution and Miranda Keefe.

For a change I'll be so bold to ignore gentleman style and reply in the order of the posts – instead of Ladies first.

backwardsevolution,

in my first paragraph I failed to make a clear distinction. I started with the remark that I'm adding the book "Two Hundred Years Together" to my to-read list and then mentioned that I'm right now reading "Mein Kampf". All remarks after mentioning the latter book are directed at this one – and not the one of Solzhenitsyn.

Miranda Keefe,

I'm aware that accountant isn't an exact characterization of the concept of a Mayor of the Palace. As a precaution I had added the phrase "seems to be similar". You're correct with the statement that Charlemagne was descendant Karl Martel. At first I intended to write that Karolinger (Carolings) took over from Merowinger (Merovingians), because those details are irrelevant to the point that I wanted to make. It would've been an information overload. My main point was the power of accountants and related fields such as sales and marketing. Neither John D. Rockefeller, Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs actually created their products from scratch.

Many of those who are listed as billionaires haven't been creators / inventors themselves. Completely decoupled from actual production is banking. Warren Buffet is started as an investment salesman, later stock broker and investor. Oversimplified you could describe this activity as accounting or sales. It's the same with George Soros and Carl Icahn. Without proper supervision money managers (or accountants) had and still do screw those who had hired them. One of those victims is former billionaire heiress Madeleine Schickedanz ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_Schickedanz ). Generalized you could also say that BlackRock is your money manager accountant. If you've got some investment (that dates back before 2008), which promises you a higher interest rate after a term of lets say 20 years, the company with which you have the contract with may have invested your money with BlackRock. The financial crisis of 2008 has shown that finance (accountants / money managers) are taking over. Aren't investment bankers the ones who get paid large bonuses in case of success and don't face hardly any consequences in case of failure? Well, whatever turn future might take, one thing is for sure: whenever SHTF even the most colorful printed pieces of paper will not taste very well.

Cal , July 13, 2017 at 10:13 pm

History's Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks on

http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nppst

History's Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks . EVER SINCE THE Emperor Constantine established the legal position of the church in the

Many Bolsheviks fled to Germany , taking with them some loot that enabled them to get established in Germany. Lots of invaluable art work also.

backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 1:54 am

Cal – read about "History's Greatest Heist" on Amazon. Sounds interesting. Was one of the main reasons for the Czar's overthrow to steal and then flee? It's got to have been on some minds. A lot of people got killed, and they would have had wedding rings, gold, etc. That doesn't even include the wealth that could be stolen from the Czar. Was the theft just one of those things that happened through opportunism, or was it one of the main reasons for the overthrow in the first place, get some dough and run with it?

Cal , July 14, 2017 at 2:22 pm

@ backwards

" Was the theft just one of those things that happened through opportunism, or was it one of the main reasons for the overthrow"'

imo some of both. I am sure when they were selling off Russian valuables to finance their revolution a lot of them set aside some loot for themselves.

backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 4:09 pm

Cal – thank you. Good books like this get us closer and closer to the truth. Thank goodness for these people.

Brad Owen , July 14, 2017 at 11:45 am

An autocratic oligarch would probably be a better description. He probably believes like other Synarchist financiers that they should rightfully rule the World, and see democratic processes as heresy against "The Natural Order for human society", or some such belief.

Brad Owen , July 14, 2017 at 12:13 pm

Looking up "A short definition of Synarchism (a Post-Napoleonic social phenomenon) by Lyndon LaRouche" would give much insight into what's going on. People from the intelligence community made sure a copy of a 1940 army intelligence dossier labelled something like "Synarchism:NAZI/Communist" got into Lyndon's hands. It speaks of the the Synarchist method of attacking a targeted society from both extreme (Right-Left) ends of the political spectrum. I guess this is dialectics? I suppose the existence of the one extreme legitimizes the harsh, anti-democratic/anti-human measures taken to exterminate it by the other extreme, actually destroying the targeted society in the process. America, USSR, and (Sun Yat Sen's old Republic of) China were the targeted societies in the pre-WWII/WWII yearsfor their "sins" of championing We The People against Oligarchy. FDR knew the Synarchist threat and sided with Russia and China against Germany and Japan. He knew that, after dealing with the battlefield NAZIs, the "Boardroom" NAZIs would have to be dealt with Post-War. That all changed with his death.The Synarchists are still at it today, hence all the rabid Russo-phobia, the Pacific Pivot, and the drive towards war. This is all being foiled with Trump's friendly, cooperative approach towards Russia and China.

mike k , July 13, 2017 at 4:11 pm

Big Brother at work – always protecting us from upsetting information. How nice of him to insure our comfort. No need for us to bother with all of this confusing stuff, he can do all that for us. The mainstream media will tell us all we need to know .. (Virginia – please notice my use of irony.)

Joe Tedesky , July 13, 2017 at 4:21 pm

Do you remember mike K when porn was censored, and there were two sides to every issue as compromise was always on the table? Now porn is accessible on cable TV, and there is only one side to every issue, and that's I'm right about everything and your not, what compromise with you?

Don't get me wrong, I don't really care how we deal with porn, but I am very concerned to why censorship is showing up whereas we can't see certain things, for certain reasons we know nothing about. Also, I find it unnerving that we as a society continue to stay so undivided. Sure, we can't all see the same things the same way, but maybe it's me, and I'm getting older by the minute, but where is our cooperation to at least try and work with each other?

Always like reading your comments mike K Joe

Joe Average , July 13, 2017 at 5:09 pm

Joe,

when it comes to the choice of watching porn and bodies torn apart (real war pictures), I prefer the first one, although we in the West should be confronted with the horrible pictures of what we're assisting/doing.

Joe Tedesky , July 13, 2017 at 5:27 pm

This is where the Two Joe's are alike.

mike k , July 13, 2017 at 6:07 pm

I do remember those days Joe. I am 86 now, so a lot has changed since 1931. With the 'greed is good' philosophy in vogue now, those who seek compromise are seen as suckers for the more single minded to take advantage of. Respect for rules of decency is just about gone, especially at the top of the wealth pyramid.

Cal , July 13, 2017 at 10:15 pm

Yep

BannanaBoat , July 13, 2017 at 6:36 pm

Distraction from critical thinking, excellent observation ( please forget the NeoCon Demos they are responsible for half of the nightmare USA society has become.

ranney , July 13, 2017 at 4:37 pm

Wow Robert, what a fascinating article! And how complicated things become "when first we practice to deceive".
Abe thank you for the link to Ritter's article; that's a really good one too!

John , July 13, 2017 at 4:40 pm

If we get into a shooting war with Russia and the human race somehow survives it Robert Parry' s name will one day appear in the history books as the person who most thoroughly documented the events leading up to that war. He will be considered to be a top historian as well as a top journalist.

Abe , July 13, 2017 at 7:01 pm

"Browder, who abjured his American citizenship in 1998 to become a British subject, reveals more about his own selective advocacy of democratic principles than about the film itself. He might recall that in his former homeland freedom of the press remains a cherished value."

A Response to William Browder
By Rachel Bauman
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/response-william-browder-16654

Abe , July 13, 2017 at 7:16 pm

William Browder is a "shareholder activist" the way Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a "human rights activist".

Both loudly bleat the "story" of their heroic "fight for justice" for billionaire Jewish oligarchs: themselves.

http://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.686922.1447865981!/image/78952068.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_625/78952068.jpg

Abe , July 13, 2017 at 7:19 pm

"never driven by the money"
https://www.thejc.com/culture/books/be-careful-of-putin-he-is-a-true-enemy-of-jews-1.61745

backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 2:50 am

Abe – "never driven by the money". No, he would never be that type of guy (sarc)!

"It's hard to know what Browder will do next. He rules out any government ambitions, instead saying he can achieve more by lobbying it.

This summer, he says he met "big Hollywood players" in a bid to turn his book into a major film.

"The most important next step in the campaign is to adapt the book into a Hollywood feature film," he says. "I have been approached by many film-makers and spent part of the summer in LA meeting with screenwriters, producers and directors to figure out what the best constellation of players will be on this.

"There are a lot of people looking at it. It's still difficult to say who we will end up choosing. There are many interesting options, but I'm not going to name any names."

What the ..? I can see it now, George Clooney in the lead role, Mr. White Helmets himself, with his twins in tow.

Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 1:56 am

Is it not impressive how money buys out reality in the modern world? This is why one can safely assume that whatever is told in the MSM is completely opposite to the truth. Would MSM have to push it if it were the truth? You may call this Kiza's Law if you like (modestly): " The truth is always opposite to what MSM say! " The 0.1% of situations where this is not the case is the margin of error.

Abe , July 13, 2017 at 7:39 pm

"no figure in this saga has a more tangled family relationship with the Kremlin than the London-based hedge fund manager Bill Browder [ ]

"there's a reticence in his Jewish narrative. One of his first jobs in London is with the investment operation of the publishing billionaire Robert Maxwell. As it happens, Maxwell was originally a Czech Jewish Holocaust survivor who fled and became a decorated British soldier, then helped in 1948 to set up the secret arms supply line to newly independent Israel from communist Czechoslovakia. He was also rumored to be a longtime Mossad agent. But you learn none of that from Browder's memoir.

"The silence is particularly striking because when Browder launches his own fund, he hires a former Israeli Mossad agent, Ariel, to set up his security operation, manned mainly by Israelis. Over time, Browder and Ariel become close. How did that connection come about? Was it through Maxwell? Wherever it started, the origin would add to the story. Why not tell it?

"When Browder sets up his own fund, Hermitage Capital Management -- named for the famed czarist-era St. Petersburg art museum, though that's not explained either -- his first investor is Beny Steinmetz, the Israeli diamond billionaire. Browder tells how Steinmetz introduced him to the Lebanese-Brazilian Jewish banking billionaire Edmond Safra, who invests and becomes not just a partner but also a mentor and friend.

"Safra is also internationally renowned as the dean of Sephardi Jewish philanthropy; the main backer of Israel's Shas party, the Sephardi Torah Guardians, and of New York's Holocaust memorial museum, and a megadonor to Yeshiva University, Hebrew University, the Weizmann Institute and much more. Browder must have known all that. Considering the closeness of the two, it's surprising that none of it gets mentioned.

"It's possible that Browder's reticence about his Jewish connections is simply another instance of the inarticulateness that seizes so many American Jews when they try to address their Jewishness."

http://forward.com/news/376788/the-secret-jewish-history-of-donald-trump-jrs-russia-scandal/

backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 3:15 am

Abe – what a web. Money makes money, doesn't it? It's often what club you belong to and who you know. I remember a millionaire in my area long ago who went bankrupt. The wealthy simply chipped in, gave him some start-up money, and he was off to the races again. Simple as that. And I would think that the Jews are an even tighter group who invest with each other, are privy to inside information, get laws changed in favor of each other, pay people off when one gets in trouble. Browder seems a shifty sort. As the article says, he leaves a lot out.

Abe , July 14, 2017 at 11:37 pm

In 1988, Stanton Wheeler (Yale University – Law School), David L. Weisburd (Hebrew University of Jerusalem; George Mason University – The Department of Criminology, Law & Society; Hebrew University of Jerusalem – Faculty of Law). Elin Waring (Yale University – Law School), and Nancy Bode (Government of the State of Minnesota) published a major study on white collar crime in America.

Part of a larger program of research on white-collar crime supported by a grant from the United States Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice, the study included "the more special forms associated with the abuse of political power [ ] or abuse of financial power". The study was also published as a Hebrew University of Jerusalem Legal Research Paper

The research team noted that Jews were over-represented relative to their share of the U.S. population:

"With respect to religion, there is one clear finding. Although many in both white collar and common crime categories do not claim a particular religious faith [ ] It would be a fair summary of our. data to say that, demographically speaking, white collar offenders are predominantly middle-aged white males with an over-representation of Jews."

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2632989

In 1991, David L. Weisburd published his study of Crimes of the Middle Classes: White-Collar Offenders in the Federal Courts, Weisburd found that although Jews comprised only around 2% of the United States population, they contributed at least 9% of lower category white-collar crimes (bank embezzlement, tax fraud and bank fraud), at least 15% of moderate category white-collar crimes (mail fraud, false claims, and bribery), and at least 33% of high category white-collar crimes (antitrust and securities fraud). Weisburg showed greater frequency of Jewish offenders at the top of the hierarchy of white collar crime. In Weisbug's sample of financial crime in America, Jews were responsible for 23.9%.

Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 2:26 am

What I find most interesting is how Putin handles the Jews.

It is obvious that he is the one who saved the country of Russia from the looting of the 90s by the Russian-American Jewish mafia. This is the most direct explanation for his demonisation in the West, his feat will never be forgiven, not even in history books (a demon forever). Even to this day, for example in Syria, Putin's main confrontation is not against US then against the Zionist Jews, whose principal tool is US. Yet, there is not a single anti-Semitic sentence that Putin ever uttered. Also, Putin let the Jewish oligarchs who plundered Russia keep their money if they accepted the authority of the Russian state, kept employing Russians and paying Russian taxes. But he openly confronted those who refused (Berezovsky, Khodorovsky etc). Furthermore, Putin lets Israel bomb Syria under his protection to abandon. Finally, Putin is known in Russia as a great supporter of Jews and Israel, almost a good friend of Nutty Yahoo.

Therefore, it appears to me that the Putin's principal strategy is to appeal to the honest Jewish majority to restrain the criminal Jewish minority (including the criminally insane), to divide them instead of confronting them all as a group, which is what the anti-Semitic Europeans have traditionally been doing. His judo-technique is in using Jewish power to restrain the Jews. I still do not know if his strategy will succeed in the long run, but it certainly is an interesting new approach (unless I do not know history enough) to an ancient problem. It is almost funny how so many US people think that the problem with the nefarious Jewish money power started with US, if they are even aware of it.

Cal , July 16, 2017 at 5:41 am

" His judo-technique is in using Jewish power to restrain the Jews. "

The Jews have no power without their uber Jew money men, most of whom are ardent Zionist.
And because they get some benefits from the lobbying heft of the Zionist control of congress they arent going to go against them.

Abe , July 15, 2017 at 5:11 pm

Bill Browder with American-Israeli interviewer Natasha Mozgovaya, TV host for Voice of America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbgNeQ_xINM

In this 2015 tirade, Browder declared "Someone has to punch Putin in the nose" and urged "supplying arms to the Ukrainians and putting troops, NATO troops, in all of the surrounding countries".

The choice of Mozgovaya as interviewer was significant to promote Browder with the Russian Jewish community abroad.

Born in the Soviet Union in 1979, Mozgovaya immigrated to Israel with her family in 1990. She became a correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronoth in 2000. Although working most of the time in Hebrew, her reports in Russian appeared in various publications in Russia.

Mozgovaya covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, including interviews with President Victor Yushenko and his partner-rival Yulia Timoshenko, as well as the Russian Mafia and Russian oligarchs. During the presidency of Vladimir Putin, Mozgovaya gave one of the last interviews with the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. She interviewed Garry Kasparov, Edward Limonov, Boris Berezovsky, Chechen exiles such as Ahmed Zakaev, and the widow of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.

In 2008, Mozgovaya left Yedioth Ahronoth to become the Washington Bureau Chief for Haaretz newspaper in Washington, D.C.. She was a frequent lecturer on Israel and Middle Eastern affairs at U.S. think-tanks. In 2013, Mozgovaya started working at the Voice of America.

HIDE BEHIND , July 13, 2017 at 7:43 pm

Gramps was decended from an old Irish New England Yankee lineage and in my youth he always dragged me along when the town meetings were held, so my ideas of American DEmocracy stem from that background, one of open participation.
The local newspapers had more social chit chat than political news of international or for that mstter State or Federal shenanigansbut everu member in that far flung settled communit read them from front to back; ss a child I got to read the funny and sports pages until Gramps got finidhed reading the "News Section, always the news first yhen the lesser BS when time allowed,this habit instilled in me the sence of
priority.
Aftrr I had read his dection of paper he would talk with me,even being a yonker, in a serious but opinionated manner, of the Editorial section which had local commentary letterd to the editor as large as somtimes too pages.
I wonder today at which section of papersf at all, is read by american public, and at how manyadults discuss importsn news worthy tppics with their children.
At advent of TV we still had trustworthy journalist to finally be seen after years of but reading their columns or listening on radios,almost tottaly all males but men of honesty and character, and worthy of trust.
They wrre a part of all social stratas, had lived real lives and yes most eere well educated but not the elitist thinking jrrks who are no more than parrots repeating whatevrr a teleprompter or bias of their employers say to write.
Wrll back to Gramps and hid home spun wisdom: He alwsys ,and shoeed by example at those old and somrtimes boistrous town Halls, that first you askef a question, thought about the answer, and then questioned the answer.
This made the one being question responsible for the words he spoke.
So those who have doubts by a presumed independent journalist, damn right they should question his motives, which in reality begin to answer our unspoken questions we can no longer ask those boobs for bombs and political sychophants and their paymasters of popular media outlets.
As one who likes effeciency in prodution one monitors data to spot trends and sny aberations bring questions so yes I note this journalist deviation from the norms as well.
I can only question the why, by looking at data from surrounding trends in order to later be able to question his answers.

backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 2:07 am

Hide Behind – sounds like you had a smart grandpa, and someone who cared enough about you to talk things over with you (even though he was opinionated). I try to talk things over with my kids, sometimes too much. They're known on occasion to say, "Okay, enough. We're full." I wait a few days, and then fill them up some more! Ha.

Joe Tedesky , July 13, 2017 at 10:53 pm

Here's a thought; will letting go of Trump Jr's infraction cancel out a guilty verdict of Hillary Clinton's transgressions?

I keep hearing Hillary references while people defend Donald Trump Jr over his meeting with Russian Natalia Veselnitskaya. My thinking started over how I keep hearing pundits speak to Trump Jr's 'intent'. Didn't Comey find Hillary impossible to prosecute due to her lack of 'intent'? Actually I always thought that to be prosecuted under espionage charges, the law didn't need to prove intent, but then again we are talking about Hillary here.

The more I keep hearing Trump defenders make mention of Hillary's deliberate mistakes, and the more I keep hearing Democrates point to Donald Jr's opportunistic failures, the more similarity I see between the two rivals, and the more I see an agreed upon truce ending up in a tie. Remember we live in a one party system with two wings.

Am I going down the wrong road here, or could forgiving Trump Jr allow Hillary to get a free get out of jail card?

F. G. Sanford , July 14, 2017 at 12:42 am

I've been saying all along, our government is just a big can of worms, and neither side can expose the other without opening it. But insiders on both sides are flashing their can openers like it's a game of chicken. My guess is, everybody is gonna get a free pass. I read somewhere that Preet Bharara had the goods on a whole bunch of bankers, but he sat on it clear up to the election. Then, he got fired. So much for draining the swamp. If they prosecute Hillary, it looks like a grudge match. If they prosecute Junior, it looks like revenge. If they prosecute Lynch, it looks like racism. When you deal with a government this corrupt, everybody looks innocent by comparison. I'm still betting nobody goes to jail, as long as the "deep state" thinks they have Trump under control.

Joe Tedesky , July 14, 2017 at 1:29 am

It's like we are sitting on the top of a hill looking down at a bunch of little armies attacking each other, or something.

I'm really screwy, I have contemplated to if Petraues dropped a dime on himself for having a extra martial affair, just to get out of the Benghazi mess. Just thought I'd tell you that for full disclosure.

When it comes to Hillary, does anyone remember how in the beginning of her email investigation she pointed to Colin Powell setting precedent to use a private computer? That little snitch Hillary is always the one when caught to start pointing the finger .she would never have lasted in the Mafia, but she's smart enough to know what works best in Washington DC.

I'm just starting to see the magic; get the goods on Trump Jr then make a deal with the new FBI director.

Okay go ahead and laugh, but before you do pass the popcorn, and let's see how this all plays out.

Believe half of what you hear, and nothing of what you see.

Joe

Lisa , July 14, 2017 at 4:22 am

"Believe half of what you hear, and nothing of what you see."

Joe, where does this quote originate? Or is it a paraphrase?
I once had an American lecturer (political science) at the university, and he stressed the idea that we should not believe anything we read or hear and only half of what we see. This was l-o-o-ng ago, in the 60's.

Joe Tedesky , July 14, 2017 at 10:59 am

The first time I ever heard that line, 'believe nothing of what you see', was a friend of mine said it after we watched Roberto Clemente throw a third base runner out going towards home plate, as Robert threw the ball without a bounce to the catcher who was standing up, from the deep right field corner of the field .oh those were the days.

Gregory Herr , July 14, 2017 at 9:12 pm

JT,
Clemente had an unbelievable arm! The consummate baseball player I have family in western PA, an uncle your age in fact who remembers Clemente well. Roberto also happened to be a great human being.

Joe Tedesky , July 14, 2017 at 9:56 pm

I got loss at Forbes Field. I was seven years old, it was 1957. I got separated from my older cousin, we got in for 50 cents to sit in the left field bleachers. Like I said I loss my older cousin so I walked, and walked, and just about the time I wanted my mum the most I saw daylight. I followed the daylight out of the big garage door, and I was standing within a foot of this long white foul line. All of a sudden this Black guy started yelling at me in somekind of broken English to, 'get off the field, get out of here'. Then I felt a field ushers hand grab my shoulder, and as I turned I saw my cousin standing on the fan side of the right field side of the field. The usher picked me up and threw me over to my cousin, with a warning for him to keep his eye on me. That Black baseball player was a young rookie who was recently just drafted from the then Brooklyn Dodgers .#21 Roberto Clemente.

Gregory Herr , July 14, 2017 at 10:12 pm

You were a charmed boy and now you are a charmed man. Great story life is a Field of Dreams sometimes.

Zachary Smith , July 15, 2017 at 9:00 pm

Believe half of what you hear, and nothing of what you see.

My introduction to this had the wording the other way around:

"Don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see."

This was because the workplace was saturated with rumors, and unfortunately there was a practice of management and union representatives "play-acting" for their audience. So what you "saw" was as likely as not a little theatrical production with no real meaning whatever. The two fellows shouting at each other might well be laughing about it over a cup of coffee an hour later.

backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 2:01 am

Sanford – "But insiders on both sides are flashing their can openers " That's funny writing.

Gregory Herr , July 14, 2017 at 10:20 pm

yessir, love it

Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 2:41 am

Absolutely, one of the best political metaphors ever (unfortunately works in English language only).

Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 6:19 pm

BTW, they are flashing at each other not only can openers then also jail cells and grassy knolls these days. But the can openers would still be most scary.

Abe , July 14, 2017 at 2:13 am

Israeli banks have helped launder money for Russian oligarchs, while large-scale fraudulent industries, like binary options, have been allowed to flourish here.

A May 2009 diplomatic cable by the US ambassador to Israel warned that "many Russian oligarchs of Jewish origin and Jewish members of organized crime groups have received Israeli citizenship, or at least maintain residences in the country."

The United States estimated at the time that Russian crime groups had "laundered as much as $10 billion through Israeli holdings."

In 2009, then Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara charged 17 managers and employees of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims for defrauding Germany 42.5 million dollars by creating thousands of false benefit applications for people who had not suffered in the Holocaust.

The scam operated by creating phony applications with false birth dates and invented histories of persecution to process compensation claims. In some cases the recipients were born after World War II and at least one person was not even Jewish.

Among those charged was Semyon Domnitser, a former director of the conference. Many of the applicants were recruited from Brooklyn's Russian community. All those charged hail from Brooklyn.

When a phony applicant got a check, the scammers were given a cut, Bharara said. The fraud which has been going on for 16 years was related to the 400 million dollars which Germany pays out each year to Holocaust survivors.

Later, in November 2015, Bharara's office charged three Israeli men in a 23-count indictment that alleged that they ran a extensive computer hacking and fraud scheme that targeted JPMorgan Chase, The Wall Street Journal, and ten other companies.

According to prosecutors, the Israeli's operation generated "hundreds of millions of dollars of illegal profit" and exposed the personal information of more than 100 million people.

Despite his service as a useful idiot propagating the Magnitsky Myth, Bharara discovered that for Russian Jewish oligarchs, criminals and scam artists, the motto is "Nikogda ne zabyt'!" Perhaps more recognizable by the German phrase: "Niemals vergessen!"

backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 3:00 am

Abe – wow, what a story. I guess it's lucrative to "never forget"! Bandits.

Cal , July 14, 2017 at 2:14 pm

https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/Abstract.aspx?id=6180

National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS)
NCJRS Abstract
The document referenced below is part of the NCJRS Library collection. To conduct further searches of the collection, visit the NCJRS Abstracts Database. See the Obtain Documents page for direction on how to access resources online, via mail, through interlibrary loans, or in a local library.

NCJ Number: NCJ 006180
Title: CRIMINALITY AMONG JEWS – AN OVERVIEW

United States of America
Journal: ISSUES IN CRIMINOLOGY Volume:6 Issue:2 Dated:(SUMMER 1971) Pages:1-39
Date Published: 1971
Page Count: 15
.
Abstract: THE CONCLUSION OF MOST STUDIES IS THAT JEWS HAVE A LOW CRIME RATE. IT IS LOWER THAN THAT OF NON-JEWS TAKEN AS A WHOLE, LOWER THAN THAT OF OTHER RELIGIOUS GROUPS,

HOWEVER, THE JEWISH CRIME RATE TENDS TO BE HIGHER THAN THAT OF NONJEWS AND OTHER RELIGIOUS GROUPS FOR WHITE-COLLAR OFFENSES,

THAT IS, COMMERCIAL OR COMMERCIALLY RELATED CRIMES, SUCH AS FRAUD, FRAUDULENT BANKRUPTCY, AND EMBEZZLEMENT.

Index Term(s): Behavioral and Social Sciences ; Adult offenders ; Minorities ; Behavioral science research ; Offender classification

Country: United States of America
Language: English

backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 4:21 pm

Cal – that does not surprise me at all. Of course they would be where the money is, and once you have money, you get nothing but the best defense. "I've got time and money on my side. Go ahead and take me to court. I'll string this thing along and it'll cost you a fortune. So let's deal. I'm good with a fine."

A rap on the knuckles, a fine, and no court case, no discovery of the truth that the people can see. Of course they'd be there. That IS the only place to be if you want to be a true criminal.

Skip Scott , July 15, 2017 at 1:57 pm

Thanks again Abe, you are a wealth of information. I think you have to allow for anyone to make a mistake, and Bharara has done a lot of good.

BannanaBoat , July 14, 2017 at 10:45 am

USA justice for Oilygarchs; Ignore capital crimes and mass destruction ; concentrate on entertaining shenanigans.

Cal , July 13, 2017 at 11:39 pm

If Trump wants to survive he better let go of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Lets start here:

Trump's personal attorneys are reportedly fed up with Jared Kushner
http://www.businessinsider.com/jared-kushner-trump-lawyers-donald-jr-emails-2017-7

Longtime Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz and his team have directed their grievance at Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and senior White House adviser.
Citing a person familiar with Trump's legal team, The Times said Kasowitz has bristled at Kushner's "whispering in the president's ear" about stories on the Russia investigation without telling Kasowitz and his team.
The Times' source said the attorneys, who were hired as private counsel to Trump in light of the Russia investigation, view Kushner "as an obstacle and a freelancer" motivated to protect himself over over Trump. The lawyers reportedly told colleagues the work environment among Trump's inner circle was untenable, The Times said, suggesting Kasowitz could resign

Second
Who thinks Jared works for Trump? I don't.
Jared works for his father Charles Kushner, the former jail bird who hired prostitutes to blackmail his brother in law into not testifying against him. Jared spent every weekend his father was in prison visiting him.,,they are inseparable.

Third
So what is Jared doing in his WH position to help his father and his failing RE empire?

Trying to get loans from China, Russia, Qatar,Qatar

And why Is Robert Mueller Probing Jared Kushner's Finances?

Because of this no doubt:..seeking a loan for the Kushners from a Russian bank.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/03/sergei-gorkov-russian-banker-jared-kushner

The White House and the bank have offered differing accounts of the Kushner-Gorkov sit-down. While the White House said Kushner met Gorkov and other foreign representatives as a transition official to "help advance the president's foreign policy goals." Vnesheconombank, also known as VEB, said it was part of talks with business leaders about the bank's development strategy.
It said Kushner was representing Kushner companies, his family real estate empire.

Jared Kushner 'tried and failed to get a $500m loan from Qatar before
http://www.independent.co.uk › News › World › Americas › US politics
2 days ago –
Jared Kushner tried and failed to secure a $500m loan from one of Qatar's richest businessmen, before pushing his father-in-law to toe a hard line with the country, it has been alleged. This intersection between Mr Kushner's real estate dealings and his father-in-law's

The Kushners are about to lose their shirts..unless one of those foreign country's banks gives them the money.

At Kushners' Flagship Building, Mounting Debt and a Foundered Deal
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/nyregion/kushner-companies-666-fifth-avenue.html
The Fifth Avenue skyscraper was supposed to be the Kushner Companies' flagship in the heart of Manhattan -- a record-setting $1.8 billion souvenir proclaiming that the New Jersey developers Charles Kushner and his son Jared were playing in the big leagues.
And while it has been a visible symbol of their status, it has also it has also been a financial headache almost from the start. On Wednesday, the Kushners announced that talks had broken off with a Chinese financial conglomerate for a deal worth billions to redevelop the 41-story tower, at 666 Fifth Avenue, into a flashy 80-story ultraluxury skyscraper comprising a chic retail mall, a hotel and high-priced condominiums"

Get these cockroaches out of the WH please.,,,Jared and his sister are running around the world trying to get money in exchange for giving them something from the Trump WH.

BannanaBoat , July 14, 2017 at 10:52 am

The NYC skyline displays 666 in really really really HUGE !!!! numbers. Perhaps the USA government as Cheney announced has gone to the very very very DARK side.

Cal , July 14, 2017 at 2:16 pm

Yea 666 probably isn't a coincidence .lol

Chris Kinder , July 14, 2017 at 12:15 am

What I think most comments overlook here is the following: the US is the primary imperialist aggressor in the world today, and Russia, though it is an imperialist competitor, is much weaker and is generally losing ground. Early on, the US promised that NATO would not be extended into Eastern Europe, but now look at what's happened: not only does the US have NATO allies and and missiles in Eastern Europe, but it also engineered a coup against a pro-Russian regime in Ukraine, and is now trying to drive Russia out of Eastern Ukraine, as in Crimea and the Donbass and other areas of Eastern Ukraine, which are basically Russian going back more than a century. Putin is pretty mild compered to the US' aggressive stance. That's number one.

Number two is that the current anti-Russian hysteria in the US is all about maintaining the same war-mongering stance against Russia that existed in the cold war, and also about washing clean the Democratic Party leadership's crimes in the last election. Did the Russians hack the election? Maybe they tried, but the point is that what was exposed–the emails etc–were true information! They show that the DNC worked to deprive Bernie Sanders of the nomination, and hide crimes of the Clintons'! These exposures, not any Russian connection to the exposures, are what really lost Hillary the election.

So, what is going on here? The Democrats are trying to hide their many transgressions behind an anti-Russian scare, why? Because it is working, and because it fits in with US imperialist anti-Russian aims which span the entire post-war period, and continue today. And because it might help get Trump impeached. I would not mind that result one bit, but the Democrats are no alternative: that has been shown to be true over and over again.

This is all part of the US attempt to be the dominant imperialist power in the world–something which it has pursued since the end of the last world war, and something which both Democrats and Republicans–ie, the US ruling class behind them–are committed to. Revolutionaries say: the main enemy is at home, and that is what I say now. That is no endorsement of Russian imperialism, but a rejection of all imperialism and the capitalist exploitative system that gives rise to it.

Thanks for your attention -- Chris Kinder

backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 1:58 am

Chris – good post. Thanks.

mike k , July 14, 2017 at 11:35 am

Chris, I think most commenters here are aware of everything you summarized above, but we just don't put all that in each individual post.

Paranam Kid , July 14, 2017 at 6:40 am

It is ironic that Browder on his website describes himself as running a battle against corporate corruption in Russia, and there is a quote by Walter Isaacson: "Bill Browder is an amazing moral crusader". http://www.billbrowder.com/bio

HIDE BEHIND , July 14, 2017 at 10:02 am

One cannot talk of Russian monry laundering in US without exposing the Jewish Israeli and many AIPAC connections.
I studied not so much the Jewish Orthodoxy but mainly the evolution of noth their outlook upon G.. but also how those who do not believe in a G.. and still keep their cultural cohesiveness
The largest money laundering group in US is
both Jewish and Israeli, and while helping those of their cultural similarities, their ecpertise goes. Very deep in Eastern U.S. politics and especially strong in all commercial real estate, funding, setting up bribes to permitting officials,contractors and owners of construvtion firms.
Financials some quite large are within this Jew/Israel connections, as all they who offshore need those proper connections to do so. take bribes need the funding cleaned and
flow out through very large tax free Jewish Charity Orgd, the largest ones are those of Orthodox.
GOV Christie years ago headed the largest sting operation to try and uproot what at that time he believed was just statewide tax fraud and laundering operations, many odd cash flows into political party hacks running for evrry gov position electefd or appointed.
Catchng a member of one of the most influential Orthofox familys mrmbers, that member rolled on many many indivifuals of his own culture.
It was only when Vhristies investigative team began turning up far larger cases of laundering and political donations thst msinly centered in NY Stste and City, fid he then find out howuch power this grouping had.
Soon darn near every AIPAC aided elected politico from city state and rspecially Congress was warning him to end investigation.
Which he did.
His reward was for his fat ass to be funded for a run towards US Presidency, without any visibly open opposition by that cultural grouping.
No it is not odd for Jewery to charge goyim usury or to aid in political schemes that advance their groups aims.
One thing to remenber by the Bible thumpers who delay any talks of Israel ; Christian Zionist, is that to be of their culture one does not have to believe in G.
There are a few excellent books written about early days Jewish immigrant Pre Irish andblre Sicilian mafias.
The Jewish one remainst to this day but are as well orgNized as the untold history of what is known as "The Southern mafia.

backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 1:55 pm

Hide Behind – fascinating! I guess if we ever knew half of what goes on behind the scenes, we'd be shocked. We only ever know things like this exist when people like you enlighten us, or when there's a blockbuster movie about it. Thanks.

Deborah Andrew , July 14, 2017 at 10:03 am

With great respect and appreciation for your writing about the current unsubstantiated conversations/writing about 'Russia-gate' I would ask if 'the other side of a story' is really what we want or, is it that we want all the facts. Analysis and opinions, that include the facts, may differ. However, it is the readers who will evaluate the varied analysis and opinions when they include all the facts known. I raise this question, as it seems to me that we have a binary approach to our thinking and decision making. Something is either good or bad, this or that. Sides are taken. Labels are added (such as conservative and progressive). Would we not be wiser and would our decision making not be wiser if it were based on a set of principles? My own preference: the precautionary principle and the principle of do no harm. I am suggesting that we abandon the phrase and notion of the 'other side of the story' and replace it with: based on the facts now known, or, based on all the facts revealed to date or, until more facts are revealed it appears

BannanaBoat , July 14, 2017 at 11:00 am

HEAR -- HEAR -- Excellent --

Zachary Smith , July 14, 2017 at 11:04 am

I would ask if 'the other side of a story' is really what we want or, is it that we want all the facts.

Replying to a question with another question isn't really good form, but given my knowledge level of this case I can see no alternative.

How do you propose to determine the "facts" when virtually none of the characters involved in the affair appear trustworthy? Also, there is a lot of evidence (displayed by Mr. Parry) that another set of "characters" we call the Mainstream Media are extremely biased and one-sided with their coverage of the story.

Again – Where am I going to find those "facts" you speak of?

Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 2:52 am

Spot on.

backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 2:02 pm

Deborah Andrew – good comment, but the problem is that we never seem to get "the other side of the story" from the MSM. You are right in pointing out that "the other side of the story" probably isn't ALL there is (as nothing is completely black and white), but at least it's something. The only way we can ever get to the truth is to put the facts together and question them, but how are you going to do that when the facts are kept away from us?

It can be very frustrating, can't it, Deborah? Cheers.

Cal , July 14, 2017 at 8:52 pm

Nice comment.

None of us can know the exact truth of anything we ourselves haven't seen or been involved in. The best we can do is try to find trusted sources, be objective, analytical and compare different stories and known the backgrounds and possible agendas of the people involved in a issue or story.

We can use some clues to help us cull thru what we hear and read.

Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation

Note: The first rule and last five (or six, depending on situation) rules are generally not directly within the ability of the traditional disinfo artist to apply. These rules are generally used more directly by those at the leadership, key players, or planning level of the criminal conspiracy or conspiracy to cover up.

1. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Regardless of what you know, don't discuss it -- especially if you are a public figure, news anchor, etc. If it's not reported, it didn't happen, and you never have to deal with the issues.

2. Become incredulous and indignant. Avoid discussing key issues and instead focus on side issues which can be used show the topic as being critical of some otherwise sacrosanct group or theme. This is also known as the 'How dare you!' gambit.

3. Create rumor mongers. Avoid discussing issues by describing all charges, regardless of venue or evidence, as mere rumors and wild accusations. Other derogatory terms mutually exclusive of truth may work as well. This method which works especially well with a silent press, because the only way the public can learn of the facts are through such 'arguable rumors'. If you can associate the material with the Internet, use this fact to certify it a 'wild rumor' from a 'bunch of kids on the Internet' which can have no basis in fact.

4. Use a straw man. Find or create a seeming element of your opponent's argument which you can easily knock down to make yourself look good and the opponent to look bad. Either make up an issue you may safely imply exists based on your interpretation of the opponent/opponent arguments/situation, or select the weakest aspect of the weakest charges. Amplify their significance and destroy them in a way which appears to debunk all the charges, real and fabricated alike, while actually avoiding discussion of the real issues.

5. Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule. This is also known as the primary 'attack the messenger' ploy, though other methods qualify as variants of that approach. Associate opponents with unpopular titles such as 'kooks', 'right-wing', 'liberal', 'left-wing', 'terrorists', 'conspiracy buffs', 'radicals', 'militia', 'racists', 'religious fanatics', 'sexual deviates', and so forth. This makes others shrink from support out of fear of gaining the same label, and you avoid dealing with issues.

6. Hit and Run. In any public forum, make a brief attack of your opponent or the opponent position and then scamper off before an answer can be fielded, or simply ignore any answer. This works extremely well in Internet and letters-to-the-editor environments where a steady stream of new identities can be called upon without having to explain criticism, reasoning -- simply make an accusation or other attack, never discussing issues, and never answering any subsequent response, for that would dignify the opponent's viewpoint.

7. Question motives. Twist or amplify any fact which could be taken to imply that the opponent operates out of a hidden personal agenda or other bias. This avoids discussing issues and forces the accuser on the defensive.

8. Invoke authority. Claim for yourself or associate yourself with authority and present your argument with enough 'jargon' and 'minutia' to illustrate you are 'one who knows', and simply say it isn't so without discussing issues or demonstrating concretely why or citing sources.

9. Play Dumb. No matter what evidence or logical argument is offered, avoid discussing issues except with denials they have any credibility, make any sense, provide any proof, contain or make a point, have logic, or support a conclusion. Mix well for maximum effect.

10. Associate opponent charges with old news. A derivative of the straw man -- usually, in any large-scale matter of high visibility, someone will make charges early on which can be or were already easily dealt with – a kind of investment for the future should the matter not be so easily contained.) Where it can be foreseen, have your own side raise a straw man issue and have it dealt with early on as part of the initial contingency plans. Subsequent charges, regardless of validity or new ground uncovered, can usually then be associated with the original charge and dismissed as simply being a rehash without need to address current issues -- so much the better where the opponent is or was involved with the original source.

11. Establish and rely upon fall-back positions. Using a minor matter or element of the facts, take the 'high road' and 'confess' with candor that some innocent mistake, in hindsight, was made -- but that opponents have seized on the opportunity to blow it all out of proportion and imply greater criminalities which, 'just isn't so.' Others can reinforce this on your behalf, later, and even publicly 'call for an end to the nonsense' because you have already 'done the right thing.' Done properly, this can garner sympathy and respect for 'coming clean' and 'owning up' to your mistakes without addressing more serious issues.

12. Enigmas have no solution. Drawing upon the overall umbrella of events surrounding the crime and the multitude of players and events, paint the entire affair as too complex to solve. This causes those otherwise following the matter to begin to lose interest more quickly without having to address the actual issues.

13. Alice in Wonderland Logic. Avoid discussion of the issues by reasoning backwards or with an apparent deductive logic which forbears any actual material fact.

14. Demand complete solutions. Avoid the issues by requiring opponents to solve the crime at hand completely, a ploy which works best with issues qualifying for rule 10.

15. Fit the facts to alternate conclusions. This requires creative thinking unless the crime was planned with contingency conclusions in place.

16. Vanish evidence and witnesses. If it does not exist, it is not fact, and you won't have to address the issue.

17. Change the subject. Usually in connection with one of the other ploys listed here, find a way to side-track the discussion with abrasive or controversial comments in hopes of turning attention to a new, more manageable topic. This works especially well with companions who can 'argue' with you over the new topic and polarize the discussion arena in order to avoid discussing more key issues.

18. Emotionalize, Antagonize, and Goad Opponents. If you can't do anything else, chide and taunt your opponents and draw them into emotional responses which will tend to make them look foolish and overly motivated, and generally render their material somewhat less coherent. Not only will you avoid discussing the issues in the first instance, but even if their emotional response addresses the issue, you can further avoid the issues by then focusing on how 'sensitive they are to criticism.'

19. Ignore proof presented, demand impossible proofs. This is perhaps a variant of the 'play dumb' rule. Regardless of what material may be presented by an opponent in public forums, claim the material irrelevant and demand proof that is impossible for the opponent to come by (it may exist, but not be at his disposal, or it may be something which is known to be safely destroyed or withheld, such as a murder weapon.) In order to completely avoid discussing issues, it may be required that you to categorically deny and be critical of media or books as valid sources, deny that witnesses are acceptable, or even deny that statements made by government or other authorities have any meaning or relevance.

20. False evidence. Whenever possible, introduce new facts or clues designed and manufactured to conflict with opponent presentations -- as useful tools to neutralize sensitive issues or impede resolution. This works best when the crime was designed with contingencies for the purpose, and the facts cannot be easily separated from the fabrications.

21. Call a Grand Jury, Special Prosecutor, or other empowered investigative body. Subvert the (process) to your benefit and effectively neutralize all sensitive issues without open discussion. Once convened, the evidence and testimony are required to be secret when properly handled. For instance, if you own the prosecuting attorney, it can insure a Grand Jury hears no useful evidence and that the evidence is sealed and unavailable to subsequent investigators. Once a favorable verdict is achieved, the matter can be considered officially closed. Usually, this technique is applied to find the guilty innocent, but it can also be used to obtain charges when seeking to frame a victim.

22. Manufacture a new truth. Create your own expert(s), group(s), author(s), leader(s) or influence existing ones willing to forge new ground via scientific, investigative, or social research or testimony which concludes favorably. In this way, if you must actually address issues, you can do so authoritatively.

23. Create bigger distractions. If the above does not seem to be working to distract from sensitive issues, or to prevent unwanted media coverage of unstoppable events such as trials, create bigger news stories (or treat them as such) to distract the multitudes.

24. Silence critics. If the above methods do not prevail, consider removing opponents from circulation by some definitive solution so that the need to address issues is removed entirely. This can be by their death, arrest and detention, blackmail or destruction of theircharacter by release of blackmail information, or merely by destroying them financially, emotionally, or severely damaging their health.

25. Vanish. If you are a key holder of secrets or otherwise overly illuminated and you think the heat is getting too hot, to avoid the issues, vacate the kitchen. .

Note: There are other ways to attack truth, but these listed are the most common, and others are likely derivatives of these. In the end, you can usually spot the professional disinfo players by one or more of seven (now 8) distinct traits:

Eight Traits of the Disinformationalist
by H. Michael Sweeney
copyright (c) 1997, 2000 All rights reserved

(Revised April 2000 – formerly SEVEN Traits)

1) Avoidance. They never actually discuss issues head-on or provide constructive input, generally avoiding citation of references or credentials. Rather, they merely imply this, that, and the other. Virtually everything about their presentation implies their authority and expert knowledge in the matter without any further justification for credibility.

2) Selectivity. They tend to pick and choose opponents carefully, either applying the hit-and-run approach against mere commentators supportive of opponents, or focusing heavier attacks on key opponents who are known to directly address issues. .

3) Coincidental. They tend to surface suddenly and somewhat coincidentally with a new controversial topic with no clear prior record of participation in general discussions in the particular public arena involved. They likewise tend to vanish once the topic is no longer of general concern. They were likely directed or elected to be there for a reason, and vanish with the reason.

4) Teamwork. They tend to operate in self-congratulatory and complementary packs or teams. Of course, this can happen naturally in any public forum, but there will likely be an ongoing pattern of frequent exchanges of this sort where professionals are involved. Sometimes one of the players will infiltrate the opponent camp to become a source for straw man or other tactics designed to dilute opponent presentation strength.

5) Anti-conspiratorial. They almost always have disdain for 'conspiracy theorists' and, usually, for those who in any way believe JFK was not killed by LHO. Ask yourself why, if they hold such disdain for conspiracy theorists, do they focus on defending a single topic discussed in a NG focusing on conspiracies? One might think they would either be trying to make fools of everyone on every topic, or simply ignore the group they hold in such disdain.Or, one might more rightly conclude they have an ulterior motive for their actions in going out of their way to focus as they do.

6) Artificial Emotions. An odd kind of 'artificial' emotionalism and an unusually thick skin -- an ability to persevere and persist even in the face of overwhelming criticism and unacceptance. You might have outright rage and indignation one moment, ho-hum the next, and more anger later -- an emotional yo-yo. With respect to being thick-skinned, no amount of criticism will deter them from doing their job, and they will generally continue their old disinfo patterns without any adjustments to criticisms of how obvious it is that they play that game -- where a more rational individual who truly cares what others think might seek to improve their communications style, substance, and so forth, or simply give up.

7) Inconsistent. There is also a tendency to make mistakes which betray their true self/motives. This may stem from not really knowing their topic, or it may be somewhat 'freudian', so to speak, in that perhaps they really root for the side of truth deep within.

8) BONUS TRAIT: Time Constant. Wth respect to News Groups, is the response time factor. There are three ways this can be seen to work, especially when the government or other empowered player is involved in a cover up operation:
1) ANY NG posting by a targeted proponent for truth can result in an IMMEDIATE response. The government and other empowered players can afford to pay people to sit there and watch for an opportunity to do some damage. SINCE DISINFO IN A NG ONLY WORKS IF THE READER SEES IT – FAST RESPONSE IS CALLED FOR, or the visitor may be swayed towards truth.
2) When dealing in more direct ways with a disinformationalist, such as email, DELAY IS CALLED FOR – there will usually be a minimum of a 48-72 hour delay. This allows a sit-down team discussion on response strategy for best effect, and even enough time to 'get permission' or instruction from a formal chain of command.
3) In the NG example 1) above, it will often ALSO be seen that bigger guns are drawn and fired after the same 48-72 hours delay – the team approach in play. This is especially true when the targeted truth seeker or their comments are considered more important with respect to potential to reveal truth. Thus, a serious truth sayer will be attacked twice for the same sin.

Michael Kenny , July 14, 2017 at 11:22 am

I don't really see Mr Parry's point. The banning of Nekrasov's film isn't proof of the accuracy of its contents and even less does it prove that anything that runs counter to Nekrasov's argument is false. Nor does proving that a mainstream meida story is false prove that an internet story saying the opposite is true. "A calls B a liar. B proves that A is a liar. That proves that B is truthful." Not very logical! What seems to be established is that the lawyer in question represents a Russian-owned company, a money-laundering prosecution against which was settled last May on the basis of what the company called a "surprise" offer from prosecutors that was "too good to refuse". This "Russian government attorney" (dixit Goldstone) had information concerning illegal campaign contributions to the Democratic National Committee. Trump Jr jumped at it and it makes no difference whether he was tricked or even whether he actually got anything, his intent was clear. In addition DNC "dirt" did indeed appear on the internet via Wikileaks, just as "dirt" appeared in the French election. MacronLeaks proves Russiagate and "Juniorgate" confirms MacronLeaks. The question now is did Trump, as president, intervene to bring about this "too good to refuse" offer? That question cannot just be written off with the "no evidence" argument.

Skip Scott , July 14, 2017 at 1:40 pm

God, you are persistent if nothing else. Keep repeating the same lie until it is taken as true, just like the MSM. You say that Russia-gate, Macron leaks, etc can't be written off with the "no evidence" argument (how is that logical?), and then you trash a film you haven't even seen because it doesn't fit your narrative. Maybe some evidence is provided in the film, did you consider that possibility? That fact that Nekrasov started out to make a pro Broder film, and then switched sides, leads me to believe he found some disturbing evidence. And if you look into Nekrasov you will find that he is no fan of Putin, so one has to wonder what his motive is if he is lying.

I am wondering if you ever look back at previous posts, because you never reply to a rebuttal. If you did, you would see that you are almost universally seen by the commenters here as a troll. If you are being paid, I suppose it might not matter much to you. However, your employer should look for someone with more intelligent arguments. He is wasting his money on you.

Abe , July 14, 2017 at 9:27 pm

Propaganda trolls attempt to trash the information space by dismissing, distracting, diverting, denying, deceiving and distorting the facts.

The trolls aim at confusing rather than convincing the audience.

The tag team troll performance of "Michael Kenny" and "David" is accompanied by loud declarations that they have "logic" on their side and "evidence" somewhere. Then they shriek that they're being "censored".

Propaganda trolls target the comments section of independent investigative journalism sites like Consortium News, typically showing up when articles discuss the West's "regime change" wars and deception operations.

Pro-Israel Hasbara propaganda trolls also strive to discredit websites, articles, and videos critical of Israel and Zionism. Hasbara smear tactics have intensified due to increasing Israeli threats of military aggression, Israeli collusion with the United States in "regime change" projects from the Middle East to Eastern Europe, and Israeli links to international organized crime and terrorism in Syria.

Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 3:04 am

Gee Abe, you are a magician (and I thought that you only quote excellent articles). Short and sharp.

Abe , July 15, 2017 at 4:15 pm

When they have a hard time selling that they're being "censored" (after more than a dozen comments), trolls complain that they're being "dismissed" and "invalidated" by "hostile voices".

exiled off mainstreet , July 14, 2017 at 1:54 pm

Aaron Kesel, in Activistpost documents the links between Veselnitskaya and Fusion GPS, the company engaged by the Clintons to prepare the defamatory Christopher Steele Dossier against Trump later used by Comey to help gin up the Russian influence conspiracy theory. In the article, it is true the GPS connection may have involved her lobbying efforts to overturn the Magnitsky law, not the dossier, but it is also interesting that she is on record as anti-Trump and having associations with Clinton democrats. Though it may have been part of the beginnings of a conspiracy, the conspiracy may have developed later and the meeting became something they related back to to bolster this fraudulent dangerous initiative.

mike k , July 14, 2017 at 2:01 pm

I think as you say Skip that most on this blog have seen through Michael Kenny's stuff. Nobody's buying it. He's harmless. If he's here on his own dime, if we don't feed him, he will get bored and go away. If he's being payed, he may persist, but so what. Sometimes I check the MSM just to see what the propaganda line is. Kenny is like that; his shallow arguments tell me what we must counter to wake people up.

Skip Scott , July 14, 2017 at 5:51 pm

Yeah mike k, I know you're right. I don't know why I let the guy get under my skin. Perhaps it's because he never responds to a rebuttal.

Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 3:14 am

Then you would have to waste more time rebutting the (equally empty) rebuttal.

The second thing is that many trolls suffer from DID, that is the Dissociative Identity Disorder, aka sock puppetry. There is a bit of similarity in argument between David and Michael and HAWKINS, only one of them rebuts quite often.

Philippe Lemoine , July 14, 2017 at 3:41 pm

Another excellent article! I wrote a very detailed blog post in which I methodically take apart the latest "revelation" about Donald Trump Jr.'s emails. I talk a lot about the Magnitsky Act, which is very relevant to this whole story.

Joe Tedesky , July 14, 2017 at 4:43 pm

I always like reading your articles Philippe, you have a real talent. Maybe read what I wrote above, but I'm sensing this Trump Jr affair will help Hillary more than anything, to give her a reprieve from any further FBI investigations. I mean somehow, I'm sure by Hillary's standards and desires, that this whole crazy investigation thing has to end. So, would it not seem reasonable to believe that by allowing Donald Jr to be taken off the hook, that Hillary likewise will enjoy the taste of forgiveness?

Tell me if you think this Donald Trump Jr scandal could lead to this Joe

PS if so this could be a good next article to write there I go telling the band what to play, but seriously if this Russian conclusion episode goes on much longer, could you not see a grand bargain and a deal being made?

Philippe Lemoine , July 14, 2017 at 5:14 pm

Thanks for the compliment, I'm glad you like the blog. I wasn't under the impression that Clinton was under any particular danger from the Justice Department, but even if she was, she doesn't have the power to stop this Trump/Russia collusion nonsense because it's pushed by a lot of people that have nothing to do with her except for the fact that they would have preferred her to win.

Abe , July 14, 2017 at 6:48 pm

Excellent summary and analysis, Philippe. Key observation:

"as even the New York Times admits, there is no evidence that Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer who met Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort for 20-30 minutes on 9 June 2016, provided any such information during that meeting. Donald Trump Jr. said that, although he asked her about it, she didn't give them anything on Clinton, but talked to him about the Magnitsky Act and Russia's decision to block adoption by American couples in retaliation. Of course, if we just had his word, we'd have no particularly good reason to believe him. But the fact remains that no documents of the sort described in Goldstone's ridiculous email ever surfaced during the campaign, which makes what he is saying about how the meeting went down pretty convincing, at least on this specific point. It should be noted that Donald Trump Jr. has offered to testify under oath about anything related to this meeting. Moreover, he also said during the interview he gave to Sean Hannity that there was no follow-up to this meeting, which is unlikely to be a lie since he must know that, given the hysteria about this meeting, it would come out. He may not be the brightest guy in the world, but surely he or at least the people who advised him before that interview are not that stupid."

Philippe Lemoine , July 14, 2017 at 10:27 pm

Thanks!

exiled off mainstreet , July 16, 2017 at 1:31 pm

Your own necpluribus article was one of the best I've seen summarising the whole controversy, and your exhaustive responses to the pro-deep state critics was edifying. I am now convinced that your view of Veselnitskaya's role in the affair and the nature her connections to the dossier drafting company GPS being based on their unrelated work on the magnitsky law is accurate.

Mike , July 14, 2017 at 9:36 pm

Pretty interesting:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-jr-russia-bill-browder-testify-senate-links-natalia-veselnitskaya-steele-dossier-a7840061.html

Big Tim , July 15, 2017 at 12:31 am

"Bill Browder, born into a notable Jewish family in Chicago, is the grandson of Earl Browder, the former leader of the Communist Party USA,[2] and the son of Eva (Tislowitz) and Felix Browder, a mathematician. He grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and attended the University of Chicago where he studied economics. He received an MBA from Stanford Business School[3] in 1989 where his classmates included Gary Kremen and Rich Kelley. In 1998, Browder gave up his US citizenship and became a British citizen.[4] Prior to setting up Hermitage, Browder worked in the Eastern European practice of the Boston Consulting Group[5] in London and managed the Russian proprietary investments desk at Salomon Brothers.[6]"

Rake , July 15, 2017 at 9:13 am

Successfully keeping a salient argument from being heard is scary, given the social media and alternative media players who are all ripe to uncover a bombshell. Sy Hersh needs to convince Nekrasov to get his documentary to WkiLeaks.

Anna , July 15, 2017 at 10:25 am

"Sy Hersh needs to convince Nekrasov to get his documentary to WkiLeaks."
Agree.

P. Clark , July 15, 2017 at 12:01 pm

When Trump suggested that a Mexican-American judge might be biased because of this ethnicity the media said this was racist. Yet these same outlets like the New York Times are now routinely questioning Russian-American loyalty because of their ethnicity. As usual a ridiculous double standard. Basically the assumption is all Russians are bad. We didn't even have this during the cold war.

Cal , July 15, 2017 at 8:10 pm

Yes indeed P. Clark .that kind or hypocrisy makes my head explode!

MichaelAngeloRaphaelo , July 15, 2017 at 12:17 pm

Enough's Enough
STOP DNC/DEMs
#CryBabyFakeNewsBS

Support Duly ELECTED
@POTUS @realDonaldTrump
#BoycottFakeNewsSponsors
#DrainTheSwamp
#MAGA

Roy G Biv , July 15, 2017 at 12:50 pm

CN article on 911 truthers:

https://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/011511.html

Finnish wonderer , July 15, 2017 at 1:19 pm

Wow, I just learned via this article that in US Nekrasov is labeled as "pro-Kremlin" by WaPo. That's just too funny. He's in a relationship with a Finnish MEP Heidi Hautala, who is very well known for her anti-Russia mentality. Nekrasov is defenetly anti-Kremlin if something. He was supposed to make an anti-Kremlin documentary, but the facts turned out to be different than he thought, but still finished his documentary.

Mark Dankof , July 15, 2017 at 3:21 pm

The lengths to which the Neo Conservative War Cabal will go to destroy freedom of speech and access to alternative news sources underscores that the United States is becoming an Orwellian agitation-propaganda police state equally dedicated to igniting World War III for Netanyahu, the Central Banks, our Wahhabic Petrodollar Partners, and a pipeline consortium or two. The Old American Republic is dead.

Roy G Biv , July 15, 2017 at 4:38 pm

Interesting to note that each and everyone of David's comments were bleached from this page. Looks like he was right about the censorship. Sad.

Abe , July 15, 2017 at 5:41 pm

Note "allegations that are unsupported by facts".

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/01/19/a-reminder-about-comment-rules-2/

David , July 16, 2017 at 3:51 pm

Duly noted Abe. But you should adhere to the first part of the statement that you somehow forgot to include:

From Editor Robert Parry: At Consortiumnews, we welcome substantive comments about our articles, but comments should avoid abusive language toward other commenters or our writers, racial or religious slurs (including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia), and allegations that are unsupported by facts.

Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 6:06 pm

My favorite was David's claim that he contributed to this zine whilst it was publishing articles not to his liking (/sarc). I kindly reminded him that people pay much more money to have publishing the way they like it – for example how much Bezos paid for Washington Post, or Omidyar to establish The Intercept.

Except for such funny component, David's comments were totally substance free and useless. Nothing lost with bleaching.

Roy G Biv , July 16, 2017 at 5:44 am

You're practicing disinformation. He actually said he contributed early on and had problems with the recent course of the CN trajectory. Censorship is cowardly.

Abe , July 16, 2017 at 1:53 pm

Consortium News welcomes substantive comments.

"David" was presenting allegations unsupported by facts and disrupting on-topic discussion.

Violations of CN comment policy are taken down by the moderator. Period. It has nothing to do with "censorship".

Stop practicing disinformation and spin, "Roy G Biv".

David , July 16, 2017 at 3:57 pm

I stopped contributing after the unintellectual dismissal of scientific 911 truthers. And it's easy for you to paint over my comments as they have been scrubbed. There was plenty of useful substance, it just ran against the tide. Sorry you didn't appreciate it the contrary viewpoint or have the curiosity to read the backstory.

Abe , July 16, 2017 at 5:02 pm

The cowardly claim of "censorship".

The typical troll whine is that their "contrary viewpoint" was "dismissed" merely because it "ran against the tide".

No. Your allegations were unsupported by facts. They still are.

Martyrdom is just another troll tactic.

dub , July 15, 2017 at 9:44 pm

torrent for the film?

Roy G Biv , July 16, 2017 at 5:56 am

Here is the pdf of the legal brief about the Magnitsky film submitted by Senator Grassly to Homeland Security Chief. Interesting read and casts doubt on the claims made in the film, refutes several claims actually. Skip past Chuck Grassly's first two page intro to get to the meat of it. If you are serious about a debate on the merits of the case, this is essential reading.

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2017-04-04%20CEG%20to%20DHS%20(Akhmetshin%20Information)%20with%20attachment.pdf

Abe , July 16, 2017 at 1:16 pm

Yes, very interesting read. By all means, examine the brief.

But forget the spin from "Roy G Biv" because the brief actually refutes nothing about Andrei Nekrasov's film.

It simply notes that the Russian government was understandably concerned about "unscrupulous swindler" and "sleazy crook" William Browder.

After your finished reading the brief, try to remember any time when Congress dared to examine a lobbying campaign undertaken on behalf of Israeli (which is to say, predominantly Russian Jewish) interests, the circumstances surrounding a pro-Israel lobbying effort and the potential FARA violations involved. or the background of a Jewish "Russian immigrant".

Note on page 3 of the cover letter the CC to The Honorable Dianne Feinstein, Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Feinstein was born Dianne Emiel Goldman in San Francisco, to Betty (née Rosenburg), a former model, and Leon Goldman, a surgeon. Feinstein's paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Poland. Her maternal grandparents, the Rosenburg family, were from Saint Petersburg, Russia. While they were of German-Jewish ancestry, they practiced the Russian Orthodox faith as was required for Jews residing in Saint Petersburg.

In 1980, Feinstein married Richard C. Blum, an investment banker. In 2003, Feinstein was ranked the fifth-wealthiest senator, with an estimated net worth of US$26 million. By 2005 her net worth had increased to between US$43 million and US$99 million.

Like the rest of Congress, Feinstein knows the "right way" to vote.

David , July 16, 2017 at 1:50 pm

So you're saying because a Jew Senator was CC'd it invalidates the information? Read the first page again. The Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is obligated to CC these submissions to the ranking member of the Committee, Jew heritage or not. Misinformation and disinformation from you Abe, or generously, maybe lazy reading. The italicized unscrupulous swindler and sleazy crook comments were quoting the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after the Washington screening of Nekrasov's film and demonstrating Russia's intentions to discredit Browder. You are practiced at the art of deception. Hopefully readers will simply look for themselves.

Abe , July 16, 2017 at 2:11 pm

Ah, comrade "David". We see you're back muttering about "disinformation" using your "own name".

My statements about Senator Feinstein are entirely supported by facts. You really should look into that.

Also, please note that quotation marks are not italics.

And please note that the Russian Foreign Minister is legally authorized to present the view of the Russian government.

Browder is pretty effective at discrediting himself. He simply has to open his mouth.

I encourage readers to look for themselves, and not simply take the word of one Browder's sockpuppets.

David , July 16, 2017 at 2:55 pm

It won't last papushka. Every post and pended moderated post was scrubbed yesterday, to the cheers of you and your mean spirited friends. But truth is truth and should be defended. So to the point, I reread the Judiciary Committee linked document, and the items you specified are in italics, because the report is quoting Lavrov's comments to a Moscow news paper and "another paper" as evidence of Russia's efforts to undermine the credibility and standing of Browder. This is hardly obscure. It's plain as day if you just read it.

David , July 16, 2017 at 2:59 pm

Also Abe, before I get deleted again, I don't question any of you geneological description of Feinstein. I merely pointed out that she is the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and it is normal for the Chairman of the Committee (Republican) to CC the ranking member. Unless of course it is Devin Nunes, then fairness and tradition goes out the window.

Abe , July 16, 2017 at 4:01 pm

It's plain as day, "David" or whatever other name you're trolling under, that you're here to loudly "defend" the "credibility" and "standing" of William Browder.

Sorry, but you're going to have to "defend" Browder with something other than your usual innuendo, blather about 9-11, and slurs against RP.

Otherwise it will be recognized for what it is, repeated violation of CN comment policy, and taken down by the moderator again.

Good luck to any troll who wants to "defend" Browder's record.

But you're gonna have to earn your pay with something other than your signature unsupported allegations, 9-11 diversions, and the "non-Jewish Russian haters gonna hate" propaganda shtick.

David , July 16, 2017 at 5:07 pm

I wish you would stop with the name calling. I am not a troll. I have been trying to make simple rational points. You respond by calling me names and wholly ignoring and/or misrepresenting and obfuscating easily verifiable facts. I suspect you are the moderator of this page, and if so am surprised by your consistent negative references to Jews. I'm not Jewish but you're really over the top. Of course you have many friends here so you get little push back, but I really hope you are not Bob or Sam.

Anonymous , July 16, 2017 at 10:26 am

We can see that it was what can be considered to be a Complex situation, where it was said that someone had Dirt on Hillary Clinton, but there was No collusion and there was No attempted collusion, but there was Patriotism and Concern for Others during a Perplexing situation.

This is because of what is Known as Arkancide, and which is associated with some People who say they have Dirt on the Clintons.

The Obvious and Humane thing to do was to arrange to meet the Russian Lawyer, who it was Alleged to have Dirt on Hillary Clinton, regardless of any possible Alleged Electoral advantage against Hillary Clinton, and until further information, there may have been some National Security Concerns, because it was Known that Hillary Clinton committed Espionage with Top Secret Information on her Unauthorized, Clandestine, Secret Email Server, and the Obvious cover up by the Department of Justice and the FBI, and so it was with this background that this Complex situation had to be dealt with.

This is because there is Greater Protection for a Person who has Dirt or Alleged Dirt on the Clintons, if that Information is share with other People.

This is because it is a Complete Waste of time to go to the Authorities, because they will Not do anything against Clinton Crimes, and a former Haitian Government Official was found dead only days before he was to give Testimony regarding the Clinton Foundation.

We saw this with Seth Rich, where the Police Videos has been withheld, and we have seen the Obstruction in investigating that Crime.

The message to Leakers is that Seth Rich was taken to hospital and Treated and was on his way to Fully Recovering, but he died in hospital, and those who were thinking of Leaking Understood the message from that.

There was Also concern for Rob Goldstone, who Alleged that the Russian Lawyer had Dirt on the Clintons.

We Know that is is said Goldstone that he did Not want to hear what was said at the meeting.

This is because Goldstone wanted associates of Candidate Donald Trump to Know that he did Not know what was said at that meeting.

We now Know that the meeting was a set up to Improperly obtain a FISA Warrant, which was Requested in June of 2016, and that is same the month and the year as the meeting that the Russian Lawyer attended.

There was what was an Unusual granting of a Special Visa so that the Russian Lawyer could attend that set up, which was Improperly Used to Request a FISA Warrant in order to Improperly Spy on an Opposition Political Candidate in order to Improperly gain an Electoral advantage in an Undemocratic manner, because if anything wrong was intended by Associates of Candidate Donald Trump, then there were enough People in that meeting who were the Equivalent of Establishment Democrats and Establishment Republicans, because we Know that after that meeting, that the husband of the former Florida chair of the Trump campaign obtained a front row seat to a June 2016 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing for the Russian Lawyer.

There are Americans who consider that the 2 Major Political Party Tyranny has Betrayed the Constitution and the Principles of Democracy, because they oppose President Donald Trump's Election Integrity Commission, because they think that the Establishment Republicans and the Establishment Democrats are the Bribed and Corrupted Puppets of the Shadow Regime.

We Know from Senator Sanders, that if Americans want a Political Revolution, then they will need their own Political Party.

There are Americans who think that a Group of Democratic Party Voters and Republican Party Voters who have No association with the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, and that they may be named The Guardians of American Democracy.

These Guardians of American Democracy would be a numerous Group of People, and they would ask Republican Voters to Vote for the Democratic Party Representative instead of the Republican who is in Congress and who is seeking Reelection, in exchange for Democratic Party Voters to Vote for the Republican Party Candidate instead of the Democrat who is in Congress and who is seeking Reelection, and the same can be done for the Senate, because the American People have to Decide if it is they the Shadow Regime, or if it is We the People, and the Establishment Republicans and the Establishment Democrats are the Bribed and Corrupt Puppets of the Shadow Regime, and there would be equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats replaced in this manner, and so it will Not affect their numbers in the Congress or the Senate.

There could be People who think that Debbie Wasserman Schultz was Unacceptability Biased and Unacceptability Corrupt during the Democratic Party Primaries, and that if she wants a Democratic Party Candidate to be Elected in her Congressional District, then she Should announce that she will Not be contesting the next Election, and there could be People who think that Speaker Paul Ryan was Unacceptability Disloyal by insufficiently endorse the Republican Presidential nominee, and with other matters, and that if he wants a Republican Party Candidate to be Elected in his Congressional District, then he Should announce that he will Not be contesting the next Election, and then the Guardians of American Democracy can look at other Dinos and Rinos, including those in the Senate, because the Constitution says the words: We the People.

There are Many Americans who have Noticed that Criminal Elites escape Justice, and Corruption is the norm in American Politics.

There are those who Supported Senator Sanders who Realize that Senator Sanders would have been Impeached had he become President, and they Know that they Need President Donald Trump to prepare the Political Landscape so that someone like Senator Sanders could be President, without a Coup attempt that is being attempted on President Donald Trump, and while these People may not Vote for the Republicans, they can Refuse to Vote for the Democratic Party, until the conditions are there for a Constitutional Republic and a Constitutional Democracy, and they want the Illegal Mueller Team to recuse themselves from this pile of Vile and Putrid McCarthyist Lies Invented by their Shadow Regime Puppet Masters,

There are Many Americans who want Voter Identification and Paper Ballots for Elections, and they have seen how several States are Opposed to President Donald Trump's Commission on Election Integrity, because they want to Rig their Elections, and this is Why there are Many Americans who want America to be a Constitutional Republic and a Constitutional Democracy.

MillyBloom54 , July 16, 2017 at 12:31 pm

I just read this article in the Washington Monthly, and wish to read informed comments about this issue. There are suggestions that organized crime from Russian was heavily involved. This is a complicated mess of money, greed, etc.

http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/07/10/trumps-inner-circle-met-with-no-ordinary-russian-lawyer/

Abe , July 16, 2017 at 1:32 pm

Yes, very interesting read. By all means, examine the article, which concludes:

"So, let's please stay focused on why this matters.

"And why was Preet Bharara fired again?"

Israeli banks have helped launder money for Russian oligarchs, while large-scale fraudulent industries have been allowed to flourish in Israel.

A May 2009 diplomatic cable by the US ambassador to Israel warned that "many Russian oligarchs of Jewish origin and Jewish members of organized crime groups have received Israeli citizenship, or at least maintain residences in the country."

The United States estimated at the time that Russian crime groups had "laundered as much as $10 billion through Israeli holdings."

In 2009, then Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara charged 17 managers and employees of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims for defrauding Germany 42.5 million dollars by creating thousands of false benefit applications for people who had not suffered in the Holocaust.

The scam operated by creating phony applications with false birth dates and invented histories of persecution to process compensation claims. In some cases the recipients were born after World War II and at least one person was not even Jewish.

Among those charged was Semyon Domnitser, a former director of the conference. Many of the applicants were recruited from Brooklyn's Russian community. All those charged hail from Brooklyn.

When a phony applicant got a check, the scammers were given a cut, Bharara said. The fraud which has been going on for 16 years was related to the 400 million dollars which Germany pays out each year to Holocaust survivors.

Later, in November 2015, Bharara's office charged three Israeli men in a 23-count indictment that alleged that they ran a extensive computer hacking and fraud scheme that targeted JPMorgan Chase, The Wall Street Journal, and ten other companies.

According to prosecutors, the Israeli's operation generated "hundreds of millions of dollars of illegal profit" and exposed the personal information of more than 100 million people.

Why was Bharara fired?

Any real investigation of Russia-Gate will draw international attention towards Russian Jewish corruption in the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) sectors, and lead back to Israel.

Ain't gonna happen.

David , July 16, 2017 at 3:22 pm

Remember Milly that essentially one of the first things Trump did when he came into office was fire Preet, and just days before the long awaited trial. Then, Jeff Sessions settled the case for 6 million without any testimony on a 230 million dollar case, days after. Spectacular and brazen, and structured to hide the identities of which properties were bought by which investors. Hmmmm.

David , July 16, 2017 at 3:33 pm

By the way Milly, great summary article you have linked and one that everyone who is championing the Nekrasov film should read.

Abe , July 16, 2017 at 4:37 pm

The "great" article was not written by a journalist. It's an opinion piece written by Martin Longman, a blogger and Democratic Party political consultant.

From 2012 to 2013, Longman worked for Democracy for America (DFA) a political action committee, headquartered in South Burlington, Vermont, founded by former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.

Since March 2014, political animal Longman has managed the The Washington Monthly website and online magazine.

Although it claims to be "an independent voice", the Washington Monthly is funded by the Ford Foundation, JP Morgan Chase Foundation, and well-heeled corporate entities http://washingtonmonthly.com/about/

Longman's credentials as a "progressive" alarmist are well established. Since 2005, he has been the publisher of Booman Tribune. Longman admits that BooMan is related to the 'bogey man' (aka, bogy man, boogeyman), an evil imaginary character who harms children.

Vladimir Putin is the latest bogey man of the Democratic Party and its equally pro-Israel "opposition".

Neither party wants the conversation to involve Jewish Russian organized crime, because that leads to Israel and the pro-Israel AIPAC lobby that funds both the Republican and Democratic parties.

Very interesting.

[Dec 10, 2017] blamePutin continues to be the media s dominant hashtag. Vladimir Putin finally confesses his entire responsibility for everything bad that has ever happened since the beginning of time

Highly recommended!
Guardian in Russia coverage acts as MI6 outlet. Magnitsky probably was MI6 operation, anyway.
Notable quotes:
"... The Observer fabricated a direct quote from the Russian president for their propaganda purposes without any regard to basic journalistic standards. They wanted to blame Putin personally for the suspicions of some Russian investigators, so they just invented an imaginary statement from him so they could conveniently do so. ..."
"... What is really going on here is the classic trope of demonisation propaganda in which the demonised leader is conflated with all officials of their government and with the targeted country itself, so as to simplify and personalise the narrative of the subsequent Two Minutes Hate to be unleashed against them. ..."
"... In the same article, the documents from Russian investigators naming Browder as a suspect in certain crimes are first "seen as" a frame-up (by the sympathetic chorus of completely anonymous observers yellow journalism can always call on when an unsupported claim needs a spurious bolstering) and then outright labelled as such (see quote above) as if this alleged frame-up is a proven fact. Which it isn't. ..."
"... No evidence is required down there in the Guardian/Observer journalistic gutter before unsupported claims against Russian officials can be treated as unquestionable pseudo-facts, just as opponents of Putin can commit no crime for the outlet's hate-befuddled hacks. ..."
Dec 10, 2017 | off-guardian.org

by VT

The decline of the falsely self-described "quality" media outlet The Guardian/Observer into a deranged fake news site pushing anti-Russian hate propaganda continues apace. Take a look at this gem :

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has accused prominent British businessman Bill Browder of being a "serial killer" – the latest extraordinary attempt by the Kremlin to frame one of its most high-profile public enemies.

But Putin has not been reported anywhere else as making any recent statement about Browder whatever, and the Observer article makes no further mention of Putin's supposed utterance or the circumstances in which it was supposedly made.

As the rest of the article makes clear, the suspicions against Browder were actually voiced by Russian police investigators and not by Putin at all.

The Observer fabricated a direct quote from the Russian president for their propaganda purposes without any regard to basic journalistic standards. They wanted to blame Putin personally for the suspicions of some Russian investigators, so they just invented an imaginary statement from him so they could conveniently do so.

What is really going on here is the classic trope of demonisation propaganda in which the demonised leader is conflated with all officials of their government and with the targeted country itself, so as to simplify and personalise the narrative of the subsequent Two Minutes Hate to be unleashed against them.

When, as in this case, the required substitution of the demonised leader for their country can't be wrung out of the facts even through the most vigorous twisting, a disreputable fake news site like The Guardian/Observer is free to simply make up new, alternative facts that better fit their disinformative agenda. Because facts aren't at all sacred when the official propaganda line demands lies.

In the same article, the documents from Russian investigators naming Browder as a suspect in certain crimes are first "seen as" a frame-up (by the sympathetic chorus of completely anonymous observers yellow journalism can always call on when an unsupported claim needs a spurious bolstering) and then outright labelled as such (see quote above) as if this alleged frame-up is a proven fact. Which it isn't.

No evidence is required down there in the Guardian/Observer journalistic gutter before unsupported claims against Russian officials can be treated as unquestionable pseudo-facts, just as opponents of Putin can commit no crime for the outlet's hate-befuddled hacks.

The above falsifications were brought to the attention of the Observer's so-called Readers Editor – the official at the Guardian/Observer responsible for "independently" defending the outlet's misdeeds against outraged readers – who did nothing. By now the article has rolled off the site's front page, rendering any possible future correction nugatory in any case.

Later in the same article Magnitsky is described as having been Browder's "tax lawyer" a standard trope of the Western propaganda narrative about the case. Magnitsky was actually an accountant .

A trifecta of fakery in one article! That makes crystal clear what the Guardian meant in this article , published at precisely the same moment as the disinformation cited above, when it said:

"We know what you are doing," Theresa May said of Russia. It's not enough to know. We need to do something about it.

By "doing something about it" they mean they're going to tell one hostile lie about Russia after another.


michaelk says November 26, 2017

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/26/big-issue-who-will-step-in-after-bullies-have-silenced-dissenters

From the 'liberal' Guardian/Observer wing of the rightwing bourgeois press, spot the differences with the article in the Mail on Sunday by Nick Robinson?

michaelk says November 26, 2017
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-5117723/Nick-Robinson-Putin-using-fake-news-weaken-West.html

This thing seems to have been cobbled together by a guy called Nick Robinson. The same BBC Nick Robinson that hosts the Today Programme? I dunno, one feels really rather depressed at how low our media has sunk.

michaelk says November 23, 2017
I think huge swathes of the media, in the eyes of many people, have never really recovered from the ghastly debacle that was their dreadful coverage of the reasons for the illegal attack on Iraq.

The journalists want us to forget and move on, but many, many, people still remember. Nothing happened afterwards. There was no tribunal to examine the media's role in that massive international crime against humanity and things actually got worse post Iraq, which the attack on Libya and Syria illustrates.

rtj1211 says November 29, 2017
Exactly: in my opinion there should be life sentences banning scribblers who printed lies and bloodthirsty kill, kill, kill articles from ever working again in the media.

Better still, make them go fight right now in Yemen. Amazing how quickly truth will spread if journalists know they have a good chance of dying if they print lies and falsehoods ..

michaelk says November 23, 2017
At a time when the ruling elite, across virtually the entire western world, is losing it; it being, political legitimacy and the breakdown of any semblance of a social contract between the ruled and the rulers the Guardian lurches even further to the political right . amazing, though not really surprising. The Guardian's role appears to be to 'coral' radical and leftist ideas and opinions and 'groom' the educated middle class into accepting their own subjugation.

The Guardian's writers get so much, so wrong, so often it's staggering and nobody gets the boot, except for the people who allude to the incompetence at the heart of the Guardian. They fail dismally on Trump, Brexit and Corbyn and yet carry on as if everything is fine and dandy. Nothing to complain about here, mover along now.

I suppose it's because they are actually media aristocrats living in a world of privilege, and they, as members of the ruling elite, look after one another regardless of how poorly they actually perform. This is typical of an elite that's on the ropes and doomed. They choose to retreat from grubby reality into a parallel world where their own dogmas aren't challenged and they begin to believe their propaganda is real and not an artificial contruct. This is incredibly dangerous for a ruling elite because society becomes brittle and weaker by the day as the ruling dogmas become hollow and ritualized, but without traction in reality and real purpose.

The Guardian is a bit like the Tory government, lost and without any real ideas or ideals. The slow strangulation of the CIF symbolizes the crisis of confidence at the Guardian. A strong and confident ruling class welcomes criticism and is ready to brush it all off with a smile and a shrug. When they start running scared and pretending there is no dissent or opposition, well, this is a sign of decadence and profound weakness. They are losing the battle of ideas and the battle of solutions to our problems. All that really stands between them and a social revolution is a thin veneer of 'authority' and status, and that's really not enough anymore.

All our problems are pathetically and conviniently blamed on the Russians and their Demon King and his vast army of evil Trolls. It's like a political version of the Lord of the Rings.

WeatherEye says November 21, 2017
Don't expect the Guardian to cover the biggest military build-up (NATO) on Russia's borders since Hitler's 1941 invasion.

John Pilger has described the "respectable" liberal press (Guardian, NYT etc) as the most effective component of the propaganda system, precisely BECAUSE it is respectable and trusted. As to why the Guardian is so insistent in demonising Russia, I would propose that is integrates them further with a Brexit-ridden Tory government. Its Blairite columnists prefer May over Corbyn any day.

rtj1211 says November 29, 2017
The Guardian is now owned by Neocon Americans, that is why it is demonising Russia. Simple as that.
WeatherEye says November 29, 2017
Evidence?
Harry Stotle says November 21, 2017
The Guardian is trying to rescue citizens from 'dreadful dangers that we cannot see, or do not understand' – in other words they play a central role in 'the power of nightmares' https://www.youtube.com/embed/LlA8KutU2to
rtj1211 says November 21, 2017
So Russians cannot do business in America but Americans must be protected to do business in Russia?

If you look at Ukraine and how US corporations are benefitting from the US-funded coup, you ask what the US did in Russia in the 1990s and the effect it had on US business and ordinary Russian people. Were the two consistent with a common US template of economic imperialism?

In particular, you ask what Bill Browder was doing, his links to US spying organisations etc etc. You ask if he supported the rape of Russian State assets, turned a blind eye to the millions of Russians dying in the 1990s courtesy of catastrophic economic conditions. If he was killing people to stay alive, he would not have been the only one. More important is whether him making $100m+ in Russia needed conditions where tens of millions of Russians were starving .and whether he saw that as acceptable collateral damage ..he made a proactive choice, after all, to go live in Moscow. It is not like he was born there and had no chance to leave ..

I do not know the trurh about Bill Browder, but one thing I do know: very powerful Americans are capable of organising mass genocide to become rich, so there is no possible basis for painting all American businessmen as philanthropists and all Russians as murdering savages ..

michaelk says November 21, 2017
It's perfectly possible, in fact the norm historically, for people to believe passionately in the existence of invisible threats to their well-being, which, when examined calmly from another era, resemble a form of mass-hysteria or collective madness. For example; the religious faith/dogma that Satan, demons and witches were all around us. An invisible, parallel, world, by the side of our own that really existed and we were 'at war with.' Satan was our adversary, the great trickster and disseminator of 'fake news' opposed to the 'good news' provided by the Gospels.

What's remarkable, disturbing and frightening is how closely our media resemble a religious cult or the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. The journalists have taken on a role that's close to that of a priesthood. They function as a 'filtering' layer between us and the world around us. They are, supposedly, uniquely qualified to understand the difference between truth and lies, or what's right and wrong, real news and propaganda. The Guardian actually likes this role. They our the guardians of the truth in a chaotic world.

This reminds one of the role of the clergy. Their role was to stand between ordinary people and the 'complexities' of the Bible and separate the Truths it contained from wild and 'fake' interpretations, which could easily become dangerous and undermine the social order and fundamental power relationships.

The big challenge to the role of the Church happened when the printing press allowed the ordinary people to access the information themselves and worst still when the texts were translated into the common language and not just Latin. Suddenly people could access the texts, read and begin to interpret and understand for themselves. It's hard to imagine that people were actually burned alive in England for smuggling the Bible in English translation a few centuries ago. That's how dangerous the State regarded such a 'crime.'

One can compare the translation of the Bible and the challenge to the authority of the Church and the clergy as 'guardians of the truth' to what's happeing today with the rise of the Internet and something like Wikileaks, where texts and infromation are made available uncensored and raw and the role of the traditional 'media church' and the journalist priesthood is challenged.

We're seeing a kind of media counter-reformation. That's why the Guardian turned on Assange so disgracefully and what Wikileaks represented.

WeatherEye says November 21, 2017
A brilliant historical comparison. They're now on the legal offensive in censoring the internet of course, because in truth the filter system is wholly vulnerable. Alternative media has been operating freely, yet the majority have continued to rely on MSM as if it's their only source of (dis)information, utilizing our vast internet age to the pettiness of social media and prank videos. Marx was right: capitalist society alienates people from their own humanity. We're now aliens, deprived of our original being and floating in a vacuum of Darwinist competition and barbarism. And we wonder why climate change is happening?
tutisicecream says November 21, 2017
Apparently we are "living in disorientating times" according to Viner, she goes on to say that "championing the public interest is at the heart of the Guardian's mission".

Really? How is it possible for her to say that when many of the controversial articles which appear in the Guardian are not open for comment any more. They have adopted now a view that THEIR "opinion" should not be challenged, how is that in the public interest?

In the Observer on Sunday a piece also appeared smearing RT entitled: "MPs defend fees of up to Ł1,000 an hour to appear on 'Kremlin propaganda' channel." However they allowed comments which make interesting reading. Many commenter's saw through their ruse and although the most vociferous critics of the Graun have been banished, but even the mild mannered ones which remain appear not the buy into the idea that RT is any different than other media outlets. With many expressing support for the news and op-ed outlet for giving voice to those who the MSM ignore – including former Guardian writers from time to time.

Why Viner's words are so poisonous is that the Graun under her stewardship has become a agitprop outlet offering no balance. In the below linked cringe worthy article there is no mention of RT being under attack in the US and having to register itself and staff as foreign agents. NO DEFENCE OF ATTACKS ON FREEDOM OF THE PRESS by the US state is mentioned.

Surely this issue is at the heart of championing public interest?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/18/mps-kremlin-propaganda-channel-rt#comments

The fact that it's not shows clearly the fake Guardian/Observer claim and their real agenda.

WE ARE DEFINITELY LIVING IN DISORIENTATION TIMES and the Guardian/Observer are leading the charge.

tutisicecream says November 21, 2017
Correction: DISORIENTATING TIMES
Peter says November 21, 2017
For the political/media/business elites (I suppose you could call them 'the Establishment') in the US and UK, the main problem with RT seems to be that a lot of people are watching it. I wonder how long it will be before access is cut. RT is launching a French-language channel next month. We are already being warned by the French MSM about how RT makes up fake news to further Putin's evil propaganda aims (unlike said MSM, we are told). Basically, elites just don't trust the people (this is certainly a constant in French political life).
Jim says November 21, 2017
It's not just that they don't allow comments on many of their articles, but even on the articles where CiF is enabled, they ban any accounts that disagree with their narrative. The end result is that Guardianistas get the false impression everyone shares their view and that they are in the majority. The Guardian moderators are like Scientology leaders who banish any outsiders for fear of influencing their cult members.
BigB says November 20, 2017
Everyone knows that Russia-gate is a feat of mass hypnosis, mesmerized from DNC financed lies. The Trump collusion myth is baseless and becoming dangerously hysterical: but conversely, the Clinton collusion scandal is not so easy to allay. Whilst it may turn out to be the greatest story never told: it looks substantive enough to me. HRC colluded with Russian oligarchy to the tune of $145m of "donations" into her slush fund. In return, Rosatom gained control of Uranium One.

A curious adjunct to this corruption: HRC opposed the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Given her subsequent rabid Russophobia: you'd have thought that if the Russians (as it has been spun) arrested a brave whistleblowing tax lawyer and murdered him in prison – she would have been quite vocal in her condemnation. No, she wanted to make Russia great again. It's amazing how $145m can focus ones attention away from ones natural instinct.

[Browder and Magnitsky were as corrupt as each other: the story that the Russians took over Browder's hedge fund and implicated them both in a $230m tax fraud and corruption scandal is as fantastical as the "Golden Shower" dossier. However, it seems to me Magnitsky's death was preventable (he died from complications of pancreatitis, for which it seems he was initially refused treatment ) ]

So if we turn the clock back to 2010-2013, it sure looks to me as though we have a Russian collusion scandal: only it's not one the Guardian will ever want to tell. Will it come out when the FBI 's "secret" informant (William D Cambell) testifies to Congress sometime this week? Not in the Guardian, because their precious Hillary Clinton is the real scandal here.

jag37777 says November 20, 2017
Browder is a spook.
susannapanevin says November 20, 2017
Reblogged this on Susanna Panevin .
Eric Blair says November 20, 2017
This "tactic" – a bold or outrageous claim made in the headline or in the first few sentences of a piece that is proven false in the very same article – is becoming depressingly common in the legacy media.

In other words, the so-called respectable media knowingly prints outright lies for propaganda and clickbait purposes.

labrebisgalloise says November 20, 2017
I dropped a line to a friend yesterday saying "only in a parallel universe would a businessman/shady dealer/tax evader such as Browder be described as an "anti-corruption campaigner."" Those not familiar with the history of Browder's grandfather, after whom a whole new "deviation" in leftist thinking was named, should look it up.
Eric Blair says November 20, 2017
Hey, MbS is also an "anti-corruption" campaigner! If the media says so it must be true!
Sav says November 20, 2017
Some months ago you saw tweets saying Russophobia had hit ridiculous levels. They hadn't seen anything yet. It's scary how easily people can be brainwashed.

The US are the masters of molesting other nations. It's not even a secret what they've been up to. Look at their budgets or the size of the intelligence buildings. Most journalists know full well of their programs, including those on social media, which they even reported on a few years back. The Guardian run stories by the CIA created and US state funded RFE/RL & then tell us with a straight face that RT is state propaganda which is destroying our democracy.

A Petherbridge says November 20, 2017
Well said – interesting to know what the Guardian is paid to run these stories funded by this arm of US state propaganda.
bevin says November 20, 2017
The madness spreads: today The Canary has/had an article 'proving' that the 'Russians' were responsible for Brexit, Trump, etc etc.

Then there is the neo-liberal 'President' of the EU charging that the extreme right wing and Russophobic warmongers in the Polish government are in fact, like the President of the USA, in Putin's pocket..

This outbreak is reaching the dimensions of the sort of mass hysteria that gave us St Vitus' dance. Oh and the 'sonic' terrorism practised against US diplomats in Havana, in which crickets working for the evil one (who he?) appear to have been responsible for a breach in diplomatic relations. It couldn't have happened to a nicer empire.

Admin says November 21, 2017
The Canary is publishing mainstream russophobia?

[Dec 10, 2017] Russia-gate s Reach into Journalism by Dennis J Bernstein

Highly recommended!
When national security establishment is trying to undermine sitting President this is iether color revolution or coup d'état. In the USa it looks more like color revolution.
"Now you have this interesting dynamic where the national security establishment is effectively undermining a duly elected president of the United States. I recognize that Trump is vulnerable, but these types of investigations often become highly politicized."
Notable quotes:
"... The Credico subpoena, after he declined a request for a "voluntary" interview, underscores how the investigation is moving into areas of "guilt by association" and further isolating whistleblowers who defy the powers-that-be through unauthorized release of information to the public, a point made by National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake in an interview. ..."
"... Drake knows well what it means to blow the whistle on government misconduct and get prosecuted for it. A former senior NSA executive, Drake complained about a multi-billion-dollar fraud, waste, and widespread violation of the rights of civilians through secret mass surveillance programs. As a result, the Obama administration indicted Drake in 2010, "as the first whistleblower since Daniel Ellsberg charged with espionage," according to the Institute for Public Accuracy. ..."
"... In 2011, the government's case against him, which carried a potential 35 years in prison, collapsed. Drake went free in a plea deal and was awarded the 2011 Ridenhour Truth Telling Prize. ..."
"... In this hyper-inflated, politicized environment, it is extremely difficult to wade through the massive amount of disinformation on all sides. Hacking is something all modern nation-states engage in, including the United States, including Russia. The challenge here is trying to figure out who the players are, whose ox is being gored, and who is doing the goring. ..."
"... From all accounts, Trump was duly elected. Now you have the Mueller investigation and the House investigation. Where is this all leading? The US intelligence agency hasn't done itself any favors. The ICA provides no proof either, in terms of allegations that the Russians "hacked" the election. We do have the evidence disclosed by Reality Winner that maybe there was some interference. But the hyper-politicization is making it extraordinarily difficult. ..."
"... Well, if you consider the content of those emails .Certainly, the Clinton folks got rid of Bernie Sanders. ..."
"... The national security establishment was far more comfortable having Clinton as president. Someone central to my own case, General Michael Hayden, just a couple days ago went apoplectic because of a tweet from Trump taking on the mainstream media. Hayden got over 100,000 likes on his response. Well, Hayden was central to what we did in deep secrecy at the highest levels of government after 9/11, engaging in widespread surveillance and then justifying it as "raw executive authority." ..."
"... Now you have this interesting dynamic where the national security establishment is effectively undermining a duly elected president of the United States. I recognize that Trump is vulnerable, but these types of investigations often become highly politicized. I worry that what is really happening is being sacrificed on the altar of entertainment and the stage of political theater. ..."
"... What is happening to Randy is symptomatic of a larger trend. If you dare speak truth to power, you are going to pay the price. Is Randy that much of a threat, just because he is questioning authority? Are we afraid of the press? Are we afraid of having the uncomfortable conversations, of dealing with the inconvenient truths about ourselves? ..."
"... Yeah, it is definitely a way of describing the concept of fascism without using the word. The present Yankee regime seems to be quite far along that road, and the full-on types seem to be engaged in a coup to eliminate those they fear may not be as much in the fascist deep-state bag. ..."
"... How disgusting to have to live today in the society so accurately described by Orwell in 1984. It was a nice book to read, but not to live in! ..."
"... Truth is he enemy of coercive power. Lies and secrecy are essential in leading the sheeple to their slaughter. ..."
"... Perhaps the one good thing about Trumps election is that its shows democracy is still just about alive and breathing in the US, because as is pointed out in this article, Trump was never expected to win and those who lost are still in a state of shock and disbelief. ..."
"... One things for sure: the Neocons, the deep state, and all the rest of the skunks that infest Washington will make absolutely sure that future elections will go the way as planned, so perhaps we should celebrate Trump, because he may well be the last manifestation of the democracy in the US. ..."
"... In the end, what will bring this monstrously lumbering "Russia-gate" dog and pony show crashing down is that stupid, fake Fusion GPS dossier that was commissioned, paid for, and disseminated by Team Hillary and the DNC. Then, as with the sinking of the Titanic, all of the flotsam and jetsam floating within its radius of destruction will go down with it. What will left to pluck from the lifeboats afterwards is anyone's guess. All thanks to Hillary. ..."
Dec 10, 2017 | www.facebook.com

The investigation to somehow blame Russia for Donald Trump's election has now merged with another establishment goal of isolating and intimidating whistleblowers and other dissidents, as Dennis J Bernstein describes.

The Russia-gate investigation has reached into the ranks of journalism with the House Intelligence Committee's subpoena of Randy Credico, who produced a series about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for Pacifica Radio and apparently is suspected of having passed on early word about leaked Democratic emails to Donald Trump's supporter Roger Stone.

The Credico subpoena, after he declined a request for a "voluntary" interview, underscores how the investigation is moving into areas of "guilt by association" and further isolating whistleblowers who defy the powers-that-be through unauthorized release of information to the public, a point made by National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake in an interview.

Drake knows well what it means to blow the whistle on government misconduct and get prosecuted for it. A former senior NSA executive, Drake complained about a multi-billion-dollar fraud, waste, and widespread violation of the rights of civilians through secret mass surveillance programs. As a result, the Obama administration indicted Drake in 2010, "as the first whistleblower since Daniel Ellsberg charged with espionage," according to the Institute for Public Accuracy.

In 2011, the government's case against him, which carried a potential 35 years in prison, collapsed. Drake went free in a plea deal and was awarded the 2011 Ridenhour Truth Telling Prize.

I interviewed Drake about the significance of Credico's subpoena, which Credico believes resulted from his journalism about the persecution of Julian Assange for releasing information that powerful people would prefer kept hidden from the public. (I had a small role in Credico's 14-part radio series, Julian Assange: Countdown to Freedom . It was broadcast first as part of his Live on the Fly Series, over WBAI and later on KPFA and across the country on community radio.)

Credico got his start as a satirist and became a political candidate for mayor of New York City and later governor of New York, making mainstream politicians deal with issues they would rather not deal with.

I spoke to Thomas Drake by telephone on Nov. 30, 2017.

Dennis Bernstein: How do you look at Russiagate, based on what you know about what has already transpired in terms of the movement of information? How do you see Credico's role in this?

Thomas Drake: Information is the coin of the realm. It is the currency of power. Anyone who questions authority or is perceived as mocking authority -- as hanging out with "State enemies" -- had better be careful. But this latest development is quite troubling, I must say. This is the normalization of everything that has been going on since 9/11. Randy is a sort of 21st century Diogenes who is confronting authority and pointing out corruption. This subpoena sends a chilling message. It's a double whammy for Randy because, in the eyes of the US government, he is a media figure hanging out with the wrong media figure [Julian Assange].

Dennis Bernstein: Could you say a little bit about what your work was and what you tried to do with your expose?

Thomas Drake: My experience was quite telling, in terms of how far the government will go to try to destroy someone's life. The attempt by the government to silence me was extraordinary. They threw everything they had at me, all because I spoke the truth. I spoke up about abuse of power, I spoke up about the mass surveillance regime. My crime was that I made the choice to go to the media. And the government was not just coming after me, they were sending a really chilling message to the media: If you print this, you are also under the gun.

Dennis Bernstein: We have heard the charges again and again, that this was a Russian hack. What was the source? Let's trace it back as best we can.

Thomas Drake: In this hyper-inflated, politicized environment, it is extremely difficult to wade through the massive amount of disinformation on all sides. Hacking is something all modern nation-states engage in, including the United States, including Russia. The challenge here is trying to figure out who the players are, whose ox is being gored, and who is doing the goring.

From all accounts, Trump was duly elected. Now you have the Mueller investigation and the House investigation. Where is this all leading? The US intelligence agency hasn't done itself any favors. The ICA provides no proof either, in terms of allegations that the Russians "hacked" the election. We do have the evidence disclosed by Reality Winner that maybe there was some interference. But the hyper-politicization is making it extraordinarily difficult.

The advantage that intelligence has is that they can hide behind what they are doing. They don't actually have to tell the truth, they can shade it, they can influence it and shape it. This is where information can be politicized and used as a weapon. Randy has found himself caught up in these investigations by virtue of being a media figure and hanging out with "the wrong people."

Dennis Bernstein: It looks like the Russiagaters in Congress are trying to corner Randy. All his life he has spoken truth to power. But what do you think the role of the press should be?

Thomas Drake: The press amplifies just about everything they focus on, especially with today's 24-hour, in-your-face social media. Even the mainstream media is publishing directly to their webpages. You have to get behind the cacophony of all that noise and ask, "Why?" What are the intentions here?

I believe there are still enough independent journalists who are looking further and deeper. But clearly there are those who are hell-bent on making life as difficult as possible for the current president and those who are going to defend him to the hilt. I was not surprised at all that Trump won. A significant percentage of the American electorate were looking for something different.

Dennis Bernstein : Well, if you consider the content of those emails .Certainly, the Clinton folks got rid of Bernie Sanders.

Thomas Drake: That would have been an interesting race, to have Bernie vs. Trump. Sanders was appealing, especially to young audiences. He was raising legitimate issues.

Dennis Bernstein: In Clinton, they had a known quantity who supported the national security state.

Thomas Drake: The national security establishment was far more comfortable having Clinton as president. Someone central to my own case, General Michael Hayden, just a couple days ago went apoplectic because of a tweet from Trump taking on the mainstream media. Hayden got over 100,000 likes on his response. Well, Hayden was central to what we did in deep secrecy at the highest levels of government after 9/11, engaging in widespread surveillance and then justifying it as "raw executive authority."

Now you have this interesting dynamic where the national security establishment is effectively undermining a duly elected president of the United States. I recognize that Trump is vulnerable, but these types of investigations often become highly politicized. I worry that what is really happening is being sacrificed on the altar of entertainment and the stage of political theater.

What is happening to Randy is symptomatic of a larger trend. If you dare speak truth to power, you are going to pay the price. Is Randy that much of a threat, just because he is questioning authority? Are we afraid of the press? Are we afraid of having the uncomfortable conversations, of dealing with the inconvenient truths about ourselves?

Dennis J Bernstein is a host of "Flashpoints" on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom . You can access the audio archives at www.flashpoints.net .

orwell

"Raw Executive Authority" means Totalitarianism/Fascism.

exiled off mainstreet , December 7, 2017 at 4:23 pm

Yeah, it is definitely a way of describing the concept of fascism without using the word. The present Yankee regime seems to be quite far along that road, and the full-on types seem to be engaged in a coup to eliminate those they fear may not be as much in the fascist deep-state bag.

Jerry Alatalo , December 7, 2017 at 3:34 pm

It is highly encouraging to know that a great many good and decent men and women Americans are 100% supportive of Mr, Randy Credico as he prepares for his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. Remember all those standing right there beside you, speak what rightly needs to be spoken, and make history Mr. Credico!

jaycee , December 7, 2017 at 3:56 pm

The intensification of panic/hysteria was obviously triggered by the shock election of Trump. Where this is all heading is on display in Australia, as the government is writing legislation to "criminalise covert and deceptive activities of foreign actors that fall short of espionage but are intended to interfere with our democratic systems and processes or support the intelligence activities of a foreign government." The legislation will apparently be accompanied by new requirements of public registration of those deemed "foreign agents". (see http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/12/07/auch-d07.html ).

This will be an attack on free speech, free thought, and political freedoms, justified by an orchestrated hysteria which ridiculously assumes a "pure" political realm (i.e. the "homeland") under assault by impure foreign agents and their dirty ideas. Yes, that is a fascist construct and the liberal establishment will see it through, not the alt-right blowhards.

mike k , December 7, 2017 at 5:49 pm

How disgusting to have to live today in the society so accurately described by Orwell in 1984. It was a nice book to read, but not to live in!

john wilson , December 8, 2017 at 5:48 am

Actually Mike, the book was a prophesy but you aren't seen nothing yet. You me and the rest of the posters here may well find ourselves going for a visit to room 101 yet.

fudmier , December 7, 2017 at 4:42 pm

Those who govern (527 of them) at the pleasure of the constitution are about to breach the contract that entitles them to govern. Limiting the scope of information allowed to those who are the governed, silencing the voices of those with concerns and serious doubts, policing every word uttered by those who are the governed, as well as abusing the constitutional privilege of force and judicial authority, to deny peaceful protests of the innocents is approaching the final straw.

The governors and their corporate sponsors have imposed on those the governors govern much concern. Exactly the condition that existed prior to July 4, 1776, which elicited the following:

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the Political bands which connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the laws of nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

I submit the actions and intentions of those who govern that are revealed and discussed in this article https://consortiumnews.com/2017/12/07/russia-gates-reach-into-journalism/ should be among the list of impels that support the next declaration.

Al Pinto , December 7, 2017 at 5:23 pm

Those who govern (527 of them and the puppet master oligarch behind them) will make certain that there's no support for the next declaration. There's no respect to the opinions of the mankind, what matters is keeping the current status quo in place and further advance it by silencing the independent media.

Maybe when the next "Mother of all bubbles" come, there's an opportunity for the mankind to be heard, but it's doubtful. What has taken place during the last bubble is that the rich has gotten richer and the poor, well, you know the routine.

https://usawatchdog.com/mother-of-all-bubbles-too-big-to-pop-peter-schiff/

mike k , December 7, 2017 at 5:53 pm

Truth is he enemy of coercive power. Lies and secrecy are essential in leading the sheeple to their slaughter.

john wilson , December 8, 2017 at 5:44 am

Perhaps the one good thing about Trumps election is that its shows democracy is still just about alive and breathing in the US, because as is pointed out in this article, Trump was never expected to win and those who lost are still in a state of shock and disbelief.

Trump's election has also shown us in vivid technicolour, just what is really going on in the deep state. Absolutely none of this stuff would have come out had Clinton won and anything there was would have been covered up as though under the concrete foundation of a tower block. However, Trump still has four years left and as a British prime minister once said, "a week is a long time in politics". Well four more years of Trump is a hell of a lot longer so who knows what might happen in that time.

One things for sure: the Neocons, the deep state, and all the rest of the skunks that infest Washington will make absolutely sure that future elections will go the way as planned, so perhaps we should celebrate Trump, because he may well be the last manifestation of the democracy in the US.

Christene Bartels , December 8, 2017 at 9:57 am

In the end, what will bring this monstrously lumbering "Russia-gate" dog and pony show crashing down is that stupid, fake Fusion GPS dossier that was commissioned, paid for, and disseminated by Team Hillary and the DNC. Then, as with the sinking of the Titanic, all of the flotsam and jetsam floating within its radius of destruction will go down with it. What will left to pluck from the lifeboats afterwards is anyone's guess. All thanks to Hillary.

Apparently, Santa isn't the only one making a list and checking it twice this year. He's going to have to share the limelight with Karma.

[Dec 09, 2017] Hyping the Russian Threat to Undermine Free Speech by Max Blumenthal

Highly recommended!
This is a simply a brilliant article. Probably the best written on the subject so far. Kudos to Max Blumenthal
Thinks tanks are really ideological tanks -- formidable weapon in propaganda wars that crush everything on its way. And taken together far right think tanks financed by defense sector or intelligence agencies are really a shadow far right political party with its own neocon agenda. Actually subverting the will of American people (who elected Trump) for more peaceful relations (aka detente) with Russia in favor of interest of weapon manufactures and the army of "national security parasites".
At a time when the ruling elite, across virtually the entire western world, is losing it; it being, political legitimacy and the breakdown of any semblance of a social contract between the ruled and the rulers those think tanks decides to create a fake narrative and blame Russians. Is not this a classic variant of projection ?
The slow strangulation of the US MSM means the crisis of confidence. A strong and confident ruling class welcomes criticism and is ready to brush it all off with a smile and a shrug. When they start running scared and pretending there is no dissent or opposition, well, this is a sign of of degradation of the ruling elite. They are losing the battle of ideas and the battle of solutions to social problems. All that really stands between them and a social revolution is a thin veneer of 'authority' and status, as well as intelligence agencies spying on everybody.
Now all those well paid ( and sometimes even talented) war propagandist intend to substitute the real crisis of neoliberalism in the USA demonstrated during the recent Presidential Elections for the artificial problem of Russian meddling. And they are succeeding in this unfair and evil substitution. The also manage to "poison the well" -- relation between two nations were now at the level probably lower then during Cold War (when many Russians were sympathetic to the USA). I think 70% of Democratic voters now are convinced the Russia was meddling in the USA election and about 30% of Republican voters also think so. For the creators of 'artificial reality" such numbers signify big success. A very big success to be exact.
Notable quotes:
"... In perhaps the most chilling moment of the hearings, and the most overlooked, Clint Watts, a former U.S. Army officer who had branded himself an expert on Russian meddling, appeared before a nearly empty Senate chamber. Watts conjured up a stark landscape of American carnage, with shadowy Russian operatives stage managing the chaos ..."
"... The spectacle perfectly illustrated the madness of Russiagate, with liberal lawmakers springboarding off the fear of Russian meddling to demand that Americans be forbidden from consuming the wrong kinds of media ..."
"... A former U.S. Army officer who spent years in obscurity at a defense industry funded think tank called the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), Watts has become a go-to source for cable news producers and print journalists on the subject of Russian bots, always available with a comment that reinforces the sense that America is under sustained cyborg attack. This September, his employers at FPRI hailed him as "the leading expert on developments related to Russian-backed efforts to not only influence the 2016 presidential election, but also to inflame racial and cultural divisions within the U.S. and across Europe." ..."
"... Watts boasts an impressive-looking bio that is replete with fancy sounding fellowships at national security-oriented outfits, including George Washington University's Center Cyber and Homeland Security. His bio also indicates that he served on an FBI Joint Terror Task Force. ..."
"... Though Watts is best known for his punditry on Russian interference, it's fair to say he is as much an expert on Russian affairs as Harvey Weinstein is a trusted voice on feminism. Indeed, Watts appears to speak no Russian, has no record of reporting or scholarship from inside Russia, and has produced little to no work of any discernible academic value on Russian affairs. ..."
"... Whether or not he has the substance to support his claims of expertise, Watts has proven a talented salesman, catering to popular fears about Russian interference while he plies credulous lawmakers with ease. ..."
"... In the widely publicized testimony, Watts explained to the panel of senators that he first noticed the pernicious presence of Russian social media bots after he co-authored an article in 2014 in Foreign Affairs titled, " The Good and The Bad of Ahrar al Sham ." The article urged the US to arm a group of Syrian Salafi insurgents known for its human rights abuses , sectarianism and off-and-on alliances with Al Qaeda. Watts and his co-authors insisted that Ahrar al-Sham was the best proxy force for wreaking havoc on the Syrian government weakening its allies in Iran and Russia. Right below the headline, Watts and his co-authors celebrated Ahrar al-Sham as "an Al Qaeda linked group worth befriending." ..."
"... Watts rehashed the same argument at FPRI a year later, urging the U.S. government to harness jihadist terror as a weapon against Russia. "The U.S. at a minimum, through covert or semi-covert platforms, should take advantage and amplify these free alternative [jihadist] narratives to provide Russia some payback for recent years' aggression," he wrote. In another paper, Watts asked , "Why shouldn't the U.S. redirect some of the jihadi hatred towards those with the dirtiest hands in the Syrian conflict: Russia and Iran?" Watts did not specify whether the theater of covert warfare should be limited to the Syrian battlefield, or if he sought to encourage jihadists to carry out terrorist acts inside Russia and Iran. ..."
"... Next, Watts introduced his signature theme, claiming that Russia manipulated civil rights protests to exploit divisions in American society. Declaring that "pro-Russian" outlets were spreading "chaos in Black Lives Matter protests" by deploying active measures, Watts did not bother to say what those measures were. ..."
"... Watts then moved to the main course of his testimony, focusing on how Trump employed Russian "active measures" to attack his opponents. Watts told the Senate panel that the Russian-backed news outlets RT and Sputnik had produced a false report on the U.S. airbase in Incirlik, Turkey being "overrun by terrorists." He presented the Russian stories as the anchor for a massive influence operation that featured swarms of Russian bots across social media. And he claimed that then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort invoked the incident to deflect from negative media coverage, suggesting that Trump was coordinating strategy with the Kremlin. In reality, it was Watts who was spreading the fake news. ..."
"... Watts has pushed his bogus narrative of RT and Sputnik's Incirlik coverage in numerous outlets, including Politico . Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen echoed Watts' false account on the Senate floor while arguing for legislation to force RT out of the U.S. market on political grounds. And Jim Rutenberg, the New York Times' media correspondent, reproduced Watts' distorted account in a major feature on RT and Sputnik's "new theory of war." Almost no one, not one major media organization or public figure, has bothered to fact check these false claims, and few have questioned the agenda behind them. ..."
"... The episode began during a Trump rally at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign, when Trump read out an email purportedly from longtime Hillary Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal (the father of this writer), hoping to embarrass Clinton over Benghazi. The text of the email turned out to be part of a column written by the pro-Clinton Newsweek columnist Kurt Eichenwald, not an email by Blumenthal. ..."
"... The source of Trump's falsehood appeared to have been a report by Bill Moran, then a reporter for Sputnik, the news service funded by the Russian government. Having confused Eichenwald's writing for a Blumenthal email, Moran scrubbed his erroneous article within 20 minutes. Somehow, Moran's retracted article had found its way onto the Trump campaign's radar, a not atypical event for a campaign that had relied on material from far-out sites like Infowars to undercut its opponents. ..."
"... In his column at Newsweek, Eichenwald framed Moran's honest mistake as the leading edge of a secret Russian influence operation. With help from pro-Clinton elements, Eichenwald's column went viral, earning him slots on CNN and MSNBC, where he howled about the nefarious Russian-Trump-Wikileaks plot he believed he had just exposed. (Glenn Greenwald was perhaps the only reporter with a national platform to highlight Eichenwald's falsifications .) Moran was fired as a result of the fallout, and would have to spend the next several months fighting to correct the record. ..."
"... When Moran appealed to Eichenwald for a public clarification, Eichenwald staunchly refused. Instead, he offered Moran a job at the New Republic in exchange for his silence and warned him, "If you go public, you'll regret it." (Eichenwald had no role at the New Republic or any clear ability to influence the magazine's hiring decisions.) Moran refused to cooperate, prompting Eichenwald to publish a follow-up piece painting himself as the victim of a Russian "active measures" campaign, and to cast Moran once again as a foreign agent. ..."
"... Representing himself in court, Moran elicited a settlement from Newsweek that forced the magazine to scrub all of Eichenwald's articles about him -- a tacit admission that they were false from top to bottom. This meant that the most consequential claim Watts made before the Senate was also a whopping lie. ..."
"... The day after Watts' deception-laden appearance, he was nevertheless transformed from an obscure national security into a cable news star, with invites from Morning Joe, Rachel Maddow, Meet the Press, and the liberal comedian Samantha Bee, among many others. His testimony received coverage from the gamut of major news outlets, and even earned him a fawning profile from CNN. From out of the blue, Watts had become the star witness of Russiagate, and one of corporate media's favorite pundits. ..."
"... Dr. Strangelove ..."
"... It was not until this summer, however, that the influence operation Watts helped establish reached critical capacity. He had approached one of Washington's most respected think tanks, the German Marshall Fund, and secured support for an initiative called the Alliance for Securing Democracy. The new initiative became responsible for a daily blacklist of subversive, "pro-Russian" media outlets, targeting them with the backing of a who's who of national security honchos, from Bill Kristol to former CIA director and ex-Hillary Clinton surrogate Michael Morrell, along with favorable promotion from some of the country's most respected news organizations. ..."
Nov 13, 2017 | www.truthdig.com

Nearly a year after the presidential election, the scandal over accusations of Russian political interference in the 2016 election has gone beyond Donald Trump and reached into the nebulous world of online media. On November 1, Congress held hearings on "Extremist Content and Russian Disinformation Online." The proceedings saw executives from Facebook, Twitter and Youtube subjected to tongue-lashings from lawmakers like Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, who howled about Russian online trolls "spread[ing] stories about abuse of black Americans by law enforcement."

In perhaps the most chilling moment of the hearings, and the most overlooked, Clint Watts, a former U.S. Army officer who had branded himself an expert on Russian meddling, appeared before a nearly empty Senate chamber. Watts conjured up a stark landscape of American carnage, with shadowy Russian operatives stage managing the chaos.

"Civil wars don't start with gunshots, they start with words," he proclaimed. "America's war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America."

Next, Watts suggested a government-imposed campaign of media censorship: "Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced: silence the guns and the barrage will end."

The censorious overtone of Watts' testimony was unmistakable. He demanded that government news inquisitors drive dissident media off the internet and warned that Americans would spear one another with bayonets if they failed to act. And not one member of Congress rose to object. In fact, many echoed his call for media suppression in the House and Senate hearings, with Democrats like Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Jackie Speier agreeing the most vehemently. The spectacle perfectly illustrated the madness of Russiagate, with liberal lawmakers springboarding off the fear of Russian meddling to demand that Americans be forbidden from consuming the wrong kinds of media -- including content that amplified the message of progressive causes like Black Lives Matter.

Details of exactly what transpired vis a vis Russia and the U.S. in social media in 2016 are still emerging. This year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a declassified version of the intelligence community's report on "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections," written by CIA, FBI and NSA, with its central conclusion that Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow's longstanding desire to undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order."

To be sure, there is ample evidence that Russian-linked trolls have attempted to exploit wedge issues on social media platforms. But the impact of these schemes on real-world events appears to have been exaggerated. According to Facebook's data , 56 percent of Russian-linked ads appeared after the 2016 presidential election, and another 25 percent "were never shown to anyone." The ads were said to have "reached" over 100 million people, but that assumes that Facebook users did not scroll through or otherwise ignore them, as they do with most ads. Content emanating from "Russia-linked" sources on YouTube, meanwhile, managed to rack up hit totals in the hundreds , not exactly a viral smash.

Facebook posts traced to the infamous Internet Research Agency troll factory in Russia amounted to only 0.0004 percent of total content that appeared on the social network. (Some of these posts targeted "animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies," while another hawked an LGBT-themed " Buff Bernie coloring book for Berniacs.") According to its " deliberately broad" review , Twitter found that only 0.74 percent of its election-related tweets were "Russian-linked." Google, for its part, documented a grand total of $4,700 of "Russian-linked ad spending" during the 2016 election cycle. While some have argued that the Russian-linked ads were micro-targeted, and could have shifted key electoral voting blocs, these ads appeared in a media climate awash in a multi-billion dollar deluge of political ad spending from both established parties and dark money super PACs.

However, a blitz of feverish corporate media coverage and tension-filled congressional hearings has convinced a whopping 82 percent of Democrats that "Russian-backed" social media content played a central role in swinging the 2016 election. Russian meddling has even earned comparisons by lawmakers to Pearl Harbor, to "acts of war," and by Hillary Clinton to the attacks of 9/11 . And in an inadvertent way, these overblown comparisons were apt.

As during the aftermath of 9/11, the fallout from Russiagate has spawned a multimillion-dollar industry of pundits and self-styled experts eager to exploit the frenetic atmosphere for publicity and profits. Many of these figures have emerged out of the swamp that flowed from the war on terror and are gravitating toward the growing Russia fearmongering industrial complex in search of new opportunities. Few of these characters have become as prominent as Clint Watts.

So who is Watts, and how did he emerge seemingly from nowhere to become the star congressional witness on Russian meddling?

Dubious Expertise, Impressive Salesmanship

A former U.S. Army officer who spent years in obscurity at a defense industry funded think tank called the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), Watts has become a go-to source for cable news producers and print journalists on the subject of Russian bots, always available with a comment that reinforces the sense that America is under sustained cyborg attack. This September, his employers at FPRI hailed him as "the leading expert on developments related to Russian-backed efforts to not only influence the 2016 presidential election, but also to inflame racial and cultural divisions within the U.S. and across Europe."

Watts boasts an impressive-looking bio that is replete with fancy sounding fellowships at national security-oriented outfits, including George Washington University's Center Cyber and Homeland Security. His bio also indicates that he served on an FBI Joint Terror Task Force.

Though Watts is best known for his punditry on Russian interference, it's fair to say he is as much an expert on Russian affairs as Harvey Weinstein is a trusted voice on feminism. Indeed, Watts appears to speak no Russian, has no record of reporting or scholarship from inside Russia, and has produced little to no work of any discernible academic value on Russian affairs.

Whether or not he has the substance to support his claims of expertise, Watts has proven a talented salesman, catering to popular fears about Russian interference while he plies credulous lawmakers with ease.

Before Congress, a String of Deceptions

Back on March 30, as the narrative of Russian meddling gathered momentum, Watts made his first appearance before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

Seated at the front of a hearing room packed with reporters, Watts introduced Congress to concepts of Russian meddling that were novel at the time, but which have become part of Beltway newspeak. His testimony turned out to be a signal moment in Russiagate, helping transition the narrative of the scandal from Russia-Trump collusion to the wider issue of online influence.

In the widely publicized testimony, Watts explained to the panel of senators that he first noticed the pernicious presence of Russian social media bots after he co-authored an article in 2014 in Foreign Affairs titled, " The Good and The Bad of Ahrar al Sham ." The article urged the US to arm a group of Syrian Salafi insurgents known for its human rights abuses , sectarianism and off-and-on alliances with Al Qaeda. Watts and his co-authors insisted that Ahrar al-Sham was the best proxy force for wreaking havoc on the Syrian government weakening its allies in Iran and Russia. Right below the headline, Watts and his co-authors celebrated Ahrar al-Sham as "an Al Qaeda linked group worth befriending."

Watts rehashed the same argument at FPRI a year later, urging the U.S. government to harness jihadist terror as a weapon against Russia. "The U.S. at a minimum, through covert or semi-covert platforms, should take advantage and amplify these free alternative [jihadist] narratives to provide Russia some payback for recent years' aggression," he wrote. In another paper, Watts asked , "Why shouldn't the U.S. redirect some of the jihadi hatred towards those with the dirtiest hands in the Syrian conflict: Russia and Iran?" Watts did not specify whether the theater of covert warfare should be limited to the Syrian battlefield, or if he sought to encourage jihadists to carry out terrorist acts inside Russia and Iran.

The premise of these op-eds should have raised serious concerns about Watts and his colleagues, and even questions about their sanity. They had marketed themselves as national security experts, yet they were lobbying the US to "befriend" the allies of Al Qaeda, the group that brought down the Twin Towers. (Ahrar al-Sham was founded by Abu Khalid al-Suri, a Madrid bombing suspect who was named by Spanish investigators as Osama bin-Laden's courier.) Anyone cynical enough to put such ideas into public circulation should have expected a backlash. But when the inevitable wave of criticism came, Watts dismissed it all as a Russian bot attack.

Addressing the Senate panel, Watts said that those who took to social media to mock and criticize his Foreign Affairs article were, in fact, Russian bots. He provided no evidence to support the claim, and a look at his single tweet promoting the article shows that he was criticized only once (by @Navsteva, a Twitter user known for defending the Syrian government against regime change proponents, not an automated bot). Nevertheless, Watts painted the incident as proof that Russia had revived a Cold War information warfare strategy of "Active Measures," which was supposedly aimed at "crumbl[ing] democracies from the inside out [by] creating political divisions."

Next, Watts introduced his signature theme, claiming that Russia manipulated civil rights protests to exploit divisions in American society. Declaring that "pro-Russian" outlets were spreading "chaos in Black Lives Matter protests" by deploying active measures, Watts did not bother to say what those measures were. In fact, the only piece of proof he offered (in a Daily Beast transcript of his testimony) was a single link to an RT article that factually documented a squabble between Black Lives Matter protesters and white supremacists -- an incident that had been widely covered by other outlets, from the Houston Chronicle to the Washington Post . Watts did not explain how this one report by RT sowed any chaos, or whether it had any effect at all on actual events.

Watts then moved to the main course of his testimony, focusing on how Trump employed Russian "active measures" to attack his opponents. Watts told the Senate panel that the Russian-backed news outlets RT and Sputnik had produced a false report on the U.S. airbase in Incirlik, Turkey being "overrun by terrorists." He presented the Russian stories as the anchor for a massive influence operation that featured swarms of Russian bots across social media. And he claimed that then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort invoked the incident to deflect from negative media coverage, suggesting that Trump was coordinating strategy with the Kremlin. In reality, it was Watts who was spreading the fake news.

In the articles cited by Watts during his testimony, neither RT nor Sputnik made any reference to "terrorists" taking over Incirlik Airbase. Rather, these outlets compiled tweets by Turkish activists and sourced their coverage to a report by Hurriyet, one of Turkey's largest mainstream papers. In fact, the incident was reported by virtually every major Turkish news organization ( here , here , here and here ). What's more, the events appeared to have taken place approximately as RT and Sputnik reported it, with protesters readying to protect the airbase from a coup while Turkish police sealed the base's entrances and exits. A look at RT's coverage shows the network even downplayed the severity of the event, citing a tweet by a U.S.-based national security analysis group stating, "We are not finding any evidence of a coup or takeover." This stands entirely at odds with Watts' claim that RT exaggerated the incident to spark chaos.

Watts has pushed his bogus narrative of RT and Sputnik's Incirlik coverage in numerous outlets, including Politico . Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen echoed Watts' false account on the Senate floor while arguing for legislation to force RT out of the U.S. market on political grounds. And Jim Rutenberg, the New York Times' media correspondent, reproduced Watts' distorted account in a major feature on RT and Sputnik's "new theory of war." Almost no one, not one major media organization or public figure, has bothered to fact check these false claims, and few have questioned the agenda behind them.

Questions emailed to Watts via his employers at FPRI received no reply.

Another Watts Deception, This Time Discredited in Court

During his Senate testimony, Watts introduced a second, and even more distorted claim of Trump employing Russian "active measures" to attack his political foes. The details of the story are complex and difficult for a passive audience to absorb, which is probably why Watts has been able to get away with pushing it for so long.

Watts' testimony was the culmination of a mainstream media deception that forced an aspiring reporter out of his job, drove him to contemplate suicide, and ultimately prompted him to take matters into his own hands by suing his antagonists.

The episode began during a Trump rally at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign, when Trump read out an email purportedly from longtime Hillary Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal (the father of this writer), hoping to embarrass Clinton over Benghazi. The text of the email turned out to be part of a column written by the pro-Clinton Newsweek columnist Kurt Eichenwald, not an email by Blumenthal.

The source of Trump's falsehood appeared to have been a report by Bill Moran, then a reporter for Sputnik, the news service funded by the Russian government. Having confused Eichenwald's writing for a Blumenthal email, Moran scrubbed his erroneous article within 20 minutes. Somehow, Moran's retracted article had found its way onto the Trump campaign's radar, a not atypical event for a campaign that had relied on material from far-out sites like Infowars to undercut its opponents.

In his column at Newsweek, Eichenwald framed Moran's honest mistake as the leading edge of a secret Russian influence operation. With help from pro-Clinton elements, Eichenwald's column went viral, earning him slots on CNN and MSNBC, where he howled about the nefarious Russian-Trump-Wikileaks plot he believed he had just exposed. (Glenn Greenwald was perhaps the only reporter with a national platform to highlight Eichenwald's falsifications .) Moran was fired as a result of the fallout, and would have to spend the next several months fighting to correct the record.

When Moran appealed to Eichenwald for a public clarification, Eichenwald staunchly refused. Instead, he offered Moran a job at the New Republic in exchange for his silence and warned him, "If you go public, you'll regret it." (Eichenwald had no role at the New Republic or any clear ability to influence the magazine's hiring decisions.) Moran refused to cooperate, prompting Eichenwald to publish a follow-up piece painting himself as the victim of a Russian "active measures" campaign, and to cast Moran once again as a foreign agent.

When Watts revived Eichenwald's bogus version of events in his Senate testimony, Moran began to spiral into the depths of depression. He even entertained thoughts of suicide. But he ultimately decided to fight, filing a lawsuit against Newsweek's parent company for defamation and libel.

Representing himself in court, Moran elicited a settlement from Newsweek that forced the magazine to scrub all of Eichenwald's articles about him -- a tacit admission that they were false from top to bottom. This meant that the most consequential claim Watts made before the Senate was also a whopping lie.

The day after Watts' deception-laden appearance, he was nevertheless transformed from an obscure national security into a cable news star, with invites from Morning Joe, Rachel Maddow, Meet the Press, and the liberal comedian Samantha Bee, among many others. His testimony received coverage from the gamut of major news outlets, and even earned him a fawning profile from CNN. From out of the blue, Watts had become the star witness of Russiagate, and one of corporate media's favorite pundits.

FPRI, a Pro-War Think Tank Founded by White Supremacist Eugenicists

Before he emerged in the spotlight of Russiagate, Watts languished at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, earning little name recognition outside the insular world of national security pundits. Based in Philadelphia, the FPRI has been described by journalist Mark Ames as "one of the looniest (and spookiest) extreme-right think tanks since the early Cold War days, promoting 'winnable' nuclear war, maximum confrontation with Russia, and attacking anti-colonialism as dangerously unworkable."

Daniel Pipes, the arch-Islamophobe pundit and former FPRI fellow, offered a similar characterization of the think tank, albeit from an alternately opposed angle. "Put most baldly, we have always advocated an activist U.S. foreign policy," Pipes said in a 1991 address to FPRI. He added that the think tank's staff "is not shy about the use of force; were we members of Congress in January 1991, all of us would not only have voted with President Bush and Operation Desert Storm, we would have led the charge."

FPRI was co-founded by Robert Strausz-Hupé, a far-right Austrian emigre, with help from conservative corporations and covert funding from the CIA From the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, Strausz-Hupé gathered a "Philadelphia School" of Cold War hardliners to develop a strategy for protracted war against the Soviet Union. His brain trust included FPRI co-founder Stefan Possony, an Austrian fascist who was a board member of the World Anti-Communist League, the international fascist organization described by journalists Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson as a network of "those responsible for death squads, apartheid, torture, and the extermination of European Jewry." True to his fascist roots, Possony co-authored a racialist tract, " The Geography of Intellect ," that argued that blacks were biologically inferior and that the people of the global South were "genetically unpromising." Strausz-Hupé seized on Possony's racialist theories to inveigh against anti-colonial movements led by "populations incapable of rational thought."

While clamoring for a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union -- and acknowledging that their preferred strategy would cause mass casualties in American cities -- Strausz-Hupé and his band of hawks developed a monomaniacal obsession with Russian propaganda. By the time of the Cuban missile crisis, they were stricken with paranoia, arguing on the pages of the New York Times that filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was a Soviet useful idiot whose film, Dr. Strangelove , advanced "the principal Communist objectives to drive a wedge between the American people and their military leaders."

Ultimately, Strausz-Hupé's fanaticism cost him an ambassadorship, as Sen. William Fulbright scuttled his appointment to serve in Morocco on the grounds that his "hard line, no compromise" approach to communism could shatter the delicate balance of diplomacy. Today, he is remembered fondly on FPRI's website as "an intellectual and intellectual impresario, administrator, statesman, and visionary." His militaristic legacy continues thanks to the prolific presence -- and bellicose politics -- of Watts.

The Paranoid Style

This year, FPRI dedicated its annual gala to honoring Watts' success in mainstreaming the narrative of Russian online meddling. Since I first transcribed a Soundcloud recording of Watts' keynote address, the file has been mysteriously scrubbed from the internet. It is unclear what prompted the removal, however, it is easy to understand why Watts would not want his comments examined by a critical listener. His speech offered a window into a paranoid mindset with a tendency for overblown, unverifiable claims about Russian influence.

While much of the speech was a rehash of Watts' Senate testimony, he spent an unusual amount of time describing the threat he believed Russian intelligence agents posed to his own security. "If you speak up too much, you'll get knocked down," Watts said, claiming that think tank fellows who had been too vocal about Russian meddling had seen their laptops "burned up by malware."

"If someone rises up in prominence, they will suddenly be -- whoof! -- swiped down out of nowhere by some crazy disclosure from their email," Watts added, referring to unspecified Russian retaliatory measures. As usual, he didn't produce concrete evidence or offer any examples.

"Anybody remember the reporters that were outed after the election? Or maybe they tossed up a question to the Clinton campaign and they were gone the next day?" he asked his audience. "That's how it goes."

It was unclear which reporters Watts was referring to, or what incident he could have possibly been alluding to. He offered no details, only innuendo about the state of siege Kremlin actors had supposedly imposed on him and his freedom-fighting colleagues. He even predicted he'd be "hacked and cyber attacked when this recording comes out."

According to Watts, Russian "active measures" had singlehandedly augmented Republican opinion in support of the Kremlin. "It is the greatest success in influence operations in the history of the world," Watts confidently proclaimed. He contrasted Russia's success with his own failures as an American agent of influence working for the U.S. military, a saga in his career that remains largely unexamined.

Domestic Agent of Influence

"I worked in influence operations in counter-terrorism for 15 years," Watts boasted to his audience at FPRI. "We didn't break one or two percent [increase in the approval rating of US foreign policy] in fifteen years and we spent billions a year in tax dollars doing it. I was paid off of those programs. We had almost no success throughout the Middle East."

By Watts' own admission, he had been part of a secret propaganda campaign aimed at manipulating the opinions of Middle Easterners in favor of the hostile American military operating in their midst. And he failed massively, wasting "billions a year in tax dollars."

Given his penchant for deception, this may have been yet another tall tale aimed at burnishing his image as an internet era James Bond. But if the story was even partially true, Watts had inadvertently exposed a severe scandal that, in a fairer world, might have triggered congressional hearings.

Whatever took place, it appears that Watts and his Cold Warrior colleagues are now waging another expensive influence operation, this time directed against the American public. By deploying deceptions, half-truths and hyperbole with the full consent of Congress and in collaboration with the mainstream press, they have managed to convince a majority of Americans that Russia is "trying to knock us down and take us over," as Watts remarked at the FPRI's gala.

In just a matter of months, public consent for an unprecedented array of hostile measures against Russia, from sanctions and consular raids to arbitrary crackdowns on Russian-backed news organizations, has been assiduously manufactured.

It was not until this summer, however, that the influence operation Watts helped establish reached critical capacity. He had approached one of Washington's most respected think tanks, the German Marshall Fund, and secured support for an initiative called the Alliance for Securing Democracy. The new initiative became responsible for a daily blacklist of subversive, "pro-Russian" media outlets, targeting them with the backing of a who's who of national security honchos, from Bill Kristol to former CIA director and ex-Hillary Clinton surrogate Michael Morrell, along with favorable promotion from some of the country's most respected news organizations.

In the next installment of this investigation, we will see how a collection of cranks, counter-terror retreads and online vigilantes overseen by the German Marshall Fund have waged a search-and-destroy mission against dissident media under the guise of combating Russian "active measures," and how the mainstream press has enabled their censorious agenda.

Read part two here .

Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project at AlterNet, and the award-winning author of " Goliath ," " Republican Gomorrah ," and " The 51 Day War ." He is the co-host of the podcast, Moderate Rebels . Follow him on Twitter at @MaxBlumenthal .

Related Articles

[Nov 28, 2017] The Duplicitous Superpower by Ted Galen Carpenter

Highly recommended!
At some point quantity of duplicity turns into quality. and affect international relations. Economic decline can speed this process up. The US elite has way too easy life since 1991. And that destroyed the tiny patina of self-restraint that it has during Cold War with negative (hugely negative) consequences first of all for the US population. Empire building is a costly project even if it supported by the dominance of neoliberal ideology and technological advances in computers and telecommunication. . The idea of "full spectrum dominance" was a disaster. But the realization of this came too late and at huge cost for the world and for the US population. Russia decimated its own elite twice in the last century. In might be the time for the USA to follow the Russia example and do it once in XXI century. If we thing about Hillary Clinton Jon McCain, Joe Biden, Niki Haley, as member of the US elite it is clear that "something is rotten in the state of Denmark).
Notable quotes:
"... How Washington's chronic deceit -- especially towards Russia -- has sabotaged U.S. foreign policy. ..."
"... Unfortunately, North Korean leaders have abundant reasons to be wary of such U.S. enticements. Trump's transparent attempt to renege on Washington's commitment to the deal with Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) -- which the United States and other major powers signed in 2015 to curb Tehran's nuclear program -- certainly does not increase Pyongyang's incentive to sign a similar agreement. His decision to decertify Iran's compliance with the JCPOA, even when the United Nations confirms that Tehran is adhering to its obligations, appears more than a little disingenuous. ..."
"... There seems to be no limit to Washington's desire to crowd Russia. NATO has even added the Baltic republics, which had been part of the Soviet Union itself. In early 2008, President George W. Bush unsuccessfully tried to admit Georgia and Ukraine, which would have engineered yet another alliance move eastward. By that time, Vladimir Putin and other Russian leaders were beyond furious. ..."
"... The timing of Bush's attempted ploy could scarcely have been worse. It came on the heels of Russia's resentment at another example of U.S. duplicity. In 1999, Moscow had reluctantly accepted a UN mandate to cover NATO's military intervention against Serbia, a long-standing Russian client. The alliance airstrikes and subsequent moves to detach and occupy Serbia's restless province of Kosovo for the ostensible reason of protecting innocent civilians from atrocities was the same "humanitarian" justification that the West would use subsequently in Libya. ..."
"... Nine years after the initial Kosovo intervention, the United States adopted an evasive policy move, showing utter contempt for Russia's wishes and interests in the process. Kosovo wanted to declare its formal independence from Serbia, but it was clear that such a move would face a certain Russian (and probable Chinese) veto in the UN Security Council. Washington and an ad-hoc coalition of European Union countries brazenly bypassed the Council and approved Pristina's independence declaration. It was an extremely controversial move. Not even all EU members were on board with the policy, since some of them (e.g., Spain) had secessionist problems of their own. ..."
"... Russia's leaders protested vehemently and warned that the West's unauthorized action established a dangerous, destabilizing international precedent. Washington rebuffed their complaints, arguing that the Kosovo situation was unique. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns made that point explicitly in a February 2008 State Department briefing. Both the illogic and the hubris of that position were breathtaking. ..."
"... This -- in the context of the long history of US and EU deceit and duplicity in their dealings with Russia is why Russia is supporting Catalan separatism (e.g. RT en Espańol's constant attacks on Spain and promotion of the separatists). The US and the EU effectively gave Russia permission to do this back in the 1990s. We set a precedent for their actions in Catalonia -- and, more famously, in Ukraine. ..."
"... One could scarcely ask for a better summary of why the Cold War seems, sadly, to be reheating as well as why Democratic attempts to blame it on Russian meddling are a equally sad evasion of their share of bipartisan responsibility for creating this mess. Reinhold Niebuhr's prayer for, "the courage to change the things I can," is painfully appropriate. ..."
"... "No one forced any eastern European country to join NATO and the EU – decisions that indicate these countries feared a Russian revival after the collapse of the USSR. Russia always believed that these countries were in their near abroad or backyard." ..."
"... Putin is a rationally calculating man. He has made his strategic objectives well known. They are economic. He sees Russia as the great linchpin of the pan-Eurasian One Belt/One Road (OB/OR) initiative proposed by China as well as the AIIB. In that construct, Europe and East Asia are Russia's customers and bilateral trading partners. Military conquest would wreck that vision and Putin knows it. ..."
"... He's been remarkably restrained when egged on by Big Mouth Nikki Haley, Mad Dog Mattis or that other Pentagon nutcase Phillip Breedlove (former Supreme Commander of NATO) who have gone out of their way to demonize Russia. Unfortunately, with those Pentagon hacks whispering in Trump's ear, too much war-mongering is never enough. ..."
"... U.S. foreign policy is an unmitigated disaster. The War Machine Hammer wrecks everything that it touches while sending the befuddled taxpayers the bill. ..."
"... When you meet individual Americans, they are frequently so nice and level-headed that you are perplexed trying to imagine where their leaders come from. And while we're on that subject, America does not actually have a foreign policy, as such. Its foreign policy is to bend every other living soul on the planet to the service of America. ..."
Nov 28, 2017 | www.theamericanconservative.com

How Washington's chronic deceit -- especially towards Russia -- has sabotaged U.S. foreign policy.

For any country, the foundation of successful diplomacy is a reputation for credibility and reliability. Governments are wary of concluding agreements with a negotiating partner that violates existing commitments and has a record of duplicity. Recent U.S. administrations have ignored that principle, and their actions have backfired majorly, damaging American foreign policy in the process.

The consequences of previous deceit are most evident in the ongoing effort to achieve a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis. During his recent trip to East Asia, President Trump urged Kim Jong-un's regime to "come to the negotiating table" and "do the right thing" -- relinquish the country's nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. Presumably, that concession would lead to a lifting (or at least an easing) of international economic sanctions and a more normal relationship between Pyongyang and the international community.

Unfortunately, North Korean leaders have abundant reasons to be wary of such U.S. enticements. Trump's transparent attempt to renege on Washington's commitment to the deal with Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) -- which the United States and other major powers signed in 2015 to curb Tehran's nuclear program -- certainly does not increase Pyongyang's incentive to sign a similar agreement. His decision to decertify Iran's compliance with the JCPOA, even when the United Nations confirms that Tehran is adhering to its obligations, appears more than a little disingenuous.

North Korea is likely focused on another incident that raises even greater doubts about U.S. credibility. Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi capitulated on the nuclear issue in December of 2003, abandoning his country's nuclear program and reiterating a commitment to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In exchange, the United States and its allies lifted economic sanctions and welcomed Libya back into the community of respectable nations. Barely seven years later, though, Washington and its NATO partners double-crossed Qaddafi, launching airstrikes and cruise missile attacks to assist rebels in their campaign to overthrow the Libyan strongman. North Korea and other powers took notice of Qaddafi's fate, making the already difficult task of getting a de-nuclearization agreement with Pyongyang nearly impossible.

The Libya intervention sullied America's reputation in another way. Washington and its NATO allies prevailed on the UN Security Council to pass a resolution endorsing a military intervention to protect innocent civilians. Russia and China refrained from vetoing that resolution after Washington's assurances that military action would be limited in scope and solely for humanitarian purposes. Once the assault began, it quickly became evident that the resolution was merely a fig leaf for another U.S.-led regime-change war.

Beijing, and especially Moscow, understandably felt duped. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates succinctly described Russia's reaction, both short-term and long-term:

The Russians later firmly believed they had been deceived on Libya. They had been persuaded to abstain at the UN on the grounds that the resolution provided for a humanitarian mission to prevent the slaughter of civilians. Yet as the list of bombing targets steadily grew, it became obvious that very few targets were off-limits, and that NATO was intent on getting rid of Qaddafi. Convinced they had been tricked, the Russians would subsequently block any such future resolutions, including against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

The Libya episode was hardly the first time the Russians concluded that U.S. leaders had cynically misled them . Moscow asserts that when East Germany unraveled in 1990, both U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and West German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher offered verbal assurances that, if Russia accepted a unified Germany within NATO, the alliance would not expand beyond Germany's eastern border. The official U.S. position that there was nothing in writing affirming such a limitation is correct -- and the clarity, extent, and duration of any verbal commitment to refrain from enlargement are certainly matters of intense controversy . But invoking a "you didn't get it in writing" dodge does not inspire another government's trust.

There seems to be no limit to Washington's desire to crowd Russia. NATO has even added the Baltic republics, which had been part of the Soviet Union itself. In early 2008, President George W. Bush unsuccessfully tried to admit Georgia and Ukraine, which would have engineered yet another alliance move eastward. By that time, Vladimir Putin and other Russian leaders were beyond furious.

The timing of Bush's attempted ploy could scarcely have been worse. It came on the heels of Russia's resentment at another example of U.S. duplicity. In 1999, Moscow had reluctantly accepted a UN mandate to cover NATO's military intervention against Serbia, a long-standing Russian client. The alliance airstrikes and subsequent moves to detach and occupy Serbia's restless province of Kosovo for the ostensible reason of protecting innocent civilians from atrocities was the same "humanitarian" justification that the West would use subsequently in Libya.

Nine years after the initial Kosovo intervention, the United States adopted an evasive policy move, showing utter contempt for Russia's wishes and interests in the process. Kosovo wanted to declare its formal independence from Serbia, but it was clear that such a move would face a certain Russian (and probable Chinese) veto in the UN Security Council. Washington and an ad-hoc coalition of European Union countries brazenly bypassed the Council and approved Pristina's independence declaration. It was an extremely controversial move. Not even all EU members were on board with the policy, since some of them (e.g., Spain) had secessionist problems of their own.

Russia's leaders protested vehemently and warned that the West's unauthorized action established a dangerous, destabilizing international precedent. Washington rebuffed their complaints, arguing that the Kosovo situation was unique. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns made that point explicitly in a February 2008 State Department briefing. Both the illogic and the hubris of that position were breathtaking.

It is painful for any American to admit that the United States has acquired a well-deserved reputation for duplicity in its foreign policy. But the evidence for that proposition is quite substantial. Indeed, disingenuous U.S. behavior regarding NATO expansion and the resolution of Kosovo's political status may be the single most important factor for the poisoned bilateral relationship with Moscow. The U.S. track record of duplicity and betrayal is one reason why prospects for resolving the North Korean nuclear issue through diplomacy are so bleak.

Actions have consequences, and Washington's reputation for disingenuous behavior has complicated America's own foreign policy objectives. This is a textbook example of a great power shooting itself in the foot.

Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of 10 books, the contributing editor of 10 books, and the author of more than 700 articles and policy studies on international affairs.

Magdi , says: November 28, 2017 at 5:46 am

you are dead ON! I have been saying this since IRAQ
fiasco (not one Iraqi onboard on 9/11) we should have invaded egypt and saudi arabia. how the foolish american public(sheep) just buys the american propaganda is beyond me.. don't blame the Russians one spittle!!
Herbert Heebert , says: November 28, 2017 at 7:47 am
A few points:

1. I think North Korea might also be looking at the example of Ukraine, and Russia's clear violation of the Budapest Memorandum.

2. It's silly to put so much weight on Baker's verbal assurance re: NATO expansion.

3. I would suggest Mr. Carpenter make a list of Russia's betrayals. But I have the impression he is not interested.

Viriato , says: November 28, 2017 at 9:25 am
Excellent piece. The US really has destroyed its credibility over the years.

This points Ted Galen Carpenter makes in this piece go a long way toward explaining Russia's destabilizing behavior in recent years.

One point in particular jumped out at me:

"Kosovo wanted to declare its formal independence from Serbia, but it was clear that such a move would face a certain Russian (and probable Chinese) veto in the UN Security Council. Washington and an ad-hoc coalition of European Union countries brazenly bypassed the Council and approved Pristina's independence declaration. It was an extremely controversial move. Not even all EU members were on board with the policy, since some of them (e.g., Spain) had secessionist problems of their own. Russia's leaders protested vehemently and warned that the West's unauthorized action established a dangerous, destabilizing international precedent. Washington rebuffed their complaints, arguing that the Kosovo situation was unique."

This -- in the context of the long history of US and EU deceit and duplicity in their dealings with Russia is why Russia is supporting Catalan separatism (e.g. RT en Espańol's constant attacks on Spain and promotion of the separatists). The US and the EU effectively gave Russia permission to do this back in the 1990s. We set a precedent for their actions in Catalonia -- and, more famously, in Ukraine.

This

craigsummers , says: November 28, 2017 at 10:09 am
Mr. Carpenter

You have made a reasonable case that the US and Europe have not always been reliable, but the expansion of NATO is not one of them. No one forced any eastern European country to join NATO and the EU – decisions that indicate these countries feared a Russian revival after the collapse of the USSR. Russia always believed that these countries were in their near abroad or backyard.

The idea of a "sphere of influence" is a cold war relic which Russia invoked with the Medvedev Doctrine in 2008. This is currently on display in Ukraine. Russia is aggressively denying Ukraine their sovereignty. Who could possibly blame former Soviet Block countries for hightailing it to NATO during a lull in Russian aggression?

DOD , says: November 28, 2017 at 10:23 am
One could scarcely ask for a better summary of why the Cold War seems, sadly, to be reheating as well as why Democratic attempts to blame it on Russian meddling are a equally sad evasion of their share of bipartisan responsibility for creating this mess. Reinhold Niebuhr's prayer for, "the courage to change the things I can," is painfully appropriate.
Michael Kenny , says: November 28, 2017 at 12:12 pm
The whole weakness of the author's argument is a classic American one: very few Americans seem to be able to get their heads around the fact that the Soviet Union ceased to exist 26 years ago! They are still totally locked into their cold war mentality. He thus unquestioningly accepts Putin's pre-1789 "sphere of influence" theory in which there are "superior" and "inferior" races, with only the superior races being entitled to have a sovereign state and the inferior races being forced to submit to being ruled by foreigners. Mr Carpenter really needs to put his cold war mentality aside and come into the 21st century!

Most seriously of all, Mr Carpenter offers no solution for improving relations between the US and Russia. Saying that past US actions were wrong, even if true, says nothing about the present and offers nothing for the future. At best, Mr Carpenter's article is empty moralising.

And the unspoken, but perfectly obvious, subtext, namely that the US should "atone for its sins" by capitulating to Putin, is morally reprehensible and politically unrealistic. Since, by Mr Carpenter's own account, the problem is caused by US wrongdoing, isn't it for the US to put things right (for example, by getting Putin out of Ukraine) and not simply make a mess in someone else's country and then run for home with its tail between its legs? Who gave Americans the right to give away other people's countries?

Will Harrington , says: November 28, 2017 at 12:58 pm
Herbert Heevert

The one problem with your argument if, you are an american as I am, is that Russia is not acting in our names. If the US government, supposedly a government of, by, and for the people breaks its word, then you and I are foresworn oathbreakers as well because the government is (theoretically, at least) acting on OUR authority.

Will Harrington , says: November 28, 2017 at 1:15 pm
Craig Summers

Really?! "Russia always believed that these countries were in their near abroad or backyard."

I think that if you look at a map or a globe, you will find that this is not a belief but a fact. How you could overlook this, I don't know.

"The idea of a "sphere of influence" is a cold war relic "

If you are going to try and use history to influence opinion, it is best to check your facts. This is a very old concept.What do you think the Great Game between Imperial Russia and the British Empire in Central Asia was about? For that matter, what we call the Byzantine Commonwealth was a clearly attempt by the Romaoi to establish a political, cultural, and religious sphere of influence to support the power of the Empire, much as the United States has been doing over the past several decades.

NoldorElf , says: November 28, 2017 at 1:31 pm
You could make the case that Iraq too in 2003 is another reason why the Russians and the North Koreans distrust the US.

At this point, it is fairly certain that the Bush Administration knew that Saddam was not building nuclear weapons of mass destruction, which is what Bush strongly implied in his ramp up to the war.

One other takeaway that the North Koreans mag have from the 2003 Iraq invasion is that the US will lie any way to get what it wants.

Not saying that Russia or North Korea are perfect. Far from it. But the US needs to take a hard look in the mirror.

Jeeves , says: November 28, 2017 at 1:42 pm
What Craigsummers said.

And, Mr. Carpenter, when you have time off from your job as Russian apologist, learn the meaning of "verbal." It's not a synonym for "oral."

SteveM , says: November 28, 2017 at 1:49 pm
Re: craigsummers, "No one forced any eastern European country to join NATO and the EU – decisions that indicate these countries feared a Russian revival after the collapse of the USSR. Russia always believed that these countries were in their near abroad or backyard."

Except both here and abroad, the Global Cop Elites in Washington shape the strategy space through propaganda, fear-mongering and subversion. Moreover, the Eastern European countries are happy to join NATO when it's the American taxpayers who foot a large percentage of the bill.

Standard U.S. MO: create the threat, inflate the threat, send in the War Machine at massive cost to sustain the threat.

Rather than being broadened, NATO should have been ratcheted back after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the U.S. military presence in Europe massively reduced. Then normalized relations between Europe and Russia would have been designed and developed by Europe and Russia. Not the 800 pound Gorilla Global Cop that is good at little more than breaking things. (And perversely, after flushing TRILLIONS of tax dollars down the toilet, duping Americans to wildly applaud the "Warrior-Heroes" for a job well done.)

b. , says: November 28, 2017 at 2:33 pm
The 2008 war between Georgia and Russia was, per observers at the time, in Russian word and thought directly linked to the Balkan 's precedent.

The subtext here – of nation states, sovereignty, separatism and secessionist movements – is even more relevant with respect to US-China relationships. Since WW2 and that brief, transient monopoly on nuclear weapons, US foreign policy has eroded the Peace of Westphalia while attempting to erect an "international order" of convenience on top if it.

Both China and Russia know that nothing will stop the expansionism of US "national interests". In response to the doctrinal aspirations of the Soviets, the US has committed itself to an ideology that is just a greedy and relentless. In retrospect, it is hard to tell how many decades ago the Cold War stopped being about opposition to Soviet ideology, and instead became about "projecting" – in every sense of the word – an equally globalist US ideology.

We are the redcoats now. Now wonder the neocons and neolibs are shouting "Russia!" at every opportunity.

Janek , says: November 28, 2017 at 2:45 pm
I am amazed how many masochistic conservatives are in USA conservative circles especially in the CATO institute. Mr. T. G. Carpenter, as is clear from not only this and other articles, is a staunch defender of Yalta and proponent of Yalta 2 after the Cold War ended. As far as I remember Libya was the hatchet job of the Europeans especially the French and British. B. Obama at first didn't want to attack Libya but gave in after lobbying by the French, British and the neoliberal/neo-conservative lobby and supporters of the Arab Spring in the USA. America lost credibility after and only since the conservatives neoliberals and neocons manipulated USA and the West's foreign politics for thirty plus years. USA is still a democratic country so it is easy to blame everything on the US. In today's Putin's Russia similar critics of the Russian politics wouldn't be so "easy".

The Central Europe doesn't want Russia's sphere of influence precisely because of centuries of Russian occupation and atrocities in there especially after WW2, brutal and bloody invasion of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Cuban Crisis, Afghanistan, Chechnya etc. Now you have infiltration by Russia of the American electoral process and political system and some conservatives still can't connect the dots and see what is going on. I wonder why the western conservatives and US in particular are such great supporters of Russia. If Russia should be allowed to keep her sphere of influence after the Cold War then what was the reason to fight the Cold War in the first place. Wouldn't it be easier to surrender to Russia right after WW2.

SteveM , says: November 28, 2017 at 2:45 pm
One other observation about Russia that should be made but isn't is that the Russia-phobes can't point to an actual motive for Russian military aggression. There is no "Putin Plan" for conquest and domination by Russia like in Das Kapital or Hitler's Mein Kampf . What strategic value would Russia see from overrunning Poland and then having to perpetually suppress 35 million resistors? Or retaking the Baltic states that have only minority ethnic Russian populations?

Putin is a rationally calculating man. He has made his strategic objectives well known. They are economic. He sees Russia as the great linchpin of the pan-Eurasian One Belt/One Road (OB/OR) initiative proposed by China as well as the AIIB. In that construct, Europe and East Asia are Russia's customers and bilateral trading partners. Military conquest would wreck that vision and Putin knows it.

In the gangster movies, a mob boss often says that he hates bloodshed because it's bad for business. That's Putin. He's been remarkably restrained when egged on by Big Mouth Nikki Haley, Mad Dog Mattis or that other Pentagon nutcase Phillip Breedlove (former Supreme Commander of NATO) who have gone out of their way to demonize Russia. Unfortunately, with those Pentagon hacks whispering in Trump's ear, too much war-mongering is never enough.

U.S. foreign policy is an unmitigated disaster. The War Machine Hammer wrecks everything that it touches while sending the befuddled taxpayers the bill.

Mark , says: November 28, 2017 at 3:00 pm
"And, Mr. Carpenter, when you have time off from your job as Russian apologist, learn the meaning of "verbal." It's not a synonym for "oral."

I imagine you thought you were being funny; and you were, just not in the way you foresaw. In fact, verbal is a synonym for oral; to wit, "spoken rather than written; oral. "a verbal agreement". Synonyms: oral, spoken, stated, said, verbalized, expressed."

Of course anyone who attempts to portray the United States as duplicitous and sneaky (those are synonyms!)is immediately branded a "Russian apologist". As if there are certain countries which automatically have no rights, and can be assumed to be lying every time they speak. Except they're not, and the verbal agreement that NATO would not advance further east in exchange for Russian cooperation has been acknowledged by western principals who were present.

As SteveM implies, NATO's reason for being evaporated with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and was dead as a dodo with the breakup of the Soviet Union. Everything since has been a rationalization for keeping it going, including regular demonizations of imaginary enemies until they become real enemies. You can't just 'join NATO' because it's the in-crowd, you know. No, there are actually criteria, one of which is the premise that your acceptance materially enhances the security of the alliance. Pretty comical imagining Montenegro in that context, isn't it?

When you meet individual Americans, they are frequently so nice and level-headed that you are perplexed trying to imagine where their leaders come from. And while we're on that subject, America does not actually have a foreign policy, as such. Its foreign policy is to bend every other living soul on the planet to the service of America.

[Nov 08, 2017] The Plot to Scapegoat Russia How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Putin by Dan Kovalik

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Kovalik's historical excursion takes in the Soviet Union. Clearly, many of the U. S. military interventions described in this valuable book wouldn't have occurred if the Soviet Union still existed. Beyond that, Kovalik says, "the Soviet Union, did wield sizable political and ideological influence in the world for some time, due to the appeal of its socialist message as well as its critical role in winning [World War] II." ..."
"... Ultimately, Kovalik sides with Martin Luther King, who remarked that, 'The US is on the wrong side of the world-wide revolution' – and with Daniel Ellsberg's clarification: 'The US is not on the wrong side; it is the wrong side.'" ..."
Jun 09, 2017 | www.amazon.com

Review " A powerful contradiction to the present US narrative of the world . . . As shown here, fake news is thriving in Washington, DC."-- Oliver Stone , Academy Award winning director and screenwriter

" The Plot to Scapegoat Russia is a beautifully written, uncommonly coherent, and very compelling treatise on the issues facing America today... a troubling indictment of where we've been and where we're headed. Moreover, this book is profoundly important , and a timely retrospective review of American foreign policy misadventures since the advent of the Cold War." -- Phillip F. Nelson , author of LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination and LBJ: From Mastermind to "The Colossus"

" The Plot to Scapegoat Russia underscores how the CIA's infiltration and shaping of the media, which began in the 1950s, successfully continues today. A very worthwhile account for anyone who wants to understand how 'reality' is manufactured, while 'real truth' is murdered and buried." -- Peter Janney , author of Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace

"At a time when the U.S. military budget is again soaring to enrich the oligarchs, this timely and thought-provoking book turns Orwellian 'double-think' on its head in a cogent analysis of what's really behind all the saber-rattling against Russia. In a scholarly but also deeply personal and fluidly written work , Dan Kovalik pulls no punches in dissecting the history of how America has justified its own imperialistic aims through the Cold War era and right up to the current anti-Putin hysteria." -- Dick Russell , New York Times bestselling author of Horsemen of the Apocalypse: The Men Who Are Destroying Life on Earth and What It Means to Our Children

" The Plot to Scapegoat Russia confronts the timeliest of subjects, the effort to resuscitate the Cold War by blaming Russian president Vladimir Putin for interfering in the 2016 presidential campaign on behalf of Donald Trump, an effort pursued by CIA and the Democratic Party working in tandem. Kovalik establishes... that not a scintilla of evidence has emerged to grant credibility to this self-serving fantasy... [and he] deftly eviscerates the mainstream press . Reading [this book] will be salutary, illuminating and more than instructive ." -- Joan Mellen , author of Faustian Bargains: Lyndon Johnson and Mac Wallace in the Robber Baron Culture of Texas

William T. Whitney Jr on May 28, 2017

Review of "The Plot to Scapegoat Russia"

Beating up on Russia; history tells why
By William T. Whitney Jr. .

Lawyer and human rights activist Dan Kovalik has written a valuable book. He looked at a recent U. S. political development in terms of history and then skewered it. His new book, "The Plot to Scapegoat Russia," looks at mounting assaults against Russia that increased during the Obama administration and that spokespersons for the Democratic Party, among others, are promoting.

The CIA, he claims, without going into specifics, is engaged in anti-Russian activities. For Kovalik, "the CIA is a nefarious, criminal organization which often misleads the American public and government into wars and misadventures."

Kovalik devotes much of his book to what he regards as precedents for the current dark turn in U.S. – Russian relations. Toward that end, he surveys the history of U.S. foreign interventions since World War II. He confirms that the United States government is indeed habituated to aggressive adventurism abroad. That's something many readers already know, but Kovalik contributes significantly by establishing that U.S. hostility against Russia ranks as a chapter in that long story.

But what's the motivation for military assaults and destabilizing projects? And, generally, why all the wars? The author's historical survey provides answers. He finds that the scenarios he describes are connected. Treating them as a whole, he gives them weight and thus provides an intellectual weapon for the anti-imperialist cause. Kovalik, putting history to work, moves from the issue of U.S.-Russian antagonism to the more over-arching problem of threats to human survival. That's his major contribution.

His highly-recommended book offers facts and analyses so encompassing as to belie its small size. The writing is clear, evocative, and eminently readable; his narrative is that of a story – teller. Along the way, as a side benefit, Kovalik recalls the causes and outrage that fired up activists who were his contemporaries.

He testifies to a new Cold War. Doing so, he argues that the anti-communist rational for the earlier Cold War was a cover for something else, a pretext. In his words: "the Cold War, at least from the vantage point of the US, had little to do with fighting 'Communism,' and more to do with making the world safe for corporate plunder." Once more Russia is an enemy of the United States, but now it's a capitalist country.

That's mysterious; explanation is in order. Readers, however, may be hungry to know about the "plot" advertised in the book's title. We recommend patience. History and its recurring patterns come first for this author. They enable him to account for U. S. – Russian relations that are contradictory and, most importantly, for the U.S. propensity for war-making. After that he tells about a plot.

Kovalik describes how, very early, reports of CIA machinations from former agents of the spy organization expanded his political awareness, as did a trip to Nicaragua. There he gained first-hand knowledge of CIA atrocities, of deaths and destruction at the hands of the Contras, anti- Sandinista paramilitaries backed by the CIA His book goes on fully and dramatically to describe murders and chaos orchestrated by the United States and/or the CIA in El Salvador, Colombia, and in the South America of Operation Condor. Kovalic discusses the U.S. war in Vietnam, occupation and war in Korea, nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, nuclear testing and dying in the Marshall Islands, and the CIA's recruitment of the anti-Soviet Mujahedeen in Afghan¬istan. He recounts U. S. - instigated coups in Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954; and Chile, 1973.

These projects were about keeping "the world safe from the threat of Soviet totalitarianism" – in other words, anti-communism. But then the USSR disappeared, and the search was on for a new pretext. The Clinton administration evoked "humanitarian intervention," and continued the intrusions: in Ruanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo (on behalf of "US mining interests"), Yugoslavia, and Libya.

In Kovalik's telling, the U. S. government eventually settled upon the notion of "American exceptionalism," that is to say, "the belief that the US is a uniquely benign actor in the world, spreading peace and democracy." Thus armed, the U. S. military exported terror to Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen (via its Saudi Arabian proxy), and Honduras, through a U. S. facilitated military coup. The book catalogues other episodes, other places. Along the way on his excursion, Kovalik contrasts U. S. pretensions and brutal deeds with the relatively benign nature of alleged Russian outrages.

Good relations with Russia, he says, would be "simply bad for business, in particular the business of war which so profoundly undergirds the US economy As of 2015, the US had at least 800 military bases in over 70 nations, while Britain, France and Russia had only 30 military bases combined." And, "under Obama alone, the US had Special Forces deployed in about 138 countries." Further, "The US's outsized military exists not only to ensure the US's quite unjust share of the world's riches, but also to ensure that those riches are not shared with the poor huddled masses in this country."

Kovalik highlights the disaster that overwhelmed Russia as a fledgling capitalist nation: life expectancy plummeted, the poverty rate was 75 percent, and investments fell by 80 percent. National pride was in the cellar, the more so after the United States backed away from Secretary of State Baker's 1991 promise that NATO would never move east, after the United States attacked Russia's ally Serbia, and after the United States, rejecting Russian priorities, attacked Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011.

The author rebuts U. S. claims that Russian democracy has failed and that Putin over-reached in Ukraine. He praises Putin's attempts to cooperate with the United States in Syria. The United States has abused peoples the world over, he insists, and suffers from a "severe democracy deficit."

By the time he is discussing current U. S. – Russian relations, readers have been primed never to expect U.S. imperialism to give Russia a break. The author's instructional course has taken effect, or should have done so. If readers aren't aware of what the U. S. government has been up to, the author is not to blame.

Kovalik condemns the Obama administration and particularly Secretary of State Hilary Clinton for intensifying the U. S. campaign against Russia. He extends his criticism to the Democratic Party and the media. The theme of anti – Russian scheming by the CIA comes up briefly in the book in connection with hacking attributed to Russia and with WikiLeaks revelations about the Democratic Party. Nothing is said about possible interaction between personnel of the Trump campaign and Russian officials.

Kovalik's historical excursion takes in the Soviet Union. Clearly, many of the U. S. military interventions described in this valuable book wouldn't have occurred if the Soviet Union still existed. Beyond that, Kovalik says, "the Soviet Union, did wield sizable political and ideological influence in the world for some time, due to the appeal of its socialist message as well as its critical role in winning [World War] II."

Kovalik acknowledges "periods of great repression." He adds, however, that "the Russian Revolution and the USSR delivered on many of their promises, and against great odds. . In any case, the goals of the Russian Revolution-equality, worker control of the economy, universal health care and social security- were laudable ones." And, "One of the reasons that the West continues to dance on the grave of the Soviet Union, and to emphasize the worst parts of that society and downplay its achievements, is to make sure that, as the world-wide economy worsens, and as the suffering of work¬ing people around the world deepens, they don't get any notions in their head to organize some new socialist revolution with such ideals."

Ultimately, Kovalik sides with Martin Luther King, who remarked that, 'The US is on the wrong side of the world-wide revolution' – and with Daniel Ellsberg's clarification: 'The US is not on the wrong side; it is the wrong side.'"

Drew Hunkins on May 30, 2017

Dissects the dangerous nonsense

The most important non-fiction work thus far of 2017 is upon us. Finally the book has arrived that cuts through all the hype, deceit, misinformation and disconcerting groupthink.

Kovalik structures TPTSR by starting at the most logical place -- the history of unilateral Washington aggression across the globe, from the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran through the Washington intell agencies' orchestrated coups and proxy wars in Latin America.

This exposition of historical Washington empire building provides a solid foundation when he ultimately addresses why the predatory military-industrial-media-complex is incessantly fomenting this dangerous contemporary Russophobic campaign. The book nails it by presenting in a crystal clear manner the two exact reasons why the demonization of Moscow never seems to subside: 1.) The corporate and Washington military empire builders are deeply threatened by the potential loss of certain markets and a sovereign Russia that desires a say over the diplomatic and military maneuvers on its borders, especially its Western region. 2.) Most importantly, the MIC/national-security state absolutely MUST HAVE a villain (real or imagined, it doesn't matter) in order to justify the trillion dollar budget and careerism that seeps into every pore of the U.S. politico-economic system. This Pentagon system of pseudo economic Keynesianism could potentially lead to nuclear war. The giant house of cards could doom us all.

D. Gordon on June 1, 2017

This book is an amazing contribution. A veritable primer on U

This book is an amazing contribution. A veritable primer on U.S. foreign policy, this book is part memoir, part history, and part analysis of current events. Kovalik makes a compelling case that U.S. policies--not Russia--are the biggest danger to world peace and human rights. The book traces Kovalik's own awakening and transformation from his conservative religious-minded youth to one of our most trenchant critics of U.S. foreign policy writing today. And he does it in his own inimitable, witty, readable, and humane style.

[Nov 08, 2017] Learning to Love McCarthyism by Robert Parry

Highly recommended!
Russiagate witch hunt is destroying CIA franchise in Facebook and Twitter, which were used by many Russians and Eastern Europeans in general.
One telling sign of the national security state is "demonizing enemies of the state" including using neo-McCarthyism methods, typically for Russiagate.
In the beginning, "Russiagate" was about alleged actions by Russian secret services. Evidence for these allegations has never emerged, and it seems that the Russiagate conspiracy theorists largely gave up on this part (they still sometimes write about it as if it was an established fact, but since the only thing in support of it they can adduce is the canard about the 17 intelligence services, it probably is not that interesting any more).
Now, they have dropped the mask, and the object of their hatred are openly all Russian people, as the new Undermensch. If these people and US MSM recognized the reality that they are now a particularly rabid part of the xenophobic far right in the United States
Notable quotes:
"... Buried in the story's "jump" is the acknowledgement that Milner's "companies sold those holdings several years ago." But such is the anti-Russia madness gripping the Establishment of Washington and New York that any contact with any Russian constitutes a scandal worthy of front-page coverage. On Monday, The Washington Post published a page-one article entitled, "9 in Trump's orbit had contacts with Russians." ..."
"... The anti-Russian madness has reached such extremes that even when you say something that's obviously true – but that RT, the Russian television network, also reported – you are attacked for spreading "Russian propaganda." ..."
"... We saw that when former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile disclosed in her new book that she considered the possibility of replacing Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ticket after Clinton's public fainting spell and worries about her health. ..."
"... In other words, the go-to excuse for everything these days is to blame the Russians and smear anyone who says anything – no matter how true – if it also was reported on RT. ..."
"... The CIA has an entire bureaucracy dedicated to propaganda and disinformation, with some of those efforts farmed out to newer entities such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) or paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). NATO has a special command in Latvia that undertakes "strategic communications." ..."
"... Israel is another skilled player in this field, tapping into its supporters around the world to harass people who criticize the Zionist project. Indeed, since the 1980s, Israel has pioneered many of the tactics of computer spying and sabotage that were adopted and expanded by America's National Security Agency, explaining why the Obama administration teamed up with Israel in a scheme to plant malicious code into Iranian centrifuges to sabotage Iran's nuclear program. ..."
"... And, if you're really concerned about foreign interference in U.S. elections and policies, there's the remarkable influence of Israel and its perceived ability to effect the defeat of almost any politician who deviates from what the Israeli government wants, going back at least to the 1980s when Sen. Chuck Percy and Rep. Paul Findley were among the political casualties after pursuing contacts with the Palestinians. ..."
"... The answer seems to be the widespread hatred for President Trump combined with vested interests in favor of whipping up the New Cold War. That is a goal valued by both the Military-Industrial Complex, which sees trillions of dollars in strategic weapons systems in the future, and the neoconservatives, who view Russia as a threat to their "regime change" agendas for Syria and Iran. ..."
"... After all, if Russia and its independent-minded President Putin can be beaten back and beaten down, then a big obstacle to the neocon/Israeli goal of expanding the Mideast wars will be removed. ..."
"... Right now, the neocons are openly lusting for a "regime change" in Moscow despite the obvious risks that such turmoil in a nuclear-armed country might create, including the possibility that Putin would be succeeded not by some compliant Western client like the late Boris Yeltsin but by an extreme nationalist who might consider launching a nuclear strike to protect the honor of Mother Russia. ..."
"... The likely outcome from the anti-Russian show trials on Capitol Hill is that technology giants will bow to the bipartisan demand for new algorithms and other methods for stigmatizing, marginalizing and eliminating information that challenges the mainstream storylines in the cause of fighting "Russian propaganda." ..."
"... America's Stolen Narrative, ..."
"... witch hunt by congressional Democrats, working with the intelligence agencies and leading media outlets, to legitimize censorship and attack free speech on the Internet. ..."
"... The aim of this campaign is to claim that social conflict within the United States arises not from the scale of social inequality in America, greater than in any other country in the developed world, but rather from the actions of "outside agitators" working in the service of the Kremlin. ..."
"... The McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s sought to suppress left-wing thought and label all forms of dissent as illegitimate and treasonous. Those who led them worked to purge left-wing opinion from Hollywood, the trade unions and the universities. ..."
"... Likewise, the new McCarthyism is aimed at creating a political climate in which left-wing organizations and figures are demonized as agents of the Kremlin who are essentially engaged in treasonous activity deserving of criminal prosecution. ..."
"... Danny there was a time not to long ago, I would have said of how we are 'moving towards' to us becoming a police state, well instead replace that prediction of 'moving towards' to the stark reality to be described as 'that now we are', and there you will have it that we have finally arrived to becoming a full blown 'police state'. ..."
"... Thanks to Mr. Parry for this very fair and complete review of the latest attempts to generate a fake foreign enemy. The tyrant over a democracy must generate fake foreign enemies to pose falsely as a protector, so as to demand domestic power and accuse his opponents of disloyalty, as Aristotle and Plato warned thousands of years ago. ..."
"... The insanity of the entire "Russian hacking" narrative has been revealed over and over, including this past weekend when +/-100 Clinton loyalists published a screed on Medium saying Donna Brazile had been taken in by Russian propaganda. ..."
"... I have come to expect just about anything when it comes to Russia-Gate, but I was taken aback by the Hillary bots' accusation that videos of Hillary stumbling and others showing her apparently having a fit of some kind and also needing to be helped up the steps to someone's house -- which were taken by Americans and shown by Americans and seen by millions of shocked Americans -- were driven by Russia-Gate. ..."
"... Now, since the extremist xenophobic idea that contact with *any* Russians is a scandal has taken hold in the United States, people are probably not too eager to mention these contacts in these atmosphere of extreme xenophobic anti-Russian hatred in today's United States. Furthermore, people who have contact with large numbers of people probably really have difficulties remembering and listing these all. ..."
"... Their contacts are with Russian business and maybe the Russian mob, not the Russian state. There is really not question that Trump and his cronies are crooks, but they are crooks in the US and in all the other countries where they do business, not just Russia. I'm sure Mueller will be able to tie Trump directly to some of the sleeze. But there is no evidence that the Russian government is involved in any of it. "Russia-gate" implies Russian government involvement, not just random Russians. There is no evidence of that and moreover the logic is against. ..."
"... Mr. Cash . I think George Papadopoulis, Trump's young Aide, was an inside mole for neocon pro-Israel interests. Those interests needed to knock the unreliable President Trump out of the way to get the "system" back where it belonged – in their pocket. Papadopoulis, on his own, was rummaging around making Trump/Russian connections that finally ended with the the William (Richard?) Browder (well-known Washington DC neocon)/Natalia Veselnitskaya/Donald Trump, Jr. fiasco. The Trumps knew nothing of those negotiations, and young Trump left when he realized Natalia was only interested in Americans being allowed to adopt Russian children again and had no dirt on Hillary. ..."
"... It was never my impression that Cold War liberals opposed McCarthy or the anti-Communist witch hunt. Where they didn't gleefully join in, they watched quietly from the sidelines while the American left was eviscerated, jailed, driven from public life. Then the liberals stepped in when it was clear things were going a little too far and just as the steam had run out of McCarthy's slander machine. ..."
"... At that point figures like Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy found the path clear for their brand of political stagecraft. They were imperialists to a man, something they proved abundantly when given the chance. Liberals supplanted the left in U.S. life- in the unions, the teaching profession, publishing and every other field where criticism of the Cold War and the enduring prevalence of worker solidarity across international lines threatened the new order. ..."
"... The book concludes that by equating dissent with disloyalty, promoting guilt by association, and personally commanding loyalty programs, ""Truman and his advisors employed all the political and programmatic techniques that in later years were to become associated with the broad phenomenon of McCarthyism."" ..."
"... Formed by Google in June 2015 with Eliot Higgins of the Atlantic Council's Bellingcat as a founding member, the "First Draft" coalition includes all the usual mainstream media "partners" in "regime change" war propaganda: the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, the UK Guardian and Telegraph, BBC News, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab and Kiev-based Stopfake. ..."
"... In the beginning, "Russiagate" was about alleged actions by Russian secret services. Evidence for these allegations has never emerged, and it seems that the Russiagate conspiracy theorists largely gave up on this part (they still sometimes write about it as if it was an established fact, but since the only thing in support of it they can adduce is the canard about the 17 intelligence services, it probably is not that interesting any more) ..."
"... Now, they have dropped the mask, and the object of their hatred are openly all Russian people, anyone who is "Russian linked" by ever having logged in to social networks from Russia or using Cyrillic letters. If these people and their media at least recognized the reality that they are now a particularly rabid part of the xenophobic far right in the United States ..."
"... The interview of Roger Waters on RT is one of the best I have seen in a long while. I wish some other artists get the courage to raise their voices. The link to the Roger Waters interview is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7jcvfbLoIA This Roger Waters interview is worth watching. ..."
"... It would seem that everyone on the US telivision , newspaper and internet news has mastered the art of hand over mouth , gasp and looking horrified every time Russia is mentioned. It looks to me that the US is in the middle of another of it´s mid life crises. Panic reigns supreme every where. If it was not so sad it would be funny. i was born in the 1940s and remember the McCarthy witch hunts and the daily shower of people jumping out of windows as a result of it. ..."
"... In The Fifties (1993), American journalist and historian David Halberstam addressed the noxious effect of McCarthyism: "McCarthy's carnival like four year spree of accusation charges, and threats touched something deep in the American body politic, something that lasted long after his own recklessness, carelessness and boozing ended his career in shame." (page 53) ..."
"... Halberstam specifically discussed how readily the so-called "free" press acquiesced to McCarthy's masquerading: "The real scandal in all this was the behavior of the members of the Washington press corps, who, more often than not, knew better. They were delighted to be a part of his traveling road show, chronicling each charge and then moving on to the next town, instead of bothering to stay behind and follow up. They had little interest in reporting how careless McCarthy was or how little it all meant to him." (page 55) ..."
"... Why have they not investigated James Comey? Why has the MSM instead created a Russian Boogeyman? Why was he invited to testify about the Russian connection but never cross examined about his own influence? Why is the clearest reason for election meddling by James Comey not even spoken of by the MSM? This is because the MSM does not want to cover events as they happened but wants to recreate a alternate reality suitable to themselves which serves their interests and convinces us that the MSM has no part at all in downplaying the involvement of themselves in the election but wants to create a foreign enemy to blame. ..."
Nov 08, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

Special Report: Many American liberals who once denounced McCarthyism as evil are now learning to love the ugly tactic when it can be used to advance the Russia-gate "scandal" and silence dissent, reports Robert Parry.

The New York Times has finally detected some modern-day McCarthyism, but not in the anti-Russia hysteria that the newspaper has fueled for several years amid the smearing of American skeptics as "useful idiots" and the like. No, the Times editors are accusing a Long Island Republican of McCarthyism for linking his Democratic rival to "New York City special interest groups." As the Times laments, "It's the old guilt by association."

Yet, the Times sees no McCarthyism in the frenzy of Russia-bashing and guilt by association for any American who can be linked even indirectly to any Russian who might have some ill-defined links to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

On Monday, in the same edition that expressed editorial outrage over that Long Island political ad's McCarthyism, the Times ran two front-page articles under the headline: "A Complex Paper Trail: Blurring Kremlin's Ties to Key U.S. Businesses."

The two subheads read: " Shipping Firm Links Commerce Chief to Putin 'Cronies' " and " Millions in Facebook Shares Rooted in Russian Cash ." The latter story, which meshes nicely with the current U.S. political pressure on Facebook and Twitter to get in line behind the New Cold War against Russia, cites investments by Russian Yuri Milner that date back to the start of the decade.

Buried in the story's "jump" is the acknowledgement that Milner's "companies sold those holdings several years ago." But such is the anti-Russia madness gripping the Establishment of Washington and New York that any contact with any Russian constitutes a scandal worthy of front-page coverage. On Monday, The Washington Post published a page-one article entitled, "9 in Trump's orbit had contacts with Russians."

The anti-Russian madness has reached such extremes that even when you say something that's obviously true – but that RT, the Russian television network, also reported – you are attacked for spreading "Russian propaganda."

We saw that when former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile disclosed in her new book that she considered the possibility of replacing Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ticket after Clinton's public fainting spell and worries about her health.

Though there was a video of Clinton's collapse on Sept. 11, 2016, followed by her departure from the campaign trail to fight pneumonia – not to mention her earlier scare with blood clots – the response from a group of 100 Clinton supporters was to question Brazile's patriotism: "It is particularly troubling and puzzling that she would seemingly buy into false Russian-fueled propaganda, spread by both the Russians and our opponents about our candidate's health."

In other words, the go-to excuse for everything these days is to blame the Russians and smear anyone who says anything – no matter how true – if it also was reported on RT.

Pressing the Tech Companies

Just as Sen. Joe McCarthy liked to haul suspected "communists" and "fellow-travelers" before his committee in the 1950s, the New McCarthyism has its own witch-hunt hearings, such as last week's Senate grilling of executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google for supposedly allowing Russians to have input into the Internet's social networks. Executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google hauled before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism on Oct. 31, 2017. Trying to appease Congress and fend off threats of government regulation, the rich tech companies displayed their eagerness to eradicate any Russian taint.

Twitter's general counsel Sean J. Edgett told the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism that Twitter adopted an "expansive approach to defining what qualifies as a Russian-linked account."

Edgett said the criteria included "whether the account was created in Russia, whether the user registered the account with a Russian phone carrier or a Russian email address, whether the user's display name contains Cyrillic characters, whether the user frequently Tweets in Russian, and whether the user has logged in from any Russian IP address, even a single time. We considered an account to be Russian-linked if it had even one of the relevant criteria."

The trouble with Twitter's methodology was that none of those criteria would connect an account to the Russian government, let alone Russian intelligence or some Kremlin-controlled "troll farm." But the criteria could capture individual Russians with no link to the Kremlin as well as people who weren't Russian at all, including, say, American or European visitors to Russia who logged onto Twitter through a Moscow hotel.

Also left unsaid is that Russians are not the only national group that uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It is considered a standard script for writing in Belarus, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbo-Croatia and Ukraine. So, for instance, a Ukrainian using the Cyrillic alphabet could end up falling into the category of "Russian-linked" even if he or she hated Putin.

Twitter's attorney also said the company conducted a separate analysis from information provided by unidentified "third party sources" who pointed toward accounts supposedly controlled by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA), totaling 2,752 accounts. The IRA is typically described in the U.S. press as a "troll farm" which employs tech-savvy employees who combat news and opinions that are hostile to Russia and the Russian government. But exactly how those specific accounts were traced back to this organization was not made clear.

And, to put that number in some perspective, Twitter claims 330 million active monthly users, which makes the 2,752 accounts less than 0.001 percent of the total.

The Trouble with 'Trolling'

While the Russia-gate investigation has sought to portray the IRA effort as exotic and somehow unique to Russia, the strategy is followed by any number of governments, political movements and corporations – sometimes using enthusiastic volunteers but often employing professionals skilled at challenging critical information or at least muddying the waters.

Those of us who operate on the Internet are familiar with harassment from "trolls" who may use access to "comment" sections to inject propaganda and disinformation to sow confusion, to cause disruption, or to discredit the site by promoting ugly opinions and nutty conspiracy theories.

As annoying as this "trolling" is, it's just a modern version of more traditional strategies used by powerful entities for generations – hiring public-relations specialists, lobbyists, lawyers and supposedly impartial "activists" to burnish images, fend off negative news and intimidate nosy investigators. In this competition, modern Russia is both a late-comer and a piker.

The U.S. government fields legions of publicists, propagandists, paid journalists, psy-ops specialists , contractors and non-governmental organizations to promote Washington's positions and undermine rivals through information warfare.

The CIA has an entire bureaucracy dedicated to propaganda and disinformation, with some of those efforts farmed out to newer entities such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) or paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). NATO has a special command in Latvia that undertakes "strategic communications."

Israel is another skilled player in this field, tapping into its supporters around the world to harass people who criticize the Zionist project. Indeed, since the 1980s, Israel has pioneered many of the tactics of computer spying and sabotage that were adopted and expanded by America's National Security Agency, explaining why the Obama administration teamed up with Israel in a scheme to plant malicious code into Iranian centrifuges to sabotage Iran's nuclear program.

It's also ironic that the U.S. government touted social media as a great benefit in advancing so-called "color revolutions" aimed at "regime change" in troublesome countries. For instance, when the "green revolution" was underway in Iran in 2009 after the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Obama administration asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance so the street protesters could continue using the platform to organize against Ahmadinejad and to distribute their side of the story to the outside world.

During the so-called Arab Spring in 2011, Facebook, Twitter and Skype won praise as a means of organizing mass demonstrations to destabilize governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria. Back then, the U.S. government denounced any attempts to throttle these social media platforms and the free flow of information that they permitted as proof of dictatorship.

Social media also was a favorite of the U.S. government in Ukraine in 2013-14 when the Maidan protests exploited these platforms to help destabilize and ultimately overthrow the elected government of Ukraine, the key event that launched the New Cold War with Russia.

Swinging the Social Media Club

The truth is that, in those instances, the U.S. governments and its agencies were eagerly exploiting the platforms to advance Washington's geopolitical agenda by disseminating American propaganda and deploying U.S.-funded non-governmental organizations, which taught activists how to use social media to advance "regime change" scenarios.

A White Helmets volunteer pointing to the aftermath of a military attack.

While these uprisings were sold to Western audiences as genuine outpourings of public anger – and there surely was some of that – the protests also benefited from U.S. funding and expertise. In particular, NED and USAID provided money, equipment and training for anti-government operatives challenging regimes in U.S. disfavor.

One of the most successful of these propaganda operations occurred in Syria where anti-government rebels operating in areas controlled by Al Qaeda and its fellow Islamic militants used social media to get their messaging to Western mainstream journalists who couldn't enter those sectors without fear of beheading.

Since the rebels' goal of overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad meshed with the objectives of the U.S. government and its allies in Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Western journalists uncritically accepted the words and images provided by Al Qaeda's collaborators.

The success of this propaganda was so extraordinary that the White Helmets, a "civil defense" group that worked in Al Qaeda territory, became the go-to source for dramatic video and even was awarded the short-documentary Oscar for an info-mercial produced for Netflix – despite evidence that the White Helmets were staging some of the scenes for propaganda purposes.

Indeed, one argument for believing that Putin and the Kremlin might have "meddled" in last year's U.S. election is that they could have felt it was time to give the United States a taste of its own medicine.

After all, the United States intervened in the 1996 Russian election to ensure the continued rule of the corrupt and pliable Boris Yeltsin. And there were the U.S.-backed street protests in Moscow against the 2011 and 2012 elections in which Putin strengthened his political mandate. Those protests earned the "color" designation the "snow revolution."

However, whatever Russia may or may not have done before last year's U.S. election, the Russia-gate investigations have always sought to exaggerate the impact of that alleged "meddling" and molded the narrative to whatever weak evidence was available.

The original storyline was that Putin authorized the "hacking" of Democratic emails as part of a "disinformation" operation to undermine Hillary Clinton's candidacy and to help elect Donald Trump – although no hard evidence has been presented to establish that Putin gave such an order or that Russia "hacked" the emails. WikiLeaks has repeatedly denied getting the emails from Russia, which also denies any meddling.

Further, the emails were not "disinformation"; they were both real and, in many cases, newsworthy. The DNC emails provided evidence that the DNC unethically tilted the playing field in favor of Clinton and against Sen. Bernie Sanders, a point that Brazile also discovered in reviewing staffing and financing relationships that Clinton had with the DNC under the prior chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The purloined emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta revealed the contents of Clinton's paid speeches to Wall Street (information that she was trying to hide from voters) and pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation.

A Manchurian Candidate?

Still, the original narrative was that Putin wanted his Manchurian Candidate (Trump) in the White House and took the extraordinary risk of infuriating the odds-on favorite (Clinton) by releasing the emails even though they appeared unlikely to prevent Clinton's victory. So, there was always that logical gap in the Russia-gate theory.

Since then, however, the U.S. mainstream narrative has shifted, in part, because the evidence of Russian election "meddling" was so shaky. Under intense congressional pressure to find something, Facebook reported $100,000 in allegedly "Russian-linked" ads purchased in 2015-17, but noted that only 44 percent were bought before the election. So, not only was the "Russian-linked" pebble tiny – compared to Facebook's annual revenue of $27 billion – but more than half of the pebble was tossed into this very large lake after Clinton had already lost.

So, the storyline was transformed into some vague Russian scheme to exacerbate social tensions in the United States by taking different sides of hot-button issues, such as police brutality against blacks. The New York Times reported that one of these "Russian-linked" pages featured photos of cute puppies , which the Times speculated must have had some evil purpose although it was hard to fathom. (Oh, those devious Russians!).

The estimate of how many Americans may have seen one of these "Russian-linked" ads also keeps growing, now up to as many as 126 million or about one-third of the U.S. population. Of course, the way the Internet works – with any item possibly going viral – you might as well say the ads could have reached billions of people.

Whenever I write an article or send out a Tweet, I too could be reaching 126 million or even billions of people, but the reality is that I'd be lucky if the number were in the thousands. But amid the Russia-gate frenzy, no exaggeration is too outlandish or too extreme.

Another odd element of Russia-gate is that the intensity of this investigation is disproportionate to the lack of interest shown toward far better documented cases of actual foreign-government interference in American elections and policymaking.

For instance, the major U.S. media long ignored the extremely well-documented case of Richard Nixon colluding with South Vietnamese officials to sabotage President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam War peace talks to gain an advantage for Nixon in the 1968 election. That important chapter of history only gained The New York Times' seal of approval earlier this year after the Times had dismissed the earlier volumes of evidence as "rumors."

In the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan's team – especially his campaign director William Casey in collaboration with Israel and Iran – appeared to have gone behind President Jimmy Carter's back to undercut Carter's negotiations to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran and essentially doom Carter's reelection hopes.

There were a couple of dozen witnesses to that scheme who spoke with me and other investigative journalists – as well as documentary evidence showing that President Reagan did authorize secret arms shipments to Iran via Israel shortly after the hostages were freed during Reagan's inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981.

However, since Vice President (later President) George H.W. Bush, who was implicated in the scheme, was well-liked on both sides of the aisle and because Reagan had become a Republican icon, the October Surprise case of 1980 was pooh-poohed by the major media and dismissed by a congressional investigation in the early 1990s. Despite the extraordinary number of witnesses and supporting documents, Wikipedia listed the scandal as a "conspiracy theory."

Israeli Influence

And, if you're really concerned about foreign interference in U.S. elections and policies, there's the remarkable influence of Israel and its perceived ability to effect the defeat of almost any politician who deviates from what the Israeli government wants, going back at least to the 1980s when Sen. Chuck Percy and Rep. Paul Findley were among the political casualties after pursuing contacts with the Palestinians.

If anyone doubts how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has continued to pull the strings of U.S. politicians, just watch one of his record-tying three addresses to joint sessions of Congress and count how often Republicans and Democrats jump to their feet in enthusiastic applause. (The only other foreign leader to get the joint-session honor three times was Great Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill.)

So, what makes Russia-gate different from the other cases? Did Putin conspire with Trump to extend a bloody war as Nixon did with the South Vietnamese leaders? Did Putin lengthen the captivity of U.S. hostages to give Trump a political edge? Did Putin manipulate U.S. policy in the Middle East to entice President George W. Bush to invade Iraq and set the region ablaze, as Israel's Netanyahu did? Is Putin even now pushing for wider Mideast wars, as Netanyahu is?

Indeed, one point that's never addressed in any serious way is why is the U.S. so angry with Russia while these other cases, in which U.S. interests were clearly damaged and American democracy compromised, were treated largely as non-stories.

Why is Russia-gate a big deal while the other cases weren't? Why are opposite rules in play now – with Democrats, many Republicans and the major news media flogging fragile "links," needling what little evidence there is, and assuming the worst rather than insisting that only perfect evidence and perfect witnesses be accepted as in the earlier cases?

The answer seems to be the widespread hatred for President Trump combined with vested interests in favor of whipping up the New Cold War. That is a goal valued by both the Military-Industrial Complex, which sees trillions of dollars in strategic weapons systems in the future, and the neoconservatives, who view Russia as a threat to their "regime change" agendas for Syria and Iran.

After all, if Russia and its independent-minded President Putin can be beaten back and beaten down, then a big obstacle to the neocon/Israeli goal of expanding the Mideast wars will be removed.

Right now, the neocons are openly lusting for a "regime change" in Moscow despite the obvious risks that such turmoil in a nuclear-armed country might create, including the possibility that Putin would be succeeded not by some compliant Western client like the late Boris Yeltsin but by an extreme nationalist who might consider launching a nuclear strike to protect the honor of Mother Russia.

The Democrats, the liberals and even many progressives justify their collusion with the neocons by the need to remove Trump by any means necessary and "stop fascism." But their contempt for Trump and their exaggeration of the "Hitler" threat that this incompetent buffoon supposedly poses have blinded them to the extraordinary risks attendant to their course of action and how they are playing into the hands of the war-hungry neocons.

A Smokescreen for Repression

There also seems to be little or no concern that the Establishment is using Russia-gate as a smokescreen for clamping down on independent media sites on the Internet. Traditional supporters of civil liberties have looked the other way as the rights of people associated with the Trump campaign have been trampled and journalists who simply question the State Department's narratives on, say, Syria and Ukraine are denounced as "Moscow stooges" and "useful idiots."

The likely outcome from the anti-Russian show trials on Capitol Hill is that technology giants will bow to the bipartisan demand for new algorithms and other methods for stigmatizing, marginalizing and eliminating information that challenges the mainstream storylines in the cause of fighting "Russian propaganda."

The warning from powerful senators was crystal clear. "I don't think you get it," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, warned social media executives last week. "You bear this responsibility. You created these platforms, and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones who do something about it. Or we will."

As this authoritarian if not totalitarian future looms and as the dangers of nuclear annihilation from an intentional or unintentional nuclear war with Russia grow, many people who should know better are caught up in the Russia-gate frenzy.

I used to think that liberals and progressives opposed McCarthyism because they regarded it as a grave threat to freedom of thought and to genuine democracy, but now it appears that they have learned to love McCarthyism except, of course, when it rears its ugly head in some Long Island political ad criticizing New York City.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ).

Joe Tedesky , November 6, 2017 at 3:12 pm

I watched the C-Span 'Russian/2016 Election Investigation Hearings' in horror, as each congressperson grilled the Hi-Tech executives in a way to suggest that our First Amendment Rights are now on life support, and our Congress is ready to pull the plug at any moment. I thought, of how this wasn't the America I was brought up to believe in. So as I have reached the age in life where nothing should surprise me, I realize now how fragile our Rights are, in this warring nation that calls itself America.

When it comes to Israel I have two names, Jonathan Pollard & the USS Liberty, and with that, that is enough said.

Danny Weil , November 6, 2017 at 6:33 pm

This week's congressional hearings on "extremist content" on the Internet mark a new stage in the McCarthyite witch hunt by congressional Democrats, working with the intelligence agencies and leading media outlets, to legitimize censorship and attack free speech on the Internet.

One after another, congressmen and senators goaded representatives of Google, Twitter and Facebook to admit that their platforms were used to sow "social divisions" and "extremist" political opinions. The aim of this campaign is to claim that social conflict within the United States arises not from the scale of social inequality in America, greater than in any other country in the developed world, but rather from the actions of "outside agitators" working in the service of the Kremlin.

The hearings revolved around claims that Russia sought to "weaponize" the Internet by harnessing social anger within the United States. "Russia," said Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, promoted "discord in the US by inflaming passions on a range of divisive issues." It sought to "mobilize real Americans to sign online petitions and join rallies and protests."

The McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s sought to suppress left-wing thought and label all forms of dissent as illegitimate and treasonous. Those who led them worked to purge left-wing opinion from Hollywood, the trade unions and the universities.

Likewise, the new McCarthyism is aimed at creating a political climate in which left-wing organizations and figures are demonized as agents of the Kremlin who are essentially engaged in treasonous activity deserving of criminal prosecution.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/11/03/pers-n03.html

Joe Tedesky , November 7, 2017 at 12:32 am

Thanks for the informative link Danny.

Watching this Orwellian tragedy play out in our American society, where our Congress is insisting that disclaimers and restrictions be placed upon suspicious adbuys and editorial essays, is counterintuitive to what we Americans were brought up to belief. Why, all my life teachers, and adults, would warn us students of reading the news to not to believe everything we read as pure fact, but to research a subject before coming to a conclusion toward your accepting an opinion to wit. And with these warnings of avoiding us being suckered into a wrong belief, we were told that this was the price we were required to pay for having a free press society. This freedom of speech was, and has always been the bedrock of our hopes and wishes for our belief in the American Dream.

Danny there was a time not to long ago, I would have said of how we are 'moving towards' to us becoming a police state, well instead replace that prediction of 'moving towards' to the stark reality to be described as 'that now we are', and there you will have it that we have finally arrived to becoming a full blown 'police state'. Little by little, and especially since 911 one by one our civil liberties were taken away. Here again our freedom of speech is being destroyed, and with this America is now where Germany had been in the mid-thirties. America's own guilty conscience is rapidly doing some physiological projections onto their imaginary villain Russia.

All I keep hearing is my dear sweet mother lecturing me on how one lie always leads to another lie until the truth will finally jump up and bite you in the ass, and think to myself of how wise my mother had been with her young girl Southside philosophy. May you Rest In Peace Mum.

Martin , November 7, 2017 at 3:21 pm

Yankees chicks are coming home to roost. So many peoples rights and lives had to be extinguished for Americans to have the illusion of pursuing their happiness, well, what goes around comes around.

Gregory Herr , November 7, 2017 at 8:39 pm

Gee wiz Adam Schiff you make it sound as if signing petitions and rallying to causes and civil protests are unamerican or something. And Russians on the internet are harnessing social anger! Pathetic. These jerks who would have us believe they are interested in "saving" democracy or stopping fascism have sure got it backward.

Geoffrey de Galles , November 8, 2017 at 12:33 pm

Joe, Allow me please, respectfully, to add Mordecai Vanunu -- Israel's own Daniel Ellsberg -- to your two names.

Erik G , November 6, 2017 at 3:55 pm

Thanks to Mr. Parry for this very fair and complete review of the latest attempts to generate a fake foreign enemy. The tyrant over a democracy must generate fake foreign enemies to pose falsely as a protector, so as to demand domestic power and accuse his opponents of disloyalty, as Aristotle and Plato warned thousands of years ago.

It is especially significant that the zionists are the sole beneficiaries of this scam as well as the primary sponsors of the DNC, hoping to attack Russia and Iran to support Israeli land thefts in the Mideast. It is well established that zionists control US mass media, which never examine the central issue of our times, the corruption of democracy by the zionist/MIC/WallSt influence upon the US government and mass media. Russia-gate is in fact a coverup for Israel-gate.

Those who would like to petition the NYT to make Robert Parry their senior editor may do so here:
https://www.change.org/p/new-york-times-bring-a-new-editor-to-the-new-york-times?recruiter=72650402&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink
While Mr. Parry may prefer independence, and we all know the NYT ownership makes it unlikely, and the NYT may try to ignore it, it is instructive to them that intelligent readers know better journalism when they see it. A petition demonstrates the concerns of a far larger number of potential or lost subscribers.

mike k , November 6, 2017 at 4:10 pm

Why did we ever believe that the democrat party was a defender of free speech? These bought and paid for tools of the economic elites are only interested in serving their masters with slavish devotion. Selfishness and immorality are their stock in trade; betraying the public their real intention.

Cratylus , November 6, 2017 at 4:11 pm

Great essay.

But one disagreement. I may agree with Trump on very, very few things, among them getting rid of the horrible TPP, one cornerstone of Hillary's pivot; meeting with Putin in Hamburg; the Lavrov-Tillerson arranged cease-fire in SE Syria; the termination of the CIA's support for anti-Assad jihadis in Syria; a second meeting with Putin at the ASEAN conference this week; and in general the idea of "getting along with Russia" (a biggie) which Russia-gate is slowing to a crawl as designed by the neocons.

But Trump as an "incompetent buffoon" is a stretch albeit de rigueur on the pages of the NYT, the programs of NPR and in all "respectable" precincts. Trump won the presidency for god's sake – something that eluded the 17 other GOP primary candidates, some of them considered very"smart" and Bernie and Jill, and in the past, Ralph Nader and Ron Paul – and the supposedly "very smart" Hillary for which we should be eternally grateful. "Incompetent" hardly seems accurate. The respectable commentariat has continually underestimated Trump. We should heed Putin who marveled at Trump's seemingly impossible victory.

Bill Cash , November 6, 2017 at 4:13 pm

How do you explain all the connections between Trump acolytes and Russia and their lying about it. I think they've all lied about their contacts. Why would they do that?I lived through the real McCarthyism and, so far, this isn't close to what happened then.

Bill , November 6, 2017 at 4:40 pm

Probably because they are corruptly involved. Thing is, the higher priority is to avoid another decades-long cold war risking nuclear war. Do you remember how many close calls we had in the last one?

I'm more suspicious of Trump than most here, but even I think we need some priorities. Far more extensive corruption of a similar variety keeps occurring and no one cares, as Mr. Parry points out here yet again.

As for McCarthyism, whatever the current severity, the result is unfolding as a new campaign against dissenting voices on the internet. That's supremely not-okay with me.

Gregory Herr , November 7, 2017 at 8:46 pm

Right. Just because we don't yet have another fulll-fledged HUAC happening doesn't mean severe perils aren't attached to this new McCarthyism. Censorship of dissent is supremely not-okay with me as well.

Elizabeth Burton , November 6, 2017 at 4:58 pm

That class of people lie as a matter of course; it's standard procedure. If you exacerbate it by adding on the anti-Russia hysteria that was spewed out by the Democrats before the ink was dry on the ballots, what possible reason would they have for being truthful?

The insanity of the entire "Russian hacking" narrative has been revealed over and over, including this past weekend when +/-100 Clinton loyalists published a screed on Medium saying Donna Brazile had been taken in by Russian propaganda.

Litchfield , November 6, 2017 at 7:10 pm

I have come to expect just about anything when it comes to Russia-Gate, but I was taken aback by the Hillary bots' accusation that videos of Hillary stumbling and others showing her apparently having a fit of some kind and also needing to be helped up the steps to someone's house -- which were taken by Americans and shown by Americans and seen by millions of shocked Americans -- were driven by Russia-Gate.

Obviously, Brazile, like millions of voters, saw these films and made appropriate inferences: that Hillary's basic health and stamina were a question mark. Of course, Hillary also offered Americans nothing in her campaign rhetoric. She came across as the mother-in-law from hell.

Was it also a Russia-Gate initiative when Hillary hid from her supporters on election night and let Podesta face the screaming sobbing supporters? Too much spiked vodka or something? Our political stage in the USA is a madhouse.

Adrian Engler , November 6, 2017 at 6:20 pm

These people probably have "connections" with a relatively large number of people, and only very small fraction of the people they have contact with are probably Russians. Now, since the extremist xenophobic idea that contact with *any* Russians is a scandal has taken hold in the United States, people are probably not too eager to mention these contacts in these atmosphere of extreme xenophobic anti-Russian hatred in today's United States. Furthermore, people who have contact with large numbers of people probably really have difficulties remembering and listing these all.

Today's political atmosphere in the United States probably has a lot in common with the Soviet Union. There, people got in trouble if they had contacts with people from Western, capitalist countries – and if they were asked and did not mention these contacts in order to avoid problems, they could get in trouble even more.

I think it is absolutely clear that no one who takes part in this hateful anti-Russian campaign can pretend to be liberal or progressive. The kind of society these xenophobes who detest pluralism and accuse everyone who has opinions outside the mainstream of being a foreign agent is absolutely abhorrent, in my view.

Leslie F , November 6, 2017 at 6:40 pm

Their contacts are with Russian business and maybe the Russian mob, not the Russian state. There is really not question that Trump and his cronies are crooks, but they are crooks in the US and in all the other countries where they do business, not just Russia. I'm sure Mueller will be able to tie Trump directly to some of the sleeze. But there is no evidence that the Russian government is involved in any of it. "Russia-gate" implies Russian government involvement, not just random Russians. There is no evidence of that and moreover the logic is against.

occupy on , November 7, 2017 at 12:47 am

Mr. Cash . I think George Papadopoulis, Trump's young Aide, was an inside mole for neocon pro-Israel interests. Those interests needed to knock the unreliable President Trump out of the way to get the "system" back where it belonged – in their pocket. Papadopoulis, on his own, was rummaging around making Trump/Russian connections that finally ended with the the William (Richard?) Browder (well-known Washington DC neocon)/Natalia Veselnitskaya/Donald Trump, Jr. fiasco. The Trumps knew nothing of those negotiations, and young Trump left when he realized Natalia was only interested in Americans being allowed to adopt Russian children again and had no dirt on Hillary.

In the meantime, Trump Jr. was connected with an evil Russian (Natalia), William Browder was able to link the neocon-hated Trump Sr with neocon-hated, evil Russians (who currently have a warrant out for Browder's arrest on a 15 [or 50?] million dollar tax evasion charge), and neocons have a good chance of claiming victory out of chaos (as is their style and was their intent for the Middle East [not Washington DC!] in the neocon Project For a New American Century – 1998). Clinton may have lost power in Washington DC, but Clinton-supporting neocons may not have – thanks to George Papadopoulis. We shall see. Something tells me the best is yet to come out of the Mueller Investigations.

Roy G Biv , November 7, 2017 at 2:03 pm

You are seeing it clearly Bill. This site was once a go-to-source for investigative journalism. Now it is a place for opinion screeds, mostly with head buried in the sand about the blatant Russian manipulation of the 2016 election. The dominant gang of posters here squash any dissent and dissenting comments usually get deleted within a day. I don't understand why and how it came to be so, but the hysterical labeling of Comey/Mueller investigations as McCarthyism by Parry has ruined his sterling reputation for me.

Stygg , November 7, 2017 at 2:24 pm

If this "Russian manipulation" was as blatant as everyone keeps telling me, how come it's all based on ridiculous BS instead of evidence? Where's the beef?

anon , November 7, 2017 at 3:22 pm

Unable to substantiate anything you say nor argue against anything said here, you disgrace yourself. Do you think anyone is fooled by your repeated lie that you are a disaffected former supporter of this site? And you made the "Stygg" reply above.

Tom Hall , November 6, 2017 at 4:46 pm

It was never my impression that Cold War liberals opposed McCarthy or the anti-Communist witch hunt. Where they didn't gleefully join in, they watched quietly from the sidelines while the American left was eviscerated, jailed, driven from public life. Then the liberals stepped in when it was clear things were going a little too far and just as the steam had run out of McCarthy's slander machine.

At that point figures like Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy found the path clear for their brand of political stagecraft. They were imperialists to a man, something they proved abundantly when given the chance. Liberals supplanted the left in U.S. life- in the unions, the teaching profession, publishing and every other field where criticism of the Cold War and the enduring prevalence of worker solidarity across international lines threatened the new order.

So it's no surprise that liberalism is the rallying point for a new wave of repression. The dangerous buffoon currently occupying the White House stands as a perfect foil to the phony indignation of the liberal leadership- Schumer, Pelosi et al.. The jerk was made to order, and they mean to dump him as their ideological forebears unloaded old Tail Gunner Joe. In fact, Trump is so odious, the Democrats, their media colleagues and major elements of the national security state believe that bringing down the bozo can be made to look like a triumph of democracy. Of course, by then dissent will have been stamped out far more efficiently than Trump and his half-assed cohorts could have achieved. And it will be done in the name of restoring sanity, honoring the constitution, and protecting everyone from the Russians. I was born in the fifties, and it looks like I'm going to die in the fifties.

Danny Weil , November 6, 2017 at 6:37 pm

Truman started it. And he used it very well.

THE TRUMAN DOCTRINE AND ORIGINS OF ""McCARTHYISM
By Richard M. Freeland

This book argues that Truman used anti-Communist scare tactics to force Congress to implement his plans for multilateral free trade and specifically to pass the Marshall Plan. This is a sound emphasis, but other elements of postwar anti-Communist campaigns are neglected, especially anti-labor legislation; and Freeland attributes to Truman a ""go-soft"" attitude toward the Soviets, which is certainly not proven by the fact that he restrained the ultras Forrestal, Kennan, and Byrnes -- indeed, some of Freeland's own citations confirm Truman's violent anti-Soviet spirit.

The book concludes that by equating dissent with disloyalty, promoting guilt by association, and personally commanding loyalty programs, ""Truman and his advisors employed all the political and programmatic techniques that in later years were to become associated with the broad phenomenon of McCarthyism."" Freeland's revisionism is confined and conservative: he deems the Soviets most responsible for the Cold War and implies that ""subversion"" was in fact a menace.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/richard-m-freeland/the-truman-doctrine-and-origins-of-mccarthyism/

Howard Mettee , November 6, 2017 at 4:50 pm

Bob,

You are one of the very few critical journalists today willing to print objective measures of the truth, while the MSM spins out of control under the guise of "protecting America" (and their vital sources), while at the same time actually undermining the very principles of a working democracy they sanctimoniously pretend to defend. It makes me nostalgic for the McCarthy era, when we could safely satirize the Army-McCarthy Hearings (unless you were a witness!). I offer the following as a retrospective of a lost era.:

Top-Ten Criteria for being a Putin Stooge, and a Chance at Winning A One Way Lottery Ticket:to the Gala Gitmo Hotel:
:
(1) Reading Consortium News, Truth Dig, The Real News Network, RT and Al Jeziera
(2) Drinking Starbucks and vodka at the Russian Tea Room with Russian tourists (with an embedded FSS agent) in NYC.
(3) Meeting suspicious tour guides in Red Square who accept dollars for their historical jokes.
(4) Claiming to catch a cell phone photo of the Putin limousine passing through the Kremlin Tower gate.
(4) Starting a joint venture with a Russian trading partner who sells grain to feed Putin's stable of stallions. .
(5) Catching the flu while being sneezed upon in Niagara Falls by a Russian violinist.
(6) Finding the hidden jewels in the Twelfth Chair were nothing but cut glass.
(7) Reading War and Peace on the Brighton Beach ferry.
(8) Playing the iPod version of Rachmaninoff's "Vespers" through ear buds while attending mass in Dallas, TX..
(9) Water skiing on the Potomac flying a pennant saying "Wasn't Boris Good Enough?"
(10) Having audibly chuckled even once at items (1) – (9). Thanks Bob, Please don't let up!

Lisa , November 6, 2017 at 7:47 pm

Howard,

I chuckled loudly more than once – but luckily, no one heard me! No witnesses! So you are acquainted with the masterpiece "12 chairs"? Very suspicious.

David G , November 6, 2017 at 8:42 pm

I've heard that's Mel Brooks favorite among his own movies.

David G , November 6, 2017 at 8:48 pm

I always find it exasperating when I have to remind the waiter at the diner to bring Russian dressing along with the reuben sandwich, but these days I wonder if my loyalty is being tested.

Dave P. , November 6, 2017 at 10:27 pm

David G –

They will change the name of dressing very soon. Remember 2003 when French refused to endorse the invasion of Iraq. I think they unofficially changed the name of "French Fries" to "Freedom Fries".

It is just the start. The whole History is being rewritten – in compliance with Zionist Ideology. Those evil Russkies will be shown as they are!

Elizabeth Burton , November 6, 2017 at 4:53 pm

Clearly, since I've published one book by a Russian, one by a now-deceased US ex-pat living in Russia, and have our catalog made available in Russia via our international distributor, I am a traitor to the US. If you add in my staunch resistance to the whole Russiagate narrative AND the fact I post links to stories in RT America, I'm doomed.

I wish I could think I'm being wholly sarcastic.

Danny Weil , November 6, 2017 at 6:38 pm

You are not alone. Many of us live outside the open air prison and feel the same way

Abe , November 6, 2017 at 5:29 pm

Robert Parry has described "the New McCarthyism" having "its own witch-hunt hearings". In fact "last week's Senate grilling of executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google" was merely an exercise in political theatre because all three entities already belong to the "First Draft" coalition:

http://fortune.com/2016/09/13/facebook-twitter-join-first-draft-coalition/

Formed by Google in June 2015 with Eliot Higgins of the Atlantic Council's Bellingcat as a founding member, the "First Draft" coalition includes all the usual mainstream media "partners" in "regime change" war propaganda: the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, the UK Guardian and Telegraph, BBC News, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab and Kiev-based Stopfake.

In a remarkable post-truth declaration, the "First Draft" coalition insists that members will "work together to tackle common issues, including ways to streamline the verification process".

In the "post-truth" regime of US and NATO hybrid warfare, the deliberate distortion of truth and facts is called "verification".

The Washington Post / PropOrNot imbroglio, and "First Draft" coalition "partner" organizations' zeal to "verify" US intelligence-backed fake news claims about Russian hacking of the US presidential election, reveal the "post-truth" mission of this new Google-backed hybrid war propaganda alliance.

Abe , November 6, 2017 at 5:45 pm

The Russia-gate "witch-hunt" has graduated from McCarthyism to full Monty Pythonism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3jt5ibfRzw

Dan Kuhn , November 6, 2017 at 6:41 pm

You get the gold star for best comment today.

Abe , November 7, 2017 at 1:57 pm

Hysterical demonization of Russia escalated dramatically after Russia thwarted the Israeli-Saudi-US plan to dismember the Syrian state.

With the rollback of ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorist proxy forces in Syria, and the failure of Kurdish separatist efforts in Iraq, Israel plans to launch military attacks against southern Lebanon and Syria.

South Front has presented a cogent and fairly detailed analysis of Israel's upcoming war in southern Lebanon.

Conspicuously absent from the South Front analysis is any discussion of the Israeli planned assault on Syria, or possible responses to the conflict from the United States or Russia.

Israeli propaganda preparations for attack are already in high gear. Unfortunately, sober heads are in perilously short supply in Israel and the U.S., so the prognosis can hardly be optimistic.

"Scenarios for the Third Lebanon War

Over time, IDF's military effectiveness had declined. [ ] In the Second Lebanon War of 2006 due to the overwhelming numerical superiority in men and equipment the IDF managed to occupy key strong points but failed to inflict a decisive defeat on Hezbollah. The frequency of attacks in Israeli territory was not reduced; the units of the IDF became bogged down in the fighting in the settlements and suffered significant losses. There now exists considerable political pressure to reassert IDF's lost military dominance and, despite the complexity and unpredictability of the situation we may assume the future conflict will feature only two sides, IDF and Hezbollah. Based on the bellicose statements of the leadership of the Jewish state, the fighting will be initiated by Israel.

"The operation will begin with a massive evacuation of residents from the settlements in the north and centre of Israel. Since Hezbollah has agents within the IDF, it will not be possible to keep secret the concentration of troops on the border and a mass evacuation of civilians. Hezbollah units will will be ordered to occupy a prepared defensive position and simultaneously open fire on places were IDF units are concentrated. The civilian population of southern Lebanon will most likely be evacuated. IDF will launch massive bombing causing great damage to the social infrastructure and some damage to Hezbollah's military infrastructure, but without destroying the carefully protected and camouflaged rocket launchers and launch sites.

"Hezbollah control and communications systems have elements of redundancy. Consequently, regardless of the use of specialized precision-guided munitions, the command posts and electronic warfare systems will not be paralysed, maintaining communications including through the use of fibre-optic communications means. IDF discovered that the movement has such equipment during the 2006 war. Smaller units will operate independently, working with open communication channels, using the pre-defined call signs and codes.

"Israeli troops will then cross the border of Lebanon, despite the presence of the UN peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon, beginning a ground operation with the involvement of a greater number of units than in the 2006 war. The IDF troops will occupy commanding heights and begin to prepare for assaults on settlements and actions in the tunnels. The Israelis do not score a quick victory as they suffer heavy losses in built-up areas. The need to secure occupied territory with patrols and checkpoints will cause further losses.

"The fact that Israel itself started the war and caused damage to the civilian infrastructure, allows the leadership of the movement to use its missile arsenal on Israeli cities. While Israel's missile defence systems can successfully intercept the launched missiles, there are not enough of them to blunt the bombardment. The civilian evacuation paralyzes life in the country. As soon IDF's Iron Dome and other medium-range systems are spent on short-range Hezbollah rockets, the bombardment of Israel with long-range missiles may commence. Hezbollah's Iranian solid-fuel rockets do not require much time to prepare for launch and may target the entire territory of Israel, causing further losses.

"It is difficult to assess the duration of actions of this war. One thing that seems certain is that Israel shouldn't count on its rapid conclusion, similar to last September's exercises. Hezbollah units are stronger and more capable than during the 2006 war, despite the fact that they are fighting in Syria and suffered losses there.

"Conclusions

"The combination of large-scale exercises and bellicose rhetoric is intended to muster Israeli public support for the aggression against Hezbollah by convincing the public the victory would be swift and bloodless. Instead of restraint based on a sober assessment of relative capabilities, Israeli leaders appear to be in a state of blood lust. In contrast, the Hezbollah has thus far demonstrated restraint and diplomacy.

"Underestimating the adversary is always the first step towards a defeat. Such mistakes are paid for with soldiers' blood and commanders' careers. The latest IDF exercises suggest Israeli leaders underestimate the opponent and, more importantly, consider them to be quite dumb. In reality, Hezbollah units will not cross the border. There is no need to provoke the already too nervous neighbor and to suffer losses solely to plant a flag and photograph it for their leader. For Hezbollah, it is easier and safer when the Israeli soldiers come to them. According to the IDF soldiers who served in Gaza and southern Lebanon, it is easier to operate on the plains of Gaza than the mountainous terrain of southern Lebanon. This is a problem for armoured vehicles fighting for control of heights, tunnels, and settlements, where they are exposed to anti-armor weapons.

"While the Israeli establishment is in a state of patriotic frenzy, it would be a good time for them to turn to the wisdom of their ancestors. After all, as the old Jewish proverb says: 'War is a big swamp, easy to go into but hard to get out'."

Israeli Defense Forces: Military Capabilities, Scenarios for the Third Lebanon War
https://southfront.org/israeli-defense-forces-military-capabilities-scenarios-for-the-third-lebanon-war/

Realist , November 6, 2017 at 5:36 pm

Yes, the latest "big fish" outed yesterday as an agent of the Kremlin was the U.S. Secretary of Commerce (Wilbur Ross) who was discovered to hold stock in a shipping company that does business with a Russian petrochemical company (Sibur) whose owners include Vladimir Putin's son-in-law (Kirill Shamalov). Obviously the orders flow directly from Putin to Shamalov to Sibur to the shipping company to Ross to Trump, all to the detriment of American citizens.

From RT (another tainted source!): "US Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross Jr. has a stake in a shipping firm that receives millions of dollars a year in revenue from a company whose key owners include Russian President Vladimir Putin's son-in-law and a Russian tycoon sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department as a member of Putin's inner circle," says the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the main publisher of the Paradise Papers. After the report was published, some US lawmakers accused Ross of misleading Congress during his confirmation hearings." Don't go mistaking the "International Consortium of Investigative Journalists for "Consortium News." These guys are dedicated witch hunters, searching for anyone with six degrees of separation to Vladimir Putin and his grand plan to thwart the United States and effect regime change within its borders.

In a clear attempt to weasel out of his traitorous transgression, Ross stated "In a separate interview with CNBC, that Sibur [which is NOT the company he owned stock in] was not subject to US sanctions." 'A company not under sanction is just like any other company, period. It was a normal commercial relationship and one that I had nothing to do with the creation of, and do not know the shareholders who were apparently sanctioned at some later point in time,' he said." Since when can we start allowing excuses like that? Not knowing that someone holds stock in a company that does business with a company in which you own stock may at some later point in time become sanctioned by the all-wise and all-good American federal government?

I can't wait till they make the first Ben Stiller comedy based on this fiasco twenty years from now. It will be hilarious slap-stick, maybe titled "Can You Believe these Mother Fockers?" President Chelea Clinton of our great and noble idiocracy will throw out the first witch on opening day of the movie.

Danny Weil , November 6, 2017 at 6:27 pm

Let's be honest. Most Americans think McCarthy is a retail store. No education. And they think Russia is the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Trump is in Japan to start war with N. Korea to hide the blemishes or the canker on his ass. America is rapidly collapsing.

Adrian Engler , November 6, 2017 at 6:34 pm

In the beginning, "Russiagate" was about alleged actions by Russian secret services. Evidence for these allegations has never emerged, and it seems that the Russiagate conspiracy theorists largely gave up on this part (they still sometimes write about it as if it was an established fact, but since the only thing in support of it they can adduce is the canard about the 17 intelligence services, it probably is not that interesting any more).

Now, they have dropped the mask, and the object of their hatred are openly all Russian people, anyone who is "Russian linked" by ever having logged in to social networks from Russia or using Cyrillic letters. If these people and their media at least recognized the reality that they are now a particularly rabid part of the xenophobic far right in the United States

But when people daily spew hate against anything and anyone "Russia linked" and still don't recognize that they have gone over to the far right and even claim they are liberal or progressive, this is completely absurd.

McCarthyism, as terrible as it was, at least originally was motivated by hatred against a certain political ideology that also had its bad sides. But today's Russiagate peddlers clearly are motivated by hatred against a certain ethnicity, a certain country, and a certain language. I don't think there is any way to avoid the conclusion that with their hatred against anyone who is "Russia linked", they have become right-wing extremists.

Litchfield , November 6, 2017 at 6:46 pm

"Israel is another skilled player in this field, tapping into its supporters around the world to harass people who criticize the Zionist project."

Yes, very well organized.
In fact virtually every synagogue is a center for organizing people to harass others who are exercising their First Amendment rights to diseminate information about Israel's occupation of Palestine. The link below is to a protest and really, personal attack, against a Unitarian minister in Marblehead, Mass., for daring to screen the film ""The Occupation of the American Mind, Israel's Public Relations War in the United States." In other words, for daring to provide an dissenting opinion and, simply, to tell the truth. Ironic is that the protesters' comment actually reinforce the basic message of the film.
No other views on Israel will be allowed to enter the public for a good airing and discussion and debate. The truth about the illegal Israeli occupation will be shouted down, and those who try to provide information to the public on this subject will be vilified as "anti-semites." Kudos to this minister for screening the film.

http://www.salemnews.com/news/local_news/screening-of-film-sparks-protest-in-marblehead/article_0b075cbc-c2ae-5d46-916a-24eed79d30cd.html

http://cdn.field59.com/SALEMNEWS/ebb60114f782c4213f068bf0a39a4a46451ed871_fl9-360p.mp4

Abe , November 7, 2017 at 1:03 am

The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel's Public Relations War in the United States (2016) examines pro-Israel Hasbara propaganda efforts within the U.S.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD7mOyfclIk

This important documentary, narrated by Roger waters, exposes how the Israeli government, the U.S. government, and the pro-Israel Lobby join forces to shape American media coverage in Israel's favor.

Documentary producer Sut Jhally is professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, and a leading scholar on advertising, public relations, and political propaganda. He is also the founder and Executive Director of the Media Education Foundation, a documentary film company that looks at issues related to U.S. media and public attitudes.

Jhally is the producer and director of dozens of documentaries about U.S. politics and media culture, including Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land: U.S. Media & the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict.

The Occupation of the American Mind provides a sweeping analysis of Israel's decades-long battle for the hearts, minds, and tax dollars of the American people – a battle that has only intensified over the past few years in the face of widening international condemnation of Israel's increasingly right-wing policies.

Dave P. , November 7, 2017 at 2:45 am

Abe –

The interview of Roger Waters on RT is one of the best I have seen in a long while. I wish some other artists get the courage to raise their voices. The link to the Roger Waters interview is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7jcvfbLoIA This Roger Waters interview is worth watching.

Dan Kuhn , November 6, 2017 at 6:57 pm

It would seem that everyone on the US telivision , newspaper and internet news has mastered the art of hand over mouth , gasp and looking horrified every time Russia is mentioned. It looks to me that the US is in the middle of another of it´s mid life crises. Panic reigns supreme every where. If it was not so sad it would be funny. i was born in the 1940s and remember the McCarthy witch hunts and the daily shower of people jumping out of windows as a result of it.

As a Canadian I could not get over, even though I was just a teenager back then, just how a people in a supposedly advanced country could be so collectively paniced. I think back then it was just a scam to get rid of unions and any kind of collective action against the owners of the country, and this time around I think it is just a continuation of that scam, to frighten people into subservience to the police state. I heard a women on TV today commenting on the Texas masscre, she said " The devil never sleeps", well in the USA the 1/10 of 1% never sleeps when it comes to more control, more pwoer and more wealth, in fact I think they are after the very last shekle still left in the pockets of the bottom 99.9 % of the population. Those evil Russians are just a ploy in the scam.

Litchfield , November 6, 2017 at 6:58 pm

"The Democrats, the liberals and even many progressives justify their collusion with the neocons by the need to remove Trump by any means necessary and "stop fascism." But their contempt for Trump and their exaggeration of the "Hitler" threat that this incompetent buffoon supposedly poses have blinded them to the extraordinary risks attendant to their course of action and how they are playing into the hands of the war-hungry neocons."

And they are driving more and more actual and potential Dem Party members away in droves, further weakening the party and depriving it of its most intelligent members. Any non-senile person knows that this is all BS and these people are not only turning their backs on the Dem Party but I think many of them are being driven to the right by their disgust with this circus and the exposure of the party's critical weaknesses and derangement.

Paolo , November 6, 2017 at 6:59 pm

You correctly write that "the United States intervened in the 1996 Russian election to ensure the continued rule of the corrupt and pliable Boris Yeltsin". The irony is that a few years later Yeltsin chose Putin as his successor, and presumably the 'mericans gave him a hand to win his first term.
How extremely sad it is to see the USA going totally nuts.

Abe , November 6, 2017 at 9:00 pm

In The Fifties (1993), American journalist and historian David Halberstam addressed the noxious effect of McCarthyism: "McCarthy's carnival like four year spree of accusation charges, and threats touched something deep in the American body politic, something that lasted long after his own recklessness, carelessness and boozing ended his career in shame." (page 53)

Halberstam specifically discussed how readily the so-called "free" press acquiesced to McCarthy's masquerading: "The real scandal in all this was the behavior of the members of the Washington press corps, who, more often than not, knew better. They were delighted to be a part of his traveling road show, chronicling each charge and then moving on to the next town, instead of bothering to stay behind and follow up. They had little interest in reporting how careless McCarthy was or how little it all meant to him." (page 55)

Abe , November 6, 2017 at 9:15 pm

On March 9, 1954, Edward R. Murrow and a news team at CBS produced a half-hour See It Now special titled "A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy".

Murrow interspersed his own comments and clarifications into a damaging series of film clips from McCarthy's speeches. He ended the broadcast with a warning:

"As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves–as indeed we are–the defenders of freedom, what's left of it, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies, and whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create the situation of fear; he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right: 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.'"

CBS reported that of the 12,000 phone calls received within 24 hours of the broadcast, positive responses to the program outnumbered negative 15 to 1. McCarthy's favorable rating in the Gallup Poll dropped and was never to rise again.

Gary , November 6, 2017 at 11:34 pm

Sad to see so many hypocrites here espousing freedom from McCarthyism while they continue to vote for capitalist candidates year in year out. Think about the fact that in 2010 when Citizens United managed to get the Supreme Court to certify corporations as people the fear among many was that this would open US company subsidiaries to be infiltrated by foreign money. I guess it is happening in spades with collusion between Russian money & Trump's organization along with Facebook, Twitter & many others. How Mr. Parry can maintain that this parallels the 1950s anti-communist crusade is quite ingenuous. When libertarians, the likes of Bannon, Mercer, Trump et al, with their "destruction of the administrative state" credo are compared to the US communists of the 50s we know progressives have become about as disoriented as can be.

geeyp , November 7, 2017 at 3:30 am

I guess these "Paradise Papers" were released just yesterday, i.e., Sunday the 5th. Somehow I didn't get to it.

john wilson , November 7, 2017 at 6:01 am

So it looks like Hillary will be crossing Putin off her Xmas card list this year! I sometimes wonder if all we posters on here and other similar sites are on a list somewhere and when the day of reckoning comes, the list will be produced and we will have to account for our treasonous behaviour? Of course, one man's treason is another man's truth. I suppose in the end it boils down to the power thing. If you have a perceived enemy you can claim the need for an army. If you have an army you have power and with that power you can dispose of anyone who disagrees with you simply by calling them the enemy.

Lisa , November 7, 2017 at 9:38 am

John, your post made me wonder whether I would be on a list of traitors. I've written three posts, starting yesterday, and tried to explain something about the background of Yuri Milner, mentioned in the article. After "your comment has been posted, thank you" nothing has appeared on this thread.
Well, once more: Milner is known to me as a well-educated physicist from Moscow State University, and the co-founder and financier of The Breakthrough Prize, handing out yearly awards to promising scientists, with a much larger sum than the humble Nobel Prize. The awarding ceremony is held in December in Silicon Valley.

john wilson , November 7, 2017 at 12:34 pm

Hi Lisa, I have just looked up Milner on Wiki and he appears to be into everything including investment in internet companies. He is the co-founder of the "break through prize" that you mention and seems to have backed face book and twitter in their start up. I don't see why you posts haven't appeared as anyone can look Milner up on Wiki and elsewhere in great detail. You don't say where you have tried to post, but I would have thought on this site you would have no trouble whatever. If you have watched the last episode of 'cross talk' on RT you will see that anyone who as ever mentioned Russia in a public place is regarded as some kind of traitor. I guess you and me are due for rendition anytime now!! LOL

Lisa , November 7, 2017 at 1:49 pm

Hi John,
Naturally I had been trying to post on this site. First I tried three times in the comment space below all other posts, and they never went through. Only when I posted a reply to someone else's comment, my reply appeared. Maybe some technical problem on the site.

My motive was to show that Milner is doing worthwhile things with his millions, even if he is an "evil Russian oligarch". The mentioned prize has its own website: breakthroughprize.org. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) is a board member.

The prize is certainly a "Putin conspiracy", as it has links to Russia. (sarc)

Zachary Smith , November 7, 2017 at 8:05 pm

Maybe some technical problem on the site.

Possibly that's the case. Disappearing-forever posts happen to me from time to time. For at least a while afterwards I cut/paste what I'm about to attempt to "post" to a WORD file before hitting the "post comment" button.

In any event, avoid links whenever possible. By cut/pasting the exact title of the piece you're using as a reference, others can quickly locate it themselves without a link.

K , November 7, 2017 at 9:44 am

I'm a lifelong Democrat. I was a Bernie supporter. But logic dictates my thinking. The Russia nonsense is cover for Hillary's loss and a convenient hammer with which to attack Trump. Not biting. Bill Maher is fixated on this. The Rob Reiner crowd is an embarrassment. The whole thing is embarrassing. The media is inept. Very bizarre times.

Patricia Schaefer , November 7, 2017 at 10:14 am

Excellent article which should shed light on the misunderstandings manifested to manipulate and censor Americans. Personally, it's ludicrous to imply that Russia was the primary reason I could not vote for Hillary. My interest in Twitter peaked when Sidney Blumenthal's name popped up selling arms in Libya. He was on The Clinton Foundation's Payroll for $120K, while the Obama Administration specifically told HRC Sidney Blumenthal was not to work for the State Department.

Further research showed Chris Stevens had no knowledge of Sidney Blumenthal selling arms in Libya. Hillary NEVER even gave Chris Stevens, a candidate with an outstanding background for diplomatic relations in the Middle East, her email. Chris Stevens possessed a Law Degree in International Trade, and had previously worked for Senator Lugar (R). Senator Lugar had warned HRC not to co-mingle State Department business with The Clinton Foundation.

To add salt to the wound Hillary choose to put a third rate security firm in Libya, changing firms a couple of short weeks before the bombing. I think she anticipated the bombing, remarking "What difference does it make? " at the congressional hearings.

If you remember Guccifer (that hacker) he said he'd hacked both Hillary and Sidney Blumenthal. He also said he found Sidney Blumenthal's account more interesting.

That's just one reason why I started surfing the internet. Sidney Blumenthal was a name that hung in the cobwebs of my memory, and I wanted to know what this scum-job of a journalist was doing!

Then there was Clinton Cash, BoysonTheTracks, Clinton Chronicles, the outrageous audacity of the Democrats Superdelegates voting before a single primary ballot had been cast, MSM bias to Hillary, Kathy Shelton's video "I thought you should know." and maybe around September 2016, wondering what dirty things Hillary had done with Russia since 1993?

So I guess it's true. In the end after witnessing what has transpired since the election I would not vote for Hillary because she'd rather risk WWIII, than have the TRUTH come out why she lost.

Gary , November 7, 2017 at 3:16 pm

After living in Europe much of the last three years we've recently returned to the U.S. I must say that life here feels very much like I'm living within a strange Absurdist theatre play of some sort (not that Europe is vastly better). Truth, meaning, rationality, mean absolutely nothing at this juncture here in the United States. Reality has been turned on its head. The only difference between our political parties runs along identity politics lines: "do you prefer your drone strikes, illegal invasions, regime change black-ops, economic warfare and massive government spying 'with' or 'without' gender specific bathrooms?" MSM refer to this situation as "democracy" while of course any thinking person knows we are actually living within a totalitarian nightmare. Theatre of the Absurd as a way of life. I must admit it feels pretty creepy being home again.

Realist , November 7, 2017 at 4:09 pm

Should this give us hope? https://sputniknews.com/us/201711071058899018-trump-cia-meet-whistleblower-russian-hacking/ Trump ordered Pompeo to meet with Binney of VIPS re "Russian hacking." Is it time for the absurd Russia-gate narrative to finally be publicly deconstructed? Or is that asking too much?

Skip Scott , November 8, 2017 at 9:04 am

I wish it wasn't asking too much, but I suspect it is. If the NYT was reporting it, I'd feel better about our chances. But the Deep State controls the narrative, and thus controls Pompeo, Trump's order notwithstanding. I hope I'm wrong.

Dave P. , November 7, 2017 at 4:17 pm

Yes Joe. It is rather painful to watch as you said this Orwellian Tragedy playing out in the Country which has just about become a police state. For those of us who grew up admiring the Western Civilization starting with the Greeks and Romans, and then for its institutions enshrining Individual Rights; and its scientific, literary, and cultural achievements, it is as if it still happening in some dream, though it has been coming for some time now – more than two decades now at least. The System was not perfect but I think that it was good as it could get. The system had been in decline for four decades or so now.

From Robert Parry's article:

"The warning from powerful senators was crystal clear. "I don't think you get it," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, warned social media executives last week. "You bear this responsibility. You created these platforms, and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones who do something about it. Or we will."

Diane Feinstein's multi-billionaire husband was implicated in those Loan and Savings scandals of Reagan and G.H.W. Bush Era and in many other financial scandals later on but Law did not touch him. He has a dual residency in Israel. These are very corrupt people.

Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Perle, Nulad-Kagan clan, Kristol, Gaffney . . . the list goes on; add Netanyahu to it. In the Hollywood Harvey Weinstein, Rob Reiner. and the rest . . . In Finance and wall Street characters like Sandy Weiss and the gang. The Media and TV is directly or indirectly owned and controlled by "The Chosen People". So, where would you put the blame for all what is going on in this country, and all this chaos, death, and destruction going on in ME and many countries in Africa.

Any body who points out their role in it or utters a word of criticism of Israel is immediately called an anti-semite. Just to tell my own connections, my wife youngest sister is married to person who is Jewish (non-practicing). In all the relatives we have, they are closest to us for more than thirty five years now. They are those transgender common restroom liberals, but we have many common views and interests. In life, I have never differentiated people based on their ethnic or racial backgrounds; you look at the principles they stand for.

As I see it, this era of Russia-Gate and witch hunt is hundred times worse than McCarthy era. It seems irreversible. There is no one in the political establishment or elsewhere in Media or academia left for regeneration of the "Body Politic". In fact, what we are witnessing here is much worse than it was in the Soviet Union. It is complete degeneration of political leadership in this country. It extends to Media and other institutions as well. People in Soviet Union did not believe the lies they were told by the government there. And there arose writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Soviet Union. What is left here now except are these few websites?

Maedhros , November 7, 2017 at 4:27 pm

If there is evidence, you should be able to provide some so that readers can analyze and discuss it. Exactly what evidence has been provided that the Russian government manipulated the 2016 election?

CitizenOne , November 7, 2017 at 10:42 pm

Robert Parry You Nailed It!!!

I need to do a little research to see how far back you used the term "New McCarthyism" to describe the next cold war with Russia. It was about the same time the first allegations of a Trump-Russia conspiracy was floated by the MSM. I do not pretend to know how much airtime they spent covering their coverup for all that the MSM did to profit from SuperPacs. They have webed a weave that conspires to conceive to the tunes of billions of dollars spent to reprieve their intent to deceive us and distract us away from their investment in Donald Trump which was the real influence in the public spaces to gain mega profits from extorting the SuperPacs into spending their dollars to defeat the trumped up candidate they created and boosted. One has to look no further than the Main Stream Press (MSM) to find the guilty party with motive and opportunity to cash in on a candidacy which if not for the money motive would not pass any test of journalistic integrity but would make money for the Media.

The Russian Boogeyman was created shortly after the election and is an obvious attempt to shield and defend the actions of the MSM which was the real fake news covered in the nightly news leading up to the election which sought to get money rather than present the facts.

This is an example of how much power and influence the MSM has on us all to be able to upend a National election and turn around and blame some foreign Devil for the results of an election.

The Russians had little to do with Trumps election. The MSM had everything to do with it. They cast blame on the Russians and in so doing create a new Cold War which suits the power establishment and suitably diverts all of our attention away from their machinations to influence the last presidential election.

Win Win. More Nuclear Weapons and more money for the MIC and more money for all of the corporations who would profit from a new Cold War.

Profit in times of deceit make more money from those who cheat.

CitizenOne , November 7, 2017 at 11:25 pm

Things not talked about:

1. James Comey and his very real influence on the election has never entered the media space for an instant. It has gone down the collective memory hole. That silence has been deafening because he was the person who against DOJ advice reopened the investigation into Hillary Clinton and the Servergate investigation after it had been closed by the FBI just days before the election.

The silence of the media on the influence on the election by the reopening of James Comey's Servergate investigation and how the mass media press coverage implicating Hillary Clinton (again) in supposed crimes (which never resulted in an indictment) influenced the National Election in ways that have never been examined by the MSM is a nail in the coffin of media impartiality.

Why have they not investigated James Comey? Why has the MSM instead created a Russian Boogeyman? Why was he invited to testify about the Russian connection but never cross examined about his own influence? Why is the clearest reason for election meddling by James Comey not even spoken of by the MSM? This is because the MSM does not want to cover events as they happened but wants to recreate a alternate reality suitable to themselves which serves their interests and convinces us that the MSM has no part at all in downplaying the involvement of themselves in the election but wants to create a foreign enemy to blame.

It serves many interests. The MSM lies to all of us for the benefit of the MIC. It serves to support White House which will deliver maximum investments in the Defense Industry. It does this by creating a foreign enemy which they create for us to fear and be afraid of.

It is obvious to everyone with a clear eyed history of how the last election went down and how the MSM and the government later played upon our fears to grab more cash have cashed in under the present administration.

It is up to us to elect leaders who will reject this manipulation by the media and who will not be cowed by the establishment. We have the power enshrined in our Constitution to elect leaders who will pave the path forward to a better future.

Those future leaders will have to do battle with a media infrastructure that serves the power structure and conspires to deceive us all.

Jessica K , November 8, 2017 at 9:43 am

Clear critical thinking must accompany free speech, however, and irrationality seems to have beset Americans, too stuck in the mud of identity politics. Can they get out? I have hopes that a push is coming from the new multipolar world Xi and Putin are advocating, as well as others (but not the George Soros NWO variety). The big bully American government, actually ruled by oligarchy, has not been serving its regular folks well, so things are falling apart. Seems like the sex scandals, political scandals especially of the Democrat brand, money scandals are unraveling to expose underlying societal sickness in the Disunited States of America.

It is interesting that this purge shakeup in Saudi Arabia is happening in 2017, one hundred years since the shakeup in Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution. So shake-ups are happening everywhere. I think a pattern is emerging of major changes in world events. Just yesterday I read that because "Russia-gate" isn't working well, senators are looking to start a "China-gate", for evidence of Trump collusion with Chinese oligarchs. Ludicrous. As Seer once said, "The Empire in panic mode".

Patricia, thanks for the info on Sid Blumenthal, HRC and the selling of arms from Libya to ME jihadists, which seems to exonerate Chris Stevens from those dirty deeds and lays blame squarely at Blumenthal's and Clinton's doorstep; changes my thinking. And thanks to Robert Parry for continuing to push back at the participation of MSM and government players in the Orwellian masquerade being pulled on the sheeple.

Truther , November 8, 2017 at 12:54 pm

Just the facts for those of you who have minds still open. suggest you bookmark it quickly as the moderator will delete it within the hour.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/a-timeline-of-the-trump-russia-scandal-w511067

[Nov 04, 2017] Who's Afraid of Corporate COINTELPRO by C. J. Hopkins

Highly recommended!
These tactics do not just suppress information. They enforce conformity at much deeper level.
Notable quotes:
"... I am using the Orwellian verb "unperson" playfully, but I'm also trying to be precise. What's happening isn't censorship, technically, at least not in the majority of cases. While there are examples of classic censorship (e.g., in the UK, France, and Germany), apart from so-called "terrorist content," most governments aren't formally banning expressions of anti-corporatist dissent. This isn't Czechoslovakia, after all. This is global capitalism, where the repression of dissent is a little more subtle. The point of Google unpersoning CounterPunch (and probably many other publications) and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists like Hedges is not to prevent them from publishing their work or otherwise render them invisible to readers. The goal is to delegitmize them, and thus decrease traffic to their websites and articles, and ultimately drive them out of business, if possible. ..."
"... Another objective of this non-censorship censorship is discouraging writers like myself from contributing to publications like CounterPunch, Truthdig, Alternet, Global Research, and any other publications the corporatocracy deems "illegitimate." Google unpersoning a writer like Hedges is a message to other non-ball-playing writers. The message is, "this could happen to you." This message is meant for other journalists, primarily, but it's also aimed at writers like myself who are making a living (to whatever degree) writing and selling what we think of as "literature." ..."
"... These tactics do not just suppress information. They enforce conformity at much deeper level. ..."
"... Chomsky explains how this system operates in What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream . It isn't a question of censorship the system operates on rewards and punishments, financial and emotional coercion, and subtler forms of intimidation. Making examples of non-cooperators is a particularly effective tactic. Ask any one of the countless women whose careers have been destroyed by Harvey Weinstein, or anyone who's been to graduate school, or worked at a major corporation. ..."
"... C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org . ..."
Nov 04, 2017 | www.unz.com

On November 30, 2016, presumably right at the stroke of midnight, Google Inc. unpersoned CounterPunch. They didn't send out a press release or anything. They just quietly removed it from the Google News aggregator. Not very many people noticed. This happened just as the "fake news" hysteria was being unleashed by the corporate media, right around the time The Washington Post ran this neo-McCarthyite smear piece vicariously accusing CounterPunch, and a number of other publications, of being "peddlers of Russian propaganda." As I'm sure you'll recall, that astounding piece of "journalism" (which The Post was promptly forced to disavow with an absurd disclaimer but has refused to retract) was based on the claims of an anonymous website apparently staffed by a couple of teenagers and a formerly rabidly anti-Communist, now rabidly anti-Putin think tank. Little did most people know at the time that these were just the opening salvos in what has turned out to be an all-out crackdown on any and all forms of vocal opposition to the global corporate ruling classes and their attempts to quash the ongoing nationalist backlash against their neoliberal agenda.

Almost a year later, things are much clearer. If you haven't been following this story closely, and you care at all about freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and that kind of stuff, you may want to take an hour or two and catch up a bit on what's been happening. I offered a few examples of some of the measures governments and corporations have been taking to stifle expressions of dissent in my latest piece in CounterPunch , and there are many more detailed articles online, like this one by Andre Damon from July, and this follow-up he published last week (which reports that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges has also been unpersoned). Or, if you're the type of soul who only believes what corporations tell you, and who automatically dismisses anything published by a Trotskyist website, here's one from last December in The Guardian , and an op-ed in The New York Times , both of which at least report what Google, Twitter, and Facebook are up to. Or you could read this piece by Robert Parry , who also has "legitimate" (i.e., corporate) credentials, and who hasn't been unpersoned just yet, although I'm sure they'll get around to him eventually.

I am using the Orwellian verb "unperson" playfully, but I'm also trying to be precise. What's happening isn't censorship, technically, at least not in the majority of cases. While there are examples of classic censorship (e.g., in the UK, France, and Germany), apart from so-called "terrorist content," most governments aren't formally banning expressions of anti-corporatist dissent. This isn't Czechoslovakia, after all. This is global capitalism, where the repression of dissent is a little more subtle. The point of Google unpersoning CounterPunch (and probably many other publications) and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists like Hedges is not to prevent them from publishing their work or otherwise render them invisible to readers. The goal is to delegitmize them, and thus decrease traffic to their websites and articles, and ultimately drive them out of business, if possible.

Another objective of this non-censorship censorship is discouraging writers like myself from contributing to publications like CounterPunch, Truthdig, Alternet, Global Research, and any other publications the corporatocracy deems "illegitimate." Google unpersoning a writer like Hedges is a message to other non-ball-playing writers. The message is, "this could happen to you." This message is meant for other journalists, primarily, but it's also aimed at writers like myself who are making a living (to whatever degree) writing and selling what we think of as "literature."

Yes, as you've probably guessed by now, in addition to writing political satire, I am, as rogue journalist Caitlin Johnstone so aptly put it once, an "elitist wanker." I've spent the majority of my adult life writing stage plays and working in the theater, and it doesn't get any more elitist than that. My plays are published by "establishment" publishers, have won a few awards, and have been produced internationally. I recently published my "debut novel" (which is what you call it if you're an elitist wanker) and am currently trying to promote and sell it. I mention this, not to blow my little horn, but to the set the stage to try to illustrate how these post-Orwellian intimidation tactics (i.e., unpersoning people from the Internet) work. These tactics do not just suppress information. They enforce conformity at much deeper level.

The depressing fact of the matter is, in our brave new Internet-dominated world, corporations like Google, Twitter, and Facebook (not to mention Amazon), are, for elitist wankers like me, in the immortal words of Colonel Kurz, "either friends or they are truly enemies to be feared." If you are in the elitist wanker business, regardless of whether you're Jonathan Franzen, Garth Risk Hallberg, Margaret Atwood, or some "mid-list" or "emerging" author, there is no getting around these corporations. So it's kind of foolish, professionally speaking, to write a bunch of essays that will piss them off, and then publish these essays in CounterPunch. Literary agents advise against this. Other elitist literary wankers, once they discover what you've been doing, will avoid you like the bubonic plague. Although it's perfectly fine to write books and movies about fictional evil corporations, writing about how real corporations are using their power to mold societies into self-policing virtual prisons of politically-correct, authoritarian consumers is well, it's something that is just not done in professional elitist wanker circles.

Normally, all this goes without saying, as these days most elitist wankers are trained how to write, and read, and think, in MFA conformity factories, where they screen out any unstable weirdos with unhealthy interests in political matters. This is to avoid embarrassing episodes like Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize lecture (which, if you haven't read it, you probably should), and is why so much of contemporary literature is so well-behaved and instantly forgettable. This institutionalized screening system is also why the majority of journalists employed by mainstream media outlets understand, without having to be told, what they are, and are not, allowed to report. Chomsky explains how this system operates in What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream . It isn't a question of censorship the system operates on rewards and punishments, financial and emotional coercion, and subtler forms of intimidation. Making examples of non-cooperators is a particularly effective tactic. Ask any one of the countless women whose careers have been destroyed by Harvey Weinstein, or anyone who's been to graduate school, or worked at a major corporation.

Or let me provide you with a personal example.

A couple weeks ago, I googled myself (which we elitist wankers are wont to do), and noticed that two of my published books had disappeared from the "Knowledge Panel" that appears in the upper right of the search results. I also noticed that the people "People Also Search For" in the panel had changed. For years, consistently, the people you saw there had been a variety of other elitist literary wankers and leftist types. Suddenly, they were all rather right-wing types, people like Ilana Mercer and John Derbyshire, and other VDARE writers. So that was a little disconcerting.

I set out to contact the Google Search specialists to inquire about this mysterious development, and was directed to a series of unhelpful web pages directing me to other unhelpful pages with little boxes where you can write and submit a complaint to Google, which they will completely ignore. Being an elitist literary wanker, I also wrote to Google Books, and exchanged a number of cordial emails with an entity (let's call her Ms. O'Brien) who explained that, for "a variety of reasons," the "visibility" of my books (which had been consistently visible for many years) was subject to change from day to day, and that, regrettably, she couldn't assist me further, and that sending her additional cordial emails was probably a pointless waste of time. Ms. O'Brien was also pleased to report that my books had been restored to "visibility," which, of course, when I checked, they hadn't.

"Whatever," I told myself, "this is silly. It's probably just some IT thing, maybe Google Books updating its records, or something." However, I was still perplexed by the "People Also Search For" switcheroo, because it's kind of misleading to link my writing to that of a bunch of serious right-wingers. Imagine, if you were a dystopian sci-fi fan, and you googled me to check out my book and see what else I had written, and so on, and my Google "Knowledge Panel" popped up and displayed all these far-right VDARE folks. Unless you're a far-right VDARE type yourself, that might be a little bit of a turn-off.

At that point, I wondered if I was getting paranoid. Because Google Search runs on algorithms, right? And my political satire and commentary is published, not only in CounterPunch, but also in The Unz Review, where these far-right-wing types are also published. Moreover, my pieces are often reposted by what appear to be "Russia-linked" websites, and everyone knows that the Russians are all a bunch of white supremacists, right? On top of which, it's not like I'm Stephen King here. I am hardly famous enough to warrant the attention of any post-Orwellian corporate conspiracy to stigmatize anti-establishment dissent by manipulating how authors are displayed on Google (i.e., subtly linking them to white supremacists, anti-Semites, and others of that ilk).

So, okay, I reasoned, what probably happened was over the course of twenty-four hours, for no logical reason whatsoever, all the folks who had been googling me (along with other leftist and literary figures) suddenly stopped googling me, all at once, while, more or less at the exact same time, hundreds of right-wingers started googling me (along with those white supremacist types they had, theoretically, already been googling). That kind of makes sense when you think about it, right? I mean, Google couldn't be doing this intentionally. It must have been some sort of algorithm that detected this sudden, seismic shift in the demographic of people googling me.

Or, I don't know, does that possibly sound like a desperate attempt to rationalize the malicious behavior of an unaccountable, more or less god-like, global corporation that wields the power of life and death over my book sales and profile on the Internet (a more or less god-like global corporation that could do a lot of additional damage to my sales and reputation with complete impunity once the piece you're reading is published)? Or am I simply getting paranoid, and, in fact, I've developed a secret white supremacist fan base without my knowledge? Only Google knows for sure.

Such are the conundrums elitist literary wankers have to face these days that is, those of us wankers who haven't learned to keep our fucking mouths shut yet. Probably the safest course of action, regardless of whether I'm being paranoid or Google does have me on some kind of list, is to lay off the anti-corporatist essays, and definitely stop contributing to CounterPunch, not to mention The Unz Review, and probably also give up the whole dystopian satire novel thing, and ensure that my second novel conforms to the "normal" elitist wanker rules (which every literary wanker knows, but which, technically, do not exist). Who knows, if I play my cards right, maybe I can even sell the rights to Miramax, or okay, some other corporation.

Once that happens, I assume that Google will want to restore me to normal personhood, and return my books to visibility, and I will ride off into the Hollywood sunset with the Clintons, Clooneys, and Pichais, and maybe even Barack Obama himself, if he isn't off jet skiing with Richard Branson, or having dinner with Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos, who just happen to live right down the street, or hawking the TPP on television. By that time, CounterPunch and all those other "illegitimate" publications will have been forced onto the dark web anyway, so I won't be giving up all that much. I know, that sounds pretty cold and cynical, but my liberal friends will understand I just hope all my new white supremacist fans will find it in their hearts to forgive me.

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .

anonymous , • Disclaimer November 3, 2017 at 12:15 pm GMT

Thank you for mustering the courage and then taking the time to spell out these outrages in a straightforward, unemotional way. I've appreciated the humor that centers your other essays, but there's not a damned thing funny about this.

But why are things as they are? With billions aplenty, our rulers must be driven by their libido dominandi. We're left to wonder only whether they get off more on ostracizing the Hopkinses, on buying the politicians, or on herding the sheep from bathrooms to statues to flags.

[Oct 13, 2017] Sympathy for the Corporatocracy by C. J. Hopkins

Highly recommended!
Biting satire...
Notable quotes:
"... The Tonight Show ..."
"... Now, despite what the Russian propagandists will tell you, this recent outbreak of fascistic behavior has nothing whatsoever to do with these people's frustration with neoliberalism or the supranational Corporatocracy that has been expanding its global empire with total impunity for twenty-five years. And it definitely has nothing at all to do with supranational political unions, or the supersession of national sovereignty by corporate-concocted "free trade" agreements, or the relentless privatization of everything, or the fear that a lot of people have that their cultures are being gradually erased and replaced with a globalized, corporate-friendly, multicultural, market-based culture, which is merely a simulation of culture, and which contains no actual cultural values (because exchange value is its only operative value), but which sells the empty signifiers of their eviscerated cultural values back to them so they can wear their "identities" like designer brands as they hunch together in silence at Starbucks posting pictures of themselves on Facebook. ..."
"... No, this discontent with the political establishment, corporate elites, and the mainstream media has nothing to do with any of that. It's not like global Capitalism, following the collapse of the U.S.S.R. (its last external ideological adversary), has been restructuring the entire planet in accordance with its geopolitical interests, or doing away with national sovereignty, and other nationalistic concepts that no longer serve a useful purpose in a world where a single ideological system (one backed by the most fearsome military in history) reigns completely unopposed. If that were the case, well, it might behoove us to question whether this outbreak of Nazism, racism, and other forms of "hate," was somehow connected to that historical development and maybe even try to articulate some sort of leftist analysis of that. ..."
"... a world where a single ideology rules the planet unopposed from without ..."
"... Brexit is about Britons who want their country back, a movement indeed getting stronger and stronger in EU member states, but ignored by the ruling 'elites'. ..."
"... A lot of these so called "revolutions" are fomented by the elite only to be subverted and perverted by them in the end. They've had a lot of practice co-opting revolutions and independence movements. ..."
"... "Independence" is now so fashionable (as was Communism among the "elite" back in the '30s), that they are even teaching and fostering independence to kids in kindergarten here in the US. That strikes me as most amusing. Imagine "learning" independence in state run brainwashing factories. ..."
Oct 13, 2017 | www.unz.com

Well all right, let's review what happened, or at least the official version of what happened. Not Hillary Clinton's version of what happened, which Jeffrey St. Clair so incisively skewered , but the Corporatocracy's version of what happened, which overlaps with but is even more ridiculous than Clinton's ridiculous version. To do that, we need to harken back to the peaceful Summer of 2016, (a/k/a the "Summer of Fear" ), when the United States of America was still a shiny city upon a hill whose beacon light guided freedom-loving people, the Nazis were still just a bunch of ass clowns meeting in each other's mother's garages, and Russia was, well Russia was Russia.

Back then, as I'm sure you'll recall, Western democracy, was still primarily being menaced by the lone wolf terrorists, for absolutely no conceivable reason, apart from the terrorists' fanatical desire to brutally murder all non-believers. The global Russo-Nazi Axis had not yet reared its ugly head. President Obama, who, during his tenure, had single-handedly restored America to the peaceful, prosperous, progressive paradise it had been before George W. Bush screwed it up, was on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon slow jamming home the TPP . The Wall Street banks had risen from the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis, and were buying back all the foreclosed homes of the people they had fleeced with subprime mortgages. American workers were enjoying the freedom and flexibility of the new gig economy. Electioneering in the United States was underway, but it was early days. It was already clear that Donald Trump was literally the Second Coming of Hitler , but no one was terribly worried about him yet. The Republican Party was in a shambles. Neither Trump nor any of the other contenders had any chance of winning in November. Nor did Sanders, who had been defeated, fair and square, in the Democratic primaries, mostly because of his racist statements and crazy, quasi-Communist ideas. Basically, everything was hunky dory. Yes, it was going to be terribly sad to have to bid farewell to Obama, who had bailed out all those bankrupt Americans the Wall Street banks had taken to the cleaners, ended all of Bush and Cheney's wars, closed down Guantanamo, and just generally served as a multicultural messiah figure to affluent consumers throughout the free world, but Hope-and-Change was going to continue. The talking heads were all in agreement Hillary Clinton was going to be President, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Little did we know at the time that an epidemic of Russo-Nazism had been festering just beneath the surface of freedom-loving Western societies like some neo-fascist sebaceous cyst. Apparently, millions of theretofore more or less normal citizens throughout the West had been infected with a virulent strain of Russo-Nazi-engineered virus, because they simultaneously began exhibiting the hallmark symptoms of what we now know as White Supremacist Behavioral Disorder, or Fascist Oppositional Disorder (the folks who update the DSM are still arguing over the official name). It started with the Brexit referendum, spread to America with the election of Trump, and there have been a rash of outbreaks in Europe, like the one we're currently experiencing in Germany . These fascistic symptoms have mostly manifest as people refusing to vote as instructed, and expressing oppressive views on the Internet, but there have also been more serious crimes, including several assaults and murders perpetrated by white supremacists (which, of course, never happened when Obama was President, because the Nazis hadn't been "emboldened" yet).

Now, despite what the Russian propagandists will tell you, this recent outbreak of fascistic behavior has nothing whatsoever to do with these people's frustration with neoliberalism or the supranational Corporatocracy that has been expanding its global empire with total impunity for twenty-five years. And it definitely has nothing at all to do with supranational political unions, or the supersession of national sovereignty by corporate-concocted "free trade" agreements, or the relentless privatization of everything, or the fear that a lot of people have that their cultures are being gradually erased and replaced with a globalized, corporate-friendly, multicultural, market-based culture, which is merely a simulation of culture, and which contains no actual cultural values (because exchange value is its only operative value), but which sells the empty signifiers of their eviscerated cultural values back to them so they can wear their "identities" like designer brands as they hunch together in silence at Starbucks posting pictures of themselves on Facebook.

No, this discontent with the political establishment, corporate elites, and the mainstream media has nothing to do with any of that. It's not like global Capitalism, following the collapse of the U.S.S.R. (its last external ideological adversary), has been restructuring the entire planet in accordance with its geopolitical interests, or doing away with national sovereignty, and other nationalistic concepts that no longer serve a useful purpose in a world where a single ideological system (one backed by the most fearsome military in history) reigns completely unopposed. If that were the case, well, it might behoove us to question whether this outbreak of Nazism, racism, and other forms of "hate," was somehow connected to that historical development and maybe even try to articulate some sort of leftist analysis of that.

This hypothetical leftist analysis might want to focus on how Capitalism is fundamentally opposed to Despotism, and is essentially a value-decoding machine which renders everything and everyone it touches essentially valueless interchangeable commodities whose worth is determined by market forces, rather than by societies and cultures, or religions, or other despotic systems (wherein values are established and enforced arbitrarily, by the despot, the church, or the ruling party, or by a group of people who share an affinity and decide they want to live a certain way). This is where it would get sort of tricky, because it (i.e., this hypothetical analysis) would have to delve into the history of Capitalism, and how it evolved out of medieval Despotism, and how it has been decoding despotic values for something like five hundred years. This historical delving (which would probably be too long for people to read on their phones) would demonstrate how Capitalism has been an essentially progressive force in terms of getting us out of Despotism (which, for most folks, wasn't very much fun) by fomenting bourgeois revolutions and imposing some semblance of democracy on societies. It would follow Capitalism's inexorable advance all the way up to the Twentieth Century, in which its final external ideological adversary, fake Communism, suddenly imploded, delivering us to the world we now live in a world where a single ideology rules the planet unopposed from without , and where any opposition to that global ideology can only be internal, or insurgent, in nature (e.g, terrorism, extremism, and so on). Being a hypothetical leftist analysis, it would, at this point, need to stress that, despite the fact that Capitalism helped deliver us from Despotism, and improved the state of society generally (compared to most societies that preceded it), we nonetheless would like to transcend it, or evolve out of it toward some type of society where people, and everything else, including the biosphere we live in, are not interchangeable, valueless commodities exchanged by members of a global corporatocracy who have no essential values, or beliefs, or principles, other than the worship of money. After having covered all that, we might want to offer more a nuanced view of the current neo-nationalist reaction to the Corporatocracy's ongoing efforts to restructure and privatize the rest of the planet. Not that we would support this reaction, or in any way refrain from calling neo-nationalism what it is (i.e., reactionary, despotic, and doomed), but this nuanced view we'd hypothetically offer, by analyzing the larger sociopolitical and historical forces at play, might help us to see the way forward more clearly, and who knows, maybe eventually propose some kind of credible leftist alternative to the "global neoliberalism vs. neo-nationalism" double bind we appear to be hopelessly stuck in at the moment.

Luckily, we don't have to do that (i.e., articulate such a leftist analysis of any such larger historical forces). Because there is no corporatocracy not really. That's just a fake word the Russians made up and are spreading around on the Internet to distract us while the Nazis take over. No, the logical explanation for Trump, Brexit, and anything else that threatens the expansion of global Capitalism, and the freedom, democracy, and prosperity it offers, is that millions of people across the world, all at once, for no apparent reason, woke up one day full-blown fascists and started looking around for repulsive demagogues to swear fanatical allegiance to. Yes, that makes a lot more sense than all that complicated stuff about history and hegemonic ideological systems, which is probably just Russian propaganda anyway, in which case there is absolutely no reason to read any boring year-old pieces, like this one in The European Financial Review , or this report by Corporate Watch , from way back in the year 2000, about the rise of global corporate power.

So, apologies for wasting your time with all that pseudo-Marxian gobbledygook. Let's just pretend this never happened, and get back to more important matters, like statistically proving that Donald Trump got elected President because of racism, misogyny, transphobia, xenophobia, or some other type of behavioral disorder, and pulling down Confederate statues, or kneeling during the National Anthem, or whatever happens to be trending this week. Oh, yeah, and debating punching Nazis, or people wearing MAGA hats. We definitely need to sort all that out before we can move ahead with helping the Corporatocracy remove Trump from office, or at least ensure he remains surrounded by their loyal generals, CEOs, and Goldman Sachs guys until the next election. Whatever we do, let's not get distracted by that stuff I just distracted you with. I know, it's tempting, but, given what's at stake, we need to maintain our laser focus on issues related to identity politics, or else well, you know, the Nazis win.

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .

jilles dykstra, October 13, 2017 at 3:15 pm GMT

Yesterday evening on RT a USA lady, as usual forgot the name, spoke about the USA. In a matter of fact tone she said things like 'they (Deep State) have got him (Trump) in the box'.

They, Deep State again, are now wondering if they will continue to try to control the world, or if they should stop the attempt, and retreat into the USA.
Also as matter of fact she said 'the CIA has always been the instrument of Deep State, from Kenndy to Nine Eleven'.

Another statement was 'no president ever was in control'.

How USA citizens continue to believe they live in a democracy, I cannot understand.

Yesterday the intentions of the new Dutch government were made public, alas most Dutch also dot not see that the Netherlands since 2005 no longer is a democracy, just a province of Brussels.

You can fool all people .

Che Guava, October 13, 2017 at 4:22 pm GMT

@jilles dykstra

Jilles,

I am thinking you take the article too literally.

jacques sheete, October 13, 2017 at 4:30 pm GMT

Brexit is about Britons who want their country back, a movement indeed getting stronger and stronger in EU member states, but ignored by the ruling 'elites'.

No doubt many do want their country back, but what concerns me is that all of a sudden we have the concept of "independence" plastered all over the place. Such concepts don't get promoted unless the ruling elites see ways to turn those sentiments to their favor.

A lot of these so called "revolutions" are fomented by the elite only to be subverted and perverted by them in the end. They've had a lot of practice co-opting revolutions and independence movements. (And everything else.)

"Independence" is now so fashionable (as was Communism among the "elite" back in the '30s), that they are even teaching and fostering independence to kids in kindergarten here in the US. That strikes me as most amusing. Imagine "learning" independence in state run brainwashing factories.

Does anyone else smell a rat or two?

Anon-og , October 13, 2017 at 5:16 pm GMT

"Now, despite what the Russian propagandists will tell you, this recent outbreak of fascistic behavior has nothing whatsoever to do with these people's frustration with neoliberalism or the supranational Corporatocracy that has been expanding its global empire with total impunity for twenty-five years. And it definitely has nothing at all to do with supranational political unions, or the supersession of national sovereignty by corporate-concocted "free trade" agreements, or the relentless privatization of everything, or the fear that a lot of people have that their cultures are being gradually erased and replaced with a globalized, corporate-friendly, multicultural, market-based culture, which is merely a simulation of culture, and which contains no actual cultural values (because exchange value is its only operative value), but which sells the empty signifiers of their eviscerated cultural values back to them so they can wear their "identities" like designer brands as they hunch together in silence at Starbucks posting pictures of themselves on Facebook."

Very impressed with this article, never really paid attention to CJ's articles but that is now changing!

[Oct 11, 2017] Russia witch hunt is a tactic used by the ruling elite, and in particular the Democratic Party, to avoid facing a very unpleasant reality: that their unpopularity is the outcome of their policies of deindustrialization and the assault against working class

Highly recommended!
Chris Hedges, who is doubtless a courageous journalist and an intelligent commentator, suggests that if we are to discuss the anti-Russia campaign realistically, as baseless in fact, and as contrived for an effect and to further/protect some particular interests, we can hardly avoid the question: Who or what interest is served by the anti-Russia campaign?
An interesting observation "The Democratic Party doesn't actually function as a political party. It's about perpetual mass mobilization and a hyperventilating public relations arm, all paid for by corporate donors. The base of the party has no real say in the leadership or the policies of the party, as Bernie Sanders and his followers found out."
The other relevant observation is that there is no American left. It was destroyed as a political movement. The USA is a right wing country.
Notable quotes:
"... This obsession with Russia is a tactic used by the ruling elite, and in particular the Democratic Party, to avoid facing a very unpleasant reality: that their unpopularity is the outcome of their policies of deindustrialization and the assault against working men and women and poor people of color. ..."
"... It is the result of the slashing of basic government services, including, of course, welfare, that Clinton gutted; deregulation, a decaying infrastructure, including public schools, and the de facto tax boycott by corporations. It is the result of the transformation of the country into an oligarchy. The nativist revolt on the right, and the aborted insurgency within the Democratic Party, makes sense when you see what they have done to the country. ..."
"... The Democratic Party, in particular, is driving this whole Russia witch-hunt. It cannot face its complicity in the destruction of our civil liberties -- and remember, Barack Obama's assault on civil liberties was worse than those carried out by George W. Bush -- and the destruction of our economy and our democratic institutions. ..."
"... Politicians like the Clintons, Pelosi and Schumer are creations of Wall Street. That is why they are so virulent about pushing back against the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. ..."
"... The Democratic Party doesn't actually function as a political party. It's about perpetual mass mobilization and a hyperventilating public relations arm, all paid for by corporate donors. The base of the party has no real say in the leadership or the policies of the party, as Bernie Sanders and his followers found out. They are props in the sterile political theater. ..."
"... These party elites, consumed by greed, myopia and a deep cynicism, have a death grip on the political process. They're not going to let it go, even if it all implodes. ..."
"... The whole exercise was farcical. The White House would leak some bogus story to Judy Miller or Michael Gordon, and then go on the talk shows to say, 'as the Times reported .' It gave these lies the veneer of independence and reputable journalism. This was a massive institutional failing, and one the paper has never faced. ..."
"... The media's anti-Russia narrative has been embraced by large portions of what presents itself as the "left." ..."
"... Well, don't get me started on the American left. First of all, there is no American left -- not a left that has any kind of seriousness, that understands political or revolutionary theories, that's steeped in economic study, that understands how systems of power work, especially corporate and imperial power. The left is caught up in the same kind of cults of personality that plague the rest of society. It focuses on Trump, as if Trump is the central problem. Trump is a product, a symptom of a failed system and dysfunctional democracy, not the disease. ..."
"... For good measure, they purged the liberal class -- look at what they did to Henry Wallace -- so that Cold War "liberals" equated capitalism with democracy, and imperialism with freedom and liberty. I lived in Switzerland and France. There are still residues of a militant left in Europe, which gives Europeans something to build upon. But here we almost have to begin from scratch. ..."
"... The corporate elites we have to overthrow already hold power. And unless we build a broad, popular resistance movement, which takes a lot of patient organizing among working men and women, we are going to be steadily ground down. ..."
"... The corporate state has made it very hard to make a living if you hold fast to this radical critique. You will never get tenure. You probably won't get academic appointments. You won't win prizes. You won't get grants. ..."
"... The elite schools, and I have taught as a visiting professor at a few of them, such as Princeton and Columbia, replicate the structure and goals of corporations. If you want to even get through a doctoral committee, much less a tenure committee, you must play it really, really safe. You must not challenge the corporate-friendly stance that permeates the institution and is imposed through corporate donations and the dictates of wealthy alumni. Half of the members of most of these trustee boards should be in prison! ..."
"... Speculation in the 17th century in Britain was a crime. Speculators were hanged. And today they run the economy and the country. They have used the capturing of wealth to destroy the intellectual, cultural and artistic life in the country and snuff out our democracy. There is a word for these people: traitors. ..."
Oct 11, 2017 | www.unz.com

Originally from: The elites "have no credibility left" by Chris Hedges

But the whole idea that the Russians swung the election to Trump is absurd. It's really premised on the unproven claim that Russia gave the Podesta emails to WikiLeaks, and the release of these emails turned tens, or hundreds of thousands, of Clinton supporters towards Trump. This doesn't make any sense. Either that, or, according to the director of national intelligence, RT America, where I have a show, got everyone to vote for the Green Party.

This obsession with Russia is a tactic used by the ruling elite, and in particular the Democratic Party, to avoid facing a very unpleasant reality: that their unpopularity is the outcome of their policies of deindustrialization and the assault against working men and women and poor people of color. It is the result of disastrous trade agreements like NAFTA that abolished good-paying union jobs and shipped them to places like Mexico, where workers without benefits are paid $3.00 an hour. It is the result of the explosion of a system of mass incarceration, begun by Bill Clinton with the 1994 omnibus crime bill, and the tripling and quadrupling of prison sentences. It is the result of the slashing of basic government services, including, of course, welfare, that Clinton gutted; deregulation, a decaying infrastructure, including public schools, and the de facto tax boycott by corporations. It is the result of the transformation of the country into an oligarchy. The nativist revolt on the right, and the aborted insurgency within the Democratic Party, makes sense when you see what they have done to the country.

Police forces have been turned into quasi-military entities that terrorize marginal communities, where people have been stripped of all of their rights and can be shot with impunity; in fact over three are killed a day. The state shoots and locks up poor people of color as a form of social control. They are quite willing to employ the same form of social control on any other segment of the population that becomes restive.

The Democratic Party, in particular, is driving this whole Russia witch-hunt. It cannot face its complicity in the destruction of our civil liberties -- and remember, Barack Obama's assault on civil liberties was worse than those carried out by George W. Bush -- and the destruction of our economy and our democratic institutions.

Politicians like the Clintons, Pelosi and Schumer are creations of Wall Street. That is why they are so virulent about pushing back against the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. Without Wall Street money, they would not hold political power. The Democratic Party doesn't actually function as a political party. It's about perpetual mass mobilization and a hyperventilating public relations arm, all paid for by corporate donors. The base of the party has no real say in the leadership or the policies of the party, as Bernie Sanders and his followers found out. They are props in the sterile political theater.

These party elites, consumed by greed, myopia and a deep cynicism, have a death grip on the political process. They're not going to let it go, even if it all implodes.

... ... ...

DN: Let's come back to this question of the Russian hacking news story. You raised the ability to generate a story, which has absolutely no factual foundation, nothing but assertions by various intelligence agencies, presented as an assessment that is beyond question. What is your evaluation of this?

CH: The commercial broadcast networks, and that includes CNN and MSNBC, are not in the business of journalism. They hardly do any. Their celebrity correspondents are courtiers to the elite. They speculate about and amplify court gossip, which is all the accusations about Russia, and they repeat what they are told to repeat. They sacrifice journalism and truth for ratings and profit. These cable news shows are one of many revenue streams in a corporate structure. They compete against other revenue streams. The head of CNN, Jeff Zucker, who helped create the fictional persona of Donald Trump on "Celebrity Apprentice," has turned politics on CNN into a 24-hour reality show. All nuance, ambiguity, meaning and depth, along with verifiable fact, are sacrificed for salacious entertainment. Lying, racism, bigotry and conspiracy theories are given platforms and considered newsworthy, often espoused by people whose sole quality is that they are unhinged. It is news as burlesque.

I was on the investigative team at the New York Times during the lead-up to the Iraq War. I was based in Paris and covered Al Qaeda in Europe and the Middle East. Lewis Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle and maybe somebody in an intelligence agency, would confirm whatever story the administration was attempting to pitch. Journalistic rules at the Times say you can't go with a one-source story. But if you have three or four supposedly independent sources confirming the same narrative, then you can go with it, which is how they did it. The paper did not break any rules taught at Columbia journalism school, but everything they wrote was a lie.

The whole exercise was farcical. The White House would leak some bogus story to Judy Miller or Michael Gordon, and then go on the talk shows to say, 'as the Times reported .' It gave these lies the veneer of independence and reputable journalism. This was a massive institutional failing, and one the paper has never faced.

DN: The CIA pitches the story, and then the Times gets the verification from those who pitch it to them.

CH: It's not always pitched. And not much of this came from the CIA The CIA wasn't buying the "weapons of mass destruction" hysteria.

DN: It goes the other way too?

CH: Sure. Because if you're trying to have access to a senior official, you'll constantly be putting in requests, and those officials will decide when they want to see you. And when they want to see you, it's usually because they have something to sell you.

DN: The media's anti-Russia narrative has been embraced by large portions of what presents itself as the "left."

CH: Well, don't get me started on the American left. First of all, there is no American left -- not a left that has any kind of seriousness, that understands political or revolutionary theories, that's steeped in economic study, that understands how systems of power work, especially corporate and imperial power. The left is caught up in the same kind of cults of personality that plague the rest of society. It focuses on Trump, as if Trump is the central problem. Trump is a product, a symptom of a failed system and dysfunctional democracy, not the disease.

If you attempt to debate most of those on the supposedly left, they reduce discussion to this cartoonish vision of politics.

The serious left in this country was decimated. It started with the suppression of radical movements under Woodrow Wilson, then the "Red Scares" in the 1920s, when they virtually destroyed our labor movement and our radical press, and then all of the purges in the 1950s. For good measure, they purged the liberal class -- look at what they did to Henry Wallace -- so that Cold War "liberals" equated capitalism with democracy, and imperialism with freedom and liberty. I lived in Switzerland and France. There are still residues of a militant left in Europe, which gives Europeans something to build upon. But here we almost have to begin from scratch.

I've battled continuously with Antifa and the Black Bloc. I think they're kind of poster children for what I would consider phenomenal political immaturity. Resistance is not a form of personal catharsis. We are not fighting the rise of fascism in the 1930s. The corporate elites we have to overthrow already hold power. And unless we build a broad, popular resistance movement, which takes a lot of patient organizing among working men and women, we are going to be steadily ground down.

So Trump's not the problem. But just that sentence alone is going to kill most discussions with people who consider themselves part of the left.

The corporate state has made it very hard to make a living if you hold fast to this radical critique. You will never get tenure. You probably won't get academic appointments. You won't win prizes. You won't get grants. The New York Times , if they review your book, will turn it over to a dutiful mandarin like George Packer to trash it -- as he did with my last book. The elite schools, and I have taught as a visiting professor at a few of them, such as Princeton and Columbia, replicate the structure and goals of corporations. If you want to even get through a doctoral committee, much less a tenure committee, you must play it really, really safe. You must not challenge the corporate-friendly stance that permeates the institution and is imposed through corporate donations and the dictates of wealthy alumni. Half of the members of most of these trustee boards should be in prison!

Speculation in the 17th century in Britain was a crime. Speculators were hanged. And today they run the economy and the country. They have used the capturing of wealth to destroy the intellectual, cultural and artistic life in the country and snuff out our democracy. There is a word for these people: traitors.

[Oct 09, 2017] After Nine Months, Only Stale Crumbs in Russia Inquiry by Scott Ritter

Highly recommended!
US Congress allowed to drag itself into this propaganda swamp by politized Intelligence community, which became a major political player, that can dictate Congress what to do and what not to do. Now it is not that easy to get out of this "intelligence swamp"
Notable quotes:
"... The 2017 ICA on Russia was conceived in an atmosphere of despair and denial, birthed by Democrats and Republicans alike who were stunned by Trump's surprise electoral victory in November 2016. To say that this issue was a political event would be a gross understatement; the 2017 Russian ICA will go down in history as one of the most politicized intelligence documents ever, regardless of the degree of accuracy eventually afforded its contents. The very fact that the document is given the sobriquet "Intelligence Community" is itself a political act, designed to impart a degree of scrutiny and community consensus that simply did not exist when it came to the production of that document, or the classified reports that it was derived from. ..."
"... This was a report prepared by handpicked analysts ..."
"... iven the firestorm of political intrigue and controversy initiated by the publication of this document, the notion of a "general consensus" regarding the level of trust imparted to it by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee does not engender confidence. ..."
"... It was this document that spawned the issue of "collusion." While Sens. Burr and Warner can state that "collusion" is still an open issue, the fact of the matter is that, in this regard, Trump and his campaign advisors have already been found guilty in the court of public opinion, especially among those members of the public and the media who were vehemently opposed to his candidacy and ultimate victory. ..."
"... One need only review the comments of the various Democratic members of the Senate Select Committee, their counterparts serving on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as the various experts and pundits in the media, to underscore the degree to which prejudice has "worked its evil" when it comes to the issue of collusion and the Trump campaign in this regard. ..."
"... purchase of advertisements on various social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, by the Russians or their proxies. With regard to these advertisements, Senator Burr painted a dire picture. "It seems," he declared, "that the overall theme of the Russian involvement in the US elections was to create chaos at every level." ..."
"... No one wants to be told that they have been victims of a con; this is especially true when dealing with the sacred trust imparted to the American citizenry by the Constitution of the United States regarding the free and fair election of those who will represent us in higher office. American politics, for better or worse, is about the personal connection a given candidate has with the voter, a gut feeling that this person shares common values and beliefs. ..."
"... the percentage of Americans that participate in national elections is low. Those that do tend to be people who care enough about one or more issues to actually get out and vote. To categorize these dedicated citizens as brain-dead dupes who are susceptible to social media-based click advertisements is an insult to American democracy. ..."
"... There is a world of difference between Russian intelligence services allegedly hacking politically sensitive emails and selectively releasing them for the sole purpose of undermining a given Presidential candidate's electoral prospects, and mimicking social media-based advertisements addressing issues that are already at play in an election. The Russians didn't invent the ongoing debate in the United States over gun control (i.e., the "Second Amendment" issue), race relations (the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri) or immigration ("The Wall"). ..."
"... These were, and remain, core issues that are at the heart of the American domestic political discourse, regardless of where one stands. You either know the issues, or you don't; it is an insult to the American voter to suggest that they are so malleable that $100,000 of targeted social media-based advertisements can swing their vote, even if 10 million of them viewed it. ..."
Oct 09, 2017 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The 'briefing' is just another exercise in preferred narrative boosting.

The co-chairmen of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence held a press briefing Thursday on the status of their ongoing investigation into Russian meddling in the American electoral process. Content-wise, the press briefing and the question and answer session were an exercise in information futility -- they provided little substance and nothing new. The investigation was still ongoing, the senators explained, and there was still work to be done.

Nine months into the Committee's work, the best Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.), could offer was that there was "general consensus" among committee members and their staff that they trust the findings of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of January 2017, which gave high confidence to the charge that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election. The issue of possible collusion between Russia and members of the campaign of Donald Trump, however, "is still open."

Frankly speaking, this isn't good enough.

The 2017 ICA on Russia was conceived in an atmosphere of despair and denial, birthed by Democrats and Republicans alike who were stunned by Trump's surprise electoral victory in November 2016. To say that this issue was a political event would be a gross understatement; the 2017 Russian ICA will go down in history as one of the most politicized intelligence documents ever, regardless of the degree of accuracy eventually afforded its contents. The very fact that the document is given the sobriquet "Intelligence Community" is itself a political act, designed to impart a degree of scrutiny and community consensus that simply did not exist when it came to the production of that document, or the classified reports that it was derived from.

This was a report prepared by handpicked analysts from three of the Intelligence Community's sixteen agencies (the CIA, NSA, and FBI) who operated outside of the National Intelligence Council (the venue for the production of Intelligence Community products such as the Russian ICA), and void of the direction and supervision of a dedicated National Intelligence Officer. Overcoming this deficient family tree represents a high hurdle, even before the issue of the credibility of the sources and methods used to underpin the ICA's findings are discussed. Given the firestorm of political intrigue and controversy initiated by the publication of this document, the notion of a "general consensus" regarding the level of trust imparted to it by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee does not engender confidence.

It was this document that spawned the issue of "collusion." While Sens. Burr and Warner can state that "collusion" is still an open issue, the fact of the matter is that, in this regard, Trump and his campaign advisors have already been found guilty in the court of public opinion, especially among those members of the public and the media who were vehemently opposed to his candidacy and ultimate victory. Insofar as the committee's investigation serves as a legitimate search for truth, it does so as a post-conviction appeal. However, as the distinguished Supreme Court Justice Joseph McKenna noted in his opinion in Berger v. United States (1921):

The remedy by appeal is inadequate. It comes after the trial, and, if prejudice exist, it has worked its evil and a judgment of it in a reviewing tribunal is precarious. It goes there fortified by presumptions, and nothing can be more elusive of estimate or decision than a disposition of a mind in which there is a personal ingredient.

One need only review the comments of the various Democratic members of the Senate Select Committee, their counterparts serving on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as the various experts and pundits in the media, to underscore the degree to which prejudice has "worked its evil" when it comes to the issue of collusion and the Trump campaign in this regard.

The two senators proceeded to touch on a new angle recently introduced into their investigation, that of the purchase of advertisements on various social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, by the Russians or their proxies. With regard to these advertisements, Senator Burr painted a dire picture. "It seems," he declared, "that the overall theme of the Russian involvement in the US elections was to create chaos at every level."

No one wants to be told that they have been victims of a con; this is especially true when dealing with the sacred trust imparted to the American citizenry by the Constitution of the United States regarding the free and fair election of those who will represent us in higher office. American politics, for better or worse, is about the personal connection a given candidate has with the voter, a gut feeling that this person shares common values and beliefs.

Nevertheless, the percentage of Americans that participate in national elections is low. Those that do tend to be people who care enough about one or more issues to actually get out and vote. To categorize these dedicated citizens as brain-dead dupes who are susceptible to social media-based click advertisements is an insult to American democracy.

There is a world of difference between Russian intelligence services allegedly hacking politically sensitive emails and selectively releasing them for the sole purpose of undermining a given Presidential candidate's electoral prospects, and mimicking social media-based advertisements addressing issues that are already at play in an election. The Russians didn't invent the ongoing debate in the United States over gun control (i.e., the "Second Amendment" issue), race relations (the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri) or immigration ("The Wall").

These were, and remain, core issues that are at the heart of the American domestic political discourse, regardless of where one stands. You either know the issues, or you don't; it is an insult to the American voter to suggest that they are so malleable that $100,000 of targeted social media-based advertisements can swing their vote, even if 10 million of them viewed it.

The take away from the press briefing given by Senator's Burr and Warner was two-fold: One, the Russians meddled, and two, we don't know if Trump colluded with the Russians. The fact that America is nine months into this investigation with little more to show now than what could have been said at the start is, in and of itself, an American political tragedy. The Trump administration has been hobbled by the inertia of this and other investigations derived from the question of Russian meddling. That this process may yet vindicate President Trump isn't justification for the process itself; in such a case the delay will have hurt more than the truth. As William Penn, the founder of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, so eloquently noted:

Delays have been more injurious than direct Injustice. They too often starve those they dare not deny. The very Winner is made a Loser, because he pays twice for his own; like those who purchase Estates Mortgaged before to the full value.

Our law says that to delay Justice is Injustice. Not to have a Right, and not to come of it, differs little. Refuse or Dispatch is the Duty of a Good Officer.

Senators Burr and Warner, together with their fellow members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and their respective staffs, would do well to heed those words.

Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of "Deal of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West's Road to War" (Clarity Press, 2017).

[Oct 03, 2017] Russian Ads On Facebook A Click-Bait Campaign

Highly recommended!
This is particular dirty campaign to implicate Trump and delegitimize his victory is a part of color revolution against Trump.
The other noble purpose is to find a scapegoat for the current problems, especially in Democratic Party, and to preserve Clinton neoliberals rule over the party for a few more futile years.
Notable quotes:
"... Congress is investigating 3,000 suspicious ads which were run on Facebook. These were claimed to have been bought by "Russia" to influence the U.S. presidential election in favor of Trump. ..."
"... The mini-ads were bought to promote click-bait pages and sites. These pages and sites were created and then promoted to sell further advertisement. The media though, has still not understood the issue. ..."
"... A few thousand users will come and look at a page. Some will 'like' the puppy pictures or the rant against LGBT and further spread the page. Some will click the promoted Google ads. Money then flows into the pockets of the page creator. One can automatize, rinse and repeat this scheme forever. Each such page is a small effort for a small revenue. But the scheme is highly scale-able and parts of it can be automatized. ..."
"... This is, in essence, the same business model traditional media publishers use. One creates "news" and controversies to attract readers. The attention of the readers is then sold to advertisers. The business is no longer a limited to a few rich oligarchic. One no longer needs reporters or a printing press to join in. Anyone can now take part in it. ..."
"... We learned after the election that some youths in Macedonia created whole "news"-websites filled with highly attractive but fake partisan stories. They were not interested in the veracity or political direction of their content. Their only interest was to attract viewers. They made thousands of dollars by selling advertisements on their sites: ..."
"... The teen said his monthly revenue was in the four figures, a considerable sum in a country where the average monthly pay is 360 euros ($383). As he navigated his site's statistics, he dropped nuggets of journalism advice. ..."
"... After the mystery of "Russian" $3 ads for "adorable puppies" pages on Facebook has been solved, Congress and the New York Times will have to move on. There next subject is probably the "Russian influence campaign" on Youtube. ..."
"... Russian Car Crash Compilations have for years attracted millions of viewers. The "Russians" want to increase road rage on U.S. highways. This again will - according to expert Clinton Watts - "amplify divisive political issues across the political spectrum". ..."
"... "Russian interference" in Western faux democracies is just more Fake News that distracts from the real issues. And all those real issues come down to this: the need to reign in the oligarchs. This is very easy to do via progressive taxation (with no loopholes). ..."
"... The two words that the establishment fears most: Progressive Taxation . ..."
"... Great article. I especially like the tactful way that modern clickbait farming is obliquely tied to the MSM business model. Facebook and Google have a lot to answer for. ..."
"... Russia gate, since it is unnecessarily mentally exhausting and intellectually futile, it is namely pure provocation and as such it should be ignored and not proliferated even in its criticism making a fakes news a real news by sole fact of mentioning it on the respectable independent sites. ..."
"... The whole digital media and ad business that have built the Google and Facebook media juggernauts is all a giant scam. Smart advertisers like P&G are recognizing it for what it is and will slowly pullback. It is only a matter of time before others catch on and these companies will bleed ad revenues. ..."
Oct 03, 2017 | www.moonofalabama.org

Congress is investigating 3,000 suspicious ads which were run on Facebook. These were claimed to have been bought by "Russia" to influence the U.S. presidential election in favor of Trump.

It now turns out that these Facebook ads had nothing to do with the election. The mini-ads were bought to promote click-bait pages and sites. These pages and sites were created and then promoted to sell further advertisement. The media though, has still not understood the issue.

On September 6 the NYT asserted :

Providing new evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election, Facebook disclosed on Wednesday that it had identified more than $100,000 worth of divisive ads on hot-button issues purchased by a shadowy Russian company linked to the Kremlin.
...
The disclosure adds to the evidence of the broad scope of the Russian influence campaign, which American intelligence agencies concluded was designed to damage Hillary Clinton and boost Donald J. Trump during the election.

Like any Congress investigation the current one concerned with Facebook ads is leaking like a sieve. What oozes out makes little sense.

If "Russia" aimed to make Congress and U.S. media a laughing stock it surely achieved that.

Today the NYT says that the ads were posted "in disguise" by "the Russians" to promote variously themed Facebook pages:

There was "Defend the 2nd," a Facebook page for gun-rights supporters, festooned with firearms and tough rhetoric. There was a rainbow-hued page for gay rights activists, "LGBT United." There was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that spread across the site with the help of paid ads

No one has explained how these pages are supposed to be connected to a Russian "influence" campaign. It is unexplained how these are supposed to connected to the 2016 election. That is simply asserted because Facebook said, for unknown reasons, that these ads may have come from some Russian agency. How Facebook has determined that is not known.

With each detail that leaks from the "Russian ads" investigation the propaganda framework of "election manipulation" falls further apart:

Late Monday, Facebook said in a post that about 10 million people had seen the ads in question. About 44 percent of the ads were seen before the 2016 election and the rest after, the company said

The original story propagandized that "Russia" intended to influence the election in favor of Trump. But why then was the majority of the ads in questions run later after November 9? And how would an animal-lovers page with adorable puppy pictures help to achieve Trumps election victory?

More details via the Wall Street Journal:

Roughly 25% of the ads were never shown to anyone. That's because advertising auctions are designed so that ads reach people based on relevance, and certain ads may not reach anyone as a result.
...
For 50% of the ads, less than $3 was spent; for 99% of the ads, less than $1,000 was spent.

Of the 3,000 ads Facebook originally claimed were "Russian" only 2,200 were ever viewed. Most of the advertisements were mini-ads which, for the price of a coffee, promoted private pages related to hobbies and a wide spectrum of controversial issues. The majority of the ads ran after the election.

All that "adds to the evidence of the broad scope of the Russian influence campaign ... designed to damage Hillary Clinton and boost Donald J. Trump during the election"?

No.

But the NYT still finds "experts" who believe in the "Russian influence" nonsense and find the most stupid reasons to justify their claims:

Clinton Watts, a former F.B.I. agent now at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, said Russia had been entrepreneurial in trying to develop diverse channels of influence. Some, like the dogs page, may have been created without a specific goal and held in reserve for future use.

Puppy pictures for "future use"? Nonsense. Lunacy! The pages described and the ads leading to them are typical click-bait, not a political influence op.

The for-profit scheme runs as follows: One builds pages with "hot" stuff that attracts lots of viewers. One creates ad-space on these pages and fills it with Google ads. One promotes the spiked pages by buying $3 Facebook mini-ads for them.

A few thousand users will come and look at a page. Some will 'like' the puppy pictures or the rant against LGBT and further spread the page. Some will click the promoted Google ads. Money then flows into the pockets of the page creator. One can automatize, rinse and repeat this scheme forever. Each such page is a small effort for a small revenue. But the scheme is highly scale-able and parts of it can be automatized.

This is, in essence, the same business model traditional media publishers use. One creates "news" and controversies to attract readers. The attention of the readers is then sold to advertisers. The business is no longer a limited to a few rich oligarchic. One no longer needs reporters or a printing press to join in. Anyone can now take part in it.

We learned after the election that some youths in Macedonia created whole "news"-websites filled with highly attractive but fake partisan stories. They were not interested in the veracity or political direction of their content. Their only interest was to attract viewers. They made thousands of dollars by selling advertisements on their sites:

The teen said his monthly revenue was in the four figures, a considerable sum in a country where the average monthly pay is 360 euros ($383). As he navigated his site's statistics, he dropped nuggets of journalism advice.

"You have to write what people want to see, not what you want to show," he said, scrolling through The Political Insider's stories as a large banner read "ARREST HILLARY NOW."

The 3,000 Facebook ads Congress is investigating are part of a similar scheme. The mini-ads promoted pages with hot button issues and click-bait puppy pictures. These pages were themselves created to generate ad-clicks and revenue. As Facebook claims that "Russia" is behind them, we will likely find some Russian teens who simply repeated the scheme their Macedonian friends were running on.

With its "Russian influence" scare campaign the NYT follows the same business model. It is producing fake news which attracts viewers and readers who's attention is then sold to advertisers. Facebook is also profiting from this. Its current piecemeal release of vague information keeps its name in the news.

After the mystery of "Russian" $3 ads for "adorable puppies" pages on Facebook has been solved, Congress and the New York Times will have to move on. There next subject is probably the "Russian influence campaign" on Youtube.

Russian Car Crash Compilations have for years attracted millions of viewers. The "Russians" want to increase road rage on U.S. highways. This again will - according to expert Clinton Watts - "amplify divisive political issues across the political spectrum".

The car crash compilations, like the puppy pages, are another sign that Russia is waging war against the people of the United States!

You don't believe that? You should. Trust your experienced politician!

Samantha Power @SamanthaJPower - 3:45 PM - 3 Oct 2017

This gets more chilling daily : now we learn Russia targeted Americans on Facebook by "demographics, geography, gender & interests," across websites & devices, reached millions, kept going after Nov. An attack on all Americans, not just HRC campaign washingtonpost.com/business/econo

It indeed gets more chilling. It's fall. It also generates ad revenue.

Posted by b on October 3, 2017 at 02:09 PM | Permalink

nmb | Oct 3, 2017 2:20:52 PM | 1

As Shock Therapy failed miserably in the 90s, the neocon dynasty seeks now direct confrontation with Russia
Jackrabbit | Oct 3, 2017 2:32:24 PM | 2
"Russian interference" in Western faux democracies is just more Fake News that distracts from the real issues. And all those real issues come down to this: the need to reign in the oligarchs. This is very easy to do via progressive taxation (with no loopholes).

<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

The two words that the establishment fears most: Progressive Taxation .

Taxi | Oct 3, 2017 2:32:34 PM | 3
Oh dear intrepidus, why are you still talking about MSM's favorite weapon of mass distraction?

Even though you make a fine point or two, at this stage, you're actually adding to the whirling stupidity by indulging it it yourself, methinks.

I'm so very, very over Russiagate and it's non-existent tentacles. Pfft!

Grieved | Oct 3, 2017 2:49:24 PM | 4
Thanks, b.

You're presenting a very good concept/meme to understand: Fake news is click bait for gain.

The same can be said for any sensationalism or shocking event - like the Kurdish referendum, like the Catalonia referendum, like the Vegas shooting - or like confrontational or dogmatic comments in threads about those events.

Everywhere we turn someone is trying to game us for some kind of gain. What matters is to step back from the front lines where our sense is accosted and offended, to step back from the automatic reflex, and to remember that someone triggered that reflex, deliberately, for their gain, not ours.

We have to reside in reason and equanimity, because the moment we indulge in our righteous anger or our strong convictions, the odds are extremely good that someone is playing us.

It's a wicked world, but in fact we live in an age when we can see its meta characteristics like never before.

Anon | Oct 3, 2017 2:49:39 PM | 5
Jesus Christ, every friggin day we hear about Russians and then the next the lies falls apart, STILL the stupid dumb liberal media keep coming up with new conspiracies spread them as fact, and then try justify them even when they get debunked!
These people are indeed lunatic.

What we see is the biggest psyop., propaganda disinformation campaig ever in the western media, far more powerful than "nuclear Iraq" of 2003.
Still, and this should be a warning, majority of people in EU/US believe this nonsense.

the pair | Oct 3, 2017 3:07:19 PM | 6
$3 ads on facebook seen by nobody:

"russian meddling! their puppies hate our freedom!"

pharmaceutical ads on every evening news show and boeing/lockheed sponsoring the "p"bs news hour?"

"nothing to see here! take off your tin foil hat you f_cking alex jones putinbot!!!!"

you'd think by now most americans would realize the actual threat is other americans. the rest of the world realized it long ago.

sejomoje | Oct 3, 2017 3:08:47 PM | 7
I lol'd. But seriously the next step is a false flag implicating Russia. They're getting nowhere assassinating Russian diplomats and shooting down Russian aircraft, both military and civilian. Even overthrowing governments who are Russia-friendly hasn't seem to provoke a response.

But I consider the domestic Russia buzz to be performance art, and I imagine it's become even grating to some of its participants. How could it not be, unless everyone is heavily medicated(a lot certainly are)? Anyway it's by design that the western media and the political classes they serve need a script, they're incapable of discussing actual issues. Independence has been made quaint.

karlof1 | Oct 3, 2017 3:10:42 PM | 8
Hi Grieved--

I posted this link at the Vegas thread, but the item's contents are valid here too, and speaks to the content of your above comment, https://sputniknews.com/viral/201710031057912410-google-facebook-youtube-vegas-fake-news/

somebody | Oct 3, 2017 3:11:44 PM | 9
The line between politics and product marketing has gone.

But no matter if "the Russians" influenced the US election or not - after all that is what most countries do to each other - the FBI is correct that to be able to target audiences according to demographics and individual traits is a powerful tool.

Like the double hoax of " The War of Worlds broadcast ".

The newspapers had a clear agenda. An editorial in The New York Times, headlined In the Terror by Radio, was used to censure the relatively new medium of radio, which was becoming a serious competitor in providing news and advertising. "Radio is new but it has adult responsibilities. It has not mastered itself or the material it uses," said the editorial leader comment on November 1 1938. In an excellent piece in Slate magazine in 2013, Jefferson Pooley (associate professor of media and communication at Muhlenberg College) and Michael J Socolow (associate professor of communication and journalism at the University of Maine) looked at the continuing popularity of the myth of mass panic and they took to task NPR's Radiolab programme about the incident and the Radiolab assertion that "The United States experienced a kind of mass hysteria that we've never seen before." Pooley and Socolow wrote: "How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America's newspapers. ... AND IT'S NOT A GOOD IDEA TO COPY ORSON WELLES . . . In February 1949, Leonardo Paez and Eduardo Alcaraz produced a Spanish-language version of Welles's 1938 script for Radio Quito in Ecuador. The broadcast set off panic. Quito police and fire brigades rushed out of town to fight the supposed alien invasion force. After it was revealed that the broadcast was fiction, the panic transformed into a riot. The riot resulted in at least seven deaths, including those of Paez's girlfriend and nephew. The offices Radio Quito, and El Comercio, a local newspaper that had participated in the hoax by publishing false reports of unidentified flying objects in the days preceding the broadcast, were both burned to the ground.
ashley albanese | Oct 3, 2017 3:13:06 PM | 10
Jackrabbit 2
No - the two words the Capital system fears the most are SURPLUS VALUE , the control of the 'profit principle' for social not private ends .
Lea | Oct 3, 2017 3:42:35 PM | 11
Jesus Christ, every friggin day we hear about Russians and then the next the lies falls apart, STILL the stupid dumb liberal media keep coming up with new conspiracies spread them as fact, and then try justify them even when they get debunked!
These people are indeed lunatic.

The "Russiadunnit" thingy has turned into a business in the US. And when a new market is launched in the US, as people depend on it for their living and careers, it generally doesn't go away.
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/28/the-slimy-business-of-russia-gate/

OJS | Oct 3, 2017 3:45:59 PM | 12
god bless amerika

somebody | Oct 3, 2017 3:11:44 PM | 9
The American panic was a myth, the Equadorian panic in 1949 not so much. I listened to this Radiolab podcast about same ... the details of how they pulled it off in a one-radio station country pre-internet are interesting and valuable (they widely advertised a very popular music program which was then "interrupted" by the hoax to ensure near-universal audience (including the police and other authorities). Very very fews were "in on the joke" and it wasn't a joke. whole page on WooW: http://www.radiolab.org/story/91622-war-of-the-worlds/

specific could it happen again? http://www.radiolab.org/story/91624-could-it-happen-again-and-again/

c1ue | Oct 3, 2017 3:58:38 PM | 14
Great article. I especially like the tactful way that modern clickbait farming is obliquely tied to the MSM business model. Facebook and Google have a lot to answer for.
Christian Chuba | Oct 3, 2017 3:58:49 PM | 15
Russian Trolls outed as kids from Oregon: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/taibbi-latest-fake-news-panic-appears-to-be-fake-news-w506396
"Lankford shocked the world this week by revealing that "Russian Internet trolls" were stoking the NFL kneeling debate. ... Conservative outlets like Breitbart and Newsmax and Fox played up the "Russians stoked the kneeling controversy" angle because it was in their interest to suggest that domestic support for kneeling protests is less than what it appears....

The Post reported that Lankford's office had cited one of "Boston Antifa's" tweets. But the example offered read suspiciously like a young net-savvy American goofing on antifa stereotypes "More gender inclusivity with NFL fans and gluten free options at stadiums We're liking the new NFL #NewNFL #TakeAKnee #TakeTheKnee." ...

The group was most likely a pair of yahoos from Oregon named Alexis Esteb and Brandon Krebs. "

Christian Chuba | Oct 3, 2017 4:00:46 PM | 16
Pity Rolling Stone got caught up in that fake college rape allegation, they have actually done some solid reporting. Every MSM outlet has had multiple fake stories, so should RS be shunned for life for one bad story?
Kalen | Oct 3, 2017 4:03:18 PM | 17
It is time that sane part of independent media understood that there is no more need to rationally respond to psychotic delusions of Deep State puppets in Russia gate, since it is unnecessarily mentally exhausting and intellectually futile, it is namely pure provocation and as such it should be ignored and not proliferated even in its criticism making a fakes news a real news by sole fact of mentioning it on the respectable independent sites.

There are only two effective responses to provocation namely silence or violence, anything else plays the book of provocateurs.

Susan Sunflower | Oct 3, 2017 4:13:28 PM | 18
Now they're seriously undermining their claims of intentionality ... as well as their wildly inflated claims effect on outcome or even effective "undermining" ... again, compared to Citizens United and the long-count of 2000 ... negligible....

And still insisting that Hillary Clinton is Russia's Darth Vader against whom unlimited resources are marshalled because she must be stopped ... even though she damn near won... and the reasons she lost seems unrelated to such vagaries as the DNC e-mails or facebook campaigns (unless you believe she had a god-given right to each and every vote)

Don Bacon | Oct 3, 2017 4:13:47 PM | 19

Lucky for us that television "news" doesn't use this business model. /s
Pnyx | Oct 3, 2017 5:02:54 PM | 20
Why do you think this is important enough to make the effort to write another blog entry B? Everyone who wants to know that this is all fantasy knows by now.
Mina | Oct 3, 2017 5:05:12 PM | 21
https://mobile.twitter.com/dgaytandzhieva/status/913545591757697024
brian | Oct 3, 2017 5:09:39 PM | 22
'Congress is investigating 3,000 suspicious ads which were run on Facebook. These were claimed to have been bought by "Russia" to influence the U.S. presidential election in favor of Trump.

This is the same US congress that regularly marches off to Israel to receive orders

https://www.amazon.com/They-Dare-Speak-Out-Institutions/dp/155652482X

those who dont obey orders: http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/how-i-got-fired/

Susan Sunflower | Oct 3, 2017 5:36:59 PM | 23
@ Posted by: Pnyx | Oct 3, 2017 5:02:54 PM | 20

This isn't about the "truth" (or lies) wrt Russian involvement, it's about the increasingly rapid failure of the Government/Establishment's narrative ...

Increasingly they can't even keep their accusations "alive" for more than a few days ... and some of their accusations (like the one here, that some "Russian" sites were created and not used, but to be held for use at some future date) become fairly ridiculous ... and the "remedy" to "Russians" creating clickbait sites for some future nefarious use, I think can only be banning all Russians from creating sites ... or maybe using facebook altogether ... all with no evidence of evil-doers actually doing evil...

It's rather like Jared Kushner's now THIRD previously undisclosed private e-mail account ... fool me once versus how disorganized/dumb/arrogant/crooked is this guy?

Lochearn | Oct 3, 2017 6:43:01 PM | 24
Sorry to be off topic but yesterday the Saker of the Vineyard published a couple of articles about Catalonia. The first was a diatribe, a nasty hatchet job on the Catalan people which included the following referring to the Catalan people:

"The Problems they have because with their corruption, inefficiency, mismanagement, inability and sometimes the simplest stupidity, are always the fault of others (read Spaniards here) which gives them "carte blanche" to keep going on with it."

"... They (the independistas) are NATIONAL SOCIALIST (aka NAZI) in their Ideology"

Then Saker published an article by Peter Koenig that was reasonable and what we have come to expect. Then he forbade all comments on either of the two articles. My comment was banned, which simply said in my opinion from working for fourteen years in Spain that the Catalans were extremely efficient in comparison with their Madrid counterparts.

ToivoS | Oct 3, 2017 7:32:04 PM | 25
I must admit that I became a fan of watching those Russian car crashes that were captured by the cams many russian drivers keep on their dash boards. Some of these were very funny. I was not aware that made me a victim of Putin propaganda. In any case, they are not that interesting anymore once they were commercialized. That was about 10 years ago.
Susan Sunflower | Oct 3, 2017 7:43:29 PM | 26
I'm waiting for the expose of the Russian mail-order bride business (Do they still exist?)
ab initio | Oct 3, 2017 8:29:04 PM | 27
Very good analysis.

The whole digital media and ad business that have built the Google and Facebook media juggernauts is all a giant scam. Smart advertisers like P&G are recognizing it for what it is and will slowly pullback. It is only a matter of time before others catch on and these companies will bleed ad revenues.

ben | Oct 3, 2017 8:30:46 PM | 28
Jackrabbit @ 2: Yep!!

And here is another part to the puzzle:

http://therealnews.com/t2/story:19516:Empire-Files%3A-The-Hidden-Purging-of-Millions-of-Voters

Chipnik | Oct 3, 2017 8:42:54 PM | 29
Your answer can be found ...right ...here:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/yc7kskox
james | Oct 3, 2017 8:44:05 PM | 30
OT - more from comedy central - daily USA press briefing from today...

"QUESTION: On Iran, would you and the State Department say, as Secretary Mattis said today, that staying in the JCPOA would be in the U.S. national interest?

MS NAUERT: Yeah.

QUESTION: Is this a position you share?

MS NAUERT: So I'm certainly familiar with what Secretary Mattis said on Capitol Hill today. Secretary Mattis, of course, one of many people who is providing expertise and counsel to the President on the issue of Iran and the JCPOA. The President is getting lots of information on that. We have about 12 days or so, I think, to make our determination for the next JCPOA guideline.

The administration looks at JCPOA as – the fault in the JCPOA as not looking at the totality of Iran's bad behavior. Secretary Tillerson talked about that at length at the UN General Assembly. So did the President as well. We know that Iran is responsible for terror attacks. We know that Iran arms the Houthi rebels in Yemen, which leads to a more miserable failed state, awful situation in Yemen, for example. We know what they're doing in Syria. Where you find the Iranian Government, you can often find terrible things happening in the world. This administration is very clear about highlighting that and will look at Iran in sort of its totality of all of its bad behaviors, not just the nuclear deal.

I don't want to get ahead of the discussions that are ongoing with this – within the administration, as it pertains to Iran. The President has said he's made he's decision, and so I don't want to speak on behalf of the President, and he'll just have to make that determination when he's ready to do so."

https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2017/10/274592.htm

[Sep 30, 2017] Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is Skepticism Permissible Yet by Glenn Greenwald

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... But what it does demonstrate is that an incredibly reckless, anything-goes climate prevails when it comes to claims about Russia. Media outlets will publish literally any official assertion as Truth without the slightest regard for evidentiary standards. ..."
"... Seeing Putin lurking behind and masterminding every western problem is now religious dogma – it explains otherwise-confounding developments, provides certainty to a complex world, and alleviates numerous factions of responsibility – so media outlets and their journalists are lavishly rewarded any time they publish accusatory stories about Russia (especially ones involving the U.S. election), even if they end up being debunked. ..."
"... A highly touted story yesterday from the New York Times – claiming that Russians used Twitter more widely known than before to manipulate U.S. politics – demonstrates this recklessness. The story is based on the claims of a new group formed just two months ago by a union of neocons and Democratic national security officials, led by long-time liars and propagandists such as Bill Kristol, former acting CIA chief Mike Morell, and Bush Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff. I reported on the founding of this group, calling itself the Alliance for Securing Democracy, when it was unveiled (this is not to be confused with the latest new Russia group unveiled last week by Rob Reiner and David Frum and featuring a different former national security state official (former DNI James Clapper) – calling itself InvestigateRussia.org – featuring a video declaring that the U.S. is now "at war with Russia"). ..."
"... The Kristol/Morell/Chertoff group on which the Times based its article has a very simple tactic: they secretly decide which Twitter accounts are "Russia bots," meaning accounts that disseminate an "anti-American message" and are controlled by the Kremlin. They refuse to tell anyone which Twitter accounts they decided are Kremlin-loyal, nor will they identify their methodology for creating their lists or determining what constitutes "anti-Americanism." ..."
"... That's how the Russia narrative is constantly "reported," and it's the reason so many of the biggest stories have embarrassingly collapsed. It's because the Russia story of 2017 – not unlike the Iraq discourse of 2002 – is now driven by religious-like faith rather than rational faculties. ..."
"... No questioning of official claims is allowed. The evidentiary threshold which an assertion must overcome before being accepted is so low as to be non-existent. ..."
"... Regardless of your views on Russia, Trump and the rest, nobody can possibly regard this climate as healthy. ..."
Sep 28, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

Last Friday, most major media outlets touted a major story about Russian attempts to hack into U.S. voting systems, based exclusively on claims made by the Department of Homeland Security. "Russians attempted to hack elections systems in 21 states in the run-up to last year's presidential election, officials said Friday," began the USA Today story, similar to how most other outlets presented this extraordinary claim.

This official story was explosive for obvious reasons, and predictably triggered instant decrees – that of course went viral – declaring that the legitimacy of the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election is now in doubt.

Virginia's Democratic Congressman Don Beyer, referring to the 21 targeted states, announced that this shows "Russia tried to hack their election":

MSNBC's Paul Revere for all matters relating to the Kremlin take-over, Rachel Maddow, was indignant that this wasn't told to us earlier and that we still aren't getting all the details. "What we have now figured out," Maddow gravely intoned as she showed the multi-colored maps she made, is that "Homeland Security knew at least by June that 21 states had been targeted by Russian hackers during the election. . .targeting their election infrastructure."

They were one small step away from demanding that the election results be nullified, indulging the sentiment expressed by #Resistance icon Carl Reiner the other day: "Is there anything more exciting that [sic] the possibility of Trump's election being invalidated & Hillary rightfully installed as our President?"

So what was wrong with this story? Just one small thing: it was false. The story began to fall apart yesterday when Associated Press reported that Wisconsin – one of the states included in the original report that, for obvious reasons, caused the most excitement – did not, in fact, have its election systems targeted by Russian hackers:

The spokesman for Homeland Security then tried to walk back that reversal, insisting that there was still evidence that some computer networks had been targeted, but could not say that they had anything to do with elections or voting. And, as AP noted: "Wisconsin's chief elections administrator, Michael Haas, had repeatedly said that Homeland Security assured the state it had not been targeted."

Then the story collapsed completely last night. The Secretary of State for another one of the named states, California, issued a scathing statement repudiating the claimed report:

Sometimes stories end up debunked. There's nothing particularly shocking about that. If this were an isolated incident, one could chalk it up to basic human error that has no broader meaning.

But this is no isolated incident. Quite the contrary: this has happened over and over and over again. Inflammatory claims about Russia get mindlessly hyped by media outlets, almost always based on nothing more than evidence-free claims from government officials, only to collapse under the slightest scrutiny, because they are entirely lacking in evidence.

The examples of such debacles when it comes to claims about Russia are too numerous to comprehensively chronicle. I wrote about this phenomenon many times and listed many of the examples, the last time in June when 3 CNN journalists "resigned" over a completely false story linking Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci to investigations into a Russian investment fund which the network was forced to retract:

Remember that time the Washington Post claimed that Russia had hacked the U.S. electricity grid, causing politicians to denounce Putin for trying to deny heat to Americans in winter, only to have to issue multiple retractions because none of that ever happened? Or the time that the Post had to publish a massive editor's note after its reporters made claims about Russian infiltration of the internet and spreading of "Fake News" based on an anonymous group's McCarthyite blacklist that counted sites like the Drudge Report and various left-wing outlets as Kremlin agents?

Or that time when Slate claimed that Trump had created a secret server with a Russian bank, all based on evidence that every other media outlet which looked at it were too embarrassed to get near? Or the time the Guardian was forced to retract its report by Ben Jacobs – which went viral – that casually asserted that WikiLeaks has a long relationship with the Kremlin? Or the time that Fortune retracted suggestions that RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN's network? And then there's the huge market that was created – led by leading Democrats – that blindly ingested every conspiratorial, unhinged claim about Russia churned out by an army of crazed conspiracists such as Louise Mensch and Claude "TrueFactsStated" Taylor?

And now we have the Russia-hacked-the-voting-systems-of-21-states to add to this trash heap. Each time the stories go viral; each time they further shape the narrative; each time those who spread them say little to nothing when it is debunked.

None of this means that every Russia claim is false, nor does it disprove the accusation that Putin ordered the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta's email inboxes (a claim for which, just by the way, still no evidence has been presented by the U.S. government). Perhaps there were some states that were targeted, even though the key claims of this story, that attracted the most attention, have now been repudiated.

But what it does demonstrate is that an incredibly reckless, anything-goes climate prevails when it comes to claims about Russia. Media outlets will publish literally any official assertion as Truth without the slightest regard for evidentiary standards.

Seeing Putin lurking behind and masterminding every western problem is now religious dogma – it explains otherwise-confounding developments, provides certainty to a complex world, and alleviates numerous factions of responsibility – so media outlets and their journalists are lavishly rewarded any time they publish accusatory stories about Russia (especially ones involving the U.S. election), even if they end up being debunked.

A highly touted story yesterday from the New York Times – claiming that Russians used Twitter more widely known than before to manipulate U.S. politics – demonstrates this recklessness. The story is based on the claims of a new group formed just two months ago by a union of neocons and Democratic national security officials, led by long-time liars and propagandists such as Bill Kristol, former acting CIA chief Mike Morell, and Bush Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff. I reported on the founding of this group, calling itself the Alliance for Securing Democracy, when it was unveiled (this is not to be confused with the latest new Russia group unveiled last week by Rob Reiner and David Frum and featuring a different former national security state official (former DNI James Clapper) – calling itself InvestigateRussia.org – featuring a video declaring that the U.S. is now "at war with Russia").

The Kristol/Morell/Chertoff group on which the Times based its article has a very simple tactic: they secretly decide which Twitter accounts are "Russia bots," meaning accounts that disseminate an "anti-American message" and are controlled by the Kremlin. They refuse to tell anyone which Twitter accounts they decided are Kremlin-loyal, nor will they identify their methodology for creating their lists or determining what constitutes "anti-Americanism."

They do it all in secret, and you're just supposed to trust them: Bill Kristol, Mike Chertoff and their national security state friends. And the New York Times is apparently fine with this demand, as evidenced by its uncritical acceptance yesterday of the claims of this group – a group formed by the nation's least trustworthy sources.

But no matter. It's a claim about nefarious Russian control. So it's instantly vested with credibility and authority, published by leading news outlets, and then blindly accepted as fact in most elite circles. From now on, it will simply be Fact – based on the New York Times article – that the Kremlin aggressively and effectively weaponized Twitter to manipulate public opinion and sow divisions during the election, even though the evidence for this new story is the secret, unverifiable assertions of a group filled with the most craven neocons and national security state liars.

That's how the Russia narrative is constantly "reported," and it's the reason so many of the biggest stories have embarrassingly collapsed. It's because the Russia story of 2017 – not unlike the Iraq discourse of 2002 – is now driven by religious-like faith rather than rational faculties.

No questioning of official claims is allowed. The evidentiary threshold which an assertion must overcome before being accepted is so low as to be non-existent. And the penalty for desiring to see evidence for official claims, or questioning the validity and persuasiveness of the evidence that is proffered, are accusations that impugn one's patriotism and loyalty (simply wanting to see evidence for official claims about Russia is proof, in many quarters, that one is a Kremlin agent or at least adores Putin – just as wanting to see evidence in 2002, or questioning the evidence presented for claims about Saddam, was viewed as proof that one harbored sympathy for the Iraqi dictator).

Regardless of your views on Russia, Trump and the rest, nobody can possibly regard this climate as healthy. Just look at how many major, incredibly inflammatory stories, from major media outlets, have collapsed. Is it not clear that there is something very wrong with how we are discussing and reporting on relations between these two nuclear-armed powers?

[Sep 26, 2017] Is Foreign Propaganda Even Effective by Leon Hadar

Highly recommended!
I think the key to collapse of Soviet society and its satellites was the victory of neoliberal ideology over communism. It was pure luck for neoliberalism was that its triumphal march over the globe coincide with deep crisis of both communist ideology and the Soviet elite (nomenklatura) in the USSR. Hapless, mediocre Gorbachov, a third rate politician who became the leader of the USSR is a telling example here. Propaganda, especially "big troika" (BBC, Deutsche Welle and Voice of America), also played a very important role in this. Especially in Baltic countries and Ukraine.
Domestic fake new industry always has huge advantage over foreign one in the USA and other Western countries, because of general cultural dominance of the West.
The loss of effectiveness of neoliberal propaganda now is the same as the reason for loss of effectiveness of communist propaganda since 60th. In the first case it was the crisis of communist ideology, in the second is the crisis of neoliberal ideology. Everybody now understands that the neoliberal promises were fake, and "bait and switch" manuver that enriched the tiny percentage of population (top 1% and even more 0.01%).
When the society experience the crisis of ideology it became inoculated toward official propaganda -- it simply loses its bite.
Notable quotes:
"... As the The Economist notes, a 2015 survey of the top 94 cable channels in America by the research firm Nielsen found that RT did not even make it into the rankings, capturing only 0.04 percent of viewers, according to the Broadcast Audience Research Board. ..."
"... RT has claimed dominance on YouTube, an assertion that apparently caught the attention of the U.S. intelligence community, which noted that RT videos get 1 million views a day, far surpassing other outlets. ..."
"... Or as media-effects theorists explain the communication process, the intentions of the producer (Soviet Union) and the conventions of the content (communist propaganda) were interwoven in a strategy aimed at influencing the receiver (the American audience). But the majority of Americans, with the exception of a few hard-core ideologues, interpreted the content of the message as pitiful Soviet propaganda, assuming they even paid attention to it. ..."
"... There is no doubt that Moscow, which regarded President Harry Truman as its leading American political nemesis, was hoping that Progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace would win the 1948 election -- and had tailored its propaganda effort in accordance with that goal. That pro-Wallace campaign took place at a time when the American Communist Party still maintained some influence in the United States, where many Americans still sympathized with the former World War II ally and a large number of Soviet spies were operating in the country. But then Wallace's Progressives ended up winning 2.5 percent of the vote, less than Strom Thurmond's Southern segregationist ticket. ..."
"... Yet we are supposed to believe that by employing RT, Sputnik, Facebook, Twitter, and a bunch of hackers, the Russians could help their American candidate "steal" the 2016 presidential election. Is there any evidence that those white blue-collar workers and rural voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan -- the people who provided Trump with his margin of victory -- were even exposed to the reports distributed by RT and Sputnik, or by the memes constructed by Russian trolls or their posts on Facebook? ("Hey, did you watch RT last night?") ..."
"... Yet the assertion that a "silver bullet shot from a media gun" in the form of Russian propaganda was able "to penetrate a hapless audience" in the United States has been gaining more adherents in Washington and elsewhere. This conspiracy seems to correlate the intent of the Russian government and the content of their messages with the voting behavior of Americans. ..."
"... In a strange irony, those who are promoting this fallacious assertion may -- unlike their Russian scapegoat -- actually succeed in penetrating a hapless American audience. ..."
Sep 26, 2017 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The Russians can dish it out, but don't expect Americans to swallow everything.

During the Cold War, it became an article of faith among Western policymakers and journalists: One of the most effective ways to discredit the leaders of Communist countries would be to provide their citizens with information from the West. It was a view that was shared by Soviet Bloc regimes who were worried that listening to the Voice of America (VOA) or watching Western television shows would induce their people to take political action against the rulers.

So it was not surprising that government officials in East Germany, anxious that many TV stations from West Germany could be viewed by their citizens, employed numerous means!such as jamming the airwaves and even damaging TV antennas that were pointing west!in order to prevent the so-called "subversive" western broadcasts from reaching audiences over the wall.

After the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, communication researchers studying public attitudes in former East German areas assumed that they would discover that those who had access to West German television!and were therefore exposed to the West's political freedom and economic prosperity!were more politically energized and willing to challenge the communist regime than those who couldn't watch Western television.

But as Evgeny Morozov recalled in his Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom , a study conducted between 1966 and 1990 about incipient protests in the so-called "Valley of the Clueless"!an area in East Germany where the government successfully blocked Western television signals!raised questions about this conventional wisdom.

As it turns out, having access to West German television actually made life in East Germany more endurable. Far from radicalizing its citizens, it seemed to have made them more politically compliant. As one East German dissident quoted by Morozov lamented, "The whole people could leave the country and move to the West as a man at 8pm, via television."

Meanwhile, East German citizens who did not have access to Western German television were actually more critical of their regime, and more politically restless.

The study concluded that "in an ironic twist for Marxism, capitalist television seems to have performed the same narcotizing function in communist East Germany that Karl Marx had attributed to religious beliefs in capitalist society when he condemned religion as the 'opium of the people.'"

Morozov refers to the results of these and other studies to raise an interesting idea: Western politicians and pundits have predicted that the rise of the Internet, which provides free access to information to residents of the global village, would galvanize citizens in Russia and other countries to challenge their authoritarian regimes. In reality, Morozov contends that exposure to the Internet may have distracted Russian users from their political problems. The young men who should be leading the revolution are instead staying at home and watching online pornography. Trotsky, as we know, didn't tweet.

Yet the assumption that the content of the message is a "silver bullet shot from a media gun to penetrate a hapless audience," as communication theorists James Arthur Anderson and Timothy P. Meyer put it, remains popular among politicians and pundits today, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

Hence the common assertion that a presidential candidate who has raised a lots of money and can spend it on buying a lots of television commercials, has a clear advantage over rivals who cannot afford to dominate the media environment. But the loser in the 2016 presidential race spent about $141.7 million on ads, compared with $58.8 million for winner's campaign, according to NBC News . Candidate Trump also spent a fraction of what his Republican rivals had during the Republican primaries that he won.

Communication researchers like Anderson and Meyers are not suggesting that media messages don't have any effect on target audiences, but that it is quite difficult to sell ice to Eskimos. To put it in simple terms, media audiences are not hapless and passive. Although you can flood them with messages that are in line with your views and interests, audiences actively participate in the communication process. They will construct their own meaning from the content they consume, and in some cases they might actually disregard your message.

Imagine a multi-billionaire who decides to produce thousands of commercials celebrating the legacy of ISIS, runs them on primetime American television, and floods social media with messages praising the murderous terrorist group. If that happened, would Americans be rallying behind the flag of ISIS? One can imagine that the response from audiences would range from anger to dismissal to laughter.

In 2013 Al Jazeera Media Network purchased Current TV , which was once partially owned by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, and launched an American news channel. Critics expressed concerns that the network, which is owned by the government of Qatar and has been critical of U.S. policies in the Middle East, would try to manipulate American audiences with their anti-Washington message.

Three years later, after hiring many star journalists and producing mostly straight news shows, Al Jazeera America CEO Al Anstey announced that the network would cease operations. Anstey cited the "economic landscape" which was another way of saying that its ratings were distressingly low. The relatively small number of viewers who watched Al Jazeera America 's programs considered them not anti-American but just, well, boring.

You don't have to be a marketing genius to figure out that in the age of the 24/7 media environment, foreign networks face prohibitive competition from American cable news networks like CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, social media, not to mention Netflix and yes, those online porno sites. Thus the chances that a foreign news organization would be able to attract large American audiences, and have any serious impact on their political views, remain very low.

That, indeed, has been the experience of not only the defunct Al Jazeera America , but also of other foreign news outlets that have tried to imitate the Qatar-based network by launching operations targeting American audiences. These networks have included CGTN (China Global Television Network), the English-language news channel run by Chinese state broadcaster China Central Television ; PressTV, a 24-hour English language news and documentary network affiliated with Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting ; or RT (formerly Russia Today), a Russian international television network funded by the Russian government that operates cable and satellite television channels directed to audiences outside of Russia.

After all, unless you are getting to paid to watch CTGN, PressTV, or RT -- or you are a news junkie with a lot of time on your hands -- why in the world would you be spending even one hour of the day watching these foreign networks?

Yet if you have been following the coverage and public debate over the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, you get the impression that RT and another Russian media outlet, Sputnik (a news agency and radio broadcast service established by the Russian government-controlled news agency Rossiya Segodnya ), were central players in a conspiracy between the Trump presidential campaign and the Kremlin to deny the presidency to Hillary Clinton.

In fact, more than half of the much-cited January report on the Russian electoral interference released by U.S. intelligence agencies was devoted to warning of RT's growing influence in the United States and across the world, referring to the "rapid expansion" of the network's operations and budget to about $300 million a year, and citing the supposedly impressive audience numbers listed on the RT website.

According to America's spooks, the coordinated activities of RT and the online-media properties and social-media accounts that made up "Russia's state-run propaganda machine" have been employed by the Russian government to "undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order."

And in a long cover story in The New York Times Magazine this month, with the headline, " RT, Sputnik and Russia's New Theory of War, " Jim Rutenberg suggested that the Kremlin has "built one of the most powerful information weapons of the 21st century" and that it "may be impossible to stop."

But as the British Economist magazine reported early this year, while RT claims to reach 550 million people worldwide, with America and Britain supposedly being its most successful markets, its "audience" of 550 million refers to "the number of people who can access its channel, not those who actually watch it."

As the The Economist notes, a 2015 survey of the top 94 cable channels in America by the research firm Nielsen found that RT did not even make it into the rankings, capturing only 0.04 percent of viewers, according to the Broadcast Audience Research Board.

The Times' s Rutenberg argues that the RT's ratings "are almost beside the point." RT might not have amassed an audience that remotely rivals CNN's in conventional terms, "but in the new, 'democratized' media landscape, it doesn't need to" since "the network has come to form the hub of a new kind of state media operation: one that travels through the same diffuse online channels, chasing the same viral hits and memes, as the rest of the Twitter-and-Facebook-age media."

Traveling "through the same diffuse online channels" and "chasing the same viral hits and memes" sounds quite impressive. Indeed, RT has claimed dominance on YouTube, an assertion that apparently caught the attention of the U.S. intelligence community, which noted that RT videos get 1 million views a day, far surpassing other outlets.

But as The Economist points out, when it comes to Twitter and Facebook, RT's reach is narrower than that of other news networks. Its claim of YouTube success is mostly down to the network's practice of buying the rights to sensational footage -- for instance, Japan's 2011 tsunami -- and repackaging it with the company logo. It's not clear, however, how the dissemination of a footage of a natural disaster or of a dog playing the piano helps efforts to "undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order."

It is obvious that the Russian leaders have been investing a lot of resources in RT, Sputnik, and other media outlets, and that they employ them as propaganda tools aimed at promoting their government's viewpoints and interests around the world. From that perspective, these Russian media executives are heirs to the communist officials who had been in charge of the propaganda empire of the Soviet Union and its satellites during much of the 20th Century.

The worldwide communist propaganda machine did prove to be quite effective during the Great Depression and World War II, when it succeeded in tapping into the economic and social anxieties and anti-Nazi sentiments in the West and helped strengthen the power of the communist parties in Europe and, to some extent, in the United States.

But in the same way that Western German television programs failed to politically energize East Germans during the Cold War, much of the Soviet propaganda distributed by the Soviet Union at that time had very little impact on the American public and its political attitudes, as symbolized by the shrinking membership of the American Communist Party.

Or as media-effects theorists explain the communication process, the intentions of the producer (Soviet Union) and the conventions of the content (communist propaganda) were interwoven in a strategy aimed at influencing the receiver (the American audience). But the majority of Americans, with the exception of a few hard-core ideologues, interpreted the content of the message as pitiful Soviet propaganda, assuming they even paid attention to it.

Soviet propaganda may have scored limited success during the Cold War when it came to members of the large communist parties in France, Italy, and Japan, as well as exploited anti-American sentiments in some third-world countries. In these cases, the intentions of the producer and the convention of the message seemed to be in line with the interpretations of the receivers.

There is no doubt that Moscow, which regarded President Harry Truman as its leading American political nemesis, was hoping that Progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace would win the 1948 election -- and had tailored its propaganda effort in accordance with that goal. That pro-Wallace campaign took place at a time when the American Communist Party still maintained some influence in the United States, where many Americans still sympathized with the former World War II ally and a large number of Soviet spies were operating in the country. But then Wallace's Progressives ended up winning 2.5 percent of the vote, less than Strom Thurmond's Southern segregationist ticket.

Yet we are supposed to believe that by employing RT, Sputnik, Facebook, Twitter, and a bunch of hackers, the Russians could help their American candidate "steal" the 2016 presidential election. Is there any evidence that those white blue-collar workers and rural voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan -- the people who provided Trump with his margin of victory -- were even exposed to the reports distributed by RT and Sputnik, or by the memes constructed by Russian trolls or their posts on Facebook? ("Hey, did you watch RT last night?")

Yet the assertion that a "silver bullet shot from a media gun" in the form of Russian propaganda was able "to penetrate a hapless audience" in the United States has been gaining more adherents in Washington and elsewhere. This conspiracy seems to correlate the intent of the Russian government and the content of their messages with the voting behavior of Americans.

In a strange irony, those who are promoting this fallacious assertion may -- unlike their Russian scapegoat -- actually succeed in penetrating a hapless American audience.

Leon Hadar is a writer and author of the books Quagmire: America in the Middle East and Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Washington Times, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and the National Interest.

The Color of Celery , says: September 26, 2017 at 1:20 am

For an example of the success of propaganda, look at Breitbart. The messages online during the 2016 election were pervasive and insidious. I think this post underestimates the threat by focusing on traditional media instead of social interaction.

RT covered Assange during the election better than other outlets.

It's easy to see everything from a personal perspective and forget that we are very diverse. We don't live in an ABC, CBS, and NBC world anymore, with information controlled. Changes in thought and belief happen online now, in many, many different venues.

polistra , says: September 26, 2017 at 3:39 am
A government that has confidence in its own support doesn't need to fight foreign information. In the '30s and '40s the US government encouraged shortwave listening, and manufacturers made money by adding SW bands to their radios. We were going through a depression and then a war, but our government was CONFIDENT enough to encourage us to understand the world.

Since 1950 the government has been narrowing the focus of external input because it knows that it no longer has the natural consent of the governed. TV and the Web are intentional forms of jamming, filling our eyes and ears with internally produced nonsense to crowd out the external info.

Meddlesome , says: September 26, 2017 at 7:44 am
The ones you have to worry about are those much closer to home – "inside the tent".

Friends in the UK, Canada, and Europe are appalled at the distorting effect Israeli propaganda has on American news sources, and how unaware of it typical Americans seem to be.

Indeed, it is odd and more than a little worrying that all the concern about "foreign meddling" has so far failed to engage with Israel, which is hands down the best funded, most sophisticated and successful foreign meddler.

The FBI annually reports that Israel spies on us at the same level as Russia and China. But we have yet to fully register that Israeli spying includes systematic efforts to influence American elections and policies, efforts that dwarf those of Putin's Russia both in scale and impact.

Fran Macadam , says: September 26, 2017 at 9:24 am
I think that the corporate masters of propaganda media and politics in these United States, have, in the words of Edward G. Robinson's Rico in Little Caesar, "gotten to where you can dish it out, but you can't take it anymore."

It's counterfactual to conflate Soviet propaganda with the perspective of Russians today, unless Communism never really was the real point. In fact, it's our own leaders in media and politics who now increasingly issue dogmatic and insulting derogatory language, sounding more and more like late Soviet propagandists themselves.

Pelayo Viriato , says: September 26, 2017 at 10:20 am
@The Color of Celery:

So what? What's wrong with people being exposed to a broad array of points of view, trying to better understand the world and constantly challenging, refining, and reshaping their worldview in the process?

You're coming perilously close to suggesting that Americans who are critical of their government are dupes of hostile foreign powers ! an unfair, unhelpful, and undemocratic assertion.

ZGler , says: September 26, 2017 at 11:45 am
The problem with Russian trolls is that people don't know they are Russian trolls. They think they are their fellow Americans and neighbors on Facebook. The influence of foreign propaganda on Americans is not due to transparent media like Al Jazeera. It's due to propaganda disguised as your neighbor's opinion.
Mike Johnson , says: September 26, 2017 at 3:33 pm
this conversation cant be taken serious without a serious discussion on Israel, who by the way provides the perfect case and point of how effective foreign propaganda can be. They work through our media, school systems and even our churches. Just look at what happened to McGraw Hill for daring to show before and after maps of the Palestine over the years.

[Sep 24, 2017] Mark Ames When Mother Jones Was Investigated for Spreading Kremlin Disinformation by Mark Ames

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Adam Hochschild, the founding editor of Mother Jones (and author of some great books including King Leopold's Ghost), responded publicly to the threats coming out of the Senate in the early Reagan years. In a New York Times op-ed published in late 1981, "Dis-(Mis-?)Information", Hochschild wrote about a Republican Senate mailer sent out to 290 radio stations that accused Mother Jones of being Kremlin disinformation dupes. ..."
"... "In it, the writer Arnaud de Borchgrave accuses Mother Jones, the Village Voice, the Soho News, the Progressive magazine of serving as disseminators of K.G.B. 'disinformation' – the planting of false or misleading items in news media. "Mr. de Borchgrave provided no specific examples of facts or articles. But, then, the trouble with the K.G.B. is that you don't know what disinformation it is feeding you because you don't know who its myriad agents are. So the only safe thing is to distrust any author or magazine too critical of the United States. Because anyone who is against, say, the MX or the B-1 bomber could be working for the Russians." ..."
"... The communist/leftist imagery is there for a reason. In case you haven't noticed, Clinton supporters have waged a crude PR campaign to blame their candidate's loss on leftists, whom they equate with neo-Nazis and Trump. I've been smeared as "alt-left" by a Vanity Fair columnist, who equated me with Breitbart and other far-right journalists, for the crime of not sufficiently supporting Hillary Clinton. The larger goal of this crude PR effort is to equate opposition to Hillary Clinton with treason and Nazism. Which was exactly the goal of Reagan's "Kremlin disinformation" hysteria - the whole point was to smear critics of Reagan and his right-wing politics as pro-Kremlin traitors, whether they knew it or not. ..."
"... Even the words and the terminology are plagiarized from the Reagan Right witch-hunting campaign - "Kremlin active measures"; "Kremlin disinformation"; "Kremlin dupes" - terms introduced by right-wing novelists and intelligence hucksters, and repeated ad nauseam until they transformed into something plausible, giving quasi-academic cover to some very old-fashioned state repression, harassment, surveillance . . . and a lot of ruined lives. That's what happened last time, and if history is any guide, it's how this one will end up too. ..."
"... The Reagan Era kicked off with a lot of dark fear-mongering about the Kremlin using disinformation and active measures to destroy our way of life. Everything that the conservative Establishment loathed about 1970s - defeat in Vietnam, Church Committee hearings gutting the CIA and FBI, the cult of Woodward & Bernstein & Hersh, peace marchers, minority rights radicals - was an "active measures" treason conspiracy. ..."
"... The image at the top of this article comes from a lead article in Columbia University's student newspaper, the Spectator, published a few weeks after Reagan took office, on SST committee's assault on Mother Jones. The headline read: The New McCarthyism / Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been and the the full-page article begins, If you subscribe to Mother Jones, give money to the American Civil Liberties Union, or support the Institute for Policy Studies, Senator Jeremiah Denton's new Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism may be interested in you. ..."
"... It describes how in the 1970s Americans finally got rid of HUAC and the Senate Internal Security Committee, the Red Scare witch-hunting Congressional committees - only to have them revived one election cycle later in the Reagan Revolution. ..."
"... Sexual immorality -- it's a common theme in all the Russia panics of the past 100 years-whether the sexually liberated Emma Goldmans of the Red Scare, the homosexual-panic of the McCarthy witch-hunts, the hippie orgies of Denton's nightmares, or Trump's supposed golden shower fetish with immoral Russian prostitutes in our current panic. . . . ..."
"... To fight the Kremlin disinformation demons, Denton set up the Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism (SST), with two other young Republican senators-Orrin Hatch, who's still haunting Capitol Hill today; and John East of North Carolina, a Jesse Helms protege who later did his country a great service by committing suicide in his North Carolina garage, before the end of his first term in office in 1986. ..."
"... Sen. East's staffers leaned Nazi-ward, like their boss. One Sen. East staffer was Samuel Francis - now famous as the godfather of the alt-Right, but who in 1981 was known as the guru behind the Senate's "Russia disinformation" witch hunt. Funny how that works - today's #Resistance takes its core idea, that America is under the control of hostile Kremlin disinformation sorcerers - is culturally appropriated from the alt-Right's guru. ..."
"... Another staffer for Sen. East was John Rees, one of the most loathsome professional snitches of the post-McCarthy era, who collected files on suspected leftists, labor activists and liberal donors. I'll have to save John Rees for another post - he really belongs in a category by himself, proof of Schopenhauer's maxim that this world is run by demons. ..."
"... These were the people who first cooked up the "disinformation" panic. You can't separate the Sam Francises, Orrin Hatches, John Easts et al from today's panic-mongering over disinformation - you can only try to make sense of why, what is it about our culture's ruling factions that brings them together on this sort of xenophobic witch-hunt, even when they see themselves as so diametrically opposed on so many other issues. ..."
"... The subversion scare and moral panic were crucial in resetting the culture for the Reagan counter-revolution. Those who opposed Reagan's plans, domestically and overseas, would be labeled "dupes" of Kremlin "active measures" and "disinformation" conspiracies, acting on behalf of Moscow whether they knew it or not. The panic incubated in Denton's subcommittee investigations provided political cover for vast new powers given to the CIA, FBI, NSA and other spy and police agencies to spy on Americans. Fighting Russian "active measures" grew over the years into a massive surveillance program against Americans, particularly anyone involved in opposing Reagan's dirty wars in Central America, anyone opposing nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants, and anyone involved in providing sanctuary to refugees from south of the border. The "active measures" panic even led to FBI secret investigations into liberal members of Congress, some of whom wound up in a secret "FBI terrorist photo album". ..."
"... 'Russia is a bigger threat to America than Islamic State.' is almost certainly true. If one insists, as the US has done, on standing at the border of the bears lair and poking it with a very short stick, then there may well be consequences. On the other hand, Islamic State is no threat to the US in any way, shape or form. ..."
"... The Cold War is over, so now the US can reveal its truly feral nature. ..."
"... American slogan Violence R Us. Not judging, just being honest. We were no more interested in the common good of the Vietnamese back then, any more than we are interested in the common good of the Syrians today. ..."
"... It's always 'Russia this, Russia that', how we're going to bring democracy to some other part of the world, how some country's leader is a dictator. These are excuses we can do reverse Robin Hood wherever we can and enrich the 1%. ..."
"... It's my duty to point out that the glaring similarities in this brand of cold war Russophobia with that of pre-WW2 anti-Comintern material coming out of Nazi Germany (or even the anti-Semitic material from the early 1900s) are no coincidence. ..."
"... Among the Nazi intelligence officers and scientists we spirited away before the Russians could get their hands on them [ Operation Paperclip ] were a few sly operators who immediately started filling our elected leaders' ears with stories of Reds under the bed. One of these reps was Senator Joe McCarthy and the rest, as they say ..."
"... American-produced historical documentaries tell it like we were united as a country in support of Stalin against Hitler. This reluctance is usually credited to not wanting to get into another bloodbath like WW1 but let's be straight- about half the country (proto-deplorables?) wanted nothing to do with helping the commies beat the Nazis and actually thought the Germans weren't the bad guys. Anti-communism, big brother to anti-unionism and first cousin to anti-Semitism, was all the rage before we helped Uncle Joe beat Hitler, making it all the easier to revive after the war was over and it looked like the only threat to US world domination was a war-weakened Soviet Union. ..."
"... A few years ago, with the advent of internet freeness, I'd added MJ ..."
"... It is sensible but really too polite to say that NATO expanded because "that is what bureaucracies do and it became a way for U.S. presidents to show their 'toughness.'" To expand a bureaucracy by subversion of Ukraine and false reports of Russian aggression, to show toughness by aggression rather than defense, requires the mad power grasping of tyrants in the military, the intel agencies, the NSC, the administration, Congress. and the mass media. ..."
"... They are joined in a tyranny of inventing foreign monsters, to pose falsely as protectors, and to accuse their moral superiors of disloyalty, as Aristotle warned. This is the domestic political power grab of tyrants, a far greater danger. ..."
"... Apart from NATO and a few other treaties, the US would have no constitutional power to wage foreign wars, just to repel invasions and suppress insurrections, and that is the way it should be. Any treaty becomes part of the Supreme Law of the land, and must be rigorously restricted to defense, with provisions for international resolution of conflicts. NATO has been nothing but an excuse for warmongering since 1989. ..."
"... I think this is much closer to the mark than the association of the anti-russia fearmongering with sincere xenophobia. Russia is the go-to foreign enemy because there is such a huge and convenient stockpile of propaganda material lying around in stockpiles, but left unused because of the tragic and abrupt end of Cold War 1.0. And Russia is a great target because it is distant, and has a weird alphabet. Anyone who knows enough about Russia to contradict the disinformation (like by mentioning that they are not commies, but US-style authoritarian oligarchs) is suspicious ipso facto ..."
"... Both parties being pro wall street deficit and war hawks differing in perhaps degree .with the Demos supporting a more generous portion of calf's foot jelly being distributed to peasants of more varied hue as they also support privatization, more subtle tax cuts and deregulation for the rich, R2P wars, and globalization's race to the bottom. People seem to inhabit their own Plato's Cave each opposing their own particular artfully projected phantom menace. ..."
"... Brilliant, as Ames usually is. Especially the point that this is a manifestation of consistent anti-left sentiment within the establishment whether R or D. The confounding of Putin's Russia with some imagined communist threat always amazes me. D's got to keep up the hippie-punching at all times though! ..."
"... The Russophobia is stuck on an endless loop. I wish they'd at least come up with new lies or some fresh enemy for us all to fear. ..."
"... Without defending Trump, it is wrong of the Dems to push this stuff when Ukrainians helped Clinton's campaign and Clinton approved Uranium One getting 20% of US uranium when they gave $100 million to the Foundation. ..."
Jun 03, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

By Mark Ames, founding editor of the Moscow satirical paper The eXile and co-host of the Radio War Nerd podcast with Gary Brecher (aka John Dolan). Subscribe here. Originally published at The eXiled

Mother Jones recently announced it's "redoubling our Russia reporting"-in the words of editor Clara Jeffery. Ain't that rich. What passes for "Russia reporting" at Mother Jones is mostly just glorified InfoWars paranoia for progressive marks - a cataract of xenophobic conspiracy theories about inscrutable Russian barbarians hellbent on subverting our way of life, spreading chaos, destroying freedom & democracy & tolerance wherever they once flourished. . . . because they hate us, because we're free.

Western reporting on Russia has always been garbage, But the so-called "Russia reporting" of the last year has taken the usual malpractice to unimagined depths - whether it's from Mother Jones or MSNBC, or the Washington Post or Resistance hero Louise Mensch.

But of all the liberal media, Mother Jones should be most ashamed for fueling the moral panic about Russian "disinformation". It wasn't too long ago that the Reagan Right attacked Mother Jones for spreading "Kremlin disinformation" and subverting America. There were threats and leaks to the media about a possible Senate investigation into Mother Jones serving as a Kremlin disinformation dupe, a threat that hung over the magazine throughout the early Reagan years. A new Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism (SST for short) was set up in 1981 to investigate Kremlin "disinformation" and "active measures" in America, and the American "dupes" who helped Moscow subvert our way of life. That subcommittee was created to harass and repress leftist anti-imperial dissent in America, using "terrorism" as the main threat, and "disinformation" as terrorism's fellow traveller. The way the the SST committee put it, "terrorism" and "Kremlin disinformation" were one and the same, a meta-conspiracy run out of Moscow to weaken America.

And Mother Jones was one of the first American media outlets in the SST committee's sites.

Adam Hochschild, the founding editor of Mother Jones (and author of some great books including King Leopold's Ghost), responded publicly to the threats coming out of the Senate in the early Reagan years. In a New York Times op-ed published in late 1981, "Dis-(Mis-?)Information", Hochschild wrote about a Republican Senate mailer sent out to 290 radio stations that accused Mother Jones of being Kremlin disinformation dupes. The mailer, on Senate letterhead, featured a tape recording of an interview between the chairman of the SST subcommittee, Sen. Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, and a committee witness- a "disinformation expert" named Arnaud de Borchgrave, author of a bestselling spy novel called "The Spike" - about a fictional Kremlin plot to subvert the West with disinformation, and thereby rule the world.

Here's how Hochschild described the Republican Senate mailer in his NYTimes piece:

"In it, the writer Arnaud de Borchgrave accuses Mother Jones, the Village Voice, the Soho News, the Progressive magazine of serving as disseminators of K.G.B. 'disinformation' – the planting of false or misleading items in news media. "Mr. de Borchgrave provided no specific examples of facts or articles. But, then, the trouble with the K.G.B. is that you don't know what disinformation it is feeding you because you don't know who its myriad agents are. So the only safe thing is to distrust any author or magazine too critical of the United States. Because anyone who is against, say, the MX or the B-1 bomber could be working for the Russians."

Here, the Mother Jones founder describes the menacing logic of pursuing the "Kremlin disinformation" conspiracy: any American critical of US military power, police power, corporate power, overseas power . . . anyone critical of anything that powerful Americans do, is a Kremlin disinformation dupe whether they know it or not. That leaves only the appointed accusers to decide who is and who isn't a Kremlin agent.

Hochschild called this panic over Kremlin disinformation another "Red Scare", warning,

"[T]o accuse critical American journalists of serving as its unwitting dupes makes as little sense as Russians accusing rebellious Poles of being unwitting agents of American imperialism. When Mr. de Borchgrave accuses skeptical journalists of being unwitting purveyors of disinformation, the accusation is more slippery, less easy to definitively disprove, and less subject to libel law than if he were to accuse them of being conscious Communist agents.

" Although if you believe the K.G.B. is successfully infiltrating America's news media, then anything must seem possible."

It's a damn shame today's editorial staff at Mother Jones aren't aware of their own magazine's history.

Then again, who am I fooling? Mother Jones wouldn't care if you shoved their faces in their own recent history - they're way too donor-deep invested in pushing this "active measures" conspiracy. Trump has been a goldmine of donor cash for anyone willing to carry the #Resistance water.

PutinTrump was a project set up last fall by tech plutocrat Rob Glaser, CEO and founder of RealNetworks, to scare voters into believing that voting for Trump is treason. God knows I can't stand Trump or his politics, but of all the inane campaign ideas to run on - this?

One would've thought that the smart people would learn their lesson from the election, that running against a Kremlin conspiracy theory is a loser. But instead, they seem to think the problem is they didn't fear-monger enough, so they're "redoubling" on the Russophobia. Donor money is driving this - donor cash is quite literally driving Mother Jones' editorial focus. And it really is this crude.

Take for example a PutinTrump section titled "Russian Expansion" - the scary Red imagery and language are lifted straight out of the Reagan Cold War playbook from the early-mid 80s, when, it so happens, Mother Jones was targeted as a Kremlin dupe. Featuring a lot of shadowy red-colored alien soldiers over an outline of Crimea, Mother Jones' donor-partner promotes a classic Cold War propaganda line about Russian/Soviet expansionism-a lie that has been the basis for so many wars launched to "stop" this alleged "expansionism" in the past, wars that Mother Jones is supposed to oppose. Here's what MJ's partner writes now:

RUSSIAN EXPANSION

Through unknowing manipulation, or by direct support, Trump will become an accessory to the continual expansionism committed by Putin. Might does not equal right-and it never has for Americans-but Putin's Russia plays by different rules. Or maybe no rules at all.

The communist/leftist imagery is there for a reason. In case you haven't noticed, Clinton supporters have waged a crude PR campaign to blame their candidate's loss on leftists, whom they equate with neo-Nazis and Trump. I've been smeared as "alt-left" by a Vanity Fair columnist, who equated me with Breitbart and other far-right journalists, for the crime of not sufficiently supporting Hillary Clinton. The larger goal of this crude PR effort is to equate opposition to Hillary Clinton with treason and Nazism. Which was exactly the goal of Reagan's "Kremlin disinformation" hysteria - the whole point was to smear critics of Reagan and his right-wing politics as pro-Kremlin traitors, whether they knew it or not.

* * *

What's kind of shocking to me as someone who was alive in the Reagan scare is how unoriginal this current one is. Even the words and the terminology are plagiarized from the Reagan Right witch-hunting campaign - "Kremlin active measures"; "Kremlin disinformation"; "Kremlin dupes" - terms introduced by right-wing novelists and intelligence hucksters, and repeated ad nauseam until they transformed into something plausible, giving quasi-academic cover to some very old-fashioned state repression, harassment, surveillance . . . and a lot of ruined lives. That's what happened last time, and if history is any guide, it's how this one will end up too.

Today we're supposed to remember how cheerful and optimistic the Reagan Era was. But that's now how I remember it, it's not how it looked to Mother Jones at the time - and it's not how it looks when you go back through the original source material again and relive it. The Reagan Era kicked off with a lot of dark fear-mongering about the Kremlin using disinformation and active measures to destroy our way of life. Everything that the conservative Establishment loathed about 1970s - defeat in Vietnam, Church Committee hearings gutting the CIA and FBI, the cult of Woodward & Bernstein & Hersh, peace marchers, minority rights radicals - was an "active measures" treason conspiracy.

As soon as the new Republican majority in the Senate took power in 1981, they set up a new subcommittee to investigate Kremlin disinformation dupes, called the Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism. Staffers leaked to the media they intended to investigate Mother Jones. Panic spread across the progressive media world, and suddenly all those cool Ivy League kids who invested everything in becoming the next Woodward-Bernsteins - the cultural heroes at the time - got scared. The image at the top of this article comes from a lead article in Columbia University's student newspaper, the Spectator, published a few weeks after Reagan took office, on SST committee's assault on Mother Jones. The headline read: The New McCarthyism / Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been and the the full-page article begins, If you subscribe to Mother Jones, give money to the American Civil Liberties Union, or support the Institute for Policy Studies, Senator Jeremiah Denton's new Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism may be interested in you.

It describes how in the 1970s Americans finally got rid of HUAC and the Senate Internal Security Committee, the Red Scare witch-hunting Congressional committees - only to have them revived one election cycle later in the Reagan Revolution.

By the end of Reagan's first year in office, there was still no formal investigation into Mother Jones, but the harassment was there and it wasn't subtle at all - such as the Republican Senate mailer accusing the magazine of being KGB disinformation dupes. At the end of 1981, MJ editor/founder Adam Hochschild announced he was stepping aside, and in his final note to readers and the public, he wrote:

To Senator Jeremiah Denton, chair of the Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism: If your committee investigates Mother Jones, a plan hinted at some months ago, I demand to be subpoenaed. I would not want to miss telling off today's new McCarthyites.

So here we are a few decades later, and Mother Jones' editor Clara Jeffery is denouncing WikiLeaks - yesterday's journalism stars, today's traitors - as "Russia['s] willing dupes and propagandists" while Mother Jones magazine turned itself into a mouthpiece for America's spies peddling the same warmed-over conspiracy theories that once targeted Mother Jones.

* * *

Jeremiah Denton - the New Right senator from Alabama who led the SST committee investigation into Kremlin "disinformation" and its dupes like Mother Jones - believed that America was being weakened from within and had only a few years left at most to turn it around. As Denton saw it, the two most dangerous threats to America's survival were a) hippie sex, and b) Kremlin disinformation. The two were inseparable in his mind, linked to the larger "global terrorism" plot masterminded by Moscow.

To fight hippie sex and teen promiscuity, the freshman senator introduced a "Chastity Bill" funding federal programs that promoted the joys of chastity to Americans armies of bored, teen suburban long-hairs. A lot of clever people laughed at that, because at the time the belief in linear historical progress was strong, and this represented something so atavistic that it was like a curiosity more than anything - Pauly Shore's "Alabama Man" unfrozen after 10,000 years and unleashed on the halls of Congress.

Less funny were Denton's calls for death penalty for adulterers, and laws he pushed restricting women's right to abortion.

Jeremiah Denton was once a big name in this country. Americans have since forgotten Denton, because John McCain pretty much stole his act. But back in the 70s and early 80s, Denton was America's most famous Vietnam War hero/POW. Like McCain, Denton was a Navy pilot shot down over Vietnam and taken prisoner. Denton spent 1965-1973 in North Vietnamese POW camps-two years longer than McCain-and he was America's most famous POW. His most famous moment was when his North Vietnamese captors hauled him before the cameras to acknowledge his crimes, and instead Denton famously blinked out a Morse code message: "T-O-R-T-U-R-E".

In the 1973 POW exchange deal between Hanoi and Nixon, "Operation Homecoming," it was Denton who was the first American POW to come off the plane and speak to the American tv crews (McCain was on the same flight, but not nearly as prominent as Denton). I keep referring back to McCain here because not only were they both famous Navy pilot POWs, but they both wind up becoming the most pathologically obsessive Russophobes in the Senate. Just a few days ago, McCain said that Russia is a bigger threat to America than Islamic State. Something real bad must've happened in those Hanoi Hiltons, worse than anything they told us about, because those guys really, really hate Russians - and they reallywant the rest of us to hate Russians too.

Everything they loathed about America, everything that was wrong with America, had to be the fault of a hostile alien culture. There was no other explanation for what happened in the 1970s. The America that Denton came home to in 1973 was under some kind of hostile power, an alien-controlled replica of the America he last saw in 1965. Popular morality had been turned on its head: Hollywood blockbusters with bare naked bodies and gutter language! Children against their parents! Homosexuals on waterskis! Sex and treason! Patriots were the enemy, while America-haters were heroes! Denton re-appeared like some reactionary Rip Van Winkle who went to sleep in the safe feather-bed world of J Edgar Hoover's America - only to wake up eight years later on Bernadine Dohrn's futon, soaked in Bill Ayers' bodily fluids. For Denton, the post-60s cultural shock came on all at once - as sudden and as jarring as, well, the shock so many Blue State Americans experienced when Donald Trump won the election last November.

Sex, immorality & military defeat-these were inseparable in Denton's mind, and in a lot of reactionaries' minds. Attributing all of America's social convulsions of the previous 15 years to immorality and a Kremlin disinformation plot was a neat way of avoiding the complex and painful realities - then, as now.

"No nation can survive long unless it can encourage its young to withhold indulgence in their sexual appetites until marriage." - Jeremiah Denton

What hit Denton hardest was all the hippie sex and the pop culture glorification of hippie sex. It's hard to convey just how deeply all that smug hippie sex wounded tens of millions of Americans. It's a hate wound that's still raw, still burns to the touch. A wound that fueled so much reactionary political fire over the past 50 years, and it doesn't look like it'll burn out any time soon.

Back in 1980, Denton blamed all that pop culture sex on Russian active measures, and he did his best to not just outlaw it, but to demonize sex as something along the lines of treason.

Just as so many people today cannot accept the idea that Trump_vs_deep_state is Made In America-so Denton and his Reagan Right constituents believed there had to be some alien force to explain why Americans had changed so drastically, seeming to adopt values that were the antithesis of Middle America's values in 1965. It had to be the fault of an alien voodoo beam! It had to be a Russian plot!

And so, therefore, it was a Russian plot.

A 1981 Time magazine profile of the freshman Senator begins, Denton believes that America is being destroyed by sexual immorality and Soviet-sponsored political 'disinformation'-and that both are being promoted by dupes, or worse, in the media. By the mid-1980s, he warns, "we will have less national security than we had proportionately when George Washington's troops were walking around barefoot at Valley Forge."

Sexual immorality -- it's a common theme in all the Russia panics of the past 100 years-whether the sexually liberated Emma Goldmans of the Red Scare, the homosexual-panic of the McCarthy witch-hunts, the hippie orgies of Denton's nightmares, or Trump's supposed golden shower fetish with immoral Russian prostitutes in our current panic. . . .

To fight the Kremlin disinformation demons, Denton set up the Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism (SST), with two other young Republican senators-Orrin Hatch, who's still haunting Capitol Hill today; and John East of North Carolina, a Jesse Helms protege who later did his country a great service by committing suicide in his North Carolina garage, before the end of his first term in office in 1986.

Sen. East's staffers leaned Nazi-ward, like their boss. One Sen. East staffer was Samuel Francis - now famous as the godfather of the alt-Right, but who in 1981 was known as the guru behind the Senate's "Russia disinformation" witch hunt. Funny how that works - today's #Resistance takes its core idea, that America is under the control of hostile Kremlin disinformation sorcerers - is culturally appropriated from the alt-Right's guru.

Another staffer for Sen. East was John Rees, one of the most loathsome professional snitches of the post-McCarthy era, who collected files on suspected leftists, labor activists and liberal donors. I'll have to save John Rees for another post - he really belongs in a category by himself, proof of Schopenhauer's maxim that this world is run by demons.

These were the people who first cooked up the "disinformation" panic. You can't separate the Sam Francises, Orrin Hatches, John Easts et al from today's panic-mongering over disinformation - you can only try to make sense of why, what is it about our culture's ruling factions that brings them together on this sort of xenophobic witch-hunt, even when they see themselves as so diametrically opposed on so many other issues. I don't think this is something as simple as hypocrisy - it's actually quite consistent: Establishment faction wakes up to a world it doesn't recognize and loathes and feels threatened by, and blames it not on themselves or anything domestic, but rather on the most plausible alien conspiracy they can reach for: Russian barbarians. Anti-Russian xenophobia is burned into the Establishment culture's DNA; it's a xenophobia that both dominant factions, liberal or conservative, view as an acceptable xenophobia. When poorer "white working class" Americans feel threatened and panic, their xenophobia tends to be aimed at other ethnics - Latinos and Muslims these days - a xenophobia that the Establishment views as completely immoral and unacceptable, completely beyond the pale. The thought never occurs to them that perhaps all forms of xenophobia are bad, all bring with them a lot of violence and danger, it just depends on who's threatened and who's doing the threatening

The subversion scare and moral panic were crucial in resetting the culture for the Reagan counter-revolution. Those who opposed Reagan's plans, domestically and overseas, would be labeled "dupes" of Kremlin "active measures" and "disinformation" conspiracies, acting on behalf of Moscow whether they knew it or not. The panic incubated in Denton's subcommittee investigations provided political cover for vast new powers given to the CIA, FBI, NSA and other spy and police agencies to spy on Americans. Fighting Russian "active measures" grew over the years into a massive surveillance program against Americans, particularly anyone involved in opposing Reagan's dirty wars in Central America, anyone opposing nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants, and anyone involved in providing sanctuary to refugees from south of the border. The "active measures" panic even led to FBI secret investigations into liberal members of Congress, some of whom wound up in a secret "FBI terrorist photo album".

I'll get to that "FBI Terrorist Photo Album" story later. There's a lot of recent "Kremlin disinformation" history to recover, since it seems every last memory cell has been zapped out of existence.

After Reagan's inauguration (the most expensive, lavish inauguration ball in White House history), Senator Denton sent a chill through the liberal and independent media world with all the talk coming out of his committee about targeting activists, civil rights lawyers and journalists. Denton tried to come off as reasonable some of the times; other times, he came right out and said it: "disinformation" is terrorism: When I speak of a threat, I do not just mean that an organization is, or is about to be, engaged in violent criminal activity. I believe many share the view that support groups that produce propaganda, disinformation or legal assistance may be even more dangerous than those who actually throw the bombs.

Congratulations Mother Jones, you've come a long way, baby! Next post, I'll recover some of the early committee hearings, and the rightwing hucksters, creeps and spooks who fed Denton's committee.

glmmph , June 3, 2017 at 7:00 am

I think that John McCain may well be correct, if for the wrong reasons. 'Russia is a bigger threat to America than Islamic State.' is almost certainly true. If one insists, as the US has done, on standing at the border of the bears lair and poking it with a very short stick, then there may well be consequences. On the other hand, Islamic State is no threat to the US in any way, shape or form.

Disturbed Voter , June 3, 2017 at 7:23 am

This is now, that was then. There is no comparison. The Cold War is over, so now the US can reveal its truly feral nature. It seems both parties are struggling to bring back the 1960s with Cold War 2.0. We need to pull out of the Middle East, and invade Vietnam, again ;-( And yes, probably even back then, Mother Jones was controlled opposition. They just don't bother hiding it anymore.

John Zelnicker , June 3, 2017 at 3:18 pm

@Disturbed Voter – Dontcha know. We just signed deals with Viet Nam that will bring "billions of dollars" to the U.S. Trump said so last week after meeting with the Vietnamese Prime Minister, so it must be true. They're safe for now. :-)

witters , June 3, 2017 at 7:29 am

"Might does not equal right-and it never has for Americans-" Is there a Darwin Award for this?

Disturbed Voter , June 3, 2017 at 9:30 am

American slogan Violence R Us. Not judging, just being honest. We were no more interested in the common good of the Vietnamese back then, any more than we are interested in the common good of the Syrians today.

oh , June 3, 2017 at 3:18 pm

Our nation worries about other countries' problems but we never care about ours! It's always 'Russia this, Russia that', how we're going to bring democracy to some other part of the world, how some country's leader is a dictator. These are excuses we can do reverse Robin Hood wherever we can and enrich the 1%.

Magazines (tabloids) and (fake)news organization are cheer leaders to this effort because they cash in on the chant du jour.

Baby Gerald , June 3, 2017 at 8:16 am

Thank you so much for exposing in such great detail the hypocrisy regarding MJ s recent neo-Red Scare leanings. If only the editorial staff at dear MJ would educate themselves not only about their own organization's history, but history in general, they might avoid looking like complete fools and enemies to their own institution's founding principles when we collectively reminisce on this bizarre era at some point in the future.

It's my duty to point out that the glaring similarities in this brand of cold war Russophobia with that of pre-WW2 anti-Comintern material coming out of Nazi Germany (or even the anti-Semitic material from the early 1900s) are no coincidence.

Among the Nazi intelligence officers and scientists we spirited away before the Russians could get their hands on them [ Operation Paperclip ] were a few sly operators who immediately started filling our elected leaders' ears with stories of Reds under the bed. One of these reps was Senator Joe McCarthy and the rest, as they say

American-produced historical documentaries tell it like we were united as a country in support of Stalin against Hitler. This reluctance is usually credited to not wanting to get into another bloodbath like WW1 but let's be straight- about half the country (proto-deplorables?) wanted nothing to do with helping the commies beat the Nazis and actually thought the Germans weren't the bad guys. Anti-communism, big brother to anti-unionism and first cousin to anti-Semitism, was all the rage before we helped Uncle Joe beat Hitler, making it all the easier to revive after the war was over and it looked like the only threat to US world domination was a war-weakened Soviet Union.

As a kid in the 80s I remember MJ being singled out as a leftist commie rag by Reaganites of the day. Through college this was about all I knew about the magazine– as an epithet for what hippie commie liberals read before trying to ruin our country. Despite it leaning to my political inclinations, I never paid it any attention.

A few years ago, with the advent of internet freeness, I'd added MJ to my news stream. Once Sanders- then later Trump- started looking like an actual threat to the Clinton campaign, their headlines started turning snippy and trite toward her opposition. I turned them off my feed last year, so the only exposure to their drivel is thanks to the links here at NC . Now with the advent of twitter, their staff have taken the extra step of proving how twisted their personal Russophobian views really are. Between just Corn and Jeffery, there's enough material to make any McCarthyite proud.*

[* – I was going to close with ' and make Adam Hochschild roll in his grave' but then I googled him and discovered that he's still alive. Wonder what he thinks about this current turn at the magazine he co-founded?]

Damson , June 3, 2017 at 8:40 am

Reposting a comment that IMV, snapshots the reality of Russophobia far better than Ames (it was in response to a Ray McGovern article on Trump's visit to NATO HQ) :

"Ray has written well to the general audience, bridging the information gap for those heavily propagandized. He has properly shown the expansion of NATO as an act of calculated betrayal, a policy of aggression in the face of zero threat.

It is sensible but really too polite to say that NATO expanded because "that is what bureaucracies do and it became a way for U.S. presidents to show their 'toughness.'" To expand a bureaucracy by subversion of Ukraine and false reports of Russian aggression, to show toughness by aggression rather than defense, requires the mad power grasping of tyrants in the military, the intel agencies, the NSC, the administration, Congress. and the mass media.

They are joined in a tyranny of inventing foreign monsters, to pose falsely as protectors, and to accuse their moral superiors of disloyalty, as Aristotle warned. This is the domestic political power grab of tyrants, a far greater danger.

Tyranny is a subculture, a groupthink of bullies who tyrannize each other and compete for the most radical propositions of nonexistent foreign threats. They fully well know that they are lying to the people of the United States to serve a personal and factional agenda that involves the murder of millions of innocents, the diversion of a very large fraction of their own and other nations' budgets from essential needs, and they have not an ounce of humanity or moral restraint among them. Those who waver are cast aside, and the worst of the bullies rise to the top. This is why the nation's founders opposed a standing military, and they were right.

Apart from NATO and a few other treaties, the US would have no constitutional power to wage foreign wars, just to repel invasions and suppress insurrections, and that is the way it should be. Any treaty becomes part of the Supreme Law of the land, and must be rigorously restricted to defense, with provisions for international resolution of conflicts. NATO has been nothing but an excuse for warmongering since 1989.

Let us hope that Trump pulls the plug on NATO interventionism, accidentally or otherwise. The Dem leaders have now joined the Reps in their love of bribes for genocide, but at the least the Reps still don't like paying for it. Perhaps the last duopoly imitation of civilization."

nowhere , June 3, 2017 at 11:26 am

Hmm "but at the least the Reps still don't like paying for it." I strongly disagree. War is the only thing Rs don't mind openly supporting.

Ptolemy Philopater , June 3, 2017 at 3:15 pm

One can not repeat often enough: War Crimes Tribunals! How to disincentivize the madness.

Skip Intro , June 4, 2017 at 2:14 am

I think this is much closer to the mark than the association of the anti-russia fearmongering with sincere xenophobia. Russia is the go-to foreign enemy because there is such a huge and convenient stockpile of propaganda material lying around in stockpiles, but left unused because of the tragic and abrupt end of Cold War 1.0. And Russia is a great target because it is distant, and has a weird alphabet. Anyone who knows enough about Russia to contradict the disinformation (like by mentioning that they are not commies, but US-style authoritarian oligarchs) is suspicious ipso facto .

Mary Wehrhein , June 3, 2017 at 9:40 am

Having lived in Kansas for 60 some years which is the poster-child for trickle-down necromancy and a land heavily infused with rural, German-Catholic sensibilities, I can vouch for the deeply felt attitudes towards sex as a primary issue. "Family Values" being the code word for the whole sex and reproductive moral prism.

Like Cuba with its 50s autos, the conservatives have never given up their 60s conception of the Democrats as the party of free love, peace-nicks (soft on commies hard on guns) and tax and spend bleeding hearts coddling dependent malingerers.

The GOP here campaigns against a democrat party that no longer exists (if it ever did). They seem oblivious to the fact that the democrats have become the moderate republicans of yore. Both parties being pro wall street deficit and war hawks differing in perhaps degree .with the Demos supporting a more generous portion of calf's foot jelly being distributed to peasants of more varied hue as they also support privatization, more subtle tax cuts and deregulation for the rich, R2P wars, and globalization's race to the bottom. People seem to inhabit their own Plato's Cave each opposing their own particular artfully projected phantom menace.

GERMO , June 3, 2017 at 9:42 am

Brilliant, as Ames usually is. Especially the point that this is a manifestation of consistent anti-left sentiment within the establishment whether R or D. The confounding of Putin's Russia with some imagined communist threat always amazes me. D's got to keep up the hippie-punching at all times though!

Pespi , June 3, 2017 at 10:33 am

This is a great piece. The Russophobia is stuck on an endless loop. I wish they'd at least come up with new lies or some fresh enemy for us all to fear. Tell me about why South African dupes are causing all the problems in society, tell me that the people of the Maldives each own a nuclear capable artillery piece and are burning American flags.

Susan the other , June 3, 2017 at 11:25 am

Thanks for this post down memory lane. I assumed MJ was liberal. And Jane Fonda was a conservative. And by 1981 I was completely confused about where the media stood on any given issue. And now finally the mask is coming off and we can see (Phillip K. Dick style) that left is right and right is left. And we are all fascists. Will the real Atilla please stand up? #Resistance is a little over the top and so is putintrump. But what looks like actual progress is the fact that Bernie was not completely destroyed by the state paranoia. There has to be a certain bed-rock decency that can rise above this eternal crap. Just a note of interest on the young Orrin Hatch being on the SST as a freshman senator. Orrin was the subject of local rumors that claimed he had been put in the senate by the mafia (some mormon-mafia connection in las vegas) and the fact that they did use entrapment with a hooker to disgrace his opponent was mafia-enough to make the story convincing. The story died out fast. But we should all remember that the mafia was involved in its own anti-commie terrorist tactics for decades.

Susan the other , June 3, 2017 at 2:28 pm

file under Too Weird: 15 minutes after I posted the above I got a call from Orrin Hatch's robo-computer inviting me to a local discussion call me paranoid.

John Zelnicker , June 3, 2017 at 2:45 pm

@Susan the other – It's not paranoia if someone really is out to get you. Or, to get all of us. Or, demonstrates that they have the ability to do so at will.

REDPILLED , June 3, 2017 at 11:39 am

Only 16% of people surveyed are very worried about climate change.

Corporate news is consumed with covering the Trump/Russia affair, but whatever the truth of all this turns out to be, it pales in significance to the real existential threat that is upon us. Largely due to a lack of coverage by corporate television news, there is a dangerous lack of public awareness of it.

Susan the other , June 3, 2017 at 11:42 am

land of the free and home of the brave you have to be brave to live in this free-for-all. Just want to pass on this killer quote from Discover Magazine: "It is sometimes argued that the illusion of free will arises from the fact that we can't adequately judge all possible moves with the result that our choices are based on imperfect or impoverished information." what a nightmare world.

mpalomar , June 3, 2017 at 9:43 pm

"It is sometimes argued that the illusion of free will arises from the fact that we can't adequately judge all possible moves with the result that our choices are based on imperfect or impoverished information."

Accepting that premise does not rule out the possibility of free will, it only suggests that our free will is likely mired in a blind stumbling, darkness of unknowing.
Hallelujah.

sunny129 , June 3, 2017 at 1:57 pm

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. George Orwell. Every one has that 'right', right or wrong! But it is your right & duty to develop 'critical' thinking to DISCERN the difference

Darn , June 4, 2017 at 4:48 am

Without defending Trump, it is wrong of the Dems to push this stuff when Ukrainians helped Clinton's campaign and Clinton approved Uranium One getting 20% of US uranium when they gave $100 million to the Foundation. The book "Shattered" says her campaign did internal polling which found Uranium One was the most damaging line to use against Clinton so she decided to get her retaliation in first and use the Russia charge at every opportunity. And on election night when they realised they had been defeated they decided to blame Russia again. What has Trump done for Russia so far? He's kept up sanctions and bombed their client state Syria. Whereas Clinton had a pattern of arms sales to Foundation donors. Prefer Clinton? Fine, but not over this.

[Sep 18, 2017] The NYT's Yellow Journalism on Russia by Rober Parry

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The New York Times is prepping the American people for what could become World War III. The daily message is that you must learn to hate Russia and its President Vladimir Putin so much that, first, you should support vast new spending on America's Military-Industrial Complex and, second, you'll be ginned up for nuclear war if it comes to that. ..."
"... At this stage, the Times doesn't even try for a cosmetic appearance of objective journalism. Look at how the Times has twisted the history of the Ukraine crisis, treating it simply as a case of "Russian aggression" or a "Russian invasion." The Times routinely ignores what actually happened in Ukraine in late 2013 and early 2014 when the U.S. government aided and abetted a violent coup that overthrew Ukraine's elected President Viktor Yanukovych after he had been demonized in the Western media. ..."
"... The Times and much of the U.S. mainstream media refuses even to acknowledge that there is another side to the Ukraine story. Anyone who mentions this reality is deemed a "Kremlin stooge" in much the same way that people who questioned the mainstream certainty about Iraq's WMD in 2002-03 were called "Saddam apologists." ..."
"... Many liberals came to view the dubious claims of Russian "meddling" in the 2016 election as the golden ticket to remove Trump from the White House. So, amid that frenzy, all standards of proof were jettisoned to make Russia-gate the new Watergate. ..."
"... For one, even if the U.S. government were to succeed in destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia sufficiently to force out President Putin, the neocon dream of another malleable Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin is far less likely than the emergence of an extreme Russian nationalist who might be ready to push the nuclear button rather than accept further humiliation of Mother Russia. ..."
"... The truth is that the world has much less to fear from the calculating Vladimir Putin than from the guy who might follow a deposed Vladimir Putin amid economic desperation and political chaos in Russia. But the possibility of nuclear Armageddon doesn't seem to bother the neocon/liberal-interventionist New York Times. Nor apparently does the principle of fair and honest journalism. ..."
"... America's Stolen Narrative, ..."
"... The Trans-Atlantic Empire of banking cartels rest upon enmity with the only other Great Powers in the World: Russia and China, while keeping USA thoroughly within their orbit, relying on our Great Power as the engine that powers this Western Bankers' Empire (the steering room lies in City-of-London, who has LONG maneuvered, via their Wall Street assets, to bring us into Empire). Should peaceful, cooperative and productive relations break out between USA, Russia, and China, this would undermine everything the Western Empire has worked to build. ..."
"... THIS is why the phony Russiagate issue is flogged to get rid of Trump (who seeks cooperation with Russia and China), AND keeping Russia as "The Enemy", keeping the MIC, Intel community, various police-state ops, in high demand for "National Security" reasons (also positioned to foil any democratic uprisings, should they see past the progs daily curtain and see their plight). ..."
"... The funny thing about living through the 'fake news' era, is that now everyone thinks that their news source is the correct news source. Many believe that outside of the individual everyone else reads or listens too 'fake news'. It's like all of a sudden no one has credibility, yet everyone may have it, depending on what news source you subscribe to. I mean there's almost no way of knowing what the truth is, because everyone is claiming that they are getting their news from reputable news outlets, but some or many aren't, and who are the reputable news sources, if you don't mind my asking you this just for the record? ..."
"... To learn how to deal with this 'fake news', I would suggest you start studying the JFK assassination, or any other ill defined tragic event, and then you might learn how to decipher the 'fake news' matrix of confusion to learn what you so desire to learn. I chose this route, because when was the last time the Establishment brokered the truth in regard to a happening such as the JFK assassination? Upon learning of what a few well written books has to say, you will then need to rely on your own brain to at least give you enough satisfaction to allow you to believe that you pretty well got it right, and there go you. In other words, the truth is out there, hiding in plain sight, and if you are persistent enough you just might find it. Good luck. ..."
Sep 18, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

The NYT's Yellow Journalism on Russia September 15, 2017

Exclusive: The New York Times' descent into yellow journalism over Russia recalls the sensationalism of Hearst and Pulitzer leading to the Spanish-American War, but the risks to humanity are much greater now, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Reading The New York Times these days is like getting a daily dose of the "Two Minutes Hate" as envisioned in George Orwell's 1984, except applied to America's new/old enemy Russia. Even routine international behavior, such as Russia using fictitious names for potential adversaries during a military drill, is transformed into something weird and evil.

In the snide and alarmist style that the Times now always applies to Russia, reporter Andrew Higgins wrote – referring to a fictitious war-game "enemy" – "The country does not exist, so it has neither an army nor any real citizens, though it has acquired a feisty following of would-be patriots online. Starting on Thursday, however, the fictional state, Veishnoriya, a distillation of the Kremlin's darkest fears about the West, becomes the target of the combined military might of Russia and its ally Belarus."

This snarky front-page story in Thursday's print editions also played into the Times' larger narrative about Russia as a disseminator of "fake news." You see the Russkies are even inventing "fictional" enemies to bully. Hah-hah-hah -- The article was entitled, "Russia's War Games With Fake Enemies Cause Real Alarm."

Of course, the U.S. and its allies also conduct war games against fictitious enemies, but you wouldn't know that from reading the Times. For instance, U.S. war games in 2015 substituted five made-up states – Ariana, Atropia, Donovia, Gorgas and Limaria – for nations near the Caucasus mountains along the borders of Russia and Iran.

In earlier war games, the U.S. used both fictitious names and colors in place of actual countries. For instance, in 1981, the Reagan administration conducted "Ocean Venture" with that war-game scenario focused on a group of islands called "Amber and the Amberdines," obvious stand-ins for Grenada and the Grenadines, with "Orange" used to represent Cuba.

In those cases, the maneuvers by the powerful U.S. military were clearly intended to intimidate far weaker countries. Yet, the U.S. mainstream media did not treat those war rehearsals for what they were, implicit aggression, but rather mocked protests from the obvious targets as paranoia since we all know the U.S. would never violate international law and invade some weak country -- (As it turned out, Ocean Venture '81 was a dress rehearsal for the actual U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983.)

Yet, as far as the Times and its many imitators in the major media are concerned, there's one standard for "us" and another for Russia and other countries that "we" don't like.

Yellow Journalism

But the Times' behavior over the past several years suggests something even more sinister than biased reporting. The "newspaper of record" has slid into yellow journalism, the practice of two earlier New York newspapers – William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's New York World – that in the 1890s manipulated facts about the crisis in Cuba to push the United States into war with Spain, a conflict that many historians say marked the beginning of America's global empire.

Except in today's instance, The New York Times is prepping the American people for what could become World War III. The daily message is that you must learn to hate Russia and its President Vladimir Putin so much that, first, you should support vast new spending on America's Military-Industrial Complex and, second, you'll be ginned up for nuclear war if it comes to that.

At this stage, the Times doesn't even try for a cosmetic appearance of objective journalism. Look at how the Times has twisted the history of the Ukraine crisis, treating it simply as a case of "Russian aggression" or a "Russian invasion." The Times routinely ignores what actually happened in Ukraine in late 2013 and early 2014 when the U.S. government aided and abetted a violent coup that overthrew Ukraine's elected President Viktor Yanukovych after he had been demonized in the Western media.

Even as neo-Nazi and ultranationalist protesters hurled Molotov cocktails at police, Yanukovych signaled a willingness to compromise and ordered his police to avoid worsening violence. But compromise wasn't good enough for U.S. neocons – such as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland; Sen. John McCain; and National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman. They had invested too much in moving Ukraine away from Russia.

Nuland put the U.S. spending at $5 billion and was caught discussing with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt who should be in the new government and how to "glue" or "midwife this thing"; McCain appeared on stage urging on far-right militants; and Gershman was overseeing scores of NED projects inside Ukraine, which he had deemed the "biggest prize" and an important step in achieving an even bigger regime change in Russia, or as he put it: "Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself."

The Putsch

So, on Feb. 20, 2014, instead of seeking peace , a sniper firing from a building controlled by anti-Yanukovych forces killed both police and protesters, touching off a day of carnage. Immediately, the Western media blamed Yanukovych. Sen. John McCain appearing with Ukrainian rightists of the Svoboda party at a pre-coup rally in Kiev.

Shaken by the violence, Yanukovych again tried to pacify matters by reaching a compromise -- guaranteed by France, Germany and Poland -- to relinquish some of his powers and move up an election so he could be voted out of office peacefully. He also pulled back the police.

At that juncture, the neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists spearheaded a violent putsch on Feb. 22, 2014, forcing Yanukovych and other officials to flee for their lives. Ignoring the agreement guaranteed by the three European nations, Nuland and the U.S. State Department quickly deemed the coup regime "legitimate."

However, ethnic Russians in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, which represented Yanukovych's electoral base, resisted the coup and turned to Russia for protection. Contrary to the Times' narrative, there was no "Russian invasion" of Crimea because Russian troops were already there as part of an agreement for its Sevastopol naval base. That's why you've never seen photos of Russian troops crashing across Ukraine's borders in tanks or splashing ashore in Crimea with an amphibious landing or descending by parachute. They were already inside Crimea.

The Crimean autonomous government also voted to undertake a referendum on whether to leave the failed Ukrainian state and to rejoin Russia, which had governed Crimea since the Eighteenth Century. In that referendum, Crimean citizens voted by some 96 percent to exit Ukraine and seek reunion with Russia, a democratic and voluntary process that the Times always calls "annexation."

The Times and much of the U.S. mainstream media refuses even to acknowledge that there is another side to the Ukraine story. Anyone who mentions this reality is deemed a "Kremlin stooge" in much the same way that people who questioned the mainstream certainty about Iraq's WMD in 2002-03 were called "Saddam apologists."

But what is particularly remarkable about the endless Russia-bashing is that – because it started under President Obama – it sucked in many American liberals and even some progressives. That process grew even worse when the contempt for Russia merged with the Left's revulsion over Donald Trump's election.

Many liberals came to view the dubious claims of Russian "meddling" in the 2016 election as the golden ticket to remove Trump from the White House. So, amid that frenzy, all standards of proof were jettisoned to make Russia-gate the new Watergate.

The Times, The Washington Post and pretty much the entire U.S. news media joined the "resistance" to Trump's presidency and embraced the neocon "regime change" goal for Putin's Russia. Very few people care about the enormous risks that this "strategy" entails.

For one, even if the U.S. government were to succeed in destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia sufficiently to force out President Putin, the neocon dream of another malleable Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin is far less likely than the emergence of an extreme Russian nationalist who might be ready to push the nuclear button rather than accept further humiliation of Mother Russia.

The truth is that the world has much less to fear from the calculating Vladimir Putin than from the guy who might follow a deposed Vladimir Putin amid economic desperation and political chaos in Russia. But the possibility of nuclear Armageddon doesn't seem to bother the neocon/liberal-interventionist New York Times. Nor apparently does the principle of fair and honest journalism.

The Times and rest of the mainstream media are just having too much fun hating Russia and Putin to worry about the possible extermination of life on planet Earth.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ).

jo6pac , September 15, 2017 at 4:51 pm

Amerikas way of bring the big D to your nation. Death

http://www.globalresearch.ca/unknown-snipers-and-western-backed-regime-change/27904

Thanks RP for reading the times so I don't have to not that would.

Common Tater , September 16, 2017 at 2:05 pm

Thanks for the link, I knew about the use of snipers in Venezuela '02, did not realize there were so many more.

BayouCoyote , September 18, 2017 at 11:13 am

Kinda reminds me of what our only "Ally in the ME" did to our Marines in Iraq.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIiGfUjZnbU

JWalters , September 16, 2017 at 7:29 pm

Bingo -- In a surely related story, the mainstream press is equally relentless in AVOIDING telling Americans the facts about Israel, and especially about its control over the American press.
"Israel lobby is never a story (for media that is in bed with the lobby)"
http://mondoweiss.net/2017/09/israel-lobby-never/

Virtually everything average Americans have been told about Israel has been, amazingly, an absolute lie. Israel was NOT victimized by powerful Arab armies. Israel overpowered and victimized a defenseless, civilian Arab population. Military analysts knew the Arab armies were in poor shape and would be unable to resist the zionist army. Muslim "citizens" of Israel do NOT have all the same rights as Jews. Israelis are NOT under threat from the indigineous Palestinians, but Palestinians are under constant threats of theft and death from the Israelis. Israel does NOT share America's most fundamental values, which rest on the principle of equal human rights for all.

How has this gigantic package of outright lies has been foisted upon the American public for so long? And how long can it continue? It turns out they did not foresee the internet, and the facts are leaking out everywhere. So it appears they're desperately coercing facebook and google to rig their rankings, trying to hide the facts. But one day soon there will be a 'snap' in the collective mind, and everybody will know that everybody knows.

For readers who haven't seen it yet,
"War Profiteers and the Roots of the War on Terror"
http://warprofiteerstory.blogspot.com

Common Tater , September 17, 2017 at 3:48 am

JWalters
I can tell you are angry. I too was angry when I figured it out.
Long before I figured it out, I was a soldier. Our unit was prepared for an exercise and we were all sleeping at the regiment compound, the buses would arrive at zero-dark thirty. I was reading a book about the ME(this was shortly after 9-11). A friend, came up and asked what I was reading. I told him I was reading about the Balfour paper and how that had a significant effect on the ME. He began explaining to me how the zionist movement had used the idea that no one lived on that land, to force the people from that land, out of that land.
I quickly responded that Israel had defended that land against 5 Arab armies and managed to hold on to that land. I informed him he was mistaken.
He agreed to disagree, and walked away.
This happened way back in 2002 if only I could pick his mind now. How did he know about this, way back before the internet was in any shape to wake people up?
There is hope still that guys who are young as i was, will say "Fuck You I defend this line and no further."
Without their compliance, there can be no wars.

Bernard Fisher , September 17, 2017 at 8:57 am

CommonTater your story parallels mine -- I was in the military, went to Vietnam to 'defend our nation against communism', felt horror at the Zionist stories of how Palestinians rocketed them, was told by senior officer about what Zionism is really about and I, like you, disbelieved him. That was in 1974 -- -- Now, with all the troubles in the world I won't read the MSP but look towards the alternative news sources. They make more sense. But as I try to educate others on what I have learned I am as disappointed as my senior officer must have been back them. Articles such as this one reproduced by ICH are gems: I save and print them in a compendium detailing ongoing war crimes.

Common Tater , September 17, 2017 at 2:35 pm

Bernard Fisher
Thanks for your response.
Good Idea to save and print these "gems" on consortiumnews.
Hopefully they wake more Americans.
Cheers

michael fish , September 15, 2017 at 5:44 pm

Thanks Mr. Parry,
You are a voice in the hurricane of hatred and lies propagated by the richest people on the planet.
Eventually some moron who believes this new York Times garbage will actually unleash the bomb and we will all be smoke.
That has always been the result of such successful propaganda. And it is very successful. It has almost occluded any truth for the vast majority of westerners .
Michael Fish

Yomamama , September 16, 2017 at 1:58 am

Agreed. I wish this clear and comprehensive article could be stapled on every American voter's door (wanted to say forehead but violence is bad). Many would toss it in the trash. Many would not agree even with full comprehension because of their own horrid beliefs. But maybe a few would read it and have an epiphany. It's very hard work to find an avenue to change the minds of millions of people who've been inculcated by nationalist propaganda since birth. Since 4 years old seeing the wonderful National Anthem and jets fly over the stadium of their favorite sports team. Since required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in school.

I refused to stand for or recite the Pledge when I was seven or eight years old. I was sent to detention. My awesome mom though intervened and afterwards I could remain seated while most or all other kids stood up to do the ritual. I refuse to stand up and place hand-on-heart and remove cap during any sporting contests when the Anthem is played. I've been threatened with physical violence by many strangers around me.

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/exclusive-documents-expose-direct-us-military-intelligence-influence-on-1-800-movies-and-tv-shows-36433107c307

Thanks Mr. Parry, your voice is appreciated, your articles and logic are top-notch. Very valuable stuff, available for the curious, the skeptical. Well, until Google monopolizes search algorithms and calls this a Russian fake news site, perhaps or Congress the same

Virginia , September 16, 2017 at 1:49 pm

Excellent link, Yomamama.

Common Tater , September 16, 2017 at 2:20 pm

My hat is off to you sir, I have not been to any sporting events since I woke up, but I imagine it would be very difficult to remain seated and hatted during the opening affirmation of nationalism. My waking up coincides with a drastic drop in sports viewing. I used to be an NFL fan, rooted for the Niners (started watching NFL in the late eighties), the last full season I followed was the 2013-14 season.

It was the Ukraine coup that woke me up. It started when watching videos on youtube of guys stomping on riot cops, using a fire hose on them like a reverse water cannon. Then I realized these guys were the peaceful protesters being talked about on t.v. It was like a thread hanging in front of me, I began pulling and pulling until the veil in front of my eyes came apart. It was during this time I discovered consortiumnews.com.

Thomas Dickinson , September 16, 2017 at 3:03 pm

Mr Common Tater–just appreciating reading that someone else "woke up". That is the way it has felt to me. For me it was Oct 2002 and Bush's speech that was clearly heading us to war in Iraq. The "election" (appointment) of Bush in 2000 though was the first alarm clock that I started to hear. Most recent wake up is connected to Mr Parry's relentless (I hope) and necessary debunking of the myth of Russian nastiness and corresponding myth of US rectitude. Been watching The Untold History of the United States and have been dealing with the real bedrock truth that my government invented and invents enemies as a tactic in a game–ie. it's a bunch of boys thinking foreign relationship building is first and foremost a game. It has been hard to wash away all this greasy insidious smut from my life.

Common Tater , September 16, 2017 at 4:28 pm

Thomas Dickinson

It sucks to wake up, in a way. Once one gets past the denial, Tom Clancy novel type movies lose some of it's fun, although still entertaining. One secretly knows the audience in the cinema is just eating it all up and loving it. The American hero yells "yippie kayay mother f -- -r" as he defeats the post-Soviet Russian villain in Russia blowing up buildings, and destroying s–t as he saves the world for democracy. The Russian authorities amount to some guy in Soviet peaked hat, and long coat, begging for a bribe.

Oliver Stone's series is really good, it turns history on his head and shakes all the pennies out his pockets. Another good reporter is John Pilger, he has a long list of docs he has done over several decades.

Cheers

Homer Jay , September 16, 2017 at 5:44 pm

I have been watching that same series, about 3 episodes in. The most mind blowing part to think about is how the establishment consipired to block the nomination of the progressive Henry Wallace as a repeat VP for Roosevelt, leading instead to Harry Truman's nomination as VP, and then you know the rest of the story.

Funny how history repeated itself with the nomination of Clinton instead of Sanders. Btw, after Sanders mistakenly jumped on the Russia bashing bandwagon he was one of the few who voted against the recent sanctions being imposed against Russia, Iran, and North Korea. So yeah, I'd feel alot better with a Sanders president at this point.

Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:21 pm

Apart from the obvious Exceptionalist and Zionazi imperative to destroy Russia and China in order that God's Kingdom of 'Full Spectrum Dominance' be established across His world by his various 'Chosen People', the USA always needs an enemy. Now, more than ever, as the country crumbles into disrepair and unprecedented inequality, poverty and elite arrogance, the proles must be led to blame their plight on some Evil foreign daemon.

Only this time its no Saddam or Gaddaffi or Assad that can be easily bombed back to that Stone Age that all the non-Chosen must inhabit. This time the bullying thugs will get a, thermo-nuclear, bloody nose if they do not back off. Regretably, their egos refuse to withdraw, even in the interest of self-survival.

Paranam Kid , September 16, 2017 at 6:13 am

" It has almost occluded any truth for the vast majority of westerners."

You are so right about that, I notice it every day on other forums on which I discuss current affairs with others: the US views are the accepted ones, and I get a lot of stick for stating different views. It is actually frightening to see how few people can think for themselves.

mike k , September 15, 2017 at 5:47 pm

The American people are being systematically lied to, and they don't have a clue that it is happening. There is no awake and intelligent public to prevent what is unfolding. The worst kind of criminals are in charge of our government, media, and military. The sleeping masses are making their way down the dark mountain to the hellish outcome that awaits them.

"These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur
of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it
seem monstrous
To admire the tragic beauty they build.
It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and
kissing.
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future I should do foolishly. The beauty
of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain."

Robinson Jeffers

HopeLB , September 15, 2017 at 10:36 pm

Great, Dark and Accurate poem -- Thank You -- Think I'll send it to Rachel Maddow, Wapo and the NYTimes.Might do them some good. Wouldn't that be lovely.

Patrick Lucius , September 16, 2017 at 12:42 am

Which poem is that? Not Shine, perishing Republic, is it?

Thomas Dickinson , September 16, 2017 at 3:22 pm

Rearmament by Robinson Jeffers. I liked that a lot, too, so looked it up. https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/rearmament/

Jeff Davis , September 18, 2017 at 11:35 am

Fabulous reply. Back atcha:

Dulce et Decorum Est
BY WILFRED OWEN

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas -- GAS -- Quick, boys -- -- An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime. --
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

******************************

And this, from Bob Dylan's "Jokerman" .

Freedom just around the corner for you
But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?

******************************

I love life and am by nature a cockeyed optimist, but I find myself intermittently gloomy, my optimism overwhelmed by cynicism, when I see the abundance of moronic belligerence so passionately snarled out in the comments sections across the internet. Clearly, humans are cursed with an addiction to violence For my part, I am old and will die soon and have no children, plus I live in a quiet backwater far away from the nuclear blast zone. Humanity seems on course for a major "culling". Insane and sad.

Mike Morrison , September 15, 2017 at 5:48 pm

Over three years now the war in Donbass, Ukraine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BoKj39HKls

Dr. Ando Arike , September 15, 2017 at 5:49 pm

I'd like to see more investigative reporting on the NYT's and other major media outlets' links to the CIA and other Deep State info-war bureaus. What the Times is doing now is reminiscent of the Michael Gordon-Judith Miller propaganda in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. Operation Mockingbird, uncovered during the mid-70s Church Hearings, is an ongoing effort, it would seem. Revealing hard links to CIA information ops would be a great service to humanity.

SteveK9 , September 15, 2017 at 7:22 pm

After 'Michael Gordon-Judith Miller' I stopped reading the Times.

Beard681 , September 18, 2017 at 11:52 am

I am amazed at how many conspiracy types there are who want to see some sort of oligarch, capitalist, zionist or deep state cabal behind it all. (That is a REALLY optimistic view of the human propensity for violent conflict.) It is just a bunch of corporate shills pushing for war (hopefully cold) because war sells newspapers.

Rich Rubenstein , September 15, 2017 at 5:53 pm

Robert Parry has gotten this exactly right -- I'm a regular NYTimes subscriber /-have been for years -- and I have NEVER read anything about Russia that has not been written by professional Russia-haters like Higgins. Frankly, I don't get it. What accounts for this weird and dangerous bias?

mike k , September 15, 2017 at 6:03 pm

Have you looked into who owns the NYT?

Paranam Kid , September 16, 2017 at 6:32 am

Why do you keep reading the NYT? Not only the Russia stories are heavily biased, but all their stories are. Most op-ed's about Israel/Palestine are written by zealous pro-Israel/pro-Zionists, against very few pro-Palestine people.

Brad Owen , September 16, 2017 at 8:07 am

The Trans-Atlantic Empire of banking cartels rest upon enmity with the only other Great Powers in the World: Russia and China, while keeping USA thoroughly within their orbit, relying on our Great Power as the engine that powers this Western Bankers' Empire (the steering room lies in City-of-London, who has LONG maneuvered, via their Wall Street assets, to bring us into Empire). Should peaceful, cooperative and productive relations break out between USA, Russia, and China, this would undermine everything the Western Empire has worked to build.

THIS is why the phony Russiagate issue is flogged to get rid of Trump (who seeks cooperation with Russia and China), AND keeping Russia as "The Enemy", keeping the MIC, Intel community, various police-state ops, in high demand for "National Security" reasons (also positioned to foil any democratic uprisings, should they see past the progs daily curtain and see their plight).

Brad Owen , September 16, 2017 at 8:08 am

Progs=propaganda stupid iPad.

Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:30 pm

Here in Aust-failure I read the papers for many years until they became TOO repulsive, particularly the Murdoch hate and fear-mongering rags. I also, and still do, masochistically listen to the Government ABC and SBS. In all those years I really cannot recall any articles or programs that reported on Russia or China in a positive manner, save when Yeltsin, a true hero to all our fakestream media, was in charge. That sort of uniformity of opinion, over generations, is almost admirable. And the necessity to ALWAYS follow the Imperial US ('Our great and powerful friend') line leads to some deficiencies in the quality of the personnel employed, as I one again reflected upon the other day when one hackette referred to (The Evil, of course)Kim Jong-un as 'President Un', several times.

Jeff Davis , September 18, 2017 at 12:31 pm

"What accounts for this weird and dangerous bias?"

Several points:

The Russian -- formerly Commie -- -- boogieman is a profit center for the military, their industrial suppliers, and the political class. That's the major factor. But also, the Zionist project requires a bulked up US military "tasked" with "full spectrum" military dominance -- the Wolfowitz Doctrine, the American jackboot on the world's throat forever -- to insure the eternal protection of Israel. Largely unseen in this Israeli/Zionist factor is the thousand-year-old blood feud between the Jews and Russians. They are ancient enemies since the founding of Czarist Russia. No amount of time or modernity can diminish the passion of that animus. (I suspect that the Zionist aim to "destroy" Russia will eventually backfire and lead instead to the destruction of Israel, but really, we shouldn't talk about that.)

mike k , September 15, 2017 at 6:26 pm

The richest man in the world has the controlling interest in the NYT. Draw your own conclusions.

http://freebeacon.com/issues/mexican-billionaire-carlos-slim-becomes-top-owner-of-new-york-times/

Brad Owen , September 16, 2017 at 8:36 am

Mexico, ground zero for the world fascist movement in the 20s and 30s (going by name Synarchy Internationale still does) throuout Ibero-America, centered in PAN. The Spanish-speaking World had to contend with Franco, and Salazar being in power so long in the respective "Mother Countries" of the Iberian Peninsula. This was the main trail for the ratlines to travel.

I saw a dead coyote on the side of the road the other day. I know you know what that means to me, Mike. Omens are a lost art in these modern times, and I have no expertise in these matters, but it struck my attention hard. It was on the right side of the road: trouble for Trump coming from The Right? They are more potent than the ineffective Left, so this might be the way Trump is pulled down.

Sfomarco , September 16, 2017 at 3:37 pm

Carlos Slim (f/k/a Salim)

Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:31 pm

Yes, but who bankrolls Slim?

Stiv , September 15, 2017 at 6:51 pm

I wouldn't even need to read this to know what's going to be said. After the last article from Parry, which was very good and interesting .plowing new ground for him he's back to rehashing the same old shit. Not that it's necessarily wrong, only been said about a hundred times. Yawn

D.H. Fabian , September 16, 2017 at 2:46 am

After months of so many people pointing out how and why the "Russia stole the election" claim is false, it came roaring back (in liberal media) in recent days. It demands a response.

mike k , September 16, 2017 at 7:26 am

No one is required to read anything on CN.

Virginia , September 16, 2017 at 1:58 pm

RP brought lots of new things into play in his article and showed how they mesh together and support one another "against Trump." I almost skipped it because so familiar with the topic, but RP brought new light to the subject, in my humble opinion.

Common Tater , September 16, 2017 at 2:40 pm

I do not need to read or watch established "news" media to know what's going to be said. After the last b.s. story from the usual talking heads which was low brow and insulting to the intelligence of the audience, they are back at it again same ol'shit by the same talking heads. It is most definitely wrong, and it needs to be countered as much as possible not yawning.

Gregory Herr , September 16, 2017 at 8:18 pm

That's what struck me just how absurdly insulting will the Times get?

And I think the point that trying to destabilize the Russian Federation may very well bring about a more militant hardline Russia is important to stress.

anon , September 17, 2017 at 9:02 am

"Stiv" is a troll who makes this junk comment every time. Better to ignore him.

Colin , September 18, 2017 at 11:54 am

Were you planning to contribute anything useful to the discussion?

SteveK9 , September 15, 2017 at 7:19 pm

I always wonder what motivation the accusers believe you have when they call you a 'Putin stooge'. Why would you be one? Are you getting paid? Of course not, so this is just a judgment on your part. They could call you a fool, but accuse you of 'carrying water for the Kremlin' as I heard that execrable creature, Adam Schiff say to Tucker Carlson? That just makes no sense. Of course, none of it is rational.

Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:38 pm

They're insane. A crumbling Empire which was supposed to rule the world forever, 'Under God' through Full Spectrum Dominance, but which, in fact, is disintegrating under its own moral, intellectual and spiritual rottenness, is bound to produce hate-crazed zealots looking for foreign scape-goats. Add the rage of the Clintonbots whose propaganda had told then for months that the She-Devil would crush the carnival-huckster, and her vicious post-defeat campaign to drive for war with Russia (what a truly Evil creature she is)and you get this hysteria. Interestingly, 'hysteria' is the word used to describe Bibi Nutty-yahoo, the USA's de facto 'capo di tutti capi', in Sochi recently when Putin refused to follow orders.

David Grace , September 15, 2017 at 7:30 pm

I have another theory I'd like to get reviewed. These are corporate wars, and not aimed at the stability of nations. It is claimed that in 1991, at the fall of the Soviet Union, the oligarchs were created by the massive purchasing of the assets of the collapsing nation. The CIA was said to have put together a 'bond issue' worth some $480 Billion, and it was used to buy farms, factories, mineral rights and other formerly common holdings of the USSR. This 'bond issue' was never repaid to the US taxpayers, and the deeds are in the hands of various oligarchs. Not all of the oligarchs are tied to the CIA, as there were other wells of purchasers of the country, but the ties to Trump are actually ties to dirty CIA or other organized crime entities.

The NY Times may be trying to capture certain assets for certain clients, and their editorial policy reflects this.

I'd appreciate feedback on this.

Thanks,
David

David Grace , September 15, 2017 at 7:33 pm

There are many on-line videos on this theme. Searching 'Black Eagle Trust' is one form. Here is one link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhBZJEqoe0A

stephen sivonda , September 15, 2017 at 9:51 pm

David Grace . what have we here, a thinking man? I like your premise, and I haven't even watched the link you supplied. That being said, I'll sign off and investigate that link.

D.H. Fabian , September 16, 2017 at 2:39 am

Conspiracy theories upon conspiracy theories, ensuring that the public will never be able to root out the facts. People still argue about the Kennedy assassination 54 years later.

Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:39 pm

There is no rational 'argument' about what really happened to JFK.

Zhu Bajie , September 17, 2017 at 7:12 pm

Most conspiracy theories are fantasy fiction. If you have real evidence, based on verifiable facts, then it's not a theory any more. But most of the conspiracy theories popular in the USA just serve popular vanity. We never have to accept our mistakes, our crimes against humanity, etc. It's always THEIR fault.

We Americans over all are like small children, always making excuses.

mark , September 16, 2017 at 5:23 pm

Some of the material on the Black Eagle Trust are suspect. It gives figures for stolen Japanese war loot, for example, that are simply ludicrous. Figures of so many thousand tons of gold, for example, when the references should probably be to OUNCES of gold.

RBHoughton , September 15, 2017 at 8:03 pm

One sniper in Ukraine overthrew the democratic government. Previously one sniper in Dallas overthrew another democratic government. Are there any other examples?

Is our infatuation with democracy just a propaganda thing – to fool citizens into supposing they have value beyond their labour?

AshenLight , September 15, 2017 at 10:13 pm

> Is our infatuation with democracy just a propaganda thing – to fool citizens into supposing they have value beyond their labour?

It's about control -- those who know they are slaves will resist and fight, but those who mistakenly believe they are free will not (and if you give them even just a little comfort, they'll tenaciously defend their own enslavement). It turns out this "inverted totalitarianism" thing works a lot better than the old-fashioned kind.

mike k , September 16, 2017 at 7:19 am

Indeed. Gurdjieff told the tale of a farmer whose sheep were always wandering off due to his being unable to afford fences to keep them in. Then he had an idea, and called them all together. He told some of them they were eagles, and others lions etc. They were now so proud of their new identities that it never occurred to them anymore to escape from their master's small domain.

mike k , September 16, 2017 at 7:23 am

MLK is another example, as is Robert Kennedy.

Anna , September 16, 2017 at 12:53 pm

The American patriots are coming out: "CIA Agent Whistleblower Risks All To Expose The Shadow Government" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHbrOg092G That would be the end of the Lobby, mega oilmen and the FedReserve criminals

mark , September 16, 2017 at 5:30 pm

Yes, snipers on rooftops in Deraa, southern Syria, in 2011. These mysterious figures fired into crowds, deliberately targeting women and young children to inflame the crowd. At the same time the same snipers killed 7 police officers. Unarmed police had been sent in to deal with unrest without bloodshed. These police officers were armed only with batons.

This is a standard page from the CIA playbook. The mysterious snipers in Maidan Square in 2014 are believed to have been Yugoslavian mercenaries hired by the CIA

Zhu Bajie , September 17, 2017 at 7:14 pm

The US has had oligarchy since 1789.

BobH , September 15, 2017 at 8:06 pm

We all have some kind of a bias but fortunately most of us here know the difference between bias and propaganda. Bias based on facts and our own values is often constructive but the N.Y. Times(like most msm) has descended into disseminating insidious propaganda. Unfortunately the search for truth requires a bit more research and time than most people are willing to invest. Thankfully, Robert Parry continues his quest but the dragons are not easy to slay. My own quest for truth once led to a philosophical essay. The cartoon at the bottom(SH Chambers) sums it up.
https://crivellistreetchronicle.blogspot.com/2016/07/truth-elusive-concept.html

mike k , September 16, 2017 at 7:13 am

I put a comment on your blog.

BobH , September 16, 2017 at 11:15 am

Mike, thanks so much, I'll look forward to reading it(so far, I don't see it Moderation?)

Virginia , September 16, 2017 at 2:20 pm

If we have a bias towards honesty, that helps. It keeps one's mind more open and provides a willingness to entertain various points of view. It's not naivete, however, but thoughtful consideration coupled with awareness and that protects one from being easily manipulated. But then, oppositely, there's a human tendency to want to be popular which inclines one towards groupthink. But why that so entrenches itself, making people impervious to truth, is a conundrum -- Maybe if the "why" can be answered, the "how" will become apparent -- how to reach individuals with the truth as so oft told, though hard on the ears, at CN.

Jacob Leyva , September 15, 2017 at 10:12 pm

So what do you think of the Russia-Facebook dealings? When will we get an article on that?

Fuzzy , September 18, 2017 at 7:19 am

Really? You think this is important?

http://davidswanson.org/warlist/?link_id=3&can_id=ed31bf4cbc8f991980718b21b49ca26d&source=email-how-outlawing-war-changed-the-world-in-1928-2&email_referrer=email_232560&email_subject=how-outlawing-war-changed-the-world-in-1928

John , September 15, 2017 at 10:47 pm

The Russian /Iranian vs the Ashkenazi has been going on for many, many years ..The USA is to a large extent controlled by the Ashkenazi / Zionist agenda which literally owns most of the MSM outlets .Agendas must be announced through propaganda to sway the sleeping public toward conformity .The only baffling question that remains is why do Americans allow Zionist to control such a large part of their great republic ?

Art , September 16, 2017 at 1:43 am

Robert, you come from intelligence. Why don't you look at Russia-gate from all possible angles?
I suggest the following. Putin is an American spy. Russia-gate is created to make him a winner, a hero.
And the specious confrontation is a good cover for Putin.
This is in a nutshell.
I can obviously say mu-uch more.

D.H. Fabian , September 16, 2017 at 2:33 am

Throughout 2017, we've seen a surge of efforts by both parties -- via the media that serve them -- to build support for a final nuclear war. The focus jumps from rattling war sabers at China (via Korea, at the moment) to rattling them at Russia, two nuclear-armed world powers. This has been working to bring Russia and China together, resolving their years of conflict in view of a potential world threat -- the US. Whatever their delusions, and regardless of their ideology, our political leaders are setting the stage for the deaths of millions of us, and the utter destruction of the US.

mike k , September 16, 2017 at 6:59 am

Our political leaders have betrayed us.

Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:42 pm

Thermo-nuclear war would cause human extinction, not just billions of casualties.

Jim Glover , September 16, 2017 at 3:15 am

It is the same now with North Korea and China. So what would happen if those nations were destabilized by Sanctions or worse Russia, China Iran and more would support Kim. How to make peace?

Dennis Rodman has the guts to suggest call and talk with Kim or "Try it you might like it better than total mutual destruction". Think Love and Peace it can't hurt like all the war, hate and fear the media keeps pushing for advertising profits. War and Fear is the biggest racket on the planet. What can I do? Fighting a losing battle but it is fun tryin' to win.

mike k , September 16, 2017 at 6:57 am

We may be losing now, but who knows? It ain't over till it's over. Hang in there.

GMC , September 16, 2017 at 3:20 am

Great article- again . I used to live in the US, I used to live in Alaska, I used to live in Crimea, Ukraine but now I live in Crimea, Russia and Smolensk, Ru. I watched this all go down but it took awhile to see the entire picture. I seldom get any more emails from the states – even my brother doesn't get it. They think I'm now a " commie" , I guess. I see it as the last big gasp of hot, dangerous air from an Empire -- Exposed. Unfortunately, its not over yet and maybe we/you will have more bad times ahead. Crimea this summer is doing well with much work going on – from the badly needed new infrastructure to the new bridge, the people are much better off than in Ukraine. They made the right choice in returning to Mother Russia even though it was a no-brainer for them. The world is lucky to have free writers like, Parry, Roberts, Vltchek, Pepe', the Saker and the intelligent commenters are as important as the writers in spreading the Pravda. Spacibo Mr. Parry

mike k , September 16, 2017 at 6:54 am

Thanks for sharing with us GMC. And good luck to you.

ranney , September 16, 2017 at 4:22 am

YES -- -- -- -- -- Yes to all that you wrote Robert -- Thank you again for writing clearly and saying what obviously needs to be said, but no one else will. We've been down this road before -i.e. the media pulling us into wars of Empire – first the Spanish- American one, then a bunch of others working up to Viet Nam, and then Iraq. Each one gets worse and now we're reaching for a nuclear one. Keep writing; your voice gives some of us hope that just maybe others will join in and stop the media from their constant "messages of hate" and the urging of the public to a suicidal conflagration.

Joe Tedesky , September 16, 2017 at 8:55 am

The funny thing about living through the 'fake news' era, is that now everyone thinks that their news source is the correct news source. Many believe that outside of the individual everyone else reads or listens too 'fake news'. It's like all of a sudden no one has credibility, yet everyone may have it, depending on what news source you subscribe to. I mean there's almost no way of knowing what the truth is, because everyone is claiming that they are getting their news from reputable news outlets, but some or many aren't, and who are the reputable news sources, if you don't mind my asking you this just for the record?

Come to think of it, the 'fake news' theme is brilliant considering that now we have no bench mark for what the truth is, and by not having that bench mark for the truth we all go our separate ways believing what we believe, because certainly my news source is the only truthful one, and your news source is beyond questionable of how the news should be reported.

People read headlines, but hardly do they ever read the article. Many hear news sound bites, but never do they do the research required, in order to verify the stories accuracy. Hear say works even more to rain in the clouds of mass deception. Then there are those who sort of buy whatever it is the established news outlets are selling based on their belief that it doesn't much matter anyway, because 'the establishment' lies to us all the time as a rule, so what's the big deal to keep up on the news, because it's all obviously one big lie isn't it? So not only do we have irresponsible news journalist, we also have a very large number of a monopolized unqualified news gatherers who must accept what the various news agencies report, regardless of what the truth may be. It's better the Establishment keep it this way, because then the Establishment has better control over the 'mob grabbing the pitchforks and sickles' and crying out justice for somebody's head. It's kind of like job security for the Establishment, but in their case it's more like a 'keeping your elitist head' security, if you know what I mean.

To learn how to deal with this 'fake news', I would suggest you start studying the JFK assassination, or any other ill defined tragic event, and then you might learn how to decipher the 'fake news' matrix of confusion to learn what you so desire to learn. I chose this route, because when was the last time the Establishment brokered the truth in regard to a happening such as the JFK assassination? Upon learning of what a few well written books has to say, you will then need to rely on your own brain to at least give you enough satisfaction to allow you to believe that you pretty well got it right, and there go you. In other words, the truth is out there, hiding in plain sight, and if you are persistent enough you just might find it. Good luck.

mike k , September 16, 2017 at 11:29 am

The truth has never been that easy to find Joe. Actually all the beyond obvious propaganda on the MSM might wake some people up to do the searching necessary to get closer to what is really happening in their world. Maybe the liars have finally overplayed their hand? Or are we the people really that dumb? (I am scared to hear the answer to that one -- )

Joe Tedesky , September 16, 2017 at 12:04 pm

I could be a wise guy, and say to you 'or so you say' in reply to your kind comment, but then that would make me a troll.

All I'm saying mike is that in this era of 'fake news' we are all running about on different levels, and never shall the two of us meet. That is unless you and I get our news from the same source, but what are the odds of all of us getting the same news? It's impossible, and I'm not quite that sure that that would be what we want either. Still without an objective, and honest large media to set the correct narrative we end up in this place, where you might find yourself doing a spread sheet study to come to some conclusion of what is true, and what isn't.

Case in point, read about Russia-Gate here on consortiumnews, and then go listen to Rachel Maddow report on the same thing. Two different sets of stories. Just try and reconcile what you read on sites like this one concerning Ukraine, then go watch MSNBC or CNN. Never a match. So you mike read consortiumnews, and your in laws read the NYT and watch CNN, and there you go, a controversy arises between you and the in laws and with that life goes on, but where is the correct news to be found to settle the score?

Once upon a time the established news agencies such as CNN, and the NYT, were the hallmark of the news, and sites such as this one were the ones on the edge, now I'm convinced this conviction has reversed itself.

Thanks mike for the reply. Joe

Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 9:07 am

Wouldn't it be hilarious mike, if the dumbed down people attacked the Bastille under false pretense? Especially if the lie had been concocted by the blinded by their own hubris sitting powers to be. Talk about poetic justice, and well placed irony. Priceless --

Virginia , September 16, 2017 at 2:38 pm

Joe, Apparently people take the easy way out. And that's just it -- "the way out." Extinction -- Maybe they haven't learned there's something worth learning about and living for. I'm gonna concentrate on that. Open eyes that they might see

Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 8:08 am

You are right Virginia, it is probably 'a way out', and God bless them for it. My late Mother was like that, but I'll tell you why. When my Mother was growing up in a family of eleven children, her father would rent out their street level basement to the voting polls. A block away my uncle who was quite older than my Mother owned a corner saloon. Now on Election Day my Mother said how the men in suits would pull up in their big expensive cars, and they would descend upon my uncles corner bar. Soon after one by one drunks would come out of the tavern wearing Republican buttons then they would go into grandpap's basement voting booth, and vote. Not long after my Mom said, the same drunks would come pouring out of my uncles tavern and this time they were wearing Democratic buttons, and they would go vote once or as many times as it would take to thank the big guys in the suits for the free drinks. My Mom said this went on all day. She said a lot dead people voted whether they knew it or not, and that's the truth. She would follow up by saying, 'yeah a lot of politicians won on the drunk vote'.

So Virginia some can't take the decept and lying, and with that they give up. I myself don't feel this way, but then there are the times I can't help but think of how my dear sweet Mother probably did have it right for the sake of living your life in the most upright and honest way. Sadly, there is no virtue in politics, or so it seems.

Oh yeah, that uncle who owned the corner saloon, he did go into politics holding nominee appointed positions, until he got wise and got a honest job, as he would jokingly say.

For the record my Mother did vote, but she was the lady standing in line who looked reluctant and pissed off to be there, but never the less my Mum was a voter. Oh, the candidate my Mother loved the most was JFK. John F Kennedy's was the only presidential picture my Mother ever hung in our humble home.

My message here, was only meant to give some cover, and an explanation for those who shy away from politics, and not an excuse to stay uninvolved. For even my non political Mum did at least in the end break down, and do the right thing. We should all at least try, and keep up on the events of our time, and vote with the best intentions we can muster up.

Okay, I'm sorry for the length of my reply, but you are always worth taking time for me to give a reasonable answer to. I also hope I'm entertaining with these stories I seem to tell from time to time. Take care Virginia. Joe

Tannenhouser , September 17, 2017 at 7:28 pm

Humans are approximately 90% water, give or take depending on evaporation (Age). Water always takes the path of least resistance. Oh I wish and hope for the day when most realize they are much more than 'just' water:)

Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:47 pm

The fakestream media lies incessantly, and has for generations. Chomsky and Herman's 'Manufacturing Consent' outlines the propaganda role of the 'mass media', and is twenty-five years old, in which period things have gotten MUCH worse (just look at the fate of the UK 'Guardian' for an example). Yet the fakestream presstitutes STILL have the unmitigated gall to call others 'fake' and demand that we believe their unbelievable narratives. That's real chutzpah.

Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 8:26 am

You know Mulga you are correct, many generations have listened to many, many, lies upon their way to the voting booths. It goes without saying, how the aristocrats when they find it necessary, as they often do find it necessary, they lie to their flock for a whole host of reasons. Why we could pick anytime in history, and find out where lies have paved the way to a leaders greater conquest, or a leaders said greater conquest if not met with defeat, but never the less the public was used to propel some leaders wishes onward and upward whether for the good or the bad.

But here we are Mulga, you and the rest of us here, straddling on the fence over what might be right to what possibly could be wrong. Without a responsible press you and us Mulga need to learn from each other. Like when comment posters leave links, that's always been something good for me to follow through on.

We live in a unique time, but a time not that unique, as much as it is our time. Our great, great, grandparents were straddling the same fence, and I'm guessing they too relied on each other to navigate there way through the twisting maze of politics, and basically what they all wanted, was a little peace on earth. So Mulga I also guess that you and we the people are just carrying on a tradition that us common folk have been assigned too continue.

Like reading your comments Mulga, good to see you here. Joe

Zhu Bajie , September 17, 2017 at 7:44 pm

Fake news has always been common. Critical thinking has never been popular because Occam's Razor might slice your favorite story to shreds. Personally, I give full credence to few things in life, but suspect many more, to some degree. I trust my own experiences more than what I read in the media and try to reject conventional wisdom as much as possible.

Herman , September 16, 2017 at 9:39 am

Observing Putin's behavior, you have to be impressed with his continue willingness to extend the olive branch and to seek a reasonable settlement of differences. His language always leaves open the possibility of détente with the understanding that Russia is not going to lay down to be run over. On the contrary, the language of Obama and Trump, and their representatives is consistently take it or leave and engaging in school yard insults of Russia, Putin, Lavrov and others. We have consistently played the bully in the school yard encouraging others to join in the bullying. We talk about the corrosive discourse at home, but observe the discourse in foreign affairs. Trump and his associates are guilty, but slick talking Obama and his subordinates was often worse. .As has so often been said, we have only two arrows in our foreign affairs quiver, war and sanctions. We lack the imagination and will to actually engage in civil discussions with those on our enemies' list.

Parry is of course correct in his opinion of the New York Times but it doesn't stop there, only that the New York Times undeservedly is the "newspaper of record." His citing of Orwell is on the mark. Just turn your TV on for the news and see for yourself.

Dave P. , September 16, 2017 at 8:27 pm

Very well said, Herman. Very true.

Patricia Victour , September 16, 2017 at 9:54 am

I don't subscribe to the NYT for this reason, and it is galling to me that our local rag, "The Santa Fe New Mexican," while featuring excellent local coverage for the most part, gets all it's "national" news from the likes of the NYT, WaPo, and AP. These stories, much of it "fake news" in my opinion, are offered as gospel by the "New Mexican", with no journalistic effort to print opposing views. People I know seem so proud of themselves that they subscribe to "The Times," and I don't even dare try to point out to them that they are being duped and propagandized into believing the most outrageous (and dangerous) crap.

To add another dimension, these sources are so jealous of their position as the ultimate word on what Americans are to believe, and also so worried about their waning influence, that now RT and Sputnik, both Russia-sponsored news outlets, may be forced to register as "foreign agents" in the U.S. I am not familiar with Sputnik, but I have been watching RT on TV for several years and find it to be an excellent source of national and foreign news. Stories I see first on RT are usually confirmed soon after by other reliable sources, such as this excellent site – Consortiumnews. At no point did I feel I was being coerced by Russia during the 2016 election – I needed no confirmation that both Trump and Clinton were probably the worst candidates ever to run for President.

Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 9:31 am

You know what I find interesting is how a reporter such as Robert Parry will pinpoint his details to a critique of say the NYT, but when or if a NYTer is to write a likewise article of the Alternative Internet Press the NYTer will just simply critique their internet rival as a 'conspiracy theorist' or as now as in 2017 they refer to them as 'fake news artist'. I mean no rebuttal back referencing certain details such as what Parry mentioned, but just rhetorical words written over tabloid written headlines finalized under the heading of 'fake news'. This must be being taught in journalism school these days, because it's popular in the MSM.

Just like you have never heard or read from the MSM a detailed answered rebuttal to the pointed questions of say the '911 Truthers' or a 'JFK Assassination Researcher' a valid bona fide answer. No, but you do hear the masters and mistresses of the corporate media world call writers such as Parry, Roberts, and St Clair, 'fake newscasters', 'Putin Puppets', and or a whole host of other nasty names, as they feel fit to write, but never a honest too goodness rebuttal. Then they talk about Trump not sounding or acting presidential hmm the nerve of these wordsmiths.

BTW, I don't care much for Trump, and I even care less for our MSM. Just wanted to get that straight.

Nice comment Patricia. Joe

hatedbyu , September 16, 2017 at 10:57 am

let's not forget about the nytimes grossly negligent reporting on syria and libya. judith miller? russian doping scandal. lying about the holdomor . man i could do this all day ..

Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 10:12 am

You mean the on air hours of punditry explaining away their professions mistakes, or the honest rebuttal? It's at those particular times and occurrences of ignored self reflection our honorable (not) MSM falls back on Orwell's 1984. Like it never happened. The dog didn't eat no home work, because there never was a dog, nor was there any homework .stupid us. Life goes on uninterrupted and non commercial time can be filled with an update on Bill Cosby's past alleged sexual predator attacks, and this is our professional news casting doing its best to entertain us, not inform us god forbid, but entertain us the ignorant masses of their workless society.

One day hatedbyu the ignorant masses may just show the corporate infotainment duchess and dudes that they 'the people' ain't so ignorant, and things must change. Well at least that's the dream, but it's still a work in progress, and then there's the historical seesaw.

I think it's the power of empire to expand, just like a balloon, until it reaches it's bursting point. But just what that bursting point is, is without a doubt the most disputable of arguments to be made. I am coming to the belief we are, as always, continually getting to that point, and we may of course be very close to igniting that spark in the not so far off future. I would prefer the spark to be completely financial, and dealt with accordingly, but I'm a dreamer purest and a conspiracy theorist, so that means when the crap starts going down, I'll be the old man on the hill lighting up a big fat doobie cue soundtrack 'Fool On the Hill'.

Sorry just had to get carried away, but it's Sunday morning hatedbyu and I'm home alone and nobody's trying to break in .. Good comment hatedbyu. Joe

Stephen J. , September 16, 2017 at 11:27 am

A Compilation Not seen in Corporate Media: See Link Below:
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
US Wars and Hostile Actions: A List
By David Swanson

http://davidswanson.org/warlist/?link_id=3&can_id=ed31bf4cbc8f991980718b21b49ca26d&source=email-how-outlawing-war-changed-the-world-in-1928-2&email_referrer=email_232560&email_subject=how-outlawing-war-changed-the-world-in-1928

Bob Van Noy , September 16, 2017 at 9:42 pm

Stephen J. Thank you for introducing me to David Swanson. Great link.

Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 11:29 am

Im with you on that Bob, Stephen J providing the Swanson link should be a must read, to keep things fair and balanced. I also do wonder if Swanson's message isn't getting out there, and we all don't already know it? I'm a glass half full kind of guy, but what do we really know about each other, other than what the corporate media instills on us? I wish cable news would air a program made up of Swanson, Pilger, and Parry, for that at least could put some well needed balance finality back, if it ever was there in the first place, back into the public narrative .but there go I.

Good to see you Bob. Joe

Hank , September 16, 2017 at 11:32 am

The deep state sticks with what works: controlling the media keeps the masses ignorant and malleable. "Remember the Maine"
Germans are bayoneting Belgium babies and "remember the Lusitania" , some evidence shows higher ups knew the Japanese fleet was 400 miles from Hawaii, recall "Tonkin Gulf" episode, Iran Contra , invasion of Granada, Panama, and of course 911 and war on terror, patriot act, weapons of mass destruction, and Russia hacking the election. The masses "believe" these to be true and react and respond accordingly.

"
"Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, IT IS THE LEADERS of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is TELL THEM THEY ARE BEING ATTACKED, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. IT WORKS THE SAME IN ANY COUNTRY."

–Goering at the Nuremberg Trials

mike k , September 16, 2017 at 12:53 pm

Thanks Hank. Same ole same ole, eh? When will we ever learn?

mike k , September 16, 2017 at 11:32 am

"Trump might well go down in history of the President who screwed-up a historical opportunity to really change our entire planet for the better and who, instead, by his abject lack of courage and honor, his total lack of political and diplomatic education and by his groveling subservience to the "swamp" he had promised to drain ended up being as pathetically clueless as Obama was." (The Saker)

My sentiments exactly.

Voytenko , September 16, 2017 at 11:49 am

What a glaring lie this article is, its' author being either "useful idiot" played by Kremlin, or maybe not so much of an idiot. What are you talking about here in comments, those who applaud this article, this bunch of lies? You live in Ukraine, you know anything about that so-called "putch"? How dare you to insult the whole nation – Ukrainian nation? Shame on you, people. You don't know (author of the article including) anything about Russia, Ukraine and that bloody Putin, but you have problems with the US and its' politics. US are your business, Ukraine definitely not. Find some other examples of NYT and USA malfeasance, some you know something about. Stop insulting other nations.

anon , September 17, 2017 at 9:53 am

You are not from Ukraine, and you care not for Ukraine, or you would seek unity not dominance of East over West Ukraine. Tell us about your life in Ukraine, and show us the evidence of "that bloody Putin."

Abe , September 16, 2017 at 1:31 pm

Yellow journalism now employs "open source and social media investigation" scams foisted by Eliot Higgins and the Bellingcat disinformation site.

Bellingcat is allied with the New York Times and the Washington Post, the two principal mainstream media organs for "regime change" propaganda, via the First Draft Coalition "partner network".

In a triumph of Orwellian Newspeak, this Google-sponsored "post-Truth" Propaganda 3.0 coalition declares that member organizations will "work together to tackle common issues, including ways to streamline the verification process".

The New York Times routinely hacks up Bellingcat "reports" and pretends they're "verification"

Malachy Browne, "Senior Story Producer" at the New York Times, cited Bellingcat to embellish the media "story" about the Khan Shaykhun chemical incident in Idlib Syria.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/insider/the-times-uses-forensic-mapping-to-verify-a-syrian-chemical-attack.html

Before joining the Times, Browne was an editor at "social news and marketing agency" Storyful and at Reported. ly, the "social reporting" arm of Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media.

Browne generously "supplemented" his "reporting" on the Khan Shaykun incident with "videos gathered by the journalist Eliot Higgins and the social media news agency Storyful".

Browne encouraged Times readers to participate in the Bellingcat-style "verification" charade: "Find a computer, get on Google Earth and match what you see in the video to the streets and buildings"

Browne of Storyful and Higgins of Bellingcat are founding members of the Google-funded "First Draft" coalition.

Browne demonstrates how the NYT and other "First Draft" coalition media outlets use video to "strengthen" their "storytelling".

In 2016, the NYT video department hired Browne and Andrew Glazer. a senior producer on the team that launched VICE News, to help "enhance" the "reporting" at the Times.

Browne represents the Times' effort to package its dubious "reporting" using the Storyful marketing strategy of "building trust, loyalty, and revenue with insight and emotionally driven content" wedded with Bellingcat style "digital forensics" scams.

In other words, we should expect the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, UK Guardian, and all the other "First Draft" coalition media "partners" to barrage us more Bellingcat / Atlantic Council-style Facebook and YouTube video mashups, crazy fun with Google Earth, and Twitter campaigns.

mike k , September 16, 2017 at 1:47 pm

Thanks Abe. Sounds like these guys all read 1984, and decided it was just the thing for 2017 Amerika.

Abe , September 16, 2017 at 1:49 pm

"Our investigation debunks the claims"

Browne keeps the April 2017 NYT video positioned at the top of his Twitter feed
https://twitter.com/malachybrowne/status/857290743068721152

Obviously Browne is proud of the "investigation" even though merely shared a "story" fed to him by Higgins' Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council .

Abe , September 16, 2017 at 1:58 pm

Higgins and Bellingcat receives direct funding from the Open Society Foundations (OSF) founded by business magnate George Soros, and from Google's Digital News Initiatives (DNI).

Google's 2017 DNI Fund Annual Report describes Higgins as "a world–leading expert in news verification".

Higgins claims the DNI funding "allowed us to push this to the next level".
https://digitalnewsinitiative.com/news/case-study-codifying-social-conflict-data/

In their zeal to propagate the story of Higgins as a courageous former "unemployed man" now busy independently "Codifying social conflict data", Google neglects to mention Higgins' role as a "research fellow" for the NATO-funded Atlantic Council "regime change" think tank.

Despite their claims of "independent journalism", Eliot Higgins and the team of disinformation operatives at Bellingcat depend on the Atlantic Council to promote their "online investigations".

The Atlantic Council donors list includes:

– US government and military entities: US State Department, US Air Force, US Army, US Marines.

– The NATO military alliance

– Large corporations and major military contractors: Chevron, Google, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, BP, ExxonMobil, General Electric, Northrup Grumman, SAIC, ConocoPhillips, and Dow Chemical

– Foreign governments: United Arab Emirates (UAE; which gives the think tank at least $1 million), Kingdom of Bahrain, City of London, Ministry of Defense of Finland, Embassy of Latvia, Estonian Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Defense of Georgia

– Other think tanks and think tankers: Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Nicolas Veron of Bruegel (formerly at PIIE), Anne-Marie Slaughter (head of New America Foundation), Michele Flournoy (head of Center for a New American Security), Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings Institution.

Higgins is a Research Associate of the Department of War Studies at King's College, and was principal co-author of the Atlantic Council "reports" on Ukraine and Syria.

Damon Wilson, Executive Vice President of Programs and Strategy at the Atlantic Council, a co-author with Higgins of the report, effusively praised Higgins' effort to bolster anti-Russian propaganda:

Wilson stated, "We make this case using only open source, all unclassified material. And none of it provided by government sources. And it's thanks to works, the work that's been pioneered by human rights defenders and our partner Eliot Higgins, uh, we've been able to use social media forensics and geolocation to back this up." (see Atlantic Council video presentation minutes 35:10-36:30)

However, the Atlantic Council claim that "none" of Higgins' material was provided by government sources is an obvious lie.

Higgins' primary "pieces of evidence" are a video depicting a Buk missile launcher and a set of geolocation coordinates that were supplied by the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) and the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior via the Facebook page of senior-level Ukrainian government official Arsen Avakov, the Minister of Internal Affairs.

Higgins and the Atlantic Council are working in support of the Pentagon and Western intelligence's "hybrid war" against Russia.

The laudatory bio of Higgins on the Kings College website specifically acknowledges his service to the Atlantic Council:

"an award winning investigative journalist and publishes the work of an international alliance of fellow investigators using freely available online information. He has helped inaugurate open-source and social media investigations by trawling through vast amounts of data uploaded constantly on to the web and social media sites. His inquiries have revealed extraordinary findings, including linking the Buk used to down flight MH17 to Russia, uncovering details about the August 21st 2013 Sarin attacks in Damascus, and evidencing the involvement of the Russian military in the Ukrainian conflict. Recently he has worked with the Atlantic Council on the report "Hiding in Plain Sight", which used open source information to detail Russia's military involvement in the crisis in Ukraine."

While it honors Higgins' enthusiastic "trawling", King's College curiously neglects to mention that Higgins' "findings" on the Syian sarin attacks were thoroughly debunked.

King's College also curiously neglects to mention the fact that Higgins, now listed as a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council's "Future Europe Initiative", was principal co-author of the April 2016 Atlantic Council "report" on Syria.

The report's other key author was John E. Herbst, United States Ambassador to Ukraine from September 2003 to May 2006 (the period that became known as the Orange Revolution) and Director of the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center.

Other report authors include Frederic C. Hof, who served as Special Adviser on Syrian political transition to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012. Hof was previously the Special Coordinator for Regional Affairs in the US Department of State's Office of the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace, where he advised Special Envoy George Mitchel. Hof had been a Resident Senior Fellow in the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East since November 2012, and assumed the position as Director in May 2016.

There is no daylight between the "online investigations" of Higgins and Bellingcat and the "regime change" efforts of the NATO-backed Atlantic Council.

Thanks to the Atlantic Council, Soros, and Google, it's a pretty well-funded gig for fake "citizen investigative journalist" Higgins.

Dave P. , September 17, 2017 at 12:26 am

Abe – Thanks for all the invaluable information you have been providing.

jaycee , September 16, 2017 at 1:52 pm

The meme of an aggressive assertive Russia, based on what happened in Crimea, is a deliberate lie expressed with the utmost contempt towards principled diplomacy. The average consumer of mainstream news is also being shamelessly and contemptuously manipulated.

First, the people of Crimea did not want to be part of Ukraine after the USSR dissolved, and had previously expressed their opinion through referenda. The events of 2014 were part of an obvious pattern of previously expressed opinion.

Second, around the time of the so-called Orange Revolution, NATO analysts forecast what would probably happen should Ukraine embrace European "security architecture" (i.e. NATO), and concluded that Russia would take steps to protect their naval facilities in Crimea. Yet, in 2014, NATO officials would disingenuously express their utmost shock and surprise at the event.

Third, Viktor Yushchenko, who came to power in Ukraine in 2005 through the NED-financed Orange Revolution, consistently described his intention to join Ukraine with European institutions, including its "security architecture" (NATO), although acknowledging that the Ukrainian citizenry would have to be manipulated into accepting such a controversial and adversarial position. He would downplay presumed Russian reaction to potential removal from Crimea despite the obviousness and predictability of a serious crisis (see Sept 23, 2008 "Conversation with Viktor Yushchenko" Council On Foreign Relations). Yushchenko polled at 5.45% when he lost the Presidency in 2010, running on a platform of European integration.

Fourth, Russian officials at the highest level told their American counterparts in 2009 that any attempt to integrate Ukraine into NATO, and a corresponding threat to the Crimean naval facilities, would result in moves similar to what would later happen in 2014. Yet the United States, after instigating and legitimizing the Ukraine coup, would react to the Crimean referendum as an aggressive act which represented an unexpected security crisis requiring a reluctant but firm response of militarizing the entire region, and portraying the Russian state to the public as a dangerous and aggressive rogue power.

The deliberate omission of relevant contextual background by politicians, military officials, and the mainstream media demonstrates that none of these institutions can be trusted, and it is they who represent the greatest threat to international security. Putin has been relentlessly demonized, but it can be argued that his swift and essentially bloodless moves in Crimea in 2014 avoided what could have been a major international crisis on the level of the Berlin blockade in 1961. It appears, in hindsight, that such a crisis is exactly what the NATO alliance desired all along.

Sam F , September 17, 2017 at 9:58 am

Well said.

Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 12:02 pm

Nicely put jaycee. What you wrote took me back to a time of some eight months before Maiden Square, when my niece decided to live in Kiev. A bit of a ways away from Pittsburgh, so I started researching Ukraine. I also discovered RT & Moonofalabama, and sites like that.

What you wrote jaycee, in my humble opinion should be said in our MSM news. If for no other reason but to give an alternative fair and balance to say the likes of Rachel Maddow, or Joy Ann Reed. The way the MSM picks and chooses, and skims across important events in Ukraine, like Odessa, are criminal if ever the Press is to be judged for crimes of war. To the crys of a destroyed empire's vanquished population would then your small essay be heard jaycee, and yet that's the world we live in, but at least you said it.

Thanks jaycee (that's the first time I wrote your name and the j didn't go capital what does that mean? Who cares.)
Joe

rosemerry , September 16, 2017 at 2:04 pm

Of course the NYT liars would not bother to watch Oliver Stone's interviews with Pres. Putin, but during them he explained at length about his cooperation during the years after Ukraine elected a pro-Western president, managing to carry out mutual agreements and policies, but after the new pro- Russian president was elected, the USA did not accept him and overthrew him, which preceded the antics of Nuland et al in 2014 and the rest which followed.

MaDarby , September 16, 2017 at 2:05 pm

It appears to me that the elites decided long ago that the best solution to overpopulation is just to let climate change take care of three or four billion people while the Saud family and the Cargill family live on in their sheltered paradises with every convenience AI can provide.

It is clear these mega-rich families DO NOT CARE about society, about mass human extension or even about nature itself. They are the pinnacle of human evolution. Psycho-pathological loss of empathy might have been a bad evolutionary experiment.

This is derangement on a human specie scale, no leader no one in power has been willing to do anything but exploit every opportunity to make money and increase global domination, the great powers knew this day was coming when they made their decisions to hide it 50 years ago. The consequences are acceptable to the decision makers.

A mass extension of organic life is taking place before our eyes, nothing can stop it, THEY DO NOT CARE.

They sure as hell don't care if millions don't believe the Russia crap they just move ahead as the Imperial power, might makes right. In the end it is a religious project, the biblical slaughter of the innocents to appease a vengeful god and rid the world of evil.

Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 12:19 pm

What you bring up MaDarby takes me towards the direction of wondering what all those other Departments, other than State & Defense, of the Presidential Cabinet are up too? If our news were done and somehow properly organized, in such away as to educate us peons, then whatever the time allowed would be to broadcast and print out what each Federal Agency is up to. Now I know a citizen can seek out this information, but why can't there be a suitable mass media representation to reach us clunkheads like me, not you?

What should be exposed is the corporate ownership of the very agencies that were put in place to protect the 'Commons' has been corrupted to the point of no return. This dilemma will take a huge public referendum short of a mob revolution to change this atmosphere of complacency. The public will get blamed, but the real blame should be put on the massive leadership programs which were bolted down on to their citizens masses knowledge of said events, and there in lies the total crime of deception.

MaDarby your concern for nature is where a smart person should put their number one priority concern, no arguing there, but just a lifting word of approval of how you put it. Joe

Donald Patterson , September 16, 2017 at 2:45 pm

Consortium has been a clear voice on the lunacy of the Russia-Gate scandal. But to paint Yanukovych former President of the Ukraine as an injured party considering his history in government with what appears to be large scale corruption is part of the story as well. A treason trial started in May. More info needed on what looks like a complicated story. This would be a good piece of investigative journalism as well.

mike k , September 16, 2017 at 9:03 pm

Can you imagine what a huge can of worms would be revealed if there was a thorough investigation on every congressperson and public official in Washington DC? It would make Yanukovych look like a saint. And in addition, let's investigate the 10,000 richest people in the US, including all their offshore fortunes gained by illegal means. Wouldn't it make sense to do that? Isn't there enough evidence of probable criminal activity to open these investigations? Where is our ethical sense when it comes to our own dirty laundry? I guess it's easier to speculate about other's crimes than look into our own, eh?

Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 12:40 pm

The focus I get isn't so much focused on Yanukovych, even Putin wasn't all that crazy about his style of leadership, but my focus on a viable democratically created government doesn't necessarily start with an armed public coup. Yes, leading up to the violence, peaceful protesters took to the streets, but as we both know this is always the case until the baton twirling thugs come to finally ramp up the protest to a marathon of violent clashes and whatever else gets heads busted, until we have a full fledged revolution on our hands pass out the cookies. I mean by by-passing the voting polls, even to somehow ad hoc a temporary government in some manner of government overthrow were done peacefully, well then maybe I could get on board with this new Ukrainian government, but even the NYT finds it impossible to cover up everything.

And what about the people of Donbass? Shouldn't they have a say in this new government realignment? Ukraine has, and has always had a East meets West kind of problem. That area has been ruled over for centuries by each other, and one another, to a point of who's who and what's what is hard to figure out. Donbass, should in my regard be separate from the Now Kiev government. (Be kind with your critique of me for I am just an average American telling you what I see from here)

It's like everything else, where we should let the people of the region sit down with each other and work it out, we instead blame it on Putin, or whoever else Putin appears to be, and there you have it MIC spending up the ying-yang, for the lack of a better portrayal, but still a portrayal of what ills our modern geopolitical society.

mike k , September 16, 2017 at 2:49 pm

"The best thing which could happen to this country and its people would be the collapse of this Empire. The support, even tacit and passive, of this Empire by people like yourself only delays this outcome and allows this abomination to to bring even more misery and pain upon millions of innocent people, including millions of your fellow Americans. This Empire now also threatens my country, Russia, with war and possibly nuclear war and that, in turn, means that this Empire threatens the survival of the human species. Whether the US Empire is the most evil one in history is debatable, but the fact that it is by far the most dangerous one is not. Is that not a good enough reason for you to say "enough is enough"? What would it take for you to switch sides and join the rest of mankind in what is a struggle for the survival of our species? Or will it take a nuclear winter to open your eyes to the true nature of the Empire you apparently are still supporting against all evidence?" (the Saker)

Please go to the entire article on today's Saker Blog.

Voytenko , September 16, 2017 at 3:48 pm

Sick edition consortiumnews, sick readers. Elites, Deep State, Evil Empire USA Dove Putin with olive branch Guys, why don't you watch, say for a week, Russian TV, if you have somebody around who can translate from Russian. If you want to hear real nazi racist alt-whatever crap, Russian TV is the place. But you'll enjoy it, most probably. Thankfully, you guys, are obviously, minority, with all your pseudo intellectual delusions, discussions and ideas. "Useful idiots" – that's what Lenin said about the likes of you.

Abe , September 16, 2017 at 7:00 pm

There is no reason to assume that the trollish rants of "Voytenko" are from some outraged flag-waving "patriot" in Kiev. There are plenty of other "useful idiots" ready, willing and able to make mischief.

For example, about a million Jews emigrated to Israel ("made Aliyah") from the post-Soviet states during the 1990s. Some 266,300 were Ukrainian Jews. A large number of Ukrainian Jews also emigrated to the United States during this period. For example, out of an estimated 400 thousand Russian-speaking Jews in Metro New York, the largest number (thirty-six percent) hail from Ukraine. Needless to say, many among them are not so well disposed toward the nations of Russia or Ukraine, and quite capable of all manner of mischief.

A particularly "useful idiot" making mischief the days is Sergey Brin of Google. Brin's parents were graduates of Moscow State University who emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1979 when their son was five years old.

Google, the company that runs the most visited website in the world, the company that owns YouTube, is very snugly in bed with the US military-industrial-surveillance complex.

In fact, Google was seed funded by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The company now enjoys lavish "partnerships" with military contractors like SAIC, Northrop Grumman and Blackbird.

Google's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".

In a 2004 letter prior to their initial public offering, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin explained their "Don't be evil" culture required objectivity and an absence of bias: "We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see."

The corporate giant appears to have replaced the original motto altogether. A carefully reworded version appears in the Google Code of Conduct: "You can make money without doing evil".

This new gospel allows Google and its "partners" to make money promoting propaganda and engaging in surveillance, and somehow manage to not "be evil". That's "post-truth" logic for you.

Google has been enthusiastically promoting Eliot Higgins "arm chair analytics" since 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbWhcWizSFY

Indeed, a very cozy cross-promotion is happening between Google and Bellingcat.

In November 2014, Google Ideas and Google For Media, partnered the George Soros-funded Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) to host an "Investigathon" in New York City. Google Ideas promoted Higgins' "War and Pieces: Social Media Investigations" song and dance via their YouTube page.

Higgins constantly insists that Bellingcat "findings" are "reaffirmed" by accessing imagery in Google Earth.

Google Earth, originally called EarthViewer 3D, was created by Keyhole, Inc, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funded company acquired by Google in 2004. Google Earth uses satellite images provided by the company Digital Globe, a supplier of the US Department of Defense (DoD) with deep connections to both the military and intelligence communities.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is both a combat support agency under the United States Department of Defense, and an intelligence agency of the United States Intelligence Community. Robert T. Cardillo, director of the NGA, lavishly praised Digital Globe as "a true mission partner in every sense of the word". Examination of the Board of Directors of Digital Globe reveals intimate connections to DoD and CIA

Google has quite the history of malicious behavior. In what became known as the "Wi-Spy" scandal, it was revealed that Google had been collecting hundreds of gigabytes of payload data, including personal and sensitive information. First names, email addresses, physical addresses, and a conversation between two married individuals planning an extra-marital affair were all cited by the FCC. In a 2012 settlement, the Federal Trade Commission announced that Google will pay $22.5 million for overriding privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser. Though it was the largest civil penalty the Federal Trade Commission had ever imposed for violating one of its orders, the penalty as little more than symbolic for a company that had $2.8 billion in earnings the previous quarter.

Google is a joint venture partner with the CIA In 2009, Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel invested "under $10 million each" into Recorded Future shortly after the company was founded. The company developed technology that strips information from web pages, blogs, and Twitter accounts.

In addition to funding Bellingcat and joint ventures with the CIA, Brin's Google is heavily invested in Crowdstrike, an American cybersecurity technology firm based in Irvine, California.

Crowdstrike is the main "source" of the "Russians hacked the DNC" story.

Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council "regime change" think tank.

Alperovitz said that Crowdstrike has "high confidence" it was "Russian hackers".

"But we don't have hard evidence," Alperovitch admitted in a June 16, 2016 Washington Post interview.

Allegations of Russian perfidy are routinely issued by private companies with lucrative US Department of Defense (DoD) contracts. The companies claiming to protect the nation against "threats" have the ability to manufacture "threats".

The US and UK possess elite cyber capabilities for both cyberspace espionage and offensive operations.

Both the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) are intelligence agencies with a long history of supporting military operations. US military cyber operations are the responsibility of US Cyber Command, whose commander is also the head of the NSA.

US offensive cyber operations have emphasized political coercion and opinion shaping, shifting public perception in NATO countries as well as globally in ways favorable to the US, and to create a sense of unease and distrust among perceived adversaries such as Russia and China.

The Snowden revelations made it clear that US offensive cyber capabilities can and have been directed both domestically and internationally. The notion that US and NATO cyber operations are purely defensive is a myth.

Recent US domestic cyber operations have been used for coercive effect, creating uncertainty and concern within the American government and population.

The perception that a foreign attacker may have infiltrated US networks, is monitoring communications, and perhaps considering even more damaging actions, can have a disorienting effect.

In the world of US "hybrid warfare" against Russia, offensive cyber operations work in tandem with NATO propaganda efforts, perhaps best exemplified by the "online investigation" antics of the Atlantic Council's Eliot Higgins and his Bellingcat disinformation site.

mike k , September 16, 2017 at 8:50 pm

Thanks Abe. Your insights are invaluable.

GMC , September 17, 2017 at 4:53 am

I live in Russia and see those shows that you speak of. The Nazi rants are from the Ukraine folks invited on the show – you want to see Ukraine shows like the ones in RU. – well, you won't see any Russians invited to talk -- -- NONE --

Gregory Herr , September 17, 2017 at 10:33 am

Your posts are so blatantly contrived it's almost funny. Do you write for sitcoms as well?

mrtmbrnmn , September 16, 2017 at 4:48 pm

Is this a great country, or wot???

Stupid starts at the very top and there is no bottom to it .

Dominic Pukallus , September 16, 2017 at 10:13 pm

The Washington Post has its own ironically self-describing slogan. Perhaps that of the NYT these days should be, in the same vein, "The Sleep of Reason begets monsters". And who will soon then be able to whistle in the darkness full of these things?

mike k , September 17, 2017 at 8:03 am

When looking for monsters, the WaPo should start by looking at themselves.

Walter DuBlanica , September 17, 2017 at 2:26 pm

The chaos in Ukraine was engineered by Victoria Nuland at Hillary's request. Good that she is not president. The Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same people, same DNA, same religion Orthodoxy., Slavic, languages very close to each other, Cyrillic alphabet and a long common history .

Russian_angel , September 17, 2017 at 9:43 pm

Thank you for the truth about Russia, it hurts the Russians to read about themselves in the American newspapers a lie.

Florin , September 18, 2017 at 2:15 am

Gershman, Nuland, Pyland, Feltman . essentially ths four biggest US (quasi) diplomats, like Volodymyr Groysman, Petro Poroshenko and perhaps 'our guy' Yats – are Jewish.

Add to this the role of Israeli 'ex' military, some hundreds, which means Mossad, and of Jewish oligarchs in Ukraine – and consider that Jews are less than 1% of the population.

The point is if we were free to speak plainly, the Ukraine coup looks to be one in which American and Ukrainian Jews acted in concert to benefit Jewish power. There is more to be said on this, but this glimpse will suffice because, of course, one is not free to speak plainly even where plain speaking is, on the face of it, encouraged.

Jamie , September 18, 2017 at 12:03 pm

Where was fake Antifa when Obama armed Nazi's in the Ukraine?

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/06/12/u-s-house-admits-nazi-role-in-ukraine/

Obama then put Joe Biden's sleazy son, Hunter, on the board of the largest gas company there:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/05/14/hunter-bidens-new-job-at-a-ukrainian-gas-company-is-a-problem-for-u-s-soft-power/

By ignoring the fascism of one political party, Antifa is actually pro-fascist. This fits in well with their Hitler-like disdain for freedom of press, speech and assembly. And their absolute love of violence, we also saw in the 1930s among Nazi groups

[Sep 17, 2017] The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense by Publius Tacitus

Highly recommended!
All signs of sophisticated false flag operation, which probably involved putting malware into DNC servers and then detecting and analyzing them
Notable quotes:
"... 6 May 2016 when CrowdStrike first detected what it assessed to be a Russian presence inside the DNC server. Follow me here. One week after realizing there had been a penetration, the DNC learns, courtesy of the computer security firm it hired, that the Russians are doing it. Okay. Does CrowdStrike shut down the penetration. Nope. The hacking apparently continues unabated. ..."
"... The Smoking Gun ..."
"... I introduce Seth Rich at this point because he represents an alternative hypothesis. Rich, who reportedly was a Bernie Sanders supporter, was in a position at the DNC that gave him access to the emails in question and the opportunity to download the emails and take them from the DNC headquarters. Worth noting that Julian Assange offered $20,000 for information leading to the arrest of Rich's killer or killers. 8. 22 July 2016. Wikileaks published the DNC emails starting on 22 July 2016. Bill Binney, a former senior official at NSA, insists that if such a hack and electronic transfer over the internet had occurred then the NSA has in it possession the intelligence data to prove that such activity had occurred. ..."
"... Notwithstanding the claim by CrowdStrike not a single piece of evidence has been provided to the public to support the conclusion that the emails were hacked and physically transferred to a server under the control of a Russian intelligence operative. ..."
"... Please do not try to post a comment stating that the "Intelligence Community" concluded as well that Russia was responsible. That claim is totally without one shred of actual forensic evidence. Also, Julian Assange insists that the emails did not come from a Russian source. ..."
"... Wikileaks, the protector of the accountability of the top, has announced a reward for finding the murderers of Seth Rich. In comparison, the DNC has not offered any reward to help the investigation of the murder of the DNC staffer, but the DNC found a well-connected lawyer to protect Imran Awan who is guilty (along with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz) in the greatest breach of national cybersecurity: http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/29/wasserman-schultz-seemingly-planned-to-pay-suspect-even-while-he-lived-in-pakistan/ ..."
"... I'm afraid you're behind the times. Wheeler is no longer relevant now that Sy Hersh has revealed an FBI report that explicitly says Rich was in contact with Wikileaks offering to sell them DNC documents. ..."
"... It's unfortunate for the Rich family, but now that the connection is pretty much confirmed, they're going to have to allow the truth to come out ..."
"... Mr. Dmitri Alperovitch, of Jewish descent (and an emigre from Russia), has been an "expert" at the Atlantic Council, the same organization that cherishes and provides for Mr. Eliot Higgins. These two gentlemen - and the directorate of Atlantic Council - are exhibit one of opportunism and intellectual dishonesty (though it is hard to think about Mr. Higgins in terms of "intellect"). ..."
"... Alperovitch is not just an incompetent "expert" in cybersecurity - he is a willing liar and war-mongering, for money. ..."
"... One could of course start earlier. What is the exact timeline of the larger cyberwar post 9/11, or at least the bits and pieces that surfaced for the nitwits among us, like: Stuxnet? ..."
"... Scott Ritter's article referenced in PT's post is terrific, covering a ton of issues related to CrowdStrike and the DNC hack. You need to read it, not just PT's timeline. In case you missed the link in PT's post: ..."
"... His article echoes and reinforces what Carr and others have said about the difficulty of attribution of infosec breaches. Namely that the basic problem of both intelligence and infosec operations is that there is too much obfuscation, manipulation, and misdirection involved to be sure of who or what is going on. ..."
"... The Seth Rich connection is pretty much a done deal, now that Sy Hersh has been caught on tape stating that he knows of an FBI report based on a forensic analysis of Rich's laptop that shows Rich was in direct contact with Wikileaks with an attempt to sell them DNC documents and that Wikileaks had access to Rich's DropBox account. Despite Hersh's subsequent denials - which everyone knows are his usual impatient deflections prior to putting out a sourced and organized article - it's pretty clear that Rich was at least one of the sources of the Wikileaks email dump and that there is zero connection to Russia. ..."
"... None of this proves that Russian intelligence - or Russians of some stripe - or for that matter hackers from literally anywhere - couldn't or didn't ALSO do a hack of the DNC. But it does prove that the iron-clad attribution of the source of Wikileaks email release to Russia is at best flawed, and at worst a deliberate cover up of a leak. ..."
Sep 05, 2017 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Notwithstanding the conventional wisdom that Russia hacked into the DNC computers, downloaded emails and a passed the stolen missives to Julian Assange's crew at Wikileaks, a careful examination of the timeline of events from 2016 shows that this story is simply not plausible.

Let me take you through the known facts:

1. 29 April 2016 , when the DNC became aware its servers had been penetrated (https://medium.com/homefront-rising/dumbstruck-how-crowdstrike-conned-america-on-the-hack-of-the-dnc-ecfa522ff44f). Note. They apparently did not know who was doing it. 2, 6 May 2016 when CrowdStrike first detected what it assessed to be a Russian presence inside the DNC server. Follow me here. One week after realizing there had been a penetration, the DNC learns, courtesy of the computer security firm it hired, that the Russians are doing it. Okay. Does CrowdStrike shut down the penetration. Nope. The hacking apparently continues unabated. 3. 25 May 2016. The messages published on Wikileaks from the DNC show that 26 May 2016 was the last date that emails were sent and received at the DNC. There are no emails in the public domain after that date. In other words, if the DNC emails were taken via a hacking operation, we can conclude from the fact that the last messages posted to Wikileaks show a date time group of 25 May 2016. Wikileaks has not reported nor posted any emails from the DNC after the 25th of May. I think it is reasonable to assume that was the day the dirty deed was done. 4. 12 June 2016, CrowdStrike purged the DNC server of all malware. Are you kidding me? 45 days after the DNC discovers that its serve has been penetrated the decision to purge the DNC server is finally made. What in the hell were they waiting for? But this also tells us that 18 days after the last email "taken" from the DNC, no additional emails were taken by this nasty malware. Here is what does not make sense to me. If the DNC emails were truly hacked and the malware was still in place on 11 June 2016 (it was not purged until the 12th) then why are there no emails from the DNC after 26 May 2016? an excellent analysis of Guccifer's role : Almost immediately after the one-two punch of the Washington Post article/CrowdStrike technical report went public, however, something totally unexpected happened -- someone came forward and took full responsibility for the DNC cyber attack. Moreover, this entity -- operating under the persona Guccifer 2.0 (ostensibly named after the original Guccifer , a Romanian hacker who stole the emails of a number of high-profile celebrities and who was arrested in 2014 and sentenced to 4 ˝ years of prison in May 2016) -- did something no state actor has ever done before, publishing documents stolen from the DNC server as proof of his claims.
Hi. This is Guccifer 2.0 and this is me who hacked Democratic National Committee.

With that simple email, sent to the on-line news magazine, The Smoking Gun , Guccifer 2.0 stole the limelight away from Alperovitch. Over the course of the next few days, through a series of emails, online posts and interviews , Guccifer 2.0 openly mocked CrowdStrike and its Russian attribution. Guccifer 2.0 released a number of documents, including a massive 200-plus-missive containing opposition research on Donald Trump.

Guccifer 2.0 also directly contradicted the efforts on the part of the DNC to minimize the extent of the hacking, releasing the very donor lists the DNC specifically stated had not been stolen. More chilling, Guccifer 2.0 claimed to be in possession of "about 100 Gb of data" which had been passed on to the online publisher, Wikileaks, who "will publish them soon." 7. Seth Rich died on 10 July 2016. I introduce Seth Rich at this point because he represents an alternative hypothesis. Rich, who reportedly was a Bernie Sanders supporter, was in a position at the DNC that gave him access to the emails in question and the opportunity to download the emails and take them from the DNC headquarters. Worth noting that Julian Assange offered $20,000 for information leading to the arrest of Rich's killer or killers. 8. 22 July 2016. Wikileaks published the DNC emails starting on 22 July 2016. Bill Binney, a former senior official at NSA, insists that if such a hack and electronic transfer over the internet had occurred then the NSA has in it possession the intelligence data to prove that such activity had occurred. Notwithstanding the claim by CrowdStrike not a single piece of evidence has been provided to the public to support the conclusion that the emails were hacked and physically transferred to a server under the control of a Russian intelligence operative. Please do not try to post a comment stating that the "Intelligence Community" concluded as well that Russia was responsible. That claim is totally without one shred of actual forensic evidence. Also, Julian Assange insists that the emails did not come from a Russian source.

Fool , 05 September 2017 at 09:01 AM

Where was it reported that Rich was a Sanders supporter?
Publius Tacitus -> Fool... , 05 September 2017 at 09:15 AM
This is one of the reports, http://heavy.com/news/2016/08/seth-rich-julian-assange-source-wikileaks-wiki-dnc-emails-death-murder-reward-video-interview-hillary-clinton-shawn-lucas/.
Anna -> Publius Tacitus ... , 05 September 2017 at 10:56 AM
Wikileaks, the protector of the accountability of the top, has announced a reward for finding the murderers of Seth Rich. In comparison, the DNC has not offered any reward to help the investigation of the murder of the DNC staffer, but the DNC found a well-connected lawyer to protect Imran Awan who is guilty (along with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz) in the greatest breach of national cybersecurity: http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/29/wasserman-schultz-seemingly-planned-to-pay-suspect-even-while-he-lived-in-pakistan/
Stephanie -> Publius Tacitus ... , 06 September 2017 at 12:12 PM
Seth Rich's family have pleaded, and continue to plead, that the conspiracy theorists leave the death of their son alone and have said that those who continue to flog this nonsense around the internet are only serving to increase their pain. I suggest respectfully that some here may wish to consider their feelings. (Also, this stuff is nuts, you know.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/were-seth-richs-parents-stop-politicizing-our-sons-murder/2017/05/23/164cf4dc-3fee-11e7-9869-bac8b446820a_story.html?utm_term=.b20208de48d3

"We also know that many people are angry at our government and want to see justice done in some way, somehow. We are asking you to please consider our feelings and words. There are people who are using our beloved Seth's memory and legacy for their own political goals, and they are using your outrage to perpetuate our nightmare."

http://www.businessinsider.com/seth-rich-family-response-lawsuit-rod-wheeler-2017-8

"Wheeler, a former Metropolitan Police Department officer, was a key figure in a series of debunked stories claiming that Rich had been in contact with Wikileaks before his death. Fox News, which reported the story online and on television, retracted it in June."

Richardstevenhack -> Stephanie... , 07 September 2017 at 07:43 PM
I'm afraid you're behind the times. Wheeler is no longer relevant now that Sy Hersh has revealed an FBI report that explicitly says Rich was in contact with Wikileaks offering to sell them DNC documents.

It's unfortunate for the Rich family, but now that the connection is pretty much confirmed, they're going to have to allow the truth to come out.

Anna , 05 September 2017 at 09:20 AM
Mr. Dmitri Alperovitch, of Jewish descent (and an emigre from Russia), has been an "expert" at the Atlantic Council, the same organization that cherishes and provides for Mr. Eliot Higgins. These two gentlemen - and the directorate of Atlantic Council - are exhibit one of opportunism and intellectual dishonesty (though it is hard to think about Mr. Higgins in terms of "intellect").

Here is an article by Alperovitch: http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russian-cyber-attacks-in-the-united-states-will-intensify

Take note how Alperovitch coded the names of the supposed hackers: "Russian intelligence services hacked the Democratic National Committee's computer network and accessed opposition research on Donald Trump, according to the Atlantic Council's Dmitri Alperovitch.

Two Russian groups ! codenamed FancyBear and CozyBear ! have been identified as spearheading the DNC breach." Alperovitch is not just an incompetent "expert" in cybersecurity - he is a willing liar and war-mongering, for money.

The DNC hacking story has never been about national security; Alperovitch (and his handlers) have no loyalty to the US.

LeaNder , 05 September 2017 at 09:59 AM
PT, I make a short exception. Actually decided to stop babbling for a while. But: Just finished something successfully.

And since I usually need distraction by something far more interesting then matters at hand. I was close to your line of thought yesters.

But really: Shouldn't the timeline start in 2015, since that's supposedly the time someone got into the DNC's system?

One could of course start earlier. What is the exact timeline of the larger cyberwar post 9/11, or at least the bits and pieces that surfaced for the nitwits among us, like: Stuxnet?

But nevermind. Don't forget developments and recent events around Eugene or Jewgeni Walentinowitsch Kasperski?

LondonBob , 05 September 2017 at 03:27 PM
The Russia thing certainly seems to have gone quiet.

Bannon's chum says the issue with pursuing the Clinton email thing is that you would end up having to indict almost all of the last administration, including Obama, unseemly certainly. Still there might be a fall guy, maybe Comey, and obviously it serves Trump's purposes to keep this a live issue through the good work of Grassley and the occasional tweet.

Would be amusing if Trump pardoned Obama. Still think Brennan should pay a price though, can't really be allowed to get away with it

Richardstevenhack , 05 September 2017 at 06:23 PM
Scott Ritter's article referenced in PT's post is terrific, covering a ton of issues related to CrowdStrike and the DNC hack. You need to read it, not just PT's timeline. In case you missed the link in PT's post:

Dumbstruck: How CrowdStrike Conned America on the Hack of the DNC https://medium.com/homefront-rising/dumbstruck-how-crowdstrike-conned-america-on-the-hack-of-the-dnc-ecfa522ff44f

The article by Jeffrey Carr on CrowdStrike referenced from back in 2012 is also worth reading: Where's the "Strike" in CrowdStrike? https://jeffreycarr.blogspot.com/2012/09/wheres-strike-in-crowdstrike.html

Also, the article Carr references is very important for understanding the limits of malware analysis and "attribution". Written by Michael Tanji, whose credentials appear impressive: "spent nearly 20 years in the US intelligence community. Trained in both SIGINT and HUMINT disciplines he has worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. At various points in his career he served as an expert in information warfare, computer network operations, computer forensics, and indications and warning. A veteran of the US Army, Michael has served in both strategic and tactical assignments in the Pacific Theater, the Balkans, and the Middle East."

Malware Analysis: The Danger of Connecting the Dots: https://www.oodaloop.com/technology/2012/09/11/malware-analysis-the-danger-of-connecting-the-dots/

His article echoes and reinforces what Carr and others have said about the difficulty of attribution of infosec breaches. Namely that the basic problem of both intelligence and infosec operations is that there is too much obfuscation, manipulation, and misdirection involved to be sure of who or what is going on.

The Seth Rich connection is pretty much a done deal, now that Sy Hersh has been caught on tape stating that he knows of an FBI report based on a forensic analysis of Rich's laptop that shows Rich was in direct contact with Wikileaks with an attempt to sell them DNC documents and that Wikileaks had access to Rich's DropBox account. Despite Hersh's subsequent denials - which everyone knows are his usual impatient deflections prior to putting out a sourced and organized article - it's pretty clear that Rich was at least one of the sources of the Wikileaks email dump and that there is zero connection to Russia.

None of this proves that Russian intelligence - or Russians of some stripe - or for that matter hackers from literally anywhere - couldn't or didn't ALSO do a hack of the DNC. But it does prove that the iron-clad attribution of the source of Wikileaks email release to Russia is at best flawed, and at worst a deliberate cover up of a leak.

And Russiagate depends primarily on BOTH alleged "facts" being true: 1) that Russia hacked the DNC, and 2) that Russia was the source of Wikileaks release. And if the latter is not true, then one has to question why Russia hacked the DNC in the first place, other than for "normal" espionage operations. "Influencing the election" then becomes a far less plausible theory.

The general takeaway from an infosec point of view is that attribution by means of target identification, tools used, and "indicators of compromise" is a fatally flawed means of identifying, and thus being able to counter, the adversaries encountered in today's Internet world, as Tanji proves. Only HUMINT offers a way around this, just as it is really the only valid option in countering terrorism.

[Aug 08, 2017] The Tale of the Brothers Awan by Philip Giraldi

Highly recommended!
The real question is who controlled Imram Awan and who planted him into Congress (as a mole). The level of criminal negligence demonstrated during his hiring is atypical for the USA government. And especially for government IT. Which is staffed by very security conscious people, as a rule. So he definitely should have a "sponsor" among intelligence agencies to accomplish such a feat and suppress all the "flash lights" that lighted during evaluation of his candidacy. I think that "I want this guy" request from Debbie Wasserman was not enough. She is no Hillary Clinton ;-) But to which country this intelligence agency belong is an open question, but most probably this was a USA intelligence agency. I doubt that Mossad would use Pakistani as their agent.
Notable quotes:
"... To be sure, the tale is a strange one with plenty of unsavory links. Thirty-seven year old Awan, his wife, sister-in-law and two brothers Abid and Jamal worked as IT administrators, full and part-time, for between 30 and 80 congressmen , all Democrats, including former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. They did not have security clearances and it is not even certain that they were in any way checked out before being hired. Nor were their claimed skills at IT administration confirmed as their work pattern reportedly turned out to consist more of absences than time spent in the House offices. One congressional IT staffer described them as "ghost employees." ..."
"... At one point, Imran brought into the House as a colleague one Rao Abbas, someone to whom he owed money, best distinguished by his being recently fired by McDonald's . Abbas lived in the basement of a house owned by Imran's wife as a rental property. He may have had no qualifications at all to perform IT but the congressmen in question did not seem to notice. Abbas wound up working, on the rare occasions that he went into the building, in the office of Congressman Patrick Murphy, who was at the time a member of the House Intelligence Committee as well as for Florida Congressman Theo Deutch. He was paid $250,000. ..."
"... To cover for all the non-working but on the payroll employees, Imran also hired a high school friend Haseeb Rana, who actually did know something about computers. Rana reportedly did "all the work" and kept wanting to quit for that reason. It was also against House rules for an IT administrator to fill in for someone else, as Rana routinely did, since each such employee had be personally registered by the congressman. ..."
"... The Awans and their two friends were all taken on as salaried employees of the House of Representatives at senior civil service level paygrades of ca. $165,000 annually, which normally is what is paid to highly experienced senior managers or chiefs of staff. Imran's younger brother Jamal was only twenty years old when he was hired at that level in 2014. ..."
"... It is not known if the Awans, who were working for several Intelligence Committee members simultaneously, would have been involved or had access to the computers able to pull up classified material being used by those staffers, but Buzzfeed, in its initial reporting on the investigation of the Awans family, repeated the concerns of a Congressman that the suspects might have "had access to the House of Representatives' entire computer network." Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that that was not the case. In office environments, the IT administrators routinely ask for passwords if they are checking out the system. WikiLeaks emails confirm that Imran certainly had passwords relating to Congressman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as well as to others on her staff. ..."
"... As of February 2016, the Awans came under suspicion for having set up an operation involving double billing as well as the theft and reselling of government owned computer equipment. It was also believed that they had somehow obtained entry to much of the House of Representatives' computer network as well as to other information in the individual offices' separate computer systems that they were in theory not allowed to access. The Capitol Hill Police began an investigation and quietly alerted the congressmen involved that there might be a problem. Most stopped employing the Awan family members and associates, but Wasserman-Schultz kept Imran on the payroll until the day after he was actually arrested. ..."
"... Initially Wasserman-Schultz refused to cooperate with the police, refusing to provide her passwords and not permitting them to open her computers, but Fox News reports that she has recently apparently allowed the authorities to do a scan. ..."
"... Dr. Ali A. Al-Attar fled the United States after the indictment to avoid arrest and imprisonment and is now considered a fugitive from justice. Late in 2012 he was observed in Beirut Lebanon conversing with a Hezbollah official. Al-Attar is of interest in this case because he appears to have been a friend of Imran Awan and also loaned him $100,000, which was never repaid. The FBI is currently looking into any possible international espionage specifically involving the two men as Awan and his associates clearly had access to classified information while working in the House of Representatives that would have been of interest to any number of foreign governments. ..."
"... [An earlier version of this article appeared on The American Conservative on August 3 rd ] ..."
Aug 08, 2017 | www.unz.com

There has been surprisingly little media follow-up on the story about the July 25 th Dulles Airport arrest of House of Representatives' employed Pakistani-American IT specialist Imran Awan, who was detained for bank fraud while he was allegedly fleeing to Pakistan. The mainstream media somewhat predictably produced minimal press coverage before the story died. The speed at which the news vanished has prompted some observers, including Breitbart, to sound the alarm over a suspected cover-up of possible exposure of classified information or even espionage that just might be part of the story that we are now calling Russiagate.

To be sure, the tale is a strange one with plenty of unsavory links. Thirty-seven year old Awan, his wife, sister-in-law and two brothers Abid and Jamal worked as IT administrators, full and part-time, for between 30 and 80 congressmen , all Democrats, including former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. They did not have security clearances and it is not even certain that they were in any way checked out before being hired. Nor were their claimed skills at IT administration confirmed as their work pattern reportedly turned out to consist more of absences than time spent in the House offices. One congressional IT staffer described them as "ghost employees."

At one point, Imran brought into the House as a colleague one Rao Abbas, someone to whom he owed money, best distinguished by his being recently fired by McDonald's . Abbas lived in the basement of a house owned by Imran's wife as a rental property. He may have had no qualifications at all to perform IT but the congressmen in question did not seem to notice. Abbas wound up working, on the rare occasions that he went into the building, in the office of Congressman Patrick Murphy, who was at the time a member of the House Intelligence Committee as well as for Florida Congressman Theo Deutch. He was paid $250,000.

To cover for all the non-working but on the payroll employees, Imran also hired a high school friend Haseeb Rana, who actually did know something about computers. Rana reportedly did "all the work" and kept wanting to quit for that reason. It was also against House rules for an IT administrator to fill in for someone else, as Rana routinely did, since each such employee had be personally registered by the congressman.

The Awans and their two friends were all taken on as salaried employees of the House of Representatives at senior civil service level paygrades of ca. $165,000 annually, which normally is what is paid to highly experienced senior managers or chiefs of staff. Imran's younger brother Jamal was only twenty years old when he was hired at that level in 2014.

The process of granting security clearances to Congressional staff is not exactly transparent, but it is not unlike the procedures for other government agencies. The office seeking the clearance for a staff member must put in a request, some kind of investigation follows, and the applicant must then sign a non-disclosure agreement before the authorization is granted. Sometimes Congress pushes the process by demanding that its staff have access above and beyond the normal "need to know." In March 2016, for example, eight Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee requested that their staffs be given access to top secret sensitive compartmented information.

It is not known if the Awans, who were working for several Intelligence Committee members simultaneously, would have been involved or had access to the computers able to pull up classified material being used by those staffers, but Buzzfeed, in its initial reporting on the investigation of the Awans family, repeated the concerns of a Congressman that the suspects might have "had access to the House of Representatives' entire computer network." Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that that was not the case. In office environments, the IT administrators routinely ask for passwords if they are checking out the system. WikiLeaks emails confirm that Imran certainly had passwords relating to Congressman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as well as to others on her staff.

Congress paid the Awans more than $4 million between 2004 and 2016 at their $165,000 salary level, a sum that some sources suggest to be three or four times higher than the norm for government contractor IT specialists performing similar work at the same level of alleged competency. Four of the Awans were among the 500 highest paid of the 15,000 congressional staffers. The considerable and consistent level of overpayment has not been explained by the congressmen involved. In spite of all that income being generated, Imran Awan declared bankruptcy in 2010 claiming losses of $1 million on a car business that he owned in Falls Church Virginia that ran up debts and borrowed money that it failed to repay. The business was named Cars International A, abbreviated on its business cards as CIA

The Awans family also was noted for its brushes with the law and internal discord, though it is doubtful if the congressional employers were aware of their outside-of-the-office behavior. The brothers were on the receiving end of a number of traffic citations, including DUI, and were constantly scheming to generate income, including what must have been a hilarious phone conversation to their credit union in which Imran pretended to be his own wife in order to wire money to Pakistan. They were on bad terms with their father and step-mother, including forging a document to cheat their step-mother of an insurance payment and even holding her "captive" so she could not see their dying father. Their father even changed his last name to dissociate himself from them.

As of February 2016, the Awans came under suspicion for having set up an operation involving double billing as well as the theft and reselling of government owned computer equipment. It was also believed that they had somehow obtained entry to much of the House of Representatives' computer network as well as to other information in the individual offices' separate computer systems that they were in theory not allowed to access. The Capitol Hill Police began an investigation and quietly alerted the congressmen involved that there might be a problem. Most stopped employing the Awan family members and associates, but Wasserman-Schultz kept Imran on the payroll until the day after he was actually arrested.

Some of those defending the Awans, to include Wasserman-Schultz and the family lawyer, have insisted that he and his family were the victims of "an anti-Muslim, right-wing smear job," though there is no actual evidence to suggest that is the case. They also claim that the bank fraud that led to the arrest, in which Imran obtained a home equity loan for $165,000 from the Congressional Federal Credit Union based on a house that he owned and claimed to live in in Lorton Virginia, was largely a misunderstanding It has been described as something "extremely minor" by his lawyer Chris Gowen , a high priced Washington attorney who has worked for the Clintons personally, the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative.

It turned out that Imran and his wife no longer lived in the house which had been turned into a rental property, a clear case of bank fraud. The Awans had tenants in the house, an ex-Marine and his Naval officer wife, who were very suspicious about a large quantity of what appeared to be government sourced computer equipment and supplies, all material that had been left behind by the owners. They contacted the FBI, which discovered hard drives that appeared to have been deliberately destroyed.

The FBI is certainly interested in the theft of government computers but it is also looking into the possibility that the Awans were using their ability to access and possibly exploit sensitive information stored in the House of Representatives' computer network as well as through Wasserman-Schultz's iPad, which Imran had access to and was connected to the Democratic National Committee server. It is believed that Imran sent stolen government files to a remote personal server . It may have been located in his former residence in Lorton Virginia, where the smashed equipment was found, or as far away as Pakistan. As Imran Awan is a dual-national, born in Pakistan, the possibility of espionage also had to be considered. By some accounts the Awan family traveled back to Pakistan frequently, where Imran was treated royally by local officialdom, suggesting that he may have been doing favors for the not very friendly government in Islamabad.

Considering the possible criminal activity that Imran and his family might have been engaged in and which was still under investigation, the Capitol Police and FBI determined that he should be stopped in his attempt to flee to Pakistan. The charge that Awan was actually arrested on at the airport, bank fraud, was an easy way to hold him as it was well documented. It allows the other more serious investigations to continue, so the argument that Imran Awan is only being held over a minor matter is not necessarily correct.

Awans had wired the credit union money and some cash of his own to Pakistan, as part of a $283,000 transfer that was made in January. His wife Hina Alvi also left the U.S. two months later. She was searched by Customs officers and it was determined that she had on her $12,400 in cash. She also had with her their three children, and numerous boxes containing household goods and clothing. It was clear that she did not intend to come back but there has been no explanation why she was even allowed to leave since carrying more than $10,000 out of the country without reporting it is a felony.

As Imran Awan reportedly had access to Wasserman-Schultz's iPad, he presumably also was able to see the incriminating Hillary Clinton emails. He used a laptop in her office as well that was, according to investigators, concealed in an "unused crevice" in the Rayburn House Office Building. It is currently being examined by police but Wasserman-Schultz tried strenuously to recover it before it could be looked at. She pressured the Chief of the Capitol Police Matthew Verderosa to return it, threatening him by saying "you should expect that there will be consequences." Initially Wasserman-Schultz refused to cooperate with the police, refusing to provide her passwords and not permitting them to open her computers, but Fox News reports that she has recently apparently allowed the authorities to do a scan.

There is another odd connection of Imran Awan that goes back to the neocon circle around Paul Wolfowitz during the Iraq War. In late 2002 and early 2003, Wolfowitz regularly met secretly with a group of Iraqi expatriates who resided in the Washington area and were opponents of the Saddam Hussein regime. The Iraqis had not been in their country of birth for many years but they claimed to have regular contact with well-informed family members and political allies. The Iraqi advisers provided Wolfowitz with a now-familiar refrain, i.e. that the Iraqi people would rise up to support invading Americans and overthrow the hated Saddam. They would greet their liberators with bouquets of flowers and shouts of joy.

The Iraqis were headed by one Dr. Ali A. al-Attar, born in Baghdad to Iranian parents in 1963, a 1989 graduate of the American University of Beirut Faculty of Medicine. He subsequently emigrated to the United States and set up a practice in internal medicine in Greenbelt Maryland, a suburb of Washington D.C. Al-Attar eventually expanded his business to include nine practices that he wholly or partly owned in Virginia and Maryland but he eventually lost his license due to "questionable billing practices" as well as "unprofessional conduct" due to having sex with patients

Al-Attar was investigated by the FBI and eventually indicted for large scale health care fraud in 2008-9, which included charging insurance companies more than $2.3 million for services their patients did not actually receive with many of the false claims using names of diplomats and employees enrolled in a group plan at the Egyptian Embassy in Washington. In one case, the doctors claimed an embassy employee visited three of their clinics every 26 days between May 2007 and August 2008 to have the same testing done each time. The insurance company paid the doctors $55,000 for more than 400 nonexistent procedures for the one patient alone.

Dr. Ali A. Al-Attar fled the United States after the indictment to avoid arrest and imprisonment and is now considered a fugitive from justice. Late in 2012 he was observed in Beirut Lebanon conversing with a Hezbollah official. Al-Attar is of interest in this case because he appears to have been a friend of Imran Awan and also loaned him $100,000, which was never repaid. The FBI is currently looking into any possible international espionage specifically involving the two men as Awan and his associates clearly had access to classified information while working in the House of Representatives that would have been of interest to any number of foreign governments.

The Imran Awan case is certainly of considerable interest not only for what the investigation eventually turns up but also for what it reveals about how things actually work in congress and in the government more generally speaking. I don't know which of the allegations about what might have taken place are true, but there is certainly a lot to consider. Whether the case is investigated and prosecuted without fear or favor will depend on the Department of Justice and FBI, but I for one was appalled to learn that the official who quite likely will oversee the investigation of the Awans is one Steven Wasserman, Assistant Attorney for the District of Columbia, the brother of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. If that should actually occur, it would be a huge conflict of interest and it has to be wondered if Wasserman would have the integrity to recuse himself.

There are many questions regarding the Awan case. One might reasonably ask how foreign-born IT specialists are selected and vetted prior to being significantly overpaid and allowed to work on computers in congressional offices. And the ability of those same individuals to keep working even after the relevant congressmen have been warned that their employee was under investigation has to be explained beyond Wasserman-Schultz's comment that Awan had not committed any crime, which may have been true but one would expect congressmen to err on the side of caution over an issue that could easily have national security ramifications. And how does a recently bankrupt and unemployed Imran Awan wind up with a high-priced lawyer to defend him who is associated with the Clintons? Would that kind of lawyer even take a relatively minor bank fraud case if that were all that is involved? Finally, there are the lingering concerns about the unfortunately well-established Russiagate narrative. Did the Russians really hack into the DNC or were there other possibilities, to include some kind of inside job, a "leak," carried out by someone working for the government or DNC for reasons that have yet to be determined, possibly even someone actually employed by DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz? There are certainly many issues that the public needs to know more about and so far, there are not enough answers.

[An earlier version of this article appeared on The American Conservative on August 3 rd ]

Ace , August 8, 2017 at 5:39 am GMT

Foreign-born people should be barred for life from holding any kind of security clearance. I mean in the highly unlikely event I were to become a Chinese citizen (and be 40 years younger), would the Chinese be so stupid as to give me a clearance and allow me to work in a key government office?

Obviously not but forget"obviously" when we're talking about the U.S.A.

Ivy , August 8, 2017 at 5:49 am GMT

Where is the outrage? Where is the coverage? Wolf, Anderson, Jake, Erin, anybody at CNN? Of course, I don't expect them to acknowledge the issue.

exiled off mainstreet , August 8, 2017 at 6:18 am GMT

The Department of Justice needs to do its job looking at the Clintons, the DNC, Wasserman-Schultz, Donna Brazile and others. The stench of corruption is appalling, and the Russia thing looks more like a fraudulent story to keep the pressure off, particularly since the phony dossier which started it was compiled at the behest of a political consultancy which usually works for the same crowd. I think it is about time that Mueller's fishing expedition be closed down and the necessary draining of the swamp be commenced.

The Alarmist , August 8, 2017 at 7:34 am GMT

Occam's razor she schtupped him, and she must have really enjoyed it.

annamaria , August 8, 2017 at 1:24 pm GMT

@Cloak And Dagger It should come as no surprise to anyone that the law is only meant for we ordinary citizens and not for the elite. Those of us who are silently hoping for the indictment of Debbie and Hillary are sure to be sorely disappointed.

There is no justice anymore in these United States whose domestic and foreign policies are controlled by the deep state. Some days can be so bleak... Actually, the whole Awan-US Congress case is about the High Treason. No security clearances. The open access to the classified documents of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (oh the irony!) and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. http://dailycaller.com/2017/02/04/exclusive-house-intelligence-it-staffers-fired-in-computer-security-probe/
There are should be arrests made of those congresspeople who allowed the greatest breach in the national cybersecurity by inviting and financing the non-qualified personnel (fraudulent hiring).
An important question is, who pays Chris Gowen, a very expensive and well-connected lawyer, for the defense of the documented fraudster and possible spy.
That Steven Wasserman, Assistant Attorney for the District of Columbia, the brother of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz oversees the investigation is a scandal of gigantic proportions.
Those making the presstituting peeps about Russiangate should be from now on pummelled with the facts of the Tale of the Brothers Awan.

anonymous , Disclaimer August 8, 2017 at 1:38 pm GMT

This is a staggering story. What a load of incompetence and coverup. This government is a total sieve. Of course those people were spying. Even if they didn't want to spy, for whatever reason, the Pakistani government could surely find ways to 'convince' them to do so. Most of these politicians appear to be so clueless that it's difficult to comprehend. It's just a carnival of taxpayer ripoff in DC.

The Alarmist , August 8, 2017 at 1:48 pm GMT

@Dana Thompson Somebody should write a movie script based on this. It would be better than American Hustle - call it Pakistani Hustle, maybe. The pitch would start with, "It's the Sopranos meet the Simpsons."

Seamus Padraig , August 8, 2017 at 1:56 pm GMT

I for one was appalled to learn that the official who quite likely will oversee the investigation of the Awans is one Steven Wasserman, Assistant Attorney for the District of Columbia, the brother of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

Yup. And guess what? As Assistant DA for DC, Wasserman is also ultimately responsible for investigating the Seth Rich murder 13 months on and still no leads!

When the hell are Trump and Sessions going to get serious about going after these freaks?

F. G. Sanford , August 8, 2017 at 2:37 pm GMT

What if the Awan brothers are "cutouts" for another intelligence agency? What if Seth Rich leaked the emails, and they exposed Hillary Clinton to prosecution? What if the "deep state" panicked because it could no longer control the narrative? What if Comey dragged his feet on a slam-dunk investigation because the "deep state" was sure Clinton would win, and it could all be buried? What if they hadn't had time to consider "Plan B" in time to head off investigation of Clinton Foundation fraud? What if they never expected that Anthony Wiener's sexting would get his computer seized by the NYPD? What if the whole story extends back to the Mueller, Wolfowitz, Clarke and Tenet cabal, and all of their think-tank gurus? What if somebody realizes that the planning stages had to predate the Bush-Cheney administration? What if Russia-gate and Clinton-gate are playing out as two hands in a game of strip poker? What if one side refuses to fold? What if Hillary threatens to file a sworn affidavit? What if Mueller is the historical analogue of John J. McCloy, the anonymous "deep state" Chairman of the Board? What if this is just a plot in the latest episode of war pornography? What if it's called, "Debbie Does Dulles", and its stars include "Many Talented Celebrities"? What are the chances that somebody important goes to jail? I'm guessing the odds are pretty long. I'm betting Hillary has the goods on all of them, and she'll file that affidavit if she has to.

annamaria , August 8, 2017 at 3:22 pm GMT

Killing freedom of speech in America, one google search at a time: http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/08/08/google-committed-suppression-free-speech/
"According to reports, Google works hand in hand with the NSA and CIA to expand unconstitutional spying on everyone everywhere and to suppress independent and dissenting thought and expression. For example, on July 31, the World Socialist Web Site reported that "Between April and June, Google completed a major revision of its search engine that sharply curtails public access to Internet web sites that operate independently of the corporate and state-controlled media. Since the implementation of the changes, many left wing, anti-war and progressive web sites have experienced a sharp fall in traffic generated by Google searches." https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/07/31/goog-j31.html

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-01/wikileaks-reveals-googles-strategic-plan-help-democrats-win-election : "Wikileaks Reveals Google's "Strategic Plan" To Help Democrats Win The Election, Track Voters"

annamaria , August 8, 2017 at 3:36 pm GMT

@Seamus Padraig "As Assistant DA for DC, Wasserman is also ultimately responsible for investigating the Seth Rich murder 13 months on and still no leads!"

Amazing. How come that the name "Wasserman" has become spread over the major ongoing DC scandals: The leak of the DNC emails (the pseudo-Russiangate), the greatest breach in the national cybersecurity (Awan affair), and finally, the death of Seth Rich, a DNC employee who went into contact with Wikileaks re the DNC machinations. Looks like American "democracy on the march," Clinton style.

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/05/debbie-wasserman-schultzs-brother-steven-wasserman-accused-burying-seth-rich-case/

"The Seth Rich Case: Nucleus of An American Coup Attempt:" http://www.phillip-butler.com/seth-rich-case/

Rurik , August 8, 2017 at 4:46 pm GMT

@annamaria

the greatest breach in the national cybersecurity (Awan affair)

and the Trump Justice Dept. seems to have zero interest in it

I suspect this and other reasons- like the serial leaks from the highest levels of the intelligence agencies are why Trump is becoming openly exasperated with Sessions

I suspect that Sessions knows that too much exposure of back-room dealings of the deepstate (with perhaps the Senate), would be potentially inconvenient.

when Lindsey Graham! came to Jeff Sessions defense, I sort of knew then that Jeff Sessions is a deepstate asset

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jul/27/lindsey-graham-warns-donald-trump-firing-jeff-sess/

Joe Tedesky , August 8, 2017 at 5:02 pm GMT

@F. G. Sanford What if the Awan brothers are "cutouts" for another intelligence agency? What if Seth Rich leaked the emails, and they exposed Hillary Clinton to prosecution? What if the "deep state" panicked because it could no longer control the narrative? What if Comey dragged his feet on a slam-dunk investigation because the "deep state" was sure Clinton would win, and it could all be buried? What if they hadn't had time to consider "Plan B" in time to head off investigation of Clinton Foundation fraud? What if they never expected that Anthony Wiener's sexting would get his computer seized by the NYPD? What if the whole story extends back to the Mueller, Wolfowitz, Clarke and Tenet cabal, and all of their think-tank gurus? What if somebody realizes that the planning stages had to predate the Bush-Cheney administration? What if Russia-gate and Clinton-gate are playing out as two hands in a game of strip poker? What if one side refuses to fold? What if Hillary threatens to file a sworn affidavit? What if Mueller is the historical analogue of John J. McCloy, the anonymous "deep state" Chairman of the Board? What if this is just a plot in the latest episode of war pornography? What if it's called, "Debbie Does Dulles", and its stars include "Many Talented Celebrities"? What are the chances that somebody important goes to jail? I'm guessing the odds are pretty long. I'm betting Hillary has the goods on all of them, and she'll file that affidavit if she has to. I'm sorry F.G., but what if all the various narratives, which are being supplied to the Seth Rich murder end up only being a way of hiding the truth within plain sight, so as to make it hard to distinguish between the real, and the phony, narratives which have been put in place, as to only confuse us truth seekers? This is how 'conspiracy theories' are made to become conspiracy theories.

Rurik , August 8, 2017 at 5:21 pm GMT

It's possible the Wasserman-Schultz – Awan scandal was raised subsequently by a caller to C Span, but as the above schedule of C Span Washington Journal programming displays, if the American people wanted to in-depth information about the Awans, they'd do better to tune in to RT, where Dr. Phil Giraldi explained the case and labeled it "the scandal of the century"

EdwardM , August 8, 2017 at 5:30 pm GMT

@annamaria "As Assistant DA for DC, Wasserman is also ultimately responsible for investigating the Seth Rich murder 13 months on and still no leads!"

Amazing. How come that the name "Wasserman" has become spread over the major ongoing DC scandals: The leak of the DNC emails (the pseudo-Russiangate), the greatest breach in the national cybersecurity (Awan affair), and finally, the death of Seth Rich, a DNC employee who went into contact with Wikileaks re the DNC machinations. Looks like American "democracy on the march," Clinton style.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/05/debbie-wasserman-schultzs-brother-steven-wasserman-accused-burying-seth-rich-case/
"The Seth Rich Case: Nucleus of An American Coup Attempt:" http://www.phillip-butler.com/seth-rich-case/ Where is Mr. Wasserman's boss, the U.S. Attorney for D.C.? Oh, right, it's an Obama holdover. Why hasn't President Trump put his own person in this critical job? (Apparently he has nominated someone but as usual the Senate is in no hurry to approve him. Nothing would stop DOJ from firing the current guy and placing the Trump nominee in an acting position, just as Obama did with the incumbent.)

This story would be hilarious if it weren't so serious. The quintessential example of foreigners from corrupt societies learning quickly how to work our system. We have to give the Awans credit for milking liberal banks' and Democrats' foreigner- and Muslim-worship (combined with sheer stupidity) to refrain from asking any questions.

MEexpert , August 8, 2017 at 5:35 pm GMT

@Ace Foreign-born people should be barred for life from holding any kind of security clearance. I mean in the highly unlikely event I were to become a Chinese citizen (and be 40 years younger), would the Chinese be so stupid as to give me a clearance and allow me to work in a key government office?

Obviously not but forget"obviously" when we're talking about the U.S.A.

Foreign-born people should be barred for life from holding any kind of security clearance.

Several years ago, I was denied employment in an aerospace company because I was considered a security risk for having relatives abroad. This was done in spite of the fact that I was already working for the same company in another division. In the end, I had the last laugh, because a week later a company employee, a native born white American, was arrested for passing out secret information.

chris , August 8, 2017 at 6:11 pm GMT

@annamaria "As Assistant DA for DC, Wasserman is also ultimately responsible for investigating the Seth Rich murder 13 months on and still no leads!"

Amazing. How come that the name "Wasserman" has become spread over the major ongoing DC scandals: The leak of the DNC emails (the pseudo-Russiangate), the greatest breach in the national cybersecurity (Awan affair), and finally, the death of Seth Rich, a DNC employee who went into contact with Wikileaks re the DNC machinations. Looks like American "democracy on the march," Clinton style.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/05/debbie-wasserman-schultzs-brother-steven-wasserman-accused-burying-seth-rich-case/
"The Seth Rich Case: Nucleus of An American Coup Attempt:" http://www.phillip-butler.com/seth-rich-case/ Maybe it should be called Wassergate.

annamaria , August 8, 2017 at 6:44 pm GMT

@EdwardM Where is Mr. Wasserman's boss, the U.S. Attorney for D.C.? Oh, right, it's an Obama holdover. Why hasn't President Trump put his own person in this critical job? (Apparently he has nominated someone but as usual the Senate is in no hurry to approve him. Nothing would stop DOJ from firing the current guy and placing the Trump nominee in an acting position, just as Obama did with the incumbent.)

This story would be hilarious if it weren't so serious. The quintessential example of foreigners from corrupt societies learning quickly how to work our system. We have to give the Awans credit for milking liberal banks' and Democrats' foreigner- and Muslim-worship (combined with sheer stupidity) to refrain from asking any questions. There is no Muslim-worship among the ziocons at DNC, who got caught in the Awan affair. The Muslim card is a desperate argument for the currently unstoppable process of investigation. Whether Mr. Wasserman or his boss or Clintons' lawyer defending Awan for the undisclosed amount of money, the train is moving and the word Treason is in the air.
The most serious detail of the Awan affair is the violation of the protocol re classified information: The Awan family had no security clearance, there was no documentation of the confirmation of the previous employment and no records for their relevant education/training. Just to reiterate: the family (with a history of fraud and suspicious connections) has an open access to the classified documents of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. http://dailycaller.com/2017/02/04/exclusive-house-intelligence-it-staffers-fired-in-computer-security-probe/
Wasserman-Schultz has been directly involved in the greatest breach of the national cybersecurity. She tried to impede the investigation and she kept the fraudsters on the US-taxpayers-paid payroll up to the day of the arrest of the main culprit. She did that despite being warned by the police. She should be stripped already of her security clearance and arrested for the breach that was done on her watch and with her active help.

annamaria , August 8, 2017 at 6:51 pm GMT

@chris Maybe it should be called Wassergate. Wassergate. Great suggestion.

Ace , August 8, 2017 at 7:23 pm GMT

@MEexpert


Foreign-born people should be barred for life from holding any kind of security clearance.
Several years ago, I was denied employment in an aerospace company because I was considered a security risk for having relatives abroad. This was done in spite of the fact that I was already working for the same company in another division. In the end, I had the last laugh, because a week later a company employee, a native born white American, was arrested for passing out secret information. It's all about minimizing risk. My respect for Sikhs would make me inclined to grant security clearances to them liberally. My overall position, however, is that we have let in far too many foreigners than sane persons would and are stupidly phlegmatic about leaving illegals here to "make a life for themselves" or "make a contribution" (at the expense of native born Americans).

You were entitled to the last laugh indeed. We do not lack for native born white Americans. In fact, they are the source of our fundamental problems.

annamaria , August 8, 2017 at 7:27 pm GMT

The Kagans' clan triumph in Ukraine: http://www.fort-russ.com/2017/08/neo-nazi-commander-running-for.html
"The creator and ex-commander of the Neo- Nazi "Azov" battalion Andrei Biletsky has announced his running for president of Ukraine."
This Biletsky: http://www.fort-russ.com/2017/04/ukrainian-nazi-leader-threatens-new.html
This deserves a special new addition for the Holocaust Museums.

The Alarmist , August 8, 2017 at 8:46 pm GMT

@Biff


n no explanation why she was even allowed to leave since carrying more than $10,000 out of the country without reporting it is a felony.
Not a felony, but a mere civil infraction. Not reporting carrying more than $10k across the border can be either a criminal charge with fines up to $500k and jail time, or a civil violation which often results in all unreported assets being seized and forfeit and possibly with a civil penalty of up to the amount forfeit, or even both criminal and civil. The fact that she was allowed to go on her way with her cash shows an unusual deference to the lady.
Ace , August 8, 2017 at 9:16 pm GMT

@Seamus Padraig His boss, no doubt, is also an Obama flunkee. That's entirely possible given Trump's bewildering indifference to personnel matters.

He appears to have been hamstrung at the outset, eschewing both philosophical leadership and staffing up with loyalists. His director of personnel is a bad joke but Trump simply doesn't see it or care. He made a point of saying how he hires good people and lets them run but competent isn't the same thing as loyal or otherwise appropriate

Sowhat , August 8, 2017 at 9:27 pm GMT

@Cloak And Dagger It should come as no surprise to anyone that the law is only meant for we ordinary citizens and not for the elite. Those of us who are silently hoping for the indictment of Debbie and Hillary are sure to be sorely disappointed.

There is no justice anymore in these United States whose domestic and foreign policies are controlled by the deep state. Some days can be so bleak... I agreed but it sure would be nice if Sessions would get her and her brother.

Sowhat , August 8, 2017 at 9:48 pm GMT

@anonymous This is a staggering story. What a load of incompetence and coverup. This government is a total sieve. Of course those people were spying. Even if they didn't want to spy, for whatever reason, the Pakistani government could surely find ways to 'convince' them to do so. Most of these politicians appear to be so clueless that it's difficult to comprehend. It's just a carnival of taxpayer ripoff in DC. It could possibly be a case of intensional incompetence. There are a huge number of people IN Congress that are totally committed to destruction from within. The Trojan Horse has been within the gates for a surprising number of years. Trevor Loudon has an interesting video on Amazon titled The Enemies (inclde the "s") Within. If accurate, it IS intensional incompetence. It may be on Youtube as well.

Pachyderm Pachyderma , August 8, 2017 at 9:50 pm GMT

La (w)hore Pakistan is most likely in bed with her pimp du jour, China and using the Pakis working for the US Congress to secure data to be passed on to their handlers at ISI who in turn, pass it on to Beijing. And let's not forget the Saudis

Philip Giraldi , August 8, 2017 at 9:52 pm GMT

@Sowhat I agreed but it sure would be nice if Sessions would get her...and her brother. I just saw this posted. Don't know if it is completely true but it fits with other information. Devastating.

http://truepundit.com/exclusive-fbi-debbie-wasserman-schultz-pressured-congressional-bank-to-give-illicit-loan-to-imran-awan-and-wife/

RobinG , August 8, 2017 at 9:53 pm GMT

@Joe Tedesky I'm sorry F.G., but what if all the various narratives, which are being supplied to the Seth Rich murder end up only being a way of hiding the truth within plain sight, so as to make it hard to distinguish between the real, and the phony, narratives which have been put in place, as to only confuse us truth seekers? This is how 'conspiracy theories' are made to become conspiracy theories. F.G. said "What if the Awan brothers are "cutouts" for another intelligence agency?" But of course. They're perfect patsies, just like in our most famous "conspiracy theory" dubbed case.

Were the Awan brothers really gathering intelligence for Pakistan's ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence)? And was the ISI on secret contract with the CIA?

http://cosmicconvergence.org/?p=20927

AWANGATE: A CIA Black Operation That Used Pakistan's ISI To Do The Dirty Work While MOSSAD's Inside Woman Directs

Eagle Eye , August 8, 2017 at 10:22 pm GMT

@Seamus Padraig


I for one was appalled to learn that the official who quite likely will oversee the investigation of the Awans is one Steven Wasserman, Assistant Attorney for the District of Columbia, the brother of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
Yup. And guess what? As Assistant DA for DC, Wasserman is also ultimately responsible for investigating the Seth Rich murder ... 13 months on and still no leads!

When the hell are Trump and Sessions going to get serious about going after these freaks?

As Assistant DA for DC, Wasserman is also ultimately responsible for investigating the Seth Rich murder 13 months on and still no leads!

In a recent broadcast, Michael Savage suddenly savaged what he called "fake news from the right" such as the Seth Rich murder, Pizzagate (which he misrepresented as relating to hookers), etc. The presentation seemed curiously disengaged.

My guess is that Savage and his family were physically threatened.

SolontoCroesus , August 8, 2017 at 11:16 pm GMT

@Sam Shama What evidence prompts your scepticism about the Hezbollah connection? Al-Attar is a known Hezbollah operative with a connection to Awan. Pakistan is next door to Iran which finances Hezbollah. You want all that to be airbrushed away?

What evidence prompts your scepticism about the Hezbollah connection?

Read what was written: LACK of evidence -- in the face of the logic of antipathies -- prompts the skepticism.

Pakistan is next door to Iran which finances Hezbollah. You want all that to be airbrushed away?

Israel shares borders with Lebanon, which is home to Hezbollah; it was at Israel's instigation that Hezbollah came into being.
Does that constitute "evidence" that Israel supports Hezbollah and is also/likewise complicit in Wassergate (h/t Chris @ #35)?
Or do you prefer that Israel's involvement be airbrushed away ?

Alden , August 8, 2017 at 11:59 pm GMT

@Pachyderm Pachyderma La (w)hore Pakistan is most likely in bed with her pimp du jour, China and using the Pakis working for the US Congress to secure data to be passed on to their handlers at ISI who in turn, pass it on to Beijing. And let's not forget the Saudis... I think you are absolutely right that the Pakis passed on information to China and any other country willing to pay for it.

[Jul 30, 2017] the Ukrainingate emerging from the evidence on Hillary campaign sounds like a criminal conspiracy of foreign state against Trump

Highly recommended!
That probably explains that Trump was initially very cold toward Ukraine and needed to be kicked by neocon to produce the necessary sounds. He knew.
Jul 30, 2017 | turcopolier.typepad.com

turcopolier , 26 July 2017 at 07:18 PM

FB Ali

Would you agree that this sounds like a criminal conspiracy? pl

FB Ali -> turcopolier ... , 26 July 2017 at 07:21 PM
I would!

But I'm surprised that no one 'official' is treating it as such.

Richardstevenhack -> FB Ali ... , 26 July 2017 at 07:21 PM
There is some ramp up of calls to investigate the "Ukraine Connection"...

Senator Asks DOJ About Democrats' Work With Ukraine To Smear Trump Campaign
http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/24/senator-asks-doj-about-democrats-work-with-ukraine-to-smear-trump-campaign/

Also, Christopher Wray was asked about this and said he might look into it:

UH OH: Trump's FBI Nominee Says He May Investigate Clinton Collusion
http://www.hannity.com/content/2017-07-13-uh-oh-trumps-fbi-nominee-says-he-may-investigate-clinton-collusion/

Going down that rabbit hole just might result in exposing a DNC-Clinton-CrowdStrike-Ukraine actual collusion...

[Jul 29, 2017] Ray McGovern The Deep State Assault on Elected Government Must Be Stopped

Highly recommended!
Ray McGovern raise important fact: DNC hide evidence from FBI outsourcing everything to CrowdStrike. This is the most unexplainable fact in the whole story. One hypotheses that Ray advanced here that there was so many hacks into DNC that they wanted to hide.
Another important point is CIA role in elections, and specifically John O. Brennan behaviour. Brennan's 25 years with the CIA included work as a Near East and South Asia analyst and as station chief in Saudi Arabia.
McGovern thing that Brennon actually controlled Obama. And in his opinion Brennan was the main leaker of Trump surveillance information.
Notable quotes:
"... Do really think the Deep State cares about the environment. Trump is our only chance to damage Deep State. McGovern is wrong... DNC were from Seth Rich, inside DNC. Murdered for it. McGovern is wrong... i could go on and on but suffice it to say his confidence is way to high. He is wrong. ..."
Apr 2, 2017 | www.youtube.com

Greg Rhodes 3 months ago

I really like Ray... I watch and listen , he seems to use logic, reason and facts in his assessments.. I'm surprised CIA and the deep state allow him to operate ... stay safe Ray...
Robert Eargle 2 months ago

McGovern, you idiot. To try to put Trump on Hillary's level is complete stupidity. The war with Russia or nothing was avoided with a Trump victory. Remember the NATO build up on the Russian border preparing for a Hillary win? Plus, if Hillary won, justice and law in the USA would be over with forever. The Germans dont know sht about the USA to say their little cute phrase. Trump is a very calm mannered man and his hands on the nuke button is an issue only to those who watch the fake MSM. And no the NSA has not released anything either. Wrong on that point too.

Manley Nelson 2 months ago

The German expression of USA having a choice between cholera and plague is ignorant. McGovern is wrong ....everyone knew HRC was a criminal. McGovern is wrong... Jill Stein in not trustworthy. A vote for Jill Stein was a vote away from Trump. If Jill Stein or HRC were elected their would be no environment left to save. Do really think the Deep State cares about the environment. Trump is our only chance to damage Deep State. McGovern is wrong... DNC were from Seth Rich, inside DNC. Murdered for it. McGovern is wrong... i could go on and on but suffice it to say his confidence is way to high. He is wrong.

Rodger Asai 3 months ago

Another month or so and the DHS may offer a color-coding system to help the sheeple understand various levels of confidence. Green - Moderate Confidence Blue - High Confidence Yellow - Very High Confidence Orange - Extremely High Confidence Red - Based on Actual Fact

The last category may be one of the signs of the apocalypse.

KELLI2L2 3 months ago

As it turned out Jill Stein was a bad choice too... Recount debacle.

midnighfairy 1 month ago

I want Hilary to pay for her lies

[Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills

Highly recommended!
max Book is just anothe "Yascha about Russia" type, that Masha Gessen represents so vividly. The problem with him is that time of neocon prominance is solidly in the past and now unpleasant question about the cost from the US people of their reckless foreign policies get into some newspapers and managines. They cost the USA tremedous anount of money (as in trillions) and those money consititute a large portion of the national debt. Critiques so far were very weak and partially suppressed voices, but defeat of neocon warmonger Hillary signify some break with the past.
Notable quotes:
"... National Interest ..."
"... Carlson's record suggests that he has been in the camp skeptical of U.S. foreign-policy intervention for some time now and, indeed, that it predates Donald Trump's rise to power. (Carlson has commented publicly that he was humiliated by his own public support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.) According to Carlson, "This is not about Trump. This is not about Trump. It's the one thing in American life that has nothing to do with Trump. My views on this are totally unrelated to my views on Donald Trump. This has been going since September 11, 2001. And it's a debate that we've never really had. And we need to have it." He adds, "I don't think the public has ever been for the ideas that undergird our policies." ..."
"... National Interest ..."
"... But the fight also seems to have a personal edge. Carlson says, "Max Boot is not impressive. . . . Max is a totally mediocre person." Carlson added that he felt guilty about not having, in his assessment, a superior guest to Boot on the show to defend hawkishness. "I wish I had had someone clear-thinking and smart on to represent their views. And there are a lot of them. I would love to have that debate," Carlson told me, periodically emphasizing that he is raring to go on this subject. ..."
"... New York Observer ..."
"... National Interest ..."
"... Weekly Standard ..."
"... Weekly Standard ..."
"... Though he eschews labels, Carlson sounds like a foreign-policy realist on steroids: "You can debate what's in [the United States'] interest. That's a subjective category. But what you can't debate is that ought to be the basic question, the first, second and third question. Does it represent our interest? . . . I don't think that enters into the calculations of a lot of the people who make these decisions." Carlson's interests extend beyond foreign policy, and he says "there's a massive realignment going on ideologically that everybody is missing. It's dramatic. And everyone is missing it. . . . Nobody is paying attention to it, " ..."
"... : Flickr/Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0. ..."
Jul 14, 2017 | nationalinterest.org

This week's primetime knife fights with Max Boot and Ralph Peters are emblematic of the battle for the soul of the American Right.

To be sure, Carlson rejects the term "neoconservatism," and implicitly, its corollary on the Democratic side, liberal internationalism. In 2016, "the reigning Republican foreign-policy view, you can call it neoconservatism, or interventionism, or whatever you want to call it" was rejected, he explained in a wide-ranging interview with the National Interest Friday.

"But I don't like the term 'neoconservatism,'" he says, "because I don't even know what it means. I think it describes the people rather than their ideas, which is what I'm interested in. And to be perfectly honest . . . I have a lot of friends who have been described as neocons, people I really love, sincerely. And they are offended by it. So I don't use it," Carlson said.

But Carlson's recent segments on foreign policy conducted with Lt. Col. Ralph Peters and the prominent neoconservative journalist and author Max Boot were acrimonious even by Carlsonian standards. In a discussion on Syria, Russia and Iran, a visibly upset Boot accused Carlson of being "immoral" and taking foreign-policy positions to curry favor with the White House, keep up his ratings , and by proxy, benefit financially. Boot says that Carlson "basically parrots whatever the pro-Trump line is that Fox viewers want to see. If Trump came out strongly against Putin tomorrow, I imagine Tucker would echo this as faithfully as the pro-Russia arguments he echoes today." But is this assessment fair?

Carlson's record suggests that he has been in the camp skeptical of U.S. foreign-policy intervention for some time now and, indeed, that it predates Donald Trump's rise to power. (Carlson has commented publicly that he was humiliated by his own public support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.) According to Carlson, "This is not about Trump. This is not about Trump. It's the one thing in American life that has nothing to do with Trump. My views on this are totally unrelated to my views on Donald Trump. This has been going since September 11, 2001. And it's a debate that we've never really had. And we need to have it." He adds, "I don't think the public has ever been for the ideas that undergird our policies."

Even if Carlson doesn't want to use the label neocon to describe some of those ideas, Boot is not so bashful. In 2005, Boot wrote an essay called "Neocons May Get the Last Laugh." Carlson "has become a Trump acolyte in pursuit of ratings," says Boot, also interviewed by the National Interest . "I bet if it were President Clinton accused of colluding with the Russians, Tucker would be outraged and calling for impeachment if not execution. But since it's Trump, then it's all a big joke to him," Boot says. Carlson vociferously dissents from such assessments: "This is what dumb people do. They can't assess the merits of an argument. . . . I'm not talking about Syria, and Russia, and Iran because of ratings. That's absurd. I can't imagine those were anywhere near the most highly-rated segments that night. That's not why I wanted to do it."

But Carlson insists, "I have been saying the same thing for fifteen years. Now I have a T.V. show that people watch, so my views are better known. But it shouldn't be a surprise. I supported Trump to the extent he articulated beliefs that I agree with. . . . And I don't support Trump to the extent that his actions deviate from those beliefs," Carlson said. Boot on Fox said that Carlson is "too smart" for this kind of argument. But Carlson has bucked the Trump line, notably on Trump's April 7 strikes in Syria. "When the Trump administration threw a bunch of cruise missiles into Syria for no obvious reason, on the basis of a pretext that I question . . . I questioned [the decision] immediately. On T.V. I was on the air when that happened. I think, maybe seven minutes into my show. . . . I thought this was reckless."

But the fight also seems to have a personal edge. Carlson says, "Max Boot is not impressive. . . . Max is a totally mediocre person." Carlson added that he felt guilty about not having, in his assessment, a superior guest to Boot on the show to defend hawkishness. "I wish I had had someone clear-thinking and smart on to represent their views. And there are a lot of them. I would love to have that debate," Carlson told me, periodically emphasizing that he is raring to go on this subject.

Boot objects to what he sees as a cavalier attitude on the part of Carlson and others toward allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and also toward the deaths of citizens of other countries. "You are laughing about the fact that Russia is interfering in our election process. That to me is immoral," Boot told Carlson on his show. "This is the level of dumbness and McCarthyism in Washington right now," says Carlson. "I think it has the virtue of making Max Boot feel like a good person. Like he's on God's team, or something like that. But how does that serve the interest of the country? It doesn't." Carlson says that Donald Trump, Jr.'s emails aren't nearly as important as who is going to lead Syria, which he says Boot and others have no plan for successfully occupying. Boot, by contrast, sees the U.S. administration as dangerously flirting with working with Russia, Iran and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. "For whatever reason, Trump is pro-Putin, no one knows why, and he's taken a good chunk of the GOP along with him," Boot says.

On Fox last Wednesday, Boot reminded Carlson that he originally supported the 2003 Iraq decision. "You supported the invasion of Iraq," Boot said, before repeating, "You supported the invasion of Iraq." Carlson conceded that, but it seems the invasion was a bona fide turning point. It's most important to parse whether Carlson has a long record of anti-interventionism, or if he's merely sniffing the throne of the president (who, dubiously, may have opposed the 2003 invasion). "I think it's a total nightmare and disaster, and I'm ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it," Carlson told the New York Observer in early 2004. "It's something I'll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who's smarter than I am, and I shouldn't have done that. . . . I'm enraged by it, actually." Carlson told the National Interest that he's felt this way since seeing Iraq for himself in December 2003.

The evidence points heavily toward a sincere conversion on Carlson's part, or preexisting conviction that was briefly overcome by the beat of the war drums. Carlson did work for the Weekly Standard , perhaps the most prominent neoconservative magazine, in the 1990s and early 2000s. Carlson today speaks respectfully of William Kristol, its founding editor, but has concluded that he is all wet. On foreign policy, the people Carlson speaks most warmly about are genuine hard left-wingers: Glenn Greenwald, a vociferous critic of both economic neoliberalism and neoconservatism; the anti-establishment journalist Michael Tracey; Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation ; and her husband, Stephen Cohen, the Russia expert and critic of U.S. foreign policy.

"The only people in American public life who are raising these questions are on the traditional left: not lifestyle liberals, not the Williamsburg (Brooklyn) group, not liberals in D.C., not Nancy Pelosi." He calls the expertise of establishment sources on matters like Syria "more shallow than I even imagined." On his MSNBC show, which was canceled for poor ratings, he cavorted with noninterventionist stalwarts such as Ron Paul , the 2008 and 2012 antiwar GOP candidate, and Patrick J. Buchanan. "No one is smarter than Pat Buchanan," he said last year of the man whose ideas many say laid the groundwork for Trump's political success.

Carlson has risen to the pinnacle of cable news, succeeding Bill O'Reilly. It wasn't always clear an antiwar take would vault someone to such prominence. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio or Mitt Romney could be president (Boot has advised the latter two). But here he is, and it's likely no coincidence that Carlson got a show after Trump's election, starting at the 7 p.m. slot, before swiftly moving to the 9 p.m. slot to replace Trump antagonist Megyn Kelly, and just as quickly replacing O'Reilly at the top slot, 8 p.m. Boot, on the other hand, declared in 2016 that the Republican Party was dead , before it went on to hold Congress and most state houses, and of course take the presidency. He's still at the Council on Foreign Relations and writes for the New York Times (this seems to clearly annoy Carlson: "It tells you everything about the low standards of the American foreign-policy establishment").

Boot wrote in 2003 in the Weekly Standard that the fall of Saddam Hussein's government "may turn out to be one of those hinge moments in history" comparable to "events like the storming of the Bastille or the fall of the Berlin Wall, after which everything is different." He continued, "If the occupation goes well (admittedly a big if ), it may mark the moment when the powerful antibiotic known as democracy was introduced into the diseased environment of the Middle East, and began to transform the region for the better."

Though he eschews labels, Carlson sounds like a foreign-policy realist on steroids: "You can debate what's in [the United States'] interest. That's a subjective category. But what you can't debate is that ought to be the basic question, the first, second and third question. Does it represent our interest? . . . I don't think that enters into the calculations of a lot of the people who make these decisions." Carlson's interests extend beyond foreign policy, and he says "there's a massive realignment going on ideologically that everybody is missing. It's dramatic. And everyone is missing it. . . . Nobody is paying attention to it, "

Carlson seems intent on pressing the issue. The previous night, in his debate with Peters, the retired lieutenant colonel said that Carlson sounded like Charles Lindbergh, who opposed U.S. intervention against Nazi Germany before 1941. "This particular strain of Republican foreign policy has almost no constituency. Nobody agrees with it. I mean there's not actually a large group of people outside of New York, Washington or L.A. who think any of this is a good idea," Carlson says. "All I am is an asker of obvious questions. And that's enough to reveal these people have no idea what they're talking about. None."

Curt Mills is a foreign-affairs reporter at the National Interest . Follow him on Twitter: @CurtMills .

Image : Flickr/Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.

[Jul 13, 2017] Progressive Democrats Resist and Submit, Retreat and Surrender by James Petras

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "Have you ever met or talked to any Russian official or relative of any Russian banker, or any Russian or even read Gogol, now or in the past?" ..."
"... Progressives joined the FBI/CIA's 'Russian Bear' conspiracy: " Russia intervened and decided the Presidential election" – no matter that millions of workers and rural Americans had voted against Hillary Clinton, Wall Street's candidate and no matter that no evidence of direct interference was ever presented. Progressives could not accept that 'their constituents', the masses, had rejected Madame Clinton and preferred 'the Donald'. They attacked a shifty-eyed caricature of the repeatedly elected Russian President Putin as a subterfuge for attacking the disobedient 'white trash' electorate of 'Deploralandia'. ..."
"... Progressive demagogues embraced the coifed and manicured former 'Director Comey' of the FBI, and the Mr. Potato-headed Capo of the CIA and their forty thugs in making accusations without finger or footprints. ..."
"... Then Progressives turned increasingly Orwellian: Ignoring Obama's actual expulsion of over 2 million immigrant workers, they condemned Trump for promising to eventually expel 5 million more! ..."
"... Progressives, under Obama, supported seven brutal illegal wars and pressed for more, but complained when Trump continued the same wars and proposed adding a few new ones. At the same time, progressives out-militarized Trump by accusing him of being 'weak' on Russia, Iran, North Korea and China. They chided him for his lack support for Israel's suppression of the Palestinians. They lauded Trump's embrace of the Saudi war against Yemen as a stepping-stone for an assault against Iran, even as millions of destitute Yemenis were exposed to cholera. The Progressives had finally embraced a biological weapon of mass destruction, when US-supplied missiles destroyed the water systems of Yemen! ..."
"... Thank you for putting your finger on the main problem right there in the first paragraph. There were exceptions of course. I supported Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic Primary that gave us the first black etc. But I never voted for Obama. Throughout the Cheney Admin I pleaded with progressives to bolt the party. ..."
"... This is an excellent summary of the evolution of "progressives" into modern militarist fascists who tolerate identity politics diversity. There is little to add to Mr. Petras' commentary. ..."
"... Barak Obama is America's biggest con man who accomplished nothing "progressive" during eight years at the top, and didn't even try. (Obamacare is an insurance industry idea supported by most Republicans, which is why it recently survived.) Anyone who still likes Obama should read about his actions since he left office. Obama quickly signed a $65 million "book deal", which can only be a kickback since there is no way the publisher can sell enough books about his meaningless presidency to justify that sum. Obama doesn't get royalties based on sales, but gets the money up front for a book he has yet to write, and will have someone do that for him. (Book deals and speaking fees are legal forms of bribery in the USA.) ..."
"... Then Obama embarked on 100 days of ultra expensive foreign vacations with taxpayers covering the Secret Service protection costs. He didn't appear at charity fundraisers, didn't campaign for Democrats, and didn't help build homes for the poor like Jimmy Carter. He returns from vacation this week and his first speech will be at a Wall Street firm that will pay him $400,000, then he travels to Europe for more paid speeches. ..."
"... They chose power over principles. Nobel War Prize winner Obomber was a particularly egregious chameleon, hiding his sociopathy through two elections before unleashing his racist warmongering in full flower throughout his second term. ..."
"... Like a huge collective 'Monica Lewinsky' robot, the Progressives in the Democratic Party bent over and swallowed Clinton's vicious 1999 savaging of the venerable Glass Steagall Act ..."
Jul 10, 2017 | www.unz.com

Introduction

Over the past quarter century progressive writers, activists and academics have followed a trajectory from left to right – with each presidential campaign seeming to move them further to the right. Beginning in the 1990's progressives mobilized millions in opposition to wars, voicing demands for the transformation of the US's corporate for-profit medical system into a national 'Medicare For All' public program. They condemned the notorious Wall Street swindlers and denounced police state legislation and violence. But in the end, they always voted for Democratic Party Presidential candidates who pursued the exact opposite agenda.

Over time this political contrast between program and practice led to the transformation of the Progressives. And what we see today are US progressives embracing and promoting the politics of the far right.

To understand this transformation we will begin by identifying who and what the progressives are and describe their historical role. We will then proceed to identify their trajectory over the recent decades.

Progressives by Name and Posture

Progressives purport to embrace 'progress', the growth of the economy, the enrichment of society and freedom from arbitrary government. Central to the Progressive agenda was the end of elite corruption and good governance, based on democratic procedures.

Progressives prided themselves as appealing to 'reason, diplomacy and conciliation', not brute force and wars. They upheld the sovereignty of other nations and eschewed militarism and armed intervention.

Progressives proposed a vision of their fellow citizens pursuing incremental evolution toward the 'good society', free from the foreign entanglements, which had entrapped the people in unjust wars.

Progressives in Historical Perspective

In the early part of the 20th century, progressives favored political equality while opposing extra-parliamentary social transformations. They supported gender equality and environmental preservation while failing to give prominence to the struggles of workers and African Americans.

They denounced militarism 'in general' but supported a series of 'wars to end all wars' . Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson embodied the dual policies of promoting peace at home and bloody imperial wars overseas. By the middle of the 20th century, different strands emerged under the progressive umbrella. Progressives split between traditional good government advocates and modernists who backed socio-economic reforms, civil liberties and rights.

Progressives supported legislation to regulate monopolies, encouraged collective bargaining and defended the Bill of Rights.

Progressives opposed wars and militarism in theory until their government went to war.

Lacking an effective third political party, progressives came to see themselves as the 'left wing' of the Democratic Party, allies of labor and civil rights movements and defenders of civil liberties.

Progressives joined civil rights leaders in marches, but mostly relied on legal and electoral means to advance African American rights.

Progressives played a pivotal role in fighting McCarthyism, though ultimately it was the Secretary of the Army and the military high command that brought Senator McCarthy to his knees.

Progressives provided legal defense when the social movements disrupted the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

They popularized the legislative arguments that eventually outlawed segregation, but it was courageous Afro-American leaders heading mass movements that won the struggle for integration and civil rights.

In many ways the Progressives complemented the mass struggles, but their limits were defined by the constraints of their membership in the Democratic Party.

The alliance between Progressives and social movements peaked in the late sixties to mid-1970's when the Progressives followed the lead of dynamic and advancing social movements and community organizers especially in opposition to the wars in Indochina and the military draft.

The Retreat of the Progressives

By the late 1970's the Progressives had cut their anchor to the social movements, as the anti-war, civil rights and labor movements lost their impetus (and direction).

The numbers of progressives within the left wing of the Democratic Party increased through recruitment from earlier social movements. Paradoxically, while their 'numbers' were up, their caliber had declined, as they sought to 'fit in' with the pro-business, pro-war agenda of their President's party.

Without the pressure of the 'populist street' the 'Progressives-turned-Democrats' adapted to the corporate culture in the Party. The Progressives signed off on a fatal compromise: The corporate elite secured the electoral party while the Progressives were allowed to write enlightened manifestos about the candidates and their programs . . . which were quickly dismissed once the Democrats took office. Yet the ability to influence the 'electoral rhetoric' was seen by the Progressives as a sufficient justification for remaining inside the Democratic Party.

Moreover the Progressives argued that by strengthening their presence in the Democratic Party, (their self-proclaimed 'boring from within' strategy), they would capture the party membership, neutralize the pro-corporation, militarist elements that nominated the president and peacefully transform the party into a 'vehicle for progressive changes'.

Upon their successful 'deep penetration' the Progressives, now cut off from the increasingly disorganized mass social movements, coopted and bought out many prominent black, labor and civil liberty activists and leaders, while collaborating with what they dubbed the more malleable 'centrist' Democrats. These mythical creatures were really pro-corporate Democrats who condescended to occasionally converse with the Progressives while working for the Wall Street and Pentagon elite.

The Retreat of the Progressives: The Clinton Decade

Progressives adapted the 'crab strategy': Moving side-ways and then backwards but never forward.

Progressives mounted candidates in the Presidential primaries, which were predictably defeated by the corporate Party apparatus, and then submitted immediately to the outcome. The election of President 'Bill' Clinton launched a period of unrestrained financial plunder, major wars of aggression in Europe (Yugoslavia) and the Middle East (Iraq), a military intervention in Somalia and secured Israel's victory over any remnant of a secular Palestinian leadership as well as its destruction of Lebanon!

Like a huge collective 'Monica Lewinsky' robot, the Progressives in the Democratic Party bent over and swallowed Clinton's vicious 1999 savaging of the venerable Glass Steagall Act, thereby opening the floodgates for massive speculation on Wall Street through the previously regulated banking sector. When President Clinton gutted welfare programs, forcing single mothers to take minimum-wage jobs without provision for safe childcare, millions of poor white and minority women were forced to abandon their children to dangerous makeshift arrangements in order to retain any residual public support and access to minimal health care. Progressives looked the other way.

Progressives followed Clinton's deep throated thrust toward the far right, as he outsourced manufacturing jobs to Mexico (NAFTA) and re-appointed Federal Reserve's free market, Ayn Rand-fanatic, Alan Greenspan.

Progressives repeatedly kneeled before President Clinton marking their submission to the Democrats' 'hard right' policies.

The election of Republican President G. W. Bush (2001-2009) permitted Progressive's to temporarily trot out and burnish their anti-war, anti-Wall Street credentials. Out in the street, they protested Bush's savage invasion of Iraq (but not the destruction of Afghanistan). They protested the media reports of torture in Abu Ghraib under Bush, but not the massive bombing and starvation of millions of Iraqis that had occurred under Clinton. Progressives protested the expulsion of immigrants from Mexico and Central America, but were silent over the brutal uprooting of refugees resulting from US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the systematic destruction of their nations' infrastructure.

Progressives embraced Israel's bombing, jailing and torture of Palestinians by voting unanimously in favor of increasing the annual $3 billion dollar military handouts to the brutal Jewish State. They supported Israel's bombing and slaughter in Lebanon.

Progressives were in retreat, but retained a muffled voice and inconsequential vote in favor of peace, justice and civil liberties. They kept a certain distance from the worst of the police state decrees by the Republican Administration.

Progressives and Obama: From Retreat to Surrender

While Progressives maintained their tepid commitment to civil liberties, and their highly 'leveraged' hopes for peace in the Middle East, they jumped uncritically into the highly choreographed Democratic Party campaign for Barack Obama, 'Wall Street's First Black President'.

Progressives had given up their quest to 'realign' the Democratic Party 'from within': they turned from serious tourism to permanent residency. Progressives provided the foot soldiers for the election and re-election of the warmongering 'Peace Candidate' Obama. After the election, Progressives rushed to join the lower echelons of his Administration. Black and white politicos joined hands in their heroic struggle to erase the last vestiges of the Progressives' historical legacy.

Obama increased the number of Bush-era imperial wars to attacking seven weak nations under American's 'First Black' President's bombardment, while the Progressives ensured that the streets were quiet and empty.

When Obama provided trillions of dollars of public money to rescue Wall Street and the bankers, while sacrificing two million poor and middle class mortgage holders, the Progressives only criticized the bankers who received the bailout, but not Obama's Presidential decision to protect and reward the mega-swindlers.

Under the Obama regime social inequalities within the United States grew at an unprecedented rate. The Police State Patriot Act was massively extended to give President Obama the power to order the assassination of US citizens abroad without judicial process. The Progressives did not resign when Obama's 'kill orders' extended to the 'mistaken' murder of his target's children and other family member, as well as unidentified bystanders. The icon carriers still paraded their banner of the 'first black American President' when tens of thousands of black Libyans and immigrant workers were slaughtered in his regime-change war against President Gadhafi.

Obama surpassed the record of all previous Republican office holders in terms of the massive numbers of immigrant workers arrested and expelled – 2 million. Progressives applauded the Latino protestors while supporting the policies of their 'first black President'.

Progressive accepted that multiple wars, Wall Street bailouts and the extended police state were now the price they would pay to remain part of the "Democratic coalition' (sic).

The deeper the Progressives swilled at the Democratic Party trough, the more they embraced the Obama's free market agenda and the more they ignored the increasing impoverishment, exploitation and medical industry-led opioid addiction of American workers that was shortening their lives. Under Obama, the Progressives totally abandoned the historic American working class, accepting their degradation into what Madam Hillary Clinton curtly dismissed as the 'deplorables'.

With the Obama Presidency, the Progressive retreat turned into a rout, surrendering with one flaccid caveat: the Democratic Party 'Socialist' Bernie Sanders, who had voted 90% of the time with the Corporate Party, had revived a bastardized military-welfare state agenda.

Sander's Progressive demagogy shouted and rasped on the campaign trail, beguiling the young electorate. The 'Bernie' eventually 'sheep-dogged' his supporters into the pro-war Democratic Party corral. Sanders revived an illusion of the pre-1990 progressive agenda, promising resistance while demanding voter submission to Wall Street warlord Hillary Clinton. After Sanders' round up of the motley progressive herd, he staked them tightly to the far-right Wall Street war mongering Hillary Clinton. The Progressives not only embraced Madame Secretary Clinton's nuclear option and virulent anti-working class agenda, they embellished it by focusing on Republican billionaire Trump's demagogic, nationalist, working class rhetoric which was designed to agitate 'the deplorables'. They even turned on the working class voters, dismissing them as 'irredeemable' racists and illiterates or 'white trash' when they turned to support Trump in massive numbers in the 'fly-over' states of the central US.

Progressives, allied with the police state, the mass media and the war machine worked to defeat and impeach Trump. Progressives surrendered completely to the Democratic Party and started to advocate its far right agenda. Hysterical McCarthyism against anyone who questioned the Democrats' promotion of war with Russia, mass media lies and manipulation of street protest against Republican elected officials became the centerpieces of the Progressive agenda. The working class and farmers had disappeared from their bastardized 'identity-centered' ideology.

Guilt by association spread throughout Progressive politics. Progressives embraced J. Edgar Hoover's FBI tactics: "Have you ever met or talked to any Russian official or relative of any Russian banker, or any Russian or even read Gogol, now or in the past?" For progressives, 'Russia-gate' defined the real focus of contemporary political struggle in this huge, complex, nuclear-armed superpower.

Progressives joined the FBI/CIA's 'Russian Bear' conspiracy: "Russia intervened and decided the Presidential election" – no matter that millions of workers and rural Americans had voted against Hillary Clinton, Wall Street's candidate and no matter that no evidence of direct interference was ever presented. Progressives could not accept that 'their constituents', the masses, had rejected Madame Clinton and preferred 'the Donald'. They attacked a shifty-eyed caricature of the repeatedly elected Russian President Putin as a subterfuge for attacking the disobedient 'white trash' electorate of 'Deploralandia'.

Progressive demagogues embraced the coifed and manicured former 'Director Comey' of the FBI, and the Mr. Potato-headed Capo of the CIA and their forty thugs in making accusations without finger or footprints.

The Progressives' far right - turn earned them hours and space on the mass media as long as they breathlessly savaged and insulted President Trump and his family members. When they managed to provoke him into a blind rage . . . they added the newly invented charge of 'psychologically unfit to lead' – presenting cheap psychobabble as grounds for impeachment. Finally! American Progressives were on their way to achieving their first and only political transformation: a Presidential coup d'état on behalf of the Far Right!

Progressives loudly condemned Trump's overtures for peace with Russia, denouncing it as appeasement and betrayal!

In return, President Trump began to 'out-militarize' the Progressives by escalating US involvement in the Middle East and South China Sea. They swooned with joy when Trump ordered a missile strike against the Syrian government as Damascus engaged in a life and death struggle against mercenary terrorists. They dubbed the petulant release of Patriot missiles 'Presidential'.

Then Progressives turned increasingly Orwellian: Ignoring Obama's actual expulsion of over 2 million immigrant workers, they condemned Trump for promising to eventually expel 5 million more!

Progressives, under Obama, supported seven brutal illegal wars and pressed for more, but complained when Trump continued the same wars and proposed adding a few new ones. At the same time, progressives out-militarized Trump by accusing him of being 'weak' on Russia, Iran, North Korea and China. They chided him for his lack support for Israel's suppression of the Palestinians. They lauded Trump's embrace of the Saudi war against Yemen as a stepping-stone for an assault against Iran, even as millions of destitute Yemenis were exposed to cholera. The Progressives had finally embraced a biological weapon of mass destruction, when US-supplied missiles destroyed the water systems of Yemen!

Conclusion

Progressives turned full circle from supporting welfare to embracing Wall Street; from preaching peaceful co-existence to demanding a dozen wars; from recognizing the humanity and rights of undocumented immigrants to their expulsion under their 'First Black' President; from thoughtful mass media critics to servile media megaphones; from defenders of civil liberties to boosters for the police state; from staunch opponents of J. Edgar Hoover and his 'dirty tricks' to camp followers for the 'intelligence community' in its deep state campaign to overturn a national election.

Progressives moved from fighting and resisting the Right to submitting and retreating; from retreating to surrendering and finally embracing the far right.

Doing all that and more within the Democratic Party, Progressives retain and deepen their ties with the mass media, the security apparatus and the military machine, while occasionally digging up some Bernie Sanders-type demagogue to arouse an army of voters away from effective resistance to mindless collaboration.

(Republished from The James Petras Website by permission of author or representative)

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WorkingClass > , July 12, 2017 at 9:21 pm GMT

But in the end, they always voted for Democratic Party Presidential candidates who pursued the exact opposite agenda.

Thank you for putting your finger on the main problem right there in the first paragraph. There were exceptions of course. I supported Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic Primary that gave us the first black etc. But I never voted for Obama. Throughout the Cheney Admin I pleaded with progressives to bolt the party.

This piece accurately traces the path from Progressive to Maoist. It's a pity the Republican Party is also a piece of shit. I think it was Sara Palin who said "We have two parties. Pick one." This should be our collective epitaph.

exiled off mainstreet > , July 12, 2017 at 11:20 pm GMT

This is an excellent summary of the evolution of "progressives" into modern militarist fascists who tolerate identity politics diversity. There is little to add to Mr. Petras' commentary.

alan2102 > , July 13, 2017 at 2:04 am GMT

EXCELLENT.

Astuteobservor II > , July 13, 2017 at 5:17 am GMT

at this point, are they still progressives though? they are the new far right

CCZ > , July 13, 2017 at 5:30 am GMT

"Progressives loudly condemned Trump's overtures for peace with Russia, denouncing it as appeasement and betrayal!"

Perhaps the spirit of Senator Joseph McCarthy is joyously gloating as progressives (and democrats) take their place as his heirs and successors and the 21st century incarnation of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

Carlton Meyer > , Website July 13, 2017 at 5:56 am GMT

The great Jimmy Dore is a big thorn for the Democrats. From my blog:

Apr 29, 2017 – Obama is Scum!

Barak Obama is America's biggest con man who accomplished nothing "progressive" during eight years at the top, and didn't even try. (Obamacare is an insurance industry idea supported by most Republicans, which is why it recently survived.) Anyone who still likes Obama should read about his actions since he left office. Obama quickly signed a $65 million "book deal", which can only be a kickback since there is no way the publisher can sell enough books about his meaningless presidency to justify that sum. Obama doesn't get royalties based on sales, but gets the money up front for a book he has yet to write, and will have someone do that for him. (Book deals and speaking fees are legal forms of bribery in the USA.)

Then Obama embarked on 100 days of ultra expensive foreign vacations with taxpayers covering the Secret Service protection costs. He didn't appear at charity fundraisers, didn't campaign for Democrats, and didn't help build homes for the poor like Jimmy Carter. He returns from vacation this week and his first speech will be at a Wall Street firm that will pay him $400,000, then he travels to Europe for more paid speeches.

Obama gets over $200,000 a year in retirement, just got a $65 million deal, so doesn't need more money. Why would a multi-millionaire ex-president fly around the globe collecting huge speaking fees from world corporations just after his political party was devastated in elections because Americans think the Democratic party represents Wall Street? The great Jimmy Dore expressed his outrage at Obama and the corrupt Democratic party in this great video.

jilles dykstra > , July 13, 2017 at 6:27 am GMT

Left in the good old days meant socialist, socialist meant that governments had the duty of redistributing income from rich to poor. Alas in Europe, after 'socialists' became pro EU and pro globalisation, they in fact became neoliberal. Both in France and the Netherlands 'socialist' parties virtually disappeared.
So what nowadays is left, does anyone know ?

Then the word 'progressive'. The word suggests improvement, but what is improvement, improvement for whom ? There are those who see the possibility for euthanasia as an improvement, there are thos who see euthanasia as a great sin.

Discussions about left and progressive are meaningless without properly defining the concepts.

Call me Deplorable > , July 13, 2017 at 12:06 pm GMT

They chose power over principles. Nobel War Prize winner Obomber was a particularly egregious chameleon, hiding his sociopathy through two elections before unleashing his racist warmongering in full flower throughout his second term. But, hey, the brother now has five mansions, collects half a mill per speech to the Chosen People on Wall Street, and parties for months at a time at exclusive resorts for billionaires only.

Obviously, he's got the world by the tail and you don't. Hope he comes to the same end as Gaddaffi and Ceaușescu. Maybe the survivors of nuclear Armageddon can hold a double necktie party with Killary as the second honored guest that day.

Seamus Padraig > , July 13, 2017 at 12:10 pm GMT

@jilles dykstra

Discussions about left and progressive are meaningless without properly defining the concepts.

Properly defining the concepts would impede the system's ability to keep you confused.

Seamus Padraig > , July 13, 2017 at 12:16 pm GMT

Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson embodied the dual policies of promoting peace at home and bloody imperial wars overseas.

You left out the other Roosevelt.

Like a huge collective 'Monica Lewinsky' robot, the Progressives in the Democratic Party bent over and swallowed Clinton's vicious 1999 savaging of the venerable Glass Steagall Act

Hilarious!

Ignoring Obama's actual expulsion of over 2 million immigrant workers, they condemned Trump for promising to eventually expel 5 million more!

This is a huge myth. All that really happened is that the INS changed some of its internal terminology to make it sound as though they were deporting more people: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/04/21/lies-damned-lies-and-obamas-deportation-statistics/?utm_term=.7f964acd9b0d

Stephen Paul Foster > , Website July 13, 2017 at 1:28 pm GMT

The Progressives now, failing electorally, are moving on to physical violence.

See: http://fosterspeak.blogspot.com/2017/07/trumps-would-be-assassins.html

annamaria > , July 13, 2017 at 2:22 pm GMT

@Carlton Meyer Obama, a paragon of American scoundrel

Anonymous IV > , July 13, 2017 at 2:49 pm GMT

@Seamus Padraig Agree on the bit about Obama as "deporter in chief." Even the LA Times had to admit this was misleading

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-obama-deportations-20140402-story.html

so it's not just conservative conspiracy theory stuff as some might argue.

Still, the overall point of this essay isn't affected all that much. Open borders is still a "right wing" (in the sense this author uses the term) policy–pro-Wall Street, pro-Big Business. So Obama was still doing the bidding of the donor class in their quest for cheap labor.

I've seen pro-immigration types try to use the Obama-deportation thing to argue that we don't need more hardcore policies. After all, even the progressive Democrat Obama was on the ball when it came to policing our borders, right?! Who needed Trump?

Agent76 > , July 13, 2017 at 3:28 pm GMT

"Who controls the issuance of money controls the government!" Nathan Meyer Rothschild

June 13, 2016 Which Corporations Control The World?

A surprisingly small number of corporations control massive global market shares. How many of the brands below do you use?

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44864.htm

"Control the oil, and you control nations. Control the food, and you control the people." Henry Kissenger

Alfa158 > , July 13, 2017 at 5:33 pm GMT

@Carlton Meyer If Jimmy keeps up these attacks on Wall Street, the Banksters, and rent-seekers he is going to get run out of the Progressive movement for dog-whistling virulent Anti-Semitism. Look at how the media screams at Trump every time he mentions Wall Street and the banks.

yeah > , July 13, 2017 at 5:46 pm GMT

Mr. Petra has penned an excellent and very astute piece. Allow me a little satire on our progressive friends, entitled "The path to hell is paved with good intentions".

The early socialist/progressive travellers were well-intentioned but naďve in their understanding of human nature and fanatical about their agenda. To move the human herd forward, they had no compulsions about resorting to harsher and harsher prodding and whipping. They felt entitled to employ these means because, so they were convinced, man has to be pushed to move forward and they, the "progressives", were the best qualified to lead the herd. Scoundrels, psychopaths, moral defectives, and sundry other rascals then joined in the whipping game, some out of the sheer joy of wielding the whip, others to better line their pockets.

So the "progressive" journey degenerates into a forced march. The march becomes the progress, becoming both the means and the end at the same time. Look at the so-called "progressive" today and you will see the fanatic and the whip-wielder, steadfast about the correctness of his beliefs. Tell him/her/it that you are a man or a woman and he retorts "No, you are free to choose, you are genderless". What if you decline such freedom? "Well, then you are a bigot, we will thrash you out of your bigotry", replies the progressive. "May I, dear Sir/Madam/Whatever, keep my hard-earned money in my pocket for my and my family's use" you ask. "No, you first have to pay for our peace-making wars, then pay for the upkeep of refugees, besides which you owe a lot of back taxes that are necessary to run this wonderful Big Government of ours that is leading you towards greener and greener pastures", shouts back the progressive.

Fed up, disgusted, and a little scared, you desperately seek a way out of this progress. "No way", scream the march leaders. "We will be forever in your ears, sometimes whispering, sometimes screaming; we will take over your brain to improve your mind; we will saturate you with images on the box 24/7 and employ all sorts of imagery to make you progress. And if it all fails, we will simply pack you and others like you in a basket of deplorables and forget about you at election time."

TheJester > , July 13, 2017 at 6:18 pm GMT

Knowing who is "progressive" and know who is "far-right" is like knowing who is "fascist" and who is not. For obvious historical reasons, the Russian like to throw the "fascist" slogan against anyone who is a non-Russian nationalist. However, I accept the eminent historian Carroll Quigley's definition of fascism as the incorporation of society and the state onto single entity on a permanent war footing. The state controls everything in a radically authoritarian social structure. As Quigley states, the Soviet Union was the most complete embodiment of fascism in WWII. In WWII Germany, on the other hand, industry retained its independence and in WWII Italy fascism was no more than an empty slogan.

Same for "progressives". Everyone wants to be "progressive", right? Who wants to be "anti-progressive"? However, at the end of the day, "progressive" through verbal slights of hand has been nothing more than a euphemism for "socialist" or, in the extreme, "communist" the verbal slight-of-hand because we don't tend to use the latter terms in American political discourse.

"Progressives" morphing into a new "far-right" in America is no more mysterious than the Soviet Union morphing from Leninism to Stalinism or, the Jewish (Trotskyite) globalists fleeing Stalinist nationalism and then morphing into, first, "Scoop" Jackson Democrats and then into Bushite Republicans.

As you might notice, the real issue is the authoritarian vs. the non-authoritarian state. In this context, an authoritarian government and social order (as in communism and neoconservatism) are practical pre-requisites necessity to force humanity to transition to their New World Order.

Again, the defining characteristic of fascism is the unitary state enforced via an authoritarian political and social structure. Ideological rigor is enforced via the police powers of the state along with judicial activism and political correctness. Ring a bell?

In the ongoing contest between Trump and the remnants of the American "progressive" movement, who are the populists and who the authoritarians? Who are the democrats and who are the fascists?

I would say that who lands where in this dichotomy is obvious.

RobinG > , July 13, 2017 at 6:19 pm GMT

@Alfa158 Is Jimmy Dore really a "Progressive?" (and what does that mean, anyway?) Isn't Jimmy's show hosted by the Young Turks Network, which is unabashedly Libertarian?

Anyway, what's so great about "the Progressive movement?" Seems to me, they're just pathetic sheepdogs for the war-crazed Dems. Jimmy should be supporting the #UNRIG movement ("Beyond Trump & Sanders") for ALL Americans:

On 1 May 2017 Cynthia McKinney, Ellen Brown, and Robert Steele launched

We the People – Unity for Integrity.

The User's Guide to the 2nd American Revolution.

Death to the Deep State.

https://www.unrig.net/manifesto/

Ben Banned > , July 13, 2017 at 9:13 pm GMT

Petras, for some reason, low balls the number of people ejected from assets when the mafia came to seize real estate in the name of the ruling class and their expensive wars, morality, the Constitution or whatever shit they could make up to fuck huge numbers of people over. Undoubtedly just like 9/11, the whole thing was planned in advance. Political whores are clearly useless when the system is at such extremes.

Banks like Capital One specialize in getting a signature and "giving" a car loan to someone they know won't be able to pay, but is simply being used, shaken down and repossessed for corporate gain. " No one held a gun to their head! " Get ready, the police state will in fact put a gun to your head.

Depending on the time period in question, which might be the case here, more than 20 million people were put out of homes and/or bankrupted with more to come. Clearly a bipartisan effort featuring widespread criminal conduct across the country – an attack on the population to sustain militarism.

peterAUS > , July 13, 2017 at 10:05 pm GMT

@yeah Nice.

If I may add:
"and you also have to dearly pay for you being white male heterosexual for oppressing all colored, all the women and all the sexually different through the history".

"And if it all fails, we will simply pack you and others like you in a basket of deplorables and forget about you at election time. If we see that you still don't get with the program we will reeducate you. Should you resist that in any way we'll incarcerate you. And, no, normal legal procedure does not work with racists/bigots/haters/whatever we don't like".

Reg Cćsar > , July 14, 2017 at 1:19 am GMT

@CCZ

"Progressives loudly condemned Trump's overtures for peace with Russia, denouncing it as appeasement and betrayal!"
Perhaps the spirit of Senator Joseph McCarthy is joyously gloating as progressives (and democrats) take their place as his heirs and successors and the 21st century incarnation of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

take their place as his heirs and successors and the 21st century incarnation of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee

which itself was a progressive invention. There was no "right wing" anywhere in sight when it was estsblished in 1938.

[Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Cohen's appearance on Carlson's show last night demonstrated again at what a blistering pace public opinion in the West about Putin and Russia is shifting, for the better. ..."
"... Cohen is always good, but last night he nailed it, calling the media's coverage of Hamburg 'pornography'. ..."
"... It was just a year ago, pre-Trump, that professor Cohen was banned from all the networks, from any major media outlet, and being relentlessly pilloried by the neocon media for being a naive fool for defending Putin and Russia. ..."
"... "The first thing you notice is just how much the press is rooting for this meeting between our president and the Russian President to fail. It's a kind of pornography. Just as there's no love in pornography, there's no American national interest in this bashing of Trump and Putin. ..."
"... Carlson tried to draw Cohen out about who exactly in Washington is so against Assad, and why, and Cohen deflected, demurring - 'I don't know - I'm not an expert'. Of course he knows, as does Carlson - it is an unholy alliance of Israel, Saudi Arabia and their neocon friends in Washington and the media who are pushing this criminal policy, who support ISIS, deliberately. But they can't say so, because, ... well, because. Ask Rupert Murdoch. ..."
Jul 12, 2017 | russia-insider.com
Cohen's appearance on Carlson's show last night demonstrated again at what a blistering pace public opinion in the West about Putin and Russia is shifting, for the better.

Cohen is always good, but last night he nailed it, calling the media's coverage of Hamburg 'pornography'.

Ahh, the power of the apt phrase.

It was just a year ago, pre-Trump, that professor Cohen was banned from all the networks, from any major media outlet, and being relentlessly pilloried by the neocon media for being a naive fool for defending Putin and Russia.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/5L2F4ocEIZw

Last night he was the featured guest on the most watched news show in the country, being cheered on by the host, who has him on as a regular. And Cohen isn't remotely a conservative. He is a contributing editor at the arch-liberal Nation magazine, of which his wife is the editor. It doesn't really get pinker than that.

Some choice quotes here, but the whole thing is worth a listen:

"The first thing you notice is just how much the press is rooting for this meeting between our president and the Russian President to fail. It's a kind of pornography. Just as there's no love in pornography, there's no American national interest in this bashing of Trump and Putin.

As a historian let me tell you the headline I would write instead:

"What we witnessed today in Hamburg was a potentially historic new detente. an anti-cold-war partnership begun by Trump and Putin but meanwhile attempts to sabotage it escalate." I've seen a lot of summits between American and Russian presidents, ... and I think what we saw today was potentially the most fateful meeting ... since the Cold War.

The reason is, is that the relationship with Russia is so dangerous and we have a president who might have been crippled or cowed by these Russiagate attacks ... yet he was not. He was politically courageous. It went well. They got important things done. I think maybe today we witnessed president Trump emerging as an American statesman."

Cohen goes on to say that the US should ally with Assad, Iran, and Russia to crush ISIS, with Carlson bobbing his head up and down in emphatic agreement.

Carlson tried to draw Cohen out about who exactly in Washington is so against Assad, and why, and Cohen deflected, demurring - 'I don't know - I'm not an expert'. Of course he knows, as does Carlson - it is an unholy alliance of Israel, Saudi Arabia and their neocon friends in Washington and the media who are pushing this criminal policy, who support ISIS, deliberately. But they can't say so, because, ... well, because. Ask Rupert Murdoch.

Things are getting better in the US media, but we aren't quite able to call a spade a spade in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

[Jul 01, 2017] MUST SEE video explains the entire 17 Intelligence Agencies Russian hacking lie

Highly recommended!
Political hacks picked up be Clinton stooges in intelligence agencies and guided by Clapper produced what was required on them...
Notable quotes:
"... Stefan Molyneux opens the below video with the song lyrics, "When the walls come crumbling down", as the political analyst comprehensively explains the bullsh**t lie Hillary Clinton and her mainstream media cronies feed the world so as to sabotage Trump's presidency, at the risk of war with Russia. ..."
"... It is a must watch, must share video which puts yet another US Deeep State lie to bed ..."
"... As a reminder as to how stupid the "17 Intelligence Agencies" Russian hacking narrative The FBI did not even get access to the DNC servers. It relied upon data provided by private security firm CrowdStrike, who had to walk back their audit conclusions on the hacks. ..."
"... Because we are certain that the Coast Guard Intelligence Agency, Marine Corps Intelligence Agency, and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency are authorities when it comes to US election hacking, and thus should be trusted when they sign off to being "highly confident" of Russian election meddling. ..."
Jul 01, 2017 | theduran.com

Yesterday The Duran reported that the New York Times was finally forced to admit that the "17 US intelligence agencies" narrative is completely made up fake news.

The "17 Intelligence Agencies" Russian hacking narrative was the core foundation for which the entire Trump-Russia collusion/cooperation/connection was built upon.

Stefan Molyneux opens the below video with the song lyrics, "When the walls come crumbling down", as the political analyst comprehensively explains the bullsh**t lie Hillary Clinton and her mainstream media cronies feed the world so as to sabotage Trump's presidency, at the risk of war with Russia.

watch-v=6vvPx7AqDl8

It is a must watch, must share video which puts yet another US Deeep State lie to bed

As a reminder as to how stupid the "17 Intelligence Agencies" Russian hacking narrative The FBI did not even get access to the DNC servers. It relied upon data provided by private security firm CrowdStrike, who had to walk back their audit conclusions on the hacks.

Below is a complete list of the 16 intelligence agencies in the US Intelligence Community, headed by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), whose statutory leadership is exercised through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), who under the Obama White House was James R. Clapper making 17 total agencies.

Why the list?

Because we are certain that the Coast Guard Intelligence Agency, Marine Corps Intelligence Agency, and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency are authorities when it comes to US election hacking, and thus should be trusted when they sign off to being "highly confident" of Russian election meddling.

The 16 members of the IC are:
Agency/Office Parent Agency Federal Department Date est.
Defense Intelligence Agency none Defense 1961
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency none Defense 1996
National Reconnaissance Office none Defense 1961
National Security Agency none Defense 1952
Military Intelligence Corps United States Army Defense 1863
Office of Naval Intelligence United States Navy Defense 1882
Twenty-Fifth Air Force United States Air Force Defense 1948
Marine Corps Intelligence United States Marine Corps Defense 1939
Coast Guard Intelligence United States Coast Guard Homeland Security 1915
Office of Intelligence and Analysis none Homeland Security 2007
Central Intelligence Agency none Independent agency 1947
Bureau of Intelligence and Research none State 1945
Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence none Treasury 2004
Office of National Security Intelligence Drug Enforcement Administration Justice 2006
Intelligence Branch Federal Bureau of Investigation Justice 2005
Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence none Energy 1977

[Jul 01, 2017] MUST SEE video explains the entire 17 Intelligence Agencies Russian hacking lie

Highly recommended!
Political hacks picked up be Clinton stooges in intelligence agencies and guided by Clapper produced what was required on them...
Notable quotes:
"... Stefan Molyneux opens the below video with the song lyrics, "When the walls come crumbling down", as the political analyst comprehensively explains the bullsh**t lie Hillary Clinton and her mainstream media cronies feed the world so as to sabotage Trump's presidency, at the risk of war with Russia. ..."
"... It is a must watch, must share video which puts yet another US Deeep State lie to bed ..."
"... As a reminder as to how stupid the "17 Intelligence Agencies" Russian hacking narrative The FBI did not even get access to the DNC servers. It relied upon data provided by private security firm CrowdStrike, who had to walk back their audit conclusions on the hacks. ..."
"... Because we are certain that the Coast Guard Intelligence Agency, Marine Corps Intelligence Agency, and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency are authorities when it comes to US election hacking, and thus should be trusted when they sign off to being "highly confident" of Russian election meddling. ..."
Jul 01, 2017 | theduran.com

Yesterday The Duran reported that the New York Times was finally forced to admit that the "17 US intelligence agencies" narrative is completely made up fake news.

The "17 Intelligence Agencies" Russian hacking narrative was the core foundation for which the entire Trump-Russia collusion/cooperation/connection was built upon.

Stefan Molyneux opens the below video with the song lyrics, "When the walls come crumbling down", as the political analyst comprehensively explains the bullsh**t lie Hillary Clinton and her mainstream media cronies feed the world so as to sabotage Trump's presidency, at the risk of war with Russia.

watch-v=6vvPx7AqDl8

It is a must watch, must share video which puts yet another US Deeep State lie to bed

As a reminder as to how stupid the "17 Intelligence Agencies" Russian hacking narrative The FBI did not even get access to the DNC servers. It relied upon data provided by private security firm CrowdStrike, who had to walk back their audit conclusions on the hacks.

Below is a complete list of the 16 intelligence agencies in the US Intelligence Community, headed by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), whose statutory leadership is exercised through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), who under the Obama White House was James R. Clapper making 17 total agencies.

Why the list?

Because we are certain that the Coast Guard Intelligence Agency, Marine Corps Intelligence Agency, and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency are authorities when it comes to US election hacking, and thus should be trusted when they sign off to being "highly confident" of Russian election meddling.

The 16 members of the IC are:
Agency/Office Parent Agency Federal Department Date est.
Defense Intelligence Agency none Defense 1961
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency none Defense 1996
National Reconnaissance Office none Defense 1961
National Security Agency none Defense 1952
Military Intelligence Corps United States Army Defense 1863
Office of Naval Intelligence United States Navy Defense 1882
Twenty-Fifth Air Force United States Air Force Defense 1948
Marine Corps Intelligence United States Marine Corps Defense 1939
Coast Guard Intelligence United States Coast Guard Homeland Security 1915
Office of Intelligence and Analysis none Homeland Security 2007
Central Intelligence Agency none Independent agency 1947
Bureau of Intelligence and Research none State 1945
Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence none Treasury 2004
Office of National Security Intelligence Drug Enforcement Administration Justice 2006
Intelligence Branch Federal Bureau of Investigation Justice 2005
Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence none Energy 1977

[Jun 26, 2017] The Soft Coup Under Way In Washington by David Stockman

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history – led by some very bad and conflicted people!" ..."
"... If Donald Trump had any kind of presidential strategy and propensity to take command, he would have had all the intercepts of Russian chatter gathered up weeks ago. He would then have had them declassified and made public, even as he launched a criminal prosecution against Obama's hit squad­-John Brennan, Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett for illegally unmasking and leaking classified information. ..."
"... Such a course of action would have crushed the Russian interference hysteria in the bud. At bottom, the latter was a rearguard invention of the Deep State and Democratic partisans. They became literally shocked and desperate for a scapegoat early last fall by the prospect that the unthinkable was happening. ..."
"... That became more than evident­-and more than pathetic, too­-when earlier this morning he tweeted out an attack on his own Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein. At least Nixon fired Elliot Richardson (his Attorney General) and Bill Ruckelshaus (Deputy AG): ..."
"... Mueller is a card-carrying apparatchik of the Deep State, who was there at the founding of today's surveillance monster as Director of the FBI in the aftermath of 9/11. Since the whole $75 billion apparatus that eventually emerged was based on a vastly exaggerated threat of global Islamic terrorism that doesn't exist, Russia had to be demonized into order to keep the game going­-a transition that Mueller fully subscribed to. ..."
"... To wit, Mueller's #1 hire was the despicable Andrew Weissmann. The latter had led the fraud section of the department's Criminal Division, served as general counsel to the F.B.I. when Mueller was its director, and, more importantly, was the driving force behind the Enron task force the most egregious exercise in prosecutorial abuse and thuggery since the Palmer raids of 1919. ..."
"... Exactly four years ago in June 2013, no one was seriously demonizing Putin or Russia. In fact, the slicksters of CNN were still snickering about Mitt Romney's silly claim during the 2012 election campaign that Russia was the greatest security threat facing America. ..."
"... But then came the Syrian jihadist false flag chemical attack in the suburbs of Damascus in August 2013 and the US intelligence community's flagrant lie that it had proof the villain was Bashar Assad. To the contrary, it subsequently became evident that the primitive rockets that had carried the deadly sarin gas, which killed upwards of 1500 innocent civilians, could not have been fired from regime-held territory; the rockets examined by UN investigators had a range of only a few kilometers, not the 15-20 kilometers from the nearest Syrian base. ..."
"... Needless to say, in the eyes of the neocon War Party, this constructive act of international statesmanship by Putin was the unforgivable sin. It thwarted the next target on their regime change agenda­-removal of the Assad government in Syria as a step toward an ultimate attack on its ally, the Shiite regime of Iran. ..."
"... So it did not take long for the Deep State to retaliate. While Putin was basking in the glory of the 2014 winter Olympics at Sochi, the entire apparatus of Imperial Washington ­– the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department and a long string of Washington funded NGOs ­- was on the ground in Kiev midwifing the putsch that overthrew Ukraine's constitutionally elected President and Russian ally. ..."
"... Indeed, given the Stalin-era animosity between the Russian-speaking Donbas and Crimean regions of the confected state of Ukraine and the virulent anti-Russian populations elsewhere­ – including descendants of the Nazi collaborators with Hitler during WWII -- there could have been no other outcome. And that was especially the case after Washington designated "Yats", a neo-Nazi sympathizer named Arseniy Yatseniuk, as the guy to takeover the Ukrainian government at the time of the Kiev uprising. ..."
"... There is nothing like a demonized enemy to keep the $700 billion national security budget flowing and the hideous Warfare State opulence of the Imperial City intact. So why not throw in an allegedly "stolen" US election to garnish the case? ..."
"... In a word, the Little Putsch in Kiev is now begetting a Great Big Coup in the Imperial City. This is a history-shattering development, but don't tell the boys and girls and robo-machines on Wall Street. ..."
Jun 22, 2017 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

This article was first published by Contra Corner

Bull's eye!

"They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history – led by some very bad and conflicted people!"

The Donald has never spoken truer words but also has never sunken lower into abject victimhood. Indeed, what is he waiting for -- handcuffs and a perp walk?

Just to be clear, "he" doesn't need to be the passive object of a "WITCH HUNT" by "they".

If Donald Trump had any kind of presidential strategy and propensity to take command, he would have had all the intercepts of Russian chatter gathered up weeks ago. He would then have had them declassified and made public, even as he launched a criminal prosecution against Obama's hit squad­-John Brennan, Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett for illegally unmasking and leaking classified information.

Such a course of action would have crushed the Russian interference hysteria in the bud. At bottom, the latter was a rearguard invention of the Deep State and Democratic partisans. They became literally shocked and desperate for a scapegoat early last fall by the prospect that the unthinkable was happening.

Namely, the election by the unwashed masses of an outsider and insurrectionist who could not be counted upon to serve as a "trusty" for the status quo; and whose naďve but correct instinct to seek a rapprochement with Russia was a mortal threat to the very modus operandi of the Imperial City.

Moreover, from the very beginning, the Russian interference narrative was rooted in nothing more than standard cyber noise from Moscow that pales compared to what comes out of Langley (CIA) and Ft. Meade (NSA). And we do mean irrelevant noise.

After all, it didn't take a Kremlinologist from the old Soviet days to figure out that Putin did not favor Clinton, who had likened him to Hitler. And that he welcomed Trump, who had correctly said NATO was obsolete, that he didn't want to give lethal aid to the Ukrainians, and had expressed a desire to make a deal with Putin on Syria and numerous other areas of unnecessary confrontation.

So let's start with two obvious points. Namely, that there is no "there, there" and that the president not only has the power to declassify secret documents at will but in this instance could do so without compromising intelligence community (IC) "sources and methods" in the slightest.

The latter is the case because after Snowden's revelations in June 2013, the whole world was put on notice and most especially Washington's adversaries­–that it collects in raw form every single electronic digit that passes through the worldwide web and related communications grids. It boils down to universal and omniscient SIGINT (signals intelligence), and acknowledgment of that fact by publishing the Russia-Trump intercepts would provide new knowledge to exactly no one.

Nor would it jeopardize the lives of any American spy or agent (HUMINT); it would just document the unconstitutional interference in the election process that had been committed by the US intelligence agencies and political operatives in the Obama White House.

Yes, we can hear the boxes on the CNN screen harrumphing and spinning noisily that declassifying the "evidence" would amount to obstruction of justice! That is to say, since Trump's "crime" is axiomatic (i.e. his occupancy of the Oval Office), anything that gets in the way of his conviction and removal therefrom amounts to "obstruction".

Given that he is up against a Deep State/Dem/Neocon/ mainstream media prosecution, the Donald has no chance of survival short of an aggressive offensive of the type described above.

But that's not happening because the man is clueless about what he is doing in the White House and is being advised by a cacophonous coterie of amateurs and nincompoops. So he has no action plan except to impulsively reach for his Twitter account.

That became more than evident­-and more than pathetic, too­-when earlier this morning he tweeted out an attack on his own Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein. At least Nixon fired Elliot Richardson (his Attorney General) and Bill Ruckelshaus (Deputy AG):

"I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt"

So alone with his Twitter account, clueless advisors and pulsating rage, the Donald is instead laying the groundwork for his own demise. Were this not the White House, it would normally be the point at which they send in the men in white coats with a straight jacket.

Indeed, that's essentially what Donald's ostensible GOP allies on the Hill are actually doing. RussiaGate is self-evidently a witch-hunt like few others in American political history. Yet as the mainstream cameras and microphones were thrust at one Congressional Republican after another yesterday afternoon following Donald's outburst quoted above, there was nary an echo of the agreement.

Even Senator John Thune, an ostensible Swamp-hating conservative, had nothing but praise for Special Counsel Robert Mueller while affecting an earnest confidence that he would fairly and thoroughly get to the bottom of the matter.

No he won't!

Mueller is a card-carrying apparatchik of the Deep State, who was there at the founding of today's surveillance monster as Director of the FBI in the aftermath of 9/11. Since the whole $75 billion apparatus that eventually emerged was based on a vastly exaggerated threat of global Islamic terrorism that doesn't exist, Russia had to be demonized into order to keep the game going­-a transition that Mueller fully subscribed to.

So he will "find" extensive Russian interference in the 2016 election and bring the hammer down on the Donald for seeking to prevent it from coming to light. The clock is now ticking and his investigatory team is being loaded up with prosecutorial killers who have proven records of thuggery when it comes to finding crimes that make for the fame and fortune of the prosecutors­-even if the crime itself never happened.

To wit, Mueller's #1 hire was the despicable Andrew Weissmann. The latter had led the fraud section of the department's Criminal Division, served as general counsel to the F.B.I. when Mueller was its director, and, more importantly, was the driving force behind the Enron task force the most egregious exercise in prosecutorial abuse and thuggery since the Palmer raids of 1919.

Meanwhile, as we said the other day, the GOP elders especially could also not be clearer about what is coming down the pike.

They are not defending Trump with even a modicum of the vigor and resolve that we recall from the early days of Tricky Dick's ordeal, and, of course, he didn't survive anyway. Instead, it's as if Ryan, McConnell, et al. have offered to hold his coat, while the Donald pummels himself with a 140-character Twitter Knife that is visible to the entire world.

So there should be no doubt. A Great Big Coup is on the way. But here's the irony of the matter.

Exactly four years ago in June 2013, no one was seriously demonizing Putin or Russia. In fact, the slicksters of CNN were still snickering about Mitt Romney's silly claim during the 2012 election campaign that Russia was the greatest security threat facing America.

But then came the Syrian jihadist false flag chemical attack in the suburbs of Damascus in August 2013 and the US intelligence community's flagrant lie that it had proof the villain was Bashar Assad. To the contrary, it subsequently became evident that the primitive rockets that had carried the deadly sarin gas, which killed upwards of 1500 innocent civilians, could not have been fired from regime-held territory; the rockets examined by UN investigators had a range of only a few kilometers, not the 15-20 kilometers from the nearest Syrian base.

In any event, President Obama choose to ignore his own red line and called off the bombers. That, in turn, paved the way for Vladimir Putin to step into the breach and persuade Assad to give up all of his chemical weapons commitment he fully complied with over the course of the next year.

Needless to say, in the eyes of the neocon War Party, this constructive act of international statesmanship by Putin was the unforgivable sin. It thwarted the next target on their regime change agenda­-removal of the Assad government in Syria as a step toward an ultimate attack on its ally, the Shiite regime of Iran.

So it did not take long for the Deep State to retaliate. While Putin was basking in the glory of the 2014 winter Olympics at Sochi, the entire apparatus of Imperial Washington ­– the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department and a long string of Washington funded NGOs ­- was on the ground in Kiev midwifing the putsch that overthrew Ukraine's constitutionally elected President and Russian ally.

From there, the Ukrainian civil war and partition of Crimea inexorably followed, as did the escalating campaign against Russia and its leader.

Indeed, given the Stalin-era animosity between the Russian-speaking Donbas and Crimean regions of the confected state of Ukraine and the virulent anti-Russian populations elsewhere­ – including descendants of the Nazi collaborators with Hitler during WWII -- there could have been no other outcome. And that was especially the case after Washington designated "Yats", a neo-Nazi sympathizer named Arseniy Yatseniuk, as the guy to takeover the Ukrainian government at the time of the Kiev uprising.

So as it turned out, the War Party could not have planned a more fortuitous outcome -- especially after Russia moved to protect its legitimate interests in its own backyard resulting from the Washington-instigated civil war in Ukraine, including protecting its 200-year old Naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea. The War Party simply characterized these actions falsely as acts of aggression by a potential sacker of the peace and territorial integrity of its European neighbors.

There is nothing like a demonized enemy to keep the $700 billion national security budget flowing and the hideous Warfare State opulence of the Imperial City intact. So why not throw in an allegedly "stolen" US election to garnish the case?

In a word, the Little Putsch in Kiev is now begetting a Great Big Coup in the Imperial City. This is a history-shattering development, but don't tell the boys and girls and robo-machines on Wall Street.

Pathetically, they still think its game on.

David Alan Stockman is an author, former businessman and U.S. politician who served as a Republican U.S. Representative from the state of Michigan and as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.

[Jun 26, 2017] The Soft Coup Under Way In Washington by David Stockman

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history – led by some very bad and conflicted people!" ..."
"... If Donald Trump had any kind of presidential strategy and propensity to take command, he would have had all the intercepts of Russian chatter gathered up weeks ago. He would then have had them declassified and made public, even as he launched a criminal prosecution against Obama's hit squad­-John Brennan, Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett for illegally unmasking and leaking classified information. ..."
"... Such a course of action would have crushed the Russian interference hysteria in the bud. At bottom, the latter was a rearguard invention of the Deep State and Democratic partisans. They became literally shocked and desperate for a scapegoat early last fall by the prospect that the unthinkable was happening. ..."
"... That became more than evident­-and more than pathetic, too­-when earlier this morning he tweeted out an attack on his own Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein. At least Nixon fired Elliot Richardson (his Attorney General) and Bill Ruckelshaus (Deputy AG): ..."
"... Mueller is a card-carrying apparatchik of the Deep State, who was there at the founding of today's surveillance monster as Director of the FBI in the aftermath of 9/11. Since the whole $75 billion apparatus that eventually emerged was based on a vastly exaggerated threat of global Islamic terrorism that doesn't exist, Russia had to be demonized into order to keep the game going­-a transition that Mueller fully subscribed to. ..."
"... To wit, Mueller's #1 hire was the despicable Andrew Weissmann. The latter had led the fraud section of the department's Criminal Division, served as general counsel to the F.B.I. when Mueller was its director, and, more importantly, was the driving force behind the Enron task force the most egregious exercise in prosecutorial abuse and thuggery since the Palmer raids of 1919. ..."
"... Exactly four years ago in June 2013, no one was seriously demonizing Putin or Russia. In fact, the slicksters of CNN were still snickering about Mitt Romney's silly claim during the 2012 election campaign that Russia was the greatest security threat facing America. ..."
"... But then came the Syrian jihadist false flag chemical attack in the suburbs of Damascus in August 2013 and the US intelligence community's flagrant lie that it had proof the villain was Bashar Assad. To the contrary, it subsequently became evident that the primitive rockets that had carried the deadly sarin gas, which killed upwards of 1500 innocent civilians, could not have been fired from regime-held territory; the rockets examined by UN investigators had a range of only a few kilometers, not the 15-20 kilometers from the nearest Syrian base. ..."
"... Needless to say, in the eyes of the neocon War Party, this constructive act of international statesmanship by Putin was the unforgivable sin. It thwarted the next target on their regime change agenda­-removal of the Assad government in Syria as a step toward an ultimate attack on its ally, the Shiite regime of Iran. ..."
"... So it did not take long for the Deep State to retaliate. While Putin was basking in the glory of the 2014 winter Olympics at Sochi, the entire apparatus of Imperial Washington ­– the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department and a long string of Washington funded NGOs ­- was on the ground in Kiev midwifing the putsch that overthrew Ukraine's constitutionally elected President and Russian ally. ..."
"... Indeed, given the Stalin-era animosity between the Russian-speaking Donbas and Crimean regions of the confected state of Ukraine and the virulent anti-Russian populations elsewhere­ – including descendants of the Nazi collaborators with Hitler during WWII -- there could have been no other outcome. And that was especially the case after Washington designated "Yats", a neo-Nazi sympathizer named Arseniy Yatseniuk, as the guy to takeover the Ukrainian government at the time of the Kiev uprising. ..."
"... There is nothing like a demonized enemy to keep the $700 billion national security budget flowing and the hideous Warfare State opulence of the Imperial City intact. So why not throw in an allegedly "stolen" US election to garnish the case? ..."
"... In a word, the Little Putsch in Kiev is now begetting a Great Big Coup in the Imperial City. This is a history-shattering development, but don't tell the boys and girls and robo-machines on Wall Street. ..."
Jun 22, 2017 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

This article was first published by Contra Corner

Bull's eye!

"They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history – led by some very bad and conflicted people!"

The Donald has never spoken truer words but also has never sunken lower into abject victimhood. Indeed, what is he waiting for -- handcuffs and a perp walk?

Just to be clear, "he" doesn't need to be the passive object of a "WITCH HUNT" by "they".

If Donald Trump had any kind of presidential strategy and propensity to take command, he would have had all the intercepts of Russian chatter gathered up weeks ago. He would then have had them declassified and made public, even as he launched a criminal prosecution against Obama's hit squad­-John Brennan, Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett for illegally unmasking and leaking classified information.

Such a course of action would have crushed the Russian interference hysteria in the bud. At bottom, the latter was a rearguard invention of the Deep State and Democratic partisans. They became literally shocked and desperate for a scapegoat early last fall by the prospect that the unthinkable was happening.

Namely, the election by the unwashed masses of an outsider and insurrectionist who could not be counted upon to serve as a "trusty" for the status quo; and whose naďve but correct instinct to seek a rapprochement with Russia was a mortal threat to the very modus operandi of the Imperial City.

Moreover, from the very beginning, the Russian interference narrative was rooted in nothing more than standard cyber noise from Moscow that pales compared to what comes out of Langley (CIA) and Ft. Meade (NSA). And we do mean irrelevant noise.

After all, it didn't take a Kremlinologist from the old Soviet days to figure out that Putin did not favor Clinton, who had likened him to Hitler. And that he welcomed Trump, who had correctly said NATO was obsolete, that he didn't want to give lethal aid to the Ukrainians, and had expressed a desire to make a deal with Putin on Syria and numerous other areas of unnecessary confrontation.

So let's start with two obvious points. Namely, that there is no "there, there" and that the president not only has the power to declassify secret documents at will but in this instance could do so without compromising intelligence community (IC) "sources and methods" in the slightest.

The latter is the case because after Snowden's revelations in June 2013, the whole world was put on notice and most especially Washington's adversaries­–that it collects in raw form every single electronic digit that passes through the worldwide web and related communications grids. It boils down to universal and omniscient SIGINT (signals intelligence), and acknowledgment of that fact by publishing the Russia-Trump intercepts would provide new knowledge to exactly no one.

Nor would it jeopardize the lives of any American spy or agent (HUMINT); it would just document the unconstitutional interference in the election process that had been committed by the US intelligence agencies and political operatives in the Obama White House.

Yes, we can hear the boxes on the CNN screen harrumphing and spinning noisily that declassifying the "evidence" would amount to obstruction of justice! That is to say, since Trump's "crime" is axiomatic (i.e. his occupancy of the Oval Office), anything that gets in the way of his conviction and removal therefrom amounts to "obstruction".

Given that he is up against a Deep State/Dem/Neocon/ mainstream media prosecution, the Donald has no chance of survival short of an aggressive offensive of the type described above.

But that's not happening because the man is clueless about what he is doing in the White House and is being advised by a cacophonous coterie of amateurs and nincompoops. So he has no action plan except to impulsively reach for his Twitter account.

That became more than evident­-and more than pathetic, too­-when earlier this morning he tweeted out an attack on his own Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein. At least Nixon fired Elliot Richardson (his Attorney General) and Bill Ruckelshaus (Deputy AG):

"I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt"

So alone with his Twitter account, clueless advisors and pulsating rage, the Donald is instead laying the groundwork for his own demise. Were this not the White House, it would normally be the point at which they send in the men in white coats with a straight jacket.

Indeed, that's essentially what Donald's ostensible GOP allies on the Hill are actually doing. RussiaGate is self-evidently a witch-hunt like few others in American political history. Yet as the mainstream cameras and microphones were thrust at one Congressional Republican after another yesterday afternoon following Donald's outburst quoted above, there was nary an echo of the agreement.

Even Senator John Thune, an ostensible Swamp-hating conservative, had nothing but praise for Special Counsel Robert Mueller while affecting an earnest confidence that he would fairly and thoroughly get to the bottom of the matter.

No he won't!

Mueller is a card-carrying apparatchik of the Deep State, who was there at the founding of today's surveillance monster as Director of the FBI in the aftermath of 9/11. Since the whole $75 billion apparatus that eventually emerged was based on a vastly exaggerated threat of global Islamic terrorism that doesn't exist, Russia had to be demonized into order to keep the game going­-a transition that Mueller fully subscribed to.

So he will "find" extensive Russian interference in the 2016 election and bring the hammer down on the Donald for seeking to prevent it from coming to light. The clock is now ticking and his investigatory team is being loaded up with prosecutorial killers who have proven records of thuggery when it comes to finding crimes that make for the fame and fortune of the prosecutors­-even if the crime itself never happened.

To wit, Mueller's #1 hire was the despicable Andrew Weissmann. The latter had led the fraud section of the department's Criminal Division, served as general counsel to the F.B.I. when Mueller was its director, and, more importantly, was the driving force behind the Enron task force the most egregious exercise in prosecutorial abuse and thuggery since the Palmer raids of 1919.

Meanwhile, as we said the other day, the GOP elders especially could also not be clearer about what is coming down the pike.

They are not defending Trump with even a modicum of the vigor and resolve that we recall from the early days of Tricky Dick's ordeal, and, of course, he didn't survive anyway. Instead, it's as if Ryan, McConnell, et al. have offered to hold his coat, while the Donald pummels himself with a 140-character Twitter Knife that is visible to the entire world.

So there should be no doubt. A Great Big Coup is on the way. But here's the irony of the matter.

Exactly four years ago in June 2013, no one was seriously demonizing Putin or Russia. In fact, the slicksters of CNN were still snickering about Mitt Romney's silly claim during the 2012 election campaign that Russia was the greatest security threat facing America.

But then came the Syrian jihadist false flag chemical attack in the suburbs of Damascus in August 2013 and the US intelligence community's flagrant lie that it had proof the villain was Bashar Assad. To the contrary, it subsequently became evident that the primitive rockets that had carried the deadly sarin gas, which killed upwards of 1500 innocent civilians, could not have been fired from regime-held territory; the rockets examined by UN investigators had a range of only a few kilometers, not the 15-20 kilometers from the nearest Syrian base.

In any event, President Obama choose to ignore his own red line and called off the bombers. That, in turn, paved the way for Vladimir Putin to step into the breach and persuade Assad to give up all of his chemical weapons commitment he fully complied with over the course of the next year.

Needless to say, in the eyes of the neocon War Party, this constructive act of international statesmanship by Putin was the unforgivable sin. It thwarted the next target on their regime change agenda­-removal of the Assad government in Syria as a step toward an ultimate attack on its ally, the Shiite regime of Iran.

So it did not take long for the Deep State to retaliate. While Putin was basking in the glory of the 2014 winter Olympics at Sochi, the entire apparatus of Imperial Washington ­– the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department and a long string of Washington funded NGOs ­- was on the ground in Kiev midwifing the putsch that overthrew Ukraine's constitutionally elected President and Russian ally.

From there, the Ukrainian civil war and partition of Crimea inexorably followed, as did the escalating campaign against Russia and its leader.

Indeed, given the Stalin-era animosity between the Russian-speaking Donbas and Crimean regions of the confected state of Ukraine and the virulent anti-Russian populations elsewhere­ – including descendants of the Nazi collaborators with Hitler during WWII -- there could have been no other outcome. And that was especially the case after Washington designated "Yats", a neo-Nazi sympathizer named Arseniy Yatseniuk, as the guy to takeover the Ukrainian government at the time of the Kiev uprising.

So as it turned out, the War Party could not have planned a more fortuitous outcome -- especially after Russia moved to protect its legitimate interests in its own backyard resulting from the Washington-instigated civil war in Ukraine, including protecting its 200-year old Naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea. The War Party simply characterized these actions falsely as acts of aggression by a potential sacker of the peace and territorial integrity of its European neighbors.

There is nothing like a demonized enemy to keep the $700 billion national security budget flowing and the hideous Warfare State opulence of the Imperial City intact. So why not throw in an allegedly "stolen" US election to garnish the case?

In a word, the Little Putsch in Kiev is now begetting a Great Big Coup in the Imperial City. This is a history-shattering development, but don't tell the boys and girls and robo-machines on Wall Street.

Pathetically, they still think its game on.

David Alan Stockman is an author, former businessman and U.S. politician who served as a Republican U.S. Representative from the state of Michigan and as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.

[Jun 15, 2017] Comeys Lies of Omission by Mike Whitney

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Donald Trump is not the target of an FBI investigation. Donald Trump has never been the target of an FBI investigation. The FBI is not investigating Trump for collusion, improper relations with a foreign government, treason or any of the other ridiculous things he's been falsely accused of in the fake media. In fact, the FBI is not investigating him at all. ..."
"... So, there was no counter-intelligence case on Trump? There was no investigation of collusion with Russia? But how can that be, after all, Trump has been hectored and harassed by the media from Day 1? His appointments have been blocked, his political agenda has been derailed, and the results of the 2016 elections have been effectively repealed due to the relentless attacks of the media, political elites and high-ranking leaders in the Intelligence Community. Now Comey admits that Trump is not guilty of anything, he's not even a suspect. ..."
"... Trump repeatedly asked Comey to announce that he wasn't under investigation. According to Comey, Trump "emphasized the problems this was causing him" and (Trump) said "We need to get that fact out." But Comey repeatedly refused to publicly acknowledge the truth. Why? ..."
"... It's true, he admitted it himself. Following his first meeting with Trump on January 6, he started recording contents of his private conversations with the president-elect on a secure FBI laptop in his car outside Trump Tower. He didn't even wait until he got back to the office, he did it in the goddamn parking lot. That's what you call "eager". In his testimony he admitted that he kept notes of his private meetings with Trump "from that point forward." ..."
"... Does that sound like the normal activities of dedicated public servant acting in behalf of the elected government or does it sound like someone who's on an assignment to dig up as much dirt as possible on the target of a political smear campaign. ..."
"... Comey is a man with zero integrity. Did you know that? ..."
"... In short, the memo Comey that approved gave a thumbs-up on waterboarding, wall slams, and other forms of torture – all violations of domestic and international law. Then, there's warrantless wiretapping. ."("Let's Check James Comey's Bush Years Record Before He Becomes FBI Director", ACLU) ..."
"... Repeat: "He approved or defended some of the worst abuses of the Bush administration (including) torture, warrantless wiretapping, and indefinite detention." How does that square with the media's portrayal of Comey as a man of unshakable integrity and honor? ..."
"... In my mind, Comey tipped his hand when he said that he leaked the memo of his private conversation with Trump to the media in order to precipitate the appointment of a special prosecutor. Think about that for a minute. Here's what he said: ..."
"... because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel ..."
"... Listen to Comey. The man is openly admitting that leaking the memo was all part of a very clearly-defined political strategy to force the appointment of a special prosecutor. That was the political objective from the get go. He doesn't even try to hide it. He wasn't trying to protect himself from 'mean old' Trump. That's baloney! He was laying the groundwork for a massive and expansive investigation into anything and anyone even remotely connected to the Trump team, a gigantic fishing expedition aimed at taking down Trump and his closest allies. That's what Comey's been up to. Only his plan didn't work, did it, because the 'leaked memo' didn't lead to the appointment of the special prosecutor. Instead, someone had to whisper in Trump's ear that he should fire Comey and, ah ha, that's all it took. ..."
"... In other words, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenberg had to step in and give Comey his pink slip before the media could cry "obstruction", creating the perfect opportunity to appoint "hired gun" Robert Mueller as special counsel. Now that the dominoes are in motion, Comey can trundle off to some comfy job at one of the many rightwing Washington think tanks while Mueller gathers together his team of superstar prosecutors to launch their first broadsides on the White House. ..."
"... Clearly, Trump was not trying to impede the investigation. But even if he was, it is a particularly murky area of the law and difficult to prove. ..."
"... lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition . He can be reached at [email protected] . ..."
"... Excellent article. The politicized charge 'obstruction of justice' is nebulous, arcane and insufferably highfalutin, which makes the entire investigation a very appealing opportunity to launch a politically correct witch hunt. Watch the MSM cheer it on. ..."
"... But the endgame is not exclusively about Russia. Ancillary targets include Russia's teetering allies, Syria and Iran. Cui Bono? ..."
"... Good takes all, Mike, and they're the truth. But I'd fire Rosenburg for his betrayals, then fire Mueller for his political selections, all Democrats, most with contributor or employment connections to the Clintons, the Foundation, or the Global Initiative. Those would be a firings for cause and I would fire all their allies, too. Immediately, I'd demand a Grand Jury hearing and have appointed another Special Prosecutor. Nixon wasn't impeached over the Saturday Night Massacre, he was impeached because they had the goods on him. ..."
"... The endless investigations can be terminated by the President on whim. The Congress can then impeach and hold a trial. They would all look like fools because there's nothing there, only their desire to do Trump in. Trump should fire, fire, fire wherever the politics lead in whatever agency. A lot of this is Clinton-driven, too. Jeff Sessions also needs to get on board, carry the frustrated Clinton investigations to a Grand Jury, flip it all back on them and indict Comey, Rosenberg and all their little buddies down below that leaked. Anyone who leaks, lies or obstructs goes to jail. ..."
"... It may sound strange, but I do not believe this entire escapade is about Donald Trump or Russia. It is about our Neocon overlords asserting their unconstitutional primacy over the sovereign will of the American People. ..."
"... If the American people had their way, all our "Neocon overlords" would be in federal prison or Guantanamo Bay, and all their assets seized to pay down the heinous 20 trillion debt their lies have created. ..."
"... Presumably Comey was deeply involved in Obama's illegal spying. ..."
"... Learned thus far; the deep state has more power than the Senate, the HOUSE and all members of the voting public.. Its not about Trump, its about you voters.. you people out their in vote land did not vote for the person the deep state elected.. therefore your elected persons must go.. somehow, he must go.. and believe me the DEEPSTATE has pledged to make it so.. ..."
"... Mueller was not appointed via the congressional "special prosecutor" statute (which was allowed to lapse.) He was appointed by the Justice Departement which means that Trump appointed the man whose job is to destroy him. Why would Trump agree to that when he can simply fire Rosenstein and instal someone who'll get rid of Mueller. Sure, the Washington Post will moan and groan, but who cares. ..."
"... A little discouraged. Don' t think the swamp is drainable. Trump agenda will never be enacted under these circumstances. Maybe Trump should fire Rosenstein and Mueller and then resign, loudly proclaiming truth about swamp. Don't like Pence but maybe few things can get done. Trump underestimated deep state. They ARE in charge. What will the people do ? Become more apathetic? ..."
"... Alternatively, Trump could go out swinging. Fire Rosenstein and Mueller and rally base and see what happens. Can't go on as is. The death by a thousand cuts. ..."
"... In light of Mueller's early actions corroborating his status as an establishment thug and lackey, Trump should fire him, and should fire Rosenstein, particularly since he has the power to do so, and Comey's testimony admits that the leak was intended to get somebody, probably his longtime associate Mueller, in as special prosecutor. As the article shows, the whole thing has been an effort by the power structure to continue its nihilistic war policies. Trump's other proven faults are not the issue. Our survival and the restoration of the rule of law are what is at stake. ..."
"... The problem is that this leads back to the same questions of why Russia is Washington's sworn enemy anyway. Furthermore, what is Trump's motivation in pushing for a detente with Russia, potentially jeopardizing first his candidacy, and now his presidency, with a generally unpopular among the electorate position? ..."
"... I tend to agree with some of the comments above, that this has to do with the Neocons, their hold on power and their plans for Middle Eastern conquest. Russia stands in the way of a lot of their plans. Still, Trump's stance on Russia, and who or what else is behind that, to me is the great mystery in all this. And, to be clear, I don't believe in any kind of ridiculous collusion or blackmail scenario. ..."
"... Trump needs to stage a false flag assasination attempt. Blame it on operatives within the FBI and the upper echelons of congress. Invite bikers for Trump and other patriots to washington, putting them on the payroll and arming them while stating "Due to the assasination attempt I can no longer trust the secret service or Washington establishment for protection." He then needs to have this army occupy both Capitol hill, the CIA and the FBI. etc etc. Its time for Trump to flex his inner Yeltsin. ..."
"... Uh, because he is a tool of the criminal elite who really run the show, which is one reason he was rewarded with a directorship at HSBC in an earlier time. He made beaucoup bucks there they made beaucoup bucks laundering hundreds of billions of drug cartel money. Apple tree. ..."
"... I don't care much for Trump, finding many of his specific domestic policies noxious; but I do have a dog in the fight when the Deep State tries to overturn the election of the Chief Magistrate of the nation because he might upset their applecart. He already fucked with their so-called "trade" deals by deep sixing the TPP, and then he is talking about speaking respectfully with Russia, implicitly rejecting the unipolarity of American Hegemony. What further proof did the Deep State require to set a soft coup into motion? ..."
"... Comey's having previously taken a job as general counsel of Bridgewater, including a reported and unmerited $3+ million severance on leaving, was sufficient reason for Trump to fire him on day one. Comey's due diligence had to have made him aware of–and therefore he apparently wanted to be in on–Dalio's deranged, Stalinesque corporate culture of backstabbing absolutely everyone under the guise of openness. ..."
"... Were Trump to take hysterical pieces like this post seriously it would likely precipitate him into war with Russia. Fortunately that won't be necessary, because Trump can order the FBI to do or stop doing things; the pres has that constitutional authority as Dershowitz has said repeatedly from the begining, so there is no case against Trump for obstruction. Dershowitz has also said anything (jaywalking) is in theory an "impeachable offense" , because impeachment is completely political. ..."
"... JULY 10 = ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF SETH RICH MURDER How about something big on July 10? The date shouldn't be wasted. Over 66,000 people have signed the petition to make this point. There are only 3 days left, but it could still make the 100K mark. ..."
Jun 14, 2017 | www.unz.com

"The Democrats are not fighting Trump over his assault on health care, his attacks on immigrants, his militaristic bullying around the world, or even his status as a minority president who can claim no mandate after losing the popular vote. Instead, they have chosen to attack Trump, the most right-wing president in US history, from the right, denouncing him as insufficiently committed to a military confrontation with Russia."

- Patrick Martin, "The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming", World Socialist Web Site

Donald Trump is not the target of an FBI investigation. Donald Trump has never been the target of an FBI investigation. The FBI is not investigating Trump for collusion, improper relations with a foreign government, treason or any of the other ridiculous things he's been falsely accused of in the fake media. In fact, the FBI is not investigating him at all.

Last week, former FBI Director James Comey admitted publicly what he has known all along: that Trump was not a suspect in the Russia hacking probe and never has been. Here's the story from Politico:

"Comey assured Trump he wasn't under investigation during their first meeting. He said he discussed with FBI leadership before his meeting with the president-elect whether to disclose that he wasn't personally under investigation. "That was true; we did not have an open counter-intelligence case on him," Comey said." (Politico)

So, there was no counter-intelligence case on Trump? There was no investigation of collusion with Russia? But how can that be, after all, Trump has been hectored and harassed by the media from Day 1? His appointments have been blocked, his political agenda has been derailed, and the results of the 2016 elections have been effectively repealed due to the relentless attacks of the media, political elites and high-ranking leaders in the Intelligence Community. Now Comey admits that Trump is not guilty of anything, he's not even a suspect.

What's going on here? Why didn't Comey clear the air earlier so the American people would know that their president wasn't in bed with a foreign power? Why did he allow this farce to continue when he knew there was no substance to the claims? Did he enjoy seeing Trump twisting in the wind or was there some more sinister "political" motive behind his omission?

Trump repeatedly asked Comey to announce that he wasn't under investigation. According to Comey, Trump "emphasized the problems this was causing him" and (Trump) said "We need to get that fact out." But Comey repeatedly refused to publicly acknowledge the truth. Why?

Comey never answered that question to Trump, but he did explain his reasoning to the Senate Intelligence Committee last week. He said he didn't want to announce that Trump was not part of the Bureau's Russia probe because "it would create a duty to correct, should that change."

A "duty to correct"? Are you kidding me? What kind of bullshit answer is that? How many hours of legal brainstorming did it take to come up with that lame-ass excuse?

Let's state the obvious: Comey wanted to maintain the cloud of suspicion that was hanging over Trump because it helped to feed the perception that Trump was a traitor who collaborated with Russia to win the election. By remaining silent, Comey helped to fuel the public hysteria and reinforce the belief that Trump was guilty of criminal wrongdoing. That is why Comey never spoke out before, it's because his silence was already achieving the result he sought which was to inflict as much damage as possible on Trump and his administration.

Did you know that Comey was spying on Trump from Day 1?

It's true, he admitted it himself. Following his first meeting with Trump on January 6, he started recording contents of his private conversations with the president-elect on a secure FBI laptop in his car outside Trump Tower. He didn't even wait until he got back to the office, he did it in the goddamn parking lot. That's what you call "eager". In his testimony he admitted that he kept notes of his private meetings with Trump "from that point forward."

Does that sound like the normal activities of dedicated public servant acting in behalf of the elected government or does it sound like someone who's on an assignment to dig up as much dirt as possible on the target of a political smear campaign.

Isn't that what Comey was really up to?

Comey is a man with zero integrity. Did you know that?

"There's one very big problem with describing Comey as some sort of civil libertarian: some facts suggest otherwise. While Comey deserves credit for stopping an illegal spying program in dramatic fashion, he also approved or defended some of the worst abuses of the Bush administration during his time as deputy attorney general. Those included torture, warrantless wiretapping, and indefinite detention.

On 30 December 2004, a memo addressed to James Comey was issued that superseded the infamous memo that defined torture as pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure". The memo to Comey seemed to renounce torture but did nothing of the sort. The key sentence in the opinion is tucked away in footnote 8. It concludes that the new Comey memo did not change the authorizations of interrogation tactics in any earlier memos.

In short, the memo Comey that approved gave a thumbs-up on waterboarding, wall slams, and other forms of torture – all violations of domestic and international law. Then, there's warrantless wiretapping. ."("Let's Check James Comey's Bush Years Record Before He Becomes FBI Director", ACLU)

Repeat: "He approved or defended some of the worst abuses of the Bush administration (including) torture, warrantless wiretapping, and indefinite detention." How does that square with the media's portrayal of Comey as a man of unshakable integrity and honor?

It doesn't square at all, does it? The media is obviously lying. Now ask yourself this: Can a man who rubber-stamped waterboarding be trusted? No, he can't be trusted because he's already proved himself to be inherently immoral.

Would a man like Comey agree to use his position and authority to try to "undo" the damage he did prior to the election when he announced the FBI was reopening its investigation of Hillary Clinton? In other words, was Comey being blackmailed to gather illicit material on Trump?

I think it's very likely, although entirely unprovable. Even so, Comey has been way too eager to frame Trump for things for which he is not guilty. Why has he been so eager? Was he really just protecting himself as he says or was he gathering information to build a legal case against Trump?

In my mind, Comey tipped his hand when he said that he leaked the memo of his private conversation with Trump to the media in order to precipitate the appointment of a special prosecutor. Think about that for a minute. Here's what he said:

"My judgment was I needed to get that out into the public square. So I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. I didn't do it myself for a variety of reasons, but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel , so I asked a close friend of mine to do it."

Listen to Comey. The man is openly admitting that leaking the memo was all part of a very clearly-defined political strategy to force the appointment of a special prosecutor. That was the political objective from the get go. He doesn't even try to hide it. He wasn't trying to protect himself from 'mean old' Trump. That's baloney! He was laying the groundwork for a massive and expansive investigation into anything and anyone even remotely connected to the Trump team, a gigantic fishing expedition aimed at taking down Trump and his closest allies. That's what Comey's been up to. Only his plan didn't work, did it, because the 'leaked memo' didn't lead to the appointment of the special prosecutor. Instead, someone had to whisper in Trump's ear that he should fire Comey and, ah ha, that's all it took.

In other words, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenberg had to step in and give Comey his pink slip before the media could cry "obstruction", creating the perfect opportunity to appoint "hired gun" Robert Mueller as special counsel. Now that the dominoes are in motion, Comey can trundle off to some comfy job at one of the many rightwing Washington think tanks while Mueller gathers together his team of superstar prosecutors to launch their first broadsides on the White House.

Whoever wrote this script deserves an Oscar. This is really first-rate political theater.

Now it's up to Mueller to prove that Trump tried to obstruct the investigation by asking Comey to go easy on former national security advisor General Michael Flynn. (According to Comey, Trump said, "I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.") It might sound like obstruction, but there are real problems with this type of prosecution particularly the fact that Trump denies the allegations. Also, Comey has acknowledged that Trump expressed his support for the overall goals of the investigation when he said, "that if there were some 'satellite' associates of his who did something wrong, it would be good to find that out."

Clearly, Trump was not trying to impede the investigation. But even if he was, it is a particularly murky area of the law and difficult to prove. Here's a short clip from an article by Professor Jonathan Turley at George Washington University who helps to clarify the point:

"The desire for some indictable or impeachable offense by President Trump has distorted the legal analysis to an alarming degree. Analysts seem far too thrilled by the possibility of a crime by Trump. The legal fact is that Comey's testimony does not establish a prima facie - or even a strong - case for obstruction.

It is certainly true that if Trump made these comments, his conduct is wildly inappropriate. However, talking like Tony Soprano does not make you Tony Soprano .

The crime of obstruction of justice has not been defined as broadly as suggested by commentators The mere fact that Trump asked to speak to Comey alone would not implicate the president in obstruction. .

It would be a highly dangerous interpretation to allow obstruction charges at this stage. If prosecutors can charge people at the investigation stage of cases, a wide array of comments or conduct could be criminalized. It is quite common to have such issues arise early in criminal cases. Courts have limited the crime precisely to avoid this type of open-ended crime where prosecutors could threaten potential witnesses with charges unless they cooperated.

We do not indict or impeach people for being boorish or clueless or simply being Donald Trump." ("James Comey's testimony doesn't make the case for impeachment or obstruction against Donald Trump", USA Today)

The fact that the obstruction charge won't stick is not going to stop Mueller from rummaging around and making Trump's life a living Hell. Heck no. He's going to dig through his old phone records, bank accounts, tax returns, shaky land deals, ex girl friends, whatever it takes. His prosecutorial tentacles will extend into every nook and cranny of Trump's private life and affairs until he latches onto some particularly sordid incident or transaction he can use he can use to disgrace, discredit, and demonize Trump to the point that impeachment proceedings seem like a welcome relief. It should be obvious by now, that the deep state elites who launched this coup are not going to be satisfied until Trump is forced from office and the results of the 2016 presidential election are wiped out.

But, why? Why is Trump so hated by these people?

Trump is not being attacked because of his reactionary political agenda, but because he's been deemed insufficiently hostile to Washington's sworn enemy, Russia. It's all about Russia. Trump wanted to "normalize" relations with Moscow which pitted him against the powerful US foreign policy establishment. Now Trump has to be taught a lesson. He must be crushed, humiliated and exiled. And that's probably the way this will end.

MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition . He can be reached at [email protected] .

Fran Macadam Website, June 14, 2017 at 5:04 pm GMT

Somebody else sure is in charge of America other than 300 million ordinary Americans, though it certainly isn't Russians.

Mike Whitney, June 15, 2017 at 3:30 am GMT

Let me get this straight: Comey leaks a memo to the NY Times saying that Trump pressured him to go easy on Flynn. He hoped that the leak would result in an "obstruction" charge against Trump. But it doesn't work.

So, Rod Rosenstein–who has convenently replaced Sessions– talks Trump into firing Comey. Why?

Because Rosenstein is working for the other team and he needs Trump to do something stupid that REALLY looks like obstruction, so he fires the head of the FBI. (Again, according to Salon, firing Comey was Rosenstein's idea)

A week later, Rosenstein –without consulting Trump– appoints deep state handyman and political assassin, Bob Mueller. So, in effect, Rosenstein appointed a special prosecutor to address the appearence of obstruction that he created when he told Trump to fire Comey.
How's that for symetry!

Then on Tuesday, Rosenstein was asked what he would do if the president ordered him to fire Mueller. Rosenstein said, "I'm not going to follow any orders unless I believe those are lawful and appropriate orders." He added later: "As long as I'm in this position, he's not going to be fired without good cause," which he said he would have to put in writing.

Oh man, this thing has "set up" written all over it. The whole thing stinks to high heaven

Countercoup, Part 5: After Comey, Sessions Hearings the #TrumpRussia Con is Failing – Rogue Money, June 15, 2017 at 5:05 am GMT

[ ] Comey's defenders were left sputtering that the fired FBI director had repeatedly affirmed the 'fact' of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and that Comey had called Trump a liar. The President's response was to hint again that he had recordings of his conversations with Comey, to which the ex-director cockily declared 'Lordy I hope there are tapes'. This of course, is a bluff by Comey and his derp state/Trump hating media backers, since Comey's entire argument for obstruction of justice rests on his feelings/interpretations of a conversation alone with the President, rather than any actual evidence of obstructing actions by Administration officials. The only thing known for sure as of this posting is that the U.S. Secret Service says it does not have recordings of the private Trump-Comey conversation. Meaning the President may have used a personal recording device to protect himself from Comey's subsequent write up and self-serving leaked recollections of their conversation. For more on the crookedness of Comey, read this summary by Mike Whitney at Unz Review. [ ]

utu, June 15, 2017 at 5:09 am GMT

@Mike Whitney I can see the reason for Trump being furious with Sessions.

Mark Green, June 15, 2017 at 6:17 am GMT

Excellent article. The politicized charge 'obstruction of justice' is nebulous, arcane and insufferably highfalutin, which makes the entire investigation a very appealing opportunity to launch a politically correct witch hunt. Watch the MSM cheer it on.

Meanwhile, the broad and well-earned suspicions surrounding the Clintons and their money-laundering foundation will be moved aside and slowly forgotten, as planned.

Trump's enemies will use this open-ended 'investigation' to cloud and sully every action the President makes. It is a legalistic act of war using the courts as cover. Disgraceful.

But the endgame is not exclusively about Russia. Ancillary targets include Russia's teetering allies, Syria and Iran. Cui Bono?

jilles dykstra, June 15, 2017 at 6:51 am GMT

Seen from Europe the hearings by the USA Senate seem a comedy, if it was not serious. In my view the effort is to prevent talks with Russia, in order to get a normal relation with that country. At all costs Russia must remain the dangerous enemy of the USA. Why ?

I suppose on the on hand the desire for USA world domination, on the other hand the fear, that existed in the USA since the 1917 Lenin coup, that Europe's trade relations with the east would become more important than across the Atlantic.

Antony C. Sutton, ´Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution', 1974 New Rochelle, N.Y.

Jim Christian, June 15, 2017 at 9:54 am GMT

@Mike Whitney

Good takes all, Mike, and they're the truth. But I'd fire Rosenburg for his betrayals, then fire Mueller for his political selections, all Democrats, most with contributor or employment connections to the Clintons, the Foundation, or the Global Initiative. Those would be a firings for cause and I would fire all their allies, too. Immediately, I'd demand a Grand Jury hearing and have appointed another Special Prosecutor. Nixon wasn't impeached over the Saturday Night Massacre, he was impeached because they had the goods on him.

The endless investigations can be terminated by the President on whim. The Congress can then impeach and hold a trial. They would all look like fools because there's nothing there, only their desire to do Trump in. Trump should fire, fire, fire wherever the politics lead in whatever agency. A lot of this is Clinton-driven, too. Jeff Sessions also needs to get on board, carry the frustrated Clinton investigations to a Grand Jury, flip it all back on them and indict Comey, Rosenberg and all their little buddies down below that leaked. Anyone who leaks, lies or obstructs goes to jail.

This IS manageable, Jeff Sessions needs to man up here, or another AG needs to be in his place.

alexander, June 15, 2017 at 10:01 am GMT

Dear Mr. Whitney,

Thank you for a fine article. It may sound strange, but I do not believe this entire escapade is about Donald Trump or Russia. It is about our Neocon overlords asserting their unconstitutional primacy over the sovereign will of the American People.

If the American people had their way, all our "Neocon overlords" would be in federal prison or Guantanamo Bay, and all their assets seized to pay down the heinous 20 trillion debt their lies have created.

Rather than be held to ACCOUNT for the gigantic mess they have made, the stupid wars they "lied us into", and the trillions they have pilfered from the taxpayer in the process They put on this " Comey (dog) and Mueller (pony) show to deflect from their stupendous failures and horrendous criminality.

On day ONE of his Presidency, Donald Trump should have called in "the Marines", and started seizing assets (up ,down, left and right) to recoup the losses our nation has endured.

The American people should be witnessing a Nuremberg like trial, today, where all our treasonous, defrauding "elites" are admonished, shamed, and sentenced before the entire world.

LondonBob, June 15, 2017 at 10:30 am GMT

@Mike Whitney Yes the role of Rosenstein and his background needs exploring. Firing Comey was the right thing to do I think, he and they would have worked something anyway.

Frank Qattrone and Martha Stewart could tell you that you can do nothing wrong but they can still put you in prison. Trump needs to be careful and get some good advice, I think so far he hasn't taken this seriously enough. Seems clear Mueller has a conflict and that a special counsel was appointed on false pretext.

LondonBob, June 15, 2017 at 10:33 am GMT

Presumably Comey was deeply involved in Obama's illegal spying.

Notaboutrump_but_about you voters, June 15, 2017 at 12:29 pm GMT

Learned thus far; the deep state has more power than the Senate, the HOUSE and all members of the voting public.. Its not about Trump, its about you voters.. you people out their in vote land did not vote for the person the deep state elected.. therefore your elected persons must go.. somehow, he must go.. and believe me the DEEPSTATE has pledged to make it so..

Mike Whitney, June 15, 2017 at 12:55 pm GMT

Why should Trump hire his own executioner? Would you? Would you try to help the people who are trying to frame you for nothing? Comey already admitted that there wasn't even an investigation. Why wasn't there an investigation? Because they have nothing on Trump. Nothing. That's why Comey "the waterboarder" agreed to frame him on the obstruction charge. Because they have Nothing.

Mueller was not appointed via the congressional "special prosecutor" statute (which was allowed to lapse.) He was appointed by the Justice Departement which means that Trump appointed the man whose job is to destroy him. Why would Trump agree to that when he can simply fire Rosenstein and instal someone who'll get rid of Mueller. Sure, the Washington Post will moan and groan, but who cares.

If Congress thinks there is enough evidence here to prosecute Trump, LET THEM APPOINT THEIR OWN SPECIAL PROSECUTOR.

Agent76, June 15, 2017 at 1:15 pm GMT

Jun 8, 2017 Comey's Testimony What's EVERYBODY Missing?

Jason Bermas breaks down the Comey testimony, and reveals what everyone is missing!

Jul 7, 2016 Justice Vs. "Just Us": Of Course the FBI Let Hillary off the Hook

The only thing that surprises me is that anyone is surprised by this.

pepperinmono, June 15, 2017 at 1:30 pm GMT

A little discouraged. Don' t think the swamp is drainable. Trump agenda will never be enacted under these circumstances. Maybe Trump should fire Rosenstein and Mueller and then resign, loudly proclaiming truth about swamp. Don't like Pence but maybe few things can get done. Trump underestimated deep state. They ARE in charge. What will the people do ? Become more apathetic?

Alternatively, Trump could go out swinging. Fire Rosenstein and Mueller and rally base and see what happens. Can't go on as is. The death by a thousand cuts.

exiled off mainstreet, June 15, 2017 at 2:06 pm GMT

In light of Mueller's early actions corroborating his status as an establishment thug and lackey, Trump should fire him, and should fire Rosenstein, particularly since he has the power to do so, and Comey's testimony admits that the leak was intended to get somebody, probably his longtime associate Mueller, in as special prosecutor. As the article shows, the whole thing has been an effort by the power structure to continue its nihilistic war policies. Trump's other proven faults are not the issue. Our survival and the restoration of the rule of law are what is at stake.

I emigrated to Canada 10 years ago, fortunately being a dual citizen. One of the major reasons I did so was the Martha Stewart case mentioned by a commenter above. I didn't think much of Martha Stewart personally, but if she could be prosecuted despite the fifth amendment for a statement made not under oath exclusively on the say-so of a government agent, then there was no longer due process in the yankee imperium.

The fact the courts had allowed this "law" to go unchallenged was proof that the rule of law no longer obtained. That was a key factor in my deliberations about what to do. I also find it discouraging that counterpunch apparently did not see fit to publish this Whitney article, probably because it is too much on point and they don't want to fully break with the traditional left, which has destroyed itself by being taken over by fascists like the Clintons and Tony Blair. The yankee imperium needs a figure like Corbyn to put things right again, not a sell-out like Sanders.

pepperinmono, June 15, 2017 at 2:12 pm GMT

Republicans in Congress surely don't like Trump. However, they better start getting on board with him. They are tied together, whether they like it or not.

art guerrilla Website, June 15, 2017 at 2:12 pm GMT

what i find so weird, is the almost immediate flip-flop of so-called progressives/dem'rats yelling full-throatedly for violence against -not just all things t-rumpian- ALL those who fail ANY trivial PC litmus test they have their about-face on -essentially- renouncing nonviolence, adopting Empire's motto of 'might makes right', and going full berserker against the rest of the 99% is too sudden and severe to be anything but an astroturf wannabe purple revolution with hillary's puppet masters pulling the strings

IF they were actually calling for jihad against EMPIRE, instead of their fellow pathetic nekkid apes, i could get behind that but their petulant excuses for why they should be given free reign to 'punch a nazi' (ie ANYONE who disagrees with me), the disgusting shilling for hillary/dem'rats/Empire is maddening
.
don't give a shit about t-rump; but they hound him out of office, i will consider that a direct assault on my small-dee democracy, that a duly elected official is run off by hijacking the mechanisms of state to pursue the agenda of the 1% is not right, though done numerous times
.
i think they might find that 100+ million PISSED-OFF, nothing-to-lose unemployed may consider that the straw that broke the camel's back, and soros and his cabal of deep state slime won't like the pushback when bubba gets out of the recliner
.
come the revolution idiot dem'rats appear to be itching for, just WHICH SIDE do stupid libtards think the police, natl guard, military, etc are going to come down on ? ? ?
(hint: NOT the libtard side )

SolontoCroesus, June 15, 2017 at 2:20 pm GMT

@Mike Whitney nb. from the essay:

"Instead, someone had to whisper in Trump's ear that he should fire Comey and, ah ha, that's all it took. In other words, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosen berg had to step in"

We know what you meant. They all look alike.

JL, June 15, 2017 at 2:23 pm GMT

The problem is that this leads back to the same questions of why Russia is Washington's sworn enemy anyway. Furthermore, what is Trump's motivation in pushing for a detente with Russia, potentially jeopardizing first his candidacy, and now his presidency, with a generally unpopular among the electorate position?

I tend to agree with some of the comments above, that this has to do with the Neocons, their hold on power and their plans for Middle Eastern conquest. Russia stands in the way of a lot of their plans. Still, Trump's stance on Russia, and who or what else is behind that, to me is the great mystery in all this. And, to be clear, I don't believe in any kind of ridiculous collusion or blackmail scenario.

nsa, June 15, 2017 at 2:42 pm GMT

We here in Ft. Meade are having a good laugh. One of our assets, a shyster named Rosenstein (that's Scottish, isn't it?) gives Trumpenstein a little pinprick in the back (not even a stab) and the silly old jooie tool folds like a cheap lawn chair. No wall, no tax cuts, no ending the jooie wars for the izzies, no mass deportations, no curbing the jooie central bank .just tacky soap opera histrionics for the few interested in the doings in wash dc.

nickels, June 15, 2017 at 2:52 pm GMT

Trump needs to stage a false flag assasination attempt. Blame it on operatives within the FBI and the upper echelons of congress. Invite bikers for Trump and other patriots to washington, putting them on the payroll and arming them while stating "Due to the assasination attempt I can no longer trust the secret service or Washington establishment for protection." He then needs to have this army occupy both Capitol hill, the CIA and the FBI. etc etc. Its time for Trump to flex his inner Yeltsin.

The Alarmist, June 15, 2017 at 3:20 pm GMT

"Why has he been so eager?"

Uh, because he is a tool of the criminal elite who really run the show, which is one reason he was rewarded with a directorship at HSBC in an earlier time. He made beaucoup bucks there they made beaucoup bucks laundering hundreds of billions of drug cartel money. Apple tree.

Joe Franklin, June 15, 2017 at 3:46 pm GMT

@Mike Whitney Put Rosenstein under oath and ask him about any communications and agreements and meetings he may have had with Comey or Mueller before he appointed a special prosecutor. Do the same thing with Comey and Mueller in regard to Rosenstein. Trump's attorney should do these interrogations.

Agent76, June 15, 2017 at 4:31 pm GMT

@JL

Know this and it is all NATO and their aggression in the world of the empire. Nov 29, 2016 The Map That Shows Why Russia Fears War With USA

Sowhat, June 15, 2017 at 5:11 pm GMT

I feel that, despite the exhaustive process, this one has to be played- all 19 holes. Everyone is going to demand a good stiff one at the nineteenth. Given his resume, Rosenstein was a good choice by Trump. Sessions may regret his recusal but, Rosenstein may feel that his Frosted Flakes breakfast will carry the day. One should not prejudice him. Trump may have snagged a few and ended up in a sand trap but, he's still below par and we're only on the forth fairway. I did some digging and found that Rod's from Philly. Just thought I would throw that in.
You can't judge a book by it's cover. The guy will be a good caddy.

anon, June 15, 2017 at 7:00 pm GMT

@Mike Whitney Trump should directly appeal to the American people( his base and large number of disaffected Clinton supporters)

JerseyJeffersonian, June 15, 2017 at 8:12 pm GMT

@Mike Whitney Thank you, Mr. Whitney. This comment and comment #12 delineate the mechanics of the set-up with laser-like precision.

We are in your debt for articulating the hinge points of this assault on the Constitutional order. I don't care much for Trump, finding many of his specific domestic policies noxious; but I do have a dog in the fight when the Deep State tries to overturn the election of the Chief Magistrate of the nation because he might upset their applecart. He already fucked with their so-called "trade" deals by deep sixing the TPP, and then he is talking about speaking respectfully with Russia, implicitly rejecting the unipolarity of American Hegemony. What further proof did the Deep State require to set a soft coup into motion?

DanCT, June 15, 2017 at 9:02 pm GMT

Comey's having previously taken a job as general counsel of Bridgewater, including a reported and unmerited $3+ million severance on leaving, was sufficient reason for Trump to fire him on day one. Comey's due diligence had to have made him aware of–and therefore he apparently wanted to be in on–Dalio's deranged, Stalinesque corporate culture of backstabbing absolutely everyone under the guise of openness.

Dalio may be very rich, but he's an evil man who we may assume saw in Comey a kindred spirit. Having a Ray Dalio protege leading the FBI suggests agents supported him, if that's actually the case, out of fear and not allegiance.

Sean, June 15, 2017 at 9:05 pm GMT

Were Trump to take hysterical pieces like this post seriously it would likely precipitate him into war with Russia. Fortunately that won't be necessary, because Trump can order the FBI to do or stop doing things; the pres has that constitutional authority as Dershowitz has said repeatedly from the begining, so there is no case against Trump for obstruction. Dershowitz has also said anything (jaywalking) is in theory an "impeachable offense" , because impeachment is completely political.

They want Trump to quit and are predicting impeachment in an attempt to get him to just go, but even if Trump got fed up and wanted to quit, he couldn't now, because without the protection of office, his fortune (at least) would be destroyed. As for the Russia innuendo, it is always open to Trump to humiliate Russia with a military initiative (in Syria for example), which would prove he has nothing to hide. As a major conflict with Russian proxies beckoned, the country would look askance at scarce domestic intelligence resources being used for an old tax or sexual harassment line of investigation against the sitting president. Knowing what kind of a man he is, who can doubt that Trump wouldn't hesitate to kill Russians if that is what it took to turn the heat on his opponents..

Sam J., June 15, 2017 at 9:33 pm GMT

@Joe Franklin " Put Rosenstein under oath "

That's a good idea. Should be public. He needs to be fired any way. The person or persons who recommended Rosenstein need to be fired also.

annamaria, June 15, 2017 at 9:58 pm GMT

@Fran Macadam " the Russians did not "interfere in our Democracy" either. We have no democracy."

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/15/the-russians-didnt-do-it/

Sowhat, June 15, 2017 at 10:05 pm GMT

@Mike Whitney

A week later, Rosenstein –without consulting Trump– appoints deep state handyman and political assassin, Bob Mueller

I missed this. Is there a reference, please?

Sowhat, June 15, 2017 at 10:10 pm GMT

@alexander

If the American people had their way, all our "Neocon overlords" would be in federal prison or Guantanamo Bay, and all their assets seized to pay down the heinous 20 trillion debt their lies have created.

Agree

RobinG, June 15, 2017 at 10:26 pm GMT

@Mark Green "Ancillary targets" are American citizens. (Syria and Iran are much clearer direct targets.)

Trump has done some great things. Recognition of Fake News and the Deep State threatened a much bigger awakening. So Trump had to be diminished. Sure, he's a mixed bag, but his defeat of Killary was a blessing. His direct communication (Twitter) and exposure of the MSM was brilliant.

As you say, 'obstruction of justice' is nebulous. Going on the defensive is a loser's game. There must be a counter-attack. What have we got? Please, if you have something better, something simpler to put in meme and slogan, let's have it, but I see Who Killed Seth Rich as a powerful offensive. You don't even have to solve it. Just get the case broadcast. Do you know that only this week, Seth Rich's neighbor has come out as a witness? (NOT a witness of the shooting, but of the immediate aftermath, police, etc. Seth may have been totally beat down before he was shot.)

JULY 10 = ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF SETH RICH MURDER How about something big on July 10? The date shouldn't be wasted. Over 66,000 people have signed the petition to make this point. There are only 3 days left, but it could still make the 100K mark.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/appoint-special-prosecutor-investigate-murder-seth-rich-alleged-wikileaks-email-leaker

PLEASE SIGN. Either way, THE ANNIVERSARY LOOMS.

RobinG, June 15, 2017 at 10:36 pm GMT

@Jim Christian

"..carry the frustrated Clinton investigations to a Grand Jury, flip it all back on them and indict Comey, Rosenberg and all their little buddies down below that leaked "

YES, SO TRUE!! Big mistake to let Clinton off the hook. And what was her involvement in the murder of Seth Rich? Investigate the DNC, Lynch, Comey, Clinton – all of them.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/appoint-special-prosecutor-investigate-murder-seth-rich-alleged-wikileaks-email-leaker

Appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate the murder of Seth Rich, the alleged Wikileaks email leaker.

Sowhat, June 15, 2017 at 10:54 pm GMT

@Sam J. "...Put Rosenstein under oath..."

That's a good idea. Should be public. He needs to be fired any way. The person or persons who recommended Rosenstein need to be fired also. Putting him under is an excellent idea. Trump needs to hear it or read it. IMO, Rosenstein doesn't have a resumč that him suspect.

[Jun 15, 2017] Comeys Lies of Omission by Mike Whitney

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Donald Trump is not the target of an FBI investigation. Donald Trump has never been the target of an FBI investigation. The FBI is not investigating Trump for collusion, improper relations with a foreign government, treason or any of the other ridiculous things he's been falsely accused of in the fake media. In fact, the FBI is not investigating him at all. ..."
"... So, there was no counter-intelligence case on Trump? There was no investigation of collusion with Russia? But how can that be, after all, Trump has been hectored and harassed by the media from Day 1? His appointments have been blocked, his political agenda has been derailed, and the results of the 2016 elections have been effectively repealed due to the relentless attacks of the media, political elites and high-ranking leaders in the Intelligence Community. Now Comey admits that Trump is not guilty of anything, he's not even a suspect. ..."
"... Trump repeatedly asked Comey to announce that he wasn't under investigation. According to Comey, Trump "emphasized the problems this was causing him" and (Trump) said "We need to get that fact out." But Comey repeatedly refused to publicly acknowledge the truth. Why? ..."
"... It's true, he admitted it himself. Following his first meeting with Trump on January 6, he started recording contents of his private conversations with the president-elect on a secure FBI laptop in his car outside Trump Tower. He didn't even wait until he got back to the office, he did it in the goddamn parking lot. That's what you call "eager". In his testimony he admitted that he kept notes of his private meetings with Trump "from that point forward." ..."
"... Does that sound like the normal activities of dedicated public servant acting in behalf of the elected government or does it sound like someone who's on an assignment to dig up as much dirt as possible on the target of a political smear campaign. ..."
"... Comey is a man with zero integrity. Did you know that? ..."
"... In short, the memo Comey that approved gave a thumbs-up on waterboarding, wall slams, and other forms of torture – all violations of domestic and international law. Then, there's warrantless wiretapping. ."("Let's Check James Comey's Bush Years Record Before He Becomes FBI Director", ACLU) ..."
"... Repeat: "He approved or defended some of the worst abuses of the Bush administration (including) torture, warrantless wiretapping, and indefinite detention." How does that square with the media's portrayal of Comey as a man of unshakable integrity and honor? ..."
"... In my mind, Comey tipped his hand when he said that he leaked the memo of his private conversation with Trump to the media in order to precipitate the appointment of a special prosecutor. Think about that for a minute. Here's what he said: ..."
"... because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel ..."
"... Listen to Comey. The man is openly admitting that leaking the memo was all part of a very clearly-defined political strategy to force the appointment of a special prosecutor. That was the political objective from the get go. He doesn't even try to hide it. He wasn't trying to protect himself from 'mean old' Trump. That's baloney! He was laying the groundwork for a massive and expansive investigation into anything and anyone even remotely connected to the Trump team, a gigantic fishing expedition aimed at taking down Trump and his closest allies. That's what Comey's been up to. Only his plan didn't work, did it, because the 'leaked memo' didn't lead to the appointment of the special prosecutor. Instead, someone had to whisper in Trump's ear that he should fire Comey and, ah ha, that's all it took. ..."
"... In other words, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenberg had to step in and give Comey his pink slip before the media could cry "obstruction", creating the perfect opportunity to appoint "hired gun" Robert Mueller as special counsel. Now that the dominoes are in motion, Comey can trundle off to some comfy job at one of the many rightwing Washington think tanks while Mueller gathers together his team of superstar prosecutors to launch their first broadsides on the White House. ..."
"... Clearly, Trump was not trying to impede the investigation. But even if he was, it is a particularly murky area of the law and difficult to prove. ..."
"... lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition . He can be reached at [email protected] . ..."
"... Excellent article. The politicized charge 'obstruction of justice' is nebulous, arcane and insufferably highfalutin, which makes the entire investigation a very appealing opportunity to launch a politically correct witch hunt. Watch the MSM cheer it on. ..."
"... But the endgame is not exclusively about Russia. Ancillary targets include Russia's teetering allies, Syria and Iran. Cui Bono? ..."
"... Good takes all, Mike, and they're the truth. But I'd fire Rosenburg for his betrayals, then fire Mueller for his political selections, all Democrats, most with contributor or employment connections to the Clintons, the Foundation, or the Global Initiative. Those would be a firings for cause and I would fire all their allies, too. Immediately, I'd demand a Grand Jury hearing and have appointed another Special Prosecutor. Nixon wasn't impeached over the Saturday Night Massacre, he was impeached because they had the goods on him. ..."
"... The endless investigations can be terminated by the President on whim. The Congress can then impeach and hold a trial. They would all look like fools because there's nothing there, only their desire to do Trump in. Trump should fire, fire, fire wherever the politics lead in whatever agency. A lot of this is Clinton-driven, too. Jeff Sessions also needs to get on board, carry the frustrated Clinton investigations to a Grand Jury, flip it all back on them and indict Comey, Rosenberg and all their little buddies down below that leaked. Anyone who leaks, lies or obstructs goes to jail. ..."
"... It may sound strange, but I do not believe this entire escapade is about Donald Trump or Russia. It is about our Neocon overlords asserting their unconstitutional primacy over the sovereign will of the American People. ..."
"... If the American people had their way, all our "Neocon overlords" would be in federal prison or Guantanamo Bay, and all their assets seized to pay down the heinous 20 trillion debt their lies have created. ..."
"... Presumably Comey was deeply involved in Obama's illegal spying. ..."
"... Learned thus far; the deep state has more power than the Senate, the HOUSE and all members of the voting public.. Its not about Trump, its about you voters.. you people out their in vote land did not vote for the person the deep state elected.. therefore your elected persons must go.. somehow, he must go.. and believe me the DEEPSTATE has pledged to make it so.. ..."
"... Mueller was not appointed via the congressional "special prosecutor" statute (which was allowed to lapse.) He was appointed by the Justice Departement which means that Trump appointed the man whose job is to destroy him. Why would Trump agree to that when he can simply fire Rosenstein and instal someone who'll get rid of Mueller. Sure, the Washington Post will moan and groan, but who cares. ..."
"... A little discouraged. Don' t think the swamp is drainable. Trump agenda will never be enacted under these circumstances. Maybe Trump should fire Rosenstein and Mueller and then resign, loudly proclaiming truth about swamp. Don't like Pence but maybe few things can get done. Trump underestimated deep state. They ARE in charge. What will the people do ? Become more apathetic? ..."
"... Alternatively, Trump could go out swinging. Fire Rosenstein and Mueller and rally base and see what happens. Can't go on as is. The death by a thousand cuts. ..."
"... In light of Mueller's early actions corroborating his status as an establishment thug and lackey, Trump should fire him, and should fire Rosenstein, particularly since he has the power to do so, and Comey's testimony admits that the leak was intended to get somebody, probably his longtime associate Mueller, in as special prosecutor. As the article shows, the whole thing has been an effort by the power structure to continue its nihilistic war policies. Trump's other proven faults are not the issue. Our survival and the restoration of the rule of law are what is at stake. ..."
"... The problem is that this leads back to the same questions of why Russia is Washington's sworn enemy anyway. Furthermore, what is Trump's motivation in pushing for a detente with Russia, potentially jeopardizing first his candidacy, and now his presidency, with a generally unpopular among the electorate position? ..."
"... I tend to agree with some of the comments above, that this has to do with the Neocons, their hold on power and their plans for Middle Eastern conquest. Russia stands in the way of a lot of their plans. Still, Trump's stance on Russia, and who or what else is behind that, to me is the great mystery in all this. And, to be clear, I don't believe in any kind of ridiculous collusion or blackmail scenario. ..."
"... Trump needs to stage a false flag assasination attempt. Blame it on operatives within the FBI and the upper echelons of congress. Invite bikers for Trump and other patriots to washington, putting them on the payroll and arming them while stating "Due to the assasination attempt I can no longer trust the secret service or Washington establishment for protection." He then needs to have this army occupy both Capitol hill, the CIA and the FBI. etc etc. Its time for Trump to flex his inner Yeltsin. ..."
"... Uh, because he is a tool of the criminal elite who really run the show, which is one reason he was rewarded with a directorship at HSBC in an earlier time. He made beaucoup bucks there they made beaucoup bucks laundering hundreds of billions of drug cartel money. Apple tree. ..."
"... I don't care much for Trump, finding many of his specific domestic policies noxious; but I do have a dog in the fight when the Deep State tries to overturn the election of the Chief Magistrate of the nation because he might upset their applecart. He already fucked with their so-called "trade" deals by deep sixing the TPP, and then he is talking about speaking respectfully with Russia, implicitly rejecting the unipolarity of American Hegemony. What further proof did the Deep State require to set a soft coup into motion? ..."
"... Comey's having previously taken a job as general counsel of Bridgewater, including a reported and unmerited $3+ million severance on leaving, was sufficient reason for Trump to fire him on day one. Comey's due diligence had to have made him aware of–and therefore he apparently wanted to be in on–Dalio's deranged, Stalinesque corporate culture of backstabbing absolutely everyone under the guise of openness. ..."
"... Were Trump to take hysterical pieces like this post seriously it would likely precipitate him into war with Russia. Fortunately that won't be necessary, because Trump can order the FBI to do or stop doing things; the pres has that constitutional authority as Dershowitz has said repeatedly from the begining, so there is no case against Trump for obstruction. Dershowitz has also said anything (jaywalking) is in theory an "impeachable offense" , because impeachment is completely political. ..."
"... JULY 10 = ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF SETH RICH MURDER How about something big on July 10? The date shouldn't be wasted. Over 66,000 people have signed the petition to make this point. There are only 3 days left, but it could still make the 100K mark. ..."
Jun 14, 2017 | www.unz.com

"The Democrats are not fighting Trump over his assault on health care, his attacks on immigrants, his militaristic bullying around the world, or even his status as a minority president who can claim no mandate after losing the popular vote. Instead, they have chosen to attack Trump, the most right-wing president in US history, from the right, denouncing him as insufficiently committed to a military confrontation with Russia."

- Patrick Martin, "The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming", World Socialist Web Site

Donald Trump is not the target of an FBI investigation. Donald Trump has never been the target of an FBI investigation. The FBI is not investigating Trump for collusion, improper relations with a foreign government, treason or any of the other ridiculous things he's been falsely accused of in the fake media. In fact, the FBI is not investigating him at all.

Last week, former FBI Director James Comey admitted publicly what he has known all along: that Trump was not a suspect in the Russia hacking probe and never has been. Here's the story from Politico:

"Comey assured Trump he wasn't under investigation during their first meeting. He said he discussed with FBI leadership before his meeting with the president-elect whether to disclose that he wasn't personally under investigation. "That was true; we did not have an open counter-intelligence case on him," Comey said." (Politico)

So, there was no counter-intelligence case on Trump? There was no investigation of collusion with Russia? But how can that be, after all, Trump has been hectored and harassed by the media from Day 1? His appointments have been blocked, his political agenda has been derailed, and the results of the 2016 elections have been effectively repealed due to the relentless attacks of the media, political elites and high-ranking leaders in the Intelligence Community. Now Comey admits that Trump is not guilty of anything, he's not even a suspect.

What's going on here? Why didn't Comey clear the air earlier so the American people would know that their president wasn't in bed with a foreign power? Why did he allow this farce to continue when he knew there was no substance to the claims? Did he enjoy seeing Trump twisting in the wind or was there some more sinister "political" motive behind his omission?

Trump repeatedly asked Comey to announce that he wasn't under investigation. According to Comey, Trump "emphasized the problems this was causing him" and (Trump) said "We need to get that fact out." But Comey repeatedly refused to publicly acknowledge the truth. Why?

Comey never answered that question to Trump, but he did explain his reasoning to the Senate Intelligence Committee last week. He said he didn't want to announce that Trump was not part of the Bureau's Russia probe because "it would create a duty to correct, should that change."

A "duty to correct"? Are you kidding me? What kind of bullshit answer is that? How many hours of legal brainstorming did it take to come up with that lame-ass excuse?

Let's state the obvious: Comey wanted to maintain the cloud of suspicion that was hanging over Trump because it helped to feed the perception that Trump was a traitor who collaborated with Russia to win the election. By remaining silent, Comey helped to fuel the public hysteria and reinforce the belief that Trump was guilty of criminal wrongdoing. That is why Comey never spoke out before, it's because his silence was already achieving the result he sought which was to inflict as much damage as possible on Trump and his administration.

Did you know that Comey was spying on Trump from Day 1?

It's true, he admitted it himself. Following his first meeting with Trump on January 6, he started recording contents of his private conversations with the president-elect on a secure FBI laptop in his car outside Trump Tower. He didn't even wait until he got back to the office, he did it in the goddamn parking lot. That's what you call "eager". In his testimony he admitted that he kept notes of his private meetings with Trump "from that point forward."

Does that sound like the normal activities of dedicated public servant acting in behalf of the elected government or does it sound like someone who's on an assignment to dig up as much dirt as possible on the target of a political smear campaign.

Isn't that what Comey was really up to?

Comey is a man with zero integrity. Did you know that?

"There's one very big problem with describing Comey as some sort of civil libertarian: some facts suggest otherwise. While Comey deserves credit for stopping an illegal spying program in dramatic fashion, he also approved or defended some of the worst abuses of the Bush administration during his time as deputy attorney general. Those included torture, warrantless wiretapping, and indefinite detention.

On 30 December 2004, a memo addressed to James Comey was issued that superseded the infamous memo that defined torture as pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure". The memo to Comey seemed to renounce torture but did nothing of the sort. The key sentence in the opinion is tucked away in footnote 8. It concludes that the new Comey memo did not change the authorizations of interrogation tactics in any earlier memos.

In short, the memo Comey that approved gave a thumbs-up on waterboarding, wall slams, and other forms of torture – all violations of domestic and international law. Then, there's warrantless wiretapping. ."("Let's Check James Comey's Bush Years Record Before He Becomes FBI Director", ACLU)

Repeat: "He approved or defended some of the worst abuses of the Bush administration (including) torture, warrantless wiretapping, and indefinite detention." How does that square with the media's portrayal of Comey as a man of unshakable integrity and honor?

It doesn't square at all, does it? The media is obviously lying. Now ask yourself this: Can a man who rubber-stamped waterboarding be trusted? No, he can't be trusted because he's already proved himself to be inherently immoral.

Would a man like Comey agree to use his position and authority to try to "undo" the damage he did prior to the election when he announced the FBI was reopening its investigation of Hillary Clinton? In other words, was Comey being blackmailed to gather illicit material on Trump?

I think it's very likely, although entirely unprovable. Even so, Comey has been way too eager to frame Trump for things for which he is not guilty. Why has he been so eager? Was he really just protecting himself as he says or was he gathering information to build a legal case against Trump?

In my mind, Comey tipped his hand when he said that he leaked the memo of his private conversation with Trump to the media in order to precipitate the appointment of a special prosecutor. Think about that for a minute. Here's what he said:

"My judgment was I needed to get that out into the public square. So I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. I didn't do it myself for a variety of reasons, but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel , so I asked a close friend of mine to do it."

Listen to Comey. The man is openly admitting that leaking the memo was all part of a very clearly-defined political strategy to force the appointment of a special prosecutor. That was the political objective from the get go. He doesn't even try to hide it. He wasn't trying to protect himself from 'mean old' Trump. That's baloney! He was laying the groundwork for a massive and expansive investigation into anything and anyone even remotely connected to the Trump team, a gigantic fishing expedition aimed at taking down Trump and his closest allies. That's what Comey's been up to. Only his plan didn't work, did it, because the 'leaked memo' didn't lead to the appointment of the special prosecutor. Instead, someone had to whisper in Trump's ear that he should fire Comey and, ah ha, that's all it took.

In other words, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenberg had to step in and give Comey his pink slip before the media could cry "obstruction", creating the perfect opportunity to appoint "hired gun" Robert Mueller as special counsel. Now that the dominoes are in motion, Comey can trundle off to some comfy job at one of the many rightwing Washington think tanks while Mueller gathers together his team of superstar prosecutors to launch their first broadsides on the White House.

Whoever wrote this script deserves an Oscar. This is really first-rate political theater.

Now it's up to Mueller to prove that Trump tried to obstruct the investigation by asking Comey to go easy on former national security advisor General Michael Flynn. (According to Comey, Trump said, "I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.") It might sound like obstruction, but there are real problems with this type of prosecution particularly the fact that Trump denies the allegations. Also, Comey has acknowledged that Trump expressed his support for the overall goals of the investigation when he said, "that if there were some 'satellite' associates of his who did something wrong, it would be good to find that out."

Clearly, Trump was not trying to impede the investigation. But even if he was, it is a particularly murky area of the law and difficult to prove. Here's a short clip from an article by Professor Jonathan Turley at George Washington University who helps to clarify the point:

"The desire for some indictable or impeachable offense by President Trump has distorted the legal analysis to an alarming degree. Analysts seem far too thrilled by the possibility of a crime by Trump. The legal fact is that Comey's testimony does not establish a prima facie - or even a strong - case for obstruction.

It is certainly true that if Trump made these comments, his conduct is wildly inappropriate. However, talking like Tony Soprano does not make you Tony Soprano .

The crime of obstruction of justice has not been defined as broadly as suggested by commentators The mere fact that Trump asked to speak to Comey alone would not implicate the president in obstruction. .

It would be a highly dangerous interpretation to allow obstruction charges at this stage. If prosecutors can charge people at the investigation stage of cases, a wide array of comments or conduct could be criminalized. It is quite common to have such issues arise early in criminal cases. Courts have limited the crime precisely to avoid this type of open-ended crime where prosecutors could threaten potential witnesses with charges unless they cooperated.

We do not indict or impeach people for being boorish or clueless or simply being Donald Trump." ("James Comey's testimony doesn't make the case for impeachment or obstruction against Donald Trump", USA Today)

The fact that the obstruction charge won't stick is not going to stop Mueller from rummaging around and making Trump's life a living Hell. Heck no. He's going to dig through his old phone records, bank accounts, tax returns, shaky land deals, ex girl friends, whatever it takes. His prosecutorial tentacles will extend into every nook and cranny of Trump's private life and affairs until he latches onto some particularly sordid incident or transaction he can use he can use to disgrace, discredit, and demonize Trump to the point that impeachment proceedings seem like a welcome relief. It should be obvious by now, that the deep state elites who launched this coup are not going to be satisfied until Trump is forced from office and the results of the 2016 presidential election are wiped out.

But, why? Why is Trump so hated by these people?

Trump is not being attacked because of his reactionary political agenda, but because he's been deemed insufficiently hostile to Washington's sworn enemy, Russia. It's all about Russia. Trump wanted to "normalize" relations with Moscow which pitted him against the powerful US foreign policy establishment. Now Trump has to be taught a lesson. He must be crushed, humiliated and exiled. And that's probably the way this will end.

MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition . He can be reached at [email protected] .

Fran Macadam Website, June 14, 2017 at 5:04 pm GMT

Somebody else sure is in charge of America other than 300 million ordinary Americans, though it certainly isn't Russians.

Mike Whitney, June 15, 2017 at 3:30 am GMT

Let me get this straight: Comey leaks a memo to the NY Times saying that Trump pressured him to go easy on Flynn. He hoped that the leak would result in an "obstruction" charge against Trump. But it doesn't work.

So, Rod Rosenstein–who has convenently replaced Sessions– talks Trump into firing Comey. Why?

Because Rosenstein is working for the other team and he needs Trump to do something stupid that REALLY looks like obstruction, so he fires the head of the FBI. (Again, according to Salon, firing Comey was Rosenstein's idea)

A week later, Rosenstein –without consulting Trump– appoints deep state handyman and political assassin, Bob Mueller. So, in effect, Rosenstein appointed a special prosecutor to address the appearence of obstruction that he created when he told Trump to fire Comey.
How's that for symetry!

Then on Tuesday, Rosenstein was asked what he would do if the president ordered him to fire Mueller. Rosenstein said, "I'm not going to follow any orders unless I believe those are lawful and appropriate orders." He added later: "As long as I'm in this position, he's not going to be fired without good cause," which he said he would have to put in writing.

Oh man, this thing has "set up" written all over it. The whole thing stinks to high heaven

Countercoup, Part 5: After Comey, Sessions Hearings the #TrumpRussia Con is Failing – Rogue Money, June 15, 2017 at 5:05 am GMT

[ ] Comey's defenders were left sputtering that the fired FBI director had repeatedly affirmed the 'fact' of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and that Comey had called Trump a liar. The President's response was to hint again that he had recordings of his conversations with Comey, to which the ex-director cockily declared 'Lordy I hope there are tapes'. This of course, is a bluff by Comey and his derp state/Trump hating media backers, since Comey's entire argument for obstruction of justice rests on his feelings/interpretations of a conversation alone with the President, rather than any actual evidence of obstructing actions by Administration officials. The only thing known for sure as of this posting is that the U.S. Secret Service says it does not have recordings of the private Trump-Comey conversation. Meaning the President may have used a personal recording device to protect himself from Comey's subsequent write up and self-serving leaked recollections of their conversation. For more on the crookedness of Comey, read this summary by Mike Whitney at Unz Review. [ ]

utu, June 15, 2017 at 5:09 am GMT

@Mike Whitney I can see the reason for Trump being furious with Sessions.

Mark Green, June 15, 2017 at 6:17 am GMT

Excellent article. The politicized charge 'obstruction of justice' is nebulous, arcane and insufferably highfalutin, which makes the entire investigation a very appealing opportunity to launch a politically correct witch hunt. Watch the MSM cheer it on.

Meanwhile, the broad and well-earned suspicions surrounding the Clintons and their money-laundering foundation will be moved aside and slowly forgotten, as planned.

Trump's enemies will use this open-ended 'investigation' to cloud and sully every action the President makes. It is a legalistic act of war using the courts as cover. Disgraceful.

But the endgame is not exclusively about Russia. Ancillary targets include Russia's teetering allies, Syria and Iran. Cui Bono?

jilles dykstra, June 15, 2017 at 6:51 am GMT

Seen from Europe the hearings by the USA Senate seem a comedy, if it was not serious. In my view the effort is to prevent talks with Russia, in order to get a normal relation with that country. At all costs Russia must remain the dangerous enemy of the USA. Why ?

I suppose on the on hand the desire for USA world domination, on the other hand the fear, that existed in the USA since the 1917 Lenin coup, that Europe's trade relations with the east would become more important than across the Atlantic.

Antony C. Sutton, ´Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution', 1974 New Rochelle, N.Y.

Jim Christian, June 15, 2017 at 9:54 am GMT

@Mike Whitney

Good takes all, Mike, and they're the truth. But I'd fire Rosenburg for his betrayals, then fire Mueller for his political selections, all Democrats, most with contributor or employment connections to the Clintons, the Foundation, or the Global Initiative. Those would be a firings for cause and I would fire all their allies, too. Immediately, I'd demand a Grand Jury hearing and have appointed another Special Prosecutor. Nixon wasn't impeached over the Saturday Night Massacre, he was impeached because they had the goods on him.

The endless investigations can be terminated by the President on whim. The Congress can then impeach and hold a trial. They would all look like fools because there's nothing there, only their desire to do Trump in. Trump should fire, fire, fire wherever the politics lead in whatever agency. A lot of this is Clinton-driven, too. Jeff Sessions also needs to get on board, carry the frustrated Clinton investigations to a Grand Jury, flip it all back on them and indict Comey, Rosenberg and all their little buddies down below that leaked. Anyone who leaks, lies or obstructs goes to jail.

This IS manageable, Jeff Sessions needs to man up here, or another AG needs to be in his place.

alexander, June 15, 2017 at 10:01 am GMT

Dear Mr. Whitney,

Thank you for a fine article. It may sound strange, but I do not believe this entire escapade is about Donald Trump or Russia. It is about our Neocon overlords asserting their unconstitutional primacy over the sovereign will of the American People.

If the American people had their way, all our "Neocon overlords" would be in federal prison or Guantanamo Bay, and all their assets seized to pay down the heinous 20 trillion debt their lies have created.

Rather than be held to ACCOUNT for the gigantic mess they have made, the stupid wars they "lied us into", and the trillions they have pilfered from the taxpayer in the process They put on this " Comey (dog) and Mueller (pony) show to deflect from their stupendous failures and horrendous criminality.

On day ONE of his Presidency, Donald Trump should have called in "the Marines", and started seizing assets (up ,down, left and right) to recoup the losses our nation has endured.

The American people should be witnessing a Nuremberg like trial, today, where all our treasonous, defrauding "elites" are admonished, shamed, and sentenced before the entire world.

LondonBob, June 15, 2017 at 10:30 am GMT

@Mike Whitney Yes the role of Rosenstein and his background needs exploring. Firing Comey was the right thing to do I think, he and they would have worked something anyway.

Frank Qattrone and Martha Stewart could tell you that you can do nothing wrong but they can still put you in prison. Trump needs to be careful and get some good advice, I think so far he hasn't taken this seriously enough. Seems clear Mueller has a conflict and that a special counsel was appointed on false pretext.

LondonBob, June 15, 2017 at 10:33 am GMT

Presumably Comey was deeply involved in Obama's illegal spying.

Notaboutrump_but_about you voters, June 15, 2017 at 12:29 pm GMT

Learned thus far; the deep state has more power than the Senate, the HOUSE and all members of the voting public.. Its not about Trump, its about you voters.. you people out their in vote land did not vote for the person the deep state elected.. therefore your elected persons must go.. somehow, he must go.. and believe me the DEEPSTATE has pledged to make it so..

Mike Whitney, June 15, 2017 at 12:55 pm GMT

Why should Trump hire his own executioner? Would you? Would you try to help the people who are trying to frame you for nothing? Comey already admitted that there wasn't even an investigation. Why wasn't there an investigation? Because they have nothing on Trump. Nothing. That's why Comey "the waterboarder" agreed to frame him on the obstruction charge. Because they have Nothing.

Mueller was not appointed via the congressional "special prosecutor" statute (which was allowed to lapse.) He was appointed by the Justice Departement which means that Trump appointed the man whose job is to destroy him. Why would Trump agree to that when he can simply fire Rosenstein and instal someone who'll get rid of Mueller. Sure, the Washington Post will moan and groan, but who cares.

If Congress thinks there is enough evidence here to prosecute Trump, LET THEM APPOINT THEIR OWN SPECIAL PROSECUTOR.

Agent76, June 15, 2017 at 1:15 pm GMT

Jun 8, 2017 Comey's Testimony What's EVERYBODY Missing?

Jason Bermas breaks down the Comey testimony, and reveals what everyone is missing!

Jul 7, 2016 Justice Vs. "Just Us": Of Course the FBI Let Hillary off the Hook

The only thing that surprises me is that anyone is surprised by this.

pepperinmono, June 15, 2017 at 1:30 pm GMT

A little discouraged. Don' t think the swamp is drainable. Trump agenda will never be enacted under these circumstances. Maybe Trump should fire Rosenstein and Mueller and then resign, loudly proclaiming truth about swamp. Don't like Pence but maybe few things can get done. Trump underestimated deep state. They ARE in charge. What will the people do ? Become more apathetic?

Alternatively, Trump could go out swinging. Fire Rosenstein and Mueller and rally base and see what happens. Can't go on as is. The death by a thousand cuts.

exiled off mainstreet, June 15, 2017 at 2:06 pm GMT

In light of Mueller's early actions corroborating his status as an establishment thug and lackey, Trump should fire him, and should fire Rosenstein, particularly since he has the power to do so, and Comey's testimony admits that the leak was intended to get somebody, probably his longtime associate Mueller, in as special prosecutor. As the article shows, the whole thing has been an effort by the power structure to continue its nihilistic war policies. Trump's other proven faults are not the issue. Our survival and the restoration of the rule of law are what is at stake.

I emigrated to Canada 10 years ago, fortunately being a dual citizen. One of the major reasons I did so was the Martha Stewart case mentioned by a commenter above. I didn't think much of Martha Stewart personally, but if she could be prosecuted despite the fifth amendment for a statement made not under oath exclusively on the say-so of a government agent, then there was no longer due process in the yankee imperium.

The fact the courts had allowed this "law" to go unchallenged was proof that the rule of law no longer obtained. That was a key factor in my deliberations about what to do. I also find it discouraging that counterpunch apparently did not see fit to publish this Whitney article, probably because it is too much on point and they don't want to fully break with the traditional left, which has destroyed itself by being taken over by fascists like the Clintons and Tony Blair. The yankee imperium needs a figure like Corbyn to put things right again, not a sell-out like Sanders.

pepperinmono, June 15, 2017 at 2:12 pm GMT

Republicans in Congress surely don't like Trump. However, they better start getting on board with him. They are tied together, whether they like it or not.

art guerrilla Website, June 15, 2017 at 2:12 pm GMT

what i find so weird, is the almost immediate flip-flop of so-called progressives/dem'rats yelling full-throatedly for violence against -not just all things t-rumpian- ALL those who fail ANY trivial PC litmus test they have their about-face on -essentially- renouncing nonviolence, adopting Empire's motto of 'might makes right', and going full berserker against the rest of the 99% is too sudden and severe to be anything but an astroturf wannabe purple revolution with hillary's puppet masters pulling the strings

IF they were actually calling for jihad against EMPIRE, instead of their fellow pathetic nekkid apes, i could get behind that but their petulant excuses for why they should be given free reign to 'punch a nazi' (ie ANYONE who disagrees with me), the disgusting shilling for hillary/dem'rats/Empire is maddening
.
don't give a shit about t-rump; but they hound him out of office, i will consider that a direct assault on my small-dee democracy, that a duly elected official is run off by hijacking the mechanisms of state to pursue the agenda of the 1% is not right, though done numerous times
.
i think they might find that 100+ million PISSED-OFF, nothing-to-lose unemployed may consider that the straw that broke the camel's back, and soros and his cabal of deep state slime won't like the pushback when bubba gets out of the recliner
.
come the revolution idiot dem'rats appear to be itching for, just WHICH SIDE do stupid libtards think the police, natl guard, military, etc are going to come down on ? ? ?
(hint: NOT the libtard side )

SolontoCroesus, June 15, 2017 at 2:20 pm GMT

@Mike Whitney nb. from the essay:

"Instead, someone had to whisper in Trump's ear that he should fire Comey and, ah ha, that's all it took. In other words, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosen berg had to step in"

We know what you meant. They all look alike.

JL, June 15, 2017 at 2:23 pm GMT

The problem is that this leads back to the same questions of why Russia is Washington's sworn enemy anyway. Furthermore, what is Trump's motivation in pushing for a detente with Russia, potentially jeopardizing first his candidacy, and now his presidency, with a generally unpopular among the electorate position?

I tend to agree with some of the comments above, that this has to do with the Neocons, their hold on power and their plans for Middle Eastern conquest. Russia stands in the way of a lot of their plans. Still, Trump's stance on Russia, and who or what else is behind that, to me is the great mystery in all this. And, to be clear, I don't believe in any kind of ridiculous collusion or blackmail scenario.

nsa, June 15, 2017 at 2:42 pm GMT

We here in Ft. Meade are having a good laugh. One of our assets, a shyster named Rosenstein (that's Scottish, isn't it?) gives Trumpenstein a little pinprick in the back (not even a stab) and the silly old jooie tool folds like a cheap lawn chair. No wall, no tax cuts, no ending the jooie wars for the izzies, no mass deportations, no curbing the jooie central bank .just tacky soap opera histrionics for the few interested in the doings in wash dc.

nickels, June 15, 2017 at 2:52 pm GMT

Trump needs to stage a false flag assasination attempt. Blame it on operatives within the FBI and the upper echelons of congress. Invite bikers for Trump and other patriots to washington, putting them on the payroll and arming them while stating "Due to the assasination attempt I can no longer trust the secret service or Washington establishment for protection." He then needs to have this army occupy both Capitol hill, the CIA and the FBI. etc etc. Its time for Trump to flex his inner Yeltsin.

The Alarmist, June 15, 2017 at 3:20 pm GMT

"Why has he been so eager?"

Uh, because he is a tool of the criminal elite who really run the show, which is one reason he was rewarded with a directorship at HSBC in an earlier time. He made beaucoup bucks there they made beaucoup bucks laundering hundreds of billions of drug cartel money. Apple tree.

Joe Franklin, June 15, 2017 at 3:46 pm GMT

@Mike Whitney Put Rosenstein under oath and ask him about any communications and agreements and meetings he may have had with Comey or Mueller before he appointed a special prosecutor. Do the same thing with Comey and Mueller in regard to Rosenstein. Trump's attorney should do these interrogations.

Agent76, June 15, 2017 at 4:31 pm GMT

@JL

Know this and it is all NATO and their aggression in the world of the empire. Nov 29, 2016 The Map That Shows Why Russia Fears War With USA

Sowhat, June 15, 2017 at 5:11 pm GMT

I feel that, despite the exhaustive process, this one has to be played- all 19 holes. Everyone is going to demand a good stiff one at the nineteenth. Given his resume, Rosenstein was a good choice by Trump. Sessions may regret his recusal but, Rosenstein may feel that his Frosted Flakes breakfast will carry the day. One should not prejudice him. Trump may have snagged a few and ended up in a sand trap but, he's still below par and we're only on the forth fairway. I did some digging and found that Rod's from Philly. Just thought I would throw that in.
You can't judge a book by it's cover. The guy will be a good caddy.

anon, June 15, 2017 at 7:00 pm GMT

@Mike Whitney Trump should directly appeal to the American people( his base and large number of disaffected Clinton supporters)

JerseyJeffersonian, June 15, 2017 at 8:12 pm GMT

@Mike Whitney Thank you, Mr. Whitney. This comment and comment #12 delineate the mechanics of the set-up with laser-like precision.

We are in your debt for articulating the hinge points of this assault on the Constitutional order. I don't care much for Trump, finding many of his specific domestic policies noxious; but I do have a dog in the fight when the Deep State tries to overturn the election of the Chief Magistrate of the nation because he might upset their applecart. He already fucked with their so-called "trade" deals by deep sixing the TPP, and then he is talking about speaking respectfully with Russia, implicitly rejecting the unipolarity of American Hegemony. What further proof did the Deep State require to set a soft coup into motion?

DanCT, June 15, 2017 at 9:02 pm GMT

Comey's having previously taken a job as general counsel of Bridgewater, including a reported and unmerited $3+ million severance on leaving, was sufficient reason for Trump to fire him on day one. Comey's due diligence had to have made him aware of–and therefore he apparently wanted to be in on–Dalio's deranged, Stalinesque corporate culture of backstabbing absolutely everyone under the guise of openness.

Dalio may be very rich, but he's an evil man who we may assume saw in Comey a kindred spirit. Having a Ray Dalio protege leading the FBI suggests agents supported him, if that's actually the case, out of fear and not allegiance.

Sean, June 15, 2017 at 9:05 pm GMT

Were Trump to take hysterical pieces like this post seriously it would likely precipitate him into war with Russia. Fortunately that won't be necessary, because Trump can order the FBI to do or stop doing things; the pres has that constitutional authority as Dershowitz has said repeatedly from the begining, so there is no case against Trump for obstruction. Dershowitz has also said anything (jaywalking) is in theory an "impeachable offense" , because impeachment is completely political.

They want Trump to quit and are predicting impeachment in an attempt to get him to just go, but even if Trump got fed up and wanted to quit, he couldn't now, because without the protection of office, his fortune (at least) would be destroyed. As for the Russia innuendo, it is always open to Trump to humiliate Russia with a military initiative (in Syria for example), which would prove he has nothing to hide. As a major conflict with Russian proxies beckoned, the country would look askance at scarce domestic intelligence resources being used for an old tax or sexual harassment line of investigation against the sitting president. Knowing what kind of a man he is, who can doubt that Trump wouldn't hesitate to kill Russians if that is what it took to turn the heat on his opponents..

Sam J., June 15, 2017 at 9:33 pm GMT

@Joe Franklin " Put Rosenstein under oath "

That's a good idea. Should be public. He needs to be fired any way. The person or persons who recommended Rosenstein need to be fired also.

annamaria, June 15, 2017 at 9:58 pm GMT

@Fran Macadam " the Russians did not "interfere in our Democracy" either. We have no democracy."

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/15/the-russians-didnt-do-it/

Sowhat, June 15, 2017 at 10:05 pm GMT

@Mike Whitney

A week later, Rosenstein –without consulting Trump– appoints deep state handyman and political assassin, Bob Mueller

I missed this. Is there a reference, please?

Sowhat, June 15, 2017 at 10:10 pm GMT

@alexander

If the American people had their way, all our "Neocon overlords" would be in federal prison or Guantanamo Bay, and all their assets seized to pay down the heinous 20 trillion debt their lies have created.

Agree

RobinG, June 15, 2017 at 10:26 pm GMT

@Mark Green "Ancillary targets" are American citizens. (Syria and Iran are much clearer direct targets.)

Trump has done some great things. Recognition of Fake News and the Deep State threatened a much bigger awakening. So Trump had to be diminished. Sure, he's a mixed bag, but his defeat of Killary was a blessing. His direct communication (Twitter) and exposure of the MSM was brilliant.

As you say, 'obstruction of justice' is nebulous. Going on the defensive is a loser's game. There must be a counter-attack. What have we got? Please, if you have something better, something simpler to put in meme and slogan, let's have it, but I see Who Killed Seth Rich as a powerful offensive. You don't even have to solve it. Just get the case broadcast. Do you know that only this week, Seth Rich's neighbor has come out as a witness? (NOT a witness of the shooting, but of the immediate aftermath, police, etc. Seth may have been totally beat down before he was shot.)

JULY 10 = ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF SETH RICH MURDER How about something big on July 10? The date shouldn't be wasted. Over 66,000 people have signed the petition to make this point. There are only 3 days left, but it could still make the 100K mark.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/appoint-special-prosecutor-investigate-murder-seth-rich-alleged-wikileaks-email-leaker

PLEASE SIGN. Either way, THE ANNIVERSARY LOOMS.

RobinG, June 15, 2017 at 10:36 pm GMT

@Jim Christian

"..carry the frustrated Clinton investigations to a Grand Jury, flip it all back on them and indict Comey, Rosenberg and all their little buddies down below that leaked "

YES, SO TRUE!! Big mistake to let Clinton off the hook. And what was her involvement in the murder of Seth Rich? Investigate the DNC, Lynch, Comey, Clinton – all of them.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/appoint-special-prosecutor-investigate-murder-seth-rich-alleged-wikileaks-email-leaker

Appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate the murder of Seth Rich, the alleged Wikileaks email leaker.

Sowhat, June 15, 2017 at 10:54 pm GMT

@Sam J. "...Put Rosenstein under oath..."

That's a good idea. Should be public. He needs to be fired any way. The person or persons who recommended Rosenstein need to be fired also. Putting him under is an excellent idea. Trump needs to hear it or read it. IMO, Rosenstein doesn't have a resumč that him suspect.

[May 23, 2017] Trumped-up claims against Trump by Ray McGovern

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... A few days before his firing, Mr. Comey reportedly had asked for still more resources to hunt the Russian bear. Pundit piranhas swarmed to charge Mr. Trump with trying to thwart the investigation into how the Russians supposedly "interfered" to help him win the election. ..."
"... Truth is, President Trump had ample reason to be fed up with Mr. Comey, in part for his lack of enthusiasm to investigate actual, provable crimes related to "Russia-gate" -- like leaking information from highly sensitive intercepted communications to precipitate the demise of Trump aide Michael Flynn ..."
"... we suspect Mr. Comey already knows who was responsible.) ..."
"... In contrast, Mr. Comey evinced strong determination to chase after ties between Russia and the Trump campaign until the cows came home. In the meantime, the investigation (already underway for 10 months) would itself cast doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Trump's presidency and put the kibosh on plans to forge a more workable relationship with Russia -- a win-win for the establishment and the FBI/CIA/NSA "Deep State"; a lose-lose for the president. ..."
"... So far, it has been all smoke and mirrors with no chargeable offenses and not a scintilla of convincing evidence of Russian "meddling" in the election. The oft-cited, but evidence-free, CIA/FBI/NSA report of Jan. 6, crafted by "hand-picked" analysts, according to then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper , is of a piece with the "high-confidence," but fraudulent, National Intelligence Estimate 15 years ago about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. ..."
"... On March 31, 2017, WikiLeaks released original CIA documents - ignored by mainstream media - showing that the agency had created a program allowing it to break into computers and servers and make it look like others did it by leaving telltale signs like Cyrillic markings, ..."
"... It is altogether possible that the hacking attributed to Russia was actually one of several "active measures" undertaken by a cabal consisting of the CIA, FBI, NSA and Mr. Clapper - the same agencies responsible for the lame, evidence-free memorandum of Jan. 6. ..."
"... Mr. Comey displayed considerable discomfort on March 20, explaining to the House Intelligence Committee why the FBI did not insist on getting physical access to the Democratic National Committee computers in order to do its own proper forensics, but chose to rely on the those done by DNC contractor Crowdstrike. Could this be explained by Mr. Comey's fear that FBI technicians not fully briefed on CIA/NSA/FBI Deep State programs might uncover a lot more than he wanted? Did this play a role in Mr. Trump's firing of Mr. Comey? ..."
"... President Trump has entered into a high-stakes gamble in confronting the Deep State and its media allies over the evidence-free accusations of his colluding with Russia. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, publicly warned him of the risk earlier this year. "You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you," ..."
May 17, 2017 | www.baltimoresun.com
Donald Trump said he had fired FBI Director James Comey over "this Russia thing, with Trump and Russia." The president labeled it a "made-up story" and, by all appearances, he is mostly correct.

A few days before his firing, Mr. Comey reportedly had asked for still more resources to hunt the Russian bear. Pundit piranhas swarmed to charge Mr. Trump with trying to thwart the investigation into how the Russians supposedly "interfered" to help him win the election.

But can that commentary bear close scrutiny, or is it the " phony narrative " Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn of Texas claims it to be? Mr. Cornyn has quipped that, if impeding the investigation was Mr. Trump's aim, "This strikes me as a lousy way to do it. All it does is heighten the attention given to the issue."

Truth is, President Trump had ample reason to be fed up with Mr. Comey, in part for his lack of enthusiasm to investigate actual, provable crimes related to "Russia-gate" -- like leaking information from highly sensitive intercepted communications to precipitate the demise of Trump aide Michael Flynn . Mr. Flynn was caught "red-handed," so to speak, talking with Russia's ambassador last December. (In our experience, finding the culprit for that leak should not be very difficult; we suspect Mr. Comey already knows who was responsible.)

In contrast, Mr. Comey evinced strong determination to chase after ties between Russia and the Trump campaign until the cows came home. In the meantime, the investigation (already underway for 10 months) would itself cast doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Trump's presidency and put the kibosh on plans to forge a more workable relationship with Russia -- a win-win for the establishment and the FBI/CIA/NSA "Deep State"; a lose-lose for the president.

So far, it has been all smoke and mirrors with no chargeable offenses and not a scintilla of convincing evidence of Russian "meddling" in the election. The oft-cited, but evidence-free, CIA/FBI/NSA report of Jan. 6, crafted by "hand-picked" analysts, according to then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper , is of a piece with the "high-confidence," but fraudulent, National Intelligence Estimate 15 years ago about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But what about "Russia hacking," the centerpiece of accusations of Kremlin "interference" to help Mr.Trump?

On March 31, 2017, WikiLeaks released original CIA documents - ignored by mainstream media - showing that the agency had created a program allowing it to break into computers and servers and make it look like others did it by leaving telltale signs like Cyrillic markings, for example. The capabilities shown in what WikiLeaks calls the "Vault 7" trove of CIA documents required the creation of hundreds of millions of lines of source code. At $25 per line of code, that amounts to about $2.5 billion for each 100 million code lines. But the Deep State has that kind of money and would probably consider the expenditure a good return on investment for "proving" the Russians hacked.

It is altogether possible that the hacking attributed to Russia was actually one of several "active measures" undertaken by a cabal consisting of the CIA, FBI, NSA and Mr. Clapper - the same agencies responsible for the lame, evidence-free memorandum of Jan. 6.

Mr. Comey displayed considerable discomfort on March 20, explaining to the House Intelligence Committee why the FBI did not insist on getting physical access to the Democratic National Committee computers in order to do its own proper forensics, but chose to rely on the those done by DNC contractor Crowdstrike. Could this be explained by Mr. Comey's fear that FBI technicians not fully briefed on CIA/NSA/FBI Deep State programs might uncover a lot more than he wanted? Did this play a role in Mr. Trump's firing of Mr. Comey?

President Trump has entered into a high-stakes gamble in confronting the Deep State and its media allies over the evidence-free accusations of his colluding with Russia. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, publicly warned him of the risk earlier this year. "You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you," Mr. Schumer told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Jan. 3.

If Mr. Trump continues to "take on" the Deep State, he will be fighting uphill, whether he's in the right or not. It is far from certain he will prevail.

Ray McGovern ([email protected]) was a CIA analyst for 27 years; he briefed the president's daily brief one-on-one to President Reagan's most senior national security officials from 1981-85. William Binney ([email protected]) worked for NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection systems still used by NSA.

truth_will_set_you_free Newcomer 4day(s)ago
The public owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to both Mr. McGovern and Mr. Binney, who are substantial individuals with sterling reputations, for putting themselves forward and informing the public of the crimes that are taking place in DC behind closed doors.

The fact that paid shills and trolls would make the effort to post content free criticisms of this article only serves to underline the article's importance to a thoughtful reader. The people who sponsor these posters obviously have complete contempt for the public. However, each day, thanks to articles like this and the idiotic attempts to criticize them, more and more people are becoming aware of the fraud that is DC.

[May 23, 2017] Trumped-up claims against Trump by Ray McGovern

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... A few days before his firing, Mr. Comey reportedly had asked for still more resources to hunt the Russian bear. Pundit piranhas swarmed to charge Mr. Trump with trying to thwart the investigation into how the Russians supposedly "interfered" to help him win the election. ..."
"... Truth is, President Trump had ample reason to be fed up with Mr. Comey, in part for his lack of enthusiasm to investigate actual, provable crimes related to "Russia-gate" -- like leaking information from highly sensitive intercepted communications to precipitate the demise of Trump aide Michael Flynn ..."
"... we suspect Mr. Comey already knows who was responsible.) ..."
"... In contrast, Mr. Comey evinced strong determination to chase after ties between Russia and the Trump campaign until the cows came home. In the meantime, the investigation (already underway for 10 months) would itself cast doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Trump's presidency and put the kibosh on plans to forge a more workable relationship with Russia -- a win-win for the establishment and the FBI/CIA/NSA "Deep State"; a lose-lose for the president. ..."
"... So far, it has been all smoke and mirrors with no chargeable offenses and not a scintilla of convincing evidence of Russian "meddling" in the election. The oft-cited, but evidence-free, CIA/FBI/NSA report of Jan. 6, crafted by "hand-picked" analysts, according to then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper , is of a piece with the "high-confidence," but fraudulent, National Intelligence Estimate 15 years ago about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. ..."
"... On March 31, 2017, WikiLeaks released original CIA documents - ignored by mainstream media - showing that the agency had created a program allowing it to break into computers and servers and make it look like others did it by leaving telltale signs like Cyrillic markings, ..."
"... It is altogether possible that the hacking attributed to Russia was actually one of several "active measures" undertaken by a cabal consisting of the CIA, FBI, NSA and Mr. Clapper - the same agencies responsible for the lame, evidence-free memorandum of Jan. 6. ..."
"... Mr. Comey displayed considerable discomfort on March 20, explaining to the House Intelligence Committee why the FBI did not insist on getting physical access to the Democratic National Committee computers in order to do its own proper forensics, but chose to rely on the those done by DNC contractor Crowdstrike. Could this be explained by Mr. Comey's fear that FBI technicians not fully briefed on CIA/NSA/FBI Deep State programs might uncover a lot more than he wanted? Did this play a role in Mr. Trump's firing of Mr. Comey? ..."
"... President Trump has entered into a high-stakes gamble in confronting the Deep State and its media allies over the evidence-free accusations of his colluding with Russia. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, publicly warned him of the risk earlier this year. "You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you," ..."
May 17, 2017 | www.baltimoresun.com
Donald Trump said he had fired FBI Director James Comey over "this Russia thing, with Trump and Russia." The president labeled it a "made-up story" and, by all appearances, he is mostly correct.

A few days before his firing, Mr. Comey reportedly had asked for still more resources to hunt the Russian bear. Pundit piranhas swarmed to charge Mr. Trump with trying to thwart the investigation into how the Russians supposedly "interfered" to help him win the election.

But can that commentary bear close scrutiny, or is it the " phony narrative " Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn of Texas claims it to be? Mr. Cornyn has quipped that, if impeding the investigation was Mr. Trump's aim, "This strikes me as a lousy way to do it. All it does is heighten the attention given to the issue."

Truth is, President Trump had ample reason to be fed up with Mr. Comey, in part for his lack of enthusiasm to investigate actual, provable crimes related to "Russia-gate" -- like leaking information from highly sensitive intercepted communications to precipitate the demise of Trump aide Michael Flynn . Mr. Flynn was caught "red-handed," so to speak, talking with Russia's ambassador last December. (In our experience, finding the culprit for that leak should not be very difficult; we suspect Mr. Comey already knows who was responsible.)

In contrast, Mr. Comey evinced strong determination to chase after ties between Russia and the Trump campaign until the cows came home. In the meantime, the investigation (already underway for 10 months) would itself cast doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Trump's presidency and put the kibosh on plans to forge a more workable relationship with Russia -- a win-win for the establishment and the FBI/CIA/NSA "Deep State"; a lose-lose for the president.

So far, it has been all smoke and mirrors with no chargeable offenses and not a scintilla of convincing evidence of Russian "meddling" in the election. The oft-cited, but evidence-free, CIA/FBI/NSA report of Jan. 6, crafted by "hand-picked" analysts, according to then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper , is of a piece with the "high-confidence," but fraudulent, National Intelligence Estimate 15 years ago about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But what about "Russia hacking," the centerpiece of accusations of Kremlin "interference" to help Mr.Trump?

On March 31, 2017, WikiLeaks released original CIA documents - ignored by mainstream media - showing that the agency had created a program allowing it to break into computers and servers and make it look like others did it by leaving telltale signs like Cyrillic markings, for example. The capabilities shown in what WikiLeaks calls the "Vault 7" trove of CIA documents required the creation of hundreds of millions of lines of source code. At $25 per line of code, that amounts to about $2.5 billion for each 100 million code lines. But the Deep State has that kind of money and would probably consider the expenditure a good return on investment for "proving" the Russians hacked.

It is altogether possible that the hacking attributed to Russia was actually one of several "active measures" undertaken by a cabal consisting of the CIA, FBI, NSA and Mr. Clapper - the same agencies responsible for the lame, evidence-free memorandum of Jan. 6.

Mr. Comey displayed considerable discomfort on March 20, explaining to the House Intelligence Committee why the FBI did not insist on getting physical access to the Democratic National Committee computers in order to do its own proper forensics, but chose to rely on the those done by DNC contractor Crowdstrike. Could this be explained by Mr. Comey's fear that FBI technicians not fully briefed on CIA/NSA/FBI Deep State programs might uncover a lot more than he wanted? Did this play a role in Mr. Trump's firing of Mr. Comey?

President Trump has entered into a high-stakes gamble in confronting the Deep State and its media allies over the evidence-free accusations of his colluding with Russia. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, publicly warned him of the risk earlier this year. "You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you," Mr. Schumer told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Jan. 3.

If Mr. Trump continues to "take on" the Deep State, he will be fighting uphill, whether he's in the right or not. It is far from certain he will prevail.

Ray McGovern ([email protected]) was a CIA analyst for 27 years; he briefed the president's daily brief one-on-one to President Reagan's most senior national security officials from 1981-85. William Binney ([email protected]) worked for NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection systems still used by NSA.

truth_will_set_you_free Newcomer 4day(s)ago
The public owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to both Mr. McGovern and Mr. Binney, who are substantial individuals with sterling reputations, for putting themselves forward and informing the public of the crimes that are taking place in DC behind closed doors.

The fact that paid shills and trolls would make the effort to post content free criticisms of this article only serves to underline the article's importance to a thoughtful reader. The people who sponsor these posters obviously have complete contempt for the public. However, each day, thanks to articles like this and the idiotic attempts to criticize them, more and more people are becoming aware of the fraud that is DC.

[May 20, 2017] Invasion of the Putin-Nazis by C.J. Hopkins

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... So, here we are, a little over one hundred days into " The Age of Darkness " and the " racially Orwellian " Trumpian Reich , and, all right, while it's certainly no party, it appears that those reports we heard of the Death of Neoliberalism were greatly exaggerated. Not only has the entire edifice of Western democracy not been toppled, but the global capitalist ruling classes seem to be going about their business in more or less the usual manner. The Goldman Sachs vampires are back in the White House (as they have been for over one hundred years). The post-Cold War destabilization and restructuring of the Middle East is moving forward right on schedule. The Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, and other non-globalist-ball-playing parties remain surrounded by the most ruthlessly murderous military machine in the annals of history. Greece is being debt-enslaved and looted. And so on. Life is back to normal. ..."
"... OK, not completely normal. Because, despite the fact that editorialists at "respectable" papers like The New York Times (and I'm explicitly referring to Charles M. Blow and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman) have recently dropped the completely ridiculous "Trump is a Putinist agent" propaganda they'd been relentlessly spewing since he won the election, a significant number of deluded persons, having swallowed their official vomitus (i.e., the vomitus of Blow and Krugman, and other neoliberal establishment hacks) ..."
"... They are convinced (these deluded persons are) that the Russians are waging a global campaign not only to maliciously hack, or interfere with, or marginally influence, free and fair elections throughout the Western world, but to control the minds of Westerners themselves, in some Orwellian, or possibly Wachowskian fashion. Worse yet, these deluded persons are certain, the Russians are now secretly running the White House, and are just using Trump, and the Goldman Sachs gang, and capitalist centurions like General McMaster, as a front for their subversive activities, like denying Americans universal healthcare and privatizing the hell out of everything. ..."
"... whomever is responsible for ferreting out the Putin-Nazi infiltrators that "respected" pundits like Blow and Krugman (and stark raving loonies like Louise Mensch) have convinced them are now controlling the government. Weirdly, these same "respected" journalists, the ones who have been assuring the world that The President of the United States is a covert agent working for Russia, have failed to even mention this March for Truth, and are acting like they had nothing to do with whipping these folks up into a frenzy of apoplectic paranoia. ..."
"... Oh, yeah, and if Russiagate isn't paranoid enough, apparently, the corporate media is now prepared to deploy the "Putin-Nazi Election Hackers" propaganda in any and every election going forward ( as they did in the recent French election , and as they tried to do in the Dutch elections , and presumably will in the German elections, and as The Guardian appears to be retroactively doing in regard to the Brexit referendum ). Any day now, we should be hearing of the "Putin-Nazi-Corbyn Axis," and the "Putin-Nazi-Podemos Pact," and video footage of Martin Schultz and a bevy of former-East German hookers engaging in Odinist sex magick rituals in an FSB-owned bordello in Moscow. Soon, it won't just be elections no, we'll be hearing reports of Russian shipments of rocks, bottles, and pointy sticks to the "Putin-Nazi Palestinian Terrorists," and well, who knows how far they're willing to take this? ..."
"... You remember last year as clearly as I do, how, suddenly, out of seemingly nowhere, the Putin-Nazi menace materialized, and took the place of the "self-radicalized terrorist" as the primary target for people's hatred and fear. OK, sure, at first, there were no Putin-Nazis. It was just that the Brexit folks were fascists, and Trump was Hitler, and Bernie Sanders was some sort of racist hacky sack Communist. But then the Putinists poisoned Clinton , and unleashed their legions of Russian propagandists on the gullible, Oxycodone-addicted denizens of "flyover country," and, as they say, the rest is history. ..."
"... In any event, here we are now stuck inside this simulation of "reality" where Putin-Nazi hackers are coming out of the woodwork, a partyless neoliberal banker has been elected the President of France, Donald Trump is an evil mastermind or a Russian operative, depending on what day it is (as opposed to just a completely incompetent, narcissistic billionaire idiot), and neoliberal propaganda outfits like The New York Times , The Washington Post , MSNBC, CNN, The Guardian , NPR, et al., are perceived as "respectable" sources of journalism, as if their role in generating and occasionally revising the official narrative weren't so insultingly obvious. ..."
May 17, 2017 | www.unz.com
So, here we are, a little over one hundred days into " The Age of Darkness " and the " racially Orwellian " Trumpian Reich , and, all right, while it's certainly no party, it appears that those reports we heard of the Death of Neoliberalism were greatly exaggerated. Not only has the entire edifice of Western democracy not been toppled, but the global capitalist ruling classes seem to be going about their business in more or less the usual manner. The Goldman Sachs vampires are back in the White House (as they have been for over one hundred years). The post-Cold War destabilization and restructuring of the Middle East is moving forward right on schedule. The Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, and other non-globalist-ball-playing parties remain surrounded by the most ruthlessly murderous military machine in the annals of history. Greece is being debt-enslaved and looted. And so on. Life is back to normal.

Or OK, not completely normal. Because, despite the fact that editorialists at "respectable" papers like The New York Times (and I'm explicitly referring to Charles M. Blow and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman) have recently dropped the completely ridiculous "Trump is a Putinist agent" propaganda they'd been relentlessly spewing since he won the election, a significant number of deluded persons, having swallowed their official vomitus (i.e., the vomitus of Blow and Krugman, and other neoliberal establishment hacks) like the hungry Adélie penguin chicks in those nature shows narrated by David Attenborough.

They are convinced (these deluded persons are) that the Russians are waging a global campaign not only to maliciously hack, or interfere with, or marginally influence, free and fair elections throughout the Western world, but to control the minds of Westerners themselves, in some Orwellian, or possibly Wachowskian fashion. Worse yet, these deluded persons are certain, the Russians are now secretly running the White House, and are just using Trump, and the Goldman Sachs gang, and capitalist centurions like General McMaster, as a front for their subversive activities, like denying Americans universal healthcare and privatizing the hell out of everything.

If you think I'm being hyperbolic, check out #MarchforTruth on Twitter, or its anonymous Crowdpac fundraising page , which at first glance I took for an elaborate prank, but which seems to be in deadly earnest about "restoring faith in American government," uncovering Trump's "collusion" with Russia, and reversing his "subversion of the will of the people." The plan is, on June 3, 2017, thousands of otherwise rational Americans are going to pour into the streets "demanding answers" from well, I'm not sure whom, some independent prosecutor, or congressional committee, or intelligence agency, or whomever is responsible for ferreting out the Putin-Nazi infiltrators that "respected" pundits like Blow and Krugman (and stark raving loonies like Louise Mensch) have convinced them are now controlling the government. Weirdly, these same "respected" journalists, the ones who have been assuring the world that The President of the United States is a covert agent working for Russia, have failed to even mention this March for Truth, and are acting like they had nothing to do with whipping these folks up into a frenzy of apoplectic paranoia.

Incidentally, one of my colleagues contacted Mr. Blow directly and inquired as to whether he'd be vociferously supporting or possibly leading the March for Truth, and was chastised by Blow and his Twitter followers. I found this reaction extremely troubling, and asked my colleague to contact Mensch and suggest she check with her handlers at The Times to make sure the Russians haven't gotten to him. However, just as he was sitting down to do that, the "Comey-firing" brouhaha broke, which seems to have brought Blow back to the fold , albeit in a less hysterical manner than his Rooskie-hunting readers have grown accustomed to. We can only hope that both he and Krugman return to form in the weeks to come as Russiagate builds to its dramatic climax.

Oh, yeah, and if Russiagate isn't paranoid enough, apparently, the corporate media is now prepared to deploy the "Putin-Nazi Election Hackers" propaganda in any and every election going forward ( as they did in the recent French election , and as they tried to do in the Dutch elections , and presumably will in the German elections, and as The Guardian appears to be retroactively doing in regard to the Brexit referendum ). Any day now, we should be hearing of the "Putin-Nazi-Corbyn Axis," and the "Putin-Nazi-Podemos Pact," and video footage of Martin Schultz and a bevy of former-East German hookers engaging in Odinist sex magick rituals in an FSB-owned bordello in Moscow. Soon, it won't just be elections no, we'll be hearing reports of Russian shipments of rocks, bottles, and pointy sticks to the "Putin-Nazi Palestinian Terrorists," and well, who knows how far they're willing to take this?

All joking aside, as I've written about previously , what we're dealing with here is more than just a lame attempt by the Democratic Party to blame its humiliating loss on Putin (although of course it certainly is that in part). The global neoliberal establishment is rolling out a new official narrative. It's actually just a slight variation on the one it's been selling us since 2001. I could come up with a sixteen-syllable, academic-sounding name for this narrative, but I'm trying to keep things simple these days so let's call it The Normals versus The Extremists , (the Normals being the neoliberals and the Extremists being everyone else). The goal of this narrative is to stigmatize and otherwise marginalize opposition to Neoliberalism, regardless of the nature of that opposition (i.e., whether it comes from the left, right, or from religious, environmentalist, or any other quarters). Now, as any professional storyteller will tell you, one of the most important aspects of the narrative you're trying to suck people into is to make your protagonist a likeable underdog, and then pit him or her against a much more powerful and ideally incorrigibly evil enemy. During the Cold War, this was easy to do - the story was Democracy versus the Commies , traditional "good versus evil"-type stuff.

Once the U.S.S.R. collapsed, the concept needed major rewrites, as a new evil adversary had to be found. This (i.e., the 1990s) was a rather awkward and frustrating period. The global capitalist ruling classes, giddy with joy after having become the first ever global ideological hegemon in the history of aspiring global hegemons, got all avant-garde for a while, and thought they could do without an "enemy." This approach, as you'll recall, did not sell well.

No one quite got why we were bombing Yugoslavia, and Bush and Baker had to break out the Hitler schtick to gin up support for rescuing the Kuwaitis from their old friend Saddam. Fortunately, in September 2001, the show runners got the break they were looking for, and the official narrative was instantly switched to Democracy versus The Islamic Terrorists . This re-brand got extremely good ratings, and would have been extended indefinitely if not for what began to unfold in the latter half of 2016. (One could go back and locate the week when the mainstream media officially switched from the " Summer of Terror " narrative they were flogging to the new "Invasion of the Putin-Nazis" narrative my guess is, it was early to mid-September.) It started with the Brexit referendum, continued with the rise of Trump, and well, I don't have to recount it, do I? You remember last year as clearly as I do, how, suddenly, out of seemingly nowhere, the Putin-Nazi menace materialized, and took the place of the "self-radicalized terrorist" as the primary target for people's hatred and fear. OK, sure, at first, there were no Putin-Nazis. It was just that the Brexit folks were fascists, and Trump was Hitler, and Bernie Sanders was some sort of racist hacky sack Communist. But then the Putinists poisoned Clinton , and unleashed their legions of Russian propagandists on the gullible, Oxycodone-addicted denizens of "flyover country," and, as they say, the rest is history.

In any event, here we are now stuck inside this simulation of "reality" where Putin-Nazi hackers are coming out of the woodwork, a partyless neoliberal banker has been elected the President of France, Donald Trump is an evil mastermind or a Russian operative, depending on what day it is (as opposed to just a completely incompetent, narcissistic billionaire idiot), and neoliberal propaganda outfits like The New York Times , The Washington Post , MSNBC, CNN, The Guardian , NPR, et al., are perceived as "respectable" sources of journalism, as if their role in generating and occasionally revising the official narrative weren't so insultingly obvious. Personally, I am looking forward to the upcoming German elections this Autumn, wherein Neoliberal Party "A" is challenging Neoliberal Party "B" for the right to continue privatizing Greece (and any other formerly sovereign nations the banks can get their hands on) in a demonstration of European unity, and fiscal austerity and, you know, whatever.

If this is the Death of Neoliberalism, just imagine what awaits us at the Resurrection.

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .

[May 20, 2017] Invasion of the Putin-Nazis by C.J. Hopkins

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... So, here we are, a little over one hundred days into " The Age of Darkness " and the " racially Orwellian " Trumpian Reich , and, all right, while it's certainly no party, it appears that those reports we heard of the Death of Neoliberalism were greatly exaggerated. Not only has the entire edifice of Western democracy not been toppled, but the global capitalist ruling classes seem to be going about their business in more or less the usual manner. The Goldman Sachs vampires are back in the White House (as they have been for over one hundred years). The post-Cold War destabilization and restructuring of the Middle East is moving forward right on schedule. The Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, and other non-globalist-ball-playing parties remain surrounded by the most ruthlessly murderous military machine in the annals of history. Greece is being debt-enslaved and looted. And so on. Life is back to normal. ..."
"... OK, not completely normal. Because, despite the fact that editorialists at "respectable" papers like The New York Times (and I'm explicitly referring to Charles M. Blow and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman) have recently dropped the completely ridiculous "Trump is a Putinist agent" propaganda they'd been relentlessly spewing since he won the election, a significant number of deluded persons, having swallowed their official vomitus (i.e., the vomitus of Blow and Krugman, and other neoliberal establishment hacks) ..."
"... They are convinced (these deluded persons are) that the Russians are waging a global campaign not only to maliciously hack, or interfere with, or marginally influence, free and fair elections throughout the Western world, but to control the minds of Westerners themselves, in some Orwellian, or possibly Wachowskian fashion. Worse yet, these deluded persons are certain, the Russians are now secretly running the White House, and are just using Trump, and the Goldman Sachs gang, and capitalist centurions like General McMaster, as a front for their subversive activities, like denying Americans universal healthcare and privatizing the hell out of everything. ..."
"... whomever is responsible for ferreting out the Putin-Nazi infiltrators that "respected" pundits like Blow and Krugman (and stark raving loonies like Louise Mensch) have convinced them are now controlling the government. Weirdly, these same "respected" journalists, the ones who have been assuring the world that The President of the United States is a covert agent working for Russia, have failed to even mention this March for Truth, and are acting like they had nothing to do with whipping these folks up into a frenzy of apoplectic paranoia. ..."
"... Oh, yeah, and if Russiagate isn't paranoid enough, apparently, the corporate media is now prepared to deploy the "Putin-Nazi Election Hackers" propaganda in any and every election going forward ( as they did in the recent French election , and as they tried to do in the Dutch elections , and presumably will in the German elections, and as The Guardian appears to be retroactively doing in regard to the Brexit referendum ). Any day now, we should be hearing of the "Putin-Nazi-Corbyn Axis," and the "Putin-Nazi-Podemos Pact," and video footage of Martin Schultz and a bevy of former-East German hookers engaging in Odinist sex magick rituals in an FSB-owned bordello in Moscow. Soon, it won't just be elections no, we'll be hearing reports of Russian shipments of rocks, bottles, and pointy sticks to the "Putin-Nazi Palestinian Terrorists," and well, who knows how far they're willing to take this? ..."
"... You remember last year as clearly as I do, how, suddenly, out of seemingly nowhere, the Putin-Nazi menace materialized, and took the place of the "self-radicalized terrorist" as the primary target for people's hatred and fear. OK, sure, at first, there were no Putin-Nazis. It was just that the Brexit folks were fascists, and Trump was Hitler, and Bernie Sanders was some sort of racist hacky sack Communist. But then the Putinists poisoned Clinton , and unleashed their legions of Russian propagandists on the gullible, Oxycodone-addicted denizens of "flyover country," and, as they say, the rest is history. ..."
"... In any event, here we are now stuck inside this simulation of "reality" where Putin-Nazi hackers are coming out of the woodwork, a partyless neoliberal banker has been elected the President of France, Donald Trump is an evil mastermind or a Russian operative, depending on what day it is (as opposed to just a completely incompetent, narcissistic billionaire idiot), and neoliberal propaganda outfits like The New York Times , The Washington Post , MSNBC, CNN, The Guardian , NPR, et al., are perceived as "respectable" sources of journalism, as if their role in generating and occasionally revising the official narrative weren't so insultingly obvious. ..."
May 17, 2017 | www.unz.com
So, here we are, a little over one hundred days into " The Age of Darkness " and the " racially Orwellian " Trumpian Reich , and, all right, while it's certainly no party, it appears that those reports we heard of the Death of Neoliberalism were greatly exaggerated. Not only has the entire edifice of Western democracy not been toppled, but the global capitalist ruling classes seem to be going about their business in more or less the usual manner. The Goldman Sachs vampires are back in the White House (as they have been for over one hundred years). The post-Cold War destabilization and restructuring of the Middle East is moving forward right on schedule. The Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, and other non-globalist-ball-playing parties remain surrounded by the most ruthlessly murderous military machine in the annals of history. Greece is being debt-enslaved and looted. And so on. Life is back to normal.

Or OK, not completely normal. Because, despite the fact that editorialists at "respectable" papers like The New York Times (and I'm explicitly referring to Charles M. Blow and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman) have recently dropped the completely ridiculous "Trump is a Putinist agent" propaganda they'd been relentlessly spewing since he won the election, a significant number of deluded persons, having swallowed their official vomitus (i.e., the vomitus of Blow and Krugman, and other neoliberal establishment hacks) like the hungry Adélie penguin chicks in those nature shows narrated by David Attenborough.

They are convinced (these deluded persons are) that the Russians are waging a global campaign not only to maliciously hack, or interfere with, or marginally influence, free and fair elections throughout the Western world, but to control the minds of Westerners themselves, in some Orwellian, or possibly Wachowskian fashion. Worse yet, these deluded persons are certain, the Russians are now secretly running the White House, and are just using Trump, and the Goldman Sachs gang, and capitalist centurions like General McMaster, as a front for their subversive activities, like denying Americans universal healthcare and privatizing the hell out of everything.

If you think I'm being hyperbolic, check out #MarchforTruth on Twitter, or its anonymous Crowdpac fundraising page , which at first glance I took for an elaborate prank, but which seems to be in deadly earnest about "restoring faith in American government," uncovering Trump's "collusion" with Russia, and reversing his "subversion of the will of the people." The plan is, on June 3, 2017, thousands of otherwise rational Americans are going to pour into the streets "demanding answers" from well, I'm not sure whom, some independent prosecutor, or congressional committee, or intelligence agency, or whomever is responsible for ferreting out the Putin-Nazi infiltrators that "respected" pundits like Blow and Krugman (and stark raving loonies like Louise Mensch) have convinced them are now controlling the government. Weirdly, these same "respected" journalists, the ones who have been assuring the world that The President of the United States is a covert agent working for Russia, have failed to even mention this March for Truth, and are acting like they had nothing to do with whipping these folks up into a frenzy of apoplectic paranoia.

Incidentally, one of my colleagues contacted Mr. Blow directly and inquired as to whether he'd be vociferously supporting or possibly leading the March for Truth, and was chastised by Blow and his Twitter followers. I found this reaction extremely troubling, and asked my colleague to contact Mensch and suggest she check with her handlers at The Times to make sure the Russians haven't gotten to him. However, just as he was sitting down to do that, the "Comey-firing" brouhaha broke, which seems to have brought Blow back to the fold , albeit in a less hysterical manner than his Rooskie-hunting readers have grown accustomed to. We can only hope that both he and Krugman return to form in the weeks to come as Russiagate builds to its dramatic climax.

Oh, yeah, and if Russiagate isn't paranoid enough, apparently, the corporate media is now prepared to deploy the "Putin-Nazi Election Hackers" propaganda in any and every election going forward ( as they did in the recent French election , and as they tried to do in the Dutch elections , and presumably will in the German elections, and as The Guardian appears to be retroactively doing in regard to the Brexit referendum ). Any day now, we should be hearing of the "Putin-Nazi-Corbyn Axis," and the "Putin-Nazi-Podemos Pact," and video footage of Martin Schultz and a bevy of former-East German hookers engaging in Odinist sex magick rituals in an FSB-owned bordello in Moscow. Soon, it won't just be elections no, we'll be hearing reports of Russian shipments of rocks, bottles, and pointy sticks to the "Putin-Nazi Palestinian Terrorists," and well, who knows how far they're willing to take this?

All joking aside, as I've written about previously , what we're dealing with here is more than just a lame attempt by the Democratic Party to blame its humiliating loss on Putin (although of course it certainly is that in part). The global neoliberal establishment is rolling out a new official narrative. It's actually just a slight variation on the one it's been selling us since 2001. I could come up with a sixteen-syllable, academic-sounding name for this narrative, but I'm trying to keep things simple these days so let's call it The Normals versus The Extremists , (the Normals being the neoliberals and the Extremists being everyone else). The goal of this narrative is to stigmatize and otherwise marginalize opposition to Neoliberalism, regardless of the nature of that opposition (i.e., whether it comes from the left, right, or from religious, environmentalist, or any other quarters). Now, as any professional storyteller will tell you, one of the most important aspects of the narrative you're trying to suck people into is to make your protagonist a likeable underdog, and then pit him or her against a much more powerful and ideally incorrigibly evil enemy. During the Cold War, this was easy to do - the story was Democracy versus the Commies , traditional "good versus evil"-type stuff.

Once the U.S.S.R. collapsed, the concept needed major rewrites, as a new evil adversary had to be found. This (i.e., the 1990s) was a rather awkward and frustrating period. The global capitalist ruling classes, giddy with joy after having become the first ever global ideological hegemon in the history of aspiring global hegemons, got all avant-garde for a while, and thought they could do without an "enemy." This approach, as you'll recall, did not sell well.

No one quite got why we were bombing Yugoslavia, and Bush and Baker had to break out the Hitler schtick to gin up support for rescuing the Kuwaitis from their old friend Saddam. Fortunately, in September 2001, the show runners got the break they were looking for, and the official narrative was instantly switched to Democracy versus The Islamic Terrorists . This re-brand got extremely good ratings, and would have been extended indefinitely if not for what began to unfold in the latter half of 2016. (One could go back and locate the week when the mainstream media officially switched from the " Summer of Terror " narrative they were flogging to the new "Invasion of the Putin-Nazis" narrative my guess is, it was early to mid-September.) It started with the Brexit referendum, continued with the rise of Trump, and well, I don't have to recount it, do I? You remember last year as clearly as I do, how, suddenly, out of seemingly nowhere, the Putin-Nazi menace materialized, and took the place of the "self-radicalized terrorist" as the primary target for people's hatred and fear. OK, sure, at first, there were no Putin-Nazis. It was just that the Brexit folks were fascists, and Trump was Hitler, and Bernie Sanders was some sort of racist hacky sack Communist. But then the Putinists poisoned Clinton , and unleashed their legions of Russian propagandists on the gullible, Oxycodone-addicted denizens of "flyover country," and, as they say, the rest is history.

In any event, here we are now stuck inside this simulation of "reality" where Putin-Nazi hackers are coming out of the woodwork, a partyless neoliberal banker has been elected the President of France, Donald Trump is an evil mastermind or a Russian operative, depending on what day it is (as opposed to just a completely incompetent, narcissistic billionaire idiot), and neoliberal propaganda outfits like The New York Times , The Washington Post , MSNBC, CNN, The Guardian , NPR, et al., are perceived as "respectable" sources of journalism, as if their role in generating and occasionally revising the official narrative weren't so insultingly obvious. Personally, I am looking forward to the upcoming German elections this Autumn, wherein Neoliberal Party "A" is challenging Neoliberal Party "B" for the right to continue privatizing Greece (and any other formerly sovereign nations the banks can get their hands on) in a demonstration of European unity, and fiscal austerity and, you know, whatever.

If this is the Death of Neoliberalism, just imagine what awaits us at the Resurrection.

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .

[Apr 15, 2017] SECSTATE TILLERSONS CHIEF OF STAFF MARGARET PETERLIN HAS BEEN MANAGING US CYBER WARFARE OPERATIONS AGAINST RUSSIA FOR YEARS

Notable quotes:
"... Stack, who started with family money he incorporated as the Stack Family Office and diversified into computer engineering and IT technology investments, is a decade younger than Peterlin. Both of them have worked on cyber weaponry for US Government agencies. According to the Wikileaks release last month of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) "Vault 7" files, these weapons include UMBRAGE. ..."
"... The CIA's UMBRAGE operation "collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation. With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the "fingerprints" of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from. UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques." ..."
"... Reporting on the applications of UMBRAGE lack conclusiveness on whether US Government agents have used UMBRAGE as a "factory for false flag hacking operations" to make the intrusions into the US election campaign, which have subsequently been blamed on Russian cyber operations – blame Tillerson endorsed in his press conference in Moscow yesterday. For that story, read this . ..."
"... According to another report , "it would be possible to leave such fingerprints if the CIA were reusing unique source code written by other actors to intentionally implicate them in CIA hacks, but the published CIA documents don't say this. Instead, they indicate the UMBRAGE group is doing something much less nefarious." ..."
"... What Tillerson knows also is that Peterlin has spent most of her career participating in these operations. Whether or not the CIA's Operation UMBRAGE has been used to manufacture the appearance of Russian hacking in the US elections, Peterlin knows exactly how to do it, and where it's done at the CIA, the Pentagon, and other agencies. Peterlin has also drafted the memoranda so that for Americans to do it, it's legal. And for men like Stack, something to boast about. ..."
Apr 15, 2017 | johnhelmer.net
Peterlin's appointment to run Tillerson's office was announced more authoritatively by the Washington Post on February 12. There her Texas Republican Party credentials were reported in detail, but not her expertise in signals, codes, and cyber warfare.

"Peterlin has a wealth of government and private-sector experience. After distinguished service as a naval officer, she graduated from the University of Chicago Law School and clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit [Texas and Louisiana]. She then went to work for House Majority Leader Dick Armey [Republican, Texas], just days before the 9/11 attacks. Afterward, she helped negotiate and draft key pieces of national security legislation, including the authorization for the use of force in Afghanistan, the Patriot Act and the legislation that established the Department of Homeland Security. 'She's very substance- and policy-focused. She's not necessarily a political person,' said Brian Gunderson, a State Department chief of staff for Condoleezza Rice who worked with Peterlin in the House [Armey's office]. Following a stint as legislative counsel and national security adviser for then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Peterlin moved over to the Commerce Department, where she served as the No. 2 official in the Patent and Trademark Office."

Peterlin's appointment triggered a lawsuit by a group of patent lawyers and investors against the Secretary of Commerce. On July 23, 2007, two months after Peterlin was sworn in, papers filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia charged that Peterlin's appointment violated the Patent Act of 1999 requiring the Director and Deputy Director of the Patent Office to have "professional experience and background in patent or trademark law." Peterlin, the lawsuit charged, "lack[ed] the requisite professional experience and background." The court was asked to order a replacement for Peterlin "who fulfills those requirements." Six months later, in December 2007 Judge James Robertson dismissed the case on several technicalities. Peterlin's lack of professional skill and alleged incompetence were not tested in court. Peterlin didn't last long in her job and left in 2008. Peterlin's career publications focus on computer and internet surveillance, interception, and espionage. She started with a 1999 essay entitled "The law of information conflict: national security in cyberspace." In December 2001, with two co-authors, she published a paper at the Federalist Society in Washington entitled "The USA Patriot Act and information sharing between the intelligence and law enforcement communities". It can be read in full here .

Peterlin argued "the unalterable need for greater information sharing means that the U.S. no longer has the luxury of simply separating law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Separation is a security risk." Peterlin's conclusion: "Who performs the surveillance may also matter, but the conditions of the performance are of the most critical importance the focus of attention should be principally on the techniques by which intelligence is gathered domestically and not on whether other members of the intelligence community are permitted to view the intelligence gathered as a result of those operations."

After she left the Patent and Trademark Office in 2008, Peterlin became an employee of the Mars family companies with the job title, "technology strategy officer". That lasted six years, before she went into business for herself at a consulting company she called Profectus Global Corporation. There is almost no trace of that entity on the internet ; it appears unrelated to similarly named entities in Hungary and Australia. Peterlin then joined XLP Capital in Boston in November 2015.

Peterlin's appointment as managing director of the firm, according to XLP's press release, reveals that when Peterlin was in the US Navy she was a cyber communications specialist. She was also seconded by the Navy to the White House as a Navy "social aide" when Hillary Clinton was First Lady.

XLP didn't mention that at the time Peterlin was hired, she was also a board member at Draper Labs, the Massachusetts designer, among many things, of US missile guidance systems and the cyber weapons to combat them. According to XLP, one of Peterlin's selling points was "extensive experience with administrative law as well as deep operations exposure to Federal agencies, including the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Defense, and Health and Human Services." For deep operations, read cyber warfare.

Before Peterlin joined Tillerson two months ago, her employer at XLP Capital was Matthew Stack (below). In his internet resume Stack reports he is "an accomplished computer hacker and cryptanalyst, and has written and advised on state-run network cyber-warfare policy, and agility-based strategic combat. He was recognized in 2009 by Hackaday as one of the top 10 most influential hardware hackers."

... ... ...
Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?personId=71987011&privcapId=302978562

At Lambda Prime, Stack claims credit for two cyber warfare projects in 2013 – the practical, "weaponized virtual machines with heterogenous nodes for unpredictable and agile offensive fronts" and the theoretical, "Clausewitz, a modern theory of grand strategy for cyber military forces, and the role of guerilla cyber tactics". The following year Stack hosted his first "Annual Hackathon" - "Hackathoners flew in from all across the United States to inhabit a 27 acre, early 1900s mansion that serves as the Lambda Prime corporate headquarters".

On social media Stack has revealed his involvement in internet hacking operations in Kiev; also which side he was on. "Ominous clouds hang over Kiev's central square, like Russia over its post-Soviet era neighboring Slavic states, " Stack instagrammed to his followers. "The country may be a mess, but Kiev has the fastest internet I've ever clocked – now I know why so many hackers live in Kiev. Thanks to my amazing tour guide @m.verbulya."

Stack, who started with family money he incorporated as the Stack Family Office and diversified into computer engineering and IT technology investments, is a decade younger than Peterlin. Both of them have worked on cyber weaponry for US Government agencies. According to the Wikileaks release last month of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) "Vault 7" files, these weapons include UMBRAGE.

This was developed for the CIA's Remote Devices Branch; the leaked files for the UMBRAGE operations date from 2012 to 2016. The CIA's UMBRAGE operation "collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation. With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the "fingerprints" of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from. UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques."

Some of the UMBRAGE components date from 2012; most from 2014. A leaked memo dated June 19, 2013, reveals one of the UMBRAGE managers telling others: "As far as Stash organization, I would recommend that you create one larger "Umbrage" project, and then create separate repositories within that project for each component. Then there is one central point on the site for 'all things Umbrage'."

Reporting on the applications of UMBRAGE lack conclusiveness on whether US Government agents have used UMBRAGE as a "factory for false flag hacking operations" to make the intrusions into the US election campaign, which have subsequently been blamed on Russian cyber operations – blame Tillerson endorsed in his press conference in Moscow yesterday. For that story, read this .

According to another report , "it would be possible to leave such fingerprints if the CIA were reusing unique source code written by other actors to intentionally implicate them in CIA hacks, but the published CIA documents don't say this. Instead, they indicate the UMBRAGE group is doing something much less nefarious."

Yesterday Tillerson claimed to make "a distinction when cyber tools are used to interfere with the internal decisions among countries as to how their elections are conducted. That is one use of cyber tools. Cyber tools to disrupt weapons programs – that's another use of the tools." With Peterlin prompting by his side during his meetings with Lavrov and Putin, Tillerson knew this was not a distinction US cyber operations against Russia make.

What Tillerson knows also is that Peterlin has spent most of her career participating in these operations. Whether or not the CIA's Operation UMBRAGE has been used to manufacture the appearance of Russian hacking in the US elections, Peterlin knows exactly how to do it, and where it's done at the CIA, the Pentagon, and other agencies. Peterlin has also drafted the memoranda so that for Americans to do it, it's legal. And for men like Stack, something to boast about.

Peterlin's and Stack's public records are two reasons why none of this is secret from the Russian services. That's another reason why in Moscow yesterday Lavrov would not look at Tillerson during their press conference - and why Putin refused to be photographed with him.

[Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There are some nice logs of the NSA using this. ..."
"... In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious, it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in. ..."
"... Russia has an independent foreign policy and acts in what it perceives as it's own best interests. It has refused to become a vassal state of the West and is a threat to the Empire's full-spectrum dominance. Worst of all it has begun trading outside the $US in energy and other resources with China and Iran. ..."
"... Mainstream media are now busy repressing any news and any questioning about facts ..."
"... Western media are in full panic as Aleppo falls with all sorts of gruesome tales about the mistreatment of their favorite terrorists in Aleppo and a strange silence on the whereabouts of their '250K civilians' under siege ..."
"... I cant believe the Fake News outlets are still making a big deal about this issue. Obomber is leaving in a cloud of failure as he deserves ..."
"... "Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." ― Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. ..."
"... New Canadian documentary - All Governments Lie. "It lucidly argues that powerful interests have been creating supercharged fake stories for decades to advance their own nefarious interests. And the institutional media have too often blithely played along." The Globe and Mail. ..."
"... No comments about Seth Rich the DNC staffer Assange hinted had leaked the Podesta emails to Wikileaks and was subsequently shot multiple times and died at 04:20 on a Washington DC street in a 'motiveless' crime in which none of his possessions were taken. ..."
"... The rise of the right wing in Europe is due to the fact that Social Democratic parties have completely sold out to neo-liberal agenda. ..."
"... So Putin's plan to undermine U.S. voter confidence was to simply show what actually happens behind the scenes at the DNC, how diabolical! ..."
"... Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, has published a report that claims that that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was on the executive board of a foreign company that received $35 million from the Kremlin. "The company was a transparent Russian front, and how much Podesta was compensated - and for what - is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position on that board to the Federal government, as required by law," John Schindler of the Observer wrote. ..."
"... So it's true because the CIA said so. That's the gold standard for me. ..."
"... "Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies" - Ron Paul ..."
"... At least Tucker Carlson is able to see through the BS and asks searching question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRkeGkCjdHg ..."
"... President-elect Donald Trump's transition team said in a statement Friday afternoon that the same people who claim Russia interfered in the presidential election had previously claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. ..."
"... The neoliberal corporate machine is wounded but not dead. They will use every trick, ploy and opportunity to try to regain power. The fight goes on. ..."
"... Good occasion to substantiate the accusation which ,substantiated or not,will remind the "useful idiots" of the "change of regime " US policy and who started the Ukrainian crisis. ..."
"... Just another chapter in the sad saga of the Democrats unwillingness to admit they ran the worst candidate & the worst campaign in recent memory. It's not our fault! Them dirty Russkies did it! ..."
Dec 09, 2016 | www.theguardian.com

From: Barack Obama orders 'full review' of possible Russian hacking in US election Spncer Ackerman in New York and David Smith in Washington

Geoff Smythe , 24m ago

Well, if Rupert Mudroach, an American citizen, can influence the Australian elections, who gives a stuff about anyone else's involvement in US politics?

The US loves demonising Russia, even supporting ISIS to fight against them.

The United States of Amnesia just can't understand that they are run by the military machine.

As Frank Zappa once correctly stated: The US government is just the entertainment unit of the Military.

Nataliefreeman, 11 Dec 2016

Altogether the only thing people are accusing the Russians of is the WikiLeaks scandal. And in hindsight of the enormous media bias toward Trump it really comes of as little more than leveling the playing field. Hardly the sort of democratic subversion that is being suggested.

And of course there is another problem and that is in principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that set up a NAT entry that made the connecting computer appear somewhere else, with the entry deleted afterwards. Typically, IP table modifications aren't logged, so this would not be detectable.

In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that ran a SED script at a specific time that changed any occurrence of one IP address with another. Not sure anyone would bother with this, but it's why good system admins place so much emphasis on securing logs. However, it's obvious we're not talking about good admins.

In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There are some nice logs of the NSA using this.

In principle, someone along the way could tap into the fibre, spoofing IP addresses and injecting/sniffing packets. The US even has a submarine designed for this, but optics aren't complex and any number of neo-phone phreaks could have the hardware.

In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious, it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in.

In principle, the supposed destination machine could have been hacked to relay the packets in encrypted form to the South Pole or a college campus in Texas. There are many examples of client machines being hacked to do this. It's basically what zombie machines are in botnets.

In practice, it is flat-out guaranteed that none of the security agencies could distinguish this from a Russian attack. Nothing in the area monitored could tell the difference. We know, for a fact, that college kids spoofing a scan from China have fooled the DoD and NSA on previous occasions, it has caused international incidents.

So we have known forms of attack that are known to exist, aren't complex and in some cases are already used for attacks. They are 100% untraceable.

HollyOldDog -> Nataliefreeman, 11 Dec 2016 01:4
Don't know about Russians, but in the early 2000's the Ukrainian hackers had some nasty viruses embedded in email attachments that could fuckup ARM based computers.
smellycat -> waltercarl67, 11 Dec 2016 00:0
Time to stop attempting regime change in other countries then, if you condemn it in your own. What goes around comes around.
caveOfShadows , 10 Dec 2016 23:1
European governments tried to elect Hillary Clinton. Latin American and Asian allies of the US tried to elect Clinton.

Top leaders of France, the UK, Germany, all leaked to US newspapers, with dire warnings of how Trump's election would lead to bad outcomes.

Many countries made as clear as possible, without coming out officially for a candidate, that they were for the election of Clinton.

Mexico tried to get Clinton elected. Believe me, they did. Not officially, of course, but almost.

But all we hear about is Russia.

Wonder why???

uyCybershy -> caveOfShadows , 10 Dec 2016 23:1
Russia has an independent foreign policy and acts in what it perceives as it's own best interests. It has refused to become a vassal state of the West and is a threat to the Empire's full-spectrum dominance. Worst of all it has begun trading outside the $US in energy and other resources with China and Iran.
imperfetto , 10 Dec 2016 23:0
Mainstream media are now busy repressing any news and any questioning about facts, as the last battle in their support to jidaists fighting the Syrian Army. This is the dark pit where our so called free press has fallen into.
Flugler -> imperfetto , 10 Dec 2016 23:1
Yep had a chat with an army mate yesterday asked him what the fcuk the supposed head of MI6 was on about regarding Russian support for Syrian govt suggesting Russian actions made terrorism more likely here in UK. He shrugged his shoulders and said he hoped Putin wiped the terrorists out...
smellycat -> imperfetto , 10 Dec 2016 23:4
Western media are in full panic as Aleppo falls with all sorts of gruesome tales about the mistreatment of their favorite terrorists in Aleppo and a strange silence on the whereabouts of their '250K civilians' under siege

Of course no news on the danger to the civilians of W,Aleppo, who have been bombarded indiscriminately for months by the 'moderates' in the east of the city or the danger to the civilians of Palmyra, Mosul or al Bab.

Geoff Smythe -> smellycat , 11 Dec 2016 01:3
Or the 50,000 that have been evacuated out of Aleppo by the Russian military. https://www.rt.com/news/369869-syria-evacuation-civilians-aleppo /
Merseysidefella , 10 Dec 2016 21:5
I cant believe the Fake News outlets are still making a big deal about this issue. Obomber is leaving in a cloud of failure as he deserves. I´ll still look for the Guardian articles on football which are excellent.
Cheers!
GuyCybershy -> confettifoot , 10 Dec 2016 21:0
The Sanders movement inside the Democratic party did offer some hope but this was snuffed out by the DNC and the Clinton campaign in collusion with the media. This is what likely caused her defeat in November and not some Kremlin intrigue.
dopamineboy , 10 Dec 2016 20:5
"Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." ― Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda.
dopamineboy , 10 Dec 2016 20:5
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," Karl Rove.
caveOfShadows -> dopamineboy , 10 Dec 2016 23:1
Don't use quotes when you are doing a fake attribution.
dopamineboy , 10 Dec 2016 20:4
New Canadian documentary - All Governments Lie. "It lucidly argues that powerful interests have been creating supercharged fake stories for decades to advance their own nefarious interests. And the institutional media have too often blithely played along." The Globe and Mail.
joinupthedots , 10 Dec 2016 20:4
Fake news....No news.....None sense news?

Uncle Sam has been doing it for years and the degree of incestuousness between MSM and the "Agencies" is all right here (just one example)

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmeyerM.htm

smellycat -> joinupthedots , 10 Dec 2016 20:5
That's some serious shit
'"The same sons of bitches," he hissed, "that killed John F. Kennedy."
stoneshepherd , 10 Dec 2016 20:2
No comments about Seth Rich the DNC staffer Assange hinted had leaked the Podesta emails to Wikileaks and was subsequently shot multiple times and died at 04:20 on a Washington DC street in a 'motiveless' crime in which none of his possessions were taken.

Hmmm....

Flugler -> stoneshepherd , 10 Dec 2016 20:3
Distract the masses with bullsh*t , nothing new... Trump needs to double up on his personal security, he has doubled down on the CIA tonight bringing upmtheir bullsh*t on WMD. Thing are getting interesting...
Liesandstats , 10 Dec 2016 19:2
Meanwhile the good guys with their Smart bombs indulge in a spot of collateral damage. (Or war crimes as it's described when Russians do it).

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/breaking-90-iraqi-soldiers-killed-in-mosul-from-us-airstrikes/

This article is jiberish, as are the ones trying to say that the Russians caused Brexit.

GuyCybershy -> sunflowerxyz , 10 Dec 2016 19:3
The rise of the right wing in Europe is due to the fact that Social Democratic parties have completely sold out to neo-liberal agenda.
Powerspike , 10 Dec 2016 19:1
Spreading lies about the very real Podesta emails and their importance seems to be a fake news stock in trade. Since Hillary was responsible I'm not sure where Putin comes into the picture.
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/a-clinton-fan-manufactured-fake-news-that-msnbc-personalities-spread-to-discredit-wikileaks-docs /
GuyCybershy , 10 Dec 2016 19:0
So Putin's plan to undermine U.S. voter confidence was to simply show what actually happens behind the scenes at the DNC, how diabolical!
Powerspike , 10 Dec 2016 18:3
"If we can revert to the truth, then a great deal of one's suffering can be erased, because a great deal of one's suffering is based on sheer lies. "
R. D. Laing
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
US politicians and the MSM depend on sheer lies.....
Powerspike -> KassandraTroy , 10 Dec 2016 18:5
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.
R. D. Laing
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
I'm sick of jumping through their hoops - how about you?
James7 , 10 Dec 2016 17:2
"Tin Foil Hat" Hillary--
"This is not about politics or partisanship," she went on. "Lives are at risk, lives of ordinary people just trying to go about their days to do their jobs, contribute to their communities. It is a danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly."

We fail to see how Russian propaganda has put people's lives directly at risk. Unless, of course, Hillary is suggesting that the increasingly-bizarre #Pizzagate swarm journalism campaign (which apparently caused a man to shoot up a floor tile in a D.C. pizza shop) was conjured up by a bunch of Russian trolls.

And this is about as absurd as saying Russian trolls were why Trump got elected.

"It needs to be said," former counterintelligence agent John R. Schindler (who, by the way, believes Assange and Snowden are both Russian plants), writes in the Observer, "that nearly all of the liberals eagerly pontificating about how Putin put Trump in office know nothing about 21st century espionage, much less Russia's unique spy model and how it works. Indeed, some of the most ardent advocates of this Kremlin-did-it conspiracy theory were big fans of Snowden and Wikileaks -- right until clandestine Russian shenanigans started to hurt Democrats. Now, they're panicking."

(Nonetheless, #Pizzagate and Trump, IMHO, are manifestations of a population which deeply deeply distrusts the handlers and gatekeepers of the status quo. Justified or not. And with or without Putin's shadowy fingers strumming its magic hypno-harp across the Land of the Free. This runs deeper than just Putin.)

Fake news has always been around, from the fake news which led Americans to believe the Pearl Harbor attack was a surprise and completely unprovoked .

To the fake news campaigns put out by Edward Bernays tricking women into believing cigarettes were empowering little phallics of feminism. (AKA "Torches of Freedom.")

This War on Fake News has more to do with the elites finally realizing how little control they have over the minds of the unwashed masses. Rather, this is a war on the freaks, geeks and weirdos who've formed a decentralized and massively-influential media right under their noses.

Laissez Faire Today

James7 -> fedback , 10 Dec 2016 17:3
and there may be some truth to that. An article says has delved into financial matters in Russia.

Kremlin Connection? The TRUTH About Hillary's Shady Ties To Russia REVEALED
Find out why insiders say Clinton has some explaining to do.

Americans have no idea just how closely Hillary Clinton is tied to the Kremlin! That's the shocking claim of a new report that alleges the Democratic nominee is secretly pals with Vladimir Putin and his countrymen.

Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, has published a report that claims that that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was on the executive board of a foreign company that received $35 million from the Kremlin. "The company was a transparent Russian front, and how much Podesta was compensated - and for what - is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position on that board to the Federal government, as required by law," John Schindler of the Observer wrote.

As Radar previously reported, when Clinton was secretary of state, she profited from the "Russian Reset," a failed attempt to improve relations between the U.S. and Russia.

chweizer wrote, "Many of the key figures in the Skolkovo process - on both the Russian and U.S. sides - had major financial ties to the Clintons. During the Russian reset, these figures and entities provided the Clintons with tens of millions of dollars, including contributions to the Clinton Foundation, paid for speeches by Bill Clinton, or investments in small start-up companies with deep Clinton ties." Schweizer also details "Skolkovo," a Silicon Valley-like campus that both the U.S. and Russia worked on for developing biomed, space, nuclear and IT technologies. He told the New York Post that there was a "pattern that shows a high percentage of participants in Skolkovo who happen to be Clinton Foundation donors."

BaronVonAmericano , 10 Dec 2016 17:0
So it's true because the CIA said so. That's the gold standard for me.

So let me be the first to thank Russia for providing us with their research.

Instead of assassination, coup or invasion, they simply showed us our leaders' own words when written behind the public's backs.

I'm no fan of Putin, but this was a useful bit of intelligence you've shared with us.
Happy Christmas, Vlad.

Next time why not provide us with the email of all our banks and fossil fuel companies; you can help us clean up both political parties with one fell swoop that way.

GuyCybershy -> BaronVonAmericano , 10 Dec 2016 17:0
"Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies" - Ron Paul
greyford14 -> GuyCybershy , 10 Dec 2016 17:1
Be careful there, Ron Paul is an FSB agent of Putin, according to the Washington Post.
elias_ , 10 Dec 2016 17:0
At least Tucker Carlson is able to see through the BS and asks searching question.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRkeGkCjdHg
GuyCybershy -> elias_ , 10 Dec 2016 17:1
Dems are so out to lunch that they make FOX pundits seem sane. I would say the Democratic party is beyond hope of saving.
sblejo , 10 Dec 2016 16:4
The U.S. is getting what it deserves, IF Russia was even dumb enough to meddle. The government in this country has been meddling in other countries' affairs sixty years, in the Middle East, in South America and other places we don't even know about. The result is mayhem, all in the 'interests' of the U.S., as it is described.
Burnaby1000 , 10 Dec 2016 16:4
Note that most supporters of the Russian hacks never (and cannot) present rational arguments, just dubious talking points--AKA Fake News.

But it is fun to spot the gaps in their logic, and the holes in their stories.

Great sport--rather like hunting hares.

GuyCybershy -> Burnaby1000 , 10 Dec 2016 16:4
We need to trust the CIA, they'd never fix evidence to manipulate the American public.
BaronVonAmericano -> Burnaby1000 , 10 Dec 2016 16:5
Where's the gap in this logic:
A) The American public has been offered ZERO proof of hacking by the Russian government to alter our election.
B) Even if true, no one has disputed the authenticity of the emails hacked.
C) Therefore, the WORST Russia could have done is show us who are own leader are when they don't think we're listening.
D) Taken together, this article is pretty close to fake news, and gives us nothing that should outrage us much at this time -- unless we are trying to foment war with Russia or call for a military coup against the baboon about to take the oath of office.
foolisholdman , 10 Dec 2016 16:3
Hacking by unnamed individuals. No direct involvement of the Russian government, only implied, alleged, etc. Seems to me that if Hillary had obeyed the law and not schemed behind the scenes to sabotage Bernie S. there would have been nothing to leak! Really this is all about being caught with fer fingers in the cookie jar. Does it matter who leaked it? Did the US public not have a right to know what the people they were voting for had been up to? It's a bit like the governor of a province being filmed burgling someone's house and then complaining that someone had leaked the film to the media, just when he was trying to get re-elected!
GuyCybershy -> foolisholdman , 10 Dec 2016 16:3
The US public has a right to know what CNN, New York Times and the Washington Post want them to know.
sblejo -> foolisholdman , 10 Dec 2016 16:4
It is called passing the buck, and because of the underhanded undermining of Bernie Sanders, who was winning, we have Trump. Thank you Democratic party.
aidanfahey , 10 Dec 2016 16:3
I am disappointed that the Guardian gives so much prominence to such speculation which is almost totally irrelevant. Why would we necessarily (a) believe what the superspies tell us and (b) even if it is true why should we care?

I am also very disappointed at the Guardians attitude to Putin, the elected leader of Russia, who was so badly treated by the US from the moment he took over from Yeltsin. I was in Russia as a visitor around that time and it was obvious that Putin restored some dignity to the Russian people after the disastrous Yeltsin term of office. If the US had been willing to deal with him with respect the world could be a much better place today. Instead the US insisted in trying to subvert his rule with the support of its supine NATO allies in order to satisfy its corporate rulers.

GuyCybershy -> aidanfahey , 10 Dec 2016 16:5
They expected Russia to fall apart like the USSR and then they could march in and pick up the pieces. Putin prevented this and this why they hate him.
NickinHalifaxNS , 10 Dec 2016 16:2
If this is true, the US can hardly complain. After all, the US has a long record of interfering in other countries' elections--including CIA overthrow of elected governments and their replacement with murderous, oppressive, right-wing dictatorships.

If the worst that Russia did was reveal the truth about what Democratic Party figures were saying behind closed doors, I'd say it helped correct the unbalanced media focus on preventing Trump from becoming President. Call it the globalization of elections.

BaronVonAmericano , 10 Dec 2016 15:5
First, the government has yet to present any persuasive evidence that Russia hacked the DNC or anyone else. All we have is that there is Russian code (meaningless according to cyber-security experts) and seemingly baseless "conclusions" by "intelligence" officials. In other words, fake news at this point.

Second, even if true, the allegation amounts to an argument that Russia presented us with facts that we shouldn't have seen. Think about that for a while. We are seeing demands that we self-censor ourselves from facts that seem unfair. What utter idiocy.

This is particularly outrageous given that the U.S. directly intervenes in the governance of any number of nations all the time. We can support coups, arm insurgencies, or directly invade, but god forbid that someone present us with unsettling facts about our ruling class.

This nation has jumped the shark. The fact that Trump is our president is merely confirmation of this long evident fact. That fighting REAL NEWS of emails whose content has not been disputed is part of our war on "fake news," and the top priority for some so-called liberals, promises only worse to come.

elias_ , 10 Dec 2016 14:5
>> Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said Russia had "succeeded" in "sow[ing] discord" in the election, and urged as much public disclosure as is possible.

What utter bullshit. The DNC's own dirty tricks did that. Donna Brasille stealing debate questions and handing them to Hillary so that she could cheat did that. The FBIs investigation into Hillary did that. Podesta's emails did that. The totally one-sided press coverage (apart from Fox) of the election did that. But it seems the american people were smart enough to see through the BS and voted for trump. Good for them.

And we're gonna need a lot more than the word of a few politicised so-called intelligence agencies to believe this russo-hacking story. These are the same people who lied about Iraqi WMDs so they are proven fakers/liars. These are also the same people who hack EVERYONE else so I, quite frankly, have no sympathy even of the story turns out to be true.

MrIncredlous , 10 Dec 2016 14:4
Obama is a disgrace to his office.

Announce "consensus" (not unanimous) "conclusion" based in circumstantial evidence now, before the Electoral College vote, then write a report with actual details due by Jan 20.
Put a proven liar in charge of writing the report on Russian hacking.
Fail to mention that not one of the leaked DNC or Podesta emails has been shown to be inauthentic. So the supposed Russian hacking simply revealed truth about Hillary, DNC, and MSM collusion and corruption.
Fail to mention that if hacking was done by or for US government to stop Hillary, blaming the Russians would be the most likely disinformation used by US agencies.
Expect every pro-Hillary lapdog journalist - which is virtually all of them - in America will hyperventilate (Twitter is currently on fire) about this latest fact-free, anti-Trump political stunt for the next nine days.
Or, as a reader put it, this is a soft coup attempt by leaders of Intel community and Obama Admin to influence the Electoral College vote, similar to the 1960s novel "Seven Days in May."

DanielDee , 10 Dec 2016 14:4
When the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security release a joint statement it is not without very careful consideration to the wording.
Therefore, to understand what is known by the US intelligence services one must analyse the language used.

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-department-homeland-security-and-office-director-national

This is very telling:
"The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts."

Alleged:
adjective [attributive]
said, without proof, to have taken place or to have a specified illegal or undesirable quality

Consistent:
adjective
acting or done in the same way over time

Method:
noun
a particular procedure for accomplishing or approaching something

Motivation:
noun
a reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way

So, what exactly is known by the US intelligence services?

Well what we can tell is:
the alleged (without proof) hacks were consistent (done in the same way) with the methods (using a particular procedure) and motivations (and having reason for doing so) with Russian State actions.

There is absolutely no certainty about this whatsoever.

elias_ , 10 Dec 2016 14:4
Thank God Obama will be out of office soon. He is the biggest disappointment ever. He has ordered the death of THOUSANDS via drone strikes in other people's countries and most of the deaths were innocent bystanders. If President Xi of China or Putin were to do that we would all be calling them tyrannical dictators and accusing them of a back door invasions. But somehow people are brainwashed into thinking its ok of the US president to do such things. Truly sickening.
Flugler , 10 Dec 2016 14:4
Says the CIA the organisation set up to destabilise governments all over the world. Lol.....
Congratulations for keeping a straight face I hope Trump makes urgently needed personnel changes in the alphabet soup agencies working against humanity for very many years.
Susanna246 , 10 Dec 2016 13:1
Beware --

This is an extremely dangerous game that Obama and the political elites are playing.

The American political elites - including senetors, bankers, investors, multinationals et al, can feel power and control slipping away from them.

This makes them very dangerous people indeed - as self-preservation and holding onto power is their number one priority.

What they're aiming to do ( a child can see what's coming ), is to call into question the validity of Trump's victory and blame the Russians for it.

The elites are looking to create chaos and insurrection, to have the result nullified and to vilify Putin and Russia.

American and Russian troops are already lined up and facing each other along the Eastern European borders and all it takes is one small incident from either side.

And all because those that have ruled the roost for so many decades ( in the White house, the 2 houses of Congress and Wall St ), simply cannot face losing their positions of power, wealth and political influence.

They're out to get Trump, the populists and President Putin.

God help us all.

MacTavi5h , 10 Dec 2016 12:5
This is starting to feel like an attempt to make the Trump presidency appear illegitimate. The problem is that it could actually make the democrats look like sore losers instead. We've had the recount, now it's foreign interference. This might harm them in 2020.

I don't like that Trump won, but he did. The electoral college system is clearly in the constitution and all sides understood and agreed to it at the campaign commencement. Also some, by no means all, of commenters saying that the popular vote should win have also been on referendum BTL saying the result isn't a legitimate leave vote, make your minds up!

I don't want Trump and I wanted to remain but, by the rules, my sides lost.

alexfoxy28 , 10 Dec 2016 12:5
Yet in August, Snowden warned that the recent hack of NSA tied cyber spies was not designed to expose Hillary Clinton, but rather a display of strength by the hackers, showing they could eventually unmask the NSA's own international cyber espionage and prove the U.S. meddles in elections around the world.

http://yournewswire.com/snowden-claims-russia-can-expose-u-s-meddling-in-foreign-elections /

nishville , 10 Dec 2016 12:3
A reader's comment from the Independent:

Will the CIA be providing evidence to support these allegations or is it a case of "just trust us guys"? In any event, hypocrisy is a national sport for the Yanks. According to a Reuters article 9 August 2016 "NSA operations have, for example, recently delved into elections in Mexico, targeting its last presidential campaign. According to a top-secret PowerPoint presentation leaked by former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden, the operation involved a "surge effort against one of Mexico's leading presidential candidates, Enrique Peńa Nieto, and nine of his close associates." Peńa won that election and is now Mexico's president.

The NSA identified Peńa's cellphone and those of his associates using advanced software that can filter out specific phones from the swarm around the candidate. These lines were then targeted. The technology, one NSA analyst noted, "might find a needle in a haystack." The analyst described it as "a repeatable and efficient" process.

The eavesdroppers also succeeded in intercepting 85,489 text messages, a Der Spiegel article noted.

Another NSA operation, begun in May 2010 and codenamed FLATLIQUID, targeted Pena's predecessor, President Felipe Calderon. The NSA, the documents revealed, was able "to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon's public email account."

At the same time, members of a highly secret joint NSA/CIA organization, called the Special Collection Service, are based in the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and other U.S. embassies around the world. It targets local government communications, as well as foreign embassies nearby. For Mexico, additional eavesdropping, and much of the analysis, is conducted by NSA Texas, a large listening post in San Antonio that focuses on the Caribbean, Central America and South America."

zulugroove -> nishville , 10 Dec 2016 13:4
Fake news!! ...That would be a Clinton / Obama , reply!!
CTG2016 , 10 Dec 2016 12:0
Breaking news! CIA admits people in USA aren't smart enough to vote for the person right person. Why blame Russians now?
Come on. Let's move on and enjoy the mess Trump will start. This is going to be worse than GWB.
We should all just enjoy the political comedy programs.
Gallicdweller , 10 Dec 2016 11:1
The CIA accusing a foreign power of interfering in the election of a showman for president - it would take me all day top cite the times that this evil criminal organisation has interfered in the affairs of other countries, ordered assassinations, coups etc. etc. etc
Dave Harries , 10 Dec 2016 10:4
Yes like the "help" the CIA gave to the Taliban, Bin Laden and Co. when the Russians were in Afghanistan.
Then these dimwits from the CIA who taught Bin Laden and Co guerrilla warfare totally "missed" 9/11 and Twin Towers with all their billions of funding.
So basically this is a total load of crap and if you think we are going to believe any reports vs. Russia these fools at the CIA are going to publish then think again.
fedback , 10 Dec 2016 10:4
During the election our media was exposed as in essence a propaganda tool for the Democrat campaign and they continue the unholy alliance after the election
Liesandstats , 10 Dec 2016 10:4
Instead of trying to blame the Russians how about reflecting on why the Democrats picked such a dreadful candidate.
ana ruiz , 10 Dec 2016 10:2
Pathetic move from an organisation that created ISIS and is single handling every single conflict in the world. Here we have a muppet president that for once wants to look after USA affairs internally and here we have a so alleged independent organisation that wants to keep bombing and destabilising the world. Didn't Trump said he wanted to shake the FBI and CIA ? Who is going to stop this machine of treachery ? : south America, middle east ...Asia ... they put their fingers on to create a problem- solution caveat wereas is to create weapons contracts /farma or construction and sovereign debt . But it never tricles down to the layperson ..
Tim Jenkins , 10 Dec 2016 10:2
"We are Not calling into question the election results"
next White House sentence - "Just the integrity.. " WTF

What more do you need to know - Bullshit Fake News.. propaganda, spoken by the youngest possible puppet boy White House Rep. who almost managed to have his tie done up..

I am bookmarking this guy, for a laugh! White House Fake Newscaster ..:)

Worth watching the sides of his mouth onto his attempt to engage you with the eyes, but blinking way too much before, during and after the word "Integrity".. FAKE!

His hand signals.. lmfao, so measured, how sweet.. now sack the sycophants --

fedback , 10 Dec 2016 10:2
People should know that these Breaking News stories we see in Western media on BBC, Guardian etc, about Russian interference are in fact from Wash Post and NY Times quoting mysterious sources within the CIA
Of course we know that Wash Post and NY Times were completely objective during the election and didn't favor any party
fedback , 10 Dec 2016 10:0
Russia made Hillary run the most expensive campaign ever, spending 1.2 billion dollars.
Russia stole Hillary's message to the working people and gave her lousy slogans
Tim Jenkins , 10 Dec 2016 09:5
My real comment is below, but work with me, for a moment.
So, since 2008, eh? Barack has thought carefully, with a legal mind.

Can't we somehow blame the Russians for the whole Economic collapse.. coming soon, Wall Street Cyber Crash, screwed up sKewed up systems of Ponzi virus spiraling out of control..

blame the Russians , logic, the KGB held the FED at gunpoint and said "create $16.2 Trillion in 5 working days"
jeez, blame anything and anybody except peace prize guy Obama, the Pope, Bankers & Israel..

Now can we discuss the Security of the Pound against Cyber Attack.. what was it 6% in 2 minutes, early on Sunday morning, just over month ago.. whoosh!

It seems more important than discussing an election where the result was always OBVIOUS!

And we called it, just like Kellyanne Conway..

Who is Huma Abedin? I wish to know and hear her talking to Kellyanne Conway, graciously in defeat.. is that so unreasonable?
********
Obama wishes to distract from exceedingly poor judgement, at the very minimum....
after his Greek Affair with Goldman Sachs.. surely.

As for his other Foreign Policy: Eternal Shame, founded on Fake News!
Obama the Fake News Founder to flounder over the Russians, who can prove that he, Obama supports & supported Terrorism!

Thus this article exists, to create doubt over the veracity of evidence to be presented over NATO's involvement in SYRIA! Obama continues to resist, or loose face completely..

Just ask Can Dundar.... what he knows now and ask Obama to secure the release of Can Dundar's wife's passport, held for no legitimate reason in Turkey! This outrageous stand off, from Erdogan & Obama to address their failures and arrogant disrespect of Woman and her Legal Human Rights is Criminal.. & a Sickness of Mind that promotes Dictatorship!

Mainstream Media - Fake News.. for quite some time!
& Obama is guilty!

Powerspike , 10 Dec 2016 09:4
President-elect Donald Trump's transition team said in a statement Friday afternoon that the same people who claim Russia interfered in the presidential election had previously claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/09/trump-team-same-people-who-say-russia-meddled-in-election-said-iraq-had-wmds/#ixzz4SQWsDXpZ
alexfoxy28 , 10 Dec 2016 09:1
It's getting funny as Biden promised cyber attack on Russia weeks before Trump was elected .. due to Russian hackers?
uptonogoode -> alexfoxy28 , 10 Dec 2016 09:5
Link?
alexfoxy28 -> uptonogoode , 10 Dec 2016 09:5
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/721851/russia-joe-biden-obama-cyber-attack-war-clinton-putin-US-moscow

or just google about it.

ArtherOhm , 10 Dec 2016 08:5
Is the USA, as author of windows software, really unable to prevent foreign hacking?

Do the CIA never do anything like this?

Do we actually have any evidence rather than just a lot of allegations?

Shotcricket -> Burnaby1000 , 10 Dec 2016 09:0
'Russia like to surprise' ?

The one certainty of the US/EU led drive to remove an elected leader just in their 2nd year after an election that saw them gain 47% of the popular vote was the Russki response, its borders were immediately at open 'threat' from any alliance. NATO or otherwise, the deep sea ports of eastern Ukraine which had always been accessed by the Russki fleets would lose guaranteed access etc....to believe the West was surprised by this action, would be to assume the US Generals were as stupid as the US administration, they knew exactly the response of the Russkis & would have made no difference if their leader had been named Putin or Uncle Tom Cobbly.

In some ways the Russkis partitioning of the East of Ukraine could well minimise the possibility of a world conflict as the perceived threat is neutralised by the buffer.

The Russkis cyber doodah is no different to our own the US etc, they're all 'at it' & all attempt to inveigle the others in terms of making life difficult.....not too sure Putin will be quite as comfortable with the Pres Elects 3 Trumpeteers though as the new Pressie looks likely to open channels of communications but those negotiations might well see a far tougher stance......still, in truth, all is never fair in love or war

Powerspike , 10 Dec 2016 08:4
.....that the CIA is not only suddenly involved, but suddenly at the forefront, may well reflect President-elect Trump's stated policy intentions being far removed from those that the CIA has endorsed, and might be done with an eye toward undermining Trump's position in those upcoming policy battles.
At the center of those Trump vs. CIA battles is Syria, as the CIA has for years pushed to move away from the ISIS war and toward imposing regime change in Syria. Trump, by contrast, has said he intends to end the CIA-Saudi program arming the Syrian rebels, and focus on fighting ISIS. Trump was even said to be seeking to coordinate anti-ISIS operations with Russia.
The CIA allegations could easily imperil that plan, as so long as the allegations remain part of the public discourse, evidence or not, anything Trump does with respect to Russia is going to have a black cloud hanging over it.
http://news.antiwar.com/2016/12/09/cia-claims-russia-intervened-to-get-trump-elected /
Nataliefreeman , 10 Dec 2016 08:3
Oh dear Obama trolls? Food for your starved thoughts:

Your degree of understanding IT is disturbing, especially given how dependent we are on it.

This is all very simple. The process by which you find out if and how a machine was hacked was clearly documented in the Russian "Internet Audit", run by a group of Grey Hats.

Grey Hats: People concerned about security who perform unauthorized hacks for relatively benign purposes, often just notifying people of how their system is flawed. IT staff have mixed reactions(!), the illegality is not disputed but the benefit of not being hit by a Black Hat first can be considerable at times. Differentiation is rare, especially as some hacktivist groups belong here, causing no damage beyond reputational by flagging activity that is not acceptable to the hacktivists.

Black Hats: These are the guys to worry about. These include actually destructive hacktivists. These are the ones who steal data for malicious purposes, disrupt for malicious purposes and just generally act maliciously.

Nothing in reports indicates if the DNC hack was Grey Hat or Black Hat, but it should be obvious that there is a difference.

IP addresses and hangouts - worthless as evidence. Anyone can spoof the former, happens all the time (NMap used to provide the option, probably still does), Grey Hats and Black Hats alike have the latter and may break into other people's. It's all about knowing vulnerabilities.

That voting machines were even on the Internet is disturbing. That they and the DNC server were improperly configured for such an environment is frightening - and possibly illegal.

The standard sequence of events is thus:

Network intrusion detector system identifies crafted packet attacking known vulnerability.
In a good system, the firewall is set to block the attack at that instant.

If the attacker scans the network, the only machine responding to such knocks should be a virtual machine running a honeypot on attractive-looking port numbers. The other machines in the zone should technically violate the RFCs by not responding to ICMP or generating recognized error codes on unused/blocked ports.

The system logger picks up an event that creates a process that shouldn't be happening.
In a good system, this either can't happen because the combination of permissions needed doesn't exist, or it doesn't matter because the process is root jailed and hasn't the privileges to actually do any harm.

The file alteration logger (possibly Tripwire, though the Linux kernel can do this itself) detects that a process with escalated privileges is trying to create, delete or alter a file that it isn't supposed to be able to change.
In a good system with mandatory access controls, this really is impossible. In a good system with logging file systems, it doesn't matter as you can instruct the filesystem to revert those specific alterations. Even in adequate but feeble systems, checkpoints will exist. No use in a voting system, but perfectly adequate for a campaign server. In all cases, the system logs will document what got damaged.

The correct IT manager response is thus:
Find out why the firewall wasn't defaulting to deny for all unknown sources and for unnecessary ports.
Find out why the public-facing system wasn't isolated in the firewall's DMZ.
Find out why NIDS didn't stop the attack.
Non-public user mobility should be via IPSec using certificates. That deals with connecting from unknown IP addresses without exposing the innards of the system.
Lock down misconfigured network systems.
Backup files identified by file alteration detection as corrupt for forensic purposes.
Revert files identified by file alteration detection as corrupt to last good version.
Close permission loopholes. Everything should run with the fewest privileges necessary, OS included. On Linux, kernel permissions are controlled via capabilities.
Establish from the logs if the intruder came through a public-facing application, an essential LAN service or a non-essential service.
If it's a LAN service, block access to that service outside the LAN on the host firewall.
Run network and host vulnerability scanners to detect potential attack vectors.
Update any essential software that is detected as flawed, then rerun the scanners. Repeat until fixed.
Now the system is locked down against general attacks, you examine the logs to find out exactly what failed and how. If that line of attack got fixed, good. If it didn't, then fix it.
Password policy should prevent rainbow attacks, not users. Edit as necessary, lock accounts that aren't secure and set the password control system to ban bad passwords.

It is impossible from system logs to track where an intruder came from, unsecured routers are common and that means a skilled attacker can divert packets to anywhere. You can't trust brags, in security nobody is honest. The sensible thing is to not allow such events in the first place, but when (not if) they happen, learn from them.

GraemeHarrison , 10 Dec 2016 08:2
If the USA is to investigate the effect of foreign governments 'corrupting' the free decisions of the American people in elections, perhaps they could look into the fact that for the past three decades every Republican candidate for president, after they have won the nomination of their party, has gone to just one foreign country to pledge their firm commitment/allegiance to that foreign power, for the purpose of shoring up large blocks of donors prior to the actual presidential election. The effect is probably more 'corrupting' than any leak of emails!
SamSamson , 10 Dec 2016 08:2
Obama should confess to creating ISIS, sustaining ISIS & utilising ISIS as a proxy army to have them do things that he knew US soldiers could never be caught doing!!!

They then spoon fed you bullshit propaganda about who the bad guys were, without ever being to properly explain why the US armed forces were prevented from taking any hostile action against ISIS, until they were FORCED TO, that is, when Putin let the the cat out of the bag!!!

LordTomnoddy , 10 Dec 2016 08:1
Hilarious. One would've thought Obama of all presidents would be reluctant to delve too deeply into this particular midden. As the author of the weakest and most incompetent American foreign policy agenda since Carter's, it's much the likeliest that if China or Russia have been hacking US elections, then by far the biggest beneficiary will have been himself.
Tim Jenkins , 10 Dec 2016 08:1
Just another attempt to distract from realities, like:-

From:[email protected] To: [email protected], [email protected] Date: 2015-05-28 12:12 Subject: Fwd: POLITICO Playbook

cdm Begin forwarded message: > From: Lynn Forester de Rothschild <[email protected]> > Date: May 28, 2015 at 9:44:12 AM EDT > To: Nick Merrill <[email protected]>, "Cheryl Mills ([email protected])" <[email protected]> > Subject: FW: POLITICO Playbook > > Morning, > I am sure you are working on this, but clearly, the opposition is trying to undercut Hillary's reputation for honesty (the number one characteristic people look for in a President according to most polls) ..and also to benefit from an attack on wealth that Dems did the most to start I am sure we need to fight back against both of these attacks. > Xoxo > Lynn > > By Mike Allen (@mikeallen; [email protected]), and Daniel Lippman (@dlippman; [email protected]) > > > > QUINNIPIAC POLL, out at 6 a.m., "Rubio, Paul are only Republicans even close to Clinton": "In a general election, ... Clinton gets 46 percent of American voters to 42 percent for Paul and 45 percent of voters to 41 percent for Rubio." Clinton leads Christie 46-37 ... Huckabee 47-40 ... Jeb 47-37 ... Walker 46-38 ... Cruz 48-37 ... Trump 50-32. > > --"[V]oters say 53-39 percent that Clinton is NOT honest and trustworthy, but say 60-37 ... that she has strong leadership qualities. Voters are divided 48-47 ... over whether Clinton cares about their needs and problems." > > --RNC's new chart - "'Dead Broke' Clintons vs. Everyday Americans": "Check out the chart below to see how many households in each state it would take to equal the 'Dead Broke' Clintons." http://bit.ly/1Avg8iE

Blind leading the Blind.. & Obama knows that very well after it was clear that Clinton was NEVER trusted by the Voters, which makes Debbie and the DNC look like a complete bunch of..

Idiots?!?! STILL BLAMING The RUSSIANS.... instead of themselves!

She was and always will be unelectable due to exceedingly poor judgement, across the board.

Can we move on?

Polly123456 , 10 Dec 2016 08:0
Who is in charge of Internet security in the US government? Because it seems full of holes. Last time it was the Chinese and this time it's the Russians, yet not one piece of evidence to say where hacks have come from. How much are these world class Internet security people paid? And why do they still have a job? People sitting in their bedrooms on a pc from stores like staples have hacked their security regularly.
AlexPeace , 10 Dec 2016 08:0

In 2016, he said, the government did not detect any increased cyber activity on election day itself but the FBI made public specific acts in the summer and fall, tied to the highest levels of the Russian government. "This is going to put that activity in a greater context ... dating all the way back to 2008."

Extremely vague. Seems like there is no evidence at all to suggest any Russian involvement, but they need to pretend otherwise. Blah, blah, blah, Weapons of mass destruction... Apollo mission, etc
FMinus , 10 Dec 2016 08:0
Ole, Russians exposed the DNC emails, we knew about that. I though this should investigate Russians vote rigging, but I guess not. I for once welcome anyone who hacks my government and exposes their skeletons, so I can see what kind of dirty garbage I had leading or potentially leading my country.

Maybe the DNC should play fair and not dirty next time and put a candidate forward without skeletons that still reek of rotting flesh.

Robert Stokes -> FMinus , 10 Dec 2016 08:3
You rig electronic voting machines by reflashing the firmware or switching out the sd cards. Can't be done remotely.
Baldrick Daacat , 10 Dec 2016 07:5
And the CIA has never intervened in a foreign election?
VibePit -> Baldrick Daacat , 10 Dec 2016 08:0
Oh heaven forbid!! The Shah of Iran was democratically elected but of course. . .
HeathCardwell , 10 Dec 2016 07:2
Don't believe any of this at all.
American has been thee most corrupt and disgusting western nation for decades, run by people who are now being shown for who they really are and they're shitting themselves big time. The stakes don't get higher than this.
theonetruepainter , 10 Dec 2016 07:1
What's the point of this?

The American people don't want Clinton because she is a liar and a dangerous psychopath who also ignored the working people.

If you want to change that, get her treatment. Don't try to undermine the election result.

theonetruepainter , 10 Dec 2016 07:0
How can you not respect Putin?

He's spent the last few years making fools out of Clinton, Kerry and the obomber.

If you didn't want him to let Crimea rejoin Russia, then you shouldn't have initiated the coup that broke up Ukraine.

Peter Turner , 10 Dec 2016 07:0
What a total load of double talk. There is zero integrity in anything CIA says or does since the weapons of mass destruction deal or before that it was the Iran Contra deal and before that it was the Bay of Pigs. Now we have this rigging os the election results based on zero evidence. The whole thing is just idiocy. What is Obama trying to achieve?The end game will be for Obama to go down in history as ... let's just say he is not the smartest tool in the shed when it comes to being a so called world leader. Well done Obama you have now completely trashed what is left of your legacy.
LondonLungs , 10 Dec 2016 06:5

"CIA concludes Russia interfered to help Trump win election – report "

You might as well ask accountants to do a study on wether it's worthwhile to use an accountant. Part of the CIAs job is to influence elections around the world to get US-Corporation friendly gov'ts in to power. So yes of course they are going to say that a gov't can influence elections, if they said otherwise then they'd be admitting they're wasting money.

Ted Reading Reading 10 Dec 2016 06:3
So, it was the Russians! I knew it must've been them, they're so sneaky. All HFC had was the total backing of the entire establishment, including prominent Republican figures, the total fawning support of the entire main-stream media machine which carefully controlled the "she's got a comfortable 3 point lead maybe even double-digit lead" narrative and the "boo and hiss" pantomime slagging of her opponent. Plus the endless funds from the crooked foundation and murderous fanatics from the compliant Gulf states, and lost. But hey, do keep this going please, it'll help the Trumpster get a second term! Trump/Nugent 2020.
righteousfist01 , 10 Dec 2016 06:2
It's possible the Russians hacked and released the documents. However the report is not saying the Russians created them.

So whatever was so deplorable about them was all Democrat

Nataliefreeman -> righteousfist01 , 10 Dec 2016 06:3
Good point. Add that the whole election was dogged is the most glaring media bias and suddenly Russia comes off as simply leveling the playing field a bit
12inchPianist , 10 Dec 2016 06:1
CIA finds Russia had covertly influenced election. CIA finds FBI had overtly influenced election. Fancy that!
ashleigh2 , 10 Dec 2016 06:1
The 'secret' enquiry reported to Congress that the CIA concludes etc, etc, etc. Then yet more revelations from 'anonymous sources' are quoted in the Washington Post and The New York Times reaching the same conclusions.....talk about paranoia, or are the Democrats guilty of news fakery of the highest order to deny the US voters....
Nataliefreeman , 10 Dec 2016 05:5
Ooh Obama...there's a little snag about this investigation.

In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that set up a NAT entry that made the connecting computer appear somewhere else, with the entry deleted afterwards. Typically, IP table modifications aren't logged, so this would not be detectable.

In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that ran a SED script at a specific time that changed any occurrence of one IP address with another. Not sure anyone would bother with this, but it's why good system admins place so much emphasis on securing logs. However, it's obvious we're not talking about good admins.

In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There are some nice logs of the NSA using this.

In principle, someone along the way could tap into the fibre, spoofing IP addresses and injecting/sniffing packets. The U.S. even has a submarine designed for this, but optics aren't complex and any number of neo-phone phreaks could have the hardware.

In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious, it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in.

In principle, the supposed destination machine could have been hacked to relay the packets in encrypted form to the South Pole or a college campus in Texas. There are many examples of client machines being hacked to do this. It's basically what zombie machines are in botnets.

In practice, it is flat-out guaranteed that none of the security agencies could distinguish this from a Russian attack. Nothing in the area monitored could tell the difference. We know, for a fact, that college kids spoofing a scan from China have fooled the DoD and NSA on previous occasions, it has caused international incidents.

So we have known forms of attack that are known to exist, aren't complex and in some cases are already used for attacks. They are 100% untraceable.

Bosula , 10 Dec 2016 05:5
How about a Presidential review covering US interference in the elections of countries around the world?
Paulare -> Bosula , 10 Dec 2016 06:2
But where to start?

UK, Australia, Chile, Nicoragua, Cuba, Philippines, Malaysia, Germany...?

such choice..

Bosula -> Paulare , 10 Dec 2016 08:0
Yes. Maybe do it on a regional basis across the globe.
Anarchy4theUK , 10 Dec 2016 05:4
Of course the Americans would never interfere in other people's elections would they?...........I imagine the Russians wanted to avoid a nuclear war with war monger Hilary & who can blame them?
Nataliefreeman -> Anarchy4theUK , 10 Dec 2016 06:1
Y'know really all they seem to be looking possibly guilty of is the wikileaks scandal. Compare that to the enormous media bias regarding Trump and suddenly the Russians at worst come off as evening the playing field so as to help an election be less biased...
Kris Penny , 10 Dec 2016 05:4
When certain members of the public would believe one man over those who have more intelligence in a follicle than he will ever have floating in his cranium is when you realise that a place like Guantanamo should exist, exclusively for them.
http://www.allgov.com/news/where-is-the-money-going/surprise-cost-of-ammo-for-us-navy-destroyers-new-guns-800000-a-shot-161114?news=859762
Newmacfan , 10 Dec 2016 05:3
Paranoia about Russia has arrived at the laughable, almost like the fable of the boy who cried wolf! Even the way the CIA statement is worded makes you smile. "silk purse sows ear"? Everyone is clutching at straws rather than looking down the barrel at the truth......that folks is what is missing from Western Politics......"The Truth" --
StephenO , 10 Dec 2016 04:3

Obama expected the review to be completed before he leaves office...

Really?? Obama wants a "deep review" of internet activities surrounding the elections of 2008, 2012, and 2016; and he wants this done in less than 40 days? And it encompasses voting stations throughout the 50 states? That's the definition of political shenanigans.

Dom Michaels -> pureist , 10 Dec 2016 04:3
Seeing as how the CIA interfered with Ukraine before and during the overthrow of Yanukovich, and with Moscow protests a few years ago...... seems like everyone is always trying to interfere with each-other. Hypocrisy abounds
MarkThomason , 10 Dec 2016 03:5
This is not really a fight against Trump. That is lost. This is an intramural fight among Democrats.

This is desperate efforts by the corporate Democrats to hang on to power after Hillary (again) lost.

Excuses. Allegations without sources given, anonymous.

Remember that the same people used the same media contacts to spread fake news that the Podesta leaks were faked, and tried to shift attention from what was revealed to who revealed it.

GuyCybershy -> MarkThomason , 10 Dec 2016 04:0
Agreed. Another reason why the Democratic party is not worth saving. 13 million voted for Sanders in the primary, that is enough to start a new party.
Fabr1s , 10 Dec 2016 03:4
if the Ruskies did it, there's something funny: they did it on Obama's watch and her protege, Hillary, lost it. The system is a real mess in this case.

Kris Penny , 10 Dec 2016 03:4
Read and research further...
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-department-homeland-security-and-office-director-national
GeoffP -> Kris Penny , 10 Dec 2016 04:0
Interesting link. It raises a particularly salient question: assuming the Russians did indeed do it - and after the whole CIA yellow cake thing in Iraq, no one could possibly doubt national intelligence agencies any more - does it particularly matter?

Did the Russians write the emails? The betrayal of Sanders, the poor protection on classified materials, the cynical, vicious nonsense spewed out by the HRC campaign, the media collusion with the DNC and HRC: did the Russians do these things too? Or was that Clinton and the DNC? Silly question, I'm sure.

sejong -> jcadams , 10 Dec 2016 03:5
Russia's competence with computer hacking and cyber espionage is a given

So what? What about Chinese or Israeli competence in these areas?

This is Fake News that exists only because Clinton lost.

The real news is about in competence by HRC, DWS, and the DNC in foisting a sure loser on American voters.

naomh -> sejong , 10 Dec 2016 03:5
Thank you for speaking the truth!!!!
GeoffP -> jcadams , 10 Dec 2016 04:0
Well, chief, the Wisconsin recount is in and the results are staggering: after the recount, Clinton has gained on Trump by 3 votes... and Trump gained on Clinton by a heady six votes. One begins to wonder at the 'Manchurian candidate' claim.
third_eye , 10 Dec 2016 03:3
It is precisely charades like this that millions in the US and around the world have given up on the establishment. Business as usual or rather lying as usual will only alienate more not-so-stupid citizens. It speaks volumes about their desperation that they're are actually employing such obviously infantile tactics on the Russia even as they continue to paper over Hillary's tattered past. The result of the investigation is totally predictable..................Yes, the Russians were involved in hacking the elections, but..........for reasons of national security, details of the investigative process and evidence cannot be revealed.
Longleveler , 10 Dec 2016 03:2
If the Russians really wanted Trump to win that means they helped Hillary win the Democratic primaries because Bernie would have beat Trump.. There was a mess of hanky-panky going on to defeat Bernie, and deflecting the blame to a foreign actor should keep the demonstrators off the streets.
If someone is gullible enough to believe the Russians did it they'd also believe that Elvis made Bigfoot hack the DNC. That's even more plausible since bigfoot is just a guy who spends so much time sitting at his computer he lost all interest in personal hygiene.
Will D , 10 Dec 2016 03:1
The Democrats are really desperate to find anything they can use to challenge the results of the election.

Either way they look foolish - openly investigating the possibility of Russian hacking which acknowledges that their electoral systems aren't well secured, OR look really foolish if they find anything (whether real or faked).

The big question now is if, and how much, they will fake the findings of the investigation so that they can declare the election results wrong, and put Clinton into the White House.

Clearly, it is a case of desperate times calling for desperate measures. It is incredible that one man can make the largest Western nation look so ridiculous in the eyes of the world.

madeiranlotuseater , 10 Dec 2016 02:4
Pot calling the kettle black. Reveal fully what the CIA get up to all over the planet. The phoney intel America has used to go to war causing countries to implode. The selective way they release information to project the picture they want. I am not convinced that Russia is any better or any worse than the USA.
onofabeach , 10 Dec 2016 02:3
I can understand the Russians wanting Obama in 2008 and 2012 because he is a weak leader and totally incompetent.

I can also understand Putin preferring DJT to HRC.

It's about time the planet settled down a little bit, Trump and Putin will do more for world peace in the next year than Obama achieved in his 8 wasted years in charge.

The Democrats have yet to realise the reason for their demise was not the racists, the homophobes, the KKK, the Deplorables, the misogynists, the xenophobes etc etc etc.

It was Hillary Clinton.

Get over it, move on, stop whining, get out of your safe room, put the puppy down, throw the play dough away, stop protesting, behave like an adult.

As much as I am enjoying the monumental meltdown of the left, it is getting sad now and I am starting to feel very sorry for you.

BoBiel , 10 Dec 2016 02:2
Georgia Says Someone in U.S. Government Tried to Hack State's Computers Housing Voter Data

http://www.wsj.com/articles/georgia-reports-attempt-to-hack-states-election-database-via-ip-address-linked-to-homeland-security-1481229960

http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2016-12-08/georgia-accuses-us-of-trying-to-hack-its-election-systems

123Akava , 10 Dec 2016 02:1
What a sad bunch of clowns. But the time is ripe. You and your sort are done Obama, Hillary Clinton, Juncker, Merkel, Hollande, Mogherini, Kerry, Tusk, Nuland, Albright, Breedlove, SaManThe Power and the rest of the reptiles. With all respect - mwuahahaha! - you will soon sink into the darkness of the darkest places of history, but you won't be forgotten, no you won't!
poppetmaster , 10 Dec 2016 02:0
The Democrats still don't understand that the problem in American politics is everything that happened BEFORE election day.

How can you worry about the ballot boxes when the entire process from beginning to end is utterly corrupt.

CarlHansen , 10 Dec 2016 02:0
As for the Podesta email. John Podesta was so stupid that he gave out his password in a simple email scam that any 8 year old kid could have conducted. I wouldn't be surprised if Assange did it himself. Assange will be celebrating at the demise of Hillary.
phobeophobe , 10 Dec 2016 02:0
Guys! Your side lost the election. Get over it & stop looking for excuses.

I don't think it was the Russians, it was just a lot of people got sick of being told what to think & how to behave by your side of politics.

It is because people who disagree with you are either ignored, shut-down or called names with weaponised words such as "racist, bigot, xenophobe, homophobe, islamophobe, you name it. You go out onto the streets chanting mindless slogans aimed at shutting down debate. You have infiltrated academia and no journalism graduate comes out of a western univerity without a 60 degree lean to the left. People of alternative views to what is now the dominant social paradigm are not permitted to speak at universities. Once they were the vanguard of dangerous ideas. Now they are just sheep pens.

You have infiltrated the mainstream media so of course people need to go to Info Wars, Breitbart & Project Veritas to get the other side to your one-sided argument.

Your side of politics has regulated the very words we speak so that we can't even express a thought anymore without being chanted down, or shut down, prosecuted or sued.

There was once a time when it was the left who spoke up for freedom of speech. It was the left who demanded that a man be judged by the content of his character & not the color of his skin & it was once the right who used to be worried about the Russians taking over our institutions.

Have a look at yourselves. Look at what you've become. You've stopped being the guardians of freedom & now you have become the very anti-freedom totalitarians you thought you were campaigning against.

Bleating about the "popular vote" doesn't cut it either. That's like saying, the other side scored more goals than us but we had possession of the ball more times. It is sad for you but it is irrelevant.

Trump won the election! Get over it!

Let's see what sort of job he does before deciding what to do next.

Nataliefreeman , 10 Dec 2016 01:5
News flash for all the obamabots:

In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that set up a NAT entry that made the connecting computer appear somewhere else, with the entry deleted afterwards. Typically, IP table modifications aren't logged, so this would not be detectable.

In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that ran a SED script at a specific time that changed any occurrence of one IP address with another. Not sure anyone would bother with this, but it's why good system admins place so much emphasis on securing logs. However, it's obvious we're not talking about good admins.

In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There are some nice logs of the NSA using this.

In principle, someone along the way could tap into the fibre, spoofing IP addresses and injecting/sniffing packets. The U.S. even has a submarine designed for this, but optics aren't complex and any number of neo-phone phreaks could have the hardware.

In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious, it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in.

In principle, the supposed destination machine could have been hacked to relay the packets in encrypted form to the South Pole or a college campus in Texas. There are many examples of client machines being hacked to do this. It's basically what zombie machines are in botnets.

In practice, it is flat-out guaranteed that none of the security agencies could distinguish this from a Russian attack. Nothing in the area monitored could tell the difference. We know, for a fact, that college kids spoofing a scan from China have fooled the DoD and NSA on previous occasions, it has caused international incidents.

So we have known forms of attack that are known to exist, aren't complex and in some cases are already used for attacks. They are 100% untraceable.

DanielDee , 10 Dec 2016 01:3
Joe Biden unwittingly gave the game up when he spoke to the press with indignation of the Russian hacks. The US would respond in kind with a covert cyber operation run by the CIA First of all it would be the NSA, not the CIA Secondly, it's not covert when you tell the press! Oh Joe, you really let the Obama administration down with that gaffe! Who would believe them now? A lot of people it would seem. Mainly those still reeling from an election they were so vested in
fedback , 10 Dec 2016 01:2
Unfortunately our media has lost all credibility.
For years we were told it was necessary to remove the dictator Assad in Syria. The result, a country destroyed, migrant crisis that fuelled Brexit and brought EU to its knees.
Now they are going to sell the 'foreign entities decided the US election'.
It's just a sad situation
GuyCybershy -> fedback , 10 Dec 2016 01:2
Syria has been destroyed because Western client states in the Middle East wanted this to happen. Assad had a reasonably successful secular government and our medieval gulf state allies felt. threatened by his regime. there was the little business of a pipeline, but of course that would be called a "conspiracy theory".
SomersetApples , 10 Dec 2016 01:1
If Obama has resources to spend on investigations, he should be investigating why the US is providing guided missiles to the terrorist in Syria. We had such great hopes for him, and he has proved to be totally useless as a president. Rather than giving us leadership and guidance he is looking under his bed for spooks. Just another example of his incompetence at a time when we needed leadership.

Looking for proof of espionage will be like trying to prove a negative and only result in a possible or at best a likely type of result for no purpose. It would just be another case of an unsupported accusation being thrown about.

Facing up to the question of who is supplying weapons to terrorist would require the courage to take on the Military Industrial Complex and he hasn't got it. Trump will be different.

ID3053875 , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
If the russians did interfere in the USA elections perhaps is a bit of poetic justice.
The USA has interfere in Latin America for over hundred years and they have given us Batista, Somoza, Trujillo, Noriega, Pinochet, Duvaliers , military juntas in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Streener in Paraguay to name a few. They all were narcissists, racists and insecure. The american people love this type of leader now they got him in the white house may be from Russia with love. Empires get destroyed from within, look at Little Britain now, maybe the same will happen soon in the USA.
Viva China , is far from Latin America
nbk46zh , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
So if the US managed to somehow get rid of Russia and China, what would they do then? How would it justify hundreds of billions in defense spending? Just remember, the US military industry desperately needs an external enemy to exist. Without it, there is no industry.
ID5151903 , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
No I disagree. I don't think it was a conpriscy. It was just decades of misinformation, lies, usually perpertrated by our esteemed foreign minister. The man is a buffoon , liar and incompetent. It is quite amusing to see how inept, Incompotent and totally unsuited this man child is to public office.
PullingTheStrings , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
Good to see alot of Americans on here back into Mccarthyism/Paranoia/scapegoating/Witch hunting/Propaganda.
smellycat , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
Clinton's 'Russia did it' cop-out
https://off-guardian.org/2016/12/09/clintons-russia-did-it-cop-out /
prairdog , 10 Dec 2016 00:4
Why should we trust US intelligence which is essentially US propaganda?
DanielDee , 10 Dec 2016 00:3
Another red herring that smacks of desperation. The final death throes of a failed administration. These carefully chosen words reveal a lot. The email leaks were "consistent with the methods and motivations" of Russian hackers. In layman's terms its the equivalent of saying "we haven't got a clue who it was but it's the kind of thing they would probably do". Don't expect a smoking gun because it doesn't exist, otherwise we would have known about it by now.
PostTrotskyite -> DanielDee , 10 Dec 2016 00:3
It's not just the US who has accused Putin of meddling in their domestic affairs. Germany and the UK have made the same allegations. Are they wrong too?
DanielDee -> PostTrotskyite , 10 Dec 2016 00:5
I think anyone with reasonable intelligence would take each accusation on a case by case basis. There is no doubt that Russia conducts cyber operations, as the US and UK and Germany does. There is also little doubt that significant Russophobia exists, particularly since the failed foreign attempt of regime change in Syria that was thwarted by Russia. On that last point many citizens of the West are coming to the realisation that a secular government in Syria is preferable to one run by jihadists installing crude sharia law (Libya was certainly a lesson). Furthermore, if Hillary Clinton had succeeded one dreads to think of the consequences of her no-fly-zone plans. Thankfully she didn't succeed, no doubt in part to wikileaks revelations, who for the record stated that did not result from Russian hacks
sejong , 10 Dec 2016 00:2
Fake News is mass gaslighting, removing any sense of what is real. Biggest psy-op ever.
gondwanaboy , 10 Dec 2016 00:1
Barack Obama orders 'full review' of possible Russian hacking in US election


FAKE NEWS ALERT

JCDavis -> gondwanaboy , 10 Dec 2016 00:2
They already stated their conclusions, now they have to find evidence.
Yodasyodel , 9 Dec 2016 23:5
Hows the election recount going? You know the one this paper kept going on about a few weeks ago in Wisconsin that was supposed to be motivated by "Russian Hacking" in the election? Not very well but you have gone quiet. Also I see the Washington Post has been forced to backtrack for implying news outlets like Breitbart are Russian controlled on the advice of their own lawyers....after all calling someone a Russian agent without a shred of evidence is seriously libellous and they know it. Russian agents to blame yeah ok Obama no doubt the Easter Bunny will be next in your sights you fraud.
Wilderloo , 9 Dec 2016 23:5
Look no further than Hillarys private server. Classified information sent and received and Obam was part of it. Obama is a liar and a fraud who is now blaming the Russians for crooked Hillarys loss.
SUNLITE , 9 Dec 2016 23:5
Feed the flames of the war mongers that want Russia and Putin to be our bogeyman.Feed the military industrial complex more billions.The U.S. Defense budget is already 10 times that of Russia ,feed NATO already on Russia's boarder with tanks ,troops and heavy weapons.i did expect more from this pres,... The lies ,mis information and propaganda has worked so well since the end of WW2,upon a public who has been fed those lies {and is to busy with sports ,gadgets,games, alcohol and other drugs }for 70 yrs by a compliant,for profit lap dog media more interested in producing infotainment and profits than supplying information..If you don't think the "public" isn't very poorly informed and will believe anything ,..just look at who the next prez will be..
GuyCybershy -> SUNLITE , 10 Dec 2016 00:0
I don't think it's true that Trump voters were less informed than Clinton voters. The public knows that they all lie, they simply choose the one who's lies most appeal to them.
Alexander Bach , 9 Dec 2016 23:5
Did he also order to investigate the Clinton's deeds revealed by the 'hackers'?
fedback , 9 Dec 2016 23:3
Unfortunately Obama is not leaving office with dignity.
This action is another attempt to delegitimize the election of Trump. We already have the recount farce going on.
If Republicans had tried to delegitimize the election of Obama we know what the reaction from media would have been. An outcry against antidemocratic and racist behaviour
USApatriot12 , 9 Dec 2016 23:3
The corporate media is so predictable at this point. The news cranks up the anti-Russia hysteria while the guys over in entertainment roll out a slick fantasy about anti-Nazi resistance. It all adds up to a big steaming pile of crap but you hope it will push enough buttons to keep the citizens chained to their their desks for another quarter. Don't bet on it. As a great American said at another time of upheaval, you can't fool everyone forever...
GuyCybershy -> USApatriot12 , 9 Dec 2016 23:3
We're supposed to condemn "white nationalism" in The US and UK while supporting it in Ukraine.
GeeDeeSea -> GuyCybershy , 9 Dec 2016 23:4
That's not all. We in US and UK are supposed to condemn jihadists in Iraq while supporting them Syria.
James7 -> Eddy Cannella , 9 Dec 2016 23:2
Hillary? Although I would lean to more "Grey."

Kremlin Connection? The TRUTH About Hillary's Shady Ties To Russia REVEALED
Find out why insiders say Clinton has some explaining to do.

Americans have no idea just how closely Hillary Clinton is tied to the Kremlin! That's the shocking claim of a new report that alleges the Democratic nominee is secretly pals with Vladimir Putin and his countrymen.

Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, has published a report that claims that that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was on the executive board of a foreign company that received $35 million from the Kremlin. "The company was a transparent Russian front, and how much Podesta was compensated - and for what - is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position on that board to the Federal government, as required by law," John Schindler of the Observer wrote.

As Radar previously reported, when Clinton was secretary of state, she profited from the "Russian Reset," a failed attempt to improve relations between the U.S. and Russia.
chweizer wrote, "Many of the key figures in the Skolkovo process - on both the Russian and U.S. sides - had major financial ties to the Clintons. During the Russian reset, these figures and entities provided the Clintons with tens of millions of dollars, including contributions to the Clinton Foundation, paid for speeches by Bill Clinton, or investments in small start-up companies with deep Clinton ties." Schweizer also details "Skolkovo," a Silicon Valley-like campus that both the U.S. and Russia worked on for developing biomed, space, nuclear and IT technologies. He told the New York Post that there was a "pattern that shows a high percentage of participants in Skolkovo who happen to be Clinton Foundation donors."

raymondffoulkes , 9 Dec 2016 23:1
So it's anti-Russia propaganda today again, all over the Guardian as well as everywhere else.

I daresay they have a few things (perhaps a tad more important than football and athletics) to say about us as well..

smellycat -> raymondffoulkes , 9 Dec 2016 23:2
Sour grapes at the liberation of Aleppo and their loss of face.
I'm surprised they haven't started asking about the missing 250K civilians,who must even now be languishing in Assad's dungeons.
Keeping that one for tomorrow probably.
nbk46zh , 9 Dec 2016 23:1
When Cheney used the terror alert levels to keep the US population in the constant state of fear, the Democrats denounced it as fear mongering. Now they're embracing the same tactics in the constant demonization of Russia. Look, it's raining today! Russia must be trying to control the weather in the US! Get them! Utterly ridiculous.
stegordon21 , 9 Dec 2016 23:0
The US has been the most bloodthirsty, aggressive nation in my lifetime. Where the US goes we obediently follow. Yet as Obama (7 countries he's bombed in his presidency, not bad for a Nobel Prize Winner) continues to circle Russia with NATO on their borders. We're continually spun headline news that Russia is the aggressor and is continually meddling in foreign affairs. We are the aggressors, we are the danger to ourselves and it's we who are run by megalomaniac elites who pump us full of fear and propaganda.
nbk46zh , 9 Dec 2016 23:0
Malicious cyberactivity... has no place in international community... No? When West does it, then it's for democratic purposes? But invading countries on a humanitarian pretense does? So Democrats are still looking to blame Russia for everything not going their way I see. This rhetoric didn't work for Clinton in the election and it won't now. Stop with this nonsense
GuyCybershy -> nbk46zh , 9 Dec 2016 23:1
There wasn't a lot of outrage about the use of the "stuxnet" virus against Iran. You see, when we do it is always for a good cause.

Paulare , 9 Dec 2016 22:5
Take the long view folks.

The Egyptian Empire lasted millenum,
The Greek and Roman Empires a thousand years, give or take.
The Holy Roman Empire centuries.
The British and French circa 200 years.
The USSR about 70, the USA 70 and counting

This is just the cyclical death throes of empires played out at ever increasing speed before our very eyes.

DexDex , 9 Dec 2016 22:5
5 articles abut Russia, again. This is the Russia interference in the Guardian. Putin must be stopped.
Earl_Grey -> DexDex , 9 Dec 2016 23:0
NATO has bought a subscription to the Guardian
TonyBlunt , 9 Dec 2016 22:5
Is all this hoohaa the BBC and the Guardian trying to get some revenge for the Russian liberating East Aleppo?
TheIPAResistance , 9 Dec 2016 22:5
This is exactly why we should never move to electronic voting. Can you imagine the lengths the IPA would go to ensure their men security the power they need to roll out their neoliberal agenda? As a tax-free right wing think tank composed of rich like Rinehart, Murdoch, Forrest, et al. the sky's the limit.
Anthony1152 , 9 Dec 2016 22:4
The five stages of dealing with psychological trauma: Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Hillary and the Democrats are still at stage one and two. Obama is only beginning stage one as events dawn on him.
TheCharacteristicEquation 9 Dec 2016 22:4
I really do feel the established media and its elite hierarchy are vexed by both the Trump victory and Brexit here in the UK. Now the media attention turns to a report on another of its perpetual campaigns, namely Russia, and corruption in sport.

I'm not going to doubt the 'findings', but I know humans are corrupt ALL over the world, but it does strike me that no Western outlet, ever prints anything positive about Russia. I mean - nothing, zero!

dallasdunlap , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
If, indeed, the Russian government gathered the DNC and Podesta info released by Wikileaks, the Russians did the American people a favor by pulling back the curtain on behind the scenes scheming by Clinton campaign potentates.
Of course, I don't believe the Democratic claim that Clinton lost the election because of the Russians and the FBI.
GuyCybershy -> dallasdunlap , 9 Dec 2016 22:4
Podesta's password was "p@ssword". Inexcusable carelessness.
smellycat , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
Nothing wrong with a bit of regime change now and then, so we've been told. No good crying when the Russians do it to you.
sammy3110 , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
It's instructive to see the Guardian drag up Reagan's "Evil Empire" spiel, but only after Hillary lost.
GeeDeeSea , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
US backed a coup, or set up a coup, to overthrow the democratically elected government in Ukraine which led to war. Putin's payback seems fully justified.
theenko -> GeeDeeSea , 9 Dec 2016 22:4
sweet fucking jesus

Yanukovych is a disgrace to Ukrainian's everywhere and a traitor to his country. Fucking Putin puppet should be in jail.

GeeDeeSea -> theenko , 9 Dec 2016 22:4
sweet fucking jesus

Porshenko is a disgrace to Ukrainian's everywhere and a traitor to his country. Fucking Obama puppet should be in jail.

Earl_Grey , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
Oh my, a foreign country may have had a tiny influence on a US Election.

How about investigating the overthrow of the Democratically elected Govt in Ukraine, or the influence the US has had on the Syrian Govt, or even in Australia, where the Chinese Govt donates massive amounts of money to Political Parties (note, there's no link of course between Chinese Govt donations and Chinese Companies being able to buy most of Australia and employ Chinese Nationals in Australia on Chinese conditions and 500,000 Chinese Nationals being able to buy Real Estate in Sydney alone... none whatsoever).

bcnteacher , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
Good call! Something is fishy about the US electoral system.
COReilly , 9 Dec 2016 22:2
I'm not a policy or think tank wonk, but isn't Russia just a euphemism for China. Aren't their geopolitical interests linked. You just say Russia because China has us by the financial balls (I'm sure the Guardian would prefer to NOT be censored on the mainland) right? Package it that way and I'm on board. My love of Dostoevsky goes out the window. Albeit I still think Demons one of the best novels ever written. Woke me up.
fedback , 9 Dec 2016 22:1
Survivor of Bosnian sniper fire Hillary Clinton decries fake news in speech yesterday
Aaron Aarons , 9 Dec 2016 22:1
I'm all in favor of delegitimizing the incoming semi-fascist Trump/Pence regime, and find Obama's talk of a smooth transition disgusting. However, I reject the appeal to Russophobia or other Xenophobia.

BTW, Obama and his collaborators like Diane Feinstein have done a lot to prepare the legal basis for fascistic repression under the new POtuS.

Sund Fornuft , 9 Dec 2016 22:1
I already know what the comission will find. They will find evidences that Iraq holds vast ammonúnt of weapons of mass destruction! Oh wait, that was already used.
kalander , 9 Dec 2016 22:0
Obama has been as useless as his predecessor young Bush. His policies generally are in tatters and the US neo cons evil fantasy of full spectrum dominance has met its death in Syria. Bravo.
ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 22:0
The neoliberal corporate machine is wounded but not dead. They will use every trick, ploy and opportunity to try to regain power.

The fight goes on.

fedback , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
After an election cycle with proven collusion between the DNC/Hillary Clinton campaign and our media, our media has the nerve to come up with the term 'fake news'.
Hypocrisy at its finest
John Urquhart , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
Nobody does paranoia like the yanks. To the rest of the world, the unedifying spectacle of the world's biggest bullies, snoops, warmongers, liars and hypocrites complaining about how unfair life is, is pretty nauseating. Most of America's problems are home-grown.
ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
Why fake the news when you can just strong the media companies into muzzling their criticism?

http://nypost.com/2016/12/09/mika-brzezinski-says-clinton-camp-tried-to-pull-her-off-the-air /

mjp3470 , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
And the final report will conclude with something along the lines of:
'After a thorough, exhaustive investigation of all relevant evidence concerning the potential of foreign interference in the United States electoral process, the results of the investigation have shown that, although there remain troubling questions about the integrity of U.S. cyber-security which should prompt immediate Congressional review, there has been uncovered no conclusive evidence to support the conjecture that cyber attacks originating with any foreign actor, state or individual had any significant effect on the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election, and that there is no cause or justification for the American People to question the fairness of or lose faith in the electoral process and laid out by and carried out according to the Constitution.'
I do Holiday cards too.
garenmel -> mjp3470 , 9 Dec 2016 22:2
My hat off to you sir/madam. This was great!
Powerspike , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
Georgia's Secretary of State is accusing someone at the Department of Homeland Security of illegally trying to hack its computer network, including the voter registration database.
In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, copied to the full Georgia congressional delegation, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp alleges that a computer with a DHS internet address attempted to breach its systems.
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/309530-state-of-georgia-allegedly-accusing-homeland-security-of-attempted-hack

Wake up and smell the BS, the hacking is being done by people a lot nearer home.....

feliciafarrel , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
Oh dear, the GOP seem to have forgotten what they were saying about Putin and the Kremlin a short while back:

The continuing erosion of personal liberty and fundamental rights under the current officials in the Kremlin. Repressive at home and reckless abroad, their policies imperil the nations which regained their self-determination upon the collapse of the Soviet Union. We will meet the return of Russian belligerence with the same resolve that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. We will not accept any territorial change in Eastern Europe imposed by force, in Ukraine, Georgia, or elsewhere, and will use all appropriate constitutional measures to bring to justice the practitioners of aggression and assassination.

https://www.gop.com/platform/american-exceptionalism/

Are they going to conveniently forget all decency and morality? Is the white supremacist agenda in the GOP finally in the ascendant?

Russian Troll (Number 254) 9 Dec 2016 21:5
I as a Russian Troll do not like this investigation and will do or say anything in order to change your mind. Putin is not a problem, the EU is.
Powerspike , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
..... prohibiting "fake" or "false" news would be a cure worse than the disease, i.e., censorship by other means. The government cannot be trusted with distinguishing fake from genuine news because it has ulterior motives. News the government dislikes would be conflated with fakery, and news the government approved would be conflated with truthfulness. Private businesses like Facebook cannot be trusted with distinguishing fake from genuine news because its overriding mission is to make money and to win popularity, not to spread truth. It would suppress news that risked injury to its reputation or profits but leave news that did the opposite undisturbed.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/5/reflections-fake-news /
GuyCybershy , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
"The Anonymous Blacklist Promoted by the Washington Post Has Apparent Ties to Ukrainian Fascism and CIA Spying".

http://www.alternet.org/media/anonymous-blacklist-promoted-washington-post-has-shocking-roots-ukrainian-fascism-eugenics-and

GuyCybershy , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
Clinton lost even though she outspent Trump two to one. She was just a lousy candidate who ran a terrible campaign.
fimbulvinter -> GuyCybershy , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
Uh excuse me but that sort of introspection doesn't fly. She was flawless and the blame rests solely on Russia/alt-right/Sanders/Third Parties/Racism/Misogyny/Alignment of the stars/etc/etc
emilyadam , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
I thnk the idea that russia has world domination is quite laughable, what else they gonna be blamed for next, reduction of giraffe population!Lol
I think a teeny wee paranoia is setting in, or outright deliberate propaganda, too obvious
Jim Moodie , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
Is this worse than when the two CIA operatives were caught searching through files in the Offices of the British Labour Party about thirty years ago. What goes around comes around.

The CIA hacks have been destabalisuping Government for a at least seventy years.

One thing is pretty obvious paper ballots and a different ballot for each is much harder to rig.

It is ironic it takes a despot life key Trump to bring the issue to a head AFTER unexpectedly won.

freeandfair -> Jim Moodie , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
"Is this worse than when the two CIA operatives were caught searching through files in the Offices of the British Labour Party about thirty years ago. What goes around comes around."

The CIA were caught hacking into the US Congressional computers just 6 or so months ago. Nothing came out of it.

guest88888 , 9 Dec 2016 21:3

possible Russian hacking in US election

Based on the fact that the US 2000 (and possibly 2004) election was outright stolen by George Bush Jr., perhaps the propagandists in the White House and media ought to be looking for a "Russian connection" in regards to our illustrious former president.

Texas_Sotol , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
I'm shocked--shocked--to hear that our close Russian allies have done anything to influence and undermine the stability of other countries. Preposterous accusation! And to try to become huge winners in the Western Hemisphere, by cheating? Vitriolic nonsense!

Many posters here actually believe that Good Old Russia should just stick with what they do best. That's poison!

Fencewalker -> Bluebird101 , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
Rather like the Litvenenko inquiry...full of maybe's and possibilities, with not a shred of hard, factual proof shown - demonstrating that the order came from the Kremlin.
It's just a total accident that Putin's most vocal opponents keep getting shot in the head, gunned down on bridges, suffering 'accidents' or strange miscarriages of (sometimes post-mortem) 'justice' and fall victim to radiological state-enacted terrorism in foreign countries. No pattern there, whatsoever.
Informed17 , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
I am at a loss. On the one hand, I hear about Russian economy in tatters, gas station posing as a country, deep crisis, economy the size of Italy, rusty old military toys, aircraft carrier smoking out the whole Northern hemisphere, etc. On the other hand, I hear about Russian threat all the time, which must be countered by massive build up of the US and EU military, Russia successfully interfering in the elections in the beacon of democracy, the US, with 20 times greater economy, with powerful allies, the best armed forces in the world, etc. Are we talking about two different Russias, or is this schizophrenia, pure and simple?
jamese07uk -> Informed17 , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
It's always easy to find reasons to fear something, added to that the psychology of the unknown, and we have the makings of very powerful propaganda. Whatever Russia's level of corruption, and general society, I feel I cannot trust the Western media anymore 100%. There seems to be a equally sinister hidden agenda deep within Western Elites - accessing Russia's land, political and potential wealthly resources must surely be one of them!? The longterm Western agenda/mission?
spiridonovich , 9 Dec 2016 21:1
The Democratic Party's problem is Russia, which the President is rightly putting front and center. All Russians are the summit of eviality, and must be endlessly scapegoated in order for Democrats to regain power for the nation's greater good.

Democrats' problems have nothing to do with corruption, glaring conflicts of interest, favoritism, ass-licking editors, crappy data, lacking enthusiasm, and horribly poor judgement.

None of these issues need to be publicly addressed, being of no consequence to independent voters, and the President, Guardian, et al. must continue their silent -- and "independent" -- vigil on such silly topics, if Democrats are to have any hope of cultivating enough mindless, enraged, and abandoned sheep to bring them future victories.

ImmortalTao , 9 Dec 2016 21:1
I admire Trump, Putin & Farage. Don't agree with them but I have admiration for them. They show all the cunning, calculating, resourcefulness that put the European race on top. Liberals don't like that and want to see the own people fall to the bottom. Thankfuly the neoliberal elite are finishedm
MJMaguire , 9 Dec 2016 21:1
Absurd nonsense - the third anti-Russian story of the day. Very little of this has much traction because of the sheer volume of misinformation coming out about Russia. there are very good cogent reasons why the Democrats lost the US election - none of them have anything to do with Russia.
slats7 , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
another pathetic attempt to delegitimize Trump. wanna know why he won? look in the mirror, Barry.
oldsunshine -> slats7 , 9 Dec 2016 21:2
Will Obama see Clinton if he looks in the mirror??
Bluejil , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
I can't see a thing wrong with reviewing the last three election cycles, if there is any doubt at all and to put speculation to bed, it should be done.
CurtBrown -> Bluejil , 9 Dec 2016 21:1
Why stop at the last three?
Karl Marks -> CurtBrown , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
Because the US is more concerned about money than democratic integrity.
dicksonator , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
So the US intelligence servies aren't doing similar operations?

If they werent, heads would roll as they have a considerable budget. Did we learn nothing from Edward Snowden? Are Russia just better at this? I doubt it.

I think both sides conduct themselves in a despicable manner so please dont call me a Putin apologist. Well, feel free actually, I could'nt care less.

gray2016 , 9 Dec 2016 21:0

Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election


US interference:

COUNTRY OR STATE Dates of intervention Comments
VIETNAM l960-75 Fought South Vietnam revolt & North Vietnam; one million killed in longest U.S. war; atomic bomb threats in l968 and l969.
CUBA l961 CIA-directed exile invasion fails.
GERMANY l961 Alert during Berlin Wall crisis.
LAOS 1962 Military buildup during guerrilla war.
142 more rows

Shall I go on with anoter 142? US lying scumbags

yeCarumba -> gray2016 , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
the vietnam fiasco alone is enough to disqualify america from any criticism about interference in internal affairs
they practically destroyed the country
KitKnightly , 9 Dec 2016 20:5
The pathetic way the media are pushing this big-bad-Russians meme is a little depressing.

This "hack" is totally fictional, the wikileaks e-mails were almost certainly that...leaks. As most o their output has been over the years. For 95% of the Wikileaks existence there have been absolutely zero connections with "the Kremlin", in fact they have leaked stuff damaging to Russia before now.

The Russian's did not hack the DNC, or rig the election, this is yet another example of the political establishment hysterically pointing fingers and making up lies when their chosen side loses an election.

freeandfair -> KitKnightly , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
I remember how North Korea was blamed for Sony hack. I think they were even cut from the internet for a day and there was all this talk of punishing them. And then later it came out that very likely wasn't North Korea. Only the news cycle already moved on and nobody cared.
mismeasure , 9 Dec 2016 20:5
Traditionally, the best Cold Warriors have been right-wing liberals. In the absence of policies that concretely benefit the people they engage in threat inflation and demagoguery.
SergeyL , 9 Dec 2016 20:4
In 90s US set all figures in Russia - from president to news program anchor. Elections of 96 were ripped by American "advisors" so that Eltsyn with 3% rating "won" them. It's payback time.
Shaemus Gruagain , 9 Dec 2016 20:4
Oh how wonderful it is to watch them smart and the bonus? no more Obamas.
uest88888 -> PeteCW , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
And yet the so-called "Russian trolls" (which is apparently anyone who exercise a modicum of skepticism) seem to be winning here at CiF based on the number of likes per comment, which is likely why the NSA sponsored propagandists and clueless dopes are getting so increasingly shrill.
Mattster101 , 9 Dec 2016 20:3
If you take a wider view, this is all really about keeping the Dems in the game, trying to undo the Trump validity and give them another go in 4 or so years. Really, seems quite desperate that a man that allowed 270000 wild horses to be sold for horsemeat this year across the border to Mexico, brought HC in to his own cabinet having said 'she will say anything and do nothing', knowing what a nightmare that would make, and is going to watch his healthcare get ripped to shreds, needs more accomplishments in his last year, aka Obama, ergo, let's investigate the evil russians and their female athletes with male DNA ( you would think I am making this stuff up, but I am not ) ... Come on Grandma, where are you when we need you most
nolongersilent , 9 Dec 2016 20:3
we must somehow, subvert the despicable populace that elected trump. we must erase from history the conceding of president elect clinton - newpeak from the ministry of truth. we'll get her into the white house if it takes more cash, lies, and corruption. after all, who needs democracy in the democratic party when we have big brother. democracy just confuses the members. we'll send the despicables through the ministry of love to re-educate them, of course, this IS 1984 after all....we will vote for you, the intelligentsia of the left knows what is best for you.
eldudeabides , 9 Dec 2016 20:3
Should Hillary have been disqualified (and prosecuted) for having access to debate questions beforehand?
Nete75 , 9 Dec 2016 20:3
"Malicious cyber activity, specifically malicious cyber activity tied to our elections , has no place in the international community. Unfortunately this activity is not new to Moscow. We've seen them do this for years ... The president has made it clear to President Putin that this is unacceptable."

Note how carefully it specifies that it is cyber activity tied to the american elections that is inappropriate. I presume that is simply to avoid openly saying that mass-surveillance by the US government of everyone's private email, and social network accounts doesn't come under that "no place in the international community" phrase. You know, one does wonder how these people's faces don't come off in shame when whinning about potential interference by foreign governemnts after a full 8 years or so of constant revelations of permanent spying and mass-surveillance by the US government of international leaders and ordinary citizens worldwide.

Boghaunter , 9 Dec 2016 20:2
So the DNC was hacked - so what. Hacking is so common these days as to be expected. A quick perusal of the internet provides some SIGNIFICANT hacks that deserved some consternation:

9/4/07 The Chinese government hacked a noncritical Defense Department computer system in June, a Pentagon source told FOX News on Tuesday.

Spring 2011 Foreign hackers broke into the Pentagon computer system this spring and stole 24,000 files - one of the biggest cyber-attacks ever on the U.S. military,

On the 12th of July 2011, Booz Allen Hamilton the largest U.S. military defence contractor admitted that they had just suffered a very serious security breach, at the hands of hacktivist group AntiSec.

5/28/13 The confidential version of a Defense Science Board report compiled earlier this year reportedly says Chinese hackers accessed designs for more than two dozen of the U.S. military's most important and expensive weapon systems.

June 2014 The UK's National Crime Agency has arrested an unnamed young man over allegations that he breached the Department of Defense's network last June.


1/12/15 The Twitter account for U.S. Central Command was suspended Monday after it was hacked by ISIS sympathizers (OK twitter accounts shouldn't be a big deal. Why does US CentCom even HAVE a twitter account???)

5/6/15 OPM hack: China blamed for massive breach of US government data

Omoikani , 9 Dec 2016 20:2
And so the neocon propaganda machine trundles on, churning out this interesting material day after day. The elephant in the room is that if you get hacked you have no knowledge of this until your private stuff is all over the internet, and the chances of finding out who did it are zilch. Everyone in IT security knows this.
johhnybgood , 9 Dec 2016 20:1
Another "fake news" story. Does anybody with a pulse really believe that Russia hacked the DNC? The US Security Services admitted that it was NOT Russia; the likelihood is that the leaks were provided to Wikileaks by insiders within the US Administration - they wanted to ensure that Hillary did not win. None of the actual revelations were covered by the MSM, and "the Russians did it" was a convenient distraction.
Omoikani -> johhnybgood , 9 Dec 2016 20:2
All people that on earth do dwell have no clue who hacked the DNC to the amusing end that Podesta's e-mails ended up on the internet, but it suits a dangerous political narrative to demonise Russia until it becomes plain logical to attack them.
peterward881 , 9 Dec 2016 20:0
YES YES let attack Russia, YES YES YES, Russia Russia we should carry on attacking Russia. We the journalists are well paid by the man from Australia. YES YES we must to carry on attacking Russia and forget the shit happening in other countries. YES YES it is our duty.
guest88888 , 9 Dec 2016 20:0

Election hacking: Obama orders 'full review' of Russia interference

And I guess Obama has also ordered the Guardian to do a full court press of anti-Russian propaganda, just judging by the articles pumped out on today's rag alone.

The US government is seemingly attempting the "Big Lie" tactic of Joseph Goebbels and instigating support in the public for war against Russia. By repeating the completely unsubstantiated allegations that Russia has somehow "interfered with the election" they hope, without any genuine basis, to strong arm the public into accepting a further ramping of tensions and starting yet another illegal war for profit.

Chirographer , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
There's nothing wrong with conducting the investigation, but shouldn't it have been done before accusing Russia?

And aren't all the people cited in the article political appointees, Democrats or avowed Trump enemies, and then there's closing, " A spokesman for the director of national intelligence declined to comment."

Karega , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
Surely of all the Orders Obama might issue during his last weeks in office, why does he choose to give a stupid Order that effectively makes US some sort of Banana Republic? This man was/is more hype than real! At a stroke of a pen he seriously undermines the integrity of the US Electoral System. Whatever credibility was left has now been eroded by these constant and silly claims that somehow Russians installed Trump as President. Doesn't that make Trump some sort of Russian Agent?
Meanwhile MSM keeps on streaming some fake news and theories and then Obama Orders US intelligence to dig deeper. This is lunacy!
alexfoxy28 , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
Obama certainly understands that Russia is not the reason why Trump was elected. However, he wants to create new obstacles on the way of normalization of relations between the US and Russia and make it more difficult for Trump.

However, Trump is not a weak man, not a skinny worm; and he can hit these opponents back so hard that international court for them (for invasions into sovereign countries) will lead to their life sentences.

Ginen , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
Only two weeks ago the Obama Administration publicly stated there was no evidence of cybersecurity breaches affecting the electoral process, as reported in the NYT :

The administration, in its statement, confirmed reports from the Department of Homeland Security and intelligence officials that they did not see "any increased level of malicious cyberactivity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on Election Day."

The administration said it remained "confident in the overall integrity of electoral infrastructure, a confidence that was borne out." It added: "As a result, we believe our elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective."

Was Obama lying then or is he lying now?
imperfetto , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
Is there any limit to the ridicolous, Mr. Obama? what is this? a tragicomic play of the inept?
Here we are with the most childish fabrication that it must be the Russians' fault if Trump won the election. I'll be laughing for an entire cosmic era! And all this after US publically announced that they were going to launch a devastating acher attack against the badies: the Russians, which of course didn't work out. Come on, this is more comedy that a serious play.

What probably is going on, the readers can gather by having a look at the numberless articles that are being published by maistream media against the Russians.
Why this histeric insurgence of Russofobia? Couldn't it be that it is intolerable for the US and their allies to see the Russians winning in Aleppo, and most of all restoring peace and tollerance among the population returning to their abbandoned homes.

brothersgrimm , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
I think Hillary, in part, lost the election due to all the fake news being pumped out by the mainstream corporate media, doing her bidding. People are tired of it, along with all the corruption and lies that came to the surface through the likes of Wikileaks.
Trump is a terrible alternative, but the only alternative people were given, so many went with it.
Now we see fake news making out the Russians to be the bad guys again, pumping out story after story, trying to propagandize the population into sucking up these new memes. Russia has its problems, and will always act in its own self-interest, but it's nothing compared to the tactics the US uses, bullying countries around the world to pander to its own will, desperately trying to maintain its Empire.
RoachAmerican , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
Examine something real, Nuclear Hillary. It must be time for Spring Planting??
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/23/us/clinton-foundation-donations-uranium-investors.html?_r=0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syEjkPyqRew
Minutes 20 to 25
Uranium One Wyoming
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html

http://www.npr.org/2015/04/23/401781313/clinton-foundation-linked-to-russian-effort-to-buy-uranium-company
https://youtu.be/jkfE10g8xbc
at 25 minutes et seq
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkfE10g8xbc&feature=youtu.be


Below, first paragraphs are the most important
http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/five-questions-about-the-clintons-and-a-uranium-company

The 1 2 3 Step of Acquisition of Uranium One
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-clintons-putin-and-uranium-2015-4

Going Private Part Public Company Disappears
http://www.wise-uranium.org/ucscr.html

http://www.pravdareport.com/russia/economics/22-01-2013/123551-russia_nuclear_energy-0 /
Coward Comey needs to go.

Joelbanks , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
The scripture tells us those who live by the sword will perish by it.

America was in the interference of other countries' elections before its ugly 2016 presidential election. Remember Ukraine and Secretary Hillary Clinton's employee Victoria F****the EU Nuland in Ukraine. Now we have the makings of some kind of conflict with Russia over its alleged meddling in America's elections. More global tension= More cash flowing into the US equity market, money printing by another means.

hardlyeverclever , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
I'd be surprised if the Russians weren't trying to affect the outcome of the election. The Brits had a debate in Parliament on Trump, Obama made threats to the UK on the Brexit vote, so who knows what we're all doing in each others elections behind closed doors while we are clear to do so publically.

The MSM's absolute refusal to address the leaks in a meaningful way (other than the stuff about recipes) suggests to be no one felt it a big deal at the time.

alexfoxy28 , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
Obama could realise that Hillary's viewes on Putin and Russia did not help her at all. People are not that stupid, they see well, use own brains and not so easily impressed by whatever CNN says to them.
Alun Jones , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
John McAfee said that any organization sophisticated enough to do these hacks is also sophisticated enough to make it look as though any country they want did it. So it could have been anyone.
palindrome , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
Obama earlier this year: Russia is not a world power, only a regional power.

Obama now: Russia has the power to manipulate the USA election.

Which one is it then?

Of course it's all bull...Obama is another establishment puppet who cannot accept that people have figured out their modus operandi.

diddoit , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
It's reported today on Ars Technica : ThyssenKrupp suffered a "professional attack"

The steelmaker, which makes military subs, says it was targeted from south-east Asia.

..the design of its plants were penetrated by a "massive," coordinated attack which made off with an unknown amount of "technological know-how and research."

The internet and precious information...

alexfoxy28 , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
Neoliberals are just desperately losing ideological competition at home and abroad. They cannot convince people that they are right because it's not what's going on.

It does not matter what some others say, it's what really goes on matters.

alexfoxy28 -> imipak , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
But there is innate, basic self-interest in all people (that does not depend on education, ethnicity, race) and people know it instinctively well. They will not go against it even if all around will tell otherwise.
alexfoxy28 -> alexfoxy28 , 9 Dec 2016 21:1 0 1
simulacra27 , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
The fake news channel brought to you by Obama and co.
p.s. I mean that people cannot be manipulated by others at this basic level when some higher level manipulative tools are used.
Kasem3000 , 9 Dec 2016 19:1
I love how this has now become solid fact. No confirmation, nothing official but it is no common fact that the Russians interfered. How many reports do we hear about US interference with foreign countries infastructure through covert means.
ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 19:1
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/08/vladimir-putin-hillary-clinton-russia

Meh. Seems like tampering happens all the time. How many elections in South America did the USA fix? How many in the middle east and Africa? I think this "russian's did it" rhetoric is counterproductive as it is stopping Democrats from doing the introspective needed to really understand why HRC lost the election.

ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 19:1
How can you on the one hand crusade against "fake news" and on the other promote this:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/dec/08/artist-alison-jackson-self-publishes-spoof-trump-photos-despite-fear-of-being-sued#comments

Sutir Comed , 9 Dec 2016 19:0
Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot and there was credible evidence that the Russians had rigged the election in favor of the Democrat. The right-wing echo chamber would be having seizures! These people are UTTER HYPOCRITES. And they would obviously rather win with the help of a hostile foreign power than try to preserve the integrity of our elections.
MayorHoberMallow , 9 Dec 2016 19:0
Russia may or may not have hacked the DNC. I'd like to find out. I hope the DNC aren't enough of doofusses to assume this wouldn't be in the realm of possibility.
I presume that the U.S. has its own group of hackers doing the same Worldwide. This is not a criticism; I would expect the U.S. intelligence community to learn what our rivals, and even some of our friends, are up to.
Timothy Everton , 9 Dec 2016 19:0
This is getting to be pretty lame. I have doubts that "Russia" could interfere to any great extent with our elections any more than we could with theirs. Sure, individuals or organizations, and more than likely in THIS country, could do so. And they have, as we saw with the DNC and Sanders campaign (and vice versa). Let's not go into an almost inevitable nuclear war over what is quite possibly "fake news".
dreylon , 9 Dec 2016 19:0
Russia did this, Russia did that
its getting very boring now, you have lost all credibility
you have cried wolf to many times
stop trying to manipulate us
Johnny Kent , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
When will the Democrats get it? It wasn't the Russians, who are blamed for everything, including the weather, by desperate Western failed leaders, but an unsuitable candidate in Clinton, which lost them the Election. Bernie Sanders would have walked it.
Catonaboat , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
Well Guardian I do believe you hit a nerve, I don't think I've ever seen a more one sided BTL. Me thinks some people do protest too much.
Iaorana , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
Regarding the notorious "fuck the EU " on the part of the US "diplomat" Victoria Nuland "the State Department and the White House suggested that an assistant to the deputy prime minister of Russia Dmitry Rogozin was the source of the leak, which he denied " Wiki

Good occasion to substantiate the accusation which ,substantiated or not,will remind the "useful idiots" of the "change of regime " US policy and who started the Ukrainian crisis.

Lafcadio1944 , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
Boy, oh boy, fake news is everywhere just read this headline!

Election hacking: Obama orders 'full review' of Russia interference

Which states as fact there was interference by Russia and that the investigation is to determine how bad it was. NO EVIDENCE WHAT SO EVER has been offered by anyone that Russia interfered in any way. FAKE NEWS!!

Mike5000 , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
Voting machine hacking is a very serious problem but you generally need physical access to a voting machine to hack it. Anyone notice thousands of Russians hanging around in Detriot, Los Angeles, etc election HQs? How about Clinton drones?

If the DNC hadn't rigged the primary we'd be celebrating president-elect Bernie. If they hadn't rigged the general Hillary would have lost by a landslide.

ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
We never investigated this tho did we Former President Obama?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/08/vladimir-putin-hillary-clinton-russia

Time to put on your big girl pants, accept defeat and leave gracefully.

Powerspike , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
1000 Russian athletes were doping in the 2012 Olympics - but it's taken until now to realise it?!
Russia influenced the 2016 US election?!
Russia is presently "influencing" the German elections?!
Russia is killing civilians and destroying hospitals with impunity in Syria?!
etc
Wow! Russia is taking over the world, it must be stopped, can anyone save us? Obama? Trump? NATO?
Look out! Russian armies are massing on the border ready to sweep into Europe.......arrhhh!

I love the smell of gibberish in the morning!

geofffrey , 9 Dec 2016 18:4
***Newsflash***

Reads:

"..ex-prime minister Anthony Charles Lynton Blair of the United Kingdom, and Hillary Rodham Clinton of the United States of America, have formally announced a new transatlantic political party to be named: The Neoliberal Elite Party for bitter anti-Brexiters and sore anti-Trumpettes.

dahsab , 9 Dec 2016 18:4
Rather rich coming from my country which has interfered in elections around the world for decades. I suppose it's only cheating if the other team does it.

Not that they'll find any evidence. Just another chapter in the sad saga of the Democrats unwillingness to admit they ran the worst candidate & the worst campaign in recent memory. It's not our fault! Them dirty Russkies did it!

[Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There are some nice logs of the NSA using this. ..."
"... In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious, it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in. ..."
"... Russia has an independent foreign policy and acts in what it perceives as it's own best interests. It has refused to become a vassal state of the West and is a threat to the Empire's full-spectrum dominance. Worst of all it has begun trading outside the $US in energy and other resources with China and Iran. ..."
"... Mainstream media are now busy repressing any news and any questioning about facts ..."
"... Western media are in full panic as Aleppo falls with all sorts of gruesome tales about the mistreatment of their favorite terrorists in Aleppo and a strange silence on the whereabouts of their '250K civilians' under siege ..."
"... I cant believe the Fake News outlets are still making a big deal about this issue. Obomber is leaving in a cloud of failure as he deserves ..."
"... "Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." ― Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. ..."
"... New Canadian documentary - All Governments Lie. "It lucidly argues that powerful interests have been creating supercharged fake stories for decades to advance their own nefarious interests. And the institutional media have too often blithely played along." The Globe and Mail. ..."
"... No comments about Seth Rich the DNC staffer Assange hinted had leaked the Podesta emails to Wikileaks and was subsequently shot multiple times and died at 04:20 on a Washington DC street in a 'motiveless' crime in which none of his possessions were taken. ..."
"... The rise of the right wing in Europe is due to the fact that Social Democratic parties have completely sold out to neo-liberal agenda. ..."
"... So Putin's plan to undermine U.S. voter confidence was to simply show what actually happens behind the scenes at the DNC, how diabolical! ..."
"... Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, has published a report that claims that that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was on the executive board of a foreign company that received $35 million from the Kremlin. "The company was a transparent Russian front, and how much Podesta was compensated - and for what - is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position on that board to the Federal government, as required by law," John Schindler of the Observer wrote. ..."
"... So it's true because the CIA said so. That's the gold standard for me. ..."
"... "Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies" - Ron Paul ..."
"... At least Tucker Carlson is able to see through the BS and asks searching question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRkeGkCjdHg ..."
"... President-elect Donald Trump's transition team said in a statement Friday afternoon that the same people who claim Russia interfered in the presidential election had previously claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. ..."
"... The neoliberal corporate machine is wounded but not dead. They will use every trick, ploy and opportunity to try to regain power. The fight goes on. ..."
"... Good occasion to substantiate the accusation which ,substantiated or not,will remind the "useful idiots" of the "change of regime " US policy and who started the Ukrainian crisis. ..."
"... Just another chapter in the sad saga of the Democrats unwillingness to admit they ran the worst candidate & the worst campaign in recent memory. It's not our fault! Them dirty Russkies did it! ..."
Dec 09, 2016 | www.theguardian.com

From: Barack Obama orders 'full review' of possible Russian hacking in US election Spncer Ackerman in New York and David Smith in Washington

Geoff Smythe , 24m ago

Well, if Rupert Mudroach, an American citizen, can influence the Australian elections, who gives a stuff about anyone else's involvement in US politics?

The US loves demonising Russia, even supporting ISIS to fight against them.

The United States of Amnesia just can't understand that they are run by the military machine.

As Frank Zappa once correctly stated: The US government is just the entertainment unit of the Military.

Nataliefreeman, 11 Dec 2016

Altogether the only thing people are accusing the Russians of is the WikiLeaks scandal. And in hindsight of the enormous media bias toward Trump it really comes of as little more than leveling the playing field. Hardly the sort of democratic subversion that is being suggested.

And of course there is another problem and that is in principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that set up a NAT entry that made the connecting computer appear somewhere else, with the entry deleted afterwards. Typically, IP table modifications aren't logged, so this would not be detectable.

In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that ran a SED script at a specific time that changed any occurrence of one IP address with another. Not sure anyone would bother with this, but it's why good system admins place so much emphasis on securing logs. However, it's obvious we're not talking about good admins.

In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There are some nice logs of the NSA using this.

In principle, someone along the way could tap into the fibre, spoofing IP addresses and injecting/sniffing packets. The US even has a submarine designed for this, but optics aren't complex and any number of neo-phone phreaks could have the hardware.

In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious, it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in.

In principle, the supposed destination machine could have been hacked to relay the packets in encrypted form to the South Pole or a college campus in Texas. There are many examples of client machines being hacked to do this. It's basically what zombie machines are in botnets.

In practice, it is flat-out guaranteed that none of the security agencies could distinguish this from a Russian attack. Nothing in the area monitored could tell the difference. We know, for a fact, that college kids spoofing a scan from China have fooled the DoD and NSA on previous occasions, it has caused international incidents.

So we have known forms of attack that are known to exist, aren't complex and in some cases are already used for attacks. They are 100% untraceable.

HollyOldDog -> Nataliefreeman, 11 Dec 2016 01:4
Don't know about Russians, but in the early 2000's the Ukrainian hackers had some nasty viruses embedded in email attachments that could fuckup ARM based computers.
smellycat -> waltercarl67, 11 Dec 2016 00:0
Time to stop attempting regime change in other countries then, if you condemn it in your own. What goes around comes around.
caveOfShadows , 10 Dec 2016 23:1
European governments tried to elect Hillary Clinton. Latin American and Asian allies of the US tried to elect Clinton.

Top leaders of France, the UK, Germany, all leaked to US newspapers, with dire warnings of how Trump's election would lead to bad outcomes.

Many countries made as clear as possible, without coming out officially for a candidate, that they were for the election of Clinton.

Mexico tried to get Clinton elected. Believe me, they did. Not officially, of course, but almost.

But all we hear about is Russia.

Wonder why???

uyCybershy -> caveOfShadows , 10 Dec 2016 23:1
Russia has an independent foreign policy and acts in what it perceives as it's own best interests. It has refused to become a vassal state of the West and is a threat to the Empire's full-spectrum dominance. Worst of all it has begun trading outside the $US in energy and other resources with China and Iran.
imperfetto , 10 Dec 2016 23:0
Mainstream media are now busy repressing any news and any questioning about facts, as the last battle in their support to jidaists fighting the Syrian Army. This is the dark pit where our so called free press has fallen into.
Flugler -> imperfetto , 10 Dec 2016 23:1
Yep had a chat with an army mate yesterday asked him what the fcuk the supposed head of MI6 was on about regarding Russian support for Syrian govt suggesting Russian actions made terrorism more likely here in UK. He shrugged his shoulders and said he hoped Putin wiped the terrorists out...
smellycat -> imperfetto , 10 Dec 2016 23:4
Western media are in full panic as Aleppo falls with all sorts of gruesome tales about the mistreatment of their favorite terrorists in Aleppo and a strange silence on the whereabouts of their '250K civilians' under siege

Of course no news on the danger to the civilians of W,Aleppo, who have been bombarded indiscriminately for months by the 'moderates' in the east of the city or the danger to the civilians of Palmyra, Mosul or al Bab.

Geoff Smythe -> smellycat , 11 Dec 2016 01:3
Or the 50,000 that have been evacuated out of Aleppo by the Russian military. https://www.rt.com/news/369869-syria-evacuation-civilians-aleppo /
Merseysidefella , 10 Dec 2016 21:5
I cant believe the Fake News outlets are still making a big deal about this issue. Obomber is leaving in a cloud of failure as he deserves. I´ll still look for the Guardian articles on football which are excellent.
Cheers!
GuyCybershy -> confettifoot , 10 Dec 2016 21:0
The Sanders movement inside the Democratic party did offer some hope but this was snuffed out by the DNC and the Clinton campaign in collusion with the media. This is what likely caused her defeat in November and not some Kremlin intrigue.
dopamineboy , 10 Dec 2016 20:5
"Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." ― Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda.
dopamineboy , 10 Dec 2016 20:5
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," Karl Rove.
caveOfShadows -> dopamineboy , 10 Dec 2016 23:1
Don't use quotes when you are doing a fake attribution.
dopamineboy , 10 Dec 2016 20:4
New Canadian documentary - All Governments Lie. "It lucidly argues that powerful interests have been creating supercharged fake stories for decades to advance their own nefarious interests. And the institutional media have too often blithely played along." The Globe and Mail.
joinupthedots , 10 Dec 2016 20:4
Fake news....No news.....None sense news?

Uncle Sam has been doing it for years and the degree of incestuousness between MSM and the "Agencies" is all right here (just one example)

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmeyerM.htm

smellycat -> joinupthedots , 10 Dec 2016 20:5
That's some serious shit
'"The same sons of bitches," he hissed, "that killed John F. Kennedy."
stoneshepherd , 10 Dec 2016 20:2
No comments about Seth Rich the DNC staffer Assange hinted had leaked the Podesta emails to Wikileaks and was subsequently shot multiple times and died at 04:20 on a Washington DC street in a 'motiveless' crime in which none of his possessions were taken.

Hmmm....

Flugler -> stoneshepherd , 10 Dec 2016 20:3
Distract the masses with bullsh*t , nothing new... Trump needs to double up on his personal security, he has doubled down on the CIA tonight bringing upmtheir bullsh*t on WMD. Thing are getting interesting...
Liesandstats , 10 Dec 2016 19:2
Meanwhile the good guys with their Smart bombs indulge in a spot of collateral damage. (Or war crimes as it's described when Russians do it).

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/breaking-90-iraqi-soldiers-killed-in-mosul-from-us-airstrikes/

This article is jiberish, as are the ones trying to say that the Russians caused Brexit.

GuyCybershy -> sunflowerxyz , 10 Dec 2016 19:3
The rise of the right wing in Europe is due to the fact that Social Democratic parties have completely sold out to neo-liberal agenda.
Powerspike , 10 Dec 2016 19:1
Spreading lies about the very real Podesta emails and their importance seems to be a fake news stock in trade. Since Hillary was responsible I'm not sure where Putin comes into the picture.
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/a-clinton-fan-manufactured-fake-news-that-msnbc-personalities-spread-to-discredit-wikileaks-docs /
GuyCybershy , 10 Dec 2016 19:0
So Putin's plan to undermine U.S. voter confidence was to simply show what actually happens behind the scenes at the DNC, how diabolical!
Powerspike , 10 Dec 2016 18:3
"If we can revert to the truth, then a great deal of one's suffering can be erased, because a great deal of one's suffering is based on sheer lies. "
R. D. Laing
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
US politicians and the MSM depend on sheer lies.....
Powerspike -> KassandraTroy , 10 Dec 2016 18:5
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.
R. D. Laing
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
I'm sick of jumping through their hoops - how about you?
James7 , 10 Dec 2016 17:2
"Tin Foil Hat" Hillary--
"This is not about politics or partisanship," she went on. "Lives are at risk, lives of ordinary people just trying to go about their days to do their jobs, contribute to their communities. It is a danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly."

We fail to see how Russian propaganda has put people's lives directly at risk. Unless, of course, Hillary is suggesting that the increasingly-bizarre #Pizzagate swarm journalism campaign (which apparently caused a man to shoot up a floor tile in a D.C. pizza shop) was conjured up by a bunch of Russian trolls.

And this is about as absurd as saying Russian trolls were why Trump got elected.

"It needs to be said," former counterintelligence agent John R. Schindler (who, by the way, believes Assange and Snowden are both Russian plants), writes in the Observer, "that nearly all of the liberals eagerly pontificating about how Putin put Trump in office know nothing about 21st century espionage, much less Russia's unique spy model and how it works. Indeed, some of the most ardent advocates of this Kremlin-did-it conspiracy theory were big fans of Snowden and Wikileaks -- right until clandestine Russian shenanigans started to hurt Democrats. Now, they're panicking."

(Nonetheless, #Pizzagate and Trump, IMHO, are manifestations of a population which deeply deeply distrusts the handlers and gatekeepers of the status quo. Justified or not. And with or without Putin's shadowy fingers strumming its magic hypno-harp across the Land of the Free. This runs deeper than just Putin.)

Fake news has always been around, from the fake news which led Americans to believe the Pearl Harbor attack was a surprise and completely unprovoked .

To the fake news campaigns put out by Edward Bernays tricking women into believing cigarettes were empowering little phallics of feminism. (AKA "Torches of Freedom.")

This War on Fake News has more to do with the elites finally realizing how little control they have over the minds of the unwashed masses. Rather, this is a war on the freaks, geeks and weirdos who've formed a decentralized and massively-influential media right under their noses.

Laissez Faire Today

James7 -> fedback , 10 Dec 2016 17:3
and there may be some truth to that. An article says has delved into financial matters in Russia.

Kremlin Connection? The TRUTH About Hillary's Shady Ties To Russia REVEALED
Find out why insiders say Clinton has some explaining to do.

Americans have no idea just how closely Hillary Clinton is tied to the Kremlin! That's the shocking claim of a new report that alleges the Democratic nominee is secretly pals with Vladimir Putin and his countrymen.

Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, has published a report that claims that that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was on the executive board of a foreign company that received $35 million from the Kremlin. "The company was a transparent Russian front, and how much Podesta was compensated - and for what - is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position on that board to the Federal government, as required by law," John Schindler of the Observer wrote.

As Radar previously reported, when Clinton was secretary of state, she profited from the "Russian Reset," a failed attempt to improve relations between the U.S. and Russia.

chweizer wrote, "Many of the key figures in the Skolkovo process - on both the Russian and U.S. sides - had major financial ties to the Clintons. During the Russian reset, these figures and entities provided the Clintons with tens of millions of dollars, including contributions to the Clinton Foundation, paid for speeches by Bill Clinton, or investments in small start-up companies with deep Clinton ties." Schweizer also details "Skolkovo," a Silicon Valley-like campus that both the U.S. and Russia worked on for developing biomed, space, nuclear and IT technologies. He told the New York Post that there was a "pattern that shows a high percentage of participants in Skolkovo who happen to be Clinton Foundation donors."

BaronVonAmericano , 10 Dec 2016 17:0
So it's true because the CIA said so. That's the gold standard for me.

So let me be the first to thank Russia for providing us with their research.

Instead of assassination, coup or invasion, they simply showed us our leaders' own words when written behind the public's backs.

I'm no fan of Putin, but this was a useful bit of intelligence you've shared with us.
Happy Christmas, Vlad.

Next time why not provide us with the email of all our banks and fossil fuel companies; you can help us clean up both political parties with one fell swoop that way.

GuyCybershy -> BaronVonAmericano , 10 Dec 2016 17:0
"Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies" - Ron Paul
greyford14 -> GuyCybershy , 10 Dec 2016 17:1
Be careful there, Ron Paul is an FSB agent of Putin, according to the Washington Post.
elias_ , 10 Dec 2016 17:0
At least Tucker Carlson is able to see through the BS and asks searching question.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRkeGkCjdHg
GuyCybershy -> elias_ , 10 Dec 2016 17:1
Dems are so out to lunch that they make FOX pundits seem sane. I would say the Democratic party is beyond hope of saving.
sblejo , 10 Dec 2016 16:4
The U.S. is getting what it deserves, IF Russia was even dumb enough to meddle. The government in this country has been meddling in other countries' affairs sixty years, in the Middle East, in South America and other places we don't even know about. The result is mayhem, all in the 'interests' of the U.S., as it is described.
Burnaby1000 , 10 Dec 2016 16:4
Note that most supporters of the Russian hacks never (and cannot) present rational arguments, just dubious talking points--AKA Fake News.

But it is fun to spot the gaps in their logic, and the holes in their stories.

Great sport--rather like hunting hares.

GuyCybershy -> Burnaby1000 , 10 Dec 2016 16:4
We need to trust the CIA, they'd never fix evidence to manipulate the American public.
BaronVonAmericano -> Burnaby1000 , 10 Dec 2016 16:5
Where's the gap in this logic:
A) The American public has been offered ZERO proof of hacking by the Russian government to alter our election.
B) Even if true, no one has disputed the authenticity of the emails hacked.
C) Therefore, the WORST Russia could have done is show us who are own leader are when they don't think we're listening.
D) Taken together, this article is pretty close to fake news, and gives us nothing that should outrage us much at this time -- unless we are trying to foment war with Russia or call for a military coup against the baboon about to take the oath of office.
foolisholdman , 10 Dec 2016 16:3
Hacking by unnamed individuals. No direct involvement of the Russian government, only implied, alleged, etc. Seems to me that if Hillary had obeyed the law and not schemed behind the scenes to sabotage Bernie S. there would have been nothing to leak! Really this is all about being caught with fer fingers in the cookie jar. Does it matter who leaked it? Did the US public not have a right to know what the people they were voting for had been up to? It's a bit like the governor of a province being filmed burgling someone's house and then complaining that someone had leaked the film to the media, just when he was trying to get re-elected!
GuyCybershy -> foolisholdman , 10 Dec 2016 16:3
The US public has a right to know what CNN, New York Times and the Washington Post want them to know.
sblejo -> foolisholdman , 10 Dec 2016 16:4
It is called passing the buck, and because of the underhanded undermining of Bernie Sanders, who was winning, we have Trump. Thank you Democratic party.
aidanfahey , 10 Dec 2016 16:3
I am disappointed that the Guardian gives so much prominence to such speculation which is almost totally irrelevant. Why would we necessarily (a) believe what the superspies tell us and (b) even if it is true why should we care?

I am also very disappointed at the Guardians attitude to Putin, the elected leader of Russia, who was so badly treated by the US from the moment he took over from Yeltsin. I was in Russia as a visitor around that time and it was obvious that Putin restored some dignity to the Russian people after the disastrous Yeltsin term of office. If the US had been willing to deal with him with respect the world could be a much better place today. Instead the US insisted in trying to subvert his rule with the support of its supine NATO allies in order to satisfy its corporate rulers.

GuyCybershy -> aidanfahey , 10 Dec 2016 16:5
They expected Russia to fall apart like the USSR and then they could march in and pick up the pieces. Putin prevented this and this why they hate him.
NickinHalifaxNS , 10 Dec 2016 16:2
If this is true, the US can hardly complain. After all, the US has a long record of interfering in other countries' elections--including CIA overthrow of elected governments and their replacement with murderous, oppressive, right-wing dictatorships.

If the worst that Russia did was reveal the truth about what Democratic Party figures were saying behind closed doors, I'd say it helped correct the unbalanced media focus on preventing Trump from becoming President. Call it the globalization of elections.

BaronVonAmericano , 10 Dec 2016 15:5
First, the government has yet to present any persuasive evidence that Russia hacked the DNC or anyone else. All we have is that there is Russian code (meaningless according to cyber-security experts) and seemingly baseless "conclusions" by "intelligence" officials. In other words, fake news at this point.

Second, even if true, the allegation amounts to an argument that Russia presented us with facts that we shouldn't have seen. Think about that for a while. We are seeing demands that we self-censor ourselves from facts that seem unfair. What utter idiocy.

This is particularly outrageous given that the U.S. directly intervenes in the governance of any number of nations all the time. We can support coups, arm insurgencies, or directly invade, but god forbid that someone present us with unsettling facts about our ruling class.

This nation has jumped the shark. The fact that Trump is our president is merely confirmation of this long evident fact. That fighting REAL NEWS of emails whose content has not been disputed is part of our war on "fake news," and the top priority for some so-called liberals, promises only worse to come.

elias_ , 10 Dec 2016 14:5
>> Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said Russia had "succeeded" in "sow[ing] discord" in the election, and urged as much public disclosure as is possible.

What utter bullshit. The DNC's own dirty tricks did that. Donna Brasille stealing debate questions and handing them to Hillary so that she could cheat did that. The FBIs investigation into Hillary did that. Podesta's emails did that. The totally one-sided press coverage (apart from Fox) of the election did that. But it seems the american people were smart enough to see through the BS and voted for trump. Good for them.

And we're gonna need a lot more than the word of a few politicised so-called intelligence agencies to believe this russo-hacking story. These are the same people who lied about Iraqi WMDs so they are proven fakers/liars. These are also the same people who hack EVERYONE else so I, quite frankly, have no sympathy even of the story turns out to be true.

MrIncredlous , 10 Dec 2016 14:4
Obama is a disgrace to his office.

Announce "consensus" (not unanimous) "conclusion" based in circumstantial evidence now, before the Electoral College vote, then write a report with actual details due by Jan 20.
Put a proven liar in charge of writing the report on Russian hacking.
Fail to mention that not one of the leaked DNC or Podesta emails has been shown to be inauthentic. So the supposed Russian hacking simply revealed truth about Hillary, DNC, and MSM collusion and corruption.
Fail to mention that if hacking was done by or for US government to stop Hillary, blaming the Russians would be the most likely disinformation used by US agencies.
Expect every pro-Hillary lapdog journalist - which is virtually all of them - in America will hyperventilate (Twitter is currently on fire) about this latest fact-free, anti-Trump political stunt for the next nine days.
Or, as a reader put it, this is a soft coup attempt by leaders of Intel community and Obama Admin to influence the Electoral College vote, similar to the 1960s novel "Seven Days in May."

DanielDee , 10 Dec 2016 14:4
When the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security release a joint statement it is not without very careful consideration to the wording.
Therefore, to understand what is known by the US intelligence services one must analyse the language used.

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-department-homeland-security-and-office-director-national

This is very telling:
"The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts."

Alleged:
adjective [attributive]
said, without proof, to have taken place or to have a specified illegal or undesirable quality

Consistent:
adjective
acting or done in the same way over time

Method:
noun
a particular procedure for accomplishing or approaching something

Motivation:
noun
a reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way

So, what exactly is known by the US intelligence services?

Well what we can tell is:
the alleged (without proof) hacks were consistent (done in the same way) with the methods (using a particular procedure) and motivations (and having reason for doing so) with Russian State actions.

There is absolutely no certainty about this whatsoever.

elias_ , 10 Dec 2016 14:4
Thank God Obama will be out of office soon. He is the biggest disappointment ever. He has ordered the death of THOUSANDS via drone strikes in other people's countries and most of the deaths were innocent bystanders. If President Xi of China or Putin were to do that we would all be calling them tyrannical dictators and accusing them of a back door invasions. But somehow people are brainwashed into thinking its ok of the US president to do such things. Truly sickening.
Flugler , 10 Dec 2016 14:4
Says the CIA the organisation set up to destabilise governments all over the world. Lol.....
Congratulations for keeping a straight face I hope Trump makes urgently needed personnel changes in the alphabet soup agencies working against humanity for very many years.
Susanna246 , 10 Dec 2016 13:1
Beware --

This is an extremely dangerous game that Obama and the political elites are playing.

The American political elites - including senetors, bankers, investors, multinationals et al, can feel power and control slipping away from them.

This makes them very dangerous people indeed - as self-preservation and holding onto power is their number one priority.

What they're aiming to do ( a child can see what's coming ), is to call into question the validity of Trump's victory and blame the Russians for it.

The elites are looking to create chaos and insurrection, to have the result nullified and to vilify Putin and Russia.

American and Russian troops are already lined up and facing each other along the Eastern European borders and all it takes is one small incident from either side.

And all because those that have ruled the roost for so many decades ( in the White house, the 2 houses of Congress and Wall St ), simply cannot face losing their positions of power, wealth and political influence.

They're out to get Trump, the populists and President Putin.

God help us all.

MacTavi5h , 10 Dec 2016 12:5
This is starting to feel like an attempt to make the Trump presidency appear illegitimate. The problem is that it could actually make the democrats look like sore losers instead. We've had the recount, now it's foreign interference. This might harm them in 2020.

I don't like that Trump won, but he did. The electoral college system is clearly in the constitution and all sides understood and agreed to it at the campaign commencement. Also some, by no means all, of commenters saying that the popular vote should win have also been on referendum BTL saying the result isn't a legitimate leave vote, make your minds up!

I don't want Trump and I wanted to remain but, by the rules, my sides lost.

alexfoxy28 , 10 Dec 2016 12:5
Yet in August, Snowden warned that the recent hack of NSA tied cyber spies was not designed to expose Hillary Clinton, but rather a display of strength by the hackers, showing they could eventually unmask the NSA's own international cyber espionage and prove the U.S. meddles in elections around the world.

http://yournewswire.com/snowden-claims-russia-can-expose-u-s-meddling-in-foreign-elections /

nishville , 10 Dec 2016 12:3
A reader's comment from the Independent:

Will the CIA be providing evidence to support these allegations or is it a case of "just trust us guys"? In any event, hypocrisy is a national sport for the Yanks. According to a Reuters article 9 August 2016 "NSA operations have, for example, recently delved into elections in Mexico, targeting its last presidential campaign. According to a top-secret PowerPoint presentation leaked by former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden, the operation involved a "surge effort against one of Mexico's leading presidential candidates, Enrique Peńa Nieto, and nine of his close associates." Peńa won that election and is now Mexico's president.

The NSA identified Peńa's cellphone and those of his associates using advanced software that can filter out specific phones from the swarm around the candidate. These lines were then targeted. The technology, one NSA analyst noted, "might find a needle in a haystack." The analyst described it as "a repeatable and efficient" process.

The eavesdroppers also succeeded in intercepting 85,489 text messages, a Der Spiegel article noted.

Another NSA operation, begun in May 2010 and codenamed FLATLIQUID, targeted Pena's predecessor, President Felipe Calderon. The NSA, the documents revealed, was able "to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon's public email account."

At the same time, members of a highly secret joint NSA/CIA organization, called the Special Collection Service, are based in the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and other U.S. embassies around the world. It targets local government communications, as well as foreign embassies nearby. For Mexico, additional eavesdropping, and much of the analysis, is conducted by NSA Texas, a large listening post in San Antonio that focuses on the Caribbean, Central America and South America."

zulugroove -> nishville , 10 Dec 2016 13:4
Fake news!! ...That would be a Clinton / Obama , reply!!
CTG2016 , 10 Dec 2016 12:0
Breaking news! CIA admits people in USA aren't smart enough to vote for the person right person. Why blame Russians now?
Come on. Let's move on and enjoy the mess Trump will start. This is going to be worse than GWB.
We should all just enjoy the political comedy programs.
Gallicdweller , 10 Dec 2016 11:1
The CIA accusing a foreign power of interfering in the election of a showman for president - it would take me all day top cite the times that this evil criminal organisation has interfered in the affairs of other countries, ordered assassinations, coups etc. etc. etc
Dave Harries , 10 Dec 2016 10:4
Yes like the "help" the CIA gave to the Taliban, Bin Laden and Co. when the Russians were in Afghanistan.
Then these dimwits from the CIA who taught Bin Laden and Co guerrilla warfare totally "missed" 9/11 and Twin Towers with all their billions of funding.
So basically this is a total load of crap and if you think we are going to believe any reports vs. Russia these fools at the CIA are going to publish then think again.
fedback , 10 Dec 2016 10:4
During the election our media was exposed as in essence a propaganda tool for the Democrat campaign and they continue the unholy alliance after the election
Liesandstats , 10 Dec 2016 10:4
Instead of trying to blame the Russians how about reflecting on why the Democrats picked such a dreadful candidate.
ana ruiz , 10 Dec 2016 10:2
Pathetic move from an organisation that created ISIS and is single handling every single conflict in the world. Here we have a muppet president that for once wants to look after USA affairs internally and here we have a so alleged independent organisation that wants to keep bombing and destabilising the world. Didn't Trump said he wanted to shake the FBI and CIA ? Who is going to stop this machine of treachery ? : south America, middle east ...Asia ... they put their fingers on to create a problem- solution caveat wereas is to create weapons contracts /farma or construction and sovereign debt . But it never tricles down to the layperson ..
Tim Jenkins , 10 Dec 2016 10:2
"We are Not calling into question the election results"
next White House sentence - "Just the integrity.. " WTF

What more do you need to know - Bullshit Fake News.. propaganda, spoken by the youngest possible puppet boy White House Rep. who almost managed to have his tie done up..

I am bookmarking this guy, for a laugh! White House Fake Newscaster ..:)

Worth watching the sides of his mouth onto his attempt to engage you with the eyes, but blinking way too much before, during and after the word "Integrity".. FAKE!

His hand signals.. lmfao, so measured, how sweet.. now sack the sycophants --

fedback , 10 Dec 2016 10:2
People should know that these Breaking News stories we see in Western media on BBC, Guardian etc, about Russian interference are in fact from Wash Post and NY Times quoting mysterious sources within the CIA
Of course we know that Wash Post and NY Times were completely objective during the election and didn't favor any party
fedback , 10 Dec 2016 10:0
Russia made Hillary run the most expensive campaign ever, spending 1.2 billion dollars.
Russia stole Hillary's message to the working people and gave her lousy slogans
Tim Jenkins , 10 Dec 2016 09:5
My real comment is below, but work with me, for a moment.
So, since 2008, eh? Barack has thought carefully, with a legal mind.

Can't we somehow blame the Russians for the whole Economic collapse.. coming soon, Wall Street Cyber Crash, screwed up sKewed up systems of Ponzi virus spiraling out of control..

blame the Russians , logic, the KGB held the FED at gunpoint and said "create $16.2 Trillion in 5 working days"
jeez, blame anything and anybody except peace prize guy Obama, the Pope, Bankers & Israel..

Now can we discuss the Security of the Pound against Cyber Attack.. what was it 6% in 2 minutes, early on Sunday morning, just over month ago.. whoosh!

It seems more important than discussing an election where the result was always OBVIOUS!

And we called it, just like Kellyanne Conway..

Who is Huma Abedin? I wish to know and hear her talking to Kellyanne Conway, graciously in defeat.. is that so unreasonable?
********
Obama wishes to distract from exceedingly poor judgement, at the very minimum....
after his Greek Affair with Goldman Sachs.. surely.

As for his other Foreign Policy: Eternal Shame, founded on Fake News!
Obama the Fake News Founder to flounder over the Russians, who can prove that he, Obama supports & supported Terrorism!

Thus this article exists, to create doubt over the veracity of evidence to be presented over NATO's involvement in SYRIA! Obama continues to resist, or loose face completely..

Just ask Can Dundar.... what he knows now and ask Obama to secure the release of Can Dundar's wife's passport, held for no legitimate reason in Turkey! This outrageous stand off, from Erdogan & Obama to address their failures and arrogant disrespect of Woman and her Legal Human Rights is Criminal.. & a Sickness of Mind that promotes Dictatorship!

Mainstream Media - Fake News.. for quite some time!
& Obama is guilty!

Powerspike , 10 Dec 2016 09:4
President-elect Donald Trump's transition team said in a statement Friday afternoon that the same people who claim Russia interfered in the presidential election had previously claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/09/trump-team-same-people-who-say-russia-meddled-in-election-said-iraq-had-wmds/#ixzz4SQWsDXpZ
alexfoxy28 , 10 Dec 2016 09:1
It's getting funny as Biden promised cyber attack on Russia weeks before Trump was elected .. due to Russian hackers?
uptonogoode -> alexfoxy28 , 10 Dec 2016 09:5
Link?
alexfoxy28 -> uptonogoode , 10 Dec 2016 09:5
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/721851/russia-joe-biden-obama-cyber-attack-war-clinton-putin-US-moscow

or just google about it.

ArtherOhm , 10 Dec 2016 08:5
Is the USA, as author of windows software, really unable to prevent foreign hacking?

Do the CIA never do anything like this?

Do we actually have any evidence rather than just a lot of allegations?

Shotcricket -> Burnaby1000 , 10 Dec 2016 09:0
'Russia like to surprise' ?

The one certainty of the US/EU led drive to remove an elected leader just in their 2nd year after an election that saw them gain 47% of the popular vote was the Russki response, its borders were immediately at open 'threat' from any alliance. NATO or otherwise, the deep sea ports of eastern Ukraine which had always been accessed by the Russki fleets would lose guaranteed access etc....to believe the West was surprised by this action, would be to assume the US Generals were as stupid as the US administration, they knew exactly the response of the Russkis & would have made no difference if their leader had been named Putin or Uncle Tom Cobbly.

In some ways the Russkis partitioning of the East of Ukraine could well minimise the possibility of a world conflict as the perceived threat is neutralised by the buffer.

The Russkis cyber doodah is no different to our own the US etc, they're all 'at it' & all attempt to inveigle the others in terms of making life difficult.....not too sure Putin will be quite as comfortable with the Pres Elects 3 Trumpeteers though as the new Pressie looks likely to open channels of communications but those negotiations might well see a far tougher stance......still, in truth, all is never fair in love or war

Powerspike , 10 Dec 2016 08:4
.....that the CIA is not only suddenly involved, but suddenly at the forefront, may well reflect President-elect Trump's stated policy intentions being far removed from those that the CIA has endorsed, and might be done with an eye toward undermining Trump's position in those upcoming policy battles.
At the center of those Trump vs. CIA battles is Syria, as the CIA has for years pushed to move away from the ISIS war and toward imposing regime change in Syria. Trump, by contrast, has said he intends to end the CIA-Saudi program arming the Syrian rebels, and focus on fighting ISIS. Trump was even said to be seeking to coordinate anti-ISIS operations with Russia.
The CIA allegations could easily imperil that plan, as so long as the allegations remain part of the public discourse, evidence or not, anything Trump does with respect to Russia is going to have a black cloud hanging over it.
http://news.antiwar.com/2016/12/09/cia-claims-russia-intervened-to-get-trump-elected /
Nataliefreeman , 10 Dec 2016 08:3
Oh dear Obama trolls? Food for your starved thoughts:

Your degree of understanding IT is disturbing, especially given how dependent we are on it.

This is all very simple. The process by which you find out if and how a machine was hacked was clearly documented in the Russian "Internet Audit", run by a group of Grey Hats.

Grey Hats: People concerned about security who perform unauthorized hacks for relatively benign purposes, often just notifying people of how their system is flawed. IT staff have mixed reactions(!), the illegality is not disputed but the benefit of not being hit by a Black Hat first can be considerable at times. Differentiation is rare, especially as some hacktivist groups belong here, causing no damage beyond reputational by flagging activity that is not acceptable to the hacktivists.

Black Hats: These are the guys to worry about. These include actually destructive hacktivists. These are the ones who steal data for malicious purposes, disrupt for malicious purposes and just generally act maliciously.

Nothing in reports indicates if the DNC hack was Grey Hat or Black Hat, but it should be obvious that there is a difference.

IP addresses and hangouts - worthless as evidence. Anyone can spoof the former, happens all the time (NMap used to provide the option, probably still does), Grey Hats and Black Hats alike have the latter and may break into other people's. It's all about knowing vulnerabilities.

That voting machines were even on the Internet is disturbing. That they and the DNC server were improperly configured for such an environment is frightening - and possibly illegal.

The standard sequence of events is thus:

Network intrusion detector system identifies crafted packet attacking known vulnerability.
In a good system, the firewall is set to block the attack at that instant.

If the attacker scans the network, the only machine responding to such knocks should be a virtual machine running a honeypot on attractive-looking port numbers. The other machines in the zone should technically violate the RFCs by not responding to ICMP or generating recognized error codes on unused/blocked ports.

The system logger picks up an event that creates a process that shouldn't be happening.
In a good system, this either can't happen because the combination of permissions needed doesn't exist, or it doesn't matter because the process is root jailed and hasn't the privileges to actually do any harm.

The file alteration logger (possibly Tripwire, though the Linux kernel can do this itself) detects that a process with escalated privileges is trying to create, delete or alter a file that it isn't supposed to be able to change.
In a good system with mandatory access controls, this really is impossible. In a good system with logging file systems, it doesn't matter as you can instruct the filesystem to revert those specific alterations. Even in adequate but feeble systems, checkpoints will exist. No use in a voting system, but perfectly adequate for a campaign server. In all cases, the system logs will document what got damaged.

The correct IT manager response is thus:
Find out why the firewall wasn't defaulting to deny for all unknown sources and for unnecessary ports.
Find out why the public-facing system wasn't isolated in the firewall's DMZ.
Find out why NIDS didn't stop the attack.
Non-public user mobility should be via IPSec using certificates. That deals with connecting from unknown IP addresses without exposing the innards of the system.
Lock down misconfigured network systems.
Backup files identified by file alteration detection as corrupt for forensic purposes.
Revert files identified by file alteration detection as corrupt to last good version.
Close permission loopholes. Everything should run with the fewest privileges necessary, OS included. On Linux, kernel permissions are controlled via capabilities.
Establish from the logs if the intruder came through a public-facing application, an essential LAN service or a non-essential service.
If it's a LAN service, block access to that service outside the LAN on the host firewall.
Run network and host vulnerability scanners to detect potential attack vectors.
Update any essential software that is detected as flawed, then rerun the scanners. Repeat until fixed.
Now the system is locked down against general attacks, you examine the logs to find out exactly what failed and how. If that line of attack got fixed, good. If it didn't, then fix it.
Password policy should prevent rainbow attacks, not users. Edit as necessary, lock accounts that aren't secure and set the password control system to ban bad passwords.

It is impossible from system logs to track where an intruder came from, unsecured routers are common and that means a skilled attacker can divert packets to anywhere. You can't trust brags, in security nobody is honest. The sensible thing is to not allow such events in the first place, but when (not if) they happen, learn from them.

GraemeHarrison , 10 Dec 2016 08:2
If the USA is to investigate the effect of foreign governments 'corrupting' the free decisions of the American people in elections, perhaps they could look into the fact that for the past three decades every Republican candidate for president, after they have won the nomination of their party, has gone to just one foreign country to pledge their firm commitment/allegiance to that foreign power, for the purpose of shoring up large blocks of donors prior to the actual presidential election. The effect is probably more 'corrupting' than any leak of emails!
SamSamson , 10 Dec 2016 08:2
Obama should confess to creating ISIS, sustaining ISIS & utilising ISIS as a proxy army to have them do things that he knew US soldiers could never be caught doing!!!

They then spoon fed you bullshit propaganda about who the bad guys were, without ever being to properly explain why the US armed forces were prevented from taking any hostile action against ISIS, until they were FORCED TO, that is, when Putin let the the cat out of the bag!!!

LordTomnoddy , 10 Dec 2016 08:1
Hilarious. One would've thought Obama of all presidents would be reluctant to delve too deeply into this particular midden. As the author of the weakest and most incompetent American foreign policy agenda since Carter's, it's much the likeliest that if China or Russia have been hacking US elections, then by far the biggest beneficiary will have been himself.
Tim Jenkins , 10 Dec 2016 08:1
Just another attempt to distract from realities, like:-

From:[email protected] To: [email protected], [email protected] Date: 2015-05-28 12:12 Subject: Fwd: POLITICO Playbook

cdm Begin forwarded message: > From: Lynn Forester de Rothschild <[email protected]> > Date: May 28, 2015 at 9:44:12 AM EDT > To: Nick Merrill <[email protected]>, "Cheryl Mills ([email protected])" <[email protected]> > Subject: FW: POLITICO Playbook > > Morning, > I am sure you are working on this, but clearly, the opposition is trying to undercut Hillary's reputation for honesty (the number one characteristic people look for in a President according to most polls) ..and also to benefit from an attack on wealth that Dems did the most to start I am sure we need to fight back against both of these attacks. > Xoxo > Lynn > > By Mike Allen (@mikeallen; [email protected]), and Daniel Lippman (@dlippman; [email protected]) > > > > QUINNIPIAC POLL, out at 6 a.m., "Rubio, Paul are only Republicans even close to Clinton": "In a general election, ... Clinton gets 46 percent of American voters to 42 percent for Paul and 45 percent of voters to 41 percent for Rubio." Clinton leads Christie 46-37 ... Huckabee 47-40 ... Jeb 47-37 ... Walker 46-38 ... Cruz 48-37 ... Trump 50-32. > > --"[V]oters say 53-39 percent that Clinton is NOT honest and trustworthy, but say 60-37 ... that she has strong leadership qualities. Voters are divided 48-47 ... over whether Clinton cares about their needs and problems." > > --RNC's new chart - "'Dead Broke' Clintons vs. Everyday Americans": "Check out the chart below to see how many households in each state it would take to equal the 'Dead Broke' Clintons." http://bit.ly/1Avg8iE

Blind leading the Blind.. & Obama knows that very well after it was clear that Clinton was NEVER trusted by the Voters, which makes Debbie and the DNC look like a complete bunch of..

Idiots?!?! STILL BLAMING The RUSSIANS.... instead of themselves!

She was and always will be unelectable due to exceedingly poor judgement, across the board.

Can we move on?

Polly123456 , 10 Dec 2016 08:0
Who is in charge of Internet security in the US government? Because it seems full of holes. Last time it was the Chinese and this time it's the Russians, yet not one piece of evidence to say where hacks have come from. How much are these world class Internet security people paid? And why do they still have a job? People sitting in their bedrooms on a pc from stores like staples have hacked their security regularly.
AlexPeace , 10 Dec 2016 08:0

In 2016, he said, the government did not detect any increased cyber activity on election day itself but the FBI made public specific acts in the summer and fall, tied to the highest levels of the Russian government. "This is going to put that activity in a greater context ... dating all the way back to 2008."

Extremely vague. Seems like there is no evidence at all to suggest any Russian involvement, but they need to pretend otherwise. Blah, blah, blah, Weapons of mass destruction... Apollo mission, etc
FMinus , 10 Dec 2016 08:0
Ole, Russians exposed the DNC emails, we knew about that. I though this should investigate Russians vote rigging, but I guess not. I for once welcome anyone who hacks my government and exposes their skeletons, so I can see what kind of dirty garbage I had leading or potentially leading my country.

Maybe the DNC should play fair and not dirty next time and put a candidate forward without skeletons that still reek of rotting flesh.

Robert Stokes -> FMinus , 10 Dec 2016 08:3
You rig electronic voting machines by reflashing the firmware or switching out the sd cards. Can't be done remotely.
Baldrick Daacat , 10 Dec 2016 07:5
And the CIA has never intervened in a foreign election?
VibePit -> Baldrick Daacat , 10 Dec 2016 08:0
Oh heaven forbid!! The Shah of Iran was democratically elected but of course. . .
HeathCardwell , 10 Dec 2016 07:2
Don't believe any of this at all.
American has been thee most corrupt and disgusting western nation for decades, run by people who are now being shown for who they really are and they're shitting themselves big time. The stakes don't get higher than this.
theonetruepainter , 10 Dec 2016 07:1
What's the point of this?

The American people don't want Clinton because she is a liar and a dangerous psychopath who also ignored the working people.

If you want to change that, get her treatment. Don't try to undermine the election result.

theonetruepainter , 10 Dec 2016 07:0
How can you not respect Putin?

He's spent the last few years making fools out of Clinton, Kerry and the obomber.

If you didn't want him to let Crimea rejoin Russia, then you shouldn't have initiated the coup that broke up Ukraine.

Peter Turner , 10 Dec 2016 07:0
What a total load of double talk. There is zero integrity in anything CIA says or does since the weapons of mass destruction deal or before that it was the Iran Contra deal and before that it was the Bay of Pigs. Now we have this rigging os the election results based on zero evidence. The whole thing is just idiocy. What is Obama trying to achieve?The end game will be for Obama to go down in history as ... let's just say he is not the smartest tool in the shed when it comes to being a so called world leader. Well done Obama you have now completely trashed what is left of your legacy.
LondonLungs , 10 Dec 2016 06:5

"CIA concludes Russia interfered to help Trump win election – report "

You might as well ask accountants to do a study on wether it's worthwhile to use an accountant. Part of the CIAs job is to influence elections around the world to get US-Corporation friendly gov'ts in to power. So yes of course they are going to say that a gov't can influence elections, if they said otherwise then they'd be admitting they're wasting money.

Ted Reading Reading 10 Dec 2016 06:3
So, it was the Russians! I knew it must've been them, they're so sneaky. All HFC had was the total backing of the entire establishment, including prominent Republican figures, the total fawning support of the entire main-stream media machine which carefully controlled the "she's got a comfortable 3 point lead maybe even double-digit lead" narrative and the "boo and hiss" pantomime slagging of her opponent. Plus the endless funds from the crooked foundation and murderous fanatics from the compliant Gulf states, and lost. But hey, do keep this going please, it'll help the Trumpster get a second term! Trump/Nugent 2020.
righteousfist01 , 10 Dec 2016 06:2
It's possible the Russians hacked and released the documents. However the report is not saying the Russians created them.

So whatever was so deplorable about them was all Democrat

Nataliefreeman -> righteousfist01 , 10 Dec 2016 06:3
Good point. Add that the whole election was dogged is the most glaring media bias and suddenly Russia comes off as simply leveling the playing field a bit
12inchPianist , 10 Dec 2016 06:1
CIA finds Russia had covertly influenced election. CIA finds FBI had overtly influenced election. Fancy that!
ashleigh2 , 10 Dec 2016 06:1
The 'secret' enquiry reported to Congress that the CIA concludes etc, etc, etc. Then yet more revelations from 'anonymous sources' are quoted in the Washington Post and The New York Times reaching the same conclusions.....talk about paranoia, or are the Democrats guilty of news fakery of the highest order to deny the US voters....
Nataliefreeman , 10 Dec 2016 05:5
Ooh Obama...there's a little snag about this investigation.

In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that set up a NAT entry that made the connecting computer appear somewhere else, with the entry deleted afterwards. Typically, IP table modifications aren't logged, so this would not be detectable.

In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that ran a SED script at a specific time that changed any occurrence of one IP address with another. Not sure anyone would bother with this, but it's why good system admins place so much emphasis on securing logs. However, it's obvious we're not talking about good admins.

In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There are some nice logs of the NSA using this.

In principle, someone along the way could tap into the fibre, spoofing IP addresses and injecting/sniffing packets. The U.S. even has a submarine designed for this, but optics aren't complex and any number of neo-phone phreaks could have the hardware.

In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious, it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in.

In principle, the supposed destination machine could have been hacked to relay the packets in encrypted form to the South Pole or a college campus in Texas. There are many examples of client machines being hacked to do this. It's basically what zombie machines are in botnets.

In practice, it is flat-out guaranteed that none of the security agencies could distinguish this from a Russian attack. Nothing in the area monitored could tell the difference. We know, for a fact, that college kids spoofing a scan from China have fooled the DoD and NSA on previous occasions, it has caused international incidents.

So we have known forms of attack that are known to exist, aren't complex and in some cases are already used for attacks. They are 100% untraceable.

Bosula , 10 Dec 2016 05:5
How about a Presidential review covering US interference in the elections of countries around the world?
Paulare -> Bosula , 10 Dec 2016 06:2
But where to start?

UK, Australia, Chile, Nicoragua, Cuba, Philippines, Malaysia, Germany...?

such choice..

Bosula -> Paulare , 10 Dec 2016 08:0
Yes. Maybe do it on a regional basis across the globe.
Anarchy4theUK , 10 Dec 2016 05:4
Of course the Americans would never interfere in other people's elections would they?...........I imagine the Russians wanted to avoid a nuclear war with war monger Hilary & who can blame them?
Nataliefreeman -> Anarchy4theUK , 10 Dec 2016 06:1
Y'know really all they seem to be looking possibly guilty of is the wikileaks scandal. Compare that to the enormous media bias regarding Trump and suddenly the Russians at worst come off as evening the playing field so as to help an election be less biased...
Kris Penny , 10 Dec 2016 05:4
When certain members of the public would believe one man over those who have more intelligence in a follicle than he will ever have floating in his cranium is when you realise that a place like Guantanamo should exist, exclusively for them.
http://www.allgov.com/news/where-is-the-money-going/surprise-cost-of-ammo-for-us-navy-destroyers-new-guns-800000-a-shot-161114?news=859762
Newmacfan , 10 Dec 2016 05:3
Paranoia about Russia has arrived at the laughable, almost like the fable of the boy who cried wolf! Even the way the CIA statement is worded makes you smile. "silk purse sows ear"? Everyone is clutching at straws rather than looking down the barrel at the truth......that folks is what is missing from Western Politics......"The Truth" --
StephenO , 10 Dec 2016 04:3

Obama expected the review to be completed before he leaves office...

Really?? Obama wants a "deep review" of internet activities surrounding the elections of 2008, 2012, and 2016; and he wants this done in less than 40 days? And it encompasses voting stations throughout the 50 states? That's the definition of political shenanigans.

Dom Michaels -> pureist , 10 Dec 2016 04:3
Seeing as how the CIA interfered with Ukraine before and during the overthrow of Yanukovich, and with Moscow protests a few years ago...... seems like everyone is always trying to interfere with each-other. Hypocrisy abounds
MarkThomason , 10 Dec 2016 03:5
This is not really a fight against Trump. That is lost. This is an intramural fight among Democrats.

This is desperate efforts by the corporate Democrats to hang on to power after Hillary (again) lost.

Excuses. Allegations without sources given, anonymous.

Remember that the same people used the same media contacts to spread fake news that the Podesta leaks were faked, and tried to shift attention from what was revealed to who revealed it.

GuyCybershy -> MarkThomason , 10 Dec 2016 04:0
Agreed. Another reason why the Democratic party is not worth saving. 13 million voted for Sanders in the primary, that is enough to start a new party.
Fabr1s , 10 Dec 2016 03:4
if the Ruskies did it, there's something funny: they did it on Obama's watch and her protege, Hillary, lost it. The system is a real mess in this case.

Kris Penny , 10 Dec 2016 03:4
Read and research further...
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-department-homeland-security-and-office-director-national
GeoffP -> Kris Penny , 10 Dec 2016 04:0
Interesting link. It raises a particularly salient question: assuming the Russians did indeed do it - and after the whole CIA yellow cake thing in Iraq, no one could possibly doubt national intelligence agencies any more - does it particularly matter?

Did the Russians write the emails? The betrayal of Sanders, the poor protection on classified materials, the cynical, vicious nonsense spewed out by the HRC campaign, the media collusion with the DNC and HRC: did the Russians do these things too? Or was that Clinton and the DNC? Silly question, I'm sure.

sejong -> jcadams , 10 Dec 2016 03:5
Russia's competence with computer hacking and cyber espionage is a given

So what? What about Chinese or Israeli competence in these areas?

This is Fake News that exists only because Clinton lost.

The real news is about in competence by HRC, DWS, and the DNC in foisting a sure loser on American voters.

naomh -> sejong , 10 Dec 2016 03:5
Thank you for speaking the truth!!!!
GeoffP -> jcadams , 10 Dec 2016 04:0
Well, chief, the Wisconsin recount is in and the results are staggering: after the recount, Clinton has gained on Trump by 3 votes... and Trump gained on Clinton by a heady six votes. One begins to wonder at the 'Manchurian candidate' claim.
third_eye , 10 Dec 2016 03:3
It is precisely charades like this that millions in the US and around the world have given up on the establishment. Business as usual or rather lying as usual will only alienate more not-so-stupid citizens. It speaks volumes about their desperation that they're are actually employing such obviously infantile tactics on the Russia even as they continue to paper over Hillary's tattered past. The result of the investigation is totally predictable..................Yes, the Russians were involved in hacking the elections, but..........for reasons of national security, details of the investigative process and evidence cannot be revealed.
Longleveler , 10 Dec 2016 03:2
If the Russians really wanted Trump to win that means they helped Hillary win the Democratic primaries because Bernie would have beat Trump.. There was a mess of hanky-panky going on to defeat Bernie, and deflecting the blame to a foreign actor should keep the demonstrators off the streets.
If someone is gullible enough to believe the Russians did it they'd also believe that Elvis made Bigfoot hack the DNC. That's even more plausible since bigfoot is just a guy who spends so much time sitting at his computer he lost all interest in personal hygiene.
Will D , 10 Dec 2016 03:1
The Democrats are really desperate to find anything they can use to challenge the results of the election.

Either way they look foolish - openly investigating the possibility of Russian hacking which acknowledges that their electoral systems aren't well secured, OR look really foolish if they find anything (whether real or faked).

The big question now is if, and how much, they will fake the findings of the investigation so that they can declare the election results wrong, and put Clinton into the White House.

Clearly, it is a case of desperate times calling for desperate measures. It is incredible that one man can make the largest Western nation look so ridiculous in the eyes of the world.

madeiranlotuseater , 10 Dec 2016 02:4
Pot calling the kettle black. Reveal fully what the CIA get up to all over the planet. The phoney intel America has used to go to war causing countries to implode. The selective way they release information to project the picture they want. I am not convinced that Russia is any better or any worse than the USA.
onofabeach , 10 Dec 2016 02:3
I can understand the Russians wanting Obama in 2008 and 2012 because he is a weak leader and totally incompetent.

I can also understand Putin preferring DJT to HRC.

It's about time the planet settled down a little bit, Trump and Putin will do more for world peace in the next year than Obama achieved in his 8 wasted years in charge.

The Democrats have yet to realise the reason for their demise was not the racists, the homophobes, the KKK, the Deplorables, the misogynists, the xenophobes etc etc etc.

It was Hillary Clinton.

Get over it, move on, stop whining, get out of your safe room, put the puppy down, throw the play dough away, stop protesting, behave like an adult.

As much as I am enjoying the monumental meltdown of the left, it is getting sad now and I am starting to feel very sorry for you.

BoBiel , 10 Dec 2016 02:2
Georgia Says Someone in U.S. Government Tried to Hack State's Computers Housing Voter Data

http://www.wsj.com/articles/georgia-reports-attempt-to-hack-states-election-database-via-ip-address-linked-to-homeland-security-1481229960

http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2016-12-08/georgia-accuses-us-of-trying-to-hack-its-election-systems

123Akava , 10 Dec 2016 02:1
What a sad bunch of clowns. But the time is ripe. You and your sort are done Obama, Hillary Clinton, Juncker, Merkel, Hollande, Mogherini, Kerry, Tusk, Nuland, Albright, Breedlove, SaManThe Power and the rest of the reptiles. With all respect - mwuahahaha! - you will soon sink into the darkness of the darkest places of history, but you won't be forgotten, no you won't!
poppetmaster , 10 Dec 2016 02:0
The Democrats still don't understand that the problem in American politics is everything that happened BEFORE election day.

How can you worry about the ballot boxes when the entire process from beginning to end is utterly corrupt.

CarlHansen , 10 Dec 2016 02:0
As for the Podesta email. John Podesta was so stupid that he gave out his password in a simple email scam that any 8 year old kid could have conducted. I wouldn't be surprised if Assange did it himself. Assange will be celebrating at the demise of Hillary.
phobeophobe , 10 Dec 2016 02:0
Guys! Your side lost the election. Get over it & stop looking for excuses.

I don't think it was the Russians, it was just a lot of people got sick of being told what to think & how to behave by your side of politics.

It is because people who disagree with you are either ignored, shut-down or called names with weaponised words such as "racist, bigot, xenophobe, homophobe, islamophobe, you name it. You go out onto the streets chanting mindless slogans aimed at shutting down debate. You have infiltrated academia and no journalism graduate comes out of a western univerity without a 60 degree lean to the left. People of alternative views to what is now the dominant social paradigm are not permitted to speak at universities. Once they were the vanguard of dangerous ideas. Now they are just sheep pens.

You have infiltrated the mainstream media so of course people need to go to Info Wars, Breitbart & Project Veritas to get the other side to your one-sided argument.

Your side of politics has regulated the very words we speak so that we can't even express a thought anymore without being chanted down, or shut down, prosecuted or sued.

There was once a time when it was the left who spoke up for freedom of speech. It was the left who demanded that a man be judged by the content of his character & not the color of his skin & it was once the right who used to be worried about the Russians taking over our institutions.

Have a look at yourselves. Look at what you've become. You've stopped being the guardians of freedom & now you have become the very anti-freedom totalitarians you thought you were campaigning against.

Bleating about the "popular vote" doesn't cut it either. That's like saying, the other side scored more goals than us but we had possession of the ball more times. It is sad for you but it is irrelevant.

Trump won the election! Get over it!

Let's see what sort of job he does before deciding what to do next.

Nataliefreeman , 10 Dec 2016 01:5
News flash for all the obamabots:

In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that set up a NAT entry that made the connecting computer appear somewhere else, with the entry deleted afterwards. Typically, IP table modifications aren't logged, so this would not be detectable.

In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that ran a SED script at a specific time that changed any occurrence of one IP address with another. Not sure anyone would bother with this, but it's why good system admins place so much emphasis on securing logs. However, it's obvious we're not talking about good admins.

In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There are some nice logs of the NSA using this.

In principle, someone along the way could tap into the fibre, spoofing IP addresses and injecting/sniffing packets. The U.S. even has a submarine designed for this, but optics aren't complex and any number of neo-phone phreaks could have the hardware.

In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious, it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in.

In principle, the supposed destination machine could have been hacked to relay the packets in encrypted form to the South Pole or a college campus in Texas. There are many examples of client machines being hacked to do this. It's basically what zombie machines are in botnets.

In practice, it is flat-out guaranteed that none of the security agencies could distinguish this from a Russian attack. Nothing in the area monitored could tell the difference. We know, for a fact, that college kids spoofing a scan from China have fooled the DoD and NSA on previous occasions, it has caused international incidents.

So we have known forms of attack that are known to exist, aren't complex and in some cases are already used for attacks. They are 100% untraceable.

DanielDee , 10 Dec 2016 01:3
Joe Biden unwittingly gave the game up when he spoke to the press with indignation of the Russian hacks. The US would respond in kind with a covert cyber operation run by the CIA First of all it would be the NSA, not the CIA Secondly, it's not covert when you tell the press! Oh Joe, you really let the Obama administration down with that gaffe! Who would believe them now? A lot of people it would seem. Mainly those still reeling from an election they were so vested in
fedback , 10 Dec 2016 01:2
Unfortunately our media has lost all credibility.
For years we were told it was necessary to remove the dictator Assad in Syria. The result, a country destroyed, migrant crisis that fuelled Brexit and brought EU to its knees.
Now they are going to sell the 'foreign entities decided the US election'.
It's just a sad situation
GuyCybershy -> fedback , 10 Dec 2016 01:2
Syria has been destroyed because Western client states in the Middle East wanted this to happen. Assad had a reasonably successful secular government and our medieval gulf state allies felt. threatened by his regime. there was the little business of a pipeline, but of course that would be called a "conspiracy theory".
SomersetApples , 10 Dec 2016 01:1
If Obama has resources to spend on investigations, he should be investigating why the US is providing guided missiles to the terrorist in Syria. We had such great hopes for him, and he has proved to be totally useless as a president. Rather than giving us leadership and guidance he is looking under his bed for spooks. Just another example of his incompetence at a time when we needed leadership.

Looking for proof of espionage will be like trying to prove a negative and only result in a possible or at best a likely type of result for no purpose. It would just be another case of an unsupported accusation being thrown about.

Facing up to the question of who is supplying weapons to terrorist would require the courage to take on the Military Industrial Complex and he hasn't got it. Trump will be different.

ID3053875 , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
If the russians did interfere in the USA elections perhaps is a bit of poetic justice.
The USA has interfere in Latin America for over hundred years and they have given us Batista, Somoza, Trujillo, Noriega, Pinochet, Duvaliers , military juntas in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Streener in Paraguay to name a few. They all were narcissists, racists and insecure. The american people love this type of leader now they got him in the white house may be from Russia with love. Empires get destroyed from within, look at Little Britain now, maybe the same will happen soon in the USA.
Viva China , is far from Latin America
nbk46zh , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
So if the US managed to somehow get rid of Russia and China, what would they do then? How would it justify hundreds of billions in defense spending? Just remember, the US military industry desperately needs an external enemy to exist. Without it, there is no industry.
ID5151903 , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
No I disagree. I don't think it was a conpriscy. It was just decades of misinformation, lies, usually perpertrated by our esteemed foreign minister. The man is a buffoon , liar and incompetent. It is quite amusing to see how inept, Incompotent and totally unsuited this man child is to public office.
PullingTheStrings , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
Good to see alot of Americans on here back into Mccarthyism/Paranoia/scapegoating/Witch hunting/Propaganda.
smellycat , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
Clinton's 'Russia did it' cop-out
https://off-guardian.org/2016/12/09/clintons-russia-did-it-cop-out /
prairdog , 10 Dec 2016 00:4
Why should we trust US intelligence which is essentially US propaganda?
DanielDee , 10 Dec 2016 00:3
Another red herring that smacks of desperation. The final death throes of a failed administration. These carefully chosen words reveal a lot. The email leaks were "consistent with the methods and motivations" of Russian hackers. In layman's terms its the equivalent of saying "we haven't got a clue who it was but it's the kind of thing they would probably do". Don't expect a smoking gun because it doesn't exist, otherwise we would have known about it by now.
PostTrotskyite -> DanielDee , 10 Dec 2016 00:3
It's not just the US who has accused Putin of meddling in their domestic affairs. Germany and the UK have made the same allegations. Are they wrong too?
DanielDee -> PostTrotskyite , 10 Dec 2016 00:5
I think anyone with reasonable intelligence would take each accusation on a case by case basis. There is no doubt that Russia conducts cyber operations, as the US and UK and Germany does. There is also little doubt that significant Russophobia exists, particularly since the failed foreign attempt of regime change in Syria that was thwarted by Russia. On that last point many citizens of the West are coming to the realisation that a secular government in Syria is preferable to one run by jihadists installing crude sharia law (Libya was certainly a lesson). Furthermore, if Hillary Clinton had succeeded one dreads to think of the consequences of her no-fly-zone plans. Thankfully she didn't succeed, no doubt in part to wikileaks revelations, who for the record stated that did not result from Russian hacks
sejong , 10 Dec 2016 00:2
Fake News is mass gaslighting, removing any sense of what is real. Biggest psy-op ever.
gondwanaboy , 10 Dec 2016 00:1
Barack Obama orders 'full review' of possible Russian hacking in US election


FAKE NEWS ALERT

JCDavis -> gondwanaboy , 10 Dec 2016 00:2
They already stated their conclusions, now they have to find evidence.
Yodasyodel , 9 Dec 2016 23:5
Hows the election recount going? You know the one this paper kept going on about a few weeks ago in Wisconsin that was supposed to be motivated by "Russian Hacking" in the election? Not very well but you have gone quiet. Also I see the Washington Post has been forced to backtrack for implying news outlets like Breitbart are Russian controlled on the advice of their own lawyers....after all calling someone a Russian agent without a shred of evidence is seriously libellous and they know it. Russian agents to blame yeah ok Obama no doubt the Easter Bunny will be next in your sights you fraud.
Wilderloo , 9 Dec 2016 23:5
Look no further than Hillarys private server. Classified information sent and received and Obam was part of it. Obama is a liar and a fraud who is now blaming the Russians for crooked Hillarys loss.
SUNLITE , 9 Dec 2016 23:5
Feed the flames of the war mongers that want Russia and Putin to be our bogeyman.Feed the military industrial complex more billions.The U.S. Defense budget is already 10 times that of Russia ,feed NATO already on Russia's boarder with tanks ,troops and heavy weapons.i did expect more from this pres,... The lies ,mis information and propaganda has worked so well since the end of WW2,upon a public who has been fed those lies {and is to busy with sports ,gadgets,games, alcohol and other drugs }for 70 yrs by a compliant,for profit lap dog media more interested in producing infotainment and profits than supplying information..If you don't think the "public" isn't very poorly informed and will believe anything ,..just look at who the next prez will be..
GuyCybershy -> SUNLITE , 10 Dec 2016 00:0
I don't think it's true that Trump voters were less informed than Clinton voters. The public knows that they all lie, they simply choose the one who's lies most appeal to them.
Alexander Bach , 9 Dec 2016 23:5
Did he also order to investigate the Clinton's deeds revealed by the 'hackers'?
fedback , 9 Dec 2016 23:3
Unfortunately Obama is not leaving office with dignity.
This action is another attempt to delegitimize the election of Trump. We already have the recount farce going on.
If Republicans had tried to delegitimize the election of Obama we know what the reaction from media would have been. An outcry against antidemocratic and racist behaviour
USApatriot12 , 9 Dec 2016 23:3
The corporate media is so predictable at this point. The news cranks up the anti-Russia hysteria while the guys over in entertainment roll out a slick fantasy about anti-Nazi resistance. It all adds up to a big steaming pile of crap but you hope it will push enough buttons to keep the citizens chained to their their desks for another quarter. Don't bet on it. As a great American said at another time of upheaval, you can't fool everyone forever...
GuyCybershy -> USApatriot12 , 9 Dec 2016 23:3
We're supposed to condemn "white nationalism" in The US and UK while supporting it in Ukraine.
GeeDeeSea -> GuyCybershy , 9 Dec 2016 23:4
That's not all. We in US and UK are supposed to condemn jihadists in Iraq while supporting them Syria.
James7 -> Eddy Cannella , 9 Dec 2016 23:2
Hillary? Although I would lean to more "Grey."

Kremlin Connection? The TRUTH About Hillary's Shady Ties To Russia REVEALED
Find out why insiders say Clinton has some explaining to do.

Americans have no idea just how closely Hillary Clinton is tied to the Kremlin! That's the shocking claim of a new report that alleges the Democratic nominee is secretly pals with Vladimir Putin and his countrymen.

Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, has published a report that claims that that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was on the executive board of a foreign company that received $35 million from the Kremlin. "The company was a transparent Russian front, and how much Podesta was compensated - and for what - is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position on that board to the Federal government, as required by law," John Schindler of the Observer wrote.

As Radar previously reported, when Clinton was secretary of state, she profited from the "Russian Reset," a failed attempt to improve relations between the U.S. and Russia.
chweizer wrote, "Many of the key figures in the Skolkovo process - on both the Russian and U.S. sides - had major financial ties to the Clintons. During the Russian reset, these figures and entities provided the Clintons with tens of millions of dollars, including contributions to the Clinton Foundation, paid for speeches by Bill Clinton, or investments in small start-up companies with deep Clinton ties." Schweizer also details "Skolkovo," a Silicon Valley-like campus that both the U.S. and Russia worked on for developing biomed, space, nuclear and IT technologies. He told the New York Post that there was a "pattern that shows a high percentage of participants in Skolkovo who happen to be Clinton Foundation donors."

raymondffoulkes , 9 Dec 2016 23:1
So it's anti-Russia propaganda today again, all over the Guardian as well as everywhere else.

I daresay they have a few things (perhaps a tad more important than football and athletics) to say about us as well..

smellycat -> raymondffoulkes , 9 Dec 2016 23:2
Sour grapes at the liberation of Aleppo and their loss of face.
I'm surprised they haven't started asking about the missing 250K civilians,who must even now be languishing in Assad's dungeons.
Keeping that one for tomorrow probably.
nbk46zh , 9 Dec 2016 23:1
When Cheney used the terror alert levels to keep the US population in the constant state of fear, the Democrats denounced it as fear mongering. Now they're embracing the same tactics in the constant demonization of Russia. Look, it's raining today! Russia must be trying to control the weather in the US! Get them! Utterly ridiculous.
stegordon21 , 9 Dec 2016 23:0
The US has been the most bloodthirsty, aggressive nation in my lifetime. Where the US goes we obediently follow. Yet as Obama (7 countries he's bombed in his presidency, not bad for a Nobel Prize Winner) continues to circle Russia with NATO on their borders. We're continually spun headline news that Russia is the aggressor and is continually meddling in foreign affairs. We are the aggressors, we are the danger to ourselves and it's we who are run by megalomaniac elites who pump us full of fear and propaganda.
nbk46zh , 9 Dec 2016 23:0
Malicious cyberactivity... has no place in international community... No? When West does it, then it's for democratic purposes? But invading countries on a humanitarian pretense does? So Democrats are still looking to blame Russia for everything not going their way I see. This rhetoric didn't work for Clinton in the election and it won't now. Stop with this nonsense
GuyCybershy -> nbk46zh , 9 Dec 2016 23:1
There wasn't a lot of outrage about the use of the "stuxnet" virus against Iran. You see, when we do it is always for a good cause.

Paulare , 9 Dec 2016 22:5
Take the long view folks.

The Egyptian Empire lasted millenum,
The Greek and Roman Empires a thousand years, give or take.
The Holy Roman Empire centuries.
The British and French circa 200 years.
The USSR about 70, the USA 70 and counting

This is just the cyclical death throes of empires played out at ever increasing speed before our very eyes.

DexDex , 9 Dec 2016 22:5
5 articles abut Russia, again. This is the Russia interference in the Guardian. Putin must be stopped.
Earl_Grey -> DexDex , 9 Dec 2016 23:0
NATO has bought a subscription to the Guardian
TonyBlunt , 9 Dec 2016 22:5
Is all this hoohaa the BBC and the Guardian trying to get some revenge for the Russian liberating East Aleppo?
TheIPAResistance , 9 Dec 2016 22:5
This is exactly why we should never move to electronic voting. Can you imagine the lengths the IPA would go to ensure their men security the power they need to roll out their neoliberal agenda? As a tax-free right wing think tank composed of rich like Rinehart, Murdoch, Forrest, et al. the sky's the limit.
Anthony1152 , 9 Dec 2016 22:4
The five stages of dealing with psychological trauma: Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Hillary and the Democrats are still at stage one and two. Obama is only beginning stage one as events dawn on him.
TheCharacteristicEquation 9 Dec 2016 22:4
I really do feel the established media and its elite hierarchy are vexed by both the Trump victory and Brexit here in the UK. Now the media attention turns to a report on another of its perpetual campaigns, namely Russia, and corruption in sport.

I'm not going to doubt the 'findings', but I know humans are corrupt ALL over the world, but it does strike me that no Western outlet, ever prints anything positive about Russia. I mean - nothing, zero!

dallasdunlap , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
If, indeed, the Russian government gathered the DNC and Podesta info released by Wikileaks, the Russians did the American people a favor by pulling back the curtain on behind the scenes scheming by Clinton campaign potentates.
Of course, I don't believe the Democratic claim that Clinton lost the election because of the Russians and the FBI.
GuyCybershy -> dallasdunlap , 9 Dec 2016 22:4
Podesta's password was "p@ssword". Inexcusable carelessness.
smellycat , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
Nothing wrong with a bit of regime change now and then, so we've been told. No good crying when the Russians do it to you.
sammy3110 , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
It's instructive to see the Guardian drag up Reagan's "Evil Empire" spiel, but only after Hillary lost.
GeeDeeSea , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
US backed a coup, or set up a coup, to overthrow the democratically elected government in Ukraine which led to war. Putin's payback seems fully justified.
theenko -> GeeDeeSea , 9 Dec 2016 22:4
sweet fucking jesus

Yanukovych is a disgrace to Ukrainian's everywhere and a traitor to his country. Fucking Putin puppet should be in jail.

GeeDeeSea -> theenko , 9 Dec 2016 22:4
sweet fucking jesus

Porshenko is a disgrace to Ukrainian's everywhere and a traitor to his country. Fucking Obama puppet should be in jail.

Earl_Grey , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
Oh my, a foreign country may have had a tiny influence on a US Election.

How about investigating the overthrow of the Democratically elected Govt in Ukraine, or the influence the US has had on the Syrian Govt, or even in Australia, where the Chinese Govt donates massive amounts of money to Political Parties (note, there's no link of course between Chinese Govt donations and Chinese Companies being able to buy most of Australia and employ Chinese Nationals in Australia on Chinese conditions and 500,000 Chinese Nationals being able to buy Real Estate in Sydney alone... none whatsoever).

bcnteacher , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
Good call! Something is fishy about the US electoral system.
COReilly , 9 Dec 2016 22:2
I'm not a policy or think tank wonk, but isn't Russia just a euphemism for China. Aren't their geopolitical interests linked. You just say Russia because China has us by the financial balls (I'm sure the Guardian would prefer to NOT be censored on the mainland) right? Package it that way and I'm on board. My love of Dostoevsky goes out the window. Albeit I still think Demons one of the best novels ever written. Woke me up.
fedback , 9 Dec 2016 22:1
Survivor of Bosnian sniper fire Hillary Clinton decries fake news in speech yesterday
Aaron Aarons , 9 Dec 2016 22:1
I'm all in favor of delegitimizing the incoming semi-fascist Trump/Pence regime, and find Obama's talk of a smooth transition disgusting. However, I reject the appeal to Russophobia or other Xenophobia.

BTW, Obama and his collaborators like Diane Feinstein have done a lot to prepare the legal basis for fascistic repression under the new POtuS.

Sund Fornuft , 9 Dec 2016 22:1
I already know what the comission will find. They will find evidences that Iraq holds vast ammonúnt of weapons of mass destruction! Oh wait, that was already used.
kalander , 9 Dec 2016 22:0
Obama has been as useless as his predecessor young Bush. His policies generally are in tatters and the US neo cons evil fantasy of full spectrum dominance has met its death in Syria. Bravo.
ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 22:0
The neoliberal corporate machine is wounded but not dead. They will use every trick, ploy and opportunity to try to regain power.

The fight goes on.

fedback , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
After an election cycle with proven collusion between the DNC/Hillary Clinton campaign and our media, our media has the nerve to come up with the term 'fake news'.
Hypocrisy at its finest
John Urquhart , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
Nobody does paranoia like the yanks. To the rest of the world, the unedifying spectacle of the world's biggest bullies, snoops, warmongers, liars and hypocrites complaining about how unfair life is, is pretty nauseating. Most of America's problems are home-grown.
ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
Why fake the news when you can just strong the media companies into muzzling their criticism?

http://nypost.com/2016/12/09/mika-brzezinski-says-clinton-camp-tried-to-pull-her-off-the-air /

mjp3470 , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
And the final report will conclude with something along the lines of:
'After a thorough, exhaustive investigation of all relevant evidence concerning the potential of foreign interference in the United States electoral process, the results of the investigation have shown that, although there remain troubling questions about the integrity of U.S. cyber-security which should prompt immediate Congressional review, there has been uncovered no conclusive evidence to support the conjecture that cyber attacks originating with any foreign actor, state or individual had any significant effect on the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election, and that there is no cause or justification for the American People to question the fairness of or lose faith in the electoral process and laid out by and carried out according to the Constitution.'
I do Holiday cards too.
garenmel -> mjp3470 , 9 Dec 2016 22:2
My hat off to you sir/madam. This was great!
Powerspike , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
Georgia's Secretary of State is accusing someone at the Department of Homeland Security of illegally trying to hack its computer network, including the voter registration database.
In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, copied to the full Georgia congressional delegation, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp alleges that a computer with a DHS internet address attempted to breach its systems.
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/309530-state-of-georgia-allegedly-accusing-homeland-security-of-attempted-hack

Wake up and smell the BS, the hacking is being done by people a lot nearer home.....

feliciafarrel , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
Oh dear, the GOP seem to have forgotten what they were saying about Putin and the Kremlin a short while back:

The continuing erosion of personal liberty and fundamental rights under the current officials in the Kremlin. Repressive at home and reckless abroad, their policies imperil the nations which regained their self-determination upon the collapse of the Soviet Union. We will meet the return of Russian belligerence with the same resolve that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. We will not accept any territorial change in Eastern Europe imposed by force, in Ukraine, Georgia, or elsewhere, and will use all appropriate constitutional measures to bring to justice the practitioners of aggression and assassination.

https://www.gop.com/platform/american-exceptionalism/

Are they going to conveniently forget all decency and morality? Is the white supremacist agenda in the GOP finally in the ascendant?

Russian Troll (Number 254) 9 Dec 2016 21:5
I as a Russian Troll do not like this investigation and will do or say anything in order to change your mind. Putin is not a problem, the EU is.
Powerspike , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
..... prohibiting "fake" or "false" news would be a cure worse than the disease, i.e., censorship by other means. The government cannot be trusted with distinguishing fake from genuine news because it has ulterior motives. News the government dislikes would be conflated with fakery, and news the government approved would be conflated with truthfulness. Private businesses like Facebook cannot be trusted with distinguishing fake from genuine news because its overriding mission is to make money and to win popularity, not to spread truth. It would suppress news that risked injury to its reputation or profits but leave news that did the opposite undisturbed.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/5/reflections-fake-news /
GuyCybershy , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
"The Anonymous Blacklist Promoted by the Washington Post Has Apparent Ties to Ukrainian Fascism and CIA Spying".

http://www.alternet.org/media/anonymous-blacklist-promoted-washington-post-has-shocking-roots-ukrainian-fascism-eugenics-and

GuyCybershy , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
Clinton lost even though she outspent Trump two to one. She was just a lousy candidate who ran a terrible campaign.
fimbulvinter -> GuyCybershy , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
Uh excuse me but that sort of introspection doesn't fly. She was flawless and the blame rests solely on Russia/alt-right/Sanders/Third Parties/Racism/Misogyny/Alignment of the stars/etc/etc
emilyadam , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
I thnk the idea that russia has world domination is quite laughable, what else they gonna be blamed for next, reduction of giraffe population!Lol
I think a teeny wee paranoia is setting in, or outright deliberate propaganda, too obvious
Jim Moodie , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
Is this worse than when the two CIA operatives were caught searching through files in the Offices of the British Labour Party about thirty years ago. What goes around comes around.

The CIA hacks have been destabalisuping Government for a at least seventy years.

One thing is pretty obvious paper ballots and a different ballot for each is much harder to rig.

It is ironic it takes a despot life key Trump to bring the issue to a head AFTER unexpectedly won.

freeandfair -> Jim Moodie , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
"Is this worse than when the two CIA operatives were caught searching through files in the Offices of the British Labour Party about thirty years ago. What goes around comes around."

The CIA were caught hacking into the US Congressional computers just 6 or so months ago. Nothing came out of it.

guest88888 , 9 Dec 2016 21:3

possible Russian hacking in US election

Based on the fact that the US 2000 (and possibly 2004) election was outright stolen by George Bush Jr., perhaps the propagandists in the White House and media ought to be looking for a "Russian connection" in regards to our illustrious former president.

Texas_Sotol , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
I'm shocked--shocked--to hear that our close Russian allies have done anything to influence and undermine the stability of other countries. Preposterous accusation! And to try to become huge winners in the Western Hemisphere, by cheating? Vitriolic nonsense!

Many posters here actually believe that Good Old Russia should just stick with what they do best. That's poison!

Fencewalker -> Bluebird101 , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
Rather like the Litvenenko inquiry...full of maybe's and possibilities, with not a shred of hard, factual proof shown - demonstrating that the order came from the Kremlin.
It's just a total accident that Putin's most vocal opponents keep getting shot in the head, gunned down on bridges, suffering 'accidents' or strange miscarriages of (sometimes post-mortem) 'justice' and fall victim to radiological state-enacted terrorism in foreign countries. No pattern there, whatsoever.
Informed17 , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
I am at a loss. On the one hand, I hear about Russian economy in tatters, gas station posing as a country, deep crisis, economy the size of Italy, rusty old military toys, aircraft carrier smoking out the whole Northern hemisphere, etc. On the other hand, I hear about Russian threat all the time, which must be countered by massive build up of the US and EU military, Russia successfully interfering in the elections in the beacon of democracy, the US, with 20 times greater economy, with powerful allies, the best armed forces in the world, etc. Are we talking about two different Russias, or is this schizophrenia, pure and simple?
jamese07uk -> Informed17 , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
It's always easy to find reasons to fear something, added to that the psychology of the unknown, and we have the makings of very powerful propaganda. Whatever Russia's level of corruption, and general society, I feel I cannot trust the Western media anymore 100%. There seems to be a equally sinister hidden agenda deep within Western Elites - accessing Russia's land, political and potential wealthly resources must surely be one of them!? The longterm Western agenda/mission?
spiridonovich , 9 Dec 2016 21:1
The Democratic Party's problem is Russia, which the President is rightly putting front and center. All Russians are the summit of eviality, and must be endlessly scapegoated in order for Democrats to regain power for the nation's greater good.

Democrats' problems have nothing to do with corruption, glaring conflicts of interest, favoritism, ass-licking editors, crappy data, lacking enthusiasm, and horribly poor judgement.

None of these issues need to be publicly addressed, being of no consequence to independent voters, and the President, Guardian, et al. must continue their silent -- and "independent" -- vigil on such silly topics, if Democrats are to have any hope of cultivating enough mindless, enraged, and abandoned sheep to bring them future victories.

ImmortalTao , 9 Dec 2016 21:1
I admire Trump, Putin & Farage. Don't agree with them but I have admiration for them. They show all the cunning, calculating, resourcefulness that put the European race on top. Liberals don't like that and want to see the own people fall to the bottom. Thankfuly the neoliberal elite are finishedm
MJMaguire , 9 Dec 2016 21:1
Absurd nonsense - the third anti-Russian story of the day. Very little of this has much traction because of the sheer volume of misinformation coming out about Russia. there are very good cogent reasons why the Democrats lost the US election - none of them have anything to do with Russia.
slats7 , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
another pathetic attempt to delegitimize Trump. wanna know why he won? look in the mirror, Barry.
oldsunshine -> slats7 , 9 Dec 2016 21:2
Will Obama see Clinton if he looks in the mirror??
Bluejil , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
I can't see a thing wrong with reviewing the last three election cycles, if there is any doubt at all and to put speculation to bed, it should be done.
CurtBrown -> Bluejil , 9 Dec 2016 21:1
Why stop at the last three?
Karl Marks -> CurtBrown , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
Because the US is more concerned about money than democratic integrity.
dicksonator , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
So the US intelligence servies aren't doing similar operations?

If they werent, heads would roll as they have a considerable budget. Did we learn nothing from Edward Snowden? Are Russia just better at this? I doubt it.

I think both sides conduct themselves in a despicable manner so please dont call me a Putin apologist. Well, feel free actually, I could'nt care less.

gray2016 , 9 Dec 2016 21:0

Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election


US interference:

COUNTRY OR STATE Dates of intervention Comments
VIETNAM l960-75 Fought South Vietnam revolt & North Vietnam; one million killed in longest U.S. war; atomic bomb threats in l968 and l969.
CUBA l961 CIA-directed exile invasion fails.
GERMANY l961 Alert during Berlin Wall crisis.
LAOS 1962 Military buildup during guerrilla war.
142 more rows

Shall I go on with anoter 142? US lying scumbags

yeCarumba -> gray2016 , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
the vietnam fiasco alone is enough to disqualify america from any criticism about interference in internal affairs
they practically destroyed the country
KitKnightly , 9 Dec 2016 20:5
The pathetic way the media are pushing this big-bad-Russians meme is a little depressing.

This "hack" is totally fictional, the wikileaks e-mails were almost certainly that...leaks. As most o their output has been over the years. For 95% of the Wikileaks existence there have been absolutely zero connections with "the Kremlin", in fact they have leaked stuff damaging to Russia before now.

The Russian's did not hack the DNC, or rig the election, this is yet another example of the political establishment hysterically pointing fingers and making up lies when their chosen side loses an election.

freeandfair -> KitKnightly , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
I remember how North Korea was blamed for Sony hack. I think they were even cut from the internet for a day and there was all this talk of punishing them. And then later it came out that very likely wasn't North Korea. Only the news cycle already moved on and nobody cared.
mismeasure , 9 Dec 2016 20:5
Traditionally, the best Cold Warriors have been right-wing liberals. In the absence of policies that concretely benefit the people they engage in threat inflation and demagoguery.
SergeyL , 9 Dec 2016 20:4
In 90s US set all figures in Russia - from president to news program anchor. Elections of 96 were ripped by American "advisors" so that Eltsyn with 3% rating "won" them. It's payback time.
Shaemus Gruagain , 9 Dec 2016 20:4
Oh how wonderful it is to watch them smart and the bonus? no more Obamas.
uest88888 -> PeteCW , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
And yet the so-called "Russian trolls" (which is apparently anyone who exercise a modicum of skepticism) seem to be winning here at CiF based on the number of likes per comment, which is likely why the NSA sponsored propagandists and clueless dopes are getting so increasingly shrill.
Mattster101 , 9 Dec 2016 20:3
If you take a wider view, this is all really about keeping the Dems in the game, trying to undo the Trump validity and give them another go in 4 or so years. Really, seems quite desperate that a man that allowed 270000 wild horses to be sold for horsemeat this year across the border to Mexico, brought HC in to his own cabinet having said 'she will say anything and do nothing', knowing what a nightmare that would make, and is going to watch his healthcare get ripped to shreds, needs more accomplishments in his last year, aka Obama, ergo, let's investigate the evil russians and their female athletes with male DNA ( you would think I am making this stuff up, but I am not ) ... Come on Grandma, where are you when we need you most
nolongersilent , 9 Dec 2016 20:3
we must somehow, subvert the despicable populace that elected trump. we must erase from history the conceding of president elect clinton - newpeak from the ministry of truth. we'll get her into the white house if it takes more cash, lies, and corruption. after all, who needs democracy in the democratic party when we have big brother. democracy just confuses the members. we'll send the despicables through the ministry of love to re-educate them, of course, this IS 1984 after all....we will vote for you, the intelligentsia of the left knows what is best for you.
eldudeabides , 9 Dec 2016 20:3
Should Hillary have been disqualified (and prosecuted) for having access to debate questions beforehand?
Nete75 , 9 Dec 2016 20:3
"Malicious cyber activity, specifically malicious cyber activity tied to our elections , has no place in the international community. Unfortunately this activity is not new to Moscow. We've seen them do this for years ... The president has made it clear to President Putin that this is unacceptable."

Note how carefully it specifies that it is cyber activity tied to the american elections that is inappropriate. I presume that is simply to avoid openly saying that mass-surveillance by the US government of everyone's private email, and social network accounts doesn't come under that "no place in the international community" phrase. You know, one does wonder how these people's faces don't come off in shame when whinning about potential interference by foreign governemnts after a full 8 years or so of constant revelations of permanent spying and mass-surveillance by the US government of international leaders and ordinary citizens worldwide.

Boghaunter , 9 Dec 2016 20:2
So the DNC was hacked - so what. Hacking is so common these days as to be expected. A quick perusal of the internet provides some SIGNIFICANT hacks that deserved some consternation:

9/4/07 The Chinese government hacked a noncritical Defense Department computer system in June, a Pentagon source told FOX News on Tuesday.

Spring 2011 Foreign hackers broke into the Pentagon computer system this spring and stole 24,000 files - one of the biggest cyber-attacks ever on the U.S. military,

On the 12th of July 2011, Booz Allen Hamilton the largest U.S. military defence contractor admitted that they had just suffered a very serious security breach, at the hands of hacktivist group AntiSec.

5/28/13 The confidential version of a Defense Science Board report compiled earlier this year reportedly says Chinese hackers accessed designs for more than two dozen of the U.S. military's most important and expensive weapon systems.

June 2014 The UK's National Crime Agency has arrested an unnamed young man over allegations that he breached the Department of Defense's network last June.


1/12/15 The Twitter account for U.S. Central Command was suspended Monday after it was hacked by ISIS sympathizers (OK twitter accounts shouldn't be a big deal. Why does US CentCom even HAVE a twitter account???)

5/6/15 OPM hack: China blamed for massive breach of US government data

Omoikani , 9 Dec 2016 20:2
And so the neocon propaganda machine trundles on, churning out this interesting material day after day. The elephant in the room is that if you get hacked you have no knowledge of this until your private stuff is all over the internet, and the chances of finding out who did it are zilch. Everyone in IT security knows this.
johhnybgood , 9 Dec 2016 20:1
Another "fake news" story. Does anybody with a pulse really believe that Russia hacked the DNC? The US Security Services admitted that it was NOT Russia; the likelihood is that the leaks were provided to Wikileaks by insiders within the US Administration - they wanted to ensure that Hillary did not win. None of the actual revelations were covered by the MSM, and "the Russians did it" was a convenient distraction.
Omoikani -> johhnybgood , 9 Dec 2016 20:2
All people that on earth do dwell have no clue who hacked the DNC to the amusing end that Podesta's e-mails ended up on the internet, but it suits a dangerous political narrative to demonise Russia until it becomes plain logical to attack them.
peterward881 , 9 Dec 2016 20:0
YES YES let attack Russia, YES YES YES, Russia Russia we should carry on attacking Russia. We the journalists are well paid by the man from Australia. YES YES we must to carry on attacking Russia and forget the shit happening in other countries. YES YES it is our duty.
guest88888 , 9 Dec 2016 20:0

Election hacking: Obama orders 'full review' of Russia interference

And I guess Obama has also ordered the Guardian to do a full court press of anti-Russian propaganda, just judging by the articles pumped out on today's rag alone.

The US government is seemingly attempting the "Big Lie" tactic of Joseph Goebbels and instigating support in the public for war against Russia. By repeating the completely unsubstantiated allegations that Russia has somehow "interfered with the election" they hope, without any genuine basis, to strong arm the public into accepting a further ramping of tensions and starting yet another illegal war for profit.

Chirographer , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
There's nothing wrong with conducting the investigation, but shouldn't it have been done before accusing Russia?

And aren't all the people cited in the article political appointees, Democrats or avowed Trump enemies, and then there's closing, " A spokesman for the director of national intelligence declined to comment."

Karega , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
Surely of all the Orders Obama might issue during his last weeks in office, why does he choose to give a stupid Order that effectively makes US some sort of Banana Republic? This man was/is more hype than real! At a stroke of a pen he seriously undermines the integrity of the US Electoral System. Whatever credibility was left has now been eroded by these constant and silly claims that somehow Russians installed Trump as President. Doesn't that make Trump some sort of Russian Agent?
Meanwhile MSM keeps on streaming some fake news and theories and then Obama Orders US intelligence to dig deeper. This is lunacy!
alexfoxy28 , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
Obama certainly understands that Russia is not the reason why Trump was elected. However, he wants to create new obstacles on the way of normalization of relations between the US and Russia and make it more difficult for Trump.

However, Trump is not a weak man, not a skinny worm; and he can hit these opponents back so hard that international court for them (for invasions into sovereign countries) will lead to their life sentences.

Ginen , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
Only two weeks ago the Obama Administration publicly stated there was no evidence of cybersecurity breaches affecting the electoral process, as reported in the NYT :

The administration, in its statement, confirmed reports from the Department of Homeland Security and intelligence officials that they did not see "any increased level of malicious cyberactivity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on Election Day."

The administration said it remained "confident in the overall integrity of electoral infrastructure, a confidence that was borne out." It added: "As a result, we believe our elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective."

Was Obama lying then or is he lying now?
imperfetto , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
Is there any limit to the ridicolous, Mr. Obama? what is this? a tragicomic play of the inept?
Here we are with the most childish fabrication that it must be the Russians' fault if Trump won the election. I'll be laughing for an entire cosmic era! And all this after US publically announced that they were going to launch a devastating acher attack against the badies: the Russians, which of course didn't work out. Come on, this is more comedy that a serious play.

What probably is going on, the readers can gather by having a look at the numberless articles that are being published by maistream media against the Russians.
Why this histeric insurgence of Russofobia? Couldn't it be that it is intolerable for the US and their allies to see the Russians winning in Aleppo, and most of all restoring peace and tollerance among the population returning to their abbandoned homes.

brothersgrimm , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
I think Hillary, in part, lost the election due to all the fake news being pumped out by the mainstream corporate media, doing her bidding. People are tired of it, along with all the corruption and lies that came to the surface through the likes of Wikileaks.
Trump is a terrible alternative, but the only alternative people were given, so many went with it.
Now we see fake news making out the Russians to be the bad guys again, pumping out story after story, trying to propagandize the population into sucking up these new memes. Russia has its problems, and will always act in its own self-interest, but it's nothing compared to the tactics the US uses, bullying countries around the world to pander to its own will, desperately trying to maintain its Empire.
RoachAmerican , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
Examine something real, Nuclear Hillary. It must be time for Spring Planting??
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/23/us/clinton-foundation-donations-uranium-investors.html?_r=0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syEjkPyqRew
Minutes 20 to 25
Uranium One Wyoming
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html

http://www.npr.org/2015/04/23/401781313/clinton-foundation-linked-to-russian-effort-to-buy-uranium-company
https://youtu.be/jkfE10g8xbc
at 25 minutes et seq
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkfE10g8xbc&feature=youtu.be


Below, first paragraphs are the most important
http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/five-questions-about-the-clintons-and-a-uranium-company

The 1 2 3 Step of Acquisition of Uranium One
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-clintons-putin-and-uranium-2015-4

Going Private Part Public Company Disappears
http://www.wise-uranium.org/ucscr.html

http://www.pravdareport.com/russia/economics/22-01-2013/123551-russia_nuclear_energy-0 /
Coward Comey needs to go.

Joelbanks , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
The scripture tells us those who live by the sword will perish by it.

America was in the interference of other countries' elections before its ugly 2016 presidential election. Remember Ukraine and Secretary Hillary Clinton's employee Victoria F****the EU Nuland in Ukraine. Now we have the makings of some kind of conflict with Russia over its alleged meddling in America's elections. More global tension= More cash flowing into the US equity market, money printing by another means.

hardlyeverclever , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
I'd be surprised if the Russians weren't trying to affect the outcome of the election. The Brits had a debate in Parliament on Trump, Obama made threats to the UK on the Brexit vote, so who knows what we're all doing in each others elections behind closed doors while we are clear to do so publically.

The MSM's absolute refusal to address the leaks in a meaningful way (other than the stuff about recipes) suggests to be no one felt it a big deal at the time.

alexfoxy28 , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
Obama could realise that Hillary's viewes on Putin and Russia did not help her at all. People are not that stupid, they see well, use own brains and not so easily impressed by whatever CNN says to them.
Alun Jones , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
John McAfee said that any organization sophisticated enough to do these hacks is also sophisticated enough to make it look as though any country they want did it. So it could have been anyone.
palindrome , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
Obama earlier this year: Russia is not a world power, only a regional power.

Obama now: Russia has the power to manipulate the USA election.

Which one is it then?

Of course it's all bull...Obama is another establishment puppet who cannot accept that people have figured out their modus operandi.

diddoit , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
It's reported today on Ars Technica : ThyssenKrupp suffered a "professional attack"

The steelmaker, which makes military subs, says it was targeted from south-east Asia.

..the design of its plants were penetrated by a "massive," coordinated attack which made off with an unknown amount of "technological know-how and research."

The internet and precious information...

alexfoxy28 , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
Neoliberals are just desperately losing ideological competition at home and abroad. They cannot convince people that they are right because it's not what's going on.

It does not matter what some others say, it's what really goes on matters.

alexfoxy28 -> imipak , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
But there is innate, basic self-interest in all people (that does not depend on education, ethnicity, race) and people know it instinctively well. They will not go against it even if all around will tell otherwise.
alexfoxy28 -> alexfoxy28 , 9 Dec 2016 21:1 0 1
simulacra27 , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
The fake news channel brought to you by Obama and co.
p.s. I mean that people cannot be manipulated by others at this basic level when some higher level manipulative tools are used.
Kasem3000 , 9 Dec 2016 19:1
I love how this has now become solid fact. No confirmation, nothing official but it is no common fact that the Russians interfered. How many reports do we hear about US interference with foreign countries infastructure through covert means.
ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 19:1
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/08/vladimir-putin-hillary-clinton-russia

Meh. Seems like tampering happens all the time. How many elections in South America did the USA fix? How many in the middle east and Africa? I think this "russian's did it" rhetoric is counterproductive as it is stopping Democrats from doing the introspective needed to really understand why HRC lost the election.

ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 19:1
How can you on the one hand crusade against "fake news" and on the other promote this:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/dec/08/artist-alison-jackson-self-publishes-spoof-trump-photos-despite-fear-of-being-sued#comments

Sutir Comed , 9 Dec 2016 19:0
Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot and there was credible evidence that the Russians had rigged the election in favor of the Democrat. The right-wing echo chamber would be having seizures! These people are UTTER HYPOCRITES. And they would obviously rather win with the help of a hostile foreign power than try to preserve the integrity of our elections.
MayorHoberMallow , 9 Dec 2016 19:0
Russia may or may not have hacked the DNC. I'd like to find out. I hope the DNC aren't enough of doofusses to assume this wouldn't be in the realm of possibility.
I presume that the U.S. has its own group of hackers doing the same Worldwide. This is not a criticism; I would expect the U.S. intelligence community to learn what our rivals, and even some of our friends, are up to.
Timothy Everton , 9 Dec 2016 19:0
This is getting to be pretty lame. I have doubts that "Russia" could interfere to any great extent with our elections any more than we could with theirs. Sure, individuals or organizations, and more than likely in THIS country, could do so. And they have, as we saw with the DNC and Sanders campaign (and vice versa). Let's not go into an almost inevitable nuclear war over what is quite possibly "fake news".
dreylon , 9 Dec 2016 19:0
Russia did this, Russia did that
its getting very boring now, you have lost all credibility
you have cried wolf to many times
stop trying to manipulate us
Johnny Kent , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
When will the Democrats get it? It wasn't the Russians, who are blamed for everything, including the weather, by desperate Western failed leaders, but an unsuitable candidate in Clinton, which lost them the Election. Bernie Sanders would have walked it.
Catonaboat , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
Well Guardian I do believe you hit a nerve, I don't think I've ever seen a more one sided BTL. Me thinks some people do protest too much.
Iaorana , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
Regarding the notorious "fuck the EU " on the part of the US "diplomat" Victoria Nuland "the State Department and the White House suggested that an assistant to the deputy prime minister of Russia Dmitry Rogozin was the source of the leak, which he denied " Wiki

Good occasion to substantiate the accusation which ,substantiated or not,will remind the "useful idiots" of the "change of regime " US policy and who started the Ukrainian crisis.

Lafcadio1944 , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
Boy, oh boy, fake news is everywhere just read this headline!

Election hacking: Obama orders 'full review' of Russia interference

Which states as fact there was interference by Russia and that the investigation is to determine how bad it was. NO EVIDENCE WHAT SO EVER has been offered by anyone that Russia interfered in any way. FAKE NEWS!!

Mike5000 , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
Voting machine hacking is a very serious problem but you generally need physical access to a voting machine to hack it. Anyone notice thousands of Russians hanging around in Detriot, Los Angeles, etc election HQs? How about Clinton drones?

If the DNC hadn't rigged the primary we'd be celebrating president-elect Bernie. If they hadn't rigged the general Hillary would have lost by a landslide.

ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
We never investigated this tho did we Former President Obama?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/08/vladimir-putin-hillary-clinton-russia

Time to put on your big girl pants, accept defeat and leave gracefully.

Powerspike , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
1000 Russian athletes were doping in the 2012 Olympics - but it's taken until now to realise it?!
Russia influenced the 2016 US election?!
Russia is presently "influencing" the German elections?!
Russia is killing civilians and destroying hospitals with impunity in Syria?!
etc
Wow! Russia is taking over the world, it must be stopped, can anyone save us? Obama? Trump? NATO?
Look out! Russian armies are massing on the border ready to sweep into Europe.......arrhhh!

I love the smell of gibberish in the morning!

geofffrey , 9 Dec 2016 18:4
***Newsflash***

Reads:

"..ex-prime minister Anthony Charles Lynton Blair of the United Kingdom, and Hillary Rodham Clinton of the United States of America, have formally announced a new transatlantic political party to be named: The Neoliberal Elite Party for bitter anti-Brexiters and sore anti-Trumpettes.

dahsab , 9 Dec 2016 18:4
Rather rich coming from my country which has interfered in elections around the world for decades. I suppose it's only cheating if the other team does it.

Not that they'll find any evidence. Just another chapter in the sad saga of the Democrats unwillingness to admit they ran the worst candidate & the worst campaign in recent memory. It's not our fault! Them dirty Russkies did it!

[Oct 12, 2016] NSA whistleblower says DNC hack was not done by Russia, but by US intelligence

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Stated Binney: "Now what he (Mueller) is talking about is going into the NSA database, which is shown of course in the (Edward) Snowden material released, which shows a direct access into the NSA database by the FBI and the CIA Which there is no oversight of by the way. So that means that NSA and a number of agencies in the U.S. government also have those emails." ..."
"... "Yes," he responded. "That would be my point. They have them all and the FBI can get them right there." ..."
"... And the other point is that Hillary, according to an article published by the Observer in March of this year, has a problem with NSA because she compromised Gamma material. Now that is the most sensitive material at NSA. And so there were a number of NSA officials complaining to the press or to the people who wrote the article that she did that. She lifted the material that was in her emails directly out of Gamma reporting. That is a direct compromise of the most sensitive material at the NSA. So she's got a real problem there. So there are many people who have problems with what she has done in the past. So I don't necessarily look at the Russians as the only one(s) who got into those emails. ..."
"... GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). ..."
Oct 12, 2016 | theduran.com
Binney also proclaimed that the NSA has all of Clinton's deleted emails, and the FBI could gain access to them if they so wished. No need for Trump to ask the Russians for those emails, he can just call on the FBI or NSA to hand them over.

Breitbart reports further

Binney referenced testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2011 by then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in which Meuller spoke of the FBI's ability to access various secretive databases "to track down known and suspected terrorists."

Stated Binney: "Now what he (Mueller) is talking about is going into the NSA database, which is shown of course in the (Edward) Snowden material released, which shows a direct access into the NSA database by the FBI and the CIA Which there is no oversight of by the way. So that means that NSA and a number of agencies in the U.S. government also have those emails."

"So if the FBI really wanted them they can go into that database and get them right now," he stated of Clinton's emails as well as DNC emails.

Asked point blank if he believed the NSA has copies of "all" of Clinton's emails, including the deleted correspondence, Binney replied in the affirmative.

"Yes," he responded. "That would be my point. They have them all and the FBI can get them right there."

Binney surmised that the hack of the DNC could have been coordinated by someone inside the U.S. intelligence community angry over Clinton's compromise of national security data with her email use.

And the other point is that Hillary, according to an article published by the Observer in March of this year, has a problem with NSA because she compromised Gamma material. Now that is the most sensitive material at NSA. And so there were a number of NSA officials complaining to the press or to the people who wrote the article that she did that. She lifted the material that was in her emails directly out of Gamma reporting. That is a direct compromise of the most sensitive material at the NSA. So she's got a real problem there. So there are many people who have problems with what she has done in the past. So I don't necessarily look at the Russians as the only one(s) who got into those emails.

The Observer defined the GAMMA classification:

GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was).

Zerohedge has some background on Binney , who is about as rock solid a security analyst as you could get.

Over a year before Edward Snowden shocked the world in the summer of 2013 with revelations that have since changed everything from domestic to foreign US policy but most of all, provided everyone a glimpse into just what the NSA truly does on a daily basis, a former NSA staffer, and now famous whistleblower, William Binney, gave excruciating detail to Wired magazine about all that Snowden would substantiate the following summer.

We covered it in a 2012 post titled " We Are This Far From A Turnkey Totalitarian State" – Big Brother Goes Live September 2013." Not surprisingly, Binney received little attention in 2012 – his suggestions at the time were seen as preposterous and ridiculously conspiratorial. Only after the fact, did it become obvious that he was right. More importantly, in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, what Binney has to say has become gospel.

Binney was an architect of the NSA's surveillance program. He became a famed whistleblower when he resigned on October 31, 2001, after spending more than 30 years with the agency. He referenced testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2011 by then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in which Meuller spoke of the FBI's ability to access various secretive databases "to track down known and suspected terrorists."

[Oct 12, 2016] NSA whistleblower says DNC hack was not done by Russia, but by US intelligence

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Stated Binney: "Now what he (Mueller) is talking about is going into the NSA database, which is shown of course in the (Edward) Snowden material released, which shows a direct access into the NSA database by the FBI and the CIA Which there is no oversight of by the way. So that means that NSA and a number of agencies in the U.S. government also have those emails." ..."
"... "Yes," he responded. "That would be my point. They have them all and the FBI can get them right there." ..."
"... And the other point is that Hillary, according to an article published by the Observer in March of this year, has a problem with NSA because she compromised Gamma material. Now that is the most sensitive material at NSA. And so there were a number of NSA officials complaining to the press or to the people who wrote the article that she did that. She lifted the material that was in her emails directly out of Gamma reporting. That is a direct compromise of the most sensitive material at the NSA. So she's got a real problem there. So there are many people who have problems with what she has done in the past. So I don't necessarily look at the Russians as the only one(s) who got into those emails. ..."
"... GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). ..."
Oct 12, 2016 | theduran.com
Binney also proclaimed that the NSA has all of Clinton's deleted emails, and the FBI could gain access to them if they so wished. No need for Trump to ask the Russians for those emails, he can just call on the FBI or NSA to hand them over.

Breitbart reports further

Binney referenced testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2011 by then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in which Meuller spoke of the FBI's ability to access various secretive databases "to track down known and suspected terrorists."

Stated Binney: "Now what he (Mueller) is talking about is going into the NSA database, which is shown of course in the (Edward) Snowden material released, which shows a direct access into the NSA database by the FBI and the CIA Which there is no oversight of by the way. So that means that NSA and a number of agencies in the U.S. government also have those emails."

"So if the FBI really wanted them they can go into that database and get them right now," he stated of Clinton's emails as well as DNC emails.

Asked point blank if he believed the NSA has copies of "all" of Clinton's emails, including the deleted correspondence, Binney replied in the affirmative.

"Yes," he responded. "That would be my point. They have them all and the FBI can get them right there."

Binney surmised that the hack of the DNC could have been coordinated by someone inside the U.S. intelligence community angry over Clinton's compromise of national security data with her email use.

And the other point is that Hillary, according to an article published by the Observer in March of this year, has a problem with NSA because she compromised Gamma material. Now that is the most sensitive material at NSA. And so there were a number of NSA officials complaining to the press or to the people who wrote the article that she did that. She lifted the material that was in her emails directly out of Gamma reporting. That is a direct compromise of the most sensitive material at the NSA. So she's got a real problem there. So there are many people who have problems with what she has done in the past. So I don't necessarily look at the Russians as the only one(s) who got into those emails.

The Observer defined the GAMMA classification:

GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was).

Zerohedge has some background on Binney , who is about as rock solid a security analyst as you could get.

Over a year before Edward Snowden shocked the world in the summer of 2013 with revelations that have since changed everything from domestic to foreign US policy but most of all, provided everyone a glimpse into just what the NSA truly does on a daily basis, a former NSA staffer, and now famous whistleblower, William Binney, gave excruciating detail to Wired magazine about all that Snowden would substantiate the following summer.

We covered it in a 2012 post titled " We Are This Far From A Turnkey Totalitarian State" – Big Brother Goes Live September 2013." Not surprisingly, Binney received little attention in 2012 – his suggestions at the time were seen as preposterous and ridiculously conspiratorial. Only after the fact, did it become obvious that he was right. More importantly, in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, what Binney has to say has become gospel.

Binney was an architect of the NSA's surveillance program. He became a famed whistleblower when he resigned on October 31, 2001, after spending more than 30 years with the agency. He referenced testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2011 by then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in which Meuller spoke of the FBI's ability to access various secretive databases "to track down known and suspected terrorists."

Continued

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[Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat Published on Dec 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi Published on Dec 05, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders Published on Nov 19, 2018 | www.rt.com

[Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi Published on Nov 27, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Nov 24, 2018] MI6 Scrambling To Stop Trump From Releasing Classified Docs In Russia Probe Published on Nov 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda Published on Nov 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Nov 24, 2018] British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns Published on Nov 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Nov 24, 2018] Now we know created MH17 smear campaign, who financial Steele dossier and created Skripal affair ;-) Published on Nov 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also. Published on Nov 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore Published on Feb 20, 2018 | www.wsws.org

[Oct 25, 2018] DNC Emails--A Seth Attack Not a Russian Hack by Publius Tacitus Published on Oct 25, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir Published on Oct 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Oct 09, 2018] The Skripals Are an MI6 Hoax - 'Not Worthy of Ladies' Detective Novels' - Israeli Expert Demolishes UK Case Published on Oct 09, 2018 | russia-insider.com

[Oct 08, 2018] British intelligence now officially is a by-word for organized crime by John Wight Published on Oct 08, 2018 | www.rt.com

[Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum Published on Oct 07, 2018 | freethoughtblogs.com

[Oct 02, 2018] I m puzzled why CIA is so against Kavanaugh? Published on Oct 02, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Sep 23, 2018] UK Begged Trump Not To Declassify Russia Docs; Cited Grave Concerns Over Steele Involvement Published on Sep 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Sep 21, 2018] One party state: Trump's 'Opposition' Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsence by Caitlin Johnstone Published on Sep 21, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

[Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin Published on Aug 03, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

[Sep 15, 2018] BBC is skanky state propaganda Published on Aug 30, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

[Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts Published on Aug 18, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov Published on Jul 28, 2018 | russia-insider.com

[Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement Published on Aug 11, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Aug 08, 2018] Sergei Skripal was linked to a consultant with former UK spy Christopher Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence Published on Aug 06, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography Published on Aug 08, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake. Published on Aug 05, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community? Published on Jul 31, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

[Jul 23, 2018] Chickens with Their Heads Cut Off, Coming Home to Roost. The "Treason Narrative" by Helen Buyniski Published on Jul 23, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

[Jul 22, 2018] Tucker Carlson SLAMS Intelligence Community On Russia Published on Jul 22, 2018 | www.youtube.com

[Jul 20, 2018] So many (ex-) MI6 operators (Steele, Tait, etc) involved in the story. It is interesting that the media don t question the intense involvement of the British in all this. And of course, the British haven t been laggards in adding fuel to the fire by the whole novichok hoax Published on Jul 20, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Jul 20, 2018] What exactly is fake news caucus99percent Published on Jul 20, 2018 | caucus99percent.com

[Jul 20, 2018] Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia by Paul Craig Roberts Published on Jul 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Jul 17, 2018] I think there is much more to the comment made by Putin regarding Bill Browder and his money flows into the DNC and Clinton campaign. That would explain why the DNC didn t hand the servers over to the FBI after being hacked. Published on Jul 17, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Jul 16, 2018] Five Things That Would Make The CIA-CNN Russia Narrative More Believable Published on Jul 15, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Jul 15, 2018] Sic Semper Tyrannis HILLARY CLINTON S COMPROMISED EMAILS WERE GOING TO A FOREIGN ENTITY – NOT RUSSIA! FBI Agent Ignored Evide Published on Jul 15, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Jul 15, 2018] Peter Strzok Ignored Evidence Of Clinton Server Breach Published on Mar 06, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Jul 15, 2018] Something Rotten About the DOJ Indictment of the GRU by Publius Tacitus Published on Jul 15, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Jul 15, 2018] As if the Donald did not sanctioned to death the Russians on every possible level. How is this different from Mueller's and comp witch hunt against the Russians? Published on Jul 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Jul 13, 2018] False flag operation covering DNC leaks now involves Mueller and his team Published on Jul 13, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Jul 05, 2018] Britain's Most Censored Stories (Non-Military) Published on Jul 01, 2018 | truepublica.org.uk

[Jul 03, 2018] Russia has a lot of information about Lybia that could dig a political grave for Hillary. They did not release it Published on Jul 03, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Jul 03, 2018] Musings II The "Intelligence Community," "Russian Interference," and Due Diligence Published on Jun 29, 2018 | jackmatlock.com

[Jun 17, 2018] Mattis Putin Is Trying To Undermine America s Moral Authority by Caitlin Johnstone Published on Jun 17, 2018 | caitlinjohnstone.com

[Jun 17, 2018] the dominant political forces in EU are anti-Russia Published on Jun 17, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Jun 13, 2018] How False Flag Operations Are Carried Out Today by Philip M. GIRALDI Published on Apr 26, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

[Jun 12, 2018] The real reason for which 'information apocalypse' terrifies the mainstream media Published on Jun 12, 2018 | failedevolution.blogspot.com

[Jun 09, 2018] Spooks Spooking Themselves by Daniel Lazare Published on May 31, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

[Jun 09, 2018] Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack by Ray McGovern Published on Jun 09, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

[May 31, 2018] Journalists and academics expose UK's criminal actions in the Middle East by Julie Hyland Published on May 31, 2018 | www.wsws.org

[May 29, 2018] Guccifer 2.0's American Fingerprints Reveal An Operation Made In The USA by Elizabeth Lea Vos Published on May 29, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[May 24, 2018] The diversion of Russia Gate is a continuation of former diversions such as the Tea Party which was invented by the banksters to turn public anger over the big banking collapse and the resulting recession into a movement to gain more deregulation for tax breaks for the wealthy Published on May 24, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

[May 23, 2018] If the Trump-Russia set up began in spring 2016 or earlier, presumably it was undertaken on the assumption that HRC would win the election. (I say "presumably" because you never can tell..) If so, then the operation would have been an MI6 / Ukrainian / CIA coordinated op intended to frame Putin, not Trump Published on May 23, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b Published on May 04, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[May 03, 2018] Skripal case British confirm they have no suspect; Yulia Skripal vanishes, no word of Sergey Skripal by Alexander Mercouris Published on May 02, 2018 | theduran.com

[May 03, 2018] Despite all the propaganda, all the hysterical headlines, all the blatantly biased coverage, the British haven't bought it Published on May 03, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice Published on Mar 13, 2018 | www.wsws.org

[Apr 23, 2018] The Tony Blair Rule: The Truth Takes 15 Years to Come Out, Skripal Countdown Starts Now - Simonyan Published on Apr 23, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Apr 21, 2018] It s a tough old world and we are certainly capable of a Salisbury set-up and god knows what else in Syria. Published on Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

[Apr 16, 2018] British Propaganda and Disinformation An Imperial and Colonial Tradition by Wayne MADSEN Published on Apr 16, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

[Apr 15, 2018] The Trump Regime Is Insane by Paul Craig Roberts Published on Apr 13, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Apr 10, 2018] The Ghouta Massacre near Damascus on Aug 21, 2013 was not a sarin rocket attack carried out by Assad or his supporters. It was a false-flag stunt carried out by the insurgents using carbon monoxide or cyanide to murder children and use their corpses as bait to lure the Americans into attacking Assad. Published on Apr 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Apr 05, 2018] The Three Most Important Aspects of the Skripal Case so Far and Where They by Rob Slane Published on Apr 04, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

[Apr 05, 2018] An Interview with Retired Russian General Evgeny Buzhinsky The National Interest Published on Apr 05, 2018 | nationalinterest.org

[Apr 03, 2018] This Washington Post Headline Is Fake News Published on Apr 03, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Apr 03, 2018] Exercise TOXIC DAGGER - the sharp end of chemical warfare Published on Apr 03, 2018 | www.gov.uk

[Apr 02, 2018] Russophobia Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy by A. Tsygankov Published on Jun 09, 2017 | www.amazon.com

[Apr 02, 2018] Russia 'Novichok' Hysteria Proves Politicians and Media Haven't Learned the Lessons of Iraq by Patrick Henningsen Published on Mar 31, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

[Apr 02, 2018] The Litvinenko Conspiracy Published on Mar 31, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

[Apr 01, 2018] UK may have staged Skripal poisoning to rally people against Russia, Moscow believes Published on Apr 01, 2018 | www.rt.com

[Mar 31, 2018] FBI Director Mueller testified to Congress that Saddam Hussein was responsible for anthrax attack! That was Mueller's role in selling the "intelligence" to invade Iraq. Published on Mar 31, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Mar 27, 2018] The Stormy Daniels scandal Political warfare in Washington hits a new low by Patrick Martin Published on Mar 27, 2018 | www.wsws.org

[Mar 25, 2018] Cambridge Analytica Scandal Rockets to Watergate Proportions and Beyond by Adam Garrie Published on Mar 25, 2018 | www.eurasiafuture.com

[Mar 24, 2018] Why the UK, the EU and the US Gang-Up on Russia by James Petras Published on Mar 20, 2018 | unz.com

[Mar 22, 2018] Vladimir Putin: nonsense to think Russia would poison spy in UK Published on Mar 18, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

[Mar 21, 2018] Arafat and Litvinenko: an Interesting Turn to a Mysterious Story Published on Mar 16, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Mar 21, 2018] Whataboutism Is A Nonsensical Propaganda Term Used To Defend The Failed Status Quo by Mike Krieger Published on Mar 20, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Mar 17, 2018] How the gas was administred in a place which was under surveillance and why passersby were not affected Published on Mar 17, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Mar 16, 2018] Corbyn Calls for Evidence in Escalating Poison Row Published on Mar 16, 2018 | therealnews.com

[Mar 16, 2018] NATO to display common front in Skripal case Published on Mar 16, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Mar 15, 2018] The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation Published on Mar 14, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Mar 14, 2018] Russian UN anvoy> alleged the Salisbury attack was a false-flag attack, possibly by the UK itself, intended to harm Russia s reputation by Julian Borger Published on Mar 14, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

[Mar 14, 2018] UNSC holds urgent meeting over Salisbury attack Published on Mar 14, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Mar 13, 2018] The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party by Patrick Martin Published on Mar 13, 2018 | www.wsws.org

[Mar 12, 2018] New Huge Anti-Russian Provocation ahead of Russian election by Robert Stevens Published on www.moonofalabama.org

[Mar 12, 2018] State Department's War on Political Dissent Published on Mar 12, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

[Mar 11, 2018] Reality Check: The Guardian Restarts Push for Regime Change in Russia by Kit Published on Mar 11, 2018 | off-guardian.org

[Mar 11, 2018] The Elephant In The Room by Craig Murray Published on Mar 11, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

[Mar 11, 2018] It is highly probably that Steele and Skripal knew each other Published on Mar 10, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Mar 11, 2018] Ramping Russophobia is the most convincing motive for the Skripal attack Published on Mar 11, 2018 | twitter.com

[Mar 10, 2018] Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko s death. Published on Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this Published on Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Mar 08, 2018] Mueller determines the US foreign policy toward Russia; The Intel Community Lies About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus Published on Mar 07, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Mar 08, 2018] Cue bono question in Scripal case? Published on Mar 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Mar 08, 2018] In recent years, there has been ample evidence that US policy-makers and, equally important, mainstream media commentators do not bother to read what Putin says, or at least not more than snatches from click-bait wire-service reports. Published on Mar 08, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Mar 06, 2018] Is MSNBC Now the Most Dangerous Warmonger Network by Norman Solomon Published on Mar 03, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

[Mar 06, 2018] The U.S. Returns to 'Great Power Competition,' With a Dangerous New Edge Published on Mar 06, 2018 | fpif.org

[Mar 06, 2018] The current anti-Russian sentiment in the West as hysterical. But this hysteria is concentrated at the top level of media elite and neocons. Behind it is no deep sense of unity or national resolve. In fact we see the reverse - most Western countries are deeply divided within themselves due to the crisis of neolineralism. Published on Mar 06, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Mar 02, 2018] Contradictions In Seth Rich Murder Continue To Challenge Hacking Narrative Published on Mar 02, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Feb 26, 2018] Democrat Memo Lays Egg by Publius Tacitus Published on Feb 26, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Feb 23, 2018] NSA Genius Debunks Russiagate Once For All Published on Feb 23, 2018 | www.youtube.com

[Feb 22, 2018] Bill Binney explodes the rile of 17 agances security assessment memo in launching the Russia witch-hunt Published on Mar 4, 2017 | www.youtube.com

[Feb 20, 2018] For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia Published on Feb 20, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Feb 20, 2018] Russophobia is a futile bid to conceal US, European demise by Finian Cunningham Published on Feb 20, 2018 | www.rt.com

[Feb 19, 2018] Nunes FBI and DOJ Perps Could Be Put on Trial by Ray McGovern Published on Feb 19, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

[Feb 19, 2018] The Russiagate Intelligence Wars What We Do and Don't Know Published on Feb 19, 2018 | www.thenation.com

[Feb 18, 2018] This dangerous escalation of tensions with Russia is extremely lucrative for the war profiteers, the retired generals intelligence members who prostitute themselves as media pundits, the members of Congress who get $$$ from the war profiteers, and the corporate media which thrives on links to the war profiteers as well as on war reporting Published on Feb 18, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

[Feb 14, 2018] Recused Judge in Flynn Prosecution Served on FISA Court Published on Feb 14, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Feb 14, 2018] The Anti-Trump Coup by Michael S. Rozeff Published on Feb 21, 2017 | www.lewrockwell.com

[Feb 10, 2018] More on neoliberal newspeak of US propaganda machine Published on Feb 10, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

[Feb 08, 2018] Control of narrative means that creation of the simplistic picture in which the complexities of the world are elided in favor of 'good guys' vs. 'bad guys' dichotomy Published on Feb 08, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Jan 26, 2018] Warns The Russiagate Stakes Are Extreme by Paul Craig Roberts Published on Jan 26, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Jan 25, 2018] Russiagate as Kafka 2.0 Published on Jan 25, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Jan 24, 2018] Brazen Plot To Exonerate Hillary Clinton And Frame Trump Unraveling, Says Former Fed Prosecutor Published on Jan 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Jan 16, 2018] The Russia Explainer Published on Apr 04, 2017 | russiaexplainer.com

[Jan 14, 2018] Sic Semper Tyrannis The Trump Dossier Timeline, A Democrat Disaster Looming by Publius Tacitus Published on Jan 12, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Jan 06, 2018] Russia-gate Breeds Establishment McCarthyism by Robert Parry Published on Oct 27, 2017 | ronpaulinstitute.org

[Jan 02, 2018] The Still-Missing Evidence of Russia-gate by Dennis J. Bernstein Published on Jan 02, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

[Jan 02, 2018] Some investigators ask a sensible question: "It is likely that all the Russians involved in the attempt to influence the 2016 election were lying, scheming, Kremlin-linked, Putin-backed enemies of America except the Russians who talked to Christopher Steele?" Published on Dec 30, 2017 | theduran.com

[Jan 02, 2018] What We Don t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking by Jackson Lears Published on Jan 04, 2018 | lrb.co.uk

[Jan 02, 2018] Jill Stein in the Cross-hairs by Mike Whitney Published on Dec 26, 2017 | www.unz.com

[Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater Published on Dec 28, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com

[Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou Published on Dec 28, 2017 | theduran.com

[Dec 28, 2017] On your surmise that Putin prefers Trump to Hillary and would thus have incentive to influence the election, I beg to differ. Putin is one smart statesman; he knows very well it makes no difference which candidates gets elected in US elections. Published on Dec 28, 2017 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Dec 27, 2017] Putin is one smart statesman; he knows very well it makes no difference which candidates gets elected in US elections. Any candidate that WOULD make a difference would NEVER see the daylight of nomination, especially at the presidential level. I myself believe all the talk of Russia interfering the 2016 Election is no more than a witch hunt Published on Dec 27, 2017 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Dec 18, 2017] The Scary Void Inside Russia-gate by Stephen F. Cohen Published on Dec 15, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

[Dec 13, 2017] All the signs in the Russia probe point to Jared Kushner. Who next? Published on Dec 13, 2017 | www.theguardian.com

[Dec 11, 2017] How Russia-gate Met the Magnitsky Myth by Robert Parry Published on Jul 13, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

[Dec 10, 2017] blamePutin continues to be the media s dominant hashtag. Vladimir Putin finally confesses his entire responsibility for everything bad that has ever happened since the beginning of time Published on Dec 10, 2017 | off-guardian.org

[Dec 10, 2017] Russia-gate s Reach into Journalism by Dennis J Bernstein Published on Dec 10, 2017 | www.facebook.com

[Dec 09, 2017] Hyping the Russian Threat to Undermine Free Speech by Max Blumenthal Published on Nov 13, 2017 | www.truthdig.com

[Nov 28, 2017] The Duplicitous Superpower by Ted Galen Carpenter Published on Nov 28, 2017 | www.theamericanconservative.com

[Nov 08, 2017] The Plot to Scapegoat Russia How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Putin by Dan Kovalik Published on Jun 09, 2017 | www.amazon.com

[Nov 08, 2017] Learning to Love McCarthyism by Robert Parry Published on Nov 08, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

[Nov 04, 2017] Who's Afraid of Corporate COINTELPRO by C. J. Hopkins Published on Nov 04, 2017 | www.unz.com

[Oct 13, 2017] Sympathy for the Corporatocracy by C. J. Hopkins Published on Oct 13, 2017 | www.unz.com

[Oct 11, 2017] Russia witch hunt is a tactic used by the ruling elite, and in particular the Democratic Party, to avoid facing a very unpleasant reality: that their unpopularity is the outcome of their policies of deindustrialization and the assault against working class Published on Oct 11, 2017 | www.unz.com

[Oct 09, 2017] After Nine Months, Only Stale Crumbs in Russia Inquiry by Scott Ritter Published on Oct 09, 2017 | www.theamericanconservative.com

[Oct 03, 2017] Russian Ads On Facebook A Click-Bait Campaign Published on Oct 03, 2017 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Sep 30, 2017] Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is Skepticism Permissible Yet by Glenn Greenwald Published on Sep 28, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

[Sep 26, 2017] Is Foreign Propaganda Even Effective by Leon Hadar Published on Sep 26, 2017 | www.theamericanconservative.com

[Sep 24, 2017] Mark Ames When Mother Jones Was Investigated for Spreading Kremlin Disinformation by Mark Ames Published on Jun 03, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

[Sep 18, 2017] The NYT's Yellow Journalism on Russia by Rober Parry Published on Sep 18, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

[Sep 17, 2017] The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense by Publius Tacitus Published on Sep 05, 2017 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Aug 08, 2017] The Tale of the Brothers Awan by Philip Giraldi Published on Aug 08, 2017 | www.unz.com

[Jul 30, 2017] the Ukrainingate emerging from the evidence on Hillary campaign sounds like a criminal conspiracy of foreign state against Trump Published on Jul 30, 2017 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Jul 29, 2017] Ray McGovern The Deep State Assault on Elected Government Must Be Stopped Published on Apr 2, 2017 | www.youtube.com

[Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills Published on Jul 14, 2017 | nationalinterest.org

[Jul 13, 2017] Progressive Democrats Resist and Submit, Retreat and Surrender by James Petras Published on Jul 10, 2017 | www.unz.com

[Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary Published on Jul 12, 2017 | russia-insider.com

[Jul 01, 2017] MUST SEE video explains the entire 17 Intelligence Agencies Russian hacking lie Published on Jul 01, 2017 | theduran.com

[Jun 26, 2017] The Soft Coup Under Way In Washington by David Stockman Published on Jun 22, 2017 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

[Jun 15, 2017] Comeys Lies of Omission by Mike Whitney Published on Jun 14, 2017 | www.unz.com

[May 23, 2017] Trumped-up claims against Trump by Ray McGovern Published on May 17, 2017 | www.baltimoresun.com

[May 20, 2017] Invasion of the Putin-Nazis by C.J. Hopkins Published on May 17, 2017 | www.unz.com

[Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia Published on Dec 09, 2016 | www.theguardian.com

[Oct 12, 2016] NSA whistleblower says DNC hack was not done by Russia, but by US intelligence Published on Oct 12, 2016 | theduran.com

[Mar 17, 2018] How the gas was administred in a place which was under surveillance and why passersby were not affected Published on Mar 17, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Mar 15, 2018] The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation Published on Mar 14, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Mar 11, 2018] Washington s Century-long War on Russia by Mike Whitney Published on www.nakedcapitalism.com

[Mar 10, 2018] Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in Obama policy and HRC campaign long before any Steele s Dossier. This was a program ofunleashing cold War II Published on Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Jan 28, 2018] Russiagate Isn t About Trump, And It Isn t Even Ultimately About Russia by Caitlyn Johnstone Published on Jan 28, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

[Jul 01, 2017] MUST SEE video explains the entire 17 Intelligence Agencies Russian hacking lie Published on Jul 01, 2017 | theduran.com

[Jun 26, 2017] The Soft Coup Under Way In Washington by David Stockman Published on Jun 22, 2017 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

[Jun 15, 2017] Comeys Lies of Omission by Mike Whitney Published on Jun 14, 2017 | www.unz.com

[May 23, 2017] Trumped-up claims against Trump by Ray McGovern Published on May 17, 2017 | www.baltimoresun.com

[May 20, 2017] Invasion of the Putin-Nazis by C.J. Hopkins Published on May 17, 2017 | www.unz.com

[Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia Published on Dec 09, 2016 | www.theguardian.com

[Oct 12, 2016] NSA whistleblower says DNC hack was not done by Russia, but by US intelligence Published on Oct 12, 2016 | theduran.com

Oldies But Goodies

  • [Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia
  • [Oct 12, 2016] NSA whistleblower says DNC hack was not done by Russia, but by US intelligence
  • [Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou
  • [Dec 28, 2017] On your surmise that Putin prefers Trump to Hillary and would thus have incentive to influence the election, I beg to differ. Putin is one smart statesman; he knows very well it makes no difference which candidates gets elected in US elections.
  • [Dec 27, 2017] Putin is one smart statesman; he knows very well it makes no difference which candidates gets elected in US elections. Any candidate that WOULD make a difference would NEVER see the daylight of nomination, especially at the presidential level. I myself believe all the talk of Russia interfering the 2016 Election is no more than a witch hunt
  • [Dec 18, 2017] The Scary Void Inside Russia-gate by Stephen F. Cohen
  • [Dec 13, 2017] All the signs in the Russia probe point to Jared Kushner. Who next?
  • [Dec 11, 2017] How Russia-gate Met the Magnitsky Myth by Robert Parry
  • [Dec 10, 2017] blamePutin continues to be the media s dominant hashtag. Vladimir Putin finally confesses his entire responsibility for everything bad that has ever happened since the beginning of time
  • [Dec 10, 2017] Russia-gate s Reach into Journalism by Dennis J Bernstein
  • [Dec 09, 2017] Hyping the Russian Threat to Undermine Free Speech by Max Blumenthal
  • [Nov 28, 2017] The Duplicitous Superpower by Ted Galen Carpenter
  • [Nov 08, 2017] The Plot to Scapegoat Russia How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Putin by Dan Kovalik
  • [Nov 08, 2017] Learning to Love McCarthyism by Robert Parry
  • [Nov 04, 2017] Who's Afraid of Corporate COINTELPRO by C. J. Hopkins
  • [Oct 13, 2017] Sympathy for the Corporatocracy by C. J. Hopkins
  • [Oct 11, 2017] Russia witch hunt is a tactic used by the ruling elite, and in particular the Democratic Party, to avoid facing a very unpleasant reality: that their unpopularity is the outcome of their policies of deindustrialization and the assault against working class
  • [Oct 09, 2017] After Nine Months, Only Stale Crumbs in Russia Inquiry by Scott Ritter
  • [Oct 03, 2017] Russian Ads On Facebook A Click-Bait Campaign
  • [Sep 30, 2017] Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is Skepticism Permissible Yet by Glenn Greenwald
  • [Sep 26, 2017] Is Foreign Propaganda Even Effective by Leon Hadar
  • [Sep 24, 2017] Mark Ames When Mother Jones Was Investigated for Spreading Kremlin Disinformation by Mark Ames
  • [Sep 18, 2017] The NYT's Yellow Journalism on Russia by Rober Parry
  • [Sep 17, 2017] The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense by Publius Tacitus
  • [Aug 08, 2017] The Tale of the Brothers Awan by Philip Giraldi
  • [Jul 30, 2017] the Ukrainingate emerging from the evidence on Hillary campaign sounds like a criminal conspiracy of foreign state against Trump
  • [Jul 29, 2017] Ray McGovern The Deep State Assault on Elected Government Must Be Stopped
  • [Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills
  • [Jul 13, 2017] Progressive Democrats Resist and Submit, Retreat and Surrender by James Petras
  • [Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary
  • [Jul 01, 2017] MUST SEE video explains the entire 17 Intelligence Agencies Russian hacking lie
  • [Jun 26, 2017] The Soft Coup Under Way In Washington by David Stockman
  • [Jun 15, 2017] Comeys Lies of Omission by Mike Whitney
  • [May 23, 2017] Trumped-up claims against Trump by Ray McGovern
  • [May 20, 2017] Invasion of the Putin-Nazis by C.J. Hopkins
  • [Dec 22, 2018] British Security Service Infiltration, the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft by Craig Murray
  • [Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts
  • [Dec 21, 2018] Virtually no one in neoliberal MSM is paying attention to the fact that a group of Pakistani muslims, working for a Jewish Congresswoman from Florida, had full computer access to a large number of Democrat Representatives. Most of the press is disinterested in pursuing this matter
  • [Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat
  • [Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi
  • [Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders
  • [Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi
  • [Nov 24, 2018] MI6 Scrambling To Stop Trump From Releasing Classified Docs In Russia Probe
  • [Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda
  • [Nov 24, 2018] British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns
  • [Nov 24, 2018] Now we know created MH17 smear campaign, who financial Steele dossier and created Skripal affair ;-)
  • [Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.
  • [Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore
  • [Oct 25, 2018] DNC Emails--A Seth Attack Not a Russian Hack by Publius Tacitus
  • [Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir
  • [Oct 09, 2018] The Skripals Are an MI6 Hoax - 'Not Worthy of Ladies' Detective Novels' - Israeli Expert Demolishes UK Case
  • [Oct 08, 2018] British intelligence now officially is a by-word for organized crime by John Wight
  • [Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum
  • [Oct 02, 2018] I m puzzled why CIA is so against Kavanaugh?
  • [Sep 23, 2018] UK Begged Trump Not To Declassify Russia Docs; Cited Grave Concerns Over Steele Involvement
  • [Sep 21, 2018] One party state: Trump's 'Opposition' Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsence by Caitlin Johnstone
  • [Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin
  • [Sep 15, 2018] BBC is skanky state propaganda
  • [Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts
  • [Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov
  • [Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement
  • [Aug 08, 2018] Sergei Skripal was linked to a consultant with former UK spy Christopher Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence
  • [Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography
  • [Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake.
  • [Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?
  • [Jul 23, 2018] Chickens with Their Heads Cut Off, Coming Home to Roost. The "Treason Narrative" by Helen Buyniski
  • [Jul 22, 2018] Tucker Carlson SLAMS Intelligence Community On Russia
  • [Jul 20, 2018] So many (ex-) MI6 operators (Steele, Tait, etc) involved in the story. It is interesting that the media don t question the intense involvement of the British in all this. And of course, the British haven t been laggards in adding fuel to the fire by the whole novichok hoax
  • [Jul 20, 2018] What exactly is fake news caucus99percent
  • [Jul 20, 2018] Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia by Paul Craig Roberts
  • [Jul 17, 2018] I think there is much more to the comment made by Putin regarding Bill Browder and his money flows into the DNC and Clinton campaign. That would explain why the DNC didn t hand the servers over to the FBI after being hacked.
  • [Jul 16, 2018] Five Things That Would Make The CIA-CNN Russia Narrative More Believable
  • [Jul 15, 2018] Sic Semper Tyrannis HILLARY CLINTON S COMPROMISED EMAILS WERE GOING TO A FOREIGN ENTITY – NOT RUSSIA! FBI Agent Ignored Evide
  • [Jul 15, 2018] Peter Strzok Ignored Evidence Of Clinton Server Breach
  • [Jul 15, 2018] Something Rotten About the DOJ Indictment of the GRU by Publius Tacitus
  • [Jul 15, 2018] As if the Donald did not sanctioned to death the Russians on every possible level. How is this different from Mueller's and comp witch hunt against the Russians?
  • [Jul 13, 2018] False flag operation covering DNC leaks now involves Mueller and his team
  • [Jul 05, 2018] Britain's Most Censored Stories (Non-Military)
  • [Jul 03, 2018] Russia has a lot of information about Lybia that could dig a political grave for Hillary. They did not release it
  • [Jul 03, 2018] Musings II The "Intelligence Community," "Russian Interference," and Due Diligence
  • [Jun 17, 2018] Mattis Putin Is Trying To Undermine America s Moral Authority by Caitlin Johnstone
  • [Jun 17, 2018] the dominant political forces in EU are anti-Russia
  • [Jun 13, 2018] How False Flag Operations Are Carried Out Today by Philip M. GIRALDI
  • [Jun 12, 2018] The real reason for which 'information apocalypse' terrifies the mainstream media
  • [Jun 09, 2018] Spooks Spooking Themselves by Daniel Lazare
  • [Jun 09, 2018] Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack by Ray McGovern
  • [May 31, 2018] Journalists and academics expose UK's criminal actions in the Middle East by Julie Hyland
  • [May 29, 2018] Guccifer 2.0's American Fingerprints Reveal An Operation Made In The USA by Elizabeth Lea Vos
  • [May 24, 2018] The diversion of Russia Gate is a continuation of former diversions such as the Tea Party which was invented by the banksters to turn public anger over the big banking collapse and the resulting recession into a movement to gain more deregulation for tax breaks for the wealthy
  • [May 23, 2018] If the Trump-Russia set up began in spring 2016 or earlier, presumably it was undertaken on the assumption that HRC would win the election. (I say "presumably" because you never can tell..) If so, then the operation would have been an MI6 / Ukrainian / CIA coordinated op intended to frame Putin, not Trump
  • [May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b
  • [May 03, 2018] Skripal case British confirm they have no suspect; Yulia Skripal vanishes, no word of Sergey Skripal by Alexander Mercouris
  • [May 03, 2018] Despite all the propaganda, all the hysterical headlines, all the blatantly biased coverage, the British haven't bought it
  • [Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice
  • [Apr 23, 2018] The Tony Blair Rule: The Truth Takes 15 Years to Come Out, Skripal Countdown Starts Now - Simonyan
  • [Apr 21, 2018] It s a tough old world and we are certainly capable of a Salisbury set-up and god knows what else in Syria.
  • [Apr 16, 2018] British Propaganda and Disinformation An Imperial and Colonial Tradition by Wayne MADSEN
  • [Apr 15, 2018] The Trump Regime Is Insane by Paul Craig Roberts
  • [Apr 10, 2018] The Ghouta Massacre near Damascus on Aug 21, 2013 was not a sarin rocket attack carried out by Assad or his supporters. It was a false-flag stunt carried out by the insurgents using carbon monoxide or cyanide to murder children and use their corpses as bait to lure the Americans into attacking Assad.
  • [Apr 05, 2018] The Three Most Important Aspects of the Skripal Case so Far and Where They by Rob Slane
  • [Apr 05, 2018] An Interview with Retired Russian General Evgeny Buzhinsky The National Interest
  • [Apr 03, 2018] This Washington Post Headline Is Fake News
  • [Apr 03, 2018] Exercise TOXIC DAGGER - the sharp end of chemical warfare
  • [Apr 02, 2018] Russophobia Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy by A. Tsygankov
  • [Apr 02, 2018] Russia 'Novichok' Hysteria Proves Politicians and Media Haven't Learned the Lessons of Iraq by Patrick Henningsen
  • [Apr 02, 2018] The Litvinenko Conspiracy
  • [Apr 01, 2018] UK may have staged Skripal poisoning to rally people against Russia, Moscow believes
  • [Mar 31, 2018] FBI Director Mueller testified to Congress that Saddam Hussein was responsible for anthrax attack! That was Mueller's role in selling the "intelligence" to invade Iraq.
  • [Mar 27, 2018] The Stormy Daniels scandal Political warfare in Washington hits a new low by Patrick Martin
  • [Mar 25, 2018] Cambridge Analytica Scandal Rockets to Watergate Proportions and Beyond by Adam Garrie
  • [Mar 24, 2018] Why the UK, the EU and the US Gang-Up on Russia by James Petras
  • [Mar 22, 2018] Vladimir Putin: nonsense to think Russia would poison spy in UK
  • [Mar 21, 2018] Arafat and Litvinenko: an Interesting Turn to a Mysterious Story
  • [Mar 21, 2018] Whataboutism Is A Nonsensical Propaganda Term Used To Defend The Failed Status Quo by Mike Krieger
  • [Mar 17, 2018] How the gas was administred in a place which was under surveillance and why passersby were not affected
  • [Mar 16, 2018] Corbyn Calls for Evidence in Escalating Poison Row
  • [Mar 16, 2018] NATO to display common front in Skripal case
  • [Mar 15, 2018] The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation
  • [Mar 14, 2018] Russian UN anvoy> alleged the Salisbury attack was a false-flag attack, possibly by the UK itself, intended to harm Russia s reputation by Julian Borger
  • [Mar 14, 2018] UNSC holds urgent meeting over Salisbury attack
  • [Mar 13, 2018] The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party by Patrick Martin
  • [Mar 12, 2018] New Huge Anti-Russian Provocation ahead of Russian election by Robert Stevens
  • [Mar 12, 2018] State Department's War on Political Dissent
  • [Mar 11, 2018] Reality Check: The Guardian Restarts Push for Regime Change in Russia by Kit
  • [Mar 11, 2018] The Elephant In The Room by Craig Murray
  • [Mar 11, 2018] It is highly probably that Steele and Skripal knew each other
  • [Mar 11, 2018] Ramping Russophobia is the most convincing motive for the Skripal attack
  • [Mar 10, 2018] Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko s death.
  • [Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this
  • [Mar 08, 2018] Mueller determines the US foreign policy toward Russia; The Intel Community Lies About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus
  • [Mar 08, 2018] Cue bono question in Scripal case?
  • [Mar 08, 2018] In recent years, there has been ample evidence that US policy-makers and, equally important, mainstream media commentators do not bother to read what Putin says, or at least not more than snatches from click-bait wire-service reports.
  • [Mar 06, 2018] Is MSNBC Now the Most Dangerous Warmonger Network by Norman Solomon
  • [Mar 06, 2018] The U.S. Returns to 'Great Power Competition,' With a Dangerous New Edge
  • [Mar 06, 2018] The current anti-Russian sentiment in the West as hysterical. But this hysteria is concentrated at the top level of media elite and neocons. Behind it is no deep sense of unity or national resolve. In fact we see the reverse - most Western countries are deeply divided within themselves due to the crisis of neolineralism.
  • [Mar 02, 2018] Contradictions In Seth Rich Murder Continue To Challenge Hacking Narrative
  • [Feb 26, 2018] Democrat Memo Lays Egg by Publius Tacitus
  • [Feb 23, 2018] NSA Genius Debunks Russiagate Once For All
  • [Feb 22, 2018] Bill Binney explodes the rile of 17 agances security assessment memo in launching the Russia witch-hunt
  • [Feb 20, 2018] For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia
  • [Feb 20, 2018] Russophobia is a futile bid to conceal US, European demise by Finian Cunningham
  • [Feb 19, 2018] Nunes FBI and DOJ Perps Could Be Put on Trial by Ray McGovern
  • [Feb 19, 2018] The Russiagate Intelligence Wars What We Do and Don't Know
  • [Feb 18, 2018] This dangerous escalation of tensions with Russia is extremely lucrative for the war profiteers, the retired generals intelligence members who prostitute themselves as media pundits, the members of Congress who get $$$ from the war profiteers, and the corporate media which thrives on links to the war profiteers as well as on war reporting
  • [Feb 14, 2018] Recused Judge in Flynn Prosecution Served on FISA Court
  • [Feb 14, 2018] The Anti-Trump Coup by Michael S. Rozeff
  • [Feb 10, 2018] More on neoliberal newspeak of US propaganda machine
  • [Feb 08, 2018] Control of narrative means that creation of the simplistic picture in which the complexities of the world are elided in favor of 'good guys' vs. 'bad guys' dichotomy
  • [Jan 26, 2018] Warns The Russiagate Stakes Are Extreme by Paul Craig Roberts
  • [Jan 25, 2018] Russiagate as Kafka 2.0
  • [Jan 24, 2018] Brazen Plot To Exonerate Hillary Clinton And Frame Trump Unraveling, Says Former Fed Prosecutor
  • [Jan 16, 2018] The Russia Explainer
  • [Jan 14, 2018] Sic Semper Tyrannis The Trump Dossier Timeline, A Democrat Disaster Looming by Publius Tacitus
  • [Jan 06, 2018] Russia-gate Breeds Establishment McCarthyism by Robert Parry
  • [Jan 02, 2018] The Still-Missing Evidence of Russia-gate by Dennis J. Bernstein
  • [Jan 02, 2018] Some investigators ask a sensible question: "It is likely that all the Russians involved in the attempt to influence the 2016 election were lying, scheming, Kremlin-linked, Putin-backed enemies of America except the Russians who talked to Christopher Steele?"
  • [Jan 02, 2018] What We Don t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking by Jackson Lears
  • [Jan 02, 2018] Jill Stein in the Cross-hairs by Mike Whitney
  • [Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater
  • [Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou
  • [Dec 28, 2017] On your surmise that Putin prefers Trump to Hillary and would thus have incentive to influence the election, I beg to differ. Putin is one smart statesman; he knows very well it makes no difference which candidates gets elected in US elections.
  • [Dec 27, 2017] Putin is one smart statesman; he knows very well it makes no difference which candidates gets elected in US elections. Any candidate that WOULD make a difference would NEVER see the daylight of nomination, especially at the presidential level. I myself believe all the talk of Russia interfering the 2016 Election is no more than a witch hunt
  • [Dec 18, 2017] The Scary Void Inside Russia-gate by Stephen F. Cohen
  • [Dec 13, 2017] All the signs in the Russia probe point to Jared Kushner. Who next?
  • [Dec 11, 2017] How Russia-gate Met the Magnitsky Myth by Robert Parry
  • [Dec 10, 2017] blamePutin continues to be the media s dominant hashtag. Vladimir Putin finally confesses his entire responsibility for everything bad that has ever happened since the beginning of time
  • [Dec 10, 2017] Russia-gate s Reach into Journalism by Dennis J Bernstein
  • [Dec 09, 2017] Hyping the Russian Threat to Undermine Free Speech by Max Blumenthal
  • [Nov 28, 2017] The Duplicitous Superpower by Ted Galen Carpenter
  • [Nov 08, 2017] The Plot to Scapegoat Russia How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Putin by Dan Kovalik
  • [Nov 08, 2017] Learning to Love McCarthyism by Robert Parry
  • [Nov 04, 2017] Who's Afraid of Corporate COINTELPRO by C. J. Hopkins
  • [Oct 13, 2017] Sympathy for the Corporatocracy by C. J. Hopkins
  • [Oct 11, 2017] Russia witch hunt is a tactic used by the ruling elite, and in particular the Democratic Party, to avoid facing a very unpleasant reality: that their unpopularity is the outcome of their policies of deindustrialization and the assault against working class
  • [Oct 09, 2017] After Nine Months, Only Stale Crumbs in Russia Inquiry by Scott Ritter
  • [Oct 03, 2017] Russian Ads On Facebook A Click-Bait Campaign
  • [Sep 30, 2017] Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is Skepticism Permissible Yet by Glenn Greenwald
  • [Sep 26, 2017] Is Foreign Propaganda Even Effective by Leon Hadar
  • [Sep 24, 2017] Mark Ames When Mother Jones Was Investigated for Spreading Kremlin Disinformation by Mark Ames
  • [Sep 18, 2017] The NYT's Yellow Journalism on Russia by Rober Parry
  • [Sep 17, 2017] The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense by Publius Tacitus
  • [Aug 08, 2017] The Tale of the Brothers Awan by Philip Giraldi
  • [Jul 30, 2017] the Ukrainingate emerging from the evidence on Hillary campaign sounds like a criminal conspiracy of foreign state against Trump
  • [Jul 29, 2017] Ray McGovern The Deep State Assault on Elected Government Must Be Stopped
  • [Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills
  • [Jul 13, 2017] Progressive Democrats Resist and Submit, Retreat and Surrender by James Petras
  • [Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary
  • [Jul 01, 2017] MUST SEE video explains the entire 17 Intelligence Agencies Russian hacking lie
  • [Jun 26, 2017] The Soft Coup Under Way In Washington by David Stockman
  • [Jun 15, 2017] Comeys Lies of Omission by Mike Whitney
  • [May 23, 2017] Trumped-up claims against Trump by Ray McGovern
  • [May 20, 2017] Invasion of the Putin-Nazis by C.J. Hopkins
  • [Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia
  • [Oct 12, 2016] NSA whistleblower says DNC hack was not done by Russia, but by US intelligence
  • [Mar 17, 2018] How the gas was administred in a place which was under surveillance and why passersby were not affected
  • [Mar 15, 2018] The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation
  • [Mar 11, 2018] Washington s Century-long War on Russia by Mike Whitney
  • [Mar 10, 2018] Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in Obama policy and HRC campaign long before any Steele s Dossier. This was a program ofunleashing cold War II
  • [Jan 28, 2018] Russiagate Isn t About Trump, And It Isn t Even Ultimately About Russia by Caitlyn Johnstone
  • [Jul 01, 2017] MUST SEE video explains the entire 17 Intelligence Agencies Russian hacking lie
  • [Jun 26, 2017] The Soft Coup Under Way In Washington by David Stockman
  • [Jun 15, 2017] Comeys Lies of Omission by Mike Whitney
  • [May 23, 2017] Trumped-up claims against Trump by Ray McGovern
  • [May 20, 2017] Invasion of the Putin-Nazis by C.J. Hopkins
  • [Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia
  • [Oct 12, 2016] NSA whistleblower says DNC hack was not done by Russia, but by US intelligence
  • [Dec 28, 2019] Senior OPCW Official Busted Leaked Email Exposes Orders To Delete All Traces Of Dissent On Douma
  • [Dec 22, 2019] So US intelligence tipped off the DNC that their emails were about to be leaked to Wikileaks. That's when the stratagem of attributing the impending Wikileaks release to a Russian hack was born -- distracting from the incriminating content of the emails, while vilifying the Deep State's favorite enemies, Assange and Russia, all in one neat scam
  • [Dec 20, 2019] Did John Brennan's CIA Create Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks by Larry C Johnson
  • [Dec 20, 2019] NSA Whistleblower: "Mueller Report based on fabricated evidence" Former NSA technical chief, Bill Binney, says it looked like the CIA did this, and made it look like the Russians were doing the hack to implicate Russians by Eric Zuesse
  • [Dec 20, 2019] The purpose of manufactured hysteria in the US is to obfuscate the issues important to the Deep State like destroying the first amendment, renewing the 'Patriot' act, extremely increasing the war/hegemony budget, etc
  • [Dec 19, 2019] Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials, often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and incipient tyranny.
  • [Dec 14, 2019] A Determined Effort to Undermine Russia
  • [Dec 10, 2019] The level of Neo-McCarthyism and the number of lunitics this NYT forums is just astonishing: When it comes to Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected.
  • [Dec 07, 2019] Why the foreign policy establishment consensus is neocon by default.
  • [Dec 04, 2019] The central question of Ukrainegate is whether CrowdStrike actions on DNC leak were a false flag operation designed to open Russiagate and what was the level of participation of Poroshenko government and Ukrainian Security services in this false flag operation by Factotum
  • [Dec 04, 2019] Common Funding Themes Link 'Whistleblower' Complaint and CrowdStrike Firm Certifying DNC Russia 'Hack' by Aaron Klein
  • [Dec 04, 2019] DNC Russian Hackers Found! You Won't Believe Who They Really Work For by the Anonymous Patriots
  • [Dec 04, 2019] June 4th, 2017 Crowdstrike Was at the DNC Six Weeks by George Webb
  • [Dec 04, 2019] Cyberanalyst George Eliason Claims that the "Fancy Bear" Who Hacked the DNC Server is Ukrainian Intelligence – In League with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike
  • [Dec 04, 2019] Fancy Bear - Conservapedia
  • [Dec 04, 2019] June 2nd, 2018 Alperovich's DNC Cover Stories Soon To Match With His Hacking Teams by George Webb
  • [Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion
  • [Nov 07, 2019] Rigged Again Dems, Russia, The Delegitimization Of America s Democratic Process by Elizabeth Vos
  • [Nov 03, 2019] Growing Indicators of Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force by Larry C Johnson - Sic Semper Tyrannis
  • [Nov 02, 2019] WATCH Udo Ulfkotte – Bought Journalists by Terje Maloy
  • [Nov 01, 2019] Viable Opposition The Legal Connection Between Washington and Kiev
  • [Nov 01, 2019] Color revolution is a method of using a minority to render the country ungovernble, waving a simplistic banner against corruption and for (undefined) democracy, which leaves the masses unorganized and eschews even a platform, in favor of a secret coterie run by intelligence againces
  • [Oct 28, 2019] Expert Panel Finds Gaping Plot-Holes In OPCW Report On Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack by Caitlin Johnstone
  • [Oct 25, 2019] Trump-Haters, Not Trump, Are The Ones Wrecking America s Institutions, WSJ s Strassel Says
  • [Oct 19, 2019] Russian agents under every bed
  • [Sep 23, 2019] Apparently now that the notion Russia interfered in the US presidential election to tip the vote to Trump has become an article of faith that much of the world regards as established fact
  • [Sep 17, 2019] The Devolution of US-Russia Relations by Tony Kevin
  • [Sep 03, 2019] Russiagate as crocodile tears of western propaganda
  • [Aug 24, 2019] George Kennan on Russia Insights and Recommendations
  • [Aug 21, 2019] Solomon If Trump Declassifies These 10 Documents, Democrats Are Doomed
  • [Aug 17, 2019] Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome (PTDS)
  • [Aug 17, 2019] Debunking the Putin Panic by Stephen F. Cohen
  • [Aug 16, 2019] Ministry of truth materialized in XXI century in a neoliberal way by Kit Knightly
  • [Aug 16, 2019] Lapdogs for the Government and intelligence agencies by Greg Maybury
  • [Aug 12, 2019] Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized
  • [Jul 29, 2019] The Real Reason The Propagandists Have Been Promoting Russia Hysteria by Caitlin Johnstone
  • [Jul 28, 2019] Mueller Crumbles Under Questioning by Barbara Boland
  • [Jul 28, 2019] Antisemitism prejudices projection on Russians
  • [Jul 27, 2019] Russia interfered on a massive scale ($3,684 was spends on ads on which $1932 on promoting Trump) and is doing it again as we sit here! Just how massive? They spent $100,000 on clickbait ads from a company owned by a man who was in a photo with the evil mastermind!
  • [Jul 27, 2019] Understanding the Roots of the Obama Coup Against Trump by Larry C Johnson
  • [Jul 26, 2019] Tucker: Democrats believed Mueller would save America. But he is A daft old man blinking in the sunlight once the curtain has been opened
  • [Jul 26, 2019] Tucker What should happen to those who lied about Russian collusion
  • [Jul 13, 2019] Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson
  • [Jul 06, 2019] Mueller Report Gets the Trump Tower Meeting Wrong; Promotes Browder Hoax by Lucy Komisar
  • [Jun 30, 2019] USG's Bizarre Change of Position in the Roger Stone Case by Larry C Johnson
  • [Jun 19, 2019] Investigation Nation Mueller, Russiagate, and Fake Politics by Jim Kavanagh
  • [Jun 14, 2019] Comments on Yasha Levin article: With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite
  • [May 29, 2019] With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite by Yasha Levine
  • [May 28, 2019] Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word Jew for Russian and International Jewry for Russia and re-read.
  • [May 22, 2019] NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries
  • [May 20, 2019] "Us" Versus "Them"
  • [May 19, 2019] How Russiagate replaced Analysis of the 2016 Election by Rick Sterling
  • [May 19, 2019] Intel agencies of the UK and US are guilty of fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing fake analysis and operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity
  • [May 16, 2019] The Disinformationists by C.J. Hopkins
  • [May 15, 2019] Russia-gate s Monstrous Offspring
  • [May 14, 2019] The Propaganda Multiplier How Global News Agencies and Western Media Report on Geopolitics
  • [May 13, 2019] US Foreign Policy as Bellicose as Ever by Serge Halimi
  • [May 12, 2019] Charting a Progressive Foreign Policy for the Trump Era and Beyond
  • [May 11, 2019] Doug Ross @ Journal A TIMELINE OF TREASON How the DNC and FBI Leadership Tried to Fix a Presidential Election [Updated]
  • [May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus
  • [May 11, 2019] CIA Paid $100,000 To Shadowy Russian For Dirt on Trump, Including Sex Video by Chuck Ross
  • [May 08, 2019] Obama Spied on Other Republicans and Democrats As Well by Larry C Johnson
  • [May 07, 2019] Look! A whale!
  • [May 07, 2019] Chris Hedges: The Demonization of Russia is Driven by Defense Contractors
  • [Apr 29, 2019] The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory by Aaron Maté
  • [Apr 28, 2019] The British Role in Russiagate Is About to Be Fully Exposed
  • [Apr 28, 2019] Breath of fresh air--real journalism again! Have so much respect for Chris Hedges and Aaron Mate, great work!
  • [Apr 28, 2019] On Contact Russiagate Mueller Report w- Aaron Mate
  • [Apr 26, 2019] Jared Kushner, Not Maria Butina, Is America's Real Foreign Agent by Philip Giraldi
  • [Apr 26, 2019] Intelligence agencies meddling in elections
  • [Apr 22, 2019] FBI top brass have been colluding with top brass of CIA and MI6 to pursue ambitious anti-Russian agenda
  • [Apr 22, 2019] Current Neo-McCarthyism hysteria as a smoke screen of the UK and the USA intent to dominate European geopolitics and weaken Russia and Germany
  • [Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA
  • [Apr 21, 2019] Whenever someone inconveniences the neoliberal oligarchy, the entire neoliberal MSM mafia tells us 24 x7 how evil and disgusting that person is. It's true of the leader of every nation which rejects neoliberal globalization as well as for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
  • [Apr 20, 2019] Trump has certainly made the world safer
  • [Apr 20, 2019] Sure, blame those guys over there for Hillary fiasco and hire Mueller to get the goods . That s the ultimate the dog ate my homework excuse.
  • [Apr 17, 2019] The media's interest in the well-being of a foreign population is directly proportional to the West's interest in toppling its government, while editorial standards are inversely proportional to its enemy status
  • [Apr 16, 2019] CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump
  • [Apr 13, 2019] Russophobia, A WMD (Weapon Of Mass Deception) by Jean Ranc
  • [Apr 10, 2019] Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times
  • [Apr 08, 2019] Aaron Maté Was Also Right About Russiagate
  • [Apr 06, 2019] The Magnitsky Act-Behind the Scenes ASEEES
  • [Apr 04, 2019] TEST IT YOURSELF, THE 2-SECOND-ROUNDING FACT PATTERN IN THE DNC EMAILS By William Binney and Larry Johnson
  • [Apr 02, 2019] 'Yats' Is No Longer the Guy by Robert Parry
  • [Apr 01, 2019] Amazon.com War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate (9781510745810) Stephen F. Cohen Books
  • [Mar 31, 2019] What is the purpose of Russiagate hysteria?
  • [Mar 30, 2019] The Real Costs of Russiagate
  • [Mar 30, 2019] You don't like Trump? Bolton? Clinton? All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population.
  • [Mar 25, 2019] Spygate The True Story of Collusion (plus Infographic) by Jeff Carlson
  • [Mar 24, 2019] The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian.
  • [Mar 24, 2019] The accountability that must follow Mueller's report
  • [Mar 24, 2019] "Russia Gate" investigation was a color revolution agaist Trump. But a strnge side effect was that Clintons have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug to the status of some kind of martyr.
  • [Mar 24, 2019] With RussiaGate Over Where's Hillary
  • [Mar 24, 2019] One thing left out is the ability of readers to call BS on a story i.e. a robust comment section for debates.
  • [Mar 23, 2019] Brennan pipe dream obliterated. The color revolution against Trump failed
  • [Mar 22, 2019] Glenn Greenwald on Twitter The Mueller investigation is complete and this is a simple fact that will never go away
  • [Mar 18, 2019] Journalists who are spies
  • [Mar 18, 2019] The Why are the media playing lapdog and not watchdog – again – on war in Iraq?
  • [Mar 17, 2019] VIPS- Mueller's Forensics-Free Findings
  • [Mar 06, 2019] Disinformation destroys reality
  • [Feb 22, 2019] Neo-McCarthyism is used to defend the US imperial policies. Branding dissidents as Russian stooges is a loophole that allow to suppress dissident opinions
  • [Feb 17, 2019] Trump is Russian asset memo is really neocon propaganda overkill
  • [Feb 16, 2019] MSM Begs For Trust After Buzzfeed Debacle by Caitlin Johnstone
  • [Feb 13, 2019] MoA - Russiagate Is Finished
  • [Feb 13, 2019] Stephen Cohen on War with Russia and Soviet-style Censorship in the US by Russell Mokhiber
  • [Feb 09, 2019] Did The Department Of Justice Protect Brenda Snipes From Prosecution For Ballot Destruction by Elizabeth Lea Vos
  • [Jan 22, 2019] War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate
  • [Jan 21, 2019] Beyond BuzzFeed The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures On The Trump-Russia Story by Glenn Greenwald
  • [Jan 20, 2019] Doctor, nurse, Chief Nursing Officer of the Army, whatever.
  • [Jan 19, 2019] Coincidence - Chief Nurse Of British Army Was First Person To Arrive At Novichoked Skripal Scene
  • [Jan 11, 2019] New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics by Mark Ames
  • [Jan 11, 2019] Facts does not matter in the current propoganda environment, the narrative is everything
  • [Jan 08, 2019] Shock Files- What Role Did Integrity Initiative Play in Sergei Skripal Affair- - Sputnik International
  • [Jan 08, 2019] Skripal spin doctors- Documents link UK govt-funded Integrity Initiative to anti-Russia narrative
  • [Jan 06, 2019] British elite fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.
  • [Jan 02, 2019] Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News
  • [Jan 02, 2019] The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts" by Mac Slavo
  • [Jan 02, 2019] Did Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article ?
  • [Dec 30, 2018] RussiaGate In Review with Aaron Mate - Unreasoned Fear is Neoliberalism's Response to the Credibility Gap
  • [Dec 29, 2018] -Election Meddling- Enters Bizarro World As MSM Ignores Democrat-Linked -Russian Bot- Scheme -
  • [Dec 22, 2018] British Security Service Infiltration, the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft by Craig Murray
  • [Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts
  • [Dec 21, 2018] Virtually no one in neoliberal MSM is paying attention to the fact that a group of Pakistani muslims, working for a Jewish Congresswoman from Florida, had full computer access to a large number of Democrat Representatives. Most of the press is disinterested in pursuing this matter
  • [Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat
  • [Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi
  • [Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders
  • [Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi
  • [Nov 24, 2018] MI6 Scrambling To Stop Trump From Releasing Classified Docs In Russia Probe
  • [Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda
  • [Nov 24, 2018] British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns
  • [Nov 24, 2018] Now we know created MH17 smear campaign, who financial Steele dossier and created Skripal affair ;-)
  • [Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.
  • [Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore
  • [Oct 25, 2018] DNC Emails--A Seth Attack Not a Russian Hack by Publius Tacitus
  • [Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir
  • [Oct 09, 2018] The Skripals Are an MI6 Hoax - 'Not Worthy of Ladies' Detective Novels' - Israeli Expert Demolishes UK Case
  • [Oct 08, 2018] British intelligence now officially is a by-word for organized crime by John Wight
  • [Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum
  • [Oct 02, 2018] I m puzzled why CIA is so against Kavanaugh?
  • [Sep 23, 2018] UK Begged Trump Not To Declassify Russia Docs; Cited Grave Concerns Over Steele Involvement
  • [Sep 21, 2018] One party state: Trump's 'Opposition' Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsence by Caitlin Johnstone
  • [Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin
  • [Sep 15, 2018] BBC is skanky state propaganda
  • [Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts
  • [Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov
  • [Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement
  • [Oct 19, 2019] Russian agents under every bed
  • [Sep 15, 2019] Demythologizing the Roots of the New Cold War by Ted Snider
  • [Sep 03, 2019] Russiagate as crocodile tears of western propaganda
  • [Aug 17, 2019] Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome (PTDS)
  • [Jul 27, 2019] Russia interfered on a massive scale ($3,684 was spends on ads on which $1932 on promoting Trump) and is doing it again as we sit here! Just how massive? They spent $100,000 on clickbait ads from a company owned by a man who was in a photo with the evil mastermind!
  • [Jul 26, 2019] Tucker: Democrats believed Mueller would save America. But he is A daft old man blinking in the sunlight once the curtain has been opened
  • [Jun 03, 2020] Dems ratpack of reparations freaks, weird sexual curiosities, and race hustlers is actually a fifth column for Trump re-election by Fred Reed
  • [Jun 03, 2020] Not The Onion: NY Times Urges Trump To Establish Closer Ties With Moscow
  • [Jun 03, 2020] Rule of law in Murrika is kaput
  • [May 07, 2019] Look! A whale!
  • [Sep 28, 2020] Truth be told: political operatives own and run our MSM. This is why the press is called the 'Fourth Estate'
  • [Sep 26, 2020] Galloway- Lying industry may be the only sector of Western economies still in full production TAXPAYERS pay for it
  • [Sep 25, 2020] US standard "negotiating" techniques
  • [Sep 23, 2020] How fake media actually works: reporter are given the narrative and they should rehash their stories to fit it
  • [Sep 23, 2020] The deviousness of Russians is completly off the charts.
  • [Sep 21, 2020] Stephen F. Cohen- The Ukrainian Crisis - It s not All Putin s Fault
  • [Sep 21, 2020] Stephen Cohen at the AJC 2017 Forum, about Russia and Terrorism
  • [Sep 20, 2020] CJ Hopkins Exposes The Final Act In 'The War On Populism'
  • [Sep 17, 2020] Military desperados and Mattis "military messiah syndrome" by Scott Ritter
  • [Sep 09, 2020] Proof of collusion at last! - IRRUSSIANALITY
  • [Sep 01, 2020] How Democrats and Republicans made deals to pass Magnitsky Act by Lucy Komisar
  • [Aug 27, 2020] The Ceaseless Lies of Eva Bartlett; or, The Partisan Scrubbing of Western Consciousness. The New Kremlin Stooge
  • [Aug 23, 2020] Catapulting Russian-Meddling Propaganda by Ray McGovern
  • [Aug 19, 2020] The Republican led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence repeats the lies about Guccifer 2.0
  • [Aug 17, 2020] Who's Afraid of QAnon- by Gregory Hood
  • [Aug 16, 2020] CIA Behind Guccifer Russiagate A Plausible Scenario
  • [Aug 08, 2020] Russia Hoax- Are We All Being Played- Put Up Or Shut Up! - Zero Hedge
  • [Aug 04, 2020] Russia never saw Trump as a potential ally or friend by The Saker
  • [Aug 03, 2020] Natalie Wynn also refers to Jo Freeman's 1976 piece on "Trashing," in which she describes her experience of being ostracized by fellow feminists for alleged ideological deviation. The dynamic of cancellation predates the internet.
  • [Aug 03, 2020] KEEPING YOUR MOUTH SHUT by James L. Gibson & Joseph L. Sutherland
  • [Aug 02, 2020] Russiagate, Nazis, and the CIA by ROB URIE
  • [Jul 23, 2020] Demorats defeat amedment ot cut Defence by 10%
  • [Jul 21, 2020] This Skripal thing smelled to high heaven from day 1. My opinion is that Sergei Skripal was involved (to what degree is open to speculation) with the Steele dossier.
  • [Jul 20, 2020] The Real 'Russian Playbook' Is Written in English -- Strategic Culture
  • [Jul 18, 2020] Divide We Fall -- America Has Been Blacklisted and McCarthyism Refashioned for a New Age
  • [Jul 07, 2020] Mutiny on the Bounties by RAY McGOVERN
  • [Jul 06, 2020] US claim of 'Russian Bounty' plot in Afghanistan is dubious and dangerous - The Grayzone
  • [Jul 01, 2020] Russiagate's Last Gasp by Ray McGovern
  • [Jun 28, 2020] Evidence Free Press Release Claims 'Russia Did Bad, Trump Did Not Respond' - NYT, WaPo Publish It
  • [Jun 23, 2020] Identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ( soft neoliberals ) to counter the defection of trade union members from the party
  • [Jun 03, 2020] Dems ratpack of reparations freaks, weird sexual curiosities, and race hustlers is actually a fifth column for Trump re-election by Fred Reed
  • [Jun 03, 2020] Not The Onion: NY Times Urges Trump To Establish Closer Ties With Moscow
  • [Jun 03, 2020] Requiem to Russiagate: this was the largest and the most successful attempt to gaslight the whole US population ever attempted by CIA and Clinton wing of Dems by CJ Hopkins
  • [Jun 01, 2020] More Evidence of the Fraud Against General Michael Flynn by Larry C Johnson
  • [Jun 01, 2020] More Evidence of the Fraud Against General Michael Flynn by Larry C Johnson
  • [May 24, 2020] Guccifer 2.0 was always John Brennan 1.0
  • [May 24, 2020] Guccifer 2.0's Hidden Agenda : looks like Gussifer 2.0 was a false flag operation designed to smear WikiLeaks and distract from the content of the stolen by Seth Rich or some other insider DNC emails
  • [May 20, 2020] McGovern Turn Out The Lights, Russiagate Is Over by Ray McGovern
  • [May 19, 2020] Russophobia in the Age of Donald Trump
  • [May 16, 2020] Bought MSM experts typically are just MIC prostitutes: most are neocons and "Russiagaters"
  • [May 11, 2020] Twin Pillars of Russiagate Crumble by Ray McGovern
  • [May 10, 2020] Did the FBI target Michael Flynn to protect Obama's policies, not national security by Kevin R. Brock
  • [May 10, 2020] Does Obama now feels his potential liability for staging coup d' tat and gaslighting the whole nation?
  • [May 08, 2020] Thiefs stole from a Russian fifth column critter: NY Times Accused Of Ripping Off Pulitzer Prize-Winning Stories From Russian Journalists For 2nd Time
  • [May 07, 2020] Media Malpractice Is Criminalizing Better Relations With Russia by Stephen F. Cohen
  • [May 05, 2020] UK government experince with the White Helmets and the Skripal affair definitly halps in anti-china propaganda.
  • [Apr 22, 2020] Especially as the insane neoliberal economy we live in, we are ruled by a group of kleptocrats and vicious stooges. Which make allegations against Biden deserving a closer look but that does not make them automatically credible
  • [Apr 17, 2020] Barr just said the Russia collusion probe was a travesty, had no basis and was intended to sabotage Trump.
  • [Apr 02, 2020] Bloomberg spent north of $500 millions to become president with zero results, and you want me to believe that Russians spent 1% of that and got better results
  • [Apr 02, 2020] We have two discredited old parties, incapable of dealing with the crises facing them, attempting to revive the only ideas that have ever galvanised the US public in their lifetimes: opposition to communism and the racism which underlay just about every US military adventure since 1945
  • [Mar 28, 2020] Russians again were outsmarted by the US intelligence agencies
  • [Mar 28, 2020] Why You Should Never Watch RT -- Ever!
  • [Mar 24, 2020] This weaponizing of random indignation is a classic tool of the Western propaganda
  • [Mar 21, 2020] When reading any article concerning current events (ie. Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, or Coronavirus) consider how the The Seven Principles of Propaganda may apply
  • [Mar 17, 2020] DOJ drops charges against Russian trolls after they dared demand evidence in US court -- RT USA News
  • [Mar 12, 2020] Did Joe Biden's Former IT Guy Masquerade as Guccifer 2.0 by Larry C Johnson
  • [Mar 05, 2020] Intelligence Officials Sow Discord By Stoking Fear of Russian Election Meddling by Dave DeCamp
  • [Mar 04, 2020] Russiagate should be viewed as classic, textbook case of gaslighting and projecting election interference
  • [Mar 03, 2020] Russia isn't backing Sanders and Trump as much as hoping for chaos
  • [Mar 03, 2020] Whacking Rich is a reminder to Sanders what the party establishmen is capable of
  • [Feb 24, 2020] Seven signs of the neoliberal apocalypse by Van Badham
  • [Feb 21, 2020] Why Both Republicans And Democrats Want Russia To Become The Enemy Of Choice by Philip Giraldi
  • [Feb 19, 2020] During the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" was staged in the USA by "managerial elite" which like Soviet nomenklatura (which also staged a neoliberal coup d' tat) changed sides and betrayed the working class
  • [Feb 19, 2020] On Michael Lind's "The New Class War" by Gregor Baszak
  • [Jan 29, 2020] For the last three years, all the "resistance oxygen" was sucked up by the warmongering against Russia
  • [Jan 24, 2020] Peter Hitchen to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat: You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now, sweetie
  • [Jan 24, 2020] Crimes of the century truth, perception and punishment
  • [Jan 20, 2020] Fake Investigations... Designed To Fool by Bryce Buchanan
  • [Jan 18, 2020] Putin plants to prohibit dual citizens to serve in government
  • [Jan 09, 2020] It looks like UK and the USA intelligences agencies run the contest to see who can come up with the most surreal anti-Russian propaganda psy-ops
  • [Jun 03, 2020] Requiem to Russiagate: this was the largest and the most successful attempt to gaslight the whole US population ever attempted by CIA and Clinton wing of Dems by CJ Hopkins
  • [Jun 01, 2020] More Evidence of the Fraud Against General Michael Flynn by Larry C Johnson
  • [Jun 01, 2020] More Evidence of the Fraud Against General Michael Flynn by Larry C Johnson
  • [May 24, 2020] Guccifer 2.0 was always John Brennan 1.0
  • [May 24, 2020] Guccifer 2.0's Hidden Agenda : looks like Gussifer 2.0 was a false flag operation designed to smear WikiLeaks and distract from the content of the stolen by Seth Rich or some other insider DNC emails
  • [May 20, 2020] McGovern Turn Out The Lights, Russiagate Is Over by Ray McGovern
  • [May 19, 2020] Russophobia in the Age of Donald Trump
  • [May 16, 2020] Bought MSM experts typically are just MIC prostitutes: most are neocons and "Russiagaters"
  • [May 11, 2020] Twin Pillars of Russiagate Crumble by Ray McGovern
  • [May 10, 2020] Did the FBI target Michael Flynn to protect Obama's policies, not national security by Kevin R. Brock
  • [May 10, 2020] Does Obama now feels his potential liability for staging coup d' tat and gaslighting the whole nation?
  • [May 08, 2020] Thiefs stole from a Russian fifth column critter: NY Times Accused Of Ripping Off Pulitzer Prize-Winning Stories From Russian Journalists For 2nd Time
  • [May 07, 2020] Media Malpractice Is Criminalizing Better Relations With Russia by Stephen F. Cohen
  • [May 05, 2020] UK government experince with the White Helmets and the Skripal affair definitly halps in anti-china propaganda.
  • [Apr 22, 2020] Especially as the insane neoliberal economy we live in, we are ruled by a group of kleptocrats and vicious stooges. Which make allegations against Biden deserving a closer look but that does not make them automatically credible
  • [Apr 17, 2020] Barr just said the Russia collusion probe was a travesty, had no basis and was intended to sabotage Trump.
  • [Apr 02, 2020] Bloomberg spent north of $500 millions to become president with zero results, and you want me to believe that Russians spent 1% of that and got better results
  • [Apr 02, 2020] We have two discredited old parties, incapable of dealing with the crises facing them, attempting to revive the only ideas that have ever galvanised the US public in their lifetimes: opposition to communism and the racism which underlay just about every US military adventure since 1945
  • [Mar 28, 2020] Russians again were outsmarted by the US intelligence agencies
  • [Mar 28, 2020] Why You Should Never Watch RT -- Ever!
  • [Mar 24, 2020] This weaponizing of random indignation is a classic tool of the Western propaganda
  • [Mar 21, 2020] When reading any article concerning current events (ie. Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, or Coronavirus) consider how the The Seven Principles of Propaganda may apply
  • [Mar 17, 2020] DOJ drops charges against Russian trolls after they dared demand evidence in US court -- RT USA News
  • [Mar 12, 2020] Did Joe Biden's Former IT Guy Masquerade as Guccifer 2.0 by Larry C Johnson
  • [Mar 05, 2020] Intelligence Officials Sow Discord By Stoking Fear of Russian Election Meddling by Dave DeCamp
  • [Mar 04, 2020] Russiagate should be viewed as classic, textbook case of gaslighting and projecting election interference
  • [Mar 03, 2020] Russia isn't backing Sanders and Trump as much as hoping for chaos
  • [Mar 03, 2020] Whacking Rich is a reminder to Sanders what the party establishmen is capable of
  • [Feb 24, 2020] Seven signs of the neoliberal apocalypse by Van Badham
  • [Feb 21, 2020] Why Both Republicans And Democrats Want Russia To Become The Enemy Of Choice by Philip Giraldi
  • [Feb 19, 2020] During the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" was staged in the USA by "managerial elite" which like Soviet nomenklatura (which also staged a neoliberal coup d' tat) changed sides and betrayed the working class
  • [Feb 19, 2020] On Michael Lind's "The New Class War" by Gregor Baszak
  • [Jan 29, 2020] For the last three years, all the "resistance oxygen" was sucked up by the warmongering against Russia
  • [Jan 24, 2020] Peter Hitchen to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat: You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now, sweetie
  • [Jan 24, 2020] Crimes of the century truth, perception and punishment
  • [Jan 20, 2020] Fake Investigations... Designed To Fool by Bryce Buchanan
  • [Jan 18, 2020] Putin plants to prohibit dual citizens to serve in government
  • [Jan 09, 2020] It looks like UK and the USA intelligences agencies run the contest to see who can come up with the most surreal anti-Russian propaganda psy-ops
  • [Dec 28, 2019] Senior OPCW Official Busted Leaked Email Exposes Orders To Delete All Traces Of Dissent On Douma
  • [Dec 22, 2019] So US intelligence tipped off the DNC that their emails were about to be leaked to Wikileaks. That's when the stratagem of attributing the impending Wikileaks release to a Russian hack was born -- distracting from the incriminating content of the emails, while vilifying the Deep State's favorite enemies, Assange and Russia, all in one neat scam
  • [Dec 20, 2019] Did John Brennan's CIA Create Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks by Larry C Johnson
  • [Dec 20, 2019] NSA Whistleblower: "Mueller Report based on fabricated evidence" Former NSA technical chief, Bill Binney, says it looked like the CIA did this, and made it look like the Russians were doing the hack to implicate Russians by Eric Zuesse
  • [Dec 20, 2019] The purpose of manufactured hysteria in the US is to obfuscate the issues important to the Deep State like destroying the first amendment, renewing the 'Patriot' act, extremely increasing the war/hegemony budget, etc
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